Sugar Shack oysters from the Barnegat Oyster Collective are topped with garlicky ramp butter and ready to be grilled. Read more

As a professional oyster farmer with the Barnegat Oyster Collective on Long Beach Island, Matt Gregg jokes that hed become appalled by all the home raw bar pictures on Instagram of oysters perched awkwardly on chunky cubes of common fridge ice. And so, the oyster paddle was born.

The handled wooden board is perfect for crushing cubes to appropriately small bits. On the other side are a half-dozen grooves carved into the face so that the oysters can be carried without losing one bit of precious liquor.

The best part is that Gregg and the Oyster Collective are one of the few local oyster groups now shipping direct to the home consumer. Cape May Salt Farms is also shipping several varieties of fine Jersey oysters, including Stormy Bays and Elder Points, along with the Salts, which pioneered the resurgence of farmed New Jersey oysters. Sweet Amalia in Cape May Courthouse has plans to make its oysters available again soon, too.

The Sugar Shacks in my bag from BOC were medium-sized but meaty and firm, with a vegetal brininess and a nice sweet finish. They were fantastic topped with frozen scoops of ramp granita made from Greggs easy recipe  six finely minced ramp bottoms (or shallots) blended with black pepper into  cup of cider vinegar then frozen.

The paddle especially came in handy, though, when I took another dozen oysters hot off the grill bubbling with ramp butter (a blend of pureed ramps mixed with pressed garlic, lemon zest, bread crumbs, and Parmesan into soft butter).

Ill never match the artistry of Ameen Lawrence, the Oyster Houses longtime master shucker. But with a free oyster knife in the party pack and a good how to instruction sheet refresher, I did get my shucking skills back in decent shape. The only thing missing during these days of quarantine is a big crowd to share them with. More for me!

 Craig LaBan

A party pack of two dozen oysters from Barnegat Oyster Collective, $45, including shucking knife and free shipping for one-day ground delivery. The oyster paddle is $25.
STATEN ISLAND, N.Y. -- At least 240,000 New York City families who requested a device to participate in remote learning while schools are closed due to the coronavirus (COVID-19) will receive them by the end of April, according to the city Department of Education (DOE).

The DOE said 240,000 families requested a device through a survey, which was released by the agency last month before remote learning began on March 23. Out of the 240,000 total devices that will be distributed, the agency said 70,000 Apple iPad internet-enabled devices have already been shipped -- which includes 13,000 devices to students in homeless shelters.

Before the survey was out, 175,000 devices were distributed by public schools -- which may include laptops, tablets, or iPads. Families were scrambling to try to get that technology available at their childs school the week before remote learning began.

According to the DOE, some families will have received one device from a school, but may still be requesting another device for another child in their family. Families may also be requesting an iPad if they dont have Wi-Fi.

*** CLICK HERE FOR COMPLETE COVERAGE OF CORONAVIRUS IN NEW YORK ***

300,000 KIDS NEEDED DEVICES

When Mayor Bill de Blasio first announced on March 15 during a press conference that public schools in New York City would close to curb the spread of the coronavirus (COVID-19), the city identified 300,000 students that may have been without technology to move to remote learning.

Chief Executive Officer for the Department of Education (DOE) Ursulina Ramirez said at the time that the city would work to purchase 300,000 Apple iPads to distribute to students, prioritizing students most in need.

We said from the beginning, we needed 300,000 iPads, said de Blasio during a press conference on Sunday. They [Apple] were very quick to prioritize the children of New York City and I want to thank them for thatI talked to the CEO Tim Cook, and the outstanding challenge was we needed 50,000 more iPads to fulfill our order. We needed them really quickly to be able to meet our deadline of putting the iPads in the hands of each child by the end of April.

Cook told de Blasio that no matter what it takes, Apple will get the iPads to New York City in time. At the same press conference, Schools Chancellor Richard Carranza shared the importance of de Blasios conversation with Cook because the country has been experiencing supply chain issues.

If you think about every school system in America right now is transitioning to online, remote learning as well, he said. It's not  we're not the only ones in need of devices. So this is  it was just a game changer for the Mayor to have that conversation with Tim Cook. And as soon as we get them, and we get them set up, we're shipping them right out to students and families.

PRIORITY FOR DEVICES

Last month, the DOE began shipping the first batch of iPads to students living in shelters, followed by students in temporary housing, emergency shelters, youth shelters, and foster care.

In the first week of April, the DOE focused on delivering iPads to high school students, multilingual students, students with disabilities, and students living in public housing. iPads are distributed on a rolling basis with new shipments arriving and being staged each week.

Students who requested an iPad but arent in the priority groups will be eligible to receive iPads after deliveries to most in-need students have been made.

The DOE has been receiving shipments of iPads each week from Apple. Partners at IBM are staging the iPads, which means connecting them to the internet, adding all necessary applications, and enabling content filtering. After they are staged, the iPads are assigned to individual students and shipped to homes.

According to de Blasio, T-Mobile has been supplying LTE data plans for students. IBM has been setting up school iPads with apps and resources for learning and Microsoft, Google, and ProTech are creating those apps and tools for distance learning.

They've all again been willing to answer the call, answer it quickly, make sure that we could give a rich experience, a powerful experience to our kids, said de Blasio. It's not the same as being in a classroom, obviously, but we are trying to make it the very best it can be even if it's distance learning.

De Blasio also thanked hard-working delivery workers, including FedEx, UPS, NTT, and Deluxe, who have been delivering the devices to student homes.

REQUESTING A DEVICE

Carranza encouraged families that need a device to request it through the DOEs technology survey. Families can call 311 or go to schools.nyc.gov to fill out the survey at https://coronavirus.schools.nyc/RemoteLearningDevices.

Everyone who fills out a request form online, with school staff, or over the phone, will be sent follow-up emails and texts. Priority will be given to students most in need, and devices are granted on a temporary basis and will later need to be returned.

There is a limit of one device per student, and parents should fill out a separate form for each student who needs a device. To receive the device, make sure you agree to the Terms of Use in the request form.

FOLLOW ANNALISE KNUDSON ON FACEBOOK AND TWITTER.
Pennsylvanias spring hunting seasons for turkeys will move ahead on schedule, despite the coronavirus pandemic and the resulting stay-at-home state order, according to the Pennsylvania Game Commission.

Hunting turkeys in Penns Woods will be different this year because of COVID-19, particularly during the youth spring turkey hunt on April 25, noted the commission in announcing the unchanged hunting schedule. But Gov. Tom Wolfs travel restrictions allow for turkey hunting as outdoor recreation.

The commission urged hunters to follow social-distancing and stop-the-spread protocols.

Some simple rules can make all turkey hunting safer. One of the easiest to follow is: If you live together you can hunt together. When you live in the same home as someone, theres relatively no risk of spreading COVID-19, so long as no one in the home has it. If someone does, everyone in the home is expected to self-quarantine for two weeks.

Consider carefully whether you should mentor any hunter this spring turkey season. If Pennsylvanians are lucky, the state will be coming off COVID-19s apex. But stopping the spread remains as important as ever. No turkey hunt is worth the risk of contracting COVID-19.

If youre going, think of the problems that must be resolved to hunt turkeys safely while mentoring a friend or mentee. Hunting in a blind is out; it doesnt meet social-distancing requirement to be at least 6 feet apart. So is sharing a vehicle to reach your hunting location.

Commission Executive Director Bryan Burhams noted, Theres no doubt turkey hunting will be tough on hunters used to hunting with friends and at camp. The same applies to hunters who usually mentor young hunters interested in gobbler hunting.

But COVID-19 is bigger than spring gobbler hunting, and we all must do our part to ensure this pandemic stops haunting all Pennsylvanians. Im not asking anyone to stop hunting this spring. On the contrary, Im hoping youll get afield and make the most of the spring season without taking COVID-19 risks.

After the youth spring gobbler hunt, the statewide spring gobbler season runs from May 2-30.

The statewide flock, expected to mirror 2019s estimated spring population of 212,170 turkeys, has been aided by good reproduction last year, declining participation in fall seasons and a mild winter with abundant natural foods.

A strong base of old toms is strutting in our forests and fields in their annual quest for companionship followed by a healthy population of high-spirited jakes, said Mary Jo Casalena, commission turkey biologist. Theres also a good supply of 2-year-olds roaming in some wildlife management units.

Last spring, hunters killed 37,300 turkeys, which was down from 2018s 40,300. The harvest generated a spring hunter first-turkey success rate of 19 percent and has ranged 19 to 21 percent for the past three years.

A record number of hunters again bought second gobbler tags  22,517 (13 percent of spring turkey hunters)  marking the third consecutive year second-tag sales topped 20,000.

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Contact Marcus Schneck at mschneck@pennlive.com.
Students at Victorias two largest universities are fighting for an academic amnesty on their semester one grades, arguing that virus-driven disruptions could cause permanent damage to their study and work prospects.

Students say their weighted average marks, which are used for entry to post-graduate courses and some jobs, will probably suffer due to a disrupted semester that has now moved to online-only classes in all Australian universities.

University student Katrina Young. Credit:Simon Schluter

Some universities, including La Trobe, Swinburne and the University of NSW, have granted an academic amnesty to students who fail subjects, meaning those marks will be excluded from their academic transcripts.

Melbourne and Monash students are demanding a similar safety net guarantee that a students average score cannot go down after semester one.
What lies beyond the pandemic? MassForward is MassLives series examining the journey of Massachusetts small businesses through and beyond the coronavirus pandemic.

________________

More than two weeks after the passage of a multi-trillion dollar stimulus package, small businesses in Worcester have yet to see any relief from the federal government.

On Worcesters Main Street, down to restaurants on Green Street and around to Shrewsbury Street -- a triangle within the city that once represented the epicenter of the Worcester Renaissance -- its the same story.

Ive heard a lot of talk. Weve all applied, owner of Hangover Pub Michael Arrastia said. Every restaurant that Ive talked to in the community, everyone asks, Have you applied? Have you heard anything? The answer is no. Nobody has gotten anything.

None of the Worcester small businesses MassLive spoke to have received any financial assistance from the federal government amid the coronavirus pandemic. Small businesses approved havent heard when the loan could arrive. Those waiting for approval have been given no timetable.

When President Donald Trump signed a stimulus package at the end of March, it was meant to inject $2.2 trillion into the United States economy to combat the financial harm caused by the coronavirus pandemic. The largest economic relief plan in the countrys history set aside $349 billion specifically for small businesses.

The White House relayed a message to small businesses that help was on the way.

Those in Worcester continue to wait.

Its been challenging, owner of Nuestra Natalie Rodriguez said. Federal money has been very hard to even get anywhere with at this point.

Some businesses have received notifications congratulating them with an approval for a Paycheck Protection Program loan also known as a PPP loan. But again, a timetable on funding remains uncertain.

PPP loans were created through the CARES Act and were meant to help small businesses retain employees while paying for other costs such as rent, utilities, insurance and more. The key selling point is they can be forgiven if certain criteria are met.

The Small Business Administration said that at least 75% of the forgiven amount must be used for payroll. Forgiveness is also based on the employer maintaining or quickly rehiring employees and maintaining salary levels. Forgiveness will be reduced if full-time employment declines, or if salaries and wages decrease.

My problem with that loan is as soon as you receive the loan you have to start paying employees, and Im OK with that. But if there is no business and Im paying my employees, I still have my rent and utilities, said Loretta Gjonca, who owns Nuovo Restaurant with her husband Aleksander. Theyre saying you have to pay at least 75% of the payroll, its not going to be much help for us.

Expenses for businesses extend beyond payroll, especially when many were forced to layoff employees weeks before the PPP loans being available. Arrastia said as one of the few people remaining on staff, he accounts for most of the payroll but isnt taking much of a salary. Instead, hes focused on paying insurance, utilities, bills for the security system and other costs associated with owning a business like rent or a mortgage.

Arrastia has concerns about how helpful a loan is if it only pays to support the employees but doesnt contribute to sustaining the business.

You can almost hear it in their voice. Some politicians, theyre like, were creating jobs," Arrastia said. Now is not the time to create jobs, now is the time to keep the businesses open for the jobs when we reopen.

Owner of The Hangover Pub in Worcester, Michael Arrastia is still waiting to hear if his application for a Paycheck Protection Program loan was accepted.

The payroll stipulation is even more complicated for new businesses like Nuestra, which opened in Worcester in January.

The SBA uses a business payroll from 2019 to calculate how much money it can be approved for. Nuestra doesnt have a 2019 payroll.

In trying to obtain SBA and PPP loans, Rodriguez had to upload pictures of her licenses and documentation from the city to try to prove to the federal government her business is legitimate.

My bank is working the best they can with me, but theyre asking for documentation I dont have, Rodriguez said. So it works for businesses that arent new and were open last year. But it has some flaws they didnt think of.

Funding for the PPP loans is provided through the federal government and the Small Business Administration, but businesses apply for the loans through local lenders.

The SBA reported issues from lenders when the program launched on April 3.

Things will smooth out

As with any new program, there are some bumps, but things will smooth out, said Bob Nelson, the Massachusetts district director for the U.S. Small Business Administration.

One of the key recurring issues, Nelson said, involves the computer software. Many lenders are new to SBA or havent worked with the agency in a long time so some lenders are still getting accustomed to the programming.

Many lenders didnt receive the final rules and regulations for the program until 7:30 p.m. on April 2 - hours before the program launched. The short turnaround overwhelmed lenders and the SBA, which is providing an unprecedented amount in funding.

By the end of June, the administration has the task of approving $349 billion in loans. By comparison, the most money the SBA has loaned in a single year was $30 billion.

Theyre trying to figure out how theyre going to internally handle the volume of requests that are coming in, Nelson said. I know from my discussions with a lot of lenders, there is huge demand and significant interest for this money.

_________

They left their careers to open stores at Worcester Public Market; what now?

_________

Know your banker

Small businesses within the city that previously established strong relationships with banks and lenders havent experienced as many issues in applying for the PPP loans. The owners of Nuovo Restaurant, Crust Bakeshop and Maker to Main each told MassLive, they applied for PPP loans without many issues.

We are lucky, we have a very good relationship with our banker, Gjonca said. And weve had an SBA loan before, which is almost paid for. Everything they require, we are the perfect candidate.

Nuovo Restaurant in Worcester doubled the order for workers construction the field hospital at the DCU Center last week at no extra cost.

Even with experience in dealing with SBA, Gjoncas experienced a nightmare in applying for the administrations Economic Injury Disaster Loan Emergency Advance.

Sitting in front of her computer for hours, Gjoncas work on her SBA EIDL loan only created more stress. The website rejected her application multiple times, before it finally accepted it. The headaches the process created extended to other business owners.

Rodriguez received a notice of denial and is working on an appeal.

Alexis Kelleher, co-owner of Crust Bakeshop, experienced the SBA application website also bouncing back her application claiming the information was incorrect.

Sometimes you feel like an idiot because youre going through these applications and youre answering all the questions, Kelleher said. ... For better or worse I gave up on that one.

While the federal government has been deliberate, businesses say the city of Worcester has done its best to streamline communication. From the Worcester Regional Chamber of Commerce to city officials, daily emails provide businesses with advice.

Last week, Worcester announced 189 small businesses in the city would receive grants of up to $10,000. The grants funded by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development come with strict limitations on income and size of business. Those limitations exclude many of the citys businesses.

Small businesses welcome the grants, which are capped at $10,000 grants. However, the citys grants are dwarfed by the PPP loans which are limited to $10 million.

The EIDL and the PPP, those are things that everyone is hanging their hats on, said Arriastia, who also applied for a city grant.

To this point, those hats continue to hang as small businesses search for answers.

I dont think they were prepared when [the government] sent out the information, Rodriguez said. But were just hopeful. Were just trying to be positive. Well appeal anything we have to appeal and were ready to fight to get these loans.

MassForward is MassLive's series examining the journey of Massachusetts' small businesses through and beyond the coronavirus pandemic.

Related Content:
America First  President Donald Trumps favourite mantra  resonates rather cynically, as America tops the global coronavirus death toll chart. Indeed, the presidents insistence on American exceptionalism has finally brought the US into a state of exception.

The arrogance of America First, which pushed Trump to withdraw from the Paris climate accords, UNESCO, UNHCR, and UNRWA and belittle various other international treaties and agreements, also kept him convinced for far too long that the coronavirus outbreak in China would not threaten the US.

This, as it now turns out, was a fatal mistake.

When the White House finally realised it needed to take action, it found itself chasing ventilators across the world and cajoling second-rate countries to send shipments of masks, as its citizens started dying daily by the hundreds.

The dire need for basic medical supplies and equipment has even forced the Trump administration to rein in its anti-China rhetoric and start talking about cooperating with Beijing.

But the US is not alone in scrambling to obtain ventilators and other much-needed medical gear for the fight against the coronavirus outbreak.

Governments in Europe have asked local factories to adapt manufacturing lines to produce ventilators as fast as possible. Elsewhere, security and intelligence services, including the Israeli Mossad, have engaged in various operations abroad to secure shipments of ventilators into their countries.

At an average cost of $50,000, this medical apparatus now seems to have become far more important than tanks and rockets that cost millions.

Indeed, who could have predicted the rise of the ventilator in world politics and its strategic significance to state survival!

The newly acquired strategic value of the ventilator points to a major flaw in the threat perceptions that have dominated world politics for centuries.

The almost $2 trillion spent globally on weapons each year have done nothing to protect countries from the COVID-19 pandemic. Nor have the billions of dollars spent on border security.

The threat of this virus defies the modern demarcations of state sovereignty we have had since the 1648 Westphalia Treaty, after which states grew obsessed with borders, authority, nations and most of all  military power.

But the COVID-19 outbreak recognises no borders, no sovereignty, no hierarchy of world power, or the might of military arsenals, which have always been deemed the ultimate guarantor of national security.

Plans for strategic defence were typically based on the slightest possibility or perception of a potential threat. Anchored in this extreme Hobbesian vigilance of war of all against all, this approach led to the allocation of astronomical budgets for weapons purchases and a tiny fraction given to health sectors.

Last year, the US Congress allocated $738bn for defence and $3.8bn for healthcare from the national budget for 2020. According to some estimates, there are currently 160,000 ventilators across the US, leaving the country short by 580,000 ventilators if it faces a severe spread of the virus. Acquiring the needed additional ventilators would cost approximately $29bn or 4 percent of the defence budget.

The US is not the only country with an absurd disparity in budgeting for potential military threats to national security versus all others. While the World Health Organization had been warning for years that a pandemic of this scope is quite possible, given the constant emergence of zoonotic viruses like the coronavirus, few countries have taken heed.

Those who have  South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, and others  have invested in their healthcare systems and have had a much easier time controlling their COVID-19 outbreaks.

And it is not just pandemics that pose a much more realistic threat than war. Climate change is another. According to the United Nations, the world needs to invest $300bn to stop the further rise of global temperature over the next 20 years; this is equal to what the worlds military spends every 60 days. In its 2020 budget, the US, the richest country in the world, allocated $800m to environmental programmes, that is 0.1 percent of its defence budget.

The coronavirus outbreak and the international scramble for ventilators should force governments around the world to take heed of the vitality and depth of global interconnectedness, consider collective defence and rethink the very notion of orthodox sovereignty.

It should also cause countries and international institutions to revisit the order of threats from a global perspective instead of the current and parochial state-centric one. That is to say, the focus should fall on those threats that could put the entire planet and its inhabitants on the verge of annihilation.

Desperate responses to the current crisis and tensions between countries demonstrate the necessity of collective global action on global emergencies. The COVID-19 pandemic should be a wake-up call for world governments to the fact that humanity faces serious and real collective threats in which tanks and fighter jets are all but useless.

This pandemic should be an opportunity for a global overhaul of international cooperation and national budgets which should focus on collective survival, not on narrow state-centric interests.

The views expressed in this article are the authors own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeeras editorial stance.
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Thriving health apps conquer market, illustration photo

Alain Huynh, deputy CEO of eDoctor, told VIR that there are always opportunities in times of crisis, especially for healthcare services. Digital healthcare and telemedicine are the future, which will bring healthcare services directly and efficiently to people, and enable citizens to adopt a healthier lifestyle. The ongoing pandemic is speeding up and empowering digitalisation in many areas, including healthcare.

eDoctor offers a digital platform which connects its users with doctors enabling social distancing. The demand for its online consultation increased at least 200 per cent in the past few weeks and will most likely continue to grow further.

So far, eDoctor has provided latest updates and guidelines verified from the authorities to its app users, and its booking and at-home services help people with chronic diseases to stay away from crowds. In an effort to support the community, eDoctors online consultation service is now free of charge.

Raghu Rai, CEO of Jio Health, told VIR that COVID-19 is a behavioural tipping point for consumers across the world. It has and will indelibly change the way we travel, work, and live. This pandemic has elevated our collective health consciousness and revealed structural challenges across our global economy, infrastructure, and healthcare systems, Rai said.

Given mobility limitations alongside risks transmissions at traditional care facilities, consumers are beginning to embrace telemedicine as a convenient medium. Our team of over 150 doctors is providing free telemedicine consultations nationwide and around the clock, in an effort to democratise access to quality, affordable care, he added.

Jio Health provides telemedicine across a diverse range of specialties including pediatrics, internal medicine, and eye care. Its volume of telemedicine consultations has doubled within the past month and the startup anticipates continued growth.

Furthermore, Jio Health has recently launched a free COVID-19 Telemedicine Assessment that enables individuals to privately consult with a licensed specialist to understand their potential risks for the new disease and receive guidance on topics including prevention, immunity, and treatment.

Similarly, Doctor Anywhere has launched its in-app service COVID-19 Advisory Clinic to provide accessible and affordable healthcare during this unprecedented time. Through video consultancy, a professional doctor is available within minutes. Signs and symptoms of infections can be identified, and if necessary, the Doctor Anywhere Care Team will arrange further medical assistance. The startup has recorded increasing numbers of online engagement towards its app, with around 350 calls per day.

Nguyen Thanh Phan, CEO of Doctor Anywhere Vietnam, said that this is just the right time for digital healthcare services to come out onto the map and reveal their qualities. In the time of pandemics, these advantages become essentially perceived. Before the pandemic, the idea of a digital alternative where patients can see a qualified doctor online within five minutes was nearly not thought of. Users are now more open to digital healthcare due to its benefits, Phan said, stressing that COVID-19 is not an opportunity but a timely educator to lift up the bar for digital healthcare services.

Health-tech startups are currently receiving more capital to meet the surging demand. eDoctor has just raised a new round of funding from Japans CyberAgent Capital and Genesia Ventures, as well as South Koreas early-stage venture capital firms Bon Angels and Nextrans.

Meanwhile, Doctor Anywhere announced it has secured a $27 million Series B financing round. This investment marks the agile growth of the health app. In Vietnam, Doctor Anywhere aims to diversify and optimise its products and services, bringing its accessibility to the majority of people.

Health-tech startups are upbeat about the outlook of Vietnams digital health services. Rai from Jio Health told VIR that with a young, tech-savvy consumer population and bright, ambitious medical talent, Vietnam is uniquely positioned to leapfrog traditional models of care. Vietnams annual out-of-pocket healthcare spending amounts to $6 billion and accounts for nearly 40 per cent of total healthcare expenditures.

With an average age of 27, Vietnams population is still young enough to embrace technology as a gateway to healthcare services that could prevent the onset of chronic diseases. As a result, there is a greater incentive to invest in proactive care that empowers healthy living, he added.
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Exhaust Heat Recovery System Market  Overview

The demand for efficient automobiles is escalating gradually and the demand for components that can ensure that efficiency is also growing. Market reports linked to the automobile industry have been presented by Market Research Future which makes reports on other industry verticals that aims to analyze the current market scenarios better. The market is projected to earn incomes reaching USD 54.01 billion by 2023 while progressing at a CAGR of 10.40% in the forecast period.

The exhaust heat recovery system market growth is expected to be primarily motivated by the strict emission regulations together with growing demand for diesel vehicles. The innovations in modern engine systems are expected to further spur the development of the exhaust heat recovery system market. The considerable fuel cost savings and substantial CO2 reduction are the other important factors that will influence the market expansion in the approaching forecast period.

Segmental Analysis

The segmentation of the exhaust heat recovery system market is carried out on the basis of the component, technology, region, and vehicle. On the basis of component, the exhaust heat recovery system market is segmented into turbine, EGR valve & cooler, condenser, evaporator, TEG module, compressor, and others. Based on technology, the exhaust heat recovery system market is segmented into turbocharger, EGR, ORC, TEG among others. The segmentation of the market based on vehicle comprises of light commercial vehicle (LCV), PC, hybrid, truck, bus and overhead valve engine (OHV). The regions included in the exhaust heat recovery system are Europe, Asia Pacific, the Americas, Africa, and the Middle East.

Detailed Regional Analysis

The regional analysis of the exhaust heat recovery system market globally is segmented into Europe, Asia Pacific, the Americas, Africa, and the Middle East. The Americas region is the leading market in the exhaust heat recovery system market globally. The strict regulations applied by the government along with several environmental organizations to conserve energy is motivating the market in the Americas region. The United States (U.S) has appeared as a major contributor in the North American region that is backed by robust economic development as well as speedy industrialization in the country. The market in the Asia Pacific region is increasing at a rapid rate as a result of the increased rate of industrialization together with the growing significance of sustainable energy in developing markets, chiefly in China and India. Moreover, the flourishing manufacturing sector in the region is expected to profit the exhaust heat recovery system market in the region. Moreover, countries such as Japan, China, Singapore, and Australia are prominent contributors to the market in the region.

Competitive Landscape

The market contenders find themselves in a favorable position with the ability to manage the pace of change. The development of a strong value chain is moreover motivating the expansion of the market. The market trends hint at favorable development of the products that can bring in novelty to the product range and address the customer need better. The market also shows potential for demonstrating a greater comparative or differential value. The presence of a productive entity is expected to generate more sales or superior margins compared to its market rivals. The advent of new technology has boosted the growth potential of the market. Substantial cutbacks in administrative finances are bringing further development to the market.

The prominent competitors in the exhaust heat recovery system market are Faurecia (France), Continental (Germany), Bosal (Belgium), Denso (Japan), Valeo (France), Calsonic Kansei (Japan), Mahle (Germany), Delphi Technologies (UK), Dana (US), Mitsubishi Electric (Japan), Hitachi Ltd. (Japan), Tenneco Inc. (US), Borgwarner Inc. (US)

Industry Updates:

Dec 2018 BorgWarner who is a product leader in technology solutions in a variety of propulsion systems has recently introduced its new offerings such as advanced exhaust heat recovery system (EHRS) among others at a prominent tradeshow.
Shona Eakin is 50 and has cerebral palsy. She uses a wheelchair and is fairly independent though she needs help getting dressed and getting ready for bed.

Her husband, Mike, is 58 and has muscular dystrophy. He has been on a ventilator full- time for 24 years.

"Weve been hoping and praying we dont end up in the hospital for anything," Shona said.

"Typically when he goes into the hospital, they let him bring his own ventilator in. The worry now" she continues, is "Will they take his ventilator and use it for someone who has COVID-19?"

As the number of COVID-19 cases and corresponding deaths accelerates across the country, one of America's most vulnerable  and most overlooked  groups of citizens worry not just about how to get food and pay rent in a locked-down nation, but whether they will even be considered treatable if they get sick.

Concerns: People with disabilities are afraid they will be denied health care because of coronavirus

In essence it comes down to the question of who chooses who will live and die when allocating scarce health care resources.

Federal and state health officials have been warning for weeks of critical ventilator shortages, so much so that President Donald Trump recently invoked the Defense Production Act to force General Motors to retool an automobile assembly line to produce ventilators.

But as the novel coronavirus peaks in New York, New Jersey, New Orleans and Detroit, people with disabilities fear they will wind up on the losing end of the life-and-death choices doctors are forced to make.

"Are we going to be valued as an individual, and given the same quality of treatment as somebody else?" sa said Shona, who lives in Pennsylvania.

US coronavirus map: Tracking the outbreak

Her husband owns his ventilator, but she worries that rental companies might try to recall and reallocate equipment to people to someone who might be better able to survive, or worse, better able to pay.

Story continues

"It's always in the back of your mind," she said. "What could they do if youre in a state of shortage and dont have enough equipment, and it comes down to somebodys judgment?"

What happens if care is rationed?

Gabe Trujillo, 36, of Arizona, also worries that if he has to go to the emergency room, his wheelchair and his asthma could put him at the end of the queue for treatment.

"That's definitely scary just to think about as a person with a disability," said Trujillo, who has Hopkins Syndrome, an extremely rare form of permanent paralysis triggered by a severe asthma attack.

"It definitely has me worried now, not just for myself, but other people with disabilities," he said.

Eakin and Trujillo are not alone in their fears.

Gabe Trujillo, a content producer for 12News, works from home during the COVID-19 outbreak. Trujillo became disabled after a severe asthma attack when he was 14 years old. He is considered high risk for the Corona virus and worries that people with disabilities might not have the same access to medical care.

According to Pew Research Center, more than 40 million Americans have some sort of disability, the most common of which involves mobility impairment.

Disability activist Valerie Novack, a fellow with the Center for American Progress who works on the organization's Disability Justice Initiative, said that when the COVID-19 crisis erupted, her first concern was getting resources to people with disabilities.

"We don't have the infrastructure in place to simultaneously ask people to not leave their homes and get them the things they need," she said.

Those concerns quickly shifted.

"I'm very, very scared, particularly for our community, that people will die, not because they contract COVID-19, not because of physical distancing or quarantining or because they didn't get access to food or a home health aide or something like that, but because they're being refused treatment, because we don't have enough things like ventilators or hospital beds," she said.

What choices would doctors make?

More recently, advocates point to Italy, where the COVID-19 virus overwhelmed the country's medical system. There were stories of doctors and nurses who were moved to tears because they could not provide care for everyone who needed it.

In a March 18 article in the New England Journal of Medicine, correspondent Dr. Lisa Rosenbaum interviewed Italian doctors who were dealing with critical shortages of medical equipment in the grip of the pandemic.

"What they seemed to find far more unbearable was watching people die because resource constraints limited the availability of ventilatory support," she wrote.

One doctor, she said, "offered a hypothetical scenario involving two patients with respiratory failure, one 65 and the other 85 with coexisting conditions. With only one ventilator, you intubate the 65-year-old."

Another doctor said his hospital was taking into consideration "in addition to the number of comorbidities, the severity of respiratory failure and probability of surviving prolonged intubation, aiming to dedicate its limited resources to those who both stand to benefit most and have the highest chance of surviving."

Comorbidity refers to situations where patients have more than one serious medical condition, for instance, COVID-19 and kidney disease, and it's a subject that is being debated in the U.S. medical community in the context of how to allocate scarce resources.

Dr. David Beyda, chair of bioethics at the University of Arizona College of Medicine-Phoenix, said the decision on who gets treatment should not be made solely on whether a person has a disability.

CDC report: Thousands of health care workers sickened by COVID-19 and 27 dead

"A person is a person, no matter what," he said, adding that treatment decisions should always be decided on a case-by-case basis and that health-care professionals must not let stereotypes or biases against people with disabilities enter into their decisions.

In a scenario where two people are in need of heroic lifesaving measures but only one can be treated, the patient who is likely to have the best outcome is the person who should be treated, he said.

"Look at what the prognosis would be for each one of them. The one who has the better prognosis of coming out is the one who should get the ventilator," he said. "It should not be directly related to age, special needs, race, ethnicity, etc., etc. ... It really comes down to the prognosis  who has the better chance of getting through this  and then go with that."

The duty to treat patients

Competing schools of thought among medical ethicists advocate using a first-come-first-served approach or a lottery to decide who gets care, but Beyda said those approaches could favor those who have the financial resources or are able to shop for care.

He acknowledged that a patient's underlying medical condition, whether it's a physical, cognitive or intellectual disability or a chronic condition like heart disease or diabetes, likely would be a factor in a treatment decision.

To balance that factor, Beyda said it's important for people with disabilities to have advocates in the discussion to ensure health care providers aren't allowing individual biases to color their decisions.

And even if the decision is made to not provide heroic measures, doctors still have a duty to treat the patient, Beyda said.

"If you have a comorbidity that has a poor prognosis, I still have a duty and obligation to not only care for you, but to care about you and to take care of you," he said. "And that would be me saying, 'OK, let's talk about what can we do here. ... What are some of things we can help you with?' as opposed to saying, 'Well, you know what, you've got no chance, so have a nice day."

Still, the very idea of comorbidity scales might mean some people with disabilities would be automatically relegated to palliative care as soon as they walk in the door, and that's not a comforting thought, said Paul Timmons, founder of Portlight.org, a national organization that focuses on providing disaster strategies and relief for people with disabilities.

"I don't like to call it triage," Timmons said. "Let's call it what it is, which is care rationing  someone indiscriminately choosing that your life is a higher quality than my life because I am in a wheelchair, and therefore you get to live and I do not. This is the real fear that's happening right now."

For Timmons and other disability advocates, COVID-19 is just the latest battle in a long war for recognition and equal treatment. More battles loom on the immediate horizon, and they may involve fighting on multiple fronts.

Hurricane season is fast approaching in the southeastern United States, and wildfire season is looming in the West.

World Health Organization: Trump announces 'halt' in US funding to World Health Organization amid coronavirus pandemic

While the federal Americans with Disabilities Act prevents discrimination against people with disabilities and the 1988 Stafford Act guarantees equal access to services in an emergency, the threat of compound natural disasters along with the ongoing COVID-19 crisis means providers will be taxed even more, putting people with disabilities at even greater risk of losing access to care.

"Nashville, Tennessee, saw a tornado at the beginning of March. Salt Lake City, Utah, had an earthquake last month. Jonesboro, Arkansas, just had a tornado. These are things that are happening just right now," said Shaylin Sluzalis, co-executive director for the Philadelphia-based Partnership for Inclusive Disaster Strategies.

"Now that we're seeing COVID-19 as sort of our overarching tsunami on top of everybody's roofs, ... what will that look like for our community?" she said.

She said that in any disaster, "the disability community is disproportionately impacted" in every facet of life, whether it's access to personal assistants, shelter or medical care.

"Honestly, people with disabilities die in those instances," she said. "We are dead. We are forgotten."

This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: Coronavirus: People with disabilities worry about COVID-19 care
Just when everybody thought that Meghan Markle only had a rift with the members of the royal family leading her and Harry's controversial exit, it turns out that the Duchess of Sussex also had a sour relationship with the royal staff.

A recent revelation showed that while the 38-year-old former "Suits" actress was well-received when she first arrived at the Buckingham Palace, royal aides later on started to hate her guts and celebrity background.

Royal Staff Disapproval

Speaking to The New Yorker, royal expert Camilla Tominey said that Meghan Markle had a "clash of cultures" with the royal staff, as she also failed to respect the hierarchy within the palace walls.

She explained that the initial joy came from the fact that Princess Diana's happy-go-lucky son scored such an amazing woman who is an instant asset to the royal family.

Tominey, who worked as The Telegraph's royal editor, revealed that Meghan soon failed to impress palace aides with the qualities that made her an instant media magnet. Such attributes include her showbiz affiliation, her self-confidence, and feminist habits of being assertive.

"I've put it down to a clash of cultures, in the sense that she had come from the celebrity world, which is very fast-paced and quite demanding," Tominey said.

"The royal world is very different-it's much slower-paced and hugely hierarchical. In the royal world, it's 'What should we do next?' 'Well, what did we do last time?'" she added.

Unawareness of Royal Traditions

The royal expert claimed that the palace staffers also hated how Meghan did not completely comprehend the unwritten traditions within the royal family. Her demands also started raising eyebrows from the royal aides.

"It's a bit like 'Downton Abbey'-there's a hierarchy of staff who have been at Buckingham Palace for years and years, to serve Queen and country. And, therefore, for Harry and Meghan to be making demands, there was a bit of below-stairs chatter, particularly with the Duchess, that was 'Well, hang on a minute, who do you think you are?' " Tominey said.

Despite having tension with the palace staff, Meghan and Harry apparently had a much better relationship with the team at their Frogmore Cottage home.

The surprise lunch that the Duke and Duchess of Sussex threw for staff members before they officially step down as senior royals prove that the couple worked well with the Frogmore Cottage staff.

Relationship with the Press

The British media was also charmed by Meghan during the early days of her relationship with Prince Harry. However, the Duchess started giving the press a reason to act as an antagonist when they continuously avoid traditional practices of covering the royal family.

One example would be the birth of their son Archie in 2019. The palace only issued a statement on the afternoon of May 6th saying that Meghan had gone into labor earlier that morning while, in fact, the Duchess had already given birth before the statement was released.

In July, the couple also chose to have an intimate and private christening party for baby Archie, which angered royal fans and press. The press felt that Meghan and Harry are trying to make them irrelevant to their job.
Seven persons, including a two-year-old girl, were killed on Wednesday in separate incidents of roof collapse triggered by heavy rains in northwest Pakistan, police said.

A family of three was killed when the roof of their house collapsed due to torrential rains in Khanpur village at Dir district of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province.

A man, his wife and their two-year-old daughter were killed in the incident, police said, adding that local people retrieved the bodies from the debris.

In a similar incident, a woman and her three children were killed when the roof of their house caved in due to intermittent rains in Matani area, some 35 km south of Peshawar.

Police rushed to the spot and retrieved the bodies from the rubble with the help of locals.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
The remaining passengers of a coronavirus-hit cruise ship that spent two weeks stranded off the coast of Uruguay will be evacuated to the United States, the US Embassy said Tuesday. Nearly 25 passengers and around 80 crew members remain on the ship Greg Mortimer after 110 Australians and New Zealanders left Uruguay Saturday on a charter flight taking them home. The ship had spent more than two weeks off the port of Montevideo with more than 200 people aboard, among whom more than 100 cases of coronavirus infection were detected. The US Embassy said in a statement Tuesday that the passengers still on the ship, including six US citizens, will be flown to the United States on a plane fitted with medical equipment. The flight is being organized by the cruise ship's owner, Aurora Expeditions. The plane was scheduled to land Tuesday in Montevideo and then leave for Miami Wednesday, weather permitting, the statement said. The non-US passengers will stop over in Miami and then take medevac flights to their countries. To get the passengers from the ship to the Montevideo airport, a "sanitary corridor" will be created so as to ensure safe transport of people exposed to the virus. The same procedure was followed with the Australians and New Zealanders, too. The crew of the Greg Mortimer will remain in quarantine on the ship. The ship had been on an expedition to Antarctica, South Georgia and Elephant Island when the adventure was called off on March 20 due to the nearest South American countries -- Argentina and Chile -- closing their borders and imposing lockdowns. The ship traveled to Montevideo as it was the nearest port still open. It had been anchored in the Rio de la Plata, 20 kilometers from the coast since March 27.
'Wish I could go back in time', yearns a pilot who was in the cockpit of a Jet Airways plane that landed little past midnight at Mumbai airport on April, 2019. Not many thought it will be the last flight of the once-storied carrier, where scores of pilots and other staff served for at least two decades

New Delhi/ Mumbai: "Wish I could go back in time", yearns a pilot who was in the cockpit of a Jet Airways plane that landed little past midnight at Mumbai airport on April, 2019. Not many thought it will be the last flight of the once-storied carrier, where scores of pilots and other staff served for at least two decades.

As the grounding of the cash-starved Jet Airways nears one year, many dreams have been shattered but there is optimism of an insolvency resolution-led new birth.

The airline announced the temporary suspension of services on 17 April last year and the last flight S2-3502 that took off from Amristar at around 1030 pm touched down at Mumbai's Chhatrapati Shivaji International Airport at 12.22 am on 18 April.

Jet Airways' low-cost arm JetLite operated the flight with a Boeing 737-800 aircraft, which was later taken on lease by no-frills airline SpiceJet.

From a sense of belonging to disbelief to lingering hopes of a revival, a few former staff PTI spoke to have myriad emotions when they recalled Jet Airways days.

For Nidhi Chaphekar, the Jet Airways cabin crew member who was injured in a terror attack at Brussels airport in 2016, the closure of the airline is more tough than the terror incident.

Chaphekar, who was with the airline for nearly 24 years, is now a motivational speaker and has also released a book.

There are lot of troubles for many former employees. Some are even under depression and some are doing part-time jobs, including taking tuitions, she said.

"I worked with Jet Airways for 21 years and everything looked like a dream. For many like me, the clock has come back to a standstill," a senior pilot who flew Airbus 330 plane told PTI.

Requesting anonymity since he is now working with an overseas airline, the pilot said like him, many of his colleagues have also got jobs with foreign carriers but there are issues to deal with.

After Jet Airways shuttered with no money to fly last year, thousands of staff came together for public meetings, silent protests and made representations to the government and other authorities. Candle light marches were also organised in various cities, including the national capital and Mumbai.

Some drivers who had worked with Jet Airways are now driving Ola, Uber and auto rickshaws, according to the pilot.

Jet Airways, which began its journey as an air taxi operator with service from Mumbai to Ahmedabad, had about 1,300 pilots and a total of about 20,000 employees at its peak.

Captain Mohit Dagar said memories are still fresh when he joined the airline as a trainee first officer more than 11 years ago.

He was the pilot-in-command of the last flight that operated on 17 April.

"Some days I wish I could go back in time. Not to change anything but to feel a few things again," he told PTI from Dubai.

Sounding nostalgic about his Jet Airways days, Dagar said there were so many great memories such as in getting command, becoming trainer, flying to so many wonderful and challenging airports.

"One thing I am really grateful (for) is the kind of training I received. You realise this only when you go out in the world to a new company. Wherever I go, whichever aircraft I fly, there will always be a Jet pilot deep down in my heart," he said.

A senior executive, who was privy to most developments during the final months of Jet Airways, said the airline was a vibrant place to work and there was always a sense of belonging.

"The D-day (17 April) was not expected by anyone at the airline... It was a disbelief when the operations were suspended on 17 April," he said on condition of anonymity.

According to him, Jet Airways brand has outlived the airline's operational presence and it was the loss of a national brand rather than just an airline.

At the peak of its operations, Jet Airways had little over 120 planes. When the operations came to a halt due to mounting debt woes and unpaid salaries, the airline had around 16 own planes.

Amit Kelkar, who worked with Jet Airways for 23 years as an aircraft maintenance engineer, said many employees had to make huge compromises in salaries and designations at new companies.

He was also the vice president of Jet Aircraft Maintenance Engineers' Welfare Association.

Irrespective of operations, Jet Airways' work of maintaining planes in an airworthy condition was on till 31 May, 2019. After that, approval for maintenance and training was suspended, he noted.

Sharing sentiments of many others, he said payment of EMIs was a big issue for most even as he added that a substantial number of former Jet Airways staff are still waiting patiently in the hope of revival.

Kelkar, who is also actively involved in the insolvency resolution process, said that many questions about Jet Airways reaching the current situation remain unanswered.

Released in February, Chaphekar''s book is about her experience after Brussels airport terror attack. The book is about how she faced the negativity and about grit, she noted.

Her photograph taken soon after the terror attack on 22 March, 2016, was widely carried.

On 20 June, 2019, the National Company Law Tribunal admitted the insolvency petition filed against Jet Airways.

While some entities expressed their interest in the airline, no concrete proposals have come up so far. On 18 March, 2020, the tribunal allowed 90 days' extension for the corporate insolvency resolution process of Jet Airways.
TDT | Manama

The Ministry of Health announced yesterday the death of a 60-year old Bahraini national who was a registered active case of the coronavirus (COVID-19). The deceased male was suffering from underlying and chronic health problems, the Health Ministry said.

He was a contact of an active case, and was then placed in isolation where he received extensive 24-hour treatment from a specialised medical team. His demise marked the seventh death in Bahrain related to the coronavirus.

The Health Ministry expresses its heartfelt condolences to the individuals family at this difficult time. The Ministry highlighted that, excluding three cases, all other 870 active COVID-19 cases remain stable and all patients continue to receive treatment from a specialised medical team, following guidelines provided by the World Health Organisation.

The total of 873 active cases was reached after 167 new cases were reported yesterday by the Health Ministry. From those, 161 were announced in the afternoon while an additional six were reported in the evening.

Out of the 161 cases, 156 were from expatriate workers, while three were contacts of other active cases and the two others were from arrivals from abroad. The 156 new active cases were detected following the testing of 3,581 expatriate workers conducted over a period of 24 hours, as part of an ongoing campaign to test workers at their place of residence.

Early detection of COVID-19 cases among expatriate workers and quarantining their contacts expedites treatment and strengthens precautionary measures set out to safeguard the well-being of citizens and residents, the Health Ministry said.

No information was given on the six additional cases from last night. Meanwhile, the number of discharged patients reached 648 after the Ministry announced a total of 57 new recoveries as of last night.

Fifty-four of those were reported in the afternoon yesterday while an additional three discharged patients were announced in the evening. The total tested increased to 70,813, according to the Health Ministrys website.
The man found inside a burning car with what appeared to be several gunshot wounds in Massachusetts this week was identified by authorities Tuesday as a Brockton resident.

Roberto Correa, 44, was found dead in the car in Sharon near the Canton line at about 1 a.m. Monday, according to a statement from the Norfolk district attorneys office.

The initial investigation revealed the apparent gunshot wounds.

It was not clear where the shooting occurred.

The death remains under investigation and no arrests have been announced.

The car had recently been rented by another person who has been contacted by investigators, the district attorneys office said.
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Editor's Note: The article was updated to include information that the U.S. Mint's Philadelphia facility will produce silver coins.

(Kitco News) - The physical gold market has been dealing with significant supply issues and the crunch is going to get bigger as the U.S. Mint announced that it is shutting down gold and silver bullion production at its West Point Facility.

In a media alert Wednesday, the U.S. Mint said it is shutting down the facility due to the increasing number of COVID-19 cases in Orange County, New York, and out of an abundance of caution.

My commitment to the health and safety of the Mint workforce is unwavering and continues to be my highest priority, said Mint Director David J. Ryder. These are challenging and unprecedented times, and decisions on Mint operations are made with the best interests of Mint employees first and foremost.

The U.S. mint did not provide any timeline as to when the facility might re-open again. The Mint will resume production once it is deemed prudent to do so, it said in the statement.

The Mint facility at West Point produces investment grade gold, silver, platinum and palladium bullion coins.

According to the latest sale data, the U.S. mint has sold 56,500 one-ounce American Eagle Gold Bullion coins in the first two weeks of April. Sales for the month are up 465% compared to all of April 2019.

Meanwhile, the U.S. Mint data shows that it has sold 350,000 one-ounce American Eagle silver coins, down compared to 1.1 million coins sold in April 2019. However, the slower sales numbers come after the mint said that it sold out of its silver coins last month and has been rebuilding its inventory.

Although the Mint wont be producing coins in New York it said that it will redirected some silver bullion production to its Philadelphia facility. American Eagle and America the Beautiful silver bullion coins will be available to its network of authorized purchasers.
The Jammu and Kashmir Police on Wednesday donated Rs 9.47 crore to the J-K COVID-19 Relief Fund to aid the effort of the government to prevent the spread of coronavirus in the Union Territory.

Director General of Police Dilbag Singh presented the cheque to Lieutenant Governor Girish Chandra Murmu on behalf of the J-K police here.

The donation is a collective effort of all ranks of J-K Police wherein all gazetted officers have contributed two day's salary and all non-gazetted police personnel have contributed a day's salary towards the COVID-19 Relief Fund, an official spokesperson said.

The Lieutenant Governor appreciated the efforts of the department and outlined the collective responsibility of individuals, institutions, and organizations in coming forward to play their role in protecting communities and fellow countrymen in this time of crisis.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
The Indian Army has issued an advisory asking its personnel, ex-servicemen and their families to download the 'Aarogya Sethu' mobile app, launched by the government to help users know if they have come in contact with any positive coronavirus patient and ways to avoid the infection.

Military officials said all the defence personnel, veterans, their families and dependents have been advised to download and install the mobile app. The army has a total strengthen of 1.3 million personnel.

The app, available for both Android and iOS mobile platforms, has been developed by the National Informatics Centre, an agency under the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology.

The app, launched on April 2, provides people with important information including ways to avoid coronavirus infection and its symptoms.

In its advisory, the Army asked its personnel not to use the app in office premises, operational areas and sensitive locations.

It also directed them to follow existing cyber security policies. The three services have put in place strict measures to prevent leaking of sensitive information through social media platforms.

The advisory says location services and Bluetooth should be switched on only during visits to public places and health facilities managing coronavirus infected people.

The army men were also asked to update their mobile operating system and install antivirus on their phones.

Last month, Army Chief Gen Manoj Mukund Naravane issued instructions to insulate the 1.3 million strong Army from the coronavirus pandemic.

Gen Naravane also conveyed to the families of the soldiers guarding India's borders with Pakistan and China that the Army is taking care of its personnel serving the country in this difficult time.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Something New, southern Colorados preeminent bridal and formal wear provider, is pleased to announce it now offers brides in Colorado Springs, and across the nation, an option to find and purchase the ideal wedding gown through free virtual consultations.

Although we are all living through a time of physical isolation, brides and grooms across the nation are still planning their fall and winter weddings or altering plans to host weddings remotely,all of which require a beautiful wedding gown, said Mindi Linscombe, Owner of Something New. Recently, clients from across Colorado and the country have reached out looking for assistance as formal wear shops across the country are generally closed. Our team really pivoted quickly to create a loving and caring online atmosphere for brides to find the gown of their dreams.

Here are how Something New virtual consultations typically operate:



During a video conference (via Skype, Zoom, or any other format the bride chooses), the bride talks with her Something New master stylist about wedding details and style likes and dis-likes. The Something New master stylist shows the bride-to-be sample dresses based on this discussion.

Once a bride settles on a few dresses, Something New ships them to the bride or facilitates curbside pick-up at Something News showroom for local clients. (For sanitary purposes, all gowns are steamed and cleaned before shipping)

Once a dress is chosen by the bride, Something New assists with the alteration process.

Final delivery of the gown is made.

I found the virtual consultation process to be relaxing and fun, said Ally Ernst, virtual customer. Although working remotely, the staff at Something New are true experts and made me feel very cared for each step of the way. I am so grateful for this service as I was able to find my dream dress!

Something News virtual consultations are offered to anyone in the nation. We recently completed a consultation and wedding gown delivery to a bride in Kansas City and we love working with brides from all parts of the country, added Linscombe.

The retailer prides itself on having a diverse inventory of dresses that meet any style request, and in February 2020, People Magazine highlighted a custom gown created by Something New.

Something News vision is to make every bride, or anyone needing formal attire, feel exceptional. The company offers premium clothing options within these categories:

Wedding Dresses

Prom Dresses (For those planning on attending a virtual prom or delayed prom scheduled for summertime)

Tuxedo (for those attending a virtual prom, delayed prom or upcoming wedding)

Bridesmaids & mothers dresses

Those looking to book a virtual appointment with Something New, please click HERE.

In addition, Something New offers its own curated line of wedding dresses via virtual consultation  Brooklyn Grace  with a portion of proceeds benefitting The Exodus Road which is an organization dedicated to fighting human trafficking through prevention, rescue and survivor care. Something New also donates a portion of profits to Childrens Hospital and Compassion International in these organizations efforts help make the world a better place.

About Something New: Founded in 2007,Something New is the largest bridal and formal wear provider in Southern Colorado. It offers customers the finest options in wedding dresses, prom dresses, tuxedos, bridesmaids and mothers dresses. To learn more please visit https://www.somethingnewboutique.com/. To connect with the organization on social media visit its Facebook or Instagram pages.
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Linkedin Gabriel Stargardter and Manuel Mucari (Reuters) Rio de Janeiro, Brazil/Maputo, Mozambique  Wed, April 15, 2020 11:41 636 fc6853813033f564188675f8bd202719 2 World Brazil,DrugKingpin,drug-cartel,Drugs-trafficking,drug-lord,drug-network Free

One of Brazil's top cocaine traffickers has been arrested in Mozambique, officials in both countries said, underlining the growing global footprint of the First Capital Command (PCC) gang, Brazil's most powerful criminal organization.

Gilberto Aparecido dos Santos, aka "Fuminho," had been on the run for more than 20 years until his capture in Maputo on Monday, and was one of Brazil's "most-wanted" fugitives, Brazil's federal police said in a statement.

"The prisoner was considered the largest supplier of cocaine to a gang operating throughout Brazil, as well as being responsible for sending tons of the drug to several countries," the statement said.

Originally formed as a prison gang in Sao Paulo, the PCC has spread across Brazil and is increasingly moving cocaine overseas, especially to Europe and Africa.

In March, Reuters reported that Brazil has become one of the top suppliers of cocaine to Europe, transforming the country's role in the trans-Atlantic drug trade.

Leonardo Simbine, a spokesman for Mozambique's Criminal Investigations Services, told Reuters that local police had been tipped off by Interpol that dos Santos had entered the country in mid-March.

"We did our investigations and found him at a luxury hotel in Maputo. We arrested him with two accomplices, two Nigerian citizens," Simbine said.

On his way to the maximum security prison where he is now being held, dos Santos refused to answer questions from the press. "Talk to my lawyer," he said.

Brazil has 40 days to submit an extradition request, Simbine said, adding that dos Santos is being held on charges of drug possession and using a false passport.

In its statement, Brazil's federal police said the operation to catch dos Santos also involved the US Drug Enforcement Administration, the US Department of Justice and the Mozambique police.

The Brazilian federal police also accused dos Santos of allegedly financing a rescue plan for PCC boss Marcos Willians Camacho, or "Marcola," who is in a federal jail in Brasilia. The alleged plan prompted Brazilian authorities to heighten security at the jail in February, the statement said.

Local media have reported that dos Santos was Camacho's "right-hand man."
The Australian Federal Police have confirmed seven of its officers began trialling the controversial facial recognition tool, Clearview AI, without departmental oversight.

Responding to questions taken on notice from a parliamentary inquiry, the nations top police department admitted that a its officers began testing the software but said that it was not used as an enterprise product.

Between 2 November 2019 and 22 January 2020, members of the AFP-led Australian Centre to Counter Child Exploitation (ACCCE) registered for a free trial of the Clearview AI facial recognition tool and conducted a limited pilot of the system in order to ascertain its suitability, the AFP said.

The trial was to assess the capability of the Clearview AI system in the context of countering child exploitation.

During that trial, seven AFP officers accessed Clearview and searched for known individuals, and unknown individuals relating to child exploitation cases.

Other international law enforcement agencies apparently tipped the ACCCE off about the potential value of the Clearview AI product in identifying victims or perpetrators of child abuse which sparked the trial.

Indeed, a New York Times investigation that brought the shadowy workings of Clearview AI into the public eye demonstrated the near-miraculous way Clearview identified people.

One US law enforcement officer told the Times they tracked down a man who appeared in a child exploitation video because the software found his face reflected in the mirror of another persons gym selfie.

Accountability concerns

Despite Clearviews apparent usefulness, the efficacy of its system  along with broader security and privacy issues  raises some serious concerns about whether or not the tool is robust enough to be used by Australian law enforcement.

The AFP revealed that the Office of Australian Information Commissioner investigated the departments use of Clearview, issuing a notice to produce information documents related to its use of Clearview.

And in a joint statement, Labor shadow ministers Kristina Keneally, Mark Dreyfus, and Tim Watts called Clearview AI deeply problematic.

The use by AFP officers of private services to conduct official AFP investigations in the absence of any formal agreement or assessment as to the systems integrity or security is concerning, especially given the recent hacking of Clearview, the statement said.

In late February, Clearview AIs client list was pulled off its systems by hackers and then shared with journalists at Buzzfeed.

The list supposedly included email addresses from police departments around the country but, when questioned, departments either denied using the service or refused to comment on the operational methodology of their facial recognition systems.

On the same day as these revelations, AFP commissioner, Reece Kershaw, was fronting a parliamentary committee into the review of the mandatory metadata retention regime.

What ought to have been a straightforward reprisal of the AFPs inquiry submission took a difficult turn for Kershaw when Shadow Attorney General, Mark Dreyfus, asked point blank whether the AFP was using Clearview AI.

Does the AFP use this technology? Dreyfus asked.

I have asked that question today myself, off the back of media reporting," Kershaw replied.

Evidently the AFP Commissioner had no idea whether or not the countrys top police officers were inputting pictures of Australian faces into an unsanctioned facial-matching service that draws on a database of images scraped from the internet without users consent until he read about it on Buzzfeed.

Unscientific

Clearview AI supposedly conducted its own independent accuracy test in October last year  but its validity has been criticised for a lack of scientific rigour.

Swinburne University lecturer, Jake Goldenfein, said the test does not represent the type of testing that an entity seeking to produce an accountable system would undertake as it didnt include work by state standards bodies or university researchers.

Instead, Goldenfein wrote, Clearview AI gave the task to a trio composed of a retired judge turned private attorney, an urban policy analyst who wrote some open source software in the 1990s, and a former computer science professor who is now a Silicon Valley entrepreneur.

Goldenfein also said Australian police use of Clearview AI was concerning given the company's apparent lack of oversight.

Beyond the ethical arguments around facial recognition, Clearview AI reveals Australian law enforcement agencies have such limited technical and organisational accountability that we should be questioning their competency even to evaluate, let alone use, this kind of technology.
The agency, founded in 1948, was designed to promote global health, and it typically has been praised in its efforts  particularly in the developing world  to expand vaccination programs for tuberculosis, polio and other infectious diseases. It is less adept in the kind of crisis currently gripping the world. In an emergency  when decisive action is necessary  the WHO can coax and cajole, but it cannot compel its members to do much. It also cannot issue fines for noncompliance, for instance.
Alex Gorsky, Chairman and CEO of Johnson & Johnson, rings the opening bell to celebrate the 75th anniversary of his company's listing at the New York Stock Exchange, September 17, 2019.

Johnson & Johnson surprised investors with a modest dividend increase of 6.3%, followed by Procter & Gamble, which raised its dividend 6%.

But don't kid yourself: They are likely anomalies.

Dividends are under pressure because of a dramatic drop in cash flow used to fund them. There's also concern that companies that take any government aid will be under pressure to suspend the dividend.

"Dividend pain has just begun," analyst Charles Toole of Adviser Investments wrote in a recent note to clients.

Many companies have suspended share buybacks and even withdrawn guidance, but so far only a very few have suspended dividend payments, including Carnival, Darden, Ford, Hilton, Nordstrom, Delta, and Boeing.

A significant subset of Wall Street investors view a dividend as a critical component of stock ownership, so management is very reluctant to cut. But with 30% to 50% declines in some stocks in the past two months, even with the rally, previously modest dividend yields of 2% to 3% are now in the 4%, 5% or 6% range for many companies and they are unsustainable given much lower cash flows.

Some investors seem to feel the drop in dividends will be substantial. The Chicago Mercantile Exchange has maintained a S&P 500 Annual Dividend Index Futures contract for the past five years. Right now, investors are anticipating dividends will decline by 16% for full-year 2020 dividends.

"Investors who rely on dividends for income are about to feel the pain of the coronavirus pandemic's knock-on effects," Toole wrote.

Finding companies at risk is fairly easy. Look for those that pay respectable dividends and have seen cash flow drop dramatically.

"Regulation aside, companies most at risk of needing to cut their dividend are those whose cash generation is currently too low to sustain a dividend payment," Michael Lerner at Credit Suisse wrote in a recent note to clients. Companies on his list include Royal Caribbean and many energy companies, including Halliburton and EOG.

Toole also compiled a list of 20 companies that have had dramatic increases in their dividend yield due to plunging prices. One that particularly stands out is Kohl's, which has gone from $44 at the end of February to roughly $18 today.

The retailer has suspended its share buyback program, dramatically cut back on capital expenditures, and slashed inventories. But it hasn't cut its dividend, which is now yielding 14.8%, a huge increase from the 5.3% dividend yield on Dec. 31. The company has said it is evaluating the dividend.

Raymond James also compiled a list of names whose dividends are likely at risk if the economic disruption continues. Not surprisingly, they are concentrated in hotels, airlines, retail and energy.
The head of the World Health Organization on Wednesday lamented the US decision to halt funding for the UN agency, promising a review of its decisions while sidestepping President Donald Trump's complaints about its alleged mismanagement, cover-up and missteps.

WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus was on the defensive after Trump announced a halt to U.S. funding that has totaled nearly a half-billion dollars annually in recent years. Trump claimed the WHO had parroted Chinese assurances about how the virus is spread, failed to obtain virus samples from China, and made a disastrous decision to oppose travel restrictions as the outbreak spread.

Countries and health experts around the world expressed alarm at Trump's move and warned it could jeopardize efforts to fight the coronavirus pandemic. Philanthropists like Bill Gates and Michael Bloomberg joined European and African leaders and health experts who lined up behind the WHO or insisted the U.S. shouldn't cut off funding at such a critical time.

While Trump pointed to a U.S. investigation of the U.N. agency, Tedros stopped short of addressing his complaints directly and said the WHO's performance in handling the outbreak would be reviewed as part of a usual process to ensure transparency and accountability.

We regret the decision of the president of the United States to order a halt in funding to the World Health Organization, Tedros said. WHO is reviewing the impact on our work of any withdrawal of U.S. funding and will work with our partners to fill any financial gaps we face.

No doubt, areas for improvement will be identified and there will be lessons for all of us to learn, he added. But for now, our focus my focus is on stopping this virus and saving lives. The exact fallout from a halt in U.S. funding was far from clear.

The WHO runs on biennial budgets, and U.S. funding comes in two main forms about three-fourths of it through voluntary contributions and one-fourth through assessed contributions, which are a bit like regular dues.

The U.S. already contributed at least $15 million to a $675 million emergency fund set up by the WHO to help pay for the initial coronavirus response through April.

Trump has a mercurial reputation. So he sort of promises death and destruction and then it doesn't necessarily happen, said Gian Luca Burci, a former legal counsel for WHO who now teaches at Geneva's Graduate Institute. I think it will become more clear in the next few weeks. He noted WHO's tricky task of uniting opposing constituencies: China and the U.S. have been at odds on a number of issues. Maybe Tedros went too far," he said. "But you can see also some of the reasons why he wanted to secure China's cooperation. Trump has repeatedly labelled COVID-19 the Chinese virus and criticized the agency for being too lenient on China, where the novel coronavirus first emerged late last year. Outside experts have questioned China's reported infections and deaths from the virus, calling them way too low and unreliable. An investigation by The Associated Press has found that a six-day delay between when Chinese officials learnt about the virus and when they warned the public allowed the outbreak to blossom into an enormous public health disaster. The WHO has been particularly effusive in its praise for China, calling on other countries to emulate its approach and repeatedly praising its transparency.

Tedros has also heaped compliments on Trump, praising his great job in responding to the outbreak last month. The European Union on Wednesday said Trump has no reason to freeze WHO funding at this critical stage and called for measures to promote unity instead of division.

In Beijing, Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian said the country is seriously concerned about the U.S. decision. A spokesman for British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, who this week emerged from intensive care after contracting the virus, declined to criticize either China or Trump.

The U.K. has no plans to stop funding the WHO, which has an important role to play in leading the global health response, James Slack said.

Political fault lines emerged in the U.S., with Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, a Democrat, saying the dangerous, illegal decision to halt funding will be swiftly challenged. Sen. Lindsay Graham, a Republican ally of Trump, insisted that we cannot afford China apologists running the WHO. Aid workers in developing countries worried they might be hit hardest.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Voters, candidates and election officials across Virginia are in a holding pattern after Gov. Ralph Northam announced last Wednesday he wants to move locality elections from May 5 to coincide with the Nov. 3 general election.

Northam announced his plans in response to the COVID-19 pandemic during his regular briefing and via a statement to the news media. Such a change must be approved by the General Assembly, which is scheduled to return to Richmond on April 22  just 12 days before the election.

We have wrestled with our options, and none of them are ideal or perfect, Northam said. No one should have to choose between protecting their health or casting a ballot. Holding in-person elections right now would put the health of voters and our election workers at risk. Therefore, I am recommending we move the May election to November.

He is unilaterally moving the planned June 9 Republican primary vote two weeks later to June 23 for the same reason.

Northam said he spoke with lawmakers about the option.

Asked by a reporter if he might call a special session to get action sooner, Northam said he plans to wait for the reconvened session thats now a week away.
Express News Service

CHENNAI: Around 350 construction workers employed by a reputed developer have been denied last two months salary, following which they staged a protest on Tuesday. The furious workers, who have been working on a project coming up at Aishwarya Nagar in Ayanambakkam, said they are unable to send money home, causing financial hardships.

Carpenter Bhagirathi (33), who hails from Bihar, started working at this site in November. The contractor is yet to pay me salary for two months. I am spending money out of my pocket on rations during the lockdown, said the father of two boys. The contractor has to pay me Rs 80,000. I am burning midnight oil to ensure my children dont go hungry. But, whats the point if I am not paid?

The last straw was the denial of ration supplies by the state officials, as most of them are migrant labourers. We had gone to the hospital to meet a colleague who is recovering there. So we could not give Aadhaar details to officials. So our names were left out when the ration was distributed Monday, says 25-year-old Chandrabhan, also a carpenter at the site. Unable to take it anymore, they spilled out in the streets in protest.

When contacted, the contractor said he himself was stuck due to the lockdown, but had arranged for rations to be supplied. He confirmed that he had not paid two months salary. I am yet to get paid by the developer, and will release salaries as soon as the developer pays me, he said. An official from the developers office claimed money could not be paid due to lockdown.

Ration supplies are being taken care of, as we are giving them Rs 100 a day as food allowance, the official said. Yesterdays case may be different. They could not have got the ration due to shortage. We also have to cater to workers in 21 of our sites, the official said.I am not asking for lakhs, all I want is the Rs 44,000 they owe me, said Gobind (29) from Kathihar in Bihar, a father of three children.

To be probed

Though Labour Department officials could not be contacted, Express has learnt that its planning to probe the case
A group of Coalition backbenchers has called for a review of Australia's funding to the World Health Organisation following Donald Trump's decision to halt US financial support to the global body over its handling of the coronavirus pandemic.

The US President has announced a freeze on all payments to the WHO pending a review, accusing the United Nations offshoot of being too close to the Chinese government and "severely mis-managing and covering up" the threat.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison on Wednesday didn't rule out reviewing the WHO's performance once the pandemic was over, saying Australia did not rely on the world health body's advice in dealing with the COVID-19 outbreak.

Foreign Affairs Minister Marise Payne said Australia shared some concerns about the WHO's management of the crisis.
Expert Advice with Tyron Hyde

Could landlords potentially be at risk if they allow inspections of their property during the current pandemic?

I believe so. Which is why Our Plan to Help Property Investors utilises decades of data Washington Brown has collected from properties around Australia to continue preparing depreciation schedules.

It is aimed to protect our inspectors, your tenants and carries no risk to YOU  the investor.

Guidance from State governments in regards to inspections specifically refers to real estate agents being able to make private appointments.

However, Quantity Surveyors and other inspection industries do not fall under the same umbrella.

Landlords have a duty of care to their tenants and the potential for litigation further down the line is an unknown risk.

Landlords have a duty of care to Tenants

John Denes of & Legal agrees

Where there is a physical inspection of premises by a quantity surveyor which results in a person (the tenant or the inspector) contracting the COVID-19 virus, there may be a breach of duty of care because of the failure to take reasonable steps to avoid infection.

Due to the global pandemic status of COVID-19, the potential for infection is arguably a foreseeable risk and legal action may be taken against the landlord/owner of the premises and/or the quantity surveyors firm as a consequence of the breach.

It is at this stage uncertain how the Courts will deal with the liability issue and it may take years before the extent of the relevant duty of care as a result of COVID-19 can be fully defined.

At this stage, all states have strict protocols for private viewing so real estate transactions can, hopefully, continue.

Property sales tend to take place over a limited time period and a personalised viewing is necessary in most cases.

As of the 31st of March there has been strong guidance from the Federal Government to stay home, unless you are shopping for essentials, medical reasons, exercise or you cant work remotely.

Firms like ours and many others, have started working remotely. We have existing data on a huge range of buildings and have access to a variety of means to carry out a report.

Furthermore, the Australian Institute of Quantity Surveyors has stated that reports can be amended post coronavirus.

Inspections could put both the tenant and landlord at risk.

There are two main reasons we have decided NOT to carry out inspections of occupied properties at the moment.

Reason number 1  after decades of collecting data from properties around the country, Washington Brown has sufficient information to continue to prepare most depreciation schedules.

Reason number 2  other than the obvious health risks to both the tenant and our inspectors, we dont want to put landlords at risk.

According to NSW Health some people with Covid 19 have been infectious before any symptoms have developed.



It is also not certain how long the virus survives on surfaces.

So here is the main concern. Lets say, you as the landlord, organise for a depreciation inspector to enter your investment property for the purpose of carrying out a depreciation report.

Then, heaven forbid, that inspector unwillingly passes the virus onto your tenant and he/she becomes ill  or worse.

The tenant could then sue you the landlord, and include within that claim the property manager and the Quantity Surveying firm.

The landlord has the contractual arrangement with the tenant (Lease agreement) and from my experience thats where the legal case would start.

We plan to be part of the solution, not the problem.

If you have clients who may benefit from this information, we encourage you to share this article with them.
President Moon Jae-in attends ASEAN Plus Three virtual summit at the presidential Blue House in Seoul, Tuesday, April 14, 2020. Courtesy of Cheong Wa Dae



The leaders of South Korea, China, Japan and ASEAN member states have agreed to push for a joint fund for medical supplies against pandemics like COVID-19, according to their joint statement released Wednesday.



The statement was adopted to summarize the results of a Special ASEAN Plus Three summit that the 13 countries held via videoconferencing the previous day to discuss joint efforts to tackle the novel coronavirus.



The participating leaders were South Korean President Moon Jae-in, Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and Chinese Premier Li Keqiang, as well as their counterparts from the 10 member countries of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN).



The leaders agreed to "consider setting up an APT reserve of essential medical supplies that enables the rapid response to emergency needs," the document read.






tech2 News Staff

Zoom has had an unmatched rise in popularity ever since the global outbreak of Coronavirus forced people around the world to work from home. However, the platform was seemingly unprepared for this boost in userbase, because this sudden rise in popularity also disclosed various security concerns regarding the app.

Zoombombing was one of the most dangerous flaws found in the video conferencing app, which caused schools in the US to ban the app for its students. Zoom CEO soon apologised for the issue and promised to fix the app.

Besides these, Zoom was also found to be infected with some other vulnerabilities that was leaking data of its users.

Now, a report by Bleeping Computer claims that half a million Zoom accounts have been hacked and the data from these accounts have been sold on the dark web.

Reportedly, these accounts are being sold for less than a rupee each and in some cases, they are being given away for free. This was first found by cybersecurity intelligence firm Cyble around 1 April.

Per the report, Cybel had reached out to the sellers of these Zoom accounts and bought 530,000 Zoom credentials at $0.0020 (15 paisa approximately) per account. "These accounts are shared via text sharing sites where the threat actors are posting lists of email addresses and password combinations," Bleeping Computer writes.

These Zoom account credentials reportedly included email address, meeting URLs, passwords, and HostKeys.

The cybersecurity firm also revealed that most of the hacked accounts belonged to well-known companies such as Chase, Citibank, educational institutions, and others. 290 of these belonged to universities and colleges.

Currently, Zoom has not responded to this report, however, if you have a Zoom account it would be wise to immediately change your password if you use the same for other accounts and websites as well. You can also visit Have I Been Pwned to see if your account has been compromised.
Winnipeg Mayor Brian Bowman says the city is doing all it can to avoid laying off municipal workers during the COVID-19 pandemic, including redeploying about 70 staff members into new roles.

Hey there, time traveller!

This article was published 14/4/2020 (637 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Winnipeg Mayor Brian Bowman says the city is doing all it can to avoid laying off municipal workers during the COVID-19 pandemic, including redeploying about 70 staff members into new roles.

As the crisis lingers on, however...

"Ive said to date that there hasnt been layoffs, but thats something that you should expect to hear something sooner (rather) than later on," Bowman said Tuesday.

The mayor said staff have been transferred to assist Winnipeg Harvest and the citys new community service ambassador program (tasked with education and enforcement of public health orders).

"There has been a tremendous effort to try and redeploy as many people as possible and avoid layoffs," Bowman said, after many Canadian cities have laid off hundreds of workers in recent weeks, including severe job losses in Vancouver, Edmonton and Calgary.

Bowman said the fact the City of Winnipeg cant legally run a deficit could soon force some tough decisions.

"One of the things thats different about municipal governments is we are prohibited under legislation from borrowing for our operating (costs)... The flexibility is just not there like it is with other levels of government," he said.

Meanwhile, city hall had some positive news to provide on public health order enforcement: officials didnt give out any tickets for COVID-19-related violations during the first few days of the new enforcement program.

"I think, by and large, Winnipeggers are doing an exceptionally good job (following the social-distancing orders) and I think were seeing that reflected in the numbers," said Bowman.

On April 9, the province and city announced pre-set fines of $486 per individual and $2,542 per business, for those caught violating one of three Manitoba health orders now in effect to reduce the spread of COVID-19.

The orders restrict public gatherings to 10 or fewer people, require the closure of non-essential businesses, and enforce measures to keep a two-metre social distance between people.

The city said community service ambassadors and bylaw enforcement officers patrolled 234 parks Saturday through Monday. During that time, officials doled out 12 verbal warnings, one large-group warning, and 32 closed-facility warnings.

The city also reported 819 "positive interactions," and said no tickets were issued.

Jason Shaw, Winnipegs assistant chief of emergency management, said the large-gathering warning appears related to a group having a barbecue at a picnic shelter.

Shaw said there were also multiple incidents of closed skateboard parks being used. He urged parents to remind children those facilities are currently off-limits.

"If we dont start seeing some better behaviour in some of these areas, were going to start looking at higher levels of enforcement. Im not exactly sure if thats barricades or what that means," Shaw said Tuesday.

He noted the enforcement plan includes an effort to provide public education and warnings prior to ticketing.

The city said as many as 44 ambassadors and more than 20 bylaw enforcement officers may be patrolling Winnipeg on any given day.

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.

A provincial spokesperson said data on health order violations in the rest of Manitoba wasnt available Tuesday, but would be released "shortly."

"Public health officials continue to focus on educating the public about the need to self-isolate and to practice good social (physical) distancing at this time. The majority of Manitobans are complying with the order," the spokesperson said in an emailed statement.

Meanwhile, city council will begin the use of electronic meetings as the pandemic lingers, beginning when the property and development committee gathers April 20.

Council members and public servants can choose to participate in-person, or through video conferencing, throughout meetings in April and May. Public delegates, however, must make presentations remotely.

joyanne.pursaga@freepress.mb.ca

Twitter: @joyanne_pursaga
In Afghanistan, the Taliban has dispatched health teams to far-flung provinces to confront the coronavirus. In Mexico, drug cartels are offering aid packages to those feeling its economic impact. In Brazil and El Salvador, gangs enforce curfews to prevent its spread.

As governments around the world have responded to the coronavirus, so too have armed insurgents and terrorist groups and drug cartels and gangs, a parallel underworld of public health policy and strategic messaging.

EMPTY STREETS: Photos show how coronavirus has desolated New Orleans' French Quarter

It is hardly the first time such groups have attempted to fill the role of government. But few crises in modern times have tested the limits of the world's nation-states as the coronavirus has, providing an opening for armed groups to step in where presidents, police forces and parliaments have failed.

Some groups have attempted to weave governments' failures to control the virus into their own propaganda narratives. In Somalia, al-Qaida-linked al-Shabab fighters say the pandemic was spread "by the crusader forces who have invaded the country." The Islamic State has told followers to prepare to exploit their enemies while they are overwhelmed by outbreaks. In Yemen, Houthi rebels have accused Saudi Arabia of airdropping masks infected with covid-19.

In eastern Afghanistan, where the Afghan government and the Taliban have clashed for nearly two decades, the rivalry over which group has a more effective health policy is now on full display.

Esmatullah Asim, a provincial council member from Wardak province, watched the arrival of Taliban forces in medical gear this month and was impressed. Asim said the government quarantines only those who show symptoms at the border, but the Taliban quarantines every person who has returned recently from Iran.

"The Taliban quarantine is much better than the government," he said. The group also raises awareness about the virus in the territory it controls, he said. "They stop the vehicles, telling the passengers how to prevent the spread of the virus."

Even the U.S. State Department conveyed kudos.

SHORT SUPPLIES: Groceries say we have enough food. Here's why shelves are empty

"We join the Afghan Ministry of Public Health in welcoming the Taliban's efforts to raise awareness against #COVID19 and their offer of safe passage to health workers & international organizations working to prevent the spread of the virus," the department wrote in a tweet.

Analysts who study the organizational structure of armed groups are now cataloguing dozens of instances of rebels and bandits making forays into public health policy.

"In some cases, the government just isn't coming to help, so this is a chance for nonstate armed groups to appear to be the responsible, accountable actor," said Sarah Parkinson, an assistant professor of political science and international studies at Johns Hopkins University. "In other cases, it's concern for their own members. And in others, it's an attempt to use a piece of evidence in their own propaganda war."

Some governments have acknowledged that armed groups could exploit their weaknesses after the virus fades, seizing on the aftermath of economic dislocation.

The mayor of the Italian city of Palermo, Leoluca Orlando, warned this month that "a den of Mafia jackals" is poised "to exploit the desperation of the new poor from coronavirus." Other Italian officials have suggested that the mafia could provide its own loans or cash handouts to undermine the government.

In Mexico, at least two drug cartels have begun providing aid packages to residents in places partially controlled by armed groups. In Michoacan, a video emerged last week of the Los Viagras cartel handing out plastic bags of food to hundreds of people. In Tamaulipas, a Mexican state that borders southern Texas, photos circulated of boxes full of sugar, oil and other staples distributed in large piles. On the top of each box was plastered the name of the donor: "Gulf Cartel," they said, "in support of Ciudad Victoria," the state capital.

Falko Ernst, an analyst with the International Crisis Group in Mexico, said there was an "obvious tension" in the effort.

LONE STAR BUNKERS: Texas-based bunker company receiving heavy orders as pandemic escalates

"These groups are trying to be seen as catering materially and providing a notion of security in places where they are also directly preying on the population through extortion and kidnapping and violence," he said. "But in a lot of places, these groups are the least bad solution for populations that don't have anywhere else to turn."

In Brazil's favelas, the messages come through WhatsApp.

"Whoever is caught on the street will learn how to respect the measure," one gang warned a Rio de Janeiro slum. "We want the best for the population. If the government is unable to manage, organized crime resolves."

Last month, as the Salvadoran government was enforcing one of Latin America's earliest and most stringent lockdowns, leaders of MS-13 decided that they would institute their own curfew. It was a rare overlap of policy between the gang and the government, which have fought each other for years.

But it also reflected a reality in much of El Salvador: The police have limited access in neighborhoods under criminal control, and in those places, only a gang-enforced curfew would be observed. MS-13 explained its reasoning to the San Salvador newspaper El Faro: The policy was about protecting its own members, who probably wouldn't have access to medical treatment if they were infected.

"If there are no respirators left and one of us is gravely ill, all tattooed, and an old woman appears who is in serious condition, they are going to disconnect the gang member and they are going to let him die," one member said.

A similar overlap in policy has occurred in Afghanistan, where the Taliban has dispatched teams that distribute gloves, soap and masks in areas under its control.

ON THE FRONTLINE: Houston H-E-B employees test positive for coronavirus

But while the insurgents and the government agree on the need to combat the virus, they continue to fight each other.

"We can't completely stop our attacks," Taliban spokesman Zabiullah Mujahid said. He blamed the government for "compelling" them.

Advocacy groups have encouraged more coordination between the Taliban and the Afghan government to tackle the coronavirus. Human Rights Watch proposed videoconferences with "representatives from the Public Health Ministry, the Taliban's health commission, the U.N. Assistance Mission in Afghanistan and key international humanitarian agencies."

In many countries, police have been redeployed from rural to urban areas, giving criminal groups more room to operate with impunity - and to enforce their own health policy as the pandemic spreads.

In some cases, "criminal groups will play the role of enforcer with full agreement and even at the request of the state," wrote Vanda Felbab-Brown of the Brookings Institution. "Such deals in which governments outsource the rule of urban and rural peripheries to criminal groups long preceded covid-19."

Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, the militant group that dominates Syria's northern Idlib province, has used the virus to burnish its credentials as a legitimate governing body, issuing orders restricting gatherings and distributing health information to the public.

No cases have been reported in the province. Public health officials and aid workers say the spread of the virus in the crowded refugee camps of Idlib, among a population with little access to health care, would be calamitous.

"The large number of our people gathered in a small geographic space, and the monumental population density in the camps, forecasts disastrous results if the epidemic spreads," said Ayman Jibis, the health minister for the Hayat Tahrir al-Sham-created Salvation Government.

- - -

Sieff reported from Mexico City. George reported from London. Fahim reported from Istanbul. The Washington Post's Sharif Hassan in Kabul; Haq Nawaz Khan in Peshawar, Pakistan; and Sarah Dadouch in Beirut contributed to this report.
An Australian state is considering lifting its coronavirus restrictions within weeks and allow social gatherings, schools and businesses to go back to normal.

There are 532 COVID-19 cases in Western Australia - the second lowest out of the mainland states - and the number of infections grew by only five cases on Wednesday.

Premier Mark McGowan said the state had not just flattened the curve of coronavirus cases but 'driven it down to being nearly non-existent'.

'We've got to work out how we get our economy back up,' Mr McGowan said.

Police officers patrol Cottesloe Beach in Perth on Friday. Western Australia is considering lifting its coronavirus restrictions within weeks as the state's premier says the number of cases has been 'driven down to nearly non-existent'

Despite the low number of cases in the state compared with more populous parts of the country, WA has some of the most draconian laws in Australia - including heavy fines for going between nine designated regions without an essential reason.

Mr McGowan said the state's infection rate was extremely low by world standards, reiterating any potential plans to tweak restrictions should not be expected until May.

'It is like playing a game of chess,' he said.

'You're just constantly looking at what the angles are, what the options are, what the potential pitfalls are.'

'But it's a very serious game of chess because people's health is at risk.'

A series of legislative measures have been put before state parliament to support the economy and community during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Mr McGowan told parliament efforts were already underway to manage WA's economic recovery, with Public Sector Commissioner Sharyn O'Neill appointed state recovery controller.

Pictured: A taped-off picnic bench on Mosman Beach in Perth on April 10. Premier Mark McGowan said any potential plans to tweak restrictions should not be expected until May

Curtin University epidemiologist and pro-vice chancellor of health sciences Archie Clements believes WA is well-placed to begin loosening restrictions.

'Most of the cases can be directly traced to a known source so it doesn't look like there's much going on by the way of undetected community transmission,' Professor Clements said.

'All in all, we've probably avoided the worst of the epidemic and I think with the current numbers it's likely that the epidemic will peter out in WA.'

The government wants a sustained period of low transmission and has made clear the hard border closures will remain in place for the foreseeable future.

WA public schools are scheduled to begin term two on April 29 but teachers are still concerned about how schools will function safely when classes resume. Pictured is an empty classroom at a primary school in Brisbane on March 30

A cyclist rides past social distancing signage at Scarborough Beach in Perth on April 10

Professor Clements predicts a phased approach where the lowest-risk activities are relaxed first.

'That will be things like rather than having businesses closed, they might reopen things like restaurants but with a lower density of patrons,' he said.

'They might allow small community events to take place. And then I think it will be allowing things like schools to go back, and I'm hoping that will be sooner rather than later.

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

Teachers are still concerned though about how schools will function safely in term two.

There are 33 patients in Perth hospitals, including 11 in intensive care.

A decision on education will be made after the national cabinet meeting on Thursday, with WA public schools scheduled to begin term two on April 29.

But State School Teachers Union of WA president Pat Byrne said members remained concerned they did not have access to personal protective equipment like health workers.

'There's no question that the best form of learning is in the classroom,' she told reporters on Wednesday.

'What the dilemma for us is, is how to put that consideration against the consideration of safety and health for both the students and the adults who work in a school.

'We've already seen some teachers walking off the job. Very small numbers, but we have seen it.'

Health minister Roger Cook said he was 'fairly comfortable' with schools opening for term two.

'I think there's a lot of anxiety in the community and obviously we're very cognisant of that,' he told reporters.

Premier Mark McGowan agreed face-to-face schooling was best and he did not want to see children educated from home for the rest of the year, but refused to pre-empt the outcome of the cabinet meeting.

'In one form or anther, education will resume,' he told 6PR radio.
Philadelphia School District students will begin formal remote, computer-based instruction next week  38 days after they were last in classrooms.

They wont begin learning new material until May 4, 52 days after in-person school was dismissed March 13 because of the coronavirus pandemic.

That gap, officials say, is due in large part to a lack of technology and internet access for many in a school system where roughly 75% of students live below the poverty line. Inventorying existing technology, then purchasing Chromebooks and putting them in students hands, was cumbersome and complicated.

But an article published this month in the national research and opinion journal Education Next took issue with the districts count of students who lacked internet access, and said the long lag time between in-person and digital instruction has disadvantaged impoverished students, a point echoed by some advocates and parents.

Monica Lewis, district spokesperson, said the district has made an all-out effort to ensure that students had the opportunity to learn even when schools were closed, noting that it has made optional paper packets available for students since just after the closure.

We have to put this in perspective: We have obstacles that other districts dont have, and weve been doing everything that we can to make sure that our students have the education they need, said Lewis.

Superintendent William R. Hite Jr. has said that 59% of pupils in grades three to eight lack computers at home, as do 49% of high school students.

Paul von Hippel, the Education Next studys author and an associate professor of public affairs at the University of Texas at Austin, took issue with those numbers, drawn from the districts own student survey. Another internal measure, the districts parental survey, suggests 91% of those who responded said they had internet service at home. Another source, the U.S. Census Bureaus American Community Survey, said 80% of households covered by the city school system had internet access and 88% had access to more than one computing device.

Von Hippel said he believes the real number is somewhere in the middle, but the larger points are that Philadelphia waited too long to get children online, and that some children will always lack access  even on May 4, when new learning is supposed to begin.

At some point, you have to decide that we have enough kids online that we should keep learning going, said von Hippel, who said he became aware of Philadelphias situation as he researched the effects of school closures nationally. Theyre letting the perfect be the enemy of the good.

Many large urban school systems are in Philadelphias boat, forced to find ways to buy tens of thousands of computers quickly and distribute them to children. New York Citys district, the largest in the United States, had launched remote learning by March 23. Local districts plans have varied widely. Cheltenham began remote instruction Monday; other school systems, like Downingtown, had no interruption in academic offerings.

Philadelphias long pause worries me, von Hippel said. We know from past research what happens when kids miss two months of school. Its very concerning. Philadelphia is already behind other districts in achievement. Can we really let that gap grow?

Also at issue is the Pennsylvania Department of Educations role in what remote learning looked like. Early guidance from the Commonwealth did not mandate that districts offer education during coronavirus shutdowns, and decreed that districts could not offer instruction to some students unless all were able to access it.

Philadelphia specifically instructed teachers not to offer remote instruction, in a March 17 memo to principals, then clarified its stance a day later, saying teachers did not have to do so but could teach as long as no assignments were mandatory or graded. When Pennsylvania announced new guidance the next week, lifting the no instruction for some but not all rule, that freed the district to move forward with a technology plan, Hite has said.

Pennsylvanias early directive stemmed from a fear of lawsuits over the rights of students with special needs and English-language learners, said Donna Cooper, executive director of the nonprofit advocacy group Public Citizens for Children and Youth, but it did not serve districts well.

The state stopped everybody in their tracks for three weeks, said Cooper, whose organization launched a campaign urging Philadelphia and other districts to fully teach children during the coronavirus closures. I would have used those three weeks for planning. Some districts thought, This is it, schools over.'

Philadelphia is hampered by infrastructure issues and the challenges associated with educating large numbers of needy kids, Cooper said, but the district also made the wrong assumption about whether movement was possible.

Lewis, the district spokesperson, said the school system has been diligent about moving its students toward digital learning since the shutdown, with administrators acting urgently to set the framework for digital learning.

We were prepared to address some type of learning throughout the course of the closure, Lewis said. Weve done everything possible. Theres not been a day where we sat around twiddling our thumbs.

The Philadelphia Inquirer is one of more than 20 news organizations producing Broke in Philly, a collaborative reporting project on solutions to poverty and the citys push toward economic justice. See all of our reporting at brokeinphilly.org.
Nearly 90 percent of the asked Vietnamese have agreed that the Government should continue its social distancing policy beyond April 15 to avoid the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic, according to a survey conducted by Infocus Mekong Research.

HCM City's streets are empty during the social distancing period from April 1-15

According to the survey conducted on April 14 among 500 Vietnamese, only 5 percent believed that the country should stop social distancing, while another 6 percent were neutral.

The sentiment was the same across North, Central and South Vietnam.

When asked about their present employment status, 80 percent had negatively been impacted by COVID-19 and the required social distancing, but still elected to maintain the policy.

With 35 percent of people on reduced pay and work hours and another 45 percent having either lost their livelihoods, or at least temporarily, it is a clear indication that Vietnamese people are placing health and family above the mighty dong, Ralf Matthaes, managing director of Infocus Mekong Research, said.

Its good to see that citizens still have their priorities in the right place. As they say, better safe than sorry, Matthaes said.

A number of localities across the country have proposed extending the social distancing measures beyond April 15, according to the National Steering Committee on the Prevention and Control of COVID-19.

HCM Citys authorities have also suggested extending the measures until the end of the month. Several localities have said social distancing should last until the end of May.

Prime Minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc recently urged the public to continue to strictly follow social distancing guidelines, which are scheduled to take effect until April 15.

PM Phuc has asked the national committee to propose further plans, and the Government will make the decision on the next steps on April 15.

Deputy Minister of Health Nguyen Thanh Long said the steering committee had collected opinions from its sub-committees on the imposition of social distancing.

The decision to extend social distancing will be made based on feedback collected from sectors and localities, according to PM Phuc./.VNA

PM Nguyen Xuan Phuc orders stricter physical distancing Prime Minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc on April 13 ordered the serious continuation of the implementation of Directive No.16 and anti-COVID-19 strategy to mitigate the risk of infection in the community.
BAKU, Azerbaijan, April 15

By Elchin Mehdiyev - Trend:

The so-called election in Azerbaijans Nagorno-Karabakh region occupied by the Armenian armed forces has once again shown that no one recognizes this illegal regime, Head of the Azerbaijani community of the Nagorno-Karabakh region of Azerbaijan, MP Tural Ganjaliyev told Trend.

Ganjaliyev reminded that during the debates between the leaders of Azerbaijan and Armenia within the Munich Security Conference in February 2020, Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev once again declared to the whole world that Nagorno-Karabakh region is the historical land of Azerbaijan and has been under the occupation of Armenia for almost 30 years.

The MP stressed that a crushing blow was dealt to the policy being pursued by Armenia.

The so-called election in Nagorno-Karabakh region in late March was the second crushing blow to the Armenian government because the world does not recognize this so-called election, the MP said.

Ganjaliyev appreciated the corresponding statements made in various countries and international organizations.

"The co-chairs of the OSCE Minsk Group, namely, the US, France, Russia, the OSCE Parliamentary Assembly issued a statement in connection with the so-called "election" in occupied Nagorno-Karabakh region, Ganjaliyev added.

Moreover, NATO, the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, the Non-Aligned Movement, the Turkic Council and several other international organizations expressed their positions in connection with this illegal "election", the MP said. Of course, behind these achievements there is a balanced foreign policy of the Azerbaijani president."

Ganjaliyev stressed that several achievements are still reached in Azerbaijans foreign policy.

"I think that we will witness another crushing blow to Armenia in the near future," the MP said.
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Way back in 1995, Amazon made its first-ever customer sale. Within two short months, Amazon was selling US$20,000 per week in the U.S. and countries around the world.

Today, Amazon has become the go-to marketplace for more than 310 million customers, and more than 54 percent of all product searches occur on Amazon.

In other words, Amazon has replaced Google as the No. 1 search engine for products.

So, how can your brand leverage this fast-growing, ultra-competitive marketplace while still remaining profitable? Lets take a look at four Amazon advertising strategies you can start using today to improve your effectiveness and sell more products.

1. Optimized Product Listings

Before even considering advertising on Amazon, you need to start with effective product listings that are optimized properly for both your audience and Amazons algorithm. Many brands advertising on Amazon still neglect this fundamental step, which leads to lower engagement, lower audience intent, and fewer sales.

You need to err on the side of excellence, especially the more complicated or technical your product is. There are five common shortcomings that brands make in regards to product listings:

Poor brand representation or low quality images: Make sure that all of the text supporting your product  from title and description to details and bulleted copy  are optimized with the keywords that resonate with your audience. Look to Amazons own product listings to get a sense of how it positions information.

Make sure that all of the text supporting your product  from title and description to details and bulleted copy  are optimized with the keywords that resonate with your audience. Look to Amazons own product listings to get a sense of how it positions information. Misleading product claims: Be accurate and truthful in the claims you are making about your products. The fastest way to destroy consumer trust is to exaggerate or inaccurately portray your products. Dont be a snake oil salesman!

Be accurate and truthful in the claims you are making about your products. The fastest way to destroy consumer trust is to exaggerate or inaccurately portray your products. Dont be a snake oil salesman! Unanswered questions: If someone asks you a question about your product, answer it! A huge part of building consumer trust is being highly responsive in your customer service. Unanswered questions are warning signs of a brand that doesnt care.

If someone asks you a question about your product, answer it! A huge part of building consumer trust is being highly responsive in your customer service. Unanswered questions are warning signs of a brand that doesnt care. Negative reviews: Although you cant entirely control negative reviews, you can leverage them to your advantage. Use them as an opportunity to get valuable feedback on your products, provide customer service if something went wrong, or even determine if your customers are receiving counterfeit products from a third-party seller.

Although you cant entirely control negative reviews, you can leverage them to your advantage. Use them as an opportunity to get valuable feedback on your products, provide customer service if something went wrong, or even determine if your customers are receiving counterfeit products from a third-party seller. Duplicate listings: If the same product has multiple listings, you not only are diluting your traffic, but also might be sending shoppers to an unoptimized product page. Make sure that your products dont have multiple listings. If they do, work with Amazon Seller Support to get them removed.

2. The Right Goals

This might sound like common sense, but youd be amazed at the number of brands that dont have clearly defined goals, or have goals focused far too granularly to see the bigger picture. Success means different things to different companies, so understanding the specific needs of your brand is the first step to setting the right goals.

There are three common objectives for Amazon advertisers:

Brand awareness

Rapid growth

Sales at a target ROI

Before even considering building out or expanding your Amazon advertising, you need to set clear expectations for the channel.

For instance, if brand awareness is your main goal, youll probably want to invest more heavily in your Amazon Store and Amazon Sponsored Brand ads, which are a great way to showcase your products and get more people viewing what you offer.

If sales at a target ROI is the goal, youll need a much more comprehensive advertising strategy and campaign optimizations in place to reach your goal.

A D V E R T I S E M E N T

3. Competitive Research and Analysis

Understanding your competitors and your position in the marketplace is another essential step toward optimizing your Amazon advertising.

One of the best ways to make this determination is to perform a SWOT analysis (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats) of your brand. This will help you better define your competition, and it also can help you flesh out the specific strengths of your brand.

The big takeaway here is that you can make more profit quickly and easily by focusing on your strengths and capitalizing on the strengths of your products. You can spend a lifetime trying to eliminate your weaknesses and never achieve the same impact as optimizing for your strengths.

Here are six questions to ask yourself as you look to understand your unique strengths:

How competitive is your category on Amazon?

on Amazon? What is your fulfillment strategy , and what is the strategy of your competitors?

, and what is the strategy of your competitors? What do your product reviews look like?

look like? What is the quality of your product listings ?

? How are you priced compared to your competitors?

compared to your competitors? Are your products bundled similarly to your competitors or do you have a unique selling angle?

4. Keywords, Keywords, Keywords

Last but not least, understanding the keywords that are resonating with your audience is essential to optimizing your Amazon advertising campaigns.

There are three main keyword match types on Amazon:

Exact match captures traffic that matches the keyword exactly or is a plural. If the search is sock, either sock or socks would be an exact match, but red sock would not.

captures traffic that matches the keyword exactly or is a plural. If the search is sock, either sock or socks would be an exact match, but red sock would not. Phrase match captures traffic with any variation of a keyword or keyword phrase, assuming the words appear in the correct order. If the search phrase is red socks, phrases like long red socks and red socks for sports would track, but red long socks would not.

captures traffic with any variation of a keyword or keyword phrase, assuming the words appear in the correct order. If the search phrase is red socks, phrases like long red socks and red socks for sports would track, but red long socks would not. Broad match captures traffic when an individual word within the keyword or keyword phrase is used. The order does not matter as long as one of the words for the search is present. A search for red long socks would track for any combination of terms using red, long, socks, or any combination of these words.

There are a number of free tools available to help you in your keyword research.

Also, the Amazon search bar itself is an incredible resource for keyword research. When you start typing a query into the search field, Amazon attempts to auto fill the keyword or phrase based on the tremendous audience data acquired from its 310 million customers.

This offers a great opportunity to see the common keywords that are associated with your products, and the terms that real consumers are using.

Tying It All Together

Once you have gathered a solid collection of keywords, completed your competitive research and SWOT analysis, set smart goals, and fine-tuned your listings, youre well on your way to mounting an efficient, optimized Amazon advertising campaign.

A D V E R T I S E M E N T

Obviously, the setup is only half the battle. Fine-tuning the ads themselves and continuously analyzing, testing and optimizing are key to long-term success.
This defendant would have easily fit that category, but we are releasing people we think we should be able to trust and that they will do the right thing, the judge said. The problem for Mr. Baumgartner is that he has demonstrated time and time and time again that we cannot trust him, that he will not come to court.
Parson said he wants to wait until the state expands testing for the disease before he lifts restrictions designed to stop the spread.

I want to assure everyone that public health remains our No. 1 priority, Parson said. Once testing is where it needs to be, we can open the state back up.

Parson also has been on calls with other governors to discuss such action, he said.

Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker, a Democrat, also is talking with other chief executives about a regional pact.

A spokeswoman for Pritzker declined to say how many other Midwest governors would join the effort, but said an announcement could come as soon as this week. Coordination among states in the region could help some manufacturers, including the auto industry.

Parson cautioned that Missouris needs may not match those of other states.

Missouri is so diverse and the way were set up in this state is totally different than a lot of other states. So, were going to approach that from whats best for the state of Missouri, Parson said Tuesday.
Coronavirus has de-democratised what is supposed to be the USs most prized democratic institution: Congress.

With the US economy shut down for the foreseeable future and the clock ticking on patchwork federal programmes to keep people and businesses afloat, the negotiating reins for federal rescue legislation have been forced into the hands of party leaders and a select handful of committee chairmen and ranking members  with everyone else left largely on the sidelines warming the bench.

In March, Congress passed a $2.2trn economic relief package cobbled together behind closed doors mostly by this small coterie of party and committee leaders and a small team of White House economic advisers.

When that bill finally emerged, not a single senator voted against it. Only one House member, Kentucky Republican Thomas Massie, voted no. Days later, Donald Trump signed the so-called CARES Act into law.

No public committee hearings. No markups. No robust floor debate. Most House members werent even in Washington for negotiations or the final vote. Most senators were isolated in their D.C. apartments unless they were called to the floor for votes.

In the Senate, just three amendments got floor time (and were promptly voted down). In the House, none.

Demand for action

To be certain, no one person or party is responsible for this de-democratisation of Congress. Its one of the many side effects of social distancing.

The public expects action in a crisis. Swift action.

Speed, decisiveness are everything.

So it went that the most expensive bill in US history was passed under perhaps the least democratic, least inclusive process in US history.

And so it will go for any subsequent legislation, as long as the coronavirus crisis continues to keep lawmakers away from Washington.

At a time when the rank-and-files input is perhaps needed most, social distancing guidelines have rendered it impossible for Congress to craft legislation under the ages-old normal process and caucus routines that rely on face-to-face collegiality and give voice to all members concerns.

Democratic lawmakers have already begun identifying problems with the CARES Act.

The Treasury Departments small business paycheck protection programme (PPP), which received an infusion of more than $350bn in the CARES Act to help companies keep employees on their payroll, hasnt been doling out money to community-based financial institutions that provide capital to mostly minority-, tribal-, women-, and veteran-owned small businesses in poor areas of the country without easy access to normal banks.

Democrats are complaining that the CARES Act doesnt provide nearly enough funding for the states, localities, and health systems bearing the brunt of the pandemic response.

Meanwhile, Republicans are worried that PPP, the small business lending program, will run dry by the end of this week. Congress needs to pump an additional $250bn into it. Now. Theres no time to hash out legislative caveats, they say, no time to write new language to expand funding for food stamps benefits and other things.

Thats because senators and House members are back in their states and districts, largely confined to their homes like the rest of us.

And while theyre dialing into caucus-wide conference calls on a regular basis to provide feedback from all across the country to party leaders, its hard to have a meaningful two-way conversation over the phone while hundreds of other people on the line are chomping at the bit to say their piece, too.

Congress dirty secret

The dirty little secret about Congress is that most of whats on TV is public relations and not real debate  most deals arent struck after someone gives a moving floor speech or presents a compelling argument at a committee hearing. No, deals are brokered in the countless side conversations on the House floor, the huddled whisperings among senators in the well during votes, the testy confrontations at caucus meetings and luncheons.

People would be dumbfounded to know how much business gets done away from the friendly confines of the C-SPAN cameras, said Jim Manley, who advised Democratic senators for more than two decades.

Senator John Thune, the second highest ranking Republican in that chamber, highlighted lawmakers struggle to adjust to remote communications in a recent interview with Roll Call.

The best information you can gather about whats going on in your caucus is not by trying to contact people through phones or through staff; its when everybodys on the floor, and you have a chance to huddle, the South Dakota Republican said.

And therein lies the problem: Its hard to sit down across from someone and hash out a deal when you cant sit down across from someone and hash out a deal.

So, now more than ever, rank-and-file members must put their faith in party leaders more than ever to represent their interests.

They have all the power.
Source: Xinhua| 2020-04-15 09:44:15|Editor: huaxia

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Chinese Ambassador to Slovenia Wang Shunqing (R) speaks during the handover ceremony for protective gear donations from China in Maribor, Slovenia, April 14, 2020. The Chinese Embassy in Slovenia on Tuesday handed over protective gear donated by Chinese organizations, to support Slovenia's fight against COVID-19. (Xinhua/Peng Lijun)

LJUBLJANA, April 15 (Xinhua) -- The Chinese Embassy in Slovenia on Tuesday handed over protective gear donated by Chinese organizations here at a civil defence warehouse, to support Slovenia's fight against COVID-19.

The protective gear, including face masks and other protective equipment, were donated by Chinese cities that are twinned with Slovenian cities, Chinese local governments, Chinese companies, the Association of Chinese Businesses in Slovenia, and the Chinese Olympic Committee, to ramp up protection of the country's critical services, notebly that of police officers and health care workers.

Chinese Ambassador to Slovenia Wang Shunqing commended the donations and the bilateral relationship.

"We will not forget when China fought against the epidemic at a difficult time, Slovenia provided valuable assistance to us. The Chinese culture stresses gratitude, this time China's aid testifies to this spirit," he said.

Wang said the coronavirus epidemic tells us that the destiny of all countries in the world is connected, and solidarity and cooperation is the only choice.

Slovenian Ministry of Defence State Secretary Damijan Jaklin expressed thanks for the assistance from China, saying the cooperation between China and Slovenia in various fields would be strengthened by the experience of fighting the epidemic together.

Later in the day, Wang went to Maribor, the second largest city in Slovenia, and witnessed another donations from Chinese cities including Chongqing, Nanjing, Hangzhou and Huai'an.

A total of 1,220 cases have been reported in Slovenia with 56 deaths, according to the official data released on Tuesday.
Voters wait in line to cast their ballots in the National Assembly general election at a polling station in Seoul's Songpa District, Wednesday. / Yonhap



By Lee Hyo-sik, Jun Ji-hye



Many people turned out to vote for a new National Assembly, Wednesday, although they were asked to comply with strict quarantine guidelines at polling stations to prevent the possible spread of COVID-19. The country's general election was the world's first nationwide election during the pandemic.



A 34-year-old businessman who lives in Seoul's Jungnang District said, "I was concerned about COVID-19, but I did not even think about giving up my right to vote as I wanted to vote for a new Assembly member who will truly work hard for this country."



All voters were asked to wear face masks, sanitize their hands and wear plastic gloves at the polling stations.



The election authorities put green or white tape on the floor to mark a 1-meter distance, advising voters to maintain a safe social distance from each other while waiting in line.



Voters were asked to take off their masks only when the authorities checked their identities before ballot papers were handed out.



A 37-year-old office worker who lives in Seoul's Gangnam District said she was surprised to see a lot more people than she expected at the polling station.



"Korea has faced many difficulties since the outbreak of COVID-19, but at the time, the country's response to the virus has set an example to the world. I hope the new Assembly members will continue to work to elevate the national status," she said.



A 48-year-old salary worker living in Dongjak District in Seoul said he supported a ruling party candidate, claiming the nation could backpedal if the main opposition party takes the control of the Assembly.



"If the opposition party wins the general election, it will block the passage of supplementary budget bills aimed at helping businesses and individuals affected by the coronavirus pandemic," said a public relations manager at a coffee franchise. "I believe people should vote for the ruling party so that the government can do a better job in responding to the pandemic."



During the two-day early voting on Friday and Saturday, a larger-than-expected number of people cast their ballots despite the pandemic, with voter turnout reaching a record 26.69 percent, according to the National Election Commission.



A 49-year-old man who resides in Gwangmyeong, Gyeonggi Province, said he voted on the second day of the early voting as he was concerned about going to the polling station when it was packed with many people.



"I cast a ballot based on a candidate rather than a party. I voted for a younger candidate over his older rival who was a former city mayor," said a producer at one of Korea's three largest terrestrial broadcasters. "The general election serves as a referendum for the ruling party and the administration. I believe people should send a warning to the President and his people, who have done a poor job."



A 50-year old voter who resides in Songdo, Incheon, who voted in the first day of the early voting, said he voted for a ruling party candidate because the party needs a majority in the Assembly to perform state affairs smoothly.



"I think the main opposition party is incapable of checking the ruling party and has lost public trust because of a series of disgraceful scandals," the CEO of a mid-size cosmetics company said. "I would rather bet on the ruling party for its ability to take care of itself."


Interview: PreK-12 Distance Learning During the COVID-19 Shutdown

Christ Episcopal School Director of Technology Bob Krieger discusses distance learning measures for Early Childhood-12 students implemented since the school shut down in mid-March in response to the spread of COVID-19.

Page 1

Steve Nathans-Kelly: I'm here today with Bob Krieger from Christ Episcopal School in Covington, Louisiana. We're going to talk a little bit about Bob's role as Director of Technology at the school during the current crisis when they, like many schools and many religious organizations, are working with a number of streaming technologies to try to keep the community together, and continue learning. So in terms of the day-to-day operations, how much live distance learning is going on? And what are you using to deliver it?

Bob Krieger: My school--just for those who don't know about us--we go from preK all the way through 12th grade. We have two campuses. One is the early childhood campus--pre-K, kindergarten classes--and the other one is the main campus, the 1st through 12th. For 3rd through 12th, we all have email addresses. The kids themselves can log in with their computers as themselves without having to use mom and dad's email address, which is great cause it keeps everything within the school domain, which is really nice. The teachers do live classes for our 3rd through 8th graders. The teachers don't really have online classes every day, but they do meet with the kids online in a live video conference-type situation, about twice a week, and then they have office hours.

For high school, we're trying to keep things a little bit more along the lines of what normal school is like. When your class at school begins at eight in the morning, then your class online begins at eight in the morning. They're not going to be as long. We're cutting it short to about 40 minutes. That gives the kids time to get away from their computer, go do something and come back, so they're not stuck in front of the computer for four or five or six hours a day.

The big deal, right before we started this--when we felt the shutdown was coming--was trying to do a crash course in how to do video streaming, how to do the recording, how to do Google Classroom. A lot of the teachers didn't have that or they knew about it, but hadn't bothered getting started with it yet. I was showing them how it works and then letting them run with it. Being here, being ready to go online to show them how to do certain things, they had questions like, "How do I do this or?" Or, "What's the best way to do that?" Getting online with them as well as via video chat or a remote online connection ... Windows and Macs and Chromebooks all install a different way. And that makes it difficult. And I need to be able to help them do that.

One of the ways I've done it is my little setup here. I use a Blackmagic Design ATEM Mini, which I got a few weeks before this whole thing started. It was basically something that I was gonna use for personal use, for recording plays at school, for recording chapels at school as well. But when this crisis came along, I said, "Well, let me see what I can do." So what I actually have in my office, you'll see behind me, I've got a Windows 10 PC. Then over on this side. I've got a Mac and a Chromebook. And with the, the ATEM Mini, I have it all set up. So there's no switching in the the Google Meet or the Zoom or whatever to get to it, to show my screen. All I have to do is do a switch. So there's the Windows 10 PC; we've got the Mac, and of course the Mac is up, I have my ATEM software on there. And then the Chromebook, and then I come back here. So it actually really helps. When I'm giving a lesson to someone online or to a bunch of people online, it's like, "Let me show you how you do it on a PC and they can actually see the PC right there. Let me show you on the Chromebook. Let me show you on the Mac." And it really helps me get the job done quicker. They're able to see what's going on better than me just talking to them on the phone. Like, "Do you see that icon in the corner?" "Which one? The red one?" "No, the blue one." "I don't have a blue one." It's really kind of difficult to just talk your way through it 'cause I'm trying to remember how things go and having it right here in front of me and showing them at the same time. It works.

Steve Nathans-Kelly: So you've been actually using this setup in training faculty remotely, is that right? Because it seemed like at the beginning of this crisis, there was a lot of putting faculty in a room together to learn how to do this stuff, when it wasn't really the right time to do that.

Bob Krieger: When we closed school, we had two days. Wectold the students and told the faculty, "We're shutting down on Friday. You have the weekend. Monday and Tuesday are just free days. Go relax, go sleep, go do whatever." Mainly to the students, "Go do what you gotta do." And then Wednesday we began school. During that Monday and Tuesday, I took that time. I took lower school first and second grade, and I took third and fourth and then seventh and then the school teachers all separately during those days to give them the basics of how to do what they're gonna do. I don't consider it that hard, but it's new to them. They're used to just throwing up a PowerPoint or a video up on the screen and showing it and displaying it. "Well, let me show you how to do that here so that you have the ability to do this remotely."

Steve Nathans-Kelly: You mentioned before we get started that you're using Google Meet. How did you decide on that versus Zoom or versus another option? Was it something the school was already using?

Bob Krieger: No, the school wasn't using any kind of video conferencing software at all for classes or for teachers. I know the administration would have Zoom meetings with other administrators around the country. But that was them, that was out of my hands, and that's where they picked. I was looking at something we use. We're a Google school. Our email system, our classroom, and everything is all Google-based, all Gmail-based, and everybody knows that. Everybody works with that. And you go to the little Google waffle in the corner to get the little apps and it just works. When Google came out and said that they were making Meet available for schools, it was like, "Here, this is free. We know we're having this problem. Schools, go for it." I said, "Great, let's try this." Zoom came out and they did theirs as well saying, "Okay, we have the free version of Zoom now everyone can use."

At first it was the Early Childhood Center. The lady who's in charge over there, she liked Zoom, so she told her teachers, "Let's use Zoom when we have our meetings." Great. Everybody else is using Google Meet. It was just that much easier to because it worked well in the ecosystem that we already had in place. The fact that you could schedule a meeting using the Google Calendar and then bang, it was just right there, and invite the students. Bang. It's just right there. It's in their email; they just click on a link and there it is--just like Zoom does, but it just integrates so much easier.

At that time I really wasn't too worried about the differences. It just like, "Okay, we're using Google Meet, you wanna, use Zoom, go use Zoom. I don't care. Enjoy yourself, there you go." But then there was an issue with Google Meet where students were getting into these meetings and Google Meet was designed for professional use--not necessarily for school use. So you had students going in there and removing other students from the meeting and blocking everybody's mic and just being kids, and that was a problem. A number of people complained, and I asked Google, "Is there anything you can do about it?" And they said, "Just wait one minute." And within a week that fix was in place.

Now, when teachers start a meeting, they're the ones who have control over muting a mic or blocking a student from the classroom if they're being disruptive, which is fantastic. So that solved the problem. And I love the fact that Google was on the ball saying, "Let me help." Now we are really concentrating on Google rather than Zoom because of some of the other issues that I'm sure other people have heard about that Zoom is having, with unwanted people joining a meeting without being invited, which is kind of strange. At least with Google Meet, you have to be within our Christ Episcopal School domain to join a Meet, or the meeting leader has to physically allow someone to enter the meeting.

We did have an issue with Meet as well where you had only the person who was speaking was full screen. You didn't have a grid view. Kind of like what we're looking at with Zoom right now, we have the two of us on here. One of the other tech directors in the area who teaches in a school down in New Orleans found some code and packaged it up and put it online as a Chrome extension--the Google Grid View--and he called it the Brady Bunch Look. As people join, the grid forms, and each person stays on camera. That grew like wildfire. There was a Google education group on Facebook, and all of a sudden I see that posted on there, and everybody's using it. So the community got together and solved the problem, which was fantastic. And Ryan is sitting back saying, "Well, I didn't really create it, I just packaged it. I just kind of put it out there." But it was a wonderful thing. And then he added some more functionality to it where, as a speaker speaking and on that grid, you'll see a little highlight on there. You can include yourself or not in there, you can pin yourself or not--it's just all these different things that Google Meet didn't quite have, but the extension allowed it to work.

That's one of the things I see in this whole area with the shutdown, is that people are working together, and to get these things to work, making something do it really wasn't intended to do, to do what they need to do so that people can teach the way they need to teach.

I also teach a filmmaking class, and that took a big hit, because we were going to be working on narrative films. Everybody was shooting a short film and working with a bunch of other kids to get together as actors and crew and everything else. But with the shutdown, you can't go out and meet anybody. So what are we gonna do? Well, we're actually turning things around a little bit. We've decided on a concept: We're gonna make one film and everyone is broken up into groups and those groups are going to do something along the lines of the movie Unfriended, where everything has to be done via webcam or social media and recorded through that interaction. But it's not a horror movie. It's going to be more about how do kids date during this time? What they decided on is more light, more fun, more upbeat, I guess you could say.

They all rewrote their scripts, and they're actually working on recording their segments now. We're going to put it together and edit it. I was planning on using Adobe Premiere, and everyone had a copy of it. We're not gonna do it that way now. We want to try to collaborate on this from everyone's home. There's an online editor called WeVideo that is platform-independent. It doesn't matter whether they're on Chromebook, Mac, or PC; it'll work because everything's uploaded to the cloud. It's not gonna be 4K, it's not gonna be 1080p. It's gonna be just 720, but that's fine. This way, everyone can take a look at the different edits and put it together, and then we can collaborate together on the one final film. Hopefully, we're going to have an online screening before the end of school. At least that's the plan. We'll see how it all works out.

This is the silver lining I was talking about. Yes, we're all stuck at home. We can't shake each other's hands or give each other a hug, but we're learning new techniques and learning these new technologies. We're using them in ways they were never intended, but ways that just make us advance and help us continue advancing toward the end goal. That part is wonderful. So let's not overlook the good that actually comes with the bad.

It was like this after Katrina. When we had that lovely little storm a few years ago, people were wringing their hands and crying, and they were usually the people who weren't in New Orleans or weren't in this area. But we all pulled together. We helped everybody out. We came together as a community and learned new ways of doing things, new ways of making things work. It's like, tighten your belt and roll up your sleeves and start throwing out the trash and we're going to continue.

That's what I see in this crisis happening right now around here, at least in the education community. People, you tightening their belts, rolling up their sleeves, digging into the work, and doing what needs to be done with a smile on their face. Because it's not like we have to use chalkboard and chalk anymore. We have these technologies. The internet works, this stuff works, let's use it, and let's use it to the best of our ability. People are doing things with it that I never thought was possible.

Steve Nathans-Kelly: Thanks so much, Bob, and keep doing what you're doing.

Bob Krieger: I'm trying. Okay. Well, thank you for having me. I appreciate it.

Page 1
Photograph: John G Mabanglo/EPA

More than 90 residents and 10 staff members at San Franciscos largest homeless shelter have tested positive for coronavirus, in a development that homeless advocates say was both predictable and preventable amid massive policy failures.

The outbreak at the MSC South shelter is believed to be the largest reported outbreak in a single shelter in the country. The spike caused a single 12% surge in positive cases in the city, illustrating the magnitude of the crisis in a region that so far has weathered the coronavirus storm well.

Related: Wasted time: how San Francisco failed its homeless population amid coronavirus

San Francisco reported 957 confirmed Covid-19 cases on Monday, a number that was significantly higher than the 797 reported on Friday, said Dr Grant Colfax, the director of the San Francisco department of public health, in large part due to the large numbers of testing we did in the homeless community.

There will be more, Colfax said.

The population of people experiencing homelessness face many barriers to health and wellness in normal times, and this pandemic will only exploit and amplify those problems, he said. Other cities such as Boston, Los Angeles and Seattle are grappling with a large number of cases of Covid-19 among their homeless populations. We expect to see the same.

A person sits outside the MSC South homeless shelter in San Francisco. Photograph: John G Mabanglo/EPA

But the outbreak at the MSC South shelter follows weeks of warnings from advocates and local lawmakers that the thousands of people living on San Franciscos streets or in overcrowded shelters could do little to protect themselves from the virus or help prevent its spread, with calls for the mayor, London Breed, to move the citys more than 8,000 homeless residents into vacant hotel rooms growing louder each day.

This [outbreak] was totally preventable and totally predictable, said Chris Herring, a sociology doctoral candidate at UC Berkeley who works with the Coalition on Homelessness.

Before the coronavirus outbreak, MSC South typically housed 340 people a night, with 200 beds for men only in an open-floor set-up on the second floor. Bunk beds stood about two feet apart, with no partitions, and there was just one hallway of bathrooms to share among everyone. It was definitely ripe for viral spread, in terms of the designs and the density and the amount of people there, said Herring, who had spent time at MSC South during his research.

Story continues

This [outbreak] was totally preventable and totally predictable Chris Herring

The line to get into MSC South used to stretch down the street. The majority of the shelters beds were for 90-day stays, but the shelter had more drop-in overnight beds than any other in the city. Its drop-in center acted as a triage for all overnight beds, with some individuals getting shuttled to other shelters where a bed was available. There was a huge amount of crossover between people and staff within these shelters up until two weeks ago, Herring said.

Dr Allen Cooper, a retired Stanford University medical school professor who volunteered at the MSC South shelter clinic, had written to Breed to warn her about the conditions for viral spread in the citys shelters even before the coronavirus outbreak.

In January, he saw a case of norovirus rip through not just MSC South, but spread to a nearby shelter as well. It was tearing through here, Cooper said. Given how fast something like that would spread through the shelter, I just thought that coronavirus would go viral.

To improve social distancing at the shelters, the facilities stopped receiving new residents and the city resolved to move some shelter residents to other new emergency congregate shelters, including the Moscone Center  a large conference center downtown known for its tech gatherings. Breed maintained that providing every single homeless individual in the city with a hotel room was simply impossible.

On 6 April, the city announced the two first positive cases at MSC South. The city had to rethink its plan for new shelters when photos leaked showing the arrangements at Moscone: thin mats on the floor, divided into physically distanced cells by masking tape. The mayor admitted that authorities had moved 19 individuals from MSC South to Moscone Center before realizing that they had contact with the two positive cases.

By the time the first two cases tested positive at the shelter, Breed was moving into hotel rooms only those who had tested positive, had been exposed to the virus or were already in shelters and considered especially vulnerable to the disease  people over the age of 60 or with underlying health conditions.

An activist protests from her vehicle outside Moscone Center, asking Mayor London Breed to house homeless people using vacant hotels. Photograph: Ben Margot/AP

The focus has been on waiting until after, what do you do after people get sick, said Kelley Cutler, the human rights organizer for the not-for-profit Coalition on Homelessness. But we need to do prevention because for a lot of these folks, its too late. Once you wait until after, its too late.

A recent study conducted by researchers at three US universities had determined that in this pandemic, homeless people would be two to three times more likely to die and two to four times more likely to be hospitalized than the general population.

Cutler pointed out that Breed had been proactive with so many of her orders with the coronavirus crisis, but when it came to the homeless population, the citys response was reactive at best.

By 10 April, the number of positive cases at MSC South had risen to 70, and on Monday it had jumped another 21. In addition, the city has been unable to determine exactly how many of the 987 cases and 15 deaths are of homeless residents. In addition to the 92 MSC South residents and one other shelter resident, Colfax noted that 20% of all Covid-related hospitalizations at Zuckerberg San Francisco general hospital, the citys safety-net medical facility, were of homeless individuals.

This could have been averted, said Cooper, the Stanford medical professor. He questioned what occurred in the week that passed between the first two positive cases and the surge. Why did it take them so long to do the testing and begin segregating the positive cases? he said.

By the time officials discovered the outbreak, about 100 residents remained at MSC South, Breed said. All have moved into hotel rooms over the weekend.

City health and homeless officials have argued that the uptick in cases, particularly among the unhoused population in congregated settings like shelters, was to be expected.

Outbreaks like these were bound to happen, said Colfax, the San Francisco department of public health official. This is how coronavirus spreads. Our goal is to slow the spread down and mitigate the bad outcomes we see with this virus.

A man wearing a face mask directs people to food donations in San Francisco. Photograph: Shannon Stapleton/Reuters

Meanwhile, the city has given a number of reasons for why not every homeless person should be housed in a hotel room during the pandemic. It would not be fiscally prudent, said Trent Rhorer, the citys human services agency director. It has not been easy to provide adequate staff, Breed said on Monday. Some homeless individuals have behavioral health issues that make it difficult for them to abide by the rules, Colfax said.

Herring fears for the individuals who remain in the shelters. Signs posted on shelter doors now tell guests they can only leave the shelter for one hour a day. Many of these shelters are just a place to sleep, Herring said. Many of them do not have a TV room, a common area. Theyre designed as sleeping quarters. And now people are being told they have to stay here 23 hours and if they leave they cannot come back and have to stay out in the streets.

Although the citys department of homelessness and supportive housing says shelter evictions will be limited during the pandemic and that the department will extend guests stays, Herring doesnt think the set-up of the shelters will be sustainable for residents to shelter-in-place, conceivably into June.

There will be more disruptions inside the shelters, people are going to be kicked out, and theyre not going to be let back in, he said. Unless the mayor is going to let people into hotels, were going to see more and more people on the streets.
Kayleigh McEnany, a former Fox figure who is fiercely loyal to President Donald Trump, took over on Wednesday as his new press secretary, entering the high-profile job at a time of turmoil in White House relations with the press.

McEnany, 31, made the formal announcement a week after her predecessor Stephanie Grisham stepped down.

"Honored to join the @WhiteHouse as President Trump's @PressSec," she tweeted. "I look forward to connecting the American People to @realDonaldTrump's agenda and sharing the historic successes of this Administration."



A graduate of Georgetown University and Harvard Law School, McEnany worked for Fox and CNN before joining the Republican National Committee communications team. She then became the Trump 2020 reelection campaign spokeswoman.

She enters the White House as Trump is in open war with several major outlets over critical coverage of his response to the coronavirus pandemic. The crisis and the economic fallout have reshaped Trump's reelection bid, which was previously based on a once-booming economy that is now deteriorating terribly by the day.

McEnany has been criticized over past comments including support for Trump's conspiracy theory that former president Barack Obama was not born in the United States -- a falsehood seen by many as racist.

She has also drawn fire over a comment she made on Fox Business in February downplaying the coronavirus threat, saying, "We will not see diseases like the coronavirus come here, we will not see terrorism come here, and isn't that refreshing when contrasting it with the awful presidency of President Obama?"



McEnany faces the immediate question of whether she will actually brief journalists, as press secretaries have traditionally always done, or maintain Grisham's policy of talking largely to Fox

A hallmark of the Trump White House is that he likes to act as his own spokesman, tweeting and giving frequent press conferences, rather than going through the press office.

In her nine-month tenure, Grisham gave no formal press briefings.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
HARTFORD - A Superior Court judge on Wednesday reserved decision on a class action lawsuit by the ACLU of Connecticut seeking an emergency order to release inmates from state prisons to reduce the spread of COVID-19.

Judge Barbara Bellis said she would attempt to rule on the case by the end of the month following a telephone conference with lawyers for the state and ACLU.

Ten lawyers were on the call for the 40-minute proceeding with Bellis.

The COVID-19 pandemic is a critical emergency, and it is rapidly spreading in Connecticut prisons and jails. One person has already died in the Connecticut DOCs care, and the lives of people living and working in Connecticut prisons are at risk. The court should be moving with the extreme urgency this life or death situation demands, said Dan Barrett, legal director of the ACLU of Connecticut and an attorney on the case. It is appalling that instead of concentrating on protecting and saving the lives of people living and working in Connecticut prisons and jails, the state is focusing its arguments on legal technicalities and bureaucratic nonsense.

The ACLU of Connecticut filed the lawsuit in Superior Court on April 3, seeking immediate action to prevent the spread of COVID-19 by reducing the number of people who are incarcerated in state Department of Correction prisons and jails. The class action lawsuit was filed on behalf of the Connecticut Criminal Defense Lawyers Association and six people who are incarcerated, including one man with an autoimmune condition and another scheduled for release in May.

>>SEARCHABLE DATABASE: Details about recently released or incarcerated CT inmates

On April 14, the New England Healthcare Employees Union, 1199 SEIU, submitted a friend of the court brief in support of the lawsuit. In that brief, the union states it is the exclusive representative of approximately 600 frontline health care workers in the DOC, including doctors, nurses, psychiatrists, social workers, and other health care professionals in Connecticuts jails and prisons.

However, Bellis did not accept the brief.

People who are incarcerated and their loved ones do not have the luxury of time, and they need the court to act now to protect them, said David McGuire, executive director of the ACLU of Connecticut. In the past week alone, one person incarcerated by the state has died, the number of COVID-19 cases among incarcerated people has nearly quadrupled, the number of COVID-19 cases among DOC workers has nearly tripled.

Assistant Attorney General James Belforti argued during Wednesdays conference that a ruling in favor of the plaintiffs would effectively circumvent the executive authority of Gov. Ned Lamont and DOC Commissioner Rollin Cook and the legislature along with the Judicial Branch. He called the plan reckless and potentially dangerous.

Belifort stated the plaintiffs are seeking the release of thousands of prisoners who have been incarcerated by one form of judicial order or another during a time when social services and communities are unable to provide adequate help.

Belforti also argued that the CCDLA had no standing since they have suffered no injury. This isnt an association of inmates who are seeking redress for a wrong, Belforti said. The six inmates named in the lawsuit also have no standing since they have no legal right to demand release, he added.

Bellis said she hoped to have a ruling by the end of the month but was shooting for some time next week.

I appreciate the arguments today, she said. I do have my work cut off for me.
The University of Pennsylvanias Lia Thomas competes in a swim meet against Dartmouth and Yale on Saturday. (Kylie Cooper)

After undergoing hormone replacement therapy, Thomas has posted fast times for the University of Pennsylvania's women's team, sparking debates from the starting blocks to online message boards to cable news networks.
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Linkedin Ghina Ghaliya (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Wed, April 15, 2020 10:30 636 fc6853813033f564188675f8bd1f8346 1 Politics 2020-regional-elections,KPU,house-of-representatives,Tito-Karnavian,COVID-19,coronavirus,delay,virus-corona,virus-korona-indonesia Free

The government and the House of Representatives have agreed to reschedule the voting day for this year's simultaneous regional elections to Dec. 9 from its initial schedule in September due to the COVID-19 outbreak.

Lawmakers and relevant stakeholders reached the decision after a hearing held on Tuesday between House Commission II overseeing home affairs, Home Minister Tito Karnavian, the General Elections Commission (KPU), the Elections Supervisory Agency (Bawaslu) and the Election Organization Ethics Council (DKPP).

"House Commission II approved the government's proposal to postpone the 2020 regional elections to Dec. 9, 2020," Commission II chairman Ahmad Doli Kurnia said.

Read also: Regional elections postponed after organizers catch COVID-19

The Golkar Party politician went on to say that Commission II together with the home minister and KPU would hold a work meeting to further discuss the matter and the latest developments of the pandemic after the emergency period for the COVID-19 outbreak had ended.

"At the same time, we will review the stages of the regional elections," said Doli.

The government will draft a regulation in lieu of law (Perppu) to provide a legal basis for the postponement of the voting day, which will be held simultaneously in the country's 270 regions.

The 2016 Regional Elections Law mandates that the 2020 simultaneous regional elections be held in September, with voting day on Sept. 23, 2020, as stipulated in a 2019 KPU regulation.

However, due to the SARS-CoV-2 outbreak  which has now infected more than 4,000 people in the country  the KPU had previously suggested three alternative dates for voting day: Dec. 9, 2020; March 17, 2021; and Sept. 29, 2021.

Read also: Indonesian regions report lack of funds to hold 2020 local polls

As the election organizer, the KPU does not have the authority to delay the local elections and can only postpone the stages of the elections. The authority to delay the election schedule belongs to the House.

According to the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance (International IDEA), the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic has led many countries to postpone elections, with at least 12 national elections and 20 local elections in 30 countries having been delayed.

The government, the KPU and the House had also previously agreed to reallocate the remaining balance of around Rp 9 trillion (US$550 million) from the election budget for COVID-19 prevention and control.
Stephen Garcia's family is frantic. The auto body worker, just 32 years old, has been on a ventilator in a Los Angeles-area hospital for nearly two weeks, gravely ill with COVID-19, unresponsive  and unaware of the battle they're waging on his behalf.

For days, Garcia's mother, his aunt and his girlfriend have pleaded with doctors at Kaiser Permanente Downey Medical Center to try an experimental treatment  blood plasma from people recovered from COVID-19  in hopes of saving his life.

They know it's not at all a sure thing. But they've seen stories from across the country: an anesthesiologist in Colorado, an Orlando father of three, a dozen patients at a hospital in Texas, all of whom have received what's known as convalescent plasma, an investigational therapy to halt the deadly virus. And they wonder why Garcia  the outgoing, ambitious father of a 9-year-old girl  can't get it, too.

"Why not try it?" said Garcia's mother, Irma Hoenes, 52. "What if it does help?"

So far, their efforts have been in vain. Hospital officials have declined to enroll Garcia in any clinical trial or expanded access program or to seek emergency individual use of convalescent plasma, though the federal Food and Drug Administration recently authorized these pathways for use in critically ill patients.

"The doctor just said no. His hospital is not participating in that treatment," said Silvia Richard, Garcia's aunt. "I don't know how they can say they are trying everything."

Garcia's plight underscores the lack of coordination  and disparities in access  as families of failing COVID-19 patients jockey to obtain the still-unproven treatment. Even as efforts ramp up to collect blood plasma from the first survivors of the novel coronavirus, one's chances of procuring the treatment appear to depend on accidents of geography, social-media savvy and the willingness of treating physicians.

"The demand is going to be super high, but I anticipate that it's going to be a couple of weeks before we get anything like a pipeline to move from a trickle of product to a river," said Dr. Michael Joyner, principal investigator of the Convalescent Plasma Expanded Access Program, coordinated by the Mayo Clinic.

"Disparities like this exist in our system  our non-system," he said.

In the past two weeks, blood centers across the U.S. have accelerated efforts to collect COVID-19 convalescent plasma on the theory it contains protective antibodies that can transfer immunity from a patient who had the disease to someone still suffering.

The experimental practice was used during the devastating 1918 flu, as well as to treat measles in the 1930s. More recently, plasma therapy been used to treat victims of Ebola, SARS and H1N1 influenza. This year, an early review of five critically ill COVID-19 patients in China found that they appeared to improve after receiving convalescent plasma.

But the treatment is only now being studied in multiple clinical trials. FDA officials made clear that while the agency authorized the treatment for emergency use in serious or critically ill COVID-19 patients, much remains unknown. "Although promising, convalescent plasma has not yet been shown to be safe and effective as a treatment for COVID-19," the agency wrote.

It remains uncertain, for instance, at what point in illness the therapy could be most helpful. Early research suggests that convalescent plasma may be most effective when given to people before they get sick or early in the course of the disease, said Arthur Caplan, director of the division of medical ethics at New York University School of Medicine.

But that doesn't deter families desperate for a solution, he acknowledged. "I understand that you might want us to try anything and everything," he said.

Fewer than 100 people so far have been treated with plasma through the emergency avenues approved by the FDA, according to the AABB, an international nonprofit focused on transfusion medicine and cellular therapies. The group has partnered with SurvivorCorps, a grassroots movement aimed at encouraging recovered COVID-19 patients to donate plasma.

So far, the use of COVID-19 plasma has been limited primarily by the number of eligible donors. "The biggest issue right now, the main, main issue right now, is just building up the supplies," Joyner said.

Potential donors are people with lab-confirmed cases of COVID-19, who have recovered from, and since tested negative for, the virus. Blood centers anticipate it eventually will be possible to collect tens of thousands of units of COVID-19 convalescent plasma, said Eduardo Nunes, the AABB's vice president of quality, transfusion and standards.

But, for now, supplies remain scarce. "This will only work if people come out and donate so that there is an inventory available," said Dr. Alyssa Ziman, director of transfusion medicine at UCLA Health, where the blood center is beginning plasma collection this week.

The promise of plasma, set against the scarcity of supply, has led to families seeking out their own sources. Last week, the family of Dr. Priya Khanna, a New Jersey nephrologist, turned to Twitter after she was sickened with COVID-19.

"Plasma donor needed urgently for my beautiful young sister who dedicated her life to helping others," read a wrenching April 8 tweet shared widely by health care workers. Within a day, Khanna's family reported they had found a donor.

In Grapevine, Texas, Sue Szendrey began recruiting potential donors on Facebook after her husband, Billy Szendrey, 64, was hospitalized with COVID-19 on March 22. "We put out the word that we needed plasma," she said. "I got 17 names over the weekend."

One volunteer turned out to be eligible. The young woman donated her plasma at Carter BloodCare in Bedford, Texas, one of the centers collecting plasma. Dr. Geeta Paranjape, the center's medical director, said the plasma was reserved for Baylor Scott & White Medical Center Grapevine, where Billy Szendrey is being treated.

"We rely on the physician to use it in the best possible way," Paranjape said.

On April 9, Billy Szendrey received the plasma, much to his wife's relief. "Don't you want to give people a chance?" Sue Szendrey said. "If you can get this done, do it."

Back in L.A., Stephen Garcia's family said he is being denied that chance and with little explanation.

Garcia's mother said she repeatedly has asked her son's physicians about obtaining convalescent plasma. They "just said there's not a lot of information and they're not participating," she said.

In an email, Kaiser Permanente spokesman Marc Brown said that hospital officials are committed to providing "state-of-the-art care for patients with COVID-19" but that they couldn't comment on a specific patient.

Brown did not make Garcia's physicians available for an interview. Kaiser Health News reached out directly to one of the physicians, Dr. Timothy Hulbert, a critical care specialist, who did not respond to a request for comment. (Kaiser Health News is not affiliated with Kaiser Permanente.)

Brown did not address questions about whether the hospital system would provide convalescent plasma to any patient, not just Garcia.

"Individual treatment decisions, including the compassionate use of potential therapies outside of the context of a clinical trial, are made between the patient and their physicians based on both the risks and the potential benefits in a particular clinical situation," Brown's email said.

Hospital systems aren't required  legally or ethically  to provide access to unproven treatments, said Caplan, the bioethics professor.

"If the physician believes that there's no point, given prior use and the resources diversion that it might take to do it, you can't do it without the physician being on board," Caplan said.

There's no denying that some patients will have access to convalescent plasma and others won't, Joyner said. "Many of these decisions will be made at the level of individual providers or groups of providers," he said.

Even when patients do obtain plasma, there's no guarantee it will help. Despite the Texas donor's efforts, Billy Szendrey remained unconscious, in critical condition, several days after the treatment, his wife said. In New Jersey, Dr. Priya Khanna died early Monday, her family reported on Twitter. She was 43.

The sad truth is it's not yet clear how best to treat COVID-19 patients, especially those who require ventilators, said Joyner, an anesthesiologist. A dose of antibody-rich plasma remains promising, but not certain.

"The idea that a single intervention is going to have a Lazarus-like effect? It's possible, but it's very unusual," Joyner said. "It's a very difficult proposition to turn those people around."
Vietnams Prime Minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc (C) addresses a live video conference on the special Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) Plus Three Summit on the COVID-19 pandemic in Hanoi as South Korea's President Moon Jae-in, Japan's Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and China's Premier Li Keqiang are seen on television screen, April 14, 2020.

Southeast Asian leaders agreed at a special online summit on Tuesday to ensure a social safety net for the regions vulnerable populations and backed reallocating funds toward fighting the COVID-19 outbreak.

The leaders of the 10-member Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) later in the day held a separate online summit with leaders from China, Japan and South Korea to discuss the global public health crisis, whose ripple effects have battered economies worldwide. Tuesdays meetings were held via video-calls because of COVID-19 concerns.

Vietnamese Prime Minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc, the chairman of ASEAN in 2020 and whose country hosted the regional blocs special summit, said all its members were struggling to prevent the coronavirus from negatively affecting their people.

It is in these grim hours that the solidarity of the ASEAN community shines like a beacon in the dark, he said in his opening statement.

Nations in the bloc, including Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines and Thailand, have recorded more than 20,000 confirmed COVID-19 cases and more than 900 deaths from the disease.

In a joint statement, the members agreed to: Cooperate in ensuring a social safety net for our people, preventing social disruption and instability as a consequence of negative impact of the pandemic, continue efforts to design and implement risk-informed and shock-responsive social protection systems to reduce the vulnerabilities of at-risk populations and improve their overall resilience.

In addition, members said they would intensify cooperation to obtain adequate provisions of medicine, essential medical supplies and equipment including diagnostic tools and personal protective equipment.

They also agreed to support reallocating existing funds to battle the pandemic and to establish a COVID-19 ASEAN Response Fund.

We have no choice but to unite to fight this virus, Indonesian President Joko Jokowi Widodo said.

While the ASEAN leaders did not set a target amount for the fund, Thai Prime Minister Prayuth Chan-o-cha said it should be used to procure test kits, personal protective equipment and medical tools.

In addition, it should be used to support research and development in medicines and vaccines to help ASEAN become more self-reliant, he said.

Thai officials said the fund should involve reallocating 10 percent of existing ASEAN development funds along with donations from the so-called Plus Three nations  China, Japan and South Korea.

Rodrigo Duterte, the president of the Philippines, called for closer cooperation in the face of what he called an unfolding catastrophe  unprecedented in scale and devastating in impact for all.

We are particularly concerned with food security in this period of lockdowns. Our most urgent priority is ensuring sufficient supply of rice for our people, Duterte said.

The Philippine leader said ASEAN must be open for trade.

Crisis or no crisis, no country can stand alone, he said. Let us, therefore ensure the supply chain connectivity and the smooth flow of goods within our region.

Duterte called on ASEAN to establish an early warning system to prepare for future pandemics.

We have to improve and expand existing ASEANs mechanisms to cover public health emergencies, he said.

Malaysias leader urged his ASEAN counterparts to start discussing an economic recovery plan focusing not just on the financial aspects, but also on social safety nets.

We must not allow ASEAN to revert back to our comfort zone  but make ASEAN emerge as a new growth center, a new power-house not just for our 600 million people, but for the world, Malaysian Prime Minister Muhyiddin Yassin told the summit.

During the ASEAN Plus Three meeting, Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe proposed establishing a regional center for infectious diseases.

International cooperation is essential for combating the virus that is spreading beyond borders, Abe said, according to Japanese media. We should share information and knowledge in a free, transparent and swift manner.

The proposal drew support from the other participants.

ASEAN countries agreed to act on Japans proposal and discuss it further, Indonesian Foreign Minister Retno Marsudi told reporters.

Li Keqiang, the premier of China, where the coronavirus was detected, meanwhile proposed establishing a fast route for essential personnel to travel to other countries, according to a news release from the Chinese Embassy in Jakarta.

Keqiang said that APT countries need to leverage their strengths in economic complementarity and strong business ties to further ease tariffs, eliminate barriers, boost the flow of trade and investment, and keep markets open to each other, in an effort to restore growth in East Asia as quickly as possible, it said, referring to the ASEAN Plus Three countries.

With all the necessary control measures in place, we should consider opening a fast-track lane for essential personnel on urgent visits in the areas of commerce, logistics, production and technological services. This will be conducive to maintaining the necessary flow of people and goods and stabilizing the industrial and supply chains.

ASEAN lawmakers welcomed Tuesdays online summits before they got into full swing.

Its high time that ASEAN leaders get together to find a regional response to the ongoing COVID-19 crisis, Charles Santiago, a Malaysian MP who chairs the ASEAN Parliamentarians for Human Rights, said in a statement issued by the group.

Neither the virus nor the consequences of the measures taken to stop the pandemic will stop at ones border. The current situation, as well as the management of its long term impact, requires regional solidarity and a global solution, he added.

Deadly day in Indonesia

The ASEAN leaders met on the day that Indonesia recorded its highest single-day death count since Southeast Asia's most populous nation confirmed its first coronavirus cases in early March.

The toll rose to 459 after 60 deaths were reported in the past 24 hours, according to the countrys COVID-19 task force. The number of confirmed cases increased by 282 to 4,839, task force spokesman Achmad Yurianto said.

Worldwide nearly 122,000 people have died and nearly 2 million have been infected by COVID-19, according to the latest data compiled by disease experts at Johns Hopkins University in the United States.

In a report issued over the weekend, epidemiological experts at the University of Indonesia warned that COVID-19 cases requiring hospitalization could hit 1 million on the main island of Java by July if the government did not ban people from traveling to celebrate Eid al-Fitr, the festival marking the end of Ramadan.

The government previously banned civil servants, soldiers and police from taking part in the annual exodus. The ban did not cover the rest of nation.

Luhut Pandjaitan, coordinating minister for maritime affairs and investment, downplayed the prediction even though Indonesia has the highest COVID-19 death toll in East Asia outside of China.

So far, I believe, Indonesia is in good shape, Pandjaitan told reporters on Tuesday.

Reported by BenarNews, an RFA-affiliated online news service.
The foundation of an agreement between Fine Gael and Fianna Fail on a joint programme for government may not be the end of the way we do politics in Ireland but it surely signifies the beginning of the end, representing the biggest polar shift since the Civil War.

Yet if either Leo Varadkar or Micheal Martin are to have any hope of persuading smaller parties to come on board they will have put at least some sturdy scaffolding on the foundation structure they have signed up to.
A positive smile during this time should be contagious, so says Christina Burrell, a nursing student and patient care technician on the front lines of the coronavirus battle.
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One of my favorite "restaurants" in Hanoi is Pho Thin near Ngoc Son Temple, Hoan Kiem Lake. It has never been closed until now.

Lee Chang-Hee

Pho Thin is where I can taste the best pho at a reasonable price, and I am sure that many Hanoians would agree with me. This humble family-owned street restaurant supported generations of people coming from the home village of its founder, the late Mr. Bui Chi Thin, who hoped to build their new life in the capital city. Since its establishment in 1954, Pho Thin never ceased its operation as a household business, during the centrally planned economy, the American War, or the financial crisis in late 1990s and late 2000s. Now, however, it is temporarily closed for social distancing.

This anecdote illustrates the devastating magnitude of the economic and social challenges triggered by the Covid-19. Millions of household businesses are put on hold, while thousands of larger enterprises have suspended their operation. Every day people are losing jobs, and their income.

The entire world is facing an unprecedented severe crisis, the worst one since World War II. With various forms of lockdowns and social distancing, the global health crisis is quickly triggering a global economic and social crisis. According to the latest estimates of the International Labor Organization (ILO), full or partial lockdowns have affected almost 2.7 billion workers, representing 81 percent of the worlds workforce. The ILO Monitor released earlier this week indicated that working hours will decline by 6.7 percent in the second quarter of 2020, which is equivalent to 195 million full-time workers.

Around 38 percent of the global workforce is employed in the sectors that are now facing a severe decline in output and a correspondingly high risk of devastating layoffs, wage reductions and working hours. Accommodation and food services, including street restaurants like Pho Thin of Hanoi, are among them.

It is no longer just a public health challenge. We need to protect public health, and peoples livelihoods. It is not a choice. If we fail to save peoples livelihoods, we will ultimately fail to protect their life and health against the virus, and vice versa.

The good news is that Vietnam is one of a few success stories so far, perhaps together with Korea, in containing the spread of Covid-19. From the very beginning, the Government put the top priority on protecting peoples lives and health, as announced by Prime Minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc. Unlike some other countries where abrupt and harsh lockdown created chaos, Vietnam has taken resolute but gradual and soft measures, with transparent and real-time information sharing. It is no wonder that Vietnams approach has garnered praise from the international community but also from its own people. The Berlin-based Dalia Research showed that among many countries surveyed, Vietnams citizens report the highest trust and confidence in the governments response to this pandemic.

But dont forget this is not a single-country fight. Its a global one! So, even if Vietnam succeeds in keeping Covid-19 under full control, its economy and society will still be severely affected as long as the Covid-19 crisis keeps spreading in the other countries with which Vietnam is connected through trade. More than two million jobs are at risk, as the latest estimate by the Ministry of Planning and Investment clearly shows.

Ta Hien, Hanoi's popular night beer street, is deserted at 7 p.m. on April 13, 2020. Photo by VnExpress/Ngoc Thanh.

I am very encouraged to see that Vietnam has begun to introduce and roll out policy packages to stimulate the economy and support enterprises, jobs and incomes, as evidenced by the resolution on governments Covid-19 support. Yes, there may be rooms for improvement. But I believe that the unprecedented $2.6 billion support package is broadly in line with what ILO suggests at global level for large scale and integrated policy responses to fight Covid-19: 1) stimulating the economy and employment, 2) supporting enterprises, jobs and incomes, and 3) protecting workers in the workplace. Such policy framework will enhance post Covid-19 recovery by limiting harms to people and minimizing threats to future growth potential.

I want to emphasize three points.

First, under the current situation, enterprises are likely to accelerate layoffs, which have already started. If unchecked, these layoffs will magnify the social crisis and resulting downward spiral.

It is critical to focus on maintaining jobs, by directing the governments support to businesses that carry out various measures to retain workers in employment. This will help to slow down and minimize the shock of employment crisis. In doing so, it is important to have social dialogue between enterprises and workers, and between both of them and the Government for gradual adjustment to jobs, working hours and wage incomes based on mutual understanding. Social dialogue can create trust and confidence in policies and measures taken by the Government and enterprises, minimizing possibility of social instability. This will help the economy bounce back once Covid-19 comes under control. In this regard, Vietnam already has some good initiatives, such as what have been done by Hai Phong Economic Zone trade unions.

Second, it is important to minimize the impacts of various containment measures on micro enterprises, family business and rural agricultural communities. These are the businesses that sustained Vietnam during the wars and economic crises in the past. However, the current pandemic and social distancing measures is causing a heavy strain on their capacity to absorb economic and social shocks. When there is an abrupt collapse of global demand for Vietnamese goods and services, or a disruption of global supply chains, millions of micro enterprises, family businesses and rural farming community provide subsistence support. Therefore it is urgent to allow them to play their roles at this critical juncture, with governments support.

Third, micro enterprises, family business and rural agricultural communities, as well as all workers in non-standard forms of employment often fall through the cracks of social protection. Together with employment retention measures, emergency cash transfers are therefore essential to ensure that they get the support they need to stay afloat. Cash disbursements to low- and middle-income groups are not only an effective way to protect peoples livelihoods but also maintain continued consumption. These households are likely to spend a large portion of the cash support on food and basic necessities in the local market, thereby maintaining demand and benefiting the society as a whole. Evidence from previous crises shows that social protection cushion the demand and supply shocks, both in addressing emerging deprivations and serving as an effective economic and social stabilizer.

Protecting peoples livelihood through this difficult time must be a priority to protect the foundation of the society and therefore is at the heart of paving a solid path towards recovery and win the fight against Covid-19. Now it is time to take balanced approach to this dual crisis. On public health front, Vietnam has proven to be one of best countries in the world. It is time to prove that the nation is equally excellent in addressing economic, social and labor market challenges. I have the confidence that Vietnam can do it. The international community, including ILO and U.N. agencies, will provide all available support.

*Lee Chang-Hee is the country director of ILO Vietnam.
Thailand has extended through April 30 a ban on international passenger flights landing in the country as part of its effort to control the spread of COVID-19.

The ban was initially ordered April 4 after chaos broke out at Bangkok's international airport when more than 100 returning Thai citizens reportedly refused to abide by regulations requiring them to go directly to state-run quarantine centers. The original three-day ban has already been extended once.

Thai authorities even before the airport incident had announced that the return of Thais from abroad would have to be delayed because there were not enough facilities to properly monitor and quarantine them.

Strict regulations requiring prior certification from foreigners that they do not have the coronavirus have effectively banned the entry of most foreign visitors.

Exceptions to the ban renewal announced Wednesday by the Civil Aviation Authority of Thailand include state or military aircraft, emergency landings, technical landings without disembarkation, humanitarian, medical or relief flights, repatriation flights and cargo flights. All who do enter are subject to health crisis regulations, including a 14-day state quarantine.

Thailand has a huge tourism industry and last year welcomed about 40 million visitors.

There were 30 new confirmed cases of COVID-19 announced Wednesday, bringing the total to 2,643. Two more deaths were announced, bringing the total to 43, while 1,497 infected people have recovered.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
The 2020 International Prize for Arabic Fiction (IPAF) has gone to Algerian author Abdelouahab Aissaoui for his book Spartan Court.

The Djelfa-born author was announced winner of the IPAF Tuesday in Abu Dhabi by the organizers who streamlined the ceremony due to movement restriction imposed by the UAE because of the novel coronavirus.

Aissaoui receives $50,000 cash prize and will have his winning work translated into English. He beat five other contenders hailing from Syria, Egypt, Lebanon and Iraq.

Winning the prize is a great prospect and dream to which every novelist with a project aspires, he said on IPAF website.

But it also means greater responsibility and it raises expectations of readers  those interested in literature and critics  when they read the successful book and future works by the writer.

With a background in electromechanical engineering, the 35-year-old man quickly developed a taste for writing. He won several literary awards including Algerias President of the Republic Prize with his piece Jacobs Cinema (2013), Kuwaits Suad al-Sabah Novel Prize in 2017 for his third book, Circles and Doors.

Spartant Court is a fiction work presenting a historical relation between the power struggle between Ottoman and French colonial powers in Algeria at the start of the 19th century.

The work invites readers to gain a greater understanding of life under occupation and the different forms of resistance that grow against it, commented Muhsin al-Musawi, chair of the prizes five-member judging panel.

Established in 2017, IPAF is one the worlds leading generous literary awards. Backed by UK-based Booker Prize Foundation, the prize aims at promoting the translation of Arabic literature into English.
In a new memoir that lifts the lid on the cabinet tensions, Mr Turnbull writes that Finance Minister Mathias Cormann tried to shut Mr Morrison out of some of the talks on tax in order to prevent the details being leaked.

Mr Turnbull says the tactics infuriated ministers to the point where he thought Mr Morrison would offer to resign as treasurer after an especially damaging media leak about superannuation and negative gearing.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison has been blamed for media leaks that weakened the government during high-stakes cabinet debates on tax reform, in an explosive claim from his predecessor Malcolm Turnbull.

Mr Turnbull wondered whether Mr Morrison was out of his depth and told a cabinet meeting in February 2016 that the leaking had to stop  a remark he aimed at his treasurer and raised again in private talks after the meeting.

I have spoken to Morrison again and again about this and it was important the cabinet see that I am putting my foot down, Mr Turnbull wrote in his diary at the time, in an extract included in the new memoir, A Bigger Picture, to be released on Monday.

He has to be, and be seen to be, on notice. He almost offered his resignation to me afterwards but didnt. In my study here in The Lodge we agreed to go forward but strictly on the basis that we agree on matters like this privately and then announce. No more front-running.

Malcolm Turnbull addresses the media after the party room meeting for the leadership spill in 2018. Credit:Alex Ellinghausen

Mr Turnbulls claims, and his blunt conclusion that Mr Morrison played a double game in the governments leadership turmoil, come at a time when the Prime Minister is seeking national unity to counter the COVID-19 virus.
For 20 years, O magazine has put small businesses on the map. Now to celebrate its 20th anniversary, we have exclusive "GMA" Deals and Steals to support small businesses that have appeared in the magazine.

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PHOTO: Deals & Steals Supporting Small Businesses from O Magazine (ABC News Photo Illustration, Sara Happ, Corkcicle)

Find all of Tory's "Deals and Steals" on her special deals website, GMADeals.com.

Plus, this month, to mark the 50th anniversary of Earth Day, Tory has 50% off eco-friendly products from 25 companies -- mostly small businesses -- that you can shop all month long. Shop her exclusive "Deals" here!

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NEED HELP? CONTACT TORY: For those who need assistance with a deal, please email Tory Johnson directly at help@gmadeals.com. Tory and her team respond to all viewer emails within an hour during business hours.

PHOTO: O Magazine 20th Anniversary (O Magazine)

'GMA' Deals & Steals supporting small businesses from O Magazine originally appeared on goodmorningamerica.com
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India case count rises to 11,439, death toll at 377, Maharashtra leads with 2,334 cases



The total number of coronavius cases in India has risen to 11,439 after 1076 fresh Covid-19 infections were reported in the past 24 hours, according to the latest data from Health Ministry. Fatalities from coronavirus in India has gone up to 377, with Maharashtra topping the tally with 178 deaths. On the other hand, 1,305 patients have been cured of the virus or discharged. In terms of total number of cases, Maharashtra is the worst affected state with 2,687 coronavirus cases. Tamil Nadu (1,204), Telangana (624), Rajasthan (1034) and Delhi crosses 1,500 are among the other worst affected states.



Dharavi: 5 new positive cases reported. The total number of positive cases in the area have now risen to 60 (including 7 deaths). Mumbai: 10 more staff of a hospital test positive. They were in quarantine after 3 patients admitted there had tested positive. A total of 35 staff of the hospital have tested positive for the Coronavirus till now. They are being treated at the hospital itself.



29 Coronavirus positive cases have been reported in Rajasthan today so far - 15 in Jaipur, 7 in Jodhpur and 7 in Kota. Total number of positive cases in the state now stands at 1034: State Health Department.



Taking the overall tally to 709. Of these, the 13 cases are in Agra and one in Sitapur. The remaining are from Lucknow.



52 more COVID19 cases & 2 more deaths (Ahmedabad & Surat) reported in Gujarat. The total number of coronavirus cases in the state is at 695 & virus-related deaths at 30: State Health Department. Read More...


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Despite praising China's coronavirus response and "transparency" in the wake of the outbreak, Donald Trump and White House officials have now accused the country's government of blocking efforts to determine the source of the virus as reports surface that warnings were issued about a coronavirus research lab in Wuhan as early as 2018.

Mr Trump has cast doubt over the country's handling of the outbreak and shifted blame to the World Health Organization amid accusations that his own delayed response to the virus had cost lives after multiple warnings from members of his administration over several weeks were reportedly ignored or dismissed.

White House officials also are mulling whether the virus that causes the Covid-19 disease originated from a lab in Wuhan. Mark Milley, chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said that reports are "inconclusive" while Secretary of State Mike Pompeo echoed the president's claims about China's alleged lack of transparency and suggested a link between a lab and nearby market.

On Tuesday, Mr Milley told reporters: "We've had a lot of intelligence take a hard look at that. At this point it's inconclusive, although the weight of the evidence seems to indicate natural. But we don't know for certain."

A 2018 cable from US diplomats who visited the Wuhan Institute of Virology and obtained by The Washington Post said that findings at the lab "strongly suggest" that a Sars-like coronavirus can be transmitted from bats to humans, underlining the importance of "surveillance of Sars-like coronaviruses in bats and study of the animal-human interface critical to future emerging coronavirus outbreak prediction and prevention."

Scientists cast serious doubt over claims that the virus had "escaped" from or was purposely manipulated in a research setting, a theory promoted by right-wing officials who have claimed that the virus was engineered as a bioweapon.

The "rumour and speculation", as Mr Milley called it, has persisted despite several reports and statements from scientists and researchers who found that the virus's genetic makeup was not lab-created.

Secretary Pompeo told Fox News host Sean Hannity: "We know they have this lab. We know about the wet markets. We know that the virus itself did originate in Wuhan. So all those things come together."

He said that WHO had denied the US access to information from China at a critical early period of the outbreak. But in January, the president said: "China has been working hard to contain the coronavirus. The United States greatly appreciates their efforts and transparency."

And through February, the president repeatedly said that he spoke with President Xi Jinping and was assured that the country is "working hard" to combat the outbreak.

On Tuesday, the president announced the US would suspend financial support for the WHO after he accused the United Nations agency of "severely mismanaging" the global response and "pushing misinformation" from China's government.

Recommended WHO responds to Trump halting US funding

The announcement came a day after he aggressively defended the US response, including his restrictions on travel from China at the end of January, and screened a video to reporters that downplayed the outbreak's impact. He refused to answer whether the administration considered any response to the outbreak in the entire month of February.

Secretary Pompeo also blamed the organisation for the pandemic.

He told Fox News host Sean Hannity: "We need the World Health Organization to do its job, to perform its primary function, which is to make sure that the world has accurate, timely, effective, real information about what's going on in the global health space, and they didn't get that done here."
Later, Mayor Mike Duggan said all of the citys front-line employees, including bus drivers, would get $800 a month in hazard pay. He also announced that masks would be made available to riders on all buses.

But on the first day of the mask initiative last week, there were no masks on board the No. 17 bus Rochell Brown was driving.

A manager told her that riders were not required to wear them.

Ms. Brown, 49, shook her head and thought about a colleague who died this month from complications of Covid-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus. It should be mandatory, she said of the masks.

She saw herself at risk of a similar fate. She had a heart attack two years ago and has hypertension. The night before this ride, her doctor suggested she take time off for her safety.

Yet here she was, on a sun-soaked, mild spring morning, performing an essential duty for $19.13 an hour, but without, she felt, the praise and appreciation that police officers and emergency medical workers received. No one was peering out of a window clapping for her. Her bus was not even equipped with masks.
MATTOON  Flames and smoke were seen Tuesday afternoon from the roof of Neal Hall as firefighters from multiple departments responded to a fire at this Lake Land College building.

Crews from the Mattoon Fire Department used a ladder truck to access the roof of this building, which is located at the central entrance to campus. They were supported on scene by personnel from the Lincoln and Wabash fire protection districts, Charleston Fire Department, Mitchell-Jerdan Ambulance Service, local law enforcement, and Ameren Illinois.

Lake Land College reported in a press release that emergency responders were dispatched to the scene after a fire broke out on an isolated section of the roof of Neal Hall at approximately 2:50 p.m. Tuesday.

Mattoon fire Capt. Jeff Hilligoss said the fire was mainly confined to the roof but some did spread down to common use area in the building below.

"We had crews fighting the fire on the roof and there were other crews fighting the fire that dropped down into that area," Hilligoss said. He added that the two crews had to carefully coordinate their firefighting efforts so they did not hit each other with debris or water.

Hilligoss said the campus is closed due to the coronavirus pandemic, but the Lake Land Police Department helped provide access to Neal Hall. Hilligoss said the campus closure had the benefit of ensuring that no college students or staff were in harm's way during the fire, adding no injuries were reported among the emergency responders or anyone else on the scene.

"It could have been a whole lot worse," Hilligoss said of the fire.

Mattoon firefighters cleared the scene at 5:35 p.m. and are now working with Lake Land to determine the cause of the blaze, Hilligoss said.

Lake Land's campus is closed as a public health precaution during the pandemic, but a limited number of college staff members and contractors still work on campus.

"The roof of Neal Hall was being replaced and the contractors who were working on the roofing project escaped from the building without injury," Lake Land reported.

Neal Hall houses a nursing lab, 2-D and 3-D art labs, a music classroom, a biology lab and greenhouse, an earth science lab and general education classrooms. Lake Land reported that it will release more information as it becomes available.

Read the statement from Kelly Allee, Lakeland spokeswoman:

"At approximately 2:50 p.m., a fire broke out on an isolated section of the roof of Neal Hall on the Lake Land College campus in Mattoon. Area fire departments and emergency services responded immediately.

The fire has been extinguished and crews are evaluating the cause of the fire and assessing the damage.

The roof of Neal Hall was being replaced and the contractors who were working on the roofing project escaped from the building without injury.

There were no students or staff on campus when this occurred. The campus remains on Level 3 Restricted Access to all staff and students without prior approval due to COVID-19.

Neal Hall houses a nursing lab, 2-D and 3-D art labs, a music classroom, a biology lab and greenhouse, an earth science lab and general education classrooms.

The College will release more information as it becomes available."

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More than half of the 55 deaths from coronavirus statewide are linked to senior care homes, according to new state data.

The deaths are tied to span 13 nursing, assisted living and independent living homes in six counties and include a cluster at the Southeast Portland nursing home Healthcare at Foster Creek.

Across Oregon, more than 1,600 people have now tested positive for COVID-19.

Here are more developments to know Wednesday:

REOPENING: Oregon Gov. Kate Brown announced her framework for loosening coronavirus restrictions. She pointed to a five benchmarks she wants to achieve before lifting the sweeping shutdown orders. One of those metrics is obtaining enough personal protective gear -- but officials arent sure how much the state needs.

CARE: A laundry list of powerful Oregon politicians asked Gov. Kate Brown on Wednesday to use her coronavirus emergency powers to fast-track a private inpatient mental health facility in Wilsonville.

CLAIMS: Oregons rickety, outdated system for processing jobless claims is failing thousands of workers when they most need help, delaying unemployment cash they could use to help pay rent and other bills.

RESPONSE: The City of Portland will furlough non-union employees and freeze their pay as the city prepares for a $100 million hit in lost revenue.

CRIME: Multnomah Countys adult jail population has dropped about 30 percent because of fewer arrests and early releases amid the coronavirus pandemic.

TRANSPORTATION: Oregon airports will receive more than $140 million in federal aid to help them weather the coronavirus pandemic, lawmakers announced. The regional transit service TriMet is still operating, but now faces a lawsuit that alleges it violated state law by deciding in secret to ban cash fares.

ALCOHOL: A Cave Junction tavern became the first Oregon establishment to have its liquor license suspended for allegedly defying state restrictions. As consumption shifted from bars to home, liquor sales skyrocketed. The Oregon Liquor Control Commission says state-controlled liquor stores sold close to $66 million in distilled spirits in March, a record for that month.

EDUCATION: Closing campuses is leading to catastrophic revenue cuts and downsizing at Oregon colleges. The University of Oregon was among the first to pull the trigger, cutting 282 jobs. High schools students are back in virtual classrooms. Some students are using 3D printers to make face shields for essential workers.

LIFE TODAY: The owners of a Southern Oregon bookstore want to keep you entertained on quarantine. They pledged to send a free book from Gold Beach Books to anyone who asked for one. But after receiving thousands of emails, they had to stop taking requests.

Latest news | Live map tracker |Text alerts | Newsletter

-- The Oregonian/OregonLive

Get the latest Oregon coronavirus updates via text
Cash is King as they say. Without cash even the government, businesses, and the people will suffer. In times of crisis such as the one we live in, access to cash proves more difficult even for the employed. How much more the unemployed and vulnerable. And maybe the situation will be worsened months after the coronavirus pandemic in Ghana.

In a view, COVID-19 (coronavirus) is only a catalyst to more people losing their jobs because even before it hard hit to the people of Ghana, we had an uncountable number of people losing their jobs and daily bread due to the closure of a number of banks and micro-finance institutions in Ghana (since 2008). In addition, the change of government has always had it part of the story where some workers are told to go home or contract already awarded by the previous government aborted.

Also because government is not always transparent in its recruitment process, it makes many new graduates getting access to the few government positions difficult.

But going forward, a lot more people are going to go home or get fired from their jobs even if they survive the coronavirus hunger, and the disease itself after June 2020 as some predict. This is because with the COVID-19 and stay at home measure, peoples cash will soon get finished, unless those who insure a future income. Some businesses will find it difficult to take-off or start over with customers making little or no purchase. And many enterprises may close down due to capital or customers lost.

Some businesses around may likewise find it difficult to break even and pay salaries of employees not to even talk of taking new hires. Government may not be able to award new contracts nor pay old contractors on time, all adding up to the problem.

In the midst of the predicted hunger and job crisis, government intervention will only do us good if it is not political and discriminatory. Getting people and businesses back on track will not be automatic, because the government has already promised so many free stuffs, which some may not be fully honored as promised. The government may seemingly run out of cash to support the vulnerable and still embark on campaign for the 2020 elections.

At this point and month after the COVID-19, an immediate remedy may be for people to be frugal, government should continue to relieve people and businesses from increasing taxes, banks should be encouraged to keeping lending but to responsible people and businesses (those faithful to always pay their debt). Likewise, tenants whose rent are due should sit with landlords, and borrowers should have new discussions with people and institutions who already lend them some monies before the pandemic.

Last but not the least, it meant no disrespect, but we should for once abide by our laws and stay out of troubles. I will do it myself. I will even keep washing my hands, keep my hand sanitizer in my bag, and leave my sandals at the door.
U.S. Rep. John Katko criticized the World Health Organization's response to the coronavirus pandemic, but he believes President Donald Trump's decision to halt funding to the international agency is "premature."

Katko, R-Camillus, told reporters during a video conference Wednesday that he prefers a review once the COVID-19 outbreak is over. He co-authored a bill with U.S. Rep. Stephanie Murphy, a Florida Democrat, that would establish a 9/11-style commission to examine the response to the pandemic.

Trump announced Tuesday that he is ordering the federal government to stop funding the World Health Organization and review the United Nations agency's "role in severely mismanaging and covering up the spread of the coronavirus."

One of the chief criticisms levied by Trump is that the World Health Organization opposes travel bans like the one imposed by the president on non-citizens traveling from China to the U.S. The organization's website cited evidence that travel bans are "ineffective in most situations," but later adds that in "certain circumstances" restrictions may be useful.

Trump also questioned the World Health Organization's independence in dealing with China, where COVID-19 originated. An Associated Press report Wednesday revealed that China waited six days to notify its citizens of the outbreak. There have been other reports of China suppressing information that could've alerted others in the country and around the world about the threat of the virus.

The World Health Organization received $237 million in dues from the U.S. over a two-year period. The U.S. pledged another $636 million, making it the organization's largest source of funding. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation pledged to contribute more than $500 million in 2018 and 2019. China's share was $76 billion, according to the organization.

The WHO receives 14.67% of its funding from the U.S. government and 0.21% of its funding from China.

"The world depends on the WHO to work with countries to ensure that accurate information about international health threats is shared in a timely manner, and if it's not, to independently tell the world the truth about what is happening," Trump said. "The WHO failed in this basic duty and must be held accountable."

Katko agrees that the World Health Organization's reluctance to support travel bans or guidance hindered the ability to control the virus. He believes that may have contributed to the spread of COVID-19 in Europe, especially Italy.

He also acknowledged concerns about the organization's objectivity, but he added that it's "preliminary."

There's also a question of whether Trump has the authority to unilaterally cut off funding for the World Health Organization. Katko says Congress, not the president, "controls the power of the purse."

"He may and I understand why he's doing it," he said. "He may ultimately be right. I just think it was premature."

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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- Additional reporting by Cate McCurry

It has been confirmed that the State has increased the subsidy available to employers from 70% to 85% on incomes less than around 24,400 per year.

The scheme will also be extended to higher-paid workers, those earning over 76,000, in a bid to reduce the number of people being laid off which could reach one million without a major State intervention.

The move comes after employers said that some of their part-time staff are not working because they can earn more from the Covid-19 emergency payment.

Finance Minister Paschal Donohoe announced that for employees with a previous average net pay between 412 and 500 per week, the subsidy will be up to 350 per week.

There are no changes for those earning 31,000 to 38,000 a year, who will continue to receive a subsidy of up to 70%, up to a maximum of 410 per week.

Mr Donohoe said for employees with previous net pay over 586 per week, equivalent to 38,000 a year, a tiered approach will apply.

The maximum subsidy payable for those earners remains 350 per week.

Mr Donohoe also said the wage subsidy is now available to support employees where the average net pre-Covid salary is greater than 76,000, and their gross post-Covid salary has fallen below 76,000.

The tiered arrangement applicable to gross incomes over 38,000 will apply in such circumstances.

More than 43,000 employers have registered for the scheme and over 26,000 of these have already received a refund.

The Revenue Commissioners said more than 255,000 employees have already received at least one payment under the scheme, and that about 84% of employees have also received a top-up payment from their employer.

The department also acknowledged there are imperfections and anomalies from the scheme, particularly for lower-paid workers.

Mr Donohoe said that in the coming weeks, his department will be publishing updated economic forecasts where the Government will lay out its view of the impact of Covid-19 on Irelands economy this year and in 2021.

Speaking at Government Buildings in Dublin, the finance minister said: Forecasts that have already been published show a significant decline in gross domestic product for this year.

It is certainly possible that we could see a decline in economic activity within this year that is comparable or potentially greater than what we experienced a decade ago.

So we are in uncharted waters. Were facing a new kind of challenge, facing new economic difficulties.

Mr Donohoe said: The Temporary Wage Subsidy Scheme was designed and introduced with great speed.

This was done to ensure the greatest number of employees maintained the link with their employee during this difficult time.

It stood to reason that there were anomalies that needed to be ironed out to ensure greater fairness and implementation of the scheme.

The whole world is facing a time of unprecedented difficulty.

Here in Ireland, we are working hard to ensure the impact and fallout from what is happening is minimised for our people to the greatest extent possible.

Todays measures serve to reinforce that message and to offer additional comfort to employers and employees in the period ahead, he said.
Robbie Butler MLA with colleagues at Stormont on his last day on the job in 2016

UUP MLA Robbie Butler has revealed that he is willing to return to his former job as a firefighter to help out during the coronavirus pandemic.

Mr Butler worked for the Northern Ireland Fire and Rescue Service (NIFRS) for 16 years before being elected as MLA for Lagan Valley in 2016.

On Monday the Fire Brigades Union said that 147 NIFRS staff in are self isolating due to the Covid-19 outbreak.

NIFRS said that fires in the home during March were nearly 50% higher than the same period last year due to the increased amount of time people are spending at home.

The number of fires in the home in NI was nearly 50% higher this March than it was in March 2019 because more of us are spending more time at home. Help us support the NHS during #COVID19 by being aware of fire safety in your home:https://t.co/DAhrqwniqn pic.twitter.com/r0yCkBmxST  Northern Ireland Fire & Rescue Service (@NIFRSOFFICIAL) April 13, 2020

Mr Butler told BBC Radio Ulster that in light of the increased pressures the fire service was facing he had contacted the Interim Chief Fire and Rescue Officer Michael Graham to offer his services as a volunteer.

The UUP MLA joined the NIFRS on Valentine's Day 2000 and said he had 16 "really good years" as part of the organisation.

"I served in just about every capacity that you could imagine," Mr Butler explained.

"The fire service invest an awful lot of money, time and training into their personnel, firefighters are highly trained professionals, they really are."

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Mr Butler said he was aware of a number of former NIFRS personnel offering their services if needed during the pandemic.

"When you see the NHS ask for nurses and GPs and doctors and all those people to come back onto the front line, and (in the NIFRS) you have 7.5% isolating and you have to take the sickness into account, and I know that they have allocated some recruits, maybe they have limited capacity and limited training ability at this stage," he said.

"I know having spoken to the chief that at the moment they do have the capacity and their routine service is probably at its greatest capacity for many years which is excellent, but as this thing goes on and more and more people are exposed to coronavirus I think that 7.5% potentially can only go one way."

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Mr Butler said that the rising temperatures would lead to the fire service's busiest time of the year during the summer.

Firefighters battled major gorse blazes in Fermanagh and Tyrone on Tuesday evening.

"The grass gets very dry and at times the fire service can be very, very stretched between April and the end of May, hopefully that isn't the case this year, but I'm sure they are preparing for it.

The Lagan Valley MLA said that he would be happy to get involved on the front line tackling fires if given the chance.

"I would love to be used operationally because that's where my heart was, in the job. The only thing I couldn't do is drive the trucks because that's no longer on my driving license. With regards to the rest of it I imagine, with an element of training breathing apparatus and road traffic collisions there's nothing you couldn't do.

"To be honest I would be more than happy just to go in and assist in a support mechanism even, just to help the guys and girls on the front line to ensure that they're as safe as possible and that they have the resources where they need them at the right time."
Medical staff put on their personal protective equipment at an MOT testing centre in Belfast, Northern Ireland, that is being used as a drive-through location for testing for COVID-19. (PA)

NHS shortages during the coronavirus pandemic are forcing doctors to wash and reuse personal protective equipment (PPE) and dip their hands into buckets of steriliser instead of using hand gel.

According to the British Medical Association (BMA), NHS medics are being forced to work without proper equipment, with some using bin bags for protection, despite government assurances that PPE supplies have been sorted.

Some doctors have been told by their NHS trusts to reuse gowns, the BMA said, and some have donated their share of PPE to nurses and healthcare assistants.

It comes as a leaked Public Health England document revealed plans for PPE to be cleaned and reused by NHS staff as a last resort.

A woman holding up PPE signs stands outside St Thomas' Hospital in London, where Boris Johnson was treated for coronavirus. (AP)

It states the measures could be taken if stocks run low during the COVID-19 crisis and admits there is currently a "reduced ability to re-supply" PPE such as protective gowns and masks, the BBC reported.

It is understood that the chief medical officers and chief nurses of the four UK nations discussed the issue recently.

Following the meeting, a draft document written by Public Health England and dated 13 April suggested solutions for "acute supply shortages" of PPE.

"These are last-resort alternatives, but, given the current in-country stock and the reduced ability to re-supply, we are suggesting that these are implemented until confirmation of adequate re-supply is in place," it said.

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The plans suggested a series of "last-resort arrangements", including buying "building" or "sportswear" eye protection with extensions to cover the side of the eyes if there are no available goggles or face shields, and using washable laboratory coats and patient gowns where there are no available disposable gowns or coveralls.

The document also suggests repurposing face masks using various disinfection or sterilisation methods, including steam and UV disinfection.

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Care minister Helen Whately said on Wednesday there has been a global scramble for PPE and distributing it to care providers and GPs has been a massive logistical effort.

She added: It is a precious resource.

We have to make sure it is used when you need it to either protect a member of the workforce or protect a patient, because people have been crying out wanting to use PPE all the time for everything and actually that is not the best way.

Dr Chaand Nagpaul, chairman of the BMA, told the BBC: "This underlines the urgency with which we need this situation sorted.

"The government must be honest about PPE supplies.

"If [Public Health England] is proposing the reuse of equipment, it needs to be demonstrably driven by science and the best evidence in keeping with international standards, rather than by availability, and with absolutely no compromise to the protection of healthcare workers.

In a statement, Public Health Englands Dr Susan Hopkins said: "PPE is a precious resource and it is crucial that everyone in health and social care has access to the right protective equipment.

"All options are being considered to ensure this, including the safe reuse of items, but no decisions have been made."

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One of the current concerns affecting the World Health Organisation (WHO) is to ensure that countries control lockdown relaxation regulations in a methodical and structured manner, a point alluded to by director Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus in a recent press conference.

He stated that whilst relaxation measures were welcomed in the likes of Austria and Denmark, he was anxious that a hurried approach could lead to a 'deadly resurgence of the virus'.

The organisation have outlined six key areas that could lead to nations easing confinement regulations:

Control the transmission, guarantee the condition of health workers, minimise the risk of infection in open spaces. Introduce preventative measures in offices and schools, control the possibility of 'imported cases' and ensure that members of the public are constantly informed of the danger the virus presents

Dr. Tedros emphasised the importance of the final point adding: "Each individual has a huge role to play in defeating the pandemic".

Wuhan starts to open

China sealed off Wuhan, a central city of 11 million people, on 23 January, a drastic step that came to symbolise its aggressive management of the virus. More than 50,000 people in Wuhan were infected, and more than 2,500 of them died, about 80% of all deaths in China, according to official figures.

Full screen Sin tituloPeople wearing face masks walk on a street in Wuhan, China's central Hubei province on April 14, 2020. - China has largely brought the coronavirus under control within its borders since the outbreak first emerged in the city of Wuhan late last year. (Photo by Hector RETAMAL / AFP) HECTOR RETAMAL (AFP)

Last week the original epicentre of the Covid-19 virus ended it's lockdown period although many restrictions and controls remain in place.



Spain on lockdown through to 26 April

In a bid to curb the spread of the coronavirus in Spain, one of the nations most affected by the pandemic, Spanish prime minister Pedro Sanchez declared a state of emergency on 14 March, ordering people in the country to stay at home as part of measures that were initially due to run until 29 March.

The Spanish government has, however, eased measures as of Monday 13 April to allow some work to start again. There have been 169,496 cases in Spain with over 17,000 deaths but the daily cases and deaths has been in decline now for a couple of days. However, in a sign that the situation was taking a turn for the better, some businesses, including construction and manufacturing, were allowed to reopen.

Full screen SPAIN-HEALTH-VIRUS-POLITICSThis handout picture made available by the Moncloa Palace shows Spain's Minister of Interior Fernando Grande-Marlaska giving a press conference on March 30, 2020 in Madrid. - Spain confirmed another 812 deaths in 24 hours from the coronavirus on Monday, bringing the total number of deaths to 7,340, according to health ministry figures. (Photo by - / various sources / AFP) / RESTRICTED TO EDITORIAL USE - MANDATORY CREDIT "AFP PHOTO / HANDOUT / LA MONCLOA " - NO MARKETING - NO ADVERTISING CAMPAIGNS - DISTRIBUTED AS A SERVICE TO CLIENTS - (AFP)

Sanchez secured parliament's backing for a second extension, until 27 April - and, although Spain's rate of cases and deaths has begun to show signs of slowing, he said he was "convinced" he'll also have to seek a third, which would take the stay-at-home order in place in the country into May.

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Stock Market Today LIVE Updates: Sensex soars above 770 points, Nifty crosses 9,200-mark; Rupee opens high

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Even estimates for a partial recovery next year are marred by extreme uncertainty and the outcome could be far worse, depending on the course of the pandemic, the fund warned.

The retreat from riskier assets followed the International Monetary Funds prediction on Tuesday that the global economy may shrink by 3 percent in 2020 due to the virus outbreak, in the worst downturn since the Great Depression of the 1930s.

E-Mini futures for the S&P 500 fell right from the closing bell and were down 0.26 percent, while Nikkei futures pointed to an opening loss of around five points, defying broad gains in US stocks overnight.

Asian shares looked set to pull back from a one-month high on Tuesday, as warnings of a deep recession dampened investor optimism that the slowing spread of the coronavirus could allow businesses to re-open.

A second source said banks involved in the talks included HSBC and JP Morgan as well as lenders in the Gulf.

Ten billion dollars is where they want to get to, (its) not clear if, in this market, theyll manage to reach that.

The financing would be for the SABIC deal, but the borrower is Aramco, said one of the sources, adding that the discussions were at an initial stage, with the company sounding out banks.

Aramco agreed last year to buy the controlling stake in SABIC from the kingdoms wealth fund for $69.1 billion, sealing one of the biggest-ever deals in the global chemical industry.

Saudi Aramco, the worlds largest oil producer, is in early talks with banks for a loan of about $10 billion to help finance its acquisition of a 70% stake in Saudi Basic Industries Corp (SABIC), three banking sources told Reuters.

"Coming back to our markets, Nifty ended Mondays session in the red as 9,130 on the upside is acting as a tough resistance to breach even after multiple attempts. However, following a GAP up opening in todays session if Nifty manages to stay afloat beyond 9130, bulls can propel the market higher to levels of 9300-9350 which happens to be the upper end of a rising wedge pattern. Failure to hold beyond 9130 can trigger profit booking which can drag the Index lower to levels of 8900-8740, Agarwala said.

"Early risers in Asia are trading mixed though as NIKKEI, HANG SENG, SHANGHAI and JAKARTA markets are trading in the red while KOSPI and TAIWAN markets are trading in the green. Dow Jones Fut. and S&P500 Fut. are also trading soft at the moment which could limit the gains in our markets as well.

Indian markets are slated to resume trade on Wednesday in the positive territory with a GAP up opening as indicated by the SGX Nifty which is currently trading with gains of 190 points from Mondays close. Overnight the US markets shut shop with substantial gains as the Dow Jones gained 2.4 percent and S&P 500 gained 3 percent respectively, said Aditya Agarwala, Senior Technical Analyst, YES Securities.

This recovery in 2021 is only partial as the level of economic activity is projected to remain below the level we had projected for 2021, before the virus hit, Gita Gopinath, the IMFs chief economist, told a news conference via a video link.

The IMF, in its 2020 World Economic Outlook, predicted a partial rebound in 2021, with the world economy growing at a 5.8% rate, but said its forecasts were marked by extreme uncertainty and that outcomes could be far worse, depending on the course of the pandemic.

The global economy is expected to shrink by 3.0% during 2020 in a stunning coronavirus-driven collapse of activity that will mark the steepest downturn since the Great Depression of the 1930s, the International Monetary Fund said on Tuesday.

The Nasdaq registered a fourth straight day of gains. Among its biggest boosts was Amazon.com, which rose 5.3 percent to $2,283.32, a record high close.

In New York state, an epicenter of the pandemic, total hospitalisations fell for the first time since the onset of the novel coronavirus outbreak, according to Governor Andrew Cuomo.

White House adviser Larry Kudlow said President Donald Trump would make a number of announcements about reopening the US economy in the next day or two as the health crisis appeared to be ebbing, although some state governors have said the decision to restart businesses lies with them.

US stocks jumped on Tuesday as optimism that the Trump administration could move to ease lockdowns from the coronavirus outbreak overshadowed worrying earnings reports from JP Morgan and Wells Fargo.

On the other hand, the broader 50-scrip Nifty at National Stock Exchange (NSE) opened at 9,196.40 points after closing at 8,993.85 points. The Nifty is trading at 9,158.10 points in the morning

The Sensex opened at 31,277.11 points and touched a high of 31,400.36 and a low of 31,178.10 points. It is trading at 31,298.53 points up by 608.51 points or 1.98 per cent from its Tuesday''s close at 30,690.02 points.

On scrutiny of these posts it is observed that many of these social media users are our employees, said the letter, adding that some posts had made disparaging comments about the bank, its management and policies.

State Bank of India, the countrys largest lender, said in a notice sent to its employees that disciplinary action would be taken for violating the code of conduct if they spoke on social media about the functioning of its branches.

Some branch staff have complained on social media of the difficulty in imposing social distancing in such conditions, earning a rebuke from employers and even from the police.

Banks have seen a surge in traffic after Prime Minister Narendra Modi outlined a package of anti-crisis measures including direct cash payments to millions of poorer Indians, who have been queuing at branches to access the funds.

State-owned banks in India have barred employees from posting pictures, video clips or messages on social media on issues such as overcrowding at bank branches during the coronavirus crisis, according to multiple sources and documents seen by Reuters.

And a lower MLF rate should incentivise commercial banks to reduce the lending benchmark, as the medium-term lending cost now serves as a guide for the LPR.

The cut came largely in line with market expectations, as economists believe the central bank would keep its yield curve steady by lowering the MLF rate by the same margin as the cut to the 7-day reverse repo rate in late March.

The Peoples Bank of China (PBOC) said it was lowering the one-year medium-term lending facility (MLF) loans to financial institutions to 2.95%, the lowest level since the liquidity tool was introduced in September 2014, down 20 basis point from 3.15% previously.

The move should pave the way for a similar reduction to the countrys benchmark loan prime rate (LPR), which will be announced on the 20th, to lower financing costs for companies hit by pandemic.

Chinas central bank on Wednesday cut the interest rate on its medium-term funding for financial institutions to the lowest level on record, in an attempt to combat the economic fallout from the coronavirus health crisis.

Both benchmarks were undercut by worries that a record global output cut by producers would not offset plunging fuel demand due to efforts to contain the coronavirus pandemic.

US West Texas Intermediate crude rose 36 cents, or 1.8%, at $20.47, having crashed 10.3 percent in the previous session.

Brent futures were up 38 cents, or 1.3 percent, at $29.98 a barrel as of 0201 GMT, after falling 6.7 percent on Tuesday.

Oil prices rose on Wednesday as investors looked for bargains after the previous sessions slump and on hopes that consuming countries will look to fill their strategic reserves, although oversupply fears and warnings of a deep recession capped gains.

Larsen & Toubro (L&T) share price added more than 5 percent after heavy civil infrastructure business of L&T Construction secured two contracts to build regional rapid transit system (RRTS) infrastructure from National Capital Region Transport Corporation (NCRTC) in Uttar Pradesh

The Sensex is up 792.05 points or 2.58 percent at 31482.07, and the Nifty up 235.65 points or 2.62 percent at 9229.50.

This is going to be hard. Our economy is going to take a significant hit, he said at a daily government news conference.

Finance minister Rishi Sunak said he was deeply troubled by the prospect that two million people would lose their jobs due to the impact of the virus.

In the April-June period alone, economic output could plunge by 35 percent, with the unemployment rate more than doubling to 10%, the Office for Budget Responsibility said on Tuesday. A bounce-back may come later in the year if restrictions on public life to slow the spread of the coronavirus are lifted, it added.

Britains economy could shrink by 13% this year due to the governments coronavirus shutdown, its deepest recession in three centuries, and public borrowing is set to surge to a post-World War Two high, the countrys budget forecasters said.

The economy is almost in free fall, said Sung Won Sohn, a business economics professor at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles. We will see the bottom when the coronavirus infection rates stabilize. Its going to be a pretty deep bottom from which to come up.

The report from the Commerce Department on Wednesday would come as millions of Americans are thrown out of work, and strengthen economists conviction that the economy is in deep recession. States and local governments have issued stay-at-home or shelter-in-place orders affecting more than 90% of Americans to curb the spread of COVID-19, the respiratory illness caused by the virus, and abruptly stopping the country.

US retail sales likely suffered a record drop in March as mandatory business closures to control the spread of the novel coronavirus outbreak depressed demand for a range of goods, setting up consumer spending for its worst decline in decades.

Fitch Group Chief Executive Officer Paul Taylor said the company is deeply saddened by this tragedy. This donation is part of Fitch's ongoing efforts to complement other relief and recovery initiatives across the world.

In a statement Fitch Group has said "it has donated USD 50,000 to Give2Asia in support of the organisation's crisis response to the outbreak of Covid-19".

It has launched a campaign to support frontline health workers and hospitals responding to the outbreak, including partnerships with several non-governmental organisations in China.

Give2Asia is an international non-profit organisation that coordinates funding between global donors with charitable projects and social enterprises across the Asia-Pacific region.

Funds from Fitch and other donors will help towards the purchase of medical supplies, construction of hospitals, and providing frontline staff with food, lodging and subsidies.

Fitch Group has said it has pledged USD 50,000 to Give2Asia to fight coronavirus pandemic.

The EGM "now stands cancelled in light of extension of nationwide lockdown till 3 May 2020 in view of COVID-19 and in light of circulars issued by the ministry of corporate affairs in the matter of conduct of general meetings in the current situation," the company said in a filing to BSE.

The extra ordinary general meeting (EGM) was originally scheduled to be held on March 24, 2020 and was subsequently postponed to April 7, 2020 and was further postponed and rescheduled to 15 April.

Suzlon Energy on Wednesday said it has cancelled the extra ordinary general meeting of its shareholders scheduled to be held during the day in view of the extension of nationwide lockdown till 3 May, to contain the spread of coronavirus pandemic.

All the sectoral indices are trading in the green. Nifty Bank index jumped 2.18 percent to touch 20,000-mark in Wednesday's morning session.

The market continued the morning rally as the Sensex jumped 818.72 points or 2.67 percent to 31,508.74 while the broader Nifty was up 248.45 points or 2.76 percent at 9,242.30 at around 10.30 am.

Regarding COVID-19 and its impact on the real estate sector, Kamal Khetan, chairman and managing director, Sunteck Realty said, "While its still early to ascertain the impact on the real estate industry, I believe that Sunteck with its strong brand franchise and presence across the pricing spectrum, from uber-luxury to affordable segment, is well positioned to tackle challenges ahead".

"A significant progress in construction work across projects along with strong pre-sales has led to major ramp up in collections," the filing said.

In a regulatory filing the company said its pre-sales grew 87 per cent on a quarter-on-quarter basis at Rs 608 crore, while collections grew by 6 per cent to Rs 175 crore in the January-March quarter of this year.

Sunteck Realty on Wednesday said it has seen substantial growth in pre-sales at Rs 1,221 crore, while collections grew by 8 per cent to Rs 715 crore for the financial year ended 31 March 2020.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi extended on Tuesday a lockdown of Indias 1.3 billion population till May 3 as the number of coronavirus cases went past 10,000 despite a three-week shutdown announced last month.

The government will also allow farm activities, construction of roads and buildings in the hinterland which has so far been less affected by the coronavirus contagion.

India will allow opening up of some industries in rural areas after 20 April to reduce the distress caused to millions of people because of a prolonged lockdown to halt the spread of coronavirus, the government said on Wednesday.

IndusInd Bank was the top gainer in the Sensex pack jumping nearly 7 percent. Other major gainers included Axis Bank, ICICI Bank, ITC, L&T, and NTPC

Sensex was trading 737.48 points or 2.40 percent higher at 31,427.50 while the broader Nifty was up 224.25 points or 2.49 percent at 9,218.10 at around 11.10 am.

Japans Nikkei was still off 0.5 percent, though that followed a 3% jump the previous session. E-Mini futures for the S&P 500 dipped 0.5 percent, following a 3 percent rise in New York.

While not unexpected, it did help MSCIs broadest index of Asia-Pacific shares outside Japan edge up 0.3% to a fresh one-month top. Shanghai blue chips, however, eased 0.2 percent.

China moved again to cushion its economy, cutting a key medium-term interest rate to record lows and paving the way for a similar reduction in benchmark loan rates.

Asian share markets took a breather on Wednesday as warnings of the worst global recession since the 1930s underlined the economic damage already done even as some countries tried to re-open for business.

"If there is no timely intervention from the RBI and the government, people at large will face extremely challenging situations, which will lead to unscrupulous money lenders charging exorbitant interest rate," P Satish, executive director, Sa-Dhan said.

Urging the Prime Minister to intervene on the issue of MFIs eligible for back-to-back moratorium, Sa-Dhan said there are financial institutions who are refusing to provide back-to-back moratorium to MFIs.

It said that despite Reserve Bank of Indias circular pertaining to the moratorium on retail loans, financial institutions are refraining from extending the same benefits to microfinance institutions (MFIs).

Microfinance lenders' umbrella body Sa-Dhan has urged Prime Minister Narendra Modi for an extension of the loan moratorium benefits to the MFI industry in a bid to help small-ticket borrowers, who are at the risk of being pushed into extreme hardships.

Medical supplies like surgical masks, gowns and ventilators are required in massive number across the globe because of the coronavirus pandemic that surfaced in central China's Wuhan city last year and spread to at least 185 countries and territories.

The IMF has called on all countries to refrain from putting restrictions on exporting medical supplies in view of their massive requirement across the globe to combat the coronavirus pandemic that has killed at least 119,000 people and infected nearly two million.

IndusInd Bank, Axis Bank, HUL, ICICI Bank, L&T and Sun Pharma were the major gainers in the Sensex pack.

Sensex jumped 769.07 points or 2.51 percent to 31,459.09 while the Nifty was up 238.60 points or 2.65 percent at 9,232.45 at around 11.20 am.

Founded in 2013 by Kushal Nahata, Gaurav Srivastava and Gautam Kumar, FarEyes logistics platform enables enterprises to operate, track, and optimise their logistics operations. It has over 150 global clients including Walmart, DHL, Amway and Dominos.

"We will use the funds to further invest in enhancing predictive capabilities of our platform as well as accelerating growth in Europe, the US and Asia Pacific," FarEye co-founder and CEO Kushal Nahata told PTI.

Existing investor SAIF Partners also participated in the series D round. The company, which has raised USD 40 million till date, did not disclose the valuation at which the latest funds were raised.

Logistics software company FarEye on Wednesday said it has raised USD 25 million (around Rs 190 crore) in funding led by Microsofts venture fund M12, with participation from Eight Roads Ventures and Honeywell Ventures.

"With this, JSPL has come to be acknowledged as one of the regular suppliers to France Railways. Similarly, Britain and Australia have expressed interest and they are expected to place orders as well," JSPL MD V R Sharma said.

In a regulatory filing the company said JSPL has bagged a contract to supply the special grade rail blooms to France rail hayange, France.

Private steel maker JSPL on Wednesday said it has bagged an order worth Rs 50 crore to supply 12,000 tonnes of rail blooms to France.

Further, he said, "Our set of offerings are specially curated to meet the varying needs of our consumers especially in these times and hence, this association helps us in ensuring our products reach their consumers who are finding it difficult to purchase them due to the lockdown..."

Cipla Health CEO Shivam Puri said, We have collaborated with these premier delivery partners as their expertise coupled with our suppliers will allow us to reach out to a larger segment of the population."

A home-delivery system makes it very convenient and safe for customers to get access to the wellness products, which otherwise might be difficult due to these lockdown conditions, the company said in a statement.

Leveraging on the extensive service delivery mechanism of the partners, Cipla Health will cater to 4 lakh people and cover 250 stores in 45 cities across the country.

Startup Cipla Health, a subsidiary of Cipla, on Wednesday said it has partnered with Swiggy, Zomato and Dunzo for home deliveries of over-the-counter wellness products in the wake of the nationwide lockdown.

In addition to Pichai and Nadella, the president has named IBM''s Arvind Krishna and Micron''s Sanjay Mehrotra to the Tech Group. Other members of the group are Apple''s Tim Cook, Oracle''s Larry Ellison and Facebook''s Mark Zuckerberg.

"They're the names that are, I think, the best and the smartest, the brightest. And they''re going to give us some ideas," Trump told reporters at his daily White House news conference on coronavirus on Tuesday.

Trump has roped in over 200 top American leaders from various industries and sections to create nearly a dozen and half different groups, who will advise him and offer recommendations on how to revive the American economy, which has hit an unprecedented ebb in just a few weeks due to the deadly coronavirus.

President Donald Trump has named six Indian-American corporate leaders, including Sunder Pichai from Google and Satya Nadella from Microsoft, to his Great American Economic Revival Industry Groups formed to revive the US economy ravaged by the coronavirus pandemic.

"Without urgent relief, many airlines will not survive to lead the economic recovery. As of early April, the number of flights worldwide was down by 80 percent compared to the same period in 2019," said IATA, which brings together 290 airlines.

"The scale of the crisis makes a sharp V-shaped recovery unlikely. Realistically, it will be a U-shaped recovery with domestic travel coming back faster than the international market.

It marks a sharp worsening of the forecast for the aviation industry, as just three weeks ago the decrease was predicted to be 44 percent, or $252 billion.

Airline passenger revenues are set to plunge by 55 percent, or $314 billion, in 2020 due to the coronavirus pandemic, the International Air Transport Association (IATA) said on Tuesday.

For those in the United States in need of an extension of their nonimmigrant stay, the USCIS may extend their stay depending on the circumstances, a USCIS spokesperson told PTI.

The US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) on Tuesday said that it has taken steps to help individuals, employers and others address some of the immigration-related challenges they face as a direct result of the COVID-19 national emergency.

In the Indian context, non-immigrant visas prominently includes B-1 and B-2 visas for business or travel purposes, F-1 visas for students, J-1 visas for exchange visitors mainly research scholars and physicians, H-1B for IT professionals and L1 for intra company transferees in managerial or executive position.

The extension of non-immigrant visa holders in the US, including those from India, facing difficulties as a direct result of the COVID-19 national emergency might be provided special consideration or expedited processing on a case-by-case basis, the country''s citizenship and immigration agency has said.

Even as the announcement stalled over 15,000 passenger trains, thousands of migrant workers gathered near Mumbai's Bandra railway station on Tuesday, hoping to catch trains back to their home states.

However, with the lockdown being extended, the railways not only cancelled all its passenger services till 3 May on Tuesday, but also stopped advance bookings.

With the national transporter allowing tickets to be booked during the 21-day lockdown announced earlier for journeys starting after 14 April, around 39 lakh bookings were made by passengers.

The railways is set to cancel around 39 lakh tickets booked for journeys between April 15 and May 3 due to the extension of the nationwide lockdown and suspension of passenger trains till the extended period in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic, sources told PTI.

The acquisition of the US-based rolled products major Aleris Corporation positions Hindalco as one of the world's largest aluminium companies, with a global footprint spanning 49 manufacturing facilities in North America, Europe and Asia, the group said in a statement.

The Aditya Birla Group flagship company has further cemented its position as the world''s largest producer of value-added aluminium products with the completion of the $2.8 billion acquisition of Aleris by its wholly-owned US subsidiary Novelis Inc.

The scrip jumped 8.91 percent to Rs 123.95 on the BSE. On the NSE, it climbed 8.96 percent to Rs 124.

Shares of Hindalco on Wednesday advanced nearly 9 percent after the $2.8 billion acquisition of Aleris by its wholly-owned US subsidiary Novelis Inc.

The market continued in the green zone as Sensex was trading 720.97 points or 2.35 percent higher at 31,410.99 while the Nifty was up 227.35 points or 2.53 percent at 9,221.20 at around 12.35 pm.

However, inflation in onion continued to rule high at 112.31 percent during March.

Inflation in vegetables fell sharply to 11.90 percent in March from a high of 29.97 percent in the previous month.

The nationwide lockdown which started on 25 March would have had some impact on the data collection for the month.

Food inflation in March fell to 4.91 percent from 7.79 percent in the previous month, data released by the commerce and industry ministry on Wednesday showed.

The inflation based on wholesale price index (WPI) eased to 1 per cent in March from 2.26 percent in February on sharp fall in food prices in the country.

Aviation consultancy Centre for Asia Pacific Aviation (CAPA) India said the civil aviation ministry should instruct airlines to "halt unfair practice of taking advance bookings until resumption is certain and an interim transition schedule has been established".

However, most of the airlines had been taking bookings except national carrier Air India for domestic flights for the period beyond 14 April.

India had imposed a 21-day lockdown from 25 March to curb the spread of the coronavirus pandemic. Consequently, all domestic and international commercial passenger flights were suspended for this time period.

With the nationwide lockdown extended till 3 May, domestic airlines have again decided not to refund customers in cash for their cancelled flights and instead have offered them rescheduling of tickets for a later date without any additional fee.

The shares of the company were trading at Rs 87.50 apiece on BSE, up 6.84 per cent from the previous close.

"If there is any in-between communication from the government, we will comply," the company said.

"... In order to ensure safety of its employees, the management has decided to extend the closure of the office and companys plants at Faridabad, Pune, Sitarganj and Bawal till Sunday, 3 May," the company said in a filing to BSE.

Talbros Automotive Components on Wednesday said it has extended the closure of the office and companys plants till 3 May in view extension of lockdown to deal with the spread of coronavirus.

The Sensex was trading 564.08 points or 1.84 percent higher at 31,254.10 while the Nifty was up 181.60 points or 2.02 percent at 9,175.45 at around 1 pm.

The market pared its morning gains despite the inflation-based on wholesale price index (WPI) eased to 1 percent in March from 2.26 per cent in February on sharp fall in food prices in the country.

Abhishek Rajan, senior vice-president at Paytm Travel said, We are working to customers an option to book bus tickets in advance without worrying about the loss of money in case of a change in their plans.

In case of any change in plans, they will be allowed to cancel the tickets up to a few hours before the scheduled travel time, without paying a single rupee. This free cancellation period will vary for different operators, and will be mentioned on the Paytm app.

In a statement, Paytm Travel confirmed that customers will be able to pre-book bus tickets as soon as the lockdown ends.

Paytm on Wednesday announced that it will offer free cancellation on bus ticket bookings after the lockdown period ends.

The leading end-to-end supply chain management services company has provided 'Corona Kavach,' a protective personal equipment (PPE) to the front line team besides training them to maintain social distancing while they perform their duties.

Dubbed as corona warriors, the personnel would ensure movement of essential goods and services during the lockdown across the length and breadth of the country, he said.

The city-based company has deployed over 1,000 employees and drivers to support its logistics activities in view of the ongoing lock-down in the country, company joint managing director Ravi Viswanathan said.

TVS Supply Chain Solutions, part of diversified conglomerate TVS Group, has taken up measures to serve companies that are reinventing themselves to manufacture coronavirus related equipment.

The government has allowed farming operations and farm workers in the field. Agencies engaged in procurement of agri-products, including MSP operations are permitted during the lockdown period.

"All agricultural and horticultural activities remain fully functional," the ministry of home affairs said, issuing a new set of guidelines for enforcement during the second phase of the lockdown till 3 May.

Operations of tea, coffee and rubber plantations are allowed with maximum 50 percent workers. Processing, packaging, sale and marketing of these commodities as well as cashew have been allowed with maximum 50 percent workers, it said.

Agricultural and allied activities including dairy, fisheries as well as tea, coffee and rubber plantation are allowed to function in the second phase of the COVID-19 lockdown, the government said on Wednesday issuing fresh guidelines.

Globally, however, gold prices fell 1.12 per cent to USD 1,749.10 per ounce in New York.

Fresh positions built up by participants mainly led to the rise in gold prices, analysts said.

The yellow metal for August delivery edged up by Rs 446, or 0.96 percent, to Rs 46,900 per 10 gram in a business turnover of 2,090 lots.

On the Multi Commodity Exchange, gold contracts for June traded higher by Rs 469, or 1.01 percent, at Rs 46,755 per 10 gram in a business turnover of 17,493 lots.

Gold prices rose by Rs 469 to Rs 46,755 per 10 gram in futures trade on Wednesday as speculators created fresh positions on firm spot demand.

Standard Chartered chief executive Bill Winters said, At Standard Chartered we continue to support our clients and communities despite the ongoing challenges with COVID-19 and are proud to have been able to provide Qatar Airways with this financing.

Qatar Airways Group chief executive Akbar Al Baker said, Qatar Airways focus remains on finding solutions to get as many people back to their homes to be with their families and loved ones during these difficult times and this is made possible by the support we have from so many people including our close partners such as Standard Chartered.

Qatar Airways and Standard Chartered have signed a $850 million financing in respect of seven Boeing 787-9 aircraft.

"The downgrade mainly reflects our expectation that the improvement in Tata Steel's earnings and financial profile, on which the ''BB-'' rating was based, is unlikely to materialise in the next 12-18 months. This is mainly due to COVID-19 related disruptions and the consequent economic effects," it said.

The agency lowered its long-term foreign currency issuer credit rating on Tata Steel and subsidiary ABJA Investment Co. Pte. Ltd., and the issue rating on various US-dollar denominated senior unsecured notes ABJA has issued, to ''B+'' from ''BB-''.

The outlook reflects risks of further weakening in Tata Steel''s credit profile if the effect of economic conditions and lower commodity prices are more prolonged than our current expectations, S&P Global Ratings said in a statement.

S&P Global Ratings on Wednesday said it has lowered its ratings outlook on Tata Steel as the agency does not foresee improvement in the steel maker''s earnings and financial profile over the next 12-18 months.

The market continued to trim the morning gains as the Sensex was trading 434.42 points or 1.42 percent higher at 31,124.44 while the Nifty was up 145.20 points or 1.61 percent at 9,139.05 at around 1.30 pm.

Thai authorities even before the airport incident had announced that the return of Thais from abroad would have to be delayed because there were not enough facilities to properly monitor and quarantine them.

The ban was initially ordered April 4 after chaos broke out at Bangkok''s international airport when more than 100 returning Thai citizens reportedly refused to abide by regulations requiring them to go directly to state-run quarantine centers. The original three-day ban has already been extended once.

Thailand has extended through April 30 a ban on international passenger flights landing in the country as part of its effort to control the spread of COVID-19.

People/organisations are encouraged to contribute anywhere between Rs 500 to 1,800 per month which will be sufficient for providing one basic amenity in the form of soaps, milk, vegetables, wheat, oil, sanitary napkins, etc. vital for the kids.

Families belonging to these children are expected to receive Rs 3,750 per month through the initiative, starting April 2020.

Donors who wish to donate, can make their contribution through this link: https://miraclefoundationindia.in/donate/

In a pursuit to support 378 children sent back from the CCIs, relief packages worth Rs 28.74 lakh for two months including the cost for support to CCIs will be facilitated by Miracle Foundation.

"To add fuel to this selling pressure in Banks and major Nifty constituents, European markets have opened in the red with cuts of 1.5 percent to 2 percent as all the three major Indices FTSE, CAC and DAX are trading lower. Below 9100 Nifty can slide lower to levels of 8900-8740," he said.

However, banks continue to drag the Nifty index lower as Bank Nifty is on the verge of trading the red territory. Nifty continues to face resistance at the 9300 as bear are protecting this zone with heavy call writing which is leading to profit booking at higher levels, said Agarwala.

Further, broader markets are abuzz on Wednesday as both Midcap and Smallcap Indices are up between 3 percent-2.5 percent respectively, he said.

Indian markets at half-time are trading in the green with gains of 1.50 percent led by outperformance in the FMCG, metal, pharma and realty space, said Aditya Agarwala, senior technical analyst, YES Securities.

Sensex fell 83.22 points or 0.27 percent to 30,606.80 while the Nifty was down 11.20 points or 0.12 percent at 8,982.65 at around 2.15 pm.

The market gave up the early gains and slipped into the red zone in the afternoon trade.

"Wednesdays rally would be short-lived if government does not come up with formidable plan to aid ailing industries in terms of fiscal relief packages. Market is hopeful about stimulus package from governments side in next few days," Modi said.

Infrastructure, cement, agro, automobile stocks gained momentum today with this development. However, demand is going to be a concern given economic disruption led by pandemic, he said.

The opening up of various industries from 20 April bodes well to kickstart economic activities, said Binod Modi, senior research analyst, Reliance Securities said.

The is for the first time that SpiceJet is operating a freighter to Chian, the airline said.

It would then depart from Shanghai at 5 pm (local time) and arrive at Kolkata airport at 8.10 pm. After leaving Kolkata at 9 pm, the flight would land at 11.10 pm in Hyderabad on Wednesday, SpiceJet said.

The flight left from Kolkata airport at 8.25 am Wednesday and landed at 3.30 pm (local time) at Shanghai, it said.

SpiceJet on Wednesday said it has sent its freighter flight to China to bring medical supplies from Shanghai to Hyderabad amid the nationwide lockdown to combat the coronavirus threat.

Prior to this, Vatts was with Vodafone Idea Ltd., where he was executive vice president - Regulatory and Corporate Affairs. He comes with over 25 years of experience and has previously worked with Idea cellular and AT&T.

Sources meanwhile said, Vatts will lead the regulatory function and implement practices that comply with the regulatory framework across all lines of business.

He will report to Gopal Vittal, managing director and chief executive officer  India and South Asia of Bharti Airtel, according to sources.

Telecom operator Bharti Airtel has appointed Rahul Vatts as the chief regulatory officer of the company.

Explaining the rationale behind the investment, Arun Dubey, MD, Zenfold Ventures said, "Our investment and partnership outlook is sector and stage-agnostic. At present some of the ventures we are building are in the space of nutraceuticals. We believe EON has a very scientifically backed approach to nutrition and has strong capabilities to execute of the vision."

EON has already expanded its team of experts in scientific and R& D departments and will also be adding key people in finance and marketing and supply chain.

Talking about the stake sale Raktim Chattopadhyay, founder & CEO, EON said, "We are thrilled to have Zenfold Ventures as a strategic investor in EON, and this infusion will help us reach more cancer patients in a shorter time. We plan to use the latest funds to expand our reach to the US and European markets and also to build a world-class talent pool.

Zenfold Ventures has announced fundraising in Esperer Onco Nutrition Pvt Ltd (EON) but the amount was not specified.

The policy offers protection for COVID-19 from day one of the purchase and can be purchased at a price of Rs 499 (including GST) for fixed sum insured of Rs. 25,000.

For those customers who want to financially protect themselves, they can also buy Bharti AXA Group Health Assure Policy covering COVID-19 through this section. The policy comes with a fixed cover offering 100 percent sum insured as a lump sum, if the policy holder is diagnosed positive or gets quarantined in a government hospital or military facility/establishment.

Customers can also take Apollo 24/7s free digital self-risk assessment test. The test comprises of some basic questions to analyse the symptoms. Basis the responses the test generates a risk score and suggests further action along with the important preventions to be taken.

Airtel Payments Bank has created a dedicated Fight Corona section under the banking section of the Airtel Thanks app to equip its customers in these difficult times. Through this section, customers can make direct contribution to PM CARES Fund using their Airtel Payments Bank account, according to a press release.

Late last month, DGH said that in view of the nationwide lockdown imposed to curb the spread of COVID-19 pandemic, the OALP bid Round-V last date for bid submission will be extended. The revised date was to be notified later.

"The bid submission date for India OALP Bid Round-V, offering 11 blocks for exploration and development, is extended to 10 June 2020," the Directorate General of Hydrocarbons (DGH) said in a tweet.

The fifth bid round under Open Acreage Licensing Policy (OALP) opened in January and was to initially close on 18 March. However, the bid date was first extended to 16 April and then late last month, it was extended again but no closing deadline was given.

The government has extended the last date of bidding for the 11 oil and gas blocks on offer in the fifth exploration bid round to 10 June in view of the COVID-19 lockdown in the country.

Kotak Mahindra Bank, HDFC Bank, Hero MotoCorp, Bajaj Finance, HDFC and Maruti were the major losers in the Sensex pack.

The market continued its downward trend as the Sensex plunged 283.71 points or 0.92 percent to 30,406.31 while the Nifty was down 57.50 points or 0.64 percent at 8,936.35 at around 2.35 pm.

Delivering to the Industrial 4.0 digital services demands, requires holistic enterprise agility from edge to cloud, to run a variety of complex workloads and mission critical operations. Our partnership has been successful for several years now, with several of our large enterprise clients, in driving outcomes driven transformation, said Dinesh Venugopal, president  Mphasis Direct Digital.

Under this partnership, the two entities can globally enable customers to seamlessly transform the way they build, run and manage their most important applications, with Kubernetes as the common infrastructure substrate.

Mphasis, an IT solutions provider specializing in cloud and cognitive services, on Wednesday announced its strategic partnership with California-based software company VMware, innovator in enterprise software.

Within hours of the government extending lockdown to 3 May, budget carrier IndiGo said it will resume flight services in a phased manner from 4 May.

After the announcement of extension of lockdown till 3 May, aviation regulator Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA) issued a circular stating all international as well as domestic flights will remain suspended during the lockdown.

InterGlobe Aviation shares plunged 6.55 percent to Rs 998.25 on the BSE. SpiceJet also declined 4.92 percent to Rs 46.30 -- its lower circuit.

Airline stocks on Wednesday tumbled up to 6.5 percent after the government extended the lockdown to May 3 leading to the subsequent suspension of all commercial passenger services till then.

"Mondelez India commits to donate 71 tonnes of biscuits and chocolates as the first step towards extending support to communities during the COVID-19 crisis," the company said in a statement.

The company has decided to contribute 3,60,000 units of biscuits and 23 lakh units of chocolate to India FoodBanking Network, of the Food Security Foundation India, in 12 major cities in the country, it said.

Mondelez India Foods Pvt Ltd, manufacturer of Cadbury chocolates, on Wednesday committed to donate 71 tonnes of biscuits and chocolates for distribution in 12 major cities in the country amid the coronavirus pandemic.

"It will serve as an online financial superstore through which an ecosystem of providers of services and products, such as insurance and credit cards, can reach out to the new generation of digital natives," TCS said in a statement.

The initiative is seen as a bid to boost competition in the financial services sector, spark greater innovation and enhance customer experience by democratising access to banking in Israel by making financial services accessible to the consumer.

Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) said on Wednesday it has been selected by Israel's ministry of finance to transform its banking sector by building a service bureau that will serve as a shared, plug-and-play, digital banking operations platform.

They said the rules on social distancing and travel could be extended until 3 May.

Germany will consider easing coronavirus-related restrictions on the retail sector from 20 April, several participants in a call held on Tuesday between the chancellery and state chancelleries told Reuters on Wednesday.

This is an important step as we complete the consolidation of GFG Alliances steel businesses into Liberty Steel Group. I am proud of the leadership team we have brought together, which comprises some of the most experienced names in the global metals industry, said Gupta, the executive chairman of the group.

The group, based in London, said the new board's immediate focus will be to weather the economic storm brought about by the COVID-19 crisis and to ensure the business is well prepared for the recovery when it comes.

British Indian entrepreneur Sanjeev Gupta on Wednesday took charge of a newly-revamped board of directors and global leadership team of the Liberty Steel Group, setting a goal of becoming a carbon neutral company by 2030.

The step is aimed to to facilitate the cause of relief work pertaining to COVID-19 pandemic, the company said.

Similary, they have also pledged Rs 4 crore to various state government relief fund ot Chief Minister Relief funds, it added.

The company and members of promoter group have contributed an aggregate amount of Rs 4 crore to PM CARES Fund, Supreme Industries said in a regulatory filing.

During the session, the rupee witnessed high volatility and touched a high of 75.99 and a low of 76.48 against the US dollar.

At the interbank foreign exchange, the rupee opened strong at 76.07, but soon lost ground and finally settled at 76.44, registering a fall of 17 paise over its previous close.

Forex traders said firm US dollar index weighed on the local unit. Besides, investor sentiments remain fragile amid concerns over the impact of coronavirus outbreak on the domestic as well as global economy.

The Indian rupee pared early gains and settled for the day 17 paise lower at an all-time low of 76.44 (provisional) against the US dollar on Wednesday, tracking weak domestic equities and strengthening of the American currency overseas.

Sensex fell 300.54 points or 0.98 percent to 30,389.48 while the Nifty was down 68.85 points or 0.77 percent at 8,925 at around 3 pm.

A greenshoe is a clause contained in the underwriting agreement of an initial public offering (IPO) that allows underwriters to buy up to an additional 15 per cent of company shares at the offering price.

Along with this, the company will also consider raising Rs 150 crore via greenshoe option.

The board of directors at Tata Communications on Wednesday approved fundraising of Rs 500 crore via private placement of rated, secured, listed, redeemable and non-redeemable debentures (NCDs).

It has also demanded that revised guidelines by the government concerning the transport fraternity must reach to authorities at district and other lower levels for a better clarity.

Apprehending challenges in movement of stranded drivers in view of no public transport in place, the truckers'' apex body has sought government intervention in ensuring safe return of drivers.

The All India Motor Transport Congress (AIMTC), the umbrella body of transporters that represent about 95 lakh truckers and entities, however, expressed concerns over loss of livelihoods for truckers, loaders and drivers in view of lockdown extension.

Transporters' body AIMTC has welcomed the revised guidelines for enforcing the lockdown extension, saying if implemented properly they will take some pressure off the sector and ensure safe return of stranded truck drivers.

Anil Yadav, a daily wager with the parcel department of the railways who was ready to rush back to his village in Maharajganj in Uttar Pradesh to harvest the wheat crop, is still stunned by Prime Minister Narendra Modis announcement on Tuesday extending the pan India shutdown by 19 days.

And now, with the lockdown extended till May 3 to stem the spread of the coronavirus, the little money they had is mostly gone and so is hope it will end anytime soon.

With three weeks gone and maybe another three to go before they can even contemplate returning to their villages, the days ahead stretch interminably for the thousands of migrant labourers who decided to not take the long walk home but wait for the lockdown to end.

Migrant labourers who leave their villages in search of work during non-agricultural months are stranded in cities across India, leaving their families fearful that their harvest-ready crops will wither and die on the stalks and push them deeper into debt.

The remaining 2,800 employees of the airline such as members of cabin crew and ground handling services will be unaffected.

The compulsory no pay leave will affect around 1,200 employees in senior grades.

On 27 March, the airline had also introduced compulsory leave without pay for up to three days between 1 April and 14 April for the same set of senior employees.

Vistara CEO Leslie Thng on Wednesday announced that senior employees will be going on compulsory leave without pay for up to three days between 15 April and 30 April as a measure to further conserve the airline''s cash flow amid the lockdown to combat the coronavirus threat.

Also, the company said it would hand over 10,000 kits of PPEs and dry rations to district administrations of Tiruvallur and Chennai in coming days. The auto-maker said it has donated Rs 5 crore to Chief Minister Relief Fund and was taking wide range of other initiatives towards the battle against COVID-19.

The dry rations were meant for distribution to those in need in the district, surrounding the manufacturing facilities of Hyundai Motor India at neighbouring Sriperumbudur.

Senior executives of the Hyundai Motor India Foundation handed over personal protective equipment (PPE) and dry rations to district collector P Ponniah.

Korean automajor Hyundai Motor India on Wednesday donated medical equipment to the district administration of Kancheepuram to help fight against coronavirus pandemic.

It will also participate in setting up an isolation ward for COVID-19 patients at the government hospital in Chengalpattu, near its Chennai plant, BMW Group India said in a statement.

The company said it has partnered with government and non-government organisations for on-ground implementation in Delhi-NCR and Chennai.

BMW Group India on Wednesday pledged Rs 3 crore for the ongoing battle against the coronavirus pandemic.

The sector expects a revenue drop of not less than 60 to 70 percent, which is going to leave a cascading impact on a host of different things, he added.

"The food service sector essentially faces the same challenges as the hospitality sector and even somewhat like the aviation sector. Being a $7 billion industry in India, it is going to see the most severe impact imaginable," Elior India CEO and MD Sanjay Kumar told PTI.

Food services firm Elior India on Wednesday said the food service sector is expecting up to 70 percent drop in revenue which will have a cascading effect on various other things amid lockdown extension.

The power distribution contracts plummeted 77 percent on an annualised basis; real estate awards fell 35 percent; infrastructure contracts slipped 43 percent; irrigation awards nose-dived 66 percent and water supply awards dipped 29 percent, show the numbers collated by the brokerage Emkay Global.

The problem was more pronounced in the final quarter of the year, as the government contracts came to an almost full standstill as it cut spending to maintain fiscal numbers under check, and the final week saw the entire nation coming to a halt due to the lockdown.

Infrastructure sector activity witnessed a decline of 43 percent in FY20, following financial troubles at the national road builder NHAI and the massive contraction in March due to the lockdown, according to a report.

The government last week approved an emergency economic stimulus package worth 108.2 trillion yen ($1.01 trillion), with fiscal spending of 39.5 trillion yen, aimed at battling the fallout from the coronavirus.

Japans coronavirus emergency economic stimulus should boost the countrys real gross domestic product by 3.8 percent, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe said on Wednesday at the end of a meeting of the governments top economic advisory council.

The company had also joined hands with logistics player like Dunzo besides opening up directly to the consumers with its portal ITCstore.in with an aim of ensuring uninterrupted supplies of essential items and foods to its consumers.

It had partnered with food delivery chains such as Domino's, Swiggy and Zomato along with community centric apps such as Apna Complex, My gate, No broker and Azgo which had the readiness to address delivery to housing societies in metros.

The Kolkata-based firm had launched multiple initiatives to partake in India's fight against coronavirus infection by tapping a range of distribution channels to ensure that supplies of essential food and hygiene products are delivered at the doorsteps of its consumers during the national lockdown.

FMCG major ITC expects its new collaborations with unlikely partners, including Domino's, Swiggy and Zomato in the wake of coronavirus pandemic and subsequent lockdown opening new distribution channels, to become mainstream in future, according to a company official.

"The government has allowed inter and intra-state movement of goods traffic by road as well as rail. Also, farming operations, as well as industries outside municipal limits, have also been allowed to operate from 20 April. All these will involve fuel consumption," a top industry official said.

Petrol and diesel sales had fallen by over 66 percent and aviation turbine fuel (ATF) consumption collapsed by 90 percent as the unprecedented nationwide lockdown shut factories, stopped road and rail transportation and suspended flights.

Petrol and diesel consumption, which saw its biggest ever decline in the aftermath of a nationwide lockdown, is likely to pick up in the second half of the month as the government has allowed trucks to ply as well as farmers and industries in rural areas to resume operations after 20 April.

On sectoral front, bank, auto and energy ended in the red, while buying seen in the FMCG, IT and metal.

As many as 1429 shares have advanced, 940 shares declined, and 174 shares remained unchanged.

Kotak Mahindra Bank, Hero MotoCorp, Bajaj Financ,e HDFC, Maruti, HDFC Bank, Reliance and Sun Pharma were the major losers in the Sensex pack.

The benchmark indices gave up the morning gains as the Sensex tanked 310.21 points or 1.01 percent to 30379.81 while Nifty was down 68.55 points or 0.76 percent at 8925.30 at close.

The remaining 2,800 employees of the airline such as members of cabin crew and ground handling services will be unaffected.

The compulsory no pay leave will affect around 1,200 employees in senior grades.

On 27 March, the airline had also introduced compulsory leave without pay for up to three days between 1 April and 14 April for the same set of senior employees.

Vistara CEO Leslie Thng on Wednesday announced that senior employees will be going on compulsory leave without pay for up to three days between 15 April and 30 April as a measure to further conserve the airline''s cash flow amid the lockdown to combat the coronavirus threat.

Also, the company said it would hand over 10,000 kits of PPEs and dry rations to district administrations of Tiruvallur and Chennai in coming days. The auto-maker said it has donated Rs 5 crore to Chief Minister Relief Fund and was taking wide range of other initiatives towards the battle against COVID-19.

The dry rations were meant for distribution to those in need in the district, surrounding the manufacturing facilities of Hyundai Motor India at neighbouring Sriperumbudur.

Senior executives of the Hyundai Motor India Foundation handed over personal protective equipment (PPE) and dry rations to district collector P Ponniah.

Korean automajor Hyundai Motor India on Wednesday donated medical equipment to the district administration of Kancheepuram to help fight against coronavirus pandemic.

It will also participate in setting up an isolation ward for COVID-19 patients at the government hospital in Chengalpattu, near its Chennai plant, BMW Group India said in a statement.

The company said it has partnered with government and non-government organisations for on-ground implementation in Delhi-NCR and Chennai.

BMW Group India on Wednesday pledged Rs 3 crore for the ongoing battle against the coronavirus pandemic.

The sector expects a revenue drop of not less than 60 to 70 percent, which is going to leave a cascading impact on a host of different things, he added.

"The food service sector essentially faces the same challenges as the hospitality sector and even somewhat like the aviation sector. Being a $7 billion industry in India, it is going to see the most severe impact imaginable," Elior India CEO and MD Sanjay Kumar told PTI.

Food services firm Elior India on Wednesday said the food service sector is expecting up to 70 percent drop in revenue which will have a cascading effect on various other things amid lockdown extension.

The power distribution contracts plummeted 77 percent on an annualised basis; real estate awards fell 35 percent; infrastructure contracts slipped 43 percent; irrigation awards nose-dived 66 percent and water supply awards dipped 29 percent, show the numbers collated by the brokerage Emkay Global.

The problem was more pronounced in the final quarter of the year, as the government contracts came to an almost full standstill as it cut spending to maintain fiscal numbers under check, and the final week saw the entire nation coming to a halt due to the lockdown.

Infrastructure sector activity witnessed a decline of 43 percent in FY20, following financial troubles at the national road builder NHAI and the massive contraction in March due to the lockdown, according to a report.

The government last week approved an emergency economic stimulus package worth 108.2 trillion yen ($1.01 trillion), with fiscal spending of 39.5 trillion yen, aimed at battling the fallout from the coronavirus.

Japans coronavirus emergency economic stimulus should boost the countrys real gross domestic product by 3.8 percent, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe said on Wednesday at the end of a meeting of the governments top economic advisory council.

The company had also joined hands with logistics player like Dunzo besides opening up directly to the consumers with its portal ITCstore.in with an aim of ensuring uninterrupted supplies of essential items and foods to its consumers.

It had partnered with food delivery chains such as Domino's, Swiggy and Zomato along with community centric apps such as Apna Complex, My gate, No broker and Azgo which had the readiness to address delivery to housing societies in metros.

The Kolkata-based firm had launched multiple initiatives to partake in India's fight against coronavirus infection by tapping a range of distribution channels to ensure that supplies of essential food and hygiene products are delivered at the doorsteps of its consumers during the national lockdown.

FMCG major ITC expects its new collaborations with unlikely partners, including Domino's, Swiggy and Zomato in the wake of coronavirus pandemic and subsequent lockdown opening new distribution channels, to become mainstream in future, according to a company official.

To provide protection to healthcare professionals in the fight against #COVID19 , Indian Railways plans to produce over 30,000 coveralls (Personal Protective Equipment) in April 2020. Railways plans to manufacture 1,00,000 of the same in May: Ministry of Railways pic.twitter.com/PrBfG5AsQ1

"The government has allowed inter and intra-state movement of goods traffic by road as well as rail. Also, farming operations, as well as industries outside municipal limits, have also been allowed to operate from 20 April. All these will involve fuel consumption," a top industry official said.

Petrol and diesel sales had fallen by over 66 percent and aviation turbine fuel (ATF) consumption collapsed by 90 percent as the unprecedented nationwide lockdown shut factories, stopped road and rail transportation and suspended flights.

Petrol and diesel consumption, which saw its biggest ever decline in the aftermath of a nationwide lockdown, is likely to pick up in the second half of the month as the government has allowed trucks to ply as well as farmers and industries in rural areas to resume operations after 20 April.

On sectoral front, bank, auto and energy ended in the red, while buying seen in the FMCG, IT and metal.

As many as 1429 shares have advanced, 940 shares declined, and 174 shares remained unchanged.

Kotak Mahindra Bank, Hero MotoCorp, Bajaj Financ,e HDFC, Maruti, HDFC Bank, Reliance and Sun Pharma were the major losers in the Sensex pack.

The benchmark indices gave up the morning gains as the Sensex tanked 310.21 points or 1.01 percent to 30379.81 while Nifty was down 68.55 points or 0.76 percent at 8925.30 at close.

Stock Market Today Latest Updates: Sensex soars above 770 points, Nifty crosses 9,200-mark; Rupee opens high

New York: Asian shares looked set to pull back from a one-month high on Tuesday, as warnings of a deep recession dampened investor optimism that the slowing spread of the coronavirus could allow businesses to re-open.

E-Mini futures for the S&P 500 fell right from the closing bell and were down 0.26 percent, while Nikkei futures pointed to an opening loss of around five points, defying broad gains in US stocks overnight.

The retreat from riskier assets followed the International Monetary Funds prediction on Tuesday that the global economy may shrink by 3 percent in 2020 due to the virus outbreak, in the worst downturn since the Great Depression of the 1930s.

Even estimates for a partial recovery next year are marred by extreme uncertainty and the outcome could be far worse, depending on the course of the pandemic, the fund warned.

Some analysts agreed and counselled caution.

The current market optimism may be premature because the global economy is in a deep recession, said Kim Mundy, an analyst at Commonwealth Bank of Australia. We expect the global economy will contract by 2.8 percent in 2020, vastly more than during the great financial crisis.

Asian stocks had climbed to their highest in a month on Monday, buoyed by Chinese trade data that showed exports did not slow as much as feared in March, even though analysts warned the outlook for the worlds second-largest economy remained grim.

In energy markets, concerns about a global recession led crude oil prices to plunge by over 10 percent towards $20 a barrel overnight, as investors doubted a record global output cut could offset a sharp drop in demand as the economy stalls.

By 2300 GMT, US crude futures CLc1 had recovered a touch and were up 3.1 percent at $20.74 a barrel, but a long way from a January high of $63.27.

Healthy demand for less risky investments and a softer dollar kept gold prices near a 7-1/2-year peak. Spot gold prices were flat at $1,728.44 an ounce, after hitting a high of $1,738.05 earlier, a level not seen since late 2012.

Still, some investors took heart from news the coronavirus outbreak may be near a peak as European countries such as Austria and Spain started to loosen lockdown restrictions.

In the United States, which has suffered the most fatalities from the virus, the governors of seven states, including New York, said they were preparing plans to gradually restart the economy.

Sparks of investor optimism, alongside the US Federal Reserves massive new lending programme to support the economy, pinned the US. dollaranother traditional safe-haven assetat a two-week low.

Against a basket of six currencies, the US. dollar index eased 0.5 percent to 98.86. That helped the euro cling to earlier gains at $1.0984, while the greenback stayed soft against the Japanese yen at 107.17.

US 10-year yields were little changed at 0.750 percent as investors braced for Wednesdays release of March US retail sales data, which will give a key gauge on how the virus pandemic has hurt the US economy.

In a sign of the pandemics toll on the economy, two major U.S. banks  JPMorgan Chase & Co (JPM.N) and Wells Fargo & Co (WFC.N)  reported plunges in first-quarter profit on Tuesday as both set aside billions of dollars to cover potential loan losses.

James Bullard, the president of St Louis Federal Reserve, estimated on Tuesday that the economic shutdown due to the coronavirus pandemic is costing the United States perhaps $25 billion a day in lost output and cannot be sustained indefinitely. But to re-open, he said the country needs risk management strategies and widespread testing.
Cameron Diaz has broken her silence on becoming a mother to baby Raddix Chloe Wildflower Madden, as she hailed parenthood as the 'best thing ever'.

The 47-year-old actress and her husband Benji Madden, 40, welcomed their daughter into the world in December and the Mask star is loving every minute of the new chapter in her life.

She said: 'I love being a mother. It's the best, best, best part of my life.

'I'm so happy, it's the best part of my life': Cameron Diaz, 47, has broken her silence on becoming a mother to baby Raddix as she says she's 'so lucky' Benji Madden, 40, is the father

'I'm so grateful and so happy and it's the best thing ever and I'm so lucky to do it with Benj and we're having the best time. I'm thrilled. I can't believe it.'

And Cameron praised the Good Charlotte rocker for being an 'amazing father' and admitted she feels 'lucky' because he's such a hands-on dad, so she gets time to wind down herself at the end of the day while he looks after their daughter.

Speaking to Who What Wear CEO Katherine Power on her friend's Instagram Live, she said: 'I'm either cooking, cleaning or taking care of my baby -- and usually all at the same time.

Support: Cameron praised the Good Charlotte rocker for being an 'amazing father' and admitted she feels 'lucky' because he's such a hands-on dad

'I have to cook at night. I know people hate cooking... I drink [wine] every night it's my wind down for the day.

'After we do bath time with our baby and we put her to sleep, Benji puts her to bed, he's so good. He's such an amazing father. I'm so lucky he's my baby's father.

'He's incredible. He puts her down and I go into the kitchen and I pour myself a nice glass of red wine. I start my cooking, I put on my show, whatever it is.'

The Bad Teacher star admitted measures put in place to slow the spread of coronavirus haven't had a major impact on her because she's been 'living a quarantine life' since her daughter was born.

Benji recently gushed: 'My wife and daughter fill me up with so much gratitude! Everyday, I feel so lucky. [I] just wanted to say it out loud'

She said: 'I've kinda been living a quarantine life anyhow because I have a three month old, three-and-a-half month. So my life has been completely quiet and still for the last few months.

'But I was able to have my friends over all the time. And now I just don't see anybody.

'But it's nice, and I love a bubble and being in the womb of my home with my husband and cooking.

'But at the same time it's crazy that you can't go out to the world right now.'

In February, Benji issued a rare public statement about how fulfilled he felt after welcoming his first child - 'really, really cute' newborn daughter Raddix - with his wife Cameron Diaz on December 30.

Still going strong! The Maryland-born musician (L) and the 47-year-old SoCal native (R) celebrated their fifth wedding anniversary on January 5 (pictured August 30)

'My wife and daughter fill me up with so much gratitude!' the guitarist - who boasts 997K social media followers - captioned a painting of three red roses.

'Everyday, I feel so lucky. [I] just wanted to say it out loud. Much love and best wishes.'

The couple had announced their happy news in January in an Instagram post.

They wrote: 'Happy New Year from the Maddens! We are so happy, blessed and grateful to being this new decade by announcing the birth of our daughter, Raddix Madden.

'She has instantly captured our hearts and completed our family.

'While we are overjoyed to share this news, we also feel a strong instinct to protect our little's one's privacy. So we won't be posting pictures or sharing any more details, other than the fact that she is really really cute!! Some would even say RAD:)

'From our family to all of yours, we're sending our love and best wishes for a Happy New Year and Happy New Decade. Sincerely, Cameron&Benji [heart emoji]'
Source: Xinhua| 2020-04-15 18:31:56|Editor: huaxia

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Airport staff load donated medical supplies onto a plane at the Yinchuan Hedong International Airport in Yinchuan, capital of northwest China's Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region, April 15, 2020. A team of medical experts with medical supplies left for Saudi Arabia on Wednesday morning to assist its ongoing efforts in the fight against COVID-19. (Xinhua/Feng Kaihua)

YINCHUAN, April 15 (Xinhua) -- China has sent a team of medical experts to Saudi Arabia to assist the country's fight against the novel coronavirus outbreak.

The team, consisting of eight medical experts, left Yinchuan, capital of northwest China's Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region, on Wednesday morning for Saudi Arabia.

The experts specialized in various areas including virus testing, infectious disease, respiratory disease, intensive care, and traditional Chinese medicine from several hospitals in Ningxia and centers for disease prevention and control at both the national and regional level.

The experts also took with them medical supplies donated by the regional government, including surgical masks, N95 masks, protective clothing, nucleic acid testing kits and infrared thermometers.

Upon arrival, the Chinese experts will share their experiences with and offer training for Saudi medical staff on the prevention, control, diagnosis and treatment of COVID-19.

They will also provide necessary medical supplies, TCM consultation and epidemic prevention trainings for overseas Chinese there.
Brave 4-Year-Old Boy Beats CCP Virus While Undergoing Rare Cancer Treatment

The content is not available due to expiration.
Rashtrasant Tukadoji Maharaj



Nagpur University (RTMNU) has submitted a proposal to the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) for setting up a coronavirus testing facility on its campus here, an official said on Wednesday.

The varsity proposes to make the facility available for public at affordable charges, a release said.

"As per the ICMR statement issued on April 1, there area total of 126 laboratories that havebeen approved and supported by the government. However, testing facilities for this dreadful virus, COVID-19, are inadequate in Vidarbha region (in east Maharashtra). Presently, this facility is available only in a few government medical colleges in Nagpur," it said.

The varsity is sending a proposal to ICMR for granting permission to set up a COVID-19 Testing Facility Centre at its campus, which could be made available for general public at an affordable price, it said.

RTMNU PRO Shyam Dhond told PTI on Wednesday that the varsity is providing 500 cooked food packets two times a day to the needy people through its community kitchen.

He said varsity employees have donated their one day's salary, totalling about Rs 16 lakh, to the Maharashtra CM relief fund to fight coronavirus.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Franklin Graham, the evangelical pastor whose group Samaritan's Purse is running a field hospital in New York's Central Park, says he is being harassed for insisting his hospital workers are opposed to gay marriage.

Mr Graham - who has a long history of anti-LGBTQ beliefs - makes all volunteers agree to a Statement of Faith which includes the line 'marriage is exclusively the union of one genetic male and one genetic female'.

However, Graham has since posted in a lengthy Facebook message about how he has been harassed by 'elected officials and others' in New York.

'While so many have expressed their appreciation and support, sadly some New York officials and a special interest group have expressed concerns or outright opposition to the presence of Samaritan's Purse and our field hospital in Central Park. They include: Eight Democratic members of New York's Congressional delegation in Washington, D.C., The New York City Commission on Human Rights, The Reclaim Pride Coalition,' Graham alleged.

Franklin Graham is the evangelical pastor whose group Samaritan's Purse is running a field hospital in New York's Central Park which was set up at the end of March

Franklin Graham says he is being harassed for insisting his hospital workers are opposed to gay marriage before coming to work at the field hospital

'While our Scriptural belief in marriage between a man and a woman seems particularly offensive to representatives of these three groups, we don't believe this is the time or place to wage this debate. Samaritan's Purse is a decidedly Christian private relief organization, funded almost entirely by individuals around the world who share our passion for providing aid to victims of war, disease, disaster, poverty, famine and persecutionand doing so in Jesus' Name,' the pastor continued.

'It seems tone-deaf to be attacking our religious conviction about marriage at the very moment thousands of New Yorkers are fighting for their lives and dozens of Samaritan's Purse workers are placing their lives at risk to provide critical medical care.'

'If any of these groups had funded and erected their own emergency field hospitals to serve COVID-19 patients in Central Park, we would join what we believe would be most New Yorkersand Americansin applauding and praying for them, not harassing them.

Last month, while setting up the temporary structure, in an attempt to allay fears because of the charity's anti-gay stance, Samaritan's Purse told state lawmakers that they would require those working at the hospital to sign an additional second pledge vowing not to discriminate against patients according to the New York Times.

The hospital has treated 119 patients so far. The facility, run by Christian humanitarian group Samaritan's Purse, has just over 70 medics and can take 10 intensive care patients

In a lengthy post on Facebook, Graham justified his group's views on same-sex marriage

Nonetheless, Graham justified his position by saying the group had a right to 'lawfully hire staff who share our Christian beliefs' because it is a religious charity.

The hospital consists of 14 tents with room for 68 beds, staffed by a team of more than 70 doctors, nurses and other medical personnel and relief specialists.

There are also 10 ICU beds equipped with ventilators. The hospital has admitted 119 patients during their first two weeks of operation.

Last week, activist William Talen - best known for his satirical character Reverend Billy - was arrested at the hospital and escorted away by six police officers, one clutching what is believed to be Talen's rainbow flag.

As he was being escorted away, the 69-year-old shouted: 'They have no business being in New York City. They are the virus.'

Talen allegedly jumped the perimeter of the hospital and planted a flag on the grounds before he was arrested.

Samaritan's Purse COVID Response team lead Dr Elliott Tenpenny said: 'We're taking more patients all the time to help the people in New York City'

Last month, the makeshift field hospital was constructed in Central Park in just 48 hours to take the pressure off overwhelmed hospitals in the city.

Samaritan's Purse COVID Response team lead Dr Elliott Tenpenny told MSNBC: 'We're taking more patients all the time to help the people in New York City.

'In partnership with Mount Sinai, we're accepting patients and each day a certain number come through and we receive them throughout the day.

He added: 'The challenge is those two hospitals [Mount Sinai hospitals in Brooklyn and Queens], those two boroughs, are really the ones that have been hit the hardest early on in this pandemic in New York City.

Central Park hospital has been taking in patients from the hardest-hit boroughs of Brooklyn and Queens

'We've been able to serve a great function here by offloading them and allowing them to treat more people.

'This virus doesn't just attack older Americans. There is greater risk for severe cases.

'This virus doesn't care who you are. It doesn't care how old you are. It's attacking people of all ages.'

The organization is also running a field hospital in Italy, the first time they have had two facilities open simultaneously.

He added: 'We've only been open three or four days, but if our patients in Italy are any indication they could be here weeks. Two to three weeks even, the sicker patients.'
<! Keniebi Okoko >

By Abankula

Keniebi Okoko, Bayelsa-born billionaire businessman and philanthropist, has died in Lagos, throwing many Bayelsans into mourning.

Some reports said Okoko, son of Professor Kimse Okoko, died on Tuesday during a liposuction surgery in a Lagos hospital.

A power outage was blamed for the death.

Okoko was in his early 40s.

He contested the Bayelsa primary for the governorship ticket of the Peoples Democratic Party last year. He did not succeed.

He was also a pastor of Salvation Ministries in Port Harcourt.

Many Bayelsans and people who he had touched in his lifetime, were shocked by his sudden death.

They poured out their anguish in posts on Facebook.

Ojims Michael wrote: Keniebi Okoko please wake up, please remember all we prayed about.

This one came as a big shock to me last night, suddenly gone forever OMG you are just too young for this I cant even wrap my head around this oh God why?, wrote Stephanie T.Douglas.

Pro-Jane Whatson said: A big loss to all of us at salvation ministries. Just take it as God know why and celebrate his salvation and look very for God while on Earth.

Michael Osaro Jnr wrote a lengthy tribute:

I cant find the rationale behind the death of a promising and wealthy young man like this who is even a pastor, a giver and a faithful servant of God.

Na waaa oooo. Watin man go do for this life self. Life is absolutely nothing my brother.

Rest in Peace and sleep well in the bosom of the Lord my beloved pastor Keniebe Kimson Koko. We will miss you greatly

Okoko was the founder and CEO KDI Group, said to be involved in oil and gas.

He was reputed to be the godson of former Nigerian leader, Goodluck Jonathan.

According to his Facebook wall, Okoko attended University Demonstration Secondary School (UDSS), Choba.

He also went to University of Port Harcourt.

In 2018, he went for the certificate programme in Harvard Business School.
A young Neanderthal girl kneels at the water's edge as host Neil deGrasse Tyson looks on. Until about 40,000 years ago, our Neanderthal relatives lived very much as we did.

Religion and worship are intrinsically tied with our history as a species, as is fire, and both are recurring motifs in this week's episodes of "Cosmos: Possible Worlds."

At the beginning of episode 11, called "Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors," host Neil deGrasse Tyson reminds us that when Homo sapiens, which means "wise ones," discovered and controlled fire hundreds of thousands of years ago, everything changed. Fire allowed us to cook food and heat dwellings, and it served as a focal point for storytelling and sharing cultural identity among community members.

Persepolis, a complex built by emperors around 600 BCE when Persia was the only superpower on Earth, illustrates the central focus fire had in ancient civilization. The domestication of fire played a crucial role in the worship of the Zoroastrian god, Ahura Mazda, and symbolized the god's purity and the "light of the illuminated mind."

Related: ' Cosmos: Possible Worlds' brings the search for E.T. down to Earth

Evil, catastrophe and disease, on the other hand, were caused by Angra Mainyu, the Zoroastrian representation of what modern Christian societies would call the devil . Why people thought of these maladies as being the creation of an evil being becomes more obvious as Tyson walks us through how a rabies virus invades a dog's body after the pup has been infected by a rabid bat.

Disease microbes not only attack and kill cells, Tyson explains, but also change their hosts' behavior to facilitate the virus' spread to other hosts. The rabies virus , for example, turns its host into a fearless, crazed animal by attacking the limbic system, which deals with emotions and memory. Once the limbic system is compromised, the virus turns its attention to the mechanisms in the animals' throat that produce saliva, causing infected animals to foam at the mouth. The virus also inhibits the swallowing mechanism, maximizing the chances infected saliva will spread to another host.

How does the virus "know" to do this? " Evolution by natural selection ," says Tyson, explaining that "given enough time, a random mutation will take hold if it enhances the virus' chance of survival." Ironically, it's the victims that keep a virus' "wicked flame" alive as it leaps from host to host, bending them to its will as if it were a sentient being. "We are at the mercy of unseen forces; viruses, microbes, hormones, our very own DNA. Where does the programming end and free will begin, if it ever does at all?"

Elaborating on these points, Tyson turns to insects and animals. Simple behavioral programs are abundant in the animal kingdom; for example, upon their death, bees secrete oleic acid (a "death pheromone") to tell their fellow hive members to remove their corpses from the hive, and geese will instinctively retrieve any egg-like objects that may have rolled away from their nests. While we may detect evidence of spontaneous decision-making in animals, Tyson says, can we identify a source of executive authority in them, or a "soul"? What about human beings?

We don't yet have established parameters for what it means to be "distinctly human," Tyson notes. Plato was one of the first philosophers to put forth a definition: "Man is a featherless biped." Aristotle, a student of Plato's, would later proclaim that man is a social and political animal. Neither of these definitions hold much weight; after all, ants, bees, and termites are also social animals. Underscoring this point, Tyson gives us several examples of animal species that engage in trade and art, use technology and tools, parent their young through adolescence into adulthood, and who enslave and exploit other animals and keep them in captivity. Other animals even show each other affection and tenderness.

Related: Creative creatures: 10 animals that use tools

On the Monterey Cliffs, "Cosmos: Possible Worlds" host Neil deGrasse Tyson gently rocks a newborn baby. (Image credit: Cosmos Studios)

It would seem the only thing that separates us from other animals, Tyson ponders, is our "neurotic need to feel 'special.'" Against the backdrop of the Halls of Extinction, featured prominently in previous episodes, Tyson insists that there must be a clear distinction between ourselves and animals that justifies our eating them, wearing them and even bringing an end to their species.

"Is DNA destiny, and if it is, does it have the power to write epic tales of heroism and saintliness?" There's heroism in the way a gazelle will put herself in harm's way to protect her offspring and herd from a cheetah , but there's also heroism in stories from our ancient past, as Tyson illustrates with the story of Ashoka. Five seconds ago on the "cosmic calendar"  approximately 2,200 Earth years ago  the emperor Ashoka's reign of terror over the Indian subcontinent began, marked by his proclivity for torture and extreme violence.

After an exchange with an unnamed Buddhist monk, Ashoka underwent a profound change; having realized the true scope of his power, social welfare became Ashoka's top priority as his idea of "kinship" expanded to include everyone, even animals. He banned the ritual sacrifice of animals and established veterinary hospitals. Ashoka further dug wells, planted trees, built shelters, signed peace treaties with neighboring countries he once warred with, built schools, hospitals and hospices, introduced the education of women and free healthcare for all, and much more.

"Ashoka's dream," Tyson says, referring to his philanthropic pursuits, "grows louder with time." We cut to a scene of a mother with her crying child, who had been born just moments before. We see the child again in the twelfth and penultimate episode of the series, "Coming of Age in the Anthropocene." The opening scene finds us on a placid seashore where Tyson describes life on Earth to the newborn. "We're all very young here," he coos, "new, like you, to the mysteries of the universe." Science, Tyson states, is our birthright and is how we piece together our history.

Setting the stage for this new episode, Tyson recalls our own planet's fiery beginnings when it was hammered by a celestial body the size of Mars , which blasted into space material that became Earth's moon. Earth gradually cooled, forming a crust on its surface that allowed oceans to form. In our planet's infancy, days were much shorter; only about six hours long, notes Tyson. The environment was also toxic and hostile: "Scientists reason that the thick, hazy atmosphere trapped the heat of the Earth and made it scorching hot," Tyson explains.

Related: How the moon formed: 5 wild lunar theories

Amazingly, there were organisms that survived this seemingly uninhabitable environment; these were cyanobacteria that lived deep in the oceans, and "remade" the planet by consuming carbon dioxide and producing oxygen, which in turn consumed the thick methane that enveloped our planet, causing temperatures to drop. Atoms of oxygen then gathered in the sky above our planet and formed ozone molecules. Life on land became possible, and the young Earth's landscape changed drastically as this life began to adapt to its new conditions.

At 11 o'clock on New Year's Eve of the cosmic year, Homo erectus stood up for the first time, freeing its hands and earning the species its name. "They began to move around, to explore, daring to risk everything to get to unknown places. They were brave, and their blood runs in your veins," says Tyson of our ancient ancestors. Some explored Africa and others went on to Europe, and evidence supports the theory the European pioneers would later evolve into Neanderthals . Other H. erectus individuals would go on to Asia and evolve into our hominid cousins, the Denisovans.

Our Neanderthal relatives lived much as we did and did many of the things we consider to be "human," says Tyson. To this day, a few of us even carry some Neanderthal genes; however, some unknown force wiped out the Neanderthals and Denisovans many years ago. Scientists postulate it may have been their complacency that doomed them, as we have evidence showing they never ventured beyond ocean coastlines.

More restless than their cousins the Neanderthals and Denisovans, our Homo sapiens ancestors crossed seas and unforgiving landscapes, changing the land, ocean and atmosphere, leading to mass extinction. The scientific community gave our age a new name, " Anthropocene ," from the Greek words for "human" and "recent." Just as the Neanderthals and Denisovans may have doomed themselves, however, early Homo sapiens may have doomed their descendants: us.

Altering our world comes at a great price; a "darkness," Tyson says, has been looming over us as our technology advances and population increases. The invention of agriculture allowed humans to settle on farms and later in cities. The carbon dioxide and methane released from various farming and agricultural techniques increased exponentially as our need for them increased, to sustain ever-growing numbers. In China we began burning coal, which became fuel for foundries, forges and homes.

As harmful to the environment as these were, nothing compared to the damage done by chlorofluorocarbons , or CFCs. Before refrigerators, we kept food items cool and stored them in ice boxes. Later, the ice box was replaced by a gas-powered refrigerator that used ammonia sulfur dioxide as a coolant. However, these chemicals were poisonous and the mechanism would often leak, making them dangerous. The invention of CFCs, a molecule that hadn't existed in nature previously, was so successful it was used in almost everything.

The catastrophic effect CFCs had on ozone was not discovered until the early 1970s, when chemists Mario Molina and Sherwood Rolland, studying the effects rocket fuel had on the atmosphere, found CFCs not only accumulated in the atmosphere, but had already thinned the ozone layer. When UV light hits a CFC molecule, it strips away the chlorine atoms, which then eat away at ozone, the very insulation that makes it possible to live on Earth. Thankfully, the scientists worked tirelessly to warn the world, and global governments heeded their warning; manufacturers stopped producing CFCs, and the ozone has been getting thicker ever since. Our children may even see the damage completely healed.

Related: The effects of global warming

The episode ends on a harrowing note, another scientists' warning we have yet to heed. Syukuro Manabe was born in rural Japan and took an intense interest in Earth's average global temperature. During the course of his career, he would assemble the evidence he needed to write "Thermal Equilibrium of the Atmosphere with a Given Distribution of Relative Humidity," a paper that predicted the increase of Earth's temperature due to greenhouse gases until it becomes an uninhabitable and toxic environment again, leading to our extinction.

Many still believe the "science is unsettled," however, despite Manabe's correctly predicting the rise in temperature and its effects on our planet. "The scientists warned us," says a remorseful Tyson as we look into our future at life on Earth: lethal outdoor temperatures, global water shortages, wildfires. These ruminations culminate in the striking visual of battered baby bottles littering a dry and barren field, implying the worst for mankind. Tyson ends on a hopeful note, which will carry us into the final episode of the series.

"This doesn't have to be," says Tyson. "it's not too late. There's another hallway, another future we can still have. I promise to get you there; we'll find a way."

"Cosmos" airs on the National Geographic channel on Mondays at 8 p.m. ET/9 p.m. CT and will be reprised on the Fox television network this summer.

Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom and on Facebook .
Cyber security and public health experts warn the federal government's coronavirus tracking app won't be effective unless it can convince a large section of the public to sign up to it.

The government wants 40 per cent of Australians to voluntarily sign up for the app in order to track COVID-19 outbreaks.

The humble smartphone is being pegged as a key to tracing Covid-19 transmissions. Credit:Bloomberg

"I think it will be beneficial, but the degree of benefit is going to increase with the degree of people using it," associate professor at the University of New South Wales school of public health and community medicine, Dr James Wood said.

"There will have to be pretty clear messaging about what is being provided, and how that data will be used."
The Lancaster County District Attorney is working to provide support to victims after dozens of inmates were granted early release in light of the COVID-19 pandemic, the office announced Tuesday.

While the DA did not provide exact numbers on the inmates to be released, a statement adds that the review process for early release is ongoing at the local and state level.

We have and will offer objections to certain inmates, in consideration of the victims and public safety, the office said.

The District Attorneys Office said the process could bring concern and questions to crime victims.

Our office is working to provide appropriate support to victims. Our team of victim advocates continues to work (primarily remotely) during the COVID-19 emergency, The DAs office said.

People directly affected by the early inmate releases are being contacted by victims advocates, the office said.

Any victims with questions about the process are encouraged to contact an advocate. Anyone already working with an advocate can contact them directly, but the team of advocates can be contacted by phone at 717-299-8048 or email: victimwitness@co.lancaster.pa.us.

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The Central government on Wednesday gave its go-ahead for MGNREGA workers to take up jobs from April 20 onwards. MGNREGA workers, however, would have to ensure all necessary precautions such as maintaining social distancing and wearing masks to ensure that virus does spread in rural areas.

The ministry said that MGNREGA workers involved in irrigation and water conservation would be given priority. "Other central and state sector schemes in irrigation and water conservation sectors may also be allowed to be implemented and suitably dovetailed with MGNREGA works," the new guidelines issued by the home ministry said. The MHA has also called for "strict implementation of social distancing" for all MGNREGA workers.

As per the revised lockdown guidelines issued by the Ministry of Home Affairs on Wednesday, areas that follow the lockdown norms perfectly will be allowed some relaxations from April 20 onwards. The tasks taken up by MGNREGA workers would be focus on irrigation and water conservation as India is preparing for the summer season ahead of monsoon.

Jobs that don't take up more than 3-4 people and can be done while practising social distancing would be encouraged, said the ministry of rural development. Other jobs that can be taken up the MNREGA workers include digging of wells, planting of trees or horticulture trees.

Meanwhile, India has reported 9,756 active cases of coronavirus (as of 8 am, April 15), according to the Health Ministry. Total deaths stood at 377. As many as 1305 patients have been cured or discharged and 1 migrated.

Also Read: Coronavirus India Lockdown Live Updates: COVID-19 Guidelines to be issued today as migrant crisis hit nation

Also Read: Coronavirus lockdown 2.0 guidelines issued: Check full list of relaxations, restrictions by MHA
An American research company says a dam in China on the Mekong River held back water while countries farther down the river needed water last year.

U.S. research company Eyes on Earth released its findings in a report. It said China was not suffering from a lack of rain at the time.

Chinas government rejected the findings. It said there was low rainfall over its territory during last years monsoon season.

Eyes on Earth Inc. researches international water issues. Its study was financed by the U.S. government. The study could affect discussions between China and other countries on the Mekong River. The river supports 60 million people living on or near it. The Mekong runs for about 4,350 kilometers through China, Myanmar, Laos, Thailand, Cambodia and Vietnam.

Last year's drought saw the Lower Mekong at its lowest levels in more than 50 years. The lack of water hurt farmers and fishermen economically.

If Chinese officials are saying they did not make the drought worse for other countries, the information found does not support that position, said Alan Basist. He is the president of Eyes on Earth.

The Upper Mekong flows through Chinas Yunnan Province. Satellite measurements of the areas ground wetness in 2019, suggest it had a small increase in rain and snow during that year.

Satellites also measured areas downstream from China along the border of Thailand and Laos. Water levels there were at times up to three meters lower than they should have been, the group said in the study.

That suggests China was not letting the water out during the wet season, Basist said.



Troubled waters

China has 11 dams on the Upper Mekong River. No one outside of China really knows the effects that these dams have on the flow of water. China has not released information about how much water the dams are using to fill their reservoirs. Eyes on Earth said those reservoirs can hold more than 47 billion cubic meters of water.

China does not have water treaties with the lower Mekong countries. But it has promised to work with other countries on the river to find the cause of last years drought.

The United States says China controls the river. Last year in Bangkok, U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said the drought was caused by Chinas decision to shut off water upstream.

Starting in 2012, when the larger of Chinas upper Mekong dams opened, the flow of water to other countries changed.

The explanation that Chinas dam building on the Lancang River is causing downstream droughts is unreasonable, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs said in a statement to Reuters. It calls the river the Lancang, its Chinese name.

Im Pete Musto.

The Reuters News Agency reported this story. Susan Shand adapted it for Learning English. Mario Ritter, Jr.was the editor.

_______________________________________________________________

Words in This Story

drought n.a period with a severe lack of rain

monsoon n.the rainy season in South and Southeast Asia

data n.information gathered to examine something

reservoir  n.a large pool of drinking
(@ChaudhryMAli88)

One more patient died of COVID-19 in Moldova overnight bringing the total death toll from the disease in the country to 36, the Moldovan Health Ministry said on Tuesday

CHISINAU (UrduPoint News / Sputnik - 14th April, 2020) One more patient died of COVID-19 in Moldova overnight bringing the total death toll from the disease in the country to 36, the Moldovan Health Ministry said on Tuesday.

"One more death from COVID-19 was registered. The deceased patient is the woman, 63, from Stefan Voda. She was hospitalized on April 3 in critical condition," the ministry said on Facebook.

Moldovan authorities previously reported 1,712 confirmed COVID-19 cases and 35 fatalities, including seven deceased patients from Transnistria.

Moldova went into a 60-day lockdown on March 17 in an effort to stem the spread of the disease, shutting borders, nonessential businesses, schools and universities, and canceling public events.

Moldovan Prime Minister Ion Chicu on Tuesday announced that the government was planning to review the state budget this week in order to provide more support to the national health system, population and businesses in the light of the pandemic.
Keeping up with the ever-changing demands of consumers, Bahrains Euro Motors has launched a virtual showroom for its new and used BMWs.

Designed to provide customers with a hassle-free viewing option, the innovative solution guides customers in selecting the BMW model that is right for them, said a statement.

As the official importer of BMW Group vehicles in Bahrain, Euro Motors strives to focus on presentation, quality, technical service and customer care. The dealership was tasked with the challenge of adapting to the changes in the global auto-market whilst, effectively meeting the demands of the regional consumer.

The companys contemporary showrooms allow customers to peruse Euro Motors' full collection of new and used BMW models as well as browse its extensive offerings and services. BMW enthusiasts will have the option to filter the collection by series, model and price and for used car models, a mileage and year filter, it said.

Accessible in both English and Arabic, the showroom highlights the full range of vehicle specs, providing potential clients the choice of adding their favourite vehicles to the car park and compare models, as well as the ability to send inquiries directly to the importer.

Like all industries, the auto industry is pushing towards modern and pioneering systems that allow products to meet the customers where they are.

David McGoldrick, General Manager at Euro Motors said: Since its inception, Euro Motors has set out to position itself as the leader in the automotive industry and we plan to continue to bring convenient and cutting-edge technology to the forefront.

Through our virtual showroom, visitors can explore our vast collection of new and used BMW vehicles, customise their order and receive instant notifications. Additionally, they will have the option to call or send a request through e-mail where our dedicated and expert staff will assist.

Euro Motors anticipates that this innovative system will not only serve as an invaluable sales device, it will also enhance the relationship between consumers and the business, it said.  TradeArabia News Service
BAKU, Azerbaijan, Apr. 15

By Rufiz Hafizoglu - Trend:

Turkeys export of ready-made clothing to Azerbaijan increased by 10.06 percent in January through March 2020 compared to the same period of 2019, exceeding $10.2 million, Turkeys Ministry of Trade told Trend.

Meanwhile, in March 2020, Turkeys export of ready-made clothing to Azerbaijan dropped by 41.07 compared to the same month of 2019, amounting to 2.2 million.

In 1Q2020, Turkeys export of ready-made clothing to world markets dropped by 6.1 percent, compared to the same period of 2019, amounting to $4.2 billion. Turkeys export of ready-made clothing amounted to 9.9 percent of the countrys total export.

In March 2020, Turkeys export of ready-made clothing to world markets dropped by 27.4 percent compared to the same month of 2019, amounting to 1.2 billion.

From March 2019 through March 2020, Turkey exported ready-made clothing in the amount of 17.4 billion.

---

Follow the author on Twitter: @rhafizoglu
WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus after a news briefing on the coronavirus in Geneva on March 11. (Fabrice Coffrini / AFP via Getty Images)

To the editor: In a fit of pique and misdirection, President Trump has halted all U.S. funding for the World Health Organization, which amounts to 17% of that body's budget.

In announcing his decision, Trump had the temerity to state, Had the WHO done its job to get medical experts into China to objectively assess the situation on the ground ... the outbreak could have been contained at its source, with very little death." Yet in July 2019, this same administration cut the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention staff in Beijing by more than two-thirds.

Furthermore, the L.A. Times recently reported that the Trump administration last fall closed the U.S. Agency for International Development's program for hunting new viruses. At the time, the New York Times noted that "ending the program, experts fear, will leave the world more vulnerable to lethal pathogens ... that emerge from unexpected places, such as bat-filled trees."

Furthermore, the National Science Foundation had to close all of its overseas offices in 2018, throttling the scientific progress that has been a hallmark of this nation since its founding. Trump's "America first" policy has squandered our nation's claim to global leadership, endangering us all.

John Ashbaugh, San Luis Obispo

..

To the editor: At the end of the article you quote Sen. Patrick Leahy's (D-Vt.) criticism of the president's handling of the pandemic. However, that has no relevance to the point of the article: whether the WHO handled its responsibilities competently in dealing with the coronavirus outbreak in Wuhan, China.

The WHO was required to be vigilant in dealing with the original problem in China; if it did not do that, Trump's own irresponsibility does not excuse that of the WHO.

According to an opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal, China pushed very hard to have Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus become the WHO's director general. All fine, except for the fact that when Adhanom was the health and then foreign minister of Ethiopia, China loaned the country nearly $1 billion for infrastructure improvements, including for hospitals.

Story continues

The Journal further reported that despite evidence of problems in China in December, the WHO effectively sat on its hands.

If the WHO will not do the job it is funded to do, what else could the United States do to exert pressure other than suspending funding?

Joel Drum, Van Nuys

..

To the editor: What a clever move on the part of our president  to all but bankrupt the United Nations international health organization in the middle of a worldwide pandemic. But of course Trump he needed someone else to blame, didn't he?

On Jan. 14, the WHO said there was no clear evidence of a human-to-human transmission of the virus. But by the end of that month, the WHO acknowledged a worldwide health crisis.

Trump, in contrast, did not begin to take the coronavirus seriously  well, sort of seriously  until late February, and even then he insisted his administration had everything under control.

Erica Hahn, Monrovia

..

To the editor: Who in his right mind would suggest cutting the WHO's funding during a pandemic?

That would be Trump, who believes he is the font of all knowledge and cannot comprehend the need of the entire world to work together to solve this health crisis.

Carol Karas, Camarillo
BarcelonaThe situation of level 3 prison inmates (and those who benefit from Article 100.2 of the prison rules and regulations) who have a job outside their penitentiary facility has taken an unexpected turn. Catalonias Justice Ministry has issued a statement announcing that they will be allowed daytime leave from this Wednesday so they may return to their jobs. This includes several of the Catalan political prisoners who remain in jail over their involvement in the failed 2017 independence bid. However, first they will need to prove that the company they work for is back in business [following the ease of the lockdown restrictions]. Former Catalan ministers Jordi Turull, Josep Rull and Joaquim Forn will likely benefit from this decision, as well as Omnium Cultural president Jordi Cuixart.

According to ministry sources, the decision excludes inmates such as former minister Dolors Bassa who enjoyed leave to look after her mother, ex-parliament Speaker Carme Forcadell and Jordi Sanchez, the leader of Crida, who used to do voluntary work outside. ERC sources have indicated that their leader, Oriol Junqueras, and former Foreign Minister Raul Romeva will not benefit from this decision for now.

The measure concerns all level 3 and Article 100.2 inmates who had weekday leave to work off-site, including those who were sent home for the COVID-19 lockdown. Any inmate who wasnt, like the Catalan independence leaders, will either be sleeping in new cells located in the admissions module when they come back from work in the evening, or will be transferred to an open facility. This is how the Catalan authorities intend to stop them from being in close contact with inmates who remain in prison, thus preventing any COVID-19 outbreaks among the prison population.

Even though the Catalan government opposes lifting the total lockdown and sending non-essential workers back to their job, it is now enabling level 3 and Article 100.2 inmates to travel to work every day. In the case of the Catalan political prisoners, their daytime leave for work purposes was suspended on March 16, even though the Spanish authorities did not enforce a total lockdown until March 28.

The president of grassroots group Omnium Cultural, Jordi Cuixart, will be able to go back to work because as he explained in an interview with this newspaper his company is regarded as a critical asset and remains open. In a press release, Omnium VP Marcel Mauri insisted that invoking Article 100.2 is a right, not a privilege and emphasised that it is necessary for all political prisoners to be allowed home for the lockdown as the UN, the Council of Europe and Front Line Defenders have urged.

Besides Cuixart, Josep Rull will also be allowed to go back to his job in a Terrassa hospital from Wednesday. Jordi Turull will be returning to his place of work, the Badia law firm, also located in Terrassa, whereas Joaquim Form will be travelling to his office in Mediapros Barcelona HQ. ERC sources have confirmed that neither Oriol Junqueras nor Raul Romeva will be leaving the Lledoners facility. The former works for the university of Vic and has his office on the Manresa Campus. The latter does work for a company tasked with gauging the progress of the Dayton Peace Agreement. Jordi Sanchez and Carme Forcadell, who had been doing voluntary work outside prison when the state of emergency was declared, wont be allowed out either, nor will Dolors Bassa, who used to look after her mother.

Its worth remembering that when the Catalan prison boards began to study whether level 2 inmates who enjoyed daytime leave to go to work should be allowed to go home for the lockdown (this included the Catalan political prisoners), the Spanish Supreme Court leaked that if they agreed to send the political prisoners home, they might be committing perversion of justice. Eventually the Catalan prison boards decided not to grant the Catalan political prisoners permission to spend the lockdown at home.

58 inmates and 47 prison staff have tested positive

Catalonias Justice Ministry has revealed that only 22 inmates are presently being allowed to have a job outside prison thanks to Article 100.2, and all of them are currently on lockdown in jail. Out of a further 1,841 level 3 inmates, only 188 remain in jail as a result of the confinement.

Even though the Justice Ministry will allow level 3 (and Article 100.2) inmates to go back to work from Wednesday, the other measures aimed at halting the spread of COVID-19 in prison facilities remain in place. All leave and visits from friends and family have been cancelled, as well as any scheduled outings and all visits to the facilities, including conjugal ones.

So far a total of 56 inmates in Catalan prisons have tested positive for coronavirus, four of whom have made a full recovery. A further 16 remain in Terrassas Hospital Penitenciari, 32 in the COVID-19 ward of Module 4 in the Quatre Camins prison, two are in the COVID-19 ward of the Brians 2 facility, two in the Brians 1 infirmary for women, one in a regular hospital and another is at home. Up to 47 prison staff have also tested positive for coronavirus.
(TNS)  A state computer system was supposed to streamline enrollment for Medicaid and MinnesotaCare, but instead it has cost the state $76 million in federal funding due to data errors and has increased workloads for counties.Minnesota stands to lose an equivalent amount in future funding from the federal government due to the errors, according to a report released Wednesday by the Office of the Legislative Auditor.The auditor noted that the Minnesota Department of Human Services, which administers the government programs that insure 1.1 million Minnesotans, has generally complied with legal requirements surrounding use of personal data.But the report said that DHS, and the state's technology agency MNIT, generally had inadequate internal controls over the system, known as the Minnesota Eligibility Technology System, or METS.Over the past eight years, the costs to build and operate the system were $432 million. METS also is a component of the MNsure health insurance exchange.As a result of deficiencies in the METS system, county caseworkers were required to manually review 37% of 624,000 cases over a 15-month period."METS has not achieved the efficiencies that an automated eligibility determination system should provide," the report said.In a reply to the audit, DHS and MNIT acknowledged "that challenges remain" and that they were pleased that "the report found that we 'generally complied' with legal requirements."But the reply, published as part of the report, took issue that internal controls were generally not adequate."The findings in this area of the report had relatively low error rates," said DHS Commissioner Jodi Harpstead and Tarek Tomes, MNIT Commissioner.The state's counties, which hold the responsibility for enrolling people into the state's public health insurance programs, have long called for fixes to METS."The inefficiencies in the current METS tools are unmanageable, causing many manual work-arounds and poor customer service outcomes," the Association of Minnesota Counties said in late 2016. "Because METS does not function well, counties have been forced to add staff to meet the requirements."
Source: Xinhua| 2020-04-15 11:43:56|Editor: Xiaoxia

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WASHINGTON, April 14 (Xinhua) -- U.S. President Donald Trump announced Tuesday that his administration is halting the nation's funding to the World Health Organization (WHO), a move that experts said could exacerbate the COVID-19 pandemic and cost more lives.

Speaking during a press briefing at the White House, Trump said a review is being conducted to assess the WHO's role in addressing the spread of the coronavirus.

"With the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, we have deep concerns about whether America's generosity has been put to the best use possible," Trump told reporters, also claiming that "the WHO failed to adequately obtain, vet, and share information in a timely and transparent fashion."

The announcement came as Trump is aggressively defending his own handling of the COVID-19 crisis after his administration has been increasingly scrutinized for downplaying the threat from the coronavirus early on and is being faulted for delays in testing.

Patrick Leahy, ranking member of the U.S. Senate Appropriations Committee, said that "Withholding funds for WHO in the midst of the worst pandemic in a century makes as much sense as cutting off ammunition to an ally as the enemy closes in."

"The White House knows that it grossly mishandled this crisis from the beginning, ignoring multiple warnings and squandering valuable time, dismissing medical science, comparing COVID-19 to the common cold," the Vermont Democrat said in a statement. "Not wanting to take responsibility as the deaths continue to mount, he blames others."

Patrice Harris, president of the American Medical Association, said in a statement that halting funding to the WHO is "a dangerous step in the wrong direction that will not make defeating COVID-19 easier."

"Fighting a global pandemic requires international cooperation and reliance on science and data," Harris said. "Cutting funding to the WHO -- rather than focusing on solutions -- is a dangerous move at a precarious moment for the world."

According to a tally from Johns Hopkins University on Tuesday, the United States has reported more than 600,000 confirmed cases of COVID-19 and over 25,000 deaths, both the highest on record. Globally, the number of confirmed cases is approaching 2 million, as the death toll has reached over 126,000, the tally showed.

Based in Geneva, Switzerland, the WHO is a specialized agency of the United Nations for international public health, which has played a crucial role in guiding the global efforts in combating the coronavirus pandemic. The United States contributed more than 400 million U.S. dollars to the agency in 2019, roughly 15 percent of its budget.

Thomas Bollyky, director of the global health program and senior fellow for global health, economics, and development at the Council on Foreign Relations, a U.S. think tank, said Tuesday that the WHO "plays an irreplaceable role" in global outbreak response.

Bollyky tweeted that the WHO "has largely served its purpose well" in the COVID-19 crisis, urging Washington to seek to strengthen and enhance the agency's independence and effectiveness, not to "degrade it amid a crisis."

Lawrence Gostin, director of the O'Neill Institute for National and Global Health Law at Georgetown University, called the White House's decision "disgraceful," warning that it would cause deaths and even blow back on the United States.

"How shortsighted when global coop needed more now than ever," Gostin said in series of tweets Tuesday, adding that Washington has "entirely abandoned" U.S. global health leadership.

It is noteworthy that Trump's tone toward the WHO differed sharply from one of his tweets on Feb. 24, several days before the United States reported the first death from COVID-19.

"The Coronavirus is very much under control in the USA," Trump wrote. "We are in contact with everyone and all relevant countries. CDC & World Health have been working hard and very smart."

In an interview with CBS News Radio on Monday, Robert Redfield, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) of the United States, said the WHO "has been a very important public health partner with the CDC, and continues to be."

Redfield also noted that CDC staffers have been working "side-by-side" with the WHO, but added that he'd "leave the politics ... for others to try to resolve."

"We must quarantine politicizing this virus at national and global levels," WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said from Geneva last week.

"We have to work together, and we have no time to waste," the director added.
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The Star Wars stand alone series The Mandalorian will not be back until October.

But in the meantime fans can busy themselves with a documentary about the hit Disney+ show that features the popular Baby Yoda.

The streaming service will debut an eight part series that looks behind the scenes of the smash hit show that features a bounty hunter who will do anything to protect the magical, mysterious green child.

Something to entertain us during self-isolation: The Star Wars stand alone series The Mandalorian will not be back until October. But in the meantime fans can busy themselves with a documentary about the hit Disney+ show

On the Star Wars holiday May 4 - called so because May the Fourth sounds like May the Force as in the line 'May the force be with you' - the new docu will be made available in over a dozen countries worldwide.

The show will debut along with the scheduled Star Wars: The Clone Wars finale.

The executive producer Jon Favreau will be making comments as well as various cast members such as Pedro Pascal.

The breakout star: The new docu will cover Baby Yoda who has become extremely popular

There will also be new footage presented.

'Disney Gallery: The Mandalorian is an opportunity for fans of the show to take a look inside and get to see a different perspective, and perhaps a greater understanding, of how The Mandalorian came together and some of the incredibly talented contributors throughout Season 1,' Favreau said in a Disney press release.

'We had a great experience making the show and were looking forward to sharing it with you.'

Sounds good: On the Star Wars holiday May 4 - called so because May the Fourth sounds like May the Force as in the line 'May the force be with you' - the new docu will be made available in over a dozen countries worldwide

Disney Gallery: The Mandalorian premieres May 4 on Disney+, with new episodes every Friday.

This comes after there was new casting rumours on season two.

MakingStarWars.net suggested that veteran actress Jamie Lee Curtis, 61, will likely join Pedro and Baby Yoda as she was seen on the set of the Disney+ show recently.

Curtis, who is best known for her hit films A Fish Called Wanda and Halloween, is the daughter of Hollywood Golden Age vets Tony Curtis and Janet Leigh.

The Star Wars franchise is known for casting veterans such as Alec Guinness in A New Hope and Laura Dern in The Last Jedi.

The cast: Carl Weathers, Pedro Pascal, and Gina Carano in The Mandalorian (2019)

There was in indication about what character she would play.

The writer Jason Ward says that 'for a few days during the filming of Star Wars: The Mandalorians second season I had Jamie Lee Curtis at the location for the filming of the show.'

He added that if he was wrong about her being on the set for The Mandalorian, she may have been on the set of a nearby production, Avatar 2.

A good choice: Last week report from MakingStarWars.net suggested that veteran actress Jamie Lee Curtis will likely join Pedro Pascal and Baby Yoda as she was seen on the set recently. Seen in 2018

The two are filming in 'the same general location' he added.

'One day around the set and I can see Curtis having been there for a set visit,' reported Ward.

'But there were multiple times she was around and I think she has a role in the series. I reached out to sources for confirmation and at the moment, and I cant get total confirmation of it because of the current climate of the world if you know what I mean. I reached out to Curtis and I didnt get a response back.'

Season one featured Pascal as the main Mandalorian, Din Djarin, who is hunted down after he abducts Baby Yoda after having handing the child over to dark forces that are the last of the Empire.

She's got it: Rosario Dawson has reportedly clinched the role of Jedi padawan Ahsoka Tano in the upcoming second season of Disney+ series The Mandalorian

Fan-favorite: Ahsoka was introduced in the CGI series Star Wars: The Clone Wars as Anakin Skywalker's premiere Jedi padawan apprentice

Also in the series are Carl Weathers as Greef Karga, Gina Carano as Cara Dune, and Nick Nolte as Kuiil.

Season two, which will drop in October 2020, has already added some interesting names like Michael Biehn and Rosario Dawson, who is set to play the live-action version of Ahsoka Tano.

Dawson, 40, will be playing the first live-action version of Ahsoka, who has already appeared in the CGI animated series Star Wars: The Clone Wars and Star Wars: Rebels.

Both of those series are considered 'canon' by Star Wars aficionados, as they come from original Star Wars creator George Lucas as well as Dave Filoni, who among his many credits include writing for, directing and producing on The Mandalorian.

Ahsoka is one of the main protagonists of The Clone Wars, introduced as Anakin Skywalker's premiere Jedi padawan apprentice.

She is of the Togruta race of aliens, characterized by her orange skin and unique striped headpiece or 'headtails'.

'Yes please!': Dawson's casting is a Star Wars fan's dream come true, as the actress herself stated her desire to play Ahsoka way back in 2017 when responding to a user on Twitter

For those keeping track, Anakin is the Jedi master who eventually becomes Darth Vader  played by actor Hayden Christensen in Lucas's Star Wars prequels in the early aughts.

Dawson's casting is a Star Wars fan's dream come true, quite literally, as the 25th Hour actress herself stated her desire to play Ahsoka way back in 2017 when responding to a user on Twitter.

That tweet spurred fans everywhere to campaign for Rosario to appear in a Star Wars movie as the character, which she even acknowledged on Good Morning America months later, saying that 'it would be amazing!' and asking, 'Internet, help me out!'

The Mandalorian is a sci-fi western, set in the world of Star Wars that quickly became a cultural phenomenon at the end of last year, largely thanks to the adorable Baby Yoda character (known on the show as 'The Child').

It remains to be seen exactly how Dawson's character Ahsoka Tano will figure into the world populated by Mandalorians, a creed of assassins made famous by Bobba Fett in the original films.

In February, Variety reported that The Madalorian is slated to return to the Disney+ streaming platform with new episodes in October of this year  it remains to be seen whether the show will be able to meet that date in light of the current industry-wide halt in production due to coronavirus.
TDT | Manama

The Supreme Criminal Court of Appeal yesterday rejected the plea of eight members of a terrorist cell who were sentenced to 10 years in jail in January this year.

The appellants were among 11 Bahraini men who were tried for their involvement in assaulting policemen and targeting oil pipelines and ATMs in different areas of the country. On January 28, the First High Criminal Court announced its verdict against the 11 defendants.

The court sentenced five of the defendants to life in prison, two defendants to three years imprisonment, one defendant to 10 years imprisonment, one defendant to five years imprisonment, and one defendant to seven years.

Two other defendants were acquitted for lack of evidence. Four of the defendants were also ordered to pay hefty fines of BD100,000 each. According to court files, the defendants are said to have joined the terrorist cell and were eyeing to murder policemen and officers and bomb oil and gas pipelines as well as ATMs, after receiving financial funds from wanted fugitives in terror cases who are currently out of the Kingdom.

The defendants plot was dismantled after police received confidential information revealing their plans. It was discovered that the first defendant recruited the third defendant and he ordered him to examine banks located in Sanad, as the cell aimed to bomb ATMs there.

According to the third defendants testimony, the first defendant requested him, the third defendant, to observe the gas pipes and told him that they were part of the plot to bomb them. It is said that the cell detonated a bomb near a gas pipe but the explosion didnt cause any damages to the facility
India extends lockdown period till May 3 as it becomes more evident that the only way to fight the coronavirus is to stop its spread. More than 1,26,000 people world wide have died due to the corona epidemic. While in India, the death toll from this virus has crossed 350. This fight against the coronavirus is a big challenge for a country like India. The analysis was done by Zee News Editor-in-Chief Sudhir Chaudhary in DNA, the world's most-watched news show.

Around 700 years ago, an epidemic called 'Black Death' had spread and had claimed the lives of as many as 7 to 200 million people all over the world. The Black Death epidemic began to spread from mice onboard ships. When the ships arrived in Italy, the crew would be kept in isolation for 40 days before being allowed to go home. One of the waays to fight the epidemic was isolation. It was during this time the process of quarantine was used and has come to prevail.

Since there is no cure for the coronavirus and we are still some time away from finding a vaccine, it has been established that lockdown and social distancing are the only measures against this deadly virus.

There is only one way to fight coronavirus and that is to prevent it from spreading. But by the time a country becomes active to fight coronavirus the cases of infection increases rapidly. This is how the COVID-19 spread in India.

It took 44 days to reach 100 positive cases. After this, in 10 days the cases crossed 500. In the next 5 days, coronavirus infections crossed 1 thousand. In the next 10 days, more than 5000 cases occurred. After that it took just 5 days to reach 5 thousand to 10 thousand. But with the complete lockdown of 21 days, India has reduced the speed of Corona. This is because if we compare India with the countries most affected by Corona, then we are in a much better position.

While it took 75 days for 10,000 infection cases in India, in the US, the COVID-19 cases crossed 10,000 in just 57 days. There were more than 10,000 cases in Italy in just 39 days. The number of infections exceeded 10,000 in 45 days in Spain, 51 days in Germany and 55 days in France.

We are told you that if there was no lockdown in India, by now there would have been more than 8 lakh COVID-19 patients in the country. Without the lockdown restrictions, if coronavirus continues to infect with the same speed in India, then by April 30, there will be more than 58 thousand positive cases. If lockdown were completely removed, coronavirus cases could reach 20 million, and the hard work of the entire country would have gone in vain. That is why PM Modi decided to extend lockdown by May 3. But the challenge is also how to run life along with saving life. Because in the coronavirus crisis the economy is being estimated to be a big loss.

According to the British company Barclays, the Indian economy has lost about Rs 9 lakh crore in the 3-week lockdown. The total lockdown till May 3 would result in a total loss of Rs 18 lakh crore. According to the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry (FICCI), the Indian economy cannot tolerate lockdown for long. The unemployment rate in India reached 23.8 per cent in the week of March 29, according to data from the Center for Monitoring Indian Economy.

According to the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII), 2 crore jobs will be lost in the tourism sector alone. 9 million jobs will be lost from textiles and other small industries. One million jobs can be lost from the automobile industry. Aviation industry threatens 6 lakh jobs. About 14 crore people in India's 47 crore employees and laborers.

India faces a big challenege as it is a country with a huge population and limited resources for such a population. The country's health system is also not very strong. Nevertheless we have won the initial battle against the coronavirus by our restraint and determination.
Champaign, IL (61820)

Today

Windy and partly cloudy this evening. Mostly cloudy with diminishing winds after midnight. Low 29F. Winds SW at 20 to 30 mph. Higher wind gusts possible..

Tonight

Windy and partly cloudy this evening. Mostly cloudy with diminishing winds after midnight. Low 29F. Winds SW at 20 to 30 mph. Higher wind gusts possible.
HONG KONG: Asian equities were lower in Wednesday trade, bucking an overnight rally on Wall Street prompted by encouraging signs that US coronavirus infection rates were in decline.

American officials are beginning to tackle the question of how to safely reopen for business and ease lockdowns that have helped slow the pandemic but battered the economy.

Major indices on Wall Street gained more than two percent overnight on signs that new virus cases had fallen in some of the country's biggest hotspots, including New York.

But analysts said it was too soon to herald a broader market turnaround after the International Monetary Fund forecast a 5.9 percent contraction for the US economy this year, and the worst global downturn since the Great Depression of the 1930s.

"Appearances can be deceiving as behind the headlines lies the most gnarly storm clouds building, suggesting there is still much to be worried about," said AxiCorp chief market strategist Stephen Innes.

"But flattening infection curves and the thoughts of more stimulus lifted all boats. And regardless of whether I think we are in la-la land, it is what it is."

Shanghai finished down 0.6 percent and Hong Kong was 0.7 percent lower despite export data on Tuesday showing Chinese trade volumes had fallen less than feared.

Tokyo slid 0.5 percent after a sharp rise in the last session, with a stronger yen weighing on investor sentiment.

Sydney ended 0.4 percent lower and Singapore fell 0.3 percent, but Seoul shot up 1.7 percent as South Korea voted in national parliamentary elections.

London was 0.3 percent down shortly after the opening bell.
Challenges to lenders making loans through the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) persist, CUNA, the American Association of Credit Union Leagues and state Leagues wrote to Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin Tuesday. The PPP is a Small Business Administration product designed to help small businesses meet costs during the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic.

CUNA, AACUL and the Leagues wrote to Mnuchin April 3, the day the PPP became active, with concerns over the compressed timeline for implementation and publishing of guidelines, and todays letter notes that challenges still remain for credit unions to fully participate in the program and serve member businesses.

We hope that you will give all due consideration to these recommendations as equal and fair access for all credit unions is critical to the success of the program, the letter reads. Credit unions are eager to work with you to ensure that the PPP is successful, and we hope that you find these comments constructive.
AFRICOM'S PARTNERSHIP ENDURES DURING COVID-19

UN-standard level-2 hospitals provided by the U.S. to African partner nations as part of the African Peacekeeping Rapid Response Partnership (ARPRP) have been deployed to fight the COVID-19 pandemic.

By U.S. Africa Command Public Affairs, United States Africa CommandStuttgart, Germany Apr 14, 2020

UN-standard level-2 hospitals provided by the U.S. to African partner nations as part of the African Peacekeeping Rapid Response Partnership (ARPRP) have been deployed to fight the COVID-19 pandemic.

Ghana, Senegal, and Uganda independently decided to deploy their hospitals in support of their national response, said U.S. Air Force Maj. Mohamed Diallo, International Health Specialist, U.S. Africa Command. "The military providers who operate these hospitals are already seeing patients. We are proud that the training and equipment the United States provided via APPRP enabled our African partners to quickly and effectively respond to their population's medical needs."

"We are proud to stand by our partners as we battle this deadly virus in Africa and around the globe," said U.S. Air Force Lt. Gen. James Vechery, deputy commander, U.S. Africa Command. "As we work shoulder-to-shoulder, it is exciting to see our African partners putting the capabilities we've developed over the past few years to such great use during this global pandemic."

Both Senegal and Uganda are using the hospitals as overflow facilities for existing hospitals.

"We are going to start treating people," said Lt. Col. Henry Obbo, Uganda Land Forces spokesperson. "It's just put here as emergency, just in case the means of health might require additional facilities."

Ghana, which has nearly 300 confirmed cases of COVID-19, is using the facility to treat those affected by the virus.

"Now more than ever, the United States is pleased to work together with the government, armed forces, and people of Ghana. This mobile hospital will directly serve those most in need," said Amb. Stephanie Sullivan, U.S. Ambassador to Ghana. "Together, we will emerge from this stronger and more united."

Each hospital package includes 14 shelters with a total of 690 square meters (7,427 square feet) of shelter space, consisting of an intensive care unit, a radiology unit, and 20 beds.

"This program, and the medical capabilities it brings to the COVID-19 fight on the African continent, is a prime example of the unique, continuing commitment that U.S. Africa Command pledges to our Africa partners throughout Africa," said U.S. Air Force Col. Krystal Murphy, deputy command surgeon, U.S. Africa Command. "It is our hope that the support we provide to our partners enables them to lessen human suffering and strengthen their nations, their people, and the global community."

The purpose of APRRP is to build, strengthen, and institutionalize security forces' enabling capabilities. For both Senegal and Ghana, the cost was approximately $6.5 million to equip two hospitals each. The program also includes approximately $2 million each to be used for training. The official ribbon-cutting for the hospital in Senegal was October 2019, and for Ghana was February 2020.

"The goal of U.S. engagement programs is to build capable and self-sufficient partners and allies. The fact that each of these nations independently deployed their UN-level 2 Hospitals in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic strongly suggests we achieved this goal," said Murphy. "We are very pleased that our investment is already paying dividends for the people of Senegal, Ghana and Uganda."

The hospitals are one example of efforts undertaken by U.S. Africa Command to assist African partners to enhance their medical capabilities and pandemic response. Programs such as tactical combat casualty care training, medical readiness exercises, and conferences focused on pandemic response efforts all demonstrate the long-term investment by the command.

"U.S. Africa Command enjoys strong and enduring relationships with our partners in Africa," said Murphy. "We have a history together. And we will have a future together. We are exchanging expertise and experiences with one another as we work to find a collective solution to this pandemic. It's a two-way dialogue for sure, which serves to tighten the bonds between us and our African partners."

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Ghanaians have been advised to stay away from sex especially with strangers.



President, the Private Newspaper Publishers Association of Ghana (PRINPAG), Mr. Andrew Edwin Arthur who gave the advise bemoaned the lack of discipline and disregard for the lockdown directive.



According to him, the coronavirus will soon go away hence the need for Ghanaians to abstain from sex for the period we are in to help prevent the spread.



Recounting a story he watched on TV concerning a man who agreed to accommodate a young lady who claimed she was being chased by some people in exchange for sex, he said the lady was actually escaping from an isolation centre after testing positive for the virus.



The man he disclosed denied at first when he was asked if he had seen a lady that fit the description of the one he accommodated until the news was broke to him the lady was being chased for escaping from the isolation centre.



He admonished Ghanaians to strictly adhere to the preventive measures, stay at home so the virus is not spread to other areas.



The Ghana Health Service (GHS) has disclosed some 17 persons have fully recovered from the coronavirus disease.



Director-General of the Service, Dr Patrick Aboagye disclosed this at the Information Ministrys press briefing on Covid-19 in the country.



He explained that patients are only declared free from the disease after they have recorded two consecutive negatives.



Currently we have 83 people in that category. A significant number have tested the first negative but we have 17 who have recorded double negatives and are obviously clinically cured.



Dr Aboagye also disclosed that out of the 566 confirmed Covid-19 cases in the country, 208 who are all well, asymptomatic, or in mild condition are being treated at home and in isolation centres across the country.



For the 66 patients who have had their first negative test after contracting the disease, the Director-General said they will be tested again and chances are that they will all test negative again.

Source: rainbowradio









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From ELLE

Experienced politicians know there is a right way to answer questions about pursuing higher office. Be demure. Redirect. Convey vague interest while insisting never to have given it serious consideration. But Stacey Abrams does not give the expected answer when I ask if she would accept an offer from former vice president Joe Biden to serve as his 2020 running mate. Yes. I would be honored, Abrams says. I would be an excellent running mate. I have the capacity to attract voters by motivating typically ignored communities. I have a strong history of executive and management experience in the private, public, and nonprofit sectors. Ive spent 25 years in independent study of foreign policy. I am ready to help advance an agenda of restoring Americas place in the world. If I am selected, I am prepared and excited to serve.

Abramss direct response betrays ambition, makes verifiable claims, and establishes outcomes to which she could later be held accountable. By normal political rules, it is the wrong answer. But as Abrams and I talk in March in the midst of the COVID-19 crisis, it is clear that normal political rules no longer apply. Im asking her about an unknown political future even as the future itself is frighteningly unknowable: schools closing, businesses shuttering, and Americans sheltering against a raging virus we can barely fathom. Amid this chaotic unpredictability, Abramss candor is disarming and comforting.

Into the Unknown

In the March 15 televised debate, Biden committed to choosing a woman as his running mate. Less than a week later, the progressive strategy network Way to Win released survey data indicating Stacey Abrams was Bidens strongest potential lieutenant. A graduate of Spelman College, the LBJ School of Public Affairs at UT Austin, and Yale Law School, Abrams made history as the first woman to lead a political party in Georgias General Assembly and the first African American to lead the Georgia House of Representatives. In 2018, she pursued history again, mounting an ultimately unsuccessful campaign to become Americas first black woman governor. Her defeat came amid election irregularities and allegations of voter suppression. Abrams refused to concede the close race to her Republican opponent, Brian Kemp. Im supposed to say nice things and accept my fate, Abrams writes in the preface to her New York Times best-seller, Lead From the Outside. I refused to be gaslighted into throwing away my power, diminishing my voice.



Story continues

Photo credit: Alex Wong - Getty Images

The loss was not her end. The political star that is Stacey Abrams has continued to rise. On the heels of her defeat, she founded Fair Fight, a national organizing effort to ensure fair elections. This was followed by Fair Count, which works to achieve a fully accurate and representative census. Then, late last year, Abrams launched the Southern Economic Advancement Project to promote equitable economic and social policy for all races, classes, and genders across the region. She did all this while crisscrossing the country, giving lectures, supporting local Democratic candidates, and even becoming the first black woman to deliver the official Democratic response to President Trumps State of the Union in 2019.



Ive learned that failure is not permanent, Abrams tells me. My responsibility is to not let failure dissuade me from my core obligations. Sometimes we pursue a challenge thinking it is about our victory, but we dont know the true purpose until later. Not becoming governor of one state gave me the opportunity to launch a national network in 20 states [to fight for fair elections]. We are helping reform democracy in places where it was broken and battered. We are fixing access to a census that the president of the United States tried to destroy. She continues, I may not have won the office, but what I was able to earn for the causes I serve has been extraordinary, and beyond anything I could have imagined. Apparently, Im a really good loser.

For Abrams, the child of two Methodist ministers, her continued political climb is a journey that requires steadfast faith. Outside of the House of Representatives, black Southern Democrats have struggled to capture statewide office or lasting national prominence. Some of the cautionary tales are painful: After serving a decade in Congress, Tennessees Harold Ford Jr. was defeated in the states 2006 Senate race amid racist campaign propaganda. Ford served on the powerful House Budget committee and spent a decade as a media pundit but fell from grace in 2017, after being fired from Morgan Stanley for misconduct. More recently, Floridas Andrew Gillum exited public life amid a tabloid-ready scandal of addiction. The former mayor of Tallahassee lost his gubernatorial bid in Florida the same night Abrams was defeated in Georgia. For years, Abrams and Gillum were linked as the pair most able to build a viable Democratic presence below the Mason-Dixon Line. Abrams is kind and empathetic toward her colleague, saying, Andrew and his family deserve the privacy to address the challenges they face.

She is unbothered by these tortured trajectories, and feels a true calling to work in the service of others no matter what may unfold. For me, the ambition is to serve as many people as I can, to the greatest extent I can, in the best way possible, she says. I cannot know every challenge I will meet. My job is to nurture the intellectual curiosity and the stamina necessary to respond to the unknown.

Backing Biden

Stamina undoubtedly will be necessary for Abrams if she is tapped to serve as Bidens running mate. She describes Biden as having a truly sincere sense of humor and marvels at his heartfelt enjoyment of interacting with the American people. When youre in politics, you learn the difference between those who simply tolerate others and those who genuinely love people, she says. As an introvert, I find it fascinating. His charming gregariousness isnt just an affect.

Introversion may be her most comfortable default, but the public-facing Abrams exudes striking eloquence, sincere warmth, and uncompromising rootedness in identity politicsa contrast to Bidens verbal stumbles and misconduct allegations. Although she has been called a pragmatic progressive, it is her courage and straight-no-chaser public discourse that has earned Abrams the respect of voters, organizers, and elected officials alike. The vice presidency seems an odd fit for a politician who proudly writes of her own leadership, I refused to play my scripted part.



But Abrams insists she understands the role. The VPs job is to be chief lieutenant and partner by taking on the roles and responsibilities assigned to you by the president, she says. I am very self-aware, and I know that my resume...is usually reduced to She didnt become the governor of Georgia. But it is important to understand all the things I did to prepare for that contest. That campaign was not a whim. It was the outcome of decades of deliberate work building my capacity to serve as many people as I could, in the most effective way possible. My responsibility is to be ready to do the jobto have the core capacities that are embedded in the role. I am able to stand effectively as a partner, to execute a vision, and to serve the vision of the president.

Photo credit: Jessica McGowan - Getty Images

I am dubious about Abramss willingness to recede into the supportive shadow of the vice presidency. Her genuine and strategic empathy are too highly attuned for her to stay silent in the face of perceived injustice, so I ask her to grade the national Democratic Party. The Democratic Party has shown its strength and its cohesion during the coronavirus pandemic, she says. Governors are standing up and saying we will lead when those who should do not. Mayors and members of city councils are showing the best of who we can be. They are bolstered by the national apparatus amplifying their message. Then she lightens the mood with a slight laugh, adding, This moment is a perfect reminder that there is no national coven, no cabal declaring, Democrats, heres what were going to do on Thursday. The quality of the party is us. We are Democrats. We set the tone. We set the agenda. Those we elect to every level of government are part of it. Lets tell our story from the bottom up, not just the top down.

Poverty, Pandemic, and The Polls

The bottom, not the top, is where Abrams has focused her work. She and I had planned to talk in Atlanta, sitting together, sharing a meal, and discussing her vision for the country. Instead we strain to hear each other over a spotty phone line, hunkered down in our homes, doing our part to flatten the curve. It is a striking contrast to the last time we saw each other. We unexpectedly shared an elevator in a New Orleans hotel a few months after her gubernatorial loss. Abrams was accompanied by her parents, her siblings, and their families. Being Southerners, we all embracedchatting, laughing, sharing a bit of pleasant apolitical intimacy. Now we are living in a world where a global pandemic is stealing lives, smashing dreams, crushing economies, and eliminating those little rituals of shared humanity. I want to know how Abrams is coping personally.

We are well, she begins. My parents and my niece recently moved to Georgia from Mississippi. They now live quite close to both my youngest sister and me. We are all observing social distancing, but my dad is a bit surprised: Youre not gonna give me a hug? he said. And I said, Of course not. Were gonna operate from six feet away. I opened the door with the Clorox Disinfecting Wipes I have with me at all times. And I didnt hang out. I left. Because my parents are older, and my dad is in remission from prostate cancer. We remind him that despite the instinct to help, and to hug his children, the best thing he can do is stay away from us until this has passed. And my niece is 13, so social isolation for a teenager is a very different thing. Its almost traumatic.

Abrams is balancing the intergenerational concerns of youth and her elders while trying to be a responsible citizen of a nation gripped by infectious disease. In this way, she is like millions of ordinary Americans. But what sets her apart from many decision-makers is her insistence that our problem solving must always begin at the bottom. Many Americans are now experiencing what poor communities live with daily. We have communities perennially facing lower wages, higher poverty, lack of access to health care, and lack of access to child care. Shift workers, low-wage workers, agrarian workers, and service workers are now being pushed over the edge, she says. We must be intentional about identifying these challenges and concrete about naming and pursuing the solutions. These issues arent ancillary. They are central to who we are. The poor deserve expanded and deepened support. The poorest among us are often the people working the hardest. And they deserve to be protected. It is not socialism to have a social safety net.



Photo credit: The Washington Post - Getty Images

While amplifying the concerns of the most vulnerable, Abrams remains focused on the 2020 election, even as it recedes from the national headlines to make way for coronavirus coverage. Determined to ensure that the virus does not pose a mortal threat to American democracy, Abrams rings the alarm about voting. The November elections are not as far away as they seem, she warns. In the United States, 3,100 different administrative units manage elections. This public health crisis means we need funding to address the mechanics of elections now. And we need a sustained public education campaign. If we shift to vote by mail and you are Native American and living on a reservation in South Dakota or Montana, then your mail schedule is different from the average voters. If youre African American or Latino, you dont necessarily trust a voting process you cant see and touch. These communities have shared memory and lived experience of being denied access to the vote. Vote-by-mail rules have to be clear and known and fair. We must be adaptable to the moment were in.

Even from quarantine, Abrams is leading Fair Fight to help ensure the congressional stimulus package includes hundreds of millions of dollars to support vote-by-mail systems for the 2020 election. And she isnt stopping with the most immediate election cycle. Abrams takes the long view, explaining the critical significance of this years census: The Constitution does not permit the census to be postponed until 2021. Even as we shelter in place, we have an obligation to ensure a full, fair, and complete census. Our democracy works based on an allocation of political power. That allocation happens when we draw the line that says, This is where you get to pick the people who will speak for you. The census tells us where the lines can be drawn. And if you are invisible, they will draw those lines around your power, and they will erase you. We need an accurate census so we can be seen and we can be represented.

Black Girl Magic

As I listen to Abrams eloquently chart a path for fairness, equity, and democracy, even in the shadow of a terrifying and unprecedented public health crisis, it is easy to see her as invinciblesuperhuman, even. We are used to seeing black women this waytrained to rely on their seemingly unlimited reservoirs of strength and believing them magically invulnerable to hurt or harm. Abrams performs the strong black woman archetype elegantly. With palpable love and genuine humility, she explains how her parents shaped her. My parents showed me where they came from. They taught me who they were, and they taught me what I could be. They imbued me with a sense of capacity that I dont know I would have if I had not been their progeny, she says. And so my obligation is to replicate that. My power is amplified when I share it with others who do not recognize it as their own.

Photo credit: The Washington Post - Getty Images

Of course this is true. Its true for Stacey Abrams. Its true for Anita Hill. Its true for Rep. Ayanna Pressley (DMass.). Many smart, capable black girls are raised to become smart, capable black women who sacrifice personal comfort for collective uplift, carrying the legacy of unyielding strength and uncompromised service. Still, Abrams is human, not just an armored warrior.

I ask a simple question: When do you feel beautiful? For the first time, she hesitates. Stacey Yvonne Abrams, child of Gulfport, Mississippi, who dared pursue a gubernatorial seat, who confidently asserts her readiness for the vice presidency, pauses and searches for an answer. Actuallythats notI dont think about beauty a lot, she says. I was often told I wasnt beautiful. Not directly. It was more like, This person is beautiful. Youre really smart. Im a sturdy black woman with natural hair. It took me a while to recognize that I am an attractive woman. I dont look like everyone else. But I do me really well.

Abrams hits her stride. I feel beautiful when young black girls come up to me. They are not just excited to see me, but to see themselves in me. When little girls point to the gaps between their teeth because they havent had braces. They may come from families that will never be able to afford them, like mine couldnt. I keep my gap. I could do Invisalign, but my gap is my mothers gap. Its my grandmothers gap. This doesnt make me less, because my parents didnt have the money to have my teeth fixed with braces. And it doesnt make me less when I stand before a nation and deliver the State of the Union response.

Abrams has a Sankofa sensibility. Sankofa is a West African assertion that our collective future must be rooted in a critical examination of our past. Abramss impulse to reach for the lessons of history while staying fixed on the necessity of service to the future suggests she may be the singularly remarkable leader America needs in this time of unprecedented economic and social change. In a world of social distancing, Abrams is a woman worth watching closely.

This article originally appeared in the Summer 2020 issue of ELLE.

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KYODO NEWS - Apr 16, 2020 - 02:05 | All, Japan

About 700 kilograms of cocaine with an estimated street value of 14 billion yen ($130 million) was seized by customs authorities from cargo on a ship docked in Yokohama Port earlier this year, sources close to the matter said Wednesday.

The amount, believed to be the country's largest cocaine haul on record, is nearly double the approximately 400 kg discovered last October in a shipping container in Kobe Port, western Japan.

(Photo taken on Sept. 27, 2019 shows seized 177 kg of cocaine at Mikawa port of Toyohashi, Aichi Prefecture.)

Local customs authorities suspect that a large international smuggling syndicate was involved and are investigating the matter on suspicion of a violation of customs law.

The cocaine, which was hidden in a shipping container housing boxes of bananas and other items, was discovered by a customs officer in late March to early April this year, according to the sources.

During questioning by customs officials, crew members of the ship have denied involvement in the smuggling, the sources said.

The customs authorities suspect the cocaine may have arrived in Yokohama by mistake after smugglers failed to retrieve the drugs that were loaded on the ship while it was overseas.
Michael W Smith leads worship in NYC's Central Park: Where are you God in midst of plague?

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Legendary worship leader Michael W. Smith co-hosted an Easter worship service alongside Christian evangelist Franklin Graham in New York City's Central Park on Sunday.

At the event broadcast nationally on Fox News, Graham and Smith stood at the center of a field hospital Samaritan's Purse built adjacent to Mount Sinai Hospital in Central Parks East Meadow to help care for patients during the city's COVID-19 outbreak.

We have patients in this hospital, and some are struggling for every breath that they take. This is a very dangerous virus, Graham stressed.

Before introducing Smith, Graham said the musician has been a longtime friend of the family and a close friend of his late father, Billy Graham.

Smith kicked off worship with his song, Sovereign Over Us. Following the song he somberly shared a message of encouragement.

Here we are America, and everyone watching around the world and here we are, where calamity and hope collide and where your sin and mine collide as well, Smith said.

Seated in front of his keyboard, Smith said he was on the ground where the battle is perhaps fiercest against this foe we all face in common.

I think about Jesus when He was hanging on the cross, on another collision course, Heaven and Hell, life and death, he said. There was a moment when Jesus cried out 'My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? And I think many of you out there [are] probably asking the same thing. With suffering and death touching everyone alike, you might be saying the same thing. 'Where are you, God? Where are you in the midst of this plague?

The Nashville-based musician said while he doesnt have all the answers, he's keeping himself focused on the resurrection of Jesus.

Today is a celebration of the greatest love story, the world has ever known. When God Himself gave the Son, He sent to Earth to show the world what love is, only to die on the cross for the sin of all, Smith declared.

Jesus endured the suffering of the cross because He knew that it was temporary. Three days later, He would overcome death, and bring hope to all who believe, he added.
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Distressing new footage has emerged of passengers fleeing from an inferno jet as the Russian authorities today charged the plane's captain with negligence after it was hit by lightning.

Forty-one people died in the blaze after the Aeroflot Sukhoi Superjet 100 crash landed at Sheremetyevo, Moscow's business international airport.

A video that forms part of the criminal investigation shows flames more than 100ft high engulfing the aircraft, yet 37 escaped from the horror.

The Aeroflot jet crashed on to a runway at Sheremetyevo, Moscow's business international airport, after being hit by lightning and was engulfed in flames

Emergency services fight the 100ft flames after the plane crash landed and erupted into a toxic inferno which killed 41 people

Captain Denis Evdokimov, 42, has claimed he is being made a scapegoat after his Murmansk-bound domestic flight was hit by lightning soon after takeoff.

He faces up to seven years in jail if convicted. He returned to the airport making a rough 'jumping' emergency landing which led to fire engulfing the plane on 5 May last year, separate footage shows.

Denis Evdokimov, 42, had been formally charged with violation of safety rules and the negligent control of his plane leading mass deaths, harm to health and major damage

The new video shows the plane spin to a halt with its rear engulfed in toxic flames.

After some 17 seconds the first front chute is opened and four seconds later the first passenger escapes onto the tarmac.

The second chute is opened after 30 seconds.

Passengers from the front of the plane slide out of the aircraft and run from the burning Superjet.

The emergency services are seen arriving and seeking to extinguish the inferno.

The Russian Investigative Committee announced today that Evdokimov had been formally charged with violation of safety rules and the negligent control of his plane leading mass deaths, harm to health and major damage.

His failure to control the lightning-hit Superjet 'resulted in the destruction  of the aircraft' killing 40 passengers and one crew member.

Ten people were injured. In all, 37 people escaped alive from the carnage.

State investigators in charge of 'particularly important cases' say the actions of air traffic control and the emergency services on the ground were probed.

They were found not to be responsible for the loss of life. Nor were there problems with the aircraft to prevent a safe emergency landing, said the committee.

The first front chute is opened after 17 seconds and four seconds later the first passenger escapes onto the tarmac in Moscow

The second chute is opened after 30 seconds allowing more passengers to escape the inferno

A total 37 passengers escaped the flames in May with ten people injured as passengers from the front of the plane were able to slide out the aircraft

'Investigators and experts studied the data of the flight recorders of the crashed aircraft, according to which during the flight the aircraft adequately responded to the pilot's control actions,' said a statement.

The captain's lawyer Natalya Mitusova claims the experienced Aeroflot pilot is being made a scapegoat after suspicions that the authorities are seeking to protect the reputation of the Superjet, a Russian-made aircraft over which safety concerns have been raised.

She claimed the aircraft did not 'obey' the pilot as he took manual control of the aircraft after the lightning strike.

The dispute centres on what happened to the stricken plane when it was hit by lightning soon after taking off from Sheremetyevo International Airport in Moscow.

Prosecutors say the pilot botched the landing, coming in at too steep an angle. This resulted in the rough landing when broken landing gear pierced the fuel tank, igniting the plane in flames. Most of the 41 victims of the disaster died from carbon monoxide poisoning or were burned alive.

The back and middle of the plane was lost in the fire with most of the 40 passengers who died sitting in this part of the plane

Forensic experts working at the wreckage of the Russian-made Superjet after it 'was thrown from side to side' and did not respond to Evdokimov's movements of the controls due to paralysis following the lightning strike, according to prosecutors

Mitusova said the Superjet was 'was thrown from side to side' and did not respond to his movements of the controls due to paralysis after the emergency.

There was an 'incorrect reaction of the aircraft' to the pilot's actions in only the fourth time a Superjet had been landed fully manually, she said.

The captain also claims that once on the ground a rear plane door was opened in violation of his orders and this led to the inferno on the exterior of the Superjet engulfing the passenger cabin.

Most passengers who died were sitting in the rear or middle section of the aircraft.

Without the rear emergency door having been opened, passengers would have had time to leave the cabin, claims the pilot.

The captain claims a rear plane door was opened in violation of his orders and this led to the inferno on the exterior of the Superjet engulfing the passenger cabin

Investigators check the documents of the victims. They say the Superjet has been hit by lightning on 16 previous occasions, but this was the only time it led to catastrophe

'Someone from the crew or passengers opened the door, after which the fire entered the cabin,' said Mitusova.

Evdokimov's legal team also allege ground rescue services were slow to get to the scene.

The video was cut so it is not possible to be sure of the time it took before spraying started - but passengers were still emerging at this point.

Investigators say the Superjet has been hit by lightning on 16 previous occasions, but this was the only time it led to catastrophe.

Heroic Aeroflot flight attendants saved dozens of those on board the Moscow to Murmansk flight but 41 perished in the inferno either burned alive or overcome by toxic fumes.

Prosecutors want a maximum seven years jail for the Evdokimov, whose father was a respected military pilot and Soviet air force major general.

Svetlana Petrenko, spokeswoman for the Russian Investigative Committee, said: 'Actions by Evdokimov violated the existing regulations and led to the destruction and outbreak of fire.

'As a result, 40 passengers and one crew member were killed, and (ten) others were badly injured.'

In the aftermath of the horror, there were claims of serious technical problems on the Superjet - a plane supported by Vladimir Putin - were to blame.
As some California counties close gun shops because of the coronavirus, even as gun dealers report a surge in customers nationwide, one state lawmaker wants Gov. Gavin Newsom to halt sales of firearms and ammunition throughout the state, except to law enforcement officers.

Adding more firearms to our current state of affairs perpetuates the cycle of public panic and impulsive action, Assemblyman Miguel Santiago, D-Los Angeles, said Monday in a letter to Newsom.

Santiago cited reports of sharply rising U.S. gun sales since early March and said some retailers had reported a 70% increase over an 11-day period. He also noted a report by the state attorney generals office in January that 22,424 firearms were still owned by Californians who are legally prohibited from possessing them, despite attempts to enforce that ban.

By suspending firearm and ammunition sales and arming Californians with strong safeguards on public health and safety reinforced by state peace officers, we can mitigate undue risks to our public, Santiago wrote.

Asked about the request at a news conference Wednesday, Newsom said he would continue to defer to the sheriffs and their determination of the local health in each county.

The governor issued a statewide shelter-in-place order on March 19, telling Californians to stay at home except for essential activities. When asked at a news conference on March 25 whether he considered gun businesses to be essential, Newsom said the state would not offer any guidance and would leave the decision up to each county.

I believe in peoples right to bear arms and I believe people are exercising that right, Newsom said, according to published reports. Ill defer to sheriffs in their respective jurisdictions.

He spoke after Los Angeles County Sheriff Alex Villanueva ordered closure of all gun stores in the states most populous county. After being sued by the National Rifle Association and other gun groups, Villanueva withdrew his order on March 30, saying he was persuaded by a non-binding advisory from the Trump administrations Department of Homeland Security that gun and ammunition dealers were essential critical infrastructure workers.

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.

By contrast, gun shops have been closed in most of the Bay Area. On March 31, the NRA and its allies sued Alameda, Contra Costa, Santa Clara and San Mateo counties in federal court in San Francisco for refusing to declare firearms dealers to be essential businesses. The suit claims the action violated the constitutional right to possess guns for self-defense.

San Franciscos last gun store closed in 2015 in response to a city ordinance that required video recording of all commercial firearms sales.

Santiagos office did not respond to a request for comment. His letter was made public by the Firearms Policy Coalition, which said his proposal for a statewide ban would deny tens of millions of Californians their fundamental rights for an indefinite amount of time.

Bob Egelko is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: begelko@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @BobEgelko
Source: Xinhua| 2020-04-14 22:48:23|Editor: Xiaoxia

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A woman enquires about the opening hours of a store at a mall in Johannesburg, South Africa, April 14, 2020. The total number of confirmed COVID-19 cases in South Africa has risen to 2,415, Health Minister Zweli Mkhize said on Tuesday. This was an increase of 143 from Monday's announcement, he said in his latest update on the pandemic. (Xinhua/Chen Cheng)

CAPE TOWN, April 14 (Xinhua) -- The total number of confirmed COVID-19 cases in South Africa has risen to 2,415, Health Minister Zweli Mkhize said on Tuesday.

This was an increase of 143 from Monday's announcement, he said in his latest update on the pandemic.

Gauteng Province topped the list with 909 cases, to be followed by Western Cape with 643 cases and KwaZulu-Natal with 489 cases.

The total number of tests conducted to date is 87,022, said Mkhize.

In a related development, South Africa received the medical supplies donated by China to help with the fight against COVID-19, according to the Department of International Relations and Cooperation.

The supplies arrived Monday night at Or Tambo International Airport in Johannesburg and were received on Tuesday by Health Minister Mkhize and Naledi Pandor, Minister of International Relations and Cooperation.

The Chinese shipment landed in time as South Africa's stock of gloves and masks could last only four weeks, according to the local news outlet News24.
Reach Cyber Charter School Logo We are not only educating our students in the traditional sense, but also giving them the ability to develop real-world skills and earn industry recognized credentials that prepare them to enter the workforce.

Reach Cyber Charter School, a Pennsylvania statewide online public charter school, is making career development a top priority and is preparing students for the future by partnering with Credly. Credly, the digital credential leader, offers a digital badging platform that recognizes knowledge, skills, and achievements as digital credentials that enables individuals to capture future opportunities, whether it be schooling or joining the workforce.

Through this digital platform, Reach Cyber students will have the opportunity to build a digital portfolio of their experiences and certifications by earning badges in six pathways: Arts and Communications, Business Administration, STEM, Health Science, Human Services, and Information Technology. Digital badging will begin during the 2020-21 school year and will give students the opportunity to earn industry-recognized credentials through the completion of select courses such as Microsoft Office Specialist, Microsoft Technology Associate, Microsoft Programming with Java, Microsoft Programming with Python, and Microsoft Programming using HTML and CSS. Additional course offerings such as Communication Skills for Business, Entrepreneurship and Small Business, and more will allow students to earn certifications and gain practical skills to increase their employability.

We want to help close the skills gap in Pennsylvania, said JD Smith, Director of Career Pathways at Reach Cyber Charter School. We are not only educating our students in the traditional sense, but also giving them the ability to develop real-world skills and earn industry recognized credentials that prepare them to enter the workforce. For example, students who complete the Business Administration pathway have earned three badges, completed relevant courses and are knowledgeable on the topics of fundamental business concepts. They can create business plans, evaluate elements of effective communication and much more.

Reach Cyber is integrating digital badging through Credlys Acclaim platform into its high school career pathways development program. The program already allows students to gain in-person professional trade experience with local partner businesses. Credlys Acclaim platform is the worlds largest network of individuals and organizations using verified achievements to unlock opportunities.

We are dedicated to equipping our students with the tools they need to achieve professional success, said Jane Swan, CEO of Reach Cyber Charter School. Thats why we have partnered with Credly. It can be difficult to articulate your skills in a series of bullet points on a resume. This new service will provide students with a web-enabled, verifiable version of industry certifications, which will help them enhance their resumes, digital portfolios, and LinkedIn pages.

The goal of Reach Cybers new digital badging program is to prepare students to reach professional status prior to graduation, allowing them to begin their professional careers earlier than some of their brick-and-mortar counterparts. This skill-based training will also allow students to find their passion and hone in on skills and interests as they look to join the workforce.

"We are seeing companies across a variety of industries turn to skills-based hiring as a way to more readily identify and connect with qualified candidates," said Jonathan Finkelstein, CEO of Credly. "Reach Cyber Charter School is providing an invaluable tool in the form of a verified record of their students' knowledge and skills. These early digital credentials will serve Reach Cyber students over the course of their burgeoning careers."

Serving students virtually across the state of Pennsylvania, Reach Cyber Charter School delivers an award-winning curriculum with STEM enrichment opportunities, engaging electives, technology tools, and online and in-person social experiences for families who want an individualized approach to education. Reach Cybers flexible pacing options allow students to choose from a traditional calendar option, year-round option, or for high school students, an accelerated schedule, to best meet their academic and scheduling needs.

Reach Cyber is currently enrolling for the 2020-21 school year. Families interested in Reach Cyber Charter School are highly encouraged to attend an upcoming online information session. These information sessions give families the opportunity to speak with current teachers and staff, learn more about the schools curriculum and program, and help them find out if a cyber school is the right fit for their student.

For more information about Reach Cyber or to begin the enrollment process, visit http://www.ReachCyberCharter.com.

About Reach Cyber Charter School

Reach Cyber Charter School is Pennsylvanias school for students in grades K-12. Reach Cyber, a Pennsylvania Connections Academy school, provides students with the flexibility to learn from anywhere there is an Internet connection and with an innovative, online school curriculum that meets rigorous state education standards. The combination of certified Pennsylvania-based teachers, an award-winning curriculum, engaging electives, technology tools, and social experiences provides a supportive online learning opportunity for students who want an individualized approach to education. Reach Cyber incorporates 21st century learning and STEM-enrichment opportunities, as well as flexible pacing options that allow students to choose from a traditional calendar option, year-round option, or for high school students, an accelerated schedule. For more information, call 800-382-6010 or visit http://www.ReachCyberCharter.com.

About Credly

Credly is helping the world speak a common language about peoples knowledge, skills, and abilities. Thousands of employers, training organizations, associations, certification programs, and workforce development initiatives use Credly to help individuals translate their learning experiences into professional opportunities using trusted, portable, digital credentials. Credly empowers organizations to attract, engage, develop, and retain talent with enterprise-class tools that generate data-driven insights to address skills gaps and highlight opportunities through an unmatched global network of credential issuers. http://www.Credly.com.
There's a crack of daylight at the end of the long COVID-19 tunnel as Manitobans continue to benefit from their stay-at-home, physical-distancing efforts.

Hey there, time traveller!

This article was published 14/4/2020 (637 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

There's a crack of daylight at the end of the long COVID-19 tunnel as Manitobans continue to benefit from their stay-at-home, physical-distancing efforts.

The province's chief public health officer, Dr. Brent Roussin, said if the province's coronavirus infection numbers remain low, authorities could start rolling back restrictions "very carefully" in the "relatively near future."

On Tuesday, Manitoba reported no new additional cases of the virus. The average number of new cases per day over the past week has been under six.

The total number of active cases in Manitoba (positive tests, minus recoveries and deaths) stood at 142. That number has also been stable in recent days.

Roussin placed several caveats Tuesday on any possible start to the gradual reopening of business and society in general, but planning for that welcome occurrence is well underway.

Premier Brian Pallister said there have been "numerous discussions" at the government level about which specific sectors of the economy could begin to restart.

"There are plans to see our economy rebound. Were working very diligently on that," he said Tuesday, while being careful to add that the health and well-being of Manitobans come first.

There's the danger that by moving too quickly to remove or ease public health orders the virus could very well bounce back, he said.

The federal and provincial governments have been holding discussions about reopening the national economy in stages, but Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said Tuesday that Canadians can assume that the current restrictions will be in place for weeks.

There are plans to see our economy rebound. Were working very diligently on that."  Manitoba Premier Brian Pallister

On Monday, Saskatchewan Premier Scott Moe said if COVID-19 case numbers remain low next week, the province might unveil a plan to reopen segments of the economy in that province.

Roussin spoke carefully Tuesday about any easing of restrictions in Manitoba.

The day before, he warned Manitobans could face tougher controls on their behaviour to prevent a surge of the virus before any gradual easing of public health orders takes place.

Before controls are lessened, Roussin said he will want to see a downward trend in active COVID-19 cases and be assured there's hospital capacity to deal with any spikes in very sick patients, among other factors. (On Tuesday, nine coronavirus patients were in hospital, including four in intensive care.)

"It's certainly nice to see a number of days like this," he remarked.

If there's another week of good news, "then that's going to make us think of what sort of things we could do to ease some of the restrictions without compromising our gains," Roussin said.

The province is now contemplating how it might begin easing restrictions.

"It's certainly nice to see a number of days like this."  Dr. Brent Roussin

"We have work underway right now looking at various sectors," the chief public health officer said. "Probably the first area would be in the business restrictions and which sectors could we loosen up on and how."

How well Manitobans followed the strict public health orders over the recent long weekend could be a key factor in determining how soon restrictions are eased. The results won't be known for another seven to 10 days or so.

"We will be following that closely, and it's going to guide some of our efforts going forward," Roussin said.

He said while there has been good news recently on the coronavirus front, Manitobans are very likely going to be dealing with it in one way or another for the foreseeable future.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?rel=0&wmode=transparent" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen>

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.

However, he said it's "very unlikely" that they will be dealing with it in the same restrictive manner they are now.

Meanwhile, public health officials have completed an analysis on the first 121 positive cases of the coronavirus in Manitoba.

Investigations found the 121 had a total of 397 contacts. Of those, 37 developed COVID-19 for a "secondary attack rate" of nine per cent, Roussin said.

He said Manitoba wants to expand its COVID-19 testing and it will.

However, hospitalization rates and other factors are showing so far that authorities have not been missing instances of coronavirus transmission, he said.

larry.kusch@freepress.mb.ca
The retreat Wednesday came the day after the S&P 500 hit a one-month high. Though still far from the record reached on Feb. 19, stocks in the United States have been steadily climbing in recent weeks as investors have begun to focus on the prospect of an eventual rebound from the economic collapse set off by the pandemic.

But on Wednesday, they were confronted by a number of reports that highlight just how badly the economy is faring. The Commerce Department said that retail sales in March dropped 8.7 percent as consumers were forced to stay home, and the Federal Reserve said industrial production and manufacturing output in the United States fell by the most since 1946.

The German Economy Ministry said economic output in Europes largest economy was likely to plunge almost 10 percent from April through June.

As they reported earnings, the nations banks also raised more warnings about the potential for a wave of defaults on loans, saying that they are stockpiling cash in anticipation of losses.

Bank of America and U.S. Bancorp both dropped more than 6 percent after reporting results. JPMorgan Chase and Wells Fargo, which reported a downbeat reports yesterday, were also sharply lower. Goldman Sachs, which reported better-than-expected results on Wednesday, was a relative standout with a small gain after its trading unit performed better than expected in the first quarter.
YEREVAN.  We said that the institution of investment protection is not enough for the economic revolution, and in fact we were right. Opposition Prosperous Armenia Party MP and economist Mikayel Melkumyan said this Wednesday in the National Assembly, referring to the latest foreign investments results published by the statistical committee.

"The amount of foreign chain investment has decreased by exactly 45% in the real sector of the economy in 2019 compared to 2018," he said. "It is incomprehensible; a year ago you announced that this difference is 111 billion, now you reduce it to 74.9 billion.

If you study, you will see that after giving official information, the largest companies in the energy sector have withdrawn their capital from the territory of the Republic of Armenia. In other words, on the one hand, there is a revolution here, on the other hand, the capital is leaving Armenia.

In general, we have zero, in the non-real sector; that is, the $254.1 million in 2018 became the $254.5 million in 2019. () let's figure out how the capital can flow out of Armenia by 37% in one year.
WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus at a March 11 news briefing in Geneva. (Fabrice Coffrini / AFP/Getty Images)

President Trump's America-first policies, contempt for multilateral organizations and testy relationships with other world leaders are contributing to what many see as a surprising lack of global unity and coordination in combating the COVID-19 pandemic.

It is usually the U.S. president who would lead such an effort in times of global emergency. But Trump's moves to weaken Western post-World War II alliances such as NATO, his harsh treatment of traditional American allies and his slow response to the coronavirus threat have prevented close cooperation even among the United States' usual partners, including Europe and Canada.

Taking their cue from Trump, other nations have similarly turned inward to fight a health threat that has defied borders. Far from rising to a shared cause, most countries are battling on their own. If anything, the pandemic has fueled nationalist sentiments  including among hawks inside the Trump administration  and reignited international rivalries.

"What we're seeing is the biggest global crisis of our lifetimes with truly no global response," said Ian Bremmer, president of the international risk-assessment Eurasia Group. "Trump's orientation  his unilateralism, his transactionalism and his challenging personal relations with so many of our key allies  have made worse what was going to be a severe structural crisis irrespective of Trump."

In past crises, such as the economic crash of 2008-09 and the 2014 Ebola outbreak, the International Monetary Fund, World Bank, World Health Organization and other international institutions joined with U.S. officials and leaders from around the world to fight back and lead the recovery effort. Central banks from the wealthiest 20 countries produced plans in 2008 that stimulated the economy and stabilized institutions, while medical teams from dozens of countries rushed to West Africa in 2014 to battle a deadly outbreak of a feared disease.

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There were key differences, of course. The economic crash was limited to financial and economic sectors. Ebola was a more contained contagion. The scale of the new coronavirus is far broader, hitting numerous countries in swift succession, with deaths mounting, economies paralyzed and the impact spreading through every sector of society. Some governments may feel too overwhelmed with cases to join a global effort, even if there were one.

For Trump and the U.S., it's a missed opportunity to reassert American global leadership and goodwill at a time when that status is under growing threat from China and others, experts say. And, rather than call for global unity, Trump frequently portrays the battle against the virus as an international competition, boasting that the U.S. is doing better than other nations at testing and containing deaths, though both claims are disputed.

"The administration has stuck to its worst penchants not to follow expert advice, treated this as a zero-sum game, and missed opportunities to at least look like it was getting out there in front and saying: 'We'll be there to help as much as we can,'" said Daniel Nexon, a Georgetown University government professor and author of "Exit From Hegemony," adding that that is what every president since Ronald Reagan has done in times of disaster.

William Burns, former deputy secretary of State and president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, said past American leadership established strong partnerships abroad that created "an invaluable force multiplier"  using a military reference to suggest how a single action can reverberate and produce numerous additional benefits.

"In this one, the Trump White Houses blend of arrogance and ineptitude, against the backdrop of more than three years of diplomatic disarmament, is a force divider," he said in an email.

In his almost-daily briefings lately, Trump has defended his response to the deadly pandemic and insisted that the U.S. is working to help other nations by manufacturing needed medical supplies and working on a vaccine. But he's made no apologies about focusing on the U.S., saying protecting Americans is his foremost priority.

Trump has repeatedly cited his moves to isolate from the rest of the world  including his Jan. 31 order to restrict some travel from China, and later from Europe, Canada and Mexico  as critical to stopping the spread of the virus in the U.S.

White House officials insist Trump has maintained contact with other world leaders in dealing with the crisis, though little documentation of such conversations has been released. Trump was planning a teleconference with G-7 leaders on Thursday, and his staff has reached out to economic, health and science officials in numerous countries, aides say.

President Trumps leadership and concrete actions have spurred the international community to take the steps necessary to save lives," White House spokesman Judd Deere said. "By any honest measure, the scope and reach of President Trumps global leadership has been historic.

Trump supporters say his approach is working. "Kudos for the president," said James Carafano, a fellow at the conservative Heritage Foundation. Carafano and others say Trump has dealt with other world leaders behind the scenes.

"He hasn't personally chosen to highlight his [global] role," Carafano said. He added that Trump's angry decision Tuesday to cancel U.S. funding for the World Health Organization "put it on notice for its poor response and failures, and I think thats global leadership."

Critics, however, say the Trump administration has undercut the traditional venues of collective action. Last month, as it became clear the world was headed for recession, the Group of Seven  composed of the top economies  failed to reach agreement on a joint statement due to the Trump administration's insistence on referring to COVID-19 as the "Wuhan virus" as a way to emphasize blame on China.

By suspending U.S. funding for the WHO, Trump singled out the U.N.'s global health body for special blame. He accused the organization of initially underestimating the threat from the disease  as Trump did  and of having a perceived bias in favor of China. U.S. funding constitutes roughly 17% of the WHO's budget.

The WHO "got it wrong," Trump said. "I think they have to get their priorities right, and their priorities are that everybody has to be treated properly  every country. And it doesnt seem that way, does it? ... It's very unfair."

He accused the organization and its director-general, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, of being "China-centric" and overly deferential to Beijing, allowing the nation to hide the extent of the outbreak in its early weeks.

Tedros responded by saying his organization was "color blind" and had done its best to keep the world abreast of what was initially the outbreak of a mysterious respiratory inflammation.

Those pushing for a global response to the pandemic are sounding alarms. A vocally frustrated U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres has seen his calls for more global coordination largely ignored during the health crisis  including a worldwide cease-fire in regional conflicts, an easing of sanctions against countries besieged by the pandemic like Iran and Venezuela, and a multitrillion-dollar emergency humanitarian aid fund.

"The relationship between the biggest powers has never been as dysfunctional," Guterres said. "International cooperation has never been at this low level. ... I know many think they can do it by themselves. COVID-19 is showing dramatically, either we ... are together, or we can be defeated."

Pope Francis echoed that sentiment in an unusually political Easter Sunday address, decrying "functional hypocrisy," indifference and self-centeredness at the highest level of governments.

Gordon Brown, prime minister of Britain during the 2008 recession, said there had been "too much America first, India first, China first" and that countries had to acknowledge they're interdependent "whether we like it or not."

"We cannot say we are doing everything it takes [to counter the pandemic] unless we all come together to obtain a global response," he said in a telephone interview from London. "This is our moment of truth. ... It is no longer a debate between globalism and nationalism."

Brown is one of more than 100 former world leaders who have written to the G-20 to call for an $8-billion plan to develop a vaccine, expand universal capacity to detect, test and treat the disease and shore up the economy.

To be sure, international fractures predated the pandemic. Trump has built his political career in part on skepticism about international pacts. A rise in right-wing nationalism was already occurring in many countries.

The coronavirus "has shone a spotlight on what was already happening," said Georgetown's Nexon. "Trump is both symptom and accelerant."

Although the European Union did finally agree last week on a stimulus package to help members of the 27-country bloc, strains that have plagued it for several years reemerged and threatened to drive a deeper wedge.

Germany, the largest economy, which has had relative low contagion, was reluctant to go to the aid of Italy or Spain, where infections and deaths were soaring. Anti-EU sentiment, already festering in some countries, grew.

Smaller countries that might have turned once to the United States in a crisis have looked instead to China or Russia, two longtime U.S. rivals who are making the most of the U.S. vacuum by sending supplies around the world. Even China, whose initial secrecy fueled the global outbreak, is hoping to gain international praise for offering assistance to other nations, much to the frustration of Trump's State Department.

And a number of governments appear to be exploiting the crisis to crack down on dissent at home and consolidate power, as in the case of Hungarian President Viktor Orban and Russia's Vladimir Putin.

Asked about concerns that such leaders are taking advantage, the administration again seemed to abdicate its customary leadership role.

"In the time of crisis, we turn to each government to do what they think is the best for their communities and [to be] able to ensure safety and security," said Julie Chung, a principal deputy assistant secretary of State, in a briefing with reporters. "So I defer to each of the separate governments on what individual measures they are taking."
By Jan Strupczewski

BRUSSELS (Reuters) - The European Union is looking at ways to revive its economy after what is expected to be the 27-nation bloc's deepest recession, caused by the coronavirus pandemic.

EU leaders will hold talks on April 23. The issue is highly divisive because it concerns European solidarity in a crisis -- member countries' willingness to share costs and ensure all have an equal chance to recover.

The International Monetary Fund expects the output of the 19 countries that share the euro to contract by 7.5% this year rather than grow 1.2% as forecast in February, before the pandemic triggered lockdowns in most EU countries.

With such output loss, European politicians compare the task of bringing the economy back on track to the U.S. Marshall Plan for Europe after World War II.

CORONABONDS OR EUROBONDS

France has proposed a Recovery Fund of around 3% of EU gross domestic product -- about 420 billion euros -- financed through joint debt issuance. After borrowing on the market, it would lend to governments so that all EU members can benefit from a low and equal funding costs.

Paris did not give any technical details of how the fund might be set up, what its capital would be or whether the liability of its members would joint and several.

Some officials have pointed out that setting up such an institution, getting a credit rating and marketing its bonds would take more time than the EU realistically has to start supporting a recovery.

The main obstacle, however, is political. Even though the fund's borrowing would be limited in scope and only for the purpose of getting Europe's economy going again, joint debt remains legally or politically unacceptable for Germany, the Netherlands, Finland and Austria.

JOINT BORROWING USING THE EU'S LONG-TERM BUDGET

A more likely option, proposed by EU Budget Commissioner Johannes Hahn, is that borrowing for the recovery be done by the executive European Commission, which has a triple-A credit rating, against the security of the next EU long-term budget.

Story continues

The Commission could borrow around 100 billion euros a year for two to four years after the epidemic.

Each year it would leverage that sum 10 times, to 1 trillion euros a year, using the same method as in the EU's flagship investment plan over the last five years -- buying the riskiest tranches of an investment to attract private capital.

The scheme, which would provide around 2 to 4 trillion euros for the recovery over two to four years, would depend on EU governments providing implicit guarantees.

This could be done by temporarily raising the maximum limit of EU gross national income set for the EU budget's "own resources" to 2% from 1.23%. GNI is the EU's preferred measure of economic output.

It would not mean governments have to pay more to the EU, only that they would be ready to do so, if a loan from the Commission to a government was not repaid in time.

EU leaders will discuss this option on April 23, although they are unlikely to make a decision immediately.

But France and Germany, the most powerful EU countries, seem open to the idea. German Chancellor Angela Merkel signalled readiness on Monday to finance recovery from the pandemic through a bigger European Union budget and joint debt issuance via the Commission.

French President Emmanuel Macron told the Financial Times the EU had "no choice" but to set up a fund that "could issue common debt with a common guarantee". That could dovetail with the Commission proposal as the fund could be a special purpose vehicle set up by the EU executive and the common guarantee would be the seven-year EU budget.

REDISTRIBUTION OF MONEY VIA THE EU LONG-TERM BUDGET

The EU budget, now under negotiation, is likely to be between 180 billion and 240 billion euros a year. Almost one-third of it goes to support farming, which produces only around 1% of EU GDP. Another third goes towards equalising living standards across the bloc.

The next 2021-2027 budget could redirect funds from less productive areas to focus them on industrial, digital and green policy to help the EU economy modernise after the slump.

It could also front-load spending to aid recovery in the initial years of the budget, though leaving less for later.

PERPETUAL BONDS TO FINANCE GRANTS

Spain has proposed a 1.5 trillion euro Recovery Fund financed through perpetual bonds issued by the EU that would issue grants not loans, to avoid some southern countries building up more debt.

The money would be transferred early in the 2021-2027 budget, based on the percentage of a country's population affected by the pandemic, the fall in economic output or rise in unemployment.

The annual interest to be paid on the perpetual bonds would be covered by new EU taxes like that planned on emissions, or a single market tax.

(Reporting by Jan Strupczewski; Editing by Catherine Evans)
Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs Konstantinos Vlasis conversed by telephone today with His All Holiness Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew to express his best wishes ahead of Easter.

The Deputy Minister reiterated the firm support of Greeces government and Prime Minister for the Ecumenical Patriarchate and the Ecumenical Patriarch, and he also had the opportunity to talk to the His All Holiness about the recent developments in the coronavirus pandemic.
The Pentagon is investing more than $500 million to satisfy the need for protective masks in the novel coronavirus response, including sterilization efforts so medical professionals can safely reuse masks up to 20 times.

The Defense Department has delivered 10 million N95 respirators to the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and to the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and is "prepared to provide 10 million more," Defense Secretary Mark Esper told defense reporters at a Pentagon briefing Tuesday.

"On Friday, we received approval for our first Defense Production Act project, investing $133 million to increase domestic production of N95 masks to over 39 million in the next 90 days," Esper said. "This will help ensure our government has the industrial capacity to meet the nation's needs."

Related: Trump Invokes Defense Production Act to Force GM to Make Ventilators

The Pentagon has also awarded a $415 million contract -- on behalf of HHS -- for 60 critical-care decontamination systems, which will sterilize nearly five million N95 respirators per day, he added.

"This will allow medical professionals to reuse masks and will reduce the nation's need for new inventory," Esper said.

So far, these decontamination units have been delivered to cities including New York, Chicago and Boston, he said, adding that the rest "should be available by early May."

The Pentagon has also deployed about 50,000 active-duty, National Guard and Reserve members across the country to assist states that are struggling to contain the COVID-19 pandemic, Esper said.

"To date, we have deployed over 4,000 doctors, nurses and other medical personnel across all components to bolster the capacity of some of the nation's most severely affected areas," he said.

Recently, the Army stood up 15 Urban Augmentation Medical Task Forces, made up of Reserve medical professionals, designed to reinforce severely overworked civilian hospital staffs.

The Pentagon is deploying 14 of those task forces to "priority regions -- six of those are allocated to New York, three to New Jersey, two to Massachusetts, one to Connecticut, one to Michigan and one to Pennsylvania," Esper said.

-- Matthew Cox can be reached at matthew.cox@military.com.

Read More: Army Deploys Reserve Medical Specialists to Aid Overwhelmed City Hospitals
ALTON  With a ceremonial bite from a trackhoe, the Southern Illinois University School of Dental Medicine (SDM) began construction Monday on the site that will house its new Advanced Care Clinic (ACC) on the Alton campus.

Drone footage captured the launch of demolition, making way for the $11.5 million facility scheduled to be completed in June 2021.

The building will provide SDM with state-of-the-art accommodations to facilitate treatment for its most vulnerable patient population  children who require general anesthesia for the completion of care. The clinic also will allow the SDM to expand and enhance its postdoctoral specialty programs.

We are thrilled to be embarking on this next great phase in the growth of the School of Dental Medicine, said SIU SDM Dean Bruce Rotter, DMD.

The Advanced Care Clinic, created in response to recent challenges in the provision of healthcare, underscores our dedication to patient care in our region, he said. By adding general anesthesia capabilities in two medical operating suites, the SDM will be able to offer more comprehensive, predictable and safe treatment, allowing for the timely completion of care, particularly for children and patients with special dental care needs.

Rotter extended his gratitude to Delta Dental of Illinois and the Illinois Childrens Healthcare Foundation for their financial support in making the clinic possible. He also thanked general contractor Poettker Construction Co. and other supporting construction service providers.

The SIU School of Dental Medicine is preparing future dental professionals who will shape a changing world through their important work as clinicians and service to the community, said SIUE Chancellor Randy Pembrook. The new Advanced Care Clinic will allow our students to develop their skills in a top-level facility, with important focus placed on the care of vulnerable patient populations.

The project involves demolishing the former Multidisciplinary Lab Building 283 which is no longer in use. The new clinic will be built on that site and serve dental students and residents. The clinic will serve a comprehensive range of patient dental needs through existing, expanded and new post-doctoral programs.
Source: Xinhua| 2020-04-15 09:51:33|Editor: huaxia

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Chinese President Xi Jinping (L) is warmly welcomed by Kyrgyz President Sooronbai Jeenbekov when arriving for the 19th meeting of the Council of Heads of State of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, June 14, 2019. (Xinhua/Ding Lin)

The Chinese people hold a brotherly friendship with the Kyrgyz people, said the Chinese President.

China, he added, is ready to continue sharing containment experience as well as diagnostic and treatment plans with Kyrgyzstan, and will dispatch medical experts to the neighboring country as soon as possible.

BEIJING, April 14 (Xinhua) -- Chinese President Xi Jinping said Tuesday that China will stand together with Kyrgyzstan in the fight against COVID-19 and continue to offer as much assistance as its capacity allows.

He made the remarks in a phone conversation with Kyrgyz President Sooronbai Jeenbekov.

Xi pointed out that the coronavirus disease is spreading around the world, posing a huge threat to the safety and health of people in all countries.

He recalled that at the most challenging moment in China's COVID-19 prevention and control, the Kyrgyz government overcame difficulties to provide China with timely assistance in medical supplies, and various sections of Kyrgyz society expressed support for China's fight in various forms, leaving many heartwarming stories.

The Chinese people hold a brotherly friendship with the Kyrgyz people, and China empathizes with Kyrgyzstan's current difficulties, said the Chinese president.

China, he added, is ready to continue sharing containment experience as well as diagnostic and treatment plans with Kyrgyzstan, and will dispatch medical experts to the neighboring country as soon as possible.

Chinese Ambassador to Kyrgyzstan Du Dewen (L) and Kyrgyzstan's Health Minister Sabirzhan Abdikarimov attend a handover ceremony of China-aided materials in Bishkek, capital of Kyrgyzstan, April 2, 2020. (Chinese Embassy to Kyrgyzstan/Handout via Xinhua)

He said he believes that under the leadership of Jeenbekov, Kyrgyzstan will certainly be able to defeat the epidemic at an early date.

Meanwhile, Xi stressed that China and Kyrgyzstan are friendly neighbors and comprehensive strategic partners linked by mountains and rivers.

China, he said, is ready to work with Kyrgyzstan to uphold the vision of building a community with a shared future for mankind, strengthen solidarity, coordination and cooperation both at the bilateral level and within multilateral frameworks such as the Shanghai Cooperation Organization.

That will allow the two countries to stick together, help each other and make positive contributions to safeguarding public health security and restoring global economic growth, added the Chinese president.

He also suggested that the two sides increase mutual support on issues involving each other's core interests, promote joint development of the Belt and Road, deepen cooperation in various fields, and continuously lift their comprehensive strategic partnership to new levels.

Photo taken on April 2, 2020 shows tulip blossoms in Bishkek, capital of Kyrgyzstan. (Xinhua)

For his part, Jeenbekov said China has achieved significant results at this stage in its fight against COVID-19, and is providing enormous support for and playing a leading role in the global battle, which the Kyrgyz side sincerely admires.

This outbreak, he added, has once again highlighted the urgent, realistic and epochal need to implementing Xi's vision of building a community with a shared future for mankind.

He thanked the Chinese side for caring for the Kyrgyz citizens in China and providing valuable support and assistance for Kyrgyzstan's fight against the epidemic in a timely manner.

Kyrgyzstan will always be the most reliable good friend and good partner of the Chinese people, he said, adding that his country is ready to deepen cooperation with China in agriculture and other fields, promote joint development of the Belt and Road, and advance the building of a community with a shared future for mankind. 
China Petroleum & Chemical Corporation, or Sinopec, is helping Kuwait to remodel a camp at a refinery into a hospital to treat the rising number of coronavirus patients in one of OPECs core oil producers.

Sinopecs unit Sinopec Fifth Construction Co is helping Kuwait to turn the living quarters of construction workers at the Al-Zour New Refinery Project (NRP) into a makeshift hospital, Sinopec, one of Chinas biggest oil and petrochemical firms, told Chinese publication the Global Times on Tuesday.

As of early Tuesday, April 14, Kuwait had 1,355 confirmed coronavirus cases and 3 deaths, with a growing curve of daily COVID-19 cases.

The Kuwaiti government chose our camp because it is in the desert, a good place for isolation. With its existing facilities, it can be converted into a makeshift hospital with little modification, a Sinopec Fifth Construction employee told the Global Times.

Last month, Sinopec launched two production lines for N95 respirators and surgical masks in response to a shortage created by the coronavirus pandemic.

While life in China begins to return to normal after a two-month lockdown, the coronavirus is spreading to nearly all other countries in the world. Globally, as of 2:00 a.m. CEST on April 14, there have been 1,812,734 confirmed cases of COVID-19, including 113,675 deaths, reported to the World Health Organization (WHO).

In the Middle East, the countries including Kuwait are being directly hit by the pandemic and by the indirect hit from the colossal oil demand loss that has been weighing on the price of oil and consequently, on the oil revenues of the oil-exporting nations in the region.

Some Middle Eastern producers, such as Qatar and Abu Dhabi, have tapped the international debt markets in the past week amid growing fiscal pressures on their economies and wealth funds in the oil price crash and the coronavirus pandemic.

By Tsvetana Paraskova for Oilprice.com

More Top Reads From Oilprice.com:
Fully 204 residents of an elderly care home run by the municipality of Budapest have been infected by novel coronavirus, the chief medical officer told an online press briefing on Tuesday.

Ten of the residents of the Pesti Road care home have died, Cecilia Muller said. Muller said she has ordered the inspection of all of Hungarys 1,035 retirement homes, beginning with the ones housing the most people.



The chief medical officer said elderly care home residents should be placed in isolation for two weeks after being discharged from hospital.



She said hospitals have been asked to free up 60% of their beds to ensure that every coronavirus patient in need can get treatment.



Though Hungary has so far avoided mass infections, the authorities are prepared for a worst-case scenario, she added. In response to a question, she said plans were in place to examine the populations level of immunity to the virus once the epidemic subsides.



Meanwhile, Muller said the various drugs used around the world to treat coronavirus patients are available in Hungary too.



She welcomed the 122 Covid-19 recoveries in Hungary and the recent release from intensive care of nine patients who no longer need to be on ventilators. This is a very great achievement, she said, thanking health-care staff for their efforts.



Meanwhile, police officers took action against 4,692 people over the Easter holiday for breaching restrictive regulations.



Tibor Lakatos, head of the emergency centre set up by the operative board coordinating the response to the epidemic, told the same press conference that police raised charges against 69 people for gathering in groups on the southern shores of Lake Balaton.



MTI Photo: Zsolz Szigetvary
MONTEVIDEO, Uruguay - The final 15 passengers, including six Americans, were evacuated Wednesday from an Australian cruise ship that has been anchored off Uruguays coast for almost three weeks with more than half the people aboard infected with the new coronavirus at one point. The passengers were taken to Montevideos airport and boarded a charter flight to Miami.

The Greg Mortimer departed March 15 on a voyage to Antarctica and South Georgia that was titled In Shackletons Footsteps, a reference to the polar explorer who led British expeditions to the region and died there in 1922. But the trip was cancelled after much of the crew and passengers tested positive for COVID-19 and the ship reached the Uruguayan coast on March 27.

Uruguay initially refused to let the passengers off the Greg Mortimer, which is operated by Australias Aurora Expeditions, but last week it evacuated 112 Australians and New Zealanders, most of whom had COVID-19.

On Friday, Uruguayan authorities formed a humanitarian corridor to transport the remaining Americans, three British citizens, five Europeans and a Canadian to the airport. After the charter flight reaches Miami, the passengers will be flown to their home cities and countries.

The health of the passengers evacuated on Wednesday is good, said Dr. Marcelo Gilard, director of pre-hospital assistance at the Uruguayan clinic CASMU where the ships 86 crew members will be held. Two other passengers remain in The British Hospital in Montevideo

The crew is going to remain in quarantine, said Uruguayan Foreign Minister Ernesto Talvi.

After the quarantine, the cruise ship will sail to Las Palmas, Spain, which was its final destination.

The crew suspects they may have made contact (with the virus) in Ushuaia in Tierra del Fuego, Argentina, where the ship departed from in mid-March, said Gilard. The city is like an airport; there is traffic of all nationalities and it is a stop where the crew disembarks for recreation.

From March 13 until Wednesday, Uruguay has had 493 confirmed cases of the coronavirus and eight deaths. 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.
Laxman Pai, Opalesque Asia:

The mergers and acquisitions (M&A) deal volume in Europe saw a decrease of 1.78% from 3,484 to 3,422 in the first quarter of 2020, said GlobalData.

However, on the back of some of the high-value transactions (such as US$33.4bn Aon - Willis Towers Watson merger deal and acquisition of ThyssenKrupp Elevator by a consortium of Investors for $18.7bn) deal value increased by 45.35% from $134.4bn in the first quarter of 2019 to $195.3bn in Q1 2020.

Goldman Sachs dominates the M&A financial advisers league table based on the deal value in the first quarter of 2020, according to the data and analytics company.

The American firm advised on 20 deals worth $114.1bn in Q1 2020.

GlobalData, which tracks all M&A, private equity/venture capital and asset transaction activity around the world to compile the league tables, confirmed that Rothschild & Co occupied the second position with 48 transactions worth $58.3bn.

Aurojyoti Bose, Financial Deals Analyst at GlobalData, said: "Despite advising on a relatively smaller number of deals, Goldman Sachs is the only adviser which crossed $100bn mark in Q1 2020 outpacing its peers by a large margin. The firm advised on some big-ticket deals such as the $33.4bn Aon - Willis Towers Watson merger deal."

Goldman Sachs, which topped the league table of M&A financial advisers in Europe, also stood at the first position in GlobalData's recently released global league table of top 20 M&A financial advisers.......................

To view our full article Click here
Longford has recorded its largest day-on-day increase in Covid-19 so far today. The latest county breakdown of figures, up to midnight on Monday, April 13, showed an increase of 11 cases on the previous day, bringing Longford's tally so far to 69 cases.

Cavan currently has 254 cases; Westmeath is currently at 258; Leitrim now has 40 cases, while Roscommon has 50 cases for the virus.

This evening, the Health Protection Surveillance Centre said that a further 38 people have died of Covid-19. Some 29 deaths were located in the east, and the deceased had a median age of 84.

As of 1pm Wednesday April 15, the HPSC has been notified of the following cases;

 An additional 657 new confirmed cases of Covid-19 reported by Irish laboratories

 An additional 411 confirmed cases of Covid-19 reported by a laboratory in Germany

With the latest figures from Germany included, there are now a total of 12,547 confirmed cases of Covid-19 in Ireland.

Dr. Tony Holohan, Chief Medical Officer, Department of Health, said: We are continuing to monitor the course of this disease across a range of indicators  not only in the number of confirmed cases and deaths reported but also through hospital and ICU admissions, clusters and patterns of transmission.

While a number of these parameters are going in a positive direction, it is clear that we need to keep going in our efforts, on an individual level, to limit the spread of this virus.

Read next: Covid-19 testing to begin in Longford's Connolly Barracks
Tusla, the child and family agency has been involved in seven grievance proceedings over the past two years and in the same period commenced five disciplinary processes against members of staff in one of its busiest areas.

Details released under Freedom of Information relating to the Dublin Mid-Leinster area show that three grievance proceedings commenced in 2018 involving Tusla staff, of which three have now concluded.

Another four grievances commenced in 2019, of which two have now concluded.

Regarding disciplinary matters, Tusla said two disciplinary processes commenced in 2018, and both have now concluded, while last year three disciplinary processes got underway, of which two are still open and one concluded.

Of the three disciplinary processes, Tusla said one staff member was on suspension for the duration of the process.

The process for invoking a grievance, disciplinary or dignity at work processes commences when a dispute reaches the threshold defined within the relevant Tusla policy on the matter, the Child and Family Agency said with regard to the nature of the dispute or the reason for disciplinary action.

Before invoking any formal process however, more informal methods of resolution must be explored by management and staff in the first instance.

In addition, there has also been Dignity at Work issues in Dublin Mid-Leinster in the same two-year period.

According to Tusla, two dignity at work processes commenced in 2018, of which two have now concluded, while last year one dignity at work process got underway and remains on-going.

According to the agency, independent third parties may be appointed to investigate a disciplinary investigation or a dignity at work complaint and figures show the costs, inclusive of VAT, of 9,372.60 in 2018 and 2,416.60 in 2019, although regarding last years total Tusla said the costs have not fully been billed as some matters are on-going.

As for legal fees as they relate to grievance, disciplinary and dignity at work matters, Tusla said zero costs were incurred in 2018 and just 397.44 last year.
Ontario is in the midst of two parallel COVID-19 epidemics, health experts say: one in the community at large, where there are encouraging signs that physical distancing is working, and one in seniors homes, an ongoing disaster whose true scope we are only beginning to see.

The provinces hospital intensive care units, which health officials scrambled to expand and fortify after they were besieged in other countries, are operating well under capacity. Though its too soon to declare that Ontario escaped the catastrophic COVID-19 surge seen elsewhere, right now there are more ICU beds and ventilators available than even the best-case modelling scenarios predicted  a hopeful sign.

But the pandemic continues to erupt in long-term-care and retirement homes, where residents are less likely to be transferred to ICUs.

Ontario now has outbreaks in more than 100 long-term-care homes. On Tuesday, Torontos medical officer of health announced that 69 of the citys 115 COVID-19 deaths  60 per cent  had been residents of seniors facilities. Dr. Eileen de Villa warned to expect a rise in cases in these settings, as newly expanded testing capacity uncovers the true spread of disease.

Premier Doug Ford called the situation in long-term-care homes a wildfire and the front line of the pandemic, promising an enhanced plan and new measures to fight the virus in these settings.

Thanks to our collective efforts, weve not seen the surge in our hospitals we were so worried about, Ford said Tuesday. As a result we have capacity within the health sector, and I want available resources from our health system to be redeployed to those homes when theres a serious outbreak.

While new measures the premier announced Tuesday had been called for by experts, some said the province had adequately readied hospitals but neglected equally obvious signs the virus would ravage nursing homes.

Its a sector that has been grossly neglected for years and was ripe for a catastrophe like this, says Dr. Nathan Stall, a geriatrician and researcher at Sinai Health System.

We knew that this was going to be a problem, we just chose as a society and as a health-care system to turn our focus to the (hospital-based) acute and critical care resources.

Stall adds that it was appropriate to prepare hospitals, since they serve the broader population  but I dont think it should have been at the complete neglect of the other sector.

The earliest data on the outbreak from China showed that elderly citizens had much higher chances of severe illness and death from the novel virus. Outcomes for seniors in Italy were even worse.

Nursing homes have several features that amplify that risk, experts say. Ontarios long-term-care facilities are chronically underfunded and understaffed  a problem advocacy groups had warned of for years. Precarious work conditions force staff to patch together part-time, low-paying work at several facilities. Infection prevention and control is less rigorous than at hospitals, and made more difficult by the design of homes, with shared eating and living spaces.

Ontario faced criticism in recent weeks for not testing widely for the virus in long-term-care homes, and for not supporting staff with sufficient supplies of masks, gloves and other personal protective equipment. Until Tuesday, the province had encouraged limiting staff to one work location but not mandated it.

Were seeing a common trend right now, that when a home gets an outbreak, in some homes it can spread quickly, says Dr. Samir Sinha, director of geriatrics at Sinai Health System and the University Health Network.

Those homes are more likely to immediately have staffing challenges, as sick or exposed employees are forced to stay home.

Eatonville Care Centre in Etobicoke announced Tuesday that a total of 27 residents had died from COVID-19 and 53 had tested positive; 70 are awaiting results. Seven Oaks in Scarborough, a city-run facility where inspectors found infection control problems last October, has seen 22 deaths and 82 cases, plus 14 affected staff.

Ford announced Tuesday that as of midnight, the province was issuing a new emergency order preventing staff from working in multiple facilities, as other provinces already have. Ford also announced that new hospital-based care teams would be sent to support nursing home staff struggling with outbreaks.

The sad truth is, our long-term-care homes are quickly turning into the front line of the fight against this virus, Ford said, promising more resources.

On Friday, the province announced newly expanded testing criteria that would prioritize seniors home residents. De Villa on Tuesday said that the increased testing means numbers in long-term-care homes would go up, and while that may seem concerning, it would help public health guide outbreak control.

One of my fears in all of this is theres been a change in messaging over the past few days  that were doing a good job, said Stall. And theres been misinformed talk about ending the lockdown.

From the perspective of myself as a geriatrician and my colleagues, were horrified by whats going on right now. Yes, our acute and critical care systems might be doing better than expected, but our long-term-care settings are in horrible shape.

ICU statistics were never going to adequately reflect the outbreaks toll on long-term-care homes. Even in pre-COVID times, frail and elderly patients from long-term-care facilities were unlikely candidates for invasive ICU care, especially those with serious health conditions, said Dr. Silvy Mathew, a family physician who works at Belmont House, a long-term-care facility and retirement home in Toronto.

Its just not considered good care in terms of how to manage illness in the very elderly, she said. The likelihood of them doing well is next to none.

This has been particularly true with COVID-19, where survival rates for ventilated patients are dismal. In a Lancet paper looking at 37 critically ill patients in Wuhan, China, 30 died within a month of being placed on mechanical ventilation, and in another small study from Seattle, only one of the seven patients older than 70 survived after going on a breathing machine.

Most long-term-care facilities had already worked with residents and families to engage in advance care planning, geriatricians say, and the pandemic hastened those conversations. So while 50 per cent of Canadas COVID-19 deaths have been linked to long-term-care facilities, many were likely people who already indicated they wouldnt want invasive ventilation.

Thats why youre not seeing many of these people flooding the ICUs, Sinha said. This is not about denying people access to care, its actually about doing things in line with what people want and need.

That said, there are some concerns about blanket policies or misinterpreted messaging that could prevent long-term-care patients from being transferred to hospitals when resources become strained  a worry reflected by an Ontario Medical Association position statement circulated to members on Monday, which recommended against such blanket policies.

At least one long-term-care physician in Toronto has seen a patient denied the hospital care they were seeking.

Ive had one patient go to the hospital and was just told directly that they would not be offered a ventilator, said Dr. Pamela Liao, a family doctor who specializes in geriatrics and palliative medicine and works in several Toronto-area retirement homes.

Liao is now treating this patient in the community but with a fraction of the resources that they would have if they were in acute care. She points out that in long-term-care facilities, there might be one registered practical nurse responsible for 25 to 30 patients; in an ICU, the nurse-to-patient ratio might be one to one.

Experts warn that the provinces flattening ICU numbers and heightened focus on seniors facilities should not be taken as signals to start relaxing social distancing measures. Nobody is ruling out the possibility that ICUs could still reach a critical threshold, especially if people start letting their guards down now.

And beyond beds and ventilators, there are growing concerns over other ICU necessities. On Tuesday, the Canadian Association of Emergency Physicians released a statement warning that crucial medications necessary for supporting COVID-19 patients on mechanical ventilation  like sedatives, paralytics and painkillers  could be in short supply and may be reaching a critical shortage in the coming weeks.
Claes Bang of "Dracula" fame and "Succession" star Brian Cox have teamed up for the pilot episode of the series "The Agoraphobics Detective Society".

The pilot, which will also feature Grace Van Patten and radio presenter Mariella Frostrup, will be shot by all the actors at their homes, reported Deadline.

It is about a distraught group of patients banding together to find a renowned expert psychiatrist who disappears without explanation.

Produced by Maggie Monteith, the proceeds from the eight-episode series will go to UK and US film and TV freelancers impacted by the coronavirus pandemic.

The writer-directors of the pilot comprise Bang's "Dracula" co-star Dolly Wells as well as Suzi Ewing and Heidi Greensmith.

The actors will film their parts separately from home before the episode is released on the Pinpoint Presents website later this month.

Viewers will be urged to the UK Film and TV Charity's Emergency COVID-19 Relief Fund and the Motion Picture & TV Fund in the US.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Chennai, April 15 : With the footfalls of monthly pensioners and others in bank branches falling down, bankers in Tamil Nadu will work between 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. till May 3.

A decision to this effect was communicated to all the banks in Tamil Nadu by the State Level Bankers' Committee (SLBC) on Wednesday.

Last month when the lockdown was announced by the central government, the SLBC had decided that bank branches would work between 10 a.m. and 2 p.m.

Subsequently, anticipating huge crowd in bank branches to withdraw the relief amount announced by the government and pension by the pensioners, the SLBC decided that the bank branches would work between 10 a.m. and 4 p.m.

As the number of people coming to the branches has fallen and those who come to complete their banking transactions before 1 p.m. the SLBC has decided to revert to 10 a.m to 2 p.m. schedule for bank branches.
Turkey holds 4th joint patrol with Russia in Syria

Turkey and Russia agreed on a protocol which urged parties to cease all military actions along the line of contact in the Idlib de-escalation area starting from 00.01 of March 6, 2020.

Turkish and Russian troops conducted fourth joint ground patrol in northwestern Syria in line with the Moscow agreement, Turkeys National Defense Ministry said on Wednesday.

THE TURKEY-RUSSIA AGREEMENT

Fourth joint Turkish-Russian land patrol was conducted today [Wednesday] by air and ground vehicles on M4 motorway in Syrias Idlib province, as part of the earlier TR-RF agreement, the ministry said on Twitter.

The M4 highway, also known as the Aleppo-Al Hasakah road, is about 30 kilometers (19 miles) from Turkey's southern border.

The protocol also noted that joint Turkish-Russian patrols would begin on March 15 along the M4 highway from the settlement of Trumba -- 2 km (1.2 miles) to the west of Saraqib -- to the settlement of Ain al-Havr.
A new grant will fund an international collaboration to develop tools to assess patients who suffer from cardiovascular disease.

The Bhargava group at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign will collaborate with researchers at the Indian Institute of Technology Delhi, a leading technology-focused educational institution in India. The grant Partnership 2020: Leveraging U.S.-India Cooperation in Higher Education is an initiative of the U.S. Department of State, the University of Nebraska at Omaha, and the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

Researchers hope to develop techniques for analyzing MRI and echocardiogram images, which will allow them to assess patients who suffer from cardiovascular disease. They have been awarded $75,000 for phase 1 of the study.

Cardiovascular disease is one of the leading causes of death in India. Usually, doctors assess patients by echocardiogram or MRI, which takes time, said Shachi Mittal, a Beckman Institute Postdoctoral Fellow in the Chemical and Imaging Structures Laboratory and one of the principal investigators on the grant. Additionally, the health care load is high, and it is therefore important to help them make faster and more accurate diagnose.

Our lab has developed digital methods that use deep learning to enhance clinical care. We will collaborate with the researchers at IIT-Delhi and local hospitals in India to acquire cardio images and build models to predict patient outcomes, Mittal said.

The scientists at Beckman have always tried to increase the quality and impact of their research, said Rohit Bhargava, Founder Professor of Engineering in the Department of Bioengineering and the director of the Cancer Center at Illinois. With this grant, we can add a new dimension to Beckmans engagement at the convergence of health and technology. We can take the expertise from the University of Illinois and apply it to the problems in India to co-develop practical solutions for both countries.
In response to James Bennetts letter regarding mailing voter ballots (Fiasco in Wisconsin shows need for mail ballots, April 15) :

Mr. Bennett, if you want to really mess up voting, use the U.S. Postal Service.

Please allow me to enlighten you on the most incompetent organization in existence with actual examples:

1. I ordered stamps on April 3. The post office sent the stamps by Priority Mail. I received them on April 11.

2. I mailed a certified letter to Raleigh on Jan. 9. As far as the post office is concerned, the letter is still in the Greensboro distribution center.

3. I mailed a certified letter to Kansas City on Jan. 9. As far as the post office is concerned, the letter is still in the Kansas City distribution center.

4. When I order something online, the post office will take two to five days to get the package from the Greensboro distribution center to my house in ZIP code 27407.

The last package was shipped and received in one day by the Greensboro distribution center. Instead of going to the 27407 distribution center, the package went to the 27406 distribution center.
Canadian oil is struggling. And I mean really, really having a tough time. Alberta's benchmark, Western Canadian Select, is now cheaper than a pint of beer. Sitting at $4.71 at the time of writing, WCS is facing a nightmare scenario.

Fortunately for Alberta, Canada's Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said this month that the government was scrambling to secure an aid package for the country's oil sector. And though the help has been slow to come, it seems the administration is now closer than ever to providing some relief for the ailing industry.

We recognize that the most important thing from the very beginning was to get help out to Canadians right across the country, regardless of the sectors theyre in, regardless of their situation or their location, the prime minister said.

And some relief has come. Not only have OPEC and a slew of other oil producers across the globe agreed upon a massive 9.7 million barrel per day cut in oil production, but the Canadian government has also been making some attempts to prop up the industry.

In Saskatchewan, mineral rights have been extended until 2021, allowing more time for producers to plan since holding onto those titles typically means drilling a well - which in this environment, is currently out of the question.

Warren Waldegger, the president and CEO of Fire Sky Energy, noted that An extra year on some of those leases...hopefully will lead to future drilling activity."

Alberta too has seen some relief, with a $100 million loan to the Orphan Well Association to begin the reclamation and abandonment of up to 1000 more wells. Additionally, the government noted that it will enact important reforms under Bill 12 of the Oil & Gas Conservation Act, allowing the Orphan Well Association to sell oil from orphan wells to associated pipelines.

But whether or not the government is doing enough to support the industry through this crisis remains unclear. The mega-relief package that Finance Minister Bill Morneau touted was only "hours away" a few weeks ago still hasn't come.

By Michael Kern for Oilprice.com

More Top Reads From Oilprice.com:
RIVERSIDE, Calif. -- A research team led by physicists at the University of California, Riverside, reports tiny satellite galaxies of the Milky Way can be used to test fundamental properties of "dark matter" -- nonluminous material thought to constitute 85% of matter in the universe.

Using sophisticated simulations, the researchers show a theory called self-interacting dark matter, or SIDM, can compellingly explain diverse dark matter distributions in Draco and Fornax, two of the Milky Way's more than 50 discovered satellite galaxies.

The prevailing dark matter theory, called Cold Dark Matter, or CDM, explains much of the universe, including how structures emerge in it. But a long-standing challenge for CDM has been to explain the diverse dark matter distributions in galaxies.

The researchers, led by UC Riverside's Hai-Bo Yu and Laura V. Sales, studied the evolution of SIDM "subhalos" in the Milky Way "tidal field" -- the gradient in the gravitational field of the Milky Way that a satellite galaxy feels in the form of a tidal force. Subhalos are dark matter clumps that host the satellite galaxies.

"We found SIDM can produce diverse dark matter distributions in the halos of Draco and Fornax, in agreement with observations," said Yu, an associate professor of physics and astronomy and a theoretical physicist with expertise in particle properties of dark matter. "In SIDM, the interaction between the subhalos and the Milky Way's tides leads to more diverse dark matter distributions in the inner regions of subhalos, compared to their CDM counterparts."

Draco and Fornax have opposite extremes in their inner dark matter contents. Draco has the highest dark matter density among the nine bright Milky Way satellite galaxies; Fornax has the lowest. Using advanced astronomical measurements, astrophysicists recently reconstructed their orbital trajectories in the Milky Way's tidal field.

"Our challenge was to understand the origin of Draco and Fornax's diverse dark matter distributions in light of these newly measured orbital trajectories," Yu said. "We found SIDM can provide an explanation after taking into both tidal effects and dark matter self-interactions."

Study results appear in Physical Review Letters.

Dark matter's nature remains largely unknown. Unlike normal matter, it does not absorb, reflect, or emit light, making it difficult to detect. Identifying the nature of dark matter is a central task in particle physics and astrophysics.

In CDM, dark matter particles are assumed to be collisionless, and every galaxy sits within a dark matter halo that forms the gravitational scaffolding holding it together. In SIDM, dark matter is proposed to self-interact through a new dark force. Dark matter particles are assumed to strongly collide with one another in the inner halo, close to the galaxy's center -- a process called dark matter self-interaction.

"Our work shows satellite galaxies of the Milky Way may provide important tests of different dark matter theories," said Sales, an assistant professor of physics and astronomy and an astrophysicist with expertise in numerical simulations of galaxy formation. "We show the interplay between dark matter self-interactions and tidal interactions can produce novel signatures in SIDM that are not expected in the prevailing CDM theory."

In their work, the researchers mainly used numerical simulations, called "N-body simulations," and obtained valuable intuition through analytical modeling before running their simulations.

"Our simulations reveal novel dynamics when an SIDM subhalo evolves in the tidal field," said Omid Sameie, a former UCR graduate student who worked with Yu and Sales and is now a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Texas at Austin working on numerical simulations of galaxy formation. "It was thought observations of Draco were inconsistent with SIDM predictions. But we found a subhalo in SIDM can produce a high dark matter density to explain Draco."

Sales explained SIDM predicts a unique phenomenon named "core collapse." In certain circumstances, the inner part of the halo collapses under the influence of gravity and produces a high density. This is contrary to the usual expectation that dark matter self-interactions lead to a low-density halo. Sales said the team's simulations identify conditions for the core collapse to occur in subhalos.

"To explain Draco's high dark matter density, its initial halo concentration needs to be high," she said. "More dark matter mass needs to be distributed in the inner halo. While this is true for both CDM and SIDM, for SIDM the core-collapse phenomenon can only occur if the concentration is high so that the collapse timescale is less than the age of the universe. On the other hand, Fornax has a low-concentrated subhalo, and hence its density remains low."

The researchers stressed their current work mainly focuses on SIDM and does not make a critical assessment on how well CDM can explain both Draco and Fornax.

After the team used numerical simulations to properly take into account the dynamical interplay between dark matter self-interactions and tidal interactions, the researchers observed a striking result.

"The central dark matter of an SIDM subhalo could be increasing, contrary to usual expectations," Sameie said. "Importantly, our simulations identify conditions for this phenomenon to occur in SIDM, and we show it can explain observations of Draco."

The research team plans to extend the study to other satellite galaxies, including ultrafaint galaxies.

###

Yu, Sales, and Sameie were joined in the study by Mark Vogelsberger of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Jesus Zavala of the University of Iceland. Sameie is the first author of the research paper.

The research was supported by grants from the U.S. Department of Energy, National Aeronautics and Space Administration, NASA MIRO FIELDS Fellowship, National Science Foundation, the Hellman Fellow Foundation, and Icelandic Research Fund.

The University of California, Riverside (http://www.ucr.edu) is a doctoral research university, a living laboratory for groundbreaking exploration of issues critical to Inland Southern California, the state and communities around the world. Reflecting California's diverse culture, UCR's enrollment is more than 24,000 students. The campus opened a medical school in 2013 and has reached the heart of the Coachella Valley by way of the UCR Palm Desert Center. The campus has an annual statewide economic impact of almost $2 billion. To learn more, email news@ucr.edu.
Lee Nak-yon, center bottom, a former prime minister and a candidate of the ruling Democratic Party, watches TVs broadcasting results of exit polls for the parliamentary election at the National Assembly in Seoul, Wednesday. AP-Yonhap



By Kim Yoo-chul





President Moon Jae-in, the ruling Democratic Party of Korea (DPK) and the Cheong Wa Dae economic team are expected to talk up the prospects of a rapid economic rebound from the COVID-19 pandemic as the results of the general election are expected to bolster his position, presidential aides and political analysts said Wednesday.



As the Korean president serves a single five-year term with no possibility of re-election, the results were "considered" crucial for Moon and the ruling DPK. Accordingly Moon doesn't appear to need to worry about entering "lame-duck" status for now as they will clearly give him a fresh impetus in pushing forward his economic agenda which had been stalled by the pandemic.






Blank Social Security checks are run through a printer at the U.S. Treasury printing facility in Philadelphia, Pa., on Feb. 11, 2005. (William Thomas Cain/Getty Images)

IRS Launches Get My Payment Stimulus Check Tracking Tool

The much-anticipated tool that tens of millions of Americans can use to track the status of their CCP virus stimulus payments from the federal government was launched on Wednesday morning.

The Internal Revenue Services (IRS) Get My Payment portal allows people to see when their money will be deposited or when a check will be mailed. The website will also confirm if the IRS will send the money in the mail or via a direct deposit.

A number of people were receiving a message on the IRS portal, saying: Due to high demand, you may have to wait longer than usual to access this site. We appreciate your patience. An Epoch Times reporter tested the website and was able to log in after an approximately 5-minute wait.

If you dont have direct deposit information on file with the IRS, you will be able to provide that information through the website.

You will also need to enter your Social Security Number, date of birth, and mailing address to access the website.

The Treasury Department earlier this week confirmed that more than 80 million people will begin to receive stimulus paymentspart of the $2.2 trillion bill passed by Congress last monthby Wednesday.

We are pleased that many Americans are receiving their Economic Impact Payments, said Treasury Secretary Steven T. Mnuchin in the release. This administration is delivering fast and direct economic assistance to hardworking Americans, and we hope these payments will bring them much-needed relief.

For those who did not file a tax return in 2018 or 2019, a separate online tool for non-filers to submit basic personal information has been provided.

Eligible Social Security beneficiaries and railroad retirement recipients who didnt file their taxes in 2018 or 2019 will automatically get their payments via direct deposits, according to the Treasury Departments release.

Regardless of how you receive your payment, the IRS will send you a mailed letter to the most current address they have on file approximately 15 days after it sends your payment, it said in a statement.

The stimulus package was passed and signed into law late last month in an attempt to offset economic losses suffered by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) virus outbreak in the United States. Governors across dozens of states have implemented stay-at-home orders and shuttered businesses and activities deemed nonessential, leading to millions of job losses and furloughs.

On Monday, President Donald Trump announced he will make a decision on reopening the U.S. economy after conferring with governors and other officials. Days before that, he admitted that reopening the economy will be the biggest decision of my life.

Staying at home leads to death also and it is very traumatic for this country but staying at home if you look at numbers that leads to a different kind of death. But it leads to death also. So, its a very big decision. As I say, its the biggest decision Ill ever make, Trump said last week during a daily briefing.
NEW YORK, April 15, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- Ready Capital Corporation (NYSE: RC) announced today that the Company's national Small Business Administration (SBA) lender, ReadyCap Lending, LLC, has obtained SBA approvals to fund in excess of $2 billion loans through the U.S. Small Business Administration's Paycheck Protection Program ("PPP Program"). Through the Coronavirus Aid, Relief and Economic Security Act ("CARES Act"), the initiative calls for existing SBA lenders to extend loans to small business to cover payroll, occupancy and operating expenses through the PPP Program. Furthermore, the PPP Program includes a 100% guarantee from the federal government for loans up to $10 million and principal forgiveness for borrowers if the funds are used primarily for retaining employees. Ready Capital, through its front-end technology embedded in its iBusiness Funding platform, helps small businesses by lending, not only to its existing clients, but also new applicants. Ready Capital started taking applications the first week of April and began funding of the PPP Program on Monday, April 13th. The Company will continue to fund approved loans over the upcoming weeks and is accepting applications at ppp.readycapital.com.

Thomas Capasse, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer said, "Ready Capital has fully dedicated its resources towards helping small businesses obtain this much needed capital to assist with difficulties due to COVID-19. We are proud to support our clients, who are the lifeblood of our business, and proud to be able to support all small business applicants, who are the lifeblood of this country. The government has done their part to make these funds available and it is our responsibility to get the funds into the hands of people who need it most. We estimate our efforts to date, will help to fund the payroll of approximately 200,000 individuals across the country."

About Ready Capital Corporation

Ready Capital Corporation (NYSE: RC) is a multi-strategy real estate finance company that originates, acquires, finances and services small- to medium-sized balance commercial loans. The Company specializes in loans backed by commercial real estate, including agency multifamily, investor and bridge as well as U.S. Small Business Administration loans under its Section 7(a) program. Headquartered in New York, New York, the Company employs over 400 lending professionals nationwide. The Company is externally managed and advised by Waterfall Asset Management, LLC.

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Ready Capital Corporation

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Ahram Online has compiled a list of some of the most important figures concerning Egypts capabilities and efforts to contain the spread of coronavirus.

-Egypt has 2,505 confirmed coronavirus cases nationwide, including 183 fatalities. The total number of recoveries from the virus so far stands at 553.

-To date, Egypt has 14 functioning quarantine hospitals, out of 30 hospitals have already been prepared for the current phase.

-The health ministry's quarantine hospitals have 2,241 beds and 407 ICU beds, and are equipped with 346 ventilators.

-The ministry has 56 fever and pulmonology hospitals that carry out triage and referral of coronavirus patients before they are taken to quarantine hospitals.

-The health ministry has 25 central laboratories nationwide to perform coronavirus tests.

-Till last week, Egypt has conducted 25,000 coronavirus tests and has increased its capacity to around 2,000 tests a day.

-The health ministry received 477,257 inquiries in March about the coronavirus pandemic through its 105 and 15335 hotlines through 300 operators, including English-speaking ones.

-The Armed Forces have 22 quarantine hospitals equipped with 3,700 beds, 300 ICU beds, and 140 ventilators.

-The military has also set up four mobile field hospitals, with 502 beds.

-The army has set up production lines for facemasks and protective suits with a capacity of 100,000 masks and 1,000 suits a day, while maintaining reserves of 5 million masks. Some 50,000 suits are planned to be produced.

-The higher education ministry has allocated 33 buildings to serve as isolation hospitals at the universities of Cairo, Alexandria, Ain Shams, Assiut, Mansoura, Minya, and Helwan as a first phase, with 5,828 rooms capable of serving 11,304 individuals.

-The cabinet has allocated EGP 2.3 billion to compensate the irregular and seasonal workers affected by the outbreak of the coronavirus, amounting to EGP 500 a month per individual.
Patients and medical workers wear personal protective equipment due to COVID-19 concerns outside the emergency room at NYU Langone Medical Center in New York City on April 13, 2020. (John Minchillo/AP Photo)

Idaho Governor Says Nonessential Businesses Can Open After April 30

Idaho Gov. Brad Little said nonessential businesses can prepare to reopen after the end of the month amid the CCP virus pandemic.

Little made the announcement on Wednesday as he extended the states stay-at-home order until April 30.

Believe me, no one wants to get Idaho back to work more than me, Little said in a news conference. But he stipulated that the state shouldnt reopen other parts of its economy yet because it would potentially allow for the resurgence of the virus.

Idaho will be better positioned for a strong economic comeback because we are making difficult changes in how we live and work in the short term, Little said. The statewide stay-home order is working to flatten the curve and slow the spread of coronavirus in Idaho, but the science tells us if you dont time these measures right, then we could worsen the outcome for citizens health and the economy weeks, or months down the road.

He said that services and businesses deemed nonessential can now offer curbside and delivery services between April 15 and April 30.

Any facility or service (including formerly non essential businesses) can begin to operate via curbside services, drive-in, drive-through pickup, mailed services or delivery services, said a post on the governors Facebook page.

The order still excludes businesses such as bars, gyms, event centers, and salons.

And starting on Wednesday, travelers who leave the state for nonessential business have to quarantine for 14 days when they return.

Rebounding to an economic recovery will require consumer confidence. Without therapeutics to treat symptoms of coronavirus, without a vaccine and without herd immunity, consumers want to know what businesses will adhere to strict practices to assure their health and safety, Little added in the news conference. We can expect to go through phases of loosening and tightening of these measures until we do. In the meantime, I will continue to push for expanded access to testing.

Little said he will reevaluate the stay-at-home order at the end of the month.

I want to thank the people of Idaho for doing an incredible job protecting their neighbors and themselves by following the statewide stay-home order. We are truly a state made up of people who care for each other, Little 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.
[April 15, 2020] On Tap Credit Union Supports the Community With Local Restaurant Gift Card Giveaways and Early Access to Stimulus Check Funds

On Tap Credit Union, a leader in providing consumers in local Colorado communities with innovative financial solutions for more than 60 years is continuing to support in times of success or hardship through a gift card giveaway campaign and creating financial hardship products to support our Members. Over the course of the next four weeks, On Tap will purchase over forty $25 gift cards from different local businesses in Golden or Arvada, Colorado and given to a family in need. In addition to local business support, the brand has been crafting new solutions for Members during this pandemic to offer some financial relief options, more here. These are two examples of how On Tap is continuing to foster a relationship with Members and the local community during this period of time. "Local businesses are the heart of our communities and while we are on pause from connecting in person due to COVID-19," said On Tap Credit Union President and CEO Tracie Wilcox. "We can still continue to drive support through gift card purchases, to-go ordering, and shopping local online. Now is the time for us to pay it forwrd and care for these communities in which we live and serve."



Credit unions were founded by an innate need to support one another without being denied a loan. At On Tap, we've continued that spirit in crafting solutions for our Members, especially during this pandemic. One relief program being offered to Members is the emergency relief loan to support those who need their stimulus checks now and can't wait until May. For more information on this program, visit our website here. At On Tap, we are proud to be Member-Owned which allows us to put our Members first and we'll continue to craft solutions that support members, local businesses and the community during this time.

Full sweepstakes for gift card giveaway terms and conditions are available here. About On Tap Credit Union Formerly Coors Credit Union, On Tap Credit Union is a full-service cooperative financial institution serving people living and working in Jefferson, Denver, Boulder and Larimer counties. Founded in 1954, the credit union has $317 million in assets and more than 20,000 members, who are also owners of the organization. The credit union provides personal consultation and financial products including vehicle, mortgage, and home equity loans, credit cards, insurance, savings and investment products, and financial guidance, as well as a full suite of business services including commercial lending. For more information, please visit www.OnTapCU.org. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20200415005144/en/

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Lisa Riley came under fire on Lorraine on Wednesday after she admitted she had moved households during the nationwide lockdown.

The Emmerdale star, 43, said she spent the first two weeks in Derry, Northern Ireland, before moving back home to Yorkshire after her fiance Al returned from America.

Viewers of the show soon flooded Twitter as they questioned if Lisa had just confessed to flouting official government guidelines, stating you should remain in your own household for the entire duration of lockdown.

From Derry to Yorkshire: Lisa Riley came under fire on Lorraine on Wednesday after she admitted she had moved households during the nationwide lockdown

Lisa told Lorraine: 'Lockdown's not too bad, it's how you cope with it. The first two weeks I was homeschooling my nieces and nephews in Derry and my other half ended up getting back from America so now we're back home together.

'I think it's all about giving each other space.'

While Lorraine appeared to glide over the fact Lisa said she switched households, viewers at home picked up on it.

One wrote on Twitter: 'Why did you not ask Lisa Riley whom gave her permission to move from one home in lockdown to another home. If she can why cant the many that are facing physical abuse'.

Flouting rules: The Emmerdale star, 43, said she spent the first two weeks in Derry, Northern Ireland, before moving back home to Yorkshire after her fiance Al returned from America

Moved? Lisa told Lorraine: 'Lockdown's not too bad, it's how you cope with it. The first two weeks I was homeschooling my nieces and nephews in Derry'

Another viewer added: 'Did I hear right? During last lockdown Lisa Riley spend two weeks with her brother and then back with her boyfriend. Thought that wasn't allowed'.

A third chimed: 'I've noticed @GMB like pulling people to account. Why has Lorraine Kelly just ignored the fact Lisa Riley has just said she spent 1st 2 weeks of lockdown in 1 property & now moved to another when her partner returns from USA?'.

'so Lisa Riley spent the first 2 weeks at a different house and went to shops to buy hair die is that not a problem...', another viewer typed.

Quarantine: Lisa told Lorraine: 'I think it's all about giving each other space'

Unimpressed: While Lorraine appeared to glide over the fact Lisa said she switched households, viewers at home picked up on it

Lisa also discussed how filming for Emmerdale has been halted due to government's advice for the nation to stay at home.

She said: 'We're going to have enough episodes to transmit until early summer, and we've got so much to offer! Mandy has got so much to offer at the moment.

'It's the wedding tonight! But will she make the wedding? Because Mandy lost her on a night out.'

Sad: The actress also said she lost her uncle to coronavirus

The actress also told Lorraine she lost her great-uncle to coronavirus.

'My beautiful uncle Bert he was 104, he had a fall at home and went into the hospital and became one of the statistics,' Lisa said.

'It's horrible we can't go to the funeral. But his favourite thing is a family bbq, so we'll all be getting together when this is over.'

During the interview, Lisa also admitted she was proud to show off her grey roots after being unable to visit a hairdressers.

She said: 'As a nation we need to share our silvers! That's my beautiful mother, she's given me her legacy. I won't be letting Al do my roots but I have got a box dye. Luckily at Emmerdale they do it for us, so I rang and asked what colour I was. '
This story was originally published on Nov. 22, 2019 in NYT Parenting.

In the bowels of Midtown Manhattan, a trio of embryos sit in a vat of liquid nitrogen. Theyre the genetic siblings of my sons, Jack and Charlie, the frozen fruits of an I.V.F. cycle completed in 2016  and I have no clue what to do with them.

These embryos  created from my eggs, my husbands sperm and a lot of our money  represent a tiny fraction of the estimated 620,000 cryopreserved embryos in the United States, according to the Health and Human Services Department. Many will be implanted in the hope of making more babies. But some remain stuck in limbo, dependent on people who are done building their families and now have an agonizing decision to make.

For those like me who are definitely done reproducing (two kids is plenty for us, thanks), there are three options: preserve, discard or donate. If theres any chance they would want them in the future, its better to hold onto them, says Dr. Briana Rudick, the director of Columbia University Fertility Centers Third-Party Reproduction Program, of a patients option for long-term preservation. You dont ever know what life is going to bring you. Some of her patients have donated embryos to friends  or returned for them after the loss of a child. (Cryopreserved embryos seem to be viable for decades. In 2017, a healthy baby girl was born from an embryo that had been frozen for 24 years.)

[Learn more about I.V.F. and how to bring down the cost of treatment.]

Another option is to thaw and discard them. Some patients find relief and closure this way, but Im not sure I can bring myself to destroy our hard-won embryos. Discarding seems so wasteful, when there are so many people who are in such need, says Dr. Craig R. Sweet, the medical director of Specialists in Reproductive Medicine and Surgery in Fort Myers, Fla., and the founder of Embryo Donation International, one of a small handful of non-faith-based and full-service embryo-donation programs in the United States.
WASHINGTON, D.C.  Airports across southern Oregon will receive an influx of more than $15 million in funding from the CARES Act as relief from the economic hit caused by the coronavirus pandemic, members of Oregon's Congressional delegation announced on Tuesday.

The funding for airports from the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act allows them to cover operating expenses that arise from a sharp decline in air travel and other economic losses in the wake of COVID-19.

The economic impact from this global pandemic has devastated airports in Oregon and nationwide, said Senator Ron Wyden. More federal help will be needed to support these key travel connections throughout Oregon, but I am gratified these resources are en route to ensure our states airports will continue running in communities that rely on them for travel, the transport of goods and more.

The lion's share of that funding, nearly $15.1 million, goes to the Rogue Valley International-Medford Airport.

Our aeronautical revenues seemed to have disappeared overnight, said Jerry Brienza, Airport Director for the Medford airport. This necessary funding will ensure that the airport remains open, operational, and safe. These funds will also be used to help retain employees and pay airport debt service.

According to Jackson County, construction was still set to begin on Monday of this week at the airport on a new passenger boarding bridge. That project is planned to go forward in four phases  beginning with the removal and repainting of aircraft pavement markings, followed by the pouring of a new foundation, moving the old loading bridge, and finally the installation of the new bridge.

Though Medford's airport received the majority of funding, a number of small airports across the region will receive some funding as well. Most  including the Ashland, Brookings, Illinois Valley, Chiloquin, Gold Beach, Grants Pass, Lake County, and Christmas Valley airports  will get between $20 and $30 thousand.

The Crater Lake-Klamath Regional Airport in Klamath Falls will receive a slightly larger sum at $69,000.

This relief funding is incredibly important to help Oregons airports, large and small, deal with the economic impacts of the coronavirus outbreak, said Senator Jeff Merkley. These assets are economic hubs for communities across our state, and we need to make sure they have the resources they need to get to the other side of this crisis.

Throughout the state of Oregon, airports will receive more than $140 million in relief grants. The Portland International Airport accounts for $72.3 million on its own.
The Ruby Princess has been ordered to leave Australian waters by Sunday, as police investigate whether the ship's senior staff were ordered to downplay the coronavirus risk on board.

The cruise liner is docked at Port Kembla on the New South Wales south coast with about 1,000 crew members on board.

Nearly 3,000 passengers were on March 19 allowed to disembark the ship in Sydney without health checks, before dispersing across the country in a calamitous blunder that border authorities blame on NSW Health.

More than 600 passengers have since been diagnosed with coronavirus and 19 people have died. The ship is the biggest single source of COVID-19 infection in Australia.

NSW Police Commissioner Mick Fuller on Wednesday said Ruby Princess wouldn't be docked at Port Kembla much longer.

The Ruby Princess luxury cruise liner docked in Port Kembla on the New South Wales south coats on Sunday

NSW Police Commissioner Michael Fuller said he wants the ship gone by Sunday

'Ive drawn a line in the sand and I want this ship gone by Sunday,' he told The Australian.

Investigators are questioning staff on board the ship on whether they were pressured to downplay the sickness of passengers before it docked in Sydney.

'What pressure may or may not have been on captains and on doctors, that would be crucial to the criminal investigation and the commission of inquiry,' Mr Fuller said.

The probe comes after an ACT woman in her 60s died from COVID-19 in Canberra Hospital on Thursday after being on the vessel.

There are currently 140 cases of coronavirus on the boat, with 1,056 crew in quarantine.

The crew are reportedly running out of water on board, with staff members asked to take shorter showers to conserve supplies

'Otherwise, we come into a situation that we cannot supply you water to take that shower,' the crew were told via a PA announcement, according to The Daily Telegraph

Probes put spotlight on Ruby Princess fiasco THE INQUIRIES INTO THE RUBY PRINCESS CORONAVIRUS SCANDAL CRIMINAL INVESTIGATION: * Announced on April 5 by NSW Police Commissioner Mick Fuller. * NSW Police homicide squad to investigate how cruise line operator Carnival Australia was permitted to disembark passengers in Sydney. * Evidence to be gathered from the ship, interviewing of witnesses and looking into hundreds of calls made to CrimeStoppers to determine whether national biosecurity laws and state laws were broken. * Actions of the port authority, ambulance, police, NSW Health and Carnival Australia will be examined. * Six-month long investigation due to report to the NSW premier in September. NSW GOVERNMENT SPECIAL COMMISSION OF INQUIRY: * Announced on April 15 by Premier Gladys Berejiklian. * Led by barrister Bret Walker SC who has been granted unlimited powers. * Examining the ship's departure, arrival and the role of all relevant NSW and federal agencies, as well as cruise ship operator Carnival Cruises. * Will receive all relevant information already garnered by NSW Police. * Due to report back to the NSW premier by mid-August. POTENTIAL CORONIAL INQUEST: * The 19 deaths associated with the Ruby Princess cruise ship as at April 15 have been reported to the NSW state coroner. * No decision has been made about whether an inquest will be held. Advertisement

Crew on board the Ruby Princess in Port Kembla, on April 6. There are currently 140 cases of coronavirus on the boat, with 1,056 crew in quarantine

NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian announced a special commission of inquiry into the Ruby Princess's arrival in Sydney.

The ship was declared 'low risk' before arrival by NSW Health officials based on the Human Health report of passengers on board.

Ms Berejiklian vowed to leave 'no stone unturned' in the inquiry, surrounding the events which allowed the ship to dock unchecked.

Princess Cruises president Jan Swartz supported the inquiry.

'This commission of inquiry is an opportunity for all to learn from this tragic event,' she said in a statement.

'There are no doubt important lessons to be learned.'
Its an indication how you can spend a relatively small amount of money and have an impact, a grass-roots impact, he said, adding: Republicans will act at their peril, both the president and people at the state level, if they employ tactics to deny people the opportunity to vote in a way that is safe for them and safe for their communities. I think that will drive turnout up. They will find ways to vote.
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America greatly stands to benefit from a universal face mask policy that mandates face coverings in public. Understandably, adoption of such a policy raises concerns, including:

Universal public masking will come with an exaggerated sense of security, loosening peoples social distancing practices.

Not everyone will use masks correctly, making their efforts counterproductive.

Part of a national universal mask policy should include efforts to educate the public. Government officials should begin by wearing masks themselves, especially in press and media appearances, to lessen stigmas and display correct mask usage. Authorities should additionally provide accessible instructions on how to wear masks while emphasizing the continued importance of social distancing. This could be achieved by promoting existing material from leading medical experts on social media, such as videos on proper mask wearing, and highlighting social distancing campaigns. Alternatively, the CDC could continue producing their own videos, as was done by Singapores Ministry of Health, or partner with celebrities to gain a wider reach with vulnerable populations. Ultimately, public education must be a key facet in successfully implementing a universal mask policy.

Universal public masking will deplete already dwindling PPE stores.

The CDC has promoted the publics use of cotton face masks that can easily be made at home with materials around the house. As a public alternative to those used in clinical settings, cotton masks stand to increase the PPE available to health care workers, as they reduce the need for home stores of surgical masks and N95s.

And dont forget  America has yet to uncover the cotton masks potential in the world of fashion. Consumerism handling the reigns of a cotton mask trend shows great promise in making masks both popular and accessible. This way, the government doesnt have to be the only body encouraging more healthy, unexposed citizens to wear cotton masks in order to save PPE for health care professionals.

Shuhan He, ER physician and co-founder of GetUsPPE.org, shares these sentiments. I want every consumer company to make and sell masks for every man, woman, and child, he says. I want masks with Gucci and Nike and in purple and red and gold and designs of every flavor, as long as it gets people to wear a mask. A universal mask policy could set the foundation for this trend, giving manufacturers the consumer base needed to change culture through clout.

Universal public masking could negatively affect vulnerable populations.

In the time of social distancing, working from home is a privilege. The well-off are employed in industries where they are at a desk, says Adie Tomer, a fellow at the Brookings Institution. Mobility data from metro areas nationwide has shown that COVID-19 is not an equal opportunity pathogen, hurting those for whom staying at home means sacrificing income. Low-income essential workers largely fall into this category.

While a universal mask mandate has the potential to greatly benefit the bottom 10 percent, concerns remain regarding equal access to information. If the CDCs recommendation for cotton masks is not properly broadcasted, a universal mask policy could accidentally trigger the unnecessary purchasing of surgical masks at obscene markups, a financial barrier to a citys poorest residents. Public masking campaigns should include celebrities popular with diverse groups, and should be available in multiple languages. Every American household should know how to attain a few reusable cotton face masks with reasonable ease.

Additionally, if police are chosen to enforce the policy, racial minorities stand to face a disproportionate risk of being targeted for harassment and fines. Racial profiling could label minorities as essential workers, leading them to be perceived as greater threats than their white counterparts due to increased public exposure. Some black Americans also express concerns regarding the CDCs recommendation to wear a bandana, as black men may fit the description for a gang member.

Ultimately, a universal mask policy holds enormous potential, but only if these nuances are addressed.

Varsha Venkatakrishna is a medical student and is affiliated with #GetUsPPE.

Image credit: Shutterstock.com
Tyler Pletsch | The Intelligencer

EDWARDSVILLE  State Sen. Jason Plummer, R-Edwardsville, is urging Gov. J.B. Pritzker to act as quickly as possible to get unemployment benefits to independent contractors, self-employed individuals and others who do not normally qualify for unemployment benefits but are being hurt by this shutdown.

Self-employed gig workers, according to ADP Research Institute, make up 18 percent of Illinois workforce. Under the recently signed federal stimulus law, these gig workers are now eligible for unemployment benefits, and states must modify their websites in order to review these claims. Unfortunately, no modification has been made to the Illinois Department of Employment Securitys (IDES) website. Therefore, no claims can be submitted.
Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, April 15)  Graduation rites in the country will be postponed indefinitely due to the extension of the enhanced community quarantine and government's restriction on mass gatherings, the Education Department said Wednesday.

"The graduation and moving up rites in basic education throughout the country is postponed indefinitely," the DepEd said in its advisory.

Citing Department Order 02 and Department Memorandum 42, the DepEd said that schools, in consultation with the Parent-Teachers Association leadership, can schedule or forego the holding of the ceremonies once the community quarantine in their respective areas have been lifted.

It clarified that those who would still insist on pushing through with the ceremonies after the lifting of the quarantine in their areas must strictly follow physical distancing protocol from the Department of Health.

"If holding the rites will push through, DOH guidelines on mass gatherings must be observed," the DepEd said.

Education Secretary Leonor Briones, who herself had just recovered from COVID-19, initially scheduled the end-of-school year rites on April 13 to 17, with emphasis on physical distancing measures for all schools.

Majority of the scheduled programs of the DepEd, including preparations for school openings, have already been put on hold due to the enhanced community quarantine.

President Rodrigo Duterte placed the entire Luzon under lockdown on March 17. The quarantine, which was supposed to end at midnight of April 13, was then extended until April 30 as the government continues to address the COVID-19 crisis. Some other areas outside Luzon have also temporarily shut down their borders or imposed a lockdown to contain the virus.

There are now 5,223 COVID-19 cases in the Philippines with 335 deaths. A total of 295 people have already recovered from the infection.
While over 80 million Americans are expected to receive a stimulus deposit by the end of this week, some Americans could see a delay for their paper checks after the Treasury Department ordered that President Donald Trumps name to be included on the printed checks.

Chad Hooper, national president of the IRS-founded Professional Managers Association (PMA), told Yahoo Money that "reprogramming historically has led to delays. Our team at IRS always works very diligently to mitigate and minimize those delays.

Mark Everson, a former IRS Commissioner and now the vice chairman of alliantgroup, said that this addition would qualify as a programming change that requires testing.

Read more: Coronavirus stimulus check scams: How to avoid becoming a victim

Anytime you have more changes from what youve done before, youve got to test it, Everson told Yahoo Money. So by definition, it involves time. The difficulty of that task is compounded by the fact that theyre not fully staffed [because] theyre not in the office doing a lot of this work. Theyre stretched in the technology area and theyre under a tight timeline.

The design is scheduled to be delivered to the Bureau of Fiscal Service for printing and issuing on Thursday morning. The Treasury denied that the checks will be delayed.

The checks are scheduled to go out on time and exactly as planned  there is absolutely no delay whatsoever, a Treasury spokeswoman told Yahoo Money, noting the first checks will be mailed early next week.

U.S. President Donald Trump displays a signed National Security Presidential Memorandum in the Oval Office February 7, 2019 in Washington, DC. (Photo by Win McNamee/Getty Images)

However, two members of the PMA with direct knowledge of the situation told Hooper that this would lead to a delay.

They were not able to speak to the expected duration, Hooper said. In that sense, the Treasurys position that there will not be a delay is plausible. The situation is fluid and our team works around the clock to try to make changes which would mitigate impact.

President Trump accused of causing delay to feed his ego

The first batch of printed checks is expected to arrive by April 24. If theyre delayed, it may be only the first ones that are impacted because the paper checks will be issued weekly, according to Hooper.

Story continues

The Washington Post first reported the request to add President Trumps signature.

The presidents printed name will appear on the left side of the paper check, the first time a presidents name will be printed on an IRS disbursement, according to the Posts reporting. Various parties in D.C. are not happy with the move.

Read more: Coronavirus stimulus check: How to get one if you dont file your taxes

Its outrageous, we already know that folks who are not in the system for electronic deposit will have to wait longer to get their check sent in the mail to them, Sen. Gary Peters (D-MI) told Yahoo Money. Now that hes adding his name those checks will be delayed further.

A spokesperson for the Ways and Means Committee told Yahoo Money that the committee was not consulted about this, and we do not want the checks to be delayed for a second to add the signature.

Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon, the top Democrat on the Finance Committee, asserted to the New York Times that Donald Trump is further delaying cash payments to millions of Americans struggling to pay the rent and put food on the table to feed his ego.

Stimulus checks are printed at the Kansas City Regional Financial Center in Kansas City, Mo., Thursday, May 8, 2008. (AP Photo/Orlin Wagner)

Read more: How to file taxes: The full breakdown

As part of a $2 trillion coronavirus relief package, many Americans will get government checks up to $1,200  plus $500 per child  to help them ride out a job loss, reduced work hours, and other money challenges as the country tries to stem the pandemic.

Heres everything you need to know about the stimulus check.

Who gets a stimulus check?

Our updated estimate is that 93.6% of [tax] filers will have a rebate, Garrett Watson, senior policy analyst at The Tax Foundation, said. And this works out to approximately 140 million households.

Your eligibility is based on your most recent tax return and your adjusted gross income. If you already filed your 2019 taxes, your eligibility will be based on that. If not, the IRS will use your 2018 taxes to determine if you qualify.

The benefit is available not only to those who have filed taxes, but also to those who receive Social Security benefits as long as theyve received their SSA-1099 or RB-1099 forms.

Read more: Tax deadline postponed: Why you should still file as soon as you can

Single adults with income up to $75,000 will get a $1,200 payment. Married couples with income up to $150,000 will get $2,400. Single parents who file as head of household with income up to $112,500 will get the full $1,200 check.

And, Americans who qualify for the stimulus payment and have children will get an additional $500 per child under 17.

Reduced checks will be available for single adults who earn between $75,001 and $99,000 and married couples who earn between $150,001 and $198,000. The check will be reduced by $5 for every $100 over $75,000 for single adults and $150,000 for married couples.

An unidentified printer looks over stimulus checks at the Kansas City Regional Financial Center in Kansas City, Mo., Thursday, May 8, 2008. (AP Photo/Orlin Wagner)

Who doesn't get a check?

Single adults who make more than $99,000 and married couples who earn more than $198,000 wont receive stimulus checks.

Those without a Social Security number and nonresident aliens  those who arent a U.S. citizen or U.S. national and dont have a green card or have not passed the substantial presence test  arent eligible.

Youre also ineligible if your parents claim you as a dependent on their taxes.

How will the government send you the stimulus check?

The IRS will use the direct deposit information you provided from the taxes youve filed either for 2019 or for 2018.

If you have no direct deposit information on file or if the account provided is now closed, the IRS will mail you a check, instead.

When will the stimulus check arrive? It depends.

Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said at a White House briefing on April 2, that those Americans who have signed up for direct deposit will receive their payment within two weeks.

Social Security, youll get it very quickly after that, Mnuchin said. If we dont have your information, youll have a simple web portal, youll upload it. If we dont have that, well send you checks in the mail.

The payments will be deposited directly into your bank account if you received your last tax refund or expect to receive this years refund that way.

Otherwise, checks will be mailed, which could take longer to get to Americans. Adding to the complications, about 6% of U.S. adults  or about 12 million Americans  do not have a checking, savings, or other bank account, according to a 2018 Federal Reserve report.

The New York Times, citing IRS guidelines that detail how Americans who arent usually required to file tax returns will need to do so to receive payments, noted the guidance will almost certainly mean longer waits for those who must file new returns to be eligible to receive a stimulus payment.

Americans with the lowest income will get mailed checks first, according to reporting by the Washington Post. Heres the timetable for the first checks, per IRS documents seen by the Post:

Taxpayers with income up to $10,000: April 24

Taxpayers with income up to $20,000: May 1

Taxpayers with income up to $40,000: May 15

The rest of the checks will be issued by gradually increasing income increments each week. Households earning $198,000 who file jointly will get their reduced checks on Sept. 4. The last group of checks will be sent on Sept. 11 to those who didnt have tax information on file and had to apply for checks, according to the Washington Post.

How can those who dont file taxes get a payment?

Americans who dont usually file taxes can register to get their stimulus aid checks on IRS website or use Turbotaxs free tool to file a minimum tax return.

TurboTaxs tool helps determine if youre eligible for the stimulus payment. If eligible, you need to answer a few questions and choose whether to get the payment though direct deposit or check.

There are as many as 10 million Americans who are not required to file a tax return, TurboTax said in a statement. Because the IRS will use the federal tax return to determine and send individual stimulus payments, these individuals are at risk of not receiving their stimulus payment.

Social Security recipients and those required to file tax returns dont need to provide additional information, but still must meet the eligibility criteria to get a payment.

U.S Treasurer Anna Escobedo Cabral, right, thanks workers at the San Francisco Regional Financial Center for their efforts in the printing of stimulus check in Emeryville, Calif., Thursday, May 8, 2008. (AP Photo/Eric Risberg)

Can you track the payment?

Yes. Those who are still waiting can track it online. Americans will also be able to provide the Internal Revenue Service with their direct deposit information if its not on file with the agency.

If you do not receive them by Wednesday, youll be able to put in your direct deposit information, and within several days, we will automatically deposit the money into your account, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said on Monday. We want to do as much of this electronically as we can.

The agency expects to release an online Get My Payment tool on its website by the end of the week that tracks the status of your stimulus check. The tool will let people follow the scheduled payment date for either a direct deposit or mailed check.

The tool will also allow people to provide their bank account details to get their payment by direct deposit versus waiting for a mailed check, which dont go out until the end of April. If you filed a tax return in 2018 or 2019 but didnt provide direct deposit information, youll be able to identify yourself, input that banking information, and receive the payment in several days in your account, according to Mnuchin.

Do you have to pay back the stimulus check?

No. The stimulus payment is actually a refundable credit against your 2020 tax liability, according to Kyle Pomerleau of the American Enterprise, and is paid out as an advanced refund. That means you dont have to wait to file your 2020 taxes to get the money.

It also doesnt reduce any refund you would otherwise receive, Watson said.

In fact, if you dont qualify for the stimulus check now based on your 2018 or 2019 tax returns, you may be able to qualify to take the tax credit next year when you file your 2020 taxes if your income meets the thresholds.

Jessica Smith and Ben Werschkul contributed reporting.

Denitsa is a writer for Yahoo Finance and Cashay, a new personal finance website. Follow her on Twitter @denitsa_tsekova.

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Places once thought to be safe now feel increasingly dangerous, residents say: Hundreds of thousands of Burkinabes who have fled the violence are squeezing together in cramped quarters just as they are supposed to be sheltering apart  and police are enforcing dusk-to-dawn curfews with whips and automatic weapons.
GANDHINAGAR: The Gujarat government on Wednesday (April 15, 2020) rejected media reports which claimed that there are separate wards for patients of different religions in Civil Hospital in Ahmedabad treating COVID-19 patients.

The Gujarat Health and Family Welfare Department took to Twitter and said, These reports are absolutely baseless.

Some reports have appeared in the media that there are separate wards for patients of different religions in Civil Hospital Ahmedabad COVID hospital. These reports are absolutely baseless.  GujHFWDept (@GujHFWDept) April 15, 2020

It further clarified that the patients are kept in different wards based on their medical condition, the severity of the symptoms and age, purely based on the advice of treating doctors.

Therefore, reports appeared in certain media are totally baseless and misleading, it said in a tweet.

Patients are kept in different wards based on their medical condition, severity of the symptoms and age, purely based on the advice of treating Doctors.

Therefore, reports appeared in certain media are totally baseless and misleading.@CMOGuj @civilhospamd @InfoGujarat  GujHFWDept (@GujHFWDept) April 15, 2020

The clarification came amid reports that coronavirus cases in Gujarat rose to 695 as 56 more people were found infected with the disease on Wednesday.

Of the new cases, 42 were reported from Ahmedabad, six from Surat, three each from Vadodara and Panchmahal, and each from Botad and Kheda, it said.

With this, the total number of coronavirus cases in Ahmedabad has gone up to 404, followed by Vadodara-116, the health department said.

Botad and Kheda districts reported the first coronavirus cases on Wednesday.

With 1,076 new COVID-19 cases reported in the last 24 hours, India`s tally of coronavirus cases rose to 11,439, said the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare on Wednesday.

Out of the total cases, 9,756 cases are active while 1,306 patients have been cured/discharged and migrated. Thirty-eight new deaths were reported in the last 24 hours, pushing the death toll to 377.
Amid the coronavirus lockdown, if a person is facing crisis, he/she can withdraw a certain amount from Employees' Provident Fund (EPF), the government of India said on March 26.

The amendment in rules has been notified by the government for the coronavirus-related need for withdrawal of money from EPF accounts. An EPF member can withdraw up to 75 percent of EPF account balance or three months basic wages or the amount that person actually needs, whichever is lower, according to the amended rules.

Coronavirus India News LIVE Updates

How can a person is eligible to apply for EPF withdrawal

An EPF account holder should follow three things to apply for claim online:

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

a) Universal Account Number (UAN) of the EPF member must be activated

b) Aadhaar should be verified and linked with UAN

c) Bank account of the EPF member with IFSC Code should be seeded with UAN.

Also read: Coronavirus pandemic | EPFO settles 1.37 lakh PF withdrawal claims worth Rs 280cr



Visit the member e-Sewa website

Log in by entering your UAN, password and captcha code.

Visit Online services and select claim option (Form -31, 19,10C and 10D)

A new page will appear on screen with all information such as name, date of birth, and last four digits of Aadhaar number. The page will also show bank account details. Enter the last four digits of the bank account and click on verify. A pop-up will appear on your screen asking you to give a 'Certificate of undertaking'.

Once the last four digits of bank account are verified, then click on 'Proceed for online claim'.



From the drop down menu, you will be required to select 'PF advance (Form 31)'.

You will be required to select purpose of withdrawal as 'Outbreak of pandemic (COVID-19)' from the drop down menu.

Enter the amount required and upload the scanned copy of cheque and enter your address.

A one-time password (OTP) will be sent on your mobile number registered with Aadhaar.

Enter the OTP received by you via SMS.



Once the OTP is successfully submitted, the claim request will also be submitted. The money will be credited to your bank account only if the details match and your claim is accepted by the EPFO.

Also read: COVID-19: How much can you withdraw from your EPF?

Checking the status of claim

EPF member can log in to his/her account on the Member e-Sewa portal anf there check the status by clicking on 'Track Claim status' under the 'online services' tab.

Remember things while applying

While applying for withdrawal, check whether the organisation is exempted. If the organisation is exempted, then EPF members will have to contact the employer for the withdrawal. Exempted organisations are those having private trusts to manage the EPF of employees.

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[April 15, 2020] Blis Launches New 'Habits to Home Targeting' Product in Response to COVID-19 to Help Advertisers Deliver Personalised Ads to Entire Households at Scale

NEW YORK, April 15, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- Blis, the trusted location-powered advertising and analytics partner, today announced the launch of a new product, Habits to Home Targeting, created to help brands adapt their advertising for a 'stay at home' COVID world. The new product combines Blis' accurate historical audience targeting data, largely from pre-COVID consumer behaviours, with a new proprietary technology designed to identify and reach entire households at scale. Blis Habits to Home Targeting, the newest in its suite of Activation offerings, can deliver personalised ads across multiple devices in the home. It combines consented historical location behaviours, collected over the past six months, with Blis' new proprietary Smart Households technology. The new product provides brands with an opportunity to connect and reach all consumers residing in a household. At a time when fewer purchase decisions are being made outside the home, shared habits can influence preferences and buying behaviours. Greg Isbister, CEO of Blis said, "At Blis, we use mobile location data to help brands understand, reach and engage consumers globally. But right now, with many people around the world impacted by lockdowns, the usual methods of reaching consumers are also restricted. Foot traffic to stores and leisure destinations worldwid has seen a significant decline, -82% in the UK alone, but mobile usage and media consumption at home is increasing at an astounding rate. Habits to Home Targeting is an agile solution to a pressing problem faced by many advertisers during this crisis. Using historical behaviours, we can reach whole households at scale and help brands connect with all involved in the decision making within a home."



Where possible, people are currently working from home, leaving only for essential travel and usually making trips to stores alone, rather than in groups. Understanding which stores users visit, and when, is key, and reaching an entire household based on historic location behaviours means brands can deliver highly relevant and effective communication to a receptive audience. As with all Blis location data, Habits to Home Targeting is powered by a rich, consented dataset that adheres to the rigorous standards of GDPR and CCPA.

Isbister continued, "In times of economic struggle, marketing is often the first budget line to be cut. Taking a long-term view and focusing efforts on brand-building is critical for our entire industry to adapt to this challenge and survive. We're seeing brands really take a considered approach towards pivoting their messaging, and Habits to Home Targeting will help ensure that they reach the community of people within a household that will be impacted by any purchasing decisions made on their behalf." About Blis Blis is the trusted leader in location-powered advertising and analytics, helping brands understand, reach and engage consumers globally to deliver measurable results. Because location data is the most accurate indicator of 'real' behaviour and intent at scale vs any other type of data, Blis uses this data to map real-world consumer behaviours based on where people are and where they've been, uncovering the truth about what people actually do. Blis' Smart Platform provides unmatched transparency, accuracy and scale. Its three tried and tested proprietary technologies  Smart Pin, Smart Scale, Smart Places and new Smart Households  allow for more effective planning, activation and measurement for marketers and business decision makers alike. Established in the UK in 2004, Blis now operates in 42 offices across five continents. Working with the world's largest and most customer-driven companies across all verticals including Unilever, Samsung, McDonald's, HSBC, Mercedes Benz and Peugeot, as well as every major media agency, Blis reaches over a billion mobile devices a year. To learn more, visit blis.com. Logo: https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/1155210/Blis_Logo.jpg CONTACT: For further information, please contact: Blis: Marian Brannelly; [email protected] SOURCE Blis

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Quigley said with unemployment growing, the sooner that project could go out for bid, the better it would be for the local economy.

Shutt indicated the bid request would be issued May 26, which he suggested was the earliest possible date because of federal funding tied to the work. He also reminded Quigley that a drainage project around Fredonia would be bid on May 12, which could also offer work to local contractors.

The board approved the plans and specifications for the Indian Slough project.

The supervisors also recognized several county officials for landmark years of service awards.

Those honored included Katie Hammond for serving 20 years with the conservation board as well as a trio of members of the secondary roads department: Chad Grimm, 20 years; Joellen Schantz, 25 years; and Don Garrett, 25 years.

Because of the COVID-19 restrictions, none of the service certificates were presented during the meeting.

The board also met with Veterans Affairs Director Adam Caudle for his monthly update. Caudle said office calls and other work in March had been steady but had dropped off as more COVID-19 restrictions were implemented.
Overnight conditions deteriorated. We got some snow. Some icy conditions on the expressway. Vehicles driving at high rates of speed caused the accident, Deputy District Fire Chief John Giordano told reporters at the scene. It caused an effect where vehicles couldnt stop behind them because of the high speeds they were traveling, and thus the amount of vehicles we have at this time.
U.S. President Donald Trump listens during a meeting with healthcare executives, in the Cabinet Room of the White House, Tuesday, April 14, 2020, in Washington. AP



U.S. President Donald Trump said Tuesday that he was cutting off U.S. payments to the World Health Organization during the coronavirus pandemic, accusing the organization of failing to do enough to stop the virus from spreading when it first surfaced in China.



Trump, who had telegraphed his intentions last week, claimed the outbreak could have been contained at its source and that lives could have been saved had the U.N. health agency done a better job investigating the early reports coming out of China.



''The WHO failed in its basic duty and must be held accountable,'' Trump said at a briefing. He said the U.S. would be reviewing the WHO's actions to stop the virus before making any decision on resuming aid.



There was no immediate comment from the Geneva-based organization on Trump's announcement. But when asked about possible U.S. funding cuts during a regular U.N. briefing earlier Tuesday, WHO spokeswoman Margaret Harris responded, ''Regardless of any issues, our work will go on.''



Trump said the U.S. will continue to engage with the WHO in pursuit of ''meaningful reforms.''



The United States contributed nearly $900 million to the WHO's budget for 2018-19, according to information on the agency's website. That represents one-fifth of its total $4.4 billion budget for those years. The U.S. gave nearly three-fourths of the funds in ''specified voluntary contributions'' and the rest in ''assessed'' funding as part of Washington's commitment to U.N. institutions.



A more detailed WHO budget document provided by the U.S. mission in Geneva showed that in 2019, the United States provided $452 million, including nearly $119 million in assessed funding. In its most recent budget proposal from February, the Trump administration called for slashing the U.S. assessed funding contribution to the WHO to $57.9 million.



More than 125,000 deaths worldwide, including more than 25,000 in the U.S., have been blamed on the coronavirus, according to Johns Hopkins University.



Last week, Trump blasted the WHO for being ''China-centric'' and alleging that it had ''criticized'' his ban on travel from China as the COVID-19 outbreak was spreading from the city of Wuhan.



The WHO generally takes care not to criticize countries on their national policies, and it was not immediately clear what specific criticism Trump was alluding to.



Trump himself showed deference to China at the beginning stages of the outbreak.



''China has been working very hard to contain the Coronavirus,'' he tweeted Jan. 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!''



Asked Tuesday about the appropriateness of seeking to cut the WHO's funding in the middle of a worldwide viral outbreak, Trump said the review would last 60 to 90 days.



''This is an evaluation period, but in the meantime, we're putting a hold on all funds going to World Health,'' Trump said.



Trump has also complained that other countries give substantially less than the U.S., singling out China.



The American Medical Association immediately called on Trump to reconsider his decision.



''During the worst public health crisis in a century, halting funding to the World Health Organization is a dangerous step in the wrong direction that will not make defeating COVID-19 easier,'' AMA President Patrice A. Harris said in a statement.



Harris said international cooperation is needed to fight the virus, along with science and data.



''Cutting funding to the WHO, rather than focusing on solutions, is a dangerous move at a precarious moment for the world,'' she said.



For most people, the coronavirus causes mild or moderate symptoms, such as fever and cough, that clear up in two to three weeks. But it can cause more severe illness, including pneumonia, and death for some people, especially older adults and people with existing health problems. The vast majority of people recover. (AP)


The first person in the world to receive the CCP virus vaccine described getting the shot.

Jennifer Haller, a 44-year-old mother of two from Seattle, told The Telegraph that the vaccine was comparable to the regular flu shot but said the test had a ton of risks. Haller said she responded to a request posted on Facebook for volunteers to partake in the trial for the vaccine.

Even at that time we were all feeling so helpless, she added. There was nothing I could do to stop this global pandemic. Then I saw this opportunity come up and thought: Well, maybe there is something I can do to contribute.

Hallers family had expressed concerns about her getting the vaccine after she underwent a number of medical tests just to get it.

She was injected on March 16, as it was reported by The Associated Press. A doctor injected her with the experimental vaccine, named mRNA-1273, making her arm sore, NPR reported.

Besides that, [there were] no side effects, she said. I wanted to do something because theres so many millions of Americans that dont have the same privileges that Ive been given, added Haller, who now works from home. Theyre losing their jobs. They are concerned about paying bills, feeding their family.

Haller, according to the report, said she had to sign a 45-page waiver to enroll in the vaccine trial.

The injection was developed by the U.S. National Institutes of Health and the Massachusetts-based biotechnology company Moderna Inc.

During the trial, which is run by Seattles Kaiser Permanente Washington Health Research Institute, participants get two doses of the vaccine 28 days apart before officials monitor the patients for a year, according to reports.

There were a ton of risks involved. But Im a real positive person and the benefits of this far outweighed any risks in my mind, Haller was quoted by the Telegraph as saying. Forty-four other adults joined her in the trial.

After receiving the shot, Haller said she had to keep a log for two weeks.

The first day I had a slightly elevated temperature, she said. The second day my arm was pretty sore. But that was iteverything was all right after that.

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.

From The Epoch Times
The family of Nana Osei Boansi Kuffour, the deceased father of Ghanaian musician, Bice Obour Osei Kuffour, has begun to raise concerns after reports came out that health workers who took care of their late father tested negative of COVID-19.

A statement signed by the family pointed out their misgivings about the press statement released by the Management of the Ridge Hospital to announce the health workers had tested negative to COVID-19.

We find it strange and unfortunatethat an institution the size of the Greater Accra Regional Hospital will wrongly communicate the date of death of a patient to the public. Our beloved Nana Osei Boansi Kuffuor died on Friday, March 27th, 2020 and not on Thursday, March 26th as stated in the media release, the statement from the family insisted.

They also challenged the hospital to release the autopsy report of Nana Osei Boansi Kuffour.

We also find it strange that the Greater Accra Regional Hospital, through that press statement deliberately sought to paint a picture that makes it appear that our late father died from the dreaded COVID-19 and needlessly exposed people along the line. The statement issued by the GARH stated categorically that the deceased tested positive after his death. Does it mean that he did not test positive before his death? Does it mean that he was only tested after his death? they further stated.

With regard to the autopsy report, the family seeks to know why the Hospital has been unable to share the cause of death of Nana Kuffour as has been requested by their lawyers and family leadership.

It is instructive to note finally, that all family members who were exposed to the late Nana Osei Boansi Kuffuor have all tested negative. Family members including his wife and other very close associates who were also exposed to him have also tested negative. The health personnel from the Greater Accra Regional Hospital have also tested negative as stated in the Media Release sent out by the Management of the Hospital. So then, did our late father really die of COVID-19 as the public has been made to believe?, the family added.

Obour said his father initially tested positive for malaria upon his return from the United Kingdom on March 19.

He said his family later arranged for his father to be tested for COVID-19 at the Greater Accra Regional Hospital (Ridge Hospital) after his condition got worse and was transferred there from his hometown.

Reports say after his death, the COVID-19 test results ran on him showed that he was positive.

--citinewsroom
K-State student newspaper, yearbook and magazine staffers earn state media honors

Wednesday, April 15, 2020

Collegian Media Group students earned 29 individual awards and the Kansas State Collegian, Royal Purple yearbook and Manhappenin' magazine earned All-Gold Kansas ratings from Kansas Collegiate Media.





MANHATTAN  The Kansas State Collegian, 2019 Royal Purple yearbook and Manhappenin' magazine, all part of Kansas State University's Collegian Media Group, all received Gold All-Kansas ratings from Kansas Collegiate Media. The Gold All-Kansas rating is the highest given by the association, which is composed of student media representing both the two and four-year schools in Kansas.

Collegian Media Group students also earned 29 individual awards. The Collegian Media Group is part of the A.Q. Miller School of Journalism and Mass Communications in the College of Arts and Sciences.



The following students earned awards from Kansas Collegiate Media:



Alex Todd, fall 2018 bachelor's graduate in information systems, Andover, first place in news/event photography, first place in sports/action photography and honorable mention in sports/action photography, all for the Royal Purple; Katelin Woods, senior in theatre and mass communications, Clearwater, third place in special section and honorable mention in social media storytelling, both for the Kansas State Collegian; Bailey Britton, sophomore in mass communications and English, Colby, first place in news/event writing, Kansas State Collegian; Rafael Garcia, May 2019 bachelor's graduate in mass communications, Emporia, first place in news/event writing, Kansas State Collegian.



From Greater Kansas City: Olivia Rogers, senior in political science, Gardner, honorable mention in social media storytelling, Kansas State Collegian; Mary Beth Karlin, sophomore in pre-professional elementary education, Lenexa, second place in feature writing, Manhappenin' magazine; Mackenzie Smith, December 2019 bachelor's graduate in apparel and textiles, Olathe, first place in bare feature photos, Manhappenin' magazine; Hallie Everett, sophomore in mass communications, Overland Park, first place in news event writing, Royal Purple; Madi Fleming, freshman in interior design, Overland Park, second place in feature writing, Manhappenin' magazine; Julie Freijat, sophomore in mass communications, Overland Park, honorable mention in illustration and graphics, Kansas State Collegian; Courtney Honn, sophomore in pre-professional elementary education, Overland Park, third place in headline design, Royal Purple; Logan Wassall, senior in mass communications, Overland Park, first place in sports/action photography for the Kansas State Collegian and third place in sports/action photography for the Royal Purple; and Kaylie McLaughlin, senior in mass communications, Shawnee, third place in special section and honorable mention in social media storytelling, both for the Kansas State Collegian.



Halle Lang, sophomore in fine arts, Hays, first place in bare feature photos and honorable mention for feature photography, Manhappenin' magazine; Olivia Bergmeier, senior in mass communications, Hutchinson, second place in feature photography for the Royal Purple and honorable mention in illustration and infographics for the Kansas State Collegian; Katie Harbert, senior in agricultural communications and journalism, Kingman, honorable mention in page design, Royal Purple; Dylan Connell, freshman in fine arts, Manhattan, first place in news/event photography, Kansas State Collegian; Natalie Jaeger, May 2019 bachelor's graduate in mass communications, Mound City, third place in page design, Manhappenin' magazine; Brianna Womack, senior in mass communications, Silver Lake, second place in news event writing, Royal Purple; Dene Dryden, senior in English, Stockton, third place in feature writing, Collegian; Rachael Hogan, December 2019 bachelor's graduate in mass communications, Topeka, third place in special section, Kansas State Collegian.



From Wichita: Leah Brock, junior in mass communications, first place in page design, Royal Purple; Hannah Greer, summer 2019 bachelor's graduate in mass communications, honorable mention for feature photography, Manhappenin' magazine; Natalie Leonard, senior in mass communications, first place in feature writing, Manhappenin' magazine; and Kate Torline, junior in mass communications, first place in bare feature photos and honorable mention for feature photography, Manhappenin' magazine.



From out of state: Abby Pfannenstiel, senior in apparel and textiles, Kansas City, Missouri, first place in table of contents design and second place in fall 2019 cover design, Manhappenin' magazine; Caroline Fullerton, junior in agricultural economics, Platte Woods, Missouri, first place in headline design, Manhappenin' magazine; and Ashley Read, senior in fine arts, Austin, Texas, first place in cover design-2019 Insight, Royal Purple.



From out of country: Alanud Alanazi, senior in architectural engineering, Saudi Arabia, honorable mention in news/event photography, Royal Purple.



The Collegian Media Group shares the stories of Kansas State University and Manhattan with communities on and off campus through its three student run publications: the Kansas State Collegian newspaper, Royal Purple yearbook and Manhappenin' magazine. Collectively, the publications are among the oldest and most decorated collegiate publications in the nation. The Royal Purple first appeared in 1909 but was preceded by class books in 1891 and in 1896 K-State celebrated the inaugural edition of the campus newspaper, originally named The Student Herald. Started in 2016, Manhappenin' magazine is the newest publication in the Collegian Media Group.






High-profile North Korean defector Thae Yong-ho gives a speech during his general election campaign as a candidate of the main opposition United Future Party (UFP) in Nonhyeon-dong, a part of the Gangnam-A constituency, April 9. Yonhap



By Yi Whan-woo



High-profile North Korean defector Thae Yong-ho, a candidate of the main opposition United Future Party (UFP) running in a southern Seoul district, is likely to secure a win in the general election.



In his first election bid, Thae, the former North Korean deputy ambassador to the United Kingdom, was ahead of Kim Sung-gon of the ruling Democratic Party of Korea (DPK) 53.9 percent to 43.9 percent in the Gangnam-A constituency as of 11 p.m. Wednesday.



If the final result is favorable to him, Thae, who campaigned under his new name in the South, Thae Gu-min, would be the first North Korean defector to win a National Assembly seat through a constituency vote.



Although the affluent Gangnam-A district has traditionally been the conservative home turf, doubts had risen over whether Thae could win  UFP election camp chief Kim Chong-in once opposed the idea of his candidacy there, saying his background had little connection to the district.





Two former female judges  Lee Soo-jin, left, of the ruling Democratic Party of Korea (DPK) and Na Kyung-won of the main opposition United Future Party (UFP)  appeal to voters in Seoul's Dongjak-B district, April 5. Yonhap



In the Dongjak-B constituency, attention was on the duel between two female former judges. Lee Soo-jin of the DPK was ahead of the UFP's Na Kyung-won, bidding for her fifth term.



Lee, one of the DPK's political rookies, had taken 50.7 percent while Na was at 46.7 percent as of 11 p.m.



Lee was a district court judge until she resigned in December 2019 to join the DPK.



She was an outspoken critic of former Chief Justice Yang Sung-tae who is on trial on charges of abusing his power in politically sensitive cases to win favors from the previous Park Geun-hye government.





Democratic Party of Korea candidate Ko Min-jung, left, former spokeswoman to President Moon Jae-in, and main opposition United Future Party candidate Oh Se-hoon, a former Seoul mayor, call for support during their last-ditch campaigns in Gwangjin-B district in Seoul, Tuesday. Yonhap
By The Associated Press Apr. 14, 2020 | 06:38 PM | WASHINGTON





Trump says the outbreak could have been contained at its source and spared lives had the U.N. health agency done a better job investigating reports coming out of China. The president says the world depends on the World Health Organization to work with countries to make sure accurate information about health threats are shared in a timely manner. He claims the organization failed to carry out its basic duty and must be held accountable. But he says the U.S. will continue to engage with the organization in pursuit of what he calls meaningful reforms.











American taxpayers should absolutely not subsidize an agency whose leadership worked with Communist China to conceal the dangers of COVID-19 from the world, Comer said. Until there is accountability from the WHO on this apparent cover-up and a full investigation into their relationship with the Chinese government, I fully support the Presidents action to cut off their funding.





Comer previously joined other members of the House Committee on Oversight and Reform and requested documents from the WHO on their assistance with the Chinese government's COVID-19 propaganda efforts. You can see the full letter at the link below.

President Donald Trump says he is halting U.S. payments to the World Health Organization (WHO) pending a review of its warnings about the coronavirus and China.Congressman James Comer released the following statement, praising Trump's decision to put a hold on the payments.

On the Net:
A nursing home in Baltimore announced Wednesday that it has 170 positive coronavirus results among residents and staff, making it the site of the biggest outbreak in Maryland, and one of the largest in the country.

At the 200-bed FutureCare-Lochearn facility in Baltimore, 129 residents and 41 staff members have tested positive for coronavirus, said spokeswoman Holly O'Shea. She said in a statement that most of those who tested positive "presented no symptoms of any kind."

O'Shea did not respond to questions about how many residents have been hospitalized, or whether there have been any deaths from covid-19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus.

The nursing home opened in 2005 and is one of 15 facilities run by FutureCare in Maryland, most of which are in Baltimore. It is in the 21215 Zip code, which leads the state in cases, reporting 223 as of Wednesday.

O'Shea said the facility decided to implement widespread testing, including of asymptomatic residents and staffers, because of the facility's location and how many elderly people with underlying conditions it cares for. She said FutureCare is the first company to implement such widespread testing before an outbreak was known.

A state "strike team" arrived at the facility Wednesday morning to assist staff members, said Mike Ricci, spokesman for Gov. Larry Hogan, a Republican. The team includes members of the Maryland National Guard, staff members from local and state health departments and doctors and nurses from area hospitals.

Hogan issued an emergency order this month requiring nursing home staffs to wear protective gear and segregate infected patients to halt the spread of the disease. He also said nursing homes should send tests to the state lab.

But Joseph DeMattos, president of Health Facilities Association of Maryland, which represents health-care providers at assisted-living facilities and nursing homes, said he has heard from providers across the state that there remains a shortage of tests available for nursing home residents and staff. He said that in the absence of more tests, nursing homes that are able to do so should pay for private testing.

Baltimore Mayor Jack Young said Wednesday that the city's health department is working closing with staff at the facility, and with the state's health department and the facility's partners at LifeBridge Health and Johns Hopkins Health. He said Baltimore City Health Department distributed personal protective equipment (PPE) from the Strategic National Stockpile to the facility, as well as from the Maryland Department of Health's PPE cache.

There have been positive cases reported at at least 125 of the nursing homes and assisted-living facilities in Maryland. The state's biggest outbreak before FutureCare's announcement was at Pleasant View Nursing Home in Mount Airy, where 24 residents have died and 120 residents and staffers tested positive.

Carroll County health officials have said they are not sure what caused the rapid spread of the virus at Pleasant View.
London: The British government has hailed India-UK trade ties as the first consignment of 2,800,000 packets of paracetamol from India is set to be distributed across the country's supermarkets and retailers to stem the spread of the coronavirus pandemic.

The shipment followed India's decision to lift export restrictions on essential drugs, but further discussions were required for the UK's urgent need for paracetamol.

"This will mean nearly 3 million more packets of paracetamol on British supermarket shelves," UK International Trade Secretary Liz Truss said in a statement on Tuesday.

"Coronavirus is the largest threat we have all faced in decades, so it's imperative that we work together to continue global trade and keep supply chains open. I'd like to extend a big thank you to officials both in the UK and India who worked hard on this agreement and I look forward to working with India and other countries soon to ensure we beat COVID-19," she said.

Last week, Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) minister, Lord Tariq Ahmad, had also highlighted the export consignment of paracetamol as a sign of the close cooperation between India and the UK.

"The UK and India continue to work in close partnership to respond to the COVID-19 threat. My sincere thanks on behalf of the UK government to India for approving this important shipment," said Ahmad.

The shipment arrived as a series of charter flights laid on by the UK government to ferry thousands of British residents stranded in India's coronavirus lockdown began landing in the UK since earlier this month.

The FCO says that the flight will make "serious inroads" into repatriating the estimated 21,000 Britons in India, with an end of April target set for getting the majority who wish to return to their homes in the
Such are the sensitivities surrounding Informer 3838, the miniseries about criminal barrister turned police informer Nicola Gobbo, that the writers of the show have asked their names not appear on it.

Ordinarily that only happens on movies that have been savaged beyond recognition by a producer or a studio (if you ever see the name "Alan Smithee" on the credits, that's why). But in this instance it was because of fears that one or more of the people portrayed in the show might not be too happy with what they're seeing. And when the offended parties are police and/or gangsters, it doesn't pay to be cavalier.

"It's because of safety fears," says actor Rhys Muldoon, who plays drug dealer Terrence Hodson in the series.

"One of the writers doesn't care, but one of them really does," says Rory Callaghan, CEO of Screentime, which has produced the show for Nine.
Gujarat Chief Minister Vijay Rupani has self-isolated himself for the next one week after meeting Congress MLA Imran Khedawala, who tested positive for coronavirus on Tuesday. Khedawala, along with other party leaders met the CM on Tuesday morning and tested positive in the evening. As part of the precautionary measure, the Gujarat CM has now decided to run the administration without meeting anyone.

Rupani's health is believed to be fine so far, but without taking any chances, he has decided to run the state administration through technological facilities like video conference, video-calling and tele-calling, Chief Minister's Office (CMO) Secretary Ashwani Kumar said on Wednesday.

Also read: Coronavirus India Lockdown guidelines Live Updates: No liquor sale; air, rail shut; country's tally at 11,439

"The Gujarat CM is fit and fine. Medical experts Atul Patel and Dr RK Patel tested him today and have confirmed that the CM has no symptoms for now. But as per safety measures, no outsider is allowed at his residence," Kumar said. As per Kumar, Khedawala committed a big mistake by not staying at home and coming out to meet Rupani when his samples had already been taken for testing.

Deputy CM Nitin Patel and MoS (Home) Pradeep Singh Jadeja had also attended the meeting. Meanwhile, the Khadia-Jamalpur MLA will soon be admitted to a designated COVID-19 hospital. The number of coronavirus cases in Gujarat has risen to 650 after 78 fresh infections were reported on Tuesday, while the death toll increased to 28 with the addition of two more fatalities, a health department official said.

The count of cases in Ahmedabad rose to 373 after 53 new infections were reported on Tuesday, while in Vadodara, the tally went up to 113 with the addition of six patients, the official said. The nation-wide tally has risen to 11,439, including 9,756 active cases and 377 deaths, the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare says.

Edited by Manoj Sharma

Also Read: Coronavirus in India: State-wise COVID-19 cases, deaths, list of testing facilities
The Iranian authorities have sent a draft memorandum of understanding to the Ukrainian Foreign Ministry to prevent Kyiv from filing lawsuits against Iran over a Ukrainian passenger jet shot down near Tehran on January 8, according to Radio Farda.

"Iran is pushing Ukraine to sign a memorandum of understanding obliging Ukraine and the families of victims of flight 752, shot down over Tehran, to waive their right to pursue the matter any further through courts," the statement reads.

According to the document, Ukraine and the families of the victims are to accept "human error" as the cause of the crash.

The said document also stipulates that Ukraine and the families of the victims should not pursue criminal and judicial action against Iran in return for the payment of compensation by Iran and releasing the plane's flight recorder's contents after they are analyzed.

The Ukraine International Airlines (UIA) plane (Flight PS752) heading from Tehran to Kyiv crashed shortly after taking off from the Imam Khomeini International Airport at about 06:00 Tehran time (04:30 Kyiv time) on January 8. There were 176 people on board  nine crew members (all Ukrainians) and 167 passengers (citizens of Ukraine, Iran, Canada, Sweden, Afghanistan, Germany, and the UK). They all died.

On January 11, Iran admitted that its military had accidentally shot down the Ukrainian passenger jet. Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) accepted full responsibility for the downing of the Ukrainian airliner.

It emerged later that the UIA plane had been shot down by two missiles of the Tor-M1 air defense system, which Iran received from Russia.

Photo: AA
Network of Surveillance Drones Would Deter Beijings Aggression in Pacific: Report

A network of drones that constantly monitor hot spots in the Pacific would help blunt Beijings military aggression and geopolitical ambitions in the region, according to a report by a Washington think tank.

The report by the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments (CSBA) also recommended the same approach could temper Russian aggression in Europe.

Like having an airborne CCTV camera on every geopolitical corner, the fleet of 92 drones would provide constant surveillance.

With every move being watched, adversaries couldnt rely on muddying the waters with fake information and denials to buy time and grab territory, such as what happened with Russias military action in Ukraine, according to the report.

CSBA calls its novel concept deterrence by detection.

The logic that underpins the approach should be familiar to policemen and parents, according to the report, published on April 14. It is that potential transgressors are less likely to act if they know they are being watched.

The idea is similar to the increasingly popular idea of using numerous simpler, cheaper, unmanned platforms to outwit adversaries that have pitted their military might against the large, expensive U.S. platforms such as aircraft carriers.

CSBA states that the project could be achieved using existing unmanned aircraft. It estimates the cost at about $1.4 billion, which could be shared between partner nations.

A U.S. Air Force RQ-1 Predator unmanned reconnaissance aircraft sits on a tarmac. (U.S. Air Force/Getty Images)

Visible By Design

Imagine a network of unmanned systems monitoring 24-7 activity in the South China Sea, report author and CSBA CEO Thomas Mahnken told The Epoch Times in March.

That sort of 24-7 situational awareness, I would argue, could be a real deterrent to malign action, said Mahnken, who is a former Pentagon official and a member of the National Defense Strategy Commission.

The United States currently relies on satellites and manned aircraft for its surveillance. But these are very expensive and give only periodic coverage of areas of interest, according to the CSBA report.

The surveillance drones, with minimal defenses and no stealth capabilities, would be vulnerable, says Mahnken. But that keeps costs down, and like CCTV cameras, ensures that the deterrence is visible.

China could choose to shoot them down, but in so doing, they would have to cross a threshold, he said. They wouldnt kill anybody, but they would be seen taking this aggressive action. So the bumper sticker we have for this idea is that we call it deterrence by detection.'

In all-out war, you want to be stealthy, you dont want to be a lucrative target. For the gray zone, theres an advantage to being seen.

A full-scale model of The RQ-4 Global Hawk unmanned plane is displayed during a presentation at PiO Exhibition Center in Tokyo, Japan, on March 24, 2010. (Koichi Kamoshida/Getty Images)

The gray zone that Mahnken mentioned refers to military aggression and other actions that dont cross the line into conventional warfare, but achieve the same strategic aims. Chinas building of militarized islands and Russias little green men in Ukraine are examples.

In 2018, the Trump administration published the National Defense Strategy, which stated for the first time that the U.S. military was pivoting and modernizing to tackle great power competition with Russia and China. The document also called for the military to modernize and adapt to wrestle in the gray zone for geopolitical advantages.

China has used paramilitary naval forces, such as fishing fleets and its maritime militia, to harass its maritime neighbors military and commercial vessels in order to further its claims over disputed territory, the CSBA report states.

Beijing has also flown fighter jets across the median line of the Taiwan Strait, conducted sorties with its bombers over the Miyako Strait, and also built militarized islands in disputed waters, notes the report.

Russia, for its part, has employed military and paramilitary forces to seize the Crimean Peninsula and support a separatist insurgency in eastern Ukraine. It has used jammers and other forms of electronic attack to disrupt NATO exercises, the report stated. Such operations often prove difficult to identify as they unfold, particularly since China and Russia obscure their motives and roles. Consequently, the United States and its allies have struggled to counter their actions before it is already too late. 6 Zones

CSBA proposes six zones for such a system to be set up: the Taiwan Strait, South China Sea, and East China Sea in the Asia-Pacific and the Baltics, Black Sea, and eastern Mediterranean Sea in Europe.

According to the think tank, the number of airframes needed for their idea is well within reach. CSBA analysis shows that implementing deterrence by detection would require 46 airframes in the Western Pacific and another 46 in Europe, for a total of 92 aircraft. Split among the United States and its many allies and partners in the Western Pacific and Europe, the estimated cost per country should remain affordable relative to the expected security gains.
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"COVID-19 is associated with a fairly unique combination of nasal symptoms: a sudden loss of one's sense of smell, also known as 'anosmia,' without nasal obstruction," said Sedaghat. "The occurrence of sudden onset anosmia without nasal obstruction is highly predictive of COVID-19 and should trigger the individual to immediately self-quarantine with presumptive COVID-19."Most individuals are experiencing COVID-19 report symptoms two to 14 days after exposure, such as fever, cough, and shortness of breath. Medical assistance is needed if individuals have trouble breathing, persistent pressure or pain in the chest or confusion or inability to rouse, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. For most, recovery comes without assistance.Sedaghat's conclusions are available online in the scholarly journal Laryngoscope Investigative Otolaryngology, where he explains that anosmia without nasal obstruction is "a highly specific indicator of COVID-19."His findings are based on his review of 19 studies that describe the sinus and nasal disorders reported in relation to the current coronavirus plaguing the nation. Sedaghat's published paper also references a recent study led by Paris physicians Dominique Salmon and Alain Corre, which shows that out of a group of 55 patients presenting with anosmia without nasal obstruction 94% were found to test positive for COVID-19 by nasal swabbing and polymerase chain reaction tests.Sedaghat said COVID-19 could be spread when the virus, if present in the body, is produced in the lining of the nose and then released into mucus. "When someone sneezes, this mucus which contains the virus is aerosolized outwards. Similarly, if someone wipes their nose and then touches surfaces without washing their hands first, that could lead to spread of COVID-19," explains Sedaghat.Loss of smell can occur during anytime an individual is infected with COVID-19, but when this occurs as an initial symptom it is particularly instructive, says Sedaghat."A sudden loss of one's sense of smell wouldn't trigger most people to think they have COVID-19," explains Sedaghat. "These individuals could continue business as usual and spread the disease as a carrier. The guidelines for when to formally test for COVID-19 remain fluid in the setting of limited tests. But if someone experiences anosmia without nasal obstruction, aside from quarantining, it would not be unreasonable to reach out to one's primary care physician about getting tested."Sedaghat says the nasal cavity is likely the major site of entry and infection by COVID-19 since at least 90% of inhaled air enters the body through the nose. "Nasal virus production is at very high levels and tends to occur early in the disease process while patients are still asymptomatic or having very mild symptoms," he says.Source: Eurekalert
As widebody belly space bottoms out, Agility Logistics highlights falls in available uplift of more than 60% from Europe to North America, Latin America and Africa, while freighter capacity is 14% higher than in 2019, including up 45% ex-China

Global air cargo capacity has begun to stabilise following several weeks of massive declines, but remains 35% below 2019 levels and down by double-digit percentages across all trade lanes  including falls of more than 60% from Europe to North America, Latin America and Africa  according to freight forwarder Agility Logistics.

Based on data from Seabury, the analysis indicates that global widebody belly capacity declined slightly last week but seems to have bottomed out, as Middle Eastern carriers increased their widebody belly capacity last week versus the last week of March, mainly to China, India and Australia. Carriers in other regions continued to shrink their belly capacity, except on select routes where they deployed cargo-only movements on passenger aircraft and flights.

Meanwhile, freighter capacity has been increasing and is now 14% higher than 2019 levels, increasing at most major airports in Asia and the Middle East, while the picture in North America, Europe and Africa is mixed, Seabury indicates. China, Russia, Hong Kong and South Korea have seen the biggest increases; India, Italy, Bangladesh and Ecuador the biggest decreases.

Outbound China freighter capacity increased 45% versus 2019 levels, experiencing big increases on flights headed for the US, Russia, Japan, South Korea, Qatar, Vietnam and Ethiopia.

And utilisation of widebody freighters has also increased, up 16.5% on average since January; B777F and B747-8F freighters have flown 14 hours per day on average so far in April, Agility highlighted.

Yesterday, The Guardian reported that the number of cargo-only flights at London Heathrow has surged to five times normal levels, with the airport now saying it is prioritising medical supplies as passenger travel grinds to a halt. The UK's biggest airport expects passenger traffic to plunge by 90% in April, with remaining flights mainly limited to repatriating citizens stranded abroad during the coronavirus outbreak.

Instead, the hub airport is restyling itself as a vital airbridge for supplies and medical essentials during the coronavirus crisis, the newspaper said.

The number of cargo-only flights has jumped significantly. Heathrows busiest day for cargo so far was on 31 March, when it handled 38 cargo flights in only one day. The airport usually deals with 47 cargo flights per week.

Image: Shutterstock.com
By Laman Ismayilova

Talented artists are invited to take part in a republican art contest We are grateful. The competition is co-organized by Azerbaijan Ministry of Culture, Azerbaijani Artists Union and the State Art Gallery.

The competition aims to express dedication of healthcare workers, law enforcement agencies and the Azerbaijani police during coronavirus pandemic.

The art contest is open for all artists no older than 30 years. Foreigners living in Azerbaijan can also take part in the competition.

Registration will be open until May 15th. The selection will take place in 3 age categories (5-12 years old, 12-17 years old and 17-30 years old). Three separate exhibitions will be also held for each age category.

Winners in each age group will be announced and awarded by the Ministry of Culture.

If you want to take part in the competition, please visit the following link:

http://xsm.az/site/minnetdariq.

---

Laman Ismayilova is AzerNews staff journalist, follow her on Twitter: @Lam_Ismayilova

Follow us on Twitter @AzerNewsAz
[April 15, 2020] Dating.com Group Shifted its Focus to Niche Apps And Launched a $50M Corporate VC Fund

VALLETTA, Malta, April 15, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- Dating.com Groupone of the leading social discovery companies globally and an umbrella brand for more than 15 projects, including Dating.com, Dil Mil, Lovinga, Tubit, and TripTogethertoday announced plans to develop its first product for the LGBT community and to launch its own investment program to support the next generation of dating apps. The plan was announced at its regular board meeting in Malta. During the meeting, Dating.com Group board members discussed the future strategy of the company and its business development plans. Jev Golinejs, a member of the Board of Directors, said: "There's a clear trend of dating moving towards niche apps targeted at specific audiences and varying significantly in the way they work. This opens a huge space for new opportunities and entrants." Acknowledging this new direction, Dating.com Group is planning to focus on niche apps and announced the expansion of its brand portfolio by launching a new product specifically targeted at the LGBT communitya community not covered by any of its brands yet. This new guys-only dating app will offer a unique combination of freemium local connection and unlimited long-distance contacts available under subscription. The app will also have several unique features, including video streaming tools that will make communications truly real while offering more possibilities to match with other users. The creation of this app reflects Dating.com Group's strategy tosatisfy representatives of practically all niche groups in the long term.



Jordan Goodwin, Dating.com Group Product Manager, said: "Now there are over 1,500 dating apps or websites looking to draw people to their product, and to match them with one another. Niche apps aim to satisfy specific audience requirements in the most effective way, and represent the next huge wave in dating." Meanwhile, the company's Corporate VC fund was formed in order to invest in dating projects across the globe. The corporate vehicle under the Dating.com Group umbrella will invest in companies in the Seed to Series B stage, with a ticket size of up to $5 million.

In order to expand, Dating.com Group sees three main directions: buying, building, and investing in promising dating projects. The launch of its VC fund, the debut of a new niche dating app, and the recent acquisition of Dil Mil illustrates its strategy of expansion through investment, development, and M&A, respectively. In all, the company is planning to strengthen its influence in the dating market and is expected to expand its business globally. About Dating.com Group

Dating.com Group is a global social discovery platform, enabling people from around the globe to connect through the power of shared interests and mutual benefits. Dating.com Group has offices in seven countries and a team of more than 500 professionals with more than 73 million registered users across the entire portfolio. Brands include Dating.com, DateMyAge, LovingA, Tubit, AnastasiaDate, ChinaLove, and many more, each with a unique platform tailored to different communities defined by interest, geography and demographics. Media contact: Alexandra Suslova

[email protected]

+1 781 691 5211 View original content:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/datingcom-group-shifted-its-focus-to-niche-apps-and-launched-a-50m-corporate-vc-fund-301040173.html SOURCE Dating.com Group

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"It was disappointing to have our Prime Minister making comments this morning that were completely at odds with what is going on in Victoria, urging children to go to school," she said. "There has been so much work done to get it right for our Victorian students." Victoria is the first state to start term two. School workers said some parents took their children to school on Wednesday morning  in some cases because they heard the Prime Minister said they should  but were turned away. Mr Morrison said he did not expect schools would return to full attendance in the coming weeks, or even months, but he wanted to move to a "functional attendance" at school, which would enable classroom lessons.

"Obviously, the populations will be lower, which is greater opportunity to ensure better social distancing practices in the classrooms, which protect teachers," Mr Morrison told Perth radio. "There will be some teachers who should not be in a school environment. Importantly, in the staff room, because they are more at risk than many others in the community." Professor Tony Blakely, an epidemiologist at the University of Melbourne, said the question of when to send children back to school depended on what "end game" authorities were pursuing. Reopening schools could be one of the first lockdown measures changed if a decision was made to abandon any hope of eliminating the virus in Australia.

Professor Blakely said schools could still be reopened under a strategy of suppression or "squashing the curve"  maintaining a low rate of COVID-19 infection until a vaccine became available  as children tended to have only a mild version of the illness and "they also don't transmit it very well". Dr Coatsworth said while there had been outbreaks associated with schools, investigations in NSW and South Australia had established that "single, or one or two cases, of child-to-child transmission, or teacher-to-child transmission, have not resulted in the sort of widespread outbreaks that we've seen amongst adults". That contrasted with weddings and aged care facilities, where large numbers of adults have been infected. "It quite clearly affects a lower proportion of children," he said. Dr Coatsworth said while it remained the view of the Australian Health Protection Principal Committee that "schools are safe places because of the low rates of transmission", chief medical officers were working on ways to make them "even safer for staff, for teachers, in their essential role in this COVID-19 epidemic".

Opposition education spokeswoman Tanya Plibersek said the national cabinet needed to come to a clear consensus when it met on Thursday. Loading "I think what parents want is some clear advice from the Prime Minister and premiers. They dont want the Prime Minister and premiers arguing over whether it's safe for kids to return to school, Ms Plibersek said. Before the Victorian school term began, teachers were encouraged to contact parents and create a list of the students who would be attending school out of necessity. Mr Andrews said rather than providing a list of "seven or eight different jobs, or seven or eight different reasons" when it was appropriate for parents to send their children to school, his government wanted families to follow the advice that "if you can have your kids' education at home, that's exactly what you must do".

"Last week ... we said, 'Look, everyone's circumstances are different. Let's let parents make that decision themselves,' " he said. "The whole notion of what is critical has changed a lot. Every parent will make those important decisions." Loading Mr Andrews said essential workers were not just healthcare workers, they included jobs such as supermarket workers, truck drivers and public transport staff. While the Prime Minister made no specific reference to Victoria's arrangements, Mr Andrews said he believed Mr Morrison and federal Education Minister Dan Tehan were reiterating Victoria's advice that schools should be open for children who needed it. He backed parents and schools to resolve any confusion over who should send their children to school.
New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio in New York City on April 14, 2020. (Scott Heins/Getty Images)

New York City Officials Defend Backdating Deaths

New York City officials defended backdating thousands of deaths to the COVID-19 death toll, saying they believe the toll is still higher than the new figure.

Officials on April 14 added 3,778 probable deaths to the official count, saying the patients likely died from the disease but that no test had confirmed the diagnoses.

Asked repeatedly about the addition during the daily briefing on the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus, officials said they felt they had to make the change.

We want to make sure that every New Yorker is counted that has been taken from this vicious virus, Health Commissioner Dr. Oxiris Barbot told reporters in Manhattan.

Mayor Bill de Blasio added, We thought it was very important to portray this larger reality as more and more information was coming in.

So many people have passed away, it was bigger than we fully understood or could document. And I think it could get bigger still.

A healthcare worker takes a break outside the emergency center at Maimonides Medical Center during the outbreak of the CCP virus in the Brooklyn borough of New York on April 14, 2020. (Brendan McDermid/Reuters)

Along with the deaths presumed to be linked to COVID-19, there are 6,589 deaths in which patients were reported to have tested positive.

Another 8,184 people died who were not linked to COVID-19.

Between March 11 and April 13 last year, 5,167 deaths occurred in New York City, which is about 3,000 fewer than the 8,184 non-COVID-19 deaths during the same period this year, officials said. The mayor said he believes most of the additional deaths were attributable to COVID-19.

Officials said the influx of patients in recent weeks reportedly led to overburdened hospitals, and emergency dispatchers began prioritizing calls where people were in direct danger.

Barbot said that the pandemic and the strict measures put in place to try to blunt the spread of the virus lead to stress and that the disease could be linked to some deaths by heart attack that arent currently being counted as COVID-19 deaths.

She said it would take officials a fair amount of time to tease out what happened with the deaths presumed to be from COVID-19, if were ever able to do that.

What we wont have is severity of underlying illness, etc., she said.
Usually when Matt Hancock delivers the Downing Street press briefings he does so with the mildly snooty air of Monsieur Ambassador from those cheesy Ferrero Rocher ads.

On Wednesday there was a tweaked sense of humility about the Health Secretary as he entered the No 10 State Dining Room. His body language radiated a sense of vexed urgency.

His brow was corrugated, his eyes a liquorice wheel of dark swirls. Hancock had come to address the social care catastrophe highlighted by this newspaper throughout the week.

We have revealed the explosion of coronavirus cases among care home residents that has resulted in thousands of deaths, many of which were not even included in daily government figures.

There was a tweaked sense of humility about Health Secretary Matt Hancock as he entered the No 10 State Dining Room. His body language radiated a sense of vexed urgency.

Hancock wanted it to be known he had paid attention to the issue and was getting on top of things. He was getting it done. This is our plan, he said. Perhaps it was me, but I couldnt help but detect the slightest note of anxiety in his voice.

As of now, he said, all care home residents coming back from hospital will be tested before returning. There would be a new online delivery system for personal protective equipment (PPE) to supply care homes.

He wanted to ramp up care recruitment, offering to pay the training costs of new cadets. There was also a tokenistic plan to launch a special care workers badge like the blue one NHS workers wear.

Mr Hancock has pieced together a tokenistic plan to launch a special care workers badge like the blue one NHS workers wear

This badge will be a badge of honour, he said, raising his snout triumphantly in the air. His presentation made the right noises, but then Mr Hancock is a politician of rare perceptiveness.

His political antenna, finely honed under the tutelage of that other wily operator George Osborne, picks up more signals than the Hubble space telescope. If there is a criticism it is that he sometimes lacks empathy.

He can speak compassionate words but they rarely sound particularly cuddly. When you hear Hancock talk of taking the fight to this disease, you find yourself wondering what hes working to hardest to save: peoples lives or his own career.

In Wednesday's briefing, there was genuine sensitivity to his language. We heard of plans to give people the right to say goodbye. Wanting to be with someone you love is one of the deepest human instincts, he said.

When he brought up the tragic case of Ismail Mohamed Abdulwahab, a 13-year-old boy who died alone from the virus earlier this month, Hancock admitted the incident had made him weep.

Hancocks half hour  actually it was more like an hour since he does tend to prattle on a tad  featured cameos from deputy chief scientific adviser Dame Angela McLean and Englands chief medical officer Professor Chris Whitty.

Dame Angela took charge of the slide machine and said she was starting to see a flattened curve in the epidemic. Whitty sadly didnt share all her optimism. He expects the number of deaths to increase on Thursday.

The Press also remained sceptical. The BBCs Hugh Pym asked Hancock how care home residents would be tested when testing for NHS staff thus far had been so useless. Hancock breezily replied they were building capacity all the time.

Alex Thomson from Channel 4 News suggested the Government had been slow addressing the problems in care homes as priority had been given to younger people, leading to unnecessary deaths.

Neither of those things is the case, Hancock insisted. For all the barbed questions, Hancock seemed minded to shower hacks with compliments.

Such an important question! he yelled at a female journalist from The Spectator. Another scribe was congratulated on his work. There was even a kindly word for a reporter from his local Suffolk paper, the Eastern Daily Press.

Defensiveness? Possibly. But he certainly fared better than department colleague Helen Whately, roasted at the hands of Piers Morgan on ITVs Good Morning Britain earlier in the day.

Hancock at least arrived with a plan up his sleeve, though we could have done with him producing it far sooner.
Tropicana Atlantic City has laid off 2,704 employees as the state-mandated closures of New Jersey casinos stretch into their second month, according to a WARN notice filed with the New Jersey Department of Labor and Workforce Development.

Gov. Phil Murphy ordered New Jerseys nine casinos to close March 16 as part of an order that also shuttered movie theaters, concert venues and gyms across the state to slow the spread of the coronavirus.

Much of the industrys workforce have been put out of work, and the American Gambling Association projected the state will lose $1.1 billion in economic activity if the casino closures last two months.

A spokesman for Eldorado Resorts, which owns Tropicana, declined to comment on the furloughs but directed NJ Advance Media to the companys April 8 report to shareholders, which says that as of Saturday the company moved to the minimum workforce needed to maintain basic operations and furloughed other nonessential employees. The effective date on the notice to the state was April 11.

Just 1-in-10 of the companys employees will be retained, as it expected to furlough 90 percent of workers at each of its properties nationwide and corporate staff.

In addition to the 2,704 furloughed employees in Atlantic City, another 529 workers in Indiana, 430 in Ohio and 1,205 in Missouri have been laid off, according to casino.org. The website reported that 451 Las Vegas employees were furloughed in March.

Furloughed workers will continue to receive health benefits, according to the filing. The company will pay the employer- and employee- medical, dental and vision premiums until June 30.

Eldorado executives also have agreed to pay cuts affecting their base salaries only. This temporary reduction in base salary becomes effective April 11, 2020, and will not impact any other aspect of the executive officers compensation," according the the Securities and Exchange Commission filing.

Union officials have said that the Tropicana parent company provided employees with four weeks of severance pay following the March 16 orders. Most others provided two weeks of severance.

Casinos are eligible to seek some of the $425 billion in corporate loans available as part of the federal stimulus and may qualify for employee retention tax credits to keep their workers on their payrolls.

Casino union leaders have criticized the industry for shedding employees despite the available aid.

We feel like the casino operators could to a lot more to step up and take care of employees, said Ben Albert of Unite Here Local 54, which represents 10,600 Atlantic City casino workers.

Tropicana Atlantic City has said that in addition to the casino, all its associated restaurants are closed. Carmines Atlantic City, located within Tropicana, has let go of 181 employees, according to its own WARN layoff notice.

Gov. Phil Murphy ordered Atlantic Citys nine casinos to close one month ago, along with racetracks, gyms, fitness centers, theaters, performing arts centers, concert venues and nightclubs.

Expansive as casino floors are, many individuals come into contact with common surfaces, he said in his executive order.

Samantha Marcus may be reached at smarcus@njadvancemedia.com. Follow her on Twitter @samanthamarcus.

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Get the latest updates right in your inbox. Subscribe to NJ.coms newsletters.

NJ Advance Media reporter Jonathan D. Salant contributed to this report.
US President Donald Trump's freeze on funding for the World Health Organisation is a selfish response to the global pandemic, a senior Russian official said on Wednesday.

"We see yesterday's announcement by Washington on freezing funding of the WHO as most concerning. It is a sign of the very selfish approach of the US authorities to what is happening in the world due to the pandemic," deputy foreign minister Sergei Ryabkov told state agency TASS.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
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In todays unstable and volatile environment that we live in, every conflict, however small it may be, may hold much larger repercussions in the future, and with the number of armed conflicts going around the world right now, every countrys defense has to continuously watch over its shoulders so as to not get destroyed by enemy forces. This is where Air and Missile Defense Radar (AMDR) comes into the picture. Air & Missile Defense Radar is expected to be in huge demand in economies which witness frequent conflicts. Regions such as Middle East, Asia Pacific and Europe are experiencing an increasing number of threats from outside forces, which will definitely make them a much sought-after technology in coming years.

The Air & Missile Defense Radar is also known as AN/SPY-6, and offers surface warfare capabilities, as well as air and missile defense. The system consists of two primary radars- the X-band radar and the S-band radar, with the former used for precision tracking, missile communication, along with horizon search and terminal target illumination. The S-band radar is used for tracking, volume search and ballistic missile defense discrimination, & similar to X-band, also offers missile communication. The Air & Missile Defense Radar is additionally capable of performing electronic attacks owing to its AESA antenna.

Get More Information of Air & Missile Defense Radar Market @ https://www.grandviewresearch.com/industry-analysis/air-missile-defense-radar-amdr-market

The Air and Missile Defense Radar system is expected to serve the global market in the coming years, owing to some of the following factors:

Major countries in Asia and Middle East are in constant threat of missile and nuclear attacks thus making these regions a potential market for the firms. There is an increased demand for naval based radar system from the armed forces from both European and U.S central command.

Industry trend is highly opportunistic as the increased threat in the East Asian, Middle East and European countries regarding the nuclear and other missiles has been very high from the era of cold war.

Need of possessing improved and much stronger naval fleet amongst many countries creates opportunities for the market.

Defense and surveillance systems around the globe have undergone miniaturization and automation, which again is a driving factor for the market.

Air and defense radar industry is influenced by key players such as Thales, SAAB, Rockwell Collins, Raytheon, Northrop Grumman, and Lockheed Martin. Other vendors include Kelvin Hughes, Israel Aerospace Industries, Honeywell International, Finmeccanica, Exelis, Cobham, Boeing, BAE Systems, and Airbus Group. Some of the major developments taking place in the industry include:

In November 2019, Raytheon was awarded a 97.3 Million USD contract regarding integration and production support for the AN/SPY-6(V), which includes software development for the Aegis baseline 10, along with Maintenance Training System development, among others.

In December 2019, Northrop Grumman partnered with the Strategic Capabilities Office, for the demonstration of a conventionally-configured, ground-launched ballistic missile, conducted by the U.S. Air Force from Californias Vandenberg Air Force Base.

Access Blog of Air & Missile Defense Radar Market @ https://www.grandviewresearch.com/blog/air-and-missile-defence-radar-amdr-industry
Virtual Asean+3 conference agrees joint fund to fight virus

THAILAND: Asean and its Plus three dialogue partners - China, Japan and South Korea - have agreed in principle to setting up a joint fund to combat the coronavirus pandemic following a virtual summit, government spokeswoman Narumon Pinyosinwat said yesterday (Apr 14).

CoronavirusCOVID-19

By Bangkok Post

Wednesday 15 April 2020, 10:23AM

Prime Minister Prayut Chan-o-cha and other Asean leaders appear in a video conference yesterday (Apr 14) on COVID-19 hosted by Vietnam. Photo: Government House

The 13-nation special summit initiated by Asean comes as the region struggles to contain the COVID-19 outbreak.

However, the amount was not decided upon during the special meeting between the Southeast Asian nations, China, South Korea and Japan.

The director-general of the Asian Affairs Department in Chinas foreign ministry, Wu Jianghao, said the money would come from an existing cooperation fund.

He also revealed all parties had agreed to set up a reserve medical supply centre, noting that the most urgent task was to contain the spread of the virus.

He said China will share its experience and research and provide technical assistance, according to thestar.com.my.

Chinese Premier Li Keqiang, said all countries must cooperate more closely for a collective response to the pandemic.

We have gained valuable experience in jointly tackling crises and have put in place mechanisms for enhancing emergency preparedness.

As we all live in this community with a shared future, we must work for an early victory against COVID-19 in East Asia, he said in a statement.

During talks between Asean leaders yesterday morning, Prime Minister Prayut Chan-o-cha proposed re-purposing funds to support efforts to deal with the ongoing threat.

Gen Prayut then attended the evening Asean Plus 3 Special Summit via video conferencing.

According to Ms Narumon who revealed the gist of the meeting, Gen Prayut and other Asean leaders commended the leaders of the Plus Three countries for their efforts and effective measures against COVID-19 which could considerably decrease infections and deaths.

All the leaders accepted that COVID-19 is a global crisis that has impacted all sectors of society.

In his statement at the Asean Plus Three Special Summit, Gen Prayut proposed three approaches.

The first was establishing a COVID-19 Asean Response Fund by allocating money from the Asean Development Fund and cooperation funds with China, Japan and South Korea.

This would be to handle short-term impacts such as procuring test kits, personal protective equipment, and related medical equipment, and long-term measures such developing new vaccines and medicines.

A second proposal involved optimising existing Asean Plus Three mechanisms, especially in public health, to develop and promote the use of information technology to provide innovative solutions to tackling pandemic and future challenges.

Gen Prayut also proposed the Asean Secretariat and the Trilateral Cooperation Secretariat to compile and exchange information on related policies and measures of each country, and to make the most use of Chiang Mai Initiative Multilateralization to mitigate negative impacts, and regain regional economic and financial stability, where necessary.

The prime minister emphasised that close partnerships and sustainable development would lead everyone out of the crisis.

We will overcome the COVID-19 crisis together, Gen Prayut said.

The virtual Asean Summit was proposed by Indonesia, since the virus, first detected late last year in the central Chinese city of Wuhan, has spread worldwide, dealing a crushing blow to social and economic activities across the globe.

Most of the Asean leaders focused on two things. The first was their common efforts to fight against COVID-19. The second was cooperation to deal with the impacts of the outbreak in socioeconomic sectors, Indonesian Foreign Minister Retno Marsudi said during a video press conference.

Mr Marsudi, who attended the online summit with Indonesian President Joko Widodo, added the leaders of the 10-member bloc also agreed to bolster anti-virus efforts in such areas as information, research, epidemiology and clinical treatment.

Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte told the videoconference, Retreating from regional and global connections cannot be the answer, according to his Presidential Communications Operations Office.

Regardless of how we handle the crisis within our own respective territories, we can only be truly safe if we defeat this virus everywhere, Mr Duterte added.

The Asean meeting was chaired by Vietnam, which holds the rotating Asean chair this year.

In opening remarks, Vietnams premier Nguyen Xuan Phuc hailed the work of Asean in fighting the virus so far.

He said COVID-19 has badly impacted peoples lives, their socio-economic situation ... challenging stability and social security.
T he Government has promised to ramp up testing as a new report reveals one in ten hospital nurses are off work.

According to the report, 10 per cent of a headcount of around 280,000 nurses and midwives were recently reported absent as a result of the coronavirus outbreak.

Data from the Covid-19 national operational dashboard from Saturday, seen by the Health Service Journal, showed that there were 28,063 coronavirus-related absences at English acute trusts.

This could include staff who have symptoms themselves, or those who are in isolation due to someone in their home showing signs of illness.

The Government has said it will expand testing to include family members of NHS workers with symptoms / PA

The news comes as ministers said they are "confident" that the Government will achieve its target of 100,000 coronavirus tests a day by the end of the month.

Many staff have spoken about being unable to work due to isolation rules.

If someone in a family shows Covid-19 symptoms, including a new continuous cough or high temperature, then according to Government guidance everyone in the household must not leave the home for 14 days.

A letter was sent to regional NHS bosses on Sunday outlining testing expansion plans to include family members with symptoms living in the same homes as NHS workers.

It also said that testing must take place within three days from the onset of symptoms in order for it to be the most effective.

UK landmarks light up blue for NHS staff fighting coronavirus 1 /25 UK landmarks light up blue for NHS staff fighting coronavirus The Shard in London is lit up in blue in a gesture of thanks to the hardworking NHS staff fighting against coronavirus Tower Bridge in London is lit up in blue in a gesture of thanks to hardworking NHS staff PA Tower Bridge in London is lit up in blue in a gesture of thanks to hardworking NHS staff The London Eye is pictured lit blue in support of the NHS Reuters London's Piccadilly Circus saluting local heroes during Thursday's nationwide Clap for Carers NHS initiative to applaud NHS workers fighting the coronavirus pandemic PA Selfridges lit up in blue in a gesture of thanks to the hardworking NHS staff fighting coronavirus on the frontline PA Fulwell Windmill in Sunderland is lit up in blue in a gesture of thanks to the hardworking NHS staff fighting coronavirus PA MediaCityUK in Manchester lit up in blue in a gesture of thanks to hardworking NHS staff PA Northern Spire Bridge in Sunderland is lit up in blue in a gesture of thanks to hardworking NHS staff PA Belfast City Hall is lit up in support of the NHS Reuters The SSE Arena, Wembley, is seen with a lit up sign for the Clap For Our Carers campaign REUTERS Tawstock Court in Barnstaple lit up in blue PA Ashton Gate, the home of Bristol City FC is lit up in blue in a gesture of thanks PA Wembley stadium is seen lit up blue REUTERS Wembley Arch in London is lit up in blue PA The Lowry lit up in blue in a gesture of thanks to the hardworking NHS staff who are trying to battle coronavirus. PA The Tyne Bridge in Newcastle is lit up in blue in a gesture of thanks to the hardworking NHS staff PA People applaud infront of big screen in Piccadilly Circus during the Clap For Our Carers campaign Reuters The Shard in London is lit up blue

The letter reads: If a member of staff tests negative, then they can return to work if they are well enough to do so and should discuss this with their employing organisation.

If an individual living in the same household as a member of the NHS family tests negative then the NHS worker can return to work without themselves being tested, as long as they remain symptom-free and the whole household can come out of self-isolation.

On testing, Work and Pensions Secretary Therese Coffey told LBC: We are working at pace and the same is true with testing  we are increasing the capacity, we are increasing it daily, but I appreciate we still need to reach that target of 100,000 set by the Government by the end of this month and thats why many laboratories are being opened up so we can reach that target.

Asked whether the Government can meet its 100,000-a-day testing target at the end of the month, she told BBC Breakfast: Im confident that we can.

It comes after the Governments chief scientific adviser admitted that testing wasn't being carried out as fast as it needed to be.

Coronavirus testing: What we know so far

Speaking to ITV on Monday, Sir Patrick Vallance said: Well, I think the testing at the beginning was at the right level.

At the beginning PHE (Public Health England) got off to a good start in terms of testing to try and make sure they caught people coming into the country with it.

I then think its not scaled as fast as it needs to scale  thats being done now  but I do think testing is an incredibly important bit of this. It needs to be done at scale and it needs to be done rapidly enough to be able to look at outbreaks and isolate.

I think its been good in terms of whats been able to be done in hospitals.
CAIRO  Critics are challenging Egypt's official reporting of its coronavirus cases, though authorities say their statistics are accurate and other statistics can't be trusted.

On April 3, Al-Shorouk newspaper published statistics showing there were 870 registered cases of the coronavirus in all Egyptian provinces as of the evening of April 2.

The statistics indicated that Cairo province was the most affected with 175 cases, followed by Alexandria province with 105, Damietta with 98 and Aswan with 75. No cases were recorded in the northern Sinai Peninsula, according to the statistics. Al-Shorouk did not reveal the source or origin of the figures.

The following day, Ministry of Health and Population spokesman Khaled Mujahid denied the figures being circulated online were correct and said they were being falsely attributed to the ministry. He called on all Egyptians to accept information only from official ministry sources, especially after inaccurate statistics went viral.

However, a source in the Ministry of Health and Population told Al-Monitor on condition of anonymity, because he is not authorized to speak to the press, that the statistics published April 3 by Al-Shorouk were indeed correct but weren't released officially. The ministry's denial applied to statistics circulating online but didn't mention the newspaper. The source said that confirms the authenticity of Al-Shorouks statistics. The source refused to provide further information.

According to the latest statistics released by the Egyptian Ministry of Health and Population, there were 2,065 confirmed coronavirus cases as of April 12, with 159 deaths.

Mujahid said in a statement April 8 that in all confirmed cases, patients were in isolation in hospitals and receiving the needed medical care according to World Health Organization (WHO) guidelines. He stressed that there were no unannounced cases in any province.

Meanwhile, Mujahid told Al-Monitor by phone that the ministry is constantly coordinating with WHO and following its guidelines regarding follow-up measures. He said the ministry follows an advanced statistical process in counting and registering numbers, so the numbers it announces are accurate.

Cases are declared as soon as patients are confirmed positive, in full transparency, in accordance with the International Health Regulations, he added. However, new cases are only considered confirmed after several widely recognized laboratory procedures are followed, including polymerase chain reaction (PCR) to amplify DNA. He explained that patients are quarantined when they test positive, and only after that are they included in the daily coronavirus updates.

COVID-19 patients are tested every 48 hours, he said, and only after they test negative twice in a row does the ministry announce such cases as recoveries. Patients are then isolated for another 14 days, which is the virus incubation period. Mujahid pointed out the time-consuming nature of the process, which is why new cases aren't immediately included in daily updates.

In March, Canadian researchers published a statistical study on coronavirus infections in Egypt, estimating there were about 6,000 to 19,000 cases, but the Egyptian government rejected the study March 17, calling the estimates inaccurate.

Alaa Ghannam, a health expert and head of the Right to Health Program at the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights, told Al-Monitor by phone that only the official figures announced by the Egyptian Ministry of Health should be considered, despite the possibility of their inaccuracy. He explained that, on one hand, the ministry announces only the cases it detects, but on the other hand, Egypt has not conducted PCR tests for all citizens or even for a large number of citizens  as the United States has, for example  so the announced numbers will be much less than the actual cases.

Meanwhile, the government does not announce the number of PCR tests being conducted daily.

Ghannam said many citizens don't believe ministry statistics because they don't trust the government's disclosures of information in general and especially with regard to the health situation. They believe the government deliberately reduces the announced figures to keep from panicking citizens or affecting their morale, he concluded.
Photo credit: BBC

From Digital Spy

The Nest spoilers follow.



After five episodes of lies, murder and betrayal, surrogacy drama The Nest concluded on Monday (April 13) with surprisingly happy endings for the three main characters, wealthy couple Dan (Line of Duty's Martin Compston) and Emily McDermott (Peaky Blinders' Sophie Rundle) and their surrogate Kaya (Sex Education's Mirren Mack).

But should it have done?

Young Kaya, at least, did deserve happiness and peace after being let down by just about everyone in her life and it was a huge relief when she finally broke free from her horrendous mother Siobhan (Shirley Henderson) who had always blamed her daughter for the death of Kaya's aunt Neve.

It was revealed in the final episode that Siobhan had been the one brandishing a knife at Neve, and Kaya had tried to stop the attack.

So it was especially pleasing to watch the calculating Siobhan  who had also caused numerous problems by convincing Kaya to go to the press about her surrogacy  shuffle off into the sunset with a handful of cash, hopefully never to be heard from again.

Photo credit: BBC

Teen Kaya  clearly the most sensible person in this whole baby mess  realised that raising the child she had carried for couple Dan and Emily wasn't a life she was ready for, or one that would be best for the baby.

The final episode ended with her preparing for the new start she had always wanted and most definitely deserved after everything she had been through.

Far less satisfying, however, was the ridiculously sweet ending that Dan and Emily got  after applying to court they were granted temporary custody of the baby thanks to Kaya's selfless recommendation, with a view to it becoming permanent.

Wait, what? We're supposed to be happy for them after Emily manipulated husband Dan (by threatening to leave him) into accepting virtual stranger Kaya as a surrogate despite his understandable reservations? We should be jumping for joy that they eventually got their way after they both exploited Kaya by offering her 50,000 to carry their embryo?

Story continues

And are we also expected to forget they whisked the poor girl off to a clinic in the Ukraine, after being told she wasn't a suitable surrogate under UK law, before she could change her mind?

Photo credit: BBC / Studio Lambert / Mark Mainz

Then there were the double-whammy revelations that Dan used to launder drug money through his business when he got started, and that teenage Emily gave her school friend drugs that accidentally killed her  neither of which exactly make them candidates for parents of the year.

While the third option for the baby  being taken into care  is even more awful to contemplate, it's frustrating that The Nest ends up with Dan and Emily as the best parental choice for the unfortunate little one.

This child  named Grace by Dan and Emily, and Neve by Kaya  is set to be raised by two parents who were teetering on the edge of divorce before she came along, buckling under the pressure of Dan's business empire and Emily's bordering-on-scary obsession with having a baby.

The judge in their custody case berates the McDermotts for their haste, recklessness, arrogance and perception that money can buy them anything, though it apparently does.

However, she doesn't take Emily's precarious mental state into account and still allows them to take the baby home, reasoning that this unstable couple are the poor baby's best option.

Really?

She also conveniently forgets that the whole sorry mess  Dan's money laundering and the couple's surrogacy story  have been splashed all over the newspapers, giving Baby McDermott something disturbing to look at once she has learned to read.

Photo credit: BBC

The judge clearly hasn't taken the McDermotts' living arrangements into account either  their loch-side, glass walled house may have been suitably stylish for a wealthy couple, but it's not exactly child-friendly if they take an accidental dip.

The finale may have ended with them happily playing with the baby in the living room (let's hope they put a rug down on those hard floors), but the safety conscious among us really needed a scene in which Dan installed baby gates, added extra balcony railings, and fitted shatterproof window panes before the baby moved in.

And, just before we let Emily and Dan skip off into a life in a parental happiness filled with unicorns and rainbows  what about the baby's 'real' parents?

Yes, in a wincingly annoying plot twist it was revealed that the embryo implanted into Kaya wasn't the McDermotts' embryo at all (oops) and there had been a mix up in the lab. So while Kaya is the baby's mother under UK law since she carried her, the baby genetically belongs to another couple, whose identity is unknown.

Who wants to bet that, if The Nest returns for a second series, the story have the biological parents arriving in Glasgow trying to get 'their' baby back? At least, whoever they are, they would probably be an improvement on Emily and Dan

The Nest airs on BBC One.

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Looking for more TV recommendations and discussion? Head over to our Facebook Group to see new picks every day, and chat with other readers about what they're watching right now.



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Sima Sistani has been getting through the coronavirus outbreak stay-home orders the past month in many of the same ways others have: home-schooling her 7-year-old, trading off parenting shifts with her husband, and jumping from room to room to find a quiet space for phone calls. "I'm basically in whatever room my kids are not in," she said.But Sistani's work life has been dramatically changed in one way that's unique: as co-founder and chief executive officer of video-chat app Houseparty, which has surged in popularity since early March, she's suddenly leading a company that has evolved from a low-pressure way to chat with friends to a legitimate lifeline for those unexpectedly stuck indoors.

"I used to always tell people, like, 'Hey, we're not curing cancer here,' " Sistani said in an interview - conducted over Houseparty - from her home in San Francisco this week. "This is the first time where I feel like, wow, we have such a responsibility and an obligation right now to maintain this service because people need it. It's critical for them right now."

Alongside Zoom, Houseparty may be the product that most defines the current moment, when about 300 million Americans have been urged to stay home to help mitigate the spread of Covid-19. At its core, Houseparty's free mobile and desktop apps let people video chat with friends or family, similar to Zoom and Apple's FaceTime. But Houseparty, which has previously been popular mainly with teens, builds in a slew of other features meant to encourage interaction, including the ability to remotely play games such as trivia or "Heads Up," or to jump into ongoing conversations your friends are already having in the app.

In the past month, Houseparty has seen 50 million signups, said Sistani, which she estimates is about 70 times the app's typical amount in some markets. The company doesn't disclose total user numbers, but it has been the most-downloaded social networking app in Apple's U.S. App Store every day since March 20 - ahead of Facebook Inc.'s trio of Facebook, Messenger and WhatsApp - and it was the second-most downloaded app of any category over Easter weekend behind only Zoom, according to App Annie. ("Zoom by day, Houseparty by night," Sistani jokes.)

To many now stuck at home, Houseparty's rise may have come out of nowhere. But the app has been around for almost four years, and last June was acquired by Epic Games, maker of the blockbuster video game Fortnite, after raising more than $70 million in venture capital. In a fundraising round in late 2016, investors valued Houseparty at about $150 million, according to Pitchbook.

At the time of the acquisition, the two companies talked about a shared vision of enabling more live interaction, an increasingly prevalent goal in the gaming industry. Connecting people is Houseparty's ultimate mission, and Sistani likes to talk about creating "empathy" online, and fixing what she considers to be a rising "loneliness epidemic." But while she admits Houseparty is a social network, Sistani considers her business far different from social media - where users post to an audience without necessarily interacting, and where people mindlessly scroll through the feed to kill time. A sticker on Sistani's phone reads: "Social media seriously harms your mental health."

Instead, Sistani sees Houseparty as a more intimate alternative to those feeds, but also to intrusive phone calls that can interrupt real life or come at unexpected times. When people are logged into Houseparty, others can see they're available and around to chat, and then pop in to say hello. "I think that's what the promise of social networks was supposed to be," she said. Even Facebook, the company that created the never-ending feed, seems to agree: CEO Mark Zuckerberg has been pushing the company more toward intimate products such as messaging and groups in recent years.

Since the Covid-19 outbreak started requiring people to stay at home in early March, Sistani says she's seen the app used for happy hours and fitness sessions,engagements and gender reveals - something she did through the app herself three years ago, before the birth of her daughter. "I just think any kind of activity that would usually be in person with your loved ones, people are moving to Houseparty," she says.

Sistani's disdain for social media carries over to Houseparty's business, too, and helps explain why the company has sworn off ads as a potential revenue source. Instead it's looking at offering in-app purchases, though that business is still nascent. Sistani says making money is far lower on her priority list than simply keeping the app functional. "It's not about capitalizing on this moment. That is not how we're thinking about it at all," she said, adding that being part of Epic Games helps from a financial standpoint. The year before it acquired Houseparty, the gaming juggernaut generated $3 billion in profit, according to TechCrunch.

Before it became Houseparty, the startup behind the app was known for another video product - Meerkat, a livestreaming app through which anyone could broadcast a video feed directly from a smartphone. Meerkat was the 2015 breakout hit at tech and media conference South by Southwest, the same conference where Twitter first attracted attention in 2007.

But less than six months after the conference, and three months after using the SXSW hype to raise $14 million, Meerkat's then-CEO Ben Rubin told his board that the company needed to change course. The startup quickly realized that livestreaming to a group of followers was the kind of thing that celebrities and media organizations did well, but wasn't easy for regular people. "When we kept looking at why Meerkat wasn't working, we kept saying it's theater, it's performant," Sistani, who took over as CEO in early 2019, said on a podcast in 2018.

So the company did what many Silicon Valley tech companies must do at some point: it pivoted, changing focus from a one-to-many broadcast platform to a video-chat service for close friends. The mission was, "let's be the most human way to connect when you're not physically together," Sistani, who was chief operating officer at the time of the change, recalled.

Like other products that have been thrust into the spotlight - notably Zoom, which went from 10 million daily users in December to 200 million this month - Houseparty's dramatic rise on the App Store charts hasn't been flawless. "It's been a crunch," Sistani said. The increased usage has been a strain on Houseparty's technical infrastructure, forcing the company, which has about 100 full-time employees, to cut access to some of its non-essential features just to make sure the app doesn't crash.

Then there were the allegations, made online by numerous Twitter accounts, that Houseparty had been hacked, and that downloading the app had resulted in some users losing control of other accounts where they presumably used the same password, like Spotify.

Houseparty quickly denied that there was any breach, but the accusations were widespread enough that Houseparty sent its own tweet offering a $1 million bounty to anyone with information about where the hack rumors started.

"We are investigating indications that the recent hacking rumors were spread by a paid commercial smear campaign to harm Houseparty," the company said, though the statement and payment offer drew even more attention to the rumors. Sistani declined to elaborate further, citing legal limitations on what she could discuss. "We don't know what happened, and we're still investigating it," she added.

Sistani also is waiting to find out what awaits Houseparty after people return to work and school. "Being in person with someone is still better than anything that we can provide," she said, though she hopes that people will emerge more connected after the outbreak than they were before. Hopefully, she says, "Houseparty would have a role in that new more connected, empathetic future."
By Laman Ismayilova

Baku Book Center has announced an essay contest on the topic "Life after coronavirus".

In the essay, everyone is invited to express his view of what life will be like after the end of the coronavirus pandemic, to share his vision on scientific, socio-political, humanitarian, social, economic, psychological consequences.

The Center will chose the best six essays.The author of the contest idea is member of the Azerbaijani Writers Union, professor Elmira Suleymanova.

More details are provided on the Center`s Facebook. The deadline is May 10, 2020.

Baku Book Center was officially opened to visitors on September 1, 2018. The main goal of the Center is to encourage people in reading book as a bearer of cultural, spiritual values and useful knowledge.

Here booklovers can also take part in presentations of books, literary and musical evenings, meetings with cultural and art workers, thematic master classes and much more.

The Center also organizes events with the participation of international organizations and diplomatic missions.

By the decision of the CIS Executive Committee, Baku Book Center has been awarded the diploma "For the great work in development of domestic book distribution and international book exchange in 2018."

---

Laman Ismayilova is AzerNews staff journalist, follow her on Twitter: @Lam_Ismayilova

Follow us on Twitter @AzerNewsAz
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and parliament speaker Benny Gantz faced a midnight deadline on Wednesday to form a unity government or risk prolonging the country's unprecedented political crisis.

The right-wing premier Netanyahu and centrist Gantz, Israel's former army chief, have gone head-to-head in three stalemate elections over the past year. Following the most recent vote last month, both men fell short of a majority and neither had a clear path toward a viable governing coalition.

With the COVID-19 pandemic raging, including more than 12,000 confirmed infections in Israel, there have been widespread calls for an interim emergency alliance.

A Netanyahu-Gantz deal would give the Jewish state its first stable government since December 2018 and offer a rare period of political calm amid a global health crisis that is taking a devastating economic toll.

If the two cannot reach a deal by President Reuven Rivlin's midnight deadline, Israel's parliament, or Knesset, will likely be asked to nominate a candidate to become prime minister.

Throwing the decision to the Knesset would almost certainly create further uncertainty and could push Israel towards another election.

Gantz, who heads the Blue and White alliance, was given a mandate for four weeks to form a government following the March vote after receiving a majority of recommendations from the 120-member Knesset. But he was unable to do so given the bitter divisions within the anti-Netanyahu parliamentary bloc.

After being elected Knesset speaker, Gantz pledged to use the remainder of his mandate to seek a deal with Netanyahu.

Minutes before the mandate expired at midnight on Monday, Gantz and Netanyahu asked Rivlin for an extension, insisting they were close to a deal. Rivlin gave them until the end of Wednesday.

Israel is shut down for the final day of Passover until Wednesday evening, meaning Gantz and Netanyahu will have less than five hours to talk before the deadline.

Gantz's decision to seek a deal with Netanyahu triggered the break-up of his Blue and White alliance.

But he said it was necessary to ease the grinding political deadlock and strengthen Israel's ability to confront the pandemic.

By becoming speaker, Gantz all but conceded that Netanyahu would remain prime minister, at least through the first part of any prospective unity deal. The two have reportedly discussed a range of power-sharing scenarios, including a deal that would see Gantz take over as premier after a number of months, or years. But obstacles have emerged during coalition talks.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
A group of live-streamers have faced backlash after filming macaques playing with pregnancy test strips in a scenic spot in China.

Social media footage captures a monkey ripping apart the packaging of a test kit with its teeth while another visitor dropping a huge bag of marshmallows to feed the wild monkeys at the Qianling Mountain Park.

Horrified Chinese web users have called for a boycott of such live-streaming hosts who are criticised as morons with poor taste.

The nature park said that its difficult for them to intervene and determine whether the live-streamers actions indeed cause harm to the macaques.

Social media footage captures a visitor unleashing a huge bag of marshmallows to feed the wild monkeys at the Qianling Mountain Park while another woman cheerfully says lets eat

The scenic spot, located in the south-western Chinese city Guiyang, is a natural habitat to hundreds of wild monkeys.

Tourists were allowed to feed the monkeys before the coronavirus outbreak, according to the press. Local authorities banned the activity in late March and advised visitors to keep three metres (nine feet) away from the wild animals.

But recently emerged clips show live-streamers handing pregnancy test strips to the animals to play with, while another monkey is seen ripping apart the packaging of a test kit with its teeth.

The live-streamers, who appeared to try to attract their audience with the videos, remain unidentified. It is also unclear when the videos were filmed.

A manager from the nature park, known by his surname Zhang, confirmed such incidents with the local press.

Because its hard for us to determine whether the live-streamers actions indeed cause harm to the macaques, Mr Zhang told Pear Video. If it is harmful then the police would get involved.

When they act like ordinary visitors, you have no idea what their intentions are. You cant just ban them from entering the park.

If we see one, we will remove them. Sometimes they would just run away if they see us approaching, the manager added.

Local authorities banned feeding monkeys in late March and advised visitors to keep three metres (nine feet) away from the wild animals. Visitors wearing protective masks are pictured looking at a monkey at the Beijing Zoo

The scenic spot, located in the south-western Chinese city Guiyang, Guizhou Province, is a natural habitat to hundreds of wild monkeys

Outraged web users have also called for a boycott of such social media influencers and slammed them as morons with poor taste.

One comment read: Live-stream hosts with poor taste! They need to be banned as soon as possible.

Another one wrote: To all the social media platforms, please pay attention to these rubbish live-streamers. They have never done any good than doing outrage things to grab attention!

The novel coronavirus, which was first found in Wuhan, is widely believed to be originated in bats.

But scientists are still trying to unravel several key aspects of the COVID-19 pandemic, including how the virus was initially transmitted to a human.

China has banned all trade and consumption of wildlife, a practice believed to be responsible for the country's deadly virus epidemic.

It comes as a second Chinese city has banned its residents from eating dogs and cats with a new law in response to the coronavirus pandemic.

Scientists are still trying to unravel several key aspects of the COVID-19 pandemic, including how the virus was initially transmitted to a human. Residents are pictured purchasing seafood at a wet market in Macau

Zhuhai, a city bordering Macau with a population of 1.7 million, issued the order in line with a government's proposal which lists dogs as 'companion animals', an official told state media.

The two cities, both in the southern province of Guangdong, will enforce the ban from May 1.

Last week, the Chinese Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs excluded dogs from farm animals in a drafted directive.

The authority said it recognises dogs as 'companion animals' and 'not suitable' to be managed as livestock in the document released on April 8.

The global tally of infections has topped 2million and the deadly disease has claimed at least 130,680 lives.
Summary Poland Life Insurance: Key Trends and Opportunities to 2023 report provides a detailed outlook by product category for the Polish life insurance segment.

New York, April 14, 2020 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Reportlinker.com announces the release of the report "Poland Life Insurance: Key trends and Opportunities to 2023" - https://www.reportlinker.com/p05823111/?utm_source=GNW



It provides values for key performance indicators such as direct written premium, claims paid, penetration and assets during the review period (2014-2018) and forecast period (2018-2023).



The report gives a comprehensive overview of the Polish economy and demographics, and provides detailed information on the competitive landscape in the country.



The report brings together research, modeling and analysis expertise, giving insurers access to information on segment dynamics and competitive advantages, and profiles of insurers operating in the country. The report also includes details of insurance regulations, and recent changes in the regulatory structure.



Key Highlights

- Key insights into the dynamics of the Polish life insurance industry.

- Comparison of Polish life insurance segments, along with premium and claim trends.

- A comprehensive overview of the Polish economy, government initiatives and investment opportunities.

- Polish insurance regulatory frameworks evolution, key facts, taxation regime, licensing and capital requirements.

- Polish life insurance industrys market structure giving details of retail and commercial lines of business.

- Details of the competitive landscape, M&A and competitors profiles.



Scope

This report provides a comprehensive analysis of the life insurance segment in Poland -

- It provides historical values for the Polish life insurance segment for the reports 2014-2018 review period, and projected figures for the 2018-2023 forecast period.

- It offers a detailed analysis of the key categories in the Polish life insurance segment, and market forecasts to 2023.

- It profiles the top life insurance companies in Poland and outlines the key regulations affecting them.



Reasons to Buy

- Make strategic business decisions using in-depth historic and forecast market data related to Polish life insurance segment, and each category within it.

- Understand the demand-side dynamics, key market trends and growth opportunities in the Polish life insurance segment.

- Assess the competitive dynamics in the life insurance segment.

- Identify growth opportunities and market dynamics in key product categories.

Read the full report: https://www.reportlinker.com/p05823111/?utm_source=GNW



About Reportlinker

ReportLinker is an award-winning market research solution. Reportlinker finds and organizes the latest industry data so you get all the market research you need - instantly, in one place.



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To keep residents safe and virus free, visitors have not been allowed in most communities for the last few weeks, but the staff has set up computer stations so residents can video chat with their loved ones. Activities that used to be held in large communal settings have been altered to cater to smaller groups with appropriate social distancing. Apartment doorway exercise classes have gained a solid following and everyone gets meals delivered by room service.

Another benefit of keeping residents safe and virus free is to help reduce stress on emergency responders and local hospital systems. Community leadership and staff know their services are helping and take pride in the role they are playing. Stories abound about the extraordinary dedication of senior living staff members going above and beyond to care for their residents.

While reports of outbreaks of the virus in nursing homes and assisted living communities make for spectacular news stories, there are a number of factors to consider in response. First, the resident population of the broad range of senior living options can be distinguished from nursing homes. Nursing homes ordinarily serve residents with pre-existing medical needs where senior living communities by and large are focused on social determinants of health such as nutrition, social engagement and overall wellness. Assisted living communities also address residents who need assistance with activities of daily living (ADLs) including bathing, dressing and medication management.

The industry acknowledges that senior living residents are vulnerable to the virus but notes that residents who desire the supportive residential living environment provided in senior living communities, benefit from the services that are offered. Meals, wellness checks and assistance with ADLs cannot be overlooked when assessing the value of seniors communities and the positive impact on residents' sense of wellness.

This sense is illustrated by the engagement of resident groups who have found ways to help their outside communities and to connect with families. One group dubbed themselves the "Masketeers" and have been sewing face masks to give to all who need them. Resident families have decorated outdoor areas with colorful balloons and provided heart warming messages with sidewalk chalk on parking lots. In return, many residents have responded with window art of their own to show their love. Many senior communities are adorned with signs that read "Heroes Work Here" expressing gratitude for the hard work and dedication of the staff who keep operations humming. "I don't know if there is a better place we could have gone to, especially with all that is going on," commented one resident's sister.

To be sure, there are new challenges. Staff members are screened for symptoms and contacts with potentially infected individuals at the beginning of each shift and senior living operators have been making the case to elevate the priority of testing for staff and residents alike. Residents who exhibit symptoms are tested for the virus and quarantined or isolated as appropriate. The presence of personal protective equipment can result in a more clinical environment than normal and communities are on the constant lookout for fresh supplies. But, life goes on with a commitment to getting through these extraordinary times and returning to the comfortable "at home" routine of community life as soon as possible.

About Senior Lifestyle Corporation

Senior Lifestyle, founded in 1985, is a privately-held, owner-operator and developer of seniors housing communities. With a portfolio of more than 190 communities located throughout 27 states, Senior Lifestyle offers independent living, assisted living, memory care and skilled nursing for the luxury, moderate and affordable segments. Senior Lifestyle has been routinely recognized as a leader in the delivery of innovative programs and hospitality services for all levels of care. For more information, visit www.seniorlifestyle.com.

SOURCE Senior Lifestyle Corporation

Related Links

http://www.seniorlifestyle.com


She is currently in the midst of completing a four-year apprenticeship with a San Francisco law firm in order to take the California bar exam in 2022.

And on Tuesday night, Kim Kardashian shared a snap of one of questions from her homework.

The 39-year-old star wrote: 'OMG my law school studying is Tiger King themed today.'

Law: And on Tuesday night, Kim Kardashian shared a snap of one of questions from her homework, which was Tiger King themed

The question for the MBE (Multistate Bar Exam) read: ' A woman visited a tiger rescue zoo with her family. While she was there, she tripped over a tiger's tail and injured her arm. Who should the woman sue and what is her best theory of liability.'

The choices were 'The owner of the zoo, for negligence, the owner of the zoo, for strict liability, the owner of the zoo, since a tiger zoo is considered abnormally dangerous activity, Carole Baskin.'

She playfully circled Carole Baskin, adding three exclamation points; Carole is the CEO of Big Cat Rescue in Florida.

Last month, Kim took to Twitter to gush about the new show that has the world abuzz - Tiger King.

The latest: The 39-year-old star wrote: 'OMG my law school studying is Tiger King themed today'

Closer look: She playfully circled Carole Baskin, adding three exclamation points

The brunette beauty wrote: 'Has anyone seen Tiger King on Netflix?!?! It is crazy!!!!'

Kim followed it up with 'Wow the amount of texts I've gotten about Tiger King since I tweeted about it all have mentioned their belief that Carol killed her husband! What are you thoughts? Do you think Carol killed him?'

Last year, Kim revealed she was working toward becoming a lawyer; she plans on taking the California bar exam in 2022.

California is one of four states that allows a person an alternate from going to law school; she must complete a four-year apprenticeship with a law firm (she is doing that with a San Francisco firm).

Tiger King series: Carole is the CEO of Big Cat Rescue in Florida

Focused: Last year, Kim revealed she was working toward becoming a lawyer; she plans on taking the California bar exam in 2022

She is required to complete 18 hours a week of work and take written and multiple choice exams monthly.

Kim hopes to follow her late father, Robert Kardashian's footsteps in becoming a lawyer.

Last year, she said in a lengthy Instagram caption: 'One person actually said I should "stay in my lane." I want people to understand that there is nothing that should limit your pursuit of you dreams, and the accomplishment of new goals. You can create your own lanes, just as I am,' alongside a picture of her studying with her mentors Jessica Jackson and Erin Haney.

The mother of four also shared snaps of letters she received from inmates during her COVID-19 isolation on Tuesday.

Kim has been a passionate advocate for prison reform; she also has her own show, called Kim Kardashian West: The Justice Project on Oxygen.

Big heart: The mother of four also shared snaps of letters she received from inmates during her COVID-19 isolation
Washington peace envoy Zalmay Khalilzad met with Pakistans military chief on April 14, a day after discussing the lagging U.S.-Taliban peace deal in Afghanistan with the chief negotiator for the insurgent movement.

The meetings included General Scott Miller, head of U.S. forces in Afghanistan. Statements from the U.S. Embassy in Islamabad and the U.S. military in Kabul said Washington was engaged in ongoing efforts to find a sustainable peace after decades of relentless war, but the U.S. officials released no details.

Taliban political spokesman Suhail Shaheen said the insurgent group's chief negotiator, Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, used Monday's meeting at the Taliban's political office in Qatar to protest attacks against Taliban fighters in their homes, contrary to provisions of the February 29 agreement.

Our men have been targeted in their residential areas while there is no room for such attacks in the agreement, either by the U.S. or their internal (Afghan) supporters, he said, a reference to the Afghan National Security Forces.

The U.S. military has refused to address the Taliban's specific complaint but has said it is abiding by the agreement and will continue to come to the aid of the Afghan military.

At the meeting with Pakistan's Chief of Army Staff General Qamar Javed Bajwa, Pakistans military leaders reaffirmed their support for U.S. efforts and renewed their commitment to act to advance a political settlement to the conflict," according to a statement released by the U.S. Embassy in the Pakistani capital.

At the heart of most of the talks, say Taliban and U.S. officials, is the demand for a reduction of violence. The Taliban have not been attacking U.S. and NATO troops since the agreement was signed, instead attacking Afghan forces in outlying areas. Washington wants a reduction of those attacks.

Shaheen said the Taliban are ready to negotiate a countrywide cease-fire but only during intra-Afghan negotiations, the next critical step of the deal. However, getting to intra-Afghan negotiations, which Washington had hoped would begin weeks earlier, has mostly been held up by political turmoil in Kabul as dueling presidents fight over who is the real winner in last year's presidential elections and the government squabbles over the deal's call for the release of 5,000 Taliban prisoners and 1,000 government prisoners.

The Kabul regime is creating hurdles in the way of intra-Afghan negotiation by not releasing our prisoners as it is a prerequisite for commencement of intra Afghan negotiations," Shaheen told the Associated Press.

The government has freed 300 men they say are Taliban but who have yet to be verified by the insurgents and the Taliban have freed 20 government employees.

The call for a reduction in violence has taken on greater importance as the coronavirus pandemic threatens to overwhelm Afghanistan's beleaguered and war-ravaged health care system.

The U.N. secretary-general has asked for a cease-fire to conflicts around the world to focus resources on fighting the pandemic. Afghanistan has more than 700 confirmed cases and 23 deaths, but testing is limited and more than 200,000 Afghans have returned home in recent months from neighboring Iran, where the virus has infected nearly 75,000 and killed more than 4,600.
Deputies are searching for the driver who struck and killed a man who was crossing FM 1960 on his bicycle late Tuesday night.

A Harris County sheriffs deputy patrolling FM 1960 near the Hardy Toll Road spotted the bicyclist lifeless near the roadway around 10:30 p.m., according to Harris County Sheriffs Office Sgt. Simon Cheng. Investigators believe the man was attempting to cross north on FM 1960 when the westbound driver struck him.
Last week, paramedics came for my elderly neighbor across the street as my kids and I watched helplessly from our front window. They donned masks and tied each others long blue gowns closed. Why is the fire truck here, too? my son asked.

I think it always comes when an ambulance is called, I said, trying to be useful when in fact I felt useless.

With more than half the world under stay-at-home orders, many of us are experiencing this feeling of helplessness in the face of other peoples suffering. Under normal conditions, there would be meals to make and hospital visits to pay. But these are not normal days.

And yet, we are not powerless. Not even close. One of the most effective things we can do for our neighbors the world over is to get down on our knees and reach out to God, the source of help itself.

I wrote 20 Prayers to Pray During This Pandemic to remind us that God is who he says he is: See now that I myself am he! There is no god besides me (Deut. 32:39).

In the weeks since the publication of that piece, hundreds of thousands of people around the globe have been reading, praying (presumably), and also sharing those prayersin seven languages [see yellow links]. The numbersencompassing more than 100 countriespay tribute to how the church is coming together in crisis.

As we continue to join hands from a distance, here are 20 more prayers for our neighbors everywhere:

1. For the church, struggling with faith in the midst of global suffering: God, we believe in your willingness to heal and your power to do so. Help our unbelief.

2. For those who have turned to faith in Jesus for the very first time during this pandemic: God, help our new brothers and sisters grow in the grace and knowledge of our Savior.

3. For those who dont know Jesus yet but find their hearts stirred by spiritual curiosities and eternal longings: God, in your kindness, lead many to repentance and obedient faith in your Son.

4. For first responders and frontline health care workers, especially in epicenters of infection: God, reinforce their ranks and strengthen them with supernatural energy.

5. For companies with the ability (and the mandate) to manufacture much-needed protective equipment for our frontline health care workers: God, establish the work of their hands.

6. For transit workers, police officers, and other public servants working tirelessly, often without adequate protection: God, give them stamina every day and keep them from falling ill.

7. For nursing homes, rehabilitation centers, and other long-term care facilities: God, encourage the lonely residents and strengthen the staff members who help them. Prevent further spread of infection, and comfort families who can no longer visit their loved ones.

8. For the incarcerated, who are particularly vulnerable to the spread of this virus: God, give wisdom to prison officials. Protect inmates and staff from both violence and illness. Deliver them all from fear.

9. For women and children in abusive situations: God, restrain those who commit harm. Provide protection and rescue for victims and comfort them in their vulnerability.

10. For countries in the developing world: God, contain the spread of infection in our worlds most densely populated and poorest cities. Spare countries already burdened with disease and chronic poor health.

11. For Asian Americans in the United States, Africans in China, and other people all over the world subjected to COVID-related racism: God, confront this evil with your swift justice, and deliver our brothers and sisters from cruelty.

12. For everyone anxious about the economic futurehow theyll pay for housing, food, and essential medicines: God, connect them to sources of help through the church, the government, and the community. Enable them to look toward you for provision.

13. For small churches without cash reserves: God, keep their doors open, and urge your people to give generously.

14. For educators, forced to adapt curricula to online learning, and for students, forced to exercise more autonomy: God, make homes a place of curiosity, inquiry, and study. Give special help to children without regular access to the internet and other digital tools.

15. For those disappointed by the cancellation of milestone celebrations like graduations, weddings, or baby showers: God, comfort them in their disappointments, and make it possible for them to gather again with friends and family.

16. For expectant mothers, who face the prospect of labor and delivery without the support team theyd planned for: God, deliver them from fear, and fill them with joy as they witness new life.

17. For women facing unexpected pregnancy in this time of economic crisis: God, help them to find the practical and emotional support they need to keep them from seeking abortions.

18. For churches, parachurch ministries, and other Christian organizations doing online evangelism and discipleship: God, bless our imperfect digital efforts and continue to advance the kingdom of Jesus through your people.

19. For those dying alone in hospitals and for their loved ones: God, draw near to them and, by your mercy, let them encounter Christ, the friend who never leaves and never forsakes.

20. For those involved with politics at every level: God, help our leaders to work collaboratively and communicate efficiently, setting aside self-interest for the common good.

God, we acknowledge that you spoke the world into being and continue to sustain it with your Word. We trust in your wisdom, power, and goodness. Help us at every opportunity to love as you loved and to serve as you serve. Give us courage to speak of our hope in Jesus, who suffered for us, rose from the dead, and is coming again. Amen.

Jen Pollock Michel is the author of Teach Us to Want, Keeping Place, and Surprised by Paradox. She lives with her husband and their five children in Toronto.

[ This article is also available in espanol, Portugues, Francais, , , Indonesian, and . ]
When coronavirus trumps cancer

Its very important to protect our staff and our immunosuppressed patients, said Fred Hutch's Dr. Gary Lyman, a lead investigator on the COVID19-cancer registry study. If cancer patients get infected, theyre more at risk for life-threatening complications. We want to avoid COVID-19 infection if at all possible.

Lyman said oncologists across the country are reinventing cancer care for the COVID-19 era, rescheduling noncritical procedures, surgeries and visits; using telemedicine where possible; opting for oral medications over infusions if doable and rewriting policy on the fly to help keep high-risk cancer patients out of the ER and harms way.

These are desperate times which require desperate measures, he said.

Sapien, diagnosed at 40, had her scheduled single mastectomy this week. But her reconstruction was postponed and her request for the prophylactic removal of her other breast  a common practice  was deemed elective and denied.

Doing a double [mastectomy] increases your operating room reservation, knocking somebody out of a spot, she said. Theyre trying to use the OR for critical cases. Normally, I would have the choice, but this isnt a normal time. And I get that.

Dr. Julie Gralow, who serves as clinical director of the Breast Medical Oncology program at Seattle Cancer Care Alliance and does research for both Fred Hutch and the University of Washington, said she and colleagues are discussing surgery delays and treatment swaps with patients and rescheduling prevention screenings like mammograms, bone-density tests and colonoscopies.

We are totally triaging, she said.

Those with fast-growing breast cancers  think triple negative and HER2 positive  receive the exact same standard of care: preoperative chemotherapy. But those who have slower-growing cancers such as ER positive and HER2 negative will mostly likely be put on endocrine (anti-hormone) therapy first instead of having surgery.

Im still starting chemo if its warranted, but were doing the minimum amount of surgery and no reconstruction, not even putting in tissue expanders, she said. The more surgery, the higher the likelihood of complication or infection. Our priority at this time is to keep patients out of surgery and out of the hospital. We need to protect the OR space and the ventilators and the potential ICU beds, and we need to preserve resources like masks and gowns and gloves.

Is it safe to delay treatment or surgery?

Many patients can safely have their therapies delayed or switched around to avoid clinic visits and exposures, Gralow said, adding that theres "good trial data on using endocrine therapy preoperatively in postmenopausal women with breast cancer, the most common cancer in women in the U.S.

In the vast majority of people, preoperative endocrine therapy stabilizes or shrinks the cancer, she said. Well aim to give it for three to six months to delay the surgery.

Other breast cancer patients may safely have the order of treatments swapped, as no trial has ever shown that the order of chemo and surgery impacts survival, Gralow said.

Those with metastatic cancer, in treatment for life, might also be able to take a drug holiday, she said.
M inister Helen Whately was accused of "laughing" by Piers Morgan in a row over coronavirus deaths in care homes.

On Tuesday, it was announced 217 people had died after contracting the virus in care homes as of April 3, though it is expected this number is now higher.

Mr Morgan asked Ms Whately to "just answer straight questions" as he pressed on the figures, with reports of thousands of fatalities put to her.

At this point she appeared exasperated to which he asked: "Why are you laughing?"

Ms Whately, who is Minister for Care, told him: "I'm trying to answer your questions... I don't think it's funny in the slightest."

Piers Morgan questions the Care Minister over the number of healthcare workers that have died

Mr Morgan went on: "So why do you keep laughing then?"

Ms Whately said: "I'm not laughing... I have not been, but it feels like you're shouting at me and not giving me a chance to answer".

Pressed on a 4,000 figure, reported by the Daily Mail, Ms Whately said she believed the figure was higher than 217, but would not speculate on the number.

"I don't think it's appropriate for me to give you a ball park figure for something as serious as this," she said.

Elsewhere in the interview, she conceded the Government does not know how many social care workers have died amid the coronavirus outbreak as she clashed with Mr Morgan. 

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Quizzed over staff deaths related to Covid-19, she told Good Morning Britain: We know that also some workers have died who work in social care and, Ill be straight with you, we dont have a figure for that.

Mr Morgan also asked her about the number of NHS workers who had died, with Ms Whately stating the confirmed toll stood at 19.

He branded that toll as "complete and utter nonsense", stating reports which branded the figures as potentially twice that number.

"I don't get my number from newspapers I have to get it from the NHS and from our scientists," she said.

"Your focus on figures slightly blows the fact that we're talking about individual people's lives here," she also told Mr Morgan during the row.

It comes as the Government promised to ramp up testing in care homes , while it has also been urged to release daily figures from them alongside the hospital numbers.

Questions have also been raised over the supply of personal protective equipment in the care sector.

Ms Whately told Sky News that more than 1,000 care workers had been tested for Covid-19 and more than 2,000 others referred for testing.
A 106-year-old woman, thought to be the oldest patient in Britain to beat the novel coronavirus, has been discharged from hospital.

Connie Titchen, a great grandmother from Birmingham, in central England, battled the virus for just under three weeks and was given a clean bill of health by medics at City Hospital.

I feel very lucky that Ive fought off this virus, Titchen said. I cant wait to see my family.

Titchen, who was born in 1913 and has lived through both world wars, was admitted to hospital in mid-March with suspected pneumonia. She was diagnosed with Covid-19 soon afterwards.

She has always cooked for herself too, although she likes a cheeky McDonalds every now and then. I havent told her they are closed, said her granddaughter Alex Jones, 40.

I think the secret of her old age is that she is physically active and very independent. She had a hip operation back in December and within 30 days she was walking again. She really is amazing and I know all the family cant wait to see her. She has quite a few fans!

Nurse Kelly Smith who looked after Titchen said:

Its been fantastic to see Connie recover. She is amazing and weve been doing our best to nurse her back to health.

We were really pleased when she was given the all clear. Its nice to see patients leave our ward after having beaten this virus.

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An IT glitch led to nearly 100 people who were positive for the coronavirus being told they were negative, it has emerged.

The blunder happened in recent days after those affected were contacted by text about their test results following analyses at a German laboratory.

They were first told their test was negative, but later informed it was positive.

Dr Cillian de Gascun, head of the National Virus Laboratory, said the results came back from Germany as "invalids" and the computer, as it was configured, read this as a negative.

He said in the ordinary course of events the Irish lab would have looked for a follow-up sample from the patients, but because they had given a swab around two weeks previously, the likelihood is they had cleared the infection and a new swab would be negative.

Instead the UCD lab collaborated and re-analysed them.

The fact the swabs would have been taken around 14 days previously meant the patients would have likely recovered during self-isolation at that point, although some could have deteriorated, said chief medical officer Dr Tony Holohan.

The glitch is the latest problem to hit the testing system here, which will be central to the decision to relax some of the restrictive measures imposed until May 5.

Over the past week, 20,468 tests were carried out in Irish laboratories, of which 4,233 were positive. Around one in five had the virus.

The plan is to widen the net, and expand the criteria for testing outside the current priority groups, in order to capture more people who have the virus.

However, Dr Holohan said yesterday that he has "no confidence" yet that the testing regime, as of now, would be able to cope with this expansion.

It can still take four to five days for a test result to be returned to one of the priority groups in the community, although it is faster if the test is carried out on a hospital patient.

The testing and tracing system must be available in real time if there is to be any easing of restrictions here, otherwise a rise in cases would not be detected.

Leading infectious disease consultant Dr Sam McConkey believes that contact tracing of people who are first-degree contacts of a person who has tested positive should be done in less than six hours.

They should go into rapid, voluntary self-isolation with the use of GPS mobile phone locations, Bluetooth links and QR codes that record, with the person's consent, where they have been in the last 14 days.

The HSE has said the testing system will be ramped up over the next week with the use of more domestic laboratories, but there are also uncertainties about the future supply of reagent for laboratory analysis.

It is also unclear if the German laboratory will continue to be able to provide a back-up service which would allow thousands of tests to be processed in a day.

Dr De Gascun said: "Having come through a challenging few weeks, we have significantly strengthened testing capacity and will continue to do so over the coming week, to put us in a very strong position to identify and suppress the virus."

The Health Protection Surveillance Centre is also to develop a strategy to conduct a study which will identify the proportion of the population who have had Covid-19.

This will include people who have had the virus but were unaware of it because they had little or no symptoms.

A blood test may detect antibodies.
is expected to launch the Galaxy Fold 2 later this year and the device may come in martian green as well as astro blue colour variants, ditching the S-Pen this time.

The phone will have a slightly bigger screen but will keep the form factor of the original Galaxy Fold, reports GSMArena.

The company is reportedly planning to start manufacturing components in May, and is looking at starting mass-producing the device in June/July.

It is expected to hit the market in Q3 2020, and may be launched alongside the Galaxy Note 20 in August.

Galaxy Fold 2 can offer a larger cover display than the 4.6-inch screen on the original Galaxy Fold.

The size of the foldable display of the second generation phone may be increased to 7.7-inch compared to Galaxy Fold's 7.3-inches.





ALSO READ: Samsung Display closes part of Vietnamese plant to curb coronavirus spread

The phone will be available in two models with a more affordable 256GB one and a slightly expensive 512 GB model.

The next Fold may also adopt the same camera array as the S20 Plus, which includes a 64MP telephoto camera and may get a punch-hole instead of a notch.

It will be the company's third foldable Android handset and will come after the company announced the Galaxy Z Flip and the Galaxy Fold.

With regard to the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic, Samsung India on Tuesday committed Rs 20 crore towards combating the coronavirus. The company announced that it will donate Rs 15 crore to the PM-CARES Fund and Rs 5 crore to relief funds of state governments of Uttar Pradesh and Tamil Nadu, where it operates manufacturing units.

In Uttar Pradeshs Noida, Samsung is already providing support to the local administration and community by equipping hospitals with medical equipment required in the preventive drive against the pandemic along with infra-red thermometers, public addressal systems and air purifiers. Samsung is also providing food packets to local communities in Noida on a daily basis.



ALSO READ: Galaxy Z Flip: First look at the Samsung's pocket-sized foldable smartphone

(Only the headline and picture of this report may have been reworked by the Business Standard staff; the rest of the content is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
The New Humanity advocacy group launched a petition addressed to the UN secretary general and the President of the EU Parliament. The comprehensive embargo that is crushing the Syrian people makes them more vulnerable. Sanctions today are "cruel and unacceptable". The goal is to save people by transcending political and ideological orientation. Click on petition to see it.

Rome (AsiaNews)  New Humanity, a Catholic group, has launched a petition addressed to the UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres, US President Donald Trump, European Council President Charles Michel and EU Parliament President David Sassoli.

The petition calls for the "immediate" end to the economic embargo against the civilian population in Syria through urgent and concrete measures and for the removal of the "obstacles" that prevent the "exchange of goods and money" needed to combat the COVID-19 pandemic.

Thousands of people around the world have signed the petition calling for end to EU and US sanctions. Its promoters note that the novel coronavirus has affected humanity as a whole, but not everyone is equal before the disease.

The people of Syria are still at war and are facing the outbreak overburdened by the comprehensive embargo. For this reason, the petition urges the European Union and the United Nations to ease restrictions, especially vis-a-vis medical supplies and financial transactions.

International sanctions have accentuated the conditions of vulnerability, the petition says. And at this moment in history," they are cruel and unacceptable" because they deprive people of the aid and support" needed to overcome the novel coronavirus.

Today, we must consider that the rationale behind the embargo has become outdated, since preserving the lives of the people of Syria is enormously more important, the petition goes on to say.

In recent weeks, various people who spoke to AsiaNews have slammed the sanctions, asking that they be lifted to alleviate the suffering of the Syrian population.

Critics include the Maronite archbishop of Damascus who spoke from the deep "pit" that is now Syria, the Apostolic Vicar of Aleppo who calls the sanctions a crime" that hits the people, and a Christian doctor who considers them an "obstacle" in the fight against coronavirus.

Pope Francis himself in his recent Easter message urged the international community to ease the sanctions against countries like Syria and Iran affected by the COVID-19 outbreak.

Thousands of people have signed the non-partisan petition, including Pascal Pittet of Terre des Hommes, Jamal Abo Abbas of the Syrian Arab Community in Italy, Sebastiano Caputo of SOS Cristiani d'Oriente, the Blue Marists of Aleppo, and former Italian premier Romano Prodi.

The petitions goal of safeguarding the Syrian people goes beyond any political or ideological orientation and seeks to avoid being complicit in a catastrophe.
The extended lockdown is set to cost the Indian economy up to Rs 17.78 lakh crore and mount the woes of sectors such as travel and tourism, manufacturing, auto even as partial opening of select sectors outside of coronavirus hotspots from April 20 has kindled hopes.

A Barclays research estimates India's loss of economic activity could be as high as $234 billion in the lockdown period, resulting in zero per cent GDP growth this fiscal. ICRA, however, expects GDP to shrink by 1% in FY21.

The Centre's move to allow manufacturing across Special Economic Zones (SEZs), Export Oriented Units (EOUs) and units operating from rural areas is being seen as part of the strategy for a gradual exit from the lockdown. The Home Ministry order has also allowed manufacture of IT hardware and essential goods among a slew of other activities. While many companies engaged in manufacturing are exploring the possibility of opening their factories, they are discussing the plan with other players in the supply chain. However, options are limited.

ALSO READ:Coronavirus fallout: IMF cuts India's GDP growth to 1.9%; global economy to see worst recession since 1930s

Manufacturing

The industry's demand for opening manufacturing - 80-odd per cent of which is shut or operating at very low utilisation - was unfounded and was rejected. Opening up manufacturing at a time when demand in most sectors has crashed between 50-90% would have been suicidal. It would have only locked up precious cash in producing goods which could not be sold as shops, showrooms and malls stay shut.

A Gurugram-based auto component supplier to Maruti said he can open factories after Maruti restarts. "It will take a couple of days to figure out what all production can be started. Unless the whole supply chain works, it is difficult to resume operations," he said.

However, export-oriented plants may restart as most international markets have not blocked exports and ports of entry and exit continue to function with some restrictions. Especially so for continuous process manufacturers whose plants have least human intervention. Steel producer JSW, which exports nearly 30% of its requirement, is going ahead with its plan to reopen manufacturing to cater to markets in US and Europe. Confederation of Indian Industries (CII) said that existing export orders and opportunities should be met to retain India's export market share in the post-COVID period.

ALSO READ:Saving jobs: Allow PF contribution cuts, no wage hikes, ISF urges govt

Aviation

Passenger-less aviation sector has had a lease of life hauling cargo for government and private firms in India and abroad. Since lockdown began, Air India, Spicejet, Go Air and Indigo have logged seven lakh kilometers in more than 600 flights lifting more than 4,300 tonnes of cargo. However, even that's no solace for the industry that was clocking over 3,000 flights per day.

Airline sector has already been pushed to the wall. Sydney-based Centre for Asia Pacific Aviation (CAPA) recently said that the combination of COVID-related travel restrictions and an economic downturn is likely to result in first quarter of FY21 being a virtual washout for Indian aviation.

"The extension of lockdown and suspension of our services till May 3, 2020 further impacts our cash flow significantly. As part of a number of steps we are taking to conserve cash and save costs, we had to make the difficult decision of further reducing our staff costs with the objective of preserving jobs," a Vistara spokesperson told BusinessToday.In. For the period April 15-30, 30% of Vistara's workforce will have to undertake compulsory no-pay leave of one to three days, depending on employment grades (three days for senior-most employees). "With FY2021 set to be an exceptionally challenging year, all segments of the aviation value chain will need to immediately start planning for much smaller scale operations, supported by serious enterprise-wide restructuring," CAPA said in its report earlier.

ALSO READ:Coronavirus lockdown: Travel agents lock horns with airlines over air ticket refunds

Travel/Tourism

With all modes of transport being suspended, the nationwide lockdown has deeply impacted the country's travel and tourism sector. Those stranded could have preferred to travel back to their homes, but the extension has thwarted their plans. Allowing public transport following the expiry of 21 days lockdown could have helped operators to generate some cash, but now they will have to wait longer.

Travel experts say the economic loss to the travel and tourism sector in the lockdown period remains the biggest concern, but an even bigger worry for the sector is how long it would take to recover after removal of restrictions as travelers would still follow social distancing norms and there may be mandatory restrictions such as booking of alternate seats. "Fear and apprehension would be there in the minds of travellers till the time a long-term solution of Coronavirus comes. We see the sector taking a longer time than expected to recover," said Ankur Bhatia, Executive Director of travel technology and hospitality company Bird Group.

ALSO READ:Coronavirus cure: India to start plasma therapy; Kerala first off the block

Agriculture

While extended lockdown means more pain for most of the industries, the agriculture sector could cheer a bit as almost all farm sector activities have been permitted during this period. With harvesting near 100% in Gujarat and 70-odd per cent in Madhya Pradesh and Punjab heading for wheat harvesting starting April 15, the farming community got a huge relief with the opening up of the sector, including allied sectors such as food processing and cold storages - vital for securing the produce.

Learning from previous experience, the Centre has this time clearly spelt out in its order that farm sector would be exempted from the extended lockdown through May 3. Accordingly, transportation of seeds, fertilisers, food grains would get the green channel. But agriculture sector experts still fear a slight delay in harvest of crops due to lockdown as policies set by the Central government are not properly executed at the local level. While harvesting of wheat has neared completion in many states, it is yet to wrap up in the key states of Haryana and Punjab.

T Haque, former chairman of Commission for Agricultural Costs and Prices (CACP) said that delay in harvesting of Rabi crops could lead to late sowing of Kharif crops which could result in lower yield. "The harvesting could be further delayed by untimely rain and hailstorm. There are issues related to transportation, storage and agriculture market being non-operational. In case of perishable items in some states like Karnataka, farmers are facing difficulty in harvesting as labour is not available," Haque said.

ALSO READ:Coronavirus lockdown 2.0 guidelines issued: Check full list of relaxations, restrictions by MHA

Transportation of processed seeds is another issue as they are transported from one state to the other. Haque said that in the Kharif seasons, the demand for processed seeds is quite significant. The seeds may not reach farmers in time if its smooth supply is affected. Even as government has allowed mandis dealing in agricultural produce, many markets are reported shut.

Given that agriculture is the mainstay for two-thirds of the population, any negative impact of extended lockdown on it could multiply the problems. Lower yield means lower income for farmers and hence poor demand for consumption.
NASHVILLE, Tenn.

April 15, 2020

Jesse Edwards

April 10

Tennessee

Jesse Edwards

Joel Edwards

Jesse Edwards

April 10

State of Tennessee

Nashville, TN

Jesse Edwards

Nashville, Tennessee

Melonee Hurt

/PRNewswire-PRWeb/ -- When Evolve Studio co-foundersaw firsthand how the COVID-19 pandemic was having a very negative effect on those close to him, he did what any filmmaker would do. He turned his desire to help into a short film. The result, Distance, was released to YouTube onand is already garnering publicity and attention for its message of hope in a time when everyone is hungry for a ray of light.It's a story told through the eyes of everyday people dealing with very real emotions. Simply put, this film examines fear, sadness, anger, desperation, frustration -- and most importantly -- hope."Everyone we know is afraid right now and hurting in some way," Edwards said. "We knew the world needed a message of hope specific to this moment. When the U.S. declared a State of Emergency, a lot of people lost their jobs and were immediately displaced. I thought right away, 'What about those who were already unemployed? What about those with relationships that were already broken? What hope exists for those who have lost everything and are now even more completely alone?'"With the combination of social isolation, sickness, job and income loss and justified fears regarding COVID-19; the toll on mental health, psychological distress, substance abuse and suicide could be substantial. The World Health Organization estimates roughly one million people commit suicide each year, but that's in a normal year. What would this pandemic do to the suicide numbers for this year?It was a sobering thought that set him into action.In true first-responder fashion, the storyteller in him rallied the team at Evolve and began putting his ideas on film. Instead of focusing on the devastation of this worldwide pandemic, Edwards chose to focus on a message of hope shown through the heart of a little girl and the power and magnitude of one simple gesture."We needed to put something into the world injecting hope into it, and if it could change even one life it was worth it," he said.The result is Distance, a 15-minute independent short film with an official rating (PG) by the Motion Picture Association (MPA).Jesse and his brother Joel, who produced the film, knew the window was closing becausedidn't have mandated restrictions in place yet, but other states did."We knew if we were going to create a film about this current moment, it had to be now,"said. The screenplay was written within 48 hours, the film was cast within 24 hours, principle photography completed within 2 days, and post production immediately followed for another 11 days, all while abiding by state, federal and local restrictions and COVID-19 best practices."This was a filmmakers' fire drill like no other."said. "It's honestly a miracle that the film materialized in the timeframe, legal window, and with the precautions we took and limitations that we had. Our team also did an incredible sprint in post. The editorial, original score, VFX came together in less than two weeks. I'm so proud of the way our studio could rally around this moment in time and produce a powerful narrative story that speaks to our current COVID-19 reality. I'm not sure there is anything else like this in the content universe."Going from script to screen is a process that can traditionally take months, not weeks, butsaid if they could have finished it sooner, they would have."As a writer, I always try to look at telling stories that help connect the audience with their feelings," he said. "Maybe even feelings they don't know they have such as fear, shame, or loneliness. So, when this pandemic hit the U.S., I thought 'how much more do we need messages of hope right now?'"He added that every conversation he had with people he's close to, he could hear fear and concern in their voices as they are thrust into so many unknowns."My heart went out to all the people who don't have someone to call them right now," he said. "From there, Norman's character was born. He was a person who, for reasons completely separate from the pandemic, has shut the world out and doesn't feel like he can talk to his family."The inspiration for the catalyst of hope in the movie came from Edwards' own little girls and the simple gestures they do for their daddy that carry equal parts simplicity and magnitude."Every day for the last couple of months, my 5-year-old girl will have made me a stack of cards. She just decorates different pieces of paper and hands them to me. In that moment, I try to forget about my day and look at what she has done while waiting for me to come home. It's such a simple, beautiful act," he said.Without giving too much away, let's just say that a young child and her simple gesture of kindness to one stranger carries enough impact to change the lives of those who watch this film.And because getting this message out was such an important driver behind this film, the Edwards brothers decided instead of licensing or selling the movie, they would put it on YouTube and other VOD platforms for everyone to have access to it for free.The film premiered, and can be viewed here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IBKe0eSS6VI"I am excited about equipping the audience of this film to hear these words and to share them with other people," Jesse said. "The more we can come together, the more we can heal. Maybe someone who watches this film needs to hear 'You're not alone. I'm scared too and I'm here for you.'"For more information on the Motion Picture Association and film ratings, click here: https://www.motionpictures.org/ and https://www.filmratings.com/.The filming operated within complete compliance of the, US Federal Government mandates and CDC recommendations around COVID-19 best practices. Production followed volunteer, micro limited crew & cast footprint, social distancing, and strict clean-set protocols. The filmmakers acknowledge the threat posed by the spread of COVID-19 is real, alarming and should be taken very seriously. Strict precautions were thoroughly evaluated and enforced to ensure a safe set.ABOUT EVOLVE STUDIOS-based independent, award-winning, Evolve Studios produces premium content for a wide array of partners including Disney, National Geographic, ESPN, Netflix, NBC Universal, HBO, Discovery and many others. Evolve was founded in 2010 by brothers, Joel &. What started out as an entrepreneurial dream for the two "Vimeo Kids", fueled by an iMac, DSLRs & ramen noodles, Evolve Studios is now becoming one of the most discreetly influential original & branded content studios. As a full-service production company, Evolve produces a diverse range of premium content from original episodic series, branded & commercial content, films, documentaries, promos, music videos, digital films and immersive VR content.Evolve's work has been recognized with numerous awards including 5 National Television Emmy's, 42 Emmy nominations & many other top industry accolades.Empowered by incredible young talent, team culture and blue-collar creative work effort, Evolve has built a multifaceted studio that produces in three industry verticals all from the new content frontier inTo learn more, visit http://www.evolve.studioONLINE PRESS KIT WITH IMAGES AND VIDEO CLIPS IS HERE: https://www.dropbox.com/sh/ej76od7a7uxfr44/AAC3bnyQJDLYYar7Hzc6Ypq9a?dl=0CONTACT:buzz@evolve.studio 615.496.4411SOURCE Evolve Studios
Two troopers and two civilians who were injured in a wreck Monday while the troopers were chasing a motorcyclist in Madison County are out of the hospital as authorities continue to search for the motorcyclist.

The troopers were attempting to stop a red motorcycle on U.S. 72 near Shields Road in Madison County when the motorcyclist refused to comply with the troopers orders to pull over, Trooper Derek Campbell said Tuesday. The troopers initiated a pursuit with the motorcycle when their vehicle collided with a Honda Civic at the intersection of Jordan Lane and Holmes Avenue in Huntsville. Two other vehicles -- a a Dodge Charger and a Honda Accord -- were struck as a result of the first collision.

The troopers vehicle then overturned and caught fire. The troopers, along with the driver of the Accord and a passenger in the Charger were taken to local hospitals with injuries. All victims have since been released from the hospital, Campbell said.

The motorcyclist evaded arrest and is still being sought.

ALEAs Traffic Homicide Unit is investigating the wreck along with the State Bureau of Investigation.

Anyone with information on the wreck or the suspects were asked to call the ALEA Huntsville Highway Patrol post at 256-533-4202 or the ALEA Communications Center at 256-353-0631.
Michigan Governor Gretchen Esther Whitmer





It could be a crippling blow to GOP hopes of controlling Michigans State Senate and Legislature for decades. A Federal Court lawsuit is claiming that a newly-created independent redistricting commission violates their Constitutional rights.

Michigan voters have had it with GOP gerrymandering of the states Senate and Legislature after it gerrymandered Michigan after the 2010 midterm election solidified their power over the state. Leaked emails showed party officials boasting that their map would pack Dem garbage into a small handful of districts in the southeast.

Voters passed by voter referendum in 2018 that created a new independent redistricting commission. This commission is subject to some of the strongest anti-conflict of interest rules of any such commission in the country. In addition to strict requirements that Democrats, Republicans, and independents are represented, it bars current and recently elected officials, political party officials, lobbyists, or their relatives from serving on the panel.

Earlier today, the Sixth Circuit Federal Appeals Court threw out a lawsuit filed by the Michigan GOP Party v. Benson and refused to block the new election commission from proceeding.

The GOP had argued the rules and formation of the commission violated the First and Fourteenth Amendments, by restricting freedom of association. Several voting rights groups, including Common Cause and the Brennan Center for Justice, sided with Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson in defending against the lawsuit.

There appears to be a considerable backlash against GOP gerrymandering and rejection of the Republican Party taking place in Michigan in part to the poor administration of the former Michigan governor Rick Snyder and his suspension of elected officials during his terms as well as the Flint Michigan water disaster.

In 2018 Gretchen Esther Whitmer, a Democrat, was elected governor defeating Republican Attorney General Bill Schuette. As governor, Whitmer has focused on healthcare and infrastructure. She is extremely popular, and in February 2020, she was selected to give the Democratic response to President Donald Trumps 2020 State of the Union Address. She is the national co-chairwoman of the Joe Biden 2020 presidential campaign and may be under consideration as his potential choice to run as his Vice Presidential running mate.

The fact that she is in control in Michigan reducers President Trumps chances of being able to manipulate the 2020 election to win the state. Michigan is considered critical to Trumps re-election chances.





Gerrymandering: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO)








Tom Friedman, Times Opinion columnist, will join us on our next DealBook Debrief call, tomorrow at 11 a.m. Eastern. He will discuss his plan for making the American economy more resilient after the pandemic  make sure to read his latest column about it  and take your questions. For information about how to join this and future DealBook calls, sign up here. (Want this in your inbox each morning? Sign up here.)

Who is, and isnt, on the list

President Trump revealed yesterday who will advise him on reopening the economy. Sort of.

He read out the names of nearly 200 corporate chiefs and other notable figures during a news conference at the White House, implying they would act as consultants of sorts. (At least one of them told The Times that no such request had been made before the announcement.) The White House later published a list of leaders who would serve on Great American Economic Revival Industry Groups and take part in conference calls.

Who made the cut: Tim Cook of Apple, Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook, Jamie Dimon of JPMorgan Chase, Sheldon Adelson of Las Vegas Sands and Robert Kraft of the New England Patriots.

 Some companies nabbed multiple representatives. Blackstone got two, Steve Schwarzman and Jon Gray. Oracle has both Larry Ellison and Safra Catz. Home Depot has three: the C.E.O. Craig Menear and its co-founders Ken Langone and Bernie Marcus.
SANTA ROSA, Calif., April 14, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- As a health care company, NeilMed Pharmaceuticals, Inc. is dedicated to providing relief to hospitals and health workers on the frontlines. Thus, NeilMed has committed a minimum of USD $250,000 to invest in items to give to the medical community as they fight COVID-19 infections. As this pandemic unfolds, NeilMed is stepping up to serve its communities during this crisis by donating a variety of equipment needed by health care professionals to protect themselves as well as their patients.

NeilMed Pharmaceuticals Inc.

Using its robust manufacturing facility, NeilMed has begun to produce hand sanitizer to donate to hospitals and other relief organizations. NeilMed will manufacture 20,000 three-ounce bottles of hand sanitizer to be used by medical professionals and those in need. This volume of hand sanitizer will also protect NeilMed employees and their families and maintains the sterility of our facility.

With protective equipment in short supply worldwide, NeilMed is acquiring and donating:

1) 100,000 FDA-approved KN95 masks;

2) 100,000 surgical masks;

3) 2,000 surgical sterile gowns;

4) 10,000 face shields; and

5) 5 thermal scanners

As NeilMed continues to receive shipments of these items from its manufacturers, they will be donated to doctors, nurses and other health workers in the local Bay Area community as well as throughout the country. NeilMed has already given a significant amount of these items to health professionals and continues to form partnerships with hospitals and clinics to arrange for donations.

NeilMed will also donate its branded nasal irrigation and other products to healthcare professionals, first responders and others treating COVID-19 patients upon request. These products promote the health, hygiene and well-being of users and NeilMed is happy to provide them for those in need.

Those who are part of a nonprofit, health clinic, hospital or other organization that would benefit from partnering with NeilMed to receive these protective products and NeilMed products are encouraged to contact NeilMed for assistance. Reach out to [email protected] or by calling 1-877-477-8633.

"Thank you so much for the N95s that you donated to the local Disease Control Unit at Public Health. We are busy with case investigations and contact tracing of all of the COVID + persons in Sonoma County. We have been doing testing of household members, and our testers are using appropriate PPE. This includes N95s, so thank you for your timely donation.

Mary Miller, MSN

Nursing Services Director

County of Sonoma Department of Health Services"

Commitment to NeilMed Employees

The well-being of NeilMed employees is also of utmost importance. NeilMed looks after the safety and well-being of employees by taking steps to ensure that the offices and manufacturing facility are safe and healthy environments. Employees are well-trained regarding CDC and WHO guidelines concerning COVID-19. NeilMed is committed to making sure those guidelines are followed at its offices, and to showing appreciation of its employees' hard work. Some of the measures taken include:

Using technology to allow the bulk of NeilMed employees to work remotely whenever possible. Encouraging social distancing in the front offices by eliminating business travel, avoiding cross-traffic through office doors and staircases, creating additional office space, separating manufacturing employees from front office employees, providing phone and screen-sharing technology for intra-office communications, and digitally signing documents. Creating policies conforming to CDC and WHO guidelines that require employees to maintain distance from one another, sanitize their workstations, stay home when they are sick, and other obligations. These policies are posted throughout the office, distributed to employees and communicated in frequent meetings. Reducing the risk of spread of COVID-19 by taking employees' temperatures via thermal body scanners upon arrival and departure and intermittently throughout production hours. Enhancing cleaning and sanitization measures in the manufacturing facility by providing ample hand sanitizer stations, installing four extra sinks for hand-washing, and other efforts. Reducing the risk of the spread of COVID-19 between manufacturing employees by providing them with masks and gloves. Adding a third shift to reduce the number of employees working during each shift. Modifying manufacturing lines to space employees farther away from one another. Slowing machine speeds to reduce the number of employees present on the production line. Rewarding employees with increased pay, bonuses and providing them with daily meals and complimentary NeilMed products. Meals are sourced from local restaurants that are struggling during this crisis. In the break areas, microwave use has been eliminated, and the number of dining tables and chairs has reduced to enable employees to social distance. Employees who carpool together are placed into teams to work on the same production lines together, away from other groups of employees. Limiting the number of activities performed on-site by, for example, temporarily curbing marketing mailer and sample request projects.

Those who are part of a nonprofit, health clinic, hospital or other organization that would benefit from partnering with NeilMed to receive protective products and NeilMed products are encouraged to contact NeilMed for assistance. Reach out to [email protected] or by calling 1-877-477-8633.

Related Images

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Commitment to the Healthcare Community

commitment-to-neilmed-employees.jpg

Commitment to NeilMed Employees

Related Links

COVID-19: We Are Here To Help

SOURCE NeilMed Pharmaceuticals Inc.
As exams get underway on virtual campuses across the province, instructors are implementing new measures to deter cheating on finals that would typically put students under intense in-person supervision and scrutiny.

Hey there, time traveller!

This article was published 14/4/2020 (637 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

As exams get underway on virtual campuses across the province, instructors are implementing new measures to deter cheating on finals that would typically put students under intense in-person supervision and scrutiny.

Honesty declarations, timed multiple choice questions and appeals for good faith are being used to promote academic integrity in e-learning exams at both the University of Manitoba and University of Winnipeg.

Instructors are wrestling with ways to prevent cheating since the COVID-19 pandemic response escalated so quickly there has been little time for the U of M to organize external proctoring services, said Janet Morrill, president of the universitys faculty association.

"There are more opportunities (to cheat) and fewer controls," Morrill said, adding that academic integrity is also being challenged because the pivot online means professors arent necessarily able to use assessments they feel are the most appropriate for their courses.

By Tuesday afternoon, biology student Jess MacPherson had already completed three online exams, as well as pre-exam quizzes that require students to review academic rules.

"Its a privilege for us to still be able to carry on education during this time. Im just glad I can finish my semester, so why take advantage of an opportunity to learn?" said MacPherson, who heads the U of M Biology Undergraduate Students Association.

Students who are found to have cheated on a test  for the first time  face penalties ranging from receiving a mark of zero to a 12-month suspension from taking courses in the faculty in which they cheated. Students can be expelled for repeated and severe misconduct.

Last year, MacPherson saw the impact of penalties first-hand when she was on a disciplinary committee tasked to review a students misconduct. The accused was suspended from all science courses for a year.

If academic penalties arent enough to dissuade such activity, MacPherson said she thinks the most effective method to promote integrity is timed tests.

Meanwhile, U of M Students Union president Jakob Sanderson said that if there have been any controversies surrounding the new practices, its that some students want time to browse all exam questions rather than being forced to answer each timed question before moving onto the next.

"The vast majority of students arent going to be going into their exam and looking at ways to cheat," Sanderson said. "A lot of folks have a lot of test anxiety and having to do an exam is already quite stressful."

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Mark Torchia, vice-provost of teaching and learning, said there has been a move to encourage U of M instructors to lessen the weight of finals so students can show their progressive learning throughout a semester and are dissuaded to breach academic codes of conduct due to stress.

"Academic integrity doesnt just fall on the student; it falls on the instructor to provide the best ways to learn," Torchia said.

U of M has a proactive educational approach on academic integrity, he said  but at the same time, breaches can result in "life-changing" consequences.

A total of 706 academic discipline incidents involving 644 students were reported at the Winnipeg university during the 2018-19 academic year. Last year, approximately two per cent of the student population was involved in academic misconduct of some sort.

maggie.macintosh@freepress.mb.ca

Twitter: @macintoshmaggie
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.

Vote

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Dozens of Southeast Minnesota bee colonies returned from California on Saturday, April 11.

"Vacation is over," said Chris Schad, co-owner of the Oronoco-based Bee Shed.

Schad meant his vacation; the bees were on a work trip.

The bees participated in the largest single pollination event in the world to help pollinate almonds in California over the winter.

"These bees are August strength right now, but its April," Schad said.

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About 40 of the Bee Sheds colonies were returned to Southeast Minnesota on Saturday by a third-party distributor based in Wisconsin. They were delivered to Northwoods Orchard, where the bees will help pollinate the apple crop there.

"We wouldnt have a crop without them," said Steve Eckdahl, orchard co-owner.

Eckdahl operated a fork tractor to unload pallets of hives and place them on the orchard grounds.

Schad checked on the Langstroth hives and marked which boxes were full and which contained colonies that didnt make it back to Minnesota.

The practice of sending bee colonies to California is not without risk. Bees can be exposed to pesticides on the journey or while working.

For the almond industry, the little migrant workers are a must. California has more than a million acres of almond trees. It takes two hives of bees to pollinate 1 acre. The approximately half-million bee colonies in California cant handle the task on their own.

The practice has also drawn controversy for outcompeting native pollinators.

At a couple hundred dollars per hive, sending hundreds or thousands of hives can be a good source of revenue for apiaries when honey prices are low.

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Rochester beekeeper Curt Boger sent 10 hive boxes to California along with the Bee Sheds hives. Two of Bogers hives returned with bees.

Boger raises the bees as a fundraising activity for Holy Cross Lutheran Church. This was the first year he sent hives west. The ones he kept in Minnesota through the winter fared better. He said four hives survived the winter.

"Thats more than Ive ever got through a winter here," he said.

For the Bee Shed, the owners said sending a few dozen colonies is lucrative but also less stress on the colonies than keeping them in Minnesota over the winter.

"How are they doing?" said John Shonyo, Bee Shed co-owner. "Better than how they would be doing if they stayed here."

"Almond pollen is super healthy for bees," Schad added. "They really thrive on it."

The vast majority of hives had bees and were densely packed. Schad identified the pollen in some of the bees pollen sacks and maple and pussy-willow pollen, likely from Wisconsin.

The hives were moved on a trailer from Wisconsin. The noise and motion stirred some of the bees from their hive boxes. They buzzed around the beekeepers and their helpers as Eckdahl slowly pulled pallets of hive boxes from a flatbed trailer and placed them in a grassy area in the low-lying part of the orchard.

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Although they were active, the bees were not aggressive. After the motion and activity died down, the bees found their way back to a hive with the help of fellow colony members emitting pheromones to help them identify their home colonies.

A cold snap and snowstorm followed the flurry of activity under warm, sunny conditions Saturday. Shonyo and Schad will check on each of the colonies to see if the queen is still alive.

The two will then work to split the colonies for the upcoming summer. To split a colony, beekeepers isolate the queen from the workers, forcing the colony to groom a new queen and split off to form a new colony.

The two will wait until warmer weather to begin that work.

Eckdahl, who will literally enjoy the fruits of the labor, said hes happy to help the beekeepers, having kept bees himself.

"Once I retire, I might get back into it," he said.
Alan Halsall appears to have taken a thinly-veiled swipe at his ex-wife Lucy-Jo Hudson.

Hollyoaks star Lucy-Jo, 36, claimed this week Alan 'must have regretted' his hastily-deleted Instagram rant at her boyfriend Lewis Devine, but the Coronation Street stalwart has now insisted he has 'no regrets'.

In February, Alan seemingly lashed out at his ex-wife's beau after he referred to the former couple's daughter Sienna-Rae as his own.

'No regrets': Alan Halsall appears to have taken a thinly-veiled swipe at his ex-wife Lucy-Jo Hudson. The Coronation Street star is pictured last week with girlfriend Tisha Merry

After her comment went viral, Alan took to his Instagram account on Tuesday night to set the record straight.

Sharing a picture of a beautiful sunset, he added the caption 'No regrets...', seemingly aimed at his former spouse.

Proving he has well and truly moved on from his marriage, Alan has been posting sweet snaps with his girlfriend Tisha Merry.

The couple spent their one-year anniversary in lockdown together last week, joking they were 'all dressed up with nowhere to go'.

Cheeky: Sharing a picture of a beautiful sunset, he added the caption 'No regrets...', seemingly aimed at his former spouse

Breaking her silence: Hollyoaks star Lucy-Jo, 36, claimed this week Alan 'must have regretted' his hastily-deleted Instagram rant at her boyfriend Lewis Devine (pictured with Lucy-Jo)

Speaking in an interview with OK! this week, Lucy broke her silence on the incident and reckons that her ex, 37, had misgivings over what he said.

She told the publication: 'I had literally just given birth to Carter when he posted that so I didnt see it and my head was elsewhere. He quickly deleted it so he must have regretted it.

'I didnt bother bringing it up with him. Lew and I were both too focused on Carter so it just didnt get our attention.'

Lucy-Jo also opened up about co-parenting with Alan, stating it can 'challenging' as they clash over their parenting styles.

Furious: In February, the Coronation Street actor seemingly lashed out at his ex-wife Lucy-Jo's beau after he referred to the former couple's daughter Sienna-Rae as his own

She added: 'The thing is, everybody who has a blended family knows its not easy. You cant pretend that it is. And me and Alan sometimes have different views on raising Sienna so trying to co-parent can be challenging. Its probably like that for a lot of blended families.'

Alan seemingly lashed out at his ex-wife Lucy-Jo's boyfriend Lewis after he called the actor's daughter his own.

The Tyrone Dobbs actor appeared to make a remark in response to Lewis' gushing post following the birth of his and Lucy-Jo's son Carter in February.

Moving on: 'I had literally just given birth to Carter when he posted that so I didnt see it and my head was elsewhere. He quickly deleted it so he must have regretted it'

Amid his excitement at becoming a new dad, Lewis heaped praise on Lucy-Jo and Alan's six-year-old girl Sienna, with part of his statement reading: 'Our Sienna is delighted and is already making the best big sister, just like I knew she would!'

In a now-deleted Instagram post viewed by The Sun, Alan didn't appear to take too kindly to Lewis' use of the word 'our' and seemed to hit back at his ex's new beau.

He wrote: 'You're welcome to keep the lying cheating one & call her your own! But not my daughter.'

Touching: Amid his excitement at becoming a new dad in February, Lewis heaped praise on Lucy and Alan's six-year-old girl Sienna, referring to the youngster as 'our'

Scathing: In a now deleted Instagram post viewed by The Sun, Alan didn't appear to take too kindly to Lewis' use of the word 'our' and seemed to hit back at his ex's new beau

MailOnline contacted representatives of Alan and Lucy for comment at the time.

Lucy-Jo split from Alan in May 2018, after nearly nine years of marriage; it was revealed that she'd embarked on a relationship with Lewis just two months later.

However, she didn't go public with her romance until October of that year, taking to Instagram to share a gushing post dedicated to her boyfriend, with whom she shared the stage in Snow White And The Seven Dwarfs pantomime in 2017.
Every evening, a voluntary group comes and distributes boxes of cooked rice to a camp of about 100 migrant labourers living in six tin sheds at Ambegaon Budruk, on the outskirts of Pune city.

This is the only food that this camp of labourers gets in the day.

On Wednesday evening, Fatima Begum, a woman in her 30s, walked down the hill to collect food provided by the officials of Pune police who had found her while trying to walk from Pune to Madhya Pradesh along with around 150 others in the morning hours of Wednesday.

Grateful for the food that the camp was receiving once a day, Fatima said with despair,

If we ask for more food, we are told that we do not need to eat twice to live. Once a day is enough for you, they tell us.

Residing at a remote settlement near Sachhai Mata temple in the hill-area of Shaninagar area in Ambegaon Budrukh, the cluster of tin sheds which are home to these labourers from Madhya Pradesh, does not permit movement of two adults at once.

On Tuesday, these labourers and their children had made a failed attempt at walking to Madhya Pradesh from Ambegaon in Katraj, Pune.

Reason? The message of lockdown extension had not reached their remote settlement according to Sapna Vinod, a 20-something woman who was cradling a 2-year-old in her arms while her elder was leaning against her leg.

The extension of the 21-day lockdown was announced by Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Tuesday morning through a live telecast.

While on their way to Madhya Pradesh on foot, the labourers- some of who wore masks- were intercepted at a check post at Khadi Machine chowk in Kondhwa around 4am, said senior inspector Vinayak Gaikwad of Kondhwa police station.

A few people came first. They were stopped and one by one around 50-60 families arrived at the check post. There were four policemen at the check post. Then the night patrol and beat marshalls joined them and took all of them to the shelter set up at Darekar School. But they chose to go back home, said Gaikwad.

Gyansingh Thakur, 34, who lives with his wife and two children, said they were unaware that the lockdown had been extended.

How will we know? The only communication we had last was from the contractor who told us on a Saturday that we cannot come the next day due to something called as Janta Curfew. We got to know about the first extension from the people around like in shops. Once the money ran out, we stopped going to the shop. Now were told that we must stay like this until May begins, he said.

Jamna Bai, who is among the few older women in the colony, said they were trying to go to their hometown in Madhya Pradesh. We have families there. We thought now that the lockdown is over, we will find a way to reach our state. Even if there are no vehicles, we were ready to walk the distance, she said.

The labourers pay anywhere between Rs 1,300 to Rs 2,000 in rent for the tin shed and the cost of electricity usage is in addition to the cost of the water tanker that has to be paid for twice in every month.

The police who had intercepted them made food available for them. Cooked rice was also provided around 6pm on Wednesday. Until it arrived, the labourers who walked 16-18km from their houses and back, were awaiting the arrival of their next meal.

While some had been in Pune anywhere between 2-6 months, few others had arrived two days before the Janta Curfew was announced.

A young man who spat angrily and then stormed off in a huff said some time should have been given to migrant labourers to go back home to their families, rather than forced to live without income. They would most likely die of starvation if not disease, he said angrily.

While the police has now assured them supply of food it remains to be seen whether the Pune Municipal Corporation will make some temporary arrangements for these labourers.
Were not going to be able to provide basic services and actually have a normal society if we dont get help from the federal government, Mr. de Blasio said in an interview with CNN.

Our revenue is gone, our tax base is gone, our economy is gone, he said. Five to 10 billion is the amount of money weve lost that we would normally use to be able to support our first responders, our basic services, everything that keeps the biggest city in America going.

The Independent Budget Office, a nonpartisan city agency, forecast on Wednesday that the city would shed roughly 475,000 jobs in the 12 months that started April 1, resulting in an estimated tax revenue shortfall of $9.7 billion in fiscal years 2020 and 2021.

Mr. de Blasio said that the budget offices forecast was pointing in the right direction, but he added, Were going to lose much more after that. Remember, the revenue losses are deepening.
Better resourced law firms will have the means to ensure that their attorneys appear in the best possible light  both figurative and literal light, Mr. Keith said.

In an email on Wednesday, Jack Tuter, the chief judge of the 17th Circuit, said that he had not reviewed Judge Baileys letter before publication and that it did not reflect official policy in the circuit. In Family Court, he said, many folks are self-representing and may or may not follow dress code rules.

As such, Judge Tuter added, we have expected appropriate dress but not necessarily enforced it.

Judge Bailey, who did not immediately respond to requests for comment, noted in his letter that video platforms like Zoom can make it easier for lawyers to talk over one another, and over the judge.

Often, he wrote, lawyers are not looking at their screens but down at their files, their outlines and notes, or simply out the window, and cannot see the judge is hollering, Stop! Stop! because an objection has been made and the audio stays with the witness rather than obeying the judge.

Mia Singh, a lawyer in Broward County and the president of the Weston Bar Association there, said she agreed with Judge Bailey. I have seen employees on the other side of meetings looking like they literally rolled out of bed, she said. I dont take them as seriously.

For years, Ms. Singh has been organizing meetings where lawyers and judges  including Judge Bailey, her former boss  talk shop. During the coronavirus pandemic, she wanted to make those connections online and considered putting together a newsletter for lawyers.

She was looking for candid input  free of stuffy legalese  and asked Judge Bailey to write something for a series called Virtual View From the Bench. She said that after he emailed his letter to her, she sent it to her network of lawyers across Broward County, and her bar association posted it online.
The British government on Wednesday dismissed a TV presenter's claim that there could be a link between 5G technology and coronavirus as "complete nonsense".

The 5G conspiracy theory, spread widely on social media, has already led to a new telecoms mast being set alight in Ireland at the weekend.

Experts have poured scorn on the claim, saying 5G is based on radio frequency and is not related to the viral outbreak.

But Eamonn Holmes, who presents ITV's This Morning show, said they were dismissing the theory "when they don't know it's not true".

"What I don't accept is mainstream media immediately slapping that down as not true when they don't know it's not true," he said, leading to hundreds of complaints.

"It's very easy to say it is not true because it suits the state narrative."



A government told journalists that Holmes's claims were "complete nonsense" and "entirely bogus", while experts also rubbished the comments.

"It's fair to say Eamonn Holmes is to the advancement of science what I am to banal and unsatisfying morning television," said Michael Head from the University of Southampton.

"There are no links between 5G technology and transmission of the novel coronavirus.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
When the economy was locked down in mid-March, companies large and small had just days to respond. Hundreds of thousands of people suddenly found themselves working remotely. They rewrote the rules; they figured it out.

Yet five weeks later our Parliament is still struggling with the same challenge. The politicians are arguing over the best way to meet  in slimmed-down physical sessions or virtually via some kind of video link.

The remote option makes a lot of sense, but Members of Parliament dont seem to be in a huge rush to work out the details. A Commons committee is due to report to the Speaker of the House on the issue by mid-May, a full month from now.

In normal times that would be lightning speed for government work. But in these extraordinary times, it seems like forever.

Whats the hang-up? If companies of all types can figure it out within days, surely the politicians can quickly agree on a format for debate  if the political will is there.

To hear the MPs tell it, the will is indeed there. The major parties very properly agree that the government must be held accountable during the crisis.

Aid programs worth tens of billions of dollars should be scrutinized and ministers should be questioned about how the government is responding to the pandemic. An emergency is no time for the opposition to be silenced.

On the contrary, its in times like this that we most need our representatives to both question and be questioned. As the government expands its role greatly to fight the collective threat, its actions must not go unexamined, or unchallenged when thats called for.

Question Period must be held; committees must be able to grill ministers and officials on their actions.

Parliament has met briefly twice since the crisis hit to pass legislation needed to deliver federal aid. The first time, the opposition successfully pushed back on an unwarranted attempt by the Trudeau government to give itself vast tax-and-spend powers until the end of next year. Both times, the opposition made useful suggestions to improve the aid packages.

But meeting physically is problematic in these times. Only 32 MPs participated in each session in order to maintain social distancing, meaning the great majority couldnt take part. Those whose ridings are far from Ottawa found it particularly difficult. And many staff members had to be called out, potentially putting their health at risk.

A better option would be a virtual session involving all MPs. There would be a loss in forgoing real-life physical meetings, but thats inevitable under the current circumstances. Full sessions of all 338 MPs clearly arent possible during the lockdown.

So Parliament needs to figure this out, and quickly. It can be done, as all those companies that managed to start working remotely, sometimes literally overnight, have shown. It just takes a bit of creativity.

Others are grappling with the same issue. Britains Parliament plans to start holding virtual sessions as early as next week. The assembly of tiny Maldives, of all places, started operating virtually on March 30 via Microsoft Teams software.

Canadas Commons and Senate, and their committees, should be able to at least debate and ask questions via Zoom or Skype or other online tools. Of course there may be issues of security and privacy, but those can be worked out as they arise.

In the meantime, Parliament is due to resume sitting this coming Monday, April 20, after being suspended for five weeks.

Slimmed-down physical sessions may be needed while the details of a virtual sitting are worked out, as Conservative Leader Andrew Scheer has argued. But the parties should waste no time in agreeing on that.

The rest of us have figured out Zoom. Our elected representatives need to get with the program and do the same.
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First Minister warns in Q&A session: Nobody should think that because they havent got it yet, somehow it isnt going to hit them

This article is old - Published: Wednesday, Apr 15th, 2020

The First Minister of Wales Mark Drakeford has said he wants to have a conversation with the people of Wales on how the country returns to a new normality as and when restrictions are relaxed, and gave thanks to the most fantastic support from people over the really difficult things we have asked them to do over the last few weeks.

Mr Drakeford took direct questions from North Wales media this morning, via remote video that is now becoming the norm for many under lockdown. We asked him several questions, with his answers detailed below.

Previously the First Minister and other Ministers have said now is not the time to be examining previous decisions and to leave that for future inquiries, with a focus on the here and now and future response to the pandemic.

We pointed to previous advice and decisions over the last month or so, and pointed out that the people giving the advice and making decisions now are unchanged. We asked the First Minister about his confidence in them, and what he was doing to challenge them.

Mr Drakeford said: The system challenges itself all the time, there are four Chief Medical Officers who meet almost every day and that that is what they spend their time doing, challenging the evidence, interrogating the data, looking to see what lessons that can be learned from overseas.

Now, I entirely understand that lots of this is a contested area where there are people who have strong views about the right way things should be done, how we should go about different aspects of responding to the crisis.

As a politician, I cannot be in the position where I choose which bits of advice I think we should go on. I think that will be a really dangerous way of proceeding. What I have to do, Im in exactly the same position as the First Minister of Scotland and Ministers elsewhere in the UK, is we have a system, we have experts who are employed to provide advice to governments, they are independent, they are objective, they are the senior people in their field.

They test the advice all the time. Of course we ask questions, whenever advice is given to us to make sure we are understanding it, and we think its robust. Then we have to rely on it.

I want people in Wales to know that the decisions that are being made about how their health is protected, are not being made on any sort of political basis. They are being made entirely on the most expert, senior advice, that we can secure. Then we do our best to translate that advice into the most effective practice on the ground.

Locally we have reported how Wrexham is currently averaging around 16 tests a day. Previously the First Minister indicated Gwent was seen as a hotspot due to more vigorous testing, and last week the public was told testing follows the levels of transmission in the community. We asked if it was chicken and egg situation, and how they were following the levels of community transmission to discover if there needs to be more testing, if there is not much testing taking place.

The First Minister explained that the system was not entirely based or has to rely on that process, Epidemiologists have very sophisticated models in which they can work back, for example, on the rate of admissions to ITU beds in different parts of Wales. That will tell them the level of community circulation because people in ITU the demand for ITU beds is a product and how much coronavirus is around in the community.

There are different levels of pressure on ITU beds in different parts of Wales, which is why the scientists are confident in saying to us that there is a pattern in the spread of the disease, it is moving east to west, and it is moving south to north.

So in different parts of Wales, it doesnt just rely on levels of community testing to know how much hes around, you can, in a formulaic way assess how much is around any part of Wales by looking at the demand there is in other parts of the system, hospital admissions, ITU admissions of people in hospital, which is why were confident that Gwent had the first and most significant flare up in coronavirus in Wales.

He said: Its coming everywhere. Nobody should think that because they havent got it yet, somehow it isnt going to hit them.

Im afraid Coronavirus is something that will spread, it is spreading at different paces to different parts of Wales, and North Wales can be deduced from, as I say, hospital admissions, ITU admissions, that tell us how much of it is about in the community.

We pointed out that the information he was referencing gives the First Minister and others the real picture, however that is not public. We noted that yesterday, his Health Minister said he wanted to be as transparent as possible with statistics to underscore what the reality of Coronavirus says is. We asked if death rates, ITU capacities and recovery rates as are public in other countries should be public domain in Wales.

The First Minister replied: We are keen to put as much into the public domain as we can. Theres always a concern in some points of the data if the numbers are small in any particular area that you could lead to the identification of individuals, and the distress that that might cause to them and families and so on.

Where we can aggregate data to a level where the risk of individual identification is mitigated, then we are very keen to put data into the public domain.

Where there are suggestions that we could do more of that, or could do it in way that would be more helpful to people to understand what is happening in the localities, we are very happy to hear those suggestions and see if we can act on them.

We pointed to our story last night where we had been told testing criteria was too tight for some local authorities to submit names for testing, which itself came in response to the Health Minister stating his frustration that testing slots were not full up.

We noted that having symptoms being a requirement for a test seemed at odds with a virus that could itself be asymptomatic, and asked the First Minister if the policy would be reviewed promptly, and would responsibility be delegated to councils and trust them to put the names forward.

The First Minister said: Were very keen that the capacity we have for social care staff should be taken up in full. It is it isnt completely straightforward, because every person who comes to be tested has to come at a particular time.

You cant just have everybody turning up at 10 oclock, because youd have all sorts of consequences from that. So youve got to get a number of tests slots youve got, youve got the names of the people who are to be tested, youve got each one of them has to have an individual appointment to come to it.

There are quite a few links in that chain, I appreciate what local authority leaders have said, but because there are lots of links in that chain it can be difficult to navigate and can result in some spaces not being taken up.

We are reviewing it, and want the system to be as straightforward and as simple as we can make it while remaining safe for the people who we are asking to come forward. We want to work with our local authority colleagues to make the system as user friendly for them as we can, so they can take maximum advantage of the testing that we were able to offer.

Earlier this morning the new Labour leader Keir Starmer tweeted a copy of a letter where he asked UK Government to publish their exit strategy in a request for them to be open and transparent with the public about how it believes the lockdown will ease and eventually end. We asked the First Minister if he was aware of that, feeding in to that process and supporting publication of such documents.

In the next couple of days there will be meetings involving the devolved administrations of the UK, UK Government today and tomorrow, and those meetings are about the immediate future, explained Mr Drakeford.

Is this the right moment to lift the lockdown? What will the Chief Medical Officers of the Scientific Advisory Committee tell us? And if the moment isnt right, and I dont think it is right, to lift the lockdown, then how long do we need the current arrangements to continue?

That will be the debate for today and tomorrow, but I will be making the point at these meetings that at the very beginning of next week, we need to be discussing a common set of criteria for how we know when we should come out of lockdown, and then what that recovery plan is looking like.

So weve had a discussion inside the Welsh Government about how we think the lockdown could be eased, how we could do that in a way that doesnt lead to the virus just springing up and spreading very quickly again, and I want to do that on the UK basis. I think it is better if theres one plan, that we all support and can communicate it clearly to people.

Once the next two days are over, and weve made the decisions about what comes next in the immediate future, then I want to have those conversations with other administrations in the UK Government too.

I want to have it with the Welsh public too, I want us to begin to be able to say to people even if this is going to go on a bit longer this is how we think we can come out of it, and see if our thinking is supported by people in Wales.

The First Minister spoke of a gradual process for coming out of lockdown, including the appetite for people to move back into some of the things we used to do and take for granted, We have had the most fantastic support from people over the really difficult things we have asked them to do over the last few weeks and I want to make sure we go on having support for the measures we need to take to come out of all of this.

We asked what the general strategy to get out of the crisis long term was, if it was widespread testing, tracking and tracing, vaccinations or something else. We also asked if herd immunity style plans could be ruled out.

The First Minister said: In the end a vaccination for the disease will give people real confidence, that if they have had a vaccination that they are safe and can continue all aspects of their daily life without being anxious about it.

All come with degree of uncertainly and risk, and in Wales we need to find out what the appetite for that is. Testing, tracing and suppressing are, I think, definitely all part of coming out of lockdown.

As we reduce the restrictions there will be localised flare ups of the disease and we need to have surveillance teams in place to be able to identify that really quickly, and take local action to respond to it. There are a series of ways to come out of lockdown that are being discussed in the media, you could do it by geography, but we are not attracted by that in Welsh Government.

You could do it by activity, we begin to allow people to do some things used to do but in controlled conditions, but minimising risk with very clear protocols.

The First Minister gave a random example of libraries, which could be brought back to use however with a specific set of rules on how they can be used in the new pandemic world, If we are clear about we can allow people to do, have clear rules to follow, people would have confidence to begin to do those things again.

With future steps being thought of now, including the surveillance mentioned and tracking / tracing systems, we asked what is being stepped up now to enable that to avoid the PPE, testing and ventilator lag that has been seen over the last few weeks.

The First Minister said: There is lots being done and led by the Chief Medical Officer and Public Health Wales to put in place surveillance arrangements needed the other side of lockdown. We will need to have extra feet on the ground in public health terms, people to respond rapidly to evidence of local flare ups of the disease.

The Chief Medical Officer has already prepared a paper internally for us in the Welsh Government to look at, and we are talking today with Scotland and Northern Ireland about plans they are putting in place, to develop a shared sense of the sort of practical arrangements we can develop.

The plans are being formed to ensure the best chance of making sure when lockdown lifted we are able to respond to any adverse impacts of that.

Finally we had spotted that New Zealands Prime Minister had said she and other ministers will take a percentage pay cut lasting six months to show solidarity with those affected. We asked if similar was happening in Wales with the First Minister and his cabinet?

The First Minister said he had only just seen the report himself, and not had a chance to see what has been proposed, or think about it but acknowledged once it is put in place by a government like New Zealand it inevitably it prompts discussion here and that discussion was at the very start.

(Top pic, Mr Drakeford on the video call earlier today)
Residents of nursing homes and personal care homes are among the most vulnerable to the coronavirus, health care experts have said.

Now, the Pennsylvania Department of Health has gained a clearer picture of the impact of the pandemic on those residents.

Half of all the coronavirus deaths in Pennsylvania have occurred in long-term care facilities, Health Secretary Dr. Rachel Levine said in a news conference today.

Levine said 324 people have died in long-term care facilities, which include nursing homes and personal care homes. Statewide, 647 people in Pennsylvania have died due to the coronavirus, the health department said today.

We continue to work closely with these facilities to provide infection control support and personal protective equipment, Levine said.

More than 26,000 people have been diagnosed with the virus, although Levine has said the rate of spread is slowing in Pennsylvania.

Levine said 3,316 patients who have contracted the virus are residents of long-term care facilities. Cases have been identified in 297 distinct locations in 33 counties, Levine said. About 12 percent of those who have been infected in Pennsylvania are residents of long-term care facilities.

Seniors are most at risk for developing life-threatening complications from the coronavirus, health care experts have said. Those in long-term care facilities are particularly vulnerable since many have other health complications.

Levine said the state has taken a deep dive into data involving long-term care facilities that sheds more light on infections. The health department has also begun publishing data detailing the number of cases in such facilities in each county.

In Lancaster County, 248 infected patients have been found in long-term care facilities, the fourth highest number in the state; 20 of those patients have died.

In Cumberland County, 30 patients in such facilities have contracted the virus and two have died. Dauphin County has identified 28 cases in long-term care facilities; no deaths have been reported.

The health department said it is working with nursing homes to help protect residents.

The Pennsylvania Health Care Association, which represents the states nursing homes, has been pushing the state to provide more aid for facilities and more supplies to protect workers.

Zach Shamberg, the associations president and CEO, told PennLive last week nursing homes need more aid simply so they can keep the doors open and the lights open in this epidemic.

Nursing homes, which often struggle with turnover, have faced even more challenges with staffing in the pandemic. Shamberg said dedicated staff are putting themselves at risk to care for residents.

Long-term care facilities are facing chronic shortages of supplies, he said. Theres simply not enough masks, goggles and gowns available, he said.

Before the outbreak, some advocates for seniors have called for more oversight of nursing homes. Critics have said regulators have not done enough to crack down on nursing homes that have had a history of violations.

Last week, U.S. Sens. Bob Casey Jr., D-Pa., and Pat Toomey, R-Pa., wrote a joint letter to federal regulators regarding nursing home oversight in the pandemic. They are seeking a briefing from federal officials on what is being done to monitor those nursing homes with a history of health and safety violations.

Those are facilities that could likely be at significant risk because theyve failed to meet basic standards of quality for a significant amount of time, Casey told PennLive last week.

More from PennLive

Pa. will now require most customers to wear masks, workers to wear them on the job, to slow COVID-19 spread

Read PennLives investigation of nursing homes: Still Failing the Frail

Pa. Senate sends bill that would reopen businesses to Gov. Wolf
Actor Ananya Panday has desribed her first day of shoot as a professional actor on the sets of Student of the Year 2, saying that it almost ended up being a washout. Ananya said that when rain threatened to cancel her entry shot, she was dejected, because her co-stars Tiger Shroff and Tara Sutaria had already shot theirs.

She told Mumbai Mirror, Our first shot was supposed to be for the song Jatt Ludhiyane Da. Punit had individually promised the three of us that all our first shots will be solo so that each one of us gets to savour it.

She continued, Tigers was a dance step, while Tara got a beauty shot. When it was my turn, it started raining. I got upset thinking I wouldnt get to shoot, and that my first day was ruined. Everybody got to do their scene except me. Luckily, Punit changed mine to an indoor shot so everything worked out.

Also read: Ananya Panday gets trolled for considering Koffee With Karan as barometer of success, Twitter asks are National Awards a joke?

Ananya in an earlier interview to Hindustan Times had spoken about the support she gets from her parents, Chunky and Bhavana Pandey. They are very happy. Parents will always be your only true fans who want the best for you. Im so happy my parents are seeing my success. Theyve always emphasised on me living a very balanced life. I began working at a young age, they always try and make time for me to chill, enjoy and live a normal life, she said.

After SOTY 2, Ananya appeared in Pati Patni Aur Woh, with Kartik Aaryan and Bhumi Pednekar. She also has Khaali Peeli, with Ishaan Khatter, and Shakun Batras next lined up.

Follow @htshowbiz for more
All of our favourite characters are back along with a couple of new faces, including Daniel Radcliffe who's joining the cast to play Kimmy's new love interest.

Prince Frederick Windsor, a young royal that's 12th in line to the British throne.
Source: Xinhua| 2020-04-15 23:07:29|Editor: huaxia

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ANKARA, April 15 (Xinhua) -- Turkish penal institutions started to release thousands of prisoners on Wednesday after law for reducing sentences was published on the official gazette.

Turkish parliament adopted an amendment on Tuesday to release nearly 90,000 inmates from prisons amid fears that the COVID-19 pandemic will carve a deadly path through cramped penitentiaries among prisoners and staff.

Local media showed footage of buses carrying prisoners from the penal institutions. These inmates are delivered to bus terminals or city centers by the transportation of the justice ministry.

Nearly 15,000 people will be released from the prisons and approximately 30,000 others from the open penal institutions, the ministry of justice said in a statement on Wednesday, noting that some 45,000 prisoners in open penal institutions will go on leave.

Inmates that are in open prisons and who remain under conditional release for less than a year will be directly released on probation.

They will be sent to their homes and considered on parole until May 31. If the outbreak persists, the justice minister will be able to extend the period for three times by a maximum of two months each.

The amendment reduces execution periods of some inmates except those convicted of offenses like "deliberate manslaughter," "intentional injury," "injury to a child, elderly and a spouse," "sexual violence crimes," "drug production and trade," "state espionage," "crimes against state intelligence services" and violations of the National Intelligence Agency Act and Anti-Terrorism Act.

There were almost 300,000 prisoners in Turkish penal institutions.
In normal years, even the most moribund church draws a crowd for Easter Sunday for a joyous celebration.

This, however, is probably the least normal year in living memory for most Americans.

More than a half-million Americans had tested positive for COVID-19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus that was first identified in Chinas Wuhan province late last year. More than 23,000 Americans have died. And people who live in most states, including Texas, are still under stay-at-home orders of some kind, as public health experts have strenuously advised.

Still, turnout was robust for the virtual service offered by Joel Osteens Lakewood Church in Houston, for example, perhaps because the pandemic is weighing so heavily on everyones mind.

Here is a reset where Im seeing things that Ive never seen in my 50 years on this planet, said the filmmaker Tyler Perry, who spoke to the virtual congregation via video message.

Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner addressed the congregation at the megachurchs central campus next to Greenway Plaza, although the rows and aisles in the building  once home to the NBAs Rockets  were empty. Houston Police Chief Art Acevedo and Houston Fire Chief Samuel Pena joined Turner on stage, as they all observed CDC guidelines about social distancing.

It was a joyous occasion, but one in which our proximity to loss was a central theme.

I know this is a difficult time, said Perry. To everyone who is ill, my prayers are that you would get better soon, and to everyone who has lost loved ones, hear me when I say this: My prayer for you is that God would send you comfort.

My prayer for you is that grief will come in waves, he continued.

Meanwhile, Republican leaders were making plans to resurrect the state and national economy, after slamming the brakes on both last month.

President Donald Trump insists he has the authority to do so whenever he likes, even if many of the governors who have shut down their respective states think its too soon to reopen the economy without risking a new wave of infections.

The authority is total, Trump said at a White House briefing Monday.

Total, he repeated, as the journalists in the briefing room, carefully spaced apart, sputtered questions in response to that sweeping and false claim.

Gov. Greg Abbott, at his own news conference earlier that day to announce $50 million in loans for the states struggling small businesses, reiterated that he plans to reopen the state economy in the coming weeks, via a slow process.

Its not clear why the governor thinks were ready for that. At the same news conference, he acknowledged the need for increased testing in Texas, which thus far has ranked second-to-last in terms of testing per capita of all states.

But Abbott also noted that Texas is seeing some slowing in the growth rate of new COVID-19 cases, for example. He referred to such metrics as glimmers of hope with a bunch of red flags attached.

And in an appearance Monday evening on Sean Hannitys Fox News program, Abbott said that we can plow ahead even before May 1, the date Trump has now posited as one for coronavirus-related restrictions to ease.

Texans love to work. Texans are dying to get back to work," Abbott said. "We want them to get back to work, but we have to do so in a very safe way so that we don't regenerate the spread of the coronavirus in the state of Texas.

It would be nice to think we could pull that off, but according to Turner, who leads the nations fourth most populous city, were not there yet. In a CNN appearance this weekend, he flatly rejected the suggestion that Houston will be able to reopen for business as usual in one or two weeks. We have lost more than 300 Texans, nearly a third of whom lived in our nursing homes and assisted-living centers, and the projected peak when emergency rooms are most at risk of being overwhelmed is weeks away.

Were not at the peak yet, Turner explained. And, again, hopefully all the decisions will be based on the medical professional advice that weve received, whether or not we have the ubiquitous testing  and were a long way from having the testing that we need across the city of Houston.

His immediate focus, he continued, is on containing the spread of the virus so cases of COVID-19 dont overwhelm the regions hospital capacity.

If you asked me whether or not were ready to open up today, or next week, the answer is no, Turner said.

A potential showdown between state leaders such as Abbott and local leaders such as Turner may be effectively preempted by the presidents bizarre assertion of total authority over the states, which has already drawn pushback from governors like New Yorks Andrew Cuomo, who stressed that Trump isnt a king.

The disjunct is a troubling one, though, in that it points to differing priorities among those tasked with leading us through this crisis. And Abbott, for his part, should remember that although Texans are eager for normal life to resume, were not willing to put our neighbors at risk unnecessarily.

The governors executive order shutting down nonessential businesses carved out an exemption for churches, after all  and yet during this Holy Week, which included Passover as well as Easter, most Texans were content to gather virtually.

erica.grieder@chron.com
The family of a Vietnamese man living in Germany, who passed away recently after contracting novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19), has agreed to donate his body to science for research on the virus, a family member told Tuoi Tre (Youth) newspaper on Tuesday.

Nguyen Minh Son, a 58-year-old man, was the first Vietnamese national in Germany to have died from the viral disease.

Sons brother-in-law Pham Hoai Nam told Tuoi Tre that the late mans family had received a proposal on cadaver donation from a hospital in Munich.

After the family gave their nod to the proposal, Nam said, German scientists carried out an autopsy on Sons cadaver on Tuesday to study the process of how the virus invades a body, as well as attacks and destroys human organs.

The work is expected to take two to three weeks before the hospital cremates Sons remains and sends his ashes to the family.

According to Nam, the family agreed to donate Sons body because every member has always supported organ and body donation for scientific cause.

Some members of Nams extended family are registered organ donors, and becoming one was among Sons living wishes.

Moreover, the family members were swayed by the arguments of the German experts, who said although Son had had diabetes for years, it remained unanswered as to why his condition worsened so quickly after hospitalization  he passed away after only seven days of treatment.

For this reason, the German experts sought to conduct a more in-depth study into Sons case.

Nguyen Minh Son (left) and his wife N.T.L. are seen in this supplied photo.

Sons wife N.T.L. believes it is likely that he caught the virus on March 29 when he went to cast his vote in person in a local election, Vu Luong, a retired Vietnamese journalist living in Berlin, told Tuoi Tre.

Other than that occasion, the man and his wife had strictly complied with travel restrictions imposed in the federal state of Bavaria and the city of Munich since they became Germanys epicenters of COVID-19 in March.

L. said Son could have voted by mail but eventually decided to cast his vote in person as a way to relax after more than days of staying indoors.

On April 1, he developed coughing and felt like he had a cold. His symptoms deteriorated over the next two days, with more coughing, fatigue, headaches, and body aches.

Son was admitted to the hospital on April 4 and later tested positive for the novel coronavirus. He passed away on April 11, after having been on a ventilator for two days.

L. has been under home quarantine since April 4, but all of her COVID-19 tests have returned negative for the virus to date.

Son was the 2,607th person, and the first Vietnamese, to have died of COVID-19 in Germany.

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Its never gotten this bad, she said.

Davidson, 32, stood on the gravel entrance to the complex as she watched the water rush by around 8 a.m. Monday morning. She said the water had started receding, and she was hoping it would eventually be low enough that she could get her cat, Artemis, from her apartment.

Her other cat, Autumn, was saved during the initial rescue effort and was waiting in her nearby Jeep.

Davidson said she was working her shift as a paramedic with Sullivan County EMS when she received a call around 3 a.m. from the apartment complexs property manager about the flooding.

She returned home around 3:30 a.m. and helped get people out of the boat as the Washington County Life Saving Crew moved the residents out of the units.

She said she was thankful her neighbors made it out safely by about 5 a.m.

This is fixable  you dry out, you pick up, you move on, she said. Clothes, shoes, furniture can all be replaced, but you cant replace life.
About 3,500 jurists, academics, actors, artistes, writers and people from other walks of life have slammed the Uttar Pradesh government and police for filing an FIR against Siddharth Varadarajan, the founding editor of web portal The Wire, and demanded that all criminal proceedings against him be dropped.

In a joint statement on Tuesday, they called the registration of the FIR against Varadarajan an attack on press freedom.

They also urged the central and state governments not to use the COVID-19 pandemic as a cover to trample upon the media's freedom.

A medical emergency should not serve as a pretext for imposition of a de facto political emergency, the statement said.

The signatories to it include former Supreme Court judge Madan B Lokur, former Madras High Court judge K Chandru and former Patna High Court judge Anjana Prakash.

Two former chiefs of naval staff -- Admiral Ramdas and Admiral Vishnu Bhagwat -- are also among the signatories, along with former finance minister Yashwant Sinha.

The statement expressed shock at the action of the Uttar Pradesh government under Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath and police in filing criminal charges against The Wire and one of its founding editors for an "entirely factual story on COVID-19 and religious events".

"This attack on media freedom, especially during the COVID-19 crisis, endangers not just free speech, but the public's right to information," the statement said.

The signatories called upon the Uttar Pradesh government to withdraw the FIR against Varadarajan and The Wire, and drop all criminal proceedings.

They also called upon the media not to communalise the pandemic.

The Uttar Pradesh police booked Varadarajan this month over comments on Twitter, claiming that the day the Tablighi Jamaat event was held in Delhi, Adityanath had insisted that a Ram Navami fair will take place as usual.

The FIR against the journalist also mentioned his remark questioning Adityanath's participation in a religious ceremony at the Ramjanmabhoomi site in Ayodhya during the nationwide lockdown to contain the spread of coronavirus.

The statement said the target of this action was a factual story on the Tablighi Jamaat and its exposure to COVID-19.

"Towards the end, the impugned article merely pointed out that 'Indian believers' more generally have been late to adopt precautions and avoid congregation, recalling UP Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath's plans, as late as March 18, to proceed with a religious fair at Ayodhya and his flouting of the national lockdown and social distancing norms by taking part in a religious ceremony along with others on March 25," the statement said.

Two FIRs were filed under various provisions of law on April 1, one on a complaint from a resident of Ayodhya and the other on the basis of a complaint by the Station House Officer (SHO) of Faizabad's Kotwali Nagar Police station, it noted.

A plain reading of the sections invoked in the FIRs made it clear that they could not possibly apply to the article in question, the statement said.

"The FIRs were followed up with a gross display of intimidation on April 10, when policemen arrived in a black SUV with no number plate at Varadarajan's residence in Delhi to issue a legal notice, ordering him to appear in Ayodhya on April 14 at 10 am," it said.

That the Uttar Pradesh government sent policemen who drove 700 kilometres during the nationwide lockdown to issue this summons, when the postal system was still operational, spoke volumes for its priorities, the statement added.

"The UP police's action is just the latest in a series of attempts by the ruling establishment, or persons close to them, to entangle The Wire and its editors in legal cases in an effort to shut them down," it said.

The police action against The Wire also came against the backdrop of the "demonisation of Muslims" in a section of the media as being responsible for the spread of the novel coronavirus in India, the statement said.

Several former bureaucrats, including former national security adviser Shivshankar Menon, former foreign secretary Sujatha Singh, former adviser to the governor of Punjab and former ambassador to Romania Julio Ribeiro and former CEC MS Gill, among others, are signatories to the statement.

Other signatories include authors Vikram Seth, Nayantara Sahgal, Arundhati Roy, Anita Desai, K Satchidanandan and Kiran Desai.

The statement has also been endorsed by actors and artistes such as Amol Palekar, Naseeruddin Shah, Nandita Das, Farhan Akhtar and Mallika Sarabhai. Zoya Akhtar, Kiran Rao and Anand Patwardhan are among the filmmakers, and Dayanita Singh is among the photographers who have backed the statement.

Senior journalists and over a thousand professors from universities across the globe are also among the signatories.

The FIR against Varadarajan had referred to a tweet by him, which said, "On the day the Tablighi Jamaat event was held, Adityanath insisted a large Ram Navami fair planned for Ayodhya from March 25 to April 2 would proceed as usual and that Lord Ram would protect devotees from the coronavirus."



Later, the journalist tweeted, saying, "I should clarify that it was Acharya Paramhans, Hindutva stalwart and head of the official Ayodhya temple trust, who said Ram would protect devotees from coronavirus, and not Adityanath, though he allowed a public event on 25/3 in defiance of the lockdown and took part himself.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
NEWTOWN BOROUGH >> The Newtown Borough Council welcomes the new year with three new members of council and a new borough mayor. District Court Judge Mick Petrucci was on hand on January 3 to administer the oath of office to the towns new mayor, Republican John Burke, who replaces longtime mayor Charles Corky Swartz who decided not to run for...
A man in Osun state, Akinloye Saheed has been remanded by a magistrate court in the state in custodial centre over a post he made on Facebook concerning COVID-19 in the state.

Akinloye had taken to his Facebook page to accuse the state government of importing COVID-19 patients into the state to get funds from the federal government.

According to the police prosecutor, Mr John ldoko, while speaking in the court, Akinloyes post was with the intent to incite members of the public against the Osun State Government.

Idoko quoted the accused person to have written thus: When I accused Osun Government of importing COVID-19 patients into the state just to access fund from the FG many didnt believe. The said imported patients are now Negative. APC, You Are Not Doing Well.

Idoko said on the 11th of April 2020 at 11:05pm, Akinloye interfered with an executive order of the Osun State Government when he published the item on his Facebook page.

He said the action of the accused person was in contravention with COVID-19 Laws of Osun State 2020 and thereby committed an offense contrary to and punishable under section 61 of the Criminal code Cap 34 Vol. II Laws of Osun State of Nigeria, 2002.

Read Also: Woman Murdered After Exposing Two Gay Men On Facebook (Video)

After the arraignment, the state counsel, Dapo Adeniji told the could that the state government was interested in the matter and thereafter applied to take over the case.

In his ruling, Magistrate Olusegun Ayilara said he was not satisfied with the facts to be considered whether to grant the bail or not.

He ordered for the filing of written application for bail. He thereafter ordered the remand of the accused person in a custodial centre and adjourned the case to May 13.
By PTI

NEW DELHI: The country's largest paramilitary force CRPF has extended the leave period of its personnel till the new lockdown deadline of May 3, a senior official said.

The nationwide lockdown was imposed on March 25 till April 14 to prevent the spread of the novel coronavirus, but on Tuesday it was extended till May 3 by Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

ALSO READ: This is how wives of CRPF personnel are contributing to India's anti-coronavirus drive

The 3.25-lakh personnel strong Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) had earlier extended the leave period of its personnel who are at home and prohibited the movement of those on training till April 15.

"The matter has been reviewed and in view of the current scenario, it is hereby directed that force's personnel who are away on leave should be advised not to return for duty till the lockdown period is over," a CRPF order, which has been accessed by PTI, said.

CLICK HERE TO FOLLOW CORONAVIRUS LIVE UPDATES

The order was issued on Tuesday.

The move is aimed to break the chain of COVID-19 and also to save our troops from infection, a senior official said.

Similarly, there will be no movement of personnel who had gone on training or some courses.

They have also been asked to "stay where they are", he said.

Only emergency operational movements will be sanctioned after review by supervisory authorities, the official said.

The CRPF is the country's lead internal security force with its three main combat theatres being anti-Naxal operations, counter-terrorist offensive in the Kashmir valley and taking on armed insurgency in the north eastern states.
On Tuesday, Prime Minister (PM) Narendra Modi extended the lockdown by another 19 days, till May 3. But there was a nuanced policy measure that the PM introduced in his speech. He spoke about hotspots  which represent clusters where a high number of cases have been identified and which can become sites of community transmission. These hotspots, he emphasised, had to be contained; the administration had to ensure that areas which were vulnerable were strictly monitored; and the overall objective had to remain to prevent the emergence of new hotspots. States, districts and sub-regions which are able to do so will see a relaxation of restrictions after April 20.

Through this approach, the PM is attempting to balance the dual, often, conflicting objectives the country has to meet. On the one hand, it must soften the blow of the pandemic in a country of 1.3 billion people whose lives and livelihoods were forced to a grinding halt. On the other, it must spend time, money and resources on the containment of the disease, and eventually, its eradication.

To do the latter, the PMs reference to hotspots is crucial. It comes in the wake of several states in the country declaring certain areas as containment zones. In these zones, the lockdown is more strictly enforced; even essential supplies are delivered to houses; there is aggressive screening; testing is ramped up; isolation is enforced; the patients are treated; and the effort is to first flatten the curve and then ensure that the zone becomes free of disease.

This model assumed national prominence because of the measures adopted in the textile town of Bhilwara in Rajasthan, which came to be known as ruthless containment, a phrase coined by the states additional secretary (health), Rohit Kumar Singh. The measures merit detailed examination because the model is now serving a broader template.

Once it was discovered that the disease had arrived, and spread in the town, the Rajasthan state government, led by chief minister Ashok Gehlot and Singh, along with a determined and capable local district administration, aided ably by health care professionals and police personnel, worked tirelessly on two fronts: Precaution and treatment. The Bhilwara model proved to be a difficult, but necessary, method. It was difficult because the model caused large-scale public inconvenience  it is not easy for any regime, especially democratic regimes, to disrupt the lives of citizens. But this was done. The first lesson from Bhilwara, therefore, is that state governments must remain alert, have a constant feedback mechanism from the ground, respond promptly, and be ready to take decisions, purely on grounds of the spread of the disease and expert input.

When the first case was reported on March 19, the administration did not hesitate to implement an inside-out curfew. Remember this was before the national lockdown was imposed. Restrictions were put in place, albeit leniently, and essential services were allowed during this time. However, fearing a greater spread, the administration gradually extended the geographical reach of the curfew by creating buffer zones, which ultimately covered the whole district. It then began tightening essential supplies. This was a Herculean, multi-pronged approach that required agencies to go door-to-door to deliver essentials. This, then, is the second lesson  adapt according to circumstances, implement even tougher measures when necessary, but do it sensitively and with a humane face to ensure that citizen needs are met. This was then supplemented with the aggressive screening of all residents, and continuous testing of symptomatic individuals. This is particularly praiseworthy since the nearest testing centre is in Jaipur, about 250 kilometres away from Bhilwara. Over time, government agencies established dedicated Covid-19 hospitals and arranged for vehicles to ferry people from the rural areas to get tested. Thousands of hotel rooms, and beds in other institutions and hostels, were set up as quarantine centres to keep symptomatic patients in isolation. This, then, is the third lesson. Hard measures are not an end in themselves. They are the means to ensure better health outcomes. And therefore, the period of strict lockdown has to be used to ramp up health infrastructure, test, isolate and treat.

To keep local officials motivated, teams of elected village representatives right up to the subdivisional magistrates, were given special and specific responsibilities. This is the fourth lesson. India has robust institutions on the ground; it has leaders with roots in the community who have legitimacy with the people; it is important to make the entire process participatory by using these institutions and leaders. That will ensure popular buy-in.

There is, however, a troubling trade-off involved in the Bhilwara model, as in other containment zones. Pandemics trigger health emergencies which demand coercive measures and the curtailment of some civil liberties that often dont feature in democracies. These include restrictions on the freedom of movement  through curfew, quarantine, sealing borders and so on  and the rationing of supplies. But perhaps, in times of unprecedented crises, this is the only way forward. And that, then, is the final lesson. There will be short-term restrictions on rights  but it is for a larger public good, and conditional on the rights being restored when public health improves.

Chandrachur Singh teaches at Hindu College, University of Delhi.

The views expressed are personal
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Linkedin Daniela Desantis (Reuters) Asuncion, Paraguay  Wed, April 15, 2020 11:11 636 fc6853813033f564188675f8bd1ff2b0 2 World Paraguay,South-America,coronavirus,COVID-19,COVID-19-lockdown,pandemic,health Free

As a global coronavirus pandemic spread around the world, landlocked Paraguay did not wait, imposing a strict lockdown in early March, before neighboring countries. The result: the fewest cases in the region.

The grains producer with a population of around 7 million people has just 159 confirmed cases and seven deaths. Just three of the infected people are hospitalized, with one in intensive care, health ministry data shows.

That compares with over 2,000 cases in Argentina, 10,000 in Peru, almost 8,000 in Chile, and 25,000 in Brazil. Smaller neighbor Uruguay has almost 500 confirmed cases while Bolivia has 354.

Luis Alberto Escoto, representative of the World Health Organization in Paraguay, told Reuters the country's success was due to aggressive social distancing measures.

"Their best result can be attributed to adoption of these and the attitude that the population has despite living in a difficult context, of inequality and poverty," he said.

Paraguay's government shut schools and suspended large events in the second week of March. Shortly later, it closed its borders, airports and ordered a total quarantine of the population with very few exceptions.

Police and military watch the streets and shops and have punished more than a thousand people for violating restrictions.

The South American nation, however, also has one of the lowest test rates for the virus, with 26.2 tests per 100,000 inhabitants, according to the WHO and Pan American Health Organization. It has shortages of tests and a lack of qualified personnel.

It has also had trouble getting ventilators and protective equipment for medical personnel, part of the reason President Mario Abdo extended the quarantine on Monday.

Escoto, however, said this was not masking a hidden crisis, while local lawmakers emphasized the country's health system - though under-funded - was not buckling under the strain.

"There is a certain under-reporting that exists. But the absence of mortality or serious cases saturating the system suggests there is not exponential community transmission yet," said Senator and former Minister of Health Esperanza Martinez.

"The fear is that when these measures are lifted without having a rapid test strategy," she added, "Paraguay may get the sort of peaks that have occurred in other countries."
Tahmir Banks, 21, of Lansdowne, shown here, has been arrested and charged with murder and gun offenses in the March 30, 2020, fatal shooting of Nicholas Troxell, 41, on a SEPTA Market-Frankford Line train, Philadelphia Police said. Read more

A 21-year-old Delaware County man has been arrested in last months fatal shooting of a Kensington man on SEPTAs Market-Frankford Line train, Philadelphia police said Wednesday.

Tahmir Banks, of the unit block of Beverly Avenue in East Lansdowne, was arrested and charged Friday with murder, gun violations, and related offenses in the March 30 shooting death of 41-year-old Nicholas Troxell.

A police spokesperson said the motive for the shooting was an argument, but did not elaborate. The shooting was believed to have occurred while the westbound train was near the Erie-Torresdale station shortly after midnight.

After SEPTA police learned of the shooting, they removed Troxell  who was shot once in the head  when the train stopped at the Allegheny station in Kensington. He was pronounced dead shortly afterward at Temple University Hospital.

Troxells family could not be reached for comment Wednesday. An online obituary said he was a devoted dad to five children and had seven grandchildren. Nicks family will remember him for his artistic talent, and like many who grew up in Philly, he displayed this through street graffiti art, the obituary said.

No attorney was listed for Banks. He was denied bail and was being held at the Curran-Fromhold Correctional Facility.

According to online court records, Banks had been arrested in September on charges of possession with intent to deliver drugs and had been released on unsecured bail. He was awaiting trial on those charges.

Also Wednesday, Philadelphia police identified two of three men fatally shot Tuesday as gun violence continued amid the coronavirus pandemic.

The three slayings increased the citys 2020 homicide count to 110 as of Tuesday night, a 16% jump from the same period last year  and close to the figure of 111 homicides in 2007, the most recent year when homicides exceeded 100 for the same time period.

Authorities reported no arrests in Tuesdays homicides, which remained under investigation.

Police identified a 38-year-old man fatally wounded about 9:30 a.m. on the 700 block of East Locust Avenue in East Germantown as Sean Washington, of nearby North Lambert Street. Washington, who was shot in the torso, died shortly afterward at Albert Einstein Medical Center.

At the scene Tuesday, police Crime Scene Unit investigators examined a pink handgun found on the sidewalk near the fatal shooting. Police provided no details about the guns connection to the slaying.

Authorities also identified a 32-year-old man fatally wounded about 4 p.m. Tuesday on the 2500 block of 24th Street in North Philadelphia as Joseph Williams, who lived nearby on Sergeant Street. Williams, who had numerous gunshot wounds to his head and body, was pronounced dead shortly afterward at Temple University Hospital.

About 8:50 p.m., a 19-year-old man was fatally wounded in a street shooting in Kensington. Police said the victim, who was shot once in the back while on the 200 block of Westmoreland Street, was pronounced dead shortly afterward at Temple. His name had not been released as of Wednesday afternoon.
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A voter casts his ballot at a polling station in Gwangjin District in Seoul, Wednesday. Yonhap



South Koreans voted in parliamentary elections amid the coronavirus pandemic Wednesday, with turnout at nearly 60 percent just hours before the voting was to end in a sign of intense public interest in what is seen as a referendum on President Moon Jae-in.

As of 4 p.m., 26.3 million people, or 59.7 percent of the total 44 million eligible voters, had completed casting their ballots, with two hours left until voting ends at 14,330 polling stations across the nation, according to the National Election Commission (NEC). The polls opened at 6 a.m.

The turnout, which included part of a record high turnout of 26.69 percent in last week's two-day early voting, is 9.5 percentage points higher than at the same time in the previous elections four years ago.

South Korea holds the quadrennial parliamentary elections to fill the 300-seat unicameral National Assembly -- with 253 directly elected seats and 47 proportional representation (PR) slots.

The country has gone ahead with the elections as its massive and rapid testing and quarantine efforts have slowed the spread of COVID-19.

South Korea recorded fewer than 30 new cases of the novel coronavirus for the third day in a row Wednesday, bringing the nations' total to 10,591.

This year's turnout already topped the 2016 elections' 58 percent and is forecast to surpass 60 percent for the first time in 16 years since the turnout reached 60.6 percent in the 2004 parliamentary elections.

Experts said the advanced voting and a sense of crisis in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic appear to have pushed citizens to cast their ballots.

"As the country is going through difficulties due to COVID-19, I felt this sense of duty to cast my vote," a 49-year-old surnamed Lee said at a polling station in Seoul.

Lee Sung-wook, another voter in the southeastern city of Busan, said he was surprised to see a 100-meter queue when he arrived at his polling station just minutes after the voting began.

"I thought I would be the first one to have arrived, but I couldn't even see the beginning of the line," the 38-year-old said. "I could feel the heat over the elections."












SACRAMENTO, Calif. - California will give cash payments to immigrants living in the country illegally who have been hurt by the coronavirus.

Gov. Gavin Newsom announced Wednesday the state will use a mix of taxpayer dollars and charitable contributions to give up to 150,000 adults $500 each. Households would be capped at $1,000.

Taxpayers are paying $75 million while a group of charities have committed to raising $50 million. Some charities have already contributed $5.5 million.

Newsom said people living in the country illegally are not eligible for federal stimulus checks or unemployment benefits.

RELATED: Gov. Gavin Newsom shares daily COVID-19 update

The Governor also announced, beginning April 20, the Employment Development Department (EDD) will help those applying for unemployment insurance, as well as the new Pandemic Unemployment Assitance (PUA) program set to begin on April 28.

PUA will provide federally funded benefits distinct from UI program for those out of work or partially unemployed because of the coronavirus, including the self-employed.

These benefits will be issued within 24 to 48 hours, as opposed to the traditional 21 days for regular unemployment insurance claims.
3 T-34 battle tanks rumble down a Yekaterinburg street during rehearsals for celebrations that will mark the 75th anniversary of the Allied victory in World War II. The event is still set to go ahead on May 9 amid the coronavirus pandemic, but Russian officials have admitted that they may need to reschedule the popular Moscow parade to a later date.
EDMONTONA University of Calgary professor says it was unethical for the Alberta government to bring in changes during the COVID-19 pandemic to how doctors bill for their services.

Dr. Ian Mitchell, whos a clinical professor of pediatrics at the Cumming School of Medicine, called it a managerial failure by the government.

Its about the complexity of a brand new system, he said in an interview.

Managers choose the time carefully to make changes in any workforce and when the workforce is already stressed, the managers job ... is to try to calm things.

The government went ahead with changes to a funding framework on March 31, despite pleas from doctors to delay them so physicians could focus on the pandemic.

It led to a lawsuit by the Alberta Medical Association, which argues doctors charter rights were violated by not having access to third-party arbitration.

Alberta Health said in a statement that the government is committed to maintaining total payments to physicians at $5.4 billion this year.

With recent changes to support physicians in the pandemic, we expect to spend even more, spokesperson Steve Buick said in the email.

Mitchell said its being portrayed by the government as a money issue, but its more complicated than that.

He and his colleague, Juliet Guichon, a bioethicist at the Cumming School of Medicine, wrote a column outlining their concerns, which was published Wednesday by the CBC.

It suggested the changes by the government were a needless burden during a pandemic and called the move unethical and potentially dangerous.

Mitchell compared it to a supermarket changing every bar code on every food item at a time when cashiers are stressed, concerned about their health and worried about transmitting the novel coronavirus.

They just would not do this, he said.

Its exactly the same thing. Theyve changed the codes, its a new system to learn and people are actually doing webinars to learn the new system.

He and Guichon argue that the move is also unethical under the provinces own rules.

A document titled Albertas Ethical Framework for Responding to Pandemic Influenza, which was published in January 2016, said the health system is obliged to respond to the needs of the affected individuals, society and health-care providers who put themselves at risk for the good of others.

It suggests the system must abide by the principles of working together, flexibility and good decision-making.

Buick said that document has nothing to do with physician payment and deals with clinical and policy choices around patient care, restrictions on public activity.

Doctors have said that the changes will force hundreds of clinics across the province, particularly in rural areas, to reduce staff or close their doors.

They received support Wednesday from the National Farmers Union, which noted that physicians working in Sundre and Stettler have given notice that they can no longer afford to provide emergency and obstetrical services at local hospitals.

This demonstrates the disastrous impact on rural communities that is happening as a result of the UCP governments attacks on doctors, Glenn Norman, vice-president of policy, said in a news release.

He noted that Sundre is in the heart of cattle country and also serves forestry and oil-sector workers, while Stettler has a lot of grain farming and oil-service work.

These occupations are all considered high risk, Norman said.

The organization reminded the Alberta government that rural communities often face difficulties attracting doctors and the health ministers assertion that he would simply replace doctors who leave shows a complete disregard for the patient-physician relationship.

Mitchell added that the doctors hes spoken to find the changes confusing and worry about the effect they will have on health care overall.

We need to cancel all the changes immediately, said the University of Calgary professor, suggesting the province go back to the negotiated contract that was in place and restart bargaining talks once the pandemic is over.

People are already stressed. We dont need to load them with an additional layer of stress.

Read more about:
Members of NASA's Curiosity Mars rover mission team photographed themselves on March 20, 2020, the first day the entire mission team worked remotely from home.Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

For people who are able to work remotely during this time of social distancing, video conferences and emails have helped bridge the gap.

The same holds true for the team behind NASA's Curiosity Mars rover. They're dealing with the same challenges of so many remote workers - quieting the dog, sharing space with partners and family, remembering to step away from the desk from time to time - but with a twist: They're operating on Mars.

On March 20, 2020, nobody on the team was present at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, where the mission is based. It was the first time the rover's operations were planned while the team was completely remote. Two days later, the commands they had sent to Mars executed as expected, resulting in Curiosity drilling a rock sample at a location called "Edinburgh."

The team began to anticipate the need to go fully remote a couple weeks before, leading them to rethink how they would operate. Headsets, monitors and other equipment were distributed (picked up curbside, with all employees following proper social-distancing measures).

Not everything they're used to working with at JPL could be sent home, however: Planners rely on 3D images from Mars and usually study them through special goggles that rapidly shift between left- and right-eye views to better reveal the contours of the landscape. That helps them figure out where to drive Curiosity and how far they can extend its robotic arm.

But those goggles require the advanced graphics cards in high-performance computers at JPL (they're actually gaming computers repurposed for driving on Mars). In order for rover operators to view 3D images on ordinary laptops, they've switched to simple red-blue 3D glasses. Although not as immersive or comfortable as the goggles, they work just as well for planning drives and arm movements.

The team ran through several tests and one full practice run before it was time to plan the "Edinburgh" drilling operation.

What It Takes to Drive a Rover

Of course, hardware is only part of the equation: A great deal of logistical adjustments are required as well. Typically, team members at JPL work with hundreds of scientists at research institutions around the world to decide where to drive Curiosity and how to gather its science. Working at a remove from those scientists is not new. But working apart from other people who are usually based at JPL is.

Programming each sequence of actions for the rover may involve 20 or so people developing and testing commands in one place while chatting with dozens of others located elsewhere.

"We're usually all in one room, sharing screens, images and data. People are talking in small groups and to each other from across the room," said Alicia Allbaugh, who leads the team.

Now they do the same job by holding several video conferences at once while also relying more on messaging apps. It takes extra effort to make sure everybody understands one another; on average, each day's planning takes one or two more hours than it normally would. That adds some limits to how many commands are sent each day. But for the most part, Curiosity is as scientifically productive as ever.

To make sure everyone is being heard and understands one another, science operations team chief Carrie Bridge proactively talks to the scientists and engineers to close any communication gaps: Does anyone see issues with the current plan? Does the solution the engineers are converging around work for the scientists?

"I probably monitor about 15 chat channels at all times," she said. "You're juggling more than you normally would."

Typically, Bridge would make her rounds to several groups working in a kind of situation room where Curiosity's data and images are viewed and commands are generated. Now she calls into as many as four separate videoconferences at the same time to check in.

"I still do my normal routine, but virtually," she said.

The transition has taken getting used to, but Bridge said the effort to keep Curiosity rolling is representative of the can-do spirit that attracted her to NASA.

"It's classic, textbook NASA," she said. "We're presented with a problem and we figure out how to make things work. Mars isn't standing still for us; we're still exploring."

For more information about Curiosity, visit:

https://mars.nasa.gov/msl/

https://nasa.gov/msl

Please follow SpaceRef on Twitter and Like us on Facebook.
NORWALK  A New York City educator with more than 20 years of experience is expected to be named Norwalks next schools superintendent.

The Board of Education is expected Thursday to approve Alexandra Estrella as the successor to the retiring Steven J. Adamowski as Norwalks superintendent of schools, effective July 1.

Estrella has most recently served as the superintendent of Community School District 4 in East Harlem, N.Y. The board will vote on Estrellas appointment at its Thursday meeting, which can be viewed live via the districts YouTube page.

I couldnt be happier to welcome Dr. Estrella to Norwalk schools, Board of Education Chairwoman Sarah Lemieux said Wednesday. I think her combination of experience and thoughtfulness and diligence and warmth is going to be absolutely perfect for the community.

District 4 is part of the New York City Department of Education and comprises 23 schools and roughly 13,500 students from pre-K through 12th grade.

Estrella began her career as a science teacher in Washington Heights. In 2008, she founded Esperanza Preparatory Academy, a dual-language middle school in East Harlem, and in 2011 expanded the school to grades six through 12.

Under her auspices, the districts New York state testing scores in English and Language Arts improved by 22 and 20 percent, respectively. Graduation rates in the district rose from 70 to 84 percent during her time and she worked to close the achievement gap. Estrella started one of New York Citys first special education inclusion programs for grades six through 12. For several years, Estrella has led her staff in culturally-responsive training and championed social-emotional learning within the district.

The biggest factor in her consideration was that she already accomplished so many of the things we are trying to do here, Lemieux said. Shes done work closing the achievement gap, teaching students with diverse needs, in bilingual education and bringing really robust social emotional education into the system. Shes already done all of that.

Estella graduated with a doctorate in education from Sage College of Albany and holds a masters degree in science education from Pace University and a masters degree in educational leadership from Baruch College.

In 2017, Estrella was hit with a $3,000 fine for the 2011 sale of her Mount Vernon home to a teacher employed at one of her schools, in breach of New York City rules. New York Citys then-Deputy Press Secretary for the Department of Education told the New York Daily News at the time that Estrella made a mistake and had an otherwise clean disciplinary history.

"She has been a strong leader in her community, and we will continue to support her in her work to bring equity and excellence to all students in District 4," Aciman told the Daily News.

Estrella will replace Adamowski, who came to Norwalk in 2015 and had previously held the title special master with the Connecticut Department of Education and was previously superintendent of public school districts in Hartford and Cincinnati, Ohio.

Estrellas nomination ends a months-long process to find Adamowskis successor.

We had a really great slate of candidates that we had to choose from and she was the best choice among a lot of good candidates, Lemieux said.

justin.papp@scni.com; @justinjpapp1; 203-842-2586
US president Donald Trump has said he will halt payments to the World Health Organisation.

Mr Trump said the coronavirus outbreak could have been better contained had the health agency done a better job investigating reports coming out of China.

Here, the PA news agency answers some questions about the organisation:

 What is the World Health Organisation?

The WHO is a body responsible for international health which is part of the United Nations. It aims to promote health, keep the world safe and serve the vulnerable.

 When did it start?

The origins of an international body for health matters date back to International Sanitary Conferences, with the first one held in 1851 in France to discuss quarantine regulations around cholera. After the Second World War, a range of world health bodies  including one for the League of Nations  were combined to form the WHO.

WHO Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus (Salvatore Di Nolfi/Keystone via AP)

 Who is involved?

The WHO has 194 member states, one more than the United Nations. Liechtenstein is not a member of the WHO but is in the UN, and the reverse is true of the Cook Islands and Niue. Member states appoint an Assembly to determine policies and financial matters.

 And what do they do?

There are three main strands to the WHOs work, with its efforts dealing with health emergencies currently in the spotlight. With coronavirus, the organisation said it supports development of tools, detects and responds to acute health emergencies and supports the delivery of services in fragile settings.

 Why is Taiwan not involved?

This is due to the difficult relationship between China and Taiwan. Membership of the WHO is only granted to members of the United Nations  of which Taiwan is not  or those whose applications are approved by the assembly. There has been increased pressure for Taiwan to be allowed to participate in light of the outbreak.

 Who funds it?

The budget has two sources of income: assessed and voluntary contributions. Assessed contributions are calculated relative to the countrys wealth and population, with the United States paying 115,766,922 dollars (91,455,868) in the two years between 2020-2021, compared to 9,570 dollars (7,560) for Liberia. The UKs assessed contributions are 21,851,530 (17,262,708) for the same period.

Story continues

 What about voluntary contributions?

Voluntary contributions come from a number of sources, including countries, to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and European Commission. According to the WHO, the US is the largest funder when assessed and voluntary contributions are pooled together, at 14.67%, followed by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation at 9.76%, the GAVI Alliance at 8.39% and the UK at 7.79%.

Global coronavirus cases and deaths. See story HEALTH Coronavirus. Infographic PA Graphics

 What is Donald Trumps stance?

The thrust of Mr Trumps argument is the WHO should have investigated early reports more thoroughly. The organisation has previously come in for similar criticism, with a damning report into the Ebola outbreak saying it failed to act quickly when early signs of the outbreak emerged in 2014.

 What have opponents said?

UN secretary-general Antonio Guterres has said the WHO is absolutely critical to coordinating global efforts to combat Covid-19, adding the right time to look at its work is once we have finally turned the page on this pandemic.
JENISON, MI -- About 87 acres of land and inland water features are expected to be added to the Ottawa County Parks system in late spring or early summer.

Officials with the Ottawa County Parks Foundation and the countys Parks and Recreation Commission announced Wednesday, April 15, that they reached an agreement to purchase and make public many acres of former gravel-mining property near the Bend Area in Georgetown Township.

The purchase would add another piece of property to the Grand River Greenway project, which aims to preserve and connect public land in the Grand River corridor.

The Grand River Greenway and Bend Area are projects that have been in the works for decades, David VanGinhoven, president of the Parks and Recreation Commission and treasurer of the Ottawa County Parks Foundation, said in a statement.

With this agreement, we have taken an important step forward in achieving both of these visions. The past few weeks have shown how critical it is to have outdoor spaces available, and that gives added urgency to Ottawa County Parks efforts to conserve natural areas.

The purchase will be funded by a grant from the Michigan Natural Resources Trust Fund, the Ottawa County Parks millage and $50,000 in funding from the Ottawa County Parks Foundations Grand River Greenway Campaign.

A total purchase price was not disclosed. If purchased, the space would be open to the public this summer or early fall.

The expansion of the Bend Area will add 42 acres of inland water features and about seven acres of land to the existing 263 acres of land, 9,907 feet of Grand River frontage and 48 acres of inland water features.

Some of the new acreage are wetlands.

While the Bend Area is currently undeveloped, parks officials envision it to eventually become a central feature of the Grand River Greenway. They hope to increase the park size to more than 700 acres and have amenities there such as swimming beach, hiking, biking, a system of interconnected lakes for paddling, playgrounds, picnicking, fishing and more.

The Bend Area represents a portion of the 37-mile-long Idema Explorers Trail that will connect Grand Haven to Millennium Park in Kent County and beyond. Ottawa County Parks aims to construct it by 2025.

The project is supported in part by the Grand River Greenway Campaign, which to date has raised over $6.6 million of its $7.2 million goal.

Read more on MLive:

Whitmer says shes disappointed in coronavirus stay-at-home protest, but supports free speech rights

Employee at Michigans largest egg producer tests positive for coronavirus

MSP exercising extreme discretion for social distancing enforcement during stay-at-home protest
Samsung has just announced its new tablet. This time around, the company announced the rumored Galaxy Tab S6 Lite. This is a mid-range tablet, but it still packs a punch.

As far as the design is concerned, its exactly what youd expect. Its bezels are not exactly thick, which is a good thing, but theyre thick enough for you to be able to grasp the tablet properly.

The Samsung Galaxy Tab S6 Lite is made out of metal, and it has two AKG-tuned speakers

The device seems to be made out of metal all around, just like its older sibling, the Galaxy Tab S6. There is a single camera on the back of this device, along with Samsung and AKG logos.

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The device is being marketed with the S Pen in official images, but were not sure if it ships with one or not. There doesnt seem to be a dock on the phone for the S Pen, nor are magnetic pins visible.

In terms of specs, the Galaxy Tab S6 Lite is nothing to scoff at. The device is fueled by the Exynos 9611 64-bit octa-core processor. That is one of the companys mid-range processors.

The device features a 10.4-inch TFT LCD display, and this is a fullHD+ (2000 x 1200) panel. The tablet also includes 4GB of RAM and 64GB of storage. You can expand that storage via a microSD card up to 1TB.

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A 7,040mAh battery is included in the package, along with Android 10

A 7,040mAh battery is also a part of this package. Were not sure if the tablet supports fast charging, though. Chances are it does, but were not sure how fast it is. Dont expect miracles, though.

A Type-C USB port is included on the bottom of the device, and this tablet includes two speakers. Samsung opted to include two, not four as on the Galaxy Tab S6. That is understandable considering the price cut.

These speakers are tuned by AKG, though, and they should be pretty good, especially for a mid-range product. Android 10 comes pre-installed, along with Samsung One UI 2.0 skin.

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This tablet measures 244.5 x 154.3 x 7mm, while it weighs 467 grams. We still do not know how much will the Galaxy Tab S6 Lite cost, unfortunately.

We also do not know whether the company plans to release an LTE version of this tablet. A regular variant with Wi-Fi only will be available, but were not sure about an LTE variant. Dont expect 5G to be included, thats for sure.

Samsung will hopefully release more information on the price and availability of this device. Until then, check out the official images that are provided in the gallery below.
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Guwahati/Shillong/Agartala, April 15 : With six more coronavirus cases reported in Meghalaya and one fresh case in Assam on Wednesday, the total number of such cases in the northeastern region (excluding Sikkim) reached 44, with 32 from Assam alone, Chief Ministers and Health Ministers said.

Two persons have so far died in the North-East -- a senior 69-year-old doctor in Meghalaya on Wednesday and a 65-years-old man, with a travel history to Saudi Arabia and Delhi in Hailakandi district in southern Assam, on April 10.

In addition to 32 cases in Assam, the count in other N-E states is: six in Meghalaya (after one death), two each in Manipur and Tripura, and one each in Mizoram and Arunachal Pradesh. Of the 44 people, 32 had attended the Tablighi Jamaat religious congregation in Delhi's Nizamuddin area last month.

Confirming the death of the veteran doctor, Meghalaya Chief Minister Conrad K. Sangma said in a tweet : "The first COVID-19 positive patient in Meghalaya passed away this morning (Wednesday). The senior doctor, who was the founder of the private Bethany Hospital, breathed his last in the wee hours. He had tested positive for the coronavirus on Monday evening".

The Chief Minister in a separate tweet said that of the swab samples tested so far, six have reported positive for corona and they are all family members and aides of the doctor of the private hospital. The six tested positive include two women and a child. Six other samples are being re-tested.

The government sanitised the adjoining areas of the Bethany Hospital, particularly Nongrim Hills, near the hospital in Shillong. These areas around the hospital in Shillong and Nongpoh have been sealed.

Contact-tracing of the doctor is continuing. The deceased doctor had no travel history except that his son-in-law, who is a pilot, had been to COVID-19 infected countries, and had returned home on March 22.

According to health officials in Shillong, the pilot, however, did not show any symptoms of coronavirus and was an asymptomatic case.

In a related development, Manipur Health and Family Welfare Department's Additional Director Khoirom Sasheekumar Mangang told IANS on phone that swab samples of 20 people, including 11 close contacts of a Shillong-based Air India pilot, who spent three nights in Imphal from March 17 after returning from New York, have been found COVID-19 negative.

In Guwahati, Assam Health Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma, in a tweet, said: "A woman from Dhubri (western Assam) has tested COVID-19 positive. She is wife of a COVID-19 positive person who is connected both with Nizamuddin Markaz in Delhi, and Athgaon Kabristan congregation in Guwahati".

In Agartala, health officials said of the two persons, who had earlier tested COVID-19 positive, the first patient (a woman) has already been cured and discharged from the hospital on Wednesday and that she would be in institutional quarantine for next 14 days.

The health condition of the second patient, a jawan of the Tripura State Rifles, is also stable.

In Aizawl, Mizoram Health Minister R. Lalthangliana in a separate press release said in Aizawl that the 22-year-old woman from the state, who tested corona positive in a Mumbai hospital, is a breast cancer patient.

"A doctor from Mizoram, who worked in a hospital in Meghalaya, also tested positive for coronavirus in Shillong on Tuesday night. The lone COVID-19 patient being treated at the Zoram Medical College in Aizawl for the last month, is showing good progress, and on Monday, his ventilator was removed and he was breathing normally," the release quoted the Minister as saying.
Vancouver, British Columbia--(Newsfile Corp. - April 15, 2020) - Destiny Media Technologies (TSXV: DSY) (OTCQB: DSNY), the makers of Play MPE, a cloud-based music distribution, collaboration and content discovery platform, today announced financial results for its fiscal 2020 second quarter ended February 29, 2020.

Highlights

Highlights for the quarter include:

Play MPE launched in Canada starting with Universal Music Canada in late January;

Play MPE platform improvements include sending side translations into Spanish, German, Japanese and French and recipient side improvements to song discovery and ease of use; and

Play MPE business development group restructured including the hiring of a new director of business development.

Fiscal 2020 Second Quarter Results

In the Company's slowest seasonal quarter ending February 29, 2020, Play MPE revenue fell by approximately $57,000, due to the timing of contract renewal negotiations. Global Play MPE independent label revenue continues to increase.

"During the quarter we started to see the results of investments into product development with two significant releases for the Play MPE platform." said Fred Vandenberg, Chief Executive Officer for Destiny Media Technologies. "Play MPE continues to be the most advanced platform and these releases will assist in the expansion of Play MPE into new markets. The Company saw a significant step during the quarter with the start of the expansion into Canada."

The Company commenced a stock repurchase program in September 2019, resulting in market purchases to April 12, 2020 of 550,140 shares (representing 5% of shares outstanding as of August 31, 2019) for a total cost of $533,223 USD.

Fiscal 2020 Second Quarter Earnings Conference Call

Destiny Media Technologies will host a conference call at 5:00 p.m. ET (2:00pm PT) on April 15, 2020, to further discuss its fiscal 2020 first quarter results. Investors and interested parties may participate in the call by dialing 1-416-764-8688 or 1-888-390-0546 and referring to conference ID # 15660597. A written transcript and archived stream will subsequently be made available on Destiny's corporate site at https://investors.dsny.com.

CONDENSED CONSOLIDATED INTERIM STATEMENTS OF COMPREHENSIVE INCOME (LOSS)

(Expressed in United States dollars)

Unaudited





Three Months

Ended

February 29,

2020



Three Months

Ended

February 28,

2019



Three Months Ended

February 29,

2020



Three Months

Ended

February 28,

2019



$

$



$



$

Service Revenue

806,729



879,364



1,852,585



1,863,383























Cost of revenue



















Hosting costs

15,839



29,251



42,456



59,208

Internal engineering support

6,516



6,916



13,363



14,287

Customer support

36,351



28,030



75,722



56,277

Third party and transactions costs

10,414



9,415



22,861



20,010



69,120



73,612



154,402



149,782











Gross Margin

737,609



805,752



1,698,183



1,713,601



















Operating expenses















General and administrative

216,094



206,203



435,597



396,864

Sales and marketing

362,400



222,746



646,156



433,392

Product development

287,752



282,895



607,726



555,056

Depreciation and amortization

35,478



19,711



67,550



40,335



901,724



731,555



1,757,029



1,425,647

Income (loss) from operations

(164,115 )

74,197



(58,846 )

287,954











Other income















Interest income

8,110



6,522



14,477



12,921

Other income

674



-



696



34

Net income (loss)

(155,331 )

80,719



(43,673 )

300,909



















Other comprehensive income (loss)















Foreign currency translation adjustments

(15,108 )

29,232



(13,556 )

(19,853 )









Total comprehensive income (loss)



(170,439 )

109,951



(57,229 )

281,056



















Net income (loss) per common share,















basic and diluted

(0.01 )

0.01



(0.00 )

0.03



















Weighted average common shares outstanding:













Basic and diluted

10,629,438



11,002,775



10,665,834



11,002,775



CONDENSED CONSOLIDATED INTERIM BALANCE SHEETS

(Expressed in United States Dollars)

Unaudited

As at,

February 29,



August 31,





2020



2019



$



$













ASSETS









Current









Cash and cash equivalents

1,050,177



2,512,138

Short-term investments

1,129,382



380,056

Accounts receivable, net of allowance for







doubtful accounts of $9,853 [August 31, 2019 - $10,106]

567,916



332,271

Other receivables

9,825



14,240

Prepaid expenses

69,965



77,067

Total current assets

2,827,265



3,315,772

Deposits

33,472



33,716

Property and equipment, net

238,934



260,907

Intangible assets, net

21,184



24,695

Right of use asset

501,483



-

Total assets

3,622,338



3,635,090











LIABILITIES AND STOCKHOLDERS' EQUITY







Current







Accounts payable

246,156



132,451

Accrued liabilities

256,679



303,470

Deferred leasehold inducement

-



46,774

Deferred revenue

7,014



23,388

Current portion of operating lease liability

219,894



-

Total current liabilities

729,743



506,083

Operating lease liability, net of current portion

333,407



-

Total liabilities

1,063,150



506,083











Commitments and contingencies







Stockholders' equity







Common stock, par value $0.001







Authorized: 20,000,000 shares







Issued and outstanding: 10,450,656 shares







[August 31, 2019 - issued and outstanding 11,000,796 shares]

10,451



11,001

Additional paid-in capital

9,338,308



9,850,348

Accumulated deficit

(6,384,156 )

(6,340,483 ) Accumulated other comprehensive (loss)

(405,415 )

(391,859 ) Total stockholders' equity

2,559,188



3,129,007

Total liabilities and stockholders' equity

3,622,338



3,635,090







About Destiny Media Technologies Inc.

Destiny Media Technologies ("Destiny") provides software as service (SaaS) solutions to businesses in the music industry solving critical problems in distribution and promotion. The core service, Play MPE (www.plaympe.com), provides promotional music marketing to engaged networks of decision makers in radio, film, TV, and beyond. More information can be found at www.dsny.com.

Forward-Looking Statements

This release contains forward-looking statements that reflect current views with respect to future events and operating performance. Any such statements are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those projected in these forward-looking statements. Destiny Media Technologies is not obligated to update these statements in the future. For more information on the Company's risks and uncertainties relating to those forward-looking statements, please refer to the Risk Factors section in our Annual Form 10-K for the fiscal year ended August 31, 2019, which is available on www.sedar.com or www.sec.gov.

Contact:

Fred Vandenberg

CEO, Destiny Media Technologies, Inc.

604 609 7736 x236

To view the source version of this press release, please visit https://www.newsfilecorp.com/release/54479
Mondelez India Foods Pvt Ltd, manufacturer of Cadbury chocolates, on Wednesday committed to donate 71 tonnes of biscuits and chocolates for distribution in 12 major cities in the country amid the coronavirus pandemic. The company has decided to contribute 360,000 units of biscuits and 23 lakh units of chocolate to India FoodBanking Network, of the Food Security Foundation India, in 12 major cities in the country, it said.

"Mondelez India commits to donate 71 tonnes of biscuits and chocolates as the first step towards extending support to communities during the COVID-19 crisis," the company said in a statement.

Follow LIVE updates on the COVID-19 pandemic here

Since food security has become a major concern in the current COVID-19 situation, this association will aid in strengthening various feeding programmes through the company's products which are easy to share and consume.

Mondelez India also said about 1 lakh meals were provided by employees through a company association with Akshaya Patra Foundation and will continue to do so through the month of April 2020.

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 has also donated 1 lakh masks and about 225 litres of sanitisers in Mumbai to support the frontline members, including hospital staff and the police.

Apart from this, the company extended support to local authorities around their factory locations by donating 1,800 relief kits consisting of critical masks and sanitisers and some snack products like chocolates, biscuits and Tang in Himachal Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Andhra Pradesh and Maharashtra, it added.

Follow our full coverage of the coronavirus pandemic here
US coronavirus deaths rose by 2,228 in a single-day record on Tuesday as President Donald Trump escalated his feud with the World Health Organization announcing a hold on US funding for it in a move widely seen as an attempt to deflect mounting criticism of his administrations missteps in handling the outbreak.

More than 25,980 people had died of the coronavirus in the United States till Tuesday evening, according to the Johns Hopkins tracker and 608,377 had been infected - almost a third of the total number of cases in the world, which was close to 2 million; the toll worldwide was 126,557.

Tuesday was the worst the United States had seen yet, overtaking the previous single-day record of 2,069, last Friday. Public health officials had warned before that this week and the one before would be the most painful yet, with comparisons to pivotal events in US history such as the Pearl Harbor attacks in 1941 and the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.

Reuters news agency reported the real toll was far in excess as it did not include the 3,700 deaths in New York City that had been presumed to be coronavirus-related but had not been tested.

The surge in cases and deaths came amidst growing optimism that the country may be nearing the peak after which these numbers will begin to go down. Officials have cited the flattening of the curve in some hotspots such as New York and New Jersey, among signs that give them hope.

The Trump administration has been pushing for reopening the country, the society and the economy. The president announced Tuesday bipartisan groups of advisers he will be consulting to shortly determine the way forward. The decision to end or continue social-distancing and other mitigation efforts would rest ultimately with state governors.

The president acknowledged as much at the daily briefing Tuesday, dialling down an escalating feud with governors, some of whom have publicly pushed back against his claims of total authority in deciding when to end the mitigation measures and threatened to defy him if he persisted.

But the president predictably dialled up his spat with the World Health Organization, which is in the middle of leading a global response to the epidemic that had hit nearly 160 countries, killed more than quarter of a million people and infected close to two million people.

We have not been treated properly, Trump said, as he announced the suspension of the US funding, which is around $450 million, for a period of 60 to 90 days.

During the duration of the hold, the president said, the United States will conduct a review to assess the World Health Organizations role and severely mismanaging and covering up the spread of the coronavirus.

The president accused the WHO of not alerting the world about the critical significance of the outbreak, opposing his administrations ban on foreigners travelling from China and then for siding with China and helping it conceal the true extent of its outbreak; a list of complaints he has aired before.

The president has come under mounting criticism for his administrations delayed and botched response to the outbreak, stemming in part from his own reluctance to acknowledge the seriousness of the impending crisis and delaying mitigation efforts till much after the first cases and fatalities.

Trumps criticism of the WHO of its response to the outbreak and then papering over Chinas suppression of numbers run counter to his own praise for both the world body and China.

CDC (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) & World Health have been working hard and very smart, he tweeted in February. And he has praised China often in tweets and remarks.

President Trump has severe US ties with a number of world bodies or scaled them down now: the Paris Accord on climate change (2017), UNESCO (2017), Iran deal (2018) and UNHCR (2018). The president has complained about US contributions to world bodies such as the United Nations.

In another development, the Washington Post reported that President Trumps name will be printed on cheques the US treasury will be sending to American families as part of the $2.2 trillion stimulus package. This has been called an unprecedented move intended to derive political capital from what was actually a bipartisan effort, supported by both parties.
Formaspace workbenches shipped from our Austin factory arrive on site (bottom), where GM staff set them up on the new production line (top). (Photo by AJ Mast for General Motors) Formaspace manufactures 500 ESD workbenches in only 18 days for GMs Kokomo, Indiana facility producing critically important ventilators for Coronavirus patients.

Formaspace announced today that it has completed an initial order of 500 new ESD workbenches destined for General Motors manufacturing facility in Kokomo, Indiana, where GM and Ventec Life Systems are partnering to produce Ventec critical care ventilators in response to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Formaspace received the urgent request from GM on March 22, 2020, and put the resources of the entire company toward one goal: delivering as fast as possible. The first truckload of ESD workbenches departed the Formaspace factory in Austin for Indiana three days later, with subsequent truckloads shipping out each day until the initial order was completed on April 9.

We were able to respond quickly to this urgent request from GM because we manufacture all our custom industrial furniture using American-sourced steel and other raw materials from the USA at our factory headquarters in Austin, Texas, says Jeff Turk, Formaspace CEO. Now that this initial order is complete, we are utilizing our newly increased production capacity to speed up delivery of non-healthcare critical projects, and expect those orders will be completed within a few days. I hope you will support us as we do our part to help healthcare providers respond to the COVID-19 pandemic.

The assembly operations at the 100,000 sq ft facility in Kokomo span three floors of the building and feature a cleanroom area and two production lines.

The 500 new workbenches supplied by Formaspace will be used for assembling the delicate electronic components. Each of the workbenches features work surfaces with full coverage ESD protection (to suppress static electric shocks that could damage sensitive microelectronics), built-in parts bins, heavy-duty white powder-coated steel frames, integrated overhead lighting, and 8 plug power strips.

Every ventilator we build can help save lives, and GMs global supply base and manufacturing teams, the UAW, and the Kokomo community are working with passion and unwavering commitment to get the job done, said Gerald Johnson, GM executive vice president, Global Manufacturing. People have moved mountains to help increase the production of Ventecs critical care ventilator. I have never seen anything like it in my career.

According to Frank Bucher, Formaspace EVP of Sales and Marketing, Our production facility is open and able to respond to the needs of our customers who are constructing new facilities or making changes to their existing operations, including manufacturing facilities, material handling, and distribution centers, pharma and healthcare laboratories, or primary, secondary, and university educational facilities. We have added an additional work shift to keep up with current demand, and we are taking special care to ensure all hygiene precautions are in place to allow our facilities to operate safely during this difficult time.

Formaspace fosters the spirit of discovery and creation through the design and manufacture of unique, made-in-America furniture solutions, from ideation to installation. To learn more about our large-scale, custom manufacturing capabilities and our unique furniture systems for large and small conference rooms, private offices, co-working spaces, makerspaces, cafes, lounges, laboratories, industrial environments, K-12, universities, and beyond, please visit https://formaspace.com
By PTI

DUBAI/PESHAWAR: Around 400 Pakistani prisoners have been released from jails across the United Arab Emirates in view of the coronavirus pandemic, which has claimed 28 lives and infected over 4,900 people in the Gulf kingdom so far.

The released Pakistanis were jailed for minor offences, the Pakistani Embassy in Abu Dhabi said on Tuesday, adding that the UAE government was arranging special flights to repatriate them.

Of the 400 prisoners, 189 people already reached Peshawar on a FlyDubai flight, the Dawn newspaper reported on Tuesday.

The second flight is expected to land in Faisalabad.

All the repatriated prisoners would be kept in isolation till they are tested for COVID-19, Additional Deputy Commissioner Ashfaq Khan told the daily.

The decision to release the prisoners follows demonstrations by hundreds of Pakistanis outside the Embassy in Abu Dhabi and Consulate in Dubai last week, demanding they be sent back home.

Around 25,000 Pakistanis have requested repatriation from the UAE in recent weeks.

Many have lost jobs and closed businesses due to the coronavirus outbreak.

Similarly, 25,000 Indians are stranded in various parts of the globe, including the UAE.

However, the Supreme Court of India has ruled that stranded expatriates cannot be flown back home till May 3, when the coronavirus lockdown ends in the country.

The coronavirus which originated in China's Wuhan city in December last year has claimed 28 lives and infected 4,933 people in the UAE.

Across the world, the virus has killed over 126,000 people with nearly 2 million positive cases so far.
Weining Han became the CEO of Synertone Communication Corporation (HKG:1613) in 2015. This report will, first, examine the CEO compensation levels in comparison to CEO compensation at companies of similar size. Then we'll look at a snap shot of the business growth. Third, we'll reflect on the total return to shareholders over three years, as a second measure of business performance. This process should give us an idea about how appropriately the CEO is paid.

Check out our latest analysis for Synertone Communication

How Does Weining Han's Compensation Compare With Similar Sized Companies?

At the time of writing, our data says that Synertone Communication Corporation has a market cap of HK$774m, and reported total annual CEO compensation of HK$1.8m for the year to March 2019. We think total compensation is more important but we note that the CEO salary is lower, at HK$1.4m. We took a group of companies with market capitalizations below HK$1.6b, and calculated the median CEO total compensation to be HK$1.8m.

Next, let's break down remuneration compositions to understand how the industry and company compare with each other. Speaking on an industry level, we can see that nearly 73% of total compensation represents salary, while the remainder of 27% is other remuneration. Synertone Communication does not set aside a larger portion of remuneration in the form of salary, maintaining the same rate as the wider market.

So Weining Han receives a similar amount to the median CEO pay, amongst the companies we looked at. Although this fact alone doesn't tell us a great deal, it becomes more relevant when considered against the business performance. You can see a visual representation of the CEO compensation at Synertone Communication, below.

SEHK:1613 CEO Compensation April 14th 2020

Is Synertone Communication Corporation Growing?

Synertone Communication Corporation has seen earnings per share (EPS) move positively by an average of 47% a year, over the last three years (using a line of best fit). Its revenue is down 4.9% over last year.

Story continues

Overall this is a positive result for shareholders, showing that the company has improved in recent years. The lack of revenue growth isn't ideal, but it is the bottom line that counts most in business. Although we don't have analyst forecasts shareholders might want to examine this detailed historical graph of earnings, revenue and cash flow.

Has Synertone Communication Corporation Been A Good Investment?

Since shareholders would have lost about 3.2% over three years, some Synertone Communication Corporation shareholders would surely be feeling negative emotions. It therefore might be upsetting for shareholders if the CEO were paid generously.

In Summary...

Remuneration for Weining Han is close enough to the median pay for a CEO of a similar sized company .

We like that the company is growing EPS, but we find the returns over the last three years to be lacking. Considering the the positives we don't think the CEO pays is too high, but it's certainly hard to argue it is too low. CEO compensation is an important area to keep your eyes on, but we've also identified 5 warning signs for Synertone Communication (2 shouldn't be ignored!) that you should be aware of before investing here.

If you want to buy a stock that is better than Synertone Communication, this free list of high return, low debt companies is a great place to look.

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.
UN working to avert dual crises as COVID-19 hits hunger hotspots

April 15,2020 | Source: UN News

Leading up to the coronavirus pandemic, more than 820 million people went to bed hungry, including 110 million people who were living in acute food insecurity. Now as some developing countries face a double crisis - hunger and COVID-19 - the United Nations is working to support the most vulnerable.



As the number of infections in vulnerable countries grows  among populations who are already malnourished, weak and vulnerable to disease  a crisis within a crisis could emerge, said Dominique Burgeon, Director of Emergency and Resilience Division of the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) in an interview.



And that, in a vicious feedback loop, will leave more people weaker and vulnerable to the virus, he warned.



In a recent op-ed, FAO Director-General Dongyu Qu said that the global supply of food remains strong, but questions remain over supply chain, due to quarantine regulations and partial port closures, which are causing slowdowns and logistical hurdles in the shipping industry. Amid border restrictions, trucking faces similar threats, he added.



The cumulative effects of such market disruption, while not yet dramatic, will likely become apparent as early as this month, he warned.



Well-nourished citizens in wealthy countries may weather a couple of months without some fresh or imported produce, but in the developing world, a child malnourished at a young age will be stunted for life, he warned.



Governments, even as they prioritize public health goals, must do everything in their power to keep trade routes open and supply chains alive, he urged.



Now more than ever, we need international co-operation and supple arrangements to preserve the fluidity of global food markets, he said.



FAO's response strategy during the COVID-19 pandemic targets countries already facing food crises, like Ethiopia, Kenya and Somalia, where nearly 12 million people had already found themselves in dire circumstances due to extended droughts and back-to-back harvest failures before hordes of desert locusts descended on their crops and pastures from late December to early January. Africas Sahel region also faces a food crisis.



Communities in rural areas depend on agricultural production, seasonal jobs in agriculture, fishing, or pastoralism. If they become ill or constrained by restrictions on movement or activity, their livelihoods will be destroyed, he explains.



During the Ebola crisis in Africa, food production plummeted by 12 per cent. In Liberia, 47 per cent of farmers were unable to cultivate. Restrictions and market closures disrupted flows of food and necessities. Shortages of goods led to an increase in prices of key commodities. Because of disrupted agricultural market supply chains, people went hungry.



The lessons from the Ebloa outbreak are clear, FAO officials say, emphasizing that while health needs are an urgent and primary concern, we cannot neglect livelihoods or food security aspects.



As part of the UNs $2 billion humanitarian appeal, FAO asked donors for $110 million to protect the food security of vulnerable rural populations. The agency is providing smallholder farmers and herders with seeds, tools, livestock feed and other inputs, along with animal health support, so they can continue to produce food for their families and communities and generate income.



FAO is also working to ensure the continuity of the food supply chain, including between rural, peri-urban and urban areas, by supporting through various activities the functioning of local food markets, value chains and systems.



In Zimbabwe, the World Food Programme (WFP) is working to ease hunger, as the number of acutely food insecure Zimbabweans has risen to 4.3 million, from 3.8 million at the end of last year.



With most Zimbabweans already struggling to put food on the table, the COVID pandemic risks even wider and deeper desperation, said Eddie Rowe, WFPs Country Director. We must all do our utmost to prevent this tragedy turning into a catastrophe.



WFP is planning to assist 4.1 million people in April, although insufficient funding has prevented it achieving the same monthly target since the turn of the year. In March, it reached 3.7 million of the most vulnerable Zimbabweans.



WFP continues to monitor and adjust delivery modalities to meet critical needs throughout lockdown periods. In Djibouti, in coordination with partners, WFP began distributing two-months worth of food assistance to 18,500 refugees.



In Honduras, WFP works with the Government to ensure that families unable to receive food rations will receive cash-based transfers, and teachers and local school authorities in rural areas have started to distribute food rations to the families of schoolchildren.



In Haiti, the agency will be delivering one-month rations to 2,185 households in quarantine. In Myanmar, WFP is planning to upgrade warehouses for cold chain processes to support the Governments COVID-19 response.

 United Nations

Theme(s): Others.
[April 15, 2020]

NASA Awards NOAA's Space Weather Follow-On Lagrange 1 Magnetometer

WASHINGTON, April 15, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- On behalf of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), NASA has awarded the Space Weather Follow-On Lagrange 1 (SWFO-L1) Magnetometer contract to Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) based in San Antonio, Texas.

This is a cost-plus, fixed-fee contract with a total value of $12,562,664. The period of performance is 75 months.

SwRI will design, analyze, develop, fabricate, integrate, test, calibrate and evaluate the magnetometer instrument that consists of two three-axs magnetometers and associated electronics that will be used to measure the vector interplanetary magnetic field. SwRI will also support launch and on-orbit check-out of the instrument, supply and maintain the instrument Ground Support Equipment and support the Mission Operations Center through mission hand-over to NOAA.







The work will be performed at SwRI in San Antonio, Texas, and at the University of New Hampshire in Durham.

The SWFO-L1 satellite, which is planned to launch in 2024 as a rideshare on the NASA IMAP, will collect upstream solar wind data and coronal imagery to support NOAA's mission to monitor and forecast space weather events.

NOAA is responsible for the Space Weather Follow-On program. NASA is the program's flight system procurement agent, and NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, is the lead for acquisition.

For information about NASA and agency programs, visit:

https://www.nasa.gov

View original content to download multimedia:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/nasa-awards-noaas-space-weather-follow-on-lagrange-1-magnetometer-301041148.html

SOURCE NASA
Predicting that the growth rate in the first quarter of the current fiscal may slip into negative, former RBI governor C Rangarajan on Wednesday expressed the view that Prime Minister Narendra Modi's lockdown extension announcement should have included plans to address the issues of migrant labourers and daily wagers.

Rangarajan said though there may be negative growth in the GDP during the first quarter, if the situation recovers during the next three quarters, the growth rate may be closer to 3.5 percent.

"The most important thing is that the hardship of the lockdown is being borne very severely by the vulnerable sections."



Because of the closure of the factories, the daily wage earner including the migrant labourer has been severely affected, he said.

"Therefore if lockdown is absolutely essential, then I think something must be done to take care of these people who have been thrown out of employment.

And therefore this announcement should have been accompanied by an announcement regarding what and how they will take care of these people...Immediately in his (Modi) speech or elsewhere we should have seen (measures for labourers and daily wage earners).

Even today in the relaxation norms, along with it perhaps some announcements on how the migrant labourer and others will be helped.

It is also necessary," Rangarajan told PTI.

The former RBI Governor said the government has gone by medical advice to impose a lockdown and by the same advice they expanded the lockdown also which is essential to combat the coronavirus spread.

The lockdown has brought the economic activity to "halt", he said.

"Perhaps in the first quarter of the year, the GDP growth may even be negative.But that could be made up by the growth in the next three quarters.

Some people have estimated the growth rate to be about 2 percent.But I think probably it will be closer to 3.5 per cent for the year as a whole.

But that all depends on how long this virus will continue, he said when asked about the lockdown impact on the economic growth.

He said Direct Cash Transfer system is one of the mechanisms through which the government can help the migrant labourers and at the same providing food and other relief material to them must be the first priority of the dispensation.

Replying to a query, he said the governments spendis expected to go higher than it originally was planned and finding resources to meet the expenditure will be difficult for it.

According to him, the centre needs to go for extra borrowings for which the Reserve Bank of India will have to step in to support the governments fund raise programmes.

The government itself is placed in a situation that it will have to borrow a lot more than what is planned.

In that also the RBI will have to help in some manner in a mutual agreement with the government to provide liquidity to the government, he said.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Source: Xinhua| 2020-04-15 22:25:21|Editor: xuxin

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BUNIA, DR Congo, April 15 (Xinhua) -- At least thirty-five people were killed Saturday and Sunday in the offensive between the armed forces (FARDC) against the armed group CODECO in several localities in the territory of Djugu, Ituri province in the northeast of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DR Congo), army sources said Wednesday.

According to Jules Ngongo, spokesman for the army in this part of the country, the fight took place after several attempted incursions by these heavily armed militiamen who attack different villages committing acts of violence against the civilian population.

Joined by telephone from Ituri where the army continues its offensive against the attackers, Lieutenant Jules Ngongo puts forward a death toll of 35, including two FARDC soldiers and others injured, as well as several weapons recovered by the loyalist forces.

According to civil society in the province of Ituri, the assailants of the CODECO group occupy at least 26 of the 28 localities in the Ndjugu territory, located some 40 km from the city of Bunia, the capital of the province.

On Wednesday in Kinshasa, the Special Representative of the Secretary General in the DRC and head of the UN peacekeeping mission known as MONUSCO, Leila Zerrougui, condemned the killings committed in recent weeks in this territory of Djugu in Ituri, before reiterating the determination of the peacekeepers to support the Congolese army in its efforts.

"Murders, looting, arson, the civilian population is facing particularly brutal and heinous violence, in a province which has already suffered only too much," said Leila Zerrougui, adding that "MONUSCO will not falter in its support to the FARDC against the perpetrators of these abuses, who will be held accountable for their actions ".

The conflicts that have persisted in this part for decades have already pushed 300,000 civilians to leave their homes to take refuge in the camps for the displaced in the town of Bunia and others have crossed the border with Uganda, according to local authorities and humanitarian agencies based in the area.
<! L-R Actor, Jussie Smollett, brothers, Olabinjo and Abimbola Osundairo (Source:IG) >

There are reports that Empire actor, Jussie Smollett was in a sexual relationship with one of his alleged attackers, Abel Osundairo.

The Osundairo brothers were named in the alleged attack on Jussie Smollett back in 2019.

PageSix reports that the two were frequent callers at an upscale Chicago gay bathhouse.

They used to party together and he had a sexual relationship with [Abel]. They went to this affluent Chicago bathhouse multiple times and they had to show ID.

Its known as a bathhouse where a lot of affluent black gay men hang out. There should be a record [of their visits, an insider told PageSix.

However, the Osundairo brothers, Abel and Ola have come out severely to debunk the notion that they are homosexuals.

In a suit filed against Smolletts lawyers, the brothers say the comments put them and their family, who are Nigerian, at risk due to the countrys laws that state homosexuality is punishable by up to 14 years in prison.

We have sat back and watched lie after lie being fabricated about us in the media only so one big lie can continue to have life. These lies are destroying our character and our reputation in our personal and professional lives. the suit read.

Smollett was allegedly attacked in Chicago back in 2019 in what he termed was racially induced.

The Empire actor was later indicted by a jury on a sixteen count charge for spearheading his own attack, a claim he has continued to deny.
The proposed telescope would be a 1km-diameter wire-mesh that can gaze out into the cosmos without being hindered by the Earth's atmosphere.

NASA is funding an early-stage proposal to build a meshed telescope inside a crater on the far side of the moon, according to Vice.

This "dark side" is the face of the moon that is permanently positioned away from Earth, and as such it offers a rare view of the dark cosmos, unhindered by radio interference from humans and our by our planet's thick atmosphere.

The ultra-long-wavelength radio telescope, would be called the "Lunar Crater Radio Telescope" and would have "tremendous" advantages compared to telescopes on our planet, the idea's founder Saptarshi Bandyopadhyay, a robotics technologist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory wrote in a proposal.

Related: 10 interesting places in the solar system we'd like to visit

NASA's Innovative Advanced Concepts Program is awarding $125,000 for a Phase 1 study to understand the feasibility of such a telescope, Bandyopadhyay told Vice.

The telescope  designed as a wire mesh  would be deployed into a 2- to 3-mile-wide (3 to 5 kilometers) crater on the moon's far side. The 0.62-mile-diameter (1 km) wire-mesh telescope would be stretched across the crater by NASA's DuAxel Rovers, or wall-climbing robots, according to the proposal summary.

If built, the "Lunar Crater Radio Telescope" would be the largest filled-aperture radio telescope in the solar system, Bandyopadhyay wrote. A filled-aperture radio telescope is a telescope that uses a single dish to collect data rather than many dishes, according to Vice.

Because this telescope would be on the far side of the moon, it would avoid radio interference from Earth, satellites and even the sun's radio-noise during the lunar night. It would also let us gaze out into the cosmos without the veil of Earth's atmosphere.

The atmosphere reflects low-frequency wavelengths of light greater than 32.8 feet (10 meters), essentially blocking them from reaching ground-based telescopes. The telescope "could enable tremendous scientific discoveries in the field of cosmology by observing the early universe in the 10 50m wavelength band...which has not been explored by humans till-date," Bandyopadhyay wrote.

Editor's Note: This story was updated on April 14 at 1:50 pm to clarify a statement about the radio-noise from the sun.

The telescope would be deployed in a lunar crater on the far-side. (Image credit: Saptarshi Bandyopadhyay)

Originally published on Live Science.
Source: Xinhua| 2020-04-15 15:12:51|Editor: huaxia

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Healthcare workers wheel a patient into the emergency room at Brooklyn Hospital Center during the coronavirus pandemic in the Brooklyn borough of New York, the United States, on April 14, 2020. (Photo by Michael Nagle/Xinhua)

- Trump told reporters that "the WHO failed to adequately obtain, vet, and share information in a timely and transparent fashion."

- The announcement came after the Trump administration has been increasingly scrutinized for downplaying the COVID-19 threat and is being faulted for delays in testing.

WASHINGTON, April 15 (Xinhua) -- U.S. President Donald Trump announced Tuesday that his administration is halting the nation's funding to the World Health Organization (WHO), a move that experts said could exacerbate the COVID-19 pandemic and cost more lives.

Speaking during a press briefing at the White House, Trump said a review is being conducted to assess the WHO's role in addressing the spread of the coronavirus.

"With the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, we have deep concerns about whether America's generosity has been put to the best use possible," Trump told reporters, also claiming that "the WHO failed to adequately obtain, vet, and share information in a timely and transparent fashion."

The announcement came as Trump is aggressively defending his own handling of the COVID-19 crisis after his administration has been increasingly scrutinized for downplaying the threat from the coronavirus early on and is being faulted for delays in testing.

Photo taken on April 9, 2020 shows a COVID-19 drive-thru testing site at the George Washington University Hospital in Washington D.C., the United States. (Photo by Ting Shen/Xinhua)

Patrick Leahy, ranking member of the U.S. Senate Appropriations Committee, said that "Withholding funds for WHO in the midst of the worst pandemic in a century makes as much sense as cutting off ammunition to an ally as the enemy closes in."

"The White House knows that it grossly mishandled this crisis from the beginning, ignoring multiple warnings and squandering valuable time, dismissing medical science, comparing COVID-19 to the common cold," the Vermont Democrat said in a statement. "Not wanting to take responsibility as the deaths continue to mount, he blames others."

Patrice Harris, president of the American Medical Association, said in a statement that halting funding to the WHO is "a dangerous step in the wrong direction that will not make defeating COVID-19 easier."

"Fighting a global pandemic requires international cooperation and reliance on science and data," Harris said. "Cutting funding to the WHO -- rather than focusing on solutions -- is a dangerous move at a precarious moment for the world."

Screenshot of the COVID-19 Map by the Center for Systems Science and Engineering (CSSE) at Johns Hopkins University (JHU), April 15, 2020.

According to a tally from Johns Hopkins University on Tuesday, the United States has reported more than 600,000 confirmed cases of COVID-19 and over 25,000 deaths, both the highest on record. Globally, the number of confirmed cases is approaching 2 million, as the death toll has reached over 126,000, the tally showed.



Based in Geneva, Switzerland, the WHO is a specialized agency of the United Nations for international public health, which has played a crucial role in guiding the global efforts in combating the coronavirus pandemic. The United States contributed more than 400 million U.S. dollars to the agency in 2019, roughly 15 percent of its budget.

Thomas Bollyky, director of the global health program and senior fellow for global health, economics, and development at the Council on Foreign Relations, a U.S. think tank, said Tuesday that the WHO "plays an irreplaceable role" in global outbreak response.

Bollyky tweeted that the WHO "has largely served its purpose well" in the COVID-19 crisis, urging Washington to seek to strengthen and enhance the agency's independence and effectiveness, not to "degrade it amid a crisis."

Lawrence Gostin, director of the O'Neill Institute for National and Global Health Law at Georgetown University, called the White House's decision "disgraceful," warning that it would cause deaths and even blow back on the United States.

"How shortsighted when global coop needed more now than ever," Gostin said in series of tweets Tuesday, adding that Washington has "entirely abandoned" U.S. global health leadership.

A healthcare worker prepares a COVID-19 test outside Brooklyn Hospital Center during the coronavirus pandemic in the Brooklyn borough of New York, the United States, on April 14, 2020. (Photo by Michael Nagle/Xinhua)

It is noteworthy that Trump's tone toward the WHO differed sharply from one of his tweets on Feb. 24, several days before the United States reported the first death from COVID-19.

"The Coronavirus is very much under control in the USA," Trump wrote. "We are in contact with everyone and all relevant countries. CDC & World Health have been working hard and very smart."

In an interview with CBS News Radio on Monday, Robert Redfield, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) of the United States, said the WHO "has been a very important public health partner with the CDC, and continues to be."

Redfield also noted that CDC staffers have been working "side-by-side" with the WHO, but added that he'd "leave the politics ... for others to try to resolve."

"We must quarantine politicizing this virus at national and global levels," WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said from Geneva last week.

"We have to work together, and we have no time to waste," the director added. 
President Trumps decision could mean as much as $720m in health programmes could go unfunded this year and next.

Concerns have been raised over the World Health Organizations (WHO) future after US President Donald Trump announced a funding cut for the body amid the coronavirus pandemic.

WHO is the leading United Nations body dealing with health issues, including the fight against the deadly coronavirus which has now infected more than two million people and killed more than 128,000 people worldwide.

With Trumps decision on Tuesday, several WHO programmes, including emergency mitigation of the coronavirus, are now in danger of being set aside, as hundreds of millions of dollars in funding dry up.

While international organisations and the private sector contribute to its budget, WHO relies mostly on donor countries to function.

In the 2018-19 WHO budget, the US contributed 15 percent of the international bodys $4.4bn budget  the most from a single donor country.

While announcing his decision, Trump accused the WHO of promoting Chinas disinformation about the virus that likely led to a wider outbreak, including in the US.

In response, WHO Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus told a press conference on Wednesday that he regretted the decision but called on world unity to fight the new coronavirus pandemic.

The USA has been a long-standing and generous friend of the WHO and we hope it will continue to be so, he said, adding that WHO was still assessing the impact and would try to fill any gaps with partners.





For 2020-21, WHO has allotted almost $4.8bn for its health programmes, including fighting malaria, eradicating polio as well as special research and preparation for possible health outbreaks.

Trumps announcement could mean that as much as $720m worth of WHO programmes could go unfunded this year and the next, including efforts to contain the spread of the coronavirus.

According to a UN report, as of March 2020, the US also has an outstanding contribution of around $99m to the WHO from 2019 and the first three months of this year.

Bad news for the world

The latest WHO budget was finalised almost seven months before the first reported cases of the coronavirus emerged in China, which contributed about 10 percent of the international bodys budget.

Dr Wang Linfa, an infectious disease expert at Duke-National University of Singapore (NUS), told Al Jazeera that Trumps decision to cut WHO funding is definitely very bad news for the world.

A US public health expert said that WHOs Tedros is caught in a geopolitical struggle between Washington and Beijing [File: Naohiko Hatta/Reuters]

In late January, Wang had warned that the first two weeks of February were very, very crucial in determining the spread of COVID-19, the infection caused by the new coronavirus, outside China, and also how other countries carry out measures to stop the disease from spreading.

On Wednesday, Wang said that Trumps decision would not only hurt other countries, but also the US.

I do hope the decision will be reversed soon.

Time for unity

But UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres came to the WHOs defence, saying on Tuesday that it was not the time to be reducing funds to the WHO or any other organisation fighting the pandemic.

Now is the time for unity and for the international community to work together in solidarity to stop this virus and its shattering consequences, Guterres said in a statement.





WHOs Tedros did said in a social media post on Wednesday that the organisations singular focus is on working to serve all people to save lives and stop the pandemic.

Tedros also re-posted on social media a statement from well-known American epidemiologist, Dr Larry Brilliant, who said that there is a very political campaign against the WHO chief.

WHO criticism

Criticism of Tedros, however, has not come from Trump alone.

In March, Taiwan accused the WHO of foot-dragging in response to the coronavirus epidemic, and for failing to communicate Taipeis early warning regarding a possible human-to-human transmission of COVID-19.

A Foreign Policy article published in early April also called the WHO of being Chinas coronavirus accomplice, while Rich Lowry, editor of the US magazine National Review, wrote that while Trump is always inclined to shift blame, the WHO and China are at the centre of this international catastrophe.

Meanwhile, an Associated Press report, published on Wednesday, said Beijing failed to warn the public of the impending outbreak for days, allowing the wider spread of the disease.

Nevertheless, Lawrence Gostin, a public health policy expert at Georgetown University in Washington, DC, denounced Trumps decision to hold the WHO funding, adding that the president is also looking to shift the blame as the pandemic is devastating the US.

As of Wednesday, there were more than 609,000 people infected in the US, and more than 28,300 have died.

Government workers stand outside a blue tent used to coordinate transportation of travellers from Wuhan to designated quarantine sites in Beijing on April 15 [Sam McNeil/AP]

A New York Times article published on Saturday revealed that Trump repeatedly ignored warnings of an incoming pandemic, and the lack of planning in his administration led to the high infections and deaths.

I think its intended to shift the blame from the US to China and the WHO. But the blame cant be shifted, Gostin told Al Jazeera.

Gostin, who also serves as the WHO director for public health and human rights, said Tedros is caught in the middle of a power struggle between China and the US, affecting not just the fight against COVID-19, but also other deadly diseases.

How sad to see that President Trump thinks that the WHO should take sides. There are no sides in the pandemic. We are all in this together.

With additional reporting by Ted Regencia
Source: Xinhua| 2020-04-15 09:40:01|Editor: zyl

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CANBERRA, April 15 (Xinhua) -- Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison has issued a plea to Australian teachers to keep schools open amid the COVID-19 pandemic.

In a video published on social media channels on Wednesday morning, Morrison urged teachers to not force parents to choose between home-schooling their children or going to work to "put food on the table."

"The education of our children hangs in the balance," he said.

"We cannot allow a situation where parents are forced to choose between putting food on the table through their employment, to support their kids and their kids' education."

"We will lose many things in the course of fighting this virus."

"One thing that I know teachers are united on, with their parents, is we do not want one of those things to be the loss of a child's education, giving up a whole year of their learning."

Students in Victoria, where the education department have closed schools to limit the spread of COVID-19, began online learning on Wednesday.

Those in Queensland and New South Wales who are able to learn from home will begin doing so online on April 20 and April 27, respectively.

Schools in all three states will remain open only for the children of parents who are unable to work from home.

In the video, Morrison thanked teachers for keeping classes going in the extraordinary circumstances.
Sunrise host David 'Kochie' Koch became a grandfather for the sixth time last week.

But due to the current COVID-19 lockdown and travel restrictions, the doting granddad hasn't been able to meet the newborn yet.

On Wednesday, the 64-year-old became emotional while interviewing his daughter, Brianna Jayasinghe, and granddaughter, Ella Hope, via video link on Sunrise.

Family: David 'Kochie' Koch became emotional while interviewing his daughter, Brianna Jayasinghe, and granddaughter, Ella Hope, via video link on Sunrise on Wednesday

Kochie looked absolutely delighted as he gazed at his daughter's growing family via FaceTime.

At one point, he appeared to get misty-eyed, and by the end of the interview his co-host couldn't resist taking a playful swipe at his emotional state.

'Stop crying!' she laughed as she waved her hand at him. 'Aw, are you okay?' she added.

Struggle: Due to the current COVID-19 lockdown and travel restrictions, the doting granddad hasn't been able to meet the newborn yet

'I love babies,' Kochie responded with a smile, before composing himself and cutting to the next segment.

The TV star's daughter Brianna gave birth to baby girl Ella Hope Elizabeth in Perth on Monday, April 6.

Kochie told the Daily Telegraph last week that he and his wife Libby were first introduced to baby Ella on FaceTime.

The family has since held group Zoom chats with the adorable little girl, with Kochie saying: 'It was kind of like being there. She is just the cutest little thing.'

'You're so lucky to have such a wonderful mum': The popular breakfast show presenter's daughter Brianna Jayasinghe gave birth to baby girl Ella Hope Elizabeth in Perth last week

The Sunrise host expressed great sadness over not being able to meet his sixth grandchild last week.

He shared three photos of the mother-of-three and her newborn daughter on Instagram in celebration of the bundle of joy's arrival.

'Welcome to the family Ella Hope Elizabeth Jayasinghe, you gorgeous little girl,' David captioned the sweet post.

He added: 'You're so lucky to have such a wonderful mum ... and dad and two brothers.

'Grandchild number six, born in Perth and devastated we can't be there for a cuddle.'

Sydney-based Kochie and his wife Libby are unable to travel to Western Australian after the state shut the border.

Far away: David was unable to see his newborn grandchild in person as he and wife Libby remained in Sydney, after Western Australian enforced a strict border control on Monday at midnight

Ella Hope's name has a special meaning amid these uncertain times, according to David's London-based daughter Georgina.

'My niece was born today and one of her middle names is Hope. I can't wait to tell her how much that meant during this time,' Georgie wrote on Twitter.

Brianna also shares two sons with her husband CJ, eight-year-old Jax and four-year-old Teddy.

David's daughter Samantha Brown also has three children, Lila, nine, Oscar, 11, and Matilda, 13.
A Los Angeles street artist has welcomed Prince Harry to the city with a graffiti portrait telling people to 'Keep Calm and Wash Hands'.

Artist Keith Biele, 51, reportedly disliked how American President Donald Trump addressed the Duke of Sussex, 35, and his wife Meghan Markle following their move from Vancouver to California last month.

The President welcomed the royal couple by tweeting about their security costs and explaining that the US would not be paying for their protection.

Not happy with the negative comment, Keith took to intersection of Franklin Avenue and Beachwood Drive in the Los Feliz neighbourhood, and created a street art version of Harry.

A Los Angeles street artist has welcomed Prince Harry to the neighbourhood with a graffiti portrait telling people to 'Keep Calm and Wash Hands' (pictured)

The portrait, which was debuted to the public earlier this month, shows the duke with his hands in the pockets of a blue hoodie (pictured)

The portrait, which was debuted to the public earlier this month, shows the duke with his hands in the pockets of a blue hoodie which features a crown and the writing, 'Keep Calm and Wash Hands'.

Keith took inspiration from the motivational posters made by the UK government in the Second World War that read 'Keep Calm and Carry On', but changed the message to be COVID-19 related.

Alongside Harry, there is a painted blue French bulldog and an orange pitbull to represent peace.

Speaking to People, he said: 'I didn't like the way the President welcomed them to the country by saying, 'Hey, we're not going to pay for your security,'

'So I wanted to try to find a way to use this image and welcome them and at the same time to make a comment and a little public service announcement to everybody.'

Keith took to intersection of Franklin Avenue and Beachwood Drive in the Los Feliz neighbourhood, and created a street art version of Harry (pictured)

The vibrant garment features a crown and the writing, 'Keep Calm and Wash Hands' (pictured)

Explaining his message, he said: 'I wanted to use [the UK's] saying and put 'Wash Your Hands' in there to update it with what's going on with the COVID-19.'

Harry and Meghan moved to California from Vancouver at the end of last month, having officially stepped back from royal life on March 31.

The couple upped sticks to Los Angeles, Meghan's home town and where her mother Doria Ragland lives.

But the Duke is finding life 'a bit challenging' following his move, his friend Dr Jane Goodall has revealed.

Elsewhere, Dr Jane Goodall, 86, told Radio Times she had 'been in touch' with Prince Harry since he quit royal duties and moved to Los Angeles (pictured together in 2019). She said he is finding it 'a bit challenging'

The 86-year-old primatologist has 'been in touch' with Harry following his move and told Radio Times: 'I don't know how his career is going to map out, but, yes, I've been in touch  though I think he's finding life a bit challenging right now.'

The couple are both fans of the world-renowned activist and invited her to their Frogmore Cottage home in Windsor last summer. Dr Goodall believes she may have been one of the first people outside the family to hold Archie.

She is currently in lockdown in Bournemouth where she opened up about Harry and his new life.

At the suggestion that Harry and his brother William are champions of the natural world, she added: 'Yes  except they hunt and shoot. But I think Harry will stop because Meghan doesn't like hunting, so I suspect that is over for him.'
Married At First Sight's Steve Burley revealed that his Melbourne barbershop business was struggling last week.

And on Wednesday, the Kingsman Barbers owner, 51, said he would be offering a free haircut to people financially impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic.

Steve announced the offer in a string of videos posted to his Instagram Stories, captioned: 'You've looked after us, it's time to look after you!'

'It might be you!' Married At First Sight's Steve Burley (pictured) offers a free haircut every week to people financially impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic

'What we've decided to do at Kingsman Barbers, is once a week, every week, from now on, starting this week, is give somebody one free hair cut,' Steve said in the clip.

'So, what we want is for you to come in, tell us your stories about COVID-19, how it's impacting on you. Whether you've lost your job perhaps or you're finding financial difficulties obviously because of the COVID-19 situation.

'I will then decide who gets a free haircut. So guys, book yourself in, get yourself in and maybe, maybe, it might be you.'

All the boys! Many of the male MAFS stars such as Dave Cannon (left), Seb Guilhaus, Jonethen Musulin and Luke Eglin have been to Kingsman Barbers (pictured) for a haircut

The base haircut at Kings Barbers costs $35 while the most expensive option, the 'Kings Royal Shave and Haircut Special', costs $65.

Many of the male MAFS stars such as Dave Cannon, Seb Guilhaus, Jonethen Musulin and Luke Eglin have been to Kingsman Barbers for a haircut.

The Block's Jesse Raeburn has also paid the barbershop a visit, calling it the 'best cut in town'.

Meanwhile, MAFS cast members in other cities have posted videos to Instagram, urging fans in Melbourne to book an appointment.

Rave reality reviews! The Block's Jesse Raeburn (left) has also paid the barbershop a visit, calling it the 'best cut in town'

'One way to do a bit of self-care is to go and get your haircut,' Drew Brauer said in an Instagram post last week, drumming up support for his friend and co-star.

'Speaking of haircuts, if you're in Melbourne, my man Steve has a barbershop in Balaclava.'

Meanwhile, Ivan Sarakula said: 'We're all going through a pretty tough time at the minute and it's affecting a lot of businesses. One of my boys, Steve, from the show has a barbershop by the name of Kingsman Barbers in Balaclava, Victoria.'

'Hey, if anyone needs a trim in Melbourne, check out Steve's barbershop,' Seb wrote on Instagram.

Social distancing: Steve shared a photo to Instagram of himself wearing a face mask in the shop as two barbers worked behind him, keeping a safe distance from each other

On March 25, Steve shared a photo to Instagram of himself wearing a face mask in the shop as two barbers worked behind him.

The staff kept plenty of space between their chairs while cutting hair.

'Social distancing is in place. We are open with clearly some changes to help you and us. Book online only,' Steve explained.

As of this week, Kingsman Barbers is now operating under reduced trading hours.
New Delhi: The Russian government's main defence export body, Rosoboronexport, has donated $2 million for Prime Ministers Citizen Assistance and Relief in Emergency Situations Fund (PM CARES Fund) formed to combat the coronavirus COVID-19 crisis.

A source said, "Traditionally India has been one of the major partners of Rosoboronexport as the supplier of military products. Now, the company is helping India in the humanitarian domain. The amount of donation is $2 million. This is an act of solidarity in countering the new epidemiological threat."

The PM CARES fund, set up by the Centre, has received the donation from Rosoboronexport for the purposes of acquiring the medical equipment and medical protective gear. The money has already been transferred.

The last big deal India signed with Rosoboronexport was in October 2018 for the S-400 air defence missile system. Rosoboronexport is the first foreign donor to acknowledge its contribution to PM CARES fund.

The Indian Embassy in Moscow, Russia, has publicised PM CARES Fund widely. In fact, Indian ambassador to Russia D Bala Venkatesh Varma made a video appeal to publicize the fund in Russia.

The central government has announced that PM CARES Fund, being a public charitable trust, will accept a contribution from India and abroad "keeping in mind the unprecedented nature of the pandemic".

Rosoboronexport is under the Russian government and the announcement shows the traditional warm ties both Moscow and New Delhi enjoy. In March, Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Russian President Vladimir Putin had spoken on the COVID-19 crisis. It was followed by a talk between, Foreign Secretary Harsh V Shringla and Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Igor Morgulov during which both sides spoke about the close bilateral cooperation in ensuring the welfare of each others stranded citizens in their respective countries due to the crisis.

About 15,000 Indian students in Russia and about 5,000 Russian tourists are currently in India. Later in April, as part of BRICS joint plan to deal with the crisis, health officials of all the BRICS countries will meet via video conference.
Omicron variant of COVID-19 identified in Antrim, Charlevoix counties

The omicron variant of COVID-19 has been identified in one Antrim County resident and one Charlevoix County resident.
Japan could suffer more than 400,000 deaths from coronavirus if the country does not follow social distancing rules and other measures, according to a dire projection released by its health ministry on Wednesday.

Research commissioned by the government and carried out by Hokkaido University found that in a worst-case scenario, Japan could see some 850,000 people fall seriously ill as a result of the Covid-19 outbreak.

The report projected that 420,000 of those would die, because the countrys health system would not have the numbers of intensive care units or ventilators to cope with so many seriously ill people.

Coronavirus cases have been shown to be particularly severe among older people, and Japan has the worlds oldest population. The country has avoided a total lockdown and Japanese companies have been slow to adapt to remote working protocols, prompting fears that the country has done too little, too late to respond to the pandemic.

The new projections should serve as a wake-up call for people to enforce social distancing more stringently, said Hokkaido University professor Hiroshi Nishiura, one of the leading experts advising the government on its coronavirus response. We can stop the transmission if all of us change our activity and significantly reduce interactions, he told the Associated Press.

Japan has had more than 8,800 cases of infection and 231 deaths, including about 700 positive cases from a cruise ship that was quarantined at a port near Tokyo earlier this year.

Tokyo has been particularly hard hit by the virus, with about a quarter of the countrys cases, and with more hospitals and even hotels taking in patients to maintain isolation. A panel of medical experts has warned that the healthcare system in the capital is on the brink of collapse.

Prime minister Shinzo Abe declared a state of emergency in Tokyo and six other districts on 7 April, and then extended it nationwide on Saturday.

But rather than enforce a lockdown, the government has merely requested citizens not to congregate in restaurants, bars and nightclubs, which remain open.

Mr Abe said that in order for the emergency declaration to be lifted within a month, social interactions must be reduced by 80 per cent, or at least 70 per cent. To achieve this, peoples further cooperation is needed, he said.

The government has declined to offer compensation for workers who have lost earnings, and is accused of doing little to help an office culture bound to fax machines and old-school paper seals make the move online. According to one New York Times report, companies applying for remote working support because of coronavirus must print out a 100-page application and deliver it in person.
Courtney Wild was among those to appear in court to denounce Epstein's death: Getty

Courtney Wild, one of the accusers of rapist Jeffrey Epstein, has lost her bid to challenge the secret "sweetheart deal" that Florida prosecutors offered him following a sex crimes trial in 2007.

Mr Epstein - who died earlier this year while in prison for other charges - was only sentenced to 13 months in jail and spent much of it outside of a prison, as he was allowed to travel to his office almost daily. He was also required to pay financial settlements to victims and was added to the sex offender registry in some states.

The Daily Mail reported that Ms Wild - who accused Mr Epstein of sexually abusing her when she was a teenager - claimed the secret deal the prosecutors made with the now-dead pedophile was a violation of the Crime Victims' Rights Act because they did not notify the victims the deal was made.

According to Reason, 11th Circuit Court Judges ruled 2-1 against Ms Wild and other victims of the crime who'd petitioned for the challenge.

The judges ruled that the Crime Victims' Rights Act doesn't apply until federal criminal charges are formally filed, which means the victims of Mr Epstein weren't entitled to challenge the non-prosecution agreement.

Ms Wild was introduced to Mr Epstein at age 14 and he paid her to give him massages. He then used the opportunity to pressure Ms Wild into sex.

"Despite our sympathy for Ms Wild and others like her, who suffered unspeakable horror at Epstein's hands, only to be left in the dark-and, so it seems, affirmatively misled-by government lawyers, we find ourselves constrained to deny her petition," US Circuit Judge Kevin Newsom said.

The judges characterised the case as a "tale of national disgrace," and claimed the federal prosecutors misrepresented victims like Ms Wild and others. They noted the ruling likely left the victims with little to celebrate.

"It isn't lost on us that our decision leaves petitioner and others like her largely empty handed, and we sincerely regret that. ... We can only hope that insight of the protections provided by other statutes - and even more so in the wake of public outcry over federal prosecutors' handling of the Epstein case - they will not [make other secret plea deals in the future]."

Read more

Ghislaine Maxwell files lawsuit against Jeffrey Epstein estate
Cab service Uber has facilitated Uber Essential to pick and drop customers in need to essential service locations like hospitals and pharmacies. In the backdrop of an extended lockdown as measure to contain coronavirus pandemic, the services have been started for emergency-purposes only in select cities.

Uber Essential is currently available in Bengaluru, Nashik, Gurgaon, and Hyderabad.

The essential service has already started in Mumbai for medical emergencies and hospital visits. However, the person travelling must carry the necessary documents stating the purpose of travel. Uber has partnered with Mumbai Police who has identified a 'select fleet' of cabs to take people to and fro to the hospitals, Medianama reported.

"With the full consent of authorities, this limited mobility solution has been providing efficient and reliable transportation for riders to essential service locations such as hospitals and pharmacies, as permitted and approved by local authorities," Uber said in a statement.

The government has allowed only people in essential services like healthcare, banking and media to commute with the existing lockdown in force.

To travel to essential service locations such as pharmacies or hospitals, one must carry necessary documentation for the purpose of travel.

Uber in a statement said that the app has been designed to facilitate urgent travel needs to hospitals only. It further stated that the driver partners are being provided with the essentials to prevent the spread of coronavirus.

"Uber Essential driver-partners are being provided masks, gloves, sanitizers, and safety training. They're also being issued curfew passes by local law enforcement authorities to ensure seamless movement to essential service locations," Uber's statement read.

A customer will have to book a cab with Uber-essential just like he books a cab for any purpose.

The basic steps are as follows:

--Download the Uber app. It is available on Google Play Store and App Store.

--Create an account. If you don't already have an account, you must create one with necessary details.

--Request a ride. Riders can check the availability of Uber essential on their apps in the areas of vicinity.

--The price will appear upfront with the driver's details.

Users must note that the Uber Essential service category will be displayed in only the select areas of the designated cities where it has gone live.

Uber Essential riders will receive reminders through in-app messages and emails about basic steps they can take to help prevent the spread of the virus.
The US Ambassador to Ghana, Stephanie S. Sullivan, has penned an article underscoring the strong partnership between her nation and Ghana in the fight against Covid-19.



She states that the help of the US in the fight against the deadly virus, not only in Ghana but also globally, is much more than money and supplies.



Its the experts we have deployed worldwide, and those now conducting tutorials via teleconference. I am pleased that members from my embassy team  from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), Naval Medical Research Unit Three (NAMRU-3), U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), and others  are working closely with the government of Ghana on how best to combat this pandemic. Its the doctors and public-health professionals around the world who have been trained thanks to U.S. funding and educational institutions.



Find below the full article:



Americas partnership in Ghana and around the world against COVID-19



By: Stephanie S. Sullivan, U.S. Ambassador to Ghana



The story of U.S. leadership in the global battle against COVID-19 is a story of days, months, and decades. Every day, the United States provides U.S. technical assistance to hospitals and labs around the world. These efforts, in turn, build on a decades-long foundation of American expertise, generosity, and planning that is unmatched in history.



The United States provides aid for altruistic reasons, because we believe its the right thing to do. We also do it because pandemics dont respect national borders. If we can help countries contain outbreaks, well save lives abroad and at home in the United States.



That generosity and pragmatism explain why the United States was one of the first countries to help the Chinese people as soon as reports emerged from Wuhan of another outbreak. In early January, the U.S. government offered immediate technical assistance to the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention.



In the first week of February, the United States transported nearly 18 tons of medical supplies to Wuhan provided by Samaritans Purse, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, and others. We also pledged $100 million in assistance to countries to fight what would become a pandemic  including an offer to China, which was declined.



Our response now far surpasses that initial pledge. Since the outbreak of COVID-19, the U.S. government has committed nearly $500 million in assistance. This funding will improve public health education, protect healthcare facilities, and increase laboratory, disease-surveillance, and rapid-response capacity in more than 60 of the worlds most at risk countries all in an effort to help contain the outbreak.



Our aid helps people in the most dire circumstances. For instance, the U.S. government is helping United Nations agencies and non-governmental organizations build more water, sanitation, and health facilities across northern Syria to prevent the spread of the virus. We are also working with NGOs to deliver medicines, medical supplies, and food to the Syrian people, including those living in regime-held areas. We are aiding friends from Africa to Asia, and beyond.



Americas unsurpassed contributions are also felt through the many international organizations fighting COVID-19 on the front lines.



The United States has been the largest funder of the World Health Organization since its founding in 1948. We gave more than $400 million to the institution in 2019  nearly double the second-largest contribution and more than the next three contributors combined.



Its a similar story with the U.N. Refugee Agency, which the United States backed with nearly $1.7 billion in 2019. Thats more than all other member states combined.



Then there is the World Food Program (WFP), to which the United States gave $3.4 billion last year, or 42% of the WFPs total budget. Thats nearly four times the second-largest contributor, and more than all other member states combined. We also gave over $700 million to the United Nations Childrens Fund (UNICEF), more than any other donor.



We are proud that when these international organizations deliver food, medicines, and other aid all around the world, that too is largely thanks to the generosity of the American people, in partnership with donor nations.



The United States continues to be the single largest health and humanitarian donor for both long-term development and capacity-building efforts with partners, and emergency response efforts in the face of recurrent crises. This money has saved lives, protected people who are most vulnerable to disease, built health institutions, and promoted the stability of communities and nations.



America funds nearly 40% of the worlds global health assistance programs, adding up to $140 billion in investments in the past 20 years  five times more than the next largest donor. Since 2009, American taxpayers have generously funded more than $100 billion in health assistance and nearly $70 billion in humanitarian assistance globally.



Here in Ghana, the strong partnership between the United States of America and the Ghana Armed Forces (GAF) is at the forefront of combating COVID-19. The GAF has deployed one state-of-the-art Level II Field Hospital in the Greater Accra area as part of the government of Ghanas COVID-19 response to directly serve those most in need. The hospital is one of two that I handed over February 4 this year on behalf of the United States. The donation was made through the U.S. governments Africa Peacekeeping Rapid Response Partnership (APRRP) program. Also in early February, even before Ghana had its first known case, the U.S. National Institutes for Health, through its longstanding partnership with the Noguchi Memorial Institute for Medical Research, made available material to enable several hundred samples to be tested.



However, our help is much more than money and supplies. Its the experts we have deployed worldwide, and those now conducting tutorials via teleconference. I am pleased that members from my embassy team  from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), Naval Medical Research Unit Three (NAMRU-3), U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), and others  are working closely with the government of Ghana on how best to combat this pandemic. Its the doctors and public-health professionals around the world who have been trained thanks to U.S. funding and educational institutions.



Of course, it isnt just our government helping the world. American businesses, NGOs, and faith-based organizations have given at least $1.5 billion to fight the pandemic overseas. American companies are innovating new technologies for vaccines, therapeutics, diagnostics, and ventilators.



As we have time and time again, the United States will aid others during their time of greatest need. The COVID-19 pandemic is no different. We will continue to help countries build resilient health care systems that can prevent, detect, and respond to infectious disease outbreaks. Just as the United States has made the world more healthy, peaceful, and prosperous for generations, so will we lead in defeating our shared pandemic enemy.



The United States reaffirms this commitment to our partnership with Ghana. As Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said on April 10, we are also thankful to the government of Ghana for its strong support in helping the U.S. Embassy in Accra repatriate over 1,400 American citizens and permanent residents of the United States who requested assistance to return to the United States at this time.



We are also doing our part as a U.S. Embassy team to be good neighbors and friends. Since March 25, the U.S. Embassy in Accra has been closed to the public, and will remain closed until at least April 20. We took this step to maximize social distancing and minimize movement to stop the spread of COVID-19. It is also the responsible and right thing to do for each other.



We continue to provide updates to American citizens in Ghana on how to enroll in the Smart Traveler Enrollment Program (STEP.travel.gov) via the U.S. Embassy website (gh.usembassy.gov) and social media platforms (@usembassyghana on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram). For emergency American Citizen Services, please contact the U.S. Embassy Consular Section by emailing [email protected]



Now more than ever, the United States is pleased to work together with the government and people of Ghana. I also echo His Excellency President Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addos call for all Ghanaians and residents of Ghana to stay home as much as possible at this time, as one of the most effective ways to combat the pandemic and flatten the curve.



A Ghanaian proverb states: A worthy cause is worth pursuing to the end.



Together, we will emerge from this stronger and more united.

Source: 3news









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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But one of Carl and Patricias sweetest found successes was their November 1992 exclusive business arrangement which made them the first Midwest distributor boasting a fresh candy counter inside another business establishment to sell Fannie May chocolate and candies. I recall writing a front-page newspaper story about the launch, which received much promotion since the timing was perfectly planned to welcome the holiday season. Like many stores and outlets, for years, the Philips store had already had a cooler which sold frozen fresh pre-packaged chocolates. But having an expansive display fresh candy counter allowed their specially trained employees to hand-pack and box their own custom assortments, as well as offer samples, all much to the delight of their customers.
New Jerseys county jail population dropped by more than 2,000 people last month, a significant decrease that could help the state fight the coronavirus behind bars.

While there were 8,900 people in jail in early March, there were 6,875 three weeks later, almost a quarter fewer, according to data from the American Civil Liberties Union of New Jersey.

That does not mean 2,000 people were released. Police are arresting fewer people, crime is down and lawyers have argued successfully to free some people. In addition, there was one large release last month of inmates, who were serving jail time as a result of probation sentences or municipal court convictions.

A year ago in March, cops made 13,459 arrests statewide, according to a State Police spokesman. Last month, officers only arrested 8,576.

The state attorney general has recommended cops delay filing some criminal charges during the pandemic, and State Police previously reported a drop in shootings and other crime amid the statewide shutdown.

Lawyers are also successfully freeing some residents who have not yet been convicted.

Thousands of inmates awaiting trial were thrown into limbo when the state stopped forming new juries, and public defenders who filed motions to free some were responsible for a significant amount of releases, according to office spokesperson Jennifer Sellitti.

CORONAVIRUS RESOURCES: Live map tracker | Businesses that are open | Homepage

Furthermore, county jails released almost 700 low-level offenders last month because of a state Supreme Court order.

A total of 697 people were set free, according to ACLU-NJ data, slightly less than previously reported. That includes 157 people who judges freed over prosecutors objections.

However, 98 people initially flagged for release were kept detained.

Lawmakers who opposed the courts move praised prosecutors who fought to keep some people behind bars.

"This is a huge win for the rule of law, state Sen. Declan OScanlon, R-Monmouth, and two colleagues said in a statement about prosecutors efforts.

Those who were freed stepped into a world of job losses, rent struggles and lost health plans.

The New Jersey Reentry Corporation is receiving about 100 calls a day from former inmates who need housing or other services, according to Bolivar Flores, a pastor who runs the nonprofits hotline.

Jacqueline Petrakian, the groups Ocean County site director, said shes fielded dozens of calls in recent weeks from people needing food stamps, cash assistance and other help. Those without phones would normally apply for jobs in libraries, employees said, but libraries are closed.

The nonprofit has been able to line up short-term warehouse jobs for some people, and motels are making it easier for the homeless to spend the night, employees said.

That group and other organizations could soon see a larger workload. Gov. Phil Murphy said Friday that some sick and elderly prison inmates will be temporarily released to ease pressure inside a prison system near capacity.

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.

Blake Nelson can be reached at bnelson@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter at @BCunninghamN.
PRIME Minister Kassim Majaliwa has said suspension of all sporting activities and events that are of a huge public nature will remain intact, as part of strengthening preventive measures to avoid the spread of COVID-19.

In a statement issued by the Prime Ministers Office in Dodoma yesterday, Majaliwa said there will be no change to the suspension imposed to all sporting activities about 30 days ago until further notice.

The decision was announced shortly after the National Coordination Task Force Committee in charge of the fight against the spread of COVID-19 pandemic that convened in Dodoma yesterday under the Chairmanship of Premier Majaliwa.

Majaliwa, whose office is in charge of Disaster Management Department (DMD), said in a statement that until yesterday, the number of infections in Tanzania rose to 53, with four new cases registered in Dar es Salaam.

On March 17th this year, the government through Premier Majaliwa, announced suspension of all sporting activities and events that are of a huge public nature for at least 30 days, to monitor the situation.

By then, only one Tanzanian was infected by the pandemic, which has so far claimed close to 125,000 lives worldwide by late yesterday, with close to two million people infected across the globe.

This means, the Mainland Premier League and other lower leagues will remain halted until further notice.

Runaway top flight leaders Simba, who need to win five matches to retain the title for the third straight season, will have to wait a little bit longer for them to be crowned champions for 21st times.

Simba are destined for the third premier league title in the 2019-2020 season as they sit top of the league table on 71 points from 28 matches, massive 17 points above second placed Azam FC, who have played the same number of matches.

Young Africans are third on the log with 51 points from 27 matches. With ten matches to go it will require miracles for Simba to lose their grip on the title, although mathematically, both Azam and Yanga are capable of reaching 71 points tally, only if Simba lose all their remaining matches.

The latest decision also means that all inter-primary school games (UMITASHUMTA) and inter-secondary (UMISSETA) will remain suspended indefinitely.
NEW MILFORD  This years budget process will look very different, as elected officials  not voters  are asked to adopt the final budget.

The town council adopted the new procedure at this weeks meeting to meet Gov. Ned Lamonts executive order requiring town budgets be adopted without a town meeting or referendum, due to social distancing to prevent the spread of coronavirus.

For New Milford, that means the Board of Finance will hold a virtual public hearing. It can then make changes before sending its budget and a tax rate back to the town council, which will set the final budget by June 15.

Im a firm believer the public should be allowed to vote, Mayor Pete Bass said. Its their tax money.

He said the town was exploring ways to have a safe vote, such as absentee ballots, when Lamonts executive order was issued.

A few council members disagreed with the governor issuing the executive order in March without letting the towns figure out an alternative to vote.

I cant comprehend how theres no wiggle room on absentee ballots so residents can vote on their budget, said councilman Chris Cosgrove. The governor should be ashamed.

Councilman Doug Skelly agreed.

I think he overstepped his bounds, he said.

Councilwoman Mary Jane Lundgren disagreed and said Lamont didnt abuse his power because it would be irresponsible to make people go outside and possibly catch the virus. She said the vote would need to happen soon, making it difficult to implement another method.

There just isnt enough time, she said. The biggest abuse would have been to bring people out to the poll.

The finance board is currently considering a nearly $105.9 million budget, which is $2.8 million, or 2.7 percent, more than the current year.

It includes $65.4 million for education, which is the figure the school board adopted in a split vote and is 2.2 percent higher than the current budget. The funds will be used for adding bilingual teachers, paraprofessionals, a special education teacher and money for strategic planning.

The school budget had originally made a $291,000 cut to the Effective School Solutions program, but theres a chance it could return since health insurance costs were about $396,000 less than budgeted. However, that money is still included in the final figure for the schools to use how they wish.

The overall budget also includes $40.4 million for the town  a $1.37 million increase from the current budget  with salaries and benefits the biggest drivers. There is also $2.4 million in new expenses, including $585,000 for three more sanders in addition to the recommended two vehicles, another $1 million for road work, $160,000 for bridge replacements and $132,000 for pensions.

kkoerting@newstimes.com
The COVID-19 pandemic has hit the global economy hard and analysts are saying the slowdown due to the impact of Coronavirus will be worst than the 2008 financial crisis. The automobile industry globally is struggling to keep their plants active and sell vehicles. Here's what Skoda Auto CEO Bernhard Maier has to say on the current challenges and consequences of the coronavirus pandemic and looking ahead.

How hard has the coronavirus crisis hit Skoda?

Our global sales markets have been severely affected. This means that were currently generating very little revenue, while our fixed costs remain the same. This is an enormous burden. In the coming days and weeks, it will be crucial for society as a whole to strike the right balance between providing the best possible protection for citizens from the virus and securing the economy and jobs.

Can you estimate the financial consequences of the coronavirus pandemic?

No, its much too early for that. On the positive side, we have been operating profitably and currently have sufficient liquidity. For years, weve been producing at our capacity limit. Thats why, unfortunately, we probably wont be able to entirely make up for the loss of production this year. All the more reason for us to hope that the coronavirus pandemic can be contained as quickly as possible so that we can supply the many customers waiting for our cars. Id like to take this opportunity to express my sincere thanks to all the Skodians who are handling this situation so well.

Companies are providing support for society in various ways. What is Skoda doing?

Were helping in several ways. For example, our Technical Development Department is producing 3D-printed reusable FFP3 respirators in collaboration with the Research and Innovation Centre on Advanced Industrial Production (RICAIP) and the Czech Institute of Informatics, Robotics and Cybernetics (CIIRC), which are urgently needed in Czech hospitals. In India, too, where were responsible for the Group, our colleagues at the Pune plant are producing face shields that are being donated to doctors.

When production is restarted, how do you intend to protect your employees health?

Were currently working on a Safe Production and Safe Office concept to provide the best possible protection for all our employees and especially those working in close proximity to one another, for example, in production. The concept includes extensive protective measures, such as face masks and disinfectants. These are already in place for all those who are carrying out urgent and necessary work during the shutdown.
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A doctor from the Geriatric Department of AIIMS has gone beyond the call of his duty and taken the initiative of serving cooked food to old age homes, slum dwellers and migrants stranded amidst the coronavirus lockdown.

Since March 27, Dr Prasun Chatterjee, an associate professor in the Department of Geriatric Medicine, also the founder President of an NGO Healthy Aging India, with his team of volunteers has distributed over 50,000 one-time large meals.

"Our team has been visiting old age homes, slums, homes for persons with disabilites and even rag-pickers' colonies to distribute food to save them from starvation. We started with old age homes," he said.

Besides, this mass feeding drive in communities, Dr Chatterjee and his team has also been distributing masks, and sensitizing the community about social distancing, hand washing, and respiratory etiquettes.

Dr Vijay Gurjar, assistant professor in the Department of Geriatric medicine at AIIMS, who is also associated with this initiative has also been visiting old age homes and slums regularly to spread awareness about the disease and preventive measures.

"Being a doctor we know that in these critical conditions nutrition is the most important thing for poor people especially senior citizens and the children, " Dr Gurjar said.

He also highlighted that physical distancing is not maintained in old age homes and said the older people are weak and suffer from various-co-morbid conditions and thus are at high risk of the deadly COVID-19.

To understand the specific needs of the community Dr Chatterjee also visits the communities on a regular interval.

"As per the felt need, we also initiated distribution of milk for infants and young children below five years catering to almost 300 children everyday in two slums located in Prem Nagar and Rohini sector 23," he said.

The NGO has also released a helpline number 18001028836 and anyone can directly call on it for food.

"Emergency calls have been pouring in and over 200 people have been catered to within two hours of intimation," he said.

A woman from the rag-picker community of Prem Nagar said they would go to a school in the vicinity to get the food but queues would be so long that by the time their turn came, the food would be finished.

"We felt we were born again when the NGO gave us 'khichri'. We had wholesome food after some days," she said.

Vinod, a migrant labourer from a slum in Rohini and a native of Bihar, said their group needs cooked food rather than dry ration as they have no gas facility to cook or store their ration.

Healthy Aging India was started by a few doctors from AIIMS in 2013 to intervene in the area of elderly care in society, and had been running programs in the health and education sector,under the guidance of Dr Chatterjee.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Its not surprising that Bay Area animal shelters have cleared out during the coronavirus pandemic. In an era of physical distancing and unfettered anxiety, pets can provide companionship, distraction and immense joy  plus a good excuse to hit pause on Netflix and take a walk around the block.

But if youre feeling frazzled, spare a thought for your furry companions. From picking up on our stress levels and trying to make sense of new routines (why are these little humans home all the time?), to potentially being at risk for COVID-19, pets are experiencing a crisis of their own.

Here are some ways to help them navigate through it.

Q: Can my cat get coronavirus? Is it safe to walk my dog?

A: A dog and two cats from separate households in New York state tested positive for the coronavirus, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, in what are believed to be the first cases of pets in the United States to be diagnosed with the virus. The animals were thought to have contracted the virus from people in their household or community.

The cases appear to contradict earlier reports from the federal government and the World Health Organization that there is no evidence that dogs or cats have become ill with this particular virus.

The CDC says it doesnt know for sure which animals can be infected with SARS-CoV-2, the scientific term for the virus that causes the COVID-19 disease, and that more research is required.

But a study conducted by the journal Science on a small number of animals found inoculated cats and ferrets are highly susceptible to infection in a laboratory setting, while dogs have low susceptibility. Livestock such as chickens, pigs and ducks are not likely to catch the virus, the researchers found.

Treat pets as you would other human family members, the CDC says. Do not let pets interact with people or animals outside the household. If a person inside the household becomes sick, isolate that person from everyone else, including pets.

Until more is known, the CDC recommends the following:

 Do not let pets interact with people or other animals outside the household.

 Keep cats indoors when possible to prevent them from interacting with other animals or people.

 Walk dogs on a leash, maintaining at least 6 feet (2 meters) from other people and animals.

 Avoid dog parks or public places where a large number of people and dogs gather.

Q: Can I get the COVID-19 virus from an infected pet? Can my dog carry the virus in from being outside?

A: There is no strong evidence that pets can be carriers of the coronavirus at this time, according to the CDC.

COVID-19 is mainly spread through droplets produced when an infected person coughs, sneezes or speaks. The CDC says that viruses do not typically spread to people from the skin, fur or hair of pets.

However, general precautions should be taken to protect yourself, including washing your hands thoroughly before and after handling animals, maintaining physical distancing guidelines when outside for you and your pet and avoiding places where other people and animals gather.

It may be possible that a person can get COVID-19 by touching a surface or animal that has the virus on it and then touching their own mouth, nose, or possibly eyes, but this is not thought to be the way the virus spreads, according to the CDC.

Its much more likely that an owner could potentially transmit the respiratory illness to their pet.

We dont believe that they are playing a role in transmission, but we think that they may be able to be infected from an infected person, the World Health Organizations epidemiologist Maria Van Kerkhove said.

If you are sick, the CDC provides the following guidelines:

 If you are sick with COVID-19 (either suspected or confirmed by a test), restrict contact with your pets and other animals, just like you would around other people.

 When possible, have another member of your household care for your pets while you are sick.

 Avoid contact with your pet, including petting, snuggling, being kissed or licked, and sharing food or bedding.

 If you must care for your pet or be around animals while you are sick, wear a cloth face covering and wash your hands before and after you interact with them.

Q: How should I care for my pet during shelter-in-place mandate?

A: To help pets cope with the lifestyle change, Dr. Wailani Sung, a veterinary behaviorist at San Francisco SPCA, said owners should do their best to maintain a consistent routine and remain patient around their pets.

Feed them on a normal schedule. Take them for walks at the same time every day. If youre working from home, take regular breaks to interact with your companion animals in a positive way, whether its throwing a ball or working on a new training behavior.

The key is to keep them mentally engaged.

They learn they get your undivided attention for a couple of minutes and then while theyre mentally tired, you can back to work again, she said.

Q: Can my pets pick up on my coronavirus anxiety?

A: As much as our animals love having us at home around the clock to slow the spread of the coronavirus, they are also highly sensitive to the unrest we may be feeling internally.

Pets can react to our emotional state, whether its one of anxiety or happiness, said Melissa Bain, a professor of clinical animal behavior at the UC Davis School of Veterinary Medicine.

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.

While most animals are highly adaptable, Bain said there are some common signs of stress that might indicate trouble  including cowering, panting, shaking, drooling and pacing.

If a pet is displaying any of the signs listed above, it could be a cause for concern, Bain said. Additionally, owners should be on the lookout for physical problems, such as vomiting and diarrhea.

Thats when pet owners should call  not visit  their veterinarians to ask about behavioral treatment.

Q: What should I do if my pets get non-coronavirus sickness or injuries?

A: Gov. Gavin Newsom updated the Californias stay-at-home orders to clarify that animal care facilities, including animal shelters are essential services.

If your pet gets sick during this period many veterinary clinics remain open for urgent and emergency care only. But most ask that you call ahead, as they may have different protocols in place for dealing with people and their animals. The San Francisco SPCA, for example, requires people wear facial masks when entering their buildings.

Telemedicine appointments are available for most non-emergency issues, such behavior issues.

Q: What should I do with my pets if I get sick?

A: Public health officials in the Bay Area urge residents to plan ahead for pet care, in case the owners become ill or hospitalized with the coronavirus. They suggest stocking up on pet supplies, including food and medications, to last at least two weeks, a travel kennel, treats and toys.

I think everybody should have an emergency plan for their pets, especially living in the Bay Area, which is an epicenter of natural disasters, Sung said. That way, if something happens to you, the person who cares for your pet doesnt have to run around and figure out, What kind of food I need to get? 

Officials also suggest identifying a temporary caregiver and writing down emergency information such as an owners name and contact, veterinarians contact and the pets feeding schedule and medical conditions.

The SPCA says its best if the pet can stay at home with a friend or family member, but if that isnt possible you may need to board your pet.

Q: Whats the best way to prepare your pets for when you transition back to work?

A: Apart from maintaining a consistent schedule for your pets that will continue once you return to work, Bain said its never too early to start helping your animal companion prepare for the transition.

That can look like giving it a long-lasting food treat in another room away from the owner, so that it starts to be rewarded for being away from the owner, she said.

Sung also recommends owners start now by leaving their pets alone for incrementally longer periods of time, even if its just in another room of the house; stocking up on sensory toys to keep the animals occupied while theyre away; and working with employers to gradually resume their regular office hours.

If youre with your pets 24/7 for six to eight weeks and all of a sudden you leave them, its going to be a shock to their system, she said.

Aidin Vaziri is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: avaziri@sfchronicle.com
California Design Den, Inc., a leader in natural, sustainable, chemical-free cotton bedding products, today revealed a recent materials contribution to the Refugee Artisans Initiative of Seattle, WA, for the purpose of manufacturing comfortable, washable, protective cotton face masks for healthcare workers and concerned citizens. Now that the US Surgeon General and the Center for Disease Control (CDC) have recommended that all citizens wear protective face masks in public, California Design Den, 
It was just the beginning of a disastrous rollout of online education for Fairfax schools, whose 189,000 students in Northern Virginia constitute one of the largest districts in the nation. The week started when parents and students throughout the system struggled to log in to Blackboard, the schools virtual learning platform. Those technical problems persisted Wednesday, the second day of distance learning  and, in combination with online misbehavior, ultimately forced administrators to cancel school entirely for the rest of the week.
PORT WASHINGTON, NY  Normally, Port Washington high-schooler Emily Milgrim would be doing homework for school, dancing on the Portettes kickline and dance team, and editing articles for the school newspaper. She's still dancing remotely with a local studio, but Milgrim recognized she was living through extraordinary times. Two weeks ago, she decided she wanted to show her appreciation for those on the front lines of the outbreak, especially given that Nassau was among the most affected counties in the country.

Milgrim, a junior at Paul D. Schreiber High School, came up with an idea: collect cards of appreciation for the dedicated nurses, doctors and other medical staff who were giving their all to save as many lives as they could from the COVID-19 disease, then deliver them to a hospital. She founded the movement Friends of the Frontline Nassau to do just that, and started collecting cards for health care workers at St. Francis Hospital in Roslyn. She partnered with Delux Transportation, which set up a collection box outside its storefront and then on Monday delivered the cards.

Photo credit: Emily Milgrim, used with permission.

Photo credit: Emily Milgrim, used with permission.

About 200 cards  both physical and virtual  were collected, Milgrim said.



"It's hard to tell. Sometimes people send photos of their cards spread out on a table," she said, noting they avoided physically touching the cards, making it difficult to get an accurate total.

Milgrim has volunteered at St. Francis in the past and is interested in pursing a career in the medical field in the future. She thought gathering cards would be one of the easier ways to show the community's support, especially since people aren't equally able to donate money, food or supplies.

"Seeing all the crazy things that have been going on in the world right now, one of the only ways people can show their solidarity and support for these hardworking people is by sending them something that will brighten up their day," Milgrim said.

Milgrim said she started small, inviting friends and family members to write cards, and that it has grown from there through word-of-mouth. The Friends of the Frontline Nassau Facebook group has since grown to nearly 300 members, with people posting photos of their cards. The group has even made its way into virtual classrooms, with teachers assigning the cards to their young students as a project. She knows a lot of the people submitting cards are children she can tell by the handwriting.

Story continues

"I think a lot of parents are having their children do it in the community because it's a nice show of gratitude and it's a little art project for them as well," she said.

Milgrim said she's currently accepting virtual cards and plans to announce new initiatives regularly. That includes a similar effort for volunteer fire medics, police medics and emergency medical technicians.

"We're trying to figure out if it makes sense for us to collect them in a box again or have people support the USPS mailing service and mail them directly to fire medics and EMTs," she said.

The new method would directly support the U.S. Postal Service, which has seen mail volume plummet by nearly a third and expects to lose $13 billion in revenue due to the pandemic, according to The New York Times.

Additionally, other local hospitals will review cards in the near future, she said.

The new coronavirus forced New York to issue a statewide stay-at-home order to all nonessential workers and close schools until at least April 29. The death toll Wednesday climbed to 11,586, including over 1,000 in Nassau alone.

Here are the latest number of confirmed cases of COVID-19 for the Port Washington area, according to Nassau County.

Baxter Estates: 9

Flower Hill: 47

Manhasset: 69

Manhasset Hills: 29

Manorhaven: 51

Plandome: 8

Plandome Heights: 8

Plandome Manor: 6

Port Washington: 96

Port Washington North: 13

Sands Point: 20

Roslyn: 53

Roslyn Estates: 4

Roslyn Harbor: 8

Roslyn Heights: 76

See also:

This article originally appeared on the Port Washington Patch
Senior US Officials Meet Taliban to Forward Peace Talks

By Ayesha Tanzeem April 14, 2020

Senior U.S. officials met with the Taliban in Qatar Monday to discuss possible violations of a deal the two sides signed February 29, among other issues, according to a Taliban spokesman.

"They talked about complete implementation of the Agreement as well as delay in the release of the prisoners. Violations of the Agreement and other issues and ways of their solutions were also discussed," tweeted Suhail Shaheen, spokesman of the Taliban political team in Doha.

The top U.S. commander in Afghanistan, General Austin Miller, accompanied Zalmay Khalilzad, the architect of the U.S.-Taliban deal, to the meeting hosted by Qatar's foreign minister, Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdur Rahman al-Thani. The Taliban delegation was led by Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, the head of its political office.

The militant group has repeatedly asserted that the Americans have violated their end of the agreement by attacking either civilians or Taliban forces not involved in fighting. U.S. officials deny this.

In a recent message, Taliban spokesman Zabiullah Mujahid claimed that "American invaders and their local puppets" dropped bombs killing civilians and destroying their homes in Badakhshan province.

Earlier, in an interview with VOA, Shaheen claimed U.S. forces attacked Taliban forces in violation of the agreement.

"They attacked our guards while there was no fighting. They attacked residential houses of our military people at night when they were resting or carried out night raids," Shaheen said.

The February agreement allows the two sides to defend themselves when attacked but forbids initiating attacks on each other.

Earlier this month, Colonel Sonny Leggett, the spokesman for U.S. forces in Afghanistan, Tweeted a denial of such allegations.

"USFOR-A has upheld, and continues to uphold, the military terms of the U.S.-TB agreement; any assertion otherwise is baseless. USFOR-A has been clear  we will defend our ANDSF partners if attacked, in compliance with the agreement."

Afghan officials, on the other hand, accuse the Taliban of continuing to kill civilians.

"Taliban killed at least 30 civilians and wounded two others across nine provinces in the last seven days," spokesman for the Afghan National Security Council Javid Faisal tweeted Sunday.

Afghanistan's independent Human Rights Commission said Tuesday 83 Afghan civilians were killed and 119 others wounded since the signing of the deal between the U.S. and Taliban on February 29. The human rights body blamed Taliban for half of the killings. Islamic State and other groups were blamed for the other half.

U.S. officials have repeatedly urged the Taliban to reduce the level of violence in Afghanistan. According to Afghanistan's Tolo News channel, General Miller's focus Monday was on the need to reduce violence and creating conditions for the intra-Afghan negotiations.

Negotiations between the Taliban and other Afghan factions were the second phase of the deal and were supposed to start by March 10. They were held up when the Afghan government, which was not officially part of the U.S.-Taliban deal, refused to release Taliban prisoners before the start date.

The deal called for the U.S. to push for the release of up to 5,000 militants in return for 1,000 members of Afghan security forces held by the Taliban.

In the last two weeks though, the Afghan government has released 361 Taliban prisoners. Spokesman Faisal said the "releases will continue across other prisons to free a total of 1,500 as part of our efforts to advance peace."

In return, the Taliban have released 20 Afghan security personnel.

Welcoming the release of prisoners from both sides, U.S. envoy Khalilzad urged them to "accelerate efforts to meet targets specified in the U.S.- Taliban agreement as soon as possible."

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Invasive grey squirrels carry a parasite that makes their native red cousins sluggish and threatens to further reduce their numbers, a study has found.

Scientists say that the parasite  carried only by the greys  causes red squirrels to forage for food less efficiently and makes competition from the greys harder to face.

The problem is so severe that it could wipe out red squirrels entirely where they share woodlands with the intruders.

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Invasive grey squirrels, pictured, carry a parasite that makes their native red cousins sluggish and threatens to further reduce their numbers, a study has found

Red squirrels normally carry only one type of parasitic worm, or 'helminth', in their stomach and intestines  those of the species Trypanoxyuris sciuri.

This means that they are therefore sensitive to foreign parasites transmitted by other animals  including those of the alien grey squirrel.

Grey squirrels in Italy commonly harbour a parasite called Strongyloides robustus, which they can pass on to red squirrels.

Researchers from universities in Italy and Belgium investigated the impact this foreign parasitic worm has on red squirrel behaviour.

They studied populations of native red squirrels that live alongside grey squirrels.

The team compared the behaviour and parasites of these populations with those where only red squirrels were present.

Results revealed that infection by Strongyloides robustus caused a significant reduction in red squirrel activity.

This, in turn, can result in lower food intakes, stunt the squirrels' growth and lead to lower levels of reproductive success.

It can even decrease the red squirrels' chance of survival when competing against their grey cousins in the same habitat.

Scientists say that the parasite  carried only by the greys  causes red squirrels (pictured) to forage for food less efficiently and makes competition from the greys harder to face

Infection by the alien parasite also seriously impacted the red squirrels' relationship with native parasites.

When grey squirrels were present, the reds' activity also decreased after being infected by the native parasite Trypanoxyuris sciuri.

Both species compete for foods such as hazelnuts and chestnuts when sharing a natural environment.

The authors argue the combination of ecological and physiological impact will lead to the extinction of the red squirrel in just a few years' time.

The problem is so severe that it could wipe out red squirrels entirely where they share woodlands with the intruders

'That our red squirrel is threatened with extinction due to the introduction of an "alien" species, the North American grey squirrel, has become common knowledge,' said paper author Francesca Santicchia from the University of Insubria in Italy.

'But that one of the mechanisms involved is the reduction of activity, a personality trait that tends to be related to foraging intensity or efficiency, caused by the spillover of a parasitic helminth from grey squirrels is a new finding.'

Fellow paper author Claudia Romeo of the University of Milan in Italy added: 'This spillover is very similar to what occurs with the Squirrel Poxvirus in the UK and Ireland.'

'Although in this case of spillover of an endoparasite, the effect is much more subtle and does not lead directly to the death of the animal.'

'For red squirrels, the "natural" situation is being the only diurnal tree-dwelling mammal in our forests and woodlands,' said Lucas Wauters, also of the University of Insubria.

'But when an alien species, such as the grey squirrel, colonises these habitats, it acts as a true environmental stressor and carrier of potentially dangerous parasites.'

'This is a subtle form of parasite-mediated competition, which may exacerbate the effects of interspecific competition with grey squirrels for food, such as conifer seeds, hazelnuts, or chestnuts.'

The study comes just two years after the researchers discovered that grey squirrels cause an increase in the concentration of stress hormones in red squirrels.

The full findings of the study were published in the journal Journal of Animal Ecology.
[April 15, 2020] Former Google Cloud Executive Joins Virtru to Lead International Operations

WASHINGTON, April 15, 2020 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Virtru , the new standard in data protection, today announced the appointment of Googles former Head of Cloud ISV Partnerships, Renaud Perrier, as Senior Vice President of International Business Development and Operations. Based in Paris, Perrier is charged with directing Virtrus operations, product strategy, and technology partnerships in EMEA and APAC to help the company further expand into key international markets.

A cloud industry veteran, Perrier brings more than 20 years of sales engineering, product management, and partnership development expertise to Virtru. Prior to joining the company, he co-founded We Advocacy, and before that, served as Chief Product Officer at LumApps overseeing the collaborative platform providers product strategy and marketing. In his roles at Google, he developed its global ISV program and helped launch Google Cloud solutions in EMEA. Earlier in his career, Perrier held sales engineering positions at Microsoft. We are experiencing unprecedented change as a global workforce  already more distributed than ever before  and seeing an accelerated rise in services from telehealth to distance learning, that will likely be the go-forward norm, rather than the exception. G Suite and other cloud solutions have become essential to powering the vital connection and collaboration between individuals and among businesses, said Virtru Co-founder and CEO John Ackerly. Renaud is a tremendous asset and joins us at a time when data has never been more valuable, and privacy has never been more important. We have seenour product usage in EMEA double year-over-year, and Renauds cloud and security expertise will help us further grow internationally, as we continue our mission of unlocking the power of data by creating a world where it is always under your control  everywhere.



Agile, secure collaboration is paramount during this time of uncertainty, especially when extended enterprises are already challenged with navigating a morass of industry regulations  chief among them, GDPR  while seeking to optimize the benefits of multicloud architectures, said Perrier. Virtru enables businesses to enjoy the full power and potential of G Suite and other SaaS applications, like Salesforce, while ensuring the protection of their corporate information and customer data. Im honored to lead Virtrus expansion in EMEA and APAC as we look to provide security at scale to critical markets within those regions. Virtrus proven architecture and out-of-the-box applications for Gmail and Google Drive prevent unauthorized access to sensitive data to ensure privacy with end-to-end encryption, granular access controls, and customer-hosted keys. Virtru gives organizations the freedom to focus on their mission, innovate, and obtain the peace of mind that comes with the power of privacy. More than 5,000 organizations worldwide across several vertical markets, including education, financial services, government, healthcare, manufacturing, and technology, trust Virtru for data security and privacy protection.

About Virtru

At Virtru, we empower organizations to easily unlock the power of data while maintaining control, everywhere its stored and shared. Creators of TDF (Trusted Data Format), the open industry standard for persistent data protection, Virtru provides flexible, easy to use, and trusted privacy technologies built on its data protection platform that govern access to data throughout its full lifecycle  from creation to transmission, storage, analysis, and sharing. For more information, visit www.virtru.com or follow us on Twitter at @virtruprivacy . All product and company names herein may be trademarks of their respective owners. Contact:

Shannon Kelley

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NCP president Sharad Pawar on Wednesday termed as unfortunate the gathering of migrant workers outside the Bandra railway station and stressed such incidents should not recur in the face of the COVID-19 crisis.

He said people gathered outside the suburban station on Tuesday afternoon after somebody circulated the rumour that trains services will resume, and called for taking precaution to ensure such confusing messages are checked.

The former Union minister also urged political parties to desist from scoring points over each other during the ongoing health crisis and asked them to defeat COVID-19 collectively.

Unfortunate incident took place outside the Bandra railway station yesterday.

"Somebody circulated rumour that the train services will resume and that you (the migrant workers) have the chance to travel out of the state and thousands of people turned up there.

Unfortunately, instructions regarding social distancing were not observed there, Pawar said during his address via Facebook.

The veteran leader cautioned against circulating such confusing messages.

Precaution has to be taken to see what happened yesterday does not recur, he added.

Pawar said political parties should not think about who is in power at the Centre or in the state.

"The only one-point agenda before us is to defeat the coronavirus. We should take steps in that direction.

"And what happened in Bandra should not be repeated anywhere, added Pawar, whose party is a key constituent in the Shiv Sena-led government in the state.

Ignoring lockdown norms, over 1,000 migrant workers who earn daily wages gathered here on Tuesday demanding transport arrangements to go back to their native places, hours after Prime Minister Narendra Modi extended the coronavirus-enforced curbs till May 3.

Asked by a Facebook follower whether transport services can be allowed for a day or two to ferry students and migrant workers, who are stuck, to their native villages, Pawar replied in the negative.

He said the issue was discussed at the level of Prime Minister Narendra Modi too, but health experts suggested against it.

Experts from the medical field feel that the number of (COVID-19) patients may peak during this period. Hence, allowing such travels now seems unlikely, he said.

Pawar further said efforts are on at various levels to provide two-time meals to migrant workers.

He also welcomed Modis announcement of extending the nationwide lockdown till May 3 given the seriousness of the situation and urged people to support it.

The NCP chief further expressed concern over the rising number of COVID-19 patients in the country and called for taking care of the elderly, who are vulnerable to contracting the disease.

Noting that 377 COVID-19 patients have died in the country so far, Pawar said an analysis of the cases suggests individuals with comorbidity (already having some other illnesses) are falling prey to the disease.

I am not comparing the situation in India with that in the US, Spain, Italy (who have recorded high fatalities).

"The situation there is terrible. But experts say that Indians have a specialty physically that they have more immunity to fight such situation...but the situation (in India too) is worrying, he added.

To a question from another Facebook follower, Pawar said Maharashtra does not have adequate number of PPE (Personal Protective Equipment) kits available with it, but added the Centre is supplying more of the safety gear.

The situation is better now compared to that a week ago, he added.

He also praised the followers of Dr B R Ambedkar for observing the Dalit icon's birth anniversary on Tuesday while staying inside their homes in view of the lockdown.

The NCP chief suggested the central and state governments take steps to tackle the problems of water shortage during May and possible rise in unemployment due to the COVID-19 crisis.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Finances were listed as the top cause of stress by 21% of adults and work was named by an additional 20%. But the health of loved ones (17%) and personal health (13%) were not far behind. Family and home were also frequently listed as top stressors.

"Many of America's workers lead stressful lives in the best of times, with responsibilities at work, with family and at home," said Richard Shaffer, senior vice president of field and market development at Colonial Life. "It's no wonder that we see high stress levels and concern about health and family and finances running high during such an uncertain period."

And that stress is following Americans into the workplace.

Nearly one in four adults say they spend more than five hours of work time each week worrying. That equates to hundreds of millions of working hours and billions of dollars in lost productivity every week.

And workers know it. In the Colonial Life survey, 26% of adults say stress makes them less productive at the office and 15% say it makes them less engaged. Other adults say stress leads to absenteeism and has them looking for other jobs.

But employees also have ideas on how their employers can help. Not surprisingly, the top two ways bosses can help ease their employees' stress is through additional salary (52%) and additional paid time off (40%). These ideas finished at the top of the list when Colonial Life asked the same question in 2019.

However, fewer adults named salary and vacation time in this year's survey, opting instead for more flexible work schedules (38%), more flexible work locations (25%), wellness programs (23%), and additional voluntary benefits like life, disability and accident coverage (l7%).

"Keeping engagement high with a remote workforce can be challenging," says Shaffer. "It's more important than ever to use virtual tools and resources to keep workers knowledgeable about their benefits and ensure they and their families are protected should unexpected events arise."

To recognize April as Stress Awareness Month and guide employers and employees during the coronavirus outbreak, Colonial Life is offering additional resources on working remotely, managing teams and balancing work, home and family, on its WorkLife site.

*Online research administered March 23-30, 2020 by Dynata on behalf of Colonial Life among 1,200 U.S. adults.

About Colonial Life

Colonial Life & Accident Insurance Company offers critical support to America's workers and their families when the unexpected happens. The company is a market leader in benefits education and delivery, innovative enrollment technology and customer experience. Colonial Life provides disability, life, accident, critical illness, cancer, dental and vision benefits that protect millions of customers and their families. For more information, connect with us on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.

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Two White House officials said there was no broader planning for Trumps comments that he had total authority and that they were both surprised by his tweets to that effect Monday. There was no legal underpinning for the remarks in advance, said the officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to talk frankly, and it is widely viewed with skepticism in the building that we should be doing this.
By Padraic Halpin DUBLIN (Reuters) - The leaders of Irish rival parties Fianna Fail and Fine Gael agreed on Tuesday to govern together for the first time if they can get additional support to form a coalition two months after an election since overshadowed by the coronavirus crisis.

By Padraic Halpin

DUBLIN (Reuters) - The leaders of Irish rival parties Fianna Fail and Fine Gael agreed on Tuesday to govern together for the first time if they can get additional support to form a coalition two months after an election since overshadowed by the coronavirus crisis.

Fierce rivals on the centre-right, the two dominant parties have swapped power throughout the nation's history since emerging from opposing sides of Ireland's 1920s civil war but their combined support has diminished in recent years

No longer able to command a majority together, they need the support of at least one smaller party or eight independent lawmakers to control the fractured 160-seat parliament.

The two parties said in identical short statements that the leaders had agreed the framework document and would brief their respective parties on Wednesday.

In an internal email to Fine Gael lawmakers seen by Reuters, party chairman Martin Heydon said the leaders reaffirmed their commitment to forming a majority government of three or more parties with "an equal partnership between Fine Gael and Fianna Fail at its centre."

Leo Varadkar's caretaker government has imposed a series of restrictions to slow the spread of the coronavirus but no new legislation can be passed until a new government is formed and selects the remaining members of the upper house of parliament.

The parties negotiating teams struck the broad agreement on Monday after a month of on-off talks. It includes the need for a national economic recovery plan to overcome the coronavirus lockdown of the country, a source familiar with its contents told Reuters. [L5N2C12W8]

Both parties refuse to govern with the left-wing, pro-Irish unity Sinn Fein party, which surged to 37 seats in the February election, the same number held by Fianna Fail and two more than Fine Gael's 35.

That leaves the Green Party, which has 12 seats, and the centre-left Labour and Social Democrat parties, with six seats each, as the only viable partners. All three have so far shown little enthusiasm to join such a coalition.

A number of the 20 independents in parliament - many of whom are ex-Fine Gael and Fianna Fail members - are willing to join and would likely number enough to reach a majority.

However, senior Fine Gael members, including Varadkar and his acting finance minister, Paschal Donohoe, have suggested the participation of a third party could be a precondition of Fine Gael continuing in office.

"It will be odd," Acting Employment Affairs Minister Regina Doherty of Fine Gael told national broadcaster RTE when asked about the prospect of sharing power with their bitter rival.

"But what I know about Irish people is we tend to set aside our differences when there's a bigger issue at hand."

(Reporting by Padraic Halpin; Editing by Alison Williams and Janet Lawrence)

This story has not been edited by Firstpost staff and is generated by auto-feed.
Locked down in a Perth quarantine hotel room, Perth singer Rebecca May counts down the days until she can finally hug her best friend and go for a swim in the ocean.

"When she finally picks me up I will cry," the 39-year-old says.

It has been two months since she left her home in Leederville to pursue a dream job as a singer in a luxurious Saudi Arabian hotel, but the trip wasn't what she wished for.

She ended up spending half the time over there in quarantine.
NEW YORK - A trial for two associates of Rudy Giuliani charged with using foreign money to make illegal campaign contributions to U.S. politicians to influence policy was postponed Wednesday to February 2021.

The men  Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman  pleaded not guilty after their October arrests and are free on bail.

U.S. District Judge J. Paul Oetken in Manhattan moved the new trial date from Oct. 5 to Feb. 1 after prosecutors in a letter to the judge cited disruptions caused by the COVID-19 pandemic and said defence lawyers joined in the request.

Giuliani is a former New York City mayor and has served as the personal attorney to President Donald Trump.

The men were arrested on charges they used foreign money to make illegal campaign donations while lobbying U.S. politicians to oust the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine. Two others also have pleaded not guilty in the case.

The men allegedly made the contributions while Giuliani was trying to get Ukrainian officials to investigate the son of Trumps Democratic challenger, Joe Biden. Giuliani has said he knew nothing about the donations.

Trumps efforts to press Ukraine for an investigation of the Bidens led the House to impeach Trump, though he was acquitted by the Senate earlier this year.
H edge fund tycoons have made 1.5 billion in profits by shorting UK shares during the financial crisis, according to Evening Standard calculations that triggered calls for curbs on their activities and a windfall tax.

Firms such as Citadel, owned by billionaire US investor Ken Griffin, AQR Capital, co-founded by billionaire hedge funder Cliff Asness, wealthy London financier Crispin Odeys Odey Asset Management and Sir Paul Marshall and Ian Waces Marshall Wace were the most prolific winners from the market crash.

Lesser known beneficiaries include Capeview Capital, founded by former Deutsche trader Theo Panos and Gladstone Capital, set up by ex-Lansdown Partners trader George Michelakis.

An analysis of the 50 most shorted stocks show hedge funds made gains of 1.48 billion during Marchs stock market rout betting against under-pressure firms like easyJet and Premier Oil.

On the fall of easyJet alone, AQR made a paper profit of 48 million and Citadel 43 million. Odey made more than 4 million on Metro Bank, while every one of Marshall Waces 30 short positions will have paid off. Marshall Wace has one of the biggest number of shorts in London.

Bank of England Governor Andrew Bailey has previously warned hedge funds to think what youre doing before shorting stocks.

Some European countries have temporarily banned short-selling in a bid to protect share prices, but the Financial Conduct Authority in the UK views that as an unnecessary intervention as it would disrupt orderly markets.

Fran Boait of campaign group Positive Money said: Regulators must take a tougher line against financial profiteering during the pandemic.

Campaigners say financiers should face a windfall tax on any short-selling profits.

Tax Justice Networks Alex Cobham called for firms to pay at least 50% to 75% of their excess returns in tax, to support the health service and other vital public functions.

Investors make money shorting by borrowing shares and selling them in the hope of buying them back at a lower price later. They often also hold long positions in other assets, using long and short positions to hedge their bets.




NEWS PROVIDED BY

Catholic League

April 15, 2020



NEW YORK, April 15, 2020 /Christian Newswire/ -- Catholic League president Bill Donohue comments on a survey of LGBT rights and religious exemptions:

A new survey by the Public Religion Research Institute (PPRI) on LGBT rights finds encouraging news for allowing religious exemptions.

Most Americans, 72%, are opposed to discrimination against lesbians, gays, bisexuals, and transgender persons in jobs, public accommodations, and housing. More interesting is the finding that "a majority (56%) of Americans said they oppose allowing a small business owner in their state to refuse products or services to gay or lesbian people if providing them would violate their religious beliefs." That figure in 2016 was 61%.

The CEO of PPRI, Robert P. Jones, wasn't happy with the change. "Among conservatives and Republicans, there has been a steady drumbeat around religious liberty," he said, "and I think it has started to have some traction in the bigger national debate."

Similarly, NBC News reported that "Several of the legal test cases around this issuefor instance, Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commissionrevolved around the issue of same-sex marriage, and Jones said public opinion is more supportive of religious beliefs in the context of marriage."

Jones is right that there has been "a steady drumbeat around religious liberty." That's because of attacks on it. In fact, had PPRI asked a more accurate question the results would have been more supportive of religious-liberty exemptions.

Respondents were asked if they strongly favored, favored, opposed, or strongly opposed the following: "Allowing a small business owner in your state to refuse to provide products or services to gay or lesbian people, if doing so violates their religious beliefs." That question is too broad and does not get to the issue that drove the Masterpiece Cakeshop ruling. The wording is also tendentious: most Americans instinctively oppose someone refusing to acknowledge someone else's rights.

In June 2018, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled, 7-2, that Jack Phillips, a Colorado baker, was the victim of religious hostility by the Colorado Civil Rights Commission. PPRI CEO Jones would have us believe that LGBT people were victimized when, in fact, it was the baker.

Phillips never said he would reject servicing a gay or lesbian person. That was not the issue. The issue was the request of two homosexual men who claimed to be married and who asked Phillips to custom make a wedding cake for them. That meant he had to personally affirm their marriage, something which, on religious grounds, he could not in good conscience do.

The PPRI survey question did not tap into the issue that was extant in the Masterpiece Cakeshop matter, and therefore misrepresented the support for religious exemptions. What if the survey had asked the following: "Should a small business owner be required by law to affirm the marriage of two people of the same sex if doing so violates his religious convictions?" Surely such a question would elicit more support for religious exemptions.

LGBT people enjoy wide civil liberties and are rarely discriminated against in public accommodations, housing, and on the job. To be sure, there are some instances when their rights conflict with the religious rights of those who cannot in good conscience affirm their status. We need to remember that religious rights are encoded in the First Amendment and cannot be violated without a compelling reason.

To resolve this matter, we must first admit that sexual orientation and sex identity are not rationally analogous to race. The former two status groupings refer to behavior and volition; the latter is fixed by nature and has nothing to do with either behavior or choice. It is therefore removed from rational moral judgments, whereas sexual orientation and sex identity are not.
Book by former PGC officer highlights unusual wildlife encounters

Dick Bodenhorn has published a book highlighting some of the unusual encounters he had while working with the Pennsylvania Game Commision.
Sharad Malhotra had to step out of his house recently to get some essentials for his family. While his wife, Ripci Bhatia, was worried, they had no other option because the society where they live in has stopped allowing grocery delivery even at the main gate.

As strictly instructed by the government, only one person per family is permitted to step out, Ive been doing that and this time I got things that would last eight to nine days. Though I had also taken proper safety measures, Ripci was obviously worried. But we really dont have a choice, he says.

Malhotra shares its unfortunate that places such as Andheri and Juhu in Mumbai have being considered hotspots for Covid-19, and because of which residential committees and the local cops have strictly told everyone to avoid venturing out.

What the actor witnessed when he stepped out is something he had never seen before. The situation was so grim around. Just one or two shops were open. The roads were clear. The few who were outside looked tense. The shopkeeper was worried about the future There was a sense of emptiness, a sinking feeling... Never have we seen or heard of a crisis of this magnitude, he adds.

Malhotra urges everyone to stay home and only move out only if its really important. Together we can and we shall make a difference, he asserts, adding that his family is ensuring to cut out any negative thoughts and is focussing on the good realisations that this time of crisis has brought about.

We all are already going through this difficult situation. Adding more negativity to it will just make things worse. So lets all try and fight it together, he says.

The actor is equally concerned about his family in Kolkata and Ripcis parents in Punjab. I wish we could all have been together now, but nothing is in our hands. Were constantly in touch with them and making sure that theyre well Musky (pet dog) can also feel something is wrong, but is happy that his parents are home. I also need to take him out for a quick walk, which Im doing only within the premises with proper precautions.

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The Federal Competition and Consumer Protection Commission (FCCPC) on Wednesday sealed a popular Lagos plastic surgery hospital, Med Contour, on suspicion of illegal activities.

The FCCPC revealed this on its official Twitter handle. It said it has commenced an investigation into a failed plastic surgery performed by a doctor, Anu Fella, of Med Contour.

UPDATE: In furtherance of an open investigation, on reasonable suspicion of illegal activities (S.18(1) FCCPA), FCCPC today sealed Med Contour in an abundance of caution & consumer safety pending further inquiry. pic.twitter.com/Ofsb080cfd  FCCPC Nigeria (@fccpcnigeria) April 15, 2020

The agency said the arrest was in furtherance of an open investigation, on reasonable suspicion of illegal activities in an abundance of caution and consumer safety pending further inquiry.

The popular Lagos plastic surgeon was recently called out by a Twitter user, Omohtee, for allegedly performing a fake surgical procedure on her.

Omohtee, who disclosed that she wanted a normal waist, accused the plastic surgeon of blocking her on social media platforms after the alleged botched surgery.

She urged Nigerians to be wary of Med Contour clinic.

So apparently my offence is that her waist is too tiny, Ms Fella said in defence on Instagram.

At the expense of another persons name and profession some people just want their posts to trendthis is really sad. I leave this lady to God..let Gods will be done.

Lately, there have been several reports and pictures of botched surgeries allegedly carried out by Ms Fella. But her accusers have remained anonymous.

This is really sad. OmohTee Surgery gone wrong. She has been blocked and threatened by Dr Anu of medcontour

I pray she gets help soon pic.twitter.com/wAvuI28kLx  Indispensable David (@davidchibike) April 10, 2020

Commission moves in

According to a statement by FCCPC chief executive officer, Babatunde Irukera, obtained by PREMIUM TIMES, the agency said it became aware of complaints and dissatisfaction with respect to certain elective/cosmetic surgical procedures carried out by Med Contour services.

The Federal Competition and Consumer Protection Commission (FCCPC) sealed a popular Lagos plastic surgery hospital, Med Contour.

The allegations are that Med Contour engages in conduct that is considered otherwise unprofessional, misleading and potentially injurious, including resulting in possible fatalities, Mr Irukera said.

He said although the agency is not a professional/licencing or disciplinary inquiry, a review of the matter indicated that there was sufficient probable cause to inquire into the consumer protection aspects of the representations and services of Med Contour and its operatives.

As such, the Commission has opened an active investigation into the practices and processes of Med Contour, its promoter, associates and employees, the statement partly read.

Sections 17(5),(t),(x),(y) and 130 of the Act that established the agency, Mr Irukera said, prohibits obnoxious practices, require services to be safe and for the Commission to act to reduce risk of injury to consumers, as well as ensure services comply with applicable standards of care.

Sections 123, 124 and 125 prohibit making misleading statements, issuing guarantees or statements about the efficacy, skills or probable outcomes with respect to services that are untested or scientifically unproven, and Sections 127, 128 and 129 prohibit unfair or unreasonable contract terms, exclusion, or waiver of legitimate liability for prevailing standards of care.

He said the commission seeks to gather additional information from consumers with previous experiences with Med Contour or its operatives, whether the experiences were satisfactory or otherwise, and from persons who have any such relevant information, including about the experiences of others.

Omotee (pictured on the left) Dr Anu Fella (Pictured on the right)

The commission, therefore, requests credible information in this regard in the form of a concise narrative of facts including the identity of the Med Contour operatives the interactions occurred with.!nformat1on should be sent to failedcosmeticsurgery@fccpc.gov.ng, Mr Irukera said.

Background

Nigerians on Twitter last week called for Ms Fellas arrest after the alleged botched hip reduction was made public

In a divided outrage, some Nigerians condemned the plastic surgeon while others advised Omohtee to accept her fate.

But Dr Anu denied causing her patients deformity.

Here are some Twitter reactions

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This is really sad. OmohTee Surgery gone wrong. She has been blocked and threatened by Dr Anu of medcontour

I pray she gets help soon  MadridistaAbdlwahab   (@TheMrnass) April 10, 2020

Med Contour has been sealed by the Federal Govt for operating illegally. The MD, Dr Anu is said to be on the run as recent reports indicates she wasnt qualified or licensed to operate. Recall she did a failed butt job on Omohtee that caused outrage on Twitter NG few days back.  HENRY O (@GidiLover) April 15, 2020

Dr Anu's Medcontour clinic has been shut down and shes on the run. Maybe she can get some plastic surgery done and avoid capture.   DaddyMO (@therealdaddymo1) April 15, 2020

Dr Anu of Med Contour would have laughed it off when Omohtee must have been telling her "I will deal with you oh". Now they've locked her kiosk  nigga mine yuh speesh mine yuh wors (@tobi_grandmasta) April 15, 2020

Their letter published here yesterday made me feel they won't pursue the matter well but this their action of today, yes @fccpcnigeria is moving in the right direction. Unless you are a PR for Dr Anu of Med Contour. If yes your approach in managing their reputation is flawed  . (@SmartAtuadi) April 15, 2020

Dr Anu's Medcontour clinic shut down, I hope those affected by her quackery will get help and heal.  Zaddy Ajala (@UNCLE_AJALA) April 15, 2020

Med contour has been sealed y @fccpcnigeria after a video post by Omohtee went viral. In the video, she advised people to stay away from Med_Contour owned by one Dr Anu. She also advised ladies to love themselves.#DJXCLUSIVE #OfLaLa #Lockdown2 https://t.co/2TVfbaqH4d  RINNU_SAVVY'S STAN (@Hemmigas) April 15, 2020
PM Narendra Modi says the coronavirus lockdown will continue for nearly three more weeks.

India's Prime Minister Narendra Modi has extended a nationwide lockdown until 3 May to contain the spread of the coronavirus.

The announcement comes on what was to be the last day of the initial lockdown, which began on 25 March.

I salute all you citizens, Mr Modi said in a televised address, thanking Indians for their support in the fight against the virus.

India has reported 8,988 active cases and 339 deaths so far.

Under the lockdown, only essential businesses - such as groceries and pharmacies - are allowed to remain open. City transport services are limited to emergency staff and those with special travel passes. All trains and flights have been suspended.

Mr Modi suggested that the rules could tighten further over the next week, but he did not give more details. He said the government will issue "guidelines" soon.

"These have been made thinking of our poor and migrant workers, daily-wage workers and farmers," he said.

He added that the federal and state governments will be watching potential hotspots closely, and will evaluate every district in a week's time to determine if restrictions can be eased anywhere.

The heavy economic and social cost of India's lockdown

India's grinding lockdown has already caused economic disruption and social distress.

It has hurt the economy immensely. Joblessness has risen sharply, according to an independent assessment. India's already sputtering economy is now expected to grow between 1.5-2.8% in 2020-21, according to the World Bank. Migrant workers, the backbone of key service industries, have either fled their shuttered workplaces or are stranded in homeless centres in cities. The thriving informal economy is in tatters.

Access to food, medicines and emergency medical care for non-Covid-19 patients has become difficult for the poor. The lockdown, says an economist, "seems to be the case of the privileged transferring their epidemic risk to the under-privileged".

There is no doubt that lifting the lockdown at a time when India is seeing a rise in infections and trying to catch up on testing, can be risky.

At the same time, it is also abundantly clear that India will have to ease the lockdown to save the economy and livelihoods of people.

Some economic activity - farming, transportation of goods, wholesale markets, key gig economy services - has to reopen with social distancing and hygiene protocols.

How this will be implemented will depend purely on the acumen of the states.

Seven states and one federally-administered territory have already extended the lockdown.

The decision has come at a huge economic cost, with unemployment on the rise and businesses struggling to function amid the restrictions.

Experts also fear that it may affect farming, which employs more than half of Indias workforce.

The restrictions have already had a devastating effect on Indias poor and homeless, and ended up stranding hundreds of thousands of migrant workers across cities.

Experts around the world are closely watching the virus spread in India, which has a population of 1.3bn. They fear that the country - with its densely-populated cities and weak public health system - is particularly vulnerable to the pandemics worst effects. BBC
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At Nick Stamfords home just north of San Francisco, he and his fiancee, Angela Christian, are hashing out what groceries they can afford to pick up.

Anything else you think we need? Milk? Stamford asks Christian in a video diary sent to Nightline. She says they already have some and suggests juice for their kids.

Id love to get juice. We just cant afford it, he responds.

Its a scene playing out in millions of homes across the United States right now. Stamford is one of over 16 million Americans who are unemployed because of the COVID-19 pandemic. With four children, theres just not enough money coming in.

PHOTO: Nick discusses what groceries to buy with his fiancee. (Nick Stamford)

Were getting by. Its exhausting. Its stressful, said Stamford, who worked as an HVAC salesman.

Im trying to stay positive for the kids, but [there are] certainly tears at night sometimes, Christian added. We dont know when the next payment is going to come in.

What to know about applying for unemployment insurance during coronavirus crisis

For this grocery run, the two parents discussed spending between $50 and $75 out of a $150 weekly budget.

Christian still has her job working from home for now. Stamford, who had already applied for unemployment benefits, said he received a debit card in the mail and his first deposit at the end of March.

PHOTO: Angela still has her job and is working from home, for now. Nick has applied for unemployment and just received his first deposit at the end of March. (Nick Stamford)

I told [Christian] that I had lost my job and the first thing that we did is  sign up for unemployment, Stamford said. I have no other options as far as my type of work.

The unemployment benefits payment totaled $450, only about a third of what he says he typically brings home, and not even close to what the family needs.

Navigating the new economic normal is a journey full of potholes, frustration and confusion. As more businesses stay closed, a growing number of people are depending on government assistance.

The financial services company Moodys Analytics predicts that as many as 45 million jobs are at risk of being eliminated due to the pandemic. The firm calls that a conservative estimate.

Story continues

A new national poll from Monmouth University also reveals just how much Americans are struggling: Forty-one percent of those surveyed said they lost some income due to a decrease in hours or business. Just over a quarter of Americans said they or someone in their household had been laid off because of COVID-19 and about one in five are struggling to pay their bills.

Were barely scraping by, were getting behind, were struggling and we really need this money, Stamford said. I just feel like the system thats in place right now is not working.

PHOTO: Angela still has her job and is working from home, for now. Nick has applied for unemployment and just received his first deposit at the end of March. (Nick Stanford)

6.6 million more Americans file for unemployment amid COVID-19 financial crisis

Nearly 3,000 miles away in Virginia, salon owner Keith Walker and his partner Billy Baker arent sure how theyll make ends meet this month.

Day 12, early in the morning, preparing to have my phone interview with food stamps to see if I can get those, Walker said in a video diary sent to Nightline.

Both men are out of work right now and neither qualifies for unemployment even though Walker has run a successful salon for a decade.

I have been left behind, Walker told Nightline. Still, as of right now, [I have] no idea if anything is going to come through.

Keith Walker has run a successful salon for a decade.PHOTO: (Keith Walker)

Whats more, the couple is in the middle of adopting four children, all of whom are under 6 years old.

Walker said that after visiting the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) office to apply for the program, he received a whopping $27 a month for four children to purchase fresh fruits and vegetables.

The other morning, my 4-year-old wanted waffles for breakfast  and we had no waffles and I couldnt go to the grocery store, Walker said. We had to all sit down at the breakfast table and I had to say, Listen guys, theres a lot of sick people in the world and we need to stay healthy and we need to stay safe and so we need to stay home.

Coronavirus economic updates: Fed to provide $2.3 trillion in loans

PHOTO: Keith Walker has tried to file for numerous benefits while his salon is shut down. (Keith Walker)

The government has launched several programs for small businesses like Walkers.

The sort of heartbreaking part of all of this is how rapidly small businesses had to shut down and lay people off and how hard it has been for them to get access to the funds that were allocated for them and whether or not those funds are even structured right, said Diane Swonk, a chief economist at Grant Thronton LLP.

We know almost half of small businesses cant make it more than two months [without revenue] and were coming up on that mark now, she added.

Walker said he has been applying for loans and unemployment and estimates he only has a few weeks before hell need some kind of income. He said hes disappointed, confused, angry with how difficult its been to get financial assistance.

People like me, we apply, we apply, we apply  and here I am, in week five, week six, whatever week it is [with] zero income, Walker said.

PHOTO: Keith Walker tries to find help while his salon is shut down in the COVID-19 crisis. (Keith Walker)

In Washington, D.C., lawmakers are under pressure to approve a fourth wave of funding. The first three included the $1,200 one-time relief payments, which are being sent out this week, and the $600 per week expansion to standard unemployment benefits, as well as loans for small business owners. But money from the Economic Injury Disaster Loan program, which is designed to support small businesses in hard times, may already be out of money, according to the federal government's Small Business Administration.

As of April 10, nearly 4 million small businesses had applied for EIDL funding, requesting a total of $383 billion, according to the SBA. Congress had allocated only $17 billion for expanding EIDL and Congress isn't back in session until April 20.

Where's the money? Most Americans still waiting for COVID-19 stimulus boost

Swonk says that still isnt enough.

Were going to need more than that for a different era and certainly a different kind of crisis, not one that was ever meant to weather this kind of crisis, Swonk said. We will get more of the small business funding out, there will be more liquidity, but is it in all the places we need? No, absolutely not.

Stamford and Christian hoped that his unemployment benefits would at least hold them over another week. That is, until Stamford made a devastating discovery: Fraudulent charges were found on the debit card holding his unemployment funds.

So now I have to cancel my card and order a new one, Stamford said.

Everyday, it adds more stress, he said, and I feel like [the debit card issue] was almost a breaking point for me.

PHOTO: Nick Stanford has to choose what groceries to buy for his family. (Nick Stanford)

Christian said she believes the one-time stimulus checks are helpful but arent going to be enough for families struggling through the pandemic. She also thinks theres a lot more that the federal government can do to help.

Meanwhile, in an effort to earn some income, Walker has been preparing to-go hair color kits and dropping them off at his clients doorsteps.

No interaction, no contact, he said. They either pay me by Venmo or theyll leave a check taped to the front door.

Walker said that right now, his faith and his children are getting him through.

As frustrating as it is, I know that it will be OK, and I just have to hold it together for one more day," he said. "Thats what I tell myself each day -- just hold it together one more day, be strong for the kids one more day and things will change. And if not, well still be OK.

How 2 families are struggling to stay afloat through COVID-19 unemployment originally appeared on abcnews.go.com
Russian President Vladimir Putin instructed the government to provide direct gratuitous state assistance to small and medium-sized businesses in the amount of 12,130 rubles ($162) per employee, TASS reports.

"In addition to the support measures that are already being taken I propose providing small and medium-sized companies of the affected sectors with direct gratuitous financial assistance from the state," Putin said at a meeting with members of the government.

"The amount of support for a particular company will be calculated taking into account the total number of its employees as of April 1 of this year, proceeding from an amount of 12,130 rubles per employee per month, "Putin stated.

The government should start preparing new measures to support the economy, Vladimir Putin said Wednesday.

"The situation is changing dynamically. I request the government together with regions and business associations to assess efficiency and sufficiency of undertaken measures on a going basis," the head of state said. "It is obvious that new solutions will be required, for the economy on the whole and for individual sectors," Putin noted.
Two Winnipeg law firms were recently brought to digital halts, after their computers were infected with so-called ransomware.

Hey there, time traveller!

This article was published 14/4/2020 (637 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Two Winnipeg law firms were recently brought to digital halts, after their computers were infected with so-called ransomware.

The viruses prevented the firms from accessing anything on their computer systems, including client records, personal information, or emails. Ransomware is a type of malicious program that threatens to publish the victim's data or block access to it unless a ransom is paid.

Kris Dangerfield, Law Society of Manitoba chief executive officer, said the firms have since rectified the problem, thanks to experts brought in through cyber attack insurance coverage all law firms must have.

"I have a lot of empathy for these firms who are challenged already with everything going on now in the world," Dangerfield said Tuesday.

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Noting many people  including lawyers  are being forced to work at home due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Dangerfield said they have to be even more careful, because some protections available on office computers may not be available at home.

"We're all so much more vulnerable at this time," she said.

Dangerfield  who would not reveal which law firms were hit by the cyber attack, or whether they are specializing in civil litigation, family matters, or criminal cases  said the firms were threatened they would have to pay large amounts in ransom to regain access to the computer files.

The law society said in a statement it believes the cyber attacks began when an employee clicked on an attachment or link in a suspicious email.

Dangerfield said she doesn't know if the firms paid any ransom.

kevin.rollason@freepress.mb.ca
Wellington: Big waves are pummelling coastal areas around Wellington, New Zealand, making for difficult ferry crossings, closing roads and forcing the evacuation of coastal properties.

Emergency services were called to the south coast on Wednesday, as massive waves caused flooding from Owhiro Bay to Island Bay.

Locals reported some houses suffered damage to their garages and front walls.

Waves of up to 5 metres slammed the coast of Wellington, NZ, on Wednesday. Credit:Kevin Stent/Stuff

A Wellington Free Ambulance spokeswoman confirmed a person swept to sea in Owhiro Bay in the morning had been recovered with moderate injuries.
Expressing his happiness over Covid-19 cases levelling off in Odisha, Chief Minister Naveen Patnaik on Tuesday asked the police to ensure that movement of agriculture products is not stopped and those indulging in domestic violence during lockdown are punished.

Chairing a review meeting, Patnaik said that coronavirus statistics are levelling off in the state and going down. Of the 60 confirmed cases of Covid-19, 18 have recovered while one person died. Thats a very good sign, said Patnaik, referring to Odishas low ratio of positive cases to sample tested among all the states. With only 60 positive cases from 4,734 samples tested till Monday night, Odishas ratio of positive cases to samples tested stood at 1.26 while Delhi with 1,510 cases from the 15,000 samples tested had the highest ratio of 10.

Maharashtra with 2,334 cases had a ratio of 6.55 followed by Tamil Nadu with 6.25. Among other major states, Rajasthan and Kerala have lower infection-to-test conducted ratios, at 2.7 and 2.6, respectively.

In India, the total number of confirmed cases stood at 10,363, Lav Agarwal, Joint Secretary, Health Ministry said on Tuesday. Of these 8,988 are now being treated at various hospitals across the country, he added.

Odisha health officials said Odishas low ratio of positive cases to samples tested showed there was no community transmission, yet sounded alarm that the state needed to test more to know the exact picture of sperad of infection. Among the 60 cases, more than 90 per cent are asymptomatic cases. So we cant celebrate as yet, said a state health department official, requesting anonymity.

Enthused by low number of positive cases, Odisha has already made several relaxations including allowing NREGS work and farmers to resume agricultural activities, including harvesting, selling Rabi crops and other activities to prepare their fields for the coming Kharif season. The government order said shops and establishments selling agricultural implements, cattle feed and fish feed and food processing and packaging units will be allowed to remain open. The panchayati raj department will also facilitate construction and repair of drinking water facilities. Farmers can also dig farm ponds and purchase agricultural implements.

During Tuesdays meeting, Patnaik told the police to ensure that movement of essential and non-essential commodities should not be stopped and movement of agricultural products continue. He also highlighted domestic violence as a major cause of concern during lockdown and asked Odisha Police to begin the process of identifying habitual offenders.

Though the state government has so far established 20 dedicated Covid-19 hospitals in 18 districts, Patnaik directed officials to ensure that such arrangement is extended in all the 30 districts of the state within next week. The state government has already chalked out a plan to set up Covid-19 hospitals in 36 places having a total capacity of 6,000 beds by the end of this month.

Meanwhile, the Odisha Joint Entrance Examination 2020, which was to be held in the first week of May, has been postponed due to extension of lockdown. The annual entrance examination for admission to undergraduate courses in Engineering & Technology, Pharmacy, Postgraduate course like MBA, MCA, MTech, MPharm and Integrated was to be held from May 2-5.

Similarly, evaluation of answer sheets of the annual matriculation examinations conducted by the Odisha Board of Secondary Education will be done after conclusion of the lockdown period on May 3, said school and mass education minister Samir Ranjan Dash. Dash said textbooks for students from Class I to Class VIII will be delivered to them at their doorstep by school teachers by April 25.

Meanwhile, eminent citizens, civil society organisations and advocacy groups from Odisha have demanded setting up of a National Task Force to address the hardship and difficulties of millions of migrant workers who are stranded in different parts of the country amidst a nationwide lockdown. The need for a task force has become urgent in view of the imminent extension of the lockdown till May 3, said Citizens Action Group on Corona, Odisha.

The Citizenss Action Group said the recent violence involving migrant workers in Gujarats Surat city and Mumbai showed the need and urgency for better inter-state coordination. There are more than 2.4 million migrant workers who are currently stranded in some 50,000 camps scattered across the country. Most of them were looking to return home with the hope that the lockdown would end Monday. But now with lockdown getting extended by a fortnight, we are not sure how impatience and anxiety will shape the behavior of the stranded workers, said CAG co-convenor Umi Daniel.
NEW YORK, April 15, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- In the 1940's, America was sold fluoridation with the false equivalency that pollutants (hydrofluorosilicic acid or sodium fluoride), when added to public water supplies, acts similarly as naturally fluoridated water to safely reduce tooth decay - but without such evidence, reports Frank Zelko, PhD, Associate Professor, Environmental History, University of Hawaii, in History of Science (December 2019). This article garnered the Alice Hamilton Prize for best article by the American Society for Environmental History, reports the New York State Coalition Opposed to Fluoridation (NYSCOF)

Fluoridation "owes more to politics and historical contingency than to the triumph of rational science and enlightened policy," Zelko writes.

Fluoridation chemicals are the fertilizer industry's contaminated waste. Zelko explains the process. To make fertilizer, crushed phosphate rock is boiled with sulfuric acid releasing highly toxic hydrogen fluoride and silicon tetrafluoride gases into the atmosphere which damaged nearby crops and killed farm animals. So, pollution scrubbers were installed to convert toxic vapors to fluorosilicic acid (FSA), a dangerous but more containable liquid waste.

FSA interacts negatively with metals, producing a flammable hydrogen gas. It eats through glass and concrete. Special polyethylene or rubber-lined tanks transport FSA as hazardous chemicals to be drip fed into public water supplies.

"This is a practice that the American Dental Association and numerous scientists and public health officials describe as 'the precise adjustment of the existing naturally occurring fluoride levels in drinking water to an optimal fluoride levelfor the prevention of dental decay,'" writes Zelko.

In 1947, well-meaning but misguided dentists so strongly believed that natural and artificial fluoride were chemically the same (even while purchasing an aluminum company's waste sodium fluoride) that they successfully convinced 50 communities to artificially fluoridate  without any safety or efficacy studies conducted or concluded.

The US Public Health Service caved to pressure and endorsed fluoridation in 1950 - followed by the American Dental Association, the American Medical Association and a host of other high-profile government and professional bodies, reports Zelko

"The same toxicologists who signed off on water fluoridation used identical logic in defending the addition of lead to gasoline. Zelko said it was part of the pre-environmental scientific hubris expressed in the slogan 'better living through chemistry," reports University of Hawaii News.

More information here and here.

Contact: Paul Beeber, JD, NYSCOF President, [email protected], 516-433-8882 http://twitter.com/nyscof

SOURCE New York State Coalition Opposed to Fluoridation, Inc.
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A China-Europe freight train from Wuhan, capital of central China's Hubei Province and once the epicenter of the COVID-19 outbreak, on Tuesday arrived in its destination -- the western German city of Duisburg.

It was the first China-Europe freight train from Wuhan after the city was placed under lockdown for almost 11 weeks from January due to the COVID-19 outbreak, marking the resumption of China-Europe freight services in Wuhan.

The train left Wujiashan railway container center station in Wuhan on March 28.

In Duisburg, the welcome ceremony of the train was attended by China Consul General in Dusseldorf Feng Haiyang, Transport Minister of the State of North Rhine-Westphalia Hendrik Wuest and Chief Executive Officer of Duisburger Hafen AG (duisport) Erich Staake.

According to Wuhan Asia-Europe Logistics, operator of the train, the goods on the train include medical supplies, auto parts, electronic products, and optical communication fibers, among others.

After the arrival, the goods will then be distributed to Germany, France, Hungary, the Czech Republic and Poland.

According to the operator, freight train services between Wuhan and Europe are planned to operate twice a week westbound and once a week eastbound.

Last year, Wuhan recorded a total of 408 China-Europe freight train trips, among which 195 were outbound trips and 213 inbound trips.
New York state has only received about $12,000 in federal funding for each of its coronavirus cases compared to the $300,000 per case that Nebraska received, according to Gov Andrew Cuomo.

Cuomo is pushing for more funding after taking issue with the amount his hard-hit state received from the $2.2 trillion coronavirus relief package in comparison to states, like Nebraska, that have much fewer cases.

As of Tuesday, more than 200,000 people in epicenter New York had tested positive for coronavirus and more than 10,000 had died.

Nebraska, however, had recorded a total of 900 infections and 20 deaths.

'Some states, like Montana and Nebraska, are getting more than $300,000 in federal stimulus money per reported COVID-19 case,' Cuomo tweeted.

'New York is the hardest-hit state and yet we are getting only about $12,000 per case. We need a fair federal stimulus bill that is distributed by need.'

New York state has only received about $12,000 in federal funding for each of its coronavirus cases compared to the $300,000 per case that Nebraska received, according to Gov Andrew Cuomo

The funding is part of the immediate $30 billion being distributed to hospitals and healthcare facilities as part of the stimulus package.

The amount is being calculated based on previous Medicare revenues.

Cuomo and other lawmakers have argued that the funds should instead be handed out based on the number of cases each state has - meaning New York and New Jersey would get the biggest portion.

The $12,000 figure Cuomo quoted came from estimates in a Kaiser Health report last week that broke down how much the states would receive from the $30 billion per coronavirus case.

New York was estimated to receive $12,000 and $18,000 for New Jersey.

Meanwhile, Nebraska was estimated to receive $379,000, while West Virginia was to receive $471,000 and $380,000 for Minnesota.

It comes as Cuomo and Republican Maryland Governor Larry Hogan issued a bipartisan call at the weekend for an additional $500 billion in federal aid for states and territories dealing with the coronavirus.

Hogan is the chair and Cuomo is the vice chair of the National Governors Association.

The two said in a statement that implementing stay-at-home orders and other public health measures due to the coronavirus have 'resulted in catastrophic damage to state economies'.

'In the absence of unrestricted fiscal support of at least $500 billion from the federal government, states will have to confront the prospect of significant reductions to critically important services all across this country, hampering public health, the economic recovery, and-in turn-our collective effort to get people back to work,' they said.

The governors also said the recently passed federal CARES Act should be amended to allow existing federal funding to be used not only for COVID-19-related expenses but also to offset lost revenue.

The statement comes as the Trump administration and congressional leaders appear poised to launch new bipartisan talks on a fresh coronavirus aid package with hopes for action as soon as next week.

Meanwhile, government relief checks began arriving in bank accounts on Wednesday as the economic damage to the US from the coronavirus piled up.

The world's biggest economy began issuing one-time payments this week to tens of millions of people as part of its $2.2 trillion coronavirus relief package, with adults receiving up to $1,200 each and $500 per child to help them pay the rent or cover other bills.

The checks will be directly deposited into bank accounts or mailed to households, depending on how they filed their tax returns.

As of last week, some 17 million people in the US had been thrown onto the unemployment rolls because of the crisis.
(Photo : REUTERS/Sergio Perez/File Photo) FILE PHOTO: The Microsoft logo is pictured ahead of the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain February 24, 2019. (Photo : REUTERS/Brendan Mcdermid) A patient is seen inside the emergency area at Maimonides Medical Center during the outbreak of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) in the Brooklyn borough of New York City, New York, U.S., April 7, 2020.

Tech giants G.E. Healthcare and Microsoft team up to provide health systems with a free COVID-19 patient monitoring software.

READ ALSO: New Coronavirus Mutation Strain Found Which Could Potentially Hinder COVID-19 Vaccine Development

G.E. Healthcare originally planned to launch its Mural Virtual Care Solution at the supposed Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society meeting in March. However, as the event was canceled due to the COVID-19 pandemic, G.E. Healthcare then opted to redesign the software. It aims to distribute the software quickly to hospitals using Microsoft's Azure Cloud.

Mural Virtual Care Solution provides a cloud-based central hub that allows hospital staff to monitor patients in intensive care units, including those using medical ventilation. It combines data from different systems into a single pane.

Mural provides a "real-time, comprehensive view of patients' status across a selected care area, hospital, or entire health system." Thus, the medical staff could attend to the patients with timely and amenable care "by digitizing hospital defined protocols, care pathways, and Early Warning Scores (EWS)."

Upon providing proper triage management, Mural can help identify the patients who need urgent care or require ventilators. This aids in providing proper attention and reduce intervention time.

According to a company statement, a Mural installation can simultaneously monitor a 100-bed, multi-site ICU network with only three senior nurses and two intensivists manning the setups. It then collects and integrates real-time data from existing patient monitoring systems, ventilators, electronic medical records, labs, and other diagnostics into a single monitoring system.

Aside from the installation costs, G.E. Healthcare and Microsoft are waiving all other costs until January 2021.

Mural protects frontliners as well.

Microsoft's Chief Global Medical Officer Dr. David Rhew claims remote monitoring tools could limit the hospital staff's exposure to infected patients and help conserve personal protective equipment, which hospitals now lack. "It is a great way for us to more efficiently monitor," says Rhew.

"It is imperative that I and my fellow healthcare workers use virtual ICU technology to safely monitor and care for our sickest patients while preserving PPE," said Matthias Merkel, M.D., Ph.D. in a statement about the COVID-19 surge.

Dr. Merkel is Oregon Health & Science University Hospital's Chief Medical Capacity Officer, Vice-Chair of Critical Care Medicine, and Professor of Anesthesiology and Perioperative Medicine.

"Remaining closely connected and supported through technology enables us to progress our patients' care across a geographic distance," he adds.

As of Wednesday, 128,071 people worldwide have died of COVID-19, as the total cases passed the 2 million mark globally. The United States has reported the most cases and deaths with over 600,000 confirmed cases and 26,000 deaths from the virus.

Health experts claim that the lack of personal protection equipment in hospitals proves that the U.S. is not yet prepared to handle the coronavirus pandemic. The domestic production of gowns, masks, and gloves continuously decline over the years. Instead, the country heavily relied on importing these things from abroad.

This prompts people to create their own PPEs, masks, and face-shields. Various organizations, companies, and even individuals chip in to alleviate the shortage, instead of relying on the government supply.

Read also: COVID-19 vs. Antibodies: Antibody Points Can Be Used To Create The Vaccine, Experts Say

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Lockdown and various restrictions notwithstanding, the coronavirus positive cases in Maharashtra continued to spike with 232 more detections on Wednesday, while the death toll went up by nine to 187, a Health official said.

The number of COVID-19 cases in the state now stands at 2916, with Mumbai alone accounting for 1896 cases and 114 deaths.

Out of the nine new deaths, Pune (6) reported the highest number of fatalities, followed by Mumbai (2) while one death was reported from Akola district in Vidarbha region, he said.

Meanwhile, Union Health Ministry has reiterated that there has been no community transmission of the disease in the country so far.

The state Health official said: "232 people tested positive for coronavirus on Wednesday, taking the total number of the cases to 2916. With nine more people succumbing to the infection, the death toll now stands at 187".

With 36 more recoveries, the number of the people who cured from the COVID-19 disease in the state now stands at 295, he said.

Among various regions, Thane division has so far reported 2,228 COVID-19 cases and 129 deaths which includes the toll from Mumabi (114).

Pune division has reported 415 cases and 44 deaths, followed by Nashik division in northern Maharashtra with 83 coronavirus positive cases and five deaths.

The number of COVID-19 cases in Kolhapur division in western Maharashtra stands at 39 and one death, followed by Aurangabad division in Marathwada region which reported 25 cases and two fatalities.

Latur division reported 13 COVID-19 cases while Akola division in Vidarbha region 46, the official said.

The number of cases from the Nagpur division in east Maharashtra stood at 56 with one death, he added.

A total of 11 people from neighbouring states were undergoing treatment in Maharashtra for COVID-19 and two of them have died, he said.

"Out of 52,000 laboratory samples tested for coronavirus infection, 48,198 were negative while 2916 others have tested positive," he said.

The official said a total of 5394 squads have carried out surveillance of moe than 20 lakh people so far.

The number of people put under home quarantine is 69,738 while 5617 are under institutional quarantine, he said.

Meanwhile, Maharashtra Chief Minister Uddhav Thackeray on Wednesday said that ensuring recovery of COVID-19 patients and preventing fatalities were the challenges being faced by his government as well as the medical fraternity.

In his interaction with CEOs of privatehospital in Mumbai, along with members of the newly-set up task force of medical professionals through video conferencing, Thackeray underlined the need to put in place a robust patient management system.

The deliberations focused on issues like the patient care; need for medical equipment; availability of ICU beds, and ensuring protection of medical personnel treating coronavirus positive patients.

The CM further said that the focus should be on prevention of deaths of COVID-19 patients and saving those patients who are in a serious condition.

Underlining the concerns of the state government, a senior officer had said that though Maharashtra stands at the fourth position in the country vis-a-vis the COVID-19 mortality rate at 7.34 per cent, the state is way ahead both in terms of the number of positive cases and fatalities.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Half of all coronavirus deaths in Belgium are taking place in nursing homes, figures have revealed.

Belgium has so far reported 33,573 confirmed cases including 4,440 deaths.

Of these total fatalities, 46 per cent were in nursing homes, the latest data showed.

It comes as the the country's stay-at-home order was extended until at least May 3.

The lockdown has seen schools, bars and restaurants closed since mid-March, as the country's per capita death rate has risen to among the highest in the world.

Mass gatherings, including concerts and sporting events, have been banned until the end of August.

Announcing the decision, Prime Minister Sophie Wilmes said she would hold new crisis talks next week to discuss a 'progressive' loosening of measures from early May.

Belgium has so far reported 33,573 confirmed cases of coronavirus, including 4,440 deaths. Pictured: Belgian Prime Minister Sophie Wilmes

Belgium's stay-at-home order has been extended until at least May 3, while mass gatherings, such as concerts and sporting events, have been banned until late August. Pictured: Prime Minister Sophie Wilmes holds a news conference today

Belgium is one of few countries in Europe that includes in its daily tally of coronavirus-related deaths all non-hospitalised people who displayed symptoms of the disease even if they had not been confirmed as having had it.

That may help to explain why Belgium, a small country of about 11.5 million people, now has the fifth highest coronavirus death toll in Europe, ahead of more populous nations like Germany and the Netherlands.

Highlighting fears that many other nations may be under-reporting deaths, Britain released data on Tuesday suggesting its true death toll is probably much higher than government figures, which only record hospital fatalities.

With an overall mortality rate of around 12 per cent, Belgium would be the hardest-hit small country in Europe, according to data.

In Residence Christalain nursing home in Brussels, resident Marie-Louise Parre she was afraid: 'The anxiety is mounting, there is nothing to do.'

A veteran Belgian politician, Didier Reynders, described the number of nursing home deaths as worrying.

Other countries may well be in a similar situation but it is simply not reflected in their statistics.

In the Netherlands, for example, a large number of coronavirus deaths might not have been reported as such because of under-testing in nursing homes.

Italy, with the second highest death toll in the world after the United States, only started testing in nursing homes last week.

France includes nursing home deaths in its official tally of fatalities but they need first to have been tested and confirmed as having had COVID-19, the disease caused by coronavirus.

The same is true of Spain, meaning that those dying at home or in nursing homes with related symptoms - but untested - are not included in official figures.

Belgium's nursing homes now have sufficient face masks but still lack oxygen supplies for ventilators, Philippe De Backer, the federal minister tasked with coordinating the coronavirus response, has said.

After repeated calls from regional bodies, the Belgian government said all staff and residents at nursing homes would now be tested, in a process expected to take about three weeks.

Government officials said a fifth of nursing home residents and 14 per cent of staff had been confirmed as having coronavirus based on some 11,000 tests conducted on Tuesday.
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Linkedin Budi Sutrisno (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Wed, April 15, 2020 18:46 636 fc6853813033f564188675f8bd21d286 1 City Ahmad-Riza-Patria,Jakarta-deputy-governor,Gerindra-Party,anies-baswedan,Jakarta-administration,COVID-19,COVID-19-Jakarta,PSBB Free

Jakarta has officially got a new deputy governor with Gerindra Party politician Ahmad Riza Patria inaugurated on Wednesday, as the capital city struggles to contain the COVID-19 pandemic that has taken a heavy toll on public health and the economy.

Riza took an oath to serve in the long-vacant position at a ceremony presided over by President Joko "Jokowi" Widodo at the State Palace, which was attended by only a few guests in compliance with physical distancing protocols.

Those present, including Jakarta Governor Anies Baswedan and Defense Minister Prabowo Subianto, all wore masks and were asked to keep their distance.

Rizas appointment comes after Jakarta, Indonesia's economic center, imposed large-scale social restrictions (PSBB) to curb the spread of the contagious virus that has crippled the economy and brought the city to a halt.

Residents have been told to stay home and avoid unnecessary travel, with schools, public places and offices closed and public transportation services limited.

Read also: COVID-19: Confusion in Jakarta on first workday under partial lockdown

Only businesses operating in the financial, fuel, food, medicine, retail, water, communications and logistics sectors are exempted from the 14-day restrictions.

The partial lockdown has been imposed since Friday last week and is set to remain in place until April 24.

Speaking after the ceremony, Riza said he hoped he could help Anies address the complex set of challenges facing the city.

We hope this issue [the COVID-19 outbreak] can be resolved properly. I hope I can help the governor deal with COVID-19. I have promised the President I will diligently carry out my duties as deputy governor, Riza said.

Jakarta has been the region hardest hit by COVID-19 in the country, with 2,474 positive confirmed cases reported, nearly half of the official nationwide tally of 5,136 confirmed cases, as of Wednesday.

The capital has also reported the most deaths from the disease, with 242 fatalities out of the country's official death toll of 469.

Riza said he would begin work Thursday, and would meet with Anies and administration officials to be given an introduction to the city's programs.

Read also: World Bank suggests firms hibernate during COVID-19 pandemic

I have met with the governor, who explained the situation concerning the coronavirus. We will work together to implement the PSBB, he said.

The seat of deputy governor had remained vacant for more than a year after Gerindra politician Sandiaga Uno resigned in August 2018 to become the running mate of the party's chairman, Prabowo Subianto, in the 2019 presidential election.

Riza was elected as the Jakarta deputy governor for the remainder of the 2017-2022 term after securing 81 votes from the City Council on April 6, beating Nurmansyah Lubis, a contender from the Prosperous Justice Party (PKS), who gained 17 votes.

Jakarta Council speaker Prasetyo Edi Marsudi said he hoped Riza could help Anies to support the poor and vulnerable residents of the capital, who had been hardest hit by the pandemic.

Please oversee the distribution of social aid. Also, I ask that the quality of cloth masks in aid packages given to the residents be improved in accordance with World Health Organization standards, he said.
YEREVAN.  The first court session on the criminal case of Armenias 5th Channel television owner Armen Tavadyan and Varuzhan Mkrtchyan took place Wednesday.

But at the hearing, Artur Mkrtchyan, Chairman of the Court of General Jurisdiction of Yerevan, transferred this case to Judge Karen Farkhoyan. Tavadyan's lawyer Hovhannes Khudoyan informed Armenian News-NEWS.am about this.

This criminal case has been joined to the activist Vardges Gaspari v. Armen Tavadyan criminal case, which Judge Farkhoyan already presides over.

Tavadyan is accused of bribing a victim of the March 1, 2008 criminal case in order to give false testimony in court. He was detained for two months.

On March 12, the Criminal Court of Appeal ruled to release Armen Tavadyan from pretrial custody. His lawyer Hovhannes Khudoyan had told reporters that the reason for granting their respective appeal was the absence of a reasonable doubt.
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The National Science Foundation (NSF) has awarded a senior research grant for $237,925 to Lycoming College faculty member, Jessica Munson, Ph.D., assistant professor of archaeology and anthropology, for work on her study, Long-Term Impacts of Institutionalized Inequality on Household Wealth and Well-Being. The NSF grant will provide the means for Munson and her team of international researchers and students to conduct a large-scale excavation project at the ancient Maya site of Altar de Sacrificios, a site located in the southern Maya lowlands of Guatemala.

Inequality is an intrinsic element of large-scale human societies, and this grant from the NSF is enabling us to better understand how disparities in wealth and power differentially impacted the human condition in the past  an area that has not been well studied until now, said Munson. With its long-term perspective, archaeology is poised to make significant contributions to examining the impacts of permanent institutionalized inequality on the everyday lives of past people.

Munson explained that studying the distribution of wealth and well-being in ancient societies requires a dataset that is representative of the range of socioeconomic differences that were present in the past. Combining new archaeological investigations with analyses of legacy data, Munson and her team will collect and analyze a large sample of household archaeological data spanning the Middle Preclassic to Terminal Classic time periods (ca. 950 BCE-950 CE) at Altar de Sacrificios.

The planned excavations will sample between 40-50 households identified in recent settlement surveys conducted by the Proyecto Arqueologico Altar de Sacrificios, collecting data from burials, domestic artifacts, and residential architecture to generate multiple quality of life indices. Studying the longitudinal changes and disparities in household wealth, social well-being, and health will produce a more detailed understanding of the impacts of increasing political power on socioeconomic disparities over the span of about 2000 years of Maya prehistory.

The data generated from this project will facilitate an innovative conceptual framework and methodology to analyze multiple kinds of household inequality, providing an important dataset for future comparative studies. Understanding how ancient societies responded and adapted to political instability and socioeconomic differences in the past can provide important lessons as societies confront similar challenges today. This research is also designed to improve quality of life concerns for local communities near the field site and project laboratory.

With a duration of three years, the study will provide Lycoming College students with significant opportunities to become involved in all phases of research, including excavations and artifact analyses conducted in the project laboratory located in Guatemala.

Munson is principal investigator of the Altar de Sacrificios archaeological project, which has also received funding from the Archaeological Institute of America, the Rust Family Foundation, and the Wenner-Gren Foundation.
A boutique hotel in North Wales has been banned from installing solar panels to protect the view of an historic castle.

The architect of the Llety Arall hotel in Caernarfon, Wales, had drawn up plans for eco-friendly solar panels but planners in Gwynedd Council refused planning permission and said the panels would ruin the view of Caernarfon Castle.

The council has been accused of inconsistencies because their headquarters, only 50 yards away from the hotel, already has solar panels.

Close proximity: Gwynedd Council's building refused permission for solar panels to be built on roof of the Llety Arall hotel, despite their own offices having panels in view of Caernarfon Castle

The Llety Arall hotel in Caernarfon, Wales, had pans for solar panels rejected by Gwynedd Council who claimed the panels would ruin the view from the castle

Architect Selwyn Jones said: 'Gwynedd Council has declared that there is a climate crisis. Llety Arall has, in turn, declared a climate crisis.

'Our aim is to be as carbon free as possible. To contribute to this, it is essential to provide sufficient panels to generate as much electricity as possible.

'But it that while it is acceptable for the council to install their own panels, it is not willing to allow other people to do it.'

Planning chiefs on Gwynedd Council said the addition of new solar panels would clutter the views from the 11th century castle's Eagle Tower.

The hotel is appealing the decision and has pointed out that the council headquarters has similar panels - and is also in view of the castle.

The headquarters of Gwynedd Council boasts an impressive set of solar panels but refused the application of the hotel only 50 yards away

The Llety Arall hotel were refused permission to install solar panels which they wanted to help become carbon free

The appeal said: 'The council appears inconsistent in applying this policy.

'The council has also taken advantage of their permitted development rights as a local authority to approve the erection of an extensive collection of solar panels on their own headquarters building.

'The location is part of an important view segment of the Eagle Tower at the Castle.'

The Llety Arall was transformed from a gym into a seven-bed hotel offering a unique 'Welsh experience' after being taken over by a community group.

The proposed solar panels would 'clutter' the view from the castle's Eagle Tower. The 11th century castle held the investiture of Prince Charles as Prince of Wales

It advertises itself as: 'A Community enterprise which offers flexible accommodation for individuals, couples, families and groups in the heart of Caernarfon.

'The ideal accommodation to discover the best of Caernarfon as the most Welsh speaking town in the world.'

An appeal will be heard by independent inspectors who are expected to make a decision later this year.
Hes a young buck, a social guy, and we have rules. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have rules. And he is at an age that is the zenith of Youre not the boss of me. He bridles against our despotic reign of safety and common sense.

Coronavirus sequestering reminds me of the inchoate terror I last felt when he was 3 years old and he slipped from my hand and crossed a highway median. Come back here! Oh my God, youre going to get yourself killed!

Within the first 48 hours after he came home to us, March 14, he went out on a date. At 11:30 p.m. on a Saturday. With the excuse that he was just stepping out to put some things in his car.

And then he didnt come back. Normally, I wouldnt be awake, but as a hypervigilant mother, I was. I lost my flipping mind. Where are you? There is a pandemic! Youre not supposed to go out!

My husband was all, Hes 22. Thats what young men do. Hes entitled to his privacy.

Yeah, that advice is so March 12, 2020.

There was drama. He came back alive. With hickeys. I shouted at him about endangering others and respect. I levied the curse that someday my future grandchildren will torture him with risk-taking stunts. (Assuming we all live through this.)

Hes been good since then. (The girlfriend left for Alabama. That helps.) He stays mostly indoors, does his online homework. But this whole virus thing has stirred up my parental dread. From the moment he was born, Ive carried this terror  that despite my very best efforts, Ill fail at this most primal of human goals  to keep my offspring alive.

Like most, I learned to suppress the terror, not let it overwhelm me lest I become that parent  the helicopter harpy, the worrywart, the playgroup mommy who disinfects all the toys. Now, thanks to 24/7 Covid-19 coverage, I am that parent. #washyourhands.

Its not just the germy threat he poses to himself and others. Its that Im anxious all the time because I live with him. For nearly four years I have not lived with him and Ive been blissfully ignorant of any hare-brained thing he might do. As a mother, I know too intimately what hes capable of. Like that time he broke his arm riding his bike down a flight of stairs. Or when he sliced off part of his ear in a sauna (dont ask). I could hardly control him when I was in full possession of my parenting powers.

All this youthful energy needs structure, and Im too damn old to patrol the perimeter any longer. It makes me appreciate how other cultures have dealt with this age group through arranged marriage and military conscription. Now Im soft. I got used to the empty nest.

Ordinarily (will ordinary ever become a thing again?) I would welcome a little risk-taking and take a secret pride in my sons independence and hell-bent ways. Now I want to wrap him in a cocoon of suffocating maternal love and disinfectant. Dont leave me! Dont touch that!

When I was his age, in 1988, I went to South Africa to interview anti-apartheid activists for a year. There was no global communication then. No email. Not even reliable long-distance phone calls. I think I sent my parents a buoyant postcard that said, Got tear-gassed today.

Mom, Dad, I am so sorry. I dont know how you lived 53 years with the terror. Karma is a bitch.
A person's blood is collected for testing of coronavirus antibodies at a drive-through testing site in New York. (AP)

Both Europe and the United States could face another three waves of coronavirus, according to a World Health Organization (WHO) director.

Lawrence Gostin, a professor of public health at Johns Hopkins University, said that the worlds interconnected society meant that more outbreaks would happen even if the current one is controlled.

Speaking on the day that Donald Trump pledged to halt hundreds of millions of dollars in funding for the WHO, Gostin told BBC Radio 4s Today programme: COVID-19 is about to march through subsaharan Africa and perhaps the Indian subcontinent like an avalanche.

Lawrence Gostin warned of the potential of four waves of coronavirus. (AP)

Even if the United States and Europe were to get their COVID epidemics under control, if you've got COVID raging in other parts of the world, in this interconnected society it will come back to Europe and the United States.

Gostin, who argued against travel restrictions to prevent the spread of coronavirus in January, added: In fact I could predict that if it gets out of control in these lower income countries that we will see in the US and in Europe a second and a third wave and even a fourth wave of COVID.

So we're truly only as safe as the weakest link in the global chain.

Latest coronavirus news, updates and advice

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Trump halts WHO funding

Gostins comments come off the back of Donald Trumps decision to halt US funding of up to $500 million (400 million) for the WHO over its handling of the coronavirus pandemic.

The president was widely condemned after he accused the international body of "severely mismanaging and covering up" the spread of the virus.

Trump said the outbreak could have been contained at its source and spared lives had the UN health agency done a better job investigating reports coming out of China.

President Donald Trump speaks about the coronavirus in the Rose Garden of the White House. (AP)

He claimed the WHO failed to carry out its "basic duty" and must be held accountable.

Story continues

However, Downing Street said the organisation was playing an important role in tackling the spread of the virus, and scientists hit out at the "short-sighted" move.

The Prime Minister's official spokesman said: "Our position is that the UK has no plans to stop funding the WHO, which has an important role to play in leading the global health response.

"Coronavirus is a global challenge and it's essential that countries work together to tackle this shared threat.

Dangerous, short-sighted and politically motivated

Scientists railed against Trump's actions and stressed the need for international co-operation in tackling COVID-19.

Dr Michael Head, senior research fellow in global health at the University of Southampton, said: "Politically volatile leadership is rarely constructive or helpful at times of crisis.

Dr Stephen Griffin, associate professor at the University of Leeds School of Medicine, added: "This most recent intervention in public health policy by President Trump is perhaps one of the least productive, most short-sighted, self-motivated and hypocritical acts I have ever witnessed.

Peter Piot, director and professor of global health at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine said: "Halting funding to the WHO is a dangerous, short-sighted and politically motivated decision, with potential public health consequences for all countries in the world, whether they are rich or poor.

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The increased oil production by Saudi Arabia and Russia combined with the Covid-19 pandemic, have precipitated a global economic slowdown that has left oil and gas companies wondering in which direction the industry is heading, said experts from Deloitte, a leading provider of audit, tax, consulting, financial advisory and risk advisory services.

This is one of the topics discussed by these experts in the latest edition of the "Deloitte Middle East Point of View: Stay calm and be prepared."

In the spring 2020 issue of the magazine, they will look at what actions organizations need to take to future-proof themselves from crises.

In their article "Building resilience", Deloitte Middle East experts - Bart Cornelissen, the energy, resources and industrials leader and Yasmin Fansa, the manager of monitor - said the situation in the oil and gas industry had been further affected by the radical stay-at-home measures taken by governments globally to tackle the Covid-19 virus, drastically affecting oil demand and the larger global economy.

The authors ask the following question: As the oil industry faces the biggest crisis in decades, how should leaders build resilience in light of an uncertain future?

Future-proofing organizations is building resilience and placing it at the core of the organizations strategy, they say, addressing strategic drivers of various market environments to determine implications for industry dynamics and building optionality to gain flexibility to react to the most recent market developments quickly.

In his article on business transformation, Vuk Prelevic, Assistant Director, Financial Advisory, Deloitte Middle East, argues that companies are forced to navigate evolving complexities on a daily basis.

Take a step back and consider a plan for non-core, or underperforming operations that could benefit from a change in directory, he noted.

Adeel Khan Legari, the consulting manager at Deloitte Middle East and his co-author in their article on the importance of the role of the Project Management Office (PMO), Transforming tradition: the Project Management Office, argue the case for the PMO renouncing traditional practices to better respond to technological disruption.

Dinesh Kumar Kator, Director, and Arijit Bhattacharjee, Manager, Tax, Deloitte Middle East, in their article The hammer of economic substance: Will the shell crack?, argue that with the rapid advent of information technology and globalization, physical barriers and distances are no longer an impediment and businesses had to become agile.

Abi Man Joshi, Tax Director, Deloitte Qatar, Martin Walker, Tax Director & Head of Securities Taxes, Deloitte UK and Jallu Fehar, Associate Tax Director, Deloitte UK, discuss New Mandatory Disclosure Rules (MDR) that will come into effect in the European Union (EU) on July 1 for cross-border arrangements that concern at least one EU member state, and their far-reaching impact in the Middle East, in their article My house, my rules.

In Keeping pace with financial crime  A dynamic approach to Transaction Monitoring, Nick Athanasi, Partner, Nipun Srivastava, Director and Nicki Koller, Assistant Manager, Financial Advisory, Deloitte Middle East look at machine learning as an emerging focus area in transaction monitoring.

This issue of the ME POV also focuses on IFRS 9 and IFRS 17. Firas Anabtawi, Partner, and Marcelle Hazboun, Senior Manager, Audit & Assurance, Deloitte Middle East, look at the challenges of IFRS 9 modelling in the UAE banking industry.

Elias Maayeh, Partner, and Zeeshan Abbasi, Senior Manager, Risk Advisory, Deloitte Middle East, take an in-depth look at IFRS 17.-TradeArabia News Service
NEW HAVEN  Mayor Justin Elicker has issued an executive order that employees of retail stores and their customers must wear masks to help stop the spread of COVID-19, a dangerous viral disease that has infected 775 residents in the city and caused 19 deaths.

At the mayors virtual press conference Wednesday, Director of Public Health Maritza Bond also reported that she is monitoring three nursing homes in the city with coronavirus cases.

She said the Grimes Center, part of Yale New Haven Health, has 69 cases, compared to the 49 reported last week; the Mary Wade Home has 19, up from 10. Bond also said Regal Care, which she was reporting for the first time, has 11 cases. The director said the numbers include staff, as well as patients, testing positive for the coronavirus.

The executive order, Elickers fifth, covers such businesses as grocery stores, big-box stores or wholesale clubs that also sell food or beverages, restaurants and hotels where food is served, pharmacies, gas stations, convenience stores and liquor/package stores. It becomes effective Friday.

The mayor, in his order, points out that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has recommended that people wear cloth masks to protect others from contracting the virus.

The order does not name any penalty but says, This order is subject to enforcement by the Director of the Health Department of the City of New Haven.

In a related COVID-19 issue, CVS, in conjunction with Abbott Laboratories, will be opening a rapid testing site for the virus at the former Gateway Community College facility on Sargent Drive on Friday, where they said up to 750 cars can be accommodated daily.

Peter Hvizdak / Hearst Connecticut Media

Persons with symptoms that meet the criteria set by the CDC must pre-register online at CVS.com where they will be given a time slot and a reference number, according to its website.

Peter Hvizdak / Hearst Connecticut Media

On the issue of masks, Elicker said the city has been getting complaints from residents that personnel and customers at retail stores were failing to wear masks, putting others in jeopardy. The mask does not protect the wearer, but it reduces transmission of the disease to others, according to medical experts.

Evidence shows that someone may have COVID-19 while not showing any signs and may still be able to spread the disease. As such, having widespread use of masks can reduce the spread of the virus, the mayor said in a statement. He also said it will help people get used to the masks, as the pandemic is not likely to end anytime soon.

On the number of positive cases in the city, Elicker said he assumes the 775 cases are probably an undercount as testing is still not reaching a wide enough demographic.

The mayor said city workers will be checking retail establishments for compliance with the mask order. He said they will be doing so to remind people, rather than penalize them. Elicker said employers can refuse customers who do not wear masks.

He encouraged residents to use cloth masks, which are easy to make, or a scarf, and said they should not be using N95 masks that are needed by medical personnel and are in short supply.

Police reported earlier on Wednesday that a person who was being held in the police lockup overnight was found unresponsive and later declared deceased at the hospital.

Police Chief Otoniel Reyes said he did not know how many others were being held in the lockup at the same time, but lately it has been between 3 and 4 persons. He said they are conducting an internal review.

We do not suspect that COVID-19 has anything to do with it, Reyes said. Elicker said it was important to clarify that given the concerns generally about persons in prisons contracting the disease.

mary.oleary@hearstmediact.com; 203-641-2577
Binita Jaiswal By

Express News Service

CHENNAI: Though Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Tuesday hinted that some relaxations may be allowed after April 20 to resume business activities, the manufacturers and exporters at Tirupur garment cluster in Chennai are skeptical about reopening of their factories.

Raja M Shanmugam, president of Tirupur Exporters' Association (TEA), said the current cause of worry is the rising number of coronavirus patients in Tirupur. The Prime Minister has clearly said that relaxation may be allowed from April 20 in places that are not virus hotspots, but after Chennai, Coimbatore and Tirupur districts have reported the highest number of coronavirus patients in the state, Shanmugam explained. Till Tuesday, 79 patients have been traced in Tirupur.

"Looking at the circumstances, we are not sure what decision the administration will take regarding reopening of our units. On Monday, we had a meeting with the district administration. We appealed them not to count the entire district as a hotspot. Instead, they should monitor the situation properly and provide us relaxation," Shanmugam said.

"If we are not allowed to run our factories, then we will suffer massive losses and it will take years for us to recover from it," he added. TEA members said they will meet government officials again soon.

It is important to mention that Tirupur Exporters Association has recently written to the Central and state governments to allow the textile cluster to reopen, so that they can send samples to clients in the US and Europe, and retain export orders for the spring-summer collection. Otherwise, they will lose their export customers forever to countries like China, Bangladesh and Pakistan, where factories are still functional.

"The road ahead seems very difficult for us. Being a cluster, along with manufacturing units, allied units such as the dyeing and embroidery units should also be granted permission to function. Only then will we be able to manufacture complete garments for exports," said S Shivanan, an exporter from the district.

There are over 10,000 garment manufacturing industries in Tirupur, employing over 6 lakh people. The cluster on an average exports textiles worth Rs 2,500 crore a month. Cotton knitwear sent from here are in much demand in European countries.
Shortly after this thing unleashed itself and we were put on lockdown, something in me broke psychologically, he said. It took me several days to work through the fact that friends of mine were on the front lines of this thing. It was so intense. It still is.

Not one to give in to despair, Mr. Kosoko has reconfigured Chameleon in order to bring people together from around the world, for idea sharing, for resource sharing, and hopefully for healing, he said. He calls it a global gesture in listening.

We need possibility in this moment, he added, and so thats really what Im trying to propose: a space to dream, to imagine, and to do that in community.

The days offerings include the release of the digital zine Chameleon: A Syllabus for Survival; the streaming of a prerecorded conversation between Mr. Kosoko and the choreographer Bill T. Jones; the premiere of an excerpt from the coming film Chameleon: A Visual Album; and a performance of Pidgin Chorus, a vocal section of Chameleon, by the works collaborators. Mr. Kosoko plans to host at least some of these events on Discord, a chat app used mostly by video game enthusiasts; anyone who prefers a less interactive experience can tune in on YouTube Live.

In organizing the online gathering, Mr. Kosoko has worked with the Curtis R. Priem Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center (better known as Empac) in Troy, N.Y., where he has had several creative residencies for Chameleon. It was Empacs engineers who introduced him to Discord, a platform that allows users to hear but not see one another.

Ashley Ferro-Murray, Empacs curator of theater and dance, has been meeting with Mr. Kosoko on Discord to test it out. She said that at times, although she cant see him, she feels as if they are physically present together.
If your child was born prematurely, Dr. Feldman-Winter recommended waiting until at least 12 months after your original due date to wean. Premature babies are at higher risk of SIDS, and evidence suggests that pacifiers can help to protect against it.

Sometimes parents are concerned that pacifiers might contribute to speech problems, but theres no solid body of evidence linking the two, said Diane Paul, Ph.D., a speech-language pathologist at the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association in Rockville, Md. Two small studies  one of about 70 2-to-6.5-year-olds in Arkansas and another of about 200 preschoolers in Australia, published in 2008 and 2018 respectively  found no difference in speech difficulties between children who used a pacifier and those who did not. One 2009 study of about 130 3-to-5-year-olds in Chile, however, did suggest that children who continued using a pacifier or sucking their fingers past age 3 were more likely to develop speech disorders than those who did not use a pacifier. It found no increased risk, however, for children who had used a pacifier for 3 years or less. If theres a link at all, its for preschool children whove used the pacifier for 3 years or more, said Dr. Paul, but larger studies are still needed to tease out these differences.

Another concern parents may have is that a pacifier might disrupt breastfeeding, but if your child is already using a pacifier, this fear isnt backed by solid science, said Dr. Feldman-Winter. The research on whether pacifiers interfere with successful breastfeeding is mixed and comes from the first few months of life, especially from the time before breastfeeding is fully established. The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends waiting to introduce a pacifier until after breastfeeding is well established, Dr. Feldman-Winter said, which means breastfeeding is going well and the baby is gaining weight and is able to latch and feed effectively, without causing any pain in the mother.

Decide on the right timing for you.

Once youve established that your child is ready to ditch her binky, now its time to figure out whether the timing is right for you. The next few days or weeks might be bumpier than usual. Your child may cry or scream more easily, demand more attention or be resistant to playing independently  and may need to be soothed in other ways. Take away the pacifier when youre confident that you can resist giving it back when the going gets tough, and youre prepared to cope with the possibility of getting less sleep yourself. (If youre about to have another baby, go on an extended family trip or start a new job, it might not be the right time.)

Either way, its not going to be fun. To be honest, theres no way to take away the pacifier thats going to be pleasant, said Walls. One mother, Anne Meade, said that she and her wife, Brielle, of Boston, decided their daughter would go cold turkey on her first birthday. Naps were a little rough for about a week, but other than that, she was fine, Meade, 37, said. And I did see a change in her over the next couple months that made me think, If I had waited, this could have been ugly.

Choose your method.

There are four common strategies for pulling the plug. Theres no evidence that one method is better than any other. You know your child best, Walls said, so choose the approach that you think will work for your child and that you can be consistent with.

Go cold turkey. Prepare your child by explaining what will happen, then take the pacifier away. This is the method Dr. Castellano used with his son when he was between 12 and 16 months old. If your child uses the pacifier throughout much of the day, you can first cut down to using it only in the car and at bedtime, and then just at bedtime. Finally, you can take it away completely.
Time to Reconsider Academic Collaboration With China: Australian Senator

Australian Senator Eric Abetz is urging Australian universities and government research organisations to reconsider their academic collaborations with the Chinese regime, amid concerns that the regime is attempting to control the narrative related to the origins of the CCP virus, commonly known as the coronavirus.

Abetz said that the restrictions placed by the Chinese regime on academic publications that report on the origins of the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus, commonly known as novel coronavirus have reaffirmed the view that the Chinese regime seeks to stifle and control academic freedom within its own country and others.

We know from experience China has been pushing to exert undue and unwanted influence into our higher academic system and this latest development must prompt swift consideration, Abetz said in a statement on April 14. This is a serious wake-up call for the Australian tertiary education sector and the [Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation].

CCP infiltration within Australian universities is well-documented and is evidenced through the workings of the Partys United Front bodies, and Confucius Institutes, where free speech and intellectual freedom are often discouraged and condemned. In one instance, an Australian student, Drew Pavlou, received abusive messages and death threats after he supported Pro-Hong Kong students at the University of Queensland in July 2019.

On April 10, a directive that was issued by the Chinese regimes Ministry of Educations science and technology department was posted on the website of the Fudan University in Shanghai. The post, which was related to universities publishing research, was taken down after enquiries were made to the university about the post, reported News Corp.

The directive stipulated that academic papers, which report on the origins of the virus, must be strictly and tightly managed. The document added that academic papers are required to undergo an additional vetting process and be approved by a special task force before being submitted for publication.

From the outset, Beijing has attempted to strictly control the narrative, covering up the breakout in the wet markets, silencing the whistle-blowers who spoke out on the lethality and contagiousness of the virus, and bringing the World Health Organisation under its influence to bolster whatever little credibility it has left, Abetz said.

Experts who conducted statistical modelling, eyewitness accounts from locals, and documents previously provided to The Epoch Times have shown that Chinese authorities concealed the true scale of the outbreak in Wuhan and other parts of China.

According to a report by Washington-based think tank American Enterprise Institute, there should be an estimated 2.9 million confirmed cases of the CCP virus in China, instead of less than 100,000 known cases currently reported by the Chinese regime.

Additionally, the lab origin theory has gained prominence partly due to the fact that Wuhan is the home of Chinas only bio lab certified to work with the most dangerous pathogens such as Ebola or SARS.

It is particularly insidious to eliminate the facts surrounding the origins of the virus as this will impact the world scientific and medical communitys ability to research and gather the information that can help stop the spread and mitigate the damage of the virus.

It will generally raise doubts on any future medical or scientific information emanating from China and in particular any medical or scientific information on the coronavirus, Abetz said.

Epoch Times reporters Petr Svab, Nicole Hao and Frank Fang contributed to this report.
Although unquestionably essential to flattening the curve and saving lives, school closures are limiting opportunities for close human contact, which can have harmful effects on student health and well-being. And, from a developmental perspective, teenagers may be hit especially hard.

The introduction of social-distancing measures and stay-at-home orders to combat the novel coronavirus has left many young people feeling frustrated and robbed of highly anticipated opportunities. Imagine you just got your drivers license. Youre starting to date. Your team finally clinched the playoffs. Prom is right around the corner. But now youre stuck all day at home, within 100 feet of your parents, for conceivably months on end.

Yet, beyond the disappointment of canceled events and extracurriculars, social distancing can interfere with the basic developmental needs of teenagerswho are evolutionarily wired to become increasingly independent from parents and increasingly dependent on their peers .

Biological changes in adolescence, such as increased oxytocin receptors during puberty, heighten the pleasure of social company. And friendships, in particular, have been shown to excite reward systems in the adolescent brain. Thus, it is no surprise that, relative to other age groups, teenagers spend the most time with their peers. In fact, high school students time spent with peers is more than double the amount spent with parents and other adults.

The unquestionable necessity of social distancing is likely to throw these developmental patterns out of whack."

Yet, COVID-19 cares little about adolescents social and biological imperatives. Instead, the unquestionable necessity of social distancing is likely to throw these developmental patterns out of whack in ways that could take a toll on teenagers health, behavior, and academic performance. Here are a few changes parents and educators may see:

First, adolescent isolation can increase psychological distress. Even without a global pandemic, adolescence is the typical onset for mental-health disorders, such as anxiety and depression. Adding stress and social isolation into the mix may heighten psychiatric vulnerability and exacerbate existing psychological difficulties.

Second, the absence of in-person peer interaction can negatively affect youths social skills , including reduced comprehension of nonverbal emotional cues.

Third, without friends to hang out with, boredom can give way to risky behaviors. In addition to providing a source of stimulation, deviance and rule breaking can function as an opportunity to exert independence from parents when physical distancing is not an option. For example, past research has shown that teenagers with controlling parents engage in higher rates of risky behavior , like underage drinking and cheating on tests.

Finally, without classmates within arms reach to grapple with challenges collaboratively, school performance is also likely to take a hit. And given that spending time with friends is the primary reason teenagers look forward to going to school, academic motivation may significantly decline.

With no immediate end to social distancing in sight, it is important for educators and school administrators to think critically and creatively about how to meet adolescents needs despite these constraints. As developmental scientists who study adolescent social and emotional development, we hope to offer some ideas.

First, technology and online tools can provide unique opportunities for teenagers to connect with friends and classmates while maintaining physical distance. Encouraging young people to create content on social media (the video platform TikTok, for example), rather than using solitary video games or passively scrolling through celebrity photos , can offer an outlet for teenagers to harness their boredom into collaborative efforts and self-expression.

To promote stability in students relationships and encourage peer interaction throughout the virtual school day, teachers can capitalize on videoconference platforms for class discussions and small-group assignments. Similarly, students can use virtual study groups to fulfill social needs while making academic progress.

Of course, these suggestions presume that students have reliable and consistent access to technology, which is not the case for many. This means that flexibility and outside-the-box thinking are paramount for meeting the needs of all young people and promoting educational equity.

As the duration of shelter-in-place orders lengthens, it will also become increasingly important for teachers to monitor the mental and physical health of their students. While consistent communication can provide students with a sense of stability amidst the prevailing uncertainty of the future, recent evidence suggests that nearly a quarter of teenagers are connecting less than once a week with their teachers. Whether it be through regular check-ins or journaling assignments, making an extra effort to offer support and provide connection is likely to go a long way.

Finally, given that teachers own stress can impede student well-being, it is essential that teachers engage in self-care and capitalize on existing, shared resources to promote students academic and social-emotional learning .

Now may also be an ideal time to promote adolescent involvement in civic activities. Despite often being geared toward risk-taking, teenagers desire opportunities to contribute to the common good. Teachers can assign students to write about the social issues they are most passionate about and read about inspiring teen-activist groups that have emerged as powerful voices amid COVID-19, fighting against disparate access to child care, food, and technology. New York Citys Teens Take Charge , for example, provides online read, watch, and listen opportunities for youths to stay informed and even get involved during this coronavirus crisis.

Teenagers are hungry for exploration, social connection, and independencethe kinds of developmental drives that have become directly threatened by the same measures that are absolutely essential for public health. Therefore, although adolescents are not considered high risk from a medical perspective, they are still facing very real social and emotional challenges. Despite widespread uncertainty surrounding the future, it is essential that we all look out for adolescents, be sympathetic to their frustrations, and make sure that they have the resources and supports in place for optimal development.
The Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) has berated the presidency for throwing tantrums at Nigerians for complaining about President Muham...





The Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) has berated the presidency for throwing tantrums at Nigerians for complaining about President Muhammadu Buharis failure to provide palliatives to cushion the effect of the COVID-19 pandemic in our country.





The party said rather than listening to Nigerians, shed its corruption and take urgent steps to address the issue of panacea being raised by poor masses whose means of livelihood have been crippled by the restriction order, the Buhari Presidency chose to spew vituperations against the PDP just to divert public attention from its failure.





The party urged Buhari to immediately ensure cash and food items get to Nigerians to cushion the effect of the COVID-19 pandemic.





PDP spokesman, Kola Ologbondiyan, in a statement Tuesday night, said what Nigerians expected was for the president to accept his lapses and immediately take steps to address the issue of palliatives.

For the avoidance of doubt, all that the PDP has done, even before the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic in our country, is to counsel the Buhari Presidency like other Nigerians, on how to safeguard our nation from the pandemic, most of which were largely ignored.





From the moment that the index case was established, our party had continued to advise Mr. President on how to manage the situation. The PDP had also consistently requested of Mr. President to provide an economic palliative that will help the country manage the fall out of the pandemic.





All that our party had done had been in the best interest of Nigerians and the good governance of our nation. We believe that this is the duty which PDP owes Nigerians at this critical time.





The PDP therefore urges the Buhari Presidency to desist from this attempt to politicize the COVID-19 effort and take urgent steps to address the concerns being expressed by our party and majority of Nigerians in the overall determination to check the spread of the pandemic in our country.




Nick Cordero's wife Amanda Kloots has delivered another update on the Broadway star's medical condition.

Calling it 'really, really good news,' the 38-year-old fitness trainer said Nick's 'heart and lungs are getting stronger' as he continues his COVID-19 fight.

The turn for the better comes after Nick had to be resuscitated on Saturday after undergoing emergency surgery to alleviate a blockage of blood flow to his leg.

Good news: Nick Cordero's wife Amanda Kloots has delivered another update on the Broadway star's medical condition

'They're weaning him off the ECMO machine,' continued Amanda, referring to the apparatus which helps support the heart and lungs.

She then said that if all went according to plan, doctors would be able to remove the ECMO machine on Thursday, allowing Nick's heart and lungs to operate on their own.

'Big win,' exclaimed the mother-of-one.

However, 'we still need him to wake up,' continued Amanda, imploring fans to sing and dance for Nick at 3pm PST.

The viral movement even swept up model Devon Windsor, who posted a video of her performance in honor of Nick on Tuesday.

Fighter: However, 'we still need him to wake up,' continued Amanda, imploring fans to sing and dance for Nick at 3pm PST

Stars align: The viral movement even swept up model Devon Windsor, who posted a video of her performance in honor of Nick on Tuesday

Kloots teared up on Monday while sharing an update on her husband of two years, Tony nominee Nick Cordero, who's battling COVID-19 at the ICU in Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles.

'He's doing okay guys. He's fighting,' the 38-year-old fitness trainer said via Instastory from their Laurel Canyon home.

'FaceTiming him has been wonderful, for me at least. Me and his mom have gotten to FaceTime him now a couple times. It's very special and I can see him fighting [while unconscious]. Today is a big day and we really need some heart and lung strength to come through...so keep sending up those prayers, guys.'

'He's doing okay guys. He's fighting': Amanda Kloots teared up on Monday while sharing an update on her husband of two years, Tony nominee Nick Cordero, who's battling COVID-19 at the ICU in Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles

Amanda then recalled a romantic story from when they started dating in 2014 about how the Canadian 41-year-old secretly mastered jumping rope in her honor while he was visiting his sick father in Ontario.

'He told me, "When I was taking care of my dad, I would go to the gym every morning and I taught myself to jump rope so I could win you back,"' Kloots smiled.

'I love this story, obviously because it's about jumping rope, but just a cute story to give you a little insight into what a special guy he is and who he is and the kind of heart he has.'

Nick is on a ventilator, a dialysis machine, and he had to be resuscitated on Saturday after undergoing emergency surgery to alleviate a blockage of blood flow to his leg.

The 38-year-old fitness trainer said via Instastory from their Laurel Canyon home: 'FaceTiming him has been wonderful...I can see him fighting [while unconscious]. Today is a big day and we really need some heart and lung strength to come through' (pictured March 19)

'Keep sending up those prayers, guys!' Amanda then recalled a romantic story from when they started dating in 2014 about how the Canadian 41-year-old secretly mastered jumping rope in her honor while he was visiting his sick father in Ontario

Kloots smiled: 'I love this story, obviously because it's about jumping rope, but a cute story to give you a little insight into what a special guy he is and who he is and the kind of heart he has'

'I got to FaceTime with him today it was the first time I'd seen him since dropping him off at the ER 12 days ago,' The Irishman dancer revealed on Sunday.

'I told him he had to fight. I told him he is strong and can do this...The doctors are still concerned about his right leg and we need him to start making small responses off sedation. These are the next two goals that need to happen.'

Amanda and Cordero - who are parents to 10-month-old son Elvis - originally met while performing in the musical Bullets Over Broadway together at the St. James Theatre in Manhattan.

Kloots has urged her 98K Instagram followers to 'keep playing and dancing' to Elvis Presley's 1957 song Got a Lot o' Livin' to Do in honor of the Mob Town star.

'The doctors are still concerned about his right leg': Nick is on a ventilator, a dialysis machine, and he had to be resuscitated on Saturday after undergoing emergency surgery to alleviate a blockage of blood flow to his leg (pictured February 14)

Castmates: Amanda and Cordero originally met while performing in the musical Bullets Over Broadway together at the St. James Theatre in Manhattan

Show business couple: The Inside Game actor and The Irishman dancer are parents to 10-month-old son Elvis (pictured February 1)

Oscar nominee Florence Pugh took note and shared a video on Monday of herself dancing up a storm to Got a Lot o' Livin' to Do and asking her 1.4M followers to do the same.

'I was wondering if I could ask a huge, huge favor of you all,' the British 24-year-old said via Instastory.

'Our good friends Nick Cordero and Amanda Kloots are suffering at the moment. Nick has been battling coronavirus for the past two weeks and he's been in critical condition for the past week and he's in hospital every day fighting for his life. And it's really f***ing scary.'

The Ohio native - who used to be a Radio City Rockette - has launched a $9.99/month subscription service for her workout videos via her website as a way to make money.

Going viral: Kloots has urged her 98K Instagram followers to 'keep playing and dancing' to Elvis Presley's 1957 song Got a Lot o' Livin' to Do in honor of the Mob Town star

'I was wondering if I could ask a huge, huge favor of you all!' Oscar nominee Florence Pugh took note and shared a video of herself on Monday dancing up a storm to Got a Lot o' Livin' to Do and asking her 1.4M followers to do the same
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The coronavirus pandemic is threatening to bankrupt California's vast system of community health clinics, which one in six Californians depend on for basic health care needs.

Many clinics in Los Angeles are the first stop for low-income, homeless and uninsured patients who think they may be infected by the virus. But other services have slowed to a crawl, hitting clinic budgets with a double whammy.

These safety-net clinics worry how much longer they can keep their doors open.

"Fifty percent of our revenue is cut and expenses are not," said Barbara Hines, CEO of QueensCare Health Centers in Central L.A.

NO PATIENTS, NO MONEY

Many community clinics are located in low-income neighborhoods and service a lot of essential, low-wage workers and people of color. Many patients are on Medi-Cal or Medicaid and clinics get reimbursed for their visits.

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But clinics in L.A. have halted most routine visits to limit the spread of COVID-19, and that means lost revenue.

AltaMed Health Services, which runs a network of 35 clinics in L.A. and Orange counties, and South L.A.'s St. John's Well Child and Family Center had to close their dental clinics, which contributed to a significant loss in reimbursable visits.

Many of these networks have clinics that vary in size and operating budget, but they share a common concern: they are running short on money.

Besides the stark drop in patient visits, clinics are also now incurring additional costs, including personal protective equipment (PPE) for health care workers treating patients known or suspected to be infected with COVID-19. Due to the nationwide shortage, PPE prices have skyrocketed.

Jim Mangia, CEO of St. John's Well Child and Family Center, said his clinics have set up COVID-19 triage tents to evaluate and test patients, adding further stress to their budget.

Telehealth, which many clinics are using to treat their patients over the phone or internet,has also added costs, including software and training.

AltaMed is projecting a financial loss of $125 million through December if the pandemic continues.

"I think it's easy to see if we don't get the money we need, the business is going to have to make tough decisions," AltaMed spokesperson Berenice Nunez Constant said.

IS GOVERNMENT RELIEF ENOUGH?

Last month the federal government allocated $100 million to clinics nationwide to help with the COVID-19 response. And last week, the Trump administration, through the CARES Act, awarded an additional $1.3 billion to health centers.

However, L.A. clinics say their portion won't go far.

Mangia said St. John's will get close to $3 million, but that's only enough to keep their clinics open for about a month. Their operating budget is about $1.6 million a week.

Hines said QueensCare is applying for other emergency grants to make up for the gap in federal funding.

For its part, AltaMed joined a coalition of 35 other clinic networks in the U.S. to advocate for $8 billion in additional aid from the government.

Ninez Ponce, a professor at UCLA Fielding School of Public Health, thinks the government must give additional funding to avoid losing a vital health care resource for low-income people.

"A catastrophic loss of funding for clinics would ultimately mean that millions of patients in the safety net would potentially face additional barriers to accessing quality, comprehensive care," Ponce said.

In the meantime, clinics around L.A. are still operating.

"It's pretty stressful out here," Mangia from St. John's said. "Being the provider on the front lines, providing most of the testing and the triage, without the resources that we need."
(Bloomberg Opinion) -- Apple and Google have generated much hope and controversy with their plan to create a Covid-19 tracking app. Too bad it wont work.

Public debate has focused on how to balance the right to privacy with the potential to save lives. Theres ample reason for skepticism -- for example, anonymous Bluetooth tracking can be deanonymized. But thats not what I care about. What concerns me is that the whole concept of a tradeoff is false from the start, because no app can fix the thoroughly inequitable U.S. health care system.

Before we go there, lets talk about why people are so psyched about the app. They point to the breathlessly marketed story of Singapore, which used smartphone technology to combat Covid-19. Yet the countrys prime minister attributed its success to traditional detective work  that is, intensively interviewing the infected and tracking down contacts. Only one in six people in Singapore have downloaded the smartphone app, which is opt-in just like the Apple/Google offering. It wasnt really that crucial.

Now consider the app in the U.S. context. To be effective, it must help the most vulnerable -- people who, due to characteristics such as race, income, age and occupation are disproportionately exposed and dying. Yet many of them simply dont have smartphones. Theyre homeless, in nursing homes, in prisons. Its the same old access story, similar to how Verily, a division of Googles parent company Alphabet, can help people find and arrange coronavirus testing -- but only if they have a Google account. The people who need the service most are locked out.

Thats not all. Assume for a moment that all these people had phones, downloaded the app and would thus find out if they were exposed. What would they do? Many arent insured, so testing and treatment would be prohibitively expensive, even if it were available. Or suppose they have gig economy jobs, such as Instacart delivery. What good would it do them to be told they were exposed? They know theyre at high risk. They need the work, otherwise they would have quit already. And if they really were sick, why would they risk their livelihood by volunteering the information to an app?

Story continues

President Trump has said hospitals will be compensated for treating uninsured Covid-19 patients, but it's unclear how that limited money will be distributed, and people might be wary of risking it. Even before the current crisis, nearly a quarter of Americans avoided medical care because of cost considerations. For that matter, millions of undocumented workers are likely not eligible for help. Even insured people are reasonably worried about getting hit with multi-thousand-dollar surprise out-of-network charges, even when their hospital is in-network.

Its starting to look like the app will be helpful only to people who have money and good health insurance, not the people we should be worrying about.

So what would work? In addition to detective work, Singapore covered the cost of all treatments and tests - which were widespread and accessible -- and provided sick pay for people who had to stay home. The U.S. has a long way to go to match that. Even the best smartphone app wont solve systemic problems.

This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of Bloomberg LP and its owners.

Cathy ONeil is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. She is a mathematician who has worked as a professor, hedge-fund analyst and data scientist. She founded ORCAA, an algorithmic auditing company, and is the author of Weapons of Math Destruction.

For more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.com/opinion

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Theog legislator Rakesh Singha on Wednesday demanded that the state government announce a minimum support price for the cherry crop to protect growers across the state from losses amid the novel coronavirus outbreak.

The CPIM leader said that he and Kalash Federation chairperson Saneepni Bhardwaj had convened a meeting of eighteen co-operative societies in Thanedhar area of Shimla on April 12 to take up the issues being faced by cherry growers.

The representatives said that they were facing problems in harvesting the crop, packing, transporting, and marketing the produce in different markets, including the Azadpur Mandi, which is the largest market, Singha said.

Kumarsain sub-divisional magistrate, DSP Rampur and senior officers of the state government were present at the meeting.

Cherry and other stone fruits such as peach, plum, nectarine, and apricot are expected to be ready for harvest by the last week of April or latest by the first week of May.

There is apprehension among the stone-fruit farmers that due to the coronavirus, farmers will incur heavy losses. The government should immediately announce an MSP for cherrym which should be at least 50/Kg, said Singha.

The representatives of cooperative societies said the Delhi markets under ordinary circumstances order 40,000 boxes per day but this year commission agent will not purchase more that 10,000 boxes per day, Singha said.

He also urged the government to ensure proper supply of packing material from manufacturing units in Baddi and Nalagarh and ensure the produce reaches the markets.
When Nicholas Dahl, 36, called Chase Bank to find out about his options for mortgage forbearance at the end of March, an automated voice informed him the wait time would be 43 hours and 45 minutes. Dahl, who runs his family's art transportation business, hasn't been able to draw a paycheck since all nonessential businesses in Illinois were shuttered on March 21 due to the coronavirus pandemic. And he doesn't know how much longer he and his wife will be able to keep making payments on the three-bedroom house in the Chicago suburbs where they're raising their 8-year-old daughter.

After three hours and 45 minutes on hold, and several times where he heard a woman saying "hello" before going back to the call music, he finally hung up. He emailed the bank for information instead.

Chase responded that he could receive mortgage forbearance for 90 days. During those three months, Dahl wouldn't have to make his payments and wouldn't incur late fees, get reported to credit agencies, or risk foreclosure. But once that period was over? All of the missed payments would come due at once.

(After this piece was published, a Chase Home Lending spokesperson contacted us with this statement. Over these 90 days we will be in communication with our customers to make sure they have the help they need. ... We're just holding tight for [government agency] guidance on how to handle each of these loans.")

"I don't really think it's worth it," says Dahl, who's losing about $5,000 in income each month his business is closed. "I dont really want to pay four mortgage payments in one.

Dahl is one of many thousands of Americans who are having trouble making their monthly mortgage payments due to the coronavirus pandemicor will soon, if the crisis drags on. In the past month, nearly 17 million Americans have filed for unemployment as shelter-in-place orders, social distancing measures, and nonessential business closures went into effect. Last week, economists estimated the unemployment rate was about 13%worse than during the Great Recession. And those numbers don't even include many out-of-work, self-employed, and gig workers along with those who've had trouble filing their claims because unemployment offices are overwhelmed.

The widespread misery spread by COVID-19 has left many homeowners scrambling to figure out how to pay their mortgages. Homeowners with government-backed loansand even many withoutare being offered up to 12 months of forbearance, doled out in 90-day chunks. But this temporary fix could result in another wave of foreclosures if additional assistance isn't provided.

Many homeowners could be asked to pay back all of those missed mortgage bills in one lump sum at the end of the forbearance period, a near impossible feat for many who can't afford their payments today and don't know when the economy will recover.

Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and the Federal Housing Administration say their borrowers, who make up slightly more than half of all buyers, are never required to make lump-sum payments. They also offer various assistance plans, some more generous than others.

But even those homeowners will also eventually have to make good on what they owe, a hardship for those out of work. Those who can't could eventually lose their homes.

We are concerned about whats going on right now, with many people going into these forbearance plans without a clear sense of what will happen at the end," says Joseph Sant, deputy general counsel for the Center for New York City Neighborhoods. The nonprofit organization promotes and protects affordable homeownership.

If we dont see further action from Congress to fill this hole ... we could see another foreclosure crisis when these forbearances end," warns Sant.

Dahl's uncertainty over what would happen at the end of his forbearance period prompted him to tap his savings and his wife's ongoing salary as a dental assistant to make his $1,700 mortgage payment for their Rolling Meadows, IL, home. But the family can't afford to do this indefinitely if he can't get back to work. He's already lost out on thousands of dollars of annual revenue, as many of the bigger art shows have been cancelled.

"I dont like to leave things to chance, and I dont want to lose my house because of something that is out of my control," says Dahl. Mortgage companies should be a lot more flexible. If they show flexibility, we will not have a repeat of '08."

The foreclosure crisis was in the rearviewuntil the coronavirus

Before the pandemic, the foreclosure crisis that followed the housing bust and lingered after the Great Recession had seemed firmly in the rearview.

In January, just 0.4% of mortgages were in some stage of foreclosure, according to the most recent data released by real estate data company CoreLogic. Meanwhile, only 3.5% of mortgages were delinquent, which means they were at least 30 days late.

But there are troubling signs those numbers could rise. About 3.74% of all mortgages were in forbearance in the week ending April 5, according to the Mortgage Bankers Association, a national trade group. That's compared with just 0.25% of loans in forbearance in the week ending March 2.

The association expects the number of homeowners requesting forbearance to steadily increase.

About 15 million homeowners could rely on forbearance to get them through this crisis, or nearly a third of all single-family mortgages, predicts Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody's Analytics.

That could result in roughly 2 million foreclosures, says Zandi. To put that into perspective, there were around 7 million foreclosures as a result of the last housing bust.

I dont think a lump sum works, at least for most homeowners," says Zandi. If there isn't additional assistance offered, "there will be a lot of credit problems down the road, delinquencies, defaults, and foreclosures."

Housing advocates are urging different kinds of assistance

Sant, with the Center for New York City Neighborhoods, is worried about the lack of uniformity among mortgage assistance programs, particularly between government-backed loans and non-government-backed loans. So available help can vary even though many mortgage companies and servicers follow the steps that Fannie and Freddie take.

Instead of forbearance, Sant would like to see the creation of a program to keep mortgage payments affordable, similar to the one the federal government created after the housing bust of more than a decade ago. It helped to save more than a million homes from the clutches of foreclosures and short sales. The program granted things like loan modifications, which could lower monthly payments, and deferments, which tacked missed payments onto the ends of loans, thereby extending their duration. These actions helped homeowners remain in their properties.

Many of the government-backed loans offer similar options.

(However, the federal government's Home Affordable Modification Program was widely criticized for not helping nearly enough homeowners. And about a third of the borrowers who participated in the program wound up falling behind on their mortgage payments again.)

"There tends to be this initial, naive hope [from government officials] that, let's put the situation off, let's pause for a few months and hopefully at the end of it, people will recover and they won't need deeper relief," says Sant. "But we need to be planning now to provide meaningful relief."

Many homeowners seeking mortgage assistance are wary of forbearance

Since the crisis began, Seattle-area business owner and author Debrena Jackson Gandy's income has dropped by about 30%. Her husband, an Uber driver, has seen his take-home pay fall by about 40%. And the couple were worried about paying both the first and second mortgages on their four-bedroom home in the Seattle suburb of Des Moines, WA.

So in late March, Jackson Gandy, 53, called her mortgage companies. The first one, where she has her primary mortgage, agreed to defer her April payment and add an extra payment onto the end of her loan. But her experience with Bank of America, where she has her smaller, second mortgage, didn't go as smoothly.

The representative she spoke with offered her three months of forbearance instead. She could apply for a loan modification at the end of that period. There was no guarantee it would be granted.

"It was really shocking," says Jackson Gandy. She runs Masterminds, a personal and organizational development company that hosts events, some of which have been moved online while others have been cancelled.

"If one month is a challenge, then how can I pay four months at once?" she asks.

She was a week late in making her April mortgage payment to Bank of America, because she had to wait for her husband's earnings to come in.

(Bank of America offers deferments on its own loans, but it provides only forbearance, not deferments, on the government-backed loans it services. Chase is also a mortgage servicer for government-backed loans. Jackson Gandy isn't sure if she has a federal-backed mortgage.)

"If you can make the payment, make the payment now," says Rocke Andrews, a mortgage broker at Lending Arizona in Tucson. He's also the president of the National Association of Mortgage Brokers, a trade group.

"Don't take [forbearance] if you dont absolutely need it. It all becomes due, and who knows what happens between now and then, he advises.

The post Mortgage Forbearance Is Not All It's Cracked Up To BeHere's the Ugly Truth appeared first on Real Estate News & Insights | realtor.com.
ANN ARBOR, MI  Ann Arbors new A2Zero plan calls for powering the community with 100% renewable energy to reduce pollution and fight climate change.

City leaders hope to achieve that by 2027, but it may hinge on convincing Michigan lawmakers to allow a type of program known as community choice aggregation.

Through such programs, local governments can buy renewable energy from alternative suppliers on behalf of residents, businesses and other customers, while still receiving transmission and distribution services from existing utility providers.

While its allowed in several states, its not in Michigan, and it would require changing state law, said Missy Stults, Ann Arbors sustainability manager.

If that happens, the city could go to the market and say, We want to buy renewable energy thats the equivalent of all the electrical uses for everyone within the community, Stults said.

So we would be buying at a scale that represents all commercial enterprises, all residents, the University of Michigan.

This will be hard. Ann Arbor sustainability manager lays out path to carbon-neutrality

The city also could require it to be new energy that displaces fossil fuels, Stults said, adding she would prefer investing in renewable sources that, for example, remove a coal power plant from the grid  and that may be in another state.

Maybe its not in our backyard, but maybe its in West Virginia and that has a really significant impact on the grid, she said.

Community choice aggregation is a $3.2 million component of the citys $1 billion carbon-neutrality plan. The bulk of the plans costs are associated with expanding transit services and switching to electric buses.

It would be an opt-out program, so local residents and businesses could choose not to participate in the bulk purchase of renewable energy, Stults said.

But based on whats happened with such programs in other states, she said, youre getting electricity at a rate that is generally the same, if not slightly cheaper, than what we already pay from our investor-owned utility.

That can have a massive impact because the majority of the communitys carbon emissions  just over 50%  come from electricity usage, Stults said.

Ann Arbor declares climate emergency, sets 2030 carbon-neutral goal

The citys carbon-neutrality strategy also involves installing solar arrays on public properties locally and helping residents and businesses do the same on their properties.

The city wants to launch a community solar program through which people can buy into arrays on public properties and get credit on their utility bills.

Community solar is a very popular strategy in many, many states, Stults said. We do not have enabling legislation to do it here in Michigan, although there is legislation currently before the state to be able to enable community solar.

Stults discussed the A2Zero plan with City Council during a virtual meeting this week.

Ann Arbor officials discuss the city's A2Zero carbon-neutrality plan during a special City Council work session April 13, 2020.Screenshot of CTN video feed

The city predicts local carbon emissions could increase slightly over the next several years while the city and its partners put various pieces of the plan in place, including converting vehicles and appliances from gas to electric. Emissions are then projected to drop off dramatically with a switch to 100% renewable energy for the local power grid in 2027.

Council members brought up that state law is still a hurdle.

How deeply have you discussed the viability of state legislation to allow us to do community aggregation? Council Member Jack Eaton, D-4th Ward, asked Stults. We have a lobbyist who seems pretty astute about whats possible in Lansing, and I understand that were all optimistic that our Legislature could change parties, but in realistic terms, have we discussed the likelihood of accomplishing this legislative goal?

Local state lawmakers are excited about it, Stults said.

But more importantly, perhaps, is that weve started working on this with municipalities throughout the state who we think might actually have more success in introducing the legislation than if it comes from us, Stults said, suggesting the city will partner with other communities to move it forward.

The city could take a different approach, Stults said, noting it could encourage residents to buy into MIGreenPower, a DTE Energy program that allows customers to get 100% of their energy from wind and solar for a few extra cents per month per kilowatt hour. As of last month, more than 10,000 households in the region were participating at varying levels.

The beauty of community choice aggregation, Stults said, is that once the policy is in place, any community in the state can do it, so Ann Arbor can pave the way for others to follow.

As for creating a locally owned public energy utility that would get 100% of its power from renewable energy, Stults said, that idea came up during the A2Zero planning process.

Our understanding is that it is legally possible but likely to be extraordinarily expensive and tied up in legal battles for a very long time, she said in an email. As such, our proposal was to find ways to collaborate, wherever possible, with our utility while simultaneously pursuing CCA legislation.

Council Member Jeff Hayner, D-1st Ward, asked if theres a Plan B in case changing state law doesnt pan out.

There are backup plans, Stults said, but community choice aggregation is the strategy that gets us there.

Honestly, most CCAs around the country are at cost parity with current electrical systems, so we dont actually see a lot of pushback if we can get it through and its scaleable, she said.

A closer look at Ann Arbors plan for potentially $50M solar farm

Ann Arbor had about 2.1 million metric tons of carbon emissions in 2018, down about 14% from 2000, Stults said.

That includes UM, which accounts for 32% of emissions, while transportation accounts for 17%, the commercial/industrial sector 22%, residential buildings 23%, solid waste 3% and miscellaneous 3%.

By source, 52% of emissions came from electricity, while 28% came from natural gas. The rest came from transportation and solid waste at the previously cited percentages.

Not all community carbon emissions are included in the citys calculations, Stults said, noting there are embedded and upstream emissions associated with building materials and consumer goods, and the city isnt capturing the full range of peoples daily commutes outside the city boundaries, nor are emissions from travel by city residents counted.

The city is assuming cooperation from UM, Stults said, noting she serves on the UM carbon-neutrality commission that President Mark Schlissel announced in February 2019.

UM hasnt released a carbon-neutrality plan yet, Stults said, but it has agreed to a large renewable energy purchase through DTEs MIGreenPower program starting in 2021 and its making efficiency upgrades at its natural gas plant on campus.

The universitys emissions are projected to drop off from about 700,000 metric tons annually to under 500,000 metric tons annually by 2022.

We modeled them engaging with us in our initiatives, but its very possible that well be editing the plan once their plan is finished to integrate their strategies, Stults said.

Stults said there are differences between UMs approach and Ann Arbors approach to carbon-neutrality.

We did a moonshot  we set a goal and then we said were going to figure out how to get there, she said. UMs methodology is the inverse. They are doing incredibly detailed analysis to determine what is possible before they even set a goal and what theyre comfortable committing to.

MORE FROM THE ANN ARBOR NEWS:

Ann Arbor purchases new electric Chevy Bolts as city considers EV readiness ordinance

How will Ann Arbor pay for $1B carbon-neutrality plan?

Ann Arbor unveils concept for carbon-neutral fire station of the future

How a vegan diet could fit into Ann Arbors carbon-neutrality plan
[April 15, 2020] SeekXR Launches Seek Education To Bring Learning To Life With Augmented Reality

LEHI, Utah, April 15, 2020 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- SeekXR , a leader of Augmented Reality (AR) experiences, today announced the launch of Seek Education , an online platform and supplemental teaching resource for teachers designed to encourage interactive learning through augmented reality. The platform is being made available for free until the school year finishes at the end of June.

AR-based learning promotes an engaging educational environment and is changing the way students receive and retain information, said Head of Seek Education, Parker McDonough. Teachers and parents are facing a unique challenge right now trying to educate their children from home and were pleased to be able to provide a tool that makes their lives easier while giving children, particularly those who are visual learners, a better way to learn. Subscribing to the platform provides access to a personal dashboard displaying six core subjects in todays currculum, including anatomy, animals, art, biology, history and physical science. Students can then click on these subjects to access menus of relevant AR models such as the solar system or a human DNA strand to make learning more engaging and improve retention levels.



Until now, there have been some major barriers to entry for teachers integrating immersive technologies into the classroom - think expensive hardware like headsets and apps which only work on certain platforms," commented Jon Cheney, CEO, and co-founder of SeekXR. By leveraging SeekXRs core cross-platform technology and applying it to a new market, were able to make educational AR experiences available to everyone on any device. For now, Seek Education is focused on providing resources for K12 students, but it will expand its content library to serve learners all the way up to the university level in the near future. The platform also plans to give creatives the opportunity to publish their own high-quality 3D models to the platform and share in the profit pool based on views.

Seek Education is available now. Following the free access period, the platform is available for $3.99 per month for an individual subscription or $19.99 per month for an entire classroom. For more information visit: https://education.seekxr.com/ About SeekXR

Seek brings AR directly to websites  no app required. Seek helps improve the customer experience for Fortune 500 companies all over the world to deliver best-in-class AR content and services, with a primary focus on web-based AR solutions for e-commerce. Our proprietary, intuitive AR solution optimizes 3D models and then makes them accessible on any device. Seek gives brands the benefits of augmented reality without the hassle of developing an app. Easily create a better experience for your customers, where they can view realistic AR versions of your products anywhere, any time. Contact information

Liv Allen

[email protected]

415-370-0716

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Rajesh Abraham By

Express News Service

KOCHI: With overseas returnees turning COVID-positive even 24 days after the airports were closed in Kerala, health authorities are fearing the presence of a large number of asymptomatic carriers of the deadly virus in the state.

On Tuesday, out of the eight new COVID cases that were reported, five had returned from Dubai while the remaining three caught the infection from local contacts.

Similarly, on Sunday, the two who tested positive were UAE returnees, while on Monday, one of the three COVID-positive cases was an overseas returnee.

"We feel the airports were lax in letting passengers go directly to their homes after thermal screening. Except for one case, where a three-year-old Kannur boy who came with his parents from Italy tested positive for COVID, no other international passenger tested positive for the virus on arrival. In the case of the Kannur boy too, it was only done at the insistence of his parents, said a health official, on condition of anonymity.

"We suspect the foreign returnees may be contracting the coronavirus from their fellow asymptomatic travelers  their partners or children, long after they had reached their homes," he said.

Dr Praveen GS, an epidemiologist at the Government Medical College, said though the incubation period for COVID-19  the time between exposure to the virus (becoming infected) and the onset of symptoms -- can extend to up to 14 days, the emergence of COVID positive cases in Kerala even after 20-23 days indicates that overseas returnees may be contracting the virus from asymptomatic co-travellers, who could be living in the same house.

ALSO SEE:

In the case of Nipah, the symptoms were pronounced, which helped us to isolate the person from others. That's not the case with COVID-19. The symptoms are non-existent at times and this creates a challenge when it comes to isolating the infected person from the others. There are a large number of asymptomatic cases out there, which will make the task of tackling the disease very hard, he said.

Dr Tinku Joseph, a pulmonologist at the Amrita Institute of Medical Sciences, though, said the incubation period in certain instances could be more than 14 days.

"Cases have been reported from different parts of the world in which patients became symptomatic after 25 days of exposure," he said.

"We still don't have clear-cut data. The pattern of the virus is also constantly changing," Joseph said, while admitting there are chances of an overseas returnee acquiring the infection from asymptomatic carriers too.
German Marshall Fund: It Is not too early to think about political change in Turkey

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WHO thinks it's too early to consider COVID-19 pandemic

European Commission to require Poland to pay fine of nearly EUR 70 million

White House announces $308 million humanitarian aid for Afghanistan

Erdogan angry at minister after efforts to strengthen lira failed

Armenian FM has phone call with US Assistant Secretary of State

India imposes one-week quarantine even for vaccinated tourists

Armenian ex-president expresses condolences on poet Razmik Davoyan's death

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NEWS.am daily digest: 11.01.22

Austrian Chancellor confirms plan for mandatory COVID-19 vaccination in February

Armen Sarkissian and Kassym-Jomart Tokayev discuss situation in Kazakhstan

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Economy ministry: Organizing of accommodation and public catering increased by 61.1% in Armenia

Armenia parliament speaker expresses condolences on European Parliament President death

Azerbaijan opens fire toward Armenia village sector, one soldier wounded

Shoigu: CSTO peacekeepers deployed in Kazakhstan thanks to Syrian and Karabakh experience

Azerbaijan official pledges to remove Armenian toponyms from Google Maps

UN offers two plans to help Afghans totaling $ 5 billion in 2022

Armenia attorney general travels to Moscow on working visit

Azerbaijan MOD blames Armenian side for soldiers death

Dollar drops in Armenia

Shirak Province captives families hold protest outside Armenia government building

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ANCA urges President Biden and Congress to hold Azerbaijan and Turkey accountable for war crimes

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Armenia deputy defense minister: No one can rule out border tension at any moment

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Nearly 10,000 people detained in Kazakhstan in connection with riots

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NEWS.am daily digest: 10.01.22

Pashinyan appoints Hayk Mkrtchyan as Deputy Governor of Kotayk province
To curb the spread of the Novel Coronavirus pandemic, Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Tuesday, announced an extension of the lockdown till May 3. Ayushmann Khurrana has urged everyone to respect this announcement.

The Dream Girl actor believes the power to win over the deadly Novel Coronavirus is in our hands and has asked every citizen of this country to patiently contribute by staying at home to win over the virus.

Ayushmann said, "We all are at risk due to coronavirus and we have to be patient to beat its spread. Nothing compares to the pain of losing lives and I urge every citizen of the country to stay at home to protect themselves and their loved ones. Respect the national lockdown till May 3rd and don't flout the rules laid down by the government because the power is with us to save our lives and the lives of many others."

The actor has also requested each citizen to maintain the same resolve, same dedication during this extended period of lockdown as they have shown during the initial 21-day lockdown.

He said, "Every citizen of India is facing difficulties at various levels, every citizen is anxious but we all have been persistent in trying to keep the virus at check. Only we can help India win over coronavirus and protect the lives of millions of people. Let us be compassionate, let our resolve not waver, let our focus to make India win not waver. Each one of us has to maintain strict vigil to control the situation and help India return back to normalcy."

In a recent interview, Ayushmann said that the film industry will be hit by the lockdown. He was quoted as saying, "Our industry will take a hit for sure. People will think twice before going to theatres or to any public event."

Meanwhile, the actor condemned the attacks on cops and said that he is deeply disturbed after reading about the growing violence against police personnel in various cities across India amid COVID-19 crisis.

Ayushmann Khurrana Condemns Heinous Attacks On Cops Amid Coronavirus Lockdown" title=" Ayushmann Khurrana Condemns Heinous Attacks On Cops Amid Coronavirus Lockdown" /> Ayushmann Khurrana Condemns Heinous Attacks On Cops Amid Coronavirus Lockdown

Ayushmann Khurrana Gives Surprise To Quarantined Women On Her Birthday Amid Coronavirus Lockdown
Evolutionary biology aims to explain how new species arise and evolve to occupy myriad niches - but it is not a singular or simplistic story. Rare bees found in high mountain areas of Fiji provide evidence that they have evolved into many species, despite the fact they can't readily adapt to different habitats.

These bees - discovered by a team of researchers from Flinders University, South Australian Museum, UniSA and University of Adelaide - serve as a major warning about the impact of ongoing human-induced climate change and loss of biodiversity for different species.

The Fijian bees are locked into very specific habitats, and when these have contracted and split due to past climate change, the bee populations also became fragmented, with some isolated populations eventually turning into new species.

"The adaptation to new habitats and niches is often assumed to drive the diversification of species, but we found that Fijian bee diversity arose from an inability to adapt," says Flinders University's James Dorey, lead author on a new paper that explains this research.

The paper - "Radiation of tropical island bees and the role of phylogenetic niche conservatism as an important driver of biodiversity," by James Dorey, Scott Groom, Elisha Freedman, Cale Matthews, Olivia Davies, Ella Deans, Celina Rebola, Mark Stevens, Michael Lee and Michael Schwarz - has been published by Proceedings B journal.

"Our genetic data show how a single bee-colonisation in Fiji gave rise to over 20 endemic bee species largely constrained to cooler, high elevations," says Mr Dorey. "At least for Fijian bees, a relative inability to adapt has created a species-making machine."

New Fijian bee species evolved when a single ancestral species colonised and spread over lowland areas during cool periods, but were later restricted to different mountaintops as the climate warms and the lowlands become too hot for comfort. The isolated populations later become new species. Each subsequent climate cycle has the potential to generate new species.

"Perhaps, if Darwin had studied Fijian bees instead of Galapagos finches, he might have come to rather different conclusions about the origin of species", adds Flinders Univeristy's Associate Professor Mike Schwarz, who was part of the research group.

One of the major arguments at the core of evolutionary theory suggests that species arise from adaptive radiation into new niche spaces, with gene flow between the new and ancestral populations subsequently inhibited, eventually leading to speciation. As an alternative, phylogenetic niche conservatism points to the inability of a lineage to adapt to new or changing environments, in turn, promoting speciation when populations become isolated as their preferred habitats contract.

This is what the researchers found in the high mountain areas of Fiji. Of the 22 Fijian bee species they identified, most have very narrow elevational ranges (constrained by temperature) - and 14 species were only recovered from single mountain peaks.

"This demonstrates how slowly bees have adapted to new climates, since the colonisation of Fiji," says Mr Dorey. 'We further highlight that such phylogenetic signals could indicate climate-related extinction risks. Indeed, one Fijian bee species (Homalictus achrostus) appears to be at serious risk of extinction, with sightings becoming much rarer since its initial discovery in the 1970s. This raises concerns for the 13 other species that we have, so far, only found on single mountain tops. They have nowhere to go if climate continues to warm and represent 14 very good reasons to curb global greenhouse gas emissions."

###

Project and personal funding for this research project was provided by the Australian and Pacific Science Foundation, New Colombo Plan program, Flinders University, The South Australian Museum and Playford Trust Scholarships to James Dorey and Olivia Davies.
By Jordi Rubio and Emma Pinedo BARCELONA/MADRID (Reuters) - Spain is flattening the curve showing the spread of the coronavirus in the country, the government said on Tuesday, one month into a strict lockdown, but some voiced alarm over the loosening of restrictions that began this week. In an attempt to mitigate the economic impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, national authorities eased the terms of one of Europe's most stringent lockdowns to allow some sectors like construction and manufacturing to resume work on Monday. In Catalonia - with the second highest number of COVID-19 deaths after the capital Madrid - police stopped motorists in Barcelona to check documents specifying the reason for their journey

By Jordi Rubio and Emma Pinedo

BARCELONA/MADRID (Reuters) - Spain is flattening the curve showing the spread of the coronavirus in the country, the government said on Tuesday, one month into a strict lockdown, but some voiced alarm over the loosening of restrictions that began this week.

In an attempt to mitigate the economic impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, national authorities eased the terms of one of Europe's most stringent lockdowns to allow some sectors like construction and manufacturing to resume work on Monday.

In Catalonia - with the second highest number of COVID-19 deaths after the capital Madrid - police stopped motorists in Barcelona to check documents specifying the reason for their journey. Workers must show certificates from their employers.

"I still find it quite hasty, this return (to work) - I see too many people today," hospital employee Monica Pinzon said, stopping to speak in a Barcelona metro station where health staff distributed masks to commuters at ticket barriers.

Catalan leader Quim Torra on Sunday described the decision to restart some industrial sectors as irresponsible, and said this created an "enormous" risk of a second wave of coronavirus infections and a second lockdown.

Spain has seen one of the world's worst COVID-19 outbreaks, with over 170,000 documented cases and over 18,000 deaths. The overnight death rate has dropped well below peak levels reached in early April, but nevertheless inched up again on Tuesday.

A lockdown banning residents from leaving home for all but the most essential activities has been credited with slowing the rate of deaths but come at a heavy cost, with around 900,000 jobs lost in the last two weeks of March alone.

For Roberto Aguayo, a 50-year-old Barcelona construction worker travelling on the metro, the restart of his sector came just in time. "We really needed it. Just when we were going to run out of food, we returned to work," he said.

Shops, bars and public spaces in Spain will stay closed until at least April 26, and on Tuesday the health ministry reported the lowest increase in new cases - 3,045 - since March 18. The number of overnight deaths rose slightly to 567.

Unlike other countries in Europe, Spaniards are not allowed out of their houses for exercise and can only leave for essential activities like buying food. Children have been cooped up at home for a month.

The economic toll of the crisis will be huge. The International Monetary Fund forecasts an 8% economic slump this year in Spain, to be followed by a recovery in 2021.

Millions are turning to the government for relief.

On Tuesday, the Spanish government approved a one-month tax moratorium for the self-employed and small companies which it said would allow them to boost their short-term liquidity by around 3.6 billion euros ($3.95 billion).

Meanwhile, social security has registered nearly a million requests from self-employed people for pay-outs under the terms of a state relief package announced last month, government spokeswoman Maria Jesus Montero said.

(Additional reporting by Nathan Allen, Clara-Laeila Laudette, Belen Carreno, Jesus Aguado and Isla Binnie; Writing by Andrei Khalip and Emma Pinedo; Editing by Sonya Dowsett and Mark Heinrich)

This story has not been edited by Firstpost staff and is generated by auto-feed.
For the longest time, reports have been doing the rounds about Samantha Akkineni teaming up with filmmaker Nandini Reddy once again. The duo last worked together on Oh Baby, which came out in 2019 and turned out to be a huge commercial success. And recently, speculations were rife that they were coming together for another outing.

But sadly, that's not the case. Earlier in the day, Reddy took to Twitter and clarified that her next film isn't with Samantha. The talented filmmaker also busted the myth that her upcoming project isn't a remake but, in fact, an original script. Though she didn't reveal much about the star cast, Nandini announced that her movie will be bankrolled by Swapna Cinema.

Clearing all the rumours once and for all, the Ala Modalaindi director tweeted, "My next is not a remake. It's an original script produced by @SwapnaCinema. Whenever @Samanthaprabhu2 n I do our next we will announce it with a lot of joy and pride. Now, time for the next rumour.....Sleeping face...my rating for this rumour is 1/5... Come on guys u can do better."

Apparently, Nandini is going to work with Sam's hubby dearest, Naga Chaitanya in her next directorial venture. According to a report in Telugu Cinema, Chay is yet to sign an agreement with the production house and hence, his name is being kept under the wraps. The talented actor reportedly came on board after hearing the narration, and once he signs on the dotted line, an official announcement will be made regarding the project.

Naga Chaitanya Agrees To Be A Part Of Samantha Akkineni's Next?
Rent increases and evictions will be illegal for six months and tenants will be able to access assistance payments of up to $2000 under new Victorian laws to protect renters and landlords during the coronavirus pandemic.

The Andrews government will next week introduce new laws granting $420 million in land tax relief to landlords, to encourage them to do the right thing by tenants  with about half of that money expected to go to commercial property owners.

Premier Daniel Andrews announcing the rent relief package on Wednesday morning. Credit:Eddie Jim

Another $80 million will be spent by the state on direct rental payments to tenants who are struggling to pay their rent because of the impact of coronavirus. The laws will be introduced to State Parliament during a one-day emergency sitting next Thursday.

The ban on evictions will apply to both residential and commercial tenants. Landlords who offer rent relief to coronavirus-affected tenants will be eligible for a 25 per cent discount on land tax. They can also defer land tax payments until next March.
The Philippine Navy ship BRP Gregorio del Pilar is seen after it ran aground during a routine patrol in the vicinity of Half Moon Shoal, which is called Hasa Hasa in the Philippines, off the disputed Spratly Islands in the South China Sea, Aug. 29, 2018.

Updated at 7:37 p.m. ET on 2020-04-15

In an unusual show of unity against China, Southeast Asian nations have been pushing back on Beijings sweeping assertion of sovereignty over the South China Sea amid dissatisfaction over its stance in negotiations for a Code of Conduct, analysts say.

Last week, China faced criticism from several quarters over the sinking of a Vietnamese fishing vessel near the Paracel islands. That came not just from Vietnam and the United States  typically its boldest critics  but also the Philippines, which issued a statement of solidarity with Vietnam despite forging closer ties with Beijing.

This week, it emerged that a Chinese survey ship involved in a months-long standoff with Vietnam last year was on the move again. The Hai Yang Di Zhi 8 passed Tuesday through Vietnamese waters with an escort of China Coast Guard ships.

On Wednesday, they were heading south for Malaysian waters, according to ship-tracking data reviewed by Radio Free Asia (RFA), a BenarNews sister entity.

Their destination could be the Luconia Shoals, a site of recent Malaysian oil exploration in the southern reaches of the Spratly Islands within Malaysias exclusive economic zone. Vessel tracking data shows the China Coast Guard ship Haijing 5203 has been loitering in that area since April 1.

But perhaps even more significant than all this activity at sea has been the diplomacy waged in the background.

There have been a flurry of diplomatic notes following a submission by Malaysia to the United Nations in December that claimed sovereignty over an extended continental shelf in the South China Sea off its northern coast, potentially an area with significant undersea resources. After China strongly objected, both the Philippines and Vietnam weighed in, submitting protests to Chinas own territorial claims.

Malaysia, Vietnam and the Philippines, all members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), each cited a 2016 decision by the Permanent Court of Arbitration in a case brought by the Philippines. The ruling invalidated the legal basis of Chinas claims in the South China Sea.

Dr. Lai Yew Meng, a regional security analyst with the Universiti Malaysia Sabah, believes this could be intentional.

There could even possibly be a confluence of strategic interests to forge a united front among the three ASEAN states, sort of a de facto axis to leverage against Chinese assertive behavior and responses in the SCS (South China Sea), he explained.

That may reflect shared anxiety over Chinas efforts to bring an early end to protracted negotiations over the Code of Conduct.

The 10-nation ASEAN bloc and China agreed back in 2002 on a Declaration of Conduct, which was a statement of principles on how parties should behave in the South China Sea. But completing a more detailed  and binding  Code of Conduct (CoC) has proved much more difficult. Negotiations began in earnest in 2016. A draft of the text of the agreement has since been released.

The tentative deadline for CoC negotiations is in 2021. Those closely watching the negotiations surmise that China would like to end negotiations early, without touching basic but contentious parts of it  including what China actually claims in the South China Sea and what the South China Sea encompasses.

China could, by forcing an early resolution to the Code of Conduct, just shut everybody up, said Carl Thayer, professor emeritus at the University of New South Wales. Sorry, we closed the door, we cant change anything, what we occupy is China and you relinquish it, Thayer said.

Chinas Unyielding Claims

Against this backdrop, Malaysia did something that it surely knew China would object to. It submitted its claim to the U.N.s Commission on the Limits of the Continental Shelf (CLCS).

Malaysian officials did not respond to a request for further comment this week on why they lodged their claim. After the claim was filed in December, then Foreign Minister Saifuddin Abdullah said, It is our sovereign right to claim whatever is there within our waters and which is not claimed by others.

Its doubtful they expected a quick ruling in favor of their sovereignty. The CLCS evaluates claims on a technical basis, and cannot make judgements on disputes.

Whats really going on is that this is a forum where states publicly reveal their claims, said Julian Ku, the Maurice A. Deane distinguished professor of constitutional law at Hofstra Universitys law school.

The effect of the diplomatic note was to draw a response from China, stating its opposition to Malaysias continental shelf claim.

And China did so in a way that characteristically set it apart from other claimants, with its assertion it has sole sovereignty over the South China Sea, based not just on its claims to land features, but also on the basis of having historic rights to the waters themselves  a maximalist position with no legal validity to it under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS).

As the CoC negotiations enter a key phase, Ku said theres been speculation that China would drop the assertion of historic rights. But it hasnt done that, so that means Chinas not really backing down, not even in a subtle way, he said.

A United Front?

In the face of Chinese intransigence on its claims, Thayer said that Malaysias submission to the U.N. was intended to prompt other claimants to follow suit, which they all did so, with reference to the 2016 tribunal case between China and the Philippines.

Malaysia is trying to encourage its neighbors to enter into discussions so they can all make claims to the extended continental shelf and negotiate among each other how to reach a solution to this, Thayer said.

This helps explain why Vietnam then issued its own objection on March 30  not to Malaysias original claim, but to Chinas response to Malaysias diplomatic note  although it did follow up with two more notes on April 10 in response to Malaysia and the Philippines claims, simply reiterating its own claims to the Spratly and Paracel Islands.

Vietnam opposes any maritime claims in the East Sea (South China Sea) that exceed the limits provided in UNCLOS, including claims to historic rights; these claims are without lawful effect, Vietnams initial note said, citing the 1982 convention as providing the sole legal basis for maritime entitlements.

Ku said the language of the March 30 note showed that Vietnam was starting to treat the tribunals 2016 decision as valid and not threatening to its own claims in the area.

I think we can read Vietnams note as, We just want to make sure everyones clear we dont accept any of these Chinese arguments, whatever they might be. And just to be safe they list all the possible arguments that China has made even though the statement China submitted doesn't spell out all those arguments, he said.

This potentially opens the door for Vietnam, the current chair of ASEAN, to pursue its own case against China.

Vietnams foreign ministry spokeswoman was non-committal when asked about this possibility at a press conference last week. Ku said that Hanois decision to do so would be a political consideration, not necessarily a legal one.

Philippines shows solidarity

Under President Rodrigo Duterte, the Philippines has not pressed its advantage from the 2016 tribunal ruling, preferring instead to foster better political and economic ties with Beijing.

Thats why its Department of Foreign Affairs statement of solidarity with Vietnam on April 8 over the sinking of the Vietnamese fishing boat was so unusual.

It also followed Manilas two diplomatic notes in response to Malaysias continental shelf claim  one protesting Malaysias claim; another disputing Chinas note. The latter referred to the tribunal ruling and was very similar to Vietnams note.

The Tribunal conclusively settled the issue of historic rights and maritime entitlements in the South China Sea, the note said. The Tribunal ruled that claims to historic rights, or other sovereign rights or jurisdiction that exceed the geographic and substantive limits of maritime entitlements under UNCLOS, are without lawful effect.

The Philippines and Malaysia have an actual dispute over their continental shelves due to land both sides claim, which explains why the Philippines addressed Malaysias as well as Chinas claims in two separate notes.

But Thayer believes the alignment of Malaysias submission and the Philippines note around the 2016 tribunal ruling means the two could work toward resolving that dispute in the interest of more unity against Chinas far more expansive claims.

However, other analysts remain skeptical about the prospects for a united front on the South China Sea issue.

Dr. Lai Yew Meng notes that there are other factors in play when it comes to how Southeast Asian nations manage relations with Beijing. He said that states seek a delicate balance in their ties with China to maximize their respective national interest.
U.S. Repatriates $300 Million to Malaysia in Proceeds of Funds Misappropriated from 1Malaysia Development Berhad

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Tuesday, April 14, 2020



The Department of Justice announced today that it has repatriated to Malaysia approximately $300 million (RM 1.292 billion) in additional funds misappropriated from 1Malaysia Development Berhad (1MDB), Malaysia's investment development fund, and laundered through financial institutions in several jurisdictions, including the United States, Switzerland, Singapore and Luxembourg.

Combined with other funds that the department previously returned to Malaysia in May 2019, the United States has returned or assisted Malaysia in recovering over $600 million (RM 2.6 billion) of funds misappropriated from 1MDB. The department's efforts to recover funds misappropriated from 1MDB are continuing.

In 2019, the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California entered judgments forfeiting more than $700 million in assets acquired by Low Taek Jho, aka Jho Low, and his family located in the United States, the United Kingdom and Switzerland. To date, the United States has recovered or assisted in the recovery of more than $1 billion in assets associated with the 1MDB international money laundering and bribery scheme. This represents the largest recovery to date under the department's Kleptocracy Asset Recovery Initiative and the largest civil forfeiture ever concluded by the Justice Department.

"We are pleased to make this latest repatriation of an additional $300 million in stolen 1MDB funds," said Assistant Attorney General Brian A. Benczkowski of the Justice Department's Criminal Division. "The payment reflects the United States' continuing commitment to the Malaysian people to hunt down, seize, forfeit, and return assets that were acquired in connection with this brazen scheme."

"The repatriation of these stolen funds to the citizens of Malaysia is the result of the tireless efforts of prosecutors and federal agents to prevent foreign kleptocrats and their associates from using the United States as a playground where they can enjoy the fruits of their pilfered wealth," said U.S. Attorney Nick Hanna of the Central District of California. "The amount of money stolen from the people of Malaysia is staggering, and we have been relentless in recovering assets that always should have been used for their benefit."

"The FBI's International Corruption Squads are dedicated to protecting the United States from criminals attempting to benefit from our economy using their illicit, ill-gotten funds," said Assistant Director Calvin Shivers of the FBI's Criminal Investigative Division. "The repatriation announced today is a direct result of an FBI international corruption investigation, conclusively demonstrating that criminals will not be allowed to prosper in the United States. This money is now being returned to its rightful place  the country and people of Malaysia."

"This extraordinary sum of money is going back to the people of Malaysia where it belongs and where it can finally be used for its original intended purposeto better the lives of everyday Malaysians," said Chief Don Fort of IRS-Criminal Investigations (IRS-CI). "Mr. Low attempted to launder these assets through multiple international jurisdictions and a web of shell corporations, but his greed finally caught up with him. This case is a model for international cooperation in significant cross-border money laundering investigations."

According to the civil forfeiture complaints, from 2009 through 2015, more than $4.5 billion in funds belonging to 1MDB were allegedly misappropriated by high-level officials of 1MDB and their associates, including Low, through a criminal conspiracy involving international money laundering and bribery. 1MDB was created by the government of Malaysia to promote economic development in Malaysia through global partnerships and foreign direct investment, and its funds were intended to be used for improving the well-being of the Malaysian people. The assets subject to the 2019 judgments include high-end real estate in Beverly Hills, New York and London; a luxury boutique hotel in Beverly Hills; and tens of millions of dollars in business investments that Low allegedly made with funds traceable to misappropriated 1MDB monies.

The FBI's International Corruption Squads in New York City and Los Angeles and the IRS-CI are investigating the case. Deputy Chief Woo S. Lee and Trial Attorneys Barbara Levy, Joshua L. Sohn and Jonathan Baum of the Criminal Division's Money Laundering and Asset Recovery Section and Assistant U.S. Attorneys John Kucera, Michael R. Sew Hoy and Steven R. Welk of the Central District of California are prosecuting the case. The Criminal Division's Office of International Affairs is providing substantial assistance.

The department also appreciates the significant assistance provided by the Attorney General's Chambers of Malaysia, the Royal Malaysian Police, the Malaysian Anti-Corruption Commission, the Attorney General's Chambers of Singapore, the Singapore Police Force-Commercial Affairs Division, the Office of the Attorney General and the Federal Office of Justice of Switzerland, the judicial investigating authority of the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg and the Criminal Investigation Department of the Grand-Ducal Police of Luxembourg.

The Kleptocracy Asset Recovery Initiative is led by a team of dedicated prosecutors in the Criminal Division's Money Laundering and Asset Recovery Section, in partnership with federal law enforcement agencies, and often with U.S. Attorney's Offices, to forfeit the proceeds of foreign official corruption and, where appropriate, to use those recovered assets to benefit the people harmed by these acts of corruption and abuse of office. In 2015, the FBI formed International Corruption Squads across the country to address national and international implications of foreign corruption. Individuals with information about possible proceeds of foreign corruption located in or laundered through the U.S. should contact federal law enforcement or send an email to kleptocracy@usdoj.gov (link sends e-mail) or https://tips.fbi.gov/.

A civil forfeiture complaint is merely an allegation that money or property was involved in or represents the proceeds of a crime. These allegations are not proven until a court awards judgment in favor of the United States.

The year 2020 marks the 150th anniversary of the Department of Justice. Learn more about the history of our agency at www.Justice.gov/Celebrating150Years.

Topic(s):

Asset Forfeiture

Financial Fraud

Foreign Corruption

Component(s):

Criminal Division

Criminal - Money Laundering and Asset Recovery Section

Criminal - Office of International Affairs

USAO - California, Central

Press Release Number: 20-382

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"90 Day Fiance" couple Loren Goldstone and Alexei Brovarnik have become parents.



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TLC, which airs 90 Day Fiance, confirmed Wednesday that Loren and her husband Alexei welcomed their first child, a son, on Tuesday.

RELATED LINK: '90 DAY FIANCE' COUPLES NOW: WHO IS STILL TOGETHER? WHO HAS SPLIT? WHERE ARE THEY KNOW? (PHOTOS)

Us Weekly said Loren gave birth at Mount Sinai hospital in Miami Beach, Fla.

The couple plan to share their baby boy's name after his brit and naming ceremony next week.

Loren said she gave birth ahead of her due date.

"Everything happens and doesn't for a reason," the new mom said.

"We were meant to meet our baby boy earlier! With everything going on now with the [COVID-19] virus, this is the smile and light we needed!"

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"We are so beyond in love with him and even more in love with each other!" she added.

Loren shared the first photos of her son in an Instagram post Wednesday.

"And then there were 3!!" she wrote. "Mommy, daddy and baby are all doing great!"

Alexei had shared a picture Tuesday on Instagram of himself and Loren wearing masks while on their way to the hospital.

"The new norm, of to the doc... #teambrovarnik #babybrov #staysafe," he captioned the post.

RELATED LINK: '90 DAY FIANCE: BEFORE THE 90 DAYS' COUPLES NOW: WHO IS STILL TOGETHER? WHO HAS SPLIT? WHERE ARE THEY NOW? (PHOTOS)

Loren and Alexei announced in October that they were expecting.

Loren and Alexei, who is originally from Ukraine, initially met in Israel.

The couple initially appeared on Season 3 of "90 Day Fiance," which follows couples where one partner has a K-1 visa, and then returned for Seasons 1 and 2 of "90 Day Fiance: Happily Ever After?"

Want more 90 Day Fiance spoilers or couples updates? Click here to visit our 90 Day Fiance homepage!
Up to 200 Australian newspapers - most in regional areas with little in the way for local news - are set to close in coming months as media and publishing is slammed by the coronavirus shutdown.

Advertising revenue has plummeted at a number of small papers, which were already struggling with falling sales.

News Corp Australia has already announced the closure of 60 of its regional titles, with Australian Community Media (ACM) closing around 150 of its own.

Even major broadcasters are being affected, as the industry calls for a government rescue package to see it through the pandemic.

The likes of Seven,Ten and Nine have also been making huge financial cuts, with some even considering dropping bulletins.

A newspaper headline about the coronavirus outbreak is seen on a near-deserted street in Sydney on March 30 (pictured)

ACM has not revealed how many of the 170 newspapers in the former Fairfax-owned group will shut, but is keeping its 14 daily titles running as well as its handful of agricultural weeklies.

But it could leave some communities with no local press to champion its causes.

One of its newspaper, the North West Star, is the only publication in Mount Isa, and is usually published three times a week - but will now only retain one journalist for online.

Local MP Robbie Katter told ABC the closure felt like 'a little bit of your community has just been ripped away'.

'It has really blindsided me,' Mr Katter said.

'It really worries me on a number of levels because these rural and regional areas, we're having a tough time  and here we had an institution  the North West Star have been there for many years.'

ACM blamed the 'devastating impact' of the pandemic, and is understood to have already stood down staff at the Ararat Advertiser and the Stawell Times.

A man reads a local newspaper while sitting on roadside seating on South Terrace on March 26 in Fremantle (pictured)

Some coverage will still appear on the affected titles' websites, the company explained.

According to its own newspapers, the company's 14 daily publications will continue to print, including the Canberra Times, the Courier, the Illawarra Mercury and the Newcastle Herald.

Queensland Country Life is also safe for the time-being.

The company has also shut down four of its printing sites, Canberra, Murray Bridge, Wodonga and Tamworth until at least June 29.

Printing of its remaining daily titles will continue at other sites.

Australia's communications minister, Paul Fletcher, has said he understands the importance of local press and is looking into helping the industry.

'Broadcasters and newspapers, especially in regional areas, are facing significant financial pressures, with advertising revenues sharply down,' he said on Tuesday.

'The government recognises that regional media is essential in informing and strengthening local communities.

'I am working closely with the media sector to better understand the impacts they are facing, and expect to be able to say more next week about potential measures the government is considering.'

In a message emailed to staff on Tuesday, ACM executive chairman Antony Catalano said there had been a 'significant' import on its revenue.

But he praised staff for 'working tirelessly to try to maintain a full level of services and meet the needs of our team members, customers and the community.'

'For reasons beyond our control, we cannot sustain the same level of useful work or costs moving forward,' Mr Catalano said.

A woman is seen reading a newspaper in Sydney on March 23, as the industry is badly hit by a fall in revenue

'Accordingly, we have no choice but to temporarily cease some of our publications and temporarily close our printing sites in Canberra, Murray Bridge, Wodonga and Tamworth from April 20 until June 29.

'Regrettably, this means that for some of our employees across the business there will be no useful work available, and they will be stood down from work in accordance with the provisions of the Fair Work Act.'

The company said it was looking into whether it was eligible to apply for the federal government's JokKeeper payments scheme.

The scheme was approved in parliament last week, which Prime Minister Scott Morrison called the biggest economic lifeline in the nation's history.

Businesses will be given money to pass on to workers as the government desperately tries to save millions of jobs during the coronavirus pandemic.

Eligible workers will soon get $1,500 fortnightly payments for the next six months.

More than 730,000 businesses have registered for the program since it was announced.
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As the corporate world rises up to the challenge to help combat the deadly coronavirus pandemic, Access Bank Ghana, has taken steps to ensure it is contributing its widows might to the fight.

The bank has donated a fully equipped ambulance to the University of Professional Studies, Accra (UPSA) to improve health care delivery on campus and in the community in which it operates.

The ambulance, which will be managed by the UPSA Clinic on campus, is equipped with basic emergency kits such as oxygen inhaler, fire extinguisher, stretcher among others.

Managing Director of the bank, Olumide Olatunji, in a comment made on his behalf by a representative, Stephen Abban (Divisional Head, Retail Banking), said the donation was targeted at the UPSA because its clinic currently does not have any ambulance facility to transport patients in emergency situations, putting the lives of students and surrounding neighbours at risk should they run into any critical condition requiring swift transfer to a larger hospital.

He added that the donation also forms part of the banks efforts to help fight the COVID-19 pandemic.

A lot of logistical support is required in dealing with many health issues across the country including the COVID-19 pandemic and we believe that this gesture will also enable the UPSA clinic to move around the wider community, to attend to any emergency situation when they arise, he said.

Vice-Chancellor of the UPSA, Prof. Okoe Amartey, who received the donation on behalf of the university expressed gratitude for the gesture and said that it will serve a very useful purpose for universitys clinic especially when it plans to upgrade to a hospital in a years time to serve the community better.

He further assured Access Bank that the ambulance will be well maintained and kept in good condition to serve its intended purpose. He also thanked Access Bank for its continuous support to the university through the years, helping it become the fastest-growing public university in the country.

Access Bank Ghana continues to join the fight against several health issues confronting the country since 2009. Quite recently, the Bank launched its Fist Against Fistula campaign in partnership with the UNFPA, Ministry of Health & Ministry of Gender & Social Protection, to support efforts at eradicating fistula out of the country.

The project emerged as Best Health Project of the Year at the 2019 Sustainability and Social Investments Awards.

Currently, the Bank is also leveraging its over 1,200 employee volunteers to drive a preventive education campaign for the containment of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Staff of the Bank have been equipped as ambassadors to promote safe and healthy living among customers, their families and contacts using videos and various content across communication channels available to them.
Faith leaders, judicial branch members, and community partners from across Tennessee will gather online on April 21 for the 2020 Tennessee Faith and Justice Summit. Participants will consider the ways faith and justice intersect, learn about free legal resources available to better serve Tennesseans in need, and build bridges both locally and statewide for a better future.

The Summit, which will be held for the second time as part of the #Help4TNDay celebrations, will be held online for the first time due to the Covid-19 pandemic.

Faith leaders, attorneys and others can register for the free event, which is co-sponsored by the Beecken Center of the School of Theology at the University of the South, the Universitys Office of Civic Engagement, and the Tennessee Faith and Justice Alliance.



The Faith and Justice Summit is a fantastic program that is full of inspiration and practical solutions geared at helping the faith and legal communities join together to help people in need, said Bill Coley, chair of the Access to Justice Commission. This year provides a unique opportunity for us to open up the summit to groups who traditionally have not been able to make the trip to Sewanee. We are confident this years summit will help create new relationships and programs.



Organizers said, "The program will provide a deep dive into the problems, resources and solutions that faith leaders need to know about as they work to serve their communities and especially community members who are struggling with legal issues and do not know where to turn for help. These subjects will be illustrated by first-hand accounts of lives positively impacted by the work of the TFJA and its partner organizations.



"The program will feature a number of prominent voices from Tennessees judiciary, health and faith communities. Scheduled speakers include Tennessee Supreme Court Justice Cornelia Clark, Dr. Monty Burks, director of faith-based initiatives with the Tennessee Department of Mental Health and Substance Abuse Services, Tennessee Access to Justice Chair Commission Bill Coley, Administrative Office of the Courts Director Deborah Taylor Tate, and many more.



"Morning plenaries will highlight why access to Justice is the number one strategic priority of the Tennessee Supreme Court, and why Tennessee needs all hands on deckparticularly faith and community partners with trusted relationships built in local communitiesto achieve access to justice for all Tennesseans. A special panel will specifically consider the intersection of faith, justice, and mental health, and how faith-based partners and the legal community can benefit from what is happening in the mental health community. The panel will explore the advantages of broad partnerships and shared resources to help improve access to justice for all Tennesseans.



"While more than a million low-income Tennesseans need legal representation in a given year, there are far fewer attorneys in the state to provide them with counsel. These disparate numbers leave many Tennesseans without access to legal care. In fact, less than 20 percent of people eligible for free legal help in Tennessee ever find it. Some may feel uneasy about approaching an attorney or going to court to find a way out of their legal predicament. Others dealing with civil legal issues like eviction, foreclosure, a denial of government benefits, or debt collection may simply not know that they may be eligible for legal relief. They may feel more comfortable seeking aid in a religious setting, and often faith-leaders are trusted in a way the legal community is not.



"Faith and community partners can serve a vital role in making sure people eligible for free legal help can connect with that help when they need it. The Tennessee Faith & Justice Summit seeks to build connections between faith, community, and justice in Tennessee, grow awareness of the legal problems that impact our communities, teach religious leaders how to identify problems with potential legal remedies, and pave the way to helping all Tennesseans find the legal help they need.



"Clergy and religious leaders of all faith-traditions, lay leaders, faith-based organizations, social workers, non-profits, university leadership (including faculty and staff), representatives for legal organizations, judges, state government officials, and more will particularly benefit from this program.



Registration for the event is required at bit.ly/tnfjs-2020.
BEIJING, April 15 (Xinhua) -- China's national security authorities have awarded 76 people for their offering tip-offs or reports that had helped prevent, stop and combat acts endangering national security.

Those awarded were from a wide spectrum of society such as government officials, enterprise employees, scholars, military staff, university students and fishermen, sources said in a statement Wednesday, which marks the 5th National Security Education Day in China.

They were given commendations and prizes for their "major" or "important" contributions in this regard.

According to the statement, such contributions included giving tip-offs about instigating people in China to conduct state secret espionage, illegally collecting certain information in China and other state secret risks. There were also people awarded for capturing dubious interceptor equipment in China's territorial waters.

The statement said national security authorities will continue working with the public in the crackdown on violations against national security.
Here's how international markets are reacting. Images: Getty

Australia has shut down auctions and open houses, significantly impacting the number of homes hitting the market.

Beyond that, however, its too early to know just what impact the Covid-19 pandemic has had on house prices. The most recent figures show Australian property values rising 0.7 per cent in March, dented somewhat by a slide in the later weeks of the month.

But according to Realestate.com chief economist Nerida Conisbee, international markets offer some hints.

China, Northern Italy, New York and the UK have all been dealt severe blows by the highly infectious disease.

But theres one main property trend: markets that went into the Covid-19 period strong are generally faring better.

The New York property market started the year particularly strong. In the first quarter of 2020, the number of sales were up 13.5 per cent compared to the same time last year and the median sale price was down 1.2 per cent, Conisbee said.

[But] New York now has a strict lockdown in place, which means that real estate agents cant work, and it is not possible to do an in person showing of a property.

Last week, only two properties sold at the median price point in New York (US$4 million), dropping to the lowest level since the Global Financial Crisis.

And according to data from Realtor.com, new listings fell 31 per cent year on year in the week ending 5 April.

The situation is similar in Northern Italy, where sales were heading towards a solid first quarter before being knocked down by the pandemic. Milan has seen homes for sale fall 12 per cent in January and February compared to last year, but its unclear if this slowdown is due to the virus or a general slowing in the region.

For March, there is still very little data, although an Italian real estate research house, Scenari Immobiliari, claims there has been no impact on pricing and rents in Milan have actually risen, Conisbee said.

In the UK, the number of new homes listed is down 1 per cent despite restrictions on people moving home, but transactions are down 70 per cent.

Story continues

And in China, where the country was essentially locked down from the end of January, new housing starts fell 45 per cent as workers were forced to stay inside. Property investment also slid 16.3 per cent and house sales fell 40 per cent.

But surprisingly, property values rose 5.8 per cent in February, only slightly down from January at 6.3 per cent, Conisbee said.

What can we learn?

It is still too early to know what will happen to pricing in Australia as a result of Covid-19 and we likely wont be able to analyse data in a meaningful way until May, the economist said.

But Australia is also in a different situation to the four regions above  there are significantly lower rates of death and infection, while the country is also undergoing a less severe lockdown.

Additionally, Australias property market was well into recovery in the first quarter of 2020, which is a positive sign.

However, a ban on private inspections of occupied properties in Victoria threatened to significantly impact that economy and property industry.

The Victorian government is set to remove that ban following backlash from the property industry which claimed it would stop nearly all property sales.

Propertyology managing director Simon Pressley believes Australian property is set to rocket following the Covid-19 period, as real estate remains an essential asset.

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WFH for Private offices in Delhi, restaurants & bars to be shut as Omicron-led to sudden rise in Covid cases

Fake: Gujarat govt is not segregating patients based on their religion

India

oi-Vicky Nanjappa

New Delhi, Apr 15: There are reports stating that in Gujarat coronavirus patients are being segregated on the basis of their religion.

It states that the health department of the Government of Gujarat has been segregating patients in civil hospitals on the basis of their religion.

Fake News Buster

Officials have said that this claim is fake and should be debunked. The Health Department of the Government of Gujarat clarified that the news is false. It said that no segregation is being done in civil hospitals on the basis of religion.

The Health Department also said that the coronavirus patients are being treated based on symptoms, severity etc. It is being done according to the recommendations of the doctors who are treating the patients.
Police here in Navi Mumbai detained one person for threatening a huge protest by migrant labourers in Kurla, Mumbai, on April 18.

The man, Vinay Dubey, was detained by the Navi Mumbai police on Tuesday in Airoli and was later handed over to the Mumbai police.

Dubey has been accused of inciting migrants through his social media posts calling for action.

Meanwhile, on Tuesday Maharashtra Home Minister Anil Deshmukh had said that strict action will be taken against those responsible for spreading rumours that trains were going to start which led to a large number of people gathering outside Bandra station.

"The orders have been given against those who spread the rumour that trains will start. Strict action will be taken against those who spread rumours," Deshmukh had tweeted.

More than 1,000 migrant workers in Mumbai gathered outside the station in Bandra and demanded transportation arrangements to go back to their hometowns, hours after Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced the extension of the ongoing nationwide lockdown till May 3.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Doug Preszler wasn't thinking about risk when he took a cashier job at a regional supermarket in eastern Iowa. But five months in, he has found himself at the forefront of a global crisis with little training or protection - save for the pocket-size bottle of hand sanitizer and Ziploc full of disposable gloves he brings from home each day.

The 51-year-old has told himself not to live in fear, yet concedes he increasingly is. Even the most routine tasks are fraught: Accepting bills and giving change scare him the most, Preszler says. And he has run through so much hand sanitizer that his skin is cracking.

"I've been way more anxious this week," he said. "They've started telling people: 'Go to the grocery store as little as possible.' And yet I'm going there every day."

Next to health-care providers, no workforce has proved more essential during the novel coronavirus pandemic than the 3 million U.S. grocery store employees who restock shelves and freezers, fill online orders and keep checkout lines moving. Although the public health guidelines are clear - steer clear of others - these workers are putting in longer shifts and taking on bigger workloads. Many report being stressed and scared, especially as their colleagues fall ill to covid-19, the highly contagious disease responsible for more than 20,000 deaths in the U.S. alone.

Some liken their job to working in a war zone, knowing that the simple act of showing up to work could ultimately kill them. At least 41 supermarket employees have died - including a Trader Joe's worker in New York, a Safeway employee in Chicago, two Walmart associates near Chicago, and four Kroger employees in Michigan. Thousands more have tested positive for the virus.

Now workers across the country are staying home or quitting altogether, according to interviews with more than a dozen employees, leaving many markets short-staffed and ill-prepared to deal with demand. That's complicated the scramble led by Walmart, Kroger and Safeway to fill hundreds of thousands of new jobs. Demand for groceries has doubled in recent weeks, employees say, as Americans avoid restaurants and prepare most of their meals at home.

Job postings for grocery clerks have jumped 60% the past four weeks, according to Julia Pollock, a labor economist for the site ZipRecruiter. Supermarkets are increasingly hard-pressed to find and keep staffers. Workers are walking out, going on strike and circulating petitions aimed at getting companies such as Amazon, Trader Joe's and delivery service Instacart to take additional measures to protect their health.

"The language in job postings has become more desperate," Pollock said. "Grocery companies are saying there's an 'urgent need,' or that they need workers to 'start immediately.' It's becoming more difficult to convince workers to put themselves at risk."

Chains such as Kroger and Safeway have begun providing masks and gloves. Walmart is checking employees' temperatures before each shift. And countless large and regional chains have installed shields at cash registers and signs encouraging social distancing - the best defense against spreading the coronavirus. But employees say more needs to be done.

"Grocery workers are risking their safety, often for poverty-level wages, so the rest of us can shelter in place," said John Logan, director of labor and employment studies at San Francisco State University. "The only way the rest of us are able to stay home is because they're willing to go to work."

Public health experts generally say nurses, doctors, paramedics and other medical workers the highest risk of exposure to covid-19. But grocery workers also come in close contact with large groups of people, often without meaningful protective gear. They are less likely to have paid sick leave or the financial means to take time off if they feel ill.

The sector's relatively low pay - grocery cashiers averaged $11.43 an hour in 2018, Labor Department data shows - has also become a bigger part of the calculation.

At least 1,500 supermarket workers throughout the country have tested positive for covid-19, according to the United Food and Commercial Workers International Union, which represents 900,000 grocery employees at chains such as Kroger, Safeway and Giant. Nearly 3,000 members are not working because they are quarantined, hospitalized or awaiting test results, the union said.

"The big picture is: Workers are frightened," said President Marc Perrone. The labor group, he said, is urging states to categorize grocery workers as first responders to give them higher priority for testing and protective equipment like masks.

"We believe in our health-care professionals being first, but we also believe that if we're going to slow the transmission, that we need to start flatting the curve in those areas where grocery employees are literally coming face-to-face with thousands of people," Perrone said, referring to a depiction of virus infections on a chart.

Although more than 40 states and the District of Columbia have ordered nonessential businesses to shut their doors in recent weeks, grocery stores are among the few retailers that remain open.

Wando Evans had worked at a Chicago-area Walmart for 15 years when managers sent the 51-year-old home on March 23 because he was displaying flu-like symptoms.

Two days later, he was found dead.

Now his brother, Toney Evans, alleges in a wrongful-death lawsuit filed Monday that the world's largest retailer did not provide protective masks and gloves, adequately disinfect the store or keep workers apprised of their colleagues' illnesses. Another store employee, Phillip Thomas, 48, died four days after Evans.

Walmart spokesman Randy Hargrove said the retailer was "heartbroken" by the deaths. "We take this issue seriously and will respond with the court once we have been served with the complaint," he said in a statement. The company declined to provide a full count of employees who have tested positive for the virus or died from related complications.

Some employees at a Whole Foods Market in Virginia say they are afraid to go to work.

"It's like you're constantly in fight-or-flight mode," said a worker in her 50s who spoke on the condition of anonymity to protect her job and health insurance. "It's been scary, it's been confusing and there is a palpable fear among everyone who's still working. It feels like a war zone."

That fear, she says, picked up last week after a store manager called, texted and emailed late one evening to say that someone at their store had tested positive for covid-19. A number of cashiers called in sick the next day, leaving long lines that snaked through the aisles. Although there are signs and stickers at her store encouraging customers to stand six feet apart, not everyone does. (Whole Foods is owned by Amazon, whose founder, Jeff Bezos, owns The Washington Post.)

The store recently installed dividers at registers and is offering masks to workers who want them. But she said there are no limits on how many people can be at the store at one time, and the company has made no specific accommodations for its older or more vulnerable workers.

A spokeswoman for Whole Foods said the company has had "crowd control protocols" at its stores since March 25. The company is also checking workers' temperatures and providing gloves and masks before each shift, she said.

When the Virginia worker ended her shift that day, she told her manager that she wanted time off. She plans to stay home for a couple of weeks, though her children are urging her to quit. Her daughter is helping her update her resume.

"We're in new territory, and nobody knows what to do," she said. "But I also need to keep myself safe."

Montgomery and Prince George's counties, starting this week, will require shoppers at stores to wear masks.

Shoppers Food stores in Maryland recently began limiting the number of customers who can shop at one time. It is providing disposable gloves and paying employees an extra $2 an hour. But many workers are still scared. The store hasn't been able to find masks for its employees, they said, and hasn't provided them with hand sanitizer in days.

Shoppers' parent company, United Natural Foods, did not respond to a request for comment.

"There are things they could have done to better protect us, sooner," said Amber Stevens, 30, who has been working at the Forestville, Maryland, store for a dozen years. "It's a scary feeling to be around so many people and then come home to my family."

Stevens says she's lucky to still have a job when much of the economy is upside down. At least 17 million Americans have filed for unemployment benefits since mid-March, and U.S. stock markets have tumbled from the all-time highs set in mid-February. But she worries about passing on the virus to her 9-year-old daughter or 59-year-old mother.

Workers say grocers have done little to assuage their fears. Jasmine Kapralova says she has repeatedly asked her managers at a Trader Joe's in Seattle for guidance on responding to the virus since late February, after dozens of infections had been confirmed locally. She and her colleagues asked to wear masks to work but were told they would be disciplined if they did, she said.

"Any time we tried to talk to management about this outbreak, they made it clear they did not want us speaking about it," said Kapralova, 39, who has worked at the company for nearly a decade. "They warned us not to freak each other out and cause panic."

She and three colleagues, she said, came down with respiratory infections in early March. Kapralova took three weeks off with pay but says she was warned by her manager not to talk about her symptoms - which included a fever, body aches, a cough and difficulty breathing - on social media. She took an extra week off unpaid, but is still sick.

Kenya Friend-Daniel, a spokeswoman for Trader Joe's, said the company has given Kapralova three weeks of paid leave while she recovers. Managers were concerned, she said, that Kapralova's social media posts speculating that she had covid-19 were alarming her colleagues. They asked her to refrain from saying more online because she had not been formally diagnosed, Friend-Daniel said.

Although the grocer initially discouraged workers from wearing masks, Friend-Daniel said it is now providing masks and gloves to all employees to keep up with changing guidelines from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Kapralova has since asked managers to take her off the store's schedule, Friend-Daniel said.

"I shouldn't go in, but I feel pressured to go because I need the money," Kapralova said. She and her 12-year-old daughter have been living with relatives since they lost their home in a fire five years ago. "I'm scared to death of dying, but also of losing my job and not getting paid."

Elsewhere in Seattle, a longtime Kroger employee says he's facing a similar decision. At least two colleagues have tested positive for covid-19 and about 20 more are home sick or awaiting results - although the company has instructed workers not to discuss this with shoppers.

"It scares the hell out of me," said the employee, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he fears retribution. "We're terrified, but what choice we do have? We're college students or we're parents trying to raise kids. We need the paychecks."

Kroger spokeswoman Kristal Howard said the company is communicating "openly and transparently" with its employees and the public. "Our store teams should confirm when there's been a diagnosed case, sharing how we've worked with the health department and the immediate actions taken to sanitize and clean the store," she said.

The Seattle employee says it never occurred to him that the supermarket job he applied for 13 years ago to support his new wife and infant could one day put his life at risk. He feels vulnerable and scared.

"Nobody told us," he said, "that when the world falls apart, it's going to fall on our shoulders."
Courtesy of San Mateo County Sheriff's Office

A San Francisco police officer assigned to the San Francisco International Airport bureau was arrested and booked into jail on suspicion of domestic violence and sexual assault, The Chronicle has learned.

Simon Chan, a 23-year veteran at the department, was placed on unpaid leave effective April 9 and an internal investigation is ongoing, said Sgt. Michael Andraychak, a San Francisco police spokesman.
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Linkedin Farida Susanty (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Wed, April 15, 2020 14:24 636 fc6853813033f564188675f8bd2097d2 1 Business COVID-19,Hotel,tourism-industry,Blue-Bird,delivery-service,logistics,social-restriction,pertamina Free

Increasingly desperate businesses have come up with creative ideas to meet customers needs and weather the COVID-19 downturn.

Hospitality company Swiss-Belhotel International is offering a service it calls Isolation Package in Indonesia, where the hotel offers Wi-Fi, laundry and room service for those wanting to self-isolate during the pandemic. The rooms are being offered at a 35 percent discount from the normal price.

For a one month stay, the hotel chain offers a service called Stay Longer, Stay Relaxed, with cost starting from Rp 3,000,000 (US$191.25) in several hotels in Jakarta, Bali, and Surabaya, East Java.

The [customers] responses have been pretty good. We have received several inquiries because people need conducive places and hi-tech speedy wi-fi to work, Swiss-Belhotel International group marketing and communications executive Cindy Margareth told The Jakarta Post recently.

Read also: Tourism will take at least a year to recover from COVID-19 outbreak: Economists

Aryaduta Hotel Group, a Lippo Group company, also introduced a special program dubbed Comfort in Self Isolation in late March. The program, offered at prices starting from Rp 850,000, enables guests to self-quarantine for around 14 days and includes three meals per day, while ensuring that staff will not enter rooms and will not have direct contact with guests.

The COVID-19 pandemic has hit businesses, especially tourism services, hotels and restaurants, hard. The governments call to implement social distancing to contain the spread of the virus has added to their financial woes.

Indonesian Hotel and Restaurant Association (PHR) chairman Hariyadi Sukamdani said 1,266 hotels had temporarily halted operation as of Wednesday due to the outbreak.

As citizens have been encouraged to stay home to flatten the curve of contagion, taxi operator Blue Bird has rolled out a special delivery service Blue Bird COD (Chat-Order-Delivery), which delivers items, such as groceries bought in a shop or documents, to and from customers using the companys fleet.

The publicly listed company has worked with supermarkets and hotels to provide the new service. It is currently available in the Greater Jakarta area, Bandung, Semarang in Central Java, Surabaya in East Java and Bali, among other regions.

A pedestrian walks in front of the Sultan Hotel, Jakarta, on April 9, 2020. The Indonesian Hotel and Restaurant Association said there were 1,266 hotels throughout Indonesia forced to temporarily close due to the spread of COVID-19. (JP/Seto Wardhana)

It cannot be denied that the company has been hit by the current situation, which, we feel, has also been experienced by other companies in other industries, Blue Bird president director Noni Purnomo told the Post. But on the other hand, this kind of uncertain situation also calls for us to develop our services.

Before the pandemic, Blue Bird had seen a 31.21 percent decline in profit to Rp 314.5 billion last year from Rp 457.3 billion in 2018 as app-based ride-hailing services cleaved off swaths of its market share.

The transportation sector is one of the hardest hit in Indonesia. The Indonesian Chambers of Commerce and Industry (Kadin) noted that there had been a 50 percent revenue decline in the transportation sector since the country began experiencing COVID-19.

Kadin vice chairman of transportation Carmelita Hartoto projected the situation would worsen over the next six months, along with the extension of the "particular state of disaster emergency" declared by the government until the end of May.

If the condition drags on and is prolonged, it is predicted that there will be many land transportation business players who will be out of work, she said in a statement.

As of Tuesday afternoon, Indonesia had recorded more than 4,800 cases of COVID-19 with more than 450 deaths, official data shows.

Amid the health crisis, state-owned oil and gas company Pertamina expanded its existing Pertamina Delivery Service (PDS) to offer customers deliveries of oil, gas and lubricant. Previously, the service had only supplied its Bright Gas product.

Read also: Transportation industry seeks 'rescue package' to weather COVID-19 impacts

The liquefied petroleum gas (LPG) delivery service is currently available in 89 cities and regencies, oil in 67 cities and regencies and lubricants in 10 cities and regencies.

Were continuing to expand the service areas, Pertamina corporate communications vice president Fajriyah Usman said.

The newfound business strategies might help companies survive the pandemic, said Institute for Development of Economics and Finance (INDEF) economist Andry Satrio Nugroho.

These are normal efforts to be made by any business to survive this kind of situation, he said, adding that companies in the transportation sector should focus on logistics and delivery, as the service had been in demand.

He said smaller hotels would have difficulty offering work-from-home packages.

The hotels that employ this strategy must have quite stable financial capabilities. [They are] often big hotels  four-star minimum  with hotel chains in many countries, he said.

Read also: Five more months to business as usual: Business players

The government, Andry added, should focus its business incentives on manpower cost reduction by delaying state health insurance (BPJS) payments and lowering utilities bills.

Hariyadi of the PHRI expressed a similar view, saying that the hotels efforts might not be enough to increase the occupancy rate.

What customers want to spend their money now? The packages are not always attractive because, now, consumers are holding back on spending money, he said.
Australian Treasurer Josh Freydenberg dismissed calls for pay cuts

Australian politicians will not take a pay cut despite their counterparts in New Zealand agreeing to one.

Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, ministers in her government and public service chief executives will take a 20 per cent pay cut for the next six months.

Ms Ardern said the decision was made in solidarity with New Zealanders who had lost jobs and income as a result of the COVID-19 shutdown.

Treasurer Josh Frydenberg dismissed calls for Australian politicians to follow suit.

Asked by reporters if politicians should take a pay cut, he simply said: 'We have frozen the pay increases for politicians here and for public servants.'

On April 2 Scott Morrison said he was not considering cutting his hefty $549,250 salary which comes out of taxpayers' pockets.

The government and central bank are spending more than $300billion on measures to shore up the creaking economy, which will saddle Australia with debt for years to come.

One way to save money to pay back debts would be to reduce the wage bill in the public sector, including politicians.

Prime Minster Scott Morrison was asked if he was considering reforming franking credits or cutting ministers' salaries.

New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern (pictured), ministers in her government and public service chief executives will take a 20 per cent pay cut for the next six months

Mr Morrison replied: 'No, we're not reconsidering franking credits and these sort of things.'

Franking credits are a tax rebate to shareholders who get dividends, including retirees. Labor pledged to scrap them in the 2019 election campaign, and that policy was identified as one which cost the party an election it was expected to win.

Dozens of high-earning figures in the private sector have vowed to take pay cuts.

Qantas CEO Alan Joyce, whose base salary is $2.1million, has said he will not take a penny of his salary as long as coronavirus lasts.

Qantas CEO Alan Joyce, whose base salary is $2.1 million, has said he will not take a penny of his salary as long as coronavirus lasts

NRL CEO Todd Greenberg, who earns $1.2million, will take a 25 per cent pay cut - and has said he will sacrifice more if the players have their salaries cut further.

Politicians, judges and officials holding senior public office have had their pay frozen until the crisis is over - but some commentators say the freeze is not enough.

MPs wages in Australia As at 1 July 2019, the base salary of federal MPs is $211,250 per annum. This is before travel allowance and electorate entitlements. Prime Minister Scott Morrison gets $549,250. Deputy Prime Minister Michael McCormack is on $433,063. Treasurer Josh Frydenberg is paid $396,094. Finance Minister Mathias Cormann, who is also Leader of the Government in the Senate, gets $396,094. Opposition Leader Anthony Albanese is on $390,813 Advertisement

John Roskam, Executive Director at the Institute of Public Affairs, said: 'Not all this extra spending has to be new money and debt. There should be a 20 per cent reduction in public service pay until the crisis is over.

'There needs to be a sense of shared sacrifice from the public service. We have seen a disconnect of bureaucrat elites from the productive economy.'

In late March One Nation leader Pauline Hanson demanded politicians take a pay cut.

'I have no problems with politicians wages being cut back in areas, and Im happy to tell the Prime Minister where to start,' she said.

The base salary for a federal MP is $211,250.

Ms Hanson also said politicians' perks should be removed, such as flying business class instead of economy and that committee payments should cease.

Last month Malta's Prime Minister said he would forgo a month's salary to send a message to the nation that he was also making sacrifices during the pandemic.
MEMS loudspeakers CMOS compatible electrostatic transducers 14. April 2020, 13:31 Uhr |

Assembled MEMS loudspeaker with a cover chip on top showing the acoustic openings. The MEMS chip with three different micro loudspeakers is glued to a carrier plate, which allows wire bonds for electrical contacting.

Micro loudspeakers, buried in the CMOS chip, should enable even smaller, more powerful and particularly energy-efficient in-ear wireless headphones. For the commercialization of the patented technology, a spin-off of the Fraunhofer IPMS has now convinced investors to provide initial financing.

Arioso Systems GmbH received EUR 2.6 million from investors for early financing (seed). The company is a spin-off of the Fraunhofer Institute for Photonic Microsystems IPMS in Dresden, and is one of the first companies worldwide to offer CMOS-compatible technology for MEMS sound transducers. It is now financially supported by Brandenburg Kapital, Potsdam, the High-Tech-Grunderfonds III, Bonn, the Technologiegrunderfond Sachsen, Dresden, and Business Angels.

Silicon sound transducer for earphones

Arioso Systems aims to bring to market MEMS transducers that can be manufactured using standard CMOS manufacturing technology. These micro loudspeakers are based on electrostatic bending actuators (NED  Nanoscopic Electrostatic Drive) developed at Fraunhofer IPMS.

The new MEMS sound transducer does not have a membrane like conventional loudspeakers, but many bending actuators  similar to the strings of a harp. They are only 20 m thin and are located inside a Si chip. Openings at the top and bottom of the chip  at right angles to the movement of the bending beams  allow air to escape from the chambers and flow into the chambers where the electrostatic bending actuators move.

MEMS transducer

Alle Bilder anzeigen (5)

In the bending actuators, electrode gaps as thin as 200 nm generate enormously high forces through electrostatic fields with the aid of a control voltage, the audio signal. These forces lead to a curvature of the bending beam and the mechanical movement of the "string" in the transducer.

Due to the drive principle, the deflection of the NED actuators is much greater than the electrode gap. Therefore large deflections can be generated with low control voltages. With suitable electrodes and an arrangement of the actuator cells on both surfaces of the bending actuator, movement in both directions (bidirectional) is possible.

Since the NED actuators can be integrated directly into the silicon chip, they take up very little volume and are much more energy efficient than conventional loudspeakers. They make it possible to build extremely small micro loudspeakers, e.g. for in-ear headphones and hearing aids.
Most people were expecting another slow recovery of the property market in 2020  until the Covid-19 came in, said Lim Boon Ping, the president of the Malaysian Institute of Estate Agents.

Since mid-March, Malaysia has been under a Movement Control Order, requiring residents to stay home unless they are providing essential services or buying groceries or medicine. The order, in place until late April, has made title searches and property showing much harder, said Sarkunan Subramaniam, the managing director of Knight Frank Malaysia. As both buyers and sellers have become more vigilant amid the outbreak, a wait-and-see approach is prevalent, he said, as people will try to avoid showrooms and sales galleries during this critical period.

Before the pandemic, the housing market in the state of Penang  which encompasses Penang Island and the city of Seberang Perai on the Malay Peninsula  was faring better than those in much of the rest of the country, said Mark Saw, the executive director of Knight Frank Malaysia. The state, sometimes called the Silicon Valley of the East, has developed a tech-manufacturing sector that attracts workers and investors from oversees. According to the National Property Information Center, the average home price in Penang during the second quarter of 2019 was 437,632 ringgit ($101,000), higher than the national average of 420,345 ringgit ($97,000), although still far below the average of 780,564 ringgit ($180,000) in Kuala Lumpur.

Over the years, generally, Penang property has sustained itself more than the rest of Malaysia, because of its unique position being known as the pearl of the Orient and its historical background, Mr. Saw said.

On Penang Island, where George Town is, land for new development is limited. Properties with land currently range in price from 800,000 ringgit ($185,000) to 15 million ringgit ($3.5 million), depending on the location, said Anders Ong, a sales team leader at the Roof Realty, in Penang. A condominium can sell for 400,000 ringgit ($92,000) to 5 million ringgit ($1.16 million).
PHILADELPHIA, April 15, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- An online platform supporting women whose businesses shuttered due to the pandemic, such as chefs, fitness instructors, makeup artists, mixologists, astrologers, artists etc., launched this month. Girls Nite In Online (GNIOnline) connects women virtually by hosting free 30-minute workshops multiple times daily. The classes are taught by women who have lost income due to the pandemic. At the end of class, all participants are invited to donate to a virtual tip jar connected to the workshop leader's Venmo. 100% of the money goes directly to the instructor - GNIOnline takes no fees!

Even celebrities such as Ruth Buzzi, Paula Deen, Tori Spelling, Nancy Kerrigan, Lisa Leslie and Alysia Reiner have sent videos of support.

"Our team, while working from home wanted to do something to help others. Creating this platform has given us all a shot of positive. It is so uplifting watching the power of women all coming together," says Shelly Fisher, founder of GNIOnline. "We have had over 1000 women in classes so far learning something new and taking 30 minutes just for them."

Classes are held Monday through Friday beginning at 7:30am EDT. Fridays at 4:00 EDT is always Happy Hour with a featured mixologist.

Girls Nite In Online is always looking for new presenters. If you have something creative or want to get involved, contact them through their website.

Visit gnionline.com for more information!

About PIF Group: Conshohocken, PA, the PIF (Pay it Forward) Group is built on a model of support and giving back. Whether through 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 support 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 B, and www.Positivities.com. Shelly also co-authored with Jen Jones Breaking Sad:What to Say After Loss, What Not to Say, and When to Just Show Up.

Press Contact

Brooke Marano

Email: [email protected]

Cell: 610.613.4076

SOURCE Girls Nite In Online

Related Links

https://www.gnionline.com


An FIR has been registered against at least 1000 migrant workers for assembling near Bandra railway station in Mumbai on Tuesday in defiance of the coronavirus lockdown norms, causing a public health scare, police said. No arrests have been made yet and the workers are being identified, a Bandra police station official said.

"We have registered an FIR under sections 143 (Whoever is a member of an unlawful assembly), 147 (Punishment for rioting), 149 (Every member of unlawful assembly guilty of offence committed in prosecution of common object), 188 (Disobedience to order duly promulgated by public servant) and 186 (Obstructing public servant in discharge of public functions) of the Indian Penal Code (IPC)," he said.

Besides section 3 of the Epidemic Diseases Act has also been invoked against them, he said.

More than 1,000 migrant workers, who earn daily wages and been stuck in Mumbai since the last three weeks, gathered in Bandra around 3 PM demanding transport arrangements to go back to their native places, hours after Prime Minister Narendra Modi extended the coronavirus-enforced curbs till May 3.

The gathering in suburban Bandra, in violation of lockdown norms, created a potential law and order situation for an overstretched police force and the men in uniform resorted to mild force to scatter the crowd.

Also read: Lockdown Impact: Thousands of labourers gather at Bandra Station In Mumbai; lathicharged By cops

Also read: Coronavirus lockdown 2.0: Govt sets up 20 control rooms to address wage workers' issues
Amazons practices have drawn the repeated criticism of Frances labor minister, Muriel Penicaud, who said last month that the companys protection measures were insufficient. In early April, Penicaud said the conditions at four Amazon sites in France failed to meet social distancing guidelines and that she had given them three days to comply.
The "Laboratory Information System (LIS) Market Analysis, Trends, and Forecasts" report has been added to ResearchAndMarkets.com's offering.

The Laboratory Information System (LIS) market worldwide is projected to grow by US$920.9 Million, driven by a compounded growth of 6.9%. Standalone, one of the segments analyzed and sized in this study, displays the potential to grow at over 6.6%. The shifting dynamics supporting this growth makes it critical for businesses in this space to keep abreast of the changing pulse of the market. Poised to reach over US $1.6 Billion by the year 2025, Standalone will bring in healthy gains adding significant momentum to global growth.

Representing the developed world, the United States will maintain a 7% growth momentum. Within Europe, which continues to remain an important element in the world economy, Germany will add over US $54.6 Million to the region's size and clout in the next 5 to 6 years. Over US $64.9 Million worth of projected demand in the region will come from Rest of Europe markets. In Japan, Standalone will reach a market size of US $124.1 Million by the close of the analysis period. As the world's second largest economy and the new game changer in global markets, China exhibits the potential to grow at 8.9% over the next couple of years and add approximately US $63.1 Million in terms of addressable opportunity for the picking by aspiring businesses and their astute leaders.

Presented in visually rich graphics are these and many more need-to-know quantitative data important in ensuring quality of strategy decisions, be it entry into new markets or allocation of resources within a portfolio. Several macroeconomic factors and internal market forces will shape growth and development of demand patterns in emerging countries in Asia-Pacific. All research viewpoints presented are based on validated engagements from influencers in the market, whose opinions supersede all other research methodologies.

Competitors identified in this market include, among others:

Orchard Software Corporation

Sunquest Information Systems, Inc.

Cerner Corporation

CompuGroup Medical AG

Meditech

SCC Soft Computer.



Key Topics Covered:

I. INTRODUCTION, METHODOLOGY REPORT SCOPE

II. EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

1. MARKET OVERVIEW

A Prelude to Laboratory Information Systems (LIS)

Functions of an Effective LIS

Global Laboratory Information Systems Market Set to Witness Rapid Growth

Standalone LIS Holds Major Share, Integrated Systems Grow at Faster Pace

Services Segment Dominates the LIS Market, Software to Witness Higher Growth during the Forecast Period

On-Premise LIS Holds Major Share Due to Customization Benefits

Cloud-based LIS Model to Grow in Prominence due to Many Benefits Offered over Traditional, On-Premise Models

US Holds Clear Edge over Other Regions, Asia-Pacific to Exhibit Fastest Growth

Artificial Intelligence: The Future of LIMS

RECENT MARKET ACTIVITY



2. FOCUS ON SELECT PLAYERS

3. MARKET TRENDS DRIVERS

Burgeoning Population and Rising Incidence of Chronic Diseases A Key Market Driver for LIS

EXHIBIT 1: Fatalities by Heart Conditions Estimated Percentage Breakdown for Cardiovascular Disease, Ischemic Heart Disease, Stroke, and Others

EXHIBIT 2: Worldwide Cancer Incidence: Number of New Cancer Cases Diagnosed for 2012, 2018 2040

EXHIBIT 3: Number of New Cancer Cases Reported (in Thousands) by Cancer Type: 2018

EXHIBIT 4: Rising Diabetes Prevalence: Number of Adults (20-79) with Diabetes (in Millions) by Region for 2017 and 2045

Aging Demographics Add to the Global Burden of Chronic Diseases, Presenting Opportunities for Laboratory Information System/LIS market

EXHIBIT 5: Expanding Elderly Population Worldwide: Breakdown of Number of People Aged 65+ Years in Million by Geographic Region for the Years 2019 and 2030

Growing Adoption of Laboratory Automation Drives the Need for LIS

Rise of Laboratory 4.0 to Spur the Adoption of LIS

Laboratory Information Systems Gain Traction amidst Growing Need to Enhance Workflow Efficiencies and Reduce Costs

Healthy Trajectory in Genomics Research Favors Market Growth

Market Stands to Gain from Growing Proteomics Research Volumes

EXHIBIT 6: Global Proteomics Market Sales in US$ Million for the Years 2019 and 2024

Improving Healthcare Expenditure to Turbo Charge Future Growth of the Market

EXHIBIT 7: World Healthcare Spending Growth (in US$ Trillion) and Real GDP Growth for the Years 2012 through 2018

Need to Improve Diagnostics Accuracy

Increasing Popularity of Enterprise LIS

Rise in Consolidation of Healthcare Providers Creates Need for Robust and Comprehensive LIS

Growing Emphasis on Personalized Medicine to Support Growth

Rise in Investment in R&D Activity to Spur Growth

Shortage of Trained Professionals Hinders Adoption Rate



4. GLOBAL MARKET PERSPECTIVE

III. MARKET ANALYSIS

IV. COMPETITION

For more information about this report visit https://www.researchandmarkets.com/r/j1sli1.

View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20200414006119/en/

Contacts:

ResearchAndMarkets.com

Laura Wood, Senior Press Manager

press@researchandmarkets.com



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Shares puts on free Investor Events throughout the year across the country. They provide an opportunity for investors to learn more about companies on the stock market and hear from a range of investment experts including fund managers and Shares journalists.
A group of farmers of Dumraon in Buxar district, about 130km west of Patna, has formed a novel grain bank to feed marginalised people who are facing immense hardship due to the nationwide lockdown. The farmers, who are the stakeholders of the grain bank, have formed a set of guidelines to operate the bank while considering the rules to be followed during the lockdown.

About six days ago, when I received a call from some social workers that a group of nuts (nomads) were starving due to the lockdown near Dumraon railway station, I got food prepared for them. However, I realised that this was not the long-lasting solution to feed the hungry, as the lockdown would continue, Rana Ranjeet Singh, a well-off farmer of Navanagar under Dumraon block in Buxar district, said.

Singh said he mobilised the farmers of Dumraon and Navanagar blocks to chip in and donate grains for the grain bank. I called a meeting of farmers while maintaining social distancing, and now several people are contributing to the bank, he said, adding that most donations to the bank, ranging from 2 kg to 100 kg, are of wheat and rice.

Since April is the month of harvest, farmers normally have sufficient stock of foodgrains and the Rabi crop in Dumraon region is a good year, according to farmers.

Singh said the farmers willing to donate to the grain bank stock up the grains in their houses itself. This method has been adopted as stocking up the grain at one place will create issues of transportation and also escalate the cost of the service. Besides during this emergency period, where will we get a place to store the grain, he said, adding that till now about 70 farmers have joined the bank.

Once a farmer is ready to donate the grain, he informs Singh, who contacts the needy, who then go to the donor farmer to collect the grain. A needy family is not given more than 15kg grain for a week. Since the needy are known in the locality and are not outsiders, there is less chance of them collecting foodgrain more than once a week. Many cannot avail benefits of government schemes, as they dont even own a ration card. The bank is a boon for them, Rameshwar Ojha, another farmer of Dumraon, said.

Singh said that the district administration officials of Dumroan were contacted to collect the foodgrains from the farmers and get them distributed under their supervision. But they refused, citing reasons such as maintenance of law and order and other official work, so we decided to go ahead with the formation of the grain bank, he said.

Block development officer (BDO), Dumraon, Prabhat Ranjan, while appreciating the efforts of the farmers by forming the grain bank said it was true the district administration officials were tied up with identifying the Covid-19 patients and other works. It will be difficult for us to distribute the foodgrains, but we are not stopping anyone from helping the needy, he said.

Singh claimed the idea of creating a grain bank was catching the fancy of farmers of neighbouring Bhojpur, Rohtas and Kaimur districts.

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A day after a Theodore Roosevelt sailor died from COVID-19 complications in Guam, a second sailor from the coronavirus-stricken aircraft carrier has been moved to the ICU with shortness of breath, the Navy said Tuesday.

Also Tuesday, Defense Secretary Mark Esper said the Navy investigation into the ships outbreak and what led its former commanding officer, Capt. Brett Crozier, to issue a plea for help has been completed and is in the hands of the Chief of Naval Operations office. Adm. Mike Gilday will review the report and make fact and finding recommendations to Esper soon, the defense secretary said in a news conference at the Pentagon.

Esper also said he had not approved the $243,000 plane trip to Guam made by former Acting Navy Secretary Thomas Modly this month. Modly made the trip to deliver an address to the Roosevelt crew disparaging Crozier, an action that would cost him his job. Esper said he did not monitor senior officers trips in general but said he encouraged them to get out of the office and travel.

In an update on the health of the carriers crew, Esper said that 213, or about a third, of the 589 Roosevelt sailors who have tested positive have shown symptoms of infection. More than 300 sailors have either not been tested or not received their results. More than 3,900 sailors have tested negative and more than 4,000 have been moved off the ship, the Navy reported Tuesday. The Navy said it has tested 93% of the crew.

Since the Roosevelt docked in Guam on March 27, the crew of the massive, crowded warship has been attempting to fend off the virus. Crozier was dismissed for an email he sent out to several people in which he pleaded with Navy officials for more help protecting the crew. Soon after, Modly resigned after delivering his remarks aboard the ship. Since then, healthy sailors have begun 14-day quarantines in Guam hotel rooms.

Over the weekend, four sailors were hospitalized to better monitor their coronavirus symptoms, the Navy said. On Tuesday, one of those sailors was transferred to an intensive care unit for increased observation due to shortness of breath, the Navy said.

The Navy has yet to identify the Roosevelt crew member who died Monday. Reportedly a Navy chief in his early 40s, he was in isolation in a Guam Naval Base home with four other sailors who tested positive when he was found unresponsive on Thursday. Medical crew members and the other sailors performed CPR on him and transferred him to the base hospital. The Navy flew his wife to Guam to be with him in the days before he died.

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.

According to the father of a Roosevelt sailor who has tested positive for the virus, conditions for the more than 300 positive sailors being held in group quarantine in a base gymnasium have improved in the past few days. Mark Blakewood, of Orange Park, Fla., said the improvements came after The Chronicle published a story and asked questions of the Navy about the conditions in the makeshift quarantine.

On Easter Sunday, sailors in quarantine who had been using their linens from the ship got fresh sheets and towels, along with a promise for Monday, Wednesday and Friday laundry service, Blakewood said. Sailors also are beginning to receive needed toiletries, he said.

Unfortunately, its more reactive than proactive, he said. But I think the little things do help.

Matthias Gafni is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: matthias.gafni@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @mgafni
This article, Joe Exotic's Tiger King songs a big hit on Spotify, originally appeared on CNET.com.

One of the numerous odd side stories to come out of hit Netflix documentary Tiger King: Murder, Mayhem and Madness was Joe Exotic's, uh, musical career. The animal park owner wanted to be a country music star and made numerous music videos, but musician Vince Johnson told Vanity Fair he and the late Danny Clinton were the real performers. The show's directors, Eric Goode and Rebecca Chaiklin, told the L.A. Times a fact-checker discovered Joe did sing somewhat on certain songs, so they chose not to call him out on it in the show.

It may not be Joe himself singing, but that hasn't stopped Spotify from adding several of Joe's songs to its musical streaming service. The song I Saw a Tiger was added to Spotify on March 30, a Spotify representative said in a statement, "following a clamoring from fans to get it added to the platform." Upon checking Monday, we saw numerous other Joe Exotic songs available.

And people are actually listening. The music service notes that in less than two weeks, Joe Exotic's music found listeners in all 79 of Spotify's global markets.

While the US, with its large population, has the largest sheer number of listeners, Denmark is streaming I Saw a Tiger at a higher rate than any other country, followed by the UK, Ireland and then Iceland. Within the US itself, North Dakota, Mississippi and Montana are the top three states streaming the song.

"As of (April 13), Joe Exotic is averaging an 18% daily increase in its share of streams," the Spotify statement said. And Joe's fans are young, with listeners aged 25-29 consuming his music at the highest rate.

Other Joe Exotic songs now available on Spotify include the unnerving Here Kitty Kitty, which is all about Joe's theory that rival Carole Baskin fed her missing second husband, Don Lewis, to her tigers. Baskin has denied having anything to do with Lewis' disappearance. "I never threatened (Lewis) and I certainly had nothing to do with his disappearance," Baskin says in a statement on her website.

Spotify isn't the only place to get Joe's music. Netflix has added a singalong version of I Saw a Tiger, complete with lyrics and a cute little tiger head bopping along, karaoke-screen-style, to show you when to sing what.




Meghan Markle reportedly clashed with Buckingham Palace staff just before her wedding over her celebrity background. Royal experts said the aides did not approve the actress due to her Hollywood past.

Camilla Tominey, a reporter who has written about the British royal family for more than a decade, said the staff was not impressed by her showbiz luster, self-confidence, and feminist habits---qualities that made her irresistible to the American press.

Tominey also claimed Prince Harry and Meghan Markle's excessive demands did not go down well behind palace doors, leading an aide to ask, "who do you think you are?" at the royal couple before they officially tied the knot in 2018.

Royal Source Spills Details on Meghan Markle's True Colors

Multiple reports painted the actress as a highly demanding person in the days leading up to her wedding. The Duke and Duchess' approach also created "below-stairs chatter" among staff who have been serving at the Buckingham Palace for many years.

The royal expert said the arguments stemmed from a clash of cultures---the film industry is very fast-paced and demanding, a far cry from the slower, traditional world of the royals.





Civil Servant in Tiara

The royal couple's decision to step down as senior royals have created a huge controversy. Numerous tabloids claimed the royal exit created a rift between the pair and the British royal family.

The news shocked many people, but few believe Meghan was the catalyst in the announcement. Royal writer Ashley Pearson said the unglamorous life of being a royal ultimately led to the decision. She also claims Markle compared her short stint of being a royal to a "civil servant in a tiara."

Markle also had a hard time understanding how to be progressive without causing controversy or criticism. She was a staunch critic of the current US administration. She is also an advocate for addressing climate change and women's rights, all of which are not apolitical.

Meghan Markle and Kate Middleton: Different Social Media Approaches

Their stance on progressive issues, including mental health and wildlife conservation, can cause problems of public debate--of which the British royal family is not fond.

The Duke and Duchess of Sussex have since moved to California with their 11-month-old son Archie. Many consider the move to be following the footsteps of leaders who used their celebrity status to promote causes and raise awareness on issues and politics.

The pair unveiled the name of a new foundation they plan to launch in the future. The charitable foundation, Archewell, will reportedly focus on building the pair's brand and further their ambition to implement 'world change.'

'Archewell': Meghan and Harry's Secret Revealed

The nonprofit organization will reportedly provide education and emotional support, along with other essential services. The foundation will be a "source of action" and will embody the strength needed "to do something of meaning" and "to do something that matters."

The Sussexes also announced the suspension of their official Instagram account a day before they stepped down from royal duties.

"While you may not see us here, the work continues," the caption read. "Until then, please take good care of yourselves, and of one another."
At least 28 people die in two separate attacks in eastern DRC, raising fears of an ethnic conflict escalation.

More than two dozen people were killed in two separate attacks in eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo, a region in the grip of militia violence, officials said on Wednesday.

CODECO assailants attacked the people of the village of Koli while they were asleep, killing 22 civilians, said Adel Alingi, head of the Djugu administrative region in Ituri province, referring to an armed group targeting the Hema ethnic community.

The raid took place overnight from Saturday to Sunday.



All [of the dead] were from the Hema community, Alingi told AFP news agency, adding the motive for the attack remained unclear.

The people of the village have fled for their lives, he said.

In the second attack on Tuesday, two soldiers, a civilian and five members of the Allied Democratic Forces (ADF) militia were killed in Beni, in neighbouring North Kivu province, said the armys regional spokesman Anthony Mualushayi.

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 between the Lendu, mainly farmers, and the Hema, herders and traders, has a long history in the gold and oil-rich province.

Tens of thousands of people have been killed between 1999 and 2003. According to the UN, most victims were targeted because they were Hema.

The conflict has reignited in recent years.

More than 700 people were killed in Ituri since late 2017, a UN report said in January, adding some of deaths might constitute a crime against humanity.

The ADF began operating in Uganda in opposition to President Yoweri Museveni.

It then fell back to North Kivu, DRCs border province with Uganda, during the Congo Wars of the 1990s.

Since October 2014, the group has been accused of killing more than 1,000 civilians.

Hundreds died in violence that began last October, in apparent reprisal for an army offensive against the ADF.

The army has claimed a string of successes, saying it has destroyed all the ADF strongholds in the forest and jungle around Beni and killed five of six known rebel leaders.

The violence comes as new cases of Ebola were detected in the country in recent days, alarming international organisations that a new outbreak of the disease might take place amid the fighting.

The World Health Organization has said the Ebola outbreak in DRC still constitutes a public health emergency of international concern following the emergence of new cases.

The announcement on Tuesday came a day after the country had been expected to announce its outbreak  the tenth recorded in its history and by far its largest  was over.
Saudi Arabia did not intend for U.S. oil producers to suffer, Saudi Energy Minister, Prince Abdulaziz bin Salman, said in an interview with a select group of reporters, including Energy Intelligences Amena Bakr.

I made it clear that it was not on our radar or our intention to create any type of damage to their industry. My belief is that once this market stabilizes, and given the nature of shale oil and the shale industry, that they will be able to recover as the market recovers, as the world economy recovers. So I have no single doubt in the mind that in the future, they will rise again from the ashes and thrive and prosper, the Saudi minister told reporters in the phone interview published by Energy Intelligence on Tuesday.

Saudi Arabia is looking forward to a time when U.S. producers thrive once again in a market with higher oil demand, Abdulaziz bin Salman said.

Before the OPEC+ group agreed on Sunday to reduce oil production, the leaders of the OPEC and non-OPEC producers, Saudi Arabia and Russia, respectively, traded accusations over who is to blame for the previous deals collapse. Russias President Vladimir Putin said that Saudi Arabias oil price war and its readiness to offer steep discounts for its oil was designed to bankrupt U.S. shale. Saudi Arabia responded to that by accusing Russia of breaking up the OPEC+ coalition last month. The words attributed to Putin by media are fully devoid of truth, Saudi Minister of Foreign Affairs, Prince Faisal bin Farhan Al Saud, said in a statement in early April.

The new OPEC+ deal put the Saudi-Russia feud behind and was an effort to respond to the glut threatening to fill up global storage within weeks as demand crashed amid the COVID-19 pandemic. The nearly 10 million bpd cut would be for just two monthsMay and Juneafter which the producers will soften the cuts.

Story continues

Premium: A Global Oil Cartel?

The idea for stretching the cuts over two years came from Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the Saudi energy minister said in the interview with reporters.

Asked about the Saudi-Russian dynamic in the negotiations leading to the deal, Abdulaziz bin Salman told Energy Intelligence:

Within a family you get into differences of opinion. I wouldn't call it a feud. It all happens within the family. At the end of the day, a family is a family. When they are confronted with a challenging situation, two parents come out and that sense of band-of-brothers prevails.

According to the minister, despite disagreements in the course of negotiations, such as the one with Mexico, I think the first read of that is that Opec-plus is here to stay.

By Tsvetana Paraskova for Oilprice.com

More Top Reads From Oilprice.com:

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Robare Custom Homes was established in 1998 and quickly became a premier custom builder specializing in residential and small commercial building throughout San Antonio, the Texas Hill Country, and surrounding areas. Receiving over 75 Local, Regional, & National Awards in the past decade, you can feel confident that Robare Custom Homes will offer you an award-winning design build experience.

Owner Mike Robare has instilled the company philosophy that has served them well for over 20 years: People Are Our Business. Nothing is more heartwarming than the happiness we bring to a family moving into their dream home. Building homes is more than just a business transaction; it is a long-term relationship between people who trust each other.

Putting people first may be a tall order for some builders, but Robare Custom Homes makes a commitment to provide an extraordinary level of personal service, attention to details, and an enjoyable and interactive experience for our customers. The Robare corporate culture revolves around teamwork, integrity and excellence in performance. Each client is promised that their home will be built with the highest of standards, never compromising on quality.

The Robare Custom Homes team consists of over one hundred combined years of design and construction experience in the custom residential and small commercial market segments. Integrity in business is at the heart of Robare Custom Homes mantra and with that the entire team strives to build beautiful custom homes with indisputable quality and distinction. The quality and consistency of Robare Custom Homes has been recognized by our peers and customers alike, as exemplified in our awards and testimonials. One of our proudest moments was being honored in 2005 with a Presidential Citation from the Builders Association for our donation of the Park Rangers quarters at Government Canyon State Natural Area located in northwest Bexar County. Robares heart of giving awarded him the title of Humanitarian of the Year in 2018 for the Greater San Antonio Builder Association. Their culture of giving has led Mike and his employees to Guatemala on over 20 trips to build schools in the extreme rural areas of the country.

Robare Custom Homes is a business that believes in faith and family. Mike has found that keeping lifes priorities in order, that being: God, family, then business, not only brings greater success, but also, balance and a higher level of satisfaction to himself, his entire team, and most importantly his clients.

Continuing education in the building industry is a must by our standards and is an inherent expectation of our valued clients. Mike has been certified and has achieved the following designations: Certified Graduate Builder (CGB), Certified Aging in Place Specialist (CAPS/ADA), Certified Green Professional (CGP), and in 2008 Mike achieved the most prestigious and highest level of builder certification that the National Association of Home Builders offers and one of a select few in the United States, Graduate Master Builder.

This year, we are honored to be participating The Spring Tour of Homes and The Parade of Homes. We have 3 separate entries showcasing the latest in technology, craftmanship, and design features. Our membership and active role within the Greater San Antonio builder Association allows us to stay on the forefront and the cutting edge of all that is Custom Home Building. This year for both events its going to be a must attend for anyone considering building a new home or remodeling in the next year or two. For your one on one consultation on your New Luxury Dream Home contact us directly at 210-372-9880 or at info@robarecustomhomes.com. We look forward to starting your dream home in the new future.

Editors Note: This content is made possible by Robare Custom Homes. It is not written by and does not necessarily reflect the views of The San Antonio Express-News' or mySanAntonio.com'storial staff. Learn more about our advertising products at www.hearstmediasanantonio.com.
CHICO, Calif.- Medical workers battling coronavirus continue putting their lives on the line to protect others.

Action News Now spoke with local doctor, Dr. Bradley Smith, who is also the CEO of Immediate Care Clinics.

Dr. Smith says hes been practicing medicine for years and has never seen anything like the Covid-19 outbreak.

He says the most difficult part is not having enough tests, something he is working to solve soon.

He says he is extremely thankful to his staff who have been working around the clock adjusting to the situation.

Immediate Care Clinics in Chico and Orland are open as usual but they have strict protocols in place.

They are having patients wait in their car until a provider is ready to bring them straight into their room.

All staff is wearing masks and PPE.

"I've never thought about catching anything from anyone in my entire career, I know it's a crazy way to be but that's what gets us into medicine, I have other practitioners who are the same way, they are dedicated to taking care of people and if there is little risk for themselves, that's why we went into medicine, it's not an easy job." Smith said.

Dr. Smith says they are working to come up with a plan to be able to provide rapid COVID-19 tests to whoever needs one in near future.

The clinic is open Monday through Friday from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m and on weekends from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m.
MatadorMuzz, the new band fronted by Interpol's Paul Banks, will release their self-titled debut album on June 5.

The record includes the previously released songs "Bad Feeling" and "Broken Tambourine," as well as a brand-new track called "Red Western Sky," which you can download now via digital outlets.

Along with Banks, Muzz features The Walkmen drummer and Fleet Foxes touring member Matt Barrick, and Josh Kaufman of the folk group Bonny Light Horseman.

Interpol's most recent album is 2018's Marauder. They also released an EP, A Fine Mess, in 2019.

Here's the Muzz track list:

"Bad Feeling"

"Evergreen"

"Red Western Sky"

"Patchouli"

"Everything Like It Used to Be"

"Broken Tambourine"

"Knuckleduster"

"Chubby Checker"

"How Many Days"

"Summer Love"

"All Is Dead to Me"

"Trinidad"

Copyright  2020, ABC Audio. All rights reserved.
A coronavirus rapid test area in Nepal. (Getty Images)

The World Health Organization (WHO) has said there are six things that need to happen before countries lift their coronavirus lockdowns.

In a letter released on Tuesday, the international body said that, first of all, transmission had to be controlled.

The second measure that had to be met was capacities were in place to detect, test, isolate and treat every case and trace every contact, it added.

Thirdly, it said outbreak risks had to be minimised in special settings like health facilities and nursing homes.

The fourth hurdle was that preventive measures were in place in workplaces, schools and other places where its essential for people to go.

Read more: London's NHS Nightingale 'largely empty' and only had 19 patients over Easter

Spain has allowed some non-essential employees to go back to work. (Getty)

The fifth was that importation risks can be managed and sixth, communities are fully educated, engaged and empowered to adjust to the new norm.

The WHO also advised on Wednesday countries that ease restrictions should wait at least two weeks to evaluate the impact of such changes before easing them again.

Some of the countries hardest-hit by the virus are now considering lifting lockdowns and beginning the transition toward a resumption of normal life.

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

6 charts and maps that explain how COVID-19 is spreading

The WHO update said any such steps should be taken gradually, with time to evaluate their impact before new steps are taken.

It said: To reduce the risk of new outbreaks, measures should be lifted in a phased, step-wise manner based on an assessment of the epidemiological risks and socioeconomic benefits of lifting restrictions on different workplaces, educational institutions, and social activities...

Ideally there would be a minimum of two weeks (corresponding to the incubation period of COVID-19) between each phase of the transition, to allow sufficient time to understand the risk of new outbreaks and to respond appropriately.

Story continues

It warned the risk of re-introduction and resurgence of the disease will continue.

US president Donald Trump announced on Tuesday that he would halt funding to the WHO over its handling of the coronavirus pandemic.

The WHOs special envoy for the outbreak, David Nabarro, said that any recriminations should be left until after the virus has been defeated.

He added: If in the process you decide you want to declare that youre going to withdraw funding or make other comments about the WHO, remember this is not just the WHO, this is the whole public health community that is involved right now.

Coronavirus: what happened today?

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After a months-long saga over whether President Trumps personal vendetta cost Amazon a $10 billion Pentagon contract, the Pentagons inspector general said it found no evidence that the decision to award the cloud-computing contract to Microsoft was the result of interference from President Trump, Bloomberg reports. While this could clear the way for Microsoft to resume work on the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI) contract, some will likely find the probe inconclusive.

In a 317-page report detailing its investigation, the inspector generals office said it does not believe that Department of Defense (DoD) personnel who evaluated the contract proposals and selected Microsoft were pressured by any DoD leaders more senior to them. But that may not end the speculation. Reuters points out that several officials did not fully participate.

We could not definitively determine the full extent or nature of interactions that administration officials had, or may have had, with senior DoD officials regarding the JEDI Cloud procurement because of the assertion of a presidential communications privilege, the report said.

Last fall, the Department of Defense awarded the $10 billion contract to Microsoft and tasked the company with replacing its legacy cloud-computing systems. Amazon quickly challenged the decision. It filed a complaint with the US Court of Federal Claims and followed that with a lawsuit, in which the company said President Trump used his power to screw Amazon out of the JEDI Contract as part of his highly public personal vendetta against Mr. Bezos, Amazon, and the Washington Post. A spokesperson said the evaluation process contained clear deficiencies, errors, and unmistakable bias.

In February, a judge granted Amazons request to put the Microsoft contract on hold. The inspector general report released today may clear the way for Microsoft to continue -- or it might not. According to a past report by CNBC, Amazon hopes to depose President Trump and six other officials as part of its lawsuit. Its unclear whether the inspector generals report will change that.
For more coverage, visit our complete coronavirus section here.

Whatever duration of the COVID-19 pandemic you look at, from Washington to all ends of the globe, one forecast is unfailingly accurate: Do not expect a "return to normal."

The coronavirus has already revealed, as never before, shortcomings and inequities in America's health care system. Long lines at food banks drive home a lesson about our economy: Half of all Americans live paycheck to paycheck. Technology workers can set up at home, the financial industry can move billions. But America depends on underpaid workers who deliver food, treat the sick, and do the vital grunt work.

Seeds of upheaval? Probably not. But renewed focus on overdue reform, and scrutiny of those who block it.

A relatively modest reaction, given what pandemics have done. Consider impacts on history, the consequences of suffering:

-- The Spanish flu: The 1918 Spanish flu killed millions, with the largest death toll -- 17 to 19 million -- coming in India. Mahatma Gandhi survived, but the flu took his daughter-in-law and grandson. But the indifference of British rulers gave renewed life and expanded support for the movement led by Gandhi for India's independence. "Indian nationalists blamed the (British) Raj for the pandemic -- one nationalist newspaper ran the comment, 'The Raj are doing nothing tand we are dying like dogs," Catharine Arnold, author of "Pandemic 1918," recently told CBC News.

While the Ganges was swollen with dead bodies, colonial authorities remained in the hills and away from fetid cities. "(They) also paid the price for the long indifference to indigenous health, since they were absolutely unequipped to deal with the disaster," in the words of Laura Spinney, author of "Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How It Changed the World."

-- Smallpox in the Americas: The disease made its first appearance in the New World in 1518, less than a quarter century after Columbus sailed the ocean blue. It was a classic case of the "virgin soil epidemic" for which natives of North America had no defense mechanisms. It played a major role in Spanish conquests of the Aztec and Inca empires, and destruction of these advanced civilizations.

Smallpox would kill millions, from the Caribbean to what is now Alaska. "The discovery of America was followed by possibly the greatest demographic disaster in the history of the world," in the words of retired University of Virginia historian William Denevan.

Elizabeth Kolbert, writing in the New Yorker, noted the lasting influence of something 500 years ago: "This disaster changed the course of history, not just in Europe and the Americas, but also in Africa: Faced with a labor shortage, the Spanish increasingly turned to the slave trade."

-- AIDS in America: The AIDS epidemic reached to corners of America far beyond so called LGBTQ "enclaves" in San Francisco and greater New York. With the Reagan Administration as indifferent as the British Raj -- until the epidemic claimed actor Rock Hudson -- many of the closeted came out to campaign for their lives.

On an airport tarmac in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, campaigning for president in 1992, Bill Clinton encountered a bevy of ACT-UP demonstrators, a trio of them locally grown. He huddled with them, coming away deeply moved. A best selling book, "And the Band Played On," detailed indifference as a cause of catastrophe. Its author, Randy Shilts, would die of AIDS.

The campaign to force resources to find a cure found an unlikely champion -- actress Elizabeth Taylor. But a crowd of 300,000 people would march past the White House demanding recognition and response. It signaled the beginning of a long push to rid America of the social disease of homophobia.

-- The Potato Pandemic: Potatoes were the staple food for the people of Ireland, until 1845 when a fungus caused drops to become, in words of author Timothy Egan, "dark, moldy, stinky masses of inedible tubers." Thousands starved. The British continued to grow and harvest grain, doing little to relieve the misery.

The result was that 1.8 million people fled the Emerald Isle from 1845 to 1855; 1.5 million of them headed for America. The mass exodus from Ireland would change the country of destination, despite resistance from a movement in America, the Know Nothings. In Ireland, the seeds of an independence movement against the lofty Brit rulers that let it happen.

Who were they? Words of overseer Charles Trevelan live in Egan's book "The Immortal Irishman." "It forms no part of the functions of government to provide supplies of food," to which he added by way of instruction to subordinates: "Do not encourage the idea of prohibiting exports ... perfect free trade is the right course."

"Dependence on charity is not to be made an agreeable mode of life," added the nobleman, sounding like a 21st Century Fox News pundit.

-- The Plague (episode 1): Starting in northeast Egypt, the plague of the 6th Century AD spread east and eventually reached the capitol of the Eastern Roman Empire. Constantinople was under the enlightened rule of Emperor Justinian, whose greatest creation the Hagia Sophia draws thousands to Istanbul.

Justinian survived the plague, but it hit Constantinople three times more. A new religion, Islam, would sweep across and rule, to this day, much of Justinian's empire.

-- Black Death (14th Century): It killed perhaps a third of Europe's population, and would erupt again. As Kolbert reports, the last major outbreak in Europe occurred in 1720.

The plague led to rudimentary public health measures. But as Kolbert writes, in a distant mirror on today, "evasion, resistance and riot" greeted control efforts. "Public health measures ran up against religion and tradition, as of course they still do. The fear of being separated from loved ones prompted many families to conceal cases."

-- Cholera pandemics: The bacteria-driven disease spread from India north to Russia, west to Europe and eventually the United States in the 19th Century. Tsar Nicholas I instituted a quarantine. Cholera pandemics would hit St. Petersburg, Glasgow, Liverpool, and Dublin.

An 1891 outbreak, in the city of Donetsk, caused rioting and brutal repression of workers by Russian authorities. Once again, removed rulers and maladroit response would plant the seeds of revolution.

Haiti in 2010 soon after a devastating earthquake, experienced a 21st Century outbreak of cholera. It infected 809,000 people, and took 9,000 lives. Since then, a raging civil war in Yemen has caused another outbreak of the deadly disease. Cholera has since spread to Muslim refugee camps in Myanmar (formerly Burma).

Lessons from these pandemics: Diseases flare up again, unless checked by vaccine. Indifferent governments lose all credibility. Deep social ills are exposed. Anger is directed at the rich, whether British authorities sheltered from Spanish flu in the foothills of the Himalayas, or a conservative American administration loathe to do anything about AIDS.

In a world where travel can spread a virus quickly across oceans -- the COVID-19 pandemic apparently crossed the Pond from Europe -- preparedness is absolutely essential. Delay is deadly. A model for stopping a pandemic and keeping it from spreading, the Obama administration's response to the outbreak of Ebola in Africa ... while Donald Trump screamed on Twitter about alleged inadequacy of the response.

With angry populism on the rise in many countries, the control of disease rests with a premise that has caused riots in centuries past: Trust the doctors, trust the experts.

RELATED CORONAVIRUS COVERAGE:
Tom Friedman, the amiable but compulsively mistaken columnist of the New York Times, has produced a proposal for Joe Biden to nominate in advance a unity cabinet, composed of an ideological range of people from Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to Mitt Romney. This argument, and the reasoning given for it, are so preposterous that a cordial reply seems called for: This is the same columnist who told his readers that the purported Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election was an invasion of American sovereignty as profound, outrageous, and threatening as the attacks on Pearl Harbor in 1941 and on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon in 2001. It is the same person who informed President Obama that Obama had created a foreign-policy doctrine like those of his predecessors James Monroe, Harry Truman, and Richard Nixon (all very successful foreign-policy presidents), in Obamas case by making preemptive and unrequited concessions to Cuba and Iran. I could go on if there were a need for it.

Friedman wrote in the Times on April 7 that Joe Biden must announce at his partys convention the composition of an entire cabinet, including a number of Republicans. To set the stage for this dramatic proposal, he laid down the customary Times artillery barrage of aggressive disparagements on the incumbent: President Trump seeks to exacerbate the worst in America and it is a matter of life and death to get rid of him, as he only seeks to dominate the country with his 48 per cent (or less) of voters, to suppress the vote, and to squeak by in gaming the electoral system. Reelecting Trump would be the moment America ceded its global leadership to China. Having thus established the necessity of his proposal, Friedman counseled Biden to recruit those who would believe in science, so they could deal with climate change, along with people who in the present crisis took the science of this epidemic seriously and would be open to extraordinary measures to help the disadvantaged, support the public sector, and ensure universal health care (though not, to be fair, with the SandersWarrenOcasio-Cortez single-payer Leviathan straitjacket). This great act of unification is necessary to prevent four more years of lying, dividing, and impugning experts. How Friedman expects to build unity by smearing and defaming the basket of deplorables half of the country that has steadily supported Trump isnt clear.

Story continues

Tom Friedman has taken the idea of a national unity government from the parliamentary system. In countries where the government requires a parliamentary majority and the principal legislative house is determined at least partially by a slate system depending on the numbers of votes each party receives overall, such as Germany and Israel, coalitions are, in practice, always necessary, but that certainly doesnt ensure a high level of policy consensus. In states where the principal legislative house is chosen by a constituency system in which the leading candidate in each district wins, regardless of how fragmented the vote is (first past the post), such as Great Britain and Canada, coalitions are resorted to only in extreme emergencies  four times in the combined history of those two countries in the 20th century, of which three were during the World Wars and one in the Great Depression. On such occasions, the incumbent prime minister, or the most prestigious alternative, is called to lead.

The most famous and successful example was Winston Churchill, from 1940 to 1945. On May 10, 1940, as the Nazi offensive in the west broke into the Netherlands, Belgium, and France, King George VI called upon Mr. Churchill  the leading opponent of the discredited appeasement policy, and a veteran of 39 years in Parliament and nine different cabinet positions, including the Exchequer (Treasury), Home Office, War, Trade, Colonies (an immense empire), munitions (in World War I), the Air Force, and what was then the greatest navy in the world in both World Wars. The small all-party war cabinet that Mr. Churchill chaired, as prime minister and minister of national defense, was delegated practically unlimited powers, except the right to tax, in what swiftly became the greatest crisis of national survival in British history. The country, as Mr. Churchill said in his inaugural statement promising nothing but blood, toil, tears, and sweat, had not seen the campfires of an invader for nearly a thousand years.

Tom Friedman didnt refer to Churchill, but he did use the terminology of the time (a national unity cabinet, which is not an American political expression, as cabinet members are not in the legislature). Claiming any sort of grandeur of emergency now, and on behalf of Joe Biden, is a formidable stretch, even for someone with the elasticity of imagination of Tom Friedman. The precedents he does cite are Lincoln, FDR, and Obama, but these are flimsy; he is inspired by Doris Goodwins book Team of Rivals, about Lincoln, but Lincoln only had 39.5 percent of the total vote in the 1860 election (which was contested by four serious candidates), and it remains less than half if the votes from the southern states that shortly seceded are omitted. It was only the Republican Partys second presidential election, and Lincoln unified his party by bringing in his rivals for the nomination, especially William H. Seward, who had led on the first two ballots at the nominating convention. Lincoln moved closer to the idea of coalition in his reelection, when he renamed his party the National Union and selected the only southern Democratic senator who had remained faithful to the Union, Andrew Johnson of Tennessee, as vice president.

Franklin D. Roosevelt is cited because he nominated Frances Perkins, the first woman cabinet member, to be secretary of labor. She was a lifelong Democrat who had worked closely with Roosevelt when he was governor of New York. During World War II Roosevelt did come closer than anyone in U.S. history to coalition government, by bringing in prominent Republicans Henry Stimson (who had held high offices under four Republican presidents) as secretary of war, former Republican vice presidential candidate Frank Knox (Navy secretary), John G. Winant (ambassador to Great Britain), William J. Donovan (chief of intelligence), Edward Stettinius (secretary of State), and Patrick Hurley (ambassador to China), and in sending equal numbers of Republicans and Democrats to the founding meeting of the United Nations (having learned from Woodrow Wilsons mistakes of 1919). The reference to President Obama for having made Republican senator Chuck Hagel defense secretary is spurious, as Hagel was only his third defense secretary and was acrimoniously forced out after two years, hardly an advertisement for national unity.

Friedmans candidate for State is Mitt Romney, which is nonsense. When he was the presumptive Republican nominee for president in 2012 and made his foreign-policy tour, the highlight was telling the British, a month before opening, that they werent capable of putting on the Olympic Games successfully (they did). Friedman doubtless likes him for his vote to convict Trump in the impeachment farce, but representing the nomination of Romney to any office as a gesture of national unity is absurd. And there is no reason to believe that Bill Gates, Michael Bloomberg, Senator Elizabeth Warren, and Republican Ohio governor Mike DeWine would accept the posts Friedman has allocated to them. Joe Biden could not remotely convene such a group and lead it anywhere; an attempt to announce any such concept at the nominating convention would be seen as an effort to prop up an implausible candidate, and would just be yet another attempt to claim that Donald Trump is illegitimate and whoever can be mobilized to oppose him is the official agent of national salvation. If Friedman had any practical interest in national unity, he would lead a movement in the Trump-hating media to acknowledge the presidents achievements and oppose him in civil terms and for rational reasons, not by attempting to continue the fraud that he is a cloven-footed, horned monster of corruption and incompetence.

More from National Review
Some women at Damwaateon, a deprived farming community in the Wa West District of the Upper West Region have experienced concern about the manner in which they compete with both wild and domestic animals for water from a stream in the community.



That, they said, was as a result of the lack of alternative source of water in the community for domestic purposes such as cooking and drinking, which had compelled them to rely on dugouts at the stream for water.



Madam Mercy Dasaa, a resident of the community told the Ghana News Agency (GNA) that the streams dried-up in the dry season and they had to dig dugouts before they could get water to fetch.



Sometimes if you are not lucky, you will dig and fetch and the time you will return the next day animals would have come to drink and destroy, so you have to dig again to fetch, she explained.



Madam Dasaa said they had only one borehole in the community of more than 500 inhabitants and added that it did not produce enough water during the dry season.



Madam Agnes Diesob, another resident of the community said the situation impeded their economic activities in the community as the women had to spend several hours at the stream or borehole in search of water for the family.



The residents appealed to the District Chief Executive, Mr Edward Larbiri Sabo and the Member of Parliament for the area, Mr Joseph Yiele Chireh to come to their aid by providing them with a source of potable water.



They said if nothing was done to alleviate their plight in accessing potable water in the community, they would not entertain any politician who would come to the community to campaign for votes during the electioneering.



Meanwhile, Mr Yussif Gizuure, the Assembly Member for the area told the GNA that he was aware of the challenges facing the people including the challenge in accessing potable water.



He gave the assurance that he would negotiate with the DCE to find solutions to those challenges.



Ghana, as a signatory to the 17 United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), was required to, among other things; ensure availability and sustainable management of water and sanitation for all by 2030.

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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WASHINGTONU.S. President Donald Trump signalled Wednesday that hes prepared to support easing travel restrictions along the Canada-U.S. border sooner rather than later  although the feeling may not be mutual, given the extent of the COVID-19 outbreak in the United States.

Canada is doing well in its efforts to control the spread of the virus, Trump said during his daily media briefing at the White House.

In the same breath, however, the president  who makes no secret of his urgent desire to see the American economy come roaring back to life  seemed to equate Canadas success with efforts in the U.S., a comparison sure to raise eyebrows north of the border.

Our relationship with Canada is very good  well talk about that. It will be one of the early borders to be released, the president said. Canadas doing well, were doing well  so well see.

The two countries negotiated a mutual ban on non-essential travel in both directions in mid-March, an agreement that explicitly exempted the flow of trade and commerce, as well as vital health-care workers such as nurses who live and work on opposite sides of the border.

That agreement is currently due to expire early next week. Other travel restrictions, such as a U.S. ban on foreign nationals arriving from a long list of European countries, are likely to remain in place a while longer, Trump said.

We have a lot of nations that are heavily infected  some are getting better, (but) some are still on the way up, unfortunately. Were keeping very strong borders with those nations, he said.

But with Canada, we are talking about different things.

If indeed the U.S. is anxious to lift the restrictions, the dramatic imbalance in the outbreaks severity in the two countries  the U.S. has more than 560,000 active cases, the most in the world, while Canadas caseload is just over 18,000  could put the federal government in an awkward position.

Earlier Wednesday, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau made it clear that efforts to control the spread of the virus in Canada are likely to remain in place for several more weeks. And on Tuesday, the government tightened its self-isolation requirements for those arriving from outside the countrys borders, making an extended hotel stay mandatory for anyone without a suitable quarantine plan.

Widespread testing and the ability to rapidly track down the contacts of infected people will be key to an eventual return to normal activities, Trudeau said.

We have to be through this first wave sufficiently to be able to know we have the capacity to stamp out and restrict any future outbreaks as they come along, he said.

That means technology, that means better testing capacity, that means continued vigilance  not just by governments but by all Canadians. ... Were still a number of weeks away from that.

Read more about:
Amazon has confirmed the firing of two former employees who had been vocal critics of the company's climate and labor practices. On Monday, the retailer told the Washington Post, which is owned by Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, that it had stopped employing Emily Cunningham and Maren Costa. The firings were later corroborated by CNBC.

Amazon said it fired the two user experience designers for repeatedly violating its internal policies. Amazon's external communications policy says employees can't talk about the company publically without approval from management. A spokesperson for Amazon told the Washington Post, the rule does not allow employees to "publicly disparage or misrepresent the company."

"We support every employee's right to criticize their employer's working conditions, but that does not come with blanket immunity against any and all internal policies. We terminated these employees for repeatedly violating internal policies," the spokesperson told the Washington Post.

Citing the same policy, Amazon had threatened to fire Cunningham and Costa in the past as well. The two say they were fired in retaliation for their climate and labor advocacy. Both women are members of an employee advocacy group called Amazon Employees for Climate Justice. At the start of the year, they criticized the retailer for its climate policies in a video former presidential candidate Bernie Sanders shared on his Twitter account. Representing approximately 8,700 other employees, Cunningham was also the person who called on Amazon to reduce its dependence on fossil fuels during the company's annual board of directors meeting last year.

"Because of how effective we've been in getting Amazon to take leadership in the climate crisis, they've wanted me gone for a while," Cunningham told the Washington Post. "They were targeting the most visible leaders in an attempt to silence everyone," Costa added.

We are in the middle of both the climate crisis and a global pandemic. This is the time to deeply care about one another. Its about the kind of humans we want to be in an uncertain, scary world that is disproportionately harming and killing BIPOC and other vulnerable ppl. 3/  Emily Cunningham (@emahlee) April 14, 2020

More recently, both Cunningham and Costa expressed solidarity with Amazon's warehouse workers, publically denouncing the sanitary conditions at the company's fulfillment centers during the coronavirus pandemic. Before their firing, they said they would match donations up to $500 to support those individuals "while they struggle to get consistent, sufficient protections and procedures from our employer."

Amazon's firing of Cunningham and Costa follows termination of warehouse worker Chris Smalls last month. Smalls, one of the organizers of the recent Staten Island fulfillment center coronavirus protest, was fired after he spoke to several media outlets about working conditions at Amazon's warehouses. For its part, the company said it had fired Smalls for disregarding a quarantine order from his manager. In one of its recent daily updates, Amazon announced it had started providing masks to its warehouse employees. It also said it had begun conducting temperature checks.
President Donald Trump on Tuesday April 14, announced that he has stopped US' funding of the World Health Organization over its "role in severely mismanaging and covering up the spread of coronavirus."



The US President who disclosed that a review is currently being conducted, stated that the UN agency failed "in its basic duty. He added that the most dangerous and costly decisions from the WHO, was its disastrous decision to oppose travel restrictions from China and other nations.



Trump told journalist at the White House;



Today I am directing my administration to halt funding while a review is conducted to assess the World Health Organizations role in severely mismanaging and covering up the spread of the coronavirus.



American taxpayers provide between $400 million and $500 million per year to the WHO and in contrast, China contributes $40 million a year or even less.



As the organisations leading sponsor, the United States has a duty to insist on full accountability. One of the most dangerous and costly decisions from the WHO was its disastrous decision to oppose travel restrictions from China and other nations.



The WHO failed in its basic duty and must be held accountable.



Had the WHO done its job to get medical experts into China to objectively assess the situation on the ground and to call out Chinas lack of transparency, the outbreak could have been contained at its source with very little death, he told reporters.



This would have saved thousands of lives and avoided worldwide economic damage. Instead, the WHO willingly took Chinas assurances to face value and defended the actions of the Chinese government.



With the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, we have deep concerns whether Americas generosity has been put to the best use possible.



WHO executive director Dr Michael Ryan had hailed China for its transparency with the coronavirus outbreak in January. But US intelligence officials now believe the countrys communist government told multiple lies about their outbreak, and think the official death toll of 3,400 is way under the true figure of around 40,000 people killed.



At Tuesday's press briefing, Trump directly accused China of covering up the threat of coronavirus, in contrast to a tweet he sent on January 24. The tweet read;



'China has been working very hard to contain the coronavirus. 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!



President Trump stopped US funding of the WHO, barely a week after the international health organization Director-General, Dr Tedros Adhanom accused him of playing politics with the crisis.













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A number of TDs have raised the question of new allowances to allow them to purchase office equipment while they work from home during the Covid-19 outbreak.

British MPs were last week offered an extra 10,000 (11,500) to help with the purchase of new equipment for them and their staff to assist them in working from home.

Though it was reported that MPs had given themselves the increase, it was in fact the Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority. Here in Ireland, it is the Houses of the Oireachtas that would make the decision to offer a new allowance.

Sources say the question of extra funding to pay for office equipment or laptops has been raised by a small number of TDs.

Some staff have asked about access to better internet connections, new computer and printing equipment, and additional funds for increases in mobile phone bills.

However, the Houses of the Oireachtas says it is not considering any allowances.

A statement said TDs can avail of an 8,000 allowance when they are first elected to assist with setting up their constituency offices.

TDs can also claim up to 750 every 18 months for the purchase of mobile phones and associated equipment.

There is no additional allowance being considered, said the Houses of the Oireachtas. For many years now [25-plus years], TDs have been able to avail of a constituency office set up grant.

Due to public health guidelines, most TDs are working at home, with some representatives  mostly Dublin-based  able to make journeys to their Leinster House offices.

Sinn Fein Dublin Mid-West TD Mark Ward said that while working from home is not ideal, TDs are paid more than enough and said that, if anything, TDs should take a pay cut.

Were paid more than enough at this stage, he said. In fact, were on the record as saying that there should be a reduction in TDs wages.

Any supports that are out there at the moment for people to work from home should be given to small and medium enterprises that are really struggling.

I have people around my area that have closed their businesses and are struggling and dont know if theyll get it back after Covid-19. Any additional money should be given to businesses who need it, not TDs.

Mr Ward, who was first elected in Novembers by-election, used his constituency office allowance to pay for office space in a local community facility.

He says that while trying to be a national legislator from home is not ideal, there are people in much worse positions.
(Bloomberg Opinion) -- Two and a half years ago, Giuseppe Conte was an obscure lawyer and academic unknown to most Italians. Next week, this very unlikely prime minister will lead Italys most important round of European negotiations in nearly a decade.

The European Unions political leaders will meet on April 23 to agree on a coordinated economic response to the Covid-19 pandemic, which has killed more than 65,000 people across the bloc. Italys economy is set to shrink by 9.1% this year, according to the International Monetary Fund. After a promising start, the government is struggling to put together a timely response because of administrative failures and concerns over the countrys very high debt levels.

Conte has demanded that the euro zone sets up joint and several liabilities (euro bonds) to show solidarity with its financially weaker members, but countries including Germany and the Netherlands are unlikely to give way on this. The single-currency areas finance ministers reached an agreement last week for a coronavirus rescue package, but it only included the lightest reference to possible discussions over a limited form of euro bonds  or coronabonds, as theyre otherwise known.

The prime minister will hope to press the case of coronabonds afresh at the EU meeting. In reality, he may have to choose whether to climb down from this unrealistic negotiating strategy or walk away, which would mark an unprecedented rupture between Rome and the EU.

Italy is already the biggest beneficiary of the European Central Banks vast bond-buying program, which has helped keep a lid on its borrowing costs. The euro zone is also likely to agree to a number of schemes that would let all member nations borrow at preferential rates to fund their health-care systems and support their labor markets. Ideally, the bloc would add some form of commitment to mutualizing at least some of this extra debt between its members after the crisis.

Story continues

But the brutal truth is that Conte has no real leverage here. A conflict with the rest of the euro zone would spook investors, adding an Italian sovereign debt crisis to the epidemic.

Conte, whos never been elected to parliament, is in a situation similar to the one faced by Mario Monti, another technocratic Italian prime minister, back in June 2012. At the height of the euro zone crisis, Monti tried to convince Germany to cap Italys borrowing rates, which were spiraling out of control. In a dramatic European Council meeting, he failed to obtain the hoped-for concessions, except for a vague commitment to use the European Stability Mechanism, the euro zones rescue fund, more flexibly. Luckily, Italys bond yields were saved a few weeks later by the then ECB president, Mario Draghi, who pledged to do whatever it takes to save the euro.

Conte faces a more tragic and costly crisis than Monti. But, in one way, hes more fortunate. Over the past decade, Draghi has transformed the ECB into a more interventionist institution, fully committed to defending the single currency. Christine Lagarde, his replacement, appeared to put that role in doubt in March, when she said that the ECB was not there to close the spreads between the bond yields of weaker and stronger euro zone states. However, she has since corrected that mistake, stressing that there are no limits to her commitment to the euro. The central bank has bought more than 50 billion euros ($55 billion) in assets via its new pandemic-related program over its first three weeks  many of them Italian government bonds.

A Conte veto at the EU meeting would reopen old doubts over Italys euro membership and make it much harder for the ECB to support the country. Moreover, nothing good would come out of it politically. Its impossible to have fully-fledged euro bonds without the Germans and the Dutch on board. While France and Spain have backed Italys calls for some form of joint debt issuance, theyre unlikely to join a Conte walkout. Italy risks being isolated.

Contes real troubles are mainly at home. Italys governing coalition is divided, as the left-of-center Democratic Party is in favor of a more conciliatory approach to the European negotiations, while the populist Five Star Movement is taking a hard line. Matteo Salvinis right-wing League, meanwhile, is using its position outside power to capitalize on these divisions, expressing Salvinis euroskeptic instincts and waging a campaign against any use of the ESM instead of fully fledged euro bonds. Coronabond supporters believe its fairer for the euro zone to share more of the cost of the coronavirus response because the Covid-19 outbreak isnt the fault of any country.

Last week, Conte used an address to the nation on Italys lockdown to attack Salvini, a sign of just how nervous the prime minister has become.

Contes strategy at the EU meeting may decide his political future. In a period of emergency, his approval ratings are high, but there are creeping doubts about his ability to preside over a new phase of gradual reopening. Italy has set up a task force, led by Vittorio Colao, the former chief executive officer of Vodafone Group Plc, to advise the government on this so-called Phase 2. In the Machiavellian world of Rome politics, one wonders whether this is a sign that the political landscape is shifting.

For weeks, the euro zones dithering has given Conte a convenient political scapegoat to divert attention from a growing list of domestic failures. This has worked so far, as Italian voters have blamed Germany and the Netherlands. But the strategy seems to have run out of road. Conte has to make up his mind on where he stands; and be prepared to accept the consequences.

This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of Bloomberg LP and its owners.

Ferdinando Giugliano writes columns on European economics for Bloomberg Opinion. He is also an economics columnist for La Repubblica and was a member of the editorial board of the Financial Times.

For more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.com/opinion

Subscribe now to stay ahead with the most trusted business news source.

2020 Bloomberg L.P.
After playing a central role in Provenance Hotels emergence as a significant player in Portlands hotel business, Bashar Wali is leaving the company.

In a highly personal email released Wednesday morning, Wali said the global pandemic, which has wreaked havoc in the hospitality business, convinced him it was time to make a dramatic change.

Six hours later, Provenance put out a press release announcing Katherine Durant, Provenance chair and CEO, will now assume the role of president as well. Gordon Sondland, Provenance founder, will replace Durant as chair.

Sondland and Durant are married.

Wali will leave the company on May 29.

The landscape has been irrevocably changed, he said in an email that was circulated widely. And if it hasnt yet, then it must. In the post-COVID 19 era, can I really return to debating which local roaster I carry for my coffee? Making quips about the superficial things that most hotels are going to get wrong anyway? Posting pictures of palatial hotel bathrooms that are larger than some Manhattan apartments? I think not.

Since the coronavirus has swept across the state, occupancy in Oregon hotels has plummeted between 70% and 80%. The sudden collapse has forced hotels to lay off or furlough thousands of employees, according to the Oregon Restaurant & Lodging Association.

Provenance owns or manages 14 hotels across the country, six of them in Portland.

Wali worked closely with Sondland, founder of the local chain of boutique hotels. Wali took the lead of the company when Sondland was appointed U.S. Ambassador to the European Union.

Sondlands stint as ambassador put him in the middle of President Donald Trumps Ukraine scandal and made him a star witness in the resulting impeachment investigation. Wali was left to deal with the local fallout after U.S. Rep. Earl Blumenauer called for a boycott of Sondlands hotel chain.

Bashar has been a valued member of our team for nearly 15 years, and we thank him for the dedication and ingenuity he has brought to Provenance during his tenure, said Sondland. While we are sad to see him leave the Company in his current capacity, we understand his desire to pursue a new venture and we are pleased that he will remain a significant presence in our world as an investor and friend. We wish him all the best in his next endeavor.

Last falls notoriety did nothing to prepare Provenance or Wali for the COVID-19 pandemic, which has been brutal on the hotel business. Hospitality will experience a sea change, Wali said in his email. And my role within the business must as well.  This time calls for bigger thinking. Bolder action.

Jeff Manning

503-294-7606

971-263-5164

jmanning@oregonian.com
Gov. Tom Wolf said this week the draconian steps we're now taking cannot go on forever.

Yet the big question remained: When can we start re-opening businesses and schools and otherwise returning to normal?

While lacking exact answers, Wolf this week showed a roadmap of how we might get there. Two experts interviewed on Tuesday said the route seems sound.

For the near-term future, Wolf says, well have to continue with the full-fledged closings and social distancing to enable the healthcare system to fully prepare for whatever surge of patients might hit. The recent flattening of Pennsylvanias coronavirus case count also must stay on course.

Then well reach a fork in the road. Whether well be able to choose the route to normalcy will have much do to with the availability of antibody testing. Antibody testing, according to a growing consensus, may take us well down the road to normal even before the arrival of a vaccine, which is expected to be a year or more away.

Antibody testing is different than the test that tells whether someone has COVID-19. It involves detecting the antibodies that occur after someone is exposed. The hope is that people who have been exposed develop a strong and reasonably long-lasting immunity. Based on other diseases, scientists have reason to think that might happen. But they still dont know for sure.

If it does, it will enable health care workers to work without fear of getting sick. It could give people confidence they can return to work or school without getting sick. And depending on the level of immunity in the general population, it might pave the way to a gradual reopening of businesses and schools. Beyond that, theres reason to hope that blood plasma from people who have been infected can help others recover from COVID-19. Antibody testing could help find them.

Broad testing is the only thing that can give us the confidence to get back on our feet again, Wolf said.

Antibody testing has suddenly become the focal point of the national effort to reopen.

Dr. Anthony Fauci, one of President Donald Trumps key advisers, a few days ago said such testing could become available within about a week. But many questions remain about when it will become available enough to have a major impact.

Presently, there is no federally-approved test. However, the federal government has suspended the normal approval process, allowing a host of companies to move forward with tests.

Dr. Raghavendra Tirupathi, the medical director for Keystone Infectious Diseases and chair of infection prevention at WellSpan Chambersburg Hospital, says antibody testing is more simple technologically than the test for COVID-19 that has been so unevenly available.

He says its one that can be developed and carried out at any number of government, hospital and commercial labs.

Im looking at four to six weeks for it to become available at the grass-roots level, he says.

Still, the test will need to be available at hospitals, health centers and doctors office across the state. Further, the government must remove all cost barriers. The last thing you want is for people to stay away from the testing for financial reasons, he said.

But the level of testing needed to begin returning to normal will involve broad access to both the antibody test and the COVID-19 test, said Matthew Ferrari, an epidemiologist and researcher at the Center for Infectious Disease Dynamics at Penn State University.

Ferrari warns that because of the unknowns about immunity from the COVID-19, antibody testing tells us little about whether an individual is safe from infection.

However, it can provide valuable information about the prevalence of the new coronavirus throughout a region and a population. In a best-case scenario, he said, it would show that more people had been exposed than previously thought, meaning the illness is less lethal than previously known. That would bolster confidence that some restrictions can be safely rolled back.

Ferrari believes major forward progress will require widespread availability of both antibody and COVID-19 testing. The antibody testing will give us information about the overall prevalence and consequences of the coronavirus. Fast access to the COVID-19 test will enable us to immediately know who has it. Those people can then be isolated, and their contacts can be traced, so we know who else might be carrying it and who should therefore be quarantined.

With that level of testing in place, the restrictions could focus on individuals, rather than the shutdowns and other restrictions imposed on everyone.

When might Pennsylvania be able to begin reopening businesses and schools?

Tirupathi stresses the factors that will drive the decision can change daily. His best guess is that, if we continue to get good results from the present restrictions, Pennsylvania might be able to consider starting to ease restrictions sometime in June. He expects it to begin slowly, in staggered fashion, probably with reopening of businesses that dont involve large gatherings of people, such as construction or online sales. If that doesnt trigger a substantial rise in cases, progressively larger businesses can reopen. If that goes well, schools might reopen, and so on, according to Tirupathi.

Ferrari, the Penn State scientist, resists naming a specific number of weeks or months. Rather, he says, I think we should all be looking to the health care infrastructure to tell us when we feel comfortable reopening. That means getting hospitals to the point they are capable of handling every COVID-19 patient and having full availability of tests.

That, he said, will give us the safety net which will give confidence to jump from the cliff toward normalcy.

The good part, he said, is those are things we can accomplish, and do so quickly through sufficient effort and cooperation. To that end, he said he was greatly heartened by the coalition announced this week by Gov. Wolf and the governors of New York, New Jersey and several northeastern states.

For now, Wolf is stressing that the social distancing is working but warning against complacency. If we become lapse, or ease up on the restrictions too soon, we risk a second wave of infections, which would prolong the human suffering and economic devastation.

On Tuesday, he was asked whether people in parts of the state that dont have many cases are facing unfair restrictions. Wolf noted there was a time when Philadelphia and surrounding hard-hit counties had no cases. He said the goal is to spare other counties from rising counts. The fact that parts of the state have few cases may well be a sign the restrictions are working.

All of us have to figure out what is the right cadence, what is the right balance, he said. If we dont do this right, the economy is going to be in worse shape than it is right now.

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.
Skullduggery: noun. Def: underhanded or unscrupulous behavior.

In 1991, the Tennessee General Assembly passed a bill known as the Anti Skullduggery Act. This Act was sponsored by then State Senator Steve Cohen of Memphis to address a problem he saw as a result of the most recent November elections.

Senator Cohen was rightfully upset that a sitting incumbent legislator filed papers to qualify for the next election. He was in a relatively safe Republican seat and, as it turned out, no one filed papers to run against him in the primary and the Democrats opted to pass on the seat as they knew the odds of winning against a long term incumbent was not worth the investment, right? So the incumbent would have been the only candidate on the ballot in November. That is not really unusual in these situations.

There is an old saying in politics; the two best ways to run for office are scared or unopposed. In this case, the incumbent was running unopposed.

But, what the incumbent didnt tell anyone at the time was that he was planning to retire and had no intention of actually running that year. So, he talked a friend of his into waiting until the very last day to file qualifying papers and be prepared to file his candidacy for that office and the incumbent would then withdraw his name from the ballot. No one else knew about the plans so no one else had time to get the necessary signatures and file paperwork before the noon deadline on that particular date. The new candidate then went on to run unopposed in the primary and general election and then served very well in the Tennessee General Assembly for several terms.

But, that did not sit well with Senator Cohen. It appeared to him, rightfully so, that this was trickery, deceit, and yes, even skullduggery.

Senator Cohen introduced his bill, the Anti Skullduggery Act, and made a strong and logical argument for its passage. And it did pass both chambers with strong support.

Very simply the ASA now provides that if any incumbent for any office withdraws his/her candidacy on the last day of the qualifying period, the qualifying deadline will then be extended for another seven days to allow others to enter the race. It actually made a lot of sense to address skullduggery in the election process.

Now, fast forward to Hamilton County in 2020 and the District 2 County School Board election. The incumbent, Kathy Lennon, an unapologetically vocal and left leaning representative to the Board of Education, filed her papers to be on the August ballot. She knew, however that she would likely be targeted by a more conservative candidate who would be a better fit for that district and faced an uphill battle. She was not up for that fight. But then, another candidate also qualified to run. This candidate, Marco Perez, had actually served as Lennons campaign treasurer in the last election and was considered to be one of her political lieutenants. Strange, right?

Well, not so strange if you participate in Skullduggery.

On the last day that a candidate could withdraw from the race, April 9, Ms. Lennon withdrew her candidacy, leaving Mr. Perez as the only candidate to appear on the August ballot from District 2.

Sound familiar?

As it turns out, the provisions of the Anti-Skullduggery Act then kicked in. The qualifying period was then opened for another seven days under the Tennessee statute. And along comes a very qualified candidate to serve, Mr. Tom Decosimo.

Tom was already planning to run in August as a write in candidate after it appeared there would be no opposition to the acolyte candidacy of Ms. Lennon. Tom was then made aware of the Anti-Skullduggery Act and quickly quipped if what the incumbent and her lieutenant did is not skullduggery, I dont know what is. And he is right. The ASA was specifically crafted to address this type of deception.

Tom has now qualified to be on the August ballot. He will be an outstanding candidate and an exceptional member of the Hamilton County Board of Education.

I strongly urge anyone who lives in District 2 to support Tom Decosimo and lets begin to see some real progress on the School Board, working toward real solutions while managing a half a billion dollar budget funded by taxpayers.

Ken Meyer

Former Member of the Tennessee General Assembly who voted for the Anti Skullduggery Act.






Temperature checks on voters, separate booths for those with fevers, special polling stations for the quarantined: South Koreans headed to the polls Wednesday with a big turnout expected despite the coronavirus threat. South Korea is the first country with a major virus outbreak to hold a national election since the global pandemic began, and a complex web of safety measures was spun around the ballot, as well as the campaigning that preceded it. The parliamentary poll vote kicked off at 6 am (2100 GMT Tuesday) with 43.9 million voters eligible to cast their ballots. All citizens must wear protective masks and undergo temperature checks at the polling station. Those found to have fever will cast their ballots in separate booths to be disinfected after each use. Voters have also been asked to wear plastic gloves after cleaning their hands with sanitiser at polling stations, and to keep at least one metre (three feet) apart. "We are now holding an election at a very difficult time amid social distancing campaigns and a contraction of economic activity," election commission chairman Kwon Soon-il said Tuesday. "Please go to the polling stations tomorrow and show that you are the owners of this country." South Korea was among the first countries to be hit by the virus outside China, where the coronavirus first emerged. For a time South Korea had the world's second-largest outbreak, before it was largely brought under control through a widespread testing and a contact-tracing drive. Those self-quarantining at home will be allowed out to vote in a 100-minute window around the polls' 6:00 pm close, as long as they do not show virus symptoms. Special polling stations were set up at eight central quarantine facilities at the weekend to enable residents to vote. But anyone who is staying at home and has developed symptoms is effectively disenfranchised. Campaigning has also been affected by the outbreak: instead of the traditional handshakes and distributing of name cards, candidates have been keeping their distance from citizens, bowing and offering an occasional fist bump. Many have turned to online media such as Youtube and Instagram to connect with voters, while some have even volunteered to disinfect parts of their constituencies. - Record early turnout - A survey conducted by Gallup Korea last week showed that 27 percent of respondents were reluctant to vote due to the epidemic. But 72 percent said they were not worried, and a high turnout is expected after 11.7 million people, including President Moon Jae-in, voted early over the weekend. South Korea's relatively quick and effective handling of the epidemic has been a boon for the left-leaning Moon ahead of the vote, largely seen as a referendum on his performance. Just a few months ago he was assailed by critics over sluggish economic growth and his dovish approach to North Korea. But fewer than 40 new coronavirus cases were recorded on each of the six days up to and including Monday, the latest available figures. Overall, the country has had nearly 11,000 infections, and 222 deaths. Moon's approval rating has jumped from 41 percent in late January to 57 percent last week, according to Gallup polls. Moon's position is not at issue as he is directly elected, but while his Democratic party is the largest in parliament it does not hold a majority, relying on minority support to pass legislation. The country uses a mix of first-past-the-post constituencies and proportional representation, and some high school students are voting for the first time after Seoul lowered the age limit from 19 to 18. South Korea bans opinion polls in the last week before an election, but the last available gave the Democratic party 44 percent support, a huge lead over the main conservative opposition United Future Party, on 23 percent. At first the coronavirus outbreak worked against the government, said Hahn Kyu-sup, a communications professor at Seoul National University, "but now with the virus spreading to other countries and South Korea receiving a relatively good evaluation in comparison, the epidemic has become an advantage".
The Chargers confirmed Wednesday that one member of the organization had tested positive for COVID-19. (Los Angeles Chargers)

One member of the Chargers organization tested positive for COVID-19 last month, and two others have shown symptoms, the team confirmed Wednesday.

Spokesman Josh Rupprecht reported that all involved were doing well and recovering.

The Chargers closed their Costa Mesa offices to nonessential personnel on March 12 because of the coronavirus outbreak and shut down their headquarters completely March 17.

The organization notified those who had been exposed to the employee, and all were self-isolating. The two other employees who have shown symptoms have not tested positive.

Everyone in the Chargers front office has been working from home for at least the last four weeks.

General manager Tom Telesco will head the teams operation when the draft begins April 23 from a makeshift office on the dining room table of his Newport Beach home.
Ryanair will be hit by its exposure to countries most affected by the coronavirus pandemic and air travel restrictions that will remain in place "well beyond" the second half of this year, according to ratings agency Fitch.

Fitch downgraded Ryanair's rating to 'BBB' yesterday from 'BBB+', reflecting expectations for the wider aviation industry.

But it also acknowledged that the carrier has "industry-leading liquidity".

"The downgrade reflects our updated macroeconomic and global aviation industry expectations, weakening Ryanair's business and financial profile over the entire rating horizon," according to analysts at Fitch.

They added that they are factoring in a "deep global recession for 2020" which will affect air travel demand "well beyond" current restrictions.

The agency is assuming Ryanair's revenue will not recover to the level seen in the financial year that ended last month until the 2023 financial year.

Fitch added that uncertainty remains around air travel, future social distancing requirements and demand recovery, "as well as Ryanair's large exposure to European countries that are considerably affected by the outbreak, particularly Italy and Spain".

The agency said its negative outlook on the company's rating also reflects the "heightened risk for Ryanair to adjust its operational base and investment programme in a fast-evolving environment".

It added: "We estimate Ryanair's industry-leading liquidity to drain during full-year 2021, but to remain sufficient, assuming substantial measures to preserve cash."

Ryanair, which has a fleet of more than 450 aircraft, has already grounded most of its planes. It is still operating a skeleton service between Ireland and the UK, as well as to some mainland European destinations, however.

Last week, Ryanair's director of operations, Neal McMahon, told pilots here that beyond the end of May, the carrier still has no certainty on a return-to- service date, "and cannot rule out further measures to protect the long-term viability of our operation in Ireland, such as extended layoffs and/or job losses".

Fitch warned that the airline industry's recovery will lag that of the broader economy.

It also expects restrictions, especially on international flights, to be in place into next year at least.

"This will in turn, coupled with economic weakness, affect the propensity to travel beyond 2021," noted the agency. "We therefore forecast weaker passenger load factors for Ryanair.

"The recovery of different travel segments will vary, with discretionary travel to remain more vulnerable in our view."

The International Air Transport Association yesterday predicted that the Covid-19 pandemic will see airline passenger revenues fall by $314bn (286bn) this year, a 55pc decline compared with 2019.
A US prisoner released from a Florida jail because of the coronavirus pandemic has been arrested on suspicion of murder just one day after being freed.

Now, 26-year-old Joseph Edwards Williams is back behind bars and facing several new charges, including second degree murder, resisting an officer and possession of a firearm, according to the Hillsborough County Sheriff's Office.

He had been released with others inmates but was arrested on Sunday on a warrant in connection to the homicide, which took place in Tampas Progress Village neighbourhood.

Sheriff Chad Chronister said in a statement: There is no question Joseph Williams took advantage of this health emergency to commit crimes while he was out of jail awaiting resolution of a low-level, non-violent offence.

As a result, I call on the State Attorney to prosecute this defendant to the fullest extent of the law.

Coronavirus infecting a cell - In pictures 1 /9 Coronavirus infecting a cell - In pictures Coronavirus infecting a cell EPA An image captured and color-enhanced at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) Integrated Research Facility (IRF) in Fort Detrick, Maryland, USA and made available by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) shows a colorized scanning electron micrograph of an apoptotic cell (red) heavily infected with SARS-COV-2 virus particles (yellow) EPA The SARS-COV-2 virus begin the infection process of cytoplasm of the cell, inside which is the nucleus, responsible for storing the genetic material of the cell EPA Tthe SARS-COV-2 virus particles after infection and viral replication inside the cell (white circle in the left corner) EPA A series of dark spots, which are viral particles of the SARS-COV-2 virus, trying to infect the cytoplasm of the cell, inside which is the nucleus, responsible for storing the genetic material of the cell EPA An arrow pointing to a novel coronavirus particle attached to cell membranes, displaying its typical glycoprotein spike 'corona' on the viral surface (issued 02 April 2020), seen in an electron microscope image, the first black and white portrait of the SARS-CoV2 virus, which causes the COVID-19 disease EPA An image captured and color-enhanced at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) Integrated Research Facility (IRF) in Fort Detrick, Maryland, USA and made available by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) shows a colorized scanning electron micrograph of an apoptotic cell (purple) heavily infected with SARS-COV-2 virus particles (yellow) EPA

Williams reportedly appeared in video court Tuesday afternoon.

He has a lengthy criminal record containing 35 charges, according to the Hillsborough County Sheriff's Office, and was one of more than 100 inmates released locally to curb the spread of Covid-19 in detention centres.

"Judges, prosecutors, and Sheriffs around the country are facing difficult decisions during this health crisis with respect to balancing public health and public safety," said Mr Chronister.
(CNN)  US President Donald Trump announced Tuesday he is halting funding to the World Health Organization while a review is conducted.

Trump said the review would cover the WHO's "role in severely mismanaging and covering up the spread of coronavirus."

Trump's announcement comes in the middle of the worst global pandemic in decades and as he angrily defends his own handling of the outbreak in the United States.

Amid swirling questions about whether he downplayed the crisis or ignored warnings from members of his administration about its potential severity, Trump has sought to assign blame elsewhere, including at the WHO and in the news media.

The US funds $400 to 500 million to the WHO each year, said Trump, noting that China "contributes roughly $40 million."

"Had the WHO done its job to get medical experts into china to objectively assess the situation on the ground and to call out China's lack of transparency, the outbreak could have been contained at its source with very little death," Trump said.

His decision to withdraw funding from the WHO follows a pattern of skepticism of world organizations that began well before the coronavirus pandemic. Trump has questioned US funding to the United Nations, withdrew from global climate agreements and lambasted the World Trade Organization -- claiming all were ripping off the United States.

Democratic Sen. Chris Murphy of Connecticut, who serves on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said earlier Tuesday that while the WHO and China "made mistakes," Trump is also looking to deflect blame from his own administration.

"Right now, there is a very coordinated effort amongst the White House, and their allies to try to find scapegoats for the fatal mistakes that the President made during the early stages of this virus," he said.

Murphy added: "It is just wildly ironic that the President and his allies are now criticizing China or the WHO for being soft on China when it was in fact the President who was the chief apologist for China during the early stages of this crisis."

Trump said Tuesday if the WHO had acted appropriately, he could have instituted a travel ban on people coming from China sooner.

Trump said Tuesday the WHO made a "dangerous and costly" decision to oppose travel restrictions from China.

But just days before Trump instituted his ban on travelers from China, he also was praising the country.

On January 24, Trump tweeted: "China has been working very hard to contain the Coronavirus. 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!

US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo reiterated the administration's dissatisfaction with the international organization amid the coronavirus pandemic in a series of interviews prior the President's announcement.

"The World Health Organization in its history has done some good work. Unfortunately, here it didn't hit the top of its game, and we need to make sure that we push through efforts to fundamentally change that or make a different decision that says we're going to do our part to make sure that these important world health obligations, things that frankly keep Americans safe too, actually function," Pompeo said in an interview with "Good Morning Orlando."

Just weeks earlier, Pompeo and the State Department had highlighted the US contribution to the global pandemic response, including its role as "the largest supporter of the World Health Organization since its creation in 1948."

Tuesday's announcement about the halting of funding comes days after a major US ally -- the United Kingdom -- announced an additional 65 million contribution to the WHO.

The move to freeze the funding is the latest in a series of administration actions against international multilateral organizations. Prior to the pandemic, the administration's fiscal year 2021 proposal laid out a $65 million cut to the World Health Organization -- a more than 50% decrease over FY20.

CNN's Kevin Liptak contributed to this report.
PR-Inside.com: 2020-04-15 11:03:04

This marks the beginning of ThinkOns wholesale cloud footprint in Europe extending Infrastructure, Data Protection and Business Continuity services to the Channel in the UK

LONDON, April 15, 2020 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- ThinkOn Inc. , an industry leader in wholesaling secure cloud infrastructure and data management services underpinned by the powerful VMware and Veeam technology stacks has now achieved a new milestone in its efforts to drive global expansion. ThinkOn has announced a new cloud operating environment in the United Kingdom that is supported by Datanet.co.uk, a leading Data Centre facility based just out of London, in Fleet. This new data centre joins ThinkOns other 20 cloud regions across Canada, the US and Caribbean.



This expansion will provide access to the companys range of backup solution offerings like ThinkOn RansomGuard powered by Veeam Cloud Connect and Secure Cloud Backup for Office 365 , disaster recovery solutions with Veeam Cloud Replication. ThinkOn has also deployed the technology resources required to building a secure and sophisticated VMware Powered Public/Private Cloud and intelligent object storage powered by Hitachi Vantara. Additional services to this market will be rolled out within the coming months.

With this new market in ThinkOns service delivery roadmap, the company is aiming to grow its Channel Partner base in the UK, while opening new growth avenues for existing partners and subscribers.

ThinkOns expansion into the UK is an impactful decision in ThinkOns history and a strategic step towards the organizations growth. We are committed to deliver unmatched service delivery and experience to our partners in the UK as in other regions. This new site will help us address cloud adoption challenges in the European landscape while meeting UKs data security and compliance standards said Craig McLellan, CEO and Founder of ThinkOn Inc.

Data Protection Driven by Customer Focus

ThinkOn will continue to provide 24/7 support to partners and subscribers with dedicated workforce. This facility meets all certification requirements of ISO 27001, SOC 2 Type 2, as well as stringent privacy regulations in the UK. Any existing workload on the North American cloud will remain sovereign to the location as requested by the partners.

About ThinkOn Inc.

ThinkOn is an exclusive wholesale provider of cloud infrastructure and data management services with over 150 partners and over 1,100 end subscribers in the commercial and public sector. ThinkOns cloud is engineered for high availability, reliability and scalability supported by simple and easy to understand suite of cloud services. Headquartered in Toronto, Canada, the company supports its channel across 20+ DCs in North America, Caribbean and now the UK to deliver un-paralleled data management and information asset protection solutions.
Dauphin Countys largest nursing facility has confirmed multiple people are in quarantine after testing positive for the coronavirus.

Administrators from the Spring Creek Rehabilitation and Healthcare Center in Harrisburg didnt say how many patients have the virus, but that there are active cases."

These patients are isolated on one floor of the facility, and all other residents and staff members are being monitored for symptoms, Spring Creek said.

We understand the severity of this pandemic but undoubtedly realize the difficulty our residents and families face during this time of isolation, Spring Creek said in a statement. Our concerns during this time are as always with our residents and staff.

When the outbreak began, Spring Creek took measures similar to others in the area by shutting down visitation and group activities, administrators said. Personal protective equipment was also made available.

Two employees at a Cumberland County nursing home have also been in quarantine since testing positive for the virus. No residents at that facility had tested positive as of Tuesday.
Corvus Gold Continues To Expand Main Zone With 42.7m @ 1.98 g/t Gold and 47.2m @ 1.47 g/t Gold at Mother Lode Deposit, Nevada

Posted by Publisher Internet

.

Highlights:

ML20-132: 2m @ 1.43 g/t Au, including 29m @ 1.88 g/t Au (lost hole in CIZ)

ML20-133: 7m @ 1.98 g/t Au including 38.1m @ 2.16 g/t Au (lost hole in CIZ in 18.3m @ 1.8 g/t Au)

Corvus Gold Inc. (?Corvus? or the ?Company?)  (TSX: KOR, OTCQX: CORVF  https://www.commodity-tv.com/ondemand/companies/profil/corvus-gold-inc/) announces it has received additional positive results from its ongoing Main Zone infill deposit expansion, Phase-4 drill program (Table 1) at the 100% owned Mother Lode project.? These results with hole ML20-132 (47m @ 1.43 g/t Au, including 29m @ 1.88 g/t Au) & ML20-133 (42.7m @1.98 g/t Au including 38.1m @ 2.16 g/t Au & 18.3m @ 1.8 g/t Au) successfully expand the Main deposit in unestimated parts of the 2018 mineral resource model in addition to extending the newly identified CIZ (Central Intrusive Zone) at depth (Figure 1).? ?RC (reverse circulation) drilling into and through the CIZ continues to be challenging but drilling to date has now confirmed the continuity of the CIZ over a strike length of ~600m and to a depth of 200 metres down dip. ?In addition, a new diamond core hole recently completed through the CIZ with results pending has shown the zone is much wider than the single dike intercepted by the RC drilling but expands for at least 150 metres in width north of the historic pit.?

Corvus has taken proactive actions to address the potential impacts of the Covid-19 outbreak on its personnel and projects that will enable the Company to continue work programs and advance its key 2020 initiatives with minimal disruption.? The Company began the year fully funded for the 2020 and 2021 work programs (~CAD $21M as of January 2020, 85% held in USD).? The Company?s project work continues on schedule and on budget with the implementation of the Corvus Covid-19 procedures and in full compliance with requirements enacted by the State of Nevada.

Hole ML20-132 (47m @ 1.43 g/t Au, including 29m @ 1.88 g/t Au, hole lost at the beginning of the CIZ, 3.1m @ 0.43 Au of oxide) was drilled to infill an area of the deposit between prior holes ML18-102 (NR19-03, Feb.21, 2019, 32m @ 2.1 g/t Au hole, ended before CIZ was reached) & ML17-012 (NR17-19, Dec 12, 2017, 29m @ 1.53 g/t Au, lost at the top of the CIZ).? The latest drilling has shown that mineralization in this area is thicker than the prior drilled surrounding holes and comparable in grade.? Infill holes are continuing to increase the overall quality and size of the deposit as well as demonstrate continuity, which is intended to augment the mine design.

Similar to the other infill holes reported this year, ML20-133 (42.7m @1.98 g/t Au including 38.1m @ 2.16 g/t Au & 18.3m @ 1.8 g/t Au in the top of CIZ with poor recovery and early termination) was drilled to infill an area between holes ML18-088 (NR19-02, Jan.22, 2019, 27.4 m @ 2.26 g/t Au, stopped before the CIZ) and ML18-052 (NR18-08, Apr.5, 2018, 53m @ 1.90 g/t Au and 41.2m @ 1.52 g/t Au of oxide in the CIZ where the hole ended).? These new results indicate that the thickness and grade is comparable to earlier drilling in addition to extending the CIZ to the north.?

Hole ML20-138 was drilled along the eastern boundary of the central Mother Lode property to evaluate the eastern extension of the Main deposit.? The results indicate the mineral system wains to the east and although the deeper oxide part of the system may present a future target as hole ML20-138 ended before testing the full system due to poor drilling conditions.

Jeffrey Pontius, President and CEO of Corvus, said, ?The ongoing infill work at Mother Lode is favorable for an expansion of the deposit when we conduct our next mineral resource update.? The results from the CIZ are also encouraging for turning this new discovery below the Main deposit into an expansion of the oxide gold system at depth.? The new deep core tail drilling program has been successful at drilling across the CIZ target in our latest deep hole (ML19-123CT) which has intersected a broad (+150m), deeply oxidized zone with multiple intrusive dikes and strong alteration.? If this hole returns significant grade it could lead to an oxide expansion of the Mother Lode deposit.??

Qualified Person and Quality Control/Quality Assurance

Jeffrey A. Pontius (CPG 11044), a qualified person as defined by National Instrument 43-101 ? Standards of Disclosure for Mineral Projects (?NI 43-101?), has supervised the preparation of the scientific and technical information that forms the basis for this news release and has approved the disclosure herein.? Mr. Pontius is not independent of Corvus, as he is the CEO & President and holds common shares and incentive stock options.

Carl E. Brechtel, (Nevada PE 008744 and Registered Member 353000 of SME), a qualified person as defined by NI 43-101, has coordinated execution of the work outlined in this news release and has approved the disclosure herein. Mr. Brechtel is not independent of Corvus, as he is the COO and holds common shares and incentive stock options.

The work program at Mother Lode was designed and supervised by Mark Reischman, Corvus? Nevada Exploration Manager, who is responsible for all aspects of the work, including the quality control/quality assurance program.? On-site personnel at the project log and track all samples prior to sealing and shipping.? Quality control is monitored by the insertion of blind certified standard reference materials and blanks into each sample shipment.? All mineral resource sample shipments are sealed and shipped to American Assay Laboratories (AAL) in Reno, Nevada, for preparation and assaying.? AAL is independent of the Company.? AAL?s quality system complies with the requirements for the International Standards ISO 9001:2000 and ISO 17025:1999.? Analytical accuracy and precision are monitored by the analysis of reagent blanks, reference material and replicate samples.? Finally, representative blind duplicate samples are forwarded to AAL and an ISO compliant third-party laboratory for additional quality control.? Mr. Pontius, a qualified person, has verified the data underlying the information disclosed herein, including sampling, analytical and test data underlying the information by reviewing the reports of AAL, methodologies, results and all procedures undertaken for quality assurance and quality control in a manner consistent with industry practice, and all matters were consistent and accurate according to his professional judgement.? There were no limitations on the verification process.

Mr. Scott E. Wilson, CPG (10965), Registered Member of SME (4025107) and President of Resource Development Associates Inc., is an independent consulting geologist specializing in Mineral Reserve and Mineral Resource calculation reporting, mining project analysis and due diligence evaluations.? He is acting as the Qualified Person, as defined in NI 43-101, and is the primary author of the Technical Report for the Mineral Resource estimate and has reviewed and approved the Mineral Resource estimate and the Preliminary Economic Assessment summarized in this news release.? Mr. Wilson has over 29 years of experience in surface mining, mineral resource estimation and strategic mine planning. Mr. Wilson is President of Resource Development Associates Inc. and is independent of the Company under NI 43-101.

Mr. Wilson, a qualified person, has verified the data underlying the information disclosed herein, including sampling, analytical and test data underlying the information by reviewing the reports of AAL, methodologies, results and all procedures undertaken for quality assurance and quality control in a manner consistent with industry practice, and all matters were consistent and accurate according to his professional judgement.? There were no limitations on the verification process.

Metallurgical testing on North Bullfrog and Mother Lode samples has been performed by McClelland Analytical Services Laboratories Inc. of Sparks Nevada (?McClelland?), McClelland is an ISO 17025 accredited facility that supplies quantitative chemical analysis in support of metallurgical, exploration and environmental testing using classic methods and modern analytical instrumentation.? McClelland has met the requirements of the IAS Accreditations Criteria for Testing Laboratories (AC89), has demonstrated compliance with ANS/ISO/IEC Standard 17025:2005, General requirements for the competence of testing and calibration laboratories, and has been accredited, since November 12, 2012. Hazen Research Inc. (?Hazen?), an independent laboratory, has performed flotation, AAO testing and cyanide leach testing on samples of sulphide mineralization from the YellowJacket zone and Swale area of Sierra Blanca, and roasting tests on Mother Lode flotation concentrate. Hazen holds analytical certificates from state regulatory agencies and the US Environmental Protection Agency (the ?EPA?).? Hazen participates in performance evaluation studies to demonstrate competence and maintains a large stock of standard reference materials from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), the Canadian Centre for Mineral and Energy Technology (CANMET), the EPA and other sources.? Hazen?s QA program has been developed for conformance to the applicable requirements and standards referenced in 10 CFR 830.120 subpart A, quality assurance requirements, January 1, 2002. Pressure oxidation test work on Mother Lode concentrate samples was performed by Resource Development Inc. of Wheatridge, CO.

For additional details, see technical report entitled ?Technical Report and Preliminary Economic Assessment for the Integrated Mother Lode and North Bullfrog Projects, Bullfrog Mining District, Nye County, Nevada?, dated November 1, 2018 and amended on November 8, 2018, with an effective date of September 18, 2018 on the Company?s profile at www.sedar.com.

About the North Bullfrog & Mother Lode Projects, Nevada

Corvus controls 100% of its North Bullfrog Project, which covers approximately 90.5 km2 in southern Nevada. ?The property package is made up of a number of private mineral leases of patented federal mining claims and 1,134 federal unpatented mining claims.? The project has excellent infrastructure, being adjacent to a major highway and power corridor as well as a large water right. The Company also controls 445 federal unpatented mining claims on the Mother Lode project which totals approximately 36.5 km2?which it owns 100%.? The total Corvus 100% land ownership now covers over 127 km2, hosting two major new Nevada gold discoveries.

Effective as of September 18, 2018, the combined Mother Lode and North Bullfrog Projects contains a Measured Mineral Resource for the mill of 9.3 Mt at an average grade of 1.59 g/t gold, containing 475 k ounces of gold and Indicated Mineral Resources for the mill of 18.2 Mt at an average grade of 1.68 g/t gold containing 988 k ounces of gold and an Inferred Mineral Resource for the mill of 2.3 Mt at an average grade of 1.61 g/t gold containing 118 k ounces of gold.? In addition, effective as of September 18, 2018, the project contains a Measured Mineral Resource for oxide, run of mine, heap leach of 34.6 Mt at an average grade of 0.27 g/t gold containing 305 k ounces of gold and an Indicated Mineral Resource for, oxide, run of mine, heap leach of 149.4 Mt at an average grade of 0.24 g/t gold containing 1,150 k ounces of gold and an Inferred, oxide, run of mine, heap leach Mineral Resource of 78.7 Mt at an average grade of 0.26 g/t gold containing 549 k ounces of gold.

About Corvus Gold Inc.

Corvus Gold Inc. is a North American gold exploration and development company, focused on its near-term gold-silver mining project at the North Bullfrog and Mother Lode Districts in Nevada.? Corvus is committed to building shareholder value through new discoveries and the expansion of its projects to maximize share price leverage in an advancing gold and silver market.

On behalf of

Corvus Gold Inc.

(signed) Jeffrey A. Pontius

Jeffrey A. Pontius,

President & Chief Executive Officer

Cautionary Note Regarding Forward-Looking Statements

This press release contains forward-looking statements and forward-looking information (collectively, ?forward-looking statements?) within the meaning of applicable Canadian and US securities legislation.? All statements, other than statements of historical fact, included herein, including, without limitation, statements regarding the advancement and development of our Mother Lode project and the expansion of our drill program; plans for drilling; expectations of and potential for additional resources or mineralization; expectations regarding the potential for future open-pit and underground mining; expectations for types of mineralization; updates on the development progress at the Mother Lode project; the potential for new deposits and discoveries and expected increases in a system?s potential; expectations regarding the potential expansion of the Bullfrog mining district; anticipated content, commencement and cost of exploration programs, anticipated exploration program results, are forward-looking statements.? Although the Company believes that such statements are reasonable, it can give no assurance that such expectations will prove to be correct.? Forward-looking statements are typically identified by words such as: believe, expect, anticipate, intend, estimate, postulate and similar expressions, or are those, which, by their nature, refer to future events.? The Company cautions investors that any forward-looking statements by the Company are not guarantees of future results or performance, and that actual results may differ materially from those in forward looking statements as a result of various factors, including, but not limited to, variations in the nature, quality and quantity of any mineral deposits that may be located, variations in the market price of any mineral products the Company may produce or plan to produce, the Company\-\-s inability to obtain any necessary permits, consents or authorizations required for its activities, the Company\-\-s inability to produce minerals from its properties successfully or profitably, to continue its projected growth, to raise the necessary capital or to be fully able to implement its business strategies, and other risks and uncertainties disclosed in the Company?s Annual Report on Form 10-K for the fiscal year ended May 31, 2019 filed with certain securities commissions in Canada and the Company?s most recent filings with the United States Securities and Exchange Commission (the ?SEC?).? All of the Company?s Canadian public disclosure filings in Canada may be accessed via www.sedar.com and filings with the SEC may be accessed via www.sec.gov and readers are urged to review these materials, including the technical reports filed with respect to the Company?s mineral properties.
CIE@IIITH has a long-standing incubation partnership with Pernod Ricard India Foundation called "WE", a social impact incubator program for women entrepreneurs. The incubator now seeks to focus on COVID-19 solutions lead by women founders and innovators.

COVID-19 outbreak has created devastating effects on the healthcare systems and people. This program hopes to tide back the situation with hacks and innovative solutions.

The accelerator program will provide a platform for women entrepreneurs and women-led enterprises with access to mentorship, deployment, technology support and up to Rs 25 lakhs grant to fight back against COVID-19, with a total grant of up to 2 crores.

The main focus areas for solutions are in-home care (mobile healthcare technologies), elderly care (AI based predictive technologies for risk assessment), hardware devices (point of care devices) and preventive healthcare (analytics leveraged to predict disease onset).

"The current COVID-19 situation reiterates the need for innovative solutions for Public Health in India. Entrepreneurs can provide solutions for the long-term safety of the society. I am sure this program will produce several such ideas. IIIT Hyderabad is glad to coordinate this effort and provide technological support to the women entrepreneurs of this program", said Prof PJ Narayanan, Director, IIIT Hyderabad.

"Pernod Ricard India has always risen to the needs of the nation, and we believe that technology has the power to provide long terms solutions, and that too into spaces, which we have not ventured, and during these unprecedented times, our incubators serve to provide support to entrepreneurs who already had the vision towards winning this battle", said Sunil Duggal, VP Corporate Affairs, Pernod Ricard India.

The cohort-based program is also supported by CFHE at IIT Hyderabad, AIC CCMB, RICH, TIE Hyderabad.

More details visit, at https://cie.iiit.ac.in/pernod-ricard/, or visit prifoundation.com

This story is provided by BusinessWire India. 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.)
Two hospitals in north-western Tasmania were closed on Monday morning as a result of an outbreak of COVID-19 among hospital workers in the region.

Half of the confirmed cases, and all six deaths in the state have resulted from the outbreak at North West Regional Hospital (NWRH) and North West Private Hospital (NWPH) in the small regional city of Burnie.

Of the 165 confirmed COVID-19 cases in Tasmania, 81 are directly linked to the two hospitals and the surrounding area. To date, at least 46 healthcare workers have tested positive.

All but 3 of the 67 cases confirmed in Tasmania in the past week are part of the local outbreak.

The hospitals 1,200 workers and their householdsaround 5,000 people in totalhave been placed under mandatory self-isolation for two weeks. The workers were informed by text message on Sunday afternoon and instructed to watch a press conference by Premier Peter Gutwein for more information.

Gutwein warned that there will be more deaths to come in coming days in the region, which he described as the epicentre of our battle at the moment.

The state government has promised to provide the self-isolating workers with basic groceries, as well as accommodation for those who cannot remain at home because they live with elderly or otherwise at-risk family members. However, it is up to individual to organise that support through a public health hotline. Some have reported waiting on hold for up to three hours.

Australias Chief Medical Officer Brendan Murphy alleged yesterday morning that the virus had spread in the region as a result of an illegal dinner party attended by hospital staff. He later retracted this statement after Gutwein made clear that the investigation into the outbreak had found no evidence of this, and that Murphy was commenting on a rumour.

By suggesting that workers are responsible for the spread of COVID-19 by flouting social distancing laws, Murphy and the media are seeking to divert attention away from the responsibility of governments for the crisis, and to turn sections of the working class against each other.

Healthcare workers told the Guardian that there had been shortages of N95 masks and other protective equipment at the hospitals. While COVID-19 patients were housed in separate wards, staff had been assigned to work with both confirmed cases and uninfected patients, increasing the risk of transmission.

Following demands from staff, portable showers were erected to allow workers to wash after their shifts, but there was no hot water. The average April temperature range in Burnie is 1119 degrees Celsius (52  66 degrees Fahrenheit).

On April 10, more than 100 NWRH workers who had been in close contact with confirmed cases at the hospital were placed in mandatory isolation and offered COVID-19 tests. They were immediately replaced by staff from the Mersey Community Hospital (MCH) in Latrobe, 60 kilometres away. This exposed even more workers to the virus, and increased the risk of infection to their families and the broader community.

With the closure of NWRH and NWPH, most patients have been moved to MCH, overturning an earlier decision not to house COVID-19 patients at MCH. As a result, workers at MCH are concerned that a lack of preparation and staff will create the conditions for another outbreak.

One worker at the hospital told the Advocate, The hospital systems have failed staff and therefore have failed the community, and a lot of people are angry about that. Now everybody is scared about an outbreak at MCH.

On March 31 the Tasmanian Health Service reduced the opening hours of the emergency department at MCH, in part due to a lack of available doctors. In an effort to cut costs, the hospital has few permanent doctors on staff and relies heavily on locums. The emergency department was subsequently closed completely, and a number of workers were stood down or had their hours cut as a result.

The Tasmanian Department of Health has not at any stage called for coronavirus testing of all patients and workers at the two hospitals to determine the true scale of the outbreak and attempt to contain it.

Tasmania has the highest per capita rate of COVID-19 deaths, and the second highest rate of confirmed cases. It has tested only 0.8 percent of its population, less than any other state, and just over half the grossly inadequate national figure of 1.4 percent.

The premier announced that all non-essential retail businesses would be closed to walk-in customers for two weeks, but hardware stores will remain open to trade customers, suggesting there are no plans to shut down the construction industry.

Gutwein ruled out a total lockdown of the region as it would be impractical. Instead he insisted social distancing is the way to beat this, and said that policing in the region would be increased to enforce the tighter restrictions.

While the outbreak is still under investigation, the most likely source is the Ruby Princess cruise ship. In March, border control and health authorities in Sydney allowed around 2,700 passengers off the ship without medical examinations, COVID-19 tests, or temperature checks. At least 18 have since died, and hundreds more have developed symptoms and tested positive.

Three passengers of the Ruby Princess have since died at the NWRH, the first on March 30. Within days of the first death, two staff tested positive, and an outbreak management team was established.

The ship remains stranded off the NSW coast as the Australian government refuses to allow more than 1,000 workers still on board to enter the country unless they require urgent medical treatment. While fewer than a third of the crew members have been tested for COVID-19, 66 have returned positive results. Eleven crew members with acute symptoms have been evacuated from the ship to receive medical care in Sydney.

Ruling out testing all Ruby Princess crew members, Dr Christine Selvey, the NSW deputy chief health officer, stated that, it wont change the way anyones being managed on the ship.

She went on to say that broader testing would not give a clear picture of conditions on the ship, because soon after infection the tests are negative during the incubation period.

The admission that COVID-19 tests return a high rate of false negatives, as well as the low rate of testing, casts significant doubt on claims from state and federal governments that Australia is on the right track and flattening the curve.

These claims have been eagerly picked up by sections of the corporate media who are now labelling Australias social distancing measures an economy-damaging overreaction, and calling for an imminent return to work.

In fact, the official figures are a poor indication of the extent to which COVID-19 has spread throughout the country. The calls in Australia and around the world to reopen large sections of industry reflect the callous disregard in which workers are held under capitalism.

While the general public has demonstrated tremendous respect and gratitude for frontline health workers, who have no choice but to be exposed to the coronavirus, these workers have struggled to obtain even the most basic protective equipment.

The outbreak in Tasmania, initially stemming from a tiny number of infected patients, shows the devastating potential of the pandemic, and the huge risk posed to healthcare workers and the whole community by every additional case of COVID-19.
Vietnam has been closely monitoring the situation in the East Vietnam Sea and demands that all nations comply with international law, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs stated following reports of the return of a Chinese ship to the Southeast Asian countrys Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ).

Reuters reported on Tuesday that Chinese vessel Haiyang Dizhi 8, which is used for offshore seismic surveys, was spotted 158 kilometers off Vietnams coast, within the countrys EEZ.

The ship was escorted by at least one China Coast Guard vessel, Reuters quoted data from Marine Traffic, a website that tracks shipping, as indicating.

Responding to the media report, Vietnams Ministry of Foreign Affairs stated on Tuesday evening that Vietnamese authorities have been closely monitoring the situation in the East Vietnam Sea.

Vietnam demands that all nations comply with provisions in the 1982 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) and international law in order to contribute to the maintenance of peace, stability, and cooperation in the East [Vietnam] Sea, the foreign ministry remarked.

The Haiyang Dizhi 8 first entered Vietnam's EEZ in the southern area of the East Vietnam Sea in July 2019 and appeared to be conducting a seismic survey.

The ship left the area on August 7 and returned one week later under the escort of Chinese coast guard vessels.

The Chinese fleet entered the area for the third time on September 7 and illegally operated there until September 27.

On October 3, the Vietnamese foreign ministrys spokesperson Le Thi Thu Hang announced that the group of ships had expanded their operation range within Vietnams EEZ and Continental Shelf.

They exited the maritime area in late October 2019.

Hanoi has persistently made clear that the waters that the Haiyang Dizhi 8 and its escorts operated in lie entirely within the sovereignty and jurisdiction of Vietnam, and resolutely voiced its opposition to the illegal actions on multiple occasions.

On April 2, a Vietnamese fishing boat was sunk by a Chinese coast guard vessel near Vietnams Hoang Sa (Paracel) archipelago. All of the fishermen on board were eventually rescued.

Following the incident, Vietnams foreign ministry requested China to investigate, clarify, and strictly handle the civil servants and Chinese vessel responsible for the incident, demanding that similar actions not be repeated and adequate compensation be paid to the Vietnamese fishermen.

The U.S. Department of State has said that the incident was part of a long string of Chinas actions to assert unlawful maritime claims and disadvantage its Southeast Asian neighbors in the East Vietnam Sea.

Like us on Facebook or follow us on Twitter to get the latest news about Vietnam!
ASHLAND, Ore.  Ahead of what the city expects to be smoky wildfire season, Ashland is preparing to help the most "smoke-vulnerable" residents.

They are doing that with air purifiers.

Using an $85,000 grants from the Oregon Department of Environmental Quality, the City of Ashland plans to purchase around 400 HEPA-grade air purifiers.

"We're targeting people on the older end of the spectrum who we know are sensitive to smoke and specifically trying to target the people who may not have the financial means to purchase these units," Ashland Fire & Rescue's Wildfire Division Chief Chris Chambers said.

The air purifiers the city plans on purchasing cost around $140-150 each. The city will work with local organizations to determine which residents are most in need of their own air purifier, according to Chambers. People should not call to apply for the units. Those identified as most in need will, instead, be contacted by the city.

In addition to the air purifiers, the grant will be used to upgrade the air filtration systems a few public spaces to create what Chambers called "clean air refuges." These will allow Ashland residents to get out of their homes and go to a public building with clean air.
WHO is Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus? 3 things you need to know

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Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, who is not a physician but has been leading the World Health Organization's new coronavirus response, has come under severe criticism, including from President Donald Trump, for not holding China accountable for concealing the truth about the disease. Here are three things about him that have surfaced.

Tedros, the first African and non-medical doctor to become director-general of the United Nations health agency and who will be in office for two more years, is being blasted for sounding the alarm too late even as numerous reports point to the responsibility of the Chinese Communist Party in putting millions of lives and the global economy at risk as it downplayed the coronavirus outbreak initially.

In late January, Tedros met with Chinese President Xi Jinping in Beijing and then praised the Chinese government for setting a new standard for outbreak control and its openness to sharing information.

However, anonymously speaking to Bloomberg, three officials recently said the U.S. intelligence community noted in a classified report to the White House last week that China lied about the extent of the COVID-19 outbreak, under-reporting the number of infections and deaths.

The reality is that we could have been better off if China had been more forthcoming, Vice President Mike Pence said on CNN recently. What appears evident now is that long before the world learned in December that China was dealing with this, and maybe as much as a month earlier than that, that the outbreak was real in China.

Despite the WHOs purported mission to operate as an apolitical international institution within the United Nations, recent media reports suggest that the WHO helped Beijing disseminate propaganda, downplayed the extent of the disease, and possibly delayed ordering a public health emergency, Republicans on the House Oversight and Reform committee wrote to Tedros last week, according to The Hill.

Given the actions and statements of WHO officials during the past few months, we are concerned that the WHO is no longer serving the needs of the world and is instead taking its cues from China. Throughout the crisis, the WHO has shied away from placing any blame on the Chinese government, which is, in essence, the Communist Party of China, they added.

Here are three things about Tedros, who holds a Doctorate of Philosophy in Community Health from the U.K.s University of Nottingham and a Master of Science in Immunology of Infectious Diseases from the University of London.

Tedros was accused of covering up cholera outbreaks in Ethiopia, Sudan

Tedros, who is Ethiopian by nationality, served as Ethiopias health minister between 2005 and 2012 and was accused of refusing to record cholera epidemics three times  in 2006, in 2009 and in 2011.

The allegation was made by Prof. Larry Gostin, now the director of the WHO Collaborating Center on Public Health Law & Human Rights.

Dr. Tedros is a compassionate and highly competent public health official. But he had a duty to speak truth to power and to honestly identify and report verified cholera outbreaks over an extended period, The New York Times quoted Gostin as saying in May 2017, before Tedros was elected to lead the organization.

The WHO might lose its legitimacy if it was led by someone who has been accused of covering up epidemics in his home country.

In September 2017, about four months after Tedros, 55, was elected as WHO director-general, some U.S. doctors specializing in infectious diseases, wrote an open letter to him, holding him and the WHO responsible for refusing to classify a cholera outbreak in Sudan in an attempt to guard its global reputation.

Your silence about what is clearly a massive cholera epidemic in Sudan daily becomes more reprehensible, they wrote. Your failure to transport stool samples from victims in Sudan to Geneva for official confirmation of cholera makes you fully complicit in the terrible suffering and dying that continues to spread, out of control, with daily new reports confirming that this is indeed a cholera epidemic.

The inevitable history that will be written of this epidemic will surely cast you in an unforgiving light.

Tedros has denied the allegations, calling them attempts to harm his reputation before his election.

Tedros was part of the Ethiopian regime during gross human rights violations

When Tedros was Ethiopias minister of Foreign Affairs between 2012 and 2016 and was part of the governing partys and coalitions leadership committees, the country was accused of human rights violations, including the killing of protesters and political targeting of opponents and journalists.

Large-scale and unprecedented protests swept through Ethiopias largest region of Oromia beginning in November 2015, and in the Amhara region from July 2016. Ethiopian security forces cracked down on these largely peaceful demonstrations, killing more than 500 people, the Human Rights Watch said in a report during the time.

Scores of people fleeing security force gunfire and teargas during the annual Irreecha festival died in a stampede on October 2 in Bishoftu, Oromia region. On October 9, following the destruction of some government buildings and private property by youths, the government announced a draconian and far-reaching six-month countrywide state of emergency, which prescribes sweeping and vaguely worded restrictions on a broad range of actions and undermines free expression, association, and peaceful assembly.

The report added, The protests occurred against a background of nearly non-existent political space: in parliament, the ruling coalition has 100 percent of seats, there are restrictions on civil society and independent media, and those who do not actively support the government often face harassment and arbitrary detention.

When the Ethiopian government proposed expansion of the municipal boundary of the capital, Addis Ababa, in 2016, protests followed in which security forces arrested tens of thousands of students, teachers, opposition politicians, health workers, and those who sheltered or assisted fleeing protesters.

The HRW also said the government at the time sought to control and gag the media and forced many journalists to choose between self-censorship, harassment and arrest, or exile.

Tedros was given the Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter Humanitarian Award in 2011

Tedros was the recipient of the Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter Humanitarian Award in 2011 when he was Ethiopias minister of Health.

A pioneer in malaria research, Dr. Tedros has devoted his life to public service and scientific research, it was noted at the time. Dr. Tedros is recognized for his leadership in the rapidly evolving field of global health, and has worked to enhance Ethiopias active engagement in major international forums Through all his appointments and activities, he has kept his eye on the prize: Bringing about a real and lasting improvement in the health conditions of his own country.

In his five years as Ethiopias Minister of Health, Dr. John Hardman, president and CEO of The Carter Center, said at the time, Dr. Tedros has embarked on an ambitious effort to improve the health of Ethiopians through efforts to address specific diseases such as malaria and HIV/AIDS, and to improve the structure and capacity of Ethiopia for health services, with a special emphasis on maternal care.
President Trump speaks as Vice President Mike Pence, left, and Treasury Secretary Steven T. Mnuchin listen at the March 25 White House coronavirus briefing. (Getty Images)

To the editor: In your excellent investigation of what could have been done by the Trump administration during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic but was not, the president is quoted as saying about the elimination of the directorate for global health security and biodefense, "I'm a business person  I don't like having thousands of people around when you don't need them."

As a business person myself, I find this to be a completely reasonable statement. But here's the important distinction on which all Americans should be able to agree: Government is not a business.

In fact, government's job is to do all those things that business cannot or will not do. It's in the preamble to the Constitution: "provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty." None of these is in the interest of businesses to do.

While I firmly believe there are some lessons that government can learn from commerce, we should never accept the idea that government should be run like a business lest we find ourselves in a similar situation again.

John McGlynn, Long Beach

..

To the editor: The comparison between President Obama's and President Trump's response to pandemics is deceptive.

Obama did not declare a national emergency for the H1N1 swine flu on April 26, 2009. Rather, a public health emergency was declared by public health officials.

In fact, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano called the declaration "standard operating procedure." She said that she preferred to call it a "declaration of emergency preparedness."

Six months later, after millions of people had been infected, 20,000 hospitalized and 1,000 had died, Obama declared the outbreak a national emergency due to the fact that the rapid increase in illness could overburden healthcare resources.

Perhaps we should all be a little less judgmental.

Nathan Post, Santa Barbara

Story continues

..

To the editor: A message to our future leaders: Be humble and surround yourselves with the experts. Then listen to them.

What happened and is continuing to occur is because of Trump's gross negligence and ignorance. "It could have been different" will be recorded in U.S. history as not only expressing what could have been in 2020, but also all the years of Trump's leadership.

Esther Friedberg, Studio City

..

To the editor: At a time when we depend on a science-based response to the dangers of the COVID-19 pandemic, Trump appointed Vice President Mike Pence to lead his administration's response. This is someone who has declined to express acceptance of evolution and will not say that climate change poses a threat.

Tim Bradley, Irvine
As states across India work to contain the spread of COVID-19, there have been instances in which people have tried to honour their local sanitary workers and cleaners by garlanding them or doing paada pujas. These are undoubtedly moving gestures and show civil societys recognition of the risk these workers undertake in their jobs on a daily basis, but they are not enough. Among the front-line workers battling the virus in India are doctors, nurses and other medical professionals.

However, sanitary workersboth at government hospitals and employed by local bodiesare among the most vulnerable of these frontline workers, most likely to come from historically oppressed communities, and also with the least job security and benefits as government bodies look to outsource such tasks to private firms.

In Tamil Nadu, at least one sanitary worker has been afflicted with COVID-19 so far. But a pandemic is only one of the many risks they face on a daily basis. In cities where garbage segregation is poor, they have been forced to separate waste by hand, equipped with little in the way of safety gear. Workers employed on contract basis do not have access to paid leave, pension or health benefits.

Their salary can be half of what permanent workers are paid and are often delayed. Contract workers are also less able to save and secure the future of their kids. Yet, in virtually every crisisnatural disasters or pandemic it is they who are at the forefront of restoring normalcy at great personal risk. Praising them as heroes without recognising the structural inequities that force them into such roles glosses over the systemic overhaul required to better their lives.

When the pandemic ends, it is essential that civil society and governments remember their work, the risk at which it was undertaken, and how poorly prepared and compensated they are. The governments must ensure their job security with reasonable wages and benefits that allow for social mobility, and civil society should pressure governments to make sure this is done.
Harry and Meghan at the Mountbatten Festival of Music in March. (Getty Images)

One of Prince Harry and Meghan Markles final royal engagements will be streamed this weekend, so we can relive their last moments in the UK.

The couple carried out a string of engagements in early March before they left their roles as senior royals for life in North America.

One of the most significant ones for Harry was the Mountbatten Festival of Music in the Royal Albert Hall.

It was the last time he would attend an event as the Captain General of the Royal Marines, an honourary post he agreed to give up when he relinquished his senior duties.

It wont be given to any other member of the Royal Family, while the 12-month period of review until the end of March 2021 takes place.

Meghan, 38, dressed in striking red to match her husband as they attended the music event at Royal Albert Hall, which raised money for the Royal Marines Charity.

Read more: Prince Harry will stop hunting because Meghan doesn't like it, says wildlife expert

Now the whole event will be shown on the charitys Facebook page on Saturday evening, just what we need during lockdown.

The event took place three times, with two evening performances and a matinee. The televised performance is the one which took place in front of the Duke and Duchess of Sussex.

The Royal Marines Charity said: The concerts displayed the outstanding versatility of some of the worlds finest military musicians and are given the West End treatment with spectacular lighting effects.

The festival saw the Royal Marines showcase their incredible musicianship and pageantry and featured a wide range of musical styles, including music from the big screen and superb solo items, as well as the traditional marches and overtures that have proved such a hit with audiences over the years.

Read more: Royal blood: How celebrities from Ellen DeGeneres to Ralph Fiennes have royal relations

Story continues

Meghan wore a floor length red gown for the evening event. (Getty Images)

The duchess wore a striking red floor length gown by Safiyaa to match her husbands uniform, with red Aquazzura shoes, a Manolo Blahnik clutch and earrings by Simone Rocha.

The duke and duchess received a long round of applause and a standing ovation from the crowd as they took their seats in the royal box.

Meghan appeared alongside her husband at several engagements as the couple said goodbye to the UK for now.

While the pair remain the Duke and Duchess of Sussex, they no longer use their HRH titles and will be making their own money as they cut ties with the Sovereign Grant.

They moved to Los Angeles just before the border between the USA and Canada was closed to slow the spread of coronavirus.

Read more: Harry and Meghan reveal new organisation name - and inspiration for calling son Archie

It was a significant event for Prince Harry because of the military role. (Getty Images)

They were given a standing ovation as they took their seats. (Getty Images)

Harry, 35, is likely to set up his travel company Travalyst in the UK, but paperwork filed in the USA confirms they will be starting a non-profit organisation called Archewell in the states.

Watch the broadcast on Saturday evening here.

---Watch the latest videos from Yahoo UK---
CAIROAn Egyptian policeman and seven suspected terrorists were killed on Tuesday in an exchange of gunfire, the ministry of interior said in a statement late on Tuesday.

It said three other policemen had also been wounded.

The exchange took place in the al-Amiyira district, the public prosecutor said in a statement.

The ministry received information that there is a terrorist cell, whose elements embrace Takfiri ideology, using several areas as a shelter in eastern and southern Cairo as a starting point to carry out terrorist operations, the statement said.

Egypt uses the term takfiri to refer to Islamist terrorists who often accuse their victims of being infidels.

Two private television stations broadcast what they called footage of the shooting, which Reuters was not immediately able to verify, and asked residents to stay indoors.

Weapons and ammunition were found with the suspects, the ministry said.

The public prosecutor said a team of investigators has been dispatched to the scene of the attack.

Egypt has been fighting an Islamist insurgency in the northern part of the Sinai Peninsula since the ouster of Mohamed Mursi of the Muslim Brotherhood in 2013 following mass protests against his rule.

The military and police launched a major campaign against terrorist groups in 2018, focusing on the Sinai Peninsula as well as southern areas and the border with Libya.

The last major attack was in November 2017 when terrorists killed more than 300 people in an attack on a mosque in north Sinai, the deadliest such incident in the Arab worlds most populous country.

By Omar Fahmy, Ahmed Mohamed Hassan, Nadine Awadalla, Amina Ismail, Haitham Ahmed and Ulf Laessing
As millions of Americans woke up to $1,200 checks in their bank accounts, some of the nations richest taxpayers learned they were about to receive a bit of relief as well  about $1.7m each, to be exact.

Nearly 43,000 millionaires across the country would soon profit off a loophole adapted from the Republican tax code overhaul of 2017, which allows certain business owners to significantly reduce their tax liability by temporarily suspending the limit of deductions they can place against non-business income.

The loophole was included as a provision in the sweeping $2.2tn Coronavirus Aid, Relief and Economic Security (CARES) Act, according to a report published by the Joint Commission on Taxation. Democrats who ordered the report have since accused Republicans of having wrongly seized on this health emergency to reward ultrarich beneficiaries, likely including the Trump family, and called for the tax break to be immediately repealed.

The Joint Commission on Taxation said that a staggering 82 per cent of the benefits of the policy go to about 43,000 taxpayers who earn more than $1m annually. Those 43,000 taxpayers eligible for the loophole would receive an average windfall of nearly $1.7m  a figure confirmed by the commissions calculations and first reported by Forbes.

Meanwhile, some of those wealthy Americans earning more than $1m annually may receive far greater than $1.7 million, as the provision can be retroactively placed so losses in 2018 and 2019 can be carried back against the past five years, according to the policy.

Rep. Lloyd Doggett (D-TX), who commissioned the report along with Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI), slammed his Republican colleagues over the tax break in a statement alleging the loophole was so generous that its total cost is more than total new funding for all hospitals in America and more than the total provided to all state and local governments.

Republican leaders have defended the CARES Act amid mounting criticism of lesser-known additions to the relief package, created as part of an effort to reverse a historic economic downturn caused by the coronavirus pandemic.

Senate Finance Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley said in a statement: Every senator criticising this provision voted for this bipartisan bill, so their complaints about a law they helped write simply stink of partisan politics."

The Joint Committee on Taxations analysis, first reported by the Washington Post, came as the IRS issued the first wave of stimulus payments to everyday Americans. Those earning $75,00 or less annually were set to receive the full $1,200, while taxpayers earning more would see smaller amounts based on a sliding scale. No one making more than $99,000 would receive any portion of the economic impact payments included in the CARES Act.

Nearly 17 million Americans lost their jobs since the pandemic began  an unprecedented number that surpassed even the worst losses during the Great Depression. Over 600,000 people in the US have contracted the novel virus, according to data published by Johns Hopkins University, and nearly 25,000 Americans have died.

Someone wrongly seized on this health emergency to reward ultra-rich beneficiaries, likely including the Trump family, with a tax loophole not available to middle class families, Mr Doggett said. This net operating loss loophole is a loser that should be repealed.
On the first day of the extended nationwide lockdown Wednesday, many incidents of violation of the constraints were reported from various parts of West Bengal and over 700 people were arrested in the state capital alone for breaching the rules.

Although major parts of the state wore a deserted look, people in some parts of the city were seen jostling with each other in markets to buy essential commodities despite a complete ban on large gatherings.

In various parts of the state especially in districts such as Burdwan, Bankura and Birbhum, ignoring repeated pleas by officials, citizens were seen standing outside shops in close proximity in violation of the social distancing norm.

Many people were either arrested or detained by the police for not obeying lockdown restrictions. At some places, the wrongdoers were given punishments such as squats and frog jumps, before they were let go.

A total of 723 people have been arrested in the city alone in 24 hours since Tuesday evening for defying the lockdown imposed by the government to contain the spread of COVID-19, a senior police officer said here.

More than 100 vehicles have been seized and around 117 people charged for not wearing masks at public places, which has been made mandatory by the state government.

The arrests were made by the Kolkata Police during checking at barricades at roads and patrolling across the metropolis, the police officer said.

Requesting people to strictly adhere to the lockdown order, Kolkata Police Commissioner Anuj Sharma had earlier directed officers to take strong legal action against those found violating the norms.

The Kolkata police in several parts of the city used drones for surveillance against lockdown violations.

Police personnel were seen asking people on the public address system to remain indoors. They were urging the public to not panic as the government would ensure a regular supply of grocery, LPG cylinders, and food grains.

West Bengal has so far reported 164 coronavirus positive cases, including seven deaths.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi had on Tuesday announced extension till May 3 of the lockdown imposed earlier till April 14.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
The Village of Syracuse was incorporated on April 13, 1825, marking the official founding of what would eventually become the city we all know and love. However, it was five years earlier in 1820 when Syracuse truly began its rise from a swampy crossroads of 250 residents to one of the chief cities of New York. That was the year the Erie Canal opened for navigation along the Middle Section. 1820 would be a year of great excitement for the nebulous community of Syracuse, which also received its name that year. It would see the arrival of new boats, Governor DeWitt Clinton would visit twice, and a host of celebrations would herald the transformative effects this artificial waterway would have on the area. To understand the history of Syracuse and the effect the Erie Canal had on it, 1820 is a year that deserves special attention.

Navigation on the Erie Canal began in late 1819, when the packet boat The Chief Engineer of Rome made the canals inaugural voyage from Rome to Utica. It was the following year, in 1820 that a packet boat first came to Syracuse. That boat was the Montezuma, designed and constructed by Comfort Tyler, an early settler of the Syracuse area who had moved to Montezuma. The Montezuma was 76 feet long and 14 feet wide, with two cabins fitted out for passengers. It was launched on April 13, taking 70 passengers through the Montezuma lock.

A week later, on April 20, the Montezuma set off from its namesake port to Syracuse. Hundreds of people lined the banks of the canal to witness the historic occasion. When the Montezuma failed to arrive at noon as scheduled, many of the onlookers began to proclaim that the boat had sunk and the canal was doomed to failure, cursing DeWitt Clinton and other canal backers in the process. The Montezuma had not sunk, however, and had instead been delayed in Jordan in order to hook up a team of swift horses, who entered Syracuse at a full trot around 2:00 PM, kicking up a wake that soaked many of the onlookers.

For the next two hours, the residents of Syracuse celebrated the arrival of the Montezuma before about 100 members of the crowd boarded the boat to travel up the newly built side canal to Salina, which was at the time the principal settlement of the area. The celebration continued, with throngs of people walking on the towpath alongside the boat for the 22 minute trip up what would eventually become the Oswego Canal. In Salina a band greeted the Montezuma, and led a procession from the boat to Beachs Inn. Following what was undoubtedly a raucous celebration, 150 people, including the band, boarded the boat for the return trip to Syracuse.

Thus, began canal boat travel in Syracuse. The Chief Engineer, which had recently been purchased by Comfort Tyler, arrived three days later and with the Montezuma would begin a regular service between the Seneca River and Utica. This was only the beginning of the exciting events that would make 1820 a year of note for Syracuse.

Written by Derrick Pratt, Erie Canal Museum Educator.

READ MORE

1925: Syracuses Man with the Geese is allowed to walk his birds again after police had them penned

1905: No one knows who killed a Cayuga County hermit and miser with an ax

1920: After 41 years of service, 79-year-old letter carrier finally calls in sick

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Kabul To Ban Motorcycles In Bid To Improve Security

April 14, 2020

Afghan authorities say they will ban motorcycles and scooters in the capital, Kabul, for an unspecified period of time in an effort to improve security.

"Most of the crimes in the city, including targeted killings and other crimes, are carried out using motorbikes," Interior Ministry spokesman Tariq Arian said on April 14.

Motorcycles and scooters are popular in Kabul.

Violators of the ban, which is to take effect immediately, will have their motorcycles seized, the Interior Ministry said.

Delivery riders, who have seen heavy demand since Kabul's coronavirus lockdown, will be exempted.

AFP quoted an unidentified security official as saying that Taliban militants are conducting an increasing number of targeted killings of government officials using motorbikes.

According to the official, street robberies by thieves on motorcycles and scooters are also on the rise.

The decision comes as Kabul, with a population of about 5 million people, is under a three-week lockdown in a bid to contain the spread of the coronavirus in the city.

A total of 714 people in Afghanistan have contracted COVID-19, the disease caused by the virus, according to the Health Ministry. It said the disease had so far killed 23 people in the country.

Based on reporting by dpa and AFP

Source: https://www.rferl.org/a/kabul-to- ban-motorcycles-in-bid-to-improve -security/30553223.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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New Delhi, April 15 : Having worries about money, especially during the COVID-19 crisis which has disrupted businesses across the sectors, is quite natural. But not talking about it may do more harm than you could probably think of, suggests a new report.

Those with worries about money are more likely to suffer from depression and anxiety. Moreover, these worries may also lead to reduced productivity, said the guide from Britain-based Salary Finance Ltd. which offers technology platforms to help people become financially healthier and happier.

On an average, about 2.7 hours are lost on worries about money and those with financial stress are more likely to be looking for a new job, it added.

Worries about money affect both the employer and the employees.

"Therefore, nurturing a culture that encourages employees to talk more openly about their worries about money can help employers find the right solutions," said Salary Finance which partners with employers to help their people take control of their money.

Founded in 2015 by the former Head of Google UK & Ireland, a former banking consultant and a social impact entrepreneur, the company has grown from three founders to a team of nearly 200, operating in the UK, the US and India.

"Your culture is the beating heart of everything you do as an organisation and should be central to your programme. Stamping out the stigma, and encouraging people to talk and share their stories will help people feel they are not alone," Salary Finance said in a blog on Tuesday that detailed how to go about creating a financial wellbeing programme.
Representative Image

Biswajit Dhar

The time for speculation seems to be over. It is now official that the COVID-19 pandemic would have devastating impact on world trade volumes in 2020. According to estimates presented by the World Trade Organization (WTO), global trade volumes could decline between 13 percent and 32 percent.

There are a number of facets of this estimate that need careful consideration. The first is that COVID-19 has brought in such levels of uncertainties that its impact can best be explained through a very wide range.

The second aspect of this deep dive in trade volumes is to understand the implications for global growth, as well as those for individual countries. One reference point for doing so is to consider the aftereffects of the economic recession of the previous decade. In 2009, global trade volumes fell by over 12.6 percent, while global GDP fell by 2 percent. Thus, trade volumes declined in excess of six times than did global GDP growth.

Trends in GDP growth and trade volumes since the early 1970s show that in normal years, trade had increased, on an average, by a factor of three over GDP growth, but uncertain GDP growth triggered a steep fall in trade volumes. The WTO estimates of a precipitous fall in trade, therefore, portends a sharp fall in global GDP.

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

A third aspect of the numbers provided by the WTO relates to the worst-case scenario, namely, decline in trade volumes by 32 percent. When compared with the corresponding figures from period of the Great Depression, this number is truly alarming. While in the three depression years of 1929-32, trade volumes fell by 30 percent, the WTO is predicting a 32 percent decline in less than a year. COVID-19 could, therefore, result in one of the worst economic crises ever.

It is perhaps not surprising that the global trade would decline dramatically. Over the past two decades, global production has been woven into the regional and global value chains, which means that even a slight blip in the just-in-time business model can potentially create significant disturbances to the supply side. The supply-side has been extensively disrupted as more than 93 percent of worlds population faces partial to complete closure of international borders.

Simultaneously, the demand-side has been severely impacted by almost complete lockdown. Estimates show that more than 3.9 billion people, or half of the world's population, are facing government-enforced lockdown. This implies that a vast majority of economic activities in these countries have been affected.

Given such large-scale economic disruption, most countries can expect at best a U-shaped recovery. The contours of this recovery have been spelt out in the stimulus packages that several western economies have announced over the past fortnight.

The packages have one factor in common, and this, not unsurprisingly, is the revival of their domestic enterprises, especially the small and medium enterprises. These economies seem to be emphasising on strengthening local production facilities, which, no doubt, is one important ways of putting back the jobs that have been lost to the pandemic.

With economic recovery seemingly dependent on providing impetus to domestic economic activities, what could be the likely impact on trade post the pandemic? We will argue that global trade stands at a crossroads for at least two reasons. First, the current model of hyper-globalisation could well have its sceptics among policy makers in many countries, especially in the developing world. As mentioned above, the disruptions in the realm of trade is likely to impact their GDP, because of their substantial exposure to trade.

Alongside, most emerging economies have also experienced sharp outflows of portfolio flows in Q1 of 2020, which has been estimated to be largest ever, even exceeding the worst points of the economic recession of 2008.

The second source of rethink about globalisation could be threat from a rising China. In recent days, reports have suggested that Chinas manufacturing sector is getting back in business. If this is indeed a reality, it will be the third instance in the past two decades when China would have turned an adverse economic situation to its advantage. The first was in the post-9/11 phase when China emerged as an economic powerhouse, and the second was the financial crisis of 2008, when, again, the dragon was able to consolidate its economic position.

If history repeats itself, China would be in a position to dominate the global economy through trade and would surely emerge as the undisputed leader of globalisation. This possibility could make many countries to think about their commitment to a China-led model of globalisation.

Biswajit Dhar is Professor at Centre for Economic Studies and Planning, School of Social Sciences, Jawaharlal Nehru University. Views are personal.

This is the fifth article in a multi-part series, World After COVID-19 , which looks at the probable developments in various sectors: macro economy, trade, healthcare, agriculture, judiciary, international politics and sports.
US drama God Friended Me is ending with its current second season.

US reports confirm it will wrap with a two-hour finale -which has had time to incorporate a conclusion.

The show stars Brandon Micheal Hall as an atheist whose life is turned upside-down when he receives a friend request on social media from God.

Were extremely proud of the unique concept and uplifting stories God Friended Me has told over the past two seasons, CBS and Warner Bros. Television said in a joint statement.

We thank the brilliant cast, writers, production team and crew for a show that stirred thoughtful conversation about faith, life and happiness, and made viewers feel good at the end of each episode. The creative team behind the show has one last friend suggestion in mind, as well as an ending we hope brings a satisfying conclusion to Miles journey in search of the God Account.

Season Two is currently screening in Australia Monday nights on Seven, and is now expected to bow out in early May.

Source: Variety
Eleven people, including a journalist of a Marathi television news channel, were on Wednesday arrested for allegedly spreading rumours that the state was running a special train for migrant workers, which led to around 1,000 of them gathering at the Bandra railway station on Tuesday, defying the nationwide lockdown.

The large gathering eventually forced the Mumbai Police to resort to lathi-charge to disperse the migrants  most of them from Uttar Pradesh and West Bengal  who were demanding the state help them return home. This was hours after Prime Minister Narendra Modi extended the coronavirus-enforced nationwide lockdown to May 3.

An FIR was registered on Tuesday against 700 people at Bandra police station, under which nine people were arrested, and another two FIRs were filed on Wednesday. Vijayalaxmi Hiremath, senior police inspector at Bandra police station, confirmed the arrests.

On Wednesday, an FIR was filed against Vinay Dubey, a resident of Navi Mumbai, who uploaded a video on social media, telling migrant workers from north India to gather at Kurla Terminus on April 18 to demand that they be sent back to their homes. Dubey, booked under sections 117, 153(a), 188, 269, 270, 505(2) of the Indian Penal Code (IPC) and section 3 of the Epidemic Diseases Act, was detained from Navi Mumbai late on Tuesday. Another FIR was against Rahul Kulkarni, a journalist with ABP Majha, for allegedly running a report stating that a special train will run for migrant workers, said Bandra police officers. Kulkarni was arrested in the afternoon. He will be produced in court tomorrow, said Hiremath.

ABP Majha, however, defended its journalist, saying its news reports were entirely misconceived and they were on the basis of valid documents .

The channel said there was no conceivable way the crowds that gathered at Bandra can be linked to their stories.

The channel, in a statement, said, There are several reports purporting to draw a connection between the gathering at Mumbais Bandra West station and a news story run on ABP Majha. The reports are entirely misconceived and are being circulated with the sole intention of baselessly maligning ABP Majha. Our news story was broadcast in public interest and on the basis of valid documents and information. Subsequent to the Honble Prime Ministers announcement at 10 am of the continuation of the lockdown and announcements thereafter from the Ministry of Railways with regard to cancellation of trains and refunds till May 3, 2020, we ran multiple stories, starting from shortly after the Railway Ministrys announcement starting from12:30 pm to 1.30 pm, on our channel clearly announcing that no trains will be running. There is no conceivable way in which the crowds that gathered at the Bandra West Station from around 3:45 pm can be linked to our stories. To insinuate that our running of the story and the updates thereafter amount to a criminal act is outrageous. We are shocked and dismayed that our reporter Mr. Rahul Kulkarni has been arrested in connection with the story. We will be taking necessary and immediate steps in law. We can say with full confidence that we have not deviated from practices of responsible journalism. Journalism and media are essential services. There is no denial of the Railway Ministrys letter of 13.4.2020 recommending running of trains to return migrant labourers to their hometowns. We are a responsible and respectable channel running an essential service in providing information and news to society and community at large. We make every possible good faith endeavor to ensure the accuracy of our information and news from credible sources before broadcasting the same. Consequently, despite the morning news before the PMs speech, shortly after the Railway Ministry announcement that no trains will run till 3rd May, 2020, we immediately started running the story on our channels as a responsible media institution. We would like to say that before journalists are arrested there should be due verification of all facts and circumstances.

Later in the day, nine people Mohammad Amruddin, 35; Saif Hussein Shaikh, 36; Alam Mohammad Salim Shaikh, 28; Shamsher Ali Amir Ali Malik, 36; Helal Hakimuddin Ali, 32; Mohammad Shahid Ibrahim Shaikh, 29; Mohammad Arshad Mohammad Anvar Shaikh, 26; Altabash Chhotu Shaikh,28 and Firoz Sailchul Shaikh, 20  were arrested from Shastri Nagar in Bandra (West). All the accused were arrested as per the FIR lodged on Tuesday.

Kulkarni has been booked under sections 269 (negligent act likely to spread infection of disease dangerous to life) 270 (malignant act likely to spread infection of disease dangerous to life) 505 (b) (with intent to cause, or which is likely to cause, fear or alarm to the public, or to any section of the public whereby any person may be induced to commit an offence against the state or against the public tranquillity), 188 (disobedience to order duly promulgated by public servant) 117 (abetting commission of offence by the public or by more than ten persons) of the IPC, along with section 3 of the Epidemic Diseases Act.

Bandra police officers also revealed that they have narrowed down a list of other suspects responsible for the gathering. The police are questioning at least seven people from Bandra (West).
The Aurangabad Municipal



Corporation (AMC) has set up 13 'fever clinics', which will help in detection of COVID-19 cases in the city.

These clinics will screen people, who are suffering from fever or infections, and the suspected COVID-19 patients will be referred to the dedicated hospitals for further tests and treatment, a release issued by the district administration said.

Maharashtra Industries Minister Subhash Desai, who is also the district Guardian Minister, had recently held a meeting with the district officials, during which it was decided to set up such these 'COVID-19 fever clinics', it said.

Total 2,500 beds have been made available in these clinics, the district administration said.

Meanwhile, the Aurangabad civic body, which has made it mandatory to people to wear masks while stepping out of homes, has so far collected Rs 89,500 from 177 offenders, the release said.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Rio de Janeiro Governor Wilson Witzel, a leading opponent of President Jair Bolsonaros calls to relax COVID-19 containment measures, said Tuesday he had tested positive for the new coronavirus.

In a video posted to Twitter, Witzel said he had started feeling unwell Friday, with a fever, sore throat and loss of smell, a key symptom of the virus.

Today, the test result came back positive Now, thank God, Im feeling better, and will continue working while following my doctors advice, said Witzel, 52.

I ask you once again to stay at home, because this disease, as everyone can see, spreads quickly and doesnt spare anyone.

Along with Sao Paulo Governor Joao Doria, Witzel has been one of the leading proponents for closing non-essential businesses and ordering people to stay home to slow the spread of the disease.

On Monday he extended Rio de Janeiros stay-at-home measures until April 30.

Those policies have been attacked by Bolsonaro, who accuses them of needlessly wrecking Latin Americas biggest economy over a disease the far-right president has compared to a little flu.

Witzel fired back last month that Bolsonaros defiance of guidelines from the United Nations and World Health Organization could be considered a crime against humanity.

Rio de Janeiro state, home to 16 million people, has registered 224 deaths from the virus so far, second only to Sao Paulo.

Brazil, the Latin American country hit hardest by the pandemic, has registered more than 1,300 deaths.
Around 150 migrant workers, who had



set off on foot for their native places in Madhya Pradesh from Pune amid the lockdown, were stopped by the police early on Wednesday, an official said.

All these people live in Katraj area of Pune and work as labourers in and around the city, the official said.

"Our police patrol team spotted a group of around 150 people, including women and children, walking in the early hours of Wednesday. When they were stopped, they told us that they are labourers working in and around Pune and had set off on foot for their native places in MP," said a police officer, attached to the Kondhwa police station.

He said it seems that these people thought they would get some transport facility, through which they can reach their native places in the neighbouring state.

"We convinced them not to leave Pune and assured that arrangements for their accommodation will be done. However, they decided to go back to the places in Katraj area, where they are currently staying," he said.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
High level vacancies are hampering the Trump administration's response to the COVID-19 pandemic, according to a group of organizations that focus on issues such as immigration, climate change, and government accountability.

In a letter sent April 14 to Senate committee chairs and ranking members, 18 advocacy groups led by Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility argued that the lack of confirmed officials in senior positions is increasingly hampering pandemic response.

"We continue to witness a worsening, widespread vacancy issue across the federal government where key offices are without Senate confirmed leadership, sometimes for years on end, to the detriment of the agencies' functioning," the organizations including National Federation for Federal Employees, Union for Concerned Scientists, and the Project on Government Oversight stated in the letter.

Agencies such as the Department of Homeland Security have operated for months, and in some cases years, without Senate-confirmed leaders. DHS Secretary Chad Wolf, who has served in an acting capacity since November 2019, is the fourth secretary to serve in three years, a fact the letter pointed out. High level vacancies are a persistent problem at the departments of Interior, State, Health and Human Services and elsewhere across government.

Public health and disaster management roles such DHS Under Secretary of Science and Technology and the Federal Emergency Management Agency's Deputy Administrator position are staffed by acting personnel. The Offices of Personnel Management and Management and Budget have installed new leaders in recent months after prolonged periods of turnover, "[creating] a long confusing line of 'actings' heading both of those offices."

"We fear that the leadership vacuum in several federal agencies is weakening the nation's response to the coronavirus pandemic," PEER and its co-signers wrote. "The effect of [this] is disastrous considering DHS has a central role in responding to the coronavirus."

Kristine Simmons, the Vice President of Government Affairs at the Partnership for Public Service, said that the process to confirm Presidential nominees had lengthened considerably in recent years.

"This administration has had a difficult time getting nominees through the Senate," she said in an interview with FCW, noting that a recent report from the Partnership showed that Trump's appointees took twice as long to be confirmed as that of former President Reagan.

"Part of it is the complexity of the confirmation process. There is a lot of burden on nominees. The length of the process can be discouraging for people, and it's easy for folks to make unintended mistakes in the nominating paperwork, which all have to be resolved before the nominee can be sent to the Senate for consideration."

The organizations listed in the letter urged Senate leaders to use their advice and consent powers under the Constitution's Appointments clause to force the White House to speed up nominating personnel to critical vacant positions and withhold cooperation if the Administration requests any action from their Senate committees until they install permanent leaders whose agencies fall within their jurisdiction.

According to Liz Hempowicz, the public policy director for the Project on Government Oversight, said there are few if any guardrails in place to ensure that the President or agencies follow Federal Vacancies Reform Act  the law designed to make sure presidential administrations clear their appointees for high office with the U.S. Senate where appropriate.

"It's entirely possible for someone to stay beyond the 210-day period that the law says a person can serve in an acting capacity," she said in an interview.

"The FVRA also requires agencies to report any vacancies to the Government Accountability Office, but it's unclear if there are consequences if they don't self-report. It allows the president incredible flexibility to put temporary people into positions and creates an incentive for him to not nominate permanent leaders."

The letter's authors asked agency inspectors general and the congressional Government Accountability Office to investigate if any prolonged vacancies are punishable under the act.

"Presidential abuse of the vacancies process is not a novel concept -- yet the stakes are incredibly high as our nation is on the front lines of a massive pandemic which requires an all-hands-on-deck approach," the letter stated. "Reforms are called for."
Yves here. As the article points out, this Massachusetts effort comes what is probably too late for this first wave of the infection. But it may still prove valuable. Some fear Covid-19 comes back after lockdowns are relaxed or next fall because contracting the disease does not confer much immunity, so having worked out some of the bugs in contact tracing would be useful. But it is an open question as to whether this effort is well enough manned. And there are also concerns about whether there are enough resources committed to administering and processing tests.

MIT Technology Review discusses San Franciscos plans to launch comprehensive contact tracing. I have to note that the Technology Review has regularly been sloppy in its coronavirus reporting. For instance, it has regularly depicted contracting the disease as conferring immunity, when that is an open question (for other coronaviruses, immunity is relatively short-lived, and theres an additional worry that very mild cases might not produce a strong enough immune system response to be protective).

For the Technology Review piece, theres a glaring disconnect between the headline, How San Francisco plans to trace every coronavirus case and contact, and the detail:

The task force will interview every patient who tests positive and provide necessary support to ensure that all are completely isolating themselves, down to helping them find and get to shelter if necessary. They also expect to reach out to between three and five people that patients came into contact with in the preceding days. Theyll alert them they may have been exposed, ask them to limit their contacts, and either encourage them to go in for a test or bring one to them. Those who test positive will trigger additional rounds of interviews and contact tracing.

Three to five people? In this lockdown world, that may be a reasonable number, but you can see this is nonsensically low for any essential worker who by definition is out and about.

However, these programs do not have to achieve 100% effectiveness to make a serious dent in disease propagation. And most of these approaches seems to assume everyone has a smartphone, when in fact, only 82% of US adults do.

By Martha Bebinger, who covers health care and other topics at WBUR, the NPR affiliate in Boston. She has won dozens of regional and national awards in 18 years as a reporter. Originally published at Kaiser Health News in partnership with WBUR and NPR

Massachusetts is launching an effort to reach everyone in the state who may have the coronavirus and get them tested and into isolation or treatment if needed. The ambitious goal is to stop  not just slow  the destructive power of COVID-19 through the tedious, yet powerful public health tool called contact tracing.

Contact tracing starts with a call to someone who has tested positive for the coronavirus, and then follow-up with everyone that person was in close contact with  family, friends, colleagues or others they got closer than 6 feet from for more than a brief encounter. Everyone on that list is interviewed about their contacts and symptoms.

This is a routine, resource-intensive public health strategy thats been successfully used in the U.S. and around the world to contain infectious disease outbreaks  from measles to smallpox to tuberculosis to Ebola and more.

Local public health workers across the U.S. are already using this strategy with COVID-19  a few cases at a time. Last week, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Robert Redfield told NPR that very aggressive contact tracing would be necessary before the country could start to return to any sort of pre-pandemic normalcy. In Massachusetts, Gov. Charlie Baker had already begun a statewide effort.

We need to get out ahead of this and do everything we possibly can here in Massachusetts, through and in the aftermath of the surge, Baker said during a briefing about the project on April 3.

The state is partnering with the Boston-based nonprofit Partners in Health, and has begun hiring and training some of the 1,000, or so, people who will call everyone who tests positive.

Many of the thousands of Massachusetts residents who will receive calls wont know that they may have been exposed to the virus. Callers will keep the name of the infected person private, although organizers acknowledge it may not be difficult for the call recipients to determine the source of their COVID-19 exposure.

In an ideal scenario, everyone whos been in close contact with someone who is positive would be tested, even if the person receiving the call does not have symptoms. But Massachusetts, like most states, still doesnt have the capacity to do that. As of Sunday, at least 25,475 people had tested positive. There were 6,499 tests conducted daily, on average, in Massachusetts last week.

Anyone who has had close contact with someone who is positive will be asked to quarantine for 14 days, even if they get tested and are negative. Thats because the incubation period for the coronavirus is believed to be up to two weeks. Close contact here is defined as spending 15 minutes or more within 6 feet of someone who is positive.

Public health experts say many more tests for the coronavirus are needed to cover everyone who will be identified by this project. And waiting up to five days for test results, as some people still do, is a problem.

The delay in how long it takes to get the results remains too long to make contact tracing very effective, said Dr. Sandro Galea, dean of the School of Public Health at Boston University.

But Galea noted that testing capability could change anytime.

Yesterday, we probably did not have the tools, he said. Whether well have the tools tomorrow remains to be seen.

And then theres the question of how to assist people who are not sick and need to be quarantined so they dont spread the virus, or for those who are sick and need care in isolation. Some people will have enough space at home to stay relatively isolated from other members of their household. But many others  those who share bathrooms, kitchens and bedrooms, or who live with someone at increased risk for a severe case of COVID-19  will be given options.

The Baker administration, which says it plans to spend $44 million on the contact-tracing project, is looking at setting up isolation units in dormitories and hotels. People in quarantine as well as those in isolation will need food delivery, possibly child care, and lots of additional help so that they dont interact with others and spread the virus.

Its going to be a huge job, said Dr. Joia Mukherjee, the chief medical officer at Partners in Health. I know we will succeed somewhat and we will fail somewhat  we wont be able to find every single person  but we will hopefully prevent a lot of deaths.

Mukherjee said even if contact tracing cant stamp out the coronavirus, it can not only flatten but shrink the curve so that fewer people will get infected.

Mukherjee, who has helped organize similar projects to fight Ebola in West Africa, calls contact tracing going on the offensive against the coronavirus. She argues a defensive strategy alone isnt good enough.

Lets just spell out what the defensive [strategy] is. The defensive is, Were going to get creamed, and lets just make sure our hospitals are staffed, she said. What were saying is, Lets use tools that can reach into that silent epidemic and start to cut that off.

Some public health leaders and infectious disease doctors are questioning the timing of this launch in Massachusetts. Galea said contact tracing is usually more effective at the beginning of an epidemic, before a disease like COVID-19 has spread.

I dont know that its too late  its certainly late, he said. Had we had the tests and were we organized enough to do contact tracing right upfront, it would have potentially taken us down a very different path in this epidemic.

Baker said contract tracing is a powerful tool the state must try to prevent more infections. Galea said it might help Massachusetts control a second wave of infections that could come when stay-at-home orders and advisories are lifted.

Massachusetts may be rolling out the most robust expansion of contact tracing so far, but Utah, North Dakota and other states are also launching projects. The CDCs Redfield said his agency has 600 staffers doing this work and plans to add more.

But its still not clear how much financial assistance states can expect from the federal government.

Partners in Health is collaborating with 36 community health centers in Massachusetts to conduct the tracing. Health centers say the deal means they can bring back employees who were furloughed recently when elective medical care stopped; Partners in Health is connecting the tracing project to clinics where people could be tested and speak to a nurse or doctor.

Neither making nor receiving these calls will be easy, and cultural sensitivity is important too, according to a task force from the Johns Hopkins University Center for Health Security that recently looked at what case finding and contact tracing might entail across the United States.

The contact tracer may be the first person to alert someone they may be infected with the coronavirus. Stacey King, director of practice at Harvard Universitys Chan School of Public Health, has been working with student volunteers whove teamed up with local boards of health in Massachusetts to assist with contact tracing. King said building trust while asking about symptoms, contacts, recent activities and the health of family members will be challenging.

Especially when people are under so much stress right now, she said, I think it will be one of the hardest things that we experience.

Even if your state isnt ramping up contact tracing efforts, you might still get a call from a local public health official if youve been exposed to someone with a confirmed coronavirus test result. In the event you get a call someday soon and are asked to trace your contacts, it might help to start keeping notes now, say public health workers: Who have you recently spent more than a few minutes with  and been within 6 feet of?

The Partners in Health project is set to continue through October and wind down in January 2021.
HANOI, April 14 (Xinhua) -- The Association of Southeast Asian Nations, China, Japan and South Korea (ASEAN Plus Three or APT) on Tuesday pledged to enhance cooperation in jointly fighting the COVID-19 pandemic and stabilizing and invigorating the regional economy.

In a joint statement of the special ASEAN Plus Three meeting on COVID-19, the 13 Asian countries agreed to pool more efforts to guarantee the health and safety of people and keep markets open and free in the region.

They committed to enhancing national and regional capacities to prepare for and respond to pandemics, including the protection of healthcare workers and other frontline personnel, and the provision of adequate medicines and medical supplies, the statement said.

It added that the countries will strengthen scientific cooperation in epidemiological research, as well as actively share and leverage on digital technologies and innovation to promote a science-based response to combat COVID-19.

Meanwhile, they said they will intensify efforts to keep markets open for trade and investment, and enhance cooperation among ASEAN Plus Three countries with a view to ensuring food security, and strengthening the resiliency and sustainability of regional supply chains.
Nancy Pelosi railed against Donald Trump in a 'dear colleague' letter sent to Democrats Tuesday, blaming the current situation in the U.S. in the midst of the coronavirus crisis on the president.

'In order to move forward, we must first understand the truth of what has put us in this position,' the House Speaker wrote before diving into a series of problems she blames on Trump, calling it 'the truth.'

'The truth is that Donald Trump told his most loyal followers that the pandemic was a hoax and that it would magically disappear, thus endangering lives and paving the way for economic disaster,' she listed, insisting he ignored warnings of the coronavirus threat earlier this year.

Pelosi also laid out in the letter that she believes Trump's presidential actions are the reason coronavirus hit the U.S. as hard as it has and caused so much economic disaster and financial hardships for Americans.

'Donald Trump dismantled the infrastructure handed to him which was meant to plan for and overcome a pandemic, resulting in unnecessary deaths and economic disaster,' she wrote.

'The truth is a weak person, a poor leader, takes no responsibility. A weak person blames others,' the California Democrat continued.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said Tuesday that Donald Trump is responsible for the high number of deaths and economic destruction caused by coronavirus. 'The truth is a weak person, a poor leader, takes no responsibility. A weak person blames others,' she wrote in a letter to Democratic colleagues

She accused the president of 'dismantling the infrastructure handed to him which was meant to plan for and overcome a pandemic, resulting in unnecessary deaths and economic disaster'

Democrats want the next coronavirus relief package to include billions for upping production and distribution of personal protective equipment for hospitals and other healthcare centers and professionals

Here people line up outside the Utah Department of Workforce Services as more than 15 million people filed for unemployment in the last three weeks

Democrats were able to block a measure last week from Republicans requesting unanimous consent for a $250 billion expansion of the payment protection program (PPP) for small businesses to avoid stuttering and keep their employees on the payroll.

Pelosi claimed her Party would not allow the interim provision to pass because it did not include a list of measures Democrats demanded be included.

Although Republican Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said the other measures should be included in part two of the CARES Act, Democratic leadership said other provisions are more urgent than the PPP and require immediate attention.

Pelosi asserts one of these necessary additions is an expansion of testing availability.

'The President continues to obfuscate, saying we have more testing than any other country in the world. The truth is that only 1 percent of Americans have been tested,' she wrote. 'The failure to test is central to the spread of the virus and its impact on those most vulnerable in our society. The failure to test is dangerous and deadly, and without testing, we cannot resume our lives.'

As of Tuesday night the amount of deaths surpassed 26,000 and there are more than 615,000 confirmed cases, which is higher than any other country has reported.

Experts analyses show the pandemic is likely to reach its peak in the U.S. this week, but some claim there could be a resurgence of the virus in the fall or winter.

Pelosi is also demanding that the next bill include billions for an increase in production and distribution of testing sets, masks and other personal protective equipment (PPE) for healthcare centers, hospitals and healthcare professionals.

In March, Trump signed the CARES Act  a $2.2 trillion bill that allocated money, loans and grants to several industries, government institutions, small businesses and directly to the American people  in the form of $1,200 direct checks.

Democrats claim they need another overarching bill like the one passed at the end of March.

Trump hold nearly-daily press briefings at the White House with his coronavirus task force. Pelosi accused Trump of downplaying the threat of the virus earlier on this year and calling it a 'hoax'

The House Speaker engages in virtual interview nearly every day to run counter-programming to Trump's White House briefings

Due to the coronavirus crisis the once record-breaking economy has spiraled and unemployment claims reached an all-time-high this month after more than 15 million people filed for the benefits in three weeks.

Pelosi blames the economic repercussions of the virus on Trump and his handling of the outbreak from the start.

'The truth is because of an incompetent reaction to this health crisis, the strong economy handed to Donald Trump is now a disaster, causing the suffering of countless Americans and endangering lives,' she said.

Trump holds nearly-daily press briefings with his White House coronavirus task force, which are nationally televised and attended by a controlled number of members of the media.

Pelosi has done her best to run counter-programming to the president's seemingly limitless air-time by appearing in virtual interviews with networks almost every day  sometimes from her home in San Francisco.
YEREVAN, APRIL 15, ARMENPRESS. Armenian Member of Parliament from the ruling My Step bloc Rustam Bakoyan  representing the Yazidi community of the country, has introduced a bill envisaging the opportunity of unpaid leave for national minority representatives for celebrating their national, religious and remembrance days.

Bakoyan introduced the bill on amending the Labor Code during the plenary session of parliament, and also congratulated the Yazidi community on Malake Taus, the Yazidi New Year.

Nearly 100 years after the Armenian Genocide, the Yazidi people were subjected to genocide on their land in the beginning of the 21st century. We are living in a very contradictory period of time, unfortunately, we  the Yazidis  are still being murdered for our national affiliation and religion in the 21st century. However, in this context, me and all Yazidis living in Armenia have a big occasion to be proud of, we live in and are citizens of a country where our rights are fully protected, our life is a supreme value here, the lawmaker said.

The amendments proposed by the MP seek to grant no more than 4 days a year in unpaid leave for national minority representatives to celebrate their holidays and commemoration days.

Gevorg Petrosyan from the opposition Prosperous Armenia Party, however, said that he himself used to work in the private sector and there was never a case when a national minority representative from the Yazidi community would be rejected leave on those days. He says the workers are allowed to be absent for these occasions and they still keep their pay.

This bill makes it look like they will be deprived from their salaries for these days, he said.

Bakoyan said the issue concerns not only the Yazidi community and that the issue is significant.

He said the brotherly attitude of Armenians is obvious, but regulation by law are still important.

Reporting and writing by Anna Grigoryan

Edited and translated by Stepan Kocharyan


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Small intestinal crypts of Crohns disease patients. Credit: Prof. Dirk Haller / TUM

Crohn's disease is a chronic inflammatory disorder of the intestine that, in most cases, relapses episodically. As of now, there is no cure for this disease. A research group led by the Technical University of Munich (TUM) has discovered a marker at a microscopic level, which can be used to identify patients that show a high probability of suffering from an inflammation recurrence in the immediate future. With this insight, therapeutic counter-measures may be employed at an earlier stage.

Intestinal stem cell metabolism is facilitated by mitochondriathe in-cell power plants. Chronic inflammation processes inhibit the cells' metabolism and lead to functional loss of these stem cells. In collaboration with the Helmholz Zentrum Munchen and the Universite de Paris, a TUM research team has discovered this connection by analyzing intestinal epithelial cells of Crohn's disease patients and comparing them to mouse model findings.

The interrelated role of stem cells and Paneth cells

Stem cells are indispensable for the maintenance and regeneration of tissues. Intestinal stem cells inside the intestines are intermingled with so-called Paneth cells, which are responsible for the local immune defense and for creating an environment in which the stem cells can prosper, thus termed guardians of the stem cell niche.

Patients suffering from Crohn's disease have fewer Paneth cells and furthermore, these are limited in their functionality. The research group examined the causes for alterations in Paneth cells and attempted to determine the importance of stem cell metabolism in this context.

Prof. Haller, Dr. Eva Rath and Dr. Amira Metwaly discussing results. Credit: Andreas Heddergott / TUM

In addition to mouse studies, the researchers analyzed intestinal biopsies from Crohn's disease patients, characterizing the stem cell niche meticulously. After six months, the patients' intestines were examined again endoscopically focusing on finding signs of inflammation.

Predicting Crohn's disease recurrence by observing the appearance of stem cells

The study showed that microscopic alterations in stem cell niche were particularly prevalent in those patients who showed symptoms of a relapse of inflammation after six months.

"These changes in the stem cell niche are a very early indicator for the start of inflammatory processes. Therefore, the appearance of the stem cell niche can be used to evaluate the probability of a disease recurrence after the resection of originally affected parts of the small intestine. This presents a reasonable starting point for therapeutic intervention," explained Dirk Haller, Professor for Nutrition and Immunology at TUM.

Murine small intestinal crypts. Credit: Prof. Dirk Haller

Restoring stem cell function

In both human patients and mouse models, alterations in Paneth and stem cells coincided with decreased mitochondria functionality.

Knowing that a lowered mitochondrial respiration leads to alterations in the stem cell niche, the researchers used dichloracetate (DCA), a substance applied in cancer therapy leading to an increase in mitochondrial respiration.

The shift in cellular metabolism induced by DCA was able to restore the intestinal stem cell functionality of mice suffering from inflammation, as demonstrated in intestinal organoids, organ-like structures cultured ex vivo.

Therapeutic approach for prolonging the inflammation-free phases of Crohn's disease

"These findings point to a new therapeutic approach for prolonging the inflammation-free remission phases of Crohn's disease," said Eva Rath, scientist at the TUM School of Life Sciences Weihenstephan and co-author of the study.

The aim of further research is to investigate the effect of DCA in animal models and patients in more detail. A so-called metabolic interventionmaking targeted changes in the cells' metabolismcould prevent functional loss of stem cells and Paneth cells, which both maintain the intestinal barrier. This could lead to preventing subsequent inflammation.

More information: Sevana Khaloian et al, Mitochondrial impairment drives intestinal stem cell transition into dysfunctional Paneth cells predicting Crohn's disease recurrence, Gut (2020). Journal information: Gut Sevana Khaloian et al, Mitochondrial impairment drives intestinal stem cell transition into dysfunctional Paneth cells predicting Crohn's disease recurrence,(2020). DOI: 10.1136/gutjnl-2019-319514
As part of efforts to enforce



lockdown strictly, Tamil Nadu police on Wednesday said they have so far registered around 2 lakh FIRs and seized over 1.50 lakh vehicles as the city corporation warned of Rs 100 fine for pedestrians and suspension of driving licence for those travelling in vehicles without face masks.

The police said as many as 1,84,748 instances of lockdown violations were seen and FIRs were registered for all of them against violators.

While a fine amount of Rs 82.32 lakh has been collected, 1.56 lakh vehicles have been seized, they said.

The Greater Chennai Corporation, which days ago made it compulsory for people to wear masks if they step out of their homes for essential purposes today said non-compliance will invite action including a fine for pedestrians.

"Greater Chennai Corporation under section 2 of Epidemic Diseases Act, 1987 hereby directs that all public under the jurisdiction of GCC shall use the face mask compulsorily when stepping out of their homes for permitted work and needs," a Chennai corporation statement said.

Any person disobeying the direction shall be deemed to have committed an offence and action will be taken against them by police authorities, it said.

While vehicles involved in violation will be seized, the driving licence will be suspended for six months and a penalty of Rs 100 per day shall be imposed for the pedestrians.

"This comes into force with immediate effect," it added.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
The Wuhan coronavirus had infected over 2 million people worldwide as of Wednesday morning, according to a tally kept by Johns Hopkins University.

The worldwide death count has surpassed 128,000, while more than 500,000 people have recovered. The U.S. accounts for approximately 30 percent of global cases with more than 609,000 nationwide. Across the country, over 26,000 people have died.

But experts have warned that China, which has around 82,000 confirmed cases, is deliberately undercounting the actual statistic, which could be nearly 3 million.

Other than the outbreak site of Hubei, Chinese provinces not only top the list of best-performing areas in limiting Covid, they do so by a huge margin. Yet hundreds of thousands of people, if not over one million, left Hubei for those other provinces before the quarantine and circulated freely for weeks, Derek Scissors of the American Enterprise Institute told National Review. All the mistakes other countries made, China made first, before it imposed harsh, effective restrictions. And its population is 20 times larger than countries reporting far more cases.

Critics have also pointed at the World Health Organizations failures to accurately describe and handle the initial outbreak due to their credulity toward Chinese information. On Tuesday, President Trump said he was halting U.S. funding to the WHO pending a review of its handling of the pandemic. The U.S. funds 15 percent of the organizations annual budget, or 75 times the amount that China pays.

The silence of the WHO on the disappearance of scientific researchers and doctors, and new restrictions on the sharing of research into the origins of COVID-19 in the country of origin is deeply concerning. Especially when we put up by far the largest amount of money, Trump said. Over the weekend China mandated that research papers on the origin of the coronavirus must be approved by the state before publication.

More from National Review
GREENWICH  The town of Greenwich reported another massive surge in the number of residents diagnosed with coronavirus.

As of Wednesday, the number of confirmed cases in town was 499, up by more than 100 over the 394 cases reported on Tuesday. That was also a major uptick from the 324 cases reported on Monday.

The big increase can be attributed to a lag in calculating test results and inputting data at the state Department of Public Health, Town Director of Health Caroline Baisley said. Many of the newly reported cases involve patients who were tested two to three weeks ago, she said.

On his daily conference call with media, First Selectman Fred Camillo said the numbers show the importance of following social distancing guidelines.

The alarming issue here is that many of these people may have been asymptomatic and continued their daily business interacting with family, going outdoors or to the supermarket and unknowingly exposing countless others, Camillo said. I cannot continue to emphasize enough just how important it is to wear facial coverings whenever outside of your home. Keep your distance. Wear gloves.

Gov. Ned Lamont also called on everyone to wear face masks in public.

If youre walking around and you need a bit of space, youre going up to a group of people there, just put on your mask, Lamont said during his daily news briefing Wednesday.

Earlier in the day, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo promised an executive order requiring everyone in his state to wear masks in places where they are close to others, from sidewalks to stores and mass transit.

Lamont said he would issue a similar order Thursday or Friday. Anybody coming into that particular facility, starting with grocery stores, has to wear a mask, Lamont said. He suggested masks of nearly any kind, from scarves and bandanas, to homemade face gear.

In his conference call, Camillo said he was concerned about places like delis where customers are in close quarters.

Its really important that people cover up when theyre in a confined space like that, he said.

Camillo added that he has observed that 90 percent or more of customers in grocery stores are wearing gloves and masks.

Also, Town Hall will remain closed to everyone through May 20, Camillo announced Wednesday. His original closure order was through April 22, but Camillo said the new date is in accordance with Lamonts orders.

Town employees will continue to work from home and are available to the public via phone and email during business hours. More information about all town departments is online at www.greenwichct.gov.

The town Department of Public Works is continuing to work  and overnight, a DPW crew was deployed to repair a wastewater pump station that broke down after it became clogged with wipes, paper towels, face masks and gloves that had been flushed down toilets.

Camillo reminded residents to be more careful about what they flush.

You need to use common sense, its not meant for that, he said. Things you would not do in normal times are not things you should do during emergency times. You have to think before doing something like that.

Camillo said it was unfortunate not only because the repairs had to be made but also because the DPW crew had to work in close quarters in the dark.

Residents should still get outside  but its important for everyone to follow social distancing guidelines, Camillo said. He spoke Wednesday with fellow first selectmen and mayors in Fairfield County to compare strategies and deliver a common message  just as the governors in Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Rhode Island and Pennsylvania are.

I know some of these measures sound harsh and sound like big government, but were in a pandemic and this is all for the health and the safety of the people, Camillo said. Its not to tell people what to do because we like doing that. If we dont do anything more people are going to lose their lives and thats what were trying to prevent.

In other statistics released Wednesday, Greenwich Hospital was treating 117 coronavirus patients as of Wednesday afternoon, an increase of only one patient from the day before. The hospital has discharged 223 total patients with the virus, up from 206 on Tuesday.

Overall at its testing site, Greenwich Hospital has seen 1,292 positive results out of a total of 3,330 tests submitted. That number includes people from across the region, not just Greenwich residents.

kborsuk@greenwichtime.com
(Natural News) President Donald Trump recently referred to the Wuhan coronavirus (COVID-19) as the Chinese Virus because, much to the chagrin of the mainstream media, it did, in fact, originate in China. But thats not the whole story.

As it turns out, the United States government actually gave $3.7 million to the laboratory in Wuhan that had been conducting coronavirus experiments on bats  the same lab that some believe was the true source of the Wuhan coronavirus (COVID-19).

It was none other than the Wuhan Institute of Virology, the biosafety level-4 (BSL-4) lab that was caught illegally selling tainted lab animals at nearby wet markets, that was the recipient of this $3.7 million in American taxpayer money. And this $3.7 million, believe it or not, is what made these experiments possible in the first place.

What this means, shockingly, is that American taxpayers actually funded the eventual spread of the Wuhan coronavirus (COVID-19), which has hammered our nations economy and put millions of people out of work. And we have none other than our lovely federal government to blame for this crisis.

The Wuhan Institute of Virology undertook coronavirus experiments on mammals captured more than 1,000 miles away in Yunnan which were funded by a $3.7 million grant from the US government, reports the United Kingdoms DailyMail Online.

Sequencing of the COVID-19 genome has traced it back to bats found in Yunnan caves but it was first thought to have transferred to humans at an animal market in Wuhan.

Be sure to check out the below episode of The Health Ranger Report as Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, unpacks how the globalists are using the Wuhan coronavirus (COVID-19) crisis to test the limits of Americans, and see how much tyranny theyre willing to endure:

The federal government is STILL funding dangerous research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology with American taxpayer dollars

At the time when this U.S. money was being disbursed to Wuhan, some lawmakers and pressure groups loudly objected to it, noting that the Wuhan Institute of Virology was engaged in dangerous and cruel animal experiments. Now, many of these same folks are pointing out that these experiments did, in fact, prove to be very cruel and unspeakably dangerous now that we have a global pandemic on our hands.

Im disgusted to learn that for years the U.S. government has been funding dangerous and cruel animal experiments at the Wuhan Institute, which may have contributed to the global spread of coronavirus, and research at other labs in China that have virtually no oversight from US authorities, announced U.S. congressman Matt Gaetz recently.

Anthony Bellotti, president of a pressure group known as White Coat Waste, has also condemned the government use of American taxpayer dollars to fund these horrors. He noted in a recent statement that animals infected with viruses or otherwise sickened and abused in Chinese labs reportedly may be sold to wet markets for consumption once experiments are done.

This is exactly what Natural News and other independent news sources have been warning about for months, only to be chastised for spreading conspiracy theories. But now, these conspiracy theories are becoming conspiracy facts, thanks to these continued revelations.

Worse, documents obtained by the DailyMail Online suggest that scientists in Wuhan experimented with coronavirus on bats as part of a project directly funded by the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH), and that the NIH is still licensing with the Wuhan lab to receive even more American money for further experimentation.

Not only is the Wuhan Institute of Virology not a secure facility, its also been revealed that it doesnt actually operate at level-4 safety standards, but rather at level-2, which only provides minimal protections against infection of lab workers.

More of the latest news about the Wuhan coronavirus (COVID-19) is available at Pandemic.news.

Sources for this article include:

DailyMail.co.uk

NaturalNews.com
A blundering fugitive has been jailed after replying to his own police 'Wanted' appeal on Facebook while on the run from justice.

Burglar Jack Martin, 19, was caught out after posting on his police wanted appeal to warn people: 'If you see me keep your mouth shut'.

Martin was caught within weeks after being branded a 'pathetic gangster wannabe' by thousands of people who shared the online appeal to help the police.

Burglar Jack Martin, 19, was caught out after posting on his police wanted appeal to warn people: 'If you see me keep your mouth shut'

And he is back behind bars - sentenced to 18 months custody for theft after his warning backfired.

A court heard the teenager has already chalked up 15 previous convictions for 41 offences, including burglary, shoplifting and public disorder.

Martin was sent to a young offender institution for 18 months at Cardiff Crown Court this week after he admitted raiding a house in Abersychan, Gwent.

Christopher Evans, prosecuting, said: 'It would appear he hooked the keys through the letter box of the front door.

'The complainant had left Christmas presents worth 294 in the boot of her Ford Fiesta and he drove off in the vehicle.

'That was after he had attempted to burgle two other houses on the same street.'

Mr Evans told how the 5,000 Fiesta was later found on its roof after Martin had 'flipped' it after crashing into a roundabout in Pontypool, Gwent.

The court heard how he defied a restraining order that night after he had gone to his adopted parents' house for help. Martin is prohibited from entering their street.

Martin, of Pontypool, admitted burglary, two counts of attempted burglary, theft and breaching a restraining order.

Ieuan Bennett, mitigating, said: 'He's had a difficult background in life.

A blundering fugitive has been jailed after replying to his own police 'Wanted' appeal on Facebook while on the run from justice

'He started taking drugs and became estranged from his adoptive parents who excluded him from the family home. He has sobered up in prison.'

Judge Jeremy Jenkins told Martin he had 'skilfully' taken they keys through the letterbox to burgle his victim.

As well as locking him up, Judge Jenkins banned him from driving for two years and nine months.

He has been sentenced to 18 months custody for theft after his warning backfired

In the wanted appeal, a Gwent Police spokeswoman said: 'Due to the fact that Jack has breached his licence conditions, by displaying poor behaviour and failing to reside at an approved address he has been recalled to prison.'

But Martin's comment brought a flood of attention to the Facebook appeal and hundreds of people shared the page.

One comment said: 'Pathetic gangster wannabe, grow up and get a proper haircut.'

Another said: 'Get back in the slammer you parasite.'

He was arrested after the appeal in August and brought to Cardiff Crown Court for sentencing.

After his arrest a police spokeswoman said: 'Jack Martin, who officers were trying to locate after he breached his licence conditions, has now been arrested and taken into police custody. Thank you for your shares.'
Source: Xinhua| 2020-04-15 15:13:11|Editor: huaxia

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BEIJING, April 15 (Xinhua) -- China sent charter planes to bring back 2,744 Chinese stranded in the coronavirus-affected countries, the nation's top civil aviation authorities said Wednesday.

Sixteen Chinese charter planes flew to Iran, Italy, the United Kingdom, the United States and Spain from March 4 to April 12, bringing back home the Chinese including 1,449 students studying abroad, according to the Civil Aviation Administration of China.

The daily number of incoming passengers through airports across China has stabilized at 2,000 to 3,000 over the past 16 days, as there were no more than 20 incoming flights each day of the period.

China has stepped up measures to guard against imported coronavirus infections, cutting the number of international flights and requiring all international flights bound for Beijing to be diverted to other airports first.
Theres simply no way of making plans with your friends or dear ones up until May 3 - in fact, you should not even be trying to do that. But as India enters into the second phase of the country-wide lockdown, many are getting anxious to go out again.

Image Source/Indian Express/Arul Horizon

So much so, some are devising plans to meet their friends, and are using social media to do that. Might we point out that this a terrible idea, because its no longer a secret? Three Pune boys were bored out of their wits, that they used Twitter to plan to meet each other.

Little did they know that their conversation would be interrupted by the Pune police themselves! Heres what happened:

Twitter user named Parth @ParthEkal tweeted that May 3 was too far away and he couldn't abide by the lockdown regulations for that long. To his tweet, another user named Indrajeet replied, they can meet sometime before. 'Jaggu, we can meet right now. You stay 1 street across. Tu bol fkta kadhi (You just tell when!)'. The conversation continued as follows:

#1

3rd May tak nahi hoega sorry  Parth (@ParthEkal) April 14, 2020

#2

We'll meet uske pehele kabhi toh  Indrajeet (@jaggu__4) April 14, 2020

#3

You keep forgetting. Ek baar Baba Rancho ne kaha tha "invite nahi, uniform lagta hai uniform" ;)  Charit Shetty (@ShettyCharit) April 14, 2020

When the first user Parth said, they could meet right now as they live just one street across, Pune Police intercepted their conversation and asked whether they could join. This tweet caught Pune Police's attention, who then re-tweeted it with a rather savage reply. 'Hey! Even we'd like to join and give you company for longer! Tumhi saanga fakt kuthe ani kadhi. (You just tell us when and where)', the official Twitter handle wrote.

Hey! Even we'd like to join and give you company for longer! Tumhi saanga fakt kuthe ani kadhi? https://t.co/TnJOROnmgy  PUNE POLICE (@PuneCityPolice) April 14, 2020

On Twitter, Pune Police have established a named for themselves with their witty responses

      ?



             ?



         ? https://t.co/XkezXLLAdD  PUNE POLICE (@PuneCityPolice) April 12, 2020

They have been answering all sorts of questions people have, regarding the lockdown. In one instance, a Twitter user asked the department what would happen if they went out - to which the police came up with a witty yet powerful reply.

Image Source/Indian Express

'What if we put you inside? If we put someone in jail without any cause would it be nice? So, how is going outside without a reason alright?' reads their reply when translated from Hindi. With this the Pune police team has made it abundantly clear that you just cannot and should not mess with them!
Malawi's Supreme Court on Wednesday began hearing an appeal by President Peter Mutharika against the cancellation of his re-election following polls held in the southern African nation last May.

Admitting electoral laws were flouted during the vote, lawyers for Mutharika and the electoral commission said before the Supreme Court that the breaches did not materially prejudice anyone.

The Constitutional Court in February annulled the results of the May 2019 poll and ordered a re-run, citing "grave" and "widespread" irregularities including the use of correction fluid on tally sheets.

Mutharika appealed against the landmark ruling, accusing the court of bias against him.

His lawyer, Samuel Tembenu, admitted correction fluid was used but said that no votes were altered.

"There was no evidence to state that votes were taken from one candidate and given to another," he told a full bench of seven Supreme Court judges.

He said the Constitutional Court had used the term "irregularities" loosely when it nullifed the vote results in February.

"They were merely breaches of the electoral law," he said.

The country's electoral commission is also appealing the decision to overturn the election it organised and the order for a vote re-run.

Its lawyer Tamando Chokotho said the opposition politicians who disputed the poll outcome failed "to show that any party suffered any prejudice through the result management system".

"No prejudice or advantage was shown in relation to the use of Tippex, alterations or duplicates," said Chokotho said.

The hearings are set to last two weeks.

'Tippex prejudiced no one'

In his appeal papers, Mutharika said the judges had "erred in law" and asked the Supreme Court to reverse the judgement.

The president described the ruling as "a serious miscarriage of justice and an attack on the foundations of the country's democracy".

A new election has been set for July 2, although it could be delayed by the appeal and the coronavirus outbreak.

Malawi Electoral Commission chairwoman Jane Ansah has said the court overstepped its powers by ordering parliament to amend electoral laws ahead of a new vote.

Mutharika has refused to assent to the proposed amendments, notably one that requires a more than 50 percent majority to secure a win.

That threshold is a major sticking point for the incumbent, who had been declared winner with just 38.5 percent of the vote.

Runner-up Lazarus Chakwera, the leader of the main opposition Malawi Congress Party (MCP), came a close second with 35.4 percent, losing by just 159,000 votes.

The MCP has since partnered with the United Transformation Movement (UTM) to maximise the chances of unseating the president.

UTM leader and the country's vice president Saulos Chilima came third with 20 percent of the vote.

It is the first time a presidential election has been challenged on legal grounds in Malawi since independence from Britain in 1964.

Malawi. By Jean Michel CORNU (AFP)

The court ordered a fresh election within 150 days, as well as an investigation into the conduct of the electoral commission.

Both Mutharika and the MEC have made various attempts to delay the process.

Ansah claims that organising an election would require more time and has suggested October 28 as the new polling date.

Chakwera's lawyer, Mordecai Msiska, said it was "astounding" that Mutharika "is still resisting" the Constitutional Court order.

"This kind of attitude endangers the entire constitution process and democratic order and the glue that holds a country together and keeps legitimacy,' Msiska said.
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Source: Xinhua| 2020-04-14 19:27:27|Editor: ZD

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Representatives from Lao Ministry of Health and designated hospitals attend a video conference on COVID-19 prevention and control with medical experts from China's Shanghai in Vientiane, Laos, April 13, 2020. (Photo by Kaikeo Saiyasane/Xinhua)

VIENTIANE, April 14 (Xinhua) -- Experts in China's Shanghai and Laos have held an anti-COVID-19 pandemic video exchange meeting.

The Chinese Embassy in Laos on Tuesday said at a press release that the medical experts from the Shanghai Municipal Center for Disease Control and Prevention and representatives from the Lao Ministry of Health and designated hospitals attended the video exchange meeting on Monday.

At the meeting, the Lao side presented a detailed report on the current epidemic situation in Laos and the prevention and control measures, and raised questions about the difficulties in the work.

Shanghai medical experts introduced China's experience in combating the COVID-19, conducted in-depth exchanges on how to protect community, respond to the flow of the people, and prevent the virus spread, and provided professional answers to specific issues in prevention and protection, testing, diagnosis and treatment.

The Lao side said that the exchange is another successful practice of Lao-Chinese epidemic prevention and control cooperation, after China sending a medical expert team. Experts in Shanghai, rich in theory and practice, have provided practical and useful suggestions, will be important references for the pandemic prevention and control in Laos.

Laos detected its first two confirmed COVID-19 cases on March 24, and only after five days, the Chinese anti-epidemic medical expert team arrived in capital Vientiane on March 29.

Lao Health Ministry announced at its daily press conference that the country has detected 19 confirmed COVID-19 cases as of Tuesday afternoon.
Searches are currently being conducted at the premises of the Kyiv City State Administration (KRSA) after employees of the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) documented the extortion by the first deputy chairman of the KRSA Mykola Povoroznyk of undue benefits from a representative of the developer company, TSN reports on Tuesday evening with reference to its own sources in law enforcement agencies.

According to the information, the official demanded a bribe for influencing the decision to agree on town-planning conditions and restrictions in the amount of $125,000. He acted through an intermediary who was detained by SBU employees to receive $60,000. Plans were also discussed for obtaining $246,000 for another construction project.

Photos of the place of searches and the detention of the intermediary were shown on TSN TV channel.

The Interfax-Ukraine agency does not have confirmation or refutation of this information.
South Africa: Non-compliant businesses shut down in Free State

A Free State government-led blitz has netted 17 suspects for hiking prices on essential services and goods during the COVID-19 lockdown, among other contraventions.

With the five week-long Disaster Management Regulations expected to have a dire impact on consumers and small businesses, the provincial MEC for Economic, Small Business Development, Tourism and Economic Affairs, Makalo Mohale, on Monday embarked on an operation aimed at monitoring compliance.

The MEC, accompanied by Department officials and law enforcement agencies, visited Bulfontein, Ventersburg, Reddesburg, Smithfield, Memel, Bothavillle and Bloemfontein for noncompliance to the Covid-19 Disaster Management Regulations.

During the blitz several businesses were found to be operating without valid municipal permits, overpricing food, not complying with health and safety laws and not observing laws governing asylum seekers.

Among the 17 shop owners arrested were five illegal immigrants. The operations saw nine shops being shot down.

It was discovered that there is lot of foreign nationals who are not properly documented who are running spaza shops in many towns and townships. Most businesses are not registered in terms of the Business Act 71 of 1991, said the department in a statement.

The municipalities have been alerted to the violations. However, the department has vowed to work with local authorities to ensure compliance.

The department acknowledged that the lockdown has had a devastating impact on businesses across the country.

The clothing and textile sector in the Free State, which provides employment in Botshabelo and QwaQwa, has felt the effects of the pandemic. There were signs that some of factories may find it difficult to re-start operations post the lockdown.

Other sectors severely affected by the government-imposed restrictions included food, tourism and hospitality, manufacturing, logistics and retail.

The informal sector (street vendors, motor mechanics, etc) has also been severely affected as most of operators in this sector rely solely on their business to put bread on the table, read the statement.  SAnews.gov.za

This story has been published on: 2020-04-15. To contact the author, please use the contact details within the article.
Haven Lunsford of Washington, Ind., acknowledges a horn honk outside Washington Nursing Center at 603 E. National Hwy in Washington, Ind., Monday afternoon, April 6, 2020. Protesters were unhappy about the surprise transferring of family and friends from the facility. The owner of the company, Chosen Healthcare, was attempting to move the longtime residents to different facilities it owns in Indiana so they could allegedly turn the facility into a COVID-19 hospital. (Denny Simmons/Evansville Courier & Press via AP) (DENNY SIMMONS / COURIER & PRESS/AP)
(Newser)  California Gov. Gavin Newsom says he is working on reopening the country's most populous statebut it's not going to happen overnight. At a press conference Tuesday, the governor outlined six factors the state will look at when deciding whether to loosen the stay-at-home order that has been in place since March 19, the Los Angeles Times reports. He said the state needs to expand coronavirus testing, protect people most at risk, including the elderly, ensure hospitals have enough supplies, see progress in developing COVID-19 treatments, ensure schools and businesses can continue physical distancing, and be able to decide if and when stay-at-home orders should be reinstated, the Sacramento Bee reports.

story continues below

"This cannot be a permanent state, Newsom told reporters. "These stay-at-home orders have a profound impact on the economy." But the orders, he said, would not be loosened until hospitalizations "flatten and start to decline," and large gatherings are still "not in the cards," the AP reports. Newsom and Dr. Sonia Angell, director of the California Department of Public Health, warned that as restrictions start to be lifted, Californians should not expect things to look the same way they did before the pandemic. "This is not about going back to where we were before," Angell said. "Its about going forward in ways that are healthy for all of us. But it wont look the same." (Read more California stories.)
The 1,000 ventilators promised to California hospitals by Tesla CEO Elon Musk have not been delivered, says the office of Gov. Gavin Newsom.

The ventilators were set to be delivered straight to the hospitals by Tesla after Gov. Newsom announced the donation on March 23.

The hospitals are yet to receive them, despite Newsom's dramatic announcement that they had arrived in the state, the Sacramento Bee reported.

The promise from the tech entrepreneur and billionaire came at the worst of California's outbreak when the state was desperately searching for ventilators for its most critical patients. They have since been able to donate ventilators to other states.

DailyMail.com has reached out to Gov. Newsom's office and Tesla for comment.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk promised 1,000 ventilators to California hospitals on March 23 which have not been delivered, according to Governor Gavin Newsom's office

Gov. Gavin Newsom thanked Musk for the donation in March but they have not been delivered

The news comes after Musk was criticized for sending Bilevel Positive Airway Pressure (BPAP) machines to, which are used for treating sleep apnea, to New York in boxes branded with Tesla stickers.

The BPAP machines are not the type needed to treat coronavirus patients.

New York City Hospitals shared an image on Twitter on March 31 thanking Musk and Tesla for delivering 40 ventilators to Elmhurst Hospital in Queens, but the photo showed BiPAP machines and not the invasive ventilators that were needed urgently by the hospitals.

However, the Tesla CEO rebutted claims that the firm delivered the wrong ventilators, stating New York State Governor Andrew Cuomo had asked for both noninvasive and invasive devices, according to InterestingEngineer.

The FDA recently announced that BiPAP, the ones Tesla delivered, and CPAP machines could be used as an alternative to traditional life-support ventilators, as hospitals face shortages of the larger, more complex and costly devices.

'Invasive ventilators are for worst case patients,' Musk shared in a tweet.

'Survival rate at that point is low, as Gov Cuomo has pointed out. Nonetheless, we start delivery of intratracheal Medtronic units in NYC tonight.'

Musk announced in March that he was working to provide hospitals around the world with ventilators to treat patients with the virus.

Musk was criticized after this picture was shared which shows BPAP machines where sent to New York hospitals, as critics said that invasive ventilators were drastically needed instead

Henry Ford Health System shared this photo that showed a donation of 40 ventilators from Tesla. The boxed were branded with Tesla stickers despite only being purchased for by the firm

The CEO had previously dismissed concerns about the outbreak, going as so far as to call the panic 'dumb.'

But he seemed to quickly change his tune after the coronavirus made its way to the US  there are currently more than 633,000 cases reported in the country and the death toll has surpassed 27,0600.

Musk had previously told his Twitter followers that 'if there is a shortage' he would step in to make ventilators for patients in intensive care who are struggling to stave off COVID-19.

Additionally, Tesla delivered 50,000 face masks to the Seattle home of a University of Washington physician to help protect healthcare workers as they grapple with the shortages of personal protective equipment.

Musk previously dismissed concerns about the outbreak, calling the panic 'dumb'

But he seemed to quickly change his tune after the coronavirus made its way to the US and offered to ship ventilators to hospitals in need, including a promise of 1,000 to California

Gov. Newsom has been criticized by state lawmakers for making the announcement about Musk's donation before the ventilators were delivered, sparking calls for more information on Newsom's plan to buy 400 million masks and other personal protective equipment to slow the spread of coronavirus.

'In light of the massive spending commitments made for PPE and other medical equipment, I request that the Administration launch, no later than early next week, a regularly updated webpage that describes the state's inventory of each major type of equipment and the destinations of each outgoing shipment, including quantities shipped by county, city, and categories of users including health facilities and other essential workers,' said State Sen. Holly Mitchell.

On Tuesday, the governor announced a 12-point list of questions the state must have answers for before it can reopen at reduced capacity.

Newsom said that the state had been able to 'buy time' with social distancing, it must anticipate a virus peak 'some time in the future'.

'As we contemplate reopening parts of our state, we must be guided by science and data, and we must understand that things will look different than before.'

He then unveiled a collection of slides with questions the state would have to address before it reopened.

California is among the states that have broken with President Trump to set up their own reopening plan.

He has joined with other west coast states, Washington and Oregon.

It came after New York Governor Andrew Cuomo on Monday revealed he and five other east coast states had formed a 'council' to tackle the pandemic.

'California, Oregon and Washington have agreed to work together on a shared approach for reopening our economies  one that identifies clear indicators for communities to restart public life and business,' the governors said in a joint statements.

The nine states combined account for more than 98 million people, close to 30 per cent of the population of the U.S., and more than 30 per cent of GDP.

Despite the reported failure of Tesla to deliver ventilators, California has now begun to ship their own to other states in need, sending out hundreds of machines to New Jersey, New York and Illinois.

'Committed to the health of every Californian. Practicing our duty as Americans to take care of one another. I know other states would do the same,' Gov. Newsom said on April 7 as the machines were shipped out.

'I want to express my sincere gratitude to the people of California & to Gov. Gavin Newsom, who sent us 100 ventilators overnight for use by patients here in Illinois,' Gov. JB Pritzker said in response.

'It's truly incredible to work with elected officials across the nation who are providing real leadership.'
The COVID-19 pandemic has forced the majority of the workforce across the globe to adopt the idea of working remotely from home. It's the only way to curb the spread of the virus. But if you're not used to the idea of working remotely, then here's some motivation.



NASA's Curiosity team that's responsible for operating the rover on the Red planet is now working from home too and they're operating the rover from home. Yes, you read that right. A group of people are working from their respective homes to operate a robot on a different planet.

 nasa

This has been confirmed by NASA itself in a blog post which also details how the team adapted to the unprecedented situation. Handling a rover, in case you don't know, is a complex task. It only gets complicated when that robot is in a different planet.





The team lead, Alicia Allbaugh, noted how difficult it has been, having to communicate and handle everything at a given time. "Were usually all in one room, sharing screens, images, and data. I probably monitor about 15 chat channels at all times. Youre juggling more than you normally would," she added.

 nasa



The blog post explains how the processes previously accomplished on high-performance workstations are now being done on laptops and web services. A lot of work is being done over video calls too, sometimes several at once.



Amidst all of this chaos, we're happy to report that the rover is performing its tasks as planned. The rover has successfully managed drive up to a rock, drill the sample and send confirmation back to the team. The work seems to be going on as usual.



If this isn't motivating enough to quit procrastinating and get your work done, then we don't know what is. These are some really tough times and we all need to make some adjustments to make sure everything is functioning as planned. Let's fight through this together and come back stronger.

Source: NASA
Prophet James Owusu of the True Light Worship Centre has urged the Christian community and the clergy in particular to acknowledge the positive impact of Information and Communications Technology (ICT) in Christian ministry.



Speaking in an interview, the head of the City of Testimonies branch of the True Light Worship Centre in Tema, said Christians must explore the advantages of modern communication technology such as the Internet and social media as a tool to spread the message of Jesus Christ to the world.



He said fierce criticisms of social media and misconceptions about its negative impact on Christianity have proven to be inaccurate as most preachers are now resorting to online services since the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic due to restrictions on public gatherings including religious activities.



According to him, the initial criticisms of the internet age by some Christians and church leaders were clearly borne out of a lack of understanding, reiterating that technology is a massive tool for effective evangelism.



Prophet Owusu, however, called for responsible use of communication technology, warning that uncontrolled use of new media platforms such as Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram can lead to addiction which can impact negatively on individual's social and religious life.



On Friday, March 27, 2020, President Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo, declared a partial lockdown in parts of the country effective Monday, March 30, 2020, as part of efforts to curb the spread of the COVID-19 coronavirus disease.



The 2-week lockdown will extend the period of the closure of churches as the government has already imposed limitations on social gatherings such as church meetings.



In response to the shutdown, most Christian organizations have resorted to living.

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
Rose, who was recently adopted from Westside German Shepherd Rescue of Los Angeles, shows us how exhausting taste-testing homemade dog biscuits can be. (Mariah Tauger / Los Angeles Times)

The day before Los Angeles was ordered to stay home, I drove downtown and adopted a dog . If I was going to be sheltering in place alone for the foreseeable future  my kids, sent home from their colleges, were quarantined at their dad's house  I wanted a therapy dog.

I wasnt the only one. In the weeks since much of the country has been confined to quarters, people have been adopting and fostering pets in record numbers. Now here we all are at home in our ad hoc bunkers, emptying our pantries and madly stress-baking. Maybe it's time to bake something for your dog.

My new roommate, a long-haired German shepherd who looks like my previous dog dressed up in a bear suit, came to me lonely, exhausted and underweight. To bulk her up, I polled a few local pastry chefs for recipes.

Sherry Yard, Spago's longtime pastry chef, provided her terrific dog biscuit recipe a few years ago. Lincoln Carson, whose downtown restaurant Bon Temps was one of the highlights of last year, sent me the recipe for the dog biscuits he once sold at the same counter as his stunning French pastries. Cecilia Leung, former chef at Lincoln and Little Flower in Pasadena, riffed on Yard's classic recipe for a recipe she tailored for her own dog.

Dog biscuit recipes from L.A. pastry chefs Lincoln Carson, Sherry Yard and Cecilia Leung use pantry ingredients such as oatmeal, powdered milk and peanut butter. (Mariah Tauger / Los Angeles Times)

"This is where we've come to now: Dogs are our clientele," Leung texted me last week from her kitchen. We joked  was it a joke?  about opening a dog bakery. "The takeout window is near the ground. We push the food out in a dog bowl."

All three recipes have peanut butter as a primary ingredient, which should surprise no one with a dog. This is also useful for those of us doing deep dives into our pantries, as the ingredients are well-suited to what's in many of our kitchens now  bunker items that remind me of my childhood eating commodity food from an Iowa boarding school kitchen. Jars of peanut butter, oatmeal, powdered milk, odd bits of flours and grains, dried seaweed, chopped up parsley (use the stems), chicken stock (I've been making it out of roasted chicken bones).

Story continues

Rose, a recently adopted German Shepherd, tries three recipes, all using peanut butter, for homemade dog biscuits. (Mariah Tauger / Los Angeles Times)

Once the batter is made, roll out the dough as you would a batch of Christmas cookies and cut them out with cutters. I used a dog-bone shape for one recipe, which is easy to do with a knife if you don't have a cutter. Leung cut hers  which, she points out, are gluten-free  in the shape of rabbits; I cut some in the shape of cats. Because I have an entire box filled with cookie cutters from when the kids were little, and, well, I don't like cats either.

My kitchen soon filled with the aroma of peanut butter cookies and my dog sat on the kitchen floor and stared eagerly at the oven, a happy improvement over two weeks ago, when she had stared blankly at my sofa.

Baking for others is a terrific way to get through quarantine, especially if the other in question is your shutdown companion and therapy dog. And if you run out of takeout Sichuan food, you can always eat the biscuits yourself.

"It's like a savory sable," texted Leung. They taste pretty good dipped in spicy chili crisp too, at least if youre human.




Bill Gates, a major donor to the global health agency, is among critics of Donald Trump's funding cut.

"When we are divided, the virus exploits the cracks between us," the WHO director-general said

US President Donald Trump has been heavily criticised for halting funding for the World Health Organization (WHO) amid the global coronavirus pandemic.

Philanthropist Bill Gates, a major funder of the WHO, said it was "as dangerous as it sounds".

President Trump said on Tuesday that the body had "failed in its basic duty" in its response to coronavirus.

The head of the WHO said it was reviewing the cuts' impact "to ensure our work continues uninterrupted".

"We regret the decision of the President of the United States to order a halt in the funding to the WHO," Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said at a press conference, adding that the US has been "a long-standing and generous friend... and we hope it will continue to be so".

Earlier on Twitter he saidthe agency's "singular focus" was to stop the outbreak.

UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres said it was "not the time" to cut funds to the WHO, which "is absolutely critical to the world's efforts to win the war against Covid-19".

Mr Trump has accused the WHO of making deadly mistakes and overly trusting China.

"I am directing my administration to halt funding while a review is conducted to assess the World Health Organization's role in severely mismanaging and covering up the spread of the coronavirus," Mr Trump told reporters on Tuesday.

A White House statement on Wednesday said the agency had "failed" the US people.

"The American people deserve better from the WHO, and no more funding will be provided until its mismanagement, cover-ups and failures can be investigated," it read.

Mr Trump has been under fire for his own handling of the pandemic. He has sought to deflect persistent criticism that he acted too slowly to stop the virus's spread by pointing to his decision in late January to place restrictions on travel from China.

He has accused the WHO of having "criticised" that decision, an apparent reference to general advice from the agency against travel restrictions.

The US is the global health body's largest single funder and gave it more than $400m in 2019. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which is funding Covid-19 treatment and vaccine research, is the second-largest funder.

A decision on whether the US resumes funding will be made after the review, which Mr Trump said would last 60 to 90 days.

In other reaction:

A spokesman for UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson said there were "no plans" to halt funding and said the WHO had "an important role to play in leading the global health response". The UK gives most of any country apart from the US

Germany's foreign minister Heiko Mass tweeted that strengthening the "under-funded" WHO was one of the best investments that could be made at this time

Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian said that the decision would "undermine international co-operation" in fighting the virus

The American Medical Association said it was a "dangerous step in the wrong direction"

There was no justification for the move at a time when the WHO was "needed more than ever", said the EU's foreign policy chief Josep Borrell

Australian PM Scott Morrison said he sympathised with Mr Trump's criticisms but that the WHO also does "a lot of important work"

New Zealand leader Jacinda Ardern said the WHO had provided "advice we can rely on"

The president was doing "whatever it takes to deflect from the fact that his administration mismanaged this crisis", said Democratic representative Eliot Engel

The decision was "exactly right", said US Senator Josh Hawley, among many Republicans who share Mr Trump's views on the WHO

What is Donald Trump's argument?

The US has by far the highest number of coronavirus cases and deaths worldwide - with more than 600,000 cases and 26,000 deaths.

Mr Trump accused the WHO of having failed to adequately assess the outbreak when it first emerged in the city of Wuhan, losing precious time.

"Had the WHO done its job to get medical experts into China to objectively assess the situation on the ground and to call out China's lack of transparency, the outbreak could have been contained at its source with very little death," he told reporters.

"This would have saved thousands of lives and avoided worldwide economic damage. Instead, the WHO willingly took China's assurances to face value... and defended the actions of the Chinese government."

What is the WHO - and who funds it?

Founded in 1948 and based in Geneva, Switzerland, it is the UN agency responsible for global public health

Has 194 member states, and aims to "promote health, keep the world safe and serve the vulnerable"

Involved in vaccination campaigns, health emergencies and supporting countries in primary care

Funded by a combination of members' fees based on wealth and population, and voluntary contributions

US provided 15% of its 2018-19 budget - with more than $400m

China gave about $86m in 2018-19

Chinese officials initially covered up the outbreak of the virus in Wuhan, and punished whistleblowers who tried to raise the alarm. Beijing later imposed draconian restrictions, including quarantine zones on an unprecedented scale, drawing effusive praise from the WHO and Mr Tedros.

But WHO experts were only allowed to visit China and investigate the outbreak on 10 February, by which time the country had more than 40,000 cases.

White House reporters pointed out, however, that Mr Trump himself had praised China's response to the outbreak and downplayed the danger of the virus at home long after the WHO had declared a "public health emergency of international concern".

Why has the WHO faced criticism?

It is not the first time the WHO's response to the outbreak has come under scrutiny.

On 14 January, the organisation tweeted that preliminary Chinese investigations had found "no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission" of the new virus.

Mr Trump and others have used the tweet to attack the WHO for simply believing China, despite evidence to the contrary. But about a week after that tweet, on 22 January, the agency released a public statement saying that human-to-human transmission did appear to be taking place in Wuhan.

At the end of January, on the same day it declared a public health emergency, the WHO said that travel restrictions were not needed to stop the spread of Covid-19 - advice that was eventually ignored by most countries, including by the Trump administration the next day.

In March, the UN agency was also accused of being unduly influenced by China after a senior official refused to discuss Taiwan's response to the outbreak.

Meanwhile, some health experts also say that the WHO's guidance on face masks has led to public confusion.

Other frequently-made criticisms of the WHO more generally are that it is constrained by politics and a sprawling bureaucracy. It came under particular fire for its response to the 2014-16 Ebola outbreak in West Africa and how long it took to declare a public health emergency, leading the organisation to announce reforms in response. BBC
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COPPELL, Texas, April 15, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- Costar Technologies, Inc. (the "Company") (OTC Markets Group: CSTI) announced today that James Pritchett, who has been President and Chief Executive Officer of the Company since January 2009, has retired from the Company. The Board of Directors appointed Scott Switzer, the Company's Chief Operating Officer and Chief Financial Officer, to serve as Interim President and Chief Executive Officer. Mr. Pritchett will serve as a consultant to the Company over the next year to assist as needed for a seamless transition.

Mr. Pritchett said, "The stability of our business and the successful integration of Arecont Vision creates a propitious time for me to pass the baton to Scott Switzer, who I have been working closely with for many years as my designated successor under our CEO succession plan. I have enjoyed working with Scott to build Costar into the company it is today and believe that the Company will be well served by enabling Scott and the next generation of leaders to take the helm."

Rory J. Cowan, Chairman of the Board of Directors of the Company, stated, "On behalf of the entire Board, I would like to thank Jim for his numerous contributions to the Company during his decade-long tenure as CEO. Under his leadership, the Company has seen tremendous growth. We look forward to continuing to benefit from his thoughtful counsel as a consultant to the Company."

"Jim is leaving behind a great company, generating solid returns for our long-term shareholders," said Scott Switzer, the Company's Interim Chief Executive Officer. "It has been a great privilege to have learned from such an industry veteran. I am honored to have been chosen to succeed Jim and lead our amazing team. Jim has positioned Costar to deliver long-term success, having driven a culture of customer service and technical excellence throughout the organization."

About Costar Technologies, Inc.

Costar Technologies, Inc. develops, designs, manufactures and distributes a range of security solution products including surveillance cameras, lenses, digital video recorders and high-speed domes. The Company also develops, designs and distributes industrial vision products to observe repetitive production and assembly lines, thereby increasing efficiency by detecting faults in the production process. Headquartered in Coppell, Texas, the Company's shares currently trade on the OTC Markets Group under the ticker symbol "CSTI". Costar was ranked as the 35th largest company in a&s magazine's Security 50 for 2019. Security 50 is an annual ranking by the magazine of the world's largest security manufacturers in the areas of video surveillance, access control and intruder alarms, based on sales revenue.

Cautionary Statement Regarding Forward Looking Statements

This press release contains forward-looking statements, including statements regarding the Company's ability to grow revenue and earnings, that are subject to substantial risks and uncertainties that could cause actual performance or results to differ materially from those expressed in or suggested by the forward-looking statements, including but not limited to risks related to the ability to diversify business across vertical markets, secure new customer wins, and launch new products. You can often identify forward-looking statements by words such as "believe," "may," "estimate," "continue," "anticipate," "intend," "plan," "expect," "predict," "potential," or the negative of these terms or other comparable terminology. These forward-looking statements are based on management's current expectations but they involve risks and uncertainties. Actual results and the timing of events could differ materially from those anticipated in the forward-looking statements as a result of the risks and uncertainties.

You should not place undue reliance on any forward-looking statements. The Company assumes no obligation to update forward-looking statements to reflect actual results, changes in assumptions, or changes in other factors affecting forward-looking information, except to the extent required by applicable laws.

SOURCE Costar Technologies, Inc.
Fitch Group has said it has pledged USD 50,000 to Give2Asia to fight coronavirus pandemic.

Funds from Fitch and other donors will help towards the purchase of medical supplies, construction of hospitals, and providing frontline staff with food, lodging and subsidies.

Give2Asia is an international non-profit organisation that coordinates funding between global donors with charitable projects and social enterprises across the Asia-Pacific region.

It has launched a campaign to support frontline health workers and hospitals responding to the outbreak, including partnerships with several non-governmental organisations in China.

In a statement Fitch Group has said "it has donated USD 50,000 to Give2Asia in support of the organisation's crisis response to the outbreak of Covid-19".

Fitch Group Chief Executive Officer Paul Taylor said the company is deeply saddened by this tragedy. This donation is part of Fitch's ongoing efforts to complement other relief and recovery initiatives across the world.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Ayushmann Khurrana Wants To Be Professor From Money Heist, Even Plays The Tune On Piano!
IONIA COUNTY, MI -- An employee of Michigans largest egg producer has tested positive for coronavirus COVID-19.

Herbrucks Poultry Ranch officials said Wednesday, April 15, that the worker is part of an isolated group of employees on the night shift bird crew.

Herbrucks has taken a number of proactive, preventative measures, consistent with CDC guidelines and Gov. Gretchen Whitmers Executive Order, to keep employees safe and healthy and prevent the spread of COVID-19, Herbrucks President Greg Herbruck said in a statement.

Our best practices include personal protection equipment for employees, working in pods to minimize the risk of contamination, rigorous sanitation practices and limiting access to our worksite by outside vendors.

Herbruck said he doesnt expect the infection to impact production and store delivery.

The companys six million hens produce approximately 10 million eggs a day, according to its website. Employees at Herbrucks are essential workers under Whitmers executive order.

According to the company, employees are required to wear N95 masks, safety glasses and rubber gloves when working near others. They also receive an extra mask to use outside of work.

The company, located at 6425 Grand River Ave. in Saranac, has long practiced biosecurity protocols similar to what is required now by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), officials say.

In December, Herbrucks announced it opened an onsite Employee Wellness Clinic for employees and their dependents to receive free access to a wide range of preventative health care services.

The company also has a 24/7 hotline for employees with questions or concerns about the coronavirus or other health issues.

In total, Michigan has 27,001 confirmed cases of COVID-19 and 1,768 deaths as of Tuesday, April 14.

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:

Wednesday, April 15: Latest developments on coronavirus in Michigan

Gov. Whitmer extends executive orders on hospital capacity, virtual public meetings

Nearly a quarter of Michigan workers have filed for unemployment

Michigans coronavirus survivors describe battles to stay alive
The new intuitive platform will provide proprietary and curated content on emerging markets

Tellimer ("Tellimer"), the London-headquartered emerging markets information and data company today unveiled a new digital AI-powered research platform for investors, corporates, advisors and global decision-makers. Designed to revolutionise the way users access unique and difficult to find information in emerging markets, the new platform, called "Tellimer Insights", will use ground-breaking technology to provide investors with access to world-class proprietary and curated data, insights and analytics.

The content will include unique research from Tellimer's international analysts along with content provided by banks, brokers and research firms.

The content will be accessible 24/7 from all smart devices, as well as in low-latency environments. All aspects of the platform are designed mobile-first to make remote and on the go working efficient and seamless. Insights can be written, edited, published and read on mobile devices, allowing analysts in multiple locations to deliver timely insights to clients wherever they are.

Tellimer Insights equips global decision-makers with easily accessible and expert emerging markets information to help them make better business decisions. It enables users to follow subjects, companies, countries and analysts of their choice, build watchlists, search dynamically and access a growing range of technology tools. For institutional users, the platform features an array of new AI-powered functionalities, from powerful predictive search to a research entitlement management tool, and authoring and publication tools for content providers.

The launch of novel data and natural language processing products will be announced later this year.

Duncan Wales, CEO of Tellimer Group, comments:

"Particularly in these uncertain times, we aim to connect our clients to the best and most timely insights in a way that makes finding relevant information as easy and flexible as possible. Everything we have built is mobile-first, and designed to be light and powerful, to empower our clients as they assess major risks and identify the right opportunities.

Over 1000 subscriber organisations, which include institutional investors, banks, insight providers, companies and sovereigns, are already connected to Tellimer's proprietary technology, which combines innovative design with the firm's in-depth experience across 85 emerging markets.

/ENDS

About Tellimer Group

We are a global technology, information and data provider, with a focus on emerging markets.

Our innovative AI-powered platform, Tellimer Insights, connects everything you need to know in emerging markets.

Drawing on our 20+ years of experience and a global network of contacts and experts, Tellimer's own analyst team provides emerging markets professionals with essential, hard-to-find knowledge to inform and support their decision-making on one easy-to-use, mobile friendly service.

Tellimer Technologies empowers businesses in all markets through our intuitive content authoring, distribution and analytics platform, as well as bespoke data products and services.

Tellimer is where you'll find what matters, from those who know.

To find out how Tellimer can help you, go to tellimer.com

View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20200415005336/en/

Contacts:

Andrew Johnson

Head of Marketing, Tellimer

t: +44 (0) 207 725 1087

e: andrew.johnson@tellimer.com
WOOD RIVER  While the numbers of Illinois coronavirus cases and deaths continue to rise, the rate of that increase is leveling off, which state officials say is a good sign the curve of the pandemic may be starting to flatten.

Illinois Department of Public Health Director Dr. Ngozi Ezike on Tuesday announced 1,222 new cases and 74 deaths, bringing the statewide total to 23,247 and 868, respectively.

She also noted that surveys are showing that those testing positive for the COVID-19 virus are recovering.

As you can imagine, people are getting better with time, she said.

Of those surveyed after seven days, 44 percent said they are in recovery. For 14 days that rises to 50 percent; at 21 days, 61 percent; and at 28 days, 69 percent.

People are getting better. People recover from this disease, she said. It is important to note that not everyone responded to the survey, so the averages may be higher.

The Madison County Health Department on Tuesday reported 128 cases, up eight from Monday. That figure includes two previously reported deaths.

More Information COVID-19 cases by county Madison - 128 (2 deaths) Jersey - 6 Macoupin - 16 Greene - 1 Calhoun - 1 Clinton - 38 Bond - 4 Washington - 2 Montgomery - 9 (1 death) St. Clair - 202 (8 deaths) Monroe - 47 (3 death) Sources: Illinois Department of Public Health and Madison County Health Department Pritzker notes stimulus protections, guidance SPRINGFIELD - Gov. J.B. Pritzker said Tuesday he is suspending laws that permit the service of a garnishment summons, wage deduction summons or a citation to discover assets as part of consumer debt collection proceedings. This step protects the use of the stimulus money for food, shelter and transportation. The Illinois Department of Financial and Professional Regulation also issued "Best Practices" to licensed lenders encouraging them to work with struggling borrowers to extend the time for payment, waive late charges and defer collection measures. Illinois residents can take temporary measures to protect their household income by considering a stop to automatic loan payments and rescinding wage assignments. For more information, visit the IDFPR website. Borrowers should know they will still owe their debt and should immediately reach out to creditors to discuss hardships they are experiencing because of the COVID-19 pandemic. See More Collapse

The majority of the cases, 74, are women. A total of 30 patients are currently hospitalized and 45 are recovered, meaning they have completed isolation.

IDPH information by ZIP code on Tuesday showed additional cases in the Alton, Edwardsville, Granite City/Pontoon Beach, Madison and Collinsville areas. Wood River (62095) also reported six case; the area had shown up in past reports, then was removed until Tuesday.

By ZIP code, Madison County cases also include 27 in 62040 (Granite City/Pontoon Beach), 20 in 62002 (Alton), 18 in 62025 (Edwardsville), eight in 62034 (Glen Carbon), seven in 62060 (Madison) and six in 62035 (Godfrey).

Additional cases were reported Tuesday in Montgomery, St. Clair and Monroe counties in the Metro East, according to the IDPH website.

Gov. J.B. Pritzker spent much of his briefing time talking about numbers, specifically the rate of doubling or the number of days it takes for the number of cases or deaths to double.

The higher that number is, the slower the growth, he said.

On March 22, it was two days for cases to double. That increased to 3.6 days by April 1 and 8.2 days by April 12.

He noted the mortality rate showed similar changes.

And while there is nothing good about twice as many people having this virus, or dying from it, he said the deceleration of the virus spread shows we are, in fact, bending the curve.

It may not flatten, and it may go up again if we dont adhere to the stay-at-home order, Pritzker said.

Both he and Ezike said the order, social distancing and hand-washing remain important.

It will make a difference, it has made a difference, and it will continue to make a difference, Ezike said.

Pritzker also said state officials must define a new normal that will allow a way of life to carry us to the other side of the pandemic.

No one looks forward to that day more than I do, he said.

For the latest information on COVID-19 or coronavirus resources, visit the Madison County Health Department online at www.madisonchd.org or on Facebook @MadisonCHD. Also visit www.co.madison.il.us for more news and a daily update or on Facebook @MadisonCountyIL.
When the alliance of oil-producing countries known as OPEC+ reached a deal to slash crude-oil output by a historic amount, it staved off a further collapse in the price of Russia's main export commodity.



The April 12 agreement requires Russia to cut crude-oil production by nearly one-quarter in May and June, a much deeper reduction than the one Moscow rejected when Saudi Arabia proposed it in early March. And the showdown may come at a steep long-term cost for the Kremlin, harming a relationship with Riyadh that had been budding after careful cultivation.



President Vladimir Putin has been wooing Saudi Arabia for years as part of efforts to expand Russia's influence in the energy-rich Middle East, where the United States has been the dominant outside arbitrator since the Cold War.



The first-ever visit to Russia by a Saudi king, in 2017, followed a historic agreement by Moscow a year earlier to join Riyadh in output cuts under the new OPEC+ umbrella -- and seemed to underscore the Kremlin's new clout in a region where its profile had been lowered considerably in the wake of the Soviet collapse of 1991.



Last October, Putin made his first trip to Saudi Arabia since 2007 as their countries -- two of the top three oil producers on the planet -- toasted their partnership in OPEC+ and agreed on investment deals.

'Fully Devoid Of Truth'



That picture has been badly clouded by the standoff that started when the two nations failed to reach an agreement on oil-output cuts.

With the coronavirus already depressing global demand, Saudi Arabia came to a March 6 meeting of OPEC+ in Vienna with a proposal to reduce output by 1.5 million barrels per day -- and Russia rejected it.



As Moscow and Riyadh publicly exchanged accusations over who was to blame, global oil prices tumbled.

The worsening COVID-19 crisis closed borders and drastically reduced travel and industrial activity, putting huge amounts of downward pressure on the demand for energy.

Six months after he was feted in Riyadh, Putin was reprimanded by the Saudi foreign minister, who said a statement in which he pointed the finger at Saudi Arabia was "fully devoid of truth."



Fair-Weather Friends?



"I think this crisis was a litmus test for Russian-Saudi relations -- it proved this relationship is transactional rather than strategic," Rauf Mammadov, an energy analyst focusing on the former Soviet Union at the Middle East Institute in Washington, told RFE/RL.



"The nature of a partnership is revealed during crisis times and this showed that there are huge flaws" in the two countries' understanding of one another, Mammadov said.



In 2015, Russia -- hit by Western sanctions that were imposed over its seizure of Crimea, and which have curtailed foreign investment -- signed an agreement with Saudi Arabia that foresaw Riyadh investing $10 billion into the former Soviet republic.



However, only about a quarter has been invested so far  a fact that had rankled the Kremlin.

But if unhappiness over investment flows was one reason for Russia's decision to reject the Saudi proposal, Riyadh may have fired back soon after the showdown in Vienna.



Days after the rancorous March 6 meeting, Russian media reported that a deal between the Russian Direct Investment Fund, a state-owned investment vehicle, and Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund (PIF) to acquire a nearly 31 percent stake in a Russian oil services company had been put on hold.



As it reportedly turned away from Russia, PIF bought stock in four of the European Union's top energy companies -- Equinor ASA, Royal Dutch Shell PLC, Total SA and Eni SpA -- worth about $1 billion over the past month.

Meanwhile, Igor Sechin, an influential Putin ally who heads state oil giant Rosneft and who Russian media reported was behind the Kremlin's decision to break with Riyadh at the OPEC+ meeting, later said the alliance had lost its significance as the United States and other countries raised output to counter its cuts.

Murky Motives



The motives behind Russia's move are murky, though, and may have been multiple. Some analysts said Moscow was out to punish the U.S. shale-oil industry, while others said that Russia's coordination with OPEC+ may have been undermined by different aims more broadly, beyond energy markets.



James Phillips, a Saudi Arabia analyst at the Heritage Foundation think tank in Washington, said the nations' common goal of higher oil prices -- a result of their heavy reliance on the commodity to fill their budgets -- contrasts sharply with their divergent foreign-policy interests and makes it difficult for them to cooperate.



"It was an arms-length relationship to begin with, based on shared economic interests but clashing foreign-policy interests, so I think it will be difficult for either side to closely cooperate with the other," Phillips told RFE/RL. "They will continue on in kind of a cold, transactional relationship."

Riyadh and Moscow back opposite sides in the war in Syria, while the Kremlin continues to support the government in Iran, a political and religious adversary of Saudi Arabia.



A day after Russia rejected its March 6 proposal, Saudi Arabia unexpectedly announced it would significantly ramp up oil output in April by more than 2 million barrels a day even as the coronavirus caused demand to drop.



The aggressive move -- which caused the largest one-day decline in oil prices in nearly three decades -- was viewed as Riyadh's attempt to get the Kremlin back to the negotiating table.

Winners, Losers



Moscow didn't take the bait and stood its ground at the time, boasting it could withstand lower oil prices longer than Riyadh on account of its higher foreign currency reserves and the lower price it needed for its budget to break even.



However, analysts say no one could have anticipated the demand destruction just around the corner caused by the coronavirus that would send Russia's crude blend Urals to as low as $10 a barrel in some parts of Europe.



Russia needs a Urals oil price in the low $40s to balance its budget, according to the BCS Brokerage.



Moscow was forced back to the table with Riyadh to discuss historic production cuts, analysts said, raising questions of whether Putin miscalculated.



Konstantin Sonin, a Russian economist and professor at the University of Chicago, told RFE/RL that, even if Moscow had agreed to the initial Saudi proposal, it would not have avoided the eventual price decline brought on by the coronavirus-driven collapse in demand weeks later or the need to agree again on new output cuts.

Nonetheless, Sechin's name in Russia will inevitably be tied to the events due to his perceived prominent role in scuttling the agreement with Saudi Arabia, he said.



"Sechin will be blamed for this anyway, because in bad times people like to find scapegoats," Sonin said. But he added that this would not hurt Sechin's standing with Putin, calling the Russian president "extremely loyal" to such allies.



If Russia was eager to get back to talks, so too were the Saudis, who were facing the prospect of having no buyers for their increased output, said Ellen Wald, president of U.S.-based Transversal Consulting and a specialist on Saudi Arabia.



"If they had not agreed to cut production when they did, then [the Saudis] would have looked very stupid if they had filled all these tankers and they were just sitting there with nowhere to go," Wald told RFE/RL.



Saudi Arabia's actions may have also damaged its strategic relationship with the United States, said Phillips. Six U.S. senators, mainly from oil-producing states, called for cutting American support for Riyadh if it did not reduce oil production.



There was almost no such talk about Russia by senators, and Putin may be hoping that the agreement to end the price war  which U.S. President Donald Trump pressed hard for and helped broker  could provide a platform for an improvement in ties with the United States.
Chennai, April 15 : It is going to take some more time for the scientists and crew members abroad four ships belonging to National Institute of Ocean Technology (NIOT) on the sea before they can shout Land Ahoy! About 110 persons -- scientists and crew members -- abroad four ships belonging to the National Institute of Ocean Technology (NIOT) will continue to be onboard till May 3, said a top official.

"The lockdown has been extended till May 3. So they will continue to be on their ships if signing off is not possible. There is sufficient food stock onboard for them," NIOT Director M.A. Atmanand told IANS.

The four ocean research vessels are: Sagar Nidhi (25 scientists, 30 crew members, sailed out a month ago), Sagar Manjusha (6 scientists, 16 crew members, sailed out on March 19), Sagar Anveshika (5 scientists, 12 crew members, sailed out from Vizag on March 20) and Sagar Tara (4 scientists, 13 crew members, sailed out on March 22 from Beypore, Kerala).

"The scientists, crew and the vessels are in ship shape. Some ships will take in supplies at ports and then go back into the sea," D. Rajasekhar, Project Director, Ship Management Group, told IANS.

According to Rajasekhar, the people onboard are in constant touch with their family members through their phones as well as the satellite phones in the vessels.

Rajasekhar said Sagar Nidhi reaching Tuticorin will wait for the next scientific mission. The scientists will be signed off if possible or stay onboard.

On the other hand, Sagar Manjusha and Sagar Anveshika will reach Chennai on April 17 for supplies and proceed for scientific mission around April 21.

The fourth ship, Sagar Tara, after completing scientific survey in Lakshadweep Islands will enter Cochin or Baypore for supplies and proceed to Bay of Bengal for scientific measurements, Rajasekhar added.

He said the scientists and the vessel crew are in constant touch with their family members through satellite phones and WhatsApp.

The vessels and scientists have been deployed for different purposes like the laying down of Tsunami warning systems, bathymetric surveys, scientific study for desalination projects (off Lakshadweep Islands) and others.

Two researchers from the US are also onboard of one of the ships and they would continue their work as flights have been grounded due to the coronavirus induced nationwide lockdown.
WASHINGTON - Elizabeth Warren endorsed Joe Biden on Wednesday, the latest of the former vice-presidents onetime White House rivals to back him as the Democratic Party moves to project unity against President Donald Trump going into the November election.

Joe Biden has spent nearly his entire life in public service. He knows that a government run with integrity, competence, and heart will save lives and save livelihoods, Warren said in a nearly four-minute video announcing her decision. And we cant afford to let Donald Trump continue to endanger the lives and livelihoods of every American.

The Massachusetts senator rose to brief front-runner status in the Democratic race last fall but suspended her campaign last month after a disappointing Super Tuesday that included a third-place finish her home state. Warren left the race without endorsing Biden or her fellow progressive Bernie Sanders  but the dynamics changed substantially in subsequent weeks, with campaigning forced into a hiatus amid the coronavirus outbreak.

Sanders dropped out last week and endorsed Biden within days, hoping to persuade his fervent progressive supporters to warm to the more centrist Biden. Former President Barack Obama followed suit on Tuesday. Warrens formal backing doesnt carry the political heft it might have if she had endorsed Biden over Sanders weeks ago. Nonetheless, her announcement now could fuel speculation that Biden may choose her as a running mate.

Indeed, Warren said Wednesday night on MSNBC that she would accept the vice-president position if Biden offered it to her.

Biden has said he soon will announce a committee to oversee his vice-presidential search.

Biden saluted Warren for the series of detailed policy proposals she released as a candidate and said he will count on her to help rebuild the economy once the threat of the coronavirus lifts.

She helped set a high-water mark for what our politics can be at their best  authentic and service-oriented, focused on how we can deliver the most help to the most people, he said in a statement. I am proud to have Senator Warren in my corner for the fight ahead  not just as we work to defeat Donald Trump in November, but in the years to come, as we push through a bold and progressive policy agenda for the American people.

Warren referred to the pandemic more directly in a tweet. In this moment of crisis, its more important than ever that the next president restores Americans faith in good, effective government  and Ive seen Joe Biden help our nation rebuild. Today, Im proud to endorse @JoeBiden as President of the United States, she said.

Some of Warrens allies note that, in the days before her endorsement, Biden embraced some of the senators plans to combat the coronavirus, including calls to cancel student debt and expand Social Security benefits during the crisis. He also has adopted a plan she promoted as a candidate to overhaul the nations bankruptcy system.

In her video, Warren also referenced the pairs sometimes rocky relationship. They clashed in 2005, when Biden was a Delaware senator and Warren was a Harvard Law School professor and bankruptcy expert, during a congressional hearing over a bankruptcy bill. It was a scene that Biden, as vice-president, recalled when he swore Warren into office eight years later.

Joe Biden was there at the very moment I became a Senator, Warren said. And when he did, he said you gave me hell! And youre gonna do a great job.
Source: Xinhua| 2020-04-15 15:04:53|Editor: huaxia

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BEIJING, April 15 (Xinhua) -- China has launched a nationwide campaign to crack down on fraud as it has seen a fast growth of swindling cases, the Ministry of Public Security said.

The operation, codenamed "Cloud Sword 2020," focuses on combating fraudulent acts, in particular telecom scams, and tackling unsolved homicide cases.

Describing the crackdown as a major task for 2020, Du Hangwei, vice minister of public security, urged police across the country to curb the growing momentum of telecom fraud and crack accumulated criminal cases by using new technologies.

In 2019, Chinese police cracked about 200,000 cases of telecom fraud and captured around 160,000 suspects, marking a year-on-year increase of 52.7 percent and 123.3 percent, respectively, the ministry said.

Also last year, police seized about 51,000 suspects in 5,320 cases for offering fraudulent loans and 11,000 in 620 groups for scams under the pretext of "unfreezing national assets."

Remarkable progress was made in hunting down fugitives, the ministry noted, adding 469,000 suspects at large were captured in 2019, including 139 on the ministry's class-A wanted list.

In light of emerging changes in criminal cases amid the COVID-19 epidemic, Du demanded efforts to fight against illegal activities related to the epidemic.

According to statistics released by the Supreme People's Procuratorate (SPP), 2,305 people in 1,883 cases had been prosecuted in China over criminal offenses related to the COVID-19 epidemic.

Among them, 25 people were indicted for impairing infectious disease prevention, 556 for obstructing official duties, 162 for manufacturing or selling fake or inferior products such as substandard drugs or medical equipment, 21 for engaging in illegal business operations including price gouging and 330 for damaging wildlife resources such as hunting illegally, killing or selling precious or endangered wild animals and their byproducts, the SPP said.
Four persons tested positive for



COVID-19 in Bihar on Wednesday, taking the total number of people afflicted with the disease to 70, an official said.

Principal Secretary, Health, Sanjay Kumar said three persons from Nalanda district a 60-year-old man and two women aged 25 and 35 years all of whom came in contact with a coronavirus-infected patient with travel history to Dubai, have tested positive.

In addition, a 60-year-old man from Munger has also tested positive, Kumar said, adding that his contact-tracing is on.

Only Siwan, where 29 people have tested positive for the novel coronavirus, has reported more cases than Munger which shares the second spot with Begusarai with eight cases each.

However, for quite some time Munger was left with zero active cases as six patients had recovered and a Qatar-returnee, from whom they were said to have picked up the contagion, had died last month.

Nalanda, the home district of Chief Minister Nitish Kumar, now has four active cases while two patients from the district have recovered.

The state has reported 10 cases in the last five days while no fresh cases were reported on April 10 and 12.

A total of 29 patients across the state have so far recovered from the disease.

Altogether 8,263 samples have been tested till date at five facilities in the state.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
If you havn't done it yet,to get one of the fastest volcano news online:

JMA reported that during 28 February-6 March incandescence from Suwanosejima's Ontake Crater was visible nightly. Occasional eruptive events and two explosions were recorded; ash plumes rose as high as 900 m above the crater rim. Occasional eruption sounds were reported in a village 4 km SSW on 3 March. ...

JMA reported that during 28 February-6 March incandescence from Suwanosejima's Ontake Crater was visible nightly. Occasional eruptive events generated ash plumes that rose as high as 900 m above the crater rim. The Alert Level remained at 2 (on a 5-level scale). ...

JMA reported that during 13-19 March incandescence from Suwanosejima's Ontake Crater was visible nightly. On 14 March an ash plume rose 400 m above the crater rim. On 23 March the Tokyo VAAC reported that an explosion produced an ash plume that rose to an altitude of 0.9 km (3,000 ft) a.s.l., or 120 m above the summit, and drifted SE. ...

The Japan Meteorological Agency (JMA) reported that surveillance cameras observed one explosion at volcano's Otake Crater. ...

JMA reported that during 19-27 March incandescence from Suwanosejima's Ontake Crater was visible nightly. One explosion was recorded on 23 March and eruptive events were detected during 23-24 March; ringing sounds were noted in a village 4 km SSW. Gray-white plumes rose 700 m above the crater rim on 24 March. ...

The Japan Meteorological Agency (JMA) reported that surveillance cameras observed on 23 March one explosion at volcano's Otake Crater, on 24 March recorded 23 eruptions. ...

JMA reported that during 27 March-3 April incandescence from Suwanosejima's Ontake Crater was visible nightly. An eruptive event on 2 April produced a grayish-white plume that rose 800 m above the crater rim; ringing sounds were noted in a village 4 km SSW. The Alert Level remained at 2 (on a 5-level scale). ...

JMA reported that during 3-10 April incandescence from Suwanosejima's Ontake Crater was visible nightly. Small eruptions occasionally occurred, producing gray-white plumes that rose as high as 900 m above the crater rim; rumbling sounds were noted in a village 4 km SSW. The Alert Level remained at 2 (on a 5-level scale). ...

A fascinating archipelago with very active volcanoes, tropical islands and very friendly and hospital people who still live their original Melanesian culture. Browse through our vast collection of photos.

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Before now, Human Capital experts have warned of imminent changes to the work environment. They projected a revolution in the way, manner and how works are done, as well as the dynamic nature of work itself.

As hard as these realities seem to many, current Covid-19 global pandemic experience has further underscored the believability of these changes and several alternatives available to how works could be done, either through a virtual-physical or virtual-virtual platform as against the traditional physical-physical work model.

Since the virus made its way to countries of the world through the Wuhan Province of China up till its discovery in Nigeria, several lessons have manifested from this unfortunate development.

For us in Nigeria and Lagos State specifically, being the epicenter of the virus in the country, the stay at home order from the President Muhammadu Buhari has further exposed the dependence of a large chunk of the countrys population on daily earnings, just as it also revealed the need for us to be more inventive in our approach to work and move with the current trend of virtual work environment.

In March this year, President Buhari launched the Digital Nigeria Programme as one of Federal Governments key initiatives that will empower innovators and entrepreneurs with skills required to thrive in our emerging digital economy".

Also, the Federal Ministry of Communication and Digital Economy is partnering with a number of institutions to enable Nigerians acquire cutting edge digital skills within the comfort of their homes. One of such partnerships is based on the MoU signed with IBM, a computer hardware company in January this year to provide Nigerians with over 280+ hours of free learning & 85+ courses on key emerging technologies like; Blockchain; Artificial Intelligence; Big Data; and Cloud Computing.

The tragic episode of Covid-19 may be one that had exhumed inherent creativity in us as human and it has, no doubt, made it more glaring that certain things we had hitherto considered to be far-reaching and highly unattainable are actually achievable and within our reach. Thus, we may not know the giant that lies in us until we're pushed to the wall.

Before the Covid-19 pandemic, the Lagos State government may never have considered the possibility of an online Executive Council meeting if the current reality had not compelled governments across the world to be more ingenious and think outside the box to ensure that the business of governance continues in-spite of the threat posed by the virus.

As it was in Lagos State, the United Kingdom also witnessed a first electronic cabinet meeting which allowed Ministers to discuss the latest updates on the corona virus outbreak, while observing official advice to work from home whenever possible. This was indeed historic because it was the first time in the history of the UK that a cabinet meeting took place with no ministers physically present.

In the education sector, the Lagos State Government also introduced a teaching and learning platforms on Radio and Television for learners. The initiative, according to the Commissioner for Education, Mrs. Folasade Adefisayo, was intended to support SS3 students preparing for their West African Senior School Certificate Examination (WASSCE), while the Chairman of Lagos SUBEB, Hon. Wahab Alawiye-King explained that the on-air programmes were designed to academically engage pupils despite the closure of schools.

Of the most recent in these series of online initiatives in Lagos State was an online training session targeted at thousands of Public Servants in the State through the Ministry of establishments, Training and Pensions with emphasis on the future of works across the globe. This initiative was also made possible through Zoom App and was facilitated by several resource persons including the Chairman of the States Civil Service Commission, Mrs. Olubunmi Fabamwo. This, being another first of its kind, was commended by several Public Servants who joined the online training sessions.

Perhaps, the underlying message here is that in-spite of several disruptions of social and human activities globally occasioned by the Covid-19 pandemic, creative ways are being devised to keep the business of governance going, improve the human capacity of workforce and ensure smooth running of school curriculum through the aid of technology.

Also, in what appears to be incredulous, faith-based activities are now being held online, with faithfuls worshiping in the comfort of their homes. Charity offerings are now being sent online and used for the purposes which they are meant for. Also, casual worshipers have quickly come to the realization of the need for personal relationship with their makers as against seeking covering under the shadows of their spiritual leaders.

To government officials and other corporate workers, the reality is dawn on them that their daily activities could now be carried out anywhere and anytime via the internet, considering the viral advantages associated with the various online platforms and channels which are yet to be fully explored for maximum economic gains.

In reality, many Lagosians share this sentiment as some had continued their official work within the confine of their homes, thereby making millions of naira for themselves and their respective organisations. Sadly, many are yet to come to term with this reality.

Among other things, Covid-19 has taught us the need to save for the raining days and not eat with all fingers, as there may sometimes be very complicated situations that might hamper daily activities.

That a lot of us, from the first day of the restriction order, have already started exhibiting palpable fears of survival for the two weeks which the restriction order was supposed to last, clearly exposes a seeming lack of saving and proper planning culture.

With more emerging trends globally in the workspace, tougher times lie ahead, especially for those who cannot innovate and move with the wave of technology in carrying out assigned tasks. As it is presently in developed climes, where medical solutions and treatments could be administered online without a physical contact between doctor and patient, our society should brace up and prepare for the unimaginable in the space of the future work.

While we await a final end to this deadly pandemic and a resuscitation of our business activities, it is quite instructive to carefully note some salient issues imminent in the present predicament.

If we can embrace the culture of flexible work hours and also working from the comfort of our homes, our life expectancy, especially, in this part of the world, would geometrically increase, as there would be more time for family integration while needless hours spent in traffic would be reduced. This would obviously leads to a healthier lifestyle and saner environment.

Afuwape is of the Social Media Department, Lagos State Ministry of Information and Strategy, Alausa, Ikeja.
WASHINGTON  Acting Navy Secretary Thomas Modly took his $243,000 trip to the COVID-19 ravaged USS Theodore Roosevelt before formally asking for approval to use extra pilots to accommodate his schedule, according to documents and a Navy official.

Once in Guam, Modly made a brief appearance on the ship, gave a 15-minute speech excoriating the captain he had fired for beseeching the Navy for help for his crew, and potentially exposed himself to coronavirus. Modly and two staff members are in quarantine, according to a Navy official who was not authorized to comment publicly. The pilots were not exposed to potential infection, the official said.

A 2018 policy instituted under then-Defense Secretary Jim Mattis prompted Modly's office to file the request for a waiver, a copy of which was obtained by USA TODAY. The directive seeks to limit senior officials to one air crew per trip to curb the cost of travel by military aircraft. Waivers have been issued to senior officials visiting troops in combat zones.

Modly's office had informed the Pentagon orally before the trip that he intended to use more than one crew, the Navy official said.

Acting Navy Secretary Modly has resigned: Here's what we know.

FILE - In this Dec. 3, 2019, file photo, acting Navy Secretary Thomas Modly testifies during a hearing of the Senate Armed Services Committee about about ongoing reports of substandard housing conditions in Washington, on Capitol Hill.

The 35-hour, $243,000 trip cost Modly his job and has roiled the Navy as it seeks to care for the 589 sailors from the Roosevelt who have tested positive for COVID-19. One sailor has died from the disease, and another is in intensive care, the Navy announced Tuesday.

On April 4, Modly flew with members of his staff and an additional air crew from Washington to Hawaii aboard a C-37B, a Gulfstream 550 business jet modified for military use. In Hawaii, Modly and his staff joined another party that included the new commanding officer of the Roosevelt. They then flew to Guam, leaving behind an air crew, according to his request for the waiver. Modly returned on April 6 to Hawaii, where the extra air crew was waiting to provide his "timely return" to Washington.

Story continues

The waiver request is stamped April 7, the day Modly resigned amid criticism for calling Capt. Brett Cozier, the former commander of the Roosevelt, too naive and stupid to be in charge. Modly's exposure to the virus forced him to tender his resignation offer remotely. Defense Secretary Mark Esper accepted and named James McPherson to fill Modly's post.

President Donald Trump has waded into the controversy, criticizing Crozier for writing the letter but suggesting his career not be ruined for having a "bad day." A Navy investigation into events surrounding Crozier's letter is expected to be released this week.

Farewell: Capt. Crozier, fired for letter about coronavirus, gets send-off from sailors

This handout photo released by the US Navy shows Captain Brett Crozier addressing the crew for the first time as commanding officer of the aircraft carrier USS Theodore Roosevelt (CVN 71) during a change of command ceremony on the ships flight deck in San Diego, California on November 1, 2019.

Modly's decision to fly to Guam and back without allowing time to rest crews was made so quickly that his chief of staff filed the the request after his return. The letter sought an exception to the June 2018 policy memo written by Mattis' Deputy Defense Secretary Patrick Shanahan.

Using an extra crew can divert it from other missions and waste limited resources, according to a Pentagon official who has been involved in travel planning but is not authorized to speak about it. Use of an extra crew can indicate poor trip planning, the official said.

The letter was sent to the Pentagon's Executive Secretary, an organization inside the Defense secretary's office that approves military air travel for senior Pentagon and cabinet officials.

"Rapidly changing events in Guam with (the Roosevelt) response necessitated a short-notice decision to travel on a Saturday, resulting in our office not seeking an advance exception to policy," wrote Robert Love, Modly's chief of staff.

The USS Theodore Roosevelt

Rep. Jackie Speier, D-Calif., and a member of the Armed Services Committee, called Tuesday for an an investigation into Modly's trip.

Modly fired Capt. Crozier for not adhering to the chain of command, yet he flies to Guam costing taxpayers a quarter of a million dollars  endangers the lives of two flight crews  and does this all without getting approval from the secretary of Defense," Speier said. "This warrants an investigation, not just a quick resignation with yet another Trump appointee slinking off. We must demand accountability."

On Tuesday, Esper said approval of the waiver was not his responsibility but added that travel by senior leaders is "invaluable" for their understanding of military operations. He noted that travels extensively as Defense secretary and did so as Army secretary, his previous post. Esper himself needed a waiver as Army secretary to lead a delegation to the Invictus Games for wounded warriors in Sydney.

Modly's predecessor, Richard Spencer, avoided the need for a waiver in 2018 by flying home on a commercial airliner from the Middle East, records show.

Fact check: What's true and what's false about coronavirus?

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Modly: Navy secretary took $243,000 Guam trip before filing formal ask
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Linkedin Yunindita Prasidya (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Wed, April 15, 2020 15:06 636 fc6853813033f564188675f8bd20c562 1 Business JCI,listing,Indonesia-Stock-Exchange,IDX,jakarta-composite-index Free

Share prices of two companies, financial service provider PT Bhakti Multi Artha and property developer PT Bumi Benowo Sukses Sejahtera, have soared by up to 35 percent during their market debut despite weakening stock index on Wednesday.

The shares of Bhakti Multi, listed on the Indonesia Stock Exchange (IDX) under the code BHAT, rose by almost 35 percent to Rp 139 (1 US cent) from its initial public offering (IPO) price of Rp 103, just a minute after morning trading opened.

Bumi Benowos shares, traded under the code BBSS, also climbed 35 percent to Rp 162 per share, from its initial price of Rp 120.

Read also: Companies offer special packages, new services to entice virus-weary customers

As the share prices of the two companies had reached the limit of percentage increase for a single-day transaction for their price range, bids higher than the peak prices will automatically be rejected as regulated in the exchange's auto rejection regulation.

The IDXs main gauge, the Jakarta Composite Index (JCI), meanwhile, jumped during morning trade before succumbing back to negative territory as trading went on. The index plunged by more than 2 percent as of 2:10 p.m. and had lost almost 27 percent of its value so far this year amid concerns of economic blows during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Bhakti Multi Artha president director Dimas Teguh Mulyanto said during a virtual ceremony of the companys listing on Wednesday that it planned to bring out new financial products for its customers.

Going forward, we will continue to develop insurance products and other financial services to meet the dynamic needs of the public, Dimas noted.

During its IPO, Bhakti Multi raised Rp 206 billion, which will be used to increase the capital of its subsidiary company, PT Asuransi Jiwa Nasional.

With the listing, the company has a greater chance to conduct expansion such as strengthening capital and adding investment portfolio, Dimas said in a written statement published on Wednesday.

Read also: Millions to lose jobs, fall into poverty as Indonesia braces for recession

The companys subsidiary, operating in the life insurance sector, has more than 900,000 customers.

Bumi Benowo, on the other hand, raised Rp 156 billion from its IPO, which took place earlier this month and planned to use the majority of its proceeds to purchase plots of land.

Our company operates in construction, warehousing and shop-houses and so far owns 10 hectares of land from a total of 30 hectares allowed in the location permit, Bumi Benowo Sukses Sejahtera president director Felix Soesanto said during the virtual ceremony on Wednesday.

The company planned to allocate 88 percent of the funds to purchase a 59,000-square-meter plot of land in Kebomas district, Gresik, East Java. The land, worth around Rp 130 billion, will be developed into a warehouse area. The rest of the funds will be used as working capital for the companys development.

The company aims to increase sales by 579.1 percent this year and see a net profit increase of 808.3 percent, of which 20 percent of the net profit will be disbursed as dividends to shareholders.

According to a written statement obtained by The Jakarta Post, the company expressed optimism about its business growth as it was supported by the strong prospects of e-commerce business and third party logistics, as well as its lands strategic location to transportation hubs, which would ease distribution.

Read also: Explainer: The progress and challenges of sustainable financing in Indonesia

Bumi Benowo and Bhakti Multi became the 25th and 26th companies, respectively, to be listed on the IDX this year and the seventh and eight companies to do so with a virtual officiating ceremony as the government issued large-scale social restrictions amid the COVID-19 outbreak.

It is a very strategic decision for the company to engage with the public through an initial public offering and to join elite companies on the Indonesia Stock Exchange, IDX assessment director I Gede Nyoman Yetna said in the virtual ceremony on Wednesday.

We hope these two companies can bring optimal shareholder value and are capable of contributing to the growth of the national economy, he added.
The first hint that Prime Minister Narendra Modi favoured early resumption of economic activity in the country had come a few days before his address to the nation. He had, while speaking with chief ministers over the weekend, told them that it is imperative to focus on lives and livelihoods for Indias bright future, a clear shift from his assertion three weeks earlier that health is wealth.

In line with this sentiment, he extended the national lockdown till 3 May but provisioned for easing restrictions in areas that do not have Covid-19 cases from 20 April. These areas are being classified as green zones and would be the first to see resumption of economic activity.

The 6-day gap, a top government official said, was designed to ensure that everyone is able to understand how to take the first steps out of the lockdown and prepare well for it. Right from businesses and state governments to the district administration, the official told Hindustan Times.

Coronavirus outbreak: Full coverage

It gives everyone time to smooth off the rough edges in the plan, a second senior official, who heads one of the empowered committees on Covid-19 at the Centre, explained.

The government, he said, didnt have this luxury when PM Modi announced the lockdown on March 24 evening. Giving people advance notice when imposing the lockdown could have defeated its purpose. Movement of people, including those who could be symptomatic or asymptomatic, could have defeated the objective of a lockdown right at the beginning.

Besides, it is easier to get people to stay indoors than to ensure that only some of them step out.

Still there had been communication gaps, evidenced by the repeated instructions sent out by the Centre that asked police not to stop truckers from ferrying essential and non-essential goods.

A plan where some people and industrial units outside containment zones could operate requires a more nuanced approach by the district administration, the second official said.

It also gives private companies permitted to operate in the green zones to make logistical arrangements for resuming operations; workforce, raw materials etc. Or to seek clarifications from the government. Like the transporters who have asked the government to explain if their vehicles could pass through districts which have Covid-19 clusters or large outbreaks.

We also hope that the district administrations would also use this time to reinforce the message that communities in neighbourhoods that have had Covid-19 cases should play a greater role to enforce the lockdown in those areas, a third official said.

Because the only way the lockdown is going to be lifted is if there are no cases. This is the incentive for community participation that PM Modi had also alluded to in his address to the nation.

That the lockdown could be back if there is a Covid-19 outbreak in a Covid-free zone. We must make sure we dont become careless, nor allow anyone else to be careless, PM Modi had said.

That it was in their interest to stay on the right side of the zoning plan, in which every area would be marked green, orange or red.

Hotspots (designated red zones) will be assumed to be undertaking effective containment activities, if no case is reported in the next 14 days (designated orange zones) and will be deemed successful in containment, if no case is reported for 28 days (designated green zones), Union Health Secretary Preeti Sudan explained in her communication to the states on Wednesday.

The top health ministry official identified 170 districts as Covid-19 hotspots and explained that such areas would be treated as green zones only if they do not report a single coronavirus case in 28 days.

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In the mid-tier space, clients with weak balance sheets are likely to ask for price revision apart from delay in payment.

Mid-tier IT services firms, along with small technology companies, face higher risk to business operations because of the coronavirus disease (Covid-19), compared to their larger peers, according to industry experts.

They said higher dependence on some of the most affected business segments along with low fire power in terms of cash reserve make these smaller firms vulnerable in case things dont improve in the coming quarter.

Also, exposure to smaller clients and dependence on higher number of small deals could be seen as weak links for the firms in the current environment.

Tier-1 IT firms mostly have Fortune-500 companies as clients. So, when things become better, these companies will start capital expenditure, which make bigger companies less vulnerable to the current crisis.

"In the mid-tier space, things are different as clients with weak balance sheets are likely to ask for price revision apart from delay in payment, said Sanjeev Hota, head of research at Mumbai-based brokerage Sharekhan.

Also concentration risk, in terms both of geography and business verticals, make mid-tier firms more prone to risks arising from the Covid-19 crisis, Hota added.

Many nations, including the US have shut establishments apart from imposing strict restriction on travel, because of the pandemic.

While most business verticals of IT firms have seen a dip in demand, travel and hospitality, and retail segments have been affected most.

According to a note by Anand Rathi, among the mid-tier IT firms while Sonata Software draws around 53 per cent revenue from retail and travel verticals, Mastek has 34 per cent exposure to these verticals.

Similarly, Mindtree draws around 30 per cent of revenue from these segments, which stands at 29 per cent for NIIT Technology. For L&T Infotech, these two verticals contribute 11 per cent of top line, while for Tech Mahindra and Mphasis, it stands at seven per cent.

Usually, most mid-tier firms also face client concentration risk as top 10 clients contribute a large part of the revenues of these companies.

So, any client-specific risk has the potential to pull down earnings.

Also, strong balance sheet with robust cash reserves give big IT services firms better fire power to carry on business without much cost optimisation.

Market leader Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) and Infosys have more than $2 billion of cash reserve each, which put these firms in good stead to manage the current disruption.

Among the mid-tier firms, Hexaware Technologies was the first company to flag concerns related to the pandemic.

Its chief executive officer R Srikrishna said that verticals like travel and transportation, and consumer, to a lesser extent, would be impacted during January-September.

Earlier, industry body NASSCOM requested the government and public sector businesses to release pending payments to small and medium technology firms to tide over the liquidity mismatch.

The industry body also urged the Center to defer payment of advance income tax in the first quarter.
PHOENIX  Gov. Doug Ducey says he will be the one to decide when to reopen Arizonas economy, not President Trump.

In a wide-ranging news conference on COVID-19 Tuesday afternoon, the governor said that, for the moment, he is still using May 1 as a target date to start removing restrictions he placed on both what businesses can operate and the personal movement of Arizonans.

And Ducey rejected the idea of all-mail balloting for the August primary  and beyond if necessary  given the risks that may remain from the virus.

But Ducey got defensive when asked about comments made Monday by Trump, a fellow Republican, who insisted that he, as president, gets to make the decision when to open up the states.

First, the governor deflected questions.

The comment (from Trump) was that hes in charge of the national guidance, the governor said. And thats accurate.

It was pointed out to Ducey, though, that Trumps remarks were far broader.

When somebodys president of the United States, the authority is total, the president said at a news conference Monday when asked about plans by some governors to start reopening their economies.

And thats the way its got to be, Trump continued. Its total. And the governors know that.

Pressed, Ducey snapped back.

Well, Im going to make the best decision for Arizona, Ducey said. So theres your answer.
BAY CITY, MI  When a pile of toxic coal ash tumbled into the clear, blue waters of Lake Michigan nine years ago in Wisconsin, it was called a freak accident and a preventable mess.

Its exactly what the state of Michigan and power companies that are closing their coal-burning plants want to avoid.

After several decades of burning coal to meet Michiganders' electricity needs, Consumers Energy is retiring its coal plants near the Saginaw Bay shoreline and elsewhere, but its coal ash, a form of industrial waste known to contain toxins, will linger there indefinitely.

The landfill of toxic ash at Consumers Energys Bay County site, which state permits say can be up to 6 stories tall, will be a lasting legacy of burning coal at electrical generating plants there for decades. In fact, as the states power generators move away from burning coal to cleaner alternatives, they are leaving behind similar dumps across Michigan, either on the shores of the Great Lakes or on waters connected to them.

The ash landfills and ponds have been at the power plants for years, for disposal of burned coal residue. The ash will remain in the landfills at the old power plant sites where it is finally piled for years and years.

State and local officials consider the dumps a safe solution to deal with the waste.

Others arent so sure.

The bottom line is theres a pretty considerable concentration of toxic chemicals and heavy metals in coal ash, said Terry Miller, a Bay County resident who is chairman of the environmental group The Lone Tree Council. Some of them, people have heard about: mercury, lead and arsenic; theyre all in coal ash.

Coal ash spill just a bad memory in North Carolina 6 years later

This is how Consumers and DTE energy companies plan to manage coal ash

It was front page news in 2011, when thousands of tons of coal ash tumbled from a Wisconsin bluff, sending 725 cubic yards of the toxic waste and soil into Lake Michigan.

A few years later, national headlines announced a huge coal ash spill that polluted waterways, coating the Dan River in ash for more than 70 miles, and affecting tourism in Appalachia.

And an environmental organization reports that groundwater under most coal ash sites is polluted with heavy metals such as arsenic, which can cause cancer.

Miller said hes worried the ash landfills could lead to groundwater pollution decades down the road.

The rules on coal ash are so loose. Weve had so many accidents with coal ash, Miller said. (Groundwater) its like another Great Lake, we have to be conscious of that.

Consumers Energy has state approval to maintain a coal ash landfill next to the mouth of the Saginaw River in Bay County that could measure 60 feet high  as tall as a six-story building, about half as tall as Bay City Halls iconic clock tower  and 11.2 million cubic yards in volume.

In mid-February, though, Consumers Energy said it submitted a revised closure plan that would reduce the volume of landfill disposal at lower heights. The company will not be using the maximum permitted volume or filling to the maximum permitted elevation, according to the state of Michigan.

Impact on drinking water

On the Saginaw River, there is little concern about coal ash.

William Bohlen, director of the Bay County Road Commission-Department of Water & Sewer, said they have tested drinking water for heavy metals and have had the results come back undetected, according to the departments 2017 water quality report.

Paul Reinsch, acting deputy director for Saginaws Department of Water and Wastewater Treatment Services, said, This is an extremely unlikely event for the Saginaw water system for various reasons...contamination of our water supply with coal ash and subsequent leaching of heavy metals like arsenic and mercury is highly unlikely given the sheer volume of Lake Huron and other factors.

Saginaw, Midland and Bay City draw their raw water from Whitestone Point in Arenac County north of Au Gres, roughly 40 miles as the crow flies from the mouth of the Saginaw River.

Laura Ogar, Bay County director of environmental affairs and community development, isnt concerned about coal ash being stored at Consumers Energys Bay County site, calling it a reasonable plan.

Concern is if theres some type of exposure to that contaminant, right? Whether its human exposure to it or environmental ecological exposure, she said. Nobodys drinking that water. Theres not a drinking water aquifer.

In addition, naturally present clay soils would trap any such contaminants and hold them in place, she said.

Its a controlled site, its fenced, its on the operational campus, theyve got monitoring, she said. And because the landfill will be capped, I dont see a human exposure pathway.

Frank Cloutier, director of public relations for the Saginaw Chippewa Indian Tribe, also is confident in Consumers Energys plan.

Any time you have an opportunity for contaminants to mix with the fresh waters of the Great Lakes, youre always going to pique the curiosity of the Saginaw Chippewa Indian Tribe, he said, or that of anyone with a conscience. The tribe has gotten involved in some major pollution lawsuits in the Saginaw River watershed, notably one decades ago over PCB contamination in the river in Bay County.

We feel confident in their (Consumers Energys) ability to stay within the guidelines of the regulatory agencies that they answer to. Theyve always been stewards of the land and done very well by alleviating some of the stress from the footprint that they create, he said.

Scott DeVuyst is a charter boat captain and member of the board of the Bay City Yacht Club, which has been located across the river from Consumers since 1954. As environmental stewards, water quality is of the utmost importance to the yacht club, he said.

Yes, its on our radar. From our standpoint right now, Consumers power has been a very good steward and a good neighbor across the water from us, DeVuyst said, adding that Consumers even washes coal dust off the boats when it blows across the water.

The legacy of coal ash

While the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency doesnt classify coal ash as hazardous material  a decision officials made in 2014 to the chagrin of environmentalists  the agency acknowledges coal ash contains contaminants such as mercury, cadmium and arsenic, which, without proper management, can pollute waterways, groundwater, drinking water and the air.

In Michigan, the ash comes from coal plants, several of which have closed, located in Bay, Eaton, Hillsdale, Huron, Ingham, Manistee, Marquette, Monroe, Muskegon, Ottawa, St. Clair and Wayne counties. Some coal ash is recycled or reused, as it is an important ingredient in the manufacture of concrete and wallboard, according to the EPA.

Herek L. Clack is a research associate professor at the University of Michigan in the department of civil and environmental engineering, whose research focuses on reducing the environmental and health impacts of a variety of airborne aerosols. He said chemicals found in coal ash can affect human health.

Some metals found in coal ash are neurotoxins and can cause neurological damage in infants and children, he said. Those types of chemicals would have similar long-term adverse health effects, like lead in drinking water found in cities such as Flint, he said.

Michigans two largest power companies, Consumers Energy and DTE Energy, say they havent had any significant ash spills, and manage coal ash as part of daily business. At locations where they are shutting down coal-fired plants, they plan to put coal ash into licensed landfills on some of those sites and monitor them for leaks for at least 30 years, as required by law. The landfill Consumers is maintaining in Bay County will also take all the ash from Consumers Muskegon facility. Margie Ring, state solid waste engineering coordinator, Materials Management Division, Michigan Department of Environment, Great Lakes and Energy, said she is not aware of any significant coal ash spills in Michigan attributable to either Consumers or DTE.

A detailed 2013 report by the Clean Water Fund, an environmental group based in Washington, D.C., mentions no coal ash spills in Michigan. But the report, Toxic Trash Exposed: Coal Ash Pollution in Michigan, does detail many instances of groundwater contamination at sites across the state.

State environmental officials are overseeing the companies plans and working with Consumers Energy. Michigan Department of Environment, Great Lakes and Energy, formerly DEQ, and utilities across the state continue to evaluate coal ash sites for any concerns regarding rising water levels. EGLE has not identified any high-risk areas with regard to flood hazards at this time.

The Great Lakes have already been contaminated by spilled coal ash. A 2011 incident next to the We Energies Oak Creek Power Plant in Wisconsin, about 12 miles south of Milwaukee, saw dredging equipment, coal ash, dirt and other debris spill into Lake Michigan. It happened when a section of bluff collapsed and slid from a terraced area at the top of a hill down to the lake, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported at the time, leaving behind a debris field that stretched 120 yards long and 50 to 80 yards wide at the bottom.

A U.S. Coast Guard lieutenant called it a freak accident, while the National Resources Defense Council called it a preventable mess.

Due to the small amount of coal ash and the size of Lake Michigan, no lasting effects were anticipated and We Energies was never fined, said Ann Kipper, now deputy administrator of the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources External Services Division.

Jodi Perras, formerly deputy regional director for the Beyond Coal campaign for the Sierra Club in Indianapolis, says the group wants to ensure the long-term safety of ash buried at old coal plants.

We are concerned about utilities that just cap these coal ash dumps in place by putting a liner and cover over it and basically call it a day, she said.

Potential threats

The greatest issue with long-term coal ash disposal at the Bay County complex is how close the material is to the Saginaw River, said Philip Roycraft, district supervisor of the Materials Management Division of the Michigan Department of Environment, Great Lakes and Energy.

The greatest concern is the proximity to the Saginaw River, but theres nothing that could be done about that, he said. Thats because, back in the day, coal plants were located on the lakes.

The Weadock landfill was permitted for construction in April 1992. The landfill can take coal ash under a state-issued solid waste operating license, according to Consumers Energy officials.

But landfills can and do leak.

A March 2018 report by a group called the Environmental Integrity Project is billed as the first comprehensive national study of coal ash. It found widespread groundwater contamination from coal ash not only in Michigan but across the country.

The report, part of which was based on Consumers Energys own Annual Groundwater Monitoring Reports for its Karn and Weadock power plants, each dated January 2018, claimed groundwater located in the vicinity of the ash pond at the D.E. Karn plant had arsenic levels exceeding federal limits by 48 times.

Abel Russ, senior attorney for the Environmental Integrity Project, said the report was based only on data from power companies first annual groundwater monitoring reports, which would have been completed in 2017 or early 2018.

According to the EIP, nationally, groundwater beneath virtually all coal plants is contaminated and groundwater is threatened by both coal ash ponds and dry coal ash landfills. The report found:

91 percent of coal plants have unsafe levels of one or more coal ash constituents in groundwater.

The groundwater at a majority of coal plants (52 percent) has unsafe levels of arsenic, which is known to cause multiple types of cancer.

The majority of coal plants (60 percent) also have unsafe levels of lithium, a chemical associated with multiple health risks.

The majority of coal plants have unsafe levels of at least four toxic constituents of coal ash.

The EIP report calls for the regulation of all coal ash dumps, not just the active ones; for all coal ash dumps to be high and dry; for more monitoring, including testing of all residential wells and surface water bodies that might be affected by coal ash; and for greater transparency of the data, among other things.

Ring said Consumers Energy does not test surface water in the Saginaw River and/or Saginaw Bay. Rather, it samples the groundwater before it discharges to the surface water. Consumers Energy has been meeting discharge limits established for this facility, she said.

The Weadock plant groundwater near the ash pond had arsenic levels seven times the safe level, beryllium four times, lithium six times, sulfate five times and cobalt two times, the EIP report contended.

Consumers spokesman Roger Morgenstern said there was no impact on any public drinking water sources, and no contamination at the companys plants has moved off its property.

Consumers Energy agrees that groundwater concentrations for some constituents were detected at levels in on-site monitoring wells that are above drinking water standards at four of the five Consumers Energy sites, company officials said. We have over 120 wells located on these sites and continuously monitor them. Only about 10% of those wells showed elevated levels and are located under, or adjacent to the landfill. The well monitoring data continues to show no groundwater contamination at, or beyond, property boundaries.

The Trenton Channel Power Plant is owned by Detroit Edison, a subsidiary of DTE Energy. It had groundwater arsenic at 38 times the federal "safe level in the vicinity of the pond and radium nine times the safe level, according to the EIP report.

When asked about the EIP report, DTEs Eric Younan and Renee McClelland said, Their analysis is misleading because their data isnt presented in the right context. The Environmental Integrity Project (EIP) implies contaminants that are present in coal ash are discharged into groundwater at 91% of U.S. coal plant sites. We have groundwater monitoring systems around our ash impoundments and landfills in accordance with both federal Environmental Protection Agency rules and Michigan requirements per Michigan Department of Environment, Great Lakes, and Energy (EGLE, formerly DEQ). These monitoring systems show that no breach or release of any constituents associated with coal ash has occurred with the exception of our bottom ash basin at our River Rouge Power Plant. In that instance, we have proactively addressed any potential concern of shallow groundwater around the bottom ash impoundment through a groundwater collection system that is actively collecting groundwater and preventing any migration of groundwater from the site.

When asked how worrisome groundwater contamination at coal plants sites is, EGLEs Ring replied, Groundwater impacts have been observed at a number of coal ash disposal facilities across the state. Most of these impacts have been known for some time, and the facilities have either implemented corrective action, or are doing so. We are guiding facilities and working with partners on efforts to remediate impacts.

Michigans Solid Waste Management regulations require solid waste disposal areas, including coal ash landfills and surface impoundments, to perform post-closure maintenance and monitoring of regulated disposal facilities for 30 years. After 30 years, the owner or operator may petition EGLE to end this requirement.

New state law

Charlotte Jameson is program director, legislative affairs, energy and drinking water policy, for the Michigan Environmental Council. She helped lobby for a bill that passed with bipartisan support in 2018 to give then-DEQ, now EGLE, a role in regulating coal ash disposal and cleanup.

Coal ash regulation has a spotty history of regulation across the nation, Jameson said. In 2015, the federal government adopted new regulations that required monitoring of all coal ash ponds, landfills, groundwater and air quality.

Then, in 2016, the federal government passed another act that allowed states to take over regulation of coal ash.

So our state Legislature moved in 2018 to pass a law that would create the state program in Michigan, she said.

We haven't seen a lot of impact yet from the 2018 law, but we could soon see the state move to ensure unsafe, leaking coal ash ponds are shut down. That is what MEC will continue to advocate for at the state and federal level.

As shown by North Carolinas hard lesson with coal ash, regulations are needed before environmental problems begin, said Amy Adams, North Carolina program manager for Appalachian Voices.

Once it escapes into the environmentonce its in there, its damned near impossible to get up, Adams said. So a spill prevention plan or a clean-up plan is moot if you cant enact it.

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A man has been arrested after a police chase in the Moreton Bay region, and charged in relation to a shot being fired into a moving ute from an allegedly stolen car being driven alongside in Brisbane.

The alleged drive-by shooting occurred about 1pm on Wednesday in the southbound lanes on Gympie Arterial Road in Bald Hills, in Brisbane's northern outskirts.

Police said a silver Audi with four people inside was seen driving dangerously near the Pine River Bridge in Bald Hills, before pulling up beside a white Holden Colorado ute.

A short time later, the ute driver told police, he saw a gun being pointed out of the Audi's window.
New Delhi, April 15 : The Delhi government has joined hands with 'CallDoc' app to launch 24x7 free online medical consultation services to help the patients connect with the doctors remotely through the mobile application for their non-emergency medical needs.

Through this, the Delhi Health Department said the patients can easily consult with the general physicians as well as specialists from home at any time convenient to them.

Announcing this collaboration, Delhi Health Minister Satyendar Jain said that more than 100 doctors are offering their services for free to provide hassle-free consultations to patients.

"Delhi government is glad to collaborate with 'CallDoc' app to bring 24x7 online medical consultations for free to the people of Delhi. This will save the trouble of physical travel for regular OPD visits, especially for the senior citizens. We are proud of the 100+ doctors from Delhi who are offering their services for free via this app," Jain said.

The doctors include are those affiliated to Delhi Medical Council, as well as doctors from Delhi government's University College of Medical Sciences (UCMS) and Maulana Azad Medical College (MAMC), the Health Department added.

The outbreak of coronavirus has put a lot of pressure on the healthcare infrastructure across the globe, including Delhi.

The outbreak of the virus has made it difficult for people to visit hospitals and doctors over non-emergency medical issues, with major hospitals being marked as 'Covid-19 designated' hospitals.

The CallDoc app will help people in such situations, while at the same time reducing the chances of transmission of the dreaded virus at the hospitals and clinics.

CallDoc is a cloud-based platform created by Oncall Medicare Pvt. Ltd. to provide citizens with better and faster healthcare at any time and place of their convenience.

"The user is able to connect to a doctor through video or audio or chat and get the consultation over phone by using this mobile app," the Health Department said.

It added that through the mobile app, the patients can upload their test reports for doctors to review. The doctors can upload prescriptions on the app after consultation.

The CallDoc app can be downloaded from Google Play Store and ioS store. After downloading, the patient has to select the doctor on the basis of name and specialty and mention the purpose of consultation.

"We at Oncall Medicare are extremely pleased to collaboration with the Delhi government. Our services, along with the well laid network of the Delhi government, will be able to deliver affirmative outcomes and provide relief to the people at large and all the stakeholders," said Arun Dagar, Founder and Chief Executive of CallDoc app.
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.




The entire sixth-grade class at Schaghticoke Middle School in New Milford has been invited to participate in an essay contest.

State Rep. Bill Buckbee (R-New Milford) created the contest as a way for New Milford students to express their thoughts on the contributions of historical figures from the town of New Milford, or the contributions from Connecticut women, and how those contributions affect them.

"Engaging students to take a look at the historical past of the very town they live in is meant to be enriching for the community as a whole," said Buckbee.

"This year, 2020, also marks the 100th anniversary of the women's right to vote in America, he said. I am looking forward to reading the reflections from students as they consider that it took people with courage to challenge and change the previous status quo of our society."

Buckbee pointed to the contributions of women across the country who led the women's suffrage movement as a prime example of a good essay topic.

He also pointed to the fact that local hero, Roger Sherman, played a significant role in weaving the fabric of a young United States, making him a prime subject for a quality essay.

"We have a couple of great topics for the students to think about this year," Buckbee said. "Good luck to all of those who enter the contest, I will be reading them all.

Submissions can be emailed directly to SMS Principal Dr Chris Longo at longoc@newmilfordps.org.

They are due by April 24.
Greetings, fellow Blues.

I have a programme from the Empire Exhibition Cup Final: Celtic versus Everton, 1938.

I know some of you are collectors. Is it worth anything?

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Hundreds of people from the Domkal municipality area of Murshidabad district blocked a state highway for three hours on Wednesday morning, alleging that they did not get food in 20 days amid claims by chief minister Mamata Banerjee that there was no shortage of it in Bengal and that the poor were being given free ration.

There were many women and children among members of the 400-odd families that blocked the BerhamporeDomkal state highway violating lockdown orders. Most of the agitators did not wear masks or maintain social distancing guidelines.

The agitators lifted the blockade when the local administration intervened, but not before the chairman of Domkal municipality, who rushed to the spot, admitted that ration dealers did not disburse the quota of food supplies to those in the below poverty line (BPL) segment. Each ration card holder is supposed to get five kg rice and five kg flour a month.

While talking to HT last week, State food and supplies minister Jyotipriyo Mallick said, There is no shortage of rice in Bengal. We have 9.45 lakh metric tons in stock and another four lakh metric tons are stored in rice mills. We have enough rice to feed people till August. Our government does not procure rice from the Food Corporation of India. We buy directly from farmers.

The administration has taken action against some ration dealers for not opening their shops or not giving people their full quota, said the minister.

On Wednesday, Mahadeb Das, a resident of ward no 10 in Domkal municipality, said, Dulal Saha, the ration dealer in our area, gave a kilo of rice each to a handful of families in the last two weeks. It is not enough to feed a family of 4-5 members.

Most people from this area work as wage labourers in Bengal or other states. We lost our livelihood because of the lockdown. We were told that the state and the Centre are providing free food for the poor, he said.

Subodh Das, another agitator, said The government is not allowing us to work. Are we supposed to starve to death? We know we risked our lives by gathering so many people for the agitation but there was no option.

Chairman of the Trinamool Congress-run run Domkal municipality, Jafikul Islam convinced the agitators to lift the blockade.

More than 1.57 lakh people live in Domkal and 69 per cent of them belong to the BPL category. We received only 42 quintals of rice from the government for distribution among poor people. More supplies are coming, said Islam.

I have come to know that the local ration dealer has not given people the quota of ration they are entitled to. Stern action will be taken against him, Islam added. I have promised each of the aggrieved families 10 kg rice and 5 kg potato, he said.
New Delhi, April 15 : Plasma technique will be used for treatment of critical coronavirus patients here on a trial basis, Delhi Lt. Governor Anil Baijal said on Wednesday.

"Delhi to use plasma technique for treatment on (a) trial basis to save life of critical COVID-19 patients," Baijal said in a tweet.

According to a statement from the Raj Niwas, S.K. Sarin, Director, ILBS informed Baijal that the Delhi government has got approval to use convalescent plasma technique on a trial basis to save the life of serious patients of Covid-19.

Delhi government will be deploying it as per the protocol of the Union Ministry of Health & Family Welfare, Sarin said.

In convalescent plasma therapy, the antibodies of a person who has recovered from the virus are taken and transfused into a sick person (having the virus) to help boost the person's immune system.

Baijal on Wednesday held a meeting to review Covid-19 Patient Management in Delhi. Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal, his deputy Manish Sisodia and Health Minister Satyendar Jain, and Chief Secretary Vijay Dev were also part of the meeting, along with the Health teams of the Covid Hospitals.

In a statement, the Raj Niwas said during the meeting, held on video conference, Baijal stressed on the requirement of a strong communication network between all hospitals and the Health Department to collate real time data and swiftly plan resource mobilisation.

"The Health Department presented a patient management system and requested incharges of all hospitals to update it daily so that correct data is collected and a clear picture emerges enabling decision makers to swiftly plan resources for emerging scenarios," the Raj Niwas said.

The Lt. Governor also emphasized that every single life is precious and all possible steps will be taken to ensure best possible treatment to each patient.

Also, the LG was informed by the Health Secretary that sufficient PPEs are being procured.

"The Delhi government has ordered for 1.5 lakh PPEA kits and secured supply of 3,500 Personal Protective Equipments per day, tender has also been finalized for two lakh more PPEs kits," the Raj Niwas said.

Moreover, the Health Secretary also said that an order has been issued for five lakh N-95 Masks and supply of 25,000 per week for frontline health workers/health professionals is being received.

"The Health Department is providing these PPEs to all COVID hospitals as per need." Baijal also directed that sStandard operating procedures or guidelines be strictly adhered for hospitals to avoid overcrowding.

He also instructed the Health Department to follow all protocols of the Union Health Ministry while dealing with Covid-19 cases.

The Lt. Governor also directed all Covid-19 designated hospitals to plan for additional health infrastructure and medical professionals considering all possible scenarios.

"The Lt. Governor also reviewed enforcement of lockdown with CS, Delhi and CP, Delhi and directed that concerted efforts be taken to ensure that all directions of Government of India are followed. District Officials should ensure that no congregation of people is allowed in their respective jurisdiction," the statement added.
Dr BS Ajaikumar, Chairman & CEO, HealthCare Global Enterprises Limited shares his views on the ongoing COVID-19 situation

"Seeing the ongoing surge in COVID-19 cases, nobody can predict when India will be free from this fatal virus. If you follow China, as an example, it took two and a half months. So, if we started in March, it should be decreased by the middle of May. I dont know how much the weather is going to fully play because there is something called flu season and sometimes it has to come to an end. The main point whether this would come to an end, we dont know.

The lockdown is a significant step taken by the Government, but they should have done this two week earlier. It is late but better late than never.

Data plays an important role, and we need to monitor the number of cases closely. Once the cases are stabilised, that will be the turning point.

The economic impact of the coronavirus outbreak will be severe. The government should come up with bailout packages for the severely hit sectors and incorporate a strategy for national economic recovery.

The health ministry should come out with a medical bulletin addressing the nation so that there is no spreading of the fake news among people. They should have proper messaging channels to spread awareness about COVID-19 to the rural population as there is high internal migration.

The government should ensure the availability of equipment required by the doctors and paramedical staff as ventilators and testing kits are needed in massive numbers to treat the infected patients. And this is high time they should strengthen the public health system."

- Dr BS Ajaikumar, Chairman & CEO, HealthCare Global Enterprises Limited
Source: Xinhua| 2020-04-15 19:00:28|Editor: huaxia

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A staff member sanitizes a student's hands at Hermann Gmeiner School of Yantai in Yantai City, east China's Shandong Province, April 15, 2020. East China's Shandong Province on Wednesday partially reopened schools, with third-graders at 804 senior high schools and secondary vocational schools resuming formal school classes as the COVID-19 epidemic waned. (Photo by Sun Wentan/Xinhua)

JINAN, April 15 (Xinhua) -- East China's Shandong Province on Wednesday partially reopened schools, with third-graders at 804 senior high schools and secondary vocational schools resuming formal school classes as the COVID-19 epidemic waned.

The opening of the spring semester was delayed by more than 60 days due to the epidemic. Earlier online classes offered an alternative to offset the impact on the study of the students who will sit the college entrance examination this summer.

Students wearing masks had body temperatures taken and presented their health QR codes before entering the campus while keeping a distance from each other.

"After waiting for such a long time, we are finally back to school," said Li Qirui of the high school affiliated to Shandong Normal University.

Many schools began formulating school opening plans and storing up protective equipment starting from early March.

"We had more than 40,000 face masks in a stockpile, which can help ensure one mask per student per day," said Dong Ya, the principal of Jinan Middle School in the provincial capital of Jinan.

Xing Shunfeng, an official with the provincial education bureau, said the seniors will be in small classes of around 30 students each, and the schools will be mostly under closed-off management in a bid to reduce infection risks.

Shandong, one of the most populous provinces across China, has a total of 37,700 schools, with more than 19 million students and a teaching staff of 1.5 million.
A doctor suspected of suffering from coronavirus was admitted to a Delhi hospital, an official said here on Wednesday.

He was taken to the same hospital where he worked from his flat in Ghaziabad around 9.30 pm on Tuesday night, Chief Medical Officer Dr N K Gupta said.

The area was sanitised after getting information, Gupta added.

District Magistrate Ajay Shankar Pandey said if the doctor tested positive for the virus, the building where he lived will be sealed.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
When British Prime Minister Boris Johnson came out of intensive care and spoke to the nation on Sunday, he thanked all NHS staff, but in particular two nurses that stood beside his hospital bed for some critical 48 hours - Jenny from New Zealand and Luis from Portugal.

Johnson was in intensive care for several days after being hospitalised following a positive test for the new coronavirus.

Luis' father, also named Luis Pitarma, is originally from Aveiro, a city near Porto.

After applying for many jobs and having no luck in his native country, his son left in 2014 to travel to the United Kingdom and has been an intensive care nurse at Saint Thomas Hospital in London since 2016.

His family is proud of what he has achieved so far, although they worry about him being on the frontlines of the fight against the new virus.

The words of recognition that came from the British Prime Minister, as well as the special phone call by Portuguese President Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa, have brought a renewed sense of motivation to Luis' continued work on the frontline of the fight against the virus.

Luis' father also believes this was a message of encouragement not only for his son but for all health workers in both the United Kingdom and in Portugal.

Portugal has so far confirmed more than 500 deaths from the new virus and more than 17,000 people infected.

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.
At a time when the education department has started online classes for students across Jammu and Kashmir since March 26, high-speed 4G internet remains elusive across the Union territory.

The 4G service was snapped here on August 4 last year, a day before the BJP-led central government had revoked Article 370.

On January 24 this year, the UT administration had restored internet connectivity, but with obsolete and archaic 2G network.

The Supreme Court had on April 9 asked the J&K administration and Centre to respond to a plea seeking directions to restore 4G internet in the UT, in view of the prevailing pandemic.

However, many students in Jammu and Srinagar told HT over the phone that the low-speed 2G network was playing a spoilsport in their e-studies.

Though there is no substitute to classroom teaching where concepts are clarified and understood in a better way, 2G network is adding to our woes, said Madhu Gupta, a student of a private school in Jammu city.

She added, Schools have been sending assignments on e-care portals, but the slow-paced 2G network renders us helpless and sulking.

Rupin Gupta, another student from the city, said, Not everyone has a broadband facility at home and majority of the people are relying on mobile internet. Jammu region is constantly being punished by the BJP government for no fault of its people.

Furqan Ali, a 23 year old youth from Srinagar, said that 2G network was a cruel joke on millions of students across the UT. The administration gives us lame excuses that restoration of 4G network may lead to terror attacks, and keeps denying the law abiding citizens their fundamental rights. Not everyone is a terrorist in J&K, he remarked.

School education department director Anuradha Gupta said that on March 26, a day after the lockdown began, they switched over to other modes of communication like online classes, TV, radio, conference calls etc for keeping the schoolchildren abreast with their studies. Schools heads and teachers were also roped in to help the students using these modes, she added.

Meanwhile, the home department has decided to continue 2G internet services in the UT till April 27. T

The 2G mobile internet services has been extended in Jammu and Kashmir till April 27 for postpaid and only verified prepaid SIM, according to an order issued by the home department secretary Shaleen Kabra.

The postpaid SIM card holders shall continue to be provided access to the internet but these services shall not be made available on prepaid SIM cards unless verified as per the norms applicable for postpaid connections, the order said.

The order attributed the decision of not restoring 4G internet to social media applications that are used for the circulation of photographs of terrorists of proscribed terror organisations, mobilising crowds and spike in terror attacks.

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Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal on Wednesday said the Delhi government has ordered shifting of the people living in the open at the Yamuna Ghat here during the lockdown as arrangements have been made to provide them food and shelter.

The move follows media reports about the plight of migrant workers who took shelter under a flyover on the banks of the Yamuna in the wake of the countrywide lockdown amid the coronavirus pandemic.

Taking to Twitter, the chief minister thanked the media for pointing out the matter and said there will be no shortage of accommodation and food for those gathered at Yamuna Ghat.

In another tweet, Kejriwal said the government has been providing food to 10 lakh people every day and has given free-ration to 75 lakh beneficiaries.

The number of coronavirus cases in the national capital on Wednesday increased to 1,578, with 17 fresh cases and two deaths being reported.

The death toll from COVID-19 in Delhi now stands at 32.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Going big is part of the great Texas myth, but when it comes to COVID-19 testing, this state is decidedly small.

Officials are not conducting enough tests to develop an accurate picture of the scope and spread of the disease in Texas, and that lack of detail undercuts our understanding of where hot spots are occurring and will muddy decisions about when to loosen restrictions to revitalize the economy. If officials get this latter point wrong, they will refuel this crisis and hospitals will be swamped.

As the Houston Chronicle recently reported, Texas is second-worst in the nation when it comes to testing per capita. This ranking was based on data collected through Wednesday of last week. The Chronicle analysis found 332 tests had been conducted for every 100,000 people. Only Kansas was worse, at 327 tests per 100,000 people. As the Chronicle reported, 26 states were testing at double the rate of Texas, at least as of last Wednesday.

The problems here are myriad.

In the most basic sense, this lack of testing means we have no idea how widespread the disease is across Texas. It doesnt mean much to say about 15,500 cases have been reported in more than 180 counties if the real number is much higher. Nor does it mean much to divine any trends if the data is incomplete  Texas has been woefully slow in ramping up testing  and large swaths of the population go untested.

Beyond this, the official COVID-19 death count may also be inaccurate if people failed to get tested and then died at home. Witness how New York City recently increased its death toll by 3,700 to account for people who never tested positive for the virus but likely died from it.

This is not a concern limited to New York City. As ProPublica has reported, there has been a spike in at-home deaths in Massachusetts and Detroit. These are deaths that very well could be from COVID-19 but have not been logged in the official count. If testing were to improve on this front, public health officials could deploy resources to limit an outbreak in a given area.

Artificially low numbers could also create a false sense of security. There has been much discussion about reopening the economy, and we share that aspiration. The pandemic is also an economic crisis. We might be saving lives by staying home, but people are losing jobs and desperate for food.

But it only stands to reason that an economic recovery cant happen until testing is widespread, affordable and available to all. With widespread testing would come better data.

Gov. Greg Abbott recently said he sees glimmers of hope in recent data but with a whole bunch of red flags.

But one considerable red flag is the lack of data and our inability to divine precise policies to guide our way forward. To save lives and restart the economy, Texas has to rapidly expand testing.
Foreign Ministry spokeswoman says Vietnam always monitors East Sea developments and insists that all nations comply with international laws.

Responding to a VnExpress question about reports that a Chinese oil survey vessel has returned to Vietnams exclusive economic zone (EEZ), Le Thi Thu Hang said Tuesday: "Vietnamese authorities always keep a close eye on all developments in the East Sea."

Citing data from Marine Traffic, a website that tracks shipping, Reuters reported Tuesday that the Chinese survey vessel, Haiyang Dizhi 8, used for offshore seismic surveys, had appeared again at 158 km (98 miles) off Vietnams coast, within Vietnams EEZ. It was accompanied by at least one Chinese coast guard vessel, the report said.

Hang said in a statement: "Vietnam demands that all nations follow regulations of the 1982 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) and international rules in all activities, contributing to building peace, stability and cooperation in the East Sea."

The East Sea is known internationally as the South China Sea.

In July last year, the Haiyang Dizhi 8 and its escort vessels had violated Vietnams EEZ and the continental shelf of Vietnam near the Vanguard Bank, occupying the area until August 7. The vessels returned to the water area on August 13 and stayed until October.

Vietnam repeatedly condemned the operations of the vessel and escorts as a violation of its sovereignty and demanded that they leave Vietnamese waters immediately.

The presence of the Chinese vessel last year drew strong international criticism, with leaders from many countries including the U.S. condemning it.

The news of the Haiyang Dizhi 8 returning to Vietnams EEZ comes amid intense campaign to curb the spread of the novel coronavirus in Vietnam, as in most of the rest of the world.

It follows the recent sinking of a Vietnamese fishing boat near Vietnams Hoang Sa (Paracels) Islands in the East Sea this month, which Vietnam has strongly condemned and demanded compensation for.

Other countries have also expressed deep concern over the incident, with the U.S. State Department, Defense Department and several senators calling it a flagrant violation of international laws.
Working with a team of corporate collaborators, academic advisors, and contract manufacturers to prepare contract proposals and bids for U.S. and international government health agencies to develop Ii-Key-SARS-CoV-2 peptide vaccines against COVID-19 for clinical testing and approval

MIRAMAR, Fla., April 14, 2020 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Generex Biotechnology Corporation ( www.generex.com ) (GNBT) ( http://www.otcmarkets.com/stock/GNBT/quote ) today announced that the company is working with corporate collaborators, academic advisors, and contract manufacturers, with guidance from BARDA and other government agencies to develop a plan and budget for testing a synthetic peptide vaccine against the coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 using the companys proprietary and patented Ii-Key immune system activation technology. Because Generex subsidiary NuGenerex Immuno-Oncology (formerly Antigen Express) has a long history of developing the Ii-Key peptide vaccine technology with the goal of rapidly responding to potential pandemic threats, we have been able to rapidly mobilize our efforts so as to be prepared to respond to the COVID-19 global pandemic. By working towards partnerships and contracts with government and private collaborators, our goal is to accelerate the discovery and development of a safe and effective vaccine to help fight COVID-19.



Collaborating with government and academia

Generex is collaborating with private collaborators and academic experts to evaluate a number of peptide vaccine candidates for future clinical use. Our research partners have identified amino acid sequences that are predicted via computational algorithms to be antigenic epitopes of the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus, and we are linking these epitopes with Ii-Key to develop a synthetic peptide vaccine.

Generex is also in discussion with U.S. and international governments to support clinical development and manufacturing capabilities for a vaccine. The company has agreed to terms with a peptide manufacturer to produce research grade peptides that will be used to screen against blood samples from patients who have recovered from COVID-19. Generex is in discussions with major contract companies to plan for the manufacturing of GMP grade clinical peptides to support the companys planned safety and immunogenicity clinical trial, which is projected to initiate vaccinations in mid-summer.

Story continues

Due to the ongoing pandemic emergency, the company is in discussions with these commercial contract manufacturers and the U.S. government to plan for the production of large-scale commercial batches of vaccine if the clinical trials are successful to support mass vaccination under a proposed emergency use authorization (EUA), as well as Phase III efficacy protocols starting in the Fall.

Researching vaccines for COVID-19

There are currently no specific treatments nor vaccines for COVID-19. Researchers across the world, including Generex, are investigating new products for the treatment and prevention of COVID-19, including the development of numerous vaccine modalities. A vaccine is a prophylaxis, or preventative, approach against disease. Through immunization, vaccines can activate a healthy immune system to produce an immune response that may provide long-term protection against viruses and bacterial pathogens. Although neutralizing antibodies are the principal defense against viral infection, two additional cell types are essential both for a robust defense and for immunological memory against subsequent infections. Cytotoxic T cells (CD8 cells) can kill the primary infected cells, the factories for virus production and release, and helper T cells (CD4 or Th cells) enhance production of both antibodies and the cytotoxic T cells and can afford immune memory for decades.

The Ii-Key technology that Generex has developed for over 15 years with tens of millions of dollars in research and development expenditures is designed to activate both the cellular (T cell) and humoral (antibody) immune response to create a Complete Vaccine. Generex is in discussions to develop a proprietary, patented Ii-Key-SARS-CoV-2 vaccine against the coronavirus and plans to work with the government and commercial collaborators to evaluate if vaccination with the peptide vaccine can immunize the population and protect against COVID-19. Our new, COVID-19 specific patents are currently being filed by our partner as provisional applications, and full applications will be filed in the U.S. and internationally on a country by country basis to protect the SARS-CoV-2 peptide epitopes as well as the Ii-Key-SARS-CoV-2 vaccines as additional in silico, in vitro, and in vivo data are compiled to support current and future claims. Generex has signed a licensing agreement that includes exclusivity to utilize the patented epitope sequences for Ii-Key peptide vaccines.

Generex President & CEO Joseph Moscato said, My team and I are in discussions with the U.S. government about funding our vaccine development program, and we are speaking with people at Health Canada this week to discuss the Canadian regulatory path for approval in Canada. Our current plan is to conduct a clinical trial of our Ii-Key multivalent peptide vaccine to evaluate safety and immunogenicity as defined by activation of the cellular and humoral response. The 3-arm study design will compare the Ii-Key-SARS-CoV-2 vaccine alone and with immune adjuvant versus adjuvant alone. In the first stage of this immunogenicity trial, 20 healthy subjects will be enrolled in each arm, and will be vaccinated at day 0, given a booster vaccination on day 21, and have blood drawn for evaluation of immune response on day 31. A data safety monitoring board will review the interim results for safety and immune response before providing a go/no go decision to complete enrollment in the extension stage of the trial, which will enroll a total of an estimated 120 subjects. If approved by the FDA, this protocol will establish the data foundation for a large scale, mass vaccination protocol under an EUA.

To meet the potential demand for hundreds of millions of vaccine doses, we are in discussions with our GMP manufacturing contractors to start production of clinical/commercial supply as soon as the DSMB review is complete and satisfactory. Last week we submitted and presented our overall plan to the U.S. Corona Watch task force, and this week we will be detailing our plan in an application to BARDA. We are working diligently to achieve success by working to secure funding of the next stages of the COVID-19 vaccine development and clinical trials with the goal of having our vaccine ready for a mass vaccination by autumn if everything goes perfectly. If the clinical trials are successful, we then plan to partner with larger companies, such as retail pharmacy chains, to work towards vaccinating a large number of American and Canadian citizens to potentially protect the population against COVID-19.



Mr. Moscato continued, We have recruited the best of the best for our advisory panel and have identified clinical trial partners, contract manufacturers, regulatory consultants, and leading institutions, that if funding is secured and early test results are positive, will manufacture and conduct the clinical testing of our vaccine with world class leaders in virology and vaccinology. We have compiled a multidisciplinary team to prepare the BARDA proposal in the next week to 10 days. We are in discussions to secure immediate funding to support the BARDA application process and initial vaccine development work. From our knowledge, the U.S. government has nothing like the Generex COVID 19 Complete Vaccine technology in their pandemic preparedness portfolio, and while there are no guarantees that BARDA will approve our vaccine development proposal, the Ii-Key-SARS-CoV-2 vaccine is designed to be the only vaccine that specifically activates both the cellular and humoral immune response to provide long-lasting protection from COVID-19, so we are confident in our approach and position.



Mr. Moscato concluded, We have spoken with health authorities and officials from several other countries to discuss our vaccine development program in order to define the regulatory path and requirements for each specific country. We recognize that it is important that each participating country establish the regulatory guidelines, manufacturing processes, and clinical systems to manage vaccination of their populations. If the clinical trials are successful we will also work with local regulators on clinical trials, manufacturing, and distribution strategy for immunizing their populations."

About Generex Biotechnology Corp.

Generex Biotechnology is an integrated healthcare holding company with end-to-end solutions for patient centric care from rapid diagnosis through delivery of personalized therapies. Generex is building a new kind of healthcare company that extends beyond traditional models providing support to physicians in an MSO network, and ongoing relationships with patients to improve the patient experience and access to optimal care.

NuGenerex Immuno-Oncology (formerly Antigen Express), a subsidiary of Generex Biotechnology, is a clinical stage oncology company developing immunotherapeutic peptide vaccines based on the CD-4 T-Cell activation platform, Ii-Key. NuGenerex Immuno-Oncology (NGIO) is being spun out of Generex as a separate, independent public company to advance the platform Ii-Key technology, particularly in combination with the immune checkpoint inhibitors. NGIO is currently engaged in a Phase II clinical trial of its lead cancer immunotherapeutic vaccine AE37 in combination with pembrolizumab (Mercks Keytruda) for the treatment of triple negative breast cancer.



Cautionary Note Regarding Forward-Looking Statements

This release and oral statements made from time to time by Generex representatives in respect of the same subject matter may contain "forward-looking statements" within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. These statements can be identified by introductory words such as "expects," "plan," "believes," "will," "achieve," "anticipate," "would," "should," "subject to" or words of similar meaning, and by the fact that they do not relate strictly to historical or current facts. Forward-looking statements frequently are used in discussing potential product applications, potential collaborations, product development activities, clinical studies, regulatory submissions and approvals, and similar operating matters. Many factors may cause actual results to differ from forward-looking statements, including inaccurate assumptions and a broad variety of risks and uncertainties, some of which are known and others of which are not. Known risks and uncertainties include those identified from time to time in the reports filed by Generex with the Securities and Exchange Commission, which should be considered together with any forward-looking statement. No forward-looking statement is a guarantee of future results or events, and one should avoid placing undue reliance on such statements. Generex undertakes no obligation to update publicly any forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise. Generex claims the protection of the safe harbor for forward-looking statements that is contained in the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act.

Generex Contact:

Generex Biotechnology Corporation

Joseph Moscato

646-599-6222

Todd Falls

1-800-391-6755 Extension 222

investor@generex.com
A man who allegedly incited migrant labourers to protest here amid lockdown was arrested by the police on Wednesday.

The man, Vinay Dubey, who was earlier detained for threatening to launch an agitation on April 18, was booked under Sections 117, 153 A, 188, 269, 270 and 505 (2) of the Indian Penal Code (IPC) and Section 3 of The Epidemic Diseases Act.

He will be produced before a local court later today.

Dubey has been accused of inciting migrants through his social media posts calling for action.

More than 1,000 migrant workers here gathered outside the station in Bandra on Tuesday and demanded transportation arrangements to go back to their hometowns, hours after Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced the extension of the ongoing nationwide lockdown till May 3.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
The streets of downtown Tomball arent as filled with pedestrians as they used to be, as Harris County is still under a stay-at-home order. Even so, the citys marketing and tourism department continues event planning.

Tomball recently cancelled its Rails & Tails Mudbug Festival scheduled for May 1, Marketing and Tourism Director Mike Baxter said. But they are still planning for their 4th of July celebration, having already booked musicians and fireworks and acquired permits for the festival, despite that possibly facing cancellation as well.

Were having to just continue as if things are gonna be OK, thats just all you can do, Baxter said.

VIDEO: First responders, neighbors hold parade to help Tomball boy celebrate birthday

While the marketing and tourism department made the arrangements and bookings for the years festivals back in January, Baxter said the city hasnt really lost any money that was budgeted for festivals and events.

All of our suppliers, entertainers, they get it, Baxter said. Even though we have an agreement were gonna do this, nobodys holding our feet to the fire saying we expect to be paid at this point, so everybodys working with us very well.

PANDA EXPRESS THANKS HEALTH CARE WORKERS: Tomball health care workers receive free Panda Express meals for service during COVID-19 pandemic

The department is funded primarily from hotel/motel tax dollars, but since the volume of people visiting is much lower due to the pandemic, Baxter said it remains to be seen how the lower tourism will affect the citys budget next year.

We all realize that as things are right now there will probably be some (budget) cuts, but we dont know yet what or to what degree, Baxter said. Were just gonna have to work through this thing and if we have to cut back on somethings, make things smaller, thats just the way it is. Then things will get back on track and well be good to go the following year.

Baxter said the a few months of the stay-at-home order shouldnt have a significant effect on the citys revenue. He mentioned that the city had a large reserve fund and is financially stable at this point.

The hit to Tomballs tourism market is being felt by the small businesses in Old Town Tomball, where many of these festivals are held. Baxter said the city is keeping in touch with downtown businesses, and that many of them are doing well and staying open by providing delivery or takeout from their restaurants.

The festivals were originally created as a marking tool to bring people in town, and if they dont spend their money today, theyll come back in a week or so, Baxter said. Since were not doing festivals, that tool has been taken away from us.

Jacob Loyd, the general manager at one downtown restaurant, Tejas Chocolate + Barbecue at 200 Elm St., said the restaurant is down in profit a significant amount but is still getting by so far through takeout business. But they have had to lay off some people since the stay-at-home order began.

We have hopes of bringing everyone back on once we get back to normal, Loyd said.

Veronica Gonzalez, a manager at Ciscos Salsa Company at 209 Commerce St., said lunchtime business hasnt been good but theyve seen steady business in the evenings.

Our dinners are steady, we have a lot of regulars so thats also a plus, Gonzalez said. Were staying afloat so thats what matters.

Gonzalez said they also had to lay off about half of their wait staff and kitchen staff, but said some are on hold and on unemployment. She hopes they will be back once the health crisis is over.

paul.wedding@hcnonline.com
A man in Louisville, Kentucky shot his wife dead before turning the gun on himself in a murder-suicide as authorities say domestic violence is on the increase amid coronavirus lockdowns.

John Wortman, 63, killed Rebekah, 60, on Friday night at their south Louisville home.

Their bodies were discovered around 11.20pm and the coroner declared the husband died of a self-inflicted wound.

A motive for the murder-suicide had not been reported but Louisville Police Department said that although statistics show domestic violence is on the rise, they haven't seen an increase in those calls and urged those suffering abuse to report it.

John Wortman, 63, killed Rebekah (pictured), 60, Friday at their home in Jefferson County

'We have heard from several victims at the domestic violence intake center that they didn't call police because they thought we were not coming,' Lt. Shannon Lauder said. 'And that's so concerning for us.

'If you call 911, and you need help, we are still coming. We will be there for you.'

Some police departments have warned in order to keep their officers and the community safe, they may not respond to some scenes amid the COVID-19 pandemic.

The Center for Women and Families said there was an increase in contact about physical and emotional domestic matters.

A USA Today study recently found there was a 10 to 30 percent increase in domestic disturbance calls to police around the country, in 19 out of the 20 agencies questioned.

'How do you stay safe in your own home when you have a perpetrator living in your home?' Elizabeth Wessels-Martin, CEO of the Center for Women and Families asked. 'And that's one of the things I don't think people were prepared for when we enforced this quarantine, what the dynamics would look like and the increase in violence.'

As someone who has survived domestic abuse, she said about being confined to a home: 'It's like you're constantly walking on eggshells. It's almost hard to breathe.'

She added: 'We are open just like we've always been,' Wessels-Martin echoed.' People can come to the center as a walk in, our crisis line is open, Greyhound is still running. So if folks need to relocate we will help them relocate.

'Get help. Get out. Save yourself. All it takes is one time.'

Houston Police Chief Art Acevedo said the city's aggravated assaults were up 10 percent in the last three weeks, and half of those were domestic violence, a significantly higher proportion than normal.

Calls to Missouri's child abuse and neglect hotline dropped by half as the virus first struck the state. Advocates said the calls aren't made because the kids aren't in school.

Another organization said children were suffering with domestic abuse during the pandemic too.

'And what we know about child abuse, especially child sexual abuse, is isolation helps keep that secret,' Pam Darnall, president and CO of the Family & Children's Place, told WDRB. 'So the more children are isolated from others the easier it is for that abuse to continue and to begin.'

A former colleague of Rebekah remembered her as an 'amazing person'.

'She always had a smile on her face and was just happy,' Joni Lofton told the Courier Journal. 'She loved her family, friends and clients. She liked to be busy and was very crafty.'

Lofton added to WDRB: 'She had so many sewing machines that would do embroidery, applique... She would give it as gifts.'

The pair worked together at a tax preparation office for several years and she referred to her as 'Becky'. But Lofton said they hadn't been in frequent contact since they changed jobs.

She was shocked about the deaths.

'I have no idea what on Earth could have been the cause of this,' Lofton said. 'I just feel numb.'
Of the many things were learning to do during the coronavirus pandemic, perhaps the most difficult, or at least the most frustrating, is manage our childrens at-home schooling.

Parents are navigating the world of homework on a new level, but there are many online resources for parents and educators.

READING/WRITING

Blue Willow Bookshop: Have a child who loves YA? The independent bookstore in West Houston is taking applications for its new Teen Advisory Council. bluewillowbookshop.com

Bookshare: The e-library has books and reading tools for children with dyslexia, blindness and other reading barriers. bookshare.org

Friendswood Library: Staff host live storytimes for all ages  toddlers to tweens. facebook.com/FriendswoodLibrary

Harry Potter at Home: Its Hogwarts for all at a new hub spearheaded by J.K. Rowling. Resources include a free audiobook, word searches, playtime ideas and a free series license for teachers. Wizardingworld.com

Writers In The Schools: For grades 6-12, the local non-profits new WITS U is a weekly opportunity for adolescents to learn from professional writers in virtual sessions that feature poetry lessons, writing prompts and more. witshouston.org

Storyline Online: Videos feature award-winning actors reading childrens books with illustrations. Celebrity readers include Viola Davis, Allison Janney, Annette Bening and Betty White at storylineonline.net.

Story Time from Space: Astronauts read childrens books from space. Really. storytimefromspace.com

Nessy: Designed to help children with dyslexia, Nessy is offering a free seven-day trial. nessy.com/

S.T.E.M.

Code.org: Try Hour of Code, online tutorials, games and other tools to inspire coding, such as a video introduced by Bill Gates. code.org

Girls Who Code: New, free resources for all include coding lessons in making binary bracelets, learning Python and making your own chatbot. girlswhocode.com/code-at-home

VEX Robotics: No robot is required to use the new, web-based virtual robotics resource for computer science teachers. vexrobotics.com

NASA At Home: Designed for kids K-12, the new at-home STEM resources include dial-a-moon (a daily high resolution image of the moon), space station emoji puzzles, videos and scientist chats. nasa.gov/nasa-at-home-for-kids-and-families

Space Center Houston: STEM learning happens at home with new resources including a spacecraft-designing contest, space seed growing, a virtual Apollo 13 exhibit and videos. spacecenter.org/

Tinkercad: The app teaches all ages about 3-D design and coding.

FOR PARENTS/TEACHERS

Fluency & Fitness: K-2 reading and math, indoor recess, brain breaks and more. Parents can get three free weeks of access. fluencyandfitness.com/

Grants for teachers: Public school teachers can get funds for classroom projects, thanks to donations from individuals and corporate partners including Chevron. donorschoose.org/teachers

Screencastify: The web-based tool that allows teachers to host virtual group classes is temporarily being offered to schools for free. Technology administrators can email sales@screencastify.com

Scholastic Learn at Home: Scholastic has released new daily lessons for grades K-9. In addition, there are teacher resources, author chats and new online hubs related to popular book series such as Dog Man. classroommagazines.scholastic.com

Studies Weekly: The K-6 Social Studies, Science and Civil Rights lessons are temporarily being offered for free at studiesweekly.com

Teachers Pay Teachers: The marketplace allows educators to buy consumable and distance learning materials from one another. teacherspayteachers.com

UTSA Institute of Texan Cultures: The website provides primary and secondary educational resources for teachers of all grade levels. texancultures.utsa.edu/resources

Khan Academy: A free online learning platform with practice exercises, instructional videos and a learning dashboard for students. It also has specialized content from NASA, the Museum of Modern Art, the California Academy of Sciences and MIT. There are now daily schedules for students in pre-K through grade 12 to follow from home. khanacademy.org/

Tinkergarten at Home: Free weekly activities, including outdoor fun, parent insights, online sessions with others and more. tinkergarten.com/

Rock Hall EDU: The Rock Hall of Fames digital learning platform, includes lesson plans, activities, videos, playlists and more from the Rock Halls Library & Archives. And its free. Among them are the Music & Civil Rights Collection, An Introduction to Rock Drumming with Max Weinberg and Good Vibrations Experiment. rockhall.com/

Science Kids: A vast amount of resources in science and technology, including projects for kids and lesson plans for teachers. Sciencekids.co.nz

The Smithsonian: Pre-K through 12 resources and training for educators and parents. learninglab.si.edu

Outschool: Outschool is offering free live online classes for students ages 3-18 that are done via video chat. Classes include English, math, social studies, science, coding, health and wellness, music, art and world languages. outschool.com/

YMCA of Greater Houston: The new virtual Y has storytime, on-demand workouts, live classes, educational tools for kids and more. ymcahouston.org

NATURE

Houston Museum of Natural Science: Online resources include virtual field trips, behind-the-scenes tours of the Cockrell Butterfly Center and a Wheres Waldo-esque picture search for museum artifacts. hmns.org/hmns-at-home

Houston Zoo: The series of meet-the-animals live streams are hosted by zookeepers who answer questions in real time via Facebook Live. Watch the animal encounters at 11 a.m. weekdays (facebook.com/houstonzoo) or anytime on youtube.com/houstonzoo. Since its temporary closure, the zoo has seen a nearly 3,000% increase in live cam viewers from across the globe who tune in to watch the everyday habits of flamingos, chimps, leafcutter ants and other zoo residents.

National Parks Foundation: While parks are closed, the National Parks Foundation is offering online resources, including nest-cams of bald eagles and livestreams of cherry blossoms in bloom. Nationalparks.org

Virtual farm tours: The American Dairy Association is offering virtual tours of farms for kids of all ages. americandairy.com

ART

Brazos Bookstore: Kids K-6th grade can enter a bookmark design contest, with winning designs distributed to customers this summer. The independent bookstore has launched a virtual middle grade book club via Zoom. brazosbookstore.com

Google Arts & Culture: The virtual portal has a vast amount of cultural resources, including the chance to explore artworks in renowned cultural institutions around the world such as the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. https://artsandculture.google.com/

Houston mural coloring book: Visit Houstons new, downloadable coloring book allows kids to use crayons to paint murals by local artists including downtowns Houston Is Inspired art. visithoustontexas.com/coronavirus-information-and-resources-for-travelers/virtual-activities/

Lunchtime Doodles With Mo Willems: The award-winning childrens author hosts a daily meet-up with kids, featuring lessons on drawing his beloved characters, celebrity cameos and storytelling. Videos are supplemented with activity sheets at kennedy-center.org/mowillems.

MUSEUMS

Childrens Museum of Houston: In addition to virtual maker classes (roller coaster-designing, atom-modeling), the museum hosts online bilingual storytimes, toddler singing sessions and science lessons. Cmhouston.org

The Woodlands Childrens Museum: Shadow puppet theater and storytime videos are available at woodlandschildrensmuseum.org.

NEWS

CNN 10: Often used in classrooms, the on-demand 10-minute videos break down todays headlines. cnn.com/cnn10

Houston Public Media TV 8: Houston Public Media has expanded its PBS Kids education programming for grades Pre-K - 12 via its television channels and houstonpublicmedia.org/tv8.

The New York Times for students: In a new initiative, high school teachers can grant their students access to a free digital subscription through July 6. nytimes.com/initiative/highschoolaccess

PBS Kids: PBS Kids offers a newsletter with activities and games for kids ages 2-8. The PBS KIDS Video app offers educational videos and a live stream of the PBS KIDS channel. The PBS KIDS Games app has almost 200 educational games. And PBS KIDS for Parents includes information, activities and tips for parents, including How to Talk to Your Kids About Coronavirus. pbskids.org/

LIBRARIES

Harris County Public Library: An iKnow Virtual Library Card is free and instantaneous, allowing access to audio books, e-books and other digital resources. hcpl.net/services/iknow-card

Houston Public Library: Any resident of Texas can get a free, instant library card to access e-books, audio books, newspaper subscriptions, music, streaming videos and other online resources. For grades K through college, the librarys Brainfuse tool offers homework help, live chatting with tutors, and writing assistance. The library hosts a virtual storytime Monday, Wednesday and Friday at 11 a.m. on Facebook. houstonlibrary.org and 832-393-1313 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Monday-Friday

GAME LEARNING

BrainPop: Parents can get free access to the sites games, animation and lessons on a variety of topics. brainpop.com

Dreamworks: The new Trolls World Tour download includes coloring tutorials, crafts, recipes and other fun inspired by the new Trolls movie. dreamworks.com

Lego Masters Builder: Inspired by the FOX reality show, the web-based game allows for virtual brick-building with AR. legomastersbuilder.com

Mattel Play Room: The toy companys new virtual tools include printable materials, videos, downloadable books, crafts and apps featuring brands such as Barbie, American Girl Doll, Hot Wheels, Uno and Thomas & Friends. mattel.com/playroom

Discovery Green: The parks online resources include a slime-making craft activity from The Orange Show, fitness classes and previously-recorded plays and concerts. Discoverygreen.com

Just Add Beats: The local entitys new course teaches kids in grades 2-12 how to use a phone to record podcasts and learn other techniques of music production, sound design and digital storytelling. Use promo code JABONLINE to get the class for free. just-add-beats.teachable.com

LANGUAGES

Duolingo: A free language learning platform that can teach you Spanish, French, Japanese and more. duolingo.com/
Shutdowns in the Philippines through April 30 to contain the coronavirus spread are expected to give President Rodrigo Duterte a new burst of public support despite economic hardships on a largely impoverished population.

Duterte ordered in March that the National Capital Region be sealed off through April 14 and two weeks ago extended the order through April 30. The initial mandate came after officials discovered local transmission of the deadly coronavirus-induced respiratory disease COVID-19 that has infected 5,223 people in the Philippines and killed 335.

Metro Manila, population 13 million, plus surrounding Luzon Island are subject to shutdowns and curfews through month's end.

Economic stimulus and public health aid expected to total $23 billion, up to 6% of GDP, in the Philippines is helping to ease discontent, analysts believe. They say the aid is reaching the poor as well as others after a rough, confusing start. In March, one group of slum dwellers in Metro Manila protested along a highway after not receiving food supplies as expected.

Vice President Leni Robredos office, for example, had distributed food packages to health workers, hospitals and community centers, her office said in a statement March 18.

Of course, there are challenges, but its slowing working into the system, so thats why they were confident in extending the lockdown to April 30, said Jonathan Ravelas, chief market strategist with Banco de Oro UniBank.

In a boost for Duterte, the Philippine Senate voted unanimously last month on a bill declaring a national state of emergency. The Senate gave Duterte special powers over the budget and government programs as related to coronavirus control, domestic media outlets reported.

Duterte  popular throughout his presidency that began in 2016  has generated more popularity through televised pep talks about his governments efforts, said Eduardo Araral, associate professor at the National University of Singapores public policy school.

I think the food and the money has started to trickle in, Araral said. Dutertes approval rating is still resilient. Hes on top of things, so that probably has kept the anger from boiling.

Duterte said Monday he would consider a gradual economic revival aimed at helping people affected by shutdowns, according to a statement on the presidential office website.

Shelter-in-place orders and mass business shutdowns have gripped much of the world since February as governments try to control virus caseloads by reducing social interaction.

Groups outside the Philippines have opposed some of the restrictions. In India, migrant workers unable to return home protested Tuesday against an extension of the countrys lockdown. People asked to shelter at home in parts of the United States have defied the order. In Germany, the Constitutional Court banned a planned rally to advocate the right to assembly even during a lockdown.

Land, air and sea travel in the Philippine capital region is restricted through April 30 and anyone entering the metro area for work from its farther-flung suburbs is supposed to show proof of employment. Shopping malls, a major source of retail income and service jobs, are closed.

The Southeast Asian country's economy depends partly on consumer spending, which is growing because of job creation on the back of new investments in factories, infrastructure and call centers. Officials hope GDP growth will ease poverty that afflicts one in five Filipinos. GDP could stall at no growth this year, Ravelas said.

Philippine officials have talked about replacing the lockdown next month with quarantines of infected communities or a phased-in lifting, people on the ground say. Public support could fade if harder restrictions last too long, analysts say.

In government, theyre very careful about how theyre going to proceed with things, because there might be some sensitivity to public sentiments and public reaction about how the administration is actually addressing the virus, said Herman Kraft, political science professor at University of the Philippines Diliman.
More than 600,000 have signed a petition demanding the government give hazard pay to all of its USPS workers continuing to brave the outside during the coronavirus lockdown.

It comes as 19 postal workers have died of coronavirus, while 500 have tested positive and another 6,000 have had to self-isolate, USPS leaders told Congress last week.

The petition claims that USPS staff have not been given adequate protective equipment as they work 12-hour overtime shifts, packing and loading potentially contaminated packages and letters.

'As of this present time, there have been upwards of more than 40 confirmed cases of coronavirus within the United States Postal Service,' the Change.org petition written on March 16 says.

A United States Postal Service (USPS) worker unloads packages from his truck in Manhattan during the outbreak of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) in New York City on Tuesday

A USPS worker toils in the rain in Manhattan during the coronavirus pandemic on Tuesday

'Megan Brennan USPS CEO hasn't sent any supplies such as had sanitizer or mask for employees protection, she made a very vague statement which basically read her employees should follow CDC guidelines.'

A spokesman for USPS said that the petition was exceedingly outdated and much had changed at the agency since it was written.

USPS employs some 600,000 staff and last Thursday Brennan asked lawmakers for another $50 billion in addition to a $10 billion loan already sanctioned by Congress last month.

'We are at a critical juncture in the life of the Postal Service,' Brennan told The Washington Post. 'At a time when America needs the Postal Service more than ever, the reason we are so needed is having a devastating effect on our business.'

USPS trucks are seen parked in rain in Manhattan during the outbreak of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) in New York City, New York

A USPS mail carrier pushes his cart while delivering mail in the rain on Manhattan's Upper West Side during the outbreak

It comes after staff at delivery titans UPS and FedEx said they were being kept in the dark about COVID-19 cases among their colleagues despite the deaths of three workers in a week.

Two dozen employees spoke with NBC Tuesday, accusing bosses of a 'frustrating lack of communication with front-line employees' that has caused widespread 'fear and anxiety' in the workforce.

UPS and FedEx are America's two largest corporate delivery companies, employing a combined total of 600,000 people. A large majority of employees are deemed 'essential workers', meaning that they continue to perform their duties despite the current pandemic.

However, both companies have confirmed that they have employees who have passed away from COVID-19.

Staff at UPS and FedEx say they're being left in the dark about cases of COVID-19 at their companies, despite the deaths of three delivery workers in the space of a week. A UPS employee is pictured in Washington DC last week

A UPS driver is pictured in a mask and gloves while on a delivery route amid the COVID-19 pandemic

Last week, FedEx announced that one of its company pilots, 32-year-old Paul Fox, had died from the virus. UPS also acknowledged that two employees at their Worldport facility in Louisville, Kentucky had also succumbed to the disease.

Long-time UPS worker Roml Ellis, 55, passed away on April 4. The company confirmed that a second employee from the facility died April 10.

The deaths have rattled co-workers at Worldport, who say they learned of Ellis' death from TV news.

'It was all hush-hush. The only reason we got the full details was because it was reported on the local news station,' one stated.

'How are any of us supposed to get ahead of a virus when we don't even know who's sick?' another frustrated UPS worker added.

Workers wear protective masks while loading boxes onto a delivery truck at the UPS ground sorting facility in Louisville, Kentucky last week. Two employees at the facility have died from COVID-19

Employees are pictured sorting packages at the UPS Worldport facility. Workers at Worldport say they were only provided with masks after their colleague passed away. They also allege that areas of their sprawling facility are 'not disinfected consistently'

The workers claim they repeatedly asked bosses about their sick co-workers, but management refused to provide any details citing 'privacy concerns'.

However, staff at Worldport say they need to know basic details for their own health and safety.

'We don't want to know people's names, but we do want to know if we were working in direct contact with somebody who's contagious,' one told NBC.

'All we get from the supervisors is 'the only thing we know is what management tells us.'

Workers at Worldport say they were only provided with masks after Ellis passed away. They also allege that areas of their sprawling facility are 'not disinfected consistently'.

Meanwhile, FedEx and UPS employees are 'still working in close proximity to one another' 'in the bellies of planes, in delivery trucks and in warehouses'.

The NBC report comes as the coronavirus pandemic worsens across much of the United States. Medical workers are pictured at Mount Sinai hospital in New York as they battle the outbreak

On April 9, it was reported that 16 FedEx pilots have tested positive for COVID-19. The company told NBC it has employees who have been diagnosed 'across the enterprise', but would not disclose the number.

Similarly, UPS would not tell the news network how many of its workers had tested positive to the virus.

DailyMail.com has reached out to both delivery companies for comment.

In a statement, UPS told DailyMail.com: 'UPS is saddened by the loss of our employees at Worldport, and we extend our deepest condolences to their families and friends.'

'When UPS learns of a COVID-19 positive case, we inform co-workers in their immediate work area that a case exists, without disclosing the individual identity of the ill employee due to healthcare privacy concerns.

'We are disclosing the incidents to co-workers who need to know because of their potential contact with the ill employee, however we do not communicate site-wide those instances of a diagnosis, as this is beyond the scope of guidance provided by public health officials.'

The NBC report comes as the coronavirus pandemic worsens across much of the United States. More than 600,000 Americans have tested positive to the disease, and 25,000 have died.
Houston hotels and motels must train their employees on how to spot human trafficking and contact law enforcement under an ordinance approved by city council Wednesday.

The mandate also requires the businesses keep records of the training, which they must produce within three days upon request by the city. All 524 Houston hotels and motels also must post signs that list common indicators of trafficking, along with phone numbers for local and national law enforcement and other information.

The ordinance takes effect immediately, but businesses will not have to certify their employees have been trained until March 31, 2021.

The measure was approved by a 16-0 vote with Councilmember Michael Kubosh absent.

Houston is the second major city in the country to adopt such an ordinance, after Baltimore. The Texas Hotel and Lodging Association said it supports the ordinance, and is planning to seek a statewide mandate from the Texas Legislature.

I view this as the first step and not the final step, Mayor Sylvester Turner said. Some council members said they want to impose further requirements in the future.

Most hotels chains already conduct training, but Minal Patel Davis, who led the ordinances drafting as the mayors special adviser on human trafficking, said the policy provides consistency by establishing standards for that training and a mandate for those that do not already provide it.

Some training, she said, only addresses sex trafficking and leaves out labor trafficking. Other programs do not have time pacing mechanisms for online training, which means one employee can complete the training for an entire staff in an hour. The city also will have the power to approve what training programs may be used.

Do brand hotels have their trainings? Yes, Patel Davis said. My question would be, if they are  why is the risk landscape what it is for the industry?

Choice Hotels, which operates the Cambria Hotel downtown and Comfort Suites, said it provides an in-house training tool for franchisees.

IHG, operating such brands as Holiday Inn and Crowne Plaza, said we condemn human trafficking in all forms and offer a free, mandatory training for all IHG-branded hotels in the Americas.

In December, three victims sued three major hotel chains, arguing that the companies exercised gross negligence about on-site prostitution at Houston hotels despite corporate policies that promote social responsibility. Those companies were Choice Hotels, Hilton Worldwide Holdings, and Wyndham Hotels.

A survey of trafficking survivors found that 80 percent of respondents said the commercial sex trade they experienced had occurred in hotels.

Houston had 202,352 unique ads directly marketing commercial sex over the last eight months, according to Children at Risk, a nonprofit that tracks such advertisements. That is second in the state to Dallas, the group said.

During a presentation last week, the policys authors referred to the case of the former Plainfield Inn, a hotel near the Bissonnet Track, known for street-level prostitution, where there were 400 calls for police service over two years.

The mother of one minor victim filed a civil lawsuit in 2017 after the body of her daughter, who was alleged to have been trafficked out of the motel, was murdered and found in a ditch. Petitions in that lawsuit argued she might have survived if employees had been empowered to spot trafficking.

READ THE TRACK: A three-part Chronicle investigation exploring Houstons reputation for trafficking

District J Councilman Edward Pollard, whose district includes the Bissonnet Track, called the ordinance a step in the right direction.

We do need to look at it and see what we can do to possibly make it stronger down the line, Pollard said, suggesting a 12-hour minimum rule for hotel and motel stays. Council member Robert Gallegos echoed that call.

The ordinance has been in the works since 2015 and incorporated suggestions from model legislation supported by the American Hotel and Lodging Association. Patel Davis said it includes fines to hold businesses accountable. It also forbids hotels and motels from retaliating against an employee who reports trafficking.

The ordinance includes fines of $100 for first violations and $500 after that. Each day the policy is violated is considered a separate infraction.

Justin Bragiel, general counsel for the Texas Hotel and Lodging Association, told council members last week that the ordinance will help reach the hotels falling through the cracks.

Our hope with the ordinance is that well be able to reach the hotels that maybe arent members of our association or arent affiliated with a major hotel brand where human trafficking training is already mandated by brand standards, Bragiel said. So this will be broader and, hopefully, wider.

dylan.mcguinness@chron.com
The Butte County Sheriff's Office has detailed the strange case of Paradise Vice Mayor Michael Zuccolillo, who was apprehended Tuesday after police say he sent explicit messages to a girl he thought was 16 years old.

But she was not a teen girl  the internet profile was the creation of a man with a personal vendetta against Zuccolillo, police say.

On Feb. 24, an individual contacted sheriff's detectives with a tip that Zuccolillo, 41, was sending sexually explicit messages to a minor. "Due to animosity he had for Zuccolillo resulting from a bad business deal" Butte County sheriffs say he invented the profile of a 16-year-old girl from China visiting the Sacramento area. He claimed the "girl" was exchanging messages with Zuccolillo, who was allegedly planning on meeting up with the girl for sex.

"The subject told sheriff's detectives he obtained the evidence by targeting Zuccolillo in what is best described as a self-initiated 'to catch a predator' style operation," the sheriff's office wrote in a press release. "Detectives were leery of the information provided by the subject," it added, "and questioned the veracity of the evidence provided by the subject given the subject's motivation for targeting Zuccolillo."

But based on the severity of the allegations, police began conducting their own investigation. They told the man to end all contact with Zuccolillo and took possession of the fake profile. Police then put an undercover officer on the profile; according to the Butte County District Attorney's Office, Zuccolillo continued to send the "girl" sexually explicit texts and photos of himself.

The D.A.'s office filed charges of arranging a meeting with a minor for the purpose of engaging in lewd or lascivious behavior, sending harmful material to a minor, and communicating with a minor for the purpose of engaging in sexual conduct against Zuccolillo.

He turned himself in Tuesday and posted his $135,000 bail. His arraignment is set for July 10.

Zuccolillo, a real estate broker, was elected to the Paradise town council in 2016. Last year, he was selected for a one-year term as vice mayor by his fellow council members. That term ends on Dec. 8.

At a town council meeting Tuesday night, Mayor Greg Bolin read a statement about Zuccolillo's arrest.

"Paradise Town Council members along with many members of the public were surprised to learn of Vice Mayor Zuccolillo's arrest today," Bolin said. "This matter is very serious and the town understands there is a criminal justice process that will now take place. Since this is an ongoing criminal matter the town will no further comment on this subject. We continue to focus on the rebuilding of the town and bringing residents and businesses back home. We'll leave it at that."

Katie Dowd is a senior digital editor with SFGATE. Email her: katie.dowd@sfgate.com.
I am very proud of the team and their continued hard work and dedication"

A COUNCIL-run care home has been rated good following a Care Quality Commission (CQC) inspection.

West Berkshire Councils Willows Edge Care Home in Newbury was rated good in all inspection categories  safe, effective, caring, responsive and well-led.

The home provides personal care to up to 39 residents aged 65 and over.

The CQC report, published on March 24, follows an inspection visit on February 27.

The home was also rated good during its last inspection in 2017.

In the summary report, inspectors said that People spoke positively of the staff.

Staff were kind and compassionate and interacted well with people. The atmosphere was relaxed, friendly and welcoming.

People told us staff respected their privacy and dignity.

The report added: People we spoke with and healthcare professionals we spoke with all spoke highly of the service in general and the registered manager and the level of support and leadership they provided.

Willows Edge Care Home registered manager Pooja Dhoot said: The team at Willows Edge go above and beyond every day to ensure our residents are safe and happy.

I am very proud of the team and their continued hard work and dedication.

The CQC said that there were enough staff on duty to meet peoples needs and that staffing levels were above the recommended level on the day of the inspection.

The report said that processes were in place to control and prevent the spread of infection, with staff understanding their responsibilities.

Work to make the home more dementia-friendly that was flagged up during the homes last inspection had been carried out.

Inspectors said that significant refurbishment work had been completed.

One health professional told the CQC: I have a good example of joined-up care here.

One person came here from hospital with some specialist equipment, but no instructions or training had been provided.

Staff here went back to the hospital to be trained on how to use it.

Another said: It is the considered opinion of all my colleagues that the care received by residents at Willows Edge is amongst the best in our experience.

Residents at the home said that staff were kind and that they could have a laugh together.

West Berkshire Council executive member for adult social care Graham Bridgman (Con, Burghfield and Mortimer) said: I want to say thank you to Pooja Dhoot, our registered manager, and to all of her staff for the efforts they put in day to day to make Willows Edge such a great care home, for the benefit of all of the residents.

Ensuring that our vulnerable children and adults achieve better outcomes is a key element of our council strategy and it is great to see Pooja and her team recognised for their part in achieving this.

I would also like to take this opportunity to thank the staff in all of the care homes across the district, both those run by the council and those in the private sector, for the efforts they are making on behalf of all of us to deal with the Covid-19 emergency  they are very much in the front line and we all appreciate their efforts.
Accra, April 10, 2020- GB Foods Africa -Ghana, manufacturers of Gino & Pomo range of food products, has donated money and other items valued at GHS 350,000 to the government to support the fight against the COVID-19 pandemic in the country.

The donation comprises a cheque of GHS 100,000 and sanitary and medical items including hand sanitizers, liquid hand washes soaps, paper towels, and GB Foods products comprising Gino rice, tomato mix, pasta, and seasoning tablets.

GB Foods General Manager of BU Ghana, Mr. David Kofi Afflu in presenting the items said, During this period, we understand that people across all sectors are facing a range of difficulties with an outbreak such as this unprecedented one. This donation is a demonstration of GB Foods commitment to supporting Government in its fight against the disease as well as health workers and the wider community.

The cheque will go to the Government of Ghana COVID-19 Fund while the medical items will be delivered to the Noguchi Memorial Institute for Medical Research and the Greater Accra Regional Hospital.

The Veronica Buckets and GB Foods products will be given to the Ministry of Local Government to be placed in open markets in Accra and Kumasi to aid with frequent hand washing while the food will go to support the feeding of those who are vulnerable.

Management of GB Foods used the opportunity to urge all Ghanaians to observe the protocols established by the Ghana Health Service and other relevant international and local authorities to help stem the spread of COVID-19.

Ghanas total confirmed Covid-19 cases as of Wednesday 11.04.2020 stood at 636 including 8 deaths and 17 recoveries. Eight regions have so far reported cases  Upper East Region, Central Region, Ashanti Region, Upper West Region, Eastern Region, Northern Region, Greater Accra Region, and North East Region.
The movement of ships at Indian ports is almost halted because of the lockdown and quarantine measures taken by the government to control coronavirus pandemic. "There are scary views of ships waiting at the mid-sea for days at the Mumbai, Gujarat and the west coasts because of the manpower shortage and logistics problems at the ports," said a senior executive of a shipping line.



The government has not paid heed to the problems at the ports. The vessels, which sail a short distance of less than 14 days, have to complete the remaining days mid-sea to prove that their crews don't have the virus epidemic. Besides, when the vessels get the berth, offloading and uploading become a severe issue as less than 20 per cent workers are present at the ports and there are no trucks to carry the goods to different parts.





The inter-state traffic has become nearly impossible even for the trucks that carry essential goods.

Most of the ports have declared force majeure. It means ports will not be responsible for any claims against damages and charges because of the unprecedented situation. Force majeure clause absolves firms of meeting their contractual commitments for reasons beyond their control.



Adani Ports and Special Economic Zone (APSEZ), India's biggest private port operating firm, has declared force majeure at its facilities in Mundra, Tuna and Dhamra in the wake of lockdown imposed by the government.



Berthing operations and truck movement were disrupted across the ports in the country. Shipping lines continue to cancel sailing. The containers are stuck in transshipment across major ports because of the global trade restrictions. "Large number of containers have been stuck in transshipment and the rise of 'Blank Sailings' (cancellations) by shipping lines has lead to a shortage of empty containers," says an industry expert.





Ports and shipping companies are likely to post huge losses because of the lockdown as it leads to delay in delivery of necessary goods across the globe.

The world's biggest container line Maersk announced that the global shipping industry would face a hard time this year due to disruption in trade. Maersk's chief executive Soren Skou said that the scarcity of workers is creating a huge pressure on transportation.A lot of ships are lying idle on Asian ports due to the cancellation of shipments from China.

Also Read: Coronavirus Lockdown Live Updates: Govt identifies 170 districts as hotspots; total cases in India reach 11,933

Also Read: Coronavirus lockdown 2.0: All agricultural activities to remain fully functional, says govt
Distance is an independent short film by Nashville-based Evolve Studios. The film was released on You Tube to spread home amid the COVID-19 pandemic and is receiving accolades for its message of hope. As a writer, I always try to look at telling stories that help connect the audience with their feelings. So, when this pandemic hit the U.S., I thought how much more do we need messages of hope right now? -- Filmmaker and Evolve Studios co-founder Jesse Edwards

When Evolve Studio co-founder Jesse Edwards saw firsthand how the COVID-19 pandemic was having a very negative effect on those close to him, he did what any filmmaker would do. He turned his desire to help into a short film. The result, Distance, was released to YouTube on April 10 and is already garnering publicity and attention for its message of hope in a time when everyone is hungry for a ray of light.

Its a story told through the eyes of everyday people dealing with very real emotions. Simply put, this film examines fear, sadness, anger, desperation, frustration -- and most importantly -- hope.

Everyone we know is afraid right now and hurting in some way, Edwards said. We knew the world needed a message of hope specific to this moment. When the U.S. declared a State of Emergency, a lot of people lost their jobs and were immediately displaced. I thought right away, What about those who were already unemployed? What about those with relationships that were already broken? What hope exists for those who have lost everything and are now even more completely alone?

With the combination of social isolation, sickness, job and income loss and justified fears regarding COVID-19; the toll on mental health, psychological distress, substance abuse and suicide could be substantial. The World Health Organization estimates roughly one million people commit suicide each year, but thats in a normal year. What would this pandemic do to the suicide numbers for this year?

It was a sobering thought that set him into action.

In true first-responder fashion, the storyteller in him rallied the team at Evolve and began putting his ideas on film. Instead of focusing on the devastation of this worldwide pandemic, Edwards chose to focus on a message of hope shown through the heart of a little girl and the power and magnitude of one simple gesture.

We needed to put something into the world injecting hope into it, and if it could change even one life it was worth it, he said.

The result is Distance, a 15-minute independent short film with an official rating (PG) by the Motion Picture Association (MPA).

Jesse and his brother Joel, who produced the film, knew the window was closing because Tennessee didn't have mandated restrictions in place yet, but other states did.

We knew if we were going to create a film about this current moment, it had to be now, Jesse Edwards said. The screenplay was written within 48 hours, the film was cast within 24 hours, principle photography completed within 2 days, and post production immediately followed for another 11 days, all while abiding by state, federal and local restrictions and COVID-19 best practices.

This was a filmmakers fire drill like no other. Joel Edwards said. It's honestly a miracle that the film materialized in the timeframe, legal window, and with the precautions we took and limitations that we had. Our team also did an incredible sprint in post. The editorial, original score, VFX came together in less than two weeks. Im so proud of the way our studio could rally around this moment in time and produce a powerful narrative story that speaks to our current COVID-19 reality. Im not sure there is anything else like this in the content universe.

Going from script to screen is a process that can traditionally take months, not weeks, but Jesse Edwards said if they could have finished it sooner, they would have.

As a writer, I always try to look at telling stories that help connect the audience with their feelings, he said. Maybe even feelings they dont know they have such as fear, shame, or loneliness. So, when this pandemic hit the U.S., I thought how much more do we need messages of hope right now?

He added that every conversation he had with people hes close to, he could hear fear and concern in their voices as they are thrust into so many unknowns.

My heart went out to all the people who dont have someone to call them right now, he said. From there, Normans character was born. He was a person who, for reasons completely separate from the pandemic, has shut the world out and doesnt feel like he can talk to his family.

The inspiration for the catalyst of hope in the movie came from Edwards own little girls and the simple gestures they do for their daddy that carry equal parts simplicity and magnitude.

Every day for the last couple of months, my 5-year-old girl will have made me a stack of cards. She just decorates different pieces of paper and hands them to me. In that moment, I try to forget about my day and look at what she has done while waiting for me to come home. Its such a simple, beautiful act, he said.

Without giving too much away, lets just say that a young child and her simple gesture of kindness to one stranger carries enough impact to change the lives of those who watch this film.

And because getting this message out was such an important driver behind this film, the Edwards brothers decided instead of licensing or selling the movie, they would put it on YouTube and other VOD platforms for everyone to have access to it for free.

The film premiered April 10, and can be viewed here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IBKe0eSS6VI

I am excited about equipping the audience of this film to hear these words and to share them with other people, Jesse said. The more we can come together, the more we can heal. Maybe someone who watches this film needs to hear Youre not alone. Im scared too and Im here for you.

For more information on the Motion Picture Association and film ratings, click here: https://www.motionpictures.org/ and https://www.filmratings.com/.

The filming operated within complete compliance of the State of Tennessee, US Federal Government mandates and CDC recommendations around COVID-19 best practices. Production followed volunteer, micro limited crew & cast footprint, social distancing, and strict clean-set protocols. The filmmakers acknowledge the threat posed by the spread of COVID-19 is real, alarming and should be taken very seriously. Strict precautions were thoroughly evaluated and enforced to ensure a safe set.

ABOUT EVOLVE STUDIOS

Nashville, TN-based independent, award-winning, Evolve Studios produces premium content for a wide array of partners including Disney, National Geographic, ESPN, Netflix, NBC Universal, HBO, Discovery and many others. Evolve was founded in 2010 by brothers, Joel & Jesse Edwards. What started out as an entrepreneurial dream for the two Vimeo Kids, fueled by an iMac, DSLRs & ramen noodles, Evolve Studios is now becoming one of the most discreetly influential original & branded content studios. As a full-service production company, Evolve produces a diverse range of premium content from original episodic series, branded & commercial content, films, documentaries, promos, music videos, digital films and immersive VR content.

Evolves work has been recognized with numerous awards including 5 National Television Emmys, 42 Emmy nominations & many other top industry accolades.

Empowered by incredible young talent, team culture and blue-collar creative work effort, Evolve has built a multifaceted studio that produces in three industry verticals all from the new content frontier in Nashville, Tennessee.

To learn more, visit http://www.evolve.studio

ONLINE PRESS KIT WITH IMAGES AND VIDEO CLIPS IS HERE: https://www.dropbox.com/sh/ej76od7a7uxfr44/AAC3bnyQJDLYYar7Hzc6Ypq9a?dl=0

CONTACT: Melonee Hurt

buzz@evolve.studio

615.496.4411
Union Human Resource Development Minister Ramesh Pokhriyal Nishank on Tuesday said that students can use the online portal of government to study during the lockdown, which has been extended till May 3 in the view of coronavirus spread.

We have started online study programme through Diksha, Swayam Prabha, E-Pathshala in which all the study material is available for higher education. The material is also provided for parents, students and teachers who can use it anytime, Pokhriyal said.

He said that students of class I to VIII have been promoted to the next class in the view of the situation and students of class IX and XI have been promoted on the basis of internal exams.

We will plan for students of class X and XII so that we can conduct the exams after the situation improves. Students do not need to panic and we are concerned about the (academic) year of the students, he said.

He appealed to businessmen to join hands with the research institutions and researchers who are developing various types of equipment in the fight COVID-19 so that they can provide it to people at nominal rates.

The 21-day nationwide lockdown in India, which was imposed till April 14, has been extended till May 3.
Schools in New South Wales will re-open within five weeks, Premier Gladys Berejikilan said today.

Term two starts on 27 April and schools will return to some normality three weeks later.

In her press conference this morning, Ms Berejiklian said: 'We envisage the school term will be very exactly the same as what the end of term one was like.

'However, from week three of term two there will be more face-to-face contact for students.'

Schools in New South Wales will re-open within five weeks, Premier Gladys Berejikilan (pictured) said today

Victoria has no plans to re-introduce face-to-face teaching.

The state's education secretary James Merlino said today: 'If you can learn from home you must learn from home.'

He said around three per cent of students were going to school and the rest were at home.

Schools are open for children who cannot learn from home if their parents have to go to work.

All states and territories, except the Northern Territory where attendance is compulsory, have made school optional or told parents not to send children to class during the coronavirus pandemic.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison, was pushing for schools to re-open as the risk of serious infection was very low among that age group - but unions expressed concerns about teacher safety.

Chief Medical Officer Brendan Murphy said the powerful unions were responsible for shutting down schools against the wishes of state premiers.

'Most of the state governments actually didn't want to close the schools, it was the parents and the teachers who closed the schools,' he told a New Zealand parliamentary hearing.

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

On Tuesday night Mr Morrison released a video asking teachers to agree to go back to work, saying: 'Your students and their families are relying on you more than ever.'

The President of the Queensland Teachers Union told Mr Morrison to 'butt out' and insisted that teachers should not have to attend school.

President Kevin Bates claimed that 'young people will not suffer' from learning online - despite strong evidence that children learn far better in a classroom environment.

But health experts have repeatedly said schools are safe and on Wednesday afternoon Deputy Chief Medical Officer Dr Nick Coatsworth again re-iterated it was fine for schools to be open.

Children make up only two per cent of coronavirus cases in Australia, he said.

'It's the view of the Australian Health Protection Principal Committee that schools are safe places because of the low rates of transmission.'

He described teachers as 'essential' and said the AHPPC will advise the National Cabinet how to make schools even safer so they can re-open.

The National Cabinet will this morning discuss plans to get schools open within three to four weeks, with each state and territory likely to move at different times.

Australia has made significant progress in the fight against coronavirus, with a clear flattening of the curve on the graph that measures the daily infection rate

Classrooms across the nation were virtually empty toward the end of term one as parents stopped sending their children to school

The Prime Minister said teachers are 'more likely to catch coronavirus in the staffroom than they are in the classroom' and said he was 'very concerned' about current levels of teaching.

'I kept my kids in school up until the last week because they weren't getting taught at school in that last week.

'They were sitting in a room looking at a screen - that's not teaching, that's child minding and schools aren't for child minding,' he said.
Wayne Hoffman knew something wasnt right when he started having trouble breathing.

For days, the 65-year-old had a high fever and respiratory issues, and on March 24 he worsened enough to warrant a trip to the emergency room.

It was there that he and his wife got the news no one wants to hear: You have the coronavirus.

Hoffman was put into an induced coma and put on a ventilator for nearly two weeks. He came out of sedation with tremors that make it hard for him to talk or write, and he needs to learn to walk again from spending so much time in a hospital bed.

I was a little confused. It was hard with the speech, Hoffman said in a phone interview while recovering at the Penn State Health Milton S. Hershey Medical Center.

Hoffman shares the diagnosis with thousands of Pennsylvanians, but Hoffman is unique in many ways  especially because of his alter ego.

For more than three decades, the Lebanon resident has been affectionately known in central Pennsylvania as Huffy the Clown.

His talents have transformed over the years, from balloon animals, to magic, to DJing and now, biker shows.

Everyone still needs to have fun," Hoffman said. Its seeing the gratification  the smile when you make a balloon for someone, that smile thats on a kids face or on an adults face.

Hoffman was managing a Ponderosa Steakhouse 35 years ago when he met a clown who came into the restaurant to make balloon animals for customers. After the clown had a stroke, he asked Hoffman if hed be interested in taking over. The rest, as they say, is history.

Several years ago, Hoffman combined the persona with a love of motorcycles and started emceeing or riding at rodeos as a scary clown. These shows have taken him to states up and down the East Coast and as far away as Daytona, Fla.

Hoffman has also been featured at central Pennsylvania events like the Lebanon Area Fair and the Cherry Blossom Festival in Millersburg.

Years of bringing smiles to the community have made him well-known, and loved. When news spread that Huffy the Clown had the coronavirus, people flocked to social media to look for updates.

We are asking for healing thoughts and prayers for one of our members, Wayne Huffy the Clown Hoffman, a member of the Lebanon Valley Motorcycle Club wrote on Facebook. Positive healing thoughts and prayers are appreciated!

Hoffman said the support has helped make the weeks spent alone in his hospital bed, separated from his wife, Wendy, easier to bear.

It makes you feel good when you have the support from other people," Hoffman said. Its going to be a rough, rough journey for a little bit here.

Hes already started physical therapy through video calls, and hopes to be discharged from the hospital soon. He needs to test negative for the virus twice in 48 hours before he can go home.

Hoffman said hes thankful to be on the upswing, but knows how serious his situation could have become.

This COVID-19 is no joke," he said. I know Im a clown and I joke around all the time, but this is serious stuff.
In the wake of international students struggling economically due to unprecedented coronavirus outbreak, a United States federal agency has said on April 14 that they can now apply for off-campus work authorisation. Seen as a major relief among thousands of foreign students in the US including Indians, the announcement was made by US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) if the student faces severe economic hardship because of the pandemic. However, the official statement included that there are certain regulatory requirements which have to be fulfilled before the work permit is granted. All applications by the international students would be reviewed case-by-case.

The USCIS said, If you experience severe economic hardship because of unforeseen circumstances beyond your control, you may request employment authorisation to work off-campus (if you meet certain regulatory requirements).

Read - Kemba Walker Donates Headphones To Students To Help Them Adjust Amid COVID-19 Outbreak

For the most recent policy updates, operational changes, and other COVID-19 resources & info, please visit: https://t.co/YAt68QsUCp  USCIS (@USCIS) April 13, 2020

As of April 15, while the coronavirus infections in the US have reached 614,246 with at least 26,064 fatalities, the examples that US federal agency gave for foreign students to apply for off-campus work authorisation included severe financial condition, payment of medical bills, among other exceptions. Amid the global health crisis, as the fatal COVID-19 sweeps across the globe, a large number of international students were left stranded in the US including the ones from India with universities shut down and having no place to work.

In a bid to slow the spread of coronavirus, White House had ordered on March 13 for all educational institutions to be closed. Moreover, certain students were even asked to leave their allotted dorm rooms for the rest of the session. According to reports, there are expected to be at least 250,000 Indian students in America. Even though many were able to return by March 22 until India suspended its international flights, hundreds of others were still left due to a lack of resources. Some Indian-American hotel owners have stood up to provide assistance to such students and offered free accommodations, meals in some cases.

Read - Embassy Of India In Israel Salutes Indian Students For Helping Israel In COVID-19 Battle

Read - HRD Min Ramesh Pokhriyal Asks Students To Use Online Govt Portal To Study During Lockdown

All 50 states under the Presidential disaster declaration

Meanwhile, US President Donald Trump issued a disaster declaration for Wyoming on April 12 which implies that all 50 states will be under such declaration for the first time in history. According to White House Press Secretary, Judd Deere, a US President has never before declared a major disaster in all its states at once. Donald Trump not only tweeted about the move himself but also said that the country is "winning" against the "war with the invisible enemy". The declaration came on the same day the US surpassed the COVID-19 death toll of Italy which is also one of the hardest-hit countries of the pandemic outside China, where it originated. The nationwide number of casualties in the US hiked from 10,000 to more than 20,000 in reportedly just five days.

Read - Promote Students Of Classes 6-9 & Class 11; Focus On E-learning: UP Govt
Northern Ireland's electricity grid is in need of enhancement with a shrinking capacity margin on the horizon

SONI, the system operator for electricity in Northern Ireland, has drafted proposals for the strengthening and enhancing of the NI electricity grid.

The draft, an updated 10-year plan for the years to 2028, is expected to ask the Utility Regulator to approve capital investment costing 465m, equivalent to over 45m each year.

Energy users now have the opportunity to comment on the draft SONI plan. Is it ambitious enough to underpin the needs of the NI economy? Can customers afford to pay for it?

The details of 81 projects included in the draft plan by SONI have been published by the regulator as a step in building approval for a comprehensive plan.

This development plan comes at a critical juncture: the all-island integrated single electricity market is evolving from the structural changes introduced two years ago, but now continuing to function on an all-island basis after the UK has left the EU, with a special protocol which allows the all-island SEM to remain as an agreed UK-EU arrangement.

The amended NI electricity investment plan builds on a recent All-Island Electricity Capacity Statement showing that, north and south, the amount of spare electricity generating capacity has been reducing to the point where new investment and changed transmission systems are needed if the grid, for the whole island, is to be sustainable for the longer term.

A capacity deficit of over 220mw is expected in the Republic of Ireland by 2024.

By 2025, in Northern Ireland the capacity margin could be as low as 50mw - well below any recent year.

The Northern Ireland capacity estimate assumes that by 2025, the Kilroot coal-burning power plant will have closed.

The draft SONI plan envisages a series of upgrades and new developments which would make the all-island grid ready for a modest increase in electricity demand.

Critically, the draft SONI plan presents four major capital investment projects. These are:

 a high-capacity 400kv interconnector from Tyrone to Cavan (long awaited);

 major re-enforcement of the grid from Magherafelt to Coolkeeragh;

 major re-enforcement of the grid from Ballylumford to Castlereagh; and

 an underground connection from a large 480mw Belfast power station to Castlereagh.

While there is a growing appreciation that the major cross-border interconnector is overdue and could be a source of all-island financial savings, the draft plan expects the project to be operational by 2023.

Recent NI developments would suggest that timing looks optimistic.

The high-capacity north-south interconnector already has full planning permission on the southern side of the border but still awaits final approval from the Executive Minister for Infrastructure, Nichola Mallon.

In a further cross-border link, a connection from Turleenan in Co Tyrone to Dromore in Co Donegal is planned to enhance electricity supplies into Donegal.

SONI has made some changes to the development plan which is now to be updated.

Two potentially large projects, listed last year, have been removed from the proposed new investment plan.

Several years ago, investors assessed the merits of a compressed air energy storage scheme, to generate electricity to add to capacity when the system was operating with high demand (with higher sales prices) and to store compressed air in underground caverns when load on the grid was low and this would be comparatively cheap.

The SONI draft plan notes that this project has been cancelled.

A second potentially large project is also removed from the plan. There was in recent years a serious commercial interest in harnessing the tidal energy around the north coast of Co Antrim.

The possible application for a grid connection to undersea turbines at Fair Head and Torr Head has disappeared because the application has been withdrawn.

For the immediate future, there seems to be no expectation of any coastal energy generation facilities. Earlier investigations in Strangford Lough or off the south Down coast have left no declared proposals.

Nevertheless, the SONI draft plan points to compelling developments if the electricity grid is to function successfully.
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Linkedin Apriadi Gunawan (The Jakarta Post) Medan, North Sumatra  Wed, April 15, 2020 15:16 636 fc6853813033f564188675f8bd20ca8f 1 National COVID-19,coronavirus,virus-corona,virus-korona-indonesia,North-Sumatra,Medan,Belawan-port,quarantine,ship,health-quarantine Free

North Sumatra health authorities have placed dozens of passengers and crew members of KM Kelud into quarantine after three crewmen tested positive for COVID-19 upon arriving at Belawan Port in Medan on Monday evening.

North Sumatra COVID-19 task force spokesperson Aris Yudhariansyah said the three crewmen were taken to an isolation ward at the Martha Friska Hospital in Medan. Meanwhile, 36 passengers and 14 other crew members were put in quarantine in two separate places.

All passengers are quarantined at a site of plantation company PT Perkebunan Nusantara [PTPN] III in Sungai Karang subdistrict, while the crewmen are quarantined on board the ship, Aris said on Tuesday.

He added 36 passengers would be quarantined for four days in Sungai Karang before representatives of the local administration took them for a 14-day quarantine in their respective regions.

Rapid testing prior to docking at Belawan Port also showed that 40 crewmen had contracted the disease. Thirty-nine of them were evacuated to the Galang Island COVID-19 Specialist Hospital in Riau Islands, while another one was taken to an isolation ward at BP Batam Hospital in Batam, also in Riau Islands.

Read also: Medan toddler suspected of COVID-19 infection dies

KM Kelud sailed from Tanjung Priok Port in Jakarta to Riau Islands and North Sumatra carrying a total of 111 passengers and 57 crew.

Thirty-one passengers got off at Batu Ampar Port in Batam and 44 others at Tanjung Balai Karimun Port in Riau Islands. Meanwhile, 36 people disembarked at Belawan Port in Medan.

State-owned shipping company PT Pelni corporate secretary Yahya Kuncoro said the Port Health Authority (KKP) had adhered to the health protocol by spraying disinfectant on all parts of the ship right after it docked at Belawan Port.

The ship is now placed 9 miles from the port. We will quarantine KM Kelud for 14 days in that location starting today, Yahya said on Tuesday.

As of Monday, no passenger was reported to have tested positive for COVID-19. (aly)
The coronavirus pandemic has not shut down the day-to-day business of adjusting claims, but the workload is lighter and claims managers are coping with evolving government regulations and guidelines.

Crawford & Co. says it has added a new step to its vetting process. Each claim is reviewed by a triage specialist and assigned to the right team. When an on-site visit is requested, the company contacts the policyholder by telephone and email and asked a series of questions to evaluate the risk.

Ken Tolson, U.S. president of Crawford Claims Solutions, said so far only 3 percent of the policyholders contacted have said they are suffering from flu-like symptoms, or have recently returned from an overseas trip or a high-risk area. He said when claimants are determined to be a high risk, his company asks if they are willing to use a self-service app so personal contact can be avoided.

He said 30% of policyholders said yes in the risk-assessment survey that started three weeks ago, but thats a very small sample size. He said knows by experience that 65% to 70% of policyholders will participate in some form of self service if asked.

Crawford & Co. was one step ahead of the pandemic in one sense. In 2017 the company purchased a majority stake WeGoLook, a tech company headquartered in Oklahoma City that designed a gig-economy platform. Crawford sends one of its 46,000 lookers to the site of the claim to take video that can be used by a professional adjuster to survey damages, Tolson said. The lookers follow a script on the YouGoLook smart phone app telling them exactly what to photograph and from which angles.

Tolson said Crawford & Co. was an earlier adopter of technology to assist in claims management, but the pandemic has enlightened the entire industry.

What we are seeing now is an acceleration of adoption of these tools, Tolson said. Up until now, a lot of people have tinkered with it, but never really embedded it into their claims processes.

Some claims still require an on-site visit. In those cases, Crawford follows whatever guidelines are requested by its carrier clients.

Tolson said some carriers have directed that no in-home visits be allowed. In those instances, the company has to persuade the homeowner to use a self-service app or simply delay the inspection until the situation changes, he said.

Other carriers insist that all adjusters wear gloves and masks, Tolson said. But the guidelines vary by location. In Canada, public health officials ask that only people who are experiencing symptoms to wear masks and gloves. That created an awkward situation for one carrier that had issued an edict that all of its claims handlers wear masks and gloves while out in the field, he said.

One thing all health officials seem to agree on is the value of using hand sanitizer in situations where it is impossible to wash your hands. Tolson said Crawford & Co. wasnt able to buy enough sanitizer for the hundreds of adjusters that it employs in locations scattered around the country, so it decided to manufacture the product itself. He said the company mixed alcohol with glycerine and distributed bottles throughout its workforce. It also contracted with distilleries to continue production.

Our purchasing and procurement people are quite creative, he said.

Medical and pharmacy management provider Mitchell International has a close-up view of how insurance carriers are going about the business of adjusting auto and workers compensation claims. The San Diego-based company has a 70 percent market share in the bill review space for auto, and 30 percent in workers comp, said Michele Hibbert, senior vice president for regulatory compliance.

Hibbert said carriers are reporting from 30 percent to 60 percent declines in personal auto claims. She said its too soon to report changes in volume for other lines, however Mitchell expects an increase in commercial auto claims as stay-at-home orders increase the number of deliveries.

Hibbert said for the most part insurance carriers have quickly adapted to the new work-from-home regime. She said State Farm, one of Mitchells clients, has nearly 30,000 claims representatives now working remotely.

I have been utterly impressed, she said. They are not missing a beat.

Hibbert said the pandemic has added a layer of complexity to the business of claims adjusting as insurance commissioners around the country issue edicts demanding that carriers be flexible when adjusting claims.

We live after every word those regulators write, she said. We are being very careful when reading these things. When you are axed to be quote-unquote flexible, what does that really mean?

For the workers comp line, the primary change has been an increased focus on telemedicine. Hibbert said some states are allowing prescriptions to be prescribed after telemedicine treatment instead of requiring the usual in-person visit. Theres also been a push toward telephonic court hearings.

Hibbert said one concern she has for workers compensation is that many of the claims involve soft-tissue injuries that requires palliative care. What happens if treatment is delayed for several weeks? Carriers will have to decide whether a claimant is entitled to 12 trips to physical therapy, for example, for an injury that tends to resolve itself after several weeks anyway.

She also worries that claimants will delay needed care and increase claim duration. Also, working from home may lead to ergonomics problems. Hibbert said employees moving from custom-fitted office chairs to their dining room tables may bring a wave of ergonomic-related injuries.

Hibbert said Mitchell allowed its employees to take their office chairs with them. The company conducts ergonomic assessments using FaceTime, she said.

For independent claims adjusters, the drop in claims volumes translates directly into a loss of income. One claims shop is trying to help by increasing pay and making payments more promptly.

SCA Appraisal Co., a national independent appraisal firm headquartered in Burbank, Calif., last month started giving network and franchise appraisers an extra 5% commission on each claim assigned to them, said Phil Langley, vice president of client services. He said the company last month started making weekly payments to appraisers and using electronic fund transfers instead of mailing checks.

Langley said the commission rates it pays vary according to the contractor and the type of services, but average about 50 percent. The extra 5 percent payment amounts to about 10 percent more for each claim, albeit with fewer claims.

Langley said claims volume for most insurers had dropped 40 percent to 60 percent, depending on the line, since the start of the pandemic shutdowns last month. He said the claims volume for his shop has dropped less, only about 30 percent. He said SCA may be benefitting because some carriers are unable to send their own employees to field assignments. Also, the company is still working claims that came in before shutdowns were ordered.

Langley said SCA appraisers are observing social distancing guidelines when out in the field. As it happens, though, SCA Appraisal has made it easier for appraisers to avoid in-person visits when adjusting auto claims by building an in-house photo claims system, called Streamline.

Langley said for simple claims where a desk estimate is possible, the company sends claimants a link to a website that they can use to take photographs of damaged areas. Those photos are run through the CCC One Valuation system.

He said the beauty of the web-system is it does not require the consumer to download an app.

It doesnt leave a footprint,he said. Do you really want to download an app just to use it once?

Langley said personal auto makes up a large portion of SCAs business. As long as the coronavirus pandemic lingers, those claims will likely continue to dwindle  as will revenue to his company.

Its down about 30 percent, he said. That will impact us, but this is our 41st year in business. We have some staying power.

Topics Carriers COVID-19 Auto Claims Workers' Compensation
As the coronavirus lockdown persists in many parts of the world, filmmakers are screening their movies for free on online platforms like YouTube.

A Nigerian filmmaker, Kayode Kasum, has also followed suit by premiering his 2018 movie project, Oga Bolaji on YouTube.

Oga Bolaji centres on the simple, happy-go-lucky life of a retired, 40-year-old musician (played by Gold Ikponmosa) whose life changes forever when he crosses paths with a 7-year-old girl.

The filmmaker said Oga Bolaji showcases the resilience and ingenuity of the Nigerian spirit, of striving, hoping, and dreaming despite lifes pain and limitations.

Oga Bolaji was produced by Mayowa Bakare and written by Kayode Kasum and Omo Ojeiwa.

The film also earned rave reviews when it screened at the New York African Film Festival, Nollywood week Paris, Made in Nollywood Bologna, RTF Film Festival, Cardiff Film Festival, and the Zanzibar International Film Festival to mention a few.

Watch Here:
On March 14, Mallory Pease woke with a sore throat but didn't worry much about it. Pease was nearing her second babys due date and knew that feeling rundown sometimes happens late in pregnancy. But then she became congested. Soon after, she couldnt taste or smell anything.

I was sleeping every chance I could get. I was also nine months pregnant so I didnt really think anything of it, Pease, 27, of Homer, Michigan, told TODAY. Then the coughing started and shortness of breath.

When Mallory Pease went to the hospital after her water broke, short of breath and feverish, she was tested for a variety of illnesses. She was positive for COVID-19. (Courtesy of Mallory Pease)

Later that week she had a fever. In the back of her mind, she had a nagging worry: What if it is COVID-19? But she thought that was unlikely: Even before social distancing and stay-at-home orders were the norm, she was already nesting at home and avoiding social gatherings.

A week after her first symptoms, her condition worsened and breathing was a struggle. By the time her water broke on Sunday, she was afraid.

I was really out of breath, she said. I knew that there was no way I was going to be able to get through contractions and still find the energy to breathe.

When she arrived at Oaklawn Hospital in Marshall, Michigan, she and her husband, Mitchell, immediately went into a room alone. Both had to wear masks and the labor and delivery nurse wore full personal protective equipment and stayed in the room the entire time. Doctors  also covered head to toe in PPE  tested Pease for pneumonia, flu and coronavirus, she said. While she immediately learned that she did not have flu or pneumonia the results of the COVID-19 test took longer.

Health & Wellness

Deep down I knew I had it, but I still didnt want to admit it, Pease said.

While she hoped to deliver her daughter without an epidural, she quickly realized she needed relief. As she labored from midnight to 5 a.m. she took shallow pant-like breaths but often needed oxygen.

That helped a lot, she said. It wasnt bad until I needed to take a big breath. That is when I would start coughing and that would make me more out of breath.

Story continues

While Mallory Pease needed oxygen to help her during the most severe symptoms of COVID-19, baby Alivia tested negative and stayed in the hospital for some observation. Reuniting at home was sweet. (Courtesy of Mallory Pease)

After Alivia was born doctors let Pease hold her for five minutes before she was whisked away to the isolation nursery and Pease went to the coronavirus floor. Alivia tested negative for it, but doctors still kept her under observation.

While little is known about pregnancy and coronavirus, one recent study found that pregnant women who have COVID-19 may be able to pass the infection onto their babies. It is unclear if that transmission can occur in the womb.

While Alivia was under observation, Pease became sicker. She spiked a fever and often gasped for air.

I could hardly stand up to go to the window. I had to get help to go to the bathroom. And I needed somebody to help me get unplugged from everything, she explained.

As coronavirus spreads across the country, more women are experiencing pregnancy and labor with it. The uncertainty of the novel coronavirus brings new challenges to pregnancy.

Beth, 33, a freelance wedding planner in New York City who asked not to use her last name, is pregnant with her second child due May 16. Nearly a month ago, she stared having symptoms, including shortness of breath, weakness and chest pains. When she first asked about it, her doctor suggested she was having a panic attack.

They werent as supportive about my symptoms without a positive test as I would have preferred them to be. That has probably been the most difficult part. My primary care doctor cant exactly recommend certain things because Im pregnant. Then I turn to my OB and they are saying to call my primary care doctor, she told TODAY. You end up just trusting your gut that youre going to survive and get through it.

Her husband, Mike, and 2-year-old daughter also experienced coronavirus symptoms and after Beths throat swelled up, she finally received a test and learned she was positive. While she is feeling better after 25-plus days of symptoms, shes worried how her status will impact her ability to go to the rest of her prenatal appointments. So far, most of them have been video checkups.

They said they prefer for me not to come in, she said. It has been really stressful. I just keep worrying what if there is something wrong with the baby and I have to go and been seen and then I am putting people at risk.

While Beth hasn't required hospital care to treat her coronavirus symptoms, Pease required a longer hospital stay than having a baby normally requires. A few days after giving birth, she was finally able to breathe without supplemental oxygen.

I was still out of breath and it took me a while to catch my breath, Pease explained.

On Thursday, March 26, she returned home while Alivia went to stay with an aunt for a week to allow Pease to recover. She needed the help, too. Just cuddling her baby drained her.

Just sitting and holding her and nursing, as much as we could do it, was just completely exhausting, Pease said. I had zero energy so that was a wake-up call.

Mallory Pease feels better, but is surprised that some symptoms of coronavirus still linger. A bad night of sleep leads to coughing fits that cause her to feel incredibly run down. (Courtesy of Mallory Pease)

Alivia is at now home with Pease, Mitchell and their 2-year-old daughter, Emma, and Pease feels better each day. Over the weekend she had a bad night of sleep, which caused coughing fits.

I still need to take it slow and not rush this healing process, she said. Our story has a happy ending. I want people to know its not all bad but coronavirus is not something to take lightly.
The PM spoke highly of ASEAN member states joining hands with Vietnam in responding to the pandemic from the very early days.

He appreciated their backing of Vietnams proposals, such as establishing the ASEAN COVID-19 Response Fund, setting up a reserve for medical supplies to meet urgent needs during epidemics, organising an online drill of defence forces, and setting up a task force of senior ASEAN information officials to combat fake news.

PM Phuc emphasised the need for ASEAN to support those affected, work together in mitigating the viruss impact on socio-economic development, and propose measures to speed up economic recovery.

ASEAN leaders also expressed their political commitment to fighting COVID-19.

They said joint efforts by the bloc have seen encouraging initial results, with the number of infections in the region being much lower than elsewhere.

They also affirmed that the top priority of the bloc at this moment is to control and prevent the spread of the disease, in particular tackling cross-border infections.

ASEAN needs to take action to minimise the socio-economic impact, protect local people, and support micro, small, and medium-sized enterprises (MSMEs).

The leaders also discussed measures to facilitate economic recovery, including strengthening intra-bloc trade, speeding up negotiations over economic cooperation agreements, and implementing economic stimulus packages.

Concluding the teleconference, the leaders adopted the Declaration of the Special ASEAN Summit on COVID-19.
MC2 will retire Midwest generated Renewable Energy Certificates (RECs) equal to 100 percent of its customers energy consumption to celebrate the 50 th Anniversary of Earth Day

Anniversary of Earth Day MC2 supports the development of sustainable renewable generation resources in the Midwest

An equivalent to over 3,000 metric tons of CO 2 will be eliminated from the atmosphere

CHICAGO, April 15, 2020 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- MC Squared Energy Services, LLC (MC2), a leading retail electric supply company located in the heart of Chicago will celebrate and honor the 50th anniversary of Earth Day in a unique way. On Wednesday April 22, MC2 will retire Midwest-based Green-e Wind Renewable Energy Certificates (RECs) equal to 100 percent of the energy consumption during this day. This includes all residential, commercial, educational and governmental customers served by MC2 in Illinois and Ohio, states in which the company is a certified retail electric supplier. These RECs are in addition to existing state mandated Renewable Portfolio Standard (RPS) requirements.

Chuck Sutton, MC2 founder and president, said he was looking for a unique way to celebrate the 50th anniversary of Earth Day, a worldwide event established in 1970 to demonstrate support for environmental protection. On Earth Day 2020 MC2 is projected to retire renewable energy certificates equivalent to over 3,000 metric tons of CO 2 eliminated from the atmosphere. Sutton says the company is excited to do its part to help reduce the worlds carbon footprint. Our efforts to reduce carbon emissions on the 50th anniversary of Earth Day is just one way we as company can demonstrate our commitment to make the planet we live in a better and safer place for all of our customers.

MC Squared Energy Services offers electricity supply products and services that are backed by RECs as a way for customers to support the reduction of harmful emissions and help the environment. A REC represents 1 megawatt-hour (MWh) of electricity that has been generated from a renewable energy source. Each REC retired by MC Squared is backed by Green-e, a trusted global leader in energy certification.

To bolster its environmental commitment, MC Squared Energy Services proudly offers its EcoGreen Power Supply Program. The program is designed to give customers the opportunity to support renewable energy backed by 100 percent Wind Green-e certified RECs. The MC2 EcoGreen Power Program is Green-e Energy certified and meets the environmental and consumer protection standards established by the nonprofit Center for Resource Solutions. For more information on Green-e, visit https://www.green-e.org/. For more information on MC Squared Energy Services and its EcoGreen Power Program, visit www.mc2energyservices.com.

About MC Squared Energy Services, LLC

Established in 2008 by veteran energy industry experts, MC Squared Energy Services, LLC (MC2) is a certified, retail electric-service provider headquartered in Chicago. MC2 helps municipalities, businesses and individuals with competitive electric supply products to fit their specific needs. The companys customer-focused team has the resources and knowledge to meet its customers electrical supply requirements. MC2 prides itself on being easy to work with and responsive to its customers.

MC Squared Energy Services, LLC is a wholly owned subsidiary of Wolverine Holdings. Founded in 1994, the Wolverine companies comprise a number of diversified financial institutions specializing in proprietary trading, asset management, order execution services and technology solutions. They are recognized as a market leader with focus on innovation, achievement and integrity with clients and colleagues. The Wolverine companies are headquartered in Chicago with satellite offices in New York and San Francisco, and a proprietary trading affiliate office located in London.

For Further Product Information, Contact :

Samantha Komzak

MC Squared Energy Services, LLC

312-854-1981

skomzak@mc2energyservices.com

For Further PR Information, Contact :

Gary McCoy, President

Fairway Communications

847-372-0722

gmccoy@fairwaycommunications.com
Source: Xinhua| 2020-04-15 17:25:17|Editor: huaxia

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BEIJING, April 15 (Xinhua) -- China sent charter planes to bring back 2,744 Chinese stranded in the coronavirus-affected countries, the nation's top civil aviation authorities said Wednesday.

Sixteen Chinese charter planes flew to Iran, Italy, Britain, the United States and Spain from March 4 to April 12, bringing back home the Chinese, including 1,449 students studying abroad, according to the Civil Aviation Administration of China (CAAC).

The daily number of incoming passengers through airports across China has stabilized at 2,000 to 3,000 over the past 16 days, as there were no more than 20 inbound flights each day of the period.

China has stepped up measures to guard against imported coronavirus infections, cutting the number of international flights and requiring all international flights bound for Beijing to be diverted to other airports first.

The airport in Wuhan, the city once hardest hit by the novel coronavirus, has resumed flights to and from 45 domestic cities since April 8 when travel restrictions placed on the epicenter of the outbreak was lifted, said Sun Shaohua, deputy director of the CAAC operation monitoring center.

As of Tuesday, there had been 799 flights to and from Wuhan, transporting 40,600 passengers, Sun said.

Key airport projects were proceeding smoothly in Hubei Province. As of March 25, four key airport projects in Ezhou, Jingzhou, Yichang and Xiangyang cities had resumed construction. All workers for the projects have returned to work earlier this month, Sun said.
The Lies and Half-truths Surrounding a Donation from China to Cuba to Fight the Coronavirus The island's government blamed the embargo for a Chinese donation never making it to Cuba. This is the complete story behind that half-truth.

The donation that never arrived

On April 1 the official newspaper of Cubas Communist Party, Granma, published an article entitled "The untold story of how a plane carrying medical supplies from China was unable to reach Cuba."

The source of the information was Cuba's Ambassador to China Carlos Miguel Pereira Hernandez. Granma reproduced a text published by Pereira Hernandez, who claimed, without any evidence, that a foundation of Chinese billionaire Jack Ma, founder of the Alibaba online store, had wished to send medical supplies to Cuba to combat the coronavirus epidemic, but was unable to do so because of the US embargo and its enacting legislation.

"Their carrier (the Jack Ma Foundation's), a US company, refused to ship the order at the last minute, citing regulations under the economic, commercial and financial blockade imposed against the destination country, ratcheted up by the current administration in the USA," wrote the ambassador in a blog, which Granma printed.

Later Pereira reiterated: "the noble, enormous and commendable effort of the founder of Alibaba and the Jack Ma Foundation (...) were unable to reach Cuban soil, despite how necessary those resources were in the battle the small Antillean island, besieged and blockaded, is waging. Once again, this unfair, arbitrary and illegal blockade disrupts everything."

This very same version of the story was in other media, and the matter seemed clear: one of the richest men in China moved to support the fight against the pandemic, but, at the last minute, the transport company refused to go to Cuba.

The government, through Granma, however, left several questions unanswered, including a fundamental one: when there were several options to send the material, why was a company chosen that had refused to fly to Cuba for months?

What follows is the other half of the story.

What did the donation consist of?

Jack Ma is the founder of Alibaba, one of the largest internet sales companies in the world, a rival to America's Amazon. Ma has a foundation that, on March 21, announced on Twitter that it would send two million masks, 400,000 virus detection tests, and 104 mechanical respirators to Latin American countries.

How was this donation to reach its destinations?

The logistics arm responsible for shipping the Alibaba group's products is Cainiao, which has its own cargo planes. To deliver donations as soon as possible, Cainiao partnered with nearly 50 transportation and logistics partners who, to date, have delivered more than 100 million vital medical supplies to more than 140 countries in Latin America and the rest of the world.

In Africa, for example, they partner with Ethiopian Airlines. In Europe they work with ASL Airlines, which is of Irish origin, although the state-owned China Cargo supplied shipments from the Ma Foundation to Spain.

In Latin America Alibaba has used several airlines for its shipments. For example in Mexico, on March 31, it used the Mexican cargo airline AeroUnion. This airline, in fact, makes charter flights to Havana.

Any of said airlines could have delivered the donation to Cuba. However, to reach the Island and other countries in the region such as Panama, Bolivia and Colombia Cainiao chose Avianca, as reported by the AP news agency.

It is unknown how and why this decision was made, or if the Cuban authorities in Beijing knew about it in advance, and were able to foresee what would happen as a result. But, by choosing Avianca, the Chinese donor made a key mistake, because Avianca was unable to carry out the order.

We consulted Alibaba and the Jack Ma Foundation about this decision, but, as of this publication, they had not responded to several emails sent.

Is it true that "an American company declined the order at the last minute," as the ambassador stated?

This is completely false.

Avianca is not exactly a company based in the United States. Rather, its headquarters are in Colombia, and it is an airline with mainly Colombian and Salvadoran shareholders. Since last year these owners have controlled Avianca's shares through a network of companies based in Delaware, United States.

The location of these companies, in fact, caused Avianca to stop selling tickets for its flights to Cuba from Colombia and El Salvador last year. The airline announced on October 31, 2019 that, while it resolved some issues related to the embargo with the United States authorities, it would not be flying to the island. Later, on November 20, Avianca confirmed that as of January of this year it would no longer be operating flights to Cuba.

So, was it a last-minute cancellation? No, it was not. Cuban authorities knew, at least since last November, that Avianca, as it had become a company partly governed by US law, due to the aforementioned Delaware-based firms, could not fly to Cuba.

Have other donations hit the same obstacle?

No.

On April 6, Foreign Minister Bruno Rodriguez announced that "a donation sent by the People's Republic of China reached Cuba." According to Xinhua, the Chinese state news agency, the shipment included 2,000 N95 masks, 10,000 surgical masks, 2,000 protective suits, and an equal number of isolation shoes, goggles and gloves.

Another donation, from a Chinese company called Zhengzhou Yutong Bus, donated 100,000 protective masks and 10,000 protective suits, according to Xinhua.

How did these materials reach Cuba? As of press time we have not been able to independently verify the route of entry, but it is safe to say that, if they made it to the island, it was simply because a more suitable carrier than Avianca was contracted.

Other donations from the founder of Alibaba to countries suffering from embargoes also reached their destinations. A tweet from the Jack Ma Foundation on March 13 stated that in previous weeks countries like Iran (also sanctioned by the United States) had received medical shipments from this Chinese company.

The Government of Iran, for its part, expressed its appreciation. A spokesman for the Foreign Ministry in Tehran stated that "the Iranians never forget their friends in difficult times," while confirming that the material was received on March 14, along with medical equipment and financial aid from Azerbaijan, the United Arab Emirates, China, Japan, Qatar, Russia and Turkey.

How was this possible? Because they chose the right airline to transport the material.

Does the embargo really prohibit a US company from sending humanitarian donations to Cuba?

The laws of the US embargo on Cuba are considered too harsh and illegal by many countries around the world. But it provides for exceptions, and these include the sending of donations. Article 746.2 of one of these laws expressly states that no American company needs prior authorization to make humanitarian donations to Cuba. Article 740.12 specifies that only donations of medical materials that can serve to torture or violate human rights are blocked by the embargo, or if there is certainty that they will be sold by Cuba to another country, or will be used to produce "biotechnological" materials. "

So, why didn't Avianca deliver the material?

When asked for this story, Avianca referred to its public statements and declined to issue any further explanations. Therefore, there is no clear answer.

The airline may have feared being sued in the United States by one Ramon Lopez Regueiro, who sued another airline for operating in Cuba last September.

Lopez Regueiro, a US citizen, claims that the Jose Marti International Airport belongs to him, because his father had a license to build and operate it under the dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista. The facilities were later expropriated by the Revolution.

A US law currently in force allows citizens to report any company in the world that knowingly benefits from or uses, in any way, private property expropriated by the Cuban Revolution.

Though passed in 1996, this provision, found in the third section of the Helms-Burton Act, had not previously entered into force because it was considered too imprecise and extreme. Last year, however, the Trump Administration decided that it should apply.

Since then it has spawned lawsuits, such as that filed by Lopez Regueiro, who alleges that any airline operating in Cuba is benefiting from an asset that was expropriated without his family being compensated.

These are the grounds on which he sued American Airlines and Chile's Latam Airlines, and has warned other companies that he might sue them too.

Although this risk has not dissuaded multiple airlines from flying to Havana, it may have deterred Avianca.

Lorenzo Palomares Starbuck, a Florida lawyer who endorses strict application of the third section of the Helms-Burton Act, stated in an interview that "no carrier can arrive at a facility that has been confiscated by the Castro government."

"It will be very difficult right now for any US airline, or with capital investment like Avianca's, to take donations to Cuba," she said.

This opinion, however, is not unanimously shared by US courts. The suits of other expropriated Cuban-American heirs have foundered.

In January of this year, Granma reported that a Miami judge dismissed a complaint against several cruise companies that used property at the Port of Havana that had been expropriated by the Revolution.

* Katia Monteagudo is a Cuban journalist who has written for various media outlets, including Yahoo News and the magazine El Estornudo. Mayli Estevez is also a Cuban journalist who contributes to Tremenda Nota and Play Off Magazine.
On Friday, Dr. Mangala Narasimhan received an urgent call. A man in his 40s with Coronavirus was in a dire situation, and her colleague wanted her to come the intensive care unit at Long Island Jewish Hospital to see if he needed to be put on life support.



Before I come over there, Narasimhan told the other doctor, try turning the patient over onto his stomach and see if that helps.



Narasimhan didn't need to go the ICU. The flip worked.



Doctors are finding that placing the sickest coronavirus patients on their stomachs -- called prone positioning - helps increase the amount of oxygen that's getting to their lungs.



"We're saving lives with this, one hundred percent," said Narasimhan, the regional director for critical care at Northwell Health, which owns 23 hospitals in New York. "It's such a simple thing to do, and we've seen remarkable improvement. We can see it for every single patient."



"Once you see it work, you want to do it more, and you see it work almost immediately," added Dr. Kathryn Hibbert, director of the medical ICU at Massachusetts General Hospital.



'We're opening up parts of the lung'



Patients with coronavirus often die of ARDS, or acute respiratory distress syndrome. The same syndrome also kills patients who have influenza, pneumonia and other diseases.



Seven years ago, French doctors published an article in the New England Journal of Medicine showing that patients with ARDS who were on ventilators had a lower chance of dying if they were placed on their stomachs in the hospital.



Ever since, to varying degrees, doctors in the United States have been placing ventilated ARDS patients on their stomachs.



Now they've doubled down on this with coronavirus patients, and it's paying off. When the patient at Long Island Jewish was placed on his stomach, his oxygen saturation rate, a measure of oxygen in the blood, went from 85% to 98%, a huge jump.



The ventilated patients typically stay on their stomachs for about 16 hours a day, going on their backs for the rest of the time so doctors have better access to their front side and can more easily give them the treatments they need.

Critical care specialists say being on the belly seems help because it allows oxygen to more easily get to the lungs. While on the back, the weight of the body in effect squishes some sections of the lungs.



"By putting them on their stomachs, we're opening up parts of the lung that weren't open before," Hibbert said.



Choosing belly or back

There is a downside to placing ventilated coronavirus patients on their stomachs.



Ventilated patients require more sedation when they're on their stomachs, which could mean a longer stay in the ICU. At Mass General, about a third of coronavirus patients on ventilators get placed on their stomachs, usually the ones who are sickest and have the most to gain from being in that position.



Some hospitals are also placing coronavirus patients who are not in the intensive care unit on their stomachs.



At Mass General, a "proning team" of nurses visits patients outside the ICU to encourage them to turn onto their stomachs. Since it might be uncomfortable for a non-sedated patient to spend 16 hours on their stomachs, the nurses try to get them to spend at least four hours on the stomachs, split into two sessions.



"Most are willing to give it a try," Hibbert said. "How long they stay in that position really varies from person to person, whether they're comfortable falling asleep in that position, or if they get bored and want to turn over to their backs."



The 2013 French study looked only at patients who were on ventilators, so it's not entirely clear what effecting the stomach position has for patients who are not as severely ill.



At Rush University Medical Center, they're studying whether the stomach position is helpful for patients who are not so sick that they need a ventilator to breathe for them, but sick enough that they need supplemental oxygen delivered through a tube in their nose.



In their clinical trial, patients are being randomly assigned to be on their stomachs or backs, according to David Vines, chair of the cardiopulmonary sciences department at Rush.



"We'll see if proning helps, and if so, how long should they be in the prone position," Vines said.

Source: cnn









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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As the West focuses on its own survival, Africans have the opportunity to complete what their ancestors started.

The Western brand is suffering from what many see as a slow and haphazard response by Western governments to the COVID-19 outbreak. As the epicentre of the pandemic moved from China to Europe and now to the US, the weakness of Western neoliberal and neo-colonial systems has come to the fore.

As African countries started cancelling flights from former colonial countries and putting their citizens under quarantine, the myth of Western invincibility fell apart, alongside its corollary that only the Global South is susceptible to infectious epidemics. Indeed, it was perhaps the Western hubris and delusion of grandeur that initially made many governments in Europe and North America not take the outbreak of COVID-19 seriously.

In this unprecedented historical moment, many fear for the future. Africans do, too, but while they will certainly also go through a tough period, they should see this crisis as an opportunity to fast track the process of decolonialisation.

This first has to happen on a rhetorical level.

The idea that Africa is a continent of disease and death has to be challenged, especially now that the West itself is suffering from major outbreaks and alarming death tolls.

This is a trite view about the continent informed by colonial, missionary and unethical humanitarian lenses that reduces an entire continent of 54 countries to a malicious or ignorant single story. Surely, there are undeniable weaknesses in many sectors of African states and economies, including healthcare, but that does not mean there is no infrastructure or services, no preparedness, resilience, creativity, local knowledge or innovation that are utilised in normal times and times of emergencies.

The COVID-19 crisis is fast disrupting this colonial perspective that healthcare systems in Africa are the only ones always overwhelmed by outbreaks. COVID-19 has shown that austerity measures and lack of investment anywhere in the world cripple healthcare systems.

In many ways, the pandemic presents an opportunity for African peoples to see themselves differently, and the world to consider the African continent as a partner in finding solutions to complex problems such as COVID-19.

And Africans already are seeing themselves differently and are readily challenging the tired old tropes amid the pandemic. But the work on decolonialisation should not stop at rhetoric only.

While this new crisis might be another challenging moment for African peoples, after the epidemic is over, the continent will have the chance to become more autonomous and self-reliant, as the West focuses on its own survival. It will have the opportunity to wean itself off of exploitative neo-colonial relations.

This will be the time to lay the foundations of economic reforms that prioritise African markets, innovation and local manufacturing and end the resource curse. A major overhaul is needed across the continent to transition economies from relying on the extraction and sale of raw materials to the West (and East  ie, China), and into building up local industries that utilise local resources and turn them into value-added products for export.

This should happen in parallel to renegotiating various trade agreements with foreign entities, which aim to extract African resources and make African markets dependent on foreign imports.

At the same time, other trade arrangements within and outside the continent should be fast-tracked. For instance, this will be a great time to start implementing Africa Free Trade Area agreements (AFCFTA), an idea first proposed by pan-Africanist leaders who dreamt of a continent that would first trade within its own borders and not give priority to its former colonial countries.

A strengthened continental trade will allow the African Union, or African regional blocks to assert their agency more globally.

This will also be the best time to start cracking down on capital flight and tax evasion by local monopolies and foreign corporations which rob Africans societies of billions of dollars every year. If implemented properly, taxation and the repatriation of illicit gains can provide the needed funding for economic overhauls across the continent.

This process has to go hand-in-hand with putting a stop to African dependence on foreign development loans, which have forced governments into austerity for decades, as well as aid and charity, which have curbed local efforts to develop social services.

Foreign funding should be gradually substituted with national funding drawn from taxation, repatriation of funds and new higher-value exports.

It will also mean that African countries will have to stop importing foreign saviours to help solve African problems. The continent has enough local talent and educated experts at home and in the diaspora to tackle challenges in a variety of fields and they would do it better than foreigners, because unlike them, they actually know very well the local context and specificities.

This would allow African countries not only to use local expertise but also to develop it and eventually export it. In this sense, it is important to open up intra-African cooperation, especially in the context of the current pandemic. West African countries have built important knowledge on dealing with the Ebola outbreaks that can help others on the continent improve their national responses to COVID-19.

With an economic overhaul and a local talent focus, African countries can then proceed to develop their social sector. Improving healthcare should be a top priority, as should be the stimulated growth of local pharmaceutical industries and biotechnology.

Just as Western governments are now realising the mistake they have made in outsourcing production of everything to China  from masks to ventilators  African governments too should make sure that their nations are self-sufficient in key industries essential to national security, safety and health.

Education and innovation should also be on top of the agenda. African governments should increase investment in the education sector and continue to expand innovation initiatives that have sprung across the continent.

All this is part of a decolonialisation process that is long overdue. In fact, the African people have long been ready to embark on it, but they have been waiting for their political elites who have lagged behind.

But perhaps now that Western hospitals are no longer able to take in and treat African leaders and their assets stashed away in Western banks may be at risk amid the global downturn, they too may finally come on board.

Indeed, there are already a few positive signs. We have recently seen the African Union mobilise resources to confront COVID-19. African leaders are speaking with one voice, and in a recent teleconference have expressed the need to be united in finding solutions for the pandemic. Such initiatives are encouraging in a crisis that has seen many countries in the West react selfishly and refused cooperation with others.

We are living a historical moment which could engender a sense of reawakening and assertiveness among Africans that could guide us through the difficult journey our ancestors started in the 20th century. Indeed, decolonisation may well be fast-tracked because of the threat of a pathogen.

The views expressed in this article are the authors own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeeras editorial stance.
Youre forced to stay in a specific area, youre told to trust the government, youre told food will be scarce  welcome to 1700s Native nation.

JAMIE AZURE, tribal chairman of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa, on how Native Americans are looking to their forebears for strategies to cope with food shortages during the coronavirus crisis.
PR-Inside.com: 2020-04-15 08:11:11

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Oakwood Laboratories in the Cleveland, Ohio area is a leader in microsphere-based pharmaceutical development and manufacturing. Oakwood will operate Flow Pharma's production volume vaccine manufacturing system at their Solon, Ohio manufacturing plant, using Oakwood's state-of-the-art microsphere-based processing, quality testing, and packaging systems to make GMP FlowVax COVID-19 vaccine doses for clinical testing.PLEASANT HILL, CA / ACCESSWIRE / April 15, 2020 / Flow Pharma, Inc., a San Francisco Bay Area biotechnology company developing the FlowVax(TM) peptide vaccine platform technology, today announced that Oakwood Laboratories, headquartered in Oakwood Village Ohio (a suburb of Cleveland) will begin working with Flow Pharma to interface Oakwood's microsphere based, GMP pharmaceutical manufacturing operations to the FlowVax vaccine platform manufacturing system. FlowVax vaccines utilize Flow Pharma's patented Size Exclusion Antigen Presentation Control (SEAPAC(TM)) technology based on the benefits of making vaccine microspheres the same size as human white blood cells."Oakwood Laboratories has for many years been a leader in controlled release, injectable microsphere-based pharmaceutical development and manufacturing. We are currently manufacturing multiple FDA approved sterile products in our GMP facility, designed specifically to manufacture microsphere-based products" said Mark Smith, President of Oakwood Labs. "We also have the analytical, Quality Control, and other quality systems and infrastructure in place to test this type of product. Since the vaccine does not make use of either live or attenuated virus, there is no risk of infection from processing it." "Flow Pharma's FlowVax platform has many applications from immuno-oncology to infectious diseases, and we are partnering with Oakwood to accelerate all of our products under development into clinical testing." Said Reid Rubsamen, M.D., CEO, Flow Pharma. "Our work with FlowVax Ebola demonstrated protection in a mouse model and we have used the same approach for SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19. We are proud to have developed a vaccine prototype which, based on our prior research, we believe will protect against COVID-19, and are doing everything we can to get FlowVax COVID-19 into clinical testing as soon as possible." "There are many companies developing antibody vaccines to protect against infection with SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19." Said Charles Herst, Ph.D., Chief Science Officer, Flow Pharma. "We are taking a different approach. We believe that vaccination with FlowVax COVID-19 will cause killer T-cells specific to SARS-CoV-2 to increase in number, rather than produce the antibody response created by most COVID-19 vaccines currently under development. Relying on killer T-cells rather than antibodies allows us to more easily target the portions of the virus least likely to mutate, because mutations can allow a virus to hide from the vaccine. We plan to test FlowVax COVID-19 for both pre-exposure and post-exposure prophylaxis because killer T-cells can kill infected cells." About Flow PharmaFlow Pharma, Inc. is a San Francisco Bay Area based, biotechnology company using artificial intelligence to guide selection of neoantigen peptide targets on cancer cells or virus-infected cells for attack by the patient's own, native immune system. These peptides can then be loaded into the FlowVax(TM) platform for administration by injection.Flow Pharma, Inc. is conducting gene sequencing studies with neoantigen identification on breast cancer patients in the US and cervical cancer patients in China, in preparation for conducting Phase I/II clinical trials planned for later this year. Neoantigens are small peptide markers expressed on cancer cells as a result of a cancer-causing viral infection or mutation of the DNA in normal cells, agents that cause transformation into cancer cells.About Oakwood LaboratoriesOakwood Laboratories, LLC is a Cleveland-based specialty pharmaceutical company focused on the development, scale-up, and manufacture of sustained and controlled release injectable microsphere-based pharmaceuticals. Oakwood's technology enables one injection to last from two weeks to one year. This enables patients to receive fewer injections, and is also useful for targeted therapies, and in situations where patient compliance is an issue.The manufacturing process developed by Oakwood is readily scalable and is used to manufacture commercial scale products under GMP. Oakwood partners with pharmaceutical and biotech companies to bring their products from conception through commercialization.Forward Looking StatementsThis press release may contain forward-looking statements, including information about management's view of Flow Pharma, Inc. ("the Company"), future expectations, plans and prospects. In particular, when used in the preceding discussion, the words "believes," "expects," "intends," "plans," "anticipates," or "may," and similar conditional expressions are intended to identify forward-looking statements. Any statements made in this presentation other than those of historical fact, about an action, event or development, are forward-looking statements. These statements involve known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors, which may cause the results of the Company, its subsidiaries and concepts to be materially different than those expressed or implied in such statements. Unknown or unpredictable factors also could have material adverse effects on the Company's future results. The forward-looking statements included in this presentation are made only as of the date hereof. The Company cannot guarantee future results, levels of activity, performance or achievements. Accordingly, you should not place undue reliance on these forward-looking statements. Finally, the Company undertakes no obligation to update these statements after the date of this release, except as required by law, and also takes no obligation to update or correct information prepared by third parties that are not paid for by Flow Pharma, Inc.Media ContactInvestor RelationsFlow Pharma, Inc.3451 Vincent RoadPleasant Hill, California 94523925-708-8000ir@ flowpharma.com SOURCE: Flow Pharma, Inc.
The Akatsi North District Assembly COVID-19 Taskforce has arrested 22 persons at Ave-Hevi attempting to crossover to neighbouring Togo.



The taskforce, led by Dr. Prince Sodoke Amuzu, the District Chief Executive made the arrest at midnight.

The 22 persons, 17 men and five women were travelling on motorbikes without registered number plates, allegedly from Akatsi South.



Dr. Amuzu who briefed the Ghana News Agency said the motorbikes were confiscated with the 22 persons sent back to Akatsi South with a police escort.



The DCE said surveillance had been heightened to ensure people went by the President's directive to stop the spread of the disease.



He called for support from chiefs, opinion leaders and youth groups in the District to keep border communities safe.

In a related development, Dr. Amuzu said the Assembly was running free land ploughing services to farmers and urged the locals to take advantage of it.



He said the Assembly was also giving out free seedlings and fertilizers and asked farmers to plant more to feed the country after the COVID-19 pandemic.

Source: GNA









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Kioxia Corporation, the world leader in memory solutions, is pleased to announce the launch of KIOXIA branded consumer products, including microSD/SD memory cards, USB memory and SSDs. Kioxia and its group companies started to operate under its new company name on October 1st, 2019. After the brand change of its business-to-business products, Kioxia will launch consumer products with a completely new look and feel in April, 2020. [1]

This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20200414006160/en/

Kioxia Corporation: Launch of KIOXIA branded consumer products (Photo: Business Wire)

With its comprehensive portfolio of microSD/SD memory cards, USB memory and SSDs, Kioxia offers consumer products that are specifically designed for enabling end-users to store their digital way of life wherever and whenever they want. Kioxias consumer products are mainly focused and optimized for use with smartphones, tablets and PCs, digital cameras and more.

With its new consumer products, Kioxia puts great emphasis on retaining the same excellent quality, performance and reliability standards, that consumers are used to expect from the formerly known Toshiba Memory product line-up. Kioxia will keep striving to preserve the high standards, and its dedication to the development and production of innovative class-leading flash storage solutions to meet the ever-changing customer demands.

Kioxia provides an uplifting experience realized by a new look and feel of the memory products. Product and package design feature a fresh and modern colorful design that reflects Kioxias vision as an independent flash memory manufacturer. Each product contains a specific color (Light Blue, Magenta, Yellow, Light Gray, Light Green, Orange) which is used to make it highly recognizable and easier than ever for customers to select the right products for their unique applications.

Under its new name, Kioxia is highly innovation-focused and more nimble than ever before to deliver exciting, new flash technology, to provide more choice with all our product line up for customers and enable end-users anywhere to benefit from Kioxias memory solutions. Kioxias mission is to create an uplifting experience and change the world by evolving memory.

KIOXIA branded consumer products will be launched by Kioxias distributors from April, 2020. For availability in your area, please contact your nearest Kioxia contact window. [1]

Please follow the link for more information about the new KIOXIA branded consumer products.

https://personal.kioxia.com

Notes

[1] Availability/line-up may vary by region. Launch in Japan is scheduled for middle of May.

*Company names, product names, and service names may be trademarks of their respective companies.

About Kioxia

Kioxia is the world leader in memory solutions, dedicated to the development, production and sale of flash memory and solid state drives (SSDs). In April 2017, its predecessor Toshiba Memory was spun off from Toshiba Corporation, the company that invented NAND flash memory in 1987. The company pioneers cutting-edge memory solutions and services that enrich people's lives and expand society's horizons. Kioxia's innovative 3D flash memory technology, BiCS FLASH, is shaping the future of storage in high-density applications, including advanced smartphones, PCs, SSDs, automotive and data centers.

Customer Inquiries:

https://personal.kioxia.com/support/

*Information in this document, including product prices and specifications, content of services and contact information, is correct on the date of the announcement but is subject to change without prior notice.

View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20200414006160/en/
WALTHAM, Mass., April 15, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- Arrow Electronics, a global provider of technological solutions, has signed a distribution agreement in Italy with Actifio, a multi-cloud copy data management software provider. The agreement is already active in DACH (Germany, Austria, Switzerland), Benelux, Iberia, France, United Kingdom, and Ireland with the aim of supporting Arrow resellers with solutions that facilitate organizations in managing the growth of their data in hybrid and multi-cloud environments as well as in on-premise environments, reducing the same time storage costs.

Actifio is one of the most powerful copy-data management solutions on the market, which helps companies keep up with the speed of the business. Companies in the Italian market are currently experiencing an overload in data growth, and they need a technology they can rely on for immediate access, both on-premises and in the cloud. With Actifio, businesses can count on a hardware-independent software-defined-storage solution that can manage data throughout the life cycle. In addition, the copy data management and test data management functions allow integration with applications for creating consistent backups and entire test environments, regardless of the size of the databases.

Francesca Cieloscuro, Regional Sales Director of Actifio Italy, said: "Several months ago we opened the Italian office to expand our commercial strategies. We are happy to join forces with such a high-value distributor. For years Arrow has committed to providing resellers with the most technologically advanced and highly innovative solutions, which meet the needs of the most demanding customers."

There is much more data being created than ever before. To stay ahead of innovation, organizations need to leverage copy data management not only to incentivize their digital transformation, but also to guide its data resiliency, DevOps initiatives, and cloud mobility.

"Our agreement with Actifio ensures we can arm our resellers with a single, powerful multi-cloud platform that guarantees redundancy and continuous data availability - even in the event of a disaster," highlights Michele Puccio, sales director of Arrow's enterprise computing solutions business in Italy. "Actifio is a software-defined and multi-cloud solution, therefore flexible, scalable, and agile, which makes it future-proof."

All the brands mentioned are trademarks or registered trademarks owned by their respective companies

About Arrow

Arrow Electronics drives innovation for more than 175,000 technology manufacturers and service providers. With sales of $29 billion in 2019, Arrow develops technology solutions that improve our business and our everyday lives. More information can be found at: www.fiveyearsout.com .

About Actifio:

Actifio is the pioneer of multi-cloud copy data management software. With more than 3,600 customers around the world, Actifio enables organizations to virtualize and deliver their data instantly, anywhere. An enterprise-class software platform powered by patented Virtual Data Pipeline technology, Actifio helps accelerate adoption of hybrid, public and multi-cloud strategies, build higher quality applications faster, and improve business resiliency and availability. For more, visit Actifio.com or follow @Actifio on Twitter.

Contact: Carissa Ryan, [email protected]

SOURCE Actifio

Related Links

http://Actifio.com


Six Indian companies are working on a vaccine for COVID-19, joining the global race against time to find a preventive for the deadly infection spreading rapidly across the world, says a top Indian scientist.

Nearly 70 vaccine candidates' are being tested and at least three have moved to the human clinical trial stage, but a vaccine for the novel coronavirus is unlikely to be ready for mass use before 2021.

As COVID-19 infects more than 1.9 million in the world and claims 1,26,000 lives, Indian scientists are also part of the global fight against the disease.

While Zydus Cadila is working on two vaccines, Serum Institute, Biological E, Bharat Biotech, Indian Immunologicals, and Mynvax are developing one vaccine each, Gagandeep Kang, executive director of the Translational Health Science and Technology Institute, Faridabad, told PTI.

Kang is alsovice chair of the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI), which noted in a recent study that the global vaccine R&D effort in response to the COVID-19 pandemic is unprecedented in terms of scale and speed.

But it is a complicated process with many stages of testing and many challenges, explained experts. A vaccine for the new coronavirus,SARS-CoV-2,may not take 10 years that other vaccines do but it could be at least a year before it is proven safe, effective, and made widely available, they said.

Vaccine development is a lengthy process which often takes years, with many challenges, said E. Sreekumar, chief scientific officer at the Rajiv Gandhi Centre for Biotechnology(RGCB) in Kerala.

Generally, vaccines take several months to pass the different stages of testing, and then approvals also take time. For COVID-19, we don't expect a vaccine to come in this year, agreed Rakesh Mishra, director of the CSIR-Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology (CCMB) in Hyderabad.

Vaccine testing typically begins with animal and lab testing before going on to different stages of human testing.

The human testing phase is composed of many phases, Sreekumar told PTI.

Phase one trials are small-scale, usually involving few participants, to assess whether the vaccine is safe for humans. Phase two trials often involve several hundred subjects, and mainly evaluate the efficacy of the vaccine against the disease, he said.

The final phase involves thousands of people to further assess the efficacy of the vaccine over a defined period of time, and can last several months, Sreekumar said.

That is why we don't see a vaccine coming in at least a year from now.

Even after the vaccine is ready, he explained, there are a lot of challenges, including whether the vaccine is effective in all populations, and if it can be used for different strains of the novel coronavirus, which might start mutating as time passes.

There are lots of vaccines which are being tested for COVID-19, some of which are in the stage 1 clinical trial, Mishra added.

But we still don't know how fast they will proceed towards a vaccine and they can take several months to reach any point, he said.

According to the World Health Organization (WHO), three vaccine candidates are in the clinical testing phase, meaning they are able to be tested on humans, while nearly 70 are in the preclinical phase -- either in lab testing, or animal studies.

Though Kang named six companies, the WHO has listed only Zydus Cadila and Serum Institute from India as among the global firms working on a COVID-19 vaccine.

As of April 8, 2020, said CEPI, the global COVID-19 vaccine R&D landscape includes 115 vaccine candidates, of which 78 are confirmed as active and 37 are unconfirmed.

Of the 78 confirmed active projects, 73 are currently at exploratory or preclinical stages, noted the CEPI team in an analysis published in the journal Naturereviews drug Discoverylast week.

The most advanced candidates have recently moved into clinical development, including mRNA-1273from US-based biotechnology company Moderna, Ad5-nCoVfrom Chinese biopharma company CanSino Biologicals, and INO-4800from Americanpharmaceuticals company Inovio.

Others in this list include LV-SMENP-DC and pathogen-specific aAPCfrom Shenzhen Geno-Immune Medical Institute in China.

Numerous other vaccine developers have indicated plans to initiate human testing in 2020, the CEPI scientists said.

Experts believe the genome sequencing of the new coronavirus provided by scientists in China shows it shares 79 per cent of the same genetic material as severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS)and 50 per cent of the same material asMiddle East respiratory syndrome (MERS),a species of coronavirus which infects humans, bats, and camels.

This allows developers to use groundwork already created in research for vaccines for those viruses.

Australia's national science agency CSIRO announced earlier this month that it has begun preclinical tests of a vaccine developed by Oxford University in the UK.

A striking feature of the vaccine development landscape for COVID-19 is the range of technology platforms being evaluated, including nucleic acid (DNA and RNA), virus-like particle, live weakened virus, and inactivated virus approaches.

The CEPI noted that many of these platforms are not currently the basis for licensed vaccines, but experience in fields such as oncology is encouraging developers to exploit the opportunities that next-generation approaches offer for increased speed of development and manufacture.

It is conceivable that some vaccine platforms may be better suited to specific population subtypes such as the elderly, children, pregnant women, or immunocompromised patients, noted Sreekumar.

The CEPI analysis shows most COVID-19 vaccine development activity is in North America, with 36 (46 per cent) developers of the confirmed active vaccine candidates compared with 14 ( per cent) in China, 14 (18 per cent) in Asia (excluding China) and Australia, and 14 (18 per cent) in Europe.

Given the imperative for speed, there is an indication that vaccine could be available under emergency use or similar protocols byearly 2021, it said.

This would represent a fundamental change from the traditional vaccine development pathway, which takes on an average over10 years, even compared with the accelerated five-year timescale for development of the first Ebola vaccine, the organisation said.

Although there is a lot of enthusiasm, but it will take its own course to bring out a vaccine for COVID-19, Mishra added.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
UGANDA: The Ministry of Health permanent secretary in Uganda has revealed that people living in institutional quarantine in Uganda have started having sex with each other.



According to WatchDog Uganda, Permanent Secretary Diana Atwine made the claims during a recent interview on Radio One talk show, saying most of the people quarantined at hotels now move to rooms of others to go sleep with themselves.



She said the Ministry of Health (MOH) is greatly concerned because the practice is jeopardizing the governments efforts to curb the spreading of Coronavirus in Uganda.



Ugandans are not serious. Some who are in quarantine have even begun having (sexual) affairs. They move to rooms of others in the hotels where we have placed them. Others like in Mulago move from their rooms to visit their colleagues who are in other rooms, this is too dangerous and it will distract our efforts, said Atwiine.



According to her, this was the reason some people have not been released ever since they learnt about this practice.



The discovery comes weeks after the country's Ministry of Health announced 17 places to be used as isolation centres. The places include Hotels, Hospitals, lodges, and Universities, where over 232 people are placed under quarantine



Uganda has over 50 cases of Coronavirus with 7 recoveries.













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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In the largest effort so far, a group of MPA families helped fund the donation of 10,000 surgical masks, 1,060 N95 masks, 200 pairs of protective goggles, and 900 medical gowns to Chicago hospitals. Led by a donation from the family of sophomore Lana Liu, the families of MPA students Frank Li, Shane Liu, Wayne Zhang, Chris Chen, Joshua Sun, and Desmond Yang, and alumnus Connor Hu contributed to a fund established by Cornerstone Education and the Illinois chapter of the national nonprofit and civic organization United Chinese Americans. Joined by state Rep. Theresa Mah and Lakeisha Collins, the group delivered personal protective supplies to Rush University Medical Center last week and planned deliveries at the University of Chicago Medical Center and Mercy Hospital and Medical Center.
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TOKYO, April 15 (Xinhua) -- Sony Corp. plans to join forces with other companies in Japan to manufacture much-needed ventilators to be used in intensive care facilities amid a shortening supply of the machines as the number of coronavirus patients here continues to increase, sources at the company said Wednesday.

The Tokyo-based multinational conglomerate will utilize its digital camera production facility in Aichi Prefecture as well as its medical equipment plant in Shizuoka Prefecture to make components for ventilators, the sources said.

They added that Sony will also be involved in assembling ventilators, with the plan aimed at as many as 2,000 ventilators being produced within three months and more thereafter once the collaboration expands to include other domestic firms.

In a bid to garner more support from domestic manufacturers like Sony and companies from other fields to help increase the production of ventilators as the virus number continues to climb nationwide, the Japanese government said the approval process of manufacturing medical equipment will be reduced from several months to a matter of days.

Sony's initial collaboration with Tokyo's Acoma Medical Industry Co. in manufacturing ventilators will be expanded henceforth to include other companies, so the manufacturing process can be enhanced and the volume of ventilators can increase to meet the ever-increasing demand, the sources said.

Japan has seen the overall pace of new virus infections increase recently. Concerns have been mounting in the government and among medical communities that should cases continue to rise at such a pace, the nation could fast run out of ventilators.

As of Wednesday evening, coronavirus cases in Japan increased by 467 nationwide, including 127 new infections in Tokyo and 74 in Osaka, health ministry and local authorities said, bringing the nationwide total to 8,640.

The death toll from the pneumonia-causing virus now stands at a total of 189, including those from a cruise ship that was quarantined in Yokohama near Tokyo, the latest figures showed.

On April 7, Japan declared a state of emergency in seven prefectures over the coronavirus crisis in a bid to better empower hard-hit prefectures to take enhanced measures to curb the spread of the virus.
[April 15, 2020] Wipro Limited Announces Results for the Quarter and Year ended March 31, 2020 under IFRS

Wipro Limited (NYSE: WIT, BSE: 507685, NSE: WIPRO) today announced financial results under International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) for its quarter and year ended March 31, 2020. Highlights of the Results Results for the Year ended March 31, 2020: Gross Revenue was Rs 610.2 billion ($8.1 billion 1 ), an increase of 4.2% YoY

), an increase of 4.2% YoY IT Services Segment Revenue was at $8,256.2 million, grew at 1.7% YoY

Non-GAAP 2&3 constant currency IT Services Segment Revenue increased by 3.9% YoY

constant currency IT Services Segment Revenue increased by 3.9% YoY IT Services Operating Margin 4 for the year was at 18.1%, an expansion of 0.2% YoY

for the year was at 18.1%, an expansion of 0.2% YoY Net Income for the year was Rs 97.2 billion ($1.3 billion 1 ), an increase of 8.0% YoY

), an increase of 8.0% YoY EPS for the year was Rs 16.67 ($0.221) per share and grew 11.2% YoY Results for the Quarter ended March 31, 2020: Gross Revenue was Rs 157.1 billion ($2.1 billion 1 ), an increase of 4.7% YoY

), an increase of 4.7% YoY IT Services Segment Revenue was at $2,073.7 million, a decrease of 1.0% QoQ

Non-GAAP 3 constant currency IT Services Segment Revenue increased by 0.4% QoQ

constant currency IT Services Segment Revenue increased by 0.4% QoQ IT Services Operating Margin4 for the quarter was at 17.6%, a decrease of 0.8% QoQ

Net Income for the quarter was Rs 23.3 billion ($308.5 million 1 ), a decrease of 6.3% YoY

), a decrease of 6.3% YoY EPS for the quarter was Rs 4.09 ($0.051) per share, a decrease of 1.1% YoY

The Board has not recommended any final dividend. The interim dividend of Rs 1 declared by the Board at its meeting held on January 14, 2020 shall be considered as the final dividend for the financial year 2019-20. Thus, the total dividend for the financial year 2019-20 remains Rs 1 per equity share Performance for the quarter & year ended March 31, 2020 Abidali Z. Neemuchwala, CEO and Managing Director said, "In these unprecedented times, I am extremely proud of how the Wipro team has come together and worked 24/7 to ensure the safety and well-being of each other while continuing to serve our clients. We hope that all of us stay safe and strong during these tough times. We are confident that our broad portfolio of services and our ability to execute to our commitments makes us well-positioned to gain market share." Jatin Dalal, Chief Financial Officer said, "The quarters ahead seem challenging and require a tremendous response on costs. We also anticipate our working capital to increase, but our strong balance sheet provides us the confidence that we will emerge stronger and better. Further, due to the volatility in the external environment, we have decided not to provide a quarterly guidance on revenues." We estimate that the IT Services Revenues for the quarter ended March 31, 2020 were negatively impacted by COVID-19 by approximately $14 -$16 million5 (0.7%-0.8% of revenues). Due to the uncertainty around the course of the COVID-19 pandemic, we do not have visibility into the extent to which it will disrupt our operations, and we have decided to not provide revenue guidance for the quarter ending June 30, 2020. We anticipate that we will resume providing revenue guidance when we have increased certainty of both demand and supply side factors. IT Services Wipro continued its momentum in winning deals globally as described below: Wipro has won a multi-year engagement in Mexico with one of the world's largest Spanish language media companies to redefine their workplace experience. This engagement enables their digital strategy to deliver enhanced user experience and move to a flexible and secure model leveraging VirtuaDesk, Wipro's digital IP, and security expertise. Wipro will also leverage its deep media expertise and innovation to enable the client in their long-term business objectives.

A large US-based healthcare company has awarded Wipro a multi-year contract to transform its contact center operations using Design Thinking, AI Automation & Analytics leveraging Wipro HOLMES and other digital technologies.

A multinational professional services firm has awarded Wipro a Digital Workspace Services contract under which Wipro will provide IT support and transform the end user experience for its employees globally, leveraging its design-led approach.

Wipro has won a multi-year engagement with a top Australian utility company for modernizing their core back-office platform leveraging SAP S/4 HANA digital core. This program will enable the client to consolidate and streamline their Corporate Finance, Supply Chain & Procurement functions in a single integrated platform. Wipro continued to partner with our customers during COVID-19, some examples of how we collaborated are below: Our customer, an American food service, facilities, and uniform services provider caters to over 5000 client locations across the US, majority of which are now inaccessible due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The company's Chief Growth Officer collaborated with Wipro to map nursing homes in these locations that may be in dire need of help and which could be serviced by the local task teams. We successfully developed a Google Distance Matrix API based solution to map the top 10 service locations that could aid nursing homes in their serviceable regions. Especially for the New York state nursing homes that are more severely affected than most, we could provide same day location mapping results for priority outreach. This solution now has the ability to cover all nursing homes, enabling our customer to take its humanitarian effort nationwide.

One of the European governments recently announced multi-billion in loans for corporates to avail during the COVID-19 crisis. Within a span of 3 days, we helped our customer, one of the largest banks in Europe, update and go-live with their loan processing applications to ensure their corporate customers' businesses stay up and running. These applications can now process interest-free loans in just 15 minutes, and so far, nearly 10,000 of the bank's corporate customers have benefited immensely.

Amidst the COVID-19 crisis, we helped our customer, a Postal Services company in Middle East, launch a special medicine delivery service as a part of the government's quick response for citizens.

Even amidst the operational issues posed by the pandemic, we were able to help our client, a clothing retailer in South Africa, successfully go-live with a large Oracle retail implementation. This is an example of a 100% 'remote' cutover, and has enabled the client to optimize its operations significantly to serve their customers. Analyst Recognition Wipro was recognized as the "Star Performer of the year" in Everest Group PEAK Matrix Service Provider of the Year awards

Wipro was positioned as a Leader in Gartner Magic Quadrant for Managed Workplace Services, Europe, David Groombridge, 25 Feb 2020

Wipro was named as a Leader in Gartner Magic Quadrant for Managed Workplace Services, North America, Daniel Barros, 25 Feb 2020

Wipro was positioned as a Leader in IDC MarketScape: Worldwide Business and Industrial IoT Consulting and Systems Integration Services 2020 Vendor Assessment. (Doc #US46120820, March 2020)

Wipro was positioned as a Leader in IDC MarketScape: Worldwide Business and Industrial IoT Engineering and Managed Services 2020 Vendor Assessment. (Doc #US46121220, March 2020) Disclaimer: Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in its research publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner's research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose IT Products IT Products Segment Revenue for the year was Rs 11.0 billion ($146.0 million 1 )

) IT Products Segment Results for the year was a loss of Rs 0.28 billion ($3.7 million 1 )

) IT Products Segment Revenue for the quarter was Rs 2.8 billion ($37.0 million 1 )

) IT Products Segment Results for the quarter was a profit of Rs 0.12 billion ($1.5 million1) India business from State Run Enterprises (SRE) India SRE Segment Revenue for the year was Rs 8.4 billion ($111.4 million 1 )

) India SRE Segment Results for the year was a loss of Rs 1.8 billion ($24.2 million 1 )

) India SRE Segment Revenue for the quarter was Rs 2.3 billion ($31.1 million 1 )

) India SRE Segment Results for the quarter was a loss of Rs 0.48 billion ($6.4 million1) Please refer the table at the end for reconciliation between IFRS IT Services Revenue and IT Services Revenue on a non-GAAP constant currency basis. About Non-GAAP Financial Measures This press release contains non-GAAP financial measures within the meaning of Regulation G and Item 10(e) of Regulation S-K. Such non-GAAP financial measures are measures of our historical or future performance, financial position or cash flows that are adjusted to exclude or include amounts that are excluded or included, as the case may be, from the most directly comparable financial measure calculated and presented in accordance with IFRS. The table at the end provides IT Services Revenue on a constant currency basis, which is a non-GAAP financial measure that is calculated by translating IT Services Revenue from the current reporting period into U.S. dollars based on the currency conversion rate in effect for the prior reporting period. We refer to growth rates in constant currency so that business results may be viewed without the impact of fluctuations in foreign currency exchange rates, thereby facilitating period-to-period comparisons of our business performance. Further, in the normal course of business, we may divest a portion of our business which may not be strategic. We refer to the growth rates in both reported and constant currency adjusting for such divestments in order to represent the comparable growth rates. This non-GAAP financial measure is not based on any comprehensive set of accounting rules or principles and should not be considered a substitute for, or superior to, the most directly comparable financial measure calculated in accordance with IFRS and may be different from non-GAAP measures used by other companies. In addition to this non-GAAP measure, the financial statements prepared in accordance with IFRS and the reconciliation of these non-GAAP financial measures with the most directly comparable IFRS financial measure should be carefully evaluated. Results for the quarter and year ended March 31, 2020, prepared under IFRS, along with individual business segment reports, are available in the Investors section of our website www.wipro.com Quarterly Conference Call We will hold an earnings conference call today at 07:15 p.m. Indian Standard Time (09:45 a.m. U.S. Eastern Time) to discuss our performance for the quarter. The audio from the conference call will be available online through a web-cast and can be accessed at the following link- https://links.ccwebcast.com/?EventId=Wipro200415 An audio recording of the management discussions and the question and answer session will be available online and will be accessible in the Investor Relations section of our website at www.wipro.com About Wipro Limited Wipro Limited (NYSE: WIT, BSE: 507685, NSE: WIPRO) is a leading global information technology, consulting and business process services company. We harness the power of cognitive computing, hyper-automation, robotics, cloud, analytics and emerging technologies to help our clients adapt to the digital world and make them successful. A company recognized globally for its comprehensive portfolio of services, strong commitment to sustainability and good corporate citizenship, we have over 175,000 dedicated employees serving clients across six continents. Together, we discover ideas and connect the dots to build a better and a bold new future. Forward-Looking Statements The forward-looking statements contained herein represent Wipro's beliefs regarding future events, many of which are by their nature, inherently uncertain and outside Wipro's control. Such statements include, but are not limited to, statements regarding Wipro's growth prospects, its future financial operating results, and its plans, expectations and intentions. Wipro cautions readers that the forward-looking statements contained herein are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from the results anticipated by such statements. Such risks and uncertainties include, but are not limited to, risks and uncertainties regarding fluctuations in our earnings, revenue and profits, our ability to generate and manage growth, complete proposed corporate actions, intense competition in IT services, our ability to maintain our cost advantage, wage increases in India, our ability to attract and retain highly skilled professionals, time and cost overruns on fixed-price, fixed-time frame contracts, client concentration, restrictions on immigration, our ability to manage our international operations, reduced demand for technology in our key focus areas, disruptions in telecommunication networks, our ability to successfully complete and integrate potential acquisitions, liability for damages on our service contracts, the success of the companies in which we make strategic investments, withdrawal of fiscal governmental incentives, political instability, war, legal restrictions on raising capital or acquiring companies outside India, unauthorized use of our intellectual property and general economic conditions affecting our business and industry. The conditions caused by the COVID-19 pandemic could decrease technology spending, adversely affect demand for our products, affect the rate of customer spending and could adversely affect our customers' ability or willingness to purchase our offerings, delay prospective customers' purchasing decisions, adversely impact our ability to provide on-site consulting services and our inability to deliver our customers or delay the provisioning of our offerings, all of which could adversely affect our future sales, operating results and overall financial performance. Our operations may also be negatively affected by a range of external factors related to the COVID-19 pandemic that are not within our control. Additional risks that could affect our future operating results are more fully described in our filings with the United States Securities and Exchange Commission, including, but not limited to, Annual Reports on Form 20-F. These filings are available at www.sec.gov. We may, from time to time, make additional written and oral forward-looking statements, including statements contained in the company's filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission and our reports to shareholders. We do not undertake to update any forward-looking statement that may be made from time to time by us or on our behalf. For the convenience of the readers, the amounts in Indian Rupees in this release have been translated into United States Dollars at the certified foreign exchange rate of US$1 = Rs 75.39, as published by the Federal Reserve Board of Governors on March 31, 2020. However, the realized exchange rate in our IT Services business segment for the quarter ended March 31, 2020 was US$1= Rs 73.95. YoY growth rates for the year ended March 31, 2020 have been computed by adjusting revenues for the year ended March 31, 2019 for the impact of divestments. Constant currency revenue for a period is the product of volumes in that period times the average actual exchange rate of the corresponding comparative period. IT Services Operating Margin refers to Segment Results Total as reflected in IFRS financials. The estimated impact of COVID-19 on our business is due to service discontinuity caused by inability of our employees to work from home or contract cancellations/ramp down attributed to the COVID-19 pandemic.







WIPRO LIMITED AND SUBSIDIARIES INTERIM CONDENSED CONSOLIDATED STATEMENT OF FINANCIAL POSITION (Rs in millions, except share and per share data, unless otherwise stated) As at March 31, 2019 As at March 31, 2020 Convenience translation

into US dollar in millions

Refer footnote 1 ASSETS Goodwill 116,980 131,012 1,738 Intangible assets 13,762 16,362 217 Property, plant and equipment 70,601 81,120 1,076 Right-of-use assets - 16,748 222 Financial assets Derivative assets 173 - - Investments 6,916 9,302 123 Trade receivables 4,373 6,049 80 Other financial assets 5,146 5,881 78 Investments accounted for using the equity method 1,235 1,383 18 Deferred tax assets 5,604 6,005 80 Non-current tax assets 20,603 11,414 151 Other non-current assets 15,872 11,935 158 Total non-current assets 261,265 297,211 3,941 Inventories 3,951 1,865 25 Financial assets Derivative assets 4,931 3,025 40 Investments 220,716 189,635 2,515 Cash and cash equivalents 158,529 144,499 1,917 Trade receivables 100,489 104,474 1,386 Unbilled receivables 22,880 25,209 334 Other financial assets 14,611 8,614 114 Contract assets 15,038 17,143 227 Current tax assets 7,435 2,882 38 Other current assets 23,086 22,505 299 571,666 519,851 6,895 Assets held for sale 240 - - Total current assets 571,906 519,851 6,895 TOTAL ASSETS 833,171 817,062 10,836 EQUITY Share capital 12,068 11,427 152 Securities premium reserve 533 1,275 17 Retained earnings 534,700 519,907 6,896 Share-based payment reserve 2,617 1,550 21 Other components of equity 18,198 23,299 309 Equity attributable to the equity holders of the Company 568,116 557,458 7,395 Non-controlling interest 2,637 1,875 25 TOTAL EQUITY 570,753 559,333 7,420 LIABILITIES Financial liabilities Long - term loans and borrowings 28,368 4,840 64 Derivative liabilities - 138 Lease liabilities - 12,638 168 Other financial liabilities - 151 2 Deferred tax liabilities 3,417 2,825 37 Non-current tax liabilities 11,023 13,205 175 Other non-current liabilities 5,258 7,537 100 Provisions 2 2 - Total non-current liabilities 48,068 41,336 546 Financial liabilities Loans, borrowings and bank overdrafts 71,099 73,202 971 Derivative liabilities 1,310 7,231 96 Trade payables and accrued expenses 88,304 78,129 1,036 Lease liabilities - 6,560 87 Other financial liabilities 644 899 12 Contract liabilities 24,768 18,775 249 Current tax liabilities 9,541 11,731 156 Other current liabilities 18,046 19,254 255 Provisions 638 612 8 Total current liabilities 214,350 216,393 2,870 TOTAL LIABILITIES 262,418 257,729 3,416 TOTAL EQUITY AND LIABILITIES 833,171 817,062 10,836

WIPRO LIMITED AND SUBSIDIARIES INTERIM CONDENSED CONSOLIDATED STATEMENT OF INCOME (Rs in millions, except share and per share data, unless otherwise stated) Three months ended March 31, Year ended March 31, 2019 2020 2020 2019 2020 2020 Convenience

translation into US

dollar in millions

Refer footnote 1 Convenience

translation into US

dollar in millions

Refer footnote 1 Revenues 150,063 157,110 2,084 585,845 610,232 8,094 Cost of revenues (106,942) (114,133) (1,514) (413,033) (436,085) (5,784) Gross profit 43,121 42,977 570 172,812 174,147 2,310 Selling and marketing expenses (10,994) (10,295) (137) (44,510) (42,907) (569) General and administrative expenses (6,669) (7,681) (101) (35,951) (29,823) (396) Foreign exchange gains/(losses), net 316 993 13 3,215 3,169 42 Other operating income 1,546 395 5 4,344 1,144 15 Results from operating activities 27,320 26,389 350 99,910 105,730 1,402 Finance expenses (2,530) (1,653) (22) (7,375) (7,328) (97) Finance and other income 7,228 4,907 65 22,923 24,081 319 Share of net profit /(loss) of associates accounted for using the equity method (17) 13 - (43) 29 - Profit before tax 32,001 29,656 393 115,415 122,512 1,624 Income tax expense (7,064) (6,205) (82) (25,242) (24,799) (329) Profit for the period 24,937 23,451 311 90,173 97,713 1,295 Profit attributable to: Equity holders of the Company 24,833 23,260 308 90,031 97,218 1,288 Non-controlling interest 104 191 3 142 495 7 Profit for the period 24,937 23,451 311 90,173 97,713 1,295 Earnings per equity share: Attributable to equity share holders of the Company Basic 4.13 4.09 0.05 14.99 16.67 0.22 Diluted 4.12 4.07 0.05 14.95 16.62 0.22 Weighted average number of equity shares used in computing earnings per equity share Basic 6,008,783,491 5,692,835,298 5,692,835,298 6,007,376,837 5,833,384,018 5,833,384,018 Diluted 6,023,959,306 5,703,378,727 5,703,378,727 6,022,304,367 5,847,823,239 5,847,823,239 Additional Information: Particulars Three months ended Year ended March 31, 2020 December 31, 2019 March 31, 2019 March 31, 2020 March 31, 2019 Audited Audited Audited Audited Audited Revenue IT Services BFSI 46,690 46,612 46,043 184,457 175,262 Health BU 20,589 19,799 19,288 78,240 75,081 CBU 25,669 25,443 23,667 97,008 89,313 ENU 19,570 19,553 18,628 76,443 72,830 TECH 19,503 18,584 18,402 75,895 76,591 MFG 12,486 12,450 11,551 48,158 46,496 COMM 8,453 8,565 8,286 33,840 32,680 Total of IT Services 152,960 151,006 145,865 594,041 568,253 IT Products 2,792 2,576 2,759 11,010 12,312 ISRE 2,341 1,847 1,787 8,400 8,544 Reconciling Items 10 3 (32) (50) (49) Total Revenue 158,103 155,432 150,379 613,401 589,060 Other operating Income IT Services 395 - 1,546 1,144 4,344 Total Other Operating Income 395 - 1,546 1,144 4,344 Segment Result IT Services BFSI 8,144 8,246 9,649 34,132 33,831 Health BU 3,049 3,186 1,940 12,027 8,638 CBU 4,546 4,725 4,716 16,729 16,828 ENU 3,766 3,130 2,787 12,176 7,081 TECH 3,906 3,256 3,031 14,312 15,916 MFG 2,336 2,385 2,262 9,252 8,327 COMM 1,330 1,444 985 5,336 4,396 Unallocated (547) 1,360 1,161 2,577 3,142 Other Operating Income 395 - 1,546 1,144 4,344 Total of IT Services 26,925 27,732 28,077 107,685 102,503 IT Products 116 (140) (93) (282) (1,047) ISRE (481) (528) (775) (1,822) (1,829) Reconciling Items (171) 169 111 149 283 Total 26,389 27,233 27,320 105,730 99,910 Finance Expense (1,653) (1,844) (2,530) (7,328) (7,375) Finance and Other Income 4,907 5,370 7,228 24,081 22,923 Share of net profit/ (loss) of associates accounted for using the equity method 13 34 (17) 29 (43) Profit before tax 29,656 30,793 32,001 122,512 115,415 The Company is organized into the following operating segments: IT Services, IT Products and India State Run Enterprise segment (ISRE). IT Services: The IT Services segment primarily consists of IT Service offerings to customers organized by industry verticals. The industry verticals are as follows: Banking, Financial Services and Insurance (BFSI), Health Business Unit (Health BU), Consumer Business Unit (CBU), Energy, Natural Resources & Utilities (ENU), Manufacturing (MFG), Technology (TECH) and Communications (COMM). Key service offerings to customers includes software application development and maintenance, research and development services for hardware and software design, business application services, analytics, consulting, infrastructure outsourcing services and business process services. IT Products: The Company is a value-added reseller of desktops, servers, notebooks, storage products, networking solutions and packaged software for leading international brands. In certain total outsourcing contracts of the IT Services segment, the Company delivers hardware, software products and other related deliverables. Revenue relating to the above items is reported as revenue from the sale of IT Products. India State Run Enterprise segment (ISRE): This segment consists of IT Services offerings to entities/ departments owned or controlled by the Government of India and/ or any Indian State Governments Reconciliation of Non-GAAP Constant Currency IT Services Revenue to IT Services Revenue as per IFRS ($MN) Three Months ended March 31, 2020 IT Services Revenue as per IFRS $ 2,073.7 Effect of Foreign currency exchange movement $ 30.5 Non-GAAP Constant Currency IT Services Revenue based on $ 2,104.2 previous quarter exchange rates Year ended March 31, 2019 IT Services Revenue as per IFRS $ 8,120.3 Effect of divestments $ (63.3) Adjusted IT Services Revenue $ 8,057.1 Year ended March 31, 2020 IT Services Revenue as per IFRS $ 8,256.2 Effect of Foreign currency exchange movement $ 114.0 Non-GAAP Constant Currency IT Services Revenue based on exchange rates of comparable period in previous year $ 8,370.2 View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20200415005469/en/

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Asahi Songwon Colors | Company resumes operations/production at manufacturing plants. (Image: asahisongwon.com)

Vardhman Textiles: Company started partial operations in its spinning units in Punjab, HP and MP. (Image: Moneycontrol)

Dalmia Bharat Sugar: Company started manufacturing hand sanitizers at its distillery units in Uttar Pradesh and Maharashtra. (Image: PTI)

Galaxy Surfactants: Small intermediate feed tank blast at Tarapur M-3 Plant has led to 2 fatalities and 3 injuries. (Image: galaxysurfactants.com)

Nectar Lifesciences: Company started limited operations of its API plants in Derabassi, Punjab. (Image: Moneycontrol)

Rossell India: ICRA reaffirmed its long term credit rating at BBB+/Stable for company's line of credit facilities. (Image: Moneycontrol)

Sun Pharma | Gets tentative US FDA nod for Dapagliflozin, Diabetes drug

Interglobe Aviation | To resume flight operations from May 4 in a phased manner

JSW Steel | Moody's reviews company for downgrade

Ajanta Pharma | Gets US FDA nod for Metformin Hydrochloride tablets

Hindalco Industries | Company owned Novelis Inc acquired US-based Aluminium rolled products manufacturer Aleris Corporation.

Metropolis Healthcare | Private equity giant Carlyle has launched a block deal to nearly exit the multinational pathology chain owner, sources in the know told Moneycontrol. Metropolis Healthcare is one of the private diagnostic firms approved by the government for COVID-19 tests.

Welspun Corp | Company has partially resumed operations at its plant in Anjar, Gujarat in manufacturing of LSAW pipes.

Alkem Lab | Company gets tentative US FDA nod for Dapagliflozin, Diabetes drug

NTPC | Company has decided to raise Rs 4,374.10 crore on April 16, 2020 through private placement of unsecured non-convertible bonds

Apollo Tyres | Board of directors of the company are scheduled to meet on April 17, 2020, to consider the issue of non-convertible debentures through private placement.

Mahindra & Mahindra | India Ratings and Research has affirmed its long-term issuer rating of the company at 'INDAAA'and kept the outlook stable.

DFM Foods | Company has resumed partial operations at its Greater Noida plant

Biocon | Company with Mylan NV announced launch of Fulphila, a biosimilar to Neulasta (pegfilgrastim) in Australia

Maruti Suzuki India: Suzuki Motor Gujarat Pvt Ltd (SMG) has extended the suspension of the production of cars till further notice.

Wipro | IT major will release its March quarter earnings today

Bharat Forge | Company has decided to further extend the suspension of its operations at all the offices and manufacturing locations in India till further notice.

Dr Reddys Laboratories | Company has launched Amphetamine Sulfate Tablets, USP, in US market.
Healthcare workers, police and firefighters gather for a tribute to the fight against the coronavirus April 14 at Glendale Adventist Hospital. (Luis Sinco / Los Angeles Times)

Los Angeles County health officials on Wednesday confirmed 42 more deaths linked to the coronavirus, the highest number reported in a single day, bringing the county's death toll to 402.

Public Health Department Director Barbara Ferrer also confirmed 472 new COVID-19 cases, bringing the county's total to nearly 10,500. Officials have previously said the case count includes people who have recovered, but there is no way to track those numbers.

Among the most recent deaths, 24 people were older than 65, 11 were ages 41 to 65 and one person was 18 to 40, Ferrer said. Information on the six other deaths wasn't immediately available.

"These are now our worst two days back to back," Mayor Eric Garcetti said during a news conference Wednesday evening, referencing Tuesday's death toll of 40. "These are not statistics. These are stories."

The county's news comes after nearly a month of unprecedented social distancing efforts that have altered the lives of Californians. Public officials across the state this week have begun offering their insights as to when the restrictions may finally be eased.

A common theme appears to be emerging: Now is not the time to loosen stay-at-home orders.



Gov. Gavin Newsom on Tuesday said California needs to increase testing, protect high-risk residents from infection and expand hospital capacity before the state can begin to modify the stay-at-home order he imposed a month ago and gradually return to a sense of normalcy.

The parameters Newsom outlined suggest the state must meet a high bar before walking back the order.

I want you to know its not, it will not be a permanent state, he said. We recognize the consequences of the stay-at-home orders have a profound impact on the economy, your personal household budget, your personal prospects around your future.

It could be sometime in May before state and local officials begin to seriously contemplate how they might start to gradually ease the stay-at-home order.

Story continues

This is not the end, and its not even the beginning of the end, but perhaps the end of the beginning, Anna Roth, director of Contra Costa Health Services, said Tuesday, quoting Winston Churchills comments after a victory in World War II in 1942. Now is not the time for us to take a victory lap.

Dr. Chris Farnitano, Contra Costa Countys health officer, went further. Its not even the end of the beginning. Its still the beginning of the beginning in this crisis, Farnitano told the county Board of Supervisors.



If we do not continue our efforts to really reduce the spread within our community by our social-distancing and staying-at-home efforts ... we are still at risk of facing a surge that could overwhelm our hospitals," he said.

In Los Angeles, Garcetti said, a key step toward lifting restrictions will be widespread, two-pronged testing  virology tests, which check whether you're actively infected, and serology tests to detect whether you've been infected by the virus in the past.

The tests, he said, will help L.A. move "from crisis to recovery."

Managing outbreaks in long-term care facilities, where older patients with underlying health conditions are among the most vulnerable, remains a priority, Long Beach officials said Wednesday, noting that of the city's 18 COVID-19 deaths, 13 have been associated with long-term care facilities. The city issued a new health order on Wednesday requiring that all staff and residents have their temperatures checked daily and mandating that staff wear surgical masks at all times.

In the Bay Area, which initially saw the largest concentration of cases statewide but has had success flattening the curve, officials on Wednesday doubled down on a message from last week: Dont even think about packing together in public on 4/20.

The city's legendary love fest to cannabis won't be tolerated this year and the streets surrounding Golden Gate Park, where the event is held each year, will be fenced off, San Francisco Police Chief William Scott said during a news conference.



If we have to cite, we will, Scott said. If we have to arrest, we will.

Californias hospitals have not been stretched to the limit, as medical facilities have been in New York. As of Wednesday, California had reported 858 deaths, while New York state has reported more than 10,000. Over the last week, California has averaged 1,177 new cases and 48.3 new deaths per day.

Daily coronavirus related deaths reached new heights in Los Angeles County this week. Health officials on Tuesday confirmed 40 deaths linked to the coronavirus, which before Wednesday, was the highest number reported in a single day.

The latest number of those infected includes 28 people in the homeless community. While the majority of those people were unsheltered, officials noted that six people who tested positive for COVID-19 were staying in a shelter. At least three of the cases were reported at the Union Rescue Mission on skid row.

Ferrer added that county health officials are "making sure everybody is appropriately isolated and quarantined" at the shelter.

She said officials are using daily data on countywide infections and deaths to make decisions about when to start relaxing social distancing requirements. She's hopeful this could begin by the middle or end of May, but encouraged residents to continue their efforts, including wearing face coverings in public and staying home as much as possible, in the meantime.

"The sacrifices made cannot be counted: Some have lost loved ones, some have been ill, some have lost jobs, some have had to temporarily close business, some are guiding children through remote learning and everyone has had to live our day-to-day life very differently than we are used to," Ferrer said. "Thank you for continuing to do what you're doing. Engaging in these practices is making a difference, and we will get to the other side of this together."



However, it may be quite a while before life as most Angelenos know it returns to normal.

An internal Los Angeles Fire Department email reviewed by The Times indicates that the city may hold off on allowing big gatherings, like concerts and sporting events, until 2021 because of the coronavirus threat. Mayor Eric Garcetti raised the issue during his weekly briefing Monday with a group of high-level staff from several departments, including Fire Chief Ralph Terrazas, according to the email.

Newsom and officials in his administration say their strategy to slow the spread of the virus is working, pointing to relatively low growth in COVID-19 hospitalizations as evidence that staying home and social distancing are preventing a surge of infections.

But that success comes with a cost.

More than 2.3 million Californians filed for unemployment benefits in the last month as businesses closed due to state mandates, and the economy continues to unravel. Some students lost access to free and reduced-cost meals when schools shuttered, and many have not participated in virtual learning . To meet a growing demand in L.A., Garcetti said Wednesday that the city plans to more than double the number of seniors receiving free meals several times a week from 5,000 to 12,000. And the governors strategy of distancing residents can also lead to social isolation and increased health risks for the elderly and vulnerable.

Despite his attempts to quell uncertainty, Newsom has not yet provided a timeline for when the states nearly 40 million people can expect to return to work  or move about freely. And to those struggling to make ends meet, thats the question they want answered most.

When are the restrictions going to be lifted? asked Miguel Tot, who last worked at his job managing a downtown Los Angeles restaurant on March 16. Theres no timetable on that, so I have no idea, you know, when normality is going to come back.

Times staff writers Marisa Gerber, Richard Winton, Colleen Shalby, Dakota Smith and Ben Welsh contributed to this report
M ore than two million people could lose their jobs because of the coronavirus lockdown, the UKs fiscal watchdog has warned as the Chancellor said tough times lay ahead.

Unemployment could rise from 1.3 million to 3.4 million, leaving about one in 10 of the working population without a job, according to the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR).

Chancellor Rishi Sunak said not every business or household could be protected from the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic, but said a bounceback would come when the crisis eases.

Mr Sunaks remarks came yesterday evening in the governments daily coronavirus briefing, on the same day the OBR said the economy could shrink by 35 per cent between now and June.

Rishi Sunak said the economy would 'bounce back' as the coronavirus crisis begins to ease / PA

It came as ministers faced pressure from Labour to publish their lockdown exit strategy and the death toll for patients in hospitals who tested positive for Covid-19 rose above 12,000.

In other developments:

- A survey by the British Chambers of Commerce suggested around one in three British businesses has furloughed between 75 per cent and 100 per cent of its workforce due to the coronavirus crisis.

- The International Monetary Fund projected that the global economy would suffer its worst year since the Great Depression in the 1930s, shrinking by an estimated 3 per cent.

- Sir Simon Stevens, chief executive of NHS England, is reported to be the latest senior figure leading the UK's response to the crisis to have suffered from coronavirus. The BBC said he had self-isolated for just over a week.

All you need to know from the latest coronavirus briefing

In its first estimate of the economic toll taken by the crisis, the OBR said public sector net borrowing is expected to increase by 218 billion this year.

Thats compared with March forecasts, hitting 273 billion, or 14 per cent of GDP.

"That would be the largest single-year deficit since the Second World War," the independent forecaster said.

It based the outlook on a scenario where the lockdown lasts three months followed by a partial lifting for three months.

But it said, in this case, there would be a sharp bounceback in the economy, with gross domestic product likely to jump 25 per cent in the third quarter and a further 20 per cent in the final three months of 2020.

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Mr Sunak told the daily Downing Street press conference: "These are tough times and there will be more to come. As I have said before, we cannot protect every business and every household.

"But we came into this crisis with a fundamentally sound economy, powered by the hard work and ingenuity of the British people and British businesses.

"So while those economic impacts are significant, the OBR also expects them to be temporary, with a bounceback in growth."

It came as Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer added his voice to calls for the Government to publish its exit strategy from the lockdown this week.

In a letter to Dominic Raab, who is deputising for Boris Johnson, Sir Keir said Labour would support the Government if, as is expected, it keeps the current measures in place.

But he said: "The question for Thursday therefore is no longer about whether the lockdown should be extended, but about what the Government's position is on how and when it can be eased in due course and on what criteria that decision will be taken."

A Government source said talk of an exit strategy before the UK has reached the peak "risks confusing the critical message that people need to stay at home in order to protect our NHS and save lives".

Elsewhere, Health Secretary Matt Hancock said all care home residents and social care staff with coronavirus symptoms will be tested as capacity increases.

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He also vowed to provide tests for all potential care home residents before they are discharged from hospital.

It follows intense criticism of the Government's treatment of the sector, with claims it has been forgotten as the disease spread.

On Tuesday, figures released by the Office for National Statistics showed that 16,387 people died in England and Wales in the week to April 3 - an increase of 5,246 deaths compared with the previous week and 6,082 more than the five-year average.

Covid-19 was mentioned on 3,475 death certificates in the same week, including hospital, care home and community deaths.

But care home providers have warned they are seeing a higher number of cases and deaths than are officially reported, in part due to a time lag with the ONS figures.
Who could have imagined that kolonya, a traditional Turkish sanitiser, long out of vogue with the young and urbane, was to make such a glorious comeback? Since Turkeys Scientific Board listed the liquid, with its 80 per cent ethyl alcohol base, as an official preventive measure against Covid-19, suppliers have been out of stock and century-old kolonya brands have been working around the clock to meet growing demand at home and abroad.

Kolonya made its Turkish debut in the early 20th century long after the French reclaimed it following their battles with Germany in the late 18th century and called it eau de cologne, or the water of cologne. At home, it was a common gesture for the youngest member of the family to grab the chic kolonya bottle as soon as guests were welcomed in, gently pouring it into hands  starting from the elderly and garnering praise in return.

In side-street barbershops throughout Anatolia, it is still the final touch on clean-shaven faces, sizzling tiny cuts with refreshment and sanitisation. So is the case with public toilets when the person in charge sits on a small stool with a paper towel in one hand, kolonya in the other, assuring everyone leaves with clean hands. For decades, kolonya with its traditional lemon, lavender and tobacco flower scents had Turks under its spell, not least as a viable alternative to more costly perfumes.

It was exclusively sold at pharmacies, Nigan Bayazit, a retired professor of design, who studied kolonya bottles, explains. Its accessibility and affordability contributed to its widespread popularity.

Recommended How to care for dry hands during the coronavirus outbreak

In recent times, however, even if still used daily in rural Anatolia and by the elderly in big cities, the tradition mostly faded in urban Turkey and among younger generations. It might have been the traditional family lifestyle and its roles that the young rejected along with kolonya, Sebnem Timur, a professor of design at Istanbul Technical University, argues.

This, Sweetheart, why dont you offer our guests some kolonya might have prepared the end of it, she says, in reference to a 2007 academic study on kolonya habits to which she contributed. For young individuals, who had a problem with traditional roles and wanted to become urbanised, modern, kolonya was part of the package with needle-work tablecloths, crystal bottles and classical ornate furniture that reminded them of an outdated lifestyle.

In early March, however, their rejection was turned on its head when health minister Fahrettin Koca on live television quoted scientists working on the coronavirus outbreak saying, The Science Council recommends kolonya, as long as it (alcohol level) is over 60 per cent.

Even before his statement, people of all ages had already flocked to pharmacies, supermarkets and online platforms, quickly draining available stock. Long lines formed in front of kolonya shops as people waited to refill their plastic containers just as in old times.

A gesture of community hygiene (EPA)

While kolonya was resting in your daddys leather slippers, it suddenly turned into a chevalier of medicine, dressed in green scrubs, Timur says. Soon after, popular Bogazici Kolonyalari, increased production capacity to maximum level, with their manufacturing site working in three shifts seven days a week, Phillip Haas, the chairman says. Eyup Sabri Tuncer, one of the most prominent kolonya labels on the market started producing well over their 80,000-bottle daily capacity, breaking records seen at even the busiest holiday times.

This is not about increasing business but producing in the spirit of national mobilisation at a time of war against a deadly threat, Engin Tuncer, a third-generation chair of Eyup Sabri Tuncer says. We own our leadership position and remain committed to not increasing our prices.

Prices, however, depend on supplies of ethyl alcohol, kolonyas main ingredient, imports that Pakistan, Iran, Russia and Brazil normally provide but froze due to the spread of the pandemic at home, suffocating markets at large. Underground producers picked up on the demand, releasing fake kolonya versions with methyl alcohol that have serious side effects such as temporary blindness, skin irritation and burns, certified producers warn. The Industry and Technology Ministry stepped in, gathering all kolonya producers for a series of fast-track meetings before announcing immediate measures to fill the gap in raw materials.

Kolonya becomes a popular household item again (EPA)

For three months, it lifted the petroleum sectors obligation to mix their fuel with 3 per cent of ethyl alcohol, diverting resources to medical steriliser producers, the semi-official Anadolu News Agency reported on 13 March. Furthermore, ethyl alcohol production lines of Amasya and Eskisehir sugar factories, which treat sugar cane, wheat and sugar beet and previously stalled alcohol lines, were back in the business, reports say.

Good news for consumers young and old when Turkey has so far 1,403 Covid-19 deaths and 65,111 cases. Like many others, my childhood is filled with memories of serving kolonya to guests but now I realise it was my grannies subtle way of sterilising people coming in from outside, Zeynep Karakasoglu, a 40-year-old commercial scriptwriter, says. Previously, I was not fond of it but am now using the lemon one every day.

A side street pharmacy in Istanbuls Emirgan neighbourhood saw clients through a service window on Saturday. Kolonya is requested extremely often, sells very well and of course we have none left, a young attendant says, speaking through her white mask. Weve been sold out for a week but you can find it online.

Roads and bus stops were bare along the citys coastal road except for the occasional car passing by. Some young people just discovered it, but Ive loved kolonya as long as I remember, Aytul Pamuk, a 53-year-old housewife, says, speaking from afar, easily heard in the quiet of the normally buzzing street. Every morning, I wash my hands and face, put my lemon kolonya on and my ritual hasnt changed for years.

Production of kolonya has soared (Eyup Sabri Tuncer)

Turkish kolonya producers relied on customers like Pamuk, but also sought ways to appeal to younger generations. In the last eight years, weve run several gentrification projects to work on the popularity of kolonya among younger generations, introduced more hip and trendy odours like clementine flower and Japanese cherry flower, says Tuncer. Our immediate surveys show that our solid clientele aged between 30 to 60 has dropped down to 14 years of age due to the pandemic.

Beyond borders, Turkish kolonya for the first time entered homes in Japan, China, Taiwan and South Korea, adding to Tuncers more than 70 export destinations, while in Britain, Turkish grocers put out their entire stock. Kolonya was a sweet memory from my travels in Turkey and was excellent for sterilisation, Esmee Egerton, a fashion designer in Manchester, says. I was keen to get my hands on some but all I could find was a tobacco flower-scented 200ml one from 2017 priced at 7.

In Turkey today, a comparable lemon-scented Eyup Sabri Tuncer one sells at 9.5 Turkish lira (1.15). Technology might have offered other alternatives such as electronic sanitisers and air filters during the pandemic but kolonya is for those who demand more than sterilisation. I have an electric sanitiser at home, but I prefer my kolonya, Karakasoglu says on the phone. Stuck in the middle of such stressful and agonising times, I appreciate the feeling of peace its scent brings back from my childhood years.
Egypts imports dropped significantly by 24 percent to record $13.814 billion in Q1 2020, down from $18.233 billion in the same period of 2019, according to GOEIC

Egypts non-petroleum exports increased by two percent, recording $6.728 billion during the first quarter of 2020, up from $6.58 billion during the same period of 2019, according to Egypts External Trade Indices report issued on Wednesday.

According to the report issued by the General Organisation for Export and Import Control (GOEIC), Egypts imports dropped significantly by 24 percent to record $13.814 billion in Q1 2020, down from $18.233 billion in the same period of 2019.

Minister of Trade and Industry Niveen Gamea said these indices have contributed to reducing Egypts trade balance deficit by $4.566 billion, declining by 39 percent in Q1 2020 in comparison to the same quarter of 2019.

Gamea stated that these positive indices were recorded despite the harsh conditions the global economy is witnessing owing to the COVID-19 outbreak. She added that the indices reflect the success of the trade ministrys strategy and the business community in resuming production to preserve Egypts export market and increase the reliance on national products to meet the needs of the domestic market.

She added that Egypts manufacturing sector is able to exploit the current opportunity to increase production rates and open new export markets, especially that many factories in different countries have been closed due to the COVID-19 outbreak.

The sector can also make use of the decrees the trade ministry issued recently, especially with regards to halting exports of a number of medical and food products. This resulted in the increase of these products in the domestic market and, consequently, a decline in Egypts imports.

According to the report, construction materials were at the top of Egypts exports in Q1 2020 with $1.527 billion, followed by chemicals and fertilisers with $1.252 billion, food stuffs with $881 million, crops with $821 million, and electronics, engineering products with $548 million.

On the other hand, five sectors witnessed a significant decline in their imports in Q1 2020 compared to the same period of 2019, including construction materials with $1.879 million, down from $2.844 million with a decline of 34 percent, in addition to furniture imports that recorded $239 million, down from $369 million with a decline of 35 percent.

Imports of medical industries also declined to $639 million, down from $951 million with a drop of 33 percent.

Fertilisers and chemical sector imports declined as well to $984 million, down from $2.904 billion in the same period in 2019, while ready-garments imports dropped to $103 million, down from $145 million in the same quarter of 2019, according to the report.

The report also showed that the United Arab Emirates, the US, Italy, Saudi Arabia, and Spain were the top markets to receive Egypts exports during Q1 2020 with $747 million, $381 million, $385 million, $380 million, $241 million respectively.

China, U.S, Germany, India, and Russia were the top exporting countries to the Egyptian market with $2.336 billion, $938 million, $879 million, $713 million, and $701 million respectively.

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The rate of increase of confirmed cases of Covid-19 in Offaly has slowed according to the latest data from the Health Protection Surveillance Centre.

After double digit increases over the last few days, today saw an increase of six cases.

The number of confirmed cases has increased from 144 on Tuesday to 150 today according to the latest available figures.

The number of confirmed cases in Westmeath now stands at 258 while in Laois the number of confirmed cases has increased to 118. Longford has the lowest number of cases in the Midlands at 69.

Nationally, the largest number of cases confirmed are in Dublin (5,850) and Cork (829). The smallest number of cases are in Roscommon (50), Carlow (53) and Leitrim (40).

The Department of Health has confirmed 38 more deaths and 1,068 new cases, including results returned from a German lab.

It brings to 444 the total number of people who have died in Ireland while the number of confirmed infections has passed the 12,500 mark with a total of 12,547 positive tests recorded in the Republic since the end of February.

Today's number of confirmed cases marks the biggest daily reported increase. However, part of the increase is due to a clearing of a backlog of tests which are due to be processed in full this week.




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FT. LAUDERDALE, FL / ACCESSWIRE / April 15, 2020 / Cardiff Lexington Corporation (OTCPINK:CDIX) has announced its Annual Report for the physical year end 2019 results with the filing of their 10K. The net effect of Cardiff Lexington acquisitions increased 2019 Assets to $4,907,113 an increase of 46.9% from 2018.

Assets: Affordable Housing Rentals $ 299,565 $ 318,285 New York Style Pizza Restaurant 398,253 108,908 Italian Ice Franchise Group 27,735 169,030 Tax Resolution Services 4,302,238 60,578 Others 269,401 2,684,265 Consolidated assets $ 4,907,113 $ 3,341,066

The Company reported Revenues of $4,541,142 for the year ending 12/31/2019. This represents an increase of 91.3% above 2018 performance. The increase in revenues is attributable to full quarter cycles of acquisitions over the past two years and improved performance within several subsidiaries.

31-Dec-19 31-Dec-18 Revenues: Affordable Housing Rentals $ 176,882 $ 186,096 New York Style Pizza Restaurant 626,123 602,866 Italian Ice Franchise Group 207,658 538,156 Tax Resolution Services 3,530,480 899,748 Other - 147,072 Consolidated revenues $ 4,541,142 $ 2,373,938 Cost of Sales: Affordable Housing Rentals $ 174,433 $ 182,690 New York Style Pizza Restaurant 454,691 446,880 Italian Ice Franchise Group 176,904 503,478 Tax Resolution Services 1,491,053 337,986 Other - 156,664 Consolidated cost of sales $ 2,297,081 $ 1,627,698 Income (Loss) from operations from subsidiaries Affordable Housing Rentals $ (18,720 $ -1,468 New York Style Pizza Restaurant 10,350 28,336 Italian Ice Franchise Group (47,983 -10,395 Tax Resolution Services 114,773 -168,851 Profit/Loss from operations $ 125,123 $ -152,378

Management continues work to restructure, renegotiate, and refinance current debt and position for additional acquisitions. Cardiff Lexington and its subsidiaries are actively involved in various Covid-19 Disaster Relief Funding scenarios and we begin the road to recovery from the short-term economic crisis the worldwide pandemic has imposed. Our commitment to employees and shareholders is unwavering.

Alex H. Cunningham, Cardiff Lexington CEO stated, "We were encouraged by the performance in 2019 where our subsidiary companies from a standalone operations perspective posted the Company's first profitable Annual Net Operating Income of $125,123 as compared to the loss of ($152,378) last year. This is a significant step and substantial accomplishment. We have proven the viability and success of our business model which combines sustained growth in market share complemented by steady growth through acquisitions. As we continue to transition from convertible debt to conventional debt eliminating derivative liability allocations, continue to shed unprofitable business segments, and continue to attract profitable asset rich acquisitions management expect this positive trend to continue into 2020 and beyond."

ABOUT CARDIFF LEXINGTON CORPORATION: Cardiff Lexington is a public holding company, much like a cooperative, leveraging proven management in private companies that become wholly owned become subsidiaries. Cardiff Lexington's business model targets acquisition of middle market private niche companies both mature, and, second stage with high growth potential. Our focus is not industry or geographic-specific, but rather proven management, market, and margin. Cardiff Lexington targets acquisitions of mature, high growth, niche companies. Cardiff Lexington's strategy identifies and empowers select income-producing middle market private businesses and commercial real estate properties. Cardiff Lexington provides these companies both 1) the enhanced ability to raise money for operations or expansion, and 2) an equity exit and liquidity strategy for the owner, heirs, and/or Investors. The Cardiff Lexington umbrella enables those business owners to exit personal equity and to take advantage of the capitalization power of a public company without losing independent management control. Fundamental to the Cardiff Lexington strategy, acquisitions become standalone autonomous subsidiaries gaining advantage of the power of a public company. Owners gain liquidity, diversification, pooled resources, leverage value, and mitigated risk. As a Cardiff Lexington subsidiary these companies gain both the enhanced ability to raise money for operations or expansion while also establishing a longer-term equity exit strategy. Management does not directly or indirectly provide any unsubstantiated commentary or opinion to any third parties related to ongoing negotiations or confidential discussions outside of formal press releases.

For Investors Cardiff Lexington seeks to aggressively grow and hold assets that create a diversified lower risk environment that over the long term protects and safely enhances investment by continually adding assets and holdings through acquisitions to a diversified continually growing niche holding company. Cardiff Lexington is led by strong and talented team of executives and advisors providing expert acquisition, market guidance and added value for subsidiaries and investors.

FORWARD LOOKING STATEMENT: This news release contains forward looking statements within the meaning of the Securities Litigation Reform Act. The statements reflect the Company's current views with respect to future events that involve risks and uncertainties. These risks include the failure to meet schedule or performance requirements of the Company's contracts, the Company's liquidity position, the Company's ability to obtain new contracts, the emergence of competitors with greater financial resources, and the impact of competitive pricing. In the light of these uncertainties the forward-looking events referred to in this release might not occur.

Investors Relations

800-628-2100 ext. 705

investorsrelations@cardifflexington.com

SOURCE: Cardiff Lexington Corporation

View source version on accesswire.com:https://www.accesswire.com/585160/Cardiff-Lexington-Announces-2019-Year-End-Results
WASHINGTON  Three potential COVID-19 vaccines are making fast progress in early-stage testing in volunteers in China and the U.S., but its still a long road to prove if theyll really work.

Chinas CanSino Biologics has begun the second phase of testing its vaccine candidate, Chinas Ministry of Science and Technology said Tuesday.

In the U.S., a shot made by the National Institutes of Health and Moderna Inc. isnt far behind. The first person to receive that experimental vaccine last month returned to a Seattle clinic Tuesday for a second dose.

NIH infectious disease chief Dr. Anthony Fauci told The Associated Press there are no red flags so far and he hoped the next, larger phase of testing could begin around June.

A third candidate, from Inovio Pharmaceuticals, began giving experimental shots for first-step safety testing last week in the U.S. and hopes to expand its studies to China.

Initial tests focus on safety, and researchers in both countries are trying out different doses of different types of shots.

But moving into the second phase is a critical step that allows vaccines to be tested in many more people to look for signs that they protect against infection.

Last week, CanSino filed a report showing it aimed to enroll 500 people in this next study, comparing two doses of the vaccine to dummy shots. As of Monday, 273 of the volunteers had been injected, state media said.

Looking ahead, Fauci said if the new coronavirus continues to circulate widely enough over the summer and fall, it might be possible to finish larger studies slightly sooner than the 12 to 18 months hed originally predicted  maybe toward mid to late winter of next season.

Please let me say this caveat: That is assuming that its effective. See, thats the big if,' Fauci stressed. Its got to be effective and its got to be safe.

During a news conference in China, authorities also cautioned that the studies must be done properly.

Although we are in an emergency, we cannot lower the standards of safety and effectiveness in the reviews of vaccines, said Wang Junzhi, a Chinese biopharmaceutical expert. The public is paying huge attention.

The World Health Organization this week counted more than five dozen other vaccine candidates in earlier stages of development being pursued around the world. Many research groups are teaming up to speed the work; in an announcement Tuesday, vaccine giants Sanofi and GSK became the latest to partner on a candidate.

On the WHOs list are a wide variety of ways to make vaccines  so if one approach doesnt pan out, hopefully another one will.

CanSinos vaccine is based on a genetically engineered shot it created to guard against Ebola. The leading U.S. candidates use a different approach, made from copies of a piece of the coronavirus genetic code.

___

AP camera operator Borg Wong contributed to this report from Beijing.

___

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.
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Linkedin Ardila Syakriah (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Wed, April 15, 2020 16:42 636 fc6853813033f564188675f8bd21247b 1 National STEM,#STEM,Science,#science,fresh-graduate,#fresh-graduates,unemployment,#employment,COVID-19,#COVID19,COVID-19-in-Indonesia,#students,student Free

After almost five years fighting her way through an arduous mechanical engineering degree at one of Indonesia's top schools, 24-year-old Tantya Tya Ani thought she could breathe a sigh of relief upon graduating in September last year.

She started seriously looking for jobs in December, applying for roles that would allow her to work onsite  defying the odds that have for a long timed sided with men in the world of science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM).

According to UNESCO, only 35 percent of STEM students globally are women, but womens representation in these fields is increasing, thanks to women like Tya.

However, it is not only sexist comments and harmful stereotypes, both of which she encountered at university, that have kept Tya from landing her dream job. The COVID-19 pandemic has caused a public health and economic crisis, forcing businesses to close or halt recruitment and leaving millions out of work.

Tya said she had not heard back from a company in Bandung, West Java, after a job interview in January, with the city soon to impose large-scale social restrictions (PSBB) to curb SARS-CoV-2 transmission. An internship she secured at a Malaysian company, scheduled to begin in March, would likely be canceled as well, she said.

"I was waiting for my visa and work permit when the pandemic hit. I had even found a place to rent there and started working remotely for the company. However, the internship will be canceled, as the company has had to halt its operations because of the lockdown there," Tya said.

Read also: Women encouraged to work in STEM industries

Living with her parents in Surabaya, East Java, Tya said she was still sending out applications amid the pandemic, but with far less hope now. To keep her mind at ease, she has been accepting freelance projects and helping with her friend's new business. She also spends less time on Instagram now, opting instead to explore new interests, such as cooking and making ceramics, while she stays at home in compliance with the governments calls for physical distancing.

Tya said she could not help but feel morally obligated to find a job, even though her parents had told her to take things easy, expressing hope that life would return to normal soon.

"The government hasn't taken this seriously since the start. As a result, both public health and the economy are at stake now. I hope they'll prioritize public health for now," Tya said.

Online talent recruitment and career discovery platform Glints country director for Indonesia, Steve Sutanto, said companies in general had become more prudent in hiring new talents, with retail, travel, aviation and food and beverage industries being among the most affected.

"Our observation shows around 30 to 50 percent of companies in Jakarta have stopped their internal recruitment activities starting three to four weeks ago," Steve said.

Steve said that although there was no definite answer to when recruitment would return to normal, with some experts predicting a second wave of the outbreak, the current situation was bound to change the way companies rolled out recruitment once the pandemic ended.

A recent survey by the Mobile Marketing Association (MMA) and SurveySensum revealed that more than half of the 80 businesses surveyed in March had cut their hiring budgets.

Read also: Budget cuts, furloughs inevitable for start-ups to survive pandemic: Investors

Business players expect to resume normal operations around September or October as uncertainty continues to haunt the country's unemployed, including fresh graduates.

Indonesia has seen rising levels of university enrollment, with more people believing a degree will lead to better-paying jobs. University graduates accounted for 9.7 percent of Indonesia's workforce, or 12.27 million of 133 million workers as of August 2019, according to BPS data.

The same data, however, revealed that 5.67 percent, or some 730,000 of the countrys 13 million university graduates, were unemployed. The figure was higher than the country's overall unemployment rate at the time of 5.28 percent, which equates to 7.05 million people.

This figure does not include the roughly 2.8 million people who have lost their jobs as of Monday because of the pandemic, according to data by the Manpower Ministry and the Workers Social Security Agency (BPJS Ketenagakerjaan).

"It was already hard to find a job to begin with, even without a pandemic," said Ghea, 21, who graduated with a bachelors degree in communication science in early March, shortly after Indonesia announced its first confirmed cases.

Reports of layoffs have made her feel uneasy, as it means she will have more competition for positions.

Ghea, who had worked her hardest to finish her studies in less than four years, said she had been on the lookout for job vacancies online every day and had so far applied to around 15 companies, mostly in retail, since March.

Sadly, three retail companies have reached out to her to tell her that they were canceling their recruitment, but she is pinning her hopes on an online interview with a start-up company this week.

"I just don't want to be a burden on my mother anymore," she said.

Ghea said all her friends were sharing the same experience and were now trying to sign up for the government's preemployment card program, a social safety net program that offers aid similar to unemployment benefits.

Read also: Govt introduces new social benefits as 2.8 million lose jobs

The program will cover 5.6 million participants aged 18 years and above who are currently not attending university, particularly those who have yet to receive any social assistance, and offer them the opportunity to participate in training courses.

The program was initially intended to reduce youth unemployment, but the aim shifted slightly to accommodate people who have lost their jobs or run struggling small businesses during the pandemic. As many as 1.4 million people had applied for the program a day after it was rolled out on Saturday.

"I tried signing up many times but the website was always down. There must have been many people trying to sign up too," Ghea said.

Uncertainty about the future also worries Athiyya Nabila Ayu, a 22-year-old final year accounting student who expects to graduate in August after finishing her thesis. She said she had tried applying for jobs, but had only heard back from one company.

"Of course, it's not a good time to graduate," she said. "My parents are also worried whether I can get a job in a time like this."

 Editor's note: The article was updated to correct a misspelling of Glints country director Steve Sutanto's name.
TEHRAN, Iran, April 15

Trend:

Iran's Oil Minister Bijan Zanganeh said that the creation of a fund for the development of downstream petrochemical projects is on the agenda, Trend reports citing Iranian Young Journalists' Club website.

The activity of refineries and petrochemical units and the volume of sales of their raw materials to downstream units in April of this year has decreased by 40 percent compared to the same period last year, which indicates that the units are closed, Zanganeh stated.

Petrochemical units are interested in selling their products inside the country, because, firstly, the products are being priced through the stock market, and secondly, they do not have export problems, he said.

Zanganeh went on to say that the oil ministry has taken steps to support this sector.

We have defined the petrochemical projects in four chains of methanol, profile, ethylene and benzene, to help the private sector invest in these areas," he said.

He added that the establishment of a non-governmental petrochemical support and downstream development projects fund is on the agenda.

The government is helping to support the downstream units, said Zanganeh.
ABC News

Former President Donald Trump, his sister Maryanne Trump Barry and the estate of his late brother Robert Trump tried on Tuesday to convince a New York judge to dismiss a lawsuit by Mary Trump that accused her family of swindling her out of at least $10 million. Attorneys for the Trump siblings argued Mary Trump's claims are time-barred by a six-year statute of limitations and prohibited by legal releases she signed in 2001 when the family settled the estate of Fred Trump Sr., the former president's father. The Trumps also argued Mary Trump possessed "boxes and boxes of information" about the estate settlement that should have given rise to any claims at the time.
If you're looking for a way to stay healthy at home, how about giving yoga a try? Benefits can include stress relief and pain management.

Hannah Horecka owns Quiet Strength Yoga in Ellsworth. She's now teaching classes online through Zoom. She says the response she's received since taking her classes virtual has surpassed expectations.

Quiet Strength Yoga is donating 50% of the profits from online classes to the SPCA of Hancock County. "They're not necessarily an organization you'd think about being affected by a pandemic," says Hannah. "I wanted to do what I could to help them out."

Benefits of yoga can include stress relief and pain management, and it doesn't take much space to practice. All of these elements make yoga a good option for those who want to stay active during Gov. Mills' Stay Healthy at Home mandate.

Yoga might be intimidating for those who have never tried it, but Hannah says it's an activity for everybody. She suggests making sure you pick the right class and find a teacher who's style is compatible with you. "You don't need to be flexible to do yoga," Hannah says. "That's the point of yoga, is to help you build that flexibility and build that that strength."

Hannah joined the TV5 Morning News to teach techniques such as poses for when you wake up, moves that ease back and shoulder pain, and breathing techniques to relieve stress.

You can find Hannah at www.QuietStrengthYoga.com, or at "Quiet Strength Yoga" on Facebook.
Canadas had worse months than this one, and democracy survived. This time, Im not so sure.

Heres a good candidate for the worst month: June, 1940. It was just after Dunkirk. And the week of June 9-16 was, arguably, the most terrifying in Canadian history. On Monday, June 10, 1940, Defence Minister Norman Rogers was killed in a plane crash east of Toronto.

The same day, Italy declared war and seized the Riviera. The German Army crossed the Seine River on its drive to Paris, and Britains last fighting force on the continent was evacuated. Serious plans were being made in Ottawa to accommodate a British government in exile and the Royal Navy in Halifax. Churchill had referenced that plan in his we shall fight them on the beaches speech the previous Tuesday.

On the Tuesday, the French government fled Paris, which soon fell. The Russians occupied the Baltic States that Friday. On Saturday, the fortress of Verdun, which the French defended in the First World War at the cost of 163,000 lives, surrendered without a fight.

Canada, Australia and some of Britains colonies could be left to fight alone. The Americans and Soviets werent willing to take on Hitler. The stock market bet on Hitler, with stocks taking a beating that wouldnt be seen again until March, 2020.

Ottawa reeked of fear. Generals wanted all this bad news kept out of the newspapers and off the radio, but Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King refused. Wilfrid Eggleston, the chief press censor, convinced King that people would fight harder if they knew the truth. It was the same argument made by King George VI to Winston Churchill in the movie Darkest Hour.

King and the censors were right. Canadians were afraid but defiant. They got behind the war effort and endured five years of rationing, war bond drives, and the loss of thousands of the countrys young people.

Of course, there are serious differences between 1940 and today. The coronavirus isnt reading our newspapers and analyzing our strategy. Yet Canadian governments have not been levelling with people. We know it, and so many of us dont buy into the hard work thats needed to keep us safe as a result.

There needs to be a social and political consensus on important issues to suppress attempts by the selfish and the greedy to undermine the obvious success of physical distancing policies.

But that does not mean we must stifle good faith political and media debate on public health issues.

The publics defences against arbitrary power were quick to be shut down when COVID-19 became a serious, imminent health threat. First, we lost the courts. Parliament and the provincial legislatures, except for brief emergency sittings, have not been a check on the power of the state.

In many small towns and cities, bureaucrats asked municipal councils to hand over their policy-making powers for the duration. Some councillors said, rightly, that there was no reason for them to be cut out of decision-making. They were available by phone or internet, and most had plenty of time on their hands to weigh options and make decisions.

The media and our representatives have a duty to ask if Ontario and Canada really did learn lessons from the 2003 SARS outbreak in Toronto. They should not face social media hounding for questioning if public health officials have kept up with the available scientific literature on issues like virus spreading, masks and asymptomatic carriers.

Why, long after the threat was obvious to anyone following events in China and doing the math here, did Canadas chief health officer, Dr. Theresa Tam, insist the risk to Canadians from COVID-19 was low?

Truth-seeking makes for better policy, especially when it embarrasses the powerful.

Democracy and public debate seems today like a frill that we could simply do away with when things got tough. It may be the biggest mistake of this pandemic. We may have missed the lessons from SARS. We certainly failed to learn the value of democracy and a free press from Canadas darkest hour.
If were seeing more domestic violence, there were already power and control issues going on, she said. I would not want to say the coronavirus causes domestic violence. Its highlighted right now because we have people sheltered in, and theres a lot of togetherness right now. Abusers know there are very few places victims can go. Its the perfect storm of being able to commit abuse without anyone knowing the depth of it.
Iran's President Hassan Rouhani has lashed out at the country's Financial Controller's Office for a report which says his administration has mishandled the country's budget two years ago.

The report by Iran's Chief Auditor Adel Azar was published on Tuesday April 14 and charged that $4.8 billion of the budget has "disappeared."

Speaking on the Iranian state TV, an angry Rouhani asked why similar auditing is not being done about the financial performance of military organizations, revolutionary institutions and the Judiciary.

He charged that the auditing report does not cover the performance of "insiders" and simply reveals figures about "outsiders" including his administration.

All the three groups of financial entities mentioned by Rouhani are controlled by Rouhani's hardline political rivals at the IRGC, the financial organizations operating under Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and the Judiciary, which is headed by his election rival Ebrahim Raeesi.

The Chief Auditor highlighted financial corruption in the administration, adding that the Rouhani government allocated foreign currency at the discounted government rate to individuals who either did not import anything and pocketed the money altogether, or those who imported things other than the essential commodities they were meant to import.

He was talking about a period when among other cases, Rouhani's Ministry of Industry was accused of allocating billions of dollars to merchants who imported luxurious vehicles instead of foodstuff. This was a time marked by an unusual decline in the value of the Iranian currency rial against foreign currencies, particularly the U.S. dollar.

In unprecedented remarks about the supervisory body affiliated with the Iranian Parliament, Rouhani charged that the Chief Auditor's report was "totally wrong," and "out of ignorance," adding that such "bad" reports should not create doubts among the people.

The Chief Auditor or the Financial Controller's Office have still not reacted to Rouhani's angry comments, but Judiciary Chief Ebrahim Raeesi has appointed a special committee to probe into the case of mishandling the budget.

According to the IRGC-linked news agency Tasnim, Raeesi has ordered the Tehran Prosecutor to start investigating the case at a special section, as soon as he heard the Chief Auditor's report during an open parliamentary session on Tuesday.

Adel Azar had said at the session that $4.8 billion out of the $31 billion dollars of foreign currency allocated to importers of essential commodities are still unaccounted for, as no goods were imported by those who got the discounted foreign currency from the administration.

He also said that only a small amount of the money has been returned to the treasury.

The Governor of the Central bank of Iran Abdolnasser Hemmati also questioned the integrity of the Chief auditor's report in an interview with the Iranian Labor News Agency (ILNA) Wednesday morning.

He said: "We have told the Judiciary about those who have not fulfilled their financial obligations. So, the $4.8 billion has not been lost."

Nevertheless, Rouhani called on his spokesperson Ali Rabiei and the ministers of economy and industry to respond to the Chief Auditor's comment separately, "not just to defend the administration, but to defend the truth."

Meanwhile, the Chief Auditor had revealed earlier that the Oil Products Distribution Company of Iran, which is part of the Rouhani administration, has not returned 4,140 billion rials and more than $20 million dollars of the money it owed to the treasury.

The report also revealed information about the "astronomical salaries" of the company's managers.

The Financial Controller's Office is part of the Iranian Parliament (Majles) and its chief is appointed by the members of the parliament.
Shailene Woodley attends the Moncler fashion show on February 19, 2020 in Milan, Italy. (Photo by Stefania D'Alessandro/Getty Images)

Shailene Woodley has shared that she was "very, very sick" in her early 20s while filming the Divergent movies and that her situation had an impact on her career as a result.

The actor starred as Tris Prior in the three films of the series, with the first being released in 2014, but that she was dealing with a "very scary physical situation" at the time.

"I haven't spoken much about this yet publicly, and I will one day, but I was very, very sick in my early 20s," the 28-year-old told the New York Times. "While I was doing the Divergent movies and working hard, I also was struggling with a deeply personal, very scary physical situation.

US actress Shailene Woodley poses for photographers during the photocall of 'Divergent' in Madrid, Spain on Thursday, April 3, 2014. (AP Photo/Abraham Caro Marin)

"Because of that, I said no to a lot of opportunities because I needed to get better, and those jobs ended up going to peers of mine who I love.

"They went on to a lot of success, but there was a mix of people saying, 'You shouldn't have let that go!' or 'You shouldn't have been sick!'

A fourth Divergent film was originally planned for a release in 2017, however, after being postponed it was eventually cancelled.

Shailene Woodley attends the premiere of HBO's "Big Little Lies" season two at Jazz at Lincoln Center on Wednesday, May 29, 2019, in New York. (Photo by Evan Agostini/Invision/AP)

The star added that she had to "let go" of her career at the time but was now "on the other side of it" and had been focusing on her mental health in the last few years.

Her TV role in Big Little Lies from 2017-2019 as Jane Chapman proved to be a big success as she was nominated for Primetime Emmy Award as well as Golden Globe.

Woodley went on to feature in films Snowden and Adrift after the Divergent series. Her latest movie, Endings, Beginnings was set for a May 2020 release but its launch has been brought forward and will now be a digital one as a result of the coronavirus pandemic.
The coronavirus lockdown has upended the lives of thousands of poor people across the country. For these people whose daily wages have been cut off, staying home and maintain social distance is coming at a very painful cost. In this hour of need, some people are going out of their way to help those in need.

Take for instance, CRPF ASI Padmeswar Das, who is on leave at home in Assam. While he might not be deployed in the field at the moment, he is not off-duty as he busy preparing ration packets - that he purchased using his savings - for the poor in his village, who are the worst hit, by the coronavirus lockdown.

Twitter

The 48-year-old trooper, whose unit is deployed in south Kashmir's terrorist violence-hit Shopian district, is helping those affected by the lockdown in his tiny village of Chatanguri, about 76 km from the district headquarters of Morigaon district.

After witnessing how the poor were struggling amid lockdown, Mr Das decided to do his bit to help them. He spoke to his wife and mother and came up with an idea.

Twitter/@Crpfmadadgaar

He immediately rushed to the market and bought about 80 kg of rice and other dry ration. The next day, he and his family prepared over 50 packets containing 2 kg of rice, 1 kg potato, a small bottle of mustard oil, a packet of salt, onions and half kg pulses in each.

"I spent about Rs 8,000-10,000 for purchasing and packing these items," Mr Das said hesitantly, as he does not seem keen to share the cost of his noble deed.

ASI Padmeswar Das of 76 bn @crpfindia @JKZONECRPF @jammusector currently at home in Morigaon (Assam) due to Lockdown has been helping the needy in his village by voluntarily distributing food items to them out from his own savings

For any assistance call 14411. pic.twitter.com/xGcIiRJJfy  CRPF Madadgaar (@CRPFmadadgaar) April 12, 2020

"I donned my uniform as movement of civilians was barred due to the lockdown, used my gamocha (traditional Assamese scarf) as a mask and got a handcart to distribute the packets among the needy." When complimented that he was being a good samaritan, Mr Das said he only knew that "efforts of any kind always count."

"My colleagues in my delta company unit in Shopian and in the entire force are spread out to help in the fight against coronavirus and the lockdown affected people in whatever way they can. I am just one among them," Mr Das, who has a young son and daughter, said.

Twitter/@crpfmadadgaar

His boss and Commandant of the 76th battalion of the force (based in Jammu), Neeraj Pandey, is all praise for his "tough and dedicated" colleague.

"I am proud of what Das did to help people despite being on official leave. He has gone beyond his call of duty but that is what our ethos and regimentation are all about," Neeraj Pandey said.

The Assistant Sub Inspector (ASI), who joined the CRPF as a constable in 1991, said he came home on March 3rd, and by the time he was supposed to leave the lockdown was imposed. He also mentioned that unit based in Kashmir valley also sent in a message asking him to stay put and not return.

"Had I been with my force, I would have had an army of my colleagues and officers to help the needy. Then I thought I can be one-man army," Mr Das told PTI

"My force stands for the motto 'service and loyalty' whether a jawan is alone or in a group," he said.

Unfazed by the continuing lockdown, Mr Das plans to replenish the stocks for those who need his help again.
Senate Democrats on Wednesday pressed for a $30 billion boost to COVID-19 testing, making the case that the U.S. must implement an aggressive nationwide testing strategy before reopening the shuttered American economy.

On a conference call with reporters, lawmakers pushed Republicans and the Trump administration to tack on $30 billion to a fourth COVID-19 relief package in the works, urging officials to bolster testing supplies and manufacturing, expand free testing for all and improve reporting and contact tracing.

Testing is the best tool we have to fight the virus today, to know whos infected and whos not, and to reopen our economy, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer of New York said. Testing is the foundation.

We cannot safely end sheltering in place until we have testing every place, Sen. Dick Durbin of Illinois said, arguing the virus doesnt give a tinkers damn who you are. If you are breathing and coughing and sneezing in America, we need to test you.

Schumer called out President Donald Trump, who in early March said 'anybody who needs a test can get a test.' He was very wrong. Testing capacity is woefully inadequate to reopen the country."

The lawmakers added that testing is particularly scarce in poorer areas and in African American communities that have been hit hard by the virus.

We need a broad, comprehensive plan that deals with need for testing, supply lines and tracking, Schumer said. We need all of this together in one large plan. The administration is at best scattershot and at worst chaotic when it comes to testing.

Trump has touted testing efforts, noting more than 3 million Americans have been tested and highlighting public-private partnerships that have helped develop quicker tests.

The Trump administration has also pushed to expand antibody testing, which uses a finger-prick of blood and helps identify those who have already had the virus and developed some immunity to it. The administration has said the private health insurance must cover the costs of COVID-19 testing, including antibody tests.

But the president has also said that management of testing is up to state governors, not the federal government.

But the Democrats, including Sens. Patty Murray of Washington and Debbie Stabenow of Michigan called for a broader federal plan.

They noted states face testing component shortages while competing against each other to buy equipment, supplies and testing materials. They argued Trump could make quicker use of the Defense Production Act to manufacture and distribute materials to hotspots and any new areas where the virus arises.

Trump, who issued stay-at-home and social distancing guidelines in mid-March and extended them through April, said on Tuesday that he would soon release plans for each state to begin easing stay-at-home and other restrictions that have brought the economy to a halt. Trump and his public health advisers have noted that certain places, such as New York, would need to maintain social distancing longer than other areas.

But Stabenow said fully reopening the economy depends on Americans confidence that they and others dont have the virus.

If you dont know, youre going to stay home, she said. If people dont stay home and testing isnt fully ramped up, the virus will continue spreading and our hospitals will be overwhelmed.

Durbin noted that for the short term, the nation must rely on the Defense Production Act to help increase testing. But the coronavirus, which has infected more than 600,000 and killed more than 25,000 Americans, should inspire the U.S. to create supply lines closer to home, Durbin argued.

He said the virus should provide a long term roadmap to reduce U.S. dependence on foreign medicines and supplies, in order to better guarantee the effectiveness and safety of treatment and the availability of equipment should another pandemic strike.

Related Content:
With time on their hands and an Internet connection at their disposal, they could have taken recourse to humour, campy or fine, British or Indian style, via videos and albeit-restricted WhatsApp forwards to ward off boredom. They could have gone wild on social media, risked a broken friendship and a half. They could have turned to books, music or art for inspiration, listened to an author or two at a lit fest on Instagram. With all these options on offer, the lockdown instead saw a 95 per cent increase in Indian traffic to Pornhub, an international pornography website.

International agencies such as Europol, the United Nations and Ecpat (End Child Prostitution and Trafficking) also reported increased online activity from child pornography addicts amid lockdown. These individuals have taken to targeting children by befriending them online. Disturbingly, Indian searches frequently looked for images and videos of bleeding, choked and tortured children, indicating a sadistic mindset.

Child sex abuse has been the scandal of the millennium ever since Boston Globe in 2002 uncovered the notorious Catholic Church sodomies. Then came the trial and conviction of the American financier, Jeffrey Epstein. Epstein, found dead in August 2019, is believed to have committed suicide. A year prior, Cardinal Theodore McCarrick of the Archdiocese of Washington, D.C. had resigned from the College of Cardinals following similar offences. That was close on the heels of Archbishop Anthony Apuron of Guam being removed from office by the Vatican. Closer home, we had vicar Raju Kokkan and pastor Robin Vadakkumchery in Kerala abusing youngsters, both of whom were since arrested  the latter got life.

Evidently, child pornography is a stepping stone for paedophiles and ephebophiles to committing sexual offences. Yet until 2009, it was not illegal to browse child pornography in India. While under IPC sections 292 and 293 and Section 67 of the Information Technology Act, sale, distribution and advertising of child porn were punishable by fines and/or a jail term between two and seven years, the law was still silent on its consumption. It is Section 67B that first criminalised creating, collecting, searching, browsing and downloading of content involving child porn. India had finally woken up to the need of having comprehensive legal machinery to deal with cyber crime.

While invoking the law in the time of coronavirus may prove infructuous when it comes to reforming child pornographers, perhaps reminding them of the depravity of their clandestine activities may not. Lets do that  by shaming them.
A man works at an assembly line of Vinfast Auto factory in Hai Phong City, northern Vietnam, June 14, 2019. Photo by Reuters/Kham.

The government has set an annual growth target of 7 percent from 2021-2025 to make up for the Covid-19 induced slowdown.

A recent statement said the government will continue to improve the business environment and infrastructure, expand export markets, apply advanced technologies and promote private sector development over the next five years.

It noted that the global economic situation continues to be complicated and unpredictable, while the domestic economy faced many difficulties and potential risks, posing many challenges for sustainable development. The Covid-19 pandemic has exacerbated the situation.

Therefore, the target set out for the period of 2021-2025 "was a challenging task," the government said.

Vietnams Q1 GDP growth of 3.82 percent was the lowest since 2010, with the coronavirus outbreak crippling key industries like tourism, hospitality and aviation.

The government recently passed a VND62 trillion ($2.6 billion) financial support package for poor people and businesses affected by the Covid-19 pandemic and cut electricity prices. The central bank has also cut its policy rates to prop up economic activities.

Vietnams annual GDP growth exceeded 6.8 percent from 2017-2019, and was among the fastest growing economies in Southeast Asia.

Last year, economic expansion was 7.02 percent, the second highest in the last decade after a record 7.08 percent in 2018.

The nation has confirmed 267 cases so far with 98 still under treatment and others discharged or awaiting their release from hospitals.
Festivals are a part of ones custom, culture and religion. They are a way for people of the same faith to come together, rejoice and celebrate events that hold importance for them. However, the COVID-19 pandemic has put a stop to all that and not just in India, but across the world. Here's what these celebrations look like now. 1. Punjab Left: Sikh devotees pay their respects at the Golden Temple in Amritsar on the occasion of Baisakhi on April 14, 2019. Baisakhi marks the Sikh New Year and is also the spring harvest festival for Sikhs. Right: The Golden Temple wears a deserted look during the government-imposed nationwide lockdown as a preventive measure against the COVID-19 coronavirus, in Amritsar on April 14, 2020.

AFP AFP Golden Temple Amritsar Bisakhi

2. Kolkata Left: Devotees celebrate Haalkhata Puja at Dakshineswar Kali Temple on Noboborsho. Right: Dakshineswar Temple stands closed on Bengali New Year on April 14, 2020 due to the lockdown.



BCCL BCCL Kolkata New Year

3. Jerusalem's Old City Left: Thousands of Jewish worshippers take part in the priestly blessing, a prayer which takes place during the holiday of Passover at the Western Wall in Jerusalem's Old City on April 13, 2017. Right: The number of Jewish worshippers during this year's priestly blessing are not even half the number the year before.

Reuters Reuters 3. Jerusalem's Old City

4. France Left: A waiter walks through a sea of tourists seated in front the Arles arena in southern France during the Easter Feria, on April 11, 2004. Right: A cat takes a casual stroll in front of the now-deserted Arles arena.

AFP AFP Before And After Images Show How Coronavirus Halted Normal Routine Of People

5. Nepal Left: Hindu devotees pull a wooden chariot through the crowd at Durbar Square during the nine-day-long Nepalese New Year celebrations in Bhaktapur on April 10, 2019. Right: The same place lies abandoned on the first day of the Nepalese New Year, on April 13, 2020.

AFP AFP Nepal Coronavirus

6. Thailand Left: People play with water during the Songkran Water Festival celebrations to commemorate the Thai New Year in Bangkok on April 13, 2019. Right: The same square at Central World shopping mall stood empty on April 13 this year.

Reuters Reuters Bangkok

7. Varanasi Left: Pilgrims attend the evening prayer at Dashashwamedh Ghat on the banks of the Ganges river in Varanasi on May 3, 2019. Right: A lone Hindu priest performs the evening prayer during the government-imposed nationwide lockdown, as pictured on April 9, 2020.



AFP AFP Varanasi

8. Yangon Left: Locals celebrate on the eve of Myanmar's New Year water festival (Thingyan) at Mahabandula park in front of the city hall in Yangon on April 12, 2019. Right: The same park remained empty on the first day of Thingyan on April 12, 2020.



AFP AFP Yangon

9. Jerusalem's Old City Left: Worshippers carry wooden crosses during a Good Friday procession on Via Dolorosa in Jerusalem's Old City on April 6, 2018. Right: This year there was no procession after Israel took stringent steps to contain the coronavirus disease,



Reuters Reuters jerusalem

10. Patna Left: Devotees take a holy dip in the Ganges in Patna on April 14, 2019 on the occasion of 'satuani.' Right: This year on April 14, the number of devotees who showed up was barely half the usual count.

BCCL BCCL Patna

11. Italy Left: Locals attend the Via Crucis (Way of the Cross) procession led by Pope Francis during Good Friday celebrations at the Colosseum in Rome, Italy on April 19, 2019. Right: The Colosseum grounds stood empty this year.

Reuters Reuters Italy



12. Thailand Left: Locals seen celebrating the Songkran Water Festival to commemorate the Thai New Year at Silom Road in Bangkok, Thailand April 13, 2017. Right: A view of the same street post the outbreak, on April 13 this year.
Nobody is sure when the Covid-19 pandemic will end or even when it will stop killing Indians. But of one thing there can be no doubt. Even before Covid became the central feature of our lives, the economy was already in the doldrums. With a global recession expected and predictions about our growth rate scaled down to 1.5% or even lesser, this will get worse.

In the post-Covid India, we will all be scared, damaged, poorer and even less sure of what the future holds for us than we were in the already gloomy pre-Covid era.

But there is one other factor that we may not be paying enough attention to. In the post-pandemic world, we will have to work hard to repair relations between Hindus and Muslims. Rarely, in recent decades, have the two communities been so distrustful of each other.

It started with the anger over the Citizenship (Amendment) Act and the National Register of Citizens. Without going into the rights and wrongs of that issue, there is no doubt that many Indian Muslims interpreted the governments moves as a way of treating them as second class citizens.

I believed, perhaps naively, when the Covid crisis started that we could sort out our differences and fight the virus unitedly.

Then the Tablighis set the agenda. I have written about the criminal behaviour of the Jamaat before so I wont belabour the point.

The Tablighi Jamaat means nothing to most Indian Muslims. It is a primitive, fundamentalist movement that would take Islam to the Middle Ages. Liberal Muslims all over the world do not waste any time defending it. Just as liberal Hindus are appalled by the things that Golwalkar of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh wrote, liberal Muslims disown their communitys fundamentalists and loonies. Even the RSS itself is now deleting the most embarrassing bits from new editions of Golwalkars books.

Hindus do not believe that they have to find excuses for Golwalkar or for the misdeeds of other Hindus. When the Babri Masjid was demolished, the strongest condemnation came from liberal Hindus. Nobody in the mainstream said, Yeah, but what about all the temples that Muslims had also destroyed? There was no place for whataboutery or weak excuses.

Perhaps it is because majorities behave differently from minorities, but after the Tablighi incident, some liberals (Hindu and Muslim) issued only qualified criticism of the Jamaat when outright condemnation was called for. And all too often they resorted to whataboutery.

Once that whataboutery started, liberals were playing the RSS game. The Jamaat should have been seen as a lunatic fringe group of Muslims who endangered Indias fight against Covid. Instead, thanks to liberal naivete and communalist poison from both sides, the incident has now become a Hindu-Muslim thing.

We sometimes forget that a desire to spawn strife is not just restricted to our own communalists. Several foreign countries have an interest, if not in fomenting Hindu-Muslim conflict, then certainly in keeping India weakened and divided.

Thousands of fake messages have gone out to Muslims on social media documenting entirely non-existent cases of persecution and warning of dire consequences from the authorities if they dare admit to having contracted the infection. Thats one possible reason why some of those who attended the Jamaat gathering are now absconding. And thats why we have not been able to track down everyone who was inside that petri-dish of corona infection.

The trouble with communal tension is that, like the coronavirus, it grows exponentially.

A primitive Muslim sect uses the name of God to keep devotees from following the rules of the lockdown. When they are caught and a backlash ensues, Muslims are told that they will be tortured by the police. They hide. They infect more people. Public opinion grows against them. Persecution does begin. And so the cycle goes.

It has now got to the stage in Delhi where even secular Hindus ask whether it is safe to order biryani (do you think the cooks may be infected?) and check the religion of delivery boys (only because of corona, na!). It is heartbreaking to see the kind of abuse and discrimination that innocent Muslims are being subjected to. Videos aired on TV channels and social media show Muslim vendors being asked to leave markets, Muslims being denied entry to shops and much more. For how long will Muslims take these humiliations before beginning to wonder if their own country is rejecting them?

It is very difficult  if not impossible  to break the circle of mistrust and hatred when it gets to this level.

And I fear that the gulf between communities will grow. Some of it will come from extremists on both sides. Some of it is coming from digital armies across our border. And some of it, sadly, is being fanned to win votes.

When the virus is brought under control and we confront the recession, we will be encouraged to forget that even before Covid arrived, our economy was already in trouble.

Instead, we will be told that India was doing fine. Even the fight against Covid was going well till Muslims decided to sabotage the governments efforts and refused to practise physical distancing or to be tested. Yes, it will be said, there is a recession but thats only because of Covid. And we could have handled Covid if it wasnt for the Muslims. The economy and the battle against corona were all destroyed by Muslims.

Such words as jihad will be flung around on TV channels and it will be suggested that Muslims did this deliberately because many of them are anti-national.

We must fight and defeat Covid. But once thats done, we must work to restore communal harmony. And that will be an even more difficult struggle.

The views expressed are personal

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World GDP will record -3% growth in 2020: in Asia it will stop at zero. Collapse of Japan and strong slowdown of India. China will grow by 1.2%, the worst since 1976. Chinese small and medium-sized enterprises have lost 70% of their earnings. Tokyo and Washington evaluate "decoupling" with Beijing. The Fund wants greater cooperation.

Hong Kong (AsiaNews)  The global economy will register -3% growth in 2020 because of the pandemic, the worst collapse since the Great Depression of the 1930s, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) reveals. The gross domestic product in Asia will stop at zero, with a sharp slowdown in China and India, as well as in the Japanese economy.

In the next two years, world GDP could lose 9 trillion dollars. A 20% rebound is expected in 2021 if the coronavirus is defeated in the second half of the year. Recovery, however, will not bring the global economy back to pre-crisis levels, which could only be achieved in 2022.

The world is in quarantine. Restrictions on the movement of people and economic activities imposed in the vast majority of countries have derailed the global goods chain, with highly recessive effects.

Among the advanced economies in Asia, Japan is the one that will suffer the largest backlash (-5.2%), together with Taiwan (-4%). South Korea will have a negative growth of 1.2%. Among the emerging economies, Thailand will have an estimated growth of -6.7%, hit by the collapse of the tourism sector. India will continue to grow, but with a strong contraction (+ 1.9%).

Chinese GDP will slow down to 1.2%, far from 6.1% in 2019, and from 6% expected at the beginning of the year. For the Chinese it is the worst since 1976, when the country divested itself of the cultural revolution and launched a vast program of economic openings. Compared to 2019, the Chinese economy recorded -8% growth in the first quarter of this year.

A recovery to 9.2% is expected for 2021, but the picture is currently particularly bleak. China's recovery will still depend on foreign demand, which has seen a sharp drop - Beijing's exports fell 13.3% in the first quarter.

The government's large infrastructure plans do not directly favor small and medium-sized enterprises, which employ most of the national workforce. They also struggle to obtain bank loans on favorable terms, despite the fact that the authorities have taken measures to facilitate the issuing of incentive driven packages.

According to a study by the Qinghua University, the income of smaller Chinese companies dropped nearly 70% in March. The sectors most affected are the educational and hospitality sectors (hotels, restaurants, bars, etc.).

Then there is the problem of possible "decoupling". Some countries are now actively considering how to decrease their dependence on the Chinese manufacturing industry. Economic separation from Beijing is being proposed by the United States and Japan (a little less by Europe), although it appears difficult to achieve, given that it would cost billions of dollars.

Instead, the Fund recommends greater international cooperation, especially with regard to the distribution of vaccines and anti-viral treatments: for the IMF, the containment of the pandemic is the basis for reviving the world economy.

All states, especially emerging economies, need to invest more in national health systems. These measures must be accompanied by actions to support workers and businesses. Central banks must continue to pump liquidity into the financial system, and the debts of many developing countries must be written off.
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Tiger King star Joseph Maldonado-Passage, better known as Joe Exotic, is in discussions to have his own radio show in prison.

Mr Maldonado-Passages husband, Dillon Passage, told Metro UK that a radio station has approached him to broadcast a show from prison.

This radio station here in the US wants him to have his own radio show from inside the prison, he said.

So well see what happens with that. Its kind of mind-blowing, Mr Passage added.

Mr Maldonado-Passage is currently serving 22 years at a federal prison in Fort Worth, Texas, after being convicted in 2019 of two counts of murder to hire and 17 counts of animal abuse.

Earlier this month, his husband told Andy Cohens US radio show that he was moved to a different facility after a coronavirus outbreak at the prison.

We speak three to five times every day, Mr Passage said. But since hes been moved to this new facility, they are putting him on a COVID-19 isolation because of the previous jail he was at  there were cases, he said.

Mr Passage revealed to Metro on Tuesday that hes now been able to talk to his husband, but that Mr Maldonado-Passage wishes he could talk more. He doesnt really get phone call privileges mainly because hes still in isolation for the coronavirus stuff.

His test results did come back negative for the virus, Mr Passage added.

According to a tracking project hosted by Johns Hopkins University, the US has upwards of 613,187 people have tested positive for coronavirus. The death toll has reached at least 26,950.
LONDONAs Britain closes in on 100,000 reported cases of the coronavirus  a solemn milestone in a contagion that has ravaged its political leadership  a raft of new statistics suggests that the government is undercounting the human, and economic, cost of the epidemic.

The governments Office of National Statistics released data Tuesday revealing that the death toll from the virus could be at least 10 per cent higher than the official toll of 12,107 because that number does not take into account people who die in nursing homes or in their own residences.

At the same time, the Office for Budget Responsibility, a fiscal watchdog group, said the lockdown could shrink Britains economy by 35 per cent in the second quarter and throw two million people out of work  a prediction even worse than the governments darkest warnings.

Taken together, these new numbers cast a grim shadow over Britains response to the epidemic, which has already been dogged by shortfalls in testing and questions about the supply of ventilators and protective gear.

As in the United States and other countries, nursing homes in Britain have become hot zones for the virus. Two major operators have reported 521 deaths in their homes in recent weeks, many of which have not yet been reflected in the official statistics because of a lag in recording the deaths.

In data released Tuesday, the Office of National Statistics reported that from the beginning of the year until April 3, there were 217 deaths from the coronavirus in nursing homes in England and Wales; 136 in private homes; and 33 in hospices.

It estimated that 90.2 per cent of deaths from the virus occurred in hospitals, while the rest occurred in nursing homes, hospices, or at home. The statistics do not include Scotland or Northern Ireland.

But for the week of March 28 to April 3, the office reported 16,387 deaths in England and Wales, the largest weekly total since it began compiling data in 2005, and 6,082 more than the five-year average death toll for that week. It reported that 3,475 deaths were registered as involving coronavirus.

This suggests either that people are dying of other illnesses at significantly greater than normal rates or that coronavirus is killing even more people than is being accounted for.
MADRID, SPAIN  APRIL 06: A butcher wearing a mask is seen working at the 'Carnes de Pedraza' Butcher in Alpedrete on April 06, 2020 in Madrid, Spain. David Benito

Spain and Italy may have both been hit hard by the coronavirus pandemic, but it's the former that could see a greater impact on its workforce, according to the International Monetary Fund. Spain's jobs situation is predicted to deteriorate more quickly than Italy's this year. Its unemployment rate could reach 20.8%  an increase from an October forecast of 13.2%, the latest World Economic Outlook showed. In comparison, Italy's jobless rate is seen at 12.7% in 2020, from 10.3% in October. "The issue in Spain is that they have a much larger share of workers on a temporary contract. In the previous crisis we also saw a very rapid rise in unemployment, with employees on a temporary contract bearing the largest brunt," Maartje Wijffelaars, senior economist at RaboResearch in the Netherlands, told CNBC Tuesday. Spain has grappled with high unemployment over the years and it was one of the main legacies from the sovereign debt crisis of 2011. At the height of that crisis, more than 26% of the Spanish working population was out of a job. By contrast, Italy's jobless rate did not surpass 13%, according to the EU's statistics office.

Even though Spain has managed to bring those levels down, the country's labor market was already in a more precarious situation than Italy's before the pandemic hit. In February, 13.7% of Spanish workers were unemployed versus 9.8% in Italy. Both countries implemented national lockdowns in March to help stop the spread of Covid-19. This policy effectively brought economic activity to a halt, with people only allowed to go outside to purchase groceries and medicine. "We expect the shock in the first quarter to be worse for Italy than in Spain, as the outbreak hit Italy earlier in the year and lockdown measures were implemented earlier," Wijffelaars from RaboReseacrh said.

I expect the (Spanish) administration to prove pretty responsible when trying to get out of this crisis. Anna Rosenberg Head of Europe and the U.K. at Signum Global

However, she added that the economic shock in the second quarter will be larger in Spain "as most heavily hit sectors such as tourism and hospitality are more important for the Spanish economy than for the Italian economy." Data from the Spanish labor ministry showed that in March, the construction sector saw 22.92% of newly unemployed people and the services sector saw the highest increase in absolute terms.

Madrid more 'responsible' than Rome
A London-based retail data company that counts fashion firms Boohoo, Zara and Chloe as customers, on Wednesday said it has raised $29 million (23.1 million) to expand.

Edited, which allows users to track the popularity and prices of clothes and beauty products across the retail industry, said the money will be invested in tech and hiring more people in the UK and the US where it has an office in New York.

Most of the funding comes from London-based private equity firm Beringea, a backer in jewellery brand Monica Vinader, and US investor Wavecrest Growth Partners. Hermes GPE also took place in the funding round.

Wavecrests managing partner Deepak Sindwani said: During these uncertain times, retailers and brands need real-time data more than ever.

He added: We believe Edited provides an essential data and business intelligence platform to enable customers to make the most profitable design, pricing, product, and supply chain decisions.

Karen McCormick, chief investment officer of Beringea, said Edited offers a must-have product for retailers and analysts.

Edited, which employs around 100 staff, was founded in 2009 in Clerkenwell by former fashion designer Julia Fowler and software engineer Geoff Watts. They retain a stake in the business alongside existing early backers.
As the United Kingdom is scrambling to overcome the coronavirus pandemic, Finance Minister Rishi Sunak said that the publics health is more important than the economy. While addressing the daily' COVID-19 briefing, Sunak said that the best thing the authorities can do to protect the health of the economy is to protect the health of the people. Sunaks statement comes after the UK reported more than 93,000 infected cases.

Sunak said, It's not a case of choosing between the economy and public health. Common sense tells us that doing so would be self defeating. We can't protect every business and every household.

"The absolute priority must be to focus all of our resources, not just of the state, but of businesses, and of all of you at home as well, in a collective national effort to beat this virus."  Chancellor @RishiSunak at the #Coronavirus press conference yesterday. pic.twitter.com/7ujUsJ0LTv  UK Prime Minister (@10DowningStreet) April 15, 2020

READ: We'll Recover Quickly & Strongly After Covid: UK FM & Narayana Murthy's Son-in-law Sunak

He went on to say that the country was in a strong financial position before the pandemic and the at the UK will bounce back. He said that he believes that the country will recover quickly and strongly. He even stressed the importance of staying safe and well and said that the most important thing to protect the economy is to stay healthy.

The Officer for Budget Responsibility (OBR) also reportedly released a statement which suggested that the UK economy could shrink by as much as 35 per cent due to the pandemic. However, Sunak said that the situation would have been much worse had it not been for the action the government has taken so far. He also called for a collective national effort to prioritise on all the resources to beat the pandemic.

READ: 'Proud' Father On Son Who Treated Boris Johnson

Tax norms eased for foreign workers

Earlier this week, the Chancellor of the Exchequer also announced that the authorities will be temporarily easing the tax criteria for highly skilled foreign workers, including those from India, in a bid to fight back the virus outbreak during a fixed three-month period. He announced that so-called Statutory Residence Test (SRT) will be waived between March 1 and June 1. The latest announcement by Sunak means that there would be no chance in the tax status of international workers coming in response to the British governments efforts to fight the coronavirus pandemic.

Sunak said, "We will amend the Statutory Residence Test (SRT) to ensure that any period(s) between March 1 and June 1, 2020 spent in the UK by individuals working on COVID-19 related activities will not count towards the residence tests. It is right that these changes are time-limited and only support those people whose skill sets are currently required.

"The qualifying criteria will therefore be designed so that the relaxation of the rules is tightly targeted, minimising the risk of abuse. We will also keep the duration of this measure under review as the situation develops, in line with the other support already provided," he added.

(With PTI inputs)

READ: Prince Harry Finding Life 'a Bit Challenging' In Los Angeles, Says His Friend Dr Goodall

READ: COVID-19 Is 10 Times More Deadly Than Swine Flu: WHO




New Delhi, April 15 : In a humanitarian gesture, the Central government on Wednesday decided to facilitate the return of 180 Pakistanis stranded in India amidst a nationwide lockdown to their home country. The Pakistani nationals will cross over to Pakistan from the Attari-Wagah international border in Punjab tomorrow morning.

This is the first movement of people from the border since all the international borders were sealed following the outbreak of novel coronavirus pandemic.

Official sources said the High Commission of Pakistan had requested the government for assistance to facilitate the return of Pakistanis in Delhi, Uttar Pradesh, Haryana and Punjab.

Even as Pakistan has engaged in several ceasefire violations along the Line of Control in Jammu and Kashmir, amid the coronavirus pandemic, the government decided to help the Pakistani nationals on humanitarian grounds, sources said. The Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) is coordinating with the authorities to facilitate their departure from India.

The government has requested the police of Punjab, Haryana, Uttar Pradesh and Delhi to facilitate the movement of the vehicles carrying Pakistani nationals and enabling them to reach Attari tomorrow morning.

"It is requested that all returning Pakistan nationals may be screened as per the international norms and existing provisions of the government of India and only asymptomatic individuals may be allowed to return," a letter by Additional Secretary of MEA, Dammu Ravi told the police chiefs of the four states. Ravi is the coordinator of the MEA Covid Coordination Committee.
Though cases and deaths continue to grow in New Jersey, more than 6,300 patients with the coronavirus or under investigation for it have been discharged from hospitals since April 4, state officials said Wednesday.

It was the first time officials gave a total number of New Jersey residents recovering from the virus after requiring treatment in a hospital.

While the numbers we report every day are grim, over 6,000 discharges is a reminder people are getting better and overcoming this illness, state Health Commissioner Judith Persichilli said Wednesday during the states daily coronavirus briefing in Trenton.

Gov. Phil Murphy stressed that the overall number of positive test results in the state is cumulative and that while 54,000 cases have been reported in April, about 17,000 were confirmed earlier and have gone through the two-week incubation period."

Sadly, we have lost some of those folks, Murphy said. As we see the daily overall number of positive test results rise, we should also keep in mind there are hundreds, if not thousands, who have received positive tests results and have now defeated the virus.

New Jersey, a state of 9 million residents, has seen at least 71,030 confirmed cases and 351 confirmed deaths of COVID-19, state officials announced Wednesday. Only New York has more cases and deaths among U.S. states.

As of 10 p.m. Tuesday, 8,270 people with the virus or under investigation for it were hospitalized in New Jersey, officials said. Of those, 1,980 were in critical care and 1,705 on ventilators.

That is a 3% daily growth in hospitalizations  down from 4% Monday, Persichilli said.

And between 10 p.m. Monday and 10 p.m. Tuesday, 709 people with the virus were discharged from hospitals, officials said.

Officials say about 85% of people with the virus experience moderate symptoms, while 15%  especially the elderly and those with underlying conditions  see more serious cases.

Murphy has said in recent days there are signs the rate of infection is slowing in New Jersey after weeks of school closings, business closings, and orders for residents to stay at home.

Officials have also said the peak of hospitalizations from the virus is now likely to be lower, but later in April. The state has been working to add thousands of hospital beds to handle the surge, including at closed hospitals, field hospitals, hotels, and college dormitories.

But Murphy has warned that cases and deaths are still increasing, and residents need to keep staying inside and practicing social distancing to erase any progress.

Stay home, stay apart, keep your face covered, and we will beat this damn virus," the governor said Wednesday.

The governor said Tuesday night that residents may be under lockdown orders until June or July.

Murphy has also called on the federal government to help provide more medical supplies  including ventilators and testing materials.

Boy, do we need help, he said Tuesday.

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.

Brent Johnson may be reached at bjohnson@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter @johnsb01.

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[April 14, 2020] Typsy Provides Free Hospitality Education to the World

MELBOURNE, Australia, April 14, 2020 /CNW/ -- Global hospitality learning platform Typsy today announced the launch of a new plan to support the worldwide hospitality industry during the coronavirus pandemic. The Typsy COVID Support Plan offers unrestricted, free online access to its industry-leading platform and Netflix-style library of 650+ hospitality video lessons. The COVID Support Plan will be available for individuals, businesses, and schools until Wednesday, Sept. 30, 2020. With venues across the world being forced to downsize or close in response to the pandemic, this support plan will help businesses stay engaged and connected with their workforce. It will also enable members to freely develop their hospitality skills, empowering those who have been affected by COVID-19 to access online learning opportunities and re-enter the workforce with confidence. In a statement released today, Typsy CEO Jonathan Plowright described the initiative as crucial, saying, "The negative impacts on hospitality and tourism are devastating, however, a stronger community is building. People are rallying to provide initiatives that give the industry the best chance at a strong rebound in the future. Being able to offer free access to Typsy at this time allows us to support not only our existing customers, but we can also help many more people whose lives and businesses have been disrupted by the effects of COVID-19. Community has never been more important than it is now, and providing online learning is a positive and accessible way to help people stay productive, connected and engaged with their employers and the hospitalit industry. We all need to do what we can to ensure the industry comes through this."



Typsy is backed by the world's leading hotel school and Swiss-based education group Ecole Hoteliere de Lausanne (EHL) and counts dozens of global groups, including Radisson, Delaware North, Wyndham and Hyatt, as clients. "Our clients have been impacted enormously both commercially and operationally, which has had a ripple effect on all suppliers. Whilst our revenue has taken a major hit, we are incredibly fortunate to have strong backing from our partner, EHL, who is steadfast in their resolve to help support the industry. This puts us in a fortunate position whereby we can invest in the increased computing and other costs necessary to provide free access to the platform during this difficult period." Over the past month, Typsy usage has increased over 1,600%, and it's expected that up to one million new learners will join the platform to learn and earn micro-credentials over the next six months.

Typsy is the world's fastest-growing online hospitality learning platform. Typsy courses are led by world-class instructors and designed for hotel and restaurant chains, learning institutions, small businesses, as well as individuals looking to upskill and improve their resume and job opportunities. The Typsy course library consists of lessons in a variety of categories including leadership, beverage, service, hotel and culinary. Endorsed certificates are earned for every course completed on Typsy. Typsy recognizes that it is essential to address ways in which hospitality practices can evolve and adapt to deal with the impact of COVID-19. The company today also released a COVID-19 course which includes topics useful to many operators right now, such as how to serve guests safely during take away service. As this is a uniquely stressful situation for hospitality staff and businesses, a Health and Wellbeing for Hospitality course is also being released this month, covering topics including the effects of stress, stress management, common myths about mental health, and substance use in hospitality. Press contact:

Felicity Thomlinson

0429 448 217

[email protected] Related Links Typsy's COVID Support Plan Typsy View original content:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/typsy-provides-free-hospitality-education-to-the-world-301040152.html SOURCE Typsy

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BAKU, Azerbaijan, Apr. 15

By Rufiz Hafizoglu - Trend:

The trade turnover between Turkey and Kazakhstan dropped by $22.3 million in February 2020 compared to the same month of 2019, exceeding $157.2 million, Trend reports citing the Turkish Trade Ministry.

In February 2020, Turkeys export to Kazakhstan amounted to $76.9 million, while import from Kazakhstan - $80.2 million.

From January through February 2020, trade turnover between Turkey and Kazakhstan dropped by $48.1 million compared to the same period of 2020, amounting to $306.3 million.

During the reporting period, export from Turkey to Kazakhstan amounted to $136.6 million, while import from Kazakhstan - $169.6 million.

Turkeys foreign trade turnover in February 2020 exceeded $32.2 billion.

In February 2020, export from Turkey increased by 2.3 percent compared to February 2019, exceeding $14.6 billion.

Turkey's import increased by 9.8 percent in February 2020 compared to the same month of 2019 and exceeded $17.6 billion.

From January through February 2020, Turkey's trade turnover exceeded $66.1 billion. Meanwhile, Turkeys export increased by 4.1 percent compared to the same period of 2019, reaching $29.3 billion.

Over the reporting period, Turkeys import increased by 14.3 percent compared to the same period of 2019, amounting to $36.8 billion.

The foreign trade turnover of Turkey exceeded $374.2 billion in 2019.

---

Follow the author on Twitter: @rhafizoglu
(Newser)  The CEO of the company behind video game mega-hits like Call of Duty and World of Warcraft has a 10,000-strong staff reporting to him. And now they all have his personal phone number. Activision Blizzard CEO Bobby Kotick told CNBC on Tuesday that he provided them with his digits about a month ago and "encouraged every single employee that has a concern that relates to their health care" to reach out.

story continues below

He's heard from "a few hundred" thus far, spurring CNN to quip that Kotick "is using the coronavirus pandemic to (safely) get closer to his employees." Kotick also shared that the company is working on "a number of different initiatives that are new for a company like ours to be involved with," including a UCLA clinical trial on a possible anti-viral medication. (Read more coronavirus stories.)
STATEN ISLAND, N.Y. -- The state wont be proceeding with a field hospital at the College of Staten Island planned to help deal with the coronavirus outbreak, the Advance/SILive learned Tuesday.

CSI President William Fritz wrote in a Tuesday morning email to the school community that the hospital conversions planned for the schools recreation center and one of its parking lots will not be going forward.

This is good news which is consistent with reports of improving numbers related to COVID infections, Fritz wrote in his message. As you all know, the situation is fluid and I will inform you should the situation change.

A state official confirmed that, as of Tuesday, the field hospital is being temporarily suspended, because of virus mitigation efforts.

Plans for the temporary hospitals had been reduced since a 1,000 bed field hospital was announced in late March. On Wednesday, the Advance learned the number of beds could be reduced to 150.

A source with knowledge of the project said that the Army Corps of Engineers would be halting construction at the site for 48 hours as state hospitalizations for the virus continued their downward trend.

*** CLICK HERE FOR COMPLETE COVERAGE OF CORONAVIRUS IN NEW YORK ***

New Yorks Regional Administrator for the Federal Emergency Management Agency Thomas Van Essen told the Advance in an interview published Sunday that FEMA was reviewing whether the hospital was still necessary.

"I think as the numbers go down in some of the hospitals there is a decision being made on whether or not that alternate site will be necessary. And if they believe it is, well put it together as quickly as possible, and put it to use as quickly as possible, Von Essen said.

Staten Islands other field hospital at the South Beach Psychiatric Center began accepting patients April 7 after a coordinated effort among Cuomos office, the Army National Guard, and Northwell Health, which operates the adjacent Staten Island University Hospital site in Ocean Breeze.

As spokesman for Rep. Max Rose (D-Staten Island/South Brooklyn), who is deployed with the National Guard, said it will allow for shifted funding to supplies like personal protective equipment and more staffing.

Staten Islanders should be proud that we worked together to bend the curve, and as a result, these beds at CSI are no longer currently needed, the spokesman said. However, this is by no means mission accomplished. If the conditions change, weve shown that we can quickly mobilize and build emergency hospital facilities if needed.

Borough President James Oddo said that field hospital was essential in expanding the boroughs bed capacity, and "if need be, theoretically there is more physical capacity in that building.

I think this should be seen as good news because there no longer is the need for CSI to play this role, he said. We dont need a showy pink elephant auxiliary site, we need staffing help and supplies.

Mayor Bill de Blasio said Friday that the city will use its additional hospital capacity built to respond to the coronavirus outbreak as isolation and quarantine space.

We want capacity ready, no matter what, and let us pray we dont dont need some of these facilities to be as much for medical use where we go ahead to the phases I described yesterday with low transmission or no transmission, he said.
Newron Pharmaceutical S.p.A. ("Newron") (SIX: NWRN, XETRA: NP5), a biopharmaceutical company focused on the development of novel therapies for patients with diseases of the central and peripheral nervous system, announces that it has received Tranche 3 under its financing agreement with the European Investment Bank (EIB) that was signed in October 2018 and comprises up to EUR 40 million, subject to achieving a set of agreed performance criteria. The EIB loan is backed by the European Fund for Strategic Investments (EFSI), the central pillar of the Investment plan for Europe. Tranche 3 consists of EUR 7.5 million and will primarily be used to support the Company's development programs in diseases of the central nervous system. The first two tranches of the loan totalling EUR 17.5 million were received by Newron in 2019.

In connection with Tranche 3, EIB has received warrants entitling it to purchase up to 151,344 ordinary shares of Newron at an exercise price of EUR 9.25 per share.

About Newron Pharmaceuticals

Newron (SIX: NWRN, XETRA: NP5) is a biopharmaceutical company focused on the development of novel therapies for patients with diseases of the central and peripheral nervous system. The Company is headquartered in Bresso near Milan, Italy. Xadago/safinamide has received marketing authorization for the treatment of Parkinson's disease in the European Union, Switzerland, the USA, Australia, Canada, Brazil, Colombia, the United Arab Emirates and Japan, and is commercialized by Newron's Partner Zambon. US WorldMeds holds the commercialization rights in the USA. Meiji Seika has the rights to develop and commercialize the compound in Japan and other key Asian territories. In addition to Xadago/safinamide for Parkinson's disease, Newron has a strong pipeline of promising treatments for rare disease patients at various stages of clinical development, including sarizotan for patients with Rett syndrome and ralfinamide for patients with specific rare pain indications. Newron is also developing Evenamide as the potential first add-on therapy for the treatment of patients with positive symptoms of schizophrenia. For more information, please visit: www.newron.com

Important Notices

This document contains forward-looking statements, including (without limitation) about (1) Newron's ability to develop and expand its business, successfully complete development of its current product candidates, the timing of commencement of various clinical trials and receipt of data and current and future collaborations for the development and commercialization of its product candidates, (2) the market for drugs to treat CNS diseases and pain conditions, (3) Newron's financial resources, and (4) assumptions underlying any such statements. In some cases, these statements and assumptions can be identified by the fact that they use words such as "will", "anticipate", "estimate", "expect", "project", "intend", "plan", "believe", "target", and other words and terms of similar meaning. All statements, other than historical facts, contained herein regarding Newron's strategy, goals, plans, future financial position, projected revenues and costs and prospects are forward-looking statements.

By their very nature, such statements and assumptions involve inherent risks and uncertainties, both general and specific, and risks exist that predictions, forecasts, projections and other outcomes described, assumed or implied therein will not be achieved. Future events and actual results could differ materially from those set out in, contemplated by or underlying the forward-looking statements due to a number of important factors. These factors include (without limitation) (1) uncertainties in the discovery, development or marketing of products, including without limitation difficulties in enrolling clinical trials, negative results of clinical trials or research projects or unexpected side effects, (2) delay or inability in obtaining regulatory approvals or bringing products to market, (3) future market acceptance of products, (4) loss of or inability to obtain adequate protection for intellectual property rights, (5) inability to raise additional funds, (6) success of existing and entry into future collaborations and licensing agreements, (7) litigation, (8) loss of key executive or other employees, (9) adverse publicity and news coverage, and (10) competition, regulatory, legislative and judicial developments or changes in market and/or overall economic conditions.

Newron may not actually achieve the plans, intentions or expectations disclosed in forward-looking statements and assumptions underlying any such statements may prove wrong. Investors should therefore not place undue reliance on them. There can be no assurance that actual results of Newron's research programs, development activities, commercialization plans, collaborations and operations will not differ materially from the expectations set out in such forward-looking statements or underlying assumptions.

Newron does not undertake any obligation to publicly up-date or revise forward looking statements except as may be required by applicable regulations of the SIX Swiss Exchange where the shares of Newron are listed. This document does not contain or constitute an offer or invitation to purchase or subscribe for any securities of Newron and no part of it shall form the basis of or be relied upon in connection with any contract or commitment whatsoever.

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Contacts:

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Stefan Weber CEO

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pr@newron.com

UK/Europe

Julia Phillips Natalie Garland-Collins, FTI Consulting

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Switzerland

Martin Meier-Pfister, IRF

+41 43 244 81 40

meier-pfister@irf-reputation.ch

Germany/Europe

Anne Hennecke, MC Services

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USA

Paul Sagan, LaVoieHealthScience

+1 617 374 8800, Ext. 112

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Using automation developed by a staff member, the Garland, Texas, Fire Department can better inventory its thousands of assets and comply with regulations.

We track everything from large equipment like our apparatus -- our fire trucks, our engines, our ambulances, our staff vehicles -- all the way down to the Band-Aids, said Debbie Watson, senior business process analyst and citizen developer at the department.

The department used to track inventory with spreadsheets, a Microsoft Access database and pencil and paper, she said. We found that when we asked questions like, How much hose do we need to buy this year because its going to be coming to end of life? we couldnt answer that question in a timely manner.

Another pain point was the annual audit by the Texas Commission of Fire Protection. To check maintenance records on over 1,700 pieces of equipment, auditors had to page through six to 10 inch thick binder full of paper records -- a process that used to take five to six hours, Watson said. With the automation, it takes about a half-hour.

Watson created one database that shows each asset and its serial number, date of manufacture, date of purchase and other pertinent information, and she created another that tracks all activities associated with that asset: putting it into service, repairs, having it cleaned and taking it out of service, for example. That allowed the auditor to select a person, pull up that persons information and theres all the details right there, she said. He walked in and walked out in 30 minutes.

She used Microsoft SharePoint Nintex Workflow for SharePoint and Nintex Forms to develop the solution. Data entered in Nintex Forms is stored in SharePoint, and the Nintex Workflow lets users drag and drop elements to build automated processes without having to learn to code.

The workflow is my favorite part because it enables us to automate all this stuff and seamlessly move it from place to place, Watson said. If I need to do anything from calculations, validations, approvals, movement from one list to another, all that  is done using the Nintex Workflow.

One of the biggest benefits of automation has been in ease of reporting, she said. For instance, the department must meet Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) requirements for tracking controlled substances. Historically, ambulance staff members did that by conducting occasional audits and faxing in their numbers, which were added to a paper log that was stored in the departments narcotics vault. Someone then went to the ambulances to verify the numbers accuracy.

Now, its really simple to just have each ambulance submit a data check each morning, and we know what we have across the entire department at any time, Watson said. Thats important because we need to be able to tell [the DEA] at any moment how much of a certain medication we have in the city and where it is, what the expiration dates on those are, how many are expired and how many of those are on this ambulance.

Another area that automation has simplified is budgeting for future purchases of assets, such as ladders or hose.

Before, it was so hard to know which ones were coming to end of life, and now its super simple to say, Show me all hose that was manufactured before 10 years ago and that gives us a leeway to know when were going to need to purchase, Watson said.

Automation facilitates firefighters daily activities, too. For instance, when they need their gear cleaned after responding to a fire, they can open a request using the Nintex forms and it shows all the gear theyre responsible for. They check what they need cleaned, the support services department gets a notice, they pick up the gear, wash it, fill out a report that its done and return the gear.

Starting small with asset tracking was a great way to get department support for automation, Watson said. Now, everybody in the department is responsible for inventorying. Shes now working on an application to automate daily checks of self-contained breathing apparatus, which firefighters must conduct on their own device.

The city government made Nintex available to all its 45 business units so that users without coding skills, like Watson, could create process automation solutions. So far, the city has about 20 citizen developers and has saved $4 million through their work.
Source: Xinhua| 2020-04-15 06:10:13|Editor: zyl

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A worker of a cleaning company prepares to clean a shop in Rome, Italy, April 14, 2020. The COVID-19 has claimed another 602 lives in locked-down Italy over the past 24 hours, bringing the total number of infections, fatalities and recoveries to 162,488 since the pandemic began here in late February, the country's Civil Protection Department said Tuesday. (Xinhua)

ROME, April 14 (Xinhua) -- The COVID-19 has claimed another 602 lives in locked-down Italy over the past 24 hours, bringing the total number of infections, fatalities and recoveries to 162,488 since the pandemic began here in late February, the country's Civil Protection Department said Tuesday.

Speaking during a nightly televised press conference, Civil Protection Department Chief Angelo Borrelli confirmed that there were 675 new active coronavirus infections compared to Monday, bringing the nationwide total to 104,291 cases.

Of those infected, 28,011 are hospitalized (down by 12 patients compared to Monday), while 3,186 are in intensive care (down by 74 patients compared to Monday).

The rest, or 70 percent of all positive cases, are quarantined at home, Borrelli said.

The death toll on Tuesday was 602, bringing the total to 21,067 since the pandemic first broke out in northern Italy on Feb. 21.

He added that there were 1,695 additional recoveries compared to Monday, bringing the total to 37,130.

Tuesday's numbers are up from a total of 159,516 cases on Monday: 103,616 active infections, 35,435 recoveries and 20,465 fatalities.

Borrelli also said that the Civil Protection Department can now count on 10,598 volunteers and he thanked European Parliament President David Sassoli, who is Italian, "for the beautiful words he spoke today about our volunteers, defining them as the pulsating heart of the best of Italy and a resource that we cannot do without."

The civil protection chief said Italians have so far donated over 122 million euros (133 million U.S. dollars) to the coronavirus emergency fund, and that his department has so far spent 26 million euros of the donated money to purchase individual protection gear and ventilators.

With regards to migrants reaching Italy's shores, Borrelli said his department is working to identify solutions and "the possibility of quarantining incoming migrants on ships, or in areas or facilities on land. So we are assessing the measures to be fielded."

No specific vessel or location for quarantining migrants has been decided on yet, Borrelli said.

Also present at the press conference was Dr. Massimo Antonelli, who directs the Emergencies and Reanimation Department at Rome's Policlino Gemelli Hospital.

He told reporters that a comparative study of total intensive care unit cases over the course of the past four weeks in the northern Lombardy region, where the pandemic first broke out, and the central Lazio region where Rome is located, showed that in spite of vastly different numbers - 3,862 and 424 patients, respectively -- both regions showed identical survival rates of 65 percent.

"This means that the severity of the illness, above and beyond the raw numbers, stays the same," Antonelli said.

"The conclusions to be drawn could be that, first, the (containment) measures have worked and are working to reduce the impact on our health care facilities and secondly, that, while the patients (who reach the ICU) are severely compromised, the effectiveness of the intensive care units is the same in both regions, giving us a 65 percent survival rate, which is impressive given the severity of the illness," he explained.

In the northern city of Parma, Mayor Federico Pizzarotti granted an emergency waiver to the national lockdown rules banning all public ceremonies including weddings and funerals in order to marry two doctors who are battling on the COVID-19 front line.

The husband, 48, is a doctor in the COVID-19 ward of Parma's Maggiore Hospital while the wife, 35, is a doctor at a long-term rehabilitation clinic for recovering COVID-19 patients in the town of Albinea near the city of Reggio Emilia. Both Parma and Reggio Emilia are in the northern Emilia-Romagna region.

Pizzarotti officiated at the civil ceremony in City Hall, with the few people present all wearing surgical masks.

"Today is a special day during a special period, because a wedding that takes places at this time is a bit like a wartime wedding," Pizzarotti told TG Sanita, a weekly newscast by the National Federation of Orders of Surgeons and Dentists (FNOMCeO, in its Italian acronym).

"At a time when our civilization and our society are at a standstill, celebrating the marriage of two doctors who are saving lives on the front line is a sign to their family and also to society at large, so that we can look with hope to the future that awaits us," said the mayor.

FNOMCeO, which is keeping a running tally of doctors who lost their lives in the battle against the virus, also announced the death of a family doctor on Tuesday, bringing the total fatalities among their ranks to 116 since the emergency began.

Also on Tuesday, the Interior Ministry said that police carried out checks on a total of 252,148 individuals who were circulating during the "Pasquetta" or "Little Easter" holiday on Monday.

Under normal circumstances, Italians mark the Easter long weekend with outings, trips, and big meals with families and friends.

"A total of 16,545 people were fined, 88 were cited for making false statements and another 29 were cited for being outside their homes while being positive to the virus," the ministry said in a statement.

Under the terms of the government's nationwide lockdown that went into effect on March 10 and expires on May 3, people are forbidden from leaving their homes except to fulfil basic needs such as getting groceries, walking their dogs, or for provable health emergencies.

People who tested positive with the virus and are under home quarantine are absolutely forbidden from going outside. Violators are punishable with hefty fines, and the violation gets noted on their criminal records.
Kourtney Kardashian is fondly remembering her family trip to Japan with sisters Kim and Khloe back in 2018.

Despite the 39-year-old KKW Beauty founder slamming her siblings for their 'embarrassing' wardrobe choices at the time, Kourtney dubbed the destination one of her 'favorite places in the world' on Tuesday.

'I had planned a trip to be there this month. When we make plans, God laughs,' the reality star, 40, captioned a series of throwback images, which included a tea ceremony, shopping trip and video footage of some incredibly carved fruit.

Konnichiwa! Kourtney Kardashian is fondly remembering her family trip to Japan with sisters Kim and back in 2018 with a series of throwback pictures

In her first snap, the wellness guru beamed, while sitting with her legs crossed on a beige cushion in a floral kimono robe.

For the occasion, she sported a chic black and white ensemble and raised one arm up in the air and held a cup of tea in the other.

For another pose in the same look, she delicately sipped her tea and flaunted her red nails, as she styled her dark tresses in waves.

Memories: While Kim appeared to be glaring at her in another snap, Kourtney posed for a mirror selfie with her hair slicked back, turquoise eyeshadow and a furry black coat

Unlike Khloe, 35, who didn't appear in any of the mother-of-three's pictures, Kim could be spotted in the background of three with her bright pink hair.

While crossing Shibuya Crossing, one of the busiest intersections in the world, Kayne West's wife could be seen wearing a pair of silver biker shorts and a form-fitted puffer jacket.

Kourtney wrote that the spot reminded her of 'Times Square with the huge neon signs and fast-paced energy,' on her blog Poosh, while chronicling the trip a few months later.

Chic: Kourtney's looks, however appeared to have remained more timeless than Kim's, as her throwbacks included two all-black ensembles

Again, Kim, who was shooting a Yeezy campaign on the trip, caused tension between her sisters for point-blank telling them they looked like 'f***ing clowns.'

'Kourtney and all of the glam people, at this point, hate me, because I just killed all of their dreams,' she said on the KUWTK, which aired in October 2018. 'And I dont care. If you cant take the criticism, you shouldnt have come on this trip.'

Kourtney's looks, however appeared to have remained more timeless, as her throwbacks included two, stunning all-black ensembles.

Trip to remember: Despite the 39-year-old KKW Beauty founder slamming her siblings for their 'embarrassing' wardrobe choices at the time, Kourtney dubbed the destination one of her 'favorite places in the world' on Tuesday

In another picture, she could be seen posing in front of a newsstand in an over-sized long leather coat, matching sunglasses and heeled bootie.

She looked effortlessly at ease, as she threw up her locks in a messy bun and buried her hands in the jacket's pockets.

While Kim appeared to be glaring at her in another, Kourtney posed for a mirror selfie with her hair slicked back, turquoise eyeshadow and a furry black coat.

Cultured: For another pose in a chic black and white kimono robe, she delicately sipped her tea and flaunted her red nails, as she styled her dark tresses in waves

Also on Poosh, Kourtney called the trip 'a great bonding experience' with her sisters and said it 'marked our last adventure together before True was born.'

Khloe had been eight months pregnant during the trip, where they enjoyed vintage shopping and took a high-speed train from Tokyo to Kyoto, known for its beautiful temples, parks and thick forests.

'Japan was one of the most beautiful and amazing places Ive ever been,' Kourtney wrote in her travel diary. 'I cant wait to go back and hope to bring the kids someday!'

In November, Kim and Kourtney traveled to Tokyo with their children, just one day after Thanksgiving.
PHILADELPHIA The American Red Cross is facing a national blood crisis  its worst blood shortage in more than a decade. Dangerously low blood supply levels are posing a concerning risk to patient care and forcing doctors to make difficult decisions about who receives blood transfusions and who will need to wait until more products become []
American Idol will continue its current season despite the coronavirus pandemic, with contestants performing from home.

The programmes team unveiled plans for the rest of the ongoing season on social media Tuesday.

Ryan Seacrest will perform his hosting duties from Los Angeles.

Judges Katy Perry and Lionel Richie will tune in from California as well.

Luke Bryan, the third judge, is set to work from Nasvhille, Tennessee, as is mentor Bobby Bones.

Contestants will perform from their respective houses, and viewers will vote as usual.

American Idols current season began in February on ABC.

The coronavirus pandemic suspended production before the live shows could take place.

The top 20 participants are now scheduled to perform from 26 April, when the live rounds begin remotely.
The suspects are accused of joining the Islamic State militant group in January 2019, having originally planned to travel to Tajikistan to carry out jihad before instead turning their sights to targets in Germany. The cell was in touch with senior Islamic State leaders in Syria and Afghanistan, according to German authorities, who said the group also funneled money to the cell through agents in Turkey.
Union leaders representing Border Patrol and Customs and Border Protection agents say the agencies are failing to adequately protect front-line workers from the novel coronavirus.

The two unions say some agents have been exposed to the virus and later learned they were infected.

In a recent Facebook post, Hector Garza, president of Local 2455 of the National Border Patrol Council, accused Laredo Sector Chief Felix Chavez of failing to protect Border Patrol Agents from COVID-19.

Garza said that, in five different situations in which an agent was directly or indirectly exposed to the virus, Chavez did not allow the agent to take leave before getting a test, thus exposing the remainder of the workforce and their families to COVID-19.

Were facing an invisible enemy, and the protective equipment we have is simply gloves and a face mask, he said. When people come across illegally, we are returning them right away, so were really not going to know if they have the disease or not.

Garza, whose local union represents about 2,200 Border Patrol agents in the Laredo sector, said he went public after getting nowhere in a private meeting with Chavez.

Weve seen chiefs in other sectors exercise discretion and allow agents to go on safety leave when there is a suspected or confirmed exposure to COVID-19, but unfortunately, that is not what Chief Chavez is doing, he said.

Garza could not say how many of the five agents he cited tested positive for the virus.

Requests for comment from the Laredo Border Patrol Sector went unanswered.

A separate issue affecting agents for Customs and Border Protection nationwide is also bringing complaints from Laredo.

It concerns the abrupt cancellation, after only one week, of a CBP policy that gave an extra day of paid leave each week to agents, including those who work Laredo ports.

I had never seen morale that high. It just shot up. It showed the employees that the agency was concerned about their health, said Rick Guerra, president of CBP union in Laredo, of the policy launched several weeks ago.

When they took it back, it crushed morale. It was inexplicable and against all common sense, he added.

Guerra said CBP agents often work in close quarters and also have a difficult time maintaining a safe distance from pedestrians and motorists arriving from Mexico.

Its not possible to stay 6 feet away. We need adequate PPE (personal protection equipment). We need sanitized work areas and plexiglass barriers in certain areas, he said.

Guerra said that about 1,100 CBP employees work in Laredo, and that about seven federal agents there, including the Border Patrol, have thus far tested positive for the coronavirus.

On April 7, the day after the temporary leave policy was canceled, Anthony Reardon, president of the National Treasury Employees Union, which represents 25,000 CBP workers, wrote to Chad Wolf, the acting secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, and Mark Morgan, the acting commissioner of U.S. Customs and Border Protection, asking the agency to reconsider.

The extra day off, he said, reduced potential exposure to the virus, and also provided additional personal time to deal with unanticipated family responsibilities resulting from the forced closures of schools and day care centers.

A CBP spokesman said Wednesday that the special leave was rescinded because of COVID-19 related requirements on the border that necessitated the mobilization of those CBP officers.

In a subsequent letter, sent April 14, Reardon noted that 218 CBP employees have been infected with the coronavirus.

jmaccormack

@express-news.net
"Wish I could go back in time", yearns a pilot who was in the cockpit of a Jet Airways plane that landed little past midnight at Mumbai airport on April 18, 2019. Not many thought it will be the last flight of the once-storied carrier, where scores of pilots and other staff served for at least two decades.

As the grounding of the cash-starved Jet Airways nears one year, many dreams have been shattered but there is optimism of an insolvency resolution-led new birth.

The airline announced temporary suspension of services on April 17 last year and the last flight S2-3502 that took off from Amristar at around 1030 pm touched down at Mumbai's Chhatrapati Shivaji International Airport at 12.22 am on April 18.

Jet Airways' low-cost arm JetLite operated the flight with a Boeing 737-800 aircraft, which was later taken on lease by no-frills airline SpiceJet.

From a sense of belonging to disbelief to lingering hopes of revival, a few former staff PTI spoke to have myriad emotions when they recalled Jet Airways days.

For Nidhi Chaphekar, the Jet Airways cabin crew member who was injured in a terror attack at Brussels airport in 2016, the closure of the airline is more tough than the terror incident.

Chaphekar, who was with the airline for nearly 24 years, is now a motivational speaker and has also released a book.

There are lot of troubles for many former employees. Some are even under depression and some are doing part time jobs, including taking tuitions, she said.

"I worked with Jet Airways for 21 years and everything looked like a dream. For many like me, the clock has come back to a standstill," a senior pilot who flew Airbus 330 plane told PTI.

Requesting anonymity since he is now working with an overseas airline, the pilot said like him, many of his colleagues have also got jobs with foreign carriers but there are issues to deal with.

After Jet Airways shuttered with no money to fly last year, thousands of staff came together for public meetings, silent protests and made representations to the government and other authorities. Candle light marches were also organised in various cities, including the national capital and Mumbai.

Some drivers who had worked with Jet Airways are now driving Ola, Uber and auto rickshaws, according to the pilot.

Jet Airways, which began its journey as an air taxi operator with service from Mumbai to Ahmedabad, had about 1,300 pilots and a total of about 20,000 employees at its peak.

Captain Mohit Dagar said memories are still fresh when he joined the airline as a trainee first officer more than 11 years ago.

He was the pilot-in-command of the last flight that operated on April 17.

"Some days I wish I could go back in time. Not to change anything but to feel a few things again," he told PTI from Dubai.

Sounding nostalgic about his Jet Airways days, Dagar said there were so many great memories such as in getting command, becoming trainer, flying to so many wonderful and challenging airports.

"One thing I am really grateful (for) is the kind of training I received. You realise this only when you go out in the world to a new company. Wherever I go, whichever aircraft I fly, there will always be a Jet pilot deep down in my heart," he said.

A senior executive, who was privy to most developments during the final months of Jet Airways, said the airline was a vibrant place to work and there was always a sense of belonging.

"The D-day (April 17) was not expected by anyone at the airline... It was a disbelief when the operations were suspended on April 17," he said on condition of anonymity.

According to him, Jet Airways brand has outlived the airline's operational presence and it was the loss of a national brand rather than just an airline.

At the peak of its operations, Jet Airways had little over 120 planes. When the operations came to a halt due to mounting debt woes and unpaid salaries, the airline had around 16 own planes.

Amit Kelkar, who worked with Jet Airways for 23 years as an aircraft maintenance engineer, said many employees had to make huge compromises in salaries and designations at new companies.

He was also the vice president of Jet Aircraft Maintenance Engineers' Welfare Association.

Irrespective of operations, Jet Airways' work of maintaining planes in an airworthy condition was on till May 31, 2019. After that, approval for maintenance and training was suspended, he noted.

Sharing sentiments of many others, he said payment of EMIs was a big issue for most even as he added that a substantial number of former Jet Airways staff are still waiting patiently in the hope of revival.

Kelkar, who is also actively involved in the insolvency resolution process, said that many questions about Jet Airways reaching the current situation remain unanswered.

Released in February, Chaphekar's book is about her experience after Brussels airport terror attack. The book is about how she faced the negativity and about grit, she noted.

Her photograph taken soon after the terror attack on March 22, 2016, was widely carried.

On June 20, 2019, the National Company Law Tribunal admitted the insolvency petition filed against Jet Airways.

While some entities expressed their interest in the airline, no concrete proposals have come up so far. On March 18, 2020, the tribunal allowed 90 days' extension for the corporate insolvency resolution process of Jet Airways.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
State-owned banks have barred employees from posting pictures, video clips or messages on social media on issues such as overcrowding at bank branches during the coronavirus crisis, according to multiple sources and documents seen by Reuters.

Banks have seen a surge in traffic after Prime Minister Narendra Modi outlined a package of anti-crisis measures including direct cash payments to millions of poorer sections, who have been queuing at branches to access the funds.

Some branch staff have complained on social media of the difficulty in imposing social distancing in such conditions, earning a rebuke from employers and even from the police.

State Bank of India (SBI), the country's largest lender, said in a notice sent to its employees that disciplinary action would be taken for violating the code of conduct if they spoke on social media about the functioning of its branches.

"On scrutiny of these posts it is observed that many of these social media users are our employees," said the letter, adding that some posts had made disparaging comments about the bank, its management and policies.

A similar memo warning employees against social media posts has also been issued by other state-owned banks including Punjab National Bank (PNB), a communication seen by Reuters said.

Emails sent to both banks seeking comment remained unanswered.

Asked about the memos, a spokesman for the finance ministry said the department of financial services, which oversees state-owned banks, had not issued any gag orders and was "always looking for honest feedback to improve the customer services".

Bankers say they are now also being harassed by police for failing to ensure the social distancing required to help curb the spread of coronavirus.

"Instead of helping us the police are threatening to arrest us," said one bank official, who asked not to be named due to the restrictions imposed by the state-owned bank where he works.

The All India Bank Officers' confederation, a union of bank employees, has raised the matter with federal and state authorities, requesting them not to penalize bank employees.

"So far we're neither getting help to manage the crowds, nor are we being allowed to voice complaints... about the critical lapses and failures of social distancing at banks," said another bank employee who also requested anonymity.

The finance ministry spokesman said the government had ordered state authorities "to render all possible help to the bankers in implementing social distancing".

Bank unions said they had also asked for protective gear for branch officials but this had not yet been provided as India is still struggling to meet the safety requirements of health workers.

India has extended a lockdown on its 1.3 billion people until at least May 3 to combat the spread of coronavirus. India has so far reported more than 10,000 cases of the COVID-19 disease caused by the virus, including 358 deaths.

Also Read: Coronavirus India Lockdown Live Updates: COVID-19 Guidelines to be issued today as migrant crisis hit nation

Also Read: Coronavirus found in two Indian bat species; researchers recommend proactive surveillance
GENEVA  The head of the World Health Organization on Wednesday lamented the U.S. decision to halt funding for the U.N. agency, promising a review of its decisions while sidestepping President Donald Trumps complaints about its alleged mismanagement, cover-up and missteps.

WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus was on the defensive after Trump announced a halt to U.S. funding that has totaled nearly a half-billion dollars annually in recent years. Trump claimed the WHO had parroted Chinese assurances about how the virus is spread, failed to obtain virus samples from China, and made a disastrous decision to oppose travel restrictions as the outbreak spread.

Countries and health experts around the world expressed alarm at Trumps move and warned it could jeopardize efforts to fight the coronavirus pandemic. Philanthropists like Bill Gates and Michael Bloomberg joined European and African leaders and health experts who lined up behind the WHO or insisted the U.S. shouldnt cut off funding at such a critical time.

While Trump pointed to a U.S. investigation of the U.N. agency, Tedros stopped short of addressing his complaints directly and said the WHOs performance in handling the outbreak would be reviewed as part of a usual process to ensure transparency and accountability.

We regret the decision of the president of the United States to order a halt in funding to the World Health Organization, Tedros said. WHO is reviewing the impact on our work of any withdrawal of U.S. funding and will work with our partners to fill any financial gaps we face.

No doubt, areas for improvement will be identified and there will be lessons for all of us to learn, he added. But for now, our focus  my focus  is on stopping this virus and saving lives.

The exact fallout from a halt in U.S. funding was far from clear.

The WHO runs on biennial budgets, and U.S. funding comes in two main forms  about three-fourths of it through voluntary contributions and one-fourth through assessed contributions, which are a bit like regular dues. The U.S. already contributed at least $15 million to a $675 million emergency fund set up by the WHO to help pay for the initial coronavirus response through April.

Trump has a mercurial reputation. So he sort of promises death and destruction and then it doesnt necessarily happen, said Gian Luca Burci, a former legal counsel for WHO who now teaches at Genevas Graduate Institute. I think it will become more clear in the next few weeks.

He noted WHOs tricky task of uniting opposing constituencies: China and the U.S. have been at odds on a number of issues.

Maybe Tedros went too far, he said. But you can see also some of the reasons why he wanted to secure Chinas cooperation.

Trump has repeatedly labelled COVID-19 the Chinese virus and criticized the agency for being too lenient on China, where the novel coronavirus first emerged late last year.

Outside experts have questioned Chinas reported infections and deaths from the virus, calling them way too low and unreliable. An investigation by The Associated Press has found that a six-day delay between when Chinese officials learnt about the virus and when they warned the public allowed the outbreak to blossom into an enormous public health disaster.

The WHO has been particularly effusive in its praise for China, calling on other countries to emulate its approach and repeatedly praising its transparency.

Tedros has also heaped compliments on Trump, praising his great job in responding to the outbreak last month.

The European Union on Wednesday said Trump has no reason to freeze WHO funding at this critical stage and called for measures to promote unity instead of division.

In Beijing, Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian said the country is seriously concerned about the U.S. decision.

A spokesman for British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, who this week emerged from intensive care after contracting the virus, declined to criticize either China or Trump.

The U.K. has no plans to stop funding the WHO, which has an important role to play in leading the global health response, James Slack said.

Political fault lines emerged in the U.S., with Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, a Democrat, saying the dangerous, illegal decision to halt funding will be swiftly challenged. Sen. Lindsay Graham, a Republican ally of Trump, insisted that we cannot afford China apologists running the WHO.

Aid workers in developing countries worried they might be hit hardest.

Trumps decision  is pulling the rug out from under our feet at a pivotal moment. It will impact the humanitarian community as a whole, said Tom Peyre-Costa, regional media adviser for Central and West Africa for the Norwegian Refugee Council. It defies logic at the height of a global pandemic and will lead to many more deaths.

On Twitter, Bill Gates  whose foundation was the agencys second-largest donor for its latest two-year budget, contributing over $530 million  wrote that stopping funding for the WHO during a world health crisis is as dangerous as it sounds.

Worldwide, the pandemic has infected over 2 million people and killed over 128,000, according to a tally by Johns Hopkins University.

Some global health academics said Trumps attacks might actually strengthen WHO credibility.

If Trump was making a great success of the pandemic response in the U.S., if there were minimal cases and deaths there, that might be different, said Sophie Harman, a professor of international politics at Queen Mary University of London. But things are getting worse and that reinforces the need for WHO.

___

Cheng reported from London. Associated Press Writers Jill Lawless in London, Frank Jordans in Berlin, Daria Litvinova in Moscow, Darlene Superville in Washington, Andrew Meldrum in Johannesburg and Sam Mednick in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso, contributed to this report.

Follow AP coverage of the pandemic at http://apnews.com/VirusOutbreak and https://apnews.com/UnderstandingtheOutbreak

.
Washington

Disregarding an emerging scientific link between dirty air and COVID-19 death rates, the Trump administration declined Tuesday to tighten a regulation on industrial soot emissions that came up for review ahead of the coronavirus pandemic.

Andrew R. Wheeler, head of the Environmental Protection Agency, said his agency will not impose stricter controls on the tiny, lung-damaging industrial particles, known as PM 2.5, a regulatory action that has been in the works for months. The scientific evidence, he said, was insufficient to merit tightening the current emissions standard.

"We believe the current standard is protective of public health," Wheeler said in a call with reporters Tuesday. "Through the 5-year review process we've identified a lot of uncertainties. Through those uncertainties we've identified that the current standard does not need to be changed."

Special Investigation 147 NY dams are 'unsound,' potentially dangerous Thousands of dams have not been inspected in over 20 years.

The published proposal says that Wheeler places "little weight on quantitative estimates" of the mortality risk associated with fine soot pollution. The decision brought praise from Republican lawmakers and the nation's oil companies and manufacturers, which had said a tighter regulation on smokestack emissions of fine soot would harm their economic viability  even before the global health crisis cratered the global economy.
Global pork production in 2020 is expected to decline 7 percent compared to the previous year due to African swine fever and Covid-19 outbreaks.

The latest estimate by the USDA for this year's global pork production - 2% lower than their previous forecast - equates to 94.3 million tonnes of pork.

Chinese production has been revised down by 6%, with the nation still struggling to recover from African swine fever.

It is likely the outbreak of coronavirus has only slowed progress in this area, according to AHDB analyst Felicity Rusk.

The USDA now expects Chinese production in 2020 to be 20% lower than in 2019, which was itself down 21% from 2018.

Key exporting nations, including the US, EU (including the UK) and Brazil, are expecting to see growth in production this year.

Strong export demand from Asian countries has provided producers with the incentive to expand herds.

However, this is not enough to compensate for the decline expected in China and other nations affected by ASF, Ms Rusk said.

With lower expectations of Chinese production, imports have been revised up 4% from the previous forecast to 3.85 million tonnes, she added.

This is almost 60% more than in the previous year. In January and February alone, the nation imported twice as much pork and offal than in the same period last year.

Elsewhere, import estimates for many other nations, such as Mexico, South Korea, Colombia and the US, have been revised down from the previous forecast.

"The Covid-19 pandemic has meant that the foodservice sector has all but closed in many nations," Ms Rusk said.

"As such, demand from this sector has dissipated, which will have a knock-on effect on import demand. Furthermore, in the longer-term, weaker economic growth is also likely to affect import demand negatively.

"As such, overall imports were revised down by 4% from the previous forecast to 9.6 million tonnes."
BAKU, Azerbaijan, April 15

Trend:



President of Turkmenistan Gurbanguly Berdimuhammedov has instructed to take into account every initiative of citizens related to the constitutional reform in the country, Trend reports with reference to Neutral Turkmenistan newspaper.



"No initiative of our people should be left without attention. People should be aware that their opinion is always important, said the head of state.



Turkmenistan has started the discussion of the constitutional law on changes and amendments to the Constitution of Turkmenistan. The decisions on the amendments to the constitution will be made with the participation of citizens, public organizations and political parties.

This reform has to be approved due to the rapidly changing economic and political situation in the world, the new requirements of the time, and the country's commitment to international legal norms, the president stressed.

Citizens pay special attention to the events taking place in the country, and to key aspects of the constitutional reform, the report said.

Democratization of society, ensuring sustainable and stable growth of the economy as well as improving the well-being and quality of life of the population are the results of the constitutional reforms carried out in Turkmenistan.
As I noted in my last column, my recent California cabernet sauvignon tastings were dominated by Napa Valley, both in quality and the number o
BenevolentAI, a startup which has raised $292 million to apply AI to create drugs faster, today says it has uncovered an already approved drug as a potential treatment for COVID-19, after it applied its AI platform and team to the problem. The revelation, which has now appeared in peer-reviewed scientific journals and has entered clinical trials with a major pharmaceutical company, could offer a glimmer of hope to a world locked down by the pandemic.

In February, BenevolentAI set up a specialist scientific team and launched an investigation using its drug discovery platform.

Baroness Joanna Shields, CEO of BenevolentAI, explained: In response to the COVID-19 global health emergency, we turned our AI drug discovery and development platform toward understanding the bodys response to this novel infectious disease.

Key to their approach was that rather than focusing solely on drugs that could affect the virus directly, we explored ways to inhibit the cellular processes that the virus uses to infect human cells, she said.

The idea was to identify approved drugs that could potentially stop the progression of COVID-19, inhibit the cytokine storm and reduce the inflammatory damage associated with this disease.

Diseases such as COVID-19 and influenza can be fatal due to an overreaction of the bodys immune system called a cytokine storm.

Cytokines are small proteins released by many different cells in the body, including those of the immune system, where they coordinate the bodys response against infection and trigger inflammation.

The bodys response to infection goes into overdrive when SARS-CoV-2 -- the virus behind the COVID-19 pandemic -- enters the lungs, triggering an immune response and attracting immune cells to the region to attack the virus. This results in localized inflammation. Some people experience worse symptoms than others at this point. But in some people, excessive or uncontrolled levels of cytokines are released, which then activate more immune cells, resulting in "hyperinflammation," which can seriously harm or even kill the person.

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BenevolentAIs team fed into their platform everything they knew about COVID-19 and the drugs that could inhibit the cellular processes that the virus uses.

In an interview with TechCrunch, Peter Richardson, BenevolentAIs VP of Pharmacology, explained how the discovery came about.

Using the BenevolentAI Knowledge Graph there were two processes. One was finding the connections, and the regulators, he said.

It's incredibly, incredibly difficult to hold in your head what's relevant, all the time, without having the Knowledge Graph to show you the basic points. It's really good at showing the basic interactions that are so important in understanding a biological process. Cellular tracking is an amazingly complicated thing to process.

But, he said, the BenevolentAI platform handled the information with aplomb: This took an hour for the platform to process.

The next process was for the human team to find possible drugs to inhibit regulators. These were then fed into the Knowledge Graph. Richardson said this "took roughly half an hour to process."

The result was that they identified baricitinib as a potential drug with both anti-viral and anti-cytokine properties, with 90 minutes of computing time, inside three days of additional human work.

Benevolents research findings were published in The Lancet in early February and again twice in the Lancet Infectious Diseases journal. These proposed baricitinib as a potential treatment with both anti-viral and anti-inflammatory properties for COVID-19 patients admitted to hospital prior to the development of critical lung damage.

By March, investigator-led studies began recruiting and treating infected patients with baricitinib. Today, Eli Lilly and the US National Institute for Allergies and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) have announced that the drug will now begin its first large randomized trial in COVID-19 patients.

Baricitinib, sold as a prescription drug called Olumiant, is an already approved drug developed by Eli Lilly and Incyte for the treatment of rheumatoid arthritis.

The randomized trial announced by Eli Lilly with NIAID will investigate the efficacy and safety of baricitinib as a potential treatment for patients with serious COVID-19 infections.

The study will begin in the U.S. in late April, with planned expansion to additional sites in Europe and Asia, with the results being expected within the next two months. This new trial joins a Canadian government randomised trial already underway assessing baricitinib as a potential treatment.

Commenting, Shields said: We are pleased that Eli Lilly is progressing baricitinib to clinical testing for COVID-19 patients. While we wait for a vaccine to be developed, there is an immediate need for medicines that can prevent life-threatening respiratory and other serious complications of COVID-19 infections.

Daniel Skovronsky, MD, PhD, Lillys chief scientific officer and president of Lilly Research Laboratories said: Lilly is moving at top speed and using all available resources to help fight this pandemic. Developing potential therapeutic medicines for COVID-19 is part of our vital and humanitarian mission.

Professor Justin Stebbing from Imperial College, London, who has been collaborating on this work between Eli Lilly and BenevolentAI, also commented, saying: There are no specific therapeutic agents for any coronavirus infections -- we rely on quarantine, isolation and public health policies to prevent disease spread, and on supportive care measures for those who become ill. What we lack is a specific agent to treat the infected and, optimally, decrease viral shedding and subsequent transmission. The results of such trials will be central to clinical care as the outbreak continues and we anticipate that this treatment will improve mortality and reduce the pressure on hospitals and ICUs worldwide. This research is notable for its incredible speed from computer to bench and bedside within a few months.

Commenting, Richardson added: If you turned the BenevolentAI 250-person team and turned all of them into 65-year-old ex-pharmacology teachers, it would have taken probably a year to come up with this treatment. Instead, it took my three colleagues working two hours a day, and myself working full time, three days to come up with this. We've gone from computer to bedside, as it were, in two months.
Some scholars have called on African governments to use the opportunity of the coronavirus crisis to develop models to improve the continents health sector, public policies and infrastructures in the service of its people.

PREMIUM TIMES on Tuesday obtained the letter which advised African leaders and citizens to seize the opportunity to develop the continents potentials.

They asked African leaders to break with a model of development based on the vicious cycle of indebtedness and break with the orthodox vision of growth for the sake of growth, and of profit for the sake of profit.

The letter was signed by 50 scholars including Wole Soyinka (Nobel laureate), Inocencia Mata (University of Lisbon), Anthony Obeng (The African Institute for Economic Development and Planning), Lionel Zevounou (Paris Nanterre University), Amy Niang (University of the Witwatersrand) and Ndongo Samba Sylla (Economist, Senegal), among others

As of April 14, Africa has 15,738 cases and 838 deaths, data obtained from African centre for disease control revealed.

Scholars

The scholars said the COVID-19 pandemic threatens to shatter the foundations of states and institutions whose profound failings have been ignored for too long.

Like a tectonic storm, It is impossible to list these, suffice it to mention chronic under-investment in public health and fundamental research, limited achievements in food self-sufficiency, the mismanagement of public finances, the prioritization of road and airport infrastructures at the expense of human well-being.

All of this has in fact been the object of abundant specialised research, except that it seems to have escaped attention in spheres of governance on the continent. The management of the ongoing crisis constitutes most glaring evidence of this gap, part of the letter reads.

The coalition also said coronavirus has given rise to a call for radical change in direction of governance as African leaders are being urged to take the destiny of the continent back onto its own hands.

More than ever, we call upon leaders to ponder the necessity to adopt a concerted approach to governance sectors related to public health, fundamental research in all disciplines and to public policy. In the same vein, health has to be conceived as an essential public good, the status of health workers needs to be enhanced, hospital infrastructure needs to be upgraded to a level that allows everybody, including leaders themselves, to receive adequate treatment in Africa. Failure to implement these reforms would be cataclysmic, they said.

Our belief is that emergency cannot, and should not constitute a mode of governance. We must instead be seized by the real urgency, which is to reform public policy, to make them work in favour of African populations and according to African priorities. In short, it is imperative to put forth the value of every human being regardless of status, over and beyond any logic of profit-making, domination or power capture, they added.

Lockdowns, punitive

The scholars also said the lockdowns being implemented by most of the African government are punitive and disruptive and African leaders need to look beyond the state of emergencies and be in a state of preparedness.

Lets be clear: we are not advocating an impossible choice between economic security vs. health security but we wish to insist on the necessity for African governments to take into account the chronic precarity that characterises the majority of their populations. Yet, as a continent that is familiar with pandemic outbreaks, Africa has a head start in the management of large-scale health crises.

Our belief is that emergency cannot, and should not constitute a mode of governance. We must instead be seized by the real urgency, which is to reform public policy, to make them work in favour of African populations and according to African priorities. In short, it is imperative to put forth the value of every human being regardless of status, over and beyond any logic of profit-making, domination or power capture the statement reads.

The group called on African leaders to adopt a converter approach to government sectors related to public health, fundamental research in all disciplines and public policies as failure to implement these reforms would be cataclysmic

This letter is a small reminder, a reiteration of the obvious: that the African continent must take its destiny back into its own hands. For it is in the most trying moments that new/innovative orientations must be explored and lasting solutions adopted.

The present letter is addressed to leaders of all walks of life; to the people of Africa and to all those that are committed to re/thinking the continent. We invite them to seize the opportunity of the coronavirus crisis to joint efforts in rethinking an African state in the service of the well-being of its people, to break with a model of development based on the vicious cycle of indebtedness, to break with the orthodox vision of growth for the sake of growth, and of profit for the sake of profit.

The challenge for Africa is no less than the restoration of its intellectual freedom and a capacity to createwithout which no sovereignty is conceivable. It is to break with the outsourcing of our sovereign prerogatives, to reconnect with local configurations, to break with sterile imitation, to adapt science, technology and research to our context, to elaborate institutions on the basis of our specificities and our resources, to adopt an inclusive governance framework and endogenous development, to create value in Africa in order to reduce our systemic dependence.

The scholars said the dearth of political will and the extractive practices of external actors can no longer be used as an excuse for inaction.

More crucially, it is essential to remember that Africa has sufficient material and human resources to build a shared prosperity on an egalitarian basis and in respect of the dignity of each and everyone.. We no longer have a choice: we need a radical change in direction. Now is the time! the letter reads in part.
Choosing the right air conditioner can be frustrating enough to send your temperatures rising. From electricity bills to energy efficiency to a WI-FI connected ACs, a lot of things should be considered in investing the money while purchasing an air conditioner.



Here we bring you a list of five best air conditioners available in the market that will help you beat the heat this summer. Have a look:

1. TCL AI Ultra-Inverter Air Conditioner:

The top one in the list, are the wide range of TCL AI Ultra-Inverter Air Conditioners. This air conditioner is not just pocket-friendly but comes with a combination of Smart connectivity, High Cooling performance, low power consumption and durability. Ranging between RS 26,990 to RS. 40,990, TCL AI Ultra-Inverter Air Conditioner are available in three different types  iECO Air, Smart Air and Turbo Air the price range vary as per the needs and budget of the customer. Pricing : Elite Series  Turbo Air 3 Star 1T  26,990 INR 3 Star 1.5T  31,990 INR 3 Star 2T  41,990 INR Elite Series  Smart Air 3 Star 1T  28,990 INR 3 Star 1.5T  33,990 INR 3 Star 2T  43,990 INR Elite Series  iECO Air  40,990

2. LG 1.5 Ton 5-Star Inverter Air Conditioner:

LG is the most trusted brand in India. The company has managed well to capture the Indian consumer market like no other brand. And justifying its image, LG has some of the best range of Air Conditioners in India. LG 1.5 Ton 5-Star Inverter Air Conditioner is currently the best one available in the market from the top brand. Some of the best features of this air conditioner include:

5-Star Energy Rating

Double Filtration System

Better Cooling and Requires Low Maintenance

Lowest-Noise Operation

Monsoon Comfort Moisture Control

3. Voltas 1.5 Ton Star Window AC:

Voltas is one of the most preferred brands by the Indians. This air conditioner from Voltas is the latest and best one available from the brand in the market. From having an in-built auto-restart to anti-dust filter, this one comes with a lot of facilities to provide the best cooling effects, some of them includes:

High Ambient Cooling

Active Dehumidifier

2-Stage Filtration

Self Diagnosis

4. Whirlpool 1.5 Ton 3 Star Inverter Split AC:

The next one on the list is a budget-friendly air conditioner that will assure you of terrific cooling with excellent durability.

Using its advanced Intellisense inverter technology, this Whirlpool air conditioner throws cool air till a distance of 12 m for uniform cooling and also adapts to ones cooling preferences while using minimal energy. The best thing about this ac is that it can cool the entire room about 40% faster than its counterparts.

Besides this, Whirlpool 1.5 Ton 3 Star

Inverter Split AC comes with a lot of other facilities as well, which includes:

Split AC

1.5-ton capacity

6th sense fast cool technology

Intellisense Inverter Technology

In-built stabiliser

5. Daikin 1.5 Ton 5 Star Inverter Split AC:

Any list of best air conditioners is incomplete with a Daikin air conditioner. This brand has a cult following. Over the years it has emerged out as one of the top brands. This one from Daikin is designed to give you the best cooling for a long time. Also being an inverter AC, this one gives you uniform cooling with minimal energy bills.

The compressor of this ac has Neo Swing technology which decreases friction and vibration and delivers efficient cooling. It also prevents the leakage of refrigerant gas. Besides this, here, check out some other features of this air conditioner:
For 39-year-old CRPF jawan Ashok Kumar, having the rarest blood group among humans is a blessing which led him to instinctively save a life.

The head constable and radio operator of the 72nd battalion of the paramilitary force based in Sunderbani, Jammu on Wednesday donated blood to a 69-year-old resident of Poonch, a border town along the India-Pak Line of Control in Jammu and Kashmir, who had the same uncommon blood group.

The family of Nazir Hussain sent an SOS to the Kashmir-based CRPF 'madadgaar' helpline on social media stating that they were in urgent need of 'AB negative' blood for the man, who suffers from chronic kidney problem.

The CRPF helpline got into action and quickly went through its database to find out if anyone in its Jammu-based units had the rare blood group.

"I am the only person in my battalion who has AB negative blood group and when my commandant asked me to volunteer, I was more than happy to do so," Kumar told PTI over phone.

He said he was provided a vehicle by his unit and he rushed to the Poonch district hospital where Hussain was undergoing dialysis and his relatives were eagerly waiting for help to arrive.

"I salute and shall be indebted to the 72 battalion of the CRPF forever and especially to brother Ashok Kumar who came as an angel and saved a life by donating his precious and invaluable bloodtimely in this hard time and proved that humanity never dies," Hussain's grandson Adalat Khan said in a message sent to the force.

As 'AB negative' is a very rare blood group it was almost impossible to get it through donation, Khan said. He said no units of this group were available at the blood bank and no one in their family has this blood type.

That was when they decided to seek the help of 'madadgaar', he said.

Head constable Kumar said he got to know that he had such a rare blood group during his recruitment in the force in 2003.

"I had then also donated my blood to a colleague when I just entered the force. Why should one hesitate to help when god has bestowed them with such a rare blessing?" the trooper from Bihar's Arwal district said.

"It is the motto of my force to help and serve the people and that was all I did," Kumar said.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Morgan and Jax Hart didnt think that they were taking a big risk when they leased out the former Townshends Tea space in the Montavilla neighborhood last fall.

They already had a loyal clientele at their two small cafes in the neighborhood, Hungry Heart Bakery and Heartbreaker, and felt ready to expand. They closed Heartbreaker and invested over $100,000 in leasing and renovating the new space in hopes of opening a larger neighborhood brunch spot, White Rabbit. The grand opening had been planned for this month.

But reality came crashing in on March 16, when Oregon Gov. Kate Brown announced a ban prohibiting on-premises dining at restaurants and bars across the state in an effort to stem the tide of COVID-19.

Now, the Harts have been forced to rethink their business model as they consider their options for keeping the project afloat. Their current plan is to open White Rabbit as a small market while stay-at-home restrictions remain, offering coffee, pastries, breakfast sandwiches and to-go items that can be prepared at home.

Its nerve-racking to be trying to figure out what to do right now, Morgan Hart said. There are a lot of ways that this could play out and a lot of them are really, really scary. Were very aware of those. Weve looked at what that looks like for us, in terms of if we have to give up on the project, if we have to declare bankruptcy, if we lose everything. Weve looked at that. We have the reality of that hanging over our heads.

White Rabbit was one of dozens of soon-to-open businesses in Portland placed on hold by the coronavirus pandemic. Some of those businesses had already hired staff and purchased inventory. Those that hadnt still put down large initial investments and remain on the hook for rent and utilities, even as theyre forced to push back their timelines for opening.

In the Montavilla neighborhood alone, three new restaurants and one bar were supposed to open this spring. All four projects are now on hold.

One of those projects is Lazy Susan, a neighborhood restaurant, which will focus on seasonal vegetables and charcoal-grilled meats in the former Country Cat space. It was one of Portlands most-anticipated restaurants, with former Le Pigeon and Han Oak chef Andrew Mace and former New York chef Julian Calcott in the kitchen, Ava Genes alum Nora Mace on pastry, Michelle Ruocco of Han Oak behind the bar and longtime Le Pigeon server Danny McGeough working the floor. The project is backed by Earl Ninsom, the prominent Portland restaurateur whose string of hits culminated last year with Eem, The Oregonian/OregonLives 2019 Restaurant of the Year.

It feels like quite a blessing that we didnt have a whole staff on payroll, Mace said. We were right at the point where we were about to get that going. Its good that I dont have to worry about trying to get them on unemployment. On the other hand, nobody really knows what its like to open a restaurant post-corona. And we dont have a clientele that knows who we are or trusts us. To try to put together some semblance of a takeout or to-go food menu is really challenging.

At the moment, Ninsom is working to resume takeout services at three of his restaurants: Eem, Hat Yai and PaaDee. Once those operations are rolling, Lazy Susan might consider launching a to-go option of its own, though likely not until May.

Were enjoying having a break, and think a lot about the people who are suffering a lot more than us, Mace said. We feel really lucky that we can ride it out and start up again when everybody else does.

The three other new businesses in Montavilla believe they can weather the storm without having to scrap their projects as well, but challenges remain.

The City of Portland's Bureau of Development Services has suspended most new permit applications and all walk-in services due to the COVID-19 outbreak. While the Bureau is continuing to conduct inspections and process permits in the pipeline, its computer network was not designed to support remote work, which has slowed the process.

The Harts still need to receive a Certificate of Occupancy before opening White Rabbit, while Erik Mahan is waiting for approval from the city to begin construction on his new Montavilla bar, Tinker Tavern. He has been in contact with the city and is hopeful that he will have the necessary permit to move forward with construction within the next few weeks, but his initial plan of opening in May is no longer on the table.

Both the Harts and Mahan, like other business owners, are in discussions with their landlord about options as well.

This was my time to put together my vision and kind of run it with everything on my shoulders, which Ive been excited for and looking forward to for some time, said Mahan, who has been a part of other projects in Portland, including German beer bar Stammtisch. Im pretty optimistic, but coming into July and August, if for whatever reason, thats a point that things are still shut down, things still arent open, theres no path to opening, then it will be a time to regroup and discuss the opportunities there.

Some businesses in Portland have tried to open during the pandemic, but that has presented other challenges. James Anderson, the owner of Motorcycle Public House, invested $25,000 into opening his bar at the former Nick's Parkrose Food Corral & Pub space in the Argay neighborhood. He was open for a week before Browns order banned on-site consumption of food and beverages. Now, he is trying to get by with to-go services.

Anderson tried to apply for an emergency small business grant through Prosper Portland, but the grant required businesses to have been operating since last July. Adriana Focke, principal broker and owner at Check Point Realty, has also tried to apply for multiple local and federal small business grants and loans, but nothing has come through.

Focke purchased a property near the South Waterfront last year in hopes of expanding her brokerage, but the pandemic has made it difficult for her to generate the interest she had hoped for by opening an office and has made it harder to hire realtors.

The financial stimulus part of it has been really frustrating, Focke said. Every single opportunity to sign up for a loan or funds or anything, were in the dark, we dont really hear anything. Prosper Portland was one that I signed up for, but only a small fraction of people who applied got the grants. They opened up another round, but were not sure how thats going to look. The stimulus that everyone is supposed to receive, $1,200, we havent seen that either. Its just a mess. I think the money needs to come in right away.

Back in Montavilla, Dan and Elise Gold were planning to open their new deli, Sebastianos, on April 1 in the former Heartbreaker space. The couple met in culinary school over a decade ago, but only recently decided they were ready to take a jump into the restaurant world as owners.

But the pandemic has sidetracked those plans for now. Without a built-in clientele and no childcare options for their five- and two-year-old children due to the stay-at-home order, the Golds determined that it wasnt the right time to open.

Were a mom and pop shop and we have a small space and it just feels like we should wait until we can really be successful, Dan Gold said. So, even if it takes a month or two, we figured June 1 would be conservative, let things blow over for a couple months. At this point, I wouldnt consider that conservative anymore.

When Gold and other owners will be able to open their new businesses remains unknown.

Spring was supposed to bring big changes to Montavilla as grand openings took place throughout the neighborhood. Instead, boarded up windows and shuttered storefronts now line the once vibrant dining neighborhood on SE Stark Street.

This has changed our entire timeline for everything, Morgan Hart said. This has also changed how we believe were going to be able to move forward with this project at all. Like everybody else, were trying to read the news, were trying to pay attention to what everyone else in our industry is doing and saying. Realistically, we have no idea when bars and restaurants are going to be able to actually have people inside and when thats going to feel safe to the general public.

-- Jamie Goldberg | jgoldberg@oregonian.com | @jamiebgoldberg

-- Michael Russell | mrussell@oregonian.com | @tdmrussell

Subscribe to Oregonian/OregonLive newsletters and podcasts for the latest news and top stories.
THE Department of the Interior and Local Government (DILG) has issued show cause orders against three governors and two mayors who have allegedly violated the enhanced community quarantine rules.

DILG Undersecretary and spokesperson Jonathan Malaya said Wednesday, April 15, that they will identify the five local government officials once they respond to the show cause letters sent to them.

The five officials were given 48 hours to explain why they should not be slapped with administrative charges for negligence, dereliction of duty, and violation of the Bayanihan To Heal as One Act.

Malaya said the officials allegedly violated the prohibition against mass gatherings, failed to strictly implement social distancing measures, prohibited the movement of all types of cargo through the borders of his province or city or town, refused entry to overseas Filipino workers who have been issued health certifications by the Department of Health, prohibited the operation of industries vital to the countrys food security, and prohibited the entry of essential personnel like health workers, among others.

Failure to explain these alleged violations will result in the automatic filing of an administrative case before the Office of the Ombudsman, Malaya said.

The five officials may also face criminal charges from the National Bureau of Investigation of the Department of Justice.

Earlier, the DILG also issued show cause orders to four barangay officials.

DILG Secretary Eduardo Ano said they have a zero tolerance policy for erring local officials during this public health emergency.

The point of all of these national policies is to ensure unity, cohesion, and order in the entire country during the Covid-19 crisis which requires the LGUs full cooperation and compliance, he said.

As directed by the President himself, we will not go easy on local government officials who will violate the prescribed directives during the ECQ, thats the mandate of the DILG  local government supervision. Therefore, we have no choice but to issue show cause orders and file the necessary charges against them, when necessary, kagaya ng ginawa natin sa ilang barangay official na lumabag din sa quarantine policies, he added.

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Ano said more show cause orders will be issued against local chief executives in the next few days.

We consider LGUs as our partners from the very beginning but once we have exhausted all avenues for dialogue, we have no choice but to start filing cases. Hahabulin namin sila, he said.

The entire Luzon as well as several areas in the country like Cebu are under strict quarantine measures to prevent the spread of the novel coronavirus, or Sars-CoV-2, which causes the coronavirus disease (Covid-19).

The Philippines is under as state of national emergency, state of public health emergency and state of calamity because of the Covid-19 pandemic. (SunStar Philippines)
Washington

For weeks, President Donald Trump has faced relentless criticism for having overseen a slow and ineffective response to the coronavirus pandemic, failing to quickly embrace public health measures that could have prevented the disease from spreading.

Recent polls show that more Americans disapprove of Trump's handling of the virus than approve.

On Tuesday, the president tried to shift the blame elsewhere, ordering his administration to halt funding for the World Health Organization and claiming the organization made a series of devastating mistakes as it sought to battle the virus. He said his administration would conduct a review into whether the WHO was responsible for "severely mismanaging and covering up" the spread.

A centerpiece of the president's attack is his contention that it was too quick to believe information about the virus coming from the Chinese government at a time when it should have been more critical. He said the WHO "willingly took China's assurances to face value."

Trump himself went out of his way to publicly and repeatedly praise the Chinese government for its handling of the virus at the beginning of the year when his administration was negotiating a trade deal with China.

On Jan. 24, Trump tweeted: "China has been working very hard to contain the Coronavirus. The United States greatly appreciates their efforts and transparency."

The president claimed that the WHO "fought" the United States after he ordered limits on flights from China on Jan. 31.

Special Investigation 147 NY dams are 'unsound,' potentially dangerous Thousands of dams have not been inspected in over 20 years.

The WHO generally opposes travel bans. In practice, they have done little to stem the spread of viruses, and they prevent the distribution of medical supplies and expertise to countries needing them. They also can cause economic damage that may outweigh the harms done by an epidemic.

The question of whether the WHO was not aggressive enough in recommending action against the virus has come up in other countries, as well. Some governments have noted that the organization's leadership did not challenge China's assertion in mid-January that there was not human-to-human transmission of the coronavirus.

But the WHO did issue urgent advisories about the potential dangers from the virus.

The biennial budget for the WHO is about $6 billion, which comes from member countries around the world. In 2019, the United States contributed about $553 million.
Patients and medical workers wear personal protective equipment due to COVID-19 concerns outside the emergency room at NYU Langone Medical Center in New York City on April 13, 2020. (John Minchillo/AP Photo)

New York City Backdates Thousands of Presumed COVID-19 Deaths

New York City included thousands of deaths, some of which happened weeks ago, in its updated COVID-19 death count on Tuesday.

The newly counted deaths are presumed to be caused by COVID-19 because doctors were confident enough to list the disease or an equivalent on the patients death certificates despite the diagnosis not being confirmed by laboratory tests.

Officials added 3,778 probable deaths to the COVID-19 count (pdf), taking a number that would have been 6,589 to over 10,000.

The shift came after officials said there were hundreds of people dying at home every day in recent weeks.

Most of the newly counted deaths happened in emergency rooms or hospitals, while another 825 took place at home and 673 transpired at nursing homes, long-term care facilities, or hospices.

We thought it was very important to portray this larger reality as more and more information was coming in, New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio told reporters at a press conference on Wednesday.

We want to make sure that every New Yorker is counted that has been taken from this vicious virus, added Health Commissioner Dr. Oxiris Barbot.

Mayor Bill de Blasio speaks at a food shelf organized by the Campaign Against Hunger in Brooklyn, New York, on April 14, 2020. (Scott Heins/Getty Images)

New York state officials reported 671 new deaths on April 14, taking the statewide count to 10,834. New York Citys revised death toll is now near that total.

New York Citys Health Department said it will now count any fatalities deemed as likely being caused by COVID-19 as a death caused by the new disease, which is caused by the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus, commonly known as the novel coronavirus. A probable virus death is defined by the department as a victim who had no known positive laboratory test for SARS-CoV-2 (COVID-19) but the death certificate lists as a cause of death COVID-19 or an equivalent.

SARS-CoV-2 is the technical name for the CCP virus.

As new information becomes available, some deaths previously classified as probable may be reclassified as laboratory-confirmed, according to the department.

The deaths were backdated to March 11, the date of the first confirmed death from the CCP virus in the city, officials said.

While these data reflect the tragic impact that the virus has had on our city, they will also help us to determine the scale and scope of the epidemic and guide us in our decisions, Barbot said in a statement.

Medical workers assist patients outside a special CCP virus intake area at Maimonides Medical Center in Brooklyn, New York City, on April 14, 2020. (Spencer Platt/Getty Images)

Before the revised death toll, daily deaths appeared to have started dropping in the city in recent days, mirroring a trend across the state.

Another 8,184 deaths took place in the city between March 11 and April 13 that arent linked to COVID-19. The numbers are only current through April 13 because of a lag in reporting due to the pandemic.

Most of the deaths in the city confirmed as being caused by the new disease were among those 75 or older. The vast majority of victims across all age groups had underlying conditions, including diabetes, lung disease, cancer, heart disease, asthma, or kidney disease.

The CCP virus causes symptoms similar to the flu. Many patients get better through rest and symptom treatment at home but some require hospital care, which can include assistance breathing. Some patients die after spending weeks on ventilators.

There is no vaccine or known treatment for the virus, though some existing and experimental drugs, like remdesivir and hydroxychloroquine, have shown effectiveness in treating hospitalized patients and are being studied in clinical trials.
A global health crisis is stimulating innovation on a global scale Many of the principles embodied in the innovations developed in response to COVID-19 will be applicable to solving healthcares next crisis, the financial one - Kevin Fleming, CEO, Loyale Healthcare

While many in the healthcare industry continue to focus on responding to the COVID crisis, other healthcare executives and planners are now turning their attention to longer term strategies. For some, the goal may be survival. More fortunate providers are taking steps to ensure that the lessons learned from the crisis serve to make their organizations stronger, more resilient and ultimately more successful.

Just as necessity is the mother of invention, crisis is often the catalyst for innovation. World War II gave birth to the jet engine, synthetic rubber and oil, pressurized cabins on aircraft, radar, missile guidance systems, nuclear technology and a lot more. Many of these wartime innovations have become a regular part of everyday modern life. Similarly, the COVID crisis is forging global public/private partnerships and creative invention at a pace that in more ordinary circumstances might have taken years to develop if it at all.

By in large the industry has recognized that innovation has been and will be key to helping put the COVID crisis behind us. And, as has been true throughout history, this global crisis continues to stimulate strategic partnerships and innovations that will - and should - survive long after the crisis has passed.

Profiled below are a few of these innovations and partnerships. The list is far from exhaustive, but provides a representative illustration of the breadth and velocity of innovation in the healthcare industry as some of the global economys best minds turn their talents to defeating a single, common enemy.

Here in the U.S., the COVID-19 response has been hampered in many places by shortages of tests, inadequate supplies, a scarcity of personal protective equipment (PPE) to protect front line healthcare workers and too few ventilators for the critically ill. Some innovations address these problems, such as James Dysons new design for ventilators for the British Government. Developed in just 10-days, Dyson (of vacuum cleaner fame) expects to ship 15,000 ventilators starting this month.

The U.S. Federal Drug Administration (FDA) fast-tracked approval of solutions created by scientists at the The Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center to expand and accelerate COVID-19 testing. Using a recipe developed by medical center researchers in just 24-hours, the team then collaborated with the universitys colleges of engineering and dentistry to 3D print more than 50,000 swabs for test kits to be distributed to hospitals across Ohio. Their innovative solutions are going to be shared nationwide.

While manufacturing and supply chain have been the subject of some innovations, most new thinking appears to be coming in the form of technology. More specifically, technology tools that coordinate and optimize the delivery of care at scale and reduce person-to-person contact. And, while theres no downplaying the tragedy and anxiety of the crisis were in, we cant help but be encouraged by the lasting benefits this emergency continues to inspire.

HCA Healthcare, the nations largest healthcare provider, has formed a partnership with Google Cloud and SADA to develop a data portal, accessible to hospitals across the nation, to help communities respond more effectively to COVID-19. According to their press release, the open data platform will help accelerate analysis and response by aggregating data on ICU bed and ventilator utilization, testing results and total number of patient visits to Americas hospital systems.

Seeding the system, which is expected to go live this week, HCA will provide statistical data from its 185 hospitals, structured in a manner to comply with HIPAA and other applicable restrictions. HCA has invited groups representing approximately 4,000 hospitals to join and share data on the platform. Hospitals interested in learning more and submitting data are invited to visit onboarding.nationalresponseportal.com.

Apple is also joining Google in the COVID-19 innovation race. The two companies announced in a release a joint effort to enable the use of Bluetooth technology to help governments and health agencies reduce the spread of the virus - with user privacy and security central to the design. The contact tracing technology is designed to protect people and get society back up and running. Noting the important work already being done by public health authorities, universities and NGOs around the world to develop opt-in contact tracing technology, Apple and Google will be launching a comprehensive solution that includes application programming interfaces (APIs) and operating system-level technology to assist in enabling contact tracingwhile maintaining strong protections around user privacy.

Health systems and hospitals are also innovating at a heightened pace. In an industry analysis co-authored by physicians and administrators for the Harvard Business Review on April 3, 2020, titled, How hospitals are using AI to Battle COVID-19, the authors list multiple innovations including Partners Healthcares collaboration with Providence St. Joseph Health System to deploy Providences online screening and triage tool. Developed in partnership with Microsoft, the tool served more than 40,000 patients in its first week - an unprecedented scale necessitated by the acute need in one of the areas hardest hit by COVID-19.

Other innovations designed to scale services using innovative digital tools for care administration and patient engagement include Baidus no-contact infrared sensor system and the artificial intelligence (AI) system developed by Tampa General Hospitals in collaboration with Care.ai. at the health systems facilities entrances to intercept individuals with potential symptoms from visiting patients.

An article in the Journal of Informatics in Health and Biomedicine (JAMIA) describes UC San Diego Healths implementation of technological support important for optimizing clinical management of the COVID-19 pandemic. The article and corresponding paper shares analysis of UC San Diego Healths adaptation of the Epic Electronic Health Record (EHR) system for rapid screening, laboratory testing, clinical decision support, reporting and patient-facing technology related to COVID-19.

UC San Diego didnt stop there. As reported by Beckers Health IT, the health system went on to develop an artificial intelligence algorithm which it has applied to more than 2,000 lung X-ray images to help radiologists more quickly identify signs of early pneumonia in COVID-19 patients. Partnering with Amazon Web Services for a clinical research study, the project aims to quickly detect pneumonia and better distinguish between COVID-19 patients likely in need of more supportive care in the hospital and those who could be monitored at home.

This relatively short list of industry innovations represents the tip of the iceberg. Not included here are the many promising endeavors under way globally to expand telehealth solutions, find better treatments for COVID-19 victims and, ultimately, develop a vaccine. Driven as they are by the determination to protect human life, these efforts are emblematic of healthcare innovation at its very best. And although Dyson may not make ventilators in the long term, or the partnerships between Google, Apple and Amazon Web Services and healthcare providers may not endure, the fact that the industry and technologists have found a better way will certainly lead to lasting change in healthcare delivery.

Looking beyond the COVID-19 crisis, one can imagine how innovations developed initially to support a more effective response to this public health crisis might be employed in other healthcare disciplines.

For many healthcare providers, the next crisis will likely be financial. Whether its because theyve been treating COVID-19 patients at a net loss or cancelling and postponing other treatments to keep their patients safe, hospitals across the country are experiencing unprecedented financial losses. These have led to large scale employee furloughs, facility closures and - for many - the possibility of bankruptcy or failure.

Many of the principles embodied in the innovations listed above are applicable to solving healthcares next crisis, the financial one. Here, we believe patients have an important role to play. As weve noted in previous articles, patients now account for more than a third of provider revenue. But the systems healthcare providers use to collect payments were developed for insurance companies. They have not performed well for patients or their providers.

Loyale Patient Financial Manager was developed precisely for this situation. Leveraging aggregated patient data to intelligently segment patient populations, our open platform operates at the core of a hospitals patient revenue cycle. With personalized, omnichannel communications, multiple payment options (including financing) and a leading self-serve online portal, our users report better patient satisfaction and better financial outcomes.

Many of the innovations developed in direct response to the COVID-19 crisis will have a lasting impact on the cost and quality of care, in America and around the world. We applaud the scientists, researchers, engineers, clinicians and others who are working around-the-clock to protect us all. And were grateful to be playing an important role helping solve healthcares next crisis.

Kevin Fleming is the CEO of Loyale Healthcare

About Loyale

Loyale Patient Financial Manager is a comprehensive patient financial engagement technology platform leveraging a suite of configurable solution components including predictive analytics, intelligent workflows, multiple patient financing vehicles, communications, payments, digital front doors and other key capabilities.

Loyale Healthcare is committed to a mission of turning patient responsibility into lasting loyalty for its healthcare provider customers. Based in Lafayette, California, Loyale and its leadership team bring 27 years of expertise delivering leading financial engagement solutions for complex business environments. Loyale currently serves approximately 12,000 healthcare providers across 48 states. Loyale is proud to have an enterprise-level strategic partnership with Parallon which includes the deployment of Loyales industry leading technology at all HCA hospitals and Physician Groups.
General Secretary of the ruling New Patriotic Party (NPP), John Boadu, has lauded Ghanas COVID-19 Response Team for the introduction of COVID-19 Tracker App.



The COVID-19 Tracker has been launched to trace contacts of persons infected by the virus, in actual time.



The app will use telephone data and other relevant avenues to do the contact tracing as well as track persons who have been to COVID-19 affected countries and also verify whether persons under quarantine due to the virus infection are adhering to directives.



According to the Minister of Communication, Ursula Owusu-Ekuful, the app has been downloaded 16,000 times in less than 24 hours after it was launched on Monday, April 13, 2020.



She further disclosed that about 100 reports of symptoms related to the virus have been made through the app.



We are interested in tracking the virus in our country and so it is specifically designed to be used in Ghana," she noted, adding that the app is available on android smartphones and that persons not using android could dial *769# to access the app.



Speaking in an interview on Peace FM's 'Kokrokoo' program on Wednesday, John Boadu commended the team over the initiative saying a similar app has been developed in Dubai to track persons and their activities during the pandemic.



He recounted that the tracking app in Dubai delivers real time activities of the users by tracking their location and what they go out to do.



"Apart from the permit, it will determine where you are going, your location, whether what you want to do is permissible, the time for permission, and so if the time elapses, your app will shut down," he explained.



He said sanctions are meted out to persons found going beyond the permit and time given them on the app.



John Boadu was optimistic the COVID-19 tracker app will help in the country's fight against the virus.



He called on the nation to "support government to enforce the measures put in place in order to help contain the pandemic".







Source: Ameyaw Adu Gyamfi/Peacefmonline.com/Ghana









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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1. Medicaid block grants put more control of Medicaid spending in the hands of state governments instead of the Federal government. The block grants will offer health benefits to our vulnerable populations and assure payment to our local, rural hospitals, while controlling government spending. Less spending and more local control is ideal.

2. The problem isnt in the actual tax structure-the problem with our tax system is the amount of taxes that are taken from our hard-working Montanans through property tax and income tax. The government needs to control its spending. Our pockets are not an endless pot for our government to pick out of.

3. Laws regarding vaping use and sales should be aligned with the current laws on regular tobacco products.

4. The funds for these tax-credit scholarships are diverted before the funds ever become public funds. This should be handled no differently than any other tax-exempt donation. The Montana Legislature was right to include religious schools in the tax credit program. If the tax credit is struck down by the Supreme Court, the Legislature should make a second attempt.

5. The folks Ive talked to in Richland County believe that property taxes are too high. To fix this problem, we need to curtail government spending. Property owners in Montana do not have bottomless pockets. Our government needs to act like our tax funds are in their own checking accounts, and recognize that the money will run out.

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TikTok parent ByteDance is planning to hire 10,000 employees globally, including in India. It hopes to recruit for 40,000 jobs in 2020, competing with Chinese giant Alibaba. This hiring wave comes at a time when tech companies are looking to reduce employees or cut pays.

According to Bloomberg, the company looks to currently hire 10,000, out of which a third are high-level research or software coding jobs. The eight-year old company aims to invest in future growth. While it is acquiring talent for music licencing from Miami to Mumbai, it is looking for online tutors to capture China's online education boom. It is also aiming for the online gaming segment as well as for enterprise software.

New hires will support the company's various apps such as TikTok and Toutiao. The company aims to have 1,00,000 staff globally by the end of the year, as envisioned by Chief Executive Officer Zhang Yiming. As such, it will have around the same strength as Alibaba.

As per Bloomberg, ByteDance is looking to consolidate its social media strongholds in China and the US, while expanding in new markets. It aims to fill 100 vacancies including from summer software intern to lead engineer for augmented reality in Mountain View.

Coronavirus has confined people across countries to their homes, spiking the use of social media channels. As China returns to normal, the company's referral program is looking to fill 9,900 positions.

Around 3,000 coding, engineering and research roles and as many in products and operations are being filled by the company. It is also looking to add more than 100 positions in locations such as London, LA, Singapore and Mountain View.

Also read: TikTok appoints Nikhil Gandhi as India head

Also read: How to make money on TikTok
As an aghast nation watched more than 3,000 hungry and angry migrant clamouring to go home at Bandra today, a slanging match erupted between the ruling Maha Vikas Aghadi (MVA) government and the Opposition Bharatiya Janata Party on Tuesday.

The migrants, including many women and children, from various states, gathered near Bandra in the hope of getting a meal and then catching a train back to their states, hours after Prime Minister Narendra Modi extended the national lockdown till May 3 - three days more than Maharashtra's shutdown till April 30.



Not willing to move, the stunned migrants staged a dharna demanding transportation back home and others started running around, compelling the police to mildly cane them, and after around two hours, Mumbai Police Spokesperson and DCP Pranay Ashok said they had been dispersed and the situation was under control.





The police was taken completely unawares by the hordes, which came in small trickles from different directions, pointing to a potential intelligence failure, flouting prohibitory orders and throwing to the winds "social distancing" norms, barely 2 km from the residence of Chief Minister Uddhav Thackeray in Bandra east.



Senior police personnel and political leaders like local Congress MLA Zeeshan Siddique appealed to them to maintain calm and promised to arrange food-and-shelter for them and raise their issue with the government.



Slamming the Modi government at the Centre, Tourism Minister and Sena leader Aditya Thackeray said that "the current situation in Bandra, or even the rioting in Surat, is a result of the Union government not being able to take a call on arranging a way home for the migrant labour. They don't want food or shelter, they want to go back home".



Later, he appeared to soften up by saying that the migrant issue persists everywhere, the state houses more than 600,000 migrants, provides them with meals, and will continue to ensure all comforts at the migrant camps set up in Maharashtra.



He also thanked the Centre for understanding the situation while trying to ensure the safety of the home states of migrants.



Nationalist Congress Party's Home Minister Anil Deshmukh breathed fire and blamed Modi for letting down the desperate migrants who were expecting that the PM would make some announcement to facilitate their return home.



"The migrant labourers are in large numbers from Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh and other states. Today they were hoping that the PM would make some announcement which would give them an opportunity to return to their native places," Deshmukh said, adding that nothing of the sort happened, and the PM let them down badly.



Congress' Mumbai Guardian Minister Aslam Shaikh said that CM Thackeray had raised with Modi the issue of sending the migrants back home, but the Centre extended the lockdown without addressing the migrants' concerns.



In a sharp reaction, former Mumbai Congress President Sanjay Nirupam said: "This was bound to happen. People have no food to eat, they are prevented from returning to their native villages. For how long can they remain like this? The government's figures are merely on paper. For how long and to how many people can any government keep feeding freely, is there no alternative?"



Attacking the Centre, Congress state spokesperson Sachin Sawant said that if the PM had given time to the migrants to return home, they would not have come to the streets like in Mumbai, Delhi, Surat and other places.



"The state government can provide them food, but cannot send them to their homes in view of the lockdown," Sawant pointed out.



Trade Unions Joint Action Committee Maharashtra Convenor Vishwas Utagi said there are over two million migrants stuck in Mumbai since the March 25 lockdown, besides 3,000 fishermen stranded at Gholvad in south Gujarat.



"They have no food, no work, no homes, no transport to go home. How can they survive? The government machinery is not responding to the challenge and this is a human tragedy in other parts of the country also," Utagi said.



Sena MP Priyanka Chaturvedi said CM Thackeray addressed the migrants directly, calmed them and assured the state's full support, and "warned those trying to spread rumours and fake news, and the state government would not spare the guilty".



However, Opposition Bharatiya Janata Party MP Poonam Mahajan demanded that the state government should make separate planning for the migrants here which it was not doing, resulting in this chaos today.



The BJP state Vice-President Kirit Somaiya demanded to know how such a huge crowd could gather, flouting Sec. 144 (the prohibitory orders).



"It's a matter of deep concern. What about intelligence, and why today? The state government must treat this incident seriously and modify its schemes to provide food to the migrants," Somaiya said.



Countering this, Congress' Sawant accused Somaiya of raking up a aconspiracy' angle without the BJP understanding the plight of the migrants - "Should we say the same (conspiracy) for Surat and Delhi incidents?"



Targeting the ruling Maha Vikas Aghadi government, BJP leader Nitesh Rane said tomorrow, it could be a (migrant) crowd from the Konkan.



"It's the anger of the people -- 10 people live in a 10x10 hutment in Mumbai -- they should be given proper food or allowed to return home," Rane demanded.
The Federal Capital Territory (FCT) administration has condemned the violation of the lockdown imposed on the city by the federal government.

The FCT minister, Muhammad Bello, has, therefore, issued new guidelines on the enforcement of the lockdown.

The new directives were contained in a statement by Mr Bellos spokesperson, Abiodun Ogunleye.

PREMIUM TIMES reported how President Muhammadu Buhari imposed a lockdown on the FCT, Lagos and Ogun to check the spread of coronavirus.

Lagos and the FCT together account for about 70 per cent of Nigerias coronavirus cases. Ogun was included in the lockdown because of its proximity to Lagos.

After the first 14 days of the lockdown, Mr Buhari extended it by another 14 days from Monday night.

While the level of compliance has been satisfactory at the Federal Capital City (FCC) over the first few days of the lockdown, the same cannot be said about the satellite towns located at the various area councils where residents there have largely ignored the lockdown directive, Mr Ogunleye said.

However, over the past few days, adherence to the lockdown directives at the City Center has also deteriorated;

Residents have used the excuse of going to the markets to flout the lockdown directives and traders selling non-essential food commodities have also used this window to open their shops in clear violation of the directives not to do so.

The FCT administration said markets in the Nigerian capital will henceforth only be open on Wednesdays and Saturdays. Before, they were open every other day.

Also, residents are allowed to only go to markets in their districts.

The administration also banned okada in Kubwa district of the capital.

Read the full statement by Mr Ogunleye below.

PRESS STATEMENT

COVID 19: FCTA RELEASES NEW GUIDELINES ON CESSATION OF MOVEMENT IN THE FCT

1. Following a review of the effects and level of compliance of the cessation of movement in the FCT as part of measures to contain the spread of COVID 19, the following observations were made and new directives issued by the FCT COVID-19 Security Committee chaired by the FCT Minister, Malam Muhammad Musa Bello. They are:

a. The FCT has been quite fortunate to have maintained a relatively stable number of COVID- 19 positive cases and the FCT Administration is making efforts to ensure that there is no escalation in the number of positive cases returned from the Territory;

b. While the level of compliance has been satisfactory at the Federal Capital City (FCC) over the first few days of the lockdown, the same cannot be said about the satellite towns located at the various area councils where residents there have largely ignored the lockdown directive;

c. However, over the past few days, adherence to the lockdown directives at the City Center has also deteriorated;

d. Residents have used the excuse of going to the markets to flout the lockdown directives and traders selling non-essential food commodities have also used this window to open their shops in clear violation of the directives not to do so;

e. Despite the directives that residents should patronize neighborhood shops and markets within their districts and not move from one district to the other to buy their essential items in order to minimize movement of people and vehicles across the city, this has largely been flouted as well;

2. In order to ensure that the FCT does not witness an escalation in the number of COVID-19 positive cases and prevent a public health emergency, the FCT Administration has resolved on the following new measures to enforce the cessation of movement and ensure its compliance by residents of the FCT. They include the following;

a. Market operational days are henceforth reduced to two days in a week namely Wednesdays and Saturdays only;

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The FCT COVID-19 Security meeting in session. FCT Minister, Malam Muhammad Musa Bello Welcomes the FCT Police Commissioner, Bala Ciroma to the FCT COVID-19 Security Committee meeting

b. Residents should patronize only neighborhood markets as movement from one district to the other now constitutes a violation of the lockdown;

c. Mobile courts will now be activated to try all violators of the directive on the cessation of movement across the FCT;

d. Motorcycles (Okada) are henceforth barred from operating anywhere in Kubwa and Dutse Alhaji during the lockdown;

e. The FCTA will step up sensitization efforts especially in the rural communities and enjoins Area Council, Chairmen, traditional rulers and community leaders to actively engage in sensitizing the populace on the dangers of COVID -19;

3. The FCT Administration remains deeply committed to ensuring that the COVID-19 pandemic remains controlled in the FCT and seeks the cooperation of all residents in curtailing its spread especially into our rural and suburban communities.

ANTHONY OGUNLEYE

CHIEF PRESS SECRETARY

FCTA/OCPS/PR/128

15/14/2020
'As long as there is PM-CARES, it's money that will do the talking,' notes Kanika Datta.

Corporate India may be wallowing in forced inactivity, but its publicity machinery remains as active as the COVID-19 virus.

The provocation for this PR pandemic is the government's decision to allow COVID-19-related expenditure within permitted corporate social responsibility (CSR) activity under the terms of the six-year-old mandate.

The March 23 announcement included donations to the prime minister's national relief fund within allowable CSR spending.

Five days later, Prime Minister Narendra Damodardas Modi offered companies an even better option in the clumsily labelled Prime Minister's Citizen Assistance and Relief in Emergency Situations, which conveniently translates to PM-CARES.

As atonement for serious lapses in governmental planning for migrant workers and others after the nation-wide lockdown, the creation of the fund may be unexceptionable.

As means of personal mobilisation --- so much better than clapping and thali-banging, for instance -- it remains unsurpassed.

The Modi-initiated PM-CARES, made effective through an ordinance, improves on the government's prime minister's national relief fund which Jawaharlal Nehru set up in 1948, on several counts.

First, it extends the same tax break on donations as the PM relief fund, but removes the upper limit of 10 per cent of the donor's gross income.

Second, companies can donate to this fund until the end of June and claim the deduction for FY20 tax returns.

Third, PM-CARES contributions will not affect the eligibility of companies to sign up for the concessional lower corporate tax regime announced in September last year to businesses that do not claim any tax relief.

These announcements offer significant relief for companies after draconian amendments to the Companies Act in July last year altering the quasi-mandatory 'pay or explain' mandate introduced by the United Progressive Alliance into a binding obligation.

Under these amendments, non-complying companies will attract penalties ranging from Rs 50,000 to Rs 25 lakh and/or imprisonment of officers for up to three years.

Under the rules, qualifying companies have to spend 2 per cent of their average profits for the past three years on specified CSR activities every year.

Mandate-qualifying companies -- those with turnover of Rs 1,000 crore or more, or net worth of Rs 500 crore or more, or profit of Rs 5 crore or more -- have three years to comply or have the money transferred to a government-specified fund.

Despite the finance minister's invocation of Mahatma Gandhi's truism on profit and social responsibility, the amendment unmistakably added to the climate of harassment that is encouraging business people to exit India in droves.

PM-CARES offers a handy panacea for CEOs's CSR headaches.

No surprise, then, that the excited phone calls from excitable PR executives touting this or that company's COVID-19 action plan began even before the reverberations from the PM's announcement faded away.

The usual avalanche of press releases followed, recording the lakhs and crores that India Inc is pouring into PM-CARES, just like all those Bollywood celebrities.

Assuming PM-CARES spends this money both wisely and well, this flood of donations is a great thing, whatever the motivations.

For instance, if it invests heavily in subsidising nationwide and sorely needed COVID-19 tests, that would be money well spent.

But two niggling doubts remains.

The first, which has been asked before, is the need for a separate fund when a 72-year-old set up with set procedures for disaster relief funding are already in place.

The weak explanation -- or non-explanation -- from the government is that this fund focuses on fighting COVID-19-type pandemics and enables personal contributions (which the prime minister's national relief fund also allows).

Even if we assume the supposed benefits of the special fund outweighs any political motives, the second point of unease centres on governance.

Like the prime minister's national relief fund, PM-CARES is a public charitable trust.

But where the first is governed from the PM's office by designated bureaucrats, the latter has the PM as chairman and the members include the ministers of defence, home and finance.

This specificity of management by the political executive is unsettling.

It suggests the establishment of a CSR-government complex with all the connotations of surveillance and quid pro quos.

Given this, the question to ask is whether PM-CARES's activities will be in the public domain in the same manner as the prime minister's national relief fund.

If the government was serious about co-opting the corporate sector meaningfully in the fight against COVID-19, it could have specified activities with durable benefits beyond cheque-writing.

Some private companies and public sector banks, for instance, have involved their CSR administrations in helping state governments provide food and shelter for migrants and quarantine centres.

Including, say, the provision of medical equipment and facilities to emerging under-served hotspots could have been another useful way of involving the resources of the corporate sector.

Or, let's look at the long term in making this mandate -- which is conceptually flawed in the first place -- work to fill in the serious gaps in India's health care infrastructure that this pandemic has exposed.

But as long as there is PM-CARES, it's money that will do the talking.
Enterprise Products Partners is opening the northbound capacity of its Seaway pipeline, offering U.S. oil producers struggling to place their oil near the Gulf Coast to ship their barrels to the primary storage hub at Cushing, Oklahoma.

Given the current turmoil in the crude oil market, including impacts on both refinery and export demand, there is strong market interest to access the Cushing storage market, the pipeline operator said in a filing with the U.S. Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) this week, as carried by Reuters.

The Gulf Coast-Cushing oil flow would have been an unusual occurrence just a year ago when the Seaway pipeline was mostly carrying oil in the other direction-from the inland to the U.S. Gulf Coast refineries and export terminals. The Seaway pipeline was expanded with a southbound flow from Cushing to the Gulf Coast in 2012 when rising U.S. production meant more oil needed to the carried from the oilfields to the coast and major refineries there.

But this year, the massive oil demand drop in the U.S. and overseas due to lockdowns in the COVID-19 pandemic has had U.S. oil producers scrambling to find storage for their produced barrels when no one wants more oil right now.

Enterprise Products Partners is now offering the unused capacity on its pipeline system from Fort Bend County, Texas, to Cushing. Oil could also flow south to the Gulf area, a company spokesman told Reuters in a statement.

The U.S. Department of Energy is also trying to help U.S. oil producers with finding storage for their unwanted oil. The DOE said on Tuesday that it was negotiating contracts with nine U.S. oil producers to store a total of 23 million barrels of their produced oil in the Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR), to help U.S. oil producers with storage availability amid the huge demand loss from the pandemic.

By Tsvetana Paraskova for Oilprice.com

More Top Reads From Oilprice.com:
WUHAN, April 14 (Xinhua) -- Chinese authorities have stressed unremitting efforts in taking regular epidemic control measures in Wuhan, central China's Hubei Province.

Vice Premier Sun Chunlan Tuesday inspected on-site epidemiological investigation and COVID-19 containment work at communities, public transit hubs and farm produce markets in the Chinese city hardest hit by the coronavirus.
The College Boards president, Jeremy Singer, described plans for a remote proctoring system that locks down everything else in the computer. The camera and microphone are on, you can detect any movement in the room. If the parents are in there, next to them, that would be detected.

Experts said many families might be reluctant to give the organization such extensive access to their private devices.

Thats a big privacy issue, both to lock down your computer and to put some kind of client on your computer to be able to do that, said Jonathan Supovitz, a professor of leadership and policy at the Graduate School of Education for the University of Pennsylvania.

The development of an online option is an indication that the testing companies are fighting for their lives. The fairness of standardized testing was already under increasing attack before the virus, with some colleges and universities moving away from the tests as an application requirement.

In the wake of the pandemic, more colleges have at least temporarily made ACT and SAT results optional for 2021 applicants, including the vast University of California system, Tulane, Case Western Reserve and Williams College.
Renowned leader in development of novel diagnostic tests Dr. Hans Frykman joins ProMIS scientific advisory board (SAB)

TORONTO and CAMBRIDGE, Mass., April 15, 2020 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- ProMIS Neurosciences, Inc. (TSX: PMN) (OTCQB: ARFXF), a company with a unique, core technology to predict novel targets on the molecular surface of complex proteins, announced today a collaboration with Dr. Hans Frykman and his team to develop a high-throughput, highly specific serological assay to accurately detect the presence of antibodies against SARS-CoV-2, the virus responsible for the COVID-19 pandemic. A test for COVID-19 immunity is essential to understanding patterns of immunity in the community and support an effective surveillance program, which public health authorities suggest is necessary to restart society.



A specific and sensitive test that could identify who has virus immunity and who remains at risk would enable normal societal function to recommence more effectively. A highly specific serology test for SARS CoV-2 is currently lacking due to its close relationship with other relatively benign (i.e., the common cold) but highly similar strains of coronaviruses. Prominent cross-reactivity between the family of coronaviruses hinders development of specific tests using traditional platforms such as ELISA (enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay).

"Community surveillance of COVID-19 is the largest unmet need of our decade," stated Dr. Neil Cashman, ProMIS Chief Scientific Officer. "We are very pleased to welcome Dr. Frykman to the ProMIS SAB and to collaborate with him and his team to jointly address this gap. Dr. Frykman's lab has a substantial track record for developing novel serological assays, including the application of sophisticated techniques such as surface plasmon resonance (SPR), to unambiguously determine specific antibody concentrations in human serum samples."

Commenting on the collaboration, Dr. Frykman stated: "This exciting collaboration brings together our broad experience in developing sensitive and highly accurate serological tests with ProMIS' unique ability to create peptide antigens based on rational identification of the site and shape (conformation) of epitope targets on complex protein structures, such as those displayed on the surface of the virus causing COVID-19. We anticipate that the predicted specificity of the ProMIS peptide antigens for the antibody response to COVID-19, without cross-reactivity with other coronavirus infections, will be an essential component for the rapid development of a highly sensitive and accurate serological assay."

About Dr. Hans Frykman

Hans Frykman, MD, PhD, is the CEO and medical director of BC Neuroimmunology Lab and Neurocode Labs. BC Neuroimmunology lab has a 35-year history of delivering highly specific clinical neuroimmunology testing to the North American marketplace. The lab is a technology leader and is academically collaborating with several leading centers in Europe and USA. Neurocode labs is Canada's first and only clinical whole exome sequencing facility. Dr. Frykman is a clinical assistant professor of medicine at the University of British Columbia.

Dr. Frykman received his postgraduate medical training at Karolinska University Hospital, Mayo Clinic, University of Minnesota, Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center and University of British Columbia. He received his medical degree from Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, PhD in Bio-organic chemistry from Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm and MSc in Chemical Engineering from Chalmers University in Gothenburg.

About ProMIS Neurosciences

ProMIS Neurosciences, Inc. is a development stage biotechnology company whose unique core technology is the ability to rationally predict the site and shape (conformation) of novel targets known as Disease Specific Epitopes on the molecular surface of proteins. Using this unique precision approach, the Company is developing novel antibody therapeutics that selectively target toxic oligomers of proteins implicated in the development and progression of neurodegenerative diseases, in particular Alzheimer's disease, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) and Parkinson's disease.

In the infectious disease setting, these disease-specific epitopes represent peptide antigens that can be used as an essential component to create accurate and sensitive serological assays to detect the presence of antibodies that arise in response to a specific infection, such as COVID-19. These peptide antigens can also be used to create potential therapeutic antibodies to treat active infection, as well as serve as the basis for development of vaccines. ProMIS is headquartered in Toronto, Ontario, with offices in Cambridge, Massachusetts. ProMIS is listed on the Toronto Stock Exchange under the symbol PMN, and on the OTCQB Venture Market under the symbol ARFXF.

Visit us at www.promisneurosciences.com or follow us on Twitter and LinkedIn

For media inquiries, please contact:

Shanti Skiffington

shanti.skiffington@gmail.com

Tel. 617 921-0808

For Investor Relations, please contact:

Alpine Equity Advisors

Nicholas Rigopulos, President

nick@alpineequityadv.com

Tel. 617 901-0785

The TSX has not reviewed and does not accept responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release. This information release contains certain forward-looking information. Such information involves known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors that may cause actual results, performance or achievements to be materially different from those implied by statements herein, and therefore these statements should not be read as guarantees of future performance or results. All forward-looking statements are based on the Company's current beliefs as well as assumptions made by and information currently available to it as well as other factors. Readers are cautioned not to place undue reliance on these forward-looking statements, which speak only as of the date of this press release. Due to risks and uncertainties, including the risks and uncertainties identified by the Company in its public securities filings, actual events may differ materially from current expectations. The Company disclaims any intention or obligation to update or revise any forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise.
HERNDON, Va., April 15, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- As the nation addresses the current economic turmoil caused by the coronavirus, National Student Clearinghouse Research Center data may help clarify how postsecondary pathways transpire during a recession and shed light for institutional and public policy makers to craft effective responses to respond to today's uncertain times.

The findings presented in "National Postsecondary Enrollment Trends: Before, During, and After the Great Recession," showcased patterns among traditional-age, first-time students enrolling in colleges and universities for fall 2006 through 2010. The report includes detailed trend summaries and related tables; color charts broken down by regions, institution types, years, and other important variables; and insights.

Furthermore, Completing College: A National View of Student Attainment Rates - Fall 2008 Cohort reveals that while a larger number of students enrolled during the peak of the recession, completion rates declined. The largest decrease in completions was among nontraditional age students.

"During the Great Recession, our data showed that the impact on postsecondary institutions is not immediate; community colleges and for-profits saw the greatest increases in enrollment, mostly among older students who showed up later in the recession," said Doug Shapiro, Executive Director of the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center. "However, the coronavirus impact will likely be different, especially among out of state and international enrollments as many students will want to stay closer to home, and students that continue with on-line education options. State budgets will undoubtedly be hit hard again, even as some states were just now getting their higher education funding back up to pre-recession levels."

The "National Postsecondary Enrollment Trends: Before, During, and After the Great Recession," findings include:

Community colleges experienced dramatic increases in enrollment after a delay of one to two years.

The proportion of students enrolling full time in public two-year institutions increased slightly and four-year institutions saw virtually no change.

The four-year private sector maintained its market share more effectively than was predicted.

Each region of the country experienced distinct enrollment patterns.

Persistence rates (continued enrollment with any U.S. institution) fell as the cohort size surged, particularly in community colleges

The "Completing College: A National View of Student Attainment Rates - Fall 2008 Cohort" found that the entering student population was 12 percent larger than the one in fall 2007 (approximately 2.7 million and 2.4 million, respectively). There was a 20 percent increase in the number of older students (over age 20) and a larger share of those enrolled less than full time (1.5 percentage points more than in fall 2007). In addition, the share of students enrolled in community colleges and four-year private for-profit institutions increased one percentage point each.

Completion rates fell as cohort sizes grew. The overall national six-year completion rate for the fall 2008 cohort was 55.0 percent, a decrease from the 56.1 percent completion rate for the fall 2007 cohort. Most of the decline occurred in the rate at which students graduated from their starting institution (42.1 percent for fall 2008 vs. 43.0 percent for fall 2007). There was almost no change in the rate at which students transferred and completed at a different institution. Other key stats include:

Some student populations experienced larger declines in their attainment rates, while others remained the same or actually increased.

Nontraditional age students saw the largest decline. The completion rate fell 2.6 percentage points for those who entered college at age 21 through 24, and 1.4 percentage points for adult learners over 24.

Traditional-age students experienced a 0.5 percent decline, attributable mostly to a small shift away from full-time enrollment

Completion rates held steady for traditional-age students who enrolled exclusively full-time, and increased slightly, by 0.3 percentage points, for those who combined full-time and part-time enrollments

The total completion rate for students who started in two-year public institutions declined 0.7 percentage points (39.1 percent for fall 2008 vs 39.8 percent for fall 2007)

There was a larger decline in the transfer pathway from two-year to four-year colleges: 16.2 percent of the students who started at community colleges went on to graduate from four-year schools, compared to 17.2 percent of the fall 2007 cohort

The completion rate for those who started in four-year private nonprofit institutions increased 0.7 percentage points. However, this group's share of the total cohort for fall 2008 was 1.2 percentage points smaller than for fall 2007

About the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center

The National Student Clearinghouse Research Center is the research arm of the National Student Clearinghouse. The Research Center collaborates with higher education institutions, states, school districts, high schools, and educational organizations as part of a national effort to better inform education leaders and policymakers. Through accurate longitudinal data outcomes reporting, the Research Center enables better educational policy decisions leading to improved student outcomes.

The Research Center currently collects data from more than 3,600 postsecondary institutions, which represent 97 percent of the nation's postsecondary enrollments in degree-granting institutions, as of 2018. Clearinghouse data track enrollments nationally and are not limited by institutional and state boundaries. To learn more, visit https://nscresearchcenter.org.

Media contact: Todd Sedmak, [email protected] or 703-742-4837

SOURCE National Student Clearinghouse Research Center
VANCOUVER, British Columbia, April 14, 2020 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- New Pacific Metals Corp. (TSX-V: NUAG) (OTCQX: NUPMF) (New Pacific or the Company) is pleased to report the first independent National Instrument 43-101 (NI 43-101) Mineral Resource estimate for its 100% owned Silver Sand Deposit, Bolivia. The study was completed by AMC Mining Consultants (Canada) Ltd. (AMC).



The Company will host a webcast to discuss the Silver Sand Project on April 15, 2020 at 10:30 am Eastern Time / 7:30 am Pacific Time  details of which are at the bottom of the news release.

The resource estimate used property boundary and conceptual open pit mining constraints and are presented in Table 1 using a 45 g/t silver cut-off grade. The model is depleted for historical mining activities:

Table 1: Silver Sand Deposit - Conceptual Pit1 constrained Mineral Resource as of 31 December 2019.

Resource category Tonnes (Mt) Ag (g/t) Ag (Moz) Measured 8.4 159 43.05 Indicated 26.99 130 112.81 Measured & Indicated 35.39 137 155.86 Inferred 9.84 112 35.55

1 Notes:

CIM Definition Standards (2014) were used for reporting the Mineral Resources.

The Qualified Person is Dinara Nussipakynova, P.Geo. of AMC Mining Consultants (Canada) Ltd.

Mineral Resources are constrained by an optimized pit shell at a metal price of US$18.70/oz Ag, recovery of 90% Ag and Cut-off grade of 45 g/t Ag.

Mineral Resources are reported inside the Claim boundary.

Pit optimization allows waste mining to extend outside the claim to the NE and SW.

Drilling results up to 31 December 2019.

The numbers may not compute exactly due to rounding.

Mineral Resources that are not Mineral Reserves do not have demonstrated economic viability.

Source: AMC

Surrounding the conceptual constrained open pit is a zone of mineralized material of similar tenor and grade which has been drilled at variable distances ranging from 25m to plus 100m: The first area immediately surrounds and encompasses the pit and has been drilled between 25m and 50m distances. The Company considers this area to contain potential tonnage range of 7Mt to 15Mt and grades ranging from 85 g/t Ag to 150 g/t Ag. This area requires additional engineering studies to be included in any future mine plans. The second area occurs at the southern end of the Silver Sand deposit and has received less exploration to date. The Company has defined an additional tonnages from 10Mt to 20Mt and grades ranging from 85 g/t Ag to 150 g/t Ag exploration target surrounding and below the current defined resource. Initial drilling has intersected silver mineralization over similar widths and intervals as the main deposit, however, drill density insufficient to categorize the zone as Inferred at this time. The potential quantity and grade from these two areas are conceptual in nature, there has been insufficient exploration to define a mineral resource, and it is uncertain if further exploration will result in the target being delineated as a mineral resource.

HIGHLIGHTS

Silver Sand is one of the more significant new global primary silver discoveries in the last decade.

Mineralization remains open to the North and South and at depth. No feeder zones or source intrusions have been discovered to date. The Company classifies the exploration potential as good to excellent

Detailed drilling indicates good mineral continuity to provide high confidence  lower technical risk. Measured & Indicated tonnes of 35.39 Mt @ 137 g/t Ag for 155.86 Moz or ~70% of the resource estimate.

Mineralization starts at or near-surface and is amenable to potential open-pit mining extraction: Approximately 70% of the resources are within 200 m of the conceptual open pit surface.

Favourable initial metallurgical test work indicates laboratory-based recoveries of up to 97% for the various oxide  transition and sulphide mineral domains (see news release dated August 23, 2019 for details).

Resource estimate excludes the recently discovered Snake Hole zone where drilling intercepted 72.4 m grading 279 g/t Ag (see news release dated January 13, 2020 for details) and the final 37 infill drill holes released on February 19, 2020, which returned high-grade intervals from the core of the deposit.

Technical studies to facilitate the Preliminary Economic Assessment commenced in Q1-2020 and are ongoing using independent subject matter experts.

New Pacific remains well funded to advance the Silver Sand deposit with US$32 million in the treasury.

RESOURCE ESTIMATE DETAILS

The resource estimate is based on a geological model that included assay results received by New Pacific for the Silver Sand deposit to December 31, 2019. The estimate does not include any drill results from the recently discovered Snake Hole prospect, located 600 m to the east of the Silver Sand resource. A mineralization wireframe was constructed by New Pacific with LeapFrog software. The domain was reviewed by the independent Qualified Person (QP) and minor modifications made prior to estimation. One of the modifications was to separate the one domain into two separate domains based on the orientation of modelled zones of continuous mineralization.

AMC completed an ordinary kriging (OK) estimate on these domains. Prior to estimation, drillhole data were composited to 1.4 m and samples were capped for all variables within each domain where required. Silver values for both domains were capped at 1,500 g/t Ag.

In addition to the OK estimate completed inside the domains, a background OK estimate was also completed outside of mineralization wireframes.

The parent block size was 5 mE x 5 mN x 5 mRL with sub-blocking employed. Sub-blocking resulted in minimum cell dimensions of 1.25 mE x 1.25 mN x 0.5 mRL.

The background mineralization (outside the mineralization domains) was estimated with a parent block dimension of 10 mE x 10 mN x 10 mRL.

As mineralization is hosted in one rock type, the QP assigned density measurements to the block model based on the mean density. Density values of 2.54 tonnes/m3 and 2.50 tonnes/m3 were assigned to blocks inside and outside of the mineralized domains respectively.

Mineral Resource classification was completed using an assessment of geological and mineralization continuity, data quality and data density. Estimation passes were used as an initial guide for classification. Wireframes were then generated manually to build coherent volumes for the different classes.

Table 2 shows the search parameters and number of samples used for each pass. The highest confidence level is Pass 1. The lowest confidence level is Pass 3.

Table 2: Minimum and maximum sample parameters

Pass X (m) Y (m) Z (m) Minimum no. of samples Maximum no. of samples Minimum no. of drillholes 1 30 30 10 8 24 4 2 60 60 20 6 20 3 3 90 90 30 4 20 2

The block model was assigned Measured, Indicated, and Inferred Mineral Resource classifications.

QA/QC and DATA VERIFICATION

Qualified Person, Simeon Robinson, P.Geo., considers sample preparation, analytical, and security protocols employed by New Pacific to be acceptable. The QP has reviewed the Quality Assurance and Quality Control (QA/QC) procedures used by New Pacific including certified reference materials, blank, duplicate, and umpire data, and has made some recommendations. The QP does not consider these to have a material impact on the Mineral Resource estimate and considers the assay database to be adequate for Mineral Resource estimation.

Dinara Nussipakynova, P.Geo., is the QP for Mineral Resources and data verification. Data verification included a review of the assay database and collar locations. The QP considers the assay database to be acceptable for Mineral Resource estimation.

COVID-19 - FUTURE WORK

New Pacifics commitment to the health and safety of our team and the communities in which we operate is one of the core values of the Company. In response to the COVID-19 pandemic and based on guidance and directives from relevant public health authorities, the Company has elected to temporarily suspend all field-based operations in Bolivia. The Companys Health & Safety Team has implemented Company-wide safety protocols such as 14-day self-isolation where necessary, travel restrictions, remote working and enhanced hygiene controls. Both of the Companys corporate offices in Vancouver and La Paz are closed with all staff having implemented work-from-home protocols. New Pacific continues to monitor the situation and will return to normal operations when it is deemed safe to do so by the respective public health authorities.

In the interim, the Company is actively completing detailed geological (structural and geochemical/geometallurgical) studies on the Silver Sand Deposit to support future advanced technical studies. Advanced discussions with multiple Subject Matter Experts continue in preparation for when field studies are permitted to restart.

In addition, members of the Exploration Team are compiling and interpreting results from recently completed detailed mapping and sampling work along with target identification/generation at the Silver Sand North Block including for the high priority El Bronce and Jisas targets.

With regards to its regional exploration programs, implementation of the Silverstrike Project has been completed in addition to first-pass detailed surface mapping and sampling programs.

QUALITY ASSURANCE AND QUALITY CONTROL

HQ-size drill core samples from altered and mineralized intervals are split into halves by diamond saw, with an average sample length of between one to one and a half metres at the Companys core processing facility located in Betanzos, a small town located 20 kilometres from the project site. Half core samples are stored in a secure storage facility in Betanzos for future reference, with the other half shipped in securely sealed bags to ALS Global in Oruro, Bolivia for preparation, and ALS Global in Lima, Peru for geochemical analysis. All samples are first analyzed by a multi-element ICP package (ALS code ME-MS41) with ore grade over limits for silver, lead and zinc further analyzed using ALS code OG46. Further silver over limits are analyzed by gravimetric analysis (ALS code of GRA21).

A standard quality assurance and quality control (QAQC) protocol is employed to monitor the quality of sample preparation and analysis. Standards of certified reference materials and blanks are inserted into the normal core sample sequences prior to shipping to the lab at a ratio of 20:1 (i.e., every 20 samples contain at least one standard sample and one blank sample). Duplicate samples of coarse rejects at a ratio of 20:1 are sent to a second internationally accredited lab for check analysis. The assay results of QAQC samples of standards and blanks do not show any significant bias of analysis or contamination during sample preparation.

QUALIFIED PERSONS

The Mineral Resource estimate and data verification was completed by AMC. Dinara Nussipakynova, P.Geo., Principal Geologist with AMC is the Qualified Person for the purpose of NI 43-101 for all technical information pertaining to the current Mineral Resource. New Pacifics quality assurance and quality control program was reviewed by AMC. Simeon Robinson, P.Geo., Senior Geologist with AMC is the Qualified Person for the purpose of NI 43-101 for all technical information pertaining to the current Mineral Resource. The Qualified Persons under NI 43-101 have reviewed the technical content of this news release for the Silver Sand deposit and have approved its dissemination.

Further details supporting the geological model, estimation procedure and metallurgical testwork will be available in a NI 43-101 technical report. The technical report will be posted under the Companys profile at www.sedar.com within 45 days from the date of this news release.

WEBCAST DETAILS

The Company will host a conference call and presentation webcast at 10:30 am Eastern Time / 7:30 am Pacific Time on April 15, 2020 to provide further information. Participants are advised to dial in five minutes prior to the scheduled start time of the call. A presentation will be made available on the Companys website prior to the webcast. Webcast details:

Date: April 15, 2020 at 10:30 am Eastern Time / 7:30 am Pacific Time Toll-free: Canada/USA

Toronto

International

1-800-319-4610

1-416-915-3239

1-604-638-5340

Webcast: http://www.gowebcasting.com/10584

About New Pacific

New Pacific is a Canadian exploration and development company which owns the Silver Sand Project in Potosi Department, Bolivia and the Tagish Lake gold project in Yukon, Canada.

For further information, contact:

New Pacific Metals Corp.

Gordon Neal

President

Phone: (604) 633-1368

Fax: (604) 669-9387

info@newpacificmetals.com

www.newpacificmetals.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.

Cautionary Statements Regarding Estimates of Mineral Resources

This news release uses the terms measured, indicated and inferred resources as a relative measure of the level of confidence in the resource estimate. Readers are cautioned that mineral resources are not economic mineral reserves and that the economic viability of resources that are not mineral reserves has not been demonstrated. The estimate of mineral resources may be materially affected by geology, environmental, permitting, legal, title, socio-political, marketing or other relevant issues. The mineral resource estimate is classified in accordance with the Canadian Institute of Mining, Metallurgy and Petroleum's "CIM Definition Standards on Mineral Resources and Mineral Reserves" incorporated by reference into NI 43-101. Under Canadian rules, estimates of inferred mineral resources may not form the basis of feasibility or pre-feasibility studies or economic studies except for Preliminary Assessment as defined under NI 43-101. Readers are cautioned not to assume that further work on the stated resources will lead to mineral reserves that can be mined economically.

CAUTIONARY NOTE REGARDING FORWARD-LOOKING INFORMATION

Certain of the statements and information in this news release constitute forward-looking information within the meaning of applicable Canadian provincial securities laws. Any statements or information that express or involve discussions with respect to predictions, expectations, beliefs, plans, projections, objectives, assumptions or future events or performance (often, but not always, using words or phrases such as expects, is expected, anticipates, believes, plans, projects, estimates, assumes, intends, strategies, targets, goals, forecasts, objectives, budgets, schedules, potential or variations thereof or stating that certain actions, events or results may, could, would, might or will be taken, occur or be achieved, or the negative of any of these terms and similar expressions) are not statements of historical fact and may be forward-looking statements or information.

Forward-looking statements or information are subject to a variety of known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors that could cause actual events or results to differ from those reflected in the forward-looking statements or information, including, without limitation, risks relating to: fluctuating equity prices, bond prices, commodity prices; calculation of resources, reserves and mineralization, foreign exchange risks, interest rate risk, foreign investment risk; loss of key personnel; conflicts of interest; dependence on management and others.

This list is not exhaustive of the factors that may affect any of the Companys forward-looking statements or information. Forward-looking statements or information are statements about the future and are inherently uncertain, and actual achievements of the Company or other future events or conditions may differ materially from those reflected in the forward-looking statements or information due to a variety of risks, uncertainties and other factors, including, without limitation, those referred to in the Companys Annual Information Form for the year ended June 30, 2019 under the heading Risk Factors. Although the Company has attempted to identify important factors that could cause actual results to differ materially, there may be other factors that cause results not to be as anticipated, estimated, described or intended. Accordingly, readers should not place undue reliance on forward-looking statements or information.

The Companys forward-looking statements or information are based on the assumptions, beliefs, expectations and opinions of management as of the date of this news release, and other than as required by applicable securities laws, the Company does not assume any obligation to update forward-looking statements or information if circumstances or managements assumptions, beliefs, expectations or opinions should change, or changes in any other events affecting such statements or information. For the reasons set forth above, investors should not place undue reliance on forward-looking statements or information.

CAUTIONARY NOTE TO US INVESTORS

This news release has been prepared in accordance with the requirements of NI 43-101 and the Canadian Institute of Mining, Metallurgy and Petroleum Definition Standards, which differ from the requirements of U.S. Securities laws. NI 43-101 is a rule developed by the Canadian Securities Administrators that establishes standards for all public disclosure an issuer makes of scientific and technical information concerning mineral projects.
JACKSON, Mich., April 15, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- The Consumers Energy Foundation is supporting Michigan communities and an innovative solution to protect healthcare workers with over $600,000 in grants to help the continuing battle against COVID-19. These grants plus the $500,000 donations announced in March bring the Foundation's contribution to COVID-19 support to over $1 million.

"It's inspirational to see how Michiganders are stepping up to fight the COVID-19 virus," said Brandon Hofmeister, president of the Consumers Energy Foundation. "As our company continues to provide critical energy to Michigan's homes and hospitals, our foundation is honored to support the front line of this war against COVID  through providing additional protective equipment for doctors and nurses, helping our senior citizens stay safe in isolation, and ensuring everyone in Michigan has access to food."

Grants totaling $300,000 will be distributed to 30 community foundations supporting 45 counties across Consumers Energy's service territory.

"Consumers Energy Foundation's latest commitment to address the challenges of the coronavirus is an investment in local problem solving," said Kyle Caldwell, CEO of the Council of Michigan Foundations. "Michigan's community foundations are connected to the issues and nonprofits that are most relevant during this crisis. This latest grantmaking will go a long way in supporting local partnerships, front line nonprofits, United Ways and others helping Michiganders' resilience."

The Food Bank Council of Michigan is receiving $140,000 to support the production of 5,000 quarantine boxes for isolated and home-bound senior citizens, each containing a 7-day supply of nutritionally-balanced, shelf-stable food.

A $100,000 grant is going to Michigan State University to support the work of MSU Extension to develop an innovative process to help prevent the spread of COVID-19 using commercial ovens to decontaminate personal protection masks to help alleviate the shortage of personal protective equipment for doctors, nurses and other health care professionals.

"Our scientists in the Food Processing and Innovation Center were able to spool up this process in less than a week," said Jeff Dwyer, director of MSU Extension. "Having clean PPE, especially N95 masks has the potential to save lives in hospital settings in Michigan and throughout the world. We are grateful that the Consumers Energy Foundation saw the potential and is willing to help fund our front-line workers."

Another $90,000 will be distributed across Michigan to support local nonprofits addressing the crisis.

Separately, Consumers Energy President and CEO Patti Poppe and her husband, Eric, recently made a donation in the company's hometown of Jackson of $1 million for a relief fund to provide grants for small businesses struggling due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

The Foundation grants being announced today are in addition to the $500,000 it provided last month to the Food Bank Council of Michigan and the Michigan Association of United Ways. The Food Bank Council of Michigan will use $250,000 from these funds to help fill gaps where schools are unable to provide food for children, vulnerable seniors and those who need food for their families but cannot work due to COVID-19. The Michigan Association of United Ways is using the $250,000 from the Foundation to deploy emergency response activities in local communities, including to ensure sustainability to nonprofits so the organizations can continue addressing basic needs.

The Consumers Energy Foundation is the charitable arm of Consumers Energy, Michigan's largest energy provider. The foundation enables communities to thrive and grow by investing in what's most important to Michigan  its people, our planet and Michigan's prosperity. In 2019, the Consumers Energy Foundation, Consumers Energy, its employees and retirees contributed more than $11.5 million to Michigan nonprofits. For more information about the Consumers Energy Foundation, visit www.ConsumersEnergy.com/foundation.

Consumers Energy, Michigan's largest energy provider, is the principal subsidiary of CMS Energy (NYSE: CMS), providing natural gas and/or electricity to 6.7 million of the state's 10 million residents in all 68 Lower Peninsula counties.

For more information about Consumers Energy, go to www.ConsumersEnergy.com.

Check out Consumers Energy on Social Media

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/consumersenergymichigan

Twitter: https://twitter.com/consumersenergy

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/user/consumersenergy

Flickr: https://www.flickr.com/photos/consumersenergy



SOURCE Consumers Energy Foundation

Related Links

https://www.consumersenergy.com


Many residents are poor and do not have their own transportation to the testing facility, community leaders said, and many are elderly.

Theres a lot of anxiety around COVID-19, James said, People wondering who is walking around with it, are they positive, is their family positive  how are they going to get to (testing) sites far from their homes. It has really shown the disparity thats going on in our country and in our state.

The testing facility will be located at Windsor Health Center at 100 North Eighth Street and will be up and running by weeks end, East St. Louis Mayor Robert Eastern said Monday. State officials have said that the East St. Louis area will have three testing sites that will perform up to 470 tests per day.

In total in Illinois, there have been 23,247 reported cases of COVID-19 and 868 total deaths.

We are in fact bending the curve, Gov. J.B. Pritzker declared Tuesday, pointing out that the states doubling rate, or the number of days it takes to double the rate of confirmed cases, has fallen since April 1.
Frontier Communications Corporation FTR recently inked a Restructuring Support Agreement (RSA) with bondholders to secure adequate funds in order to reduce its huge debt burden and prop up liquidity to fuel long-term growth. The company has also filed petitions for bankruptcy protection under Chapter 11 of the United States Bankruptcy Code in the Southern District of New York.



Per the RSA, Frontier will trim its debt by more than $10 billion. The recapitalization plan further intends to offer the flexibility to sustain operations, while continuing to honor the financial obligations of the trade vendors for all goods and services provided before and after the bankruptcy filing. This, in turn, is likely to facilitate the smooth functioning of customer-oriented operations, without disrupting the services.



In addition, Frontier has secured $460 million worth of debtor-in-possession ("DIP") financing that is likely to augment its liquidity position to more than $1.1 billion, including about $700-million cash in hand. This is likely to offer a safety cushion to the company for implementing its restructuring plan. Moreover, it has sought the courts approval to expedite the asset sale transactions of its Washington, Oregon, Idaho and Montana operations and assets for $1.3 billion in cash.



Frontier is presently focusing on various cost-control initiatives by bringing about productivity and customer-oriented enhancements, thus improving efficiency in its daily operations. At the same time, the company has been targeting Small and Medium Businesses (SMBs). It has been enhancing its Ethernet capabilities, lately, and eyeing the retention of SMB customers with attractive plans.



For instance, of late, the company has been enhancing its product portfolio with a new cloud-based Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS) offering, which complements its Ethernet and SD-WAN offerings. While the major thrust remains on increasing the uptake of its services by SMB customers, Frontier is expanding its Fiber-based broadband footprint to cater to the needs of bigger customers as well. We are encouraged by the sustainable broadband subscriber growth supported by strong network expansion and an improved pricing structure.



The stock has lost 84.9% in the past year compared with the industrys decline of 47.2%.

Story continues





Frontier presently has a Zacks Rank #2 (Buy). Other similar-ranked stocks in the broader industry include ORBCOMM Inc. ORBC, T-Mobile US, Inc. TMUS and Iridium Communications Inc IRDM. You can see the complete list of todays Zacks #1 Rank (Strong Buy) stocks here.



ORBCOMM delivered a positive earnings surprise of 5.8%, on average, in the trailing four quarters.



T-Mobile has a long-term earnings growth expectation of 17.7%. It surpassed earnings estimates in the trailing four quarters, the average positive surprise being 19.5%.



Iridium delivered a positive earnings surprise of 14.1%, on average, in the trailing four quarters.



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These 31 photos chronicle some of the most trying times in the history of the American economy, including the current downturn in the wake of COVID-19.

This article was first published on Stacker
The Xperia 1 II, Sony's most expensive flagship, is edging ever closer to being released. Due this quarter, Sony has hinted that we could be just days away from a proper unveiling. The device's 1,119 (~US$1,227.40) launch price may be a sticking point for most people, though.

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The Xperia 1 II may finally be getting a release. Announced in February, the Xperia 1 II is Sony's next flagship smartphone. Featuring the obligatory Snapdragon 865, the device also has a 6.5-inch OLED panel and Sony's 21:9 aspect ratio.

Spotted with an IMX557 last month, plenty of mysteries remain about the Xperia 1 II. While Sony had originally stated that it would release the device in Q2 2020, the absence of release date updates since the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic suggested that the company had delayed proceedings.

Sony Espana is of the belief that the Xperia 1 II is still on track for Q2. Specifically, the subdivision has been informing people that the Xperia 1 II will land before the end of the month. Hence, we may be just days away from a proper launch.
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MTN has launched a R250-million relief package to help fight the coronavirus pandemic across the markets in which it operates.

MTN said it has tailored its response to contribute both in its home market, South Africa, as well as in many other markets facing challenges managing the pandemic.

The package comprises five intervention initiatives, focusing on employees, customers, vulnerable groups, contributions to the South African governments solidarity fund, and participating in industry interventions.

We believe it is the responsibility of all organisations to assist where they can during the pandemic, said MTN board chairman Mcebisi Jonas.

MTN plays a vital role in the mobile and telecommunications industry across Africa and the Middle East and it is vital that we assist our employees, customers and stakeholders during this difficult time.

Board and executive salary contributions

MTN plans to raise R40 million for the MTN Global Staff Emergency Fund, which caters for employees in need.

This contribution will be raised through contributions from the companys executives and board members.

The board chairman, Group CEO, Group CFO, and a number of other directors have pledged 30% of their salaries and board fees to be contributed to the fund for the next three months.

Executives from MTN Group and MTN South Africa have contributed to the fund, and other staff have also taken salary cuts to contribute to the fund.

MTN added that over R150 million will be invested in Yello Hope packages for customers, which include free SMSs, discounted calling during off-peak periods, zero-rating of essential services and websites, and payment concessions for business customers.

Utilising our services and technologies for the greater good is key at the moment, said MTN Group CEO Rob Shuter.

We can positively impact millions of lives and our main focus is on keeping our network in good working order and enable our customers to connect with their loved ones during this most difficult time for all.

MTN added that it will also contribute R10 million to the solidarity fund, and will continue to participate in initiatives which have been set up to assist vulnerable South Africans.
Hygiene conditions in government notified Covid-19 hospitals are not good and patients are complaining of bad hygiene and sanitation facilities. With the number of suspected patients in Hyderabad rising to 500, the isolation facilities are filled up.

There are complaints of 15 people using four bathrooms which are not cleaned properly. In fact some of them are asking family members to provide them with cleaners so that they can regularly clean the bathrooms themselves.

Patients who have mild symptoms but are positive have nothing to do except sleep and they are not told why they have been hospitalised. I am doing nothing but sleeping here. I get no medicines and the food is also not good. Why dont they let me go home? I am feeling like an orphan here, said one patient who has asked doctors this question too, but as they do not come close to him they have told him to rest and not ask too many questions.

Patients say that they are feeling helpless and are having difficulty coping with the environment around them.

Doctors wear personal protection equipment and seeing them in this garb makes patients feel as though they have got a very bad disease. One patient said, The doctors are acting differently as they do not speak to us and stand very far from us. They only ask if we have any breathing problems. If we say no we are asked to lie down and rest. Why are we being made to sleep here?

There are complaints of mosquitoes in the wards and patients dont get a good nights sleep. Those who require medication and need extra support are kept in special rooms. There a nurse visits morning and evening and doctors are also present.

The Covid-19 notified centres in Hyderabad are -only government hospitals - Gandhi, Fever, Chest, King Koti and four Ayush hospitals. Patients found positive and seriously affected are admitted here.

A senior health official explained, Due to these complaints from Covid-19 patients, some of them who are positive are not traceable as they have switched off their phones. We are not able to track them.

Covid-19 patients who can afford to pay do not want to go to government hospitals and are demanding that private hospitals should be allowed to admit them. The suspected patients are lining up at private hospitals and demanding that they be treated there.

Most of these patients are visiting government hospitals for the first time. A patients are saying, It is horrible and they cant believe that the government hospitals are so badly maintained. They want to go to private hospitals for treatment.
Green Party leader Eamon Ryan has been challenged by his own party members about the leaking of internal party matters to the press.

Mr Ryan has come under increased pressure in recent weeks after stories about the inner workings of his party and their views on government formation have appeared in the national media.

Political commentators have speculated about a split in the party, messaging which some within the Greens believe is coming from the leader himself.

In one instance, Mr Ryan was confronted about rumours that had emerged about the possibility of someone from the Green Party taking on the role of Tanaiste in a new coalition government.

When challenged by his parliamentary colleagues on the issue, Mr Ryan allegedly admitted to the leaks, but claimed he may have misspoken when speaking to journalists, two party sources have confirmed.

A source within the party said that Mr Ryan did not seem embarrassed about the issue.

The problem is with Eamon continuing to leak stuff to get his way, you cant hide a split, the source said.

Its not imagined that hes leaking either, its not paranoia from the membership, hes admitted it, when he was challenged on it, he wasnt embarrassed either.

He said: I mustve misspoken. 

Mr Ryan has publicly called for the suspension of government formation talks after his party threw their weight behind a unity government to deal with the Covid-19 pandemic.

Meanwhile, behind the scenes, he has attempted to persuade his party colleagues to get on board with a Fianna Fail/Fine Gael coalition, suggesting that they could concentrate on headline issues such as health, housing, and the environment.

You wouldve hoped we would keep our eye on policy, thats what we promised people during the election, a source in the Green Party added.

He doesnt seem to have been burned at all about his last time in government. I dont think he gets what is on the line here.

People tell him all the time what a competent minister he was, and he loves to hear it, but theres people within the party who disagree.

All of this is about his personal trajectory, hed jump into Cabinet right this second if he could get a ministry.

It seems now Eamon wants to be the Tanaiste, and thats all the matters to him.

The TDs who were elected in February had no idea about his motivations.

The Green Party would have to get any coalition deal approved by two thirds of their membership. This could prove to be a difficult task, and one that many believe the younger membership of the Green Party would not vote for.

If we dont have our principles, whats the point of the Greens? the source said.

For all his leaking and dirty tricks, its not going to get across the membership in a vote, it doesnt seem to have any impact.

Another source within the party who confirmed the confrontation took place, said that it is clear theres a difference of opinion within the party about government formation.

Its fair to say Eamon has a goal, and he is relentless in pursuing those goals.

Mr Ryan has been repeatedly approached for comment.
WASHINGTON  The Navy is looking into whether it can reinstate Capt. Brett E. Crozier, who was removed from command of the carrier Theodore Roosevelt after he pleaded for more help fighting a novel coronavirus outbreak aboard his ship, Defense Department officials said Wednesday.

Adm. Michael Gilday, chief of naval operations, has indicated that he may reinstate Crozier, who is viewed as a hero by his crew for putting their lives above his career, officials said.

No final decisions have been made, Cmdr. Nate Christensen, a spokesman for the admiral, said in a statement to The New York Times on Wednesday. Christensen added that Gilday was reviewing the findings of a preliminary investigation into the events surrounding Croziers removal.

But Gildays decision could be upended by President Donald Trump, who has not been shy about intervening in military personnel cases. Just five months ago, Trump fired Navy Secretary Richard Spencer for opposing the presidents intervention in support of a Navy SEAL accused of murdering a wounded captive with a hunting knife during a deployment to Iraq in 2017.

No one in the Navy wants a repeat of those events, which came complete with Trump on Twitter admonishing the Navy leaderships handling of the SEAL case. But Navy officials insist that Gilday will make a decision based on the findings of the investigation into the Roosevelt crisis, and not on what he thinks the president wants him to do.

Trump himself has indicated he may be open to reassessing the events around the firing. He said recently that Crozier made a mistake, but he also noted that the captain had a bad day. It remained unclear how the president would view a move to reinstate Crozier, or when action would be taken.

Crozier, who is in isolation on Guam with coronavirus, was removed from command on April 2 by Thomas Modly, the acting Navy secretary at the time, a move that drew outrage among the carriers crew and across the country and eventually led to Modlys resignation.

Gilday and Gen. Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, had both cautioned Modly not to fire Crozier until after an investigation into the case has been completed. Modly, believing Trump wanted the captain fired, ignored them, officials said.

As of Wednesday, 615 Roosevelt crew members have tested positive for coronavirus; five are in the hospital with one in intensive care, and one has died. The death of the sailor on Monday was a poignant punctuation to Croziers March 30 plea for help, after four days of being rebuffed by his superiors in his request to evacuate the ship, because, he wrote, sailors dont need to die.

That plea, sent in an email to 20 Navy personnel, became public and angered Modly, which led to his decision to remove the captain from his post.

Gilday indicated last week that he was open to the possibility of reinstating Crozier once the preliminary investigation was completed. I am taking no options off the table as I review that investigation, he told reporters. I think that is my responsibility.

Any decision to reinstate Crozier would come with its own problems. Navy officials remain unhappy with the captains decision to send an unclassified letter pleading for help to so many people, instead of relying on his chain of command. For the Navy to reinstate him, Gilday would have to determine that Croziers superiors were not being adequately responsive to his pleas for help before he sent the letter, Navy officials said.

More for you 22 million unemployed, wiping out decade of U.S. job gains

Gilday already has the findings of an initial investigation into the Roosevelt case. But that investigation was conducted by Adm. Robert Burke, the Navys second-highest admiral, who was involved in the situation aboard Roosevelt. It was Burke who, as part of the investigation, called the senior medical officer aboard the ship and criticized the doctor, saying he had failed as a leader, according to crew members.

In the run-up to Croziers letter, the ships medical staff and the captain advocated swift, decisive action, while Croziers immediate boss, Rear Adm. Stuart Baker, countered that less drastic measures would still protect the crew and leave the Roosevelt in operation.

Gilday told reporters earlier this month that a focus of the investigation was determining why Crozier, a Naval Academy graduate with nearly 30 years of service, felt compelled to send his four-page letter outside normal communications channels and whether that illustrated a breakdown in communications with his chain of command, particularly with Baker. The Navy has said Crozier did not copy Baker on his letter.

Before the results are made public, Gilday will consult with the new acting Navy secretary, James McPherson, as well as with Defense Secretary Mark Esper and Milley.

The Navy investigation now in progress should take its time and make sure we truly understand the detailed ticktock of events that preceded the letter launched by Capt. Crozier, said James G. Stavridis, a retired admiral and former top commander of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. If it becomes clear that his chain of command was not responsive, it makes a potential case for rehabilitation much stronger.

Esper, the Pentagons top civilian, has not indicated where he stands on the investigation. Appearing on Fox News on Wednesday, he appeared to acknowledge that he may eventually have to weigh in. At some point it likely will come to me, he said. But the most important thing though is taking care of our sailors who are now in Guam.

The investigation will not examine why the Roosevelt, and its nearly 5,000 crew members, made a long-scheduled, four-day port call in Da Nang, Vietnam, beginning on March 5, despite reported cases of coronavirus in the country.

The top U.S. military officer in Pacific, Adm. Philip Davidson, ordered the visit to proceed as a show of American military might in a region increasingly worried about Chinas growing territorial claims in the South China Sea.

Navy and Pentagon officials have since defended the decision, saying there were only a handful of reported coronavirus cases, mostly in the northern part of the country, at the time the Roosevelt pulled in. Navy officials publicly say they are not sure how the virus got aboard the ship, but privately acknowledge that it almost certainly happened during the port call.

In Guam, many among the Roosevelts crew say they are hoping Crozier will return as their captain. One crew member described his fired commander as having proved prescient during every chapter of the crisis. While the ships interim commander, Capt. Carlos Sardiello, who commanded the Roosevelt previously, is viewed favorably by much of the crew, he is not seen to be as receptive to them as Crozier was when he was in charge.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
The UK will not follow Donald Trump by freezing hundreds of millions of pounds in funding for the World Health Organisation, Downing Street insisted today.

The PM's spokesman said the government believes the WHO has an 'important role to play' in the global response to coronavirus.

The US president launched an extraordinary attack on the 'China-centric' UN agency overnight, putting $500million in funding on hold while an investigation is conducted into its handling of the pandemic.

Mr Trump singled out what he called the WHO's 'dangerous and costly decision' to argue against international travel bans to combat the pandemic.

London's divergence from Washington comes as Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab prepares to come face-to-face, via webcam, with the US president.

He will represent the UK at a virtual G7 conference chaired by Mr Trump tomorrow afternoon, as Boris Johnson continues his recovery from coronavirus.

President Trump announced yesterday (pictured) that he was halting all US funding to the World Health Organization over its response to the coronavirus pandemic

Dominic Raab is due to stand in for Boris Johnson at a G7 conference call tomorrow

The US move has sparked a backlash from Beijing, as well as health experts who insist it is not the right time to be stopping the cashflow.

Other major donors including the EU and Australia have made clear they will continue with funding.

The PM's spokesman said this afternoon that the UK's contribution - usually around 200million a year - would not be withheld.

'Our position is that the UK has no plans to stop funding the WHO, which has an important role to play in leading the global health response,' the spokesman said.

'Coronavirus is a global challenge and it's essential that countries work together to tackle this shared threat.'

Asked if the Government was disappointed by Donald Trump's move, the spokesman said: 'I can only set out the UK's position and that is we have no plans to stop funding the WHO.'

The spokesman sidestepped a question over whether the UK will step in to plug the funding gap left by US.

'We are a key donor already, contributing 75million to help it lead international efforts to stop the spread of the virus.'

The spokesman also confirmed Mr Raab will call for 'global collaboration' when he dials into the meeting tomorrow.

The Prime Minister's official spokesman told reporters this morning The G7 is committed to doing whatever it takes to tackle this pandemic.

'The Foreign Secretary will underline the need for global collaboration to tackle this crisis.

'This includes increasing the speed and scale of production of vaccines, treatments and tests internationally.

He will also encourage co-ordination on the economic response to the virus and G7 to support vulnerable countries.

The WHO's funding comes from 'assessed' contributions - required to be a member - and 'voluntary' contributions.

The UK's total in 2018 came to around $220million - although it has injected more this year to combat coronavirus.

The US is the largest single contributor to the WHO, paying in some $893million between 2018 and 2019 which made up around 15 per cent of the agency's total budget during that period.

So far in 2020 the US has agreed to pay some $57million in assessed contributions to the WHO - the largest single payment by a country.

The Trump administration has been fighting to reduce spending on foreign aid budgets including contributions to the WHO for at least three years, Foreign Policy reported, but had been repeatedly slapped down by Congress.

Announcing the move to suspend funding Tuesday, Trump suggested the WHO had been doing the bidding of China, where the coronavirus outbreak began before spreading to the United States.

Trump pointed to the funding disparities between the two countries, which both fund the WHO.

The president said while American taxpayers pay around $400 to $500 million annually to the WHO, China pays a 10th of that, at around $40 million a year.

The World Health Organization and its head Tedros Ghebreyesus (left), has come in for criticism over its handling of the pandemic, including accusations that it parroted Chinese government propaganda and was too quick to praise the regime (pictured right, Chinese leader Xi Jinping)

No human-to-human transmission, no travel bans, but plenty of praise for Beijing: How WHO parroted Chinese lies as coronavirus pandemic unfolded

By Chris Pleasance for MailOnline

The World Heath Organisation has found itself with serious questions to answer after President Trump accused the UN agency of 'severely mismanaging' its response to the coronavirus pandemic and withheld $500million in funding.

The WHO has been spearheading global efforts to fight the virus, but has come under attack for playing along with China as the country sought to minimise its initial outbreak and the threat the disease posed.

Critics point to its uncritical parroting of Chinese government data, early claims that the disease was not spreading person-to-person, and praise for the country's leaders as evidence that it was not fulfilling its role.

Trump - who is facing heavy criticism for his own response - has blasted the WHO for advising against travel bans, which he claims 'accelerated the pandemic all around the world', and called for an investigation.

Here, the Mail Online has tracked key WHO statements about coronavirus - from the first cases, through China's outbreak, and beyond - to reveal what the world's largest health body said and when as the disease spread...

Donald Trump gives a briefing at the White House on Tuesday announcing that he will suspend all US funding to the World Health Organisation

December 31  China first reports a cluster of unusual pneumonia cases in Wuhan to the WHO

January 4  WHO tweets about a cluster of pneumonia cases in Wuhan with no deaths, saying investigations into the cause are underway

January 5  The WHO issues its first guidance on pneumonia of unknown cause, saying there are a total of 44 patients and 11 in severe condition. The main symptom is listed as fever, with a few patients having difficulty breathing

The WHO says there is no evidence of human-to-human transmission and that no health care worker infections have been reported

January 7  China says it has identified the cause of the pneumonia as a novel coronavirus, initially named 2019-nCoV by the WHO

China first reported cases of 'pneumonia of unknown cause' to the WHO on December 31, and the agency put out its first tweet on January 4 saying the cause was being investigated

January 9  The WHO praises China for identifying the new virus in a short space of time and repeats its assessment that the virus does not transmit readily between people. It also advises against travel or trade restrictions on China

January 13  The WHO says it is now working with authorities in Thailand after reports of a case there, and may call a meeting of the Emergency Committee

January 14  The WHO tweets saying there is no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission in China, though later clarifies and says there may have been limited transmission via family members

Jan 20-21 - WHO's field team in China conducts a brief field visit to epicentre Wuhan

Jan 21  The first case is confirmed on US soil in Washington, in a person who had travelled from China a week before

Jan 22  A report from the WHO team sent to Wuhan notes human-to-human transmission is taking place, but says more research is needed to assess the full extent. The report notes confirmed infections in 16 medics, a clear sign of transmission from patients

The team recommends avoiding large gatherings, isolating infected people, and a focus on washing hands as the best way to combat the viruss spread

The same day, that WHO Emergency Committee convenes for the first time. Afterwards, Dr Tedros says he has spoken with the Chinese Minister for Health, and praises the government for its invaluable efforts to halt the virus. He calls a second meeting for the following day

Jan 23  With the Emergency Committee split, Dr Tedros says he has decided not to declare the virus a public health emergency of international concern. Referencing the lockdown of Wuhan, which was announced the same day, he says he hopes it will be effective and short in duration. He praises Chinas cooperation and transparency in tackling the virus

Dr Tedros says there is limited evidence of human-to-human transmission, mostly among families or doctors treating the virus. At this point, there are 584 confirmed cases and 17 deaths globally, including in Vietnam, South Korea, Japan, Thailand and the US

On January 14, more than a month after the first infections at this seafood market are thought to have taken place, the WHO tweeted saying China had found no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission

He recommends screening at airports and tells countries to put testing facilities in place, but stops short of recommending a travel ban

Jan 28  Dr Tedros and other senior WHO officials meet Xi Jinping in China, agreeing that a panel of experts should be sent to monitor the outbreak. He praises the seriousness with which China is taking this outbreak, especially the commitment from top leadership and the transparency they have demonstrated

Jan 29  Dr Tedros gives a speech praising Chinas efforts to contain the virus, saying the country deserves our gratitude and respect for locking down swathes of the country to prevent the spread.

He notes a few cases of human-to-human spread outside China, which he says is of grave concern and will be monitored closely

Jan 30  The WHO Emergency Committee reconvenes early and declares a public health emergency of international concern. It comes after confirmed cases of human-to-human transmission in Germany, Japan, Vietnam and the US

Dr Tedros again praises China for setting a new standard for outbreak response with its lockdowns, and says the small number of cases outside the country  98  is thanks to their efforts

Despite noting that a majority of cases outside China have a history of travel to or from Wuhan, he again recommends no measures to curb international travel or trade

Jan 31  Donald Trump announces travel restrictions on people coming from China

Feb 3  Dr Tedros gives a speech to the WHO updating on coronavirus, saying there are 17,238 cases in China and 361 deaths  now thought to be an under-estimate

He praises Xi Jinping for his individual leadership, and insists that cases outside China can be managed if world authorities work together and follow recommendations which include  no ban on travel or trade, supporting countries with weak health systems, investment in vaccines and diagnosis, combating disinformation and urgent reviews of emergency preparedness

Feb 7  Dr Li Wenliang, a doctor who first reported the existence of coronavirus and was initially silenced by China, dies from the virus

Feb 10  The WHOs team of experts arrives in China to assist with the outbreak

Feb 11  The WHO names the disease caused by the virus COVID-19, saying it avoided including a geographical name because it risks stigmatizing people. It says it will not be using the name SARS-CoV-2 because it risks causing unnecessary fear by linking it to the 2003 SARS outbreak

Tedros Ghebreyesus, WHO Secretary-General, pleaded for world leaders to refrain from politicising the virus 'unless you want more body bags'

Feb 12  Dr Tedros says the number of new cases being reported in China has stabilised but adds that it must be interpreted with extreme caution and the outbreak could still go in any direction

Feb 16-24  WHO team of experts convenes in China, visiting affected sites and sharing information on the best ways to tackle the crisis

Feb 17  Dr Tedros begins chairing daily updates on the coronavirus response, with each briefing beginning with an update on the number of infections including from China, which are repeated without caveats

He give an analysis of Chinese data on some 44,000 confirmed cases. He says the data shows that 80 per cent of cases are mild, 14 per cent lead to severe disease, and 2 per cent are fatal. The disease is more severe in older people, with the young largely spared.

He urges world leaders not to squander a window of opportunity to get ahead of the virus and prevent it from spreading

Feb 26  Donald Trump announces a dedicated coronavirus response team, which Mike Pence will lead

Feb 28  The team of WHO experts delivers its first report on the coronavirus. Among its major findings are that the disease likely came from bats, that it is spread through close contact with infected people and not through the air, and that most common symptoms include fever, dry cough and fatigue

The report praises Chinas response as perhaps the most ambitious, agile and aggressive disease containment effort in history saying lockdowns were achieved due to the deep commitment of the Chinese people to collective action and had achieved a rapid decline in cases

Mar 9 - The whole of Italy is placed on lockdown as the virus spreads, the first European nation to enter total lockdown

Mar 11 - The WHO declares coronavirus a pandemic, meaning it is spreading out of control in multiple locations around the world. At this point, cases have been reported in more than 100 countries

Mar 13 - WHO says Europe is now the new epicentre of the virus after cases increase steeply, with Dr Tedros noting more cases are now being reported every day than were reported in China at the height of its epidemic

Mar 19 - China reports no new domestic infections from coronavirus since the pandemic began

The pandemic has now infected some 2million people worldwide, with 128,000 confirmed deaths (pictured, a hospital in Italy)

Mar 20 - Dr Tedros issues a warning that 'young people are not invincible' to the virus after data from outside showed large numbers of people under the age of 50 ending up in intensive care

Mar 25 - As Donald Trump begins touting hydroxychloroquine as a potential coronavirus treatment, WHO warns that no drugs have so far been approved for treating the virus

The same day the organization calls for an extra $2billion in funding to help tackle the virus

Apr 3 - As millions of US citizens sign on for unemployment benefit, Dr Tedros and the IMF call for debt relief and social welfare to help people through the pandemic

Apr 6 - The WHO updates its guidance on masks to say they are effective at stopping spread of the virus, but must be used in conjunction with other methods.

It comes after the CDC updated its guidance to advise people to wear masks in public

Apr 8 - Following Trump's first barrage of criticism for the WHO, Dr Tedros urges world leaders to 'stop politicising the pandemic' unless they want 'more body bags'

Apr 13 - A group of scientists convened by WHO to research a vaccine for coronavirus issue a joint statement urging world leaders to keep listening to the scientific community when responding to the virus
Every year, the American Ornithological Society presents a range of awards honoring members for their research and volunteer work. The work of the 2020 awardees spans a diversity of ornithological disciplines from genetics to landscape ecology in a range of habitats around the world, as well as invaluable service to AOS and ornithology. This year's slate of awardees represents just a small sample of the broad diversity of the society's members and the contributions they are making to the scientific study and conservation of birds.

"In 2020, we once again have the pleasure of recognizing the impressive talent and incredible achievements of ornithologists at both early and senior career stages," says AOS president Kathy Martin. "Presenting the achievements of the award winners for this year provides a ray of sunshine as we contemplate living with the current global challenges of 2020."

SENIOR PROFESSIONAL AWARDS

The William Brewster Memorial Award is given each year to the author or coauthors of the most meritorious body of work (book, monograph, or series of related papers) on birds of the Western Hemisphere published during the past ten years. In 2020, AOS is continuing the tradition begun last year of presenting two separate Brewster Medals, one to Regina Macedo and one to John Rotenberry. Dr. Macedo, Associate Professor in the Department of Zoology at Brazil's University of Brasilia, is being recognized for her pioneering role as an avian behavioral ecologist in Brazil and her achievements in the fields of sexual selection, the evolution of cooperation and sociality, and communication systems in Western Hemisphere Neotropical birds. Dr. Rotenberry is Professor Emeritus of Evolution, Ecology, and Organismal Biology at the University of California, Riverside and is currently an Associate in the Department of Ecology, Evolution, and Behavior at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities, and he is being recognized for his major contributions to our understanding of the community ecology of the birds of shrub-steppe ecosystems.

The 2020 Elliott Coues Achievement Award, recognizing outstanding and innovative contributions to ornithological research, will also be presented to two separate recipients, Andre Dhondt and Tom Smith. Dr. Dhondt, the Edwin H. Morgens Professor of Ornithology at the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology, has made major contributions to the study of the ecology of hole-nesting birds and of disease dynamics in the wild. Dr. Smith, Professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of California at Los Angeles, is known for his contributions to our understanding of the speciation and distributions of tropical birds, with a focus on how diversity is generated and maintained in tropical rainforests.

The 2020 Ralph W. Schreiber Conservation Award, honoring extraordinary conservation-related scientific contributions by an individual or small team, will be presented to Jaime Collazo. Dr. Collazo is a Professor of Applied Ecology at North Carolina State University and Assistant Unit Leader for NC Cooperative Fish and Wildlife Research and has made immense contributions to almost every aspect of avian conservation in his native Puerto Rico for more than 40 years.

The 2020 Loye and Alden Miller Research Award, given annually for lifetime achievement in ornithological research, will be presented to Erica Nol. Dr. Nol, Chair of the Biology Department at Canada's Trent University, has an international reputation for her work on the ecology and conservation of migratory shorebirds and songbirds in the Western Hemisphere and is considered one of the top avian ecologists in Canada.

EARLY PROFESSIONAL AWARDS

The James G. Cooper Early Professional Award and the Ned K. Johnson Early Investigator Award are presented annually to recognize outstanding and promising work by researchers early in their careers.

The 2020 James G. Cooper Early Professional Award will be presented to Nick Mason. Currently an NSF postdoctoral fellow at the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology at the University of California-Berkeley, Dr. Mason has an exemplary record of service to AOS, and his publication record includes well-cited papers on Horned Lark plumage adaptation, redpoll transcriptomics, and tanager signal evolution.

Two Ned K. Johnson Early Investigator Awards are being presented in 2020, one to Sara Kaiser and one to Jennifer Walsh. Dr. Kaiser is the Director of the Hubbard Brook Field Ornithology Program at the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology, where her research focuses on the ways in which the environment affects the evolution of complex social behaviors. Dr. Walsh is a postdoctoral associate at the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology and has studied the behavior, ecology, conservation, and genomics of Saltmarsh and Nelson's sparrows, addressing nearly every aspect of their biology.

SERVICE AWARDS

The Marion Jenkinson Service Award and Peter R. Stettenheim Service Award are given to individuals who have performed continued, extensive service to AOS.

The 2020 Marion Jenkinson Service Award will be presented to Michael Butler. An Associate Professor of Biology at Lafayette College, Dr. Butler's record of service to AOS and the former Cooper Ornithological Society and American Ornithologists' Union includes extensive involvement in the Society's annual meetings, judging student presentation awards, organizing symposia and social events, and chairing sessions. Dr. Butler joined the AOS Membership Committee in 2015 and has chaired the committee since 2016, and as part of his work with the committee he co-authored a paper in The Auk: Ornithological Advances in 2016 summarizing society member survey data to help guide the society's strategic planning process.

The 2019 Peter R. Stettenheim Service Award will be presented to Susan Haig. Currently a Senior Scientist Emeritus with the USGS Forest and Rangeland Ecosystem Center, Dr. Haig has served the AOU and AOS in numerous ways, including chairing both the Membership Committee (1999-2002, continuing as a member until 2006) and the International Affairs Committee (2002-2004, continuing as a member until 2010) and serving as an Elective Councilor (2009-2010) and later President of the AOU (2012-2014). Perhaps one of Dr. Haig's most influential roles has been as the AOU representative to a committee that evaluated the possibility of forming a federation of ornithological societies, the early seeds of an effort that culminated six years later in the merger of the AOU and COS to create AOS.

PUBLICATIONS AWARDS

The 2020 Katma Award, given to the author(s) of a publication in any journal that offers unconventional ideas or innovative approaches in the study of birds, will be presented to Mikus Abolins-Abols and Mark E. Hauber for their paper "Host defences against avian brood parasitism: an endocrine perspective," published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B in 2018. Abolins-Abols and Hauber argue that progress in answering lingering questions about birds' defenses against brood parasitism will come through a fresh perspective provided by an endocrinological approach that identifies the proximate mechanisms underlying host behavior.

The 2020 Brina C. Kessel Award, given in even-numbered years to the author of an outstanding paper published in the two preceding years in the AOS journal The Auk: Ornithological Advances, will be presented to Corey Tarwater, Ryan Germain, and Peter Arcese for their 2018 paper "Examination of context-dependent effects of natal traits on lifetime reproductive success using a long-term study of a temperate songbird." This paper, based on a long-running study of a Song Sparrow population on an island off the coast of British Columbia, showed that survival and lifetime reproductive success were heavily affected by a suite of natal characters, but that maternal age and inbreeding coefficient affected both traits.

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Apple is recovering some of its iPhone sales losses in China as coronavirus lockdown measures there are being eased.

The tech giant shipped roughly 2.5m iPhones in China this month, according to recently published Chinese government figures.
The petitions are multifaceted but the ongoing coronavirus crisis remain a recurring topic.

14 new petitions are now open to signatures on the website of the Chamber of Deputies.

The petitions need to obtain at least 4,500 signatures until 26 May in order to be considered by parliament.

One of them for example seeks a more extensive tobacco ban while another petition demands that World Women's Day become a national holiday.

The ongoing Covid-19 crisis also remains a topic for debate. In this context, one petitioner demands that Luxembourg's medical staff receive a bonus for their tireless efforts during the pandemic.

More details on the various petitions can be found on the CHD.lu website. They have to be signed online.

The complete list

Stop tobacco (1510)

Making Women's Day a national holiday (1511)

Mental health in the school sector - pupils to see psychologist every two years (1516)

Equal distribution of contributions to pension plans for married couples and couples registered in civil partnership (PACS) (1520)

French subtitles for official speeches on Covid-19 (1523)

Creation of a solidarity fund for businesses closed during the pandemic, financed by businesses that were allowed to remain open (1525)

Suspension of repayments of real estate and personal loans during crisis (1527)

Extensive screening campaign for coronavirus (1528)

Creation of an official ID for employees in medical and care sector (1529)

Employees to benefit from half a day off to donate blood (1530)

Virtual school during confinement (1531)

Bonus for medical staff (1535)

Financial aid for SMEs and self-employed individuals during crisis (1536)

Resignation of Spuerkees management board for lack of interest in welfare of population (1501)

11 existing petitions online again

11 petitions had been put on hold when the state of emergency was declared. These petitions are now open to signatures again for 27 days.
D onald Trump has instructed his administration to temporarily halt funding to the World Health Organisation over its handling of the coronavirus pandemic.

The US President said the WHO had "failed in its basic duty and it must be held accountable as the crisis continues to grip the world.

At his daily White House briefing, Mr Trump said the group had promoted China's "disinformation" about the virus that likely led to a wider outbreak of the virus than otherwise would have occurred.

Payments to the organisation will be suspended pending a review of its warnings about Covid-19 and China, the US leader said on Tuesday.

President Donald Trump speaks about the coronavirus in the Rose Garden of the White House on Tuesday / AP

The US is the biggest overall donor to the Geneva-based WHO, contributing more than $400 million (316m) in 2019, roughly 15 per cent of its budget.

The hold on funding was expected. Mr Trump has been increasingly critical of the organisation as the global health crisis has continued, and he has reacted angrily to criticism of his administration's response.

Announcing the move, Mr Trump said there was credible information in December to suspect human-to-human transmission and the WHO did not respond appropriately.

So much death has been caused by their mistakes, Mr Trump said.

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But the president said the US would continue to engage with the organisation in pursuit of what he called meaningful reforms.

The decision drew immediate condemnation.

American Medical Association President Dr Patrice Harris called it "a dangerous step in the wrong direction that will not make defeating Covid-19 easier" and urged Mr Trump to reconsider.

Democratic Representative Nita Lowey, who heads the U.S. House of Representatives Committee that sets government spending, said Mr Trump was making a mistake.

Trump: I will decide on easing coronavirus guidelines

"The coronavirus cannot just be defeated here in the United States, it has to be defeated in every conceivable location throughout the world," she said in a statement.

Mr Trump had earlier threatened to cease sending US funds to the WHO, claiming that the international body "missed the call" on the pandemic.

He said the organisation was "very China-centric" in its approach, seemingly suggesting that the WHO had gone along with Beijing's efforts months ago to minimise the severity of the outbreak.

The WHO has praised China for its transparency on the virus, even though there has been reason to believe that more people died of Covid-19 than the country's official tally.

"They should have known and they probably did know," Mr Trump had said of WHO officials.

When he previously threatened to cut funds, Mr Trump backtracked and said he would strongly consider it.

Senior WHO officials pushed back at Mr Trumps calls to withhold funding from the organisation.

We are still in the acute phase of a pandemic, so now is not the time to cut back on funding, Dr Hans Kluge, the WHO regional director for Europe, told a virtual briefing last week in response to a question about Mr Trumps remarks.
As tourism continues its global shutdown because of coronavirus, one of the least-visited and most remote parts of Europe is offering frustrated travellers the chance to be remote tourists.

The Faroe Islands  the archipelago of 18 islands between Scotland and Iceland  is offering travellers stuck at home with only a device for company to explore the destination through the eyes of a local

A new online portal presents the opportunity to take virtual control of an islander, to go hiking, kayaking or on a helicopter trip.

Tourists are currently banned from the Faroe Islands, which normally welcomes 130,000 visitors a year.

The islands tourist board has now created what it claims to be the worlds first remote tourism tool.

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Users who visit remote-tourism.com get the chance to take control of a local by means of a mobile, tablet or computer for an hour.

As with a real-life computer game, the player will control the moves of the Faroese islander: asking them to turn, walk, run or jump.

The local is equipped with a live video camera, allowing people to not only see views but also ensure their instructions are obeyed.

You can explore the Faroes rugged mountains, see close-up its cascading waterfalls and spot the traditional grass-roofed houses, promises the tourism board.

Moves that jeopardise the travellers safety are not permitted.

The virtual tours will take place once or twice daily until 25 April or later.

Gudrid Hojgaard, director of Visit Faroe Islands, said: When the travel bans began to escalate, we wondered how we could recreate a Faroe Islands experience for those who had to cancel or postpone their trip to the Faroe Islands, and for everyone else stuck at home.

We believe that our remote islands are the perfect place to inspire people in lockdown  and, naturally, we hope to welcome them in person once everyone is free to travel again.

The Faroe Islands will remain closed to tourists until the end of April at the earliest.

Separately Czech Tourism and the brewer Budvar has promised to deliver care packages of Czech beer to UK travellers forced to cancel trips to the republic.

The offer is open to the first 500 frustrated tourists who submit evidence online of a planned journey to the Czech Republic that has been axed because of Covid-19.
Wednesday, April 15, 2020

The Herman Trend Alert

April 15, 2020

Wasting Food versus Feeding People

While this Herman Trend Alert focuses on the dislocation of food in the US, this solution could work for small and large farms worldwide.

Many of you may have seen on television or read the New York Times article about the fact that farmers are ploughing over their fields rather than harvesting the vegetables or about dairy farmers dumping thousands of gallons of milk or about poultry farmers smashing millions of eggs. To have this happen when thousands of families are waiting in lines at under-resourced food banks was very disturbing to me. Something is very wrong with this picture!

Why is this happening?



With more than half of the restaurants and almost all of the hotels shut down and the cruise lines on hiatus, all of the produce, all of the eggs, all of the meat and poultry, and all of the dairy to serve their guests is simply not needed. To give you an idea of the extent of this waste, according to estimates from the country's largest dairy cooperative, Dairy Farmers of America, their farmers are dumping 3.7 million gallons of milk each day and one chicken processor is crushing three-quarters of a million eggs every week. At the same time, hundreds of thousands of families are lining up in their cars at food banks throughout the United States waiting for the bags and boxes they need to feed their families.

The problems that must be solved



1. Either the farmers currently destroying their production must be paid for their goods or they must be given tax breaks or both.



2. A food logistics company is needed to help with the myraid details involved with supply chain.



3. Once logistics are handled, we will need trucking companies to move the goods to where they are most needed.



4. But wait, there is more: the farmers produce and ship the goods in very large quantities and most food banks are simply not equipped to break them down. So, we also need processing facilities for repackaging the eggs, dairy, cheese, meat, poultry, etc.

What is needed



1. Some organization (government or non-profit) needs to pay for the food or Congress must give the farmers tax breaks or perhaps, both.



2. We need service companies like Sysco, Jeronimo Martins, Farmer Brothers, US Foods, and Gordon Food Service to handle the logistics.



3. Third, we will need trucking companies like Old Dominion, J.B. Hunt, YRC, and Schneider to step up to the plate and offer to move the goods to where they are most needed.



4. Either the food banks like The Food Bank of the Southern Tier in Corning, New York which traditionally has done this kind of repackaging or we may need to establish new processing facilities for reapportioning the eggs, dairy, cheese, meat, poultry, etc.

We can do this!



The US has some of the greatest minds in the world; we should be able to figure this out. It may require thinking outside of our traditional boxes, but we have the technology and we have the service companies. Where are the philanthropists and innovators who could help make this happen? I could not sit idly by and not bring this situation to your attention.

To read the referenced article, visit the New York Times.

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Read this Herman Trend Alert on the web: http://www.hermangroup.com/alert/archive 4-15-2020.h tml

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Married At First Sight's Hayley Vernon complained about her self-isolation struggles on Wednesday amid the coronavirus pandemic.

The 32-year-old bodybuilder shared her first-world woes on Instagram stories, revealing to fans she was forced to paint her nails, wax her eyebrows and use a self-tanner while at home.

'So I've got a couple of things to say. Basically, I'm really missing the girls at Feeling Smooth [beauty salon]. It is 1902 up in this house,' Hayley said, clutching a roll of toilet paper.

First world problems! Married At First Sight star Hayley Vernon (pictured) shared her isolation struggles, as she's forced to use canned self-tanner, paint her nails and wax her own eyebrows

She added: 'I'm painting my own nails. I just realised that if you paint your own nails a dark colour and you've got short nails and no SNS, your fingers will resemble fish fingers.

'I also have a hole in my eyebrow after trying to wax my eyebrows and I've had to tan myself out of a can.

'I can do this. Love that for me,' Hayley sulked.

Help! 'I also have a hole in my eyebrow after trying to wax my eyebrows and I've had to tan myself out of a can,' said Hayley

After her disastrous attempt, the controversial bride decided she would only do cosmetic treatments to herself after consulting with her favourite salon.

'Why? Because I go to an accountant to do my bookkeeping, I've been going to these girls for so many years to get my skin done.

'Why the f**k did I think I could do it myself? I can't. Anyway, lesson learned. Calling you girls tomorrow,' she said.

Hayley showed off her expansive leg tattoo in the footage, which she had finished in Bali during a holiday in December.

Wise: After her disastrous attempt, the controversial bride decided she would only do cosmetic treatments to herself after consulting with her favourite salon

Hayley has not only added more ink to her body since debuting on the controversial series, but she's also just finished her post-show celebrity makeover.

The TV star has transformed her look with veneers, Botox and filler treatments since leaving the show and parting ways with TV 'husband' David Cannon.

Earlier this month, Hayley said that years of clenching her jaw while weight training and wearing a mouthguard at night had made her jaw become 'more prominent'.

She said this had made her face 'quite square' and made her feel insecure.

Tatt's huge! Married At First Sight bride Hayley Vernon has given fans a closer look at her large leg tattoo after undergoing a post-show celebrity makeover

To physically change this, Hayley said it required 'quite a lot of Botox' being injected into her masseter muscle, as well as some dermal filler in her cheeks.

Hayley is also fan of lip filler and also received veneers worth up $30,000 for free after filming wrapped.

Hayley's cosmetic transformation began in 2018 when she underwent a breast augmentation in Bangkok, Thailand.
A person walk a dog near McDonald's in Union Square during the coronavirus pandemic on April 14, 2020 in New York City.

The coronavirus pandemic is straining McDonald's relationship with its U.S. franchisees once again.

The fast-food giant is pushing for franchisees to do more to protect their workers, while franchisees are asking for more financial relief to keep them afloat. Franchisees operate 95% of McDonald's 14,000 U.S. restaurants.

McDonald's is deferring rent for three months for franchisees to lessen the financial blow of social distancing measures. Only about one-third of its U.S. franchisees will be asked to pay March rent. Operators who have seen the sharpest sales drops are also receiving deferrals on service fees.

Tensions between the National Owners Association and McDonald's management have flared up in the past month, based on correspondence between the two viewed by CNBC. McDonald's U.S. franchisees formed the independent advocacy group in 2018 to push back against the Chicago-based company's discounts and renovation plans. The NOA now represents more than 70% of McDonald's U.S. operators.

The National Franchisee Leadership Alliance, which officially negotiates with McDonald's on behalf of franchisees, asked for a two-week extension on service fees and rent due April 10, citing the uncertainty surrounding the Small Business Administration emergency loans. McDonald's operators make a base rent payment on the first of the month and then pay rent and fees on the tenth, based on the prior month's revenue for the location.

McDonald's management denied the request on April 3.

The NOA told McDonald's management in a letter dated April 7 that its members and most of the company's franchisees are "increasingly losing faith in the partnership and company leadership."

"Too much time has passed since the crisis has started, too many opportunities to make a statement of support are diminished and frankly as company leaders make hollow or superficial claims dozens of other companies are acting much more compassionately than the industry leader," the NOA wrote.

The group mentioned that other fast-food executives are foregoing their salaries.

The following day, CEO Chris Kempczinski said that he and four other executives would be taking pay cuts after discussing the move for several weeks with the company's board, which endorsed the decision.

McDonald's U.S. President Joe Erlinger responded April 9 that their faith in management seemed to be based on unlimited financial support.

"If that's how the NOA seeks to define its relationship with McDonald's, then in reality, we don't have a relationship, and I am extremely disappointed and disheartened by this," Erlinger wrote in a letter obtained by CNBC.

Erlinger estimated that McDonald's has given operators about $900 million of additional liquidity and said that no other major franchisor has done more to support its franchisees.

"It's important to emphasize that our financial support is intended to help owner/operators survive this crisis. McDonald's is not able to guarantee owner/operator cash flows or equity values," Erlinger wrote.

In March, McDonald's said it would give employees of company-owned locations paid leave for two weeks if they were exposed to the coronavirus. But the company has continued to face criticism from politicians and its own workers.

Erlinger asked the NOA and the NFLA to endorse a similar policy and support a 10% raise for its employees who are working for the next 60 days, citing the potential positive impact on the company's reputation.

McDonald's U.S. same-store sales fell 13% in March as the company transitioned to serving its Big Macs and McFlurries through takeout, drive-thru and delivery only. The fast-food chain has suffered smaller declines than the broader restaurant industry, likely due to its lower prices and drive-thru lanes.

Shares of the company, which has a market value of $137 billion, have fallen more than 9% so far this year. The stock was down more than 3% in midday trading Wednesday.
When Janna Pratt decided to run for band council on the Saskatchewan reserve where she grew up, she was shocked to find that, unlike settler politicians, she wasnt able to take a leave from her job to serve her community, or even campaign. She would have to quit.

In the six years since, the 41-year-old Cree/Saulteaux woman has battled both her employer, SaskTel, and the province to change Saskatchewans Employment Standards Act. On March 27, an amendment to the act  to be known as Jannas Law  was adopted, enabling First Nations leaders to have the same job protections as their counterparts.

Pratt is now hoping to convince lawmakers in the rest of Canada that this legislative oversight should be fixed.

People need to recognize that we have four levels of government in this country: federal, provincial, municipal and band council, said Pratt, a customer sales representative. The workload at the band council level is the same as working as a city councillor or a mayor. Its a full-time job.

Back in 2013, when Pratt, who hails from Gordon First Nation, near Punnichy, Sask., contemplated a run for band council, she consulted her longtime employer, the provinces main telecom provider. She wanted to ensure her job would be waiting for her should she take a leave to serve a political term. She was stunned to discover that SaskTels corporate policy did not include Indigenous elections.

Basically, I had to choose between my stable job or serving my community, said Pratt. I couldnt believe it.

Back then, a band councillor at Gordon First Nation made about $30,000 a year. (Currently they make $39,000.) Pratt would have had to step away from a $50,000-a-year job with a supportive supervisor, and forfeit her seniority. There was no guarantee any of that would be waiting for her at the end of the two-year band councillor term. That scenario wasnt something Pratt, a single mother of one at the time, thought she could handle.

It would have been a big sacrifice to give up my regular salary for a band councillor salary, but to think that I had to make that sacrifice and not have a well-paying job to return to once the term was up was too much financially, said Pratt.

By comparison, city councillors in nearby Regina make more than $45,000 a year, and according to provincial law, are entitled to return to their previous employ.

Pratt, backed by her union, Unifor, brought her concerns to the bargaining table with her employer. Negotiations ended with an amendment to SaskTels policy, allowing employees to seek nomination for band council.

With her leave granted and a secure job waiting, Pratt launched her campaign for band council in 2013.

Pratt recalls that, though she held her fellow candidates in high esteem, there was a lack of professional and educational experience. And when she lost the election, she couldnt let go of the feeling that, if more people were offered job security, the number of candidates with more education would be much higher.

And so, following her loss, Pratt took a closer look at provincial and federal labour law, only to discover neither offered job security for Indigenous elections. In fact, the Saskatchewan Employment Act, while progressive in Canada for even offering job security for political leave, still discriminated against First Nations, said Pratt, who pored over the legislation.

That was the moment I became an activist.

Bolstered by her SaskTel victory, Pratt took her fight for inclusivity to the provincial level. She attended labour conferences, lobbying others to take action.

In the fall of 2016, she met Saskatchewan New Democrat MLA David Forbes, who took on the issue. Forbes shared Pratts surprise over the exclusion in the employment act. As a former teacher, Forbes, knew he could always return to his scholastic career if he ever lost his provincial seat.

Forbes wrote to provincial Labour Relations Minister Don Morgan petitioning for change.

This is a good thing for the government to do, especially in the spirit of truth and reconciliation. It seems like an oversight for decades to our colonial eyes, Forbes said during last falls sitting of the legislature. I would say in our whiteness, we have forgotten that there are Indigenous elections.

When Jannas Law was finally passed a few weeks ago, Pratt was scheduled to speak in the Saskatchewan legislature, but couldnt because of the coronavirus lockdown.

It was a little disappointing. But, Im so happy that this has finally become law, said Pratt, who has aspirations to one day run for chief of Gordon First Nation. Im doing it for all of those who want to serve their home community but need their job security.

Pratts victory drew admiration from Sen. Lillian Dyck, the first First Nations woman appointed to the Senate, and who also comes from Gordon First Nation.

Its such a remarkable story of someone who faced a barrier and overcame it, said Dyck. A lot of people would just walk away rather than find a solution.

But this isnt the end of the fight for Pratt. The change in her home province is just the first step in her plan to lobby for this type of job security, including for First Nations band council hopefuls, across the country.

I am astonished that other jurisdictions still dont have any employment protection for office seekers and holders, said Larry Brown, formerly of the Saskatchewan Department of Labour, who helped amend provincial employment law in 1971 to allow for political leave.

Though job protection for leave to campaign or serve in elected officemight exist in some collective agreements and corporate policies across the nation, no other provincial, territorial or federal laws offer the same protections as Saskatchewan. This means Pratt, in her national efforts, will be petitioning to add an entire section into employment standards acts, as well as ensuring that band council is included.

You would have to start from scratch to include political leave and be sure to recognize Indigenous government as part of that while building the legislation, said Jim Stanford, an economist and director of the Centre for Future Work.

Pratt, along with Forbes, will be contacting other provincial labour ministers. The two have drawn their inspiration from the reservist leave law that came into effect in 2007 all across Canada.

Maj. Wallace Noseworthy, a reservist in the Canadian military, had to quit his job managing a car dealership in Stephenville, N.L., after he was not granted a leave to serve abroad. Up until then, there were no job protections for reservists, federally or provincially. Noseworthy lobbied from overseas and his personal story fuelled a campaign that, within just a year and a half, resulted in changes to employment acts in every province and territory, as well as on a federal level.

Once the movement gets going, there tends to be a bit of copying and adjusting as different legislatures take it on, said Kevin Banks, director of the Queens Centre for Law in the Contemporary Workplace. If there is public sympathy, as there was with the reservists, things can move very quickly.

The Canadian Labour Congress, the national lobby group for Canadas labour movement, has also taken an interest in Pratts fight.

We are going to be very supportive of this initiative and will help out however we can. This should be a fundamental right for every Canadian, said CLC president Hassan Yussuff.

Often it just takes one persons story to draw attention to gaps in our laws to start a conversation that ripples across the country.
Were going to get back to living life, even if it kills us
The Comhaltas branch John Dungan CCE based in North Longford, has donated Easter eggs to local frontline heroes in Cavan General Hospital and St Josephs Longford.

The John Dungan CCE committee had purchased Easter eggs to gift their members who participated in their Craobh Fleadh Cheoil which has now been postponed.

With the current circumstances they decided to donate them to some of our frontline heroes in Cavan General Hospital and St Joseph's Longford.

Chairperson Nessa McKenna said, "The parents of some of our members are frontline workers and we would like to take this opportunity to thank them for the brilliant job they are doing. We hope they enjoy an Easter egg with a well deserved tea or coffee!

Ms McKenna added, Our own Secretary Elaine Ledwith is a trained nurse and has returned to the frontline to help with the Cover-19 battle. We hope everyone follows the guidelines set out by the government to reduce cases and help us to return to normality as soon as we can."

ABOVE: Dylan & Daragh Ledwith, members of John Dungan CCE, loading the boot of the car with Easter eggs to deliver to the frontline staff at Cavan General Hospital and St Joseph's Longford

Meanwhile, Sinn Fein TD for Cavan-Monaghan Pauline Tully has said that the outbreak of Covid-19 among healthcare workers at Cavan General Hospital must serve as a wake-up call that the safety of our healthcare workers must be put first.

Seventy doctors and nurses at the hospital have been infected with the virus, while dozens more are self-isolating as a result.

Deputy Tully added, The fact that Cavan General Hospital is now in lockdown points to major failings in the supply and distribution of potentially lifesaving equipment.

This is unacceptable - priority must be given to frontline staff who are placing their own health at risk in order to keep us safe and to treat our loved ones who have contracted the virus.

She said she will be asking the Department of Health to address the very serious and escalating situation that is impacting on staff and patients in Cavan General Hospital.

Our healthcare workers now account for 27% of all those infected by the virus. This brings home the fears faced by those on the frontline fighting this virus. This situation will have ramifications for those in need of hospital care.

Read also: Longford gardai play Easter Bunny in Abbeyshrule
The unit has been developed by DRDL in consultation with the doctors of Employees' State Insurance Corporation (ESIC), Hyderabad

Defence Research & Development Laboratory (DRDL), Hyderabad has added another product to the portfolio of Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO) to combat Coronavirus (COVID-19) by developing COVID Sample Collection Kiosk (COVSACK).

The unit has been developed by DRDL in consultation with the doctors of Employees' State Insurance Corporation (ESIC), Hyderabad. The COVSACK is a kiosk for use by healthcare workers for taking COVID-19 samples from suspected infected patients. Patient under test walks into the Kiosk and a nasal or oral swab is taken by health care professional from outside through the built in gloves.

The Kiosk is automatically disinfected without the need for human involvement, making the process free of infection spread. The shielding screen of kiosk cabin protects the health care worker from the aerosols/droplet transmission while taking the sample.This reduces the requirements of PPE change by health care workers.

After the patient leaves the Kiosk, four nozzle sprayers mounted in the kiosk cabin disinfect the empty chamber by spraying disinfectant mist for a period of 70 seconds. It is further flushed with water & UV light disinfection. The system is ready for next use in less than two minutes. Voice command can be given through two-way communication system integrated with the COVSACK. It is possible to configure COVSACK to be used either from inside or outside as required by the medical professionals.

The COVSACK costs nearly Rs one lakh and the identified industry based at Belgaum, Karnataka can support 10 units per day. The DRDO has designed and developed two units and handed over these to ESIC Hospital, Hyderabad after successful testing.
Six persons including Anand Paranjpe, Thane city NCP president tested positive for Covid-19 on Tuesday, taking the citys total positive cases to 87. It is suspected that Paranjpe may have been infected during one of two recent visits to state housing minister Jitendra Awhads residence. On Tuesday, 14 staffers and party workers of Awhad tested positive.

Sandeep Malvi, deputy municipal commissioner of Thane Municipal Corporation, said, Six people tested positive for Covid-19 on Wednesday. The NCP leader has also tested positive and we are testing his close contacts.

Paranjpe confirmed the news that he has tested positive. He told HT, I got myself tested yesterday. I do not have any symptoms but have been admitted at a private hospital in Thane. His family members too are undergoing tests and are quarantined.

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PALO ALTO, Calif., April 15, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- Today Bloomboard announced it has partnered with Minnesota Service Cooperatives (MSC) to support Minnesota districts in providing a relevant, job-embedded approach to professional learning and career advancement through micro-credentials. The partnership will offer Minnesota school districts a continuing education framework consisting of a series of micro-endorsements. Each micro-endorsement is a collection of micro-credentials on a particular topic which allow educators to prove competency in specific practice areas while accumulating graduate-equivalent credit hours.

The Minnesota Service Cooperatives

By implementing an effective micro-credentialing program, district leaders:

Offer teachers a selection of micro-endorsement options aligned to district strategic plans

Realize meaningful results for improving teacher practice through job-embedded learning

Observe increased student achievement resulting from the direct classroom application built into the competency-based learning experience required to earn micro-credentials

Retain and recruit excellent teachers by offering better options for their career growth

"We've seen a growing interest in alternative ways for teachers to move along salary schedules that are inexpensive and directly related to work done in the classroom," said Jennifer McLachlan, micro-credential coordinator for MSC. "Micro-credentials add another layer of support for teachers looking to improve their practice. We strongly encourage districts to align micro-endorsements to existing salary schedules, which will empower their teachers, anchor focus on student outcomes and practices that are best for kids, and develop an avenue for retaining and recruiting great teachers."

Bloomboard and MSC have worked with several districts throughout Minnesota, including Waseca Public Schools, Fairmont Area Schools, and Saint Peter Public Schools, to establish a micro-credentialing pilot program that would both support individual educators and drive ROI for districts.

After partnering with Bloomboard and MSC, Saint Peter Public Schools is now halfway through its pilot program, and the results have been positive: 100 percent of participating teachers surveyed agreed that working on their micro-credential submissions had a positive impact on their practice as an educator and had a positive impact on their students. What's more, 90 percent agreed that the incentives provided for completing micro-credentials motivated them to participate.

"So many educators experience a dilemma when considering advancement," said Sanford Kenyon, CEO of Bloomboard. "Either they are forced to invest tens of thousands of dollars and spend countless hours earning graduate degrees, or in many cases, they consider leaving the profession. Unlike 'sit and get' professional development and advancement options, micro-credential based advancement provides more affordable pathways for educators while demonstrably improving practice because of its rigorous, job-embedded and evidence-based approach."

About Bloomboard

Founded in 2010, BloomBoard is leading the shift from professional development to educator advancement via micro-certification. The company partners with states and districts to enable a unique online learning experience where educators improve their instructional practice and advance in their careers by earning micro-credentials. BloomBoard aims to help all organizations transition to meaningful, purpose-driven educator development and advancement based on measurable certification. For more information, visit bloomboard.com.

About Minnesota Service Cooperatives (MSC)

The Minnesota Service Cooperatives is a Joint Powers organization comprised of nine educational service agencies. The service agencies are geographically distributed across the state and serve members in their respective areas. Each agency has a unique understanding of the strengths and needs of their members, and uses these insights to positively impact and improve outcomes. For more information, visit mnservcoop.org.

Press contact

Michael Rutkowski

[email protected]

801-850-8578

SOURCE BloomBoard

Related Links

http://bloomboard.com


In a grim estimate, a prestigious Tehran-based research center found that up to 75% of the Iranian population could test positive for the coronavirus if isolation measures are not implemented.

The assessment by the Iranian parliaments research center, based on Health Ministry epidemiological models, says nearly 30,000 Iranians could die of the virus if only 10% of workable containment policies are in place. The morality figure could collapse to 6,000, however, provided that 40% of social distancing restrictions are robustly observed.

The 46-page document warns that a peak in Iran could be as far away as November, when a second wave may await the population. The study evaluated the governments current response planning as acceptable, unlike its weak handling at the outset.

Iran announced 94 new deaths April 15, marking a second day of a two-digit mortality rate. More than half of Iranian provinces are witnessing significant drops in positive cases, according to Health Ministry statistics, with confirmed daily infections falling somewhere between zero to 20.

The situation in the capital Tehran, nonetheless, remained alarming. Nahid Khodakarami, a female member of the Tehran City Council, challenged the official mortality reports, saying that in the most optimistic estimate, at least 70 people are dying on a daily basis in Tehran. She said the discrepancy was because acute respiratory symptom is the official cause for many COVID-19 deaths.

Amid the pandemic, Iran has waged a parallel battle to finance its response, attempting to get US-imposed international banking restrictions lifted. Last week, the governor of Irans central bank, Abdolnasser Hemmati, declared that $1.6 billion  frozen by a Luxembourg bank due to US pressure  had found its way back home. Officials in Luxembourg, however, clarified that a final decision resided with the countrys highest court and the funds had yet to be sent. Later, Hemmati told Irans state TV that even further seizure of the amount will not be the end of the world for Iran, as it is pressing to unfreeze a lot more of such funds held overseas.

Elsewhere, Irans Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif lamented on Twitter the US regimes bullying that kills people amid the coronavirus pandemic and will leave behind a memory of infamy among Iranians. His American counterpart Mike Pompeo has stated that Washington is ready for real humanitarian assistance to the Iranian people." But, according to Pompeo, cash aid will not end up in the right hands in Iran and will be used by the state for corrupt purposes. Medical supplies and other humanitarian imports are exempt from US sanctions.

Mounting a fresh, rosy defense of his governments crisis management, President Hassan Rouhani said in a televised speech April 15 that even with sanctions in force, not a single coronavirus patient has been turned away from Iranian hospitals during the outbreak.

Despite its relentless complaints about US measures interfering with the pandemic response, Iran has in recent weeks taken pride in self-reliance, with a list of new achievements  mostly claimed by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC)  ranging from homemade diagnosis kits to a promised vaccine soon to be introduced. In the latest, IRGC commander Hossein Salami unveiled an astounding, phenomenal device, which he said was capable of detecting coronavirus-infected human bodies and objects within a radius of 100 meters in a matter of five seconds.
People wearing face masks walk past an Apple store in Beijing on March 17, 2020 in Beijing, China. Fred Lee | Getty Images

Rival tech giants Google and Apple have teamed up to create technology to help health officals trace who's been infected by Covid-19, and are building it directly into iOS and Android, the two operating systems that power almost 100% of the world's smartphones. It's a big announcement  not only is it an unusual example of two tech giants working together, but digital contact tracing is a technology that is being closely watched to see if it can help schools and businesses re-open when the Covid-19 coronavirus epidemic slows down. It's a digital version of traditional contact tracing, a labor-intensive process in which public health officials contact everyone who might have been exposed to someone infected with Covid-19 to tell them to self-isolate or get tested. Contact tracing is a big part of mitigation efforts in Hong Kong and Taiwan, for example. In its digital form, Apple and Google are making it possible to automate this process at large scale by giving public health authorities the ability to tell when people are near each other by using signals picked up from their smartphones.Those tools will become available through iOS and Android operating systems in mid-May, the companies say. Both companies are emphasizing privacy, saying that the tools won't identify particular individuals, but will only make it possible for public health officials to contact people who might have been exposed. Officials in the United States say that massively expanding contact tracing is a key step in order to make it safe enough for governments around the world to allow gatherings and for people to go back to work. CDC Director Robert Redford told NPR in April that "very aggressive" contact tracing will be required for the U.S. to return to normal. "Control measures can only be lifted if the right public health measures are in place, including significant capacity for contact tracing," World Health Organization director general Dr. Tedros Ghebreyesus said this week. But digital contact tracing is not a magic bullet, and there are a lot of steps that still need to happen before digital contact tracing apps start slowing the spread of the coronavirus around the world.

1. Public health groups need to build the apps

First, the apps themselves need to be built. Apple and Google are only making the technology available and easier to implement  it will be up to official health groups that would normally do contact tracing to actually build and distribute the apps. (Official groups are the only organizations that can access the APIs Apple and Google are building.) Google and Apple say they will provide support organizations building these apps, and even provide sample apps that they can use as a starting point. But health organizations around the world vary in their technical sophistication, privacy regulations, and amount of institutional attention they can offer at the moment, and when the apps become available will likely vary by region. Google and Apple's APIs will become available in mid-May in software updates, the companies say. Britain's National Health Service, among others, is already working on an app. But no release dates or launch plans have been confirmed yet.

2. Testing needs to be more widely available

When the apps are available, they will require testing to be readily available. The way the proposed apps work, if someone tests positive for Covid-19, the apps will be able to use Bluetooth to figure out all the other phones that they've crossed paths with in the past few weeks and ping them. Cryptography will be employed to make sure that the apps can't identify individuals on either end. But if anyone can say that they believe they're Covid-19 positive without independent verification, it opens the system to false notifications and other trolling. Apple and Google both confirmed that the apps will only be triggered when there's a verified positive test. So for digital contact tracing to work, there need to be enough Covid-19 tests for anyone who believes they're positive. In the United States, over 3 million test have been performed so far, according to the COVID Tracking Project. But officials still say there is still a lack of testing kits, and some experts say that there needs to be millions of tests done per day.

3. People have to trust the technology

Users will actively have to participate, or "opt-in," to use the apps and systems built with the Google and Apple technology, according to company representatives. Users will have to download an app or, later this year, consent through a pop-up to participate in helping public agencies track Covid-19 cases. Governments won't be allowed to mandate usage, the companies say. That means everyone who participates will need to consent to share their location and proximity data. The more people that use the system, the more effective it will be. One estimate from a contact tracing research group suggests that 60% of people in a region would need to download an app before digital contact tracing could stop the spread of the virus. Apple and Google representatives say the more people that use digital contact tracing the more effective it will be, but have not mentioned a benchmark they're shooting for. In technical communications, Apple and Google have made clear that the technology they're releasing won't give them a new database of user locations  in fact, it doesn't use GPS location data at all  but there's evidently still a lot of convincing to do on the privacy front, at least in the United States. Sen. Richard Blumenthal said on Wednesday in a statement that "Apple and Google have a lot of work to do to convince a rightfully skeptical public that they are fully serious about the privacy and security of their contact tracing efforts." President Trump praised Apple and Google's initiative on Tuesday, but warned that it would raise "big constitutional problems" for "a lot of people."

4. It can't totally replace manual contact tracing
The Houston Chronicle has lifted the paywall on this developing coverage to provide critical information to our community.To support our journalists work, consider a digital subscription.

9:29 p.m.

Volunteers handed out an estimated 350 food boxes at a mobile food pantry in Montgomery County on Saturday. An outreach organization known as Montgomery County United teamed up with the Montgomery County Food Bank and Fellowship of Montgomery to host the mobile food pantry a second time at the parking lot of the church located at 12681 FM 149. One hundred sixty total cars drove through the line, with several representing multiple families experiencing hardship due to the novel coronavirus pandemic, reported the Chronicle's Meagan Ellsworth.

8:11 p.m.

Texas on Saturday reported more than 1,000 new cases of the novel coronavirus for the fifth straight day. There are 47,583 confirmed cases statewide, up 1,556 cases or 3.4 percent from yesterday, according to the Chronicle's Stephanie Lamm.

There are 13,077 cases in the Houston region, up 140 cases or 1.1 percent from yesterday. The Houston area has recorded 306 deaths from the virus, up 7 deaths from yesterday.

Potter, Dallas and Randall counties saw the biggest increases in cases at 618, 214 and 116 new cases respectively. Harris County reported 76 new cases to reach 9,050 cases. More than 200 people in the Houston area have died from the virus.

7:57 p.m.

More than 2,000 people tuned into Rice University's first virtual commencement ceremony, which included clips of campus life, taped speeches from student speakers and the reading of each graduate's name.

Like other colleges around the country, the Houston university closed its campus, resumed classes online and postponed its in-person spring commencement earlier this year in efforts to curb the spread of the coronavirus. Many Texas colleges have offered students the option to walk across the stage and celebrate in-person later in the year, and some, to attend a virtual celebration or commencement, the Chronicle's Brittany Britto reported.

This was, we know, not the ending you envisioned, but we call todays event a commencement for a reason," Rice President David Leebron said in a video. "And let us hope and indeed believe that it is the beginning of things even greater than what you imagined. So take these difficult circumstances to celebrate all the more the accomplishments we recognize today.

4:40 p.m.

Houston's Health Department says it will not report its daily COVID-19 update for case amounts and new deaths Saturday due to an issue with its data reporting system.

As of Friday, the city had 5,340 cases and 114 deaths due to the disease caused by the new coronavirus.

12:50 p.m.

Kingwood has canceled its Independence Day parade due to the coronavirus, the Chronicle's Savannah Mehrtens writes.

The annual parade has been held for over 30 years and has had up to 151 floats that travel north on West Lake Houston Parkway from Creekwood Middle School and turns on Kingwood Drive before it ends at Kingwood High School.

10:20 a.m.

The novel coronavirus dealt American retailers a blow like none before, driving an unprecedented plunge in sales across nearly every segment of the industry, the Chronicle's Amanda Drane reports.

National retail sales in April dove 22 percent from the same period a year ago, the Commerce Department reported Friday, and a record 16.4 percent from the previous month. The fall was twice as steep as a previous record drop of 8.3 percent, set in March when business closures and social distancing measures to slow the spread of the coronavirus were widely imposed.

In Texas, the decline in retail sales may not end up as steep because of its earlier opening of the states economy, said Venky Shankar, research director for Texas A&Ms Center for Retailing Studies.

Gov. Greg Abbott allowed Texas retailers to begin opening at 25 percent capacity on May 1. Salons opened last week, and soon, gyms will open, too. These new additions will allow retail sales in the Houston area to climb faster than other states that are still locked down, Shankar said.

All of these will probably make the decline much less in Texas, he said.

9:30 a.m.

Harris County is considering boosting its homestead exemption for seniors and disabled homeowners, the Chronicle's Zach Despart reports.

Precinct 2 Commissioner Adrian Garcia is pushing the change, less than a year after advocating for a property tax increase on all homeowners. He said residents affected by the novel coronavirus and rising appraisal values deserve relief.

This would be the first time in 12 years that we will have brought meaningful tax reform to Harris County homeowners, and given that seniors and homeowners are particularly vulnerable during the COVID-19 pandemic, we need to step up and help right away, Garcia said in a statement.

His proposal, which is scheduled for consideration at Tuesday's Commissioners Court meeting, would raise the exemption for the targeted residents from $160,000 to $229,000, on top of the flat 20 percent exemption available to all homeowners. The effect would be to wipe out the county property tax burden for senior and disabled homeowners whose properties are valued at $286,000 or less. The current ceiling is $200,000.

8:35 a.m.

Widespread coronavirus testing is necessary to tracking and containing the virus. However, a new study reveals that 41 of 50 states fail to test widely enough to drive infections below a significant benchmark, according to an AP analysis of metrics by Harvard's Global Health Institute.

Texas and Georgia are among the states falling short of this benchmark. Both states have recently moved to reopen stores, malls, and other businesses. Read more details in this latest update.

7:00 a.m.

There are now 4,564,286 million confirmed COVID-19 cases worldwide, with a global death toll rising to 308,211, according to Johns Hopkins University. As of Saturday morning, Texas Health and Human Services is now reporting 45,198 COVID-19 cases in the state with 1,272 deaths. There are now 8,817 confirmed cases in Houston and Harris County.

CORONAVIRUS UPDATES: Stay informed with accurate reporting you can trust on HoustonChronicle.com
Sen. Richard Burr (R-N.C.), left, and Acting Deputy Homeland Security Secretary Ken Cuccinelli walk to a briefing from administration officials on the CCP virus, on Capitol Hill in Washington on Feb. 25, 2020. (Mark Wilson/Getty Images)

Sen. Burr Should Explain Stock Sales Made After Virus Briefings: Senator

Sen. Richard Burr (R-N.C.) should give an explanation for the stock sales he made shortly after receiving closed-door briefings on the threat of the CCP virus, Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.). said on Wednesday.

Tillis is running for re-election in the same state that Burr helps represent. He said he has not spoken with Burr about what happened but suspects the Department of Justice is probing his colleague.

Regardless of what happens with the investigation, I think Senator Burr owes everybody in North Carolina and the United States an explanation, and well see where the investigation goes, Tillis said during an interview with Hugh Hewitt.

A decision on whether Burr should step down as chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee is between Burr and Senate leadership, according to Tillis.

Burr sold between $628,000 and $1.7 million of his stocks on Feb. 13. He was one of five senators who disclosed stock sales.

Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) walks to the Senate subway in the U.S. Capitol in Washington on Feb. 3, 2020. (Sarah Silbiger/Getty Images)

The sales were made early this year after some senators received closed-door briefings about the threat caused by the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus, commonly known as the novel coronavirus. The virus causes a disease called COVID-19. Attempts to curb the spread of the new illness have led to near-nationwide lockdowns, crippling the economy and causing millions of Americans to lose their jobs.

Most senators said they werent directly involved with the sales but Burr said he was involved with his.

In a letter to Ethics Chairman Sen. James Lankford (R-Okla.), Burr said that he relied solely on public reporting to guide my decision to sell the stock.

An independent review, though, is warranted to ensure full and complete transparency, he added.

The Senate Ethics Committee hasnt confirmed whether a probe into the sales has been launched. The Department of Justice and FBI declined to confirm reports of a probe of the sales when reached by The Epoch Times.

Burr reiterated through an attorney in late March that hed welcome a review.

Senator Burr welcomes a thorough review of the facts in the matter, which will establish that his actions were appropriate, the attorney said.
Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, April 15)  Kawit, Cavite Mayor Angelo Emilio Aguinaldo announced Wednesday that he placed the municipality under "extreme" enhanced community quarantine in an effort to prevent the spread of the deadly coronavirus disease.

"Isasailalim na natin ang buong Kawit sa extreme [enhanced] community quarantine simula ngayong araw, April 15, bilang bahagi ng ating mas pinaigting na aksyon laban sa COVID-19," Aguinaldo said in a Facebook post.

[Translation: We will put the entire Kawit under extreme (enhanced) community quarantine starting today, April 15, as part of our intensified efforts against COVID-19.]

The mayor said the municipal government will impose stricter measures on social distancing. Operating hours of establishments within his jurisdiction will also be limited, he added.

"Mas hihigpitan na rin natin ang pagbabantay sa mga Authorized Persons Outside of Residents (APOR). Kakailanganin na ng mga APOR na magdala ng updated quarantine pass at ng personal log sheet," Aguinaldo said.

[Translation: We will also be stricter toward Authorized Persons Outside of Residents (APOR). They will have to secure an updated quarantine pass and a personal log sheet.]

The authorized persons will be required to record their activities and the people they interact with in the log book, the mayor said. He noted that it will help the municipal government in contact tracing.

Aguinaldo assured its citizens that he will provide food aid during the quarantine period. He said he is currently coordinating with the local council to reallocate the municipality's funds for the benefit of those who will not be covered by the Social Amelioration Program of the national government.

Kawit, Cavite reported its first confirmed COVID-19 case on April 9.

As of Wednesday, the Philippines has 5,453 cases of the viral disease, with 349 deaths and 353 recoveries.
The President of Botswana, Mokgweetsi Masisi and his Vice President Slumber Tsogwane are currently on quarantine according to a broadcast journalist with the state-owned Radio Bostwana, Henry Lechuti.



Henry, who is also under mandatory quarantine after coming into contact with a COVID-19 infected person said the nation is under a six-month State of Emergency to bring the spread of the virus under control.



He said when the situation improves, the lockdown period will be reviewed according to government.



Botswana has 13 cases with one death.



Botswana Members of Parliament were put under quarantine after coming in contact with a health worker who tested positive for the virus. The health worker was screening cabinet and the MPs.



Narrating his situation in an interview with Kwami Sefa Kayi on Peace FM's 'Kokrokoo' programme, he said he was infected in the line of duty.



"We were covering 'an important event' in parliament when we came in contact with the health officer who was checking our temperature . . . we mingled with the Members of Parliament and after we were instructed to go into mandatory quarantine; over 30 journalists," he indicated.



Mr Lechuti also touched on the adverse effect the lockdown and mandatory quarantine is having on his personal life at home.



"I'm in the same house with my wife but because of being in quarantine, we communicate on whatsapp," he indicated.





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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[April 14, 2020] INVESTOR ACTION ALERT: The Schall Law Firm Announces the Filing of a Class Action Lawsuit Against ServiceMaster Global Holdings, Inc. and Encourages Investors with Losses in Excess of $100,000 to Contact the Firm

The Schall Law Firm, a national shareholder rights litigation firm, announces the filing of a class action lawsuit against ServiceMaster Global Holdings, Inc. ("ServiceMaster" or "the Company") (NYSE: SERV) for violations of 10(b) and 20(a) of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 and Rule 10b-5 promulgated thereunder by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. Investors who purchased the Company's securities between February 26, 2019 and November 4, 2019, inclusive (the ''Class Period''), are encouraged to contact the firm before June 9, 2020. If you are a shareholder who suffered a loss, click here to participate.



We also encourage you to contact Brian Schall of the Schall Law Firm, 1880 Century Park East, Suite 404, Los Angeles, CA (News - Alert) 90067, at 310-301-3335, to discuss your rights free of charge. You can also reach us through the firm's website at www.schallfirm.com, or by email at [email protected]. The class, in this case, has not yet been certified, and until certification occurs, you are not represented by an attorney. If you choose to take no action, you can remain an absent class member.

According to the Complaint, the Company made false and misleading statements to the market. ServiceMaster failed to inspect clients' property for Formosan termite activity and mitigate damage. Due to this behavior, the Company faced a wave of customer litigation which was not disclosed to investors. The Company began remedial measures at least as early as 2018 such as raising praising in Mobile, Alabama, in an effort to deter contract renewals. Based on these facts, the Company's public statements were false and materially misleading throughout the class period. When the market learned the truth about ServiceMaster, investors suffered damages. Join the case to recover your losses. The Schall Law Firm represents investors around the world and specializes in securities class action lawsuits and shareholder rights litigation. This press release may be considered Attorney Advertising in some jurisdictions under the applicable law and rules of ethics. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20200414006064/en/

[ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ]
Source: Xinhua| 2020-04-15 20:40:36|Editor: Xiaoxia

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by Xinhua writer Yu Jiaxin

London, April 15 (Xinhua) -- "I'm waiting for the delivery of Traditional Chineses Medicine (TCM). They are still on the way," Natasha Chalumeau, a 48-year-old Londoner said expectantly.

As a beneficiary of TCM, Chalumeau had received acupuncture and Chinese herbs treatment for about three years to improve her immunity. "The efficacy is obvious and that's why I ordered herbal remedies this time. Being preventive is more important than reactive," she told Xinhua.

In Britain, a growing number of people are seeking TCM remedies to prevent or help treat COVID-19. As the country braces for its "darkest hour", the novel coronavirus-related death toll has surpassed 12,000 as of Monday afternoon while the lockdown is still in place without a clear timeline to end.

"Among my patients, Britons who are turning to TCM almost doubled compared with before," said Tianjun Wang, chairman of the UK Traditional Chinese Medicine Forum and the initiator of UK TCM Network. The consultants are mainly Chinese at the beginning, but more Britons are joining in now, he said.

For TCM clinics like Wang's, due to the high demand, the prescriptions of TCM have increased sharply by 5 to 10 times compared with before the coronavirus epidemic.

London-based Chinese Medicine expert Lihua Li said the engagement across her social media platform has skyrocketed since the beginning of March. "Our consultation numbers have broken record with 300 people receiving online consultation within a month with a growing number of non-Chinese customers from UK and Europe," she said.

Although many clinics are closed due to the lockdown, practitioners like Wang are doing remote consultations and prescribing appropriate remedies to patients.

Wang told Xinhua that his diagnostic approaches, among others, include inquiring patients' symptoms online and checking the patients' tongue if needed. Herbal remedies will be prescribed if necessary.

Professor Songxuan Ke, founder and principal of Asante Academy of Chinese Medicine in London, said many of his patients with typical symptoms reported improvement soon after taking the Chinese herbs, and they have recommended TCM to more people.

"But I always advise them to contact local hospitals first to seek help in case hospital interventions are needed," Ke said.

According to practitioners interviewed, the majority of local people turned to TMC are those wishing to improve their immune system. A small number are patients infected with mild symptoms of COVID-19.

In Britain, a surge in confirmed cases poses a great challenge to the capacity of NHS (National Health System). Most people are asked to stay at home, and those who have mild symptoms also need to isolate for seven days before seeking medical help. Concern over lack of due help and treatment is also one of the reasons why more people turned to TCM to improve immunity, according to TCM practitioners.

Now that China has progressively curbed the virus domestically and is helping other countries to combat the virus, the contributions of TCM can not go unnoticed.

According to the National Administration of TCM, clinical observation showed that TCM has proven to be effective in the treatment of over 90 percent of all confirmed COVID-19 cases on the Chinese mainland by relieving symptoms, slowing the progression of the disease, and boosting the recovery of patients.

Professor Ke explained to Xinhua that patients with the pneumonia caused by COVID-19 have difficulty in breathing because their lungs are blocked by mucus. "TCM could help clear the mucus by reducing dampness of the body to reach an 'internal balance' while some chemical medicines may cause more mucus," he said.

"People in the West have very limited knowledge about Chinese medicine and naturally are very sceptical about Chinese medicine, especially to treat this vicious epidemic," said Ke.

However, TCM should not be seen as alien to Western societies, said Ke. In TCM, there's a saying goes like "food and medicine (herbs) share the same origin," he said, adding that food therapy, more widely acceptable in the West, is an inextricable part of TCM.

"TCM never made claim to be able to kill the virus now and more research is needed," Ke said, "perhaps East and West cooperation will speed up a better treatment."
India should release an economic package of not less than 5 per cent of its GDP as the growth rate may drop to 2.1 per cent in 2020-21 due to the impact of coronavirus infection, an expert said on Wednesday.

Narendra Jadhav, a Rajya Sabha MP and former RBI chief economist, said the principle objective of the government should be to save lives now and save livelihoods in the immediate future.

"Due to Covid-19, India's GDP growth rate will take a hit and may come down to 2.1 per cent from 4.5 per cent...India should release an economic package which should not be less than 5 per cent of its GDP soon," he said during an online address to theMasters' Union School of Business.

Jadhavalso highlighted a host of policy measures that the government should take in these times including relaxing the Fiscal Responsibility and Budget Management Act (FRBM ACT), letting the fiscal deficit rise for 1 year, relaxing the limits on the debt that can be raised by the states and taking away MPLAD funds for 2 years.

He pointed out that due to the Spanish Flu outbreak in 1918, the global GDP came down by about 6 per cent.

"But with the crisis at hand, the GDP of the world will come down by 2.2 per cent which looks small but is incredible in terms of the size and travesty it can cause," Jadhav noted.

The IMF on Tuesday projected a GDP growth of 1.9 per cent for India in 2020.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
[April 15, 2020] MassMutual Announces $3 Billion of Free Life Insurance for Healthcare Workers on the COVID-19 Frontline

Massachusetts Mutual Life Insurance Company (MassMutual) today announced the launch of MassMutual HealthBridge, which will provide free term life insurance to the brave and resilient frontline healthcare workers across Massachusetts and Connecticut risking their lives during the COVID-19 pandemic. MassMutual is committed to its Live Mutual belief that we are all in this together and is offering local healthcare workers who are putting their safety on the line no-cost policies of up to $25,000. This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20200415005106/en/ MassMutual Announces $3 Billion of Free Life Insurance for Healthcare Workers on the COVID-19 Frontline (Photo: Business Wire) All active employees of licensed hospitals, urgent care centers or emergency medical services providers in Massachusetts and Connecticut, the primary operational locations for many of MassMutual's employees, whose jobs may involve occupational exposure to the virus are eligible for the 3-year term life policies. By uploading proof of employment and filling out a short application on the HealthBridge page, qualified healthcare workers will receive this free element of financial protection - completed fully online - from MassMutual.



"MassMutual HealthBridge is our way of helping the everyday heroes on the front lines who are sacrificing so much in the fight against COVID-19," said Roger Crandall, MassMutual Chairman, President and CEO. "We are giving back by doing what we have done best for nearly 170 years - helping to provide financial security and protection to individuals and families for events both planned and unplanned. We can never repay healthcare workers for their selfless efforts during this crisis, but by helping them protect their loved ones, we hope we can contribute to their peace of mind as they work to protect us all." HealthBridge, totaling $3 billion of insurance coverage, is an extension of MassMutual's current LifeBridge program, which has been providing free life insurance for nearly two decades to income-eligible families to help children with educational expenses in the event a parent or guardian passes away.

State of Connecticut Insurance Department Commissioner Andrew N. Mais added, "We already work closely with MassMutual on their LifeBridge program. This is a natural - and much welcome - addition during a time when healthcare professionals are worried about themselves and their families. We're thankful that MassMutual is stepping up to support these vital personnel who are tenaciously battling the virus with a multi-year, multi-million dollar commitment." "Healthcare workers are on the frontline supporting our communities during this unprecedented public health crisis and the risks that they face are significant," said Massachusetts Insurance Commissioner Gary D. Anderson. "Now more than ever, it is critical that regulators and insurers recognize the importance of flexible and innovative products that enable these essential personnel to do their jobs as efficiently as possible while knowing that their families are protected." HealthBridge guaranteed-issue policies for eligible applicants would be paid to their loved ones in the event of their death. Interested individuals can find more information on the HealthBridge page. Applications will begin to be accepted by the end of April. In addition to HealthBridge, MassMutual recently provided $1.5 million in support to COVID-19 response funds across the state of Massachusetts, including seed funding for Community Foundation of Western Massachusetts' COVID-19 Response Fund as well as support for the Boston Resiliency Fund. The company also redeployed its Springfield-based Wellness Center health professionals to Baystate Health and donated personal protective equipment to Baystate and Mercy Hospital to serve broader community needs. Additionally, the company extended its free FutureSmart digital financial literacy curriculum beyond educators to families in which the parents/guardians are currently taking on secondary roles as their children's teachers. About MassMutual MassMutual is a leading mutual life insurance company that is run for the benefit of its members and participating policyowners. MassMutual offers a wide range of financial products and services, including life insurance, disability income insurance, long term care insurance, annuities, retirement plans and other employee benefits. For more information, visit www.massmutual.com. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20200415005106/en/

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PHILIPSBURG:--- On Tuesday, April 14 President of the Supervisory Board of the St. Maarten Chamber of Commerce & Industry (COCI) Benjamin Ortega, called on the general public and the business community to stand together during this time of distress due to the COVID-19 global pandemic.

The world is upside down. Even more than ever. people are overwhelmed with their individual realities. Some of us face the fact that a loved one has been infected with the virus. Some of us face the reality of being affected, directly or indirectly by the virus hitting our shores.

Many weeks we looked ahead of the world stories giving us updates of the developments in their respective countries. Who would have thought that we too one day would be the center of any world news even if this was from our own media? A reality check hit many of us hard when the rest of the world began to shut down and we too were affected forced to take the same measures in order to stop the spread of COVID-19 and save lives.

Our government, various departments, and various stakeholders have been working around the clock it seems to stare our country as much as possible away from what frequently seems to be inevitable.

A total closure of our country and restricting our movement was the only way at present to curb us from further disaster. Whether some would say late or not, this was the best thing to give each of us a fighting chance especially those most vulnerable, frail and those with underlying health conditions.

During the last few weeks, we have learned of many reports and deliberations on what our needs would be to survive this pandemic virus. Keeping in mind that the entire world is under attack and that some hard war-like decisions are being made to keep every citizen of each individual country safe and sound.

This is no difference for us in our oh sweet St. Maarten Land. Unfortunately, our reality check, although not unique, we face the fact that our government and country are not as financially stable enough to carry the weight and financial burden that comes with the world economic crisis we face.

We remain to point out and refer to the world, as every piece of this planet faces pretty much the same situation. Because of our status in the Kingdom of the Netherlands, we are entwined to seek assistance and approval within the Kingdom for our financial moves geared to save every last bit that we have. Again, mentioning the many deliberations, reports and analysis being made to reach what we consider the best option for us all.

Note yet again a reality check that we need assistance, in every form to assist us out of this crisis. Physical, medical and more so ever financial. The core responsibility of our country and just like many others stated in the constitution is to take care and provide and safeguard the wellbeing of every citizen within our country. This is the foundation that we govern from.

During each disaster we face, everyone, every stakeholder group and every representative will fight for as much as possible what he or she represents within their nation. Whether you are considered a business fighting to keep your doors open, or you are a mother or father fighting to feed your family and yourself in that matter.

Capitalism has no place in a true crisis. It is not about the survivability of an individual business sector or company. It's about the survivability of the economy at large. It is not about how many persons your sector represents; its about how many employees are you able to retain. Nor is it how many injections we or government can provide to stabilize this crisis economy. It's about what we can afford and what measures we need to take to ensure we have a future. A future that we can rebuild from and onward.

Desperate Measures for Desperate Times. At the end of the day when there is no time to waste and the country is in a financial dependency, grants, loans or commerce are needed.

There is only one nonrefundable reality check, how are we going to ensure that every person, woman, man, child will be fed, and safeguarded from this world pandemic and crisis that is bigger than us all.

I would like to thank all of the organizations that have partaken in the various deliberations, that have provided feedback and insight, that have executed stakeholder strategies, that have aided the less fortunate and that continue to contribute to the wellbeing of us all.

This crisis has shown us that we need to find more ways to conduct our daily lives, business, and our country. Being resilient as we are, we need to ensure that digitalization, data technology, and diversity is at our foreground. Our door to the Chamber of Commerce & Industry may be closed, but we remain working as much as possible on improving and providing our services. Email us at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. for assistance until we are able to reopen our doors to the public.

Stand together and assist where you can and how you can regardless to what you think you deserve. Failure is not an option. Standing still and doing nothing is one reality check we cant afford to cash in anytime soon, Ortega said on Tuesday in his message.
During an uncertain time, these institutions are trying to understand what this means for gathering and practicing faith as a community.
At the age of seven, Bonnie Henry accompanied her family to the hospital where her older sister Lynn had to have her appendix removed. The experience left a lasting impression on B.C.'s future provincial health officer.

"That was her first experience of going into the hospital, and in that moment she realized that this is what I want to do: I want to be a doctor," recalls Lynn Henry, sitting at her sister's dining room table.

Submitted by Lynn Henry

A month or so ago, not many Canadians would have been able to name, let alone recognize, their province's top public health official. But in the midst of a global pandemic, Henry is one of many health officers across the country who have become household names.

For instance, Henry's decision to cut her own hair made headlines.

"I did do some of my own tinkering," joked Henry at a recent news briefing, where she apologized to her hairdresser.

Lynn Henry

"Obviously she was the person who put the order in place that all salons were closed, so her stylist was quite willing to leave the instructions on the doorstep," said Lynn, who lives in Toronto but has been staying with her sister in Victoria since before the pandemic began.

"It was quite a hilarious moment for us both to try and figure out the instructions. I was astonished and amused and slightly dismayed by how viral it all went."

While the spotlight and adulation may be new to Henry, the pressures of a job that impacts thousands of lives is something with which she's had plenty of experience.

Becoming the top doc

Henry assumed the position of B.C.'s top doctor in February 2018, following the retirement of her colleague Dr. Perry Kendall.

"She's an example of grace under pressure  of honesty, straightforwardness, empathy and communication," Kendall said in an interview. "I don't think I could have done the job as well as she's doing."

Kendall said Henry's background makes her "the right person at the right place at the right time."

Story continues

While completing her medical degree at Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia, Henry spent a significant amount of time at sea as a medical officer with the Canadian navy.

She was deployed at the Canadian Forces Base in Esquimalt, on Vancouver Island.

WATCH | Henry talks about why she chose epidemiology as a field of study

"She qualified in diving, as a flight surgeon, and was the only physician in the Canadian fleet at one time on a warship," said Kendall.

"I think it gave her a great sense of command, control and a sense of presence. And also the ability to give orders and to recognize how you do need to get organized in emergency situations."

A global outreach

Following her time with the military, Henry navigated through a number of urgent global health initiatives in the span of just three years.

In 2000, she worked with the World Health Organization and UNICEF on a polio eradication program in Pakistan. The following year, she went to Gulu, Uganda, to help combat an Ebola outbreak.

Submitted by Lynn Henry

She credits those experiences with preparing her for the complexities of a global response that a pandemic like COVID-19 has required.

"Having those international connections really helps you understand some of the back story of what's happening in different countries," Henry said in an interview. "That's been very helpful for us here in Canada."

On the front lines of SARS

The 2002-2003 SARS epidemic is believed to have killed 774 people globally, including 44 in Canada, most of them in Toronto. Henry was on the front lines of that outbreak.

As an associate medical officer with Toronto Public Health, she worked closely with the late Dr. Sheela Basrur, the city's first chief medical officer of health, on an epidemiological investigation of the disease and its spread across the city.

WATCH | Henry talks about the lingering impact of the SARS outbreak in Toronto

"What stays with me from SARS was I talked to every single one of the families who had people who died from SARS and I knew the impact that the disease had on them," said Henry.

"That really drove some of the reasons why I've been so passionate about protecting people's privacy, about ensuring that we do everything we can for health care workers."

The ballad of Bonnie Henry

So far, B.C. has been successful at flattening the curve compared to central Canada, a fact that has buoyed Henry's popularity across the province, even inspiring a ballad and a mural in her honour.

Hamish Telford, professor of political science at the University of the Fraser Valley, says that's understandable given the non-partisan role she plays.

Maggie MacPherson/CBC

"She steps forward and gives us her expertise without political spin," he said. "And it just so happens that she has a lovely personality and disposition and an extremely reassuring voice."

Even so, he says, it's important to remember that people are not infallible.

"We've seen her advice evolve over time We have to be prepared for that  that she will possibly make mistakes."

For Henry, an outbreak on a global scale comes with the acknowledgment that there is only so much under her control. And while there's no timeline in sight for a world without COVID-19, she says her inspiration has come from the public.

"Every day when I walk home and I watch people lining up to the grocery store, [I see] most people are patient and they're working it through and they're working it out. That's what allows me to sleep."

If you have a COVID-19-related story we should pursue that affects British Columbians, please email us at impact@cbc.ca.
NEW YORK (AP)  Bank of America is slashing the amount it charges customers when they spend more than they have in their accounts and plans to eliminate entirely its fees for bounced checks.
A Chinese research firm attached to the military has become the first organisation to enter the second clinical-trial stage in the global race to develop a vaccine for the coronavirus infection, which has claimed nearly 120,000 lives across the world so far.

China has approved three COVID-19 vaccine submissions for clinical trials, state-run Xinhua news agency quoted a Ministry of Science and Technology official as saying on Tuesday.

An adenovirus(common virus) vector vaccine, developed by a research team led by Major General Chen Wei of the Institute of Military Medicine under the Academy of Military Sciences of the People's Liberation Army, was the first to be approved to enter clinical trial.

The first phase of the clinical trial was completed at the end of March, and the second phase started on April 12.

It is the first Covid-19 vaccine in the world that has entered the second phase of clinical trial, the Xinhua report quoting the World Health Organization as saying.

On Sunday, the vaccine developed by the Institute of Biotechnology, Academy of Military Medical Sciences of China, entered Phase II of a human clinical trial with 500 volunteer participants.

The eldest volunteer is a 84-year-old Wuhan resident, Xiong Zhengxing, who completed the vaccination on Monday morning.

The vaccine is developed by genetic engineering methods and is used to prevent diseases caused by novel coronavirus infections, state-run China Daily reported on Monday.

The first phase of the vaccine clinical trial focused on its safety, while the second phase weighs more on its efficacy. Unlike the first phase, the second phase recruited more participants and introduced a placebo control group.

Volunteer recruitment for the vaccine began on Thursday. It is China's first candidate for the virus that entered clinical human testing. The Phase I trial was conducted in March.

Following the outbreak of COVID-19 in the central Chinese city of Wuhan, many other Chinese institutes are also stepping up efforts to develop vaccines for the deadly disease that has killed over 120,000 people and infected 1,929,000 across the globe.

Story continues

China has stepped up the process to finalise vaccines to counter COVID-19 after Kaiser Permanente research facility in Seattle and Washington stole the march and began human trials.

On Monday, the WHO said a safe and effective vaccine would be needed to fully halt the spread of COVID-19.

"Our global connectedness means the risk of re-introduction and resurgence of COVID-19 will continue," WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus told a virtual briefing from Geneva, stressing that "ultimately, the development and delivery of a safe and effective vaccine will be needed to fully interrupt transmission."

There is a global race to develop the vaccine. India's Serum Institute of India and Bharat Biotech lab are also developing vaccines besides firms in Australia and the UK.

Currently, there are no effective drugs for the deadly disease, although several candidate drugs are in clinical trials.

Scientists say China may have a head start on the development of the vaccine as it was the first to map out the genome sequence of the novel coronavirus after it surfaced in Wuhan city in December last year.

China subsequently shared the genome sequence with the WHO, the US and other countries, setting off the race to develop the vaccine.
A 40-year-old property dealer was shot dead here apparently over an old enmity, police said on Wednesday.

A case has been registered against three people including an ex-serviceman and two of them are in police custody, they said.

Senior Superintendent of Police Shailesh Pandey said, "Owing to old enmity, property dealer Yunus Ahmed Dumpy was shot dead on Tuesday night. A case was registered against three of which Isamuddin and Asif have been arrested."



Efforts are on to arrest the third accused identified as Sirajuddin, an ex-serviceman, he added.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
The World Health Organization "failed in its basic duty" over coronavirus, Donald Trump says.

US President Donald Trump has said he is going to halt funding to the World Health Organization (WHO) because it has "failed in its basic duty" in its response to the coronavirus outbreak.

He accused the UN agency of mismanaging and covering up the spread of the virus after it emerged in China, and said it must be held accountable.

In response, the UN's chief said it was "not the time" to cut funds to the WHO.

Mr Trump has been under fire for his own handling of the pandemic.

He has sought to deflect persistent criticism that he acted too slowly to stop the virus's spread by pointing to his decision in late January to place restrictions on travel from China.

He has accused the WHO of having "criticised" that decision and of being biased towards China more generally.

"I am directing my administration to halt funding while a review is conducted to assess the World Health Organization's role in severely mismanaging and covering up the spread of the coronavirus," Mr Trump told a news conference at the White House on Tuesday.

The US is the global health body's largest single funder and gave it more than $400m in 2019.

A decision on whether the US resumes funding will be made after the review, which Mr Trump said would last 60 to 90 days.

The WHO is yet to directly respond but UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres said the international community should be uniting "in solidarity to stop this virus".

"It is my belief that the World Health Organization must be supported, as it is absolutely critical to the world's efforts to win the war against Covid-19," he said.

Germany's foreign minister tweeted that strengthening the "under-funded" WHO was one of the best investments that could be made at this time.

What is the WHO - and who funds it?

Founded in 1948 and based in Geneva, Switzerland, it is the UN agency responsible for global public health

Has 194 member states, and aims to "promote health, keep the world safe and serve the vulnerable"

Involved in vaccination campaigns, health emergencies and supporting countries in primary care

Funded by a combination of members' fees based on wealth and population and voluntary contributions

US provided 15% of its 2018-19 budget - with more than $400m

China gave about $86m in 2018-19; UK gives most of any country apart from the US

The WHO launched an appeal in March for $675m to help fight the coronavirus pandemic and is reported to be planning a fresh appeal for at least $1bn.

Bill Gates, the Microsoft founder and philanthropist, said on Twitter: "Halting funding for the World Health Organization during a world health crisis is as dangerous as it sounds."

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is the second-largest funder of the WHO.

What is Donald Trump's argument?

"With the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic, we have deep concerns whether America's generosity has been put to the best use possible," the US president said.

The US has by far the highest number of coronavirus cases and deaths worldwide- with more than 600,000 cases and 26,000 deaths.

Mr Trump accused the WHO of having failed to adequately assess the outbreak when it first emerged in the city of Wuhan.

"Had the WHO done its job to get medical experts into China to objectively assess the situation on the ground and to call out China's lack of transparency, the outbreak could have been contained at its source with very little death," he told reporters.

"This would have saved thousands of lives and avoided worldwide economic damage. Instead, the WHO willingly took China's assurances to face value... and defended the actions of the Chinese government."

Chinese officials initially covered up the outbreak of the virus in Wuhan, and punished whistleblowers who tried to raise the alarm. Beijing later imposed draconian restrictions, including quarantine zones on an unprecedented scale, drawing effusive praise from the WHO and its director-general, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus.

WHO experts were only allowed to visit China and investigate the outbreak on 10 February, by which time the country had more than 40,000 cases.

White House reporters pointed out, however, that Mr Trump himself praised China's response to the outbreak and downplayed the danger of the virus at home long after the WHO had declared a "public health emergency of international concern".

Democrats accused him of trying to shift blame away from himself in an election year, but many Republicans in Congress praised his decision.

Why has the WHO faced criticism?

It is not the first time the WHO's response to the outbreak has come under scrutiny.

On 14 January, the organisation tweeted that preliminary Chinese investigations had found "no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission" of the new virus.

Mr Trump and others have used the tweet to attack the WHO for simply believing China, despite evidence to the contrary. But about a week after that tweet, on 22 January, the agency released a public statement saying that human-to-human transmission did appear to be taking place in Wuhan.

At the end of January, on the same day it declared a public health emergency, the WHO said that travel restrictions were not needed to stop the spread of Covid-19 - advice that was eventually ignored by most countries, including by the Trump administration the next day.

In March, the UN agency was also accused of being unduly influenced by China after a senior official refused to discuss Taiwan's response to the outbreak.

Meanwhile, some health experts also say that the WHO's guidance on face masks has led to public confusion.

Other frequently-made criticisms of the WHO more generally are that it is constrained by politics and a sprawling bureaucracy. It came under particular fire for its response to the 2014-2016 Ebola outbreak in West Africa and how long it took to declare a public health emergency, leading the organisation to announce reforms in response.

Trump targets China's growing influence

At one level, this move is about the coronavirus. Administration officials have been sharply accusing the WHO of missteps in the handling of the pandemic, saying it was biased towards China.

They say the WHO was too ready to support China's deceptive early claims about the virus and then didn't push hard enough against Beijing's attempts to cover up its misinformation. In particular President Trump has latched onto the WHO's criticism of his travel restrictions against China.

But at another level, the move to defund the WHO is part of a broader effort by the Trump administration to curtail China's growing global influence.

The argument is that Chinese leadership in international organisations undermines the rules-based, accountable international system needed to prevent and fight a pandemic.

But, the Wall Street Journal reports that the decision also stems from an ongoing discussion on whether to link US aid dollars to the number of Americans working in the groups that receive them. BBC
Families of British coronavirus victims cant afford to say goodbye to their loved ones because many of them are strictly forbidden from attending funerals. But although lockdown measures are less strict in Egypt, the families of many Egyptian coronavirus patients who passed away have not been able to bury their bodies without police intervention because of the stigma surrounding the virus.

Last week, a doctor died after contracting Covid-19 from one of her patients. When her family took her body to be buried in her village, in Egypts Delta region, they were confronted by hundreds of angry people who tried to stop them. The mobs defence was that her body could be a source of transmission of coronavirus to their village. The police had to use tear gas to disperse the protest and let the doctors body finally rest in peace.

Another doctor complained on Facebook that her neighbours wanted her out of their Cairo bloc of flats once realised she worked at a respiratory hospital. She also had to call the police to convince them she is not a source of coronavirus.

In Egypt, this growing stigma means catching coronavirus could leave a long-lasting impact on the social and economic lives of those who contract it  even if they dont suffer many of the physical symptoms.

Recommended China needs to face a full reckoning for its secrecy over coronavirus

People in Europe were no less ashamed of being subject of judgment and stigmatisation, often with a racial overtone, under previous pandemics. During the most devastating wave of the Black Death in Europe, in 1347, around 1,000 Jewish families along the Rhineland had been expunged after being accused of contaminating the wells and food supplies. The poor were to join the Jews later. Guards and health officials in Milan were instructed to pay repeated visits to the houses of the Jews and the poor to make sure they are being kept clean. Doctors and health workers were among those who had been accused of perpetuating the disease for personal gains.

Of course, this kind of overt discrimination disappeared from Europe long before it faced the coronavirus pandemic, but stigma is now flourishing in a different way: Asians in the West are taking the brunt of racism prompted by the pandemic due to the original coronavirus source being China. By insisting on calling it the Chinese virus, Donald Trump is doing his bit to spread stigma and racism at greater speed than his own administrations ability to contain Covid-19 across the US.

But much of the Covid-19 stigma in Egypt, and the whole Middle East, is positively medieval. Many of the recovered  among the poor and privileged, the educated and the illiterate  are shying away from admitting theyve had the virus. They are convinced such a dangerous revelation could result in them and their families being shunned.

The Egyptian villagers who denied a doctor a burial in their local graveyard  and those who did the same in a number of Tunisian cities  stand accused of being victims to ignorance about the nature of the virus and the widespread panic around it  a flaw which is perhaps understandable. This is absolutely normal in times of pandemics, explained Khaled Fahmy, professor of modern history at the University of Cambridge. In dealing with novel viruses, we all simply become ignorant, because we dont know enough about it, and we all become scared because it is a killer.

But widespread ignorance during a pandemic is a governance and communications problem too. The government in Egypt has offered no clear or sustaining message to the public. The media stunts they perform are widely seen by experts as being bumptious  robotic briefings that lack any sign of sympathy or indeed any vital information about the virus and the national efforts being made to contain it.

As the Egyptian media is fully controlled by Abdelfattah al-Sisis government, most journalists dont have the slightest chance to hold leaders accountable or question the hollow strategy being presented. Over the last 30 years, the Egyptian media mastered the art of public health campaigns, warning citizens about the risks and transmission of hepatitis C, poliomyelitis and bilharzia  but then the Egyptian media was never previously operating under such strict suppression and censorship.

Suspicion over government competence, and hidden agendas, is nothing new in Egypt. During the countrys cholera epidemic of 1841, the fear of being taken to isolation prompted some citizens to hide their infected relatives in their homes  sometimes until death.

Stigma is a symptom of the governments failure to convey its message and, more importantly, it is a reminder as to how urgently we need socio-psychologists now. They must work as hard as virologists in the fight to find a vaccine for social stigma.


House Minority Whip Jordan Harris, D-Philadelphia, leaves the House floor wearing gloves and a mask after the morning legislative session. Read more

Could the Pennsylvania legislature overturn Gov. Tom Wolfs closure of nonessential businesses due to the coronavirus?

The short answer: It is unlikely.

The Pennsylvania Senate passed the Republican-backed bill that would broaden Wolfs definition of what constitutes an essential business allowed to remain open during the states coronavirus shutdown, by a vote of 29-21 primarily down party lines. It had passed out of the state House of Representatives on Tuesday with a 107-95 vote.

The measure is now land on the desk of Wolf, the Democratic governor who instituted the shutdown of non-life-sustaining businesses in the first place.

 READ MORE: Here are the life-sustaining businesses allowed to stay open during the coronavirus pandemic.

He plans to veto the measure, and Republicans dont have enough votes to override.

So whats the point of passing the bill at all? Here are answers to that and other questions you might have.

What would the bill mean for Pennsylvanians?

The bill would provide a COV-19 emergency mitigation plan for businesses," requiring the governors office to craft and publish guidelines for how establishments can operate while reducing the risk of spreading the coronavirus. Businesses that comply can reopen.

The guidelines would have to be in compliance with the Centers for Disease Control and Preventions public health recommendations and the United States Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency recommendations regarding what constitutes an Essential Critical Infrastructure Workforce.

CISAs guidelines are broader than Wolfs. One way it differs from the governors rules is that it identifies construction workers as critical employees. In Pennsylvania, all construction, with the exception of emergency repairs, has been halted.

Does it have a shot?

Probably not. Wolf doesnt support the legislation and is poised to veto it.

He has said opening the economy too quickly could result in a surge of new coronavirus cases, overwhelm hospitals, wipe out progress made by the stay-at-home order, and result in an even more battered economy in the long term.

Wolf has joined an alliance with six other governors of Northeastern states, including New Jersey, Delaware, and New York. The governors have vowed to work together to coordinate a regional approach to an economic reopening.

Health Secretary Rachel Levine has also urged caution, noting any relaxation of current orders would be a slow, progressive process.

After a veto, the legislature would need a two-thirds vote in both chambers for an override, meaning 136 of 203 House members and 34 of 50 Senate members would have to vote yes. The House has 110 Republicans and 93 Democrats, and the Senate is split, 28-21.

 READ MORE: Philadelphia area residents on losing jobs in coronavirus crisis

If its unlikely to pass, why introduce it?

As more than 16% of the states workforce has filed for unemployment, Republican lawmakers say Pennsylvanians need to get back to work as quickly as possible and the bill provides a clearer path for them do so.

Senate Majority Leader Jake Corman, a central Pennsylvania Republican, argued Wednesday that residents in rural counties have been forced out of work, even though their areas have not reported many coronavirus cases.

If youre in Crawford County, youre in a completely different world than if youre in Philadelphia today," Corman said. To treat it as a kind of one-size-fits-all state, the cases dont reflect that.

Republicans say the current system is confusing and cumbersome for businesses who wish to apply for a waiver to operate.

Every business in Pennsylvania needs a clear understanding of what is necessary to once again open its doors, Rep. Chris Quinn, a Delaware County Republican, said in a statement. "Waivers are being granted in a random fashion and two like businesses have no idea why one can remain open and the other must shutter its doors.

In voting against the bill, House Democrats argued it prioritizes the economy over public health.

Our health-care system cannot handle the type of carnage we would see should our businesses be open, House Minority Whip Jordan Harris, a Philadelphia Democrat, said Tuesday on the House floor. We can revive our economy, but we cannot revive lives.
The shutdown of nonessential businesses will extend until May 15 in the District of Columbia and May 8 in Virginia, as leaders warned against letting up on efforts to slow the spread of the coronavirus.

Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan, who already had renewed his business ban for 30 more days until May 10, on Wednesday ordered residents to wear masks when they go out to stores.

The additional restrictions came as Hogan, a Republican, and his regional counterparts cautiously broached the subject of life on the other side of the social shutdown that has gripped residents since mid-March.

"Because of the aggressive actions" the state has taken, Maryland is "seeing cautious signs of optimism," said Hogan. "There is light at the end of the tunnel." He promised to publicly discuss recovery plans beginning next week.

Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam, a Democrat, also credited his state's strict social distancing steps with slowing the rate of the pandemic but added a warning: "When people say it's time to stop what we're doing and go back to normal, they're wrong."

His shutdown of hair salons, movie theaters and other nonessential businesses had been set to expire next week before he extended it, and his stay-at-home order remains in place until June 10.

District Mayor Muriel Bowser, a Democrat, on Wednesday extended the public health emergency that had been set to expire after April 24, requiring residents to continue staying at home, banning gatherings of 10 or more and keeping schools closed through the new date.

The mayor's order also requires people to wear masks or face coverings at hotels, during taxi and ride-share trips, and when selling food. Grocery store customers already were required to do so.

Bowser said the city was already seeing social distancing measures pay off because infections are below what officials originally projected. But she said the city needs more time to flatten the curve and to prevent the health system from becoming overloaded.

"If we are concerned about black people dying from covid-19 in Washington, D.C., everyone needs to do their part," said Bowser, referencing racial disparities in deaths. "If you want stores to continue providing you food, everyone needs to do their part."

The mayor said she has the authority to extend restrictions further if necessary.

"I don't know that that means we are going to be open on May the 16th, but it will be a point for us to check in and if we need to extend it beyond that, we certainly will," Bowser said.

The District, Maryland and Virginia reported 93 confirmed coronavirus deaths Wednesday.

They also added 1,030 new infections, bringing the total caseload across the three jurisdictions past 18,700.

Leaders have been coordinating policies for consistency in reopening society in the greater Washington region, though differences remain. Hogan's order Wednesday about face coverings matches one already in place in the District, while Virginia has not mandated masks. The federal government has recommended masks when venturing outside for grocery shopping and everyday tasks but has not required them.

Northam hailed projections showing that preventive steps will help Virginia's hospitals handle the outbreak for at least two more months, though he continued to call for more personal protective gear, ventilators and personnel - much of which have been diverted to nursing homes and extended-care facilities to handle hot spots there.

On Wednesday, he issued a plea for up to 30,000 non-medical volunteers to support an expected surge of patients across the state. His office and the Virginia Medical Reserve Corps are working with colleges and universities to reach students, particularly those in health and medical degree programs.

Saying he knew the drastic steps to slow the spread of the disease have taken an emotional and economic toll, Northam said planning is underway to consider how and when to begin lifting restrictions. He said he currently has no plan to extend the stay-at-home order beyond June 10, though that could change.

The governor cautioned that restrictions will have to be eased slowly and said the "new normal" will look different from the past.

"That new normal will probably look like, covering your face. Spending more time at home. Teleworking if you can. Continuing to use social distancing, and continuing to stay away from large gatherings," he said.

Hogan said Wednesday that Maryland is still on the uphill side of the fight against the coronavirus, but next week he will begin rolling out a plan to reopen parts of the state economy as conditions allow.

Hogan outlined four things that must be in place before the state could begin lifting stay-at-home orders: a dramatic ramping up of testing, a fully implemented surge expansion in hospitals, the acquisition of sufficient personal protective equipment and a major expansion of the state's contact-tracing workforce.

The state has 250 contact tracers, or disease investigators, and plans to add 1,000 more, Hogan said. Through interviews with infected patients, they can trace everyone who has been exposed to the coronavirus. If more tests were available, all those people could be tested and the full extent of the outbreak would be better understood, the governor said.

He cautioned that reopening society too soon could not only lead to a surge in infections but could ultimately prolong the economic shutdown.

"It is absolutely critical for Marylanders to continue staying home," he said.

As chairman of the National Governors Association, Hogan said he will participate in a conference call with President Donald Trump, Vice President Mike Pence and governors across the country Thursday to discuss the crisis.

He said he has been calling on federal leaders to "put aside partisan politics" and has asked the Trump administration to support governors in getting assistance to fight the pandemic.

Earlier Wednesday, Deputy Health Secretary Gregg Todd told a panel of state lawmakers that Maryland had secured 7 million to 8 million pieces of personal protective equipment - gloves, gowns and masks among them - that he expected to arrive within the next few weeks. Most of the items have been ordered from China, Todd said. He estimated that Maryland currently had about half of the equipment it needs.

In the District, city officials rolled out several new measures to protect against spreading the disease.

The city plans to deploy newly obtained rapid-testing equipment for vulnerable populations, including at the District jail, homeless shelters, nursing homes and for immigrants.

At the jail, where 56 have tested positive and one has died, surgical masks will be provided to all inmates and staff at the facility and temperature checks will be taken upon entry. Inmate movement also will be restricted.

Nursing homes and skilled-care facilities will be required to check residents every four hours and test them if they show symptoms. District nursing homes have reported nine deaths and 78 infections.

The District also disclosed the deaths of four homeless residents, two of whom were not hospitalized.

The city is using five hotels to move people out of shelters, prioritizing high-risk groups such as the elderly and people with chronic medical conditions and anyone showing symptoms or requiring quarantine after close contact with a patient.

Officials across the region continue to wrestle with school closures, and on Wednesday school experts from 16 states announced a regional task force to help chart a path toward eventually reopening them.

According to the Southern Regional Education Board, the task force will be co-chaired by James Lane, the Virginia state superintendent of public instruction, and Stephen Pruitt, the president of the Southern Regional Education Board.

The group plans to hold its first meeting next week, and members will also be appointed at that time, officials said.

Coronavirus cases continued to climb around the region. Maryland reported 349 confirmed deaths Wednesday. The state also started reporting "probable deaths," which officials said refers to patients whose death certificates list covid-19 as cause of death but whose samples have not been confirmed by a laboratory test.

If confirmed, the state's 64 probable fatalities would bring the total death toll to 413.

The District added 132 infections and five deaths: three women, ages 45, 69 and 93, and two men, ages 72 and 92. Three-quarters of the District's coronavirus deaths involve patients who are black.

Virginia reported 42 new deaths and 329 new cases. The Henrico health district, the site of the state's worst nursing home outbreak, reported 50 total deaths. In the Fairfax health district, which has 256 hospitalized patients - the highest in the state - 30 people had died.

- - -

The Washington Post's Laura Vozzella, Rebecca Tan, Erin Cox and Hannah Natanson contributed to this report.
Documents reveal that Chinese President Xi Jinping waited six days to publicly warn about the Wuhan coronavirus outbreak, after his top officials determined that the situation was likely to develop into a major public health event.

On January 20, Xi broke silence on the outbreak to warn it must be taken seriously, with leading Chinese epidemiologist, Zhong Nanshan saying for the first time publicly that the virus was transmissible from person-to-person.

That public warning came six days after a January 14 teleconference in which the head of Chinas National Health Commission, Ma Xiaowei, warned Xi and local health officials that a global pandemic was likely underway, according to an internal memo obtained by The Associated Press. Some 3,000 Chinese people are believed to have been infected during the six-day delay.

The epidemic situation is still severe and complex, the most severe challenge since SARS in 2003, and is likely to develop into a major public health event, Ma said, according to the memo.

The call came a day after authorities in Thailand discovered the first case reported outside of China, which the memo cited as an indication that the situation had changed significantly. It added that clustered cases suggest that human-to-human transmission is possible.

With the coming of the Spring Festival, many people will be traveling, and the risk of transmission and spread is high, the memo reads. All localities must prepare for and respond to a pandemic.

Ma also urged officials to prioritize political considerations and social stability ahead of the long Chinas two biggest political meetings of the year in March.

The same day as the teleconference, the World Health Organization stated that preliminary investigations conducted by the Chinese authorities have found no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission of the novel coronavirus (2019-nCoV) identified in Wuhan, China. One day prior, on January 19, the National Health Commission said the virus was still preventable and controllable.

Story continues

A timeline of Chinas slow response to the coronavirus reveals the failures of Beijing to slow the spread of the pandemic. While the Chinese government has reported approximately 82,000 cases, estimates have suggested the number is closer to 2.9 million.

In December, party officials issued a gag order to labs in Wuhan after scientists realized the novel virus closely resembled SARS, ordering them to halt tests, destroy samples, and conceal the news.

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This award-winning rapper may be stuck inside, but shes still feeling the Bern. When Cardi B held a live stream, she invited the Vermont Senator to discuss the coronavirus, Joe Biden, and even his nails. Heres what you mightve missed during this pleasantly unexpected Instagram Live, featuring Bernie Sanders.

Cardi B performs at Vewtopia Music Festival 2020 | Prince Williams/Wireimage

Cardi B had a surprise guest on her Instagram Live

Social distancing isnt so bad with Instagram Lives. A few celebrities hosted daily and weekly live streams for their viewers since the start of the coronavirus (COVID-19) quarantine. Most recently, Cardi B took to her platform, sharing the stream with a special guest.

After fumbling with the Instagram Live for a while, Cardi B added Uncle Bernie, also known as the Vermont Senator and former presidential candidate Bernie Sanders. As soon as he jumped onto the live stream, he asked Cardi B how his nails looked.

Theyre looking very quarantine. I can tell youve been in quarantine quite a while now by your nails, but you know what, its OK, Cardi B responded, waving around her freshly done sky blue nails.

Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders | MANDEL NGAN/AFP via Getty Images

Bernie Sanders and Cardi B discussed current events, and even mentioned Cardi Bs mother

After his introduction and a discussion about quarantine and the coronavirus pandemic, Cardi B mentioned her support of the former presidential candidate and her reaction to him ending his campaign.

I had a fit because I was so hurt and upset that you dropped out of the race and everything, Cardi said I keep telling my people and my supporters that you guys really need to go and vote. Now were between 45 [President Trump], we aint going to name him over here, and Joe Biden.

Bernie Sanders explained why he endorsed Joe Biden. He even paused to say hi to Cardi Bs mother, who called her in the middle of the Instagram Live.

I would go further in all of these areas than he goes, but he is moving in the right direction, Sanders said. Hes moving the right direction on immigration reform, and I think youll be pleased with what he has to stay. I think youll be hearing him make some pretty strong statements on criminal justice reform.

Cardi B is a longtime supporter of Bernie Sanders

Its no surprise to fans that Cardi B is a huge fan of Bernie Sanders. She joins the list of public figures including Ariana Grande and Rev. Jesse Jackson who initially endorsed him for president. Now, with this live stream, she shared she has a better understanding of Sanders Joe Biden endorsement.

Additionally, Cardi B is not afraid to be outspoken regarding what she believes is wrong. Recently, that includes calling out other celebrities who tested for coronavirus (COVID-19) even though they were asymptomatic. She explained thats confusing to viewers because not everyone who needs a test can get one.

Music by Cardi B, including her album Invasion of Privacy, is available on Spotify, Apple Music, and most major streaming platforms.
An employee arranges gold bars for a photograph at the YLG Bullion International headquarters in Bangkok, Thailand.

Gold prices fell on Wednesday, a day after scaling over seven-year highs, as the dollar firmed and investors booked profits, although concerns of a global recession put a floor under prices.

Spot gold fell 0.9% to $1,711.40 per ounce. On Tuesday, prices had jumped as much as 1.9% to their highest since November 2012 at $1,746.50. U.S. gold futures dropped 1.5% to $1,742.80.

"Gold has been following equity markets, and equities are selling off. That's causing volatility and along with a stronger U.S. dollar, it's getting folks to adjust their portfolios in response," said Bart Melek, head of commodity strategies at TD Securities.

Global stocks fell as oil prices dropped and warnings of the worst global recession since the 1930s underscored the economic damage done by the new coronavirus.

The dollar, meanwhile, rebounded on safe haven demand amid growing concerns that the damage to the global economy from the outbreak will be protracted. U.S. retail sales suffered a record drop in March, data showed earlier.

"Before gold can really take off and have the big macro and central bank policy measures bring it up to our view of $2,000, there has to be some stability, because anytime there is a need to get cash and liquidity, gold is going to be sideswiped by that," Melek added.

Countries and central banks across the world have stepped up measures to combat the global heath crisis, which has infected over 2 million people and killed 131,100. In the latest move to cushion its economy, China cut a key medium-term interest rate to record lows, paving the way for a similar reduction in benchmark loan rates.

Despite the decline in prices on Wednesday, Commerzbank analyst Carsten Fritsch believes gold could cost $1,800 per ounce at year's end.

"The severe impact of the global lockdown on economies and financial markets, the flood of money released by central banks and governments and the ballooning sovereign debt point to ongoing robust demand for gold as a safe haven and last-resort lifeline." Silver was down 2.5% at $15.42, while platinum rose 0.6% to $779.41.

Palladium dipped 1.5% to $2,184.97 per ounce.

"We continue to expect the palladium market to be undersupplied this year and next year, despite latest industry expectations for auto sales to plummet by at least 14%," Standard Chartered Bank analysts said in a note.
The opposition Communist Party of India-Marxist (CPI-M) alleged on Wednesday that 30 people who tested positive for Covid-19 had died West Bengal though the state government said the death toll was only seven.

The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which has emerged the principal opposition to the ruling Trinamool Congress (TMC) in the state, has also accused the Mamata Banerjee government of suppressing death figures and misleading the people.

The daily Ganashakti, the CPI-Ms Bengali mouthpiece, cited sources in the health administration and reported on its front page that 30 people had died in the state after being infected by the coronavirus. It reported 25 people had died till April 13, and five more on Tuesday.

Chief minister Mamata Banerjee on Wednesday issued a strong warning to those spreading misinformation about the number of deaths.

Without referring to Ganashakti, she said, People are quoting numbers to make headlines. I warn everybody against doing so, as there is a Supreme Court order for preventing misinformation and we can take legal action. The number of deaths is being determined by an expert committee and not me.

TMC spokesperson Snehashis Chakraborty, too, accused the CPM and BJP of spreading misinformation to create panic among the public. The role of CPM and BJP is uncalled for, Chakraborty said.

On Tuesday evening, BJP national general secretary Kailash Vijayvargiya targeted the state government and alleged four bodies were lying at a state-run hospital but the administration was not saying whether the deaths were due to Covid-19.

He tweeted that 4 dead bodies are kept in the isolation Ward of MR Bangur (covid) Hospital, and gave details of the four people. In another tweet, he wrote: Are these four bodies kept in MR Bangur hospital? Were they tested for corona? Had they got treatment properly? If these are not covid deaths then why arent bodies being handed over to the relatives of deceased? Why arent these deaths reflecting in covid bulletin of the state??

BJP IT cells national head Amit Malviya also criticised the West Bengal government, tweeting that the relatives of patients had complained that bodies were decomposing in the isolation ward of MR Bangur Hospital, while the state governments bulletin said no one died of Covid in last 48 hrs.

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CLEVELAND, Ohio  Gov. Mike DeWine said Wednesday that he asked Ohio hospitals to develop a plan to resume elective surgeries and other procedures delayed in response to the coronavirus pandemic.

Ohio Department of Health Director Amy Acton ordered hospitals to postpone elective surgeries last month. The state intended the move to free up hospital space in case it experienced a surge of coronavirus patients and to limit the use of personal protective equipment, such as face masks, that were already in short supply.

DeWine said during Wednesdays daily coronavirus briefings that he had asked the Ohio Hospital Association to develop a plan to resume delayed procedures. He noted that social distancing measures have dramatically improved the states outlook for the coronavirus outbreak, and have kept hospitals from being overwhelmed with an influx of COVID-19 patients.

DeWine asked hospitals to submit the plan to him by next Wednesday. He instructed them to consider the fact Ohio and other states are still scrambling to obtain more PPE to supply hospitals, first responders and nursing homes.

We feel much better about the capacity in the hospitals themselves. But again, the problem still remains and is still a challenge, in regard to personal protection equipment and having enough of that, DeWine said.

The order to delay elective surgeries led to some confusion about what procedures qualified as elective. DeWines office and the Ohio Hospital Association issued guidelines March 18 but gave hospitals some leeway to make determinations for patients. Some Northeast Ohio doctors told cleveland.com that some procedures might be considered elective in the short term, but problems could develop if they are not addressed.

DeWine, on Wednesday, used a colonoscopy as an example. He said someone who receives a colonoscopy each year might be able to delay the procedure for a few months, but not cancel it entirely.

Once elective surgeries resume, the public should not be concerned that hospitals are unsafe, DeWine said. He said those procedures were delayed solely to preserve hospital space and PPE.

I want to make it very, very clear the hospital procedures were not limited because the hospitals are not safe, DeWine said. They were limited because of the personal protection equipment problem.

Read more cleveland.com stories:

What are elective surgeries and why are they postponed amid coronavirus? Hospital leaders explain

Ohio ordering elective surgeries postponed: What does that include?
Litigation surrounding coronavirus responses is already underway and businesses are warning that the fear of more lawsuits could hinder the reboot of the U.S. economy.

Returning America to work will require coordination between government and business and resolution of a number of regulatory, legal and liability issues, according to the Chamber of Commerce.

The issues the Chamber is concerned about include employer liability, products liability, medical liability, securities litigation, outdated regulations, health privacy and workplace safety.

This pandemic is upending every way of life, including how businesses operate and care for employees and communities. As we adjust to this new reality, we must understand that many laws and regulations were designed for a different time and place, and today they could significantly hamper or even contradict recovery efforts, U.S. Chamber President Suzanne Clark said.

In addition, the Business Roundtable, a group of CEOs of major companies, issued principles it said should guide a reopening of the U.S. economy. In a letter to Vice Mike President Pence that was shared with members of Congress and governors, the CEOs stressed putting the lives of Americans first.

Americans need to know that policymakers and employers are prioritizing their safety. A successful recovery strategy must give Americans confidence that they can safely return to work and public spaces. This means reopening at the right time, as guided by public health officials, the Roundtable wrote. It also means that as community-based movement restrictions are gradually lifted, those restrictions will need to be replaced by other kinds of protections that keep Americans safe, including, among other things, personal protective equipment, cleaning procedures, testing and other diagnostic tools, and virus monitoring.

The members of the Roundtable include CEOs of major financial, manufacturing, technology, transportation, consumer goods, pharmaceutical and other corporations. Insurance members include the CEOs of Aon, Assurant, Chubb, MetLife, Progressive, Starr, State Farm, Travelers, USAA and Verisk.

The Roundtable also stressed the need for federal guidelines on a range of issues to foster a common understanding of steps being taken across the country. Federal guidelines will also help businesses of all sizes plan, prepare for and execute the most effective recovery possible, the letter said. Even on issues not covered by federal guidelines, states should endeavor to be as coordinated as possible, particularly states within the same region.

National guidelines would be most important for appropriate safety measures such as personal protective equipment, cleaning procedures, testing and other diagnostic tools, and virus monitoring, according to the Roundtable. Clear federal guidelines, implemented across states, will give workers and consumers greater confidence, will ensure that essential services can continue to function without interruption, and will help direct use of critical supplies to the areas with greatest need, the statement said.

In her letter to Chamber members, Clark said that planning for the return to work in America cant wait.

Lawsuits Against Businesses Over Coronavirus Have Begun. More to Come? Hospitals, restaurants, day care centers, nursing homes and hotels may face claims that they didnt take adequate steps to protect people. D&O Insurers Brace For Coronavirus Event Driven Litigation What may be the first U.S. securities lawsuits alleging misdeeds related to coronavirus were filed in late March  one against a cruise line and another against a pharmaceutical company that claimed to have developed a vaccine. Litigation Builds Against Insurers Over Coronavirus Business Interruption The legal battle will be fought state by state  each with its own insurance laws  which may mean different outcomes. The language for business-interruption policies can vary between insurers, even though some virus exclusions are similar. Life-or-Death Decisions by Hospitals, Doctors Come With Threat of Lawsuits Doctors and hospitals risk being second-guessed by juries when the crisis is over. Washington Nursing Home Sued Over Coronavirus Death The Life Care Center has seen more than 120 cases and at least 37 deaths. Estate of Walmart Employee Who Died From COVID-19 Sues for Wrongful Death The suit alleges the Walmart store was not properly cleaned and employees were not given proper protective equipment.

The American business community must begin preparing now for new processes, requirements, or restrictions for which there is no playbook or precedent. And we must not allow a lack of resources, regulations that are not fit-for-purpose, and the fear of litigation to sideline efforts to return to work and lifesafely, successfully and sustainably, Clark wrote.

Clark said the return to work will be gradual, phased-in, and will vary by location, sector, business type or size, and the health status of workers.

It also will require continued social distancing, expanded use of personal protective equipment, and other counter-measures, she wrote.

Litigation related to the coronavirus crisis has thus far involved insurance, employer liability and securities. Several businesses are suing insurers over business interruption claims denials. The owner of a nursing home tied to dozens of COVID-19 deaths is being sued. The estate of an employee who died from COVID-19 is suing Walmart. A Chicago nurse is suing the hospital she says fired her for speaking out on the lack of protective equipment. Securities lawsuits have been filed against a cruise line and another against a pharmaceutical company.

Liability Issues Ahead?

A reopening plan that is medically based and relies on social distancing and other best practices for public health may raise significant regulatory and legal liability risks, the Chamber said.

The Chamber said it has begun exploring other implications in addition to liabilities of returning to work. These other areas include the essential services and resources necessary for returning to work: general health screening, COVID-19 testing, personal protective equipment, childcare, and transportation. And also support for businesses and individuals during a phased reopening: businesses dependent on high-density gatherings or travel, and individuals delayed in returning to work.

The business lobby contends that the litigation risk will become exacerbated during a reopening. It has identified a number of regulatory and legal issues it believes need to be resolved including:

Health Privacy

There are federal and state laws governing the health privacy of individuals. However, these could conflict with potential reopening requirements for employers to verify employees COVID-19 status and/or their vulnerability due to underlying health conditions. They may also interfere with conduct needed for contact tracing in the workplace. The Chamber called for a broad safe-harbor for employers in the area of health privacy.

Discrimination Claims

Employers who conduct a medically-based or risk-based reopening, such as using age or underlying health conditions, may face liability under the Age Discrimination in Employment Act and the anti-discrimination provisions of the Americans with Disabilities Act. Employers need clear guidance about what practices are acceptable in conducting a medically-based or risk-based reopening and they need a safe harbor for actions taken by employers consistent with those guidelines, the Chamber said.

Safe Workplace Requirements

Generally, OSHA holds employers responsible for making personal protective equipment (PPE) and training available. However, if the federal government recommends PPE be available in all workplaces, the Chamber wants the federal government to make it clear that PPE used to combat the spread of COVID-19 is not subject to the normal OSHA requirements. Employers are also concerned they may face lawsuits and workers compensation issues around the limited supply of PPE. The federal government should clarify the scope of liability related to PPE, according to the Chamber.

Employment Practices

Employers are concerned about potential litigation around employees scope of work and travel destinations, wage-and-hour issues (for example, whether employees should be compensated while getting tested or passing through screening), leave policy, travel restrictions, telework protocols, and workers compensation. In addition, employers fear they could risk legal actions if they do not accommodate employees who insist on returning to work even though they have not completed health screenings or are high risk. Employers fear legal exposure for not following all procedural requirements if they have to lay off workers in response to social distancing policies and government-mandated closures.

Exposure Liability

This is perhaps the largest area of concern for the overall business community, says the Chamber. It encompasses multiple types of claims that could be brought against business that have been designated as essential as well as large swaths of the remaining business community once the economy is reopened.

Among the concerns here are situations where a customer, employee, patient or member of the public is exposed to COVID-19 in a business facility or as the result of a business particular action, or failure to act, and then that claimant becomes sick. The legal theories underlying these claims may range from simple negligence to strict liability to public nuisance. If enough claims are brought, the Chamber warns they could drive businesses to bankruptcy and the threat of exposure-related lawsuits might also deter some businesses from reopening. The Chamber identifies several recommended solutions in these cases including providing a safe harbor for companies following CDC or state/local health department guidance, channeling certain claims into federal court rather state courts and restricting public nuisance claims.

Product Liability

Makers of certain products such as hand sanitizers, soaps and other cleaning supplies that are used to protect against, treat or test for COVID-19 may not have sufficient protection against litigation. Current law does not provide protection outside key healthcare-related spaces such as for a non-healthcare provider that provides PPE to its employees or uses recommended cleaning products.

Medical Liability

Healthcare providers and facilities caring for COVID-19 patients are concerned about medical liability lawsuits arising from care decisions, lack of care due to equipment shortages, or mistakes due to long hours or staff or equipment shortages. Nursing homes and assisted living facilities are also concerned with being sued for allegedly failing to protect patients from contracting COVID-19. At the federal level, the CARES Act provides some liability protections for volunteer healthcare providers caring for COVID-19 patients. The Chamber says the CARES Act language should be expanded to include all healthcare providers and facilities (not just volunteers). In addition, it supports state-level COVID-19 medical liability statutes such as one New York recently enacted.

Securities Litigation

Securities class actions already have been filed against a cruise line and pharmaceutical firm based on stock-price drops and claims that companies should have been warning investors about the potential consequences of a pandemic. The Chamber calls for an automatic stay on securities litigation cases related to the COVID-19 emergency until after the federal declaration of a public emergency has been rescinded. It is also worth considering a cap on damages in COVID-19 related securities lawsuits, the Chamber said.

False Claims Act

Cases brought under the federal False Claims Act can impose significant liability on entities receiving federal funding or contracts. According to the Chamber, these liability concerns could potentially delay relief under the CARES Act and future relief measures. The Chamber wants hold harmless language for firms participating in federal loan and relief programs.

Topics Lawsuits Legislation Claims Workers' Compensation USA Medical Professional Liability
The fire service found the blaze had started deliberately

Expensive farming equipment has been deliberately destroyed in an arson attack at a farm in Claudy, Co Derry.

Police are investigating the arson attack at a farm building on Carnanreagh Road which occurred at midnight on Sunday April 12.

A shed containing the farming equipment was set alight destroying the contents and the building.

The fire also extensively damaged three vehicles parked nearby.

Assistant group commander Brian Hetherington told the Belfast Telegraph that three appliances and a water tanker were sent to the scene at around 11.20pm on Sunday and remained there until 2.40am.

He added that the fire started from a car which spread to the nearby farm shed, completely destroying the shed.

At this point the fire service believes it is most likely that the blaze was started deliberately.

Sergeant Karen McGuinness appealed to anyone with information about the incident to contact police on 101, quoting reference 2855 12/04/20.
New York City's Mayor Bill de Blasio abruptly added 4,000 deaths to the city's roster of Wuhan virus deaths. He did this even though there are no tests proving that these 4,000 people died because of the virus. The mayor claims he made the change to increase statistical accuracy, but he may have been acting upon baser motives.

One problem with getting a handle on the Wuhan virus is that we have no accurate count telling how many people have become sick with or died from it, whether at home or abroad. Different countries use different tests; different tests have various rates of fake results, both positive and negative; and not everyone is or can be tested. Moreover, in different places, people are classified as Wuhan virus deaths if they tested positive for the virus regardless of what killed them.

We know that there may be people who have the virus but dont know it, people who are sick with something that may or may not be the virus, and people who die from causes that can be attributed to the virus, although without any real certainty. Antibody tests are useful for providing some mathematical probability about the viruss prevalence in a given population, but the tests also dont home in on the exact number of people who are or have been ill.

Put another way, virus counts around the world are subject to a lot of guesswork. The inability to get accurate numbers allows different jurisdictions to adjust the numbers depending on their policy goals.

Most people believe that China severely undercounted its Wuhan virus numbers, both when determining how many became sick and how many died. As a communist country, China has an aversion to admitting bad news because doing so is always a reflection on its all-controlling government. Additionally, now that its trying to avoid responsibility for releasing a pandemic on the world, it wants to deny that there ever was a problem within its borders.

Iran is also probably undercounting its numbers to deflect from the mullahs failures. The same is true for Russia and other totalitarian countries.

In America, though, things are different. The virus is racing through Democrat strongholds, whether cities or states. One might assume that the political leaders in those cities would like to downplay the numbers to prove their effectiveness in handling a crisis under their aegis. The opposite is true, however,

In a free society, a crisis affords the government greater control over citizens. Various jurisdictions, especially those under Democrat control, are using the opportunity to turn into police states. The government locks people in their homes, mandates the limited circumstances under which they can leave their homes, and arrests them for any deviations.

In North Carolina, police arrested people who observed social distance but assembled in the same general area to demand that the state reopen. In Michigan, among other things, Governor Gretchen Whitmer is banning the sale of seeds for growing fruits and vegetables. In Vermont, the government is mandating what stores are allowed to sell. In Philadelphia, ten police officers dragged a passenger off a bus for not wearing a mask. In Winslow, Arizona, a 71-year-old man was arrested for opening a small Native American store.

The more frightened people are, the more readily they will yield to a governments promise that, if they allow the government to control them completely, they will be safe.

Democrats especially also have a strong motive for inflating infection and death rates: They are trying to show that President Trump botched handling the pandemic. They can only do this by pointing to an inordinately high death rate.

Finally, American governments might inflate the number of Wuhan virus deaths to get money. The federal government is directing funds to those jurisdictions that are experiencing more Wuhan virus infections. This is especially important in New York, in which Governor Cuomo slashed the states Medicaid funding.

All three of those factors may figure into New York City's announcement on Tuesday that it is adding 4,000 deaths to its roster of Wuhan virus deaths, despite the absence of any certainty that those people died from the Wuhan virus:

New York City added nearly 4,000 people who never tested positive for the coronavirus to its death toll Tuesday, bringing coronavirus-related deaths in the city to around 10,000 people. The city decided to add 3,700 people to its death tolls, who they presumed to have died from the virus, according to a report from The New York Times. The additions increased the death toll in the U.S. by 17%, according to the Times report, and included people who were suffering from symptoms of the virus, such as intense coughing and a fever. [snip] The report stated that Democratic New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio decided over the weekend to change the way the city is counting deaths.

Maybe de Blasio is just making the records more accurate. Or maybe de Blasio has ulterior motives for increasing the death rate in his city by 17%. Democrats will incline to the former view; cynics and Republicans to the latter.
The world around us is charging at breakneck speed: technology is developing, new scientific discoveries are emerging, manufacturers are concluding that environmentally friendly production and a search of alternative energy sources are not just some tricks, an up-to-date tendency, or a strong stand of the owner, but a precondition for preserving the planet for future generations.

Global Society Already Switching to Alternative Energy Sources: Indeed, the Future Has Come! But What about Ukraine?

The world-leading industrial manufacturers are trying to use the energy of the sun, wind, water, biogas, and secondary energy resources, waves and tides, gas from organic waste and sewage treatment plants, etc., to the maximal extent for the sustainable use of resources and protection of the environment. Leading scientists are also trying to find ways to efficiently use secondary energy resources, such as blast and coke gas, methane from coal deposits, emission energy potential of technological processes and others.

The International Energy Agency suggests that up to the year 2030, the share of alternative energy will be around 16% of the total world production, while the European Industry Union of renewable energy sources mentions a bigger figure - up to 35%. Leading experts claim that the future of humanity remains with alternative energy sources!

In Germany, one of the top countries that use alternative energy sources, the share of renewable energy reaches up to 40% and the production of electric energy amounts to 67%, as reported by the Federal Renewable Energy Commission.

Last year, a scientific research laboratory was established as part of the Perechin Timber and Chemical Plant, aimed at the search and usage of alternative energy sources.

Collaboration of the Perechin Timber and Chemical Plant with German Karlsruhe Institute of Technology

In December 2019, a scientific research laboratory was launched as part of the plant, where PLC specialists work in collaboration with employees of the well-known European Karlsruhe Institute of Technology on critical tasks, such as the following:

 Technologies generating additional energy from charcoal waste. It is planned to be focused not only on the needs of production but also on the creation of new products;

 Technologies with the help of which useful chemical compounds are naturally extracted from wood. It presupposes the extraction of such compounds mainly from pyrolysis gases. Besides, this is the world-leading trend!

In fact, the company is sincerely proud of an opportunity to contribute to the protection of the environment together with the oldest technological institute of Germany, the absolute authority in ecology production matters.

Perechin Timber and Chemical Plant Moves with the Times: Recognition of Customers and Environmental Specialists

Compliance with high-quality standards and environmental principles of the production has made the Perechin Timber and Chemical Plant a dependable partner to large foreign companies, including the European largest activated coal plants, the world-leading silicon and metal producers.

The products can also be found in the largest European market chains, such as LIDL, Kaufland, Carrefour, EDEKA, TESCO. The plant operates in accordance with BSCI, PEFC and ISO standards.

Up-to-Date Methods of Industrial Charcoal Production at the Perechin Timber and Chemical Plant: When Ecology Is an Axiom!

The Additional Liability Company Perechin Timber and Chemical Plant uses only fuel firewood for the production of charcoal. All raw materials are properly certified.

The production process takes place in two vertical retorts and is fully automated, which allows experts to carefully monitor chemical indicators, such as ash content, humidity, volatiles content, etc. The process itself features a closed cycle: organic compounds that appear as a result of combustion are disposed of in a special boiler, producing the energy required for further processes. That is to say, the production not just eliminates environmental pollution, but also provides the necessary energy resources for its further functioning, instead.

Such a growth vector was chosen not for the recognition by international experts or as a pursuit of world trends. Instead, it was selected with the thought of future generations and the preservation of the environment on a global scale.
Volatility in Thai markets has fallen "significantly" since a series of measures were introduced last month, according to the president of the country's stock exchange, Pakorn Peetathawatchai.

The measures were introduced after global markets sold off as investors scrambled for safety from the economic threat of the global coronavirus pandemic.

As part of those adjustments, the Stock Exchange of Thailand revised circuit breaker trigger values were so that trading can be temporarily halted at an earlier stage. While these were initially part of a slate of temporary changes, the exchange announced Monday that the circuit breaker revisions would be permanent.

With these changes, "investors(s) have more time to digest the information especially during the (time) that there are a lot (of) uncertainty like now," Peetathawatchai told CNBC's "Street Signs" on Tuesday.

Previously, the temporary trading halts were triggered at the -10% and -20% levels, which Peetathawatchai said was "quite a big number." The Stock Exchange of Thailand revised those levels to -8%, -15% and -20%.

Other steps include changes to the ceiling and floor criteria, reducing the movement limits of stocks. The Stock Exchange of Thailand also announced that short-selling would temporarily only be allowed at prices higher than the last trading price. These new protocols are scheduled to last until June 30, but could be lifted earlier.

Into Tuesday's close, Thailand's benchmark SET Composite index had risen more than 22% from its 52-week closing low in March. Still, the index has shed about 20% so far in 2020.
In response to deputy of the Bright Armenia faction Hrant Ayvazyans question about the implementation of the twelfth anti-crisis measure during a question-and-answer session with government officials in parliament today, Deputy Prime Minister Mher Grigoryan said the government is considering the issue of non-gasified communities of the country in order to support the families living in those communities as well.

The deputy particularly informed that there are 330 non-gasified communities in Armenia and added that the families of those communities dont consume natural gas. He also asked what kind of support is being provided to those families.

In response, Grigoryan said the government is considering the issue of non-gasified communities, taking into consideration the real databases.

Overall, the Armenian government has approved twelve programs to mitigate the economic consequences of the coronavirus, six of which concern economic assistance to businesses (agriculture, tourism, small and medium-sized businesses, microbusiness and other sectors), and the other six concern provision of social support to various groups of the population.
Gov. Phil Murphy constantly makes this plea to Congress to help New Jersey residents slammed by the nations highest property taxes during the coronavirus crisis.

Please God, folks in Washington, if youre watching, can you lift the cap, he said on Saturday, referring to the $10,000 limit on the federal deduction for state and local taxes.

I hope permanently but can you at least lift if for some period of time? Murphy continued. This was a crushing blow to our homeowners and property taxpayers in New Jersey. We need that lifted.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., and New Jersey lawmakers are pressing to remove the cap in the next federal stimulus bill, but Senate Republicans so far have resisted.

The provision in the Republicans 2017 tax law targeted New Jersey and other high-tax states, the ones hardest hit by the coronavirus. Most of those states send billions of dollars more to Washington than they receive in services.

The cap has kept home values in the state below what they otherwise would be, according to Moodys Analytics.

CORONAVIRUS RESOURCES: Live map tracker | Businesses that are open | Homepage

The House voted last year to repeal the cap and pay for the loss of revenue by raising the top tax rate, which affects incomes higher than $510,300.

Senate Republicans have refused to consider the legislation, saying it benefits the rich, even though two-thirds of the households affected in New Jersey make $200,000 a year or less.

GOP concerns over helping the wealthy didnt apply in drafting the $2 trillion stimulus law, however. Senate Republicans inserted a tax break that this year gives 82 percent of the benefits to taxpayers making more than $1 million a year, according to the Joint Committee on Taxation.

Someone wrongly seized on this health emergency to reward ultrarich beneficiaries, likely including the Trump family, with a tax loophole not available to middle class families," said Rep, Lloyd Doggett, D-Texas, who joined U.S. Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse D-R.I., in requesting the analysis.

If you would like updates on New Jersey-specific coronavirus news, subscribe to our Coronavirus in N.J. newsletter.

Jonathan D. Salant may be reached at jsalant@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter @JDSalant or on Facebook. Find NJ.com Politics on Facebook.

Have a tip? Tell us. nj.com/tips. Get the latest updates right in your inbox. Subscribe to NJ.coms newsletters.
Source: Xinhua| 2020-04-15 12:21:20|Editor: Xiaoxia

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A voter is ready to cast her ballot at a polling station in Seoul, South Korea, April 15, 2020. South Korean voters went to the polls for parliamentary election Wednesday amid the COVID-19 outbreak, according to the National Election Commission. The election to vote for 300 members of the National Assembly, which began from 6 a.m. local time, would last for 12 hours at 14,330 polling stations across the country. Preparations were made to protect voters from possible infection while casting ballots, by disinfecting voting stations and marking the standing line at intervals of at least one meter. (Photo by Lee Sang-ho/Xinhua)

SEOUL, April 15 (Xinhua) -- South Korean voters went to the polls for parliamentary election Wednesday amid the COVID-19 outbreak, according to the National Election Commission.

The election to vote for 300 members of the National Assembly, which began from 6 a.m. local time, would last for 12 hours at 14,330 polling stations across the country.

Preparations were made to protect voters from possible infection while casting ballots, by disinfecting voting stations and marking the standing line at intervals of at least one meter.

Voters were allowed to enter the voting booths only after wearing masks, checking body temperature, rubbing their hands with sanitizer and putting on disposable plastic gloves.

The election was held at a time of the COVID-19 outbreak across the world that delayed elections in other countries such as Britain, France and the United States.

South Korea has seen a slowing daily caseload of the virus in recent weeks. If the nationwide election is successfully held without any big cluster infection, the country may relieve its rules on social-distancing.

The government has encouraged people to refrain from social gatherings and religious services as cluster infections account for more than 80 percent of the total confirmed COVID-19 cases.

In the latest tally, the country reported 27 more cases of the COVID-19 for the past 24 hours, raising the total figure to 10,591. The daily caseload hovered below 50 for the seventh straight day.

Of the 43.99 million voting-age South Koreans, 26.69 percent voted in advance on Friday and Saturday. It was the highest since the early voting system was introduced in 2013.

According to the Gallup Korea survey commissioned by the National Election Commission, 79.0 percent replied that they would go to the polls "without fail."

It was 12.4 percentage points higher than four years ago for the parliamentary election. Those who said they would vote "if possible" was 15.1 percent.

South Korean President Moon Jae-in's approval rating has risen in recent weeks amid the positive public views over his government's response to the COVID-19 outbreak.

According to the Realmeter poll, support for Moon advanced to 54.4 percent in the second week of this month. It was far higher than 46.9 percent tallied in the first week of February.

During the electioneering, Moon's ruling Democratic Party focused on the government's successful response to the virus, adopting the campaign slogan of "We protect the people."

The mood of this year's election campaign, usually energetic and noisy, was relatively dull and quiet as campaigners were advised to wear masks and avoid handshakes.

To secure the suffrage of those under the mandatory two-week self-quarantine, the election organizing body allowed them to leave home out of quarantine to go to the polls for a set period of time.

Among those who are quarantined as they were infected with the virus, came in contact with the infectees or came from overseas within two weeks, people showing no symptom would be allowed to cast ballots for an hour from 6 p.m. local time when others ended voting.

They would be required to wear masks and report to health officials before leaving home and after arriving home. They should walk or drive alone to the voting stations in less than half an hour, casting ballots in separately arranged booths and standing in line at intervals of at least two meters.

Of the 59,918 voters under the mandatory quarantine, 22.8 percent, or 13,642, applied for the vote for the general elections, widely seen as a mid-term referendum on the Moon Jae-in government.

If they violate the rules, they will face up to one-year imprisonment or up to the fine of 10 million won (about 8,200 U.S. dollars).
Hollywood actor Joaquin Phoenix who has always been vocal on issues bothering humanity like climate change has recently called for New York to release some prison inmates, in the light of novel coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic.

nbcnews.com

The 45-year-old on Tuesday shared his thoughts in a tweet released by the Release Aging People in Prison Campaign. Phoenix called on Gov. Andrew Cuomo, a Democrat, to take action immediately.



A message from Oscar award winning actor Joaquin Phoenix: Im calling on @NYGovCuomo to take action in New York by granting clemency to New Yorkers in prison. The lives of so many people depend on his action. No one deserves to die in prison from COVID-19. #ClemencyNow pic.twitter.com/CEFEkwVTBV  Release Aging People in Prison Campaign (@RAPPcampaign) April 14, 2020

"A message from Oscar award-winning actor Joaquin Phoenix : I'm calling on @NYGovCuomo to take action in New York by granting clemency to New Yorkers in prison. The lives of so many people depend on his action. No one deserves to die in prison from COVID-19," reads the tweet.



"The spread of coronavirus in prisons threatens the health and safety of all of us," he had said earlier in the video.

"When you're incarcerated there's no such thing as social distancing and ensuring good hygiene is not an option. Leaders must do everything possible to prevent incarcerated people and those who work in prisons from becoming ill and spreading the virus," the actor added.



Twitter

According to Fox News, as of Tuesday, there have been nearly 600,000 cases of the coronavirus in the United States and just over 25,000 deaths.


By Akbar Mammadov

China has expressed its support for political dialogue over the Armenian-Azerbaijani Nagorno-Karabakh conflict, Chinese Foreign Ministry's Spokesman Zhao Lijian said in a press conference on April 14.

Commenting on the second round of the so-called "presidential elections" in Azerbaijan's Nagorno-Karabakh region occupied by Armenia, the Chinese spokesman noted:

"Chinas position on the issue of Nagorno-Karabakh is clear and consistent. We hope relevant parties will resolve disputes through political dialogue and uphold regional peace and stability. China will continue promoting stability and development in the region".

In turn, the Azerbaijani Foreign Ministry's Spokeswoman Leyla Abdullayeva said in her Twitter page:

"Chinas principled position on supporting sovereignty and territorial integrity of Azerbaijan is reflected in numerous bilateral agreements signed by both states."

It should be noted that a number of countries, including France, Germany, Turkey, UK, Canada, Australia, Norway, Pakistan, Latvia, Ukraine, Georgia, Estonia, as well as major international organizations such as the EU, NATO, OSCE, OIC, GUAM, Visegrad Group, TURKPA have recently reiterated their support for Azerbaijans territorial integrity and condemned the illegal elections held in in Karabakh on March 31.

Azerbaijan and Armenia are locked in a conflict over Azerbaijans Nagorno-Karabakh breakaway region, which along with seven adjacent regions was occupied by Armenian forces in a war in the early 1990s. More than 20,000 Azerbaijanis were killed and around one million were displaced as a result of the large-scale hostilities.

The OSCE Minsk Group co-chaired by the United States, Russia and France has been mediating the Armenian-Azerbaijani conflict since the signing of the volatile cease-fire agreement in 1994. The Minsk Groups efforts have resulted in no progress and to this date, Armenia has failed to abide by the UN Security Council resolutions (822, 853, 874 and 884) that demand the withdrawal of Armenian military forces from the occupied territories of Azerbaijan.

---

Akbar Mammadov is AzerNews staff journalist, follow him on Twitter: @AkbarMammadov97

Follow us on Twitter @AzerNewsAz
WASHINGTON  Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden is looking for his Joe Biden.

The former vice president, who has committed to having a woman on the presidential ticket, has begun the vetting process for a running mate after announcing his vice presidential selection committee on April 30. He has said he wants to make his pick before Aug. 1.

Since he made that commitment to pick a woman as his running mate, several names have been floated, including some of his former Democratic opponents such as Sens. Kamala Harris, Amy Klobuchar and Elizabeth Warren. (Klobuchar has since removed herself from consideration.)

Biden is also facing fresh calls to choose a woman of color after following the death of George Floyd, which led to nationwide protests against police violence and systemic racism.

The Democratic nominee has openly talked about some candidates hes considering and said he has sought advice on the decision from former President Barack Obama.

During a virtual fundraiser in April, Biden said Obama told him to find someone who has experience where the former vice president is lacking, a dynamic that worked well between the two. Biden noted he is looking for vice presidential candidate with whom he can be "simpatico."

More: Joe Biden tops Bernie Sanders to capture Wisconsin's Democratic presidential primary

Here's a look at some of the women mentioned as possible running mates for Biden. All would be the first female vice president in U.S. history if Democrats win the White House in November.

Stacey Abrams lost her bid to become Georgia's governor.

Stacey Abrams

Abrams was the Democratic gubernatorial candidate in Georgia in 2018. After losing that race by a fraction of the overall vote, she announced a nonprofit group called Fair Fight 2020, which staffs and funds voter protection teams in battleground states across the country. She is the former minority leader for the Georgia House of Representatives.

Abrams initially said she wasn't interested in being a vice presidential candidate but said recently she would be honored to be considered Bidens running mate.

Story continues

I would be honored to be on the campaign trail as a running mate, she told the podcast Pod Save America, hosted by former members of the Obama administration, last week. But that is a process that you cant campaign for, and Im not campaigning for. Im just being straightforward.

Want to talk more about politics? Join our Facebook group Across the Aisle, Across the Nation.

In March 2019, Biden met with Abrams before he announced he was running for president. Their meeting fueled speculation that the former vice president was going to jump into the race (which he did a month later) and that Abrams would be his running mate. Rumors were floated that Abrams herself was going to jump into the 2020 presidential primary.

If chosen, she would be the first Black woman on a major party's presidential ticket.

Democrat Tammy Baldwin is a senator of Wisconsin, a state Democrats need in November.

Tammy Baldwin

The senator from Wisconsin is the first openly gay person elected to the Senate and hails from a state Democrats need to win in November. Donald Trump narrowly won Wisconsin in 2016, and it is a battleground state that Republicans and Democrats have invested resources in.

Biden was named the winner of the Democratic primary in Wisconsin, and a liberal judge knocked a conservative incumbent off the state Supreme Court, which has some Democrats optimistic about the party's chances in the general election. Baldwin has endorsed Biden.

Baldwin has served as senator for the Badger State since 2012. She was reelected in 2018, winning by 11 points two years after Trump won the state. Baldwin was a member of Wisconsin's State Assembly and served in the U.S. House of Representatives for Wisconsin's 2nd Congressional District.

Rep. Karen Bass, D-Calif., speaks during a House Judiciary Committee markup of the Justice in Policing Act of 2020 on Capitol Hill in Washington, Wednesday, June 17, 2020. (Greg Nash/Pool via AP)

Karen Bass

Bass, 66, has served California's 37th congressional district, which represents Los Angeles, for five terms and endorsed Biden for president in mid-March. She is the chair of the Congressional Black Caucus and is being vetted by the campaign, according to several news reports.

House Majority Whip James Clyburn, whose endorsement helped revive Biden's campaign, had previously floated Bass to be considered as Biden's running mate.

"Karen Bass would be a big plus," Clyburn told CNN earlier this month. "She is a great person in my mind, I work with her every day."

Prior to being elected to Congress, Bass served in the California State Assembly. She made history in 2008 after being elected as the Speaker of the California State Assembly, where she became the first Black woman in United States history to serve as a Speaker of a state legislative body

If selected, Bass would be the first Black woman on a major party's presidential ticket.

Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms, left, sits with U.S. Rep. John Lewis during a tribute to Lewis this month at Atlanta's Hartsfield Jackson International Airport. Some students at Spelman College arent happy that the mayor will be their commencement speaker this year.

Keisha Lance Bottoms

Bottoms endorsed Biden in the early stages of the primary election, and has been serving as a key surrogate for his campaign since June 2019. If chosen, she would be the first Black woman on a major party's presidential ticket.

Atlantas 60th mayor, and only the second Black woman to serve in that role, Lance Bottoms emerged as a leading figure on Biden's short list amid nationwide protests over the death of George Floyd and Rayshard Brooks.

'She has found her voice': Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms steps into national spotlight amid policing debate

Floyd was a Black man died after after a Minneapolis police officer knelt on his neck for nearly nine minutes

Nearly three weeks after his death, Rayshard Brooks was shot outside an Atlanta Wendy's after officers responded to a call about a man being asleep in his car in the drive-through lane.

Bottoms, 50, moved quickly to fire the police officer who shot Brooks, and the incident led to the resignation of Police Chief Erika Shields, a Bottoms ally who will remain in the department.

Val Demings was a police chief in Orlando before she represented Florida in Congress.

Val Demings

Demings, a two-term member of Congress, told The Washington Post last month its such an honor that her name has been mentioned as a possible vice president pick.

Before being elected to Congress in 2016, Demings was chief of the Orlando Police Department, the first woman to hold the position. If chosen, she would be the first black woman on a major party's presidential ticket.

Biden this month told a local ABC affiliate in Florida that Demings is "one of a group of close to a dozen really qualified and talented women who are on the list."

She is a very competent, very capable person," Biden said of Demings.

Demings, who helped lead the House impeachment efforts against Trump, also hails from a swing state: Florida. Trump won that state in 2016, and Republicans down the ballot were again successful in the 2018 midterms. Black voters, particularly women, have been a crucial part of Bidens success and a crucial group in Democratic politics for years.

I grew up the daughter of a maid and a janitor. I grew up poor, black and female in the South, someone who was told a lot of times that I wasnt the right color or gender. But my mother pushed me and said, No, you can make it. If you work hard and play by the rules, you can be anything you wanna be and do anything you wanna do,  Demings told the Post. So the fact that my name is being called in such a special way for such an important position during such a critical time, its such an honor.

More: Bernie Sanders officially endorses Joe Biden for president

Sen. Tammy Duckworth, D-Ill., served in Iraq and received the Purple Heart.

Tammy Duckworth

Duckworth, a senator from Illinois, is a veteran who lost both her legs in Iraq, a Purple Heart recipient and the first woman with a disability to be elected to Congress.

In 2018, she made history as the first senator to give birth while in office. Duckworth has called Trump a draft dodger and slammed him for "using his privilege" to defer military service.

Before being elected to Congress, Duckworth was assistant secretary for public and intergovernmental affairs in the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs and was the director of the Illinois Department of Veterans Affairs.

Duckworth is the daughter of a Thai mother of Chinese descent and would be the first Asian American woman on a major party's presidential ticket.

Kamala Harris had some harsh exchanges with Joe Biden during the debates, but she might have a place in his campaign.

Kamala Harris

Despite their viral clash at a debate early on in the presidential campaign, Biden hasnt squelched speculation that Harris could end up on the Democratic ticket.

Im so lucky to have you be a part of this partnership going forward. Working together, we can make a great deal of progress, he told Harris at a virtual fundraiser last week after she introduced him. Im coming for you, kid.

Harris is emerging as a favorite among Biden aides, top donors and surrogates, according to a report from Politico. South Carolina Democrat Bakari Sellers, who was a top surrogate for Harris, told Politico that Harris "deserves to be chosen." He added that a lot of people are pushing for her. She has a lot of support.

Biden previously said of course he would consider Harris as a running mate.

"Sen. Harris has the capacity to be anything she wants to be. I mean it sincerely," Biden said in December shortly after Harris dropped out of the primary. "She is solid. She can be president someday herself. She can be the vice president. She can go on to be a Supreme Court justice. She can be an attorney general. I mean, she has enormous capability."

Early last month, Harris endorsed Bidens campaign before Super Tuesday, when he won 10 out of the 14 contests.

"I have decided that I am, with great enthusiasm, going to endorse Joe Biden for president of the United States," Harris said in a video statement. "I believe in Joe. I really believe in him, and I have known him for a long time.

Before being elected to the Senate, Harris was California's first female attorney general. Before that, she was district attorney of San Francisco.

If chosen, she would be the first black woman and first Asian American woman on a major party's presidential ticket.

More: Former Senate staffer accuses Joe Biden of sexual assault

New Mexico Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham comes from a political family.

Michelle Lujan Grisham

The New Mexico governor is not one of the most well-known politicians on the list but has a long history in politics.

Lujan Grisham, the only nonwhite female Democratic governor in the country, was elected governor in 2018. She spent six years as a congresswoman representing New Mexico and was the chair of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus for 2 years.

Lujan Grisham is part of a prominent political family in New Mexico. Her uncle, Manuel Lujan Jr., served as secretary of the interior in the George H.W. Bush administration, and her grandfather, Eugene Lujan, was chief justice of the New Mexico Supreme Court.

Lujan Grisham, who is Hispanic, could help Biden's outreach to Latino voters, a group that overwhelmingly supported Sanders in the primary.

When asked on CNN Sunday about possibly being chosen for the ticket, Lujan Grisham said, I want to be the governor of New Mexico, then added, I will do whatever it takes to support a Biden administration, and Im looking forward to a federal administration that can do a national strategy in good times and in bad times.

If chosen, she would be the first Latina on a major party's presidential ticket.

Former national security adviser Susan Rice speaks at the J Street 2018 National Conference on April 16, 2018, in Washington.

Susan Rice

The national security adviser in the Obama administration, Rice would bring years of national security expertise to the ticket, as well as a past working-relationship with the former vice president.

More: How Susan Rice rose to the heights of public service and President Obama's inner circle

She also served as the assistant secretary of state for African affairs during President Bill Clinton's administration, as well as the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations under Obama.

Rice was included in the list of vice presidential possibilities Rep. Jim Clyburn, D-S.C. gave to Biden, according to the Atlantic. Clyburn is a longtime friend of Biden's, serves as House Majority Whip, and is the highest-ranking African American in Congress.

However, Rice also is a name well-known in Washington, being viewed by Republicans as a key-player in the attack on the U.S. embassy in Benghazi where Americans were killed. Additionally, allies of Trump have seized upon newly declassified portions of an email written by Rice as evidence that an investigation into her incoming successor, Michael Flynn, was politically motivated.

Poll: Joe Biden leads Donald Trump by 8 points

Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., was the top pick for a running mate in a poll.

Elizabeth Warren

Warren, who endorsed Biden Wednesday morning, could help with Bidens unity pitch to the Democratic Party. She ran as a liberal and maintains some of her support among Democratic voters, while Biden touted more moderate policies.

Nearly three out of four  71%  of Democrats and Democratic-leaning voters said Biden should consider Warren, according to a CBS News/YouGov poll released in early May.

Harris followed at 59%, then Abrams at 50%, according to that CBS News/YouGov poll.

More: More than 100 liberal activists urge Joe Biden to pick Elizabeth Warren as VP in letter

Before being elected to the Senate in 2012, Warren was a Harvard law professor and led the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau under President Barack Obama. She was the first female senator to be elected from Massachusetts.

Joe Biden saluted Gov. Gretchen Whitmer for the way she handled coronavirus in Michigan.

Gretchen Whitmer

Biden has publicly said that the Michigan governor is on his short list.

Whitmer has found herself in the national spotlight lately after the backlash shes gotten from Trump over her criticisms of the administrations coronavirus response. Biden, who endorsed Whitmer for governor in 2018, has repeatedly praised Whitmer and how she has handled the coronavirus pandemic in her state. She appeared on stage with him before the Michigan primary in March, along with Harris and Sen. Cory Booker, D-N.J.

Last week, Whitmer joined Biden on his podcast.

Whitmer has previously said she would not be Bidens running mate.

"I'm going to help him vet and make sure he's got a great running mate. It is not going to be me," she told MSNBC last month. "But I'm going to have a hand in helping make sure that he has got the rounded out ticket that can win.

Who has dropped from consideration?

Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., says, "No one knows better about being vice president than Joe Biden.

Amy Klobuchar

The senator from Minnesota exceeded expectations by placing third in the New Hampshire Democratic primary and gained some traction after her debate performances. She dropped out of the Democratic race before Super Tuesday and endorsed Biden the same day.

Since then, Klobuchar has campaigned for Biden, and has been someone considered to be on the shortlist for running mate choices.

But Klobuchar on June 18 said she was removing her name from consideration to be vice president and urging Biden to instead select a woman of color.

'I think this is a moment to put a woman of color on that ticket': Amy Klobuchar withdraws from vice president consideration

"I think this is a moment to put a woman of color on that ticket," Klobuchar said on MSNBC. "If you want to heal this nation right now  my party, yes, but our nation  this is sure a hell of a way to do it."

Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto, D-Nev., could help Joe Biden win Hispanics' support.

Catherine Cortez Masto

Biden reportedly had said the senator from Nevada was in his top 3 as a running mate, but Cortez Mastio said in late May she was taking herself out of the running.

It is an honor to be considered as a potential running mate, but I have decided to withdraw my name from consideration," she said in a statement. Nevada's economy is one of the hardest hit by the current crisis and I will continue to focus on getting Nevadans the support they need to get back on their feet."

According to Mediate, Biden had discussed Cortez Masto as a possible pick with former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada, who vouched for the senator.

Cortez Masto, the first Latina U.S. senator, could have helped Biden garner support with Latino voters who have been skeptical of his candidac. She was first elected to the Senate in 2016. Before that, she was the Nevada attorney general.

If chosen, Cortez Masto would have been the first Latina on a major party's presidential ticket.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Joe Biden vice presidential running mate not picked, but speculation swirls
Well, regardless of what happens with the investigation, I think Senator Burr owes everybody in North Carolina and the United States an explanation, and well see where the investigation goes, Tillis replied. With respect to his chairmanship, thats a decision that  would be better left to him and the leadership.
Washington, US (PANA) - The Executive Board of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) on Tuesday approved the disbursement of US$114
Amid cautious optimism as COVID-19 deaths slow, experts seek more testing as doctors say pressure on ICU remains high.

Granada, Spain  For weeks, Spain has held the grim title of suffering the second-highest coronavirus death toll in Europe, trailing only Italy.

Displays of courage and resilience by beleaguered health workers, images of ice rinks used as emergency morgues, reports of bodies left abandoned in old peoples homes and of hospital staff resorting to rubbish bags and raincoats in a desperate bid to protect themselves and others now form part of the national consciousness.

And this is all since March 14.

But has some kind of corner been turned in Spains battle against coronavirus?

On Wednesday, coronavirus deaths in Spain for the previous 24 hours stood at 523, which while high, represented a notable improvement on the total of 950 less than two weeks before.

It is also the fourth total under 600 in five days.

While the number of registered contagions in the last 24 hours increased by 3 percent, to 177,633, health authorities partly attributed that rise to an increase in testing.

In any case, the picture looks better than Spains maximum daily increase of affected cases of 42 percent.

People wearing face mask ride bikes at empty Plaza de Cibeles during the state of emergency to prevent the spread of the coronavirus (Covid-19) in Madrid, Spain on April 13, 2020. [-]

All epidemics form a kind of wave, and it seems like were over the top of that wave and on the way down, Professor Juan Ayllon Barasoain, head of the Department of Preventative Medicine and Public Health at the University of Burgos in northern Spain, told Al Jazeera.

This pandemic is following its natural course, partly because youd expect it to behave like that, partly because the lockdown and other measures are beginning to work. Its peak, that worst moment, was not as bad as it could have been.

There is widespread agreement that Spains currently limited programme of testing, estimated at 15,000 to 20,000 a day in early April, needs to be increased for a more accurate evaluation.

We have a partial photo for now, and although its indicative of trends, we do need more information, said Ayllon.

Joan Benach, professor of public and occupational health at the Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona, told Al Jazeera: We dont know exactly how many infections there are and have been in Spain, and geographically speaking, we dont know where they are. Were lacking data.

Right now, what [little data] we have gives the impression that thanks to the measures of containment that have been applied in the last few weeks, weve got over the peak.

Another possible indicator on the pandemics progress is the pressure on Spains intensive care wards  its barely easing, according to the head of Spains health emergency committee, Fernando Simon.

Speaking on Tuesday, he attributed this in part to a backlog of cases building up.

An ICU hospital doctor in Toledo in central Spain, who requested anonymity, told Al Jazeera: The situation is better than last week, but the ICUs are still under strain, particularly given that the number of places available have increased considerably in the last few weeks.

The number of patients in need of admission has dropped off a great deal.

But the overload on the ICU system remains, partly because the average length of admission for coronavirus is around 20 days, so many cases weve had from the start are still there in hospital.

More than 95 percent of cases in ICUs were still for coronavirus, she added.

Madrid  which we all follow closely, being just 60 kilometres away and the worst affected  is in the same situation: fewer admissions but ICUs still overflowing. For weeks the situation has been terrifying.

For the medical staff, the end of the epidemic cannot come soon enough.

Physically, we can manage, you help each other, but the psychological cost on us has been really terrible, said the ICU doctor.

You had to harden your heart, because the hospitals didnt have the resources for everybody and many people die, and you were choosing who made it through and who didnt.

Health workers wearing protective face masks react during a tribute for their co-worker Esteban, a male nurse that died of the coronavirus disease, amid the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) outbreak, outside the Severo Ochoa Hospital in Leganes, Spain, April 13, 2020 [Susana Vera/Reuters]

Amid guarded optimism, warnings of a data dearth and recognition that the corner has yet to be turned in Spanish hospitals ICUs, on Monday the government eased a lockdown, allowing some non-essential workers to return to work.

Until now the lockdown has been largely successful.

Over the weekend, Spanish police said 94 percent of people they questioned as to why they were not at home had acceptable explanations.

But the effects of its partial easing, and whether this could create a second peak of cases, remain to be seen.

It could go either way, professor Benach said, and it depends a lot on how citizens react. Facemasks have been distributed at public transport hubs and with a high degree of social awareness of the measures needed, we can probably contain a fresh outbreak.

But its a very open-ended scenario and not one that provides the kind of information we need in order to predict what is going to happen.

To get a clearer picture of the current situation, the government recently announced that 60,000 tests will be carried out on a random selection of the population to understand the extent of the pandemic.

Simultaneously health authorities were asked on Monday to provide much fuller details on each death attributable to coronavirus.

As for Spains embattled front-line medical staff, they are exhausted but full of hope.

I am optimistic even if my colleagues tell me I shouldnt be, the hospital doctor in Toledo told Al Jazeera. And its true, were worried about a second outbreak.

But I just hope it doesnt happen. Because were reaching such a level of exhaustion right now, that we just couldnt cope.
Source: Xinhua| 2020-04-15 21:05:34|Editor: huaxia

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GENEVA, April 15 (Xinhua) -- World Health Organization (WHO) Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus on Wednesday said on Twitter that "there is no time to waste" and that WHO's singular focus is on working to serve all people to save lives and stop the COVID-19 pandemic.

These remarks are believed to be the WHO chief's first public response after the U.S. decision to suspend funding to WHO.

Also on Wednesday, Tedros retweeted a previous tweet from an epidemiologist, who said that after working for WHO for 10 years with six Director-Generals, he found Dr. Tedros is one of the best and the current political campaign against Tedros is wrong.

U.S. President Donald Trump announced late Tuesday that he had instructed his administration to suspend funding for the WHO, which he accused of "severely mismanaging and covering up the spread of the coronavirus."
Small businesses based in Texas, California and within the construction sector are so far getting the biggest chunk of money set aside for struggling small firms, according to documents released by the Small Business Administration on Tuesday.

Why it matters: It's the agency's first  though limited  public breakdown of which small businesses are benefiting from the Paycheck Protection Program, the cornerstone of the coronavirus federal aid package meant to shore up small companies reeling from the pandemic's economic shutdown.

By the numbers: Over 88,000 Texas-based businesses got approved for loans worth $22 billion, while 54,000 California-based businesses are set to be awarded a total of $21 billion. The states are the top two contributors to total U.S. economic output.

Florida, Illinois, New York and Ohio are next in terms of states with the highest number of loan approvals and total value of loans.

Of note: The SBA hasn't provided data on how many total applications have been submitted or how many businesses have been denied these loans.

The construction industry received the biggest share of all loan money approved so far: about 13%, or $34 billion.

It also seen the second highest number of loans approved, behind the "professional, scientific, and technical services" category.

Background: The Paycheck Protection Program has faced backlash from cash-strapped small business owners who haven't been able to secure the loans.

A big appeal is these loans won't have to be paid back if the money is used to pay staff, among other things.

That should incentivize small businesses to keep their workers, bolstering America's workforce which has seen about 17 million workers file for unemployment in recent weeks.

Between the lines: While it's the biggest beneficiary so far, the construction sector is the fourth biggest small business employer, according to the SBA's latest small business report, which cites 2016 data.

Health care, hotels and restaurants are the top small business employers, but the number of loan approvals in those industries are lagging.

More than 1 million loans have been approved as of Monday, totaling more than $247 billion  out of the $349 billion set aside for the Paycheck Protection Program. It's unclear how much has actually landed in the hands of small business owners.

The average loan size is $239,152.

About 725,000 loans  or 70% of all those approved so far  are for $150,000 or less, the smallest loan size range.

More than 50,000 small businesses were approved for loans worth more than $1 million.

What's next: The pot of money will soon dry up and the Trump administration is haggling with Congress to allocate an additional $250 billion.
Millions of people's movements have dropped by as much as 87 percent in some parts of the US, as Americans stay at home amid state lockdowns to slow the spread of coronavirus.

Teralytics has taken anonymized data on tens of millions of cellphone users' movements from a major telecom provider and analyzed it to track changes in movements since the pandemic first reared its head, according to Forbes.

It excludes counties where there is data for less than 5 percent of the population.

The interactive map shows how far fewer people are now out and about in the streets of the US Saturday April 11, with 40 percent fewer trips taken compared to Saturday March 7, before any state had gone into lockdown.

On March 9, prior to lockdown, movement was only down 2 percent.

By March 15 - prior to the first state-mandated lockdown on March 20 - people were already starting to limit their movements and stay home, with movement down 15 percent as numbers of confirmed coronavirus cases began to rise.

Movement across the US was lowest on March 28, when Americans were in general 45 percent less on the go.

As of April 11, movement had inched up slightly, with Americans making 40 percent fewer trips.

The slight increase raises concerns that people will start relaxing social distancing practices as they want to return to normal life as soon as possible.

In the crisis epicenter New York, where deaths increased by 752 Tuesday bringing the state todal to 11,586, movement has plummeted more than any other urban area.

Movement was down a staggering 87 percent on Friday compared to Friday March 6.

The usually thriving Big Apple has become a ghost town as all but essential businesses have shuttered and the residents have been told to stay home to help bring the pandemic under control.

In northern Manhattan and parts of Queens and Brooklyn, daily trips are down by 60 to 70 percent, the map reveals.

In California, the nation's most populous state as well as the first to order a lockdown on March 20, has also seen a sharp decline in movements among residents as people comply with social distancing and shutdown rules.

People's movements have dropped by up to 87 percent in some parts of the US, as Americans stay at home amid state lockdowns, according to anonymized data on millions of cellphone users' movements analyzed by Teralytics. On March 9 movement was down just 2 percent

By March 15 - prior to the first state lockdown on March 20 - people were already starting to stay home, with movement down 15 percent

The analysis shows that movement has been down 50 to 65 percent most days since March 17 in San Francisco and Silicon Valley.

However, the map shows that the decline in movement has not been consistent across the nation, with some rural areas showing only slight drops and even increases in trip numbers.

In a worrying trend, people are seen to be making more trips in rural areas and conservative states in the South and West.

These area were typically slower to implement social distancing and lockdown rules, meaning people were on the back foot in reducing their movements.

Alain Labrique, an epidemiologist and director at Johns Hopkins, warned that lack of enforcement of rules in rural areas and inconsistent messaging has left some residents ignoring potentially life-saving social distancing rules.

'There's still churches that are holding meetings, there are still stores that are open,' Labrique told Forbes. 'Until there's enforcement of these guidelines there will be places where they'll be poorly adhered to.'

Fears are now mounting for rural areas as confirmed cases and deaths from the virus have begun to spike.

By March 26 people were making 38 percent fewer trips as several states had gone into lockdown

Millions of people's movements have dropped by up to 87 percent in some parts of the US, as Americans stay at home amid state lockdowns to slow the spread of coronavirus, according to anonymized data on millions of cellphone users' movements analyzed by Teralytics

The data also showed the change in movements in other hard-hit countries.

While the US has shown a 40 percent overall decline in movement, movement in Italy has been down 67 percent.

Italy, which was the deadliest country from the pandemic until Saturday when the US death toll soared past, has rolled out some of the strictest lockdown rules worldwide.

A nationwide lockdown went into effect on March 10 restricting virtually all aspects of life and the military were drafted in to enforce orders for people to stay home.

It has now began easing the lockdown rules.

President Donald Trump has faced a backlash after he has repeatedly made promises to relax US shutdown rules so the economy can get up and running as soon as possible.

On Tuesday, Trump was forced to backpedal on his claim that he has 'total' and 'absolute' authority to end state stay-home orders - something that New York Governor Andrew Cuomo pointed out contradicts the 10th Amendment to the Constitution, which was incorporated into the Bill of Rights.

Times Square, New York, is a ghost town on April 14. In the crisis epicenter New York, movement was down a staggering 87 percent on Friday compared to Friday March 6

The president said Monday that the power rested with him to reopen the country and said some states could even reopen before May 1 - which is the date his '30 Days to Slow the Spread' of the coronavirus ends.

After facing a backlash, Trump said Tuesday he would leave the decision in the hands of the individual governors of each state.

He also announced a list of more than 100 executives he plans to consult with on when to 'reopen' the US economy.

The president touted a new task force to advise him on when to reopen the country, spanning several different industries.

American Farm Bureau, Cisco systems, Midland Company, Bank of America, J.P. Morgan Chase, and Morgan Stanley were just some of the names listed.

US smartphone data reveals high-income earners can stay at home during the pandemic, while low-income workers have travel to work and expose themselves

Staying safe at home during the coronavirus pandemic is a luxury afforded the rich while low-income workers have no choice but to be out and about and travel to work, according to separate analysis of smartphone location data.

Smartphone location data from Cuebig and analyzed by the New York Times at the start of April showed a vast difference in movements between the rich and the poor.

While the rich have holed up in their homes or even fled to their second homes in rural and beachside towns to hideout from the outbreak, poorer people across the US are continuing to move around despite lockdown rules and have an increased risk of catching the killer virus.

This worrying trend lays bare the mounting evidence that the poorest in society are most at risk of being exposed to the deadly illness.

Lower-income neighborhoods, such as Queens and the Bronx in New York City, have already been some of the hardest-hit areas by the outbreak.

Wealthy people have been able to escape densely populated cities like New York to flee to their summer oasis in the Hamptons.

They also have more job security and benefits.

And, as the data suggests, they may also be in a position where they can stay at home more easily and practice social distancing.

Analysis of smartphone location data shows people in all income groups are moving around less than they did before the outbreak, but richer people are staying home far more, especially during the working week

The data showed that people in all income groups are moving around less than they did before the outbreak, but richer people are staying home far more, especially during the working week.

Across almost every US state, richer people also started limiting their movements days before the poor, meaning they had a headstart on social distancing practices before the pandemic escalated.

In metro areas under stay-at-home orders which have the greatest difference in wealth between the richest and the poorest, the richest have almost halted movement completely.

People in lower-income neighborhoods in these metro areas also drastically reduced their movement, but there was a renewed spike in movements after the third weekend of March - the start of the next workweek.

In areas where the difference between the richest and poorest is less stark, both groups continued to move around.

'People want to talk about this virus as an equal opportunity pathogen, but it's really not,' Dr. Ashwin Vasan, a doctor and public health professor at Columbia University, told the Times. 'It's going right to the fissures in our society.'

One reason for the disparity in movement is the types of jobs the richest and poorest in society hold.

Many of the jobs classed as essential amid the pandemic are those often held by lower socioeconomic groups, such as grocery store workers, care home workers, warehouse staff and delivery drivers.

If they quit, they will often not be entitled to claim unemployment benefits.

So these workers have no choice but to travel to work - and often on packed subways.

'The people at this income, they're either furloughed and not coming in to work, or they are essential construction, grocery cashiers, workers in long-term care institutions,' Matthew Rae, who directs a program on health care markets at the Kaiser Family Foundation, told the Times.

In contrast, many high-income jobs are either non-essential or desk-based meaning wealthier workers are now either working from home or have been furloughed.

'Covid-19 is exposing a lot of the structural disadvantages that low-income people face,' including a lack of job security and uneven access to health care, said Adie Tomer, a fellow at the Brookings Institution who has studied the essential work force, to the Times.

'The well-off are employed in industries where they are at a desk, and so there are some advantages built into these high-income neighborhoods during this pandemic.'

Higher movement among the poorest could also be attributed to them visiting grocery stores regularly.

The stockpiling frenzy is a luxury only afforded the rich.

Lower-income households often live paycheck to paycheck and so cannot stump up the cash to bulk buy several weeks' worth of groceries and essential goods.

Instead, they must make regular trips to stores - another possible reason for the greater movement and greater risk.

The headstart on the virus among the richest has also put them at an advantage, said Dr. Vasan, the Columbia professor.

He told The Times that just a few days can make a big difference to the spread, said Dr. Vasan, the Columbia professor: 'It's just moving like wildfire through communities.'

Vasan cautions that it is in the interest of both the rich and the poor to enable the poor to stay home.

Pockets of people who are untested or who don't get the appropriate medical treatment can quickly become new clusters, he warned.
This article is part of David Leonhardts newsletter. You can sign up here to receive it each weekday.

There was a lot of breathless commentary in recent months about why Barack Obama hadnt yet endorsed Joe Biden. Most of it was silly.

Obamas non-endorsement should have been a non-story, because former presidents  or sitting presidents in their second term  rarely get involved in competitive primaries. In 2016, Obama did not endorse Hillary Clinton until June 9, after she had already clinched the nomination over Bernie Sanders. In 2008, George W. Bush didnt endorse John McCain until all of the other leading candidates had dropped out. And Ronald Reagan didnt endorse his own vice president, George H.W. Bush, until May 1988, when the nomination was effectively over.

Opinion Debate Will the Democrats face a midterm wipeout? Mark Penn and Andrew Stein write that "only a broader course correction to the center will give Democrats a fighting chance in 2022" and beyond.

write that "only a broader course correction to the center will give Democrats a fighting chance in 2022" and beyond. Matthew Continetti writes that time and again, the biggest obstacle to a red wave hasnt been the Democratic Party. Its been the Republican Party.

writes that time and again, the biggest obstacle to a red wave hasnt been the Democratic Party. Its been the Republican Party. Ezra Klein speaks to David Shor, who discusses his fear that Democrats face electoral catastrophe unless they shift their messaging.

speaks to David Shor, who discusses his fear that Democrats face electoral catastrophe unless they shift their messaging. Michelle Cottle examines two primary contests that will shake the parties well beyond the states in play.

Obama stayed true to this pattern by waiting to endorse Biden until his last rival  Sanders  had quit the race and Sanders himself endorsed Biden. Is there any takeaway from the endorsement, then? Yes: Obama went out of his way to signal that he agrees with the partys shift toward a more progressive agenda. I could not be prouder of the incredible progress that we made together during my presidency, he said. But if I were running today, I wouldnt run the same race or have the same platform as I did in 2008. The world is different.
Saud Anwar is taking on the novel coronavirus on multiple fronts: as a Connecticut resident, a state senator, and first and foremost, he says, as a doctor.

I am just a doctor, who happens to be in [the] public and policy arena, Dr Anwar, a pulmonary specialist in the United States, told Al Jazeera. Im not a policymaker whos a doctor. Its the other way around.

The American doctor of Pakistani heritage says he feels blessed to be in a position to serve as the world contends with the novel coronavirus, which has infected more than two million and killed at least 133,000 worldwide.

Anwar has won the praises of his community and other medical professionals for his multipronged efforts, including helping develop a ventilator device that makes it possible for seven patients to be treated at once.

While most people who contract the novel coronavirus do not need a ventilator, for those who do, the machine, which helps people breathe, can be lifesaving. As the number of cases in the US  which now tops 619,000  began to surge, governors from New York to California scrambled to amass their ventilator stockpiles, warning shortages could cause more deaths.

That is when the idea for the ventilator device came about. Kevin Dyer of InterPRO, a 3D printing and manufacturing company based in Connecticut, used his network to reach out to Dr Anwar and engineer Robert Conley, who owns Interactive Cad Solutions, about what could be done.

The 3D-printed splitter can increase the capacity of ventilators to treat more than one patient at once [Courtesy of Kevin Dyer] [Daylife]

The team developed a simple splitter device that can be used on a ventilator to create multiple branches so that several patients can be hooked up to the machine at once, Dyer told Al Jazeera.

Downloaded worldwide

Anwar shared information about the ventilator device on his Facebook page, including a video demonstrating how the part works.

The team also made the design information available for anyone to download. The reaction was almost immediate.

There was a lot of enthusiasm since it was made available as a downloadable, shareable file that anyone could print, Dyer said.

According to Dyer, the design had been downloaded about 1,000 times in more than 100 countries, including Zimbabwe and South Africa as of last week.

Our hope is that somewhere in the world, as this crisis continues to unfold, that this design will be able to help someone, somewhere who doesnt have the access to all of the technology that we have in the US, Dyer said.

While Anwar has not had to use the device in Connecticut, he said that should the need arise and should it pass bureaucratic hurdles for use, he could.

Unsung hero

In the meantime, however, he continues his work in both the medical and policy arenas.

This battle has multiple fronts, Dr Anwar said.

How do you manage these patients? What can be done? So Im helping educate the people at various levels about strategies to manage the disease as we learn more about it, he added. Everybody is doing their part and Im doing my little part to hopefully share my experience and in my effort and my passion to help people and fight for every single person to take it to the next level.

Residents in Connecticut threw an unsung heroes parade for a Pakistani-American doctor who created a ventilator that can treat seven #coronavirus patients at once. pic.twitter.com/QZYKe76yzu  Al Jazeera English (@AJEnglish) April 14, 2020

That passion has not gone unnoticed. An unsung hero parade of cars drove past Anwars home last week to thank the doctor for his work.

Thank you for all your heroism, read a sign on one of the cars.

Dyer agreed. Without [Anwars] willingness to get involved, without him being open to the [ventilator device] idea [it] would have gone absolutely nowhere, Dyer said.

For Anwar, the battle against the coronavirus starts with making sure those on the front lines have the necessary protection and equipment.

If people have equated the current COVID pandemic with a war  then the healthcare workers, the physicians, the nurses, the respiratory therapists [and] the nurses aids  these are the front-line warriors, he said. They need their protection and they need their support. And they need an investment to make sure that they are well taken care of all over the world. Because between this invisible illness and the protection of our society, it is just one force of healthcare workers standing there.
The prospect of a long-awaited recovery in WA's property market has been hit by the coronavirus pandemic.

According to the latest ANZ/Property Council survey, industry participants  including developers, builders and banks  have reported the lowest ever levels of confidence.

WA's property industry is reporting the lowest confidence since they began measuring.

Despite a slight gain in confidence before the onset of the pandemic, confidence levels were half what they were at the beginning of the year.

The results reflect concern about planned building, staffing levels and economic growth, with property participants across Australia uniformly reporting an immediate negative impact on their business from the pandemic, which they anticipated would only get worse.
The lawyer of the man who was convicted for cheating on ITV game show Who Wants To Be A Millionaire has claimed that new enhanced audio evidence from the show detected several audience members coughing during filming.

Charles Ingram, his wife Diana and their accomplice Tecwen Whittock were convicted in 2003 of Procuring the Execution of a Valuable Security by Deception, two years after the show was first recorded.

Recordings had originally found that Ingram cheated on the show when his wife and Mr Whittock coughed for certain answers during the game show.

Criminal defence solicitor Rhona Friedman, who is behind the former army major's new appeal, that has been launched as new docudrama Quiz airs on ITV, said the case is 'full of holes'.

Ms Friedman said it was 'ludicrous' to suggest a conspiracy took place on the game show in 2001.

She told the Telegraph: 'There is a lacuna at the heart of this evidence,' she said. 'It wasn't a conspiracy - it's just ludicrous.'

Charles Ingram is pictured above on the show with Chris Tarrant as he played a round for 32,000

Criminal defence solicitor Rhona Friedman, who is behind the former army major's new appeal, said new technology could help to prove the innocence of Ingram (pictured) and his wife Diana

Speaking as new docudrama Quiz - which tells the story of Mr Ingram's fall from grace in 2001 - airs on ITV, Ms Friedman said it was 'ludicrous' to suggest a conspiracy took place. Pictured: Matthew Macfadyen and Michael Sheen in character as Ingram and Chris Tarrant in the drama

The lawyers claim that the evidence was not considered by the jury during the trial and that it undermines the prosecution case.

They also claim the integrity of the audio evidence could have been compromised because it came from the prosecution and was not referred for independent analysis to the Forensic Science Service.

Ms Friedman added that there were 'gaps' in the 'chain of continuity' of the audio evidence.

She said: 'In the Ingrams case, the programme makers were allowed to produce the 'expert evidence' with very limited police oversight.

'What they ended up with at trial was a gentleman's agreement that nothing had been done to alter the trial exhibits but there is no place for a gentleman's agreement in a criminal trial.'

Ms Friedman also cast doubt on why the Ingrams would rely on Whittock as an accomplice, given that he had longstanding respiratory conditions which made him liable to repeated coughing.

Who Wants To Be A Millionaire cheat Charles Ingram's lawyer says new technology had picked up coughs from several audience members, casting doubt on Ingram's guilt

Evidence which helped to convict Charles Ingram of cheating his way to the jackpot on Who Wants To Be A Millionaire is 'full of holes', according to his lawyer

She added that while the show's producers, Celador, did not 'deliberately' set out to deny the Ingrams their prize money, the prosecution 'fastened on to a theory' and 'shoved in everything they could' to suit it.

The Ingrams, from Wiltshire, were convicted in 2003 alongside their accomplice Tecwen Whittock, who was also a show contestant, of Procuring the Execution of a Valuable Security by Deception.

The successful prosecution case was based on evidence which they said indicated that Major Ingram was directed to the right answers by coughs from Whittock.

Diane Ingram was also alleged to have coughed when her husband struggled with the answers.

But the couple's lawyers said that scientific and technological advances picked up previously unheard other coughs made by Mr Whittock.

They also allegedly picked up other people coughing in the audience who could have made a noise at significant moments.

Matthew Macfayden is pictured above playing Charles Ingram in the new television drama

The Ingrams, from Wiltshire, were convicted in 2003 alongside their accomplice Tecwen Whittock, who was also a show contestant, of Procuring the Execution of a Valuable Security by Deception

And while the show host at the time, Chris Tarrant, said last week that Ingram as 'guilty every step of the way, Ms Friedman said that he admitted at the trial that he could not hear any coughing.

The lawyer plans to submit a dossier of legal arguments to the Court of Appeal later this year.

The Ingrams and Whittock were each given two-year suspended prison sentences for the crime.

Ms Friedman told ITV's This Morning: 'Charles was career military, that was going to be his life.

'And so for somebody who thinks theyre going to basically die with their military boots on, to have that taken away in such a spectacular way to lose your reputation when youre a ranking army officer was devastating.'

She added: 'I can say to you with complete conviction I think there was a miscarriage of justice in this case.'

The most recent episode of Quiz aired on Monday and depicted the moment that Diana Ingram appeared to cough to alert her husband to the correct answers.

In the dramatisation, Ingram is played by Matthew Macfadyen, while Diana is played by Sian Clifford.

The successful prosecution case was based on evidence which they said indicated that Major Ingram was directed to the right answers by coughs from Whittock (pictured)

As new drama Quiz puts the Who Wants to Be A Millionaire? cheating scandal back in the spotlight, FEMAIL reveals the VERY different fortunes of the real-life characters, from after dinner speaking to bankruptcy

By Jessica Green for MailOnline

ITV's latest primetime programme, Quiz, which dramatises Who Wants To Be A Millionaire's famous coughing scandal, has thrown Charles and Diana Ingram back into the spotlight.

The army major was convicted, alongside his wife, of cheating his way into winning 1million on the popular British quiz show in 2003, and both were given an 18 month prison sentence suspended for two years for cheating and fined 15,000 apiece.

The pair cheated their way to the win assisted by a secret syndicate of quizzers who would help contestants on the show, including alleged co-conspirator Tecwen Whittock and Paddy Spooner.

Here, FEMAIL reveals how Charles and Diana have recently declared bankruptcy for the fourth time, and now sell handmade jewellery in Bath, while Paddy lives in a 750,000 detached house just yards from the beach on the South coast.

Charles and Diana Ingram (played by Matthew Macfadyen and Sian Clifford)

Charles Ingram (pictured earlier this month, left) and his wife Diana, who notoriously conned their way to win the 1million prize on Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?, are now flogging jewellery on a market stall. Pictured right: Matthew Macfadyen as Charle

Charles Ingram and his wife Diana, who notoriously conned their way to win the 1million prize on Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?, are now flogging jewellery on a market stall.

The war veteran became known as the 'Coughing Major' when he sensationally cheated his way to the jackpot in 2001 with the help of another contestant and his wife, who coughed when the correct multiple-choice answers were read out.

But the winning cheque was taken off him before it was cashed and he was subsequently convicted - along with his wife - of deception.

He and Diana were given an 18 month prison sentence suspended for two years for cheating and fined 15,000 apiece.

Now, the couple live in Bath and continue to sell handmade jewellery created using 'Murano glass beads, Swarovski crystals, seawater and freshwater pearls or crystals', according to Diana's (pictured left recently) website. Pictured right: Sian Clifford as Diana in Qui

Ingram later persuaded magistrates to cut his fine to 5,000, while his wife had her fine quashed on appeal, but he was forced to resign his commission by the Army Board

In the same year, Ingram was convicted of an unrelated insurance fraud, which took before the recording of the episode of Who Wants To Be A Millionaire, when he made a claim for an alleged burglary at his home.

Despite their legal woes, the Ingrams continued to live comfortably in an 18th Century rented cottage in a leafy close in Westbury, Wiltshire.

They also still managed to send their three daughters to boarding school at Westonbirt School in Gloucestershire  which charges 10,000 a term  after the scandal.

In 2016, Charles (pictured) was spotted at a market in Somerset selling his wife Diana's homemade glass brooches and necklaces for as little as 5

For the first couple of years following their scandal, the husband and wife duo boasted surprisingly successful TV personality careers.

They appeared on The Weakest Link, Hells Kitchen, Celebrity Poker Club, Celebrity Fear Factor UK and Wife Swap.

But, the father-of-three - complained he could not find work because of the notoriety of the case, and was plagued by neighbours teasing him by coughing behind his back wherever he went in Wiltshire.

Yet because of legal fees and fines, in 2019, the couple declared bankruptcy for a fourth time.

In 2016, Charles was spotted at a market in Somerset selling his wife Diana's homemade glass brooches and necklaces for as little as 5.

Now, they live in Bath and continue to sell handmade jewellery created using 'Murano glass beads, Swarovski crystals, seawater and freshwater pearls or crystals', according to Diana's website.

The couple were involved in the creation of the three-part series, and spoke with writer James Graham throughout the production's development and even met the cast on set.

Tecwen Whittock (played by Michael Jibson)

Tecwen Whittock (pictured left, in 2003), a college lecturer from South Wales, was convicted of helping Charles cheat his way to the winnings. He is played in the drama by Michael Jibson (pictured right)

Tecwen Whittock, a business studies lecturer from South Wales, was convicted of helping Charles cheat his way to the winnings.

The show's production crew believed the fellow contestant and game show devotee had been in league with Charles by coughing loudly from elsewhere in the studio to indicate the correct answer.

It was suggested that pagers and mobile phones had been used, and that Diana was involved too. Tecwen was given a suspended sentence of twelve months and fined 25,000.

After the trial at Southwark Crown Court in 2003, Tecwen quit his job at Pontypridd College ahead of a formal disciplinary hearing, and reportedly had to sell his home to pay fines and costs from the trial.

Whittock, appeared on Channel 4's Richard and Judy show, where he claimed he'd decided to resign before being sacked.

'Even in my own mind, I would know that with a charge of deception and cheating there's no way I could now be teaching youngsters in education,' he said.

Despite his conviction, he continued to protest his innocence, and said the case had been 'torture' for his family.

'A big problem is that this tape with this notorious soundtrack, which is basically put together by experts, was used against us in an unfair manner,' he said.

Now 70-years-old, he is assumed to be retired after reportedly trying to have a career as an after dinner speaker.

His now abandoned website said he would occupy audiences with 'very interesting and humorous anecdotes' from his part in the scandal,

'Tecwen is available for any occasions which require a speaker in the UK or abroad. He is a qualified teacher and has many years of experience in speaking to groups of people,' it read.

It offered two types of speech - one dealing with the cheating scandal for a general audience, or a talk on the theme of coping with change for business audiences.

It's not known whether his public speaking career ever took off, and while his son visited the set of Quiz during filming, Tecwen now tries to stay out of the public spotlight.

Paddy Spooner (played by Jerry Killick)

Paddy Spooner, 53, (pictured in 2000, left) is portrayed in Quiz by Jerry Killick (pictured right). In ITV's drama, he has been shown as the mastermind behind a syndicate that arranged to have their members on the quiz show and provide them with answers by exploiting the Phone A Friend option

The dodgy quiz gang who won at least 5 million The makers of Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? were hoodwinked by a syndicate of quiz cheats who netted at least 5 million in prize money. In a highly organised operation, the consortium secretly provided contestants with answers and played the system to plant their members on to the ITV show. Applicants who paid a fee, thought to be around 500, would be slipped the answers to the questions that researchers used to pick who would be invited into the studio. And if they made it to the hot seat opposite host Chris Tarrant, the player could call on the syndicate to get help using the 'Phone A Friend' lifeline. Producers believe the gang netted 'at least' ten per cent of the 50 million prize money paid out on the show from 2002 to 2007. Paddy Spooner has been identified as the mastermind behind a syndicate that arranged to have their members on the show and provide them with answers by exploiting the Phone A Friend option. Spooner spent two months studying that information so he could provide paid-up syndicate members with the correct answer on another phone line when they were contacted by the show's researchers. Dedicated quizzers would also be on hand for the 'Phone A Friend' lifeline during the recording of the shows. If the expert posing as the friend was sure of the answer, he would signal so by saying: 'I am 90 per cent certain.' It is believed that the participants also agreed to share their winnings with the consortium. Advertisement

Paddy Spooner, 53, appeared on Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? in three different countries - in London and before that in Australia (where he scooped 100,000) and Ireland (1,000).

In ITV's drama, he is portrayed as the mastermind behind a syndicate that arranged to have their members on the quiz show and provide them with answers by exploiting the Phone A Friend option.

Waiting to take the call at the other end of the line were dedicated quizzers who took a cut of the prize money after answering the question correctly.

'Theyd use a speakerphone so they could all hear it, explained a member of the quizzing community claiming knowledge of Paddy's operation.

Speaking to the Daily Mail, they said: 'Then [they'd] press the mute button while they quickly conferred before unmuting the phone to give the answer as if just one person had come up with it. Reference books were also on hand [Google was still in its infancy].'

Paddy himself did not cheat when he appeared on the show, but the programme producers believe that afterwards, millions of winnings went to the university drop-out and his associates.

The syndicate leader also prepared his clients for the Fastest Finger First round, practising with buzzers similar to the one on the show.

The round saw numerous contestants asked one question. The first to press the buzzer with the correct answer went through to face quizmaster Chris Tarrant.

Today, trained computer programmer Paddy, is married and lives in a 750,000 detached house near the beach on the South coast. Parked outside this week was a black Jaguar saloon and a Volvo 4x4.

He did not wish to comment about his past when approached by the Daily Mail.

His syndicate - named The Consortium - was one of several organised groups around the country targeting Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?.

It was revealed that Paddy helped with Quiz, having given a detailed account of his activities to Paul Smith, the executive who devised Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?, who went went to his home last year, and took him out to lunch as part of a fact-finding mission for the drama.

Paddy is adamant he did nothing illegal and he was not convicted in the Ingram case.

Adrian Pollock (played by Trystan Gravelle)

Adrian Pollock (pictured left) is the brother of former nursery nurse Diana. The businessman and his sister, both huge quiz fans, were obsessed with Who Wants To Be a Millionaire? Separately, they ended up in the hot seat winning 32,000 apiece. Pictured right: Trystan Gravelle playing Adrian

Adrian Pollock is the brother of former nursery nurse Diana.

The businessman and his sister, both huge quiz fans, were obsessed with Who Wants To Be a Millionaire? Separately, they ended up in the hot seat winning 32,000 apiece.

Quiz viewers saw Adrian even build his own Fastest Finger First machine and rack up a staggering phone bill by obsessively applying to be on the quiz show.

Adrian, from the Vale of Glamorgan in Wales, finally got the chance to appear opposite Chris Tarrant on December 23, 2000.

He failed to answer the 64,000 question but took home a 32,000 victory. He appeared on the show three times for the first round before finally reaching the final stage.

Meanwhile, Adrian's sister claimed in court that the four phone pages she had used during the competition were not to signal her husband but to contact her sibling, who had reportedly disappeared after running up gambling debts.

It is unclear where Adrian is now, or what he is doing. He was not convicted in the Ingram case.

Chris Tarrant (played by Michael Sheen)

Chris Tarrant (pictured left, yesterday), 73, was the extremely popular presenter of Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? from 1998 to 2014. Pictured right: Michael Sheen playing the presenter in Quiz

Chris Tarrant, 73, was the extremely popular presenter of Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? from 1998 to 2014.

Since then, he has continued to present both on radio and television, as well as conducting a voice over for the film Johnny English, where he played himself.

Most recently, Chris can be seen on Channel 5 with documentaries about trains, including 2012's Chris Tarrant: Extreme Railways, 2018's Intercity 25: The Train That Changed Britain and 2019's World's Busiest Train Stations.

Speaking on This Morning in November 2019, Chris said he was pleased Michael Sheen was playing him because he was a 'good actor' and said he hoped the drama would not be sympathetic to the Major, who was 'so guilty'.

The presenter is currently social distancing at his second home in Berkshire and said yesterday that he was relieved not to be spending the lockdown in London.
In 1967 Dr. Sakharov laid out a prescription for how matter and antimatter could have survived their mutual destruction pact. One condition is that the laws of nature might not be as symmetrical as physicists like Einstein assumed.

In a purely symmetrical universe, physics should work the same if all the particles changed their electrical charges from positive to negative or vice versa  and, likewise, if the coordinates of everything were swapped from left to right, as if in a mirror. Violating these conditions  called charge and parity invariance, C and P for short  would cause matter and antimatter to act differently.

In 1957, Tsung-Dao Lee of Columbia University and Chen Ning Yang, then at Institute for Advanced Study, won the Nobel Prize in Physics for proposing something along these lines. They suggested that certain weak interactions might violate the parity rule, and experiments by Chien-Shiung Wu of Columbia (she was not awarded the prize) confirmed the theory. Nature, in some sense, is left-handed.

In 1964, a group led by James Cronin and Val Fitch, working at the Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island, discovered that some particles called kaons violated both the charge and parity conditions, revealing a telltale difference between matter and antimatter. These scientists also won a Nobel.

Hints of a discrepancy between matter and antimatter have since been found in the behavior of other particles called B mesons, in experiments at CERN and elsewhere.

In the larger picture, CP violation is a big deal, Dr. Turner of the Kavli Foundation said. It is why we are here!

Both kaons and B mesons are made of quarks, the same kinds of particles that make up protons and neutrons, the building blocks of ordinary matter. But so far there is not enough of a violation on the part of quarks, by a factor of a billion, to account for the existence of the universe today.
As governments across Europe struggle to contain the fallout of the coronavirus crisis, Polish lawmakers are debating a full ban on abortion and criminal penalties for teaching teens about sex.

Human-rights groups have slammed the conservative proposals as well as the timing, giving rise to creative protests this week that had to skirt a social-distancing ban on gatherings.

Lawmakers discussed proposals on Wednesday that embody the ruling Law & Justice Party's drive to return Poland to its "Catholic roots," a stance that has put the government at odds with the European Union's multi-cultural values. The abortion debate is intended to mobilize more radical voters to back incumbent Andrzej Duda, an ally of the ruling party.

"This is a gesture to the right wing of the political spectrum," said Anna Materska-Sosnowska, a political scientist at Warsaw University. "This agenda might divide the opposition and divert attention from the most important topics, which are health and economic issues."

With just weeks to go before a May 10 presidential election, concerns are mounting in the EU that nationalist leaders may use the covid-19 crisis as cover to tighten their grip on already fragile democracies. Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban already secured the right to rule his country by decree indefinitely.

In Poland, protesters avoided the ban on gatherings this week by standing in lines in front of stores and balconies carrying banners saying "women on strike."

Others clogged a roundabout in central Warsaw in their cars with stickers that said "women's hell." Mass rallies by women derailed the government's last attempt to ban abortions in 2016.

"The fate of this bill will be a key criterion in presidential elections," Kaja Godek, a member of the Stop Abortion initiative that submitted the bill, told parliament. Law & Justice wants to work on the draft more in committee, lawmaker Boleslaw Piecha said.

Poland already has one of the continent's most restrictive abortion laws, allowing the procedure only in the case of rape, incest, irreparable damage to the fetus or a serious health threat to the woman.

The government has also rebuffed criticism for pushing ahead with the election. Last week, Poland approved a law changing the rules for the vote to conduct it solely via mail-in ballot, raising concerns over both health issues as well as potential fraud. Other countries in the region -- such as Serbia and North Macedonia -- have delayed their spring ballots.

"You have a mouth full of words about the protection of life and at the same time you're sending 30 million Poles to risk their lives in the undemocratic ballot," Wanda Nowicka from the leftist Lewica party told parliament.

Duda is leading opinion polls, but still faces the potential of being forced into a runoff if he fails to win an outright majority.

With Law & Justice wielding only a tight advantage in parliament's lower house -- with the opposition controlling the Senate -- the presidency is crucial to its efforts to remake Poland along the lines of its nationalist Catholic vision.
By Ofeliya Afandiyeva

The Azerbaijani government will pay 50 percent of tuition fees for students from socially vulnerable families at the expense of the state budget due to COVID-19, local media reported citing the Azerbaijani Cabinet of Ministers.

Prime Minister Ali Asadov signed a relevant decree on April 13.

According to the decision posted on the website of the Cabinet of Ministers, 50 percent of the tuition fees of students studying at universities, specialized secondary and vocational schools will be paid by the state.

These benefits will be received by full-time students on a paid basis (with the exception of the second higher and specialized secondary education).

The measures are aimed at protecting families belonging to socially vulnerable groups in the context of the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic and $23.5 million will be allocated from the 2020 state budget for its implementation.

The following people will also be able to receive from these benefits: recipients of targeted state social assistance; both parents (and in the case of a single parent) or their legal representatives belonging to any of the following categories: persons with I and II degree disabilities; those registered as unemployed; labor pensioners by age; recipients of age-related social benefits.

In addition, on April 13, Prime Minister Ali Asadov signed a decree to increase the limit of preferential use of electricity for the population from 300 kWh to 400 kWh.

According to the decision published on the website of the Cabinet of Ministers, these benefits will be valid in April-May 2020.

The goal is to protect the population in the context of a coronavirus pandemic.

Azerishig OJSC will receive $5.88 million from the state budget in connection with the increase in the limit of preferential use of electricity.

---

Follow us on Twitter @AzerNewsAz
A 99-year-old World War Two veteran has become the oldest person to beat coronavirus in Brazil.

Ermando Piveta saluted from his wheelchair as medical staff cheered and clapped and a soldiers trumpet played while he left the Armed Forces Hospital in Brasilia on Tuesday.

The veteran, who was a second lieutenant in the Brazilian Army during the war and served in Africa, said: Winning this battle was for me bigger than winning the war.

In war you kill or live. Here you have to fight to live.

Mr Piveta tested positive for Covid-19 two weeks ago and spent two days in intensive care after developing pneumonia.

But he never needed a ventilator and recovered thanks to his good physical condition, from life in the military, and longevity that runs in his family, the hospitals director said.

Mr Pivetas release from hospital was a bright moment in an otherwise darkening scenario as the global pandemic hit Brazil with force this week.

The coronavirus has so far infected more than 25,000 people in the country and killed more than 1,500.

Additional reporting by Reuters
Kansas City Patiently Waits For Coronavirus Fed Cash

Stimulus checks arriving for Kansas City-area residents Help is on the way for those who qualify for a stimulus check - but some may have to wait a little longer. If you received your last tax refund from the IRS via direct deposit, you can expect to see your stimulus check appear in your bank account.

Rerouting New KCI

Heading to KCI? New traffic pattern in place later this month The next time you head to the Kansas City International Airport, the route to get to your terminal will likely look very different.Construction has continued on the new $1.5 billion single-terminal design in place of what used to be Terminal A at KCI.Due to that construction, crews have been working to establish a new traffic pattern, including two new roundabouts, to help passengers and commuters get to terminals B and C.

Cowtown Antibodies Collected In Pandemic Fight

Local doctors planning to use COVID-19 survivors plasma to save those fighting the virus KANSAS CITY, MO (KCTV) - Imagine being able to help someone suffering from the coronavirus with just a quick stick of a needle. It's already happening in some areas and it's about to become a reality in the metro as well. Monday in St.

Pandemic Airline Industry FAIL Seen Kansas City

Delta Airlines parking planes on runway at KCI Airport More planes are being parked at Kansas City International Airport. Many planes had been parked on taxiways. NewsChopper 9 was near the airport Tuesday and could see Delta planes now parked on a runway.

Kara Panty Inspiration

Kara Del Toro Shows Off Killer Curves In Lacy Black Lingerie Set On Instagram Kara Del Toro showed off her stunning body from every angle in a new Instagram post on Monday afternoon. In a series of photos on her feed, the model rocked an all-black lace set as she stood by a ...

Prez Trump Cuts Global Paycheck Amid Pandemic Fight

Trump announces US will halt funding to World Health Organization over coronavirus response President Trump announced at the White House coronavirus press briefing on Tuesday that the United States will immediately halt all funding for the World Health Organization (WHO), saying it had put "political correctness over lifesaving measures."

Tragic NYC Toll Counted

NYC death toll jumps by 3,700 after uncounted fatalities are added New York City's official coronavirus death toll has soared past 10,000, after thousands of deaths that previously went uncounted were added to the city's statistics. In a new count released Tuesday, 3,778 more deaths were added to the rolls - driving up the previously recorded total of 6,589 by more than half.

Russia Push Back

AG Barr just signaled that things are about to get ugly for the Russia collusion team "Travesty" is not a nice word. It usually is applied to gross perversions of justice, and that apparently is the context Attorney General desired when he dropped it into an interview answer the other day in the breezy courtyard of the Department of Justice (DOJ).

RONALD IS RACIST!!!

McDonald's apologizes after a restaurant in China bans black customers A McDonald's restaurant in China has come under fire after it was accused of banning black customers from entering. A sign at the Guangzhou eatery that read "from now on black people are not allowed to enter the restaurant" has been circulating on social media.

Grocery Store Full Service To Fight Coronavirus

Hy-Vee now offering free full-service fueling, and deliver food, other items to your car KANSAS CITY, Mo. - Hy-Vee announced Tuesday that they will now offer free full-service fueling at its convenience stores. The service is available from 7 a.m. until 7 p.m. seven days a week. Drivers simply need to pull up to the fuel pump, and either press the "fuel help" button or call the designated phone [...]

Helping KC Artsy Community

We're Open: Coronavirus prompts adjustments for KC musicians, artists KANSAS CITY, Mo. - Kansas City area artists and musicians have turned to technology to continue pursuing their crafts as the coronavirus pandemic has prompted stay-at-home orders, social distancing and venue closures. "Being a musician is built off of playing for people, in front of people," said Belle Loux, a member of local rock band Belle and The Vertigo Waves .

Weather Outlook For Now

Temps in low 50s Wednesday, rain chances increase in evening Hide Transcript Show Transcript CHANCE OF A SHOWER OR DO. HERE IS A LOOK AT THE BIRCHER SKIN -- THE FUTURESCAN. GOING THROUGH THE EVENING, WE STILL HAVE THE CUMULUS, BUT THEY THIN OUT AFTER SUNSET. AT 9:00 P.M. TO THE NORTH AND EAST ALONG INTERSTATE 35, SOME SHOWERS.

Inspired bywe share this collection of pop culture, community news and info from across the nation and around the world . . .And this is thefor right now . . .
Human rights groups in Zimbabwe have welcomed a court ruling ordering state security forces not to assault citizens while enforcing the country's coronavirus lockdown. One of those injured says he wants compensation from the government as his arm and leg were broken, allegedly by security forces.

The high court ruled Tuesday that security forces must respect human rights while enforcing the 21-day lockdown, which ends later this week. That followed an urgent petition from advocacy group Zimbabwe Lawyers for Human Rights, which said it had recorded several rights abuse cases by the army and police.

Twenty-eight-year-old Tendai Mthombeni said security forces broke his arm and leg while forcing him to stay indoors last Friday. In a telephone interview, Mthombeni said he cannot go back to South Africa where he works because of the injuries, so now wants compensation.

He said he doesnt believe forces will follow the court ruling. They act like they are drunk or frustrated because of poor remuneration when dealing with civilians. He added that he has dependents and he does not know how they are surviving since he is now stuck in Zimbabwe.

Kumbirai Mafunda, the spokesman for Zimbabwe Lawyers for Human Rights, welcomed the high courts ruling.

We are glad that the court has found the police to have violated citizens fundamental rights. And we hope that the police and soldiers will comply with the court order and conduct themselves in a manner which respects the constitution, which respects peoples fundamental rights, rather than violating [their rights], he said.

In a separate ruling Tuesday, the high court ordered the government to provide personal protective equipment to all medical staff to protect them from the coronavirus.

Fortune Nyamande, the chairman of the Zimbabwe Doctors for Human Rights, said his association will now pressure the government to comply with the ruling.

We think that this judgment will go a long way in compelling the government to act in the right manner. Our next step definitely will be to ensure that this judgement is enforced, and if it is not enforced, we will then seek all the necessary instruments to ensure that the decision of the court is respected, said Nyamande.

Zimbabwes justice minister, Ziyambi Ziyambi, said he would only comment on the rulings after talking to President Emmerson Mnangagwa.

Mnangagwa is expected to review Zimbabwes lockdown at the end of this week. The coronavirus has infected 18 people in Zimbabwe and caused three deaths.
YNW Melly was denied his request to be released from jail while awaiting trial on murder charges due to being infected with the coronavirus.

The 20-year-old rapper will remain in the Broward County Jail in Florida awaiting his double-murder trial, according to an article Tuesday by TMZ.

A judge issued an order denying his request for house arrest and said if the rapper, real name Jamell Maurice Demons, required special medical treatment he could request it from the Broward Sheriff's Office.

Request denied: YNW Melly, shown in a February 2019 mugshot, will remain in jail after a judge denied his request for release due to being infected with COVID-19

Melly's lawyer Bradford Cohen had filed court documents claiming his client was suffering from several COVID-19 symptoms, including chills, labored breathing, headaches and body aches after testing positive for coronavirus.

The rapper's lawyer argued that he was in danger of dying due to the infection and inadequate health care provided by the jail.

The Murder On My Mind rapper was seeking house arrest and treatment at a medical facility of his choosing at his own expense.

The families of Melly's alleged victims opposed his release request stating he didn't deserve it and could be a potential threat to them and other witnesses.

In custody: The 20-year-old rapper, shown in November 2018 on Instagram, will remain in the Broward County Jail in Florida awaiting his double murder trial

Melly was arrested in February 2019 and charged with two counts of first-degree murder.

He pleaded not guilty in March 2019 to the double-murder charges and awaits trial.

Prosecutors allege that Melly and fellow YNW rapper Cortlen Henry, also known as YNW Bortlen, staged the double-murder of Anthony 'YNW Sakchaser' Williams, 21, and Christopher 'YNW Juvy' Thomas Jr, 19, to make it appear as if they were fatally wounded in a drive-by shooting.

Awaiting trial: YNW Melly, shown in February 2019 in West Hollywood, California, pleaded not guilty in March 2019 to the double-murder charges and awaits trial

Melly turned himself in on February 13, 2019.

The rapper via management revealed April 2 on social media that he tested positive for COVID-19.

Melly collaborated with Kanye West, 42, on the 2019 single Mixed Personalities.

The Gifford, Florida native faces either life in prison or the death penalty, if convicted.
This pandemic has been and continues to be devastating for the travel & leisure industry. Airlines, hotels & resorts, amusement parks, and cruises have been forced to shut down across the globe. With demand halted, these businesses are feeling the heat and are looking to the government to back them in their most desperate hour.

The $2 trillion CARES act combined with the Federal Reserve $6 trillion in liquidity for businesses in need has put a temporary backstop on the markets, with their promised support. But, are any of these stocks safe to invest in yet?

Travel & Leisure Investable?

Top travel & leisure stocks like Marriott International MAR, Delta DAL, Six Flags SIX and Carnival CCL have been hammered since the beginning of the year, with YTD declines of (46%), (59%), and (77%). The fiscal stimulus bill gave these shares a temporary boost, but DAL and CCL quickly fell back towards their lows, while MAR couldnt keep up with the broader markets rally.

I am using MAR, DAL, SIX, and CCL to represent the markets they operate in because of their pure-play leadership in each of the sectors.

Cruises

I will discuss cruise lines first because this pandemic has hit them the hardest. The story about Carnivals Diamond Princess that was supposed to be a 14-day luxury cruise around the islands of Japan and southern China ended up being a month-long trip from hell. A passenger tested positive for the novel coronavirus 3 days before the ship was scheduled to dock. The 2,666 passengers were quarantined in their small cabins for the remainder of the extended voyage, while the number of confirmed cases racked up. There were over 700 confirmed cases by the time the cruise finally got all the passengers off.

This was not the only cruise that experienced the viruss rapid spread in close quarters. This news has tabooed the cruise line industry and left it with a deep scar that will not quickly fade. These cruises are going to miss out on their peak season this year, and many consumers are going to be apprehensive about getting on a cruise ship for years to come. Being in close quarters with many people you dont know is the epitome of what we are being conditioned to avoid.

Story continues

Cruise lines are yet to see any government relief, and I see bankruptcy and consolidation in the future of this space. I would stay away from these equities until there is more clarity on outlook.

Amusement Parks

The coronavirus has hammered Six Flags parks and, like cruises, will likely be tabooed for some time, with people wanting to avoid large crowds and seedy environments.

Six Flags was forced to file for chapter 11 bankruptcy in 2009 because of its excessive leverage going into the financial crisis. The parks werent able to sustain demand, and cash-flows were unable to match debt obligations. The company was handed over to bondholders who recapitalized the company and brought them out of the ashes.

Today the theme park giant has amassed almost as much debt as its pre-bankruptcy levels. Six Flags is operating quarter to quarter, just hoping that they will have enough income to cover the massive interest expense, which made up 63% of last years net income. The coronavirus scare could be the catalyst of a second bankruptcy, and this time it could be a complete liquidation of assets (chapter 7 bankruptcy).

I cant mention amusement parks without discussing Disney DIS and its massive international theme park exposure. Disneys 12 parks are closed indefinitely, and JP Morgan (JPM) is estimating that this will cost the company as much as $5 billion in 2020.

Despite the companys extensive theme park exposure, DIS is only down 28% this year. The future growth of Disney is going to come from its newly released direct-to-consumer platform Disney+, which has outperformed expectations. Disney+ surpassed 50 million subscribers last week, just 5 months after its launch. The number of subscribers grew by more than 22 million in only 2 months. A lot of this can be attributed to its international expansion in late March. The quarantines mandated across the globe is no doubt boosting subscription growth.

I like DIS at any price below $100, and I would avoid SIX at any price.

Airlines

Airlines have seen a substantial decrease in travelers due to this global pandemic, but they have not completely halted operations. The US government will not allow airlines like Delta to fail because they serve an essential function in our global economy.

Some of these companies are highly leveraged and not very liquid, which could lead to bankruptcies and consolidations. American Airlines AAL, for example, is funded almost entirely by debt, and it has over $12.3 billion in obligations for 2020. With demand at an all-time low and paper-thin net margins, I am not sure how much longer AAL will stay afloat, especially if they completely halt air travel.

Delta will likely survive this pandemic because it is the biggest and one of the best-capitalized airlines. Still, I am not rushing into these shares until we have more clarity on financial support and economic shutdown timelines. People are going to be scared to fly until a vaccine or treatment is released, which is likely more than 1-year out. This pandemic is expected to hurt airlines more than any event in history. Now the question is, how much of this pain is baked into the shares already?

Hotels & Resorts

Marriott, the largest hotel chain in the world, is shuttering 25% of its worldwide locations, and its revenue per available room is down by 23% in Q1. I expect this to fall even further in Q2. The company is cutting costs fast and has been forced to furlough tens of thousands of employees. Marriott has reduced its G&A by 30% and will likely continue to do so.

MAR just entered into another $1.5 billion credit line, and its credit rating remains investment grade despite the short-term uncertainty.

I do not believe that hotels will hold the same level of long-term taboo that cruises, amusement parks, and airlines do. With everyone pent up in their homes for such an extended period, consumers are going to have a strong desire to go on vacation once the quarantine is lifted.

Driving is likely going to be the preferred method of travel, but people are still going to need to stay somewhere, and I would trust a regulated hotel room over an Airbnb every day. I think we will see a big uptick in hotels & resorts once the economy opens.

Take Away

I am not rushing to invest in the travel & leisure industry because of the substantial risks I just discussed. Still, out of the stocks that I mentioned, I would keep an eye on DIS and MAR for a discounted buy when the market pulls back again. DAL is another one to keep an eye on, but I wouldnt invest in any airlines until more color is provided about the industry's outlook.

I wouldnt touch CCL or SIX as I see both of these stocks having the potential to fall to 0.

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Murder squad detectives have arrested their chief suspect following the fatal stabbing of a Dublin teenager at the weekend.

John Paul McDonagh died after a violent argument between a number of men in Fermanagh on Saturday night.

The 18-year-old, who was from Finglas but had been living in Enniskillen for some time, suffered fatal injuries after being hit with a slash hook.

A 24-year-old man was injured, while a 19-year-old who was with Mr McDonagh was arrested but later released without charge.

A fourth man, who is suspected of killing the teenager, was on the run for a number of days following the incident, but was arrested yesterday by the PSNI.

Bottles

The 29-year-old suspect is a bare knuckle boxer who lives in the North but also has connections to the Republic.

The PSNI said detectives from its Murder Investigation Team "investigating the murder of 18-year-old John Paul McDonagh in Enniskillen at the weekend have arrested a 29-year-old man on suspicion of offences, including murder, and he remains in custody".

The fight that led to the death of Mr McDonagh in the Coolcullen Meadows area of Enniskillen was captured on video, which showed a number of people armed with weapons, including bottles and a slash hook.

Mr McDonagh was treated at the scene before being rushed to hospital, but he died on Monday morning.

Relatives took to social media to pay tributes to him.

One wrote: "Eighteen years of age, his whole life ahead of him. He didn't deserve this."

Another added: "RIP John. Really can't believe you're gone. You will always be remembered, never forgotten. Fly high."

The PSNI was liaising with gardai to determine if the chief suspect had fled across the border after the killing.

Detective Chief Inspector John Caldwell said the force was appealing for anyone who captured mobile phone footage to get in touch.

"Tragically, the 18-year-old male victim passed away in hospital, and I want to express my condolences to the victim's family, friends and loved ones at this very sad time," he said.

"Our investigation continues, and I am appealing to the public to help us establish exactly what happened and who was involved.

"If you witnessed the altercation, please get in touch with us."
Saudi Arabia is battling to contain a coronavirus outbreak in Mecca amid fears that crowded slums and labour camps are hotspots for infection.

The Islamic holy city, which has a population of two millions people, has seen more than 1,000 reported case of the virus.

Mecca's large number of undocumented immigrants and cramped housing for foreign workers could have played a part in an increased rate of infection, Bloomberg reports.

Every year millions of Muslims make a pilgrimage to Mecca - which was one of the first Saudi cities to face a full-day curfew - but religious tourism was banned in February with mosques across the country shut the following month as the coronavirus crisis deepened.

An aerial view of the holy city of Mecca, Saudi Arabia August 12, 2019. Mecca's large number of undocumented immigrants and cramped housing for foreign workers could have played a part in an increased rate of infection

Saudi Arabia's capital city Riyadh - more than three times the size of Mecca - has seen 1,422 cases of coronavirus.

Late last month five employees of a construction company tested positive before authorities locked down the housing of 8,000 labourers, suspending work on expanding the grand mosque, it has been reported.

The health ministry reports that foreigners - who account for roughly a third of the Saudi population - make up between 70 and 80 per cent of new cases, sparking debate about their role in the country.

Authorities have promised free coronavirus treatment for foreign residents - undocumented immigrants included.

As many as 150 members of the Saudi royal family are infected with coronavirus, it has been reported. It was claimed that King Salman and Mohammed bin Salman both went into isolation to avoid the outbreak.

Elsewhere in the region, charity workers are scouring the United Arab Emirates for empty buildings and Bahrain is repurposing closed schools to rehouse low income labourers from overcrowded accommodation, a hotspot for the coronavirus outbreak in the Gulf.

Workers disinfect the ground around the Kaaba, the cubic building at the Grand Mosque, in the Muslim holy city of Mecca, Saudi Arabia, March 7. Every year millions of Muslims make a pilgrimage to Mecca - which was one of the first Saudi cities to face a full-day curfew - but religious tourism was banned in February

The challenge is not limited to the region's congested labour camps, where one room with bunk beds can sleep about a dozen workers, the virus has also spread in densely populated commercial districts where many expatriates share housing to save on rent. Many have lost jobs and are struggling.

Indian engineer Mohamed Aslam shares a three-bedroom apartment in the UAE capital Abu Dhabi with 14 other people. Health authorities put the building under quarantine after some residents tested positive for the virus.

'The charities are covering the food: dinner, lunch, breakfast,' he said. 'Praise be to God, because of charity we are surviving.'

Aslam is among millions of foreign workers, many from Asia, who form the backbone of Gulf economies and work in the construction, hospitality, retail, transport and services sectors, many of which have been disrupted by the outbreak.

Most of the six Gulf Arab states have taken measures to curb the spread of infection, initially linked to travel, by suspending passenger flights, closing most public venues and imposing curfews. But the number of cases has steadily risen to surpass 16,500 with 111 deaths.

Several states have said they face a challenge with migrant workers. Some, including the UAE's Dubai emirate, Qatar, Oman and Kuwait, have locked down areas with a large population of low wage workers. All have stepped up testing.

In Saudi Arabia, a video widely circulated on social media showed at least 15 foreign workers being ushered out of one room with bunk beds to be tested for the virus. A Saudi official confirmed the authenticity of the video.

Gulf governments said they are sterilising labour camps as part of disinfection drives. Bahrain said it would use schools to separate workers. Two charity groups in the UAE said they were looking for empty buildings where workers could isolate.

'Many people are infected and are staying with other people,' Krishna Kumar, president of UAE-based Kerala Social Centre said. 'We are trying to isolate them.'

May 31, 2019: An aerial view of Muslim worshippers gathering around the Kaaba, Islam's holiest shrine, at the Grand Mosque in the Saudi holy city, during the holy fasting month of Ramadan

Three doctors in the UAE, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said overcrowding is one of the biggest factors for the surge in cases. 'We have seen clustered outbreaks in the labour camps,' one of them said.

Several Gulf Arab states have allowed outbound flights for expatriates who have lost jobs or been put on leave, but some countries say they are not prepared to take them back.

In the UAE, diplomats and four charities said they were delivering thousands of meals, medicine and other essentials each day to people who had become destitute.

Indian national Abdulla, who declined to give his last name, said he had not worked at his Abu Dhabi retail job for two weeks and was relying on charity. A Ugandan office assistant living in a labour camp in Dubai's Jebel Ali, who declined to be named, said he had not been paid in weeks.

Saudi Arabia's Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman attends a meeting with U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, September 18, 2019

The UAE has said it would review labour ties with states refusing to repatriate citizens after the ambassadors of India and Pakistan said their countries were not yet ready to do so.

'We're aware of all of those who have been laid off and their plight,' Sayed Zulfiqar Bukhari, special assistant to Pakistan's prime minister, told Reuters in Islamabad.

'We're just waiting to create the right mechanism so that we don't overburden the system of taking people in here,' he said, adding airlines needed to be equipped for safety.

Bangladesh Expatriate Welfare and Overseas Employment Minister Imran Ahmed said Dhaka was working to alleviate citizens' hardships, including sending money to foreign missions 'so that migrants in trouble can be taken care of'.

A Philippines official said citizens overseas can qualify for a government stipend of $200.

Valerie, a Filipina receptionist in Dubai who shares a one-room studio with five others, had her wages cut and is digging into savings to support her parents and six siblings back home.

'I'm worried about my family if I lose my job,' she said, adding that she worries about going out to buy groceries. 'It's scary. We don't know if we will bring back the virus with us.'

Medics warn Ramadan could lead to rise in coronavirus cases when UK's three million Muslims celebrate holy month - while closed mosques prepare for online 'Iftar' meals after fast ends

Medics have warned that the Islamic festival of Ramadan could lead to a 'big spike' in coronavirus infections when British Muslims celebrate holy month.

This year Ramadan is set to begin on April 23, with around three million Muslims across the UK celebrating the religious holiday.

But a consultant at Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Birmingham has now claimed that more social interaction during the holy month could lead to an increase in cases.

Dr Adnan Sharif said the amount of social interaction during the festivities could be a worry.

'People traditionally gather to open and close prayers and break fast at sundown with friends and neighbours, which could cause a big spike in infections.'

His fears were echoed by Neil Hubbard, speaking for the Independent Doctor's Association, who said, 'he has a point'.

Dr Adnan Sharif warned that Ramadan could cause a spike in cases of the coronavirus across the UK

During Ramadan people gather on a regular basis for prayer and to connect with their local communities. Pictured above, worshippers praying in London before an evening meal at a previous Ramadan celebration

Dr Adnan works at a hospital where four in 10 Covid-19 patients are from a black, Asian or ethnic minority (BAME).

His warning regarding Ramadan echoes concerns from the British Medical Association (BMA).

The BMA recently launched an inquiry into why people from BAME backgrounds are more susceptible to such respiratory conditions.

Speaking to The Times Dr Adnan added: 'They usually have households of multiple occupancy, where grandparents, parents and children all live in the same home and there is lots of communal activity.'

Mr Hubbard, who is currently working on AI in cancer diagnosis and transplant research, said: 'If you were to examine why the Government has closed all churches and then look at the spread in Italy where there are many older people going to mass sometimes daily, you will see that the good doctor may have a point.'

Ramadan is the ninth month of the Islamic calendar and is observed by Muslims worldwide as a month of community, fasting, prayer and reflection.

It is a commemoration of the Prophet Muhammad's first revelation and the observation of Ramadan is regarded as one of the five pillars of Islam.

There are worries that this increased sense of community may lead to people breaking social distancing rules.

One of the main events of Ramadan is the Iftar dinner, that signifies the end of the fast.

This is usually when family and friends would gather to eat together.

What is Ramadan and how will it be different this year because of Covid-19? This year the holy month of Ramadan will begin on April 23 and will end on Saturday 23 May. It is the first celebration of the Islamic calendar and is believed to be the month when the Quran is said to have been revealed to Prophet Muhammad by God. Most mosques, like churches and other places of worship are currently closed at the moment in order to prevent mass gatherings and to make sure people are not passing on the virus from household to household. During Ramadan Muslims have to refrain from consuming food and drink - including water, during daylight hours. Smoking, sex and masturbation are all banned during the holy month and prayer is encouraged. This is a means of celebrating and reflecting on their Islamic faith. The Islamic calendar is based on the cycle of the moon - which is why it falls on a different date every year. The fast begins before dawn and a light meal called a suhoor is consumed. At sunset people will gather for Adhan prayers which signify the end of the fast. When the fast is fully broken at the end of the month, families come together to enjoy the meal of Iftar. The Iftar is the event where most Muslims gather and many local mosques are said to be launching virtual dinners. The Ramadan Tent Project said such virtual events will help people celebrate the end of the fast safely. People will celebrate from home this year with their loved ones, they will pray at home and if they so wish, can join virtual events set up by different organisations across the country. When Ramadan comes to an end Muslims observe Eid al-Fitr. This is a celebration often marked with lights, gift giving, and worshippers often dress up and decorate their homes. This will begin on the evening of Saturday 23 May and will end on the evening of Sunday 24 May. Advertisement

Virtual Iftars have been scheduled by some groups, so people can still celebrate and enjoy a traditional Iftar without breaking social distancing guidelines and putting others at risk.

The Ramadan Tent Project said such virtual events will help people celebrate the end of the fast safely.

People will celebrate from home this year with their loved ones, they will pray at home and if they so wish, can join virtual events set up by different organisations across the country.

Speaking to MailOnline Harun Khan, Secretary General of the Muslim Council of Britain said: 'When it comes to the coronavirus crisis, the majority of mosques suspended all congregational activities even before the government required their closure and not a single mosque has been found to be breaking the guidelines.

'In fact, we are seeing unprecedented innovation as mosques are adapting to social distancing measures and acting as a virtual hub for volunteering and supporting our NHS. We can only hope the accurate reality can be portrayed rather than the musings of one individual'.

Last week Church of England vicars across the UK threatened to revolt and go to churches to host Easter Sunday services despite the Archbishop of Canterbury's orders to stay at home.

It followed Tory MP Jack Lopresti, for Filton and Bradley Stoke, calling for churches to open on Easter Sunday to give hope to Christians during the crisis. His call, made in a column for the Telegraph, sparked criticism over his suggestion people broke lockdown.

There were similar concerns around the Jewish Passover festival after many gathered to celebrate Purim earlier this year. The festival, dating back 2,500 years, took place on March 9 and March 10, shortly before social distancing rules were brought into place, and lockdown on March 23.

Archbishop Welby even pre-recorded his Easter Sunday service himself and urged others to do the same in order to avoid them attending churches and going outside unnecessarily.

Those who said they would defy the rules set out by Mr Welby claimed they were being threatened with disciplinary measures over the weekend.

One vicar said 'it was time to revolt' and another claimed they had 'been going to church since lockdown'.

They said they would continue to do so, adding they would be attending at 10.30am on Easter Sunday.

The Rector at London's St Luke's Wimbledon Park Rev James Paice told the Telegraph over the weekend: 'If people can go to supermarkets and get food and stand less than two metres apart from others, then why can't clergy go into an empty building on their own?

Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby recording his Easter Sunday sermon in the kitchen of his flat at Lambeth Palace in London

'The advice that clergy should get shopping but not enter their buildings alone to minister online elevates the humanistic and practical above the spiritual.'

He added: 'I've been going every Sunday to a room in my church. Ever since the lockdown I have been doing it, and I will do it at 10.30am on Easter Sunday. Other clergy are doing it from the main body of church.'

So far in the UK 12,107 people have died from the coronavirus and there have been over 93,000 confirmed cases of the virus.

Public Health England is currently reporting the deaths on a daily basis.

However the figures could actually be much higher, as this is just the number of patients that have died in hospitals from the virus over the last 24 hours.
Larry Sprung, president of Mitlin Financial in Hauppauge, New York, was able to begin the application process with Bank of America when the Paycheck Protection Program opened April 3. Larry Sprung

A forgivable loan program meant to help ailing small businesses has met with much criticism amid delays, confusion and frustration. But some small-business owners have successfully applied for the loans, made through the new Paycheck Protection Program, with hardly a hiccup. These entrepreneurs appear to have something in common: relationships with representatives inside their bank who helped guide them through the process.

Lawrence Sprung, a certified financial planner and financial advisor, was one such owner. Sprung, the president of Mitlin Financial, based in Hauppauge, New York, applied for a $50,000 loan on April 3, the day banks began taking applications. Others weren't as fortunate. Many were locked out due to heavy volume or the absence of a relationship with a bank credentialed to be part of the loan program. And time is of the essence  the program earmarked up to $349 billion for small businesses on a first-come-first-served basis, leaving many anxious that funds won't be there for them.

"At the present run-rate, we're going to be out of money," Larry Kudlow, director of the National Economic Council, said Tuesday on Fox Business Network. Indeed, the money may run out as soon as Wednesday, CNBC reported. Sprung has both business bank accounts and existing credit with Bank of America, providing him with an immediate advantage since many banks initially prioritized such customers. He also has a relationship manager at Bank of America. The banker let Sprung know ahead of time what information and documentation he'd need. The morning of April 3, she sent Sprung a link to the application portal and he got through quickly. A few days later, the banker called Sprung to notify him of a website update and that he had to upload additional documents  something he may not have discovered for days if not for that phone call, he said.

"It was a big help being prepared for it," Sprung said of the application process. He's still waiting to hear about application approval.

Processing applications

Many banks have been managing the process differently with respect to the necessary paperwork to apply for a loan, according to Frank Fiorille, vice president of risk, compliance and data analytics at Paychex, a payroll processing company. The two most commonly required items are two federal tax forms: Form 940 (an annual filing) and Form 941 (a quarterly filing), Fiorille said. Firms may also need evidence of benefits payments, showing the amount of employer health insurance contributions, for example, he said.

Some under-the-radar items necessary to complete an application include: a business' six-digit North American Industry Classification System code and the exact start date of their business, according to Brock Blake, founder and CEO of Lendio, an online marketplace for small business loans. Those who own less than 20% of their business should be prepared to have another co-owner put their name on the application, too, he said. More from Personal Finance

Some small businesses are locked out of loan program

Their loan money was supposed to arrive in days. It hasn't

Tax Day is now 3 months away. Here are 3 tax savings opportunities These finer details aren't easy for lay people to grasp. Small businesses who can't find someone to shepherd them through the process run the risk of having their application kicked back to them. "By far the No. 1 reason why applications are delayed or denied is the incomplete package and incomplete information," said Robert Katz, managing director of the financial advisory services group at EisnerAmper in Philadelphia.

Having a team that can coordinate with the bank comes in handy, especially as banks ask for supporting documents. "It's tax returns and financial statements, both corporate and personal," said Katz. "If a client calls and says the bank wants these three or four extra things, we have a team that can turn that around in a couple of hours."

When access makes the difference

Entrepreneurs Fred and Marcia Puente just might be the best example of how business owners are faring as they seek funding through the federal Paycheck Protection Program. Fred, president and CEO of Blind Industries & Services of Maryland, applied for a piece of the $349 billion loan program for his Baltimore-based firm. Blind, a 501(C)(3) non-profit, manufactures textiles for the military, as well as hand-sanitizer products. The firm, whose annual sales exceed $100 million, furloughed 36 of its 495 employees.
A French court has ordered Amazon to restrict all its deliveries in the country to essential goods during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The ruling gives Amazon 24 hours to comply with the new restrictions, which would limit the online retailer to delivering food items, hygiene products, and medical supplies.

According to the Paris court, Amazon has 'failed to recognize its obligations regarding the security and health of its workers.'

The court ruled that Amazon had failed to recognize its obligations regarding the security and health of its workers,' and said the company would be fined $1.1million (one million Euros) each day for failure to comply

If the company doesn't comply with the ruling, it could be fined up to $1.1million (one million Euros) a day, according to a report from BBC.

An Amazon spokesperson said the company is 'perplexed' by the ruling.

'Our interpretation suggests that we may be forced to suspend the activity of our distribution centers in France,' the company said in a statement to Bloomberg.

'The court gave categories that are very general and create ambiguity that would be too hard to implement, this is a complex business to run.'

In an internal memo, Amazon suggested it would close its fulfillment centers in France for an initial five day period while investigating ways to proceed.

According to union representatives, workers at six Amazon facilities have been told about a temporary stoppage, during which they will continue to receive full pay.

'We believe its good news,' said Julien Vincent of the labor union, CFDT, which represents Amazon's logistics workers.

The lawsuit against Amazon's French operations was originally filed by the labor union Solidaires Unitaires Democratiques, which said the company was forcing workers to operate in unsafe conditions during the COVID-19 pandemic

'It will give us time to negotiate more seriously and upgrade health safety measures. Employees are going on partial unemployment but paid 100 percent, the company told us. We must focus on our work conditions.'

The suit against Amazon was originally filed by the French trade union Solidaires Unitaires Democratiques on behalf 100 Amazon workers it said were being forced to work in conditions that violated basic social distancing protocols.

According to an estimate from CFDT, between 30 and 40 percent of the company's total workforce in France have stopped reporting to work, either for fear they would contract COVID-19 in the company's warehouses or because they lacked the necessary childcare resources during the country's school closures.

Several hundred Amazon workers in the country organized strikes in March, which helped bring public attention to the issue.

Amazon denied the claims, saying it has implemented more aggressive cleaning policies for its warehouses and worked to ensure 'employees can keep the necessary distance from one another.'

The company has promised it will begin distributing face masks to all warehouse staff across its European and American facilities, as well as begin taking daily temperature checks of all its workers.
COLUMBUS, Ohio  After a month of draconian steps to minimize deaths and prevent hospital overload from the coronavirus pandemic, governors now face a new challenge: Deciding when and how to begin easing restrictions on businesses and social gatherings.

Many of the states chief executives say they dont want to move too quickly and risk a public health crisis, despite pressure from Republican lawmakers, business leaders, professional sports leagues and some parents.

We all want to open up tomorrow, but people will die if we do that without having things in place, Democratic Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz said Monday.

Governors have consistently said that before they can loosen social restrictions, they need to know where their states are in terms of infections. To do that, they need widespread testing and tracing procedures.

Dr. Anthony Fauci, the governments top infectious disease expert, said Tuesday that the country is not there yet.

Lets not make the mistake of pulling the plug too early, as much as we all want to, California Gov. Gavin Newsom said Tuesday as he announced a series of steps, including testing, needed to help the nations most populous state transition from surge to suppression.

No one is questioning the devastating effects the statewide shutdowns and business closures have had on the nations economy. Nearly 17 million Americans filed for unemployment in three weeks time, a record; state and local government tax revenue is plummeting, and businesses large and small are warning of imminent ruin.

Theres not a debate here about whether we need to get the economy open again, Walz said. Of course we do.

California, Oregon and Washington have agreed to coordinate how the West Coast states will begin lifting their shelter-in-place restrictions. Seven states in the Northeast, including New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania, have done the same  even as President Donald Trump asserted on Monday that he, not the governors, had the power to reopen the nations economy.

Trump abruptly reversed course on Tuesday, saying he would leave it to governors to determine the right time and manner to reopen activity in their states.

Most have said it will be slow going. Besides testing and tracking, several have said they will consider the need to protect the people most at risk and ensure hospitals can handle a surge. They also have said they need to be able to to reinstate stay-at-home orders if needed. A poorly planned rollback of restrictions would only deepen the economic pain, they said.

Weve got to make sure that we avoid a second wave at all costs, said Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, a Democrat and possible vice presidential contender. That would be devastating for our economy. So were going to make decisions based on science and having a real strategic phase-in of our economy when its appropriate and safe to do so.

Whitmers decision to maintain a statewide shutdown despite calls to reopen some rural areas and businesses has drawn the ire of Republicans, even those who backed her moves initially.

Senate Majority Leader Mike Shirkey took to Facebook to accuse Whitmer of DESTROYING OUR HEALTH BY KILLING OUR LIVELIHOODS!

The state Republican Party in New Mexico is pressuring Democratic Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham to ease up on her restrictions so small businesses can reopen.

In Ohio, the shouts of protesters punctuate Republican Gov. Mike DeWines daily briefings, and lawmakers of his own party are beginning to criticize his once widely praised aggressive approach to containing the virus, decrying the effects on businesses and communities.

DeWine has been unfazed by the protests so far. He calls the COVID-19 disease a monster that is waiting to pick members of our society off. On Tuesday, he gave a sobering assessment for those wanting a return to normal amid the pandemic.

As we reopen Ohio, people will have to be very, very careful.  Youll have to weigh benefit versus risk, he said. You will have to make sure youre wearing a mask when you go out, continue social distancing, etc. COVID-19 is not going away until we get a vaccine.

Even Indiana Gov. Eric Holcomb, a Republican who was lieutenant governor under Vice President Mike Pence, has said he does not want the state to relax at the wrong time and see another wave of virus illnesses.

Holcomb issued a statewide stay-at-home order that took effect March 25. In addition to other concerns, Holcomb said he wanted to see the state build up its own stockpile of protective supplies and hospital equipment.

Should there be a second wave come fall, like some suggest there could be, we need to be in a better position than when we first went into this storm, Holcomb said.

Republican Texas Gov. Greg Abbott says he wont reopen businesses all at once.

Abbott has issued what is effectively a stay-at-home order through the end of April in Texas, where officials in some of the states largest cities say they dont expect the number of COVID-19 cases to peak until May.

This isnt going to be a rushing the gates, everyone is able to suddenly reopen all at once, Abbott said Monday.

___

Associated Press writers Adam Beam in Sacramento, California; Tom Davies in Indianapolis; David Eggert in Lansing, Michigan; Steve Karnowski in Minneapolis; Rachel La Corte in Olympia, Washington; Geoff Mulvihill in Cherry Hill, New Jersey; Paul Weber in Austin, Texas; and Andrew Welsh-Huggins in Columbus, Ohio, contributed to this report.
A mystery man in a hazmat suit was captured spraying the perimeter of an Australian couple's home after they self-isolated on return from overseas.

Bill Patterson's CCTV cameras filmed the man dressed in a white protective suit on their property in Haberfield in Sydney's inner west on Monday.

The 59-year-old and his partner Wijittra had come out of isolation ten days earlier after returning from holiday in Thailand and were shocked to see someone spraying their property with an unknown substance, without their permission.

'I review the security cameras every morning,' Mr Patterson told Daily Mail Australia.

'They sprayed right through to the start of next door, the whole perimeter, the bins, the lamp post, everything.

A man in a hazmat suit was captured spraying an unknown substance on a couple's home after they self-isolated on return from overseas

'Just as quick as he came he was gone.'

Mr Patterson lives on a quiet cul-de-sac and believes he was targeted by someone in the street who feared contracting coronavirus.

'I was singled out,' he said. 'It's like they've come and thought "let's give this guy a spray."

'It's a carcinogenic they're spraying, it's like giving you a vaccine without asking.'

Mr Patterson was not home when the man was on his property.

'He's unidentifiable,' he said. 'He's got a fully protective suit with whites, double cartridge mask, gloves and backpack, it's full on.

The unidentified man wore protective clothing including a thick white suit, gloves and double cartridge mask with a backpack

Mr Patterson believes he was targeted by someone with fear of contracting coronavirus

'If it's a paranoid neighbour I wouldn't mind, but why wouldn't they buy a little spray bottle instead of being fully kitted out?'

Mr Patterson said he contacted several government agencies had no knowlegde of the bizarre incident.

The couple are worried about what substance was sprayed over their home and the potential health risks involved.

'We don't know what they were spraying, it could be anything,' Mr Patterson said.

'My friend told me to get out of the house and leave for a week.'

A NSW Police spokesperson told Daily Mail Australia the unidentified person could 'potentially be charged with trespass if no permission was granted'.

Daily Mail Australia has contacted Inner West Council and NSW Ministry of Health for comment.




Government has offered to assist more than 100 Zimbabweans in South Africa who now wish to return home as they are distressed and finding it difficult to make ends meet due to the national lockdown in that country.





Chronicle understands that over 550 have approached Zimbabwes embassy in South Africa and the majority want support in the form of food packages while over 100 requested to be brought home.





At the moment, the embassy is focusing on those who wish to be repatriated. The lockdown in South Africa started on March 21 and was last week extended to April 30.





In a statement, Zimbabwes Deputy Ambassador to South Africa, Counsellor Martin Makururu said Zimbabweans wishing to be assisted to return home can register on an online platform.





He said the embassy was now liaising with the head office in Harare on the possibility of repatriating those willing to return back to Zimbabwe.





It has come to the attention of embassy and consulates that some members of our community are facing challenges which may make their continued stay in South Africa uncomfortable.





The embassy wishes to advise members of the community that the Government of the Republic of South Africa allows for the voluntary, orderly repatriation of foreign nationals to their countries of origin during the lockdown period, said Counsellor Makururu.





The Embassy is liaising with Head Office in Harare on the possibility of such an eventuality. Zimbabwe borders remain open to allow for the return of citizens and permanent residents even during the lockdown period.





Counsellor Makururu said the Zimbabwean Embassy in Pretoria and its consulates in Cape Town and Johannesburg are reaching out to the Zimbabwean community in South Africa.





Citizens and permanent residents who choose to exercise the option of returning to Zimbabwe during the lockdown period are expected to go into compulsory quarantine for a period of 21 days.





While consultations with head office in Harare are underway, the embassy will continue with efforts to come up with a comprehensive evaluation of the situation on the ground as it develops and your input in the exercise will be greatly valued.





Meanwhile should you opt to return home kindly provide your details on www.surveymonkey.com, he said.





Counsellor Makururu said those who wished to return home had to provide their full names and surnames, passport or national identity card numbers, age, gender, current physical address, local phone number, home address and phone number of next of kin in Zimbabwe as well as the home address in Zimbabwe.





An official at the embassy said so far, they have received at least 550 responses with a majority of those requesting for food aid while more than 100 want to be repatriated.





We have received over 550 responses and the majority want support in the form of food packages while over 100 requested to be brought home. The embassy is focusing on those who wish to be repatriated, said the official.





The official said those in need of food have since been referred to humanitarian organisations.





The official said they are currently in the process of ascertaining the exact numbers of those who have registered for repatriation.





The exact date of repatriation is yet to be announced as the embassy is currently seized with the process of profiling those who registered.





We are at the very initial stages of this process and presently, we want to ascertain the numbers of those who may wish to be repatriated. Given the current circumstances of lockdown and the quarantine requirements of those entering Zimbabwe, we have to coordinate the movement with the relevant institutions in Zimbabwe to ensure that all necessary measures are observed to avoid the possible spread of the Covid-19, said the official.





Today (yesterday) was the first full day since the message was sent out. We will see how the numbers are tomorrow (today) and then propose timelines.





There is a large number of Zimbabweans living in South Africa.




Mancho Bibixy Tse Mancho

Cameroons Head of State, President Paul Biya Wednesday, April 15, 2020 signed a decree to commute and remit the sentences of some prisoners in the country but it is not all smiles for some detainees.

The likes of Mamadou Yakouba Mota, 1st Vice President Cameroon Renaissance Movement (MRC) detained in Yaounde since 2019 and other MRC leaders, allies, militants, and sympathisers arrested in line with the white marches of January 26, June 1 and June 8, 2019 will not benefit from the presidential decision.

Also, Mancho Bibixy Tse, leader of the Coffin Revolution of November 21, 2016 in Bamenda, currently serving a 15-year jail term at the Yaounde Central Prison, is not affected by Wednesdays decree.

A similar fate is shared by Julius Ayuk Tabe, Cornelius Kwanga, Dr Egbe Orock, Barrister Eyambe Ebai, Dr. Fidelis Nde Che, Dr. Kimeng Henry, Dr. Nfor Ngala Nfor, Prof. Augustine Awasum, Barrister Shufai Blaise and Tassang Wilfred serving a life sentence at the Yaounde Principal Prison on charges relating to the security of the state.

Although decree no. 2020/193 of April 15, 2020 to commute and remit sentences specifies that only those whose sentences have become final will benefit, it however makes certain exceptions.

The decree shall not apply to: fugitives at the date of signature of the decree, recidivist offenders, and persons imprisoned and sentenced for an offence committed while in detention.

Those sentenced for the following other offences shall not benefit from Wednesdays decree to commute and remit the sentences: security of the state; offences of chapter II of Law no. 2014/028 of 23rd December 2014 on the suppression of acts of terrorism; misappropriation of public property; corruption, indulgence (undue demand), favor, procuring favoritism, influence, interest in grant; undue influence and undue demand, counterfeit note and coin; customs or tax fraud; fraud in official and other examinations; fraudulent export of currency; illegal possession and trafficking of toxic waste; illegal possession and trafficking of narcotic; breaches against legislation on arms; breaches against forestry legislation; torture; torture; rape, sexual assault, pedophilia.

President Biyas decree is seen as an attempt to decongest prisons as the country battles to contain the spread of the novel coronavirus which has recorded no few than 830 positive cases, over a dozen deaths and about 150 recoveries.
BDF Chief-of-Staff, Lieutenant-General Theyab bin Saqr Al Nuaimi, attended a number of specialized officers military sessions graduation ceremonies, with the participation of officers from Kuwaiti army and Interior Ministry.



The chief-of-staff was briefed on the most important theoretical and practical programs.



He delivered the graduations certificates to the graduates and prizes to high achievers, praising their efforts in achieving the requirements of the sessions successfully.
China said it has recorded no deaths from the coronavirus in the last 24 hours.

The country gave rise to the global pandemic and has suffered 3,331 deaths and 81,740 cases of Covid-19.

Authorities said in their daily update on Tuesday that there were 32 new cases, all of which were from people who had returned to China from overseas.

Another 12 suspected cases  also all imported  were being kept under observation, along with an additional 30 asymptomatic cases.

China now has 1,242 confirmed cases in treatment and 1,033 asymptomatic cases under isolation and monitoring.

Numbers of daily new deaths have been hovering in the single digits for weeks, hitting just one on several occasions.

New coronavirus cases were also dropping in the European hotspots of Italy and Spain.

(PA Graphics)

In France, although daily deaths spiked to a record of 833, the rate of new intensive care hospitalisations has slowed dramatically.

Beijing continues to take strong measures in a bid to keep the virus at bay.

China and Russia have closed their land border and river port near Vladivostok following the discovery of 59 confirmed cases of the new Covid-19 among Chinese citizens returning home via the crossing.

All Chinese citizens who arrive in the border region aboard Russian domestic flights will be forced to undergo a 14-day quarantine, according to a notice posted on the website of the Chinese consulate in Vladivostok.

Only those holding special passes will then be permitted to travel on the Russian side of the border area, the notice said.

People wearing face masks in Hong Kong (Vincent Yu/AP)

It was not clear whether pass holders would be able to cross into China.

In addition, all guesthouses, nursing homes, on the Russian side of the border area will also be closed to outsiders through June 1, the notice said.

Here, the consulate general strongly recommends and reminds relevant Chinese citizens to fully take into consideration the above situation and not seek to return to China through the border crossing, the notice said.

Story continues

Hong Kong will continue to be closed to foreigners, extending the initial two-week entry restrictions on non-residents indefinitely.

Non-residents coming from overseas to Hong Kong by plane will be denied entry, and those coming from mainland China, Macao and Taiwan will be barred from entering if they have been overseas in the past 14 days.

The move to continue shutting out foreigners was announced by the government, and comes as the number of Covid-19 cases in Hong Kong rose to 915.

Meanwhile, more than 160 current and former global leaders are urging the worlds 20 major industrialised nations to approve 8 billion dollar (6.5 billion) in emergency global health funding to hasten the search for a vaccine, cure and treatment for Covid-19 and prevent a second wave of the coronavirus pandemic.

(PA Graphics)

In an open letter to governments of the Group of 20 nations, the leaders, ministers, top executives and scientists also called for 35 billion dollars (28.5 billion) to support countries with weaker health systems and especially vulnerable populations, and at least 150 billion dollars (120 billion) for developing countries to fight the medical and economic crisis.

They also urged the international community to waive this years debt repayments from poorer countries, including 44 billion dollars (36 billion) due from Africa.

While a communique from the G20 leaders summit on March 26 recognised the gravity and urgency of the health and economic crisis sparked by the pandemic, the letter said we now require urgent specific measures that can be agreed on with speed and at scale.

The group called for a global pledging conference, coordinated by a G20 task force, to commit resources to meet the emergency needs to tackle the coronavirus.

The 165 signatories included former UN secretary-general Ban Ki-moon, 92 former presidents and prime ministers, the current prime ministers of Ethiopia and Bangladesh, Sierra Leones president, philanthropist George Soros, former Irish president Mary Robinson who chairs The Elders, and Graca Machel, the groups deputy chair.
The head of Libyas UN-recognised government Fayez al-Sarraj has said he would not resume negotiations with renegade commander Khalifa Haftar, accusing him of exploiting the coronavirus pandemic to launch a new offensive against the government.

In an interview with Italian daily La Repubblica published on Wednesday, al-Sarraj accused Haftar of having bombed indiscriminately Tripoli, residential zones, civil institutions and even the public hospital of Al Khadra, in the centre of the capital.

I will never sit down with Haftar, after the disasters and the crimes he committed against all Libyans, al-Sarraj said. We have always tried to solve our disputes through a political process, but any agreement has been soon rejected by Haftar.

Rival governments

Libya, a large oil producer, has been engulfed in chaos since 2011 when longtime leader Muammar Gaddafi was killed in an uprising.

It is now split between two rival administrations: the Tripoli-based Government of National Accord (GNA) which is led by Sarraj, and the House of Representatives allied to Haftar and his self-styled Libyan National Army (LNA), supported by Egypt and the UAE.





We had agreed [to] the ceasefire and the humanitarian truce, without letting our guard down, al-Sarraj added.

We expected that the dangers of the epidemic would have turned Haftar into a man of his word, for once. But he saw in the pandemic an opportunity to attack us.

In April 2019, Haftar launched a military campaign to wrest control of Tripoli, but the offensive was largely stalled by forces loyal to the GNA.

Al-Sarraj added that his forces had launched a successful counter-offensive and has gained ground, up to the recent capture of the city of Sabrata, a key military base for Haftars army.

On Monday, the GNA said its troops seized control of three strategic coastal cities, including Sabrata, located between the capital, Tripoli, and the Tunisian border.

Our forces took control of Surman and Sabratha and are pursuing [Haftars forces], Mohammed Gnunu, GNA spokesperson said in a statement.

Al Jazeeras Mahmoud Abdelwahed, reporting from Tripoli, said: Government forces say that by taking Sabratha and Surman, they can easily take control of all of the entire coast and the highway connecting Tripoli to the Tunisian border. GNA forces can also join Amazigh or Berber fighters in the city of Zuwara and can move on al-Watiya airbase, a strategic airbase and stronghold of Haftar southwest of the capital.

Earlier on Monday, Colonel Muhammad Qanunu said the GNAs air defences intercepted planes belonging to Haftar in the Abu Grain area and shot down the two Chinese-made Wing Loong aircraft and one Russian Mi-35 helicopter.
Albany, N.Y.  New coronavirus deaths in New York fell on Tuesday, but remained over 700 for the second day in a row.

A total of 11,586 New Yorkers have now died due to the virus, including another 752 people on Tuesday, Gov. Andrew Cuomo said Wednesday during a press briefing in Albany.

New deaths totaled 778 on Monday and 671 on Sunday. Single-day deaths were over 700 for six days in a row before that.

Just two weeks ago, single-day coronavirus deaths totaled 253 and three weeks ago, the statewide death toll was 157.

The state will soon begin reporting probable coronavirus deaths, Cuomo said. Thats meant to reflect the fact that there are additional fatalities that havent been counted because the individuals who died werent hospitalized.

New York City began reporting those deaths Tuesday.

New York now has 213,779 confirmed cases of the virus, an increase of 11,571. Thats more total cases than any entire country outside the U.S.

But signs that the virus spread is slowing continue. The health care system has stabilized and has not been overwhelmed, Cuomo said.

The running three-day average of the net change in hospitalizations was negative by 124 people on Tuesday, meaning more people left hospitals than entered. Its the first time the three-day average was negative since the crisis began.

The net changes in intensive care unit admissions and intubations were also negative. Net intubations have been negative for the past three days in a row.

The net change in new hospitalizations on Tuesday alone was negative by 362 people.

The good news is we showed we can change the curve, Cuomo said. We can control the spread. That is great news.

Cuomo also noted that the raw number of new coronavirus patients entering hospitals remains high. The total was over 2,200 on Tuesday and was over 2,000 much of last week.

Net numbers are declining because patients are leaving as well, but the raw numbers of incoming patients demonstrate the continued severity of the pandemic in New York.

The states social distancing policies are working and must remain in place for now, Cuomo has said. He previously extended the closures of schools and nonessential businesses until at least April 29.

All New Yorkers should only go out for exercise or needed errands like grocery shopping or medical care.

New York has started working with several other states in the Northeast on a strategy to reopen their economies.

Cuomo said on Monday that he believes the worst of the virus is over if the state continues its smart, careful response.

He said today he plans to issue a new executive order requiring all New Yorkers to wear masks in crowded public spaces.

MORE ON CORONAVIRUS

Coronavirus in NY: Cases, maps, charts and resources

New York to require masks in public starting this week, Cuomo says

Onondaga Co. coronavirus: Recoveries outpace known infections; deathly ill at 21; 537 total cases

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Dying in coronavirus pandemic cant mute outpouring of love for CNY teen cancer victim

Complete coronavirus coverage on syracuse.com

Contact Kevin Tampone anytime: Email | Twitter | Facebook | 315-282-8598
Ministers are under growing pressure to publish the names of all of the scientific experts who sit on the secretive committee which is advising the government on its coronavirus strategy.

MPs are calling for the cast list of the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE) to be made public so that people can see exactly who ministers are getting their advice from.

The government has rejected the calls, with sources claiming the names cannot be published because of security concerns amid reports of some experts receiving death threats.

But former SAGE members have questioned that argument, insisting it is 'perfectly reasonable' for people to know who sits on the committee which Boris Johnson is relying on to guide the government's response to the outbreak.

Chief Medical Officer Chris Witty (left) attends SAGE committee meetings which are chaired by Chief Scientific Adviser Sir Patrick Vallance (right). But the rest of the membership is largely unknown

Prof Whitty and Sir Patrick, pictured alongside Boris Johnson on March 19, have been key players in the UK's response to coronavirus

Who are the experts who sit on the secretive SAGE committee? The government is under pressure to publish the names of the experts who sit on its Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE) committee. The latest published minutes of a SAGE meeting date back to August 2019 which means there is not an up to date comprehensive list of members and the government is resisting calls to publish one. Here are the experts we know are currently involved: Sir Patrick Vallance: The government's chief scientific adviser is the chair of the SAGE committee. He has been one of the key public figures during the crisis and has participated in numerous Downing Street press conferences. Chris Whitty: The Chief Medical Officer for England has also been front and centre at many Number 10 press conferences. He has been relied upon to set out the science relating to the outbreak. Neil Ferguson: A professor from the School of Public Health at Imperial College London, his complex modelling on the spread of the virus has been crucial in informing the government's response. Advertisement

SAGE is this week reviewing the latest data on the spread of the disease and the effectiveness of the nationwide lockdown before then presenting its findings to ministers.

The government will then make a decision tomorrow, based on SAGE's assessment of the evidence, on how long social distancing restrictions will remain in place.

Sir Patrick Vallance, the government's Chief Scientific Officer, chairs SAGE meetings.

Chris Whitty, the Chief Medical Officer for England, and Professor Neil Ferguson, whose computer modelling on the spread of the disease has been vital in guiding the government's response, are also known to attend.

But beyond that the attendees are largely unknown.

It is thought somewhere between 50 and 60 scientists are currently being invited to attend the committee's meetings.

Many MPs believe there needs to be greater transparency relating to the committee's membership and work given how important it is in determining the fate of the nation.

Greg Clark, the Conservative chairman of the Science and Technology Select Committee, is leading the calls for a cast list to be published, telling The Guardian that he is concerned 'the composition of Sage, and the disciplines represented therein, remains largely unknown'.

Liberal Democrat leadership challenger Layla Moran echoed a similar sentiment as she said: 'The composition of Sage and the data on which recommendations are being made must be published.'

There are also calls for SAGE to publish the evidence it is analysing and its conclusions relating to the outbreak.

Jonathan Ashworth, the shadow health secretary, said: 'Ministers must be fully transparent about the modelling and evidential base they are using to maintain public confidence.'

Sir Patrick wrote to Mr Clark to tell him the composition of SAGE will not be set out because of security advice from the Centre for the Protection of National Infrastructure.

A source told The Telegraph: 'There is a duty of care that the government has to the scientists involved with Sage.

'In the interests of their security, they are not being named. There have already been incidents of people involved in Sage and its sub-committees being threatened.'

The newspaper reported the threats related either to the lockdown being too strict or to it being implemented too slowly.

Professor Peter Openshaw, a former SAGE member and a professor of experimental medicine at Imperial College London, said people should know who sits on the committee.

He told the BBC: 'Yes. I was on Sage during the last pandemic, the 2009 pandemic.

Professor Neil Ferguson is also a member of SAGE. His modelling of the outbreak has informed the government's strategy

'I don't quite know the reason that who is on it is not announced. It seems perfectly reasonable to say who is on it.'

Told that the government had cited concerns about scientists being threatened or intimidated if their names were published, Prof Openshaw said: 'I have never felt threatened or intimidated or even particularly controlled by government in terms of what we can say.

'I think government is generally pretty keen that experts can speak out and of course we don't decide, we only advise.

'The government expert advisory system that we have in this country which is really one of the best in the world I think in terms of the government actually having scientific information passed up to them is a very open one.

'It is relatively transparent and I think generally works reasonably well.'
The Parachute Regiment of the Indian Army is celebrating its 68th Raising Day today (April 15).

The regiment has a long history and many successful missions in its kitty. It traces its history to the British era when the earliest airborne regiment was formed in 1941. It fought alongside British troops at several locations across the world.

The Indian Armys Parachute Regiment was officially formed in March, 1945, and took part in a military operation in Burma (present day Myanmar).

This regiment also worked to provide medical assistance during the 1950 war when North Korea invaded South Korea. India had sent a para unit on the call of the United Nations; it earned the title of Maroon Angels from the locals who widely appreciated the help being provided by the para unit.

The present day para regiment came into existence on April 15, 1952, when three existing parachute battalions - 1st battalion of Punjab Para Regiment, 3rd Battalion of Maratha Light Infantry and 1st Battalion of Kumaon Regiment - were absorbed.

The re-raised regiment was also given a new formation sign, the Shatrujeet, which signified the operations rediness of the brigade.

The regiment was augmented by the Sino-India war of 1962.

The regiment has been historically known for feats in mountaineering. Captain Avtar Singh Cheema of 7 Para was the first Indian atop Mount Everest. He belnged to Sriganganagar district in Rajasthan.

The troops of the Para Regiment are given training at its centre in Bengaluru.
The man did not even need the lung ventilator; he managed to recover thanks to his good physical shape and longevity that is typical for his family members

Ermando Piveta Reuters

Brazilian Ermando Piveta joined the list of people who successfully defeated coronavirus. He put on his forage cap and left the Armed Forces hospital in a wheelchair as the staff cheered and applauded, Reuters wrote.

The 99-year-old veteran of WWII shared his feelign with the press, saying: "Winning this battle was for me bigger than winning the war. In war you kill or live. Here you have to fight to live".

Piveta, the Second Lieutenant of the Brazilian army serve in Africa during the Second World War.

He was diagnosed with coronavirus two weeks ago. When the Brazilian developed pneumonia, they took him to the intensive care unit where he spent two days.

Reuters quoted the hospital director who said Piveta did not even need the lung ventilator; he managed to recover thanks to his good physical shape and longevity that is typical for his family members.

On Tuesday, Brazilian Healthcare Ministry reported that 25,262 citizens got infected with coronavirus and 1,532 people sucumbed to the disease.
China has lifted lockdown, even from Wuhan, which is the place of origin of the COVID-19 outbreak that's currently plaguing the world. Since the lockdown was lifted in China, thousands of people came out to enjoy tourists spots, shopaholics saturated their desires to shop and the wet markets reopened.

The country is hustling as rest of the world struggles. Here is all what has happened in China since the lockdown there was lifted.

Overcrowded Tourist Spots

Last week people in China flocked to tourist sites in thousands without paying any heed to the health authorities that the pandemic is far from over.

#Huangshan Mountain, a 5-A tourist attraction in East #China's Anhui Province, closed to tourists on Sunday morning due to an overflow of tourists after it exempted its 190 yuan ($26.7) entrance fee to residents of the province to promote tourism amid #COVID19. pic.twitter.com/DAffe2zhI1  Global Times (@globaltimesnews) April 5, 2020

Images from the Huangshan mountain park in Anhui province showed thousands of people crammed together, while wearing face masks, desperate to experience the outside after months of lockdown and travel restrictions. The place was so overcrowded, that at at 7:48 am, authorities issued a notice declaring that the park had reached its 20,000 person daily capacity, and would not be accepting any more visitors, media Global Times reported.

Wet Markets Reopened

Yes, you read it right. Since the lockdown in China has lifted, its controversial wet markets have opened up too.

According to reports, over 90% of the stalls in Wuhans biggest wet market have resumed business after the coronavirus lockdown was lifted.

Videos show vendors selling live crayfish at the huge Baishazhou market, where over 3,600 shops are back in business. However the trade of wild animals is currently banned.

Meanwhile, WHO has requested China to put a ban on its wet markets altogether, amid global outrage.

Factories Reopened

China seems to be getting back on its feet, as the factories there reopened by the end of March itself. However, since global trade is at a halt, many Chinese factories do not have consignments, which means there's no need for as many workers. These factories are opening only to fire employees.

Reuters

Initially, it was China that imposed tough travel restrictions and factory suspensions, now the overseas orders have been scrapped.

People Are On A Shopping Spree

According to Women's Wear Daily (WWD), Hermes in China made $2.7 million (Approx Rs 20.55 crore), in sales on the day it reopened its flagship store in Guangzhous Taikoo Hui, last Saturday.

WWD

Thousands of people spent thousands of dollars to buy luxury brand shoes, bags and what not.

So, yes, while most countries do not have an end day for lockdown, China seems to be getting back to normal.
A pregnant nurse has died after contracting the coronavirus but her baby, a girl, was delivered successfully and is doing well, the British hospital where she worked said on Wednesday.

Mary Agyeiwaa Agyapong, 28, who had worked as a nurse on a general ward at Luton and Dunstable University Hospital, to the north of London, died on Sunday.

It was not clear if the baby had tested positive for the disease. The Bedfordshire Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust said that Ms Agyapong tested positive on April 5 and was admitted to the hospital she worked at on April 7.

"It is with great sadness that I can confirm the death of one of our nurses, Mary Agyeiwaa Agyapong, who passed away on Sunday," said David Carter, chief executive of the trust.

"Mary worked here for five years and was a highly valued and loved member of our team, a fantastic nurse and a great example of what we stand for in this trust.

"Our thoughts and deepest condolences are with Mary's family and friends at this sad time." The announcement of the death comes amid an ongoing row over the lack of protective equipment provided for frontline healthcare staff in the UK during the crisis.

Meanwhile it was announced that Connie Titchen, 106, was believed to be the oldest person in Britain to overcome the virus. Doctors at City Hospital in Birmingham, in central England, said she had fought off the virus after being ill for around three weeks.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
The recent COVID-19 outbreak has been the main reason behind several temporary school closures around the world. This has made the idea of continuing to pursue educational activities during this time, a challenging proposition. The current lockdowns, implemented differently in different countries, have forced schoolteachers, who wish to complete their current teaching periods, to transition immediately to the online classroom. Many schools have already started online classes in the wake of the crisis caused by the global COVID-19 crises. Accessing and managing online teaching resources can be a bit difficult for educators or pupils accustomed to a conventional classroom.

A couple of our authors reached out to us and asked if Bentham Science had a solution for their book, Computer Based Projects for a Chemistry Curriculum - which is a great resource for school and college students and teachers interested in using computers to illustrate fundamental concepts in chemistry. And we have responded. Starting today, up to June 30, Bentham Science Publishers is making the e-book, free to download. This means that high school teachers and students anywhere in the world can access the content and benefit from the projects presented in the book.

Computer Based Projects for a Chemistry Curriculum, authored by Thomas Manning and Aurora Grumatges, presents 24 chapters; each giving information about activities employing applications such as MS excel (spreadsheets) and Spartan (computational modeling). Each project is explained in a simple, easy-to-understand manner. The content within this book is suitable as a guide for both teachers and students and each chapter is supplemented with practice guidelines and exercises. The book contents can be accessed here: http://www.eurekaselect.com/108744/volume/1

We hope that students around the world can benefit from the interesting and informative variety of projects presented in the book, while also allowing educators working in schools, to continue their teaching activities throughout the academic year amidst the current pandemic crisis. Stay safe, and happy chemistry learning.

###
It was just another Saturday afternoon in early April, albeit one day ever-so-much closer to the much-anticipated birth of her baby boy.

As Taylor Muse relaxed on the couch in her home at Fort Stewart, Georgia, a video of a man and a woman standing under a massive live oak tree popped up on the screen of her husbands smartphone.

RELATED: For more IMPACT stories, click here .



The man  a 17-time PGA TOUR winner  began speaking.

Hey, Tabitha and Jim Furyk here. Were so sorry we were not able to meet you at the RBC Heritage.

Then Tabitha chimes in. Instead we decided to bring Operation Shower to you. So please check your front door and remember -- wash your hands and be safe, and sorry we cant be there with you.

We hope everyones safe, Jim concludes. We want to thank you for your service, and good luck with your baby.

Taylor looked at her husband, Bradley, an E3 Private First Class in the Army who had recently returned from deployment. What? she asked, the surprise evident in her voice.

We brought the shower here, Bradley said.

This week, Taylor and 23 other military moms having 25 babies, including one set of twins, would have been feted at Operation Shower on Wednesday at the RBC Heritage. But the event was canceled when the tournament was shuttered in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. The gifts they would have received were shipped instead to their homes.

That is, all but the ones intended for Taylor.

The shower was sponsored by the PGA TOUR Wives Association and the Lowcountry Foundation for Wounded Military Heroes, which is the largest third-party fundraising group for Birdies for the Brave. A unique part of this particular shower is the fact that the families of wounded military personnel also are honored.
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NEW YORK, NY / ACCESSWIRE / April 15, 2020 /The Chicago Tribune has featured a law firm on the Earned Media Advantage Guided Tour to speak about how COVID-19 has been impacting the industry and what they are doing to help. In the midst of a global pandemic, Newswire has been working diligently with the legal company to ensure their voice is heard during this time. The firm has been consulting with more clients who are in need of legal advice due to the impacts of the current situation. In order to reach their prospective audience, they connected with their Earned Media Advantage Strategist regarding the best outlet to connect with, hence a mention in The Chicago Tribune."During this pandemic, business advisory is highly sought out," said Charlie Terenzio, VP of Earned Media Advantage Business at Newswire. "This client has been helping businesses navigate through these uneasy times and would like to extend their hand to others." Using Newswire's resources and personal relationships with the media, the law firm's strategist was able to connect them with the right outlet, The Chicago Tribune, for a great opportunity. Every strategist working with clients on the Guided Tour sends out the right message to the right audience at the right time to ensure the success of their campaigns. By following this process, the law firm was able to reach a wider audience and gain the Earned Media Advantage."Our Guided Tour customers have unique goals that need to be met on a weekly, monthly, quarterly and annual basis," said Terenzio. "But with an inconsistent climate today, our strategist and customers must adapt their roadmap to ensure they are able to use the opportunities at hand to ensure their voice is heard." Through Newswire's Earned Media Advantage Guided Tour, customers can transform their press releases from owned media to the Earned Media Advantage: greater brand awareness, increase website traffic, greater return on media and marketing communications spend, and increased sales.C-suite level executives from across all industries have enjoyed the results from Guided Tour by improving the overall impact of their media and marketing campaigns to help aid in sales in order to achieve their business goals. The program includes a dedicated Earned Media Advantage Strategist who personally connects with each customer to better understand their business needs to create a customerized' plan which is implemented during each campaign to ensure Customer Success.Find out how Newswire is Transforming the Value of a Press Release today and learn how your business experience the Earned Media Advantage: greater brand awareness, increase website traffic and increased sales.About NewswireNewswire delivers press release and multimedia distribution software and services (SaaS) that empower the Earned Media Advantage: greater brand awareness, increased traffic, greater return on media and marketing communications spend and the competitive edge. With over a decade of experience, Newswire continues to provide its customers with the ability to deliver the right message to the right audience at the right time through the right medium. To learn more about how Newswire can help you, visit http://www.newswire.com Contact InformationCharlie TerenzioVP of Earned MediaNewswireOffice: 813-480-3766Email: charlie@ newswire.com Related ImagesSOURCE: Newswire
Turkey yesterday repeated an offer to the United States to establish a technical working group including Nato to help solve a dispute over Ankara's purchase of Russian missile defences that angered Washington.

Ties between the Nato allies were badly strained last year when Turkey bought Russian S-400 defence systems, prompting Washington to threaten sanctions and to suspend Turkish involvement in its F-35 jet programme.

The United States says the S-400s are not compatible with Nato systems and threaten the stealth capabilities of its Lockheed Martin F-35 jets.

Turkey rejects this and says the S-400s will not be integrated into the alliance's defences.

Before the outbreak of coronavirus shifted focused away from the issue, Ankara's bilateral ties with Moscow took a heavy blow over Russia's support for Syrian President Bashar al-Assad's military offensive on the north-western Syrian town of Idlib.

In early March as fighting between Syrian government forces and the Turkish military and allied Syrian rebels intensified, Ankara sought help from the US to give it ammunition as well as humanitarian assistance for hundreds of thousands of civilians fleeing the battle.

Since then, both Turkey and the US have largely kept silent on the S-400 issue.

Turkey had previously said it would make the Russian missile defence systems operational in April but so far there has been no sign of such a move.

Speaking at a virtual Atlantic Council event yesterday, Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu said Turkey's stance on how to solve the issue had not changed.

"We offer the US to establish a technical working group with Nato's inclusion and Nato can lead this technical working group actually. And this offer is still on the table," he said.

Mr Cavusoglu added that Turkey was still willing to purchase Patriot batteries if it had a good offer.

Washington has repeatedly said it is unwilling to provide Patriots to Turkey unless it returns the S-400s.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan visited Washington last November and met with US President Donald Trump and agreed him with about setting up a working group but the effort made little progress.
The latest Russian-Turkish deal on Syrias Idlib province has opened rifts in the ranks of jihadi groups holding sway in the region amid a Turkish military buildup as part of efforts to reopen the key M4 highway.

The number of Turkish military posts in Idlib has exceeded 50 since the March 5 Moscow deal, which calls for the reopening of M4 and the establishment of a security corridor with a depth of six kilometers (nearly four miles) on either side of the road that links Latakia and Aleppo. Whether Turkey will fight the jihadi groups that reject the deal has been a key question for weeks. On March 19, a deadly rocket attack on Turkish forces was passed over with a brief statement by Ankara, which blamed the incident on some radical groups in the region.

Turkeys approach thus far appears to favor negotiation, backed with military deterrence, over outright fighting as it seeks to compel Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), the dominant group in Idlib, into cooperation and intimidate other al-Qaeda-linked groups into toeing the line.

HTS has been ambiguous in its attitude thus far. Its pragmatic wing, made up mostly of Syrians, has sought to avoid unleashing Turkeys military might on the group, but foreign members, who wield influence over the groups ideological base, appear irked that HTS leader Abu Mohammad al-Golani is inclined to flexibility and pragmatism.

The internal rift, which began more than two years ago after HTS allowed Turkey to set up military observation posts in Idlib, has deepened since the Moscow deal, which also requires the elimination of groups that the UN has labeled as terrorists. HTS had already retreated from vast areas after the Syrian army regained control of the M5 highway linking Damascus and Aleppo in February.

Clearly, HTS has not accepted any deal between Russia and Turkey. Yet, while keeping up its fight against Syrian forces backed by Russia and Iran, the group has been trying to present itself as the most reasonable faction on the ground that Turkey could engage and collaborate with. Similarly, HTS has sought to convey a message to the West that it no longer has anything to do with al-Qaeda and global jihad and is focused on fighting the Syrian regime, hoping to be removed from the terrorism list. This message seems to resonate in certain quarters. Washingtons Syria envoy James Jeffrey, for instance, argues that HTS has not posed international terrorism threats and is focused on maintaining its positions in Idlib.

In a striking exposure of the rift, Abu Malek al-Tali, a prominent HTS figure critical of Golanis efforts at rapport with Turkey, announced April 7 he was quitting the group because he was kept in the dark on its shifting policies and disapproved of the changing course. Bassam Sohyoni, the head of the Shura Council, the highest HTS body, announced his resignation the same day. Three days later, Golani managed to persuade Tali  both a senior commander and Shura Council member  to come back on board, though the latter was said to be irked by the pragmatic shift of the group.

Talis backpedaling, however, does not mean that the friction between the groups hard-line and pragmatic wings is over. The rift is likely to grow as Idlibs map of control changes down the road.

Defections could play into the hands of al-Qaeda-affiliated groups, raising the specter of a new jihadi front being opened against Turkish troops. Some groups seen as alternatives to HTS are already calling for resistance against Turkey.

Hurras al-Din, Ansar al-Din, Ansar al-Tawhid and Ansar al-Islam stand out among the factions that have rejected the Sochi and Moscow deals and assumed a menacing attitude toward Turkish-Russian patrols in Idlib. The four groups have joined forces in a coalition called Rouse the Believers Operation Room, which has slammed the Moscow deal as a venomous snake that keeps biting the hands of the Syrian people.

Separately, Hurras al-Din leader Abu Humam al-Shami has urged Syrians not to trust Turkey and Russia. Hurras al-Din was formed in 2018 by remnants of various al-Qaeda-inspired factions. The initiative was led by former leaders of Jabhat al-Nusra, the predecessor of HTS that opposed its split from al-Qaeda.

These factions hold sway in the Latakia countryside and northern Hama  that is, areas where the security corridor is planned to be. And while HTS controls up to 90% of Idlib, its power is similarly concentrated in areas along the M4 route. Areas along the border that Turkey would like to keep as a buffer zone are all in HTS hands as well. Unlike other factions, HTS could move to its own areas of control in the event of a retreat, which might be another reason behind its flexible demeanor.

Could an exodus of intransigent radicals from HTS make the group a smooth partner for Turkey and a reasonable interlocutor for Russia?

No matter how much HTS claims to have changed, the group will remain on the list of terrorist organizations unless the UN Security Council revises its decision. Its previous rebranding failed to bear fruit.

Discussions within the group, meanwhile, offer ample clues as to what extent HTS could change or be a partner to Turkey.

Abu al-Fath Yahya al-Farghali, a hard-line HTS figure, referred to the Turkish army as an infidel force in a leaked recording from a meeting in early February, when Turkey moved to stop the Syrian armys advance along the M5. Farghali said HTS was able to impose conditions on Turkey in October 2017, when Turkey began setting up military posts in Idlib. Under the alleged conditions, HTS was to retain its military control and expel the Turkish forces if need be, while the Turks would not meddle in Idlibs governance, including courts, and would not restrict the jihadi fighters.

HTS felt strong enough to reject Turkish deployment plans by mid-2019. The group lost its superiority as the Syrian army began to advance thereafter and Turkey began a unilateral build-up in the province.

According to Farghali, collaboration with apostate Turkey is justified by the notion of recourse to the infidel against the infidel that jihadist ideology permits in compelling circumstances.

The meeting at which Farghali spoke was probably held before the Saraqeb battle in late February in which HTS used Turkish-supplied armored vehicles and dozens of Turkish soldiers died.

In an April 1 statement after the recording was leaked in late March, Farghali referred to concerns of a Turkish occupation, asserting that HTS would fight any occupation because we dont expend our blood to replace one occupier with another.

In 2017 and 2018, Turkey had made do with military observation posts, leaving the rebels in Idlib to their own devices. Now it pursues a different strategy akin to the one in Afrin, aimed at direct territorial control in collaboration with allied militias.

A full implementation of the Moscow deal would inevitably push HTS and other jihadis toward the Turkish border. This would mean a critical junction: The jihadis would either open a front against Turkey or temper themselves into convenient parties for Ankara. Or both options would transpire simultaneously amid divisions in the jihadi ranks.

While moderating armed groups remains a lingering chapter in the Syrian conflict, Golanis interceding to bring Tali back is hardly a boost to hopes of moderating HTS by weeding out radicals. Despite varying tints and shades, such groups have proved to be strongly attached to their ideological mainstays. To surmise moderation just because they might be a bit more inclined to cooperation would be nothing but a deception.

Remarkably, Uighur, Uzbek and Chechen factions have kept mum in the debates on the jihadi camp. It might be a sign of caution as they probably see Turkey as their only safe haven should the Idlib front unravel. Still, making bets on those fighters, too, could always prove a curveball.
In a candid conversation, the former Prime Minister of Sri Lanka - Ranil Wickremesinghe spoke to Palki Sharma Upadhyay on the global leadership series on WION, about everything from the COVID-19 pandemic to the dire need of global leadership and on a lighter note about how he keeps himself busy with Hindi movies during the lockdown.

About how Sri Lanka coping with the pandemic  The health workers, the military and the police are doing a wonderful job. The private sector and people are cooperating Ranil Wickremesinghe acknowledged. However, where the government made a lapse is that the equipment should have been arranged early in January. We should have got more testing kits, more face masks, more ventilators and we delayed on that. I hope they are sufficient now because we have to lift this lockdown partially and bring the economy back on. We need to keep testing like Germany and South Korea he said.

On the outbreak being compared to the second world war and as a leader was it the most challenging period he has seen for the world during his lifetime, he said, It is the most challenging period. Second world war or any war, you knew who the enemy was, but here we dont know who was responsible (for the pandemic). As I mentioned in Dubai (citing the WION global summit: Dubai, 2020) we have seen the upside of globalization and now we are going to see the downside of globalization and no one thought it would come so fast. It is undermining all the economies. We are all in a very difficult situation globally and there is no global leadership to guide us that is the other problem.

About the failure of leadership and World Bodies like the U.N Security council and WHO having come under a fair bit of criticism he answered, It is a collective failure of the leaders and the institutions. The IMF, World Bank, W.H.O, the U.N - someone has to come forward & lead the world during a crisis, which is not happening. The former Prime Minister then went on to cite several examples of people taking the leadership mantle during different crises historically from climate change and World War 2 to the economic downturn in 2008. It is a global pandemic is not a national issue and a global pandemic needs a global response, he stressed.

On the question that Pakistan had sought waivers from lenders including China. Should Sri Lanka too ask China for a loan waiver in the light of these developments? He responded, We can ask China, but whether it is China or any other country, they will have to take a policy decision. Our problem is that the bulk of our foreign loans, about 50% of our debt is international sovereign bonds. Sri Lanka has to pay a billion dollars in a few months. We take it off our reserves and our reserves will come down. I cant see any new money coming in. Earlier we balanced it out and now we are on the path to repayment. The government is in conversation with the IMF because they have restored the revenue to the levels that the IMF wanted, but it is going to be difficult. We are all going to be in trouble, if not in this year then by next year. The creditor countries must look favorably on the debtor countries.

Finally, how does he spend his time during the lockdown and what does he recommend? He said, I have been watching Hindi Bollywood movies. Recently watched Hotel Mumbai. He goes on to mention watching a Hindi film about 3 friends going to Spain (Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara) and ends by asking a few movie recommendations from Palki.
Worrying cases of domestic abuse have emerged across Europe after weeks of confinement.

Among the victims of domestic violence was Italian Lorena Quaranta, who was about to qualify as a medic

Flags were lowered to half-mast and three days of mourning were declared in the Spanish town of Almassora to mark Carina's death.

In normal times, this community near Valencia would have gathered in silence to remember their 35-year-old neighbour. But confined to their homes by coronavirus, they paid their respects at a distance.

The bells tolled and Mozart's Requiem boomed out from the town hall as residents came to their windows and balconies.

Carina was killed at home in front of her two young children. Her husband Jose turned himself in to the town's civil guard and confessed.

National lockdowns have heightened the danger for women forced to stay at home with their abusers, cut off from the respite of work and less able to call for help undetected. Children, mostly home from school, are now even more exposed to trauma.

Carina was the 17th woman killed by a current or ex-partner in Spain this year. She was the first since restrictions to try to limit the spread of Covid-19 were imposed.

Fearing the aggressor indoors and virus outside

Less than a month since Europe came to a near-standstill, it is too soon to see the full impact on gender violence from official statistics.

But in abusive households, experts see a potentially devastating combination of emotions brewing. Women fear the aggressor inside the home and the virus outside.

Stress makes abusers even more volatile, while heightened privacy gives them a feeling of impunity.

In Spain , Kika Fumero traces it back to the state of alert declared on 14 March.

"From that moment I knew that what was good for stopping Covid-19 was going to be horrible for those women and their children who were in a violent situation at home," the head of the Canary Islands Institute for Equality told the BBC.

She had seen the spikes in abuse from periods of confinement before, when women were forced to spend more time with their partner during floods or holidays.

Italy, like Spain, has been at the forefront of the pandemic. More than 100 doctors there have lost their lives treating the sick.

Lorena Quaranta, 27, was on the brink of qualifying as a doctor when she died on 30 March. But she was not a victim of Covid-19. Her boyfriend Antonio told police he had killed her.

When her coffin returned to her hometown of Favara in Sicily, people hung white sheets from their balconies.

It represented, as Mayor Anna Alba put it, "the purity of her spirit, and the colour of that uniform she dreamed of wearing for the rest of her life".

How abuse has spiked under lockdown

France initially reported a sharp drop in calls to the national helpline. But within a week the government said police reports of domestic abuse had gone up nationally by a third, and by even more in Paris.

An SMS service set up for people with hearing impairments now helps abuse victims too and receives 170 text messages a day. Drop-in areas have been opened in shopping centres and there is a support service for perpetrators "on the edge".

In Spain, services for women facing gender-based violence are designated as essential, so their continued operation is guaranteed by the government.

In the first two weeks of the state of alert, its 016 helpline received 18% more calls than in the same period the previous month.

And, as in France, there are many silent requests for help. Email contact is up 286% over the same period and a new psychological support messaging service via WhatsApp received 168 enquiries in its first nine days.

A mask to save a woman's life

In Spain's Canary Islands, the Institute for Equality has launched a campaign called Mascarilla-19 (Mask-19), stressing that escaping abuse is a valid reason to leave your home.

Pharmacies are widespread and among the few places people can still freely visit.

"When a woman experiences violence at home or sexual assault, she can go to the nearest pharmacy and request Mask-19 - the mask that will save her life," says Kika Fumero, who came up with the idea.

Pharmacy staff take a woman's name, address and phone number and alert the emergency services. She can go home, or wait until police and support workers arrive.

One woman in Tenerife spent two weeks stuck at her partner's home after the state of alert was declared, before she was able to give the code word in a pharmacy while he waited outside. She has since filed a complaint and returned to her family home.

A 78-year-old killed by her husband in Gran Canaria was the second victim of femicide during Spain's lockdown.

"Older women endure mistreatment for 15 years on average before they report it," says the government's gender violence delegate Vicky Rosell. "Denounce it yourself. Do it for them. This too saves lives," she says.

Mask-19 has now been adopted across Spain, as well as in France, Germany, Italy, Norway and Argentina.

Why women may be trapped by lockdown

Virginia Gil, who runs the Aspacia foundation in Madrid, fears the number of women reporting domestic abuse under the lockdown is "just the tip of the iceberg".

Women face several barriers, she believes: fear of being discovered by their abuser, anxiety about possible coronavirus infection outside the home, and uncertainty about which local services are operating.

Ms Gil fears some abusers who would ordinarily be removed from the home are not being taken into custody by police or brought before "paralysed" courts.

How some countries are doing more than others

In Russia, the dilemma about leaving or staying was particularly hard for Maria, living in a flat 113km (70 miles) west of Moscow.

Maria, not her real name, had never been hit by her husband before. But on 26 March he flew into rage that lasted 18 hours.

"At first, there was verbal abuse. Then he started breaking things and throwing them at me and the kids," she told BBC Russian. "He smashed everything up, from the fish tank to the fridge. My children were scared."

She believes the catalyst for her husband's attack was President Vladimir Putin's announcement of a "non-working week" - and the loss of income that came with it.

When he left to buy beer, she called the police. "They told me they couldn't throw him out because it was his flat," she said. It was up to her to find a shelter for herself and her children.

Calls in Denmark for emergency accommodation almost doubled in the week after the government told people to stay at home.

The government has since funded 55 extra rooms in shelters for four months and on Wednesday the lockdown will be eased, allowing some Danish schools to reopen and giving an opportunity for women to seek help.

"One way or the other, we'll make sure there's room for everyone," says Susanne Lamhauge, head of a new crisis centre run by women's rights group Danner.

In Belgium, Jean-Louis Simoens describes a three-fold increase in calls to the listening service of the Collective Against Family Violence and Exclusion (CVFE).

"When I was manning the phones, a woman called and told me she only had 15 minutes to speak while her husband was out buying cigarettes.

"She was very frightened and we had to talk really quickly. He had hit her so badly, her face was so swollen, that she couldn't open her eyes any more.

The confinement had made his behaviour worse, so Mr Simoens helped her plan where to go if he went out. As calls are anonymous, he has no idea if she managed to escape.

Why staying home is not always staying safe

The threat of infection from coronavirus is in some cases a very direct obstacle to getting help, according to Marceline Naudi, who heads the Council of Europe's group of gender violence experts.

In some cases, it means that women victims of violence have decided not to seek medical attention for fear of contagion, but there are also fewer places to turn to.

"Domestic violence shelters in some areas have already stopped all admissions, because they are unsure how to manage the risk of infection," she says.

She also fears that by losing a job or income women will become more financially dependent on an abuser and it will be harder to leave.

In a pandemic that has killed tens of thousands of people across Europe, the message to an anxious public is that staying home means staying safe and saving lives.

That mantra is of little comfort to women imprisoned with an abuser, weighing up their chances of a successful escape amid so much uncertainty. For many, it is an impossible choice.

Extra reporting by Nina Nazarova of BBC Russian and illustrations by Olesya Volkova.

Domestic violence: Useful contacts

Spain: National helpline 016; email 016-online@mscbs.es; psychological support service via WhatsApp +34 682 916 136/+34 682 508 507; ask for Mascarilla-19 in a pharmacy

UK: National Domestic Abuse Helpline 0808 2000 247

Italy:Government helpline 1522

Belgium: Access support via 0800 30 030 in French or in Dutch on 1712

France, the national helpline is 3919, and in an emergency send an SMS to 114 or call 17.

Russia:Anna Centre helpline - 8 800 700 06 00

Across Europe support services via Women Against Violence Europe (WAVE) Network. BBC
Former Australian of the Year Patrick McGorry has raised concerns about the safety of quarantine hotels for mentally unwell returned travellers, saying care must be taken to ensure they are not at risk of self harm.

Professor McGorry, a psychiatrist and youth mental health expert who is among a group advising the federal government on its coronavirus pandemic recovery plan, said those in quarantine should be screened for suicide risk and adequate mental health support provided for those who needed it.

Pat McGorry says people quarantined in hotels must have adequate mental health support. Credit:Kathryn Junor

"If you're restricting someone's liberty, you have got a duty of care to keep them safe," he told The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age.

"There would be some people at higher risk than others, people with a past history of mental health problems."
Source: Xinhua| 2020-04-15 09:27:21|Editor: huaxia

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UNITED NATIONS, April 14 (Xinhua) -- United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said Tuesday that the World Health Organization must be supported, shortly after U.S. President Donald Trump announced that his administration is halting the nation's funding to the organization.

"It is my belief that the World Health Organization must be supported, as it is absolutely critical to the world's efforts to win the war against COVID-19," the secretary-general said in a statement issued by his spokesman.
The coronavirus pandemic is taking its toll on the world as we know it.

There are many unknowns which make planning difficult right now. The Fun Club has multi-day tours planned well into 2021 and numerous day trips scheduled that we havent even announced yet. When will we be able to travel again? Will we have more postponements and cancellations? I know well get past this, I just dont know when.

Since the future is out of my control, I thought it would be fun to look back on some of the great trips the Fun Club has had in the past. Last week I was browsing through The Wall Street Journal and noticed a tiny headline on page 2. It said, Bryce Canyon Park is Latest to Shut.

The short story explained that Bryce Canyon National Park in southern Utah became the latest park to close its gates to prevent the spread of the coronavirus. The story continued to say that the flow of visitors to the park, which is noted for its spire-shaped red rock formations known as hoodoos, made it difficult to maintain proper social distancing.

Bryce Canyon
About 100 houses were burned and several people injured during a clash over ownership of a fishing lake.

At least 19 people have been killed in fighting between members of ethnic groups in central Nigerias Taraba state over ownership of a fishing lake, police said.

The violence broke out on Monday between the Shomo and Jole ethnic groups in Lau district

Nineteen people were confirmed dead, state police spokesman David Misal told AFP news agency on Wednesday.

Around 100 houses were burned and several people were also injured.

Misal said long-standing animosity between the neighbouring communities over the lakes ownership had already cost dozens of lives.

He said the government had banned fishing around the lake after unsuccessful attempts at reconciliation by state authorities and the police. However some miscreants flouted the ban  leading to the clashes, Misal said.

President Muhammadu Buhari condemned the clashes in a statement late on Tuesday, expressing sadness at the resort to violence over disagreements that could be resolved through dialogue.

These frequent incidents of ethnic and communal violence is a failure of community leadership and the refusal to embrace dialogue as a means of conflict resolution, Buhari said

Communal clashes over land and water rights are common in parts of Nigeria, especially between nomadic herders and farmers in the centre of the country.
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Technavio has been monitoring the smart air purifier market and it is poised to grow by USD 4.71 bn during 2019-2023, progressing at a CAGR of almost 14% 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.

This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20200414005778/en/

Technavio has announced its latest market research report titled Global Smart Air Purifier Market 2019-2023 (Graphic: Business Wire)

Technavio suggests three forecast scenarios (optimistic, probable, and pessimistic) considering the impact of COVID-19. Please Request Latest Free Sample Report on COVID-19 Impact

The market is fragmented, and the degree of fragmentation will accelerate during the forecast period. Dyson, Honeywell International Inc., Koninklijke Philips N.V., LG Electronics, and Unilever, are some of the major market participants. Although the respiratory problems due to the increasing air pollution will offer immense growth opportunities, high price and low awareness of smart air purifiers in developing countries will challenge the growth of the market participants. 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.

Respiratory problems due to the increasing air pollution has been instrumental in driving the growth of the market. However, high price and low awareness of smart air purifiers in developing countries might hamper market growth.

Smart Air Purifier Market 2019-2023: Segmentation

Smart air purifier market is segmented as below:

Product Dust Collectors Fume and Smoke Collectors

Technology HEPA Activated Carbon Others

Geographic Landscape APAC Europe MEA North America South America



To learn more about the global trends impacting the future of market research, download a free sample: https://www.technavio.com/talk-to-us?report=IRTNTR30887

Smart Air Purifier 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 smart air purifier market report covers the following areas:

Smart Air Purifier Market Size

Smart Air Purifier Market Trends

Smart Air Purifier Market Industry Analysis

This study identifies increasing adoption in healthcare facilities as one of the prime reasons driving the smart air purifier market growth during the next few years.

Smart Air Purifier Market 2019-2023: Vendor Analysis

We provide a detailed analysis of around 25 vendors operating in the smart air purifier market, including some of the vendors such as Dyson, Honeywell International Inc., Koninklijke Philips N.V., LG Electronics, and Unilever. Backed with competitive intelligence and benchmarking, our research reports on the smart air purifier market are designed to provide entry support, customer profile and M&As as well as go-to-market strategy support.

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Smart Air Purifier Market 2019-2023: Key Highlights

CAGR of the market during the forecast period 2019-2023

Detailed information on factors that will assist smart air purifier market growth during the next five years

Estimation of the smart air purifier market size and its contribution to the parent market

Predictions on upcoming trends and changes in consumer behavior

The growth of the smart air purifier market

Analysis of the market's competitive landscape and detailed information on vendors

Comprehensive details of factors that will challenge the growth of smart air purifier market vendors

Table Of Contents :

PART 01: EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

PART 02: SCOPE OF THE REPORT

2.1 Preface

2.2 Preface

2.3 Currency conversion rates for US$

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 PRODUCT

Market segmentation by product

Comparison by product

Dust collectors Market size and forecast 2018-2023

Fume and smoke collectors Market size and forecast 2018-2023

Market opportunity by product

PART 07: CUSTOMER LANDSCAPE

PART 08: MARKET SEGMENTATION BY TECHNOLOGY

Market segmentation by technology

Comparison by technology

HEPA Market size and forecast 2018-2023

Activated carbon Market size and forecast 2018-2023

Others Market size and forecast 2018-2023

Market opportunity by technology

PART 09: GEOGRAPHIC LANDSCAPE

Geographic segmentation

Geographic comparison

APAC Market size and forecast 2018-2023

North America Market size and forecast 2018-2023

Europe Market size and forecast 2018-2023

MEA Market size and forecast 2018-2023

South America Market size and forecast 2018-2023

Key leading countries

Market opportunity

PART 10: DRIVERS AND CHALLENGES

Market drivers

Market challenges

PART 11: MARKET TRENDS

Increasing adoption in healthcare facilities

Increasing focus on product enhancement by vendors

Availability of smart air purifiers through online retailers

PART 12: VENDOR LANDSCAPE

Overview

Landscape disruption

PART 13: VENDOR ANALYSIS

Vendors covered

Vendor classification

Market positioning of vendors

Dyson

Honeywell International Inc.

Koninklijke Philips N.V.

LG Electronics

Unilever

PART 14: APPENDIX

Research methodology

List of abbreviations

About Us

Technavio is a leading global technology research and advisory company. Their research and analysis focus on emerging market trends and provide 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/20200414005778/en/

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On March 24, the Quebec government ordered the closure of services and businesses deemed non-essential, so as to prevent the spread of the highly contagious and potentially lethal new coronavirus. However, under the pretext of providing essential services, many businesses, including manufacturing plants, have been allowed to continue to operate.

In fact, the Coalition Avenir Quebec (CAQ) government and the political establishment as a whole have shown little regard for human life. Their principal concern is responding to the demands of the financial markets and big business, which are eager to get workers back to work as soon as possible, with little to no regard to public health, in order to continue boosting their huge profits (see: Quebec government, big business push for return to work as COVID-19 deaths soar).

Premier Francois Legault signaled late last week that his government was considering the hasty reopening of schools and daycare facilities before May 4 to allow some workplaces to reopen. Yesterday, he announced that the residential construction industry and the provinces mines will be able to resume operations in the coming days.

Such moves are reckless, indeed even criminal. Not only are the reopenings hasty and unnecessary amid a surge in coronavirus cases and deaths, they are taking place without any significant improvement in mass testing and contact tracing, the availability of health care equipment or the enforcement of proper sanitary measures at workplaces. As a result, they carry a grave risk of triggering a second, more deadly wave of mass contagion.

The governments reckless plan has aroused strong opposition among working people and on social media networks. A petition demanding the closure of schools and day-care centres until September was signed by more than 175,000 people in less than 72 hours.

A team from the World Socialist Web Site spoke with workers from various fields who have either worked, or are being forced to work, during the pandemic. Their remarks expose the malevolence and mercenary motives of the companies and the ineffectiveness of the safety measures supposedly put in place.

***

Max is an operator in a metal refining plant in Montreal that employs approximately 300 workers. The company says were an essential service because apparently the copper we produce is used to weld cans. Ive never heard that before, he commented.

The union told us that we would have reduced hours so no one would lose their job, but now were actually doing overtime, added Max. I worked 48 hours last week.

Expressing concern about the pandemic, Max said, I dont want the virus to spread any further, I dont want to infect anyone, but I have bills so I have no choice but to go back to work. Personally, I would have stayed at home, but they wont give me unemployment benefits. My boss tells me I can stay at home, but without pay. I already took two weeks without pay after I found out there were potential cases at my job. When I found out my job was on the essential services list, I had no choice but to go back to work.

There are rumors that some people may have been infected, but we have no evidence, he continued. I think its suspicious. A guy was pulled over two weeks ago, waiting for results. Theyre supposedly negative, but the guy hasnt come back to work yet. He had all the symptoms, but we were told it wasnt COVID-19.

Max explained that the health measures put in place were insignificant. At the plant, schedules were slightly modified to avoid overlapping shifts, he said. When we go in and out of the plant, theres a thermal camera to take our temperature and see if theres any change. We have cleaning products as well. But its clear that the social distance of two meters is very difficult to apply in our working conditions.

He continued, I work in an operating room thats about 10 feet long by less than 6 feet wide. In my case, there are three of us sharing that space. So when you go from one side to the other of the refining board, you are sure to run into someone.

Referring to companies such as mining companies, which have the right to continue production on the pretext that they are essential, Max said, Some people have more power than the average worker who works 40 hours a week. Its easy for managers, factories and industry to pass themselves off as essential services by using the loopholes in the system: the wheel turns, the rich get richer, the poor get poorer.

Max concluded by saying, What is needed is a real quarantine: everyone at home for 14 days!

Francois works for the aerospace manufacturer Pratt & Whitney as a component inspector. Since the beginning of the crisis, the company has maintained much of its production under the pretext that its contracts for the military are essential. Last week, in a decision that surprised and outraged workers, the company recalled its entire workforce even though aeronautics is not an essential service. Management and the union justified their decision evasively on the basis that the parts manufactured at the plant are used to propel aircraft carrying essential goods.

Francois explained to the WSWS that even in the departments that were kept in operation throughout the lockdown, the military accounts for only 5 to 10 percent of production. More than 90 percent of the production since the beginning of the pandemic has been related to commercial or other non-essential services such as engines for private jets.

Francois sharply criticized the sanitary measures, Some sanitary measures are being taken, but it is not enough! Contacts are inevitable in a factory where hundreds of workers are working, where we constantly exchange tools. When you go to the bathroom, you find about 20 employees at the same time. In spite of the schedule changes, there are still large crowds at the entrance and the exit when all the workers leave their shifts at the same time.

He explained what really motivates the company, commenting, Its good for the shareholders to maintain production because if there was only production related to the military, the company would not make a good turnover. He added ironically, For the bosses, its all in their pocket. Long live capitalism!

The WSWS also spoke with Paul, a construction worker, and Jean, his 19-year-old son.

Jean explained that he worked as a clerk in a supermarket but left because of fears for his health. There were no real safety measures in place for the workers, remarked Jean. I was working at the entrance. We had little rubber gloves. We didnt have access to a mask. I had to disinfect the customers hands, and they had to come within two meters of me.

Jean was critical of the governments response. I think the government should have acted faster and sooner, he said. Now were reacting instead of preventing.

When asked what prompted the government to push for a quick return to work, despite the fact that infections and deaths continue to rise rapidly in Quebec and across Canada, Paul paused for a moment before answering, I think the government is under financial pressure. If they ask me what is needed before the lockdown measures are lifted, I would definitely say health.

Then we discussed the catastrophic situation for health care workers and the so-called lack of money, the refrain of all levels of government in recent decades. Paul raised the issue of the staggering amounts Canada, the US and its others key allies are spending on the military. I find it very difficult to explain the lack of equipment, especially medical equipment, he added. How long has the US been at war125 years? How much money has been put into this? I dont know, its way beyond me.

The authors also recommend:

Canadas coronavirus wage-subsidy tailored to propping up business, not protecting workers incomes

[14 April 2020]

Quebec government, big business push for return to work as COVID-19 deaths soar

[11 April 2020]

Canadas health minister promotes herd immunity, after admitting government  s coronavirus failure

[8 April 2020]
In this time of uncertainty there has been a great interest expressed from enterprises towards data automation to keep their now remote working teams efficient and on the same page; and making sure that all the teams are operating with clean trustworthy data.

DBSync has been recognized as part of The Financial Times' inaugural list of The Americas Fastest Growing Companies 2020. This prestigious award is presented by The Financial Times and Statista Inc., the world-leading statistics portal and industry ranking provider.

The FT's The Americas Fastest Growing Companies is comprised of the enterprises that contribute most heavily to economic growth. 500 companies are featured on the list, which was announced online on April 6, 2020 and can currently be viewed on the FT's website.

Out of the millions of active companies in North and South America, only 500 firms were awarded in the list, and DBSync is ecstatic to be recognized as one of FTs inaugural list of The Americas Fastest Growing Companies 2020.

The inaugural FT Americas ranking comes at a perilous and uncertain time for many companies, as the coronavirus severely curtails economies, workforces and ultimately growth," said Maxine Kelly, Financial Times. "Yet the ranking also highlights 500 businesses across the continent for whom innovation and creativity have paid off  attributes that will underpin resilience and enable many of them to thrive once the worst effects of the pandemic are behind them.

We are very excited to be a part of The Financial Times' inaugural list, as our team stands guard of data security with DBSync tools for backups, archiving and near real time automation for any system and data point, said Rajeev Gupta, DBSync CEO. In this difficult time there has been a great interest expressed from enterprises towards data automation to keep their now remote working teams efficient and on the same page. And making sure that all the teams are operating with clean trustworthy data. Me and the DBSync team wish everyone to stay connected and safe!

DBSyncs key solutions are:



Cloud Workflow (iPaaS) - Enables to quickly integrate applications with pre-built templates and workflows to automate business processes. Easily automate Order-to-Cash, Procure-to-Pay, Support Automation and any other business process.

Cloud Replication and Data Lake - Enables enterprises to take a complete backup of Salesforce into a database of your choice or into AWS or BigData lakes for compliance, backup, archive and restore or copy Salesforce to Salesforce for data seeding.

DBSync has served residents needs since 2009.

About DBSync

DBSync is a leading provider of data management, replication, and application integration for CRM (Salesforce, Microsoft Dynamics 365 and more), Accounting (QuickBooks Desktop and Online, Microsoft Dynamics GP & NAV), Warehouse Management Systems (SkuVault), popular databases (Oracle, SQL Server, MySQL, MongoDB, S3, etc), and data integration markets. With easy to use pre-built maps and powerful Extract, Transform, and Load (ETL) capabilities, DBSync enables users to link information between leading Cloud and On-premise based CRM, hospital asset and case management, and accounting applications, along with support for on-premise applications running databases. DBSync provides support, training and consulting services for its integration solutions and is headquartered in Nashville, Tennessee, with centers in San Francisco, CA and Bangalore, India.

For more information on the Data Management Platform, please visit, DBSync.

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The students may be gone, but the agricultural education teachers are still going to school.

Schools in Pennsylvania and Ohio closed in mid-March, right as things were heating up in the greenhouse. That left the teachers to care for thousands of dollars in plants that classrooms of students would be tending to throughout the week, normally.

It also left teachers to figure out how to hold their annual spring plant sales in the time of the novel coronavirus.

Jodie Hoover created an online store through the Square credit card program. Hoover is the agricultural education teacher at Fort Cherry High School, in McDonald, Pennsylvania.

Customers can buy online and choose a pick-up time. Parking spaces will be marked, and their plant orders will be packed and ready for pick-up.

Ive learned a lot through my 20 years of teaching, but I never thought I would be designing a website for pick-up, she said.

Hoover has been going four days a week to take care of the greenhouse since school was excused, March 13. The schools custodial and maintenance staff offered to help out with watering on the other days.

It does break my heart, because the students really enjoy the greenhouse and look forward to it each year, she said. I also have a lot of alumni and community members that come to the greenhouse each year. I enjoy having this time to visit with them.

Local business steps up

Randy Harrold, agricultural education teacher for Laurel High School, in New Castle, Pennsylvania, said they had $3,500 invested just in plants  a mix of perennials, annual bedding plants, vegetables and succulents. That doesnt include pots and soil.

His students had just started tomato and pepper plants in trays. It was time to transplant them into six-packs for sale when the schools closed. That job was left to Harrold and an instructional aide to do the work that usually 16 or 18 students would be during class.

Theyve also been coming into the school regularly to water and care for the plants.

The New Castle Agway has in the past bought remnants for the spring plant sale. Harrold said he reached out to see if the company would be interested in any of their plants this year.

The Agway bought all their plants and will sell them at their store.

Someone in good faith always steps up to the plate, he said. Im extremely grateful for New Castle Agway. To think that the FFA account would be out $4,000 and its truly nobodys fault. For them to step in, thats a big step to take to help the Laurel FFA out.

Doing what they can

Not that a pandemic ever comes at a good time, but the timing of school closures put agricultural education teachers in a bind.

If there was a time for this to happen, this wasnt it. Were out in the ag shop, welding, working on engines. Were in the greenhouse, Harrold said.

Pam McKinney, the junior high agricultural education teacher for Georgetown Exempted Village Schools, in Georgetown, Ohio, had just put chicken eggs in an incubator for her classes when schools closed. The incubator then found a new home on her kitchen counter.

Ive been doing a lot of videos for my kids  I posted videos of eggs hatching, McKinney said. I have a chicken coop, so I walked them through that.

For an upcoming lesson on root systems, McKinney plans to send her students outside to pull some plants out of the ground to check them out in person.

Its a good thing theyre great with technology. Theyre willing to take pictures to send to me, she said. We do what we can do.

McKinney and Jamie Loudon, high school agricultural education teacher at Georgetown, are spending three or four hours each morning at the schools greenhouses, taking care of plants. They still plan to sell plants from the greenhouse while being mindful of social distancing recommendations.

They invested between $5,000 and $6,000 into the greenhouse this year. Its not a big fundraiser, but they try to make back their money and we try to sell a good product to our customers, Loudon said.

(Reporter Rachel Wagoner can be contacted at 800-837-3419 or rachel@farmanddairy.com.)
Rural charities are working together to provide heightened levels of support to farmers during the coronavirus outbreak in the UK.

Farmers are currently witnessing an uncertain period, and poor health or self-isolation may result in temporary practical difficulties on-farm.

To raise awareness of how charities can support those who need it throughout the Covid-19 pandemic, Farming Help Awareness Week was launched on Monday 13 April.

The week-long initiative will end on Friday 17 April, and the charities are using social media to promote each others work in supporting rural communities.

The Farming Help charities consist of the Addington Fund, Farming Community Network (FCN), Forage Aid, Royal Agricultural Benevolent Institution (RABI), and RSABI, supported by The Princes Countryside Fund.

The purpose of the week is to raise awareness of what each of the charities involved in the Farming Help partnership does.

Although the charities support the farming community in different ways, they are all working together under the umbrella of Farming Help to support the farming community through this difficult time.

They are also encouraging farmers and farming families to get in touch via the Farming Help helpline  03000 111 999  and make use of the support that the charities offer.

The Farming Help initiative is in conjunction with The National Federation of Young Farmers Clubs, The National Farmers Union, and the NFU Mutual Charitable Trust.

How can I reach out for help?

Utilising the Farming Help helpline and respective organisations/volunteer networks, the charities can offer the following local support. Get in touch on 03000 111 999 if you:

 Feel concerned or anxious and would like to talk to someone who understands farming, will listen to you and help you think through your options

 Would like help to draft a contingency plan to ensure you and your farm are prepared, should you be unable to work for a time.

 If you or people you rely on become ill or are self-isolating and you need to find help locally - the charities will endeavour to find support for you in your local area. They will source contact details of local organisations and groups who may be able to assist in finding help to feed livestock, collect shopping or collect prescription.
Irish telecoms firms say they will give customers slack on bills and data limits during the lockdown.

The four big providers  Eir, Vodafone, Three and Virgin  say they will ease restrictions on fair use limits applied to broadband and mobile data packages. Customers facing difficulties paying bills will also be given additional leeway, the operators say.

Other players, such as Sky, Tesco Mobile and Pure Telecom, have also signed up to the overarching commitment, which was proposed by the Communications Minister Richard Bruton.

The operators also say that they will discount access to healthcare and educational websites from being counted for data limits.

And customers who dont have fixed broadband will have the opportunity to get unlimited mobile data access fro their service provider.

Read More

The measures are to be observed by telecoms firms until June 30th, according to a joint statement from the companies and the government.

However, they companies will also be allowed to put in appropriate traffic management to avoid network congestion, meaning that data speeds may slow down for a variety of users in the near future.

Last week, Comreg announced that additional spectrum capacity for mobile operators would be provided at a nominal cost, to help networks deal with a surge in demand for communications services. Operators say that call and data volumes have risen by as much as 50pc in the last three weeks as the country tries to do its business remotely.

These commitments will make sure that all major providers are responding to this increased reliance, providing extra capacity where needed and ensuring people have the services they need to stay connected, said Communications Minister Richard Bruton. These are common commitments and some operators may choose to offer extra services to their customers.
When Angela Primachenko awoke April 6 from a week-long, medically induced coma, she was disoriented because of all of the medications in her body.

She had also lost her pregnant belly and gained a newborn daughter, while doctors kept her unconscious so that her body could fight a severe case of covid-19, the respiratory illness caused by the novel coronavirus.

"I just woke up and all of a sudden I didn't have my belly anymore," she told NBC's "Today" show from her home in Vancouver, Washington. "It was just extremely mind-blowing."

On March 22, Primachenko had a runny nose and suspected she was suffering from spring allergies. Two days later, the 27-year-old had developed a fever - a dangerous condition for a woman 33 weeks pregnant. She went to the hospital where she worked as a respiratory therapist to be tested for the coronavirus.

"I was taking precautions. I didn't go to work because I am pregnant," Primachenko told "Today." "I don't know where I caught it, I don't know where it happened, but somehow I just ended up coming to the hospital and just getting sicker and sicker."

She tested positive for the virus on March 26, and her health rapidly deteriorated. Two days later, she was struggling to breathe normally. On March 29, her doctors put her into the medically induced coma so that her body could focus on overcoming the infection.

On April 1, while Primachenko was still unconscious and fighting the virus, doctors induced labor and delivered her daughter Ava.

Doctors placed the premature Ava in the neonatal intensive care unit until she can process food on her own, Primachenko's twin sister, Oksana Luiten, told KGW. The mother and daughter won't be reunited until Primachenko has two negative coronavirus tests in a row.

But Primachenko said she has been able to see her daughter over video calls when her husband, David, visits Ava in the hospital.

Luiten told KGW the family's ordeal made them wish people would take the coronavirus pandemic seriously.

"This is not a joke," Luiten said. "This is not an average flu, this is much, much worse."

Primachenko began to recover earlier this month, when she was able to come off a ventilator and breathe on her own. Her colleagues gathered to cheer and applaud as she was wheeled out of the intensive care unit.

"Everyone did a standing ovation and just clapped me out of the ICU, which was so amazing and such a huge thing to be able to leave the ICU and go to the floors," Primachenko said. "It was just the grace of God."

For Primachenko and her family, Ava's birth and her mother's recovery have been an inspiration during a dark time.

"I don't know how to make it through without faith," Luiten told KGW. "Faith for healing, faith for life after death, faith for it all."

Primachenko and her husband chose the newborn's name for its symbolic meaning, she said.

"It means 'breath of life,'" the mother said, "so she's our new little breath of life."

The new baby joins her big sister, Emily, who is only about 10 months older than her newborn sibling since Ava was born prematurely.

"Even in the hardest days and the hardest times, there's hope," Primachenko said. "And you can rely on God and people and community. The amount of community people that were praying for me is just unbelievable. I was blown away and I'm so incredibly thankful. And I feel like I'm a miracle walking."
New York, April 15 : US President Donald Trump's signature will appear on millions of Covid-19 relief cheques being sent to people who qualify for assistance to tide over the shutdown.

A Treasury Department spokesperson indirectly confirmed it by saying that adding his signature will not delay the sending of the cheques which will commence next week.

Since Trump is not authorised to sign the cheques, his signature will be in addition to that of the Treasury Department which can make the disbursements.

The printed cheques will go to over 70 million people, most of them belonging to the low-income groups who do not pay taxes or have bank account information on record with the tax agency, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) or the Social Security Administration.

Under the $2 trillion stimulus package passed by the Congress, adults will get up to $1,200 each depending on their income and children $500 each. The payments taper off at the income limit of $75,000 and cut off at $99,000.

The IRS launched a web site on Wednesday for people to check the status of their payments but it was overwhelmed by the wave of inquiries and crashed immediately.

Out of the 150 million to 170 million payments, about half are already being processed through direct payment to bank accounts. Some recipients have already reported finding the amount in their bank accounts.

But the cheques are being delayed because they will have to be printed and sent through the post offices unlike the electronic payments.

It could be several weeks before all the cheques are sent out as they are expected to be processed at the rate of 5 million each week.

When Trump was asked earlier this month if he was going to sign the cheques, he had said, "No. Me sign? No. There're millions of cheques. I'm going to sign them? No. It's a Trump administration initiative. But do I want to sign them? No." But having his signature printed on the cheques could give him an advantage in an election year, especially when they go out to those most in need.

Democratic Party leader in the Senate, Chuck Schumer, told an interviewer on MSNBC, "It seems almost every day the President thinks this crisis revolves around him and his desires, his needs, his enemies."
Central Reserve Police Force Assistant Sub-Inspector Padmeswar Das is on leave at his home in Assam but not off-duty as he prepares ration packets, using his savings, for the poor in his village who are worst hit by the coronavirus lockdown.

IMAGE: CRPF personnel, wearing protective suits, distribute food among the needy people during a lockdown in Srinagar. Photograph: ANI Photo

The 48-year-old trooper, whose unit is deployed in south Kashmir's terrorist violence-hit Shopian district, is helping those affected by the lockdown in his tiny village of Chatanguri, about 76 km from the headquarters of Morigaon district.

Moved by the plight of the distressed, Das discussed with his mother and wife about the possible help they could extend and they enthusiastically joined him in the endeavour.

"I came home for my scheduled leave on March 3 and by the time I was supposed to return, the lockdown was declared. My unit based in the Kashmir valley also sent a message, asking me to stay put and not return.

"Had I been with my force, I would have had an army of my colleagues and officers to help the needy. Then I thought I can be a one-man army," Das said over phone from his village.

"My force stands for the motto 'service and loyalty' whether a jawan is alone or in a group," he said.

The ASI, who joined the CRPF as a constable in 1991, said he took his scooty and went to the nearest market to fetch about 80 kg of rice and other dry ration.

The next day, he and his family prepared over 50 packets, each containing two kgs of rice, one kg potato, a small bottle of mustard oil, a packet of salt, onions and half-a-kg of pulses.

"I spent about Rs 8,000-10,000 for purchasing and packing these items," Das said hesitatingly, as he did not seem keen to share the cost of his noble deed.

He said he used his uniform for the service of people.

"I donned my uniform as the movement of civilians was barred due to the lockdown, used my 'gamocha' (a traditional Assamese scarf) as a mask and got a handcart to distribute the packets among the needy," Das said.

When reminded that he acted like a good samaritan, he said he only knows that "efforts of any kind always count".

"My colleagues in my delta company unit in Shopian and in the entire force are spread out to help in the fight against coronavirus and the lockdown-affected people in whatever way they can. I am just one among them," Das, who has a young son and a daughter, said.

His boss and Commandant of the 76th battalion of the Central Reserve Police Force (based in Jammu) Neeraj Pandey is all praise for his "tough and dedicated" colleague.

"I am proud of what Das did to help people, despite being on official leave. He has gone beyond his call of duty, but that is what our ethos and regimentation are all about," he said.

Unfazed by the continuing lockdown, Das plans to replenish the stocks for those who need his help.
WASHINGTON  An outbreak of coronavirus infections at an upscale Whole Foods in the heart of the nations capital has focused attention on the plight of grocery store workers deemed essential to stay on the job during the pandemic but increasingly falling ill to its ravages.

The Whole Foods near Washingtons trendy Logan Circle told employees on Wednesday that a worker had contracted the virus, one of at least six, but that the store would not close, according to a report by WUSA, a local CBS-affiliated station. Instead, managers would order a deep cleaning with workers staying on the job, according to an email sent to employees that was obtained by the station.

Workers were free to take leave without penalty through the end of April, the email said, but it would be unpaid.

An employee at the store, who declined to be identified, passed a note to a New York Times photographer there on Tuesday stating that 16 employees at the location were confirmed to be infected, a significant outbreak in a city that has so far escaped the horrors of New York, Detroit and New Orleans.
Bollywood is perhaps being upended the most by the whole Covid-19 crisis and the subsequent nationwide lockdown, which will continue till May 3. While celebrities are keeping themselves busy sharing tidbits about their daily lives on social media, we wonder what their entourage and staff members, who are always on the go, are doing during this period.

Salman Khans bodyguard, Shera, a celebrity in his own right, says,He (Salman) is with his family at his farmhouse (Panvel), and I am taking care of my family here (Mumbai). Everything is arranged, koi tension nahi hai. There is proper security, no one can enter the gate, he shares.

On whether hes finding this time away from Bhai a bit strange, he says, This is not the time to miss those busy days, but to actually take care of your loved ones, be at home with them. Yeh waqt kisko milta hai guzaarne ka? Ghar mein rahiye.

Alia Bhatts hairstylist Priyanka Borkar, meanwhile, admits that things have been a bit difficult being home for so long and not doing any work for the past many days. I have some saving, so that is working right now. I did an independent job in February and March but I havent got paid because of the situation. Those things are tough. My mum runs a salon, so I have to take care of salon rent, paying salary to my employees besides a house loan. It is going to be tough if it goes on for two three months, she shares.

But the actors are doing their bit in making the life of their team easier. Ileana DCruzs personal assistant shares how the actor has been taking care of him and others even during this lockdown.

Madam is at her home, and Im at mine. Money is not a problem as she has already given me sufficient amount to sustain the next few months. She has asked me to not step out of the house and told me to contact her for anything that I might need, says Chandan Singh.

Shera also echoes similar sentiment sharing how he is connected with Salman all day. Anil Kapoors manager Jalal Mortezai reveals that the actor made sure that his entire staff had the essentials before the lockdown was implemented. AK is an amazing person, and its more than a working relationship when it comes to both of us. Luckily for us, we realised this situation a little earlier, and he got sanitisers and mass for the whole team and his company, he says.

Deepika Padukones makeup artist Sandhya Shekar reveals that the actor cancelled her Paris trip owing to the crisis, but her priority was the safety of her team which was to travel with her.

As a team we saw the situation and we have been discussing about it. She had many important work scheduled for this period but as a team we took a call to cancel everything, Sandhya shares, adding that she is making the most of this forced break, just relaxing a bit.

Jalal also quips how he is enjoying my family time. I have a two-year-old at home, so I get to spend more time with my children. I will be in denial if I say I dont miss the field work. But its a good opportunity to be online and read the backlog of work, he adds.

Taapsee Pannus stylist Devki does miss the busy days that used tobe before the lockdown, but it isnt as if work has totally stopped. I have my own fashion PR too, so I have that running to thankfully keep me sane! Of course, I am missing the day-to-day rush of styling her that last minute running around, thinking where are we supposed to get the earrings or shoes from?! Hope it all goes back to normal, she shares.
Presentation with live audio webcast on Thursday, April 23 at 1:30 PM ET, immediately followed by an interactive Q&A session

BOSTON, MA / ACCESSWIRE / April 15, 2020 / EuMentis Therapeutics Inc. ("EuMentis" or the "Company"), a biopharmaceutical company focused on developing novel therapeutics for the treatment of neurological diseases, today announced that Mark Tepper, Ph.D., President and Chief Executive Officer of EuMentis will present at the April 2020 Virtual Investor Summit on Thursday, April 23rd, 2020 at 1:30 PM ET.

A live audio webcast of the presentation will be available on the Virtual Investor Summit website. Immediately following the presentation, Drs. Tepper and Randall Marshall, MD, EuMentis Chief Medical Officer, will participate in an interactive Q&A session with interested parties, allowing participants to type in questions and receive live responses. A webcast replay will be available two hours following the live presentation and will be accessible for one year.

To schedule a one-on-one call with management, please contact the conference at info@virtualinvestorsummit.com and for more information, please visit virtualinvestorsummit.com.

About Virtual Investor Summit

The Virtual Investor Summit is an online platform that offers both public and private companies, across multiple industries the ability to stay active and engaged with the investment community. Our inaugural summit on April 22-23, 2020 will feature company webcast presentations followed by a virtual, interactive Q&A session, allowing participants to type in questions and receive live responses. Interested participants also have the ability to request one-on-one calls with a featured company. For more information, please visit virtualinvestorsummit.com.

About EuMentis Therapeutics Inc.

EuMentis Therapeutics Inc. is a privately held biopharmaceutical company focused on developing novel therapies to treat high value neurodevelopmental and neurodegenerative diseases. The Company's lead program, EM-036, is a nitro-aminoadamantane N-methyl-D-aspartate (NMDA) receptor antagonist in preclinical development for the treatment of multiple CNS diseases including Alzheimer's Disease and Autism-Spectrum Disorders. Preclinical data to date demonstrate significant improvement in efficacy of EM-036 over memantine in Autism-Spectrum Disorder and Alzheimer's Disease models with no safety issues. The Company plans to submit its IND filing and commence a Phase 1 study of EM-036 in early 2021. EuMentis is also expanding its pipeline through ongoing business development activities aimed at acquiring new clinical assets to treat high unmet neurodegenerative and neurodevelopmental diseases.

Forward-Looking Statements

This press release contains certain forward-looking statements, including those relating to the Company's product development, market opportunity, competitive position, possible or assumed future results of operations, business strategies, potential growth opportunities and other statements that are predictive in nature. The Company has made every reasonable effort to ensure the information and assumptions on which these statements are based are current, reasonable and complete. However, a variety of factors, many of which are beyond the Company's control, affect the Company's operations, performance, business strategy and results and there can be no assurances that the Company's actual results will not differ materially from those indicated herein. Additional written and oral forward-looking statements may be made by the Company from time to time. The Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995 provides a safe-harbor for forward-looking statements. These statements may be identified by the use of forward-looking expressions, including, but not limited to, "expect," "anticipate," "intend," "plan," "believe," "estimate," "potential," "predict," "project," "should," "would" and similar expressions and the negatives of those terms. These statements relate to future events or our financial performance and involve known and unknown risks, uncertainties, and other factors which may cause actual results, performance or achievements to be materially different from any future results, performance or achievements expressed or implied by the forward-looking statements. Prospective investors are cautioned not to place undue reliance on such forward-looking statements, which speak only as of the date of this presentation. The Company undertakes no obligation to publicly update any forward-looking statement, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise.

Investor Contact:

Jenene Thomas

JTC Team, LLC.

(833) 475-8247

jtc@jtcir.com

Mark Tepper, Ph.D.

EuMentis Therapeutics Inc., President and CEO

617-413-3020

mtepper@eumentistx.com

SOURCE: EuMentis Therapeutics Inc.

View source version on accesswire.com:https://www.accesswire.com/585026/EuMentis-Therapeutics-Inc-To-Present-at-the-April-2020-Virtual-Investor-Summit
We're knee-deep into the 21st century, and we're still getting shafted in an area that should have been fixed decades ago. Cannabis is still illegal.

It's preposterous, but it doesn't even feel weird. We're all used to it. I'm bored just saying it.

Apparently our lawmakers still need more time to think about it, though.

The recreational cannabis legalization bill, Senate Bill 115, was unceremoniously shoved to the side earlier this year. I heard they took it to a quiet spot out behind the Roundhousesomewhere where its cries wouldn't be heardand strangled it like a mad dog. The tattered bill was seen tumbling lifelessly along the gutters of Santa Fe later that evening. If you can't tell: It still bugs me.

I've been asked what went wrong, and I still refuse to guess. I have my own conspiracy theories, but I'll be tucking them away for now. It's likely that the more vanilla explanations are right, anyway. Some aspects of the bill rubbed people the wrong way, after all.

For instance: If it had passed, the bill would have made it illegal for individuals not enrolled in the state's Medical Cannabis Program to grow marijuana plants. Imagine the state criminalizing growing your own tomatoesit seems crazy. Placing limits of any kind on growing marijuana seems ridiculous until you consider the the need to control potential black market activities (made possible by the drug's illegal status elsewhere). But outright barring law-abiding citizens from growing a plant naturally is beyond strange when you stop and think about it.

Another big problem with the bill was the extreme limitations it would have put in place regarding how cannabis is advertised. Under the bill, advertising cannabis products would be prohibited on billboards, the sides of buses, unsolicited internet pop-ups, radio, television or other broadcast media (with the exception of subscription services that can guarantee that there audience is over 21).

The only places where advertisements would have been allowedin print and digital mediawere also restricted to areas where the audience is reasonably expected to be 21 years of age or older, as determined by reliable, current audience composition data. In other words: Not in easily accessible publications (like the one you're holding) or on a website without an age verification check.

These restrictions would have been detrimental not only to the dispensaries, but also to the many local media outlets that rely on ad revenue to continue running (like the one you're holding).

A major point of contention over the bill was a lack of protection for businesses wanting to maintain a drug-free workplace. Business leaders and, by extension (for obvious reasons), lawmakers said they needed assurances that employers could still enforce marijuana-free hiring practices. Some have tried arguing that it's a safety issue, but the reality probably has more to do with the Drug-Free Workplace Act of 1988.

This law enables employers to collect federal grants as long as they maintain a drug-free workplace policy. Under those policies, employees often have to sign an agreement saying they will not partake in illegal drug activity on or off company premises. Since cannabis is federally illegal, an employer couldn't knowingly employ a usereven if it's legal in the state.

Maintaining a drug-free workplace can also benefit employers by giving them cuts to workers compensation insurance premiums. The logic behind the discounts is that drug-impaired workers cause more accidents, and a drug-free policy lowers that number.

So, of course, employers don't want to have anything to do with a legalization bill that doesn't explicitly allow them to keep screening for THC during the hiring process. Considering recent changes to the state's medical cannabis laws which protect patients from being turned away for cannabis use, the concern is definitely real. It also means they consider the weight of their wallets to be more important than progressive drug reform. No surprise, there.

I still think any bill that will free those who have been incarcerated for minor cannabis crimes should be pushed through, no matter what flaws it has. It's easy for me to hop on Twitter, take a dump on our leaders for not passing the bill and go about my day like everything's groovy. For the poor wretches sitting behind bars over a joint right now, the news was probably devastating.

Oh well! Maybe next year. I'm sure that will comfort them as they rot in their jail cells.

Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham doesn't seem ready to back down yet, anyway. She told reporters that legalization is inevitable, and I'm inclined to agree. It only took a few million years for that first fish to crawl up on the beach and take a nervous breath. I just don't want New Mexico to be like his neighbor, the nervous fish that waited another million to see how it pans out.
The United Kingdom has thanked India for its approval for sending Paracetamol units which will be reaching them in the next two weeks. The UK trade secretary took to Twitter to express her gratitude to the Indian government. India has helped other countries like the US, Sri Lanka, Afghanistan with medical consignments as it is one of the leading producers of paracetamol in the world.

Soon after India approved the shipment of nearly three million paracetamol units for the UK, the British government praised the Indian government for helping them at a crucial time. Trade Secretary Liz Truss said that it was important for governments to work together in the battle against Coronavirus.

''Many thanks to the Government of India for approving the export of paracetamol. 3 million packets on their way to the United Kingdom. Vital we work together to keep trade flowing during Coronavirus'', tweeted the Trade Secretary.

READ | UK Promises To Test All Care Home Residents, Staff With COVID-19 Symptoms

UK's Trade Department shares export details

UK's department of trade also released a video aimed at providing people with details of the export from India. The department said that following talks with their Indian counterparts, UK will be receiving 2,800,000 paracetamol units.

''The shipment will arrive in the next two weeks and will be stocked in the UK's leading supermarkets'', said the department.

The UK witnessed panic buying of paracetamol tablets which resulted in a shortage of medicine. Paracetamol is important as it is used to treat fever which is one of the key symptoms for Coronavirus. However, it is not the medicine for the deadly virus.

READ | UK PM Boris Johnson Tested Negative For COVID-19 Before Leaving Hospital

The United Kingdom has also bought medicines from other countries like the United States. US pharmaceutical giant Perrigo is also supplying England with essential medicines. The MP for South West Norfolk Ms Truss said that it was important for the global trade to continue for the availability of essential supplies.

''Coronavirus is the largest threat we have all faced in decades, so it is imperative that we work together to continue global trade and keep supply chains open'' she said.

The UK is one of the worst-hit countries by COVID-19. The country has reported more than 90,000 COVID-19 cases and more than twelve thousand people have lost their lives. Many high profile people including the Prime Minister and Health Secretary were found infected with the virus. Prime Minister Boris Johnson was released from the hospital recently but he is under recuperation and would not return to work immediately.

READ | UK Hospital Celebrates Its 1st ICU Survivor

READ | Prince Charles Praises Selfless Service By British-Sikhs In Vaisakhi Message
Seoul, South Korea

A barrage of North Korean missiles fired from the ground and fighter jets splashed down on the waters off the country's east coast on Tuesday, South Korea's military said, a show of force on the eve of a key state anniversary in the North and parliamentary elections in the rival South.

The back-to-back launches were the latest in a series of weapons tests that North Korea has conducted in recent weeks amid stalled nuclear talks and outside worries about a possible coronavirus outbreak in the country.

North Korean troops based in the eastern coastal city of Munchon first launched several projectiles  presumed to be cruise missiles  on Tuesday morning, South Korea's joint chiefs of staff said in a statement.

The weapons flew more than 93 miles at a low altitude off the North's east coast, a South Korean defense official said. If confirmed, it would be the North's first cruise missile launch in about three years, said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, citing department rules.

Later Tuesday, North Korea launched several Sukhoi-class fighter jets that fired an unspecified number of air-to-surface missiles toward the North's eastern waters, the defense official said.

The official said North Korea has recently appeared to be resuming its military drills that it had scaled back due to concerns about the coronavirus pandemic. He said other North Korean fighter jets also flew on patrol near the border with China on Tuesday.

Special Investigation 147 NY dams are 'unsound,' potentially dangerous Thousands of dams have not been inspected in over 20 years.

All the recently tested missiles were short-range and didn't pose a direct threat to the U.S. mainland.

U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres expressed concern at the latest missile launches by the Democratic People's Republic of Korea or DPRK, the country's official name.

"Once again we call on the DPRK leadership to comply fully with its obligations under relevant Security Council resolutions," Guterres' spokesman Stephane Dujarric said, referring to U.N. bans on ballistic missile launches.
Source: Xinhua| 2020-04-15 18:45:30|Editor: huaxia

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Citizens bid farewell to medics from the Peking Union Medical College Hospital in Wuhan, capital of central China's Hubei Province, April 15, 2020. The last medical assistance team started leaving Hubei Province Wednesday as the COVID-19 epidemic in the hard-hit province has been subdued. The medical team consisting of over 180 medical workers from the Peking Union Medical College Hospital arrived in the provincial capital of Wuhan on Jan. 26. (Xinhua/Xiong Qi)

WUHAN, April 15 (Xinhua) -- The last medical assistance team started leaving Hubei Province Wednesday as the COVID-19 epidemic in the hard-hit province has been subdued.

The medical team consisting of over 180 medical workers from the Peking Union Medical College Hospital arrived in the provincial capital of Wuhan on Jan. 26.

Among the total, 179 medics left Wuhan Wednesday, and six will continue to stay there to assist local medical personnel in the treatment of patients.

"There are still a small number of patients who have not fully recovered. We hope they can get better as soon as possible," said Guo Fan, a member of the medical team assisting the Tongji Hospital in Wuhan.

The medical team treated 109 critically ill patients admitted to the designated hospital.

"I have left home for over 80 days, I'm looking forward to seeing my family," said Guo.

A farewell ceremony was held in the early morning in Zhonghe International Hotel, where the medical team stayed in Wuhan.

"They worked very hard. I often saw many fall asleep while having breakfast. They deserve our heartfelt gratitude," said Liu Yanxia, a kitchen helper in the hotel, who left her post to see off the medical team.

Liu Chunhong, 56, is a community volunteer in Wuhan. He and another four volunteers drove to the hotel to bid farewell to the medical team.

"The medical personnel have sacrificed a lot for Wuhan. I come here to express my appreciation," said Liu, who put on a volunteer vest with names of the team members signed on it. "I will keep this vest permanently as a souvenir."

After the ceremony, the medical workers headed for Wuhan Tianhe International Airport at around 10:50 a.m., with police motorcycles and cars escorting the buses and local residents lining the streets and waving goodbye to them.

GONE BUT REMEMBERED

Many citizens also came to the airport to bid farewell to the batch of medical personnel. Doctors and nurses received several souvenirs, including local signature snacks, books, and a special boarding pass.

"The withdrawal of the last medical assistance team shows that the epidemic is under well control in Hubei. I am very happy to see the victory day against the epidemic," said Li Tong, a nurse who was dispatched from Beijing to Wuhan on Feb. 7.

"There were so many unforgettable moments during my 69 days here. Wuhan is my second hometown. I hope it gets better and better," said Li.

Ma Xiaowei, head of the National Health Commission, also spoke highly of the medics for their extraordinary contributions to the fight against the epidemic.

"The assistance team was one of the first medical teams to arrive in Wuhan and the last to leave. They are a team of heroes," said Ma.

Since the virus outbreak, over 42,000 medical workers from across the country were dispatched to aid Hubei to curb the spread of the epidemic.

"Medics, like diseases, have no borders. They have done a wonderful job and that everyone is grateful to them. I hope that all these doctors who came to help our city will be able to rest a little," said Frederick Simon, a French national living in Wuhan.

"They have all my respect, recognition and admiration for their sacrifices," he added.

While reporting their departure at the airport, Pablo Diez, a journalist with Spanish newspaper ABC, said he was deeply impressed by their selfless dedication to the fight against the epidemic.

"The doctors and nurses are the real heroes. Everyone's lives are in their hands. I want to thank them," said Pablo Diez.

"As for the people of Wuhan, we have to support them and to honor them because they have gone through a challenging time," the journalist added.

ORDERLY WITHDRAWAL

On March 16, a leading group of China's COVID-19 response demanded the orderly withdrawal of medical staff supporting the virus-hit Hubei as the epidemic continued to ebb away in the province.

On March 17, the first batch of medical assistance teams started leaving Hubei. The 3,675 medical staffers belonging to 41 medical teams from across China have assisted 14 temporary hospitals and seven designated hospitals in Wuhan.

Dai Zongdong, an airport ground staffer, said he witnessed the arrival of almost every medical worker supporting the hard-hit province since Jan. 24.

"I also bid farewell to each of them at the airport. Today is the last batch," said Dai. "I feel very sad because it's like my family are leaving me."

"I hope the epidemic will come to an end soon and everything will return to normal," added Dai.

At 1:00 p.m., a plane carrying the 179 members of the medical assistance team from the Peking Union Medical College Hospital took off at Wuhan Tianhe International Airport and soared into the air. All three people working in the 115-meter-high air traffic control tower stood solemnly.

"It is a silent farewell. We stand to see the plane take off. Gratitude and blessing are deep in the heart," said Zou Xiugai, a tower instructor controller.
Middle Eastern airlines carrying freight were the hardest hit in the world with a volume decrease of 49 per cent in the last week of March as against the first, said WorldACD, a provider of unique information on air cargo markets.



Cargo capacity on passenger aircraft virtually disappeared in the Middle East and South Asia (MESA) region (-92 per cent), added WorldACDs market data report.



Asia Pacific airlines dropped least (-10 per cent). Airlines from North America lost 53 per cent in European markets, but airlines from Europe only 28 per cent in North American markets.



The volume of high-tech transported in the last week of March, was higher than in the first week. Fish & seafood, fruits & vegetables and flowers were hardest hit, with drops between the first and the last week of 41 per cent, 53 per cent and 58 per cent respectively.



Globally, freight capacity fell by 28 per cent in two weeks time during March Cargo carried on freighters was 3.5 per cent higher in the second half (H2) than in the first (H1), but freight carried on passenger aircraft was halved, causing the total freight carried to drop by 22 per cent from H1 to H2.



After the 2.7 per cent drop we reported for the months of January/February combined, March recorded a decrease in chargeable weight of 17.7 per cent, in spite of the first week of March being the best week of the year so far. Asia Pacific (-12 per cent) and the Americas (-17 per cent) fell least, whilst Africa and MESA were hardest hit (-28 per cent and -32 per cent respectively).



A small increase in freighter capacity (+2 per cent) was more than offset by the sudden lack of cargo capacity in passenger aircraft (-39 per cent), causing yields to go up in most regions, most visibly for cargo originating in Asia Pacific. In that region, unit prices in USD increased year-on-year (YoY) by more than one-third (from China by even 2/3, getting up to an average of $3.58 per kg. In terms of revenues, the market from China to destinations in Asia Pacific stood out with an increase of 91 per cent.



March vs February



Between February and March, freighter capacity increased by 29 per cent, whilst cargo capacity on passenger aircraft dropped by the same percentage. Changes in cargo carried were most conspicuous when looking at the results per type of airline.



Airlines flying freighters only, carried 42 per cent more cargo than in February, whilst airlines operating only passenger aircraft lost 22 per cent. The larger group of airlines operating both passenger aircraft and freighters did not suffer a material change in volume. Not surprisingly, the cargo-only airlines improved their market share considerably, whilst recording a whopping 81 per cent growth in USD-revenues.



Forwarders from the Worlds Top-20 had different experiences: the Top-10 as a group increased volumes by 3 per cent, though with individual performance ranging between -9 per cent and +16 per cent. Individual performances in Tier-2 (the numbers 11-20 lost 2 per cent as a group) were much more divergent, ranging from -40 per cent to +117 per cent.



The Top-10 slightly increased their share as they laid their hands on scarce capacity against a somewhat higher increase of charges than the increase recorded for Tier-2.  TradeArabia News Service
Gulf Pharmaceutical Industries (Julphar), one of the largest pharmaceutical manufacturers in the Middle East and Africa, has announced the appointment of Dr Essam Farouk as Chief Executive Officer (CEO), as the company drives its pioneering transformation programme across the Middle East region and beyond.

With over 27 years experience, Dr Essam will be leading Julphars evolution through its ongoing commitment to elevate and enhance its facilities, processes, practices and infrastructure, ensuring the company is in strong stead for a successful 2020 and beyond, said a statement.

Dr Essam will help solidify the business position as a leading generics company in the region by fulfilling its mission to provide high-quality solutions and improve the health of people regionally and globally, it said.

Sheikh Saqer Humaid Al Qasimi, Chairman of the Board at Julphar, said: With his wealth of experience in the pharmaceutical industry across established and emerging markets, Dr Essam brings a proven track record of leading business transformation, strategic planning and successful hands-on strategy execution. His ability to manage a diverse organization through challenging environments and achieving business and reputational success will ensure Julphar excels further and delivers a greater impact in the 50 markets we operate in around the world.

Prior to his appointment at Julphar, Dr Essam was the CEO at Algerian pharmaceutical company, Elkendi, managing the corporation since its inception in 2006. Under his leadership, the company experienced exceptional growth to become the second largest pharmaceutical company in Algeria and North Africa. He was then appointed CEO for MS Pharma Group, a position he held for seven years, guiding the company to be known as one of the top five leading pharmaceutical companies in the Middle East and North Africa. In addition, Dr Essam has also held senior roles at GlaxoSmithKline, Sanofi Aventis, T3A Pharma Group and Julphar Germany, accumulating a wealth of experience across both multinational and generic business environments.

Dr Essam Farouk said: It is an honour to join an organisation that is at the heart of the UAE and has contributed to the economic growth of Ras Al Khaimah and beyond. I am looking forward in the coming months to working with a highly-skilled team as we aim to continue ensuring that we produce high-quality medicines and innovative added-value generic products and healthcare solutions that will truly change lives for people who need them most. I am committed to restoring Julphars position as a leading regional pharmaceutical company within three years.

Dr Essam holds a Bachelors Degree in Pharmacy from the University of Zagazig and a Masters Degree from AUC and American Society for Quality of USA in Total Quality Management and Operation Management.  TradeArabia News Service
The wealthy Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation called Wednesday for global cooperation to ready COVID-19 vaccines for seven billion people, while offering $150 million toward developing therapeutics and treatments for the virus.

While it is likely to take as many as 18 months to develop and fully test a safe coronavirus vaccine, global authorities and businesses need to start now on plans to manufacture it, said foundation chief executive Mark Suzman.

"It's normal to have, at maximum, hundreds of millions of doses manufactured," he said.

"When you are dealing with a novel pathogen like COVID-19, as and when we get to identifying a successful vaccine, we are going to need billions of doses." "There are seven billion people on the planet," he said. "We are going to need to vaccinate nearly every one. There is no manufacturing capacity to do that."



Suzman announced the foundation, started and controlled by mega-billionaire Microsoft founder Bill Gates and his wife Melinda Gates, is adding $150 million to the $100 million it announced in February to help in international efforts to battle the coronavirus pandemic.

Much of the money is to support the development of COVID-19 diagnostic tests, therapeutic treatments and vaccines, and to make them globally available, he said.

Some is also for helping the poorest countries in South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa, which lack supplies, equipment and infrastructure to counter the new epidemic.

But the foundation has its focus on preparing for the creation of a vaccine that could effectively halt the spread of coronavirus.

Some 100 potential vaccines are being developed and tested by scientists around the world, Suzman said.

Many might appear hopeful in initial, small tests, he said, but most will fail in larger trials.

"A successful vaccine has to be available for seven billion people. You need to test if there are unexpected side effects, or side effects within cohorts or groups, whether it's pregnant women or the elderly or the very young," said Suzman.

"The vast majority of vaccine candidates fail in those larger trials, the so-called phase-three trials." - 'Fastest vaccine ever' -



But even as those trials take place, he said, there needs to be an international group of experts, countries and companies honing in on those with the most promise and preparing ahead of time to manufacture them.

He said both China and the United States have to be part of the joint effort, as well as the World Health Organization. On Tuesday, US President Donald Trump said he was cutting off US funds for the WHO. "Clearly for us, the World Health Organization is a very strong, reliable partner," Suzman said, noting the Gates Foundation is WHO's second-largest source of funding after the US.

Earlier Wednesday, European Commissioner chief Ursula von der Leyen called a donors conference for May 4 to fund the creation and global deployment of a vaccine, calling it "our collective best shot at beating the virus." Suzman said the Gates Foundation is "reasonably optimistic" that one or more successful vaccines can be proven within 12 to 18 months.

"This will be the fastest vaccine ever developed in human history," he said.

Yet getting the production going, he estimated, will cost several billion dollars. Each vaccine finally approved will require its own manufacturing process, and if people don't begin to prepare within months, a lot of time will be lost, he warned.

"There will be no return to 'normal' until there is a vaccine," Suzman said. "But there are no dramatic ways to short-cut it.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
The Vietnamese government has decided to extend the social distancing period in Hanoi, Ho Chi Minh City, Da Nang, and nine other provinces by another week after April 15, labeling these as high-risk localities most susceptible to a novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19) outbreak.

Earlier the same day, the National Committee for COVID-19 Prevention and Control had announced three risk-based categories for cities and provinces in the Southeast Asian country, based on which differently tailored social distancing plans would be implemented from April 16.

According to the COVID-19 committees categorization, Hanoi, Ho Chi Minh City and Da Nang are considered high-risk localities alongside the nine provinces of Lao Cai, Quang Ninh, Bac Ninh, Ninh Binh, Quang Nam, Binh Thuan, Khanh Hoa, Tay Ninh, and Ha Tinh.

These localities will practice enhanced social distancing for another week, until the end of April 22, Prime Minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc said at a meeting on Wednesday afternoon.

Schools, stores, entertainment venues remain closed in these places while any gathering of more than two is banned in public spaces.

Travel restrictions are still in place, with people told to stay home except for trips outdoors for food, medications, and emergency care.

Meanwhile, at-risk localities include the cities of Can Tho and Hai Phong and the provinces of Binh Duong, Dong Nai, Ha Nam, Kien Giang, Nam Dinh, Soc Trang, Thai Nguyen, Thua Thien-Hue, Dong Thap, Binh Phuoc, Nghe An, Lang Son, and An Giang.

The remaining 36 provinces in Vietnam are considered low-risk localities.

Social distancing rules are a little more relaxed in the last two categories, given the same one-week extension.

The categorization is based on risk factors including transportation infrastructure, traffic volumes, border length and border crossings, exposure to foreigners, population density, and density of factories and industrial zones.

All localities regardless of their risk category must strictly enforce regulations on wearing face masks in public, avoiding mass gatherings, keeping a two-meter distance in social interaction, and upholding hygienic standards.

Local governments have the authority and responsibility to take additional measures based on their own condition and risk level to make sure both epidemic control and socio-economic development goals are met.

Political, economic, and social events are to be held only under absolutely necessary circumstances and must follow established guidelines on health monitoring for safety.

For at-risk and low-risk localities, some manufacturing and business activities are allowed to resume after April 15 on the condition that epidemiological safety measures are taken.

Vietnam was poised to complete 15 days of nationwide increased social distancing on April 15 as per a prime minister directive issued on March 31.

The administrations of Ho Chi Minh City and seven other localities had suggested the social distancing measures be in place until the end of this month.

Like us on Facebook or follow us on Twitter to get the latest news about Vietnam!
Source: Xinhua| 2020-04-15 09:54:36|Editor: huaxia

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Photo taken on March 31, 2020 shows the Market Square in Helsinki, Finland. (Xinhua/Zhu Haochen)

Only with concerted efforts can the international community overcome the current challenge and prevail over the epidemic, said Chinese President Xi Jinping.

BEIJING, April 14 (Xinhua) -- Chinese President Xi Jinping said Tuesday that China stands ready to continue exchanging experience in COVID-19 prevention and control with Finland and help the European country tackle such difficulties as the current shortage of medical supplies.

Xi made the remarks in a phone conversation with Finnish President Sauli Niinisto.

On behalf of the Chinese government and people, Xi extended sincere sympathies and firm support to their Finnish counterparts over their fight against the coronavirus disease.

Pointing out that humankind is a community with a shared future that shares weal and woe, Xi said that only with concerted efforts can the international community overcome the current challenge and prevail over the epidemic.

China stands ready to work with other countries to push forward the cause of global public health, he said, adding that China will give priority to restoring and raising the production capacity of medical and anti-epidemic supplies, keep the global industrial and supply chains stable, and contribute to international anti-epidemic cooperation and world economic stability.

A worker directs container hoisting operation of a China-Europe freight train at a logistic station in Xinzhu Railway Station in Xi'an, northwest China's Shaanxi Province, March 11, 2020. (Photo by Tang Zhenjiang/Xinhua)

Not long ago, China held a video conference on epidemic control with Finland and other European countries, Xi recalled, pledging to offer more help.

He said he believes that under the leadership of Niinisto, the Finnish people will carry forward the "sisu" spirit of perseverance and defeat the epidemic.

Meanwhile, Xi said he hopes for the Finnish side to pay close attention to and guarantee the safety of the Chinese nationals living in the European country, especially Chinese students.

The Chinese president added that he is confident that through the joint fight against the coronavirus, the China-Finland friendship will grow deeper.

After defeating the outbreak, Xi suggested, the two sides should resume personnel exchanges at all levels as soon as possible, and unleash the potential of cooperation in such fields as scientific and technological innovation, information and communications, as well as life sciences, so as to push for continuous progress of their future-oriented new-type cooperative partnership.

Chinese President Xi Jinping attends a welcoming ceremony held by his Finnish counterpart Sauli Niinisto before their talks in Helsinki, Finland, April 5, 2017. (Xinhua/Rao Aimin)

For his part, Niinisto said that the Finnish people are currently making strenuous efforts against the severe outbreak raging in their country, and that China's relevant experience is very helpful to them.

He conveyed his gratitude for China's precious support and help in medical and anti-epidemic supplies, and expressed his hope to enhance cooperation with China and overcome the pandemic at an early date.

He said he fully agrees with Xi's vision of building a community with a shared future for mankind, and appreciates China's sound cooperation with the World Health Organization and European countries as well as its push for global public health security cooperation within the framework of the Group of 20 major economies.

China restoring economic development as soon as possible is of crucial significance to the world, said the Finnish president.

Hailing bilateral relations as very good, Niinisto said Finland will continue taking good care of Chinese citizens in Finland.

He added that he hopes to make concerted efforts with his Chinese counterpart to push forward the development of Finland-China relations. 
East Syracuse, N.Y.  Onondaga County Executive Ryan McMahon today said that a new COVID-19 test site at the Walmart in East Syracuse will prioritize testing for nursing home workers and first responders, in addition to people with symptoms of the illness.

McMahon talked this morning with representatives of Walmart and Quest Diagnostics, who agreed to work with the county to help get nursing home employees and other key personnel tested, whether or not they have symptoms, he said. The companies also agreed to share their testing data with the county health department, he said.

In addition to targeted workers, the Walmart site also is expected to test members of the public who meet testing guidelines, McMahon said.

Details on when the test site will open were not available, but McMahon said he thought it could be as early as Friday. Representatives of Quest and Walmart could not immediately be reached.

McMahon had initially expressed concerns about how the new test site would mesh with other testing in the county. Testing is also available from Syracuse Community Health Center or other healthcare providers. He asked for the telephone meeting earlier this week.

Nursing home residents are especially vulnerable to the novel coronavirus, and McMahon has been working on plans to test the people who work in the facilities, whether or not they exhibit symptoms, he said. The new drive-through test site provides a ready solution, he said. Onondaga County has already reported one nursing home death from the disease. Downstate nursing homes have reported hundreds.

McMahon said he does not think there is much pent-up demand for tests. He said Onondaga County  unlike other Upstate communities  does not the lack capacity to test members of the general public who meet the state health departments criteria for testing. The county has enough test kits to meet demand, which is gradually diminishing, he said.

The new East Syracuse test site is among more than 20 that Walmart plans to open this month in 10 states, company officials said. That includes test sites near Buffalo and Rochester that will open this week, according to news reports.

The East Syracuse site will be staffed by employees of Walmart and Quest Diagnostics. Samples will be sent to a Quest laboratory for analysis.

President Trump announced March 13 that national retailers including Walmart would develop COVID-19 test sites in store parking lots around the country to ramp up the amount of testing available. The effort started slowly.

Walmart opened its first two sites March 22 in the Chicago area, and had three in operation Monday, Business Insider reported. Company officials said Monday the company plans to open more than 20 drive-through test sites in 10 states by the end of this month, according to Business Insider.

Walgreens, CVS, Target and Rite Aid also committed to build test sites.

Gov. Andrew Cuomo on Tuesday reiterated his urgent call for more testing in New York state. Testing capacity must increase dramatically if the state is to emerge from economic lockdown, Cuomo said. He called upon the federal government to supply the thousands of test kits necessary.

The state cannot do this on their own, Cuomo said.

MORE ON CORONAVIRUS

Coronavirus in NY: Cases, maps, charts and resources

New York to require masks in public starting this week, Cuomo says

CNY farmer, 39, with coronavirus fighting for his life; pregnant girlfriend sick with virus too

A Syracuse bicycle shop was threatened as 'non-essential; heres how it found a way to stay open

Complete coronavirus coverage on syracuse.com
Technavio has been monitoring the automotive independent front suspension system market and it is poised to grow by USD 11.03 bn 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.

This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20200415005240/en/

Technavio has announced the latest market research report titled Global Automotive Independent Front Suspension System Market 2019-2023 (Graphic: Business Wire)

Technavio suggests three forecast scenarios (optimistic, probable, and pessimistic) considering the impact of COVID-19. Please Request Latest Free Sample Report on COVID-19 Impact

The market is concentrated, and the degree of concentration will accelerate during the forecast period. Continental AG, Hendrickson USA, L.L.C., thyssenkrupp AG, WABCO, and ZF Friedrichshafen AG are some of the major market participants. 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.

Preference for safety and optimum ride handling has been instrumental in driving the growth of the market.

Automotive Independent Front Suspension System Market 2019-2023: Segmentation

Automotive Independent Front Suspension System Market is segmented as below:

Application Passenger Cars Commercial Vehicles

Geographic Landscape APAC Europe MEA North America South America



To learn more about the global trends impacting the future of market research, download a free sample: https://www.technavio.com/talk-to-us?report=IRTNTR30813

Automotive Independent Front Suspension System 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 automotive independent front suspension system market report covers the following areas:

Automotive Independent Front Suspension System Market Size

Automotive Independent Front Suspension System Market Trends

Automotive Independent Front Suspension System Market Industry Analysis

This study identifies advent of independent modular suspension system as one of the prime reasons driving the automotive independent front suspension system market growth during the next few years.

Automotive Independent Front Suspension System Market 2019-2023: Vendor Analysis

We provide a detailed analysis of around 25 vendors operating in the automotive independent front suspension system market, including some of the vendors such as Continental AG, Hendrickson USA, L.L.C., thyssenkrupp AG, WABCO, and ZF Friedrichshafen AG. Backed with competitive intelligence and benchmarking, our research reports on the automotive independent front suspension system market are designed to provide entry support, customer profile and M&As as well as go-to-market strategy support.

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Automotive Independent Front Suspension System Market 2019-2023: Key Highlights

CAGR of the market during the forecast period 2019-2023

Detailed information on factors that will assist automotive independent front suspension system market growth during the next five years

Estimation of the automotive independent front suspension system market size and its contribution to the parent market

Predictions on upcoming trends and changes in consumer behavior

The growth of the automotive independent front suspension system market

Analysis of the market's competitive landscape and detailed information on vendors

Comprehensive details of factors that will challenge the growth of automotive independent front suspension system market vendors

Table Of Contents :

PART 01: EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

PART 02: SCOPE OF THE REPORT

2.1 Preface

2.2 Preface

2.3 Currency conversion rates for US$

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

Passenger cars Market size and forecast 2018-2023

Commercial vehicles Market size and forecast 2018-2023

Market opportunity by application

PART 07: CUSTOMER LANDSCAPE

PART 08: GEOGRAPHIC LANDSCAPE

Geographic segmentation

Geographic comparison

APAC Market size and forecast 2018-2023

Europe Market size and forecast 2018-2023

North America Market size and forecast 2018-2023

South America Market size and forecast 2018-2023

MEA Market size and forecast 2018-2023

Key leading countries

Market opportunity

PART 09: DRIVERS AND CHALLENGES

Market drivers

Market challenges

PART 10: MARKET TRENDS

Emerging modular independent suspension system

Integration of active steering controls with advanced suspension systems

Development of active chassis systems

PART 11: VENDOR LANDSCAPE

Overview

Landscape disruption

PART 12: VENDOR ANALYSIS

Vendors covered

Vendor classification

Market positioning of vendors

Continental AG

Hendrickson USA, L.L.C.

thyssenkrupp AG

WABCO

ZF Friedrichshafen AG

PART 13: APPENDIX

Research methodology

List of abbreviations

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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.

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Mayor Bill de Blasio said on Wednesday morning that he was only 'hopeful' New York would reopen by September but that social distancing would still have to exist to an extent.

He gave his grave prediction during an interview with Fox and Friends where he also warned that making 'one false move' could prove fatal.

On Tuesday, New York City added another 3,800 people to its COVID-19 death toll.

They are people who healthcare workers suspected had the virus but who never received tests before they died. It brings the city's total death toll to more than 11,000.

De Blasio said on Wednesday that the number reflected the true extent of the crisis and that 'we had to be honest about it'.

Mayor Bill de Blasio said on Wednesday morning that he was only 'hopeful' New York would reopen by September but that social distancing would still have to exist to an extent

He was asked by Fox's Steve Doocy what New York would look like in three months and skirted around giving a potential start-date for the reopening but said it would be 'months' before sporting events resumed.

'By September, three or four months from now, then we are hopeful we can be back to something more like normal but the way we get there with the smart cautious approach.

'Even if we still have to keep a lot of social distancing in place, then I can see us sustaining, then from the fall on resuming being a normal country,' he said.

Earlier, in an interview with CNN's New Day, he said, if the city or state makes 'one false move', the result could be catastrophic.

The first thing to be prepared for, is it will take time and we should get it right.

'One false move and we see a resurgence of the disease, that would be the worst of all scenarios,' he said.

He added in that interview it would be 'a while' before people were attending sporting events at Yankee Stadium again.

'It's going to be a while. Everyone is missing sports but if we put 50,000 people in Yankee Stadium and that's why you get a resurgence? We have to prove we can contain this disease.

'To get to the next phase is to know each individual person whose had the disease, who they've come into contact with... that's months away.

'You can't have a sporting events and big crowds until you can prove you've brought this disease down to something very limited and you're holding it there.

De Blasio has claimed he will have 50,000 coronavirus tests produced by the end of next week after taking matters into his own hands to get them made in the city because of a lack of help from the federal government.

A company in Indiana is also donating 50,000 diagnostic tests to the city every week starting April 20, which means - if the quotas are met - that the city will have 400,000 extra tests per month.

People line up at a food bank in Manhattan on Tuesday. Millions have lost their jobs and are unable to feed themselves

Deserted New York City streets on Tuesday. The city, like the rest of the state, remains in lockdown

There are makeshift morgues all over the city to house the overwhelming body count

Gov. Andrew Cuomo has cast doubt on de Blasio's optimistic testing plan, saying the private companies that have promised him the big numbers will never be able to deliver on them and that it will be down to FEMA to ramp up testing across the country.

There is now a global race to perfect diagnostic tests and antibody tests that could hold the key to getting people back to work.

The state of New York has approved its own antibody test that it is scaling up now to become available in thousands by next week.

Cuomo says that and widely available diagnostic tests will be the key to reopening the economy gradually.
PR-Inside.com: 2020-04-15 14:31:01

TORONTO, April 15, 2020 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Northland Power Inc. (Northland) (TSX: NPI) announces it will release its 2020 first quarter financial results after market close on Wednesday, May 13, 2020. Northland's management will hold an investor conference call and webcast at 10 a.m. Eastern Time (ET) on Thursday, May 14, 2020, followed by a question and answer period.

Conference call details:

Date: Thursday, May 14, 2020 Start Time: 10:00 a.m. ET Phone Number: Toll free (North America): (866) 864-6943 Toll free (International): (949) 877-3040

The call will also be broadcast live on the internet, in listen-only mode and may be accessed on northlandpower.com .

For those unable to attend the live call, an audio recording will be available on Northlands website at northlandpower.com on May 15, 2020.

ABOUT NORTHLAND POWER

Northland is a global developer, owner and operator of sustainable infrastructure assets that deliver predictable cash flows. Headquartered in Toronto, Canada, Northland was founded in 1987 and has been publicly traded since 1997 on the Toronto Stock Exchange (TSX: NPI).

Northland owns or has an economic interest in 2,681 MW (net 2,266 MW) of operating generating capacity and 130 MW of generating capacity under construction, representing the La Lucha solar project in Mexico. Northland also owns a 60% equity stake in the 1,044 MW Hai Long projects under development in Taiwan and operates a regulated utility business in Colombia.

Northland's common shares, Series 1, Series 2 and Series 3 preferred shares and Series C convertible debentures trade on the Toronto Stock Exchange under the symbols NPI, NPI.PR.A, NPI.PR.B, NPI.PR.C and NPI.DB.C, respectively.

For further information contact:

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investorrelations@northlandpower.com

northlandpower.com
President Donald Trump's move to halt funding to the World Health Organization has been met with severe criticism at home and abroad, with the United Nations secretary-general saying "now is not the time" for such a drastic move while the coronavirus pandemic is gripping the globe.

Trump made the announcement Tuesday pending a review of the WHO's response to the initial coronavirus outbreak in China. He claims the agency has been too close to Beijing and covered up for its mistakes.

Congressional Democrats are disputing the president's authority to do this. Republican lawmakers are planning their own investigation, examining the early response by the WHO and the Chinese government.

"Now is a time for unity in the global battle to push the COVID-19 pandemic into reverse, not a time to cut the resources of the World Health Organization, which is spearheading and coordinating the global body's efforts," U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said in a statement Tuesday.

China expressed "deep concern" about Trump's announcement, its foreign ministry spokesman, Zhao Lijian, said at a news briefing.

"As the most authoritative and most professional organization, the World Health Organization has played an irreplaceable role in global public health crisis," Zhao said. "The decision of the U.S. will undercut the ability of the WHO and damage the global cooperation of fighting the epidemic."

The European Union's foreign policy chief, Josep Borrell, tweeted similar misgivings.

Deeply regret US decision to suspend funding to @WHO. There is no reason justifying this move at a moment when their efforts are needed more than ever to help contain & mitigate the #coronavirus pandemic. Only by joining forces we can overcome this crisis that knows no borders.  Josep Borrell Fontelles (@JosepBorrellF) April 15, 2020

Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov slammed Trumps move as "a very selfish approach." He told the TASS news agency, "We urge the United States to abandon further attacks on the WHO and pursue a responsible line."

Story continues

And Moussa Faki Mahamat, the chairman of the African Union Commission, called the decision "deeply regrettable."

It's not just governments and international organizations that have lined up to express dismay at Trump's move. Experts, entrepreneurs and others have also been quick to condemn the announcement.

Microsoft founder and philanthropist Bill Gates told his 50 million Twitter followers that halting the WHO's funding was "as dangerous as it sounds."

"Their work is slowing the spread of COVID-19 and if that work is stopped, no other organization can replace them," Gates tweeted. "The world needs the WHO now more than ever."

Dr. Amesh Adalja, a senior scholar with Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, told Reuters, "The move sends the wrong message during the middle of a pandemic." While the WHO has made mistakes in the past, he added, "it's not the middle of a pandemic that you do this type of thing."

And Richard Horton, editor-in-chief of the Lancet medical journal, described Trump's move as "a crime against humanity." He tweeted that "every scientist, every health worker, every citizen must resist and rebel against this appalling betrayal of global solidarity."

A slew of other world leaders and senior officials lined up to express their dismay over what they said was Trump's willingness to hamper the WHO just when the world needs it the most.

The U.S. is the world's largest financial contributor to the organization, accounting for roughly 15 percent of its budget. Trump has said that amounts to some $500 million each year.

German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas said that ascribing blame "does not help" because "the virus knows no borders. We have to closely work together."

New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern said that "at time like this when we need to be sharing information and we need to have advice we can rely on, the WHO has provided that."

Not everyone was quite so scathing. Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison said he sympathized with some of Trump's criticisms of the WHO, but nevertheless said now was not the time "to throw the baby out with the bathwater" and hobble the agency at a time of global crisis.

Image: A medical staff member treats a patient infected with coronavirus at a hospital in Wuhan on Feb. 22, 2020. (AFP - Getty Images file)

Trump has accused the WHO of "severely mismanaging and covering up" the coronavirus crisis, specifically the initial outbreak in Wuhan, China. He also claimed that the WHO "pushed China's misinformation about the virus ... and there was no need for travel bans."

He took particular issue with the agency's criticism of his order to temporarily deny entry to the U.S. by most foreign nationals who had recently been in China. The order was issued Jan. 31, when China was the center of the outbreak.

Download the NBC News app for full coverage and alerts about the coronavirus outbreak

The agency was informed of the first cases Dec. 31. The next day, it requested information from Chinese officials, and the Wuhan market where the outbreak is believed to have originated was closed for disinfection, according to a WHO report.

Then, on Jan. 30, it declared a global health emergency as the number of cases hit 10,000.

Trump's move to halt funding for the agency that oversees international public health has raised questions about whether it could affect efforts by other countries to curtail coronavirus cases.

Dr. Patrice Harris, the president of the American Medical Association, excoriated the president in a statement Tuesday for making the move "during the worst public health crisis in a century."

"Cutting funding to the WHO  rather than focusing on solutions  is a dangerous move at a precarious moment for the world," Harris said. "The AMA is deeply concerned by this decision and its wide-ranging ramifications, and we strongly urge the President to reconsider."
Health workers have begun protests at hospitals throughout Greece in opposition to the chronic underfunding of the public health care system during the coronavirus pandemic.

On April 7, protests were held by the Federation of Greek Hospital Doctors Associations (OENGE) to coincide with World Health Day. Demands include increase in permanent front-line staff, intensive care unit beds and a full supply of personal protective equipment (PPE).

Medical staff protested at hospitals all over Athens, including outside Evangelismos, which is the capitals main hospital. Protests also took place outside hospitals in the second largest city, Thessaloniki, as well as smaller cities such as Volos, Trikala and Karditsa.

Hospital staff wearing masks to protect against the spread of the coronavirus protest at Evagelismos hospital during the World Health Day, in Athens, April 7. (AP Photo/Petros Giannakouris)

Police units intervened under the pretext that the protests were in contravention of the lockdownwhich prohibits assemblies of more than 10 people in public places. The situation was particularly tense outside Evangelismos, where police entered the hospital and tried to break up the protest but were forced to withdraw.

Since the lockdown measures were introduced, there have been numerous reports of police abuse such as imposing fines on people with the necessary documentation to justify their outings, such as shopping for necessities. Fines have even been imposed on homeless people. Another case of police brutality saw officers reportedly tearing up the document of a migrant worker justifying his need to be outside.

With 2,170 cases and a death toll of 101, Greece has not yet seen the high death toll experienced by other European countries. Belgium, which has a similar population, has recorded 31,119 cases and 4,157 deaths.

The relatively lower death toll is largely a result of strict lockdown measures implemented earlier than other European countries. Before a death had been recorded in the country, carnivals were cancelled at the end of February. Schools were shut March 10, while commercial businesses except for supermarkets, bakeries and grocery stores were shut in the week that followed.

Foremost in the minds of the ruling elite was that after a decade of relentless austerity at the behest of the European Union (EU) and the International Monetary Fund, the health care system would collapse under the weight of an unchecked pandemic.

Fearful of the backlash from workers and youth, the government felt compelled to take measures. In an interview with CNN, New Democracy (ND) Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis bluntly stated that the health care system was battered after 10 years of austerity, so we were painfully aware of the fact that we were at bigger risk compared to other EU countries.

Over the last decade, Greeces health budget was slashed by 50 percent. Just 5 percent of GDP is spent on public health care, 2 percent lower than the EU average. Greece only had 560 intensive care unit (ICU) beds as the pandemic began. In 2012, as the austerity programme began to intensify, Greece had just six ICU beds per 100,000 inhabitants. This compared to 29.2 in Germany. In the intervening eight years, Greece's ICU bed availability has no doubt worsened.

Speaking on a live broadcast by omniatv over Facebook to mark International Health Day, Meropi Mantaiou, a lung specialist at Sotiria Chest Diseases Hospitalwhich has seen more than half of COVID-19 hospital admissions in Greecesaid: Everyone is scared stiff, especially the government, in case the ESY [National Health System] collapses. Because if the ESY collapses, we will witness biblical scenes.

There are currently 30,000 job vacancies in Greek hospitals, while 4,000 workers, many of them frontline staff, are employed on temporary contracts. Their extension for another year was approved by the Health Ministry last September. Chronic understaffing, combined with the lack of PPE, has meant that even with the relatively lower hospital admissions, Greek hospitals are struggling during the pandemic. Many health workers have been infected by coronavirus. Speaking to iEidiseis.gr, Dimitra Stamatelou, a member of OENGEs executive and a health worker at Nikaia Hospital, stated, 129 of our colleagues are sick with the virus and more than 500 are under quarantine.

The conservative government has hired just over 2,000 new doctors, nurses and paramedics, with plans for hiring another 2,000. This is a drop in the ocean. The new staff are to be employed on a temporary basis and no doubt will be discarded once the pandemic is over.

Even this small increase is deceptive, as Mantaiou made clear. Speaking to Balkan Insight, she said, Very few new doctors have actually integrated in the [Sotiria] hospital. Transfers from other hospitals and clinics have provided more nursing and support personnel, but they are inexperienced. You cant use people in ICU without training. This is a patchwork.

The government is using the pandemic to bolster the private health sector. This was already under way with the launch of the Public Private Initiative in the Greek health care system in January. While this was to be initially piloted in three hospitals, ND has used the pandemic as a pretext to increase the private sectors presence at an even faster rate. The government plans to increase ICU capacity to 910 beds by leasing beds at private clinics at an exorbitant daily rate of 1,600double the usual cost charged by private hospitals!

Another area where the government is bolstering the private sector is coronavirus testing. While the rate of testing has increased in recent weeks, with just 4,055 tests per 1 million inhabitants, this is around a quarter of the rate in Germany.

At the start of the epidemic, the bulk of tests were carried out at just one lab at the Institute Pasteur in Athens. Capacity within the public sector was increased, mostly thanks to initiatives taken by medical schools nationwide, independently of the government. Instead of providing support to these initiatives, the government allocated 30 million to increase testing through the private sector.

At current market prices, this will amount to just a few hundred thousand tests. Private labs in Greece are reportedly charging as much as 300 for a COVID-19 test. Medical schools, in contrast, have offered the use of their facilities for testing at a fifth of the cost of employing the private sector.

Public labs at Athens University are having to rely on donations such as the 20,000 test kits donated to Athens and Thessaloniki Universities by the Ioannis Latsis Foundation and Syn-Enosis, a philanthropic foundation run by Greek shipowners.

No trust can be placed in a private-sector-led testing programme where commercial considerations constantly cut across public health ones. This is underscored by the 500 new privately owned mobile testing units recently procured by the government to conduct COVID-19 tests at patients homes. According to the government decree, staff contracts at the units will only be for three months with the possibility of a further three months.

The lack of any systematic testing has led many in Greeces scientific community to criticise government policy, which has so far relied solely on social distancing measures. Sotiris Tsiodras, the infectious disease specialist appointed as the Health Ministry spokesperson, responded to such criticisms by conceding that any test regime is based on the capabilities of the health system while insisting at this stage physical distance is better than testing.

As is the case across Europe, the Greek ruling elite is making plans to enforce a return to work nationally. In a TV interview with the Mega Channel, Health Minister Vassilis Kikilias announced that some lockdown measures may be lifted in May. He claimed that this will be accompanied by extensive testing to determine whether parts of the population have developed antibodies and are therefore immune, which will then determine what steps are taken thereafter.

No one should believe such reassurances when no serious effort has been made to strengthen the public health system, even as Tsiodras warns that a second wave of the pandemic in the autumn is highly likely and may well be more deadly.

The chief concern of the Greek ruling class is the strengthening of the repressive apparatus of the state in anticipation of an inevitable backlash. Anticipating a growth in social unrest, veteran journalist and commentator Alexis Papachelas wrote in Sundays Kathimerini, Decisiveness will be demanded and a war-like government that can get the country back on its feet economically and that can say No at the appropriate time when its under great pressure.
WASHINGTON, DCPeople here in the U.S., like those in other places in the world, have recently rediscovered their appreciation of health-care workers  doctors and nurses and paramedics.

But theres another whole class of less-heralded front-line workers keeping society going, people who often earn minimum-wage, or something close to it. Grocery store clerks, retail delivery warehouse workers, bus drivers, delivery people.

Its safe to say they are feeling less appreciated, though they too are very much at risk.

Were not essential. Were sacrificial. I will be replaced if I die from this, Walmart worker Jennifer Suggs of South Carolina told New Orleans public radio this week.

The fear is not just anecdotal. Nationwide, at least 41 grocery store workers had died from the illness by the weekend, and thousands have tested positive. In a survey of its 1.3 million food and retail workers released Monday, the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) union found a workforce afraid of contracting the illness through their jobs (85 per cent said customers were not following social distancing rules) and feeling their sacrifice was being taken for granted (62 per cent said customers blame them for shortages, 43 per cent said customers were shouting at them).

I just think that the sacrifices that were asking of these workers, especially given the fact that theyre low income, makes this all so much harder on them, says Molly Kinder, a fellow at the Brookings think tank in Washington who has been researching low-wage workers on the front lines of the coronavirus crisis. I think that the pandemic is shining a really harsh spotlight on working conditions and pay and benefits for the 53 million American workers who make low wages  workers, she notes, whose labour has come to be viewed as essential in this emergency.

These workers are overwhelmingly low-income and disproportionately Black and Latino. Its part of why the poor and people of colour are being hit the hardest by the coronavirus epidemic in the U.S.

These groups are the most likely to work in jobs that cant be done from home. An Axios-Ipsos Coronavirus Index survey this month found lower-income people were more likely to be working normally and more likely to be laid off than wealthier workers who can telecommute. Front-line service workers are often in daily contact with the public, risking exposure to COVID-19. Low-income workers are less likely to have paid sick time, health insurance, or a financial cushion to absorb a loss of income. Kinder said many live in multi-generational families, meaning they cannot adequately social distance at home, and take public transit to work, further increasing their exposure.

And low-income Americans, especially Indigenous and African-Americans, are more likely to have asthma, diabetes, and other chronic health conditions that make them more likely to get very sick if they contract the virus.

COVID-19 is making racial and income inequality even worse in America.

The $2 trillion economic rescue package the federal government passed does include some provisions for low-income workers  including $1,200 cheques, increased unemployment insurance benefits and no-cost testing for uninsured people.

But there are calls to do more. For instance, UFCW has asked the Centers for Disease Control to issue mandatory safety guidance for front-line food and commercial workers mandating protective equipment and sanitizing practices.

Connor Maxwell and Danyell Solomon of the Center for American Progress published a set of policy recommendations Tuesday to help people of colour during the pandemic that included more money, protection from evictions and foreclosures, no-cost medical treatment for the uninsured and underinsured, and a suspension of negative credit reporting. Kinder is advocating low-wage essential workers receive hazard pay that would give them a living-wage standard of at least $16.10 per hour.

And what about beyond the crisis? Some past emergencies have led to permanent changes  the New Deal after the Great Depression, the G.I. Bill after WWII, the rise of employer-sponsored health insurance and consolidation of public health functions and the hospital system after the 1918 flu epidemic.

Its possible to imagine an overhaul of the American safety net in the wake of COVID-19: many have said this is a wake-up call for the need to provide public health insurance and mandatory paid sick leave. Some have suggested  now that bailout cheques are being mailed to people across the country  that U.S. society may be ready to embrace a universal basic income.

As the presidential campaign goes on, addressing the toll on front-line, low-income workers is likely to at least become a debating point.

Theres growing momentum to say that, yes, in the pandemic, they deserve more money. Workers deserve paid sick leave and health insurance. But when this is over, they do too, Kinder says. And I think we might actually come out of this with some structural change.

Kinder says her own sense is that the most likely areas for change are around a much higher minimum wage, paid leave requirements, and stronger union protections. The last would be a sea change in a country where less than 10 per cent of the workforce is unionized.

I mean, I dont think were gonna turn into Denmark. But, you know, I think all these issues are incredibly raw, Kinder says. Its put into such dramatic terms what were asking and what little were giving in terms of respect and pay and benefits and safety, to an underclass of workers that have never been appreciated or valued.

The crisis is putting a spotlight on some of these issues, Kinder says. Frankly, I think thats the first step to get policy-makers to care.

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The suit points to language in Southwests contract with customers, which says the airline in such situations would put customers on the next available flight or refund their fares in accordance with the form of payment utilized for the Ticket. It alleges Southwest violated that contract for Bombin and seeks class-action status to represent everyone Southwest has failed to refund since March 1.
MILWAUKEE, April 15, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- As the U.S. acts with speed and scale to support frontline health worker heroes during the COVID-19 crisis, a key group of heroes is in danger of being left behind.

Direct Support Professionals, also known as DSPs, are health workers who provide essential supports to people with developmental disabilities. They, along with their employers and supporters, are advocating for their inclusion in pending legislation and program implementation.

"Our DSPs are motivated by professionalism and their love for the people they support," said Mike Thirtle, Ph.D., president and CEO of Bethesda, a leading nonprofit organization employing nearly 2,000 DSPs across the country. "Their work is complex: they administer medications, perform tube feedings when needed and respond to urgent medical situations. They are also working 24/7 in homes with people known or suspected to have COVID-19."

In addition, DSPs are saving lives by diligently doing the infection control work, maintaining separation where needed, and keeping homes clean and people healthy. Many DSPs are working extra hours to cover shifts lost to sick or unavailable co-workers. They are also helping people with disabilities cope with feeling the loss of beloved family members or friends who can no longer come to visit.

Necessary and costly actions

Bethesda has supported DSPs as much as possible through emergency actions that are both necessary and costly. Like hospitals, Bethesda has needed to purchase personal protective equipment for frontline teams. Critical staffing needs have necessarily led to significant labor cost increases. These emergency costs will continue until this pandemic abates.

To remedy the situation, Bethesda is strongly recommending that:

Congress pass the proposed "Heroes Bill" legislation that helps frontline health workers and, critically, include DSP health workers in its scope;

Congress expand the CARES Act Paycheck Protection Program to include help for all not-for-profit organizations that provide community-level supports for the most vulnerable people, like those with developmental disabilities; and

Finally, when reliable, widespread and rapid-cycle testing is made available, DSPs and people with developmental disabilities should be given some priority, as knowing those infected and those with immunity would empower organizations like Bethesda to best protect people with developmental disabilities, who are inherently at greater risk for the ravages of severe COVID-19.

"The government's temporary measures can make all the difference for people with developmental disabilities and the people who love them," Thirtle said. "As we work through this crisis together as a nation, I urge you to please remember the six million Americans with developmental disabilities and their families, the organizations that help them, and the brave DSPs who are there for them every day."

Bethesda urges everyone to contact their Congressional representatives on behalf of DSPs. To do so, visit the Bethesda Advocacy Center by using this link: https://www.votervoice.net/BLC/campaigns/73261/respond.

About Bethesda

Headquartered in Watertown, Wis., Bethesda is a national organization providing homes and other services for people with intellectual and developmental disabilities, and celebrated its 115th anniversary in 2019. Bethesda strives to become a central point of connection that unites people who have disabilities with communities and provides essential resources to help them live their lives to the fullest. The organization offers more than 300 programs across the country, provided 4 million hours of support across all programs in the most recent fiscal year, and is guided by Christian faith. Visit http://www.bethesdalc.org, like our Facebook page and follow us on Twitter, LinkedIn and Instagram.

SOURCE Bethesda

Related Links

http://www.bethesdalc.org


Social distancing restrictions imposed to limit the spread of coronavirus could be lifted in as soon as four weeks, Prime Minister Scott Morrison has said.

The Prime Minister said three requirements must be met before the rules are changed: more testing, better contact tracing and quicker reactions to outbreaks.

"We need an even broader testing regime," Mr Morrison said.

"We have one of, if not the most, extensive testing regimes in the world today. We need to do even better than that."

The Prime Minister said technology will be used to create "even greater tracing capability than we have now", as the federal government finalises a mobile app it hopes will help track contacts of those who contract coronavirus.

"We will use the next four weeks to ensure that we can get these in place," he said.

"And the baseline restrictions that have been set will remain place until we are able to achieve those three goals."

Mr Morrison said the restrictions would be reviewed on a state-by-state basis.
Mame Yaa Aboagye, Deputy Communications Director of the ruling New Patriotic Party (NPP) has debunked allegations by Zanetor Rawlings, Member of Parliament for Korley Klottey Constituency that government is distributing relief items intended for the less privileged and vulnerable in the lockdown areas to New Patriotic Party (NPP) faithfuls.



According to Mame Yaa Aboagye, politics should not be used to undermine President Akufo Addos effort in fighting against the deadly coronavirus.



We should not play political campaign for votes under this pandemic, she said.



Zenator Rawlings has accused government of being biased in the distribution of relief items to the target audience.



In about 3 minutes video circulating on social media, Zanetor Rawlings condemned the act saying its unacceptable and defeats the intended purpose of the food distribution.



Mame Yaa has asked the NDC and their Members of Parliament, particularly Zanetor Rawlings, to stop the politicization and further challenged them to corroborate their claims.



I am surprised at Hon.Zanetor . So, does it mean here relief items to her constituency (Korley Klottey Constiteuncy) which includes bread, This Way and sachet water are only shared among NDC members? The team she appointed to share the food are also strong NDC members...The truth must always remain so irrespective of our political colours. The most painful part is this disease does not know any party colours. It does not know NPP or NDC, so why politicize it? she questioned.



Mame Yaa Aboagye commended President Akufo-Addo for his proactive measures and interventions in fighting the pandemic and believed the Presidents judicious decisions have ignited fear in the camp of opposition party.



The attitude and propaganda of Hon. Zanetor Rawlings is shambolic. I know the fulfillment of the promises of the NPP government has greatly affected the opposition party that is why they have channeled all their energy to the distribution of the relief itemsLet us change our behavior, unite and fight the pandemic, she stressed.

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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Government continues to put stringent measures in place to help curb the incidence of fake news spread in the country, especially at a time when Ghanaians are at their wits end concerning the fast-spreading Coronavirus pandemic.



At a press briefing on Tuesday, Information Minister, Kojo Oppong Nkrumah did not mince words when he cautioned agents of fake news; politicians and civilians alike, on the need to refrain from such deeds.



He reiterated that the phenomenon is an offense and thus culprits caught will be made to face the law accordingly.



Fake News is punishable under Ghanaian Law Section 76, Electronic Communications Act, 2008 (Act 775):



(1) A person who by means of electronic communications service, knowingly sends a communication which is false or misleading and likely to prejudice the efficiency of life-saving service or to endanger the safety of any person, ...commits an offence and is liable on summary conviction to a fine of not more than [thirty-six thousand Ghana Cedis] or to a term of imprisonment of not more than five years or both, he noted



He also stated that "(2) A person is taken to know that a communication is false or misleading if that person did not take reasonable steps to find out whether the communication was false, misleading, reckless or fraudulent.



Kojo Oppong Nkrumah charged individuals who seek information on the updates of COVID-19 to verify from the Ghana Health Service website in order to be sure before they spread any news.



In these challenging times, please consider this law before you forward fake news on Whatsapp, IG, Facebook, etc. You may be held personally liable for forwarding that message. Your service provider may easily escape the net without blame, he added.

Source: ghanaweb









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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Lagos State Governor, Babajide Sanwo-Olu has promised residents in the state of safety of lives and their property even amid the lockdown.

Governor Sanwo-Olu said this on Tuesday, April 14 while addressing newsmen at Marina, following the deployment of security agencies to different locations in the state to halt attacks by robbers and hoodlums on residents while observing the stay at home order.

With the governor at the press briefing is the Commissioner of Police, Hakeem Odumosu; Commissioner for Health, Akin Abayomi; Nigeria Navy Ship Beecroft, Commandant Ibrahim Shettima and 9 Brigade Commander Ikeja Cantonment, Brigade General Musa Awwal.

Naija News understands that Sanwo-Olu had an emergency Security Council meeting with the top officials as mentioned above to discuss and provide a means of curbing the increasing reports of crime committed daily by robbers, cultists, miscreants and other criminals amid the lockdown in the state due to the Coronavirus outbreak.

The governor noted that Over 100 suspects have been arrested in the last 72 hours on account of disturbances. All the suspects have accordingly been charged to court.

Those miscreants that you may have seen in the videos going viral are not hungry people. They are opportunistic criminals and will be treated as such by the law enforcement agencies, said Sanwo-Olu.

Sanwo-Olu further stated that the Lagos State government is working hand in hand with the Federal Government to proffer solutions to the ongoing in the state. Adding that DIG Peter Ogunyanwo has been deployed in the state as the Intervention Squad Coordinator to restore peace of residents by dealing with the evil perpetrators.

He said, With this revised strategy, you will see an increase in mobile police deployment in all trouble spots in the metropolis as well as the police intensifying patrols around residential areas, boundary communities during this lockdown period.

This will also be carried out in conjunction with other security agencies  Army, Navy, Airforce and Directorate of State Security Services (DSS),

Sanwo-Olu, however, urged all Lagosians to adhere to the lockdown extension directive, noting that violators of the order will be dealt with as there will be zero tolerance for disobedience.

Meanwhile, Naija News had reported earlier that the Governor of Kaduna State, Mallam Nasir El-Rufai has given his approval for the freedom of 72 convicts in the Kaduna and Kafanchan Correctional Centres.

Naija News Understands that the State Government took the decisive approach as part of the governments efforts to prevent the spread of COVID-19.

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One in every three small and mid-sized firms said between 75 per cent and 100 per cent of their staff had been furloughed, according to a new survey from the British Chambers of Commerce (BCC).

However, only two per cent of companies have managed to obtain funding from a public loan scheme set up to help SMEs affected by the coronavirus crisis.

The group found that either a slow or a lack of response from lenders was the primary reason that so few firms were able to acquire finance from the Coronavirus Business Interruption Loan Scheme (CBILS).

Traders have complained that gaining financial assistance from the programme has been very difficult and that despite government announcements on April 2 to streamline the application process, few have received any money.

Small and medium-sized enterprises with an annual turnover of up to 45million can secure certain financial products, including loans and overdrafts valued at up to 5million for a maximum period of six years

'Businesses on the front line need cash to start flowing from support schemes fast,' said BCC Director General Dr Adam Marshall.

'With April's payday coming up, we are fast approaching a crunch point, and both the furlough scheme and CBILS facilities need to be accelerated.'

Ten days after the scheme began, only 983 companies that applied for loans have received assistance despite around 130,000 making an application.

New figures released today though have found that more than 1.1billion has been given to UK firms through CBILS, although less than 25 per cent of traders who have applied for funding have gained support.

The scheme was established on March 23, the same day Prime Minister Boris Johnson announced that all non-essential businesses should be closed to prevent the coronavirus disease from escalating.

Small and medium-sized enterprises with an annual turnover of up to 45million can secure certain financial products, including loans and overdrafts valued at up to 5million for a maximum period of six years.

BCC Director General Dr Adam Marshall: 'Businesses on the front line need cash to start flowing from support schemes fast. With April's payday coming up, we are fast approaching a crunch point, and both the furlough scheme and CBILS facilities need to be accelerated'

'It is essential that the Job Retention Scheme makes payments to businesses as soon as possible. Any delay could mean more livelihoods under threat, more business failures, and more hardship in our communities,' added Dr Marshall.

The survey also found that two-thirds of companies had furloughed staff in expectation of the government's Job Retention Scheme becoming active.

Businesses will be able to access the jobs scheme during the week of April 20, leaving only a short time for funds to start to reach cash-strapped businesses before April's payroll is processed, the BCC remarked.

36 per cent of companies surveyed by the British Chambers of Commerce reported that they have only one to three months worth of reserves left, while 17 per cent have less than a month

Cash flow is another notable concern raised by the survey, with 36 per cent of companies reporting that they have only one to three months worth of reserves left, while 17 per cent possess less than a month's reserves - broadly similar to last week.

A Treasury spokeswoman said: 'We've been taking unprecedented action at unprecedented speed to help businesses, jobs and our economy during this crisis  with hundreds of thousands of firms across the county benefitting from our wide package of support.

'Our jobs retention scheme is ensuring people are able to stay employed during the outbreak and approvals for our business interruption loan scheme has shown an eightfold increase in the last two weeks  with around 4,200 loans worth just over 800million. We're working closely with banks to ensure we get this support out to those who need it as soon as possible.'
MIDLAND, VA / ACCESSWIRE / April 15, 2020 / Smith-Midland Corporation (OTCQX:SMID) - Concrete Safety Systems (CSS), Smith-Midland's safety barrier rental division announces the signing of a $1.1m contract with Branch Civil Inc.

CSS will supply over 22,000 liner feet of NCHRP and MASH compliant J-J Hooks precast concrete highway safety barrier for the VDOT I-81 Auxiliary Lanes project in Roanoke County, Virginia. During the 2-3 year project window CSS will provide delivery, relocation, and pickup services of all barrier rented. Additional services will include pin installation on the 2,000+ feet of restrained barrier as well as rental of attenuators. Installation will begin in mid-April.

Concrete Safety Systems is a leading Mid-Atlantic barrier rental and logistics provider, with storage yards strategically located across their market area. CSS also provides security and crowd control barrier solution logistics across North America, having served as a partner in multiple high-level US and International Government and Commercial events.

About Smith-Midland Corporation

Smith-Midland Corporation is a publicly traded company (OTCQX:SMID). Smith-Midland develops, manufactures, and sells a broad array of precast concrete products for use primarily in the construction, transportation, and utilities industries. Smith-Midland Corporation has three manufacturing facilities located in Midland, VA, Reidsville, NC, and Columbia, SC. Easi-Set Worldwide, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Smith-Midland Corporation, licenses the production and sale of Easi-Set products, including J-J Hooks, and provides diversification opportunities to the precast industry worldwide. For more information, please call (540) 439-3266 or visit www.smithmidland.com.

This announcement contains forward-looking statements, which involve risks and uncertainties. The Company's actual results may differ significantly from the results discussed in the forward-looking statements. Factors which might cause such a difference include, but are not limited to, product demand, the impact of competitive products and pricing, capacity and supply constraints or difficulties, general business and economic conditions, the effect of the Company's accounting policies and other risks detailed in the Company's Annual Report on Form 10-K and other filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

CONTACT:

Media Inquiries: media@smithmidland.com

Sales Inquiries: (540) 439-3266, info@smithmidland.com

SOURCE: Smith-Midland Corporation

View source version on accesswire.com:https://www.accesswire.com/585084/Concrete-Safety-Systems-Signs-11m-Agreement-on-I-81-Project
LATEST, April 15, 8 p.m. Seven new deaths from the novel coronavirus were reported in San Mateo County on Wednesday night.

This is the first time the county has reported new deaths since last Tuesday, when eight deaths were reported. There are now 28 total deaths in San Mateo County so far.

April 15, 7 p.m. The number of Bay Area COVID-19 patients requiring hospitalization and intensive care is down from last week.

The number of total hospitalizations for confirmed and suspected coronavirus patients has been flat over the past three days, with totals of 751 on Sunday, 750 on Monday and 758 on Tuesday. The number of patients in intensive care units went from 234 Sunday to 238 Monday before falling to 225 Tuesday.

Last week's Sunday-Tuesday average for hospitalizations was 789, and the average for intensive care was 282.

April 15, 5:15 p.m. There are now 13 deaths from COVID-19 complications at Gateway Care & Rehabilitation Center, the Hayward nursing home where over 65 residents and staff members have been infected.

County officials announced two new deaths Wednesday, and the Alameda County District Attorneys Office announced it has launched a criminal investigation into the outbreak.

Earlier in the week, civil rights attorney John Burris, who represents the family of one of the victims, called for a formal investigation into whether the nursing home's sick policy led to symptomatic staff members continuing to work.

"We want to know whether this facility operated below the acceptable standard of care, and that they did what they were supposed to do to ensure that their resident and or their employees would not contract the coronavirus," Burris said.

The district attorney's office stated the probe began before Burris made the demand.

April 15, 3:45 p.m. President Donald Trump took aim at Nancy Pelosi in a White House press conference Wednesday, saying that while he was closing the border to China, House Speaker Pelosi was trying to have in San Francisco parties in Chinatown because she thought it would be great.

He then claimed, She was trying to show [the coronavirus] doesnt exist.

Trump was referring to a Feb. 24 visit Pelosi paid to Chinatown restaurants; it was three weeks before the San Francisco Mayor London Breed issued a citywide shelter in place, and about two weeks before the World Health Organization declared the coronavirus a global pandemic. Pelosi did not claim the coronavirus did not exist.

Come to Chinatown, Pelosi said at the time. Precautions have been taken by our city, we know that there's concern about tourism, traveling all throughout the world, but we think it's very safe to be in Chinatown and hope that others will come.

April 15, 3:30 p.m. Trump said in a press conference Wednesday that he will use his constitutional authority to force an adjournment of both the Senate and House of Representatives to make recess appointments if the Congress doesn't vote on his nominees. He called the delay in voting a scam.

"We need these people here, he said. We need people for this crisis and we don't want to play any more political games."

Pressed by a reporter, Trump doubled down.

If they dont act on getting these people approved that we need  we need them anyway but we especially need them now in a pandemic  we are going to do something Id prefer not doing but I will do if I have to.

Trump added there are "way over 100 people" waiting to be approved.

April 15, 2:45 p.m. Two Bay Area counties updated COVID-19 testing numbers Wednesday afternoon. Solano County announced five new cases, bringing the total to 140, and Sonoma County announced eight new cases, bringing the total there to 160.

April 15, 2:30 p.m. San Francisco Police Chief Bill Scott warned city residents to be sure to socially distance while outdoors within the next few days, saying its possible that those who do not could be subject to a citation.

You will see officers, you will see cadets, you will see park rangers, and also community workers at our parks and gathering spots we believe people will go to to get exercise or walk and to get outdoors today, he said. We havent changed our position with how we are approaching this; for those people out enjoying fresh air, we ask that they social distance, follow public health orders. We continue to stress voluntary compliance. For folks who have been warned, and thats on record, you will be cited.

Scott noted that to date, the city has issued nine citations for failure to comply with social distancing orders or for non-essential businesses operating in violation of current law. Five citations were issued to businesses and four to individuals.

Were not going to warn you twice, he said.

April 15, 2:10 p.m. On Wednesday, Trent Rhorer, Executive Director of San Franciscos Human Services Agency gave an update as to the number of hotel rooms acquired for use by the city for essential workers or the high-risk population.

The city now has 2,151 rooms across 14 hotels in San Francisco. A total of 1,271 are earmarked for those in the citys most vulnerable population; the rest are for first responders and city employees working directly with the public. There are currently 874 individuals in those 1,271 rooms for the citys most vulnerable.

Rhorer also noted that 81 total hotels have expressed interest in working with the city. Those rooms would add an additional 12,000 rooms to the stock available.

This gives us the flexibility to increase the number of rooms, should we need, he continued. It also gives us the flexibility to choose types of hotel [rooms] suitable for certain populations. Weve been segmenting rooms, for example, for people struggling with mental illness and addiction. We have a hotel staffed specifically for them with a room size that makes it a more effective location for those individuals.

April 15, 2 p.m. Dr. Grant Colfax provided an update to case numbers related to MSC South homeless shelter, saying 92 guests and 10 staffers have now tested positive for the coronavirus.

He added that at Laguna Honda, there are now 18 cases total, including four among residents and 14 among staffers. Eleven of those staff members work in patient care.

The hospital has tested a total of 329 staff members and 272 residents, and the CDC remains onsite.

Colfax also announced the city's Chinese Hospital opened 23 new beds to help continue care for those discharged from urgent care at San Francisco General.

April 15, 1:45 p.m. The city of San Francisco announced Wednesday it would be opening a third test site in SoMa in collaboration with Verilys Baseline COVID-19 Program and One Medical to increase the testing capacity in the city. The site at 600 7th Street, called CityTestSF, is not a walk-up test site, Mayor London Breed noted. A person needs to be showing symptoms before making an appointment at www.projectbaseline.com/COVID19.

The site, which can test up to 200 people per day, is first focusing on high-risk populations.

People need to have complete information about their health so they can seek treatment and take the necessary precautions to protect themselves, their loved ones, and the entire community, says Breed in a press release. CityTestSF  SoMa is an important resource for members of the public who are experiencing symptoms and are looking for a safe and convenient place to get tested.

April 15, 1:30 p.m. The city of San Francisco announced a new contract tracing program in conjunction with UCSF on Wednesday, which will enable swifter communication, better data tracking, and improved interventions to reduce further spread.

The citys current process involves reaching out to family members and contacts of those individuals who have tested positive, but this expanded capacity to contact trace will allow the city to do more public outreach to see who that person has been in contact with.

We can have people tested that may have been in contact with someone who has been infected, Breed said. The new process is currently in a testing phase, and Breed notes there will be an app for the program.

Case contacts will be able to receive daily text messages or phone calls checking in on their health and symptoms throughout the 14-day monitoring period, reads an announcement on the city website. They can self-report symptoms via text, immediately alerting public health officials that follow up or testing may be required.

April 15, 1:10 p.m. Contra Costa County announced 63 new cases of the coronavirus Wednesday, bringing the total in the county to 615. The county also reported three new deaths  the most the county has reported in one day thus far  for a total toll of 14.

April 15, 1 p.m. California Gov. Gavin Newsom talked about direct reliefwhat he defined as, "help for those who need it most" at a Wednesday press conference, touching on benefits for the unemployed, independent contractors and undocumented workers.

With the number of unemployed Californians swelling to 2.7 million in the past month, Newsom says he signed an executive order to extend the states unemployment call center hours to address an unprecedented call volume.

The call center will now be open from 8 a.m.-8 p.m., seven days a week; previous hours were 8 a.m. to noon, five days a week.

Whats more, 1,340 state workers will shift to working in the Employment Development Department to process claims for unemployment insurance.

The state has been processing about a million unemployment payments a week. Some of those checks are retroactive.

The governor shared that EDD staff insisted on working Easter to keep up with unemployment claims.



If you ever have a doubt about public employees, I hope youll consider that example, Newsom said.

Newsom shared that he also signed an executive order to advance the states workshare program that he says is currently modest." He said countries such as Germany have robust workshare programs that provide employment insurance allowing workers to keep their status even if their hours are reduced.

Newsom noted that 10% of the states workforce is undocumented and dont benefit from the federal stimulus or state unemployment programs. California will be offering $125 million in direct disaster assistance for undocumented workers, with $75 million coming from the state and $50 million philanthropists. Individual workers will be eligible for up to $500 and households $1,000, starting next month.

"We're the first state to announce a program for direct disaster assistance for those individuals," the governor said.

Applications for the federal Pandemic Unemployment Assistance (PUA) program in California will open April 28 and applies to some 1.5 million self-employed workers.

California Labor Secretary Julie Su explained the program provides unemployment assistance for the self-employed, independent contractors, employees whose wage data disqualifies them for unemployment insurance and those who have exhausted their unemployment insurance benefits. Once the program is in place, the state will turn around checks in 24-48 hours.

April 15, 12:10 p.m. Santa Clara County reported 127 additional cases of COVID-19 Wednesday, after a delay in reporting numbers. The 127 new cases thus reflect a two-day sum of new cases  56 from Monday and 71 from Tuesday  bringing the county total to 1,793.

On Tuesday, Santa Clara County reported case data was not updated that day "due to system issues with California Reportable Disease Information Exchange (CalREDIE)."

On Wednesday the county also reported 5 new deaths over the previous two days, bringing the total deaths in the county to 65.

April 15, 11:30 a.m. Alameda County reported 13 additional deaths due to COVID-19 complications on Wednesday, bringing the county death toll to 36. This is the highest number of deaths reported in a single day by a Bay Area county since the virus start. It's likely a two-day total since the county didn't update its numbers on Wednesday. The highest number of deaths reported by a Bay Area county before this was San Mateo on April 7 with eight fatalities.

Unlike some areas of the country such as New York where hundreds of infected patients have died in a day, the Bay Area hasn't seen the surge that was initially forecast by some experts.

County officials also updated Alameda's total case count to 962, reporting 76 new coronavirus infections Wednesday.

April 15, 10:45 a.m. The organizers of the Marin County Fair announced Wednesday this summer's event is canceled.

The fair typically occurs in July at the Marin Center but fairgrounds and the facility are currently reserved as a resource in the response to the COVID-19 emergency.

Its with a very heavy heart that we make this decision, Gabriella C. Calicchio, the countys director of cultural services, said in a statement. Since 1946, the Marin County Fair has been the premier family celebration in the County each summer. In our fair history, this is one of the most challenging times we have encountered.

The next Marin County Fair will be July 1-5, 2021.

California Gov. Gavin Newsom suggested at a Tuesday press conference the likelihood of a large-scale event taking place in the state this summer is negligible at best while researchers seek a vaccine for the coronavirus.

"Large-scale events that bring in hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands of strangers all together across every conceivable difference, health and otherwise, is not in the cards based on our expectations," Newsom said.

April 15, 10:20 a.m. The case count in San Francisco passed 1,000 Wednesday, reaching a total of 1,013. The city and county announced two additional deaths with the toll reaching 13.

Hospitals and clinics in S.F. have tested 9,001 individuals for the coronavirus and 13% of tests have been positive. Hospitalizations for COVID-19 illness have reached a plateau in the past week; today there are 88 individuals in hospitals for the virus. Yesterday, there were 90 and on Monday 94.

San Mateo County announced 26 new cases, bringing the total to 747 confirmed cases. The death toll remains 21.

April 15, 8 a.m. California Gov. Gavin Newsom presented a road map Tuesday for slowly and safely lifting the shelter-in-place order and reopening society and the economy.

The governor said new guidelines will take less of a "population approach," where everyone is required to stay at home, and call for more "individual accountability," such as requiring masks and temperature monitoring.

He didn't provide a timeline for when the new guidelines will be implemented, but he said before he modifies the stay-at-home mandate six things need to happen. The state must have the following:

1) Widespread testing and contact tracing, along with a ramped-up system for isolating and supporting individuals who test positive or are exposed to the coronavirus;

2) Systems and guidelines for preventing infection in people who are at risk for more severe illness, such as the elderly;

3) Well-equipped hospitals that can handle surges of infected patients;

4) Public-private partnerships for developing treatments that help infected patients recover quickly;

5) Guidelines for businesses, schools, and child care facilities to support physical distancing; and

6) The capacity to reimpose certain measures, such as the stay-at-home orders, if necessary.

Newsom explained this next stage will be "the bridge" that will get the state to the point when a vaccine becomes available. He made clear that while the conversation is starting about lifting some of the social-distancing requirements, the state may need to issue further stay-at-home orders in the future.

"I know you want timelines, but we cant get ahead of ourselves," Newsom warned. "Lets not make the mistake of pulling the plug too early, as much as we want to. I dont want to make political decisions that put peoples lives risk and the economy at risk by extending the period of time before we can transition to get people moving again. Thats the sober reality, but the reality I think that provides a little light  that this is not a permanent state."

Cumulative cases in the greater Bay Area (due to limited testing these numbers reflect only a small portion of likely cases):

ALAMEDA COUNTY: 962 confirmed cases, 36 deaths

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

CONTRA COSTA COUNTY: 615 confirmed cases, 14 deaths

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

LAKE COUNTY: 5 confirmed cases

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

MARIN COUNTY: 184 confirmed cases, 10 deaths

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

MONTEREY COUNTY: 108 confirmed cases, 3 deaths

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

NAPA COUNTY: 38 cases, 2 deaths

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

SAN BENITO COUNTY: 41 confirmed cases, 2 deaths

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

SAN FRANCISCO COUNTY: 1,013 confirmed cases, 17 deaths

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

SAN MATEO COUNTY: 767 confirmed cases, 28 deaths

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

SANTA CLARA COUNTY: 1,793 confirmed cases, 65 deaths

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

SANTA CRUZ COUNTY: 96 confirmed cases, 2 deaths

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

SOLANO COUNTY: 141 confirmed cases, 2 deaths

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

SONOMA COUNTY: 163 confirmed cases, 2 deaths

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

In California, 864 coronavirus-related deaths have been reported, according to Johns Hopkins University. For comparison, New York has 11,586, New Jersey 3,156 and Louisiana 1,103.

MORE CORONAVIRUS COVERAGE:

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

Amy Graff is a digital editor with SFGATE. Email her: agraff@sfgate.com.
(Natural News) French President Emmanuel Macron has extended the countrys coronavirus lockdown until May 11, adding that while progress has been made, the battle has not yet been won.

Macron also apologized for his initial handling of the outbreak, saying that his government has not prepared enough for the crisis. According to the latest tally from Johns Hopkins University Tuesday, the country has a total of 131,361 confirmed COVID-19 cases and 15,748 deaths.

Lockdown similar to neighboring countries

Italy and Spain, two of the nations hit hardest by the coronavirus pandemic, have similar measures in place. That said, only one of these two is extending its lockdown like France.

On Friday, Italian Prime Minister Guiseppe Conte announced that the country will remain on lockdown until May 3  a move decried by business unions in the country, warning that the extension would cripple the economy further. The prime minister, however, stressed that Italy could not afford another surge of new infections, which is currently at its lowest in weeks. As of writing, the countrys total coronavirus caseload stands at 162,488, with 21,067 deaths.

The government has made concessions on which businesses will reopen on a trial basis this week; however, the full list is expected to include just a tiny fraction of shops and factories. According to initial reports, book stores and baby clothes shops will be allowed to reopen, provided they can impose social distancing measures. Laundrymats and dry cleaners will also be considered.

In a televised address, Conte said that the extension is a difficult but necessary decision and that it was made after consultations with both scientists and union leaders.

We are all, I imagine, impatient to get going again, he added.

Spain is relaxing its lockdown

Meanwhile, Spain, the worst-hit country in Europe with 174,060 confirmed cases and 18,255 deaths, has started to relax its lockdown restrictions this week. On Monday, nonessential workers in factories and construction sites were allowed to return to work, provided they follow strict safety guidelines.

According to Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez, the move comes as the number of new cases continues to drop. However, he warned that the country still needs to be vigilant if it wants to prevent a second wave of infections.

We are still far from victory, from the moment when we will recover normality in our lives, he added. We are all keen to go back out on the streets but our desire is even greater to win the war and prevent a relapse.

Public health experts, however, have raised concerns over the premature exit, warning that loosening the lockdown was a hasty move by the Spanish government. Dr. Antoni Trilla, the lead epidemiologist at the University of Barcelona and an advising scientist to the government, said that while trying to return to normalcy and eke out profits is logical, this must be accompanied by a good system to detect and isolate and treat the new cases that occur.

We dont have all the answers

In his televised announcement, Macron stressed that the country cant afford a let-up, given the current situation in hospitals in Paris and eastern France. He pleaded with the nation to bear with the lockdown a little longer, saying that the current rules are working.

Since March 17, the countrys 67-million strong population has been hunkered down at home. Without the extension, the lockdown was slated to end on Tuesday.

I fully understand the effort Im asking from you, Macron told the nation in a televised address.

When will we be able to return to a normal life? I would love to be able to answer you. But to be frank, I have to humbly tell you we dont have definitive answers, he added.

The French president also admitted that his government had not sufficiently prepared for the coronavirus, especially during the early stages of the outbreak.

This moment, lets be honest, has revealed cracks, shortages. Like every country in the world, we have lacked gloves, hand gel, we havent been able to give out as many masks as we wanted to our health professionals, said Macron humbly  a stark contrast to his warlike rhetoric in his previous statements.

He also noted that after the lockdown, schools and shops would be the first to reopen. However, restaurants, hotels, cafes and cinemas will still remain shuttered, and travel to non-European countries will continue to be prohibited until further notice. The government will also launch a financial aid package to keep families afloat during the extension.

Still, Macron sought to reassure his citizens, even as COVID-19 continues to push the French healthcare system  one of the best in the world  beyond the brink. The number of patients in intensive care units continues to decline  falling to 6,730 patients from 6,821 in 24 hours.

Well have better days, and well return to happy days, he added.

Learn more about the ongoing coronavirus pandemic at Pandemic.news.

Sources include:

The-Sun.com

Coronavirus.JHU.edu

TheLocal.it

BBC.com

ABCNews.go.com

Reuters.com 1

Reuters.com 2
State Bank of Pakistan reviews cement industry performance in 1HFY20

15 April 2020

The State Bank of Pakistan has released its second quarterly report of FY20 (July 2019-June 2020) on the state of Pakistan's economy on 14 April. The report reviewed the performance of all sectors and appreciated the cement industry's progress, but pointed out the challenges of the coronavirus on all industries.



According to the report, the global and domestic spread of COVID-19 has brought an exceptional set of challenges for the country. The spillovers from the global economy and the infection-containment measures in the country are expected to weaken economic activity and consumer demand as well as adversely impact supply. As the situation is extremely fluid and highly uncertain, the economic outlook remains subdued compared to the pre-outbreak estimates. Therefore, the government and the SBP have taken a number of measures to mitigate the adverse impacts of COVID-19 on the economy. These include sizeable fiscal spending programmes, tax reliefs and incentives to the construction industry. As for the SBP, within a span of eight days (in March 2020), the Monetary Policy Committee cut the policy rate by 225 basis points.



Growth in cement industry

The cement industry registered growth of 6.3 per cent during 2QFY20 in contrast to a contraction in the previous quarter, owing to both higher exports as well as some revival in domestic demand. However, the steel sector, although having some complementarity with cement, was not able to post positive growth in 2QFY20 despite improvement from the 1QFY20.



The LSM sector started showing some positive signs during 2QFY20. Compared to both 2QFY19 and 1QFY20, the growth outcome improved noticeably. Expansion was evident in the construction-allied industry that seemed to have benefitted from an uptick in cement exports and an increase in government development expenditures.



All Pakistan Cement Manufacturers Association (APCMA) data on cement dispatches shows that growth reached 9.9 per cent in 2QFY20 from 2.6 per cent in the preceding quarter. The performance was driven in equal measure by local and export sales, as opposed to being predominantly export-driven previously. Furthermore, disaggregated data shows that the growth in local sales was driven entirely by the north region while the south contributed to export performance.



Cement exports

Meanwhile, cement and cement product exports decreased by 7.5 per cent in the 1HFY20 compared to a 32 per cent increase in the same period of FY19. However, Pakistani cement exports this year have become more diverse in terms of market access compared to last year, when India was the key importer of Pakistani Portland cement, importing a quarter of Pakistans cement export volumes in 1HFY19. In 1HFY20, Pakistan exported 41.8 per cent higher shipments to other destinations like Afghanistan, Madagascar and Sri Lanka.



In addition, Pakistan shipped significant volume of clinker in the first half. The demand for the raw material was created in Bangladesh, when Vietnams exports to the country had started to recede as it redirected its supplies towards a much bigger market, China. While overall clinker shipments of Pakistan rose 14.6 per cent in 1HFY20, Bangladeshs share in Pakistans clinker exports increased from 77 per cent in the previous year to 87 per cent in the same period this fiscal year. But, the overall value of cement and clinker was pulled down by low unit prices, the report remarked.



Cement price

The central bank has accepted that there was an increase in cement prices during this period due to the increase in Federal Excise Duty.



Coal imports

Lastly, coal imports declined by a sharp 15.8 per cent to US$669.5m during 1HFY20, with lower unit prices accounting for the entire drop in import values. Disaggregated data indicate that coal import volumes had fallen during July-October, before surging by 65.8 per cent in November 2019, pushing up import volumes for the six-month period YoY. A corresponding increase in coal-fired power generation was also noted in November, indicating that some of the drop in LNG generation was compensated for by generation from imported coal. At the same time, some downward pressure on coal imports was exerted by the commissioning of a 660MW indigenous coal power plant, along with lower demand by the steel industry (for which coal is a major raw material).

Published under
MONTREAL, April 15, 2020 /PRNewswire/ - With the world experiencing an unprecedented situation created by the spread of COVID-19, Boralex Inc. ("Boralex" or the "Corporation") (TSX: BLX) is announcing donations totalling $150,000 (approximately 100,000) as part of the current collective effort.

Boralex will support six organizations whose primary mission is to offer direct services related to mental health, food needs and support for seniors that are essential to the most vulnerable populations. These organizations are currently facing many challenges and Boralex donation will help them maintain their essential services or expand the services that they offer.

This money will be divided among the organizations mentioned below, proportionately to Boralex assets in countries and regions where it has operations, which are located in Canada, France and New York State.

CANADA

Quebec  Food Banks of Quebec : A large network of regional organizations that distribute food in addition to offering food assistance services to the public in each region of Quebec .

 A large network of regional organizations that distribute food in addition to offering food assistance services to the public in each region of . Ontario  The Canadian Mental Health Association, Ontario : Works to improve the lives of Ontario residents through leadership, collaboration and an ongoing pursuit of excellence in community mental health and addiction services.

 : Works to improve the lives of residents through leadership, collaboration and an ongoing pursuit of excellence in community mental health and addiction services. British Columbia  DTES Response: Coordinated effort to prevent the spread of COVID19 in the underprivileged Downtown Eastside neighbourhood in Vancouver . The funds raised are distributed among several foundations and organizations that work directly in this neighbourhood to meet the urgent needs of the community.

FRANCE

SOS EHPAD : All donations collected through this new platform created by Fondation Recherche Alzheimer will go to the establishments concerned in order to support their staff. This will allow them to purchase protective equipment (masks, gloves, hand sanitizer, etc.), enhance break rooms and provide staff with meals as well as assist them through home childcare services, transportation between home and work and even overnight accommodation at hotels near their workplace.

: All donations collected through this new platform created by will go to the establishments concerned in order to support their staff. This will allow them to purchase protective equipment (masks, gloves, hand sanitizer, etc.), enhance break rooms and provide staff with meals as well as assist them through home childcare services, transportation between home and work and even overnight accommodation at hotels near their workplace. Les Banques Alimentaires (The Food Banks): The primary food assistance network in France , comprised of 79 food banks and 29 agencies.

NEW YORK STATE

Regional Food Bank of Northeastern New York : Has been helping to feed disadvantaged members of its communities since 1982. It is the only organization of its kind in northeastern New York . The Food Bank collects large donations of food from the food industry and distributes it to charitable agencies serving disadvantaged people in 23 counties.

"Now more than ever, it's essential to provide support to the organizations that are on the front lines helping those most in need," stated Patrick Lemaire, President and Chief Executive Officer of Boralex. "Food security and isolation of vulnerable people are two issues we need to pay particular attention to during this difficult period. Boralex is concerned about the well-being of the communities where it operates and wants to offer its support to those organizations working directly with the people and dealing with the problems caused by the spread of COVID-19 every day."

Boralex recently published its 2019 annual report on environmental, social and governance issues. The report highlights the Company's efforts to help its employees and members of the communities where it is located contribute to a more sustainable world.

To learn more about the steps Boralex is taking to help all its stakeholders with the COVID-19 pandemic, see the news release issued on March 25.

About Boralex

Boralex develops, builds and operates renewable energy power facilities in Canada, France, the United Kingdom and the United States. A leader in the Canadian market and France's largest independent producer of onshore wind power, the Corporation is recognized for its solid experience in optimizing its asset base in four power generation types  wind, hydroelectric, thermal and solar. Boralex ensures sustained growth by leveraging the expertise and diversification developed over the past 25 years. Boralex's shares are listed on the Toronto Stock Exchange under the ticker symbol BLX. More information is available at www.boralex.com or www.sedar.com. Follow us on Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter.

SOURCE Boralex Inc.

Related Links

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Keeping Up with the Kardashians star Kim Kardashian West shared several never-before-seen snaps of herself being 'twinzies' with her eldest daughter North in Paris back on March 2.

The half-Armenian 39-year-old and her six-year-old privileged princess held hands during the Yeezy Season 8 after-party held at cocktail bar Le Piaf located near the Champs-Elysees in France.

Kim and little North both were both wearing matching plaited ponytail extensions braided by hair artist Chris Appleton.

'Twinzies!' Keeping Up with the Kardashians star Kim Kardashian West shared several never-before-seen snaps of herself with her eldest daughter North in Paris back on March 2

Kardashian's little girl had just made her Paris Fashion Week debut while on the catwalk of Espace Oscar Niemeyer where her famous father Kanye West was presenting his FW/20 clothing collection.

The 42-year-old rapper-designer beamed as his precocious mini-me dropped bars about her 'cool shoes' - which later turned out to be a 'remix' of five-year-old YouTube star ZaZa's 2019 original track, What I Do?

The twice-divorced socialite and the 21-time Grammy winner also parents to four-year-old son Saint, two-year-old daughter Chicago, and son Psalm, turning 1 next month.

Later on Tuesday, the aspiring lawyer excitedly Instastoried a Tiger King-themed question on her JD Advising homework, which mentioned the name of Big Cat Rescue CEO Carole Baskin.

PDA: The half-Armenian 39-year-old and her six-year-old privileged princess held hands during the Yeezy Season 8 after-party held at cocktail bar Le Piaf located near the Champs-Elysees in France

Long hair, don't care! Kim and little North both were both wearing matching plaited ponytail extensions braided by hair artist Chris Appleton

Just like Daddy! Kardashian's little girl had just made her Paris Fashion Week debut while on the catwalk of Espace Oscar Niemeyer where her famous father Kanye West (L) was presenting his FW/20 clothing collection

Plagiarized? The 42-year-old rapper-designer beamed as his precocious mini-me dropped bars about her 'cool shoes' - which later turned out to be a 'remix' of five-year-old YouTube star ZaZa's 2019 original track, What I Do?

'OMG my law school studying is Tiger King themed today!' Kim - who boasts 262.1M social media followers - captioned her snaps with Joe Exotic and Carole gifs.

Kardashian binge-watched directing duo Eric Goode & Rebecca Chaikli's eight-part docuseries Tiger King: Murder, Mayhem and Madness, which has held the No. 1 spot on Netflix since it started streaming on March 20.

The Justice Project stunner plans on taking the California State Bar in 2024 so she can follow in the footsteps of her late father Robert Kardashian who died, age 59, from esophageal cancer in 2003.

The KKW Beauty CEO and her momager Kris Jenner collaborated for the first time together on a new fragrance called KKW X Kris, which will be released Wednesday at noon PST just ahead of Mother's Day.

'OMG!' Later on Tuesday, the aspiring lawyer excitedly Instastoried a Tiger King-themed question on her JD Advising homework, which mentioned Big Cat Rescue CEO Carole Baskin

38M tuned in! Kardashian binge-watched directing duo Eric Goode & Rebecca Chaikli's eight-part docuseries Tiger King: Murder, Mayhem and Madness, which has held the No. 1 spot on Netflix since it started streaming on March 20

Legacy: The Justice Project stunner plans on taking the California State Bar in 2024 so she can follow in the footsteps of her late father Robert Kardashian (M) who died, age 59, from esophageal cancer in 2003 (pictured in 1995)

KKW Fragrance is donating 20% of sales of the perfume spanning April 15-May 5 to food bank Blessings in a Backpack 'in support of families and children affected by the COVID-19 crisis.'

This, after Kim's shapewear brand SKIMS donated $1M 'to help bring relief to those affected by this pandemic.'

Catch more of Kardashian and her Calabasas extended family in the 18th season of Keeping Up with the Kardashians, which airs Thursdays on E!

Just in time for Mother's Day! The KKW Beauty CEO and her momager Kris Jenner (R) collaborated for the first time together on a new fragrance called KKW X Kris, which will be released Wednesday at noon PST
Three potential COVID-19 vaccines are making fast progress in early-stage testing in volunteers in China and the U.S., but its still a long road to prove if theyll really work.

Chinas CanSino Biologics is beginning the second phase of testing its vaccine candidate, Chinas Ministry of Science and Technology said Tuesday.

In the U.S., a shot made by the National Institutes of Health and Moderna Inc. isnt far behind. The first person to receive that experimental vaccine last month returned to a Seattle clinic Tuesday for a second dose.

Read about a vaccine Providence is working on using cancer-fighting technique

NIH infectious disease chief Dr. Anthony Fauci told The Associated Press there are no red flags so far and he hoped the next, larger phase of testing could begin around June.

A third candidate, from Inovio Pharmaceuticals, began giving experimental shots for first-step safety testing last week in the U.S. and hopes to expand its studies to China.

Initial tests focus on safety, and researchers in both countries are trying out different doses of different types of shots.

CORONAVIRUS IN OREGON: THE LATEST NEWS

But moving into the second phase is a critical step that allows vaccines to be tested in many more people to look for signs that they protect against infection.

Last week, CanSino filed a report showing it aimed to enroll 500 people in this next study, comparing two doses of the vaccine to dummy shots.

Looking ahead, Fauci said if the new coronavirus continues to circulate widely enough over the summer and fall, it might be possible to finish larger studies slightly sooner than the 12 to 18 months he'd originally predicted  maybe toward "mid to late winter of next season.

Please let me say this caveat: That is assuming that its effective. See, thats the big if, Fauci stressed. "Its got to be effective and its got to be safe.

During a news conference in China, authorities also cautioned that the studies must be done properly.

Although we are in an emergency, we cannot lower the standards of safety and effectiveness in the reviews of vaccines, said Wang Junzhi, a Chinese biopharmaceutical expert. The public is paying huge attention."

The World Health Organization this week counted more than five dozen other vaccine candidates in earlier stages of development being pursued around the world. Many research groups are teaming up to speed the work; in an announcement Tuesday, vaccine giants Sanofi and GSK became the latest to partner on a candidate.

On the WHOs list are a wide variety of ways to make vaccines -- so if one approach doesnt pan out, hopefully another one will.

CanSinos vaccine is based on a genetically engineered shot it created to guard against Ebola. The leading U.S. candidates use a different approach, made from copies of a piece of the coronavirus genetic code.

-- The Associated Press
Bharat Petroleum Corporation Ltd is quoting at Rs 361.45, up 3.24% on the day as on 12:54 IST on the NSE. The stock is up 1.1% in last one year as compared to a 22.29% drop in NIFTY and a 25.38% drop in the Nifty Energy index.

Bharat Petroleum Corporation Ltd is up for a third straight session in a row. The stock is quoting at Rs 361.45, up 3.24% on the day as on 12:54 IST on the NSE. The benchmark NIFTY is up around 1.84% on the day, quoting at 9159.6. The Sensex is at 31241.44, up 1.8%. Bharat Petroleum Corporation Ltd has dropped around 0.88% in last one month.

Meanwhile, Nifty Energy index of which Bharat Petroleum Corporation Ltd is a constituent, has dropped around 9.75% in last one month and is currently quoting at 11830.65, up 2.21% on the day. The volume in the stock stood at 38.81 lakh shares today, compared to the daily average of 101.4 lakh shares in last one month.

The benchmark April futures contract for the stock is quoting at Rs 359.05, up 2.26% on the day. Bharat Petroleum Corporation Ltd is up 1.1% in last one year as compared to a 22.29% drop in NIFTY and a 25.38% drop in the Nifty Energy index.

The PE of the stock is 10.59 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.)
Weather officials confirmed three tornadoes touched down in Orangeburg County early Monday morning, leaving a trail of destruction in their wake.

At the latest count, 14 homes were totally destroyed and 17 suffered major damage, according to Orangeburg County Emergency Operations Center officials.

"We are still counting. We still dont have a total yet," county Emergency Services Director Billy Staley said Tuesday. "We are still putting that together and are waiting on the assessors office to get the official information from yesterday."

Two people died and at least seven were injured in the tornado that passed through the Neeses area. It ranked EF3 on the Enhanced Fujita Scale, with maximum winds of 140 mph.

Tornadoes are classified on an intensity scale from EF0, the lowest, to EF5, the strongest.

The National Weather Service says the tornado began about two miles northeast of Elko in Barnwell County near Willis Pond Road around 5:46 a.m.

"The tornado strengthened as it approached S.C. Highway 3 and Gardenia Road, where it destroyed and tossed a wood-framed home anchored to the ground, lifted a significant portion of a roof on a brick home, destroyed a fifth-wheel camper and knocked over a pivot irrigation system," the NWS analysis said.

"The tornado then crossed Norway Road, where it snapped multiple power poles," the report states. "As the tornado reached Fire Tower Road west of Neeses, it intensified further, destroying three anchored manufactured homes on Preserver Road near Ninety Six Road."

The fatalities occurred in that area.

"The tornado then turned more eastward, crossing Savannah Highway and Dragstrip Road north of Livingston where it damaged several homes or manufactured homes," the NWS report states.

The storm gradually weakened as it crossed North Road and then dissipated about eight miles west-southwest of St. Matthews in Calhoun County before reaching Interstate 26.

The maximum width of the tornado was just under a half-mile, or 770 yards, and it traveled 31.55 miles, according to the NWS.

Another EF3 tornado packing winds of 140 mph formed in Aiken County between the Savannah River Site and Williston in Barnwell County, according to NWS Meteorologist Whitney Smith. Its worst damage was in that area.

The tornado traveled to the Springfield area. By the time it came to Orangeburg County, it had been downgraded to an EF1 with winds of about 110 mph.

"There was a lot of damage to trees in Springfield where it uprooted some trees and some trees fell on homes," Smith said. "There were trees that were snapped."

Smith said the tornado also damaged the roof of a church building in the Springfield area.

There were no serious injuries or fatalities from the tornado. Additional details will be forthcoming.

"This is very unusual for South Carolina," Smith said. "We do see most of our tornadoes in the spring but to have this many tornadoes especially the time of day, it was early in the morning, the strength of tornadoes was unusual."

"We had a couple of EF3s," she said. "Most of the tornadoes we see are EF0 and EF1."

The NWS survey team determined an EF2 tornado producing winds near 120 mph struck near Big Buck Boulevard at Firefighter Lane, close to Interstate 26. The track continued into southern Calhoun County.

The tornado came close to the Orangeburg County Fire District headquarters building and the Orangeburg County/City Industrial Park.

Orangeburg County Fire District Project Manager Gene Ball said the fire complex and its buildings were spared from significant damage.

The district's building and maintenance building sustained some damage to their doors, but most of the damage included uprooted trees and limbs, he said.

"Our buildings can sustain winds upward of 140 mph," Ball said.

Allied Air at the Orangeburg County/City Industrial Park sustained some damage to its roof but the company remains operational.

Orangeburg County Development Commission Executive Director Gregg Robinson said he has not received any reports of other structural damage at the industrial park or with the new travel center under construction.

The storm track and additional details will be issued later as the survey is completed.

Calhoun County reported little impact from the storms and no known structural damage.

The NWS also surveyed damage in the Ehrhardt area in Bamberg County and determined the area did not see a tornado based on the damage spotted.

Survey teams late Tuesday began surveying the Yenome, Hilda and Denmark storm path, but details of that storm were not available Tuesday evening.

Statewide, nine people died from the storms.

S.C. Gov. Henry McMaster says he will seek an emergency declaration in the state to help damaged areas.

Staley said the county is preparing data to request both state and federal disaster aid.

"We are doing everything we need to push to get it done," Staley said. "We are preparing the data to submit it on all the different levels."

The American Red Cross is helping families who have lost their homes during this event.

There are still some roads closed in the areas impacted by the tornadoes.

According to the S.C. Department of Transportation, Norway Road from South Carolina Highway 4 (Neeses Highway) to Willow Swamp Road; Juniper Street west of Neeses from Shamrock Road to Neeses Highway; and Fire Tower Road from Butler Road to Beachwood Road were all closed due to downed trees and power lines.

The roads could reopen by Friday.

The local tornadoes were a part of a larger storm system that rolled through the Southeast over a 24-hour period from Sunday morning through Monday morning April 12-13.

The NWS issued 141 separate tornado warnings during this time period. This was the most within a 24-hour period since March 2-3, 2012.

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Mumbai, April 15 : Share price dynamics along with hopes of an exponential rise in local as well as global demand from civic bodies and other companies have boosted stocks of India's speciality chemicals manufacturers.

"There are expectations that India will play a major role in exporting bulk and speciality chemicals to the global markets and this has led to a healthy rise in the stock prices of companies from this sector," Siddhartha Khemka, Head - Retail Research, Motilal Oswal Financial Services, told IANS.

"Another key reason for the upward movement has been the opening up of plants by these companies to cater to the demand for speciality chemicals which are being used by the municipal bodies to sanitise public areas." Prior to the Covid-19 outbreak, China used to be the dominant player in exports of bulk specialty chemicals, but investors believe that India can soon grab a major chunk of that export market.

Besides, municipal agencies across the country are using various speciality chemicals to sanitise public places to curb the spread of Covid-19 infections. Some companies have taken this as an oportunity and started their plants to fulfill the deman from this categoy.

At present, the national lockdown which has been deemed necessary to curb the spread of Covid-19, has dealt a heavy blow to commerce, leading to a temporary closure of shopping malls, dine-in restaurants, grounding of aircraft, shutting down of factories and deserted market places.

Furthermore, market observers contend that attractive valuations have also led to the upward movement of these stocks.

"The share prices have bounced back after bottoming out on March 24. This is primarily due to the fact that these shares were in an oversold position," Deepak Jasani, Research Head, HDFC Securities, told IANS.

"However, the main industries that these companies provide raw materials to are the aluminium, textiles and paper industries which are currently impacted due to the lockdown." In terms of prices, Gujarat Alkalies & Chemicals stocks at the BSE on Wednesday rose by Rs 1.85 or 0.60 per cent to Rs 311.15 from its previous close of Rs 309.30. Another major, Tata Chemicals' stocks at the BSE rose to Rs 240.20, up Rs 2.80 or 1.18 per cent from its previous close of Rs 237.40 per share.

The stocks of speciality care products maker Galaxy Surfactants rose to Rs 1,292.60, up by Rs 21.30 or 1.68 per cent from its previous close.

Recently, in a regulatory filing, Gujarat Alkalies & Chemicals said that "considering the requirements of various local authorities like municipal corporations & municipalities and other essential industries, the Company has started partial operation of Hydrogen Peroxide Plant at Vadodara Complex." The company had obtained prior permission from the district authority concerned.

"Based on the requirement, the company may start operation of other plants including Sodium Chlorate Plant at Dahej Complex to meet such demand," the filing said.

(Rohit Vaid can be contacted at rohit.v@ians.in)
Classes that Click is a series spotlighting how Emory is adapting undergraduate courses to remote learning due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Each column will showcase one course, with insights and tips from both the professor and students. View more Classes that Click stories.

For nursing student Jessie Bracewell, transitioning to remote learning meant finding new ways to balance classwork while caring for her family. For professor Quyen Phan, it meant supplementing hands-on clinical training with comparable virtual activities.

Classes that Click is a series showcasing how Emorys commitment to stellar education continues during the COVID-19 pandemic and how many lessons learned will further enhance life at the university when everyone returns to classrooms together.

In this edition, Phan, assistant clinical professor in the Nell Woodruff Hodgson School of Nursing, shares how she and other faculty have adapted classes for remote environments, even those that include clinical components. Phan is joined by Bracewell and Dara Suschke, two students in the School of Nursings Accelerated BSN program, which allows those with bachelors degrees in other disciplines to earn a BSN in 15 months.

The course: Population Health (Nursing 315)

Population Health: Community and Public Health Nursing (Nursing 315) prepares students to provide clinical prevention and population-based health care across the lifespan. Emphasis is on population-focused health promotion, disease and injury prevention care, and social determinants of health to improve the nation's health.

Moving toward remote learning

How did you prepare for this phase of remote learning?

Phan: Thanks to the training I received from Emorys Center for Faculty Development and Education, I was open to trying different ways to incorporate technology. I had adopted a hybrid teaching format for this class just a couple of months before everything moved online. I want to make my class more engaging to the diverse student body with so many different backgrounds and learning styles, so I used Zoom to put together a panel discussion with speakers from rural Georgia in a recent semester.

Bracewell: Prior to the current shift to remote learning, we outfitted a spare closet to function as an office; my daughter has dubbed this space the work hole.

What was one of your primary challenges in shifting to a remote format and how did you meet it?

Phan: With a class of 180 students in two sections, it would be nearly impossible to set up faculty-moderator class discussion. Thanks to support through the CFDE teaching fellowship program, we were able to create online peer-moderator small groups for discussion on Canvas. This allows us to deep dive into some content areas that we would not be able to explore in class otherwise.

We found several ways to supplement our students clinical activities prior to moving our classes online. The School of Nursing purchased access to a simulation product that allows students to do virtual activities and our team of clinical faculty trained on the product prior to rolling it out to students on the first day of remote learning.

Our students are on standby to help virtually staff the Georgia Department of Public Health's triage phone line if they move triage to a remote service (currently, the triage line still requires volunteers to be at the GDPH headquarters). Were also supplementing their clinical hours by getting students trained on Disaster Health Response by the American Red Cross. The Red Cross provides training to health professional students online, which is particularly applicable in light of the pandemic.

Bracewell: My primary challenge during this transition has been juggling the responsibilities of home life while wrapping up a hectic semester. My husband works full-time from our home and our two children (ages 2 and 7) have had their learning shifted to online platforms as well. Balancing all of this means that my studying happens early in the morning or late at night when everyone else sleeps.

Suschke: I tend to structure my to-do list around places I have to go that day (whether its class or clinical). Now that everything is virtual and Im at home all day, I have to be more disciplined about how I structure my day.

Putting remote learning into practice

What has been a pleasant surprise about remote learning?

Phan: One of the biggest surprises is how smooth the transition to remote teaching has been for me thanks to the hybrid format that was already in place. Ive received some positive feedback regarding the hybrid teaching format; I have also received some great constructive feedback on making the activities more useful.

The instructional design and technology support teams have been amazingly supportive of the facultys transition to remote teaching. The other surprising thing about this whole process is how wonderfully supportive our own faculty members are to each other, serving as a back-up person during our live Zoom lectures and trouble-shooting glitches.

Suschke: Because I tend to be more of an introvert, this allows me to be in my comfort zone at home while I learn. Also, because I dont have to commute anywhere, I feel like I have extra time in the day to exercise and prepare food. I enjoy moving through the day at my own pace.

Bracewell: Ive been pleasantly surprised by how my cohort has been able to sustain a sense of community by connecting online.

How are you staying engaged with your students or classmates and professors?

Phan: As a coordinator of my course, which has both didactic and clinical components, I work closely with the clinical instructors to ensure at least a weekly synchronous meeting. I have synchronous activities during the scheduled class time and record the lecture for asynchronous student access. Im also keeping my regular office hours via Zoom.

Suschke: I enjoy seeing all my classmates and professors on classes through Zoom. The professors have been great about being accessible and flexible. Our cohort uses GroupMe to share information, check in with each other, collaborate on projects and share funny pictures and memes. It was fun one day when everyone shared photos of their at-home study buddies, which included lots of cute pets and children.

Lessons to be carried forward

Whats one lesson youve learned during this transition, and how will you use it later?

Bracewell: Ive learned to smile, take a deep breath and trust that everything will work out. Everyone is working hard to make this transition successful. Ive also realized that the extra time with my family is a gift. Im tired, but the extra work will be worth it in the end. I will carry this resilience forward.

Suschke: Im sure there will be more lessons down the road, but one so far is to be flexible and to get comfortable with ambiguity. This will stay with me as other unexpected circumstances emerge moving forward both in the normal classroom setting and in my future career as a nurse.

In addition to focusing on the universitys educational mission, Emory experts are on the front lines of the pandemic  caring for patients, researching possible treatments and vaccines and sharing knowledge to help inform and prepare the public. Visit Emorys COVID-19 page for the latest updates.
Representative Image

A local Congress MLA, who attended a meeting called by Gujarat Chief Minister Vijay Rupani on Tuesday morning, tested positive for coronavirus in the evening, said a civic official.

Coronavirus India News LIVE Updates

Congress MLA Imran Khedawala tested positive for coronavirus on Tuesday evening, said Deputy Municipal Commissioner Om Prakash Machra.

The MLA from the Khadia-Jamalpur seat of Ahmedabad will be admitted to a designated COVID-19 hospital soon, 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

Khedawala, along with some other Congress MLAs, was present in the meeting with Rupani held at the CM's official residence in Gandhinagar.

Follow our full coverage of the coronavirus pandemic here
M att Hancock is facing criticism for offering a "badge of honour" for social care workers as the sector continues to face pressure during the coronavirus crisis.

The Health Secretary said on Wednesday that a single brand symbolising the entire profession would allow individual workers to proudly and publicly identify themselves during the outbreak.

He said the badge would give them the same public recognition as NHS staff.

But the move was met with criticism from industry figures, who pointed to the urgent need for more protective equipment and increased testing.

Health Secretary Matt Hancock wearing the Care Badge / PA

Rehana Azam, national officer of the GMB union, said care workers need more than a badge and a pat on their head to define their precious role in society.

She said: They need the protective equipment and testing on the front line now to protect their lives.

"Ministers should be moving mountains to support our care sector to get the kit workers need available where and when they need it.

Care workers are serially undervalued, highly skilled and massively underpaid.

It will take far more than branding to get them the recognition and support they deserve and that battle will continue until care workers are treated the same as NHS workers.

Health Secretary Matt Hancock during a media briefing in Downing Street / PA

Speaking during the daily Downing Street press conference, Mr Hancock said: This badge will be a badge of honour in a very real sense, allowing social care staff proudly and publicly to identify themselves, just like NHS staff do with that famous blue and white logo.

I know that many businesses will want to offer the same recognition and benefits as they do wonderfully to the NHS.

Lockdown London 1 /18 Lockdown London

As he spoke the Health Secretary pointed to a green and white badge spelling out Care, which appears to be a badge that was launched in June 2019.

Andy Burnham, Labour mayor of Greater Manchester, tweeted in response: Of all the things that long-suffering social care staff in England most need, I would put a badge close to the bottom of the list.

And Barbara Keeley, Labour MP for Worsley & Eccles South, wrote: A badge for social care staff? They need PPE, testing, decent pay and conditions and proper recognition of the vital role they do. But a badge?

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Edel Harris, chief executive of the learning disability charity Mencap, said that beyond well-meaning gestures, such as a badge and new branding, we would much prefer to see funds available so that the hard working frontline social care workforce can be given a pay rise on a par with the NHS to really value the incredible work they do.

Plans for the care sector, set out by Mr Hancock, also include increased testing and improved access to protective equipment.

He said the Government would also strengthen recruitment efforts to get tens of thousands of more staff into the profession.

It will pay for initial induction training, he said.

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Everyone knows the job isnt easy, whether supporting people of working age, who are some of the most vulnerable in society, or supporting people and their families with dignity at the end of their lives, but I know what a fulfilling profession it is and I know that many will answer our call, he added.

Niall Dickson, chief executive of the NHS Confederation  which represents organisations across the healthcare sector, said: Let this be the day we stop talking about health and social care as if they are two different worlds, as if the NHS and nursing homes have different values.

We are in this together and, not before time, the Government has stepped in to proclaim parity for all forms of care and all staff working tirelessly to defeat the virus and save lives.

The virus does not discriminate and nor must we  all care is equal.
Sherri Denney was in the fourth day of quarantine in her home in Springboro, Ohio, when she thought about the toll the coronavirus was taking. She sat in her recliner chair and cried as the states governor checked off the number of dead and sickened, knowing there would be more the next day. Overwhelmed, Ms. Denney, 55, tried to put her feelings into words.

Wow, she began writing on an old sketch pad, quickly realizing the precise words would not come easy. Thats all I can say. My emotions are ranging from sadness to fear to anger.

The week before, a woman in Nevada turned to her own version of journaling. Mimi J. Premo recorded a video on her cellphone, giving voice to a kind of stunned weariness so many Americans are feeling. And in Indianapolis, in an interview recorded by two university research assistants, a man who is diabetic and H.I.V. positive talked about how the speed and unclear ways of transmission freaks me out.

The three accounts, snapshots of intimate moments during the pandemic, are a response to a call from historians and archivists across the country to document this extraordinary moment in history.
President Donald Trump said he will announce Thursday the first plans for lifting coronavirus lockdowns across the United States after the country passed the pandemic's "peak," mirroring a gradual easing in Europe. His comments came shortly before the number of US fatalities -- already the world's highest -- reached a new daily record and became the heaviest one-day death toll of any nation. "It is clear that our aggressive strategy is working," he told a news conference late Wednesday in Washington. "The battle continues but the data suggests that nationwide we have passed the peak on new cases." Trump said he would be announcing guidelines for a reduction in the lockdown in some states, possibly taking effect before the end of this month. Earlier, Germany also unveiled its plans for cautious reopening, becoming the first major European nation to take on the delicate task of restarting its economy without triggering a new wave of infections before a vaccine can be developed. Facing a difficult reelection in November, Trump predicted that the US economy, the world's largest, would "come back quickly" from the paralysis induced by measures taken to slow the virus. Around the world, the total number of COVID-19 cases soared past two million, according to an AFP tally, and the death toll topped 134,000, according to Johns Hopkins University. The US saw 2,569 deaths over a 24-hour period, data from Johns Hopkins showed, with total US deaths above 28,300 In Riyadh, G20 nations of the world's major economies announced a one-year debt moratorium for the world's poorest nations, as the global economy enters the worst recession in a century. Fallout, meanwhile, continued over Trump's attack on the World Health Organization and suspension of US funding to the UN agency. Despite criticism, Trump repeated his accusations Wednesday, saying the WHO covered up the extent of the virus when it first appeared in China, and that as a result France, Italy and Spain were caught unawares. "Tragically, other nations put their trust in the WHO," he said. UN chief Antonio Guterres said this is "not the time" to cut WHO funding, while billionaire Bill Gates, a major WHO contributor, called the move "dangerous." European allies were similarly disapproving and Washington's rivals also took aim -- Russia condemning the "selfish approach" of the US, and China and Iran blasting the decision. - Edging back toward normal - In Europe, Denmark began reopening schools for younger children after a month-long closure and Finland lifted a two-week rail and road blockade on the Helsinki region. Lithuania said it would allow smaller shops to reopen from Thursday. Other countries are tweaking confinement rules, with Iran set to let some small businesses reopen and India allowing millions of rural people to return to work. In South Korea, people went to the polls on Wednesday and delivered a strong show of support for President Moon Jae-in, commending his handling of the epidemic. Once home to the world's second-largest outbreak, South Korea has largely brought the virus under control through widespread testing, contact-tracing and social distancing. A full-scale return to normality still appears a long way off in most other countries. Harvard scientists have warned that repeated periods of social distancing could be needed as far ahead as 2022 to avoid overwhelming hospitals. Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez, who has allowed work to restart in some factories and building sites, warned that "nothing will be the same until a vaccine is found." Belgium extended its stay-at-home order until at least May 3 and banned mass gatherings until the end of August. - 'Extreme caution' - In Germany, Chancellor Angela Merkel announced first steps in undoing coronavirus restrictions that have plunged the economy into a recession. Most shops will be allowed to open once they have "plans to maintain hygiene" although schools must stay closed until May 4 and a ban on large public events will remain in place until August 31. "We have to proceed with extreme caution," Merkel told reporters in Berlin. Schools will gradually be reopened with priority given to pupils about to take leaving examinations. The government urged people to wear face masks when out shopping or on public transport, but stopped short of making it a requirement like in neighboring Austria. - Trouble yet to come - On the horizon looms the worst economic downturn in a century, which the IMF has said could see $9 trillion wiped from the global economy. Germany is already in recession and US manufacturing production plummeted 6.3 percent last month, its biggest fall in seven decades. In France, more than a third of workers are on temporary unemployment, the government said. In poorer, more densely populated countries, governments are still struggling to enforce restrictions on movement that are piling misery on the needy. Fears over hunger and possible social unrest are especially acute in parts of Africa and Latin America. In Ecuador hunger trumps fear of the virus for residents in rundown areas of the badly affected city of Guayaquil. "The police come with a whip to send people running, but how do you say to a poor person 'Stay home' if you don't have enough to eat?" said Carlos Valencia, a 35-year-old teacher. burs-sms/it
Photo: (Photo : Instagram/therealkellypreston)

John Travolta and Kelly Preston shared an Instagram post of a photo of them with their son Jett as it would have been his 28th birthday on Monday. They added a caption, greeting their son a happy birthday, and saying that they love him.

Jett's Death

In January 2009, their family was on vacation at the Old Bahama Bay Hotel on Grand Bahama Island when Jett had a seizure attack. He hit his head on a bathtub at his family's vacation home.

Jett's caretaker found him unconscious in the bathroom at around ten in the morning. He was declared dead at Rand Memorial Hospital.

Preston shared a throwback photo of herself, her husband, Ella Bleu, 19, and Jett, 16, earlier this month, and wrote a caption that raises awareness for the people with autism, saying that they have a special place in her heart.

Travolta's Love for Jett

After Jett was born and cleaned, Travolta held him in his arms for hours while Preston slept. Even when the nurse came to take Jett for various tests, Travolta told them to go back another day. In an interview in 1994, Travolta said that he could not imagine his life without Jett.

Preston Opens Up on Autism

Travolta and Preston do not talk much about their son Jett or autism. However, on an episode of "The Doctors" in November 2012, she shared about his condition, saying that Jett had seizures and that he had Kawasaki Syndrome when he was two years old.

Jett became very ill, which had flu-like symptoms before he was diagnosed with Kawasaki Syndrome. Usually affecting children ages two to five, the condition can cause inflammation of the arteries. And even if it is treatable, in rare cases, it can lead to heart damage.

She added that they know that certain contributing factors lead to his autism. She said some of it is found in chemicals in the environment and food. Preston blamed pesticides, fertilizers, and household cleaners because they had caused Jett to suffer from asthma.

They Welcomed Their Second Son On November 23, 2010, Travolta and Preston welcomed their second son, Benjamin, following the loss of Jett. Preston and Ella cleaned everything out of the house for a significant preparation mode to welcome their newest addition as the pregnancy neared its end.

In 2011, Travolta shared with People that Ben has given the house a renewed spirit and purpose. He was born three years after the couple was trying to conceive. The news of Preston being pregnant left the couple "completely blown away!"

Travolta told Good Morning America in September 2016 that the addition helped keep their family together. He said that having "little Ben" has made them rebond after a tremendous loss.
The Federal Government has reduced the price of NPK fertilizer from N5,500 to N5,000 per 50kg bag, Governor Muhamad Badaru of Jigawa, who is the Chairman, Presidential Fertilizer Initiative (PFI), has announced

Mr Badaru told journalists on Wednesday in Dutse that the gesture was part of palliatives introduced by the Federal Government to cushion the effect of the COVID-19 pandemic to farmers and other end-users.

As part of measures introduced by Mr President to provide relief to Nigerian farmers on account of COVID-19 pandemic, the price of NPK 20.10.10 fertilizer is now N5,000 from N5,500 per 50 kg bag, Mr Badaru said.

He promised that sufficient quantity of the fertilizer would be made available in time for the wet season farming, in spite of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Based on the forgoing, we reassure farmers that all necessary preparations for the successful implementation of Mr Presidents PFI are very much underway.

READ ALSO:

Sufficient volume of the fertilizer will be made available in time to meet the needs of Nigerian farmers for the wet season farming, despite the COVID-19 pandemic which we are hopeful will come to an end soon, he said.

The chairman disclosed that the PFI had also concluded plans for the production of Compound Blends of NPK 20. 10.10 fertilizer.

According to him, the Compound Blend appropriately suits the North-East market because the output has a uniform colour, which cannot be weaponized. (NAN)
Attempting to help its 460,000 supermarket and drugstore personnel get personal protective equipment during the COVID-19 outbreak, The Kroger Co. (NYSE:KR) asked both federal and state governments today to declare its workers temporary emergency personnel. An official designation as "extended first responders" would give them high-priority access to surgical masks, protective gloves, and other gear to help prevent coronavirus infection.

Workers at supermarkets and pharmacies stand at the front line of those who are supplying essentials such as food and healthcare supplies to Americans during the pandemic. The job necessarily involves a high level of exposure to the general public and potential infection. The hazards are starkly illustrated by the announcement of the deaths of four Kroger employees today in Michigan, the state currently with the most COVID-19 cases after New York.

The United Food and Commercial Workers International Union, or UFCW, issued a joint statement together with Kroger. Kroger CEO Rodney McMullen and UFCW President Marc Perrone said the designation of the workers as first responders was "absolutely critical" to protect the employees, people shopping for necessities, and the national food supply itself.

The UFCW and Kroger previously worked together to develop a plan to give the latter's employees a temporary $2 per hour pay boost, emergency paid leave, shorter store hours, and expanded cleaning and sanitation measures starting on April 1. Kroger has also started drive-through coronavirus testing in Kentucky.

McMullen and Perrone stressed the grocery sector's vital role, especially during the pandemic, by stating, "As all Americans are now witnessing -- grocery workers play a critical role in our communities and they must be protected."
Tim Chen, CEO and co-founder of $500 million company NerdWallet, says he is "weathering the [coronavirus] storm" just like other businesses, but he is still optimistic. "There's a real silver lining here," Chen tells CNBC Make It. Chen believes there is opportunity for the next generation of entrepreneurs. "Now is the best time ever to build a company," Chen says. Chen would know: During the 2008-2009 financial crisis he was laid off at Christmas from his job at a hedge fund. Though he was devastated, he took the opportunity to become an entrepreneur, something he always dreamed of doing. Chen, now 37, says he got the idea for NerdWallet a few months into his unemployment when his sister, who was living in Australia, emailed him a question about finding a credit card with lower foreign transaction fees. When he couldn't easily find the answer via Google, he decided to create his own list. That list inspired the idea for NerdWallet. Chen spent $800 to cover early start-up costs like domain fees and software. Today, NerdWallet has more than 10 million monthly visitors and is valued at more than half a billion dollars. "So arguably the financial crisis was absolutely the worst time ever to start a company, but I actually found quite the opposite," Chen says. Chen says he soon discovered three reasons why a recession (and now a pandemic) can be a perfect time to launch a business.

Better talent pool

Chen says now its the time to snatch up top talent. "The cost of great talent drops in recessions and it's actually easier to hire them," Chen says. And finding better talent for cheaper rates allows entrepreneurs to create a better product for less money, he says. He also suggests looking internationally for talent. "It can be daunting to get it set up. But once you do and you figure out recruiting, onboarding and operations, hiring internationally is much less expensive," he says. "If [NerdWallet] wasn't already a distributed workforce, I'd seriously consider [hiring internationally]," Chen says.

Marketing is cheap

Chen says he has already seen ad rates decline drastically during Covid-19. "So with ad rates dropping, its basically a chance to build your brand for less while we're in recession," he says. Chen advises start-ups to look for cheaper opportunities on news platforms such as Twitch and avoid the bigger name advertising platforms. "It's just super hard on platforms like Facebook and Google because they're so efficient and all the big companies are so good at doing quantitative analysis to figure out how to buy and own those ads," he says. And if you don't have a budget for marketing yet, organic marketing  getting customers to come to your business naturally over time or through word of mouth rather than through paid links  is also a good tactic during a recession Chen says. In NerdWallet's case, organic marketing was easy during the financial crisis because in the early days, the site focused on helping people do things like figuring out how to get a free checking account.

Less competition

When Chen launched NerdWallet in the beginning of 2009, he says there was virtually no one else was trying to start a personal finance company and existing competitors were too "hamstrung" because they were laying off staff. In a recession, Chen says, "You don't have to like race against 10 well-funded competitors to go after a market. There's just a lot less competition coming in the next couple years." He even believes now is a "fantastic" time to start a travel company of sorts amid travel restrictions and social distancing due to Covid-19 because no one else is thinking about it.

New businesses are nimble
Some curbs on cement, e-commerce, fertiliser, chemical and glass manufacturing lifted to stem economic fallout.

Islamabad, Pakistan  Pakistans government has loosened restrictions on a range of industries across the country in a bid to battle the economic fallout of a continuing lockdown, in place to curb the spread of the coronavirus in the country.

Prime Minister Imran Khan announced that the construction industry would be foremost among more than a dozen sectors that would be allowed to reopen operations on Wednesday.

A lockdown on all public gatherings and the closure of educational institutions and non-essential businesses remains in place until at least April 30, he said at a news conference a day earlier.

We were aware that if you suddenly close down a country, then different classes, especially the poorer classes  all of those people, small shop owners, pushcart sellers, all suddenly became unemployed, he said.

Pakistan imposed varying levels of restrictions across the country late last month, with provincial governments dictating regulations on which businesses were allowed to remain open.

Broadly, only grocery stores, pharmacies, banks and other essential services were allowed to operate before the prime ministers announcement.

From Wednesday, other industries that will be allowed to operate include cement, fertiliser, chemical manufacturing, glass manufacturing, e-commerce (aimed at exports), mines, paper and packaging manufacturers and a number of other smaller businesses, federal Minister Hammad Azhar said.

Pakistan has at least 5,988 confirmed cases of COVID-19 and 107 deaths from the disease, according to Johns Hopkins University data.

At least 1,424 patients have recovered, government data shows.

Since the beginning of the outbreak in the country in late February, Prime Minister Khan has warned that Pakistans already slowing economy could not withstand the shock that a full lockdown would entail.

Earlier this week, the World Bank predicted the economic outlook for South Asian countries was dire. The International Monetary Fund estimates Pakistans economy will contract 1.5 percent this year.

No lockdown on mosques

Shortly after the prime ministers announcement, a group of influential religious leaders announced that they would defy government orders banning congregational prayers across the country, restarting services from Wednesday.

From today onwards there will be no lockdown on mosques  mosques will be functional, said Muneeb-ur-Rehman, a prominent religious leader.

We have pledged that the medical suggestion of social distancing will be maintained, and mosques will host prayers five times a day and Friday prayers as well  all of these will remain ongoing.

Taqi Usmani, an influential preacher, likened congregational prayers to essential services like banks that have been exempted from the countrywide lockdown.

For a Muslim, offering prayers as part of a congregation and the Friday prayers are an important need, he told reporters in the southern city Karachi on Tuesday.

Especially being able to go to the mosque in Ramadan and to offer prayers as a congregation. It is not just a need, it can be an important way to be rid of the virus through [prayer].

Usmani, reading an agreement signed by more than a dozen heads of prominent religious organisations, said mosques would reopen, but would follow precautionary measures such as providing sanitiser through dispensers at mosque gates, disinfecting prayer mats and ordering social distancing between congregants wherever possible.

Mosque administrators should make sure that between rows of worshippers there should be space of one row in between them, and in a single row, people should stand with a reasonable distance between them, said Usmani.

The orders to reopen mosques are in defiance of government recommendations that mosques limit all congregational prayers to a maximum of five people, all of whom must be members of the mosque administration.

Pakistani President Arif Alvi is due to meet with prominent religious leaders later this month to negotiate on what measures will be taken at mosques during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, due to begin next month.

Asad Hashim is Al Jazeeras digital correspondent in Pakistan. He tweets @AsadHashim.
An Australian living in China says the government is tracking residents by their mobile phones and forcing them to submit to constant temperature checks as the birthplace of the deadly coronavirus slowly comes out of lockdown.

Matthew Nagy, from Queensland's Sunshine Coast, has been living in China with his wife Serina Yang since before the deadly outbreak began in Wuhan in December.

The couple recorded their first outing in months as they visited a shopping centre, restaurant and hotel in Guangzhou - 1,028 kilometres south of the original epicentre of Wuhan, in the Hubei Province.

'We were locked down for quite a long time, now a lot of the restaurants are open, the schools are going back, all the manufacturing [is starting again]... it's all going well,' Mr Nagy told his YouTube channel.

The expat said residents were required to wear masks, undergo temperature checks, provide their passport and details of where they've visited in the last 14 days and have their mobile phone scanned before they're allowed to enter buildings.

Restaurant staff in gloves and face masks used thermometre guns to check the couple's temperatures before they could enter

Mr Nagy was required to show his passport at the entrance of the Four Seasons Hotel to prove he hadn't recently flown into China from overseas

'You have to wear masks at all times when you're out and about of course,' Mr Nagy, who works in Guangzhou as a furniture company director, told viewers.

'Except when you're eating and drinking - it's accepted that you can take them off then.'

As the couple pulled up to a high-end shopping centre, they were stopped by a worker who checked their temperature using an infrared thermometer gun.

Workers also check an app on their phone which shows if they had visited a COVID-19 hotspot in the previous two weeks.

Dozens of face mask-clad shoppers were seen making their way around the mall while observing strict social distancing protocol.

'Everyone has to wear masks here. It sucks, it gets a bit annoying, but you get used to it I suppose,' Mr Nagy said.

Mr Nagy and Mrs Yang then drove to a nearby restaurant, where they documented the stringent health checks required before entering.

Two workers in gloves and face masks used thermometer guns to check the couple's temperature.

Mrs Yang told viewers that diners are required to write down their phone numbers and the places they have visited in the past 14 days.

Mr Nagy and his wife had to write down their phone numbers on a clipboard

Every second table at the outdoor cafe had signs prohibiting people from sitting there, in a bid to space out diners to stop the spread of COVID-19

Matt Nagy, from Queensland, and his Chinese wife Serina Yang took viewers on a tour of Guangzhou - 1,028 kilometres south of the former epicentre of Wuhan, in the Hubei Province

Staff scan their mobile phone and an app shows if they have been in a COVID-19 hotspot and if so they are rejected entry.

Every second table at the outdoor cafe had signs prohibiting people from sitting there, in a bid to space out diners to stop the spread of COVID-19.

Mr Nagy and Mrs Yang then travelled to the Four Seasons Hotel for afternoon tea, where a worker passed a clipboard into their car to sign.

'Matt has to fill in this health report before we can go into the building,' Mrs Yang told the camera.

At the entrance to the hotel lobby, Mr Nagy was required to show his passport to a different employee to prove he hadn't recently flown into China from overseas.

Mr Nagy and Mrs Yang then took the elevator up to the hotel's skyrise restaurant, where minimal health checks were undertaken but diners were scarce.

Authorities in Guangzhou have started investigating a possible series of community transmission of coronavirus, with the city reporting 466 cases.

The coronavirus epidemic originated from China after dozens of people suffering 'mysterious viral pneumonia' were linked to the same seafood market in Wuhan.

The country is slowly beginning to return to normal with Wuhan's 11 million people allowed to leave and re-enter the city after the lockdown was lifted on April 8.

China claims only 3,336 people have been killed by COVID-19 in the country - one 30th of the global toll - although it has been accused of covering up the real toll.

Australia has had 6,440 cases and just 63 deaths, with the declining rate of infections sparking debate about when restrictions should be lifted to salvage jobs and the economy.

As part of that lifting, Australia was also looking an app-based tracking method.

Singapore is using the TraceTogether application to help track the spread of the disease.

The video was filmed in Guangzhou - situated 1,028 kilometres south of the former epicentre of Wuhan, in the Hubei Province

Matthew Nagy, from Queensland's Sunshine Coast, has been living in China with his wife Serina Yang since before the deadly outbreak began in Wuhan in December

Australia has been given the code to develop the surveillance software to monitor residents.

'We're very keen to use it and use it perhaps even more extensively than Singapore,' Chief Medical Officer Brendan Murphy told a New Zealand parliamentary hearing.

But Professor Murphy acknowledged there were privacy concerns.

'Obviously there's a conversation to have with the community about the acceptability of it but we think that idea, the TraceTogether app, is a really excellent one,' he said.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison met with Singapore Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong via video on Monday March 23 to discuss the COVID-19 outbreak.

Mr Morrison confirmed the government was looking at digital options for contact tracing.

'But to fight this fight, there are so many tools that we have to use,' Mr Morrison told reporters.

'But the people we need most are Australians listening, being patient, carefully understanding the things we are asking of them.

TraceTogether uses Bluetooth to detect other users in close proximity, with encounters stored on a person's phone.

They then have to share the records with authorities when asked to be part of a tracing investigation.
Prince Harry and Meghan, Duchess of Sussex have officially stepped down as senior royals and its been more than a month since we last saw them in public with Prince William and Catherine, Duchess of Cambridge. That last meeting was awkward and put the foursomes fractured relationship on full display as William and the Sussexes only exchanged brief pleasantries while Kate did not even look Harry or Meghans way.

Its no secret that the Duke and Duchess of Sussex wanted to get away from the royal spotlight because of how they were being treated by the press. However, many believe that a feud between the princes and their wives may have contributed to their exit as well. One royal expert has questioned if jealousy is what ultimately drove them away from royal life.

Prince Harry, Meghan Markle, Prince William, and Kate Middleton | Phil Harris  WPA Pool/Getty Images

There was a rift between William and Harry

There has been so much written about the former Fab Four that no one knows what really went wrong between them, but we do know that the princes had some type of rift. Prince Harry addressed those reports during the documentary Harry & Meghan: An African Journey in October 2019.

Inevitably stuff happens. But were brothers, well always be brothers, Harry said. Were certainly on different paths at the moment. Ill always be there for him and as I know, hell always be there for me. We dont see each other as much as we used to because were so busy but I love him dearly.

He added, The majority of stuff is created out of nothing. As brothers, we have good days and we have bad days.

A few months later, Harry and Meghan announced that they were leaving royal life behind.

Prince William and Prince Harry | Mark Cuthbert/UK Press via Getty Images

Did jealousies of Will and Kate or other royals drive the Sussexes away?

Royal watchers everywhere have speculated about what exactly drove the Sussexes out of the U.K. and away from Harrys family, including royal expert Ingrid Seward.

While speaking to TalkRADIO host Mike Graham, Seward had a lot of questions about what the couple wanted to get away from because the media wasnt going to just stop covering them.

Everything they do will be monitored, they are certainly not going to get away from the press, she stated.What they are going to get away from is the royal family and this is a slightly grey area that is difficult to understand. What is it about the royal family that they are so very upset with?

Seward then brought up jealousy and questioned if they had some built up against other royals and that could have been behind their motivation to leave.

Prince Harry, Meghan Markle, Prince William, and Kate Middleton | Phil Harris  WPA Pool/Getty Images

I wish I could ask them, I think this is what everybody wants to know, Seward said. What is it that has driven them out? What jealousies? It is still a grey area and it has been a very difficult time for them.

Graham, however, opined that Meghan wanted out of the Firm is because she couldnt call all the shots.

One of the things I think we have learned about Meghan Markle is she doesnt like being told what to do, Graham remarked. One of the reasons we are told that she left the royal family is because she wasnt that comfortable about not being the top dog and not being able to pull everybodys strings and get what she wanted.

The duke and duchess officially stepped down from royal duties on March 31 and are now residing in Los Angeles.

Read more: How Prince Charles and Camilla Proved They Are Closer With William and Kate Now After Harry and Meghan Stepped Down
Schools in Stratford District are playing their part in the fight against coronavirus by donating much needed personal protective equipment to medical centres in the region.

One of those to help is Henley School, which recently donated a mammoth 800 pairs of gloves, 200 face masks and 100 disposable aprons to Henley Medical Centre.

Steve Jefferies, headteacher at Henley School, said: We took a huge batch of gloves, masks and disposable aprons to Henley Medical Centre, we had so much PPE because six months ago we had an outbreak of norovirus at the school and we needed lots of equipment for the deep clean team.

Yesterday we also donated all of our protective glasses that we use in our science lessons. The Medical Centre were delighted with it all, they bit my hand off really. I think throughout all of this its really pushed home the role the school plays in supporting the local community, I currently make video messages offering support to parents who are home-schooling their children.

Were so glad that we can donate this equipment.

Henley school is not the only one helping out King Edward VI School in Stratford has also risen to the task of helping the NHS.

Bennet Carr, headmaster at KES, said: We heard through an article in the Guardian that the NHS in the North West was asking schools if they could help with providing PPE, our head of design technology and science got together to see what we could do and we messaged the South Warwickshire NHS Foundation Trust through twitter to ask if they needed anything.

Within minutes we were contacted by the surgery at Meon Vale and we delivered around 30 sets of glasses, face shields and a large number of boxes of disposable plastic gloves.

Another surgery got in contact the same day, wed just delivered all our PPE to Meon Vale but I messaged some of the other headteachers in the area and St Benedicts have been able to help them out instead.

An interesting development is the recent contact weve had with a company in China we know, through the schools association with the region. I messaged them when China was going through its really difficult time with the virus to see if we could help in any way, now theyve been in contact with us to offer any assistance we might need. They said they would send over PPE equipment for our students, I told them we dont need it for our students, but the NHS would really benefit from anything they can send. Were expecting to receive this equipment any day.

Design technology staff at KES are also making use of the schools 3D printing facilities to produce visors for key workers.

These too will be distributed to local medical centres.

Johnson Clarke, practice manager at the Meon Medical Centre, said: We would like to thank KES for their donation, the masks are fantastic. All this equipment will be used really well and some of it will go to our hot hub clinic which has opened in Stratford.

He explained that the hot hubs are being used to treat patients who may have symptoms associated with coronavirus such as a high temperatures, but which may also be caused by a wide range of other conditions as well.

Stratford School has also donated many items of PPE.
Germany slams Trumps decision on halting WHO funds

Trump has announced on Tuesday that he was going to halt funding to the WHO, accusing the organization of severely mismanaging and covering up the spread of the coronavirus.

Germany on Wednesday criticized US President Donald Trump for halting funding to the World Health Organization (WHO) in the middle of the worst pandemic in decades.

"WHO HAS ALREADY BEEN SUFFERING FROM UNDERFUNDING"

Foreign Minister Heiko Maas said on Twitter that the accusations against the WHO were not helpful at a time the world needed closer international cooperation to combat the novel coronavirus.

"The virus knows no borders. We have to closely work together against #COVID19," he stressed, and called for steps to further strengthen the UN and the WHO.

Germanys top diplomat said the WHO has already been suffering from underfunding, and suggested that one of the best investments in the fight against coronavirus would be providing more support to the organization, especially for the development and distribution of tests and a vaccine.
Pritzker has been saying for weeks that the federal government should have been leading the effort to secure masks, gloves and other PPE, and hit that refrain during an interview on CNN: Weve ordered millions and millions of dollars worth of PPE and items of PPE that were getting delivered from all over the world  weve had to compete with everybody, including with Donald Trump, for that PPE," Pritzker said. "Were getting it, were doing what we need to do despite him.
Border province wants no more container trucks until pileup cleared

Containers at Tan Thanh border gate in the northern province of Lang Son. Photo courtesy of Hai Quan Online.

As China imposes trade restrictions to ward off Covid-19, the northern province of Lang Son proposes halt to container traffic at one of its major border gates.

Provincial Deputy Chairman Nguyen Cong Truong said there were over 1,000 containers waiting to enter China via Tan Thanh Border Gate as of Wednesday.

The proposed suspension would last 15 days starting Thursday, as it could take 20 to ease congestion.

China imposed more stringent import measures earlier this month to prevent entry and further spread of the novel coronavirus.

It only allows trade via five border gates in Lang Son, compared to 12 before, each operating for only five hours a day, compared to the usual 9-10 hours.

The number of containers, mostly carrying fruit, have dropped from 1,200 in March to 300 last week, then to 50.

China has rejected a Lang Son proposal to open its border gates for the same duration as before.

The Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development had earlier advised traders to stop sending goods to China via border gates to avoid a pileup.

First quarter fruit exports to China, the largest buyer of Vietnamese agriculture produce, fell 29.4 percent year-on-year to $300 million as the Covid-19 pandemic halted normal trade, according to the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development.
For two days in mid-April, severe storms raced through the southern U.S. and NASA created an animation using satellite data to show the movement and strength of those storms.

From Sunday, April 12 into Monday, April 13, 2020, a series of powerful thunderstorms developed across the southern U.S., bringing heavy rainfall and spawning several destructive tornadoes.

At NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. an animation was created that shows rainfall estimates for the region from April 11 to 13, derived from NASA's Integrated Multi-satellite Retrievals for GPM (IMERG) data product. The GPM or the Global Precipitation Measurement mission is a constellation of satellites provide the data for NASA's IMERG. The animation showed several storms that dropped more than 0.6 inches/16 mm of rainfall per hour.

On April 12, two sets of storms with those rainfall rates almost blanketed the state of Arkansas and then moved into the Tennessee Valley. Storms also generated tornadoes as they moved through Alabama, Mississippi, northern Georgia, and the Carolinas. The tornadoes in the animation were confirmed with reports from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration or NOAA.

What is IMERG?

The near-realtime rain estimate comes from the NASA's Integrated Multi-satellitE Retrievals for GPM (IMERG) algorithm, which combines observations from a fleet of satellites, in near-realtime, to provide near-global estimates of precipitation every 30 minutes. By combining NASA precipitation estimates with other data sources, we can gain a greater understanding of major storms that affect our planet.

IMERG fills in the "blanks" between weather observation stations. IMERG satellite-based rain estimates can be compared to that from a National Weather Service ground radar. Such good detection of large rain features in real time would be impossible if the IMERG algorithm merely reported the precipitation observed by the periodic overflights of various agencies' satellites. Instead, what the IMERG algorithm does is "morph" high-quality satellite observations along the direction of the steering winds to deliver information about rain at times and places where such satellite overflights did not occur. Information morphing is particularly important over the majority of the world's surface that lacks ground-radar coverage.

For more information about NASA's Precipitation Measurement missions, visit: https://gpm.nasa.gov

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New York, April 15 : The death toll from COVID-19 in New York City (NYC) increased by some 3,700 to exceed 10,000 after including those who presumably died of the disease but never got tested for the coronavirus, according to the US media reports.

The city's Health Department has been working for weeks to collect those missed data by learning about those who passed away with the same symptoms as COVID-19 and their medical histories.

The city's official number of deaths was believed to be an undercount as people who died at home before they got tested for the virus were left out, local officials and media had said.

Due to limited testing and hospital capacity, especially at the beginning of the outbreak, many people with mild to mid-level symptoms were turned down at testing centers, reported Xinhua news agency.

Mark Levine, chair of the NYC Council Committee on Health, said last week that normally 20 to 25 people die at home on a daily basis in the city, while the number now is at 200-215 every day.

"For sure nearly all the increase is people with coronavirus. But not all are being counted that way," he tweeted.

"Only people who die at home who are known to have a 'positive coronavirus test' have the disease listed as the official cause on their death certificate. We know there are many others going uncounted," he said.

As of 6 p.m. (2200 GMT) on Tuesday, a total of 202,630 cases were reported in New York state, with 110,464 in New York City, according to a tally kept by Johns Hopkins University.

-- The story has been published from a wire feed without any modifications to the text
The coronavirus pandemic and its resulting quarantine counter-measures have people around the world shuttered in their homes with little to do but fret. So its not surprising that a March survey from the American Psychiatric Association found that the disease has many people on edge. Out of 1,000 people surveyed, nearly half of respondents were anxious about contracting and dying from the virus, while 62 percent were worried about friends and family doing the same with more than 1 in 3 admitting that the pandemic was seriously impacting their mental health.

What [people] are describing is a feeling of overwhelmed-ness, Montgomery County Crisis Center manager Dorne Hill told the Washington Post recently.

Nor should it come as any surprise that people, in these times of unprecedented worry, have turned to alcohol to help manage their stress. Vodka sales in Russia jumped 65 percent during the last week of March, after Vladimir Putin instituted a partial nationwide quarantine while BACTrack reports that weekday drinking throughout the San Francisco Bay Area spiked 45 percent during the first week of the California quarantine which began March 17th.

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But for a lot of people, especially the estimated 14.4 million American adults who already struggle with Alcohol Use Disorder, the prospect of being cooped up inside with time to kill is no reason to celebrate. Compounding the problem is our need to physically distance from one another, which has all but eliminated in-person therapy, recovery and support groups. So how do you get and/or stay sober if you cant leave your house? Thankfully a number of online resources have emerged in response to the crisis.

Remote therapy isnt actually all that new. Its one of a number of applications that make up the larger field of telehealth services. As the federal Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA) defines it, telehealth is the use of electronic information and telecommunications technologies to support long-distance clinical health care, patient and professional health-related education, public health and health administration. Its effectively the same service, both in terms of quantity and quality, thats available to patients in-person, just provided remotely.

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The first proposed application came back in 1879 when the Lancet suggested leveraging new-fangled telephones to reduce the number of necessary doctors office visits. Today, telehealth is used in everything from radiology, dermatology, and dentistry to ophthalmology, optometry, and psychology. Its been a boon to rural communities and other underserved populations, enabling them access to medical care without the need to drive for hours -- assuming they have access to a connected device. And in the age of COVID-19, telehealth is once again proving its worth.

In recent years, telehealth services have seen a spike in new interest from both policy makers and the public in general. Mei Kwong, executive director of the Center for Connected Health Policy in California, notes that around 2016, Part of that reason was the technology itself was developing, much more rapidly. Technology itself was also becoming more integrated into our lives so I think people were starting to get that familiarity of, Oh, we can use [connected devices] for so many different things -- like health care.

The CCHP has also seen a significant increase of inquiries about telehealth services over the last year. Kwong points out that in 2019, the CCHP received roughly 30 inquiries. In 2020, that number had ballooned to more than 300. With that growing interest has come a rapid expansion of available online support services such as doxy.me, TalkSpace, TheraNest, and BetterHelp, all of which offer video-based behavioral therapy as well as Woebot and Wyse, which offer text-based help. And with the White Houses recent decision to relax HIPAA requirements and allow people on Medicare to access telehealth programs, the number and scope of these services are certain to grow even further.

We are doing a dramatic expansion of whats known as telehealth for our 62 million Medicare beneficiaries, who are amongst the most vulnerable to the coronavirus, Seema Verma, administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, said during a White House press conference in March. Medicare beneficiaries across the nationno matter where they livewill now be able to receive a wide-range of services via telehealth without ever having to leave home. These services can also be provided in a variety of settings, including nursing homes, hospital outpatient departments, and more.

However, these mental health services, like virtually every other internet platform, are to a degree at risk of misuse and data breaches. Zoom-bombing has quickly spread from online classrooms to online therapists offices. Whats more, as John Torous, the director of the digital psychiatry division at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, told Slate, Hackers go for valuable data. Health data is very valuable, and insecure health systems are always primary targets for hackers. This is why HIPAA requires online platforms not only be secure (at least more secure than what youd typically find in Google Meet or FaceTime) but also employ business associate agreements certifying the emplacement of administrative safeguards against potential data leaks.

Many video platforms today do already offer end-to-end encryption, so finding a secure platform is still good clinical practice, Torous continued, adding that You can have the best castle, the biggest moat, and biggest door, but if you leave the door open, it doesnt matter.

And its not just traditional medical experts that are utilizing teletherapy sessions during the quarantine, a number of informal support groups have sprung up in response as well. Laura McKowen, author of We Are The Luckiest: The Surprising Magic of a Sober Life, has started a free, Zoom-based sobriety support group which runs six days a week and reaches roughly 300 people per session.

There are all these people that now can't go to make it to real life support, they can't go to meetings or other programs they might be part of, and how impossible that would have been for me in my early sobriety. McKowen told Engadget. So I figured I had the platform to do it, I can do it so easily so why not?

While not officially associated with Alcoholics Anonymous, these meetings are structured similarly. They begin with a brief meditation followed by a reading, some kind of poem or book or passage that I love, McKowen explained. Then I have a speaker who speaks for 25 or so minutes, and then I open it up for people to share, before closing with a second round of meditation.

And although these online sessions dont offer the same physical connection as in-person meetings would -- those who share cant hear the groups applause once they finish, dont enjoy the physical closeness and recognition from other attendees -- the added anonymity of being online has shown to have benefits as well. If you were sitting in a room of 300 people, itd feel wild, McKowen said. But because everyone's at home, it doesn't feel overwhelming.

A lot of people have identified themselves as someone who's never spoken in the meeting or never said anything to a group of people about their sobriety, she continued. So, that is really encouraging to me.

To ensure that these meetings are safe spaces for those attending, McKowen maintains a tight rein on the operations. I haven't experienced any zoom-bombing that's been happening because I haven't posted the meeting information on social media anywhere.  Beyond that, all attendees are muted by default and can only be unmuted by McKowen while theyre sharing so nobody has to listen to the sound of 300 other people fidgeting while they share.

One participant in these meetings is Ginny Hogan, author of Toxic Femininity in the Workplace. Hogan, who has been sober for 13 months, has been isolating in Los Angeles since March. The good is that I don't go to social events, which were a trigger for me, she told Engadget. I'm a stand up comedian and I used to be in bars a lot and that was always hard.

On the other hand, Hogan notes that with the quarantine in place it's a lot more isolating. I think like human connection is so important in overcoming addiction I can't imagine doing this if I were earlier in my sobriety.

Her own experiences with online sobriety support groups to date have been less than stellar. I went to AA a few times, but it wasnt really for me, and a virtual AA meeting just because I was having trouble and it's just challenging, Hogan explained. I mean, it is already challenging to connect with everyone there because it's such a wide variety of people and then online with the extra distance of the Zoom call, it felt very difficult to form any sort of connection.

Like any recovery program, online support groups are not a one-size-fits-all solution. Kwong advocates for those sorts of decisions to be made by medical professionals in conjunction with their patients. You should just make it freely available to the healthcare provider to you when they think it is appropriate, she said. Leave it to their judgement.

That is what they have been trained for -- and another thing they're actually the one who's there in that situation with that patient -- because even if telehealth could be used medically to provide a service, you still want to take into account that it is appropriate for that person, Kwong continued.

But even if the idea of online support groups makes your skin crawl, there are still plenty of resources at your disposal during this quarantine. One of the simplest means of cutting back your intake is to simply not keep alcohol in your home, McKowen notes. She also recommends that people connect with some kind of community. There are so many Facebook groups, there are so many amazing people on Instagram... find a community of people that you can connect with and just dig in that way. Don't just white knuckle it and not drink.

McKowen also suggests recurating your social media feeds to reduce the amount of alcohol related content that flows through your timeline. A lot more people are talking about drinking right now, she said. If I was trying to get sober right now, I would really pay attention to what I was taking in as far as messaging from other people.
Howrah: West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee during a meeting with Industrialist and Traders regarding novel coronavirus (COVID 19) pandemic, in Howrah on April 9, 2020. (Photo: IANS) Image Source: IANS News

Kolkata, April 15 : The West Bengal government is planning to give some pocket money to migrant workers from the state, who are stranded at various places like Khar and Surat due to the ongoing Covid induced lockdown, Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee said on Wednesday.

Banerjee said she spoke to some groups of the stranded workers in Bandra and Khar. "They told me that have been given two kg rice each, but they don't have the money to buy vegetables. So we want to give them some pocket money.

"If we can contact more such workers in Mumbai and Gujarat's Surat, we will give them pocket money too. We can't send the money from here. We will get them the amount through some local contacts there," she said.

The Chief Minister said she called up Maharashtra Chief Minister Uddhav Thackeray and thanked him for helping the migrant workers from Bengal.

"They (Maharashtra government) are working in a crisis situation. If they need help from our side, we are ready," Banerjee said.

Besides the migrant workers, other inhabitants of Bengal have also got stuck outside the state due to the lockdown.

"They are stranded in Surat, Delhi, Vellore, Chenani, Vrindavan. Many of them had gone due to health emergency. We are trying to help them also in a small way," she said.
Infosys Ltd is quoting at Rs 647.25, up 1.55% on the day as on 12:54 IST on the NSE. The stock is down 10.61% in last one year as compared to a 22.29% slide in NIFTY and a 19.74% slide in the Nifty IT index.

Infosys Ltd is up for a third straight session today. The stock is quoting at Rs 647.25, up 1.55% on the day as on 12:54 IST on the NSE. The benchmark NIFTY is up around 1.84% on the day, quoting at 9159.6. The Sensex is at 31241.44, up 1.8%. Infosys Ltd has gained around 10.99% in last one month.

Meanwhile, Nifty IT index of which Infosys Ltd is a constituent, has gained around 3.68% in last one month and is currently quoting at 12603.1, up 2.43% on the day. The volume in the stock stood at 60.49 lakh shares today, compared to the daily average of 151.52 lakh shares in last one month.

The benchmark April futures contract for the stock is quoting at Rs 652, up 1.84% on the day. Infosys Ltd is down 10.61% in last one year as compared to a 22.29% slide in NIFTY and a 19.74% slide in the Nifty IT index.

The PE of the stock is 17.74 based on TTM earnings ending December 19.

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Maharashtra minister Jitendra Awhad has posted the laboratory report of his negative test result to quell what he said were rumours that he had contracted the coronavirus disease.

The state housing minister had gone into home quarantine on Monday after he had come in contact with a senior police officer, who tested positive for Covid-19 two days ago.

Awhad has tested negative in the first report.

I m fit and fine Working on streets But some channels using me for #TRP

Interesting to know that they think people watch this also (sic), the Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) leader said.

Plz c the report Undoubtebly i was over exposed for over a month God is kind who are kind to others (sic), he added.

Awhad had lashed out at the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leader Kirit Somaiya on Tuesday for questioning the test results of his Covid-19 test.

Somaiya had urged state health minister Rajesh Tope to clarify about Awhads status and that of 14 of his contacts, saying there were contradictory reports in the media on whether they had tested positive for the novel coronavirus.

On Wednesday, he sought his arrest.

How can he gossip spread rumours and create panic This is heinous crime He should b booked and arrested This tweet should b taken as a complain against @KiritSomaiya (sic), the minister tweeted.

Awhad represents Mumbra-Kalwa, which is under a complete lockdown due to the increasing number of coronavirus disease cases.

As a precautionary measure and protocol, I have home quarantined myself. Only if all my reports are negative will I be able to step out and help others, Awhad had said in an audio message posted on social media.

He said that he got tests done for 80 people, including his employees and party workers. Eleven of them tested positive. He said that unlike some news reports, his cook has not tested positive.

A statement released by Awhad said, It is important that the testing should increase. The poor cannot afford the cost of testing in private labs so people who can afford should pay for them. I would also like to clarify that my cook has not tested positive.

Awhad said that eight of those tested are asymptomatic.

I had been meeting people of my constituency and distributing food. I will be back in my constituency in a few days. Eight of my staffers are asymptomatic. The state has to take decision if asymptomatic persons can be listed as positive cases, he added.
ST. PETERSBURG, Fla. (April 15, 2020)- Since the 2010 BP oil spill, marine scientists at the University of South Florida (USF) have sampled more than 2,500 individual fish representing 91 species from 359 locations across the Gulf of Mexico and found evidence of oil exposure in all of them, including some of the most popular types of seafood. The highest levels were detected in yellowfin tuna, golden tilefish and red drum.

The study, just published in "Nature Scientific Reports," represents the first comprehensive, Gulf-wide survey of oil pollution launched in response to the Deepwater Horizon spill. It was funded by a nearly $37 million grant from the independent Gulf of Mexico Research Initiative (GoMRI) to establish the Center for Integrated Modeling and Analysis of Gulf Ecosystems (C-IMAGE), an international consortium of professors, post-doctoral scholars and students from 19 collaborating institutions.

Over the last decade, USF scientists conducted a dozen research expeditions to locations off the United States, Mexico and Cuba examining levels of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs), the most toxic chemical component of crude oil, in the bile of the fish. Bile is produced by the liver to aid in digestion, but it also acts as storage for waste products.

"We were quite surprised that among the most contaminated species was the fast-swimming yellowfin tuna as they are not found at the bottom of the ocean where most oil pollution in the Gulf occurs," said lead author Erin Pulster, a researcher in USF's College of Marine Science. "Although water concentrations of PAHs can vary considerably, they are generally found at trace levels or below detection limits in the water column. So where is the oil pollution we detected in tunas coming from?"

Pulster says it makes sense that tilefish have higher concentrations of PAH because they live their entire adult lives in and around burrows they excavate on the seafloor and PAHs are routinely found in Gulf sediment. However, their exposure has been increasing over time, as well as in other species, including groupers, some of Florida's most economically important fish. In a separate USF-led study, her team measured the concentration of PAHs in the liver tissue and bile of 10 popular grouper species. The yellowedge grouper had a concentration that increased more than 800 percent from 2011 to 2017.

Fish with the highest concentrations of PAH were found in the northern Gulf of Mexico, a region of increased oil and gas activity and in the vicinity of the Deepwater Horizon spill that gushed nearly four million barrels of oil over the course of three months in 2010. Oil-rich sediments at the bottom where much of the oil settled are resuspended by storms and currents, re-exposing bottom-dwelling fish.

Oil pollution hot spots were also found off major population centers, such as Tampa Bay, suggesting that runoff from urbanized coasts may play a role in the higher concentrations of PAHs. Other sources include chornic low-level releases from oil and gas platforms, fuel from boats and airplanes and even natural oil seeps--fractures on the seafloor that can ooze the equivalent of millions of barrels of oil per year.

"This was the first baseline study of its kind, and it's shocking that we haven't done this before given the economic value of fisheries and petroleum extraction in the Gulf of Mexico," said Steven Murawksi, professor of fisheries biology at USF, who led the international research effort.

Despite the detected trends of oil contamination in fish bile and liver, fish from the Gulf of Mexico are rigorously tested for contaminants to ensure public safety and are safe to eat because oil contaminants in fish flesh are well below public health advisory levels. Chronic PAH exposure, however, can prevent the liver from functioning properly, resulting in the decline of overall fish health.

These studies were made possible by BP's 10-year, $500 million commitment to fund independent research on the long-term effects of the Deepwater Horizon spill administered by the Gulf of Mexico Research Initiative. This year marks the end of that funding.

"Long-term monitoring studies such as these are important for early warning of oil pollution leaks and are vital for determining impacts to the environment in the case of future oil spills," Pulster said.

###
The Berkeley City Council is weighing a controversial ordinance that could reshape development on Shattuck Avenue downtown and in parts of West Berkeley by requiring developers to sprinkle affordable housing into their projects.

The proposal sponsored by four council members targets qualified opportunity zones, low-income areas where developers can bypass federal taxes on their profits, a provision of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017, designed to lure investors into these communities.

Supporters of the Berkeley proposal, set for a vote after the state shelter-in-place order is lifted, say that opportunity zones only hasten gentrification. The best way to slow it, they say, is to require that affordable housing be included in each new rental development with 10 or more dwellings. The ordinance calls for 20% of the units to be affordable, which is no different from Berkeleys current requirement for new projects. But it takes away the option to pay a $37,000-per-dwelling fee into the citys housing trust fund instead of building the affordable units.

The fund gets divvied up among nonprofit affordable housing developers. They leverage the money to get government subsidies, which in turn finance more units.

Though many cities have similar housing trust funds, the fee option has sparked an anguished debate in Berkeley, a former hippie haven now known for its million-dollar craftsman bungalows. Most developers see fees as a tool to maximize affordable housing production. Yet some council members say they allow developers to build market-rate projects for the affluent and shunt all the low-income housing into another part of town.

Berkeley City Councilwoman Kate Harrison, who wrote the proposed ordinance, stands in the latter camp. She postponed the vote  originally scheduled for Tuesday  because of the conflict her proposal sparked. But she gave a scorching speech as the council met over Zoom.

We are facing a land rush, Harrison said, predicting real estate investors would pour into Berkeley to take advantage of the federal tax benefits.

Others argue that the ordinance would torpedo opportunities to build low-income housing and exacerbate a crisis thats gripped California for years, and which they fear may only get worse as more people lose their jobs and homes amid the coronavirus pandemic.

Developers, affordable housing nonprofits and building trades unions flooded the City Council with emails last week, saying the proposal, if approved, would reduce the amount of affordable housing in Berkeley. Some said it would stifle production of housing altogether in the opportunity zones, causing key neighborhoods and swaths of the downtown core to languish.

This is not a time to kneecap affordable housing developers, City Councilwoman Lori Droste said in a phone interview Tuesday. She objects to Harrisons ordinance so vehemently that she wrote a long thread on Twitter last week, calling the proposal a killer of affordable homes, homes for students and young professionals, and middle-size buildings of 11 to 40 units that often struggle to get financing.

Harrison contends that Berkeley has already set aside plenty of money for affordable housing. She pointed to a bond that voters passed in 2018 dedicating $135 million to build housing for residents with very low incomes. Thats a far bigger pot than the city collects in fees from individual developers.

Weve made an enormous commitment to very low-income housing, she said, arguing that her ordinance would create more units for struggling families that dont qualify for low-income housing  any family of four making $70,000 or more a year.

The grocery clerks, the teachers, the nurses  all the people who made our lives possible during the pandemic  they deserve housing, too, Harrison said.

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.

Housing is expensive to build, particularly in Berkeley, where some developers might run through 37 hearings before a project is approved. Many would flee to other cities if they have to set aside a fifth of their units with lower rent, which raises the cost, critics note.

The proposed (ordinance) ... will create onerous barriers to new housing development in the city of Berkeley and is opposed by leading affordable housing organizations, land use attorney Ryan Patterson, a partner with Zacks, Freedman & Patterson PC, wrote in a letter to the council.

He feared the new rules, if passed, could interfere with a project that his firm represents at 2701 Shattuck Ave. with 57 residential units, including five for families with very low incomes. The project already has city permits, but would not meet the requirements laid out in the ordinance because the developer paid a fee instead of reserving a fifth of the units for affordable housing.

Some fear that a housing freeze could stymie new construction jobs.

Philosophically, both sides say they want the same thing. Supporters and opponents of the ordinance cite the dire shortage of low-cost housing for grocery store clerks, health care workers, delivery truck drivers and teachers  the people who have become the face of the pandemic.

Harrison said she wants to integrate those people into the downtown neighborhood she represents. Detractors of her ordinance say shell effectively push them out.

Rachel Swan is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: rswan@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @rachelswan
Bangladesh's coast guard said it rescued Wednesday at least 382 "starving" Rohingya refugees floating in a large boat in the country's territorial waters after nearly two months at sea. Acting on a tip-off, the coast guard patrol launched a three-day search for the boat, locating it at night off the country's southeastern coast, spokesman Lieutenant Shah Zia Rahman said. "We have rescued at least 382 Rohingya from a big overcrowded fishing trawler and brought them to a beach near (the coastal town of) Teknaf. They were starving," Rahman told AFP, adding that more than 30 had died on board. "They were floating for 58 days. And over the last seven days it was moving in our territorial waters," he said. The Rohingya, who were thought to be from refugee camps on Bangladesh's southeast coast, were headed to Malaysia, but turned back at sea when that country implemented a strict coastal patrol due to the coronavirus pandemic, the Dhaka Tribune local newspaper said. Rahman said authorities would investigate the possibility that the refugees could also have come from the Rohingya homeland in Myanmar's restive Rakhine state, where they are a persecuted Muslim minority. Those rescued reported that "32 Rohingya died aboard the overcrowded trawler and their bodies were thrown in the sea," the official said, adding that an investigation into the matter was under way. "We have cordoned off the place where they have landed. We could not question them because of the fear they could be infected with the coronavirus," he said. Footage posted on Facebook by a local journalist showed mostly women and children, emaciated and standing on the beach. A local government administrator told AFP that officials were still counting the rescued but that he feared the number could exceed 400. The Dhaka Tribune said the ship was packed with nearly 500 Rohingya. Nearly one million Rohingya live in squalid camps near Bangladesh's border with Myanmar, many fleeing the neighbouring country after a brutal military crackdown began in 2017. With few opportunities for jobs and education in the camps, thousands have attempted to reach other countries like Malaysia and Thailand. Since late last year, Bangladesh's law enforcement agencies have picked up some 1,000 Rohingya from coastal villages and boats as they waited to board vessels bound for Malaysia.
[April 15, 2020] iTacit Introduces QuickLaunch, Helping Companies Launch an Employee Communication App Within 48 Hours

FREDERICTON, New Brunswick, April 15, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- With the global health crisis driving companies to rapidly improve communication processes and training for front-line and temporarily remote workforces, iTacit today announced that it can put its employee communication software to work for companies in just two days with the introduction of iTacit QuickLaunch. "The current COVID-19 situation has highlighted a pain point for companies with disconnected employees, particularly those whose front-line teams lack email," explains Luke Megarity, iTacit's President and COO. "We've had many company leaders approach us to share that they cannot reach a large sector of their company with critical updates or that training on mobile is now mission-critical." iTacit developed QuickLaunch to lift the barrier of implementation time for companies that need the functionality of an employee communication app to deal with the rapidly changing situation on their front line. "Front-line workers are having new information and processes thrown at them - which needs to be communicated quicly and clearly. We recognized our ability to help companies reach their people in very short order, just when they need it most," continues Megarity.



iTacit QuickLaunch allows companies to connect the front-line and temporarily remote workforce with the information they need, including critical updates, new training and processes. The web-based solution includes an administration portal, with accompanying app and web login that can be extended to every employee and is accessible on any device. QuickLaunch is being offered to companies with a lower price point and flexible terms for the first 90 days of rollout. The 48-hour implementation is available for the platform's Connect suite with the ability to upgrade after the initial launch.

iTacit is an intuitive mobile workforce communication app and desktop software platform that enhances employee productivity. The market-leading employee communication app is widely used across healthcare, logistics, manufacturing, construction and retail industries. iTacit technology is used by over 100,000 people across more than 600 sites globally. Media Contact

Teri Maltais, Director of Marketing

Phone: +1 506 874-6799

Email: [email protected] Related Images image1.png Related Links More about iTacit QuickLaunch Related Video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PjDZOmQWe2w View original content to download multimedia:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/itacit-introduces-quicklaunch-helping-companies-launch-an-employee-communication-app-within-48-hours-301040753.html SOURCE iTacit

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A pair of sisters is accused of egging on a gunman who shot two teenagers as they ran from a brawl inside a southeast Houston apartment courtyard Tuesday.

The shooter is still on the run, police say. The victims, 17 and 18, were shot at the apartments in the 5600 block of Royal Palms around 1 p.m. and are expected to survive.

MORE FROM JAY R. JORDAN: Woman critical, man injured after shooting in northeast Harris County

Melandey Faniel, 26, and Joycelyn Faniel, 21, were part of a group of up to 30 people fighting with the teen victims about a homicide that took place at the same apartment complex earlier that morning, police said.

As the group dispersed, the two Faniel sisters urged the gunman to shoot at the young women as they ran for cover in an apartment, police allege.

Officers who were already summoned to quell the brawl heard the gunshots as they rounded the corner into the apartments entrance. They quickly detained several people, but the shooter managed to escape.

As the gunman shot the teenagers, 21-year-old Melki Albert pulled a gun and attempted to return fire but missed. Police charged him with deadly conduct and felony in possession of a weapon, alleging he shot toward apartments where people lived.

GUN VIOLENCE IN HOUSTON: 4 killed, teen shot in one night throughout Houston

Melandey Faniel and Joycelyn Faniel were each charged with aggravated assault with a deadly weapon.

Detectives do not have a detailed description of the suspect who shot the teens. Houston Police Cmdr. Ron Borza said Tuesday that the gunman could be the same person who shot and killed 36-year-old Chris McClellan around 1:30 a.m. that morning.

McClellan was answering a knock at his door when an unknown person shot him dead in the threshold.

Anyone with information is urged to call Houston Crime Stoppers at 713-222-TIPS (8477).

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
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Linkedin Zheping Huang (Bloomberg)  Wed, April 15, 2020 11:19 636 fc6853813033f564188675f8bd1ff2c3 2 Science & Tech Bytedance,TikTok,coronavirus,COVID-19 Free

ByteDance Inc. just kicked off a wave of hiring it envisions hitting 40,000 new jobs in 2020, hoping to match Alibabas headcount at a time technology corporations across the globe are furloughing or reducing staff.

The worlds largest startup is recruiting people for 10,000 open positions, of which about a third are high-level research or software coding jobs, according to an internal website provided to staff for candidate referrals and shared with Bloomberg. A ByteDance representative didnt respond to an emailed request for comment.

New hires around the globe will support the Chinese companys universe of apps from video platform TikTok to news aggregator Toutiao, while strengthening its operations in new arenas such as e-commerce and gaming. Its the first salvo of ByteDances goal to reach 100,000 staff globally by the end of the year, outlined by Chief Executive Officer Zhang Yiming in an internal memo last month. Once complete, the company will boast roughly the same number of employees as tech giant Alibaba Group Holding Ltd.

ByteDance is seeking to consolidate its social media strongholds in China and the U.S. while spurring expansions in new markets. Its hiring spree contrasts with other startups, including SoftBank-backed Oyo Hotels & Homes, Zume Pizza Inc. and Brandless Inc., that have been cutting jobs or shutting down altogether. As part of the recruitment drive launched last week, ByteDance is seeking to fill more than 100 vacancies in Mountain View -- Googles home turf -- from a summer software intern to a lead engineer for augmented reality and Apple iOS developer.

Like rival Tencent Holdings Ltd, ByteDances social media channels have seen usage spike after the Covid-19 pandemic confined millions of people to their homes. Now, as life in China begins to return to normal, the employee referral program is looking to find candidates for some 9,900 positions, according to the website viewed by Bloomberg. Just over 1,100 of those openings were for interns as of midday Tuesday.

Read also: TikTok donates Rp 100 billion for COVID-19 medical workers

The job listings offer a rare window into how the eight-year-old internet giant is investing in future growth. For example, its seeking dozens of online tutors to capture Chinas online education boom during the virus outbreak, while acquiring talent for music licensing in places from Miami to Mumbai. The Chinese app factory is also orchestrating forays into gaming, live-streaming commerce and even enterprise software, taking on deeper-pocketed rivals like Tencent and Alibaba.

Overall, ByteDance is filling some 3,000 coding, engineering and research roles, and about as many positions in products and operations, according to calculations by Bloomberg. Beyond China, its looking to boost headcount by adding more than 100 posts per location in London, Los Angeles, Mountain View and Singapore.

ByteDance, last valued at $75 billion according to CB Insights, is one of Chinas most ambitious tech outfits. It has more than 1.5 billion monthly active users across its portfolio of products from Toutiao to mini-video platform Douyin, TikToks Chinese twin app.
A worker at a different nursing home, James Anthony Carter, said protective gear was so short at the facility where he works, Alden Lakeland in Chicago, that staff members were told they could use just one cloth surgical mask each shift  with a second one handed out if working a double shift. Instead of isolation gowns to wear near infected patients, he said, workers were given aprons typically used by kitchen employees.
YEREVAN, APRIL 15, ARMENPRESS. During crises Armenias Central Bank is recording drastic changes in the exchange rate in the Armenian financial market, and the recent cases are not an exception. The problem has been solved with the CBAs intervention, but the Bank urges not to give in to forming short-term expectations, Director of the Financial Stability Department at the CBA Andranik Grigoryan said at a press conference today, asked what developments are noticed in the foreign exchange market.

He firstly reminded that the foreign exchange market or exchange rate in Armenia in fact are free-floating, the Central Bank intervenes to the foreign exchange market only in extreme cases to smooth out the potential or possible strict volatility of the market. These latest cases are also not an exception when the CBA intervened in the market just to solve it in order to avoid strict fluctuation. However, during the current crisis as well we see that numerous speculative fluctuations are taking place in us where drastic changes in the exchange rate are occurring. Our call has always been and remains the same  do not give in to forming various expectations towards short-term fluctuations. We just need to believe in our dram, our policy, he said, adding: Dram is our currency, we need to believe in the Armenian dram, work and think with the dram.

Reported by Anna Grigoryan

Edited and translated by Aneta Harutyunyan
Nuevo Laredo has recorded its ninth confirmed case of COVID-19, according to Tamaulipas health officials.

He is a 37-year-old man, according to Tamaulipas Secretary of Health Dr. Gloria Molina Gamboa. The fatality was reported early Wednesday at the Hospital General in Altamira.

A 59-year-old man with underlying conditions was hospitalized on April 8 with symptoms of pneumonia and eventually died.

Nuevo Laredo leads the state in deaths with two

A migrant shelter in Nuevo Laredo is closing its doors temporarily to incoming people due to concerns of COVID-19.

This announcement came after two migrants from Honduras were taken to a local hospital because they exhibited symptoms of COVID-19, Mexican media reported.

In an open letter addressed to the Diocese of Nuevo Laredo, governmental authorities and members of the community in general, Casa del Migrante Nazareth announced Monday that they will no longer take in more migrants.

COVID-19 continues to spread rapidly and this situation is out of the shelters control, states the letter. Casa del Migrante can only take preventive actions to reduce the risk of contagion.

Suspected cases of COVID-19 have increased in Nuevo Laredo.

As of Monday night, Nuevo Laredo had two suspected cases. That number increased to 13 on Tuesday, according to Tamaulipas health officials. Tamaulipas now has 90 cases, 11 recovered and four deaths.

Our priority is to protect the migrants and safeguard those at the home who are waiting for their appointment in their asylum process and (the migrants) who are waiting for an opportunity to present their paperwork, states the letter.

Casa del Migrante representatives mentioned in the letter that their workers also have the right to stay home. Shelter operations will continue with migrants who are currently staying there.

Shelter representatives said they will try to assist migrants and expedite their process to be sent back home.

Casa del Migrante representatives urged the Mexican Institute of Migration to take necessary action to assist and provide safety to migrants and deportees to reduce their vulnerability to other risks.
The first nine days were bearable. Mild cough, scratchy throat, lower back pain. Jill Baren, a triathlete, ascribed the last symptom to overdoing exercise.

The next eight days? Horrific. Severe fevers, chest pain, cramps, fatigue, diarrhea and dehydration that sent her to the hospital.

"The way people looked at me in the ER, the look in people's eyes, I've never seen that," says Baren, 59, of Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania. "They looked at me like I could die."

These people knew her well. Baren, president of the American Board of Emergency Medicine, was lying in the Philadelphia emergency room where she works as a physician.

Last week, fully recovered, Baren returned to caring for patients. "It feels empowering to have been through this," she says. "I'm in a position to help in a way that other people are not. I don't have to live in dire fear if a droplet goes through my protective clothing," she says. "I can reassure people, tell my story."

Baren is among the recovereds, the almost 44,000 in the United States who have survived covid-19, according to Johns Hopkins University. Because of faulty results and a lack of testing, their true number is believed to be substantially greater and will continue to mount for months to come. As of Tuesday, more than 600,000 Americans had contracted the virus.

How does it feel to be among them? To be alive on the other side of the pandemic, the crush of anxiety?

Lucky.

Lucky and weepy and invincible and relieved and tired and motivated and perplexed and altered.

There is so much information and, then again, not enough as to how to proceed. People who have recovered, even those who are still weak, share an urgency to help, inform and donate, especially plasma, anything for research. Some people report feeling like superheroes, virus Avengers. Others sense being stigmatized, that the healthy will avoid them for fear of risking infection.

- - -

March was a fevered blur for Carrie Smith, 44, a nurse in St. Louis assigned to a hospital's cardiac floor. On her worst days recovering at home, she slept 20 hours a day. Half of the respiratory therapists at her hospital went out sick, and a fifth of the nursing staff.

"I was so scared," she says. "I had written out my living will. I had prepared as if I was going to die." This is what solace sounds like on the other side of the tunnel. "It's been a relief. Everyone in my house got it, and nobody died from it."

Madeline Long, 56, of Bowie, Maryland, is a breast cancer survivor and CEO of a company that produces devices for digital mammography. "I was terrified. For three days, I didn't think I would wake up. I couldn't breathe. I thought it was the new normal," she says. "It was worse than anything I went through with breast cancer." Long spent five days in the hospital.

How does she feel now? Silence, then sobbing. "I guess I've answered your question."

The pandemic, which arrived so fast and with such force, left confusion for those who now view the virus in their rearview mirror.

Guidelines for recovery vary. It can be a challenge to obtain clearance status from local government, to even get through to an overtaxed health department. How cleared is cleared? Do you tell everyone or keep it to yourself? What is the protocol for health-care workers who have had the virus, especially with patients who haven't?

"Now, I can go help people. I can work on the front line," Smith says. "Do they want me to tell people, to reassure them? If I was a patient, and my nurse had it, I would want to know that she was really sick and now she is OK."

- - -

Diana Berrent, 45, a photographer in Port Washington, New York, has become a public face of the recovered, after fighting to get tested. Last month, she launched the Facebook group Survivor Corps, which has attracted more than 31,000 members. "I would be able to use that superpower at the end of this to go help others," she says.

Berrent took to television and created a video diary chronicled in the New York Post. "If I'm going to be the canary in the coal mine, I'm going to be the loudest canary in the coal mine," she says. "I feel like I have a sense of purpose."

"We can hold the hands of the dying. We can donate plasma," says Berrent, who has participated in two studies and volunteered to participate in four more. "There's no better therapy for survivors than using the superpowers your bodies created to save lives."

Berrent acknowledges "I wouldn't say I am definitely immune. We shouldn't be assuming anything. I still haven't gone to the supermarket. I'm still cautious. I'm taking my time. People can't be careful enough." Experts say there is no scientific assurance that someone recovered from the coronavirus is completely immune - or certainty as to how long any immunity might last.

Cases vary radically. On Tuesday, President Donald Trump met with people who have recovered; their cases ranged from life-threatening to slight, the duration from a few days to a month. People have relapsed with symptoms, and South Korea's Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports citizens testing positive after being cured. The U.S. CDC and many state health departments suggest that covid-19 recoverees wait 72 hours after fever and respiratory issues end before returning to work. That may be too short and too vague, given relapses and the infected who never exhibit major symptoms, Berrent argues: "It's going to be the death of us."

- - -

But gratitude is a constant. People living alone are grateful they didn't infect family, didn't have to care for toddlers, and were free to sleep and sweat in bed for hours. Parents of young children assume their children were infected yet are grateful that they appear asymptomatic. Young adults are grateful their cases are milder. Those with severe cases are especially grateful that they have joined the recovered.

Will Stanley, 30, is an Episcopal priest who started serving a large church in Richmond, Virginia, as vicar on Ash Wednesday. Three weeks later, he had to inform the entire congregation of 4,700 that he had contracted the coronavirus after participating in a Louisville leadership conference, a "super-spreader event" where many attendees later became ill.

Stanley's case was mild. His worries were far from it.

"I have a lot of contact with people over the age of 60. The notion that I was getting anyone of them sick was really weighty," he says. Still, "I do feel fortunate. It gives me a way of solidarity for people who aren't doing well."

"I'm a bit of a wreck. For most of my life, I've been head over heart, more intellectual. Now, the slightest thing will make me cry. Every emotion is amplified," says David Lat, 44, who lives in Manhattan but is convalescing with his husband and toddler at his parents' home in Saddle River, New Jersey. Lat, the founder of the legal news website Above the Law who wrote about his experience for The Washington Post opinion section, spent 17 days in a hospital, six of them on a ventilator.

He's raw. His voice scarred, his lungs weakened. Exhaustion is constant.

"I feel like I was given a pass," Lat says. Cliches, he realizes, even apologizes, tumble yet resonate. "This is my second life. This is not the end of the story. It's really the beginning." He has donated plasma for research, been interviewed by documentarians. While at NYU Langone Health, he shared his medical condition on social media, his Twitter followers nearly tripling, surpassing 95,000.

Atlanta pediatric emergency physician Stephanie Cohen, 45, feels "this sense of immunity," not only from the virus but from anxiety. "I don't have to worry." Cohen, a mother of five, wants to donate plasma, participate in studies and deliver food to the elderly in Albany, Georgia, where 30 people have died from the coronavirus.

"I can put it to best use in the hospital. If somebody with the virus needs to be intubated, I can do this." One of Cohen's colleagues told her, "You've taken fear and anxiety, and turned it into truth and reality."

Yet anxiety persists. "I feel lucky. I'm young and had a mild case. But I feel like a pariah. Our neighbors run away from me," says Rebecca, 21, a college junior from Elkins Park, Pennsylvania, who spoke on the condition that her last name not be used. She fears reprisals for her mother, who has yet to get sick and works in health care. Philip Kruse, 64, of Seattle, a former employee for a residential tree service who's now on disability, had a mild case - half his family got the virus - but kept it "totally undercover that I was sick because I live in public housing, and you know what a rumor mill that can be."

- - -

Still, there is a gift in being among the first people to get it - and to get over it. Julia Marsh Rabin, 51, an architect in Beverly, Massachusetts, says, "I'm so glad it's behind me. If I was other people, I'd be scared," she says. "I got it so early, I didn't know to be scared. I didn't have time to be scared."

Samantha Brownell, also 51, of South Orange, New Jersey, tested negative, but two physicians are confident she had covid-19.She was sick for 12 days. "I've never experienced such body pains. I could barely walk from the bed to the toilet," she says.

"I'm so frustrated. I'm in a state of shock," Brownell says of the negative test. "It doesn't make any sense of whatsoever. Kind of makes you feel like you're going crazy. She plans to get retested, and proceed as though she had the virus.

Richard Phillips, 49, is confounded by the lack of information of what happens after having the coronavirus. How is he supposed to proceed? How can he help?

"It's kind of maddening. Some people could still be shedding the virus. I'm trying in vain to find a study, people doing plasma treatments," says Phillips, a business and nonprofit consultant in Philadelphia. "We have this moment. I can't believe I didn't get a call from someone at the University of Pennsylvania saying, 'Come down here. We're going to take as much blood out of your body as possible.' "

Roles and responsibilities, post-virus, are still being defined. Kruse worries about his economic situation. He's donated plasma five times, gettingpaid $200 a visit.

Long is concerned that black Americans have been infected and are dying at much higher rates than the general population. "There's such large numbers in our communities," says Long, who offered to care for the 4-year-old son of a friend of a friend in Washington, D.C., who appears to have the virus. "Where else is that child going to go? Everyone is fearful that the child has been exposed to his mom," she says. "What happens to the single mom who gets sick? What happens to her children?"

Lat sees himself as "a witness, a communicator, a connector. Everyone needs to find their own special niche, their talent and apply that to this." On March 30, Berrent became the first volunteer to donate plasma at Columbia University Irving Medical Center.

"I am free of the virus, positive for the antibodies, AND I am a universal donor!!!" she shared with Survivors Corps a few days ago. "Someone, sew me a cape!"
MBABANE  Its a period of uncertainty as emaSwati wait with bated breath to know whether or not things will go back to normal tomorrow.

This is because today is when the announced 20-day partial lockdown period is expected to end according to the Prime Minister (PM), Ambrose Mandvulo Dlamini.



The public is unhappy with governments silence on the next move regarding the partial lockdown.

By 7pm yesterday, there was no indication from government on whether the partial lockdown would end or be extended just like in neighbouring South Africa.

South Africa extended its lockdown by two weeks.



Reports were to the effect that by 6pm yesterday evening, Cabinet was still in a meeting at Hospital Hill. The newsroom was yesterday inundated with calls from anxious citizens including non-essential civil servants, who wanted to know if they should return to work following the order that they should work from home by the Minister of Public Service, Christian Ntshangase.



Conference



Last week Thursday during a press conference, the PM, said the partial lockdown would continue as announced for the duration of 20 days.

Any review will be communicated to the public after the relevant consultations, said Dlamini when the country was on day 14. However, the uncertainty is not going down well with members of the public who believe that government should inform them in time on what the next move is.



I went to the rural areas when government announced that non-essential service civil servants should work from home and I therefore need to know if I should be on a bus back to my workstation tomorrow (today), said one civil servant who works as an accountant. The locals stated that at least in South Africa, the president had made the announcement to extend the lockdown for 14 days, a week before it was supposed to end.

This gives them time to prepare mentally for the extra two weeks, she said. They questioned why government was not coming forth to state its position so that every one would start preparing.



I dont understand how our government operates? Why are they quiet on such an important issue? What are they meeting about if they cant make decisions, this is very stressful. As it is, we are not sure on our next move, said another citizen.

Meanwhile, Swaziland National Association of Teachers (SNAT) Secretary General Sikelela Dlamini said it would be in governments interest to extend the partial lockdown.



He said the government could not just come out of the blue to state that the lockdown was over, especially because the country was not in a position to confidently state that the coronavirus had been confined. He said this was because a majority of the citizens had not been tested.



The statistics reflect that we have not even tested about 1 000 people yet we have a population of 1 million, said Dlamini. He said he was of the view that government needed to test at least 500 000 people before the right direction could be taken. Dlamini added that as teachers they also needed time to readjust the school calendar and time-table. He also said there was a need to also disinfect schools around the country.



Cases



Meanwhile, the latest four positive cases reported by the Ministry of Health indicated that all of them had no history of travel and therefore it was clear that the coronavirus was now in-house.



Another liSwati who preferred to be identified as E.G.D stated that in his opinion, there was a possibility of regressing if Eswatini did not maintain the lockdown. He said the present statistics were not conclusive to convince that the pandemic was under control because there had been no full testing.

A total of 770/1.3 million is very little to gain any level of confidence, he said.



He stated that if government succumbed, it would be because of pressure as it cannot afford to compensate traders. He added that, however, opening businesses without South Africa on board would be simply futile.
MasterChef fans were left stunned to see contestants hugging, giving each other high-fives and sharing food on the new all-stars season, Back To Win, on Wednesday night.

The popular cooking show was filmed in advance, well before social distancing restrictions were put in place by the Australian government, but viewers were still concerned about the cross-contamination of the food and potential spread of germs.

'Honestly I'm spun out by the abandon with which everyone is shaking hands and touching each other. What a time,' one fan wrote.

'Remember when we could share food?' On Wednesday, MasterChef fans enjoyed a pre-coronavirus world before social distancing measures come into play on the hit cooking show

Another added: 'I'm flinching every time anyone high-fives or touches anything or goes within 1.5 metres of each other.'

'I'm watching the judges all dig into the food and silently screaming "ALL THE CROSS CONTAMINATION",' a third pointed out.

But Endemol Shine and Channel Ten have assured worried viewers social distancing measures were introduced across 'every facet of the production' in future episodes.

According to 10Daily, changes include spacing out contestants' work benches, the use of gloves and no sharing of food.

'Remember when we could share food':While the contestants and judges were in close quarters during this week's episodes, Network Ten have revealed the strict rules that were put into place while filming in later weeks. Pictured: judge Melissa Leong

As reported in The Daily Telegraph earlier this month, the coronavirus pandemic caused a 'dire situation' for producers on MasterChef.

International judges Nigella Lawson and Heston Blumenthal had to cancel their scheduled appearances, while outdoor challenges with crowds were shelved.

All planned travel for the current season was also cancelled.

Social distancing please! According to 10Daily, future changes include spacing out contestants' work benches, the use of gloves and no sharing food

Contestants will also reportedly serve up individually sized dishes for judges to sample, as opposed to share plates.

One drawcard for the program, however, is that show already has segments with Gordon Ramsay, Curtis Stone and American pop star Katy Perry in the can.

MasterChef: Back To Win continues Thursday at 7.30pm on Channel 10
Expert Speak Why it is critical to cocoon the elderly and the vulnerable: All steps you want a Covid-19 patient to take in order to prevent the spread of the infection and you ask the elderly and vulnerable household members to practise in order to avoid getting infected. Read here to understand why the elderly and vulnerable should ...

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In an address to the nation yesterday, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced that his governments hasty, ill-conceived 21-day countrywide anti-coronavirus lockdown will be extended till May 3.

Speaking on the day the lockdown was originally supposed to end, Modi offered only demagogy, in remarks that were laced with right-wing nationalist and Hindu communalist appeals.

He offered no serious plan to deal either with the health emergencywhich given Indias mass poverty and ramshackle public health system threatens to result in a catastrophic loss of lifeor the socio-economic calamity triggered by the sudden, unplanned lockdown.

As the result of the lockdown, hundreds of millions of workers and toilers, who had little to no savings, have been left jobless and without any income. According to the Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy (CMIE), in the first week of April, just three in every 10 Indians of working age were employed.

Yet, even as Indias prime minister extended the lockdown for a further 19 days, he provided not a single rupee in additional aid for working people!

The 1.7 lakh crore rupee (US $22.5 billion) relief package that the far-right, Hindu supremacist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government announced on the lockdowns second day, March 26, amounts in per capita terms to less than 1,250 rupees (US$ 16.45). In other words, Indias already impoverished masses have been placed on famine rations.

Moreover, much of this aid will only be available weeks and even months hence, and many of the most vulnerable, including most migrant workers, will not be able to access it. This is because they are not enrolled in the existing poverty alleviation programs through which the state relief is being distributed.

While Modi, with consummate cynicism, claimed in yesterdays speech to be concerned and moved by the plight of Indias workers and toilers, all he would do for them was make a hollow appeal for others to provide them with charity. Adopting the tones of a Hindu priest, this servant of Indias rapacious capitalist elite beseeched, Take as much care of poor families as you can. Especially try to fulfill their food requirements.

What Modi had to say about addressing the health emergency was equally hollow.

He one again lectured the populace on the need to practice social distancing, but failed to say how this could be done in the teeming slums of Indias major cities, where people often live five and more to a room. Nor did he explain how the urban and rural poor can regularly wash their hands, when hundreds of millions dont have running water in their homes, and more than one in 10 Indians, according to a 2018 Water Aid India study, lack access to clean water near their home (emphasis added).

Modi began his address by baldly asserting Indias fight against the COVID-19 pandemic is moving ahead with great strength and steadfastness.

He went on to boast that due to his governments holistic approach and quick decisions India is in a well-managed position in combating the pandemic, better than many developed nations.

This is all lies. Apart from imposing travel restrictions, the Modi government did essentially nothing to halt the spread of COVID-19 for the first two months after the outbreak in China had been identified as a potential major threat. Yet Indian and international epidemiologists and other scientists have long recognised that India would be especially at risk in any global pandemic.

In its 2020-2021 budget, presented at the beginning of February, the Modi government allotted a derisory 69,000 crore rupees (US $9 billion) to providing health care for Indias 1.37 billion people, or less than $7 per person.

Not until March 24that is the very day Modi was compelled to abruptly shift from claiming India was a model to the region, even the world, in containing the coronavirus to imposing an unprecedented India-wide lockdowndid the government announce emergency funding to fight the pandemic.

Even then, the promised amounts are a pittance given the shortages of trained medical personnel, personal protective equipment (PPE), and ventilators, and the ruinous state of Indias public health infrastructure, which runs the gamut from dilapidated (in the major urban centers) to non-existent (across rural India.) The promised 15,000 crore rupees ($1.97 billion) is on a per capita basis less than 110 rupees ($1.45)this when a single COVID-19 test reportedly costs more than 5,000 rupees (about $67).

As for Modis claims about India being in a well-managed position, these are belied by:

the hunger, distress and suffering inflicted on working people across India by the lockdown;





the makeshift internal refugee camps to which millions of migrant workers who sought to return to their villagers because the governments ill-prepared shutdown left them jobless, and in many case homeless, have been confined;





the many medical facilities that have had to be temporarily shut because so many staff became infected with the virus because they lacked proper PPE, including even face masks;





and, last but not least, by the surge in COVID-19 cases and deaths.

On the day the lockdown was announced, India had 564 confirmed COVID-19 cases and 10 deaths attributable to the virus. By yesterday, the number of confirmed cases had increased more than 20-fold to 11,393, and the death toll had reached 393.

Prioritising money over human life, Indian authorities have administered less than 250,000 COVID-19 tests, one of the lowest per capita test rates in the world. Even now, people who present with COVID-19-type symptoms are only being tested if they can be directly tied to a cluster of previous confirmed cases or, since revised testing criteria were announced late last week, live in a small number of previously identified hotspots.

Based on the skewed results produced by its test-rationing, New Delhi, despite worried warnings from health experts that the true number of infections is likely many times higher, continues to insist that there is no community transmission in India.

In reality, everything indicates that the COVID-19 pandemic threatens to explode across the worlds second most populous country in the coming weeks.

Nevertheless, even as it extends the lockdown, the BJP government is conspiring with big business to reopen at least 15 economic sectors, including the auto, steel, rubber, telecom equipment, agro-chemical, and construction industries (see: As COVID-19 pandemic surges across India, business presses for quick return to work).

Modi announced yesterday that the lockdown would be intensified for the better part of the next week, especially in hotspots, but that after April 20 there will be graded relaxations.

Modi invoked the desperate plight of Indias workers and toilers in trying to justify whatunder conditions of the absence of systematic mass testing, contact-tracking, and an entirely revamped health care systemcan only be a premature and precipitous return to work that will amplify the pandemic and the consequent loss of life many times over.

Provision of this limited exemption in the areas that are to be identified by the 20th will be done, asserted Modi, keeping in mind the livelihood of our poor brothers and sisters. Those who earn daily, make ends meet with daily income, they are my family. One of my top-most priorities is to reduce the difficulties in their lives.

Migrant workers lost little time in giving their answer to the claim of Modi, who was propelled to power by big business to dramatically intensify the exploitation of the working class, to be their brother.

In Mumbai more than a thousand jobless migrant workers were attacked yesterday afternoon by lathi-wielding police after they had congregated at the Bandra Railway Station to demand that they be transported home. Later in the day, textile workers in Surat, Gujarat, staged their third protest in recent days to likewise demand that they be allowed to return to their villages, rather than being forced to survive on thin gruel rations.

Surat Muncipal Commisioner Banchhanidhi Pani told the Economic Times that NGOs and the municipality are currently feeding around six lakh three thousand (603,000) people per day, in Gujarats second largest city.

The author also recommends:

Amid Indias calamitous lockdown, Modi seeks to censor coronavirus reports

[4 April 2020]

Modi places Indias 1.3 billion people under lockdown

[25 March 2020]
Health minister says lockdown will be from April 18 to May 9; Supreme Court hears election appeal.

Malawi has announced a three-week lockdown to try and curb the spread of the novel coronavirus, joining other southern African countries like South Africa, Angola and Zimbabwe which have previously announced full or partial lockdowns.

Minister of Health and Population Jappie Mhango said the lockdown will be in effect from April 18 to May 9, adding that all non-essential businesses would close and services would stop.

If [we are] not careful, Malawi could lose up to 50,000 lives from COVID-19 [the disease caused by the new coronavirus], President Peter Mutharika said at a news conference on Wednesday.

Malawi has recorded 16 confirmed cases of the coronavirus and two COVID-19-related deaths. South Africa is the southern African nation with the highest number of confirmed cases, currently at more than 2,500.

On Tuesday, Namibia extended its stay-at-home order by two-and-a-half weeks.

As Malawi announced the lockdown, the countrys Supreme Court began hearing an appeal by President Mutharika against the cancellation of his re-election.

Following elections last May, President Mutharikas lawyer admitted that electoral laws were flouted during the polls but said the breaches did not materially prejudice anyone.

His lawyer, Samuel Tembenu, admitted correction fluid was used but said no votes were altered.

There was no evidence to state that votes were taken from one candidate and given to another, he told Supreme Court judges.

In February, the Constitutional Court annulled the results and ordered a rerun, citing grave and widespread irregularities including the use of correction fluid on tally sheets.

Tembenu said the Constitutional Court used the term irregularities loosely, adding that they were merely breaches of the electoral law.

A new election has been scheduled for July 2, although it could be delayed by the appeal and the coronavirus outbreak.

It is the first time a presidential election has been challenged on legal grounds in Malawi since its independence from Britain in 1964.
The CEOs and executives of America's top airlines could still stand to make millions this year under the rules of a Treasury Department deal to inject $25 billion in federal aid to meet their payroll obligations in the coronavirus crisis.

The terms of the Treasury bailout deal cap executive pay using a formula based on 2019 compensation, which hasn't yet been released in the companies' regulatory filings.

But in 2018, the CEOs of American, Delta, United and Southwest Airlines received annual compensation ranging from $8 million to $15 million.

The 'Big Four' CEOs all receive a substantial part of their compensation in company stock, which has plunged in the crisis, making the exact compensation they stand to take home this year under the salary cap rules difficult to precisely quantify.

Delta CEO Ed Bastian said last month that he will forgo 100 percent of his salary for the next six months, but most of his compensation is in the form of stock

As well, those CEOs who have a cash salary have already accepted salary reductions ranging from 10 percent to 100 percent during the crisis.

Airlines who accept the Treasury bailout will have executive compensation caps in place tied to 2019 salary levels through March 2022.

Officers and employees whose total compensation (including stock) exceeded $3 million in 2019 may not receive total annual compensation that exceeds $3 million plus 50 percent of the excess over $3 million of total compensation received in 2019.

Prior to the bailouts, most of the CEOs of the 'Big Four' US airlines had already agreed to cash salary cuts.

American CEO Doug Parker does not get paid a base salary or a cash bonus.

'He made a change to his compensation in 2015 to be paid only in stock. So hes already at zero and has been for several years,' a spokesperson told DailyMail.com.

American CEO Doug Parker's (left) all-stock compensation totaled $11,999,517 in 2018

Parker's stock-based compensation totaled $11,999,517 in 2018. American's stock is down more than 85 percent from its peaks in 2018, so Parker's compensation may be significantly impacted.

Delta CEO Ed Bastian said last month that he will forgo 100 percent of his salary for the next six months.

'Our Board of Directors elected to forego their compensation over the next six months as well,' he said in a statement last month.

Bastian made $14,982,448 in total compensation in 2018, of which $3,168,757 was in the form of salary and bonus, and the rest was in the form of stock compensation.

United Airlines CEO Oscar Munoz and President Scott Kirby both said that they will forsake 100 percent of their salaries through the end of June.

In 2018, United CEO Oscar Munoz earned a total compensation of over $10 million

Kirby had been scheduled to take over as CEO of the airline in May.

In 2018, Munoz earned a total compensation of over $10 million and Kirby took home roughly $5.5 million.

Southwest Airlines CEO Gary Kelly announced last month that he will take a 10 percent pay cut during the crisis.

In 2018, Kellys base salary was $750,000, but his total compensation neared $8 million.

The funds for the airline bailout were allocated under the $2.3 trillion CARES Act stimulus bill signed into law last month.

According to the statute controlling the bailout, companies receiving funds cannot lay off employees before September 30 or change collective bargaining agreements and must agree to restrictions on buybacks and dividends, which are banned through September 2021.

Southwest Airlines CEO Gary Kelly's base salary was $750,000 in 2018, but his total compensation neared $8 million

Also accepting federal aid were: Alaska Airlines, Allegiant Air, Frontier Airlines, Hawaiian Airlines, JetBlue Airways, and SkyWest Airlines.

The deal includes 10 of the top 12 U.S. carriers. The other two, Spirit Airlines and Republic Airlines, said on Tuesday that they were still in discussions with the Treasury.

The assistance will include a mix of cash and loans, with the government getting warrants that can be converted into small ownership stakes in the leading airlines.

Major carriers will receive 70 percent of the funds for payroll in cash assistance that will not need to be paid back, while smaller carriers receiving $100 million or less will not need to repay any funds.

The airlines did not want to give up equity, but Treasury demanded compensation for taxpayers.

American Airlines passenger planes are parked last month due to flight reductions made to slow the spread of coronavirus disease (COVID-19), at Tulsa International Airport in Oklahoma

This chart shows the number of daily air travelers in the US (blue) as well as that number's change from a year ago (red), based on data released by the TSA

The airlines have little leverage - their business has collapsed as the coronavirus pandemic reduces air travel to a trickle and they face mass layoffs without the federal aid.

The statute gave Treasury the authority to demand compensation for the grants, but did not require it.

Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said the department would work with the airlines to finalize deals 'and disburse funds as quickly as possible.

Airline workers hailed the deal as a way to preserve their jobs in the crisis.

'We are closer than ever to almost a million airline workers knowing they will receive their paycheck and keep their healthcare and other benefits, at least through September,' said Association of Flight Attendants President Sara Nelson, who is widely credited for the idea of aid specifically for payroll.

'At the same time, we were able to rein in the worst corporate practices by tying this aid to restrictions on stock buybacks, executive compensation and dividends.'
Google could be working on its own processor for the Pixel phones and Chromebooks that could launch as early as next year. The initial versions of the chipset that Google is co-making with Samsung could power next year's Pixel phones but the Chromebooks could get some later versions. The processor is codenamed "Whitechapel" and is currently under development. Google has so far relied on Qualcomm's processor for its smartphones but that could change soon as the Mountain View-based company hopes to take a leap in the hardware manufacturing business.

According to a report by Axios, Google's "Whitechapel" processor will be built using the "state-of-the-art" 5-nanometre technology by Samsung. Samsung has a big-scale chipset manufacturing business. Samsung develops its Exynos processors that are used in its Galaxy-branded smartphones, smart speakers, tablets, and more. Samsung also supplies Exynos chips to other OEMs, such as Motorola. The South Korean company has also built chipsets for Apple in the past. It is not certain if the Whitechapel chipset will be some modified version of the Exynos chipset.

The Whitechapel processor may be an eight-core ARM-based processor that will be optimised to handle Google's Machine Learning functionalities. Google has a set of ML functions that its various apps use with or without the Internet. In the latter case, the functionality has to rely on the hardware more than it should. A portion of the chipset will also be dedicated to enhancing the performance of the Google Assistant and its "always-on" capabilities, the report has said. Google has seemingly received its first working versions of the Whitechapel chipsets but they are far from being usable for Pixel phones at least until next year.

Google's decision to manufacture its own chipsets, in collaboration with Samsung, could be a huge blow to its business with Qualcomm. All of the Nexus and Pixel phones have majorly housed a Qualcomm chipset, usually the top-end one. Even the watered-down versions of Pixel 3 -- the Pixel 3a and Pixel 3a XL -- use a Qualcomm chip. At the same time, Google's own processor will take its fight against Apple to the next level. Apple was one of the first few companies to make their own processor. Google has also been developing some chips, such as Titan M and the Pixel Neural Core.

Google has not commented on the reported development.
New Delhi: Bollywood's yet another happening couple Pulkit Samrat and Kriti Kharbanda are making most of the quarantine time together. Kriti posted a video of Pulkit giving her a perfect oil 'champi' (head massage) while she giggles shyly.

This is what her caption reads: First I made him look like Champak, then made him give me a champi! @pulkitsamrat heya! Thanks ya! #quarantinememories #yelocozyolo (this is officially my new motto in life)

Don't they give you major couple goals?

Kriti and Pulkit were last seen together in Anees Bazmee's 'Pagalpanti' featuring Anil Kapoor, John Abraham, Arshad Warsi, Saurabh Shukla, Ileana D'Cruz and Urvashi Rautela. Next, Kriti has a Tamil film titled 'Vaan' and Bejoy Nambiar's 'Taish' up for release this year.

Pulkit has 'Haathi Mere Saathi' which is a multi-lingual venture starring Rana Daggubati, Vishnu Vishal, Shriya Pilgaonkar and Zoya Hussain in lead roles. It is being made in Hindi, Tamil and Telugu simultaneously with different cast across languages.

With the nationwide lockdown now extended till May 3 to fight against the deadly novel coronavirus outbreak in the country, celebs are urging everyone to 'stay home stay safe' and practice social distancing. Also, following the guidelines issued by the government will help in combating COVID-19 pandemic flu.

Globally, there are 1,986,986 confirmed cases with 126,812 deaths as of now, according to John Hopkins University website data.
The University of Portsmouth has just been awarded a grant of 68,000 for a PhD student to study the reasons for the phenomenal success of the Fifties Kenwood food mixer.

Is that crazy? A waste of taxpayers money which could have been better spent  on Kenwood Mixers for student cooks, perhaps?

Maybe, but its serious stuff, this study of a modest kitchen gadget. The Science Museum is heavily involved, with its head of libraries and archives and its curator of consumer and environmental technology collaborating on the project.

Im glad someone has noticed what a life-changing and important invention the food mixer, spear-headed by Kenwood, was.

Prue Leith bought her first Kenwood mixer  the original Chef Mixer A700, a white enamel, slimmer and more curvy design than the modern ones  in 1961. Pictured with a newer version

Mr Kenneth Wood, the London-born son of a confectioner, himself an engineer and inventor, launched his Kenwood Chef mixer in 1950.

By 1961 he employed 700 people, was one of Britains youngest millionaires and Kenwood was a household name.

Seventy years later, the Kenwood mixer is still going strong, with dozens of iterations.

They are expensive (starting at just under 300 today and going up to 1,200 for the fanciest model), as they were in the Fifties. But they sold in millions. And quite right, too.

I hope the lucky student working on her/his thesis concludes that the main reason for its success was that it was a good, hard-working donkey of a machine, one with a powerful, reliable motor, unbreakable bowls and heavy enough not to judder off the worktop.

It wasnt just clever design and solid parts that accounted for its popularity. In the post-war years, women were drudges.

They cleaned the floor on hands and knees, worked the mangle to only half-dry the washing, beat the carpets, polished the furniture with wax and elbow grease and scrubbed the front step cleaner than the neighbours.

In the kitchen, they whisked, kneaded, chopped, minced and peeled  all by hand.

And then suddenly, technology freed them  the Hoover did the floors, the twin tub did the washing and the Kenwood took a lot of the drudgery out of the cooking.

I bought my first Kenwood mixer  the original Chef Mixer A700, a white enamel, slimmer and more curvy design than the modern ones  in 1961.

It was nearly new and I paid 12 for it, which amounted to three weeks rent, or one weeks wages, and I had to borrow half the money to pay for it.

At the time I was living in a bedsit in Earls Court, West London, and had just finished the Cordon Bleu advanced course and declared myself to be a caterer.

I lugged my Kenwood up four flights to my room and set it up on my dressing table  the kitchenette had no worktop, just a cooker and a cupboard.

I made my first hazelnut meringue cake (one of the best puds ever) with that machine.

Three years later, it came with me to my first house, and took pride of place in a real kitchen.

As my catering business grew, it moved with me to more commercial premises in the City.

Expansion meant we bought new machines for the business, and I took my old faithful home again, where for decades it minced meat, beat cake batter, kneaded dough, peeled potatoes and whisked meringues.

When, in 1969, I opened my restaurant, Leiths, we got a big industrial mixer, but it was a Kenwood we bought for the pastry-chef, who needed something a bit smaller for cakes and puddings.

At Leiths School of Food and Wine, we bought Kenwood mixers, but only for the teachers use. Students had to do it all by hand. If you make something laboriously by hand, you understand what it looks and feels like. Or so I believed.

Now Im not so sure. Young people seem to learn by watching YouTube. They wouldnt dream of whisking egg-whites in a copper bowl with a hand whisk.

And today, I wouldnt either. My copper bowl has long since been consigned to decorative duty.

My beloved Kenwood stayed with me for 45 years, till the mid-Noughties, by which time my children had left home and I was writing novels instead of cookbooks, and cooking far less. The poor thing was neglected, like an old dog not getting a walk.

This Boutique Stand Mixer is sold for 399.99 at Kenwoodworld.com. Mixers usually cost from between 300 and 1000

One day it gave up. I toyed with the idea of donating it to the V&A, but being more practical than romantic, it went in the skip. I was sad, and still miss it.

Ive now got a modern one, the new Kenwood Chef with fashionable attachments such as a pasta maker, a juicer, and a blender, but it doesnt have the wonderful potato peeler.

The low roar of the Kenwood hefty metal bowl, lined with a surface rough enough to rumble muddy spuds to perfectly peeled, was the only sound I allowed to interrupt The Archers omnibus while I made Sunday lunch.

Until the vibrant-coloured American KitchenAid came along to challenge the supremacy of the Kenwood Chef, there was no other mixer strong enough to take the bashing cooks give it.

With almost nothing made of plastic, heavy to lift, capacious and reliable, the Kenwood was unbeatable. They used to be made in Hampshire by Kenwood. Now theyre made in China by DeLonghi.

Somewhat treacherously, Ive also bought a Magimix, electric hand beaters and a Thermomix  a liquidiser that heats as it beats  with the excuse that I often cook several things at once, test more than one recipe, or make extra for the freezer.

These are all excellent machines, but none of them whisks or beats like a Kenwood. You need a robust, big-bowled machine for cakes or bread.

So, if this looks a bit like a tribute to an old friend, I guess it is. Over the years, I have had many toasters, kettles, liquidisers and coffee machines. But only those two Kenwood stand mixers in 60 years of cooking.

I reckon my current one will outlast me. Maybe it could go in my coffin, as grave goods.
SIOUX CITY -- In spite of Americans on social media complaining of seeing "payment status not available" when checking into an Internal Revenue Service government website, lots of federal stimulus checks are arriving at banks and credit unions in Siouxland.

On March 27, President Donald Trump signed the coronavirus stimulus relief package, or CARES Act, in which one major component involves payments of up to $1,200 per person, plus an additional $500 for each child under age 17. Lawmakers set the program to bolster the sluggish economy, in a time of layoffs and furloughs, as a wide variety of businesses have closed.

Federal officials say the first recipients are people who filed online tax returns for both the 2018 and 2019 years. The money was sent directly to their bank accounts. The first wave of such direct deposits arrived for members of Sioux Valley Credit Union in Sioux City on Wednesday.

SVCU member services representative Kelly Potter said the phone calls from people to see if stimulus checks had arrived were steady, from opening time in the morning and into the afternoon.

Potter said "knowing (whether) it is there" was the prime question, and credit union technology could quickly answer that for those inquiring.

"We are seeing an increasing number of calls from members asking about them," she said.

The number of Iowans seeking government unemployment benefits after losing their jobs due to the pandemic has topped 100,000 over a two-week period up to the beginning of April. Among the hardest hit industries have been the food service and hospitality sectors. A survey of 670 bars and restaurants in Iowa found that more than four out of five had laid off workers.

The $1,200 payments are available to those earning less than $75,000 as an individual, including recipients of Social Security, disability and veterans benefits. Those earning above that threshold and up to $99,000 get a smaller payment.

People who on Wednesday checked out the status of checks coming to them in large numbers encountered a message of "Payment Status Not Available" from the IRS online site.

As the direct deposits and checks come in, U.S. Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, is among officials warning people to be on watch for scams.

"IRS Criminal Investigation is actively working to combat scam artists trying to exploit Economic Impact Payments," the agency said in a statement earlier this week. "So far, the scams CI has already seen look to prey on vulnerable taxpayers who are unaware of how the payments will reach them. IRS CI is prioritizing these types of investigations to help protect taxpayers and the tax system."
Ha Won asked Seo Woo to stay and be with him. He confessed that he needs her presence more. Seo Woo was speechless, but her heart fluttered at the same time after hearing Ha Won's feelings for her.

Ha Won created another program with an AI box. He worked the whole night to finish it. He will present it to the company for a client.

Meanwhile, Seo Woo created mixed music for her parents. She missed them and wanted to visit their house in the province. After she lost her parents due to fire, Seo Woo never returned to her hometown. She was traumatized and couldn't accept the incident.

Seo Woo tried to buy a bus ticket to visit her parents' place but her fears took over. Instead, Eun Joo cooked food and placed it on the altar for her parents, which Seo Woo is grateful for.

Seo Woo went to Ha Won's place instead and talked to him about her struggles. Ha Won enjoyed talking with Seo Woo and shared his thoughts of playing the piano someday. She then promised him to record while he plays the instrument.

They decided to go to the studio as Ha Won left his bicycle. Seo Woo returned to the studio to pick her things and was surprised to see new pairs of slippers Ha Won bought for her.

The next day, Seo Woo brought her piano instruments to Ha Won's house. She will start to record and mix it since this will be Ha Won's first live recording. Seo Woo hid her laughter as Ha Won began to play, but his hands were shaking, which added to the effect of the music.

Seo Woo woke up and decided to visit her hometown. Reaching the place, Seo Woo cried seeing the burnt house from afar. Memories of when her parents were still alive came flashing back. She took out her phone and played the music recording she made for them. It took an hour staring at their place.

When she was about to leave, she saw Ha Won waiting for her on the other side of the road. Ha Won drove from Seoul to her province to see if she was doing fine. They drove back together to Seoul and stopped by a shop for a cup of coffee.

When they arrived in Seoul, Ha Won's mattress was delivered to his place. Seo Woo helped him fix all the furniture inside his house. It was a long day, Seo Woo slept at Ha Won's new bed. He took the couch and went to sleep as well.

The next morning, Seo Woo woke up and went straight to work. She was happy looking at Ha Won sleeping. She called Eun Joo to apologize for not coming home last night. The day was In Wook's live play with selected fans watching. Seo Woo p

repared the instruments and set up the place while Soon Ho encouraged him to carry on. In Wook started to play the piano and his music filled the room.

Soon Ho and Seo Woo felt relieved seeing him performing well. Everyone enjoyed the live music and wished to join In Wook's future performance. He also invited everyone to dinner. Seo Woo dropped her instruments at the studio before going to the restaurant.

When Ha Won arrived at the studio, Seo Woo was asked by In Wook to stay for a few minutes. He said that he wanted to play in the studio and it wouldn't take long. Seo Woo agreed to his request. She recorded In Wook's live piano while Ha Won listened on the other side of the room.

Ha Won walked Seo Woo to her house while they talked about the day's activity. He then asked her to sleep at his place while he played the piano.
Iraqis are highly skeptical of the statistics announced by the Iraqi government regarding the country's number of coronavirus cases. This doubt is evident in media reports and blogs of journalists and activists on social media.

Health Minister Jaafar Allawi said April 12 in a television interview, The number of coronavirus cases is subject to international monitoring. Death certificates and forensic medicine are monitored and coronavirus statistics cannot be manipulated in any way. As of April 14, the country had registered 1,400 cases and 78 deaths, according to a statement by the Health Ministry.

An administrator working at a medical center east of Baghdad said during an interview with Al-Monitor on condition of anonymity, The numbers that the Iraqi Health Ministry announces daily are not the real numbers. On one day, we recorded more than 30 cases in one health center, but in the evening the Iraqi statistics that were revealed showed fewer cases than those recorded in our center.

The United Nations mission in Iraq seemed to second this skepticism when it called on the Iraqi government April 3 to support independent reports on the number of coronavirus infections, saying, The pandemic is an unprecedented global threat that requires strong responses from governments, societies and individuals.

The UN statement came after the National Media and Communications Commission of Iraq sanctioned the Reuters news agency by suspending its work for three months and fining it $21,000 for an April 2 report that there were more coronavirus cases than the Iraqi government was revealing.

The author of the report conducted a survey on Twitter about the extent of Iraqi trust in the numbers announced by the Iraqi government and asked respondents, Do you think that the figures announced by the Iraqi government regarding the numbers of infected and deceased people with coronavirus are true? Out of the 2,782 respondents, 78.5% considered the numbers inaccurate, while 21.5% said the numbers were correct.

The Health Ministry reacted the same day to the Reuters report  which said the number of coronavirus cases ranges between 3,000 and 9,000, as opposed to the official number of 772 at the time  saying, Publishing such news at this critical time will undermine peoples commitment to the curfew, which means an increased risk of infection and virus spread.

Despite the great public and media skepticism about the official figures, outgoing Prime Minister Adel Abdul Mahdi defended the government, saying, We cannot hide coronavirus deaths in Iraq. Questioning procedures is not possible.

In a different approach to sanction on Reuters, Iraqi President Barham Salih in an interview with CNN's Christiane Amanpour on April. 14, called the decision on Reuters "regrettable", revealing that his legal team is working with to "revoke" the suspension of Reuters.

The representative of the World Health Organization (WHO) in Iraq, Adham Adel, told Al-Monitor, The WHO numbers in Iraq are not misleading, and we are following the cases and fatalities through specialized staff in the organization and in coordination with the departments of the Iraqi Health Ministry.

He added, The WHO and the Iraqi Health Ministry are extremely transparent and clear with Iraqis first and with the region and the world second.

The public health director of Dhi Qar province, Haider Hantush, said in a press statement, There are many unreported cases. People are not taking testing seriously.

The Iraqi Health Ministry has prevented any doctor or health official, except for a few authorized persons, from announcing numbers or infections in the regions and told the media outlets to instead use information from the evening news bulletin every night.

A report published March 30 by the French news agency AFP also said government figures might be lower than the actual cases.

A doctor at a medical analysis center who spoke with Al-Monitor this month indicated that such was the case. She told Al-Monitor on condition of anonymity, The initial survey areas showed hundreds of cases in eastern and southern Baghdad. The problem is that we do not have the ability to deal with these cases, nor do we have the medical staff and logistical capabilities to treat them.

The doctor added, The real figures exceed the ones announced, and the Health Ministry and the government are well aware of that. They do not want to announce the real numbers because they do not want to cause public uproar and shock citizens. They are afraid of peoples reactions.

Iraqs proximity to Iran, the travel and tourism between the countries, and the countries' many commercial, religious, and personal connections have also led to speculation about the Iraqi figures.

Iraqis suspicions and doubts regarding the accuracy of official figures are fueled by past experiences of governmental lack of transparency, especially in crises; this has included information about terrorism. Many people no longer trust government data.

As of April 14, more than 45,000 Iraqis out of a population of 40 million were reported to have been tested for COVID-19; while testing had been done at a rate of roughly 1,500 citizens per day, test numbers appear to be ramping up, in part as a result of Chinese help.
EDITORS NOTE: This article is part of the Intelligencers series  Ask Us. Anyone who has questions regarding the COVID-19 pandemic should use the new coronavirus question box located on our website at theintelligencer.com to submit your questions.

Here is what we know so far about some of the theories related to a cure for COVID-19:

Temperature

A theory came out and has even been paraphrased by President Donald Trump claiming that warm weather could help slow the spread of the coronavirus.

There is no solid information on whether this is true or not. What we do know is the National Academy of Science sent a letter with their findings regarding temperature to the White House last week. Their findings include data showing that there is some sign that there is a possibility that the spread may slow with higher temperatures.

One report from China in the pandemics early stages showed that with every one degree Celcius elevation in ambient temperature led to a decrease in daily confirmed cases by 36-57 percent[]. The letter also said that this information was not consistent throughout China. In order to reach these decreasing numbers, humidity and temperature must correlate in a certain pattern. In lab tests, there was a correlation to the decrease in spread and higher temperatures but scientists warned that with virus grown in tissue culture, and not from nature, reactions can be different. They also warned that not all tests were done the same.

The tests were conducted in multiple labs and not all of these labs have the same technology so some differences included humidity at stable levels where some did not.

Overall, while warmer temperatures mixed with the right levels of humidity, there are hints that it could slow the spread but there are few examples of it happening in nature. It is due to these varying information that scientists are still debating if the weather will have some effect.

Scientists also pointed out that if the temperature does play a role, it may not be enough as very few are immune to the virus.

Hydroxychloroquine

This is a prescription medicine that is used to help treat malaria as well as lupus and rheumatoid arthritis. This theory came from a small study that showed, in some mild cases, patients getting better. The theory was then put in the spotlight when Trump, against his health officials wishes, began to support this theory.

The study suggested that The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) advise against using the drug and its closely related cousin, Chloroquine, as it has not been approved by the CDC or the Food and Drug Administration. Both drugs are currently in clinical studies to prove or disprove the theory.

Tonic water and zinc

A St. Louis Chiropractor, Eric Neptune went live on his practices Facebook page last week to talk about what some of his patients are doing with Quinine, zinc and tonic water. That live video has since gained over 17 million views.

Quinine is used in tonic water and was used over a century ago to treat malaria.

Its amazing what it does for muscle aches and pains, he said in the video. I use it all the time in my office all the time for people.

While he said he is not your doctor, this is not medical advice, this is a suggestion, he told his viewers to take Quinine and high doses of zinc. He also said that if you cannot find Quinine, to buy Schweppes tonic water as it has Quinine in it.

He claimed that there are doctors treating patients with Hydroxychloroquine and zinc for COVID-19. He compared Quinine to be similar to Hydroxychloroquine.

He backed up his theory by saying his patients notice a difference and summarized a report from Los Angeles where one doctor said they have also seen some improvement in patients. However, medical doctors warn those who may be looking in trying this treatment that it is likely ineffective and no solid proof to back up the theory.
Radio Farda has learned that Iran is pushing Ukraine to sign a memorandum of understanding obliging Ukraine and the families of victims of flight 752, shot down over Tehran, to waive their right to pursue the matter any further through courts.

Iran's Revolutionary Guard fired two missiles at Ukraine's flight 752 on January 8 in the wake of Iran's missile attacks on Iraqi military bases hosting U.S forces. Iranian authorities took responsibility for downing the flight and killing 176 passengers and crew members onboard the plane after three days of denials and later claiming that 'human error" was responsible for shooting the plane.

Radio Farda has learned that Iran has sent the draft of a memorandum of understanding (MoU) to the Ukrainian Foreign Ministry according to which Ukraine and the families of the victims are to accept "human error" as the cause of the crash. The said document also stipulates that Ukraine and the families of the victims should not pursue criminal and judicial action against Iran in return for the payment of compensation by Iran and releasing the plane's flight recorder's contents after they are analyzed.

To clarify issues related to a possible MoU proposed by Iran, Radio Farda asked Andriy Guck, an international aviation law expert to comment on MoU possible text. He pointed out that Iran may be seeking to create disunity among the countries whose nationals were killed in the crash by seeking to reach such a separate agreement with Ukraine.

Guck also said the fact that Iranian authorities claim human error caused the crash of the Ukrainian airliner does not mean that Iran has taken responsibility for the tragedy. "The question remains whether Iran is prepared to be accountable, explain why the airspace was not closed and the reasons for the human error, compensate it or not," he said and added that the MoU draft submitted to the Ukrainian Foreign Ministry by Iran does not make any mention of Iran's accountability and sets few conditions to start compensation negotiations..

According to Guck, the question of whether Iran is prepared to compensate the families of the victims and the aviation company that owned the airliner will remain unanswered if Ukraine accepts Iran's position as expressed in the draft document. In other words, Guck says, Iran considers the investigation into the "human error" that possibly caused the crash and and all respective court procedures an internal matter to be investigated and prosecuted solely by Iranian authorities.

"First of all, the reason for the crash must not be attributed to human error before the conclusion of an independent and proper investigation. Secondly, the government of Ukraine cannot be made responsible for forcing the families of the victims to forego their right of seeking an independent investigation as a precondition for payment of compensation by Iran; and thirdly, Ukraine should not have an obligation to provide Iran with the technical data of the Ukrainian airline -- which is a private company  particularly because Iran is not undertaking to provide its own data until Iran is not taking proper measures to provide access to its data and at least preliminary investigation results to Ukraine and other countries involved in the matter," Guck said.

Moreover, the draft MoU says Iran may allow international experts participation in the flight recorders analysis but only if Iran recognizes that it cannot do it. But so far it has been clear that Iran has not cooperated in this regard and is not capable or willing to decode flight recorders, so its just delaying clauses that do not foresee Irans obligations. The document prepared by Iran does not indicate who the responsible party for the payment of compensation is and lacks clear clauses for the identification of Iran's obligations and the time frame for their realization, as well as any arbitral procedure if states will not reach understanding, the Ukrainian international aviation laws expert pointed out.
MANDEL NGAN / AFP / Getty Images

En espanol | The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) on Tuesday announced it had sent warnings to 10 companies selling products they asserted can treat or prevent COVID-19, even though no products are scientifically proven to prevent or treat the acute respiratory illness caused by the novel coronavirus.

The warnings represent the U.S. government's latest effort to stop scams and remove from the marketplace bogus treatments and cures that have emerged to purportedly combat COVID-19. The companies most recently targeted by the FTC were selling items such as anti-virus kits and intravenous therapies with high doses of vitamin C.

All together, the FTC now has sent 43 warning letters, some in conjunction with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA). Earlier warnings went to entities selling homeopathic drugs, cannabinol, essential oils, colloidal silver, traditional Chinese medicine and salt therapy.

Some entities sold products online on websites and platforms including Facebook and Instagram; others offered the supposed treatments in clinics or in consumers homes.
 Flash

U.S. President Donald Trump announced Tuesday that his administration is halting the nation's funding to the World Health Organization (WHO), a move that experts said could exacerbate the COVID-19 pandemic and cost more lives.

Speaking during a press briefing at the White House, Trump said a review is being conducted to assess the WHO's role in addressing the spread of the coronavirus.

"With the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, we have deep concerns about whether America's generosity has been put to the best use possible," Trump told reporters, also claiming that "the WHO failed to adequately obtain, vet, and share information in a timely and transparent fashion."

The announcement came as Trump is aggressively defending his own handling of the COVID-19 crisis after his administration has been increasingly scrutinized for downplaying the threat from the coronavirus early on and is being faulted for delays in testing.

Patrick Leahy, ranking member of the U.S. Senate Appropriations Committee, said that "Withholding funds for WHO in the midst of the worst pandemic in a century makes as much sense as cutting off ammunition to an ally as the enemy closes in."

"The White House knows that it grossly mishandled this crisis from the beginning, ignoring multiple warnings and squandering valuable time, dismissing medical science, comparing COVID-19 to the common cold," the Vermont Democrat said in a statement. "Not wanting to take responsibility as the deaths continue to mount, he blames others."

Patrice Harris, president of the American Medical Association, said in a statement that halting funding to the WHO is "a dangerous step in the wrong direction that will not make defeating COVID-19 easier."

"Fighting a global pandemic requires international cooperation and reliance on science and data," Harris said. "Cutting funding to the WHO -- rather than focusing on solutions -- is a dangerous move at a precarious moment for the world."

According to a tally from Johns Hopkins University on Tuesday, the United States has reported more than 600,000 confirmed cases of COVID-19 and over 25,000 deaths, both the highest on record. Globally, the number of confirmed cases is approaching 2 million, as the death toll has reached over 126,000, the tally showed.

Based in Geneva, Switzerland, the WHO is a specialized agency of the United Nations for international public health, which has played a crucial role in guiding the global efforts in combating the coronavirus pandemic. The United States contributed more than 400 million U.S. dollars to the agency in 2019, roughly 15 percent of its budget.

Thomas Bollyky, director of the global health program and senior fellow for global health, economics, and development at the Council on Foreign Relations, a U.S. think tank, said Tuesday that the WHO "plays an irreplaceable role" in global outbreak response.

Bollyky tweeted that the WHO "has largely served its purpose well" in the COVID-19 crisis, urging Washington to seek to strengthen and enhance the agency's independence and effectiveness, not to "degrade it amid a crisis."

Lawrence Gostin, director of the O'Neill Institute for National and Global Health Law at Georgetown University, called the White House's decision "disgraceful," warning that it would cause deaths and even blow back on the United States.

"How shortsighted when global coop needed more now than ever," Gostin said in series of tweets Tuesday, adding that Washington has "entirely abandoned" U.S. global health leadership.

It is noteworthy that Trump's tone toward the WHO differed sharply from one of his tweets on Feb. 24, several days before the United States reported the first death from COVID-19.

"The Coronavirus is very much under control in the USA," Trump wrote. "We are in contact with everyone and all relevant countries. CDC & World Health have been working hard and very smart."

In an interview with CBS News Radio on Monday, Robert Redfield, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) of the United States, said the WHO "has been a very important public health partner with the CDC, and continues to be."

Redfield also noted that CDC staffers have been working "side-by-side" with the WHO, but added that he'd "leave the politics ... for others to try to resolve."

"We must quarantine politicizing this virus at national and global levels," WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said from Geneva last week.

"We have to work together, and we have no time to waste," the director added.
Quarantine Cruise: US Aircraft Carrier Truman to Remain at Sea, Away From COVID-19

Sputnik News

19:12 GMT 14.04.2020

After crew on four aircraft carriers came down with COVID-19, the US Navy has decided to keep the USS Harry Truman on deployment in a bid to protect its crew from the pandemic and ensure the warship would be available to respond if a crisis were to arise.

The Truman is presently underway in the Western Atlantic, and things are going to stay that way for a while, according to a Monday announcement by the US Navy. The 100,000-ton warship put to sea in December following the completion of emergency electrical repairs for issues that had quickly returned it to port in September.

"The Navy is taking this measure to maintain the strike group's warfighting capability while ensuring the safety of the crew. The demand for naval assets remains high," the service said in a news release. The move "allows the ship to maintain a high level of readiness for a potential rapid surge or forward deployment, providing options to the national command authority during this global COVID-19 pandemic."

"The ship is entering a period in which it needs to be ready to respond and deploy at any time," Vice Adm. Andrew Lewis, commander of the US 2nd Fleet, said in the release. "Normally we can do that pierside, but in the face of COVID-19, we need to protect our most valuable asset, our people, by keeping the ship out to sea."

Now, however, the ship will keep busy and sharp with advanced training scenarios, similar to the pre-deployment Composite Training Unit Exercise (COMPTUEX) used to certify carrier strike groups for deployment, Lewis told reporters Tuesday, according to USNI News.

The Truman had been sailing home to Norfolk, Virginia, after a tour of duty in the Arabian Sea, Navy Times reported.

'More Cases to Come'

Service members have tested positive for the coronavirus on four US aircraft carriers - the USS Theodore Roosevelt, USS Carl Vinson, USS Ronald Reagan and USS Nimitz - although only the Roosevelt was underway, and its raging outbreak has so far been unique. Nearly 600 of the Roosevelt's roughly 4,000 crew have tested positive for COVID-19, including its former captain, and one crew member has died.

Stars and Stripes noted on Tuesday that the Navy has the highest number of COVID-19 cases of any US service branch, with 1,056 detected so far. Military Times reported 2,557 cases across the entire armed forces, and those cases have shuttered bases across the nation and canceled participation in war games, in addition to forcing the Roosevelt into port in Guam. However, the Nimitz, with its one positive case being found off the ship, still plans to set sail later this month.

James Stavridis, a retired US Navy admiral and former supreme allied commander Europe for NATO, warned last week that "there are more cases to come."

"The Navy and all the services have some hard choices ahead in terms of whether to pull units off the line to get them well or accept some level of casualties due to the coronavirus. I think it will be a case-by-case approach depending on the mission of the unit," Stavridis told the Associated Press in an email.

Likewise, Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. John Hyten told reporters on Thursday, "It's not a good idea to think that the Teddy Roosevelt is a one-of-a-kind issue. We have too many ships at sea. ... To think that it will never happen again is not a good way to plan."

Cruise Ship Crews Also Stuck At Sea

The Navy's solution for protecting the Truman's crew echoes the measures adopted by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to prevent the spread of COVID-19 both to and from cruise ships.

According to the agency, some 80,000 cruise ship crew members on more than 100 vessels remain anchored off the coast of the United States in obedience of a No Sail Order, which the CDC extended on April 9 for up to 100 days.

Repatriating the crew members has been tough, though, as many larger ships have an international staff as diverse as their passengers.

"Sometimes in a global crisis such as this, caution and fear can take over in some people in some countries, and what would normally be a basic level of human decency to allow these men and women into a port to be able return to their homes," Roger Frizzell, a senior vice president for cruise company Carnival, told the Washington Post, "yet surprisingly it has been denied by some countries in recent weeks."

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A 27-year-old man was arrested earlier this month after being found with a pipe bomb in the bathroom of a Jantzen Beach hotel, records show.

Tyler Scott Whitney, is accused of unlawful possession of a destructive device. Court records dont say why he had the bomb or reference whether he had any plans to use it.

An officer initially contacted Whitney on April 5, when he was called to the Red Lion Hotel on the River on a report of someone who refused to leave a hotel bathroom, according to a probable cause affidavit.

The officer found a man, since identified as Whitney, locked in a womens bathroom stall, the records say. Whitney allegedly provided an Alaska identification card, and the officer eventually told him to leave.

But the officer reviewed the ID and found it didnt match Whitneys description, so he tracked him down  this time finding him in a bathroom at a nearby Oxford Suites.

The officer confronted Whitney about the identification, and Whitney said he provided it in order to avoid detection of a warrant, according to the affidavit.

The officer arrested Whitney and found needles in his backpack, the records show. And in an effort to avoid being hurt by any uncapped needles, the officer dumped the backpacks contents onto the floor.

A heavy item, which appeared to be a pipe bomb, fell to the ground.

The officer put caution tape around the bomb to keep anyone from going close, and a bomb squad eventually seized it.

Whitney, whos being held in the Multnomah County Detention Center, is also accused of giving false information to a peace officer in connection with a citation or warrant.

The warrant appears to be connected to a 2019 heroin possession and felon in possession of a firearm conviction.

-- Jim Ryan; jryan@oregonian.com; 503-221-8005; @Jimryan015

Subscribe to Oregonian/OregonLive newsletters and podcasts for the latest news and top stories.
Both a pandemic and social distancing measures that require the closure of businesses, to be sure, affect interstate commerce. But even if the federal government in theory could have more power in this area, it would take an act of Congress to bestow it on the presidency.

Lawmakers have created some executive powers relevant to the crisis  including enabling an administration to take steps to keep illness from spreading across state lines and to mobilize industry to ramp up production of needed goods in a public health crisis. But they have passed no statute purporting to give the presidency pre-eminence over governors on rescinding public health limits inside states.

Similarly, while Mr. Trump declared a national emergency over the pandemic, that did not mean he was tapping into some reservoir of limitless constitutional power. Rather, he was activating specific statutes that Congress has enacted creating particular standby powers, none of which include letting a president overturn state-imposed public health safety measures.

In a 1952 case involving President Harry S. Trumans seizure of steel mills to avert a strike during the Korean War, the Supreme Court rejected his effort to invoke purported inherent constitutional power to resolve the crisis using different tools than Congress had provided.

And even if Congress were to now enact a law giving Mr. Trump that power  which is unlikely, with the House in the hands of Democrats  there would still be legal obstacles. The Supreme Court over the last generation has pushed back when Congress has enacted laws that the court sees as federal commandeering of states authority.

The federal government may neither issue directives requiring the states to address particular problems, nor command the states officers, or those of their political subdivisions, to administer or enforce a federal regulatory program, Justice Antonin Scalia wrote in a 1997 Supreme Court ruling.

On Tuesday, Mr. Trump appeared to seek a face-saving way out, saying he was authorizing governors to decide for themselves when to reopen their states. He offered no explanation for the implication that his permission was necessary before they could lift their own orders.
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Linkedin Dzulfiqar Fathur Rahman (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Wed, April 15, 2020 14:41 636 fc6853813033f564188675f8bd20b672 1 Business COVID-19-in-Indonesia,Grab-Indonesia,food-company,grocery,ramadan,Idul-Fitri Free

The Agriculture Ministry is partnering with food producer PT Indoguna Utama and ride-hailing company Grab Indonesia, among other businesses, to secure supplies and offer them an online grocery platform.

The partnership is part of the governments anticipatory efforts to meet surging demand, especially for beef and chicken meat during Ramadan and on Idul Fitri. Both events will likely be celebrated at the peak of the COVID-19 outbreak, according to Agriculture Minister Syahrul Yasin Limpo.

Protein helps our [body repair tissue], improves our immune system and helps us grow, Syahrul said at the signing of the partnership agreement on Tuesday. How can we overcome this outbreak if our source of animal protein is insufficient or inaccessible to the people.

Indoguna Utama, which has sold food products to hotels and retailers worldwide since 1982, is expected to provide enough beef, chicken meat, fish, milk and other processed products.

Grab Indonesia, which offers food delivery services through the GrabFood feature, will provide an online platform to sell the products and deliver them.

Concerns have been raised about the possibility of food shortages, brought on by disruptions to the countrys distribution chains as a result of government measures to fight COVID-19.

The Agriculture Ministry has estimated the demand for chicken meat to reach 881,204 tons and beef 201,730 tons between March and May.

With the rate of COVID-19 transmissions showing no signs of slowing down, the government began improving regional requests for large-scale social restrictions (PSBB), which temporarily suspend school and offices, as well as religious and public activities.

Read also: Explainer: Indonesia to finance coronavirus battle mostly through debt

As of Tuesday, Indonesia has recorded 4,839 confirmed COVID-19 cases, with 459 deaths and 426 recoveries.

Because half of the cases are in Greater Jakarta, the capital imposed heightened PSBB measures on Friday and its satellite cities will soon follow suit.

Under these conditions, two things must not cease: health care and agriculture, said Syahrul. Therefore, by complying with health protocols, medical workers and farmers will keep working.

To serve stay-at-home consumers under social restrictions, the ministry is partnering with online grocery shopping platforms Sayur Box, Tanihub and Etanee, as well as food companies PT Charoen Pokphand Indonesia, PT Triputra Panganindo, PT Japfa Comfeed Indonesia and PT Cimory.

Last week, the ministry established a similar partnership with ride-hailing company Gojek and the Toko Tani Indonesia Center, a grocery store in South Jakarta that sells affordable food and groceries.

Gojek, which employs over a million drivers across the country, is offering free delivery services for minimum purchases of Rp 40,000 (US$2.50) at Toko Tani and within a 25-kilometer distance from the store.

The activities of Jakartans may slow down with the introduction of large-scale social restrictions to curb the spread of COVID-19, Gojek chief executive officer Kevin Aluwi said in a statement released on Friday. But we have prepared several measures to keep operating as best as we can while complying with health and safety procedures.

 Eisya A. Eloksari contributed to this story.
As doctors, nurses and other health care workers are fighting the coronavirus pandemic, a few national chains are stepping up to offer them free food and drinks.

But you can join the cause too.
Fruit and vegetable pickers are being flown from Romania to the UK to keep up with demand.

An air charter company said it has arranged for a flight to bring up to 180 Eastern European farm workers to Stansted Airport in Essex on Thursday.

It has been reported that up to five more flights are planned.

The National Farmers Union has expressed concern about the impact of the coronavirus pandemic on recruitment of workers to pick fruit and vegetables this summer.

Demand for groceries surged as people stockpiled food due to the outbreak.

Surrey-based Air Charter Service told the PA news agency that a private farming company in the UK has paid for Thursdays flight. It did not name the firm.

An Airbus A320 aircraft will be used, at an estimated cost of 200-250 per seat.

This is much more expensive than typical air fares with low-cost carriers, but nearly all scheduled commercial flights have been grounded as a result of travel restrictions and the collapse in demand caused by Covid-19.

Air Charter Service confirmed that an airline based at Stansted would operate the flight, which was booked last week.

Carriers based at the Essex airport include Ryanair, Jet2.com and Tui Airways.

At least 10 other flights have been arranged by Air Charter Service to take farm workers from Romania and Bulgaria to Germany.

The company said it has seen a surge in demand for charter flights due to the pandemic, including to repatriate people stranded around the world.
PHOENIX  The Arizona Supreme Court on Tuesday upheld the murder conviction and death sentence of a man in the suffocation of a 10-year-old girl he locked in a plastic storage box as punishment and left to die.

The justices rejected John Michael Allens claim that jurors abused their discretion in sentencing him to death in the 2011 killing of Ame Deal, who prosecutors said was ordered by Allen to get into the box because she had stolen an ice pop. Allen and his wife, who was Ames cousin, fell asleep and discovered the next morning that the child had died.

Even if Allen did not intend to fall asleep and leave (Ame) inside the box for more than six hours, he should have known that placing her there for any length of time would cause (Ame) physical pain and mental anguish, the justices wrote, concluding there was substantial evidence showing Allen carried out the killing in an especially cruel manner.

The court upheld Allens death sentence but threw out sentences for three related child abuse convictions, concluding the trial court improperly applied harsher sentencing enhancements than were available for Allen. He will be re-sentenced on those three convictions.

Colin Stearns, one of Allens attorneys, didnt immediately respond to a call and email seeking comment on his clients behalf.

Allen wife, Sammantha Allen, also was convicted of murder and sentenced to death in the killing of Ame. She has appealed her conviction.

The 10-year-olds death was the cruel culmination of a history of abuse that a handful of relatives heaped on her at the home they shared in Phoenix, authorities said.

Evidence showed Ame was forced to eat dog feces, crush aluminum cans barefoot and consume hot sauce. She was kicked in the face, beaten with a wooden paddle and forcibly dunked after being thrown in a cold swimming pool, investigators said.

She had been forced into the plastic box on 10 other occasion for hours at a time. The box was less than 3 feet long (0.91 meters), less than 1 foot (0.3 meter) wide and a foot deep. Ame stood about 4 feet (1.2 meters) tall and weighed nearly 60 pounds (27 kilograms).

Authorities say Ame was treated more harshly than other children at the home, and her family members characterized her as a liar and thief.

Three other relatives, including an aunt who served as Ames legal guardian, were sentenced to prison for abusing the girl.

Child welfare authorities in Arizona said they didnt receive any reports of abuse before her death. Police said child welfare reports from Utah, where the family lived before moving to Phoenix, listed Ame as an abused child.

Ames mother left the family years earlier after suffering abuse by relatives and moved to Kansas without taking her daughter. David Deal, who is listed on Ames birth certificate as her father, is serving a 14-year sentence after pleading guilty to attempted child abuse.

Ames legal guardian at the time of her death was her aunt, Cynthia Stoltzmann, who is serving a 24-year prison sentence for a child abuse conviction. Ames grandmother, Judith Deal, was sentenced to a 10-year prison sentence on a child abuse conviction.

Sammantha and John Allen were the only people charged in Ames death.
Source: Xinhua| 2020-04-15 11:46:49|Editor: huaxia

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BEIJING, April 15 (Xinhua) -- China's two grid giants have made ambitious investment plans to build charging piles for new energy vehicles (NEVs) as the country speeds up infrastructure construction to support the development of electric cars.

The State Grid Corporation of China announced Tuesday that it would invest 2.7 billion yuan (about 383.5 million U.S. dollars) this year to build 78,000 charging piles, which are expected to spur NEV-related consumption worth 20 billion yuan, according to the State Grid.

The move followed plans announced by the China Southern Power Grid recently that it would invest 25.1 billion yuan in charging facilities in the next four years.

The investment is expected to add 150 large-scale charging stations and some 380,000 charging piles in the country, the company said.

By the end of March, China has 542,000 public charging piles, industry data showed. The amount still falls short of demand, analysts said.

The country has been stepping up policy incentives to support the development of NEVs, allocating fiscal funds to encourage infrastructure construction and extending tax exemptions for NEV purchases to boost demand.
Coronavirus-related workplace disruptions have thrown a lot of time-tested leadership advice right out the window.

You need new habits to help your employees thrive under pressure, especially while your team is working remotely, says Tom Gimbel, founder and CEO of Chicago-based staffing firm LaSalle Network. In an Inc. webinar on Monday, Gimbel offered some advice you likely haven't heard before. Although LaSalle has a strong company culture in place--the company is a 12-time Inc. 5000 honoree and two-time Inc. Best Workplaces honoree--Gimbel said he's been forced to adapt his leadership style in these uncertain times.

"I wish that all of us as entrepreneurs, CEOs, owners, and leaders of companies could be doing what we do: running our companies based on a normal economy, a normal world, with normal challenges," said Gimbel, who is also an Inc.com columnist. "Unfortunately, that's not where we live anymore."

His unconventional methods, he noted, have already boosted both productivity and morale among his 250 employees. Here are his four most eye-opening tips:

1. Encourage micromanaging.

Pick your spots strategically when it comes to overseeing work projects--then dive into the details with your employees headfirst. The rationale: Getting involved on the ground level creates accountability among employees and allows them to learn directly from their boss.

"As long as you leave for an extended period of time after jumping in to micromanage, it's a healthy situation," Gimbel said. "But at times like this, when you might not know the severity economically of what's going on with your business, it's called for."

Your tone here matters. In high-stakes situations, you may not have time to explain your demands. Gimbel offered some potential language to use: "I'll teach you about why we did it later on, when we both have time. But today, you've got to do it. Just do it."

2. Don't preach balance.

You always need to safeguard your employees against overwork and burnout, but now isn't the time to prioritize work-life balance. Rather, you need to preach survival.

That means being strict about vacation requests, for example, if you need all hands on deck to keep your company afloat. "Now is the time when we come together," Gimbel said. "It's a really important message: Work should be a distraction to the craziness, and being employed and continuing to grow your career is a positive, not a negative."

3. Don't spotlight individuals.

Toss your "employee of the month" awards out the window. There will be time for individual recognition later. For now, it's more important to make sure your employees are focused on helping the team.

You can still incentivize individuals to work harder or smarter. Gimbel said he recently asked his employees to start self-reporting their workloads on a daily basis, as a motivational tool for any staffers who aren't yet giving it their all. "You need to know where you compare," Gimbel said. "How hard are people really working? When they see that self-reporting, you get a little extra push--and that's what we need now more than ever."

4. Be aggressively honest.

When employees ask about potential pay cuts or layoffs, your best answer is always your most honest one, even if that means saying "I don't know."

Gimbel cited online employment marketplace ZipRecruiter as a cautionary tale. Last month, the company laid off hundreds of employees just days after its CEO reportedly said the business was safe during a virtual all-hands meeting. "I've been very direct with my team in saying that our goal is to not do layoffs," Gimbel said. "Whether we'll have to or not? I don't know. This is my first time leading a company through a global pandemic."
A factory owner has been booked here for allegedly violating the ongoing COVID-19 lockdown and hiding 44 labourers in his processing unit, officials said on Wednesday.

The action against the factory owner comes after residents of Megha Gali had lodged a police complaint regarding the processing unit, they said.

The factory owner, Triloki Nath Chaudhary, fled before police raided the place.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
As portrayed in her latest show, "The Baker and the Beauty," Latina star Nathalie Kelley never really had the luxury of growing up with other Latinos. The series premiered on Monday about a Cuban-American family operating bakery in Miami.





Living the Latina Life?

When she was still young, the celebrity, along with her Peruvian mother and Argentinian father, moved to Sydney from Peru. There, Kelley and her family felt like an outsider, even with the increase in the number of Latinos living in Australia then.

While she could not find enough people who looked like her in Sydney, Kelley stated that in her early years, she had always been attracted to learning about her Latin American heritage and was going out with Brazilians who also moved to the country--so much that she felt herself being an "adopted" Brazilian.

However, she did not have a complete link to her historical roots until she returned to South America while she was still 16 years old.

"There were just so many feelings and emotions. It was the ultimate homecoming," Kelley said during an interview. "I just felt this deep sense of belonging, but at the same time, I recognized, 'Whoa, I grew up very differently, and things aren't all great here. It's not this fantasyland I created in my head. In my head, I thought it was going to be like that Lambada video with everyone dancing on the beach."

Check these out!

Kelly as Noa Hamilton

Kelly portrays Noa Hamilton, an international celebrity and a fashion supermodel who fell in love with Daniel Garcia, played by actor Victor Rasuk, an average guy who works at his family's bakery in the show.

In the show, Hamilton is judged as shallow because of her popularity. But that doesn't stop her from flying to Puerto Rico to establish schools.

"She's really passionate about all her causes and looks out for the people who work for her because they're her family." said Kelley, talking about her character, "in addition to taking care of her mom who's sick."

"She's got a big heart, and that's what drew me to her; it's an opportunity to peel back the layers and see the real authentic and vulnerable woman underneath the strong, opinionated, powerful boss woman who lays awake at night wondering if she's ever going to find love."

Adjusted from a famous series of Israeli artists in Miami, the show has been almost completely recorded in Puerto Rico with total revenue of $57 million on the island. According to Carlos Gomez, who portrays the father of Daniel and the head of the Garcia family in the series, both the cast and the crew were almost exclusively Latin Americans.

Although 'The Baker and the Beauty' focuses on the relationship involving Hamilton and Garcia, Kelley states the series is just as much a "love story" as it is a family celebration.
This marks the beginning of ThinkOn's wholesale cloud footprint in Europe extending Infrastructure, Data Protection and Business Continuity services to the Channel in the UK

LONDON, April 15, 2020, an industry leader in wholesaling secure cloud infrastructure and data management services underpinned by the powerful VMware and Veeam technology stacks has now achieved a new milestone in its efforts to drive global expansion. ThinkOn has announced a new cloud operating environment in the United Kingdom that is supported by Datanet.co.uk, a leading Data Centre facility based just out of London, in Fleet. This new data centre joins ThinkOn's other 20 cloud regions across Canada, the US and Caribbean.



This expansion will provide access to the company's range of backup solution offerings like ThinkOn RansomGuard powered by Veeam Cloud Connect and Secure Cloud Backup for Office 365 , disaster recovery solutions with Veeam Cloud Replication. ThinkOn has also deployed the technology resources required to building a secure and sophisticated VMware Powered Public/Private Cloud and intelligent object storage powered by Hitachi Vantara. Additional services to this market will be rolled out within the coming months.

With this new market in ThinkOn's service delivery roadmap, the company is aiming to grow its Channel Partner base in the UK, while opening new growth avenues for existing partners and subscribers.

"ThinkOn's expansion into the UK is an impactful decision in ThinkOn's history and a strategic step towards the organizations growth. We are committed to deliver unmatched service delivery and experience to our partners in the UK as in other regions. This new site will help us address cloud adoption challenges in the European landscape while meeting UK's data security and compliance standards" said Craig McLellan, CEO and Founder of ThinkOn Inc.

Data Protection Driven by Customer Focus

ThinkOn will continue to provide 24/7 support to partners and subscribers with dedicated workforce. This facility meets all certification requirements of ISO 27001, SOC 2 Type 2, as well as stringent privacy regulations in the UK. Any existing workload on the North American cloud will remain sovereign to the location as requested by the partners.

About ThinkOn Inc.

ThinkOn is an exclusive wholesale provider of cloud infrastructure and data management services with over 150 partners and over 1,100 end subscribers in the commercial and public sector. ThinkOn's cloud is engineered for high availability, reliability and scalability supported by simple and easy to understand suite of cloud services. Headquartered in Toronto, Canada, the company supports its channel across 20+ DCs in North America, Caribbean and now the UK to deliver un-paralleled data management and information asset protection solutions.
LOS ANGELES, April 15, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- Rexford Industrial Realty, Inc. (the "Company" or "Rexford Industrial") (NYSE: REXR), a real estate investment trust focused on creating value by investing in and operating industrial properties located in Southern California infill markets, today announced that the Company will release first quarter 2020 financial results after the market closes on Monday, May 4, 2020. A conference call will be held on Tuesday, May 5, 2020, at 1:00 p.m. Eastern Time to review the Company's first quarter results, discuss recent events and conduct a question-and-answer period.

Webcast:

The conference call will be available through visiting the Company's website at ir.rexfordindustrial.com . To listen to a live broadcast, go to the site at least 15 minutes prior to the scheduled start time in order to register, download and install any necessary audio software.

To Participate in the Telephone Conference Call:

Dial in at least 5 minutes prior to start time:

Domestic: 1-877-407-0789

International: 1-201-689-8562

Conference Call Playback:

Domestic: 1-844-512-2921

International: 1-412-317-6671

Pass code: 13702286

The playback can be accessed through June 5, 2020

About Rexford Industrial

Rexford Industrial, a real estate investment trust focused on creating value by investing in and operating industrial properties throughout Southern California infill markets, owns 224 properties with approximately 27.5 million rentable square feet and manages an additional 20 properties with approximately 1.0 million rentable square feet.

For additional information, visit www.rexfordindustrial.com.

Contact:

Investor Relations:

Stephen Swett

424-256-2153 ext 401

[email protected]

SOURCE Rexford Industrial Realty, Inc.

Related Links

http://www.rexfordindustrial.com


Mumbai, April 15 : The Mumbai Police on Wednesday arrested a man from Navi Mumbai, Vinay Dube, for allegedly posting messages on social media which triggered a huge crowd of migrants in Bandra on Tuesday evening, officials said.

A self-styled activist for north-Indians in Mumbai, Dube was produced before a magistrate who remanded him in police custody till April 21, Deputy Commissioner of Police Abhishek Trimukhe said.

Besides, the police have registered two other offences against several other persons, for allegedly spreading fake messages that resulted in the massive jamming.

Dube was detained by Navi Mumbai Police early today, and after the preliminary questioning was handed over to Bandra Police which arrested him early today (Wednesday).

Among other things, he had demanded that the Maharashtra government should make transportation arrangements to ferry the stranded migrants to their native states and called for nationwide protests if the trains were not made operational till April 18.

The move came hours after Home Minister Anil Deshmukh assured stringent action against those spreading mischievous messages via social media.

It is suspected that Dube's posts may have prompted yesterday's impromptu crowd, which was controlled and dispersed after a mild caning by the police, that alarmed the state health authorities after 'social distancing' went for a toss.

A majority of those who joined the protests were from north Indian states and the issue sparked a political row in Maharashtra.

The Congress has also blamed the Indian Railways for creating confusion which led to yesterday's gathering of over 3,000 people flouting prohibitory orders clamped in view of the lockdown till May 3.

-- Except for the title, this story has not been edited by Prokerala team and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed
Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, April 15)  Those who would like to meet with President Rodrigo Duterte in Malacanang will have to take a rapid antibody test first as a safety precaution amid the COVID-19 pandemic, his spokesperson said Wednesday.

[Its] just at least ma-screen kahit papaano ang may audience sa President, Presidential Spokesperson Harry Roque told reporters.

[Translation: Its just to screen whoever seeks an audience with the President.]

However, Roque clarified that no one is allowed near Duterte, adding that a velvet cordon will separate him from his visitors.

Earlier, Foreign Affairs Secretary Teddy Boy Locsin shared that he took a rapid test and got a negative result when he went to Malacanang. He mentioned that it only took ten minutes to get his result.

Roque also addressed the possible inaccuracy of the rapid tests.

Ang ayaw ng DOH diyan yung 90 percent accuracy on false negative but if its positive, so most likely its positive, he said.

[Translation: What the Department of Health does not want about it is the 90 percent accuracy on false negative but if it's positive, so most likely it's positive.]

The Health Department has repeatedly maintained that antibody tests can show false negative results, which is why it is not recommended for mass or self-testing.

The polymerase chain reaction tests remain the gold standard for detecting the deadly novel coronavirus. The rapid tests can only check the bodys antibodies that fight the infection.

The President on Monday said he will order the purchase of rapid test kits despite the product lacking approval from the country's Food and Drug Administration.
International manufacturers are seeking component suppliers in Vietnam, considering Vietnam as an alternative market in the context of Covid-19 escalation.

Do Phuoc Tong, chair of Duy Khanh Engineering, said an European company contacted Duy Khanh and placed orders with the enterprise when its Chinese supplies were interrupted because of Covid-19.





The company wants 10 products of different kinds and Duy Khanh has sent sample products to the company for consideration.



Soi The Ky, a synthetic fiber producer, which has factories in HCM City and Tay Ninh, reported that the companys revenue in the first two months of the year increased by 15 percent compared with the same period last year, partially thanks to the increase in number of orders from the partners who could not receive supplies from China because of Covid-19.



Soi The Kys factories are running at full capacity. Nguyen Phuong Chi, strategic director of the company, said many more orders have come from the manufacturers in South Korea, Thailand, Japan, Taiwan and the US.



Meanwhile, foreign invested enterprises (FIEs) which are Soi The Kys partners, have increased orders.

International manufacturers are seeking component suppliers in Vietnam, considering Vietnam as an alternative market in the context of Covid-19 escalation.

Le Nguyen Duy Oanh, deputy director of the HCM City Supporting Industry Development Center, confirmed that because of the supply disruption from China, FIEs in Vietnam and manufacturers from other countries contacted the center and asked to help find suppliers.



At least five well known manufacturers, including two from Japan and South Korea which have production bases in China, and one from Germany, have asked for help. The enterprises specialize in manufacturing household use electronics and industrial machines. They need precision mechanical products and electronic components.



According to Oanh, the demand from the enterprises is high as they make products for export to many markets in the world. They provide opportunities to Vietnamese enterprises in supporting industries.



Analysts say that Covid-19 has made manufacturers realize that they should not continue to take risks by relying too much on supplies from China.



This will benefit Vietnamese suppliers, Chi commented.



However, the analysts warned that it will not be easy to grab the opportunity.



A representative of Duy Khanh Company admitted that the companys products have high quality, but are uncompetitive in price compared with Chinese products.



Meanwhile, Oanh said most Vietnams enterprises are small scale which have low capacity of organizing mass production, so the production cost is high. In many cases, they cannot supply products ordered by partners because of the lack of machines and technology, and low qualifications of workers.

Thanh Mai

Supporting industries leading automakers towards success Vietnam is striving to successfully build up its automobile industry.
Keen to pursue a career in film production, Emma enrolled in a Bachelor of Communication from Griffith University online, offered through Open Universities Australia (OUA).

Juggling work, family and study becamepart of Emmas daily mix, with tutors at Griffith

University available online to discuss the learning materials with her and OUAs Student

Advisors online to help her manage the administration side of her course.

The flexibility and support offered by OUA has underpinned the successful online study journeys of thousands of Australians, who choose from an extensive range of single subjects and degrees available from 18 of Australias leading universities.

The not-for-profit OUA helps students choose and enrol in the right option, be it 13-week single-subject study, a top-up subject for a degree already undertaken or qualifications to help pivot to a new career.
New Delhi, April 15 : A day after scores of migrants reached the Bandra railway station in search of trains to return to their native places, social activist Saket Gokhale came down heavily on ABP Mazha channel, asking it to issue an apology to the public for irresponsible broadcast.

In a notice sent to ABP News, Gokhale said, "The notice has been served for the proceedings under the News Broadcasting Standards Authority (NBSA) regulations as well as criminal action under the IPC for broadcasting fake news and inciting public disorder." Gokhale further said that the notice was issued to highlight the active role played by ABP Mazha in rumor mongering and instigating the gathering of over 300 people at the Bandra railway station on Tuesday.

The notice to the channel came a day after ABP Mazha ran a story on Tuesday morning after which social distancing went for a toss when scores of stranded, hungry and angry migrants from different parts of India thronged near the Bandra railway station demanding that they should be given transportation to return to their native places immediately.

The Mumbai Police, which attempted to cajole them from gathering there in such large numbers, resorted to a mild lathi charge when sections of the restive hordes threatened to go out of control.

The large crowd had gathered there following rumours of special trains being arranged to transport them to their homes in other states. The railways has clarified that no such moves were initiated.

In the notice, Gokhale said that "irresponsible and non-factual" news peddled by ABP Mazha contributed towards the gathering of a massive crowd in the middle of a pandemic induced lockdown.

"Your morning news report on Special Trains incited people to violate CrPC Section 144 orders and gather in one place during a pandemic," Gokhale said.

He further alleged that instead of being a responsible news outlet and issuing a clarification, the news channel further chose to polarise the incident, seize the opportunity, and peddle baseless conspiracy theories that would create more panic and uncertainty.

He said that the action of the news channel was a violation of the code of conduct and guidelines issued by the NBSA. He also said that the actions of ABP Mazha and ABP News on Tuesday in fuelling the incident came under criminal offences under Sections 117, 153 A, 188, 269, 270 and 505 (2) of the IPC and Section 3 of the Epidemic Diseases Act, 1857.

Gokhale demanded that ABP Mazha and ABP News should issue a "clarification" and an "apology" for their irresponsible broadcast on Tuesday, and an internal inquiry be ordered to ascertain the source of their false news and action be taken against those found responsible.

He also directed both the news channels to provide 30 minutes of free airtime staggered through a 24-hour period for broadcasting the details of the Maharashtra Chief Minister's Relief Fund and soliciting contributions from the public.

He asked the news channel to respond to the notice within seven days or else criminal, legal and regulatory proceeding will be taken.




The factional leader of the dreaded Boko Haram sect, Abubakar Shekau has put the blame for the current coronavirus pandemic at the feet of evil action by people.

He also said he and the members of his sect cant be infected by the virus.

Shekau, in the 01:08:25 audio message on Tuesday, said if the evil people dont repent, they will be destroyed.

The evil you do is what brought this, stop blaming anything, whatever this is, may God protect us.

We pray five times a day, we pray Jummua, we sleep with our families, we hug, we shake hands, we are fine, fine fine.

We have anti-virus while you are infected with the coronavirus, we have anti-coronavirus; it is the Allah we worship. We pray, we slash fornicators, we cut hands (meaning punishment for thieves).

In the times of infidels like Trump, Idris Derby with the goat eye, Buhari, Muhammad Issoufu, the dog of the hands of France. Children of pigs and monkeys. If you dont repent you will be finished.

Just look at it, they stopped you from Umrah and Hajj, even the fasting they are telling you that corona season needs a lot of drinking water.

We know that we stay at places where we wont get infected, (referring to Sambisa Forest), even though we dont get the right information about this, Shekau said.

He added: It is just a calamity befalling the people.

I want to enlighten the world, even though they are blocking our information, God still has ways of delivering it.

You only hear of Corona, but you are telling Muslims not to pray and you close mosques.

Abubakar Shekau, the factional leader of Boko Haram, spoke in a 01:08:25 audio where he blamed the current coronavirus #COVID19 pandemic across the world on the evil deeds of people.https://t.co/54vIti7iAI  HumAngle_ (@HumAngle_) April 15, 2020

The Boko Haram leader also attacked President Buhari over his nationwide broadcast to Nigerians on Monday.

He said: Buhari spoke yesterday. He told them because theres no Hajj, Papa Roma could only celebrate Easter with 10 people, therefore we have to stop our people from moving for their own good, adds, its evil to lock down people.

Meanwhile, Naija News recalls the United States government recently placed a $7m bounty on Shekau, promising the huge reward for anyone who has information that can lead to the arrest of the leader to the deadly terrorist sect.

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Latest News Sydney property prices might not drop yet, as planning problems persist NSW planning approvals have fallen off a cliff since October, showing that the supply crisis might yet continue

The key trends for property investment in 2022 analysed The key trends for property investment in 2022 analysed, with rentvesting and borderless investing likely to surge

A technology company has unrolled a specialised solution for brokers and lenders facing challenges as social distancing reduces the opportunities for face to face meetings and complicates the verification of identity of new clients.

InfoTrack has announced a COVID-19 Care Package designed to support mortgage brokers with gaining immediate access to a cloud-based, online verification of identity (VOI) service that securely and accurately replicates the verification process between you and your customer.

The package delivers peace of mind that you can meet requirements without stalling your customers financial needs, and without risking your or your customers health through eliminating the need to share copies of important identity documents via email, including passports and drivers licenses.

ARNECCs 20 March update to the VOI standards to cater for remote working during COVID-19, now enables lenders to use video technology as part of their VOI process as well.

What's included in the Care Package?

InfoTrack clients say their customers are time poor, even while working from home. Plus, given the current environment, customers cant readily get to a post office. Using WebVOI offers relief that the VOI process can be completed safely, quickly and efficiently, without needing to meet face to face.

The Care Package includes complimentary, unlimited usage of its remote online VOI solution, WebVOI, to conduct as many customer verifications as needed until 30 June 2020. This enables users to continue moving their consumer loans and refinancing transactions forward by undertaking customer verification requirements remotely and getting them done in minutes.

What is WebVOI?

WebVOI is an online VOI solution offering four layers of verification, including video verification that was originally built for lawyers and conveyancers.

With ARNECCs March 20 update taking social distancing into account, alternate identity verification methods are being sought out.

WebVOI complies with ARNECC's VOI recommendations and since mid-March, WebVOI has seen a spike in transactions by 43%, effectively helping industries to continue to stay healthy whilst adhering to social distancing guidelines and protecting clients from identity fraud.

How does WebVOI work?

Step 1: Start a verification of identity and invite your customer to participate online.

Step 2: Your customer securely shares their identity documents via WebVOI.

Step 3: WebVOI uses four layers of innovative technology to confirm your clients identity. Text is extracted from identity documents and is then checked against Australian Government records. Facial recognition checks are performed, and video verification allows you to confirm your client is who they say they are.

Step 4: A customer VOI report is provided back to you with a Pass or Fail.

How do I access WebVOI via the Care Package?

We understand business may be tough and we are all in this together. When business as usual seems challenging, InfoTrack aims to assist business continuity as much as possible. To access the Care Package, get started with InfoTrack today.
Joe Exotics chief nemesis, Carole Baskin, released a statement after Tiger King premiered, calling it salacious and sensational. The lengthy statement goes on to refute the series insinuation that she may have been involved in the death of her husband Don Lewis, who disappeared without a trace. (Her household only had a small meat grinder, she says, while the Netflix doc showed a photo of a much larger one that could have more credibly ground up Lewis.) Now 58, she continues to live with her third husband, Howard Baskin, at the Big Cat Rescue facility near Tampa, Fla., and advocates to stop breeding big cats and keeping them in captivity. The facility is currently closed due to coronavirus, but you can see the cats on Instagram.
Hamilton County Health Departments Becky Barnes updated Hamilton County on the latest COVID-19 numbers and how tornado relief efforts could have an effect on these statistics. There have been two more cases in Hamilton County, bringing the total number of cases to 109.

It is also with our deepest regret that that there was one additional death because of COVID-19, bring our total number of deaths to 12, said Ms. Barnes. This death was an adult over 40 with underlying conditions, and our deepest condolences go out to that family.

While Dr. Paul Hendricks, health officer, thanked volunteers and workers for their efforts to assist in recovery after the tornado, he implored them to also be wary of social distancing. He also asked anyone who may be sick or infected to stay away and abstain from volunteering.

While this is a very basic act of human love and compassion, its exactly what the COVID-19 virus will take advantage of, said Dr. Hendricks. If you are already sick with symptoms of COVID-19, do not participate in recovery efforts, please stay at home. Infecting other workers will take people out of the line of duty, and ultimately hurt recovery efforts.

Ms. Barnes did say that safety is a concern for volunteers and workers, and that they have sent face masks to other places in order to keep recovery efforts safe. She also said tetanus booster shots are available if workers need them.

Sarah Waldrup of the Mental Health Association of East Tennessee spoke about the importance of maintaining mental health. She said even though many are social distancing, they do not need to feel as if they are alone. Ms. Waldrup said anyone who would like to receive help can call their peer recovery center at 877-642-3866.

When you call, you will be connected to a certified peer counselor who will connect you to mental health resources based upon your individual needs, said Ms. Waldrup, who also stated these counselors would also advise a person on how get help for others as well.



Chris Smith, UTCs Director of the School of Nursing, also gave an update about what the university has been doing to assisting the health department. She said the college of health education professional studies and pre-med students have worked with Dr. Dawn Ford and trained in contact tracing activities and daily monitoring.

She said 61 students and staff have been trained enough to be eligible to volunteer if they are needed. Another student is working with an epidemiologist on COVID-19 data, and three MPH students working with Sarah Worthington on a social media campaign concerning social distancing and hand-washing.

She also said one engineering professor is working with a commission in order to develop the face shields that will be distributed to healthcare providers. Ms. Smith said this professor is working from home, and other students are working to design respirators and ventilators from off-the-shelf products.

We are very proud at UTC to be able to partner with the Health Department and the community as we work to keep Chattanooga safe and healthy, said Ms. Smith.
Source: Xinhua| 2020-04-15 14:06:41|Editor: huaxia

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KATHMANDU, April 15 (Xinhua)-- Nepal and China on Tuesday agreed to ensure cross border movement of goods through the Tatopani-Zhangmu border point without human-to-human contacts amid the COVID-19 threat, a Nepali customs official said.

On March 25, the Nepali government had decided to reopen the international border points with China for supply of essential goods including medical and medicinal equipment from China. Earlier, the two Nepal China border points -- Tatopani-Zhangmu and Rasuwgadhi-Kerung (Geelong) had remained closed since late January.

Nepali officials said as Nepal has been enforcing lockdown until April 27, there will be the opening of only Tatopani-Zhangmu border point for a one-way movement of goods from China to Nepal for the time being.

"During the border security meeting held between two sides at the Nepal-China Friendship Bridge on Tuesday, two sides agreed on a mechanism that will ensure no human-to-human contacts between the two sides," Lal Bahadur Khatri, chief customs officer at Tatopani told Xinhua on Tuesday evening.

Khatri was one of the participants during the meeting led by chief district officers at Sindhupalchowk district from Nepal and their counterparts from the Chinese side.

As per the agreed mechanism, Chinese cargo companies will deliver the Nepal-bound goods to the area close to the border point by taking necessary clearance from Chinese authorities at the bordering areas.

"Once the Chinese drivers and loaders return back by leaving the goods in the bordering area, concerned Nepali traders will send its drivers and loaders across the border to take those goods," said Khatri.

According to him, there will not be more than 20 Nepali container drivers to go to the Chinese side to take the goods. "Nepali side will prepare a roster of maximum 20 drivers. The limited number of drivers will help to track and trace them if anyone is infected with the coronavirus," said Khatri.

He said there was no fixed number regarding the loaders and their numbers will be determined based on requirements. Before sending the drivers and loaders, the health desk set up by the Nepali government will conduct a health examination of them and issue health cards.

Last week, Nepal received medical goods from China in the first delivery through the reopened Tatopani-Zhangmu border point. BM Trading, a Nepali private company, had imported 7,500 pieces of N95 masks and around 300 liters of sanitizers from China.

"After the latest agreement on Tuesday, frequency goods movement through this border point will increase," said Khatri.

The deadly earthquake in 2015 badly damaged the physical infrastructure on both sides of the borders, and four years later, the Tatopani-Zhangmu border point was reopened in May 2019 but was closed again late January due to COVID-19 fears.

After reopening of the border point last year, the bilateral trade had slowly started to pick up pace through this point. During the first eight months of the current fiscal year that began in mid-July, bilateral trade through the Tatopani border stood at 5 billion Nepali Rupees (40 million U.S. dollars), according to Nepal's Department of Customs.
Bui Thi Hong Ngoc takes a fairytale trip in search of the Aurora in Teriberka, a town poised on the shores of the Barents Sea in the Arctic, which is literally on the edge of the mainland from where it's only water all the way to the North Pole.

This Tet (Lunar New Year) holiday, I took a vacation to visit Russia again. If you read an article of mine two years ago, "Adventure to the Coldest Inhabited Place on Earth", then you might remember me.

Bui Hong Ngoc (right) spends the night observing the Aurora phenomenon with one of her Russian friends. VNS Photo Alex Okylovskyi

Ever since I was a kid, the Northern Lights have been an unknown to me, only existing in movies and my imagination. Travelling to the Arctic Circle gave me the opportunity to make my dream of seeing the Northern Lights come true. However, visiting the Arctic presents an extreme set of challenges, especially to a person from a tropical country.

COLD TREK: It takes 31 hours to get to Teriberka from Saint Petersburg by car and train. VNS Photo Alex Okylovskyi

I took a train and car to get to Teriberka from Saint Petersburg. The total journey took 31 hours. Teriberka, which is in Murmansk Oblast, is a town poised on the shores of the Barents Sea, which is part of the Arctic Ocean, and is literally on the edge of the mainland from where it's only water all the way to the North Pole.

The town appeared behind two mountain ranges. The sun was shining upon an infinity snowy steppe, where I ended up in a small hostel named "At The Edge Of The Earth".

Garages filled with snowmobiles lined the roads, but the heavy snow had blocked them in. The vehicles are not only the villagers' main means of transportation, instead of deer or sled dogs, but also their main income source because they're used to transport tourists between sites.

That night I had to walk to the meeting point alone which was an hour from my hostel. Being used to lights and noise of the city, I felt nervous by the total darkness that was surrounding me at that moment. I didnt meet any villagers or tourists along the way. All I could hear was howling and barking somewhere in the distance as strong winds from the Arctic Ocean whipped in.

Snow drifts were everywhere and more than a metre deep, which made every step heavier. Surrounding me was total darkness. On one side of the road were old abandoned buildings already half sinking into the snow, while the other side appeared to be an infinite snowfield.

There was only moonlight illuminating the path ahead, and at that moment I felt like I was stepping into Terra Nullius, or No-Mans Land.

Not knowing how much time had passed, I kept walking in the freezing weather until I saw two small figures in the distance waving at me. There were my friends Andrej Nauman and Kristina Poroshina. I was so happy to see them.

In accordance with Russian tradition, despite being in the middle of nowhere, they pulled out a big flask of tea and cookies from their backpacks to show their hospitality. We chilled in an open snow field, talking about the magic we were hoping to see.

The Aurora, or Northern Lights, is the result of disturbances in the magnetosphere caused by solar winds, but as Kostya said "you only see it if you deserve to because it depends on luck. If the sky is cloudy, there's not much of a chance.

Suddenly, a small part of the sky turned green not so clearly, I was still not sure what it was. Then, minute by minute, it was glowing brighter, becoming bigger and appearing longer with its moving trail winding like a magical green river. This green river was actually moving further to the North. We literally started to chase it and we even climbed the mountain to have better a better view before the Aurora disappeared about an hour after casting its magic upon Earth.

MAGICAL: The Aurora appears in the skies above the Arctic. VNS Photo Alex Okylovskyi

If you make a wish when you reach the North to see the Aurora, your wish will come true, some of the old folks told me. But at that moment, when the lights of that green spiritual river were cast upon me, it purified my heart and soul and filled me with a feeling of peace and fulfilment. After 25 years on this planet, I believed magic truly does exist, and as Kostya said, for those who deserve it through their belief and pursuit of their dreams.

In the following nights I encountered Gala or Circular Halo  two big circles of light around the bright moon which are an optical phenomenon produced by light (typically from the Sun or Moon) interacting with ice crystals suspended in the atmosphere.

Another phenomenon I should mention due to its danger are the blizzards we encountered. Within two minutes, we could only see two to five metres in front of us due to mist and heavy snow.

The most important thing was to locate north and south. What direction was the village in? Phone signals or Google map were definitely unavailable while my phone battery drained in this bone-chilling cold, with stars and mountains all swallowed by the snowstorm.

I was lucky enough to have a paper map and was instructed how to use a compass by Alex Okyloveskyi  my boyfriend. This knowledge was crucial to getting out alive instead of drowning in the might of nature. Once you fall or faint, the snow will quickly cover you and people will not be able to hear or find you. You would be gone without a trace and your corpse would only be found in the summer when the snow melts.

However, Andrej taught me how to locate the North star. I appreciated it so much and was happy to learn so many basic but new skills. It felt like I was being taught ancient knowledge passed down from ancestors who also looked up at the same Teriberka sky, telling stories from thousands of years ago. Their spirit joined the Aurora river and gave us hope, purifying our souls and making our hearts rest at peace.

Barents Sea of the Arctic Ocean. VNS Photo Alex Okylovskyi

The journey ended in tears when Andrej and Kristina took me to the train station where we had to part. Our communication was simple but it was sincere from heart to heart. There was a good feeling rekindled in my soul again. Tears fell because it was time to say goodbye but I felt happy at the same time to bring all the beautiful seeds rekindled from this land from the sincere Russian people I met back to my real world.

When you first encounter a Russian on the street anywhere on the planet, none of them will smile at you. They hide behind an armour of suspicion and lack of trust. But when you make friends with them you can see how sentimental, loyal and open they are. They seem to be saving their feelings for the people they truly care for, and yes, I'm lucky to count them as true friends. I will remember and appreciate all these moments and the relationships with my Russian friends for all my life. VNS

Bui Thi Hong Ngoc

Greenland and Antarctica ice loss accelerating The Earth's great ice sheets are losing mass six times faster today than they were in the 1990s.
(Article updated on 16 April 2020 to include MAS link.)

Malaysia Airlines (MAS) has agreed to resume flight services between Kuala Lumpur and Kuching, Miri, and Kota Kinabalu starting this week, as announced by Transport Minister Datuk Seri Dr Wee Ka Siong. Each route will be offered once a week, although MAS may increase the frequency depending on demand.

Additionally, the national carriers subsidiary, MASwings Sdn Bhd, will also be back in service to provide connecting flights between Miri and Bintulu, Kuching and Sibu, and Sibu and Bintulu.

This comes after the Minister of Sarawak State Tourism, Arts, and Culture, Datuk Abdul Karim Rahman Hamzah commented that the Sarawak state government had urged for flights to be resumed between East and West Malaysia during the movement control order (MCO) period. The countrys three airlines  MAS, AirAsia, and Malindo Air  had grounded most of their fleets and temporarily suspended flights since last month. They had also decided to cancel all flights to Sarawak until 30 April 2020.

In reply, Wee clarified that the Transport Ministry had not instructed any of the airlines to halt their operations to Sabah and Sarawak. Instead, the decision was made independently by the airline companies to cope with the drop in travel demand due to the Covid-19 pandemic and cross-border travel restrictions.

The ministry, however, has requested that MAS and AirAsia reconsider their decisions and to ensure flights to Sabah and Sarawak remain in operation, said Wee.

In the same statement, Wee also emphasised that MAS cargo services, especially those carrying essential needs such as food and medical needs to Sarawak, have not been suspended during the MCO period.

Cargo flight services will continue to operate for the Kuala Lumpur-Kuching-Kuala Lumpur; Kuala Lumpur-Kota Kinabalu-Kuala Lumpur; and Kuala Lumpur-Labuan-Kuala Lumpur routes three times a week, said Wee.

You can head on over to MAS website to check out the availability and schedule of the weekly flights.

(Sources: Malay Mail, New Straits Times)

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H ealth Secretary Matt Hancock has announced new procedures so that wherever possible people will be given the chance to say goodbye to loved ones dying with coronavirus.

The Health Secretary told a press conference at Downing Street that wanting to be with someone you love at the end of their life is one of the deepest human instincts.

He revealed that he wept at reports of Ismail Mohamed Abdulwahab, a 13-year-old who died from coronavirus, dying without a parent at his bedside.

Im pleased to say that working with Public Health England, the care sector and many others, we are introducing new procedures so we can limit the risk of infection while wherever possible giving peoples closest loved ones the chance to say goodbye", he said.

Europe takes it's first steps out of Coronavirus lockdown 1 /25 Europe takes it's first steps out of Coronavirus lockdown People queue at a hardware store during a partial reopening after the Austrian government eased lockdown restrictions Reuters A worker checks the temperature of a customer at the entrance of a supermarket in Itay Reuters Customers hold flowers in front of a DIY store in Graz, Austria, after it re-opened on April 14, 2020, following a "shutdown" in a measure to limit the spread of the new coronavirus APA/AFP via Getty Images People wearing protective face masks and gloves walk in the streets as the Italian government allows the reopening of some shops while a nationwide lockdown continues following the outbreak of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19), in Venice, Italy, Reuters People queue to enter a hardware store during a partial reopening after the Austrian government eased restrictions following the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) outbreak in Eisenstadt, Austria Reuters Camilla Cocchi wears a face mask and gloves as she sorts out clothing in her children's clothes shop after it was allowed to reopen following lockdown measures to contain the spread of Covid-19, in Rome AP A man wearing a face mask shops in a hardware store during a partial reopening after the Austrian government eased restrictions following the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) outbreak in Eisenstadt, Austria Reuters "Respect the 2 meters distance" banner is seen at a fish stand as the Italian government allows the reopening of some shops while a nationwide lockdown continues following the outbreak of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) in Venice, Italy, Reuters Customers wearing face masks push shopping carts in front of a DIY store in Vienna, Austria, after it re-opened on April 14, 2020, following a "shutdown" in a measure to limit the spread of the new coronavirus APA/AFP via Getty Images A worker checks the temperature of a customer at the entrance of a supermarket, as the spread of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) continues, in Turin, Italy Reuters Customers line up in front of a DIY store in Graz, Austria APA/AFP via Getty Images Gianfranco Mandas wears a face mask as he sorts out clothing in his children's clothes shop after it was allowed to opens following restriction measures to contain the spread of Covid-19, in Rome AP Customers wearing face masks push shopping carts in front of a DIY store in Vienna, Austria, after it re-opened on April 14, 2020, following a "shutdown" in a measure to limit the spread of the new coronavirus APA/AFP via Getty Images Customers queue at the Trastevere market, as new restrictions for open-air markets are implemented to prevent the spread of coronavirus disease (COVID-19) in Rome, Italy, Reuters Customers wearing face masks push shopping carts in front of a DIY store in Vienna, Austria, after it re-opened on April 14, 2020, following a "shutdown" in a measure to limit the spread of the new coronavirus APA/AFP via Getty Images A man wears a protective face mask and gloves at the newsstand as the Italian government allows the reopening of some shops while a nationwide lockdown continues following the outbreak of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19), in Venice, Italy Reuters People wearing face masks work in a hardware store during a partial reopening after the Austrian government eased restrictions following the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) outbreak in Eisenstadt, Austria Reuters Customers queue at the Trastevere market, as new restrictions for open-air markets are implemented to prevent the spread of coronavirus disease (COVID-19) in Rome, Italy Reuters A general view of the parking area of a hardware store during the partial reopening of shops after the Austrian government loosens its lockdown restrictions during the global coronavirus disease (COVID-19) outbreak in Vienna Reuters

Mr Hancock also set out a package of measures aimed at combating the spread of coronavirus in care homes.

The plans included increased testing and improved access to protective equipment as well as measures designed to help social care workers enjoy similar benefits to NHS staff.

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He also gave a further hint that lockdown measures would be extended tomorrow, saying: We cannot let up in our efforts, we cannot let go of the hard work thats been done so far.

This shared sacrifice  and I know its a sacrifice  is starting to work but we will not lift these measures until it is safe to do so.

The Health Secretary denied suggestions that the lives of younger people had been prioritised at the expense of those in care homes and that people had died unnecessarily.

No, neither of those things is the case', he said.

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He said one of the first things discovered about Covid-19 was that the elderly were badly affected by the disease.

Therefore it was clear that, especially for care settings supporting older people  and its also true for care settings that support people of working age  we were going to have to have a particular focus, he said.

Deputy chief scientific adviser Dame Angela McLean said there was a huge question about how to protect care homes which do not yet have cases.

Mr Hancock also addressed concerns that victims of domestic abuse could be unable to escape their abusers during the lockdown.
By Pavel Polityuk and Sergei Karazy

KIEV (Reuters) - Ukraine, one of world's top grain exporters, is ready to ban wheat exports if sales exceed limits agreed with traders, the deputy economy minister in charge of agriculture told Reuters on Wednesday.

Any further restrictions of Ukraine's grain exports could speed up trade from Black Sea producers Russia and Kazakhstan, depleting their grain export quotas earlier than anticipated.

Ukraine has exported 18 million tonnes of wheat so far in 2019/20, leaving an additional 2 million tonnes available for export over the rest of this season that runs until June 30, in line with a memorandum signed with traders.

"If the pace of exports becomes such that we are exporting 2 million tonnes in April, so, as we agreed (with traders) and warned - we will have to implement the paragraph of the memorandum to stop exports," Taras Vysotskiy told Reuters.

"So far, the pace that we are tracking looks like we are not going to exceed these 2 million tonnes," he said in a video interview.

Ukraine's wheat harvest largely exceeds domestic consumption, but last month Ukrainian bakers and millers asked the government to limit grain exports to maintain bread prices.

The government said it would curb the export of some food products but so far has only halted foreign sales of the popular staple buckwheat. It has also asked parliament to approve lifting import duties on some cereals.

Disruptions to the supply chain caused by the coronavirus prompted neighbouring Romania to ban cereal exports to non-European Union destinations.

Last week Russia agreed to limit grain exports to 7 million tonnes from April to June to conserve supplies for the domestic market during the coronavirus outbreak.

Although the amount is roughly in line with what the country was expected to ship anyway in the period, Russia's online calculator http://mcx.ru/ministry/departments/departament-ekonomiki-investitsiy-i-regulirovaniya-rynkov/industry-information/info-netarifnaya-kvota-na-zernovye-kultury shows that, as of Wednesday, only 4.8 million tonnes of grain remains available for export from the quota until June 30 and 2.2 million tonnes are already declared for export.

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Kazakhstan opted to limit exports to 200,000 tonnes of wheat and 70,000 tonnes of flour in April, although it has said it could increase the quotas in the coming months.

Looking ahead, Vysotskiy said Ukraine's 2020/21 wheat exports could fall sharply to 12-15 million tonnes from around 20 million in 2019/20 following a reduction in the sowing area caused by poor weather.

DRY WEATHER AND FROST

Ukraine has imposed strict lockdown measures to fight the spread of the coronavirus pandemic, but Vysotskiy said the restrictions had not affected the spring sowing, which had taken place at an even faster pace than a year ago.

Ukraine harvested a record 75.1 million tonnes of grain in 2019 and exports could reach an all-time high of 52-55 million tonnes in the 2019/20 season which runs from July to June, Vysotskiy said.

However, after a record harvest last year, the minister said a lack of rain during sowing late last year and unfavourable weather conditions this spring would lead to a smaller wheat harvest and lower exports.

"We had three very dry months and high temperatures and frosts. It rained across all Ukraine, which improved the situation a bit, but of course we will not match the record harvest this year," Vysotskiy said.

Ukraine had sowed 2.7 million hectares of spring crops as of April 10, or 18% of the expected sowing area of 15.3 million hectares.

Vysotskiy said the forecast for the grain harvest for 2020 has repeatedly changed depending on the weather. It is now at 65-67 million tonnes but may drop to 60 million tonnes if the weather deteriorates.

(Additional reporting by Polina Devitt; editing by Barbara Lewis and David Evans)
Medical workers were applauded after landing in Phuket, Thailand, to help treat coronavirus patients. The popular holiday island has been one of the worst hit provinces with 191 people testing positive for COVID-19. A chartered plane with to help battle with the coronavirus. Footage shows nurses from the Prince of Songkla University Hospital in neighbouring Hat Yai province arriving at the airport today (April 15) and stepped off the ATR 72-600 twin engine turboprop jet with flowers. Since recording began, Thailand has declared 2,643 COVID-19 coronavirus cases and 43 deaths. The country has enforced strict measures to combat the pandemic including closing zoos and other businesses, banning passenger flights, imposing curfews, sweeping travel ban and alcohol prohibition.
Making a Murderer cracked open the door to a world-wide interest in wrongfully convicted criminal cases. Now, Netflix is continuing to educate people on those wrongfully convicted individuals with another docuseries, The Innocence Files.

Peter Neufeld and Barry Scheck | Photo by Barbara Alper/Getty Images

The Innocence Project

Founded in 1992 by Peter Neufeld and Barry Scheck, The Innocence Project seeks to exonerate wrongly convicted individuals. Through revolutionary advancements in DNA testing and criminal justice reform, those who work for The Innocence Project seek to prevent future injustice. According to their website, The Innocence Project has exonerated 367 people by DNA testing, including 21 who served time on death row.

The Innocence Project has a network of people across the United States working to exonerate the wrongfully convicted and support them as they re-enter their lives. Each chapter also works to improve case law legislation, push for new laws in their state that prevent wrongful conviction, and educate legal professionals on how they can avoid similar mistakes in the future.

What is The Innocence Files about?

Directors and executive producers Alex Gibney, Liz Garbus, and Roger Ross Williams created The Innocence Files, a docuseries that follows the work of The Innocence Project. We get flooded with letters from all over the country. Theyre human beings who are claiming to be wrongly convicted, Neufeld says in the trailer. Scheck adds: We realized that there were so many things wrong with this system, so we started The Innocence Project.

The Innocence Files will recount eight stories of wrongfully convicted cases that Neufeld and Scheck worked on. The series will contain nine episodes that are grouped into three categories: The Evidence, The Witness, and The Prosecution. Netflixs latest docuseries will look at those components of the justice system and entice viewers to consider the potential for flaws in a court of law that result in an unjust guilty verdict.

In The Evidence, bite-mark science is criticized and deemed unreliable for conviction after being proven wrong in different cases. The Witness chapters examine eyewitness testimonies to demonstrate how stories can change under moments of intense stress or duress. Finally, in the concluding chapters that look at The Prosecution, witness intimidation, coercion, and the suppression of evidence are discussed.

Famous wrongful convictions featured in The Innocence Files

Kennedy Brewer is one of the famous wrongful conviction cases The Innocence Files highlights. Brewer was convicted for capital murder of a 3-year-old and sentenced to death row. His case is featured in The Evidence portion of the docuseries, as DNA testing proved he didnt commit the crime in 2001. Brewer famously became known as The Innocence Projects first exoneration through post-conviction DNA testing in Mississippi.

Thomas Haynesworth is another wrongfully convicted case covered in the docuseries. Haynesworth was convicted on multiple counts of rape in 1984 and exonerated in 2011 with a Writ of Actual Innocence Based on Non-Biological Evidence.

The Innocence Files will also examine the cases of Chester Hollman III, Kenneth Wyniemko, Alfred Dewayne Brown, Franky Carrillo, Levon Brooks, and Keith Harward.

The Innocence Files debuts on Netflix April 15, but Scheck is already hopeful for a second season. He told New York Daily News, There are plenty of other issues. And, of course, race remains the most intractable and important problem in almost all of them.
At this time of national emergency, we need a functioning Parliament to hold ministers to account on their response to the coronavirus, said Keir Starmer, leader of the opposition Labour Party. There are too many questions that have gone unanswered.

Caroline Lucas, a lawmaker for the Green Party, argued that, given available technology, the only thing missing was political will. And Alastair Campbell, once a close aide to the former Prime Minister Tony Blair, posted an exhortation on Twitter to bring back Parliament, using a mild expletive to underline his impatience.

The lack of a visible parliamentary presence is all the more jarring after a period when British lawmakers grabbed global attention as they feuded over how to leave the European Union.

Parliament was such a focal point of opposition that Mr. Johnson tried to suspend sittings for five weeks during the Brexit crisis, only to be rebuked by the Supreme Court. The impasse over Britains withdrawal from the European Union was finally broken when Mr. Johnson won a big majority in Decembers general election.

But going online is not easy for an institution so steeped in tradition that casting a vote requires lawmakers to pass through a narrow lobby where their names are recorded by officials in formal dress.

Paradoxically, the job of facilitating one of the biggest revolutions in the workings of Parliament falls largely to the leader of the House of Commons, Jacob Rees-Mogg, a man whose mannerisms are so self-consciously old-fashioned that he has been nicknamed the honorable member for the 18th century.
[April 15, 2020] Arizona's Bioscience Sector Sees Record-High Venture Capital and Research Funding; Strong Gains in Jobs, Wages

Arizona's bioscience sector is performing at its highest level since data tracking began nearly two decades ago, helping to position universities, research institutes, companies, and clinicians to play an instrumental role in Arizona's response to the new coronavirus. Bioscience firms received nearly $200 million in venture-capital funding, and National Institutes of Health grants to universities, research institutes, and firms totaled $263 million in 2019. Meanwhile, university research and development increased 25% between 2016 and 2018 to exceed $600 million. All these figures are record highs for Arizona since data collection began nearly 20 years ago at the start of Arizona's Bioscience Roadmap, the state's long-term strategy to guide the biosciences through 2025. The April 15 report, the latest performance analysis commissioned by the Phoenix-based Flinn Foundation, also showed nearly 10,000 new bioscience jobs were created over a two-year span and wages increased nearly 9%, far exceeding the state's average private-sector wage. "As we all adjust to these unprecedented times and unknown future, we can take comfort in knowing Arizona's past policy decisions have had such positive outcomes," Flinn Foundation President and CEO Tammy McLeod said. "The state's sustained dedication to the goals and strategies of the Bioscience Roadmap has created a bioscience community prepared to play an instrumental role in the tracking and treatment of COVID-19 and assist in the state's economic recovery." The data suggests recent renewals by the Arizona Legislature of the Technology and Research Initiative Fund-which has funded state-university bioscience research since 2001-and the angel investment tax credit, are paying off, said Mitch Horowitz, principal and managing director of TEConomy Partners, a global leader in research, analysis and strategy for innovation-based economic development that provided the data performance analysis. "Arizona has earned an outstanding report card with robust growth outpacing the nation across nearly all bioscience performance metrics," Horowitz said. "We are seeing record-high dollars in venture capital, university research and development, and NIH grants, plus sustained increases in bioscience jobs and wages with growth rates outperforming the national average and state's private sector." The most recent data how:



Arizona added 9,696 bioscience industry jobs between 2016 and 2018, an 8.3% growth rate, which outpaces the state's overall job growth rate of 6.2% and the national bioscience job growth rate of 3.6%. There were 126,139 bioscience jobs in Arizona as of 2018, including 29,569 non-hospital bioscience jobs. The non-hospital bioscience job growth rate was 15% between 2016 and 2018 in Arizona, compared to 7.2% nationally. Job growth was seen in all industry subsectors with especially strong gains in drugs and pharmaceuticals and medical devices and equipment.

Wages increased 8.8% for bioscience workers in Arizona between 2016 and 2018. The $69,412 annual salary average is 35% higher than the average private sector job in the state. For non-hospital bio workers, a 10% wage increase pushed their average annual salary to $85,518.

Venture-capital funding for bioscience firms in 2019 reached a state record high of $198 million. The yearly average over the previous four years was $66.5 million. The 2019 figure represents 0.63% of bio venture capital in the United States-the highest percentage since 2014. Bioscience IT and medical devices each received 32% of venture-capital investments.

Arizona is at its highest level of NIH funding as a share of the U.S. total since Roadmap tracking began in 2002. The $263 million in research funding in 2019 also set a record high for the state for the second year in a row. The public universities received $214 million, with hospitals and research institutes at $32 million and bioscience companies at $17 million.

University bioscience research and development grew to $628 million at Arizona's three public universities in 2018, a 25% increase between 2016 and 2018 and the highest in the state's history. That is double the U.S. growth rate of 12% for the same time period and double Arizona's growth rate from 2014-16.

Technology transfer saw a 51% growth in the number of U.S. patents issued. Of the 180 issued patents in 2018-19, nearly half were in bioscience. There were small declines in the number of bioscience startups from university technology (32), invention disclosures (531), and licenses (129). One major reason for the bioscience sector's success today is the Technology and Research Initiative Fund, or TRIF, according to an April 15 report commissioned by the Flinn Foundation. The Milken Institute, a nonprofit, nonpartisan think tank, analyzed the impact of TRIF since it was approved by Arizona voters in 2000 as part of Proposition 301. Arizona State University, Northern Arizona University, and the University of Arizona have received 12% of the sales tax collections, $1.12 billion to date, for scientific research.

Milken concluded that TRIF "laid the groundwork for developing a strong technology transfer and innovation infrastructure within Arizona" and that its existence today "is an essential component of Arizona's innovation economy." Arizona's high-tech and life science GDP grew by 27.16% in the five years ending in 2018, and by 6.83% in 2018 alone, the report states. The growth of startups, patents, and license income, the creation of new bioscience institutes, the retention and recruitment of faculty, as well as the growing return on investment, can also be attributed to TRIF, the report states. In 2019, an $83.6 million TRIF expenditure led to $433.6 million in additional investment. Proposition 301, including TRIF, was renewed by the Arizona Legislature through 2041, but no longer has voter-approved protections. The Roadmap's vision is for Arizona to become globally competitive and a national leader in the biosciences in such fields as precision medicine, cancer, neurosciences, and bioengineering. The Roadmap is guided by Arizona's Bioscience Roadmap Steering Committee, comprised of more than 100 leaders in science, health care, business, academia, and policy. The next data report is scheduled to be released in 2022. The Flinn Foundation was established in 1965 by Dr. Robert S. and Irene P. Flinn to improve the quality of life in Arizona to benefit future generations. In addition to advancing the biosciences, the foundation supports the Flinn Scholarship, a merit-based college scholarship program, arts and culture, and the Flinn-Brown Fellowship civic leadership program. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20200415005628/en/

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The Indian government is facilitating the repatriation of 180 Pakistani citizens stranded in the country because of the Covid-19 lockdown, with 41 of them set to return via the Wagah-Attari border crossing on Thursday.

People familiar with developments, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the Pakistan high commission in New Delhi had informed Indian authorities that 180 Pakistani nationals wanted to go back home.

We are coordinating with the concerned authorities to facilitate their departure, one of the people cited above said.

The external affairs ministry is facilitating the return of foreign nationals presently in India to their countries. This include the nationals of Pakistan, the person added.

Additional secretary Dammu Ravi, the external affairs ministrys point person for all Covid-19-related matters, issued a letter to authorities in several states on Tuesday to facilitate the return of 41 Pakistani nationals who are currently in different parts of Delhi, Haryana, Punjab and Uttar Pradesh.

These 41 Pakistani nationals are set to return to their country via the Wagah-Attari border crossing at 10 am on April 16, the letter stated. The letter also directed the authorities of the concerned states to facilitate the movement of the vehicles that will take the Pakistani nationals to the land border.

It is requested that all returning Pakistani nationals may be screened as per the international norms and existing provisions of the Government of India and only asymptomatic individuals be allowed to return, the letter stated.

Like other all crossing points along Indias land borders, the Wagah-Attari crossing was closed as part of the nationwide lockdown.

There are currently some 200 Indian citizens stranded in Pakistan, including many students, and they have been asked to stay put in line with the governments policy till the end of the nationwide lockdown, the people cited above said.
"Mega Machines: Sea Giants" is a Science Channel series about cutting-edge ocean technology. The latest episode, called "U.S. Navy Mega Hospital," features the USNS Comfort (T-AH-20) and is set to air Wednesday, April 15, at 10 p.m. ET/PT.

The Comfort is one of the world's biggest Navy hospital ships, and it's currently on the front lines of the COVID-19 epidemic, providing support to the medical community in New York City.

We've got a first-look clip from the series below.

Novel coronavirus patients are being treated aboard the 1,000-bed ship, providing support for a strained medical system, alongside the city's Javits Convention Center, which can house up to 2,500 patients.

Related: Trump OKs Request to Put Coronavirus Patients Aboard Navy Hospital Ship

As with all things related to the pandemic, this is a fast-moving story. According to the New York Post, the ship is currently home to 69 COVID-19 patients. The ship had to cut its potential capacity in half after a crew member tested positive for the disease.

Launched in 1976 as an oil tanker, the ship became a Navy hospital ship in 1987 and has since notably been deployed for both Iraq wars and for the response to Hurricanes Katrina and Maria.

Science Channel is owned by Discovery and is available on most cable systems, DISH Network, DirecTV and streaming services like Philo, Sling, Fubo, Hulu with Live TV and AT&T TV. It also has an on-demand app called SCI GO for streaming, if your TV provider supports a login.

Keep Up With the Best in Military Entertainment

Whether you're looking for news and entertainment, thinking of joining the military or keeping up with military life and benefits, Military.com has you covered. Subscribe to the Military.com newsletter to have military news, updates and resources delivered straight to your inbox.
The vast majority of online publishers in the U.S. say they've had advertisers cancel or pause ad campaigns with them as the coronavirus pandemic and lockdown hurts advertisers, according to results of a new Internet Advertising Bureau survey. The advertising cutback is resulting in widespread layoffs and cost cuts even as media consumption is skyrocketing.

The effects are being felt across ad-supported websites, as well as companies that provide technical infrastructure to support selling ads.

The IAB said it surveyed more than 200 U.S. ad-supported publishers, programmatic providers and media platforms who are both members and nonmembers of the organization. The survey examined both publishers covering hard news as well as other ad-supported media, like cooking or financial advice sites.

Of those, 98% of respondents said they're expecting a decrease in revenue in 2020.

Among news publishers specifically, 88% of the survey respondents said they'd had ad buyers ask to cancel campaigns, while 86% said advertisers had asked to pause ads.

Meanwhile, 70% of nonnews publishers said they'd had ad buyers ask to cancel campaigns and that 79% had been asked by ad buyers to pause advertising.

Advertisers have pulled back significantly because of budget uncertainty in the months ahead, and because some, like companies in the travel space, have little reason to do sales-driven campaigns when much of the globe is under stay-at-home orders.

The reaction by news publishers has been swift. Last month, Buzzfeed announced pay cuts for the majority of staff. On Tuesday, the LA Times told staffers it had lost a third of its ad revenue and expected to lose more than half its ad revenue in the months ahead, and is furloughing employees and cutting the pay of senior managers. CNBC reported earlier this week that Vox is planning to furlough about 100 employees as it anticipates ad revenue to decline significantly.

The pullback has not only affected news publishers. IAC said in a letter to shareholders earlier this month it was seeing advertisers pull back spend at Dotdash, which operates verticals like financial content site Investopedia and health and wellness information site Verywell. The company said traffic was up "driven by both consumer need for the content and the reality of increased usage as people stay home and spend more time on devices, though not enough to offset declining ad rates."

Overall, respondents to the survey -- including publishers and ad-tech companies -- predict their digital ad revenues will be down an average of 19% to 25% in the March through June time frame.

Blacklisting of terms was also a factor for news publishers. Many advertisers work with ad-tech companies that have prevented promotions from running alongside coronavirus-related content. The IAB survey found that 17% of news publishers said they were being adversely affected by blacklists, but pointed out that figure might be low because some publishers might just be not getting the business and not be sure why.

In an earlier survey, the IAB surveyed nearly 400 media planners, buyers and brands responsible for U.S. ad spend, and found that 74% believe the coronavirus will have a greater impact on ad spend in the country than the 2008-09 financial crisis. They also said nearly a quarter have paused all ad spend for the rest of the first and second financial quarters.
DENVER, April 15, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- According to a new survey by ROI Rocket, a leading provider of market research-based consulting services, about 72% of Americans believe the Chinese government is just as much to blame for the acuteness of the pandemic in America as the U.S. government, or alternately, bears an even larger responsibility. More than one in four Americans (29%) go so far as to say the pandemic's severity in the U.S. is 'completely China's fault.'

Republicans are more likely than Democrats or Independents to allocate the lion's share of the blame to China. Nearly three in five Republicans (56%) believe the intensity of the outbreak in the U.S. is 'completely China's fault' compared to only 14% of Democrats and 26% of independents.

Regardless of party affiliation, most Americans (53%) strongly agree that the Chinese government's early unwillingness to share everything it knew about COVID-19, including how the disease is transmitted, prevented a prompt and appropriate U.S. response. They also strongly agree that the Chinese government has severely underreported the number of coronavirus cases and related deaths (52%).

For the third week in a row, a significant plurality of Americans say they're 'extremely concerned' about contracting the virus. This percentage has hovered around the mid-forties since mid-March and, at present, appears to have plateaued, having shown no significant increases in the past three weeks. That figure currently stands at 44%, down just one percentage point from the week prior. The percentage of those with serious concerns about an immediate or extended family member coming down with COVID-19, however, has crept up steadily from a mid-March low of 47% to a current high of 62%.

Public perception of the initial shock the pandemic delivered to the U.S. economy appears to have flattened out. About 72% of working Americans report a COVID-19-related disruption to their regular work routine. These disruptions include being compelled to work at home, suffering a layoff or furlough and/or losing work hours or wages.

As a consequence, the fairly low percentage of Americans optimistic for a 'much better' economic situation six months from nowjust over one in fourhas held steady over the last two weeks. About 29% express a sense of hope for the U.S. economy in the short-term, down just a couple of percentage points after a precipitous drop of ten points three weeks agoabout the time many new stay-at-home orders were issued. For the moment then, Americans appear to have resigned themselves to a dour holding pattern.

ABOUT THIS RESEARCH

This study of 1,002 U.S. residents aged 18 and older was fielded between March 31 and April 6, 2020. The results have an associated margin of error of +/- 3.1% at the 95% confidence level in the most conservative case. This means the results come within plus or minus 3.1% of the results that would have been obtained given a census of all qualified individuals. Sample collection was balanced to U.S. Census figures for gender, age, race/ethnicity and household income.

The study is projected to run for another thirteen (13) weeks and include separate, supplemental studies of business leaders and healthcare professionals. Press releases will be issued periodically for these studies as warranted by the results.

ABOUT ROI ROCKET

Founded in 2007, ROI Rocket is a leading provider of full-service market research, marketing and sales automation, and digital agency support with offices in Denver, CO, Vancouver, WA, and Jacksonville, FL.

PRESS CONTACTS

For additional information about this study, please contact David McGrath, CEO ([email protected]) or Libby Perkins, General Counsel ([email protected]).

SOURCE ROI Rocket
A French investment fund, which has so far spent more than 200m on Irish properties, has completed the acquisition of an Aldi store in east Corks Carrigtwohill from BAM Property, for 5.6m.

The investment sale to the French company Corum, which was agreed at the end of 2019, has now closed out, at a time when the Irish supermarket trade is exceptionally strong thanks to the stay-home impact of the cononavirus and a sales surge from home shoppers.

Carrigtwohills Aldi store went to market last year with a 7m price expectation, thanks to a 451,000 rent roll from the German discount retailer, who occupy on a 25-year lease from 2008.

The purpose-built Aldi property of over 17,000 sq ft anchors the Castlesquare Shopping Centre in Carrigtwohill, part of a major joint mixed-use scheme started in the early 2000s by BAM and Gable Holdings, delivered with many hundreds of houses and apartments.

The sale of the BAM Property asset to Corum was handled by agent Cearbhall Behan of Behan Irwin & Gosling/Downing Commercial in Cork, with Aoife Murray of Colliers in Dublin acting for the purchaser.

With 11,300 stores globally, and turnover of 50bn, Aldi is heading up to 140 Irish stores, and has traded in Ireland since 1999.

It has been leasing its Carrigtwohill outlet on a 25-year lease from January 2008. Adjoining occupiers include a Primary Care Centre, above the Aldi, and a cafe within the centre.

At the sale price of around 5.6m, it represents a return of 7.34% net yield for the active French purchaser, a better return than the proposed 6.45% at the initial 7m guide on the investments launch.
In an interview with Vatican News, the Archbishop of Nur-Sultan, Archbishop Tomasz Peta, says that the people of Kazakhstan still share a spirit of solidarity in the face of the coronavirus pandemic.

By Fr. Benedict Mayaki, SJ

In Kazakhstan, as in many other countries around the world, precautionary measures are in place to check the spread of the Covid-19 virus: The largest cities are under quarantine, schools and universities operate exclusively online, and people are allowed to go out only for essentials, such as food and medicine.

Despite these hard times and the social anxiety caused by coronavirus, the Catholic Church in Kazakhstan is still alive, said Archbishop Tomasz Peta of Nur-Sultan.

Church still alive

Archbishop Peta explained that the faithful still participate at Masses which are broadcast from Karaganda, the second largest city of Kazakhstan. There are also those who come to ask for confession and Holy Communion which they ordinarily receive on their knees. The Archbishop however noted that only a few people were able to be present at Mass in the Cathedral at Easter due to coronavirus precautionary measures.

Archbishop Peta added that the participation of priests and nuns has been instrumental in ensuring the 24-hour adoration of the Blessed Sacrament in the capitals cathedral. This practice, which has lasted for 18 consecutive years, began on 14 April 2002 as a result of the visit of Saint John Paul II, which took place in September 2001, noted the Metropolitan of Nur-Sultan.

Difficulties

The Archbishop explained that there are three priests and three nuns who are stuck in Poland and cannot return to Kazakhstan due to travel restrictions. Stressing that they are very much needed back in the country, he cited the example of Kazakhstani authorities who are extending visas of foreign nationals without requiring them to return to their countries.

At the same time, he commended the efforts of religious like the Sisters of Mother Teresa of Calcutta who are helping those in need in these difficult times. Kazakhstan currently has 1,275 confirmed coronavirus cases with 15 deaths and 165 recovered patients

Emphasizing the importance of hope and resilience, Archbishop Peta added that the society of Kazakhstan has seen difficult times before, as in the period of Stalinism and deportations. However, noted the Archbishop, the current situation, although difficult, is not the worst. There is a spirit of solidarity among the people.
Korean automajor Hyundai Motor



India on Wednesday donated medical equipment to the district administration of Kancheepuram to help fight against coronavirus pandemic.

Senior executives of the Hyundai Motor India Foundation handed over Personal Protective Equipment and dry rations to district collector P Ponniah.

The dry rations were meant for distribution to those in need in the district, surrounding the manufacturing facilities of Hyundai Motor India at neighbouring Sriperumbudur.

Also, the company said it would hand over 10,000 kits of PPEs and dry rations to district administrations of Tiruvallur and Chennai in coming days.

The auto-maker said it has donated Rs 5 crore to Chief Minister Relief Fund and was taking wide range of other initiatives towards the battle against COVID-19.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
LAKEWOOD, Ohio -- Warmer weather and the coronavirus stay-at-home order find Lakewood homeowners having plenty of time to take care of those looming projects. A common to-do-list item is painting the house, which can be a costly affair.

Thats why for more than a decade, LakewoodAlive has offered its annual Paint Lakewood Program, which not only revitalizes neighborhoods, but also educates residents on lead-safety issues.

The Paint Lakewood Program assists low to moderate income families to get the exterior of their homes painted, LakewoodAlive Housing and Internal Operations Director Allison Urbanek said. The goal of the program is for them to hire a contractor, so that the job gets done right.

Most of the contractors were working with have warranties. Another important factor is the contractors are operating in a lead-safe manner. We want to try to trap and remove as much peeling paints as possible. With our housing stock being as old as it is, a majority of it probably has lead-based paint on it.

Qualified Paint Lakewood Program applicants (homeowners and residents) -- who must meet HUD-established income guidelines with other restrictions -- can receive up to a $4,500 grant for exterior paint, supplies and professional labor costs.

The 2020 program actually marks a $1,000 increase.

The Community Development Block Grant (CDBG)-related funds are dispersed on a sliding scale of income categories, which are listed on the website. Urbanek said LakewoodAlive will also help those homeowners in further financial need find resources to cover additional costs.

We receive a certain amount of funding from the city, which is what limits how many people we can serve, Urbanek said. Annually, we help 13 to 14 households, with the average house painting costing around $6,000.

While the vast majority of Paint Lakewood Program recipients hire contractors, Urbanek noted that those homeowners who have the skills to do the work themselves are eligible.

We encourage people to leave that work to the professionals, but if they do have the ability, we work with them one on one to teach them how to work in a lead-safe manner, Urbanek said.

In fact, those homeowners are encouraged to take advantage of LakewoodAlives Lakewood Tool Box initiative, which allows members to borrow tools for upward of three days in order to complete home projects. A deposit is required to ensure that the tool returns in good shape.

We do have a paint sprayer that is available for rent, as well as ladders and scaffolding, Urbanek said. Right now, were doing things a little differently with socially distancing. All of the Tool Box rentals are by appointment only, while the Paint Lakewood Program is coordinated so we dont interact with residents. Well pick up applications from their houses off the porch or well set up phone conversations.

Its now a good time for the Paint Lakewood Program. Contractors are essential workers, so theyre out there getting work done. If you can save a few bucks by applying for the grant, you might as well do that.

Read more news from the Sun Post Herald.
World Health Organization chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus at the WHO headquarters in Geneva, Switzerland, on April 6, 2020. (AFP via Getty Images)

Chinese Communist Subversion of WHO Undermined Global Pandemic Response

News Analysis

The World Health Organization (WHO) is facing a flurry of criticism for its response to the CCP virus pandemic, and much of the problem can be attributed to the growing influence the communist regime in China has on the organization.

Critics mainly point out that the WHO was too slow to recommend travel restrictions and some other preventive measures, and also that the agency accepted information from China at face value, despite numerous red flags.

While China experts were sounding alarms about a coverup, the WHO continued to praise Chinas response and never warned the world that data coming from the regime was suspect.

WHO, an agency of the United Nations, has long been swayed by Beijings political preferences. Its current head, Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, is a former member of a Maoist group in Ethiopia.

As The Epoch Times previously documented, China has been increasing its power over U.N. institutions for years. Beijings clout has now gone so far, it undermines WHOs basic functions, such as providing timely and accurate information about the worlds health situation.

Case in point: the CCP virus.

Timeline

The CCP virus, commonly known as the novel coronavirus, broke out in the central Chinese city of Wuhan around November 2019, before spreading across China and the world.

As of April 14, there are some 2 million confirmed cases of the virus, which causes the disease COVID-19. Almost 130,000 deaths have since been attributed to the disease worldwide.

The WHO has said that Chinese authorities first informed it about the outbreak on Dec. 31, 2019. While that would have been a golden opportunity to mitigate the spread of the virus worldwide, the WHO conveyed none of its information to the world that day.

It appears that only one country had its ear close enough to the ground at that point to respond meaningfullyTaiwan.

By Dec. 31, the island nation off the coast of mainland China had already started monitoring travelers coming on flights from Wuhan. Taiwan authorities also told the WHO that day that Taiwanese doctors had learned from their mainland counterparts that health care workers had been falling ill with the mysterious new virus.

That was crucial information, since it indicated the virus was spreading from person to person. The WHO, however, ignored it, Taiwan officials later said.

It was to be expected of the WHO to ignore that warning. The CCP considers Taiwan a breakaway province and has pressed the U.N. to ignore Taiwans existence as an independent country.

Taiwan has been denied membership in the WHO, whose personnel are prohibited from using documents or even information from official Taiwan sources without prior special permission, according to a leaked 2010 WHO memo.

Such permission would involve coordination with the Permanent [UN] Mission of China in Geneva, the memo stated.

While Taiwan was getting its response to the virus underway, the situation in Wuhan was quickly deteriorating.

On Jan. 2, The Epoch Times reported on the efforts of the CCP to block information about the outbreak and the high levels of anxiety spreading throughout the city.

A Wuhan Health Commission directive prohibited all medical facilities in the city from publicizing medical information without permission, and online discussions about the outbreak were quickly censored. On Jan. 1, Wuhan police said that they had detained eight locals who had spread rumors about the outbreak.

As it turned out, at least some of the suppressed whistleblowers were doctors who had tried to warn colleagues about the new virus.

Panicked locals cleared Wuhan pharmacies of surgical masks and over-the-counter preventive Chinese medicines. China expert and physician Tang Jingyuan warned a government coverup might exacerbate the spread of the virus.

Meanwhile, the WHO remained silent.

By Jan. 3, the WHO was informed by Chinese authorities of 44 cases, 11 of them severe. That was likely the tip of the iceberg.

On Jan. 5, The Epoch Times reported, citing multiple experts, that the CCP had likely been covering up information about the virus, which was detrimental to controlling the outbreak.

That day, the WHO commented for the first time about the outbreak, disclosing that it had known about an outbreak of a pneumonia of unknown cause in Wuhan for five days and recommending that it should be handled prudently. But the agency didnt recommend any specific measures for travelers.

Instead, it did the opposite.

WHO advises against the application of any travel or trade restrictions on China based on the information currently available on this event, it said.

Five days later, the WHO addressed the outbreak again.

From the currently available information, preliminary investigation suggests that there is no significant human-to-human transmission, and no infections among health care workers have occurred, the agency stated, contradicting information that had been provided by Taiwan.

WHO does not recommend any specific health measures for travelers, WHO said. It instead released general information on how to deal with virus infections.

On Jan. 12, WHO said there was no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission, slightly adjusting its language.

Preliminary investigations conducted by the Chinese authorities have found no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission, WHO announced two days later, never expressing a shadow of a doubt about the Chinese communist regimes official statements.

At this time, Taiwan had already arranged for its own fact-finding team to travel to Wuhan.

They didnt let us see what they didnt want us to see, but our experts sensed the situation was not optimistic, Taiwanese government spokesperson Kolas Yotaka told NBC News.

Soon after the team returned, Taiwan initiated testing and reporting requirements for its hospitals.

Looking after itself, not listening to the WHO in this particular case, I think actually helped, said Dr. William Stanton, vice president of the National Yang-Ming University of Taiwan and a former U.S. ambassador to China, in a recent interview with The Epoch Times Jan Jekielek.

The WHO only managed to get its team to Wuhan for a brief field visit on Jan. 20.

On Jan. 17, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) sent personnel to screen travelers coming from Wuhan to three major U.S. airportsJFK, Los Angeles International, and San Francisco International, which were getting the highest traffic from the outbreaks epicenter. More airports were added to the list in subsequent weeks.

On Jan. 20, China confirmed human-to-human transmission.

On Jan. 23, the day the CCP put Wuhan on lockdown, the WHO announced that, despite some internal disagreements, it wouldnt declare the outbreak a public health emergency of international concern.

By then, cases had already started to crop up around the world, including in the United States.

Three days later, Taiwan banned flights from Wuhan and arranged special flights to return its people from the city.

On Jan. 28, while visiting China, the WHOs Tedros urged the countries of the world to remain calm and not to overreact, expressing confidence in the CCPs epidemic control, Chinese state-run media reported.

On Feb. 3, three days after President Donald Trump prohibited foreigners who had recently been in China from traveling to the United States, Tedros voiced opposition to travel bans, saying measures that would unnecessarily interfere with travel and trade werent needed.

In a March 20 tweet, Tedros repeated CCP propaganda, saying that for the first time, #China has reported no domestic #COVID19 cases yesterday. While for China experts, the news all but confirmed that the CCP numbers were fake, Tedros touted it as an amazing achievement, that gives us all reassurance that the #coronavirus can be beaten.

Statistical modeling, eyewitness accounts, and documents provided to The Epoch Times have shown that Chinese authorities concealed the true scale of the outbreak in Wuhan and other parts of China.

Tedros, however, repeatedly praised China for transparency in its response to the outbreaksomething experts and government officials around the world have emphasized as being the most lacking.

The Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, a nonprofit established in the 1990s by the U.S. government, published on April 10 a detailed timeline of the CCPs coverup of the epidemic and of the WHOs culpability in it. The organization also announced it would be adding the global CCP virus deaths to the historical death toll of communism.

The WHO has abdicated its responsibility to the entire world population in order to carry water for the Chinese Communist regime, the foundations executive director, Marion Smith, said in a release.

A Personal Connection

While part of the CCPs influence over the WHO was coming from the U.N., another part of it was played by Tedros himself.

Tedros is a former Politburo member of the Tigray Peoples Liberation Front, a Maoist group that had waged a guerrilla war in the 1980s against the Soviet-backed Mengistu regime in Ethiopia.

The nearest you would put [Tigrays ideology] to would be North Korea today, according to Trevor Loudon, an expert on communist movements and front groups.

In the early 1990s, as the regime at the time lost financial support from the collapsing Soviet Union, a coalition of Tigray and other groups overthrew it and ruled the country until 2019.

While on the surface, the government embraced market reforms and democratic elections, ideologically it remained socialist, Loudon said, especially in terms of foreign policy.

They still keep up their foreign communist connections, he said in a telephone interview with The Epoch Times.

Tedros, a former health and later foreign minister of the African nation, naturally maintained strong ties with the CCP, embracing projects such as the Belt and Road initiative, which serves the CCP to expand its geostrategic influence.

Tedros scored the WHOs top post in 2017 with strong backing by the CCPs lobby, despite allegations that he had covered up three cholera outbreaks during his tenure as health minister.

Chinese diplomats had campaigned hard for the Ethiopian, using Beijings financial clout and opaque aid budget to build support for him among developing countries, Sunday Times columnist Rebecca Myers wrote at the time.

Tedros denied covering up the cholera outbreaks, saying it was just acute watery diarrhea.

He has proven adept at playing into Western sensitivity to accusations of oppression.

When an adviser to his British opponent for the WHO leadership brought up the cholera coverups, he accused him of having a colonial mindset.

When Taiwan called him out for ignoring its information about the CCP virus, Tedros accused Taiwan of racist attacks.

That accusation seems to have done little to deflect the criticism; a petition calling for Tedross resignation has garnered nearly a million signatures.

Meanwhile, the Trump administration is considering cutting off its funding to the WHOthe United States is by far the largest benefactor of the organization, providing more than $110 million a year in regular funding, plus hundreds of millions more in voluntary contributions.

In Stantons view, the WHO, as currently constituted, should lose its funding.

I think we have to take a much harder line in terms of how the WHO has handled this virus, he said. Because its clearly been simply a mouthpiece, in my view, of the PRC [Peoples Republic of China] government.
People wear face masks while queuing to enter a supermarket during the mandatory isolation decreed by the Colombian government as a preventive measure against the spread of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) in Soacha

By Steven Grattan

BOGOTA (Reuters) - Gerson Monje holds up his cellphone to proudly show off his online sex shop. A red banner reading "sold out!" is plastered across half of the products.

While most Colombian businesses suffer during a five-week lockdown meant to curb the spread of the coronavirus, one online industry has seen an explosion in sales in the usually conservative country: sex toys are flying off virtual shelves.

"Sales started going up on day four of the quarantine," said Monje, who is still able to have products delivered to customers amid the national lockdown. "We've seen a rise of 50%."

"People are at home and have more time on their hands. They're with their partners or alone and need fun in their daily activities when it comes to being intimate," Monje said.

Reuters spoke to six online sex shops in Colombia and all said they have seen a swell in sales since the quarantine began. Colombians are meant to remain at home until Apr. 27, except for outings to buy food and medicine and visits to banks, among other exceptions.

Sex toys could help people keep their spirits up during long isolation, psychologist Dr. Carolina Guzman said, and might lead to an easing of sexual mores.

"Colombia has a very conservative idea around sexuality and communication surrounding it," she said. "It's a good time for people to allow themselves to work on their curiosity and to understand that buying and using these products is a great thing."

Other countries have seen a similar phenomenon. Sales of sex toys in Denmark have more than doubled, while British lingerie chain Ann Summers said sex toy sales were up 27% in the last week of March.

Inside the Sex Sense sex shop in Bogota, manager Adriana Marin watched Pope Francis give a Good Friday Mass on her computer as she sprayed boxes of products with disinfectant.

Her online shop sales have taken off even though her storefront is closed and there is stiff competition. There are about 30 other sex shops in her neighborhood alone.

Story continues

At the Bali Sex Store in Medellin, sales are up 140%.

Products with mobile phone applications that allow separated partners to control toys for one another are particularly popular, said Katty Gonzalez, the store's marketing director.

"Before people didn't have time because of so many things going on in their daily lives and I think that because of what's happening at the moment, it's giving them the opportunity to explore different things," she said.

(Refiles to correct name of sex shop in ninth paragraph to "Sex Sense" from "Sixth Sense")

(Reporting by Steven Grattan; Editing by Julia Symmes Cobb and Rosalba O'Brien)
Himachal Pradesh Chief Minister Jai Ram Thakur unfurled the national flag at the Ridge in Shimla marking the 73rd Himachal Day on Wednesday in a low-key affair amid the COVID-19 pandemic.

The celebrations were modest as Thakur presided over the symbolic state-level function and and took salute from the police contingent.

Education Minister Suresh Bhardwaj, Shimla Mayor Satya Kondal, Deputy Mayor Shelander Chauhan, Chief Secretary Anil Khachi, Director General of Police S R Mardi were also present during the function along with the chief minister.

Felicitating the residents of the state, Governor Bandaru Dattatreya unfurled the Tricolour in Raj Bhavan complex by keeping social distance. Officials of Raj Bhavan were also present on the occasion.

The governor also greeted former chief ministers Virbhadra Singh, Shanta Kumar and Prem Kumar Dhumal on the occasion of Himachal Day while talking to them over the phone, an official spokesperson said.

Dattatraya also asked about their well being and spoke on various topics in view of the prevailing circumstances and hoped that the country would emerge from the coronavirus pandemic and life would be normal soon.

Following independence in 1947, the chief commissioner's province of Himachal Pradesh was created on April 15, 1948 which has since been marked each year as Himachal Day.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
The Indian government has decided to provide Ukraine with a batch of 30,000 pills of hydroxychloroquine, which is considered by experts as a promising medication for fight against coronavirus (COVID-19), on a non-repayable basis, the Foreign Ministry of Ukraine said.

"I would like to express my sincere gratitude to the Indian government for its assistance. Even despite a ban on exports of hydroxychloroquine abroad our Indian friends have made this important to Ukraine decision," the ministry's press service quoted Foreign Minister of Ukraine Dmytro Kuleba as saying on Wednesday.

Kuleba met with Ambassador of India to Ukraine Partha Satpathy at the beginning of April.

The Health Ministry will receive the pharmaceutical drug in order to distribute it among hospitals.

The Foreign Ministry recalled that the Health Ministry has included hydroxychloroquine to the protocol of treatment for COVID-19 patients.

The Health Ministry, in turn, warned that the medication should not be used for self-treatment and can be prescribed only by a doctor. Effectiveness of hydroxychloroquine for treatment of COVID-19 patients is being carefully studied in many countries, including the United States and the EU.
Medikabazaar, India's largest business-to-business (B2B) online marketplace for medical devices, has said it has witnessed a 50-60 percent surge in enquiries as hospitals, clinics and nursing homes are stocking up on medical goods.

"So at this point in time it is all about gearing themselves against infection control, hospitals are also looking at ventilators, oxygen therapy support. For example, if they have one ventilator, they are looking to add one. They are preparing to deal with COVID-19 cases," Vivek Tiwari, co-founder and CEO of Medikabazaar, told Moneycontrol.

The company, however, is facing challenges in delivering medical supplies.

"FedEx and DHL are completely non-functional at this point of time and other courier services are not taking the risk to operate," 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

In Charts | Economic impact of lockdown on Centre and states

Most medical devices are imported from China, Taiwan and South Korea.

Tiwari said the company has been closely working with industry bodies and the government to procure the medical goods lying at Chinese airports.

Track this blog for latest updates on the coronavirus outbreak

In India, Medikabazaar is relying on its own fleet of about hundred riders to deliver supplies to hospitals. The company plans to increase the fleet to more than 500 riders by the end of this year.

Tiwari said taking advantage of the demand, many new operators have jumped into supplying PPEs, masks and other consumables, without adhering to any acceptable quality standards.

Stretched timelines

Taking advantage of demand, some suppliers in China are resorting to price gouging and stretching the delivery timelines beyond acceptable limits.

"For instance, a low-end ventilator with no turbine and just uses the oxygen within the hospital and price should not be more than $4500-$5,000. Right now, if you go to China they are charging about $8000 - $8500 minimum. In some cases, the delivery timelines are stretched beyond even acceptable limits like if you want to order today, they will tell you that we can only deliver only in July or August," Tiwari said.

Medikabazaar says it has launched a COVID Combat Collaborative Platform that connects COVID buyers, COVID sellers and COVID experts to facilitate timely and sufficient supply of medical essentials, vital for life-saving or preventive healthcare purposes against the pandemic.

"The step is aimed at eliminating misinformation regarding the demand-supply of essential medical goods, at all ends," the company said.

The Mumbai-based company was founded by Vivek Tiwari and Ketan Malkan in 2015.

Medikabazaar has 18 state-of-the-art fulfillment centres spread across the country, with a catalogue of 300,000 plus products from which hospitals and medical establishments can discover, research and compare products in real-time, eliminating the need for them to go through multiple channels to get quotes on machines and medical supplies.
Two sessions expected in May as dates of local meetings are announced

Flags are seen at the Tian'anmen Square and atop the Great Hall of the People during the opening meeting of the second session of the 13th National People's Congress in Beijing, capital of China, March 5, 2019. (Xinhua/Yang Zongyou)

Experts said the Chinese national "two sessions," which is a significant event on the political calendar to form guidance strategies for the year, could be postponed to May or even early June, while it is reasonable for local "two sessions" to be held soon as the country has basically brought the COVID-19 epidemic under control.

Against the backdrop of the pandemic, the commencement of the local "two sessions" has a critical meaning for governments that are making comprehensive strategies for the country amid the great uncertainties brought about by the pandemic, experts said.

Wenzhou in East China's Zhejiang Province announced it would hold its local two sessions - Wenzhou Municipal Committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC) and the People's Congress of Wenzhou - on April 21 and 22.

Zhou Dewen, director of the Zhejiang Private Investment Enterprise Association, said that Wenzhou, as one of the earliest cities to conduct prevention measures in late January, has done a great job in containing the COVID-19 outbreak and resuming production, which has paved the way for it to hold the meetings and make plans for the year sooner.

Hangzhou, capital of Zhejiang Province, announced it would hold its local two sessions in late April.

As of the end of Monday, Zhejiang reported a total of 1,267 infections, with 1,242 patients having been discharged and one death, according to the Health Commission of Zhejiang Province.

It would be reasonable for cities to hold their local two sessions if there have been 15 days without new reported infections and all confirmed COVID-19 patients have recovered and been discharged from hospitals, Luo Yameng, a Beijing-based urban planning and management expert, told the Global Times on Tuesday.

As the country has achieved a decisive victory in containing the novel coronavirus, local two sessions across the country will commence in the near future, Xu Hongcai, an economist at the China Center for International Economic Exchanges, told the Global Times on Tuesday.

Like the reopening of schools, the commencement of the local two sessions is a manifestation of bringing the epidemic under control, but it is more important as a critical step to review the government's work of the previous year and hear its plans for the current year, especially as the pandemic rips through the world, Zhou said.

It is critical for local governments to launch the meetings soon on the premise of sound prevention measures, since further postponement will make the annual strategies less effective, Zhou stressed.

In the meantime, although local two sessions are major political events in provinces and municipalities that pave the way for the national two sessions in Beijing, analysts and some NPC deputies and CPPCC members contacted by the Global Times said they have not been notified of a new date for the national two sessions, which are normally held in March.

"Currently, Beijing faces mounting pressure in preventing imported infections and a possible second wave of infections, and lacks the conditions to hold such an event," Wang Hongwei, a professor at the Renmin University of China's School of Public Administration and Policy, told the Global Times on Tuesday.

Luo said the surge in imported case in Northeast China's Heilongjiang Province would not affect planning of the national two sessions.

Suifenhe in Heilongjiang is a local situation and will not be a key factor in determining the schedule. Luo said the national "two sessions" could be expected to be held in late May or June.

But with special prevention measures for the two sessions, a date in early May could be expected, according to Zhou.

Zhang Shuhua, director of the Institute of Political Sciences of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences who is also a CPPCC National Committee member, said the national two sessions are expected to be scheduled at the end of April and beginning of May in Beijing. The city's decision to re-open schools starting on April 27 is also a significant point.

Bai Ming, deputy director of the Ministry of Commerce's International Market Research Institute, said this year's focus of the national two sessions will be the pandemic's influence on China this year, and in the next five years.
California has long been on the leading edge of clean energy, both in volume and in policy. So, as you begin your search for the best solar companies in California, youll find that there are a lot of providers to choose from.

The good news is that a number of the nations top solar companies got their start in the Golden State, so its residents have access to some of the best solar panels and services in the nation.

To help you in your search through the wide variety of California solar installers, weve narrowed in on a list of the top eight.

We understand that for most homeowners, the decision to invest in solar comes down to installation costs. To help you understand if solar panels are worth it for your home, you can get a free, no-obligation quote from one of the best solar companies in California by using this tool or filling out the form below.

Our Picks for Top California Solar Installers

NRG Clean Power

Sunrun

SunPower

Stellar Solar

Tesla

Sunlux

Solar Optimum

Baker Electric Home Energy

Comparing the 8 Best Solar Companies in California

NRG Clean Power Service Area: State of California; based in Los Angeles What We Like: NRG Clean Power is a total home performance company, offering a fully comprehensive approach to designing the perfect clean energy system for your home. With accessible prices, flexible solar financing options, lifetime warranties and a great reputation to boot, NRG Clean Power tops our list of the best solar companies in California. What We Dont Like: NRG Clean Power doesnt offer solar leases, which can exclude homeowners who value helping the environment more than saving money by purchasing a system of their own. What Customers Are Saying: I highly recommend this solar company. They have the process mastered. I was well-informed of the whole process, especially on the aspect of the expenses. All questions were answered promptly  just a great team!  Chai via Better Business Bureau NRG Clean Power at a Glance: Year Founded: 1992

1992 Services Provided: Solar panels, backup batteries, electric vehicle chargers, roofing and energy efficiency upgrades

Solar panels, backup batteries, electric vehicle chargers, roofing and energy efficiency upgrades Warranty: Lifetime labor warranty, product-specific warranties for photovoltaic panels and inverters

Lifetime labor warranty, product-specific warranties for photovoltaic panels and inverters Financing Options: Cash purchase, solar loan Get Quote

Sunrun Sunrun Service Area: State of California What We Like: When it comes to flexible, affordable home solar backed by a rock-solid warranty, Sunrun is a tough option to beat. Sunrun offers excellent solar lease options and solar financing with zero money down, customizing its services around your needs. What We Dont Like: The size of Sunrun can make it vulnerable to issues with communication after a sale. Some customers report having a hard time connecting with customer service. What Customers Are Saying: Sunrun walked me through the pros and cons of purchase versus leasing. Also battery versus no battery. Decided to purchase panels and install. Three months later, everything is working great. Should easily be able to break even in about eight years. Thanks for great service!  Bruce via BBB Sunrun at a Glance: Year Founded: 2007

2007 Services Provided: Solar panels, backup batteries, EV chargers

Solar panels, backup batteries, EV chargers Warranty: 10-year all-inclusive warranty and product-specific warranties

10-year all-inclusive warranty and product-specific warranties Financing Options: Cash purchase, solar loan, solar lease/power purchase agreement (PPA)

Cash purchase, solar loan, solar lease/power purchase agreement (PPA) Learn More: Sunrun Review Get Quote

SunPower SunPower Service Area: State of California; based in San Jose What We Like: SunPower has long been one of the top national solar companies  both in the quality of its products and its installations. Manufacturing its own industry-leading solar panels, SunPower delivers efficient, all-in-one solar systems with the best warranty in the business to customers throughout California and the entire U.S. What We Dont Like: SunPower outsources its work to certified dealers throughout the country. Though the company still maintains stellar reviews, your experience can be dependent on which dealer you live nearest. What Customers Are Saying: I was not the original customer. I bought the residence with SunPowers system already installed and assumed the lease. Lease is reasonable and does not increase over time. Customer service has been excellent when contacted. Any and all issues resolved with just one call.  Kevin via BBB SunPower at a Glance: Year Founded: 1985

1985 Services Provided: Solar panels, backup batteries, EV chargers

Solar panels, backup batteries, EV chargers Warranty: All-in-one 25-year warranty

All-in-one 25-year warranty Financing Options: Cash purchase, solar loan, solar lease/PPA

Cash purchase, solar loan, solar lease/PPA Learn More: SunPower Review Get Quote

Stellar Solar Stellar Solar Service Area: Southern California; based in San Diego What We Like: Voted San Diegos best solar company in 2021, Stellar Solars team of experienced solar energy consultants uses a consultative, educational, no-pressure approach to both residential and commercial solar projects. This approach pays dividends for Stellar Solar, as the company boasts exceptional customer reviews and builds its business on a booming referral network. Stellar Solar offers some of the best solar products from SunPower, Enphase, Panasonic, LG and more. What We Dont Like: Wed like to see Stellar Solar offer electrical services and energy efficiency packages along with its solar, battery and EV chargers. What Customers Are Saying: Wonderful experience with Stellar Solar The reps from Stellar are highly professional, timely and courteous. They took the time to clearly explain the process from start to finish. The installation process was straightforward. The crew was very considerate and they left the project site clean and neat.  Madeline via Google Reviews Stellar Solar at a Glance: Year Founded: 1998

1998 Services Provided: Solar panels, backup batteries, EV chargers

Solar panels, backup batteries, EV chargers Warranty: 25-year workmanship warranty, 10-year roof warranty, product-specific warranties

25-year workmanship warranty, 10-year roof warranty, product-specific warranties Financing Options: Cash purchase, solar loan, solar lease/PPA Get Quote

Tesla Tesla Service Area: State of California; currently based in Palo Alto (CEO Elon Musk has announced the company will be relocating its headquarters to Austin, Texas) What We Like: A household name in electric vehicles and solar energy, Tesla offers some of the most advanced and aesthetically pleasing solar technology on the market. Though not a solar installer like the other names on this list, Tesla will match you with a solar technician near you that is certified to install its products. Tesla also guarantees to price-match any solar system in order to offer the most affordable solar panels in the country. What We Dont Like: Installing your solar system through Tesla does come with a few downsides. The work is outsourced, and customers have experienced long wait times when reaching out with service and warranty questions. The popularity of Tesla can also lead to long wait times for products like the Powerwall 2. What Customers Are Saying: Tesla Energy partnered with Sunworks to install my solar panels, and I was super impressed with them. They provided better financing than any other companies, and they were so quick to get everything up and running. Its only been a year, and Ive already saved tons of money on my electric bill. Well worth it.  Benjamin via Yelp Tesla at a Glance: Year Founded: 2003

2003 Services Provided: Solar panels, backup batteries, EV chargers, solar roofs

Solar panels, backup batteries, EV chargers, solar roofs Warranty: 25-year panel performance warranty, 10-year comprehensive warranty

25-year panel performance warranty, 10-year comprehensive warranty Financing Options : Cash purchase, solar loan

: Cash purchase, solar loan Learn More: Tesla Solar Review Get Quote

Sunlux Sunlux Service Area: Southern California; based in Placentia What We Like: Sunlux delivers solar solutions in California as well as Texas, offering solar, storage, smart home and EV solutions. Sunluxs team of experts is well acquainted with Californias solar incentives and rebates and can walk you through financing options to make sure you get the most value out of your investment. What We Dont Like: Sunlux has only been in business since 2015, which makes it the youngest company on our list. This isnt to say that it wont provide as good or better service than solar industry veterans, but its something to note nonetheless. What Customers Are Saying: I got my solar installed last July by Sunlux. I [did] tons of research before I went with them. I am so happy I did. Everyone in their team has a customer-first mentality. I cant stress how professional [it was] every step of the way. Even after the system is installed, they still treat you like a VIP.  Johnny via Google Reviews Sunlux at a Glance: Year Founded: 2015

2015 Services Provided: Solar panels, backup batteries, EV chargers, roofing

Solar panels, backup batteries, EV chargers, roofing Warranty: 25-year equipment warranty, 25-year labor warranty, 25-year production guarantee

25-year equipment warranty, 25-year labor warranty, 25-year production guarantee Financing Options: Cash purchase, solar loan, solar lease/PPA Get Quote

Solar Optimum Solar Optimum Service Area: State of California; based in Glendale What We Like: Looking for a solar company built on real relationships and honest advice? Check out Solar Optimum. Providing residential and commercial services, Solar Optimum is certified by leading brands and has a proven track record of success in California. With a stellar industry reputation, helpful solar educational tools and an impressive warranty, Solar Optimum really goes above and beyond for its customers. What We Dont Like: Solar Optimums marketing can be a little loud at first, but the company clearly has the service to back it. What Customers Are Saying: I originally signed with another company to install a solar system but things didnt work out with them I did more research and came across Solar Optimum thanks to a coworkers recommendation. Glad I did Compared to the solar company I worked with originally, Solar Optimum deserves 10 stars, not just 5.  Jake J. via BBB Solar Optimum at a Glance: Year Founded: 2008

2008 Services Provided: Solar panels, backup batteries, EV chargers, roofing

Solar panels, backup batteries, EV chargers, roofing Warranty: 25-year equipment warranty, 25-year labor warranty, 25-year performance guarantee

25-year equipment warranty, 25-year labor warranty, 25-year performance guarantee Financing Options: Cash purchase, solar loans Get Quote

Baker Electric Home Energy Baker Electric Home Energy Service Area: Southern California; based in Escondido What We Like: With more than 80 years of experience, 16,500 installations and over 2 million in customer energy savings, the experience of Baker Electric Home Energy is unmatched in California. Its highly trained team of electricians offers more than just solar, with services including HVAC, electrical upgrades, smart home installations and service plans to keep your home powered as renewably and efficiently as possible. What We Dont Like: For the size and history of this company, its service area is a little restricting. This is only good news for those who live within it, however, as the company prides itself on staying local and delivering complete satisfaction. What Customers Are Saying: I could not be more impressed with how Baker Solar performed from my initial sales meeting all the way through service completion. This company is the gold standard. Thoroughly professional from start to finish.  Chris via Google Reviews Baker Electric Home Energy at a Glance: Year Founded: 1938

1938 Services Provided: Solar panels, backup batteries, EV chargers, HVAC, efficiency upgrades

Solar panels, backup batteries, EV chargers, HVAC, efficiency upgrades Warranty: 25-year equipment warranty, 10-year roof warranty

25-year equipment warranty, 10-year roof warranty Financing Options: Cash purchase, solar loan, solar lease/PPA Get Quote

How We Chose the Best Solar Companies in California



We researched the product ranges, services, financing options, customer feedback and industry reputations of every major California solar installer. Using this methodology, we rated and ranked each company to narrow down our picks for the best solar companies in California.

Choosing the Best Solar Installer for Your Home

Keep in mind that everyones needs are different when it comes to solar, so what may be the best solar company for your neighbor might not be right for you. Consider the following factors and place more weight on whats important to you when choosing the best company for your installation:

Services Offered

For one, its important to note that different solar companies may offer slightly different services. Most California homeowners will want a company that provides a wide range of services, assisting with everything from an initial consultation to panel installation to applying for financial incentives. But you may also want specialized services such as other home energy efficiency upgrades or an EV charger installation.

Installation Process

Consider the specific steps in the panel installation process. How long will it take to have your solar panels placed? Is the solar provider insured? Will the panels be installed by a trained member of the company, or will it be a third-party contractor who does the work?

Solar Pricing and Financing

Sticker shock is common with solar systems, but keep in mind that youll ultimately save money in the long run thanks to the reduced energy costs. In addition, California offers statewide solar incentives that can help you reduce these upfront costs. Budget can be paramount for homeowners considering solar, and some companies are more flexible than others.

Industry Affiliations

We generally recommend working with a company that maintains membership in the Solar Energy Industries Association (SEIA) or other professional associations. Membership in these groups is a great indicator of the companys professionalism, workmanship, reputation and reliability.

Types of Panels

Pay attention to the specific type of solar technology that is offered. Is the company certified to install leading brands like Tesla, Panasonic and LG? It never hurts to take a closer look into the companys tech portfolio. If you have a specific brand of solar panel or battery in mind, check that the company youre speaking with is certified to sell and install those products.

Incentives, Rebates and Tax Credits

In California, its likely youll be eligible for solar rebates and federal tax credits after making the switch to solar energy. Will your solar installation company help you make the necessary arrangements? Be sure to ask your provider about whats available in your area. Even better, ask if the company has experience applying to these incentives.

Warranty

Finally, we recommend seeking an installer that can offer a good warranty. Panels can last 25 to 30 years, and you will want to ensure your investment is protected for as long as possible. The best solar companies will offer 25-year warranties for roofing, performance and workmanship.

Cost of Solar in California

As of 2022, our market research and data from top brands show the average cost of solar panels in California is around $2.73 per watt. This means a 5-kW system would cost around $10,101 after the federal solar tax credit is applied. Keep in mind that a 5-kW system is about the minimum size youll need for your home.

The state of California also offers a variety of solar incentives to help offset the cost of your system.

California Solar Incentive Incentive Overview Self-Generation Incentive Program (SGIP) The SGIP offers rebates for storing solar energy at both residential and non-residential facilities. Active Solar Energy System Property Tax Exclusion This property tax exclusion ensures the addition of your solar equipment doesnt raise homeowners property taxes. (Solar will still increase your property value, however.) Single-Family Affordable Solar Homes (SASH) Program Deployed by the California Solar Initiative (CSI), SASH provides fixed, up-front incentives on qualifying affordable single-family housing.

How to Find the Best Solar Installer in California

California is a big place, and as the leading state in solar energy, has a lot of reputable solar companies operating within it. When evaluating the best solar installer for you, we recommend placing more emphasis on local companies that may have even more experience than some of the national leaders. Familiarity with local energy rates, utilities, incentives and weather is often an underrated factor when it comes to finding the right solar provider.

Again, we understand that the significant cost of solar can deter some readers from making the switch. Solar is a significant investment, after all. This is why we recommend taking the simple, no-pressure first step of getting a few quotes from the best California solar installers and hearing what they have to say about your homes qualifications.

Comparing quotes from multiple companies can help you gauge whether a solar system is within your budget and can save you thousands of dollars on your installation. You can use this tool or fill out the form below to get started right away.

FAQ: Best Solar Companies in California

What is the most reputable solar company in California?

Luckily for California residents, there are a number of trustworthy solar companies in the state. We recommend NRG Clean Power and Sunrun as two of the best, but any of the solar companies listed in this article will offer you reliable service at a reasonable price.

Who is the biggest solar company in California?

Sunrun claims to be the No. 1 national installer of residential solar that offers services in California, but SunPower likely rivals its market share in the state.

Is it worth going solar in California?

With ample sunshine, a number of solar companies and generous solar incentives, California is an ideal place to go solar. Of course, whether or not its worth it for you will depend on your home, budget, utility and energy needs.

Karsten Neumeister is a writer and renewable energy specialist with a background in writing and the humanities. Before joining EcoWatch, Karsten worked in the energy sector of New Orleans, focusing on renewable energy policy and technology. A lover of music and the outdoors, Karsten might be found rock climbing, canoeing or writing songs when away from the workplace.
Were U.S. President Donald Trump a thatch-haired schoolboy, rather than the most powerful man on Earth, I've no doubt he would be the bane of his poor teachers' lives and attract their ire.

They would point out that his bitterest foe of one moment sometimes becomes his closest buddy the next. They would complain about his perennial lies.

They would note his nasty habit of trying to shift the blame on to others.

One way or another, Trump junior would be an enormous pain in the backside, and his termly reports would be full of reproving remarks about his boastfulness, mendacity, self-righteousness and generally questionable character.

And yet a fair-minded teacher would have to concede that, for all his defects, the wayward pupil is sometimes able to extract a nugget of truth which evades the notice of more conventional minds, even if he is then inclined to fly off at a tangent.

President Trump announced on Tuesday that he would be freezing all funds from Washington to the World Health Organisation (WHO)

So it is with the President's attack on the World Health Organisation (WHO), which Donald Trump accused of being 'China-centric' before announcing on Tuesday that he is freezing the funding it receives from Washington.

In the past two years, the U.S. has been the body's biggest donor, giving $893million (711million).

Britain is its second biggest benefactor among major countries, shelling out $435 million (346million), followed by Germany and Japan.

China has contributed just $86 million (79 million) over the same period.

This is not the time, in the midst of the worst pandemic for a century, to turn off the funding tap to the only global organisation fighting it.

It looks peevish and mean-spirited. I'm glad the UK is not following suit.

Nor do I doubt that part of Trump's motivation is to deflect some of the fire being directed at him for his flawed management of the crisis towards China and the WHO. This, after all, is election year.

The fact remains, however, that the WHO (a United Nations agency) is a very flawed outfit. It has been far too accommodating of Beijing.

For its part, China has many questions to answer about the way it suppressed information following the outbreak of the contagion in Wuhan last December.

STEPHEN GLOVER: WHO's recent leadership, and in particular, its director-general, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus (pictured), leaves much to be desired

Let's deal first with the WHO's shortcomings. I don't doubt it has done many excellent things over the years, such as helping to eliminate smallpox and virtually getting rid of polio.

But its recent leadership, and in particular, its director-general, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, leaves much to be desired.

The first head of the WHO not to be a doctor, he was Minister of Health in the Ethiopian government before becoming Minister of Foreign Affairs.

It was, and remains, one of the most repressive regimes in Africa with an appalling human rights record.

China is a close ally, and when Ghebreyesus sought the top job at the WHO he received the enthusiastic backing of Beijing.

The measure of the man's politics may be judged by his sponsorship of the ghastly Zimbabwean tyrant Robert Mugabe as a WHO 'goodwill ambassador' in 2017.

Mugabe was a long-term protege of China's. Last September, he finally went to meet his maker, who must have had some searching questions.

When Ghebreyesus visited Beijing at the end of January, he met President Xi Jinping in the Great Hall of the People.

Neither then, nor in other settings, has he criticised the communist regime for detaining the doctors warning about a potential epidemic.

They were  monstrously  accused of spreading false 'rumours'.

Far from chiding his hosts, Ghebreyesus extolled Xi Jinping's 'very rare leadership', and hailed China for 'transparency'.

Later, he asserted that Beijing was 'setting a new standard for outbreak response' and deserved to be 'congratulated' for safeguarding 'the people of the world'.

It's true that, during February, Trump himself repeatedly praised Xi Jinping's response to the crisis, saying he had handled it 'really well' and was doing 'a very good job with a very, very tough situation'.

But the President's intermittent idiocy doesn't get Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus and his sycophancy off the hook.

I'm not qualified to say whether the contagion could have been contained within China if the WHO had got to grips with it earlier.

What is undeniable is that, instead of holding Beijing to account, its director-general has covered this secretive and despotic regime with roses.

His indulgent behaviour should be contrasted with that of one of his predecessors, the Norwegian Gro Harlem Brundtland, who in 2003 attacked China for making similar attempts to cover up Sars, a lethal viral respiratory disease. It was controlled before doing too much damage. This is my question.

Can Trump reasonably be criticised for lambasting the WHO over its excessively cosy relations with China, more so as the United States is the body's leading donor? I don't think so.

Almost certainly, what psychologists call 'displacement' is at work in that turbulent Trumpian mind.

In berating the World Health Organisation, the American President is redirecting his outrage against an infinitely larger and far more lethal adversary  China.

And here we should set aside whatever misgivings we may justifiably harbour about Trump, and examine the facts. Beijing was the cradle of the disease.

Communist apparatchiks kept the truth from the world.

They almost certainly deliberately downplayed the number of fatalities by a huge amount.

Yet there hasn't been the merest trace of contrition, far less an apology.

On the contrary, a month ago a spokesman in the Chinese Foreign Ministry suggested that the U.S. military might have been responsible for the outbreak.

How preposterous! Instead of disseminating lies, China should be expressing its regret for having nurtured the disease, which almost certainly was transferred to humans by bats or pangolins in a so-called 'wet market' in Wuhan selling wildlife products.

These wet markets were closed after the Sars outbreak but reopened again, with disastrous consequences for the rest of the world.

Almost unbelievably, the WHO last week claimed they could be made to sell safe food with increased hygiene practices, and refused to support their closure as they are deemed an important source of food and income.

China, of course, is emerging from the crisis with its economy in reasonable shape.

According to the International Monetary Fund, it is likely to perform much better than any other major economy this year, and return to buoyant growth next.

Meanwhile, the country struts around as a humanitarian superpower, dispensing aid to countries such as Italy that have been far worse stricken by the virus, and showering its largesse around the world.

This is not about blame  though Trump wants it to be.

It is about reassessing our relationship with an alien and scary country, and limiting its future role in shaping our affairs.

It's no longer tenable that the Chinese government-controlled company Huawei should be instrumental in setting up our 5G mobile network.

Trump at least half understands all this. Unfortunately, he risks shooting himself (again) in the foot by suspending WHO funding, since the shortfall will be made up by China, already consolidating its power in other UN agencies.

The President may be compared to an unruly child. He may behave like a fool.

But there is sometimes a grain of sense in what he says. China  both begetter and beneficiary of the coronavirus  is not our friend.
Operations at the Community Assistance Center in Conroe have adapted to have as little contact as possible to help stop the spread of COVID-19, but this hasnt stopped the CAC from continuing services. With the help of grants and donations, financial assistance from CAC is still available.

Rental assistance, mortgage assistance, and utility assistance are still available. Case managers are working by phone and email to communicate with clients about individual cases. So far, the CAC has seen over a 50 percent increase in people seeking its services, said Executive Director Jennifer Landers.

I really think were kind of just at the tip of that tidal wave, Landers said. People still had jobs into March, even, in most cases, and so switching into April is one thing. But once we get into May, or longer, were going to see those numbers really climb up.

Funding for programs

Much of the funding for the financial programs comes from donations and grants.

Recently, the CAC received $25,000 in funding from the Greater Houston Community Foundation and Greater Houston United Way from its recovery relief fund. Bank of America and Precinct 4 Commissioner James Metts, as well as individuals, have made donations as well.

Weve been very lucky that weve had a lot of people step up and assist us, Lander said, but she knows this is just the beginning. Were obviously looking for more assistance.

The organization had to postpone one of its biggest fundraisers until the fall, but without that increase in cash now, she said the CAC is managing as best it can. So far, Landers said they have not had to turn people away. This success is in part because the organization works collaboratively with other service organizers. If the CAC cant fulfill an entire request, its possible another provider can.

Countywide service

Residents of the county looking for assistance from the CAC are encouraged to call the appointment line at 936-539-9211 and if the call isnt picked up to leave a message with as much information as possible. Calls will be returned in the order they were left. Some days the CAC staff begin with over 100 messages.

People are calling 24/7 right now because a lot of these folks have never had to ask for assistance, Landers said. Theyve never been on the verge of homelessness or eviction and theyve never not been able to pay their bills. So, this is new for them.

There are no income or ZIP code restrictions for CAC services. It can help anyone in Montgomery County.

During a typical year, Landers said that organizations that may plan for a seven to 10 percent growth in need for services will need to start planning for something closer to 30 or 40 percent growth due to the economic devastation that COVID-19 has caused. It will depend largely on how long the crisis lasts.

Homelessness concerns

Looking ahead, Landers has concerns about how people experiencing homelessness are going to be helped, especially as the Salvation Army Center of Hope shelter and the Montgomery County Womens Center have had to limit their capacity to maintain social distancing.

If we dont find ways to get those folks off the street that are symptomatic or they currently have COVID-19, we are going to continue to see a spread, Landers said. Theyre being released after testing back onto the street. We dont have any type of isolation of quarantine like Harris County has set up.

As more people lose jobs or have hours cut, its entirely possible that the population of people experiencing homelessness will grow.

Drive-in food market

The CAC, in partnership with the Montgomery County Food Bank, has been hosting a weekly drive-in food market for families to come pick up groceries. The food is placed in their trunk to avoid contact. As the need has grown the markets have moved from the CAC parking lot to The Ark Church.

Next week, on April 22, the market will be at Grangerland Intermediate, 16283 FM 3038, in Conroe. About 500 families are being served at each food distribution.

In the coming weeks, the CAC will be taking its food distributions outside of Conroe to help service the outlying areas of the county. Information for the Wednesday markets can be found on the CAC website: https://cac-mctx.org/

Before the month is up, Landers said the CAC hopes to have a new program up and running in partnership with The Woodlands United Methodist Church to deliver food to seniors who may not be able to get out and come to the markets.

jamie.swinnerton@chron.com
Shi Yu/China Daily

By Hujjatullah Zia

As the coronavirus pandemic spread across the world, China became the target of harsh rhetoric and disinformation campaign even though it has made remarkable achievements in containing the viruseven lifting the lockdown on Wuhan, capital of Hubei province and the epicenter of the outbreak in China after 76 daysat a time when the rest of the world is still grappling with it.

Associating the pandemic with China or the Chinese people will prove counter productive, because hate crimes, including attacks on people of Asian originas reported from several cities in the Westwill do no society or economy any good.

Many believed the pandemic would bring all countries on a global platform to cooperate in the fight against this common human enemy. Instead, irresponsible remarks have fueled tensions.

As a non-traditional security threat, the pandemic is no different from terrorism: it doesn't discriminate on the basis of country, color, creed or class. As Mike Ryan, head of the World Health Organization's health emergency programs, said: "Viruses know no borders, and they don't care about your ethnicity, the color of your skin, or how much money you have in the bank". The WHO has even advised against scapegoating a country or people, while praising Beijing for its transparency in the fight against the virus.

Since we live in a "global village" and share a common destiny, the outbreak has put the life of all at stake and the imminent economic crisis will wreak havoc on people across the world. As such, we should all make greater efforts to build a community with a shared future for humankind.

During my stay in China for almost one year, I heard officials reiterating on different occasions the importance of cooperation, people-to-people exchanges and peaceful coexistence to promote global social harmony.

With this policy in mind, China has expanded cooperation with many countries in the fight against the virus. For instance, China was the first country to send medical experts and supplies to Serbia, which sought China's help. Many other countries, including Afghanistan, have also received medical help from China.

This is a time for global cooperation, not blame games or stigmatizing others. It is also a time to bridge the gaps and build trust. It is not the time for finger pointing or doubting the role and neutrality of international organizations such as the WHO whose funding the US administration has threatened to freeze. So all countries should seize this opportunity to cement their ties by helping each other and resolving differences through dialogue.

In particular, the US and China need to cooperate in the fight against the virus to prevent the pandemic from causing more damage to the global economy.

The US administration initially downplayed the virus threat. Even weeks after Singapore and the Republic of Korea implemented emergency measures, the US remained in denial. As a result, more than 553,000 people had been infected and nearly 22,000 killed in the US by Tuesday. Perhaps the US administration misconstrued its own "America first" policy as "America alone" policy.

Despite people continuing to fall victim to the pandemic in the US, Italy, Spain, Iran and elsewhere, some countries are still engaged in finger pointing and trading insults. Washington is not even considering easing sanctions against Teheran so the latter can better fight the outbreak.

But since blame games and hostility will not save human lives, all countries should join hands in order to prevent more human fatalities. And even after the pandemic is contained globally, they need to continue cooperating to deal with the inevitable economic fallout of the epidemic.

As such, the global focus should be on how to effectively contain the outbreak. China has sent out a clear message that all countries should come together and share their experiences in the fight against the pandemic, while developing a vaccine and devising a detailed plan for treating COVID-19 patients.

The author is a writer with Daily Outlook, an independent newspaper in Afghanistan.
EUGENE, Ore., April 15, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- Established in 2000, The San Francisco World Spirits Competition is among the most respected international spirits competitions and is the largest event of its kind in the U.S. Under the auspices of founder Anthony Dias Blue, judging director Tony Abou-Ganim gathered more than 40 high-profile judges including Dale DeGroff, Julie Reiner, and Ivy Mix. Blood x Sweat x Tears Vodka, Wolf Spirit Distillery's flagship brand, won a Gold Medal: a major coup for self-taught distiller Ben Green, in only his third year as a maker.

Hand-crafted from grain to glass using soft white winter wheat from Hamilton Ranch on Rattlesnake Ridge in Washington State and purified water from Oregon's Cascade Mountains, Blood x Sweat x Tears vodka also medaled at the San Diego Spirits Festival.

The 2020 Competition drew 2,325 entries from all corners of the world. Of the 189 vodka entries, 30 won Gold Medals. Umberto Luchini, the proprietor and founder of Wolf Spirit Distillery as well as creator and owner of Blood x Sweat x Tears Vodka, says, "We are grateful to be ranked alongside great vodka brands including Belvedere and Crystal Head, especially as we are priced 25-65% lower. It took us about a year -- and 3,000 liters of false starts -- to get to a vodka we all loved; our hats are off to our chief maker Ben Green."

Hand-crafted from grain to glass using soft white winter wheat from Hamilton Ranch on Rattlesnake Ridge in Washington State and purified water from Oregon's Cascade Mountains, Blood x Sweat x Tears Vodka also medaled at the San Diego Spirits Festival. The spirit is usually described as edgy, and third-party reviewers generally describe it as earthy, mineral, and herbal  particularly calling out notes of juniper  with a clear wheat influence, warm and spicy finish, and overall complexity.

Blood x Sweat x Tears Vodka is currently available in 25 U.S. markets, and partners with Best Friends Animal Society, which is creating no-kill animal shelters at an unprecedented rate. Please follow Blood x Sweat x Tears Vodka on Facebook and Instagram.

About Wolf Spirit Distillery: In his late 40s and with his own savings at stake, Umberto Luchini walked away from his CMO position at Campari America to launch Wolf Spirit Distillery, with the mission to live courageously with great purpose; to be honest; and hell-bent on upending the system. Every day, Umberto aims to inspire richer life experiences and satisfy a literal and figurative thirst for what's real. The distillery's flagship brand is Blood x Sweat x Tears Vodka, and the company also imports Tom of Finland Organic Vodka, which gives a full 5% of all profits to Tom of Finland Foundation which promotes tolerance toward all sexual orientations.

Hi-res images, interviews, and media samples available upon request.

Contact:

Alejandro Vich

Deussen Global Communications, Inc.

[email protected]

m. 646-673-3155

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Blood X Sweat X Tears Vodka Wins Gold Medal at the 2020 San Francisco World Spirits Competition

Hand-crafted from grain to glass using soft white winter wheat from Hamilton Ranch on Rattlesnake Ridge in Washington State and purified water from Oregon's Cascade Mountains, Blood x Sweat x Tears Vodka also medaled at the San Diego Spirits Festival.

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Nearly three quarters of business decision makers (71 per cent) believe that the shift to 100 per cent remote working during the Covid-19 crisis has increased the likelihood of a cyber breach, according to new data released by cyber security company Centrify, a leading provider of Identity-Centric privileged access management solutions.

The data, obtained via a poll of 200 senior business decision-makers in large- and medium-sized UK companies conducted by independent polling company Censuswide on behalf of Centrify, also revealed that 46 per cent have already noted an increase in phishing attacks since implementing a policy of widespread remote working.

The polling took place on March 2627, as the UK government announced much stricter lockdown policies to tackle the Coronavirus, including urging all employees to work from home where possible.

The research also found that 79 per cent of business decision makers have increased their cyber security procedures to manage high volumes of remote access over the next three months. Similarly, 73 per cent of businesses have given staff extra training on how to remain cyber-safe when working remotely, with specific training around verifying passwords and log-in credentials.

The survey also noted additional fears that IT systems are at risk, with over half (53 per cent) saying they believe that privileged IT admin remote access is at risk of security breach.

Andy Heather, VP, Centrify comments: Cyber criminals will no doubt attempt to seize the opportunity presented by the all-out expansion of remote workers, many of whom have not been proficiently trained in even the most basic of cyber security measures. Therefore, it is essential that businesses and employees remain vigilant during these challenging times.

Organisations of all sizes must prioritise security protocols when transitioning employees from an office to a remote working environment. This includes introducing professional training for all employees on how to operate IT and online infrastructure safely, and how to spot unusual or potentially malicious activity. Furthermore, businesses should take an Identity-centric approach to secure remote privileged access, to ensure that any hackers and cyber criminals can not gain access to sensitive systems or data.

Donal Blaney, MD, Griffin Law, a cyber security specialist legal firm commented: Ignorance of the law is no defence, even with remote working. Company directors and business owners owe it to themselves, their staff, their shareholders, and their customers to know how to protect their businesses and their customers data. They will only have themselves to blame if they have ineffective defences. Ensure your systems are secure, train your staff, keep anti-virus programmes, hardware and software current, and clarify the method with which you connect with customers securely. -- Tradearabia News Service
People trying to verify whether their $1,200 stimulus checks have arrived in their bank accounts may be putting a strain on some financial institutions online and mobile banking systems.

San Antonios Vantage Bank Texas has been experiencing intermittent service interruptions with its online and mobile banking the last couple of days.

It is our assumption, when we evaluate the subject matter related to the increase in customer calls we are experiencing this week specifically (which aligns with the timing of the outages), that the increase in online/mobile banking demand is closely tied to stimulus check status inquiries, particularly whether or not the funds have been received, Vantage spokesman Alex Polanco said in an email Wednesday.

On ExpressNews.com: San Antonio-area lenders have a backlog of small-business-loan requests

Other local financial institutions also report similar spikes in online activity this week.

We have seen a significant increase in online activity related to the stimulus check, said Salvador Guerrero, a spokesman Live Oak-based Randolph-Brooks Federal Credit Union.

Broadway Bank CEO David Bohne said its experienced a record number of people logging in online this week, which he attributed to the stimulus checks and the Small Business Administrations Payroll Protection Program. The program is offering forgivable loans to small businesses.

At Credit Human Federal Credit Union, online banking log-ins have increased 70 percent while mobile log-ins have jumped almost 150 percent from last week.

Our online and mobile volume is up almost 500 percent since Monday, said Brandy Ralston-Lint, a spokeswoman for San Antonios Security Service Financial Credit Union. It believes the surge in volume is from members checking to see if their stimulus checks have been deposited yet.

Financial institutions across the board are seeing this tremendous spike and its impacting the various vendors who support those financial institutions, she added.

Some 80 million Americans were expected to receive their checks by Wednesday. Singles earning up to $75,000 a year receive $1,200. Its a decreased amount for those who earn more than $75,000 but less than $99,000. Those who earn more than $99,000 arent eligible. Parents receive an additional $500 for each child under 17.

The checks are a cornerstone of the economic relief package to address the cornavirus pandemic.

Vantages Polanco said its digital-banking provider, Fiserve Inc., has had significant issues with its service delivery this week.

The issue also is impacting other community banks across the country, in the hundreds, which depend on Fiserv for those same services, Polanco said.

A 1 p.m. Wednesday post on Vantages website alerted customers that it would have expanded call-center hours until the issue is resolved. Representatives can assist customers with banking services that they would normally do online.

A Fiserv spokeswoman Ann Cave said its services were once again running normally.

Some of our online and mobile banking solutions were experiencing intermittent accessibility or delayed response times due to exceptionally high system-wide volume, Cave said in an email. Our services are now back to normal.

Still, Vantages alert remained on its website as of 5 p.m. Wednesday.

Cave didnt say what was behind the volume increase or how many of its clients were affected.

Ironically, Vantage announced last month it plans to move its online and mobile banking platform from Fiserv to Backbase.

Patrick Danner is a San Antonio-based staff writer covering banking and civil courts. To read more from Patrick, become a subscriber. pdanner@express-news.net | Twitter: @AlamoPD
Families are settling into a new normal of staying at home, avoiding social activities and not attending schools, all while many parents are working from home. A Purdue University professor who specializes in preschool mathematics, literacy and environments has tips for families. (Jessica Lewis/Unsplash)

Finding balance between work, family and e-learning

How pets can help children cope with social distancing

Empty schools from COVID-19 increase potential for cyberbullying, sextortion

Students dealing with loss of important rites of passage

Keeping at-home education fun through online, video games

Feeling anxious during these times of quarantines, uncertainty?

State-side deployments, activations affect families at home as well

Finding balance between work, family and e-learning

Schools have shifted to e-learning. Parents are trying to balance working from home, family obligations and now e-learning. David Purpura, an associate professor of human development and family studies, can talk about ways to find balance, as well as ways to engage children in other activities around the house. Purpura and his wife, Ashley, who is an assistant professor of religious studies at Purdue, are working from home with their four children.

Related news release: No more school: Realistic ways for parents and families to cope, find balance while together at home

A photograph of David Purpura is available to journalists via Google Drive.

Contact: purpura@purdue.edu (also available for web-based conference and phone interviews)

Media contact: Matthew Oates, 765-586-7496 (cell), oatesw@purdue.edu, @mo_oates

How pets can help children cope with social distancing

The coronavirus pandemic is forcing people all over the world to practice social distancing and stay home and children are adjusting to e-learning. As children cope with missing their friends and routines, some of their housemates might be making the transition easier: pets.

Researchers at the Center for the Human-Animal Bond in Purdues College of Veterinary Medicine can talk about how pets can provide a source of social support during stressful times and how interacting with companion animals can provide stress relief that can be measured biologically.

Related news release: Can your pet help you cope with social distancing? Science says yes.

Media contact: Abbey Nickel, 740-326-0481 nickela@purdue.edu

Empty schools from COVID-19 increase potential for cyberbullying, sextortion

Kathryn Seigfried-Spellar is an associate professor of computer and information technology in the Purdue (University) Polytechnic Institute. She studies the characteristics and factors associated with cyberdeviance, including cyberbullying and online enticement. She can speak to how the increased juvenile presence will impact online behavior for children and parents.

Related news release: Empty schools from COVID-19 increase potential for cyberbullying, sextortion

A photograph of Kathryn Seigfried-Spellar, as well as a stock photo, are available on Google Drive.

Contact: Kathryn Seigfried-Spellar, kspellar@purdue.edu. She also is available for Skype interviews.

Media contact: Brian Huchel, bhuchel@purdue.edu, Working remotely but will provide immediate response.

Students dealing with loss of important rites of passage

Heather Servaty-Seib is a Purdue University professor who researches loss and grief experiences in both death and non-death situations. She can speak to the importance of acknowledging the losses and recognizing the grief that occurs when these important rites of passage cannot be practiced in their traditional forms.

Related news release: Students dealing with loss of important rites of passage

A photograph of Heather Servaty-Seib, as well as a stock image, are available on Google Drive.

Contact: Heather Servaty-Seib, servaty@purdue.edu. In addition to phone interviews, she is available for interviews via Zoom as well as Skype and WebEx.

Media contact: Brian Huchel, bhuchel@purdue.edu. Working remotely but will provide immediate response.

Keeping at-home education fun through online, video games

William Watson is an associate professor in learning design and technology and director of the Purdue Center for Serious Games and Learning in Virtual Environments in the College of Education, can talk how to incorporate game-oriented learning activities at home while families remain in various levels of isolation due to the outbreak.

Related news release: Parents: Tips on using online and board games to help kids learn

A photograph of William Watson, as well as a stock photo, are available on Google Drive.

Contact: William Watson, brwatson@purdue.edu. In addition to phone interviews, the professor is available for Skype, Zoom and WebEx interviews.

Media contact: Brian Huchel, bhuchel@purdue.edu, Working remotely but will provide immediate response.

Feeling anxious during these times of quarantines, uncertainty?

Susan Kersey is a clinical assistant professor of nursing and director of the Psychiatric Mental Health Nurse Practitioner Program. She has expertise in the field of psychiatry and the treatment of mental health conditions. She can talk on how to work with and identify ways to address anxiety, depression and other aspects of mental health in all populations, including children. Kersey has worked in a variety of mental health settings during her career.

Related news release: Feeling anxious during these times of quarantines, uncertainty?

A photograph of Susan Kersey is available on Google Drive.

Contact: Susan Kersey, sjkersey@purdue.edu (also available for web-based conference and phone interviews)

Media contact: Matthew Oates, 765-586-7496 (cell), oatesw@purdue.edu, @mo_oates

State-side deployments, activations affect families at home as well

With states activating their National Guards to combat COVID-19, what will families experience  especially with a domestic call-up? Shelley MacDermid Wadsworth, a professor in human development and family studies and director of the Military Family Research Institute, can talk about resources available to those active duty, National Guard or Reserves families.

Related news release: Access to resources, support is key to easing stress of military families facing deployment

A photograph of Shelley MacDermid Wadsworth is available to journalists on Google Drive.

Contact: Shelley MacDermid Wadsworth, shelley@purdue.edu (also available for web-based conference and phone interviews)

Media contact: Matthew Oates, 765-586-7496 (cell), oatesw@purdue.edu, @mo_oates

About Purdue University

Purdue University is a top public research institution developing practical solutions to todays toughest challenges. Ranked the No. 6 Most Innovative University in the United States by U.S. News & World Report, Purdue delivers world-changing research and out-of-this-world discovery. Committed to hands-on and online, real-world learning, Purdue offers a transformative education to all. Committed to affordability and accessibility, Purdue has frozen tuition and most fees at 2012-13 levels, enabling more students than ever to graduate debt-free. See how Purdue never stops in the persistent pursuit of the next giant leap at purdue.edu.
For many Cambodians, Khmer New Year is an important time to spend time with friends and family and to visit pagoda to pay respect and bring food to Buddhist monks. But due to coronavirus outbreak, many Cambodians stay home, and few decide to visit the pagoda. VOA Khmer's Malis Tum reports from Phnom Penh.
As many as 155 Saudi citizens have arrived at King Khalid International Airport, in Riyadh, on a Saudi Arabian Airlines flight coming from New York, as part of shuttle trips scheduled in light of the outbreak of the Coronavirus pandemic.



Upon arrival, the returnees were subject to all health and preventive measures against the novel Coronavirus (Covid-19), including 12 stages that start from the airport of the country of departure, reported the Saudi Press Agency (SPA).



All arrivals will experience a 14-day isolation period at guest houses prepared by the Ministry of Tourism and supervised by the Ministry of Health.
This obituary is part of a series about people who have died in the coronavirus pandemic. Read about others here.

Stuart Cohen loved to explore the depths of human connection. And he did it in countless fleeting interactions  with passengers in his taxi.

As a New York City cabdriver for 25 years, Mr. Cohen thrived when chatting with passengers about subjects like the Kennedy White House or American politics. He once picked up former Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld as a fare, according to a friend of Mr. Cohens, and inquired eagerly about his personal history and thoughts on politics, in a manner without social boundaries typical of a quintessential New Yorker.

Mr. Cohen died on April 8 at Coney Island Hospital. He was 73. The cause was respiratory failure as a result of the coronavirus, W.J. OReilly, a friend of 35 years, said.
Police officers in Anambra State have allegedly killed one person and injured another during a clash with some youths.

The incident happened at Ezego street, Nkpor in Onitsha on Wednesay.

Though reports of what transpired was still sketchy at the time of this report, sources claimed the police officers shot at some youths who resisted the arrest of some of them.

They wanted to arrest our brothers and when we demanded to know why they came to arrest them, they shot at us, a source said.

The names of the victims could not be ascertained at the time of filling the report.

One of them reportedly died immediately while another one was rushed to hospital for treatment.

Police spokesperson in the state, Haruna Mohammed, who confirmed the incident debunked the allegation that the police attacked without provocation.

He said the youth attacked a police patrol team with substance suspected to be acid. He did not comment on the alleged initial attempt to arrest some youth and the reported death.

According to him, the assailants succeeded in dousing one of the officers with the substance and snatched his rifle.

The situation forced the other officers to use force to retrieve the rifle and protect themselves, he said. It was an unprovoked attack on a police patrol team with substance suspected to be acid by some miscreants.

Body of the slain victim.

Yes, they snatched the rifle of the policeman after pouring acid on him which prompted the other policemen to use force to retrieve the rifle.

The officer doused with Acid

Meanwhile, effort is ongoing to restore sanity in the area please, he added.

The clothes worn by the officer destroyed by the acid.

He said the injured officer has also been rushed to the hospital where he is receiving treatment.
PR-Inside.com: 2020-04-15 04:13:04

Renewal of Major Payment Institution license by MAS further complements EMQs ability to facilitate end-to-end compliant payments

EMQ Delivers Enhanced Cross-border Payment Capabilities to SMEs and Payment Service Providers in Singapore

Media:

Genevieve Li

+852 9200 3892

genevieve@emq.com

EMQ, a global financial settlement network, announced today that it has significantly augmented its cross-border payment capabilities to address the inefficiencies in international payments for businesses in Singapore. The company recently renewed its Major Payment Institution license by the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS), empowering businesses to send and receive money between Singapore and over 80 key markets worldwide.

Singapore is an economic powerhouse and a major gateway for cross-border trades across Southeast Asia, where SMEs and payment service providers (PSPs) will require a network infrastructure with greater speed, more certainty, increased flexibility and transparency, to capitalize on the growth opportunities in Asia and beyond, said Max Liu, co-founder and CEO of EMQ. With our newly renewed license by MAS and an integrated cross-border solution, we are well poised to offer Singapores diverse customer base secure, seamless global access to the rapidly growing payment ecosystem.

Powered by EMQs global financial settlement network, start-ups, PSPs and SMEs in Singapore are able to make and receive payments quickly and transparently to and from over 80 key global markets, as well as instant access to Singapores Fast and Secure Transfers (FAST) network. EMQs Connect API uses a scalable technology to enable efficient cross-border transactions with greater transparency and certainty. Our API driven platform with built-in redundancies is designed to meet the needs of businesses with high transaction volumes, enabling them to customize their workflows for a seamless user experience.

With a keen focus on providing more reliable and streamlined B2B and B2C cross-border transactions, we continue to invest significantly towards constant innovation of our cross-border solutions and compliance capabilities for todays businesses, Liu added.

With a network infrastructure spanning globally across four continents, EMQ is currently licensed in Hong Kong, Singapore, Indonesia and registered as a Money Service Business in Canada. The company was accepted into Taiwans Regulatory Sandbox by the Financial Supervisory Commission in Taiwan.

About EMQ

EMQ operates a global financial settlement network that provides a faster, more affordable and transparent cross-border settlement solution for businesses around the world, while adhering to complex regulations and compliance standards in different markets. The companys flexible network infrastructure has been built to effectively settle any cross-border movement of capital and can be deployed across multiple vertical industries for a broad range of services, including e-commerce, merchant settlement, procurement, remittance, payroll, etc. www.emq.com.

View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20200414006

EMQ announced today that it has significantly augmented its cross-border payment capabilities to address the inefficiencies in international payments SMEs and PSPs in Singapore.
Dear parents, if you want your children to have proper sleep, read this carefully. Joining a growing list of studies that tell parents to shun devices at bed-time, researchers say that children who use devices and decide what time they go to sleep, achieve less sleep and feel more sleepier the following day than their peers.

The study of children in this age-group (aged 11 to 13 years), published in the New Zealand Medical Journal, found most (72 per cent) of the 163 students interviewed by University of Otago researchers achieved recommended guidelines of an average 9 to 11 hours sleep nightly over one week.

But that also means that almost one in four students did not achieve sleep within these guidelines, which highlights an area for improvement, said study researcher Kate Ford.

However, consistent with previous research in 15 to 17-year-old New Zealanders, the study results show less sleep on the nights where devices are used in the hour before bed.

According to the researchers, students who used devices before going to sleep were also more likely to report that they felt sleepy the following morning. Watching television before bed had no significant effect on sleep length.

There were also some interesting observations over the weekends where students went to bed later but woke later achieving similar sleep length to the school days, the researchers said.

A small group of students (six per cent) who reported less than seven hours of sleep, including a small number reporting not sleeping at all, according to the study,

Therefore, while the average across the week of 72 per cent of students reporting adequate sleep is reassuring, it is far from the goal of every child achieving sleep within the recommended guidelines, Ford said.

Dr Paul Kelly, head of the Sleep Health Service at Canterbury District Health Board, supervised the study and explained that the foundations for good health are based on proper nutrition, regular exercise and good sleep quality.

Sleep quality is often overlooked as a contributory factor to poor health.

The study findings suggest the need for parental guidance around bedtimings and moderation of the use and availability of electronic devices before bed, Kelly said.

Respect and protect your sleep, as good daytime functioning is reliant on adequate sleep, Kelly added.

(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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IsoEnergy Intersects 7.5m of 22.7% U3O8 in Drill Hole LE20-52 Including 2.5m of 67.2% U3O8

Posted by Publisher Internet

IsoEnergy Ltd. (?IsoEnergy? or the ?Company?) (TSXV: ISO; OTCQX: ISENF  IsoEnergy Keeps Finding High Grade Uranium  Perfect Setup for Storm in Uranium Market ) is pleased to report final assay results from the winter 2020 drilling program at the Hurricane zone.? Discovered in 2018 at the Larocque East property, the Hurricane zone is a recent discovery of high-grade uranium mineralization.? Larocque East is 100% owned by IsoEnergy and is located in the prolific Eastern Athabasca Basin of Saskatchewan (Figure 1).

Winter Drilling Selected Highlights:

Drill hole LE20-52 assays average 22.7% U3O8 over 7.5m from 318.5 to 326.0m, including 67.2% U3O8 over 2.5m from 322.5 to 325.0m

Drill hole LE20-53 assays average 11.7% U3O8 over 10.5m from 317.5 to 328.0m, including 40.4% U3O8 over 3.0m from 324.5 to 327.5m

Drill Hole LE20-51 assays average 14.5% U3O8 and 3.5% Ni over 7.5m from 322.5 to 330.0m*

Drill Hole LE20-40 assays average 20.5% U3O8 over 4.0m from 322.5 to 326.5m*

Drill Hole LE20-34 assays average 33.9% U3O8 over 8.5m from 326.0 to 334.5m, including 5.0m averaging 57.1% U3O8 from 328.0 to 333.0m*

Drill Hole LE20-32A assays average 19.6% U3O8 over 8.5m from 329.5 to 338.0m, including 2.5m of 63.6% U3O8 from 334.5 to 337.0m*

*Previously released assay results

Craig Parry, Chief Executive Officer commented: ?I?d like to congratulate our technical team on these latest results and on the highly successful winter drilling program. Drilling has continued to deliver long intervals of high-grade pitchblende uranium mineralization, confirming Hurricane as major discovery. It is worth noting that the Hurricane deposit is in an exceptional location in the eastern Athabasca close to key infrastructure and only 40km from Orano?s McLean Lake Mill.? These latest results from our winter program come at a crucial time for the uranium exploration and mining sector. In recent days we have seen the major producers announce extended closures of their mines and mills which we estimate has reduced global uranium production volumes by over 50%. Already we have seen the uranium spot price rise over 30% from $24/lb three weeks ago to $31.50/lb today, breaking the important psychological barrier of $30/lb in the process. This rise has occurred without the full impact of physical product being removed from the market and when these announced supply cuts take full effect in coming weeks, we expect to see further upward pressure on prices. Against this backdrop IsoEnergy remains well positioned with $3.5m in cash and we look forward to reporting on plans for further drilling at our high-grade Hurricane discovery.?

Steve Blower, Vice President of Exploration commented: ?The last two drill holes of the campaign have returned very high-grade uranium assays over long intervals.? The southernmost drill holes on all five sections in the western end of the Hurricane zone are now all strongly mineralized.? Clearly there is room for expansion of this very high-grade area within the larger Hurricane zone footprint, which now measures 575m long, up to 40m wide and up to 11m thick.?

Investor Conference Call and Webcast

The Company will be hosting a conference call today, April 15, 2020 at 11:00 AM PST (2:00 PM EST), to give a corporate presentation, discuss the winter drilling program, and host a Q&A for investors and other interested parties.

Details of the Call:

Participant toll free dial in number: (844) 618-5255

Audience URL: ?

https://onlinexperiences.com/Launch/QReg/ShowUUID=3DFB8AE5-B96E-4255-AE54-C68AD316766F?

The presentation to be covered on the call can also be found on the Company?s website: https://www.isoenergy.ca/

Final Assays Received

Drill Hole LE20-52 (Hurricane Section 4435E)

Drill hole LE20-52 was designed to evaluate the potential for additional high-grade mineralization to the south of drill holes LE20-40 and LE20-34 (Figures 2 and 3).? It successfully intersected a thick interval of strong uranium mineralization at the sub-Athabasca unconformity that averages 22.7% U3O8 over 7.5m from 318.5 to 326.0m.? The interval includes a very high-grade section that averages 67.2% U3O8 over 2.5m from 322.5 to 325.0m. ?Within the very high-grade section is a subinterval of continuous off-scale (>65K CPS on an RS-125 handheld spectrometer) mineralization that averages 79.9% U3O8 over 1.5m from 322.5 to 324.0m.? Figure 4 is a core photo of the mineralized interval.

Drill Hole LE20-53 (Hurricane Section 4410E)

Drill hole LE20-53 was completed 25m along-strike to the west of drill hole LE20-52 (Figures 2 and 5).? It successfully intersected 10.5m of strong uranium mineralization at the sub-Athabasca unconformity from 317.5 to 328.0m that averages 11.7% U3O8 (Figures 2 and 4).? The intersection includes a 3.0m subinterval of very strong uranium mineralization that averages 40.4% U3O8 from 324.5 to 327.5m.? Within the very high-grade section is a subinterval of off-scale (>65K CPS on an RS-125 handheld spectrometer) mineralization that averages 62.7% U3O8 over 0.5m from 326.0 to 326.5m.? Figure 6 is a core photo of the mineralized interval.

Next Steps

All assays from the 2020 winter drilling program at the Hurricane zone have now been received.? Data compilation and interpretation of the drilling results are well underway, as is planning for a summer drilling program that will continue to define the extent of the Hurricane zone.? The timing and amount of summer drilling may be impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic. The Company continues to monitor the situation will make decisions regarding future work programs in due course.

The Larocque East Property and the Hurricane Zone

The 100% owned Larocque East property consists of 20 mineral claims totaling 8,371 ha that are not encumbered by any royalties or other interests.? Larocque East is immediately adjacent to the north end of IsoEnergy?s Geiger property and is 35 km northwest of Orano Canada?s McClean Lake uranium mine and mill.?

Along with other target areas, the Property covers a 15-kilometre-long northeast extension of the Larocque Lake conductor system; a trend of graphitic metasedimentary basement rocks that is associated with significant uranium mineralization at the Hurricane zone, and in several occurrences on Cameco Corp. and Orano Canada Inc.?s neighbouring property to the southwest of Larocque East.? The Hurricane zone was discovered in July 2018 and was followed up with 29 drill holes in 2019 and an additional 14 drill holes to date in 2020.? Dimensions are currently 575m along-strike, 40m wide and up to 11m thick.? The zone is open for expansion along-strike to the east and on most sections.? Mineralization is polymetallic and commonly straddles the sub-Athabasca unconformity 320 m below surface.? The best intersection to date is 33.9% U3O8 over 8.5m in drill hole LE20-34.? Drilling at Cameco Corp.?s Larocque Lake zone on the neighbouring property to the southwest has returned historical intersections of up to 29.9% U3O8 over 7.0m in drill hole Q22-040.? Like the nearby Geiger property, Larocque East is located adjacent to the Wollaston-Mudjatik transition zone  a major crustal suture related to most of the uranium deposits in the eastern Athabasca Basin.? Importantly, the sandstone cover on the Property is thin, ranging between 140m and 330m in previous drilling.?

Qualified Person Statement

The scientific and technical information contained in this news release was prepared by Andy Carmichael, P.Geo., IsoEnergy?s Senior Geologist, who is a ?Qualified Person? (as defined in NI 43-101 ? Standards of Disclosure for Mineral Projects).? Mr. Carmichael has verified the data disclosed. ?All radioactivity measurements reported herein are total gamma from an RS-125 hand-held spectrometer.? As mineralized drill holes at the Hurricane zone are oriented very steeply (-80 to -90 degrees) into a zone of mineralization that is interpreted to be horizontal, the true thickness of the intersections is expected to be greater than or equal to 90% of the core lengths.? This news release refers to properties other than those in which the Company has an interest. ?Mineralization on those other properties is not necessarily indicative of mineralization on the Company?s properties. ?All chemical analyses are completed for the Company by SRC Geoanalytical Laboratories in Saskatoon, SK.? For additional information regarding the Company?s Larocque East Project, including its quality assurance and quality control procedures, please see the Technical Report dated effective May 15, 2019 on the Company?s profile at www.sedar.com.

About IsoEnergy

IsoEnergy is a well-funded uranium exploration and development company with a portfolio of prospective projects in the eastern Athabasca Basin in Saskatchewan, Canada. ?The Company recently discovered the high-grade Hurricane Zone of uranium mineralization on its 100% owned Larocque East property in the Eastern Athabasca Basin.? IsoEnergy is led by a Board and Management team with a track record of success in uranium exploration, development and operations. ?The Company was founded and is supported by the team at its major shareholder, NexGen Energy Ltd. ?

Craig Parry

Chief Executive Officer

IsoEnergy Ltd.

+1 778 379 3211

cparry@isoenergy.ca

www.isoenergy.ca

Investor Relations

Kin Communications

+1 604 684 6730

iso@kincommunications.com

www.isoenergy.ca

In Europe:

Swiss Resource Capital AG

Jochen Staiger

info@resource-capital.ch

www.resource-capital.ch

Neither the TSX Venture Exchange nor its Regulations 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 shall not constitute an offer to sell or a solicitation of any offer to buy any securities, nor shall there be any sale of any securities in any jurisdiction in which such offer, solicitation or sale would be unlawful. The securities referenced herein have not been, nor will they be, registered under the United States Securities Act of 1933, as amended (the ?U.S. Securities Act?), and such securities may not be offered or sold within the United States absent registration under the U.S. Securities Act or an applicable exemption from the registration requirements thereunder.

Forward-Looking Information

The information contained herein contains ?forward-looking statements? within the meaning of the United States Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995 and ?forward-looking information? within the meaning of applicable Canadian securities legislation. ?Forward-looking information? includes, but is not limited to, statements with respect to the activities, events or developments that the Company expects or anticipates will or may occur in the future, including, without limitation, planned exploration activities. Generally, but not always, forward-looking information and statements can be identified by the use of words such as ?plans?, ?expects?, ?is expected?, ?budget?, ?scheduled?, ?estimates?, ?forecasts?, ?intends?, ?anticipates?, or ?believes? or the negative connotation thereof or variations of such words and phrases or state that certain actions, events or results ?may?, ?could?, ?would?, ?might? or ?will be taken?, ?occur? or ?be achieved? or the negative connotation thereof.

Such forward-looking information and statements are based on numerous assumptions, including among others, that the results of planned exploration activities are as anticipated, the price of uranium, the anticipated cost of planned exploration activities, that general business and economic conditions will not change in a material adverse manner, that financing will be available if and when needed and on reasonable terms, that third party contractors, equipment and supplies and governmental and other approvals required to conduct the Company?s planned exploration activities will be available on reasonable terms and in a timely manner. Although the assumptions made by the Company in providing forward-looking information or making forward-looking statements are considered reasonable by management at the time, there can be no assurance that such assumptions will prove to be accurate.

Forward-looking information and statements also involve known and unknown risks and uncertainties and other factors, which may cause actual events or results in future periods to differ materially from any projections of future events or results expressed or implied by such forward-looking information or statements, including, among others: negative operating cash flow and dependence on third party financing, uncertainty of additional financing, no known mineral reserves or resources, the limited operating history of the Company, the influence of a large shareholder,? alternative sources of energy and uranium prices, aboriginal title and consultation issues, reliance on key management and other personnel, actual results of exploration activities being different than anticipated, changes in exploration programs based upon results, availability of third party contractors, availability of equipment and supplies, failure of equipment to operate as anticipated; accidents, effects of weather and other natural phenomena and other risks associated with the mineral exploration industry, environmental risks, changes in laws and regulations, community relations and delays in obtaining governmental or other approvals.

Although the Company has attempted to identify important factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from those contained in the forward-looking information or implied by forward-looking information, there may be other factors that cause results not to be as anticipated, estimated or intended. There can be no assurance that forward-looking information and statements will prove to be accurate, as actual results and future events could differ materially from those anticipated, estimated or intended. Accordingly, readers should not place undue reliance on forward-looking statements or information.? The Company undertakes no obligation to update or reissue forward-looking information as a result of new information or events except as required by applicable securities laws.
A team of medical personnel and police traveling in an ambulance was pelted with stones when they had gone to escort family members of a person who died of COVID-19 in Uttar Pradesh's Moradabad.

The ambulance was taking the family members to the quarantine facility.

"When our team boarded the ambulance a crowd suddenly emerged and started pelting stones. Some doctors are still there. We are injured," said the ambulance driver.

Sharing details regarding the incident, SSP Amit Pathak told news agency ANI, "A COVID-19 positive patient had passed away in Nagphani area. In this regard, the patient's first contact, his family members, were to be quarantined. A medical team and police team had visited here for the same."

Moradabad: Some people pelted stones at medical team&police which had gone to take a person possibly infected with #COVID."When our team boarded ambulance with patient,suddenly crowd emerged&started pelting stones.Some doctors are still there.We are injured,"says ambulance driver pic.twitter.com/Rpo5jDRuJY  ANI UP (@ANINewsUP) April 15, 2020

#WATCH Moradabad: Some people pelted stones at medical team&police personnel who had gone to take the family of a #COVID19 positive patient (who died recently), to take them to a quarantine facility. 3 people were injured including a doctor & pharmacist. pic.twitter.com/q4FTzV8Vqc  ANI UP (@ANINewsUP) April 15, 2020

Attack on doctor and policemen in Moradabad. Guess which community attacked them? pic.twitter.com/tSh2LS1BpQ  Mrs. Lucifer  (@Ar_Shivangni) April 15, 2020





He added, "When the family members came out, a crowd pelted stones. The ambulance and police vehicle got damaged. We are sending the family members to the quarantine centre. The situation is under control now. We will identify the people involved in this incident and strict action will be taken against them."

The SSP said that some members of the medical team have received injuries.

"This is a violation of Section 144 and Epidemic Diseases Act, Disaster Management Act. Action will be taken under the National Security Act also," Pathak said.

Tatpal Singh, a pharmacist who was present at the site of the incident said: "We received orders to shift family members of a person who died due to coronavirus to another place. Four police personnel also went there along with us.

Twitter

"The family members were ready to come with us. But locals arrived and refused to let the family members go. Later, they got into a verbal fight with the police and started pelting stones."

As the coronavirus stigma grows, in the national capital, two women resident doctors of Safdarjung Hospital were assaulted by a man for 'spreading' the virus.





Last month in Indore, a group of health workers who had gone for coronavirus testing were attacked.
 Flash

Chinese President Xi Jinping said Tuesday that China and Serbia have once again demonstrated their brotherly bond and sincere friendship with concrete actions in the face of the COVID-19 challenge.

He made the remarks in a phone conversation with his Serbian counterpart, Aleksandar Vucic.

The China-Serbia relationship is the most profound type of relations between countries, Xi pointed out, adding that the Chinese side empathizes with the COVID-19 threat the Serbian people are facing right now.

Noting that China has provided Serbia with urgently needed medical and protective supplies and sent high-level medical experts to the European country, he said China will continue to offer help and support for Serbia's fight against the coronavirus disease.

Xi said he believes that under the strong leadership of Vucic, the courageous Serbian people will surely overcome the epidemic at an early date.

The profound and special friendship between China and Serbia was forged with blood and will, Xi stressed, adding that all risks and challenges, whatever they might be, will only make the two countries' iron-clad friendship even more indestructible.

China, he said, is willing to work with Serbia to steadfastly safeguard international morality and push for solidarity and cooperation of the international community.

Xi said he is confident that through the test of the joint fight against COVID-19, the China-Serbia comprehensive strategic partnership will usher in a better future.

He also expressed his sincere hope that the China-Serbia friendship will flourish forever.

For his part, Vucic said he is sincerely glad that China has brought COVID-19 under control at home.

China offered a helping hand when the Serbian people were in difficulty, and the Chinese medical team in particular provided great support and help for Serbia's epidemic prevention and control, he said, adding that his country will always remember that.

Noting that China has given the Serbian people hope in defeating the epidemic, he stressed that no matter what difficulties and challenges may occur, the Serbian people will always be a sincere and reliable iron-clad friend of the Chinese people.

The Serbian president said that his country will do its best to take good care of Chinese nationals in Serbia, and that he is ready to maintain close contact with Xi.

He also wished the two countries an everlasting friendship.
The Chinese government failed to warn the public for days about the seriousness of the coronavirus outbreak in Wuhan after officials secretly concluded on Jan. 14 that they likely were facing a pandemic, according to documents reviewed by the AP.

Why it matters: Chinese President Xi Jinping finally warned the public on Jan. 20, but millions of people had already begun traveling across the country to attend Lunar New Year celebrations.

It took the first case outside China, in Thailand on Jan. 13, to galvanize officials in Beijing to begin to launch a nationwide effort to distribute test kits, ease the criteria for confirming cases and order health officials to screen patients.

A Jan. 14 memo recognized that "clustered cases suggest that human-to-human transmission is possible."

The following six days until Xi's public warning came on top of an almost two-week period in which China's Center for Disease Control did not register any cases from local officials  even though hundreds of patients were appearing in hospitals across the country.

What they're saying: "This is tremendous," Zuo-Feng Zhang, an epidemiologist at UCLA, told the AP. "If they took action six days earlier, there would have been much fewer patients and medical facilities would have been sufficient. We might have avoided the collapse of Wuhans medical system."

"Allegations of a cover-up or lack of transparency in China are groundless," said foreign ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian at a press conference last week.

Go deeper: U.S.-China tensions hit a dangerous new high
Most quantum computers being developed around the world will only work at fractions of a degree above absolute zero. That requires multi-million-dollar refrigeration and as soon as you plug them into conventional electronic circuits they'll instantly overheat.

But now researchers led by Professor Andrew Dzurak at UNSW Sydney have addressed this problem.

"Our new results open a path from experimental devices to affordable quantum computers for real world business and government applications," says Professor Dzurak.

The researchers' proof-of-concept quantum processor unit cell, on a silicon chip, works at 1.5 Kelvin - 15 times warmer than the main competing chip-based technology being developed by Google, IBM, and others, which uses superconducting qubits.

"This is still very cold, but is a temperature that can be achieved using just a few thousand dollars' worth of refrigeration, rather than the millions of dollars needed to cool chips to 0.1 Kelvin," explains Dzurak.

"While difficult to appreciate using our everyday concepts of temperature, this increase is extreme in the quantum world."

Quantum computers are expected to outperform conventional ones for a range of important problems, from precision drug-making to search algorithms. Designing one that can be manufactured and operated in a real-world setting, however, represents a major technical challenge.

The UNSW researchers believe that they have overcome one of the hardest obstacles standing in the way of quantum computers becoming a reality.

In a paper published in the journal Nature today, Dzurak's team, together with collaborators in Canada, Finland and Japan, report a proof-of-concept quantum processor unit cell that, unlike most designs being explored worldwide, doesn't need to operate at temperatures below one-tenth of one Kelvin.

Dzurak's team first announced their experimental results via the academic pre-print archive in February last year. Then, in October 2019, a group in the Netherlands led by a former post-doctoral researcher in Dzurak's group, Menno Veldhorst, announced a similar result using the same silicon technology developed at UNSW in 2014. The confirmation of this 'hot qubit' behaviour by two groups on opposite sides of the world has led to the two papers being published 'back-to-back' in the same issue of Nature today.

Qubit pairs are the fundamental units of quantum computing. Like its classical computing analogue - the bit - each qubit characterises two states, a 0 or a 1, to create a binary code. Unlike a bit, however, it can manifest both states simultaneously, in what is known as a "superposition".

The unit cell developed by Dzurak's team comprises two qubits confined in a pair of quantum dots embedded in silicon. The result, scaled up, can be manufactured using existing silicon chip factories, and would operate without the need for multi-million-dollar cooling. It would also be easier to integrate with conventional silicon chips, which will be needed to control the quantum processor.

A quantum computer that is able to perform the complex calculations needed to design new medicines, for example, will require millions of qubit pairs, and is generally accepted to be at least a decade away. This need for millions of qubits presents a big challenge for designers.

"Every qubit pair added to the system increases the total heat generated," explains Dzurak, "and added heat leads to errors. That's primarily why current designs need to be kept so close to absolute zero."

The prospect of maintaining quantum computers with enough qubits to be useful at temperatures much colder than deep space is daunting, expensive and pushes refrigeration technology to the limit.

The UNSW team, however, have created an elegant solution to the problem, by initialising and "reading" the qubit pairs using electrons tunnelling between the two quantum dots.

The proof-of-principle experiments were performed by Dr Henry Yang from the UNSW team, who Dzurak describes as a "brilliant experimentalist".

###

Other authors on the paper include Ross Leon, Jason Hwang (now at the University of Sydney), Andre Saraiva, Tuomo Tanttu, Wister Huang, Kok-Wai Chan and Fay Hudson, all from Professor Dzurak's group, as well as long-time collaborators Dr Arne Laucht and Professor Andrea Morello from UNSW.

Dr Kuan-Yen from Aalto University in Finland assisted the device fabrication team, while Professor Kohei Itoh from Keio University in Japan provided enriched silicon-28 wafers from which the devices were made. The qubit devices incorporated nano-scale magnets to help enable qubit operation, and these were designed with support from a team led by Professor Michel Pioro-Ladriere at Universite de Sherbrooke in Canada, including his PhD student Julien Camirand Lemyre.
With travel restrictions in place worldwide, were turning to photojournalists who can help transport you, virtually, to some of our planets most beautiful and intriguing places. Were calling this new series The World Through a Lens. This week, Stephen Hiltner, an editor on the Travel desk, invites you to join him on an arduous multiday hike to an archaeological site in Colombia.

It was the third day of our trek through the Colombian jungle, just before 5 a.m., when Ailyn Paul, one of our guides, came by to rouse us from our narrow bunks.

Sudados! she said, calling out our groups nickname  The Sweaty Ones  through the scant privacy of our mosquito netting. Wake up! Its time to visit the Lost City.
Farm Bureau Insurance of Tennessee said it will issue $30 million in special payments to its auto policyholders in the state in response to economic stresses caused by the coronavirus emergency.

The special payment is based on approximately 24% of two months auto premium paid for each vehicle covered. Auto policyholders should start receiving checks in May 2020. The insurer covers approximately 1.2 million automobiles in the state.

During the states stay-at-home order, Tennesseans are driving less and are filing fewer automobile claims. While that trend may continue, and some insurers are taking a pay it back approach, Farm Bureau Insurance is opting to pay it forward,' Chief Executive Officer Jeff Pannell said.

Related: Updated List of Insurers Offering Discounts in Coronavirus Relief Effort

The payment program is funded from Farm Bureau Insurance reserve funds, which are set aside to protect policyholders in catastrophes such as tornado outbreaks and massive hailstorms.

This situation certainly rates as a catastrophe. Its not the kind of shock we typically plan for, but were glad the money is there to help, Pannell said.

Farm Bureau Insurance of Tennessee, headquartered in Columbia, Tenn., is a single-state company that offers auto, home and life coverage to members of the Tennessee Farm Bureau Federation. Membership is available to all Tennessee residents.

Topics Auto Agribusiness Tennessee
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Linkedin Asip Hasani (The Jakarta Post) Surabaya, East Java  Wed, April 15, 2020 14:58 636 fc6853813033f564188675f8bd20bab6 1 National East-Java,governor,khofifah-indar-parawansa,PSBB,Tri-Rismaharini,risma,COVID-19-in-Indonesia,covid-19-surabaya,covid-19-jawa-timur,virus-korona-indonesia Free

East Java Governor Khofifah Indar Parawansa has finally decided to submit a request to implement large-scale social restrictions (PSBB) to the Health Ministry to stop the spread of COVID-19 as a result of a rising number of cases over the past three days.

Khofifah, who was previously adamant about not implementing the restrictions, said the provincial COVID-19 task force had requested detailed measures from Greater Surabaya administrations -- Surabaya, Sidoarjo, Gresik and Lamongan -- in the efforts to significantly reduce the spread of the virus.

The detailed measures are part of requirements that any region must meet before requesting PSBB status.

"We are waiting for the detailed [measures]. Ive been informed that the respective administrations are working hard on it. Hopefully tonight or tomorrow [Thursday] we will receive an update," Khofifah told the press on Tuesday at the governor's official residence, the Grahadi Building, in Surabaya.

Read also: COVID-19: More regions request PSBB status as Indonesia sees big jump in infections, deaths

East Java recorded a sharp increase in the number of confirmed COVID-19 cases in the last three days, bringing the total tally to 474 with 81 recoveries and 45 fatalities as of Tuesday.

Surabaya is the hardest hit city in the province with 228 confirmed cases. Surabayas satellite cities such as Sidoarjo, Lamongan and Gresik have seen 45, 25 and 18 confirmed cases, respectively.

The head of the task force's curative team, Joni Wahyuhadi, told The Jakarta Post that cities and regencies that were hard hit by the virus should have requested PSBB status.

He refuted an accusation that put the provincial COVID-19 task force into the spotlight for discouraging cities and regencies from submitting their respective requests for PSBB status.

"Each time the governor, as the provincial task force head, announces the progress of COVID-19 spread in respective cities and regencies, those with a high number of confirmed cases, especially Surabaya, should [automatically] think of stricter measures to stop the spread," said Joni.

Separately, Surabaya task force spokesperson M. Fikser said the city administration had been working on the detailed measures that would be included in its PSBB status request.

Read also: COVID-19: Community in Madiun builds open kitchen to help affected residents avoid hunger

"I have not yet been informed about the progress of the meeting on the matter," he told the Post.

A source familiar with the matter revealed to the Post that the Surabaya administration had been preparing the measures for the request long before the surge in cases.

However, the source said that Governor Khofifah was disappointed with the Surabaya administrations actions, which were deemed taken without coordination with the provincial administration.

"There have been silent disagreements between the two leaders, said the source, referring to Khofifah and Surabaya Mayor Tri Rismaharini.
The global death toll from the coronavirus is nearing 128,000 with more than 2 million infections confirmed, causing mass disruptions as governments continue to try to slow the spread of the new respiratory illness.

Here's a roundup of COVID-19 developments in RFE/RL's broadcast regions.

Russia

A new permit system introduced in Moscow to help authorities in their bid to slow the spread of the coronavirus sputtered at the beginning as lines snaked around some metro stations and filled some streets with traffic.

As of April 15, Moscow residents were required to obtain electronic permission online to use private or public transport in the Russian capital, with police checks creating the type of crowds authorities were looking to eliminate as the pandemic grows across the country, and especially in Moscow.

The new system took effect as Russia saw a record daily rise of 3,388 in the number of confirmed cases of the virus overnight, bringing the overall total in the country to 24,490. The federal coronavirus response center said 198 people had died from COVID-19, an increase from the previous day of 28.

According to Russian health officials, Moscow has the largest number of registered coronavirus cases in the country at 14,776, including 106 deaths, and 1,205 recovered patients.

Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin said that despite some initial issues with the permit system, the problem had eased by midday and he promised to find a way to streamline movement permit checks.

"In the morning, due to control measures conducted by the City Interior Department, queues appeared, which in the current circumstances is quite critical. I have talked to the chief of the City Interior Department and asked him to organize the work in a way to prevent mass gatherings of people," Sobyanin wrote on Twitter.

Permits to use private or public transport are divided into three categories -- to go to work and back home, to visit medical institutions, and twice a week for private purposes. Movement without a permit is punished by a hefty fine.

Georgia

Georgia's government has decided to lock down four of the South Caucasus nation's main cities to control the spread of the coronavirus.

Prime Minister Giorgi Gakharia told reporters on April 14 that his cabinet decided to take the move for Tbilisi, the capital, as well as for the cities of Rustavi, Batumi, and Kutaisi for 10 days as the country grapples with the pandemic.

Gakharia said that the decision was made after 30 more people were registered as infected with the coronavirus in one day.

"The government has decided to ban citizens from entering or leaving...the cities...starting at 9 p.m. April 15," Gakharia said.

According to Gakharia, his government will initiate a move to extend the state of emergency that was announced in the country over the coronavirus for one month on March 21.

"We will ask President [Salome Zurabishvili] to propose that parliament prolongs the state of emergency until May 10 to be able to define our next steps to slow the [spread of the virus]," Gakharia said.

Parliamentary speaker Mamuka Mdinaradze said after Gakharia's press conference that lawmakers will most likely discuss a possible prolongation of the state of emergency on April 21 or April 22.

According to Mdinaradze, the ruling majority in parliament will support the proposal.

On April 15, Georgia's health authorities said that the number of coronavirus cases in the country had reached 306, including three deaths.

With reporting by RFE/RL's Russian and Georgian services
Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, April 15)  The enhanced community quarantineenhanced community quarantine in the entire Davao Region will be extended from April 19 to April 26, said Davao City Mayor Sara Duterte.

The presidential daughter said the borders of Davao City will be closed to traffic, except for important cargoes and emergencies. Airports and seaports will also remain closed.

Duterte said that the extension was decided upon by officials of the region on Wednesday amid the three new positive cases in Davao City.

Na-desisyunan sa Inter-Agency Task Force (IATF) na mag extend ng additional seven days sa implementation sa ECQ," she said. "So it is half of the incubation period.

[Translation: It was decided in the Inter-agency Task Force (IATF) to extend the implementation of the ECQ for an additional seven days, so it is half of the incubation period.]

Davao Region, formerly called Southern Mindanao, is composed of Davao de Oro, Davao del Norte, Davao del Sur, Davao Oriental and Davao Occidental.

The Department of Health on Wednesday reported that 58 more people survived the viral disease, bringing the total number of recoveries to 353.

The DOH, meanwhile, recorded 14 new fatalities. The death toll is now at 349.

As of Wednesday, the Philippines has 5,453 confirmed COVID-19 cases, with the addition of 230 new patients.
Rajasthan Chief Minister Ashok Gehlot on Wednesday expressed concern over the rising cases of coronavirus in Ramganj area in Jaipur here and appealed to people to come forward for testing for their possible infection without any fear.

"I appeal to everyone in Jaipur to please come forward for the corona test and do not be afraid. Many of the corona virus infected patients have recovered and were discharged from hospitals," Gehlot said in a tweet.

He said the state government has provided all facilities in hospitals for treatment. Peoole can call helpline numbers and the government is committed to take care of health and save lives.

"We are quite confident that we are capable of defeating corona. I am saying this because I have full faith in my doctors, health workers, sanitation workers, police and administrative officials who are trying to save lives of people without any relaxation. My heartfelt thanks to them for their dedication and selfless service," he added.

All India Congress Committee general secretary and state in-charge Avinash Pandey said all workers of the state government and Congress party are working under the guidance of the chief minister for continuously neutralising the impact of the corona pandemic.

Pandey appealed to people to maintain a "supportive atmosphere" along with following the lockdown rules to win over coronavirus.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
[April 15, 2020] Battelle Donates $1 Million to Support Three Central Ohio Organizations Providing Essential, High-Demand Services During Coronavirus Pandemic

As part of its mission to make positive impacts in the city it's called home for 90 years, Battelle announced it is donating a total of $1 million to three central Ohio organizations to provide increased emergency support because of the coronavirus pandemic. "It is well known that, in normal times, most of Battelle's philanthropic efforts center around STEM education initiatives," explained Lou Von Thaer, President and CEO of Battelle. "Given the impact that the pandemic is having on the health and well-being of our community, we turned to three trusted partners to understand the challenges they and their clients are facing so that Battelle could offer targeted support." YMCA of Central Ohio | $500,000 Since the beginning of this crisis, the YMCA has worked to expand emergency shelter access to over 200 people, stand up pandemic childcare sites and services for first responders and launched a virtual phone health and wellness program. This gift will support these emergency efforts and the staff to serve the needs of our community. "Battelle is a pillar of the Columbus community as evidenced by their groundbreaking research and development in response to the COVID-19 crsis," said President and CEO of YMCA of Central Ohio Tony Collins. "The YMCA of Central Ohio is grateful for Battelle's commitment to our community, city and state. We are also incredibly grateful for Battelle's generous philanthropic support of the YMCA so we can provide essential human services support to our community during this time of crisis."



Community Shelter Board | $250,000 Battelle's gift for homeless prevention programming will provide a safety net for those who may miss rent or house payments. "You can't stay home if you don't have a home," said Michelle Heritage, executive director of Community Shelter Board. "With incredible partners like Battelle by our side, we are fighting to save the lives of those most vulnerable in our community."

CSB is the collective impact organization driving strategy, accountability, collaboration, and resources to achieve the best outcomes for people facing homelessness in Columbus and Franklin County. LifeCare Alliance (Meals on Wheels) | $250,000 Serving five central Ohio counties and delivering meals 365 days a year, LifeCare Alliance is one of the largest Meals-on-Wheels providers in the country, and the only provider that offers a daily delivery. This gift will support 75,000 meals purchased, packaged and delivered to seniors in need during the pandemic. "Battelle has been an incredible supporter of LifeCare Alliance since its founding, through funding support, volunteering, and Board members," said Chuck Gehring, executive director of LifeCare Alliance. "This support comes at a critical time, when the need for our Meals-on-Wheels has never been higher." About Battelle Every day, the people of Battelle apply science and technology to solving what matters most. At major technology centers and national laboratories around the world, Battelle conducts research and development, designs and manufactures products, and delivers critical services for government and commercial customers. Headquartered in Columbus, Ohio since its founding in 1929, Battelle serves the national security, health and life sciences, and energy and environmental industries. For more information, visit www.battelle.org. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20200415005408/en/

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A HSE sign encouraging Social Distancing is seen behind two seagulls in Howth, Dublin, as restrictions remain in place in Ireland to help curb the spread of the coronavirus. Photo: Brian Lawless/PA Wire

Keep informed of these unprecedented times with the latest coronavirus updates on Independent.ie's live blog.





21:11 15/04/2020

Two healthcare workers at the same hospital die of suspected coronavirus

Two healthcare workers at the same hospital have died of suspected coronavirus in the past 24 hours.

The hospital staff, one male and one female, were both middle aged and were working until they became ill.

Staff at the hospital are understood to be shocked at the deaths.

The woman, aged in her 50s, was a member of the household staff and the man, in his 40s, was a health care assistant.

They both had children.

The HSE is aware of the deaths.

The deceased are believed to be the second and third cases of health service workers dying of Covid-19.

Read More





21:01 15/04/2020

French coronavirus death toll jumps by record 1,438 deaths

The number of people who died from coronavirus infection in France jumped by 1,438 or 9.1pc to 17,167 in the biggest single-day increase as a number of nursing homes reported cumulative tolls following the three-day Easter weekend, the health ministry said on Wednesday.

The number of people who died in hospitals rose by 514 or 5pc to 10,643, less than the 541 reported on Tuesday, but the cumulative death toll in nursing homes rose by 924 or 17pc to 6,524, compared with 221 on Tuesday.

"This increase is not the mortality rate over 24 hours but is due to a catch-up in reporting of data following the three-day weekend," Health Ministry Director Jerome Salomon said.

He said the COVID-19 pandemic is still highly active and called on French people to strictly respect confinement measures.





19:46 15/04/2020

Childcare employees can earn up to 586 a week under new wage subsidy scheme announced by Minister Zappone

Minister for Children and Youth Affairs Katherine Zappone announced a wage subsidy scheme for childcare workers today, which will see them earn up to 586 a week during Covid-19 lockdown

The bespoke subsidy system for the sector was expected last week, leading to fears that people employed in the sector would go unpaid for the totality of the Covid-19 lockdown, but Ms Zappone sent a letter to childcare providers today.

According to the letter sent by Ms Zappone, payments will be received on Apri 24,l for anyone who has signed up by close of business next Tuesday, April 21.

Payments can be backdated to April 6.

Under the Funding Agreement for the new administrative scheme, the Department of Children and Youth Affairs (DCYA) will make a payment to the childcare service which will equate to the Maximum additional payment the childcare service can make to an eligible employee under the Covid-19 Temporary Wage.





19:03 15/04/2020

Germany set to ease some lockdown measures

Germany plans to let small shops reopen as early as next week after a four-week coronavirus shutdown.

But Europes biggest economy is keeping strict social distancing rules in place.

After much-anticipated talks with Germanys 16 state governors, Chancellor Angela Merkel set out a plan for the first steps of a slow restart of public life.

A ban on gatherings of more than two people in public has been in place since March 23 and was due to run until Sunday.

Ms Merkel says the restrictions will remain in place, and officials will review at the end of the month what happens after May 3.





18:00 15/04/2020

Breakdown of today's figures

The Health Protection Surveillance Centre has today been informed that 38 people diagnosed with COVID-19 in Ireland have died.

29 deaths located in the east, six in the west, three in the south of the country.

The people included 22 males and 16 females.

The median age of todays reported deaths is 84.

28 people were reported as having underlying health conditions.

There have now been 444 COVID-19 related deaths in Ireland.

As of 1pm today, the HPSC has been notified of the following cases:

An additional 657 new confirmed cases of COVID-19 reported by Irish laboratories.

An additional 411 confirmed cases of COVID-19 reported by a laboratory in Germany.

With the latest figures from Germany included, there are now a total of 12,547 confirmed cases of COVID-19 in Ireland.





17:40 15/04/2020

38 further deaths in Republic of Ireland and 832 new Covid-19 cases

Dr Tony Holohan has confirmed that 657 new Covid-19 cases in Ireland and an additional 411 cases reported by a laboratory in Germany bringing the total number of new cases in the Republic of Ireland to 832.

In total in the Republic, 12,547 have now tested positive for the virus.

A further 38 patients in Ireland have died after contracting the coronavirus.

It brings the total number of deaths associated with Covid-19 here to 444.

In total on the island of Ireland there have now been 14,635 confirmed cases of Covid-19 and 584 people have sadly died as a result.





Visit our Covid-19 vaccine dashboard for updates on the roll out of the vaccination program and the rate of Coronavirus cases Ireland

16:05 15/04/2020

EU unveils road map to exit coronavirus restrictions

The European Union has moved to head off a chaotic and potentially disastrous easing of restrictions that are limiting the spread of coronavirus, warning its 27 nations to move cautiously as they return to normal life, and to base their actions on scientific advice.

With Austria, the Czech Republic and Denmark already lifting some lockdown measures, the European Commission rushed out its road map for members of the worlds biggest trade bloc to co-ordinate an exit from the lockdowns, which they expect should take at least a few months and involve large-scale testing.

About 80,000 people have died in Europe from Covid-19  two-thirds of the global toll  according to the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control. The commission said those scientists should be relied upon to guide national exit strategies in the weeks and months to come.

Read More





15:45 15/04/2020

Six further coronavirus-related deaths in Northern Ireland registered and 121 new cases confirmed

A further six patients in Northern Ireland have died in hospital after contracting coronavirus.

It brings the total number of confirmed deaths in the area to 140.

The Public Health Agency said a further 121 cases of the virus have been confirmed in Northern Ireland.

This brings the total number of cases to 2,088.

So far 13,672 people have been tested for Covid-19.





15:20 15/04/2020

Further temporary relaxation of EU driving and resting time rules due to ongoing COVID-19 pandemic

The Road Safety Authority (RSA) and the Department of Transport, Tourism and Sport have agreed a further extension of the temporary derogation from certain provisions of the EU driving and resting time rules.

The prolongation of this temporary derogation is being made in view of the potential ongoing impact of the COVID-19 crisis on HGV operations, the importance of ensuring continuity of supply chains; and in response to requests from the haulage industry.

This extension includes additional measures, which will apply from 17 April to 31 May 2020. The derogation will apply to all operators and drivers subject to the EU drivers hours and tachograph rules engaged in the carriage of all goods - including oil supplies - and will continue to be reviewed by the RSA during this time.

It includes provisions for fortnightly driving time, extra reduced daily rest periods, weekly rest requirements, regular weekly rest in the cabin. Details of the derogation are outlined further, on their website.





14:41 15/04/2020

10,000 people still haven't claimed 350 Covid-19 illness benefit

TEN thousand people who have been medically certified for the 350-per-week enhanced illness benefit have yet to receive the payment because they haven't submitted applications.

The payment is available to people who are off sick from work due to falling ill from coronavirus or who have been told to self isolate by a doctor if they have a suspected case.

A total of 27,300 people have been medically certified to meet the conditions for the receipt of the COVID-19 enhanced illness benefit payment, according to senior government official Liz Canavan.

Read More

School transport refunds for parents under review due to coronavirus classroom closures

PARENTS have been seeking refunds for rural school transport fees in light of the closure of schools due to the coronavirus crisis.

The government said the matter is under review after it received some requests for families to get some of their money back while classrooms are shut down and buses are off the road.

There is a single charge of 350-per pupil for secondary school students up to a maximum of 650 for a family and 100-per pupil in primary school up to a maximum of 220 for a family.

Pupils whose families hold a medical card are entitled to travel for free.

How Europe is preparing for life after lockdown as some countries start to lift coronavirus restrictions

As some European countries take their first provisional steps out of lockdown, member states have come into conflict with the European Commission.

Following a video conference with EU leaders on March 26, Commission President Ursula Von der Leyen said the bloc needed to operate in a coordinated exit from lockdown.

She said failing to do so would "undermine the effectiveness of the tough measures we took".

Read More

13.37 15/04/2020

Coronavirus: Ireland legend Robbie Keane and wife Claudine raise money in a bid to support frontline heroes during crisis

Former Ireland captain Robbie Keane and his wife Claudine have set up a fundraiser aiming to raise 20,000 for Irelands hospitals.

The couple are raising money as part of The Mater Foundations Our Hospital Heroes Appeal to protect healthcare staff who are likely to contract the coronavirus themselves.

They have raised over 12,000 in just two days.

Writing on the GoFundMe fundraiser, Robbie and Claudine opened up about how the virus hit close to home recently.

Read More

Nearly 1m worth of donations has provided 55,000 meals for frontline staff

Expand Close Pictured is Cian O Flaherty, founder of Feed The Heroes. Photo credit: INPHO/Dan Sheridan / Facebook

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Whatsapp Pictured is Cian O Flaherty, founder of Feed The Heroes. Photo credit: INPHO/Dan Sheridan

Nearly 1m worth of donations has provided over 55,000 meals for frontline staff from a non-profit organisation.

The 'Feed the Heroes' campaign has raised 933,000 over the last four weeks through 15,000 donors and delivered 55,000 meals to healthcare staff nationwide.

The meals have been delivered daily to community test sites, contact tracing sites, hospitals and emergency services nationwide.

15pc of the meals have been to staff in ICU and High Dependency Units and another 15pc were delivered to emergency responders such as paramedics.

Read More

Boating and fishing banned in Killarney National Park due to coronavirus crisis

BOATING, kayaking and fishing has been banned in Killarney National Park as part of the coronavirus restrictions.

A senior government official said the measure has been taken so that additional pressure isn't put on the emergency services.

Department of the Taoiseach Assistant Secretary Liz Canavan said that insofar as possible national parks and nature reserves remain open and accessible to people that live locally.

She said most people are complying with the "vital public health guidelines around social distancing" and staying within two kilometres of their homes.

Read More





12.57 15/04/2020

Coronavirus: Health workers to be redeployed to nursing homes to help stem cluster spread

PUBLIC health workers are set to be redeployed to private nursing homes in an effort to stem the spread of the Covid-19 virus.

Unions for health staff and the HSE have signed off on a deal in which those employed in the public health service will put their names forward and a volunteers register set up.

Volunteers will come from nursing, health care assistant, cleaning, chef and catering assistant roles.

However, management at the residential homes will have to have exhausted all avenues to recruit staff before they can use the scheme.

Our members want to help deal with the increasing clusters of the virus among the most vulnerable service users in the nursing home sector in their catchment area, said Siptu Health Division Organiser, Paul Bell.

Read More

Passenger numbers down by 90pc as gardai monitor all public transport to ensure essential travel

Passenger numbers are down by 90pc across public transport as An Garda Siochana have confirmed that they are monitoring all forms of transport to ensure only essential travel is taking place.

Buses, trains and trams are operating at 80pc capacity as part of lockdown measures and now gardai are enforcing essential travel across all modes of transport.

According to the National Transport Authority, passenger numbers on subsidised public transport, including Dublin Bus, Bus Eireann, Go-Ahead Ireland, Iarnrod Eireann and Luas are down by an average of approximately 90pc.

Gardai have also began monitoring all forms of transport to ensure only essential travel is taking place as per department of health guidelines

Lockdowns should be lifted in two-week stages to stem Covid-19 spread - WHO

Countries that ease restrictions imposed to fight the spread of the coronavirus should wait at least two weeks to evaluate the impact of such changes before easing again, the World Health Organization (WHO) said on Wednesday.

In its latest Strategy Update, the UN agency said that the world stands at a "pivotal juncture" in the pandemic and that "speed, scale, and equity must be our guiding principles" when deciding what measures are necessary.

Every country should implement comprehensive public health measures to maintain a sustainable steady state of low-level or no transmission and prepare its surge capacity to react rapidly to control any spread, the WHO said.

Read More





11.35 15/04/2020

Quad bikers in Dublin Mountains branded reckless for breaking 2km travel restrictions and damaging landscape

Quad bikers in the Dublin/Wicklow Mountains have been branded as reckless amid reports of bikes damaging the landscape in recent days.

The Department of Culture has stated that quad biking remains an illegal activity which is also extremely damaging to the fragile landscapes of the mountains.

Groups of people have been observed biking in the area in recent days, with some reportedly having broken the 2km radius travel limit, with speed of the bikes causing concern for local residents.

Fears have also been raised that the bikes may damage the environment and wildlife of the mountains.

Read More





11.26 15/04/2020

Daily government update on COVID-19 from Liz Canavan, a spokesperson for the Department of the Taoiseach:

43,400 employers are registered with Revenue for the Wage Subsidy scheme

27,300 people can meet the COVID-19 enhanced payment, 350 a week

Since March 31, 12,600 calls have been received by Community Call Forums. These can be contacted by individuals experiencing loneliness or financial issues



Service providers will engage with any customer experiencing financial difficulty to keep them connected to voice calls and data

Parents - never too late to have a conversation with your child about online communication

A campaign to raise awareness begins today. It is designed to reassure victims that resources are still available

National Library is asking public for websites which should be archived in order to capture the efforts undertaken during the pandemic





09.13 15/04/2020

Q&A: Why the jury's still out on the merits of face masks

Q: The debate over whether people should wear face masks in public during the Covid-19 crisis has reignited. Why is it back on the agenda?

A: It follows remarks by Dr David Nabarro, the World Health Organisation's Covid-19 envoy, who has said people should get accustomed to a new reality of always wearing a facial covering.

Q: Is he talking about after some lockdown restrictions have been eased?

A: His idea is that if hairdressing salons, for instance, are allowed reopen they would be useful. Ireland will face dilemmas on how far restrictive measures should be relaxed after May 5. So it's worth discussing any suggestions that might make things easier and safer.

Read More





08:30 15/04/2020

Northern Ireland fatalities may be 65pc higher than figures state

Deaths linked to coronavirus in Northern Ireland could be up to 65pc higher than was thought.

An additional 31 deaths in Northern Ireland that were associated with Covid-19 occurred in a 16-day period that were not initially included in official figures.

By April 3, there were 79 deaths here, well above the tally of 48 announced at the time.

The discrepancy emerged after the official figures were compared with more complete data held by Northern Ireland's official statistics agency.

It comes amid growing concerns of a significant underestimate in the number of fatalities.

Read More





07:21 15/04/2020

77 people have been discharged from ICU units

Tweeting this morning, Health Minister Simon Harris has said it was a number "to give us hope".

"A number to give us hope this morning -77. The number of people with #Covid19 who have now been discharged from ICU," he wrote.

"77 lives recovering thanks to the amazing dedication of our health professionals. 77 families relieved. 77 reasons to motivate us & encourage us to stay the course."

A number to give us hope this morning -77. The number of people with #Covid19 who have now been discharged from ICU. 77 lives recovering thanks to the amazing dedication of our health professionals. 77 families relieved. 77 reasons to motivate us & encourage us to stay the course  Simon Harris TD (@SimonHarrisTD) April 15, 2020

'WHO failed in basic duty and must be held accountable,' says president as US withdraws funding

US President Donald Trump said last night he has instructed his administration to at least temporarily halt funding to the World Health Organisation (WHO) over its handling of the coronavirus pandemic.

Mr Trump said the WHO had "failed in its basic duty and it must be held accountable." He said the group had promoted China's "disinformation" about the virus that likely led to a wider outbreak of the virus than otherwise would have occurred. But the president says the US will continue to engage with the organisation in pursuit of what he calls meaningful reforms.

Meanwhile, Mr Trump's May 1 target for restarting the US economy is "overly optimistic", his top infectious disease adviser said yesterday, after Mr Trump and state governors clashed over who has the power to lift restrictions aimed at curbing the coronavirus pandemic.

Read More

EU nations told they'll 'have to live with' virus until vaccine is found

Any loosening of lockdown measures will "unavoidably" lead to an increase in coronavirus infections, the European Commission will say today as it warns that governments "will have to live with" the virus until a vaccine is found.

The caution comes as several member states, including Italy and Spain, begin to ease lockdown restrictions, despite other governments extending quarantine measures for at least another month.

A leaked version of an EU-wide exit strategy, obtained by 'The Daily Telegraph' and to be launched by the president of the commission today, says: "Even though the way back to normality will be very long, it is also clear that the extraordinary confinement measures cannot last indefinitely.

"At the same time, it must be acknowledged that the virus continues circulating, and any level of relaxation of the confinement will unavoidably lead to a corresponding increase in new cases.
Six members of Jehovahs Witnesses banned in Russia face trial

 flickr.com/guampedia.com

17:04 15/04/2020

MOSCOW, April 15 (RAPSI)  A court in the city of Ulyanovsk will consider a criminal case against six members of Jehovahs Witnesses, a religious organization banned in Russia, the press service of the Prosecutor Generals Office reports Wednesday.

Depending on their alleged role, the defendants are charged with orgzanizing and participating in a religious community prohibited in Russia by court as extremist.

Investigators believe that a resident of Ulyanovsk has organized holding of meetings. During these meetings he has cited religious texts included in the federal list of extremist materials. Moreover, the man has collected money under the guise of donation. Other defendants took part in the meetings and propagated the Jehovahs Witnesses doctrine, the statement reads.

In April 2017, the Supreme Court of Russia ordered liquidation of the Jehovah's Witnesses managing organization and all its 395 local branches. In August, the Administrative Centre of Jehovah's Witnesses was added to the list of banned extremist organizations.

Jehovahs Witnesses religious organization has had many legal problems in Russia. Since 2009, 95 materials distributed by the organization in the country have been declared extremist and 8 Jehovah's Witnesses branches have been liquidated, according to the Justice Ministry.

Jehovah's Witnesses is an international religious organization based in Brooklyn, New York. Since 2004 several branches and chapters of the organization were banned and shut down in various regions of Russia.
At this critical moment when the international community needs unity and cooperation the most to combat the novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19), some Western politicians still don't seem able to quit politicizing the pandemic.

Recently, certain U.S. politicians, in total disregard of facts, have attempted to blame the World Health Organization (WHO) for their own countrys inadequate response to the disease and even threatened to freeze U.S. funding to the WHO.

As its clear to all, the root cause for the U.S. unreadiness to tackle the pandemic lies in the country itself, and the U.S. couldnt conceal its structural maladies by buck-passing.

The world has witnessed the leadership of the WHO in international cooperation regarding COVID-19.

Since the outbreak, the WHO has actively performed its duties under Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus. Upholding objectiveness and fairness, the organization has played an important role in helping various countries cope with COVID-19 and promoting international cooperation in fighting the pandemic.

The WHO has supported various countries to enhance their capacity to cope with the virus, cooperated with partners to provide accurate information about the pandemic and crack down on information crime, strived to ensure supply of necessary medical equipment for front-line health workers, trained and mobilized health workers, and coordinated efforts to accelerate the research and development related to the pandemic.

These efforts, which are exactly what the world needs at present, have won universal recognition and high praise from the international community.

It is my belief that the World Health Organization must be supported, as it is absolutely critical to the worlds efforts to win the war against COVID-19, United Nations (UN) Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said in a recent statement.

Some Western politicians making a big fuss about the impartiality of the WHO and pointing fingers at the organization is totally indefensible in front of facts.

Following the principles of fairness, objectivity, and impartiality, the WHO has served people around the world by releasing 50 technical documents, transporting more than 2 million pieces of protective equipment to 133 countries, and making joint efforts with over 90 countries to seek effective treatment methods.

By offering help to those who need it the most, the WHO has earnestly practiced professionalism and international humanitarian spirit.

They (WHO) have been very transparent as much as they have known the data. They have had daily calls, they have been very clear about the severity of this illness, and how the global community has to respond, said Ashish Jha, a public health professor at Harvard.

Anthony Fauci, director of the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said the WHO has been doing very well under the leadership of Tedros.

South African President Cyril Ramaphosa said in a recent statement that Tedros has shown exceptional leadership as the Director-General of the WHO from the very earliest stages of this unprecedented global health crisis.

All people who have conscience know clearly that those who try to blacken the WHOs name regardless of facts have been paying no attention to justice and running counter to universal opinion of the international community.

Beyond all doubt, theres no justice in the dictionaries of certain Western politicians. They havent thought about intensifying efforts to improve epidemic prevention and control measures of their country with a scientific and professional manner, but are always busy scapegoating others for selfish political interests, being a huge fan of unstrained political gambling.

In fact, more and more people are questioning why these politicians refuse to spend their time in saving more lives.

Public health emergency is a global challenge that no country can tackle on its own. The WHO was established exactly to improve global health governance and help various countries in the world cope with challenges to public health security.

Its extremely irresponsible for certain politicians to attempt to weaken the functions of multilateral organizations such as the WHO and sabotage global health governance system.

Sabotaging joint efforts and cooperation in fighting COVID-19 is a huge matter that concerns lives of people around the world. The international community must stay vigilant against such attempts.

(Zhong Sheng is a pen name often used by Peoples Daily to express its views on foreign policy.)
Process to apply for mobile computing devices

This communique outlines the process through which students who require assistance with a loan device can apply.

MESSAGE FROM THE DEAN OF STUDENT AFFAIRS

Dear Students

This communication follows the email that you received yesterday and will specifically outline the process through which students who require assistance with a loan device can apply.

COVID-19 is challenging us all to do things differently and to adjust to a new normal. We do this from very different circumstances. The University acknowledges these disparities and is doing all it can to ensure that our students are supported during this difficult time. As previously indicated, the remote online teaching and learning programme will start on 20 April 2020.

Whilst we have addressed the majority of the issues related to data access, we understand that some students still do not have access to devices appropriate for online and remote learning. We have thus secured a limited number of devices suitable for educational purposes that will be made available to students in need. Applications will be considered on a case by cases basis, and will take the needs of each applicant into account. These limited number of devices will be delivered to students in need.

Please note these are basic devices, will be on loan to students and will be charged to fee accounts. The charges will be reversed if the device is returned in good working order at the end of the academic year. Whilst we acknowledge that it may be difficult for some students to do so, we want to encourage those students who are able to, to continue their own efforts in securing an appropriate device.

Who may apply for a loan device?

Students registered for a full-time degree in 2020;

NSFAS funded and missing middle students with a family income of less than R600 000 annually. Bursary/scholarship funded students who have not received devices from their funders. (Please note that all information supplied will be verified); and

Students who do not have their own device, or who do not have access to a device.

Due to the challenges with delivery, regrettably only students residing within the borders of South Africa are eligible for this assistance.

Devices will be allocated in the following order of priority: final year undergraduate students, first year students, other undergraduate students and then postgraduate students.

Conditions

Devices will be made available on a case by case basis, and decisions are made on the basis of the information available and/or provided. In addition:

All devices must be returned by the end of the 2020 academic year. Where devices are not returned, students will be charged for the full cost of the device;

Where a device is damaged and/or lost, a student will be liable for the full repair and/or replacement cost of the device; and

Wits takes no responsibility for maintenance or the insurance of the device.

Application process

Students in need may approach their respective faculties for assistance, provide all the information required and note the conditions for assistance. Recommendations for assistance may also be made to faculties through student leaders (the SRC, school councils and class representatives) and the Division of Student Affairs, provided that all the relevant information is supplied. Incomplete applications will not be considered.

As the academic programme starts on 20 April 2020, those needing assistance are urged to apply through their faculties as soon as possible.

Students must make sure that they provide the following information:

A brief motivation (including proof of income, if possible);

Name and Surname,

Student Number,

Identity Document Number,

Year of Study,

Physical delivery address details (including province) on the application for assistance, including providing their up to date contact mobile numbers; and

Name and contact details of a next-of-kin, parent, or guardian (the University may contact the next of kin / parent/ guardian to verify information provided).

Applications are made through Faculties, via the details listed below:

Commerce, Law and Management: tshepiso.maleswena@wits.ac.za

Engineering and the Built Environment: FacultyRegistrar.EBE@wits.ac.za

Health Sciences: Henda.VanDerWalt@wits.ac.za or Morne.Greyling@wits.ac.za

Humanities: help.humanities@wits.ac.za

Science: SSSC.Science@wits.ac.za

We hope that these loan devices will go a long way in supporting students in need. Online and remote learning will require some adjustment to your way of learning. It wont be easy. Some mistakes will be made and lessons will be learnt. We will do our best to support you towards your academic success and the realisation of your dreams.

Stay safe!

Jerome September

Dean: Student Affairs
For many companies, their food products may be the only assets they have, says Marilyn Raybin, President of Marvell Foods. These food assets cost money to store and are depreciating in value every day, says Raybin, we can help companies sell their inventory if they need to generate cash fast.

Devastating - Coronavirus Impact on the Food Industry

"Our phone is ringing non-stop, and we are getting more on-line web submissions daily for buyers and sellers of product than we have in the past ten years from potential customers from all over the country," says Marilyn Raybin, President of Marvell Foods. "The Coronavirus impact on the food industry has been unfathomable," says Raybin, a third-generation executive and national leader in food sales, food brokerage, food trading, and food liquidation.

"Our entire society and way of life is on shaky ground, everyone is fearful, and no one knows what to expect, about anything," says Raybin, whose company has offices from Coast to Coast.

Marvell Foods - (http://www.MarvellFoods.com) A Daily Pulse on the Food Industry - A New Resource for Food Companies

Raybin and her team have a daily pulse on the market, talking to customers all day long, buyers and sellers, manufacturers and retailers, mom and pop operators, as well as the largest companies in the food industry. Here's what Raybin says: "The general emotional state of people and the internal anxiety being experienced by companies, combined with the health crisis and the life and death fear of the deadly contagion, has taken a dramatic toll on the food industry and the supply chain. The shuttering of businesses, unemployment, cutbacks across the board on everything is hollowing out every aspect of the food industry," says Raybin, "people do not know where to go or what to do with what they have, or where to go to find product so they can make whatever it is they produce."

Food Supply Chains Disrupted - Buyers and Sellers Have Instantly Evaporated

"People who had well developed, well oiled buy and sell supply chains that were all set up," says Raybin, "all that is gone, and people need help," she says from the corporate office in Boca Raton, Florida. "We are their new lifeline to help them sell and buy to less traditional sources, secondary outlets, to be exact, but the food needs a home and a place to be sold and used, and manufacturers need raw ingredients to make their goods, we help them all in every direction."

"Foodservice, for the most part, is gone," says Raybin. Manufacturers, producers, co-packers, suppliers, cold storage warehouses, truckers, retail stores have all been impacted. Just one example, says Raybin, "With foodservice gone, or at a small fraction of original production, this has completely changed the food services industry ecosystem."

The issues are involved," says Raybin, "when in an instant your buyers, and in many case suppliers, have all but dried up, and those markets where you sold your goods have evaporated, almost in an instant, this has created a gigantic problem. But," says Raybin, "people have to eat, and food still must be produced," and that's where Raybin and her company, Marvell Foods, play a role.

Marvell Foods (http://www.MarvellFoods.com) Delivers New, Alternative Paths to Market for Food Companies

Marvell Foods fits into the equation, in the food ecosystem, in several important ways. First, as an example, for manufactures who sold to "food service" distributors and entities, Marvell Foods is a resource by being able to provide a second tier of buyers. The company's client list developed over nearly thirty years includes a national and international network of buyers (and sellers) in the secondary market, which is where Marvell Foods has earned its stellar national reputation.

Marvell's buyers and sellers include, among other entities, discount stores, big-box discount retail stores, wholesalers, buffet chains, food banks, and even prisons. "The manufacturers and their entire downline of suppliers need to understand that they are going to take a big hit on price," says Raybin, "with storage and warehouses facilities filing with food, running out of space, and unable to move the product to their regular customers, the manufacturers and others sitting with product, some we are told, running cold storage trailers in their parking lots, need to decide if they are going to sit on the product, pay these mounting costs and maybe not even be able to sell any of this product at some point in a completely unknown future," says Raybin. Of course, this is a massive gamble for these companies, says Raybin, and exactly how it will pan out, no one knows. "What we do know is that there is a tremendous log jam in the entire food production industry, and we can help companies big and small," says Raybin.

Food Manufacturers, Companies, Restaurants Can Convert Food Assets to Cash Fast

Raybin points out that, for example, large restaurant chains, and even small restaurant operators, buffets, even hotels, Casinos, and Cruise Lines are sitting on millions and millions of pounds of refrigerated or frozen food, including millions of pounds of frozen vegetables, and canned goods." No one knows how long, or when, any of these companies may be fully operational or when these dormant food products might be used, if ever," says Raybin." Raybin points out that companies sitting on food inventory like this are sitting on assets that become less valuable every passing day. "We can help companies generate much-needed cash with these food assets and get them cash as quickly as possible," says Raybin.

For food companies strapped for cash right now, Marvell Foods can help them move product very fast and minimize losses," says Raybin. In some instances, Raybin can serve as a conduit to a network of food banks and assist in the donation process. "Food banks are under great pressure now, people around the country are lining up for food as no one has ever seen, we can facilitate donations to food banks," says Raybin.

The economic disruption caused by COVID-19 has left many in the food, hospitality - restaurants, bars, hotels, and food services industry, with costly excess of food products and food-related supplies sitting dormant.

ABOUT MARVELL FOODS (In the Time of Coronavirus Crisis - "BCV") http://www.MarvellFoods.com

As one of the industry's leading buyers, brokers, food traders and liquidators of surplus and salvage food products, Marvell Foods can assist your company by helping you sell food, which is losing value by the day, to generate much-needed cash.



In the spirit of pulling together during this crisis, for businesses whose sole assets might be the food you have in storage - refrigerated or frozen foods, canned, or shelf-stable products, we will work diligently to help you sell any of your inventory quickly for the best prices possible to provide you with cash to maintain your business best.

In addition to our unique national and international network of buyers, including food banks, the federal prison system, pet food manufacturers, and export, we specialize in finding buyers for either unsold or unsellable products. This crisis has put profound pressure on the food supply chain. As a multi-generational company with more than thirty years in the food business, Marvell Foods is in a unique position to help companies who find themselves in a financially distressed situation to quickly sell products at the best prices possible, as fast as possible.

If you are a food manufacturer, supplier, co-packer, distributor, or other food-related organization impacted by the coronavirus pandemic, we will do our best to be of service to you. Please contact us today to learn more. You can call us right now at 561-213-2289 OR, use our web form on the site  see the link.

Media Contact/For Business or Food Industry Interviews, Call:

Jeff Mustard

Creative Director, Writer, Producer, Director

jeff@thebambooagency.com | 954-801-8263

http://www.TheBambooAgency.com
Genetic variation analysis and the evidence of recombination events point towards the conclusion that severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) might have circulated cryptically among humans for years, as reported by a recent paper on a preprint server bioRxiv.

The pandemic of coronavirus disease (COVID-19) caused by SARS-CoV-2 is an ongoing health crisis and one of the most significant challenges to global health in modern times. This novel coronavirus mainly affects the respiratory tract, potentially causing severe pneumonia and death.

As the virus continues to spread across the world, a myriad of strains have been isolated, and many complete genomes sequenced. A rather small SARS-CoV-2 genome is made up of thirty thousand base pairs. Genomic comparisons with viruses from different patients, animal species, time periods, or places may answer the question we have all been asking ourselves: how did everything start?

Wu,F., Zhao,S., Yu,B., Chen,Y.-M., Wang,W., Hu,Y., Song,Z.-G., Tao,Z.-W., Tian,J.-H., Pei,Y.-Y., Yuan,M.L., Zhang,Y.-L., Dai,F.-H., Liu,Y., Wang,Q.-M., Zheng,J.-J., Xu,L., Holmes,E.C. and Zhang,Y.-Z. A novel coronavirus associated with a respiratory disease in Wuhan of Hubei province, China. Accession MN908947.

Genomic specificities of SARS-CoV-2

Even though SARS-CoV-2 shares similar genomic traits with other coronaviruses, its sequence is significantly different from some other betacoronaviruses known to infect humans, the novel coronavirus shares 76% amino acid sequence identity with SARS-CoV, 43% identity with MERS-CoV, and 33% identity with HCoV-HKU1.

Novel Coronavirus SARS-CoV-2: This scanning electron microscope image shows SARS-CoV-2 (round gold objects) emerging from the surface of cells cultured in the lab. SARS-CoV-2, also known as 2019-nCoV, is the virus that causes COVID-19. The virus shown was isolated from a patient in the U.S. Credit: NIAID-RML

On the other hand, SARS-CoV-2 shares 96% similarity with a coronavirus collected in Yunnan Province (China) from a bat species Rhinolophus affinis, which is why it is thought that the virus most likely originated from bats. But the mystery remains whether the virus crossed directly from bats to humans, or an intermediate host was implicated in the 'spillover.'

Intermediate Horseshoe Bat (Rhinolophus affinis). Image Credit: Binturong-Tonoscarpe

A recent research paper published in the journal Nature by Dr. Tommy Tsan-Yuk Lam and his colleagues suggested that pangolins should be considered as possible hosts, as they indeed harbor SARS-CoV-2-related coronaviruses. It is rather striking that these pangolin viruses exhibit specific genomic regions very closely related to the human virus  most importantly receptor-binding domain responsible for the attachment and infection of human cells.

Nevertheless, several issues regarding the origin, human introduction point, evolutionary patterns, and driving force of the COVID-19 pandemic remain to be clarified. Recently, a research group from Taiwan tried to tackle these issues in a paper titled 'The origin and underlying driving forces of the SARS-CoV-2 outbreak' that recently appeared on the preprint service bioRxiv, without formal peer review.

A new virus with an ancient pedigree

Dr. Shu-Miaw Chaw from the Biodiversity Research Center (Academia Sinica, Taipei, Taiwan) and her colleagues analyzed 137 genomes of SARS-CoV-2 (as well as related coronaviruses), and found evidence of recent origin and intergenomic recombination. The latter is a process described in a wide array of viruses that may allow specific variants to escape from the current fitness peak and establish a relationship with the new host.

However, the authors state that the sequence similarity of the receptor-binding domain between SARS-CoV-2 and a sequence derived from pangolin coronavirus is probably due to an ancient intergenomic introgression. This means that SARS-CoV-2 might have cryptically been present among humans for years before being noticed recently.

The ancient origin of SARS-CoV-2 is further reinforced by the lack of signatures pointing towards the adaptive evolution, as demonstrated by frequency spectra in samples from the recent outbreak.

"For a recently acquired virus, rapid evolution and a strong signature of positive selection are expected," caution study authors. "For example, during its short epidemic in 2002-2003, several rounds of adaptive changes have been documented in SARS-CoV genome", they add.

Understanding the evolutionary path

Unlike adaptive evolution that was previously shown for SARS-CoV during the brief SARS epidemic, the analysis of SARS-CoV-2 genomes reveals signs of relaxation of selection. After host adaptation, the virus may evolve following such relaxed or purifying selection seen in this novel coronavirus, which is one of the evolutionary driving forces.

Hence, further work is crucial to sequence a large number of samples from the early outbreak event, as well as to examine hospital archives in pursuit of traces of SARS-CoV-2 ancestors.

"This information not only can help us to understand the evolutionary path of this virus but also unravel the critical steps for it to achieve effective spreading in humans," explain study authors. "Nature never runs out of material to create new pathogens. It is not whether but when and where the next epidemic will occur," study authors conclude.
Microsoft Customers Enjoy Easy Access to Digital Receipts Through Ethoca's Expanding Network of Banks, Providing Better Transaction Clarity Throughout the Payment Journey Reduced Dispute Resolution Costs

Ethoca, a Mastercard company, today announced an expansion of its collaboration with Microsoft that will bring Microsoft customers simple access to their digital purchase receipts through their banks' mobile applications, enabled with Ethoca's Digital Receipts service.

Today's digital consumer is demanding more transparency about their online purchases to eliminate transaction confusion and simplify the overall payment journey. It's not uncommon for digital goods providers to experience false claim rates of 80% or higher from consumers who often fail to recognize their own purchases, or those of family members who have access to payment credentials. This results in a growing number of consumers using the dispute cycle unnecessarily.

According to Mastercard, this growing phenomenon accounts for an increasingly large share of global chargeback volumes estimated to reach more than 615 million by 20211. It also adds friction for consumers who unknowingly contest legitimate transactions that result in unintended fraud claims, as well as future false declines from their bank. Mastercard estimates that card issuers and merchants alike incur $15-$70 in operational costs for every dispute.

According to a recent Ethoca-commissioned study by research firm Aite Group, 93% of surveyed consumers said more information, including a picture of the printed receipt, would have been helpful for transactions they ended up reporting to their financial institution as unrecognized or unauthorized. Ethoca's Digital Receipts service enables businesses including Microsoft to make this information available to their customers through card issuing banks currently enrolled in Ethoca's service. Typically, consumers access this enhanced digital receipt through their bank's mobile app. The solution is currently live with a Top 5 US bank, with plans for further global expansion throughout the year. Ethoca's service has been shown to reduce inbound transaction inquiries from consumers to their bank by 15-30%.

"Ethoca is thrilled to be working with Microsoft to solve this challenge upstream in the bank's mobile app where consumers have the instant purchase clarity they need to avoid making a false claim," said Keith Briscoe, Chief Marketing and Product Officer at Ethoca. "The only way the industry can solve this growing and costly problem is through industry-wide collaboration between card issuers, merchants and card brands sharing purchase insight in real time through the channels consumers know and trust."

"This initiative aligns with Microsoft's commitment to providing the best customer experience at every occasion, including access to Microsoft's own Azure- based digital receipt and purchase information," said Stuart Dwyer, Payments Director at Microsoft. "Better information about the transaction at the moment when any doubt arises typically when the customer is checking the card statement can be effective for online purchases. It also ties in with Microsoft's commitment to provide customers with insights on how to prevent fraud by using tools such as spending notifications or spending limits, available for example via Xbox family settings. Microsoft is also actively collaborating with the industry to address the broader problem presented by first-party misuse and fraud to enhance the purchase experience for all customers."

About Ethoca

Ethoca is the leading, global provider of collaboration-based technology that enables card issuers, ecommerce merchants and online businesses to increase card acceptance, stop more fraud, recover lost revenue and eliminate chargebacks from both fraud and customer service disputes. Through the Ethoca Network the first and only of its kind in the industry we are closing the information gap between card issuers and merchants. This unique capability makes fraud and customer dispute insight available and actionable in real time.

Our suite of services delivers significant revenue growth and cost saving opportunities to more than 8,000 merchants in 40+ countries and more than 5,000 card issuers in 20+ countries. Seven of the top 10 North American ecommerce brands, nine of the top 10 North American card issuers and 10 of the top 15 UK card issuers rely on Ethoca solutions and the network that powers them. Ethoca was acquired by Mastercard in 2019.

1 Aite Group

View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20200415005100/en/

Contacts:

Scott Girling-Heathcote

Senior Account Manager

SkyParlour

scott@skyparlour.com
DCM Shriram on Wednesday said it will donate Rs 10 crore to PM-CARES Fund to support the fight against coronavirus and has earmarked another Rs 5 crore for the state relief funds as well as community services.

"DCM Shriram has set up a Rs 15 crore COVID-19 contingency fund, from which Rs 10 crore contribution is being made to the PM CARES fund to support the government's mega efforts to handle this health emergency," the company said in a statement.

The balance Rs 5 crore is committed for initiatives taken up by the company to help communities in kind and for contribution to relief funds of state governments, it added.

In addition, the company's officers, staff and workers have contributed Rs 82 lakh from their salaries and the same has also been donated to the PM CARES Fund.

DCM Shriram has repurposed its manufacturing facilities in Kota (Rajasthan) and Bharuch (Gujarat) to produce sodium hypochlorite (10 per cent solution) which is a disinfectant.

"We have donated approximately 7 lakh litres collectively to Rajasthan, Gujarat and Delhi to be used for sanitisation purposes. We are committed to supporting the states and union territory for any additional requirements as and when needed," it said.

With a surge in demand for sanitisers in the country, the company has also commenced production of hand sanitisers in its two distilleries in Uttar Pradesh.

DCM Shriram is a leading business conglomerate with a group turnover of Rs 7,771 crore. It manufactures sugar, fertilisers, seeds and chlor-vinyl chemical.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
North Korea fired several suspected cruise missiles Tuesday towards the sea. The projectiles were launched a day before National Day and also before the South holds parliamentary elections, while world attention has been largely focused on the coronavirus pandemic.

15 April, Juche 109/4/15 according to the North Korean calendar, is the Day of the Sun, a public holiday celebrating the birthday of the founder of North Korea, the Eternal President Kim Il Sung, grandfather of current leader Kim Jung-Un.

Pyongyang has repeatedly tried to show its technical capability on, or just before the Day of the Sun, in honor of the Great Leader. In April 2009 it launched a satellite, in April 2016, it tested an ICBM motor, on April 15, 2017 it launched a missile (that exploded in mid-air.)

Tuesday's missiles travelled over the Sea of Japan, also known as the East Sea, before coming down in the water, according to a statement by South Koreas Joint Chiefs of Staff.

But the state controlled Korea Central News Agency (KCNA) didnt mention the missiles.

Instead it reported on Kim Jung-Un receiving dozens of floral baskets and letters from dignitaries world wide, including from Bonginkosi Emmanuel Nzimande, the general secretary of the South African Communist Party, Nigerian President Muhammudu Buhari, and the leader of the Lao Communist Party, Bounnang Vorachith, pointing out that capital Pyongyang is bedecked with flowers ahead of the Day of the Sun.

No Covid-19

The Day of the Sun takes place three days after the yearly session of the Supreme Peoples Assembly (SPA), North Koreas parliament that, unlike its counterpart in China, the National Peoples Congress, took place in spite of the pandemic.

The Cabinet Report, one of two reports submitted to the SPA repeated a claim that not a single case [of COVID-19] has so far been reported in our country.

According to 38north.org, a North Korea watchers website, the statement corresponded with the fact that the photos of the SPA session show a convention hall filled with hundreds of delegates who were not wearing a face mask.

Story continues

Arouse the working people

But even if North Korean coverage of the Covid-19 pandemic seems eager to report on South Koreas corona casualties, an article dated February 11 states that authorities had taken unidentified steps to arouse the working people in all sectors to combat the novel coronavirus infection with highest consciousness, indicating a high level of concern.

Earlier on, Korean news outlets showed Kim Jung-Un with his entourage where he is the only one not wearing a face mask, indicating that he may be untouchable by the virus.
NEW YORK, April 15, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- Bioinformatics Market Research Report by Product (Bioinformatics Platform, Bioinformatics Service, and Knowledge Management Tool), by Application (Agriculture, Chemoinformatics, Genomics, Medicine, and Metabolomics), by End User - Global Forecast to 2025 (Cumulative Impact of COVID-19)



Read the full report: https://www.reportlinker.com/p05881705/?utm_source=PRN



The Global Bioinformatics Market is expected to grow from USD 14,086.57 Million in 2019 to USD 32,672.24 Million by the end of 2025 at a Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 15.05%.



Market Segmentation & Coverage:

This research report categorizes the Bioinformatics to forecast the revenues and analyze the trends in each of the following sub-markets:



On the basis of Product, the Bioinformatics Market is studied across Bioinformatics Platform, Bioinformatics Service, and Knowledge Management Tool. The Bioinformatics Platform further studied across Sequence Alignment Platforms, Sequence Analysis Platforms, Sequence Manipulation Platforms, and Structural & Functional Analysis Platforms. The Bioinformatics Service further studied across Data Analysis Services, Database & Management Services, and Sequencing Services. The Knowledge Management Tool further studied across Generalized Knowledge Management Tools and Specialized Knowledge Management Tools.



On the basis of Application, the Bioinformatics Market is studied across Agriculture, Chemoinformatics, Genomics, Medicine, Metabolomics, Microbial Genome Applications, Molecular Phylogenetics, Proteomics, and Transcriptomics.



On the basis of End User, the Bioinformatics Market is studied across Academics, Agricultural Bioinformatics, Animal Bioinformatics, Clinical Diagnostics, Drug Development, Environmental Bioinformatics, Forensic Bioinformatics, Gene Therapy, Medical Bioinformatics, Molecular Medicine, and Reproductive Biotechnology.



On the basis of Geography, the Bioinformatics Market is studied across Americas, Asia-Pacific, and Europe, Middle East & Africa. The Americas region is studied across Argentina, Brazil, Canada, Mexico, and United States. The Asia-Pacific region is studied across Australia, China, India, Indonesia, Japan, Malaysia, Philippines, South Korea, and Thailand. The Europe, Middle East & Africa region is studied across France, Germany, Italy, Netherlands, Qatar, Russia, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, Spain, United Arab Emirates, and United Kingdom.



Company Usability Profiles:

The report deeply explores the recent significant developments by the leading vendors and innovation profiles in the Global Bioinformatics Market including ABM Inc, Accelrys Inc., Agilent Technologies Inc, BGI Group, Biomax Informatics AG, DNASTAR, Eurofins Scientific, Illumina Inc., Partek Incorporated, Perkinelmer, Inc., QIAGEN Bioinformatics, Sophia Genetics, Thermo Fisher Scientific, Waters Corporation, and WuXi NextCODE..



FPNV Positioning Matrix:

The FPNV Positioning Matrix evaluates and categorizes the vendors in the Bioinformatics Market on the basis of Business Strategy (Business Growth, Industry Coverage, Financial Viability, and Channel Support) and Product Satisfaction (Value for Money, Ease of Use, Product Features, and Customer Support) that aids businesses in better decision making and understanding the competitive landscape.



Competitive Strategic Window:

The Competitive Strategic Window analyses the competitive landscape in terms of markets, applications, and geographies. The Competitive Strategic Window helps the vendor define an alignment or fit between their capabilities and opportunities for future growth prospects. During a forecast period, it defines the optimal or favorable fit for the vendors to adopt successive merger and acquisition strategies, geography expansion, research & development, and new product introduction strategies to execute further business expansion and growth.



The report provides insights on the following pointers:

1. Market Penetration: Provides comprehensive information on sulfuric acid offered by the key players

2. Market Development: Provides in-depth information about lucrative emerging markets and analyzes the markets

3. Market Diversification: Provides detailed information about new product launches, untapped geographies, recent developments, and investments

4. Competitive Assessment & Intelligence: Provides an exhaustive assessment of market shares, strategies, products, and manufacturing capabilities of the leading players

5. Product Development & Innovation: Provides intelligent insights on future technologies, R&D activities, and new product developments



The report answers questions such as:

1. What is the market size and forecast of the Global Bioinformatics Market?

2. What are the inhibiting factors and their impact analysis shaping the Global Bioinformatics Market during the forecast period?

3. What is the competitive position if vendors in the Global Bioinformatics Market?

4. How Porters Five Forces define the Global Bioinformatics Market landscape?

5. What are the technology trends and regulatory frameworks in the Global Bioinformatics Market?

6. Which are the products/segments/applications/areas to invest in over the forecast period in the Global Bioinformatics Market?

7. What is the competitive strategic window for opportunities in the Global Bioinformatics Market?

8. What are the modes and strategic moves considered suitable for entering the Global Bioinformatics Market?



Read the full report: https://www.reportlinker.com/p05881705/?utm_source=PRN



About Reportlinker

ReportLinker is an award-winning market research solution. Reportlinker finds and organizes the latest industry data so you get all the market research you need - instantly, in one place.



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The controversial star came in third on Peter Weber's season of The Bachelor, behind Madison Prewett and Hannah Ann Sluss.

And Victoria Fuller has reportedly moved on to another Bachelor star - Chris Soules, according to Reality Steve.

The duo have are 'currently together in Iowa for the week.'

New couple? Victoria Fuller has reportedly moved on to another Bachelor star - Chris Soules, according to Reality Steve

'One of the more random Bachelor "couples" that i can't say I ever would've guessed. I don't know how long this has been going on or how serious it is, but I can confirm that Victoria Fuller is currently together in Iowa for the week with Chris Soules. Discuss.,' Reality Steve tweeted on Wednesday.

One week ago, Victoria took to her Instagram to share a snap of herself in a bra and sweat bottoms; she captioned the image: 'Day 87 of quarantine. I now live in these sweat pants. Tried to organize my closet. Failed. Thought with all this extra time I would finish my book or take up dusting. I have not. Turns out I am just lazy. What is makeup? Buxton is over me. I am over me. Help.'

Last fall, Chris, 38, agreed to accept a two-year suspended prison sentence and two years probation for his role in a April 2017 fatal crash in Iowa.

In 2019, Chris pleaded guilty to fleeing the scene of a personal injury accident that left 66-year-old Kenneth 'Kenny' Mosher, of Aurora, dead after Soules's truck rear-ended Mosher's tractor.

The latest: Reality Steve revealed Victoria Fuller and Chris Soules are together in Iowa

Before her trip: One week ago, Victoria took to her Instagram to share a snap of herself in a bra and sweat bottom

Chris, who sustained a concussion, called 911, identified himself, waited for paramedics and even administered CPR himself, but he left the scene in a separate vehicle before police arrived and headed to his Arlington, Iowa home - which is against the law in the state, We Are Iowa reported.

He was originally charged with leaving the scene of a deadly accident, which carries a five-year maximum prison sentence, reported the Des Moines Register.

However, he avoided going to trial by pleading guilty to the reduced charge.

Soules and his parents, Gary and Linda, already paid a $2.5million in a settlement to Mosher's family in May 2019.

Mosher was taken to an area hospital, where was pronounced dead.

Soules was arrested and initially charged with the Class D felony of leaving the scene of an accident resulting in death.

Mugshot: In 2019, Chris pleaded guilty to fleeing the scene of a personal injury accident that left 66-year-old Kenneth 'Kenny' Mosher, of Aurora, dead after Soules's truck rear-ended Mosher's tractor

When the charge was lowered to the aggravated misdemeanor charge of leaving the scene of an accident resulting in injury, he pleaded guilty.

He called his parents and they advised him to call an attorney, who told him to have legal counsel with him when he spoke to police.

He said: '[I listened] to the advice given to me by my attorney. I didn't know that I had really done anything wrong. In hindsight I should have remained on the scene. But I didn't know that those were grounds for arrest at that point,' he told People.

Soules's attorney made a point of noting that witnesses at the scene of the accident said 'there was no indication whatsoever that Mr Soules was impaired.'

He told People: 'I was not drinking that night.'

His blood and urine test six hours after the accident was 0.0, according to People. Alcohol can stay in the blood for 24 hours.

In court: Soules, who sustained a concussion, called 911, identified himself, waited for paramedics and even administered CPR himself, but he left the scene in a separate vehicle before police arrived and headed to his Arlington, Iowa home - which is against the law in the state, We Are Iowa reported; pictured in court May 21, 2019

Soules first appeared on season 10 of The Bachelorette, where he finished third.

He shot to fame when he was selected as the star of season 19 of The Bachelor, where he became known as 'Prince Farming'.

On the finale, he proposed to contestant Whitney Bischoff, but the relationship ended shortly after the final episode aired.

Soules previously pleaded guilty to drunken driving in 2005 and was sentenced to one year of probation and a 60-day suspended jail sentence.

In 2001, when he was 19, he twice pleaded guilty to underage possession of alcohol and also was fined for having an open container in a car.

Victoria has also had her share of controversies.

Star: Victoria has also had her share of controversies

The Bachelor star's biggest backlash came after it was revealed she modeled merchandise that said 'white lives matter' before coming on the show.

The 26-year-old star broke her silence in February on the controversy and apologized for being a part of the campaign, via Instagram sorties that she swiftly deleted.

Adding: 'I want to say that I unequivocally reject the beliefs of the white lives matter movement or any propaganda that supports racism of any kind.'

Fuller denied racial motivations in her work for the campaign and said, 'My intention was only to support an endangered species.'

She took time to directly apologize to communities of color that experience racism daily.

Controversy: The Bachelor star's biggest backlash came after it was revealed she modeled merchandise that said 'white lives matter' before coming on the show

'I would like to specifically apologize to people of color that are affected by racism daily,' she said. 'It was never my intention to add fuel to the racial fire in this country.'

Fuller said she has learned from the controversy, and that moving forward, she hopes to speak out against racism.

She said: 'This has truly been an educational moment for me and I hope to be a voice against racism moving forward. I hope I can be shown grace as I navigate through this process.'

Fuller modeled the clothing for a Marlin Lives Matter organization in an effort to save the species and other pieces included 'blue lives matter,' a frequent retort to the Black Lives Matter movement in defense of police officers.

Though along with the 'white lives matter,' slogan, other clothing, not modeled by Fuller but included in the campaign featured designs similar to a Confederate flag.

What happened: Fuller modeled the clothing for a Marlin Lives Matter organization in an effort to save the species and other pieces included 'blue lives matter,' a frequent retort to the Black Lives Matter movement in defense of police officers

White Lives Matter was previously deemed a 'racist response to the civil rights movement Black Lives Matter, is a neo-Nazi group that is growing into a movement as more and more white supremacist groups take up its slogans and tactics,' by the Southern Poverty Law Center.

Once photos surfaced online as Fuller competes for the love of pilot Peter Weber on the ABC show, she was slammed online and lost a Cosmopolitan cover.

She was also called out in February for her DWI arrest in 2017.

The Virginia native was sentence to a year in jail for driving while intoxicated in her hometown of Virginia Beach on August 25, 2017, according to Page Six.

The sentence, however, was suspended and she was ordered to serve 24 months of probation, the outlet reported.
A woman has been arrested by the police in suspicion of killing a pregnant ewe on farmland in Kent.

The deceased ewe, which was in lamb, was discovered by a farmer in a field off Betsham Road, near Gravesend on Sunday 29 March.

Police believe the sheep was deliberately killed any time after 6.45pm the previous evening.

A lamb is also reported to have been stolen from the same field on Friday 27 March.

Police investigating the incident have now arrested a woman suspected of involvement in its death

At around midnight on 6 April, officers arrested the woman, aged in her 30's, on Bean Lane, Greenhithe, on offences relating to the ewe.

The woman, who is from the village Bean, has been released pending further enquiries.

It comes after three men were recently jailed for a total of over eleven years following a campaign of barbaric illegal sheep butchery across Northamptonshire.

Figures show that rural crime cost the UK 50m in 2018 as brazen criminals continue to target farmers' livelihoods.
KFC has reopened 11 of its 900 stores for delivery. (Getty Images)

KFC is reopening 11 of its 900 stores across the country for takeaway orders.

The popular fast-food restaurant shut its doors on 25 March after Boris Johnson ordered a lockdown to stop the spread of coronavirus.

Other major chains including McDonalds and Nandos are also closed, despite being allowed to stay open for deliveries if they adhere to social distancing rules.

KFC, which made the decision to shut to "protect the wellbeing and safety" of customers and staff, will be operating a limited menu service at the outlets.

Here is a full list of KFC outlets that will be open for delivery:

Enfield Coliseum Retail Park

Manchester  Hulme and Deansgate

Glasgow  Polokshaws Road and Great Western Retail Park

Ipswich  Cardinal Park

Aldershot

New Oscott

Tamworth

Heaton Chapel

Portsmouth

KFC initially shut down on 25 March. (Getty Images)

A KFC spokesperson said: Over the last week, weve reopened 11 of our restaurants in the UK.

"Theyre open for delivery only and are serving a limited menu, operated by fewer team members with new procedures in place to help ensure were following social distancing guidelines.

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"Theres still a need for affordable, accessible food at this time  so we want to do our part.

"Weve also donated thousands of meals from all our open restaurants to those on the frontline, including the NHS and key workers, in partnership with Deliveroo, and will continue to do so each week whilst the situation continues.

KFC has already supplied more than 3,000 free meals to NHS and key workers in the last week and promised to provide 100 more every Tuesday.

Only a handful of KFCs 900 stores are reopening, because of the strict safety measures the chain is implementing.

Staff will have to adhere to social distancing rules and will only be allowed to opt-in for work if they can get to a store without using public transport.

Story continues

Most of its workers will remain on the government furlough scheme and receive 80% of their wages.

Customers can order from KFC using Deliveroo, Uber Eats or Just Eat.

The nationwide lockdown, imposed on 23 March, is due to be reviewed by Thursday.

Foreign secretary Dominic Raab, who is deputising for the prime minister while he recovers from COVID-19, said on Monday he did not expect to make any changes to the restrictions for now.

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Mark Latham has called for country towns with no COVID-19 cases to be taken out of lockdown

Mark Latham has called for towns with no COVID-19 cases to be taken out of lockdown before big Australian cities in a bid to revive struggling rural businesses.

The National Cabinet will discuss lifting Australia's coronavirus restrictions for the first time on Thursday as figures show more people are recovering from the virus than battling it.

The New South Wales One Nation leader said it was important to consider geography in discussions for how to roll out a relaxation of the country's strict lockdown measures.

'Let's not forget that there's over 100 local government areas in Australia that haven't had a single infection,' he told radio station 2GB on Tuesday.

'Towns without a single infection are suffering the economic consequences of business closure.'

He asked why cafes and restaurants in regional areas shouldn't be allowed to re-open before major metropolitan areas to relieve the financial burden caused by the coronavirus economic downturn.

Mr Latham said Sydney - the epicentre of the nation's outbreak - should be the last place to re-open.

A family walks past closed retail stores along Peel Street in Tamworth, NSW. Mr Latham believes country towns should re-open before big cities

Port Douglas (pictured), a resort town in Far North Queensland, is among the areas struggling to survive amid the pandemic shutdown

There are more than 135 local government areas across Australia that haven't recorded a single case of coronavirus.

Most of those coronavirus-free zones are small regional towns suffering serious economic downturn, with 76 of those in the locked down state of Western Australia.

Port Douglas, a resort town in Far North Queensland, is among the areas struggling to survive amid the pandemic shutdown.

Cafes, restaurants and hotels in the small town have been forced to close indefinitely as would-be holiday-makers are forced to stay home.

Tamworth, in north-east NSW, has also been shaken by lockdowns as local businesses struggle to stay afloat.

The owner of a local travel agent told radio station 92.9FM that he fears for many stores won't survive the pandemic.

Australia has made significant progress in the fight against coronavirus, with a clear flattening of the curve on the graph that measures the daily infection rate

'I have never seen anything like it. I am scared that there will be businesses that won't come out the other side.'

Meanwhile, telco providers and companies that make health care products have been tipped to open first.

But small businesses in regional centres could be the worst affected by stage-three lockdowns, as holiday-makers and residents are barred from leaving their homes.

The restrictions were introduced on March 31 to curb the spread of the deadly coronavirus.

Gatherings are restricted to no more than two people except for members of your immediate household.

Residents are only allowed to leave their homes for essential reasons, those being for food, work or education, exercise and medical care or compassionate needs.

Residents are only allowed to leave their homes for essential reasons, such as shopping and medical reasons. Pictured: Locals sitting in the deserted streets of Tamworth, NSW

WHAT AUSTRALIA NEEDS TO DO TO END THE COVID-19 LOCKDOWN Scientists at the University of New South Wales said that until a vaccine is available, we have four measures to combat the outbreak. - Identifying every case rapidly with extensive testing, and isolating cases - Tracking and quarantine of contacts - Travel restrictions - Social distancing (including lockdown) to reduce contact (and therefore spread of infection) between people Source: UNSW Advertisement

Despite discussions about plans to re-open the economy, Scott Morrison stressed on Tuesday that the country is not in a position to relax all restrictions.

'We will be considering further plans about how we can chart that way back to get the economy operating at a much higher level than it is now so it can support people's incomes,' he said.

Deputy Chief Medical Officer Professor Paul Kelly said restrictions will most likely have to be in place for an estimated six months, but suggested it was possible some rules could be rolled back within that time frame.

'We definitely don't want to just open up everything that we've dampened down on so far because we've seen in other countries what has happened with an uncontrolled epidemic and we just cannot afford to do that in Australia,' Prof Kelly said.

Treasury modelling shows Australia's unemployment rate is expected to nearly double to 10 per cent because of the pandemic.

It was slated to reach as high as 15 per cent without government support.
On Sunday, officers responded to the 6400 block of Hil Mar Drive in District Heights for a report of a collision involving a pedestrian, Prince Georges County police said. They found Eric Henderson II, 33, of Bowie, had been struck as he crossed the road outside of a crosswalk, police said. The driver and passenger remained on the scene.
Source: Xinhua| 2020-04-15 18:38:43|Editor: Xiang Bo

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BANGKOK, April 15 (Xinhua) -- Thailand has had the money only for one month to provide as a relief grant for the people affected by the COVID-19 pandemic, said Prime Minister Prayut Chan-o-cha on Wednesday.

Prayut told reporters that the government has had some 50 billion baht (about 1.53 billion U.S. dollars) in its central fund to give away 5,000 baht (about 153 U.S. dollars) to each of the affected people for one month, though the government earlier pledged to give them the money for three consecutive months, beginning this month.

The Ministry of Finance initially earmarked the budget for such relief grant to an estimated 3 million people, then raised the targeted number to 9 million people but more than 24 million have applied online for it.

Prayut said more money for the 5,000-baht monthly grant would come from loans, totaling 1 trillion baht (about 30.65 billion U.S. dollars), which the government has planned to borrow under an executive decree, primarily designed alongside two others to cope with consequences of the pandemic situation.

However, such loan money will not be available for the Ministry of Finance to spend on the 5,000-baht grant for the people until next month or June, he added.
US President Donald Trump has halted funding to the World Health Organisation for its handling of the coronavirus pandemic, a decision attributed to his assessment that the Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus-led global health body had been biased towards China and given the world, and him, what he has described as faulty recommendations.

Trumps decision to hold back funding for the WHO at a time the world is still struggling to stop the virus that has infected close to 2 million and killed over 1.2 lakh has been criticised by several countries. Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison said he sympathised with Trumps criticisms of the WHO and it wasnt immune from criticism. But, he underlined, they werent going to throw the baby out of the bathwater here.

People familiar with the developments in Washington and New Delhi suggest that Trumps targeted attacks on the WHO chief could be also linked to the Ethopian microbiologists May 2017 election with Chinas backing. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus had defeated the US-backed Dr David Nabarro, who was the candidate of the UK.

Coronavirus outbreak: Full coverage

Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesuss term as WHO director general is due to end in 2022. If the support that Dr Tedros has received after the attacks on him are anything to go by, it is clear that the WHO director general may be on his way to get a second term if he so chooses, a person familiar with the development said.

The 55-member African Union and 120 member Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) have already come out in support of Dr Tedros handling of the Covid-19 outbreak. He would just need a simple majority in the world health body that has 194 countries as members.

This means that the United States - President Trump if he returns to power in the US presidential elections just months away - will have to do some serious heavy lifting to ensure the China-backed microbiologist is not re-elected.

As the Trump administration did last month to ensure that the US-backed Singaporean candidate Daren Tang is elected as Director General of World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) defeating heavily-favoured Wang Binying, the candidate from China, which has been accused of having a shaky record on intellectual property protection and enforcement.

President Trumps suspension of funding to the WHO is a huge setback. The United States is the biggest overall donor to the Geneva-based WHO, contributing more than $400 million in 2019, roughly 15% of its budget.

American taxpayers provide between $ 400 million and $ 500 million per year to the WHO, in contrast, China contributes roughly USD 40 million a year and even less, Trump said.

Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian rushed to the WHO director generals defence, and its own, according to news agency Press Trust of India.

Both China and WHO faced serious criticism over lack of transparency especially about the discovery of the coronavirus in December last year and its silent spread in Wuhan until Beijing imposed lockdown in the city on January 23.

India has steered clear of the debate over the WHO role, determined that it first wanted to fight off the virus outbreak before getting into any discussion over reforming the WHO.

Rather than wait for WHO to declare Covid-19 outbreak as a pandemic as it did in March, India, followed by the US and later Europe, banned flights from China. This helped mostly block infected people coming to India from China. But the infection still came through Europe and the Gulf, hitting US hard and landing Europe in a health disaster.

But PM Modi, however, made it clear in his G-20 address last month that the time had come to assess whether organizations of the past century were capable of handling the new age diseases.

For the record, WHO sent 100,000 testing kits to India late February and another 100,000 kits at the end of March.

International groups such as the African Union Commission have been more vocal. On April 8, Moussa Faki Mahamat of the AUC tweeted his surprise to learn of the campaign against WHOs global leadership. The African Union fully supports WHO and DG Tedros. The focus should remain on collectively fighting Covid-19 as a united global community. The time for accountability will come, he said.

The New York-based NAM coordinating bureau, on the other hand, issued a statement the next day in support of the WHO and its DG. It said:  The Coordinating bureau of the NAM extends its full support to the WHO and to the leadership of its DG, Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, while recognising the critical role and guidance it is currently playing on the frontlines. The NAM also expressed confidence in the leadership of Dr Tedros and asked the global community to stop politicising the virus.

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Of the eleven groups of secretary-led officers tasked with responding to the Covid-19 outbreak, the group to manage the availability of hospitals, isolation and quarantine facilities, disease surveillance . is headed by C K Mishra, secretary of the Ministry of Environment and Forests, instead of Priti Sudan, the secretary of health and family welfare. The appointment is not surprising because Sudan as the officer in charge of the ministry, has to provide resources to the thousands of hospitals and manage new emergencies daily, says a former secretary ...

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More than one in five coronavirus-related deaths in Texas have been linked to skilled nursing homes, according to a Houston Chronicle analysis of state data, illustrating the vulnerability of older residents in group settings to the deadly virus.

Data shows that 22 percent of deaths related to COVID-19 as of Monday were connected to nursing homes, while another 8 percent were linked to assisted-living facilities, which provide a less-intensive level of care.

The figures help clarify what has been a murky understanding of how the coronavirus has affected such facilities and those who rely on them. At least two nursing homes and one assisted living facility in the Houston area have been the scene of outbreaks, leading to at least two deaths. A total of 16 residents of a San Antonio nursing home have died from the virus, representing about half of all deaths in Bexar County.

Local officials have not been publicly announcing every positive COVID-19 case at every nursing home and assisted living facility. Fort Bend County reported on a FAQ webpage that four long-term care facilities had positive cases. Some say the public has been largely left in the dark about what may be going on.

Relatives have relied on facilities to tell them about any infections, sometimes prodding staffers for information themselves.The Texas Health and Human Services Commission last week required facilities to tell residents, staff and family when there is exposure, presumptive and confirmed cases in the facility.

Numbers released by the state, even as testing has lagged, confirm a fear that has existed from the start: What if state-licensed facilities couldnt keep their patients safe?

Gov. Greg Abbott banned most visitors a month ago from nursing homes, among other steps, in an attempt to protect residents from infection. Visitors were largely prohibited from assisted living facilities later.

NOTHING TO DO HERE: People in no-visit Texas nursing homes adapt to world without guests

But the rules were not enough to stop the spread within these complexes. Authorities said a worker testing positive at The Resort at Texas City prompted widespread testing there; one concern is that staffers often circulate among multiple locations.

Such facilities typically take the temperatures of employees, but that wont cover someone not showing symptoms of the disease.

Nursing homes in Texas provide around-the-clock medical care and are designed for people who need assistance with daily activities.

As of Monday, at least 70 coronavirus-related deaths were in nursing facilities, according to the Texas Health & Human Services Commission. At least 24 deaths were in assisted living facilities. There were a total of 314 deaths statewide linked to coronavirus as of that date, according to state data and Chronicle reporting.

Richard Mollot, executive director of the Long Term Care Community Coalition, said the numbers likely understate reality significantly.

Its got to be a very conservative estimation, Mollott said, because of the lack of testing, because of the lack of attention that residents are being paid under these circumstances.

The number of nursing home deaths does not include people such as James Innes father, Willard Innes. Staff at a Tyler-area nursing home told Innes mother that his father died from pneumonia, Innes said.

It struck him as strange.

That would be a huge coincidence, he said.

Now Playing: 'COVID-19 in 60': Houston coronavirus news in a minute Video: Houston Chronicle

Across the country, more than 2,300 people with coronavirus linked to long-term care facilities have died, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis.

They accounted for as much as 59 percent of deaths in Minnesota as of April 3, and as few as 7 percent of deaths in Idaho as of April 6, the Journal found. Long-term care facilities were linked to 24 percent of deaths as of April 7 in New York, the hardest-hit state.

In Texas, a total of 198 nursing facilities were reporting coronavirus cases as of Monday  representing 16 percent of all licensed facilities across the state.

A total of 52 assisted living facilities had cases  representing 2.6 percent of facilities across the state.

Texas Health & Human Services did not immediately disclose the number of deaths by county in nursing homes and assisted living centers.

Some jurisdictions in the Houston area have announced major outbreaks.

The largest disclosed regionally has been in Texas City, where the number of infected residents and workers Tuesday at the Resort at Texas City remained at 83.

Officials in Galveston County declined to say how many of the 11 people who have died in the county with the virus were linked to the facility. One man confirmed that his elderly mother, who lived there, died after testing positive.

Galveston County has responded with a push to test more nursing-home residents and workers.

The number of infected residents also remained at 28 at Park Manor of Quail Valley in Missouri City, part of Fort Bend County.

No one had died as of Tuesday and some patients were beginning to return from the hospital, facility spokesperson Leticia Caballero said.

In Harris County, the number of residents and staff infected at La Porte Healthcare Center had grown to 37, Harris County Public Health spokeswoman Elizabeth Perez said. Two people have died, the center said.

The highest death toll known so far at a local senior community was not at a nursing home, but a senior apartment community in The Woodlands, which is not regulated by the state. Four elderly men who lived at The Conservatory at Alden Bridge died with COVID-19.

Nick Powell in Galveston contributed to this report

emily.foxhall@chron.com
Bhubaneswar, April 15 : To combat coronavirus, the Odisha government has set up 21 Covid-19 hospitals in 19 districts, raising the number of beds to 3,620, according to an official here on Wednesday.

The government plans to set up coronavirus hospitals in each district in a week.

An exclusive Covid-19 hospital with 200 beds became operational in the Subarnapur district, said Subroto Bagchi, Odisha's chief spokesperson for Covid-19.

In 6798 panchayats, 7,034 temporary medical centres/camps have been readied with 1,63,528 beds.

Covid-19 testing facilities had been launched at Ispat General Hospital, Rourkela, and Institute of Life Sciences, Bhubaneswar, said Bagchi.

Due to increase in the testing facilities, 803 Covid-19 samples were tested on Tuesday, the highest so far.

With the rise in Covid-19 cases in Bhubaneswar, six senior IAS officers have been assigned to monitor the three zones of the Bhubaneswar Municipal Corporation area. They will be in-charge of intensive sampling, contact tracing, household survey in containment zones and supply of essential commodities.

Of the 60 cases in the state, Bhubaneswar has reported 46.

IANS cd/pcj
AUSTIN, TX  The number of University of Texas at Austin students diagnosed with the new coronavirus after vacationing to coastal Mexico in a group of more than 200 others has increased to 53, a school spokesperson confirmed.

A group of 211 students went on a chartered trip to Cabo San Lucas over spring break against health officials' advice related to social distancing as a method of blunting the spread of illness. Upon their return, 49 were diagnosed with the respiratory illness  an outbreak of infection that has since grown to 53, UT-Austin spokesperson J.B. Bird told Patch in response to an email.

The university originally reported on April 3 that 49 students had been positively diagnosed for the respiratory illness.

Related story: Coronavirus: 211 UT-Austin Students Took Trip, 49 Now Infected

Previously, UT-Austin officials said 70 students traveled to Mexico on a chartered flight for spring break, with the others traveling separately on commercial flights. A comany named JusCollege arranged the trip.

This article originally appeared on the Austin Patch
Egyptian President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi has mourned the death of a police officer who was killed during a shootout with militants in Cairo on Tuesday.

Another officer and two security personnel were injured and seven suspected terrorists were killed in an exchange of gunfire during a raid on a hideout in El-Amiriya neighbourhood in eastern Cairo late on Tuesday.

The interior ministry said the terrorist cell was planning to carry out attacks against Coptic Christians on their Easter holiday.

"I followed with great pride the heroic action of the interior ministry's men, which confirms the bravery of police officers in the face of terrorism and the Egyptian state's capabilities to preserve the safety and security of the homeland and citizens despite all the challenges," El-Sisi said on Twitter on Wednesday.

The president extended condolences to the family of the officer and wished those injured a speedy recovery.

The country's public prosecutor ordered an urgent investigation into the incident.
Berlin: US President Donald Trump's decision to temporarily suspend payments to the World Health Organisation in response to its handling of the coronavirus pandemic triggered international statements of support for the United Nations agency on Wednesday.

Japan will still fund WHO: Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga. Credit:AP

While Trump's criticism of the WHO is being shared by others, who argue that the agency is unwilling to hold Beijing sufficiently accountable for its mistakes, close US allies said Wednesday they vehemently disagreed with a suspension of payments and were not planning to follow suit.

In Japan, where Deputy Prime Minister Taro Aso suggested last month that the WHO might have to change its name to the "Chinese Health Organisation" amid criticism of the agency, the country's chief cabinet secretary, Yoshihide Suga, said Wednesday that Japan would continue to cooperate with and fund the WHO.

New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern rejected Trump's criticism more forcefully. "At a time like this when we need to be sharing information and we need to have advice we can rely on, the WHO has provided that," she said. "We will continue to support it and continue to make our contributions."
TEHRAN, Iran, April 15

Trend:

Iran's Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) has unveiled a smart detector, made for identifying coronavirus-infected surfaces and individuals from a 100-meter distance, Trend reports citing Mehr News Agency.

The statement was made by the commander in chief of IRGC Major General Hossein Salami.

"The smart system called Mostaan, can detect coronavirus infection instantly, and it can be further upgraded,"Salami said.

"The system was designed by the Baqiyatallah University of Medical Sciences (BMSU) and Basij science and technology headquarters," he added.

"The necessary permits will be obtained in the near future after our interaction with the Health Ministry," he said.

"The detector does not require blood sample and can identify infected surfaces and people. The system has been tested in various hospitals and 80 percent of its work was positive," he added.

"The antenna in the device can locate the infected area in 5 second up to 100 meters distance," he said. "It can be used for mass screening and be useful for smart disinfection of the surfaces."

The World Health Organization (WHO) declared COVID-19 a pandemic on March 11. Some sources claim the coronavirus outbreak started as early as November 2019.

Iran is one of the countries heavily affected by the rapidly-spreading coronavirus. According to recent reports from the Iranian officials, over 76,300 people have been infected, 4,777 people have already died. Meanwhile, over 49,900 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.
Prince Harry and Meghan Markle are not the only ones who feel devastated after Megxit. Apparently, Queen Elizabeth II is also experiencing the heartbreaking after-effects of their departure.

Queen Elizabeth II, as the longest-reigning Queen in the history of the British monarchy, surely accomplished so much over her 68 years of reign. In fact, she has been recognized for saving the palace from destruction numerous times in her lifetime.

However, her life experiences did not make her immune to heartbreaks, as she reportedly felt so down watching her grandson Prince Harry and his family with Meghan Markle and Archie leave the monarchy.

Speaking with The New Yorker, the former press officer at Buckingham Palace, Dickie Arbiter, imagined how Her Majesty witnessed the family-of-three "disappearing into the sunset."

"It is sad for the Queen - at ninety-three, the last thing she wants to see is her family disappear into the sunset," the royal commentator said.

Despite years of seeing how people come and go, Megxit was a sad moment for Queen Elizabeth II, most especially since will be celebrating her 94th birthday this year without Prince Harry for the first time.

Prince Harry and Meghan's bombshell announcement about their desire to give up their senior royal titles in January truly shocked the Queen and the enitre Firm.

However, the Duke and Duchess of Sussex's decision to live their lives without having the royal family around did not only affect Queen Elizabeth II but also all of U.K.

"It is also a letdown for the British people," Arbiter said, expressing the disappointment of the British people over Megxit. "But the British people are stoic, and they get on with it. And, if that's what Harry and Meghan want, good luck to them."

Soon after Megxit, the royal couple relocated with their 11-month-old son Archie in Los Angeles where Doria Ragland, Meghan's mother, resides.

However, it has been reported that the two are having a hard time while they are on lockdown. Meanwhile, Queen Elizabeth II -- who they left devastated in the U.K. -- is dealing with the heartbreak, too.

Queen Got The "Loneliest Job" Ever?

From Feb. 6, 1952, Her Majesty learned that accepting the crown came with great responsibility and suffering. Throughout the years, she remained silent and did everything to keep the royal family together -- even it meant sacrificing her own good.

Previously, royal biographer Penny Junor spoke up and revealed that Queen Elizabeth II's job as a monarch is the loneliest job ever, especially considering all the problems and burdens she needed to carry alone.

"I do not know how the Queen coped with all those catastrophes. Being Queen, being monarch, is a very lonely job," Junor said. "People up and down the country admire her, even Republicans admire her - they may dislike the principle, but they cannot fault the woman."

Underneath everything, however, the Queen is still a woman who is capable of feeling everything an ordinary person does. And Megxit, indeed, is one of the issues of the royal family that broke her heart both as a leader and as the head of a family.
Photo credit: Sylvie Becquet

From ELLE Decor

Such is the love that Bill Brockschmidt and Richard Dragisic feel for Sicily that they did a 23andMe test to see if either had Italian bloodonly to find that they didnt. Brockschmidt hails from Virginia, while his husband Dragisic is from West Texas. Both trained as architects (Brockschmidt is a partner in the ED A-List firm Brockschmidt & Coleman) and divide their time between Manhattan and New Orleans. But neither had been to Sicily until 2000.

For Dragisic it was his very first meal, a plate of fresh squid stuffed with almonds and oranges, that did the trick. Brockschmidts passion had deeper rootshe had become obsessed with Italy in high school Latin class. In February 2006, on their third trip to Modica, the city founded somewhere between 1300 and 1030 B.C. and known for its chocolate and churches, they decided buying a house there might be an interesting idea, Brockschmidt says. Three months later they returned and saw three properties. On the plane home they decided which was the one, and by October it was theirs. It just never seemed like a crazy idea, he says.

Photo credit: Sylvie Becquet

It may not have been crazy, but it was certainly challenging. The house, once part of a Grimaldi palazzo long ago divided into smaller dwellings, hadnt been touched for 60 years. Brockschmidt describes it as a complete ruin with no plumbing or electricity. Like most Modica houses, there was a cave, hand-chiseled around 600 B.C., that had been used over the years for animals and storage and as a safe haven during turmoil. Now the cave is a sparkling room for cooking, dining, and entertaining, but when they first saw it, the walls were sooty and black. It was so dark, they crawled around with iPhone flashlights to get measured drawings of the room. The first order of businessafter cleaning the stonewas to channel a lot more light through the caves arched entrance. To that end, they opened the center of the house and replaced small aluminum windows upstairs with tall French doors so that light could flow from the ground-floor courtyard and down from the second floor. Next, they covered the dirt floors with salvaged antique tiles with majolica accents. An old doorway to the house next door became a fireplace. A staircase was added following traces of a former one in the same spot. In the end, Brockschmidt says, It took three years and more euros than expected to make the house habitable.

Story continues

Photo credit: Sylvie Becquet

The decor was the fun part. The strategic use of color, a Brockschmidt & Coleman trademark, can be seen in the second-floor living rooms Baroque blue door surrounds. Brockschmidt and Dragisic brought milk paint over on the plane and did the painting themselves. The furnishings, which also lean toward the Baroque (including a divine settee bought in nearby Catania), make perfect senseModica is one of a group of eight cities designated a unesco World Heritage site due to the late-Baroque architecture that resulted after an earthquake had destroyed the region in 1693.

Much of the furniture also happens to be mobile. We designed the house to be totally flexible in that 18th-century way, Brockschmidt says, adding that the dining table in particular is on the move a lot. For instance, it was absent during their memorable 2013 Ali Babathemed party. For that event, a disco ball was hung from the original carved cleats on the caves ceiling, while a DJ kept everyone dancing, including blue-painted go-go dancers from Rome. The guests were new local friends as well as tons of pals who made the trek from the States, such asappropriatelyBrockschmidts high school Latin teacher. Peter Patout, the New Orleans antiques dealer, describes the event as nothing less than magical. The guests, he says, were attired in festive costumes, and the party spilled out onto the street.

Photo credit: Sylvie Becquet

Photo credit: Hearst Owned

If that celebration was magic, it was only a reflection of what convinced the pair to buy the house in the first place. Sicily is so unusual and exotic, Brockschmidt says. When the locals go to mainland Italy, they say theyre going to the Continent. Now the couple have brought at least some of the exotica of the island to our own continent. Last year they opened a New Orleans boutique, Sudin the same building as Brockschmidt & Colemans new Southern interior design outpostthat showcases the Italian art and antiques they love as well as decorative objects made by local artisans. Dragisic, who runs the shop full-time these days, is grateful that buying trips mean a chance to stay at his Sicilian retreat. One calls it a house, but in fact it is a puzzle whose pieces of ancient origin are constantly being revealed to us, even now, he says. I love that its a mystery, full of secrets and surprises.

Photo credit: James Merrell

This story originally appeared in the May 2020 issue of ELLE Decor. SUBSCRIBE

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Uttar Pradesh reported 67 fresh coronavirus cases and three fatalities on Wednesday, taking the total number of COVID-19 patients to 727 and the death toll in the state to 11, an official said.

Among the latest deaths, one each was reported from Lucknow, Agra and Kanpur, he said.

Out of the eight cases, three were reported from Agra, one each from Basti, Meerut, Bulanshahr, Varanasi and Moradabad.

"Total 727 cases of coronavirus have been confirmed in the state in 44 districts, of them 55 patients have been treated and discharged," Principal Secretary, Health, Amit Mohan Prasad told reporters.

He said presently 10,661 patients are kept in quarantine facility.

The health department study showed that 46.5 per cent cases are between the age group of 21-40 years, followed by 41-60 years of age group that has 26 per cent cases, the official said.

In 0-20 years of age group, there are 17 per cent cases, while 10.5 per cent cases were of those above 60 years, Prasad said.

He said the government has decided to conduct a "death audit" of all those who died of the deadly disease that could help them in dealing future cases.

Additional Chief Secretary, Information and Home,Awanish Awasthi said of the total COVID-19 cases in the state, 619 are from the government-identified hotspots.

He said of the total cases, 58-60 per cent are linked to the Tablighi Jamaat congregation or those who are related with them or came in their contact.

"In Uttar Pradesh, 2,717 such people have been identified and 2,470 have been quarantined," Awasthi said.

Prasad said among those who died mostly included elderly persons or those who had some underlying medical condition.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
To aid users in the current pandemic and emphasize the importance of good hygiene, Wear OS is now sending reminders to wash your hands.

Wear OS now sending wash hands reminders for good hygiene

The new reminders come courtesy of the Google Clocks new v5 4.0 update for smartwatches running on Googles wearables platform. The new reminder not only tells users to wash their hands; it also includes a timer to set. The timer gives three seconds to start running the water before a 40-second timer for the actual hand washing.

Once the forty seconds ends, users can expect a new reminder within 3 hours. Those who dont want the 3-hour reminders can disable them by tapping on the notification and turning them off.

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Why a hygiene reminder now?

Why is Google sending this reminder now? One reason is the need to practice good hygiene. The current pandemic is shining light on the need for more thorough hand washing. Its convenient to quickly run ones hands with soap through water for a few seconds, but it isnt enough when it comes to fighting sickness and disease.

The next reason, of course, pertains to the current COVID-19 pandemic. The disease is now worldwide. The US now has the highest death toll of any country worldwide. And the disease continues to spread in the US, with all fifty states now reporting deaths.

Wisconsin now has its first death in the state. The US is currently considering ways to reopen essential businesses to boost the economy.

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If the country is to reopen, though, social distancing and good hygiene practices (such as thorough hand washing) will be essential to getting the country back to some normalcy.

Failing to wash ones hands can lead to spreading germs. Users with dirty hands can touch surfaces and infect them if they have the disease. Wear OS users arent the only ones washing their hands, however. Retail stores are also disinfecting store shelves and surfaces on a daily basis now to prevent the spread of disease.

Googles additional efforts

Google is doing a number of things to aid in the fight against what US President Donald Trump calls the invisible enemy. The search engine giant is partnering with the World Health Organization (WHO) for momentary updates on the COVID-19 fight on its search engine.

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In addition, Google has been providing reliable sources for citizens on its YouTube video platform. The company finally launched its resource hub. Now, Google is partnering with Apple to provide cross-platform contact-tracing so that authorities can gather data to aid in the global fight.

Additionally, Google has removed all coronavirus apps from the Play Store. Searching for apps on COVID-19 will only bring up FEMA and the Center for Disease Control (CDC) apps. The company is also using its AI (Google Assistant) to provide helpful tips for users.
The presence of the Sunni Jama Masjid amid the now closed market outside the Bandra station, which witnessed the gathering of thousands of migrant workers, found a mention in many news reports and also in the commentary by politicians and social media users

A 2,000-strong crowd of migrant workers gathered at Mumbais Bandra railway station on Tuesday, demanding passage back home, as the coronavirus lockdown had rendered them jobless. The presence of the Sunni Jama Masjid amid the now closed market outside the station, which witnessed the gathering, found a mention in many news reports and also in the commentary by politicians and social media users.

India TV chief editor Rajat Sharma, in a tweet, asked why people had gathered outside the station to go home without any luggage in their hands. He mentioned the location of the protest to be Jama Masjid.

                .   ?                      ?  Rajat Sharma (@RajatSharmaLive) April 14, 2020

While NewsNation asked why the venue of the gathering had to be a mosque, Republic TV too referred to the location in the same manner. ABP News also questioned the organisers of the crowd at the mosque.

BJP leader Kapil Mishra also asked three questions about the incident, including why it was outside a mosque.

    - 1.                , ,   ? 2.      ? 3.   30             ?    pic.twitter.com/vDSfWXHNKM  Kapil Mishra (@KapilMishra_IND) April 14, 2020

On the same day as Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced that the nationwide lockdown to stop the spread of coronavirus would be extended till 3 May, the gathering was witnessed in Bandra, among the sensitive spots in Mumbai, a city which has reported 1,753 confirmed cases as on Wednesday. "The migrant labourers had gathered in Bandra demanding permission to return to their native states. However, they were later dispersed after police and local leaders intervened and asked them to vacate," news agency ANI quoted a police official as saying.

The communal angle found further mention in a widely shared video that showed a Muslim man addressing the crowd. In the video, the local was seen telling the crowd that the he understands the hardship they are facing and that it from Allahs side, to which, a person responds, "Allah ki taraf se nai, Modi ke taraf se hai". The man responded saying that the whole world is facing this pandemic and that mosques, churches and religious places have been shut in its wake.

Wow. Thousands of ambassadors of peace doing this at #Bandra right now. Well done @OfficeofUT, well done. The world should see this.#Covid_19 #COVIDIOTSpic.twitter.com/SdinaZXm39  Abhijit Majumder (@abhijitmajumder) April 14, 2020

In response, Twitter users posed questions about speakers invoking Allahs name and asked if all Bihari-Bengali migrant workers in Mumbai are Muslims. Another Twitter user blamed the Shiv Sena-led government for hiding a story of Muslim defiance due to its secularism bug.

The same crowd was addressed by a Muslim gentleman who was appealing to them in the name of Allah. Are all Bihari- Bengali migrant workers in Mumbai, Muslims? Secondly if they had to go to Bihar and Bengal they would gather either at VT, Dadar or Kurla not Bandra. https://t.co/UcqiO9eGMM  Vikas Saraswat (@VikasSaraswat) April 14, 2020

Why is the appeal in the name of Allah? Migrant Labourers are from pan India and pan religious background.... Pls note yesterday #KavitaKrishnan yesterday tried to peddle a fake story of a hungry woman.... Today this concerted effort to sabotage lockdown. What is happening?  Ashoke Pandit (@ashokepandit) April 14, 2020

Is it true that people whom @AUThackeray was referring as Migrant Labours were basically Muslims from Bandra? Their secularism bug caused them to hide another story of Muslim defiance for laws and in the process he blamed it on Migrant Labour?  Piyush Kulshreshtha (@ThinkersPad) April 15, 2020

Three FIRs have been registered in relation to the incident. One of the FIRs is against at least 1,000 migrant workers for assembling near the Bandra railway station. The other two are against a television journalist and self-proclaimed labour leader.

An FIR was filed against around 1,000 unidentified persons under Sections 143 (Punishment), 147 (punishment for rioting), 149 (unlawful assembly), 186 (obstructing public servant), 188 (disobedience to public order) of the Indian Penal Code as well as Section 3 (Penalty) of the Epidemic Act.

Earlier, the Mumbai Police also detained a man who may have set off rumours that led to hundreds of migrants flooding Bandra. The arrested person was identified as Vinay Dubey, who allegedly ran an online campaign 'Chalo Ghar Ki Ore' (Head towards home) for migrant labourers in Mumbai, India Today reported. He has been accused of inciting migrants by posting calls for action on Facebook and Twitter.

In a Facebook video, Dubey can be heard saying that if the government doesn't provide migrants with adequate transport, he will set off on a rally on foot to take the migrants back to North India. He can also be heard saying that his team was present at Bandra to lead the 'movement' and calling for a nationwide protest of special relief trains are not arranged by 18 April.

However, according to a Free Press Journal report, the gathering at Bandra had its root in a news report by Marathi channel ABP Majhas scribe Rahul Kulkarni. It claimed that train services will be resumed to ferry migrants back home on 14 April. He was arrested on Wednesday.

Maharashtra minister Nawab Malik also tweeted the ABP Majha story and said it cant be ruled out that the news reports might have triggered the massive crowd at Bandra railway station.

Later, Kulkarni tweeted a letter from the South Central Railway with the caption, A lot of people have been trolling me. Among them I don't know how many saw the 9 o'clock news I gave. Did we say anytime that trains are going to start? Read this railway letter now.

It is important to note that the 'letter' is a proposal and not a circular or order. However, the letter said that in a video conference held on 13 April, it was decided to run Jansadharan Specials for clearing stranded passengers/migrant labour of unreserved segment. The circular does not mention when the trains will run but has directed officials to critically analyse the number of stranded passengers and migrants and submit a proposal with destinations.

https://twitter.com/RahulAsks/status/1250107912879513601

The Railways later clarified that no passenger special relief trains were being run till 3 May.
The future of Wasabi is in doubt after accounts showed it was fighting for survival even before the pandemic.

The chain of Japanese restaurants, which employs 1,700 staff, has been closed in line with the Government lockdown.

In its most recent accounts, its parent company revealed losses of more than 15million over the last two years. It also revealed it has to repay bank loans of 25million in the next two years.

In a pickle: The Wasabi chain of Japanese restaurants, which employ 1,700 staff, has been closed in line with the Government lockdown

The accounts, released at the end of March, have raised concerns it will be the next casualty, saying there is significant doubt over the companys ability to continue as a going concern.

Its plight comes as restaurants, pubs and cafes were told they would have to remain closed for at least another three weeks.

Carluccios and Mexican chain Chiquito quickly fell into administration after the lockdown, and it is thought that other brands, many of which are owned by private equity firms, may not survive.

Wasabi has more than 50 branches in the UK. In the year to December 2018, it lost 8.5million, compared to 7.1million for the previous year, despite turnover up to 106million from 115million.

Yesterday celebrity chef Yotam Ottolenghi called for a six-month time-out on rent and commercial landlord mortgages to protect Britains restaurant industry.

He said: Restaurants are one of the backbones of the economy and a cultural institution.
With so many kids home from school, spending more time on their devices, Google wants to help parents find kid-friendly content. Today, its rolling out a new Kids tab on Google Play filled with teacher approved apps. Each app is rated on factors like age-appropriateness, quality of experience and enrichment, and parents can quickly review those ratings before they download.

Google is also introducing a teacher approved badge, so even if youre searching outside of the Kids tab, youll be able to find apps that have been rated by educators. Google has been working with teachers for the last few years to curate apps that are both fun and educational, and it has consulted with educational experts from institutions like Harvards Graduate School of Education and Georgetown University.

We trust teachers to enrich our kids while theyre in school, and were grateful theyve shared their expertise to rate the apps kids use when theyre not in school as well, Google wrote in a blog post.

Google Play Kids Tab

Google is launching the Kids tab earlier than planned, saying it has received positive feedback and could be especially useful now. Google says it is adding content as quickly as possible, but in the meantime, you may not see some of your favorite apps. The Kids tab is rolling out across the US over the next few days, and it will be expanding internationally in the coming months.

If youre looking for more kid-friendly content, check out our guide to the best streaming apps for kids.
35 million are supposed to cover the needs of combating the spread of Covid-19 in this country, - Healthcare Minister

The World Bank has assigned another 135 million dollars for Ukraine, 35 of which are supposed to be used for deterring the spread of coronavirus disease in this country. Maksym Stepanov, the Healthcare Minister of Ukraine said so during the briefing broadcasted by 112 Ukraine TV channel.

According to the official, 20 million of the said sum will be used to purchase the necessary materials and equipment for combating Covid-19. Another 15 million are supposed to cover the financial needs of medical institutions.

Earlier, the U.S. government assigned 1.2 million dollars for combating coronavirus.

As of 9 a.m. of April 15, there are 3,764 lab-confirmed cases of Covid-19 in Ukraine. 108 patients deceased, 143 recovered. 392 new cases were observed over just 24 hours.

Earlier, President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelensky claimed that the peak of the coronavirus epidemic in this country is not there yet. The crucial period is to begin in the second decade of April. He said so during his address broadcasted by 112 Ukraine TV channel.
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Linkedin Dzulfiqar Fathur Rahman (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Wed, April 15, 2020 14:40 636 fc6853813033f564188675f8bd20b0ea 1 Business high-speed-railway,KCIC,Luhut-Binsar-Pandjaitan,Jakarta-Bandung-High-Speed-Train,COVID-19 Free

Construction on the Jakarta-Bandung high-speed railway project is expected to be delayed amid the COVID-19 pandemic, a high-ranking government official has said.

Railway developer PT Kereta Cepat Indonesia China (KCIC), a joint venture between Indonesian and Chinese railway companies, initially planned to finish the project and start operations in 2021.

The target must be rescheduled because the construction is suspended right at the moment. There are only a few activities so it will definitely be delayed, acting transportation minister Luhut Pandjaitan told reporters in an online briefing on Tuesday evening.

Read also: SOE Ministry demands assessment of halted high-speed railway project

Luhut, who also serves as the coordinating maritime affairs and investment minister, said the development of the project would depend on the situation of the coronavirus outbreak in the country.

The government reported more than 4,800 confirmed COVID-19 cases as of Tuesday afternoon. Of those, 459 patients died of the highly contagious disease, while 426 people have recovered.

To curb the outbreak, President Joko Jokowi Widodo called on the public in mid-March to implement social distancing measures by studying, working and praying at home. The provincial administration in Jakarta, which has become the national epicenter of the outbreak, recently introduced large-scale social restrictions that have suspended school, office, religious and public activities for 14 days.

Chinese workers wanting to return to work on the Jakarta-Bandung high-speed railway project should abide by the health and safety protocols, said Luhut.

The Jakarta-Bandung high-speed railway project is one of the government's national strategic projects (PSN) in the transportation sector and is expected to need a total investment of US$6.07 billion.

Read also: 2019 marks new era in Indonesian transportation system

The Law and Human Rights Ministry issued in late March a regulation offering an exemption for foreigners working on national strategic projects from the temporary ban on foreign arrivals and transits. The ban is set to last until the government declares an end to the outbreak.

We are still making an evaluation, said Luhut. We are still calculating the cost of the delays to the project.

The railway project will serve four main stations: Halim in Jakarta, Karawang in West Java and Walini and Tegaluar in Bandung regency. The trains will travel at 350 kilometers per hour, cutting the travel time between Jakarta and Bandung to 45 minutes, faster than the approximately three hours on the existing train.
(Photo : REUTERS/Denis Balibouse) A baby seat is pictured in the flat of Noemie Bouchet and Arnaud Joal, who are expecting the birth of their first child very soon, during the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) outbreak in Geneva, Switzerland, April 8, 2020.

The sales of at-home sperm collection kits surge in the past weeks as men fear coronavirus hinders them from having children.

While no concrete proof connects the virus to infertility, men rush to freeze their sperm during the pandemic. They then send the kits to sperm banks with mail-in collection services trying to save their sperms.

CryoChoice's Operations Manager Heather Kilpatrick says that the sales of their at-home sperm collection kits have increased by 20% during the lockdown weeks. She adds that they receive numerous queries from people who are scared about the virus.

Similar startup companies also have reported an exponential sales increase in sperm-collection kits, which are then shipped back to clinics for cryogenic freezing. Legacy receives orders that are 10 times more than the usual volume.

Meanwhile, another company, Dadi, says more people aim to store their sperms for another five years. This prompts the company to add long-term storage spaces.

However, the fertility clinics also worry this spike during the pandemic would leave other people with no space for preservation. This includes cancer patients at higher risks of infertility because of treatments.

Yet, other clinics have already scaled-down or even closed their operations after authorities advised them that they are not essential services.

Is there a reason to be afraid of?

No research has directly connected the virus with fertility. Even the study published online that checked on the semen or testicular tissue samples from 13 COVID-19 patients did not confirm anything.

While all subjects are positive from the virus, none of the samples were positive for coronavirus. This also concludes that coronavirus is not sexually transmitted. Moreover, the study did not discuss how the virus affects men's sperms.

Nanjing Medical University in China conducted the study, which was published on Mar. 12 on the Hubei government's website. However, the article was immediately removed from the government website after a few hours. The reason for the deletion was not clear, as reported by the South China Morning Post.

Perhaps, men worry that high fever, one of the primary COVID-19 symptoms, can result in infertility. Studies show that fever, and even minor changes in body temperature, reduces sperm production and mobility. These are important factors of sperm's ability to fertilize an egg.

However, fertility specialist Dr. James Grifo from NYU Langone thinks that it is not a major issue. 'High fever is known to inhibit sperm production, but men have germ cells that cake new sperm every day,' says Dr. Grifo.

While hepatitis B and mumps lead to infertility, most viral illnesses like flu and COVID-19 do not affect potency. Thus, Dr. Grifo does not recommend freezing sperms at this time.

Aside from fever, the most common symptoms of COVID-19 include cough and shortness of breath. Health experts promote social distancing to be an effective way to prevent the spread of the disease.

As of Wednesday, Apr. 15, the number of coronavirus cases has reached the 2 million mark with a total of 2,017,174 worldwide, with 492,023 recoveries and 128,011 deaths.

Read also: Women to Lose Their Chances of Having a Baby as Clinics Stop Treatments due to the Coronavirus

 2021 TECHTIMES.com All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission.
At least seven care facilities in six towns across the Lehigh Valley and northwestern New Jersey have reported both residents and staff members testing positive for the COVID-19 coronavirus disease.

More than 30 residents at those regional sites have died.

The Pennsylvania Department of Health in its daily coronavirus briefing Tuesday said out of 25,345 positive cases of COVID-19, 1,869 statewide cases are at 232 residential care facilities, such as nursing homes and personal care homes.

A national report calculated by The Associated Press based on media reports and state health departments shows 3,621 deaths have been linked to coronavirus outbreaks in nursing homes and care centers. The latest count as of Monday by the AP is up from about 450 deaths 10 days ago.

Pennsylvania Health Secretary Dr. Rachel Levine said Tuesday she wasnt surprised by the infection rate in the areas nursing facilities, whose population is known to be especially vulnerable to serious complications from the virus.

Were taking every precaution we possibly can to protect them," she said.

Here is a look at the numbers of cases this week across some of the regions care facilities:

Lehigh Countys Cedarbrook Senior Care & Rehab has around 630 residents with nearly 800 county employees and 120 contracted dining services and therapy employees working in total at its two campuses, said county spokeswoman Laura Grammes.

At Cedarbook in South Whitehall Township, as of noon Monday, seven residents and seven staff members tested positive for COVID-19 with no deaths. The Fountain Hill location was reporting five residents and five staff members as of Monday testing positive for COVID-19, also with no deaths.

At least one resident from Fountain Hill has recovered from the virus, Grammes said.

At Genesis HealthCares Lehigh Center in Lower Macungie Township, 58 residents and 29 employees tested positive for COVID-19 by Tuesday afternoon. Of the 58 residents, 12 have died, although for two of the 12 the cause was something other than COVID-19, said Genesis spokeswoman Lori Mayer.

Just a day prior, Genesis on Monday reported 51 residents and 26 workers at the Lehigh Center having tested positive for the coronavirus.

At Northampton Countys Gracedale Nursing Home, there are more than 600 residents living and 700 people working at the Upper Nazareth Township facility -- Pennsylvanias largest nursing home operating under one roof.

As of Monday, 24 residents and 18 employees tested positive for COVID-19, with two residents having died.

ManorCare Health Services, which has several facilities across Pennsylvania and New Jersey, declined to provide data Tuesday on the coronavirus. Its regional nursing facilities include those in Palmer Township and in the Bethlehem and Allentown areas.

We communicate directly with employees, patients and their families if they are affected or if there is a risk of exposure in our facility, said Julie Beckert, spokeswoman for HCR-ManorCare. This information is constantly changing and for us to report that information publicly may just add concern and fear rather than allay it. We are happy to address any concerns or questions employees, patients and families have directly with them.

In Warren County, at Genesis HealthCares Brakeley Park Center in Lopatcong Township, as of Tuesday afternoon there were 58 residents and 14 employees who tested positive for COVID-19. Of the 58 residents, seven have since died, Mayer said.

Thats up from 16 residents and 14 staff members, with four resident deaths, as of Monday.

Mayer attributed the increase in residents testing positive to testing being conducted of every patient at Brakeley Park Center. Most of the test results, she said, were returned Tuesday afternoon. The majority of new positive cases also are asymptomatic, she noted.

At the neighboring Genesis HealthCare Lopatcong Center, six residents and two employees tested positive for COVID-19 by Tuesday afternoon, with no deaths, Mayer said. Mondays case count there was three residents and the same two staff members.

All Genesis facilities continue to adhere to the strict guidelines implemented by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, in addition to following the direction of the Pennsylvania and New Jersey Departments of Health in an effort to halt the spread of the coronavirus, Mayer said.

Our thoughts and prayers go out to the families of these residents during this difficult time, especially the families of those who have passed away, she said in a statement.

At The Chelsea at Brookfield in White Township, as of Tuesday afternoon, 14 residents and seven staff members had tested positive, with at least one resident and four staff members awaiting test results, said spokesman Tom Kranz.

The facility has reported 14 deaths. Four additional staff members who previously tested positive for the coronavirus have since returned to work, Kranz said.

The Chelsea at Brookfield currently has about 90 residents and 64 employees.

About 1.3 million people live in the nations 15,600 nursing homes, according to the CDC. Experts say nursing home deaths may keep climbing because of chronic staffing shortages that have been made worse by the coronavirus crisis, a shortage of protective supplies and a continued lack of available testing.

There also have been a surge in deaths despite steps taken by the federal government in mid-March to bar visitors, cease all group activities, and require each worker be screened for fever or respiratory symptoms at every shift. An Associated Press report earlier this month found that infections were continuing to find their way into nursing homes because such screenings didnt catch people who were infected but werent showing any symptoms.

Several large outbreaks were blamed on asymptomatic spreaders, including infected health workers who worked at several different nursing home facilities. This past week, the federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services that regulates nursing homes issued recommendations urging nursing homes to use separate staffing teams for residents, and to designate separate facilities within nursing homes to keep COVID-19 positive residents away from those who have tested negative.

Reporter Steve Novak and The Associated Press contributed to this report.

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.

Pamela Sroka-Holzmann may be reached at pholzmann@lehighvalleylive.com. If theres anything about this story that needs attention, please email her. Follow her on Twitter @pamholzmann. Find lehighvalleylive.com on Facebook.
achut deng I came to America thinking I can never go through hell. But what if this come to me? This virus is very dangerous. It caught everybody off guard, including myself. I was never prepared for it.

michael barbaro

From The New York Times, Im Michael Barbaro. This is The Daily. Today: One of the largest outbreaks of the coronavirus in the U.S. has been inside a meat processing plant in South Dakota. My colleague, Caitlin Dickerson, speaks with one of its workers. Its Monday, May 4th.

caitlin dickerson

As an immigration reporter, as soon as I hear that Covid-19 is starting to spread across the country, I start thinking about who are the most vulnerable people in this pandemic. And right away, meat and poultry plants come to mind. Because these facilities tend to be staffed by immigrants. Theres going to be a lot of pressure on workers to show up for work, because theyve been deemed essential by the federal government. And because of the nature of the work  the facilities are massive, and often you have thousands of people working at a single time, and they literally stand shoulder to shoulder. Theyre touching all the time.

achut deng Hello? caitlin dickerson Are you there? Oh, shoot. You just dropped out. Something happened.

caitlin dickerson

So Im put in touch with a woman named Achut Deng.

caitlin dickerson Woo! We did it. achut deng Yes, we did. [LAUGHS] caitlin dickerson Just to start out, Achut, can you just kind of introduce yourself and tell us what work you do? achut deng So my name is Achut Deng. I work with Smithfield. We produce pork.

caitlin dickerson

Achut is a shift lead at the Smithfield pork plant in Sioux Falls, South Dakota.

achut deng And I am a lead person for one department, 8th floor conversion.

caitlin dickerson

She works in the conversion department, deboning and processing all different cuts of pork. Shes 35. And shes a single mom of three boys 

achut deng Give  give me a second, OK? My son just come in. Give me a second.

caitlin dickerson

 who are trying to get their homework done while we talk.

achut deng Sorry. Im back. caitlin dickerson Youre back. Youre back. OK. So how did you come to work at Smithfield? achut deng Do you want me to go from South Sudan to Ethiopia to Kenya and to America?

caitlin dickerson

Yeah.

achut deng OK. So yes, I was born in South Sudan. But then, when I was six years old, we had a terrorist attack in the village.

caitlin dickerson

Achut was born in Sudan. And she became an orphan when she was six years old during the countrys civil war.

achut deng And we walked to Kenya. And that was in 1990  in 1991 still.

caitlin dickerson

She grew up in refugee camps in Ethiopia and Kenya, where life was really hard.

achut deng They created the school. But pretty much, people go and sit under the tree. Because there was no building or classroom or anything like that in the beginning.

caitlin dickerson

Her school was a shady spot beneath a large tree, where children wrote their English lessons with sticks in the dirt.

achut deng Yeah. It seemed like it was normal at the time, because we didnt have no  any other choice.

caitlin dickerson

She often went days without having food or fresh water. A lot of her friends died. She didnt know if she was ever going to leave. So she took life one day at a time.

achut deng I would say it was just surviving. Because you dont know what would happen tomorrow, you know?

caitlin dickerson

And then in the year 2000, her life changed completely.

achut deng I got the news that I was going to get a second chance on life. Im going to go to the United States.

caitlin dickerson

She was chosen for a program that relocated Sudanese orphans.

achut deng Oh, my God. It was the happiest feeling for me. I could not believe. I didnt go to sleep. The next day I went to school. I told my friends. Yeah.

caitlin dickerson

She moved to Kansas City, started a life in America. She graduated high school and started community college. And then she starts working as a waitress. And then, in her late 20s, doing private security.

caitlin dickerson And then, how do you get to Sioux Falls, South Dakota? achut deng How? You know, I always tell people I moved to Sioux Falls for a very stupid reason, thinking that I find a man. So that was pretty much a reason  a reason right there. [LAUGHING] I moved  I moved in with my younger sons father. Then we broke up. caitlin dickerson OK. And how did you hear about the Smithfield factory for the first time? achut deng He actually told me about it. Because before I moved here, I told him I cannot go a month without a job because a lot of people are relying on me, and most importantly, my kids. So and thats when he told me, oh, yeah. There is a company here, Smithfield. caitlin dickerson And when you were hearing about it, what were people saying? achut deng There was good things. Your start wages with Smithfield was $12.95. That is a very good pay. They have health care, health insurance. So a lot of people came to Sioux Falls because of Smithfield and what it was offering to people. I know a lot of Sudanese families came here because of Smithfield. So when I went and put in my application, right in there they told me, OK, youll start tomorrow. caitlin dickerson Wow. achut deng And I started as a Whizard knife operator. caitlin dickerson And for someone whos never heard of Smithfield or been to the plant, can you just walk through what exactly it is that you guys do there? achut deng So Smithfield  we receive live hogs, slaughter them, cut them into pieces. What I mean by that, by cutting off hams, legs, we make bacon, ham, even hotdogs, cheese hotdogs. We have them. Those are the things we do at Smithfield. So its the entire pig that come alive, turn into so many things afterwards. caitlin dickerson And what is a Whizard knife? achut deng Its a circle knife that goes into this electric thing. And you turn it off and on. caitlin dickerson And what is it used for? achut deng They use Whizard knife to trim off fat, from the loin until theres pretty much all meat. Just meat without fat.

caitlin dickerson

So picture a massive factory floor with giant chunks of pork zooming by on a conveyor belt. And Achut and the other Whizard knife operators are responsible for shaving fat off of the meat as it zooms past them.

caitlin dickerson How many pigs are processed there every day? achut deng 10,000 or more pig. caitlin dickerson Thats huge. achut deng Yeah.

caitlin dickerson

And theyre responsible for 4 to 5 percent of all the pork thats produced in the United States.

[music]

caitlin dickerson So when you first started, what did you think of it? How did it go? achut deng What did I think of Smithfield? Hard work. Hard work is what I thought of it. But youre not really thinking of how hard it is. You are thinking of money. You know? And everything that  once you get the paycheck you are able to pay for the apartment. You are able to put foods on the table. These were the thing that I was thinking, you know? caitlin dickerson What was it like for you physically in the beginning, starting out? achut deng Once you start doing something for the first time, something that you never done, your muscle is going to reject it. Your body is going to reject it. So I was always sore. I was always  my wrists was sore. My arm, you know, went numb. So after work, I would come home and put ice, like, on my shoulder, or my wrist, and then take ibuprofen. And I did that every night. caitlin dickerson Wow. achut deng Until one day, I went to first aid. And I talked to the nurse. And the nurse was very, very nice, outgoing. And she said, you know what, Achut? Let me give you this advice. You know, this job is a hard work. Its a very hard work. Youve been doing this Whizard knife for a year now. And your wrist is hurting, your arm hurt, your shoulder hurt. I would do one job for about a year, but after that, find another job. That way you have a rotation in your body.

caitlin dickerson

So she takes this advice. And over the next couple years, she starts moving around in the factory to different jobs. She eventually becomes a shift lead. And she starts working a lot of overtime  usually 11 to 12 hours a day, six days a week. But it really pays off. She starts to feel comfortable financially.

achut deng I get paid $18.70 an hour. caitlin dickerson What has that higher hourly wage meant for your life? achut deng My boys, all three of them  I can give them what I never have, which is a better life at a young age. caitlin dickerson Uh huh. achut deng Last year, I took them to Disney World. Thats just something that  when I went there, I cried. But it was a tears of happiness. Im bringing my kids. I am American by papers. I bring my kids here. And that was something I did. I was so proud of myself.

caitlin dickerson

Between the new salary shes making and the overtime that shes working, shes able to move into a bigger apartment with her sons. And shes also supporting five family members who are still living in Africa.

achut deng So this job offer me to take care for everybody else, not just my boys, you know? caitlin dickerson So youre basically supporting nine people on your salary from Smithfield? achut deng Yes. caitlin dickerson Wow. achut deng So thats why I pick up overtime regardless of me being tired. Every morning when I go to work, I put everything that the company offered me in order to make sure this food that Im making doesnt have anything that can go and harm someone. Because you know, these food are going to families. Its going to children. Its going to mothers. Its going to fathers, uncles, aunts, everyone around the world. Working at the meat factory, Im making food for people around the world. I think of that every day. caitlin dickerson It sounds like you take a lot of pride in your job. achut deng Yes. I do.

[music]

caitlin dickerson Do you remember the first time you heard about the coronavirus? achut deng Yeah. I would say it was sometime in January, February. We just talking about it. Its kind of, like, its something that happened in China, and its going to stay in China. Then, come the beginning of March, it was Seattle. And then, the next morning I went to work. And now everybody at work is talking about it. But still  most of us, as refugees, immigrants, its, like  its probably, you know, people are maybe just being extra about it right now. Maybe its not that bad. caitlin dickerson Why do you think you reacted that way? achut deng For me, personally, Im, like, OK. If it becomes to effect, Im like, Ive been through so much. If this is just like a virus, youre talking to someone who had malaria, you know? I survived that. So its like, OK, if its going to be like malaria, I can go through it. Its just going to be like any other thing that Ive been through. caitlin dickerson But then, on Saturday, March 21, things start to change at Smithfield. achut deng When I went to work that morning, I saw a lot of people cleaning up the handrails, doors, bathroom doors with wipes. And then, Im, like, whats going on? And one of the people told me, yeah, this thing is serious, Achut. This thing is serious. But you know, Im thinking now, OK, 150 to 160 people in one shift. Youre sitting in the break room to where tables are very small. You have six people in one table. caitlin dickerson And then, later that day, she gets an email. achut deng That time was when I receive an email, a video, from the C.E.O.s, Smithfield C.E.O. archived recording (ken sullivan) Hi. Im Ken Sullivan, president and C.E.O. of Smithfield Foods. Id like to talk to you today about Covid-19, or coronavirus. achut deng So I watched the video from the C.E.O. about this virus is not coming from food. archived recording (ken sullivan) According to the F.D.A. and C.D.C., theres no evidence that Covid-19 can be transmitted by food. achut deng And America need food. Every family need food. We dont want people to struggle from hunger, let alone a virus. archived recording (ken sullivan)  American families. We feed millions of people every day, every single day. Its a business with no shortcuts and no days off. Most of our team members work side-by-side on production lines in our facilities. We cant stay home. We cant telecommute. Food, after all, does not get made on the internet. achut deng So our company is not going to get shut down. archived recording (ken sullivan) Were here. Were always here. Were a food company. And despite Covid-19, indeed, because of it, were working around the clock to do what we do best. And thats deliver good food responsibly. caitlin dickerson How did it feel to you to have your job deemed essential in the middle of a pandemic, when people all over the country are panicking? You know? Your work is deemed fundamental to keeping the country going. achut deng At one point, I was negative about it. At one point, I was, like, wow. Do that mean my life dont matter? And here I am, putting my life at risk coming to work, because people around the world need food. caitlin dickerson Uh huh. achut deng But I said, OK. Im just going to have to stay positive. And if people need food and Im able to do that for them, then Im just going to put my life to God to protect me and not get sick. So Im  caitlin dickerson Did you also consider just staying home from work and not going in? achut deng To be honest, I did not. I was just thinking of, no, I need this job. I need to keep working so I can support my family. And thinking about it now, its, like  it hurts. caitlin dickerson It hurts that you didnt think about yourself? achut deng Yes. [SNIFFLES] Yeah.

[music]

michael barbaro

Well be right back.

caitlin dickerson

By the end of March, hospitals across the country are being overrun by Covid patients. Governors start shutting down businesses and ordering people to shelter in their homes. But in South Dakota, there are still only a few Covid cases. And Achut is still going to work until Saturday, March 28.

achut deng Now Saturday, my superintendents came up around, I would say, at about 3:00. And he said, OK, I want us to have a meeting. caitlin dickerson Uh huh. achut deng They asked me if I have any fever, cough, any, you know, shortness of breath. And I say, no, Im doing good. And he said one of the machine operator tested positive. I say what? caitlin dickerson Wow. achut deng That person  I worked with her that morning for, like, I would say, about 15 minutes. They said, OK, well, you got to go home. Because you had close contact with her. And Im, like, really? I didnt say it out loud, but Im thinking, theyre being silly. And thats when they told me youre going to be under quarantine for the next 14 days. caitlin dickerson Uh huh. achut deng But Im still going to get paid 40 hours. Is that enough for me? Its not enough for me as a person who do overtime. Overtime is, like, $500 extra. $500. That, for me, it covered a lot of things. What do I do? I cant go and get another job. But at that time, I was told its just two weeks. So Im, like, OK. Two weeks? You know, Ill be OK. Its still going to drop me back, one step backward. But I will be OK. caitlin dickerson Uh huh. achut deng And then, Monday night was when I got sick. Monday night, I went to bed feeling OK. I woke up about 2:00 a.m. with this sharp pain on my body. It just feel like someone stabbed me. So you know, I went to the bathroom. And I said, OK, maybe if I take a shower, a cold shower, its going to be better. So I turned the water on. And it just  when the water hit my body, it feel like a bunch of rocks was getting thrown on my body. So I turned the water off. I took the towel to dry myself and my skin. I just couldnt use the towel, my skin hurt. So like, OK, Im freaking out. And then, Thursday night, my body at this point is so exhausted. Even walking is, like, Im pushing myself. I just feel like something heavy sit right on my chest. Now the fear really kicked in, because now Im having problem breathing. I said, OK, its going to be better for me, Im going to stay up. I dont want to sleep. Because if I go to sleep, chances are going to be Im not going to wake up. Thats when I left my room. I came to the living room and just sat there. Because I said, OK, if I stay in my room and I die, I dont want my kids to find me dead in the room. caitlin dickerson What was that like for you emotionally? achut deng [SNIFFLES] caitlin dickerson I mean, whats going through your mind? achut deng (CRYING) I went right back to my childhood, to everything that Ive been through in life. But now, my kids  if I die, my kids will go through the same thing Ive been through. The loneliness, you know, not having anybody to check into, like a parent. Im thinking, I bring these kids to this world, I survive through everything that I went through. I said, I havent even had a chance to tell them they dont know their mom. They dont know what their mom went through. All they know is that my mom is a workaholic. She would do anything to give us a better life. Thats all they know. Its not a perfect world. Id make it perfect for them. But if I die, this world is not perfect anymore. caitlin dickerson It sounds like a horrible, horrible night. achut deng Yeah. It was. It was one of the worst night ever.

caitlin dickerson

So while Achut is at home, sick with the coronavirus, the situation at Smithfield is evolving.

archived recording This Smithfield pork processing plant is now a coronavirus hot spot.

caitlin dickerson

More and more of her colleagues are falling ill.

caitlin dickerson How many other cases do you hear about among your colleagues? achut deng Oh, a lot, a lot, a lot. I think within the South Sudanese community alone, I think we have, like, at least 40 people that I know. But in my department, I was told that it went up to 80. In one department, 80 people. caitlin dickerson And how big is your department? achut deng On a good day that people showed up, its 155. archived recording 1 The outbreak at that Sioux Falls plant is among the worst clusters of coronavirus in the country. About 250 workers there tested positive for coronavirus. archived recording 2 350 workers tested positive for Covid-19.

caitlin dickerson

And as the days pass, it keeps getting worse. The number of cases skyrockets up to more than 400 Smithfield workers who are sick. And the governor calls on the head of the company to stop production.

archived recording One of the nations largest food processors, Smithfield Foods, will close its pork processing plant in South Dakota for further cleaning.

caitlin dickerson

So on April 12, the president of Smithfield announces hes going to close the plant indefinitely. And all the workers are sent home.

archived recording This morning there were fears the nations food supply chain is at a breaking point, after more than a dozen major meat processing plants have become Covid-19 hot spots.

caitlin dickerson

Meanwhile, food processing plants across the country are getting hit hard with Covid. Other major companies, like Tyson, start raising the alarm that theyre having trouble producing and delivering food to the nations grocery stores because of the virus.

archived recording Meanwhile, President Trump announced an executive order to compel meat processing plants to remain open.

caitlin dickerson

And last week, President Trump signs an executive order declaring meat and poultry plants as part of the nations critical infrastructure, as a way to pressure the plants to keep producing food. In Sioux Falls, the plant is still closed. Smithfield says it will continue to pay workers for 40 hours a week until they go back to work. And its speeding up plans to reopen the plant as quickly as possible. But thats also raised questions about whether it can do so safely.

caitlin dickerson How are you feeling now, physically? achut deng Physically, I feel, I feel good. Im still having a little bit of headache. But you know, thats, like, almost an everyday thing when you are a mom. And you know? So Im not freaking out over it. But my fever this morning is still at 100, and I have no idea why. Im just trying to get it down to like, 99 at least, before I call my doctor to go for a check in. But I cannot afford to stay home for a long time. I would give myself a month. And if it goes after four weeks, no. It wouldnt be good for me at all. caitlin dickerson It sounds like as soon as you start feeling better, your focus goes from your health back to your finances. achut deng Yes. That is correct. So now my focus is to try to take care of myself as possible, to where when this company opens back up, then Im ready to go. So thats where my focus is. caitlin dickerson Achut, thank you so much for talking to us about your experience. achut deng Youre welcome. And thank you very much for at least giving me the voice. A lot of people dont understand the living of the refugee camp. I dont take anything for granted because of what Ive been through. And because of what I see happening to other kids that did not make it. But Im pretty sure they are looking over me. They are watching me. And Im going to make them proud.

michael barbaro

On Friday, federal officials said they were investigating the conditions at the South Dakota Smithfield plant that may have contributed to the outbreak. So far, more than 1,000 infections and two deaths have been linked to the plant. Nevertheless, it is scheduled to partially reopen later today. Well be right back. Heres what else you need to know today. On Friday, the Food and Drug Administration granted emergency approval to the antiviral drug Remdesivir, making it the first government-sanctioned treatment for those with Covid-19.

^archived recording

Now that your company has this emergency use authorization, how quickly will the drug get to those people who need it?

archived recording (daniel o'day) We are grateful and really humbled that everything has moved so quickly. You know, its only been 

michael barbaro

In an interview on Sunday with CBS, the C.E.O. of the drugs manufacturer, Gilead, said he was working with federal officials to ensure that the first shipments of the drug reach Americas hardest hit communities and hospitals.

archived recording (daniel o'day) And Margaret, we intend to get that to patients in the early part of this next week. Were beginning to work with the government, which will determine which cities are most vulnerable and where the patients are that need this medicine.

michael barbaro

And 

archived recording (andrew cuomo) Were going to form a consortium with our seven Northeast partner states, which buy about $5 billion worth of equipment and supplies. That will then increase our market power when were buying.

michael barbaro

Seven states said they would begin jointly purchasing medical equipment, from gloves to ventilators, to avoid competing with one another. And because the federal stockpile of such equipment is running out.

archived recording (andrew cuomo) So this consortium, I think, will help us get the equipment and get it at a better price.

michael barbaro
DMK president M K Stalin on



Wednesday accused Chief Minister K Palaniswami of projecting himself and his party AIADMK and "politicising" the functioning of State government in the fight against COVID-19.

Citing a proposed meeting of his party and allies, originally slated to be held today to deliberate the COVID-19 situation, he said it was cancelled due to denial of police permission and this was Palaniswami's "blatant, uncivilised "



Declining to give the nod will not be accepted as anti- coronavirus activity by anyone, but it is seen as a political action by AIADMK and through this the Chief Minister has shown his "arrogance," Stalin alleged in a statement.

On Tuesday Stalin had said "the AIADMK government has made the police department issue a notice, directing that the meeting should not be held" in view of the lockdown.

Days ago, the DMK had announced a meeting of its allies (on April 15), including the Congress and Indian Union Muslim League, to discuss the scourge of coronavirus.

The DMK also announced that the proposed meeting will be held on April 16 through video conferencing.

Stalin alleged,"By projecting him and his party AIADMK even in the fight against coronavirus, Palaniswami is politicising the neutral government apparatus meant for the the people."



The DMK chief, who is also the Leader of the Opposition in the Assembly, alleged that the government action was intended to thwart the public service of his party during the lockdown.

"Preventing" his party-led meeting with its allies, "banning" distribution of relief by his party and government's "unilateral" pooling of Rs one crore each from the MLA Constituency Development Scheme had an "ulterior motive," he alleged adding it was aimed at "preventing DMK's public work during lockdown and it is "condemnable."



The State government had on Monday clarified it had not banned distribution of food/essential commodities to the needy, but only insisted on precautions like social distancing and the need for volunteers to work with government to ensure preventing the contagion's spread.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Haivision Announces SRT Tuesday Webinar Series Featuring the Latest Innovations Using the SRT Open Source Protocol

First web event to demonstrate how organizations can leverage SRT for remote and at-home workflows with internet-resilient video streaming

Montreal, Canada( )

Haivision,?a leader in video streaming solutions, announced SRT Tuesday  a series of virtual events hosted by Haivision, Microsoft, and the SRT Alliance featuring the latest innovations using the SRT open source protocol.

On select Tuesdays throughout the coming months, the SRT Tuesday webinar series will bring technologists and end-users together to discuss how organizations can leverage SRT for streaming low latency, high quality video over unpredictable internet connections.

The first web event  Broadcast Reimagined: SRT  The Simple Solution for Your Remote and At-Home Workforce  will take place on Tuesday, April 28 at 11am ET. Attendees will learn how broadcasters are leveraging the benefits of SRT in their remote workflows for at-home staff for overcoming todays challenges of crowded internet connections, firewalls, poor quality video conferencing, packet loss, and latency. In this webinar, video experts will discuss how SRT has become an integral part of the new normal workflows, connecting remote employees and broadcast centers with live interviews, at-home contribution, and remote production monitoring.

SRT Tuesday Webinar

Title: Broadcast Reimagined: SRT  The Simple Solution for Your Remote and At-Home Workforce

Day/Time: Tuesday, April 28 at 11am ET

Speakers:

Corey Behnke, producer and co-founder, Live X

Selwyn Jans, technical video engineer, Haivision

Marcus Schioler, vice president product marketing, Haivision

Originally developed and pioneered by Haivision, SRT (Secure Reliable Transport) is an open source video transport protocol and technology stack that makes it possible to stream high-quality, low-latency live video from anywhere to anywhere over the public internet. With secure streams and simplified firewall traversal, SRT delivers the best quality video over the most unpredictable networks.

About Haivision

Haivision is the leader in live video streaming technologies, providing more than 25,000 organizations globally with video solutions that help them stream broadcast-quality, low-latency video from anywhere. Founded in 2004, Haivision is a profitable, privately held company with headquarters in Montreal and Chicago, and regional offices located throughout the Americas, Europe, and Asia. To help solve the worlds most difficult video streaming challenges, Haivision open sourced its award winning SRT low latency video streaming protocol in 2017 and founded the SRT Alliance, which now has over 350 industry leading companies supporting this new standard. Awarded an Emmy for Technology and Engineering from the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences, Haivision is also recognized as one of the most influential companies in video by Streaming Media and one of the fastest growing companies by Deloittes Technology Fast 500. Learn more at haivision.com.
In a shocking incident, the attendant of a person with symptoms of COVID-19, attacked doctors at Osmania General Hospital and later fled with the patient.

Furthermore, after their escape, the results showed the patient had tested positive for the disease, following which a police team tracked the two down and shifted them to another hospital on Tuesday.

Speaking about the incident over the phone, Dr Nagender, Superintendent of Osmania General Hospital, said: "Yesterday a patient got admitted to Osmania General Hospital with a lung infection, he did not disclose his history to the doctors. On getting suspicions that the patient might be COVID-19 infected, the Osmania doctors had taken his samples for testing and sent them to the lab. As his reports were awaited, he was shifted to the isolation centre in the hospital."

"Today morning, the patient's attendant argued with a junior doctor and attacked him for keeping the patient in the isolation ward. Later, both the patient and the attendant fled from the hospital. The incident was reported to police, and then it was revealed that the patient's sample had tested positive for COVID-19," he added.

The police immediately set into action and traced the patient and his family members, including the attendant, and shifted them to Gandhi Hospital.

DCP, East Zone, Hyderabad, Ramesh told ANI over the phone, "After receiving the complaint from Osmania doctors a case was registered against the patient's attendant under section 353 and 506 of the IPC in Afzalgunj police station. We have not initiated any action as of now because the attendant was the primary contact of the patient who later tested positive for COVID-19."

With an increase of 52 cases, the count of COVID-19 positive cases has reached 644 in Telangana, according to the State Health Department on Tuesday.

This includes 18 deaths and 110 cured and discharged patients, as per the official data.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
A television journalist was arrested from here on Wednesday over his report on resumption of special trains, which might have prompted gathering of migrant workers in suburban Bandra on Tuesday amidst the coronavirus lockdown, a police official said.

The accused, Rahul Kulkarni, was detained in Osmanabad in Marathwada region, where he is based, and brought to Mumbai where he was formally arrested.

The arrest of Kulkarni, who works with a Marathi channel, was announced by state Home Minister Anil Deshmukh on his Twitter handle.

"Police arrested journalist Rahul Kulkarni for giving report, due to which rumour was spread," Deshmukh tweeted.

In a recent report, Kulkarni said Jan Sadharan special trains would resume for people stranded due to the lockdown, the police official said.

He has been booked under IPC Sections 188 (disobedience to order duly promulgated by public servant and 269, 270 (negligent, malignant act likely to spread infection of disease dangerous to life), 117 (abetting commission of offence by public), the official said.

More than 1,000 migrant workers, most of them from Bihar, Uttar Pradesh and West Bengal, gathered near Bandra railway station here on Tuesday afternoon.

They were demanding that the state government make transport arrangements so that they can go back to their native towns and villages.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin.

Associated Press

Major US airlines and the Treasury Department reached a deal on Tuesday over billions of dollars in coronavirus aid.

The coronavirus bailout package contains two provisions for aid to the airline industry, split into two $25 billion funds for passenger airlines: payroll grants, essentially aid for airline workers paid through their employers, and loans, which are intended to help inject liquidity into the struggling companies.

Tuesday's agreement surrounded the payroll grants. The coronavirus rescue package budgeted up to $25 billion in grants for passenger airlines and $4 billion for cargo airlines. An additional $3 billion is set aside for airline contractors.

According to a statement from Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, Alaska Airlines, Allegiant Air, American Airlines, Delta Air Lines, Frontier Airlines, Hawaiian Airlines, JetBlue Airways, United Airlines, SkyWest Airlines, and Southwest Airlines all applied for the grants.

American Airlines, in a press release and a separate memo to employees, said it had received $5.8 billion in payroll assistance. The amount will be split into a $4.1 billion grant and a $1.7 billion loan.

In a memo to all employees, Delta said that it would receive $5.4 billion, including an unsecured low-interest 10 year $1.6 billion loan.

United confirmed that it had reached the deal, but did not immediately release details on amounts. In a statement, the airline said it looked "forward to completing the final agreements with the Treasury Dept in the next few days."

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Southwest announced that it would receive about $3.2 billion in payroll support, including a $1 billion loan. JetBlue confirmed it would receive $935.8 million, of which $250.7 million would be a low interest loan.

The Treasury had previously suggested that airlines would be required to pay back 30% of the grants, effectively making them loans. Labor unions and lawmakers objected to those terms, saying the money was intended for the benefit of workers in the struggling industry, not the airlines themselves, and that the repayment requirement could discourage airlines from applying for the aid.

"Unfortunately, Secretary Mnuchin decided to play games with this aid, rather than deliver it in the way Congress intended in the bipartisan deal," Sara Nelson, president of the Association of Flight Attendants-CWA union, said in a statement. "Now we must fight to keep aviation intact to protect our industry and ensure our economy lifts off again when the virus is under control."

"We have seen what happens when investment bankers like Secretary Mnuchin control the outcomes," Nelson added, "and we will not stand by to watch it play out again."

The Treasury also said it would take equity in airlines receiving aid. Details were not immediately available, although Delta said it would provide the government with warrants to acquire about 1% of Delta stock at $24.39 per share over five years.

"Even though this process was neither easy nor perfect, it is critically important that in the end there are agreements in place that put workers and families first by keeping hundreds of thousands of airline employees from flight crews to baggage handlers on the payroll during this extremely tumultuous period for the U.S. economy," Rep. Peter DeFazio (D-OR), chair of the House Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure, said.

"I strongly believe what Congress laid out in this provision of the CARES Actto put workers firstshould be the model for any industry-specific relief going forward," he added.

Under the terms of the bailout, airlines receiving payroll aid are prohibited from furloughing or laying off workers before September 30. They are also banned from buying back stock or paying dividends to shareholders until September 30, 2021. Executive compensation is also limited.

"We are closer than ever to almost a million airline workers knowing they will receive their paycheck and keep their healthcare and other benefits, at least through September," Nelson said. "At the same time, we were able to rein in the worst corporate practices by tying this aid to restrictions on stock buybacks, executive compensation and dividends."

Read the original article on Business Insider
Vidal Herrera, inside the lab of his company, 1-800-Autopsy, has been flooded with requests for private autopsies from people around the country who want to know whether a loved one died of COVID-19. (Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times)

For Julie Murillo, the fight to get her husband tested for COVID-19 lasted twice as long as his battle with the illness itself.

Julio Ramirez fell sick March 8 after returning from a trip to Indiana for his job as a sales representative for a jewelry company. Fearing he'd been exposed to the coronavirus, the 43-year-old sought care, but doctors refused to test him on two separate occasions, instead giving him medication and telling him to rest at his San Gabriel home.

He died there March 16.

Nearly three weeks later, after a campaign by Murillo that included calling government agencies and hiring a private autopsy firm, a team from the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health visited the funeral home where Ramirez's body was being kept. Test results confirmed what Murillo had suspected: Her husband had contracted the coronavirus.

As public health officials struggle to get an accurate picture of the coronavirus outbreak, much attention has been paid to how limitations on testing have caused the reported number of cases to be artificially low. But deaths can also slip through the cracks and escape official tallies  at least in the absence of a savvy loved one who becomes an advocate for the dead, like Murillo.

Julie Murillo fought for weeks to have the body of her husband, Julio Ramirez, tested for COVID-19. He died at his San Gabriel home on March 16 after being refused twice by doctors to be tested for the disease caused by the novel coronavirus. ( Julie Murillo)

The Los Angeles County Department of Public Health works closely with the county's coroner's office to test suspected COVID-19 cases postmortem.

I can give you assurances that even when theres testing that happens unfortunately after someone has passed away, those results are reported to us and they are included in our daily tabulations of the number of people who have died, health department director Barbara Ferrer said.

The majority of deaths in L.A. County are not handled by the Department of Medical Examiner-Coroner. The coroner's office investigates 15% to 20% of the county's roughly 60,000 deaths each year, according to statistics released by the health department in 2019. The rest are handled by hospitals and mortuaries.

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When a person dies of natural causes while under the care of a medical professional, either at home or in a healthcare facility, the coroner generally doesn't get involved and the treating physician signs the death certificate.

The physicians are required to denote whether COVID-19 played a role and to report all such deaths to the Department of Public Health and the coroners office. They also must report deaths of presumed COVID-19 cases, according to guidelines released by the health department last week.

In general, patients who die are assessed similar to all patients, the Department of Public Health said in an emailed statement. If the individual had symptoms consistent with COVID-19 the clinician may approve testing. This has been done on a number of cases.

But that doesnt appear to be happening uniformly, according to Vidal Herrera, a retired deputy field investigator for the county coroners office who now owns a private autopsy business in East Los Angeles.

"The families, they just want to know, 'Did my family member die of coronavirus? The hospital is not telling me,'" says Vidal Herrera, who owns 1-800-Autopsy. (Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times)

Herrera said his firm, 1-800-Autopsy, has been flooded with requests from scores of people whose loved ones died and were not tested for the coronavirus. During one especially busy time, he said he received 50 to 60 calls in just a few days.

The families, they just want to know, Did my family member die of coronavirus? The hospital is not telling me,  he said. Many times they rubber-stamp a cause of death. We see things like respiratory failure attributable to pneumonia.

The day after Ramirez developed a fever, body aches and a dry cough, he called Kaiser Permanente, his healthcare provider. A doctor evaluated him over the phone and wrote him a prescription for Tamiflu and cough medicine, Murillo said.

When Ramirez's condition continued to decline, Murillo took him to Kaiser's Downey Urgent Care center on March 13.

By then, the struggle to breathe had left her husband so weak that she had to push him in a wheelchair.

A receptionist first took the couple's cellphone number and directed them to an area for people with flu-like symptoms. A doctor then called and evaluated Ramirez by phone. The questions seemed narrowly focused on the extent of his travel and whether hed been outside the country, Murillo said.

The doctor had Murillo wheel Ramirez to another area of the hospital for a chest X-ray, where he was too frail to take off his sweater. Afterward, she pushed him to the pharmacy to pick up cough syrup, antibiotics and an inhaler.

The only person who saw him was the technician who did the X-ray, Murillo said. No one ever touched him.

The couple were sent home and told to await a call with the doctor's findings. No COVID-19 test was administered.

Murillo, 42, and Ramirez attended Roosevelt High School in Boyle Heights in the 1990s and then went their separate ways. The two later reconnected and married three years ago.

But after Ramirez got sick, they began sleeping in separate bedrooms as a precaution against the highly contagious virus.

Three days after they visited the urgent care, Murillo could not wake Ramirez when she went to check on him. She called 911, and when first responders arrived, they told her he'd been dead for several hours.

From finding my husband to trying to find a pulse on him to dragging him off the bed onto the floor  its just a vision that I cant shake, she said.

Everything is just a blur, what happened. And when I start getting a clear mind, then I start getting upset that maybe somehow this could have been prevented or he could at least have had a fighting chance.

For more than two hours, no one would come to their apartment to pick up Ramirez's body. They kept going back and forth: Is the coroner going to pick him up or the mortuary? Murillo said.

She eventually was advised that because her husbands death was considered natural and he was under the care of a doctor, it was not a coroners case and she needed to coordinate with a mortuary to have his body removed.

She also learned that the treating physician had signed a death certificate listing Ramirez's cause of death as pneumonia and there were no plans to perform an autopsy or postmortem testing for the coronavirus.

Kaiser Permanente said in a statement that, at the time, COVID-19 testing at its facilities was restricted to patients who were both exhibiting symptoms and had come in contact with another person confirmed as positive.

"COVID-19 testing was very limited by the government in the early stages of the pandemic, when Mr. Ramirez came to us," the statement said. "We were required to abide by these public health authority testing limits, as we did in this case, which were based on very limited availability of tests."

At that point, Murillo vowed to do for her husband in death what the couple couldn't do while he was alive. Fixing her mind on learning exactly what had happened took the focus off her crushing grief.

Thats the only thing helping me right now, the fact that Im trying to get my answers, she said.

The mortuary connected her with Herrera, and she hired 1-800-Autopsy to investigate. On March 26, small samples of each of Ramirezs organs were collected and preserved in formaldehyde.

For suspected COVID-19 cases, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends that some of the samples be sent to its Infectious Diseases Pathology Branch in Atlanta for testing.

But Herrera found that the CDC would not accept tissue samples from his private company. It told him to work with the L.A. County Department of Public Health, which referred him to the county coroners office, which told him to call the hospital where the physician signed off on the death certificate, he said.

Its like a dog chasing their tail, Herrera said.

The CDC did not respond to a request for comment. The L.A. County Department of Public Health said that its Acute Communicable Disease Control Program recommends that private autopsy companies work with commercial laboratories for postmortem testing.

But at the time, Herrera was unable to acquire test kits in order to administer a nasal swab and send it to a commercial lab.

So Murillo, who was quarantined without access to a computer, enlisted family members and friends to make phone calls to government officials pleading for a postmortem test.

Sixteen days after her husband's death, the county Department of Public Health called to say it was sending a team to the funeral home to test Ramirez. On April 4, she learned the results were positive.

Murillo said the discovery hasn't given her closure, but something bordering on a sense of relief.

I felt that I finally got an answer, she said.

Kaiser Permanente said in a statement that limits on who can be tested "have evolved over the past several weeks" and that testing is more available now than it was a month ago.

"We offer our deepest sympathy to the Ramirez family during their time of grieving," Kaiser Permanente said.

Last week, Herrera was able to obtain swab tests from a doctor he works with who has connections with a laboratory. He said he no longer will pursue COVID-19 testing through the CDC via autopsy. He hopes to roll out the swab testing to clients more widely in the coming days.

Our mission statement is: The deceased must be protected and given a voice. Without a witness, they will be forgotten, Herrera said. And right now, were witnessing an epidemic and they need answers.

In a cruel twist of fate, he used the first test on his friend and right-hand man, Sean Sadler. The 52-year-old licensed embalmer, who worked for 14 years as Herreras chief autopsy technician, died last week after collapsing in his shower.

Herrera said that Sadler had been off work since showing flu-like symptoms the week before. He called Herrera on April 4 to say he was still sick. Three days later, his wife called to say he was gone.

After initially suspecting Sadler had contracted the coronavirus, Herrera conducted an autopsy and tested his friend for COVID-19. The results were negative. The loss stung no less.

As we say, the circus must go on, he said, clearing his throat to choke back tears. Death doesnt stop for anybody  not for me, not for my employees. We just have to respond as we always have.

Murillo is still serving out her quarantine at the apartment she shared with her husband. She closed off the bedroom where he died. Public health officials have advised her not to go inside.

She wont watch television because the news scares her. She tested negative for the coronavirus once right after Ramirez died. But each time her nose runs or she feels a tickle in her throat, she worries she could be getting sick with the disease that caused her healthy husband to die in a week's time.

Its a surreal existence, isolated from those she loves as she tries to process the immense loss. Worst of all, she said, unable to plan a burial and wracked with anxiety, she cant properly grieve.

I want to say its just a bad dream, she said. Did this really happen?
Rajasthan chief minister Ashok Gehlot on Wednesday said the centre should address the issues of migrant labourers who are stuck in various states and desirous of reaching their homes.

Saying that resentment was brewing among the migrant labourers, he cited the example of Delhi, Mumbai and Surat where lockdown norms were defied by thousands of such people.

The chief minister said it was an interstate matter and the centre should come up with a solution.

"Anxiety among migrant labourers is rising. In Rajasthan, migrants are present in Jaisalmer, Sitapura in Jaipur and students are in Kota. They want to go back home at once," Gehlot told reporters through video conferencing.

"The state government is taking care of them, providing food and has made arrangements for the stay of such labourers and they are satisfied to some extent but they have sentiments for going home," he said.

The chief minister said the central government should have introduced the guidelines, which were issued Wednesday, five days ago during the 21-day lockdown period.

"Decisions are being made hurriedly, maybe because of the prevailing situation worldwide. The prime minister suddenly made the announcement of lockdown. Due to this, many people are stuck. People could have moved to their places if they would get time of three days and what happened in Delhi, Mumbai or Surat would not have happened," he said.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Morgues are overflowing in a New York county where dozens of people are dying from coronavirus each day as officials look to store bodies in an unused meat processing plant.

Suffolk County Executive Steve Bellone described the crisis unfolding in his section of the Hamptons in an interview with CNN on Wednesday.

'We're seeing a total of 50, 60 people dying a day from the virus. All COVID-related,' Bellone said. 'The numbers are staggering.'

A month ago, Suffolk County hadn't recorded a single coronavirus death. As of Tuesday, more than 653 people have died and 23,523 have been infected.

Harrowing footage shows countless bodies lined up inside the county morgue and two refrigerated trucks, all of which are filled to capacity.

County officials are now laying plans to convert a refrigerated building on the Suffolk County Farm into a temporary morgue as they expect the death toll to continue rising for the foreseeable future.

WARNING: GRAPHIC CONTENT

Harrowing CNN footage shows the inside of a morgue in Suffolk County, New York, where dozens of people are dying from coronavirus each day

Two refrigerated trucks brought in to store bodies after the morgue filled up have also reached capacity as Suffolk County officials prepare to open another morgue facility at an unused meat processing plant. The inside of one of the refrigerated trucks is shown above

Suffolk County Executive Steve Bellone described the crisis unfolding in his section of the Hamptons in an interview with CNN on Wednesday. 'We're seeing a total of 50, 60 people dying a day from the virus. All COVID-related,' he said. 'The numbers are staggering'

A new morgue facility with 300 beds has been set up at Suffolk County Farms (pictured)

There have been so many coronavirus deaths in a short amount of time in Suffolk County, New York, that the morgue and overflow morgues are nearing capacity. @miguelmarquez reports

Graphic warning: Some parts of the video may be disturbing for viewershttps://t.co/ovMLZUWYcl pic.twitter.com/JSAdCyvwUR  New Day (@NewDay) April 15, 2020

Bellone said the farm facility, which is owned by the county and run by the Cornell Cooperative Extension, is currently set up to hold 300 bodies but capacity could be increased to 450 if necessary.

The county has also requested more body bags from the state as its current supply dwindles.

'I'm having conversations I never imagined having in this position,' Bellone told CNN.

'At the early stages of this crisis, we were having conversations about suggestions of using ice rinks and stores with refrigeration to store bodies.

'I made the decision that I was not going to tell families that we need to convert their children's ice-skating rinks and turn them into morgues because that is not who we are.'

Suffolk County, which is home to 1.5 million people on the eastern half of Long Island, currently ranks fifth in New York state for coronavirus cases.

'If I can convey anything to people across the country who haven't been hit, it is how quick this happens and how intense it gets. And to do everything you can to prepare,' Bellone said.

'Once it does come, you're in for something you've never seen before.'

A month ago, Suffolk County hadn't recorded a single coronavirus death. As of Tuesday, more than 653 people have died and 23,523 have been infected. Pictured: Staff at Good Samaritan Hospital in West Islip remove a body from a refrigerated truck on Wednesday

Bodies are seen stacked in a refrigerated tractor trailer outside the county morgue

The new morgue facility at Suffolk County Farm (pictured) is currently set up to hold 300 bodies, but capacity could be increased to 450 if necessary

A worker is seen arranging shelves inside the refrigerated building at the farm

According to the latest figures released Tuesday, more than 1,600 of Suffolk County's 23,523 infected individuals are currently hospitalized.

The number of hospitalized patients increased by 22 from Tuesday to Wednesday as 196 were admitted and 174 were released.

About a third of those hospitalized (562) are in the intensive care unit, an increase of 31 from Tuesday.

Suffolk County, which is home to 1.5 million people on the eastern half of Long Island, currently ranks fifth in New York state for coronavirus cases. The graphic above shows cases per town: Islip - 6,051; Brookhaven - 4,321; Babylon - 3,660; Huntington - 2,923; Smithtown - 1,182; Southampton - 332; Southold - 242; Riverhead - 233; East Hampton - 105; Shelter Island - 6

The graphic above with cases per hamlet is color-coded to indicate outbreak severity

The graphic above shows cases per 1,000 people in each hamlet (white boundaries) and town (red boundaries)

Southside Hospital in Bay Shore is one of many health care facilities that are struggling to keep up with the unrelenting flood of critical-ill coronavirus patients in the past few weeks.

The hospital increased its limited capacity from 305 beds to 418 beds before setting up a tent in the parking lot specifically for COVID-19 patients.

'We're maxed out. We have been maxed out for a while,' an ER worker told CNN.

'Everyone is talking about New York City, but our local community has had a widespread disease and we actually - within the health system - had a very high percentage of patients in the ICU.'

Another worker said: 'Being an emergency room nurse, this is what you sign up for. You sign up to be there no matter what comes in the door. This is on a much bigger scale.'

Hospitals in Suffolk County have been scrambling to keep up with the high death rate. Pictured: Workers handle a body by a mobile morgue outside Good Samaritan Hospital

Southside Hospital in Bay Shore (pictured) increased its limited capacity from 305 beds to 418 beds before setting up a tent in the parking lot specifically for COVID-19 patients

Exacerbating the crisis in Suffolk County is an influx of wealthy families fleeing New York City for Long Island's coveted beach towns to escape the coronavirus hotspot. Dozens of people are seen on a beach in Sag Harbor late last month

Exacerbating the crisis in Suffolk County and neighboring Nassau County is an influx of wealthy families fleeing New York City for Long Island's coveted beach towns to escape the coronavirus hotspot.

Full-time residents of those towns have voiced concerns that the flood of so-called 'coronavirus refugees' would brought infection that much closer to their doorsteps while overwhelming already stretched resources.

Late last month local leaders in four Hamptons communities wrote a letter to New York Governor Andrew urging him to ban the refugees from coming to Long Island.
People all over the United States are stuck at home under stay home orders during the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic  making pants unnecessary for the most part.

According to one Maryland police department, many people are neglecting to don pants for their daily trip to the mailbox. Taneytown Police Department posted a playful final warning on its Facebook page.

Please remember to put pants on before leaving the house to check your mailbox, the post says. You know who you are. This is your final warning.

Please remember to put pants on before leaving the house to check your mailbox. You know who you are. This is your final warning. Posted by Taneytown Police Department on Tuesday, April 14, 2020

The post has garnered more than 1,000 reactions, over 430 comments and more than 2,500 shares.

Some commenters are defiantly vowing not to wear pants during the trek down the driveway. Others are asking for pictures to prove its happening. Many questions revolve around whether underwear alone is OK, and if not, what about a Speedo?

READ MORE:

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[April 15, 2020] GSX Techedu Inc. Class Action Alert: Wolf Haldenstein Adler Freeman & Herz LLP Announces It Is Investigating Serious New Claims Against GSX Techedu Inc. and Strongly Encourages Investors with Substantial Losses to Contact the Firm

NEW YORK, April 15, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- Wolf Haldenstein Adler Freeman & Herz LLP announces it is investigating serious and disturbing securities class action claims on behalf of shareholders of the American Depositary Shares ("ADSs" or "shares") of GSX Techedu Inc. ("GSX" or the Company") (NYSE: GSX) investors concerning the Company and its officers' possible violations of the federal securities laws. All investors who purchased ADSs of GSX Techedu Inc. and incurred losses are urged to contact the firm immediately at [email protected] or (800) 575-0735 or (212) 545-4774. On April 14, 2020, the investment analysis firm, Citron Research, issued a report on GSX entitled "GSX Techedu Inc  The Most Blatant Chinese Stock Fraud since 2011." The Citron Report claimed that the Company "is overstating revenue by up to 70% and should imediately halt trading and launch an internal investigation."



On this news, the Company's American Depositary Shares price fell sharply during intra-day trading. Wolf Haldenstein has extensive experience in the prosecution of securities class actions and derivative litigation in state and federal trial and appellate courts across the country. The firm has attorneys in various practice areas; and offices in New York, Chicago and San Diego. The reputation and expertise of this firm in shareholder and other class litigation has been repeatedly recognized by the courts, which have appointed it to major positions in complex securities multi-district and consolidated litigation.

If you wish to discuss this action or have any questions regarding your rights and interests in this case, please immediately contact Wolf Haldenstein by telephone at (800) 575-0735, via e-mail at [email protected], or visit our website at www.whafh.com. Contact: Wolf Haldenstein Adler Freeman & Herz LLP

Kevin Cooper, Esq.

Gregory Stone, Director of Case and Financial Analysis

Email: [email protected], [email protected] or [email protected]

Tel: (800) 575-0735 or (212) 545-4774 This press release may be considered Attorney Advertising in some jurisdictions under the applicable law and ethical rules. View original content to download multimedia:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/gsx-techedu-inc-class-action-alert-wolf-haldenstein-adler-freeman--herz-llp-announces-it-is-investigating-serious-new-claims-against-gsx-techedu-inc--and-strongly-encourages-investors-with-substantial-losses-to-contact-the-fir-301041216.html SOURCE Wolf Haldenstein Adler Freeman & Herz LLP

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Photo by Pius Utomi Ekpei/AFP via Getty Images

The malam said: there is no corona!

We also say: there is no corona!

A video of crowds shouting this refrain circulated on Nigerian social media in late March.

The malam or teacher they were referring to is Shaykh Sani Yahaya Jingir, an Islamic scholar based in Jos, Plateau State, in Nigerias religiously and ethnically diverse Middle Belt. He is a senior figure within the Islamic reform movement Jamaat Izalat al-Bida wa-Iqamat al Sunna (Izala for short), the largest Salafi group in Nigeria.

Shaykh Jingir has caused a stir in recent weeks with his incendiary sermons denouncing the coronavirus pandemic as yet another Western plot to stymie the practice of Islam. It is grist to his mill that travel to Saudi Arabia for the Islamic pilgrimage to Mecca (umrah) has been stopped, and that several states across Nigeria have suspended congregational prayers in an effort to stem the spread of the virus.

Recognising the danger of inflammatory messages like Shaykh Jingirs, the Jamaatu Nasril Islam, an umbrella organisation for Nigerian Muslims, issued a statement cautioning Islamic preachers against misleading their followers over COVID-19, the disease caused by the new coronavirus. Under pressure from both the religious establishment (including the Izala leadership) and state authorities, Shaykh Jingir has now backpedalled.

Read more: Debunking 9 popular myths doing the rounds in Africa about the coronavirus

Alas, he is not the only person to publicly air doubt about the threat posed by COVID-19 being real. In northern Nigeria, others  from a wandering street preacher to a local music celebrity  have expressed similar views, as Sadisu Salisu Idris, a Kano-based community activist and Quranic school graduate who collaborated with me on this research, has found.

As of April 14, most of Nigerias 373 confirmed COVID-19 cases are in Lagos (214) in the south and in Abuja/FCT (58). However, confirmed cases have also started to appear across the north of the country, including in Bauchi (six), Kaduna (six), Katsina (five), and Kano (four).

Story continues

Lockdowns are in place in the most heavily affected Nigerian states. Many other states have closed their borders and restricted large gatherings including markets. Mosques and churches in many parts of the country have been ordered to cap attendance, or to close.

But state authorities have been struggling to see heavy restrictions through. Met with popular opposition to mosque closures, on April 9 Katsina state announced they would be allowed to reopen for Friday congregational prayers.

Widespread suspicion

There is a history of scepticism in northern Nigeria towards global public health measures. The drive to eradicate polio in the early 2000s was troubled by widespread fears, fanned by religious and political leaders, that vaccines were intentionally contaminated with anti-fertility agents and HIV to decimate the Muslim population. Almost two decades later, polio still remains endemic in the region.

Its difficult to know how many people in predominantly Muslim northern Nigeria are swayed by the idea that the coronavirus pandemic is merely fake news and social media are likely to magnify extreme viewpoints. However, given the virulence of the virus, public health measures will only be effective if the vast majority of the population follows them. Understanding and addressing the wider political experiences underpinning opposition to public health measures is therefore crucial.

Interventions seen to originate in the West frequently spark suspicion in northern Nigeria, and trigger questions about the motivations that underpin them. Memories of the British colonial occupation certainly matter, as do perceptions of current geopolitics. The War on Terror in the wake of 9/11 is still fresh in peoples minds and is widely perceived as primarily a hate campaign against Islam.

The persistent anti-Islam rhetoric of some Western leaders has been noted. Events in other parts of the non-Muslim world, including violent clashes between Muslims and Hindus in India and mass incarcerations of Uighur Muslims in China, have not been lost on the northern Nigerian public either.

In these circumstances, it doesnt come as a surprise that people question whether highly disruptive measures, encouraged by mostly non-Muslim outsiders including the World Health Organization, are indeed well-intentioned.

Difficult task

Widespread perceptions of Nigerian politicians as self-interested and corrupt fuel suspicions further. The news that Nasir Ahmed El-Rufai, the governor of Kaduna State, tested positive for COVID-19 in late March was met with suspicion by some Kano residents, my research collaborator Salisu found. They believed his positive test result was fabricated and part of yet another fraudulent scheme to access federal resources allocated to states affected by COVID-19.

People in northern Nigeria have not forgotten the massive misappropriation of federal funds destined to tackle the Boko Haram crisis in north-eastern Nigeria and to support its victims. In this environment, rumours of COVID-19 being a hoax appear plausible, especially as so far most confirmed cases reported by the media have been among the elites. Their international mobility explains this, but privileged access to testing facilities is also likely to contribute to the high number of elite Nigerians confirmed to have the virus.

Recurrent rumours that the world may soon come to an end further complicate an already challenging situation, as they raise the stakes in religious observance. If the end times are imminent, the umma or Muslim community should live extra-righteously. The suspension of communal prayers seems to impede that.

Convincing the faithful that it is right to stay at home will be no easy task, especially with Islams holy month Ramadan just around the corner. Unequivocal messages from Islamic leaders across the religious spectrum will be crucial.

However, stay-at-home messages from Islamic leaders will only work if the government and international community do their part to rebuild trust. This means protecting ordinary northern Nigerians from the devastating effects heavy lockdowns are likely to have on their already precarious livelihoods.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

The Conversation

Hannah Hoechner received funding from the German Academic Exchange Foundation, the German Academic Scholarship Foundation, the Wiener-Anspach Foundation, and the Fonds Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek  Vlaanderen.
BAKU, Azerbaijan, April 15

By Leman Zeynalova  Trend:

The Trans Adriatic Pipeline (TAP) consortium has committed 1.5 million euros to support health services in Greece, Albania and Italy, Trend reports citing TAP AG consortium.

At TAP, health and safety come first. It is also our commitment to contribute to improving the livelihoods and quality of life of communities along TAPs route, across our three host countries. To that effect, Trans Adriatic Pipeline AG will provide a total of 1.5 million euros to support the fight of the health services in Greece, Albania and Italy against the COVID-19 pandemic, reads the message.

Luca Schieppati, TAP Managing Director, said that the COVID-19 and its impacts are a challenging reality for all.

We at TAP are closely monitoring developments and doing our part to help prevent the further spread of the virus, by following the latest guidance of public health authorities and implementing a wide range of measures. At the same time, we are also trying to support the needs of our host communities, he noted

Schieppati went on to add that TAP has been working closely with health authorities in all host countries, in order to support relief efforts.

We are humbled to play a small part and assist in the fight against COVID-19, by providing, with the full support of our shareholders, 1.5 million euros; 500,000 euros for each host country. This amount will support the supply of special hospital equipment, personal protective equipment and medicines, according to the needs of health authorities, he said.

TAP project, worth 4.5 billion euros, is one of the priority energy projects for the European Union (EU). The project envisages transportation of gas from Azerbaijan's Shah Deniz Stage 2 to the EU countries.

Connecting with the Trans Anatolian Pipeline (TANAP) at the Greek-Turkish border, TAP will cross Northern Greece, Albania and the Adriatic Sea before coming ashore in Southern Italy to connect to the Italian natural gas network.

The project is currently in its construction phase, which started in 2016.

Once built, TAP will offer a direct and cost-effective transportation route opening up the vital Southern Gas Corridor, a 3,500-kilometer long gas value chain stretching from the Caspian Sea to Europe.

TAP shareholders include BP (20 percent), SOCAR (20 percent), Snam S.p.A. (20 percent), Fluxys (19 percent), Enagas (16 percent) and Axpo (5 percent).

---

Follow the author on Twitter: @Lyaman_Zeyn
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TCN News

Indian American Muslim Council (IAMC), an advocacy group dedicated to safeguarding Indias pluralist ethos, on April 14, marked the birthday of B R Ambedkar which is a national holiday popular as Bhim Jayanti in India.

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On the occasion of Bhim Jayanti, IAMC also welcomed the first ever congressional resolution introduced by Representative Ro Khanna, who is the Congressman representing 17th District of California. In his resolution, Khanna has honored Dr B R Ambedkar by highlighting that in this Dalit history month, even in a dark time of Covid, it is inspirational to know that we can find the light of hope in our history as the chief architect of our Constitution had envisioned: labor reforms, codification of gender equality, and the successful inclusion of Article 17 in the Constitution of India to abolish untouchability and its practice in any form.

IAMC endorsed the resolution urging all Indian Americans to join in to celebrate the towering historical figure that Ambedkar was  a fearless feminist and caste abolitionist  whose contributions to the fields of economics, philosophy, religious, jurisprudence, and democracy remain unparalleled, even today. The resolution is also endorsed by Equality Labs and South Asian Americans Leading Together (SAALT),

We are forever grateful to Babasaheb Ambedkar for his fearless struggle against systemic oppression, and for his phenomenal contributions in ensuring Indias Constitution celebrates the diverse nature of India, said Ahsan Khan, President of IAMC.

Speaking about the recent arrest of Anand Teltumbde and Gautam Navlakha in the 2018 Bhima Koregaon case, Khan stated that both the leaders have been indicted based on fabricated evidence. The case originated from the annual celebratory gathering at Bhima Koregaon to mark the 200th year of the Battle of Bhima Koregaon victory. Khan added that both Teltumbde and Navlakha were not even present in the event and this is a clear case of a brazen witch-hunt that is reflective of a fascist model of governance.

Khan opined that in order for us to continue with the legacy of Ambedkars lifelong battle to protect basic civil liberties and secular principles, we must recommit ourselves to the founding vision of the Indian Constitution through liberty, equality and justice for all.
A ROMANIAN man now based in Ireland has become the first individual charged with an alleged breach of emergency Covid-19 regulations.

Denis Constantin (24) of Shingan, Mile House, Enniscorthy, Co Wexford appeared before Gorey District Court charged with two breaches of the new regulations which were only introduced by the Oireachtas last week.

He also faces three charges under the Road Traffic Act.

These include allegedly driving without a valid license, driving without valid insurance and driving while disqualified.

Judge Brian O'Shea was told two charges were being brought over alleged breaches of the Health Act, 1947 - Covid-19 Regulations, 2020.

In outlining the nature of the charges to the court, Garda David Shanahan said the matters arose from alleged incidents on April 11 and April 13 in Wexford.

Uniformed gardai were operating around 150 permanent checkpoints nationwide as well as 500 mobile checkpoints to ensure compliance with the new Covid-19 movement restrictions aimed at controlling the spread of the virus.

A central element of the restrictions is the requirement for people to remain within 2km of their homes unless they have special reasons for travelling further.

Valid reasons for travelling more than 2km outside a residence include essential food shopping, attending a doctor's appointment or securing medication, going to essential work duties or acting as a vital carer or home support for an elderly relative.

The court heard that gardai stopped Mr Constantin, who has been resident in Wexford for a number of years, at a checkpoint outside

Bunclody on April 11.

Gardai noted that he was allegedly more than 2km from his place of residence.

It is claimed he had no valid reason for being so far from his home.

At a second checkpoint, mounted outside New Ross on April 13, the Romanian national was again stopped and queried about his reason for allegedly being more than 2km from his home.

Gardai again queried whether the 24 year old had a valid reason for being outside the mandated 2km limit.

The court was told that after being arrested, cautioned and formally charged, Mr Constantin made no reply to gardai.

Judge O'Shea noted the charges involved and refused bail.

He remanded Mr Constantin in custody to appear again before Wexford District Court on April 21.
Iremar DaSilva fell three metres to his death while working on a deck on level two of a construction site

A Sydney building company has been slugged with a $450,000 fine over a construction site accident in which a subcontractor fell to his death and was impaled on a metal bar.

Sapform Pty Ltd and its director Luis Alberto Arrilucea were earlier in the month admonished by District Court Judge Wendy Sue Strathdee over what she said was an attempt to pass the buck and absolve themselves of wrongdoing.

The company was facing a maximum possible fine of $1.5 million over the death of Iremar DaSilva at a Ryde residential apartment building site in October 2016.

The company pleaded guilty to breaches of the Work Health and Safety Act after being pursued by SafeWork NSW.

The court heard that Mr DaSilva fell three metres to his death while working on a deck on level two of the site.

Sapform was contracted by another company, KNT Constructions, to complete the formwork for a six-storey unit block and in turn subcontracted parts of the job to Mr DaSilva, a carpenter with 10 years' experience.

KNT Constructions, now known as Truslan Constructions Pty Ltd, was in July 2019 fined $450,000 over the same incident.

There were significant gaps between the edge of the deck on which Mr DaSilva was working and the scaffolding, some as big as 53 centimetres.

In handing down her judgment on April 3, Judge Strathdee said that it was clear that the work was 'not being done in accordance with the accepted industry standard safe work sequence'.

There were no witnesses when Mr DaSilva fell from level two to the floor below and was impaled on a metal starter bar.

'The nature of the risk was foreseeable,' Judge Strathdee said.

'The measures that could have been taken to control or eliminate the risk were not difficult or expensive, and as such the offence is objectively more serious.'

Judge Strathdee said Mr Arrilucea had expressed 'heartfelt' remorse over the accident, having known and worked with Mr DaSilva for 15 years.

However, she said that in his affidavit, Mr Arrilucea had attempted to absolve himself of responsibility despite the risk being glaringly obvious and there being no guard rails or edge protection in place.

She said he had attempted to apportion some of the blame to Mr DaSilva for not following industry guidelines and a supervisor for not properly overseeing the job.

'The case presented by the defendant smacks of a deliberate attempt to blame someone else,' Judge Strathdee said.

'And that because others were at fault, the defendant's breach of duty is not as egregious as others, and in those circumstances, the breach is one that does not fall within the mid or high range of seriousness.'

Judge Strathdee also rejected the company's plea for a reduction in its fine because it owed an $870,000 debt to the Australian Taxation Office.
THE 76th Board Meeting of East African Business Council (EABC) has created a regional platform for the private sector to combat Covid-19 pandemic in the region.

The platform is steadfast to take up regional business integration issues to the attention of EAC Heads of State, Council of Ministers and Senior Government Officials in light of the novel Coronavirus.

The Covid-19 pandemic had infected more than 400 persons and caused 11 deaths in the EAC region as of yesterday. The business community has vowed to first protect the citizens during the pandemic.

The regional action platform will complement the governments efforts on preparedness and response measures to combat Covid-19 pandemic in the EAC by sharing experiences and perspectives of the business community on doing business and investments across EAC borders.

In addition, it will also guide the East African Business Council Secretariat on various proposals and recommendations towards a post regional recovery/rebound strategy for businesses in the EAC in light of Covid-19.

EABC Executive Director and Chief Executive Officer (CEO), Dr Peter Mathuki divulged to the Daily News that the Council appreciates the measures and efforts made by the governments of the EAC partner states to curb the outbreak of Covid-19 in the region such as increasing the number of testing centres and equipment, ban of social gatherings and quarantine measures.

We appreciate the EAC partner states for involving the private sector in the National Coordination Committee on Covid-19 at the country level and the EAC Council of Ministers for committing on facilitating the free movement of goods/cargo and services across the EAC partner states, said Dr Mathuki.

The Covid-19 pandemic has disrupted global and regional value chains hence impacting business operations from supplies, production capacity, distribution channels and utilisation of resources as well as consumer demand in the region.

Dr Mathuki disclosed that the regional action platform is committed to partner and collaborate with the EAC Secretariat organs and institutions, African Union (AU) and development partners in information sharing, best practices and monitoring the impact of Covid-19 on the EAC economies in a bid to bring forward solutions to boost intra-EAC trade and investments to the Summit of the EAC Heads of State.

Given the intrinsic nature and level of integration of the EAC, noted Dr Mathuki, the impact of Covid-19 poses high risks at the regional level regarding the recovery of tourism, SMEs, and manufacturing business sectors hence there is an urgent need for a common approach on the preparedness, response measures and recovery strategy for the EAC region.

A common approach will safeguard current and future jobs, exports, businesses and offer quick economic recovery for the EAC bloc.

Noting the importance of the growth and resilience of the EAC economies in light of the pandemic, the following recommendations are proposed to overcome this pandemic and support the economic recovery and prosperity in the EAC region, said the CEO.

The EABC has thus appealed to the Summit of the EAC Heads of State to hold online meetings and adopt a common approach to the preparedness, response measures and recovery strategy towards curbing Covid-19 outbreak in the EAC.

We appeal to the EAC Heads of State to come up with a common Post Covid-19 recovery/rebound strategy for the region with a focus on intra-EAC trade and investments.

The EAC region should ensure the borders remain fully operational and facilitate the free movement of goods and services across the EAC Partner States.

The EAC partner states should collaborate closely for increased production and ensure that resources (raw materials) and intermediate goods needed by industries flow across the EAC Partner States, he appealed.

The Council has asked the states to allow free movement of essential items and most traded goods in the EAC, services and service suppliers such as food, medical products, doctors, nurses, scientists, researchers, truck drivers from the EAC region.
Ugly Betty actress Becki Newton has confirmed that she recently gave birth to her third child.

Becki, 41, who played Amanda Tanen on the hit show for four seasons, shared the news with her old co-star and friend Michael Urie on Wednesday during an Instagram Live.

The now mother-of-three told Michael that she and her husband Chris Diamantopoulos, 44, had welcomed a baby girl a few months ago and sounded happy about having expanded their brood.

Happy news: Ugly Betty actress Becki Newton has confirmed that she recently gave birth to her third child, a baby girl

The confirmation comes after Becki shared a photo of her baby girl's hand on March 21, which she captioned: Sharing a little glimpse of Hope. prompting many fans and friends to congratulate her.

Sarah Jessica Parker liked the post, as the pair star together on the HBO show Divorce.

Michael also revealed that he had visited Becki in hospital while he was recently starring in the Broadway play Grand Horizons.

Kid gloves: Becki shared a picture of her baby girl last month before announcing the news, and the post was liked by her HBO Divorce co-star Sarah Jessica Parker

The pair have set out to do a regular Instagram Live show called "Quarantined Together" everyday at 4pm on Michael's account.

Becki is said to have met her actor husband Chris in a New York subway station, and the pair eventually married in May 2005. She gave birth to their first child, a boy, in 2010, and a girl, in 2014.

The actress has been most recently seen in show including HBO's Divorce, How I Met Your Mother, and American Dad!

Friends: Becki has regularly kept in touch with her Ugly Betty co-star Michael Urie, and the pair are doing Instagram Lives together during quarantine

Buddies: Michael also revealed that he had visited Becki in hospital while he was recently starring in the Broadway play Grand Horizons

Despite the hugely popular show Ugly Betty, ABC announced it was cancelling the series due to low ratings.

Since the show's cancellation, it has gained a cult following and there has been talk by Ana Ortiz and America Ferrera for an Ugly Betty movie.
 Flash

Wearing masks has long been regarded by Americans as unnecessary for healthy people. Yet, since just about half a month ago, it has become a common practice for grocery goers as well as on duty apartment concierges.

The change occurred against the backdrop of the United States becoming the global epicenter of the COVID-19 pandemic, with the country's coronavirus deaths the highest around the globe.

MASK WEARING

Although Americans have generally abided by the federal government's guidelines asking them to keep social distance, avoid group gatherings and practice good hygiene, wearing masks has been harder to come by.

Not only were most Americans still reluctant to wear masks when the coronavirus ravaged the country, they also doubted the effectiveness of doing so in preventing the transmission of the disease, believing that only sick people need to wear them.

Some were even physically attacked for covering their faces.

When the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which previously did not suggest that healthy people wear masks, put out a recommendation on April 3 for the use of "cloth face coverings" in light of the large number of asymptomatic bearers of coronavirus, Americans finally began to realize the merits of such practices.

As a result, more and more of them have since chosen to wear masks, scarfs or other makeshift coverings.

Zhang Siqi, a visiting scholar at Duke University, recalls the reaction of an employee at her local Costco wholesale store when seeing her talking while wearing a mask in mid-March.

"She was sanitizing the handrail of my shopping cart with disinfecting wipes," Zhang said. "When I explained to her that she didn't need to do so since I was wearing the mask, she got so nervous and scared that she suddenly jumped two meters away from me, not at all caring about what I said."

Zhang said the employee's reaction made her feel unwelcome, "as if the virus was erupting from my mouth as I spoke."

Things have changed now. When Zhang and her fellow members from the North Carolina Chinese Scholars Sino-U.S. Exchange Association went to a local police station on April 10 to donate two boxes of masks, a police officer was very grateful, saying he would encourage his colleagues to wear them.

The change in Americans' attitude towards wearing masks is reflective of the Chinese experience in combating the virus more objectively and rationally.

Gradually abandoning previous misperceptions, Americans have come to understand that those wearing masks do not necessarily carry the virus. People do so to effectively prevent the virus from further spreading.

As the police officer told Zhang, "We'll get through this together."

CHINA'S EXPERIENCE

A hospitalist in the U.S. state of Washington said nurses in his hospital would pat on the patient's back to help get the mucus out -- a practice commonly adopted in Chinese hospitals.

Having treated more than 20 COVID-19 patients, the hospitalist, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said he will discharge a patient when his or her two consecutive polymerase chain reaction tests for COVID-19 are both negative, and when he or she maintains smooth breathing and does not have fever for three consecutive days.

Chinese experience, according to the hospitalist, has contributed to setting those standards.

The hospitalist also said a growing number of his colleagues are now wearing masks. "That was not the case in the past, except for those working in Intensive Care Units."

In U.S. hospitals where COVID-19 patients were being treated, doctors and nurses failed to take sufficient protection during the early days. The hospitalist told Xinhua that three of his colleagues contracted the coronavirus for what he believed was not wearing masks at work.

"They were confused why I didn't get caught by the virus. After all, we work together every day," said the hospitalist. "I was not surprised at all, since I wear masks all the time and wash my hands quite often."

Ever since the coronavirus outbreak occurred in the United States, there has been constant criticism domestically of the U.S. federal government for taking the issue lightly and acting too late, which led to rapid spread of the virus and skyrocketing fatalities.

Even Anthony Fauci, the current administration's top infectious disease expert and member of the White House Coronavirus Task Force, has regretted the belated mitigation efforts.

"I mean, obviously, you could logically say that if you had a process that was ongoing and you started mitigation earlier, you could have saved lives. Obviously, no one is going to deny that," he said on CNN's "State of the Union" on Monday.

As the COVID-19 pandemic is raging around the globe, the U.S. hospitalist said the strengths of the United States and China vis-a-vis the virus are complimentary.

While the United States' advantage lies in scientific research, China has accumulated precious clinical experience given its heavy caseload during the pandemic, the hospitalist said.

The hospitalist considered the exchange of ideas between U.S. and Chinese medical workers to be both conducive and necessary. U.S. clinicians like him need specific experience because so many unexpected turns of events can happen to COVID-19 patients in the wards, he said.

"China has gone through the same virus and gained experience, and what matters is that they have managed to contain it," said the hospitalist.

"If Chinese doctors have something to share, I really look forward to learning from them," he added.
A senior legal practitioner and former President of the Ghana Bar Association (BAR), Sam Okudzeto has urged the Electoral Commission (EC) to start the voters registration exercise in places outside the partial lockdown.

The Electoral Commission suspended its planned compilation of a new voters register over the ban on public gatherings imposed on Ghanaians as part of efforts to curb the spread of the novel coronavirus disease that has bedevilled the country.

The exercise was initially scheduled for April 18, 2020, but no new date has been announced following the suspension.

The Greater Accra Metropolitan Area including Tema and Kasoa as well as the Greater Kumasi Metropolitan Area are currently under lockdown in a bid to check the spread of the disease.

The EC has said it wants to ensure that the voters register that will be used for the 2020 election is more credible and efficient than the existing one hence the need for a new Biometric Voter Management System (BVMS).

Sam Okudzeto, who is also a member of the Council of State, in an interview on Eyewitness News said the EC can compile the voters register in batches.

Our cases of the Coronavirus is not as dramatic as it is in many countries which means that we only have few pockets in the two big municipalities and few of the smaller ones. So since the lockdown is not the whole of Ghana, the EC should start the registration in areas where there is on lockdown, he said.

EC and the new voters registration

The Electoral Commission is supposed to organize the 2020 presidential and the parliamentary elections on December 7.

The Commission is seeking to replace its biometric machines to better address verification challenges that could occur during elections.

A key new feature the EC cited is the introduction of a facial recognition option in addition to fingerprint verification.

It also plans to make the Ghana Card and passport the only acceptable identification for the upcoming voter registration, but the announcement has been received with mixed reaction.

Opposition to new register

The move for the new register has been met with opposition from key political stakeholders, including the main opposition party, the National Democratic Congress (NDC).

The opposition party called on Ghanaians to reject the EC's plans because it felt the commission was yet to present a compelling argument for the compilation of a new register.

Over the course of deliberations, its officials even walked out of a meeting with the EC.

---citinewsroom
Journalists will not be allowed over the coronavirus quarantine.

A Ukrainian media outlet has reported tentative timing for an upcoming swap of prisoners between Ukraine and the two self-proclaimed republics in Donbas, the so-called "Donetsk People's Republic" and the so-called "Luhansk People's Republic."

The operation is to begin at 16:00 Kyiv time on Thursday, April 16, the venue is the Mayorske checkpoint, hromadske.ua reported, citing its sources in the OSCE Special Monitoring Mission (SMM) to Ukraine and the Ukrainian Interior Ministry.

Read alsoZelensky's Office: Preparation for next stage of prisoner swap in Donbas underway

Journalists will not be allowed over the coronavirus quarantine. There will be a cameraman from the Office of the President of Ukraine.

As UNIAN reported earlier, the Ukrainian President's Office earlier announced that latest preparations were underway to finalize the list of prisoners and arrange their logistics.
With the whole lockdown situation in India, everyone is at home, binge-watching series and movies. One series that caught the internet world's fancy is Tiger King: Murder, Mayhem and Madness and ever since it released in March, it has been trending on the web.

Tiger King

Penned and directed by Eric Goode and Rebecca Chaiklin, the docu-series focuses on the life and crimes of Maldonado-Passage aka Joe Exotic, a former country musician, Oklahoma zookeeper, gun enthusiast and big-cat keeper.

Tiger King

Exotic, 57, owned an animal park and boasted of having the largest number of big cats in the US. He was found guilty in 2019 for paying a hitman USD 3,000 to kill Carole Baskin, who he considered his rival. Everyone became an instant fan and enrolled themselves in the Tiger King fan-club.

Now, Ranveer Singh is the latest entrant who has joined this club. Ranveer re-shared a meme where a fan turned him into Joe from Tiger King on social media. The photoshopped/edited image has him petting a big cat.

Now that the image has gone Viral, Ranveer is eager to know, "Who did this?"

Ranveer Singh

On the work front, Ranveer Singh will be seen in 83. The film was scheduled to release on April 10 but was postponed due to the coronavirus crisis.


El ministro @victorzamora recibe donativo de la empresa Huawei, para proteccion personal de los trabajadores de la salud que luchan frente al #COVID19. Entre los materiales se encuentran mas de 200 000 mascarillas, ademas de gafas y trajes. #PeruEstaEnNuestrasManos pic.twitter.com/VUzIxBL2HQ
BAKU, Azerbaijan, Apr. 15

By Ilkin Seyfaddini  Trend:

Former executive director of the Extrabudgetary Pension Fund under the Ministry of Finance Bakhrom Ashrafkhanov was appointed ambassador of Uzbekistan to Azerbaijan, Trend reports with the reference to Uzbek Foreign Ministry.

"On April 14, newly appointed Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary of Uzbekistan to Azerbaijan Bakhrom Ashrafkhanov, who previously worked as Executive Director of the Extrabudgetary Pension Fund, arrived in Baku from Tashkent," the report said.

In September 2019 Ashrafkhanov was appointed executive director of the Extrabudgetary Pension Fund and left this post in March 2020.

From 2002 to 2016 Bakhrom Ashrafkhanov worked in the Ministry of Finance. In particular, he was First Deputy Minister of Finance in 2005-2007 and Head of the Treasury in 2007-2016.

From 2016 to 2018, he was Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary of Uzbekistan to Russia. In September 2018, he was appointed Chairman of the Board of Uzbekneftegaz.

Bakhrom Ashrafkhanov was born in 1969. He is a graduate of the Tashkent State University of Economics, specializing in international monetary and credit relations. From 1993 to 1994, he studied at the University of Kentucky (U.S.), specializing in International Monetary and Credit Relations and Public Finance.

---

Follow author on Twitter: @seyfaddini
The Ministry of Home Affairs issued a set of guidelines to be followed during the extended guidelines. Containment zones across the country had slightly different norms than the rest of the country. The government stated that if the rules are followed perfectly, then some restrictions will be eased for certain areas after April 20. However, it said that there will be no relaxation of any norm in the containment zones. It also restricted a host of services in these zones.

Here are the guidelines issued by the Union Home Ministry on containment zones and hotspots:

Hotspots or areas with a large number of COVID-19 cases or clusters with significant spread of the virus will be demarcated by the states, Union Territories and District administrations in accordance with the guidelines issued by the Health Ministry.

Containment zones will be earmarked by the states, UTs and district administration. All activities barring essential services such as medical emergencies and law enforcement would not be allowed in these areas.

The guidelines issued by the Ministry further state, "There shall be stricter perimeter control in the area of the containment zones to ensure that there is no unchecked inward/ outward movement of population from these zones."

These guidelines come a day after the Prime Minister's speech on lockdown extension wherein he stated, "We have to be very careful about hotspots. We will have to keep a close watch on the paces which are expected to be converted into hotspots. Creating new hotspots will further challenge our hard work and our austerity."

Multiple states have announced containment zones. However, Delhi and Maharashtra - two of the most-affected states - have issued a long list of containment zones. Number of containment zones in Delhi has reached to 55 after 8 more areas were added as of April 14, 2020. These containment zones include areas like Markaz Masjid and Nizamuddin Basti, Pratap Khand, Jhilmil Colony, Chandni Mahal, Jain Mohalla in Chirag Delhi, affected area near Gandhi Park in Malviya Nagar, area around shop no. J-4/49, Khirki Extension, Khirki Village,etc. Maharashtra has identified areas such as the Saat Rasta at Jacob Circle, Momipura, Gitanjali Square and Hasanbagh as containment zones

The number of coronavirus cases has reached 11,439 in India whereas 377 people have died due to COVID-19 so far. According to Health Ministry data, 1,305 people have been cured or discharged and 1 patient has been migrated as of April 15, 2020, 08:00 am.

Also read: Coronavirus India Lockdown Live Updates: Gujarat govt announces self-isolation for CM Vijay Rupani

Also read: Coronavirus lockdown 2.0 guidelines issued: Check full list of relaxations, restrictions by MHA
Vancouver, British Columbia--(Newsfile Corp. - April 15, 2020) - Sprott Shaw College ("Sprott Shaw") announces that it will join the fight against COVID-19. Sprott Shaw will donate approximately 5,000 pieces of medical supplies to the healthcare sector in Metro Vancouver. Also, Sprott Shaw has organized qualified staff, healthcare faculty members and student volunteers in fighting the frontline battles at hospitals, senior care homes, and other community centres. Collectively, Sprott Shaw has donated gloves, surgical and N95 masks, alcohol swabs, face shields, and other protective medical supplies that hospitals such as the Vancouver General Hospital and the Royal Inland Hospital may urgently need.

"It is humbling to realize the role we play and the gift our sector has given us. It is even more humbling and important to understand the responsibility that comes with it," commented Victor Tesan, President of Sprott Shaw College, and President of Education Services and Chief Operating Officer of CIBT Education Group Inc. "We are committed to supporting our staff, students and the communities now more than ever."

"In the Metro Vancouver area, we have Health Care Assistant students and instructors who are completing and leading clinical experiences in long-term care settings, hospitals, and senior homes," continued Victor Tesan. "Several of our staff members have also returned to work at their respective sites at the Vancouver General Hospital, Richmond General Hospital, St. Michael's Hospital, and St. Paul's Hospital. Also, our entire Level 4 Practical Nursing Access cohort has decided to take leave from their program and work at the respective healthcare facilities within their community."

"In Penticton, our campus director visited Nk'mip Resource Center (Oliver Indian Band) and spent time ensuring masks fit staff who perform the community nursing duties to ensure that they are fully protected," said Victor Tesan. "Our practicum instructors suspended their instructor duties to risk themselves at the frontline by working full-time screening patients for COVID-19 testing at the Victoria General Hospital."

"As an educational institution and a responsible corporate citizen, we support our healthcare workers at the frontline and our community at large. We are also recognizing the SprottShawHeroes who are risking their lives for us and changing the world one day at a time. Learn more about the heroes here: https://www.facebook.com/sprottshaw."

Toby Chu, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of CIBT Education Group Inc., commented, "I am grateful for the unselfish acts and the compassionate spirit of our college staff, our instructors and our student volunteers. CIBT will do whatever is necessary to support them, and to fight this pandemic outbreak hand-in-hand with our healthcare workers and our community leaders."

About Sprott Shaw College:

Established in 1903, Sprott Shaw College is a distinguished education institution with a long-standing reputation of equipping their students with innovative ways of thinking through hands-on training and practical courses. With 16 designated campuses in British Columbia, Sprott Shaw College offers over 130 career-focused diploma and certificate programs in the healthcare, business and technical-trade sectors. Sprott Shaw College offers monthly start dates, flexible scheduling, and career placement assistance.

For information about this news release, please contact:

Victor Tesan

President, Sprott Shaw College

President, Education Services & Chief Operating Officer, CIBT Education Group Inc.

O: 604-777-7560

E: info@sprottshaw.com

To view the source version of this press release, please visit https://www.newsfilecorp.com/release/54464
Source: Xinhua| 2020-04-15 02:42:27|Editor: huaxia

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"Choosing Joe to be my vice president was one of the best decisions I ever made, and he became a close friend," Obama said. "And I believe Joe has all the qualities we need in a president right now."



WASHINGTON, April 14 (Xinhua) -- Former U.S. President Barack Obama said on Tuesday he is endorsing Joe Biden, his former deputy, for the White House.

In a video posted on Twitter, Obama talked about Biden's leadership, which he said "belongs in the White House." "That's why I'm so proud to endorse Joe Biden for president of the United States."

"Choosing Joe to be my vice president was one of the best decisions I ever made, and he became a close friend," Obama said. "And I believe Joe has all the qualities we need in a president right now."

U.S. President Barack Obama(2nd R), Vice President Joe Biden(2nd L), Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Joseph Dunford(1st L), and Defense Secretary Ash Carter(1st R), attend an Armed Forces Full Honor Farewell Ceremony for the president at Joint Base Myer-Henderson in Washington D.C., the United States on Jan. 4, 2017. (Xinhua/Yin Bogu)

Biden, retweeting the video, said Obama's endorsement "means the world" to him.

"We're going to build on the progress we made together, and there's no one I'd rather have standing by my side," the former U.S. vice president said.

Biden became the Democratic Party's presumptive presidential nominee last week after his only rival, U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders, suspended his own campaign. Sanders, who had campaigned on progressive policies, endorsed Biden, a moderate political veteran, on Monday.

U.S. President Barack Obama (C), First Lady Michelle Obama (1st, L), Vice President Joe Biden (1st, R), Olympic gymnast Simone Biles (2nd, L) and Paralympic athlete Josh Brunais attend a ceremony honoring members of the 2016 U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Teams in the East Room of White House in Washington D.C., the United States, Sept. 29, 2016. (Xinhua/Yin Bogu)

In Tuesday's video, Obama did not mention sitting President Donald Trump, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, but took a shot at the administration's handling of the ongoing coronavirus outbreak in the United States.

"Pandemics have a way of cutting through a lot of noise and spin to remind us what is real and what matters," he said. "It's reminded us that good government matters, that facts and science matter, that the rule of law matters, that having leaders that are informed and honest, and seek to bring people together, rather than drive them apart, those kinds of leaders matter."

Brad Parscale, manager of Trump's re-election campaign, fired back with a statement, saying that "Biden is the only candidate left in the Democrat field, Obama has no other choice but to support him."

Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden, former U.S. vice president, attends a caucus night rally with his wife Jill Biden at Drake University in Des Moines, Iowa, the United States, Feb. 3, 2020. (Photo by Joel Lerner/Xinhua)

Primaries of the 2020 U.S. presidential race have not finished, as many states have delayed their voting due to the coronavirus pandemic. A Biden-Trump matchup is poised to take place.

The Democratic National Committee has postponed the party's presidential nominating convention in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, to Aug. 17, the week before the Republican Party's convention, scheduled for Aug. 24 to 27 in Charlotte, North Carolina.

The 2020 U.S. presidential election is scheduled for Tuesday, Nov. 3.

(Article by Xinhua Reporter Sun Ding; Video by Xinhua Reporter Hu Yousong) 
The Central Bank of Egypt (CBE) has given the banking sector a holiday on Sunday and Monday to mark the Coptic Easter and Sham El-Nessim, it said in a statement on Wednesday.



Egypts banks will resume operations on Tuesday, it added.



The Egyptian stock exchange also announced on Wednesday that the market will halt operations for the two days and that trading will resume on Tuesday.



Manpower minister Mohamed Saafan said Sham El-Nessim will be a paid holiday for private-sector employees.



Coptic Orthodox Christians -- who comprise a substantial majority of Christians in Egypt -- will celebrate Easter on Sunday.



Monday marks the traditional Egyptian spring holiday of Sham El-Nessim, which is often celebrated with family outings to parks or other outdoor excursions. It falls on the Monday after Easter and is a public holiday.



However, this year, the festivities will be muted by the coronavirus pandemic, as Egypt continues to place unprecedented measures to stem the spread of the virus, including a nationwide night-time curfew.



The cabinet said earlier this month that all shops and restaurants would be completely shuttered on Sham El-Nessim, as is the case on weekends. Under the curfew rules, malls and shops are open until 5pm on weekdays and restaurants are restricted to deliveries.



Egypt on Tuesday reported its highest daily increase in coronavirus cases with 160 new infections, bringing the total to 2,350.



The death toll now stands at 178.

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The priority of older adults, Dr. Haase explains, is to make the most of their limited time on earth, and their highest value is social connection. For them, being home alone with just their thoughts and nowhere to go can be a frightening place.

And then theres the fact that older adults may not see themselves as, well, old. Older adults may not think of themselves as being at heightened risk for Covid-19 because old age carries a lot of stigma. Theres a huge reluctance to view oneself in those terms.

How to Be Heard

So how do you explain your concerns to older relatives?

Dr. Brach believes it begins with self-understanding. When you talk to them, ask yourself, whats going on for you? Once you start to name whats going on underneath under all the agitation, you get to your anticipatory grief: You dont want to lose them.

Dr. Beck recommends a simple, practical approach for coping, and managing anxiety, when older relatives dont see the risks the way you do. The idea is, you want to invert that  you have to manage your own anxiety first.

She suggested being direct, providing solid reasoning and being clear about the consequences. You tell them why youre worried, and why you want them to do this thing, she said. It has to be rational. It cant just be because I know better and I say so.

And you may have to acknowledge the worst-case scenario. So it might be like, Mom, youre living in Florida, and youre going to the beach. I cannot stop you. But if you get sick, I cant come see you. And if you die, you may die alone, and I wont be there. This may sound harsh, but its true. Let them sit with the real possibility of what may happen.

Radical Acceptance

When all else fails, Dr. Brach espouses the art and power of radical acceptance, both for our loved ones and ourselves.
Taking aspirin just once or twice a week could lower the risk of getting several deadly cancers, scientists have claimed.

The cheap over-the-counter painkiller is believed to block an enzyme which helps tumours to form.

Researchers looked at a range of studies which compared people taking aspirin with those who did not.

Taking aspirin just once or twice a week could lower the risk of getting several deadly cancers, scientists at Milan University in Italy have claimed (file photo)

The team found regular use of the drug appeared to reduce the risk of getting stomach and oesophagus cancers by around a third.

It also cut the chances of bowel cancer by 27 per cent  based on 45 studies including more than 150,000 people.

A daily low-dose or baby aspirin appeared to lower the bowel risk by 10 per cent while a 325mg tablet each day was linked to a 35 per cent fall.

One in eight patients diagnosed with cancer in the UK get bowel tumours  more than 42,000 people a year.

The scientific review, by Milan University in Italy, found regular aspirin also appeared to reduce risk of stomach cancer by 36 per cent while oesophagus cancer was cut by a third.

The review showed people taking aspirin once or twice a week had a 22 per cent lower risk of pancreatic cancer.

A daily low-dose or baby aspirin appeared to lower the bowel risk by 10 per cent while a 325mg tablet each day was linked to a 35 per cent fall (file photo)

The risk was reduced by 44 per cent if they had been taking it for a decade. Regular aspirin use was linked to 38 per cent lower odds of cancers covering the liver, bile duct and gall bladder.

However, the review did not look at the other drugs people were taking which could affect cancer risk.

Aspirin is already known to reduce the risk of heart attacks and strokes by making the blood less sticky, but experts warn of the risk of gastrointestinal bleeding.

Senior review author Professor Carlo La Vecchia said: Taking aspirin for the prevention of bowel cancer, or any other cancers, should only be done in consultation with a doctor.
The number of domestic incidents investigated by the Jefferson County sheriffs office has jumped by 27 percent during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Sheriffs investigators in March 2019 responded to 111 calls of domestic violence, said Sgt. Joni Money. In March of 2020, when people were asked to stay at home because of COVID-19, that number climbed to 141.

Its uncertain as to whether this increase in domestic violence crimes is a direct result of the stay-at-home order that was issued earlier in March 2020, Money said, but it certainly raises some questions. In comparing last years numbers to this years numbers, the only difference seems to be the stay-at-home order.

The upward trend was feared and somewhat expected by law enforcement nationwide, and Jefferson County is not alone. According to thehill.com, police departments across the country are reporting a spike in domestic violence. Departments in Boston, Chicago, Dallas, Los Angeles and Seattle have said publicly they are seeing increases in domestic violence allegations, the publication reported.

Birminghams One Place Family Justice Center provides services to victims and survivors of domestic violence and sexual assault. Executive Director Allison Dearing, who has previously said being self-isolated or quarantined can be dangerous for people in abusive homes, said they are seeing a reduction in calls but thats not necessarily a good thing.

We believe thats probably because people are in close proximity to their abusers. The calls that we are receiving, I would say, are increased in danger, almost desperate calls, from people who are being threatened with firearms, who are afraid they are going to have to go back to a home they escaped because of COVID-19 and being concerned because there are guns in the home, she said.

These really raise our red flags for dangers, and so we hope that law enforcement when they arrive on the scene ask those calls are being increased that they are asking about access to firearms or threats of firearms in the home, Dearing said. If were having to triage and do a danger kind of assessment, were trying to see what are the most dangerous situations that have the potential to escalate.

The sheriffs office offered some alternatives to engaging in violent domestic altercations:

- Take a walk. Should tensions begin to build, citizens can still take a walk around their neighborhood. Hopefully, this will allow both parties to have the opportunity to cool down and keep the argument from escalating. Just remember to practice the social distancing guidelines while in public.

- Try to talk things out rather than allowing a disagreement to become physical. Avoiding raising your voice or using overly emphatic hand gestures can go a long way in keeping a disagreement under control. Even if the other party is yelling, lowering your tone and volume can often cause the other person to lower theirs as well.

- Settle arguments with words, not fists. Never raise your hand against another person in an emotional rage.

- Clearly and calmly state what you feel the disagreement is about to the other party. Often times, an argument can develop over nothing more than one party not understanding what point the other person is trying to make. By trying this, you may actually discover that you and the other party actually have the same opinion but are stating it differently.

During this difficult time, everyone is on edge and anxieties are high. Many people are concerned over finances, health and the stress of the disruption of normal activity, Money said. Try planning activities that will encourage fond memories, like going through old photos of happy times or cooking a favorite meal together.

She said authorities understand that sometimes, no matter what attempts are made, the situation cannot be resolved or it may be a pre-existing violent relationship that is worsened by the current stressors forced by Covid-19.

Should you need assistance with a violent party, please reach out. There are still services available to those in a violent situation.

 YWCA  The YWCA offers a 24-hour crisis line (205-322-HURT [4878]). Their 24-hour emergency domestic violence shelters are also open and operational.

 Crisis Center Birmingham  The Crisis Center continues to provide 24-hour services:

Crisis and Suicide Line  205-323-7777

Rape Response Hotline  205-323-7273

Recovery Crisis Line  205-458-3377

 Jefferson County District Attorneys Office Victims Assistance Unit  205-325-5260 On-Call Victim Assistance Officers are available

 HICA  Hispanic Interest Coalition Alabama 205-942-5505 Services and Support for Alabamas Hispanic community
San Antonio officials are looking to enhance protections for renters and pump more money into the citys rental assistance programs as economic fallout from the COVID-19 pandemic deepens.

A proposal circulated by District 1 Councilman Roberto Trevino would basically give renters 60 days to come up with rent if theyre short  similar to an ordinance enacted in Austin last month.

Landlords would have to tell renters at least two months in advance that they plan to evict them if tenants fail to pay their rent under Trevinos proposal.

Bexar County Judge Nelson Wolff has already ordered a pause in evictions, and Trevino is trying to get the 60-day policy enacted countywide. Barring that, he plans to push the proposal through City Council.

At the heart of this is really trying to work with all sides to give us more time as people are recovering, Trevino said during Tuesdays City Council videoconference meeting.

On ExpressNews.com: Get the latest update on coronavirus and a tracking map of U.S. cases

Trevinos proposal comes as the city tries to find more money for its rental assistance programs.

More residents than ever are calling the city to try to tap San Antonios risk mitigation fund. That $1 million pot was set up last year to give financial assistance to residents struggling to stay in their homes or forced out by drastic increases, residential development or health and safety problems.

Before the crisis, the city received about 50 calls a week inquiring about the fund.

That number has ballooned to 4,100 as the amount of available money in the fund fell to $400,000.

City officials have now identified about $14.3 million  including that $400,000  to help shore up rental and utility assistance programs.

The city also is targeting low-income areas of town that have seen few calls from residents to the citys COVID-19 hotline or use of the citys online self-screening tool that recommends whether someone needs to be tested.

The citys Community Health and Prevention teams delivered more than 5,000 door hangers to households on the citys East Side and are handing out fliers to East Side businesses. Theyre also looking at block-walking to deliver information to about 30,000 residents on the citys West, Southwest and Southeast sides.

But that means little if residents dont have access to testing facilities, District 5 Councilwoman Shirley Gonzales said. Gonzales noted her district, which encompasses the citys West Side and part of the South Side, has few medical facilities where residents can get tested for COVID-19.

The lack of medical facilities and medical clinics in the area is long-standing, Gonzales said. Thats one of the things we dont want to go to back to normal.

City health officials have been in contact with local hospitals with mobile units to propose using those units for COVID-19 testing in areas that lack those facilities, Metro Health Director Dawn Emerick said. Metro Health is also looking at retrofitting its own mobile health clinic for testing, Emerick said.

We cant build brick-and-mortar but we can bring testing there, Emerick said.

On ExpressNews.com: Confirmed COVID-19 cases in Bexar County rise past 800; no new deaths reported

Some frustrations abounded about the apparent dearth in testing. As of Tuesday, about 11,000 tests have been conducted by public and private labs in Bexar County  which has a population of more than 2 million residents.

It doesnt really give us the best picture of the situation were in as a community, District 9 Councilman John Courage said.

For weeks, officials have pointed to backlogs in test results at the state and federal level. Emerick noted that Metro Health is still seeing backlogs in reporting from major labs.

At one point, Metro Health took part in a pilot program with an entity that didnt use some of the traditional cooking methods in order to produce faster results, Emerick said. But those results werent as accurate as those done through traditional swabbing, she said.

We have to be very careful that were not swabbing all of these folks and then not being able to give them the results, Emerick said.

Joshua Fechter is a staff writer covering San Antonio government and politics. To read more from Joshua, become a subscriber. jfechter@express-news.net | Twitter: @JFreports
LONDON  As Britain closes in on 100,000 reported cases of the coronavirus  a solemn milestone in a contagion that has ravaged its political leadership  a raft of new statistics suggests that the government is undercounting the human, and economic, cost of the epidemic.

The governments Office of National Statistics released data on Tuesday revealing that the death toll from the virus could be at least 10 percent higher than the official toll of 12,107 because that number does not take into account people who die in nursing homes or in their own residences.

At the same time, the Office for Budget Responsibility, a fiscal watchdog group, said the lockdown could shrink Britains economy by 35 percent in the second quarter and throw two million people out of work  a prediction even worse than the governments darkest warnings.

Taken together, these new numbers cast a grim shadow over Britains response to the epidemic, which has already been dogged by shortfalls in testing and questions about the supply of ventilators and protective gear.
Source: Xinhua| 2020-04-15 23:12:24|Editor: huaxia

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HELSINKI, April 15 (Xinhua) -- The Finnish government on Wednesday pledged to increase its funding for the World Health Organization (WHO) by restoring it to the 2015 level -- 5.5 million euros (6 million U.S. dollars).

In 2019, Finland's basic contribution to the WHO was 1.9 million euros and it provided 0.75 million euros in program support. Finland also made other membership-based contributions to WHO bodies totaling 0.9 million euros in 2019, the government said in a statement.

The Finnish Ministry of Social Affairs and Health is responsible for Finland's contributions to the WHO.

The WHO is leading the global effort to prepare for and respond to the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic. Finland is one of the vice-chairs of the WHO Executive Board and supports a strong WHO, the government noted in the statement.

Finnish Foreign Minister Pekka Haavisto said on Wednesday that the decision by the United States to suspend its funding to the WHO is "a major setback."

Talking to the Finnish news agency STT, Haavisto said that "the work of the WHO is needed especially these days for overcoming the coronavirus."

Earlier this year, the Finnish Foreign Ministry has already granted one million euros in funding to the WHO's COVID-19 Strategic Preparedness and Response Plan.

Global problems can best be solved by working together, and therefore Finland advocates consistently on behalf of a more effective and stronger multilateral order, the government said, adding that this is also a key objective of its own program.

U.S. President Donald Trump announced late Tuesday that he had instructed his administration to suspend funding for the WHO, which he accused of "severely mismanaging and covering up the spread of the coronavirus." (1 euro = 1.09 U.S. dollars)
GSMA Calls for Applications to Develop Digital Access Solutions in Africa and Asia

The GSMA today opened applications for the Innovation Fund for Mobile Internet Adoption and Digital Inclusion. The Innovation Fund aims to increase mobile internet adoption and usage among those who have mobile internet coverage but are not using it in countries in Africa and Asia. The Fund is supported by the UK Department for International Development (DFID), BMZ the Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development in Germany, the GSMA and its members.

"Today, we understand the value of being connected like never before. "Mobile operators have invested almost 1 trillion USD in network infrastructure over the past five years, bringing mobile internet coverage to 91 per cent of the world's population. Despite this, 3.3 billion people are not using mobile internet services," said John Giusti, Chief Regulatory Officer, GSMA. "Now is the time to find innovative ways to solve this usage gap for the digitally excluded regardless of who they are or where they are. The Innovation Fund for Mobile Internet Adoption and Digital Inclusion will drive partnerships to develop new and innovative ways of increasing use of the mobile internet so that more citizens can fully participate in society and the economy."

The reach of mobile has expanded significantly in recent years. Today mobile broadband networks cover more than 7.1 billion people globally, but 3.3 billion of those already covered are not using mobile internet services. These citizens tend to belong to the most marginalised members of society disproportionately rural, female and illiterate. Women, for example, are 20 per cent less likely to use mobile internet than men in low- and middle-income countries. The Innovation Fund focusses on addressing this usage gap to ensure underserved citizens can use the mobile internet. As mobile networks have become the primary way of accessing the internet globally, the ability to access and use mobile services is critical to driving economic growth and creating opportunities for citizens and businesses to thrive.

The objective of the Fund is to support solutions that seek to address one or more of the following barriers to mobile internet adoption:

Accessibility : Innovations which improve the accessibility and usability of handsets and mobile internet services for citizens who are unable to access them; not including network accessibility, electricity or IDs

: Innovations which improve the accessibility and usability of handsets and mobile internet services for citizens who are unable to access them; not including network accessibility, electricity or IDs Affordability : Innovations which improve the affordability of handsets and mobile internet services.

: Innovations which improve the affordability of handsets and mobile internet services. Digital skills : Innovations which focus on improving basic digital skills and confidence to access and use mobile internet.

: Innovations which focus on improving basic digital skills and confidence to access and use mobile internet. Safety and security: Innovations which focus on safety and security of individuals regarding the use of mobile internet; these innovations will not include tackling issues of data privacy and fraud.

The Fund will support start-ups or small to medium enterprises (SMEs) with innovative new products, services or business models which can address key barriers to mobile internet adoption and use, driving digital inclusion for those currently digitally excluded, including women. It will test innovations with the most significant potential for growth and impact in Asia and Africa and provide lessons, and examples on how mobile is driving positive socio-economic change.

For further information on the GSMA's Innovation Fund or how to apply, please refer to the Innovation Fund application website www.gsma.com/mobilefordevelopment/gsma-innovation-fund-mobile-internet-adoption/ where applications will be accepted up to the closing date of 22 May 2020.

-ENDS-

Notes to Editors

The GSMA Innovation Fund supports innovative start-ups or small to medium-sized private sector companies in emerging markets to achieve sustainable growth and improved socio-economic impact. The Fund supports innovation that increases mobile internet adoption and usage for the underserved and those who are currently not using mobile internet services. The Fund works with start-ups or SMEs willing and able to work with mobile operators on projects which advance the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals.

About the GSMA

The GSMA represents the interests of mobile operators worldwide, uniting more than 750 operators and nearly 400 companies in the broader mobile ecosystem, including handset and device makers, software companies, equipment providers and internet companies, as well as organisations in adjacent industry sectors. The GSMA also produces the industry-leading MWC events held annually in Barcelona, Los Angeles and Shanghai, as well as the Mobile 360 Series of regional conferences.

For more information, please visit the GSMA corporate website at www.gsma.com. Follow the GSMA on Twitter: @GSMA.

View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20200415005041/en/

Contacts:

Media Contacts:

GSMA Press Office

Gemma Ashley

pressoffice@gsma.com
HONG KONG, April 15, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- Leading genetic testing and digital health company Prenetics (also known as CircleDNA) today announces the launch of Project Screen by Circle  the initiative is backed by philanthropic and operational support from a consortium of industry leaders, including Prenetics, Prudential Hong Kong, Xcelom, Mason Supreme Healthcare, hpa SOCIAL, Beyond Ventures and Pickupp.

Project Screen is driven by a duty of responsibility, to signify a collective response and commitment to the increased need for testing in the community. Project Screen has set out to make RT-PCR COVID-19 testing easy, safe and accurate.

Transparent Pricing. Zero Profit

Project Screen, in efforts to provide everyone in the community accessibility to WHO-approved RT-PCR COVID-19 testing is operating to only cover costs with zero profit. Full transparent pricing is listed below in HKD:

Sample Collection Kit - $53

Delivery Fee - $30

Sample Pick-Up Fee - $130

Lab Fees - $429

Operations - $257

Health Professional Oversight - $50

Credit Card Transaction Fees - $36

Total - $985

HKD $300 Subsidy, for up to 30,000 Healthcare Workers, by Prudential Hong Kong

Frontline workers at the heart of the pandemic are helping to keep Hong Kong healthy and safe. To show support and even greater accessibility for their constant sacrifice, Prudential is subsidising HKD $300 per test, up to 30,000 COVID-19 test kits, for healthcare workers and their families. This means that local first responders, doctors, nurses and any healthcare worker and their family members in Hong Kong will only pay HKD $685.

Collaboration with Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK) to develop new protocol for Whole Genome Sequencing of SARS-CoV-2 virus

In a collaboration effort between Prenetics and the CUHK Biomedicine Sciences team led by Professor Stephen Tsui, the team will develop new protocols for rapid and accurate whole genome sequencing of SARS-CoV-2. The findings will subsequently be utilized for public health control of the COVID-19 outbreak by patient clustering and contact tracing when community spread begins to prevail. It will also lead to a greater understanding of the disease that will allow Hong Kong to respond to the pandemic and to ultimately save lives.

Testing Capacity of up to 3,000 Daily

By leveraging off Prenetics existing ISO-15189:2012 accredited laboratory, Project Screen can process up to 3,000 WHO-approved RT-PCR COVID-19 samples daily. It is set to have an initial ramp-up period of 1,000 tests daily and within weeks can expand up to 3,000 samples daily. Project Screen aims to serve individuals, healthcare workers, hospitals, private clinics, and employers in Hong Kong.

Availability, Pricing and How It Works

To access a COVID-19 test, individuals, healthcare workers and their families can go to www.screen.circledna.com to complete a short questionnaire, provided by our independent healthcare partner and based on guidelines from the Department of Health. The test will be available for HKD $985 for individuals, with no profit to Project Screen or any of the consortium member companies. For healthcare workers and their families, it will be HKD $685 with a $300 subsidy provided by Prudential Hong Kong.

Project Screen has reached out to government officials and public health departments in further expanding testing capacity in Hong Kong. Given the high demand for testing, the company will work rapidly to make more tests available as the global supply shortage for COVID-19 test kits is addressed.

The testing experience includes:

WHO-approved RT-PCR COVID-19 laboratory test (gold standard) with 99.9% sensitivity / specificity

Overnight sample delivery

Infectious disease deep throat saliva sample collection and shipping materials to safely ship your sample, using COVID-19 guidelines set by the Department of Health

Same-day sample collection pick-up by trained professional at-home back to our laboratory

Private, secure digital results provided within 24 hours of receipt in laboratory

Individuals with positive results will be provided a telehealth consult with an independent registered healthcare professional.

Danny Yeung, Co-Founder and CEO of Prenetics said "Hong Kong is our home and together with the consortium of Project Screen, we felt it was our responsibility to do everything we possibly can for the community. No one company can do it all and it's just amazing we have the support of so many industry leaders whom have all worked around the clock to launch Project Screen as a non-profit initiative. Together, we can fight COVID-19!"

Derek Yung, Chief Executive Officer of Prudential said "In line with our 'We DO' spirit, Prudential is proud to be a catalyst in this meaningful initiative as we continue to demonstrate our ongoing commitment in supporting the community during the COVID-19 outbreak. Healthcare workers are the heartbeat of our medical system and providing affordable testing to the larger community is an extremely important piece in our fight against the virus. We would like to express our earnest and humble gratitude to all the heroes in the healthcare services for their important and valued contribution and together, we continue to will do whatever we can to support Hong Kong in overcoming this challenge together."

Professor Stephen Tsui, CUHK Biomedical Sciences said "As a researcher and life-long academic, it's my privilege to be involved in Project Screen. Having mapped the SARS genome 17 years ago, I'm confident that we can do the same for COVID-19. This virus is one of the biggest threats Hong Kong has faced and understanding the spread is crucial in fighting the disease. By harnessing whole genome sequencing, it will help us break down the complex picture of the COVID-19 spread, and ultimately save lives."

# # #

About Project Screen

Project Screen by Circle  a non-profit initiative providing a WHO-approved solution to get tested and diagnosed for COVID-19 from home in Hong Kong. The initiative is backed by philanthropic and operational support from a consortium of industry leaders, including Prenetics, Prudential Hong Kong, Xcelom, Mason Supreme Healthcare, hpa SOCIAL, Beyond Ventures and Pickupp.

Project Screen is driven by a duty of responsibility, to signify a collective response and commitment to the increased need for COVID-19 testing in the community. Project Screen has set out to make RT-PCR COVID-19 testing easy, safe and accurate. Together, let's fight COVID-19 in Hong Kong, for Hong Kong.

About Prenetics

Prenetics is a leading global genetic testing and digital health company. Prenetics operates its direct to consumer genomics business via its two brands, CircleDNA in Asia and DNAFit in Europe. The company has a team of over 150 people and is spread across ten offices in Asia, Europe and South Africa.

Prenetics has received over USD 50-million in strategic funding from Alibaba Hong Kong Entrepreneurs Fund, Ping An and more. Prenetics' mission is to help people lead healthier, more active lives by empowering them with personalised, predictive, and preventive measures in the form of the latest, proven innovations in DNA and mobile technology. For more information, visit www.prenetics.com and www.circledna.com

About Prudential Hong Kong

Prudential has been serving the people of Hong Kong since 1964. Through Prudential Hong Kong Limited and Prudential General Insurance Hong Kong Limited, we provide a range of financial planning services and products including individual life insurance, investment-linked insurance, retirement solutions, health and medical protection, general insurance and employee benefits.

Prudential plc is an Asia-led portfolio of businesses focused on structural growth markets. The business helps individuals to de-risk their lives and deal with their biggest financial concerns through life and health insurance, and retirement and asset management solutions. Prudential plc has 20 million customers and is listed on stock exchanges in London, Hong Kong, Singapore and New York.

Prudential plc is not affiliated in any manner with Prudential Financial, Inc., a company whose principal place of business is in the United States of America or with the Prudential Assurance Company, a subsidiary of M&G plc, a company incorporated in the United Kingdom.

Please visit www.prudential.com.hk for more information

SOURCE Prenetics
Coding is a near-essential skill nowadays. From web development to data science and even pure-bred programming, coding is a skill that can never go wrong. If you are a journalist, learning how to code can give you a prolific edge over peers as technology becomes increasingly important and data journalism takes the front seat. If you are a creative professional, knowing how to write code can help you set up your own website and host your own platform. With the advantages being nearly endless, we take a look at five of the best online coding courses that you should enrol for, as you spend an extended period of days staying at home.

Web developer bootcamp, Udemy

The web developer bootcamp course at Udemy is possibly one of the most comprehensive coding courses that you will find online, and on top of that, is available right now at a nominal fee of just Rs 455 (it actually retails at Rs 12,800). Through this course, even if you are a complete novice, you will learn how to code in HTML, CSS, Javascript and more. Some of the courses highlights include letting you build your own blog application, a browser-based game, animated apps, responsive webpages and more. In essence, this multi-month course, which spans across 46.5 hours of videos, 81 articles and 104 downloadable resources, is the starter kit for anyone that has always been enthusiastic about coding, but never gotten around to it.

Python for everybody, Coursera

With Python being a core entity of data analytics, this free to access Coursera programme is actually one of the very best around. The course takes a novice user through the basics of Python semantics, as well as techniques such as database management, web scraping, data structuring and more. By the end of this 8-month course, which requires only two hours of your time each week, you should be able to write basic Python programmes on your own.

Introductory programming courses, MIT OpenCourseware

This relatively unexplored treasure trove has the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), one of the worlds most reputed educational institutions, offer a host of its fundamental courses in various disciplines to interested learners stuck at home. Of all the programmes available here, the introductory programming list includes courses in data science, basic programming, Python, Java, MATLAB, C/C++ and more. The material may be more conventional and not purely interactive, but academically, this is about the best material that you can learn your coding from. The best part? It is absolutely free.

Data visualisation, Free Code Camp

In todays world of data-driven reportage across all forms of media, data visualisation plays a critical role. Through Free Code Camp, you get, among other courses, a completely free and highly comprehensive 300-hour lowdown on core data visualisation lessons and techniques. The only flipside is that ideally, you would be required to have basic knowledge of coding already to access the courses listed on Free Code Camp. For those who are already versed with basics, the data visualisation course on Free Code Camp is practically one of the very best that you can get on the internet today.

Java, SQL and more, Khan Academy

The best part about Khan Academy is how approachable its entire website is. Furthermore, the online programming courses are modeled on the way computer science is taught at Indian school levels. This automatically makes Khan Academys (for now) free to access courses one of the best for school students in India to follow. The courses take students through introduction in Javascript, HTML/CSS and SQL, following which you can evolve to a higher level once these courses are cleared.
Computer models are seductive even though they are very often completely wrong. The more complicated they are the greater chance that they are wrong. Like children, they copy their parents -- the model architects. Confirmation bias involves cherry picking facts to obtain a result consistent with preexisting beliefs. A complicated computer model with many degrees of freedom is a perfect environment for confirmation bias to have its way. The investigator usually will believe, or at least claim, that his model is objectively setup without bias entering into the effort.

Not all computer models are wrong. Sometimes they produce good predictions. But all too often they fail and the failures are not acknowledged because the modelers are emotionally or ideologically attached to their creation.

The claim of objectivity by academic modelers contrasts with the standard leftist or academic belief that practically everyone is a racist, driven by unconscious motives. Google implicit bias if you want to know more. When professors are pushing racial justice theories everybody is driven by unconscious forces. But when constructing computer models all is well.

Complicated models are always full of escape hatches that can explain away any failure. Climate models still enjoy support in spite of 30 years of failure. The failures are alleged to be due to things like chaotic variation or data that has to be adjusted because it does not agree with the model. COVID-19 models are new but have had notable failures. For example, the IMHE model predicted up to two million deaths but has been repeatedly adjusted and now is down to 60,000 deaths. Usually it is claimed that the model is not wrong, but deaths are lower because the American people have been good boys and girls.

In both climate models and disease models, the associated scientific establishment has a vested interest in the validity of the model. If the climate models are a waste of time, then climate science and its practitioners have been wasting everyones time. The scientific establishment behind COVID-19 modeling is wedded to a particular method of dealing with an epidemic. Their approach is to constrain the spread of the disease with social control until a vaccine is available.

If someone discovers a cure for the disease, or at least a therapy that makes the diseases effects minor, then the scientists working to stop the spread of the disease become suddenly irrelevant. That explains the hostility shown to potential therapeutics like hydroxychloroquine and Remdesivir. Hydroxychloroquine has the additional burden that President Trump suggested that it might be helpful. The academic community is full of Trump haters, so anything Trump likes must be bad.

Hydroxychloroquine is dismissed out of hand by COVID-19 task force member Dr. Anthony Fauci, who calls the evidence anecdotal, which it isnt. There is plenty of evidence that hydroxychloroquine is effective as both as a treatment and as a prophylactic. For example, it has been noticed that patients taking it for other diseases (lupus) rarely or never get COVID-19. Various doctors have produced case series strongly suggesting that it is effective against COVID-19. The problem is that the establishment wants to do double-blind studies that will take years and that are completely irrelevant to the current reality. That is just another way of marginalizing therapy in favor of social-control techniques.

The opposition to climate models comes both from outstanding experts and nonprofessional technologists that smell rats. That opposition is largely theoretical because hardly anyone really believes in impending climate doom. Medicine is different because real doctors are faced with the task of treating real patients that are in danger of dying. Some younger doctors, educated to believe deeply in strict scientific method, may be willing to refuse a treatment that has not be proven to be safe and effective via a 3-year long experiment. Older, more experience doctors may understand the limitations of strict obedience to alleged science and be more willing to take calculated risks appropriate for the patient. The risks are small for hydroxychloroquine because it has been used for decades for malaria, lupus, and arthritis.

All that social-control techniques can accomplish, other than destroying the economy, is to slow down spread of the disease. Evidently, probably long before a vaccine is available, every susceptible person will have had it. Slowing things down may help avoid overload of the medical system. The real breakthrough would be prophylaxis or therapy that would take the teeth out of the disease. For example, if vulnerable old people could avoid catching the disease by taking hydroxychloroquine, deaths would be dramatically smaller. A preliminary study by Dr. Mehmet Oz suggests that 14,000 lupus patients, mostly taking the drug, have few cases of the disease. If this works, once a vaccine was available in two years, the vulnerable could be immunized and taken off hydroxychloroquine. Keep in mind that HIV is treated successfully with therapeutics. No vaccine has been invented. How hard would it be to get a handle on the prophylactic benefit of hydroxychloroquine. One could quickly get an idea by giving a group of medical workers exposed to infection the drug and comparing the infection rate to those not taking the drug. A variant of hydroxychloroquine supplemented by zinc could also be tried. Although I believe that many medical workers are taking the drug, I am not aware that anyone is studying the results.

Hydroxychloroquine is blacklisted because Trump suggested that it is worth trying. At least three (Democrat) governors have literally blacklisted it by restricting availability and usage. The social-control doctors act as if therapeutics are a distant possibility and ignore them as much as possible.

Instead of destroying the economy by making everyone stop working and stay home, an alternative scheme might be to fall back on handwashing and face masks and let everyone go back to work. If vulnerable people can be protected by prophylaxis that would be better and more effective compared to trying to keep them isolated from human contact, possibly a fate worse than death. Surely, the treatment for the severely ill will improve as doctors get more experience and try various therapeutics. Intubation of comatose patients connected to a ventilator is a serious step with huge risks. It seems odd that the well understood and mild side effects of hydroxychloroquine are made into a big deal while more ventilators are urgently requested, as if ventilators are a fine treatment.

All this is mixed up with Trump hatred. It is sad, but true, that many of the Trump haters would rather have an economic and social disaster than see Trump reelected. If this seems implausible, they should read up on their own massive literature on implicit bias.

Norman Rogers writes often about climate and energy. He is the author of the book: Dumb Energy: A Critique of Wind and Solar Energy. His website is NevadaSolarScam.com
It's official: Murray State becomes member of Missouri Valley Conference
The World Health Organisation (WHO) on Wednesday said the agency is purely focused on saving lives and putting a stop to the coronavirus pandemic ravaging the world for the past four months.

The WHO Director-General, Tedros Ghebreyesus, in response to the threat by the U.S. government to halt funding the outfit, said it has done no wrong but only following the creed for which organisation was established in 1945.

The organisation was established by nations to protect the highest attainable standard of health as one of the fundamental rights of every human being, without distinction of race, religion, political belief, economic or social condition, he said.

Mr Ghebreyesus said that creed remains our vision today.

There is no time to waste and WHOs singular focus is on working to serve all people to save lives and stop the COVID-19 pandemic.

The U.S. president, Donald Trump, on Tuesday said he was freezing the funding of WHO pending a review into the UN health agencys role in severely mismanaging and covering up the spread of the coronavirus, adding: everybody knows whats going on there.

The United States is the biggest individual contributor to the WHOs budget.

U.S., long time ally

Mr Ghebreyesus, during the virtual briefing in Geneva, said the U.S. has been a longstanding and generous friend to WHO, and that they hope it will continue to be so.

We regret the decision of the President of the United States to order a halt in funding to the World Health Organisation, he added.

He said with the support from the people and its government, WHO works to improve the health of many of the worlds poorest and most vulnerable people.

Mr Ghebreyesus said that WHO is not only fighting COVID-19 but also working to address polio, measles, malaria, Ebola, HIV, tuberculosis, malnutrition, cancer, diabetes, mental health and many other diseases and conditions.

We also work with countries to strengthen health systems and improve access to life-saving health services, he said. COVID-19 does not discriminate between rich nations and poor, large nations and small. It does not discriminate between nationalities, ethnicities or ideologies.

Reviewing impact of Trumps decision

Meanwhile, the WHO boss said the UN health agency is reviewing the impact of the withdrawal of U.S. funding.

He said the agency will work with its partners to fill any financial gaps we face and to ensure our work continues uninterrupted.

He said the agency is committed to public health, science and to serving all the people of the world.

Our mission and mandate are to work with all nations equally, without regard to the size of their populations or economies.

In due course, WHOs performance in tackling this pandemic will be reviewed by WHOs Member States and the independent bodies that are in place to ensure transparency and accountability.

This is part of the usual process put in place by our Member States. No doubt, areas for improvement will be identified and there will be lessons for all of us to learn.

But for now, our focus  my focus  is on stopping this virus and saving lives, he said.
By PTI

CHENNAI: Makkal Needhi Maiam (MNM) chief Kamal Haasan on Tuesday took a swipe at the Union government over the migrant workers' issue in Mumbai, saying the crisis was a "time bomb" and that the "balcony government" should keep an eye on the ground.

More than 1,000 migrant workers, who earn daily wages and been stuck in Mumbai since the last three weeks, gathered in Bandra in Mumbai on Tuesday demanding transport facilities to go back to their native places, hours after Prime Minister Narendra Modi extended the coronavirus-enforced curbs till May 3.

Haasan, earlier while flagging the need to address the problems of such migrant workers, had sarcastically remarked that the Centre should not remain a "balcony government", alluding to the relatively better-off citizens.

"All the balcony people take a long and hard look at the ground. First it was Delhi, now Mumbai," he said, in an apparent reference to the migration of labourers in Delhi in large numbers earlier during the lockdown.

"The migrant crisis is a time bomb that must be defused before it becomes a crisis bigger than Corona. Balcony government must keep their eyes on what's happening on the ground too," he said on his Twitter handle.

The gathering in suburban Bandra in Mumbai earlier in the day, in violation of lockdown norms, created a potential law and order situation and the police had resorted to mild force to scatter the crowd.

On Tuesday morning, Modi had announced the extension of the ongoing lockdown till May 3, as part of the country's fight against the spread of coronavirus.
Essence Communications, Inc.This year's Essence Festival of Culture has officially been canceled due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Despite previously announcing they would postpone the annual fest for a date "closer to the fall," Essence Communications announced on Wednesday that their live event will now take place in 2021.

New Orleans Mayor LaToya Cantrell bravely recommended yesterday that no large events take place in New Orleans in 2020, and ESSENCE fully supports that decision," Essence said in a statement.

"After continued monitoring of the evolving developments in the COVID-19 global pandemic and remaining in close contact and collaboration with our partners in the City of New Orleans and State of Louisiana, we are confirming today that we will no longer move forward with the 2020 ESSENCE Festival of Culture live experience -- and look forward to returning to New Orleans in 2021."

In its place, Essence has launched the Essence Benefit Series to Fight COVID-19, which will help raise money and "provide support for businesses and organizations in black communities across the country."

The communications company also unveiled the ESSENCE Festival of Culture: The Virtual Edition, a virtual event hosted on Essence's new streaming platform. The event, to take place during 4th of July weekend, will be a benefit celebration to support the City of New Orleans.

As previously reported, this year's Essence Fest was to be hosted by comedian Loni Love and include powerhouse headliners such as Janet Jackson and Bruno Mars. It also celebrated Essence's 50th anniversary as a magazine.

Essence promises that they will honor all tickets sold for the 2020 Festival in 2021 and will also offer full refunds. A date for the 2021 Essence Festival of Culture has yet to be announced.

More information can be found at EssenceFestival.com.

Copyright  2020, ABC Audio. All rights reserved.
2020 is the year that China intends to eliminate all absolute poverty nationwide and this film is the inside story of how it is happening, said Dr. Robert Lawrence Kuhn. But 2020 is also the year of the novel coronavirus..."

PBS SoCal, Southern Californias home for the premieres of new PBS programs, announced today the presentation of its co-production VOICES FROM THE FRONTLINE: CHINAS WAR ON POVERTY. Hosted and written by Dr. Robert Lawrence Kuhn, a renowned China expert and recipient of the China Reform Friendship Medal, and executive produced by Adam Zhu, VOICES FROM THE FRONTLINE: CHINAS WAR ON POVERTY is produced by a joint US-China production team, led by award-winning director Peter Getzels. The documentary provides a textured and intimate portrayal of Chinas historic anti-poverty campaign by following five cases that highlight China's poverty alleviation policies. With unprecedented access to travel in China, the film explores the countrys poverty alleviation programs, while interviewing villagers and local officials along the way. VOICES FROM THE FRONTLINE: CHINAS WAR ON POVERTY will air Mon. May 11 at 7 p.m. on PBS SoCal, Sat. May 16 at 7 p.m. on KCET, Wed. May 20 at 8 p.m. ET/PT on Link TV Nationwide (DirecTV 375 and DISH Network 9410) and will be broadcast on PBS stations across the country with streaming available online at pbssocal.org/voicesfromthefrontline, as well as on pbs.org and on the free PBS App.

2020 is the year that China intends to eliminate all absolute poverty nationwide and this film is the inside story of how it is happening, said Kuhn. But 2020 is also the year of the novel coronavirus, and when you look at how the government has mobilized to fight the contagion, similarities between Chinas war on the epidemic and Chinas war on poverty are striking. During the production, we discovered every poor family had a targeted plan to lift it out of poverty; we witnessed village meetings to determine peoples poverty status; and we watched local officials being held accountable, their careers at stake.

"To understand Chinas approach to poverty alleviation helps people to understand how Chinas system works, said Zhu. "Directing a cross-cultural team in remote parts of China led to insights on how this extraordinary program works. said Getzels, adding we took a cinematic approach, enabling people to present their own stories.

According to the Chinese government, Chinas economic development has lifted more than 750 million people out of poverty. But for the more than 100 million intractably poor, who are often living in remote mountainous regions, economic development is not enough. With President Xi Jinping introducing targeted poverty alleviation as his most important task, measures to eliminate destitution involve customized programs with third-party evaluations to assure accuracy and honesty.

Voices from the Frontline: Chinas War on Poverty is co-produced by The Kuhn Foundation and PBS SoCal in association with CGTN.

Join the conversation on social media using #ChinasChallengesPBS

ABOUT PBS SOCAL

PBS SoCal is a donor-supported community institution that is a part of Public Media Group of Southern California, the flagship PBS station for 19 million diverse people across California formed by the merger of PBS SoCal and KCETLink Media Group. PBS SoCal delivers content and experiences that inspire, inform and entertain  over the air, online, in the community and in the classroom. We offer the full slate of beloved PBS programs including MASTERPIECE, NOVA, PBS NewsHour, Frontline, Independent Lens, a broad library of documentary films including works from Ken Burns; and educational PBS KIDS programs including Daniel Tigers Neighborhood and Curious George. Our programs are accessible for free through four broadcast channels, and available for streaming at pbssocal.org, on the PBS mobile apps, and via connected TV platforms Samsung devices, Android TV, Roku, Apple TV and Amazon Fire TV.

ABOUT THE KUHN FOUNDATION

The Kuhn Foundation (KF) advances understanding and meaning of science and philosophy and facilitates informational exchanges between China and the U.S./world. KF co-produces, with CGTN, Closer to China with R.L. Kuhn, featuring Chinas thought leaders and decision makers. KF co-produces, with Shanghai Media Group, Chinas Challenges (three seasons), which won China News Awards (three), Emmy (Los Angeles), Telly Awards (two). For all KF productions in China, Robert Lawrence Kuhn is host and writer; Adam Zhu is executive producer; Peter Getzels is director. KF produces Closer To Truth, the long-running series on PBS stations featuring world-renown scientists and philosophers exploring the big questions of cosmos, consciousness, and meaning (http://www.closertotruth.com); Robert Lawrence Kuhn, host and writer; Peter Getzels, producer/director.

ABOUT ROBERT LAWRENCE KUHN

Robert Lawrence Kuhn is a public intellectual and renowned China expert. He was awarded the China Reform Friendship Medal, honoring 10 foreigners over four decades (five are living, Kuhn is one of two Americans). For 30+ years, Kuhn, with his long-time partner, Adam Zhu, has worked with Chinas leaders and advised the Chinese government. He is a commentator on CNN, BBC, CNBC, Bloomberg, and a columnist in South China Morning Post and China Daily. He is the author of over 30 books, including How Chinas Leaders Think (featuring President Xi Jinping) and The Man Who Changed China: The Life and Legacy of Jiang Zemin (Chinas best-selling book of 2005). He is the host/co-producer of Closer to China with R.L. Kuhn (CGTN). He is an international corporate strategist and investment banker; chairman of The Kuhn Foundation; and creator/writer/host of Closer to Truth.
DENVER, April 15, 2020 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- National Bank Holdings Corporation (NBHC) expects to report its first quarter financial results after the markets close on Tuesday, April 21, 2020. Management will host a conference call to review the results at 11:00 a.m. Eastern Time on Wednesday, April 22, 2020. Interested parties may listen to this call by dialing (877) 272-6762/ (615) 800-6832 (International) using the Conference ID of 1344438 and asking for the NBHC First Quarter Earnings conference call. A telephonic replay of the call will be available beginning approximately four hours after the calls completion through May 5, 2020, by dialing (855) 859-2056 (United States) / (404) 537-3406 (International) using the Conference ID of 1344438. The earnings release and an on-line replay of the call will also be available on the Companys website at www.nationalbankholdings.com by visiting the investor relations area.

About National Bank Holdings Corporation

National Bank Holdings Corporation is a bank holding company created to build a leading community bank franchise delivering high quality client service and committed to shareholder results. Through its bank subsidiary, NBH Bank, National Bank Holdings Corporation operates a network of 101 banking centers, serving individual consumers, small, medium and large businesses, and government and non-profit entities. Its banking centers are located in its core footprint of Colorado, the greater Kansas City region, New Mexico, Texas and Utah. Its comprehensive residential mortgage banking group primarily serves the bank's core footprint. NBH Bank operates under the following brand names: Community Banks of Colorado in Colorado, Bank Midwest in Kansas and Missouri and Hillcrest Bank in New Mexico, Texas and Utah. It also operates as Community Banks Mortgage, a division of NBH Bank, in Colorado. Additional information about National Bank Holdings Corporation can be found at www.nationalbankholdings.com.

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For more information visit: cobnks.com, bankmw.com, hillcrestbank.com or nbhbank.com. Or, follow us on any of our social media sites:

Community Banks of Colorado: facebook.com/cobnks, twitter.com/cobnks, instagram.com/cobnks;

Bank Midwest: facebook.com/bankmw, twitter.com/bank_mw, instagram.com/bankmw;

Hillcrest Bank: facebook.com/hillcrestbank, twitter.com/hillcrest_bank;

NBH Bank: twitter.com/nbhbank;

or connect with any of our brands on LinkedIn.

Contact: Analysts/Institutional Investors: Media: Aldis Birkans, 720-554-6640 Whitney Bartelli, 816-298-2203 Chief Financial Officer Chief Marketing Officer ir@nationalbankholdings.com media@nbhbank.com

Source: National Bank Holdings Corporation
TAIPA on Wednesday said the industry would continue to ensure 24/7 connectivity during the extended lockdown period, as telecom infrastructure providers have taken a series of measures including providing temporary stay arrangements at data centres, and availibility of vehicles to facilitate movement of technical staff to the sites.

"All telecom sites pan India (5.92 lakh) are being monitored by IPs (infrastructure providers) every hour and the rescue teams working on ground 24X7 to keep all sites up and running despite the hurdles/hiccups faced, if any," the Tower and Infrastructure Providers Association (TAIPA) said in a statement.

The association, whose members include key telecom infrastructure players like Indus Towers, ATC Group Companies, Bharti Infratel, GTL Infrastructure, Reliance Infratel, Tower Vision, Sterlite Technologies and Space Teleinfra, said the industry has ensured the security of telecom personnels.

They have been provided with necessary Personal Protective Equipment, sanitizers, masks, among others, along with necessary protection tools to handle electricity related issues.

"The necessary support has been extended by the various ministries to the telecom infra players for continued operations of telecom services.

"Despite the administration being extremely pro-active, there were some initial challenges and telecom infrastructure providers' pro-active approach has helped to handle this crisis in a very methodical manner," TAIPA said.

It added that telecom infrastructure providers have made temporary stay arrangements at their data centres and have ensured availability of vehicles to facilitate movement of technical staff to the sites.

Fresh guidelines were issued by the government on Wednesday for enforcing the second phase of coronavirus lockdown, which is aimed to contain the spread of the pandemic that has killed over 370 people and infected over 11,000 in the country.

Industrial units in rural areas will be allowed to function from April 20, provided they follow social distancing norms, while all kinds of public transport will be barred and public places closed till May 3, according to guidelines.

Services provided by self-employed electricians, IT repair personnel, plumbers, motor mechanics and carpenters will be allowed from April 20.

Manufacturing, industrial units with access control in SEZs, export oriented units, industrial estates, industrial townships will also be allowed to function from April 20.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
OTTAWA, April 15, 2020 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Canadas unions welcome todays federal announcement of an expansion of the Canadian Emergency Response Benefit (CERB) to include those who are still making moderate incomes.



The expansion of the CERB to include those continuing to work in low-income, precarious jobs is an important step, said Hassan Yussuff, President of the Canadian Labour Congress (CLC). This move will be a relief to many workers who have been struggling and were left out of previous supports. The NDP should be credited with helping to influence this expansion of the emergency benefit.

The Prime Ministers announcement of top-up payments for essential workers, including those working in long-term care, is also a necessary move, said Yussuff.

Workers in long-term care often hold multiple part-time positions in different facilities in order to make a decent living. These workers are often without sick leave or benefits of any kind.

This crisis has made it clear that our societys essential workers have been grossly undervalued for too long, said Yussuff. When we start to re-open the economy, we must work to rectify these structural inequities around compensation and support. We must go to bat for the very workers who are ensuring our society continues to function throughout this pandemic.

The CERB expansion also includes supports for hundreds of thousands of seasonal workers, Canadians who became unemployed before the COVID crisis and workers who have exhausted their EI claims.

We will continue to work closely with government and opposition parties to bring attention to the experiences and needs of workers throughout various sectors in order to identity any new or emerging gaps, said Yussuff.
Billy McFarland, the man behind the doomed Fyre Festival, has requested early release from prison, saying that preexisting health conditions put him at higher risk during the coronavirus pandemic, according to The Hollywood Reporter.

On Tuesday, McFarlands lawyers asked U.S. District Court Judge Naomi Buchwald for McFarland to be granted compassionate release from Elkton federal prison in Ohio.

In 2018, McFarland, 28, who grew up in Short Hills and is an alumnus of the Pingry School, pleaded guilty to two counts of wire fraud. He is serving six years in prison.

McFarlands ill-fated Fyre Festival, which he promoted alongside Saddle Rivers Ja Rule, left concertgoers stranded in FEMA tents in the Bahamas in 2017, spawned two documentaries that deconstruct the failed event  Hulus Fyre Fraud and Netflixs Fyre.

Mr. McFarland is not a risk to the community nor a threat to public safety, his lawyers said. "The crime to which he pled guilty for was the non-violent financial crime of wire fraud. However, he is a low risk of recidivism for such financial crimes as he has explained that he has a supportive family that has attested to providing for his basic needs.

They pointed to McFarlands asthma and heart issues along with his position on the 'extreme' scale of the allergy spectrum."

Four Elkton prisoners have died from complications of the coronavirus.

McFarland was previously a fellow inmate of former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen and Mike The Situation Sorrentino from MTVs Jersey Shore at Otisville federal prison in New York state.

In 2019, McFarland, who had reportedly been writing a memoir, also reportedly vowed that he would plot a sequel to the Fyre Festival, despite what happened the first time around.

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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? Amy Kuperinsky may be reached at akuperinsky@njadvancemedia.com. Follow her on Twitter @AmyKup or on Facebook.

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A new report published by Allied Market Research, titled, Ethernet Cable Market by Type, Application, and Cable Structure: Global Opportunity Analysis and Industry Forecast, 20192026, projects that the global Ethernet cable market size is estimated to reach $21.36 billion by 2026. In 2019, North America dominated the market, contributing more than 35% share of the overall revenue, followed by Europe. Upsurge in demand for high-speed internet connectivity and rise in data center installation activities, primarily in the industrial sector, have fueled the growth of the global Ethernet cable market.



Ethernet cable is a type of network cable used in local area networks (LANs) and metropolitan area networks (MANs) to connect and transmit broadband signals between a modem, router, computer, and other devices. Rapid rise in demand for high-speed internet facility, increase in application of automation across industries, and reliable performance of Ethernet cables are the major factors that drive the global ethernet cable market growth. However, high installation cost and limited availability are anticipated to restrict the global ethernet cable market growth.



Power over Ethernet (POE) is a technology that enables Ethernet cables carry electrical power. For many connected devices such as networked surveillance cameras or IP cameras, two connections are required in an electrical connection, and the actual network connection. Thus, rise in adoption of Power over Ethernet (PoE) coupled with increase in data center installations is expected to provide lucrative growth opportunities for the market players in emerging economies.

Request For Report sample @ https://www.trendsmarketresearch.com/report/sample/13324



The shielded twisted pair segment accounted for a significant share of the overall Ethernet cable market in 2019. This is attributed to high speed and low cost with robust nature of these cables in industrial applications. However, the fiber-optic cable segment of the global ethernet cable market is estimated to grow significantly at a CAGR of 18.3% during the forecast period, due to increase in installation of fiber-optic cables for long distance applications, as many renowned companies are launching advanced technology fiber-optic ethernet cables. However, the copper cable segment is anticipated to register significant growth in North America, in terms of revenue.



Among various regions, North America is expected to be the major revenue generator in 2019, and will maintain its dominance in the coming future. This is attributed to rise in internet penetration due to increase in population and surge in industrial activities. However, a number of oil & gas industries in the Middle East use Ethernet cables for various applications, which is expected to support the market growth.



According to Asavari Patil, Lead Analyst, Semiconductor and Electronics at Allied Market Research, Fiber-optic cables are gaining wide acceptance and their market share is rising, as their costs have declined. Although the copper cables segment dominated the global market, fiber-optic cables are replacing traditional copper cables, owing to their several advantages. Furthermore, the demand for these cables is increasing due to investments in telecommunications and information technology and new developments in China, Brazil, India, and Western & Eastern European countries. In addition, increase in advanced activities in oil & gas industries in the Middle Eastern countries would fuel the growth of the Ethernet cable market growth.

Request For Discounts @ https://www.trendsmarketresearch.com/report/discount/13324



Asia-Pacific region is projected to grow at the fastest rate throughout the analysis period, as China witnesses the highest demand for fiber-optic cables, due to increase in need for high-speed internet and various security reasons in the global ethernet cable industry. Moreover, enhancement in industrial development and increase in expenditure in the emerging markets such as Latin America and the Middle East to meet the demands of exponentially growing economies in these countries have strengthened the market growth. Furthermore, technological advancements for cost-effective and long-distance applications in these nations offer lucrative opportunity for the expansion of Ethernet cable market.



The key players in the Ethernet cable market focus on expansion of their business operations in emerging countries with acquisition and expansion as a preferred strategy. The major players profiled in this report include Belden Inc., Southwire Company LLC, Nexans, SAB Brockskes GmbH & Co. KG, Siemon, Schneider Electric, Anixter Inc., Siemens AG, Commscope, and Prysmian Group.



KEY FINDINGS of THE STUDY

 The copper cable segment accounted for the highest ethernet cable market share in 2018 with $4.02 billion, growing at a CAGR of 7.4% from 2019 to 2026.

 The commercial segment generated the highest revenue, accounting for $3.69 billion in 2018.

 Asia-Pacific is expected to dominate the market, garnering 34.69% of the share during the forecast period.

Request For Report Analysis @ https://www.trendsmarketresearch.com/press-release/AMR/ethernet-cable-market
Companies will need buses to take migrant labour to construction sites or host them nearby, as they meet new government guidelines on how businesses should manage during the national lockdown to contain the spread of the coronavirus. The Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) on Wednesday allowed opening up of the rural economy from April 20, saying workers will have to be given transport as public transport in the country remains shut.

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By Yousef Saba and Davide Barbuscia

DUBAI (Reuters) - Franklin Templeton has recently bought more bonds issued by governments in the Gulf, including high-yield names like Oman and Bahrain, seeing value as yields spiked on the back of plunging oil prices and the coronavirus outbreak.

Gulf governments are raising billions of dollars in the debt markets to offset the impact of lower oil revenue on their budgets, but a recent sell-off due to plunging oil and the coronavirus pandemic has pushed up their borrowing costs.

Abu Dhabi and Qatar sold $17 billion in bonds between them last week and Saudi Arabia is expected to close a multi-billion dollar issue later on Wednesday.

Since the beginning of March, Franklin Templeton's GCC Bond Fund increased exposure to sovereigns to 39% from 29% and slashed financial institutions to 12% from 19%, Dino Kronfol, Franklin Templeton's chief investment officer of global sukuk and MENA fixed income, told Reuters.

The investment firm, which managed about $580 billion in global assets as of end-March according to its website, cut exposure to Gulf government-related entities to 18% from 20% and edged up corporates to 27% from 25.5% in the same period.

"We came into the coronavirus crisis relatively defensive but the oil price came as a surprise," Kronfol said. "At the depth of the crash, we shifted around 20% of the portfolio, with a strong bias towards sovereigns."

Oil prices have tumbled on the back of the COVID-19 pandemic as well as oversupply, worsened by the collapse last month of an agreement between OPEC and allies led by Russia. On Sunday, they agreed a new output curb deal but it has done little to lift oil prices.

Franklin Templeton increased its exposure to Oman by 7% and Bahrain and Saudi Arabia by 3% each since mid-March, he said.

"At the depth of the crisis, we shifted slightly down from higher-quality names into higher-yielding names. For example, selling some Abu Dhabi to buy some Saudi or to be able to buy Oman and Bahrain," Kronfol said.

He said given where Bahrain and Oman's debt was trading, investors were expecting them to restructure within two years, which he saw as too simplistic. Kronfol expects decisive action from both countries on spending, for them to have enough resources to navigate the next two years, the Gulf states to express support for Oman and oil to recover.

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The yield on Bahrain's 30-year bonds due in 2047 rose to a peak of 10% on March 20 from about 6% at end-February. Oman's similar bonds due in 2048 rose to a peak of 12.1% yield from 7% in the same period. They have since recovered to 8% and 10% respectively.

"The GCC Bond Fund was at about $205 million before this crisis and is now closer to $165 million," he said, with about half lost due to the market and half due to redemptions.

Kronfol expected Gulf assets under management to rise and said outlook for business remained positive for the year.

(Reporting by Yousef Saba and Davide Barbuscia; editing by David Evans)
An entire American college class has banding together to prank their professor during Zoom lessons  and their jokes have been getting more and more elaborate.

TikTok user Samuel Grubbs, from North Carolina, shared recordings of the pranks on the social media platform, capturing the moments that a class of 24 students have surprised their teacher during lessons.

The classmates have stood up and walked away from their screens, broken out into dance, and even passed a pencil from screen to screen as their confused professor looks on.

Planning: TikTok user Samuel Grubbs and his class have been pranking their college professor during Zoom lessons

Samuel, who is from Granite Falls, North Carolina, appears to have initiated the pranks and posted the results on TikTok.

'Our WHOLE Zoom class pranked our teacher,' he captioned the first one, which has been viewed 26.9 million times.

In the video, Samuel starts playing music and bops his head to the beat. When the tune plays again, the other students all join, in bobbing their heads in time with the tune.

The professor immediately becomes confused, assuming at first that the sound is a mistake. She points out that one of her students is an on mute as he should be.

'I hear music," she says. 'Where is that music coming from?'

Noticing they are bumping their hands, she says, 'What in the world?'

Recorded: Samuel shares videos of the pranks on his TikTok account

Games: For one, Samuel asked a classmate named Maxx for a pencil  so Maxx pretended to pass it to a student in another screen

Clever: The kids continued to pretend to pass the pencil from screen to screen

The class planned another prank for their next lesson. Yet again, they all waited for their cue from Samuel.

In this one, their professor is complaining that the class all performed terribly on the last exam when Samuel interrupts.

'Well,' he tells her, 'it is what it is.'

'It is what it is!' the whole class replies in unison.

But their third prank required even more coordination. While their professor spoke, Samuel asked a classmate named Max if he could borrow a pencil.

'Yeah, I got you bro,' Maxx replies.

But while Maxx's video is playing in the top left corner of the Zoom screen, Samuel is down on the bottom right  so they need a little help to 'pass' the pencil along.

Max pretends to pass the pencil down to Evan, who grabs it from the top of his screen. Evan passes it to Ash, who gives it to Noah, who drops it to Brooks.

'Hey, what's going on?' their confused professor asks.

They continue to pass the pencil on from screen to screen before it finally makes it to Samuel.

'How are y'all doing that?' their sweet teacher's voice chimes in.

The kids are clearly getting a kick out of their teacher's reaction, all the more so because she can't figure out what they're doing.

Busting moves: For yet another prank, the class did the Blinding Lights challenge, with each student doing a choreographed dance in time with music

'What in the world are y'all doing?' asks their teacher. 'Are you dancing?'

Viral: Samuel's videos have proven incredibly popular, earning millions of views each

For yet another prank, the class did the Blinding Lights challenge, with each student doing a choreographed dance in time with music.

'What in the world are y'all doing?' asks their teacher before she seems to laugh. 'Are you dancing?'

Their last prank to date interrupted the entire class, kicking off as soon as their professor wanted to begin presentations.

Samuel played music again, and one by one, each of the students stood up, did a short dance, and walked off the screen.

Only one met a bit of a hitch: His mother noticed him walking away from class and angrily pulled him back in front of the screen by his hair.
German police have arrested five Tajik nationals on suspicion that they were members of an Islamic State group terror cell that had been planning attacks on US forces stationed in Germany, prosecutors said on Wednesday.

Four of the suspects were arrested after dawn raids on Wednesday targeting several apartments and six other locations in the western state of North Rhine-Westphalia. Another Tajik national was previously detained.

The five were also allegedly planning attacks on individuals they deemed critical of Islam, prosecutors in the city of Karlsruhe said.

The suspects -- named as Azizjon B, Muhammadali G, Farhodshoh K, Sunatullokh K and Ravsan B -- are accused of joining the Islamic State group in January 2019 and initially planning to carry out attacks in Tajikistan.

They then switched their focus to Germany after receiving instructions from two high-ranking IS leaders in Syria and Afghanistan, prosecutors said.

The five men had been planning to attack targets including US air bases and had already ordered bomb parts online, as well as stocking up on firearms and ammunition.

They also planned an assassination attempt on a person they believed had expressed Islam-critical views in public, and had already begun spying on the intended victim, prosecutors said.

Two of the suspects are also accused of travelling to Albania to carry out an assassination attempt in exchange for $40,000. However, the project failed and they returned to Germany.

Germany has long warned of the threat of more violence ahead after several attacks claimed by the Islamic State jihadist group, the bloodiest of which was a truck rampage through a Berlin Christmas market in December 2016 that left 12 people dead.

In June 2018, German police said they foiled what would have been the first biological attack with the arrest of a Tunisian suspected IS supporter in possession of the deadly poison ricin and bomb-making material.

More recently, police in the western city of Offenbach arrested three men in November 2019 for allegedly planning a bomb attack in the name of IS.

That same month, a Syrian was arrested in Berlin accused of having procured key components for an explosive device and discussing bomb-making tips with other suspected Islamists in an online chat group.

Germany's security services estimate there are around 11,000 Islamic radicals in Germany, some 680 of whom are deemed particularly dangerous and capable of using violence -- a five-fold increase since 2013.

Germany remains a target for jihadist groups, in particular because of its involvement in the coalition fighting IS in Iraq and Syria, and its deployment in Afghanistan since 2001.

Chancellor Angela Merkel has allowed in more than one million asylum seekers since 2015 -- a decision that has driven the rise of the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, which charges that the influx spells a heightened security risk.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Dublin, April 16 : Irish Deputy Prime Minister and Minister for Foreign Affairs and Trade Simon Coveney on Wednesday described US President Donald Trump's decision to halt funding for the World Health Organization (WHO) as "indefensible" and "shocking".

He said in his twitter account that "this is indefensible decision, in midst of global pandemic" when so many vulnerable people around the world rely on the WHO, Xinhua reported.

"Deliberately undermining funding and trust now is shocking," he said, adding that "Now is a time for global leadership and unity to save lives, not division and blame!" Coveney is the first senior Irish official who has openly criticized the decision announced by Trump on Tuesday.

In another development, Professor Anthony Costello, a British paediatrician and former director of the Department of Maternal, Child and Adolescent Health at the WHO, said Wednesday that it would "be extremely damaging to America's reputation worldwide" if the US goes ahead with Trump's decision.

Speaking in a TV programme of the Irish national radio and television broadcaster RTE, Costello said the WHO has given much support to the world's poorest countries in terms of testing, research and development in the fight against the pandemic.

He further noted that Trump has been hostile to the United Nations and made similar threats in the past and his latest threat is just a "short term attempt to divert attention from his own media performances".

Costello served as director of the Department of Maternal, Child and Adolescent Health at the WHO between 2015 and 2018.

-- The story has been published from a wire feed without any modifications to the text
By Akbar Mammadov

Azerbaijan's First Vice President Mehriban Aliyeva has thanked Turkey for projecting the Azerbaijani flag in capital Ankara as a sign of Turkish-Azerbaijani friendship and solidarity.

"I express my deep gratitude to fraternal Turkey! Our countries are always close to each other - both in happy days and tribulations. This is our unity, our strength! I wish our nations good health, peace and prosperity to our countries! May Almighty God protect our world!" Aliyeva wrote in her Instagram account on April 15.

Earlier, Turkey displayed the electronic version of the Azerbaijani flag on the iconic Ata Kule tower in the capital Ankara on April 13 to show solidarity with Azerbaijan over the fight against novel coronavirus.

Along with the flag, the words With love to Azerbaijan and One people, two states periodically appeared on the tower.

It should be noted that earlier, Azerbaijan expressed its support for Turkey by flying the electronic version of the Turkish flag on the Heydar Aliyev Center in Baku. Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu praised Azerbaijan's move in his Twitter account, saying "One nation, one heart!".

---

Akbar Mammadov is AzerNews staff journalist, follow him on Twitter: @AkbarMammadov97

Follow us on Twitter @AzerNewsAz
- with additional reporting by Ray Managh

A trainee Garda has launched a High Court action aimed at preventing the Garda Commissioner from dispensing with her services.

The action has been brought by Emma Roche, who claims the decision to end her time as a member of An Garda Siochana arises out of her failure to pass a component of a physical examination known as a beep test.

The test comprises of two shuttle runs 20 meters apart before a beep sound is given. She says that she failed to pass this particular test on a number of occasions between late 2017 and 2019.

Last October she was notified in correspondence from the Garda Commissioner that a decision had been taken to dispense with her services as a member of An Garda Siochana.

She appealed that decision through the Garda Representative Association.

However she claims while her probationary period was extended she was informed that her time with the Gardai would end on April 10 last.

She claims the decision is unfair, and seeks to challenge it in High Court proceedings.

She has passed all other requirements and says she was sworn as fully attested member of the Gardai following a ceremony at Templemore in 2017.

Ms Roche, who had been stationed at Mountjoy Garda Station in Dublin now seeks an injunction preventing the Garda Commissioner from dispensing with her services as a member of An Garda Siochana.

Last weekend Ms Roche, represented by John Temple Bl instructed by solicitor Ciaran Mulholland, secured permission from the High Court to serve short notice of her injunction proceedings against the Commissioner.

The application, which is opposed by the Commissioner, was briefly mentioned before Mr Justice Mark Sanfey today.

Martin Fitzgerald Bl for the Commissioner said that it his client's case that the decision has already been made before her lawyers came to court that her services have been dispensed with.

In reply, Mr Temple said his client disputes that claim, and said Ms Roche was informed last January that she had until April 24 next to obtain the fitness requirements.

The judge adjourned the matter to a date later this month to allow the parties put their arguments in written form.
DUBAI, UAE / ACCESSWIRE / April 15, 2020 / The global vapour barrier market is on a steady growth trajectory, primarily driven by the rising number of infrastructure development activities. Projecting the market growth at a moderate CAGR of 4%, a new market study by Future Market Insights (FMI), provides a detailed analysis of the market and the COVID-19's impact on the market.

In recent times, infrastructure development activities in the private, public, commercial, and residential sectors are inclining towards green building concepts on the back of growing environmental awareness, subsequently leveraging the amenities of modern technological advancements. Owing to this fact, the demand for vapour barriers is propelling over the forecast period (2019 - 2029).

"The market facing an adversary in the form of global outbreak of COVID-19 that has led the construction activities to a standstill for an indefinite period of time. With mounting restrictions on movement, the trade is taking the blow. BASF Group, a prominent player, has issued a statement stating that the viral infection could result in the second year of falling profit for the company and reduce the production to about 1.2%. That would be the worst growth for the sector since the Great Recession in 2008 and a significant dip compared to 2019 when it grew 1.8%. While the statement stands true to the overall chemical industry, the impact of the pandemic on vapour barrier segment is inevitable," says the FMI analyst.

For more insights into the Market, request a sample of this report@ https://www.futuremarketinsights.com/reports/sample/rep-gb-3084

Segmental Highlights

Polymer vapour barriers, owing to their excellent resistance properties, are likely to garner traction in the near future.

Polyethylene will remain the most sought-out polymer type, accounting for nearly 60% of overall share, owing to the low-cost factor associated with low-density polyethylene (LDPE), and is expected to grab high attention of manufacturers.

Asphalt & Bitumen vapour barriers, which are currently being used widely, especially in concrete foundations, will witness a decline in demand due to the shortcomings that retrain the material in applications with consistent exposure to sunlight.

Drywall board lumber and gypsum board are anticipated to exhibit rapid growth both in terms of volume and value.

Membrane type vapour barriers will register remarkable growth and maintain a dominating share on the back of the easy installation.

North America will persist its dominance throughout the forecast period, on the back of stringent government regulations for improving the overall efficiency and comfort of existing homes as well as of ongoing housing developments.

Request the coronavirus impact analysis across industries and markets https://www.futuremarketinsights.com/covid19/rep-gb-3084

Asia is expected to bestow substantial revenue opportunities for players in the vapour barrier market, backed by flourishing construction industry in China, and India. However, the ongoing pandemic is likely to put a pause on the rapid growth in the immediate future.

Explore Extensive Coverage of FMI's Chemicals & Materials Landscape

Sulfur Hexafluoride Market- Obtain valuable insights on the sulfur hexafluoride with exhaustive segmental analysis, market statistics, key influencing factors, prominent players and critical developmental strategies adopted by them for a predefined projection period.

Bentonite Market- FMI's report on the global bentonite market offers an in-depth commentary on the market poised for prolific growth during 2019-2029. The study covers a comprehensive evaluation of key impacting forces, revenue sources, and market leaders along with instrumental market strategies.

Refinery Catalyst Market- Get a deep-dive analysis on the global refinery catalyst market with crucial insights on growth levers, opportunities, restraints, regulatory policies, regional market forecast and key forte of market leaders.

About Future Market Insights (FMI)

Future Market Insights (FMI) is a leading provider of market intelligence and consulting services, serving clients in over 150 countries. FMI is headquartered in London, the global financial capital, and has delivery centers in the U.S. and India. FMI's latest market research reports and industry analysis help businesses navigate challenges and take critical decisions with confidence and clarity amidst breakneck competition.

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The global tally of coronavirus infections is dangerously close to the two-million mark. While Spain and Italy are showing early signs of the curve peaking, the situation in the United States continues to be grim.

In India, the total number of reported infections is nearing the 11,000 mark, and 368 people have lost their lives to Covid-19 so far. Here are some data trends to help you understand the outbreak situation better: 1. It took just five days for Russia to double its total of confirmed cases Among severely affected countries  those with more than 10,000 reported ...
A woman comes out of a walk-through disinfectant tunnel set up at the APMC market in Hubballi district of Karnataka. (PTI)

Hubballi: A 27-year-old constable has become the first policeman to be infected with the coronavirus while on duty in Karnataka. The constable was deployed at a madrasa in Mudhol town in Bagalkot district where a youth from the seminary had tested positive for the virus last month after returning from the Tablighi Jamaat congregation at Nizamuddin in Delhi.

Health officials have kept the constable in quarantine for the past four days after he developed a cough, fever and other virus-related symptoms.

Frontline health workers including doctors and nurses have tested corona positive in Karnataka since the outbreak of the virus.

The constable was deployed to a security detail at the madrasa on March 27 when police resorted to a lathi-charge when their efforts to stop people from gathering for prayers were resisted.

The constables positive test has caused panic among police officials. The district administration has kept personnel who had come into contact with the constable under keen observation.

The total number of coronavirus cases has increased to 14 in Bagalkot district with two more reported on Wednesday. Two cases have been reported in Vijayapur district.
By Express News Service

THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: The Kovalam police have registered cases against 16 foreign tourists and the owners and staff of the hotels where they were staying after it emerged that they had breached lockdown rules by going to the beach for a swim.

The tourists, who were from the UK, Russia, Canada and France, went to the Light House beach at around 7 am on Tuesday and swam in the sea. The matter soon came to the notice of the life guards, who then turned the foreigners back.

CLICK HERE TO FOLLOW CORONAVIRUS LIVE UPDATES

The foreigners were booked for defying lockdown norms, while the owners and staff of the five hotels, where the tourists were put up, were charged under the State Epidemic Diseases Ordinance for not informing the authorities about the lockdown violation.
"Serving in the military changes you. The shades and degrees of change vary for everyone, but no one is ever the same as...
A firefighter disinfects a closed shop during the movement control order due to the outbreak of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19), in Kuala Lumpur

By Rozanna Latiff and A. Ananthalakshmi

KUALA LUMPUR (Reuters) - Malaysian authorities have begun using COVID-19 antibody rapid tests kits to supplement laboratory tests as the number of cases in the country grows, a senior health official said on Tuesday.

Officials in Malaysia, as elsewhere, had initially rejected the use of the serology test kits, which can show the presence of antibodies in people who have been infected.

Like other countries, it instead chose polymerase chain reaction, or PCR, laboratory tests, which detect the presence of the novel coronavirus itself and are seen as more reliable.

But as the number of suspected cases needing testing has risen, the turnaround time for laboratory test results had increased from around 6 hours to as many as two days or more, the director-general of health Noor Hisham Abdullah told reporters.

Malaysia reported 170 new coronavirus cases on Tuesday, taking the total to nearly 5,000 infections, the second-highest in Southeast Asia, with 82 deaths. It had done nearly 82,000 PCR tests as of Monday and reported over 8,000 pending lab results earlier this month, before it stopped publishing backlog data.

To reduce the testing backlog, the close contacts of people infected will now receive the antibody tests at the end of their 14-day mandatory quarantine period.

"On the 13th day, we will use the antibody or serology tests... and if it comes back positive, then we will carry out the PCR test again," Noor Hisham said.

"But if the antibody test comes back negative, then you're in the clear. This is how we are trying to reduce the number of PCR lab tests."

A person who tested negative can then be discharged from quarantine, freeing up state resources used to monitor them, but they would still be required to self-isolate under movement curbs imposed by the government until April 28 to limit the virus' spread.

Countries hope antibody tests may one day help them to ease movement curbs by identifying people who may have acquired immunity, but it is not yet clear if that is possible.

Story continues

Some doctors had been calling for Malaysia to use new rapid test kits - both antibody and antigen - to widen testing and reduce the backlog of cases, but like other countries, it has been awaiting trial results.

A shortage of laboratory testing supplies and difficulty in procuring them have made it hard to ramp up capacity.

Malaysia last week warned of a shortage of reagents, a chemical used in diagnostic tests to detect the presence of the coronavirus.

Noor Hisham on Tuesday also warned that the country was running low on personal protective equipment (PPEs) for health workers, with supplies of some items expected to last just another 19 days.

(Reporting by Rozanna Latiff; editing by Philippa Fletcher)
Technavio has been monitoring the radar sensors market and it is poised to grow by USD 7.9 billion during 2019-2023, progressing at a CAGR of almost 18% 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.

This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20200415005249/en/

Technavio has announced the latest market research report titled Global Radar Sensors Market 2019-2023 (Graphic: Business Wire)

Technavio suggests three forecast scenarios (optimistic, probable, and pessimistic) considering the impact of COVID-19. Please Request Latest Free Sample Report on COVID-19 Impact

The market is concentrated, and the degree of concentration will accelerate during the forecast period. Continental AG, Infineon Technologies AG, NXP Semiconductors, Robert Bosch GmbH, and ZF Friedrichshafen AG are some of the major market participants. The demand for UAVs 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 UAVs has been instrumental in driving the growth of the market.

Radar Sensors Market 2019-2023: Segmentation

Radar sensors market is segmented as below:

Application Automotive Aerospace And Defense Industrial Others

Product Non-imaging Sensors Imaging Sensors

Geographic Landscape APAC Europe MEA North America South America



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=IRTNTR31108

Radar Sensors 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 radar sensors market report covers the following areas:

Radar Sensors Market Size

Radar Sensors Market Trends

Radar Sensors Market Industry Analysis

This study identifies increasing adoption of sensor fusion technology as one of the prime reasons driving the radar sensors market growth during the next few years.

Radar Sensors Market 2019-2023: Vendor Analysis

We provide a detailed analysis of vendors operating in the radar sensors market, including some of the vendors such as Continental AG, Infineon Technologies AG, NXP Semiconductors, Robert Bosch GmbH, and ZF Friedrichshafen AG. Backed with competitive intelligence and benchmarking, our research reports on the radar sensors market are designed to provide entry support, customer profile and M&As as well as go-to-market strategy support.

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Radar Sensors Market 2019-2023: Key Highlights

CAGR of the market during the forecast period 2019-2023

Detailed information on factors that will assist radar sensors market growth during the next five years

Estimation of the radar sensors market size and its contribution to the parent market

Predictions on upcoming trends and changes in consumer behavior

The growth of the radar sensors market

Analysis of the market's competitive landscape and detailed information on vendors

Comprehensive details of factors that will challenge the growth of radar sensors market vendors

Table Of Contents:

PART 01: EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

PART 02: SCOPE OF THE REPORT

2.1 Preface

2.2 Preface

2.3 Currency conversion rates for US$

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

Automotive Market size and forecast 2018-2023

Aerospace and defense Market size and forecast 2018-2023

Industrial Market size and forecast 2018-2023

Others Market size and forecast 2018-2023

Market opportunity by application

PART 07: CUSTOMER LANDSCAPE

PART 08: MARKET SEGMENTATION BY PRODUCT

Market segmentation by product

Comparison by product

Non-imaging sensors Market size and forecast 2018-2023

Imaging sensors Market size and forecast 2018-2023

Market opportunity by product

PART 09: GEOGRAPHIC LANDSCAPE

Geographic segmentation

Geographic comparison

Europe Market size and forecast 2018-2023

North America Market size and forecast 2018-2023

APAC Market size and forecast 2018-2023

MEA Market size and forecast 2018-2023

South America Market size and forecast 2018-2023

Key leading countries

Market opportunity

PART 10: DECISION FRAMEWORK

PART 11: DRIVERS AND CHALLENGES

Market drivers

Market challenges

PART 12: MARKET TRENDS

Emergence of high-resolution radar imaging sensor

Increasing investments in autonomous cars

Growing adoption of sensor fusion technology

PART 13: VENDOR LANDSCAPE

Overview

Landscape disruption

PART 14: VENDOR ANALYSIS

Vendors covered

Vendor classification

Market positioning of vendors

Continental AG

Infineon Technologies AG

NXP Semiconductors

Robert Bosch GmbH

ZF Friedrichshafen AG

PART 15: APPENDIX

Research methodology

List of abbreviations

PART 16: 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.

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The horrendous impact of Covid-19 lockdown on the output of the British economy, on jobs and on the public finances, is an indisputable fact of our new lives.

But the scale of the hit, as documented by two reports, is so big that the shock is amplified. No wonder then that 'hawk' Chancellor of the Exchequer Rishi Sunak is the loudest voice in Cabinet, urging a time-frame for easing the lockdown. He understands the devastation that has been unleashed.

He wants to protect household incomes from being further savaged, and to restore some kind of stability to financial markets so that pensions are not wiped out.

He will have his job cut out. In its authoritative World Economic Outlook report, the International Monetary Fund detailed how the coronavirus would rob the global economy of 7trillion  more than the output of Japan and Germany combined.

Its chief economist, Gita Gopinath, described the magnitude and speed of economic collapse prompted by the 'Great Lockdown' as 'unlike anything experienced in our lifetimes'.

At the same time, the UK's independent Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) made a first official stab at chronicling the damage here, and its findings are sobering.

When, earlier this week, Sunak suggested a 30 per cent loss of Gross Domestic Product (GDP or our total output) in the second quarter (April to June) of this year, I wrote that he was drawing on a worst-case scenario to make the case for a gradual end to lockdown.

After all, a decline in growth on that scale was more than twice what leading City economists were predicting. The OBR, it seems, shares Sunak's caution  and then some. It has looked at each major sector of the British economy, fed the figures into its model and come up with a jaw-dropping 35pc loss of GDP in the second quarter.

This would add 2m extra British workers to the dole queue, bringing the total number of unemployed up to 3.4m. Britain's post-financial crisis jobs miracle would be lost in a flash. And the shortfall in tax income as a result of the nation going into slumber, together with the high cost of support measures such as the expensive jobs furlough scheme, sends Britain's relatively tidy budgetary policy into total disarray at a stroke.

The OBR believes a threemonth lockdown followed by an easing of restrictions over three months would rob the exchequer of 130 billion of taxes this year, with income tax and national insurance down 16 per cent, VAT and excise duties down 21 per cent and corporation tax down 18 per cent.

Extra outlays mean spending for the current year is hitting the stratosphere at 88 billion, or 9 per cent higher than estimated at the Budget, just before the pandemic broke, a short month ago.

To put that in perspective, it matches the cost to taxpayers in the two years immediately following the financial crisis (2008-2010).

It also increases the size of the state to 52 per cent of output which is highest level of expenditure by any British government, Tory or Labour, since the Second World War.

The loss of tax receipts and chunky extra spending push borrowing up to 273 billion, far higher than the 175 billion that the Coalition government inherited from Gordon Brown in 2010. As a percentage of GDP, it takes us back to the years of the Blitz.

The national debt, which represents the accumulation of unpaid borrowings, shoots up to 97 per cent of total output  grim, but not quite as grim as the red ink on Japan and Italy's balance sheet.

Of course Britain is not alone in seeing its economic prospects devastated by the lockdown as the IMF details: a contraction of 6.5 per cent here compares with 5.9 per cent in the United States, 7.5 per cent in the 19 eurozone countries, and 5.2 per cent in Japan.

The UK will 'bounce' back in 2021 with 4 per cent growth, says the IMF, but that's nowhere near enough to get us back to where we were when the plague descended.

The OBR also offers the nation a hint of a silver lining, arguing that while the Government's economic interventions are expensive they will 'limit the long-term damage to the economy and public finances'.

It adds the costs of doing nothing would have been far higher. The OBR's projections do show government borrowing returning to some kind of normality before the end of the current Parliament.

But, overall, the IMF's finding that for the first time on record both wealthy and developing nations are in recession at the same time, will mean that pulling out of the current nosedive is going to be a rough ride for everyone.
WUHAN, April 15 (Xinhua) -- The last medical assistance team started leaving Hubei Province Wednesday as the COVID-19 epidemic in the hard-hit province has been subdued.

The medical team consisting of over 180 medical workers from the Peking Union Medical College Hospital arrived in the provincial capital of Wuhan on Jan. 26.

Among the total, 179 medics left Wuhan Wednesday, and six will continue to stay there to assist local medical personnel in the treatment of patients.

"There are still a small number of patients who have not fully recovered. We hope they can get better as soon as possible," said Guo Fan, a member of the medical team assisting the Tongji Hospital in Wuhan.

The medical team treated 109 critically ill patients admitted to the designated hospital.

"I have left home for over 80 days, I'm looking forward to seeing my family," said Guo.

A farewell ceremony was held in the early morning in Zhonghe International Hotel, where the medical team stayed in Wuhan.

"They worked very hard. I often saw many fall asleep while having breakfast. They deserve our heartfelt gratitude," said Liu Yanxia, a kitchen helper in the hotel, who left her post to see off the medical team.

Liu Chunhong, 56, is a community volunteer in Wuhan. He and another four volunteers drove to the hotel to bid farewell to the medical team.

"The medical personnel have sacrificed a lot for Wuhan. I come here to express my appreciation," said Liu, who put on a volunteer vest with names of the team members signed on it. "I will keep this vest permanently as a souvenir."

After the ceremony, the medical workers headed for Wuhan Tianhe International Airport at around 10:50 a.m., with police motorcycles and cars escorting the buses and local residents lining the streets and waving goodbye to them.

Over 42,000 medical workers from across the country were dispatched to aid Hubei in fighting the epidemic since the virus outbreak. The supporting medics started to withdraw from March 17.
Posted on Tuesday, April 14, 2020

Texas A&M University-Kingsville has received more than $7 million to help support students impacted by COVID-19 as part of the Higher Education Emergency Relief Fund authorized by the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act.

United States Senator John Cornyn announced the funding Tuesday, April 14. Half of the allocation will directly support students who have been affected by the COVID-19 and subsequent disruption to regular university operations by providing emergency aid grants. Universities will be able to use the remaining portion of federal funding to assist students in other ways. Texas A&M University-Kingsville continues to plan for how best to utilizing this funding.

I want to express my gratitude to Senator Cornyn and the entire Texas delegation for providing much-needed support for our students who, along with the rest of the nation, have been deeply affected by the COVID-19 pandemic, said Texas A&M University-Kingsville President Mark A. Hussey. This funding allows us to assist our students so that they may continue to work toward achieving their educational goals. We know that students and their families remain concerned about the future and we urge Congress to continue to support universities and students as they consider the next relief package. As we look toward the fall semester, Texas A&M University-Kingsville remains committed to continuing to offer high-quality education and opportunity as we have for more than 95 years.

More information about how students can benefit from the funding will be announced in the coming weeks.

No Texan should have to give up their education because of the economic effects of the coronavirus, Sen. Cornyn said. In addition to allowing students to defer their federal student loan payments for six months, the CARES Act provides targeted funding to Texas institutions to help students continue their education  even if that means taking classes online.
Former director-general of NIMASA, Dr. Dakuku Peterside has cleared the confusion over the Bayelsa billionaire Keniebi Okokos death. ...





Former director-general of NIMASA, Dr. Dakuku Peterside has cleared the confusion over the Bayelsa billionaire Keniebi Okokos death.





Some reports had said he woke up from coma in ICU after earlier reports about his death.





But in a statement Wednesday, Peterside confirmed the death and revealed that Keniebi was his friend.





I start by a confession, Keniebi is my friend, brother and someone who impacts every soul he comes in contact with. Yesterday I got a call and rushed to the hospital where

I met him lifeless.

What is important is that he lived a good and impactful life and sure he has gone to be with the Lord, he said.





Peterside revealed the tense situation he met at the hospital after Keniebi had passed on.





I got to the hospital about 8-8:30pm and ijaw men and women ,and other friends of his from across the country ( high , mighty, ordinary folks ) have taken over the hospital and were ready to go to war for most loved Kenebi.





It simply restored my faith in brotherhood and humanity .





Too many persons ,in the midst of wailing, were willing to help to ensure that a loving soul like Kenebi is not put to shame .





The second observation is that all and sundry were not happy with the professional handling of the medical attention he got leading to his death and are demanding that we must get to the root of the matter so persons whose professional negligence led to this avoidable death must be held to account for it .





In Kenebis death, I have seen the outpouring of love and appreciation of impact living . May the soul of my beloved brother KENEBI Rest In Peace and May we continue rallying each other whenever the need arises.





Keniebi died in Lagos on Tuesday night during a tragic liposuction surgery in a hospital. A power outage was blamed for the death. A power outage was blamed for the death.





Until his death, he was a businessman and also pastor of Salvation Ministries in Port Harcourt. Okoko was in his early 40s. Okoko was in his early 40s.





He contested the Bayelsa primary for the governorship ticket of the Peoples Democratic Party last year. He did not succeed.





Many Bayelsans and people who he had touched in his lifetime, were shocked by his sudden death.





They poured out their anguish in posts on Facebook.





Ojims Michael wrote: Keniebi Okoko please wake up, please remember all we prayed about.





This one came as a big shock to me last night, suddenly gone forever OMG you are just too young for this I cant even wrap my head around this oh God why?, wrote Stephanie T.Douglas.





Pro-Jane Whatson said: A big loss to all of us at salvation ministries. Just take it as God know why and celebrate his salvation and look very for God while on Earth.





Michael Osaro Jnr wrote a lengthy tribute:





I cant find the rationale behind the death of a promising and wealthy young man like this who is even a pastor, a giver and a faithful servant of God.





Na waaa oooo. Watin man go do for this life self. Life is absolutely nothing my brother.





Rest in Peace and sleep well in the bosom of the Lord my beloved pastor Keniebe Kimson Koko. We will miss you greatly





Okoko was the founder and CEO KDI Group, said to be involved in oil and gas.





He was reputed to be the godson of former Nigerian leader, Goodluck Jonathan.





According to his Facebook wall, Okoko attended University Demonstration Secondary School (UDSS), Choba. He also went to University of Port Harcourt.





In 2018, he went for the certificate programme in Harvard Business School.




US President Donald Trump has announced he will halt funding for the WHO for severely mismanaging the Covid-19 crisis, prompting the Indian government to say on Wednesday the world communitys focus should remain on the pandemic.

Trumps move was widely seen as an effort to deflect mounting criticism of his administrations handling of the outbreak as coronavirus deaths rose by 2,228 in a single-day record on Tuesday. Nearly 26,000 people have died and 608,377 have been infected in the US.

At his daily briefing, Trump announced the suspension of US funding for the World Health Organization (WHO), ranging between $400 million and $500 million a year, for a period of 60 to 90 days.

Today Im instructing my administration to halt funding of the World Health Organisation while a review is conducted to assess the World Health Organisations role in severely mismanaging and covering up the spread of the Coronavirus, he said.

Trump, who has repeatedly accused the WHO of toeing Chinas line, noted Beijing contributes roughly $40 million a year and even less. He added: As the organisations leading sponsor, the US has a duty to insist on full accountability.

He further said: One of the most dangerous and costly decisions from the WHO was its disastrous decision to oppose travel restrictions from China and other nationsFortunately, I was not convinced and suspended travel from China, saving untold numbers of lives.

It was not clear when the halt in US payments will take effect or whether Trump can unilaterally suspend payments, which are authorised by the Congress. The US contributed $893 million to the WHO for its two-year budget of $5.8 billion for 2020-21.

The WHOs two-year budget includes member dues and voluntary contributions from countries and non-profit organisations. Member dues are based on a countrys wealth and population. For 2020-21, the US accounted for almost 25% of member dues, followed by China, Japan and Germany.

The Indian government reacted cautiously to Trumps decision, with people familiar with developments saying the focus of global efforts should remain on overcoming the pandemic.

At present, our efforts and attention are fully focused on dealing with the Covid-19 pandemic. Once the world has addressed this crisis, we can revisit this question [of funding for the WHO], one of the people cited above said on condition of anonymity.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi, while participating in a virtual summit of G20 leaders last month, had called for reform of the WHO, which was based on the last centurys models and hadnt adapted to deal with new challenges.

The move was criticised by world leaders, and UN chief Antonio Guterres said this was not the time to reduce the resources for the operations of the WHO.

Guterres said in a statement the need of the hour is unity in the global battle against Covid-19. It is my belief that the WHO must be supported, as it is absolutely critical to the worlds efforts to win the war against Covid-19, he said.

Acknowledging the need to review actions of different entities in responding to the Coronavirus, Guterres said this can be done after overcoming the epidemic to understand how such a disease emerged and spread its devastation so quickly across the globe, and how all those involved reacted to the crisis.

He added, The lessons learned will be essential to effectively address similar challenges, as they may arise in the future. But now is not that time.

German foreign minister Heiko Maas tweeted: Blaming does not help. The virus knows no bordersOne of the best investments is the @UN, especially the underfunded @WHO, to strengthenthe development and distribution of tests and vaccines.

Trumps criticism of the WHO runs counter to his own praise for the world body and China. CDC (Centers of Disease Control and Prevention) & World Health have been working hard and very smart, he tweeted in February.

The US president has severed or scaled down ties with several world bodies  the Paris Accord on climate change (2017), Unesco (2017) and UNHCR (2018). He has also complained about US contributions to bodies such as the UN.
Judge allows church to hold drive-in Easter service after mayor 'criminalized' communal celebration

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A federal judge on Saturday issued a temporary restraining order prohibiting the city of Louisville, Kentucky, from barring drive-in Easter worship services in order to stop the spread of the novel coronavirus.

Trump-appointee U.S District Judge Justin Walker granted the temporary restraining order to On Fire Christian Church in Louisville, allowing it to go ahead with its Easter plans after Mayor Greg Fischer issued a directive last Thursday reportedly prohibiting drive-in services.

"On Holy Thursday, an American mayor criminalized the communal celebration of Easter," Walker, who was appointed to the bench last October, wrote in his ruling.

That sentence is one that this Court never expected to see outside the pages of a dystopian novel, or perhaps the pages of The Onion. But two days ago, citing the need for social distancing during the current pandemic, Louisvilles Mayor Greg Fischer ordered Christians not to attend Sunday services, even if they remained in their cars to worship  and even though its Easter.

The Mayors decision is stunning, Walker added. And it is, beyond all reason, unconstitutional.

After the mayors directive was issued on Thursday, the church was represented by attorneys affiliated with the First Liberty Institute in filing a petition for a restraining order on grounds that the directive violated the churchgoers' religious freedom rights guaranteed by the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.

Defendants targeting of religious adherents to prevent them from gathering in a manner consistent with social distancing guidelines, while permitting similar (and at times even more intimate) social interaction to continue unabated in retail and commercial establishments, violates Plaintiffs rights under the First Amendment, the petition argued.

The judges order bars the city from enforcing or attempting to enforce, threaten to enforce or require compliance with any type of prohibition on drive-in church services hosted by On Fire Christian Church.

If the Court did not immediately intervene and stop Louisvilles enforcement plan, churchgoers at On Fire would face an impossible choice: skip Easter Sunday service, in violation of their sincere religious beliefs, or risk arrest, mandatory quarantine, or some other enforcement action for practicing those sincere religious beliefs, Walker contended.

First Liberty Institute Senior Counsel Roger Byron said in a statement that the judge recognized that the mayors prohibition of drive-in church services on Easter violated the churchs religious freedom.

Matthew Martens, a partner at WilmerHale, a law firm also representing the church in the lawsuit, said in a statement that he is grateful for the judges ruling.

[I]n this challenging time for our country, Judge Walker upheld our ideals of religious liberty and a celebration of hope exercised in a responsible manner, Martens said.

The church held its drive-in Easter service on Sunday as planned.

Our civil leaders are dealing with a difficult and tremendous situation. We pray for them, Pastor Chuck Salvo said at the beginning of the service. We applaud their work to help protect everyone during this pandemic. The church will continue to comply with the [Centers for Disease Control] guidelines and work with our local government to keep everyone safe and well.

Fischer told the Louisville Courier Journal on Saturday that his directive was only strongly suggesting that churches dont hold in-person or drive-in services for Easter and added that he did not direct law enforcement activity against the churches that planned to hold drive-in services.

"I regret that the judge did not allow us to present evidence that would have demonstrated there has been no legal enforcement mechanism communicated," Fischer complained, adding that the city twice tried to contact the court but was unsuccessful.

According to the newspaper, Fischer announced Friday that he would have Louisville Metro Police officers record the license plate numbers of people who attended church services so that local health officials can contact attendees to see if any of them have fallen ill. Instead of focusing on drive-in services, Fischer clarified that the focus was on in-person services.

Im doing it because I dont want people to die, Fischer said.

Walkers order also drew praise from U.S. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Kentucky.

Grateful for this strong, eloquent ruling defending Kentuckians religious liberty from Judge Justin Walker, @POTUSs outstanding nominee for the D.C. Circuit, McConnell tweeted. Of course church parking lots cannot be singled out with unfair standards that differ from other establishments.

Walker, a former University of Louisville law professor, was confirmed to the bench by the Senate last year by a vote of 50-41 at the age of 37. However, the American Bar Association rated Walker not qualified to be a federal judge because he does not presently have the requisite trial or litigation experience.
The Covid-19 pandemic has impacted the hospitality industry around the world, leading to temporary leaves or significantly reduced work schedules for many members of the global Hyatt family.

In a focused effort to help the colleagues who are most financially impacted by Covid-19, Hyatt has today announced the launch of the Hyatt Care Fund.

The Hyatt Care Fund is a programme designed to support colleagues with the most pressing financial needs due to Covid-19, through a series of coordinated efforts around the world. Impacted Hyatt colleagues in owned, managed and franchised hotels and in Hyatts corporate offices around the world are eligible to apply.

The ultimate goal of the Hyatt Care Fund is to provide financial relief to as many impacted colleagues as possible. Initially, grants will be prioritised to colleagues who are currently working zero hours and not eligible for government assistance. Grants will provide compensation for needs ranging from rent payments to groceries or childcare assistance to utilities and other monthly payments.

The Hyatt Care Fund is launching with initial contributions by the Hyatt Hotels Foundation, salary reductions of Hyatts Senior Leadership Team and Board of Directors, and donations from Pritzker family foundations. - TradeArabia News Service
The government of the United States has suspended its funding of the World Health Organisation. President Donald Trump told journa...





The government of the United States has suspended its funding of the World Health Organisation.





President Donald Trump told journalists on Tuesday that the organisation failed in its basic duty.





Today I am directing my administration to halt funding while a review is conducted to assess the World Health Organizations role in severely mismanaging and covering up the spread of the coronavirus, he said during a White House press briefing.





American taxpayers provide between $400 million and $500 million per year to the WHO and in contrast, China contributes $40 million a year or even less.

As the organisations leading sponsor, the United States has a duty to insist on full accountability. One of the most dangerous and costly decisions from the WHO was its disastrous decision to oppose travel restrictions from China and other nations.





The WHO failed in its basic duty and must be held accountable.





Had the WHO done its job to get medical experts into China to objectively assess the situation on the ground and to call out Chinas lack of transparency, the outbreak could have been contained at its source with very little death, he told reporters.





This would have saved thousands of lives and avoided worldwide economic damage. Instead, the WHO willingly took Chinas assurances to face value and defended the actions of the Chinese government.





With the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, we have deep concerns whether Americas generosity has been put to the best use possible.





It is not clear if Trump can unilaterally withhold contributions to the WHO.





The US president has been criticised for the nations response to the COVID-19 outbreak and some governors have disagreed with his plans to reopen the economy.





In a January 24 tweet, Trump had commended the Chinese government for its transparency and efforts to contain the virus.

However, on April 7, Trump said every aspect of the WHOs response to the pandemic was wrong.





Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, WHO director-general, warned countries against politicising the virus saying: No need to use COVID to score political points. No need. You have many other ways to prove yourselves.




We, at UNHCR, the UN Refugee Agency, are profoundly shocked and saddened by the tragic death and apparent suicide of a refugee today in Nairobi.

Our thoughts and condolences are with his family and friends. We ask everyone to kindly respect his dignity and the dignity and privacy of his family, and to desist from circulating pictures of the deceased.

The deceased person, a Ugandan national was recognized as a refugee by the Government of Kenya.

We are in close contact with the Kenyan police, who have launched an investigation to clarify the circumstances surrounding his death.

UNHCR is also in regular contact with the refugee community and relevant authorities to ensure that any required support is provided and to prevent the spread of misinformation.

UNHCR is concerned about the growing challenges faced by refugees and asylum-seekers as well as communities hosting them, in meeting their basic needs in the current difficult context.

UNHCR will continue to do its utmost to deliver critical protection and assistance to the nearly 500,000 refugees and asylum-seekers living in Kenya, especially during these challenging times.

ENDS

For more information, please contact:

 Eujin Byun, [email protected], +254 798 487 988

 Dana Hughes, [email protected], +254 733 440 536

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COLUMBIA, Md., April 15, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- Advarra , the premier provider of institutional review board (IRB), institutional biosafety committee (IBC), research quality and compliance consulting services, and standards-based research technology solutions announced today the appointment of Gadi Saarony as Chief Executive Officer.

Mr. Saarony has 25 years of leadership experience. He has served the last 17 years with Parexel International, a leading provider of clinical research, commercialization, technology, and product development consulting services to the Bio/Pharmaceutical industry. In his most recent role at Parexel, he was Executive Vice President, Chief Clinical Research Services Officer, responsible for the operational delivery of its clinical research services. His global remit included site strategy and selection, patient recruitment, data management, biostatistics and programming, clinical operations, project management and resourcing, Phase I clinics, and clinical trial logistics services. He previously held several senior-level positions at Parexel.

Mr. Saarony, commented, "I am thrilled to join and lead Advarra. The team's commitment to the advancement of clinical research, and to the well-being of clinical trial participants is truly inspiring. Advarra's capabilities and track record, combined with the healthcare expertise and experience available to it from Genstar, puts us in a great position to innovate, accelerate cycle-times, and drive safety and compliance in support of drug development. I look forward to collaborating with sponsors, sites, and partners in the pursuit of advancing human health."

David Golde, Managing Director of Genstar Capital and Advarra Chairman of the Board, said, "Gadi brings extensive strategic, commercial, and operational leadership in the pharmaceutical services industry and we are thrilled to welcome him as CEO of Advarra. Gadi's breadth of experience, network, and strong understanding of the drug development process will be instrumental in driving the company's current initiatives, and expanding into new products and services that not only increase the value proposition we provide to our customers, but improve the efficacy and safety of pharmaceutical drug development."

Before joining Parexel in 2003, Mr. Saarony served as Director of Consulting Services for Habama, Inc. and Associate Director, Strategy, with Ernst & Young, LLP, Inc. He graduated from Rider University with a Bachelor of Science in Economics and holds a Master of Science degree in International Business from The American Graduate School of International Business (now Thunderbird School of Global Management).

About Advarra

Advarra is the premier provider of global research compliance services, including IRB, IBC, consulting, and research technology products. Clinical trial sponsors and CROs recognize Advarra as the largest integrated provider of IRB services with the greatest institutional reach among health systems, cancer centers, academic medical centers, and investigators. Forte, now part of Advarra, is the industry's leading provider of standards-based research technology, including OnCore CTMS. Advarra optimizes compliance and clinical trials with its robust regulatory expertise and innovative products and services. For more information, visit advarra.com.

SOURCE Advarra

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The pharma industry on Wednesday welcomed the government decision to allow manufacturing units to remain operational amid the lockdown.

These units include pharmaceuticals, drugs, medical devices, medical oxygen, their packaging material, raw material and intermediates.

The government has also allowed pharmaceutical and medical research labs, and institutions to carry out COVID-19 related research.

"We laud the government's decision. The pharmaceutical industry is covered under essential services and manufacturing has been operational. We will continue to operate and with these guidelines, the supply of medicines will continue," Indian Pharmaceutical Alliance Secretary General Sudarshan Jain said.

IPA is committed to provide quality medicines to patients in India and globally, he added.

In similar vein, Indian Drug Manufacturers' Association Executive Director Ashok K Madan said: "Pharmaceutical industry and its ancillary industries have been notified as essential Industry. It has helped our efforts to manufacture the life saving medicines".

There have been some problems of absence of work force and on average around 35 to 45 per cent of workers are attending. Production levels consequently are down to around 45 to 50 per cent, he added.

"We are facing major problems at the ports with regard to imports and export consignments. Curfew passes at ports are now to be issued by Port authorities. Orders have already been issued by MHA for movements of trucks with drivers licence being accepted along with one cleaner help," Madan said.

IDMA hopes things to improve and assure the nation of continuous efforts to provide essential medicines, he added.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Source: Xinhua| 2020-04-15 17:44:36|Editor: huaxia

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BEIJING, April 15 (Xinhua) -- Measures taken to manage asymptomatic coronavirus cases in China have proved to be effective, a health official said Wednesday.

China has strengthened the detection, report and management of asymptomatic coronavirus carriers, He Qinghua, an official with the National Health Commission, said at a press conference.

Asymptomatic cases refer to people who tested positive for the coronavirus but develop no symptoms such as fever, cough and sore throat, but they are infectious and pose a risk of spreading to others.

As of Tuesday, a total of 6,764 asymptomatic cases of novel coronavirus infection, including 588 imported ones, had been reported on the mainland.

A total of 1,297 asymptomatic cases, of which 251 were imported, had been re-categorized as confirmed cases, while 4,444 cases including 109 imported ones had been discharged from medical observation.
Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey launched a new website Wednesday providing resources to those on the frontlines of the coronavirus pandemic and allowing the public to help health care workers and first responders.

Healeys office collaborated with the design and software companies HubSpot and IDEO to develop the site, called FrontlineMA.org. The goal of the service is to centralize information relating to the states COVID-19 response.

Frontline workers can find resources on the site about personal protective equipment guidance, priority testing, alternative housing options, free and discounted meals, self-care and emergency child care.

Members of the public are also asked to help health care workers and first responders by sending them messages of support, buying them meals and donating PPE.

Our medical providers and first responders are working nonstop to save lives, so we wanted to make it easier for them to access information about the services and support they need to take care of themselves, Healey said in a statement.

If youre having trouble viewing the embed to sign up on your mobile device click here.

The new website also features a Hero Wall that show messages and photographs from the public expressing their appreciation for health care employees and first responders. Frontline workers are able to share their experiences as well.

The attorney generals office will continue to update the site with information about the outbreak as it develops.

As workers navigate through this unprecedented moment in history, a vetted and trusted site that recognizes how this crisis is impacting workers in multiple ways is critical," Tim Foley, executive vice president of the 1199SEIU United Healthcare Workers East union, said in a statement.

Representatives from the Massachusetts Medical Society, the Professional Fire Fighters of Massachusetts, the Massachusetts Nurses Association and other organizations for frontline workers also thanked Healey.

In this time of uncertainty and change, know that your firefighters, EMTs and paramedics will respond no matter what the need," Rich MacKinnon Jr., president of the PFFM, said in the statement.

The coronavirus pandemic has led Gov. Charlie Baker to order all non-essential businesses to close through May, while the public has been urged to stay at home to stave off transmission of the viral respiratory infection.

Some resources have been made available by the state to employees deemed essential, including first responders and hospital workers, who have had to keep going to work during the crisis.

The Massachusetts Department of Early Education and Care released a list last month of the daycares exempt from closing amidst the outbreak. Their services are available to those who have no other option during the pandemic. Priority will be given to frontline workers.

The union representing licensed nurses and caregivers in Massachusetts also reached an agreement with the state over the weekend making it so that staffers on the frontlines of the crisis in group homes and hospitals will see a pay increase of up to $10 per hour.

The hazard pay deal for health care workers does not include non-union employees, though.

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Shanghai (Gasgoo)- BYD Company Limited (BYD) announced on April 14 it has completed the internal restructuring of its wholly-owned subsidiary Shenzhen BYD Microelectronics Co., Ltd. (BYD Microelectronics), which will seek to go public at an appropriate moment.

The company name of BYD Microelectronics was changed to BYD Semiconductor Co.,Ltd in January, 2020, according to the business data platform Tianyancha. Amid the restructuring, the subsidiary obtained 100% stake in Ningbo BYD Semiconductor Co.,Ltd., and in Guangdong BYD Energy Conservation Technology Co.,Ltd., and acquired the intelligent photoelectricity, LED light source and LED application businesses of Huizhou BYD Industry Co.,Ltd.



(Photo source: BYD)



In accordance with the latest announcement, BYD Semiconductor intends to introduce new strategic investors by means of enlarging shares by increasing capital, while BYD will still be its majority shareholder. Leveraging the financing platform of capital market, it will seek to be publicly-listed company at a proper moment, and establish independent capital market platform and market-oriented incentive mechanism.

As of the announcement date, the plan of introducing new investors has still been under preparation with no legally binding agreement signed.

Based on BYD's strategic position and development planning, the restructuring is intended for in-depth integration of BYDs semiconductor business, which is expected to grow faster in the state of independent operation.

In a bid to enhance the independence of BYD Semiconductor, Chen Gang resigned on April 14 as BYDs vice president, and will focus on BYD Semiconductor's development as the latter's chairman and general manager.

BYD Semiconductor's main line of businesses includes the R&D, production and sale of power semiconductors, intelligent controllers, smart sensors and optoelectronic semiconductors. With automotive-grade semiconductor at its core, the company will push ahead with the development of semiconductor applications in industry and consumption fields.
Kanye West has shed light on his battle with alcoholism in a wide-ranging interview with GQ magazine.

Though he hasn't had a drink in some time, he referred to himself as being a 'functioning alcoholic' at one point, and partly blamed Hollywood for his struggles.

Kanye, 42, revealed he previously drank Grey Goose with orange juice in the morning, but hasn't touched alcohol since coming to a realization about the pace of his life.

'I would be drinking orange juice and Grey Goose in the morning': Kanye West has shed light on his prior battle with alcoholism in a wide-ranging interview with GQ magazine

'Well, it's good that we found out about all of those awards shows that partially led me to alcoholism,' Kanye said. 'Whistle been blown, you know? Imagine My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy and Watch the Throne [being eligible] the same year and neither of them being nominated for Album of the Year.

'Imagine doing The Life of Pablo and driving down the road and never hearing none of those songs on the radio and your wife and your daughter are in the car.'

Kanye also talked about resisting the urge to partake in a day drink.

'One day I was in my office working on the couture collection, and there was some Grey Goose in the fridge and I was just going to get a daytime drink, and I looked and thought, "Devil, you're not going to beat me today." That one statement is like a tattoo.'

'All of those awards shows that partially led me to alcoholism': Though he hasn't had a drink in some time, he admitted Hollywood was partly to blame for his drinking problem

Now, Kanye hasn't had any alcohol in some time.

Still, he never to admitted to himself he may have a problem.

'I haven't had a drink since I realized I needed to take it day by day, but I never owned up, or was even told, "Hey, you're a functioning alcoholic."

'People have called me a crazy person, people have called me everythingbut not a functioning alcoholic. And I would be drinking orange juice and Grey Goose in the morning.'

Not part of his image: The interviewer added Kanye has never really been perceived as an alcoholic, even after he drank Hennessy at the 2009 VMAs

The interviewer added Kanye has never really been perceived as an alcoholic, even after he drank Hennessy at the 2009 VMAs.

Kanye admitted the only way he was able to even handle the show was with a drink in hand.

'Right? I really grabbed the drink to be able to even go to the awards show due to the information that everyone knows now. To say, "Okay, I can handle this,"' Kanye said.

Kanye was interviewed by GQ four separate times over the course of two months for his cover story, discussing everything from his music to his friendship with Kobe Bryant.

'Okay, I can handle this': Kanye admitted the only way he was able to even handle the show was with a drink in hand

The first interview was conducted just a few days following Kobe's death at Kanye's ranch in Wyoming.

Kanye called the basketball great 'one of my best friends.'

'This is a game changer for me. He was the basketball version of me, and I was the rap version of him, and that's facts! We got the commercials that prove it. No one else can say this.

'We came up at the same time, together. And now it's like, yeah, I might have had a reputation for screaming about thingsbut I'm not taking any mess for an answer now. We're about to build a paradigm shift for humanity. We ain't playing with 'em. We bringing home the trophies.'

'Kobe was one of my best friends': Kanye said in his interview, which was conducted just a few days following the basketball player's death (pictured 2004)

He also addressed his controversial political views, touching upon his decision to wear a MAGA hat.

'Both my parents were freedom fighters, and they used to drink from fountains they were told they couldn't drink from, and they used to sit in restaurants where they were told they couldn't eat from. They didn't fight for me to be told by white people which white person I can vote on.'

Kanye suggested he would be voting for Trump this year, without actually naming him.

'I'm definitely voting this time. And we know who I'm voting on. And I'm not going to be told by the people around me and the people that have their agenda that my career is going to be over. '

Controversial: He also addressed his controversial political views, touching upon his decision to wear a MAGA hat

'We know who I'm voting on': Kanye suggested he would be voting for Trump this year, without actually naming him (pictured 2016)

His views on his 2005 'George Bush doesn't care about black people' remark seem to have changed as well.

'"George Bush doesn't care about black people" is a victim statement,' he said. 'That is stemmed in victim mentality. Every day I have to look in the mirror like I'm Robert De Niro and tell myself, "You are not a slave." As outspoken as I am, and the position that I am in, I need to tell myself,' he said.

In more recent years, Kanye's faith has been thrust into the spotlight.

'A victim statement': His views on his 2005 'George Bush doesn't care about black people' remark seem to have changed as well

The rapper, who conducts weekly Sunday Service events, described himself as a 'definitely born again' Christian.

'I surrounded myself with the healingthe highest-level healing possible: singing about Jesus with my friends and family surrounding me [at Sunday Service] every single week. This was a place, contrary to popular belief about Christianity, of no judgment. I feel that the church that most people grew up on as kids had a negative environment.

'The greatest thing for me, as someone who's given their life to Christ, is knowing that other people have that as an anchor and a form of healing, because you're talking to a person that went to the hospital and back. Now you see the measured naturebeing able to let the child take the driver's seat but still be measured.'
Eighteen-year-olds have been given the right to vote in this year's general election for the first time in Korea after the National Assembly passed an electoral reform bill lowering the voting age to 18 from 19 last year. Korea Times file



New 18-year-old voters cast their ballots in a general election for the first time on Wednesday amid concerns that the coronavirus may affect the turnout of the new voters.



In late 2019, the National Assembly passed an electoral reform bill lowering the voting age from 19 to 18 and allowing eligible high school students to vote.



Until last year, South Korea was the only country among Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) member countries that did not grant voting rights to 18-year-olds.



Although the spread of the coronavirus emerged as a key element of setback that could lower voter turnout, many young voters headed to polling stations with hopes their votes could change Korean society for the better.



"It feels good to become a proud voter of South Korea ... I came to the polls excited to cast my first vote and to exercise my voting rights to voice an opinion, however small, in youth policies," said Lee Min-seo, a senior high school student who came to vote with her parents in Chuncheon, 85 kilometers east of Seoul.






Matt Simmons of the Animal Planet docuseries Wolves And Warriors was arrested for allegedly being a felon in possession of guns and ammunition.

Deputies with the Ventura County Sheriff's Department served a search warrant Monday at his home for illegal possession of firearms and ammunition, according to an article Tuesday by TMZ.

Simmons was detained as he drove away from his residence and deputies found a loaded .45 caliber handgun and additional guns and ammunition in his home.

Weapons charges: Matt Simmons of the Animal Planet docuseries Wolves And Warriors is shown in his mugshot after being arrested Monday for allegedly being a felon in possession of guns and ammunition

Sources told TMZ that deputies discovered 14 firearms in his home, including: assault rifles, a sawed-off shotgun and thousands of rounds of ammunition.

Simmons as a convicted felon is prohibited from owning or possessing any firearms or ammo, sources said.

Law enforcement sources said that Simmon was arrested for investigation of multiple charges, including: felon in possession of a firearm, felon in possession of ammunition, possession of an assault weapon, carrying a concealed firearm within a vehicle, carrying a loaded firearm in a vehicle, unlawful transfer of a firearm, and possession of substance, material, or any combination with intent to make any destructive device/explosive.

Ventura County Sheriff's deputies were assisted in serving the warrant by Narcotics and Gangs Units and California State Parks officers.

Navy veteran: The Navy veteran starred in the 2018 series on Animal Planet

Simmons posted $100,000 bail and was scheduled to appear in court on June 11.

He starred in the 2018 docuseries Wolves And Warriors along with his wife Lorin Lindner, a clinical psychologist.

Simmons is a US Navy veteran who co-founded the Lockwood Animal Rescue Center in Ventura County and the Wolves And Warriors program with Lindner.

Joint venture: Simmons starred in the 2018 docuseries Wolves And Warriors along with his wife Lorin Lindner, a clinical psychologist

The Wolves And Warriors docuseries followed US military veterans as they rescued high-risk wolves and wolf-dog hybrids from poachers and illegal breeders.

Simmons has said that he met Lindner at the West Los Angeles VA Medical Center while he was being treated for post-traumatic stress disorder and substance abuse.

Wolves And Warriors ran for one season with eight episodes.
Sudhir Suryawanshi By

Express News Service

MUMBAI: Maharashtra has emerged as a global hotspot of the COVID-19 pandemic in terms of mortality rates giving a huge cause of concern to health authorities in the state and the Centre.

The state health department, however, rejected the report saying while there is no doubt that the mortality rate in Maharashtra is among the highest in the world, it is lower than that of two states  Jharkhand and Madhya Pradesh.

According to the state health department data, Maharashtras mortality rate is 6.88 per cent. On Tuesday morning when the report was released, the state had recorded 166 deaths and 2380 positive cases.

Jharkhand, which has 24 patients, has a mortality rate of 8.33 per cent. With 43 deaths and 604 positive patients, the mortality rate in Madhya Pradesh stands at 7.22 per cent.

Interestingly, the average mortality rate in the world is 6.29 per cent while Indias average is 3.27 per cent.

As per state health department data, on the 24th day since the beginning of coronavirus outbreak, 100 positive cases were reported on a single day, while on the 37th day, it spiked to 344.

The figure went up to 1761 patients ten days later on 35th day.

As of 10 pm on Wednesday, the total coronavirus cases in the state stands at 2916 with 187 deaths. 295 patients have been discharged.

Mumbai is the epicenter of the pandemic in the state. India's 'Maximum City' has over 1500 patients and 100 deaths already. Every day, Mumbai is getting more than 200 new cases while the state's average is 344 cases and 12 deaths.

Pune is the second largest hotspot for the coronavirus cases with 272 cases and a total of 30 deaths.

ALSO READ | 60 cases, seven deaths: Here's how Dharavi's COVID-19 fight is progressing

Meanwhile, the state government has decided to seek the help of renowned economists, doctors, senior IAS officer and ministers to prepare a lockdown exit plan, and also contain the spread of the coronavirus.

This on a Wednesday when the total number of cases in the state stood at 2961 and deaths recorded rose to 187. The good news, if it could be called that, was there was a dip with only 232 positive cases being recorded.

Maharashtra CM Uddhav Thackeray had recently appealed to ex-servicemen who worked in medical and para-medical departments to join in the fight against the coronavirus if they do not have any work at present. His appeal has received an overwhelming response from 21,000 doctors and para-medical personnel.

They expressed their desire to work with the government during these unprecedented times. The government will deploy these personnel as per requirements in hospitals across the state, sources said.

Maharashtra government, which has been struggling to pay the salary of its employees, has roped in economists and bankers such as Dr Raghunath Mashelkar, Dr Vijay Kelkar, Deepak Parekh and Ajit Ranade. They will be on the government panel and give recommendations to revive the state's economy.

Responding to the CM's appeal, Mashelkar, a National Research Professor, tweeted: We are all with you chief minister of Maharashtra to fight against the coronavirus."

Thackeray has formed the Group of Ministers under the leadership of deputy chief minister Ajit Pawar who will study how lockdown can be gradually lifted and permissions will be given to manufacturing firms to resume their operation.

The group of ministers will have to study the current financial conditions of the state and recommend various measures to bring back the slowing economy to normalcy, said Balasaheb Thorat, revenue minister.

The state government has formed another task force of the doctors which will recommend the various measures to state government. Besides, they will talk with the various health officers and doctors across the state and guide them on how to fight the coronavirus.
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Linkedin Jennifer Epstein (Bloomberg) Washington  Wed, April 15, 2020 21:53 636 fc6853813033f564188675f8bd220b87 2 World US-election,united-states,Elizabeth-Warren,Joe-Biden Free

Elizabeth Warren endorsed Joe Biden on Wednesday, becoming the final major former 2020 Democratic presidential hopeful to back the partys presumptive nominee.

He knows that a government run with integrity, competence and heart will save lives and save livelihoods, the Massachusetts senator said in an endorsement video. And we cant afford to let Donald Trump continue to endanger the lives and livelihoods of every American.

After Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, Warren was considered the most progressive of the 2020 Democratic presidential candidates. Her announcement came the same week the Biden campaign rolled out two other big-ticket endorsements: Sanders and former President Barack Obama.

Warren acknowledged in her video that shes had differences with Biden over the years but said hed always been respectful of her views and even willing to adopt new policies if the argument is persuasive enough.

When you disagree, hell listen -- not just listen, but really hear you. And treat you with respect, no matter where youre coming from, she said. And he has shown throughout this campaign that when you come up with new facts or a good argument, hes not too afraid or too proud to be persuaded.

Soon after Warren dropped out of the race last month, Biden adopted her bankruptcy plan. It was a sign of goodwill in a dispute between the two that dates back to 2005, when Warren, then a Harvard Law School professor, battled the then-Delaware senator, who was opposed to some of the reforms that she was advocating.

Warren said Biden mentioned the fight when he swore her into the Senate, telling her: You gave me hell! And youre gonna do a great job.

That, she said, is the thing about Joe: he wants you in the fight with him. And when youre in the fight with Joe at your side, you know you have a partner whos committed to getting something good done for this country.

Senators Tammy Baldwin of Wisconsin, and Debbie Stabenow and Gary Peters, both of Wisconsin, also endorsed Biden Wednesday.
The University of NSW is asking staff to volunteer for a pay cut to avoid job losses as it faces a $600 million budget hole because of the coronavirus pandemic and its reliance on international students.

In a message to staff on Tuesday, vice-chancellor Ian Jacobs said that if a large number of staff helped reduce the payroll bill, it could significantly reduce "UNSW's financial difficulties  and therefore the number of job losses we have to consider".

UNSW vice-chancellor Ian Jacobs: "I understand that this is an incredibly challenging and uncertain time." Credit:Sanghee Liu

Professor Jacobs, who along with other senior managers will take a 20 per cent pay cut, acknowledged it was a "big ask" for staff to volunteer to work the same hours for less money in return for additional leave.

Any untaken leave would be paid out on completion of employment under this option.
(Editors note: Weve received calls from some readers who have had difficulty downloading the completed course certificate upon finishing the online coursework. The course is best taken on a laptop computer as certain iPhones do not allow the user to download the certificate. Other problems? Call Kalkomey, the Texas-based company thats offering the course for customer service support 7 days a week, from 8 a.m. to 11 p.m. Central Standard Time. Call 1-800-830-2268 or 214-351-0461, or send an email to info@kalkomey.com.)

The state Department of Environmental Conservations decision to offer a complete online hunters safety course for a limited time only has been a big hit.

The complete online course, began with a soft opening on Tuesday and officially went live this morning on the DEC website. Already, more than 3,000 people have signed up to take it, according to the DEC.

The course will run until June 30. Sign up by going to the courses website.

A hunter safety course must be taken and passed in order to get hunting license in New York. Such courses are not always easy to get into due to a lack of classes and instructors  or worst yet, wanna-be hunters waiting until the last minute to enroll just prior to a desired hunting season and filling up all the available courses.

The following are some commonly asked questions and answers about the DECs complete online hunter safety course:

Why is the DEC doing this now?

Previously, classroom time, along with some required online homework ahead of time, was required to get a hunter education certificate. Unfortunately, all traditional hunter education courses have been canceled due to the Covid-19 pandemic, leaving many new hunters unable to get a certificate before spring turkey season (which begins May 2), DEC said in press release.

Cost of course:

The online course cost is $19.99. Previously, the required online homework part of the course that had to be completed prior to attending a class cost $15.99.

Who can take this new online course? Minimum age?

The course is limited to New York residents only. Students have to be at least 11 years old to take the course. However, it should be noted that the minimum age to get a hunting license in New York is 12.

Harlee Lucier, 14, of Parish, NY, shot this 4-point buck in Cato during the 2016 Columbus Day weekend Youth Firearms Hunt, She was mentored by her father, Shane Lucier. The estimated live weight was 150 pounds; 120 pounds when field dressed

How long does it take to complete?

The course is approximately 7-8 hours, but it could take some people longer.

How much classroom time was required with the regular course?

DECs in-person hunter education course was a minimum of 7 hours.

What company is giving the course?

Kalkomey, headquartered in Dallas, Texas, was created in 1995, offering an online boaters safety course to a number of states. The company has since expanded to offer a number of other safety courses, including one for hunting. Kalkomey is the company that produced the online homework part of the regular hunter safety course that includes classroom time in its requirement. The company also produces the written student manual thats used in the regular classroom

Mitch Strobl, a spokesman for Kalkomey, said his company supplies online hunting courses for 46 states in the country, which are used in various ways. About half of the states have a complete online course, while others use the it along with required classroom time.

What if you previously took and passed all the online homework required for the regular course and your class time was then cancelled due to the coronavirus pandemic? Can you apply that to finishing the new complete online course?

If someone has the voucher that they completed the online homework, they should be able to log back into their account and they should be given the option to complete the Virtual Field Day. If they successfully complete that, they will be given their hunter education certificate.

Is there a similar bowhunting and/or trapping safety course thats going to be offered as well?

Not at this point. The DEC said with bowhunting certifications not needed until October when the fall big game hunting season opens, the agency is still evaluating whether to offer a complete online course for bowhunters, in addition to future opportunities for in-person courses. No word on a complete online offering for a trapper safety course.

If someone passes this course, would be accepted by other states that require hunter safety courses?

Yes, it meets International Hunter Education Association (IHEA) standards. The online Kalkomey course New York is using is one of four or five other online hunting safety courses that meet the IHEA standards, DEC said,

Is there a problem with not having the student doing any handling of a firearm or shooting during the class time?

New York does not require live fire in the in-person hunter education courses. It is highly recommended, but courses held in New York City and many other course locations (public libraries, schools, etc.) do not allow the use of live fire, DEC said.

What are the cons about not having any face-to face class-time with an instructor?

DEC said, There is always value in hands-on experience and face-to-face communication with a certified instructor. DEC encourages anyone who wants more information and hands-on experience to take an in-person course once they are scheduled. DECs Hunter Education Program staff remain available for assistance. For more information, go to https://www.dec.ny.gov/outdoor/92267.html.

Once the online course is passed, how does one get his or her hunter education certificate?

After successfully completing the online course, youll be able to immediately print out your Hunter Education Certificate, which will serve as your permanent certificate. That certificate then allows you to buy a hunting license or permit where required.

How many hunters are there currently in New York State?

The hunters in the state have been dropping. Since the 1960s, the number of hunters in New York have decreased by about 20 percent. Currently, nearly 550,000 enjoy the sport, DEC said.

The DEC has taken a series of steps in recent years to make it easier and cheaper to hunt, with some success. Cheaper licenses and new incentives have made hunting more accessible, and a change to the states youth hunting rules in 2016 now allows supervised 14- and 15-year-olds to hunt big game.

The bottom line, though, is that the majority of those who hunt are in an older demographic and are aging out of the sport. They are not being replaced fast enough by younger hunters.

Is this complete online course offering going to be a one-time deal, or is there any thought being given to doing it again?

DEC is still evaluating future virtual opportunities for this course.

*Have any other questions on the DECs totally online hunting course? Send them to outdoors writer David Figura at dfigura@NYup.com.

MORE:

NYs 2020 spring turkey hunting season set for May 1 with strong social distancing advice

Upstate NY trout fishing: Anglers share photos of their catches

Hunting for shed deer antlers: A great way to get outdoors
NATO Defence Ministers meet to discuss COVID-19

NATO - North Atlantic Treaty Organisation

14 Apr. 2020

NATO Defence Ministers will meet tomorrow (15 April 2020) by secure video conference to discuss the Alliance's response to the COVID-19 crisis. As well as ensuring the safety of Allied troops and personnel, NATO is coordinating military support to Allies in response to the pandemic.

NATO's heavy-lift capability ensures the timely transport of critical supplies from around the world. Hundreds of tons of medical equipment have been donated and delivered, and Allies are sharing medical expertise, and spare hospital capacity.

At this meeting, Defence Ministers will decide what more NATO can do to help save lives.

Disinformation around COVID-19 is a big challenge. Ministers will discuss what more Allies can do to counter false and harmful narratives with the truth. They will also discuss how NATO is maintaining our deterrence and defence, and our missions and operations around the world during the pandemic.

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Soumika M Das By

Express News Service

BHUBANESWAR: At a time when people are busy coping with coronavirus crisis, a 54-year-old Professor of IIT Kanpur, native of Balasore, has shown that one can easily switch roles if there is compassion. The professor, Laxmidhar Behera, has transformed a portion of the institute into a community kitchen centre. With help of his colleagues and students, the Balasore native cooks for 1,000 children and migrant labourers himself.

Along with a former research associate - a local community leader- and other volunteers, they distribute the meals to families of labourers who work at a nearby brick kiln. Most of these labourers had migrated to Kanpur in Uttar Pradesh from Bihar and Jharkhand. A Professor of Department of Electrical Engineering at the IIT with specialisation in robotics and artificial intelligence, its the ISKCON devotee in Behera which summons the cook in him to prepare food for such a large number of people.

I can cook for 10,000 people. Often, I conduct Bhgawad Gita recital ceremonies at the institute for students. After the recital is over, I serve them food. Its all prepared by me and my wife. Thats how I have learnt cooking for communities. I possess huge vessels used for catering to 200-300 people, he said.

When an acquaintance requested Behera to provide food to students of a school-run for children of the brick kiln labourers, he took no time to respond. I contacted ISKCON but they were not in a position to provide meals to these children due to unavoidable circumstances.

Next, I approached the institutes director and his deputy to seek permission for operating the community kitchen from campus. They agreed. said Behera who believes that none placed within 10 km radius of his locality should go hungry. Not just the institute gave him a green signal but he also received support from other faculty members, students and staff. Led by Behera, the voluntary team of IITians have been providing cooked meals to the poor families once a day around 1.30 pm and dry ration to 100 families since more than a week.

We have collected voluntary contributions from people in the campus. While 10 to 15 pack the food using aluminum foils and containers daily, 10 others help me with cooking. But we all follow the precautionary measures of social distancing, washing hands and wear masks, he says. Its peoples hunger that perturbs him the most!

Born in Talsara village under Bahanaga block, Behera had left Odisha in 1991 for higher education. After completing M.Tech from NIIT Rourkela, he got a PhD from IIT Delhi. Before joining IIT Kanpur in 2001, he had worked for BITS Pilani and as a scientist at National Research Centre of Information Technology, Germany.
Oprah Winfrey has warned African Americans to take the coronavirus outbreak seriously because it is 'ravaging our community' and 'taking us out'.

The TV mogul said the coronavirus outbreak continued to have a devastating impact on black communities across the United States but that people weren't getting the message about the risk of asymptomatic carriers.

Speaking to CBS This Morning on Tuesday, Winfrey said it was important for black people to understand that pre-existing conditions including diabetes and asthma put them at greater risk if they contracted the virus.

She also voiced concerns for her own health, saying she was staying indoors because she suffered from pneumonia last year and that her 'lungs never really fully cleared'.

'It's not only ravaging our community, but people who have preexisting conditions, which I think people didn't hear that,' she said.

Oprah Winfrey told how coronavirus is having a devastating impact on the black community

'So if you are taking medication for your diabetes, if you're taking medication because of hypertension, if you need an asthma inhaler for asthma, if you have any kind of lung disorder.'

Winfrey revealed back in September that she had been taken to the emergency room with a serious case of pneumonia.

'So the moment I heard preexisting conditions, I'm like, ''lock the door, nobody coming in here',' Winfrey said.

The disproportionate impacts of coronavirus on the African American community continue to be felt across the country.

Some lawmakers and community leaders in cities hard-hit by the pandemic have been sounding the alarm over what they see as a disturbing trend of the virus killing African Americans at a higher rate.

Among the cities where black residents have been hard-hit include Chicago, Detroit, New Orleans and Milwaukee.

A history of systemic racism and inequity in access to health care and economic opportunity has made many African Americans far more vulnerable to the virus.

Black adults suffer from higher rates of obesity, diabetes and asthma, which make them more susceptible, and also are more likely to be uninsured.

They also often report that medical professionals take their ailments less seriously when they seek treatment.

Many African Americans have service jobs such as bus drivers, pharmacy workers and grocery store employees, which have become essential during the lockdown. It prevents them from staying at home and expose them to the virus though contact with the public.

Speaking to CBS This Morning's Vladimir Duthiers, Winfrey added that 'people aren't getting the message' about the risk of asymptomatic carriers of the virus

On Winfrey's new Apple TV+ series Oprah Talks, actor Idris Elba and wife Sabrina Dhowre-Elba discussed being quarantined together in New Mexico

Winfrey discussed the issue of the impact of the virus on black people, including during the latest installment of her 'Oprah Talks COVID-19' series, which is available for free on Apple TV+ starting on Tuesday.

When she interviewed actor Idris Elba, who tested positive for the virus last month but showed no symptoms, Winfrey raised the problem of people spreading the virus without realizing they have it.

'It's all these people [asymptomatic carriers], who perhaps could be carriers,' she said.

Earlier this month, Winfrey announced she is donating $10 million to support people and cities across the country during the pandemic.

She will be committing $1 million to America's Food Fund, whose goal it is to make sure everyone has access to food. The fund was launched by Leonardo DiCaprio, Laurene Powell Jobs, Apple and the Ford Foundation.

Winfrey's comments come as the Centers for Disease Protection and Control faces increasing pressure to be more transparent about the toll of the virus on communities of color.

The agency has not publicly reported racial or ethnic demographic data for COVID-19 tests performed across the country, though its own standardized form required for reporting COVID-19 tests and cases includes a section for indicating the race or ethnicity of those tested.

Democratic lawmakers on Tuesday introduced legislation to compel federal health officials to post data daily that breaks down COVID-19 cases and deaths by race and ethnicity.

The lawmakers say the demographic data is needed to address any disparities in the national response to the coronavirus outbreak.

Tim Cook, CEO of Apple, and Oprah Winfrey hug during an Apple special event last march. She has a show in Apple TV+ and joined with the tech firm to donate $1 million to America's Food Fund

ILLINOIS: In Illinois, the majority of deaths - 42.8% - have been linked to black residents

CHICAGO: 72 percent of the deaths in Chicago have been black residents. They account for 30 percent of the city's population

'Because of government-sponsored discrimination and systemic racism, communities of color are on the frontlines of this pandemic,' Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren, one of several sponsors of the legislation in the Senate, said in a statement.

'To effectively slow the spread of the virus and ensure our response is robust and equitable, we need comprehensive national data on who is getting infected, who is getting treatment, and who is dying.'

In Chicago, 72 percent of the deaths have been black residents despite them only making up 30 percent of the city's population.

Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot told CBS' Face the Nation on Sunday that the coronavirus was 'devastating' African American communities.

'The answer that we believe is right is because of the underlying conditions that people of color and particularly black folks suffer from, whether it's diabetes, heart disease, upper respiratory illnesses, the kind of things that we've been talking about for a long time that plague black Chicago, that lead to life expectancy gaps,' Lightfoot said.

'This virus attacks those underlying conditions with a vengeance.'

Last week, New York City released data that showed black and Latino people were twice as likely to die from coronavirus than white residents.

In Louisiana, with New Orleans being a hot spot for the virus, about 70 per cent of those who have died were black. Black people only make up 32 per cent of residents in the state.
WASHINGTON - President Donald Trump signalled Wednesday that he's prepared to support easing travel restrictions along the Canada-U.S. border sooner rather than later  although the feeling may not be mutual, given the extent of the COVID-19 outbreak in the United States.

Hey there, time traveller!

This article was published 15/4/2020 (636 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

President Donald Trump speaks about the coronavirus in the Rose Garden of the White House, Wednesday, April 15, 2020, in Washington. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon)

WASHINGTON - President Donald Trump signalled Wednesday that he's prepared to support easing travel restrictions along the Canada-U.S. border sooner rather than later  although the feeling may not be mutual, given the extent of the COVID-19 outbreak in the United States.

Canada is "doing well" in its efforts to control the spread of the virus, Trump said during his daily media briefing at the White House.

In the same breath, however, the president  who makes no secret of his urgent desire to see the American economy come roaring back to life  seemed to equate Canada's success with efforts in the U.S., a comparison sure to raise eyebrows north of the border.

"Our relationship with Canada is very good  well talk about that. It will be one of the early borders to be released," the president said. "Canadas doing well, were doing well  so well see."

The two countries negotiated a mutual ban on non-essential travel in both directions in mid-March, an agreement that explicitly exempted the flow of trade and commerce, as well as vital health care workers like nurses who live and work on opposite sides of the border.

That agreement is currently due to expire early next week. Other travel restrictions, such as a U.S. ban on foreign nationals arriving from a long list of European countries, are likely to remain in place a while longer, Trump said.

"We have a lot of nations that are heavily infected  some are getting better, (but) some are still on the way up, unfortunately. Were keeping very strong borders with those nations," he said.

"But with Canada, we are talking about different things."

If indeed the U.S. is anxious to lift the restrictions, the dramatic imbalance in the outbreak's severity in the two countries  the U.S. has more than 560,000 active cases, the most in the world, while Canada's caseload is just over 18,000  could put the federal government in an awkward position.

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.

Earlier Wednesday, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau made it clear that efforts to control the spread of the virus in Canada are likely to remain in place for several more weeks. And on Tuesday, the government tightened its self-isolation requirements for those arriving from outside the country's borders, making an extended hotel stay mandatory for anyone without a suitable quarantine plan.

Widespread testing and the ability to rapidly track down the contacts of infected people will be key to an eventual return to normal activities, Trudeau said.

"We have to be through this first wave sufficiently to be able to know we have the capacity to stamp out and restrict any future outbreaks as they come along," he said.

"That means technology, that means better testing capacity, that means continued vigilance  not just by governments but by all Canadians.... We're still a number of weeks away from that."

This report by The Canadian Press was first published April 15, 2020.

 Follow James McCarten on Twitter @CdnPressStyle
Luxembourg  14 April 2020 - Subsea 7 S.A. (Oslo Brs: SUBC, ADR: SUBCY) today announced the award of contracts by Chevron U.S.A Inc. for subsea installation services related to the Anchor field, located in the Green Canyon area of the Gulf of Mexico. The Anchor field is approximately 140 miles off the coast of Louisiana.



Subsea 7s scope of work includes project management, engineering, procurement, construction and installation of the SURF components including, but not limited to, the production flowlines, risers, umbilicals, flying leads, jumpers, and associated appurtenances.



Project management and engineering will commence immediately at Subsea 7s offices in Houston, Texas. Fabrication of the flowlines and risers will take place at Subsea 7s spool-base in Ingleside, Texas, with offshore operations anticipated to occur in 2022 and 2023.

Craig Broussard, Vice President for Subsea 7 US, said, We are honored to be selected by Chevron for the SURF installation scope on the Anchor project. We look forward to building on the collaborative relationship with Chevron to deliver a best-in-class project. The combination of the SURF scope for Subsea 7 and the ongoing subsea equipment delivery by OneSubsea, will allow the Subsea Integration Alliance to work in partnership with Chevron to unlock the value of an integrated approach to project optimization.

*******************************************************************************

Subsea 7 is a global leader in the delivery of offshore projects and services for the evolving energy industry, creating sustainable value by being the industrys partner and employer of choice in delivering the efficient offshore solutions the world needs.

*******************************************************************************

Contact for investment community enquiries:

Katherine Tonks

Head of Investor Relations

Tel +44 20 8210 5568

katherine.tonks@subsea7.com

www.subsea7.com

Forward-Looking Statements: Certain statements made in this announcement may include forward-looking statements. These statements may be identified by the use of words like anticipate, believe, could, estimate, expect, forecast, intend, may, might, plan, predict, project, scheduled, seek, should, will, and similar expressions. The forward-looking statements reflect our current views and are subject to risks, uncertainties and assumptions. The principal risks and uncertainties which could impact the Group and the factors which could affect the actual results are described but not limited to those in the Risk Management section in the Groups Annual Report and Consolidated Financial Statements 2019. These factors, and others which are discussed in our public announcements, are among those that may cause actual and future results and trends to differ materially from our forward-looking statements: actions by regulatory authorities or other third parties; our ability to recover costs on significant projects; the general economic conditions and competition in the markets and businesses in which we operate; our relationship with significant clients; the outcome of legal and administrative proceedings or governmental enquiries; uncertainties inherent in operating internationally; the timely delivery of vessels on order; the impact of laws and regulations; and operating hazards, including spills and environmental damage. Many of these factors are beyond our ability to control or predict. Other unknown or unpredictable factors could also have material adverse effects on our future results. Given these factors, you should not place undue reliance on the forward-looking statements.

Attachment
Scott Morrison's passionate wish for students to again return to classrooms has been confused and muddied by the mixed messages from his national cabinet colleagues, who assume worried parents have time to analyse their nuanced comments in these unprecedented times.

The Prime Minister's want for students and teachers across the country get back to school forms an integral part of the nation's road out of the COVID-19 crisis, not only because it will benefit children but also boost workplace productivity, and in turn the economy.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison wants children to go back to school sooner rather than later. Credit:Alex Ellinghausen

Not only is he concerned students will miss out on valuable learning in front of professionals, but he wants to ease the burden on parents to allow them to return to work.

Amid headlines and news bulletins declaring the nation's leaders are at odds over a return to school on Wednesday, they stressed they were "all on the same page", despite delivering a very different message.
[April 15, 2020] UGI Corporation Supports Community Organizations During COVID-19 Emergency

UGI Corporation and its affiliated companies have provided over $200,000 of financial support to organizations in the many communities in which they operate to assist residents in need due to the coronavirus (COVID-19) emergency. "UGI Corporation has served families and communities for nearly 140 years," John L. Walsh, President and CEO of UGI Corporation, said. "We recognize the extraordinary circumstances we now face as a country and are working with community organizations to provide support for those most in need." UGI Corporation, based in the Greater Philadelphia area, has donated $100,000 to the PHL COVID-19 Fund, a rapid response fund designed to provide urgent resources to frontline non-profit organizations that are serving the most vulnerable populations in the Philadelphia region. The fund was established by the Civic Leadership Council, a coalition of government, foundation, non-profit, and corporate leaders that provide strategic guidance and direction for the fund. UGI Utilities, Inc. (UGI Utilities), a natural gas and electric utility company serving 45 counties in Pennsylvania and one county in Maryland, provided $60,000 to regional food banks in its service area. Food banks have seen a significant increase in the number of families in need and are providing hundreds of thousands of additional meals. Specifically, the UGI Utilities donations supported the Central Pennsylvania Food Bank; the Weinberg Northeast Regional Food Bank; the Second Harvest Food Bank of the Lehigh Valle and Northeast Pennsylvania; Helping Harvest; and the Second Harvest Food Bank of Northwest Pennsylvania. Together, the five food banks serve 50 counties and work with more than 1,500 local agencies and programs across the state.



UGI Energy Services, LLC (UGI Energy Services), a supplier and marketer of natural gas, liquid fuels, and electricity to customer in 11 states across the Mid-Atlantic and Northeastern United States has partnered with the American Red Cross and created the "Powered to do More" program as part of our SleevesUp - ArmsOut campaign to challenge our employees to donate blood or blood components at local Red Cross locations. In addition, UGI Energy Services, based in Wyomissing, Pennsylvania, has contributed $40,000 to support food drives, including donations in support of the Greater Pittsburgh Food Bank; Philabundance (Philadelphia and Delaware Valley); the New York City Harvest; Central Pennsylvania Food Bank; the Weinberg Northeast Regional Food Bank; and Helping Harvest. Several of these organizations serve some of the largest metropolitan regions in the Northeastern United States.

UGI's LPG businesses, AmeriGas and UGI International, have also stepped up efforts to support the communities they serve. Throughout their operations, the LPG businesses are supporting front line workers by donating propane cylinders to hospitals and other testing facilities to keep both patients and workers warm. "We will continue to identify productive ways to help out our communities and do all that we can to keep our employees, customers and communities safe," Walsh concluded. About UGI Corporation UGI Corporation is a distributor and marketer of energy products and services. Through subsidiaries, UGI operates natural gas and electric utilities in Pennsylvania, distributes LPG both domestically (through AmeriGas) and internationally (through UGI International), manages midstream energy assets in Pennsylvania, Ohio, and West Virginia and electric generation assets in Pennsylvania, and engages in energy marketing in eleven states, the District of Columbia and internationally in France, Belgium, the Netherlands and the UK. Comprehensive information about UGI Corporation is available on the Internet at https://www.ugicorp.com. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20200415005081/en/

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The Bono, Bono East and Ahafo regional offices of the Information Services Department (ISD) have appealed to the Ghana Immigration Service (GIS) to strengthen measures at the entry points to control movements of people into the country.



The ISD staff made the appeal in Sunyani after a training programme to equip them for an intensive and effective public education programme on COVID-19 in their respective districts and municipalities.



They alleged that some Ghanaians abroad were sneaking into the country through unapproved routes and appealed to the public to assist the Government in the fight against the pandemic by volunteering information about such returnees.



The officers again pleaded with the Municipal and District Security Councils to collaborate with the Police to ban meeting points and playing centres popularly referred to as 'parliament' created by the youth in their localities to aid adherence to the Presidential Directive on social distancing.



Earlier, Mr Imoro T. Ayibani, the Bono Regional Information Officer, said the information officers would use the local information centres and vans to sensitise the public on the dos and donts to prevent the spread of the virus.



He urged the officers to spread the information calmly to take away the fears of the public but ensure they (public) knew what was expected of them to prevent infections.



Mr Ayibani cautioned people against the spread of false information and said culprits could either be sentenced to a fine or imprisonment.



He announced an emergency response team comprising health and ISD officers, National Disaster Management Organisation, National Commission on Civic Education and the Municipal and District Chief Executives as ready for quick response to calls relating to COVID-19.



Mr Ayibani urged the public to make good use of the emergency numbers created in their municipalities and districts to report any symptoms of the disease for immediate assistance.

Source: GNA









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The US military has shown off its new stealth jet in Syria, flying in close proximity to Russian forces stationed at Qamishli Airport writes Al-Masdar.

The US military flew their new F-35 stealth jet over Syrias skies this past week, as they display their strength in front of the Russian Armed Forces who are only a few kilometers away from the American troops in the eastern Euphrates region.

In a tweet on Monday, the Special Ops Joint Task Force-Operation Inherent Resolve (OIR) in Syria and Iraq released three photos showing the F-35 above Syria, likely in the Hassakeh or Deir ez-Zor governorates.

A USAF F-35A Lightning II fighter jet flies in Syria, Apr. 10, 2020. Coalition and partner forces continue to strike at extremist organizations in Syria despite COVID-19, reflecting the world-wide unity to see an enduring defeat delivered against Daesh, the US military account posted.

The three photos showed up close and far away shots of the F-35A as it flew over the skies of eastern Syria.

While the US conducted this flight, the Russian military was likely watching from afar, as they have headquartered their forces in eastern Syria at Qamishli Airport in the northern region of the Hassakeh Governorate.

On a different note, militants of the Hayat Tahrir al-Sham terrorist organization have attacked the Miznaz settlement in the Syrian province of Idleb, Oleg Zhuravlev, the head of the Russian Defence Ministrys Centre for the Syrian Reconciliation, said during a briefing on Monday.

Over the past 24 hours, no fire from the side of the illegal armed groups controlled by Turkey has been registered  One shelling of Miznaz settlement in Idleb province was recorded from the position of the Hayat Tahrir al-Sham terrorist organization, Zhuravlev said.

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.
Just last year, the Montgomery County Sheriffs Offices strategic plan update had a dire warning. Outlining the plan of action for the agency, the update stated the county jails maximum inmate capacity would present a challenge if an outbreak occurred.

With projected county growth, this (capacity) will soon be inadequate and unsafe if any need for isolation or quarantine arises, it stated.

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That foresight has been put to use by officials who have adopted multiple measures to keep community spread of the coronavirus from striking jail inmates.

But with one inmate now removed after being confirmed as having COVID-19, worries continue for three women whose loved ones are jailed with preexisting or underlying conditions.

Plenty of capacity

On March 9, the day before the announcement of the countys first confirmed COVID-19 case, the Montgomery County Jail had 894 inmates, according to sheriffs office spokesman Lt. Scott Spencer.

STEM THE SPREAD: Texas coronavirus deaths pass 300 as prisons battle outbreak

The jail has a maximum capacity of 1,253. For at least the last couple of weeks, the jails numbers have been fluctuating between the high 500s and the low 600s. On Tuesday afternoon there were 598 inmates listed online.

There have been four inmates who have undergone COVID-19 testing, all but one tested negative. As of Tuesday, a woman who gave birth at a hospital and was tested there, is the only inmate who has come up positive.

Strict requirements

Since then, the jail staff and inmates are required to wear masks. New inmates, employees and visitors to the jail have their temperatures taken and are screened for COVID-19 symptoms as they come in. There is a 14-day quarantine for new inmates, Spencer pointed out

Daily screenings and temperature checks are also done on inmates, and social distancing is observed where practicable, Spencer said.

The jail is equipped with negative pressure cells in its infirmary, where inmates can be quarantined, he noted.

MORE FROM JOSE R. GONZALEZ: Montgomery County Hospital District projects big increase in COVID-19 cases

Inmates are provided soap bars and there has been increased cleaning of the jail with staff using PPE as they go about the task, Spencer said. He added that there are as few as nine inmates or as many as 48 in a pod, which is a cordoned jail housing section.

Phone only contact

Randall Lawson, Tracey Schneiders common-law husband of 17 years, has been jailed on drug charges since July. Schneider, 53, said Lawson, 46, proved to have a weakened immune system after he nearly died of the West Nile virus when he became infected around 2012.

Lawson was comatose for 12 days, according to Schneider. She said he has impaired memory, hearing and sight, and has suffered from kidney stones.

Im sure, Im positive if my husband was to contract this, it would kill him, Schneider said about COVID-19.

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Catherine Gay, 52, and Manuel Gay, 57, remarried in a ceremony following a 2017 divorce. Manuel Gay was jailed in September after being charged with drug possession, a violation of his parole for a 1991 drug conviction. Catherine Gay disclosed to The Courier her husband has a medical condition that makes him immunocompromised.

William Davis, 29, of Porter, was a week away from marrying Reba Burkhart, 26, of Splendora, until he was arrested late December on vehicle theft and evading arrest charges. Currently working in Kansas, Burkhart said Davis is a diabetic and they speak on the phone daily.

Schneider and Catherine Gay regularly saw the men at the jail before visits were suspended March 12 by the sheriffs office. Like Burkhart, they communicate with the men via phone only. It is not yet known when jail visitations will resume.

Health worries

The three men are being held in the same jail pod. The women have heard concerns from them about opportunities for infection.

The long sentence Manuel Gay likely faces is not whats bothering him, its the fear that he could get sick, Catherine Gay said.

Lawson and Manuel Gay have extensive criminal histories in Texas. Davis was convicted of crimes in Missouri similar to the charges he faces in Texas. None of the mens convictions, current or past charges are for violent offenses.

Right now theyre putting his health at risk because hes a nonviolent offender, first-time offender in Texas, Burkhart said of Davis.

However, possible release of the men is hampered by the habitual offender status their alleged offenses qualify them for.

Lawson and Davis are being held on bonds of $50,000 or more. Since Manuel Gays charges are in violation of his parole, his release depends on the Texas Board of Pardons and Parole. He is now in a state of limbo as the Texas Department of Criminal Justice recently announced it would not be accepting county jail inmates into its prisons during the outbreak.

Case by case considerations

The lowering of bonds to allow for the release of inmates with health concerns is being dealt case by case as district court judges are being extremely cautious in doing so, said Jo Ann Linzer, president of the Montgomery County Criminal Defense Lawyers Association.

Inmates have been talking to their attorneys using headsets during Zoom video conferencing to minimize person-to-person consultation and to uphold attorney-client privilege. This has been made possible by the Montgomery County DAs and sheriffs offices and district court judges, Linzer said, adding the system recently launched for wide-scale jail use.

That process has been a great cooperative effort of all the parties involved, Linzer said.

Defense attorney Tracy Pullan has seen the changes up close, including the use of Zoom during bond hearings where the multiple-screen app allows a jailed defendant to face the prosecutor and judge, along with the defense attorney also being seen.

A former assistant district attorney in Montgomery County, Pullan currently has two clients in the jail, both are there on drug charges from before the outbreak. Her clients have expressed concern about COVID-19.

They very much would like to be out, Pullan said March 31. Theyre very worried about people getting sick in the jail and it spreading through the jail. Thats a fair concern.

jose.gonzalez@chron.com

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Prime Minister Scott Morrison has been scolded by a teachers union for urging parents to send their children to school during the coronavirus lockdown.

Queensland Teachers Union president Kevin Bates said Mr Morrison's message had undermined state leaders, who instead were backing distance learning and schools to be only for last resort for parents who cannot supervise home schooling.

'Two of the major states - Victoria and Queensland - announced very clear arrangements for when schools start back,' he told the Today Show.

'Suddenly the Prime Minister turns all of that on its head and sends a message out to the community that is in complete contradiction to what the premiers have said.

'PM, butt out. Our young people will not suffer from a short hiatus in their learning... They will continue to learn.'

Mr Morrison had said that the expert medical advice remained that the coronavirus risk was very low for children attending school with no likelihood of serious illness.

Chief medical officer Brendan Murphy blamed anxious parents and teachers for effectively shutting down Australia's schools.

'Most of the state governments actually didn't want to close the schools, it was the parents and the teachers who closed the schools,' he told a New Zealand parliamentary hearing on Tuesday.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison (pictured) asked the nation's teachers to keep classrooms open

Mr Bates believes closing the schools was the right call, and that parents should keep children home where possible.

There had been 6,415 known cases of coronavirus in Australia and 62 deaths.

While those rates were low by international standards and falling further, health authorities and politicians had said it was important not to lift restrictions entirely.

'The state governments have struck the right balance,' Mr Bates said.

'There is absolutely a provision for children of essential workers and those who are vulnerable... They are entitled to come to school and teachers will be there to supervise them.'

Mr Bates said the Prime Minister had 'made a blunder'.

Pictured: A school in Observatory Hill in Sydney shared a positive message with the community urging people to stay safe during the coronavirus crisis

Australia has made significant progress in the fight against coronavirus, with a clear flattening of the curve on the graph that measures the daily infection rate

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

On Wednesday morning, Mr Morrison released a video message urging the nation's teachers to keep classrooms open, especially for the children of essential workers who cannot be effectively homeschooled.

The prime minister likened the country's educators to 'great heroes', including nurses, doctors and paramedics, who are fighting to keep Australia safe throughout the coronavirus pandemic.

'At this time, as our nation fights this coronavirus, your role has become even more important. Your students and their families are relying on you more than ever,' he said.

'As we adapt to the impact of COVID-19, the next few months will bring incredible changes for our education system. The education of our children hangs in the balance.'

Today Show host Karl Stefanovic agreed with Mr Bates, and said while he thinks the federal government has 'done a very good job throughout the whole crisis', Mr Morrison should have left schooling to state bodies.

'The prime minister is going to argue he's never changed course on this and he's always argued it is safe. But the mixed messaging between state and federal governments is confusing for parents,' he said.

'I don't know why he needed to enter this fray. I suppose he has every right to but when he uses provocative language like ''your child's education hangs in the balance'', that's when I stop and think ''is this true?''.'

Classrooms across the nation were virtually empty toward the end of term one as parents stopped sending their children to school. Pictured: Primary school in Melbourne without any students on March 23, after Victorian Premier brought forward school holidays

In Queensland, where school resumes on Monday, an exam has been axed from the Year 12 curriculum because of the COVID-19 crisis.

Education Minister Grace Grace says that instead of Year 12 students having four exams, they will now only have three in 2020.

And for parents supervising their children just two-to-three hours of learning each day will usually be enough, Ms Grace told The Courier-Mail.

During a Facebook Live session on Tuesday afternoon, Ms Grace told Year 12 students: 'Good news! You are only doing three exams this year'.

'One has been eliminated, two internal - one has already been done - so one more internal and then you'll have an external exam...We want to make sure that there is no Year 13.'

Schools, kindergartens and childcare centres will remain open for vulnerable students and children of essential workers when term two begins.

Ms Grace also clarified the definition of an essential worker.

'If you are required in your workplace and unable to supervise your children at home or make suitable arrangements, then you are deemed to be an essential worker,' she said.

Remote learning is locked in until May 22 although a decision on it whether is extended will be made by May 15.
A woman in a face mask and disposable gloves  preventive gear against the coronavirus spread  casts her vote Wednesday at a polling station in Daejeon. Yonhap



By Lee Gyu-lee



As South Korea's parliamentary elections began Wednesday morning, voters arriving at polling stations to elect lawmakers took measures to protect themselves against the spread of the coronavirus.



The following photos show how the pandemic has changed the process at polling stations across the nation:





A voter has his temperature checked before entering a polling station to cast his vote in Changwon, South Gyeongsang Province. Yonhap





A man gets hand sanitizer to help protect against the coronavirus spread as he waits in line to cast his vote at a polling station in Daegu. Yonhap





A voter gets help to put on disposable gloves to help prevent the coronavirus infection at a polling station in Jongno-gu, central Seoul. Yonhap

People wait in line to cast their votes while keeping their distance at a polling station in Seocho-gu, southern Seoul, to help protect against the spread of the virus. Yonhap









A thermal detection device at a polling station in Daegu. Yonhap




Russian citizens, who decided to return to their home country from the United States, left the country on board Aeroflot flight from New York to St. Petersburg.



According to the JFK airport's departures screen in the airports Terminal 1, the flight took off at approximately 20:07 local time (02:07 Moscow time on Wednesday), TASS reported.



The estimated time of arrival to the Pulkovo airport in St. Petersburg is 11:45 Moscow time. After that, the plane will travel to Moscows Sheremetyevo airport. The estimated time of arrival is yet unknown.

According to the Russian Consulate General in New York, a total of 276 people have registered for the flight. The diplomatic mission said that "all necessary measures have been taken to bring Russians, who had found themselves in a difficult situation in the United States, back to their motherland."
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Witnessing to someone who believes that God doesnt exist (an atheist) can be challenging. A person who doesnt believe in God will not believe in such things as the resurrection, the Bible (as Gods Word), the deity of Jesus, or any number of other essential Christian doctrines. Reasoning about the Christian faith is difficult when a person rejects the Divine Being who is the foundation of the Christian faith.

To help you move forward in evangelistic conversations with atheists, consider asking one of the following four questions in the course of your conversation:

First, was there a time when you believed in God? Gods existence is evident to all men, even those who reject Him (Romans 1:19). An atheist must suppress the truth of God that is evident in nature (Psalm 19:1). It is likely that there was a time when your atheist friend believed in God. Listening carefully and graciously about the event(s) that led them to change their mind is helpful for two reasons: You can understand the issues that led to their current unbelief, and the atheist reconnects (through their story) to a time before they suppressed the truth of Gods existence.

Second, wouldnt you like there to be a God? A person is more likely to accept evidence and arguments for things they want to be true rather than things they hope are not true. This question is simple, yet powerful. In evangelism, you are trying to tell someone about a loving creator who, despite our sin, graciously provides all that is needed for us to enjoy eternal life. Wouldnt you like for that God to exist? Getting a person who doesnt believe in God to admit that they wish God did exist is a helpful step in asking them to consider the reasons for His existence.

Third, since becoming an atheist, has there been a time when you thought that God might exist? Christians are not the only people who can have a crisis of faith. Exposure to evil can make believers question their belief, and exposure to beauty and charity can make unbelievers question their unbelief. Asking this question is helpful because an atheist has probably gone through a time when they questioned their unbelief, and by inviting them to share that story of a time when they were tempted to believe God might actually exist, you can encourage them to reconsider the existence of God.

Fourth, what would you have to lose if God existed and you decided to trust Him? Seventeenth-century philosopher and mathematician Blaise Pascal famously argued that it makes sense to believe in God because what you stand to gain if He exists is far greater than what you stand to lose if He doesnt. This argument (called The Wager) leads to a simple question: What do you have to lose? Jesus taught us to count the cost of following Him. There are losses in this life, but as the Apostle Paul point out, the suffering of this life does not compare the to the glory that is to come (Romans 8:18).

Sharing the Gospel can be hard. Asking good questions helps. A good question invites someone to share more about what they believe so that you can wisely and lovingly respond to objections and direct them to Christ. God uses these conversations to open hearts and draw people
For more coverage, visit our complete coronavirus section here.

You never forget your first trip to Top Dog.

The tiny, Berkeley-born grab-and-go grill is a rite of passage for Cal students, slinging superlative sausages late night til 3 a.m.  along with a side of libertarian literature.

Top Dog opened in 1966, during the heart of the Free Speech Movement, and 54 years later, it still features walls plastered with everything from yellow-ish newspaper clippings pushing for the privatization of the postal service to "Freedom Works Better Than Government" bumper stickers.

All of which has made the coronavirus pandemic uniquely difficult for its owners, Richard and Renie Riemann.

"We dont want to take money from the government," Renie says. "Our political background is for smaller government regulations  how can we turn around and do the opposite? This will challenge what we believe in."

Will it ever.

Top Dog has closed two of its three locations since the coronavirus pandemic forced a shelter-in-place order for six Bay Area counties  including Alameda County  and was forced to lay off one-third of its 19-person staff.

Renie, who graduated from Cal in 1967 and married Richard in 1968, said shes hopeful Top Dog can last through April.

"Its a pretty scary time," she admits from inside of a tiny office behind Top Dogs Durant Avenue location  the only one still open. "Were trying to stay afloat, but the hardest part is bringing in enough money for rent for all three places and utilities."

The city of Berkeley launched a $3 million relief fund on March 22, offering $10,000 grants to struggling small businesses with 50 or fewer employees to help cover operational expenses (payroll, rent, working capital).

The federal government approved the CARES Act on March 27, which includes the Paycheck Protection Program. The government assistance program offers loans to brick-and-mortars like Top Dog that they promise to fully forgive provided at least 75% of the borrowed dollars are going to payroll costs, and the other 25% are to interest on mortgages, rent, and/or utilities.

Riemann has zero interest in both.

"Theres always something of a catch," she said of borrowing money from the government. "We need a lot more transparency in general. Ive talked to other businesses and customers, and theyre all disgusted by the way money is taken in and we dont know whats happening to it.

"Were fixing our own potholes  it just doesnt make sense."

Renie, 76, spends her days in the office and still eats a sausage almost every day (for "quality control"). Like everyone else, she shouts her order from Top Dogs doorway to keep the recommended 6 feet of social distance, and marvels at a grill thats slightly less full of sizzling dogs than usual.

She wears a mask and remembers to wash her hands, but generally feels a bit helpless.

"With the '89 earthquake, my first thought was I need to help somehow. I need to work in a cafeteria, or help at a hospital. But now, Ive realized Im not 30 anymore. I feel 30, but Im 76, and I cant expose myself  that would put my husband at risk."

And Renie is at risk, but that seems beside the point for her.

Instead, her full attention is on keeping the business alive  not only for her and her husbands legacy, but for the Top Dog employees in their wills. Thats right: Four Top Dog employees will be bequeathed the Top Dog empire when the owners pass.

"A lot of our staff has been around for a long time  our main manager, Jeremy (Bower), hes gonna be 60. I think he came on board when he was 18. Theyre all in the will," she says. "My husband and I said, 'You know, we have to keep this going, because when we depart we want to leave this to you guys.'"

To that end, Top Dog has asked for some forgiveness from local suppliers that have deferred bills, plus it has partnered with Uber Eats to expand its reach locally ("thats been helpful," she says), and, less locally, theres been a slight uptick in mail orders from Old Blues.

"Cal has had so many people come through it; theres still a nostalgia for us," she says. "We just got an order back East, somebodys father who was a Cal grad, probably my age, and they remembered he liked Top Dog. It was costly to them, but I can appreciate it. Id do something like that. And every little bit helps.

"Most businesses like us have a thin profit margin, thats the scary part. You dont have a big buildup of back money to ride this out. Were staying afloat as long as we can."

Its just not entirely clear how long that will be.

"Were struggling along, weve got a skeleton crew, were just hoping the pandemic wont last too much longer for peoples health first of all, but also so we can all go back to business."

The one still-open Top Dog is located at 2534 Durant Ave. in Berkeley and open 10 a.m. to midnight. You can mail order sausages and buns at topdoghotdogs.com.

Grant Marek is the Editorial Director of SFGATE. Email: grant.marek@sfgate.com | Twitter: @grant_marek
An Israeli drone targeted a car of the Lebanese Hezbollah movement just inside Syria near the border with Lebanon on Wednesday, without casualties, a source from the Shiite armed group said.

"An Israeli drone first struck near a car transporting Hezbollah members," the source said, asking for anonymity because he was not authorised to speak to the press.

"The passengers got out before it was then directly hit in a second strike," the source said, but there were no casualties.

The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said "the Israeli aircraft targeted a vehicle near the Jdaidit Yabous crossing" with Lebanon that is closed due to the coronavirus epidemic.

Syrian state news agency SANA reported material damage to a "civilian car" in the same area, without mentioning what party had hit it.

There was no comment from the Israeli authorities.

Iran-backed Hezbollah has been officially fighting in Syria to support the Damascus regime since 2013, helping the regime regain key parts of the country.

Israel has carried out hundreds of air strikes in Syria since the start of the war in 2011, targeting government troops as well as allied Iranian forces and Hezbollah fighters.

It is rare for Israel to claim responsibility for such strikes directly.

The Jewish state says Iran's presence in neighbouring Syria poses a threat and vowed to continue its strikes and prevent arms deliveries to its Hezbollah foes.

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The last thing that Gary Allibon told his wife Monica was that he loved her.

Three months before his planned retirement on his 60th birthday, Mr Allibon was fatally shot at work guarding a cash-in-transit van in the heart of Sydney's CBD.

Just after 6am, three armed men approached the van on Sussex Street and threatened the guards before stealing cash and Mr Allibon's work-issued firearm.

He was shot in the back, and died at Royal Prince Alfred Hospital a short time later.
BRATISLAVA (Reuters) - The Slovak government will unveil a plan next week to gradually ease restrictions designed to stem the spread of the novel coronavirus, but will proceed cautiously to avoid worsening the situation, Prime Minister Igor Matovic said on Tuesday.

Slovakia has banned international passenger travel, closed most shops and all schools, banned public, cultural and sporting events, and imposed a compulsory 14-day quarantine for people entering the country as part of its efforts.

With some European countries looking to loosen lockdowns of varying breadth, Matovic said he was in no rush to reopen shops and other institutions, and that any loosening of curbs would be decided by healthcare experts, not economists.

He added an economic restart was linked to the situation in Slovakia's trading partners elsewhere in Europe.

"We need to have fingers crossed for Western Europe as that will determine our domestic situation," he said.

Slovakia has reported 835 cases of COVID-19, the disease caused by the new coronavirus, and two deaths.

Matovic said the latest data suggested that the spread of the virus was slowing. But there are still question marks over the situation in marginalised Roma communities and social care homes, and the impact of people's behaviour over this past Easter weekend, he added.

(Reporting by Tomas Mrva; Editing by Pravin Char)
By Trend

Turkey on Tuesday repeated an offer to the United States to establish a technical working group including NATO to help solve a dispute over Ankaras purchase of Russian missile defenses that angered Washington, Trend reports citing Reuters.

Ties between the NATO allies were badly strained last year when Turkey bought Russian S-400 defense systems, prompting Washington to threaten sanctions and to suspend Turkish involvement in its F-35 jet program.

The United States says the S-400s are not compatible with NATO systems and threaten the stealth capabilities of its Lockheed Martin F-35 jets. Turkey rejects this and says the S-400s will not be integrated into the alliances defenses.

Before the outbreak of the coronavirus shifted focused away from the issue, Ankaras bilateral ties with Moscow took a heavy blow over Russias support for Syrian President Bashar al-Assads military offensive on northwestern Syrian town of Idlib.

In early March as fighting between Syrian government forces and the Turkish military and allied Syrian rebels intensified, Ankara sought help from the United States to give it ammunition as well as humanitarian assistance for hundreds of thousands of civilians fleeing the battle.

Since then, both Turkey and the United States have largely kept silent on the S-400 issue. Turkey had previously said it would make the Russian missile defense systems operational in April but so far there has been no sign of such a move.

Speaking at a virtual Atlantic Council event, Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu said Turkeys stance on how to solve the issue had not changed.

We offer the U.S. to establish a technical working group with NATOs inclusion and NATO can lead this technical working group actually. And this offer is still on the table, he said.

He also added that Turkey was still willing to purchase Patriot batteries if it had a good offer. Washington has repeatedly said it was unwilling to provide Patriots to Turkey unless it returned the S-400s.

--

Follow us on Twitter @AzerNewsAz
The U.S. Treasury said on Tuesday (April 14) major airlines have agreed to a $25 billion rescue package - in principle.

As part of the deal, airline workers must keep their jobs until October, as the industry works to overcome its biggest challenge ever.

U.S. demand for air travel has all but disappeared - down 95 percent.

Airlines hope it will begin to bounce back by October, but they warn that the slowdown could extend into next year -- or even later.

Major carriers will receive 70% of their funds for payroll in the form of cash assistance they won't have to pay back.

And smaller carriers - like Alaska Airlines and Allegiant Air - that get $100 million or less will not need to repay any funds at all.

The six largest U.S. airlines, including American, Delta and United, have accepted the support, as well as four other carriers.

Estimated global airline losses thus far have climbed to over $300 billion, 25% more than previously forecast.
Russia is bolstering the ranks of the Fifth Corp with men from southern Syria, but has denied that they are being sent to Libya reports Alsouria Net.

A military source from Daraa informed Alsouria Net that fresh Russian movement has been witnessed in southern Syria, as they make efforts to increase the number of fighters in its Fifth Corps.

The source who requested anonymity, said Russia kicked off recruitment on Tuesday and is working on moving some new fighters to camps in the city of Homs for physical and military training.

Russia is planning to expand the power of the Fifth Corps so that it takes control over areas beyond the city of Busra al-Sham, which is the groups main center, according to the source.

He said several buses transported young men, per the recent settlement agreement in Quneitra, and headed out to the Homs camps. The source also denied rumors that the buses were carrying fighters to Libya to participate in military operations alongside Khalifa Haftar, commander of the National Libyan Army.

The Russian move came as a surprise in southern Syria amidst a state of security chaos in the area, which is witnessing assassinations via explosive devices targeting Assad forces and other leaders who were previously working for opposition factions.

Earlier, activists from Daraa shared photos and videos over social media of several buses carrying fighters from areas under the Assad regimes control and said they were heading to Libya.

However, the source confirmed that almost 450 fighters left Quneitra and were on their way to the camps in Homs.

Following the settlement agreement in southern Syria, which was inked in July 2018, Moscow had managed to attract hundreds of fighters in Daraa to the Fifth Corps, mainly in the city of Busra al-Sham in the eastern countryside, under the command of Ahmed al-Awda.

The Fifth Corps was formed in late 2016 under Russian orders to support Assad forces, which had advanced on the opposition with Russian help in recent years.

After Assads forces took control over Daraa in July 2018, Russia gave defectors the choice of either joining one of its military forces to fight under its rank or get arrested on terrorism-related charges. This has forced residents of the province to join Russias formations under what is known as settlement factions.

Previous movements

The current Russian movements in southern Syria links back to what Daraa has witnessed in the past months, namely the city of Sanamayn where the Assad troops forced an agreement on the residents.

Under the deal, the city was forced to hand over all fighters weapons and those whose settlements were rejected were asked to leave for northern Syria. Meanwhile, residents who wanted to stay in the city were obliged to join the Fifth Corps.

Following the conclusion of the settlement agreement in Daraa, the areas were divided into two parts.

The first part includes areas under the Russian control represented by the Fifth Corps, including the city of Busra al-Sham and some of the nearby villages in the eastern countryside of Daraa.

The second part includes all areas that are out of control, witnessing a constant proliferation of weapons, as in the western countryside where the Fourth Division and Military Security branch formations are active.

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.
The Federal Government has received medical equipment donated by the United Nations (UN) to aid Nigerias efforts at combating Coronavirus pandemic.

Minister of Aviation, Sen. Hadi Sirika, represented by the Minister of State for Health, Senator Olorunimbe Mamora took delivery of the equipment at the Nnamdi Azikiwe International Airport, Abuja.

Also Read: We Cant Share Donated Funds To Nigerians As Palliatives  FG

The UN System in Nigeria handed over to the Nigerian government a shipment of 50 A30 ventilators, personal protective equipment and other essential medical supplies.

The Minister expressed the appreciation of the Nigerian government to the UN and Allied Air Cargo for transporting the equipment free of charge to Abuja.

He went further to state that the medical equipments will go a long way in boosting the nations capacity to contain the spread of the Coronavirus pandemic.
NEW YORK, April 14, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- The Global Tire Cord & Tire Fabrics Market is expected to grow from USD 3,912.13 Million in 2018 to USD 5,862.13 Million by the end of 2025 at a Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 5.94%.







Read the full report: https://www.reportlinker.com/p05871679/?utm_source=PRN







The positioning of the Global Tire Cord & Tire Fabrics Market vendors in FPNV Positioning Matrix are determined by Business Strategy (Business Growth, Industry Coverage, Financial Viability, and Channel Support) and Product Satisfaction (Value for Money, Ease of Use, Product Features, and Customer Support) and placed into four quadrants (F: Forefront, P: Pathfinders, N: Niche, and V: Vital).



The report deeply explores the recent significant developments by the leading vendors and innovation profiles in the Global Tire Cord & Tire Fabrics Market including are HYOSUNG Corporation, Kolon Industries, Inc.,, Kordsa Teknik Tekstil A.?., KORDARNA Plus AS, Tokusen Inc, Century Enka Limited., Firestone Fibers & Textiles Company, FORMOSA TAFFETA CO.LTD,, Shandong Helon Polytex Chemical Fibre Co.,Ltd., and SRF Limited.



On the basis of Vehicle Type, the Global Tire Cord & Tire Fabrics Market is studied across Bicycles, Light Commercial Vehicles, Off-road Vehicles, Personal Vehicles, and Two-wheelers.



On the basis of Product, the Global Tire Cord & Tire Fabrics Market is studied across Nylon Dipped, Polyester, Rayon, and Steel.



On the basis of Application, the Global Tire Cord & Tire Fabrics Market is studied across Bias Tire and Radial Tire.



For the detailed coverage of the study, the market has been geographically divided into the Americas, Asia-Pacific, and Europe, Middle East & Africa. The report provides details of qualitative and quantitative insights about the major countries in the region and taps the major regional developments in detail.



In the report, we have covered two proprietary models, the FPNV Positioning Matrix and Competitive Strategic Window. The FPNV Positioning Matrix analyses the competitive market place for the players in terms of product satisfaction and business strategy they adopt to sustain in the market. The Competitive Strategic Window analyses the competitive landscape in terms of markets, applications, and geographies. The Competitive Strategic Window helps the vendor define an alignment or fit between their capabilities and opportunities for future growth prospects. During a forecast period, it defines the optimal or favorable fit for the vendors to adopt successive merger and acquisitions strategies, geography expansion, research & development, new product introduction strategies to execute further business expansion and growth.



Research Methodology:

Our market forecasting is based on a market model derived from market connectivity, dynamics, and identified influential factors around which assumptions about the market are made. These assumptions are enlightened by fact-bases, put by primary and secondary research instruments, regressive analysis and an extensive connect with industry people. Market forecasting derived from in-depth understanding attained from future market spending patterns provides quantified insight to support your decision-making process. The interview is recorded, and the information gathered in put on the drawing board with the information collected through secondary research.



The report provides insights on the following pointers:

1. Market Penetration: Provides comprehensive information on sulfuric acid offered by the key players in the Global Tire Cord & Tire Fabrics Market

2. Product Development & Innovation: Provides intelligent insights on future technologies, R&D activities, and new product developments in the Global Tire Cord & Tire Fabrics Market

3. Market Development: Provides in-depth information about lucrative emerging markets and analyzes the markets for the Global Tire Cord & Tire Fabrics Market

4. Market Diversification: Provides detailed information about new products launches, untapped geographies, recent developments, and investments in the Global Tire Cord & Tire Fabrics Market

5. Competitive Assessment & Intelligence: Provides an exhaustive assessment of market shares, strategies, products, and manufacturing capabilities of the leading players in the Global Tire Cord & Tire Fabrics Market



The report answers questions such as:

1. What is the market size of Tire Cord & Tire Fabrics market in the Global?

2. What are the factors that affect the growth in the Global Tire Cord & Tire Fabrics Market over the forecast period?

3. What is the competitive position in the Global Tire Cord & Tire Fabrics Market?

4. Which are the best product areas to be invested in over the forecast period in the Global Tire Cord & Tire Fabrics Market?

5. What are the opportunities in the Global Tire Cord & Tire Fabrics Market?

6. What are the modes of entering the Global Tire Cord & Tire Fabrics Market?



Read the full report: https://www.reportlinker.com/p05871679/?utm_source=PRN



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ReportLinker is an award-winning market research solution. Reportlinker finds and organizes the latest industry data so you get all the market research you need - instantly, in one place.



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Yesterday, Prime Minister Narendra Modi addressed the nation to announce an extension of the world's largest lock-down. 130 crore Indians will now observe the loc-down for two more weeks until May 3rd.

But this update of a nation-wide lockdown extension resulted in utter chaos as thousands of migrant workers gathered at the Bandra West bus station demanding to be allowed to go back to their native towns.

Free Press Journal

While most people were empathetic with this plight of migrant laborers demanding to go back home as the lockdown has dwindled their earnings and ended their livelihood, Rangoli Chandel, sister-manager of Kangana Ranaut had a rather unexpected opinion on the whole situation.

Taking to Twitter while sharing a video of migrant workers gathered at a bus terminal in Mumbai, Rangoli requested the Prime Minister the following.

My request to Modi ji people who want to die please dont stop them...but please dont let them carry the virus to other states  https://t.co/BMSJLIVK8P  Rangoli Chandel (@Rangoli_A) April 14, 2020

"M y request to Modi ji people who want to die please dont stop them...but please dont let them carry the virus to other states," tweeted Rangoli.

TOI

This statement by Rangoli was met with mixed reactions by people, some claiming that what Rangoli said is absolutely on point while others wanted her to be a little more empathetic.

A perfect example of Mismanagement by administration..... Those people came to Mumbai to earn their livelihood ....... It's a shame to even consider them not worth living  Anand (@Anand14308929) April 14, 2020

I wanna say this again, this time with sadness!

"Didi Sara time kitaabon mei hi nikaal dia, thodi empathy or moral values bhi seekh Leti"  Nitin Singh (@natty_nitin) April 14, 2020

Rangoli these are poor people and away from their home .. govt should plan to help them safe journeys to their home  Manoj Kumar (@manoj100001) April 14, 2020

Ab kuchh liberals ki fir jal Jayegi ye kya bol diya  Sahil Chawla (@SahilCh57161043) April 14, 2020

Well said.... Rangoli ji

In logo ne kabhi kisi desh ko copret Nhi kiya ,, ya ti islamic

Desh banayenge ya ashanti

Failayenge  Pankaj Kaushal 247.....Self (@PankajK66876629) April 14, 2020

In this crisis, everyone deserves to be home. Nobody and especially the poor shouldn't have to pay this big a price for a rich man's disease. Moreover, the government should value every life and ensure these migrants safely reach home.
What The Irish Wildlife Trust calls the annual scourge of wildfires on the hills has always posed dangers, but creates a new kind of threat in recent times, writes Ray Ryan.

A new vision for the hills of Ireland is being sought following a recent spate of gorse fires that damaged habitats and

diverted vital emergency services from focusing on the Covid-19 crisis.

Several hundred hectares of forest and woodland are destroyed by fire every year. The period of highest risk occurs between February and June, when ground vegetation is dead and dry following winter.

It is also the prime season for nesting birds, breeding mammals, and regeneration of growth and habitats. Fires at this time of year can have a devastating impact on wildlife.

The cost of fighting these outbreaks and the loss of standing timber is also significant. Each year, emergency services are deployed for long periods bringing outbreaks under control, sometimes with back-up from helicopters and even drones.

Burning vegetation on uncultivated land between March 1 and August 31 is banned.

People who breach those laws are liable to prosecution and could face fines, imprisonment, and endanger farm payments.

Kerry firefighters recently spent more than seven hours tackling a fire which spread across 150 acres of Killarney National Park.

Outbreaks were also reported from West Cork to the Dublin Mountains, with the annual scourge of wildfires hitting the hills of Kerry, Clare, Louth, Leitrim, and other locations.

While some fires may be accidental, many have been shown to result from the illegal burning of scrub, malicious intent, and carelessness.

Teagasc says forest owners and neighbouring landowners should be particularly vigilant during evenings and weekends when land burning is most likely to take place.

It recommends that fire breaks be inspected regularly and vegetation kept free. Fire plans are deemed essential management tools and co-operating with neighbours is regarded as vital for successful fire prevention.

All members of rural communities can assist and share responsibility for the protection of our countryside, forest resource, and property, says Teagasc.

Awareness of the real threat from fire, forward planning, co-operation, and effective prevention mechanisms are critical elements to achieve this.

Colour-coded Forest Fire Danger Notices are issued during the main wildfire risk season from February through to September.

A further orange warning issued last Thursday remains in force until midday tomorrow. Three notices  two orange (high risk) and one yellow (moderate)  were issued in March.

These provide forest owners and managers with advance warning of high-risk weather conditions and permit appropriate readiness measures to be taken in advance of fire outbreaks.

Local authorities whose fire services, along with forestry workers, are on the frontline of tackling the outbreaks, have appealed to the public to refrain from any activities such as lighting fires outdoors and dumping hot ashes.

Donegal County Council said its ability to maintain the fire services capability to respond promptly to incidents where life or property is at risk is dependent on having its brigades immediately available for call-out.

It said this capability is greatly reduced, and consequently life and property is placed at greater risk, when brigades are responding to large-scale wildfires similar to those that occurred last year.

Mayor of County Cork Ian Doyle said lives of property owners, people on the land, and frontline emergency personnel  who are already under pressure  are being endangered by illegal fires.

Everyone in our community needs to be mindful of how their actions can affect the lives of others, he said, stressing the need to allow emergency services to respond to the situation at hand.

Coillte national estates risks manager Michael Power said there is a high risk of forest fires now, particularly in upland areas. This is expected to continue as we experience ongoing dry weather over the spring and summer months, he said.

Mr Power said forest fires pose a serious health and safety risk to the public and to people working in the sector. They are very difficult to control, and they put firefighters and forest personnel at great risk.

It is particularly important that emergency services are not put at additional risk during what is an incredibly difficult period for all frontline services across the country.

Mr Power urged the public to avoid all outdoor use of fires and other ignition sources such as cigarettes on forest lands.

The Irish Wildlife Trust has called for more Government action to stop what it termed the annual scourge of wildfires on the hills.

Campaigns officer Padraig Fogarty said stricter penalties have been introduced for those with burnt land in recent years, but more needs to be done.

He said a new vision for the beleaguered hills is required where State bodies and private landowners are encouraged to re-wild landscapes or introduce farming practices that are sensitive to nature conservation.

Such an approach, we believe, would result in enormous positive benefits for climate targets, nature, and people living in these areas, he said

Agriculture, Food, and Marine Minister Michael Creed warned landowners not to carry out illegal burning of land.

Most on-farm visits are currently suspended due to the Covid-19 crisis, but his department is continuing to carefully monitor satellite imagery to identify any parcels of land that are burnt illegally. Follow-up ground inspections will take place where necessary.

Creed said: It would be an act of gross disregard for your community if you set illegal fires that could stretch the resources of our emergency services when they are already prioritising care for the vulnerable in our society at this particular time.

Stressing that this is an unprecedented time in Ireland, he said everyone must play their part in supporting the emergency services and ensuring they are not needlessly diverted.

Culture, Heritage, and Gaeltacht Minister Josepha Madigan urged everyone to be conscious of the danger posed by fires, particularly those on open ground, which can very quickly spread out of control.

We have all seen how homes and lives can be threatened and we can also see the damage to the landscape and to valuable habitats caused by illegal and uncontrolled fires, she said.
The well-funded Japanese space startup Synspective has tapped launch provider Rocket Lab to take its first Earth observation satellite to orbit. Launch is planned for late 2020, and the company's StriX- craft will be the sole payload.

Synspective was founded in 2018 and by mid-2019 had raised about $100 million, making it one of the most successful recent funding stories in the country. It's going to need all that and more, though, to realize its ambition of a 25-satellite constellation regularly imaging the whole planet.

The number may seem small when compared to Planet and SpaceX, which will require hundreds or thousands of satellites to cover the Earth. That's because Synspective's craft are not making visual observations or providing internet access, but imaging the planet's surface using what's called synthetic aperture radar.

This difficult technique uses the motion of the satellite to essentially imitate a much larger antenna, letting it produce highly detailed imagery through cloud cover and other interference. It also can cover a much wider area than an optical camera or a radio antenna beaming data to dishes on the surface.

The satellites themselves are about 100 kilograms each and are smaller than existing SAR systems  an advantage that lets Synspective use a smaller launch vehicle like Rocket Lab's Electron to put its birds in the air.

The launch isn't scheduled yet, but as the sole customer, Synspective will have lots of latitude in choosing the time of launch and target orbit. "We are very pleased to work with Rocket Lab, a pioneer in rocket ventures," said Synspective founder and CEO Motoyuki Arai in a press release. "We are also grateful for their flexibility in accepting our requests on the satellites orbit and launch period."

At present the plan is only for "late 2020" and to launch from Rocket Lab's Launch Complex 1 in New Zealand, not its brand new one in the States. We'll know more closer to launch time.
In a traditional American household, parents are normally able to assist their children with homework, from directly applying their knowledge to the material to helping them with technology like connecting students to resources on the internet.

Some parents, however, are refugees and immigrants from parts of the world where education is not a priority and are incapable of assisting their children with their homework when enrolled in American public schools.

ON HOUSTONCHRONICLE.COM: Coronavirus live updates: Infection rates at Harris County Jail continue to rise

Dr. Aisha Siddiqui, founder of Culture of Health Advancing Together, helped create CHAT Academy, a tutoring service that assists students in the Gulfton area, where many immigrant communities call home. Now, amid COVID-19, the non-profit is in dire need of support as many students and volunteer tutors are falling out of the program due to the complications of distance learning and economic uncertainty.

It was already a challenge when parents came to CHAT in person before COVID-19 because they didnt know how to check their students homework or grades because everything is online, said Dr. Siddiqui, so taking the entire education system online is not as easy for the folks we serve as it is for others.

Chat was founded in 2015 by Dr. Siddiqui while she was completing her doctorate in public health. She felt there was a need for an organization that can work with immigrants and refugees who come to America and feel isolated because they werent able to completely integrate into the American system.

While trying to understand what exactly the people she works with need to become fully independent, she started asking parents: how do the kids do homework?

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Homework? The kids dont do homework, Dr. Siddiqui recalled parents saying. One mother told Dr. Siddiqui that her daughter goes to school, but the teacher just tells her to sit in the corner while she teaches the rest of the class.

They dont know English, so they dont understand, said Dr. Siddiqui, and teachers dont have time to stop teaching the other students to focus on one.

In 2017, Dr. Siddiqui started CHAT Academy. Hosted out of a Gulfton apartment, students are connected with volunteer tutors as they are assisted with homework, learn English, engage in enrichment activities and have the opportunity to be with students just like them.

But when the stay at home ordinance was set in place, CHAT lacked the technological and economic resources to stay connected with many of the students they help.

Because students are not used to distanced learning, said Dr. Siddiqui, its very difficult for them to stay engaged online. We do many things we think we can do from home to continue to engage with the community but the community that we serve is not ready or doesnt have the mindset for this kind of system.

The volunteer tutors are also feeling the effects of the outbreak as many of them who would normally have full-time jobs have been furloughed or no longer employed and must think about getting another job, which means they may not be able to tutor anymore.

With the economic impact of COVID-19, CHAT may not be able to afford the two-bedroom Gulfton apartment they work out of, even after the pandemic is over.

"We may not be able to pay the rent; we may not be able to pay utilities. I have already disconnected the internet, said Dr. Siddiqui. It's highly possible we may not be back in that same apartment. We rely heavily on private donations and right now even our regular donors are not as engaged with CHAT because of COVID-19".

If CHAT goes away, according to Dr. Siddiqui, the community they serve will suffer. In the region in which they serve, there are about 50 different languages spoken by about 45,000 residents from 80 different countries. Not only does CHAT provide their tutoring service but offers ESL classes for women, free yoga and computer services, a photography course, skills training, and job resources, and is even doing CENSUS work.

CHAT also provides COVID-19 messaging to these communities who, as Dr. Siddiqui puts it, is part of the Houston family. If CHAT is not able to communicate to the community, the entire Houston region could be affected.

To see how you can help, go to chattx.org.

ryan.nickerson@hcnonline.com
LONDON (dpa-AFX) - Hunting Plc. (HTG.L), an energy services group, reported Wednesday that its first-quarter trading was broadly in line with management's expectations. However, the impact of the oil price decline has affected demand within the segments focused on US onshore completions since March end amid the coronavirus pandemic. Going ahead, the company said its Board has decided to withdraw 2020 full year guidance. In its trading update, the company said its other segments are likely to see declines towards the end of the second quarter, given that orders are continuing to be completed across all of Hunting's operating regions for a variety of offshore and international projects. The Balance Sheet remains robust with good liquidity, including undrawn core bank borrowing facilities of $160.0 million committed until 2022, and a net cash position of $22.3 million at 31 March 2020, compared to $123.1 million at 31 December 2019. 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.
It's one of the biggest unknowns about the coronavirus, one that determines what comes next for hundreds of thousands of Americans who have endured covid-19 and now appear to be fully recovered. Are they immune?Can they resume normal life, and shrug off the fears and anxieties that are inescapable side-effects of this pathogen?

One idea currently getting discussed at the highest levels of government is that such people should be granted a certificate of immunity - or some kind of special clearance that says this person is no longer infectious or vulnerable to the disease.

But the proposal is mired in slippery science of this new virus. No one knows if a recovered covid-19 patient is actually immune to a new infection - or if they are immune, how complete or long-lasting that might be.

Some kind of immunity post-infection is the most plausible scenario for covid-19 patients. That's the pattern with most infectious diseases. The body's remarkably adaptive immune system typically clears out a virus and then maintains sentinel disease-fighting antibodies that are ready to repel a subsequent attack.

Yet there are preliminary reports out of South Korea and China, not yet peer reviewed but gaining broad attention, that have surprised and baffled scientists. Some survivors test positive after they've been officially cured. They also have widely varying amounts of antibodies - abundant in some survivors, undetectable in others.

Serology testing, still being rolled out across the United States, looks at blood serum for signs of antibodies to the virus. Authorities have hailed the arrival of these tests as crucial to the goal of restarting the crippled economy. They could also help answer the key questions about the coronavirus, such as how many people became infected without symptoms, and how widespread it is in the community.

Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, told CNN that, once testing is more widespread, it's possible people might eventually carry some form of identification showing they're immune to the virus.

"It's one of those things that we talk about when we want to make sure that we know who the vulnerable people are," Fauci said.

But it's not obvious that such tests would clarify the issue of immunity, and other key questions remain, including: Who would issue the certificates of immunity? How would people get them? What exactly would these people be allowed to do?

"It looks like the train is getting ready to leave the station and nobody has checked to see what the track ahead is like," said Henry Greely, director of the Stanford Center for Law and the Biosciences.

In the race to respond to the pandemic, the antibody tests are hitting the market without the usual level of due diligence.

"I am concerned that some of the antibody tests that are in the market, that haven't gone through the FDA scientific review, may not be as accurate as we'd like them to be," Food and Drug Administration commissioner Stephen Hahn said this past weekend on "Meet the Press."

What this means, in practice, is that a positive result for coronavirus antibodies might not be a rock-solid case for being immune. Simply being positive might not be enough; people might need a certain threshold level of antibodies to be protected. Again, no one knows what that level might be.

What should, in theory, create at least some level of immunity is surviving a serious bout with the disease. A study in the wake of SARS, the similar coronavirus that triggered an epidemic in 2003, showed that survivors maintained neutralizing antibodies for two years on average, with the number antibodies declining thereafter. Other coronaviruses in circulation in the human species also lead to at least partial immunity for some period of time.

The immunity question has implications for whether covid-19 follows an annual cycle like seasonal influenza, or returns every two years, or goes dormant for, say, five years and then erupts again, according to a research paper published Tuesday in the journal Science. The authors noted that two other coronaviruses in circulation, which cause common colds, result in about 45 weeks of immunity on average. If the new virus follows that pattern, it would likely create annual outbreaks, they found.

In one small study 30 years ago, 15 people volunteered to have coronavirus 229E, which causes common cold symptoms, squirted up their noses. Ten became infected, and eight developed cold symptoms. A year later, all but one of them returned to be reinfected again. The majority were reinfected, but those who had been ill before did not develop cold symptoms. Moreover, the period during which the patients shed the virus, and were potentially contagious, was shorter.

The new virus, SARS-CoV-2, is genetically very similar to the first SARS virus - hence the "2" - but it affects people differently. It is not as lethal but is more easily spread. Many people who are infected do not develop symptoms at all, and yet can potentially still transmit the virus to others.

A report from China that has not yet been peer-reviewed found a wide range of antibodies among people with mild cases of the virus. Most strikingly, younger people had fewer antibodies in the wake of the disease - and 30 percent of those sampled had low levels. Some individuals had no trace of antibodies. That has raised the question of whether a person with a mild infection, one confirmed by the sensitive PCR test, might still be susceptible to a second infection.

A report out of South Korea has raised that issue more directly. Health officials said that 91 patients who had recovered from the virus, a diagnosis confirmed by a negative test result, had subsequently tested positive.

They might not have been reinfected, however. The tests are extremely sensitive and could have detected lingering traces of genetic material from nonviable virus. Because the virus does damage to the lungs, one possibility is that the debris getting cleared out could leave fragments of viral genetic material circulating in the body, Vineet Menachery, a virologist at the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston, pointed out on Twitter.

Korean officials are now taking samples from the patients who tested positive to try to grow the virus in a dish, which will be the true test of whether the people were still shedding live virus. They expect results in two weeks.

Someday, the U.S. and much of the world may have herd immunity to covid-19. That day is still very far away, likely arriving only when a safe vaccine is widely deployed. Herd immunity occurs when a large proportion of a population - typically 70 to 80 percent - is not vulnerable to infection.

The influential pandemic model developed by the University of Washington's Institute of Health Metrics and Evaluation assumes that by June the percentage of Americans infected by the coronavirus will be in the single digits. In New York City, the nation's covid-19 epicenter, about 1 percent of the population has now tested positive.

- - -

The Washington Post's Min Joo Kim in Seoul contributed to this report.
Source: Xinhua| 2020-04-15 10:20:49|Editor: zyl

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CANBERRA, April 15 (Xinhua) -- The International Monetary Fund (IMF) has warned that Australia will suffer its largest economic hit since the Great Depression in the wake of the coronavirus crisis.

In its forecasts for the global economy, the IMF predicted that Australia's gross domestic product (GDP) would contract by 6.7 percent, or 130 billion Australian dollars (83.7 billion U.S. dollars), this year.

It would be the biggest hit to the Australian economy since 1930, when the economy is estimated to have contracted by about 9.5 percent amid the Great Depression, and would mark the end of 28 consecutive years of economic growth, according to local media.

"It is very likely that this year the global economy will experience its worst recession since the Great Depression, surpassing that seen during the global financial crisis a decade ago." the report said.

Australia's economy is expected to sustain a bigger blow than that of countries that have been hit harder by COVID-19.

However, the Australian economy is expected to grow by 6.1 percent in 2021.

The IMF report said that Australian unemployment would average 7.6 percent in 2020 before increasing to 8.9 percent in 2021.

Responding to the report, Treasurer Josh Frydenberg said Australia was in a better position to cope with the economic impacts of the virus.

"Australia approaches this crisis from a position of economic strength," he said in a media release on Wednesday.

"Our measures are temporary, targeted and proportionate to the challenge we face and will ensure Australia bounces back stronger on the other side."
Two unaccompanied minors watch the departures board at an Athens airport before boarding a chartered flight to Luxembourg under a new EU relocation scheme.  UNHCR/Achilleas Zavallis

IOM, the International Organization for Migration, UNHCR, the UN Refugee Agency, and UNICEF, the UN Childrens Fund, today welcomed the relocation of 12 unaccompanied asylum-seeking children from Greece to Luxembourg. The children, who had been living in overcrowded reception and identification centres for several months on the islands of Lesvos, Samos and Chios, arrived safely in Luxembourg this afternoon. Germany is in the process of relocating another group of unaccompanied children from Greece, who are due to arrive this weekend.

These are the first relocations under a European Union initiative for 1,600 unaccompanied children in which ten Member States have pledged to participate.

The three UN agencies greeted the arrival as an encouraging start in a larger effort to relocate vulnerable children from Greece in the coming weeks. The agencies highlighted that the progress made by Greece, Luxembourg and Germany to relocate unaccompanied children is in line with the childrens best interests, considers their international protection needs and takes into account existing family ties.

The relocation efforts are humane, concrete demonstrations of European solidarity. The European Commissions coordination role has also been crucial to help find region-wide durable solutions for these particularly vulnerable children. The agencies noted that there is a need to move beyond one-off relocation exercises and establish more predictable arrangements for relocation within the EU, for longer-term impact.

The importance of this crucial initiative is amplified now due to the challenges we are all facing from COVID-19. Relocation of vulnerable children especially at a time of heightened hardship, sends a strong message of European solidarity and we hope to see this expand soon, said Ola Henrikson, IOM Regional Director for the EEA, EU and NATO.

Todays relocation of one girl and 11 boys, two of them Syrian and ten Afghans aged 11 to 15, has been led by the Governments of Greece and Luxembourg, with the support of the European Commission, UNHCR and IOM.

UNHCR, together with the European Asylum Support Office (EASO) and Greek NGO partners (Metadrasi and Praksis) has been assisting the Greek authorities in identifying unaccompanied children for relocation and determining their best interest, in close coordination with the Ministry of Migration and Asylums Special Secretary for the Protection of Unaccompanied Minors, Eirini Agapidaki. Best interest determinations were also completed for a group of unaccompanied children who arrived in Athens from the islands this morning and will depart for Germany this Saturday.

Twelve children are today looking at a brighter future in a new country, said Philippe Leclerc, UNHCR Representative in Greece. UNHCR has worked tirelessly alongside Greece, EASO, and NGOs to ensure that the childrens best interests are fully considered. European countries must work together to share the responsibility with Greece and ensure that all unaccompanied children are safe and cared for.

Prior to their departure from Greece, the children were transferred from the islands to an IOM facility in Athens. IOM conducted standard health assessments and medical examinations. Each child was tested for COVID-19, with all test results returning negative.

IOM organized the flights and predeparture orientation sessions for each child. Children were provided with information on what to expect during their journey and on arrival in Luxembourg. IOM escorts accompanied the children on the flight from Greece and ensured a safe handover of the children to relevant authorities and partners in Luxembourg.

On arrival children must have safe, supported and community-based accommodation that facilitates their social integration, including during mandatory quarantine. Children should not be housed in large shelters or centres and will require rapid access to health care, psychosocial support, education and other essential services.

I hope todays successful relocation will spur other EU States that have made pledges to accelerate action in following suit, said Ms. Afshan Khan, UNICEF Regional Director for Europe and Central Asia and Special Coordinator for the Refugee and Migrant Response in Europe. This action is critical, because children identified for relocation are the most vulnerable and most in need of protection. It is also a tangible way to support the ongoing efforts of Greek authorities to look after the thousands of refugee and migrant children who will remain under their care.

UNICEF, UNHCR and IOM have worked closely to establish standards for which children would be identified and prioritized for relocation. The agencies joint document,Minimum Child Protection Standards for Identification of Unaccompanied and separated Children to be Relocated from Greece to other countries in the European Union asserts that these standards must be firmly rooted within international child rights legal frameworks, including the Convention on the Rights of the Child, and the 1951 Refugee Convention which lays out the considerations under which international protection needs would be established.

In addition to international protection needs, several other principles should guide prioritization and selection criteria should be as flexible and open as possible to allow more categories of vulnerable people to be included in relocation.In all cases, the agencies say, a best interest assessment should always be completed to consider solutions in line with a childs individual circumstances and best interests.

As of early April, there were more than 5,200 unaccompanied and separated children in Greece in urgent need of durable solutions, including expedited registration, family reunification and relocation. Among them, over 1,600 are exposed to severe risks, including exploitation and violence, and facing precarious conditions in over-crowded reception and identification centres on the Aegean islands.EU and Member State support is crucial to ensure their immediate protection in Greece, as well as their longer-term health and well-being including through relocation.

About IOM

Established in 1951, IOM is the leading UN-related agency in the field of migration and works closely with governmental, intergovernmental and non-governmental partners. IOM works to help ensure the orderly and humane management of migration, to promote international cooperation on migration issues, to assist in the search for practical solutions to migration problems and to provide humanitarian assistance to migrants in need, including refugees and internally displaced people. For more information about IOM, visit https://www.iom.int/

About UNHCR

UNHCR, the UN Refugee Agency, leads international action to protect people forced to flee their homes because of conflict and persecution. We deliver life-saving assistance such as shelter, food and water, help safeguard fundamental human rights, and develop solutions that ensure people have a safe place to call home where they can build a better future. We also work to ensure that stateless people are granted a nationality. For more information about UNHCR, visit https://www.unhcr.org/about-us.html



About UNICEF

UNICEF promotes the rights and wellbeing of every child, in everything we do. Together with our partners, we work in 190 countries and territories to translate that commitment into practical action, focusing special effort on reaching the most vulnerable and excluded children, to the benefit of all children, everywhere. For more information about UNICEF and its work for children, visit www.unicef.org/eca

For additional information, please contact:

UNICEF:

Melanie Sharpe, UNICEF Europe and Central Asia (Geneva), [email protected] , +41 79 834 7401

, +41 79 834 7401 Olga SiokouSiova, UNICEF Greece, [email protected] , +30 211 2340 297



IOM:

Ryan Schroeder at IOM Brussels, [email protected] , + 32 492 25 02 34

, + 32 492 25 02 34 Christine Nikolaidou at IOM Greece, [email protected] , + 30 6947 833 412

, + 30 6947 833 412 Angela Wells at IOM Geneva, [email protected] , +41 79 430 5365

, +41 79 430 5365 Safa Msehli at IOM Geneva, [email protected] , +41 79 403 5526

, +41 79 403 5526 Sabine Lehman at IOM Berlin, [email protected] , +49 30 278 77 817



UNHCR:

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Sometimes we're just coming down with historical milestones. And at other times history just sneaks in the side door, bringing a major first we risk barely noticing.

A statement was issued by both Fianna Fail and Fine Gael yesterday at precisely 5.15pm. "Both leaders met this morning and agreed the framework document. Both leaders will brief their respective parliamentary parties tomorrow," it read.

Nineteen words drew a line under 98 years of political history rooted in the brutality of the Civil War in 1922-23.

Since the State's foundation either Fianna Fail or Fine Gael headed every single government. Now, despite huge remaining obstacles to it becoming reality, the Civil War parties' leaders are agreed in principle to share government for the first time.

True, there are few if any differences between Fianna Fail and Fine Gael. Former Fianna Fail leader Sean Lemass used to insist: "The difference is that we're in - and they're out."

And that was the story for much of Lemass's lifetime. The crude score is that over the last 98 years, Fianna Fail has been either the single or main party of government for 63 years. Fine Gael offered a sort of tweedledee respite, often leading a coalition of "Anybody But Fianna Fail".

Expand Close Charles Haughey, Fianna Fail 1979-1981; for nine months in 1982; and again 1987 until 1992 / Facebook

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Whatsapp Charles Haughey, Fianna Fail 1979-1981; for nine months in 1982; and again 1987 until 1992

Charlie Haughey broke Fianna Fail's taboo of never sharing government in June 1989 when Dail arithmetic obliged him to coalesce with the breakaway Progressive Democrats. The move copper-fastened an established trend away from single-party government on a UK political model, and towards coalitions happening in Europe.

Since then we have seen many hitherto improbable coalition line-ups. But the idea of Fianna Fail sharing a cabinet table with Fine Gael remained taboo.

There were two occasions in the past generation when the idea was briefly on the agenda. Fine Gael leader Alan Dukes had supported Haughey in a minority government from 1987 until 1989 under the so-called "Tallaght Strategy".

Expand Close Finance Minister Alan Dukes,TD with his Budget Bag on Budget Day 29 January 1986. / Facebook

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Whatsapp Finance Minister Alan Dukes,TD with his Budget Bag on Budget Day 29 January 1986.

After that bad election for Haughey in June 1989, the two leaders did meet for talks on government formation on June 21.

Dukes made an offer Haughey had to refuse, demanding seven of the 15 cabinet seats and an equal share of the Taoiseach's term. That drove Fianna Fail to the Progressive Democrats conceding far fewer government jobs.

Again, in March 2016, after an election stalemate, Fine Gael leader Enda Kenny offered Micheal Martin a coalition with an equal cabinet seat share and rotation of the Taoiseach's term. That was a bridge too far for Martin who opted to give Kenny outside support under "confidence and supply".

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Despite their lack of difference, Fianna Fail and Fine Gael are venerable political machines with huge culture and tradition.

This alliance will not be easy to achieve, and finding other allies will be extremely hard also. But even if coalition does not happen this move is still seismic.
By Deacon Keith Fournier

The tiles given to Mary have never been viewed as in any way diminishing the unique role of her Son and Savior Jesus Christ.

From the earliest theological reflections in Christian history we find the defense of the most important of the titles of Mary, "Theotokos" in Greek. It is translated God-bearer or "Mother of God". The great Bishop of Constantinople, St. John Chrysostom (d. 407), composed a Eucharistic Prayer for the Divine Liturgy (Holy Mass) still in use today:

"It is truly just to proclaim you blessed, O Mother of God, who are most blessed, all pure and Mother of our God. We magnify you who are more honorable than the Cherubim and incomparably more glorious than the Seraphim. You who, without losing your virginity, gave birth to the Word of God. You who are truly the Mother of God."

Objections to the term occurred early on in Christian history. In the fifth century another Bishop of Constantinople named Nestorius claimed that Mary was the mother only of the human Jesus to whom the divine Word of God was somehow joined. He and his supporters insisted that Mary was only the "mother of Christ." One sees the danger implicit in this objection. The errant Bishop carried through by claiming that only the human Jesus died on the mountain of Calvary. In short, he and his followers dis-Incarnated Jesus Christ.

St. Cyril, the Bishop of Alexandria refuted Nestorius, asserting, "It was not that an ordinary man was born first of the Holy Virgin, on whom afterwards the Word descended; what we say is that, being united with the flesh from the womb, (the Word) has undergone birth in the flesh, making the birth in the flesh His own..."

On June 22, 431, the Council of Ephesus was convened. That great Council insisted "If anyone does not confess that the Emmanuel is truly God and therefore that the holy Virgin is the Mother of God "Theotokos" (since she begot according to the flesh the Word of God made flesh), anathema sit." The Council affirmed that Jesus Christ is One Person, with two natures--human and divine and that this is a union which cannot be separated.

The Council's affirmation that Mary can rightfully be called the Mother of God is thus profoundly "Christological", affirming who Jesus is and who we can become in Him. Mary is not Mother of God, the Father, or Mother of God, the Holy Spirit; rather, she is Mother of God, the Son--Jesus Christ.

The Incarnation is a "mystery", in the sense of the Greek word from which our English word is derived, "mysterion". It is incapable of being fully expressed in words but needs to be received as a gift in faith.

The tiles given to Mary have never been viewed as in any way diminishing the unique role of her Son and Savior Jesus Christ. They were the fruit of men and women who, inspired by the Spirit, were given profound insights into the meaning of Jesus Christ and the work of salvation.

Litany is a Greek word for prayer (Latin litania, letania, from the Greek lite, prayer or supplication). Among many Litanies or prayers which recount her titles we find the Litany of Loretto from 1558 in the Western Church:

CATARINO: Coronation of Mary - 1360s Madonna in the Church (detail) - Jan van Eyck - 1425

Below is a portion of the Litany of Loreto:

Holy Mary, pray for us.

Holy Mother of God,

Holy Virgin of virgins,

Mother of Christ,

Mother of the Church,

Mother of divine grace,

Mother most pure,

Mother most chaste,

Mother inviolate,

Mother undefiled,

Mother most amiable,

Mother most admirable,

Mother of good counsel,

Mother of our Creator,

Mother of our Savior,

Virgin most prudent,

Virgin most venerable,

Virgin most renowned,

Virgin most powerful,

Virgin most merciful,

Virgin most faithful,

Mirror of justice,

Seat of wisdom,

Cause of our joy,

Spiritual vessel,

Vessel of honor,

Singular vessel of devotion,

Mystical rose,

Tower of David,

Tower of ivory,

House of gold,

Ark of the covenant,

Gate of heaven,

Morning star,

Health of the sick,

Refuge of sinners,

Comforter of the afflicted,

Help of Christians,

Queen of angels,

Queen of patriarchs,

Queen of prophets,

Queen of apostles,

Queen of martyrs,

Queen of confessors,

Queen of virgins,

Queen of all saints,

Queen conceived without original sin,

Queen assumed into heaven,

Queen of the most holy Rosary,

Queen of families,

Queen of peace
Syracuse, N.Y.  Passenger traffic plunged nearly 50% at Syracuse Hancock International Airport in March as the coronavirus outbreak forced many to cancel their travel plans.

A total of 113,672 people flew in and out of the airport last month, 47% fewer than the 216,388 who passed through the airport in March 2019, the Syracuse Regional Airport Authority reported Wednesday.

Airlines have canceled nearly 80% of their flights at the airport since the pandemic began its rapid spread last month, leaving Syracuse Hancock a virtual ghost town. Even the few flights that are operating often carry few passengers.

The sudden drop in passenger traffic is reminiscent of the decline in air travel that followed the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks.

The photo on the left shows the parking lot at Syracuse Hancock International Airport full on Feb. 20, 2020. On the right, the same parking lot on April 9, 2020, is nearly empty. The coronavirus outbreak's impact on travel has left the airport a virtual ghost town. (Rick Moriarty | rmoriarty@syracuse.com)

It is made even more dramatic by the fact that the decrease in traffic did not start until halfway through March. The drop is expected to be far greater in April.

Passenger traffic at the airport had been rising sharply prior to the coronavirus outbreak, which has killed 10,834 in New York, including 11 in Onondaga County. Traffic soared 11.5% in 2019 and was on a similar pace in the first two months of 2020.

The airport authority is advising people who have travel scheduled in the coming weeks to contact their airline directly to confirm the status of their flight.

12 Photos show Syracuse airport a near ghost town

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Coronavirus in NY: Cases, maps, charts and resources

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Complete coronavirus coverage on syracuse.com

Rick Moriarty covers business news and consumer issues. Got a tip, comment or story idea? Contact him anytime: Email | Twitter | Facebook | 315-470-3148
Dodger Stadium sits empty. (Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times)

Los Angeles may hold off on allowing big gatherings until 2021 because of the coronavirus threat, according to an internal Los Angeles Fire Department email reviewed by The Times.

Mayor Eric Garcetti raised the issue during his weekly briefing Monday with a group of high-level staff from several departments, including Fire Chief Ralph Terrazas. Garcetti indicated during the conference call that "large gatherings such as concerts and sporting events may not be approved in the city for at least 1 year," according to the email.

LAFD Deputy Chief Trevor Richmond wrote the email summarizing Terrazas' meeting with Garcetti and others and sent it Tuesday to several fire department staffers. The email was reviewed by The Times.

Fire Department spokesman Peter Sanders said Tuesday that Terrazas was "paraphrasing information he received from the mayor regarding possible scenarios for reopening timelines across a range of events."

Garcetti spokesman Alex Comisar confirmed the mayor's comments at the meeting. "The mayor was generally referencing studies of current and historical data and best practices for safely reopening our economy," Comisar said.

Comisar said the mayor doesn't have a timeline for Los Angeles to begin resuming large-scale events. Garcetti himself has repeatedly told Angelenos during his nightly press briefings that it would be a mistake to reopen businesses and stores before the pandemic can be controlled.

"It's difficult to imagine us getting together in the thousands any time soon. I think we should be prepared for that this year. I think we all have never wanted science to work so quickly. But until there's either a vaccine, some sort pharmaceutical intervention or herd immunity, the science is the science," Garcetti said on CNN Wednesday.

Garcetti also talked during the conference call with his staff about reopening the economy, starting with "essential businesses and small businesses ... phased in over a period of time (6-10 months)," according to Richmond's email.

Story continues

The coronavirus pandemic has caused the cancellation of sporting, music and cultural events across the globe.

California Gov. Gavin Newsom said Tuesday that events that draw hundreds or thousands of strangers will be off limits for the near future, based on current guidelines. The state needs to boost testing, protect high-risk residents from infection and expand hospital capacity before the stay-at-home order imposed last month can be modified, he said.

"The prospect of mass gatherings is negligible at best until we get to herd immunity and we get to a vaccine," Newsom said.

Absent a vaccine, Newsom said that Californians should expect to continue to wear face coverings or masks, and to visit restaurants with fewer tables, disposable menus and waiters wearing masks and gloves as the state slowly transitions back to normal.

His administration suggested the state will introduce guidelines for businesses to conduct health checks when employees return to work.

He also discussed the possibility of staggering school start times throughout the day for students if they return to campus in the fall.

Experts say stay-at-home orders could persist until the end of May or mid-June.

Dr. Robert Kim-Farley, a UCLA medical epidemiologist and infectious disease expert, said by that time, places that have effectively maintained physical distancing measures will see significant reductions in the numbers of cases. In the nations worst-hit areas , hospitals may start to see relief.

Also at that time, Kim-Farley suspects there will be enough capacity to offer tests for the virus and antibodies  to determine whether people are immune  to meet the demand.

In the early summer, perhaps in the middle of June to the end of July, there may be some nuanced, tailored approaches for getting people back to work and easing stay-at-home orders, he said.

Elsewhere, New Orleans Mayor LaToya Cantrell has recommended that large events in that city be pushed off until 2021, according to a local news report.
Breathing heavy wildfire smoke may increase risk of out-of-hospital cardiac arrest

DALLAS, April 15, 2020 -- Exposure to heavy smoke during recent California wildfires raised the risk of out-of-hospital cardiac arrests up to 70%, according to new research published today in the Journal of the American Heart Association, the open access journal of the American Heart Association.

Cardiac arrest occurs when the heart abruptly stops beating properly and can no longer pump blood to vital organs throughout the body. While often referred to interchangeably, cardiac arrest is not the same as a heart attack. A heart attack is when blood flow to the heart is blocked, and sudden cardiac arrest is when the heart malfunctions and suddenly stops beating unexpectedly. A heart attack is a "circulation" problem and sudden cardiac arrest is an "electrical" problem. Out-of-hospital cardiac arrests (OHCAs) are more dangerous because they can lead to death within minutes if no one performs CPR or uses a defibrillator to shock the heart back into a normal rhythm.

The natural cycle of large-scale wildfires is accelerating and exposing both rural and urban communities to wildfire smoke, according to the study. While adverse respiratory effects associated with wildfire smoke are well established, cardiovascular effects are less clear.

"In recent decades, we experienced a significant increase in large-scale wildfires, therefore, more people are being exposed to wildfire smoke. In order to respond properly, it is important for us to understand the health impacts of wildfire smoke exposure," said study author Ana G. Rappold, Ph.D., a research scientist at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's Center for Public Health and Environmental Assessment in the Office of Research and Development.

Researchers examined cardiac arrests during 14 wildfire-affected counties in California between 2015 and 2017, using information submitted to a health registry established by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the Cardiac Arrest Registry to Enhance Survival (CARES). Smoke density exposure was rated as light, medium or heavy according to mapping data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association. The researchers compared smoke exposure on the day of the OHCA to the exposure on the same day of the week in the 3 prior weeks. They also compared the exposure 1, 2 and 3 days before the OHCA to the exposure on the corresponding days in 3 weeks prior to the cardiac arrest.

The analysis found that the risk of out-of-hospital cardiac arrests:

increased on days rated as heavy smoke density and for several days afterwards, with the highest risk (70% higher than on days with no smoke) on the second day after smoke exposure;

increased among both men and women and in people age 35 and older exposed to heavy smoke; and

increased in communities with lower socioeconomic status (20% or more people living below the poverty line) with both medium and heavy smoke exposure.

"Particulate matter from smoke that is inhaled can penetrate deeply into the lungs, and very small particles may cross into the bloodstream. These particles can create an inflammatory reaction in the lungs and throughout the body. The body's defense system may react to activate the fight-or-flight system, increasing heart rate, constricting blood vessels and increasing blood pressure. These changes can lead to disturbances in the heart's normal rhythm, blockages in blood vessels and other effects creating conditions that could lead to cardiac arrest," Rappold said.

Although the researchers had no information about the actions taken by individuals, the increased risk they found in people living in lower-income communities might reflect less access to strategies to reduce exposure. Previous studies have shown that there are more respiratory problems in lower-income communities and worsening congestive heart failure in response to wildfire smoke exposure.

"People in a higher socioeconomic status group who have pre-existing cardiopulmonary conditions may be better able to take effective action to decrease exposure, such as staying indoors, using portable air filters or using effective respirator masks. They may also be more likely to live in homes with air conditioning and efficient air filtration," Rappold said.

"While other studies have found that older adults are more affected, we also observed elevated effects among middle-aged adults (aged 35-64). It is possible that this population may not be aware of their risk and may not have flexibility to discontinue activities that involve exertion and exposure during wildfire smoke episodes," concluded Rappold.

To reduce exposure to wildfire smoke, researchers advise people to stay indoors with doors and windows closed, to use high-efficiency air filters in air conditioning systems, avoid exertion, and consider seeking shelter elsewhere if the home does not have an air conditioner and it is too warm to stay inside.

The small sample size limited the researchers' ability to determine how the risks of smoke exposure might differ among people of different ages and genders. Individuals with personal health questions or concerns should consult with their doctor, researchers said.

###

All authors were supported for this work through their professional affiliations listed in the manuscript.

Co-authors are Caitlin G. Jones, M.S.; Sumi Hoshiko, M.P.H.; Jason Vargo, Ph.D.; Wayne E. Cascio, M.D.; Martin Kharrazi, Ph.D.; and Bryan McNally, M.D.

Additional Resources:

Available multimedia is on right column of release link - https:/ / newsroom. heart. org/ news/ breathing-heavy-wildfire-smoke-may-increase-risk-of-out-of-hospital-cardiac-arrest?preview= 264422114b3650e30c37c1b8c08d272f

Statements and conclusions of study authors published in American Heart Association scientific journals are solely those of the study authors and do not necessarily reflect the Association's policy or position. The Association makes no representation or guarantee as to their accuracy or reliability. The Association receives funding primarily from individuals; foundations and corporations (including pharmaceutical, device manufacturers and other companies) also make donations and fund specific Association programs and events. The Association has strict policies to prevent these relationships from influencing the science content. Revenues from pharmaceutical and device corporations and health insurance providers are available at https:/ / www. heart. org/ en/ about-us/ aha-financial-information .

About the American Heart Association

The American Heart Association is a relentless force for a world of longer, healthier lives. We are dedicated to ensuring equitable health in all communities. Through collaboration with numerous organizations, and powered by millions of volunteers, we fund innovative research, advocate for the public's health and share lifesaving resources. The Dallas-based organization has been a leading source of health information for nearly a century. Connect with us on heart.org, Facebook, Twitter or by calling 1-800-AHA-USA1.

This story has been published on: 2020-04-15. To contact the author, please use the contact details within the article.
President Muhammadu Buhari has congratulated British Prime Minister Boris Johnson following his discharge from the hospital. Boris...





President Muhammadu Buhari has congratulated British Prime Minister Boris Johnson following his discharge from the hospital.





Boris had been admitted to the hospital after testing positive for coronavirus.





In a congratulatory letter dated April 14, Buhari said: I received with great relief the news of your discharge from hospital after being successfully treated for COVID-19.





We all join you in appreciating the wonderful staff at both the hospital and the NHS who worked round the clock to look after you and those afflicted by COVID-19.

Buhari also wished the prime minister full recovery and good health in the coming days.





The prime minister had contracted the disease on March 27 and went on self-isolation afterwards. He was admitted to the hospital after showing persistent symptoms of the disease.





A day after, he was transferred to the intensive care unit after his condition worsened.





He was discharged on Sunday. A statement by Downing Street said the PM would continue his recovery at his country residence, Chequers but would not resume work immediately.





After Johnson was hospitalised, Dominic Raab, UK foreign secretary, had taken over the reins of government.
There has been a worrying spike in domestic violence in Zimbabwe, as the country entered its third and final week of a nationwide lockdown to curb the spread of the coronavirus.

The Musasa Project, a local NGO, said it had already documented 782 cases of abuse in just 13 days, compared to an average of 500 per month.

We believe from the trends that we're seeing that it is going to escalate, said Rotina Mafume Musara, an advocacy programme officer with the group.

We have got young women who have been physically assaulted for asking for food to feed the family, she told RFI. In most cases the woman relies on the partner to provide food.

With unemployment at around 80 percent most Zimbabwean families are dependent on daily informal trade to earn a living. Under the lockdown that started March 30, that is no longer possible.

Another emergency

Zimbabwe has confirmed just 17 cases of COVID-19, three of them fatal. But just over 600 tests have been done, and there is speculation the disease is more prevalent.

President Emmerson Mnangagwa's government has not yet announced whether, like neighbouring South Africa, it will extend its lockdown beyond April 19.

On Monday, 30 Zimbabweans including the country's ambassador to Sudan were quarantined at an isolation facility outside Harare after they arrived aboard an Ethiopian Airlines flight from London.

Musara says as the country responds to one public health emergency, it risks overlooking another.

As much as we say Covid-19 is an emergency, gender based violence is an emergency as well. And once it's declared an emergency, at least you're going to have various actors coming together, sitting at the same table, and trying to come up with solutions to help these women, she said.

She said more emergency shelters for abused women and a robust emergency response from the police are needed.

More than 5,000 arrests

Under the current strict conditions enforced by the army and police, women and children who are bearing the brunt of domestic violence have nowhere to run to. More than 5,000 people have been arrested for defying the lockdown, and the Heal Zimbabwe Trust, a rights group, has reported assaults against some civilians by members of the security forces for not complying with it.

In these circumstances abusers actually know that, 'This person that I'm abusing will not be able to go somewhere to report', says opposition MP, Priscilla Misihairabwi-Mushonga. She has no support system.

The MP told a talk show on Harare's private radio station Capitalk 100.4 FM on Monday: I don't necessarily agree with the fact that people are abusing because they are confined. Abusers have always been abusers.

Axe murder

On Tuesday, the station broadcast a radio drama on domestic abuse entitled, "Women bear the brunt of any outbreak" in an effort to raise awareness.

While women and children may be bearing the brunt of domestic violence, Zimbabweans have been shocked by a report of a 44-year-old woman who was arrested last week for murdering her sleeping husband with an axe on 10 April.

The tragedy, in the second city of Bulawayo, followed an argument over a TV remote.
X-rays allow researchers to map out the 3D structure of proteins relevant to diseases at the scale of molecules and atoms, and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory's (Berkeley Lab's) Advanced Light Source (ALS) X-ray facility has been recalled to action to support research related to COVID-19, the coronavirus disease that has already infected about 2 million people around the world.

A small team of staff at the ALS, which produces beams of X-rays and other types of light to support a wide variety of experiments for researchers from around the world, on March 31 launched several experiments for other scientists who controlled the work remotely.

At this time, only approved COVID-19-related experiments are allowed at ALS - most staff and experiments at the ALS and Berkeley Lab have been sidelined because of shelter-in-place orders that are intended to limit the spread of the virus.

A small group of ALS staff who run the accelerator and ensure safe operations have supported on-site work since experiments resumed.

The specially approved ALS experiments - which were authorized by Berkeley Lab leadership - have so far been carried out by individual scientists working at separate experimental sites, known as beamlines, in the ALS facility in order to maintain social distancing. Additionally, on-site workers are taking extra precautions for safety such as regularly sanitizing equipment.

None of the work involves any live samples of the SARS-CoV-2 virus that causes COVID-19. The samples include crystallized viral proteins that cannot cause infection. Additional samples to be analyzed include host-cell proteins required for infection by the virus.

"Everyone I've talked to is taking an 'everything' approach," said Jay Nix, a participant in the new experiments who is beamline director for the Molecular Biology Consortium, which supports and operates a beamline at the ALS (Beamline 4.2.2) and is a lab affiliate and partner.

"Every idea is on the table," Nix said, including explorations of the form and function of the spiky proteins poking out of the COVID-19 virus in the now-ubiquitous colorized images displayed in COVID-19-related websites and news articles.

Structural studies can lead to drugs that target and attack the virus while leaving other vital systems intact, for example, or that can otherwise improve the body's defenses against the virus.

"There are proteins that are making up the virus structure and a large number of other, non-structural proteins that help in the infection cycle of the virus," said Marc Allaire, a beamline scientist at the ALS who supports several beamlines operated by the Berkeley Center for Structural Biology. The center receives support from participating members for this work, including from a large group of pharmaceutical companies across the U.S. and internationally.

The center is a part of the Lab's Molecular Biophysics and Integrated Bioimaging (MBIB) division, which is connected to all of the beamlines and staff participating in the initial batch of approved COVID-19-related experiments.

The earliest experiments since the ALS restarted used three ALS beamlines (beamlines 4.2.2, 5.0.1, and 5.0.2) that all specialize in macromolecular crystallography, a technique for learning the 3D structure of proteins, viruses, and other samples by beaming X-rays at their crystallized forms.

Light from the X-rays striking the crystals produce patterns that computers then process into 3D reconstructions of the samples.

"I'm pleased the ALS is able to contribute to this important work and make its tools available to the biosciences research community," said ALS Director Steve Kevan. "I personally want to thank our beamline scientists and operations staff for working together to make this happen under very trying circumstances."

MBIB Director Paul Adams said, "It is a testament to the importance of the ALS for this kind of biomedical research that so many groups have requested access to help in their efforts to address COVID-19. The beamlines being used for the crystallography work developed a 'rapid response' capability several years ago, with remote access and automated data collection and analysis, and so were ready to hit the ground running when this crisis occurred."

Work that has been approved at the ALS includes proprietary experiments by several pharmaceutical companies: Switzerland-based Novartis, which has an office in Emeryville, California; San Francisco-based Vir Biotechnology; and Canada-based IniXium, a drug-discovery contract research organization serving the U.S. biotech industry.

Also in the first batch are crystallography experiments by a group of researchers from the lab of David Veesler, an associate professor at the University of Washington. That team is focusing on the spiky proteins on the surface of the COVID-19 virus, which the virus uses to bind to and enter host cells, and how to neutralize them.

Another team, led by Daved Fremont, a professor at Washington University in Saint Louis, will be sending crystallized samples to the ALS, as will a team led by James Hurley, the Judy C. Webb chair and professor of biochemistry, biophysics, and structural biology at UC Berkeley.

Hurley said three structural biologists in his lab are working on COVID-19 research: Tom Flower, Cosmo Buffalo, and Snow Ren. The researchers "have an enormous amount of experience with X-ray crystallography and cryo-electron microscopy," another technique to explore biological samples, he said.

"They have begun working on several projects to characterize structures involved in virus replication, with an emphasis on understanding how viral proteins interact with host proteins and membranes, and on the rapid application of this information to antiviral drug discovery in collaboration with others on campus," he added.

During the AIDS pandemic of the 1980s, Hurley switched fields from physics to structural biology. "I saw how structural biology helped in a pivotal way in the creation of the HIV antivirals that made AIDS a treatable disease instead of a death sentence. That experience gives me a perspective on how structural biology can help with creating new antivirals," he said.

A team led by Natalie Strynadka, a biochemistry professor at the University of British Columbia in Canada, is also expected to ship crystal samples for ALS experiments. Strynadka said her lab is collaborating with a team in Vancouver, Canada, to identify small molecular inhibitors that slow down COVID-19's main viral protease (MPro), an enzyme that breaks down proteins into smaller forms.

In related work, her lab is working with Pennsylvania-based Venatorx Pharmaceuticals and a team led by David Baker at the University of Washington to identify MPro inhibitors. "Understanding where and how these inhibitors bind to MPro using X-ray crystallography will be key in guiding further development," she said.

Ralf Bartenschlager, a virologist and professor at Heidelberg University in Germany, will be sending samples of COVID-19-infected cells, rendered inactive, for study using a technique known as soft X-ray tomography. In this collaborative effort, the aim is to unravel how infection by the SARS-CoV-2 virus alters the structure and organization of infected cells, with the long-term goal to identify viral and cellular targets perturbed by infection that are suitable for antiviral therapy. The experiment will be overseen by the Lab's Carolyn Larabell, also a professor at UC San Francisco and director of the National Center for X-ray Tomography, which develops imaging technologies for biological and biomedical research.

The ALS is also asking the research community to submit other proposals for COVID-19-related experiments, Nix said.

ALS and Berkeley Lab leadership are considering whether to open up additional X-ray capabilities, such as small-angle X-ray scattering (SAXS) and wide-angle X-ray scattering, which enables high-speed characterization of biological samples that can be in a more natural form than some other techniques allow.

Greg Hura, an MBIB research scientist and associate adjunct professor at UC Santa Cruz who operates the SIBYLS (Structurally Integrated BiologY for the Life Sciences) Beamline 12.3.1 at the ALS that conducts SAXS experiments, said, "SIBYLS can also play a role in a multi-technique and multi-national lab consortium to visualize the potential weaknesses of the COVID-19 virus, and help develop new diagnostics."

He added, "Viral genomes (DNA sequences) are small but the large molecules they encode are transformers that can adopt many functions in different contexts. SAXS provides an avenue to study these systems in the many contexts they might be targeted, and can identify the states that are most amenable to viewing them at higher resolution."

Nix noted that Beamline 4.2.2, which he operates, and some other beamlines at the ALS use robotic sample-delivery systems so that once they are filled with samples, experiments can largely operate via remote control.

"I haven't had an onsite user in over 5 years," he said.

It took a team effort, from ALS managers and staff to Berkeley Lab leadership, to make the COVID-19-related research happen, Nix noted. "They were working, even before the 'lights went out,' at the Lab, to see what we could do."

He also noted that a variety of sources of research funding are making this work possible. "It's public, private, and government support all coming together, which is really nice to see," he said.

###

The broader research community is welcome to apply for remote experiments relating to COVID-19 and SARS-CoV-2 at some beamlines via the National Institutes of Health-supported ALS-ENABLE program and an ALS fast-track proposal process known as RAPIDD (Rapid Access Proposals, Industry, and Director's Discretion beam time).

The Advanced Light Source is a DOE Office of Science user facility.

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.
15 Apr 2020, 7:57 PM

Trump halts funding to WHO over handling of coronavirus crisis

US President Donald Trump said on Tuesday he has instructed his administration to halt funding to the World Health Organisation over its handling of the coronavirus pandemic while his administration reviews its response to the global crisis. Trump, at a White House news conference, said the WHO had "failed in its basic duty and it must be held accountable."

Mumbai migrant crisis: Police register FIR against 1,000 workers over lockdown violation

An FIR has been registered against at least 1000 migrant workers for assembling near Bandra railway station in Mumbai on Tuesday in defiance of the coronavirus lockdown norms, causing a public health scare, police said. No arrests have been made yet and the workers are being identified, a Bandra police station official said. Besides section 3 of the Epidemic Diseases Act has also been invoked against them, he said.

Max Healthcare mulls coronavirus tests for entire staff, patients

A leading private hospital group has planned to have COVID-19 tests conducted on its entire workforce and patients, spanning all its facilities in the country. The move comes in the wake of a doctor, a nurse and a non-medical staff at Max Hospital, Saket, Delhi, recently testing positive for coronavirus infection. In addition, going forward, Max healthcare intends to conduct tests for any infection on all patients at the stage of admission itself. The number of coronavirus cases in Delhi on Tuesday stood at 1510 with 28 deaths.

IndiGo to resume operations with 65 planes post Lockdown 2.0

The largest domestic airline company IndiGo has said that it doesn't expect to restart operations with 100 percent capacity after the lockdown gets over on the midnight of May 3. Instead, the carrier is expecting that just 25 percent capacity would come into market post the lockdown period.

IMF cuts India's GDP growth to 1.9%; global economy to see worst recession since 1930s

India's GDP is expected to fall to 1.9 per cent in FY21 as against 5.8 per cent estimated in January amid the ongoing lockdown due to coronavirus pandemic, a global report by the IMF, said. The Indian economy may grow at 4.2 per cent in FY20 as against 5 per cent estimated by the statistics department, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) also said in its bi-annual World Economic Outlook. However, India is the only country other than China to register a positive growth rate in 2020, it added.

Coronavirus effect: India's GDP may contract by 1% in FY21, says ICRA

India's gross domestic product (GDP) could contract by one per cent in financial year 2020-21 due to extension of the nationwide lockdown, says rating agency ICRA. The cut in GDP projection came after India extended the nationwide lockdown till May 3 in an effort to contain the spread of COVID-19. This is the first forecast that indicates that Indian GDP growth could fall into a negative territory.
Solo or with friends. Amateur or expert. Hike how you like

Of all the ways to get around, the most basic and accessible one, is to walk. Its how most of the pioneering explorers across history found their way around the planet. In many places, a hike might be the only way to get to otherwise inaccessible spots. Hikes can be of any kind, depending on how you want it. Want to aimlessly wander about the countryside for a few hours? Or take on a multi-day trail with camping gear? Some may demand expert fitness levels while others can be tackled by the most reluctant couch potato. You could undertake a solo adventure or go along with a group of travellers. Here are four amazing hikes across the world that you should definitely put on your bucket list once the world opens up again.
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Political grandstanding aside, what's messed up is that she, according to comments she's confirmed on her Facebook page, brought one of her kids to this. Social distancing isn't some conspiracy right now, it's saving lives across the country and around the world. It's important to stay out of crowds, and bringing kids to a protest seems kinda irresponsible (We're not even going to ask if they washed their hands.).

It would appear that she's taking a hardline, Trumpian approach to win a district that's currently held by a Republican in Ohio. President Trump's big thing right now is that he wants to open the economy back up like now, and Ackison accordingly seems to want that too ... Except that Trump apparently wants nothing to do with her.

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Three of the first four photos on the sliding mast of her website are of her hanging out with President Trump and Vice President Pence and it's just textbook pandering. President Trump has sent a cease-and-desist asking her to take the photos down, as it looks like he's endorsing her despite having too much on his plate to be dabbling in central Ohio political races. So, essentially, Ackison doesn't give a shit about social media distancing either.
Make no mistake -- the conservative justices on the US Supreme Court are making decisions now that could influence the outcome of the November election. And the ongoing public health crisis consuming the lives of most Americans is just the cover they need.

After refusing for weeks to hold oral arguments via video conference, on Monday the Supreme Court reversed a lower court ruling that would have extended the deadline for Wisconsin voters to send in their absentee ballots. Put simply, they made it harder for the people of Wisconsin, who are grappling with the health impact of coronavirus and pending economic uncertainty, to vote. The primary was taking place Tuesday.

But why would Republicans even care about people voting in a Democratic primary? It's unlikely it has much to do with former Vice President Joe Biden or Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders.

There is, however, a Wisconsin Supreme Court race on the ballot -- one that President Donald Trump cared enough about to take a moment during a global pandemic to tweet in to support of candidate Daniel Kelly earlier this week.

Just a few days later, conservative US Supreme Court justices sided with Republicans in Wisconsin who wanted to protect a state Supreme Court seat by essentially guaranteeing that there would be a depressed voter turnout on the Democratic side.

And if you have any doubt of potential for depressed turnout, consider the fact that Trump was encouraging his loyal supporters in Wisconsin, largely Republican, to venture and vote, while the governor, himself a Democrat, was encouraging his citizens to stay at home.

Though many other states, including New York and Pennsylvania, have delayed their elections until June, the Wisconsin primary was only moving forward at all because the state Supreme Court had already overruled the governor's attempt to delay the primary until June.

So, what was the US Supreme Court's explanation for its decision? First, the majority wrote, "This court has repeatedly emphasized that lower federal courts should ordinarily not alter the election rules on the eve of an election." And, the majority added, "Even in an ordinary election," voters requesting absentee ballots by the deadline would generally receive their ballots on or before Election Day.

Give me a break. We are hardly living through an "ordinary election." Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg summed it up clearly in her dissent, "Either voters will have to brave the polls, endangering their own and others' safety. Or they will lose their right to vote, through no fault of their own."

So, here is the scary part. This goes far beyond the primary election in April. The ability of Americans to safely vote from home may be a determining factor in the outcome of the presidential election in November.

It is at the discretion of the states to make laws regarding absentee and vote by mail ballot options. And, in this particular case, Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers even called the legislature into an unsuccessful special session to attempt to delay the primary election.

Making voting easier often means that more people vote. According to one study conducted by Nonprofit Vote and the US Elections Project, in the six states with the highest turnout in the 2016 presidential election, all offered same-day voter registration. In addition, voting by mail has been shown to dramatically increase turnout in states from California to Nebraska.

Without a national mandate that Americans, during a time of a health crisis, should have the right to vote by mail, the possibilities for suppression are also endless.

As crazy as it may sound, President Donald Trump could use fear around public gatherings as a justification for working with Republican governors to shut down polling locations. We've seen Republicans shutter poll locations before -- most recently in Texas, where over 700 polling locations, many in minority neighborhoods, were closed after the 2013 Supreme Court decision, ending the requirement of several states (mostly in the South) to seek federal approval before changing their election laws.

On Super Tuesday this year, many in Texas stood in long lines -- and not just because of their enthusiasm for the candidates, but because they had limited options for locations to vote.

Trump could also work with states to narrow the hours voters can go to the polls, thus limiting options for early voting. And he could use the health and safety argument to give him cover.

And there should be little doubt Trump could turn a blind eye to deceptive voter information going out on social media platforms and via robocalls about canceled election days -- and false reports of new requirements at the polls, given how he has handled his role as a public communicator around the coronavirus.

Rather than presenting a clear and honest daily assessment of the facts, Trump has trumpeted half-baked science -- including the efficacy of certain drug for treatment -- instead of following the lead of his scientists.

But it's not just about how and when people can vote. Conservative members of the Supreme Court are also influencing the information people have access to in advance of the election.

In March, the Supreme Court took the unprecedented step of delaying oral arguments, scheduled for March 31 -- including several cases involving efforts to obtain Trump's financial records. At the time, part of the explanation cited the precedent of delays prompted by the 1918 Spanish flu epidemic.

Never mind that, since 1918, the telephone, the internet and video conferencing have all been invented -- allowing for a range of means of communicating while still observing proper social distancing measures.

While there are certainly delays across the country, many lower and state courts have also found a way to adapt. For the federal circuit, lawyers are presenting arguments by telephone -- without significant delays to scheduled timelines. In the Southern District of New York, for example, judges are "encouraged to conduct proceedings by telephone or video conferencing where practicable."

Even in Washington state, where Gov. Jay Inslee put in place stringent stay at home orders, the court is proceeding with video and telephone conference as appropriate

What does the Supreme Court's decision to delay arguments mean?

For one, the planned oral arguments that would ideally lead to a June decision on whether Trump's tax records should be turned over to the House and local prosecutors in New York may not happen before the election. And this matters because Trump's tax returns could show a range of potential conflicts of interest by revealing who invests in his businesses, perhaps explaining why he appears so sympathetic to authoritarian leaders in Russia and Saudi Arabia, and how much Trump properties have made off of taxpayers since he was elected to office. (Trump denies any wrongdoing.)

In short, the highest court in the land has not found a way to hear oral arguments, including on topics that could be consequential to voters this election cycle, like the tax records of the President of the United States, but it has made an exception to put the people of Wisconsin at risk by refusing to extend the deadline for absentee ballots.

To quote Ginsburg in her dissent on the Wisconsin decision, "It's mind-boggling."

The decision by the conservative-majority Supreme Court to make it harder for people in Wisconsin to vote should be a warning sign that Trump and the conservative court he and Senator Majority Leader Mitch McConnell helped shape will stop at nothing to get him reelected.

And we need to be ready.
Supply chain: Trucks queue to cross the border into Romania from Nagylak, Hungary. Photo: Bloomberg

The European Commission expressed disapproval at Romania's decision to ban agriculture exports and said it's assessing how the move could impact trade within the single market.

Romania issued a ban this week on sales of goods, including wheat, corn and sugar, outside the European Union.

The Romanian government plans to still allow food products to be sold within the EU, but buyers must prove they are not intended for export.

The European Commission said there are no market-related reasons to limit trade within or outside the single market. Restrictions that place an "undue burden" on agricultural exporters will hurt food security, according to an emailed statement on Saturday.

"The Commission does not have any information, which indicates that Romania is facing or will soon face shortages of agricultural products intended for human consumption," said EU agriculture commissioner Janusz Wojciechowski.

"The reported measure appears to be not proportionate."

Romanian prime minister Ludovic Orban said on Thursday that the country "can't afford to be left without wheat because of the greed of some grain owners".

The country is one of the EU's largest sellers of wheat, corn and barley, serving markets throughout North Africa and the Middle East.

The European Commission is in contact with Romanian officials and still assessing the impact of the new ban.

Maintaining a functioning food-supply chain is a priority amid the coronavirus outbreak, it said.

The country of 19 million has so far reported 6,683 cases of Covid-19 and 318 deaths.

Bloomberg
New Delhi/Washington, April 15 : The US government agencies have been funding the Islamic charities linked to terror groups based in Pakistan and the Middle East through InterAction, America's largest alliance of international non-profit organizations.

Aarti Tikoo Singh New Delhi/Washington, April 15 (IANS) The US government agencies have been funding the Islamic charities linked to terror groups based in Pakistan and the Middle East through InterAction, America's largest alliance of international non-profit organizations.

Publicly available official documents reveal that in January this year alone, the 1984-founded organization InterAction which has over 180 member organizations, received $5 million from the US government. In the last decade, the US Agency for International Development and the State Department (USAID) granted tens of millions of dollars to InterAction.

The DC-based organization, InterAction in 2017 launched a new platform called Together Project (TP) "to confront discrimination or targeted prejudicial regulations in the US due to their operating principles or religious faith".

Interestingly, contradicting its stated objective, the TP picked the most controversial Islamic charities -- Helping Hand for Relief & Development (HHRD), Islamic Relief (IR) USA, Zakat Foundation (ZF), American Relief Agency for the Horn of Africa (ARAHA) and United Muslim Relief (UMR) -- all linked to radical groups in the Middle East and Pakistan. The five charities form the core of the TP.

As per an IANS open source research, while HHRD organizes conferences in Pakistan with Falah-e-Insaniat Foundation and the Milli Muslim League, the charitable and political wings respectively of the Pakistani terror outfit Lashkar-e-Taiba. Incidentally, Financial Action Task Force (FATF), the global watchdog on terror funding, has put Pakistan on its 'grey list' for its failure to curb terror financing.

The IR-USA is a branch of Islamic Relief Worldwide (IRW) which has been designated as a terror organization by the UAE. German and Swedish governments have claimed that IRW has significant ties to Muslim Brotherhood, a Sunni Islamist transnational political movement.

Similarly, Zakat Foundation was founded by Halil Demir, a former public relations officer for Benevolence International Foundation, a US-designated terror group. The charity partners with the Istanbul-based NGO, Foundation for Human Rights, Liberties and Humanitarian Relief (IHH) in Iraq and Afghanistan. The NGO has allegedly been tied to Al-Qaeda.

ARAHA is known to have ties with extremists like Yusuf Estes who publicly supports death for apostates. He participated in one of their fundraisers in May 2019. UMR's officials publicly support Hamas, the Islamic terror group of Palestine.

DC-based sources investigating the Islamist terror-funding said the Together Project has been lobbying with the US Congress to "weaken counter-terror mechanisms, deploying InterAction's immense resources to, first, delegitimize claims of wrongdoing aimed at its members organizations and second, advance legislation designed to weaken counter-terror finance laws." Recently, TP's member partners from IR-USA and HHRD held meetings with members of the Congress and their staff to discuss "disinformation campaigns" and "bank de-risking". To discredit allegations against HHRD and other Islamist groups, they even hired Perkins Coie, the law firm responsible for the infamous 'Steel dossier' relating to the alleged cooperation between President Donald Trump and Russia during the 2016 elections, sources said.

The TP, sources said, distributes a "disinformation toolkit" that instructs members on how to control negative press and "promote alternative messages" or "new narratives". "By tying legitimate criticism of its members with 'fake news', internet 'trolls' and 'bots' and even Russian interference, TP teaches nonprofits to blur the line between fact and fantasy," an investigative researcher said.

The platform has endorsed letters to the US House and the Senate pushing for terror finance reform, met lawmakers from key committees, opposed legislation targeting terror financing in Pakistan and tried to enter special training in the bank examination manual that would downplay the risks associated with money laundering and terror financing, sources said.

It lobbied hard to put forth a bill, House resolution 2514 which would "reduce compliance costs" and lower "penalties and federal actions" against smaller foreign banks in developing countries that violate terror finance laws, sources said.

The FATF is going to review Pakistan's performance to meet international commitments in ending terror funding during a meeting in June. "But as long as InterAction and the Together Project continue to protect Islamist charities linked to terror groups, all the measures taken at FATF remain futile," an investigator in DC said.
Two years ago, Georgia Democrats captured a House seat Republicans held for 40 years, came within 320 votes of flipping another, and saw their gubernatorial candidate, Stacey Abrams, make the best showing for that office they had seen in 20 years.

In this year's elections, that rising Democratic tide is meeting a tantalizing political opportunity: Voters will select not one but two U.S. senators for seats now held by Republicans - contests that could radically alter the battle for the majority of a closely divided Senate.

But months out, the national interest in the two races has yet to match the scale of the opportunity, and Democrats are hoping that eye-raising revelations about the two GOP incumbents' personal finances will boost their chances - and national perceptions.

Sens. Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue have faced questions about their decisions to sell millions of dollars in stocks before the risks of the coronavirus pandemic had become widely known. Both senators have denied wrongdoing, saying the trades were made by third-party advisers, but the perception that the senators acted for their own private benefit has fueled Democratic attacks and the party's ambitions.

"We're going to make political history in Georgia, and I hope they want to be a part of that, because it's going to happen," Teresa Tomlinson, who is running for the Democratic nomination to face Perdue, said about Democratic strategists and donors. "It's going to happen this year, and it's going to happen in November."

Raphael Warnock, a prominent Atlanta pastor who is seeking the Loeffler seat, said the Senate races together offer a "transformational opportunity" for the state and the country. "The path to victory and change in our country runs right through Georgia," he said in an interview. "There's no question that Georgia is in play."

However, key indicators have not reflected that optimism. So far, no major party-affiliated campaign committee or super PAC has placed ad reservations in Georgia for the fall, even as a competitive presidential race in the state threatens to drive up advertising prices.

Meanwhile, Democratic candidates in the two races have posted relatively modest fundraising totals, with Abrams' well-publicized decision to skip a Senate run fueling perceptions in Washington and among donors nationally that the two races may be long shots. Instead, money has flowed more readily into Arizona, Colorado, Maine, North Carolina, and even Iowa and Kentucky - states where many Democrats see a more likely path to the majority.

Independent forecasters have come to similar conclusions. The Cook Political Report, for instance, rates Perdue's seat as "likely Republican" and rates Loeffler's seat as "leans Republican" - a more competitive rating reflecting her status as an appointee who has to weather an intraparty challenge from Rep. Douglas Collins, R-Ga.

"If you were in Las Vegas and someone gave you a thousand dollars and said, you've got to bet it on the Georgia contests, you'd probably bet on the Republicans," said Charles Bullock, a University of Georgia professor and scholar of Georgia politics.

Adding to the challenges for Democrats are the completely different formats and schedules for the two races. Perdue's race is being conducted with a normal partisan primary - albeit one that has been delayed from March 24 to June 9 due to the pandemic - that will culminate in the Nov. 3 general election.

The other seat, however, is a special election that is being conducted as a "jungle" primary pitting all comers against one another regardless of party. Initial voting will take place Nov. 3, with a Jan. 5 runoff to follow if no candidate secures an outright majority - as is likely in a race with 20 declared candidates.

Still, Bullock and others said Democrats clearly have a significant opportunity - particularly in the race for the seat Loeffler holds. A wealthy business executive with no history in electoral politics, Loeffler was tapped by Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp, a Republican, in December to succeed 15-year GOP Sen. Johnny Isakson, who resigned due to poor health. She instantly became the wealthiest member of Congress, based her reported wealth of roughly $500 million.

Even before the stock-sale revelations, Loeffler faced a fierce challenge from Collins - a conservative former Army chaplain who won plaudits from President Donald Trump and many of his allies for helping to lead the GOP defense against Trump's impeachment as the top Republican on the House Judiciary Committee.

Her challenge has been compounded after news that she and her husband liquidated nearly $2 million in stock holdings after she attended a Jan. 24 coronavirus briefing for senators. Loeffler later produced documents showing that the sales were accompanied by bullish options trades that could ultimately offset the significant financial losses she avoided.

But the political damage has been immediate, with Collins and his conservative allies as well as the entire Democratic field attacking her as an out-of-touch profiteer.

"She hasn't been in the Senate that long, and right now, that's what she's most known for," Warnock said. "I think it raises larger questions about trust: Can we trust you with this power? . . . People are busy sheltering in, and here they have a senator who is busy sheltering her investments."

Loeffler has spent recent weeks using her social media accounts and other platforms to highlight her efforts to combat the pandemic and blunt its economic impacts.

Spokesman Stephen Lawson said in a statement that Georgians "are turning away from career politicians and toward proven conservative leaders like Kelly Loeffler who have put politics aside to focus on delivering relief to families and businesses impacted most by covid-19."

Loeffler maintains the backing of the National Republican Senatorial Committee and the Senate Leadership Fund, the main GOP super PAC focused on Senate races. But neither group has active spending plans in Georgia. On Wednesday, a major pro-Trump super PAC announced it was backing Collins over Loeffler.

An adviser to the Great America PAC said electing Collins will be a "major focus" for the group, with its spending expected to reach "well into the millions by November."

"With Senator Loeffler's support already collapsing following her stock sales scandal, we are confident Collins will buck the establishment and win the seat," said Brent Lowder, senior strategist for the group.

Loeffler, however, has the personal wealth to fight back. Some in Republican circles have compared her to another wealthy Republican senator - Rick Scott of Florida - who used upward of $150 million of his own riches to twice win gubernatorial races and then a Senate seat despite tough attacks from both parties on his record as a business executive.

According to federal campaign finance reports filed this week, Loeffler loaned $5 million to her campaign in December, giving her a $6.1 million war chest, compared with the $2.2 million Collins has amassed. Warnock, the best-financed Democrat in the special election, has $1.2 million banked.

Democrats, meanwhile, believe not only that a messy intraparty dispute will redound to their benefit in a runoff but that the more conservative Collins could be a more vulnerable opponent.

They, however, have their own internal dynamics to confront. The Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee has rallied behind Warnock, the senior pastor of Atlanta's Ebenezer Baptist Church - a post once held by the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. - as have Abrams and other pillars of Georgia's Democratic establishment.

But other credible candidates - such as Matt Lieberman, the son of former senator Joe Lieberman, I-Conn., and Ed Tarver, a former U.S. attorney and state legislator - have remained in the race and showed no sign of stepping aside.

Perdue's stock sales, meanwhile, have not generated the same level of scrutiny. He both bought and sold stocks in the months before the scale of the coronavirus epidemic expanded, and he did not attend the briefing that Loeffler's critics have cited as a possible source of inside information.

But his Democratic rivals have still seized on the millionaire former CEO's financial dealings. Tomlinson, the former mayor of Columbus, connected his stock trades to stories about his business career that dogged his 2014 candidacy.

"He really has, his entire professional life, skated on some pretty thin ethical ice," she said. "And I think it plays into a narrative that makes sense to Georgians."

Perdue spokeswoman Casey Black said the stock-trading allegations "will have no impact on David Perdue's race because the facts show he has done nothing wrong, period." Black said the assets of Perdue and his wife are managed by independent advisers, "and recent market turmoil has caused their portfolio to experience losses like most Americans."

Besides Tomlinson, two other Democrats, Jon Ossoff and Sarah Riggs Amico, are running for the right to face Perdue in November. Ossoff narrowly lost a 2017 House special election, one that still made him a household name among Atlanta-area voters, while Amico, a business executive, won the 2018 Democratic nomination for lieutenant governor but lost in the general election.

Ossoff on Wednesday announced that he had $1.8 million cash to spend ahead of the primary; Amico and Tomlinson had yet to file. Perdue, meanwhile, has more than $9 million to spend with no primary to weather.

While candidates in both races have time before November to pad their fundraising, the sums Georgia Democrats have so far raised have paled in comparison to what Senate candidates in other states - even much smaller ones - have raised.

In North Carolina, nominee Cal Cunningham has more than $3 million to spend after a competitive primary, and in Maine, Sara Gideon raised more than $7 million. Former astronaut Mark Kelly raised more than $20 million last year for the Arizona race.

NRSC spokesman Jesse Hunt said Republicans are not overly concerned about either Georgia race, citing what Republicans say is a weak field of candidates as well as a national Democratic message that he suggested would be too liberal for a moderate state.

"If the Democrat candidates' personal baggage doesn't ruin their candidacies, their socialist agenda surely will," he said, though Trump and Republicans have backed trillions of dollars in bailout money.

But J.B. Poersch, president of Senate Majority PAC, said in an interview last month that while Georgia does not appear among the group's initial ad reservations, he was confident that the state would remain within range for Democrats as the campaigns develop.

"We think Georgia's good territory," he said.
Three more positive coronavirus cases were added Wednesday to Midland County, bringing its total to 36 cases and one death, according to the daily afternoon state report.

MidMichigan Health officials said Wednesday in a press release the medical center in Midland is "not overwhelmed" with COVID-19 patients.

We continue to operate within our capacity and continue to be confident that we can provide the care our community needs, both COVID-related and non COVID, the statement read.

The health system, which covers a 23-county region, also released the number of tests it has performed through Wednesday. They have completed 1,314 tests with 1,139 negative, 69 positive and 106 pending.

Also on Wednesday, the state added four cases to Bay County, bringing its cases to 64 and two deaths; added one more case to Isabella County, bringing its total to 43 cases and four deaths; one more to Gladwin County, bringing its cases to six and no deaths; and 11 cases to Saginaw County, bringing its total to 313 cases and 19 deaths.

The state added 1,058 new cases on Wednesday and 153 deaths. Overall, Michigan is at 28,059 cases and 1,921 deaths.

The average death age is 73.5, according to the state website, mich.gov, with the deceased ranging in age from 20 to 107. The state lists 37% of the deceased as 80-plus and 28% age 70-79.

The state lists the total recovered at 433 cases, as of April 10, which represents COVID-19 confirmed individuals with an onset date on or prior to March 11, 2020, according to the state website, mich.gov.

During this response, Michigan Department of Health and Human Services is reviewing vital records statistics to identify any laboratory confirmed COVID-19 cases who are 30 days out from their onset of illness to represent recovery status, according to the state website. The numbers will be updated every Saturday.

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.

If you think you've been exposed to COVID-19 and develop a fever and symptoms such as cough or difficulty breathing, call your health care provider for medical advice. If he/she isn't available call MidMichigan Urgent Care in Midland at 989- 633-1350 or MidMichigan Medical Center's Emergency Department in Midland at 989-839-3100.

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.
William Luther /Associated Press

The San Antonio Food Bank has scheduled its next drive-thru distribution for 10 a.m. Friday at the Alamodome, Food Bank spokesman Michael Guerra said Tuesday.

It will be the Food Banks fifth drive-thru giveaway in San Antonio since the start of the coronavirus crisis and its first since distributing food to a record 10,000 households on April 9 at Traders Village Flea Market.
China is seeing huge demand for artificial intelligence (AI) instructors, a job title that was included in the 16 new professions recently released by the countrys Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security.

Artificial intelligence instructors work at a network technology company in Guangshan county, Xinyang, central Chinas Henan province. (Photo/Xinhua)

The term refers to people who use intelligent training software for database management, algorithm parameter settings, human-computer interaction design, performance test tracking and other auxiliary operations in the actual use of AI products, mostly in the emerging industries and service sectors.

The new job title, generally divided into data annotators and AI algorithm engineers, is a result of emerging technologies, new industries, new forms of business and new models, said Ge Heng, an official with the ministry.

With the world continuing to promote the research and development of AI technologies, AI has been applied in various industries, including data analysis, manufacturing, education, security, municipal administration, logistics, man-machine interaction and transport, fuelling surging demand for AI instructors, said Deng Zhengjie, an associate professor at the Hainan Normal University in south Chinas Hainan province.

Chinese tech giant Alibaba Group began training its first batch of AI instructors in 2015, said Wang Zhiyu, an AI expert with the groups Chief Customer Office, adding that the group now has 200,000 AI instructors. He also revealed that there are about 500,000 practitioners in China.

There are expected to be 5 million AI instructors at home and abroad by 2022, according to a recent analysis. Data also shows that the country still has a short-term shortage of data annotators, and a severe shortage of AI algorithm engineers.

In the long run, AI instructors should improve their comprehensive skills, as AI technologies will be applied in a growing number of fields, such as music and literature, said Duan Yucong, a professor at Hainan University.

Li Zhengcai, CEO of Smart Security, a high-tech company in Beijing, also said that the biggest challenge facing AI instructors is the need for interdisciplinary skills, as they are also required to have legal knowledge.
The labourers said the TRS government has not provided any groceries or money to them as promised

Hyderabad: Immediately after Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced an extension of the nationwide lockdown till May 3, hundreds of migrant labourers packed their bags, and along with children and women, embarked on a 900-km journey on foot from the city to reach destinations in northern Andhra Pradesh.

The labourers said the TRS government has not provided any groceries or money to them as promised. The journey by foot exposed weak surveillance by the Telangana state police because the migrants from AP had a hassle-free start to their journey from Marredpally, passing at least four police check posts on their way.

As many as 60 migrant labourers, residing in Valmiki Nagar, BJR Colony, Sanjay Gandhi Nagar, Gautham Nagar, Hanumanpet and others packed their bags in advance as they waited to watch Modis address on their mobile phones. They were possibly hoping that the lockdown would be lifted but instead got a shock with the news of the extension. However, unfazed, workers and their families decided to start a journey on foot to reach their destinations.

Their destinations include Palasa, Tekkali, Nandigam and other adjoining villages in Srikakulam district, which is one of the outlier districts that has not had even a single case of Covid-19 till date.

Our hopes were dashed after Modis address. We hoped that train and buses services would resume. But to our shock, the lockdown has been extended till May 3. We are already jobless since 21 days. We cannot survive for another three weeks. Our parents and families have been awaiting for us to return, said Kanta Rao.

He said that despite claims by Chief Minister K. Chandrashekar Rao and his government, none of them have been given any rations or relief amount for the last 21 days. Several individual donors have been giving them something to eat or cook, on a regular basis, helping them to survive the bleak lockdown.

Rao said that authorities have collected their Aadhar details, current residential address and bank account details. We have been waiting for money since 10 days. No one from the government visited our place after that. We faced discrimination by a few officials and individuals, who said that leftover ration and money will be distributed to us since we hail from Andhra, a teary-eyed migrant labour said.

We are not beggars. We came to Hyderabad to work and earn money with self-respect. We feel ashamed in taking donations. I personally feel like committing suicide when donors came to distribute cooked rice and clicked a picture with my family, said Bramhaji.

Few labourers, who were happy with food donations, said that they need money to pay rent and miscellaneous expenses.

Almost all of us have been thrown out of our homes by landlords for not paying rents. No one came to our rescue. The builder said that he cannot pay since he has already suffering loses. We will stay if government gives Rs 1,000 per head, as it would useful to rent a house and survive the lockdown period, said K. Suryanarayana.

He said that 1,500 persons have already left for Srikakulam during the lockdown and another 1,000 odd people residing in Moosapet and Marrepally will leave in near future, despite police surveillance.

Numerous people started for their journey, some even to Gorakhpur in Uttar Pradesh via Srikakulam. The people were stopped finally near a check post in Begumpet.

By the time the police got alerted, the migrant labourers group had crossed check posts at Sangeet Junction, Tarnaka junction and Hubsiguda junction. Police and officials rushed to the spot and convinced the labourers to stay back, on the promise of supply essentials, shelter and money.

In the meanwhile, a heated confrontation took place between police and a Telangana Rashtra Samithi MLA who rushed the spot for not providing relief measures promised by the government. However, after about an hour of arguments, the labourers agreed to stay, on condition that the government would clear their house rent dues and provide essentials till the lockdown period lasts.
Four United Nations Special Rapporteurs on Tuesday raised deep concern over a draft of the state of emergency law, which is expected to be passed by the ruling party-dominated Senate this week.

The one-party National Assembly unanimously voted to pass the draft state of emergency legislation last week, a law widely criticized for giving the government widespread powers to curtail fundamental freedoms and rights.

The draft legislation would allow for the curtailment of civil rights and liberties, such as freedom of movement, expression, association, and assembly  all enshrined in the Cambodian Constitution  and has been widely criticized by rights groups.

The four rapporteurs, including Rhona Smith, special rapporteur on human rights in Cambodia, released the four-page document highlighting their concerns with the draft legislation and pointing out that the drafts intent of protecting the health of citizens was not the focus.

While the Governments justifications to adopt the law were centered on the response to the Coronavirus/COVID-19 pandemic, the draft law does not appear to be sufficiently focused on measures necessary to address legitimate public health needs, the report reads.

The hastily-drafted legislation is based on Article 22 of the Constitution that enables the King to declare a state of emergency, after reaching consensus with the Prime Minister and Presidents of the Senate and National Assembly.

The draft law allows for a state of emergency to be declared in multiple scenarios, ranging from national security situations such as war or foreign invasion to public health concerns such as pandemics and severe calamity. It additionally allows for this law to be used during the vaguely-worded scenario of severe chaos to national security and social order.

The rapporteurs said the draft was worded vaguely and threatened to violate Cambodias rights violations.

Nevertheless, we are concerned that, if adopted as is, the law may restrict the right to freedom of expression, right to freedom of association and peaceful assembly, and right to movement, they said.

In return, the Cambodian Human Rights Committee issued a statement on Monday, hitting back at the rapporteurs critiques of the draft legislation, by choosing to call them as being part of opposition groups.

The committee, headed by Keo Remy, insisted that the draft law was neither, by nature, a human rights violation nor a power gathering tool as alleged by a handful of opposition groups, but it is a valuable legal tool for the defense of the right to life, the right to peace, social stability and development.

Brad Adams, Asia director for Human Rights Watch, said the draft law would give Hun Sen almost unlimited powers for an unlimited period of time and martial powers.

It also allows the government to read all emails and listen to all phone calls, which is not necessary for public health, said Brad Adams.

The UN experts also asked the Cambodian government to provide additional information on measures taken to ensure the compliance of the draft law with Cambodias obligations under international human rights law and standards.

The draft has not been placed for any kind of public consultation with international stakeholders, civil society groups and NGOs.

Senate spokesperson Mam Bunneang said on Wednesday the Commission on Legislation and Justice had already reviewed the draft and would be assessed by the Permanent Committee before being presented on the floor of the Upper House.

It is a very important law for our whole nation, he said, adding that it will likely pass on Friday.
Albany, N.Y.  A new executive order will require all New Yorkers to wear a mask in crowded public spaces, Gov. Andrew Cuomo said today.

The order will go into effect Friday to allow enough time for everyone to obtain some type of face covering, Cuomo said.

Understanding NYs coronavirus masks-for-all rule: What we know, what we dont

The mask can be as simple as a bandana or other cloth. It must cover an individuals nose and mouth.

The rule will apply in any space where its impossible to keep at least 6 feet away from others, Cuomo said. That includes public transit and busy streets congested with pedestrians.

The order is meant to help the state continue slowing the spread of the new coronavirus.

You dont have a right to infect me, Cuomo said. You must have a mask or clothing covering.

When asked specifically about stores, Cuomo reiterated the order applies in any public place where you cant keep 6 feet away from others.

Initially, the order will not include any penalties, Cuomo said. Its possible a civil fine could be added in the future if not enough people comply.

Local governments will take the lead on enforcement through outreach and education. Authorities should approach individuals in public without masks and ask them why theyre not wearing one, Cuomo said.

He also said he imagined New Yorkers themselves would do the same.

The federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention began recommending widespread use of masks earlier this month. President Donald Trump said he didnt plan to wear one himself.

Earlier in the crisis, authorities had said healthy individuals didnt need to wear masks.

Other places around the country are encouraging people to wear face coverings, including Washington state. In Los Angeles, all shoppers and workers are required to wear masks, according to The Los Angeles Times. In Beverly Hills, people who walk their dogs are required to cover their faces.

MORE ON CORONAVIRUS

Coronavirus in NY: Cases, maps, charts and resources

Onondaga Co. coronavirus: Recoveries outpace known infections; deathly ill at 21; 537 total cases

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Complete coronavirus coverage on syracuse.com

Contact Kevin Tampone anytime: Email | Twitter | Facebook | 315-282-8598
The Presidency, through the Special Assistant to the President on Media and Publicity, Garba Shehu, has attacked the Peoples Democrati...





The Presidency, through the Special Assistant to the President on Media and Publicity, Garba Shehu, has attacked the Peoples Democratic Party, PDP, saying that Something must definitely be wrong with the main opposition party.





The Presidency wondered why the PDP should dismiss yesterdays national broadcast by President Muhammadu Buhari as disappointing.





In an article made available by Shehu on Tuesday evening, the Presidency said the Peoples Democratic Party ( PDP) is not normal if they would-as they did yesterday- dismiss the important national broadcast by President Muhammadu Buhari as disappointing, a speech for which the European Union, through their Ambassador to Nigeria, congratulated the President, describing it as a very powerful address to the nation last night.





But by no means is this the first shocker for Nigerians from a party that sees itself as the alternative government.

Shehu said that the PDP has opposed every single decision taken in the interest of national security by the Buhari administration.





He said that the week before, the PDP celebrated a foreign leader who they invited to come and tutor President Muhammadu Buhari, an army General and a successful war commander, on how to fight Boko Haram terrorists.





This is a leader who has transformed the armed forces in the last five years and brought them to a respectable standing among nations.





They questioned the bravery of our soldiers and spread false rumors that their preferred foreign leader had routed out insurgents on the Nigerian soil and freed Nigerian territories and soldiers held captive by terrorists in the northern part of Borno State.





PDPs corruption and ineptitude allowed Boko Haram to occupy 18 local governments to be captured and millions to relocate. Nigerians have not forgotten and are waiting for them in 2023.





For a political party that led Nigeria for 16 years pursuing wrong policies and strategies that destroyed not only the armed forces but have destroyed the nation and its economy, there wont be much from them to shock the citizens when they say that they see nothing good in the enormously successful war that the Buhari administration has waged against the Covid-19 global pandemic.





The World Health Organisation (WHO) and the UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres have at different times praised Nigeria and commended its anti-Covid war as worthy of emulation.





This is on account of the fact that from the moment of its importation into the country, the government has done a lot of work to strengthen the health sector to stem the spread and defeat the virus.





Government has succeeded in uniting the whole country- its religious and community leaders; business leaders and employee unions; students and civil society and a large number of political parties- with perhaps only the PDP yet to decide to joins a massive and an unprecedented coalition of Nigerians-saying we are all in this together-fighting to defeat the coronavirus.





Of significant interest in this circumstance is the leadership that the governing All Progressives Congress, APC has shown through an ongoing public enlightenment campaign on the rules of hygiene beaming from radio and TV stations in many parts of the country.





The PDP wont do any of these. No, to do this will be disruptive of their campaign of disorganization. They would rather attack the President as he attacks terrorists and coronavirus. They dont realize that the times have changed and the country has changed. Their leaders continue to show an abysmal lack of understanding of the sentiments of the people.





When they voted in his government in 2015, some said it was because Nigerians wanted to see the back of the PDP.





In voting massively for his second and final term, Nigerian people backed his return for the work that he is doing on all parameters, promoting the welfare of the people and providing modern infrastructure.





The decisions so far announced by the President in dealing with coronavirus will benefit the whole country- leaders and followers, farmers and consumers, manufacturers, producers and traders, youngsters and the elderly, Muslim, Christian and non-believers-all sections of society.





The PDP should make the choice of reconnecting with the people by joining this coalition and stopping the unnecessary distractions; recognizing the efforts of the people led by the government or simply shut their mouth if they have nothing important to say.





The nation is more important than politics, Garba Shehu said.
W&M gymnastics alums working on the medical front line against COVID-19

On the front lines: Stephanie Bevan '10 is a registered nurse in New York City. She works in Neonatal Intensive Care at NYU Langone Health and is taking care of infants who have been potentially exposed to the coronavirus. Courtesy photo Photo - of - Hide Caption

This story is part of a series recognizing members of the W&M community who are on the front lines fighting the COVID-19 pandemic. -Ed.

Those who enter the medical field know they are putting themselves at a certain degree of risk. Even in the best of times, there are multiple germs floating around the hospital or office waiting room.

Of course, these are not the best of times. COVID-19 has seen to that.

William & Mary's gymnastics program has approximately 50 of its graduates in the medical profession, many on the front line against this global pandemic. Some are in the major cities, some are in the rural areas, and some are in between.

Four of the Tribe's medical alums were willing to take a few minutes out of their hectic days to discuss their work and how it's changed in the last several weeks.

Lance Hoffman, '94

Emergency Medicine Physician, Fremont, Neb.

Methodist Fremont Health hospital generally sees fewer than 18,000 patients a year. The complaints mostly range from chest pains to broken limbs to accidental gunshot wounds.

But Fremont, rural or not, hasn't been immune to COVID-19.

"A couple of weeks ago, we started seeing a lot more people coming in with a fever and a cough," Hoffman said by telephone on March 31. "Of course, the problem is, we couldn't test any of them because we didn't have any tests available. And there are many other viral infections that look very similar  at least early on when it's mild.

"I do probably between 10 and 12 shifts a month, all night shifts. But in the last three nights, I probably saw three or four people with it each of those nights. I'm hoping I don't get it and bring it back home to my family."

That's a very real fear for everyone on the front line against COVID-19. There is a national shortage of personal protective equipment, and experts warn the pandemic will only worsen before it improves.

"At this point, you're required to wear an N95 mask the entire time," Hoffman said. "If you're treating a patient face to face, there are more restrictive personal protective equipment that you're supposed to use, like a gown and gloves.

"I've got this big plastic hood with a clear plastic visor on it, and an air filter plugs into the back of it. If I'm seeing someone that has a very high likelihood of exposure or who's symptomatic, I wear that."

There is plenty of fear out there, and misinformation on social media isn't helping. Hoffman stresses the basics, like staying home and washing your hands. He also suggests not coming to the hospital until you experience respiratory issues.

"I absolutely think staying home and just doing your supportive care, like sleeping, drinking enough fluids, trying to isolate yourself from other people so they don't catch it, good hand hygiene  all those things are important," he said. "The time to go to the hospital is when your breathing is affected.

"At that point, we need to do some things that you're not able to monitor at home, like the oxygen level in your blood. That's stuff that only we can do at the hospital."

And don't believe everything you read on Twitter.

"My advice is to listen to what the local healthcare authorities report," he said. "And if there's a question, go to the CDC website (www.cdc.gov). That's the voice of the nation on what the evidence shows. And it's not anecdotal."

Stacia Ruse, '15

Orthopedic surgery resident, Ann Arbor, Mich.

Stacia Ruse literally didn't sign up for this. After graduating VCU School of Medicine in 2019, she began her residency in orthopedics at the University of Michigan last July. And then 

"Back in November and December, we started getting emails about the situation in China," Ruse said. "No one really thought much of it. We were kind of like, 'It's just like a flu, not a big deal.' But at the beginning of March, people started talking about it a little bit more.

"About two or three weeks ago, we got notification that we needed to cancel all elective cases, which for ortho is almost everything outside of trauma and tumors. And now, we're running so short on staff in the medicine and ICU realm that they're asking for volunteers."

Volunteers to help with COVID patients. True, orthopedic residents aren't well versed in treating illnesses. But nearly three-fourths of the orthopedic resident staff, Ruse included, volunteered in this unique redeployment situation.

"They've combined us into what they're calling COVID teams," Ruse said. "There's seven of us on each team and we rotate every four days. We're trying to keep people in the hospital for a brief amount of time. Then you have a full seven or eight days off so that if you're symptomatic, it's caught.

"It's been really difficult for most of the departments to coordinate all this and try to find enough help. But a lot of us feel that if the department needs help, we're willing to step up."

Washtenaw County, of which Ann Arbor is the county seat, had seen 539 coronavirus cases and 10 deaths as of Monday. Unfortunately, those numbers are not final.

"Michigan as a whole has the third-most COVID cases in the country," Ruse said. "So we're ramping up pretty rapidly over here.  They're predicting in the next two weeks that we're going to have about 1,000 to 2,000 beds full of COVID patients, and our hospital isn't equipped to have that many beds.

"They're opening up the University of Michigan's indoor track (facility) for patients who aren't sick enough to be in the ICU but need general medical care. That way, we can free up some more beds in the hospital to make that more of an ICU critical care unit."

Eventually, this crisis will subside. But Ruse will always remember it.

"If you had told me that I'd be spending my intern year in the middle of a global pandemic," she said, "I'd have thought you were crazy."

Stephanie Bevan, '10

Registered Nurse, New York City

With nearly 80,000 confirmed cases and more than 4,000 deaths, New York City has become a COVID hotbed. Stephanie Bevan, who works in Neonatal Intensive Care at NYU Langone Health, is now taking care of infants who have been potentially exposed to the coronavirus.

It's unclear whether a pregnant woman can transfer COVID to her baby, but care givers are taking necessary precautions.

"We are highly encouraged to wear surgical masks at all times at work, and I often do not leave my floor, taking lunch in the break room," Bevan said by email. "When entering the hospital, we have separate lines for staff as well as visitors, and RNs are screening visitors at the entrance of the hospital for temperature and any signs and symptoms of illness prior to entering.

"When taking care of COVID-exposed infants, my hospital has strict policies regarding personal protective equipment (for) the staff and our patients. We are conserving this equipment and the hospital is also accepting mask donations. The hospital has made changes in many departments to accommodate for the influx of COVID patients, and many nurses have been reassigned to work on different units."

NYU Langone Health is allowing only visitors to pediatric patients. They must be the parents.

"This is a big change for my unit as grandparents, aunts, uncles, and siblings are not able to meet the newest members of their families," Bevan said. "We have infants on our unit for up to 3-, 4-, 5-months (old) depending on how premature they are. So you can imagine how hard this is for their families during this time."

It isn't easy for Bevan and her colleagues, either. But she believes her time at William & Mary, where she worked hard as a student and athlete, helped prepare her for this.

"I continue to sacrifice my time away from my family to go to work and help in this fight against COVID-19," Bevan said. "I encourage everyone who does not need to leave their homes to stay home and do their part in social distancing. I know we will get through this challenge and come out as stronger individuals."

Christopher Lynch, '10

Hospitalist/Internal Medicine Physician, Los Angeles

On the West Coast, Christopher Lynch and his colleagues at Harbor UCLA Medical Center had some time to prepare for COVID's full-force arrival. Now, the surge has arrived.

"Our team has now comprehensively shifted our focus to COVID-19," Lynch said. "We have now created two new separate service lines dedicated specifically to COVID-19. And our hospitalist service is one of those service lines."

"There is much we still do not know about this disease. But here, every day, we discuss each patient within a multidisciplinary forum in order to utilize the collective knowledge of our infectious disease specialists, pulmonologists, and internal medicine physicians."

According to the Los Angeles Times, California had 19,063 confirmed cases and 507 deaths as of Thursday. L.A. has accounted for the majority of those with 7,573 confirmed cases and 200 deaths.

This pandemic is unlike anything the medical community has ever seen. But like Hoffman, Bevan, and Ruse, Lynch is using what he learned at W&M as a guide.

"I am certainly drawing from my experiences on the William & Mary men's gymnastics team by embracing teamwork while persevering through challenging circumstances" he said. "Amongst our staff, all hands are on deck to focus on our response to COVID-19, requiring us to be versatile enough to address specific needs while working together as a team."
Large shallow earthquakes appear to follow a mathematical pattern known as the Devils Staircase, according to a new study, where clusters are spaced out in long but irregular intervals of inactivity.

The finding differs from classical models which suggest earthquakes are periodic due to cycles of build-up and release of tectonic stress, the Seismological Society of America (SSA) reported.

The new data was published in the Bulletin of the Seismological Society of America by a group of scientists from the Department of Geological Sciences at the University of Missouri.

The Devils Staircase pattern was evident in large earthquakes in the USs Great Basin, spanning Nevada, much of Oregon and Utah, and parts of California, Idaho, and Wyoming. The pattern was also discovered in Australia, on the Africa-Eurasia plate boundary off the coast of western Algeria, along the Dead Sea Transform Fault, and potentially in the New Madrid seismic zone of the central US, said one researcher, Dr Mian Liu. The patterns vary from region to region.

The author of the study, Yuxuan Chen, told SSA, that periodic large earthquake sequences are relatively rare.

Dr Liu, Chens PhD advisor, learned of the Devils Staircase in an unexpected way  by reading a UCLA study of the temporal pattern of a serial killer from the former Soviet Union, Andrei Chikatilo. He murdered 53 people from 1978 until he was arrested in 1990, with his killings separated by the shortest interval of three days and at the longest, 986 days.

The UCLA mathematicians suggested that the serial killers pattern of murders conformed closely to the Devils Staircase because Chikatilo was in a rhythm, driven by neurons firing in his brain.

Dr Liu told SSA: The time pattern of his killings is a Devils staircase. The researchers were trying to understand how the criminals mind worked, how neurons stimulate each other in the brain. I was intrigued because I realised that earthquakes work in a similar way, that a fault rupture could stimulate activity on other faults by stress transfer.

Temporal patterns of large earthquakes in the world, Japan, North China, and the North Anatolian Fault (NAF). | BSSA (Bulletin of the Seismological Society of America)

The new results could have an effect on assessing the probability of when earthquakes will happen.

The researchers found that these large earthquake sequences, of 6.0 or greater on the Richter scale, are burstier than expected, they told SSA.

This means there is a higher probability of repeating seismic events soon after a large earthquake but that the irregular gaps between them makes it more difficult to predict when the next big one will come.

Gang Luo of Wuhan University, who was part of the study, noted that the intervals appear to be inversely related to the background tectonic strain rate  how fast the lithosphere (the outer solid part of the earth) is being deformed from plate tetonic movement.
Indeed, Illinois hospitality industry officials estimate that at least 25 percent of the states restaurateurs will not reopen their eateries once the pandemic crisis subsides and the OK is given to end sheltering in place. Owners even asked the City Council to hold off on the push tax until safer times, and they could appear in person to argue their case in opposition in a public debate.
The Centre told the Supreme Court Wednesday that healthcare workers are coronavirus warriors and it will provide a specific helpline number for redressing their grievances such as salary cuts, delayed payment, non-availability of protective kits or eviction from rented accommodation.

A bench of Justices N V Ramana, S K Kaul and B R Gavai disposed of a batch of petitions including that United Nurses Association (UNA) seeking to formulate a National COVID19 Management Protocol for addressing the serious concerns relating to imminent and extreme risks posed to the health and safety of healthcare workers throughout the country.

Advocate Subhash Chandran K R, appearing for UNA, said nurses and healthcare workers belonging to the association are working in over 400 private hospitals of the country and many of them have either faced salary cuts up to 50 per cent or delayed payment.

He said that due to the lack of proper safety equipment, around 150-200 nurses have been infected with COVID-19 or coronavirus and over 600 to 700 healthcare workers are in quarantine.

Chandran contended that besides health hazards, many nurses and healthcare workers are also being asked by their landlords to evict the accommodation for working close to coronavirus patients.

Solicitor General Tushar Mehta, appearing for the Centre, said healthcare workers in the country are coronavirus warriors and the government is taking all necessary steps to address their grievances.

He said Ministry of Home Affairs will set up a dedicated helpline number for redressal of the complaints and their grievances will be addressed within two hours.

The bench recorded the submission of Mehta and disposed of the plea of UNA and a similar petition filed by Indian Professional Nurses Association (INA).

The plea of UNA has said, A large number of healthcare workers including nurses, doctors, and other staffers are infected in various states like Maharashtra, Kerala, Delhi, Karnataka etc. Lack of preparedness to tackle the pandemic has led to 10 nurses at Wockhardt Hospital in Mumbai Central contracting the infection and almost all 265 nurses in the said hospital are under observation to contain further spread.

The plea filed through advocate Biju P Raman said that unfortunately the Centre has not formulated a National Management Protocol for COVID19 for addressing the serious concerns relating to imminent and extreme risks posed to the health and safety of medical personnel throughout the territory of India, amidst the currently persisting and ever escalating spread of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The health and safety (physical / mental) of health care workers are of utmost importance because further shortage of health care workers would result in thousands of unattended COVID-19 patients, which will have serious repercussions including escalation of the present situation and resultant impact on the economy, medical facilities, potential deaths and loss of human resource, it said.

The Association sought direction to Centre to provide COVID-19 protection kits to every single health care professional working in the corona isolation wards, or who work in close proximity of patients suspected to be infected with the virus.

It also sought various other directions including one to ensure that all health care workers are trained on infection prevention and control (IPC), proper use and disposal of Personal Protection Equipment (PPE).

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
ALBANY  Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo on Wednesday said he would sign an order mandating that all New Yorkers wear masks or cloth coverings on their faces in situations where social distancing is not possible.

"All people in public must have a mouth and nose covering and wear them in situations where you are not maintaining social distancing," the governor said. "You must wear a mask or cloth or an attractive bandanna ... but you have to wear it in those situations."

Cuomo said the order, which had not yet been signed late Wednesday, will go into effect in three days to give people time to obtain the required face coverings. There will not be a civil penalty for any violations, but he said he's hopeful the executive order, which has the force of law, will compel people to comply.

Timeline of Gov. Cuomo's and New York's response to the coronavirus pandemic

"I havent given anyone a ticket for violating anything  (but) stopping the spread is everything," the governor said. "How can you not wear a mask when you're going to come close to a person? ... I hope New Yorkers will do it because it makes sense. Look, its not the biggest inconvenience in the world."

The federal government had already recommended that people wear masks in public settings where social distancing is not possible. Last week, Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti issued an order requiring people to wear masks in essential businesses, including grocery stores. On Wednesday morning, New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio also urged residents to wear masks in grocery stores.

The governor's executive order, Cuomo said, will require masks be worn in "any situation in public where you cannot maintain social distancing  six feet," Cuomo said. "If you're going out for a walk and you may come to a place where you can't maintain social distancing, you have to wear a mask. ... Local governments would enforce it. I don't want to go to a penalty yet."

Facebook Live: Cayla Harris on COVID-19 and the state

He added: "You're not going to go to jail for not wearing a mask. ... And by the way, people will enforce it  'Where's your mask, buddy?'  in a nice, New York kind of way."

Melissa DeRosa, Cuomo's secretary, said they had been in contact with de Blasio's administration about his request for people to wear masks in grocery stores, "and this was the logical next step to build on that."

Asked again about his response to the coronavirus pandemic, including whether he should have shut down businesses and schools sooner last month, Cuomo said: "I don't know who should have done what, when, in January, February. ... There is no state that moved faster than the state of New York from the time of our first case, to starting to shut down, to total shutdown. That all happened in like 19 days in New York."

Cuomo said the proper time to review the state's response would come when the pandemic is over. The data he has been providing at his daily briefings since early March indicate that New York has crossed the apex of cases. Trends for key indicators including deaths statewide  11,586  and people being placed on ventilators are flattening.

But Cuomo cautioned that more than 2,000 new COVID-19 cases resulted in hospitalizations on Wednesday, indicating "this is still a public health crisis and ... we are still in the woods."

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Looking ahead, the key to resuming "the new normal" will be for the federal government to help develop both a national testing model and a vaccine for coronavirus, he said.

New York has more than 228 private labs that can help facilitate testing people both for the virus and for the antibodies that would indicate they may be immune to it. But the private laboratory system was built to handle a volume far less than what is needed to conduct public health monitoring on a widespread level.

"We have a blueprint for the reopening, again, as guided by testing (and) tracing," Cuomo said. "The more essential a business service or product, the more urgent the need to immediately get them back on line ... set (against) what is the risk of infection spread of that business."

The governor said businesses should start to redesign their workplaces so that social distancing can be implemented for both employees and clients. He said that restarting the economy will require a "business-by-business evaluation."

"Every governor is now in the same situation. ... The states cannot develop national testing," Cuomo said. "There's no simple answer to it. It's basically controlled by private sector companies who have been doing it at a reduced volume. ... It is very hard to bring this to scale quickly, and we need the federal government to be part of this."

The infection rate  a measure of the number of people who can be infected by a single person with the virus  "is the difference between a manageable situation and a pandemic," the governor said, adding that rate is being tracked closely and will be a factor in reopening businesses and schools.
Unauthorized immigrants in California can apply to receive $500 of coronavirus relief provided by the state starting in May, Gov. Gavin Newsom announced Wednesday.

Why it matters: The undocumented population was left out of the federal cash assistance provided in the CARES Act passed by Congress. They also do not qualify for unemployment insurance benefits.

Around 150,000 adults  out of 3 million unauthorized immigrants in California  will receive the one-time cash assistance from the state.

Between the lines: Of the $125 million being provided to help the unauthorized population during the coronavirus pandemic, $75 million will come from the state. $50 million will come from other private philanthropic sponsors, according to Newsom.

The governor said the aid will be dispersed "through a community-based model of regional nonprofits with expertise and experience serving undocumented communities."

There is a $1,000 household cap.

The bottom line: "Every Californian, including our undocumented neighbors and friends, should know that California is here to support them during this crisis," Newsom said.
First look images of Aidan Turner in his new historical drama Leonardo were released on Wednesday.

The Poldark heartthrob, 36, transformed into Leonardo Da Vinci for the show, which will chart the artist's life from childhood to becoming one of the world's most beloved geniuses of art and science.

In the stills, Aidan is seen as a young apprentice who is learning his craft while making the paintings such as The Baptism of Christ and the Last Supper.

Exciting: Poldark's Aidan Turner transformed into Leonardo Da Vinci in first look images from the actor's new historical drama, which were released on Wednesday

In another snap, Aidan is seen slaving away under candle light as his character tries to get every detail perfect in a woman's portrait.

According to The Hollywood Reporter, the show will 'unlock the mystery' behind Da Vinci's genius as well as explore a tantalising secret in his life.

Leonardo was created by The Man In The High Castle showrunner Frank Spotnitz and Sherlock writer Steve Thompson, the show will be directed by Daniel Percival and Alexis Sweet.

At work: In one snap, Aidan is seen slaving away under candle light as his character tries to get every detail perfect in a woman's portrait

From apprentice to icon: Aidan was seen as a young apprentice who is learning his craft while making the paintings such as The Baptism of Christ and the Last Supper

Speaking about the show, Frank admitted it was 'both a challenge and an honour' to portray Da Vinci's life on the silver screen.

In a statement, he said: 'Its both a challenge and an honour to dramatize the life of one of the most fascinating people who ever lived.

'Leonardo is constantly surprising, and despite his fame remains an enigma more than 500 years after his death.

Struggle: Speaking about the show, Frank Spotnitz admitted it was 'both a challenge and an honour' to portray Da Vinci's life on the silver screen

'Weve uncovered sometimes little-noticed clues about Leonardos life and pieced them together in a puzzle that attempts to reveal the humanity behind the genius.'

While Luca Bernabei, CEO of Lux Vide who have produced the drama, added in his own statement: 'Leonardos story invites us to believe in humanity, in its extraordinary abilities and the possibility of looking to the future beyond those horizons that today appear as overwhelming obstacles.'

Leonardo is currently set for release in 2021, but has yet to find a distributor in either the UK or the USA.
Mundelein Mayor Steve Lentz said the ordinance may have helped stymie negative consequences for businesses after speaking with some of them about it. But he said businesses still are hurting and called on his residents to help them in any way they can.
Jim Mack had made several trips to New York City before, but had never been the only passenger on a commercial jet landing at a deserted La Guardia Airport.

Instead of shuffling into the madhouse that is Terminal B on a typical weeknight, Mr. Mack was greeted by an eerie silence. It felt like it was either closed or I had landed in the wrong terminal, he said.

He had flown from Tampa, Fla.  just him and a Southwest Airlines crew  and now he was striding up the concourse toward baggage claim. The only luggage on the carousel was his. The lone Uber driver was waiting for him.

The coronavirus pandemic has unraveled air travel in the United States and turned some of the worlds busiest airports into giant voids.
Maximizing production of critical medical products to support increased patient care levels

Protecting employee health and safety through enhanced infection control procedures

Hiring up to 2,000 new employees globally -- 800 to join Baxter's U.S. operations

Donating more than $2 million to relief partners in the U.S., Europe, Asia and Latin America to support impacted communities

Baxter International Inc. (NYSE:BAX), a global medical products company, today provided an update on how the company is responding to the COVID-19 epidemic that is challenging communities and healthcare systems throughout the world. The company's support remains focused on increasing supply of its life-sustaining medicines and medical devices amidst unprecedented, rising demand; protecting employee health and safety; expanding job opportunities globally to help meet increased product demand; and providing philanthropic grants to support impacted communities.

"Baxter's mission is to Save and Sustain Lives, and that commitment guides everything we do even when the obstacles seem greatest," said Jose (Joe) E. Almeida, chairman and chief executive officer. "The heroic work by healthcare providers and first responders to care for those with COVID-19 inspires us all. We are committed to doing everything we can to support the healthcare system, our employees and our communities during this unprecedented time."

Increasing Product Supply Distribution

Since the emergence of COVID-19 and associated surge of patient hospitalizations, demand for certain Baxter products has increased significantly compared to normal ordering levels. In turn, Baxter has boosted its capacity and production to help address higher demand for products including PrisMax and Prismaflex, the company's blood purification systems used to treat acute kidney injury and other conditions, along with the solutions and consumables that enable them; its Mini-Bag Plus drug delivery system; the Spectrum IQ Infusion System and accompanying I.V. administration sets; I.V. solutions; and injectable drugs used in the ICU and across the hospital. All Baxter facilities manufacturing these products are maximizing production levels and continuing to pursue all opportunities to further increase supply, enabling the company to deliver as much as possible for those medical devices and medicines that are in high demand.

"Our medically essential products put us on the front lines of this pandemic, and our 50,000 colleagues are rising to the challenge to make a meaningful difference for patients," said Almeida. "Given that demand is at extraordinary levels, it is critical that we prioritize getting our products where they are most needed hospitals that are being overwhelmed by an influx of patients who are critically ill from COVID-19."

Baxter's process for product allocations during the COVID-19 pandemic is based on specific criteria that helps deliver the company's life-saving products where they are needed the most. These efforts are informed in part from objective research sources, such as the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, government data reporting, such as U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and academic data, such as Johns Hopkins University Medicine Coronavirus Resource Center. While current customers will continue to have access to Baxter products, this process will strive to dedicate additional inventory to hospitals around the world with the greatest COVID-19 patient care needs and will be updated regularly to reflect the dynamic situation.

Baxter is increasing its access to air freight capacity as well as the frequency of transporting critically needed medical devices and medicines back and forth between the U.S. and Europe. Flights will start this week, and the new airbridge will help the company get more products to hospitals as quickly as possible. Baxter continues to aggressively monitor the availability of, and source incremental, raw materials and components to help ensure supply continuity. The company also remains focused on supporting patients with chronic diseases who rely on life-sustaining Baxter therapies, including parenteral nutrition and dialysis.

Protecting Employee Health Safety

Baxter's staged pandemic response plan, which follows guidelines from the Centers for Disease Control and the World Health Organization, is active across all facilities globally. The response plan includes protective measures such as enhanced infection control actions, remote working arrangements for office-based employees, restricted travel, symptom screening at building entrances, and use of personal protective equipment by employees. Manufacturing operations have also been modified to limit interactions between employee groups.

Baxter's manufacturing, quality, warehousing, delivery, field service employees and Renal Care Services employees continue their work to help ensure the company's products remain at the ready to treat patients around the globe. In recognition of the extraordinary role these employees hold in the supply of medical products to hospitals and patient homes, the company has instituted a special pandemic incentive for its front-line workers. In addition, the company has implemented a volunteerism program, which provides an avenue for Baxter employees with appropriate medical training and licensure, including physicians and nurses, to take a leave of absence from the company and volunteer within their communities.

Expanding Employment Opportunities

Amidst significant economic disruption, increased demand for the company's products is creating additional permanent and temporary employment opportunities up to 2,000 new positions globally, 800 of which are in the United States. The company is looking for talented and passionate individuals to join in a variety of roles worldwide, primarily in manufacturing to help bolster production. Roles are available for those with minimal experience in manufacturing and will include robust training. More information on available jobs is at www.baxter.com/careers.

Donations for Humanitarian Relief

The Baxter International Foundation is providing more than $2 million in financial support for humanitarian relief organizations on the front lines of the pandemic globally. This includes a $1 million grant to Save the Children, who is working around the world to provide supplies, training, and information to prevent the pandemic, in addition to comprehensive efforts to strengthen communities and keep children and families safe-supporting food security, helping children continue to learn, and more. It also includes support for World Vision's COVID-19 Global Emergency Response, and geographic-specific support to Direct Relief in Europe, Project Hope in Asia, Americares in Latin America and the iBio Institute and local United Way chapters in the Chicagoland area. These latest donations build on initial grants to the global United Nations Foundation/WHO COVID-19 Solidarity Response Fund, IsraAID and Partners in Health. Finally, the Foundation is supporting its pre-existing grantee base by providing options to reallocate and/or extend funds as appropriate during this time.

About Baxter

Every day, millions of patients and caregivers rely on Baxter's leading portfolio of critical care, nutrition, renal, hospital and surgical products. For more than 85 years, we've been operating at the critical intersection where innovations that save and sustain lives meet the healthcare providers that make it happen. With products, technologies and therapies available in more than 100 countries, Baxter's employees worldwide are now building upon the company's rich heritage of medical breakthroughs to advance the next generation of transformative healthcare innovations. To learn more, visit www.baxter.com and follow us on Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook.

Rx Only. For the safe and proper use of the devices referenced here, refer to the complete Instructions for Use or the appropriate operator's manual.

Important Safety Information

The PrisMax and Prismaflex systems are intended for:

CRRT for patients weighing 20 kg or more with acute renal failure and/or fluid overload.

TPE therapy for patients weighing 20 kg or more with diseases where removal of plasma components is indicated.

All treatments administered via the PrisMax and Prismaflex control units must be prescribed by a physician.

This release includes forward-looking statements concerning the company's response to the COVID-19 epidemic, including with respect to the company's ability to support heightened product demand levels (through the new airbridge or otherwise) and to make product allocations based on need and its plans to hire additional employees. The statements are based on assumptions about many important factors, including the following, which could cause actual results to differ materially from those in the forward-looking statements: ability to maintain supply continuity; actions of regulatory bodies and other governmental authorities; contractual requirements, product quality, manufacturing or supply, or patient safety issues; changes in law and regulations; and other risks identified in Baxter's most recent filing on Form 10-K and other SEC filings, all of which are available on Baxter's website. Baxter does not undertake to update its forward-looking statements.

Baxter, PrisMax, Prismaflex, Mini-Bag Plus and Spectrum IQ are registered trademarks of Baxter International Inc.

View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20200415005733/en/

Contacts:

Media Contact

Lauren Russ, (224) 948-5353

media@baxter.com

Investor Contact

Clare Trachtman, (224) 948-3020
Social distancing should be kept in high-risk localities: committee

Deputy Prime Minister Vu Duc Dam, who is head of the National Steering Committee for COVID-19 Prevention and Control, speaks at the meeting

The National Steering Committee for COVID-19 Prevention and Control on April 15 agreed to propose Prime Minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc apply the social distancing policy for at least one more week in localities with high risks.

At the committees latest meeting, its members said that Vietnam has well controlled the disease thanks to the implementation of social distancing measures as regulated in the PMs Directive No.16/CT-TTg on a two-week period from April 1-15.

However, the diseases developments remain complicated, they stated, stressing the need for more drastic measures to deal it, and at the same time ensure peoples life and production and business activities.

The committee reached a consensus on putting forward compulsory regulations for all localities, such as continuing to wear face masks, banning big gatherings, keeping a distance of at least 2 metres among the people, and ensuring hygiene. Important political, economic and social events will be organised in accordance with instructions on medical supervision to ensure safety.

In localities with risks or low risks of the disease outbreaks, several production and business activities can be resumed when sanitation is guaranteed.

Regarding travel, the committee agreed to propose the Government maintain the implementation of measures to prevent infections from outside the country. Inside the country, each locality will carry out its specific restrictions based on its risk level, while the Health Ministry will also coordinate with the Transport Ministry to issue detailed regulations.

Along with increased communications to raise public awareness of disease prevention and control, the committee suggested the Prime Minister direct relevant agencies to strictly punish any violations.

Two more COVID-19 patients recover in the south, total at 171

British patient number 235, male, 25, is discharged from the Cu Chi Field Hospital in HCM City on Wednesday morning.  Photo courtesy of the hospital

Two more COVID-19 patients recovered and were discharged from the Can Tho Tuberculosis and Lung Diseases Hospital in Can Tho City and the Cu Chi Field Hospital of HCM City on Wednesday.

The two recovered patients have brought the countrys total patients being given the all-clear to 171, making up 64 per cent of total COVID-19 confirmed patients in Viet Nam.

Patient 145, male, 34, Vietnamese national, was treated at the Can Tho Tuberculosis and Lung Diseases Hospital. During treatment, the patient was tested three times and all tests had negative results for SARS-CoV-2 on April 12, 13 and 14.

Patient 235, male, 25, British national, was treated at the Cu Chi Field Hospital. During treatment, the patient had three tests and all results showed negative for SARS-CoV-2 on April 6, 8 and 9.

The two patients will continue to be isolated and monitored for the next 14 days, according to the Sub-committee for treatment of the National Steering Committee for COVID-19 Prevention and Control.

As of this morning, the Ministry of Health confirmed 267 patients with COVID-19 and no fatalities in Viet Nam.

The world reported more than two million COVID-19 patients and over 130,700 deaths in 211 countries and territories.

One more COVID-19 patient confirmed in Vietnam, total hits 267

A doctor examines a COVID-19 patient in Hanoi

One more COVID-19 patient was reported in Vietnam on April 15 morning, raising the total number of infection cases in the country to 267.

The patient is a 46-year-old man residing in Ha Loi commune, Me Linh district, Hanoi.

He is father of the 257th patient and husband of the 258th patient. He had close contact with the 243rd patient on March 20.

He was taken to a quarantine centre on April 8 and started to develop a fever, sore throat and tiredness five days later.

He tested positive for the novel coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 on April 14.

The man is being treated at the National Hospital for Tropical Diseases No.2 in Hanois Dong Anh district.

So far, 169 people who contracted the disease have been treated and made full recovery.

Thank you, Vietnam

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The COVID-19 outbreak has affected millions of people and is also having an increasingly negative impact on the global economy. Despite insufficient resources and financial capacity, Vietnam has nonetheless provided assistance to many countries in their fight against the pandemic.

Over 450,000 made-in-Vietnam protective suits, meanwhile, have landed in the US.

It also sent 550,000 face masks to five European countries - France, Germany, Italy, Spain, and the UK.

Many countries have expressed their deep gratitude towards the Vietnamese Government and people for the valuable assistance provided, despite the country itself still dealing with insufficient resources and financial capacity.

Vietnam has affirmed it will work closely with and strengthen its international cooperation with other countries in the field of health and safety while sharing information and supporting them to overcome difficulties in combating the pandemic.

One new COVID-19 case confirmed in Vietnam, totalling 266

A medical workers is spraying a residential area with disinfectant.

The National Steering Committee for COVID-19 Prevention and Control announced a new confirmed case of COVID-19 late April 14, taking the total tally to 266 as of 18:00.

Patient 266 is from Hanois Thuong Tin district. The 36-year-old woman took care of her mother at Bach Mai hospital, home of an outbreak of COVID-19 last month, from March 8 to 10. She was quarantined at home from March 30, and had samples taken for testing on April 12. The patient is now hospitalized at the second branch of the Central Hospital for Tropical Diseases in Hanoi.

By 17:00 on April 14, another COVID-19 patient was declared cured at the general hospital at Cau Treo international hospital, the central province of Ha Tinh. Thus, the total number of COVID-19 patients given the all-clear has risen to 169.

22 more recover from COVID-19

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The information was released by the treatment sub-committee under the National Steering Committee for COVID-19 Prevention and Control.

17 patients, including 15 Vietnamese and 2 foreigners, treated at the National Hospital for Tropical Diseases, recovered after treatment.

At the Cu Chi hospital for Covid-19 treatment, five patients, including three foreigners also recovered.

All the patients were tested negative three times for SARS-CoV-2.

They will continue to be quarantined and monitored for the next 14 days.

As of April 14 afternoon, Vietnam had confirmed 266 Covid 19 cases.

Vietnamese communities in Russia, Czech Republic join local efforts against COVID-19

The Vietnamese community in St. Petersburg has present medical socks to health workers at Pokrovsk Hospital, who have direct contact with COVID-19 patients.

The Vietnamese communities in both Russia and the Czech Republic have joined their host countrys efforts to prevent the spread of COVID-19.

Representatives from the Vietnamese community in St. Petersburg have presented medical socks to health workers at Pokrovsk Hospital, who have direct contact with COVID-19 patients.

Charity groups in the community have also called on Vietnamese people to raise funds for the hospital to buy medical equipment.

Meanwhile, in the Czech Republic, Vietnamese Ambassador Ho Minh Tuan said that since the first phase of the outbreak the embassy has coordinated with the local Vietnamese community to set up special working groups to provide updated information on COVID-19 and quickly issue warnings.

The embassy has also updated information on Vietnams entry-exit regulations for those who wish to return home and promoted prevention efforts undertaken in both countries, he added.

He also noted that the Czech Minister of Foreign Affairs has expressed his appreciation of the Vietnamese community joining hands with local authorities in the fight against COVID-19.

Local media, he went on, have carried stories praising the Vietnamese communitys solidarity with the Czech people during this difficult time.

Government leaders of the two countries earlier held phone talks to discuss stronger coordination in tackling COVID-19, he added.

Vietnamese expats in US donate 200,000 USD to Vietnams COVID-19 relief efforts

The Consulate General of Vietnam in San Francisco received a total of some 200,400 USD in donations on April 13 from Vietnamese expats living in Western states in the US for Vietnams fight against COVID-19.

Speaking at the ceremony to receive the donation, Vietnamese Consul General Nguyen Trac Toan expressed his deep gratitude towards donors, who themselves are affected by the epidemic but nonetheless contribute to fighting COVID-19 in their home country.

He highlighted the power of solidarity and unity among the Vietnamese people, both at home and abroad, which has proven to be stronger than ever. He said the Consulate General will soon transfer all donations to Vietnam and he expects that Vietnamese citizens in the US will continue supporting each other during the pandemic.

The contributions included 100,000 USD from the CEO of California Waste Solutions David Duong, 18,000 USD from Vietnamese expats in California, and 8,400 USD from those living in San Francisco.

Cambodian expert commends Vietnams efforts in fighting COVID-19

A medical worker is taking samples of a resident in Me Linh commune, Me Linh district, Vinh Phuc province, for COVID-19 testing.

A board member of the Club of Cambodian Journalists (CCJ) has lauded Vietnams cooperation with the World Trade Organisation (WHO) in the fight against COVID-19 and its support for Cambodia and Laos in this regard.

As ASEAN Chair 2020, Vietnam has actively cooperated with other ASEAN member countries and the international community, especially the WHO, in COVID-19 prevention and control, said Khieu Kola, who is also an international commentator on the Cambodian news channels CNC and CTN.

The Vietnamese Government, headed by Prime Minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc, has taken many measures to protect peoples health, contributing to ASEANs efforts in the battle.

Vietnams endeavours were reflected in PM Phucs speeches at the online Special ASEAN and ASEAN 3 Summits on COVID-19 on April 14, he stressed.

Khieu Koa also highlighted Vietnams diverse experience in battling the epidemic, particularly the slogan people join hands in fighting the COVID-19 enemy that was launched in a timely manner.

Competent Vietnamese agencies have remained vigilant in the work, with the highest priority given to protecting the publics health, he said, commending Vietnams preparations of resources and medical materials for the fight.

Khieu Kola told the Vietnam News Agency that he believes ASEAN member countries will join hands to stamp out the pandemic in the near future.

German foreign ministry appreciates Vietnams support in COVID-19 fight

Deputy Foreign Minister To Anh Dung (R) hands over the assistance to German Ambassador to Vietnam Guido Hildner

The German Federal Foreign Office on April 14 spoke highly of the Germany-Vietnam friendship in the fight against the ravaging COVID-19 pandemic.

In a Facebook post, the office voiced its gratitude and appreciation for the support of the Vietnamese Government and people living in Germany in battling the disease.

Vietnam donated 110,000 protective masks to Germany and the same relief package to other European nations which are heavily hit by the pandemic, including France, the UK, Italy and Spain, said the office.

In addition, the Vietnamese community has offered thousands of masks and gloves for hospitals and nursing homes in Germany.

Vietnamese restaurants in the country are distributing thousands of food portions to doctors and nurses in hospitals intensive care units.

In return for the assistance, the World University Service Germany presented 20 water filter systems to the Vietnamese Government, which are able to provide clean water for 12,000 people, especially those in remote and mountainous areas, the German office noted.
DUBAI, United Arab Emirates, April 15, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- Mobile marketing platform BIGO Ads announces Digital Venture FZ LLC to be the branding exclusive reseller of imo for UAE and Kuwait.

BIGO Ads, from BIGO Technology, is an ads platform, providing mobile marketing solutions globally. Covering more than 150 countries, BIGO Ads integrates mobile marketing solutions into imo, the global instant communication app with global monthly active users (MAU) of 210 million, and Likee, a short video creation platform with global MAU of 115 million. With its strong user base and high-quality content, BIGO Ads enriches the user portrait system and provides marketing solutions for advertisers and partners in different scenarios.

BIGO Ads utilizes cutting-edge machine learning technology, powerful Artificial Intelligence algorithms, comprehensive big data analysis, and processing capabilities to support branding and performance advertising solutions for advertisers. With various advertising formats, such as Banner, Native, Video and different cooperation models like Programmatic buying,

Reserved branding Ads and Auction Bidding Ads, BIGO Ads provides a one-stop integrated marketing solutions for advertisers to reach the targeted audience, increase brand awareness and maximize return of investment (ROI).

Digital Venture, a leading Media Sales house, operates across key markets within EMEA.

Digital Venture offers consultative marketing solutions, powered by technology, data, innovation and creativity. In an ever-evolving ad tech world, our experts guide our advertisers to pick the right solution, to deliver the right messages to the right audiences at the right time.

Digital Venture, also exclusively represent several premium world class products. Commenting on this strategic alliance, Digital Venture CEO, Sami Hamade said, "We are very excited to represent a world class social platform such as imo of BIGO Technology and look forward to having partners join us in creating social, relevant, interactive dialogue with consumers to achieve successful brands communications strategies."

BIGO Ads is glad to partner with Digital Venture FZ LLC. With Digital Venture FZ LLC's in-depth understanding of the market and excellent relationship in MENA, as well as the rich and efficient marketing solutions of BIGO Ads, we will provide advertisers with a better service and achieve marketing objectives.

Now BIGO Ads is ready in MENA, we are looking forward to new collaboration opportunities with local business.

Go BIG with BIGO Ads!




Just a day after the country emerged from an economy crippling lockdown, a Hermes outlet, a Parisian high fashion luxury brand, recorded sales of over $2.7 million or Rs 20.6 crore, just from one store. One store, in one city. Let that sink in.

 Reuters

This bizarre behaviour comes a day after reports surfaced that the infamous wet markets from which the current strain of the novel coronavirus originated, are back at it again, selling bats, peacocks, and rats.

 Reuters (The affluent in Chinese pride in being able to afford some of the most exotic meats in the market)

This week, after a brief hiatus of new cases, China saw a number of cases where there were new infections, and a surge in the cases of reinfections, an instance, where people who were believed to have been cured of the virus, testing positive for the virus again.

 Reuters

The Hermes outlet that recorded the astonishing sales figure is located in one of China's wealthiest provinces or districts, the province of Guangdong.

This event, reports suggest, also marks the highest sales figure for that particular store in Guangzhou, the wealthiest city in China. The store has been at that location since 2004

 Reuters

This surely comes as a relief to luxury brands all over the world. For long, there has been speculation that the outbreak of the virus, and the crippled economy that is expected to follow the outbreak, would mean the death of the fashion industry, more specifically the luxury fashion brands as we know it.

 Reuters

There was speculation that luxury brands would have to reinvent themselves in a post-COVID world. Now, with the sales figure from that just one store in China, it seems that this pandemic is not going to affect the luxury segment that bad after all.

 Reuters

This sudden outbreak or urge to shop ridiculously can actually be explained.

Because of the lockdown, a number of affluent and wealthy families had to cancel their vacations. Now, even though some countries like China are emerging out of the lockdowns, they are faced with an itch to have a good a time; essentially, they feel like spending with vengeance.

The Chinese even have a term for it - baofuxing xiaofei or revenge shopping.

 Istock

This is especially bizarre if you consider the sudden spike in new cases and reinfections, as we said.

With China staring at a second, and perhaps an even deadlier wave than the one they survived, this seriously begs the question- will the authorities learn from their mistake, and extend the lockdown, or are we looking at yet another catastrophe in the making?
Most universities in the U.S. have already closed classes for the rest of the 2019-20 school year. Now some are considering extending that through the start of the 2020-21 academic schedule.

According to a report from CNN, several schools in the country, including Boston University, Harvard, Oregon State and the University of Arizona, are considering options that would involve canceling in-person classes for the 2020 fall semester.

In a release on Boston Universitys website, it said that as part of its recovery plan, if public officials say it is not safe for students to return in the fall, the plan envisions the need to consider a later in-person return perhaps in January 2021. Boston University has already canceled all in-person activities for the spring semester and for the summer.

--Check out all of PennLives coronavirus coverage by clicking here--

Weve made the big decisions relating to the spring and summer, University President Robert Brown said in the statement. We are now in a position to focus on the fall and the best and safest way in which to bring the residential teaching and research community back onto campus when time and public health considerations permit.

The statement and news release from Boston University echoed the sentiments of other schools, stating that while they are hoping to have the fall semester on campus, they are looking at plans for remote learning in the event that it isnt safe to return to campus.

According to a survey from Inside Higher Ed released in late March, 31 percent of university presidents polled believe in-person classes will return by the fall semester, while 41 percent said they believe in an uncertain timeline.

Oregon State spokesman Steve Clark told The Oregonian that virtual learning could extend past the spring and into the fall.

Only the novel coronavirus will determine what happens, Clark said. We can hope for a full return in fall 2020, but hope is not a strategy. So that is why we are going to prepare as best we can for every possible contingency.

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.

-- Follow Ed Sutelan on Twitter, @EdwardSutelan

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Rice, eggs, noodles and other supplies are sold for zero dong at a newly-opened supermarket in Hanoi.

On the morning of April 14, many Hanoians queued in front of a supermarket on Tran Duy Hung Street of Hanoi's Cau Giay District. Selling everything for zero dong, the store, named Hanh Phuc (Happiness) allows customers to choose five items not exceeding VND100,000 ($4.3).

At the entrance, customers stood two meters apart, filled in a form, and waited to shop with the support of staff.

"If you are in difficulty, please take what you need. If not, please leave some goods for others," read a sign in front of the supermarket.

Operated by an enterprise, the "Zero supermarket" is one of many opened in the northern provinces of Lang Son, Bac Giang, Bac Ninh, Hai Duong, Thai Nguyen, as well as the central provinces of Thua Thien Hue and Phu Yen. This chain will remain open until the Covid-19 pandemic is contained.

Customers employ social distancing in front of Hanh Phuc supermarket on April 14, 2020. Photo by VnExpress/Tung Dinh.

Arriving at 8:30 a.m., Nguyen Thi Kim waited an hour to enter the supermarket. Before the pandemic, Kim worked as a trash collector, but the nationwide social distancing campaign has stopped her from earning. Her husband, a motorbike taxi driver, makes only VND50,000 ($2) a day max.

To void infection, Kim wears two layers of masks and rubber gloves when going out.

"The epidemic is complex, I would rather be careful. Coming home, I always wash and disinfect my gloves," she maintained.

Kim, who suffers from disc herniation, got rice and instant noodles at the supermarket while her husbands earnings are saved for meat and vegetables.

"We need to be fed first, who cares about having tasty food," she said, adding they were lucky to receive support from authorities and big-hearted donors during the pandemic.

Holding a package of rice, sugar, eggs and oil, the middle-aged woman could not hide her happiness: "This amount of food can feed us for a week. I hope things will get better soon."

Later, at 10:30 a.m., Nguyen Thi Hang, 87, hobbled to the supermarket. Seeing the old woman walking with a stick, everyone gave way.

With support from staff, Hang collected rice, noodles, eggs, salt and fish sauce.

"With this amount of food, I can eat for weeks. A lot of rice, instant noodles and eggs are more than enough. I can cook on my own without disturbing my neighbors," she claimed.

A brave Hang makes her way to the supermarket with help from a neighbor. Photo by VnExpress/Tung Dinh.

From the northern province of Thanh Hoa, Hang pays VND400,000 ($17) per month for a room on Hanoi's De La Thanh Street. Before the outbreak, she sold cotton swabs. With the ongoing social distancing period, all of her customers and suppliers have disappeared, leaving the 87-year-old with an empty wallet.

"I plan to return to my hometown at the end of this year because I am too old. But the epidemic makes me stay here," she said.

Tran Thi Hoa, waiting since 10 a.m., said she could only work 2-3 times per month due to Covid-19, making money for food scarce.

From northern Nam Dinh Province, Hoa's family rents a room forVND1.3 million ($55.5) per month. Though their kids have moved out, two grandchildren remain. Before the pandemic, her younger child had returned to the northern province of Nam Dinh, leaving his parents, elder sibling and their minors in the capital.

Shoppers can choose up to five items for VND100,000 ($4.3) in total. Photo by VnExpress/Tung Dinh.

"We have six mouths to feed, it is dangerous if we do not earn enough money. I do whatever people hire me to do. Today, I got rice, cooking oil, instant noodles and salt, enough for one week, with the food we have at home."

Each "shopper" must fill in a form before "shopping". After two weeks, they can return to receive more food. Hoa promises if things get better in the next two weeks, she would not return because there are people facing even greater difficulties.

According to Nguyen Minh Trang, coordinator at the "Zero supermarket", said her company had spent nearly VND10 billion ($42,688) to stock the eight stores.

The supermarket opens from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m., from Monday to Thursday. On the morning of April 14, up to 400 people received food here.
BAKU, Azerbaijan, April 15

By Leman Zeynalova - Trend:

With the entire world facing the crisis of the coronavirus it is both strange and unfortunate that so-called "elections" have taken place in Nagorno-Karabakh, US expert, CEO of Caspian Group Holdings Rob Sobhani told Trend.

This of course does not help in any way further the cause of peace and may even hurt the peace process. The International community responsible for conflict resolution will not be happy with these so-called "elections" because the mood across the world is to promote cooperation and peace, he said.

Sobhani pointed out that the three co-chairs US, Russia and France may now renew their efforts to solve the conflict.

In fact, the global pandemic has created a situation across the world that shows world leaders must cooperate to solve problems such as the conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan. More broadly speaking, the recent intense talks between Russian and US presidents on the global oil price collapse may pose a new opportunity for world leaders to cooperate on the resolution of the conflict, he concluded.

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 districts.

The 1994 ceasefire agreement was followed by peace negotiations. Armenia has not yet implemented four UN Security Council resolutions on withdrawal of its armed forces from Nagorno Karabakh and the surrounding districts.

---

Follow the author on Twitter: @Lyaman_Zeyn
The annual MacKenzie-Childs Barn Sale is the latest large event to be canceled due to the coronavirus pandemic.

Every year thousands of people travel to the Finger Lakes village of Aurora to scour the sale of 80 percent off ceramics, enamelware, glassware, furniture, lighting, rugs, holiday and more. However, due to the current world health event and social distancing orders, the organizers have made the decision to cancel the event this year.

The shop posted on the Facebook event page saying: "Given the current global Covid-19 pandemic, we have made the difficult decision to cancel this years Barn Sale, scheduled for July 16-19, 2020. This choice was made to protect the health and safety of our staff, customers, and communities.

We will greatly miss seeing our customers in Aurora, New York this year, but we encourage you to sign up for email to stay connected to all we still have going on at the Farm. We wish everyone health and safety during this time and appreciate their help in staying safe and being socially responsible."

It is one of many large summer events and festivals to be canceled across Upstate New York due to the spread of COVID-19.

The home decor business shut down its stores and production facilities in March, but five employees are still working to make masks for their employees and first responders in Aurora and Auburn. They made about 400 masks to distribute in their first week. Masks will also go free of charge to Cayuga County troopers, EMTs, community volunteers, caregivers and nursing homes.

MORE ON CORONAVIRUS

Coronavirus in NY: Cases, maps, charts and resources

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Complete coronavirus coverage on syracuse.com
Korea's exports in the first 10 days of this month declined 18.6 percent compared to the same period last year. They had dropped only 0.2 percent until last month as mainstay semiconductor shipments fared relatively well, while shipments to other parts of the world compensated for declining exports to China. But the situation has worsened drastically as the coronavirus epidemic spread quickly throughout Europe and the U.S. Double-digit declines were seen in exports of petrochemical products (48 percent), mobile communications devices (23 percent) and car parts (32 percent), and exports to Vietnam, Latin America and the Middle East have also dropped. But this is only the beginning. As the epidemic drags on, exports will drop even further.

Exports fared well even during the 1997 Asian financial crisis, because economies outside Asia were relatively unscathed. Korea managed to emerge from the global financial crisis in 2008 and exports surged 28 percent the following year. But this is not expected to happen now. The epidemic has virtually frozen China, the world's manufacturing base, disrupting the global supply networks, while consumer markets in the U.S. and Europe have grown cold. Economists are worrying about a global slump equal to the Great Depression. The World Trade Organization forecast global trade to plummet up to 32 percent this year. For Korea, where exports account for 37 percent of GDP, the impact will be devastating.

The crisis hit Korea when its economic health was already severely weakened. Exports had already fallen 10 percent before the epidemic started here. Compounded by the U.S.-China trade war, the government's wrong-headed economic policies had already taken their toll on Korea's export competitiveness. Businesses were saddled with higher salary obligations due to the drastic minimum-wage hike, while a shorter working week, red tape and militant labor unions also ate into competitiveness. To overcome the impact of the epidemic, the government must first focus on recovering the export competitiveness of Korean businesses, because that is what underpins the whole of the country's economy.


Proponents and opponents of a proposed senior living complex along El Camino Real near San Elijo Lagoon have been granted a few more weeks to work out their differences.

Two appeals of the projects approval, which were supposed to be heard Wednesday night by the City Council, will instead be scheduled for the councils next regular meeting on Feb. 14.

The appeal has been postponed for two weeks as the two sides hopefully work on a solution, Mayor Catherine Blakespear said during Wednesday nights meeting.

Westmont Living, which operates a string of assisted living centers in California and Oregon, is proposing to build an 85,879-square-foot structure with 93 housing suites for seniors on whats now a mostly vacant property just north of the Temple Solel synagogue and El Caminos intersection with Manchester Road.

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The size of the proposed senior housing facility and its planned location have long been sources of conflict.

Westmonts original plans called for a 110,073-square-foot structure with 122 suites. Nearby residents said that was akin to dropping a massive, big box retail store into their backyards.

For comparison, the citys Walmart store at the northern end of Encinitas part of El Camino Real is about 100,000 square feet and the Target store is about 140,000 square feet.

In May 2016, city planning commissioners agreed that the original design was too massive for the site and rejected it. Westmont then redesigned its plans and came back months later with plans for a downsized, 85,879-square-foot structure, which the Planning Commission approved in December.

Commission Chairman Glenn OGrady said at the time that the smaller facility would still have an impact on traffic conditions, but not as much as the earlier one.

Project opponents said the redesign wasnt much better than the original, and vowed they would appeal the commissions decision to the City Council. On Dec. 22, the city received two appeals -- one came from a single project neighbor, Linda Lux, while the other was filed by a group of neighbors.

In her appeal, Lux contends that the commissions approval should be overturned by the council on the grounds that the project is incompatible with the surrounding neighborhood of single-family homes, doesnt follow city design guidelines, has lighting that will spill over into the neighborhood, and will adversely impact the general welfare of the community.

The citizens group -- Encinitas Citizens for Responsible, Respectful Encinitas Development --- contends in its appeal that the Planning Commission shouldnt have considered the project redesign in December because that was less than a year after the original, substantially similar project was rejected.

The group also argues that various commission findings in favor of the project were flawed and it contends that the developers should have been required to do a full environmental impact report on the project.
Our family business may or may not turn 32 this fall. My husband and I have survived for more than three decades in specialty retail, selling women's clothing to professionals who work in Washington, DC. Changing dress codes, the rise of online shopping, and even the emerging ethos of owning less are among the challenges we face and surmount through hard work, taking risks and endless refinement of products and business practices. None of those obstacles compares, however, with the DC governments sledgehammer decree that non-essential businesses must close.

No amount of work, investment or risk-taking serves any business owner when the means of making a living are unilaterally denied. My seasonal worry about whether our investment will resonate with customers disappeared with the new reality that public officials, pandering to panic over prudence, stopped the economy and made rent payments for owners and employees alike an imminent disaster. Too little thought is given to the economys on-the-ground realities and the essential role that businesses play.

We need all kinds of businesses, from the one person handyman services to mega-corporations that deliver goods produced in every corner of the world to every buyer who wants them. We rely on businesses utterly - its how we trade for what we cant make ourselves. The best business owners thrive because their personal integrity informs every aspect of their operations, and customers choose the products and services of companies that earn their trust. Even with its flaws and failures, trading with one another beats the alternative - using force to take from one another. Thats why the web of business is so important - it creates and reinforces the best in our nature - innovation, production, and cooperation - while mitigating our tendencies to crush, control and consume without care for the future.

Right now, the worst tendencies of our nature rule. The official response to COVID-19 is both fear-based and cynical. Despite insufficient knowledge of transmission, despite insufficient testing to have a sense of how many people have or have had the virus, and despite the resultant lack of understanding of the viruss lethality, our businesses are being crushed.

The taking of our ability to earn a living came with an even deeper strike at our cooperative commercial system. Government officials - without any public discussion - upended all the rules and norms that allow businesses to function, offering pittances of printed money in compensation for consuming the savings and credit that make the unknowable future easier to manage.

No matter how this crisis ends, officials will be able to allege that their draconian measures and the resulting economic devastation were warranted  that our fate would have been even worse if they hadnt acted so decisively and courageously. And who will be able to argue with such self-serving rhetoric? You cant prove a negative.

But we can and should start petitioning for the freedom to reopen now. Allowing commerce to recommence would begin to restore the financial and social vitality our businesses create. A more sensible approach to minimize the risks of covid-19 involves a mix of private and public actions:

Help those who are truly vulnerable stay isolated

Test huge swaths of the population so that we can better understand transmission, rates of infection, and antibody production

Eliminate regulatory roadblocks on the production and distribution of drugs and medical equipment so that patients with acute cases can be properly treated

Continue expedited work on fast and accurate tests, vaccines, and cures

Refine procedures for handling the next epidemic or biothreat.

A vibrant economy with functioning businesses is key to supporting all of the above while simultaneously providing customers with the goods, services, and community touchstones on which they depend.

Betsy Fisher is a small business owner in Washington, D.C.
In a recent study, researchers have found that the molecules in tarantula venom could be used as an alternative to opioid pain killers for those seeking chronic pain relief.

They have come up with a novel tarantula venom mini-protein that can potentially relieve severe pain without addiction. This study was published in The Journal of Biological Chemistry.

University of Queensland Dr Christina Schroeder from UQ's Institute for Molecular Bioscience said the current global opioid crisis meant urgent alternatives to morphine and morphine-like drugs, such as fentanyl and oxycodone, were desperately needed.

"Although opioids are effective in producing pain relief, they come with unwanted side-effects like nausea, constipation and the risk of addiction, placing a huge burden on society," Dr Schroeder said."Our study found that a mini-protein in tarantula venom from the Chinese bird spider, known as Huwentoxin-IV, binds to pain receptors in the body.

"By using a three-pronged approach in our drug design that incorporates the mini-protein, its receptor and the surrounding membrane from the spider venom, we've altered this mini-protein resulting in greater potency and specificity for specific pain receptors.

"This ensures that just the right amount of the mini-protein attaches itself to the receptor and the cell membrane surrounding the pain receptors."

Dr Schroeder said the mini-protein had been tested in mouse models and shown to work effectively."Our findings could potentially lead to an alternative method of treating pain without the side-effects and reduce many individuals' reliance on opioids for pain relief," she said.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Sara Ali Khan made her debut in the movie Kedarnath. Coming from a family of stars, she had a vision of her dreams and always wanted to become an actor. The actor completed her graduation abroad and ever since she returned to India, there were talks of her making a debut in Bollywood. This itself gave Sara Ali Khan immense popularity. In an interview during the release of her film Kedarnath, the actor was asked about the equation she shares with her friends from college. Here's what the Simmba actor said.

Sara Ali Khan speaks about her equation with her friends

In the interview, Sara Ali Khan was asked if her friends treated her like a star after she started appearing in movies. She said that her friends were not surprised when she chose acting as a career choice. The actor said that all her friends knew that Sara Ali Khan wanted to be an actor and she has also mentioned this in many of her interviews.

Love Aaj Kal 2 actor also said that her friends were as excited as her when she chose acting as her profession. Speaking about being in touch with her friends, she said some of her friends flew down for the screening of her movie Kedarnath.

Also Read: Sara Ali Khan Gets Candid About Parent's Divorce; Says She Has Two Happy Homes

Also Read: Sara Ali Khan Says She Was A 'huge Nerd' When She Told Mom Amrita That She Wanted To Act

Sara Ali Khan's other friends who live in America, Pakistan and London also sent her wishes and praised her for the movie. Although some of her friends can not travel all the way to Mumbai to meet her but she makes it a point to meet them whenever she visits London. She also visits London to meet her brother Ibrahim Ali Khan.

She said that when her first film released, her friends were very excited to watch her on-screen because she is a crazy girl in real life. Sara further said that her friends give her honest opinions about her film and also cheer her up in every way possible.

She is all set to feature in her fourth Bollywood movie, Coolie No. 1, sharing the screen with actor Varun Dhawan in the lead. The film is a remake of the 1995 film and was supposed to release on May 1, 2020, but the dates might differ due to Coronavirus crisis.

Also Read: Parineeti Chopra Pulls Off A Sara Ali Khan In Her New Instagram Post

Also Read: Sara Ali Khan Sure Knows The Art Of Charming Fans With Her Unique Poses; See Pics

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.
Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) during a Senate Judiciary hearing about sanctuary jurisdictions, on Capitol Hill in Washington on Oct. 22, 2019. (Charlotte Cuthbertson/The Epoch Times)

US Lawmaker Proposes Sanctions Against Chinese Officials Over CCP Virus Coverup

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) announced his intention to introduce a new bill that would impose U.S. sanctions on Chinese officials responsible for silencing medical experts, journalists, political dissidents, and Chinese citizens who spoke up about the CCP virus.

When Congress returns, introducing this legislation is just one of the necessary steps I will take to hold the Chinese officials involved in covering up the coronavirus outbreak accountable, said Cruz, according to an April 14 press release from his office.

Cruz added: The Chinese Communist Party deliberately silenced those who tried to sound the alarm and provide the world with medical informationHad the Chinese government acted responsibly, the coronavirus outbreak might not have turned into a global pandemic.

Called the Ending Chinese Medical Censorship and Cover Ups Act of 2020, the bill would require the U.S. President submit a list of persons that engaged in censorship activities in China, to the appropriate congressional committees within 90 days after the bill is enacted.

The President would need to update the list at least once annually, according to the bill.

Censorship activities to be penalized include acts that prohibit, limit, or penalize the exercise of freedom of expression or assembly by Chinese citizens on social media.

Chinese officials who punished citizens for the public dissemination of accurate epidemiological information could also be sanctioned.

The sanctions would include prohibiting property transactions in the United States, denying visas, and revoking existing visas.

Chinas censorship and suppression are now not only a threat to human rights in China and around the world, they are a direct threat to U.S. national security and our economy, Cruz said.

Beijings initial cover-up of the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus, commonly known as novel coronavirus, has been well-documented. It silenced eight doctors, among them ophthalmologist Li Wenliang and Ai Fen, head of the emergency department at Wuhan Central hospital. They were silenced after posting on Chinese social media about a new form of pneumonia in late December.

In early January, Li was summoned to a local police station for rumor-mongering. He died a month later after contracting the virus from an infected patient.

To this day, many Chinese netizens have continued to visit Lis personal Weibo account, leaving comments on his last social media post published on Feb. 1, when he wrote that he had tested positive for the virus.

On April 15, one netizen from Shanghai wrote: Two months have passed. You [whistleblowers doctors] have been sacrificed. Nobody has stepped up to take responsibility, to seek accountability, or to hold a review.

An investigation into Lis case, which resulted in the punishment of two police officers employed at the police station that summoned Li, has failed to quell public anger, as many Chinese netizens believe the two officers are merely scapegoats.

On April 13, Reporters Without Borders (RSF) issued a statement, expressing concerns about three missing citizen journalistsChen Quishi, Fang Bin, and Li Zehua. They also said Ai has been unreachable for the past two weeks.

According to RSF, Ais family feared that she had been arrested following her criticism of Chinas censorship during an interview with a local magazine.

Ais Weibo account recently became posting messages again, but RSF is concerned that Chinese police forced her to post them.

We urge the Chinese authorities to display the utmost transparency about her situation and, if she has been arrested, to immediately free her and all other journalists and information sources detained in China, said Cedric Alviani, head of RSFs East Asia bureau, in the statement.
Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, April 15)  The Department of Labor and Employment is in talks with employers to set a minimum hazard pay for health workers in the private sector amid the coronavirus crisis.

"Pinag-uusapan na po ngayon ng Department of Labor and Employment kasama ng mga private employers ang suggestion tungkol sa minimum hazard pay para sa ating mga healthcare workers sa pribadong kumpanya," Health Spokesperson Ma. Rosario Vergeire said in an online media briefing on Wednesday.

[Translation: The Department of Labor and Employment and private employers are discussing the suggestion on the minimum hazard pay for healthcare workers in private companies.]

Vergeire was asked to respond to reports that some nurses in private hospitals have been receiving a hazard pay of only 200 a day since the COVID-19 started.

The Palace, through Administrative Order No. 26, had set the amount at 500 daily for all public health workers and other government personnel reporting for work during the COVID-19 outbreak.

The same order states that private hospitals and other facilities are strongly encouraged to provide similar benefits to their frontliners.

President Rodrigo Duterte has declared a state of calamity amid rising cases of coronavirus infections in the country. Most residents in Luzon are ordered to stay home under an enhanced community quarantine, except healthcare workers and other frontliners engaged in basic services. Other areas in the country have enforced their own lockdowns.

More than 200 doctors and nurses have tested positive for COVID-19, the Department of Health said last week, adding that 12 have succumbed to the viral illness. The Philippine Medical Association has reported a higher number, saying 17 doctors have died of COVID-19. It said they contracted the disease due to the shortage of personal protective equipment.

The government has since procured more protective gear for health workers, augmented by generous donations from the private sector.

Nationwide, the number of confirmed COVID-19 cases has reached 5,453, with 353 recoveries and 349 deaths.
Madhya Pradesh chief minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan on Wednesday urged people to not be scared as coronavirus cases spiked in the industrial hub of Indore. Till late Tuesday night, the city reported 427 cases.

The chief minister said the numbers will likely see an increase as the administration has started testing extensively.

People in Indore shouldnt be scared, numbers will increase. If someone doesnt know that theyre positive, theyll not only risk their own lives but that of others too. So we decided to conduct testing extensively. This will help control corona, said Chouhan.

An analysis of the data shows that till Wednesday morning, the death rate of Covid-19 patients in the city was around 6.8 per cent, higher than the national average.

There was no testing infrastructure earlier, tests were not even being done till March 23. Now we have nine functional labs. We are also sending samples to Delhi for tests. That is why the number of cases is rising, the CM added.

Elaborating on details of the cases, Chief Medical and Health Officer (CMHO) Praveen Jadia said most of the new patients from Indore are either relatives or close acquaintances of people who earlier tested positive for coronavirus. All those, he added, who came in contact with these patients have already been isolated as a precaution.

So far, 37 people have been discharged after recovery, he said.

The local administration has imposed curfew in urban limits since March 25 after the first coronavirus patients were found in the city.

The chief minister also assured migrant workers from the state stuck in other places that money will be transferred to their accounts and arrangements are being made for them. Yesterday, Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced that the nationwide lockdown will be in place till May 3. Soon after, rail and train services were also shut till the end of extended lockdown.

Many workers of MP are stuck in other states.They couldnt return when lockdown was extended.We talked to other CMs to make arrangements for their food and shelter. Weve decided to transfer Rs 1,000 in accounts of such workers. Theyll be able to withdraw it wherever they are, said Chouhan, who took oath as CM on March 23.

The chief minister underlined that his government is standing with the workers in this critical time.

Dont worry well send you more money if needed. Were standing with you. I request peoples representatives to make a list of all such people and send it to the Chief Ministers Office or District collectors office. We will send money as and when the list is sent to us, said Chouhan.

Of the total 377 coronavirus deaths, Maharashtra tops the tally with 178 deaths, followed by Madhya Pradesh at 50, Delhi at 30, Gujarat at 28 and Telangana at 17. Punjab and Tamil Nadu have reported 12 deaths each. Karnataka has reported 10 fatalities while Andhra Pradesh reported nine deaths.
ACCESS to food during the COVID-19 crisis has been a source of anxiety everywhere in the West. But the worst of the pandemic is yet to come, which means that anything can still happen.

Hey there, time traveller!

This article was published 15/4/2020 (636 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Opinion

ACCESS to food during the COVID-19 crisis has been a source of anxiety everywhere in the West. But the worst of the pandemic is yet to come, which means that anything can still happen.

Panic-buying by people in confinement has already demonstrated the fragility of supply chains, as supermarket shelves were emptying in many countries, including Canada. Seeing shelves fill up again across the network, most consumers felt reassured. And time and time again, experts have told the public that food security will never be compromised  if borders remain open.

Global supply chains are working due to the goodwill of countries wanting to share wealth and knowledge with others. Essentially, trade is based on the principle that no one country can be good and efficient at everything.

Being a northern country, Canada has certain disadvantages. So our relationships with partners abroad allow our agri-food economy to fill in some gaps. We buy and sell with the world. Its the same for other countries; countries depend on each other. Its a simple theory and its worked for years.

But in times of crisis, such principles can easily be forgotten. Governments can react unpredictably when fear begins dictating their decisions.

Since the beginning of the COVID-19 crisis, every effort has been made to ensure trade flows as freely as possible, especially to avoid food shortages. This was the crux of the message from the United Nations and from several governments around the world, including Canada and the United States.

The UN has gone so far as to say that when acting to protect the health and well-being of their citizens, countries should ensure that any trade-related measures dont disrupt the food supply chain. But the global agency also had a more provocative message: the world could face a food shortage if authorities fail to properly manage the COVID-19 epidemic.

For now, keeping markets open without interruption has been the focus. But now that governments around the world are trying to curb the spread of COVID-19 by restricting population movements, international trade and food supply chains are beginning to slow.

Agriculture is being affected by the thorny issue of the need for foreign workers. And processing is being disrupted by impromptu factory closings. Trucking, which ensures the connections between links in the chain, is sometimes slowed by more road surveillance.

So the entire supply chain is under extreme pressure. The world is on the brink of a major slowdown in agri-food trades. Borders are becoming more firm as we get closer to the peak of this pandemic. Uncertainty about the availability of food can trigger a wave of export restrictions, creating a shortage on world markets. Such a scenario is highly improbable, but not impossible.

For Canada, the United States is the wild card. The number of positive COVID-19 cases in the U.S. is alarming, as are the number of deaths. Adding more pressure is the fact that nearly 17 million Americans have filed for unemployment benefits in the past few weeks. Considering the size of our economy, the situation in Canada is slightly worse.

These are unprecedented numbers and theyre very alarming. And, unfortunately, we all know how fear can influence governments, especially in the U.S. You only need look at the wall being erected on the U.S.-Mexico border.

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According to a recent Angus Reid survey, 71 per cent of Canadians are either concerned or extremely concerned about the nations economy. In the meantime, when a crisis hits, populations tend to stay close to whats familiar, which is why the buy-local movement is getting a bit of a lift. And 43 per cent of those surveyed said they intend to buy locally once the crisis is over.

Its always nice to buy local and support our economy. But we all need to think about the big picture: more than 60 per cent of the Canadian economy stems from exports.

Things are already getting complicated around the planet. Russia has established export quotas on certain grains until the end of June as that countrys coronavirus cases escalate.

The correlation between the number of COVID-19 cases and the nervousness of governments is strong. Lets hope cooler heads prevail in North America.

Sylvain Charlebois is senior director of the agri-food analytics lab and a professor in food distribution and policy at Dalhousie University.

 Troy Media
In this photograph taken on March 23, 2017, semi-precious stones used in Tibetan medical treatment are displayed for sale in the Indian town of Dharamsala.

Tibetan traditional medicine is seeing a marked increase in demand across China as many have come to believe  despite the absence of scientific evidence or even clinical tests  that it is effective at treating coronavirus.

A source who requested anonymity in the Tibetan capital Lhasa told RFAs Tibetan Service that several coronavirus patients in and around Tibet, who have since made full recoveries, were treated with traditional medicines.

These medicines are centuries old and are composed of natural ingredients like herbs and minerals.

The Chinese governments narrative is that besides one patient, there have been no confirmed cases of coronavirus in Lhasa.

But Tibetans in Tawu [Daofu in Chinese] and some other places were confirmed to be infected by the coronavirus. With the help of traditional Tibetan medicinal remedies, all the patients are believed to have recovered, the source said.

Because of this the popularity of Tibetan medicine has spread like wildfire, the source added.

According to the source, demand for Tibetan remedies increased sharply outside of Tibet.

It is even being promoted by a Chinese doctor as an effective alternative medicine for COVID-19, the source said.

Tibetan students returning to China to continue their studies are taking lots of Tibetan medicine with them, fearing that they might be stricken with COVID-19. Many Chinese visitors also buy the medicine such as rana samphel to send it back to their relatives and family in China, said the source.

There are also reports of Tibetan COVID-19 patients seeking traditional remedies in New York City, the U.S. city hardest hit by the deadly virus. Many believe that the traditional medicine can reduce death rates by preventing patients with mild or moderate symptoms from developing more serious ones.

Such positive news about the Tibetan traditional remedies for COVID-19, have led to a high demand of the medicine. The spike in the demand of traditional medicine was fueled not only by Tibetans but by visiting Chinese tourists in Lhasa, another source in Lhasa who requested anonymity told RFA.

These days, businesses are up and running in Lhasa, restaurants and shops are open, at the same time an influx of Chinese from mainland, including from Wuhan, [the epicenter of the pandemic], are arriving in Lhasa nonstop, said the second source.

This is very concerning for many Tibetan residents in Lhasa who fear a resurgence of the coronavirus. The lockdown in Wuhan has been lifted, so many of them are arriving in Lhasa, the second source added.

In debates following the outbreak of the coronavirus in Wuhan early this year, some experts in charge of managing the outbreak reportedly dissented from President Xi Jinping's decree that traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) should be used in tandem with mainstream medical approaches to tackle the virus.

State media touts traditional remedies

Chinas official Tibet News website republished an article on March 3 stating that ancient Tibetan traditional medicines were considerably effective in the fight against preventing and containing the coronavirus.

The original report, written in Chinese published in Xihuan News and translated into Tibetan said, Since the beginning of the deadly outbreak, traditional remedies of Chinese medicine combined with traditional Tibetan medicines have played a pivotal role in the successful fight against coronavirus.

The report quotes officials of Qinghais Health Commission as saying Out of 18 positive coronavirus cases, 17 patients have recovered after taking combination of ancient Chinese remedies and Tibetan traditional remedies. Thus the Tibetan traditional treatment received state approval and Chinese health insurance covers it.

However, RFA reported in late February this year, the sale of one type of Tibetan medicine called rimsung rilbu in India was stopped on the orders of local authorities.

Authorities became aware of the treatment after receiving reports of domestic disturbances related to people seeking the drug.

"Men-Tsee-Khang, the Tibetan Medical And Astro Institute here in [Dharamsala], Himachal Pradesh, was directed by the government to stop the sale of rimsung rilbu so as to prevent any misconception in the public mind, Kangras chief medical officer Dr. G.D. Gupta told RFA.

Men Tsee Khangs director clarified to RFA that no claim was made regarding rimsung rilbus effectiveness against the coronavirus and that the institute would comply with the authorities orders.

RFA was unable to identify any clinical data related to the effectiveness of rimsung rilbu or any other traditional medicine against the coronavirus.

Reported by RFAs Tibetan Service. Translated by Dorjee Damdul. Written in English by Eugene Whong.
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Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said Wednesday that Americans have to 'live in the reality' that their options for president in November are to either elect former Vice President Joe Biden or reelect Donald Trump.

The progressive New York representative signaled support for Biden's candidacy, openly admitting her reluctance to endorse the moderate Democrat.

'At the end of the day, one of these two people are going to be president. It's either going to be Donald Trump or Joe Biden that will be elected president in November,' Ocasio-Cortez lamented in a virtual interview with Politico Wednesday morning.

'We have to live in the reality of those choices,' she continued. 'And I know that there may be a lot of folks who are uncomfortable with that.'

The freshman congresswoman added that for some families in New York's 14th district, which she represents, the decisions between Biden and Trump could mean 'life or death.'

When Ocasio-Cortez was asked if she is expecting to endorse Biden, she said, 'Yeah. I think  we'll see. We're having conversations with Biden's team and trying to figure out what some of these policy conversations are looking like.'

'I think it's incredibly important that we support the Democratic nominee in November,' she said.

Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said Thursday that she's 'in talks' with Joe Biden's team on endorsing the former vice president

'It's either going to be Donald Trump or Joe Biden that will be elected president in November,' Ocasio-Cortez lamented in a virtual interview with Politico Wednesday morning. 'We have to live in the reality of those choices'

Biden became the Democratic nominee last week after Bernie Sanders dropped out of the race, and then during a virtual joint press conference (pictured) this week, Sanders endorsed the former vice president

AOC, who was a surrogate for the Democratic socialist's campaign, insisted the Biden choose a running mate who is more 'progressive' to help shift his platform to the left  especially on climate change and healthcare

Biden became the definite Democratic nominee last week after Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders dropped out of the race  leaving the former vice president as the sole primary candidate for the party.

The former vice president's nomination will not be official until the Democratic National Committee holds its convention in August.

Ocasio-Cortez, who was a campaign surrogate for Sanders, weighed in during Wednesday's conversations on Biden's search for a running mate, claiming it should be a more progressive woman so she can help shift his presidential platform to the left.

She did not, however, provide any names for who she wants it to be despite speculation and several names circulating that Biden is considering, including some of his past competition for the nomination.

'While I'm encouraged that Biden has said that he wants a woman of color to be his vice president, for me what's really important is not only just that woman's identity in terms of gender and cultural terms. But I think what's very important is who that woman is in her stances,' Ocasio-Cortez explained.

'I would hope that Biden's choice kind of signals that kind of branch where, you know, Barack Obama, I think he selected Joe Biden because they came even from different places politically,' she continued.

'I think it would be encouraging if Biden also picked someone who was a little bit more progressive that he knows may push him.'

Ocasio-Cortez is a Democratic socialist, and Sanders was her preferred candidate as the most progressive of the 28 Democrats who were in the running for the primary at one point or another this cycle.

Biden has already pledged to select a woman running mate.

AOC, a nickname from her initials that the representative has embraced, has already expressed that she opposes several of Biden's presidential policy proposals  especially climate change and health care, which she says doesn't go far enough.

'The vice president does not have a climate change policy that is sufficient right now,' she told Politico.

AOC represents New York's 14th district, which includes parts of The Bronx and Queens  and they are some of the hardest-hit areas from the coronavirus outbreak

Ocasio-Cortez joined Jake Sherman and Anna Palmer for a virtual interview Wednesday morning as her district, in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic.

Her district, which includes parts of The Bronx and Queens, are some of the most hard-hit areas of the coronavirus outbreak, and this week New York surpassed 10,000 deaths.

She also slammed Trump for his comments earlier this week claiming he has total authority on when states are to end their lockdowns and stay-at-home orders and reopen.

Governors pushed back, claiming it was within their power to make these decisions for their respective states  and even Republican lawmakers slammed Trump's assertions, claiming it was against the Tenth Amendment for the federal government to overreach into states' powers.

'He can't have his cake and eat it too. You can't refuse to recommend shut downs, refuse to accept any responsibility for this crisis, and then all of the sudden turn around and think that you're going to tell governors what to do after you've abdicated all your responsibility to them. And I think that that's really the bind that he's in,' Ocasio-Cortez said.

'If he gave up power, then that's fine. We have to take that mantle of leadership and responsibility,' she said of state and local leadership.
By Emerald Sheay

Only seven of us were allowed at the burial. We stood around grandma, many feet apart, as she read prayers over the casket. All our faces were covered with masks. I wanted to reach out and place a hand on her. I wanted to hug my father. Our expressions of grief were obscured. All I could make out as I glanced around our small gathering were our eyes, red-rimmed and tired. Losing a grandparent is hard, but this has turned it into a nightmare.

My grandfather, Ronald J. Sheay, was born in Newark, lived in Stockton and was a longtime employee of the New Jersey Forestry Association. He was a kind, warm, and outgoing man who loved Maine, Manhattans, and the St. Louis Cardinals, who passed away on April 5th. While his death was unrelated to coronavirus, the impact the pandemic has had on my family has been profound. There could be no gathering after the burial, no funeral, no sitting with grandma for a cup of tea, no tender touch on each others shoulders. Acts of love have been turned into potential weapons.

The day before the burial, I baked my grandma a quiche. (Then, in a panic, I google-searched can coronavirus be spread through food?) I sat on the floor sewing a face mask. I texted and called my mom. I debated going home to be with my siblings, all of us equally devastated by this loss, but decided against it. Then, I sat quietly on the couch and cried alone. These were the acts of love I could do for my family while committing to social distancing.

Even beyond the problems social distancing presents for emotional support, the administrative tasks required when someone dies have become increasingly difficult. Contacting the surrogates office, social security, attorneys, and other organizations reveal closed offices, shortened hours and overwhelmed clerks. Add an increased number of deaths to this equation and it turns the entire already unpleasant ordeal into a torment for family members trying to resolve loose ends.

Current estimates suggest that 200,000 Americans may die of COVID-19 before the virus runs its course. Families will not only be impacted by the tragic death of loved ones, but by the challenges that grief presents during self-isolation. Those in mourning are struggling to find ways to emotionally support those who have lost their loved ones and to honor the lives of the deceased.

If grief divided is made lighter, how can we lighten the load of those we love from afar?

The acts of love we can do for one another may have been limited but they are not gone. I will keep calling, leaving food, and teaching distant family members how to log onto Zoom. Staying at home becomes my act of love.

Then, come late summer, maybe I can finally sit with my grandma on the deck of her summer cottage along the coast of Maine, a hand on her shoulder, pink lemonade in our glasses and social-distancing just a bad dream since forgotten.

Emerald is a third-year law student at Seton Hall School of Law, where she is the president of the Family Law Society and a comments editor on the Legislative Journal. She earned a degree in political science and music from Rowan University in 2017.

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.
KYODO NEWS - Apr 15, 2020 - 20:19 | Coronavirus, Japan, All, World

The number of foreign visitors to Japan tumbled 93 percent in March from a year earlier, marking the biggest rate of decline for any month since 1964 when comparable data became available, amid the global coronavirus pandemic, government data showed Wednesday.

An estimated 193,700 foreigners visited Japan last month, falling year-on-year for the sixth consecutive month, according to the data from the Japan Tourism Agency.

The data also showed that the number of Japanese nationals leaving Japan dropped 85.9 percent to 273,000 in the reporting month, also the largest rate of decline.

(A street in popular tourist destination Kyoto is deserted amid the coronavirus pandemic)

Visitors from China, accounting for the largest portion of the total number of tourists to Japan for a long time until January, dived 98.5 percent to 10,400, followed by Taiwan with a 98.1 percent fall to 7,700 and South Korea with a 97.1 percent contraction to 16,700.

The United States had the largest number of travelers to Japan in March at 23,000, down 87 percent from a year earlier, according to the data. Vietnam came second with 20,800, down 56.6 percent.

"As the number of flights has declined more than 90 percent and cruise ships are not operating, the severe situation will continue," Japan Tourism Agency Commissioner Hiroshi Tabata said at a press conference.

In February, Japan banned the entry of foreign nationals with recent travel history to China's Hubei Province -- whose capital is Wuhan where the new coronavirus was first detected -- and Zhejiang Province, as well as the South Korean city of Daegu and the neighboring county of Cheongdo in the wake of a virus outbreak there.

Entry bans were extended to a total of 73 countries and regions, including the United States and the whole of China and South Korea in early April.

Foreign travelers' spending between January and March amounted to 672.7 billion yen ($6.27 billion), down 41.6 percent from a year earlier.

The Japanese government had a goal of 40 million inbound visitors by this year, when the Tokyo Olympics and Paralympics were initially supposed to be held.

Last year, 31.89 million people visited Japan, according to the agency's data.
By Tatiana Bautzer and Gabriela Mello

SAO PAULO, April 15 (Reuters) - Via Varejo SA, one of Brazil's largest appliance retailers, is seeking to suspend rent payments for over 1,020 stores to help offset a 50% revenue drop, two people with knowledge of the matter said.

One of the people said the company has already reached an agreement with some landlords and expects to get group agreements with other retailers that would exempt it from paying rent on its stores located in malls for as long as they are shut by the coronavirus lockdowns.

The first source said the rent holiday request was also made to billionaire chairman Michael Klein, the largest shareholder in the business who also owns dozens of stores rented by the company.

Via Varejo would save 80 million reais ($15 million) a month if all landlords accept the waiver, the second source said, asking for anonymity to disclose private talks.

Although still weak, the company's sales have improved since the lockdown began as the company took steps to increase online sales, which according to one of the sources represented about 30% of total sales at that time.

In the second week of the lockdown, the retailer launched software it was already working on to allow sales personnel to contact consumers through social media to help them with online orders. That eased the decline in revenue to 50% from a previous 70%, one of the sources said.

Via Varejo declined to comment.

The retailer, which was in the midst of an overhaul of operations when it and the rest of the sector were sideswiped by the widespread store closings forced by efforts to combat the novel coronavirus, is also delaying payments to some contractors.

The company has deferred payments to indirect suppliers such as cleaning and security firms, according to a memo from the company to its suppliers seen by Reuters.

"We are postponing our entire payment schedule by one month, and at least 75 days after invoice issuance," the company said, saying payments due between April 3 and 30 will be postponed ton May 5. One of the sources close to the company said Via Varejo decided to unify three monthly payments dates into a single date, and that caused the delay.

Story continues

Transportation companies are being spared, as they are key to delivering online sales, a supplier said.

Direct suppliers, such as electronics makers, are being paid on time, but Via Varejo is not increasing its inventory, two people with knowledge of ongoing talks between the company and manufacturers told Reuters.

"The orders mix has changed and retailers are now buying lighter electronics such as vacuum cleaners or air fryers", an industry source said, citing new consumer demand patterns amid the lockdown.

Via Varejo shares have lost nearly half their value so far this year, underperforming Brazil's benchmark Bovespa index, which is down about a third over the same period.

($1 = 5.1994 reais) (Reporting by Tatiana Bautzer and Gabriela Mello; Editing by Christian Plumb and Elaine Hardcastle)
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Donald Trump accused governors of organising a "mutiny" against him over his vow to "soon" issue an order opening the country amid the coronavirus outbreak, but the president has yet to provide a shred of legal evidence he has the power to do so.

Mr Trump began Tuesday the way he ended Wednesday, only his tweets came from the White House residence and his brash, Richard Nixon-esque declarations that his "authority is total" came from the briefing room downstairs. The showman in chief added some dramatics to his claim that he and he alone can override state and local orders to allow businesses and school systems now shuttered to reopen.

In a message to Democratic governors who are planning to move ahead with their own blueprints for getting their states back to some semblance of normalcy when and if the virus spread slows inside their borders, Mr Trump sounded more like a pirate ship captain on a hijacked vessel than the leader of the free world.

"A good old fashioned mutiny every now and then is an exciting and invigorating thing to watch, especially when the mutineers need so much from the Captain," Mr Trump tweeted.

He appeared to suggest he would use federal virus aid to try forcing state chiefs executive into complying with a likely coming order to, as he has put it, "open for business." He even wrote that doing so would be "Too easy!"

Tell the Democrat Governors that Mutiny On The Bounty was one of my all time favorite movies. A good old fashioned mutiny every now and then is an exciting and invigorating thing to watch, especially when the mutineers need so much from the Captain. Too easy!  Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) April 14, 2020

White House officials did not chase The Independent off the notion that the president is threatening to turn federal assistance into leverage for states' compliance.

Story continues

Doing so could put at risk some of those who have contracted the coronavirus, if their local hospital was limited in its ability to treat that person due to a governor's feud with Mr Trump over refusing to comply with an order he has yet to even legally justify.

At the centre of Mr Trump's escalating battle with states' leaders is New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, a Democrat.

The president has praised Mr Cuomo in recent days, saying the duo is working well together to make sure the Empire State has what it needs to treat patients after becoming the US's leading area for infections and deaths.

But the New York chief executive appears to have angered Mr Trump anew after accusing him of acting like "a king."

The president accused the governor of "calling daily, even hourly, begging for everything, most of which should have been the state's responsibility, such as new hospitals, beds, ventilators, etc." before making this contention: "I got it all done for him, and everyone else, and now he seems to want Independence! That won't happen!"

Mr Trump did not explain how he might force anything on Mr Cuomo, or if the two New Yorkers were merely engaging in some Big Apple bluster.

Cuomos been calling daily, even hourly, begging for everything, most of which should have been the states responsibility, such as new hospitals, beds, ventilators, etc. I got it all done for him, and everyone else, and now he seems to want Independence! That wont happen!  Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) April 14, 2020

That came during a call-in interview Monday night following perhaps the president's wildest daily Covid-19 briefing yet.

In a remark reminiscent of Richard Nixon's claim that "if the president does it, it's not illegal," Mr Trump told reporters that, in his view, "when somebody is the president of the United States, the authority is total."

That claim is false, as clearly stated in the Constitution.

Mr Trump has vowed this week to produce a document that legally justifies his opening order claims. One hurdle will be the 10th Amendment to the Constitution.

It states: "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people."

Read more

Trump insists his authority is total in wild White House briefing

Trump insists he never planned to fire Fauci

Trump plays video praising his actions at bizarre White House briefing
Leonardo DiCaprio is giving one lucky fan a chance to be in a movie with him, to help raise money for coronavirus relief efforts.

The 45-year-old actor is asking people to donate to the All In Challenge, with one lucky winner able to have a cameo in the new film Killers of the Flower Moon, directed by Martin Scorsese and starring Robert De Niro.

Speaking in an Instagram video, he said: 'We recently launched #AmericasFoodFund to help make sure every family in need gets access to food at this critical time.'

Once in a lifetime: Leonardo DiCaprio [R] is giving one lucky fan a chance to be in a movie with him, to help raise money for coronavirus relief efforts

'Our most vulnerable communities need our support now more than ever. That's why we're asking you to help us with the #AllinChallenge.'

'If you've ever wondered what it's like to be able to work with the great @martinscorsese_, Robert De Niro and myself, this is your chance.'

'Robert and I are going to be starring in a new movie called Killers of the Flower Moon, directed by Martin Scorsese. We want to offer you a walk-on role, the opportunity to spend the day on the set with the three of us, and attend the premiere.'

Big star: The 45-year-old actor is asking people to donate to the All In Challenge, with one lucky winner able to have a cameo in the new film Killers of the Flower Moon, directed by Martin Scorsese and starring Robert De Niro

The prize: 'If you've ever wondered what it's like to be able to work with the great @martinscorsese_, Robert De Niro [pictured] and myself, this is your chance,' said Leo

For a chance to win, people must donate via allinchallenge.com, with funds going to benefit Meals on Wheels America, No Kid Hungry, World Central Kitchen and Feeding America.

The charity was launched on April 1, and in 72 hours, they had raised over $13 million to help families access food through this time.

Leo wrote: 'Thank you to everyone who has supported #AmericasFoodFund so far. In the first 72 hours, we raised over $13m to help Americans most affected by this crisis. Your support enables @FeedingAmerica and @WCKitchen to continue mobilising relief efforts to help those most in need. (sic)'

Auteur and muse: Martin Scorsese and Leo pose together in November 2018

Later, Matthew McConaughey and Ellen DeGeneres accepted DiCaprios challenge and joined in to donate one-of-a-kind experiences for the cause.

Ellen is giving one lucky donor the chance to co-host The Ellen DeGeneres Show.

Meanwhile Academy Award winning actor McConaughey is donating the chance for someone to sit with Matthew on the sidelines of a Texas Football game.

Alright alright alright: Later, Matthew McConaughey and Ellen DeGeneres accepted DiCaprios challenge and joined in to donate one-of-a-kind experiences for the cause
This virus knows no boundaries, were told. No ZIP code. No political preferences, racial biases or favorite tax bracket.

But what about immigration status?

Are people living in the United States without the necessary paperwork less likely to contract the novel coronavirus? Are they less likely to pass it on to customers they cook for at restaurants? Less likely to be hospitalized with COVID-19 and need a bed at the medical center? Less likely to lose a job, to be evicted, to hear the desperate sound of their childs belly grumbling with hunger?

Not at all. Candido Batiz, his wife, 5-year-old son and 3-year-old daughter have the same fears, the same realities, the same needs as many others across Houston.

The Honduran immigrant is a finisher of sheet rock, and his wife a cleaner of hotel rooms. Neither has worked since February because of the coronavirus. They sit at home and worry. They watch as the bills keep arriving each day in the mail. They stopped paying their car insurance and their internet service. They covered this months rent, but they dont know about next months.

CORONAVIRUS UPDATES: Stay informed with accurate reporting you can trust

Even if Batiz could find work, hell have to weigh the risk of getting sick on a job. Three of the people he loves most in this world  his wife and his two kids  have asthma, an underlying health condition that could prove deadly if they contract COVID-19.

Were waiting for things to get better, but we dont know what were going to do, Batiz told the editorial board. Staying at home means not making money, and then you go to the store and things are so expensive. Theyre killing us.

Batizs family needs a life raft right now, the same that has been promised to millions of others in this country who havent worked in weeks. But no help is coming for his family. His undocumented status makes him ineligible for federal relief.

Many Americans are just fine with that. He shouldnt be here, anyway some argue. But he is  for his own reasons: survival. And for ours: he and the roughly 1.5 million undocumented immigrants in this country subsidize our daily lives  everything from our highways to our houses to our hamburgers  and improve our standard of living.

That, we are happy to accept. Gratitude is too much to ask. And apparently, so is compassion in a time like this.

Excuse us for disagreeing. Excuse us for seeing Batiz and his wife as members of the labor force. As taxpayers, among those Texas undocumented immigrants who pay more than $1.5 billion in state and local taxes. And those without Social Security numbers who pay more than $13 billion in federal taxes through individual taxpayer identification numbers, according to the American Immigration Council.

Batiz and his fellow undocumented workers make up 50 percent of construction jobs in this state. But even those deemed essential during this outbreak, including agricultural workers and home health aides, arent eligible for most safety net programs  including unemployment insurance  and they were explicitly excluded from any share of the $2.2 trillion package that Congress approved last month.

When the $1,200 checks  $2,400 for couples filing jointly  start arriving this week from the federal government, undocumented immigrants wont get a cent. Also left out are the 3.5 million children in immigrant households, many of whom are American citizens, who would otherwise mean an extra $500 for their parents.

Is that the contract? America depends on undocumented immigrants for labor but they cant depend on America for anything, even in crisis?

We cannot accept that. We must demand our lawmakers expand relief to this vulnerable population, too.

CORONAVIRUS IN HOUSTON: All of the latest news, numbers and analysis to keep you up-to-date, only on HoustonChronicle.com

Now Playing: 'COVID-19 in 60': Houston coronavirus news in a minute Video: Houston Chronicle

Its not just about compassion. Its about public health. Were all in this together isnt just a feel-good mantra. It is also a reminder of shared risk. We count on others being safe, wearing masks, and staying home so that our own families can remain healthy. Immigrants desperate to feed their families for lack of help will work, in unsafe conditions if they have to, and spread the virus.

The CARES Act is a strong start to help working families, provide relief for small businesses, and surge emergency resources to hospitals, but our work to heal this nation is far from over, Congressman Joaquin Castro, D-Texas, said during a media call. In the next coronavirus recovery bill, Congress must do more to provide health and financial support to all American workers and families.

Democrats recently introduced legislation in the House and Senate that would allow undocumented immigrants to access funds, but this shouldnt be a partisan issue. As one of the states that most benefits from and depends heavily on undocumented immigrants, Texas Republicans should help lead the call.

Locally, Mayor Sylvester Turner and Harris County Judge Lina Hidalgo have repeatedly stressed that immigration status has no impact on public testing for the coronavirus, and officials said that services such as the Harris Health Systems Ask My Nurse program are available to everyone.

Local groups are trying to fill the void as well, including the Workers Defense Project, which launched an emergency fund for undocumented workers. So far, more than 20,000 have applied.

As the outbreak continues, the dire situation that many undocumented immigrants find themselves in will only become bleaker if they continue to have no place to turn.

Were in the most powerful country in the world, Batiz said. You know, in God we trust? Thats for everyone.

At least it should be.
A one-car rollover accident claimed the life of a 69-year-old woman Tuesday afternoon in East Waco.

Waco police officer Garen Bynum said a two-door Ford hatchback was traveling north on Dallas Street around 4 p.m. when it overturned and landed in a vacant field near the intersection of Harlem Avenue.

Both occupants of the vehicle were ejected during the crash. The 69-year-old woman, who was not driving, was killed instantly, police said.

The driver, a 65-year-old relative of the victim, suffered minor injuries. He was hospitalized and detained by police under suspicion of driving while intoxicated.

Three blocks of Dallas Street were closed to traffic for several hours Tuesday afternoon.

Police are still investigating.

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Photo credit: Charles McQuillan - Getty Images

From Harper's BAZAAR

Last October, women in Northern Ireland celebrated as the country voted for their rights to have an abortion. A safe abortion, where they were no longer forced to drain their bank accounts secretly travelling over to England, or risk their lives taking illegal online pills  rights that women in the rest of the UK have had since the late Sixties.

Although laws permitting all terminations in Northern Ireland within the first 12 months of pregnancy were meant to come into effect on 31 March, the government missed this deadline. The coronavirus crisis, the lockdown and mounting pressures on health services are claimed to be the reason for the delay. Meanwhile, in the rest of the UK temporary measures have been put in place to allow women and girls to self-manage abortion at home with pills approved by the World Health Organisation.

Since the pandemic began, politicians in Northern Ireland have been wasting time debating on whether to follow suit, with the DUPs Arlene Foster vocally opposing at-home abortion pills and Sinn Feins Michelle ONeill in their favour. The question is, why was there a debate at all when safe abortion is acknowledged as a womans right, in any circumstance?

It took an army of activists and campaigners threatening executives with legal action to prompt Northern Irelands government late last Thursday to honour the new laws and make abortion available during the coronavirus crisis  if women travel to hospitals for them, requiring them to break lockdown and risk their safety. Plainly put, the new measures abjectly expose that the rights of women in Northern Ireland differ from those of their English, Scottish and Welsh counterparts, whose governments are actively taking steps to protect them.

During the first weeks of lockdown, some women in Northern Ireland were being advised by their doctors to find a way to reach the publicly funded clinics still running in England. A 39-year-old education worker from County Down, who was seven weeks pregnant and seeking an abortion, told Reuters, I was told [by my doctor] I would have to take a ferry, take the pill in the clinic in the morning, then take the other pill and then get the ferry home.

Story continues

Whats more, Northern Irelands Health Minister Robin Swann and Secretary Brandon Lewis both endorsed travelling to England as still being an option for women needing abortions, irresponsibly suggesting that they should ignore guidelines to remain isolated at home. But with flight cancellations and other travel restrictions, this would have been impossible for many, whose only other option would have been to obtain unsafe, illegal services online  and what kind of an option is that, with previous reports showing that a devastating number of women die or are seriously injured each year from botched underground methods?

Fundamentally, this truth remains: no one has an abortion without serious thought. No one does it to make a point. It is a painful and distressing process; a choice some women have to make because they know it is not right for them to have a child at that time.

With the number of Covid-19 cases still growing across the UK, women and girls who are worried to leave their homes during this time might still turn to such methods. Hospitals are not a place anyone should be visiting unless theyre in need of urgent care; we have seen countless stories of people not being able to say goodbye to loved ones whove been admitted, and of partners having to miss the birth of their babies, to stay protected from the virus. It is clear that the government only making hospital abortions available to women in Northern Ireland during this pandemic was not a measure put in place for their wellbeing, but rather a quick-fix reaction to avoid a potential lawsuit.

Photo credit: PAUL FAITH - Getty Images

The Northern Irish governments negligence over womens abortion rights is just one example of many that the coronavirus crisis is bringing to the fore: with the highest ever number of domestic-violence crimes recorded in Northern Ireland last year, domestic-abuse support groups expect an increase of incidents during lockdown; and universal credit, a scheme that disadvantages women with an imposed two-child limit unless a woman can prove she has been raped, has seen a ten-time increase in applications. Not to mention that more than 90 per cent of nurses on the front line are women.

In October, Northern Ireland voted for the right to choose. And while the rollout of this service in hospitals is a historic moment for Northern Ireland, the safety of their people is being compromised and its obvious that the fight is far from over. The health minister Robin Swann has the mandate for implementing at-home abortion pills... to delay this even further only puts more vulnerable women and girls in danger.



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New York Mayor Bill de Blasio said yesterday he's 'not confident' the city can open for large public gatherings until after August meaning beaches could be empty this summer.

'We're going to take this very slow and carefully to make sure we get it right,' de Blasio told a news conference on Tuesday. 'I'm always going to first focus on how do we guarantee the health and safety of New Yorkers and make sure we don't take our foot off the gas too soon.'

Earlier officials said 778 deaths were recorded statewide Monday, bringing New York's total to more than 10,800. That figure, though, did not factor in the thousands of probable deaths now being counted.

A City Hall source claimed that de Blasio neither had the will nor the manpower to open up the beaches this summer. Speaking to the New York Post, the insider said: 'I am told they were given orders by OMB [the Office of Management and Budget] and City Hall to plan for scenarios including full and partial closures.'

Mayor Bill de Blasio wore a bandanna over his face for a visit to the Campaign Against Hunger food pantry in Bedstuy section of Brooklyn on Tuesday

People gather along the Coney Island boardwalk on a warm day that saw thousands of New Yorkers and tourists alike visit the Brooklyn beach on June 15, 2019 in the Brooklyn borough of New York City

The official death toll from the coronavirus soared on Tuesday after NYC began counting people who probably had COVID-19, but died without ever being tested.

Officials reported 3,778 'probable' deaths, where doctors were certain enough of the cause of death to list it on the death certificate, and 6,589 confirmed by a lab test.

The source told the Post: 'Even if the mayor wants to open the beaches - which I don't think he's going to - they don't even have the manpower. They're having enormous difficulty hiring lifeguards right now.'

Furthermore, de Blasio could be overruled by Governor Andrew Cuomo even if he did want to get the beaches open this summer.

Cuomo lashed President Donald Trump's claim of 'total' authority to reopen the nation's virus-stalled economy, saying yesterday he was talking more like a king than a president.

The Democratic governor criticized Trump's assertion Monday that 'when somebody is president of the United States, the authority is total.'

'His proclamation is that he would be king, that's what a king is,' Cuomo said at his daily briefing. 'A king has total authority. That statement cannot stand.'

The Republican president made his comments after Cuomo and governors on both coasts announced multi-state compacts to coordinate reopening society amid the global pandemic.

De Blasio speaks at a food shelf organized by The Campaign Against Hunger in Bed Stuy, Brooklyn

De Blasio wears a bandana while visiting a food shelf organized by The Campaign Against Hunger in Bed Stuy, Brooklyn on Tuesday

Officers of NYPD's Mounted Unit patrol outside NYU Langone Health hospital during the coronavirus pandemic on on April 14

Cuomo said restarting the economy must be done cautiously, or the hard-won gains of the past month could be quickly lost.

In a tweet Tuesday, Trump appeared to liken the governors to mutinous crew members in the movie 'Mutiny on the Bounty.'

Cuomo said the president was 'clearly unhappy.' But after taking aim at the president's comments Tuesday in multiple TV appearances and during his state Capitol briefing, Cuomo said he would not engage in a fight with him.

'The president is clearly spoiling for a fight on this issue,' Cuomo said. 'This is too important for anyone to play politics.'

The change in the city's accounting of deaths came after officials acknowledged that statistics based only on laboratory-confirmed tests were failing to account for many people dying at home before they reached a hospital or even sought treatment.

Governor Andrew M. Cuomo provides a coronavirus update during a press conference in the Red Room at the State Capitol in Albany on Tuesday

'Behind every death is a friend, a family member, a loved one. We are focused on ensuring that every New Yorker who died because of COVID-19 gets counted,' said Health Commissioner Dr. Oxiris Barbot.

'While these data reflect the tragic impact that the virus has had on our city, they will also help us to determine the scale and scope of the epidemic and guide us in our decisions.'

But New Yorkers continue to die at an unnerving pace even as the number of patients in hospitals has levelled off.
WHO to publish updated advice on lifting COVID-19 containment measures

People's Daily Online

(Xinhua) 09:36, April 14, 2020

GENEVA, April 13 (Xinhua) -- The World Health Organization (WHO) said on Monday that it will soon publish updated strategic advice to support countries and regions in making decisions on when they can lift the current social and economic restrictions for COVID-19 containment.

WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus told a virtual press conference from Geneva that the new strategy will summarize what the world has already learned about the new virus.

"The decisions must be based first and foremost on protecting human health, and guided by what we know about the virus and how it behaves," he said.

According to the WHO chief, the new strategic advice will include six criteria for countries as they consider lifting restrictions:

First, that transmission is controlled;

Second, that health system capacities are in place to detect, test, isolate and treat every case and trace every contact;

Third, that outbreak risks are minimized in special settings like health facilities and nursing homes;

Fourth, that preventive measures are in place in workplaces, schools and other places where it's essential for people to go;

Fifth, that importation risks can be managed;

And sixth, that communities are fully educated, engaged and empowered to adjust to the "new norm."

"Every country should be implementing a comprehensive set of measures to slow down transmission and save lives, with the aim of reaching a steady state of low-level or no transmission," Tedros added.

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Q1 What nationality do the employees need to be?

Citizens of Botswana with valid omang.

Q2 How much should employers pay employees?

The purpose of the subsidy is to provide assistance to employees of eligible sectors. The Government cannot dictate to employers how much they must pay employees but encourages employers to do their best to meet employees wages and salaries.

Q3 Can an employee apply on his own?

NO. The facility is to be accessed by employers on behalf of their employees.

Q4 Is there a difference between wages and salary for purposes of the subsidy?

No. Wages and salaries are the same for purposes of the subsidy. The computation of subsidy, however, is based on the basic wage or salary of the employee.

Q5 How do we treat non-monetary benefits in computing subsidy?

Non-monetary benefits are not considered in determining 50% of the employees wages or salary.

Q6 If a business is owned by a non-citizen, can the business apply for the subsidy?

Yes. The criteria for application is that the business must be an eligible business with Batswana employees

Q7 If a business owes BURS any taxes can they apply?

Yes. The subsidy applies even if the employer owes BURS any taxes. However, businesses are encouraged to continue meeting their tax obligations.

Q8 How does the subsidy work for domestic employees such as house help and farm help?

The subsidy does not apply for private employment. It only applies in respect of registered and eligible businesses.

Q9 Can an employee for whom taxes have never been deducted be eligible for the subsidy?

YES. Some employees do not earn the minimum income to pay tax. However, they remain eligible to be paid under the wage subsidy

Q9 Construction employees not on current payroll due to finished or completed project?

Any person not considered to be an employee at the time of the subsidy is not eligible for receiving subsidy support.

Q10 Can I correct or amend a claim form once I have successfully uploaded it?

Yes. An amended claim form may be submitted. However, BURS may make enquiries to determine the reasons for the amendment

Q11 Rent-a-chair hair salon  can we claim for the individuals renting chairs?

In the instance of rent-a-chair, the renters are not employees and cannot, therefore, be considered for the subsidy. However, if the renter is a business registered for tax and is considered to be an employee of that business they may be eligible.

Q12 Which identification numbers should non-citizens enter during registration?

Non-citizens should use the number of the passport they used to apply for a residence or work permit.



Q13 Common claim form issues:

a). Changing the structure of the form Applicants should not change the structure of the Claim Form template. That is, do not add or remove column headers and do not rename column header labels

b). Error message: Unsupported file format validation The downloaded template is in the format of a CSV file. After completing the template ensure that the file is saved in this same format i.e. csv (comma delimited) before attempting to upload.

c). Omang starting with zero: To address this, follow the following steps:

Step 1: Highlight the ID (Omang) column in excel.

Step 2: Right click and choose Format Cells.

Step 3: In the list that appears, select text and click ok.

d). Error message: Sorry we could not process your request Applicants are advised to download a new form and complete that. e. Adding commas or P to monetary amounts Applicants are advised not to include commas or P in completing monetary values. P2000.00 is incorrect and should rather be entered as 2000.00. 30,000.00 is incorrect and should rather be entered as 30000.00 f. Which account number should be inserted in employee rows? The completion of the cell is optional

Q14 Some of my employees left my employment during the period between December 2019 and March 202.

These individuals are not the claimants employees and should not ordinarily be considered for a claim. See Question 26 for guidance on how to treat retrenched employees

Q15 During registration, which account should I use, the employer or employee account number?

The account number to be used for registration is that of the employer. The payments from BURS will be paid to employers for onward distribution to employees. See question 19 below.

Q16 Employee left my employment before end of April 2020 but is currently unemployed. Can I claim for them as my former employee?

NO. The employee is not in your employment and should therefore not be considered for an employers claim.

Q17 Employee left my employment before end of April 2020 and was due to commence employment at a new employer in April. Can the new employer claim for them?

The new employer may not claim for the new employee as the employee has no wage record with the new employer.

Q18 What if I dont have internet access? Can the process be accessed in any other way?

Unfortunately, the facility is only available online to reduce the risk of exposure to COVID19. BURS will not accept registration or claim forms in any other way other than online.

Q19 Who will be receiving payment from BURS, the employer or the employee?

The employer will receive the subsidy funds for onward distribution to employees.

Q20 What should be entered in the Subsidy Claimed column on the WAGE SUBSIDY CLAIM FORM?

The completion of this column is optional. BURS will compute the subsidy claim on the basis of the basic contractual salary or wage of the employee and notify the employer.

Q21 My business is not listed in the list of Business Sectors in the Registration form? What should I do?

The list of business sectors on the registration form is not exhaustive. Applicants are therefore requested to find a business sector that closely resembles their business. However, the business sectors in the Guidelines at Question 2 are not eligible.

Q22 If an employee is on maternity leave and are earning a reduced salary or wage which salary or wage can they use for claiming subsidy?

The salary or wage to be used is their basic contractual salary or wage.

Q23 Can we use an Orange Money, Mascom My Zaka, bemobile smega or similar payment instead of a bank account number during registration?

NO. Payments are to be made only into account numbers of banks registered in Botswana. Payment facilities such as the ones mentioned above are not to be used for this purpose.

Q24 My employer is not keen to apply for the subsidy. How can we be helped?

Employers are encouraged to apply for the subsidy to supplement wages or salaries of employees if their ability to pay full wages has been compromised by COVID19. Employees are therefore advised to the Secretariat of the Public Finance Management (COVID-19 Pandemic (Corona Virus) Relief Fund) as advised in Question 12 to the Guidelines.

Q25 My employees dont have bank accounts. How do I pay them?

The subsidy is paid to employers for distribution to employees. Employers are encouraged to find ways of ensuring employees are paid especially during this period of lockdown.

Q26 What if I had retrenched employees before the subsidy was made available?

Employers who had retrenched employees due to the fall in business as a result of COVID19 are advised to retain their employees and ensure they are paid the wage subsidy.



From:

Acting Commissioner General

Botswana Unified Revenue Service

Dated: 14th April, 2020
Annual Revenue of $5.0 Million; Lowered Shareholder Equity Deficit by 40% to $3.1 Million

LAS VEGAS, NV / ACCESSWIRE / April 15, 2020 / Beyond Commerce, Inc. (OTC PINK:BYOC) (the "Company"), a provider of B2B internet marketing analytics, technologies and services, today announced the company's financial results for its year ended December 31, 2019. Of note, Beyond Commerce closed its acquisition of Service 800 on March 4, 2019 and its acquisition of PathUX on May 31, 2019.

Key Financial Highlights for 2019:

Revenues increased to $5.0 million

Gross margin of 66%

Net gain of $2.2 million on subsidiary investment

Total assets of $9.2 million

Total shareholders' deficit of $3.1 million, a significant improvement from $15.8 million deficit at the end Q2 2019

Key Business Highlights for 2019:

Service 800 recognized bioMerieux with award for 20 years of steady commitment to customer experience excellence

Service 800 awarded contract from Thermo Fisher Scientific initial multi-month pilot program

Closed and integrated acquisitions of Service 800 and PathUX

Management Commentary

"2019 was an extremely active and positive year for our Company, having successfully closed and integrated our acquisitions of Service 800 and PathUX, commented, Geordan Pursglove, Beyond Commerce's Chief Executive Officer. While we are pleased to have reached $5 million in top-line revenue and significantly reduced our shareholders' deficit, we have a lot more in our sights and planned for 2020 and beyond. Our January 2020 acquisition of Customer Centered Strategies, L.L.C., a Minneapolis-based firm specializing in helping businesses grow their revenue through improved customer experience, demonstrates our ability to identify and acquire additional tuck-in acquisitions that are complementary and accretive to Service 800."

Pursglove, concluded, "We have prudently implemented cost reductions wherever possible in light of the effect from COVID-19, as we seek to operate more efficiently in this time of uncertainty. I am proud of our team as we have adapted and transitioned well and remain confident and enthusiastic on our future growth prospects."

Financial Results for the Year Ended December 31, 2019:

Revenue for the year ended December 31, 2019 was $5.0 million, compared to $0 for the year ended December 31, 2018. The increase in revenue relates to the acquisition of Service 800, which closed on March 4, 2019 and the acquisition of PathUX, which closed on May 31, 2019.

Gross profit for the year ended December 31, 2019 was $3.4 million, compared to $0 for the year ended December 31, 2018. The resulting gross margin was 66.4% for the year ended December 31, 2019.

Selling, General and administrative expenses for the year ended December 31, 2019 were $1.4 million, an increase of $1.2 million, compared to $0.2 million for the year December 31, 2018. The significant increase is mainly attributable to the Service 800 and PathUX acquisitions and the related costs associated with this operation, as the Company now has a significant amount of employees.

Payroll expenses for the year ended December 31, 2019 were $2.1 million, an increase of $1.7 million, compared to $0.4 million for the year ended December 31, 2018. The significant increase is mainly attributable to the Service 800 and PathUX acquisitions and the related costs associated with this operation, as the Company now has a significant amount of employees.

Professional expenses for the year ended December 31, 2019 were $1.5 million, an increase of $0.3 million, compared to $1.2 million for the year ended December 31, 2018.

Depreciation and amortization for the year ended December 31, 2019 were $0.6 million, an increase of $0.6 million, compared to $0 for the year ended December 31, 2018.

Operating loss for the year ended December 31, 2019 was $2.3 million, an increase of $0.5 million, compared to $1.8 million for the year ended December 31, 2018.

Net loss for the year ended December 31, 2019 was $5.5 million, an increase of $1.2 million, compared to a net loss of $4.3 million for the year ended December 31, 2018. Of note, the Company recorded a $2.2 million net gain on subsidiary investment in the year ended December 31, 2019. The resulting EPS loss for the year ended December 31, 2019 was ($0.00) per diluted share, compared to ($0.00) per diluted share for the year ended December 31, 2018.

About Beyond Commerce , Inc.

Beyond Commerce, Inc. (OTCPINK:BYOC) is focused on business combinations of "big data" companies in global B2B internet marketing analytics, technologies and services. The Company's objective is to develop and deploy disruptive strategic software technology that will build on organic growth potential and to exploit cross-selling opportunities. Beyond Commerce plans to offer a cohesive global digital product and services platform to provide clients with a single point of contact for their big data, marketing and related sales initiatives. For additional information, please visit: https://beyondcommerceinc.com and https://www.service800.com and https://www.pathux.co.

Twitter: @incbyoc

Facebook: fb.me/incbyoc

Forward-Looking Statements

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, which are subject to the "safe harbor" created by those sections for such statements. All statements other than statements of historical fact are forward-looking statements, which are often indicated by terms such as "anticipate," "believe," "could," "design," "estimate," "except," "forecast," "goal," "intend," "look forward to," "may," "plan," "potential," "predict," "project," "should," "target," "will," "would," or the negatives or other tense of such terms and other similar expressions intended to identify forward-looking statements and similar expressions. We use forward-looking statements relate to future events or future financial performance and involve known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors that may cause our actual results, levels of activity, performance or achievements to be materially different from any future results, levels or activity, performance or achievements expressed or implied by these forward-looking statements.

Contact Information:

investors@beyondcommerceinc.com

p702-675-8022

SOURCE: Beyond Commerce, Inc.

View source version on accesswire.com:https://www.accesswire.com/585174/Beyond-Commerce-Reports-2019-Results
Ritwika Mitra By

Express News Service

NEW DELHI: When the lockdown was first announced, Vimla, 35, along with her husband, walked for five days from Faridabad, where both worked as a construction worker, to Mauranipur in Uttar Pradesh be with their two children. She was looking forward to April 15 with the expectation that the shutdown would end and so would her troubles. But with the lockdown extended and with rations and the little money she had saved dwindling, she is uncertain how to cope with the days ahead.

Nobody is ready to give us rations even on credit. I have two children, how will I feed them? My children were studying in school. I do not know how I will educate them when this ends. There is no work in the village, laments Vimla.

This is the dilemma thousands of workers across the country are facing. Experts say the government needs to announce adequate relief packages to ensure workers have access to essential items. According to the Economic Survey 2018-19, over 90 per cent of Indias total workforce belong to the informal sector. In the absence of livelihood options, thousands of migrant workers have tried to reach their hometowns from cities amid the lockdown.

JNU Professor Jayati Ghosh says there is an immediate need to release the food stocks and the government should also announce stimulus packages.

Shankar, a migrant worker from Berhampur in Odisha, has been stranded in Surat.

We have nothing to eat. Whatever little we have will be over in a day or two. They were showing on TV that we do not need to pay rent. But our (house) owner has been constantly haranguing us to pay the rent and electricity bill, said Shankar, who works at a garment factory in Surat.

We will return home at the first opportunity. Food prices are rising. How will we survive? he asks.

The hope of being able to return home once the lockdown is lifted is what has kept Amos of Kurkura village in Jharkhand going despite limited restricted rations and lack of wages in Gujarats Karanj village, where he worked in an apparel factory.

I feel mentally disturbed. I want to return home, he says.

Pointing to the lacunae in the governments ration distribution, Sudhir Katiyar, secretary, Centre for Labour Research and Action, said, People without any ration cards have not received any ration. In some areas in Gujarat, people have already resorted to begging for food.

Divya Varma from Aajeevika Bureau, an organisation working with migrant communities, said, A significant number of people do not have access to the relief measures announced so far. A majority of them do not have access to PDS.

Ranu Bhogal, director of policy research and campaigns at OXFAM, says the government should carry out an exercise to enumerate migrant workers stranded across states and come up with a plan to facilitate their movement and screening.

Poor states see more outflow of migrants

As per Economic Survey 2016-17, the pattern of flow of migrants showed less affluent states see more migration and the most affluent states are the largest recipients of migrants.
A member of the Kirinyaga County Assembly is seeking protection from the police after unknown assailants raided his home in the wee hours of Tuesday.

Mutira ward MCA David Kinyua, who tabled the impeachment motion against Waiguru on March 31, said the attackers torched his cattle shed during the 1 am incident.

Mr Kinyua said his farmhand raised alarm after he discovered the huge fire. Two jerricans of petrol were recovered from the scene.

The ward rep claims the arson attack was as a result of his anti-Waiguru stance.

We were able to put off the fire. I forwarded the matter to the DCI who came to my house at 2 a.m for forensic analysis. I am seeking protection from the police. My residents have been informed of my whereabouts and have been asked to maintain calm. I want to candidly state that this plot was hatched out of my stance against the governor. I will not be intimated and I will pursue the agenda, Kinyua told reporters.

At the same time, two more anti-Waiguru MCAs recorded statements at Kianyaga police station claiming that their lives are in danger.

Ngariama MCA Erastus Ireri and Rose Njeru a nominated MCA also from Ngariama(where Waiguru hails from) said they are living in fear after leaflets were circulated warning them against criticizing Governor Waiguru.

I want to go into hibernation because I do not know what these people are planning, I have told you If you no longer see me around, you know how things are, said Ireri.
In his interview Wednesday afternoon on Parapolitika 90.1, with journalist Thanasis Fouskidis, Alternate Minister of Foreign Affairs Miltiadis Varvitsiotis emphasised the need to find a common solution in Europe and to safeguard the blocs unity.

Commenting on the impasse in the Eurogroup, he referred to the EUs difficulty with making decisions, highlighting that I dont think the short-sighted view that wants us to look religiously at the numbers, rather than seeing the political imperative, which is an expression of solidarity, will take us very far, and noting with regard to Germany and Holland that they may feel protected as economies, but they forget that they depend on the health of their customers in Eurozone countries.

But he said he was optimistic, because otherwise were talking about the end of the European Union as we know it. What has to come first is our common endeavour, and not the undermining of that endeavour, he added.

Asked about the measures taken by the government to boost the economy, he stressed that we are in a situation where we still havent seen the light at the end of the tunnel, and the measures are constantly being elaborated, expanded and made more substantial, extending into more sectors. We still havent seen the horizon of this crisis, so lets be cautious and find a cure first, he noted.

Finally, he referred to the multifaceted battle that the Prime Minister has mounted and that has made the country a pioneer the fight against the coronavirus.
Glencore said today it has opened its Raglan operation after Quebec reversed an earlier decision and said mining is an essential service.

South African operations, however, said operations remain on care and maintenance.

Glencore said on April 30th it plans to update its guidance in respect of 2020 production, key industrial division unit costs and capital expenditure, alongside Q1 production reporting.

The European mining giant broke down the current status of its global operations:

Canada - The government of Quebec has extended the order for all non-essential businesses to remain closed until 4 May. Mining has been classed an essential activity with effect from 15 April. Accordingly, our Raglan (nickel) and Matagami (zinc) operations in Quebec are analysing options to restart operations before 4 May.

Colombia - In Colombia, the President imposed a 19-day quarantine for the country from 25 March. This has now been extended to 27 April. Prodecos mining operations remain on care and maintenance, while the port continues to operate.

Peru - At Glencore's independently managed, JV operation, Antamina (Glencore share 33.75%), a decision has been taken to de-mobilise the workforce and halt operations for a likely period of approximately 2 weeks. The primary focus of the operation is to ensure the health and safety of its workforce and surrounding communities. During suspension of operations, the camp will be thoroughly disinfected and increased protocols put in place for those arriving at / departing from site. These protocols include enhanced medical screening, transportation and social distancing measures, in accordance with Peruvian guidelines.

South Africa - The South African government has extended its nationwide lockdown to 30 April. Glencore's ferroalloys and two of its coal (Middleburg and Graspan) operations currently remain on care and maintenance.

Zambia - Following Mopanis recent announcement regarding the transition of its mining operations to care and maintenance, Glencore is currently in discussions on the way forward with the Government of Zambia.
New Delhi, April 15 : The Union Home Ministry on Wednesday communicated to all states and Union Territories to ensure compliance of the new lockdown measures and direct the concerned authorities for their strict implementation to contain the COVID-19 pandemic.

In the written communication from Union Home Secretary Ajay Kumar Bhalla to the Chief Secretaries of all the states and the UT administrations, it was clarified that "these guidelines are communicated to all the field agencies and wide publicity is given for the benefit of the public and that stricter measures should be imposed as per the requirement of the local areas".

Citing his earlier orders issued on March 31 and April 14, Bhalla said that the states and the UTs "cannot dilute restrictions imposed" by the Ministry of Home Affairs earlier.

"States and UTs, however, can impose stricter measures than these guidelines as per the requirement of the local areas." Referring to Prime Minister Narendra Modi's announcement to extend the 21-day lockdown to 19 more days till May 3, Bhalla said that "activities mentioned in the consolidated guideline (Paras 5 to 20) will not be permitted in containment zones within hotspots, demarcated by the states, UTs and district administration, as per the guideline by the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare (MoHFW)".

Noting the opening of select necessary activities from April 20, the official focused on the revised guidelines linked to the lockdown which was imposed to break the chain of transmission of the coronavirus or COVID-19 pandemic which has so far claimed 377 deaths and over 9,500 confirmed cases in India.

He said that if any new area is included in the category of the containment zone, the activities allowed in that area till the time of its categorization as a containment zone will be suspended, except for those activities which are specifically permitted under the consolidated revised guidelines.

"The activities allowed under the consolidated revised guidelines will be withdrawn immediately if any of the lockdown measures are violated, risking the spread of the COVID-19," Bhalla's letter mentioned.

"All entities, in the government and private sectors, and members of the public should follow the guidelines strictly."

-- The story has been published from a wire feed without any modifications to the text
[April 15, 2020] Alliance Memory COVID-19 Update: Operations Continue Without Disruption

KIRKLAND, Wash., April 15, 2020 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Alliance Memory today announced that the companys operations are continuing without disruption during the COVID-19 outbreak. For its customers in the medical market, Alliance Memorys SRAM and DRAM products  key components in a wide range of medical equipment  are being delivered from stock or with normal lead times.

The coronavirus pandemic is having no appreciable effect on our operations, said David Bagby, president and CEO of Alliance Memory. Continuation of our production is secured based on sufficient stock and deliveries, while our employees are either working from home or on-site in teams and shifts and following government guidelines by keeping the obligatory social distance and avoiding direct person-to-person contact. Our Taiwan office and test and assembly partnersare operating normally, and customer consulting and support are also available. As a result, our medical ICs for critical medical equipment are being delivered as usual, allowing our customers to continue providing their life-sustaining solutions around the world.



Alliance Memory supplies SRAMs and DRAMs to customers in all facets of the medical industry. Typical end products include ventilators; lasers; ultrasound, physiotherapy, cardiology, and radiology technologies; CPAP machines; molecular, in-vitro, and blood gas diagnostic testing equipment; X-ray systems; PEC/CT scanners; pulse oximetry and airway clearance devices; defibrillators; blood pressure monitors; incubators; and more. About Alliance Memory Inc.

Alliance Memory is a worldwide provider of critical and hard-to-find DRAM and SRAM memory ICs for the communications, computing, consumer electronics, medical, automotive, and industrial markets. The companys product range includes NOR Flash, DRAM, and SRAM memory ICs with commercial, industrial, and automotive operating temperature ranges and densities from 64Kb to 8Gb. Privately held, Alliance Memory maintains headquarters in Kirkland, Washington, and regional offices in Europe, Asia, Canada, and South America. More information about Alliance Memory is available online at www.alliancememory.com .

Agency Contact:

Bob Decker

Redpines

+1 415 409 0233

[email protected]

[ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ]
PARIS  On the evening of April 15, 2019, the world watched Notre-Dame burn.

Confused tourists pointed their smartphones as smoke billowed out of the cathedrals rooftop. Horrified Parisians watched from the Seine Rivers banks as flames tore through the centuries-old attic, sending the spire crashing into the vaults below. President Emmanuel Macron, beamed to television sets around the world, vowed to rebuild by 2024, when Paris will host the Summer Olympic Games.

But one year later, all the tourists are gone and the streets are empty. Parisians are confined to their homes, as Mr. Macron tries to prevent the coronavirus pandemic from overwhelming Frances hospitals and tanking its economy.

The worlds attention is elsewhere.

Our days, our thoughts, our lives today are monopolized by this terrible crisis that we are going through, Mr. Macron, referring to the Covid-19 outbreak, said in a short video published on social media as he thanked those who yesterday saved the Cathedral of Notre-Dame and those who today are rebuilding it.

All the tributes initially planned for Wednesday to mark the anniversary were scrapped. They included a reception at the Elysee Palace to honor the workers tending to Notre-Dame; an official ceremony with the cathedral choir; and a performance of a musical about Notre-Dame in front of City Hall.
A division bench of the Calcutta High Court on Wednesday set aside an order by a single bench directing the CBI to investigate the death of a woman in Raniganj whose brother had accused her husband and in-laws of foul play.

Setting aside the order, the division bench comprising Chief Justice T B N Radhakrishnan and Justice Arijit Banerjee observed that this is not a fit case where the investigation should be directed to be transferred from the state police to the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI).

The division bench noted that chargesheet has been filed in the case of Pushpa Bhalotia's death and that the writ petitioner contends that it is designed to protect the accused person.

The writ petitioner has enumerated certain alleged defects and deficiencies in the process of investigation, the court noted.

The court also directed that writ petitioner Gopal Kumar Agarwal, the brother of the deceased woman, will be at liberty to approach the magistrate, before whom the trial is to be held in the case, to bring to his notice alleged defects and deficiencies in the process of investigation.

The bench directed that the magistrate may consider directing the police to conduct further investigation in the matter as may be deemed fit and proper for unveiling the truth and, if necessary, supplementary charge-sheet may be directed to be filed by the state CID, which was investigating the case.

Agarwal had alleged that the state police machinery was investigating in a manner to shield the accused, Manoj Bhalotia, who is Pushpa's husband.

While setting aside the single bench order, the division bench observed that just because some allegations are made against the state police, the investigation should not be directed to be so transferred, except in a case of national importance or where specific substantive allegations are made against high authorities in the state police administration, or where it is clearly demonstrated that the investigation has been carried out in such a manner as would not instil public confidence.

The state investigating agency should not be substituted by an independent agency like CBI for merely asking, the bench observed.

The West Bengal director general of police had moved an appeal before the division bench against the single bench order of February 7, 2019, which had directed the state CID to hand over the investigation in the case to the CBI, observing that there were differences between the post-mortem report and the state CID's conclusion of the reason behind her demise.

The victim, 39-year-old Pushpa, was found with burn injuries and was taken to a private hospital in Durgapur where she succumbed on October 5, 2017.

Her husband Manoj was then arrested in this connection. He was later granted bail by a court.

Prima facie, it was a case of suicide, according to the CID. The post-mortem report had said she could have died of a bullet injury, apart from the burn injuries.

Questioning how she could shoot herself and then set herself afire or vice versa, Pushpa's brother had filed a murder case against her husband and his family members.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Russia's Federal Security Service (FSB) claims to have uncovered a Ukrainian intelligence "sabotage and terrorism" group in annexed Crimea that included a female Russian military officer who allegedly divulged "state secrets."

The FSB said on April 15 that the Russian servicewoman had handed state secrets to Ukraine's military intelligence in 2017-18, and that a Ukrainian national also allegedly spied on orders from Kyiv.

Both suspects are being investigated for treason and espionage. The Ukrainian national has been detained, while the Russian military officer was put under house arrest because she has a child, the FSB said.

According to the FSB, the operation was directed by Colonel Oleg Akhmedov, the head of military intelligence in the southern Ukrainian city of Kherson.

The alleged espionage activity was uncovered during a separate investigation opened in January against another Russian suspect accused of building weapons caches in Crimea on the orders of Akhmedov, the FSB said.

The timing of the announcement has raised eyebrows, as it comes a day after the Ukrainian Security Service (SBU) said one of the countrys top officials had been detained on suspicion of collaborating with the FSB.

The SBU said Major General Valeriy Shaytanov was suspected of high treason and terrorism for working for the FSB in 2014 and had planned "terrorist acts" in Ukraine.

Among the allegations, the SBU said Shaytanov planned to kill Adam Osmayev, the leader of Chechen volunteers fighting on the Ukrainian side against Russia-backed separatists in the east. Osmayev was injured and his wife was killed in an ambush near Kyiv in October 2017 that Ukraine has pinned on Russian agents.

Shaytanov also allegedly provided information to Moscow about secret operations against the separatists in eastern Ukraine and recruited additional agents, the SBU said.

The alleged spy cases come ahead of an expected prisoner exchange before Orthodox Easter on April 19 between the Ukrainian government and the separatists.

Relations have been strained since 2014, when Russia seized Ukraine's Crimea region after sending in troops and staging a referendum deemed illegitimate by at least 100 countries.

In April that year, Russia threw its support behind armed separatists in Ukraine's eastern regions of Donetsk and Luhansk, where some 13,200 people have been killed in the ongoing conflict.

With reporting by TASS, Interfax, and RFE/RL's Ukrainian Service
Numerous major U.S. airlines are preparing to apply this week for a $25 billion U.S. government loan program after winning billions in federal payroll grants, people familiar with the matter said.

The U.S. Treasury told airlines to apply by Friday if they want priority consideration, according to documents posted on its website.

An airline official told Reuters most airlines are expected to apply in part because they will not be required to draw down the loan before the end of September and the terms are favorable.

American Airlines Group Inc confirmed on Tuesday it plans to apply for a $4.75 billion loan ahead of the Friday deadline set by Treasury for priority consideration. Alaska Airlines Inc said it would apply for $1.1 billion in federal loans.

Among other large carriers, United Airlines Holdings Inc and Southwest Airlines Co will also apply, while Delta Air Lines was still considering it, sources said.

Another industry person said all the major carriers would likely apply with the exception of Spirit Airlines.

American Airlines 737 max passenger planes are parked on the tarmac at Tulsa International Airport in Tulsa, Oklahoma on March 23. Several major U.S. airlines are preparing to apply this week for a $25 billion U.S. government loan program after winning billions in federal payroll grants, people familiar with the matter said

Some airlines had initially planned to tap only the $25 billion in federal payroll grants agreed Tuesday in a deal that could see government take ownership stakes.

But there is now a growing realization that the terms of the separate government loan package may be significantly better than those available in capital markets, sources said.

The Treasury Department said on Tuesday that major passenger airlines have agreed in principle to a $25 billion rescue package, ensuring airline workers have jobs until October while the industry battles its biggest-ever crisis.

Airlines did not want to give up equity, but Treasury demanded compensation for taxpayers.

Airlines are hopeful that U.S. passenger traffic, which has dropped by 95 per cent due to the coronavirus pandemic, will begin to recover by October but have warned that the slowdown in air travel could extend into next year and even longer.

It's possible they will need another round of government bailouts to survive.

Air travelers wear face masks waiting to board a Southwest Airlines flight as the spread of coronavirus disease (COVID-19) continues, at Oakland International airport in California

The U.S. Treasury told airlines to apply by Friday if they want priority consideration, according to documents posted on its website, and must apply by April 30 to be ensured consideration. Passengers Gisela Sanchez and Sael Sayago walk from the Delta ticket counter at Salt Lake City International Airport Tuesday, April 7

Major carriers will receive 70 per cent of the funds for payroll in cash assistance that will not need to be paid back, while smaller carriers receiving $100 million or less will not need to repay any funds.

The six largest U.S. airlines - American Airlines Group Inc, United Airlines Holdings Inc, Delta Air Lines Inc, Southwest Airlines Co, JetBlue Airways Corp and Alaska Airlines - as well as four other airlines accepted the support, Treasury said.

Agreements should be finalized soon and funds disbursed quickly, it said.

Carriers were told they could apply for the total salaries and benefits paid in the second and third quarters of 2019, an amount that surpasses American Airlines' current market value.

Under the terms laid out by Treasury officials last week, the government would receive repayment on 30 per cent of the funds awarded to large carriers and warrants equal to 10 per cent of the loan amount that were priced at last week's close.

Delta said it will receive $5.4 billion in grants, of which $1.6 billion will be an unsecured 10-year low-interest loan that has to be repaid, and will provide the government with warrants to acquire about 1 per cent of Delta stock at $24.39 per share over five years.

American Airlines said it would receive $5.8 billion in grants, of which it would need to repay $1.7 billion.

Southwest said it had agreed in principle and expects to receive $3.2 billion in grants and will have to repay nearly $1 billion over 10 years. Southwest will issue 2.6 million warrants to the Treasury.

JetBlue said it will receive $935.8 million in payroll grants. Alaska and its regional carrier Horizon Air will receive $992 million in funding, including $267 million in the form of a loan, that the airline expects will cover about 70 per cent of budgeted costs through Sept. 30.

Alaska said the Treasury will receive the right to buy 847,000 non-voting shares of parent Alaska Air Group at a price of $31.61 per share.

United was eligible for about $6 billion but did not disclose on Tuesday how much it would receive.

Spirit Airlines Inc, a low-cost carrier which was not listed by the Treasury as reaching agreement, said it expects 'to agree on terms soon' for payroll grants.

'We are closer than ever to almost a million airline workers knowing they will receive their paycheck and keep their healthcare and other benefits, at least through September,' said Association of Flight Attendants President Sara Nelson, who is widely credited for the idea of aid specifically for payroll.

'At the same time, we were able to rein in the worst corporate practices by tying this aid to restrictions on stock buybacks, executive compensation and dividends.'

According to the statute, companies receiving funds cannot lay off employees before September 30 or change collective bargaining agreements and must agree to restrictions on buybacks, executive compensation and dividends.

The statute gave the Treasury the authority to demand compensation for the grants, but did not require it.

Estimated global airline losses from the coronavirus pandemic have climbed to $314 billion, 25 per cent more than previously forecast, the International Air Transport Association (IATA) said on Tuesday.
Mumbai, April 15 : Art director-turned-filmmaker Omung Kumar B. shot to fame directing "Mary Kom" in 2014, and has made a few other films since then. But did you know that he has his first brush with showbiz as a child actor way back in the seventies? The year is 1979 and the film is "Guru Ho Jaa Shuru", an action comedy drama starring Ashok Kumar, Mahendra Sandhu, Prema Narayan, Deb Mukherjee and Ranjeet.

"Guru Ho Ja Suru' movie 1979, me as child star Full drama..... My god I was so young, and yes remember the rain scene... and my hair... wah," Omung wrote on social media, reminiscing about the film directed by Shiv Kumar.

In the film, Omung played the younger version of hero Mahendra Sandhu. In sync with trends of the time, he was credited as Master Omung Kumar.
U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo reiterated Washingtons opposition to granting a five-billion-dollar IMF loan to the Islamic Republic of Iran in interviews on April 14.

Earlier on Thursday, April 9, Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif) had urged President Donald Trump to reverse a reported decision to block an Iranian request from the International Monetary Fund for $5 billion in aid to fight the coronavirus crisis.

Speaking to Tony Katz of The Morning News, Pompeo asserted, "Senator Feinsteins got that wrong, and the President has talked about this too. We offered humanitarian assistance, real humanitarian assistance to the Iranian people, but were not about to send cash to the Ayatollahs."

Even if Washington decided to send money to Iran, Pompeo argued, ayatollahs would not let it go where it should go and pocket it themselves.

"If our mission set is to save lives inside of Iran, to send a bunch of money to the Iranian regime wont get that money to those people. Itll be funneled, siphoned off; itll be used for corrupt purposes. And so that is the wrong approach to assistance inside of Iran", Pompeo affirmed.

In recent weeks Iran has also pushed for lifting U.S. sanctions, calling it medical terrorism. Russia and a few countries have supported Irans demand, but Europe has shown lackluster sympathy for Tehrans position.

The United States has countered the sanction-lifting pressure by arguing that humanitarian trade is not blocked, and Iran has enough money of its own to take care of its needs during the pandemic.

Pompeo noted that the Islamic Republic Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has billions of dollars at his disposal, reminding, "The ayatollah has got billions of dollars socked away. It is not the case that Iran doesnt have the capacity, the financial resources, to take care of this problem itself."

Therefore, Pompeo concluded that the United States and the world, including the IMF, ought not to be creating free cash for the Iranian regime which, as he put it, will be used to fund proxy wars across the world, including those in Iraq where American lives are at risk.

Meanwhile, in another interview with Chris Salcedo of The Chris Salcedo Show, KSEV Houston & Newsmax TV, Pompeo insisted on Tuesday that from the beginning of the novel coronavirus outbreak in Iran, Washington offered humanitarian assistance to Tehran, but was rejected.

Lambasting the Islamic Republics response to the deadly outbreak, Pompeo said, "This is a tragedy that has struck the Iranian people. Part of the loss of life that will occur there is a direct result of the regime not having invested in their health care system, but rather having invested in Hizballah and terror campaigns around the world."

Once again, Pompeo asserted that any financial assistance to Tehran will either go to be siphoned off for corruption or end in the hands of the Lebanese Hezbollah, arms merchants and Shi'ite militia in the region.

"We should never, never do anything that would fuel the Iranian regimes capacity to inflict terror around the world and risk American lives", Pompeo said.

Medicines and medical equipment are exempt from the U.S. sanctions, but some purchases are blocked by the unwillingness of banks to process transactions for fear of incurring large penalties in the United States.

In one of the few instances of aid, Britain, France, and Germany used a special trading mechanism for the first time on March 31 to send medical supplies to Iran in a way that does not violate the sanctions.
Thanks to everyone who followed along today on a busy day of news and developments, one that finishes on a more optimistic note as Australia's curve continues to flatten.

Here are some of the major developments:

Four more weeks: PM says end in sight, vows to kick-start economy

The Victorian government is preparing to borrow up to $24.5 billion in emergency funding as it braces for the devastating economic impact of the coronavirus pandemic.

AFL games will return as soon as July, with the league to announce by the end of the month the firm date for returning to train and then play.

As the bushfire royal commission starts, fire survivors say virus is slowing relief

Crown Resorts has stood down 11,500 employees and secured more than $1 billion in fresh debt to help it endure the shutdown of its casino operations during the coronavirus pandemic.

Victoria may not have to go into stage four lockdown, and schools could reopen in weeks if case numbers continue to drop, says the state's Chief Health Officer.

And in late news a US man named Steven Lazarus has died becoming the first overseas based passenger from the Ruby Princess cruise ship to lose his life after contracting COVID-19.

Thanks and have a great evening. We will have another live blog running from early tomorrow morning.

I'll leave you with this lovely picture from Simon Schluter of St Kilda Beach earlier today....
Gujarat Chief Minister Vijay Rupani has asked people to not panic as a local Congress MLA tested positive for coronavirus after having attended a meeting with the CM, The Times of India has reported.

Imran Khedawala, the MLA from the Khadia-Jamalpur seat of Ahmedabad, tested positive for coronavirus on April 14 when he attended the high-level meeting with the CM, said Deputy Municipal Commissioner Om Prakash Machra. Khedawala, along with some other Congress MLAs, was present in the meeting with Rupani held at the CM's official residence in Gandhinagar in the morning.

The meeting was also attended by Deputy Chief Minister Nitin Patel and Minister of State for Home Pradeepsinh Jadeja.

Coronavirus LIVE updates

After the meeting, these MLAs also addressed a press conference in Gandhinagar.

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

Following the development, the political leadership of Gujarat is keeping its fingers crossed on being able to avoid catching the COVID-19 disease, the report suggested.

However, CM Rupani insisted there was no need to panic as social distancing norms were followed during the meeting, said the report.

Khedawala was sitting about eight metres away from the CM, and they took all precautions, said the report quoting the chief minister.

The CM further said that there was no need for him to be quarantined, as per the report.

Also read | COVID-19: 7 changes to expect in the global healthcare system

In a photo shared by the government, Khedawala and Shaikh can be seen sitting at a distance from Rupani while Parmar was sitting near the CM during the meet.

After the meeting, Rupani announced imposition of a curfew in some parts of Ahmedabad city, which fall in the Assembly constituencies represented by these Congress MLAs, to curb the spread of coronavirus.

(With inputs from PTI)

Follow our full coverage here
More than 620,000 people have registered an interest in accessing their retirement savings under the government's temporary early super release scheme  one of a host of measures to help households make ends meet and to keep the economy on life support during the coronavirus crisis.

Those in financial hardship are able to access up to $10,000, tax free, this financial year and a further 10,000, tax free, from July 1 until September 24, when the measure ends.

Those considering accessing their super should first consider other forms of financial assistance being offered by the government and the effect of early withdrawal on their income in retirement. Credit:Illustration: Simon Letch

With almost 11 weeks to the cut-off date to apply for the first $10,000, the amount of super withdrawn could exceed Treasury's estimate of $27 billion.

However, anyone thinking of applying for their super should be aware of the detrimental consequences that the action would have on their retirement income.
A homeowner has left an epic note to her 'dobber' neighbour who reported her to police for renting out her granny flat during the coronavirus crisis.

Landlord Tanya Watson rented out her granny flat in Woy Woy, on the New South Wales Central Coast, to an essential worker in early April.

Ms Watson said she was not allowing short-stay rentals during the pandemic and had a strict criteria on who she would accept.

'Essential workers, essential family trips... they had to have a really good reason for coming and be able to provide me with ID and proof of that reason,' she told Yahoo News.

A homeowner on the NSW central coast left a furious note (pictured) after a 'dobber' reported her to the police for renting out her granny flat during the coronavirus crisis

Ms Watson was forced to call out a 'nosy' neighbour who had mistaken the property for a holiday rental and contacted police last week.

She left a scathing note on her fence that said: 'You reported us to the police with false facts.

'The police verified that I am a responsible owner who has a tenant in my granny flat.

'Mind your own business and stop wasting police time.'

Ms Watson's tenant was a woman who relocated to the Central Coast for work and had asked to stay for three months.

The landlord confirmed these details with the woman's new employer before renting the granny flat to her on a three-month lease.

Police came and knocked on the tenant's front door on Good Friday, just two days after she had moved in.

The granny flat (pictured) was being rented by an essential worker who was a long-term tenant

'They had received an anonymous complaint that I was operating as holiday accommodation during the COVID-19 lockdown on holiday properties,' Ms Watson said.

Ms Watson was forced to show the police documentation to prove that her new tenant was not a holidaymaker.

The landlord said the experience had left her new tenant shaken.

'She was shocked, a young girl on her own who has moved from interstate, I had to make sure she was ok,' Ms Watson explained.

Ms Watson said the local police station had received around 200 complaints about non-essential travel over the Easter long weekend.

The landlord said she suspected the 'dobber' was an unhappy neighbour who had spotted the new tenant's out of state licence plate.

The maximum penalty for breaching coronavirus restrictions in NSW is $11,000.
Key Highlights:

DRDO develops safe swab sample collection kiosks named COVSACK

Kerala had innovated it as WISK a week ago, modelling South Korea

Patients walk into COVSACK and health professionals safely sit inside WISK

No need for PPEs for sample collection, besides ensuring safety of sample collector

Protection of health worker is a big concern worldwide while dealing with COVID-19 patients. Within a week of South Korea developing walk-in kisoks to collect swab samples without human intervention, Kerala emulated them with WISK sample kiosks a week ago. Now the Defence Research and Development Laboratory (DRDL) in Hyderabad has come up with COVID Sample Collection Kiosk (COVSACK), in consultation with the doctors of Employees' State Insurance Corporation (ESIC), Hyderabad.

In this, the suspected infected patients have to walk into the kiosk and a nasal or oral swab is taken by healthcare professionals from outside through the built-in gloves. The kiosk is automatically disinfected without the need for human involvement, making the process free of infection spread. The shielding screen of kiosk cabin protects the health care worker from the aerosols and droplet transmission while taking the sample.This reduces the requirement for Rs 1000-plus worth personal protection equipment (PPE) that has to be changed by healthcare workers after each sample collection, says Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO).

After the patient leaves the kiosk, four nozzle sprayers mounted in the kiosk cabin disinfect the empty chamber by spraying disinfectant mist for a period of 70 seconds. It is further flushed with water & UV light disinfection. The system is ready for next use in less than two minutes. Voice command can be given through two-way communication system integrated with the COVSACK. It is possible to configure COVSACK to be used either from inside or outside as required by the medical professionals.

The COVSACK costs nearly Rs 1 lakh and a manufacturer based at Belgaum, Karnataka is gearing up to make 10 units per day. The DRDO has designed and developed two units and handed over these to ESIC Hospital, Hyderabad after successful testing.

The Ernakulam government medical college hospital in Kerala last week had developed its WISK, with the help of district administration based on social media footage on COVID-19 sample collection methods used in South Korea. In the Kerala version, costing Rs 40,000, the kiosk has an ultraviolet light unit, gloves and exhaust fan and is almost like a Personal Protective Equipment small suit. In that, the health worker sits inside the kiosk and collect the throat swab using the gloves attached to the unit. The gloves would be sanitised after every sample collection. Another advantage is the unit can be mounted in an ambulance to go to hotspot areas and collect samples, instead of suspected patients transported in ambulances to nearby designated testing centres. Kerala has also made two units and is in discussion with NGOs to set up more such units.

Meanwhile, the Ordnance Factory Board (OFB) under the Ministry of Defence has started supply of coveralls conforming to ISO Class 3 exposure standards. Manufacture of initial order of 1.10 lakh from HLL Lifecare Limited (HLL), the government's nodal agency to procure medical equipment fighting COVID-19, is in full swing and will be completed in 40 days.

The Factories Board has also developed special two-metre tents which can be used for medical emergency, screening, hospital triage and quarantine purposes. These are made up of waterproof fabric, mild steel and aluminium alloy. Supplies have already started, said a communication from the government.

Also Read: Coronavirus Lockdown Live Updates: Govt identifies 170 districts as hotspots; total cases in India reach 11,933

Also Read: Coronavirus lockdown 2.0: All agricultural activities to remain fully functional, says govt
Toronto, Ontario--(Newsfile Corp. - April 15, 2020) - SustainCo Inc. (TSXV: SMS) ("SustainCo" or the "Company") announces today that the Company has entered into a definitive agreement (the "Agreement") with Groundheat Solar Wind Corp. (the "Purchaser") that provides for the sale (the "Transaction") of all of the issued and outstanding shares of its wholly-owned subsidiary, Clean Energy Developments Corp. ("CED"), in consideration for which the Purchaser will pay SustainCo an aggregate purchase price of $50,000 in cash.

Completion of the Transaction is subject to customary conditions for a transaction of this nature, which includes applicable regulatory and stock exchange approvals.

The board of directors of SustainCo has unanimously determined that the Transaction is in the best interests of the Company as it provides the Company an avenue to monetize the assets in CED. In the event that the Transaction is ultimately completed according to the terms of the Agreement, the Company's existing business will continue to be operated through its wholly-owned subsidiary, VCI Controls Inc. ("VCI Controls").

Chris Hazelton, the Chief Financial Officer of SustainCo, said: "We will be focusing our success and expansion of VCI Controls' core business by providing additional services during this difficult time. For three decades, VCI Controls' clients have come to expect and rely on our prompt, professional and knowledgeable team that goes well beyond the basics, providing complete satisfaction and peace of mind."

Chris Hazelton continued, "We would like to thank the employees for their commitment and their hard work in the past and particularly during these challenging times. They are our strength and the reason for our success."

About SustainCo Inc.

SustainCo conducts its operations through two wholly-owned subsidiaries, VCI Controls and CED.

VCI Controls is a leading supplier of building technologies and services that improve comfort, safety, energy efficiency, and occupant productivity. It is an industry leader in the development of intelligent building technology, including the integration of all building systems utilizing the latest in communications technologies and standards. VCI Controls' business focuses on digital controls and mechanical services, performance monitoring, and energy efficiency solutions.

CED is a Canadian industry leading geoexchange company that provides heating and cooling solutions for residential and commercial buildings using energy from the earth. It provides a complete energy solution and is able to provide engineering and design, geo installation, equipment and control systems as well as manage the complete project.

With headquarters in Toronto, SustainCo has offices across Canada including, Halifax, Montreal, Pembroke, Ottawa, and Vaughan.

Forward Looking Statements

Certain information provided in this press release constitutes forward-looking statements and information within the meaning of applicable securities laws. Specifically, and without limitation, this press release contains forward-looking statements and information relating to: the anticipated benefits of the Transaction, and the anticipated timing for the closing of the Transaction. Forward-looking information typically contains statements with words such as "anticipate", "believe", "forecast", expect", "plan", "intend", "estimate", "propose", "project", or similar words suggesting future outcomes. The Company cautions readers and prospective investors in the Company's securities not to place undue reliance on forward-looking information as, by its nature, it is based on current expectations regarding future events that involve a number of assumptions, inherent risks and uncertainties, which could cause actual results to differ materially from those anticipated by the Company. In respect of the forward-looking statements and information set out in this press release, the Company has provided such in reliance on certain assumptions that it believes are reasonable at this time, including assumptions as the ability of the Company to receive, in a timely manner, the necessary stock exchange approvals and the ability of the Company to satisfy, in a timely manner, the other conditions to the closing of the Transaction.

There are many risk factors associated with the completion of the Transaction. A number of factors could cause actual results to differ materially from those anticipated by the Company, including but not limited to risks and uncertainties inherent in the nature of the Transaction including the failure of the Company to obtain necessary stock exchange approval, or to otherwise satisfy the conditions to the Transaction, in a timely manner by the outside date or at all, risks of a material adverse change to the Company's assets or revenue, risks of unknown liabilities that may arise, uncertainties regarding Transaction, and other risks associated with business operations.

The forward-looking information included herein is expressly qualified in its entirety by this cautionary statement. The forward-looking information included herein is made as of the date hereof and the Company assumes no obligation to update or revise any forward-looking information to reflect new events or circumstances, except as required by law.

Neither the Exchange, nor its Regulation Services Provider (as that term is defined in the policies of the Exchange) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release. No stock exchange, securities commission or other regulatory authority has approved or disapproved the information contained herein.

CONTACT INFORMATION

SustainCo Inc.

Emlyn David

President, Chief Executive Officer and Chairman

(647) 258-0960

To view the source version of this press release, please visit https://www.newsfilecorp.com/release/54442
Gujarat chief minister Vijay Rupani has self-quarantined himself after a Congress legislator he met tested positive for coronavirus disease on Tuesday, news agency PTI quoted his office as saying on Wednesday.

Vijay Rupani will not to meet anyone for a week as Congress MLA Imran Khedawala tested positive, the chief ministers office said.

Gujarat chief minister Vijay Rupani is fit and fine. Medical experts Dr Atul Patel and Dr RK Patel tested him today and have confirmed that CM has no symptoms for now. But as per safety measures, no outsider is allowed at his residence, Ashwani Kumar, the CMs secretary, was quoted as saying by news agency ANI.

Rupani will run the state administration through video conferences and by making phone calls, Kumar said.

Imran Khedawala, who represents Khadia-Jamalpur seat of Ahmedabad, had attended a meeting called by Vijay Rupani on Tuesday morning and tested positive for the highly contagious disease in the evening.

The meeting was also attended by deputy chief minister Nitin Patel and minister of state for home Pradeepsinh Jadeja.

Two more people succumbed to Covid-19 in Gujarat, taking the death toll in the state to 30, the state health department said on Wednesday.

The victims included a 14-year-old girl from Vadodara and a 45-year-old woman from Surat, it said.

.
(ANSA) - Rome, April 15 - The death toll from the coronavirus among Italy's doctors rose to 120 as five more physicians died on Wednesday.

The national federation of doctors guilds FNOMCEO said the latest casualties were Patrizia Longo (family doctor), Enrico Boggio (dentist), Eugenio Malachia Brianza (SERD doctor), Elisabetta Mangiarii (family doctor) and Marco Spissu, 72, a surgeon at a private clinic.

The latter died in a hospital ICU where he had been admitted at the beginning of March in Sassari in Sardinia.



The toll includes retired doctors who have returned to the front line in the virus battle.

The death toll from the coronavirus among Italy's nurses rose to 30 as another two died on Wednesday.

Some 34% of the nurses who have died worked in care homes, the federation of nurses guilds FNOPI said.
Strictly bosses are assessing contingency plans for the upcoming series, as the TV industry continues to be thrown into chaos by the coronavirus pandemic.

Sources revealed to MailOnline that due to BBC executives 'not knowing what world we'll be in' when the show hits screens, they are keeping options open.

Despite reports claiming one option was to keep the celebrity and dance professionals in isolation together, insiders insisted this was not plausible due to family ties yet a shortened run is one option on the table.

Big changes: Strictly bosses are assessing contingency plans for the upcoming series, as the TV industry continues to be thrown into chaos by the coronavirus pandemic (Oti Mabuse and Kelvin Fletcher pictured)

Strictly Come Dancing joins a legion of shows in being rocked by the ongoing global pandemic, meaning bosses have been forced to keep their options very open.

Insiders revealed: 'Bosses are looking at contingency plans but just don't know where there'll be at. They don't know what world we'll be in...

'The international versions are running. Germany has no audience and are isolating but not in any kind of Big Brother style. Isolating individually then rehearsing.

'Strictly are looking at options. At this stage, there's no chance they could isolate as individuals or couples. That would leave any married or parent dancers not seeing their families for up to three months...

Drama: Strictly Come Dancing joins a legion of shows in being rocked by the ongoing global pandemic, meaning bosses have been forced to keep their options very open (Stacey Dooley and Kevin Clifton pictured)

'At the moment, it's not being considered. No one knows where we'll be in the world - if the series is a much shorter run, say. The isolation is not something that's currently on the table. 

It comes after numerous TV favourites such as Line Of Duty, Call The Midwife, and even EastEnders were forced to halt filming due to the ongoing coronavirus pandemic, which has also placed the country in lockdown.

MailOnline has contacted representatives for Strictly Come Dancing for comment.

The new series of Strictly is schedule to being production sometime in August, with the launch episode usually airing in early September.

Not yet: Strictly usually begins airing its new series in September, but this has been thrown into doubt due to the ongoing coronavirus lockdown

Judge Motsi Mabuse is currently filming the German version of Strictly, which has been able to continue filming throughout the pandemic by using similar isolation measures.

Which UK shows have stopped filming? EastEnders Line Of Duty Peaky Blinders Doctors Casualty Holby City River City Pobol y Cwm Hollyoaks Vera Call The Midwife The Only Way Is Essex Lorraine Loose Women Emmerdale Coronation Street Advertisement

On Monday pro Oti Mabuse - who was crowned series champion with Kelvin Fletcher last year - admitted Strictly's future is still up in the air.

She said on Lorraine: 'Right now we hope that everything's gonna be okay, or are we not sure?

'We're just hoping that everything can be okay. I think at the moment it's really important to listen to the government guidelines and just take it day by day.

'The most important thing is that everyone is safe and everyone is healthy. So, at the moment, we're all just isolated together. We're all in the same boat really.'

The pandemic has already thrown the TV industry into chaos, with numerous series forced to halt filming including Line Of Duty, Casualty and Holby City.

Others such as Ant and Dec's Saturday Night Takeaway and The Last Leg continued without a studio audience, and some such as Have I Got News For You resuming by filming entire episodes on webcam.

Worries: On Monday pro Oti Mabuse - who was crowned series champion last year - admitted Strictly's future is still up in the air

The nation was placed in lockdown on Monday 23 March due to the coronavirus pandemic, meaning members of the public must stay in their homes.

Prime Minister Boris Johnson insisted members of the public may only leave their homes for essential food shopping, daily exercise and to travel to and from work.

A majority of the nation are now working from home, with public transport only running to carry key workers, such as NHS staff.
(Screenshot from The Hill's website)

After US President Donald Trump said Tuesday that he would halt US funding to the World Health Organization (WHO), the American Medical Association (AMA), the nations largest association of physicians, immediately called on him to reconsider his decision, which they describe as a dangerous step in the wrong direction, according to a report by The Hills.

During the worst public health crisis in a century, halting funding to the World Health Organization (WHO) is a dangerous step in the wrong direction that will not make defeating COVID-19 easier, AMA President Patrice Harris said in a statement Tuesday.

Fighting a global pandemic requires international cooperation and reliance on science and data. Cutting funding to the WHO  rather than focusing on solutions  is a dangerous move at a precarious moment for the world, she added. The AMA is deeply concerned by this decision and its wide-ranging ramifications, and we strongly urge the President to reconsider.

(Screenshot from the White House's official Twitter account)

The broadside against Trump, the article said, comes after the president said he will halt funding to the WHO while a review is conducted to assess the World Health Organizations role in severely mismanaging and covering up the spread of the coronavirus.

The reality is that the WHO failed to adequately obtain, vet and share information in a timely and transparent fashion, Trump said at a White House briefing Tuesday.

Dr Hans Kluge, WHO regional director for Europe, told a virtual briefing when asked about Trumps remarks, We are still in the acute phase of a pandemic so now is not the time to cut back on funding.

UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres said on Wednesday that this is "not the time to reduce the resources for the operations of the World Health Organization or any other humanitarian organisation" in the fight against the coronavirus.
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People from all over the world visit Venice to experience the wonders the its famous waterways, but the canals are empty due to the coronavirus pandemic.

The European Space Agency (ESA) has released satellite images of the Italian city captured this month and the same time last year to highlight a distinct lack of boat traffic following the lockdown in March.

The Grand Canal and the Giudecca Channel appear almost empty compared to last year, and traffic from Venice to the island of Murano seems to be non-existent.

There were also two massive cruise ships docked at a port, but the area is also vacant.

Scroll down for video

 Slide me  The Grand Canal and the Giudecca Channel appear almost empty compared to last year, and traffic from Venice to the island of Murano seems to be non-existent. There were also two massive cruise ships docked at a port, but the area is also vacant

Italy was deemed the first hotspot of the coronavirus, which has now more than 165,000 cases and 21,645 deaths reported in the country.

Government officials quickly implanted a lockdown March 9 with the hopes of taming the infection.

The country that was once the epicenter of European infections is now seeing the rate of infections and deaths stabilize, sparking authorities to reopen parts of the economy.

But just like many government officials are saying around the world, normalcy may still be far down the road.

Since the lockdown, the lively waterways of Venice have become nothing but empty canals.

People from all over the world visit Venice to experience the wonders the its famous waterways, but the canals are empty due to the coronavirus pandemic

The country that was once the epicenter of European infections is now seeing the rate of infections and deaths stabilize, sparking authorities to reopen parts of the economy. The blue water that flows through the town are nearly empty, with some parts completely free of boats.

The ESA shared images of the city captured by its Copernicus Sentinel-2 mission satellite on April 13, 2020 and compared it with another snapped April 19, 2019.

The blue water that flows through the town are nearly empty, with some parts completely free of boats.

Usually there are multiple cruise ships that pull into the port, two can been seen in the 2019 image, but area is now empty.

According to the Italian news agency, ANSA, the streets and canals of Venice remained almost empty over Easter  with only police officers patrolling the streets and waterways.

Along with a drop in human activity following the lockdown, both Rome and Milan saw a decrease in nitrogren dioxide last month.

The average concentrations of NO2 for the past four weeks have been at least 24 percent lower than four weeks earlier this year.

The average concentration from March 16 through 22 was 21 percent lower than for the same week in 2019.

In Rome, there has been a constant decline in NO2 pollution over the past four weeks - a 47 percent decrease that the same time last year.
A Manila resident talks to a health worker behind a makeshift plastic disinfection area after submitting to a COVID-19 swab test in the Philippines, April 13, 2020.

Nearly 19 million Filipinos would get infected by the coronavirus nationwide if the Philippine government failed to implement intervention measures, a state-run think tank said, as the country recorded Southeast Asias highest number of coronavirus cases on Wednesday.

The Philippine Institute for Development Studies (PIDS), in projections done this month but released this week, said the government must isolate at least 70 percent of all cases through better contact tracing amid the current lockdown expected to end this month.

Without intervention, the peak of the COVID-19 outbreak in the Philippines would occur in the month of August 2020 with approximately 18 percent of the whole 108 million Philippine population, or 18.9 million, infected with COVID-19, the study said.

Health authorities reported 230 new infections on Wednesday, taking the nations cumulative tally to 5,453  the highest number of confirmed cases in the region. Authorities also reported 14 new deaths, taking the nations toll to 349.

While Indonesia has reported a lower number of cumulative infections at 5,136, its grim tally of officially reported fatalities, at 469, was much higher than that of the Philippines. Indonesias confirmed cases on Wednesday also passed those in Malaysia, which has so far recorded 5,072 infections, with 83 deaths.

Officials believe that the Philippines early moves to place its borders under lockdown and put the main island of Luzon under home quarantine could have helped deter higher infection numbers.

President Rodrigo Duterte imposed a lockdown five days after health officials confirmed the countrys first domestic transmission on March 7. Last week, Duterte extended the lockdown on Luzon, home to Manila and most of the nations population, until the end of this month.

The pandemic, according to the PIDS study, was expected to pull down the Philippine economy, with losses between 276.3 billion pesos (U.S. $5.1 billion) and 2.5 trillion pesos (U.S. $46.3 billion).

Among the sectors expected to be heavily hit are transport, storage and communications, largely due to the heavy declines in tourism, the study said.

Extending the lockdown by one more month could lead to a sizeable decline in the economy, with household consumption falling as workers become unemployed, it said.

Health authorities accelerated testing for the coronavirus on Tuesday, starting with thousands of people who had been admitted at hospitals in Metro Manila, officials said.

The PIDS study said that if the government could immediately stop the spread of virus, the number of infected cases on the peak day will be drastically reduced to only 900,000 cases.

Global cases of the new coronavirus shot past 2 million with almost 129,000 fatalities as of Wednesday, according to the latest data compiled by disease experts at Johns Hopkins University in the United States.

Southeast Asias COVID-19 cases soared Wednesday to almost 20,000 from hundreds during the past month, with the death toll spiking to 994 from two digits, officials said. But medical professionals have expressed concern that the actual numbers in the region could be much higher because of limited testing in many countries.

Indonesia, which has the highest death toll in East Asia outside of China, expanded its partial lockdown Wednesday to include restrictions of movement of people in cities near Jakarta, the epicenter of the nations COVID-19 cases.

Under the new measures, more than 15 million people living in Depok, Bogor and Bekasi cities would be required to use masks and are prohibited from joining public gatherings of more than five people. Religious and social events are also banned.

Other towns near Jakarta will be rolling out their partial lockdowns on Friday, according to the National Disaster Mitigation Agency. Those strict social distancing rules would place about 30 million people under movement restrictions in the greater Jakarta region, authorities said.

Meanwhile, the Indonesian military confirmed on Wednesday that more than 50 members of the military have contracted the coronavirus and seven have died.

There were 55 positive cases, and 190 patients under surveillance, military commander and Air Chief Marshal Hadi Tjahjanto told reporters in Jakarta.

Different segments of the society in nearby regions have been hit by the pandemic as well.

In Bangladesh, a doctor became the first medical professional in the South Asian country to die of COVID-19, officials said on Wednesday, as they confirmed 219 new cases along with four new deaths, taking the nations toll to 50.

Dr. Moyeen Uddin, an assistant professor at a medical college, died at the intensive care unit of the Kurmitola General Hospital in Dhaka, Bangladeshi Health Minister Zahid Maleque told reporters.

Authorities said more than 100 health workers had been infected by the coronavirus in Bangladesh, which began deploying soldiers and police last month to enforce the start of a shutdown aimed at slowing the spread of the coronavirus.

Infections have almost tripled in Bangladesh since Friday from 424 to 1,231 cases as of Wednesday, officials said.

Jeoffrey Maitem in Cotabato City, Philippines, contributed to this report.
Microglial cells from mice with elevated eIF4E appear enlarged relative to controls. They demonstrate impaired synaptic pruning activity during early development. Credit: Baoji Xu lab, Scripps Research, Florida

Many cases of autism spectrum disorders (ASDs) may result from problems in immune cells that normally work to trim back unneeded brain connections in early life, suggests a new study led by scientists at Scripps Research.

The study, published Tuesday in Nature Communications, examined the effects of a set of gene mutations that account for a small percentage of autism disorders. These mutations are known to cause a general overproduction of many proteins in brain cells, but how that overproduction leads to autism behaviors has been a mystery.

The scientists found evidence that the most relevant effect of this protein overproduction occurs in brain-based immune cells called microglial cells. These cells normally prune unneeded brain connections, or synapses, as the brain develops in childhood.

Working in mice, the scientists determined that the protein overproduction impairs microglial cells in a way that hampers their synapse-pruning function, but only in males, leading to autism-like social behavior deficits.

The finding dovetails with the long-standing observation that autism disorders are four to five times more prevalent in males than females. It is also consistent with recent evidence that in people with ASDs, the brain commonly has a higher number of synapses than normal.

"Our study suggests that impairments in microglia play a key role in the development of autism behaviors, at least in some cases, and may help explain the higher prevalence of autism disorders in males," says study senior author Baoji Xu, Ph.D., professor in the Department of Neuroscience at Scripps Research. "That, in turn, suggests that microglia might be a good target for future drugs that prevent or treat autism spectrum disorders."

ASDs are found in an estimated 2.4 percent of boys and 0.5 percent of girls. They involve a variety of abnormalities including social skill deficits, repetitive behaviors, and hypersensitivities to sounds and light. Research suggests that these disorders are largely genetic but can be caused by abnormalities in a variety of different genes acting alone or in combination. To date, well over 100 gene mutations and variants have been linked to ASDs.

Neuroscientist Baoji Xu, PhD, of Scripps Research, Florida, has found that impaired microglia, and not other brain cells, can produce autistic behaviors in male mice during early development. Credit: Scott Wiseman

One set of autism-linked gene abnormalitieswhich include mutations in the genes PTEN, TSC1, TSC2, and FMR1accounts for about 3 percent of ASD cases. The common effect of these abnormalities is to disrupt a pathway that normally regulates the level of protein production in cells, allowing protein production to rise.

Xu and his team sought to determine if there is a particular cell type in the brain that explains the connection between elevated protein production and ASD-like behaviors. They engineered mice to makein just one cell type at a timeabnormally high levels of a protein-production factor called eIF4E. A high level of eIF4E is thought to be one of the common events that links PTEN, TSC1 and other autism mutations that increase protein production.

The team found that when high eIF4E levels occurred in microglial cells, the mice developed ASD-like abnormalities in social behavior, as well as cognitive deficits and repetitive behaviors. Curiously, although protein production rose in the microglial cells of both male and female mice, the ASD-type abnormalities occurred only in male mice.

The same behavioral abnormalities were not seen at all when the high eIF4E levels occurred in neurons or in helper cells called astrocytes, although mice whose neurons had high eIF4E levels showed more anxiety-like behaviors.

The researchers examined affected microglial cells for clues to how elevated protein synthesis in these cells could lead to ASD-like behavioral changes. They found that in young male mice, microglial cells in important brain regions, including the medial prefrontal cortex, the hippocampus and the striatum, were significantly larger and also more numerous, whereas in females these changes were much more subtle and transient.

Microglia during brain development normally prune synapses that are unused or otherwise unwanted. Xu and his colleagues found that in the male ASD-like mice with elevated microglial eIF4E, there were more synapses than normal, suggesting a pruning deficita pattern also thought to be widely present in people with autism.

The affected microglia in the mice showed gene activity patterns indicating an enhanced capacity to prune synapses. However, experiments also revealed that the cells lacked the usual motility, or movement ability, that would enable them to carry out their synapse pruning functions. Xu and his colleagues suspect that this reduction in microglial motility may be the most important factor, so that on balance the cells' synapse-pruning abilities are impaired, leading to ASD-like brain changes.

The researchers now are following up with studies to discover precisely why protein increases affect microglia in males so much more than in females. That discovery could prove to be an important piece of the puzzle of sex differences in autismand could suggest new targets for autism treatments.

Explore further Single mutation leads to big effects in autism-related gene

More information: Zhi-Xiang Xu et al, Elevated protein synthesis in microglia causes autism-like synaptic and behavioral aberrations, Nature Communications (2020). Journal information: Nature Communications Zhi-Xiang Xu et al, Elevated protein synthesis in microglia causes autism-like synaptic and behavioral aberrations,(2020). DOI: 10.1038/s41467-020-15530-3
John Paul McDonagh, the teen who died after a street altercation in Enniskillen

A 29-year-old man has been charged with the murder of John Paul McDonagh in Co Fermanagh.

He is expected to appear before Strabane Magistrates Court, sitting in Dungannon, on Thursday via video link.

It's after Mr McDonagh (18) passed away in hospital on Monday. He was found by police at Coolcullen Meadows in Enniskillen on Saturday night after having lost his leg after he and another man (24) were stabbed.

The 29-year-old man has been charged with the offences of wounding with intent to do grievous bodily harm and possession of an offensive weapon in a public place.

As is normal procedure, the charges will be reviewed by the Public Prosecution Service.

Mr McDonagh was originally from Dublin but had been living in Enniskillen for some time.

He was predeceased by his father Pat and is survived by his mother Rosie, brothers, sisters and family circle.
Description

GIS  15 April, 2020: Following several complaints received from consumers, Officers of the Consumer Affairs Unit (CAU), under the aegis of the Ministry of Commerce and Consumer Protection , with the support of Health Inspectors from the Local Government, and Police Officers, visited 1 412 trade outlets from 06 to 15 April 2020.

The CAU has the responsibility of enforcing the various consumer legislations and of providing overall consumer satisfaction and security. Consequently, d uring those visits, 1 689 contraventions were issued to traders notably for: prices not affixed on shelves; prices higher than prescribed and; trading without business registration.

Moreover, for the same period, 523 complaints were also registered on the hotline 185 of the CAU, which has been put at the disposal of the public to report trade outlets that do not operate according to the established rules of the Consumer Protection (Price and Supplies Control) Act.

In addition, initiatives have been undertaken for possible legal action against traders who were fined, and officers concerned are pursuing their rounds across the country.

The public is advised to report any non-compliance from traders to the Ministry of Commerce and Consumer Protection on the hotline 185.

#ResOuLakaz #BeSafeMoris
<! Cannes Film Festival >

The Cannes Film Festival will not be held this year in its original form due to the Coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic, organisers said on Tuesday.

The festival will nevertheless be made real in 2020, in a way or another, they added in a statement.

This is coming after France extended its lockdown measures this week.

The organizers did not elaborate on what the alternatives could be but said they hoped to communicate promptly.

The prestigious festival was originally scheduled to take place in the south of France from 12 to 23 May.

When the festival was first postponed, its president, Pierre Lescure, said he was reasonably optimistic it would still go ahead this year.

Mr Lescure told Le Figaro newspaper at the time that he believed the peak of the epidemic would be reached at the end of March and that we will breathe a little better in April.

But on Monday, French President Emmanuel Macron said the countrys lockdown would be extended until 11 May, and that public events could not be held until mid-July at the earliest.

The film festival, one of the largest in the world, was initially due to take place from May 12-23.

The

, until 2003 called the International Film Festival and known in English as the Cannes Film Festival, is an annual film festival held in Cannes, France, which previews new films of all genres, including documentaries from all around the world.
California does not mandate the wearing of facial coverings in public. It simply says there may be a benefit in doing so, especially against asymptomatic transmission of the COVID-19 virus.

But some of the states counties and cities, especially in Southern California, have decided that guidance is not tough enough. Death tolls from COVID-19 in the greater Los Angeles region have been rising faster than the Bay Area, which was quicker to adopt interventions such as physical distancing and home isolation.

On Wednesday, Los Angeles County recorded its most deaths in a single day, bringing the countywide toll to 402, as of 12:30 p.m.. The previous record stood for less than 24 hours.

The countys mortality rate is 3.8%.

Riverside County, which has also seen an upswing in COVID-19 cases and deaths, was the first county to issue a mandatory face mask order. County public health officer Dr. Cameron Kaiser said too many people were not getting the message about wearing masks.

The ordinance went into effect Sunday. Residents can be fined $1,000 per day for failing to cover their face.

"This is a valid order and enforceable by fine, imprisonment or both," said Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco in a Monday video statement. "However, I need to make it perfectly clear to all residents of Riverside County: We will not be setting up a police state and this is not a declaration of martial law in Riverside County."

Bianco said officers would not stopping families out on a walk or set up vehicular checkpoints, but they will be citing those who deliberately flout the order, he said.

San Bernardino County followed Riversides example and instituted a similar mask ordinance.

The only Bay Area county to make wearing a face mask mandatory is Sonoma County.



The directive, which was issued Monday night and goes into effect Friday, requires people to wear masks in public places with the exception of those outside who are able to maintain a 6-foot (or more) distance from other people. Also, children under the age of 2 do not need to wear masks.

Violators can be charged with a misdemeanor.

Here are other jurisdictions  all in Southern California  that have adopted mandatory facial covering regulations. Violators can be charged with misdemeanors carrying fines or even jail time.

 Los Angeles: Face-coverings are required inside essential businesses.

 Beverly Hills: Face-coverings are required for anyone leaving their home.

 Burbank: Face-coverings are required inside essential businesses.

 Carson: Face-coverings are required for anyone leaving their home. (But the city will not be fining violators until masks are more available.)

 Inglewood: Face-coverings are required inside essential businesses.

 Long Beach: Face-coverings are required inside essential businesses.

 Pasadena: Face-coverings are required inside essential businesses.

 Seal Beach: Per the Seal Beach Police Department, masks and other personal protective equipment are required for people who are out of their house or vehicle and are interacting with workers. Masks are not required while walking or exercising.

California's businesses may soon follow suit and start refusing to serve those who arent wearing masks. One already has: Nugget Markets, operating in the greater Sacramento metropolitan area, requires customers to cover their faces in order to shop.

MORE CORONAVIRUS COVERAGE:

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Mike Moffitt is an SFGATE Digital Reporter. Email: moffitt@sfgate.com. Twitter: @Mike_at_SFGate
Motherson Sumi Systems (MSSL) jumped 15.60% to Rs 73 after the company said that its board approved to raise up to Rs 1,000 crore to secure liquidity while dealing with the global coronavirus pandemic.

MSSL announced on 13 April 2020 that the COVID-19 pandemic represents an unprecedented disruption to the global economy and world trade, as production and consumption are scaled back across the globe due to preventive directives from authorities world over. COVID-19 outbreak continues to grow in many areas of the world with severe toll on health. In light of this, MSSL said it has taken a holistic approach to protect the interest of various stakeholders including employees, customers, investors and societies where it is present.

The company said it is in close contact with all its customers and receiving regular updates on plant reopening dates and customer schedules. Most customers are wanting to catch up on the lost production time in the coming months due to pent up demand. "We are seeing positive development on demand coming from our China plants which went first into shutdown but have since recovered production levels to nearly pre COVID-19 times soon after starting up. This is a very positive indication for our industry," MSSL said in a statement.

The company said that most of its plants in India, Europe and Americas are currently temporarily closed and it has received positive reopening dates for vast majority of the plants by end of April / early May. However, since it is a dynamic situation, there could be further delays in reopening plants in case the local governments extend lockdowns, of which there are no current clear indications, it added.

The company reported that its 31 March 2020 net debt levels has been the lowest in eleven quarters. The company's consolidated net debt level as on 31 March 2020 stood at Rs 7,150 crore. It included Samvardhana Motherson Automotive Systems Group B.V. or SMRP's, in which MSSL holds 51% stake, net debt of 702 million euros.

MSSL said that its consolidated cash as on 31 March 2020 stood at Rs 4,690 crore, out of which SMRP reported cash reserves of euros 412 million for the period.

"We have adequate headroom in our bond documents to utilize the above and there are also no major maturities of debt in the next 12 months," the company said in a statement.

To further enhance liquidity in these uncertain times, the board of directors has accorded in-principle approval to raise up to Rs 1000 crore and delegated its committee of directors to evaluate and decide on various borrowing proposals. The firm is also proactively working to leverage on various government support schemes to enhance liquidity.

It also added that it has already completed its major capex investments in the last fiscal and that any new future capex requirements would be aligned with the new product launch schedules of its customers.

The company also updated that Samvardhana Motherson International or SAMIL, which owns 33.43% in MSSL, has paid part of latter's debt and subsequently 3.05 crore MSSL shares are expected to be released from pledge this week. It intends to pay back more facilities from internal accruals and dividends going forward.

"Our team has done a phenomenal job in almost doubling MSSL's turnover over the last 5 years to $9.6 billion / Rs 63000 crore on an unaudited basis, said MSSL's chairman Vivek Chaand Sehgal.

"Our aspirational 5-year plans cannot be timed perfectly, and the unprecedented COVID-19 situation has hindered us in closing many target acquisitions. However, we believe that these same opportunities have become more attractive invaluations since the COVID crisis. Secondly, with our strong financial position and with customer faith intact, we are also being asked by many of our customers to look at more specific companies which are in trouble and we believe can be acquired at low valuations. We wanted to showcase our plans to the investors in June but keeping in mind the current environment, we will probably do so in October. We are grateful to all the customers, government bodies and our financing partners for their support in these trying times," he added.

MSSL's consolidate net profit slumped 30.47% to Rs 270.51 crore on a 4.91% fall in net sales to Rs 15,436.46 crore in Q3 December 2019 over Q3 December 2018.

MSSL is one of the world's leading specialized automotive component manufacturing companies for OEMs.

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(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Northern Irish farmers are calling on the government to take action to tackle the immediate drop in beef and lamb prices 'before its too late'.

Prior to the coronavirus outbreak, Northern Ireland U-3 steer price was around 338-340 pence per kilogram, figures show.

Today factory quotes are 316-320p per kg, which equates to a loss of 76 on a 380kg carcass.

Cull cows have also experienced a substantial drop in both quotes and price, and processors have indicated that further deductions are yet to come.

Northern Ireland lamb prices before the pandemic were approximately 460-480p/kg, falling overnight to 4.15p/kg equating to a loss of 14.30 on a 22kg carcass.

The Ulster Farmers' Union (UFU) beef and lamb committee held a teleconference to discuss the substantial decline in prices.

The supply chain has been dramatically interrupted because of Covid-19 with the food service sector almost coming to a complete shutdown," UFU chairman Sam Chesney explained.

"Beef and sheep processing are complex and there are multiple factors within the production process such as carcass balance, that must be fully considered.

Cuts of sirloin, fillet and ribs in particular have taken the biggest hit, as they were destined for hotels and restaurants.

But with strict restriction measures now in place to slow the spread of the virus, orders have been cancelled or postponed for the foreseeable future.

Processors are indicating that waste, offal and other by-products are practically impossible to shift as a result of Covid-19.

And how consumers do their shopping has also changed as a result of the pandemic, adding further pressure.

Mr Chesney said Northern Irish beef and sheep producers entered the pandemic in a 'poor financial position'.

"Producer costs for feed and fertiliser have also increased in recent weeks due to the outbreak," he said.

"There are 19,809 beef and sheep producers in Northern Ireland who will be affected financially by price drops, more so when input costs soar in the other direction."

The UFU is urging the government to step in to prevent a 'complete collapse before its too late'.

"We need measures put in place to safeguard the industry so that when we come out the other side of this pandemic we are in a sustainable position, Mr Chesney said.
A new report has emerged that blames the Chinese government of hiding the possible outbreak of Coronavirus in the city of Wuhan. The documents hint that the government hid the news for the first six days, a crucial period during the outbreak of the virus in the epicentre.

Within those six days, a mass banquet for tens of thousands of people was also hosted in the city of Wuhan as part of the Chinese Lunar New Year celebrations. The seventh day - January 20 - was when Chinese President Xi Jinping warned the public, alleges the damning report.

Reuters

The report by Associated Press cites internal Chinese documents accessed by it to verify the claim. As per expert estimates based on retrospective data, the delay had resulted in more than 3,000 people being infected by the seventh day.



The report quotes Zuo-Feng Zhang, an epidemiologist at the University of California, Los Angeles, to stress on the effect of the delay. Zhang says, If they took action six days earlier, there would have been much fewer patients and medical facilities would have been sufficient. We might have avoided the collapse of Wuhans medical system.

Since then, the virus outbreak has lead to a global COVID-19 pandemic, infecting almost 2 million people and taking more than 126,000 lives.

Chinese Lunar New Year, in Wuhan (Representative Image Reuters)

The six-day delay was not the only chink in the armoor though. The report also mentions that the Chinese Center for Disease Control did not register any Coronavirus cases from local officials for almost the first two weeks, i.e. Jan 5 to Jan 17. This was despite hundreds of patients visiting hospitals across the country.



The reason for the delay is yet unknown. It might have been the local officials who failed to report cases or the national officials who failed to record them. Even the doctors were keeping hush about the disease after eight Chinese doctors were convicted for rumor-mongering (as they went public about the Coronavirus disease) by the country.

As the AP report mentions, the internal documents confirming Chinas delay come from an anonymous source in the medical field who did not want to be named for fear of retribution. AP also claims to have confirmed the contents with two other sources in public health familiar with the matter.

As per the documents, head of Chinas National Health Commission, Ma Xiaowei, made a grim assessment of the pandemic on Jan. 14 in a confidential teleconference with provincial health officials. AP report further mentions A memo states that the teleconference was held to convey instructions on the Coronavirus from President Xi Jinping, Premier Li Keqiang and Vice Premier Sun Chunlan, but does not specify what those instructions were.

China's President Xi Jinping (Image Reuters)

In the memo, Ma says The epidemic situation is still severe and complex, the most severe challenge since SARS in 2003, and is likely to develop into a major public health event.



The warning, however, never amounted to a public disclosure by the Chinese president, at least not in time.

The Chinese government has denied suppressing this information in the early days. As AP sought answers, the government asserted that it immediately reported the outbreak to the World Health Organization.
A court here on Wednesday



rejected a temporary bail plea of former Punjab and Maharashtra Cooperative (PMC) Bank director Jasvinder Singh Banwait.

Banwait was arrested in March by the Economic Offences Wing (EOW) of the Mumbai Police in connection with the alleged scam at the PMC Bank.

He had sought interimbail citing ill-health and the coronavirus pandemic.

Opposing the application, special public prosecutor Ajay Misar argued Banwait was one of the prime accused and the EOW had established his role in the scam.

Accepting his submission, additionalchief metropolitan magistrate R K Rajebhosale rejected the bail plea.

About the ground of ill-health, the court observed that he can get medical tratment in jail.

Everyone has some or other ailment, and this ground can not be considered at this juncture, the court added.

Banwait was a director of the PMC Bank and member of its Loan, Investment and Executive Committee when the alleged Rs 4,355 crore scam involving Housing Development and Infrastructure Ltd (HDIL) took place.

Over 70 per cent of the bank's advances went to HDIL group. Until now 15 persons have been arrested in connection with the scam.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Police officials stand in a queue to get sanitised after dispersing hundreds of stranded migrant workers from outside the Bandra Railway Station in Mumbai. PTI Photo

Mumbai: More than 1,000 migrant workers, most of them from Bihar, Uttar Pradesh and West Bengal, gathered near Bandra railway station here on Tuesday afternoon.

They were demanding that the state government make transport arrangements so that they can go back to their native towns and villages.



An FIR has been registered against a television journalist over his report that trains would restart, which may have prompted gathering of migrants in suburban Bandra on Tuesday, a police official said.

The accused, Rahul Kulkarni, based in Osmanabad district of Maharashtra, has been detained and police are in the process of bringing him to Mumbai, he said.

In a recent news report, Kulkarni said Jan Sadharan special trains would resume for people stranded due to the lockdown, he said.

He has been booked under IPC Sections 188 (disobedience to order duly promulgated by public servant and 269, 270 (negligent, malignant act likely to spread infection of disease dangerous to life), 117 (abetting commission of offence by public), the official said.
BEIJING, April 14 (Xinhua) -- China cannot stand idly by when Russia is at a crucial stage of epidemic prevention and control, a Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson said here Tuesday, stressing that the country will further strengthen anti-epidemic cooperation with Russia.

A Chinese medical team has arrived in Moscow on Saturday to assist Russia's ongoing efforts in the fight against COVID-19, spokesperson Zhao Lijian told a routine press briefing.

Chinese experts visited designated COVID-19 hospitals and conducted extensive exchanges with their Russian counterparts on epidemic control and medical treatment, he said.

The Chinese experts will conduct more exchanges and experience sharing with Russian experts and provide guidance and training for epidemic prevention and control and medical treatment, the spokesperson said.

Through a video conference, the Chinese experts also popularized epidemic prevention and control knowledge to Chinese nationals in Russia and distributed epidemic prevention materials to them, according to Zhao.

As a comprehensive strategic partner of coordination for a new era, China is sympathetic to what is happening to Russia, the spokesperson said, noting that Russia offered firm support to China during the most difficult period of China's anti-epidemic efforts.

China stands ready to make concerted efforts with Russia to overcome the current difficulties, he said.
FREDERICTONA Canadian snowbird who drove from Florida to Prince Edward Island says he now finds himself living in his car after being turned away by officials at the Confederation Bridge because of COVID-19 restrictions.

Barry Humberstone has owned a home in Northport, P.E.I., for less than a year, after moving there from Georgetown, Ont., but has spent the past six months in Florida with his American girlfriend, Michelle Williamson.

Humberstone said he was denied entry to the Island on Tuesday because his drivers licence and car registration are still from Ontario  which he admits he should have changed sooner.

They wont let me go to my principal residence because of that, when I have a truck sitting in the garage in P.E.I. with P.E.I. plates. I had a copy of the registration, and a copy of my taxes Ive paid on the property, he said.

Humberstone, 60, said he was told the documents were not proof he lives on P.E.I. full time.

I said, I dont live in P.E.I. full time. Im a snowbird  I live six months in Canada and six months in the United States.

He said the home on the Island is his principal residence, not a cottage, and he sold his home in Ontario two years ago.

Now I cant even work because my tools are in my truck. Ive got no winter clothes because all my clothes are in the house, he said.

Humberstone, who describes himself as a semi-retired homebuilder, said he is now driving to Ontario because he has family there, but wants to return to the Island.

Where do I go now? Im 60 years old and living in my car. I dont want to go to a hotel. Thats a cesspool. Im trying to stay healthy so I can see my kids (in Ontario), he said. All I want to do is go to my home.

Humberstone said he and his girlfriend, who remains in Port St. Lucie, Fla., contacted the premiers office, but were not able to get a prompt reply.

Steven Myers, P.E.I. transportation minister, said Wednesday afternoon that 36 people have been turned away at the bridge so far  most because of a lack of documentation.

Many of the people who have been turned away come with very little documentation that were looking for, and very little proof of where they are going, why they are coming here and who is going to help them while they self-isolate, he said.

They would have to be able to present to us their self-isolation plan, and show they have supports in place and contact information for those people, Myers said.

The minister said the border restrictions have been helpful in containing the number of COVID-19 cases to just 26 on the Island so far.

Humberstone said he wants to be home where he can be protected from contracting COVID-19, and cant return to the United States to be with his girlfriend because his six month stay was up.

I didnt think Id be coming home to this  to nowhere, he said.
Viewers of Believe Me called on young tourists to boycott Cyprus when lockdown is lifted after the ITV documentary last night claimed the teenage girl at the centre of the 'false gang rape' scandal was telling the truth.

People at home took to social media in their droves to offer their support to the 19-year-old, hailing her as 'brave' for speaking out, while many admitted the programme was 'hard to watch'.

During the programme, friends of the British girl, from Derbyshire, recalled how they found her 'crying hysterically surrounded by men' while her barrister, Lewis Powers, slammed police failings as a 'disgraceful miscarriage of justice'.

Her defence lawyer at trial, Nicoletta Charalambidou, added that the island has a culture of not believing women's claims of rape.

It comes after the teenager, given the name 'Emily' in the documentary, received a suspended four-month jail sentence for 'public mischief' while the group of Israeli male suspects walked free.

Emily (above), who is now back in the UK and set to appeal against her conviction, vowed: 'I will achieve justice'

Viewers of Believe Me were up in arms last night and called for a boycott of young tourists to Cyprus when lockdown is lifted after the ITV documentary claimed the teenage girl at the centre of the 'false gang rape' scandal was telling the truth

Emily, who is now back in the UK and set to appeal against her conviction, vowed: 'I will achieve justice.'

One viewer tweeted: 'My heart goes out to "Emily" and her family who went through that ordeal.

'How the Cypriot authorities can say they have a strong justice system is beyond me, absolutely disgusting. Hope to God everyone of them "lads" gets what that deserve, sickens me completely.'

Another commented: 'I can't believe in 2020 people are still blaming the victim. I hope this tale destroys the Cyprus tourism industry. I will NEVER visit a country that treats women this way. By giving consent to one person does not mean it's your fault if you get raped.'

The woman, who cannot be named for legal reasons, says she was raped after striking up a 'normal holiday romance' with a young Israeli - and then she had to face a prison ordeal

And one wrote: 'I can't imagine what a young girl goes through when she is raped and then bullied by the lawyers of her rapists and threatened with imprisonment in a foreign country.'

'The Cyprus Rape Case is a must seen reminding us that a woman who admits being sexually active on vacation will be considered a w**** by policemen, lawyers and judges. Only innocent virgins are raped, so she could only be a liar for them,' another tweeted.

The documentary - Emily's first television interview since the ordeal - told how she had consensual sex with a man during a holiday fling.

But she says that she was later held down and raped by his friends.

Jacob, who had been on the trip with her at the time, recalled how he arrived at the apartment and found the anonymous teenager, now 19, who has been given the name "Emily" in the documentary, surrounded by the gang

Speaking in the documentary, her friend Becca said: 'My friend runs at me, towards me. She was hysterical - I've never seen anyone in that kind of state in my life. It was scary. She just collapsed on my bed and was just curled up.'

Jacob, who had been on the trip with Emily, recalled how he arrived at the apartment and found her surrounded by the teenagers.

He said: 'One of them had his arms over her shoulders as if to pull her close, and the two were almost standing either side of her so that she had nowhere to move. So I've said, "what are you doing?" and they didn't reply and started walking away.

'She was crying and I was like, "come on, come on, come with me and I'll take you downstairs to where we were living".

Speaking in the documentary about the moment Emily returned to their apartment, her friend Becca said: 'My friend runs at me, towards me. She was hysterical - I've never seen anyone in that kind of state in my life. It was scary. She just collapsed on my bed and was just curled up.

'I just grabbed her and was hugging her and was like, "Just tell me what's wrong, what's happened, I can help you, just tell me what happened - did he hurt you?"

'She was like "yeah" and she said, "yes, but not just him", and that's when I put it together and was like, "did they rape you?" and she said, "yes".'

Emily claimed police had forced her to retract her statement, explaining: 'There was no other way out of that police station other than [to] sign that retraction statement.

'I thought, "As soon as I am outside this volatile environment I can sort this out."

'When you're in that situation, the only sensible thing to do is to conform.'

The bedroom where the teenager says she endured the gang rape ordeal in Ayia Napa, Cyprus

Her defence lawyer at trial, Nicoletta Charalambidou, added: 'I do not understand why it's easier to believe that a woman was not raped, rather than believing she was raped.

'Because if you wanted to believe her All the evidence was there to conclude that there was rape.'

Emily had faith that a judge would recognise that the statement was written under extreme pressure.

Instead she was put through another six-month ordeal, first being put in prison where she lost two-and-a-half stone in weight, then being under house arrest.

After five weeks behind bars she was granted bail but her family had to raise 20,000 euros to secure her release.

Shimon Yusufov, 19, has been named as the Israeli who met the British student, also 19, while on holiday in Cyprus last July

Her dreams of becoming an anti-terror police officer, having got into university to study criminology, have been shattered by the post-traumatic stress disorder she suffers from.

The Cyprus police has said their investigation was handled with professionalism and they deny improper conduct.

Some viewers questioned why the 'powerful' documentary, which aired at 10:45pm last night, was on so late, while others offered messages of support for Emily.

One raged: 'It has not got the coverage it deserves.'
In its bid to combat the spread



of coronavirus cases, the Mizoram government on Wednesday issued an advisory asking people to wear face masks while stepping out of their houses.

An official statement here said that any person, when leaving home, is advised to wear a face mask to prevent the spread of the coronavirus. A homemade mask will be also be allowed apart from a readymade mask, the statement said.

The US Centre for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and a new study has claimed that wearing a face mask is one of the best preventive measures to protect a person from being infected with the coronavirus, the statement said. The government advised people to have at least two face masks besides telling them to wash their hands carefully before wearing a mask.

The state also asked people to use a good quality cloth to make a mask.

Every mask should be washed thoroughly after a single use, the statement added. So far, at least five states and a union territory, have made wearing face masks mandatory in public places.

Meanwhile, the Centre has made wearing face masks mandatory in workplaces which will come into effect from April 20. Mizoram has reported one COVID-19 case so far after a 50-year-old pastor tested positive on March 25.

The patient is undergoing treatment at Zoram Medical College (ZMC) near Aizawl. State nodal officer of Integrated Disease Surveillance Programme (IDSP) and epidemiologist Dr Pachuau Lalmalsawma told PTI that a woman from Mizoram, who tested positive in Mumbai on Monday, retested positive on Wednesday. He said that results of 22 people from Mizoram, whose samples were collected and tested in Mumbai on Tuesday, has not been declared till Wednesday evening. They were staying with the infected woman in a dormitory of the Mizoram House in Mumbai, he said.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
As the EU's economy reels from virus lockdowns, Brussels unveiled a proposed roadmap on Wednesday to ease restrictions on life and businesses, relying in large part on smartphone tracking apps. That technology aims to spot localised COVID-19 outbreaks in real-time. Already many individual European governments are on the verge of rolling out their own tracking apps. But the European Commission is concerned those go-it-alone initiatives will provide incompatible datasets, useless for compiling a whole picture across the single market where people and goods are meant to move freely. It is also worried these apps could fall foul of strong EU data privacy rules and Europeans' deep-seated wariness of technological prying. "The aim is to get the single market back on track so that it can work properly," Commission chief Ursula von der Leyen told a videolink news conference as she unveiled the 16-page roadmap to phasing out lockdowns that have brought life to a standstill in many countries. - Apps already appearing - The document puts data collection and contact tracing at the top of its recommended measures, above expanding testing, reinforcing healthcare systems and providing more protective gear. But it said the use of any apps should be "voluntary" and comply with personal data protection rules. "Tracing close proximity between mobile devices should be allowed only on an anonymous and aggregated basis, without any tracking of citizens, and names of possibly infected persons should not be disclosed to other users," it said. An EU official giving more details to journalists later called such apps "very useful to prevent localised flare-ups" of the virus. But, he warned, "they will only work if citizens have full trust in those apps -- this is very important to stress". The Czech Republic launched a nationwide contact-tracing app this week which tracks citizens' phones and bank cards. Hard-hit Italy is close behind, last week having selected a company to bring out a contact-tracing app. France is in the process of setting up its own but parliament will have to weigh up considerable public suspicion of tracking apps when it discusses it at the end of the month. Of other EU member states, Netherlands, which also has privacy concerns, is studying it while Portugal is holding off for the moment, saying it wants to see how it works in other countries. Non-EU members are also looking at apps as part of the solution to ending crippling restrictions. Britain, for instance, announced on Sunday it will soon launch an app that would automatically alert people who have been close to someone who comes down with COVID-19 symptoms. Iceland launched its app in early April, with more than a third of its 360,000 inhabitants downloading it by last week. Switzerland says it plans to join a European initiative, and will likely discuss such a step in a government meeting on Thursday. - Call for scrutiny - The technology side of the equation is likely to get a big boost from last week's announcement from Google and Apple that they were joining together to develop a smartphone tracking tool. But both US tech titans have run up against EU regulations in the past and it is uncertain if their product would be seen as viable against European data privacy laws. Julian King, Britain's last EU commissioner who stepped down from his role in charge of the security union portfolio in the previous executive in 2019, said on Wednesday that "such advanced surveillance technology can be highly invasive". In an op-ed published by the online outlet Politico, he said: "The trouble is that aggregated data may not be enough to move us out of lockdown. "That will likely also require the use of more granular information on individual cases so that health authorities can trace our contacts." He called for strong safeguards in the use of such apps, including making sure they stopped being used when the coronavirus crisis had passed and were, "crucially, subject to independent scrutiny". "It?s difficult to see, frankly, why apps should hold on to data for years, as some have suggested," he said. Coronavirus tracking applications such as these could soon by the norm in Europe The Czech Republic has already launched a coronavirus app and Italy is close behind Technology giants may come up against EU privacy regulations
CHESTER -Crime doesnt stop for a pandemic. That message came through loud and clear when a suspect, fleeing police in a reported stolen vehicle, led officers into a dramatic crash near nurses and members of the press by Crozer Chester Medical Center Wednesday afternoon.

Chester Police Commissioner Otis Blair said the police had been called to make a report on a stolen car near 21st and Edgemont when an officer spotted that vehicle and attempted to pull it over.

They were in the process of taking a stolen vehicle report and while taking the report, they observed the stolen vehicle in question occupied by a young man, said Blair. They attempted to initiate a vehicle stop, he refused to comply, and there was a short pursuit.

The driver fled at a high rate of speed, heading west on Upland Ave. and racing past the entrance to the hospital, with police following with lights and sirens. Hospital nurses, in a day of action expressing concern about a shortage of protective masks, along with a group of reporters covering them, were all witnesses to what happened next. The Pontiac sedan passed cars and veered into oncoming traffic at the top of the hill where it crashed into a Honda heading east.

The driver of the Pontiac quickly abandoned the vehicle and fled on foot back down Upland Avenue, with the Chester officer giving chase. As they ran passed Chester Rural Cemetery, the officer fired a taser. The suspect, holding his pants up as he ran, and the officer in pursuit continued onto W. 15th Street, where the suspect was arrested in a front yard with the aid of two other Chester police officers.

The driver of the car that was struck was wearing his seatbelt. He appeared uninjured but was checked by medics.

Crime doesnt stop. Some people are just taking advantage of the situation and it just shows. Even through some people are under a stay-at-home order, there are some individuals still trying to take advantage of the situation, said Commissioner Blair. Officers have to go out there and put their lives at risk.
U.S. President Donald Trump said that Washington would halt funding to the World Health Organization over its handling of the coronavirus pandemic (WHO).

"The WHO failed in its basic duty and it must be held accountable," he said during a White House briefing.

"Today, Im instructing my administration to halt funding of the World Health Organization while a review is conducted to assess the World Health Organizations role in severely mismanaging and covering up the spread of the coronavirus," Trump stressed.



"As the organizations leading sponsor, the United States sees as its duty to insist on full accountability. One of the most dangerous and costly decisions from the WHO was its disastrous decision to oppose travel restrictions from China and other nations," the U.S. leader continued.



According to Trump, at the very start of the outbreak WHO experts relied on the Chinese governments reports that there were no cases of human-to-human transmission of the novel coronavirus in Wuhan.



He also criticized the global organization for saying that there was no need for travel bans.

According to the U.S. leader, Washington would press for a reform of the World Health Organization and was set to discuss with other nations how the US funds, allocated to this organization, should be used.
Adriel is a South Korean startup bringing automated ad tools to small businesses  and in recent months, it's been expanding into the United States and the United Kingdom.

This might seem like exactly the wrong time to be growing an ad-buying platform, since we're at the beginning of what's likely to be a tremendous pullback in ad spend due to the COVID-19 pandemic. However, co-founder and CEO Sophie Eom told me via email that ad spend on Adriel increased by 7% in February, then by 6% in March, and she estimated that spend will be up by 8% in April.

"We all know that businesses are struggling from the uncertainty of the economic situations with COVID-19," Eom said. "And most are hesitant about hiring agencies for their marketing and advertising efforts due to the high costs  in addition to the fact that many corporates don't have enough knowledge about the right marketing processes."

So why is Adriel still seeing growth? She argued, "We see that even in the midst of tough times, many startups and entrepreneurs are not giving up their businesses. In fact, they are shifting their focus and investments into more digital to reach their customers."

As part of its response to COVID-19, the company is also donating ads to support small business customers in the San Francisco area.

Adriel's technology automatically generates creative materials and suggests keywords for ads, as well as managing the targeting. But there's also a human team that reviews campaigns and suggests ways to improve. The company does not require retainers or contracts, but charges a 19% fee on ad spend.

I first spoke to Eom at the end of 2019, when she was first expanding Adriel into the U.S. In some ways, it felt like a familiar pitch  I've written about companies like AdEspresso (acquired by HootSuite) and Smartly.io (which sold a majority stake to Providence Equity Partners last year), which also said they were optimizing or automating small business advertising. Plus, Facebook itself has launched an automated ad builder.

Story continues

Eom suggested that while there are tools that sound superficially similar, there's nothing quite like Adriel (which was part of Facebook's Namsam Lab Korea incubator), with its multi-platform support for managing Facebook, Google and Instagram ad campaigns in one place, and with its focus on the true "long tail" of advertisers  she said the average Adriel client spends a relatively modest $1,000 per month on digital advertising.

"We're not merely a self-service tool either," she said. "We support and assist our clients in getting their ad placed, making their campaign more successful. We use technology to make all these processes more affordable for more business owners."

She added that Adriel has launched 7,200 campaigns for nearly 20,000 business accounts.
With the COVID-19 Lockdown in some states, the Minister of Communications and Digital Economy, Ibrahim Pantami, has said that the federal government has been providing necessary cash assistance, food items and other relief materials to poor Nigerians whose monthly top-up is less than N300.

He said the government embarked on the palliatives-sharing exercise following the hardship citizens are facing as a result of the lockdown and restriction of movements in some states.

Mr Pantami made this known in a video obtained by PRNigeria while fielding questions during an interview session.

He said through data mining process facilitated by SIM card registration, the federal government was able to identify persons who direly need governments support and also detected their poverty level.

Through data mining, we have discovered those that need urgent intervention when it comes to feeding, and also meeting other basic necessities of life, he said.

Mr Pantami, who said the government budgeted huge amount of money to cater for the poor and vulnerable who have been hit by the lockdown, noted: The federal government has been assisting many poor citizens on a weekly basis. Sometimes, our officials directly distribute food packages to their homes. And one of the most effective way we used to identify very poor persons is by looking at how much they top-up their mobile lines every month. There are those whose monthly top-up is less than 1 dollar, or let me say, N300. And with this, we were able to categorize their poverty level, see what they need, and how government can assist them.

In a related development, the Minister of Humanitarian Affairs, Disaster Management and Social Development, Sadiya Farouq, has said that urban poor dwellers with an account balance of N5,000 or less will be among the beneficiaries of the federal governments Conditional Cash Transfer scheme.

Speaking with State House correspondents in Abuja, on Wednesday, she stated that the prospective beneficiaries would be part of the additional one million households approved by President Muhammadu Buhari to boost the nations social register.

READ ALSO:

She said: You are also aware that Mr President in his broadcast (on April 13) has directed that we expand the beneficiaries of the Conditional Cash Transfer by one million.

In this regard, we are going to focus more on the urban poor. These are people who depend on informal sector to earn their livelihood  They are daily wage earners and these are people we are really going to focus more on as well as people living with disabilities.

The minister further explained that apart from the National Social Register, the Bank Verification Numbers (BVN) and previous record of purchase of recharge cards by mobile phone owners would form parts of criteria in identifying the beneficiaries of the cash transfer.

We are also using the mobile network, people that top up their phones with maybe N100, N200. These are the people we consider to be poor and vulnerable, she added.
Julian Assange's friend Stephen Hoo walking into the Ecuadorian embassy in London with one of the cyberactivist's babies in 2017.

The spying that WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange was subjected to during the seven years that he lived at the Ecuadorian embassy in London extended to his most intimate relations.

The Spanish security firm Undercover Global SL, which had been tasked with protecting the embassy, monitored every visit that Assange received, and even investigated whether he might have fathered a child during this period.

A few days ago, a 37-year-old lawyer named Stella Morris, who is a member of Assanges legal team, told The Mail on Sunday that Assange, 48, is the father of her two children, aged one and two. Morris said they were conceived while the WikiLeaks founder was staying at the embassy to avoid extradition to the United States on charges of leaking thousands of classified intelligence documents.

There was an attempt to take the babys pacifier Former employee of Undercover Gobal SL.

David Morales, a former military official who owns the security firm Undercover Global SL, is under investigation by Spains High Court, the Audiencia Nacional, for spying on Assanges meetings with his lawyers and allegedly handing information to the CIA.

Morales suspected that a baby who was repeatedly brought into the embassy by Stephen Hoo, an actor friend of Assanges who paid him regular visits, might really be the cyberactivists own child, and these visits were recorded.

Morales even issued orders to steal the babys diapers to analyze the contents for DNA, although the task was never carried out. Reports were drawn up about Stella Morris and about Stephen Hoo, according to video and documentary material to which EL PAIS has had access.

Julian Assange in London on May 1, 2019. D. LEAL-OLIVAS (AFP)

It was an employee of the Spanish security firm who alerted Assanges partner about the plans: They wanted to prove that it was his child in a bid to harm him. There were talks with three Madrid labs to see how the parental connection could be proved. One of them said that DNA cannot be extracted from feces. There was an attempt to take the babys pacifier, said a former employee of Undercover Gobal SL.

A company report dated October 27, 2017 details Hoos visits to the Ecuadorian embassy and sheds light on Morales obsession with getting to the bottom of Assanges best-kept secret during his life as a recluse.

The report noted that Hoo always showed up for his visits in the company of a minor that he tells the security team is his own child. The author of the report also wrote that attempts at seeing identification for the child were fruitless, and that Stella Morris always arrives a few minutes before Stephen Hoo, and departs a few minutes after the latter leaves, although normally she stays for entire days with the host [codename for Assange] and even spends entire nights with him.

After the unnamed employee alerted Morris, the babys visits to the embassy ended.

They wanted to prove that it was his child in a bid to harm him Former employee of Undercover Gobal SL.

Stella Morris arrives at the Hotel [the embassy] at 1.49pm and leaves at 4.11pm while Stephen Hoo arrives at 2.06pm and leaves at 3.56pm on November 25, reads the report, which includes two photographs of Hoo walking into the embassys entrance hall and carrying one of Assanges children in a baby carrier.

The report provides details about the actor obtained from the British press, and speculates that Hoo might not really be the babys father. Based on information regarding the possibility that the host [Assange] may have fathered a child during his confinement at the embassy, and given the recent visits by this baby, always in the company of Stella Morris, we posit that, due to the ties of affection between the latter and the host, it cannot be ruled out that the baby could have some kind of relationship between both. The data obtained so far does not allow us to make this assertion, and we continue to work on collecting evidence that might lead to a more accurate result.

Morris, who said she and Assange are planning to get married, made her revelations to The Mail on Sunday after first telling a judge in the hopes that the cyberactivist will be granted bail. Assange has been in Belmarsh Prison ever since he was forcibly evicted from the embassy a year ago. If he were extradited to the US, he would be facing up to 178 years in prison.

Morales was arrested in October and released while the courts investigate him for alleged violations of privacy and client-attorney privilege, besides misappropriation, bribery and money laundering. The criminal investigation was launched a few weeks after EL PAIS revealed video, audio and documentary material showing that the Spanish company had spied on Assanges meetings with his lawyers and aides.

English version by Susana Urra.
And thats the grade Im most proud of





by Michele Merritt





Grad school. The memory of it is enough to send me into existential dread. I came out of it alive, relatively unscathed, with a tenure-track job (after a couple years working the Visiting Assistant Professor circuit), and now have the coveted status of being tenured. Its not my dream job, not by a long shot. The school is in rural Arkansas. Travel money is scarce, and the teaching load is high. Still, I made it. It would be wrong to say I accomplished all of this alone. My dissertation committee totally had my back through the process, and if it werent for some really great connections and opportunities, I might not have been so successful. But thats how all academics find their way. Your mentors are supposed to help you get started. So no, I will not say I accomplished everything alone. No one does. But one thing I know for sure: I didnt make it to this point by cheating.









Well, I did cheat, on my husband, early on in grad school. I found myself goo-goo-eyed in love with a professor. We had an affair. I left my husband. The affair ended and I dated another graduate student for several years. He was an emotionally and physically abusive narcissist. Now, Im happily married with children and it all seems a distant memory. But its one that shaped me profoundly.





As soon as the affair got going, I worried what others in my department would think  that Im getting special perks as a student or that I might get better teaching jobs because of it. I never took any classes from this professor once the affair began. I had only taken one class with him prior to it.





The class was difficult and I got a B. It was the only B I got in all of grad school. Despite my ability to earn an A+ in graduate symbolic logic, this particular class destroyed me. I complained about the grade to him in a half-joking/half-serious manner. He offered to retroactively change it, mostly to shut me up, he said, half-jokingly/half-seriously. Part of me considered taking him up on it. I mean, having a 4.0 out of grad school would be nice, and it couldnt hurt my job prospects, right? But I said no. Why stoke the flames of my already suffocating insecurity about what I was doing with him and what others think about me because of it? And besides, I earned that B, fair and square. Just like I earned the only A+ in my symbolic logic class because I solved a proof on the final exam no other student could. I didnt need a grade to tell me I was smart enough. At least thats what I told myself. As a woman in a male dominated field, it is hard to find your voice and truly believe that what you have to offer the discipline is valuable. I definitely struggled to believe I really had what it took to be a professional academic. Dating a professor was certainly not helping me along this path.





Wanting to be more normal, I started seeing a graduate student in my program. It was casual at first, and the affair with the professor was still an on-again/off-again thing. It seems the professor was just as confused as I was about life, because he would goad me to go all in with this graduate student. Hes more on your level, he said. Translation: he wont get you or me into trouble, there will be no quid pro quo, and so on. Indeed, the affair should have been disclosed to the university, as per the institutional code of conduct. He knew this. He never reported it. Neither did I. But it wasnt my job to do so. I was not in the position of power. It made sense then, for him to be nudging me toward a legal relationship. And I was growing weary of his waffling back and forth about leaving his partner. (Yes, this whole time, he was still with his longterm girlfriend, despite telling me that if I left my husband, he would leave her. I had long since left my husband.)





Taking the professors suggestion, things began getting more serious with this graduate student. As jealousy would have it, Mr. Professor man wanted me back. He offered to take me to Europe for the summer where he would be working. He said if I worked with him there and got my dissertation done with people he knew, it was likely that he could get me a job with him as sort of spousal hire. I asked him if he was going to actually leave his girlfriend. He said he would once we got over there. So, I was supposed to pack up all my shit, leave the graduate student I was growing quite fond of, leave all my friends, move to Europe, and assume then hed leave his girlfriend? I might have been insecure and unsure of myself, but that whole scenario was the final nail in the coffin of our affair. I declined.





I went on to date the graduate student for a tumultuous and terrifying few years. While the professor might have been a bit manipulative, he paled in comparison to the nightmare this other guy was. He was charming at first and obviously intelligent. We drank together late into the evening, discussed philosophical problems, joked, played darts, had lots of wild sex. It was great. Then suddenly, it wasnt. He slowly began trying to control me, and the insidiousness with which he did so still shocks me to this day. By gradually chipping away at my already fragile sense of self-worth, he was able to mold me into a version of myself that I cannot even recognize when I look back.





She was so afraid to lose him that she would never stand her ground, even when she absolutely was in the right. She would let him say things like no matter what you do, you will always have the stain of sleeping with a professor on you, and not only would she not tell him to shut the fuck up, but she would crumble and cry and feel shame. He told her one day, when she came home all excited about a feminist philosophy reading group she was forming, that he couldnt wait until she got over this feminist thing, because it was just a phase and he hoped she would return to real philosophy one day. He told her that even if she got a tenure track job, it would be because she was an attractive woman. He gaslit her entire life and she was powerless to stop him.





We broke it off several times, usually after some explosive fight, like the time he refused to believe that my eczema was a real condition and that if I just read some Aristotle, I would learn that it was all in my head. Somewhere inside of me there was a person who knew he was a psychopath and I was not safe. We always ended up back together because I had become co-dependent. During one of our broken-up spells, we were out with mutual friends one night, and he asked if we might go back to his place and talk for a bit. I said ok. We got to his house and he slammed me up against the wall and started kissing me. I didnt stop him because I was still in love with him. I missed him. But as the kissing progressed, I didnt feel right. I told him I wanted to go back to the bowling alley where our friends were. He told me I didnt know what I wanted and that this was my biggest flaw, as he threw me down on the bed. I tried to stop him, but he just continued, and I finally gave up. We went back out to the bowling alley after it was over and I erased it from my mind as best as I could.





The relationship finally ended a couple years later. I had been beaten down, physically and mentally, and when it came to a head one drunken night where he threw all of my belongings out into the street and told me never to return, I finally said ok and walked away for good.





He showed up to my dissertation defense a year or so later, just to rattle me one last time. He asked absurd questions and poked fun at my research. It got to me, yes, but I was finished  with him, with the university, with my graduate student life, with all of it. I had a job in South Carolina at the time, so didnt even live in the city where I was defending my dissertation. I flew back to South Carolina after the defense and only returned once more to walk down the aisle, get hooded by my dissertation chair, and graduate.





I did not get over the feminist thing, as my grad student boyfriend suggested I would. Instead, I consider myself even more of a raging feminist who gives zero shits about outing abusive men. Especially now, in the wake of the #MeToo movement, I am empowered to call it out for what it was. The affair with the professor and the abusive graduate student boyfriend taught me a lot about myself, and healing from all of it has been a decade long process. Ive come out of it on the other side, I think, happy and whole. Like I said in the beginning, I got the job. I earned tenure. I have a family I love. Im publishing cool stuff that interests me, and I do believe it has value for my discipline. And I dont need either of these mens approval for that to be true. I didnt need it then, but certainly not now.





This professor went on to date another graduate student. (This is totally shocking, I know.) She has done really well for herself and I am happy for her. As a woman, in solidarity, I will not denigrate her accomplishments. She did eventually leave the program and completed her work elsewhere, though she now has a job where we were all grad students way back then. Arguably, shes done most of this on her own merit. Still, I feel bad for her because I know what its like to be in that position, where everyone is looking at you, silently judging you, wondering how much of what you have was helped along by sleeping with someone in power over you.





Thats why I never let him change that B. Its why I said no to him when he offered to take me to Europe for the summer. Something inside me knew I would never be able to live with it.





When my graduate student boyfriend told me the only reason I would ever amount to anything in my discipline would be because of my looks, that should have been the end of it, right then and there. But I didnt have the strength yet. I wasnt angry enough. Eventually, I got angry and stopped letting him dictate my value.





Anger is an important part of the search for truth and justice. But it is not the end. Im no longer angry at either of these men. I just think they are pathetic.





I earned what I am today, fair and square. Im a badass who loves herself, even when its really hard to do so. Impostor syndrome is legit and hard to deal with as an academic. I have my moments, to be sure. But I will never ever believe that Im only here because Im pretty, or that I slept my way into a job. Im proud of myself. And Im most proud of that B I earned a long time ago in grad school.





Michele Merritt, Ph.D., Associate Professor, Department of English and Philosophy, Arkansas State University. Read more on her works at michelemerritt.com
Source: Xinhua| 2020-04-15 13:29:29|Editor: huaxia

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BEIJING, April 15 (Xinhua) -- If it was not for the outbreak of novel coronavirus, Li Haiyi would have received confirmation letters from some of the Chinese art colleges that he had applied by this time. But right now, he is making video clips on exam assignments given online by the art schools.

China's Ministry of Education issued a notice in March asking the country's colleges and universities to use off-site methods to examine applicants for art majors for their professional skills. The move is to prevent large scale gathering and flow of people amid the novel coronavirus outbreak.

Normally, the art schools arrange independent on-site exams to appraise the examinees' professional potential, before the annual national college entrance exam, known as Gaokao in Chinese.

"I had booked tickets in advance for on-site exams at the schools that I had applied to. But they have changed their admission rules. I won't make the trips. The schools either admit directly with the results of Gaokao scores without having on-site exams or require video works as examination via online platforms," said Li.

He applied to the majors of photography, film and television production and visual communications in a number of art colleges and universities in Beijing as well as Zhejiang and Jiangsu provinces.

He said the changed rules brought more uncertainties to his college dream. "I feel like a rush for the new admission rules. I should prepare myself for the worst and repeating the graduating class in high school for another year," he said.

The prospect of jobs in China's booming film and TV industries has driven students to sign up at art colleges, deemed as cradles for film stars. Prestigious art schools used to have long queues when applicants waited their turn for annual on-site exams.

More than 1.15 million students apply for art majors across the country this year, according to the ministry's statistics.

Communication University of China said it has opened online admissions for 23 majors and directions. The school's expert teams are evaluating video works sent in by candidates online.

The university asked candidates to shoot videos with ordinary smartphones rather than professional equipment to ensure fairness. It forbids makeup and modifying effects for shooting. "Video works should keep the original images and sounds, and no post-production is allowed," it says in the online examination notice.

Yan Leifan, chief of the university's admission office, said the university received more than 21,000 applications this year, a slight increase over last year.

"It is difficult to identify cheating in online exams. This may be a common problem faced by all art schools this year," he said.

The university requires some reexaminations two weeks after Gaokao to compare the results with the online entries in order to check for cheating, he said.

Chen Zhiwen, a member of the expert group of the National Education Examination Committee, said in addition to using technology such as face recognition, education authorities have cooperated with the public security department to carry out strict identity screening for art school applicants. Face recognition is required before online video examinations.
Apple is the latest tech company to tap its troves of consumer data to help public officials fight the coronavirus.

The company Tuesday unveiled a new tool that pulls data from its Maps service to help officials measure how effective social distancing measures are around the world. The tool tracks how citizens' driving, walking or public transit habits are changing based on their searches for directions to places.

The data is presented in an anonymous, aggregated form, and officials can view it down to the city level. For instance, it shows that in Washington, requests for public transit directions - for instance, by bus or subway - declined 83% since January 13. Even requests for walking directions were down 66%, suggesting that the restrictions are having a significant effect.

This tool can also compare the effects of social distancing between cities, or even between countries.

Washington is increasingly looking to tech companies such as Apple as it seeks more data to understand whether social distancing policies are working - and make crucial decisions about how and when to re-open parts of the economy.

But the companies are walking a fine line as they try to balance pressure from governments to take steps to maintain public health with their customers' privacy expectations.

This is a particularly delicate tightrope for Apple, which has made strong user privacy a central component to its marketing pitch.

It's telling that Apple chief executive Tim Cook led with privacy when announcing the initiative:

Apple says that the data isn't associated with any individual's Apple ID and that it doesn't keep a log of where you've been. Its data presents a birds-eye view of how people are moving - or at least, thinking about moving as they type in directions.

This may not provide as much utility to public health officials as data that tracks their movements or presents what specific locations people are actually visiting within cities. And it's a far cry from the ways that other countries are using location data to map the spread of the virus. In South Korea, for instance, public officials have used cell phone location data to alert people if they've come in contact with the virus. In China, officials used their vast digital surveillance apparatus to monitor people's movements and ensure they were abiding by quarantines.

But as my colleague Geoffrey Fowler notes, it's still uncomfortable for Apple - a company that ran ads that say "what happens on your iPhone, stays on your iPhone" - to show how much data they're holding about consumers. And how it can be deployed for purposes people likely never imagined when they opened the app to find directions. From Fowler:

Facebook and Google have already made aggregated location data available in the fight against the coronavirus. The Wall Street Journal reports that public health officials at the federal and state level are using cellphone location data from the mobile advertising industry to trace people's movement during the pandemic.

And by contrast, Apple's decision seems tame. Google's aggregated data set, for instance, lets officials know how much people are traveling to specific businesses, grocery stores and pharmacies, using the same technology that underpins the Google Maps feature that lets you know how crowded a restaurant might be.

Still, it's all helpful to stop the spread, health experts say. Farzad Mostashari, the former national coordinator for health information technology at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, said such systems "can be a very helpful tool for understanding both the risks of outbreak resurgence and the potential need for local leaders to push further on social distancing initiatives." Mostashari now serves as chief executive of the health start-up Aledade.

There have already been signs of public health officials citing tech companies' data when trying to evaluate their own policies. At a news conference in Philadelphia earlier this month, city health commissioner Dr. Thomas Farley said Google analytics data showed that residents were doing a pretty good job of social distancing, but compared to other cities they could do better. He gave the city's efforts a B plus.

Apple, Facebook and Google's efforts could be increasingly in the spotlight as they collaborate more directly with the White House on the coronavirus response. Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg, Alphabet chief executive Sundar Pichai and Cook are among the executives who will participate in President Trump'sGreat American Economic Revival Industry Groups, which will work on a plan to restart the economy.

Tech companies are also building tools that would track whether individuals come in contact with the coronavirus. One ambitious effort Apple and Google are working on would use Bluetooth signals to detect whether a person's cellphone has been near other individuals who mark themselves as diagnosed with the coronavirus in a public health app.

Leveraging aggregated data like the tool Apple revealed yesterday raises fewer privacy concerns, Mostashari said.

"Unlike the idea of Bluetooth contact tracing, this doesn't raise privacy concerns because it can be conducted on an anonymous, aggregate sample and never requires re-identification or linkage," he said.
Source: Xinhua| 2020-04-15 18:43:58|Editor: huaxia

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JERUSALEM, April 15 (Xinhua) -- The number of coronavirus cases in Israel reached 12,200 on Wednesday, after 154 new ones were added since Tuesday evening, the health ministry said.

The number of deaths from coronavirus in Israel has increased from 123 to 126, the ministry added.

The ministry also issued an exceptional statement, saying a very high COVID-19 morbidity was detected in several towns in the Galilee region in northern Israel.

In the Arab town of Deir al-Assad home to some 12,400 residents, 14 new patients have been confirmed since Tuesday.

The number of coronavirus recovery cases in Israel rose by 114 on Wednesday to 2,309, while 783 patients are still being treated in hospitals with 176 in serious condition.

Meanwhile, 7,318 patients are currently treated at home, 1,196 at hotels converted into quarantine facilities, and the remaining 468 patients will be treated at home, hotel or hospital according to decisions to be made soon.
Want to buy a restaurant or store gift card but fear being stuck if the business never reopens after the coronavirus pandemic?

In a generous move in these uncertain times, Erie Insurance will add gift card and gift certificate reimbursement coverage to its 2.2 million homeowners policies at no cost.

Erie says its customers will be reimbursed for remaining balances on gift cards at independently owned local businesses that do not employ more than 100 full-time workers and are located within 100 miles of the customers home. Coverage will provide reimbursement for up to $250 per gift card, limited to $500 per policy period.

The card must have been purchased within one year before the business permanently closed. If the business permanently closes after the effective date of the coverage, the customer will be covered even if the card was purchased before the effective date of coverage. For example, a customer in Pennsylvania, where coverage is effective as of May 1, 2020, bought a gift card to a local business on Feb. 15, 2020. The business permanently closes on July 1, 2020. Coverage would apply for this because the business permanently closed after May 1.

 READ MORE: South Philadelphia restaurant River Twice sues insurance company to cover coronavirus losses

Bob Buckel, an Erie vice president, said a senior executive noted the social-media buzz about restaurants selling gift cards to give themselves cash flow and in some cases to help their workers.

Theres a disincentive to buy gift certificates because [many businesses] are currently closed, Buckel said. "What if we were to backstop that, to give them confidence so that they can support these local businesses? What a great way for us to show support for local business owners. Anyone claiming a loss must provide documentation, including the purchase date and original value of the card, the company said.

Buckel said the executive brought the idea to Eries product team. The Erie-based company, which writes about 800,000 homeowners policies in Pennsylvania, intends this feature to be permanent.

 READ MORE: DoorDash and Caviar to slash food delivery fees by 50%

The coverage will automatically be added to new and existing homeowner, condo, and renter policies effective May 1 in Pennsylvania, plus Illinois, Indiana, Maryland, Tennessee, Virginia, and Wisconsin. Coverage will be effective on June 1 in Kentucky and West Virginia. The company is working with additional insurance departments to gain approval in its three other states and the District of Columbia.
Sen. Ron Johnson is planning for a summer release of a status report on his investigation targeting Joe Bidens son Hunter  but the Wisconsin Republican acknowledged that Congress response to the coronavirus pandemic has hampered the inquiry.

The report, which Johnson was on track to release before the start of the summer months, is certain to thrust the issue into the general election debate and prompt vigorous criticism from Democrats.

Were in the process of writing different sections of the report that Id like to make public sometime this summer, Johnson, the Homeland Security Committee chairman, said in an interview. But obviously, [the coronavirus] has not been helpful and hampered our efforts.

Johnson has insisted that his investigation examining Hunter Bidens role on the board of a Ukrainian energy company has nothing to do with the election, or the fact that the former vice president is all but certain to become the Democratic presidential nominee. But Democrats have argued that the probe is politically motivated, citing Trumps efforts to parrot the allegations against Biden and his son, in addition to Johnsons own statements about his investigation.

Committee staffers have been poring through documents provided by the State Department and the National Archives, according to Johnson. The latter tranche includes information from the Obama White House, a key target of Johnsons investigation.

Ive got staff that have been devoted to that and theyre working on that stuff from home, Johnson said, adding: We  and I  can walk and chew gum at the same time here. This is not taking up massive amounts of staff time.

FILE - In this Oct. 11, 2012, file photo, Hunter Biden waits for the start of the his father's, Vice President Joe Biden's, debate at Centre College in Danville, Ky. In 2014, then-Vice President Joe Biden was at the forefront of American diplomatic efforts to support Ukraine's fragile democratic government as it sought to fend off Russian aggression and root out corruption. So it raised eyebrows when Biden's son Hunter was hired by a Ukrainian gas company. President Donald Trump prodded Ukraine's president to help him investigate any corruption related to Joe Biden, now one of the top Democrats seeking to defeat Trump in 2020. (AP Photo/Pablo Martinez Monsivais, File)

But there are several actions the committee cannot take while staffers are working remotely and while the Senate remains on recess until April 20 at the earliest.

One outstanding matter is a subpoena to Blue Star Strategies, a Democratic public-affairs firm that, according to Johnson, might have sought to leverage Hunter Bidens role on the board of a Ukrainian energy company, Burisma, to influence the Obama State Department. Johnson is seeking documents from the firm that it has refused to voluntarily turn over, acting on allegations that Biden sought to protect his son from a corruption investigation into Burisma.

Story continues

Democrats vehemently oppose the subpoena and the investigation as a whole, positing that the probe is based on unsubstantiated claims that have been advanced by Russian intelligence services. Democrats opposition to the subpoena triggered a formal committee vote to authorize the action  but that vote has yet to be scheduled while senators return to Washington for normal business remains in flux.

Additionally, senators and aides cannot receive classified briefings or view sensitive documents unless they are present at the Capitol, which is equipped with facilities specifically designed for the review of classified information.

Johnson leaned into the investigation while the elder Biden was surging in the early Democratic primary contests and appeared on track to secure his partys presidential nomination.

These are questions that Joe Biden has not adequately answered, Johnson said at the time. And if I were a Democrat primary voter, Id want these questions satisfactorily answered before I cast my final vote.

The issue has sparked heated discussions among senators, including during a March 10 classified briefing about election security.

During that briefing, several Democratic senators spoke up about Johnsons investigation  in particular, his efforts to get information from Andrii Telizhenko, a former Ukrainian diplomat and consultant for Blue Star Strategies who has leveled unsubstantiated allegations about coordination between the Ukrainian government and the Democratic National Committee during the 2016 election.

Johnson initially sought to subpoena Telizhenko, but later changed the target of the subpoena to Blue Star Strategies after the FBIs foreign influence task force briefed committee aides about Telizhenko.

Democrats have said the committees Biden probe could aid Russian disinformation campaigns and undermine U.S. national security. Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Richard Burr (R-N.C.) delivered a similar warning to Johnson during a private meeting in December, POLITICO previously reported.


GRAND RAPIDS, MI  U.S. Rep. Justin Amash says he has paused his congressional campaign as he considers whether to run for president.

Amash, a former Republican turned independent and critic of President Donald Trump, paused his campaign in mid-February, and has been discussing a potential presidential run with his family, his friends, his team, and others," according to a statement his office released on Wednesday, April 15.

Speculation that Amash, I-Cascade Township, would jump into the presidential race has swirled for months.

On Monday, the congressman, whose district encompasses the Grand Rapids-area, gave his clearest indication yet that he was considering a run when he announced on Twitter that hes looking at it closely this week.

In prior interviews, Amash, who was elected to represent Michigans 3rd Congressional District in 2010, has not definitively ruled out such a run but said his focus was on winning another term in the U.S. House of Representatives.

Amash describes himself as a constitutional conservative and a libertarian, and has been a vocal critic of President Donald Trump. He was elected as a Republican but left the party in July, and is serving out the remainder of his term as an independent.

Amash drew national headlines in May when he became the first Republican in Congress to call for impeachment proceedings against President Donald Trump. He said he made the comments after reviewing U.S. Special Counsel Robert Muellers investigation into 2016 election interference.

The congressmans comments drew an onslaught of criticism, and a few West Michigan Republicans announced that they would challenge him in the August 2020 Republican primary for the 3rd Congressional District.

On July 4, Amash announced he was leaving the Republican Party. He said Americas two-party system has evolved into an existential threat to American principles and institutions. He said he would run for reelection as an independent.

The two leading Republican candidates that are vying for the Republican nomination for Michigans 3rd Congressional District are state Rep. Lynn Afendoulis, R-Grand Rapids Township, and Peter Meijer, whose family founded the Walker-based retailer Meijer. He has worked in the business and nonprofit sectors.

Hillary Scholten, an immigration attorney, is the leading Democratic candidate.

Michigans 3rd Congressional District includes the city of Grand Rapids and a large portion of Kent County, part of Montcalm County, as well as Ionia, Barry and Calhoun counties.

Read more:

Wednesday, April 15: Latest developments on coronavirus in Michigan

Whitmer sees reasons to believe stay-at-home is working against coronavirus

Whitmer sued by residents, landscaping business over stay-at-home order
Bucharest, Romania  Given the problems such as high-level corruption, the emigration of medical personnel and the European Unions lowest healthcare expenditure per capita that have plagued the Romanian healthcare system for more than 30 years, theres little wonder that, come pandemic-time, it would face a huge challenge. We are, after all, seeing far more developed healthcare systems in danger of collapsing due to the coronavirus crisis.

It is a worldwide pandemic, all being said. The Romanian press has been showcasing testimonies from medics claiming they lack necessary protective gear, including masks or visors, while officials say all medical personnel have been protected. Worse, say analysts, they failed to be transparent about it, not admitting at the beginning that they did not have what they needed.

In January, after the WHO declared this a pandemic, a commission was formed and we started acquisition procedures for protective gear, biocides and medicines, Horatiu Moldovan, state secretary at the Romanian Ministry of Health said in an interview on Tuesday.

As acquisition contracts materialised, we have prioritised the distribution of equipment towards areas with the highest risk of exposure for medical personnel, like infectious disease hospitals, intensive care units, emergency units and SMURD (Mobile Emergency Service for Resuscitation and Extrication), leaving the less exposed areas to a future approach.

He said the amount of equipment distributed had progressively increased and, at the present time, they had covered any shortages. We didnt find there were situations where medics were exposed to risk due to the lack of protective equipment, Moldovan added.





On April 13, there were 812 medical personnel infected with COVID-19 out of 6,633 total confirmed cases.

Thats more than 12 percent of the people infected in Romania.

Out of those 812, more than 420 are in Suceava, and another 103 in Bucharest. Horatiu Moldovan says the situation in Suceava was not caused by a lack of equipment, but by poor management. Whatever the real cause, medics there claim they were washing and reusing their masks over and over again.

But where the system struggled, the people stepped up. Individuals and small enterprises have started to produce the equipment so desperately needed  foremost by those on the front line of this fight, but also for other people at risk. Manufacturers have pivoted into visor production, boutiques are now into making masks. One team created a prototype for an autonomous disinfection robot to be used in hospitals.

They are all trying to contribute. Their email, messaging and Facebook accounts are filled with requests from medical personnel lacking equipment, others in state institutions with no way of protecting themselves at work. And they are answering as many of these cries for help as they can.

People were desperate, says 33-year-old Razvan Pascu, from H3, one of more than 100 manufacturers who have started producing protective visors. In the beginning, we were delivering them directly to medics homes. You could see they were scared, that they were desperate, that they were grateful. They are great people, but they face a tremendous challenge now.





Alexandru Cristal, a 38-year-old from FabLab, said he found it extraordinary how the makers community got involved and started producing protective equipment.

I feel the country is studded by visors, and yet there is still demand.

They get messages from doctors in hospitals, on Facebook, by email or by phone. From maternity wards to ambulance services, from Bucharest to Nehoiu. They try to get to us on any available channel, he said.

Visors are not the only protective equipment needed. There was a huge shortage of masks. First, Romanias health ministry said only people with symptoms should wear masks outdoors. A few days ago, they issued a statement saying that people should wear anything they have to cover their mouth and nose.

We know our masks are not homologated (officially approved), says Andreea Savin, 27, a manager at Atelierul de Panza (The Cloth Workshop), who started making cotton masks. They are not meant for professional environments, but rather for day-to-day activities. It is very sad that we are currently receiving requests from medical personnel. It speaks volumes about the current needs and it is clear we were not prepared for what hit us.

H3s Pascu said innovation and adaptability were saving lives. What is important is that we are now proving that things can be done in our country. In a few days we changed our activity, our production, we showed we are flexible, he said. There are producers, makers who are making miracles these days. These products, visors and other solutions, created in Romania, are probably saving lives.
As the broadcasts first hit, Black people watched the news patiently as opinions on COVID-19 began to form. Some of us were stoic and naive, even somewhat comical as we listened to bravado from the Black community saying things like, This virus doesnt affect Black people! Some of us were wrong. It does affect us. And at an exponentially higher rate than any other race.

There are funders and donors, plenty of for-profit organizations and nonprofits, community development corporations, grassroots movements, volunteers, community neighborhood associations, a host of caring Hoosiers, churches, schools and government all working together in many different ways in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Given the recent data on disproportionate impacts by race, organizations are now working to understand and respond to the needs of the Black community, specifically.

The sudden shift in attention and attempt to understand the data begs the question; What exactly are we responding to? Are we responding to new needs or are we responding to sustained neglect?

Let that sink in.

In many ways, Black people have been neglected for a long time. For decades, the basic needs of Black people have been in high demand. Unemployment always hits the Black community the hardest. Black people have always been on the frontlines. Black people have been working as gas attendants and cashiers, package handlers and delivery drivers, warehouse and hospitality workers. Many of those workers are full-time employees yet still remain in positions of poverty. The United Way defines the employed yet impoverished as ALICE (Asset Limited, Income Constrained, Employed). According to the 2016 ALICE report, 61% of Indiana Black households are among the ALICE population or below the federal poverty limit.

Prior to COVID-19, the roles held by frontline workers werent deemed with the dignity of being referenced as essential. Most of these jobs dont earn a living wage in Indianapolis. Most of the persons in these roles have been neglected. However, today, we need them  we need ALICE  more than ever.

If we only focus on the current need, the margin for the neglected will become wider. The have and the have-nots will further dichotomize leaving the fate of ALICE Black people to seemingly fall further down the economic rabbit hole that we already have trouble escaping.

COVID-19 has exacerbated the plight of Black America. Whos surprised? If we consider the historical neglect, why are we surprised by a supposed sudden need? What has changed in these communities mid-Covid that was different than pre-Covid? Are we really responding to need or are we responding to a larger neglect than we previously recognized?

Small Black-owned businesses are at risk. They are (still) struggling to get resources and support. Food deserts are (still) found in highly dense Black communities at an exponentially higher rate. Black people have been superusers of public transportation. Black people are (still) suffering from high eviction rates and homelessness. Pre-existing medical conditions like asthma, heart disease and high blood pressure are considered problematic for individuals with COVID-19 making this virus a very skilled assassin equipped to infect and kill Black people at a much higher rate. Because alas, weve lived with these pre-conditions for now decades. The need then, perhaps, is not new at all.

Entities such as Kheprw Institute, the Indianapolis Recorder, Innopower and individuals such as Marshawn Wolley (IUPUI) and Shane Shepard (B4UFall)  to name a very few  have been working to educate, inform and advocate for the Black community for years.

I charge our community to join these leaders and focus on the neglect, not just the need. COVID highlighted the need, it did not create it. COVID did not create the neglect, either. The neglect is the gap. Its unconscious bias and uninformed legislation. Its ignoring the ALICE population. Its enjoying privilege, quietly.

As we discuss increasing food distribution sites in response to the need, lets not forget that many people lived in active food desserts prior to COVID. This is the time to give and give in new ways. Now that we are depending upon the ones weve neglected, lets be more mindful of our behavior and do what we can to help. Yes, lets respond to the need, the symptoms of poverty. But lets also take this opportunity to acknowledge and respond to the neglect and help fix these issues for good.

Alan Bacon is a humanity advocate, community leader, musician and innovator. Contact him at alankeithbacon@gmail.com
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Interior minister Suleyman Soylu (L) and head of Turkish Parliament Mustafa Sentop (2nd L) visits the earthquake site on Jan. 25, 2020 in Elazig, Turkey. (Burak Kara/Getty Images)

Turkish Ministers Resignation Exposes Tensions in Erdogans AKP

ANKARAThe political fallout from Turkeys rushed coronavirus lockdown over the weekend has exposed tensions at the top of President Tayyip Erdogans AK Party after he rejected the resignation of his interior minister.

Suleyman Soylu submitted his resignation on April 12 after authorities gave just two hours notice for a 48-hour curfew in Turkeys main cities, causing chaotic scenes as crowds of people rushed to the shops to stock up on supplies.

His resignation statement prompted a wave of support on social media for Soylu, who is known for his hawkish stance on security and is popular with party supporters, and Erdogan swiftly announced that the minister would stay in place.

As a prominent member of Erdogans cabinet, Soylu is seen by some party members as a potential rival to the presidents influential son-in-law, Finance Minister Berat Albayrak, and they view the weekend events through that prism.

It is no secret now that there has been a struggle and some issues between Albayrak and Soylu for some time, one AK Party official told Reuters, speaking on condition of anonymity.

Soylus  resignation was an explosion from all this buildup.

By offering to take individual blameeven though the lockdown was approved by Erdoganand then winning a public endorsement from the president, Soylu has strengthened his own position, the official said.

The government has played down suggestions of division.

Our president has rejected our interior ministers resignation.  Nobody can ax our unity and solidarity, presidential spokesman Ibrahim Kalin said on April 13.

Purge

Since being appointed interior minister four years ago, Soylu, 50, has led a crackdown in which tens of thousands of people have been detained on suspicion of links to a network accused of being behind a failed 2016 military coup.

The purge alarmed Turkeys Western allies and rights groups who say it was indiscriminate and disproportionate. Ankara says it was a necessary response to security challenges it faced domestically and from across its borders with Syria and Iraq.

Soylus relentless work and success in the battle against terrorism has been recognized by the people, the support base and the party, the AK Party official said.

No matter what anyone says, he has power and that power was really consolidated with the resignation issue.

Losing Soylu would have dealt a blow to the AK Party, a second party official said.

Soylu is one of the important centers of power within the party.  The battle for power within the party has changed as of April 12. But these have started becoming damaging images for the AK Party, the official said.

The Islamist-rooted AK Party, which has ruled Turkey since 2002, has seen two of its founder members break away in the past year to establish rival parties, and any internal party dissent would pose an additional challenge to Erdogan.

Erdogan was reelected president in 2018 under a new executive presidency which granted him sweeping powers, but his party suffered defeat in 2019 in municipal elections in the countrys two largest cities, Istanbul and Ankara.

New presidential and parliamentary elections are not scheduled until 2023.

By Gareth Jones
Let's recap the main developments today.

Queensland has now detected 1001 confirmed cases of COVID-19 - 554 are "active" and 442 have recovered. Five Queenslanders have died including a Sunshine Coast woman who passed away while in Sydney.

Queenslanders adjust to restrictions, with a solo runner spotted on Mermaid Beach today, Credit:Chris Hyde/Getty Images

The national death toll remains at 63, with almost 6500 people infected so far.

The prime minister, premiers and chief ministers joined the national cabinet meeting today.

When it comes to whether children should go to school or stay home, concerned and confused parents should "follow the instructions that are being provided by their state premiers and state education ministers", according to the Prime Minister.

It also emerged that some of the restrictions imposed to limit the spread of the virus may be lifted in as soon as four weeks.

Mr Morrison says three requirements must be met before the rules are changed: more testing, better contact tracing and quicker reactions to outbreaks.

Our live coverage has concluded for today. We will return tomorrow but in the interim, the latest news and analysis is available on the main site.
Prime Minister of Armenia Nikol Pashinyan continues to hold discussions on the future actions to mitigate the social and economic impacts of the coronavirus.

During todays consultation, Prime Minister Pashinyan was reported on the results of the 12 approved social support measures.

The Prime Minister assigned the relevant government officials to continue to keep the implementation of measures in focus and attached importance to proper implementation of digitization since the digital agenda is one of the governments priorities.

The officials also presented new ideas for providing social and economic assistance and particularly considered the issue of providing some support to beneficiary families included in the family benefits system.

In the context of new measures for economic assistance, the officials considered the application of new tools to encourage economic operators and touched upon the improvement of the toolkit for tax administration.

Nikol Pashinyan stated that the issue needs to be considered from the perspective of change and long-term application of institutional regulations.
The High Court (HC) Legal Service Committee has, in most urgent cases, started providing legal assistance to litigants through the Google Duo video-calling app.

The move has been made following the directions of committee chairperson Justice Daya Chaudhary due to difficulty in providing legal assistance through the front desk office amid lockdown.

The jail superintendents of Punjab, Haryana and Chandigarh have been directed to make the convicts/ litigants aware about their right for filing appeals in courts.

The litigants have also been told that they will now face no problems in filing appeals or petitions and that other proceedings will also be carried out smoothly.

The official statement reads, The litigants may make mention of urgency before officer on special duty (listing), Mobile no - 858800322, and in his absence, before registrar (computerisation), Mobile no - 8053635222, for getting their cases listed before appropriate court.

The legal retainers are working during the lockdown as per details mentioned on the committee website. All concerned are at liberty to contact officials who have been assigned the duty, on mobile numbers (helpline numbers): Legal assistant - 9872004422, superintendent grade 1- 9417454634, superintendent grade 1 - 9988694811, the statement reads.
Exporters body FIEO on Wednesday said the government's decision to resume factory operations in rural areas would help in opening of about 80-85 per cent of the manufacturing gradually and augmenting supply which will bring exports back on track.

Federation of Indian Export Organisations (FIEO) President Sharad Kumar Saraf said the announcement would also give a positive signal to the world that India is confident to contain Covid-19 through its measures.

"We welcome the revised guidelines, issued by the Ministry of Home Affairs today. Opening of units in rural areas, special economic zones and units in industrial townships and estates will help in opening of about 80-85 per cent of the manufacturing gradually," he said in a statement.

He added that it will be a psychological boost to migrant workers also who were getting desperate with extended lockdown.

"'The industry is also relieved as the wage and other charges will cause lesser burden on them with the commencement of production," Saraf said.

He said that since in exports, documents are extremely important to show proof of delivery and negotiation, exporting companies may be allowed passes for two persons, once a week, to collect documents from the office for submission to banks, shipping lines, courier companies.

"The export cycle is completed with the realisation of exports payments, for which opening of the office is required as otherwise payments will be at great risk particularly looking into liquidity challenges, increasing recession across economies and impending bankruptcies," he added.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
athima tongloom

Hackers are taking advantage of the disruption and fears caused by the pandemic to steal personal information from people, cybersecurity experts told CNBC. Most countries have stepped up social distancing measures to contain the virus, and that includes directing employees to work from home, which can make some more vulnerable to attacks. Authorities are also publishing infection numbers online and contacting people who may have been exposed to those infected by the virus  a process known as contact tracing. That's providing opportunities for cybercriminals to exploit people's fears by posing as health authorities or by sending scam emails, according to experts. Unsuspecting people are being directed to fraudulent websites to check if they've been in contact with an infected person, or are being tricked into downloading malicious software that steals their personal information. The outbreak that causes the respiratory disease Covid-19 has affected more than 1.9 million people around the world and over 126,000 have died from the illness, according to the latest data from Johns Hopkins University.

Everyone's involved

There were just 190 domain names on the internet with the terms "corona" and "covid" in them last year, according to Etay Maor, chief security officer at cyber-intelligence firm IntSights. Toward the end of March, he said there were more than 70,000 domain names related to those terms. "Not all of them are bad, right? Some of them are just domains people register and some of them are legit," Maor told CNBC. "But, some of them did turn out to be phishing attacks." Phishing attacks are usually carried out via email, where online criminals try to access sensitive information like log-in and credit card details, by presenting themselves as a trustworthy figure, such as a banking institution or a government body.

They're using mainly the fear that people have and the need for knowledge and using that for their types of attacks. Etay Maor Chief Security Officer, IntSights

Maor explained that every time a major event happens, attackers take advantage by creating phishing sites around them. In the case of the pandemic, hackers are preying on the fact that people are afraid, and many want to get more information about the disease, he said. The attacks have evolved from fraudulent offers of face masks and hand sanitizers, to phishing attack, and in recent weeks, more sophisticated players including nation-state actors have entered the fray, according to Maor. "Everybody has their hand in it right now. They're using mainly the fear that people have and the need for knowledge and using that for their types of attacks," he said.

Impersonation

In the first week of February, when the outbreak was still mostly limited to China, there was an increase in the distribution of malicious files disguised as documents related to the virus, according to Yeo Siang Tiong, general manager for Southeast Asia at Russia-headquartered cybersecurity firm Kaspersky. He told CNBC that a week later, attackers began sending phishing emails related to Covid-19 recommendations by posing as trusted sources like the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

"Everything looks legitimate, and upon clicking the domain, you are directed to an Outlook log-in page, which is, in fact, a phishing page designed to steal your email credentials," Yeo said. Maor added that other organizations have also been impersonated. They include the Department of Homeland Security in the U.S., the Chinese health ministry and the World Health Organization. What makes these attacks more challenging is the fact that they're not targeted at a specific entity, he said.

If an email looks mildly suspicious, don't open it. Or click on any links. If they look like your bank or financial advisers, call them and ask. Etay Maor Chief Security Officer, IntSights

Phishing emails designed around contact tracing is a popular way many attackers are using to deliver their malicious software designed to steal information, according to Matt Bennett, Asia Pacific and Japan vice president at VMWare Carbon Black. "Basically you receive an email, which says 'Hey, you've been in contact with patient X, we need to determine XYZ about you, please go to this portal,'" Bennett told CNBC. "I think that's a common trick we've seen in cybersecurity for a while where people leverage one brand or a government agency brand or reputation to trigger what they want to achieve." Bennett explained that though the types of cybersecurity threats are not new, they're a lot more effective in the current climate. "In fearful climate, people can do things that they probably shouldn't," he said.

Working from home

With many people around the world working from home, using remote tools like video conferencing services and such, experts agreed that the situation presented a broad range of vulnerabilities that cybercriminals can exploit. Phishing emails are not the only way attackers are targeting people. Remote working platforms pose a significant security risk too, and so do virtual private networks that many people use to log in to their office servers. Video conferencing platform Zoom, for example, added millions of users in the last few months as people were forced into social distancing and working from home. However, the company has come under some scrutiny over its security lapses.

Kaspersky's Yeo pointed out people working from home can make themselves a target by indiscriminately downloading all the files sent to them via other platforms. "In the absence of being guided by their IT organizations, people start to make bad decisions, they download things that perhaps they shouldn't have," Bennett added.

Protecting yourself online

Maor said there are a few ways people can protect themselves from becoming unwitting targets for cybercriminals. First, they need to be aware that these attacks are happening. "The attackers are interested in these types of attacks, going after the technology, the processes, the people. They understand these vulnerabilities, they're actively looking for them. So, people should understand that they may be a target of these types of attacks," Maor said.
In an effort to better fight COVID-19 in multiple regions of the country, Wake Forest Baptist Health has joined forces with Javara Inc. - a leading integrated clinical research organization headquartered in Winston-Salem - to conduct a community-based research study of the novel coronavirus.

As part of that effort, Wake Forest Baptist and Javara have collaborated with Oracle to develop its Patient Monitoring System, a web portal designed to collect daily information across a large population of participants.

Atrium Health, one of the largest health systems in the Southeast, and MedStar Health, the largest health care system in the Maryland and Washington, D.C. region, have joined the project. Plans are under way to extend this research study to additional health systems across the country.

The goal of the study - which will employ online data-gathering and at-home rapid diagnostic kits -- is to help the medical community better understand the pandemic and regional infection patterns to develop strategies and treatments to contain and possibly eliminate this novel coronavirus in defined communities.

The North Carolina General Assembly is providing $100,000 in immediate funding to allow researchers to purchase and mail at-home test kits to participants in a subgroup of the study.

This study should rapidly allow us to define the epidemic on a regional basis and establish the framework to both track the disease in real time and answer critical secondary research questions." John W. Sanders, M.D., principal investigator of the study and chief of infectious diseases at Wake Forest Baptist

All data will be shared in real time with appropriate government agencies such as the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, National Institutes of Health and state and local public health departments, Sanders said.

"We're humbled to contribute to such an urgent study as it illustrates clearly the connection between community partnerships and global public health," said Jennifer Byrne, CEO of Javara Inc. "Right now, information is our most valuable weapon, and by integrating community-based clinical care with remote-enabled clinical research, this project will contribute vital information to the fight against coronavirus."

The study began the process of enrolling participants last week.
A gastroenterologist has revealed how he wore disposable hospital pants on his head after his ward ran out of hair-nets.

The London-based doctor, who tweets using the handle @RNappleby, shared a photo of himself wearing the paper knickers while on shift last week.

He said the sight of himself wearing the throw-away underwear normally reserved for patients 'may have sent me over the edge'.

And, in a stinging response to Health Secretary Matt Hancock's statement last week that NHS staff could be overusing personal protective equipment (PPE), the doctor posted photos of himself wearing his own underwear on his head, and using a chocolate Easter egg for a mask.

Scroll down for video

London doctor @RNappleby wearing paper pants normally reserved for hospital patients during a shift; he told his Twitter followers that the ward had run out of hair-nets and staff had been forced to improvise

Mimicking the famous scene from comedy Blackadder, in which Rowan Atkinson's character dons underwear on his head and pencils up his nose, the doctor said he might be forced to use his own pants as PPE soon

The Health Secretary insisted there was enough protective clothing to meet demand, but urged health workers to treat the gear like a 'precious' resource.

In response, @RNappleby shared the first image of himself wearing the pants, makingit clear that the London hospital he was working in wasn't flush with PPE.

He wrote: 'Today we were asked to wear disposable patient pants because we have run out of hair nets. It may have sent me over the edge.'

The next day, he tweeted again, this time with a shot of his own underwear on his head and two pencils up his nostrils, mimicking the famous scene from cult comedy Blackadder, in which the historical protagonist dons underwear on his head and pencils up his nose.

The foundation year doctor penned: @matthancock says were wasting #PPE so after yesterdays experience, Ive bought my own in from home, no mask, will just have to hold my breath #COVID19.'

Later he added: 'I have taken the health secretarys comments onboard, so today I brought in my own pants from home.'

In another photo poking fun at the Health Secretary's words, the doctor is seen using a chocolate Easter egg as a mask

The gastroenterologist has been documenting life on a Covid-19 ward in recent weeks, including a rallying tweet about being able to discharge recovering patients.

On Easter Monday, he wrote: 'Some good #COVID19 news; in 4 days managing the geriatric COVID ward we had 15 discharges. It can kill you at any age, but you can also recover at any age too.'

Last week Matt Hancock again cautioned coronavirus medics against overusing personal protective equipment.

The Health Secretary insisted there was enough protective clothing to meet demand, but urged health workers to treat the gear like a 'precious' resource.

Last week, the Health Secretary insisted that there is enough PPE to meet demand but should be treated by hospitals as a 'precious resource'

His remarks doubled down on previous comments made at a Downing Street press briefing where he responded to reports from the frontline of a dire shortage of equipment.

However, he was met with a fierce backlash, led by a top nurse who scolded the minister for suggestions that NHS staff were straying beyond the guidance.

The health worker, from Manchester, hit back at suggestions staff were wasting equipment and said those working on her ward were afraid to take off their masks to drink, as this means they have to be thrown away, raising the risk of dehydration.

She said: 'We are being lied to about what masks we do and don't have, and they're hiding ones we are running out of.

'We can't eat or drink enough because we can't have water or snacks in the area and can't take masks off.

'And we're too scared to drink too much when we're out because if we need to go to the toilet then it means taking it all off again and wasting it, so we are all horribly dehydrated.'
Mrs. America Phyllis Season 1 Episode 1 Editors Rating 4 stars * * * * Previous Next  Cate Blanchett as Phyllis Schlafly. Photo: Courtesy of Hulu/Copyright 2020, FX Networks. All Rights Reserved.

Some viewers may approach Mrs. America with some trepidation for one central reason: the fear of potentially liking Phyllis Schlafly, the shows central figure, who is based on the actual conservative author, activist, and vocal opponent of the Equal Rights Amendment. That fear is somewhat justified since Schlafly, who died in 2016, is played by Cate Blanchett, an excellent, celebrated actress known for bringing layers and shades to strong female characters. Blanchett has been Galadriel in the Lord of the Rings movies. Shes been Katharine Hepburn in The Aviator. Shes been Carol, for Gods sake. Blanchett is so good she might make us feel sympathy for someone who once said, and I quote, sexual harassment on the job is not a problem for virtuous women.

Thankfully, Blanchett and the makers of this FX on Hulu series, including creator and showrunner Dahvi Waller, who previously wrote for Mad Men and Halt and Catch Fire, havent elevated Schlafly into an anti-heroine whom the audience feels for despite her obvious flaws. Instead, Schlafly comes across as a complex, ambitious figure with a limited worldview and no awareness of that worldviews limits, nor curiosity about widening it further. To put it more bluntly: Shes the worst kind of white woman.

In the first episode, Blanchett projects, above all else, how slippery and canny Schlafly is. She does that most effectively in a key scene that takes place on Capitol Hill. Handsy Illinois congressman Phil Crane (James Marsden)  Are you ladies decent? he asks at one point while stepping into a beauty-pageant dressing room, and who did that remind you of?  invites Phyllis to D.C. to meet with Senator Barry Goldwater and some of his congressional colleagues. She thinks shes there to offer opinions on SALT and arms control, and perhaps to win some support as she prepares for another congressional run. But the first thing Goldwater wants to know is whether Phyllis supports the Equal Rights Amendment, which will guarantee equal protection, regardless of gender, under the Constitution. Phyllis, who didnt care at all about the ERA until her friend Alice (Sarah Paulson) mentioned her distaste for it, says she thinks its unnecessary.

Ive never been discriminated against, she tells Goldwater confidently, as though she speaks for her entire gender. I think some women like to blame sexism for their failures instead of admitting they didnt try hard enough. A couple of short minutes later, after Phyllis has clearly established that she knows more about nuclear-arms agreements than any of the men present, she is asked to take notes. Shes the only woman in the room; therefore, she has to be the secretary.

[Cups hands around mouth]: HEY, PHYLLIS. ARE YOU SURE YOU HAVE NEVER BEEN DISCRIMINATED AGAINST? BECAUSE IT IS HAPPENING RIGHT NOW.

Phyllis agrees to take minutes and leaves the room to ask the assistant for a pad and pen. Here you go, Ms. Schlafly, says the aide, producing the requested items, as the sounds of womens libbers protesting can be heard faintly outside. Its Mrs. Schlafly, says Phyllis, all haughty and hell-bent on asserting her status before this young thing. Im married.

Im so sorry, Mrs. Schlafly, the aide replies. Is she apologizing for her error, apologizing for offending her, or saying she takes pity on Phyllis for being tethered to a man? The line delivery can be interpreted in all of these different ways, and its what sparks Phyllis to reenter the room, steer the conversation back to the ERA, and start speaking in strident tones against it. In real life, Schlaflys mental political calculus probably didnt happen in such a flash. But it makes for a great scene that illustrates something crucial about Phyllis: She realizes talking about womens issues may be the only way to be heard in a male-run world, yet at the same time, she cannot see why an equal-rights amendment is needed, even though the conclusion she just reached explains exactly why. Its maddening, but also fascinating.

There are other moments in this episode that show how easily Phyllis can do a heel turn. After her husband, Fred (John Slattery), who has no qualms about coercing Phyllis into having sex, makes it clear that he really doesnt want her to run for office again  Its different for a man to leave his wife at home to go to Washington than it is for a woman to leave her whole family, he explains  she announces during a dinner with politically connected friends that she has decided not to run. But then she adds that her mother will be moving in with them, which is news to Fred. The look Blanchett darts toward Slattery, all the way down that dining-room table, is the equivalent of a marital sniper shot. You think youre in charge here, it says. Youre not.

That gotcha moment makes you admire Phyllis a little. So does the care and consideration she shows to her still single sister-in-law, Eleanor (Jeanne Tripplehorn), when she breaks down crying about having never married or having children of her own. Phyllis reassures her that her life is full, even without those things  which, again, thats exactly what the womens libbers are saying!  and insists that Eleanor should come to the mother-daughter luncheon shes hosting because Phylliss kids want her to be there.

But then: heel turn. At the luncheon, Phyllis launches into a diatribe about the evils of the ERA movement and criticizes one of its leaders, Gloria Steinem, for being a single childless woman nearing 40 who is the sort of miserable, pathetic woman that feminists aspire to be. The look on Eleanors face at the sound of miserable and pathetic in this context is the look of a woman whos been offered a scone, then been punched in the face. Either Phyllis doesnt care that shes hurting Eleanors feelings after insisting that she come to this event, or shes so self-involved that she doesnt realize how much her words will sting.

Im inclined to go with self-involved, given some of the other lines in her speech, like the idea that working outside the home is a womans choice, as if some of them dont desperately need the income, or that the feminist movement is being spearheaded by Northeastern elitist liberals, as if shes not elitist herself. (Hi, Phyllis. Youre holding a tea in your expansive home and using a full waitstaff to do it.)

So much of whats in that speech can still be heard in the language of the gender and culture wars that rage on today. The worst part is that some of what Phyllis says has actually turned out to be true. Women are going to find themselves with two full-time jobs, she warns, and theyre going to be exhausted and unhappy and feel like theyre not doing either well. Phyllis is wrong about a lot, but her conclusion that women will be granted more freedom within a societal framework that wont change to accommodate it is spot-on. Moments in Mrs. America like that one make you pause and realize that this series isnt going to go easy on Phyllis Schlafly, but its also not going to be a purely black-and-white exercise either. Its going to make us think. And thats a good thing.

Fuck Yeah, Feminism Moment of the Episode: The last scene in which the roster of amazing actresses filling the roles of feminist icons  Rose Byrne as Steinem, Uzo Aduba as Shirley Chisholm, Tracey Ullman as Betty Friedan, Margo Martindale as Bella Abzug, Elizabeth Banks as Jill Ruckelshaus  come together in a single room to celebrate the Senates overwhelming approval of the ERA. We know their joy will be short-lived. But its still fun to see the joy.

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Comedian Stephen Colbert, who has been socially distancing himself by hosting "The Late Show" from home for the past month, phoned the International Space Station today (April 15) to get some isolation tips from a pro: NASA astronaut Jessica Meir.

Meir, who launched to the space station in September 2019, has spent 162 days on board the orbiting laboratory and is one of three Expedition 62 crewmembers who were in space when the coronavirus pandemic began. Meir and her two Soyuz MS-15 crewmates, NASA astronaut Drew Morgan and Russian cosmonaut Oleg Skripochka, are scheduled to return to Earth on Friday (April 17).

"It's a little bit difficult for us to believe that we are truly going back to a different planet," Meir told Colbert in the live, space-to-ground interview, which aired on NASA TV. "And it was very strange to feel that there were three of us up here at the time  now there are six of us again  and we were really the only three humans that were not subjected to [the pandemic] at the current time," she added. "Billions of humans  everybody was dealing with this in somewhere or another and the three of us weren't so it was very strange to see it all unfold."

Video: Stephen Colbert calls Space Station - Astronaut Jessica Meir interview

Related: Photos: Comedian Stephen Colbert visits NASA

TONIGHT: The one and only @SHAQ! Then @NASA astronaut @Astro_Jessica joins us from the International @Space_Station! Plus an at-home performance from @TheNational's @Mattberninger! #LSSC pic.twitter.com/FwW5lN9Y6zApril 15, 2020 See more

"Well, everybody here back on Earth is dealing with social isolation, and I understand that astronauts are actually trained to deal with isolation," Colbert responded. "Do you have any advice for the rest of us who might be getting cabin fever?"

Meir pointed out that she and several other astronauts have been sharing their tips on social media since the pandemic began and offered a few of her own words of wisdom. "I think some of the things that help us up here are to continue to get our daily exercise, to keep to a schedule and a routine  those things are important for both our mental and our physical well being," she said.

As Colbert's fans probably expected, the talk show host took the opportunity to ask about the space station's treadmill  the Combined Operational Load-Bearing External Resistance Treadmill (COLBERT). The treadmill, which NASA named after Colbert, launched to the station in 2009 and is still up and "running," Meir said.

"I was just on the COLBERT treadmill a few hours ago. There's still a picture of you on it," Meir said, adding that the astronauts use it almost daily. "We weight lift every day and we either bike or run on the treadmill every day. It's very important for us to maintain our bone density and our muscle mass, so you are a regular part of our daily routine, Stephen."

Related: Astronauts share isolation workout tips from space (video)

Personal care is important when living in isolation, but it's equally important "to make sure that we're playing nicely with others" when isolated together with family members or roommates, Meir said. Much like small groups of astronauts who work together in space for months at a time, people living together in quarantine need "to treat each other kindly with respect," she added.

When Colbert asked her for tips on "how not to annoy the people you're trapped alone with for months on end," Meir stressed the importance of good teamwork skills and simply being pleasant  two important qualities in astronauts. "We even have a buzzword for that at NASA, it's called 'expeditionary skills,' and this is something that is very important in terms of how we select astronauts and how we train them," she said.

For example, an astronaut with strong "expeditionary skills" displays effective communication strategies, good leadership and good "followership," Meir said. "Taking care of yourself and all of your equipment and supplies" also helps to ease stress levels in the household, although "that can be quite a challenge up here when things are floating around and you're using all the surfaces around you," Meir said.

NASA astronaut Jessica Meir speaks with Stephen Colbert from the International Space Station, on April 15, 2020. (Image credit: NASA TV)

"I like to think of it as all the things that parents tell their children how to play nicely with others, or also the kind of people that I would want to go camping with," Meir said. "All of those features are really important."

Functionally happily together in isolation may require a bit of effort, but it's also important that we don't lose our funny bones in all the stress. "Keep having a little bit of fun as well," Meir said, adding that it's good for our psychological well being and overall health.

The interview will air on CBS's "A Late Show with Stephen Colbert" tonight (April 15) at 11:35 p.m. ET/10:35 p.m. CT.

Email Hanneke Weitering at hweitering@space.com or follow her @hannekescience. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom and on Facebook.
Firm appoints David Forgash as Head of Global Leveraged Loans

Hires Roman Kogan as Portfolio Manager for Private Commercial Real Estate (CRE) Strategies in Europe

NEWPORT BEACH, Calif., April 15, 2020 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- PIMCO, one of the worlds premier fixed income investment managers, announces the addition of two senior portfolio management positions, appointing David Forgash as Head of Global Leveraged Loans and hiring Roman Kogan as an Executive Vice President and Portfolio Manager responsible for private commercial real estate debt strategies in Europe.

Mr. Forgash, an Executive Vice President and Portfolio Manager, has taken on leadership responsibilities for PIMCOs loan business as well as broader leveraged finance responsibilities encompassing high yield and multi-sector credit strategies. He was previously Head of PIMCOs High Yield Investments for Europe. He will be based in PIMCOs office in Newport Beach, California, and will report to Jamie Weinstein, Managing Director and Head of Corporate Special Situations, and Mohit Mittal, Managing Director and Head of Credit Trading.

Mr. Kogan has joined PIMCOs Commercial Real Estate (CRE) team in Europe as an Executive Vice President and Portfolio Manager. He will focus on private CRE strategies and play an important role in the transition of oversight of Allianz Real Estate to PIMCO, which was announced in March. Mr. Kogan joins PIMCO from Deutsche Bank and brings with him more than 10 years of experience in commercial real estate markets. He will be based in London and report to John Murray, Managing Director and Head of Commercial Real Estate.

PIMCO has made significant investments in our credit and real estate teams in recent years and David and Romans knowledge and expertise in these key strategic areas will help us find attractive opportunities for our clients, especially in the volatile markets we are seeing right now, said Dan Ivascyn, PIMCOs Group Chief Investment Officer. Navigating the risks and opportunities in the broad credit and real estate markets will be critical to our clients over the long-term, whether they are invested in mutual funds or private strategies.

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Were excited to have Roman join PIMCOs commercial real estate team, said Mr. Murray. His vast experience and demonstrated leadership in both private and public commercial real estate markets in Europe will strengthen PIMCOs platform as we position for attractive investment opportunities over the cyclical and longer-term horizons.

Professional Biographies

David Forgash

Mr. Forgash is an Executive Vice President, Head of Global Leveraged Loans and a Senior Multi-Sector Credit Portfolio Manager in Newport Beach. He was previously a Portfolio Manager in the London office and Head of High Yield Investments for Europe. Prior to joining PIMCO in 2018, he was a Senior Portfolio Manager at Millennium Capital Partners, investing across European credit. Previously, he was an Executive Director of European Credit Trading at Morgan Stanley, a Managing Director of U.S. Credit Trading at Greenwich Capital and a Vice President in Credit Trading at Lehman Brothers. He has 26 years of investment experience and holds an MBA from the Stern School of Business at New York University. He received an undergraduate degree in economics from the University of Delaware.

Roman Kogan

Mr. Kogan is an Executive Vice President and Portfolio Manager responsible for private CRE debt strategies in Europe. Prior to joining PIMCO Mr. Kogan spent over 10 years at Deutsche Bank in London and New York in various roles including European Head of Commercial Real Estate as well as Head of CRE Origination in the United States. He began his finance career in Deutsche Banks structured credit trading group and also spent four years in the structured credit trading group at Merrill Lynch. Mr. Kogan holds a bachelors degree from the United States Naval Academy and an MBA from Columbia Business School. Prior to his career in finance he spent five years as a submarine officer in the US Navy.

About PIMCO

PIMCO is one of the worlds premier fixed income investment managers. With its launch in 1971 in Newport Beach, California, PIMCO introduced investors to a total return approach to fixed income investing. In the 45+ years since, the firm continued to bring innovation and expertise to our partnership with clients seeking the best investment solutions. Today PIMCO has offices across the globe and 2,800+ professionals united by a single purpose: creating opportunities for investors in every environment. PIMCO is owned by Allianz SE, a leading global diversified financial services provider.

Except for the historical information and discussions contained herein, statements contained in this news release constitute forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. These statements may involve a number of risks, uncertainties and other factors that could cause actual results to differ materially, including the performance of financial markets, the investment performance of PIMCO's sponsored investment products and separately managed accounts, general economic conditions, future acquisitions, competitive conditions and government regulations, including changes in tax laws. Readers should carefully consider such factors. Further, such forward-looking statements speak only on the date at which such statements are made. PIMCO undertakes no obligation to update any forward-looking statements to reflect events or circumstances after the date of such statements.

Contact:

Michael Reid

PIMCO  Media Relations

Ph. 212-597-1301

Email: Michael.Reid@pimco.com
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Linkedin Budi Sutrisno (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Wed, April 15, 2020 06:36 637 fc6853813033f564188675f8bd1e89da 1 City transgender,LGBT,LGBT-persecution,LGBT-in-Indonesia,North-Jakarta,murder Free

The heinous fate that befell Mira, a 42-year-old trans woman who was burned to death in Cilincing, North Jakarta, has prompted activists and advocacy groups to demand justice as they urge authorities to bring those responsible for the brutal slaying before the law.

Human rights activists grouped under the Crisis Response Mechanism (CRM) have launched a solidarity action named A Thousand Candles for Mira, which encourages people to post a video of them lighting candles in their respective homes and to convey statements of condolences for Mira on social media.

The CRM is a community network comprising various groups that include Arus Pelangi, Sanggar Waria Remaja (Swara) and the Union of Journalists for Diversity (Sejuk), whose members are spread throughout the country.

Sejuk program manager Tantowi Anwari said the online campaign was aimed at not only showing solidarity but also demanding justice for the transgender community, which has been subjected to discrimination, to the point of claiming lives.

This vicious act happened not because of an allegation that Mira stole a wallet and so on, but because of the strong stigma against transgender people that allows these terrible thugs to violently bully them, Tantowi told The Jakarta Post on Tuesday.

Through the solidarity movement, the CRM wants to invite everyone to force Miras case to its proper conclusion because violence against transgender groups often ends in a lack of justice, he said.

Mira was beaten and burned alive by six men in a container truck parking lot in Cilincing on April 4 after they accused her of stealing a phone and wallet from a truck driver who had parked his vehicle near Miras rented room.

The North Jakarta Police, however, said the suspects had no intention to kill Mira and that they pulled out a lighter in order to force her to admit her crime, but the flame from the lighter inadvertently set alight the gasoline they had doused over her.

The police had apprehended three of the six suspects, identified only as AP, RT and AH, as of Thursday last week. Meanwhile, three other suspects, PD, AB, and IQ, remain at large.

Read also: Group of men allegedly burn transgender woman to death, escape murder charges

The legal advocacy team for Miras case  which comprises members of several rights groups including Swara  condemned the violence that resulted in her death, calling it a form of transphobia.

LGBT rights group Suara Kita took part in fundraising, mainly among its internal circle and from NGOs, by collecting used goods and reselling them in order to cover Miras hospital and funeral fees, as well as to support the paralegal team working on her case.

We have made about Rp 6.8 million [US$432] from that and we hope the fundraising will continue as long as the legal work is still ongoing, Suara Kita executive board member Teguh Iman Affandi told the Post.

The National Commission on Human Rights (Komnas HAM) said it would be monitoring the investigation into Miras death as it also planned to send a letter to the North Jakarta Police to request an explanation of the progress as well as the plan for further investigation.

Komnas HAM commissioner Beka Ulung Hapsara said he wanted to clarify the statement from the police who said they would not charge the killers with murder, and to ascertain whether the reported decision was correct.

I have read the North Jakarta Police statement that they would not use the law on murder. We must clarify this decision and analyze whether it is necessary to later carry out on-field investigations and recheck the facts, Beka said.

Beka argued that the abuse of Mira might have been caused by the continuous intolerance toward LGBT people, and he said the same stigma should not pervade law enforcement.

We will also inform the police that we are ready to intervene to oversee the legal process so that it is as complete and fair as possible, he added.

National Police Commission (Kompolnas) member Poengky Indarti said she had asked the Jakarta Police to ensure all the perpetrators in Miras case were punished appropriately since the crimes they had committed were regarded as barbaric.

This is a discriminatory act with a very high level of brutality. They must not be charged under articles that carry light [punishment] that would definitely not have a deterrent effect, said Poengky.

North Jakarta Police chief Sr. Comr. Budhi Herdi Susianto was not immediately available to provide a statement when contacted by the Post on Tuesday.
Gov. Gavin Newsom, flanked by Mark Ghilarducci, director of the California Governor's Office of Emergency Services, left, and Navy Adm. John Gumbleton, speaks in front of the hospital ship Mercy at the Port of Los Angeles on March 27. (Carolyn Cole / Los Angeles Times)

It is a tragedy unfolding in real time. At a skilled nursing facility in the Tulare County town of Visalia, 71 residents and 41 staffers have tested positive for the novel coronavirus. Six residents at the 176-bed Redwood Springs Healthcare Center are dead and eight are in acute care, according to Anita Hubbard, the center's administrator.

But without Hubbard's details, little would be known about one of California's worst outbreaks of the deadly virus in a senior facility. Tulare County stopped commenting for five days, during which the numbers of positive cases skyrocketed. Like other cities and counties statewide, California doesn't require it to release such information, even in the midst of a pandemic.

As the novel coronavirus continues to claim hundreds of lives across California, a secondary victim of the crisis is emerging: government transparency. Much of what we know about COVID-19 in nursing homes and senior facilities did not come from public agencies, but private sources: relatives, staff members and administrators.

I want updates," said Christina Valencia, whose grandmother was among the several people testing positive for the disease at a nursing home in Redondo Beach. "You should have a right to know how many residents are positive.

Californians are in the dark about more than nursing homes.

Information about the availability of personal protective equipment, or PPE, is lacking, upping the anxiety of healthcare workers. Coroners aren't releasing information about deaths. Until recently, California was not releasing information about the racial breakdown of people who were infected and killed.

Government confusion has undermined public understanding of the crisis, and has potentially compromised California's response, some health and civil liberties experts argue. But there are few rules for what cities and counties must disclose and little direction from California's top officials, including Gov. Gavin Newsom, on what must be communicated in an urgent moment.

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Dr. Richard Jackson, who served as Californias state health officer under Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, said its crucial that public health agencies and political leaders keep residents informed by sharing data on local hot spots, infection rates and demographics in their communities.

As the general principle, the public has a right to important information that would influence their own health, said Jackson, a professor emeritus at the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health.

Such transparency, some experts said, is essential for maintaining public trust amid the catastrophe.

"Mistrust is the enemy of good public policy and certainly good public health policy," said Jeffrey Kahn, head of the Johns Hopkins Berman Institute of Bioethics.

With California waging a blitzkrieg campaign to fight back the fast-moving pandemic, state and local agencies are overwhelmed, and some difficulty sharing information is inevitable. Yet California's halting release of key knowledge is alarming groups that look out for the vulnerable and disadvantaged.

Last week, the American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California sent Newsom a letter requesting more transparency about the pandemic's effect on people of color and other at-risk groups.

"From what weve seen thus far, we know that this virus has been impacting black communities and we have no idea what is necessarily happening here in California," said Abre' Conner, staff attorney for the ACLU of Northern California. "Wed like to see more data now, today."

Conner said the requirement for local data collection and release needs to come from the state, which she argues is best suited to set perimeters, instead of leaving counties and cities to make their own decisions.

"California is really behind the ball in ensuring there is comprehensive data available," she said. "We dont have any data, we dont have any accountability."

The fallout from inadequate information can be seen not just in Tulare, but in nursing homes and eldercare facilities around the state. Yolo County, home of UC Davis, Monday announced a nursing home there had an outbreak of 35 cases, including 12 staff members and one fatality. But it refused to name the facility, citing privacy concerns similar to Tulare County.

Sacramento and Alameda counties have also come under fire for failing to give details around elder facilities.

By contrast, Los Angeles County has been releasing the names of all elder facilities with a single confirmed positive case since late March.

The dearth of information frustrates family members, who, in at least one case, came close to unknowingly spreading the virus from one senior facility to another.

A few weeks ago, a woman named Marcia was hoping to reunite her two elderly parents, who both had Alzheimers and had been living in separate facilities because they needed different levels of care. The plan by Marcia, who asked that her last name not be used to protect her familys privacy, was to move her father from the Alameda Care Center in Burbank facility to the Jewish Home in Reseda, where her mom lived.

Marcia was unaware that an outbreak had occurred at the Alameda Care Center  it happened before L.A. County started releasing information about infections at senior homes.

Fortunately, one nurse in Burbank notified a nurse at the Jewish home because they were friends. The facility quarantined and tested Marcia's father based on the unofficial advice.

We got lucky, said Dr. Noah Marco, chief medical officer at the Jewish Home.

Marcia's father was less fortunate. He developed the tell-tale symptoms of COVID-19. Four days later, he died, without ever seeing his wife.

In recent days, Newsom has acknowledged the need for greater clarity and access to the data being used to make decisions.

"Understandably people are eager for transparency in real time," he said during an online briefing. "Every day we are [working] as quickly as we can."

It's not just the public that is sometimes left out of the loop.

On April 7, Newsom announced that California had secured a monthly supply of 200 million N95 respiratory and surgical masks to help protect healthcare workers. The governor did not announce the procurement during his daily media briefings, but on "The Rachel Maddow Show." That left some lawmakers surprised, because they would have to authorize the purchase within days.

"Under normal circumstances, the Legislature would have had more time to deliberate an expenditure of this magnitude," wrote state Sen. Holly Mitchell (D-Los Angeles), chair of the joint legislative budget committee, in a letter to Newsom last week, asking for more clarity on the terms of the deal.

Mitchell later said in an interview that she supported Newsom's move and understood the need for speed. But in the letter, she requested the state immediately start a public website to document its inventory of protective gear and where it's being distributed to ensure supplies wind up where they are most needed.

Tuesday, Frank Girardot, spokesman for BYD, the company that would supply the masks, said it hoped to have quality testing required for federal certifications completed by the end of the month, and shipping could begin then.

The state has yet to respond to The Times' public record request for the contract. It also hasn't responded to numerous other records requests, including one seeking information on PPE the state has requested and received from the federal government.

For government agencies, information sharing is fraught with difficulties, partly because of the time involved in collecting data, said Dr. Paul Simon, chief science officer at the Los Angeles County of Public Health. A lack of unified systems is also a problem at the state and local levels.

"We don't have this one big, massive information system that allows us to share information electronically at a moment's notice, unfortunately," Simon said.

Last month, the League of California Cities sent a letter to Newsom asking for a delay of the states public records act as city resources and personnel are stretched thin during the outbreak.

Depending on how long the COVID-19 pandemic lasts, cities may not be able to physically access certain records due to office closures, limited staffing, or limited IT capability until they are permitted back into city offices, said Corrie Manning, general counsel for the league, which represents nearly 500 cities in the state.

The governor's office did not respond to questions about the league's request.

David Snyder, executive director of the First Amendment Coalition, said while he agrees that records relating to the pandemic are vital information that should be released, those are not the only records that matter.

"There are so many opportunities in a crisis like this for government officials to abuse their powers while everyone's eyes are off the ball," Snyder said.

Despite the tremendous stress of the pandemic, public health officials still have an obligation  and a need  to provide information, said Jackson, the state health officer under Schwarzenegger.

The fastest way to lose your credibility is to give out incorrect information," he said. "The second fastest way would be to give out no information."

Times staff writer Melanie Mason contributed to this report.
In March, on Friday the 13thsuch an ominous-sounding and appropriate datethe coronavirus outbreak forced me to do something I never anticipated I'd have to do as an adult: move back home with mom.

For the six months before that day, I'd been touring 65 cities across the United States as part of a traveling Broadway show. Once we reached Galveston, TX, though, the tour was abruptly shuttered, because of concerns about COVID-19.

Since my own residence in New York City was starting to show signs of being the epicenter of the pandemic, my mother insisted that I buy a ticket to Baltimore and stay with her.

Yet the minute I got to her home, I started to show symptoms of COVID-19including a fever, cough, shortness of breath, body aches, and an explosive headache.

Eventually, I lost my sense of smell, which was the final clue. Just to clinch the matter, I soon learned that someone else on my tour had tested positive.

I tried to get tested myself, but a shortage of tests throughout Maryland made this impossible, even though doctors said I "probably" had it, given my symptoms.

The only clarity and advice I received, however, from the Maryland State Department of Health and the several ER doctors I spoke with, was to "Stay home." That was it.

At this juncture, everyone in the country was pretty much still trying to figure out what to do if you developed symptoms of COVID-19, but the one thing I did know was to try to stay away from my 70-something mom as much as possible, since contracting an infection posed a particularly serious risk to the elderly.

Our dilemma: Since my mom and I were sharing a house, how could we remain in quarantine apart from each other?

Mom and daughter during tour Kimberly Dawn Neumann

How to self-isolate when you share a house

When one person at home has the coronavirus (or any illness) and the others are not showing any symptoms, the CDC advises that the sick person go into "home isolation" or "self isolation."

But what exactly does that mean? After researching what I should do, I learned that I'd have to stay in my own room, alone. I also designated one bathroom as mine; it was the only one I used, and I told my mom never to go in there.

The CDC also recommended that I clean my own room and bathroom, and frequently wash my sheets and clothes. Although that was tough to do while I was sick, I was happy to do it, if it meant my mom wouldn't have to put her own health at risk.

Disinfect everything

I also learned that I should wipe down everything I touched with a disinfecting agent like Clorox wipesseveral times a day if possible. Thankfully, at the onset of my illness, I had plenty of wipes, and wasn't afraid to use them!

For example, after I drove my mom's car to urgent care to rule out strep and flu (for which I tested negative), I immediately went home and cleaned the car with Clorox wipes. I'm talking door handles, gear shift, keys, mirrors, steering wheel, garage door openeranything I'd touched.

Meanwhile, the CDC recommendation was that my mom should be the one to regularly clean the common areas.

Our "must disinfect" list included light switches, TV remote, phones, refrigerator door, and doorknobs. Even though I wasn't touching these things, we were trying to take every precaution.

Keeping a distance Kimberly Dawn Neumann

Masks, gloves, and hand sanitizer

During the few times I left my sick room, I also wore a maskan N99 Grove mask I'd purchased in January, because of my constant travel. Only now, rather than protecting myself from whatever bug was going around the tour bus, I was trying to protect my mom from catching whatever I had.

I also started wearing rubber gloves when out in the common areas. I only had a couple of pairs, which I'd asked for on my way out of urgent care, so I started disinfecting them at night with hand sanitizer. I'd alternate the pair of gloves I wore every day.

Ive now heard of doctors who are short of PPE reusing gloves that waydisinfecting and alternatingso I think I did something right there with my shortage of supplies.

My mom didn't have any latex gloves, but she wore a brand-new pair of winter gloves inside the house. They weren't sterile, but they did offer another barrier from my germs when she was cleaning common areas.

We also kept (highly valuable) bottles of Purell hand sanitizer in the kitchen and our separate bathrooms, and we washed our hands a lot, often while singing the words to a Beatles spoof we'd watched on YouTube called "I Gotta Wash My Hands!"

Don't share

Additionally, I was so worried about spreading the coronavirus to my mom that I kept using the same fork, knife, spoon, mug, and drinking glass (washing between uses, of course).

That may have been overkill, but the CDC's instructions were not to share utensils or glassware, and I was afraid that germs might remain on whatever I'd used, even after I washed them well.

Although we were regularly putting the sponge in the microwave to disinfect it, I didn't want to touch it, for fear of leaving my germs there.

So my mom did most of the dishwashing from any meal prep, and I took my utensils and glassware upstairs to my "sick bathroom" and washed them myself in the sink there.

Keeping your distance in a shared space

My mother and I did share some meals together, although we sat far, far away from each other, at opposite ends of a large table. I also watched some TV with her, sitting on a different piece of furniture.

Throughout all this, it would really have been nice to be able to give my mom a hug, and vice versa. To compensate, we got in the habit of standing 6 feet apart from each other, wrapping our arms around ourselves, and saying, "I'm giving you a big hug," before we went to sleep.

It was sweet and sad and corny, but that was the reality we were in. While I was miserably sick for about a week, I never ended up hospitalized.

After 14 days in quarantine, I was finally free. I'm still coughing and can't smell a thing (I'm praying that comes back soon), but I'm just so glad I listened to my early instincts.

A healthier Easter Kimberly Dawn Neumann

I'm happy I took steps quickly to avoid infecting others, especially my momwho, blessedly, is still not showing symptoms.

Yet even though we seem to be through the worst of this, I am now permanently changed in my disease-prevention habits.

For instance, it's now second nature to me to wash my hands often, and disinfect frequently handled objects like my cellphone and the TV remote.

Mom and I will still be really careful. There is no other option. Because no one wants to be responsible for infecting anyone else, especially those they love.

The post How I Self-Isolated at HomeWhile Living With Mom appeared first on Real Estate News & Insights | realtor.com.
Construction, Broker, Appraisal Products; Partial and Temporary Appraisal Delay for Banks

While in captivity sometimes it is difficult social distancing. Working from home, and having video meetings, takes some getting used to. I was telling my cat Myrtle about a service that inserts a goat or llama into your Zoom call for $100. As I was placing her line-caught halibut cheeks into her bowl, I thought, I should do this at half that price, until I remembered that she has a face for radio. Dana DiVecchio with Pittsburghs Holland Mortgage Advisors sent along a collage of some of Hollands employees home workstations. Lots of people are wearing facemasks with varying effectiveness, and social/physical distancing is the norm Even in Florida, the scene of the now infamous Spring Break gathering last month. Yup, I don't think anyone expected that when we changed the clocks, we'd go from Standard Time to the Twilight Zone. But news can still travel at the speed of light, like March 1, 2021.



Lender Services and Products

Regulators and government agencies are moving faster than ever to mitigate the economic fallout from the Covid-19 pandemic, and mortgage companies find themselves expending substantial time and resources to stay on top of the evolving guidance. Buckley LLP has moved quickly to address this need with its Covid-19 Regulatory Tracker: an interactive, web-based repository that catalogs new regulatory requirements and expectations. Attorneys and legal professionals from Buckley, a national leader in legal services for the financial services industry, monitor lengthy issuances from federal and state agencies, distilling them into concise summaries that are tagged and uploaded daily into a proprietary online database. The intuitive interface allows users to quickly search, filter, and yield results tailored to their organizations needs, saving time by filtering the hundreds of notices and alerts, and providing peace of mind that they have a comprehensive view of the latest obligations and expectations. Learn more here.

How are appraisals getting done in this new era of shelter-in-place and social distancing? Triserv (a 50-state AMC offering unparalleled service) is sharing key information with lenders about the impact of COVID-19 on appraisals. You are invited to check out these new resources (free and ungated) on what desktop appraisals include, best practices for dealing with appraisal inspections, and the real-world appraiser climate during shelter-in-place. This weeks topic is all about Desktop Appraisals: what they are, what they include, what they cost, and how they differ from drive-by appraisals. Click here to read more, and please return for additional resources Triserv will be sharing with the lender community on an ongoing basis during the current pandemic. Contact Triserv at learnmore@triservllc.com.

Black Knight Empower Loan Origination System (LOS) users can now directly submit appraisal orders into the Connexions platform thanks to a powerful new integration via Black Knight Exchange. Through the integration, lenders can easily and efficiently manage appraisal orders and vendor communication. Connexions, the premier appraisal management platform, delivers best-in-class appraisal automation, data, analytics and integration to real estate valuations, and works with more than 150 AMCs and 13,000 independent appraisers. Click here to learn more or contact us for more information.

Stearns recognizes that first responders are on the front lines of providing support to their communities during the COVID-19 pandemic. To express gratitude and offer support, Stearns Wholesale will be reducing administration/underwriting fees to all first responders who apply for a loan. Now is the time to come together as a mortgage community and offer our clients relief where we can. click HERE to be contacted by a Wholesale Account Executive for details.

With the Coronavirus dominating our lives and our new social hour with Zoom meetings seem to be our new normal but we must continue to keep a positive attitude! The equity markets are coming back and the 10-year bond at .075 bps the refinance activity is here to stay and volume is soaring. Margin calls and Non-QM trades that didnt go off are on the minds of many but have you thought about your construction projects that have stopped? Are you sure your asset is secure and safe? Let CFSI help you quickly evaluate your project. CFSI Loan Management is a full-service construction risk mitigation company, helping lenders manage the construction process from beginning to end. Let Lenders manage credit risk, CFSI manages construction risk. Let CFSI Loan Management help you audit your portfolio and enhance your construction loan program. Please contact President Brian Mingham for information.

QLMS remains a refuge of stability for the broker community. Its rock-solid foundation allows brokers to continue building on their successes from 2019 and early 2020. QLMS has taken the steps needed to ensure its partners are not blindsided by massive changes to VOE or canceled commission because of forbearance. You dont need to believe lenders who are spinning a tale that the entire industry is tightening or scare tactics saying you need to hit pause on your business. Brokers should use their superpower, choice, to find a lender who can provide their clients what they need in the best way possible. Click HERE if you are a broker who wants to become Stronger Together in the face of adversity.

New circumstances are creating new challenges. In the COVID-19 environment, its more difficult than ever to find qualified customers and keep your portfolio on track. Luckily, with the right data and expertise, lenders can still manage their risk, retain customers, and keep filling their pipeline. Customer acquisition is on everyones mind, but its crucial to work with the most up-to-date marketing and prescreen credit data to ensure that you can adjust to the ever-changing market conditions. With advanced analytics and data, IR Data Solutions can provide custom modeling so lenders can target their perfect audience at the right time. Among other benefits, lenders can also receive personalized alerts to make sure they keep up with their current customer base and lists. Reach out now to help your business grow, keep your portfolio healthy, and maintain your bottom line.



Corona-Driven News and Events

Yesterday the commentary noted, CIT closed on its deal to buy Mutual of Omaha a few months ago. MOOB is being wound down, and loans must fund by the end of June. For clarity, readers know that CIT Bank did not buy Mutual of Omaha, CIT Bank bought Mutual of Omaha Bank. The mortgage division of Mutual of Omaha insurance is alive and well, growing, had a record month last month closing over $500 million, and is still adding personnel. Mutual of Omaha has a $50 billion dollar balance sheet; keep in mind that the bank and mortgage division have separated.

loanDepot is also alive and well, with plans to hire 3,000 by year end. FHA and VA have published temporary guidance in response to COVID-19 on Employment Verification and Appraisals. loanDepot Wholesale is adhering to this guidance effective immediately. Click on each individual announcement details. FHA Employment and Appraisal Flexibility; VA Employment and Underwriting Guidance; VA Appraisal Valuation Practices

Yesterday the commentary mentioned, Caliber Home Loans is temporarily suspending its renovation products effective with Commitment Confirmations issued on or after April 5, 2020. New submissions for renovation loans will not be accepted as of April 5, 2020. The suspension is effective for all renovation products including FHA 203(K) and FNMA Homestyle. This is for Caliber Home Loans Correspondent Channel only. CHLs Retail Channel continues to offer Renovation Products.

The Mortgage 2020 Virtual Conference is today and tomorrow! Reserve your seat (on the living room couch) now for this must-see event by clicking here.

Lenders Compliance Group is offering Navigating the Checklist & Workbook, Business Continuity Plan, COVID-19 Pandemic Response tomorrow, April 16, from 1-2PM ET.

NAMMBA is hosting a Town Hall event and virtual conference on Friday, April 24, from 1-4PM ET. The agenda is being worked on, but includes a session with Dave Stevens, Mitch Kider, and Rob Chrisman (who?). The event will bring together industry stakeholders, policy makers, and CEOs to discuss the current state of the mortgage industry. These sessions will be 30 - 45 minutes in length and feature a "fireside" chat conversation.

Jennie Ensunsa with AD Mortgage wrote to say that AD is bringing back non-QM. Brokers should write to Jennie and ask for programs & rates.

In appraisal news, a Rule was announced that doesnt impact a huge portion of the mortgage market, namely mortgage bankers. Are you wondering how an investor would feel if, in four months, the appraisal comes in $50k under the refi loan amount? Transactions involving acquisition, development, and construction of real estate are excluded from this interim rule The federal banking agencies issued new federal banking guidance on appraisals via an interim final rule to temporarily defer real estate-related appraisals and evaluations under the agencies' interagency appraisal regulations. The Federal Reserve Board, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency are providing this temporary relief to allow regulated institutions to extend financing to creditworthy households and businesses quickly in the wake of the national emergency declared in connection with COVID-19. The agencies are deferring certain appraisals and evaluations for up to 120 days after closing of residential or commercial real estate loan transactions. The National Credit Union Administration (NCUA) will consider a similar proposal on Thursday, April 16.

Michael Simmons, Co-President of AXIS AMC, opined, The Interagency statement is not about lenders, its about regulated financial institutions, specifically banks and credit unions. The OCC, FRB, FDIC and NCUA are agencies that regulate banks and credit unions, and they gave them the ability to (temporarily) close a mortgage loan for refinance purposes without obtaining an appraisal. They didnt actually waive the appraisal, they just deferred it. It will have to be completed within 120 days from the date of closing. They also loosened a couple of other constraints allowing similar deferrals for commercial real estate loans. This is a bit reminiscent of 2008 when the big banks got even bigger in what in hindsight seemed to have been a ploy to overcome the too big to fail syndrome by making them even bigger still.

The largest segment of the lending space is occupied by mortgage bankers and mortgage brokers. None of them are eligible under this interim rule to avail themselves of these changes. Im sure there are any number of reasons why the Agencies may have elected to do this. Perhaps the primary reason being that banks have reserves to backstop losses that mortgage bankers dont have. Just how willing will a bank be to fund a refinance loan without an appraisal? Will you get a conservative value? Will the rate be competitive with the rest of the market? This interim rule doesnt impact a huge portion of the mortgage market. Mortgage bankers and mortgage brokers live to compete, and I believe theyll do just that. Its likely that appraisers arent in for much of a furlough after all  and borrowers needs will still be served no matter whos behind the stove.



Capital Markets

This morning we have oil prices below $20 per barrel and global equity markets sliding. But last week hopeful news from many countries regarding the pace of new coronavirus cases juxtaposed with worse economic data which continues to catch up to the present reality. The conversation in Washington shifted from shelter in place to restart as signs point to a flattening of the curve. This will depend on the level of improvement through the remainder of April into May however it may take more than two years before total GDP reaches pre-coronavirus levels. The Fed announced $2.3 trillion credit package to backstop financial markets and add liquidity to small and medium size firms. There are even rumors of another round of fiscal stimulus from the government that would presumably go towards significant infrastructure spending. The economic legacy of the coronavirus will be one of immense sovereign and private debt and the attitudes towards repayment in the face of decreasing tax revenues due to the slowdown in business activity and resulting unemployment. Credit markets will need to adjust for the increased risks and ratings agencies will need to make adjustments to their ratings models.

A couple months ago, I grew tired of reporting the same market moves (or lack thereof) each day due to Brexit and the U.S.China trade war. As I mentioned yesterday, volatility in the mortgage market has died down, and I now find myself regurgitating the same coronavirus-related headlines: Treasuries displayed little movement as the curve steepened slightly (the 10-year yield closed unchanged at 0.75 percent) due to improving risk sentiment surrounding the coronavirus pandemic. The Fed continued to do its part with the largest share of the tentative maximum MBS purchases in over a week.

Todays economic calendar began with a 7.3 percent increase MBA Weekly Mortgage Applications Survey for the week ending April 10. Thanks to $446 billion in MBS buying (from March 16 to April 3) by the Fed, mortgage rates have continued to edge lower, though still not quite as low as those seen in early March. Weve also had March retail sales (-8.7 percent, -4.5 percent ex-auto) and April NY Fed manufacturing (-78.2). Todays busy calendar rolls on with Industrial production and capacity utilization for March, Business inventories for February, and the NAHB Housing Market Index later this morning. The afternoon brings the lone scheduled Fed speaker, Atlantas Bostic, as well as the latest Beige Book from the Fed. We begin the day with Agency MBS prices up .125 and the 10-year yielding .67 percent.

Jobs

Valuation Partners, a leading nationwide appraisal management company is expanding its operations services team. We have been in business for over 35 years and are proud of our best of class reputation. Valuation Partners is looking for Customer Service Representatives who possess some background in the real estate valuation industry or Appraisal Management / Mortgage Operations & Processing, w/ good technology & strong communication skills. No relocation required. Join a successful team that provides full suite of property valuation products, with a commitment to exceptional customer experience & supported by senior leadership that understands the appraisal business. If you are interested, please send your resume confidentially to nbrazeau@valuationpartners.com. This communication is permissioned to be forwarded to interested candidates.
Apart from her acclaimed performances, Kangana Ranaut becoming the flagbearer in the criticism of the film industrys nepotism has been a highlight. The National Award-winner has taken on numerous other relevant issues as well. However, as per Pakistani actor Mansha Pasha, Kangana used the progressive values to gain traction, before supporting a government that stifles 'voices of dissent and any opinion against its policy as corrupt.

READ: This Day That Year: Rangoli Chandel's Tweets To Malaika-Arjun Wedding Rumours

Mansha Pasha had aired her views about Kangana on Twitter, terming the actor as a classic woman who talked down her privilege. She also wrote that anyone who disagrees to be too rich, too privileged or too corrupt cant be a voice of the people. Mansha concluded that one should know about people using the values only to further their own politics.

Kangana Ranaut is a classic example of a woman who started off as someone who talked down privelege, becoming a voice against nepotism.

She then used progressive values to gain traction and then support a government that stifles all voices of dissent and calls everything that  manshapasha (@manshapasha) April 13, 2020

goes against its policy to be "corrupt, anti state" and anyone who disagrees to be too rich or too privileged or too corrupt and cant be a voice for the people.

One needs to aware of those that use values u believe in to futher their own politics.  manshapasha (@manshapasha) April 13, 2020

READ: Rangoli Chandel Shares Her Wedding Pictures Ahead Of Her 10th Anniversary; See Here

As Pakistani media reported the story, Kanganas sister-cum-manager Rangoli Chandel was not too surprised with the statement. She wrote that criticism from a Pakistani was a validation that one was a '100 % nationalist and a true deshbhakt.' Rangoli also wrote that two enemy countries citizens should be talking against each other in this way itself, and she only had respect for Mansha for her statement.

Rangoli added that her only problem was with those from this country who showed their loyalty to Pakistan.

READ: Rangoli Chandel Calls For Dismissing 2024 Elections, Says 'let Modi Ji Lead Us Next Term'

Heres the post

When Pakistanis start to criticise you, its a validation that you are 100% nationalist and a sacha Desh Bhakt...two enemy country citizens must talk like this only respect for Ms Pasha, but I cant respect those jo iss desh ka khakar wafa Pakistan se karte hain... https://t.co/eGe88YpPlP  Rangoli Chandel (@Rangoli_A) April 14, 2020

Kangana and her sister Rangoli have been supporters of the Prime Minister Narendra Modi-led government. The former had even said she wished to see PM Modi be elected, ahead of the 2019 general elections. Rangoli recently hoped no elections are held in 2024 and that the PM continues to lead the country, to save the countrys wealth after the difficulties to the economy due to COVID-19.

READ: Ranveer Singh Now Enjoys Monopoly': Rangoli After User Compares Him With Ranbir Kapoor
Vietnamese citizens board a Vietnam Airlines plane that carries them from the U.K. to Vietnam on April 15, 2020. Photo courtesy of Vietnam Airlines.

More than 100 British stranded in Vietnam and Cambodia returned home Monday via a special Vietnam Airlines flight, Vietnams Foreign Ministry stated.

Approved by the government of Vietnam and the U.K., the flight departed Phnom Penh on Monday before transiting in Hanoi to pick up the stranded British.

Prior to boarding, passengers were given a health check and told to keep a minimum distance of two meters when queuing. Face masks were mandatory during the flight.

Among those repatriated on the special flight were some British tourists infected with Covid-19, who have recovered and been discharged from hospital.

The aircraft also carried antibacterial cloth masks donated by the Vietnamese government and people to the U.K. where nearly 94,000 infections have been confirmed, including over 12,000 deaths.

The flight would carry Vietnamese nationals, including overseas students under the age of 18, seniors and those in difficulty on its return. It is scheduled to land at Van Don Airport in the northern province of Quang Ninh on Wednesday. All returnees will be placed under quarantine for health supervision.

Last week, Vietnam Airlines also carried 600 German and other Europeans stranded in Vietnam back home on two special flights funded by Germany.

Vietnamese carriers suspended all international flights on March 25.

Since March 22, Vietnam has prohibited entry for all foreign nationals. Only Vietnamese and foreigners carrying diplomatic or official passports are allowed in, and all are quarantined for 14 days.

As isolation facility overload lessens, the Vietnamese government is planning to repatriate those Vietnamese abroad wishing to return home. The country has brought home nearly 4,600 Vietnamese from pandemic-hit areas since early February.

Vietnams Covid-19 infection count came to 267 as of Wednesday morning. Of these, 98 are active while the remaining 169 have been discharged from hospital.

The Covid-19 pandemic has claimed over 126,000 lives, affecting 210 countries and territories.
Tasmanian Premiere Peter Gutwein. (Photo by Brook Mitchell/Getty Images) (Photo: Brook Mitchell via Getty Images)

See the latest stories on the coronavirus outbreak.

Australian officials are investigating whether an alleged illegal social gathering of health workers is behind a spike in coronavirus cases in Tasmania.

Tasmania Premier Peter Gutwein said on Tuesday there has been a 50% spike in the states Covid-19 cases since Thursday, even as the rate of reported new infections continued to significantly slow across the rest of the country.

At least 6,366 cases of Covid-19 have been confirmed in Australia and 61 people have died. The virus has killed more than 117,000 people worldwide and more than 1.8 million are infected.

Local media reported that Australias Chief Medical Officer, Brendan Murphy, referred to an illegal dinner party of medical workers in Tasmania as responsible for the rise in cases to 150 during a video briefing with New Zealand officials. The CMO has since walked back on his comments.

Brendan was commenting on a rumour, Gutwein told reporters on Tuesday.

At this stage our contact tracing has not identified a dinner party of health workers. However, I accept that this is a serious allegation.

Ive asked the Tasmania Police to investigate this matter, and that will be started today.

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Murphy released a statement to take back claims medical staff at the centre of an outbreak around the Tasmanian town of Burnie had attended a dinner party, the ABC reports.

This morning  I referred to suggestion that a dinner party may have been the source of some of the transmission in the north-west Tasmania cluster of cases, he said.

Whilst this possibility had previously been mentioned to me following initial investigations, I am now informed that the contact tracing has not confirmed that such a dinner party occurred.

Story continues

The probe came as Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison confirmed the government expects unemployment to double from the current 5.1% to 10% by the end of June, which would mark the first time it has hit double digits since 1994. That equates to around 700,000 people without jobs, the Treasury said.

However, Morrison rejected suggestions the jobless rate could soar as high as 20%. Unemployment would have peaked at around 15% without government support measures such as a $130 billion package to keep people in work, aid for universities, and free child care, he said.

We came into this crisis - which is a dual one, a health crisis and an economic crisis - in pretty strong shape, Morrison said on Channel Nines Today show.

But it is still a big blow. I dont want to lessen that in terms of how we speak of it. Its a serious impact on our economy, its impacting peoples livelihoods and its heartbreaking.

Council ambassadors wear t-shirts with clear messages to the community on the Bondi to Bronte coastal walk on April 11, 2020 in Sydney, Australia. (Photo: James D. Morgan via Getty Images)

Officials cautioned that recent Covid-19 case numbers may have been thinned out by lower testing over the four-day Easter holiday weekend.

Morrison said it was still too early to consider lifting social distancing requirements or allowing businesses to reopen.

Most Australians must stay at home unless they have a medical appointment, are going grocery shopping or taking exercise, and cannot meet in groups of more than two.

No country has found their way out of this yet and Australia is in a better position than most ... we want to keep it that way, Morrison told Channel Sevens Sunrise program, adding that officials were looking at ways to help restart the construction, manufacturing and agriculture industries.

This article originally appeared on HuffPost and has been updated.




Nigerias Minister of Information, Lai Mohammed, has explained why the Federal Government cannot share to Nigerians the funds donated by private Nigerians and organizations for the fight against Coronavirus (COVID19).

Naija News reports that over N15 billion have been donated by private Nigerians and organizations under the auspice COVID-19 Relief Fund to the Federal Government led by President Muhammadu Buhari.

This online news platform understands that the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN)announced the donations, Nigerians have called on the government to share the N15 billion donated as palliatives during the lockdown over the Coronavirus pandemic.

Reacting to the call, Mohammed who was featured on a Radio Nigeria programme on Tuesday, April 14, said the Federal government does not have the power to distribute the N15 billion donations.

The Minister of Information explained that the private individuals and organizations came together to donate the funds and asked the Federal government how they can help to effectively fight the pandemic.

Mohammed said the Federal government has advised the private individuals to use their donations to help develop the healthcare infrastructure in the country.

The private sector donors are not giving any cash to the federal government and they have made this clear to the people. They said they will support the fight against the pandemic by asking government where they want healthcare infrastructure to be provided.

What government has done is to request them to build a 30-bed isolation ward and a 10-bed Intensive Care Unit in each state in the country. In addition, the federal government has given them a list of equipment and commodities that will also be needed. Therefore, the issue of using their donations to provide palliative cannot arise. Mohammed said

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Ontarios death toll from COVID-19 has doubled in the last week as the number of residents who have taken ill is poised to pass the 10,000 mark.

The province had 445 fatalities linked to the highly contagious novel coronavirus, that originated in China late last year, as of Wednesday at 5 p.m., up by 35 people in the previous 24 hours.

A Star compilation of online reports from the provinces 34 regional health units also showed an increase of 536 confirmed and probable cases to a total of 9,591 in the same time period, an increase of 5.9 per cent.

Although health officials expect this week will mark the peak of infection from the first wave of COVID-19, a memo Wednesday from a Toronto retirement community and nursing home underscored the dangers that still lurk.

One of the most difficult aspects of this situation is that the vast majority of residents who tested positive were not exhibiting symptoms, Heather Janes, chief executive of Christie Gardens, wrote after several more got test results showing they have the virus.

The first cases were detected at the facility two weeks ago and residents of the nursing home portion have been relocated to one area in a bid to contain any spread.

Janes asked residents to stay in their units for the safety of all and to not go out for walks or other activities.

We are learning more than ever that any of us can be carrying the virus and not even be aware, she added in the memo.

Ontarios chief medical officer of health, Dr. David Williams, said almost half the new cases reported by the province Wednesday morning were in long-term care as the province puts an increased focus on reducing infections in nursing homes.

Overall, the provincial Ministry of Health reported there were 795 patients in hospital suffering from serious effects of COVID-19 with 254 in intensive care and 188 of them on ventilators to breathe as of 4 p.m. Tuesday.

Those numbers have been stable or declining slightly for days and are far below surge projections that had been feared.

Another 6,010 Ontarians were tested for the virus, which is short of the target of 8,000 set for Wednesday, and 4,429 people were awaiting test results.

To date, 3,902 Ontarians who tested positive for the virus have recovered.

Across Canada, there have been 27,557 confirmed cases with 954 deaths, said Dr. Theresa Tam, the federal public health officer.

Lab tests have been done on more than 462,000 people, with six per cent testing positive.

Tam said that the rate of growth has slowed, now doubling every 10 days instead of every three days as was the case in late March.

But Tam stressed, as did Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, that it is too early to relax measures, saying the epidemic may be slowing down but we need to go slowly.
(Photo : Freestocks on Unsplash) Photographers Can't File A Case Against Websites For Using Their Instagram Posts Court Says

Instagram posts of professional photographers can be used by websites without breaking the law. In a report by The Verge, the "Mashable" website won a lawsuit on April 13 with the court ruling that websites can embed a photographer's Instagram post without breaking copyright law according to the terms of service of Instagram.

It was determined by The New York District that Stephanie Sinclair, a journalist and professional photographer, offered a "valid sublicense" to websites when she posted her photographs publicly on Instagram.

The filed case came from the 2016 Mashable post showcasing the works of female photographers, which also embedded one of Sinclair's photo posted in her Instagram feed. The website previously failed to directly license the Instagram post. Because of what happened, Sinclair sued Ziff Davis, the parent company of Mashable, for using her Instagram post by just embedding it.

However, Judge Kimba Wood reiterated that Instagram's terms of service state that posted photos should be fully paid, transferable, royalty-free, and sublicensable. On the other hand, images that are posted publicly on Instagram offers embedding as an option for the websites. Kimba Wood explained to the court that the terms of Instagram effectively grant a sublicense on user's public posts to be used by websites legally.

"The user who initially uploaded the content has already granted Instagram the authority to sublicense the use of 'public' content to users who share it," Kimba Wood stated.

Photographers can't file sue websites for using their Instagram posts, court says

According to The Verge's report, Sinclair disagreed with the court and reasoned that the terms and conditions of Instagram were too incomprehensible, circular, and contradictory based on her understanding.

She also added that the set-up provided by Instagram to its users is unfair because it lets people post their photos on other sites legally or gives them a choice to avoid one of the world's most popular photo-sharing service, Instagram itself.

"Instagram's dominance of photograph- and video-sharing social media, coupled with the expansive transfer of rights that Instagram demands from its users, means that Sinclair's dilemma is a real one," Kimba Wood responded on the statement of Sinclair.

However, Kimba Wood pointed out that when Sinclair posted her works "publicly", the professional photographer had made her choice to agree with Instagram's terms of service which the court cannot release her from the agreement she made.

The decision made by the court contradicts the 2018 ruling which states that a Twitter post embedded by a website can potentially break the copyright law. However, The Hollywood Reporter clarified on its post that the decisions made by the court depends on the different lines of reasoning.

The previous case which includes the websites Breitbart, Yahoo, Time, Boston Globe, and Vox Media, considered and rejected the long-standing "server test" which states that websites that embed an image posted on other sites, are not infringing copyright. The said ruling doesn't explain when can it be applied.

But, the case of Sinclair and the previous one emphasizes that the terms and conditions of a web platform, even though it is not read by everyone, can have serious impacts on its users.

 2021 TECHTIMES.com All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission.
Across Africa, advanced and low-tech solutions take leading role in efforts to meet challenges unleashed by COVID-19.

In normal times, Nichanor Ochieng sells shoes on a busy junction in Dandora, a high-density, low-income neighbourhood in Kenyas capital, Nairobi.

But these are not normal times. As the new coronavirus continues to spread, his small shop has now been turned into a temporary distribution point for free hand-cleaning and other essential products, piloting a tech-driven initiative aimed at helping slow down the pathogens transmission.

Launched by a coalition of community groups and businesses  including some of the countrys leading technology firms  Safe Hands Kenya is working to use existing tech-enabled supply chains to hand out items such as sanitiser, masks, soap and surface disinfectant, particularly in poor, densely populated areas.

Most Kenyans live on a daily wage  they have to go out to work. Where they live, social distancing is impossible, says Andrew Waititu, CEO of the newly formed Safe Hands Kenya.

Sanitation is the next best step Take products that are already being manufactured and get them into peoples hands.

Nichonar Ochiengs shop in Dandora [Courtesy of Nichonar Ochieng/Al Jazeera]

Some of the coalitions tech firms are already well-known for their e-commerce and supply chain platforms, delivering produce and other essential goods and services.

Collectively, they have access to more than 200,000 geolocated points of sale across the East African nation, many  like Ochiengs  located in informal settlements. The firms have stitched together their retail datasets with population surveys to build a geospatial demand map, which they say should help ensure more precise and equitable distribution of products to vulnerable communities.

These are slums, and the virus can spread easily in areas like Dandora, says 29-year-old Ochieng, who lives with six family members in a one-bedroom house.

Sometimes water is a problem, and some people cant afford soap. They cant afford sanitiser, he adds, having been selected for the pilot as a cooking fuel agent for Koko Networks, an energy start-up and a coalition partner.

The coalitions goal volumes are beyond what manufacturers can viably donate, so they are asking local producers to supply at cost and have been raising funds to scale up as quickly as possible. Distribution of a million bars of soap is already under way, and a media-based education campaign has been launched. They have also had an endorsement nod from the Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (Africa CDC).





Technology front and centre

The number of confirmed coronavirus cases in Africa still remains fairly low compared with other parts of the world, totalling more than 16,200, according to Africa CDC.

But as cases continue to rise, many worry that fragile healthcare systems will be swiftly overwhelmed, especially if the virus hits overcrowded areas. There are also significant concerns about the many millions of people who live without safety nets  and how long lockdowns imposed by governments as part of coronavirus containment measures can realistically last.

Like elsewhere in the world, technological solutions are being adopted across Africa to deal with problems caused by the crisis surrounding COVID-19, the highly infectious respiratory disease caused by the coronavirus.

From clinics offering virtual appointments to the rise of video-conferencing and community WhatsApp groups, African nations are leaning on many of the same workarounds that are being embraced globally.

Were seeing an unprecedented scenario in Africa where technology has become front and centre in so many everyday issues, says technology analyst Moses Kemibaro. Internet service providers are doing serious upgrades to sustain customer demands.

In a relatively early move, some telecommunications operators  including in Kenya, Rwanda, Zambia and Ghana  removed fees on smaller mobile money transactions to discourage people from handling cash. Other payment platforms have followed suit, making digital payment services more freely available.

Information about coronavirus  and how to try and stay safe  is being widely disseminated by WhatsApp, SMS and other platforms, with materials translated into local languages.

Chatbots help get information to people whose main data spend is on WhatsApp. Following millions of sign-ups to South Africas COVID-19 HealthAlert service, praekelt.org, the Johannesburg-based non-profit behind the bot, partnered with the World Health Organization (WHO) to create a global version.

Young Kenyans interact with the Shujaaz platform, which has been gathering insights into peoples experience of the crisis in East Africa [Barbara Minishi/Shujaaz Inc]

Technology is also being used to quickly gather insights into citizens lives amid the pandemic.

Multimedia youth platform Shujaaz Inc is tapping into its 7.5 million-strong network of young people across East Africa through existing SMS, mobile phone and social media channels.

Most recently, 44 percent of fans who replied say their income and ability to cover expenses is the part of their lives that has been worst hit, says Sylvia Thuku, Shujaaz Incs research manager. Another 22 percent note a deterioration in their physical and mental wellbeing.

Many tech initiatives across Africa responding to the pandemic are still in the earliest stages, but innovators are scrambling to find solutions to the inevitable economic shocks or strain on healthcare systems.

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Several are looking at ways to repurpose mobile health monitoring platforms to detect and trace COVID-19. South Africas epione.net is piloting a symptom tracker, which allows users to request a screening if they meet case definition guidelines.

Various teams across the continent are working on low-cost personal protective equipment and ventilator alternatives, while Nigerias blood delivery start-up LifeBank has launched a mobile testing unit in Lagos and created a national register of the countrys (extremely limited) critical medical equipment.

Leaning on more familiar, low-tech solutions is also essential  such as for many millions of children affected by school closures.

While smartphone use has grown rapidly, the GSMA found that in 2018 only 23 percent of sub-Saharan Africas population used mobile internet regularly. And as incomes are threatened, the cost of data may also become prohibitive.

Elsiemae Buckle of Rising Academies records a lesson in Sierra Leones capital, Freetown, that will be broadcast on national radio [Courtesy of Rising Academies

In Kenya, Eneza Education has partnered with Safaricom to deliver free learning materials by even the simplest of mobile phones.

And in Liberia and Sierra Leone, where schools closed for months during the 2014 Ebola outbreak, there has been a swift return to radio.

200409085324155

Most children dont have access to computers or the internet at home. The only medium that is both economic and realistic is the radio, explains Elsiemae Buckle of Rising Academies, which is repurposing existing curriculum content into radio-ready scripts for nationwide broadcasts in both countries.

Rising Academies have also put their scripts online under a creative commons license. In just a week, they have had interest in the materials from across 10 different countries, mostly in Africa but some in South Asia.

After the war here, it was really hard to get education up and running again, Buckle said, referring to Sierra Leones conflict, which ended in 2002. Its so important to make sure learning goes on.

Around the world, enormous challenges exposed by the unfolding pandemic have been met with urgent innovation. Across Africa, particularly extreme and unmet needs have been revealed  to which innovative solutions could also emerge, if given the right space to develop.

Ironically, COVID-19 could be a crucial launchpad for many nascent technology offerings in Africa, simply because never before has there been a big enough need in the marketplace, Kemibaro says.
[April 15, 2020] Sprott Shaw College Joins the Fight Against COVID-19

Vancouver, BC., April 15, 2020 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- via NEWMEDIAWIRE -- Sprott Shaw College (Sprott Shaw) announces that it will join the fight against COVID-19. Sprott Shaw will donate approximately 5,000 pieces of medical supplies to the healthcare sector in Metro Vancouver. Also, Sprott Shaw has organized qualified staff, healthcare faculty members and student volunteers in fighting the frontline battles at hospitals, senior care homes, and other community centres. Collectively, Sprott Shaw has donated gloves, surgical and N95 masks, alcohol swabs, face shields, and other protective medical supplies that hospitals such as the Vancouver General Hospital and the Royal Inland Hospital may urgently need.

It is humbling to realize the role we play and the gift our sector has given us. It is even more humbling and important to understand the responsibility that comes with it, commented Victor Tesan, President of Sprott Shaw College, and President of Education Services and Chief Operating Officer of CIBT Education Group Inc. We are committed to supporting our staff, students and the communities now more than ever. In the Metro Vancouver area, we have Health Care Assistant students and instructors who are completing and leading clinical experiences in long-term care settings, hospitals, and senior homes, continued Victor Tean. Several of our staff members have also returned to work at their respective sites at the Vancouver General Hospital, Richmond General Hospital, St. Michaels Hospital, and St. Pauls Hospital. Also, our entire Level 4 Practical Nursing Access cohort has decided to take leave from their program and work at the respective healthcare facilities within their community."



In Penticton, our campus director visited Nkmip Resource Center (Oliver Indian Band) and spent time ensuring masks fit staff who perform the community nursing duties to ensure that they are fully protected, said Victor Tesan. Our practicum instructors suspended their instructor duties to risk themselves at the frontline by working full-time screening patients for COVID-19 testing at the Victoria General Hospital. As an educational institution and a responsible corporate citizen, we support our healthcare workers at the frontline and our community at large. We are also recognizing the #SprottShawHeroes who are risking their lives for us and changing the world one day at a time. Learn more about the heroes here: https://www.facebook.com/sprottshaw ."

Toby Chu, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of CIBT Education Group Inc., commented, I am grateful for the unselfish acts and the compassionate spirit of our college staff, our instructors and our student volunteers. CIBT will do whatever is necessary to support them, and to fight this pandemic outbreak hand-in-hand with our healthcare workers and our community leaders. About Sprott Shaw College: Established in 1903, Sprott Shaw College is a distinguished education institution with a long-standing reputation of equipping their students with innovative ways of thinking through hands-on training and practical courses. With 16 designated campuses in British Columbia, Sprott Shaw College offers over 130 career-focused diploma and certificate programs in the healthcare, business and technical-trade sectors. Sprott Shaw College offers monthly start dates, flexible scheduling, and career placement assistance. For information about this news release, please contact:

Victor Tesan

President, Sprott Shaw College

President, Education Services & Chief Operating Officer, CIBT Education Group Inc.

O: 604-777-7560

E: [email protected]

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N-Dubz star Dappy, 32, received 'words of advice' from Hertfordshire police after he was caught going fishing during lockdown.

According to government guidelines, Britons should only leave the house to shop for basic necessities, have one form of exercise a day, any medical need or work.

However, rapper Dappy - real name Costadinos Contostavlos - appeared to flout these rules as he was seen fishing in Gobions Wood, Brookmans Park, Hertfordshire, on Friday.

Caught: N-Dubz star Dappy, 32, received 'words of advice' from Hertfordshire police after he was caught going fishing during lockdown

A spokesperson for Hertfordshire Police told MailOnline: 'Police were called at 6.38pm on Friday (10 April) to reports of two males fishing in a lake in Gobions Wood, Brookmans Park.

'Officers attended the scene straight away and found the two males heading home. Words of advice were given in relation to the importance of social distancing.'

A member of the public in the park at the time told The Mirror that when he confronted the star, he was told: 'I can do whatever the f**k I want'.

Seen on camera: Dappy - real name Costadinos Contostavlos - appeared to flout these rules as he was seen fishing in Gobions Wood, Brookmans Park, Hertfordshire, on Friday

Responding the reports online, Dappy claimed it was a 'false story', with the pictures taken before lockdown, then went on to state that he would be doing nothing wrong if he went fishing as it is classed as exercise.

MailOnline has contacted Dappy's representatives for comment.

Pictures and videos of the star fishing were uploaded online by his friend, who captioned the clip: '@dappy100 We not even been here for 5 mins & we catching'.

Defence: Responding the reports online, Dappy claimed it was a 'false story', then went on to state that he would be doing nothing wrong if he went fishing as it is classed as exercise

It comes a few months after Dappy attacked one of his fans by direct messaging her to brand her a 'fat ugly pig', a 'tramp' and a 'b***h'.

The mother-of-one, Jade Easthope, 26, from Doncaster, tweeted in February this year that she liked the star's latest song Splash, posting: '#Guiltypleasure #Nananiiiii [Dappy's catchphrase]'

This, however, prompted Dappy to slide into Jade's DMs and launch into a bizarre attack on her, demanding she 'stop taunting him' and pelting her with unkind remarks.

A month prior to that he sent another recorded message to a fan who also told him his music is her 'guilty pleasure'.

The fan was Ellana Prior, 21, and he ranted to her in the voice note: 'Do you know what guilty pleasure means you little b***h? It means something that you like that you're embarrassed about.

'I don't make music for it to be called that, do you understand? So f*** off man, you stupid little cow man.'

The fan sent the message to Dappy back in September last year but he only replied in January, two days before Splash was released.
West Bengal governor Jagdeep Dhankhar triggered a fresh controversy on Wednesday by suggesting the state government should look at calling in Central paramilitary forces to enforce the Covid-19-related lockdown.

Lockdown protocol has to be thoroughly implemented to ward off #coronavirus. Police and administration @MamataOfficial failing to effect 100% #SocialDistancing or curbing religious congregations be shown door. Lockdown must succeed-examine central para forces requisitioning! he tweeted.

His tweet came in the wake of Kolkata Police and West Bengal Police taking additional steps to prevent crowds as people venture out of their homes to buy essential supplies.

Drones are being used across the state to trace crowds and identify people violating the nationwide lockdown that has been extended till May 3. Police are also using loudspeakers to urge people to stay indoors.

A senior official of West Bengal Police, who didnt wish to be named, said: Over the past few days, as many as 1,174 markets have been relocated to spacious areas nearby so that social distancing is maintained in markets, while the area of 963 markets has been expanded.

There still are 256 markets that remain crowded. The administration is looking for suitable alternative places nearby.

Chief minister Mamata Banerjee, who has often clashed with the governor, has repeatedly said she wants a strict lockdown with a humane face.

The states ruling Trinamool Congress party criticised the governor but said it would rather ignore him.

The governor has no other work but to try and disturb the state government. The Mamata Banerjee administration is completely preoccupied with responding to the unprecedented situation over the novel Coronavirus and has no time to respond to someone behaving like a Bharatiya Janata Party worker, said Trinamool spokesperson Snehasish Chakraborty.

In a separate development, the BJP MP from Alipurduar, John Barla, has written to Union home minister Amit Shah, alleging the state administration has put him under house arrest.

I was out to supervise relief work and supply essentials to the needy but the police seized all items and told me I was supposed to stay home because the lockdown also applied to me, Barla said.
The Kangra district administration on Wednesday warned all rural civic body members of penal action in case they shield information about people returning homes in their areas from abroad or other districts and states.

Kangra Deputy Commissioner Rakesh Prajapati issued the warning while asking all sub-divisional magistrates in the district to strictly enforce curfew provisions in their jurisdiction.

Any gram panchayat pradhan and secretary who fail to provide information regarding people of their areas who got back to their homes from abroad, other states or district or have participated in Tablighi Jamaat meet would invite action, he added.

He emphasised that there was a complete ban on entry or exit of any one in the district.

He said SDMs have been asked to issue curfew passes after complete verification of the demand raised.

Any person going to PGI or other health institute for treatment would have to furnish complete information. Similarly, only family members would be provided passes in case of any death or cremation, he said.

He has also asked district authorities to closely examine curfew passes of people coming from other districts or states and if the pass was found bogus, quarantine them for 28 days on border areas.

Four such persons coming from Jammu had been quarantined.

Prajapati also urged people to stay at home to keep themselves and their family safe.

Social distancing was the mantra to defeat Corona, he said.

He said that any attempt to conceal information regarding return of any person from abroad, other states and districts or participation in Tablighi Jamaat meet at Nizamuddin in New Delhi would be severely dealt with.

Members of the Panchayati Raj Institutions and concerned secretaries and officials both in rural and urban areas would he held responsible for not sharing such information and FIR would be slapped against them, he said.

Any person, having participated in the Tablighi Jammat and failed to inform the authorities about his arrival would face action now, as the time allotted for the same has expired, he added.

The deputy commissioner said there was no restriction on the movement of shepherds (Gaddis) in the district.

Mules, horses and camels could also be moved from one place to another. Shepherds were being facilitated by providing ration at suitable places. Fodder was being supplied regularly in the district and concerned SDMs could be contacted in case of any difficulty, he added.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Kim Brent / The Enterprise

Jefferson County Sheriff Zena Stephens and her counterparts all across the country are trying to reduce their jail populations as much as possible while the coronavirus is surging, and that makes a lot of sense. They dont want the virus spreading to guards and inmates through facilities that cant social-distance. But the same logic being applied to this current effort  selective release of certain inmates  should be continued after the virus has faded.

The current round of reductions applies to inmates who have been arrested for certain nonviolent or lower-level offenses but not yet convicted in a trial. Simply put, many of them do not need to be warehoused in a jail until they go to trial. Even if they are convicted, some will be sentenced to fines or community service  not time behind bars.
CHICAGO, April 15, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- One in nine people face hunger in America, including more than 11 million children. Feeding America, the nation's largest domestic hunger-relief organization, estimates that an additional 17.1 million people could face hunger in the next six months as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. School closures, rising unemployment and rising poverty due to quarantine and stay-at-home orders have impacted everyone, especially people already at risk of hunger.

With Feeding America estimating $1.4 billion in additional resources needed over the next six months to provide enough food for our neighbors facing hunger, food banks need community support now more than ever. The "Fight Hunger. Spark Change." campaign provides everyone with an opportunity to help.

In its seventh year, the "Fight Hunger. Spark Change" campaign will run online and in-store through May 11, 2020. There are two ways to participate  donating on Feeding America's website or purchasing a participating item in-store or online.

Donate at www.FeedingAmerica.org/Walmart.





For every participating product purchased at U.S. Walmart stores, Sam's Clubs or on Walmart.com and SamsClub.com during the campaign, the supplier will donate the monetary equivalent of at least one meal ($0.10) on behalf of a Feeding America member food bank, up to applicable limits. See specially marked packages for full details.

"Every day, the Feeding America nationwide network of 200 food banks is on the ground helping children, families, and seniors who face hunger. During this pandemic, food banks will continue to distribute food to our neighbors in need," said Claire Babineaux-Fontenot, CEO of Feeding America. "Walmart and Sam's Club have been unwavering partners in the fight to end hunger. We are deeply thankful for their ongoing support during this unprecedented time."

Walmart kickstarted the campaign with a $3 million donation to Feeding America and member food banks. Each Walmart and Sam's Club will partner with at least one local Feeding America food bank, and the 22 participating suppliers include: Bush Brothers & Company, Campbell Soup Company, Clif Bar & Company, Conagra Brands, Crazy Richard's, Ferrara Candy Company, General Mills, Great Value, J.M. Smucker, Kellogg's, Kraft Heinz, Materne North America, Monster Energy, Mott's, Nestle Waters, Ocean's Halo, PepsiCo, Post Consumer Brands, Soylent, The Coca-Cola Company, The Clorox Company and Unilever. The Walmart Foundation recently gave an additional $5 million to Feeding America to help support communities and individuals facing hunger during the COVID-19 outbreak.

"'Fight Hunger. Spark Change.' has been a way for Walmart and Sam's Club to partner with our suppliers and customers to help bring food to the people who need it most," said Julie Gehrki, vice president of philanthropy for Walmart.org. "It's been an important effort every year, but this one is especially critical given the current demand on food banks. With millions of Americans worrying about how they will feed their families right now, 'Fight Hunger. Spark Change.' is a powerful way for all of us to help."

To learn more about the campaign visit www.Walmart.com/FightHunger and www.SamsClub.com/FightHunger.

About Feeding America

Feeding America is the largest hunger-relief organization in the United States. Through a network of 200 food banks and 60,000 food pantries and meal programs, we provide meals to more than 40 million people each year. Feeding America also supports programs that prevent food waste and improve food security among the people we serve; educates the public about the problem of hunger; and advocates for legislation that protects people from going hungry. Individuals, charities, businesses and government all have a role in ending hunger. Donate. Volunteer. Advocate. Educate. Together we can solve hunger. Visit www.feedingamerica.org, find us on Facebook or follow us on Twitter.

About Walmart

Walmart Inc. helps people around the world save money and live better - anytime and anywhere - in retail stores, online, and through their mobile devices. Each week, over 265 million customers and members visit approximately 11,500 stores under 56 banners in 27 countries and eCommerce websites. With fiscal year 2020 revenue of $524 billion, Walmart employs over 2.2 million associates worldwide. Walmart continues to be a leader in sustainability, corporate philanthropy and employment opportunity. Additional information about Walmart can be found by visiting corporate.walmart.com, on Facebook at facebook.com/walmart and on Twitter at twitter.com/walmart.

About Sam's Club

Sam's Club, a division of Walmart, Inc., is a leading membership warehouse club offering superior products, savings and services to millions of members in nearly 600 clubs in the U.S. and Puerto Rico. Now in its 37th year, Sam's Club continues to redefine warehouse shopping with its highly curated assortment of high-quality fresh food and Member's Mark items, in addition to market leading technologies and services like Scan & Go, Club Pickup and home delivery service in select markets. To learn more about Sam's Club, visit the Sam's Club Newsroom, shop at SamsClub.com, and interact with Sam's Club on Twitter and Facebook.

Press Contact

Zuani Villarreal at [email protected] or 312.641.6532

SOURCE Feeding America

Related Links

http://www.feedingamerica.org


The nations two largest rivers top a new listing of the most endangered waterways, according to a report released Tuesday.

The Washington, D.C.-based conservation organization American Rivers released its list of the 10 most endangered rivers in the United States. The Upper Mississippi River in Minnesota, Wisconsin, Iowa, Illinois and Missouri was cited as the most endangered, followed by the lower Missouri River in Kansas, Nebraska, Iowa and Missouri.

American Rivers, in its annual listing, cited increasingly severe flooding driven by climate change on both the Mississippi and Missouri rivers.

Mixing poor river management with climate change has created a recipe for disaster, Bob Irvin, American Rivers president and CEO, said in a statement. Lives, businesses and property are at risk. Its time for our leaders to prioritize solutions that protect rivers and strengthen communities.

The Mississippi River had major flooding last year and it is flooding again, though damage this spring has been minimal. The river was from 2 to 4 feet above flood stage Tuesday throughout much of Iowa, Illinois and Missouri, and the National Weather Service has warned of a high risk of flooding through May.

Extreme flooding has become more common along the Mississippi. For example, Hannibal, Missouri, Mark Twains hometown, has seen seven of the 10 worst floods on record since 2000.

Meanwhile, parts of the lower Missouri River saw record and near-record flooding last spring, damaging and destroying levees, shutting down major roads and displacing hundreds of residents. Water remained so persistently high that the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has been unable to repair several damaged levees.

American Rivers said communities of color and economically disadvantaged places are most likely to suffer because wealthier towns are able to build higher levees that worsen flooding for those who cant.

The organization urged federal officials and leaders in Upper Mississippi River states to fund a Corps plan aimed at better management of the river and floodplains.

For the lower Missouri River, American Rivers promoted flood protection plans that give the river room, and urged the Corps to prioritize flood risk reduction and habitat restoration.

Other waterways listed as among the 10 most endangered include the Big Sunflower River in Mississippi at No. 3, followed by the Puyallup River in Washington state, the South Fork Salmon River in Idaho, the Menominee River in Michigan and Wisconsin, Rapid Creek in South Dakota, Okefenokee Swamp in Georgia and Florida, the Ocklawaha River in Florida, and the Lower Youghiogheny River in Pennsylvania.
It was with deep regret that we learnt of the death of Aidan Gray at his sister Jackies residence in Barry, Kenagh on Thursday, April 2 at the young age of 54 years, having lost his battle with his illness of over two years which he bore with quiet dignity.

Aidan was predeceased by his parents Peter and Margaret. He was a great character when he was young and working in Martin Murrays pub in Taghshinny and left Ireland at the age of 18 to work in Bristol in England.

He was an honest and hard-working man who worked there in the construction industry. In the last twenty years or so he bought many houses in England, refurbished them and sold them on again.

In his younger days he loved go to disco dancing and travelled home every year to visit his family and many friends in the area.

Due to his ill health he returned home last January and stayed with his sister Jackie and her husband Joe Egan in Barry where he was well looked after by all the family.

Following Aidans private Funeral, his remains were laid to rest at Carrickedmond Cemetery. A Memorial Service will take place some time in the future.



We extend our deepest sympathy to his brothers and sisters, Mike, Dennis, Colm, Irene, Dessie, Mary, Jackie, Beatrice, Fiona and Angela, sister-in-law, brothers-in-law, nieces, nephews, relatives and friends. May he rest in peace.
North Korea Launches Missiles Ahead of S. Korea Election

By William Gallo April 14, 2020

North Korea test-fired multiple short-range missiles Tuesday, its latest military provocation that comes just a day before an important national election in neighboring South Korea.

Some of the projectiles appeared to be short-range cruise missiles fired from North Korea's east coast, while others may have been air-to-ground missiles fired from a fighter jet, according to South Korean military officials.

In a text message, South Korea's Joint Chiefs of Staff said it continues to assess the launches.

North Korea, which has tested five rounds of short-range missiles this year, often conducts military provocations ahead of South Korean electionsostensibly in order to influence the vote or pressure the government in Seoul.

South Koreans on Wednesday will choose 300 members of the country's National Assembly. The outcome will help determine the direction of the second half of President Moon Jae-in's five-year term in office.

Will South Koreans care?

Moon, a progressive who has prioritized engagement with the North, has seen surging approval ratings as he oversees one of the world's most effective coronavirus responses. North Korea is seen as a minor issue in the election.

"The North Koreans have a tendency of trying to interfere in South Korea's elections," says Leif-Eric Easley, a professor at Ewha University in Seoul. "This cycle, there has been less debate in Seoul about relations with Pyongyang because COVID-19 has taken up so much political bandwidth."

"The Kim regime, however, will not be ignored and may even be a bit annoyed about South Koreans practicing their democracy on [North Korean founder] Kim Il-Sung's birthday," which is April 15, added Easley.

Even during normal times, North Korea's provocations usually receive relatively little attention in South Korea. But Tuesday's launches are almost certain to be drowned out by pandemic coverage, meaning their impact may be limited further.

The missile tests appear to be North Korea's "last ditch effort" to influence the vote, says Kim Duyeon, a senior adviser for Northeast Asia and nuclear policy at the International Crisis Group. "But I don't think it will have much of an effect," she adds.

Besides South Korean politics, North Korea has other reasons to test missiles, stresses Kim. The launches help North Korea perfect its short-range missile technology, which threaten U.S. allies and forces in Asia. The tests also serve as a show of domestic confidence in North Korea's ability to handle the coronavirus pandemic.

No infections?

North Korea continues to insist it does not have any coronavirus infections, even as the virus ravages countries around the world.

Earlier this month, General Robert Abrams, the top U.S. general in South Korea, said he does not accept North Korea's claim of being coronavirus-free. "I can tell you that is an impossible claim based on all of the intel that we have seen," Abrams told VOA and CNN in a joint interview.

North Korea attempted to seal its borders to keep out the coronavirus in late January, just after the outbreak reportedly emerged in neighboring China. That move foreshadowed the severe immigration restrictions later seen in countries around the world. But completely sealing North Korea's borders would be difficult, since its economy relies on both formal and informal trade with China.

A North Korean outbreak could lead to a humanitarian disaster, because the country lacks adequate medical supplies and infrastructure. Global aid agencies have begun supplying medical aid to North Korea, though the process has been complicated by international sanctions imposed over Pyongyang's nuclear weapons program.

North Korea is banned from any ballistic missile activity under United Nations Security Council resolutions. But U.S. President Donald Trump says he is not concerned about North Korea's short-range tests.

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Opinion Article

15 April 2020

As Coronavirus (COVID-19) continues to impact travel, it's important for hotels to have an action plan in place that addresses both the current state and the future rise in travel demand.

According to a special forecast from STR and Tourism Economics, due to the COVID-19 outbreak, the hotel industry is projected to report significant declines across demand, occupancy, ADR, and revenue per available room (RevPAR) in 2020. While travel has come to a virtual standstill due to the COVID-19 outbreak, the market is expected to regain its footing in the latter part of the year and next year.

Based on research from CBRE, from the start of the US outbreak in January 2020, it is predicted that it will take approximately 6-10 months (June) for US hotel demand to recover, and 12-16 months (December) for ADR and RevPAR to recover. Therefore, hoteliers need to take the necessary steps to adequately prepare for recovery, while also setting proper expectations and KPIs.

Overall, your hotel should consider a three-phased approach :

While Travel is on Pause : While people are not traveling and many hotels are closed, hotels should stay connected with past and future guests through social, email, and editorial content that entertains and adds value to maintain a strong brand relationship.

While people are not traveling and many hotels are closed, hotels should stay connected with past and future guests through social, email, and editorial content that entertains and adds value to maintain a strong brand relationship. Initial Rise in Travel Demand : Ramp up marketing efforts focused on brand awareness and fueling new guests into the booking funnel with affordable CPCs and CPMs to reach people beginning to daydream about rebooking and planning vacations. Ensure a flexible cancellation policy and sensitive messaging relevant to the situation.

Ramp up marketing efforts focused on brand awareness and fueling new guests into the booking funnel with affordable CPCs and CPMs to reach people beginning to daydream about rebooking and planning vacations. Ensure a flexible cancellation policy and sensitive messaging relevant to the situation. Travel Demand Strengthens: Continue marketing efforts shifting focus to lower-funnel intent as well as targeting the right demographics and feeder markets with the right messaging and packages.

This is the first article in a three-part series focused on each phase of a hotel's COVID-19 recovery strategy. This article focuses on the current recovery phase while travel is on pause. For the full recovery strategy across phases, download our COVID-19 Hotel Recovery Strategy eBook.

Recovery Phase One: While Travel is on Pause

Today, while most travel is on pause, it's important to follow crisis-management best practices by swiftly developing a prevention plan, communicating to employees and guests, and making critical shifts to revenue management and digital strategies to ensure success. During this time, it is critical to clearly communicate if your hotel is open, your hotel's prevention plan, and any other relevant information or frequently asked questions in regards to COVID-19 on your website and across digital channels. It is also important to maintain flexible cancellation policies both for existing reservations and future bookings.

Understanding Travel Perception During COVID-19.

While travel demand remains slow, now is a great time to get in touch with traveler's perception of the COVID-19 situation, understand how your brand can help, and take consumer sentiment into consideration for your recovery strategy. In a recent survey of travelers in North America from Fuel Travel, when asked the first word people think of when they think of travel right now, participants responded with words like "scary," "unsafe," "caution," and "wait." This sentiment aligns with travel demand forecasts that show travel activity not picking back up until June. But this study sheds light on a critical question: How can your hotel add value now?

Adding Value to People's Lives and Giving Back.

While COVID-19 is still impacting travel and the hotel is either closed or experiencing a significant drop in bookings, your hotel brand should stay connected to past guests and share valuable content people can enjoy while at home on your website, blog, social media, and email. All messaging should be empathetic, positive, and overall uplifting. During a crisis, people will remember how your brand made them feel, and providing the right content can strengthen the brand relationship long-term.

If any marketing remains live at this time, the focus should be on brand awareness, with tasteful messaging that drives traffic to valuable content. If your hotel wishes to keep any promotions live, they should be focused on advance purchases for future stay dates, with a flexible cancellation policy.

And finally, there is no better time for your hotel to be focused on the greater good and giving back to the community. Consider little ways you can give back like partnering with a charity and allowing loyalty members to donate to the cause to earn loyalty points or rewards for a future stay or providing complimentary rooms or an exclusive rate to first responders.

Here are the top 10 considerations to implement now while travel is on pause:

1. Develop a Prevention Plan: If you haven't already, document a prevention plan that protects employees and guests while on property to put potential guests at ease and to help ensure a positive, safe experience at your hotel. It's important to note that if your hotel is currently closed, guests will want to be assured this prevention plan is still in place once the hotel reopens.

2. Communicate Critical COVID-19 Information: It is important for your hotel to address if the hotel is open, cancellation policies, and that there is a prevention plan in place across critical channels such as your website, local listings, social media, and email. Your website should address the following topics to put guests at ease:

Prevention plan

Cancellation policy (waiving of cancellation fees is recommended)

Contact information if guests have any questions or concerns

Frequently asked questions around COVID-19

How the property is helping the community

3. Implement a Flexible Cancellation Policy: While COVID-19 is still impacting travel demand, hotels need to have a clear action plan to address existing reservations and cancellations, with a flexible cancellation policy on existing and future reservations. Through proper communication with guests who have booked, you can foster loyalty and encourage future bookings. For existing reservations while the "stay at home" order is still in place throughout the United States and around the world, consider proactively reaching out to guests inviting them to rebook with added value or incentive.

According to the Fuel Travel study, over 50% of respondents have either canceled or rescheduled a trip, with cancellations outpacing rescheduling by 4:1. For reservations that have already been cancelled, prompt guests to book a future stay or purchase a gift card for the reservation amount with an added complimentary bonus to incentivize purchase.

Overall, if your hotel brand wants to maintain strong brand loyalty and enforce confidence to rebook, your hotel should maintain a flexible, stress-free cancellation policy for at least the next six months or until end of year.

4. Reassess your Digital Strategy: While travel is on pause, this is a great time to reassess your digital strategy, marketing assets, and take time to revamp initiatives and processes to set your hotel up for future success. Considerations to revamp your strategy long-term:

Audit marketing assets and what creative or templates should be revamped or redesigned

Revisit or develop an online review and reputation management strategy

Revisit website copy for relevancy, value, and brand voice

Revisit website UX and design elements

Develop an editorial calendar and communication plan for the next 60 days

Audit digital tools and martech to reassess value, revisit internal processes for efficiencies, etc.

5. Give Back to Healthcare Workers: Consider offering an affordable rate for healthcare workers and first responders who are working around the clock and/or need to self-isolate from loved ones. Some hotels are offering complimentary rooms to the healthcare community through the American Hotel & Lodging Association's Hospitality for Hope initiative. Consider the following ways to give back to the healthcare community:

Offer an affordable rate

Offer complimentary rooms

Donate food from the hotel restaurant to local hospitals

Donate to COVID-19 relief and recovery funds

6. Create Valuable and Entertaining Editorial Content: Editorial content that adds value while everyone must social distance and stay at home, is a great way to lift the spirits of past guests who currently can't travel or visit your destination. Sharing recipes from your hotel chef, at-home spa treatments from your hotel spa, and fun activity ideas for the kids are just a few ways you can help people enhance their stay-at-home experience. Editorial content ideas can include:

"Cook with Our Chef" Blog Post Series: Share a recipe from the hotel restaurant's chef or an iconic dish from the destination. Get creative and share a complimentary cocktail recipe or wine recommendation that is perfectly paired with the dish.

Share a recipe from the hotel restaurant's chef or an iconic dish from the destination. Get creative and share a complimentary cocktail recipe or wine recommendation that is perfectly paired with the dish. "DIY Spa Day" Blog Post Series: Help people escape and indulge with at-home spa tips from your on-site spa.

Help people escape and indulge with at-home spa tips from your on-site spa. "Travel Virtually" Blog Post Series: Share images of the property that people can download and use as their Zoom background or as a desktop wallpaper.

Share images of the property that people can download and use as their Zoom background or as a desktop wallpaper. "Kid-Friendly Scavenger Hunt" Blog Post: Perfect for hotels with a large family travel segment, share top landmarks at the hotel's destination and provide printable cards for each location that parents can print and hide throughout their house as a treasure hunt activity to do with their kids.

Perfect for hotels with a large family travel segment, share top landmarks at the hotel's destination and provide printable cards for each location that parents can print and hide throughout their house as a treasure hunt activity to do with their kids. "Kid-Friendly Coloring Pages" Blog Post: Share a fun fact about the destination and provide an image of the destination that people can print out and color with their kids.

7. Engage and Inspire Past and Future Guests on Social Media: Time spent on social media has increased significantly since people have been social distancing. Social media is a great way to stay connected with past guests and engage followers with inspiring travel and destination content. Asking followers to share pictures from their past stay at your hotel, sharing inspirational photos of your property or destination and asking followers their favorite thing to do in your destination, and sharing virtual tours of destination landmarks are just a few ways to engage past guests. Social media ideas can include:

"Travel the World" Social Post Series: Multi-property brands can invite people to travel the world virtually by sharing first-person photos of each destination and something special about the destination.

Multi-property brands can invite people to travel the world virtually by sharing first-person photos of each destination and something special about the destination. "Our Destination, Your Favorites" Social Post Series: Post a photo of your hotel's destination and ask people to share photos from past stays at your hotel and their favorite spots in that destination with a dedicated hashtag.

Post a photo of your hotel's destination and ask people to share photos from past stays at your hotel and their favorite spots in that destination with a dedicated hashtag. "Museum Tour Guide" Social Post Series: Share a video of a virtual tour of a local museum (using the Google Arts & Culture collection) and ask people to share their favorite exhibits or pieces.

Share a video of a virtual tour of a local museum (using the Google Arts & Culture collection) and ask people to share their favorite exhibits or pieces. "At-Home Workout" Social Post Series: If your hotel offers group activities or fitness classes, create workout or instructional videos guests can use to stay active at home.

If your hotel offers group activities or fitness classes, create workout or instructional videos guests can use to stay active at home. Spotify Playlist Social Post Series: Create and share Spotify playlists with themes related to the hotel brand or destination. Create playlists that people can use for different activities such as working out or cooking.

8. Stay Connected through CRM: Staying connected to past guests and loyalty members through email is a great way to build awareness of your editorial content and to stay connected. Email ideas can include:

Promote Blog Content: Check in with email subscribers and promote blog content around activities they can do at home such as recipes, DIY spa treatments, workouts, etc.

Check in with email subscribers and promote blog content around activities they can do at home such as recipes, DIY spa treatments, workouts, etc. "Turn Your Home Into Hotel" Email: Provide tips that people can use to bring their hotel experience to their home. Examples include using similar bath products, bed linens, and creating a minibar.

Provide tips that people can use to bring their hotel experience to their home. Examples include using similar bath products, bed linens, and creating a minibar. "Loyalty Members Give Back" Email: Choose a charity and invite loyalty members to donate and earn perks such as complimentary dining credit.

Choose a charity and invite loyalty members to donate and earn perks such as complimentary dining credit. "Curate Your Stay at Home" Email: Share content and activities that allow people to experience the destination and hotel from home such as Zoom backgrounds, music playlists, book recommendations, films based in the destination, etc.

9. Focus on the Right Audience with Advanced Purchase Offers: While travel is on pause, some people may still book trips far in advance. During this time it will be even more important for hotels to hone in on the most qualified audience with advanced purchase offers focused on a 90-day booking window, as according to ADARA flight data, people are searching for flights and hotels roughly 90 days out. Targeting strategies while travel is on pause include:

Travel-Intent Data: Leverage first-party travel intent data to hone in audiences that have indicated intent to travel to your destination. Target travel planners with a 90-day booking window for advanced booking campaigns.

Leverage first-party travel intent data to hone in audiences that have indicated intent to travel to your destination. Target travel planners with a 90-day booking window for advanced booking campaigns. Demographic targeting: Exclude demographics that are less likely to travel, such as people age 65+, unemployed, etc.

Exclude demographics that are less likely to travel, such as people age 65+, unemployed, etc. Keyword strategies: Target brand and destination keywords to reach audiences that are likely to be planning travel. Exclude keywords related to Coronavirus and cancellations to avoid reaching audiences that are simply searching for information surrounding the pandemic and reach more qualified users.

10. Digital Marketing Focused on Sensitive Branded Messaging: As mentioned, if any marketing remains live at this time, the focus should be on brand awareness, with tasteful messaging that drives traffic to valuable content. If your hotel wishes to keep any offers live, they should be focused on advance purchases for future stay dates, with a flexible cancellation policy. For more information on the best practices across channels during COVID-19, check out our recently published article.

Overall, now is the time to stay connected to past guests and foster a strong brand relationship while people are unable to travel. People will remember how your brand made them feel during this difficult time, so it's important to make all communication positive, valuable, or entertaining. For the full recovery strategy, download our COVID-19 Hotel Recovery Strategy eBook.
The World Health Organizations COVID-19 special envoy on Wednesday urged countries to focus on defeating the deadly virus after the United States halted funding to the WHO over its handling of the global pandemic.

President Donald Trump, who has become increasingly hostile towards the WHO, on Tuesday announced the United States would cut off funding the Geneva-based organisation, prompting condemnation from infectious disease experts.

There are one or two countries that seem to be quite concerned about actions that were taken early on in the pandemic...We say to everybody, we plead with everybody, look forward. Focus on the epic struggle right now and leave the recriminations until later, special envoy David Nabarro told an online conference, without naming the United States or Trump.

"If in the process you decide you want to declare that youre going to withdraw funding or make other comments about the WHO, remember this is not just the WHO, this is the whole public health community that is involved right now and every single person in the world...is sacrificing."

The United States contributed more than $400 million to the WHO in 2019, roughly 15% of its budget and its biggest overall donor.

Trump has said the WHO failed to act on credible reports from sources in China's Wuhan province, where the virus was first identified in December, that conflicted with Beijing's account of the spread.

Nabarro, who served as the United Nations special envoy on Ebola, warned countries against complacency in tackling the virus which has infected some 2,001,548 people globally and killed at least 131,101, according to a Reuters tally.

"Respond rapidly, respond robustly and then you will be able to contain this virus and hold it at bay," he said.

"If we argue about it, we will get into trouble. The virus will find its way between us and will catch us out and we will be asking ourselves why on earth didn't we move more quickly. Why on earth didn't we develop a unified strategic approach."

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Pope expresses support for 'universal basic wage' as COVID-19 harms global economy

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Pope Francis expressed support for a universal basic wage for workers of all countries in an open letter sent out on Easter Sunday.

In a letter addressed to popular movements, the head of the Roman Catholic Church said the coronavirus shutdowns appeared to economically harm the financially strapped more than most.

The ills that afflict everyone hit you twice as hard. Many of you live from day to day, without any type of legal guarantee to protect you, wrote the pontiff.

Street vendors, recyclers, carnies, small farmers, construction workers, dressmakers, the different kinds of caregivers: you who are informal, working on your own or in the grassroots economy, you have no steady income to get you through this hard time.

Adding that he believed the the lockdowns are becoming unbearable for lower-income individuals, Francis then expressed support for a minimum income supplied by governments to every citizen.

This may be the time to consider a universal basic wage which would acknowledge and dignify the noble, essential tasks you carry out, he continued.

It would ensure and concretely achieve the ideal, at once so human and so Christian, of no worker without rights.

In closing, he told the representatives of social movements to [s]tand firm in your struggle and care for each other as brothers and sisters.

I pray for you, I pray with you. I want to ask God our Father to bless you, to fill you with his love, and to defend you on this path, giving you the strength that keeps us standing tall and that never disappoints: hope, concluded Francis.

Earlier this month, Bloomberg News reported that Spain was considering the implementation of a universal basic income in response to the coronavirus lockdowns, with the likelihood that it will remain permanent.

Economy Minister Nadia Calvino said Social Security Minister Jose Luis Escriva was overseeing the project and it will be in place as soon as possible, Bloomberg reports.

Calvino also said the government hopes the basic income stays forever and will become a structural instrument, a permanent instrument.

Francis words came the same weekend that the Internal Revenue Service announced that the first of the $1,200 stimulus checks were being sent out to United States citizens.

#IRS deposited the first Economic Impact Payments into taxpayers bank accounts today. We know many people are anxious to get their payments; well continue issuing them as fast as we can, the IRS wrote on Twitter Saturday.
KEY HIGHLIGHTS

RBI extended Rs 3.74 lakh crore liquidity package to banks

Economic Task Force needs to unclog liquidity wheels, protect small businesses

Banks' current exposure to MSMEs is Rs 15 lakh crore

Emergency credit lines offered only to financially strong companies

Weaker firms left to fend for themselves

India's fiscal efforts to protect small businesses seem small as compared to some of the coronavirus-hit European countries. The most noticeable move in India has been the Reserve Bank of India (RBI)'s decision to extend a Rs 3.74 lakh crore liquidity package to banks. The liquidity is supposed to be passed down to the industry, but it is not happening at a fast pace.

Globally, coronavirus-hit countries, particularly European nations, have been quick in protecting small businesses. Take for example Spain, which is offering a 80 per cent guarantee on every new loan. Germany, which contained the coronavirus outbreak quite successfully, has gone a step ahead by offering a 90 per cent guarantee to all kinds of loans - from small to large.

Similarly, France, Italy and other countries have also followed a loan percentage guarantee model to help businesses. Beyond Europe, in Australia too, the government is offering a cover of 50 per cent as guarantee on small loans.

Meanwhile, in India, micro, small and medium enterprises (MSMEs) are caught in a bind. The banks, which already face higher delinquencies in the small loan portfolios, are very cautious in increasing their loan exposure.

So, what's being done?

Some public sector banks have opened emergency credit lines for MSMEs, but the outflow is selective to financially strong companies. The Economic Task Force set up by the Prime Minister has to now unclog the liquidity wheels so that funds flow to MSMEs.

There are wide range of suggestions, including offering a fixed percentage of guarantee to banks (say 25 to 80 per cent of the incremental loan), offering a flat fixed incremental loan amount as guarantee, using the existing SIDBI (Small Industries Development Bank of India) mechanism where the government partners with SIDBI to offer loan guarantee on very small loans.

The big stumbling block for offering any government guarantee to lending institutions is the budget constraint. Currently, banks' exposure to MSMEs - including those operating under the priority sector - is around Rs 15 lakh crore. Even a Rs 2 lakh crore guarantee cover means supporting incremental loans by around 12 per cent.

Also read: Coronavirus Impact: FY20 credit growth plunges to 50-year low at 6.1%

The former RBI Governor Raghuram Rajan, whom IMF has roped in as part of coronavirus task force, has suggested government should offer a guarantee covering the first loss in incremental small loans. But he advised that the maximum loan guarantee should be up to the quantum of the income tax paid by the SME in the previous year.

There is another issue on who should get the government guarantee benefits on priority basis. Clearly, the MSMEs serving the sectors offering essential services like FMCG, healthcare, food processing, agri should be given priority.

The MSMEs, which are defaulters in the banks' book and those which have taken the restructuring benefits under the Rs 25 crore aggregate loan scheme should be avoided. MSMEs have been through tough times in the last five years. First there was a disruption from demonetisation and GST, followed by the bankruptcy code, which pushed many large corporates into insolvency.

Since these small firms formed the supply chain of the large companies that went bust, their cash flows and ability to service loans also took a beating. The IL&FS debacle further chocked the credit lines while the slowdown in the economy impacted their revenue streams. Coronavirus lockdown has come as a last nail in the coffin for this most vulnerable segment, which contributes over 30 per cent to the country's GDP.

Also read: Coronavirus in India: Two MPC members share mantra to contain economic fallout

Also read: Coronavirus EMI scam alert! Protect yourself from online fraudsters
A British pilot and two other Vietnamese patients are making positive progress in their recovery after falling into critical conditions over the past weeks due to novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19).

Doctors and healthcare experts in Vietnam convened an online consultation to discuss the status of patients who are most seriously sickened by COVID-19.

According to doctors at the Ho Chi Minh City Hospital for Tropical Diseases, a 43-year-old British pilot, who went down with COVID-19 last month, has shown some positive clinical signs, although the improvement remains quite slow.

He still tests positive for the novel coronavirus despite a negative test on Sunday, but doctors have noticed improvements in his lung X-ray images and blood-clotting disorders.

The patient is still on a ventilator and receiving outside-body life support in the form of extracorporeal membrane oxygenation (ECMO).

The Ho Chi Minh City Hospital for Tropical Diseases has been cooperating with Cho Ray Hospital, which is the citys largest general hospital, to deliberate over the best treatment for the patient.

The mans positive clinical signs  one of them being awareness of his surroundings  have carried on to Wednesday, the infirmary said in a quick report.

Patient No. 20, a 64-year-old Hanoi woman, is also making good progress after 29 days of receiving support from ECMO.

Patient No. 161, an 88-year-old resident in Hanoi, no longer needs support from a ventilator.

She had suffered a stroke and brain hemorrhage, which resulted in partial paralysis, before being diagnosed with COVID-19.

During the consultation, doctors also discussed the possible treatment of COVID-19 patients using the plasma from those who have recovered from the disease.

The head of the National Institute of Hematology and Blood Transfusion and the director of the National Hospital for Tropical Diseases in Hanoi will be in charge of researching and making a detailed plan for this approach.

The novel coronavirus, which first emerged in the central Chinese city of Wuhan in December 2019, has infected over 1.99 million people and killed more than 126,700 globally as of Wednesday morning, according to Ministry of Health statistics.

Vietnam has confirmed 267 COVID-19 cases in total, with 169 having recovered.

The country has yet to record a death from the disease.

Three out of six patients who are most badly sickened by COVID-19 in the country are now in stable conditions.

Like us on Facebook or follow us on Twitter to get the latest news about Vietnam!
Construction of HS2 has been given the greenlight to begin despite the current coronavirus lockdown measures.

The Government issued a notice to proceed to the companies that will build phase one of the high-speed railway.

Prime Minister Boris Johnson gave the green light for HS2 in February despite it running over budget and behind schedule.

Now phase one of construction has government approval despite the country still operating in lockdown.

The Government has told construction companies to begin working on phase one of HS2 which will run between London and Birmingham

Despite the coronavirus pandemic the Government has said that it cannot put all long-term projects on hold while the country is in lockdown

HS2 Minister Andrew Stephenson said: 'While the Government's top priority is rightly to combat the spread of coronavirus, protect the NHS and save lives, we cannot delay work on our long-term plan to level up the country.

'HS2 will be the spine of the country's transport network, boosting capacity and connectivity while also re-balancing opportunity fairly across our towns and cities.

'Following the decision earlier this year to proceed with the project, this next step provides thousands of construction workers and businesses across the country with certainty at a time when they need it, and means that work can truly begin on delivering this transformational project.'

Oakervee Review, which was commissioned by the Government, warned that cost of the project could reach 106 billion at 2019 prices.

The notices issued by the Government means the companies building the train line can transition from planning the project to building it

The notices the government issued told the four joint ventures, that were previously awarded main works civil contracts, they can move on from planning and designing the project to construction.

Who was awarded contracts by HS2 in 2017? SCS Railways (Skanska Construction UK, Costain and Strabag)

(Skanska Construction UK, Costain and Strabag) Align joint venture (Bouygues Travaux Publics, Sir Robert McAlpine and VolkerFitzpatrick)

(Bouygues Travaux Publics, Sir Robert McAlpine and VolkerFitzpatrick) EKFB joint venture (Eiffage Genie Civil SA, Kier Infrastructure and Overseas, Ferrovial Agroman and BAM Nuttall)

(Eiffage Genie Civil SA, Kier Infrastructure and Overseas, Ferrovial Agroman and BAM Nuttall) BBV joint venture (Balfour Beatty Group, Vinci Construction Grands Projets, Vinci Construction UK and Vinci Construction Terrassement) Advertisement

HS2 Ltd chief executive Mark Thurston said: 'In these difficult times, today's announcement represents both an immediate boost to the construction industry  and the many millions of UK jobs that the industry supports  and an important investment in Britain's future: levelling up the country, improving our transport network and changing the way we travel to help bring down carbon emissions and improve air quality for the next generation.

'HS2 has been over 10 years in development and design. While the country's focus is rightly on defeating Covid-19, the issuing of notice to proceed today ensures that our contractors and their supply chains have the confidence that they can commit to building HS2, generating thousands of skilled jobs across the country as we recover from the pandemic.'

A review into what operations can be safely carried out within coronavirus guidelines has left some HS2 sites inactive.

The decision came despite the country still struggling through the coronavirus pandemic with only key workers meant to be leaving their home to go to work

HS2 Ltd said the construction companies will 'start work immediately' on detailed designs, site preparation work and issuing sub-contracts.

The companies are applying conditions such as ensuring a minimum distance between all personnel of two metres, having hand washing facilities and n more than one person in a vehicle unless agreed in advance.

The Department for Transport (DfT) said the firms 'will be able to commence work in line with Public Health England's guidance around construction work continuing during the coronavirus outbreak'.

The contracts have a total value of 12 billion, which covers the design and construction of bridges, tunnels, embankments and viaducts for phase one of HS2, which will run from London Euston to Birmingham.

The construction work should mean that the rail link between London and Birmingham should be operational in the next decade

The line was due to open in 2026, but it could another ten years before it is fully operational.

Passenger services between Old Oak Common, west London, and Birmingham Curzon Street are due to begin between 2029 and 2033, with trains able to start and end journeys at London Euston between 2031 and 2036.

The Department for Transport and HS2 Ltd's estimate of the cost of phase one ranges from 35 billion to 45 billion.
Attorneys for Georgia State University are seeking roughly $3.18 million$3,094,196.48 in attorneys fees and an additional $85,746.39 in costsafter a third ruling in a long-running copyright dispute over digitized course readings on college campuses. And in a supporting brief filed this week, GSU is asking the court to send a message with the award.

Fair use is a statutorily recognized right that furthers the constitutional purpose of promoting the progress of science and learning, the GSU brief states. Nonprofit educational institutions such as Defendants should be able to rely on this right and make a fair use of certain materials in teaching their students. If Plaintiffs and other similar publishers are not deterred from asserting an unwarranted number of unsupported infringement claims against these nonprofit educational institutions, it will make the cost of defending the fair use right exorbitant and educational fair use is likely to fade into non-existence.

The request comes after judge Orinda Evans on March 2 issued a 241-page written opinion finding that 38 of 48 claims presented at trial were permissiblenearly 80% of the claims that made it to a fair use analysis. The decision was Evans third ruling in the case, following two remands from the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals.

After her first ruling in the case, back in 2012, Evans designated GSU the prevailing party in the case and ordered the publishers to pay nearly $3 million in legal fees and costs to GSU. The award, however, was vacated by the 11th Circuit in 2018 after new Supreme Court guidance was issued holding that the reasonableness of a losing partys case should carry substantial weight in determining whether or not to grant fees.

Meanwhile, in a March 23 brief, the plaintiff publishers argue that they should be named the prevailing party after prevailing on "a significant number of their infringement claims." The publisherswho are not seeking legal fees nor damagesargue that given the vigorously disputed nature of the copyright issues that were raised in this case for the first time in the context of digital course readings, their position was clearly, objectively reasonable.

In their April 13 brief, however, GSU attorneys pushed back against the publishers' position.

The instant case was a test case litigation that was organized by the Copyright Clearance Center (CCC) and the American Association of Publishers (AAP) who recruited the three Plaintiffs to serve as plaintiffs, GSU attorneys argue. Accordingly, Plaintiffs motivation was not to enforce valid copyright interests, but rather, to act as a conduit to test whether publisher clearing houses could successfully argue that any educational use of a copyrighted work, no matter how small, is not a fair use and requires payment of a license fee.

The case was first filed on April 15, 2008 by three academic publishers (Cambridge University Press, Oxford University Press, and Sage) supported by the Association of American Publishers and the Copyright Clearance Center. It alleged that GSU administrators were systematically encouraging faculty to offer students unlicensed digitized course readings, known as e-reserves, as a no-cost alternative to traditionally licensed coursepacks.

The publishers are expected to file a reply brief in the coming days.
The Book of Scripture vs. Culture: a heartfelt devotional that directs readers to the authors faith-driven life that exudes with insights on culture versus the Lords Word. The Book of Scripture vs. Culture is the creation of published author Pastor Raymond Vietmeier, a computer software designer, developer, and support specialist; an associate pastor; and a Vietnam veteran.

Pastor Vietmeier shares, The Book of Scripture vs. Culture explains what the title implies. It uses biblical scriptures to explain the difference of the culture in the United States from the scriptures that say what God expects us to do. The book explains how one person was guided by God from childhood until he ultimately made that person into a preacher and a disciple. Since the author could not know the details of another persons relationship with the Holy Trinity, he used his own life story. Following that story, he explains about miracles God performed to protect him from harm so he would ultimately do the work God had planned for him from the time of conception. Also, this book goes into great detail as to what is going wrong with our cultureit is going in the opposite direction from what God expects of us in the Holy Bible. As an ordained independent minister, the author tries to back up everything he writes with scripture. He also describes how God personally directs and guides him when writing sermons and also writing the books God wants him to write. The author hopes you not only enjoy reading this book but also may learn things of which you were not previously aware of. May God bless America, and may we change our cultural direction to agree with the holy scriptures.

Published by Christian Faith Publishing, Pastor Raymond Vietmeiers new book purposefully proclaims Gods Word to all people and compares and contrasts it to the societys current culture around the world in the hopes of enlightening hearts and leading lives toward eternal glory.

This book treasures a resounding reminder of being aware of the wiles of the world and always choosing God amid the confusion and temptations of culture.

View the synopsis of The Book of Scripture vs. Culture on YouTube.

Consumers can purchase The Book of Scripture vs. Culture at traditional brick-and-mortar bookstores or online at Amazon.com, Apple iTunes store, or Barnes and Noble.

For additional information or inquiries about The Book of Scripture vs. Culture, contact the Christian Faith Publishing media department at 866-554-0919.
[April 15, 2020] AWeber Amplifies Support for Ecommerce Businesses

AWeber, a leading provider of powerfully-simple email marketing software for small businesses, today announced enhanced support for ecommerce-powered businesses. Through deepened integrations with leading ecommerce solutions, AWeber customers can now automate abandoned cart emails, send product recommendations, fine-tune automation funnels, and more, to quickly grow their email lists and boost sales. Email is one of the top marketing channels that drive ecommerce sales. By integrating with leading ecommerce software, AWeber customers can: Better understand their audiences

Tailor automated email marketing campaigns

Personalize content by purchase history

Motivate first-time customers with specific promotions

Recover lost sales through cart abandonment emails

Gain visibility into prospects' and customers' purchase behaviors "We're committed to building powerfully-simple tools for small business owners who want to connect with their prospects and customers, deliver personalized experiences, and turn first-time shoppers into lifelong fans," said Rob Patterson, Chief Marketing Officer at AWeber. "The updates to our ecommerce integrations deliver on our promise to do 90% of the work for our customers, so they can focus on developing amazing relationships with their audiences and grow their businesses." AWeber has simple, native integrations with the leading ecommerce platforms, including WooCommerce, Shopify, PayPal, Etsy (News - Alert), SamCart, JVZoo, WarriorPlus, ClickBank, 3DCart, and others. AWeber also integrates with Stripe, Ecwid and others through Zapier. AWeber's WooCommerce and Shopify plugins work seamlessly and include cart abandonment options, which allows users to compete and thrive in the ever-changing retail landscape.



To help small businesses better pair email marketing with ecommerce, AWeber has partnered with WooCommerce to offer a 50% off discount on new and renewed WooCommerce annual subscriptions. The offer is valid through April 30, 2020 and is available to users who integrate AWeber within their online store. "These updates allow customers to easily configure their ecommerce plugins to unlock incredible email marketing capabilities," said Zac Gery, Integrations Product Manager at AWeber. "AWeber customers now have the ecommerce functionality they need to fine tune their marketing funnels and convert shoppers into customers."

For a complete list of integrations AWeber supports, visit AWeber's Integrations page. To learn more about how AWeber's email marketing software can help grow your ecommerce business, register for our free webinar on April 22, 2020 at 2 p.m. ET. About AWeber AWeber is a market leader of small business email marketing and landing page software. Founded in 1998, AWeber has over 20 years of proven success helping more than one million customers around the world reliably connect with their prospects and customers through powerfully-simple email marketing software. Along with its award-winning 24/7 US-based customer support, AWeber delivers the ability to quickly load and manage contacts, send amazing emails, build landing pages, and analyze results without having to be a tech whiz. AWeber works with more than 1,000 partner software solutions, allowing customers to seamlessly integrate with the apps and services they rely on to operate and grow. A privately-held company, AWeber is headquartered in Chalfont, PA. For more information, visit aweber.com, subscribe to the AWeber blog, or connect with us on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram or LinkedIn. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20200415005454/en/

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A judge in Broward County, Florida, has asked that lawyers remain professional while conducting video court hearings through Zoom.

It is remarkable how many ATTORNEYS appear inappropriately on camera, Broward County Circuit Judge Dennis Bailey said in a statement posted on westonbar.org.

Broward County courts have been utilizing the video-conferencing program Zoom since March due to coronavirus.

While some have been wearing casual shirts, two incidents were more extreme. One man appeared shirtless during a hearing, and a woman appeared in bed, still under the covers.

Please, if you don't mind, let's treat court hearings as court hearings, whether Zooming or not, Bailey said.

Broward County courts have held about 1,200 court hearings with 14,000 participants on Zoom since last month, the Associated Press reported.

Related video: Sacramento County courts hold virtual hearings amid pandemic
Phoenix, Arizona - April 15, 2020 (Investorideas.com Newswire) SinglePoint, Inc. (OTCQB: SING) CEO, Greg Lambrecht discusses current sales processes implemented by Direct Solar in latest video. The company was recently featured in GreenTech Media, a leading renewable energy media company.

Cannot view this video? Visit:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5X7PUOplRSI&feature=youtu.be

Direct Solar America has grown from 13 states to 25 states through implementing the virtual solar sales process. Overall, management believes long term this is a beneficial move to streamline the business and spur additional, sustainable growth.

About SinglePoint, Inc.

Founded in 2011 SinglePoint, Inc (OTCQB: SING) invests in and acquires brands and companies that will benefit from injection of growth capital and the sales and marketing expertise of SinglePoint. The company portfolio currently includes solar, hemp and technology applications. SinglePoint is working to grow the company to a multinational brand.

Connect on social media at:

https://www.facebook.com/SinglePointMobile

https://twitter.com/_Singlepoint_

https://www.linkedin.com/company/singlepoint

https://www.youtube.com/user/SinglePointMobile

For more information visit: www.SinglePoint.com

Forward-Looking Statements

Certain statements in this news release may contain forward-looking information within the meaning of Rule 175 under the Securities Act of 1933 and Rule 3b-6 under the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, and are subject to the safe harbor created by those rules. All statements, other than statements of fact, included in this release, including, without limitation, statements regarding potential future plans and objectives of the Company, are forward-looking statements that involve risks and uncertainties. There can be no assurance that such statements will prove to be accurate and actual results and future events could differ materially from those anticipated in such statements.

Technical complications, which may arise, could prevent the prompt implementation of any strategically significant plan(s) outlined above. The Company undertakes no duty to revise or update any forward-looking statements to reflect events or circumstances after the date of this release.

Corporate Communication

SinglePoint Inc.

888-OTC-SING

investors@SinglePoint.com

SinglePoint.com

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New York City is struggling to get an accurate count of the number of Covid-19 fatalities as more people die at home and some likely coronavirus deaths are attributed to heart attacks and other causes, Mayor Bill de Blasio acknowledged Wednesday.

On Tuesday, New York City officials said they would begin counting "probable" Covid-19 deaths, which are people "who had no known positive laboratory test," but are believed to have died due to Covid-19. The New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene estimates that there have been 3,778 probable Covid-19 deaths since March 11 that weren't previously counted in the city's official tally. There have been 6,589 confirmed Covid-19 deaths in New York City so far.

"I want the whole truth out. Wherever the facts take us, I want the whole truth out," de Blasio said Wednesday at a news briefing. "Absolutely, I believe there are more people who died because of Covid-19, in one way or another, because of something that happened to them related to Covid-19."

New York City has had to prioritize coronavirus testing due to a scarcity of test kits and the supplies needed to analyze them, de Blasio has previously said. As a result, testing has gone largely to those who are already in the hospital and first responders, according to de Blasio. People exhibiting symptoms consistent with Covid-19 but who remain at home may not be tested and thus excluded from the official count of cases  even if they die.

De blasio has repeatedly emphasized that the city is operating on a "wartime dynamic," meaning that officials are making decisions rapidly as the situation evolves. He said the decision to report probable Covid-19 deaths was made to be more transparent with the public about the magnitude of the outbreak.

NYC Health Department Commissioner Dr. Oxiris Barbot said most people who have died from Covid-19 were diagnosed in hospitals. However, the city has seen significantly more people dying at home than usual, Barbot said.

Barbot said the city has compared "the number of deaths during that same time period in the previous year and what we find is that there are roughly 3,000 deaths above what would have been anticipated."

In the first five days of April, the number of people who died in their homes or on the street in New York City was more than eight times the deaths recorded during the same period last year, The New York Times reported, citing the New York Fire Department.

The official count could also be missing patients who suffered from other illnesses. Barbot called for more research into how Covid-19 interacts with other illnesses. For example, she said some people who have died after having a heart attack but also exhibited Covid-19 symptoms might be missed in the official tally.

"Are there potentially cases where someone registered a death as a heart attack because the person hadn't yet developed symptoms of Covid-19 and truly should have been categorized as a Covid probable?" she said. "I don't know if we'll ever be able to answer that question fully, but I think it's something that still needs to be looked into further."

Dr. J Mocco, Director of Mt. Sinai's Cerebrovascular Center in New York City, which handles stroke patients, told CNBC that there's an emerging base of evidence to indicate that Covid-19 exacerbates strokes and potentially other medical conditions.

"We're seeing more strokes than before and they are a large percent Covid positive," he said. "We had five patients over a two-week time period who were 49 years old or younger, which is not standard, who had no other risk factors except for being Covid positive."

Mocco said it's possible that people are suffering strokes and staying at home out of fear of catching Covid-19 in the hospital, but they might already have the disease and it could even be a cause of the stroke. Such patients would not be tested for Covid-19 and thus could be missed by the city's official tally. Mocco's team at Mt. Sinai, in the epicenter of the U.S. Covid-19 outbreak, continues to research how the respiratory disease interacts with other illnesses.

 CNBC's Noah Higgins-Dunn and Berkeley Lovelace contributed to this report.
TORONTO, April 15, 2020 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Northland Power Inc. ("Northland") (TSX: NPI) announces it will release its 2020 first quarter financial results after market close on Wednesday, May 13, 2020. Northland's management will hold an investor conference call and webcast at 10 a.m. Eastern Time (ET) on Thursday, May 14, 2020, followed by a question and answer period.

Conference call details:

Date: Thursday, May 14, 2020 Start Time: 10:00 a.m. ET Phone Number: Toll free (North America): (866) 864-6943 Toll free (International): (949) 877-3040

The call will also be broadcast live on the internet, in listen-only mode and may be accessed on northlandpower.com .

For those unable to attend the live call, an audio recording will be available on Northland's website at northlandpower.com on May 15, 2020.

ABOUT NORTHLAND POWER

Northland is a global developer, owner and operator of sustainable infrastructure assets that deliver predictable cash flows. Headquartered in Toronto, Canada, Northland was founded in 1987 and has been publicly traded since 1997 on the Toronto Stock Exchange (TSX: NPI).

Northland owns or has an economic interest in 2,681 MW (net 2,266 MW) of operating generating capacity and 130 MW of generating capacity under construction, representing the La Lucha solar project in Mexico. Northland also owns a 60% equity stake in the 1,044 MW Hai Long projects under development in Taiwan and operates a regulated utility business in Colombia.

Northland's common shares, Series 1, Series 2 and Series 3 preferred shares and Series C convertible debentures trade on the Toronto Stock Exchange under the symbols NPI, NPI.PR.A, NPI.PR.B, NPI.PR.C and NPI.DB.C, respectively.

For further information contact:

Wassem Khalil, Senior Director, Investor Relations, (647) 288-1019

investorrelations@northlandpower.com (mailto:investorrelations@northlandpower.com)

northlandpower.com
Elizabeth Warren endorsed Joe Biden for president on Wednesday.

She announced her endorsement in a video message about the former vice president.

In this moment of crisis, its more important than ever that the next president restores Americans faith in good, effective governmentand Ive seen Joe Biden help our nation rebuild. Today, Im proud to endorse Joe Biden as President of the United States.

The Massachusetts senator ended her presidential campaign in early March, following disappointing performance at the polls on Super Tuesday.

While Biden and Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders were still in the race she declined to endorse either candidate.

I need some space around this and I want to take a little time to think some more," she said the day she ended her presidential bid.

The announcement comes a day after former President Barack Obama formally endorsed Biden for president on Tuesday.

Im so proud to endorse Joe Biden for president of the United States, Obama said in a video released Tuesday. Choosing Joe to be my vice president was one of the best decisions I ever made.

Obama said, I believe Joe has all the qualities we need in a president right now.

Biden, the presumptive 2020 Democratic presidential nominee, served as vice president for both of Obamas terms in the White House.

Barack  This endorsement means the world to Jill and me, Biden said in a tweet. Were going to build on the progress we made together, and theres no one Id rather have standing by my side.

Sanders endorsed Biden on Monday, less than a week after Sanders ended his presidential campaign.

I am asking all Americans, Im asking every Democrat, Im asking every independent, Im asking a lot of Republicans to come together in this campaign to support your candidacy, which I endorse, Sanders said.

Sanders added that weve got to make Trump a one-term president. I will do all that I can to make that happen.

The former Burlington mayor and longtime independent congressman announced the end of his campaign last week in a virtual event, declaring he didnt have a feasible path to the nomination.
PDC Energy, Inc. PDCE has announced capex cuts and share repurchase deferrals in a bid to preserve cash for maintaining strong liquidity amid a possible financial crisis due to the coronavirus outbreak.

This energy player notified plans to trim its 2020 capex guidance by nearly 50% from the midpoint of its prior expectation of $1-$1.1 billion to the $500-$600 million range after reckoning the ongoing softness in commodity prices.

Further, the companys top brass decided to retrench its employee strength on random basis and slash up to 15% salaries of personnel at the executive ranks along with tiered pay cuts for the remaining staff in light of the coronavirus-induced recession.

This Colorado-based exploration and production company further decides to discharge its Delaware Basin drilling rig next month, indicating no drilling and completion activity in the basin for the remainder of the year. It further plans to cut back its Wattenberg rig count in May to just one.

For the next couple of months, this second-largest oil producer in the Denver-Julesburg Basin behind Houston-based Occidental Petroleum OXY might curb its total production volumes by 20-30% due to declining Nymex pricing from its prior projection. For 2020, PDC Energys total production is anticipated to drop 10% whereas its oil production is expected to see a 20% fall from the year-ago figures.

This Zacks Rank #3 (Hold) companys 2021 capital budget is projected to be in line with the current years updated capex plan. However, its oil production is estimated to improve 5-10% in the period. You can see the complete list of todays Zacks #1 Rank (Strong Buy) stocks here.

Lastly, the company expects to generate free cash flow in excess of $100 million this year, presuming the WTI crude prices to be $25 per barrel, natural gas at $2 per MMBtu NYMEX and NGL prices of roughly $5 per barrel for the rest of 2020.

Story continues

Even though PDC Energy hopes to gain traction from these key endeavors, it looks to keep close tabs on the commodity price movement, aligning with the capex adjustment plans further in response to a volatile price scenario.

PDC Energy, Inc. Price

PDC Energy, Inc. Price

PDC Energy, Inc. price | PDC Energy, Inc. Quote

To save cash and sustain liquidity, various E&P players in the energy sector are resorting to capex cuts and stock-buyback suspensions. Citing the uncertainty around the coronavirus pandemic, Apache Corporation APA and Matador Resources Company MTDR among others also announced plans to restrict their capital investments.

Given the rising possibility of a depression in 2020, cash seems the king for businesses and investors. Therefore, amid the coronavirus crisis, many companies might be forced to take stringent measures for cash preservation. So, until the fog clears, investors should brace up for more capex reductions and share-buyback delays.

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Despite warnings by Gov. Phil Murphy to not hold large gatherings and for non-essential businesses to close to help stop the spread of the coronavirus, Lakewood keeps coming up in Attorney General Gurbir S. Grewals daily lists of people who are not abiding by the executive orders issued in March.

The latest violation occurred Monday when police in the Ocean County town were called to a business in town called Toys4U, which is located in an shopping center on Madison Avenue, Grewal and New Jersey State Police Col. Patrick J. Callahan announced Tuesday.

Officers found 50 or more people outside the store, none of whom were wearing masks or social distancing, while an employee took orders at the door. The store is a non-essential business and was ordered closed on March 21 by the governor.

The stores parking lot was filled and there were 10 cars in the fire lane in front of it, officials said. None of the 10 employees inside were social distancing and only three were wearing masks, officials said.

The owner, Yossi Itzkowitz and the manager, Tzvi Blau, 29, were charged with violating the emergency orders, police said.

CORONAVIRUS RESOURCES: Live map tracker | Businesses that are open | Homepage

A second incident happened the day earlier, on Easter Sunday, when officers found a large gathering of adults and children in the backyard of a home that was hosting a catered party; complete with a chef and two waiters, police said.

Children were playing in a bouncy castle and cops also found a long table set up with a tablecloth, plates, utensils and chairs, authorities said.

Mendel Steiner, 27; Dina Endzweig, 26; Johnathan Schick, 31; Hindy Schick, 32; Ephraim Weiss, 31; and Chaya Weiss, 29, all of Brooklyn were charged with violating the emergency orders and child neglect, officials said.

Israel Goldenberg, 23, of Monsey, New York, was also charged with violating the emergency orders.

Law enforcement and medical professionals are on the frontlines of this battle to protect the citizens of New Jersey from the COVID-19 virus, and we cannot stress enough how important it is that each person follow the guidelines set forth in the Executive Order, Callahan said in a statement. Because lives are at stake, enforcement action will be taken without hesitation against those who are blatantly placing the lives of others at risk.

As of Tuesday afternoon, Lakewood had 1,117 cases of the coronavirus, according to the Ocean County Health Department. The town in the county with the second-most case cases was Toms River with 670.

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.

Chris Sheldon may be reached at csheldon@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter @chrisrsheldon Find NJ.com on Facebook. Have a tip? Tell us. nj.com/tips.
[April 15, 2020] PVH Corp. Pledges $2M Toward COVID-19 Relief Efforts

PVH Corp.'s (NYSE: PVH) values help guide its decisions, and the company's overall purpose to drive fashion forward for good is more important than ever before. Today, The PVH Foundation - the company's philanthropic fund specifically dedicated to nonprofit donations and volunteer programs - is announcing an additional $1 million, for a total commitment of more than $2 million, toward COVID-19 relief efforts. The additional donation will support frontline medical workers, the fight against food insecurity, supply chain and industry relief, and community resiliency. These donations aim to complement what has already been dedicated to the COVID-19 Solidarity Response Fund. "The COVID-19 pandemic is a human crisis touching everyone around the world in some way. PVH is built on its family-like culture, and the way we live our lives is the same way we conduct business: We try to do the right thing," said Manny Chirico, Chairman and CEO, PVH. "It's more important now than any time I can remember to support our people, communities and industry." The PVH Foundation also is working with PVH's long-term partner Better Work, a collaboration between the International Labour Organization and International Finance Corporation. Funds will be used to support activities benefitting suppliers and workers through the COVID-19 crisis. Organizations to receive contributions from The PVH Foundation have been selected by PVH associates in locations around the world. Support will be targeted in Asia, Australia, Brazil, Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain, the U.K. and the U.S. to organizations that will best address local needs. Nonprofit grantees in the U.S. will include several hospitals and healthcare organizations, including Mount Sinai Health System (N.Y.), Montefiore Health System (N.Y.), Northwell Health (N.Y.), RWJBarnabas Health (N.J.) and Hackensack Meridian Health (N.J.). Other U.S. grantees are: Feeding America , Coalition for the Homeless (NYC), Food Bank of Somerset County (N.J.), and the NYC Small Business Continuity Loan Fund. In Canada, organizations include: Lakeridge Health Foundation (Oshawa), North York General Foundation (Toronto) an the Jewish General Hospital (Montreal).



In addition to this $2M commitment, PVH had also made a 2M RMB ( $275,000 USD) contribution to the Chinese Society of the Red Cross, as well as a $50,000 contribution to A Common Thread, the CFDA/Vogue Fashion Fund initiative to provide support and raise awareness for those in the American fashion community who have been impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic. CALVIN KLEIN and TOMMY HILFIGER have donated product in the U.S., Netherlands, U.K. and Italy to support frontline healthcare workers and will continue to give product where it is needed the most. Calvin Klein is also a founding partner and donor of OutRight Action International's COVID-19 Global LGBTIQ Emergency Fund.

About PVH Corp. PVH is one of the most admired fashion and lifestyle companies in the world. We power brands that drive fashion forward - for good. Our brand portfolio includes the iconic CALVIN KLEIN, TOMMY HILFIGER, Van Heusen, IZOD, ARROW, Warner's, Olga and Geoffrey Beene brands, as well as the digital-centric True&Co. intimates brand. We market a variety of goods under these and other nationally and internationally known owned and licensed brands. PVH has over 40,000 associates operating in over 40 countries and $9.9 billion in annual revenues. That's the Power of Us. That's the Power of PVH. Follow us on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and LinkedIn. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20200415005695/en/

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Recent death figures indicate the UKs coronavirus pandemic may have peaked, an expert has said.

Professor James Naismith, director of the Rosalind Franklin Institute and professor of structural biology at the University of Oxford, also warned that lifting restrictions on movements will result in deaths.

But the measures have worked, he said, even though many deaths will continue to be reported daily, in comments later echoed by Englands chief medical officer Chris Whitty.

Provided delays due to the Easter weekend have not distorted these figures, then todays number of announced hospital deaths taken with the last week of data does indicate that this measure of the pandemic may indeed have peaked, Naismith said.

Testing for the coroanvirus continues as the new death toll was announced for the UK. (AP Photo/Matt Dunham)

If true, any sense of relief must be tempered by the fact that we will see hundreds of hospital deaths announced each day for some time ahead.

This number of deaths is an underestimate of the true toll and will increase as deaths in care homes and the wider community are added. However, I do not expect these deaths to significantly alter our understanding of when the peak has occurred.

Whitty said on Wednesday afternoon: "Our view is that it is probably reaching the peak overall," adding that statistical lags meant the number of deaths may go up in the coming days.

He said: "We are not yet at the point where we can say confidently and safely 'this is now past the peak and we can start thinking very much now about the next phases.'"

The number of people in the UK who have died after contracting coronavirus has risen 761 to 12,868, official figures this afternoon show.

There are also now 98,476 confirmed cases.

In England, the number of deaths has risen by 651, up to 11,656.

Scotland today reported a further 84 deaths, while Wales has recorded 60 new deaths and Northern Ireland has posted six, for a combined rise of 150 for those three nations.

The combined figure for all four nations brings the total number of deaths to 12,958, but that number varies from the UK-wide figure published by the Department of Health because of differences in accounting methods.

Story continues

The UK-wide figure posted by the department is accurate to 5pm on 14 April, and the cases are from data up to 9am today.

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

6 charts and maps that explain how COVID-19 is spreading

It is worth noting that if the death toll has indeed peaked, it suggests that the softer social distancing measures introduced before the lockdown may have had some positive effect and a bigger effect can therefore be expected as the lockdown measures work through, Prof Naismith added.

Public support for these measures has been crucial and saved lives.

We do not yet have vaccine or a guaranteed safe lifesaving medicine. Without either of these available to us, whatever we do next  in terms of extending or lifting various social distancing and shielding measures  will almost certainly result in deaths, either directly from COVID-19 infection or indirectly from the consequences of the lockdown.

He said the government will need to be clear about the way it will lift restrictions and the consequences its actions will have.

The new 4,000-bed capacity NHS Nightingale Hospital in east London, built at the ExCel centre to help with increased demand for treatment during the pandemic, only had 19 patients over Easter weekend.

According to data from the Health Service Journal, the hospital remained largely empty, which was reportedly down to tight criteria agreed for patients to be admitted there.

The hospital was created by NHS staff, contractors and the military in just 10 days.

An NHS England spokesperson said: While the data quoted here are not complete and validated, they confirm continuing success in ensuring we have available capacity to look after patients who need our care, which has been one of our overarching operational goals since the start of the coronavirus pandemic.

Meanwhile, the government continues to receive criticism for its testing regime.

Increased focus has been given to care homes, where residents are vulnerable to COVID-19 due to their age.

A quarter of all registered deaths involving COVID-19 in Scotland occurred in care homes, according to the National Records of Scotland.

In England, eight people died with suspected coronavirus at Green Heys Care Home in Waterloo, Merseyside.

Health secretary Matt Hancock has promised to provide tests to all who need them, but an NHS Confederation director said clarity was needed about how the government plans to run 100,000 tests a day.

The offer of more tests for social care staff is desperately needed as this sector has been suffering in silence during this pandemic, Dr Layla McCay said.

But it comes as health leaders across primary, community and mental health services are continuing to experience difficulties with getting their staff the tests they need to get back to work, despite similar promises being made by government.

Things are improving but the countrys testing capacity is far from where it needs to be to meet the ambition of 100,000 a day in just over two weeks  thats over 85,000 more tests a day than what is happening now.

We need absolute clarity from the government on how this will be achieved in such a short space of time, otherwise it will be viewed as a false promise.

Hancock said: I am deeply conscious that people in residential care are among the most vulnerable to coronavirus. We are doing everything we can to keep workers, residents and their families safe.

A COVID-19 social care action plan is due to be announced by the government this week.

Coronavirus: what happened today
SANTA FE  Three former employees are suing the 1st Judicial District Attorneys Office, including District Attorney Marco Serna, for allegedly failing to pay overtime wages and retaliating against employees.

Anai Reyes, Elisha Evridge and Connie Warren, all of whom worked as victim advocates in the office, claim they were paid only the standard hourly rate for working overtime, instead of the time-and-a-half pay required by law, according to the original complaint.

Victim advocates help the victims of crime with emotional support, as well as find other resources they may need.

Sernas office, the complaint states, also violated its policies and procedures by not paying the proper amount of overtime pay.

The lawsuit also alleges Sernas office retaliated against the three employees for attempting to correct the error in pay.

Plaintiffs were retaliated against in the form of hostile treatment by managers, belittling language from managers, denial of workplace benefits and threats of discipline, the complaint states.

The exact nature of the retaliation is not specified.

The plaintiffs filed their case in U.S. District Court on Monday and are seeking back pay, as well as punitive damages. The amount of additional overtime pay owed by the District Attorneys Office is not listed.

The offices spokesperson, Henry Varela, wrote an email Tuesday stating they could not comment on the litigation, because they had not been served with any civil suit.

A hearing has not yet been scheduled.

Serna is currently running for New Mexicos 3rd Congressional District seat, seeking to replace Assistant Speaker Ben Ray Lujan, who is running for U.S. Senate.
Senator Thom Tillis (R., N.C.) on Wednesday said fellow North Carolina Republican senator Richard Burr should respond to recent allegations of insider trading and self-dealing.

I suspect that there is an investigation in the DOJ, and well have to see where the facts lead, Tillis told radio host Hugh Hewitt on The Hugh Hewitt Show.

Regardless of what happens with the investigation, I think Senator Burr owes everybody in North Carolina and the United States an explanation, and well see where the investigation goes, Tillis said. Regarding whether Burr should give up his chairmanship of the Senate Intel Committee until the facts are fully known, thats a decisionthat would be better left to him and the leadership.

Burr sold his D.C. townhouse to lobbyist John Green in 2017, off-market and for an above-market price, without disclosing the transaction. That same month, Burr co-sponsored a bill benefiting pharmaceutical company Merck, for which Green lobbied. Both men have denied that the sale was inappropriate.

In March, Burr filed records showing he and his wife sold off stocks worth roughly $1 million in February, including holdings in hotel chains, before the coronavirus pandemic caused much of the U.S. economy to shut down.

Burr said in response to the news that he had relied solely on public news reports in deciding to sell the stocks, but critics have pointed out that he received a classified coronavirus briefing shortly before the sale.

While he maintains his innocence, Burr has asked the Senate Ethics Committee to conduct a review of his actions.

More from National Review
Nearly 160 daily wage workers



of the Dr Babasaheb Ambedkar Marathwada University (BAMU) donated their one-day income towards the Maharashtra Chief Minister's Relief Fund for the COVID-19 fight.

These workers are members of the Rajarshi Shahu Daily Wage Workers' Association. President of the association, Punam Salampure, handed over a cheque of Rs 64,000 to BAMU Vice- Chancellor Dr Pramod Yeole.

Besides, the security agency working for the university also donated Rs 11,000 towards the CM relief fund, the association said in a press release.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
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COVID-19: Akufo-Addo announces GHC600 million soft loan package for SMES in Ghana:

President Akufo-Addo has revealed that small and medium scale businesses in Ghana would benefit from a GHC600 million soft loan package.

According to him, the move is to protect such businesses from the economic impact of the coronavirus.

As part of a nationwide address on Sunday, April 5, 2020, he explained that the plan is to ensure that Ghanaian businesses are still functioning even though industries are affected by the pandemic.

READ ALSO: IMF gives Ghana $1 billion to combat COVID-19

COVID-19: Local businesses to begin manufacturing gloves and others  Akufo-Addo:

President Akufo-Addo has revealed that local manufacturing firms would soon begin the production of Personal Protective Equipment (PPEs).

According to him, the project would kick off on Tuesday, April 7, 2020, and the government is ready to provide support to make this a reality.

He went on to say that three million, six hundred thousand face masks will be produced domestically, with an output of one hundred and fifty thousand (150,000) per day.

COVID-19: Banks in Ghana support pharmaceutical companies with GHC3 billion in loans:

The Ghana Association of Bankers (GAB) has announced a GHC3 billion package for pharmaceutical companies working in Ghana.

YEN.com.gh understands that this forms part of the strategies adopted by GAB to support the companies.

The decision comes at a time when Ghana is implementing measures to eradicate the epidemic and GAB argued that the pharmaceutical companies are playing an important role in that endeavor.

COCOBOD predicts Ghana could lose $1 billion as global price of cocoa falls:

COCOBOD has predicted that Ghana is likely to lose $1 billion in revenue following a drop in global cocoa prices.

YEN.com.gh understands that the outbreak of the coronavirus led to a decline in cocoa prices on the world market.

This, COCOBOD explained, has stalled the current syndication process for loan facilities for the 2020/2021 crop season.

OVER THE WEEKEND:

No price drop expected yet for cocoa farmers due to COVID-19  COCOBOD:

The Ghana COCOBOD has downplayed suggestions that the producer price of cocoa may fall due to the outbreak of COVID-19 pandemic.

COCOBOD in 2019 increased the producer price of the beans from GH7,640 to GH8,240 per tonne.

With the global fight against COVID-19, most international trading commodities have seen plummeting prices with cocoa also being affected.

READ ALSO: COVID-19: Fitch predicts slowdown in Ghana's power sector

Read the best news on Ghana #1 news app. Install our latest app for Android and read the best news about Ghana

Nana Addo shouldn't share the food to the kayayo's only - Market women cry out | #Yencomgh

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Zoom, a video conferencing service created for corporate webinars and meetings, has grown into something more amid the coronavirus outbreak.

With the number of daily users exploding from 10 million to 200 million from December to March, it has become a forum for nearly every kind of social function, including happy hours, yoga sessions, school classes, funeral services as well as Passover, Easter and (soon) Ramadan rituals.

But no sooner had many tried Zoom for the first time than they began to hear reasons they might want to stay away.

Trolls have crashed meetings, flashing porn or racist slurs on screens. Security researchers released report after report on newly discovered vulnerabilities including leaked emails and bugs that might have allowed hackers to access webcams.

Earlier this month, Google warned employees not to use Zooms desktop application on their work computers due to privacy and security vulnerabilities. SpaceX, the U.S. Senate and New York Citys school district have enacted similar restrictions.

If youre among the tens of millions of people who have become regular Zoom users in recent weeks, you may be wondering what all this means for you. Heres a primer on some of the notable privacy and security lapses and how to keep your calls and data safe.

Is Zoom sending my data to Facebook?

A Vice investigation showed that Zooms app for iPhones sent data about users devices to Facebook, including about users who did not have Facebook accounts. The company was hit with at least two lawsuits in federal court, one by a California resident who alleges Zoom violated the states new Consumer Privacy Act by disclosing information to Facebook without providing consumers with adequate notice or the ability to opt out.

Zoom Chief Executive Eric Yuan said in a blog post March 27 that the company removed code that sent user data to Facebook in an updated version of the iOS app. The company updated its privacy policy March 29 after a swell of concern from users.

I think Zoom wasnt completely honest, Electronic Frontier Foundation senior technologist Bill Budington said. I think they are going through a lot of growing pains.

How else might my information have been compromised?

Reports of Zooms vulnerabilities predate the coronavirus crisis. Last July, security researcher Jonathan Leitschuh exposed a flaw that allowed hackers to take over Mac webcams through the app. The company fixed the problem after a public interest research centre filed a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission.

Thousands of personal Zoom videos were left viewable on the open web, including one-on-one therapy sessions, telehealth calls, and elementary school classes, the Washington Post reported. Peoples names, phone numbers and intimate conversations were revealed and childrens faces and voices were exposed.

Experts say the company now seems to be making more serious efforts to identify and quickly patch vulnerabilities. It formed an advisory council of chief security officers from other companies and hired Alex Stamos, Facebooks former chief security officer, as an adviser. Thats a lot of money being thrown at the problem to improve security. That is not insubstantial, said Leitschuh, who discovered the Mac camera vulnerability last year.

Are Zoom calls encrypted, and does that matter?

Zoom marketed its communications as protected by end-to-end encryption, which makes it, in effect, impossible for anyone, including the company itself, to spy on them. Recently, however, the Intercept revealed Zoom has been using a different type of encryption, called transport encryption, which enables the company to decode the content of calls.

That means the company could hypothetically be susceptible to pressure from government authorities to disclose communications, said Bill Marczak, a fellow at the Citizen Lab and a post-doctoral researcher at UC Berkeley.

That doesnt make those calls uniquely vulnerable, however. Cellphone calls and Skype calls on default settings, for example, arent encrypted end to end either, and its unlikely the average person would need this type of security. But reporters or dissidents under oppressive regimes, government officials discussing classified information or big companies that want to keep their business strategies confidential might want to use a more secure platform, Budington said.

What information does Zoom give my boss or co-workers?

If youve been part of a long, boring webinar, you perhaps thought there would be no harm in checking your email or your Facebook feed to pass the time. So many were alarmed at the revelation of an attention tracking feature that allowed the meeting host to see when participants clicked away from the active Zoom window for more than 30 seconds. The company announced it had removed the feature in an April 2 blog post.

Thats not the only way hosts can gather information on attendees. They can also record audio and video from meetings and save a record of group chats. Some Zoom users were surprised to learn that if they use a tool that allows them to save the chat log from a call on their local devices  which many use as a way to document meeting minutes  that record will include private chats theyve sent in addition to messages the group has sent.

What is Zoombombing?

Because Zoom is so easy to use, it has also been easy for people to exploit the app to sow mischief or chaos. Zoombombing is when uninvited participants interrupt or derail a meeting. Sometimes its harmless trolling, but often it rises to the level of harassment.

As USC and local school districts transitioned to online meetings, they reported getting Zoombombed with racist taunts and pornographic images. On Tuesday, Berkeley High School students were in the middle of a video conference when a man joined the Zoom meeting, exposed himself and shouted obscenities, the Mercury News reported.

The New York Times found scores of accounts on Instagram and on Reddit and 4Chan message boards where users co-ordinated to share meeting passwords and derail Zoom meetings.

Zooms default setting allowed anyone to join video calls if they had the meeting ID, which is a number 9 to 11 digits long. These meeting IDs are easy to guess  with an automated tool (called war-dialing), one could access thousands of meetings within a day by simply making a lot of guesses.

What are some steps I can take to make Zoom safer to use?

Be careful about how you share meeting IDs. Dont post them publicly.

Generate a new ID for every meeting you launch using the options panel, instead of using your personal meeting ID. That way, if someone gets ahold of your personal ID, future meetings wont be disrupted by Zoombombers.

You can toggle settings to ensure meeting participants need a password to access the meeting, which will further protect from disruption.

Enable Zooms Waiting Room feature, which lets meeting hosts keep would-be participants in a digital queue until they approve them to join the session. Beginning April 4, Zoom enabled the Waiting Room feature by default, requiring additional password settings for free users. Zoom has a guide to the feature on its website.

You can switch off a host of features that could be abused, if needed, including private chats, file transfers and custom backgrounds. The annotation feature, for example, could allow trolls to draw offensive shapes. You can also toggle the allow removed participants to rejoin option. Zoom has a guide to host controls on its website.

Keep your desktop app up to date, so that any patches Zoom makes to security vulnerabilities are added to your device.

If you want to be extra careful, use Zoom only on a mobile device, such as an iPad or an Android phone, because these versions go through review in the app stores.

What are some alternative platforms?

Signal and WhatsApp communications are encrypted end to end. WhatsApp allows encrypted calls with as many as four people. This is a suitable option for highly sensitive conversations.

There are also other video chatting services, such as Skype, Google Hangouts, Webex from Cisco, and FaceTime on Apple devices. Microsoft also offers powerful web, audio and video conferencing tools through its Microsoft Teams platform.

The bottom line

The reality is you cant see your friends, your classmates and maybe your co-workers right now. You cant eat at restaurants and you definitely cant go to bars. Zoom is one of the platforms people have ubiquitously adopted to replace these in-person interactions amid the coronavirus outbreak. And it works relatively well.

Its OK to use Zoom, experts say. Just be thoughtful about what youre using it for and observe a few precautions.
Were on a learning curve, so were hopeful that people will have some grace for us as were trying to work through the platforms, said Highland Clerk-Treasurer Michael Griffin. The intention always is to provide open access to government, to be transparent and also to allow the opportunity for the public to be able to interact and pose questions or pose comments and expect some kind of response from us as elected officials.
Thomas Frey drove slowly through the silent city, its stores shuttered and sidewalks deserted. Then, turning onto Race Street, he found a crowd. About 40 men sat on the sidewalk, stood in small groups, or napped in a cozy row in the fluorescent glow of a convenience store that along with the St. Johns Hospice shelter is all that remains of the commercial life of the block.

Snapping on his mask, face shield, and rubber gloves, Frey began distributing what his church, St. Miriams Parish and Friary in Flourtown, calls Blessing Bags, Ziploc bags of food, each containing a days calories.

We used to do usually about a thousand bags a month in Philadelphia and Montgomery County, Frey said. "Now, were doing a thousand bags a week, and were failing miserably.

St. Miriams is one tiny part of Philadelphias patchwork food supply for homeless people, which has strained and shredded during the pandemic  and an example of how the few volunteers who remain, people like Frey, are stretching themselves to their limits. Food pantries have closed, and some soup kitchens have reduced service. The college students who served meals on the Benjamin Franklin Parkway were hastily sent home. Restaurant and grocery store dumpsters no longer offer a reliable bounty.

While hunger has become a bottomless problem during the pandemic, those who were already homeless say their circumstances are more desperate than ever. Everything is scarce: food, money, and especially bathrooms.

"Everyone is resorting to stealing because you cant panhandle, said Joshua Smith, 29. His regulars are gone, and everyone else hurries past. Even if they have money to give, most are afraid of hand-to-hand contact, he said. People are more disrespectful now, he said. "I got sprayed with Lysol on the train.

And new arrivals continue to appear: a few released from county jails where the coronavirus has been spreading, some discharged from hospitals, still wearing wristbands and gowns that flap open in back.

Others were made homeless by the pandemic. Henry Damian, 42, said he works full time for the longshoremens union, but his finances were decimated in a divorce. Hed been staying with his parents, but he agreed to go to a shelter rather than risk bringing contagion home from work. Theyre very afraid" of exposure to the virus, he said of his family. So when theyre self-quarantined and isolating themselves, where can I go?

 READ MORE: Its heartbreaking: Coronavirus puts Philly homeless services in survival mode

Frey, a plumber from Abington, has long integrated food distribution into his daily commute through the city, making stops before work, at lunchtime, in the evening.

Rolling up the back door of his box truck, he revealed a storehouse: the Blessing Bags of food, but also bags of medicines and bandages. Hundreds of donated Bombas socks. Cardboard for sleeping on. Toothbrushes and paste. Bottled water. Maxi-pads. Dog food. Sewing kits. Raincoats. The truck has become a familiar though eccentric sight, scrawled with dry-erase messages, offering food and asking for donations. He drives by Fox 29 studios every day, so he figures its free publicity.

During ordinary times, Frey and other volunteers try to get to know people by name, recording interviews for Miracle Messages, an organization that tries to reconnect them to their families. Now, he aims to arrive as people are curling up to sleep, his goal to minimize contact and maintain his distance.

He started his night at 8:30 with Cliff McGoldrick, a first-time volunteer, riding along. McGoldrick is 70 and a smoker. If not now, when? he said, snapping on rubber gloves.

 READ MORE: As the pandemic surges, no one deserves whats brewing in Kensington

Some of those who received the Blessing Bags were also wearing masks and rubber gloves, though most masks hung loose on necks. Staying clean is difficult even for the fastidious, and even with new hand-washing stations installed by the city.

Nate Riley said his primary complaint is access to bathrooms. Guys are forced to go in the alleyways, behind dumpsters. Its pretty embarrassing, honestly.

Frey and McGoldrick had distributed nearly 40 bags, plus water, socks, and medicine, when a police car rolled up alongside five men bedded down on a corner. They had to move across the street.

Corey Wearry, 36, walked over to mediate, addressing the disgruntled men in soothing tones: They aint got to do that, but you cant disrespect them. You got to move.

Wearry said hes been homeless since he was released from jail on a drug charge; his probation officer, he said, wouldnt let him transfer supervision to Lancaster County, where his family lives. Hed been staying in a tent encampment below the Convention Center on 12th Street, but the camp was dispersed in March. Now, hes a nomad, setting up camp at night and breaking it down each morning.

Were lucky you all came, because we werent going to get no food or water tonight, he told Frey. "Its 9, and we aint eat since lunch at 12.

St. Miriams, too, is struggling  shrinking from 25 regular volunteers to six. Theyre adapting to a growing need, permitting people who have cars in which to shelter in place, but no homes, to park in the churchs lot overnight. A $10,000 grant from the city will help in the long run, but right now every day is a scramble.

Frey cant even source soap, let alone the mini-bottles of hand sanitizer he used to distribute. Hes been running out of blankets. And bare supermarket shelves and Amazon backlogs have forced him to spend whole afternoons hunting for things like peanut butter crackers. We spent every penny we had as a parish to order tuna fish and Vienna sausage," he said. "We ordered thousands and thousands of dollars of it, and we still havent received it.

The truck rattled onward, to the Eighth Street subway station, one of the few underground refuges still accessible for those without anywhere safer to stay. More than 40 people were hunkered into every niche and nook.

 HELP US REPORT: Are you a health care worker, medical provider, government worker, patient, frontline worker or other expert? We want to hear from you.

Joshua Smith bounded lightly to the truck and offered to help with deliveries. Though he lives in the subway station, hes used to giving out food  expired packets of apple slices with caramel, hummus with pita, all scavenged from Wawa dumpsters. Though panhandling has dried up, he has not lost hope. I have a lot of hustles, he said. Among them, hes a phlebotomist who can help drug users find a vein.

But the pandemic has made the prospect of getting out of the subway and into rehab fainter than ever, he said. He doesnt even have an ID. With everything closed, he wouldnt even know where to start.

Frey and McGoldrick piled back into the truck for a slow, rumbling serpentine through Center City, stopping every few blocks to hop out and give away more Blessing Bags. Frey ducked behind a building where he did an emergency plumbing job once, and noticed people sleeping amid the trashcans. Then he circled Rittenhouse Square, where the doorway of Barnes & Noble is now a shelter.

One man flagged the truck down with a grin. I havent eaten all day," he said. "I was just getting ready to steal something.

Someone asked for help getting a phone, but Frey has to focus on the most basic survival needs. Its a form of harm reduction. When he sees people lying on steam vents, he brings them fresh trash bags along with their food, urging them to sleep atop the bags to stay dry. One woman he approached this way awakened, startled. Get away from me, she shouted. My boyfriends a cop. He set the bag down gently and backed away.

As if calling on a friend, Frey leaned over a cardboard barricade at the entrance of an office building.

Hey, Ray! You hungry? I got tuna, and I got you two low-carb V-8 juices.

Ray, who declined to give his last name, is 59 and diabetic. He worked 32 years for the phone company before being laid off, he said; when he turns 60, hell be able to claim his full pension. Coronavirus or not, he just needs to make it to December. For now, Ray is enjoying the peace and quiet the pandemic has brought.

At 8 oclock, the whole world ends, he said.

Frey moved on, looping back toward the Parkway to give out the last two bags of food. Around 11, he walked empty-handed back to the truck.

This is the sad part of my night, he said. When I go home, and Ill pass 15 more people and I have nothing left to give them. I do my crying on the way home.

The Philadelphia Inquirer is one of more than 20 news organizations producing Broke in Philly, a collaborative reporting project on solutions to poverty and the citys push toward economic justice. See all of our reporting at brokeinphilly.org.
Teachers will not seek additional pay for time spent in the classroom ahead of the postponed Leaving Cert exams this summer, the head of the largest second-level teachers union has confirmed.

This follows the decision by the Association of Secondary Teachers of Ireland (ASTI) to support the postponement of the Leaving Cert exams until at least the end of July. This includes returning to classrooms for two weeks during the holidays to assist students ahead of their final exams.

Union members will absolutely not be seeking pay for this time, according to Deirdre McDonald, president of the ASTI.

This is nothing new to teachers, she said. Extracurricular activities, sports, choirs, music, all sorts of different things. All of those are all given free.

When the initial announcement was made last Friday, the union advised members that it was not enforceable. However, the union supported the decision in principle, Ms McDonald told RTE.

We had some serious concerns. We wanted to consult with our members.

The response has been overwhelmingly that they absolutely are behind coming back into school to do the face-to-face bit of work that is necessary to support the students going into the exams.

The union still has serious concerns, she added.

We have grave concerns around practical work, project work, special needs students and there will be more [concerns] as well because of the present situation.

Also around teachers, for example, who may be living with two elderly parents, who are compromised, or who have health needs, she said, adding that there is a myriad of health issues that need to be discussed.

Issues around childcare and contracts have been raised by ASTI members, she added.

"I do hope that everyone has taken Easter off, left the study and left the teaching. That has been the advice from the department, from the minister, and ourselves. Similarly in June, this is about people being able to sustain themselves," she said, adding that this applies to students as well.

They need to take June off and then towards the end of June, students start to re-engage. Likewise, teachers will support the students and then when it comes into July, as the plan is presently in place, the face-to-face will take place. The ASTI is due to meet with the Department of Education shortly to discuss its concerns.

Meanwhile, the Department of Education said that all plans for the postponed Leaving Cert are subject to public health advice.

Not running the Junior Cert exams in June will mean there should be more examiners available to supplement the marking of Leaving Cert papers.

The State Examinations Commission (SEC) also has plans to recruit more examiners, which will help make the correction process as efficient as possible. The revised exam timetable will not be published until June, according to the SEC.

"The public health situation remains fluid and so decisions in respect of the details of running the examinations can only be made closer to the commencement date."

The SEC and the Department of Education is examining alternative arrangements for students who may be unable to attend exams on health grounds as they may be ill or in quarantine, and for students who suffer a bereavement.
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Clean energy solutions provider Vikram Solar on Wednesday said it has been awarded a 300 MW project worth Rs 1,750 crore from NTPC. The project was secured by the company in a reverse bidding auction, and the solar plant will be spread across 1,500 acres of land in Rajasthan. The project is expected to be complete in 18 months, a statement by Vikram Solar said.

Vikram Solar has had a long standing business relation with NTPC. Previously, we have executed 50 MW solar plant project in Mandsaur, Madhya Pradesh and 130 MW solar project in Bhadla, Rajasthan for NTPC," said Venkat Muvvala, Head of EPC and O&M, Vikram Solar.

Vikram Solar is a leading solar energy solutions provider, specialising in efficient PV module manufacturing and comprehensive EPC solutions.

Its annual PV module production capacity stands at 1.2 GW. The company's products comply with the international standards of quality, reliability and performance, the statement said.
OTTAWA Canada has passed the crest of the first wave of the coronavirus pandemic but COVID-19 could infect many more people than federal officials have estimated if isolation measures are relaxed too soon or too broadly, according to a new study.

Thats because there is no vaccine in sight and most Canadians still have no immunity, according to a study by researchers including Amir Attaran of the University of Ottawa, which stands in contrast to a forecast recently released by the Public Health Agency of Canada (PHAC).

Last week, the federal agency said that even with relatively strong epidemic controls, up to 10 per cent of Canadas 37.5 million people could become infected.

But the new study projects that anywhere from 56.7 per cent to 84.5 per cent of Canadians  between 21.2 million and 31.6 million people  could become infected with COVID-19, depending on how soon epidemic control measures are lifted.

The federal forecast is terribly wrong, Attaran told the House of Commons health committee, because it failed to disclose its methodology and important case data necessary to understand how sick people are getting by province, and what a true case fatality rate is.

Attaran told the committee that the Public Health Agency of Canadas models which suggested somewhere between 4,400 and 44,000 Canadians could die over the course of a 12-to-18-month outbreak  were absolutely flawed.

He said the latest study uses hospitalization data and concludes that the tough epidemic control measures taken since mid-March have effectively broken the chain of transmission for now.

Theres good news and theres bad news here, Attaran testified. We cant do regional analyses because the data are hidden. But as a country, weve passed the worst of the first wave. We are over the crest, which is wonderful.

The other good news in our model is that it appears in Canada the virus is proving a bit less infectious than PHAC has estimated. We find it is on the low end of infection estimates that have been done in different countries, so that also means a smaller problem, he said.

The bad news is, we are all pre-immune, we are all still susceptible, Attaran said. And so if we lift the self-isolation and go out, many of us could get sick. Some of us will die.

While COVID-19 has yet to become the tidal wave that was feared, Attaran argued for rigorous planning of how to lift measures to create wavelets or epidemics we are going to create on purpose in a way that minimizes how many people die and .so that were not shooting our economy through the foot more than we need to.

There is no other way to reopen Canada, said Attaran, a professor in the faculties of law and the school of epidemiology and public health at the University of Ottawa.

The latest study said the lack of federal reporting of cases by onset date, severity and age group for most provinces prevents analysis at smaller geographic scales.

It considered scenarios where interventions would be lifted after 60 to 240 days. It did not model the number of deaths because Attaran said it would be irresponsible to do so without more comprehensive data from the federal and provincial governments.

Attaran singled out chief public health officer Dr. Theresa Tam and federal Health Minister Patty Hajdu for botching the federal modelling, concealing provincial numbers, and failing to present a plan for staging the next wave of disease curvelets, saying it must be planned or we will accidentally kill people.

PHAC did not respond to a request for comment Tuesday evening.

The federal agency came under fire from several fronts earlier in the day, after Alberta Premier Jason Kenney said he would not be bound by bureaucrats who block rapid approvals of testing kits.

Conservative health critic Matt Jeneroux also criticized PHAC for relying on the World Health Organization and expressed anger that Dr. Bruce Aylward, who led the WHOs COVID-19 mission to China, had failed to appear as a witness at the committee as expected.

This is unacceptable, he said. There is absolutely no doubt that the WHO has been slow to recommend concrete measures, that has negatively affected Canadas response to the virus. In fact, the WHO has  thanked China for its response, which was to mislead the world on the gravity of the virus.
MADISON  Until a few months ago, some health-care professionals were just as likely to view the use of electronic health records as a burden as an asset. Today, with the COVID-19 crisis nearing a disturbing crescendo in many U.S. states, those attitudes may be changing.

Experience thus far in the coronavirus outbreak suggests that digital health records and related online tools, such as telemedicine, are helping hospitals and health systems cope with the surge in requests for virtual diagnoses, analyzing trends in COVID-19 testing and managing cases requiring critical care.

Wisconsin-based Epic, a pioneer in the development of electronic medical records, provides such records for more than half of all Americans through 491 health systems. Its evolving story is a leading example of how health information technologies are making a difference in the lives of millions.

Because Epic is based in Verona, just outside Madison, its legacy customers include many of Wisconsins health systems. Perhaps because those health systems were early adopters or developed their own EMRs, such as the Marshfield Clinic, Wisconsin runs anywhere from a few percentage points to 10 percentage points ahead of national averages for EMR adoption by patients, office physicians and hospitals.

How is that concentration helping patients and providers in Wisconsin? Dr. Sam Butler, a physician and self-described EMR evangelist at Epic, describes the presence of integrated clinical, assess and revenue systems as the central nervous system of a health organization. That nervous system triggers a quicker response than what otherwise would occur.

One such rapid response is telemedicine, which was a remote curiosity for most patients  and even some practitioners  until COVID-19 hit. Today, millions of consultations are taking place virtually, many of them on Epic platforms that were underused in the past.

In a matter of roughly a month, Epic has helped 200 of its customers set up or expand such platforms, training medical professionals along the way.

Reports from health-care systems such as University of California-San Diego Health, Providence St. Joseph Health, the Childrens Hospital of Philadelphia and New York Universitys Langone Medical Center show that more than half of primary care are being done virtually.

That compares to single-digit percentages a few weeks ago.

Reported one Pennsylvania physician: Through telehealth, were seeing patients in their homes, meeting their families, seeing the art on their walls, learning about the things they care about most I thought telehealth would remove the human aspect, but it actually enhanced it.

Telemedicine is also a part of Epics volunteer effort at the recast Javits Center in New York City, which has been turned into a 1,000-bed hospital, and Chicagos McCormick Place Convention Center.

The story is much the same in Wisconsin, where Epics MyChart tool is being used for the digital adaptation of the bygone days when doctors went on house calls.

Care providers are transitioning many of their visits from in-person meetings to video visits, resulting in a 3,000% increase in video visits, on average, from February to March, said Dave Fuhrmann, a senior vice president for research and development at Epic. Patients are also doing more self-management from home, such as tracking their symptoms and entering their temperatures, which is shared with their care provider.

Electronic medical record systems cant process COVID-19 tests, of course, but they can help spot directions.

An organization or state can zoom out to see trends in testing, including where testing is ramping up or turn-around time for tests that could be improved, said Seth Hain, also a senior vice president for R&D at Epic. He added that EMRs also help to measure how effectively resources such as beds and ventilators are being used across Wisconsin.

There are limits, of course, on who can access virtual medicine and when  sometimes tied to the digital divide or economic hardship. For many people, however, electronic health tools may be a way to fight back against COVID-19.

Tom Still is president of the Wisconsin Technology Council. He can be reached at tstill@wisconsintechnologycouncil.com.

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A Bengaluru-based couple's joy



knew no bounds when they held their baby girl, born through surrogacy in Gujarat during lockdown, for the first time in their arms on Tuesday after she was flown in an air ambulance to be united with them.

Though the child was born on March 29 via surrogacy at a hospital in Surat, her parents finally managed to meet her after 17 days as they were unable to travel to Gujarat due to the coronavirus-enforced lockdown, Dr Pooja Nadkarni Singh, who delivered the baby at a hospital here, told PTI.

"The couple from Bengaluru approached us about a year back to have a baby through IVF and surrogacy. Though the girl was born on March 29, her parents could not come here. We finally arranged an air ambulance, which took the baby to her parents in Bengaluru," she said.

On Tuesday, Dr Singh herself took the baby to the airport in a vehicle and handed her over to doctors who had arrived in the air ambulance.

Ahmedbad Airport Director Aman Saini said the air ambulance had arrived from Delhi and all the protocols related to the safety of the child were followed.

"While passenger plane services have been stopped due to the lockdown, medical emergency services are permitted in such situations," Saini said.

Dr Singh did not reveal identity of the child's parents due to privacy issues.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Gandhinagar, April 15 : With increased and intensified surveillance and testing for coronavirus infections at the hotspots in Gujarat, health authorities said 56 new positive cases were detected in the last 12 hours in the state, including Ahmedabad's 42 cases. Gujarat till now has reported 695 positive cases and 30 deaths.

The two deaths reported on Wednesday included a female (14) with mental sickness, admitted in the SSG Hospital in Vadodara and another female (45) with comorbidity like hypertension admitted in Metas Hospital in Surat.

In the last 12 hours, Ahmedabad saw 42 new positive cases (24 males, 18 females), followed by Surat with 6 cases (5 M, 1 F), 3 cases each in Vadodara and Panchmahals (all males), one case each in new areas like Kheda and Botad (all males).

Ahmedabad now has maximum 404 positive cases, followed by Vadodara 116, Surat 48, Bhavnagar 26, Rajkot 18, Gandhinagar 16, Patan 14, Bharuch 11, Anand 10, and Panchmahals and Chotta Udepur with 5 each, Kutch and Mehsana with 4 each, Gir-Somnath, Dahod and Banaskantha two each and Jamnagar, Morbi, Sabarkantha, Botad and Kheda one each.

"Out of the total 606 active cases, the condition of 598 is stable, whereas eight who are critical are on ventilators," said Jayanti Ravi, Principal Secretary, Health and Family Welfare Department.

"In the last 24 hours, we have drawn 2,354 samples, of which 78 were positive and 2,268 negative," added Ravi.

"The total number of quarantined persons in the state is 15,147, including 13,059 home-quarantined, 1,960 in government facilities and 128 in private facilities," added Ravi.

With more positive cases emerging from Ahmedabad's hotspot or cluster areas in the fortified area of Ahmedabad, the health authorities intensified the surveillance and testing in these areas.

The Gujarat government on Tuesday imposed a week-long curfew in the walled city and in the Danilimda area.

-- The story has been published from a wire feed without any modifications to the text
Source: Xinhua| 2020-04-15 21:36:39|Editor: huaxia

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A team of medical experts from Yinchuan, northwest China's Ningxia, have been sent to Saudi Arabia to help fight COVID-19. The experts brought with them medical supplies including protective masks and suits, nucleic acid testing kits and infrared thermometers. #FightVirus
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott told Hannity on Monday that Texas is essential to reopen America economically and they need to find the way to open business at the same time to reduce the spread of the coronavirus.

"We don't want to regenerate coronavirus spread. We want to find the right strategy," the republican governor emphasized, "we're working on strategies as we speak with medical experts and business leaders to find the right strategy so we can unleash our economy." He added.

He said that we could learn from the past two months how so-called essential businesses are dealing with the coronavirus threat.

"There have been some businesses that have been open while at the same time, we've been reducing the spread of the coronavirus," the governor said to the host, "so we need to learn from the strategies about what works and allow other businesses to deploy those strategies while we are ensuring that we continue to slow the spread of the coronavirus."

The governor noted that Texas was the number one state in the United States for job creation last year, leading in Gross Domestic Product

"It is essential for the future of the United States of America economically. America needs Texas to get back to business." "We want to open. Texans love to work. Texans are dying to get back to work," He said to the host.

The host Sean Hannity concluded, "I think most states can reopen even sooner than later. We don't have to wait until May 1," mentioning the date when President hoped to begin easing the restrictions by the coronavirus pandemic.
Mumbai, April 15 : Vinay Dubey -- the man termed as the reason behind the migrants chaos in Mumbais Bandra on Tuesday when thousands of labourers took to the street demanding to be taken back to their homes -- is originally a small scale technical support provider to an e-commerce website with never ending political ambitions, making the politically redundant North Indian voters in Maharashtra his political capital.

Anindya Banerjee Mumbai, April 15 (IANS) Vinay Dubey -- the man termed as the reason behind the migrants chaos in Mumbais Bandra on Tuesday when thousands of labourers took to the street demanding to be taken back to their homes -- is originally a small scale technical support provider to an e-commerce website with never ending political ambitions, making the politically redundant North Indian voters in Maharashtra his political capital.

He had unsuccessfully fought the 2012 Uttar Pradesh Assembly elections on a Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) ticket from the Varanasi North constituency. The elections that saw Akhilesh Yadav come to power as the young Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh left him badly defeated, as he did not figure in the top five. BJP's Ravindra Jaiswal had won the seat in a neck-to-neck fight with BSP's Sujeet Kumar Maurya.

But Dubey was in no mood to call it quits. After failure in the rough political pitches of the cow belt, he made the North Indians living in Mumbai his political capital.

The man whose call through social media brought thousands of migrants to the streets of Mumbai on a day when Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced the extension of the ongoing pan-India shutdown till May 3, heads an organisation called Uttar Bharatiya Mahapanchayat.

Under this umbrella, Dubey united North Indians, mostly workers and labourers working in warehouses, restaurants, malls and factories, as well as auto rickshaws drivers.

As the 2019 general elections approached, Dubey's fondness for the NCP started to wane and he found a new but unlikely route through Raj Thackeray. Ironically, Thackeray is known for his blatant anti-North Indian stand and his outfit has often resorted to violence to exhibit its political stand on the matter.

However, necessity and changing demography makes strangers allies. Mumbai and parts of Palghar, Thane and Raigad districts are places where over 40 lakh migrants, mainly from Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, live.

Dubey with his rising importance among the city's migrants managed the impossible -- he got Raj Thackeray to address the migrants. Convinced with no support from North Indians, it was a necessary move for Thackeray as it was for Dubey who needed a political backing for himself. It was a win-win situation for both.

The state's migrants had leaders like Ram Manohar Tripathi, Ramesh Dubey, Chandrakant Tripathi, Kripa Shankar Singh, Arif Naseem Khan, Sanjay Nirupam (all from the Congress), Nawab Malik (NCP) and Abu Azmi (Samajwadi Party) who aggressively stood by them, but only till the time MNS came with its sharp 'Marath Manoos' ideology that forced many of them to subdue.

In that leadership vacuum, an odd technical support provider with high political ambitions rose to the occasion -- Vinay Dubey.

Come the 2019 general elections, Dubey once again threw his hat in the fray, as an independent this time, banking on MNS support. He fought from Kalyan against strong Maharashtian candidate Shrikant Shinde, the son of Thane strongman and state minister Eknath Shinde, and lost again.

But what he did not lose was the influence he still holds over the city's migrants. So to flex his muscle, he used the desperation of migrants caught in the Covid-19 lockdown and gave them a call to assemble on April 14 at the Lok Manya Tilak Terminus to "head home".

In a now viral video, he is heard saying, "People from other states are now stuck in my Maharashtra." Dubey is clearly seen telling them through the video to sit in the terminus. "We are stuck at home. We are dying. So might as well die while fighting," Dubey is heard saying.

The Mumbai Police has detained him now and is probing the matter. According to his 2012 election affidavit, Dubey hails from a non-descriptive village called Harinarayanpur. As per the affidavit, he had no pending FIR against him.

( can be contacted at Anindya.b@ians.in)
The two most powerful men at Royal Mail have been running the crucial service from their homes on the Continent during the coronavirus crisis.

Chief executive Rico Back and operating chief Achim Dunnwald are understood to be working from Switzerland and Germany respectively, having left the UK after the lockdown.

Critics yesterday claimed German executive Back, dubbed 'the Flying Postman' because he commutes to Britain, was too far away to effectively run the company and called for him to resign.

Tough at the top: Chief executive Rico Back (pictured) left the UK after the coronavirus lockdown

Back, 66, is working from his 2.3m family home, a luxury penthouse overlooking Lake Zurich. The father-of-four, who took over as Royal Mail boss two years ago, usually travels by air to the UK for the working week and returns to the property during weekends.

But after the postal service's London office was shut on March 24, it is understood Back returned to Switzerland and has remained there.

He took over as group boss from Dame Moya Greene in 2018, receiving 6m for changes to his contract. He was paid 647,000 last year but can earn up to 2.7m. Critics have questioned whether he could effectively run Royal Mail, which employs 140,000 staff, while being partly based abroad.

Back and Royal Mail have defended the arrangement, saying he would be in the UK every week or 'as and when requested'.

He flies to the UK covers the costs himself, including those of his London accommodation. It is understood that he has been keeping in regular contact with colleagues, including chairing daily meetings on the crisis. Dunnwald, who was made chief operating officer this month, is working from his native Germany.

Yesterday it emerged that Royal Mail has yet to cut executive pay, despite cancelling its full-year dividend. It is understood the pay committee will soon review the matter.

Terry Pullinger, deputy general secretary of the Communication Workers Union (CWU), which represents twothirds of staff, said: 'No other national postal service would have handed the keys to such a domestically-focused public service to someone who lives in a different country.

FIRMS HIT BY 1,200 BILL TO FORWARD THEIR POST Small businesses are being charged up to 1,200 for their post to be forwarded after being told to shut. They have lashed out as Royal Mail, which turned a 241m pre-tax profit last year, attempts to profit from businesses fighting to survive. Many need the forwarding service to receive crucial items such as bills, bank statements and invoices. But Royal Mail is charging over 1,200 to forward post for three months for businesses in a shared premises. For companies operating out of a single premise, for example a shop, it is charging 259. There are concerns business owners are being forced to collect post because they cannot afford the fees. Ashleigh Watson, who owns waxing salon Waxology in East Kilbride, Scotland, said it was 'unreasonable' to be charged so much after her 11,000 monthly income disappeared. The mother-of-one, 27, still has monthly bills of 1,700 before the wages of her three staff, and Government support is not paid until June. She said: 'I receive two or three letters a week  to be charged close to 300 is ridiculous.' Mike Cherry, of the Federation of Small Businesses, said: 'These exorbitant costs cannot be justified. Royal Mail has a monopoly over this service.' Royal Mail said: 'We play an important role in helping to keep the wheels of commerce turning. To enable us to do this, we need to charge. Our business redirection and diversion services offer very good value for money.' It added: We would like to reassure any customer who has taken out a Business Redirection during the COVID-19 crisis (after 16 March 2020) that should they return to their usual premises before their Business Redirection or Business Diversion expires, they will be refunded for any unused time.

'His 6m golden hello and annual reward package was, and still is, a disgrace. He must go before this vital service, which is keeping this country connected through this crisis, is lost forever. The board must act.'

Back is also currently embroiled in a row with the CWU over protective equipment given to postal workers.

As 'key workers' under Government lockdown rules, posties have continued their delivery rounds. The CWU says concerns raised by 'truly scared' staff are not being addressed. Royal Mail insists that staff have been provided with adequate protection.

It said: 'Rico Back is leading Royal Mail's response to the emergency. Our priorities during coronavirus are clear: protect our people, protect the country and protect our company.

'We are working hard to deliver the most comprehensive service we can. Executive remuneration matters will be considered by the remuneration committee as part of our year-end process.'
A 69-year-old doctor from Shillong, the first Covid-19 positive patient of Meghalaya, passed away early on Wednesday.

John L Sailo Ryntathiang, the managing director of Bethany Hospitals, died at around 3:00 am on Wednesday, sources in Shilliong confirmed. He had tested positive for Covid-19 on Monday.

This is the second Covid-19 fatality in the Northeast after the death of a 65-year-old patient at Assams Silchar Medical College and Hospital last week. There are a total of 40 Covid-19 positive patients in the region - 32 in Assam, two in Manipur and Tripura and one each in Nagaland, Mizoram, Meghalaya and Arunachal Pradesh.

Though Ryntathiang didnt have any recent travel history, he reportedly got infected from his son-in-law, a pilot with Air India who had returned from New York to Delhi on March 16 and reached Shillong on March 24.

Preliminary investigations suggest that one of the relatives of the concerned person had a travel history to one of the infected countries and he was back in Shillong before the 14-day quarantine period was over, Meghalaya Chief Minister Conrad Sangma said on Tuesday.

Though the person took all precautions, but sometimes we see asymptomatic cases as well, who dont show any signs but could be a carrier. Therefore, there is a high chance that it could have been passed on from there. We are looking at all possibilities of how this could have happened, he added.

Meghalaya had traced nearly 2,000 primary and secondary contacts of the patient and done tests on 90 of them (nearly half of the primary contacts).

The government had asked its Assam counterpart to support with testing of the 2,000 contacts. The Shillong-based Northeastern Indira Gandhi Regional Institute of Health and Medical Sciences (NEIGRIHMS) is the lone Covid-19 testing lab in Meghalaya.

Our basic strategy would be to identify, isolate and test all contact for the first few days till we are able to zero down and close the loop of transmission, Sangma said in Shillong after a cabinet meet on Tuesday.

Both branches of the private hospital, where the doctor worked, have been shut and the staff placed under quarantine. The government has asked everyone who may have visited Bethany Hospital on or after March 22 to register themselves by calling 108 or getting in touch with the health department.

Meghalayas capital Shillong has been placed under curfew for 48 hours beginning 6:00 am on Tuesday.

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Americas favorite government agency is on the brink of collapse, and Washington policymakers appear too mired in politics to save it.

Like so many businesses, the United States Postal Service has been hit hard by the coronavirus. Mail volume is down nearly a third over this time last year and continues to fall. The Postal Service is predicting $13 billion in lost revenue this fiscal year as a direct result of the pandemic. In an April 9 telebriefing to the House Oversight and Reform Committee, the postmaster general, Megan Brennan, warned that without financial assistance the agency could run out of money by the end of September.

The Postal Service cannot be allowed to crumble in the midst of a national emergency. Though organized as a self-sustaining quasi-governmental enterprise, run without taxpayer funding, it is not just another business. Even in an increasingly wired world, the agencys mandate of universal service provides a lifeline to remote areas. As this pandemic rages, its 600,000-plus employees are working to ensure that Americans receive their prescriptions and protective equipment and other essential items, no matter where they live. Nearly 500 postal workers have tested positive for the virus, with hundreds more suspected of having it, according to The Washington Post.

This year, the Postal Service is also playing an expanded role in sustaining democracy. In the new world of social distancing, mail-in and absentee voting are crucial to ensuring that Americans do not have to risk their lives to cast their votes. If the Postal Service collapses, it will take with it the infrastructure needed for millions of Americans to participate in the most fundamental act of self-government.
The police want powers to be able to enter homes and shut down parties and BBQs they deem unnecessary under lockdown laws.

The Police Federation, who represent rank and file officers, believe there is a technicality in the current measures that mean they cannot enter a private property to break up a house party, unless they are allowed in by the householders.

On Sunday, the chairman of the group John Apter said that increased numbers of people are calling the police to report their neighbours for breaking social distancing rules.

In just the first week of lockdown in late March, Greater Manchester Police were called to 494 gatherings in just four days.

A Police Federation source, told The Telegraph: 'We have asked they consider giving us powers around private gatherings or gatherings in a private dwelling.'

Police chat with passers by in St George's Park, Bristol, as the UK continues in lockdown to help curb the spread of the coronavirus on Tuesday

'Some officers are having to work round it using other legislation that wasn't designed for it.'

It comes after police have been accused of being 'overzealous' and pursuing 'over-enforcement' - from banning shops selling Easter eggs to shaming walkers with drones.

Despite the clamour for new lockdown powers, they are very unlikely to be green-lit by Home Secretary Priti Patel.

A Home Office source told the newspaper: 'It would be a really big step for policing in this country that is not needed at this point.

'Also police can issue the fixed penalty notice as they travel to or from the party.'

Police have already been given some enforcement power by the Home Office to ensure the rules set down by Boris Johnson three weeks ago are being followed.

Police pass a family out walking on Primrose Hill, London, as the UK continues in lockdown to help curb the spread of the coronavirus on Tuesday

This includes breaking up gatherings of two or more people. 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.

Just last week a survey revealed that a third of Britons think police have gone too far in their lockdown crackdown in the UK.

A YouGov poll commissioned by crime and justice consultancy Crest Advisory asked 1,646 adults between Friday and Sunday for their thoughts on how they view the police handling of the new laws and Government guidance to keep people indoors and protect against the spread of Covid-19.

Despite the clamour for new lockdown powers, they are very unlikely to be green-lit by Home Secretary Priti Patel

The new research indicated 42 per cent of respondents fully support the approach taken by the police, but a further 32 per cent felt in some cases the police had gone too far.

Some 14 per cent of people who took part in the survey said the police should take tougher action, while 6 per cent felt the police approach to date had been too heavy handed.

Just 2 per cent of the public said the police should have no role in enforcing the lockdown.

Joe Caluori, head of policy at Crest Advisory, said: 'This survey underlines the challenge police forces have in striking a balance between effective enforcement of the lockdown in order to support public health efforts to tackle Covid-19 and the need to maintain Britain's model of policing by consent.'
A double-blind research study of a drug touted by President Donald Trump early on to treat coronavirus found it to be so dangerous at high doses the trial was shut down after six days.

The study on chloroquine, conducted in Brazil, found one-quarter of the patients taking the anti-malaria medication developed potentially deadly changes in the electrical system regulating their heartbeats. While a small and imperfect study, it highlights the compelling need for more rigorous data.

Doctors in the United States have seen such heart issues with chloroquine and a similar but less toxic drug, an anti-inflammatory called hydroxychloroquine. Some medical systems are no longer using either to treat COVID-19, even if they initially tried it. Others use them only with careful monitoring.

The Infectious Diseases Society of America guidelines panel on Saturday recommended patients hospitalized with COVID-19 be given chloroquine or hydroxychloroquine in the context of a clinical trial.

Rajesh Gandhi, an infectious diseases physician at Massachusetts General Hospital and professor at Harvard Medical School, was on the IDSA guidelines panel that created the guidelines published over the weekend.

"The IDSA guidelines panel concluded that the data so far for hydroxychloroquine and chloroquine is insufficient to be either for or against it," Gandhi said. "We dont know that it doesnt work or that it works."

More: In the midst of furious coronavirus work, scientists must also socially distance in the lab

More: The first US coronavirus patients are being treated with convalescent plasma therapy. Will it work? Not even the doctors know

The evaluation found studies showing potentially dangerous changes in the electrical patterns of some patients' hearts, as well as gastrointestinal side effects. It acknowledged there is a "knowledge gap" about what is known, making clinical trials crucial.

"The guidelines are a living document, we'll continue to update as we get more data," Gandhi said.

Story continues

Despite the lack of certainty surrounding the efficacy of the drugs, Trump continues to promote them. He first heralded both chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine as possible cures for COVID-19 in briefings in March and has done so repeatedly, as recently as Tuesday, during a White House media event with people who've recovered from COVID-19.

Trump asked if they'd taken "the Hydroxy" and said, "I actually haven't heard a bad story" about the drug. He went on to indicate that while Americans understood its importance, the news media did not.

In this file photo taken on February 26, 2020, medical staff shows o at the IHU Mediterranee Infection Institute in Marseille, packets of a Nivaquine, tablets containing chloroquine and Plaqueril, tablets containing hydroxychloroquine, drugs that has shown signs of effectiveness against coronavirus.

Some researchers worry the president's focus on the drugs has put too high a priority on exploring their use over other, potentially more promising drugs.

And despite Trump's assertions, medical scientists remain unconvinced of the drugs' safety or effectiveness.

"Like many other medical centers that were desperate to come up with something to help people who had COVID-19 seriously enough to require hospitalization, we originally started using hydroxychloroquine," said Daniel Kaul, a professor of infectious disease at the University of Michigan school of medicine.

After several weeks, they saw no clear benefits for patients but very clear side effects, including a change in the electrical patterns in some patients' hearts similar to the findings of the Brazilian study. While a patient experiences no symptoms, the shifting patterns show up on an electrocardiogram and are a warning sign of a potentially fatal heart arrhythmia.

In the last week of March, the University of Michigan stopped giving hydroxychloroquine except in the context of carefully controlled clinical drug trials.

"It caused us to take a long step back and look very carefully at the data," Kaul said. "When we analyzed it, it was so flawed as to be uninterpretable and no evidence of benefit so we stopped using it."

Why Trump's support of hydroxychloroquine to treat COVID-19 could slow the race for a cure

Many medical centers, including the University of California, San Francisco, Harvard, the Mayo Clinic and the University of Washington are not prescribing either drug for COVID-19 outside of clinical studies or in very specialized cases.

"It was reasonable, based on data we had a week ago, to use hydroxychloroquine," said Andrew Badley, an infectious disease specialist at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota. "We now have the Brazilian trial, and there are other trials that have been submitted for review. As those results become available, we may or may not need to modify our thinking."

Experts noted information about what drugs are effective is constantly changing and treatment options available at individual medical centers can vary widely. Some, including in hard-hit New York, continue to use the drug on critically ill patients.

At Stony Brook Medicine, a medical system on Long Island, New York, that includes multiple hospitals and clinics, doctors originally gave most COVID-19 patients both hydroxychloroquine and an antibiotic, azithromycin, based on early data from a tiny French study. They stopped giving azithromycin early on because they observed heart issues.

"Now we give hydroxychloroquine to most (COVID-19) patients but discourage it in elderly patients that have significant cardiac disease. We also monitor patients constantly," said Bettina Fries, infection diseases division chief at Stony Brook Medicine.

With more than 400 COVID-19 patients in the system, they haven't had the luxury to set up more than a few clinical trials, she added.

"We had to pull every physician out of every clinic just to deal with the surge," Fries said. Finding the labor simply to enroll patients in a clinical trial, a very time-consuming and bureaucratic process, simply wasn't possible.

Brazilian study stopped at Day Six

The study from Brazil published on Saturday was among the first larger and more rigorous released on chloroquine. However, it included only 81 patients, lacked placebo controls and was a rushed preprint, so it cannot be used as a sole source for treatment decisions.

Patients also were given the antibiotic azithromycin and most got an antiviral treatment, oseltamivir, both of which can cause the same electrical issues in the heart muscle, noted Kome Gbinigie, a researcher at the Center for Evidence Based Medicine at Oxford Universitys Nuffield Department of Primary Care Health Services in England. Gbinigie co-authored a review of chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine as treatments for COVID-19 that appeared April 7 in the British Journal of General Practice.

Despite these confounding factors, the Brazilian findings offer "a cautionary tale," said George Daley, dean of Harvard Medical School.

"Its such an object lesson for the need for clinical trials to take precedence over gut feeling and intuition," he said. "It teaches us that there are real risks to drugs and its dangerous to advocate for an unproven therapy when you might not be taking the risks and benefits into account."

The trial was conducted at a public hospital in the Brazilian city of Manaus and posted on Saturday to medRxiv, an online server for medical articles that have not yet gone through the peer-review process.

Beginning March 23, half the participants were given a high dose of 600 milligrams of chloroquine two times a day. Half were given a low dose of 450 milligrams twice a day for the first day and then a single dose each day. The patients also received azithromycin and another antibiotic.

On day six of the trial, 11 patients had died and a quarter of those getting the higher dosage showed abnormal electrical activity in the heart.

The researchers closed the high dose part of the study and moved all remaining patients to the low dose regimen. In their paper, they wrote the high dose of chloroquine "was not sufficiently safe to warrant continuation of that particular study arm."

Like much related to COVID-19, the study comes with many caveats. It was not peer-reviewed and not subject to the stringent publication requirements of a major scientific journal. It was, however, double-blinded and randomized, meaning neither the patients nor the doctors knew who was getting what dose and patients receiving either the low or high dose were randomly selected.

It is the first of many expected studies looking at the effectiveness of both chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine.

History casts doubt on effectiveness

Its long been known that chloroquine and the similar drug hydroxychloroquine  both which have been used in much lower doses to treat malaria  can affect electrical impulses in the heart.

This particular compound has over 40 known different side effects, said John Scott, the chair of the department of pharmacology at the University of Washington in Seattle. If you affect the electrical signaling of the heart, youre in trouble.

Many infectious disease doctors doubt the effectiveness of chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine for treating COVID-19, said Otto Yang, a professor of infectious disease at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Their reasoning is based on history. While multiple lab studies have found chloroquine to show good activity against viruses including HIV and influenza, "all controlled clinical trials treating these diseases failed," he said.

When it comes to treating the virus that causes COVID-19, Yang said, "I see no reason why it would be different for SARS-CoV-2.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Coronavirus drug chloroquine  touted by Trump  has test halted
Allentown, PA (18103)

Today

Mostly sunny and bitterly cold. It will feel like it's in the single digits and low teens..

Tonight

Partly cloudy and extremely cold. Wind chills around or below 0 degrees.
Bengaluru, April 16 : Extension of lockdown has forced former Karnataka Chief Minister H.D. Kumaraswamy to perform his son Nikhil Gowda's wedding on Friday at a farmhouse near Bidadi in Ramanagara district, his aide said on Wednesday.

"Nikhil's wedding has been shifted to Kumaraswamy's farmhouse at Kethaganahalli near Bidadi from Bengaluru due to lockdown extension and cancellation of marriages and religious functions in the state," his media secretary K.C. Sadananada told IANS.

"As the lockdown is enforced to contain the coronavirus spread, the marriage will be a private event, with only family members and close relatives in attendance," said Sadananda.

Nikhil, 28, got engaged to Revathi, 22, grandniece of state Congress leader M. Krishnappa, at a top hotel in Bengaluru on February 10 and a grand wedding was scheduled to be held at Janapadaloka between Ramanagaram and Chennapatna on the state highway to Mysuru on April 17.

"When the 21-day lockdown was enforced on March 25, the families decided to hold the wedding at Krishnappa's house here, hoping it (lockdown) will be lifted on April 14. Its extension and declaring Bengaluru as a Covid hotspot forced to shift it again to the farmhouse," said Sadananda.

Kumaraswamy has taken the state government's permission to conduct the marriage, complying with all norms such as wearing masks, sanitising hands and keeping social distancing.

Nikhil's grandfather -- JD-S supremo and former Prime Minister H.D. Deve Gowda, grandmother Chennamma, uncles, including former minister H.D. Revanna, cousin and Hassan Lok Sabha member Prajwal Hegde and other family members will be present to bless him and bride Revathi.

"Kumaraswamy has urged party's leaders, cadres and supporters to bless the couple from their respective houses and not to flock to the farmhouse due to the lockdown. He has promised to hold a grand reception at the original venue on a suitable date after summer when normalcy returns," added Sadananda.

The local police has also made security arrangements around the farmhouse to prevent crowding though Ramanagara district is a greenspot with not a single Covid case till date.

Contesting the Mandya Lok Sabha seat in the May 2017 general elections in his maiden electoral bid, Nikhil, a rising bilingual (Kannada/Telugu) star, had, however, lost to south Indian actress Sumalatha Ambareesh, an Independent.
Credit: CC0 Public Domain

A new study has found young people are leaving it 'too late' to seek help for eating disorders, citing fear of losing control over their eating or weight, denial, and failure to perceive the severity of the illness as reasons not to get professional advice.

The recent online survey of almost 300 Australian young adults aged 18-25 years found a majority had eating, weight or body shape concerns, and even those with anorexia or bulimia reportedly found reasons to delay getting treatment or expert interventions.

The first author of the study, Kathina Ali, Research Associate in Psychology at Flinders University, explains that concern for others and the belief one should solve their own problems were the two most common barriers towards seeking help for eating concerns.

"Not wanting others to worry about their problems was the highest endorsed barrierit reflects the wish for autonomy and also the fear of being a burden to others in this group of young adults."

Feeling embarrassed about their problems or fearing that other people do not believe eating disorders are real illnesses even prevented young adults experiencing symptoms of anorexia nervosa or bulimia nervosa from seeking help, says fellow psychology researcher Dr. Dan Fassnacht.

"Concerningly, only a minority of people with eating disorder symptoms had sought professional help and few believed they needed help despite the problems they were experiencing," says Dr. Fassnacht, Flinders University Psychology Lecturer, co-author of a new paper just published in the International Journal of Eating Disorders.

In the research article, entitled "What prevents young adults from seeking help? Barriers toward help-seeking for eating disorder symptomatology," the Australian and German researchers recommended clinicians (counsellors, health workers and others) and the public be made aware of these barriers.

More information and education about the severity and the impact of eating disordersand how symptoms can get worse without interventions or treatmentshould be available to young adults, including the importance of seeking help, and self-management strategies.

Helpful and free evidence-based online resources are available at websites such as Australia's Butterfly Foundation and the National Eating Disorders Collaboration.

Explore further Three studies reveal noteworthy trends regarding eating disorders in the U.S.

More information: Kathina Ali et al, What prevents young adults from seeking help? Barriers toward help-seeking for eating disorder symptomatology, International Journal of Eating Disorders (2020). Journal information: International Journal of Eating Disorders Kathina Ali et al, What prevents young adults from seeking help? Barriers toward help-seeking for eating disorder symptomatology,(2020). DOI: 10.1002/eat.23266
As people who regularly risk their own health and safety for the sake of others, first responders appreciate the dangerous work that medical professionals have been doing amid the coronavirus outbreak.

So on Tuesday night, more than 100 police officers, firefighters, EMTs and other emergency workers from several Monmouth County communities gathered  wearing masks and practicing social distancing  outside the main entrance to Bayshore Medical Center in Holmdel to pay tribute to the doctors, nurses and other hospital staffers who have been on the front lines in the fight against the coronavirus.

Usually, the first responders, police, fire and emergency workers, theyre the ones perceived as being on the front line, said Detective Eric Bernardo of the Holmdel Police Department, who is also the townships emergency management coordinator and deputy chief of its volunteer fire & rescue squad. In this case, the tip of the spear is the health care workers.

A pair of fire trucks formed a patriotic arch for staffers of Bayshore Medical Center in Holmdel beginning and ending their shifts Tuesday night, April 14, 2020.Photo by Brian McGraw

As of Tuesday, Monmouth County had 4,003 confirmed cases of COVID-19, including 145 fatalities. New Jersey had 68,824 total confirmed, with 2,805 Deaths. In addition to Bayshore Medical Center, which is part the Hackensack Meridian Health network, Holmdel is also home to a Monmouth County coronavirus testing center set up at the PNC Bank Arts Center.

In a ceremony like one thats played out in other communities during the outbreak, Bernardo said at least 100 first responders from Holmdel, Hazlet, Keyport, Union Beach and Matawan lined both sides of a walkway into the hospitals main entrance for about an hour starting at 6:30 p.m., when the medical professionals were headed into or out of the medical center for the evening shift change. The total count of emergency personnel who turned out to cheer the hospital workers was more than twice the number expected, Bernardo said.

First responders from Monmouth County honored doctors, nurses and other staff at Bayshore Medical Center serving as the "tip of the spear" in the fight against the coronavirus with a ceremony Tuesday evening, April 14, 2020.Photo by Brian McGraw

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To crown the event  which was conceived by Holmdel Fire Chief Dave Farrell with the support the townships mayor and Bayshore trustee Greg Buontempo  firefighters hung a large American flag from the extended arms of two fire department bucket trucks straddling the hospital entrance, forming a patriotic arch that medical personnel passed under as they entered or left the hospital at the start or end of another shift.

We want to make sure they know that the first responders support them and appreciate what theyre doing, Bernardo said.

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TDT | Manama

A woman who attempted to smuggle drugs into the Kingdom by hiding it in her underwear had her punishment upheld yesterday by the Supreme Criminal Court of Appeal.

The woman was among three defendants arrested last year for their involvement in trafficking, selling and abusing hashish. Court files showed that the appellant was arrested upon arrival at the Bahrain side of King Fahad Causeway.

The woman raised the suspicion of Customs Affairs officers as she showed obvious confusion and was nervous, as stated in the officers testimonies. Additionally, police dogs continued barking at her, raising more doubts.

Policewomen were called to check the appellant and inspect her belongings. Initially, nothing illegal was found in her possession, but, intensified inspection led to the detection of a piece of hashish wrapped and concealed in her underwear.

Customs Affairs immediately referred the woman to the Anti-Narcotics Department in the Interior Ministry to continue the legal procedures. In the departments interrogation, the woman confessed that she smuggled the drugs for the second defendant in return for BD400.

Further investigation showed that the second defendant employed the woman to pick up pieces of hashish from a GCC national abroad, and deliver it to him hereafter smuggling it through King Fahad Causeway.

The second defendant was caught while hiding in the house of a mutual friend (the third defendant). That third defendant told prosecutors that the second defendant told him that their female friend was arrested while attempting to smuggle the drugs.

He added that the second defendant requested to hide in his house for a couple of days to avoid arrest. The first and second defendants were previously sentenced to 10 years of imprisonment and fined BD5,000 each for drug trafficking.

The third defendant received a lighter sentence of six months in jail and was fined BD100 after he was convicted of drugs abuse.
Assam on Wednesday became the first state in the country to directly import personal protective equipment (PPE) kits from China to beef up stock of the commodity needed to combat Covid-19.

A cargo plane carrying 50,000 PPE kits from Guangzhou in China landed at the Lokapriya Gopinath Bordoloi International Airport in Guwahati on Wednesday evening after a five hour direct flight.

Indian government as well as many countries across the world has been procuring PPE kits from China. We are the first state government to import the kits directly from China, Assam health minister Himanta Biswa Sarma said after receiving the cargo at the airport.

This has removed a big hurdle for us as we were buying PPE kits in small numbers are there was a worry about their continued availability. We will soon distribute these kits to our healthcare workers, he added.

Prior to arrival of the PPE kits from China, Assam had a stock of nearly one lakh kits. The state government plans to keep an available stock of two lakh PPE kits and keep replenishing it as and when it gets depleted.

Assam has 32 positive cases Covid-19 as on Wednesday. While 29 are recovering in various hospitals, two have been discharged and one has died.

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Robert Zubrin describes what sets Elon Musk apart from the other Space Entrepreneurs. Elon Musk applied his wealth but also his passion with savvy leadership to create the success of SpaceX. There is also an urgent and fanatical ambition. Elon Musk also has successfully applied the best aspects of software management and development to cars and rockets. Elon is also applying automotive and factory insights from Tesla to SpaceX.

There were and are other who tried to create space companies. Many had wealth or resources that were in the range of what Elon Musk has. They did not apply sufficient urgency, commitment and personal leadership to bring about success.

Paul Allen, Microsoft co-founder, backed Stratolaunch Systems. Jeff Bezos, who leads Amazon, funds Blue Origin.

Space companies have received nearly $26 billion in investments from 2009 to 2019. OneWeb has raised $3.4 billion. They raised $500 million round in 2015, a $1.2 billion round in 2016 and $1.25 billion in 2019.

Teledesic was a satellite constellation company with funding from cellular pioneer Craig McCaw, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, and Saudi prince Alwaleed bin Talal.

Bill Gates used technical and business leadership to build Microsoft. He had fanatical drive in the decades where he led Microsoft. Bill had business, software and technical capabilities that he applied with a fanatical drive to win.

Steve Jobs had fanatical drive that he applied to making great Apple products. This was combined with marketing, product and technical know-how.

Jeff Bezos applied his fanatical drive and urgency to building Amazon. Amazon has decades of doing whatever it took to grow as fast as possible. This urgency is not apparent in the development of Blue Origin.

How Does SpaceX and Elon Musk Improve Faster Than the Competition?

Kent Nebergall writes at macroinvent.com. Kent studied the success of SpaceX and Tesla. Elon brought methods from computer software development or other areas and applied them to cars and rockets.

Elon starts his engineering from first principles. He wants to know everything down to the physics of exactly why something is possible or impossible. He was thinking in terms of how much aluminum and how much titanium and fuel is used in a rocket. He compared the sum of the material cost and the rocket launch prices paid by customers of the rocket companies. Elon believed this could be many times cheaper.

Wood furniture is priced very closely to the cost of materials. Furniture has no price gained unless there is a highly skilled craftsmen who adds skill and artistry.

Elon next imagines what the perfect product would be like. He thinks of the Platonic ideal. Plato thought of the perfect sphere or perfect triangle. Elon considered the characteristics of the perfect electric car and the perfect rocket.

Skunk Works at SpaceX for Thermal Protection

SpaceX built an entire lab for thermal protection system research for re-entry vehicles. It became the best lab in the world in nine months starting from an empty room. They use rapid development cycles based on processes used for rapid fighter pilot reaction.

51% Experimentation Rule

SpaceX will test once they have a 51% chance of success. They will take the least amount of material that will get them valid results. NASA would wait until they had 80-90% chance of success and there would be lot more meetings about the work or process.

This more rapid testing leads to more rapid development.

SpaceX Gigafactories

SpaceX is planning Starship and Raptor engine gigafactories. In 2021, Elon Musk plans to scale the workforce at Boca Chica to 3,000 employees to eventually manufacture two SpaceX starships every week. There are currently 300 employees. This manufacturing rate will be comparable to the speed of construction of commercial wide-body airplanes.

Elon has said that mass production will bring the cost of the Starship down to $5 million. There will be six Raptor engines. This means the mass production of Raptor engines at less than $1 million per engine.

Larger buildings are being built in Boca Chica to shelter the construction. There will need to be a lot more buildings and a lot more heavy equipment to speed construction.

Airbus and Boeing Make 800-900 Planes In Normal Years. This is the scale and speed of production that Elon Musk wants to create for rockets.

Boeing and Airbus delivered 35 and 138 commercial jets in December 2019, compared to 102 and 127 deliveries, respectively, in the same month last year. For the full year 2019, Boeing delivered 380 aircraft, while Airbus set a new all-time annual record, handing over 863 jets. Boeing had retained a deliveries lead over Airbus since 2012.

SOURCES- SpaceX, What About It? Felix, Robert Zubrin, Boeing, Airbus, Wikipedia, Kent Nebergall at macroinvent.com, Additional analysis and Synthesis by Brian Wang

Written by Brian Wang, Nextbigfuture.com
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Linkedin Ghina Ghaliya (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Wed, April 15, 2020 13:48 636 fc6853813033f564188675f8bd2080c8 1 Politics omnibus-bill,COVID-19,coronavirus,PDI-P,NasDem,Lawmakers,house-of-representatives,omnibus-bill-on-job-creation Free

The ruling Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle (PDI-P) and the NasDem Party, both in President Joko Jokowi Widodos coalition, have pushed the government to drop labor provisions from the omnibus bill on job creation following growing public opposition.

The House of Representatives Legislation Body (Baleg) held a hearing on Tuesday with Coordinating Economic Minister Airlangga Hartarto, Law and Human Rights Minister Yasonna Laoly and Manpower Minister Ida Fauziyah.

Rieke Diah Pitaloka of the PDI-P faction, who is also Balegs deputy chairwoman, said during the hearing that the main substance of the bill should only be to improve the ease of doing business in Indonesia and attract investment.

The PDI-P, whose constituents are generally working class, has been reluctant to pursue the bill since the beginning. It was the only party to urge lawmakers not to rush into deliberation, citing public objections to the bill.

Rieke added that the faction was mainly considering the impact of COVID-19, noting that many companies had closed due to the outbreak.

Minister [Airlangga] certainly knows it. We strongly support the government in improving our regulations, but we should evaluate this draft, she said during the Tuesday hearing.

Read also: Guide to omnibus bill on job creation: 1,028 pages in 10 minutes

Balegs deputy chairman Willy Aditya of NasDem echoed Rieke, noting that the labor provisions in the bill should instead be included in revisions to other laws, for example, revisions to the Labor Law or the Industrial Dispute Settlement Law.

If that happens, the name of the omnibus bill could change to the omnibus bill on the facilitation of investment licensing," he told The Jakarta Post recently.

NasDems Taufik Basari suggested that the bills deliberation start with noncontroversial topics. He also asked the government to evaluate the existing draft to match the current situation.

"We received this draft when the economy was still normal. Are there new economic calculations following COVID-19 that will affect the bill? If yes, we hope the government will submit a new draft, said Taufik.

Political parties outside the government coalition, such as the Democratic Party and the Prosperous Justice Party (PKS), pushed for the deliberation of the bill to be postponed, considering that the public could not participate optimally due to the outbreak.

Responding to the lawmakers, Airlangga said the government would not submit a new draft, asserting that the bill was necessary as written to anticipate the post-outbreak optimistic scenarios of world-economic improvement in 2021. He said some institutions had predicted economic growth between 4 and 5 percent.

"Therefore, structural reform is needed. It needs to be done as soon as we overcome COVID-19, he said.

Read also: House starts deliberation of job creation bill as protesting unions forced to stay at home

He also suggested that lawmakers follow the government road map for the deliberation so the process would be faster and easier. Airlangga, however, did not mention which topics should be discussed first.

Lawmakers could find it easier to study the bill and compare it to other laws. This [road map] is a GPS to make the deliberation easier. In this situation, the most expedient [deliberation] is the one that can get out of this crisis quickly. It could help people go back to work."

Labor groups and other members of the public flooded lawmakers mobile phones last week with text messages urging them to stop the deliberation of the government-initiated omnibus bill. Rieke and Willy were among the lawmakers targeted during the online protest.

Workers, activists and members of the public have repeatedly criticized the House and government for trying to push the controversial bill through. They argued the omnibus bill would harm democracy, the environment and the interests of workers.
US$108 Million NPV 5% with IRR of 23.6% at US$1,350/oz Gold; US$670/oz gold AISC[1]

US$173 Million NPV 5% with 32% IRR at US$1,620/oz Gold

US$88 Million Pre-Production Capital Expenditures

VANCOUVER, BC / ACCESSWIRE / April 15, 2020 / Auryn Resources Inc. (TSX:AUG)(NYSE American:AUG) ("Auryn" or the "Company") is pleased to announce positive results from an independent preliminary economic assessment (PEA) and an updated resource estimate for its 100% owned 7,500 hectare Homestake Ridge gold project located in the prolific Iskut-Stewart-Kisault gold belt in northwestern British Columbia, Canada (Figure 1). The PEA demonstrates the project's potential to become a high-grade, small footprint, underground gold mine with positive economics and upside potential from both a rising gold price and prospective expansion. The PEA presentation can be viewed by clicking here, and a visualization of the Life Of Mine (LOM) model can be viewed here.

A Message from Ivan Bebek, Executive Chairman and Director:

"This is an early look into the Homestake Ridge high-grade gold project's current value, which demonstrates a highly profitable deposit with a low capex in an established mining jurisdiction, and importantly, it is open for considerable expansion.

"We took a conservative approach in our study to see the project's resilience at $1,350 gold, which generated a 23.6% IRR, however, at $1,620 gold the project generates an IRR of 32% and an NPV of over US$173 million.

"The Homestake Ridge gold project is a valuable part of our portfolio, which also includes multiple tier-one exploration opportunities, such as Sombrero and Curibaya in southern Peru and Committee Bay in northern Canada. We are very much looking forward to advancing our portfolio as we continue to see improving metal prices."

PEA Summary:

Base Case: $1,350/oz gold, $12/oz silver, $3.00/pound copper, $1.00/pound lead and an exchange rate of 0.70 (US$/C$) Net present value (NPV 5%) after tax and mining duties US$108 million Internal rate of return (IRR) after tax 23.6% Pre-production capital costs US$88 million After tax payback period 36 months All in sustaining costs (AISC) per ounce gold US$670 PEA life of mine (LOM) 13 years LOM metal production gold equivalent ounces 590,040 AuEq ounces LOM average diluted head grade 6.42g/t AuEq Peak year annual production (year three) 88,660 AuEq ounces Average LOM payable production 45,400 AuEq ounces LOM mineralized material mined 3.4 Million tonnes Mining scenario tonnes per day 900 tonnes

The Company cautions that the PEA is preliminary in nature in that it includes Inferred Mineral Resources which are considered too speculative geologically to have the economic considerations applied to them that would enable them to be characterized as mineral reserves, and there is no certainty that the PEA will be realized. Mineral resources that are not mineral reserves do not have demonstrated economic viability.

The PEA was prepared in accordance with National Instrument 43-101 ("NI 43-101") by MineFill Services Inc. of Seattle, WA with other contributors including Roscoe Postle Associates Inc. (RPA), now part of SLR Consulting Ltd. (SLR), (QP for updated mineral resource estimate) and One-Eighty Consulting Group (environmental, permitting and social). The Company plans to file the PEA on SEDAR at www.sedar.com within 45 days in accordance with NI 43-101.

Updated Mineral Resource Estimate:

The PEA is based on an updated mineral resource estimate that was prepared in-house by Auryn and audited by RPA using block models constrained to new geological wireframes. Grades for gold, silver, lead, arsenic and antimony were estimated using Inverse Distance (ID3) weighting. Two block models were constructed in Leapfrog Geo Edge software: one for the Homestake Main and Silver deposits and the other for South Reef.

The updated mineral resource estimate was developed using a revised geological model based on a complete re-log of the deposits that defined the geometry of breccia bodies and vein arrays that were successfully traced both laterally and vertically within the deposits. These resulting geometries provided additional confidence in tracing high-grade mineralization within the deposits. The resource remains open for expansion at depth and along strike (Figure 2). The updated mineral resource estimate demonstrates higher grades with a decrease in tonnes as compared to the previous resource estimate dated September 1, 2017 (detailed in a Canadian National Instrument 43-101 Technical Report dated September 29, 2017 as amended October 23, 2017 and filed on SEDAR) with overall metal content largely unchanged. The updated 2019 mineral resource estimate is summarized in Table 1.1 below:

Table 1.1 Mineral Resource by Zone - Effective Date: December 31, 2019

Average Grade Metal Content Classification Zone Tonnage

Mt Gold g/t Silver

g/t Copper % Lead

% Gold

oz Silver Moz Copper Mlb Lead

Mlb Indicated HM 0.736 7.02 74.8 0.18 0.077 165,993 1.8 2.87 1.25 Total Indicated 0.736 7.02 74.8 0.18 0.077 165,993 1.8 2.87 1.25 Inferred HM 1.747 6.33 35.9 0.35 0.107 355,553 2.0 13.32 4.14 HS 3.354 3.13 146.0 0.03 0.178 337,013 15.7 2.19 13.20 SR 0.445 8.68 4.9 0.04 0.001 124,153 0.1 0.36 0.00 Total Inferred 5.545 4.58 100.0 0.13 0.142 816,719 17.8 15.87 17.34

Notes:

1. Canadian Institute of Mining, Metallurgy and Petroleum (CIM) Definition Standards for Mineral Resources and Mineral Reserves dated May 10, 2014 (CIM (2014) definitions), as incorporated by reference in NI 43-101, were followed for Mineral Resource estimation.

2. Mineral Resources are estimated at a cut-off grade of 2.0 g/t AuEq.

3. AuEq values were calculated using a long-term gold price of US$1,300 per ounce, silver price at US$20 per ounce and copper price at US$2.5 per pound and an exchange rate of US$/C$1.20. The AuEq calculation included provisions for metallurgical recoveries, treatment charges, refining costs and transportation.

4. Bulk density ranges from 2.69 t/m3 to 3.03 t/m3, depending on the domain.

5. Differences may occur in totals due to rounding.

6. The Qualified Person responsible for this mineral resource estimate is Philip A. Geusebroek, P. Geo., RPA.

The Mineral Resource sensitivity to cut-off grade is shown on Table 1.2 below.

Table 1.2 Mineral Resource Sensitivity by Cut-Off Grade

Average Grade Metal Content Cut-off g/t AuEq Tonnage

Mt Gold

g/t Silver

g/t Copper

% Lead

% Gold

oz Silver

Moz Copper

Mlb Lead

Mlb Total Indicated 5.0 0.372 10.99 131.3 0.20 0.120 131,463 1.6 1.7 0.99 4.0 0.465 9.57 111.2 0.20 0.105 142,911 1.7 2.0 1.07 3.0 0.592 8.18 90.5 0.19 0.090 155,730 1.7 2.5 1.18 2.0 0.736 7.02 74.8 0.18 0.077 165,993 1.8 2.9 1.25 1.0 0.862 6.19 65.2 0.17 0.069 171,441 1.8 3.1 1.32 Total Inferred 5.0 2.158 8.25 145.7 0.21 0.216 572,444 10.1 9.8 10.26 4.0 2.972 6.78 133.4 0.18 0.189 648,212 12.8 11.9 12.36 3.0 4.136 5.52 118.6 0.15 0.163 734,275 15.8 14.0 14.84 2.0 5.545 4.58 100.0 0.13 0.142 816,719 17.8 15.9 17.34 1.0 6.448 4.09 90.9 0.12 0.127 847,996 18.9 17.0 18.07

PEA Project Overview:

To-date the project has been investigated with more than 275 drill holes, totaling more than 90,000 meters. In addition to the three known zones of mineralization, multiple exploration targets remain to be tested. The PEA envisions a 900 tonne per day underground mining operation spanning a 13-year mine life based on a mine plan using a gold price of US$1,300/oz. Mining would commence in the larger Homestake Main zone first, followed by the Homestake Silver zone around year six and finally the South Reef zone. The material would be treated in a conventional crushing, grinding and flotation plant to produce a copper concentrate, a lead/zinc concentrate and finally Au-Ag dore from cyanide leaching of regrind tailings.

Mining and Processing:

The mine plan and production schedule were developed in Deswik mine stope optimizer software (MSO). The principal mining method in the MSO runs was overhand longhole retreat mining on 20-meter sublevel intervals. The minimum mining width was 2.5 meters and a mining cutoff grade of 3.5 g/t AuEq was used to develop the stope wireframes. An ELOS (equivalent linear overbreak) of 0.25 meters was added at the hanging-wall and footwall to account for dilution.

Processing of the Homestake Ridge mineralization is determined by the difference in metal contents across the three deposits included in the study. Given that 97% of the metal value is gold and silver, the realization of the value of the Homestake Ridge deposits will be dependent on the recovery of precious metals. Based on recent metallurgical test work, the optimal processing stream appears to be campaign processing of each deposit in sequence, rather than blending. The flowsheet thus consists of an initial rougher flotation to produce a base metal concentrate, followed by secondary flotation to produce a pyrite concentrate. The pyrite concentrate is then reground and subjected to cyanide leaching to recover the remaining gold and silver in rougher tailings.

The Homestake Main mineralization would be processed first to produce a copper concentrate rich in gold, then Homestake Silver to produce a lead/zinc concentrate rich in silver and finally South Reef to produce a gold concentrate. The metallurgical recoveries are estimated to be 86% for gold, 74% for silver, 70% for copper and 66% for lead.

Capital and Operating Costs:

The pre-production capital is estimated at US$88 million (CAD$126 million) with US$86 million (CAD$123 million) in sustaining capital, primarily capitalized development underground. The PEA is based on owner-operated equipment and manpower. A contingency of 15% has been applied to all direct costs. Details of the pre-production and sustaining capital are shown on Table 2 below:

Table 2: Capital Cost Summary

Expenditure Initial (US$M) Sustaining (US$M) Mining Equipment $3.0 $2.1 Surface mobile equipment $3.5 $2.5 Capitalized Underground Development $66.4 Tailings $8.4 Site Development - Roads, Airport $6.3 Camp Facilities $3.2 Site Infrastructure $3.5 Power Supply $8.4 Process Plant $26.2 Access Upgrades - barge landing and roads $2.1 EPCM costs - 15% of directs $8.7 Owner Costs - 10% of directs $5.8 Reclamation - tailings $3.5 Closure $3.5 Water Treatment $1.4 Environmental Permits/Baseline Data $0.6 End of Life Salvage ($3.5)

Operating costs were developed from unit costs for projects of a similar scale in Canada and translated to USD at an exchange rate of 0.70 (US$/C$). A summary of the operating costs is shown in Table 3 below.

Table 3: Operating Cost Summary

Area Unit Cost (US$) Life-of-Mine (US$) Mining ($/t mined) $63.50 $182.9 million Processing ($/t milled) $21.00 $71.9 million General and Administration ($/t) $14.00 $48.0 million Environmental/Water Treatment $0.82 $2.8 million Community/Social $0.17 $0.6 million Total Operating Costs ($/t milled) $89.39 $306.2 million

Project Economics and Sensitivity Analyses:

The following tables illustrate the PEA project economics and the sensitivity of the project to changes in the base case metal prices, operating costs and capital costs. As is typical with precious metal projects, the project is most sensitive to metal prices, followed by operating costs and initial capital costs.

Table 4: Project Economics at $1,350 Gold

NPV at 0% (US$M) NPV at 5% (US$M) NPV at 7% (US$M) IRR Payback (Mo) Before Tax $278 $170 $140 30.1% 26 After Tax $184 $108 $87 23.6% 36

Table 5: Metal Price Sensitivity - After-Tax

Gold Price (US$/oz) Silver Price (US$/oz) NPV at 0% (US$M) NPV at 5% (US$M) IRR Payback (Mo) 40% $1,890 $16.80 $373 $239 39.4% 31 30% $1,755 $15.60 $326 $206 35.8% 32 20% $1,620 $14.40 $278 $173 32.0% 33 10% $1,485 $13.20 $231 $141 28.0% 34 Base Case $1,350 $12.00 $184 $108 23.6% 36 -10% $1,215 $10.80 $137 $75 18.8% 40 -20% $1,080 $9.60 $90 $42 13.2% 46 -30% $945 $8.40 $39 $6 6.4% 75

Table 6: Operating Cost Sensitivity - After-Tax

NPV at 0% (US$M) NPV at 5% (US$M) IRR Payback (Mo) 20% $145 $82 20.1% 39 10% $165 $95 21.9% 38 Base Case $184 $108 23.6% 36 -10% $203 $121 25.3% 35 -20% $223 $134 26.9% 35

Table 7: Capital Cost Sensitivity - After-Tax

NPV at 0% (US$M) NPV at 5% (US$M) IRR Payback (Mo) 20% $149 $79 17.1% 43 10% $167 $93 20.1% 40 Base Case $184 $108 23.6% 36 -10% $201 $128 27.7% 34 -20% $219 $137 32.5% 33

Indigenous and Community Relations:

The pursuit of environmentally sound and socially responsible mineral development guides all of Auryn's activities as the Company understands the broad societal benefits that responsible mining can bring, as well as the risks that must be managed through the implementation of sustainable development practices. Auryn strives to maintain the highest standards of environmental protection and community engagement at all of its projects.

Auryn considers sustainability to include the pursuit of three mutually reinforcing pillars: environmental and cultural heritage protection; social and community development; and, economic growth and opportunity. The Company assesses the environmental, social and financial benefits and risks of all our business decisions and believes this commitment to sustainability generates value and benefits for local communities and shareholders alike.

Auryn places a priority on creating mutually beneficial, long-term partnerships with the communities and countries in which it operates, and with its shareholders, respecting their interests as its own. At the community level, the Company works to establish constructive partnerships to address and contribute to local priorities and interests and ensure that local people benefit both socially and economically from its activities.

Auryn has undertaken early and ongoing engagement with respect to the Homestake Ridge gold project since January 2017. Engagement goals include providing Indigenous groups, residents of nearby communities and other regional interests with corporate and project-related information, details of work programs and other activities being undertaken in the field, project updates and opportunities for feedback and local involvement in the Homestake Ridge project.

Auryn's approach to Indigenous and stakeholder engagement provides opportunities and benefits through:

the provision of jobs and training programs

contracting opportunities

capacity funding for Indigenous engagement

sponsorship of community events

Members of local Indigenous groups comprise approximately 40% of Auryn's Homestake Ridge project team. Two of our primary contractors are local Indigenous-owned companies. Auryn and the Nisga'a Lisims Government entered into a Confidentiality Agreement in January 2020. The parties look forward to a collaborative relationship based on mutual respect and a desire for economic prosperity generated by responsible natural resource development in British Columbia.

Figure 1: Illustrates the general location and access to infrastructure at the Homestake Ridge project.

Figure 2: Illustrates a long section of the Homestake Main and Homestake Silver deposits demonstrating the deposits are open at depth and along strike.

QUALIFIED PERSON:

The foregoing technical information contained in this news release has been prepared in accordance with the Canadian regulatory requirements set out in National Instrument 43-101 (Standards for Disclosure for Minerals Projects) and reviewed on behalf of the Company by Dr. David Stone, P.Eng., a Qualified Person.

ON BEHALF OF THE BOARD OF DIRECTORS OF AURYN RESOURCES INC.

Ivan Bebek

Executive Chairman and Director

For further information on Auryn Resources, please contact Natasha Frakes, Manager of Corporate Communications at (778) 729-0600 or info@aurynresources.com.

About Auryn

Auryn Resources is a technology-driven junior exploration company focused on finding and advancing globally significant precious and base metal deposits. The Company has a portfolio approach to asset acquisition and has six projects, including two flagships: the Committee Bay high-grade gold project in Nunavut and the Sombrero copper-gold project in southern Peru. Auryn's technical and management teams have an impressive track record of successfully monetizing assets for all stakeholders and local communities in which it operates. Auryn conducts itself to the highest standards of corporate governance and sustainability.

Forward Looking Information and Additional Cautionary Language

Certain information contained in this news release constitutes forward-looking information or forward-looking statements within the meaning of Canadian or U.S. securities laws ("forward-looking statements"). All statements in this news release, other than statements of historical fact, which address events, results, outcomes or developments that the Company expects to occur are forward-looking statements. Forward-looking statements include statements that are predictive in nature, depend upon or refer to future events or conditions, or include words such as "expects", "anticipates", "plans", "believes", "estimates", "considers", "intends", "targets", or negative versions thereof and other similar expressions, or future or conditional verbs such as "may", "will", "should", "would" and "could". More particularly and without restriction, this news release contains forward-looking statements and information about the economic analyses for the Homestake Ridge Gold Project and its potential for development and expansion, the anticipated IRR and NPV for the project, capital and operating costs, processing and recovery estimates and strategies, proposed mining method and development plans, mineral resource estimates and statements as to management's expectations with respect to, among other things, the matters and activities contemplated in this news release.

Such forward looking statements are necessarily based upon a number of factors and assumptions that, while considered reasonable by the Company as of the date of such statements, are inherently subject to significant business, economic and competitive uncertainties and contingencies. The assumptions made by the Company in preparing the forward looking statements contained in this news release, which may prove to be incorrect, include, but are not limited to: the specific assumptions set forth above and in the Technical Report; that the Company is able to develop the property in the manner set out in the Technical Report; that the Company is able to advance the property through to feasibility; that if viable, the Company is able to obtain all necessary permits to develop the mine on the property; that the Company is able to complete the consultation with the Indigenous people in the area of that Homestake Ridge Gold Project; that the exchange rate between the Canadian dollar, and the United States dollar remain consistent with current levels or as set out in this press release; that prices for gold and silver remain consistent with the Company's expectations; that prices for key mining supplies, including labour costs and consumables, remain consistent with the Company's current expectations; that Company's current estimates of mineral resources, mineral grades and mineral recovery are accurate; and that there are no material variations in the current tax and regulatory environment. Many factors, known and unknown, could cause the actual results to be materially different from those expressed or implied.

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. Factors that could cause future results or events to differ materially from current expectations expressed or implied by the forward-looking statements include: availability of financing to fund the Company's exploration and development activities, the ability of the Company's exploration program to identify and expand mineral resources, operational risks in exploration and development for gold and silver, the Company's ability to realize the PEA, delays or changes in plans with respect to exploration or development projects or capital expenditures, uncertainty as to calculation of mineral resources, changes in commodity and power prices, changes in interest and currency exchange rates, the ability to attract and retain qualified personnel, inaccurate geological and metallurgical assumptions (including with respect to the size, grade and recoverability of mineral resources), changes in development or mining plans due to changes in logistical, technical or other factors, title defects, government approvals and permits, cost escalation, changes in general economic conditions or conditions in the financial markets, environmental regulation, operating hazards and risks, delays, taxation rules, competition, public health crises such as the COVID-19 pandemic and other uninsurable risks, liquidity risk, share price volatility, dilution and future sales of common shares, aboriginal claims and consultation, cybersecurity threats, climate change, delays and other risks described in the Company's documents filed with Canadian and U.S. securities regulatory authorities. Readers should refer to the risks discussed in the Company's Annual Information Form and MD&A for the year ended December 31, 2019 and subsequent continuous disclosure filings with the Canadian Securities Administrators available at www.sedar.com and the Company's registration statement on Form 40-F filed with the United States Securities and Exchange Commission and available at www.sec.gov. Readers should not place undue reliance on forward looking statements.

Cautionary Note to United States Investors

This news release uses the terms "indicated mineral resource" and "inferred mineral resource", which are Canadian mining terms as defined in and required to be disclosed in accordance with National Instrument 43-101 - Standards of Disclosure for Mineral Projects ("NI 43-101"), which references the guidelines set out in the Canadian Institute of Mining, Metallurgy and Petroleum (the "CIM") - CIM Definition Standards on Mineral Resources and Mineral Reserves ("CIM Standards"), adopted by the CIM Council, as amended. However, these terms are not defined terms under Industry Guide 7 ("Industry Guide 7") under the United States Securities Act of 1933, as amended, and, until recently, have not been permitted to be used in reports and registration statements filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (the "SEC"). The SEC has adopted amendments to its disclosure rules to modernize the mineral property disclosure requirements for issuers whose securities are registered with the SEC under the Exchange Act. These amendments became effective February 25, 2019 (the "SEC Modernization Rules") with compliance required for the first fiscal year beginning on or after January 1, 2021. The SEC Modernization Rules replace the historical disclosure requirements for mining registrants that were included in SEC Industry Guide 7.

United States investors are cautioned that there are differences in the definitions under the SEC Modernization Rules and the CIM Standards. Accordingly, there is no assurance any mineral reserves or mineral resources that the Company may report as "indicated mineral resources" and "inferred mineral resources" under NI 43- 101 would be the same had the Company prepared the reserve or resource estimates under the standards adopted under the SEC Modernization Rules. United States investors are also cautioned that while the SEC will now recognize "indicated mineral resources" and "inferred mineral resources", investors should not assume that any part or all of the mineralization in these categories will ever be converted into a higher category of mineral resources or into mineral reserves. Mineralization described using these terms has a greater amount of uncertainty as to their existence and feasibility than mineralization that has been characterized as reserves. Accordingly, investors are cautioned not to assume that any "indicated mineral resources" or "inferred mineral resources" that the Company reports are or will be economically or legally mineable. Further, "inferred mineral resources" have a greater amount of uncertainty as to their existence and as to whether they can be mined legally or economically. Therefore, United States investors are also cautioned not to assume that all or any part of the "inferred mineral resources" exist. In accordance with Canadian securities laws, estimates of "inferred mineral resources" cannot form the basis of feasibility or other economic studies, except in limited circumstances where permitted under NI 43-101. In addition, United States investors are cautioned that a preliminary economic assessment cannot support an estimate of either "proven mineral reserves" or "probably mineral reserves" and that no feasibility studies have been completed on the Company's mineral properties.

Accordingly, information contained in this news release describing the Company's mineral deposits may not be comparable to similar information made public by U.S. companies subject to the reporting and disclosure requirements under the United States federal securities laws and the rules and regulations thereunder.

The Toronto Stock Exchange nor the Investment Industry Regulatory Organization of Canada accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release.

[1] All-in sustaining cost ("AISC") is a Non-GAAP measure. The Company has calculated AISC using operating costs (Table 3) as a basis, and then adjusting it in accordance with the World Gold Council guidance. SOURCE: Auryn Resources Inc.

View source version on accesswire.com:https://www.accesswire.com/585183/Auryn-Delivers-Positive-Preliminary-Economic-Assessment-for-Homestake-Ridge-Gold-Deposit
Domestic airlines on April 15 evening announced they are increasing flight frequency between Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City as from April 16, but the time difference between two consecutive landings in HCM City should be at last 90 minutes.

Illustrative image (Photo: VNA)

Vietnam Airlines will operate two flights a day on the route, while maintaining one flight daily on the routes between Da Nang and Hanoi/HCM City.

Jetstar Pacific will also increase the frequency of its flights between the two biggest cities to one daily instead of four a week. The flights will be conducted in the form of code sharing with Vietnam Airlines.

Meanwhile, Vietjet Air plans to operate two daily flights between Hanoi and HCM City, one flight daily between Hanoi/HCM City and Da Nang.

The airlines pledge to strictly adhere to hygienic and disinfection regulations for the flights, including health checks and health declaration of passengers, leaving space between seats according to requirements, and spraying disinfectants after each flight and at the end of the day.

Passengers will also be required to wear face masks throughout the duration of the flight.

For more information on flight schedules, passengers are advised to access the official websites or Facebook sites of airlines, or ticket agents.

Vietjet Air operates 10 cargo flights per day



A representative from low-cost carrier Vietjet Air announced on April 14 that the airline is carrying out roughly 10 cargo flights each day, with each flight carrying essential goods for citizens whilst transporting medical supplies free of charge as a contribution to the fight against the novel coronavirus.

Vietjet Air has also pledged to sponsor the transportation of health workers on its flights throughout the social distancing period.

The airline has operated daily domestic flights during the social distancing period, with round-trip flights connecting Hanoi with Ho Chi Minh City operating on April 13, April 14, and April 15.

It added three more flights between the two major cities on April 11, April 12, and April 14 to transport passengers following the completion of their mandatory quarantine period.

As of April 16, customers will be able to check official sources to receive the flight schedule, such as the website www.vietjetair.com, the hotline 19001886, the official Facebook page at https: // www. .facebook.com/vietjetvietnam /, or the airlines ticket offices and official agents.

The morning of April 14 saw the Civial Aviation Authority of Vietnam (CAAV) send an urgent dispatch to airlines including Vietnam Airlines, Vietjet Air, Jetstar Pacific Airlines, and Bamboo Airways outlining plans to operate domestic routes between April 16 and April 24.

Accordingly, the CAAV has requested that airlines be permitted to sell air tickets for flights starting from April 16 after obtaining permission from the CAAV. VOV/VNA/VNN

Vietnam Airlines flies British tourists home amid COVID-19 About 100 British nationals have flown home from Vietnam and Cambodia on a Vietnam Airlines flight specially arranged by the British Embassy in Vietnam and Vietnamese authorities.
The smoke-filled skies that choked Northern California in recent wildfire seasons may be best remembered for sore throats, burning eyes and wheezing. New research, however, suggests that many people experienced a far more drastic side effect: heart failure.

A first-of-its-kind study that looked at the health impacts of California wildfires from 2015 through 2017, published Wednesday in the Journal of the American Heart Association, found that cardiac arrests occurred as much as 70% more often on days of heavy smoke. Most of these incidents were fatal.

The risk of cardiac arrest was greatest within three days of smoke exposure, according to the research. The threat was elevated for people as young as 35 as well as for those living in low-income communities.

In recent decades, we experienced a significant increase in large-scale wildfires, therefore, more people are being exposed to wildfire smoke, Ana G. Rappold, a study co-author and a research scientist at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, said in a statement. In order to respond properly, it is important for us to understand the health impacts of wildfire smoke exposure.

The new study is among an emerging body of science that links wildfire smoke not only to respiratory problems but also heart problems. The paper, a collaboration among scientists at the EPA, California Department of Public Health and Emory University School of Medicine in Atlanta, is the first to quantify the cardiovascular fallout of Californias recent bout with catastrophic fires, which included the deadly 2017 blazes in Wine Country and Lake Countys Valley Fire in 2015.

Rappold and others at the EPA declined to answer questions from The Chronicle about their study, nor would they address what was being done to limit the risks of wildfire smoke. The California Department of Public Health also declined to comment.

The studys publication comes a day after the EPA announced that it would not seek to tighten the nations air-quality standards, specifically for fine particles, or soot. Fine particulate matter, also known as PM 2.5, is emitted from cars and factories and is the compound in smoke believed to be responsible for heart problems. Environmental and health groups had urged the EPA to crack down on PM 2.5.

The study also arrives as the nation is grappling with the novel coronavirus outbreak. Initial research on the pandemic out of Harvard University suggests that COVID-19 may be deadlier for those who encounter high levels of particulate matter.

The American Lung Association says that greater risk comes with smoke.

Poor air quality, including particle pollution from wildfires, may increase susceptibility to infection, Will Barrett, director of Clean Air Advocacy for the organizations California chapter, said in an email. All things being equal, a person regularly exposed to poor air quality would likely have a worse outcome if they were exposed to coronavirus.

The new findings on heart failure and the California wildfires are based on anonymous federal health data from residents in 14 California counties, including San Francisco, Alameda, Contra Costa, San Mateo, Sonoma and Napa.

The authors looked at when residents in these areas experienced cardiac arrest and how smoky the air was at the time, based on records from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Only out-of-hospital cardiac arrests were evaluated because the majority of those who suffered such heart problems, according to the researchers, die before they get treatment. The authors differentiated a cardiac arrest from a heart attack by defining it is when the heart stops beating, as opposed to when blood doesnt get to the heart.

Between May and October 2015, 2016 and 2017, 5,336 cardiac arrests took place in the 14 counties, of which 877 occurred when the victim was exposed to smoke, according to the research. The incidence of heart failure, the researchers discovered, was consistently higher on days of heavy smoke and up to three days afterward, compared to days when there was no smoke at all. The risk of cardiac arrest was greatest  70% higher  on the second day after heavy smoke exposure.

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.

People 35 and older and those in communities where at least 20% of the residents live below the poverty level also had an increased risk of heart failure during heavy smoke.

The researchers suspect that people in low-income areas might not always have the means to get away from bad air. They also suspect that those ages 35 to 64 might have experienced an elevated risk because they did not know they were in danger and did not take adequate steps to protect themselves.

Days when smoke was light posed little or no additional risk for most people, according to the study. Risk levels were the same for men and women.

The reason that smoke weighs on the cardiovascular system is still being studied. The particulate matter in smoke, which can be breathed into a persons lungs, crosses into the bloodstream, and from there, scientists say, can stress the heart in multiple ways.

During smoky times, health experts advise people to stay indoors, use high-efficiency filters in air conditioners and avoid physical exertion.

Kurtis Alexander is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: kalexander@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @kurtisalexander
Hindalco Industries Ltd is quoting at Rs 119.75, up 5.23% on the day as on 12:54 IST on the NSE. The stock is down 44.29% in last one year as compared to a 22.29% fall in NIFTY and a 42.8% fall in the Nifty Metal index.

Hindalco Industries Ltd rose for a third straight session today. The stock is quoting at Rs 119.75, up 5.23% on the day as on 12:54 IST on the NSE. The benchmark NIFTY is up around 1.84% on the day, quoting at 9159.6. The Sensex is at 31241.44, up 1.8%. Hindalco Industries Ltd has added around 3.55% in last one month.

Meanwhile, Nifty Metal index of which Hindalco Industries Ltd is a constituent, has added around 4.11% in last one month and is currently quoting at 1738.4, up 3.64% on the day. The volume in the stock stood at 305.06 lakh shares today, compared to the daily average of 143.54 lakh shares in last one month.

The benchmark April futures contract for the stock is quoting at Rs 119.4, up 4.92% on the day. Hindalco Industries Ltd is down 44.29% in last one year as compared to a 22.29% fall in NIFTY and a 42.8% fall in the Nifty Metal index.

The PE of the stock is 44.45 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.)
Much of Japan will enter a state of emergency Tuesday, as the country struggles to rein in the coronavirus pandemic, months after the first domestic cases were reported.

Prime Minister Shinzo Abe said that "basic economic activity" will continue in Tokyo, Kanagawa, Saitama, Chiba, Osaka, Hyogo and Fukuoka, the seven affected prefectures, with public transport and supermarkets remaining open, but urged people to exercise social distancing and avoid unnecessary trips.

The state of emergency, which is expected to be formally announced at a press conference Tuesday, will last for approximately one month. The declaration comes as Japan reported 252 new cases of the coronavirus and seven more deaths Monday, bringing the total number of infections to over 4,600, with 91 deaths.

Abe has faced criticism for not activating emergency measures earlier, as experts warned the true number of cases could be far higher than the official statistics suggest, due to a lack of widespread testing.

Growing concerns

The Japanese capital Tokyo is among one of the country's worst hit areas, and on Monday doctors in the city declared a state of medical emergency, citing a possible collapse of the healthcare system.

Ozaki Haruo, president of the Tokyo Medical Association, told reporters Monday that the rising number of coronavirus cases could result in a shortage of beds and the spreading of the virus within hospitals, according to Japanese public broadcaster NHK.

When this happens, medical staff will be unable to provide services to critically ill patients, Ozaki said, adding that the next six weeks will be critical in preventing an "explosive spread" of the virus.

Japan only has seven intensive care beds for every 100,000 people, a fifth of the proportion available in the US.

Part of the problem is that authorities had previously been urging anyone with symptoms to go to hospital, putting additional strain on the health care system. However, Dr. Yoshihiro Takayama, an infectious diseases specialist at Okinawa Chubu Hospital, said that the authorities are preparing to shift to a new policy of requiring those with mild symptoms to "self-isolate at home."

Takayama was concerned however that the number of cases could be far greater than it appears from the official statistics, due to the paucity of testing nationwide.

As of last week, Japan had only conducted some 30,000 tests, compared with almost 400,000 carried out in neighboring South Korea.

"In some cases, the number of patients may be several times, or could be ten times more. I think it is necessary to use such imagination and prepare the medical system to deal with it," Takayama said. "The battle has only just begun."

The country is also facing a potential shortage of ventilators for the worst affected. As of February, Japan was estimated to have more than 22,000 ventilators, for a population of over 126 million, according to a report in NHK.

At least 40% of those ventilators are already in use, as officials scramble to ramp up production and source new machines from overseas.

Slow response

Japan, with strong economic and transport links to China, was among the first countries to report cases of the coronavirus. For a long time, an outbreak on board the Diamond Princess cruise ship, docked in Yokohama, was the worst outside mainland China.

Despite this long exposure to the virus, the country has been slow to take the kind of radical steps seen in many other parts of the world, and officials have faced accusations of deliberately dragging their feet to avoid greater damage to the economy after the postponement of the Tokyo Olympics, which is expected to cause a big hit.

But experts have warned that the failure to respond quickly could result in a far worse situation.

"Japan needs to have the courage to change, when we are aware we are on the wrong path," said Kentaro Iwata, an infection control specialist from Kobe University, who has repeatedly warned that Japan isn't doing enough to halt the spread of the virus. "We might see the next New York City in Tokyo."

Iwata said that the situation in the Japanese capital is comparable to that in New York, Spain and Italy just before they saw explosions in the number of cases, and he called on the government to conduct more widespread testing in order to get an idea of the true number of infections.

The Japanese government says its testing regime is adequate and suitably targeted to high risk cases.

"Testing people with a low probability of novel coronavirus would be a waste of resources," Japan's Health Ministry told CNN in a statement. "We ask people with some symptoms to stay home for a period of time."

A government panel warned last week that hospitals and medical clinics in Tokyo, Aichi, Kanagawa, Osaka and Hyogo were already stretched and that "drastic countermeasures need to be taken as quickly as possible."
A medical worker administers an IV fluid to a patient in a COVID-19 intensive care unit at Temple University Hospital's Boyer Pavilion in North Philadelphia on Tuesday, April 7, 2020. Due to the coronavirus pandemic, the hospital converted all of Boyer Pavilion into a treatment space for COVID-19 patients. Read more

Could we still be going through periods of social distancing in 2022? That might be the case, according to experts from Harvard. But right now, Philadelphias outbreak is one of the biggest in the country, if youre looking at raw infection counts. When you factor in population size, though, the city is doing a better job controlling the outbreak when compared with many other places in the United States. Also, for a video on how to make your own mask, scroll down to the bottom of the newsletter.

 Josh Rosenblat (@joshrosenblat, morningnewsletter@inquirer.com)

Phillys coronavirus outbreak is one of the biggest in the country, judging by the number of infections that have been confirmed. But the citys rate of infection (the number of cases divided by the number of people) is significantly lower than those of other major cities.

Just over 40 of every 10,000 Philadelphians have tested positive for the coronavirus. That ranks 68th out of more than 3,000 U.S. counties, according to a Johns Hopkins database. And thats much lower than cities including New York, Detroit, and New Orleans.

Mathematical modeling by Harvards Chan School of Public Health shows that prolonged or periodic restrictions may be needed for two more years. Thats because coronavirus infections will rebound and threaten to overwhelm hospitals even after the current social distancing measures are lifted.

Predicting an end to the pandemic in the summer ... is not consistent with what we know," the studys senior author said yesterday.

Thomas Frey volunteers to distribute Blessing Bags, Ziploc bags containing a days food, to homeless people in Philadelphia. But Frey and others used to distribute a thousand bags a month in Philadelphia and Montgomery County. Now, theyre doing a thousand bags a week.

Frey and his church are one tiny part of Philadelphias food supply for homeless people, which has been decimated during the coronavirus pandemic.

What you need to know today

Through your eyes | #OurPhilly

We miss the crowds, too. Thanks for sharing, @thewanderful.maggiemae.

Tag your Instagram posts or tweets with #OurPhilly and well pick our favorite each day to feature in this newsletter and give you a shout out!

Thats interesting

Opinions

While the affluent flee to airy vacation homes, folks in Reserve, La., with their poisoned lungs, are sitting ducks. The virus isnt just lethal but an exposer of painful truth.  writes Will Bunch in his debut newsletter. The Inquirers national opinion columnist writes about the deadly mix of toxic air, racism, and the coronavirus. You can sign up for to get his weekly newsletter here.

Columnist Jenice Armstrong writes about how black men cant wear face masks and not expect to get negative reactions.

Governors leadership is critical during the coronavirus pandemic, the Inquirer Editorial Board writes.

What were reading

Your Daily Dose of | Making a face mask

Heres a step-by-step video to help you make your own face mask. Its based on guidance from the Pennsylvania Department of Health.
.                ,  The Hill,  ,          ...
Panaji, April 15 : With one more patient admitted to the state's designated Covid-19 hospital testing negative late on Wednesday, Goa Health Minister Vishwajit Rane said that the count of positive patients in the state had come down to one.

"Goa to lead the way! Happy to announce that Goa's active Covid-19 case is down from two to one, after following due protocols. As per the guideline, a repeat sample was being tested and reported negative," Rane said in a statement.

"We are hopeful that our active case will be at zero by next week," he added.

The patient is now expected to be sent to home quarantine for seven days.

Ever since the viral pandemic broke out in the country, Goa had recorded seven Covid-19 positive patients, six of whom had an overseas travel history. Over the last two weeks, Rane has claimed that six persons who had tested positive have been cured as their tests had come negative.
Hearing Obamas voice in a time of crisis reminded us of what we have missed since he left office. He seemed to speak the words that each of us was thinking. He channeled our frustration, validated our fears and did what he always has done best, which is to restore our hope.
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Maharashtras coronavirus case count inched closer to 3,000 with 232 new cases on Wednesday, taking the tally to 2,916. The state had crossed the 2,000 mark just three days ago on April 13, six days after it touched 1,000. The current surge can be attributed to the past two days, which saw 352 and 350 cases respectively.

The state also recorded nine deaths in a day, taking the toll to 187. Of them, six are in Pune, two in Mumbai and one in Akola. The number of people recovered rose to 295, as 36 more recovered and were discharged from various hospitals on Wednesday. Of the total cases, over one-third of them  2,228 cases  are in the Mumbai Metropolitan Region (MMR). Mumbais count rose to 1,896 as 140 new cases were recorded in the city on Tuesday. The death toll of the city is 114.

The state government has tested 52,000 samples so far, of which, 48,198 have tested negative.

A total of 5,617 suspected patients are quarantined at government facilities, while 69,738 are home quarantined, stated the state health department.

It is true that the rise is exponential, but we still believe that it is manageable and we will be able to control the situation. We are now focussing on Mumbai and Pune regions as most of the cases are from there. If the spread in these areas is contained, then the rise of new cases will automatically start declining, said a senior official from the state health department.

Meanwhile, the state government officially extended the lockdown period till May 3, following the announcement made by Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Tuesday. Earlier, the state government had extended the lockdown period till April 30. Orders to this effect were issued on Wednesday.

Lockdown in the state was imposed from midnight of March 23.

In exercise of the powers conferred under section 2 of the Epidemic Diseases Act, 1897, the state government directs that the lockdown orders shall now be extended up to and inclusive of May 3, 2020, stated the notification issued by chief secretary Ajoy Mehta on Wednesday.

The state government is planning to give further relaxations in the lockdown. Chief minister Uddhav Thackeray has directed district authorities to prioritise infrastructure development works that can be taken up in this period. By this way, jobs to migrant workers can also be made available, said a senior official, wishing not to be named. The decision on the same is likely to come by April 20.

The mortality rate of the state continued to be twice the national rate at 6.61% on Tuesday. Of the 178 deaths recorded till Tuesday, 81% of them (144 cases) were related to comorbidities and only 19% patients (34 cases) did not have comorbid conditions, stated a data shared by the state medical education department.

The national mortality rate of Covid-19 is 3.29%, with 377 deaths and 11,442 cases as on Tuesday.

Also, of the total 1,966 patients, 64% (1,277 cases) are asymptomatic. It means they are showing no symptoms. While 13% (266 cases) are symptomatic, 2% (34 cases) are in critical condition, 8% (160 cases) have succumbed and 13% (259 cases) recovered, stated the data.

In a bid to reduce the mortality rate of Covid-19 patients in the Mumbai and Pune region, Thackeray held a meeting with leading doctors of private hospitals in Mumbai. Thackeray, during the meeting, said that providing proper medical care for coronavirus patients and reducing the mortality rate is a challenge before the state government and the medical fraternity.

Earlier this week, Thackeray set up a task force to prepare a line of treatment for patients and to reduce the fatality rate in the state.

Thackeray interacted with doctors of Saifee Hospital, Fortis Hospital, Wockhardt Hospital, Hinduja Hospital, Hiranandani Hospital, Kokilaben Hospital, Nanavati Hospital and SevenHills hospital, along with Dr Sanjay Oak, under whom the task force is set up.

The chief minister held a detailed discussion on laying out a standardised procedure to treat Covid-19 patients, and on medical care to the affected patients. He also took stock of the availability of intensive care unit (ICUs) in the city. Thackeray also stressed on coordination and planning between three types of hospitals decided to treat Covid-19 patients.
[April 15, 2020] Guidepost Solutions Launches National Security Practice Headed by Former Senior FBI Official

Guidepost Solutions, a global leader in compliance, investigations and security consulting, today announced the establishment of its National Security practice and the promotion of former senior FBI national security official Stephanie Douglas to president of the division. The group will assist companies and law firms in managing and meeting the challenges of complying with the ever-growing and complex array of government regulation in key areas including the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS), sanctions and export controls, cybersecurity and more. Douglas will split her time between the San Francisco and Washington, DC offices. "Given her distinguished career in the public and private sectors, Stephanie is uniquely situated to assist those operating in the global business landscape," said Julie Myers Wood, CEO, Guidepost Solutions. "Under her leadership, our National Security team will provide expert guidance and support to clients in mission-critical areas of their businesses as they navigate the complexities of building a compliant organization."



Prior to joining Guidepost Solutions, Douglas served as the FBI's executive assistant director for the National Security Branch, overseeing its global counterterrorism, counterintelligence and intelligence operations. She also served as the FBI's chief intelligence officer. "The global nature of today's business can often intersect with national security issues. We hope to work with businesses to better understand and mitigate those areas of concern, both for the client and for the government," she said. Douglas is joined by a veteran group of professionals with experience inside key agencies of the United States government, including the White House, Department of Justice, Department of the Treasury, Department of Commerce, Department of Homeland Security, FBI, Homeland Security Investigations and United States Attorneys' offices around the country. Several still maintain high-level security clearances within the federal government.

"We are continuing to add talent to our highly qualified team," added Douglas. "Kenneth Mendelson joined Guidepost Solutions earlier this year. He has worked for more than 25 years at the intersection of law, information technology and public policy. He specializes in compliance matters related to CFIUS and Team Telecom. And, last month Christopher Kim joined us with over 23 years of investigative and legal experience. Prior to joining Guidepost Solutions, his practice was focused on international financial institutions such as the World Bank Group sanctions matters, internal corporate investigations and monitorships involving the U.S. government." About Guidepost Solutions LLC In a world where change is certain, experience is the best protection. Guidepost Solutions offers global investigations, compliance and monitoring, and security and technology consulting solutions in a wide range of industries. With headquarters in New York, Guidepost Solutions maintains offices in key markets including Bogota; Boston; Chicago; Dallas; Honolulu; London; Los Angeles; Miami, Oakland; Palm Beach; Phoenix; Sacramento; San Francisco; Seattle; Singapore; and Washington, DC. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20200415005071/en/

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London, April 15 : English Premier League side Arsenal will continue paying employees and casual workers their full salaries until the end of May but it won't use the governments furlough scheme, the club said on Wednesday.

"All our employees are receiving their full salaries and we plan to continue this. We are not currently intending to use the government's furlough scheme," Arsenal said in a statement.

"In addition to our employees, we are extending our commitment to pay casual workers on our payroll from the end of April to the end of May.

"For our matchday casual workers this means they will be paid for all four Premier League games that have been postponed and will be paid again should they work at these games once re-arranged." The top-flight Premier League season has been suspended until at least April 30 due to the novel COVID-19 pandemic.

Tottenham Hotspur on Monday reversed their decision to use the government's furlough scheme for some non-playing staff during the coronavirus pandemic after drawing flak from supporters.

Earlier on March 31, the club had announced 550 employees would take a 20 per cent pay cut in an attempt "to protect jobs".

Liverpool had previously also reversed their decision to place some non-playing staff on temporary leave.

The Premier League giants had said they were going to apply to the government's taxpayer-funded job retention scheme.

However, later, chief executive Peter Moore in a letter addressed to the fans said: "We believe we came to the wrong conclusion last week and are truly sorry for that."
Workers of the State Emergency Service of Ukraine keep on putting out the smouldering stubs, lumber and forest cover in the Chornobyl exclusion zone. The press office of the authority reported that in the morning of April 15.

The divisions of State Emergency Service have been working on the premises of four forest districts. There is no open fire, the authority claims.

The works involve 521 people and 124 vehicles, including two helicopters; on April 14, the latter used six tons of water.

Another fire is localized on the territory of Radogashchanske forest district; there's no open fire, but forest cover is smouldering in numberous locations. 68 crew members and eleven vehicles are involved.

Rescue teams need another few days to cope with the smoldering after the fire in the Chornobyl exclusion zone. Head of the State Emergency Service Mykola Chechotkin said so during the briefing for President Volodymyr Zelensky. This is mentioned on the website of the Presidential Office.

Yesterday, the situation in the area worsened, because the fire was hard to take under control. The Service sent a large number of vehicles and staff workers to put it out. The rain helped firemen extinguish the fire.
Four people are dead, and a teenager is in critical condition after a bout of unrelated shootings overnight Monday throughout the Houston area.

Police first responded to a man who was found shot dead inside an SUV at a gas station on Lockwood at Harrisburg around 6 p.m. Officers learned the shooting took place just around the corner along Stiles Street and the victim managed to flee to the gas station before succumbing to his wounds.

MATRICIDE: Houston man accused of killing his mother while she cooked

It is unclear if he drove himself or if someone drove to the gas station, but police questioned several witnesses along Stiles Street, according to Houston Police Department Lt. Larry Crowson.

Then around 8:30 p.m., a 16-year-old was shot in the stomach during some kind of altercation at a home in the 5900 block of Selinksy. Police did not immediately know what led to the gunfire, but the teen boy is expected to survive, Crowson said.

A group of friends were meeting up in a gas station parking lot in the 15000 block of West Road around 11:30 p.m. when someone started shooting into the group, according to Harris County Sheriffs Office Sgt. Greg Pinkins. One of the men in the group was struck, and the others pulled him inside the gas station for help as the suspect fled in a white SUV -- possibly an Acura.

The friends tried to save the mans life as they called 911 to no avail. Paramedics pronounced him dead inside the gas station.

The suspected gunman is described as a Hispanic male with a thin build and a military-style haircut, Pinkins said.

FAMILY FEUD: Son questioned in father's death after heated argument

Back in Houston, officers were called to their third shooting of the night around 12:30 a.m. in the 3600 block of St. Charles, near Alabama. It is unclear what led to the gunfire, but officers found the dead body of a man face-down in a field next to the roadway.

Neighbors heard the gunfire, but no one who witnessed the shooting has come forward, according to HPD Homicide Detective Shawn Overstreet.

About an hour later, officers were called to an apartment complex in the 5600 block of Royal Palms near Griggs. A father heard a knock at his front door and was shot as soon as he opened it, according to HPD Homicide Detective Joshua Horn.

Hearing the gunfire, the mans roommate armed himself and returned fire, but missed, Horn said. The victim, whose 4-year-old son was sleeping in the apartment, died of his injuries.

Police hope surveillance video will shed some light on who the shooter is.

Anyone with information on any of these shootings is urged to call Houston Crime Stoppers at 713-222-TIPS (8477).

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
Retrenched workers who could be earning $1500 a fortnight if their bosses put them back on the books say they're not being rehired despite the government urging employers to look after their employees.

Several workers across different industries told The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age their employers are refusing to re-hire them despite the government urging businesses to use the JobKeeper payment.

An almost deserted George Street in March. The coronavirus has devastated many businesses. Credit:AAP

Three lawyers told this masthead they had been approached by workers whose bosses had refused to reinstate them after making them redundant because of coronavirus.

One worker, who had been employed at a pool business in Sydney, said he had been fired in a phone call that lasted less than a minute in late March, with his boss blaming the decision on the pandemic.
Syracuse, N.Y.  Irfan Elahi is an asbestos abatement expert who worships at the Mosque of Jesus, Son of Mary on the North Side.

He used his skills to create a prayer room covered in plastic with special ventilation that allows daily prayers to continue in the 116-year-old former church, as the holy month of Ramadan nears.

The room is lined with plastic, and two machines siphon air out of the room to create negative pressure. Air in the room is recycled every four minutes. Elahi used the materials and expertise from his day job to create what he called a clean room.

About 10 worshippers in masks are allowed in at a time, though rarely do that many show up. They stand far apart from each other as they follow a prayer leader standing on a plastic-covered prayer rug.

Before they arrived, Issa Hamadi, a neighbor, sang the call to prayer, which echoed around the empty mosques 50-foot ceilings. He walks from his home to do the call five times a day. This time, he wore a fabric mask and raised gloved hands to his head.

Volunteers disinfect the room after each prayer, and the room gets a deep cleaning after the last prayer around 9:45 p.m., Elahi said.

The mosque regularly draws hundreds of neighborhood Muslims for Friday prayers and meals during Ramadan, which begins April 23. But Friday prayers are canceled and likely so are the Ramadan gatherings, because of the coronavirus pandemic.

A Syracuse.com reporter and photographer were allowed into the room for a prayer at 1:30 p.m. Monday. The small group of Muslims praised Allah and went through their prayers, mostly in silence, as the fans whirred faintly.

May God accept our prayers and prevent all diseases from spreading around the world, the prayer leader said in Somali, according to a translator.

Elahi said mosque leaders were worried that Muslims in the neighborhood, many of whom are refugees who speak limited English, would panic if their daily prayers were canceled. Their first impulse in times of crisis is to visit the mosque more and pray harder, he said.

Outside the prayer room, Elahi and others have covered the mosque floor in plastic, and it is disinfected daily. The mosque is serving as a home base for a food drive made possible through a $22,500 grant awarded to the nearby North Side Learning Center from the COVID-19 Community Support Fund.

The grant will feed more than 100 refugee families on the North Side, said Mark Cass, the learning center director.

A teaching of Islam is that crises like this are the moments when character is defined, said Yusuf Soule, president of the centers board.

We believe that the only thing that goes with you to the grave is your good deeds. None of your money goes with you," he said. Theres a problem right now. Theres people that are in need. You have to do what you can.

The mosque was once the Holy Trinity Catholic Church, but it closed in 2010 due to declining attendance. The neighborhood changed to become home for refugees, many of them Muslim. The former church sat empty for four years before the idea was hatched to turn it into a mosque.

Reporter Patrick Lohmann can be reached at PLohmann@Syracuse.com or via cell phone at (315)766-6670.

MORE ON CORONAVIRUS

Coronavirus in NY: Cases, maps, charts and resources

Will schools reopen in New York state this academic year? Its doubtful

Closures, bankruptcies possible as coronavirus cripples CNY hospitals, experts warn

Social distancing in CNY: Hundreds of calls, police try to teach people to obey crackdown

Complete coronavirus coverage on syracuse.com
After six straight weeks of price decreases, Japanese export scrap prices rebounded on Wednesday April 15 amid continued demand from mills in Taiwan and Vietnam, and tighter ferrous scrap supply at Japanese yards.Fastmarkets price assessment for steel scrap H2, export, fob main port Japan , rose to 20,000-20,500 ($174-179) per tonne on Wednesday, down from 19,000-19,500 per tonne fob previously.

Offer prices for H2 rose to 21,000 per tonne fob, from 20,000 per tonne fob last...
BROOKLYN, Ohio

Drunken driving: Memphis Avenue

On March 26, a concerned passerby flagged down a police officer about a silver pickup truck that nearly hit numerous vehicles while traveling on Memphis Avenue. The witness also said the truck was driving on the curb.

An officer located the truck, which -- when pulling into a gas station -- had struck a gas pump.

While talking to the Brooklyn driver, the officer smelled booze. After failing a field sobriety test, the man was arrested for drunken driving. The resident was also cited for lack of reasonable control and not wearing a seatbelt.

Overdose: Memphis Avenue

On March 27, police were dispatched to an unresponsive woman thought to be overdosing at a Memphis Avenue home. After police administered three doses of Narcan, the Garfield Heights woman was revived. She was taken to the hospital.

Theft: Brookpark Road

On March 27, a Sams Club employee observed a shopper attempt to purchase an item with a switched price tag. An arriving officer arrested the suspect for theft.

Theft: Northcliff Avenue

On March 29, a Lowes employee observed a customer steal merchandise from the Northcliff Avenue store. An arriving officer located the Willoughby man, who was arrested for stealing a laser level.

Gun magazine: Cascade Crossing

On April 3, a Sheetz employee made a startling discovery in the mens bathroom.

An arriving officer talked to the worker, who said they had found a Glock 9mm magazine containing 15 rounds of ammunition in the bathroom.

There are no suspects. Police are investigating.

Fraud: Dawncliff Drive

On March 31, police were dispatched to a Dawncliff Drive residence after the homeowner learned that someone had hacked into his bank account.

An arriving officer talked to the man, who said he had discovered that someone had purchased more than $3,700 worth of merchandise from an Arizona grocery store using his debit card.

There are no suspects. Police are investigating.

Noise disturbance: Memphis Avenue

On March 30, a Memphis Avenue resident called police about a neighbor making noise. An arriving officer located the apartment tenant responsible for the disturbance. The Brooklyn man was cited for disturbing the peace.

Read more from the Parma Sun Post.
It is a privilege to support the pulmonologists that are saving lives in the midst of the pandemic crisis. Kristi Dahlke, Interim CEO GI Supply

GI Supply today announced the launch of the Piranha LC (Luminal Clearance) Aspiration Catheter for the quick, safe and effective removal of mucus and lung lavage in severe COVID-19 patients. Through its closed system, use of the Piranha LC could reduce the risk of the coronavirus infecting doctors, hospital staff and other patients as compared to current bronchoscopy procedures.

Severe coughing by COVID-19 patients can result in the release of sputum or thick phlegm from the lungs. Removal of this mucus with a bronchoscope, which is an aerosol-generating procedure, poses risks to doctors and hospital staff, including the potential spread of the virus to others.

The Piranha LC offers a safe alternative by using a patented filtered aspiration system, independent of a bronchoscope, to perform deep mucus removal and lung lavage without aerosol generations. This enables the intervention of ventilated patients without spreading the virus. The system is designed to support the needs of interventional pulmonologists, critical care pulmonologists, hospital staff and the patients they serve. Because of the Piranha LC closed system, hospital staff will likely spend less time disinfecting the rooms of

COVID-19 patients, resulting in greater workflow efficiency.

Specifically, the Piranha LC Aspiration Catheter provides:



A Closed System to support safety by avoiding the need for scope suction, and collecting all particles and samples into a suction cannister with its patented filtered aspiration system

Ease of use for quick and intuitive procedures

Efficient Design that uses wall suction and a Teflon-coated catheter to maximize mucus removal

The Piranha LC helps pulmonologists clear mucus from the pulmonary tree via a closed system that will help prevent fluid aerosolization and obtain non-contaminated lung aspirates, explained Robert A. Ganz, M.D., FASGE, S.A., the inventor of the Piranha LC. It should be of great benefit in patient care.

Working in partnership with Biomerics, GI Supply will provide national sales and marketing support on behalf of the Piranha LC Aspiration Catheter. It is a privilege to support the pulmonologists that are saving lives in the midst of the pandemic crisis, said GI Supply CFO and Interim CEO Kristi Dahlke. While we have the capacity to meet the needs of clinicians across the country, our most urgent priority right now is to serve the areas hardest hit by COVID-19, including the New York metropolitan area, Chicago, Detroit and New Orleans.

In addition to COVID-19, the Piranha LC Aspiration Catheter is indicated for use in patients with cystic fibrosis, lung cancer and COPD. The device is a great tool that physicians can use to clear mucus, areas of necrosis and infection, and can also be used to clear blood and blood clots, added Dr. Ganz.

Click here to watch a brief animation demonstrating how the Piranha LC treats patients.

Click here to access the Piranha LC Instructions for Use. (Scroll down web page to the Documentation tab.)

About GI Supply

As a physician-founded company, we strive for deep clinical input into all that we do. GI Supply is broadening our portfolio with solutions that allow physicians to perform more-advanced procedures safely, efficiently and economically. We help doctors do their jobs faster, safer and simpler. For more information visit http://www.gi-supply.com.

Dr. Ganz is a member of the GI Supply Board of Directors.

Contact

Jimena Garcia Vela

VP of Marketing

j.garcia@gi-supply.com
Indias merchandise exports shrank by more than one-third from a year ago, hit by a fall in global demand and shipments due to the new coronavirus, and analysts warned of a grim outlook for exports in 2020 as global economic activity collapses.

Merchandise exports fell 34.6% to $21.41 billion in March from a year earlier, while imports were down 28.7% to $31.16 billion during the same period, a trade ministry statement said on Wednesday.

Oil imports, the biggest item in the import bill, fell 15% to $10.01 billion, helped by fall in global crude oil prices and slowdown in domestic demand.

India meets nearly 80 percent of its fuel demand from imports.

Overall in March, Indias trade deficit marginally declined to $9.76 billion from $9.85 billion in the previous month.

Shipments of Indian goods have been hit by the shutdown of factories and cancellation of orders as the infection spread and amid a national lockdown imposed by the government late last month to try to combat the outbreak.

On Tuesday, Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced the extension of the 21-day lockdown until May 3, while promising to allow some economic activities from next week.

The ministry does not issue separate data for trade in services. That is issued in about a months time by the Reserve Bank of India.

However, the ministry did issue estimates for goods and services trade in the year to March 31, based on the full-year merchandise trade figures and the first 11 months of services trade.

Total exports of goods and services were estimated at $528.45 billion in the financial year, down 1.76% from a year earlier, compared with estimated imports of $598.61 billion, down 6.33%, the statement said.

Economists said a much-feared global recession and a fall in global trade will further hit Indian exports in 2020 while a slowdown in domestic demand will impact imports.

The International Monetary Fund, in a new global outlook, said the world economy is expected to contract by 3% in 2020 as the pandemic causes nations around the world to close down, compared with a contraction of 0.1% in 2009, the worst year of the previous recession.
The billionaire boss of fast food chain Hungry Jack's has proposed a three month rent strike due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Jack Cowin, who is worth an estimated $2.79billion, penned a letter to landlords about deferring rent until the health crisis blows over and trade returns to normal.

'We propose to defer gross rent for three months, or until the restrictions are lifted and our company's trading patterns show signs of returning to normal,' said the letter to landlords.

Hungry Jack's billionaire boss has proposed a rent strike during COVID-19 crisis

The letter, seen by The West Australian, allegedly went on to say the company did not anticipate the situation to change over the next three months, despite day-to-day updates.

Hungry Jack's outlets continue to serve customers through drive-through and take-away, as per government orders.

Since March 23, all food retailers across the country have been required to operate under a take-away model to try and curb the spread of the coronavirus outbreak.

Managing director of Lease Equity Jim Tsagalis said many small landlords would struggle without the income.

Jack Cowin (right with wife), who is worth an estimated $2.79billion, penned a letter to landlords about deferring rent until the health crisis blows over and trade returns to normal

'Not all landlords are billionaires or Mega Funds. Many need the rent to meet their commitments, mortgages and otherwise, and many are mum and dad investors,' he said.

At the end of March, billionaire retail mogul Solomon Lew declared Premier Investments would not pay rent to landlords during a virus-necessitated shutdown of brands including Smiggle, Peter Alexander, Portmans, and Just Jeans.

Mr Lew - who holds a 43 per cent stake in Premier and also owns private chains such as French Connection and Seed - has long railed against the level of rent charged by landlords.

According to the Australian Financial Review Rich List for 2019, Mr Cowin was valued at $2.79billion.

The Canadian-born fast-food mogul founded Competitive Foods Australia, which operates Burger King's Australian franchise as Hungry Jack's.

Daily Mail Australia has contacted Hungry Jack's for comment.
D enmark has become among the first European nations to relax coronavirus restrictions.

Across the country, hundreds of children up to the age of 11 are returning to nurseries and schools after facing a month in lockdown.

The Scandinavian country was quick to impose the restrictions, with schools closed on March 12.

On Wednesday, Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen welcomed kids at a school in the capital Copenhagen where she reiterated the rules around social distancing.

It came a day after she stated that her country could open much faster than expected citing figures showing a stabilisation of the virus crisis.

Denmark has reported 299 deaths from COVID-19 and 6,876 confirmed infections. Although the infection rates have been low, one researcher says some families are worried for the safety of their kids.

Children under the age of 11 returned to schools after a month in lockdown

Ida Wentsel Winther from Aarhus University has been researching families in Denmark for 20 years. As part of her latest study, she is interacting with parents and kids about their time in lockdown.

Speaking on the Evening Standards podcast, The Leader: Coronavirus Daily, she said: In Denmark we have 1.3 million school kids and young people, so we want to find out how do they accept, live and have an everyday life at home.

Some families have talked a lot about being afraid. Do the schools have control enough and is it safe enough? But most families seem OK with that.

Families with kids going back to kindergarten are little more afraid because it is difficult to explain to a 2-year-old that they cant play with other kids and need to stay 2 meters away. It is difficult for a lot of parents to accept that thats how it is.

As part of the research, Prof Winther is also looking at varying attitudes among kids of different ages.

It depends on who they are and how old they are," she said.

"The young kids are really looking forward to going back to school and the older kids are more laid back because they have connect with their friends through commuters."

When asked if children understood what coronavirus is she said: "I was shocked at how much kids knew.

"They take care, clean their hands, use medication and even clean the sticks if they are sharing it with other people. They know that they need to be around people who are taking care.

A month of being in lockdown can take its toll on most people, but Prof Winthers study found that kids coped with it better than expected.

She said: This lockdown has really changed the ways families operate.

"They have come a lot closer and many families would like to continue that contact and closeness if possible.

Europe takes it's first steps out of Coronavirus lockdown 1 /25 Europe takes it's first steps out of Coronavirus lockdown People queue at a hardware store during a partial reopening after the Austrian government eased lockdown restrictions Reuters A worker checks the temperature of a customer at the entrance of a supermarket in Itay Reuters Customers hold flowers in front of a DIY store in Graz, Austria, after it re-opened on April 14, 2020, following a "shutdown" in a measure to limit the spread of the new coronavirus APA/AFP via Getty Images People wearing protective face masks and gloves walk in the streets as the Italian government allows the reopening of some shops while a nationwide lockdown continues following the outbreak of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19), in Venice, Italy, Reuters People queue to enter a hardware store during a partial reopening after the Austrian government eased restrictions following the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) outbreak in Eisenstadt, Austria Reuters Camilla Cocchi wears a face mask and gloves as she sorts out clothing in her children's clothes shop after it was allowed to reopen following lockdown measures to contain the spread of Covid-19, in Rome AP A man wearing a face mask shops in a hardware store during a partial reopening after the Austrian government eased restrictions following the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) outbreak in Eisenstadt, Austria Reuters "Respect the 2 meters distance" banner is seen at a fish stand as the Italian government allows the reopening of some shops while a nationwide lockdown continues following the outbreak of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) in Venice, Italy, Reuters Customers wearing face masks push shopping carts in front of a DIY store in Vienna, Austria, after it re-opened on April 14, 2020, following a "shutdown" in a measure to limit the spread of the new coronavirus APA/AFP via Getty Images A worker checks the temperature of a customer at the entrance of a supermarket, as the spread of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) continues, in Turin, Italy Reuters Customers line up in front of a DIY store in Graz, Austria APA/AFP via Getty Images Gianfranco Mandas wears a face mask as he sorts out clothing in his children's clothes shop after it was allowed to opens following restriction measures to contain the spread of Covid-19, in Rome AP Customers wearing face masks push shopping carts in front of a DIY store in Vienna, Austria, after it re-opened on April 14, 2020, following a "shutdown" in a measure to limit the spread of the new coronavirus APA/AFP via Getty Images Customers queue at the Trastevere market, as new restrictions for open-air markets are implemented to prevent the spread of coronavirus disease (COVID-19) in Rome, Italy, Reuters Customers wearing face masks push shopping carts in front of a DIY store in Vienna, Austria, after it re-opened on April 14, 2020, following a "shutdown" in a measure to limit the spread of the new coronavirus APA/AFP via Getty Images A man wears a protective face mask and gloves at the newsstand as the Italian government allows the reopening of some shops while a nationwide lockdown continues following the outbreak of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19), in Venice, Italy Reuters People wearing face masks work in a hardware store during a partial reopening after the Austrian government eased restrictions following the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) outbreak in Eisenstadt, Austria Reuters Customers queue at the Trastevere market, as new restrictions for open-air markets are implemented to prevent the spread of coronavirus disease (COVID-19) in Rome, Italy Reuters A general view of the parking area of a hardware store during the partial reopening of shops after the Austrian government loosens its lockdown restrictions during the global coronavirus disease (COVID-19) outbreak in Vienna Reuters

With Austria, the Czech Republic and Denmark already lifting some lockdown measures, the European Commission today outlined its exit strategies from the lockdowns, which they expect should take at least a few months and involve large-scale testing.

About 80,000 people have died in Europe from Covid-19  two-thirds of the global toll  according to the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control.
1. President Trumps decision to halt U.S. funding to the World Health Organization was met with widespread condemnation.

Speaker Nancy Pelosi promised to swiftly challenge the move and called it dangerous and illegal  Congress has already appropriated nearly $500 million. Antonio Guterres, the U.N. secretary general, said now was not the time to cut funding. The German foreign minister also criticized the decision.

W.H.O. is not only fighting Covid-19, Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, above, the W.H.O.s director general, said. Were also working to address polio, measles, malaria, Ebola, H.I.V., tuberculosis, malnutrition, cancer, diabetes, mental health and many other diseases and conditions.
The number of Covid-19 deaths in care homes across Northern Ireland are to be released publicly from Friday, it has emerged.

The Northern Ireland Statistics and Research Agency (NISRA) has said it has been working with the Department of Health to provide further information, which will provide a more accurate reflection of the fatal spread of coronavirus across the province.

It is hoped it will also help to identify infection hotspots in care homes, where some of the most vulnerable people in society live.

Read More

It comes amid fears that coronavirus is spreading out of control among care homes - and further claims that care homes across Northern Ireland are coming under pressure from health trusts to provide places to people being discharged from hospital without first being tested to establish if they have coronavirus.

One care home manager said: "I know the test is only relevant for that point in time, but at least it would give some level of reassurance about what you are dealing with."

Health officials have come under increasing pressure for greater clarity over the extent of the spread of coronavirus in care homes, particularly as the majority of residents are considered the most high-risk category when it comes to Covid-19.

Health Minister Robin Swann has so far only released limited information about the spread of Covid-19 in care homes - on Tuesday he revealed 32 facilities in Northern Ireland have so far been affected, up from 20 the previous week.

He has not provided a breakdown of how many people have been diagnosed or the number of deaths and on Tuesday, Northern Ireland's chief medical officer, Dr Michael McBride, said he did not have the details of care home deaths as a result of coronavirus.

And earlier this week, health officials refused to release a range of figures on the situation in care homes, including the number of people who have been diagnosed with Covid-19 and the number of subsequent deaths.

There has been confusion over what information is being gathered and how it is being collated and verified since the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic.

The Public Health Agency (PHA) has been releasing statistics on a daily basis, which include the number of tests carried out, the number of positive cases and the number of Covid-19 deaths. The figures relate to the previous 24-hour period and the overall pandemic, however, they do not include the number of deaths in residential settings.

A number of different organisations have been involved in gathering statistics relating to Covid-19 cases in care homes - they are required by law to inform the Regulation and Quality Improvement Authority (RQIA) of details about any deaths, cases of communicable disease, accidents or other untoward incidents.

This is done on a daily basis when staff log on to the RQIA portal and register any issues, which are then recorded and monitored by the watchdog.

At the same time, the PHA must be notified of any outbreaks at care homes, which is defined as two or more linked cases or a disease.

With 484 care homes in Northern Ireland and 16,000 beds, there are concerns the real total of people affected by coronavirus and the number of fatalities is far higher.

Speaking on Tuesday, Mr Swann said: "Currently, the reporting of Covid-19 deaths falls into two main categories - the PHA publishes a daily surveillance report, which includes information on deaths reported by trusts and focuses mainly on hospital-based deaths.

"This is important information which enables comparison with other regions. In addition, NISRA is publishing weekly statistics that include suspected and confirmed COVID-19 related deaths across hospital and community settings."
FP Trending

Government and health authorities across the world have asked people to isolate themselves to stop the spread of Coronavirus. However, there are certain professionals who do not have the option of staying in. Google has been paying tribute to such heroes through their daily doodles.

The 15 April Google Doodle thanks all those associated with packaging, shipping and delivery. With lockdowns in place, people have heavily dependent on the online or telephonic ordering of essential goods.

The doodle features a package being delivered by a worker wearing a facemask. As a token of appreciation, this doodle also carries a big red heart like the one featured in earlier doodles of this series.

This doodle is a part of Googles over two-week-long Thank You initiative aimed at boosting the morale of the frontline workers. The first doodle focused on public health workers and researchers in the scientific community.

According to a blog published on Googles Company News, it was mentioned that the first day of the Google Doodle series coincided with the beginning of the National Public Health Week in the United States of America (USA).

After researchers, the next Google doodle was dedicated to all the doctors, nurses and other medical workers serving as the frontline soldiers in this war against a virus.

This has been followed by honouring the emergency services workers on 8 April 2020.

On 9 April hearts were sent to the custodial and sanitation workers.

Farm workers and farmers were paid a tribute on the next day.

Grocery workers and public transportation workers were appreciated on 13 April and 14 April respectively.
Details of the free electricity relief package announced by government to cushion Ghanaians amid the deadly novel coronavirus outbreak, will be announced by the Energy Minister John Peter Amewu on Thursday.



Mr Amewu will address all questions that have come up since the announcement of the package last week by President Nana Akufo-Addo, including how much it will cost the country and how customers will access the relief package.



President Akufo-Addo announced electricity bills for April, May and June for consumers with up to 50 kilowatt per hour of power in a month will be absorbed by government.



Under the package, customers who consume more than 50 kilowatts per hour will have 50 per cent of their bills absorbed by the government within the same period using their March 2020 electricity consumption as the benchmark.



Although the package is supposed to start from April, many pre-paid customers who recently purchased electricity say they are yet to enjoy the package, with some wondering whether the power distributors were ripping them off their money.



Commenting on the issue Wednesday on TV3 Covid-19 360, Information Minister Kojo Oppong Nkrumah said details on the package announced by the government were concluded on Tuesday.



Yesterday, I think for about five hours or so the Ministry for Energy completed all the various frequently asked questions, he said, noting Mr Amewu will on Thursday provide a lot more detailsthe numbers have been worked out, various categories have been worked out.



He added that details on how a customer can access the relief package will also be outlined at tomorrow mornings news briefing in Accra.



Mr Oppong Nkrumah disagreed with claims by some civil society groups that the absorption of the electricity bills will leave the countrys energy sector with huge debt after the pandemic.



The Africa Centre for Energy Policy (ACEP) for instance has said the package will mean government will spend about 350 million dollars every month



The reality is that electricity is expensive and the total bills for Ghana every month is about $350 million. If the government is taking 50 per cent of this amount, it translates into close to three billion cedis for three months.

Source: 3news









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LONDON, UK / ACCESSWIRE / April 15, 2020 / Anglo Pacific Group PLC (the "Company" or "Anglo Pacific") (LSE: APF, TSX: APY) announces the publication of its Notice of Annual General Meeting (the "AGM Notice") and Form of Proxy for the 2020 Annual General Meeting on the Company's website, www.anglopacificgroup.com Annual General MeetingThe 2020 AGM will be held at 2:00pm on 27 May 2020 at the Company's registered office, 1 Savile Row (entrance via 7 Vigo Street), London W1S 3JR. In order to comply with the UK government's "Stay at Home" measures, shareholders will not be permitted to attend the AGM in person and should therefore vote by proxy.The Board understands that beyond voting on the formal business of the meeting, the AGM also serves as a forum for shareholders to raise questions and comments to the Board. Therefore, following the AGM, the Board will hold a webcast meeting at 3:00pm on 27 May 2020 for registered shareholders and their corporate representatives or proxies. This will include a short presentation from Patrick Meier, Chairman and Julian Treger, Chief Executive Officer. Following the presentation, all members of the Board will be available to respond to questions from shareholders and their corporate representatives or proxies. Shareholders are invited to also submit any questions by email to company.secretary@anglopacificgroup.com by 5.00pm (UK time) on 25 May 2020.AGM WebcastPlease join the event 5-10 minutes prior to scheduled start time.Company NameAnglo PacificEvent Title2020 AGM Presentation WebcastTime ZoneDublin, Edinburgh, Lisbon, LondonStart Time/Date15:00pm Wednesday, 27 May 2020Duration60 minutesWebcast LinkA hard copy version of the AGM Notice and the Form of Proxy will be sent to those shareholders who have elected to continue to receive paper communications on 24 April 2020. Shareholders who have not elected to continue to receive paper communications, will be sent a notification of the availability of these documents on the Company's website by post or, where they have elected, by email.Anglo Pacific will submit to the UK National Storage Mechanism a copy of its AGM Notice in accordance with LR 9.6.1R. The documents will shortly be available for inspection through the National Storage Mechanism at https://data.fca.org.uk/#/nsm/nationalstoragemechanism and through SEDAR at www.sedar.com For further information:Anglo Pacific Group PLC+44 (0) 20 3435 7400Julian Treger - Chief Executive OfficerKevin Flynn - Chief Financial Officer and Company SecretaryWebsite:Berenberg+44 (0) 20 3207 7800Matthew Armitt / Jennifer Wyllie / Detlir EleziPeel Hunt LLP+44 (0) 20 7418 8900Ross Allister / Alexander Allen / David McKeownRBC Capital MarketsFarid Dadashev / Marcus Jackson / Jamil Miah+44 (0) 20 7653 4000Camarco+44 (0) 20 3757 4997Gordon Poole / Owen Roberts / James CrothersNotes to EditorsAbout Anglo PacificAnglo Pacific Group PLC is a global natural resources royalty and streaming company. The Company's strategy is to become a leading natural resources company through investing in high quality projects in preferred jurisdictions with trusted counterparties, underpinned by strong ESG principles. It is a continuing policy of the Company to pay a substantial portion of these royalties and streams to shareholders as dividends.This information is provided by RNS, the news service of the London Stock Exchange. RNS is approved by the Financial Conduct Authority to act as a Primary Information Provider in the United Kingdom. Terms and conditions relating to the use and distribution of this information may apply. For further information, please contact rns@ lseg.com or visit www.rns.com SOURCE: Anglo Pacific Group PLC
By Akbar Mammadov

Head of Nagorno-Karabkahs Azerbaijani community Tural Ganjaliyev has slammed the holding of illegal elections in occupied Nagorno-Karabakh amid COVID-19, saying that Armenia is using the regions Armenian population as a political tool.

Ganjaliyev described as a show the elections held in Nagorno-Karabakh on March 31, adding that the Armenian authorities held it despite the warnings of the spread of coronavirus infection in the occupied territories. In addition, Armenian authorities threatened people's lives once again by holding the second round of the so-called "elections" on April 14, despite their previous acknowledgment of the existence of COVID-19 cases in occupied Nagorno-Karabakh.

This shows that ordinary Armenians living in Nagorno-Karabakh are a tool for Armenia's dirty political games, and Armenia is not interested in the lives and health of the people there, Ganjaliyev said.

Ganjaliyev also said that Armenia prevents Nagorno-Karabakhs Armenian community from benefiting social, economic, medical and other projects and programs implemented in Azerbaijan.

Furthermore, he spoke about measures taken in Azerbaijan to fight COVID-19.

The Azerbaijani government is taking necessary and preventive steps to ensure the health and safety of citizens and protect them from the socio-economic consequences of the pandemic.

Twenty-two clinics were allocated in Azerbaijan for the treatment of coronavirus-infected patients. In March, three new clinics were opened in the regions of Azerbaijan, namely in Goranboy, Gazakh and Shamkir districts. The new Yeni klinika medical institution with 575 beds commissioned in Baku also is intended for the treatment of coronavirus-infected patients. To diagnose and examine infected patients, over 70,000 tests have been carried out in Azerbaijan so far.

"The financial volume of the state support programs aimed at the solution of economic, macroeconomic and employment problems covering over 600,000 people is AZN 2.5 billion. The mentioned measures are just a part of the state support implemented in Azerbaijan," the statement reads.

Noting that the main line of the policy of Azerbaijan is the protection of Azerbaijani citizens and their interests, the head of the community said: We reiterate that after the withdrawal of Armenian troops from the occupied territories, Armenian and Azerbaijani communities of Nagorno-Karabakh will live together peacefully, and will enjoy the privileges of being a citizen of our country on an equal footing".

---

Akbar Mammadov is AzerNews staff journalist, follow him on Twitter: @AkbarMammadov97

Follow us on Twitter @AzerNewsAz
Senior officials of the Railways on Tuesday said suspension of train services and other public transport is necessary to ensure social distancing which is the only way to prevent the spread of coronavirus.

Fearing a repeat of what happened in Mumbai earlier during the day when thousands of migrants gathered at Bandra railway station hoping to catch trains to their native places, the Northern Railway also issued an advisory.

"The general public is informed that a decision has been taken to not run any trains by Northern Railways till 3rd May 2020 in view of COVID-19, hence such fake news in circulation may not be believed," a Northern Railways spokesperson said.

The official also asked media persons to publicise that Northern Railways is not running any train from Delhi or any where else. Amidst rumours that train services in the country will be resumed from April 15, the Railway Ministry also issued a clarification on Twitter.

"It is clarified that all passenger train services are fully cancelled across the nation till 3rd May 2020 and there is no plan to run any special train to clear the passenger rush. All concerned may please take note of the same and help us in resisting any wrong news in this regard," the railway ministry said on the social networking website.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Tuesday announced extension of the lockdown across the country till May 3 to fight the coronavirus pandemic, saying the measure has produced a significant outcome in containing the infection.

Even as the announcement stalled the prospective functioning of 15,000 passenger trains of the railways, thousands of migrant workers converged near the Bandra railway station in Mumbai hoping to catch trains back to their home states.

While they were dispersed later, questions were raised as to why railways kept bookings open despite the uncertainty over the extension of the lockdown period. Railways, however, said all passengers will get full refund for tickets booked for the cancelled trains as well as for those booked in advance.

"The only way to prevent the spread of COVID-19 is by social distancing. Movement of public by public transport system cannot ensure social distancing. It is in this context that trains and buses are not being allowed to run in this crucial lockdown period. Even a single infected person travelling in a train can pass on the infection to thousands of passengers," a senior official of the railways said.

The official said in the early days of the spread of the pandemic, at least 12 cases were reported where those marked with home quarantine travelled in trains and could have spread the virus.

The official further said boarding and deboarding at different stations will continue to aggravate the situation further. India has reported 10,363 cases of the virus and 339 deaths so far.

"With many trains running, this number will get multiplied manifold. Moreover, once this large no of people will reach their respective villages, infection will spread there as well and it all will become unmanageable. The contact tracing will become impossible in such a scenario," the official said, adding that it was in public and national interest that social distancing be ensured at any cost.

Around 15,523 trains run by the railways have been affected due to the lockdown including 9,000 passenger trains and 3,000 mail express services which are run daily during normal circumstances.

Also read: Coronavirus lockdown 2.0: Railways suspends passenger services till May 3

Also read: Coronavirus lockdown 2.0: Railways cancels all passenger trains till May 3; passengers to get full refund
Part of the original crop of supermodels that made waves in the '90s, Naomi Campbell and Christy Turlington no doubt have a ton of juicy stories from their early days of ruling the runways in Milan and Paris.

Related | Naomi Campbell Is Hosting Her Very Own Talk Series

So when the two icons sat down for Campbell's "No Filter With Naomi" YouTube series, we knew we were in for a treat. And luckily, both ladies gave us all the glorious tidbits and more. From their beginnings as young teenagers living in legendary modeling agent Eileen Ford's townhouse to how they felt about that famous fashion documentary Unzipped, no topic was off-limits.

After dishing on some of their favorite magazine covers of all time (including Turlington's stunning yoga cover for Vogue) and sharing which fashion writer they're not too fond of, Campbell turned the conversation to today and asked Turlington which models she thought are the next "us," referring to the OG supermodels like herself, Turlington and Linda Evangelista.

Turlington offered names like Karlie Kloss and Jourdan Dunn, both of whom are super friendly with each other, much like how the original flock of models were at the time. Campbell, meanwhile, said that she's loving Alton Mason and James Turlington (Christy's nephew), as well as Adut Akech, Selena Forrest and Kaia Gerber. See, below, for the full chat between these two legends.
New Delhi, April 15 : The elderly are most vulnerable to anxiety and social isolation culminating into mental stress during the lockdown, which is a worrying factor against the backdrop of high mortality among them from the coronavirus infection, says an AIIMS psychiatry expert.

According to the Union Health Ministry, people above 60 years of age account for more than 60 per cent of Covid-19 deaths in India. The ministry has categorised the elderly in the high-risk profile.

Psychiatrist, Dr. Ashish Pakhre told IANS that social isolation in the elderly population is a worrying aspect. He contended that lack of social support, limitations in executing daily routines and chores, and poor family support will have immense cause for elevated stress, depression and sleep problems. "It is extremely crucial now to see what can be done to address the deleterious effects of social isolation, especially in elderly population of our society. Prolonged lockdown poses a serious public health concern in elderly population in our country," he said.

The country has already been through a 21-day lockdown and on Tuesday, the Prime Minister announced the extension of the lockdown till May 3. Would this extension of the lockdown, eventually an isolation period, make elders more uncertain and anxious about the remaining period in the lockdown? Dr Pakhre said the elders are already feeling uncertainty and anxiety, and experiencing immense concern over their health issues. He added this step to continue the lockdown is not an easy way to go ahead, of course with the special population of our society.

With most of the elderly have their children in different cities or probably out of the country, how could they fill this gap of social connectedness against the backdrop of a diminished family? To this, Dr Pakhre said online technologies/social media platforms may be used to provide social support, connection with family members as a sense of belonging. "More frequent telephonic contacts with close family members, close friends and support system is needed. If any mental health issue arises, then online consultations will be suitable to access psychological assistance or contact with a psychiatrist should be provided," he added.

With restricted movement of the elderly, Dr Pakhre insisted that authorities concerned can bring services, catering for elderly, at their homes and these should include necessary food items, groceries, and medical appointments.

(Sumit Saxena can be contacted at sumit.s@ians.in)
Giant waves were lashing against the side of the apartment building. Just outside the living room window, an electrical transformer exploded, sending sparks flying. Inside, Nick and Rachel Cope were starting a wallpaper company.

It was 2012, and Hurricane Sandy was laying waste to New Yorks low-lying neighborhoods, including Red Hook, Brooklyn, where the young couple were hunkered down. In the aftermath of the storm, most of Nicks projectshe had a design-build company at the timewere put on hold, and the hospital where Rachel was working as a therapist was shut down for post-Sandy repairs. So the Copes took advantage of the break to experiment with making marbled paper, a project that evolved over time into a bustling company, Calico Wallpaper.

Almost a decade later, they're facing another disaster-induced hiatus, with their Brooklyn design studio closed by stay-at-home orders issued to halt the spread of COVID-19. This time around, the Copes have a staff of 11, not to mention two young children at homethe stakes are different. Sandy was awful, but it was fairly localized and we did see the light at the end of the tunnel, Nick tells Business of Home. Were taking some of that experience into this, but this situation is obviously different.

The company is facing a heap of challengesa creative team learning how to work over Zoom, a design director stranded in South Africa with a wonky laptopbut in many ways, the Copes are lucky. The mills that manufacture their wallpaper are currently operating, placing them into the fortunate category of vendors who can still ship product. Across the country, many makers are facing a more complete shutdown, putting a famously industrious community into uncharted territory: downtime.

Catherine Bailey and Robin Petravic Mariko Reed

For many, the shutdown came like a dam burstingthere was a little trickle of bad news, then all of a sudden the worst-case scenario arrived. Catherine Bailey and Robin Petravic, the married couple that run Bay Areabased ceramics brand Heath, had been fine-tuning their facilities health and safety protocols and planning for a limited closure. We had a plan to shut down voluntarily on our own for a couple of weeks right before the health orders came in, says Petravic. There are certain stages of shock. Two weeks we were going to do anyway ... The reality that this is going to be months has a very different meaning.

What started as shock quickly turned into a new kind of all-encompassing busy-ness. While across the industry, the shutdown of manufacturing operations has led to furloughs and layoffs on the production floor, for principals and the back-office staff, the new normal is a mad rush to reorganize businesses on the fly, untangle the knots of the governments Paycheck Protection Program, and prep for what lies ahead.

Theres been no pause, says Bailey, who is creative director of Heath. Creating a [new] financial model was Robins constant day-and-night task [as managing director], because its like no other model weve done before. On my side, there are so many things to think about  Even thinking about what product were going to put on the shelves first once we start to ease out of this. Everything changed. Everything had to be rethought.

Ive been reaching out to the team to remind everyone to literally shower and get dressed before they go to work for the day, says Cope. And Ive been trying to remind people that its important to take breaks.

+ + +

Like many makers, Scott Hudson, founder and CEO of Seattle-based cabinetry and furniture brand Henrybuilt, had been prepping for some kind of shutdown. Still, Washington states indefinite shelter-in-place order arrived abruptly. A few of Henrybuilts projects were sitting at the end of the line on the factory floor, ready to be shipped, when word arrived. Theyre still therea little piece of the pre-COVID world trapped in amber.

Scott Hudson Courtesy of Henrybuilt

For Hudson, the shutdown carries a certain irony. Almost a year ago exactly, he voluntarily closed Henrybuilts production facility to new business for two and a half months as his staff learned a new production methodology, one-piece flow, inspired by hyper-efficient Japanese automaker Toyota.

It was a challenging time, in the best possible way, says Hudson. Theres the excitement of learning things you didnt know before.  There was a bit of a scramble when we first opened back up, but we never had to be late. No one even knew we had done it.

Now, Hudson faces a shutdown of a different character. Still, he sees some relevant takeaways. Culturally it had a benefit, which is that whenever you have a crisis or you run into an unexpected barrier, theres an infinite number of possibilities for how it could go, he says. If youre creative, you can figure out a way to turn what seems like a total loss into something that pushes the company forward. Everybody knowing that makes them see this differently.

Its a lesson that applies across the industry, as makers try to make the best of a uniquely strange time. For Jonathan Glatt, the founder of Rhode Islandbased O&G Studio, a maker of handcrafted Windsor-inspired furniture, the canary in the coalmine was the postponement of the AD Design Show in early March. From there, it was a quick escalation to the shutdown of his facility and the furlough of some members of the production staff. But many employees are using the pause in business to learn 3-D modeling software that will come in handy when the company can reopen.

For Bailey and Petravic, the shutdown has seen an inspiring reshuffle at Heath. Roles are being swapped, with many team members finding themselves taking on something new. Our photographer is now managing our social media [from] her home studio, says Bailey. Our design director is doing internal communications, and our studio director, who now cant work in his studio, is on our social media team. Its making it feel more authentic and real. We never would have tried these things before.

Its also been an opportunity to reassess the company with a sense of philosophical remove, free from the daily grind of making stuff. When the restrictions are lifted and Heath is able to ease back into manufacturing at capacity again, it wont be the exact same company it was a month ago, when the lights were first shut off. Our tile lineis it too complicated? Is it too broad? Well, now we have a chance to think about it and do something about it that we never would have if we were continually making, says Petravic.

There seemed to be these stakes in the ground that everybody thought were not movable, and when something like this happens, you realize, Wait, why do we have them there? says Bailey. Youre asking, What is Heath? Its not every single SKU that we make. Before, people might have said it was, but now its clear that its the overall quality of what we do  its the relationship we have with customers.

One of Heaths manufacturing facilities Mariko Reed

Even for those who are dealing with less-significant disruption, its been a time to tackle long-delayed housekeeping projects. Websites are being revamped. Assets are being organized. In a time when the digital world is the primary channel to reach customers, anything that works online takes priority.

Hudson is in the enviable position of having started a software company adjacent to Henrybuilt, Symbolic Frameworks, which designs digital workflow tools. That company, and a new portal for trade customers, has occupied much of his energy over the past few weeks. Glatt has developed a walled-off section of O&Gs website where designers can view pictures of in-stock product.

The Copes are planning new video content and tutorials about their process, as well as an Instagram Live series where Rachel teaches a painting workshop. Were modeling out what a decline in sales could look like and thinking about creative ways to replace that revenue. Not new products, but thinking about marketing as an inroad to connect with new customers, says Nick. We field a lot of inbound leads and requeststhis is a time for us to play offense.

+ + +

For many makers, the challenges of COVID-19 shutdowns have been as much psychological as they are logistical. Its been a period of extraordinary mental and emotional stress, full of a near-constant flood of bad news from the outside world, not to mention tough choices and emotionally wrenching layoffs and furloughs.

Staying in touch with the teams that are still working also presents its own challenges. Hudson has increased the frequency of company-wide Zoom meetings and is penning a daily email to staff that highlights new sales and anecdotes from interactions with clients. Bailey and Petravic have instituted similar policies and are looking for ways to make up for the lack of informal passing-in-the-hallway conversations that fuel a busy company. This week Im making it a point to reach out to all the people Id normally run into at lunch, and just say hi, says Petravic.

Henrybuilts Seattle manufacturing facility Courtesy of Henrybuilt

Then theres an even more basic challenge: staying positive and creative in a time of global gloom and doom. More than one principal told BOH that it had been helpful to ease up on reading the news and concentrate on the day-to-day.

At first I had a lot of dark moments  but I realized that in order to really focus on the right things, you have to find a way to be OK with the outcome, says Hudson. I still look at the news, but I discard it really quickly and focus on the positive, watching the progress were making with clients and watching the way our team was rallying.

It was a huge challenge in the first week or so, it was so overwhelming, says Bailey. But once it was digested, it became: Do the work.

+ + +

What precisely the future holds is difficult to predict. Most of the makers we spoke with are confident theyll be able to revamp their production process to accommodate the health and safety concerns of the moment. Manufacturing actually lends itself very well to the constraints [of social distancing]. We know we can do that with a few slight adjustments, says Petravic. Were pretty confident that we could be making dinnerware and tile in a way thats safer than the supermarket  I would rather work in our dinnerware factory than go to Safeway.

The greater concern is for retail shops and design showrooms. People who I think of as almost nonchalant about danger are now saying, Im not going to ride the train for six months, and I dont want to go into a room unless everyone is wearing a mask and has gloves on, says Hudson. People are talking about remote-control showrooms where you can buzz clients in, no ones there, and you have a museum-style walkaround. I think thats going to happen.

For their part, Petravic and Bailey are planning a revamp of Heaths retail locations with cautious shoppers in mindanother item on a long laundry list of COVID-hiatus tasks the couple is chipping away at. A strange quality of this extraordinary time is that, a few weeks in, its beginning to feel slightly normal. Petravic and Bailey say theyve settled into a work-from-home rhythm. The Copes, too, are making it work with two young kids. Hudson is seeing the bright side: At the beginning it felt like the end of the world, but people were still starting projects.

And while the past few weeks have been uniquely challenging for makers across the country, theyve also been uniquely galvanizing. A cliche thats never felt more true: If you can make it through this, you can make it through anything.

The first week, I started getting calls from other business owners, says Petravic. One friend of mine said, Come on, youve thought about it, right? Why not just shut the whole thing down? Thats the reality, youve got to think about it. As business owners, thats the first decision we made: OK, were not going to do that. So then it comes back to what Cathy said: Just do the work.

Homepage photo: Nick and Rachel Cope of Calico Wallpaper | Daniel Shea
State officials on Tuesday reported at least 68,824 cases and 2,805 deaths from the coronavirus outbreak in New Jersey, a figure that marked the largest one-day increase in fatalities for the state.

Gov. Phil Murphy again said there were signs that the rate of increase is slowing, helped by strong social distancing efforts and the widespread shut down of schools and businesses in the state. New Jersey, officials said, has yet to hit its plateau in the outbreak.

During a Tuesday news briefing, Murphy said the sharp spike in announced cases and deaths may be caused by catching up on reporting cases from Easter weekend.

CORONAVIRUS RESOURCES: Live map tracker | Businesses that are open | Homepage

Heres a roundup of coronavirus news:

N.J. coronavirus peak now 11 days away with 16K hospitalizations expected, health officials say: Officials on Tuesday said they predict the states peak in hospitalizations with the coronavirus will hit 15,922 patients on April 25  a little later than what was predicted a few days ago. Officials cautioned that models the state is using to prepare for the surge in patients change daily.

Of the 15,922 people projected to be hospitalized at the new peak, 3,821 are expected to be in critical care, with 3,503 on ventilators, New Jersey Health Commissioner Judith Persichilli said Tuesday at the states daily coronavirus press briefing.

Man arrested twice in 3 hours for entering Wawa without mask, making threats, cops say: A 70-year-old man was arrested twice in less than three hours after violating the states emergency orders during the coronavirus pandemic by entering separate Wawa stores without a mask and threatening to hit people with a pipe, authorities said. State officials have released a daily reports of people charged with violating orders related to the coronavirus emergency.

Dont fire us because of coronavirus, Rutgers adjunct professors say: Adjunct professors worry the pandemic might cost them their jobs at Rutgers. The university froze all hiring earlier this month, leaving thousands of adjuncts who are employed on a semester-by-semester basis in the lurch, Amy Higer, a leader of their labor union, said.

State engineer lost to coronavirus ensured medical supplies could get to N.J.: Eddy Germain, 67, of Irvington, who worked for the state Department of Transportation for 41 years, became the agencys first victim of the coronavirus.

Where is the coronavirus in N.J.? See the latest map with updates on county-by-county cases.

A return to some normalcy amid coronavirus outbreak could be June or July, Murphy says: The state will likely remain under a strict lockdown to curb the spread of the coronavirus for the next six weeks before officials could begin to pull back the rules.

I personally think in the warmer weather, we could begin to find our footing, assuming again that weve got the health care infrastructure, especially broad-scale testing, that were going to need to give us that confidence, the governor said during an appearance on MSNBC.

I think this is a June or July much better reality if we keep doing our part, especially stay at home right now, the governor added.

WATCH: @GovMurphy says "once you eliminate community spread, you can't let that come back in the back door." #MTPDaily



Gov. Murphy: "The only way that can't happen is if you have got large-scale, reliable testing." pic.twitter.com/PZ6xsEyOrs  Meet the Press (@MeetThePress) April 14, 2020

Coronavirus cases in the United States: There were 572,689 cases reported in the country as of Tuesday afternoon, according to information from the the Center for Systems Science and Engineering at Johns Hopkins University. The center logged 23,134 deaths nationwide. At least 43,482 people have recovered in the U.S., according to the centers tally.

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.

NJ Advance Media staff writers Matt Arco, Adam Clark, Brent Johnson, Larry Higgs and Jeff Goldman contributed to this report.
(Photo : REUTERS/Mike Blake) Well-wishers and friends gather on the street outside the home of former U.S. Marine nurse Ruth Gallivan to help celebrate her 104th birthday during the outbreak of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) in San Diego, California, U.S., April 1, 2020.

The first-ever wrongful death lawsuit ever filed against Life Care Center over coronavirus pandemic. The daughter of a resident residing at the Life Care Center in Kirkland, Washington, Deborah de los Angeles, has filed a lawsuit against said company. The lawsuit accuses the nursing home of fraud and wrongful death of her mother, Twilla June Morin.





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The Story Behind It All

De los Angeles, daughter of Mori, filed the lawsuit with n King Country Superior Court last week, claiming she found out that Moira had contracted COVID-19 on Mar. 3, and then was notified 22 hours later by voicemail of her mother's death.

After hearing the voicemail, she prepared for the worst but was still caught surprised by how fast the coronavirus took her mother's life. "I had to sit there for a few minutes to try to absorb that information," she spoke with ABC News. "I just couldn't believe she's gone."

Read More: Class-Action Lawsuit Against Grubhub, DoorDash, and Uber Eats For Outrageous Commission Fees

Important Information

The lawsuit is claiming that Life Care Center was aware of the fact of the coronavirus pandemic since January. Still, the management had "lacked a clear plan of action leading to a systemic failure."

Instead of quarantining the facility, they still held a Mardi Gras party; on top of that, they even allowed visitors to go inside the building. Allegedly, it took 17 days before the nursing home reported all those cases to the authorities when it was required to notify King Country of any suspected coronavirus outbreaks within 24 hours.

Attorney Brian Mickelson, Deborah's attorney, told ABC, "This company owns 200 plus facilities in the country," and added, "This is a serious threat to the caretakers and the residents and anyone who comes in contact with this facility."

The Life Care Center Kirkland had been under intense scrutiny aftermath of the incident.

Families of the residents also complained about the lack of communication--it includes late notification from the staff regarding coronavirus cases in the facility.

Deborah said, "You'd figure they should know about this virus, the rest of the world knows, why doesn't Life Care know?"

Life Care said in a statement regarding the lawsuit, "Our hearts go out to this family and the loss they have suffered during this unprecedented viral outbreak. We are unable to comment on specific legal cases that are pending, but we wish this and all families peace. The loss of our residents at Life Care Center of Kirkland is felt deeply by us."

Morin was 84 years old and had been at the Life Care Center for almost two years until she passed away. She already had dementia and autoimmune disease. Due to her condition, she was more vulnerable to any disease, especially COVID-19. Morin was a bookkeeper who turned stock trader, and a loving mother and proud grandmother.

Read More: Call of Duty: Warzone Scopes And Scatter Adds More Life To Season 3 Content

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The Russian Intelligence Service was aware of former British spy Christopher Steeles investigation into the Trump presidential campaign as early as July 2016, according to newly declassified footnotes from the Intelligence Community Inspector Generals report on the FBIs Russia investigation.

Steeles firm Orbis was hired by Fusion GPS in June 2016 to conduct opposition research on the Trump campaign. The Hillary Clinton campaign had commissioned Fusion GPS in April 2016 to compile opposition research on Trump.

The FBI had known of Steeles connections to Russian oligarchs since 2015. However, those concerns were not relayed to the team investigating the Trump campaign for alleged collaboration with Russian operatives.

In late January 2017, a member of the Crossfire Hurricane of the Crossfire Hurricane received information [redacted] that RIS (Russian Intelligence) may have targeted Orbis and research all publicly available information about it, reads Footnote 342 of the IG report, obtained by CBS News. However, an early June 2017 USIC (US Intelligence community) report indicated that two persons affiliated with RIS were aware of Steeles election investigation in early July 2016.

Despite this, the FBIs Supervisory Intel Analyst told us he was aware of these reports, but that he had no information as of June 2017 that Steeles election reporting source network had been penetrated or compromised, the footnote continued.

According to Footnote 347, in early June 2017 the FBI learned of personal and business ties between Steeles primary sub-source of information and another sub-subsource. The sub-subsource had contacts with an individual in the Russian Presidential Administration in June/July 2016; (redacted) and the sub-subsource voicing strong support for Candidate Clinton in the 2016 U.S. elections.

Several other declassified footnotes released on Friday indicated that the FBI suspected as early as January 2017 that certain allegations found in the Steele dossier were planted by Russian intelligence. Those allegations included a supposed incident in which Russian operatives recorded Trump in a Moscow hotel room with prostitutes in 2013, and an alleged meeting between Trump fixer Michael Cohen and Russian operatives in the Czech Republic in 2016.

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Miley Cyrus and Cody Simpson are certainly making the most of their time in lockdown amid the COVID-19 pandemic.

On Wednesday, the couple shared another glimpse into their steamy romance by stripping down for a risque mirror selfie together.

The 23-year-old Australian, who is self-isolating in Miley's Malibu mansion, uploaded a black-and-white photo of himself posing shirtless in the mirror while Miley seductively stood next to him in a lacy black bra.

'Captains dance with the devil': Miley Cyrus, 27, and Cody Simpson, 23, stripped down for a raunchy mirror selfie as they self-isolated together in Malibu, California amid the COVID-19 pandemic on Wednesday

Cody captioned the post by quoting the title of his latest song: 'Captains dance with the devil.'

Striking a smouldering gaze, crooner Cody showed off his sprawling collection of tattoos, while makeup-free Miley, 27, revealed some of her knuckle inkings.

Also on display was Cody's new buzz-cut hairstyle, which he recently acquired with the help of DIY hairdresser Miley.

Miley's magic: Miley shaved off Cody's shaggy blonde locks in favour of a buzz cut earlier this month

Hot couple alert! Cody and Miley have been dating since last year, after she broke up with actor Liam Hemsworth and a subsequent short romance with Kaitlynn Carter

Cody debuted his buzz cut last week with a video of Miley completely shaving off his signature blonde locks in favour of the non-nonsense hair style.

In a black and white montage set to the song Buzzin' by Shwayze, Cody ripped figure and tattoos as he sat in his chair, taking a swig or two from a bottle as Miley worked away at his 'do.

Cody shaved his hair again on Saturday in an effort to promote the 'Clean Cuts For Clean Oceans' challenge to help remove rubbish from the sea.

Good cause: Cody shaved his hair again on Saturday in an effort to promote the 'Clean Cuts For Clean Oceans' challenge to help remove rubbish from the sea

'Just buzzed the dome AGAIN for #CleanCutsForCleanOceans, even shorter this time,' he wrote on Instagram at the time.

The challenge is being run by company 4ocean, which agreed to pull one pound of trash from the ocean for everybody that shaves their head and posts a photo of it.

Cody and Miley have been dating since last year, after she broke up with actor Liam Hemsworth and a subsequent short romance with Kaitlynn Carter
President Muhammadu Buhari on Wednesday held a teleconference with members of the presidential task force on COVID-19. Buhari joi...

President Muhammadu Buhari on Wednesday held a teleconference with members of the presidential task force on COVID-19.





Buhari joined the meeting from his office at the state house.





Boss Mustapha, secretary to the government of the federation (SGF), who is chairman of the task force, and Osagie Ehanire, minister of health, were among those present.





Below are photos.








Flag carrier Oman Air, has completed 27 flights to eight different countries to return citizens home and supply the nation with food, commodities, medicine and medical equipment.

In cooperation with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Oman Air has returned citizens home from Jordan, Qatar, the UK, Tanzania, India and Saudi Arabia. The airline, which is grateful for support from all its partners in the public and private-sector, anticipates flying a rescue mission to Thailand on April 16.

Government officials have related that once the Thailand flight is concluded, all citizens who wish to return home would have done so. Oman Air stands ready to provide any additional repatriation flights once it receives an official request for it.

Oman Air continues to provide regular round-trip service to Khasab; these flights transport citizens to and from the region and deliver a range of necessary supplies.

The airline has also flown several cargo-only flights to China to collect medical supplies, along with a number of flights to India to bring food and commodities to Oman.

Those flights will continue on an as-needed basis and Oman Air is prepared to conduct cargo-only flights to other destinations if the need arises. - TradeArabia News Service
Church Members Receive Self-Quarantine Notice

NEWS PROVIDED BY

Liberty Counsel

April 15, 2020



LOUISVILLE, Ky., April 15, 2020 /Christian Newswire/ -- Maryville Baptist Church members have started receiving a letter from Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear requiring self-quarantine as a result of parking their cars in the church parking lot on Easter Sunday.

Kentucky State Police troopers wrote down license plate numbers and placed notices on churchgoers' cars in the church parking lot. Inside the church, the small number of people were seated more than six feet apart. The church also set up speakers outside for parking lot service. But those who wanted to stay in their cars to hear the message were intimidated by the police ticketing every car and some drove away.

The letter from Gov. Beshear states, in part: "You are receiving this letter because your vehicle was documented to have been parked where a mass gathering was held on Sunday, April 12, 2020 at Maryville Baptist Church. COVID-19 is spread through the community and transmitted person to person through respiratory droplets. Attending a mass gathering of more than 10 people increases your risk of COVID-19 exposure...If you and/or someone in your household attended the above gathering, following the guidance from the Kentucky Department for Public Health, you are advised to restrict movement to home while self-monitoring with public health supervision for 14 days from attending the mass gathering." The letter requires the recipients to sign a document agreeing to take their temperatures every day at the same time and report each day to the Board of County Health Department; to not attend work, school, or shopping centers, church, or any public place; to not travel outside the county; to not travel outside of Kentucky without prior approval; and to not travel by public, commercial, or emergency conveyance such as a bus, taxi, airplane, train, boat, or without prior approval.



Gov. Beshear has publicly stated he intends to target people who attend church. Even media who parked in the church parking lot last Sunday had a quarantine notice placed on their car.

Last Saturday, U.S. District Judge Justin Walker ruled that Louisville Mayor Greg Fischer's order banning parking lot church service was "unconstitutional" and granted a temporary restraining order. The judge also noted Gov. Beshear's threats. Despite this order that applied to Louisville, Gov. Beshear continued with his plan to target churchgoers on Easter.

Liberty Counsel Founder and Chairman Mat Staver said, "The intentional targeting of churches and churchgoers is unconstitutional. The only reason these cars were ticketed is because they were in a church parking lot. Had they parked in the nearby Kroger or Walmart they would not have been targeted. These people have no symptoms. They were targeted solely because of Gov. Andy Behear's discriminatory actions against churches. News Flash: The First Amendment does not have a pause button," said Staver.

Liberty Counsel is a nonprofit, litigation, education, and policy organization dedicated to advancing religious freedom, the sanctity of life, and the family since 1989, by providing pro bono assistance and representation on these and related topics. Liberty Counsel provides broadcast quality TV interviews via Hi-Def Skype and LTN at no cost.



SOURCE Liberty Counsel



CONTACT: Mat Staver, 407-875-1776, Liberty@LC.org



Related Links



lc.org/


Last month, Terence Lester heard from friends in the homeless community in Atlanta that they were afraid. They were afraid they would catch the new coronavirus because they had nowhere to wash their hands. As businesses and public spaces closed down, so did access to sinks and soap.

Lester, 37, is the founder of Love Beyond Walls, an advocacy group in Atlanta that focuses on homelessness. Last month, he came up with the idea to make refillable hand-washing stations and put them in public places for anyone to use. The project, Love Sinks In, has brought 40 hand-washing stations to Atlanta.

Each station has a 5-gallon water tank connected to a foot pedal and a hose that leads to a spout and sink bowl. The foot pedal activates the water, and there is a soap dispenser as well. The stations cost about $100 to make, which comes from donations.

Given the circumstances, a water tank typically lasts about a day. Volunteers sanitize and refill the stations daily. Lester said theyve been able to help more than 1,000 people each week.

In 2013, Lester left his wife and two kids to live temporarily on the streets of Atlanta  with their blessing. He wanted to understand what homelessness felt like. He ran away once when he was 16, he said, so living without stable housing wasnt entirely new.

Its physically exhausting, he said. When people see someone sitting on a street corner, we forget its someones every single second of their day.

People often generalize and assume the homeless are addicted or mentally ill, he said. He has learned they can be very generous. During the winter, he said, a homeless man gave Lester his last pair of socks.

At least you see me, they tell him.

Lester recalled refilling a hand-washing station in a park the same day another group was passing out meals. He watched a man head from the food line to the sink.

Im grateful I get to wash my hands before I eat, he told Lester.

That stuck with him.

Torrie Shepard has been volunteering with Love Beyond Walls for about a year. She met Lester during his March Against Poverty, where he walked from Atlanta to Memphis, Tennessee, in honor of Martin Luther King Jr. She knew she wanted to work with Lester after he got up on stage after the march and said, Poor people matter.

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Shepard buys soap in bulk for her home and donates some of it to Love Sinks In.

Terence Lester, 37, is an activist, author, speaker and minister who places hand-washing stations in public areas in Atlanta through his organization, Love Beyond Walls.

Theyre a movement of doers, she said, borrowing a phrase from the organization. Its something we should all be doing.

Soap and water are basic human rights. The United Nations Childrens Fund declared so in 2008. But Lester and Shepard say it isnt taken seriously enough.

Lester has seen how the coronavirus has disproportionately affected African Americans, who are often on the front lines in essential positions. He recalled the Detroit bus driver who was working to support his family during the pandemic when he became frightened by a passenger coughing openly. He died from the virus two weeks later.

The hand-washing stations have expanded to Birmingham, Alabama, Los Angeles and New York City.

Its more than a hobby, Lester said. Its deeply connected to who I am as a person.

This story was produced in partnership with the Media School at Indiana University.

Support journalism: Stories like this are possible because of subscribers

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Atlanta advocate brings sinks, soap to the homeless to curb coronavirus
The Boston-New York City rivalry may still exist, but goodwill between the two cities during the coronavirus pandemic has proven strong.

Brigham and Womens Hospital in Boston donated a COVID-19 testing booth to NYU Langone Health in New York City earlier this month, according to a statement from the Massachusetts health care provider.

When NYU Langone Health in Manhattan inquired late Monday night about the coronavirus testing booths that Brigham and Womens Hospital had recently developed, staff at the Brigham were quick to respond, the statement said.

The Boston hospitals engineering team and clinical leaders teamed up in March to build freestanding booths designed to provide safe testing for the disease. The pieces of equipment have thick polycarbonate panels that serve as a barrier between health care workers and patients.

The device, called the B-PROTECTED COVID-19 booth, aims to protect frontline clinicians from being infected with the viral respiratory infection while they test and swab patients. The machine also conserves personal protective equipment, according to Brigham.

Brigham and Womens Hospital in Boston donated a COVID-19 testing booth to NYU Langone Health in New York City earlier this month. Here, crews can be seen loading the booth onto a truck at Brigham's. (Courtesy Brigham and Women's Hospital)

Staff at the Boston hospital shared engineering details with NYU Langone last week. Brighams senior vice president for clinical services, Kevin Giordano, later offered to send one of the health care facilitys 10 booths to New York.

From what we see and hear, Giordano wrote to NYU Langone, New York City is at a critical time and if we can help in any way - we would want to do that.

The booth was shipped out to New York City at about 4:45 p.m. on April 7 and arrived at NYU Langone around 9 p.m., according to Brighams statement.

Douglas Carney, senior vice president of real estate, facilities and operations at Brigham, worked with Turner Construction Company in New York to have one of the businesss trucks deliver the booth.

This is not the first act of kindness between Massachusetts and New York over the course of the public health crisis.

Hundreds of thousands of face masks were brought over to Boston from China via the New England Patriots team plane. Of the 1.2 million pieces of personal protective equipment, 300,000 were sent to New York City. The community is considered to be the epicenter of the outbreak in the United States.

The city alone accounts for 7,905 of the countrys 26,059 coronavirus-related deaths, according to data from Johns Hopkins University. New York City also has 110,465 confirmed cases of COVID-19, roughly a sixth of the U.S.'s total.

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So in light of the coronavirus pandemic, what is the future of public protests? In the 1960s, the U.S. seemed almost defined by the mass demonstrations against Jim Crow and the Vietnam War. In recent years, people have marched through the streets so often, and on behalf of so many different causes, that no one could possibly keep track. In an essay published just before the emergency began, the legal scholar Richard Thompson Ford warns that public demonstrations have become so commonplace that we're suffering from "protest fatigue."

Well, so much for all that.

Shelter-in-place orders have emptied the streets. At a demonstration in Hartford, Connecticut, the other day, people stayed in their cars the whole time. Progressives are bemoaning the way that the lockdown keeps them from organizing around electoral politics. Although a tiny handful of activists are suing for the right to protest publicly, few people seem eager to venture out for something as mundane as showing solidarity with a cause.

And while many people are doubtless too busy searching for paper towels to worry much about the latest cause, skyrocketing usage of both the internet generally and social media in particular surely portend a rapid acceleration of the trend toward protesting online. What's often called "hashtag activism" has both defenders and critics, but what's clear is that you learn a lot less about my level of enthusiasm for a cause when I retweet than when I invest time and energy in marching through the streets.

That's one reason why many who might be moved by the passion of public protest remain unaffected by digital activism. Sure, an online mob might now and then scare a publisher into cancelling a controversial book, or get some college dean to condemn an unpopular utterance by a faculty member. But apart from causing the ghost of Joe McCarthy to cackle with approval, this is all tame stuff.

Yes, a social media campaign can be an important step toward organizing larger forms of activism; yes, now and then, as with #MeToo, what begins online might spark a movement with national consequences. But for the most part, digital protests are distinct from physical protests in the single most important way: they're easier to ignore.

Yet hashtag activism is our near-term future - and possibly our long-term future as well. Even after the lockdowns end, it will be some while before pluralities of potential protesters on left or right are ready to march down broad boulevards as in days of yore, arms linked and voices raised.

In his classic 1967 essay on the theory of protest, the economist Kenneth E. Boulding pointed out that demonstrators tend to have a particular payoff in mind. They make a calculation: running this much risk in return for this chance of the payoff. The risk mattered. Boulding wrote in an era when protest conjured images of brave demonstrators facing down police in riot gear or even the National Guard. The risk included the possibility of arrest or worse. Should the potential payoff not justify the risk, the demonstration would not take place. At the same time, the acceptance of the risk is itself a powerful weapon in the hands of the activist. There's a reason those police dogs in Birmingham remain a powerful part of our national memory more than half a century later.

But when protest is online, joining is cheap and risk is low. All that's required is a single click to retweet before going back to whatever one was doing before. There's little incentive to do much weighing of risk versus reward.

So as long as activism sticks to social media, we should expect more protests, over a greater range of issues. What we should not expect is for the protests to be effective. The more there are, the less effective each will be. Moreover, in a world where most people's first priority is keeping their families safe, fewer and fewer people will even notice.

Protest fatigue indeed.

To be sure, even during the emergency, it's possible to protest. A recent demonstration in Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro involved standing in one's windows and banging pots and pans together. Or consider the Hartford protest I mentioned earlier. What happened was this: Around 50 cars gathered outside the governor's official residence to demand the release of state prison inmates to help them avoid the virus. According to the New Haven Register, the drivers maintained social distancing: "They stayed in their cars, blocking traffic on Prospect Avenue, and honking non-stop for about 45 minutes before police arrived to break up the protest."

But if these examples represent the future of public protest then public protest is in big trouble. These strategies aren't the sort that win skeptics to your side. In an important new paper, the social scientists Matthew Feinberg, Robb Willer, and Chloe Kovacheff show that although "extreme" tactics by protestors - for example, blocking traffic, vandalizing property or engaging in inflammatory rhetoric - tend to increase news coverage of the demonstration itself, they tend to decrease popular support for the movement. Thus, getting loud in order to be heard by a nation fearful of leaving home is likely to prove self-defeating.

Yes, we can imagine a more disciplined group of activists taking to the streets properly masked against infection and each separated from the others by the specified six feet. Now we run into a different problem: In the dozen or so states that ban the wearing of masks in public, the protesters would probably be committing a crime.

All of this is to say that the future of public protest might be quite grim. And for a nation largely built on dissent, that's a problem.

This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of Bloomberg LP and its owners.

Stephen L. Carter is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. He is a professor of law at Yale University and was a clerk to U.S. Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall. His novels include "The Emperor of Ocean Park," and his latest nonfiction book is "Invisible: The Forgotten Story of the Black Woman Lawyer Who Took Down America's Most Powerful Mobster."

---

This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of Bloomberg LP and its owners.

---

Carter is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. He is a professor of law at Yale University and was a clerk to U.S. Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall.
One of the nations largest labor unions staged a protest Tuesday at Interstate 95 rest stops in Darien and Milford, accusing McDonalds of failing to disinfect restaurants properly after unspecified numbers of workers tested positive for the novel coronavirus COVID-19.

The 32BJ affiliate of Service Employees International Union kicked off the demonstration at 11 a.m. with what it called a caravan protest in the parking lots at the I-95 stops, two weeks after calling for better protections for service plaza workers.

McDonalds issued a joint statement Tuesday afternoon from the owners of the two franchised locations, Roger Facey and George Michell, who stated they ordered a thorough sanitization procedure after learning of the diagnoses while alerting public health authorities. Facey and Michell pledged to continue to evaluate all safety measures.

McDonalds workers told SEIU organizers, however, that their employers failed to disinfect work areas adequately after at least one worker at each of the Darien and Milford restaurants was hospitalized with coronavirus.

Sanitization and worker protection has been a recurring issue for many retailers and restaurants nationally, whether as a result of their own efforts or outside pressure. On Tuesday, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration released updated guidance for steps employers should be taking to reduce the chances of employees incurring coronavirus.

On Tuesday, Walmart closed its Connecticut Avenue store in Norwalk for sanitizing and restocking purposes, with another on the Wilton line remaining open.

SEIU published statements from multiple workers about what they claimed were lapses by McDonalds, including Azucena Santiago who works in a restaurant at the northbound I-95 plaza in Milford.

They told the sick workers coworkers to self-quarantine, and they brought in new workers from another store to replace them, SEIU quoted Santiago saying in a Tuesday statement. I worry that the disease is spreading because the store didnt close or disinfect anything. ... McDonalds doesnt pay us any sick days when we are sent home. Were caught in a terrible position.

In addition to McDonalds and Subway, the Darien and Milford stops feature Dunkin Donuts, Sbarro and Alltown Convenience Store, with the Darien northbound plaza also having a Chipotle Mexican Grill counter and Taco Bell.

Under a contract with the state, Connecticuts rest stops are managed by a Milford limited liability company called Project Services.

On the heels of Gov. Ned Lamonts declaration of a public health emergency on March 10, Project Services restricted food service to takeout and drive-through, with convenience stores, rest rooms and fuel pumps remaining open. Project Service has emphasized online its efforts to clean all common areas and food service operations in accordance with guidelines from the Centers for Disease Control & Prevention.

In a Tuesday statement issued by an external public relations firm, Project Services stated it has adhered to Safe Store rules mandated by the state of Connecticut, which cover both sanitizing surfaces and social distancing of at least six feet between people.

We employ full time union custodial associates at the I-95 sites who are working around the clock disinfecting the high touch areas, as well as the common areas that service our guests, the Project Services statement reads. Whether its truckers, health care workers, or anyone considered an essential employee, the service plazas are providing all of our patrons with a safe and comfortable convenient place for fuel, food and washrooms along the Connecticut highways.

A separate SEIU affiliate has also led a drive to ensure better protections for Connecticut nursing home workers, with the national body pressing Congress to mandate a 50 percent boost in pay for workers in that industry and others at heightened risk such as airport workers.

Alex.Soule@scni.com; 203-842-2545; @casoulman
Asia Pacific real estate investors are steeling themselves for impacts stemming from the coronavirus, the threat of which would add to existing economic headwinds in the region.

asia pacific real estate

Image by InvestmentZen

While its too early to know exactly how Asia Pacific real estate, especially commercial markets, could be affected, the increasingly important position of China on the world stage means economic repercussions are likely, according to a JLL report on the topic.

The virus is untimely for China given that its the start of a new calendar year and the spread escalated during the countrys most important holiday of Chinese New Year in late January, says Roddy Allan, chief research officer, JLL Asia Pacific. This has made it more difficult for the Chinese economy to reopen fully.

The coronavirus virus  which originated in Wuhan, China, in December late last year  has spread globally, with cases reported in Southeast Asia, Europe and United States. In China, factories, malls and tourism have been affected, adding to strains from trade tensions with the U.S. last year.

The Chinese government understands the central role it plays to keep the global economy stable and has moved swiftly and decisively to manage the fall-out, avoiding a sharp correction, Allan says.

Adding to the strain of the Asia Pacific Real Estate

While final 2019 figures arent yet out, Asia Pacifics gross domestic product likely slid to 5.8 percent last year compared to 6.3 percent in 2018, according to a World Bank Report in October, due the trade war and lower global demand for exports.

While the Asia Pacific real estate had a strong showing overall in 2019, rental declines were evident in key markets such as Hong Kong and Beijing.

Even before the coronavirus crisis, investors were already exercising caution and seeking out sectors and markets which show signs of resilience amid ongoing political uncertainty and a gradual slowdown of the global economy, Allan says. The outbreak has put this demand clearer into focus.

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While looking to the outbreak of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) in 2003 for hints on how markets could perform this year, investors should be cautious on reading too much into it, Allan says.

Mainland Chinas economy is nine times larger now than it was in 2003, just before SARS hit Hong Kong in March 2003. The country is also now the worlds top exporter and the second-largest importer, not to mention the worlds second largest economy; when SARS hit, it was the sixth largest.

Still, Allan foresees the coronavirus having a similar sharp but short-lived impact on Asia Pacific real estate investment market.

The impact on deal volume should be limited if the outbreak dies down in three to six months, he says. Transaction volumes may pull back slightly in the first half of 2020 as some investors take a wait-and-see approach and delay deals, but should be back on track by the second half of the year due to accommodating policies.

Asia Pacific real estate  Especially Retail and hospitality are vulnerable

Service industries have been among the first to feel the impact. On the hospitality front, the coronavirus has hit hotels in Hong Kong, Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore and Thailand and Australia, where Chinese tourists are among the biggest groups of visitors. Major airlines such as Cathay Pacific, Singapore Airlines and AirAsia have scaled back flights to and from China.

Retail in China, Hong Kong and Singapore is also expected to feel the impact as consumers avoid crowded places such as shopping malls, while major brands including Nike, Apple and Starbucks are closing outlets across China to prevent the spread of the virus among employees and customers, according to JLL.

There is no escaping the fact that investor sentiment will be affected in the short-term, but we do not foresee a lasting negative drag on Asia Pacifics real estate, Allan says. Risk premiums will recede once the virus is under control.

Colliers International in publishing its latest market research report which examines the performance of Singapore real estate investment in Q1 2020 and its prospects ahead said Singapore remains an attractive top investment destination.

Colliers Research projects that Singapore investment sales volumes will grow on average by 5% per annum in longer-term, over 2019-2024 despite a 24% forecasted drop year-on-year (YOY) in 2020 as Singapores strong policy response to the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic is reinforcing its safe haven status.

Despite Covid-19 challenges Singapore remains top investment destination for the long term

Jerome Wright, Senior Director of Capital Markets at Colliers International, said, The global disruption to economic activity caused by COVID-19 will mean challenging times in the short-term. However, the longer-term fundamentals of the Singapore real estate market remain strong and intact, and we can expect the market to recover as the successful control measures are lifted and industries regain full momentum.

In the short-term, based on advance estimates from the Ministry of Trade and Industry (MTI), Singapores Q1 GDP contracted by -2.2% YOY, and Singapore is experiencing the worst decline since the global financial crisis.

In addition, according to Oxford Economics, as of 24 March 2020, the Singapore economy is forecast to head into its first recession in two decades, putting 2020 growth in the range of -4% to -1%.

Colliers Research also reports some of the largest residential deals were closed during Q1 including five residential public land sales totaling S$1.4 (US$ 1.0) billion and two properties transferred during the Frasers Logistics and Industrial Trust (FLT)  Frasers Commercial Trust (FCOT) merger China Square Central for S$648 million and Alexandra Technopark for S$606 million.

An earlier report by CBRE said that as Covid-19 compels investors, investment volume will be supported by public and bite-sized deals. Preliminary real estate investment volume in Singapore for the first quarter this year amounted to S$2.47 billion, a 36.1% drop from the previous quarter. This marks the second consecutive quarter of decline in real estate investment volume.

The post Asia Pacific real estate  What does Covid-19 mean for them? appeared first on iCompareLoan Resources.
Washington, April 16 : The International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank Group have welcomed the Group of 20 (G20)'s decision to provide temporary debt relief for the world's poorest countries amid the COVID-19 pandemic.

"We strongly welcome the decision of the G20 to respond to our call to allow the poorest countries of the world that request forbearance to suspend repayment of official bilateral credit on May 1," World Bank Group President David Malpass and IMF Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva said in a joint statement on Wednesday, Xinhua reported.

"This is a powerful, fast-acting initiative that will do much to safeguard the lives and livelihoods of millions of the most vulnerable people," the statement said, adding the World Bank Group and the IMF will move quickly to respond to the G20's request to support this action.

"We championed this debt initiative, and we're committed to taking all possible steps to support the poor," said the heads of the two Washington-based international lenders.

The joint statement came after G20 finance ministers and central bankers on Wednesday agreed to "support a time-bound suspension of debt service payments for the poorest countries that request forbearance" following a teleconference meeting.

Saudi Finance Minister Mohammed al-Jadaan told reporters after the meeting that debt suspension for the poorest countries will be significant and provide around $20 billion in immediate liquidity.

"I'm so glad that during the G20 discussion this morning there was unanimous support for the Fund to do more, especially for those who need us more," Georgieva said Wednesday later at a press conference for the virtual 2020 Spring Meetings.

"Just seeing how the G20 united around debt standstill for the poorest members gives me that confidence that whatever is necessary we will collectively do in the face of this tremendous crisis," she said.

The global economy is on track to contract sharply by 3 per cent in 2020 as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, the worst recession since the Great Depression in the 1930s, according to the World Economic Outlook report released Tuesday by the IMF.
Theres no point in beating around the bush. Nate Berkus and Jeremiah Brent want you to know theyre embarrassed. Chastened. Humiliated! says Berkus.

Seated in a pair of armchairs in front of a blazing fire in their new West Village town house, the married designers look content and perfectly at homeif a little sheepish. After all, it seems like just yesterday when they moved into what was supposed to be their dream home, a nearly 9,000-square-foot Spanish colonial in Los Angeles. Fans of their TLC show, Nate & Jeremiah by Design (and readers of ADs January 2018 story), witnessed the couple gushing over the houses sun-drenched rooms, wrought-iron balustrade, and 200-year-old oak tree in the backyard. The house, they proclaimed, was where they and their then-two-year-old daughter, Poppy, would put down roots.

Ruh-roh. Now, just two years later, theyve sold the house, edited down their belongings, and booked it back to New York, the city where the couple started dating and first made a home together. One thing I can promise you, says Berkus, leaning forward in his chair, his blue eyes twinkling, is that I will never again tell a publication that a house is my forever home.  We learned our lesson, chimes in Brent. We shant be saying that again!

The photogenic first couple of TV home makeovers had originally moved West following the death of Berkuss father in 2015. Berkus, who was born in Orange County but mostly raised in suburban Minneapolis, wanted to be closer to his siblings out in Southern California. And we were ready for a new adventure, he explains. During their time there, they filmed three seasons of their show, welcomed the birth of baby Oskar (now two), and continued to grow their separate design businesses. (Berkuss headquarters have always been based in Chicago; Brent kept his New York practice going, and also opened a Los Angeles office.) But almost immediately, Brent missed the energy and street life back East. I felt untethered in Los Angeles, he says. It didnt feel like us. He also became convinced that Poppy, now five, and Oskar would have a richer experience growing up in the urban density of New York. I realized that Poppy talked to the same 11 people every day, he says.

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Berkus (eventually) came around, too. I realized that New York would never get out of Jeremiahs system, he says. And he knew that he personally would be just as happy either way. Jeremiah always says, Its either the place or the space that holds you. For him its the place, he says, gesturing toward the windows and the city beyond. For me its the space.

Fashion styling by Jessica Sailer van Lith; grooming by Pamela Lugo; James HD Brown  2020 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris; Lymann Kipp; Simon Mathers, In the Heat of the Day, 2010; Albert Chubac  2020 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris.

Fortunately, transforming four walls into a home is something Nate and Jeremiah know a thing or two about. When the couple saw this 3,400-square-foot 1899 town house, they immediately agreed it felt like themor, at least, that it had the potential to. It had just undergone a complete gut renovation, so everything from the wiring and plumbing to the newly tiled bathrooms was in pristine condition. But the house had been so stripped down that it also felt somewhat sterile, as Brent puts it. Our job was going to be to give it some soul again. They started by designing a showstopping double-height bookcase in white oak that would not only warm up the living room but also provide a much-needed place for their books, framed family photos, and pottery. I didnt want to live without those picture framestheyve been in every home Ive lived in for the past 15 years, says Berkus. The white oak bookcase is a small feat of engineering; it is so heavy, the upper portion had to be bolted to the exterior wall. Its my favorite of everything we did here, says Berkus. It set the tone.

In fact, one could say the bookshelf is a distillation of the designers twofold approach to the whole house: adding texture, detail, and architectural touches (through eye-catching mantels, wallpaper, and vintage light fixtures), while also taking on the dilemma of space management. Because, when compared with a palatial Southern California estate, an 18-foot-wide town house is relatively . . . cramped.

Step Inside Their West Village Town Home

Hunt Slonem  2020 Hunt Slonem / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York (2); Painting by Michael Hainey;  2020 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris.

Fashion styling by Jessica Sailer van Lith; grooming by Pamela Lugo; James HD Brown  2020 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris; Lymann Kipp; Simon Mathers, In the Heat of the Day, 2010; Albert Chubac  2020 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris.

Painful is how Berkus, the familys alpha layerer and collector-in-chief, describes the editing-down process. They moved some furniture to their offices, other pieces to storage, and sold still more on Berkuss 1stdibs shop. They winnowed down their cookware. They off-loaded racks of clothing to The RealReal. Our old living room had 30 pieces of furniture, says Berkus. This one has six! But what you see is the best that weve got. And with the designers addition of basket-weave grass-cloth wall covering, an 18th-century Italian mantel, and a plush mohair rug, the result is as handsome as rooms get.

Upstairs, the master suite didnt offer quite enough closet space. Bill Blass said that dressing rooms should be large and bathrooms should be small, says Berkus. In lieu of ripping up the bathroom, they stole footage from the bedroom area to accommodate more storage. And while the resulting sleeping chamber may seem small, it embodies tranquility at its coziest, with chalky plaster walls, looped ivory carpeting, and a sculptural fluted plaster cabinet they designed to hide the TV. We dont need a huge bedroom with, like, 20 seating areas, says Berkus.

Yeah, like, whos coming over? adds Brent. Nobodyexcept, of course, Poppy and Oskar, who much prefer wreaking havoc in their basement playroom or marching around the kitchen island as Brent makes their favorite pancakes. And when everybody starts going stir-crazy, well, thats fine too. The best part, says Berkus, is we just turn the doorknob and the whole city is right outside.

Originally Appeared on Architectural Digest
Joshua Jackson was once mainly known for playing Pacey on Dawsons Creek. Today, he is one of the stars of Hulus new series, Little Fires Everywhere. On the show, Jackson plays Bill, a lawyer and the husband of Reese Witherspoons character, Elena.

Off the screen, Jackson is actually married to British actress Jodie Turner-Smith. The two of them have never worked on a project together, so many fans are no doubt curious about how they met. Read on below to learn more about the couples relationship.

Joshua Jackson | V E Anderson/WireImage/Getty Images

Joshua Jackson met Jodie Turner-Smith in 2018

According to reports, Jackson and Turner-Smith first met at Ushers 40th birthday party back in October 2018. It was a star-studded event filled with other famous faces like Kendall Jenner, Kevin Hart, and Tyler Perry.

Afterward, Jackson and Turner-Smith were spotted out and about together by paparazzi. Fans on Instagram also speculated that they spent the New Year together in Nicaragua since they posted a few photos that looked to be taken at the same places.

Joshua Jackson and Jodie Turner-Smith got married in 2019

In August 2019, the couple allegedly got a marriage license in Beverly Hills. A few months later, there were reports that they got married in a secret ceremony.

Neither Jackson nor Turner-Smith confirmed or denied the news that they got married. However, Turner-Smith did address the rumors in an interview with the Sunday Times: I havent said to anybody, Yeah, we got married, People are assuming whatever they want, but when people tell me Congratulations, I say Thank you.'

She also went on to reveal that, since she and Jackson came from different racial backgrounds, she has experienced some backlash to her relationship. Because of this, she decided to not share too much about what goes on in her romantic life.

There was this wave of people who were upset that I was possibly married to a white man, Turner-Smith said. In America, interracial dating or marriage is not something that is as accepted. Certain people feel strongly against it, in both communities. I felt it from the black community. It is so complicated. I dont want to give it too much energy. The horrific things that people were saying  Im learning there are certain things I have to really keep for myself.

However, Jackson and Turner-Smith have not let other peoples opinions affect their relationship. The actress once shared that she and her husband are obsessed with each other and that she enjoys watching his movies when they are apart. Fans who follow Jackson and Turner-Smith on social media have probably also seen a few loving posts they made about each other.

Jodie Turner Smith and Joshua Jackson are the absolute cutest pic.twitter.com/jMArxS5X06  The Midsommar May Queen (@SayWhatSugar) February 24, 2020

Joshua Jackson and Jodie Turner-Smith are expecting a baby together

Shortly after Jackson and Turner-Smith got married, there were also reports that they are expecting a child together. In March, the pair confirmed that Turner-Smith is pregnant with a baby girl. The actress also posted a video on Instagram showing her child dancing in her tummy.

It seems that Jackson and Turner-Smith are already thinking a lot about how their lives will change after the birth of their child. Turner-Smith shared with the Sunday Times that they would like to raise their kid outside of the United States.

The racial dynamics over here are fraught, she said. White supremacy is overt. Its the reason I dont want to raise my kids here. I dont want my kids to grow up doing active shooter drills at school.

Turner-Smith believes that England has gone off the rails as well, so Canada  Jacksons home country  is currently an option that is high on their list.
Five more COVID-19 deaths were reported Wednesday in Northwest Indiana, including two in Lake County and one each in Porter, LaPorte and Newton counties.

The newly reported deaths bring the total number of lives lost in Northwest Indiana to 42, including 33 in Lake County, three in Porter County, four in LaPorte County, two in Newton County and one in Jasper County, data showed.

A total of 436 Hoosiers have died after being diagnosed with the disease, an increase of more than 12% from 387 reported Tuesday, according to the Indiana State Department of Health. The deaths reported Wednesday occurred between March 28 and Tuesday, officials said.

Data released by the state Wednesday morning was up to date as of noon Tuesday. All data was provisional and included only those cases reported to the State Department of Health.

Statewide, the number of positive cases rose by 440 to 8,955 on Wednesday.

Lake County had 876 positive cases, up by 55 from a day earlier, the state reported. In Gary alone, five deaths and 193 positive cases were reported, according to Gary Mayor Jerome Prince.
Source: Xinhua| 2020-04-15 22:47:46|Editor: huaxia

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GENEVA, April 15 (Xinhua) -- Some previous allegations against China's transparency in the COVID-19 response were not grounded in facts, Zhao Qinghua, consul-general of China in Zurich and the Principality of Liechtenstein, said Wednesday.

In an article published in the local newspaper Finanz und Wirtschaft (Finance and Economy), the Chinese diplomat said that states should respect the truth and bear the responsibility of ensuring the health of their citizens, as the novel coronavirus is spreading rapidly around the world.

"The fact is that China made the outbreak transparent for everyone, which can be seen in the timeline China published on how it has shared information," he wrote.

China earlier this month released a detailed timeline of its response to the novel coronavirus disease, chronicling the main facts and measures it has taken in the global joint anti-virus efforts.

The document, titled "Timeline of China releasing information on COVID-19 and advancing international cooperation on epidemic response," showed China's timeliness, openness and transparency in notifying people at home and abroad in its fight against the coronavirus.

For example, Zhao said, starting Jan. 3, China has been regularly informing the World Health Organization, as well as relevant countries and regions of the virus outbreak.

Also, the Chinese diplomat said, China has adopted comprehensive and rigorous measures to contain the outbreak.

Saying that China has also been helping promote international cooperation in the fight against the COVID-19 pandemic, Zhao told local readers that China has donated and exported a large number of essential medical supplies for those in urgent need.

"At the same time, China has sent medical teams to a number of countries including Italy and Serbia," he added.
Vadodara on Wednesday joined the list of cities which have made it compulsory for people to wear masks in public places amid the coronavirus crisis.

Violators will have to pay a penalty of Rs. 1,000, the first time and Rs. 5,000 for subsequent violations, according to an order by the Vadodara Municipal Corporation (VMC).

"The Vadodara Municipal Corporation Commissioner issued an order last night that whoever steps out of their house for any reason, will have to cover his face with a mask compulsorily. If anyone does not have a mask, they can cover their faces with either a handkerchief or any other loose cloth," said Sudhir Patel, Deputy Commissioner, Vadodara Municipal Corporation.

"From today 6 a.m. onwards, if anyone steps out of the house without covering their face, will have to pay a penalty of Rs. 1,000 for the first time, and Rs. 5,000 for subsequent violations," said Patel.

"Teams of the VMC will ensure strict implementation of the rule. There are 12 wards in the VMC, each ward has three teams. While two teams will be static, the third team will go on rounds to check if people are following the rule," Patel added.

Till now, wearing masks has been made mandatory in Ahmedabad, Gurugram, Chhattisgarh, Rajasthan, Mumbai, Pune, Delhi and Chandigarh.

According to the Union Ministry of Health and Family Welfare, the total number of positive COVID-19 cases in Gujarat is 650. Till now, 59 people have either been cured and discharged, while 28 deaths have been reported.

The total number of positive coronavirus cases across the country is 11,439, including 9,756 active cases. So far, 1,305 patients have been cured and discharged while 377 deaths have been recorded, as per data provided by the Ministry of Health.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
The $2 trillion rescue package was supposed to help out Uber drivers, freelance workers and other independent contractors who usually arent eligible for unemployment benefits.

But so far, this 23 million-strong group of working Americans is running into dead ends, delays and bureaucracy trying to collect an unemployment check.

One reason for the delay is that the Department of Labor didn't put out its first set of guidelines for the new program until April 5, more than a week after the stimulus passed, leaving state unemployment offices stalled.

The states, deluged by an unprecedented flood of claims from millions of laid-off workers, are also struggling to set up new systems and calculate how much benefits workers are owed, urging frustrated applicants to wait their turn  in some cases for weeks.

"We still dont know how were going to survive this," said Mekela Edwards, a Lyft and Uber driver in California who still hasn't been able to receive any unemployment benefits. "Me personally, I dont know how Im going to survive this."

Pennsylvania and Massachusetts, for example, are among a number of states asking independent contractors not to file until the end of the month, at the earliest, to give them more time to set up application systems. Michigan announced that gig workers could start applying Monday of this week, only to have the flood of applications take down its website for four hours. And in Illinois, which has worked with a private vendor to get a new system set up, Gov. J.B. Pritzker said this week that benefit checks are likely still a month away from reaching gig workers who have already been out of work for weeks.

The result is that gig workers and other independent contractors  of whom there are some 23 million in the country, according to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce  remain largely uncounted in the already staggering tally of nearly 17 million Americans who applied for jobless benefits in the three weeks ending April 4. Weekly claims are expected to remain near historic highs when DOL releases new weekly data on Thursday, as states continue to work through a backlog of applications overloading their systems.

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"People want their claims yesterday," said Caleb Frostman, secretary of the Wisconsin Department of Workforce Development, where officials are hoping to have the application system for gig workers set up by early next week. "It's just taking some time to get that ready to go."

So far, only 29 states are able to pay out the additional $600 weekly unemployment benefit Congress provided under the CARES Act, Labor Secretary Eugene Scalia said Wednesday. How long that takes will vary by state," Scalia said during a press call. "Some states will take longer because they rely on computer equipment that is 40 years old and in need of significant IT support.

"Why they did it through the state employment system, I will never understand that. It just seems like you're adding bureaucracy, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis said on Tuesday. But that's what they did."

States meanwhile have been struggling to figure out how to calculate weekly benefit levels for these self-employed workers, whose wages are less straightforward and harder to verify than those spelled out on a W-2 tax form. And some officials at the state level and in Washington have criticized the Trump administration for restricting eligibility in its guidance well beyond, they say, what Congress intended.

After Congress passed the CARES Act, the U.S. Department of Labor attempted to limit this program by creating real regulatory obstacles for implementing it, Pritzker said Monday. It has taken U.S. Department of Labor weeks to issue guidance to the states. And theyve promulgated confusing and very stringent regulations that attempt to severely limit who can actually qualify.

Despite the labyrinthian regulations," the Illinois governor said, his state's payments to independent contractors should go out within a month.

But despite calls for the DOL to clarify its instructions on matters such as how the new benefits apply to app-based workers, senior department officials say the guidance documents the department has issued over the past few weeks are sufficient to allow states to administer the benefits.

Stalled assistance for gig workers is just the latest example of how Congress record stimulus is traveling slowly to many Americans who need it most. Many laid-off employees are also still waiting for their benefit checks, while small businesses are fighting to access much-needed loans. Looking ahead, governors are calling for an additional and immediate $500 billion paid directly to the states.

But gig workers face difficulties unique to their independent status.

In Colorado, officials said theyve been working to get the system for contractors set up as quickly as possible. But they were still trying to master DOL's rules late last week, and since then they've been working to apply them to their system and get it ready for public use. They hope to make an announcement later this week.

You have to scale it properly, you have to test it properly, you have to ensure that when the benefits go out that theyre accurate and theyre paying the right people the right amounts, said Jeff Fitzgerald, unemployment insurance division director at Colorados Department of Labor and Employment. Thats no small matter when were talking about a universe of this many people.

Also adding to the confusion and delay are varying state laws and a legal debate over whether app-based workers should be classified as employees who are eligible for traditional unemployment benefits, or independent contractors who have to apply for benefits under the new program.

California, which last year passed a sweeping bill aimed at compelling businesses to reclassify many independent contractors as employees, started processing unemployment applications from gig workers and others as though they were employees. That prompted one group backed by Uber, Lyft and Doordash to circulate a petition urging the state to set up the new system.

But groups representing ride-hailing drivers in California and New York, where state law says app-based workers are employees who are already eligible for traditional jobless benefits, complain that gig companies arent sharing payroll information with state unemployment agencies. That prevents the state from calculating what their weekly benefit should be.

The New York Taxi Workers Alliance collected more than 1000 signatures on a petition demanding that Uber immediately provide New Yorks labor department with drivers wage information so the state can process their weekly benefit amount.

Nobody has gotten anything, said Nicole Moore of Rideshare Drivers United, an association of Uber and Lyft drivers in California. She says drivers who applied in California under the normal unemployment insurance system were told that their weekly benefit amount was zero because the state couldnt verify their income.

Without verifying a worker's income, states are also unable to pay out the $600 weekly sweetener that Congress added to weekly unemployment checks. That's because, according to DOL guidelines, workers must qualify for at least $1 a week in benefits to be eligible for the $600 add-on.

An Uber spokesperson countered some of the claims made by the ride-hailing groups, saying the company is sharing its earnings data with the state of New York, but was unable to provide further details on the process or on the situation in California. A Lyft spokesperson said the company has been actively sharing details with drivers about what benefits they're eligible for under the stimulus plan and will continue to provide information "as it becomes available from the government."

California Labor Secretary Julie A. Su stressed earlier this week that Californians who may have been "misclassified" as independent contractors rather than employees have the right to state unemployment benefits, but said verifying their earnings would make the process take longer than usual. She also suggested that applying for the federal PUA program, which would be up and running in the state in two weeks, as an alternative may get money into the pockets of such workers faster.

But at least one state said it has been able to start getting the benefits into the pockets of newly eligible workers  by ignoring federal requirements on how to implement the program. Louisiana's workforce commission said its allowing independent contractors to receive unemployment benefits before they answer a set of questions required under federal guidelines. The state said Monday it has already paid $1.7 million in benefits to such workers under the new program.

This pandemic doesnt discriminate, Louisiana Workforce Commission Secretary Ava Dejoie said in a statement. Self-employed workers are just as concerned about paying for basic necessities: rent, mortgage, utilities and such, as everyone else. Delaying their payments was simply unacceptable.

Arek Sarkissian, Katherine Landergan, Katy Murphy and Shia Kapos contributed to this report.


- John Opabola, a Nigerian Covid-19 survivor, has narrated how he beat the deadly virus in Ireland

- The survivor said that he got the virus after he had contact with an infected colleague who visited his department

- The Nigerian said that what he thought was flu quickly worsened into life-threatening instances like vomiting blood

Another Nigerian, John Opabola, who survived coronavirus has come out to share his recovery experience and how it changed his life.

A resident of Longford in the Republic of Ireland, who was on Channels Televisions Sunrise Daily, said the whole infection began with a cough.

He said he got infected when a colleague with the virus came to his department to carry a laptop.

When I started having dry cough, I called a General Practitioner who booked me for a COVID-19 test. After a few days I began to vomit and experience diarrhea; at this point, I couldnt stand by myself and breathing became very difficult for me, he said.

When he was asked if the symptoms were like anything he had experienced in the past, Opabola said no it is not.

With general body aches, he had to stop going to work to get urgent treatments. Photo sources: LinkedIn/The Nation

Source: UGC

He said that it started from dry cough before it deteriorated into a fever. Opabola said he initially thought he was having the flu so he thought exercising would cure him. According to him, the fever was sharply followed by very disturbing pains.

One of his worst nightmares during the crisis was that he immediately started vomiting blood, adding that he was grateful his lungs were not destroyed in the process.

Opabola added that he had to call off work when he started noticing general body tiredness and did not have any energy to carry out simple tasks.

Meanwhile, Legit.ng earlier reported what a landlord in Brooklyn, Mario Salerno, did as he waived rent for his 200 tenants, telling them they do not have to bother about paying for the month of April.

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The owner of 80 apartments in Williamsburg wrote a note to each of his tenants to inform them about the decision.

It should be noted that even before the generosity became known, some of his tenants were already worried about how they would pay up considering that most of them were out of jobs because of the lockdown.

In an interview with the media, the landlord said: I told them just relax, don't panic, it's gonna work out.

NAIJ.com (naija.ng) -> Legit.ng: We have upgraded to serve you better

4 ways Nigerians are dealing with the COVID 19 lockdown | Legit TV

Source: Legit.ng
[April 15, 2020] Government of Canada connects Canadians with mental wellness supports during COVID-19 OTTAWA, April 15, 2020 /CNW/ - COVID-19 is a global public health challenge that has changed the daily lives of people around the world. During these difficult times, it is critical that Canadians be able to obtain credible information and access services to support their mental health and wellbeing. That's why today, the Honourable Patty Hajdu, Minister of Health, launched a new portal dedicated to mental wellness on Canada.ca/coronavirus and the Canada COVID-19 app. Wellness Together Canada will connect Canadians to peer support workers, social workers, psychologists and other professionals for confidential chat sessions or phone calls, and will make it easier to find credible information and help address mental health and substance use issues. The portal is the result of the work of a broad consortium oforganizations with experience in providing digital mental health and substance use support, including Stepped Care Solutions, Kids Help Phone, Homewood Health, Greenspace Health, the Mental Health Commission of Canada, and the Canadian Psychological Association. Quotes "Mental wellness is difficult to maintain with the disruptions happening now. It's not easy to maintain a routine. People in every community are struggling and need our help. That's why we are acting today to make it easier for Canadians to identify, understand and address issues they are facing, with multiple tools and resources available on one platform." The Honourable Patty Hajdu

Minister of Health Quick Facts COVID-19 results in varying degrees of stress for many Canadians who do not have ready access to their regular support networks. The entire suite of tools on Wellness Together Canada will offer Canadians different levels of support depending on their need, ranging from information and self-assessment tools, to the opportunity to chat with peer support workers and other professionals.

The launch of Wellness Together Canada builds on the support of $7.5 million provided to Kids Help Phone to meet increased demand to provide young people with the mental health support they need during this difficult time, as a result of school closures and reduced access to community resources. Associated Links Wellness Together Canada

Canada COVID-19 mobile app SOURCE Health Canada

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STATEN ISLAND, N.Y. -- Compassionate release of prisoners amid the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic is a good idea thats gone too far, according to the NYPDs top cop.

Like any good thing... I think people are taking advantage of the situation, Commissioner Dermot Shea said Wednesday in an interview on FOX 5 Good Day New York."

While some prisoners who pose minimal threat of committing a serious crime should be released to spare them possible death from the virus, we need to keep violent criminals in jail," Shea said.

As of Friday, more than 1,500 inmates had been released, with plans for hundreds more to follow.

*** CLICK HERE FOR COMPLETE COVERAGE OF CORONAVIRUS IN NEW YORK ***

Shea cited a man arrested on accusations of setting his girlfriends apartment door on fire. He was released, then allegedly threatened the woman again.

He also mentioned an attempt at release by the man charged in the death of NYPD officer Brian Simonsen. Attorneys for 28-year-old Christoper Ransom reportedly asked for early release Tuesday in Queens Criminal Court due to heightened health risks from coronavirus.

In general though, said Shea, compassionate release is the right thing to do if only those prisoners who pose minimal impact on public safety are released.

Taking a look at the entire equation, we have to remain humane during this extremely difficult time."

FIGHTING FOR COMPASSION

Earlier this month, the New York Civil Liberties Union and the Legal Aid Society filed a class-action lawsuit against Gov. Andrew Cuomo and the New York Department of Corrections and Community Supervision (DOCCS) challenging the unconstitutional, automatic jailing of people held in New York City jails while waiting for a hearing for alleged parole violations."

The lawsuit demanded the opportunity for release of people detained for alleged parole violations, in light of the uncontrolled spread of the coronavirus and the dangerous public health conditions in these facilities.

"Regardless of the crimes our clients are alleged to have committed, no New Yorker who is seriously ill should face a death sentence at Rikers Island before a jury has even had a chance to judge their guilt or innocence," - @TMLuongo.https://t.co/xPsdnPDbIv  The Legal Aid Society (@LegalAidNYC) April 14, 2020

In March, Legal Aid called for the NYPD to place a moratorium on all arrests and immediately release all New Yorkers held on parole violations or in pretrial detention," in light of the health crisis.

We are in the midst of a pandemic and our last priority should be to cycle New Yorkers through our broken criminal justice system, separated from their families, communities and quality of services, said Tina Luongo, attorney-in-charge of the Criminal Defense Practice at Legal Aid.

PROSECUTORS OBJECT

Among those released were about 30 Staten Island inmates, a majority of whom were released without the approval of Richmond County prosecutors, according to Staten Island District Attorney Michael E. McMahon.

McMahon said recently that his office, in discussions with the city, had agreed to the release of only seven individuals, meaning about 23 were set free from Rikers Island without his consent.

Inmates released against his wishes had been detained for crimes including criminal weapon possession, driving while intoxicated, drug offenses and larceny.

Shea said Wednesday there are social justice advocates that believe no one should be in jail.

"And some of those very same people that believe that and stated that six months ago or a year ago are now using the compassionate release to advocate for everyone getting out of jail, he said. I think you have to be honest about whats going on.
Sharjah-based developer Alef Group has announced that 68 per cent of construction work has been completed on the first phase of its mixed-use community Al Mamsha and the project is scheduled for handover by the year-end.

A pedestrian-friendly residential community, Al Mamsha is being built at an investment of Dh3 billion ($816 million) in the Al Juraina area of Sharjah.

Located at the nexus of Sharjahs main highways ensuring easy access to major metropolitan areas as well as to Dubai and the Northern Emirates, Al Mamsha offers a wide variety of home options - from studios to one-, two- and three-bedroom apartments.

The scope of work in Phase One includes seven buildings, 693 housing units and 88 commercial stores, all spanning an area of 629,000 sq ft.
Health Minister Zweli Mkhize has announced there are 2,415 cases of COVID-19 coronavirus in South Africa. This is an increase of 143 cases from the previous day.

The total number of coronavirus tests conducted to date is 87,022, an increase of 3,359 over the past day.

According to the South Africa coronavirus portal, there are now 27 deaths attributed to the COVID-19 coronavirus in South Africa.

There have been a total of 410 recoveries in the country.

Gauteng still accounts for the highest number of cases with 909, followed by the Western Cape with 643, and KwaZulu-Natal with 489.

The full provincial breakdown is shown below:

Gauteng  909

Western Cape  643

KwaZulu-Natal  489

Free State  174

Eastern Cape  98

Limpopo  24

Mpumalanga  22

North West  22

Northern Cape  16

Unallocated  18

As at today, the total number of confirmed #COVID19 cases in South Africa is 2415. pic.twitter.com/SkLINx1vjI  Dr Zweli Mkhize (@DrZweliMkhize) April 14, 2020

More tests needed

President Cyril Ramaphosa announced on 9 April that the national lockdown will be extended by 14 days and will now stay in effect until the end of the month.

The president said there would be a big increase in testing for the virus over the next few weeks in order to identify and isolate the infected. Communities across the country will be screened, he stated.

He said this was necessary to contain the spread of the virus and avoid a massive loss of life in South Africa.

Department of Health acting director-general Anban Pillay recently told Rapport that there were not enough tests being done in South Africa, which is inhibiting the countrys ability to combat the virus.

Pillay told Parliament that not enough tests are being done to get a real picture of the coronavirus pandemic in South Africa.

Rapport added that the National Health Laboratory Service (NHLS) confirmed that test kits ordered three weeks ago from the USA had not arrived in the country yet.

These tests kits are needed to increase South Africas daily testing capability from 5,000 to 30,000 per day.

Now read: The coronavirus has pushed South African ecommerce forward many years
Sharon Stone is the cover star for the new edition of German VOGUE.

The 62-year-old actress looks incredible as she poses in a series of power looks, while chatting about lasting the test of time in 'misogynistic' Hollywood in the insightful accompanying interview.

The star, who was recently revealed to be on Bumble, also discussed the perils of dating in the internet age, and gave a detailed account of her recovery following her 2001 stroke.

New interview: Sharon Stone is the cover star for the new edition of German VOGUE, chatting about lasting the test of time in 'misogynistic' Hollywood in the accompanying interview

Sharon opened up about her early days in film, explaining she struggled to get cast before she stripped off for Playboy in a bid to get given lead female roles.

Then came her iconic Basic Instinct character, the seductive 1992 role she says has 'dominated' her life ever since.

Discussing whether the change triggered by #MeToo was noticeable to her, Sharon told the publication: 'When I started as a model and actress, the term fuckable was equated with workable and camera.

'It was a pretty misogynistic era twenty years ago. Mel Gibson, who is three years older than me, thought I was too old to star opposite him.'

Sharon told the publication: 'When I started as a model and actress, the term fuckable was equated with workable and camera'

Sharon also detailed the tough period in her life that followed the stroke she suffered in 2001, aged 43.

The dramatic life event disrupted her career, finances and her marriage, forcing the star to spend years in recovery, learning to speak and even see properly again.

On learning to accept herself again and the process of ageing, Sharon said: 'There was a point in my forties when I went into the bathroom with a bottle of wine, locked the door, and said: "I won't get out until I can fully accept my body."

Sharon also detailed the pitfalls of modern dating and trying to find love again on dating apps.

Sharon was married to screenwriter Michael Greenburg from 1984 to 1987.

Sick of the questions: Her 1992 role in Basic Instinct has 'dominated' her life ever since

Difficult recovery: Sharon also detailed the tough period in her life that followed the stroke she suffered in 2001, aged 43

She then wed journalist Phil Bronstein from 1998 until 2004, with whom she raises son Roan, 19.

The star adopted two sons, Quinn, 13, and Laird, 14, on her own.

Revealing she was getting to meet the kinds of men she'd never meet in real life, the star said she was currently chatting to an aeronautical engineer.

However, she joked she has the 'worst luck' with men and had chatted to everyone from former convicts, to 'socially awkward' people or those who prefer their dog's company to humans.

'You know, when you're single at this age, there's usually a reason for that. I count myself in there', she said.

Sharon proudly reposted some of the stunning snaps from her VOGUE shoot, thanking photographer Liz Collins.

Read the full interview with the actress in German VOGUE, out now.
When we saw the way the pandemic was affecting the nation, we asked how we could provide physicians to the workforce as quickly as possible, said Dr. Mark Rosenblatt, executive dean of the college. And when you look at the type of students we have and why they went to med school in the first place, its to help people.
The Treasury Department said on Tuesday (US time) that the nation's major airlines have tentatively agreed to terms for $US25 billion ($38.8 billion) in federal aid to pay workers and keep them employed through September.

The assistance will include a mix of cash and loans, with the government getting warrants that can be converted into small ownership stakes in the leading airlines.

The six biggest US airlines have all reached deals for federal government aid. Credit:AP

The airlines did not want to give up equity, but Treasury demanded compensation for taxpayers. The airlines have little leverage - their business has collapsed as the COVID-19 pandemic reduces air travel to a trickle and they face mass layoffs without the federal aid.

The nation's six biggest airlines - Delta, American, United, Southwest, Alaska and JetBlue - along with four smaller carriers have reached agreements in principle, and the Treasury Department said talks were continuing with others. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said the department would work with the airlines to finalise deals "and disburse funds as quickly as possible."
The Trump administration violated federal rules when it rolled back heavily debated nutrition standards for school meals programs in 2018, a federal court ruled Monday.

The U.S. District Court in Maryland vacated the rule changes and sided with plaintiffs, childrens health advocacy groups that had argued the U.S. Department of Agriculture violated the Administrative Procedures Act, which agencies must follow in changing federal regulations.

Thats because the final rule the USDA issuedwhich allowed higher sodium levels in school meals and eliminated a requirement for more whole-grain itemsdiffered too signficantly from the version it put out for public comment. That earlier draft would have delayed those regulations and allowed some exemptions, rather than eliminating the standards altogether.

Although an agency is certainly permitted to change a rule in response to comments, USDAs changes are not in character with the original scheme of the [rule put out for public comment] because there is a fundamental difference between delaying compliance standardswhich indicates that school meals will still eventually meet those standardsand eliminating those standards altogether, District Judge George Hazels opinion said.

Attorneys for the USDA argued the agency made changes to the final rule in response to public comments, an argument the court rejected.

The case was brought by Center for Science in the Public Interest and Healthy School Food Maryland.

The Trump administrations attempt to gut the whole-grain and sodium standards would have undone years of hard work and advocacy on the part of organizations like ours, Fania Yangarber, executive director of Healthy School Food Maryland, said in a statement after the ruling. Now, more than ever, our kids deserve high nutrition standards in their school meals. In the midst of a pandemic and economic crisis, this is a win for children and families across Americaparticularly those that rely on free and reduced-cost meals.

The court rejected some of the groups other arguments, including an assertion that the USDA rule change differed too greatly from the underlying federal law, the Healthy Hunger-Free Kids Act, which had been championed by former first lady Michelle Obama. The law is ambigious, Hazel wrote, and federal courts defer to agencies interpretations on such issues.

The nutrition regulations have been the subject of debate in Congress for years. Health advocacy groups argue they are necessary to combat concerns like childhood obesity. But industry groups and school nutrition directors have argued that its difficult to comply with the mandates.

Photo: Students pick up their lunch at Barre Town Elementary School in Barre Town, Vt. --Toby Talbot/AP-File

Follow us on Twitter @PoliticsK12 . And follow the Politics K-12 reporters @EvieBlad @Daarel and @AndrewUjifusa .
The commitment of an essential worker during a pandemic is even more crucial when your essential role is flying for New Zealands largest rescue helicopter operation.

Flying and working for an emergency air rescue service is by nature a demanding role. Retrieving patients from difficult or remote locations, administering treatment mid-air in a moving and compact space has its challenges.

If your office is a rescue helicopter, working from home is not an option, says a rescue helicopter spokesperson.

Philips Search & Rescue Trust is the charity that fundraises and markets for the Waikato Westpac Rescue Helicopter, TECT Rescue Helicopter, Greenlea Rescue Helicopter and Palmerston North Rescue Helicopter.

Continuing to save lives relies heavily on community funding and skilled personnel to man their fleet of five BK117.

As with all healthcare workers in todays climate, caring for trauma patients and the intimacy it requires, means the risk of COVID-19 exposure is significant.

If your essential service is saving lives from the skies, contamination could result in losing scarce members of the crew, grounding the rescue helicopter indefinitely.

Driven to keep their crew and families safe, the Waikato Westpac Rescue Helicopter, TECT Rescue Helicopter, Greenlea Rescue Helicopter and Palmerston North Rescue Helicopter chose to go beyond the governments standard precautions for health workers and introduced further measures on their own, to reduce transmission points and contain spread.

The compact environment of a rescue helicopter brings unique challenges, the new threat of COVID-19 adds yet another layer of complexity.

In a confined space, the need to create physical distance, separate crew members and limit contact with critically ill or injured patients, is complicated.

The initiative - the introduction of a barrier flight curtain, sealing off the front cabin from the rear cabin - is a serious protection measure which at $3000 per helicopter cost PSRT considerable investment at $15,000 across the network.

Without government support to fund these protection measures, the reliance on donations from the communities each rescue helicopter serves has increased significantly.

Aside from robust welfare and hygiene measures on base, initiatives include full body personal protective equipment able to withstand conditions within and outside the helicopter.

Procedures involve methodical donning and doffing conducted under safety officer supervision. Post each mission, the aircraft and all equipment are meticulously decontaminated.

Before the next shift bubble starts, the hangar is fully decontaminated ready for the arrival of fellow crew members.

In the event a pilot, intensive care paramedic or crewman is compromised, provisions have been made for limited relief staff.

Isolation accommodation has been secured offsite to ensure any affected staff can isolate immediately.

Exposure on shift means crew must leave their families and home bubble for at least 14 days until cleared.

A sacrifice the new measures are intended to avoid.

Senior Intensive Care Paramedic, Graeme Harvey his shares insight.

This is unchartered territory for everyone, were staying agile, reviewing and evolving our processes as knowledge unfolds and international standards develop. Weve had to adapt the way we work together as a team, being apart and staying protected is now how we keep each other safe; this is our new normal.

As essential workers, crew members not only leave their family bubbles, they risk exposure with each patient collected. Although the COVID-19 specific equipment and procedures require substantial sacrifice, investment and time, the welfare of crew and safe return to their home bubbles each day is PSRTs priority.
Lives of Houses

Edited by Kate Kennedy and Hermione Lee

Princeton. 304 pp. $24.95

Reviewed by Michael Dirda

For much of the country, sheltering in place has been a wearisome but essential civic duty. We dont want to get sick ourselves, and we dont want to bring any sickness to others. So we stay home. Its the right thing to do.

Having done heaps and heaps of living in Casa Dirda recently, how could I resist Lives of Houses? A recently published collection of essays edited by the biographers Kate Kennedy and Hermione Lee, the wide-ranging volume investigates the residences of "writers, politicians, composers, collectors, artists ... men and women who have shaped and recorded the history of their houses through their own work.

The books contributors include novelist Julian Barnes writing about the Finnish composer Jean Sibelius home, Ainola; historian David Cannadine on Chartwell, where Winston Churchill lived; Yeats biographer Roy Foster describing the poets richly symbolic but clammy and inhospitable tower retreat Thoor Ballylee; and Jenny Uglow on Edward Lears Villa Emily in San Remo.

A few of the best essays, however, aren't about famous people. Margaret MacMillan  former warden of St. Antony's College, Oxford  re-creates the warmth and security of her Toronto childhood in "My Mother's House":

In the winters (was there always snow and ice in those days?) we came into the kitchen in skates, just off the rink that our neighbour across the back fence made every year. She never minded. We argued, talked about the day, and watched for the warning signs that my two youngest brothers were about to fight as each slipped lower in his chair better to be able to kick the other.

In another fine piece, novelist Alexander Masters learns how people become unhoused by talking with the homeless at the Matthew 25 Mission. (Mathew 25 contains the verse, Whatever you did for the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.) Elleke Boehmer, professor of world literature in English at Oxford, addresses the trauma of cultural and personal displacement through the example of African writer Dambudzo Marechera, whose short story collection, The House of Hunger, won the 1979 Guardian First Fiction Prize. Marechera wrote much of the book while living in a tent in a meadow near Oxford, from which he had been expelled for violent and asocial behavior.

An expert on Benjamin Britten, Lucy Walker notes that this world-famous composer viewed himself as a regionalist, intending his music primarily for the people of his hometown of Aldeburgh. Laura Marcus  Goldsmiths Professor of English at Oxford  reminds us that H.G. Wells mother worked as a housekeeper at Uppark, where underground service tunnels connected the kitchens and the main house. Years later, when her son came to write The Time Machine, his Morlocks dwell in subterranean darkness and feed on the effete Eloi of the surface world.

Virginia Woolf, notes Hermione Lee, once compared a womans nature to a great house full of rooms, where most people only see the public reception areas, while in the innermost room, the soul sits alone and waits for a footstep that never comes. Many footsteps, though, have trod the winding stairs and passageways of Sir John Soaness London home, which the neoclassical architect stuffed with paintings, sculpture, and every kind of bric-a-brac. In tracing the private museums 200-year history, Soanes biographer Gillian Darley quotes from its current deputy director, Helen Dorey, who happens to be a friend of mine. At that moment this imposing and labyrinthine mansion suddenly seemed almost homey.

To introduce the sorrowful life of World War I poet and composer Ivor Gurney, Kate Kennedy writes, "There are websites, if you know where to look, full of images compiled by anonymous people with a passion for breaking into derelict asylums and taking photographs, the creepier the better." Gurney was certified insane in 1922 and passed the rest of his life in mental hospitals, dying in 1937. Deeply attached to his native Gloucestershire, he never saw its countryside again except as familiar, heartbreaking place-names on an Ordinance Survey map.

Two of my favorite essays, by Seamus Perry and Sandra Mayer respectively, offer guided tours of W.H. Audens apartment at 77 St. Marks Place in New York, where the poet lived between 1954 and 1972, and his late-in-life Kirchstetten house in Austria. Auden famously united minimum attention to his living conditions with maximum regard for routine and order. He wore the same suit day after day, padded around Manhattan in carpet slippers, and utilized his kitchen sink as a toilet. Composer Igor Stravinsky called him the dirtiest man I have ever liked. Relying on literary journalism to pay his bills, Auden toiled at his desk every day from 9 a.m. till 4 or 5 p.m., then enjoyed a massive cocktail or two, sat down to a well-prepared dinner promptly at 6, and toddled off to bed as early as 9:00, sometimes shooing guests out the door. In Austria, the poet acquired a yellow Volkswagen, eventually used as the getaway car in a series of robberies committed by a longtime lover.

From the Washington Post.
French President Emmanuel Macron on Wednesday urged international creditors to relieve African countries of debt payments this year to help them deal with the coronavirus pandemic.

In a wide-ranging interview with RFI on Wednesday Macron said a moratorium on African countries debt payments is an indispensable step to help the continent weather the coronavirus crisis.

We must give African economies some breathing space by suspending debt payments during this crisis, Macron explained, describing the moratorium as a global first.

The French presidents comments come as his finance minister says major international creditors have reached a preliminary agreement to relieve the worlds poorest countries of debt payments this year.

Macron urged finance officials for the US, China and other G20 nations to finalise that agreement when they meet online on Wednesday.

France will reallocate almost 1.2bn of African development aid to the fight against coronavirus as part of President Emmanuel Macrons effort to focus international attention on the health and economic impact of the pandemic on the continent, the Financial Times reported.

We will, without a doubt, need to envisage a humanitarian airlift from Europe to deliver aid [to Africa], French foreign minister Jean-Yves Le Drian told the countrys National Assembly last week, adding that there should be a moratorium on interest payments or even cancelling or restructuring African countries debts.

Africa is the European Unions third-largest two-way trading partnerafter the United States and Chinawith a trade surplus for the EU of 18 billion euros in 2017. Germany currently leads the EU in exports to Africa (8.3 billion euros), and France ranks second (5.6 billion euros).
The five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council have agreed to hold a summit, but the date and agenda are still under discussion, the RIA news agency cited Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov as saying.

Russian President Vladimir Putin in January proposed holding a summit between the leaders of Russia, China, the United States, France and Britain this year to discuss the conflict in Libya and other global problems.

Lavrov made the comments on Tuesday, RIA said.

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Ten Pret sites are to reopen for takeaways and delivery and will also be selling a range of grocery items.

Like many major cafe and bakery chains, Pret closed the 400 sites in its estate following instructions from the Prime Minister for pubs, restaurants and cafes to shut to help delay the spread of Covid-19.

However, some businesses have started reopening sites after taking steps to protect staff and customers. Under government guidelines, cafes can operate takeaway and delivery services, and food retailers may remain open.

From tomorrow (16 April), 10 Pret sites in London will open daily from 8am to 2pm, offering a limited menu of some of the brands most popular sandwiches, salads and baguettes, as well as hot and cold drinks, baked goods, fruit and snacks.

The shops will also be selling a selection of grocery items, such as milk, butter, and tea.

Pret said the reopenings were in response to requests from local NHS workers and hospitals, and the business would offer a 50% discount for NHS workers until the end of this month.

The shops are being staffed by Pret workers who have volunteered, with 160 staff working across the 10 shops. Pret said the volunteers had undergone a thorough interview to ensure that they were fit to return to work, and that those living with anyone vulnerable would not be permitted to return.

All UK Pret employees are getting 100% of their pay until the end of April, regardless of whether they have volunteered to work in the reopened shops.

The business has introduced a range of social distancing and safety measures in the reopened sites including:

Designated pick-up points for delivery drivers, and separate doors for deliveries and customers wherever possible

One person in the kitchen will be nominated as a kitchen runner who will get the products needed for each team member doing food preparation to minimise the amount of movement in the kitchen.

Only one person will be allowed in certain areas of the kitchen at any one time  for example, fridges or staff rooms.

Enhanced cleaning processes, including 30-minute sanitising of all hand-contact surfaces.

Protective Perspex screens fitted to the till counter.

Staff and baristas will be distanced behind the till counter.

Only card payments will be allowed, no cash will be accepted.

Customer flow into the shop will be restricted, with no more than six customers at any one time.

Customers will queue outside the shop two metres apart from each other, with clear markings for queuing.

We are incredibly grateful that 160 team members have volunteered to help reopen 10 shops in London, located close to hospitals. In doing so, this will help give frontline healthcare workers better access to freshly prepared food while also getting our supply chain up and running again to deliver food to the homeless, said Pret CEO Pano Christou.

My priority is always to protect our teams and customers as best we can, which means we have put in place a number of new social distancing measures to align with the governments guidance.
April 15 : Bollywood actor Amitabh Bachchan who made his debut in Bollywood in 1969 with Saat Hindustani, shared a photo from that year, from his first ever photo shoot for a magazine some 51 years ago. Big B, who will turn 78 in October this year, must have been 27 or 26 at that time.

T 3501 - My very first photo shoot for a film mag., - 'Star & Style' .. prodded & goaded to a very shy reticent and reluctant me , by famed most feared journalist of the times , Devyani Chaubal ; obviously there was no 'star' or 'style' in the project but Devyani thought so .. pic.twitter.com/2eCv1sxyY4  Amitabh Bachchan (@SrBachchan) April 14, 2020

In his tweet, Big B revealed as a newbie in Bollywood, he thought he neither had "style" nor was star materials during the photo shoot for Star & Style magazine.

The actor in his tweet wrote "My very first photoshoot for a film mag - 'Star & Style' - prodded and goaded to a very shy reticent and reluctant me by famed, most feared journalist of the times - Devyani Chaubal. Obviously there was no 'star' or 'style' in the project but Devyani thought so,"

Meanwhile, Big B also dug out fond throwback memories with Rishi Kapoor. Sharing a black and white photo from the sets of 1981 movie Naseeb, Big B wrote: "Shooting for the song Rang Jaamaake for film Naseeb, on a revolving set restaurant put up at Chandivali Studio... Chintu (Rishi Kapoor) as Chaplin, moi as matador. Manmohan Desai, the crazy genius director... song scenes, action, all on. Set on fire. Amazing times."

Big B and Rishi Kapoor have also famously co-starred in films such as Kabhi Kabhie, Ajooba and Amar Akbar Anthony. They were recently seen together in 102 Not Out.

On the work front, Amitabh Bachchan will be seen in 'Brahmastra: Part One of Three', also known as Brahmastra, is written and directed by Ayan Mukerji, and produced by Karan Johar. It also stars Ranbir Kapoor, Alia Bhatt, Mouni Roy and Akkineni Nagarjuna in pivotal roles and will serve as the first film in a planned trilogy.

Chehre, Jhund and Gulabo Sitabo are some of his other upcoming movies.
The Covid-19 testing that was scheduled to start at Dayanand Medical College and Hospital (DMCH) here from Wednesday has been delayed for the time being.

The DMCH authorities claimed that before going ahead with the testing process, they want to conduct some trials.

We have received the testing kits, but in order to formally start the procedure we have to first undergo some trials, said DMCH secretary Prem Gupta.

Describing the procedure, Gupta said, Two samples of a suspected patient will be sent to the microbiology labs at DMCH and PGIMER, Chandigarh. The results will be compared and only then a final nod will be given to conduct the formal Covid-19 tests.

The district administration had on Tuesday stated that the testing facility at DMCH will start operations on Wednesday.

The department of microbiology at DMCH has receiving the nod for Covid-19 testing from the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR).

Recently, Punjab chief minister Amarinder Singh had proposed the names of DMCH and Christian Medical College and Hospital (CMCH) to the Centre stating that the two prestigious medical institutions were capable of conducting the tests for coronavirus. The CM had also sought the requisite approvals for starting the testing facility.

At present, the state has three government laboratories  Government Medical College, Amritsar; Government Medical College, Patiala and Guru Gobind Singh Medical University, Faridkot.

Besides DMCH, the process is on to initiate testing operations at CMCH. Two specialists from ICMR are set to visit the hospital to share the technical know-how of the testing procedure.
The swab sample of the lone



COVID-19 positive patient in Arunachal Pradesh tested negative in the third test which was conducted at RMRC at Dibrugarh in Assam, a senior district health officer said on Wednesday.

The man from Medo village in Lohit district, who had attended the Tablighi Jamaat congregation at Nizamuddin in Delhi had tested positive for COVID-19 on April 1 and 7 test but his third test on Tuesday was negative, District Medical Officer (DMO) Dr S Chai Pul informed.

"The patient is gradually improving as his third test came negative. We have collected another sample of him today within 24-hours of his last test as per protocol, and it will be sent to Regional Medical Research Cetre (RMRC) tomorrow for the final test," Dr Pul said.

"A 12-member team of doctors including other healthcare workers are looking after the patient on regular basis," the DMO said.

The patient is as of now asymptomatic and is reported to be without any physical discomfort. He is being given regular counselling, Dr Pul added.

Arunachal Pradesh has so far reported only one COVID- 19 positive case in Lohit district.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
In the sweep of things, March 9 wasn't so long ago. In the coronavirus era, it's an eternity.

Back then, the White House press secretary was still Stephanie Grisham and the White House was still minimising the threat of the new virus. That morning, the day the number of reported American Covid-19 cases jumped from 423 to 647, Grisham appeared on Fox News's "Fox & Friends" remotely from Palm Beach, Florida. "Right now, we're telling people to act as if this is a severe flu season," she said. "And, you know, wash your hands often."

The president wasn't worried, she added, because he "is quite a hand washer." Grisham critiqued those using the virus as "a tool to politicise things and to scare people."

More remarkable than what she said was that she said it at all. Unlike her overexposed predecessors, Sean Spicer and Sarah Huckabee Sanders, Grisham was infamous for being invisible. In her nine months on the job (her tenure lasted from July until her firing on April 7), Grisham never held a White House press briefing. This makes her unique among the roughly 35 people who have held her position. She rarely conducted the smaller informal briefings know as "gaggles" and almost never appeared on TV, unless it was Fox News.

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As her tenure went on, the commentariat developed a fascination with her. A crime writer named Don Winslow said he'd donate $100,000 to a children's hospital if Grisham did a briefing. Stephen King joined in, doubling the pot. A smattering of profiles appeared, while The Washington Post's media critic started a "Grisham Watch" to track her movements. Grisham was unmoved.

Hints of a saucy persona have emerged. She called President Trump's impeachment hearings "boring." She called longtime Vogue editor in chief Anna Wintour "insecure and small-minded" for a perceived slight against the first lady. In early March, Grisham disputed a Vanity Fair piece about Trump's private coronavirus fears, calling it a "college essay." Other Grisham statements attested to nothing at all, except the sycophantic streak typical of Trump officials. Regarding the cancellation of the briefings, Grisham said they had become media circuses dominated by preening attention hogs. Which, frankly, they sometimes were.

By mid-March, Grisham managed to recede even further. On March 13, the president began delivering his own daily Covid-19 briefings, on the podium she never assumed. A few days later, she was in quarantine, out of fear she had caught the virus at Mar-a-Lago. She tested negative, but by the time she was back at the White House, incoming chief of staff Mark Meadows was searching for a replacement. By April, Grisham was out. As a consolation prize, she was named chief of staff to Melania Trump.

Justifying her absence, Grisham used the stock line that the president was his own best spokesperson. As it turns out, he is an inept spokesperson for himself. In the briefing room, he is regularly undercut by the medical experts standing beside him and spends much of his time airing grievances. Anyone who takes what Trump says at face value will becomes less informed about the threat of the coronavirus.

This brings us to an odd juncture. Some of the same critics who exhorted Grisham to start giving briefings are now exhorting TV networks to stop carrying briefings, calling them "propaganda." But propaganda, or "spin," is also what Grisham did for a living. Which raises the question of what the public really wanted from her - and will want from her successor - in the first place. What do we really miss when the nation's top PR person goes missing?

Stephanie Grisham's path to the White House would have been considered unusual in any other administration. A twice-divorced mother of two, Grisham, 43, had served as a spokeswoman in Arizona Republican politics. Before that, according to the New York Times, she was fired from one ad agency after being accused of lifting language from the car club AAA, from which she had been previously let go amid accusations she had fudged expense reports.

In 2015, she joined Trump's campaign as a press wrangler, meaning she shepherded reporters to events. After the campaign, she worked for a bit as Spicer's deputy, then became Melania's spokeswoman. The two grew close and came to share a defiant attitude toward the press. "I've learned from her that we don't have to tell everybody everything," Grisham said in "Free, Melania," Kate Bennett's biography of the first lady. "We just don't. And it works out fine."

That attitude followed her to the West Wing. Outside of pre-written statements about major news events, she rarely spoke to journalists on the record. And when she did go off the record, it was often just to alert reporters to some White House development that would soon become public.

While Sanders earned a reputation for off-podium candor, Grisham was seen as a cipher. I called about a dozen reporters who dealt with her. None disliked her, but most were dismissive of her qualifications. Some thought the White House killed the briefing to reduce transparency; others thought she wasn't capable of delivering one.

During her tenure, Grisham also held the job of White House communications director while retaining her original gig with the first lady. Before she was sacked, I had interviewed several White House officials about how she shaped PR strategy. I did not receive satisfying answers.

"She is somebody who appreciates the way that the president communicates, and she's not trying to change him," senior adviser and Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner told me. Trump's daughter and adviser Ivanka Trump added: "My husband said in Time magazine, and I thought it was a great quote, that the president makes the waves, everybody else just surfs them."

Former acting chief of staff Mick Mulvaney, before he was sacked, complimented Grisham's "calming" perspective as a single mom. I asked for an example of a communications "win" during his tenure. He cited the United States' lethal January strike against Iranian Maj. Gen. Qasem Soleimani. I asked how plugged in Grisham was on the strike. "There are certain times where she has to get up to speed very, very quickly, and that may have been one of those times," he said. The night of Iran's attempted retaliation against the United States, during which it accidentally shot down a passenger jet, killing everyone aboard, Grisham sent one tweet, criticizing CNN.

What did she do, in lieu of press briefings? The Washington Post's Erik Wemple occasionally emailed her to ask, for his "Grisham Watch." She'd respond with droll granularity:

"Met w the POTUS . . . Mtg with my comms team on impeachment and Davos . . . As of this moment I have eaten two saltine crackers and had three cups of coffee . . . Ive used the restroom twice . . ."

Last fall, the Atlantic's Megan Garber published a nostalgic essay about C.J. Cregg, the White House press secretary portrayed by Allison Janney on NBC's "The West Wing." Garber wrote: "C.J. may be sarcastic; she may be, every once in a while, cynical; but she believes, at her core, in the power of shared facts." Cregg, she declared, was the "moral center" of the show. "Through the stands she takes in arguing for the principles she believes in - the show posits a world whose messy truths can be made sense of."

It's fitting that Garber didn't write a paean to the press secretaries of real-life presidents. Barack Obama's flacks were generally thin-skinned and tight-lipped. Bill Clinton's comms shop locked the sliding door that reporters use to travel from the briefing room to the West Wing. Richard Nixon's Ron Ziegler called the Watergate break-in a "third-rate burglary attempt." The profession does not reward transparency.

When Scott McClellan (press secretary for George W. Bush) published a memoir blasting the White House for feeding him bad intelligence on the Iraq War, he was denounced by Republicans and never worked in politics again. It seems unrealistic that a press secretary, a mouthpiece for his or her boss, could be the "moral centre" of anything.

I met Stephanie Grisham for the first time in late January, when the Senate impeachment trial of the president was underway. On TV, Grisham does not look comfortable, and speaks haltingly. In person, I found her affect genial, and slightly mischievous. That said, she was only willing to speak off the record. Which means that everything I've quoted I later negotiated onto the record.

Sitting behind her desk, keeping an eye on her email, she reminded me that the decision to cancel the press briefings wasn't hers. The president scaled them back at the end of Sanders's tenure and hasn't indicated he'd restore them under anyone. "If he came in here right now and said, 'Go to the podium,' I would go to the podium." Not that she was eager to. "There are characters in that briefing room who I believe ruin it for everybody else."

Her inbox pinged with a query from a reporter. I asked her what it said, and she read it out loud. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo had recently berated an NPR reporter, and the emailing journalist wanted to know if she thought Pompeo had acted appropriately.

Grisham looked at me. "If I say 'No, I do not think that was appropriate,' the headline would be, 'I went against the secretary of state and, oh my gosh, that's terrible and I went against the president.' If I say yes, I do think that's appropriate because X, Y, Z, the headline will be, "She hates the press, everybody hates the press in this administration."

In general, Grisham suggested, there is little upside to ever saying anything. "Often I'm not looped into certain things. Not because of anything bad, [but] because we move so fast," she said. "If you ask reporters, I tell them all, 'I will never knowingly lie to you, I'll just ignore you.' "

Under Trump, briefings have declined not only at the White House, but at the State Department and the Pentagon. A Trump press flack can't know if the president is going to contradict, or has already contradicted, something she has just said. Rather than say something foolish, she says nothing at all. Spicer and Sanders learned this the hard way. Every day, during their televised press briefings, they would stand before a room of reporters and try to defend an indefensible thing their boss had done or said. It made for perversely enjoyable television, like one of those sadistic and unwinnable Japanese game shows. No wonder Grisham wasn't keen to join the cast.

Ironically, when the president began delivering his own briefings, Grisham found herself in the exact circle of hell she had avoided for months. On March 22, the normally friendly Howard Kurtz invited her on his Fox News show "MediaBuzz." He asked Grisham why the president had initially soft-pedaled the crisis. She wondered "why the media has to continue to look backwards." Kurtz then cited a briefing in which NBC reporter Peter Alexander asked the president whether he was giving false hope to Americans by touting unproven drug treatments and what Trump would say to Americans who are scared. Trump responded by calling Alexander a "terrible reporter." "It is his job to show not only leadership, but try to calm the American people," Grisham told Kurtz. "So to come after him and say he's giving false hope, I think, was wildly inappropriate."

If the cancellation of the traditional press briefing defined the Grisham era, the introduction of the Trump version brought it to a close. Neither option, clearly, has proved ideal. I suspect that what some jittery, exhausted reporters would prefer is the old ritualistic back-and-forth with a stonewalling press flack, in which nothing meaningful is conveyed, except a sense of Beltway normalcy otherwise lacking in the Trump era. Something that reminds them of C.J. Cregg.

In any case, Grisham is gone. Her replacement is Kayleigh McEnany, a TV-ready 31-year-old Harvard Law graduate who was serving as Trump's campaign spokeswoman. In late February, on Fox Business Channel, McEnany asserted, "We will not see diseases like the coronavirus come here. We will not see terrorism come here. And isn't that refreshing when contrasting it with the awful presidency of President Obama?"

It is not clear whether she will give briefings.
- David Murathe said after the COVID-19 crisis, the country will need to be united for it to revive the economy

- He said ODM party leader Raila Odinga will be needed in government to lead the nation in its economic recovery

- Murathe said Raila's experience as African Union envoy on infrastructure will come in handy in the economic recovery

Former Jubilee Party vice chairperson David Murathe has said the nation will need Opposition leader Raila Odinga after the coronavirus pandemic to help rebuild the economy.

According to the politician, Raila's experience and skills as African Union (AU) envoy on infrastructure will come in handy in rebuilding the economy after the pandemic.

READ ALSO: Gavana Mwangi Wa Iria adai madereva wa matrela wanasafirisha watu Nairobi kisiri

According to David Murathe, Kenya will require a united nation in the post-coronavirus crisis. Photo: David Murathe

Source: Facebook

READ ALSO: Kenyan newspapers review for April 15: Senate proposes bill to waive rent for Kenyans amid COVID-19 pandemic

Speaking to NTV after a meeting with Francis Atwoli, CS Eugene Wamalwa and Raila Odinga, Murathe said in the post-coronavirus crisis the country will need a united nation for it to focus on resuscitating the economy.

"If you ask me, this country will need to get united in the post-coronavirus crisis. We cannot work in the post-coronavirus crisis if we are not united or when we continue having the politics of antagonism," said Murathe.

Murathe said the effects of the pandemic would be so great it would take people who are experienced and connected to rebuild the economy.

ODM party leader Raila Odinga during a past BBI campaign. Photo: ODM party

Source: Facebook

READ ALSO: Nairobi police officer found dead in girlfriend's Umoja house after a good time together

"The former prime minister is a special envoy for the AU on infrastructure which is a key part in connecting Africa and infrastructure. So in whatever we say, he has a role to play in recovery of the economy after the coronavirus crisis," he said.

The former Gatanga MP said there is a possibility for the Jubilee Party to form a new alliance ahead of the 2022 polls.

The anti-William Ruto campaigner said the new formation may include NASA principles Musalia Mudavadi, Kalonzo Musyoka and Raila Odinga.

His sentiments came amid reports of changes in the Jubilee Party leadership which have threatened to destroy the already divided party.

Do you have an inspirational story you would like us to publish? Please reach us through news@tuko.co.ke or WhatsApp: 0732482690. Follow us on Telegram: Tuko news

Source: TUKO.co.ke
As part of its continuous efforts to provide educational opportunities that enhance the capabilities of Bahraini youth in their preferred fields, Al-Mabarrah Al-Khalifia Foundation (MKF) has signed an agreement with Vatel to provide the first scholarship to study at Vatel Hotel and Tourism Business School, within its Rayaat scholarship programme, said a report.

The scholarship qualifies students to receive a Bahraini and a French Bachelors degree in International Hotel Management and includes four-year university fees at Vatel Hotel and Tourism Business School; one of the most prominent French educational institutions in the hospitality management sector, said a report in BNA.

Vatel has 50 schools around the world, and follows a unique educational method whereby they provide the theoretical aspects within its classrooms and practical application within four- and five-star hotels in Bahrain.

Eligible applicants must be Bahraini, a fresh graduate, achieved a cumulative average of 85 per cent and above, must have good English communication skills, and must have received an acceptance letter from Vatel prior to applying for the scholarship, then they can apply starting from May 3 to 9 by filling out the online application form via the website www.mkfbh.org.

Commenting on the occasion, Her Highness Shaikha Zain bint Khalid Al Khalifa, chairman of the Board of Trustees of Al-Mabarrah Al-Khalifia Foundation, said: "We would like to thank Vatel Hotel & Tourism Business School for their collaboration, which comes as part of our aim to empower Bahraini youth and enhance their opportunities to achieve their academic dreams, by attending top educational institutions in the Kingdom through the Rayaat scholarship programme. The hospitality sector is witnessing a huge growth in the Kingdom of Bahrain, especially with the effort to diversify the sources of local income. We believe that this sector will provide a wide range of job opportunities in the near future."

Julien Liscouet, general director of Vatel, Bahrain, stated: "Bahrains vision is that its learning and teaching should produce skilled and capable graduates to serve the local, regional and international communities. This will be achieved by providing an academic environment that brings together learning, and teaching, and engages both the social and business communities to underpin high quality academic provision. Vatel strives to establish close collaboration and understanding between the School, the business community, our partners, and indeed society. Vatel ensures its students are provided with the knowledge and skills employers really need."

The Rayaat scholarship programme was launched in 2011, in line with the foundations vision to provide students with scholarship opportunities at accredited universities in the kingdom, as well as providing them with training opportunities in both the public and private sectors.
Swift Medical, SE Health, AlayaCare, Woundpedia, the University Health Network's Michener Institute, the Mayer Institute and many others are teaming up to connect patients with wound doctors, nurses, and experts - bringing immediate telehealth relief to thousands of Canadians.

TORONTO, April 15, 2020 /CNW/ - According to Wounds Canada, 30-50% of all health care in Canada involves a wound. With the ongoing spread of COVID-19, thousands of Canadians with chronic wounds are struggling to access the critical wound care they need while in isolation.

Industry Leaders Bring Telehealth to Wound Care at No Cost During Coronavirus Pandemic (CNW Group/Swift Medical)

With facility lockdowns, community self-isolation and other safety measures in place across many senior care organizations, wound care providers are increasingly unable to visit their patients in-person. Finding new ways to continue delivering wound care is essential  without timely access to care, untreated wounds can quickly lead to infection, hospitalization, amputation and death.

To address this challenge, forward-thinking leaders have come together to form the Telewound Coalition: a trusted, best-practice collective of clinical experts, healthcare providers and technology innovators working together to provide access to immediate, remote wound care throughout the COVID-19 crisis. The Coalition's objectives are to ensure accessibility and continuity of wound care, to preserve the health and safety of our most vulnerable patients and care providers, to prevent further spread of the virus, to decrease demand on personal protective equipment (PPE) and to alleviate hospital capacity pressures.

"We are only months into this pandemic and with no clear end in sight, the serious effects of delaying wound care need to be addressed in a strategic way," says Carlo Perez, Founder and CEO of Swift Medical. "The innovative solutions we create today will not only ensure continuous and compassionate care now, but will also permanently shape the future of care delivery."

The Coalition represents an industry-first, collaborative approach to better integrating our diverse wound care ecosystem in Canada. Each partner organization plays a vital role in supporting the patient's wound care journey and, together, through a unified and symbiotic strategy, the Coalition will make an immediate and lasting impact on the delivery of wound care across the country.

"SE Health is proud to be part of this trailblazing coalition," says Nancy Lefebre, Chief Clinical Executive at SE Health. "We need to empower patients in their own homes and communities. By expanding access to clinical care and virtual visits, we're helping to keep the most vulnerable patients healing and healthy at home."

"Moving to virtualize wound care is vital now more than ever due to the COVID-19 pandemic," says Adrian Schauer, CEO of AlayaCare. "As the leading home and community care technology solution adopted across Canada, we can help home care providers across the country seamlessly access remote wound care expertise and provide the best care for their patients in isolation."

Through this unique collaboration, the Coalition can immediately connect thousands of Canadians and their care providers with wound care specialists from their home or residence. To power this connectivity, Swift Medical will provide the underlying technology, their new Telewound module, accessible to patients and their care providers at no cost. This will enable thousands of virtual visits a day, keeping patients healthy and in place, and out of already overwhelmed hospitals.

"It's very important to have an interprofessional, complex wound assessment team," says Dr. Gary Sibbald at Woundpedia. "20% of the wounds make up 80% of the cost. A wound management system that accurately tracks healing trajectories and connects providers with each other and their patients can improve patient care outcomes and save health care dollars."

Given the rapidly evolving nature of the pandemic, the Coalition will continue to expand its membership and amass additional expertise and capabilities. The Coalition's technology and clinical network are established and ready to provide virtual wound care in Canada, ensuring continuity of care for patients during this pandemic.

About the Telewound Coalition

The Telewound Coalition is a North American network of wound care experts and innovators assembled to provide ongoing, remote wound management in Canada and the US. If your organization is interested in accessing the Coalition, as either a healthcare provider in need of telehealth wound care or an organization who can support the delivery of remote wound care, please visit: www.telewoundnow.org

SOURCE Swift Medical

For further information: Media Contact: David Mannion, Director, Communications, [email protected]

Related Links

www.swiftmedical.com


Former Vice President Joe Biden, the leading candidate for the Democratic Partys presidential nomination in 2020, has been accused by a former staffer of sexually assaulting her. Tara Reade alleges the incident occurred in 1993 when Biden was a senator from Delaware. There were no witnesses, Reade never filed a complaint and the statute of limitations for such an offense, if it occurred, has long since expired.

Reade told Newsweek that she went public with her claims in late March, according to the magazine, to ensure that powerful men are held to account.

The reluctance of the New York Times and the Washington Post to report Reades allegationsneither covered the story until a few days agoreveals, first of all, their rank hypocrisy.

Joe Biden (Flickr.com, Gage Skidmore)

Since the October 2017 launch of the #MeToo campaign, the Times and the Post have operated with great recklessness and sensationalism as relay stations for the transmission of sexual abuse complaints that have destroyed dozens of reputations, careers and lives. Each newspaper has eagerly passed on anonymous and unsubstantiated claims, reveled in the takedown of powerful men and pooh-poohed the implications of their actions for such elementary principles as presumption of innocence and due process.

In regard to protests against McCarthyite denunciations, Times columnist Roxane Gay, for example, complained in October 2017 about a lot of hand-wringing about libel and the ethics of anonymous disclosure.

One year later, the Times gloried, in a headline, about the fact that #MeToo Brought Down 201 Powerful Men. Nearly Half of Their Replacements Are Women. The article breathlessly began: They had often gotten away with it for years, and for those they harassed, it seemed as if the perpetrators would never pay any consequences. The word allegedly appears nowhere.

Earlier this year, in its shameful editorial celebrating the conviction of producer-monster Harvey Weinstein, the Times crowed about prosecutors in the case having been able to break through a barrier common to many assault cases, a lack of physical or other corroborating evidence. And they also overcame another, even more fundamental barrier: basic mistrust of women alleging sexual assault. In other words, the authorities and the media, including the Times, stampeded a jury into convicting Weinstein, despite a mass of evidence raising reasonable doubt.

In regard to Reades claims, however, the Times and the Post have both discovered the value of scrupulous and even sluggish investigations and permitted themselves the liberty of expressing skepticism about an accusers account. (All of a sudden, for example, in a reference to Reades recent filing of a complaint with Washington, DC police in regard to the alleged 1993 incident, the Times recalls that Filing a false police report may be punishable by a fine and imprisonment. When has the newspaper ever brought that up before in its coverage of allegations of sexual harassment or abuse?)

In an interview published by the Times April 13, its executive editor Dean Baquet resorted to sophistry to explain the newspapers tardy coverage of the Biden-Reade story. Baquet asserted that what The New York Times could offer and should try to offer was the reporting to help people understand what to make of a fairly serious allegation against a guy who had been a vice president of the United States and was knocking on the door of being his partys nominee.

In other words, Biden deserved special treatment, as he received from the editors even after the April 12 piece was published. One of the latters sentences originally read, The Times found no pattern of sexual misconduct by Mr. Biden, beyond the hugs, kisses and touching that women previously said made them uncomfortable. As amended, the sentence simply read, The Times found no pattern of sexual misconduct by Mr. Biden.

Asked about the deletion, Baquet referred to pressure from the former vice presidents forces, indicating that the [Biden] campaign thought that the phrasing was awkward and made it look like there were other instances in which he had been accused of sexual misconduct. And thats not what the sentence was intended to say.

Baquet can twist and turn as much as he likes, but everyone not a child knows the Times main obligation was not, as he suggested, to get a really sensitive story as close to right as we could, but to protect Bidens reputation for political reasons.

The ease and speed, moreover, with which the watchword of Believe women has been abandoned in the present casebecause it cuts across the plans of important sections of the ruling elite in regard to Biden and the 2020 electionssheds light on the false and cynical character of the #MeToo campaign and its function as a subservient and reactionary adjunct to the Democratic Party.

The sexual harassment witch-hunt was initiated, along with the anti-Russia hysteria, in the aftermath of the 2016 election. The Democrats and their left orbit needed to distract attention from their electoral fiasco, regroup and galvanize their shocked and demoralized middle class supporters and direct them along right-wing, identity politics lines. This was never about the rights and conditions of working women.

Now, in addition to the Times and the Post, many of the same forces that for two-and-a-half years have passed on dozens of unproven, often scurrilous claims of sexual wrongdoing, have suddenly discovered the value of due process and the need to maintain the presumption of innocence. Their proximity to the Democratic Party and the Biden campaign explains their newfound (and unconvincing) concern for elementary legal rights.

The Times Up Legal Defense Fund, an offshoot of the #MeToo campaign, turned down Reades request for funding in January on the questionable grounds that Biden was a candidate for federal office, and assisting a case against him could jeopardize the organizations nonprofit status, according to the Intercept.

The CEO of Times Up is Tina Tchen, a prominent Chicago lawyer and one of the biggest fundraisers for Barack Obama and Biden, Obama's running mate in the 2008 presidential campaign. Tchen subsequently served as the Obama-Biden administrations director of the White House Office of Public Engagement from 2009 to 2011, and later as Obamas assistant, chief of staff to First Lady Michelle Obama and executive director of the White House Council on Women and Girls.

Speaking for many, actress Alyssa Milano, whose October 15, 2017 message launched the #MeToo slogan, recently explained why she was keeping mum about the charges against Biden. On a radio program, Milano commented, I just dont feel comfortable throwing away a decent man that Ive known for 15 years in this time of complete chaos without there being a thorough investigation.

On Twitter, Milano observed, #BelieveWomen does not mean everyone gets to accuse anyone of anything and thats that. The actress added, I believe, along with many others in this space, that accusations need to be investigated with due process for the accused.

Contrary to the protestations of Milano and others, the #MeToo campaign has taken dead aim against due process and the presumption of innocence since its launch. Throwing away decent men without conducting a thorough investigation and accusing anyone of anything have been among its guiding principles.

Bidens own record on these issues is utterly poisonous. For opportunistic political reasons, this corporate-sponsored windbag has made violence against women one of his pet causes. He was the co-sponsor, along with Senator Orrin Hatch, Utah Republican, of the Violence Against Women Act of 1994, a measure that did absolutely nothing to prevent violence against women, but helped build up the state apparatus and further fueled the law and order hysteria.

Under Obama, Biden truly came into his own as the benevolent defender of womankind.

In April 2011, Biden and Education Secretary Arne Duncan announced the release of a Dear Colleague Letter on student-on-student sexual harassment and sexual violence. As Emily Yoffe explained on Politico, the letter laid out new directives for how campuses were to root out and punish sexual assault. It was the beginning of a concerted effort that radically remade how students could interact sexually, with severe penalties for those who violated increasingly expansive codes of conduct. The accused were to be judged under the lowest standards of evidence, the definitions of misconduct were widely broadened, third-party reports could trigger an investigation even if the alleged victim did not think there had been a violation, and more.

Along the same lines, in January 2014, Obama named Biden a co-chair of the White House Task Force to Protect Students from Sexual Assault. The vice president, as part of the governments Its On Us campaign, delivered sanctimonious addresses on campuses around the country, stigmatizing male college students as essentially bestial and defending the weakening of the rights of the accused in cases of sexual harassment allegations.

In June 2016, Biden intervened in the case of Stanford University student Brock Turner, penning a politically transparent open letter to the victim in the case and coming out openly against the presumption of innocence. In his wretched message, the vice president wrote: We will speak to change the culture on our college campusesa culture that continues to ask the wrong questions: What were you wearing? Why were you there? What did you say? How much did you drink? Instead of asking: Why did he think he had license to rape?

What if he did not rape anyone? That did not seem to be a possibility.

Most damningly, at the time of the Senate Judiciary Committee hearings into Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh in September 2018, the Washington Post cited Biden as suggesting that when a woman comes forward in the glaring lights of focus to make an allegation of sexual abuse, youve got to start off with the presumption that at least the essence of what shes talking about is real, whether or not she forgets facts, whether or not its been made worse or better over time.

We have no way of knowing whether Reades claim is true. Even if it is, the incident in question would be the least of the crimes committed by Biden, a leading official in an administration responsible, directly or indirectly, for the deaths of hundreds of thousands in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, Pakistan, Yemen and elsewhere, including large numbers of women and children.

The Obama-Biden administration made drone assassination a key element in its foreign policy, and even declared the right to assassinate American citizens, exercising this right to murder Anwar al-Awlaki in 2011. Obama and Biden also bolstered the repressive apparatus of the state, expanding government surveillance programs and funneling billions of dollars in military hardware to local police forces. In 2010, Biden termed Julian Assange a high tech terrorist, urging on the state persecution of the WikiLeaks co-founder.

In any event, as the present controversy graphically demonstrates, no matter what the reality of Bidens record, this warmonger and enemy of the working class has the New York Times and the rest to come to his aid.
Premier offers support for China Airlines name change

ROC Central News Agency

04/14/2020 05:13 PM

Taipei, April 14 (CNA) Premier Su Tseng-chang () on Tuesday said he supports changing the name of national carrier China Airlines (CAL) to make clear that the airline represents Taiwan, though he noted the complexities involved in such a change mean it could likely only be accomplished in the long term.

Su addressed the issue following recent media coverage of an online petition to change the company's name to "Taiwan Airlines," which had gathered 47,000 signatures as of Tuesday.

Critics of the current name and the government are also worried it could undercut the goodwill Taiwan is hoping to gain by donating millions of surgical face masks to other countries, fearing it could mislead people overseas into thinking the donations are from China.

Speaking to reporters at the Legislative Yuan, Su said he sent word to CAL on Monday that he approved of its labeling the containers carrying the masks with the Taiwan flag and the slogan "Taiwan Can Help."

But he also criticized the state-controlled airline for banners on the containers showing its name, which he said was "self-promotion" and a possible source of confusion.

In addition to removing the banners, Su said he suggested using "more symbols of Taiwan," either on the aircraft livery or elsewhere, and cited as an example the way Taiwan's international representative offices use the word "Taiwan" in parentheses after the country's official name, "Republic of China."

In the short term, when countries are expressing praise and appreciation to Taiwan for its response to the COVID-19 pandemic, it is important that the world know the difference between Taiwan and China, Su said.

In the long term, he conceded, the process of changing the company's name would be complex, with possible repercussions to its freedoms of the air privileges, but would nevertheless be "worth the effort."

Su said he had faced a similar issue during his first term as premier from 2006-2007, when the government successfully renamed Taoyuan International Airport.

Prior to 2006, the airport was called Chiang Kai-shek International Airport, in honor of former President Chiang Kai-shek (), whose legacy is widely reviled by the ruling Democratic Progressive Party (DPP).

When asked about the issue on Tuesday, Presidential Office spokesperson Xavier Chang () confirmed that the Ministry of Transportation and Communications had requested that CAL "add symbols representing Taiwan" to its aircraft for future international donations of medical supplies in order to avoid confusion.

As for changing the airline's name, Chang said that because of its complexity, the issue required "continued discussion" by the Cabinet, legislature and other stakeholders.

For its part, CAL issued a short statement Tuesday pledging to adhere to the government's requests, and said it would no longer engage in commercial promotion on the government's medical equipment donations.

The statement did not make reference to the name change proposal.

(By Chen Chun-hua and Matthew Mazzetta)

Enditem/ls

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Kolkata: West Bengals maverick governor has said police and administrative officials in the state must be shown the door for allegedly failing to enforce lockdown restrictions in the state. He said the paramilitary forces should be called in to take over the task.

He tweeted: "Lockdown protocol has to be thoroughly implemented to ward off #coronavirus. Police and administration @MamataOfficial failing to effect 100% #SocialDistancing or curbing religious congregations be shown door."

"Lockdown must succeed-examine central para forces requisitioning!" he added in another tweet.

The governor, who has often been hostile to the Trinamul Congress government ruling West Bengal, is taking after the Union Home Ministry in criticizing the gradual dilution" of the lockdown in some parts of the state.

Most of the localities in question are minority-dominated, and the BJP state unit has repeatedly alleged that the lockdown was not being properly enforced in these areas.

The Union Home Ministry has said despite the Centre issuing orders from time to time under the Disaster Management Act, 2005, they were not followed.

Reacting to the Centre's letter, chief minister Mamata Banerjee had said the Union government was only interested in "extra vigilance in some specific areas".

"We are not fighting any communal virus, we are fighting a disease spreading through human contact. Wherever we find any problem, steps will be taken to ensure that the lockdown is imposed there, but that doesn't mean shops would remain closed... We are keeping a close watch," she had said.

Dhankhar has been at loggerheads with the state government over a host of issues ever since taking office in July last year.
Source: Xinhua| 2020-04-15 16:21:27|Editor: huaxia

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WUHAN, April 15 (Xinhua) -- A makeshift hospital ceased operation in Wuhan, capital of central China's Hubei Province, on Wednesday as the coronavirus epidemic wanes.

Wuhan Leishenshan (Thunder God Mountain) Hospital was built in 10 days to treat COVID-19 patients. Construction began in late January. Its last batch of patients was transferred to normal hospitals on Tuesday.

At the closing ceremony, doctors and nurses waved flags and wrote their names on the clothes of their colleagues for memory.

"We hope that the hospital will never restart operations," a local district official told an applauding crowd.

After the closing ceremony, medical workers were seen disinfecting and sealing the remaining wards.

Wang Xinghuan, head of the hospital, said they worked hard to achieve a low mortality rate of 2.3 percent among its patients, 45 percent of whom were in severe or critical conditions.

The 1,600-bed hospital is managed by the Wuhan-based Zhongnan Hospital of Wuhan University with over 3,000 medics from nine provincial regions in China. A total of 2,011 patients have been treated there.

"After Leishenshan was built, I can see the efforts to increase beds and the support coming from across the nation," said Fang Yanhong, a nurse with the hospital.

The retirement of the hospital is a landmark development in Wuhan's months-long battle with the epidemic, indicating the city's COVID-19 treatment and medical operations are "back on the normal track," Jiao Yahui, an official with the National Health Commission, told Xinhua.

Jiao said the medical facility was built at a time when "medical resources were in the shortest supply."

It has played a very important role, enabling the city to admit more patients in a short period of time, thus helping contain the source of infection, she said.

The official said there is no timetable for dismantling the Leishenshan Hospital, noting it could be reactivated at any time.

Jiao also highlighted the importance of transferring patients from the two makeshift hospitals - Huoshenshan and Leishenshan - to four large hospitals in Wuhan.

"We hope to secure the patients the most effective treatment by placing them at the four hospitals with high-quality medical resources in the city," Jiao said, adding that the treatment of the severe and critical cases remained difficult.

HECTIC WORK, LIFE-AND-DEATH MOMENTS

Yang Xiao, an ICU doctor in Leishenshan Hospital, said the hospital is well equipped with intensive care facilities.

"The ICU wards here are well equipped with ventilators, monitors and hemodialysis devices. CT and chest radiography were also introduced into the hospital upon its establishment," said the 31-year-old doctor. "The hospital is particularly good at hemodialysis, which is managed by a team of non-local medics who came to support Wuhan."

However, Yang said "as a temporary hospital, Leishenshan could not compete with large comprehensive hospitals in terms of testing capacity and medicine inventory. So transferring the patients (to large hospitals) will benefit their treatment."

Having worked in Leishenshan for over 20 days, the young doctor said the work there has been hectic and full of life-and-death moments.

Yang recalled her most impressive patient as an 85-year-old man, who was discharged from Leishenshan a few days ago.

"The retired doctor volunteered to return to his community clinic at the peak of the epidemic and got infected there," she said. "When arriving here, he was very calm. He told me he was already 85 and 'if my time had come, then be it; if I was to live on, then live it to the fullest.'"

Yang was glad she could finally take a rest. "Many local doctors were already stretched to our breaking point ... What I wish to do most (after leaving Leishenshan) is have a good sleep."
We are all coping with the coronavirus lockdown in our own way. Some people play video games until their thumbs turn numb. Others get stuck into that nagging pile of unread paperbacks beside the bed. And then there are those who like to escape the pressures of life during enforced isolation by watching incredible graphic and often upsetting films about global pandemics.

As Covid-19 has progressed from vaguely ominous news story from the other side of the world to a clear and present threat to our way of life, something strange has happened. The popularity of movies and documentaries about outbreaks of killer diseases has undergone exponential growth. In our moment of crisis, we're turning for comfort to the very subject that has set the world head-over-heels.

In the United States, where the pandemic is becoming a whirlwind of near-Biblical destructiveness, Steven Soderbergh's 2011 film Contagion shot into the iTunes charts of most rented movies. Netflix's series Pandemic: How to Prevent An Outbreak has meanwhile taken up residence in the top 10 of popular shows in Ireland.

People have also rediscovered the 2013 Brad Pitt vs zombie plague flick World War Z and the thematically once removed Terry Gilliam curio from 1995, 12 Monkeys (also starring Pitt).

Others dived deeper. Did you know that, a year before Game of Thrones, Sean Bean and Carice Van Houten (aka Red Woman Melisandre) starred in a movie about the black death called Black Death? If you'd ever paused to consider what Ned Stark vs Covid-19 would look like, wonder no more.

Were you similarly aware that the Resident Evil films were actually about a lethal virus that grinds civilisation beneath its heel? Perhaps you didn't notice because you were too busy enjoying the second season of Netflix's Korean zombie caper Kingdom. The appeal is obvious: it's about a mystery disease that breaks out in the far East and has the potential to devastate humanity. Perfect pandemic viewing.

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Let us also salute those hardy souls who have gone so far as to make it through the ancient Richard Harris thriller The Cassandra Crossing (you can watch it right now and for free on YouTube). In it, the Limerick actor plays an Irish medical expert (or so his accent suggests) trapped on board a trans-Europe express train where a new strain of flu has been unleashed. Which is scary. But not as scary as the performance OJ Simpson puts in as a US federal agent travelling on the train disguised as a priest.

Even before Covid-19, many of these films and shows had their fans. Contagion, for instance, was a medium-scale hit first time around, with Gwyneth Paltrow and Matt Damon among the A-listers pitched into battle against a coronavirus-esque menace.

Today, however, the parallels are uncanny.

"As of right now, we have no treatment protocol and no vaccine," says a medical expert after Paltrow's businesswoman, Beth, contracts a lethal dose of a previously undiscovered new disease on a work trip to China (and then gives it to a lover before returning to her family).

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Later, a Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) expert portrayed by Kate Winslet explains that the new virus is passed on "through sneezing and coughing". Yikes on a bike.

"It has been very strange to me, whether on social media or in conversations with friends, that people will say to me, 'This is uncanny how similar it is'," Contagion's script writer Scott Burns said to Slate last month. "And I don't find it to be that surprising, because the scientists I spoke to, and there were a lot of them, all said that this was a matter of when, not if."

"It was very deliberately designed to be a cautionary film," its producer Michael Shamberg told BuzzFeed News.

"We got the science right."

"It was clear to me in January that this was something unlikely to be kept in China; it seemed quite likely that we would be where we are now," Burns said to Vulture.

"I knew it was much bigger than our government was telling us, or even than the media was reporting. It's a tricky situation for a government.

"You don't want to cause panic, but if you minimise what's going on, it means people won't have adequate time to prepare themselves, and so you see things like hoarding and panic. And then when things do get worse, people don't listen to you anymore because the last thing you said ended up not being true."

Whatever about accuracy, the real mystery, surely, is why we should wish to sit down to these films at the end of a stressful day. With coronavirus disrupting life and threatening our health and mental well-being, surely the last thing we would want to do is wallow in the horror of it all?

The truth - counter-intuitive though it may seem - is that these dark and distressing films bring a degree of solace. Or at least they do provided we don't become obsessed with them.

"No one wants to be alone," writes Dr Pamela B Rutledge in Psychology Today.

"In Contagion, Matt Damon is sharing the burden. Fiction addresses our real-life worries and can impact us in profound ways, changing our attitudes and improving our understanding of others. Right now, we are struggling to manage anxiety in the face of unanswerable questions: 'How long will it last?' 'How bad can it get?' and 'Can we survive?' The fact that Contagion is fiction does not matter. An on-screen threat helps us manage our own 'existential' fear of danger and lack of control."

"The brain is a problem-solving organ and so, when we are confronted with a new problem, our brains automatically try to explore, analyse and resolve this problem," agrees psychotherapist Stella O'Malley.

"This pandemic is not a problem that many of us have thought about before so our brains simply can't get enough of it. We want to examine this issue from every single angle as a way to practise how we should handle it.

"This can be a helpful coping mechanism. On the other hand, there can be an issue with this, as our brains also seek out the dramatic. People who suffer from anxiety can seek out the dramatic with series like Pandemic. Yet this could be quite harmful as they are raising their already heightened emotions by watching frightening programmes.

"This means that watching programmes like this is quite subjective but an easy way to figure out whether it is an adaptive or maladaptive coping mechanism for you is to assess whether you feel better or worse after watching it.

"Movies like Contagion help us experience and manage emotions by making the dangers seem possible to defeat. When we watch a scary movie - especially if we identify with the hero - we get 'proof' that we can survive and that everything will be alright. Or at least we feel like we're not alone."
Doctors, nurses and other medical staffers working at the Santa Clara Valley Medical Center in San Jose were greeted by an unusual sight Wednesday morning on their way into the hospital: rows of police officers applauding.

The footage, posted by KPIX reporter Kiet Do, shows workers in face masks and scrubs walking by dozens of officers and their police cruisers and motorcycles, siren lights aglow.

According to Santa Clara Supervisor Cindy Chavez, California Sheriff Laurie Smith invited the county fire and police officers to "thank our heroes at Santa Clara Valley Medical Center for all of their life saving."

Some officers also held signs reading "Some heroes wear scrubs" and "We appreciate all of you."

Santa Clara is the Bay Area county hardest-hit by the coronavirus. As of Monday, the county recorded more than 1,666 cases, with 60 deaths.

Last month, six employees tied to one particular unit at Valley Medical Center became sick in March. Four tested positive for COVID-19 and one other died.

Health care workers on the front lines are at a higher-than-average risk for contracting the coronavirus. Across the U.S., up to 20% of coronavirus cases have been found in health care workers, Axios reports, and in California, 2,599 health care workers in the state  roughly 11% of all California cases  tested positive for COVID-19.

"When we're in challenging times like this what we do is hold each other," said Chavez to KGO. "We're not able to do that right now so we're cheering each other."

MORE CORONAVIRUS COVERAGE:

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

Alyssa Pereira is an SFGate digital editor. Email: alyssa.pereira@sfgate.com | Twitter: @alyspereira
Worldwide PC shipments totalled



51.6 million units in the first quarter of 2020, a 12.3 per cent decline from the same period of last year, according to preliminary results by Gartner, Inc.

After three consecutive quarters of growth, the worldwide PC market experienced its sharpest decline since 2013 due to the COVID-19 outbreak, the research and advisory firm said.

The single most significant influencing factor for PC shipment decline was the coronavirus outbreak, which resulted in disruptions to both the supply and demand of PCs, said Mikako Kitagawa, research director at Gartner.

Following the first lockdown in China in late January, there was lower PC production volume in February that turned into logistics challenges.

This quarter's vendor results underscore the growing economic uncertainties that are tightening PC spending, especially among small and midsize businesses.

This uncertainty, coupled with the end of the Windows 10 upgrade peak, is causing enterprises to shift their IT budgets away from PCs and toward strategic business continuity planning , she was quoted as saying in a Gartner statement.

Despite the impact of COVID-19, the top three vendors market share remained unchanged from the previous quarter.

They accounted for 65.6 per cent of PC shipments in the first quarter of 2020, up from just over 60 per cent in the first quarter of 2019.

Although Lenovo maintained its number one position in the worldwide PC market, its shipments declined 3.2 per cent in the first quarter of 2020 and 22.6 per cent year over year in Asia Pacific.

HP Inc.had a challenging first quarter, with a 12.1 per cent decline in PC shipments after three consecutive quarters of shipment growth.

HP recorded double digit shipment declines in all key regions, taking the hardest hit in desk-based PCs in Asia Pacific and Japan.

Dell was the only top vendor that showed year over year shipment growth (rising 2.

2 per cent) despite the impact from COVID-19.

Dell s shipments grew in all regions in the first quarter of 2020, except in Asia Pacific.

Growth was particularly strong in the Americas where Dell experienced relatively stable business PC demand until March.

The first quarter of 2020 was the company s ninth consecutive quarter of shipment growth.

Asia Pacific showed the worst year over year decline of 27.1 per cent since Gartner started tracking the PC market.

With COVID-19 originating in China, the country was the largest contributor to this decline as all business, government and consumer activities came to a halt in February.

Overall PC shipments in China dropped by over 30 per cent compared to a year ago.

Desk-based PCs, the primary commercial PC type for the government and education organisations, experienced the biggest drop of nearly 40 per cent.

Mobile PCs declined less (20 per cent) as notebook demands were driven by remote employees and e-learning students, the statement added.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Source: Xinhua| 2020-04-15 09:45:37|Editor: huaxia

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Members of Chinese medical expert team to Serbia visit a clinic in Belgrade, Serbia, April 11, 2020. (Chinese medical expert team to Serbia/Handout via Xinhua)

China will continue to offer help and support for Serbia's fight against the coronavirus disease, said Chinese President Xi Jinping.



BEIJING, April 14 (Xinhua) -- Chinese President Xi Jinping said Tuesday that China and Serbia have once again demonstrated their brotherly bond and sincere friendship with concrete actions in the face of the COVID-19 challenge.

He made the remarks in a phone conversation with his Serbian counterpart, Aleksandar Vucic.

The China-Serbia relationship is the most profound type of relations between countries, Xi pointed out, adding that the Chinese side empathizes with the COVID-19 threat the Serbian people are facing right now.

Noting that China has provided Serbia with urgently needed medical and protective supplies and sent high-level medical experts to the European country, he said China will continue to offer help and support for Serbia's fight against the coronavirus disease.

Medical supplies donated by China and its companies are unloaded from an airplane in Belgrade, Serbia, March 26, 2020. (Xinhua/Shi Zhongyu)

Xi said he believes that under the strong leadership of Vucic, the courageous Serbian people will surely overcome the epidemic at an early date.

The profound and special friendship between China and Serbia was forged with blood and will, Xi stressed, adding that all risks and challenges, whatever they might be, will only make the two countries' iron-clad friendship even more indestructible.

China, he said, is willing to work with Serbia to steadfastly safeguard international morality and push for solidarity and cooperation of the international community.

Xi said he is confident that through the test of the joint fight against COVID-19, the China-Serbia comprehensive strategic partnership will usher in a better future.

He also expressed his sincere hope that the China-Serbia friendship will flourish forever.

Members of Chinese medical expert team to Serbia pose for a group photo at their residence in Belgrade, Serbia, April 12, 2020. (Chinese medical expert team to Serbia/Handout via Xinhua)

For his part, Vucic said he is sincerely glad that China has brought COVID-19 under control at home.

China offered a helping hand when the Serbian people were in difficulty, and the Chinese medical team in particular provided great support and help for Serbia's epidemic prevention and control, he said, adding that his country will always remember that.

Noting that China has given the Serbian people hope in defeating the epidemic, he stressed that no matter what difficulties and challenges may occur, the Serbian people will always be a sincere and reliable iron-clad friend of the Chinese people.

The Serbian president said that his country will do its best to take good care of Chinese nationals in Serbia, and that he is ready to maintain close contact with Xi.

He also wished the two countries an everlasting friendship. 
A virus-like particle vaccine was shown to be safe and well-tolerated among a healthy adult population living in chikungunya endemic areas, the researchers report in a new study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA).

Even though all the attention and resources are currently directed towards severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) and coronavirus disease (COVID-19), other threats such as the Chikungunya virus can also cause substantial morbidity and, therefore, should not be neglected entirely.

Chikungunya  a continually evolving virus

Chikungunya virus was discovered in the early 1950s after an outbreak in present-day Tanzania. Over the decades, it evolved and affected millions of people in outbreaks across Africa, South America, Asia, and the Caribbean, while smaller outbreaks have been described in Europe as well.

This infectious agent is transmitted by mosquitos from the genus Aedes, causing a febrile disease characterized by joint inflammation and rashes. However, up to 50% of patients may experience debilitating arthritis and fatigue for years after the initial infection.

In addition, Chikungunya virus infections have been linked to a myriad of other complications  including autoimmune disorders, heart problems (cardiomyopathies), and neurological conditions. Therefore, the focus on vaccine development is warranted.

Chikungunya virus, 3D illustration. Emerging mosquito-borne RNA virus from Togaviridae family that can cause outbreaks of a debilitating arthritis-like disease. Illustration Credit: Kateryna Kon / Shutterstock

Virus-like particle (VLP) vaccine: from laboratory to phase 2 clinical trial

Among candidate vaccines for Chikungunya virus, virus-like particle (VLP) vaccines (which are already in use for hepatitis B and human papillomavirus) show an exceptional profile of both safety and effectiveness. Such vaccines mimic authentic native viruses, but lack the viral genome and are thus not infectious.

In 2010, the Vaccine Research Center of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (US National Institutes of Health) developed a candidate Chikungunya VLP vaccine, and phase 1 dose-escalation trial on 25 human participants conducted in 2014 revealed it was both safe and highly immunogenic.

In the current issue of JAMA, the results of a phase 2 placebo-controlled randomized clinical trial with the same vaccine, conducted on 400 participants in a Chikungunya endemic area, have been reported by the group of authors known as the VRC 704 Study Team.

Primary outcomes were safety (concentrating on adverse events and laboratory parameters) and tolerability (potential reactogenicity) of the vaccine. In contrast, the secondary outcome was the immune response four weeks after the second vaccination.

Encouraging results

The Chikungunya virus VLP vaccine is the only protein-based vaccine currently being evaluated in clinical testing", explain study authors led by Dr. Grace L. Chen from the Clinical Trials Program, Vaccine Research Center, National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (US National Institutes of Health).

And the results are encouraging. "The Chikungunya virus VLP vaccine was well tolerated, with no serious adverse events related to the vaccine were reported," they conclude according to the obtained results.

Observed adverse events were mostly mild, such as reaction at the injection site in 32 percent of vaccine recipients (in comparison to 19 percent in the control group). Moreover, all adverse reactions appraised as potentially related to the studied vaccine resolved without any clinical consequences.

The critical finding was that high levels of neutralizing antibodies were demonstrated at week 8 in vaccine recipients, and the persistence of neutralizing antibodies was shown at week 72 (even though there was a notable drop in their levels).

However, phase 3 trials are now needed to adequately assess clinical efficacy, primarily to address the exact correlates of protection and long-term vaccine safety.

Ahead of the mutagenic curve

It is known that the Chikungunya virus is prone to mutations that have led to improved spread to temperate regions and an expanded number of potential hosts. Does the tested vaccine ensure that we can stay ahead of the changing nature of the virus?

"It is reassuring that antibodies produced by this VLP vaccine in mice, nonhuman primates, and humans in the phase 1 trial do neutralize pseudo-typed chikungunya virions of different genotypes", explain Dr. Mark J. Mulligan and Dr. Kenneth Stapleford from the NYU Langone's Department of Microbiology of the NYU Grossman School of Medicine.

"For chikungunya virus, it is only a matter of time before the further spread of this agent of disabling viral arthritis occurs in the Americas," they conclude. Therefore, it is pivotal to keep insisting on developing the vaccine and other countermeasures for this essential human pathogen  regardless of the global focus on the COVID-19 pandemic.
AI Gateway no code Inspection plug-In significantly reduces development and deployment efforts for advanced classification, segmentation, and detection capabilities Pleoras AI Gateway and plug-in skills help organizations quickly realize the business benefits of machine learning, without costly, time-consuming algorithm development or replacing existing infrastructure

Pleora Technologies and Neurocle today announced a technology partnership that simplifies the deployment of deep learning-based classification, segmentation, and object detection capabilities for visual inspection applications. Lead customers are evaluating the AI Gateway and Inspection plug-in developed with Neurocle to reduce errors, false-positives, and secondary screenings in packaging, pharmaceutical, and finished goods analysis applications.

Pleoras AI Gateway and plug-in skills help organizations quickly realize the business benefits of machine learning, without costly, time-consuming algorithm development or replacing existing infrastructure, said Jonathan Hou, Chief Technology Officer, Pleora Technologies. Working with partners including Neurocle, were delivering a unique evolutionary approach to AI that enables quick deployment and continuous training to improve results and lower costs of visual inspection and quality control.

With the Pleora AI Gateway and Inspection plug-In, end-users and integrators can deploy machine learning visual inspection capabilities without any additional programming. Images and data are simply uploaded to Neurocles Neuro-T, deep learning vision software which supports a unique Auto Deep Learning technology with predefined parameters optimized for the NVIDIA GPU in Pleoras AI Gateway. With Pleoras no code approach, AI models are transferred and deployed on the AI Gateway for production environments. In comparison to this plug and play approach, traditional AI algorithm development requires multiple time-consuming steps and dedicated coding to input images, label defects, fine-tune training, and optimize models.

The AI Gateway handles image acquisition from any vision standard-compliant image source and sends out the processed data over GigE Vision to inspection and analysis platforms. This means end-users can avoid vendor lock-in while maintaining infrastructure, processes, and analysis software.

In a quality inspection application, for example, the AI Gateway intercepts the camera image feed and applies the selected Inspection plug-in skills. The gateway then sends the AI processed data to the inspection application, which seamlessly receives the video as if it were still connected directly to the camera. Similarly, the AI Gateway can process imaging data with loaded plug-in skills in parallel to traditional processing tools. If a defect is detected, processed video from the AI Gateway can confirm or reject results as a secondary inspection.

Neuro-T is a user-friendly approach that enables deep learning for visual inspection with just a few clicks, said Hongsuk Lee, Chief Executive Officer, Neurocle. Developing a plug-in solution for the Pleora AI Gateway, were making inspection systems plug and play, enabling automation for manual quality control checks and improving performance of existing systems with deep learning technology.

Pleoras AI Gateway provides additional plug-in AI skills for hyperspectral imaging, with the processing flexibility of an NVIDIA GPU to deploy open source or custom algorithms developed in popular frameworks like TensorFlow and OpenCV. For more visit https://www.pleora.com/products/artificial-intelligence/ai-gateway/.

About Pleora Technologies

Pleora Technologies invented high-performance frame grabbers and embedded hardware for the delivery of sensor data over Gigabit Ethernet, and leads the market in interfaces for USB 3.0. With this spirit of innovation, Pleora engineers reliable sensor interfaces and embedded vision gateways for system manufacturers and camera companies serving the military, medical, and industrial automation sectors. Pleora provides end-to-end solutions that shorten time-to-market, reduce risk, and lower costs. We partner with our customers and tailor products to meet their individual needs. Find out more at pleora.com.

About Neurocle Inc.

Neurocle provides a Deep Learning Vision Software used in various fields including manufacturing, medical & biology, and Security. As a group of computer vision and deep learning experts, Neurocle provides the best-performing deep learning model with Auto Deep Learning algorithm and a reduced weight, which could be integrated with a variety of platforms from embedded processor to GPU. Our products, Neuro-T and Neuro-RT provide streamlined workflow from data labeling and training to model deployment, so that even non-experts can implement the technology to their own business easily and cost-efficiently, while retaining control on the project to the fullest extent. Find out more at neuro-cle.com.
Pretoria (South Africa), April 15, 2020 (SPS) - The South African Ministry of Foreign Affairs stated that the Kingdom of Morocco is a country that occupies parts of Western Sahara, reiterating its principled position in support of the United Nations efforts to resolve the conflict on the basis of international legitimacy and decisions of the African Union.

South Africa's Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation, in response to an article published by the Moroccan media, on the recent debate between South Africa and the United Nations Security Council on the occupied territory of Western Sahara "has ratified its support to the exercise of the right of the Saharawi people to self-determination, stressing that its foreign policy "is always based on principles and not on convenience."

"South Africa's approach to Western Sahara is guided by the position of the African Union, which has always supported the self-determination of the people of Western Sahara, in accordance with AU decisions and UN Security Council relevant resolutions "the South African Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation underlines in a statement published this Monday.

"This statement serves to correct the attempt to caricature South Africa's principled position on issues of anti-occupation and decolonization and aims to correct the attempt to present South Africa's principled positions on these issues as" out of date with most nations of the world " , added the South African ministry.

South Africa "especially regrets that the Security Council was unable to move the peace process forward." This is regrettable, as the people of Western Sahara continue to suffer from the occupation and their fight for their right to self-determination continues. "

As an elected member of the United Nations Security Council, the Ministry stressed that South Africa takes the opportunity to reiterate once again its firm commitment to efforts to achieve a peaceful solution that guarantees the principle of self-determination of the people of the Western Sahara in line with the approach of the United Nations and the African Union.

South Africa "unequivocally and firmly supports the work and mandate of MINURSO and urges the United Nations Security Council to assume its responsibilities and ensure that, through a neutral and balanced approach, it helps the parties to move towards a negotiated mutually and acceptable solution. " SPS

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Indian states are dealing with huge fiscal constraints as they go all out to battle the Covid-19 crisis that has engulfed the nation.

In order to alleviate their woes, they have urged the Centre to set up a separate fund from which money can be given to them, apart from seeking a widening of state fiscal deficit limit and payment of dues by the union government. Their demands are particularly relevant as the lockdown due to the coronavirus has been extended till May 3, though there may be some relaxation April 20 onwards, with respect to economic activities in areas that are not hot ...
RACINE COUNTY  Jonathan Delagrave, the Racine County executive, and Matt Montemurro, president/CEO of Racine Area Manufacturers and Commerce, announced Wednesday the creation of a task force that will discuss how to reopen local businesses in the wake of the COVID-19 outbreak.

The task force will study best practices and existing guidelines on how businesses can reopen as soon as possible, but in the safest possible way to prevent the spread of COVID-19 in Racine County.

The goal is to reduce uncertainty for local businesses, consumers, workers and the general public while adhering to local, state and national guidelines through continued coordination with health officials.

We know businesses and nonprofits face a difficult and challenging phase as they look toward opening back up. We want to support them and learn how best to position them so they are ready to hit the ground running safely and we can continue to protect public health in Racine County, Delagrave said.

We believe businesses can reopen efficiently, safely, and in a way that supports the coordinated COVID-19 response in Racine County. We look forward to helping our great local businesses that have been impacted by the COVID-19 outbreak get back on their feet, Montemurro said.

The task force is forming as Governor Evers Safer at Home order, which closed nonessential businesses in Wisconsin, is currently scheduled to expire on April 24.

The task force will be comprised of representatives from businesses, nonprofits, public health and governmental entities and will present recommendations at the conclusion of their work.

While this effort is in conjunction with RAMAC, the County is actively reaching out to businesses on the west end and throughout Racine County to participate.

Confirmed cases

Racine County has reported a total of 140 confirmed coronavirus cases and six COVID-19 related deaths. according to numbers released Wednesday. The City of Racine Health Department, which covers the city and the villages of Elmwood Park and Wind Point, has 64 cases. The Central Racine County Health Department, which covers the rest of the county, has the remaining 76 confirmed cases.

Elsewhere the area as Of Wednesday:

Kenosha County has 204 confirmed cases and four deaths

Walworth County has 49 confirmed cases and two deaths

Waukesha County has 238 confirmed cases and 10 deaths

Milwaukee County has 1,870 confirmed cases and 105 deaths, the most in the state.

We believe businesses can reopen efficiently, safely, and in a way that supports the coordinated COVID-19 response in Racine County. Matt Montemurro, president/CEO of Racine Area Manufacturers and Commerce
Workers of Chevron Nigeria Limited returning to the companys Escravos operations during the current coronavirus pandemic period will have to undergo a compulsory two-week supervised quarantine.

This is one of the highlights of a new regime of precautionary measures announced by the company on Wednesday to safeguard its operational base to prevent the spread of COVID-19 virus in the area.

Although the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC)/CNL Joint Venture (NNPC/CNL JV) operator said it has continued to operate safely without any coronavirus-related incidents, it adopted the new measures as a further assurance against the deadly virus.

CNLs General Manager, Policy, Government and Public Affairs, Esimaje Brikinn, said the precautionary safeguards would enable the company to provide a controlled environment for very close monitoring of the personnel during the period of the supervised quarantine.

Mr Brikinn said in order to make the safeguard effective, all personnel would first be required to provide a comprehensive travel history before they are placed in the supervised quarantine.

On reports that CNL quarantined some of its staff suspected of having the coronavirus in a hotel in Warri, Delta State, Mr Brikinn denied the story, saying none of the companys employees is known to have contracted the COVID-19 virus.

Based on the directive issued by the Federal Government of Nigeria regarding sustained operations in the oil and gas industry during the period of the Coronavirus pandemic, CNL entered into arrangements with some hotels and other facilities in Warri and Lagos where our staff on rotational duties would be accommodated. During their stay there, their health statuses are monitored to ensure they do not have the COVID-19 virus before returning to work at the companys Escravos Operations, he said.

The first group of personnel scheduled for the quarantine, the spokesperson said, were moved to the designated facilities on Friday, April 10, with other groups expected to follow based on a schedule.

He said the designated personnel would be required to strictly maintain social distancing protocols, personal hygiene, and use of appropriate personal protective equipment during the supervised quarantine period.

We are also working with the hotels and other facilities where the personnel will be placed, to ensure that the hotels and facilities maintained high levels of sanitation and follow strict adherence to all COVID 19 protocols, he stated.

Mr Brikinn said at the end of the two weeks, only those who would be certified free of the COVID-19 virus would be moved to Escravos.

He said anyone with suspected symptoms of the virus during the period would be subjected to further testing for confirmation and subsequently transferred to government designated hospitals for further handling in line with the government approved protocols.

Chevron continues to monitor the coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak around the world and has been utilising the guidance of local and international health authorities.

We are regularly updating our workforce and will continue to adjust plans as appropriate as we receive more information.

Our top priority is to ensure the wellbeing and safety of our workforce and their family members, and we are taking precautionary measures to reduce the risk of exposure, he said.
Face masks as a way to curtail the spread of the coronavirus are about to become more than a suggestion.

The Wolf administration announced this afternoon an order that will go into effect at 8 p.m. Sunday, which in part will require most customers to wear masks while on the premises of all businesses that serve the public within a building or defined area. Employees will need to, as well. These are common-sense actions like cleaning off carts and hand baskets that most employers have already implemented, Wolf said.

That, obviously, includes grocery stores, where the president of the Keystone State of the United Food and Commercial Workers Union Local 1776 told PennLive that consumers have little need for concern over the safety of their meat. Worker safety? Now, thats another issue that hes trying to address.

Meanwhile, the statewide total of positive test results in Pennsylvania rose to 26,490. Thats the fifth-highest total among U.S. states.

Here are other coronavirus stories we didnt want you to miss:

SAT tests to move online, at home if coronavirus forces school closures in fall

Half of all coronavirus deaths in Pa. have occurred in long-term care facilities

Spring gobbler hunting seasons are on as planned, beginning April 25

More than 2 million infected with COVID-19 worldwide: Today in Pa.

Pa. Senate sends bill that would reopen businesses to Gov. Wolf

Lady Gaga raised $35 million in 7 days to benefit WHOs global coronavirus response fund

Wolf, Fetterman create task force to address disproportionate impact of coronavirus on minorities

Pa. prison inmates might be safer from the coronavirus than the general public, statistics seem to show

Nearly 100 prisoners released from Cumberland County amid coronavirus

Debt collectors are allowed to take your coronavirus check, feds say

US retail sales plunge an unprecedented 8.7% in March

PGA Tour to restart with Charles Schwab Challenge in June: report

Best Buy announces temporary furlough of 51,000 employees, while CEO takes 50% pay cut

Sports might return this summer if nobody comes to the stadium, Dr. Anthony Fauci says
The staff at La Grange Hospital is getting fed with the help of thoughtful community members. Not only are businesses and individuals ordering meals for the hard-working healthcare workers, members of Grace Lutheran Church in Western Springs donated granola and energy bars.
Pauline Hanson has slammed calls for Virgin Australia to be given a billion-dollar government bailout.

Virgin Australia chief executive Paul Scurrah has urged the Federal Government to give them a $1.4billion bailout loan to keep the airline afloat during the COVID-19 crisis.

Ms Hanson said Virgin's 'billionaire overseas investors' should pay to cover the airline's dwindling profits.

One Nation leader Senator Pauline Hanson slammed the calls for the taxpayer funded bailout saying she didn't agree with 'Australian's paying to bailout a company' which she said hasn't paid taxes in Australia for six years

'The Australian Government have a choice on their hands right now. Bailout Virgin Australia, or let its billionaire overseas investors stump up the cash?' she wrote.

'The truth is, Australian investors own just 9 per cent of the company. The other 91 per cent is owned by overseas billionaires and foreign governments.'

While hitting out at the idea of taxpayer funded bailout Senator Hanson said she felt for those who worked for the airline in such trying times.

'I feel gutted for the staff of Virgin Australia, because I spend so much time travelling with them' she continued.

'But I don't agree with Australian's paying to bailout a company who hasn't paid tax in this country for the past 6 or more years.'

Virgin cited ongoing discussions involving financial assistance and restructuring alternatives.

The airline has already suspended all but one domestic route, stood down 8000 workers and had its credit rating downgraded.

The announcement from Virgin Australia came a day before the airline agreed to a multi-million dollar deal with Qantas on Wednesday.

The deal would see the airlines partner with the federal government to to support flights between capital cities.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison said any public funding for aviation would be spread across the entire sector.

'We haven't been picking any winners or picking any favourites here,' he told Nine.

'What we have been doing is ensuring sector-wide support, which has been already quite significant for the aviation sector.'

The government has already confirmed it will provide financial support for regional routes and stump up $100million to address the cashflow crisis among a dozen small airlines.

Deputy Prime Minister Michael McCormack is now working directly with Qantas and Virgin on ways to subsidise flights between major cities.

'They have already worked together on international routes that are vital not just for bringing people home or getting people to their homes, but also to support much-needed freight and the transfer of medical supplies,' Mr Morrison said.
Mumbai, April 15 : In a sharp decline over the past few days, Maharashtra recorded nine Covid-19 deaths and 232 new positive cases in the last 24 hours, health officials said here on Wednesday.

This is a significant drop compared to the 18 deaths and 350 new cases announced on Tuesday.

With this, the state's total has gone up to 187 deaths and 2,916 Covid-19 cases.

Of the 9 deaths, Mumbai notched two, including one in Dharavi, taking the city total to 114.

Besides there were six deaths in Pune and one in Akola, with six among all the victims succumbing to various other serious high-risk diseases.

The victims comprise three women and six men, with four aged above 60 years, three in the 40-60 age group and two under-40 years age.

Till date, 295 patients who recovered fully have been discharged, even as 69,738 people are in 'home quarantine' and 5,617 are in institutional quarantine.

A total of 5,394 surveillance teams have fanned out around the state and surveyed a population of over two million.

In Aurangabad, the health authorities implemented a cluster containment plan in RF Colony after a Covid-19 related death was recorded here two days ago and in Jalal Nagar where the victim's contacts were found positive.

Health teams have begun a door-to-door survey for a population of around 5,000 on a regular basis in the famed tourism city which already has 11 containment zones till date.
The Ministry of Health has ordered 48 producers nationwide to report their capacity to manufacture and provide medical masks for the nation's health sector no later than Thursday (April 16).

A worker sews medical masks in the Garment 10 Corporation Joint Stock Company. VNA/VNS Photo Tran Viet

The order came after legal document No 2063/BYT-TB-CT was signed by deputy minister Truong Quoc Cuong on Monday.

Cuong said the producers were told to urgently send their report to the Department of Medical Equipment and Construction at No 138A Giang Vo Street, Ba Dinh District, Hanoi, as well as send an email to the departments official email address at dmec@moh.gov.vn no later than Thursday (April 16).

The document said the move aimed to seriously implement the direction of Prime Minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc as well as the requirement of National Steering Committee for COVID-19 Prevention and Control that asked the ministry to ensure enough medical masks for the fight against the COVID-19 pandemic in the country.

Thus, the ministry asked every producer to take its responsibility to the community, increase production of medical masks, share information and experiences with other medical-mask producers and together work with the ministry in the fight against the pandemic.

Previously, the ministry ordered all 68 producers in the country to report their capacity to manufacture and provide the medical masks.

However, the ministry has received reports of only 20 producers so far. The ministry highly appreciated the 20 producers and criticised the others for their delay in sending their reports.

The ministry would require authorised agencies to consider dealing with producers that failed to send their report as required in accordance with the Law on Prevention and Control of Infectious Diseases. VNS

Vietnam offers little unmet demand for medical mask imports Chinese firms will begin exporting medical face masks, but their choice starting point, Vietnam, has little demand that goes unsatisfied by local producers.

China seeks to import medical face masks from Vietnam In Vietnam, demand for medical face masks and hand sanitizers has increased sharply on fears of potential outbreak of the new coronavirus (nCoV).
Coronavirus: daily death count continues in drop in Spain 523 in last 24 hrs, infections rise 3% to 177,633

(ANSAmed) - ROME, APRIL 15 - The latest 24-hour death toll of people in Spain known to have tested positive for COVID-19 was 523, El Pais quoted the health ministry as saying in its regular briefing.



The number is a slight drop from the previous 24-hour period and raises the total number of recorded COVID-19 deaths to 18,799.



The number of infections rose by 3% to 177,633.(ANSAmed).




Islamabad/IBNS: Pakistan PM Imran Khan received a jolt recently when despite demanding for a COVID-19 relief, he was denied so by the International Monetary Fund (IMF). The South Asian country it seems is not among the nations where the international body extended its help.

The IMF extended the relief to neighbouring Afghanistan.

The IMF recently announced immediate debt service relief to 25 of the IMFs member countries under the IMFs revamped Catastrophe Containment and Relief Trust (CCRT) as part of the Funds response to help address the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Kristalina Georgieva, Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), said in a statement: "This provides grants to our poorest and most vulnerable members to cover their IMF debt obligations for an initial phase over the next six months and will help them channel more of their scarce financial resources towards vital emergency medical and other relief efforts."

"The CCRT can currently provide about US$500 million in grant-based debt service relief, including the recent US$185 million pledge by the U.K. and US$100 million provided by Japan as immediately available resources," she said.

"Others, including China and the Netherlands, are also stepping forward with important contributions. I urge other donors to help us replenish the Trusts resources and boost further our ability to provide additional debt service relief for a full two years to our poorest member countries, she said.

Meanwhile, Pakistan PM imran Khan had recently appealed to international stakeholders for urgent debt relief for developing countries so that they can deal more effectively with the economic fallout from the COVID-19 outbreak.

"Pakistan with a population of 220 million, so far the best stimulus package we can afford is $8 billion," Khan said in the video, as quoted as saying by Business Today.

Pakistan currently has 6146 COVID-19 cases.

The country has reported 113 deaths.

The countries that will receive debt service relief today are:

Afghanistan, Benin, Burkina Faso, Central African Republic, Chad, Comoros, Congo, D.R., The Gambia, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Haiti, Liberia, Madagascar, Malawi, Mali, Mozambique, Nepal, Niger, Rwanda, Sao Tome and Principe, Sierra Leone, Solomon Islands, Tajikistan, Togo, and Yemen.
During a question-and-answer session with government officials in parliament today, Deputy Prime Minister of Armenia Mher Grigoryan said he has received a response to his letter regarding decrease of the price of Russian natural gas and has been told that Gazprom is keeping the issue in its focus.

In his letter, Mher Grigoryan had proposed to launch talks to lower the price of Russian natural gas price on the border.

Mher Grigoryan talked about the price in response to a question from deputy of Prosperous Armenia Party Mikayel Melkumyan, who particularly asked which stage the talks are in since Gazprom Armenia has submitted a bid to the Public Services Regulatory Commission of Armenia to increase the natural gas tariff. Melkumyan added that, in his opinion, the bid needs to be rejected because even though the price of natural gas on the border is $165, the calculation is done within the scope of $135.

In response, Mher Grigoryan stated that this will be touched upon when the bid is considered and the deputy will have the opportunity to express his opinion on the issue.

At the end of the day, the decisions will be taken under Armenias jurisdiction. However, we have to be constructive. After all, Gazprom Armenia is an Armenian resident organization and, in this sense, Armenia needs to be reasonable and mobilize its resources. If Armenia believes there has to be a difference in prices, it has to be neutralized on the border, and this is what the government is trying to do. At some point, this issue will become an item on the agenda of the Armenian-Russian intergovernmental commission, will be an issue for public deliberation, and deputies will be able to express their views.
Indias mobile handset makers can restart production soon, according to press reports, but, unsurprisingly, the companies involved are not confident of getting back to full capacity on that day  or for a while after.

The Indian government has extended the nationwide lockdown till 3 May. However, some economic activity will be permitted from April 20 where coronavirus is not an issue. Stringent social distancing rules will still apply, however.

In the case of mobile phones, new guidelines for states and Union Territories from the Ministry of Home Affairs have permitted mobile handset and component manufacturers to restart production on 20 April. However, labour supply issues (notably the time it may take for migrant workers to return to their jobs), excess stock and lack of physical retail may bring capacity, distribution and demand management problems.

One media outlet has even suggested that handset companies may start with as little as 15 percent of capacity. Government figures suggest there are some 270 factories making handsets and components in India.

Indian media outlets have also indicated that have been requests from a number of brands and industry associations for concessions on the delivery of smartphones and on the movement of components for inland and export purposes at this time of restricted movement.

These may help, if they are granted, but when manufacturing restarts will high-end affordable phones be a thing of the past? The exchange rate, increased GST in India and component pricing may be further headaches for smartphone manufacturers when the market is again able to function.
We live in a society ruled by rankings. Websites are devoted to them; YouTube careers have been built based upon them. Which players we select for fantasy teams, where our kids go to college, who can be trusted for a home improvement project, even which restaurant we should try for dinner are decisions guided by scores or stars.

One of the last industries to enlist the power of ratings is medicine, which arguably covers the area where scoring matters most. In fact, scores are essential. Doctors decisions can be the difference between life and death, or in the case of workers compensation, between an injury that heals properly and one that plagues a patient for the rest of his or her life  be it through a joint that doesnt quite function as it should, bills that send a patient into debt, or a devastating addiction to painkillers.

Some doctors may not seem fond of physician scoring, viewing it as anything from an unwelcome intrusion to a rigged process. As a physician myself, I dont particularly enjoy being graded either, but I welcome it if it helps deliver better care for my patients and ultimately lowers the cost of care.

Physician ratings actually offer a surprising number of benefits to doctors  and they are not alone. Insurance companies and employers as well as patients themselves also have a lot to gain from data-driven scoring.

Modern Physician Scoring

With a movement toward demonstrable results and pay-for-performance initiatives, physician scoring has become a reality, but it has not been without its hurdles. For example, it traditionally has been difficult to assess norms and establish baselines when dealing with small patient populations. There has also been a lack of consensus around what information matters, why, and which measures should be shared with the general public. Not all of these questions have been resolved, but we are getting there.

The advancement of digital records and the shift to cloud-based systems that enable secure sharing of information have dramatically accelerated the adoption of physician scoring by providing larger pools of data to compare, while public reporting projects paved the way for public disclosures. Yet, there is no standardization of criteria or universal rating system for physicians today.

The idea behind physician scoring is quite simple, however: fairly and objectively measure the outcomes of physicians within a similar scope of practice. You have to compare apples to apples. Artificial intelligence-based systems are now making this possible in a way that analyzes a number of highly specific, measurable data points  such as the cost of claims, the duration or use of opioids, and duration of temporary total disability  on top of basic outcomes across enough doctors and patient populations to come up with sophisticated scoring. To fairly measure a quality is a complex process, but with the latest in data analytics and predictive model programming, it is possible.

How It Works for All

The advantages to physician scoring are obvious for the patient. By seeing a doctor with a higher score, the patient is likely to heal and get back to work faster, lessening the impact on day-to-day life.

At the same time, doctors are pushed to deliver better care and adopt best practices. They are driven to provide evidence-based medicine. As a result, their practices flourish as more business is directed their way.

Armed with the right tools to identify the best physicians who can deliver positive outcomes, payors minimize their own costs in paying for care. Cost savings increase even more significantly when you factor in the ability to minimize litigation from claims that go awry based on botched procedures and untimely or inadequate care delivered from poor-performing doctors. Additionally, claims that are directed to highly ranked physicians are resolved faster. This reduces the amount of time each claims team member has to spend per claim, requiring fewer resources to help more people in less time.

Employers who work with organizations that leverage physician scoring also benefit by receiving reassurance that appropriate care is being given to their injured employees, ensuring their well-being and helping them return to work faster, which lessens the impact on the business. Companies also experience savings and lower their own risk of becoming involved in costly, time-consuming litigation that occurs when workers fail to receive quality care.

At a fundamental level, physician scoring enables each of these groups to unite around the common goal of helping injured workers and moving claims to closure through evidence-based medicine.

Case in Point

Perhaps the best way to showcase how physician scoring works for all is with an example. Suppose I am a representative handling workers comp claims. A number of the cases I deal with are in Stockton, California. There is only one knee doctor nearby, and he doesnt have the best score because of his pricing and the number of opioids he prescribes. I dont want to have to send all of my patients all the way to San Francisco to see someone else, however.

If my organization relies on data-driven physician scoring, I can use this information to talk to the local doctor, who does good work regardless of the factors above. We can discuss what he needs to do to bring his score up, based on multiple, objective data points and comparisons to other physicians in the area.

When the doctor sees how his pricing and prescriptive practices line up against other area physicians and he recognizes how it affects his business, he makes a few simple changes to increase his score. Greater pricing transparency is achieved, and alternatives to opioids and/or stricter policies regarding their prescription are also put into place. These changes ultimately are in the best interest of patients. They also make it possible for me to feel comfortable referring patients to a well-qualified practitioner.

Additionally, my organization experiences a benefit from my ability to send patients to an in-network doctor who can resolve a claim effectively and efficiently. Patients employers also see that proper care is being given to employees who wont have to miss as much work  particularly in terms of traveling to follow-up appointments. And patients themselves feel better faster without having to overcome the hurdles that can be associated with an injury.

While physician scoring provides a number of benefits overall, at its root it drives important changes in physician behavior, pushing doctors to do better and sustain excellent practices. This improves medical care and patient healing rates across the board, reducing costs and key pain points for all. And that is a very good thing.
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The global cellular concrete industry is anticipated to garner a CAGR of 5.5% during the forecast period (2017-2023), Market Research Future (MRFR) reveals in a detailed report. Cellular concrete is rapidly replacing traditional concrete materials in the construction sector due to several benefits it provides. It is a lightweight constriction material, which is made of water, Portland cement, compressed air, and foaming agent, and is also termed as aerated concrete.

Market Potential and Pitfalls

The soaring demand for lightweight and strong materials in the construction industry is driving the cellular concrete market across the globe. The surging preference for eco-friendly and cost-effective constructions is fueling the market growth during the assessment period. The production of conventional concrete involves the use of coal to make clinkers, which produces unwanted greenhouse gases. Cellular concrete, on the other hand, is considered an eco-friendly product, which is produced using fly-ash, at lower time and cost than conventional cement. Such benefits are likely to create huge demand from the cellular concrete market. Cellular concrete offers high-fluidity, fire resistivity, high strength, increased durability, mold resistance, and is economical. These properties enable it to offer cost-effective construction and better performance than conventional materials.

On the contrary, foam liquid concentrates used to produce cellular cement may vary from poor to exceptional. This can raise concerns regarding the quality of the product. Moreover, several foam liquid concentrates promoted in the market are not designed for the production of cellular concrete. Such factors are estimated to restrict the market growth in the foreseeable future.

Global Cellular Concrete Market: Segmental Analysis

The global cellular concrete market has been segmented on the basis of application and end user.

By application, the cellular concrete market is segmented into road sub-bases, building material, roof insulation, concrete pipes, bridge abutment, and others. Of these, the building material segment is likely to command the largest market share. The segment will retain its position in the coming years due to its low cost, less labor, and less building time.

By end user, the cellular concrete market is segmented into residential and non-residential. Of these, the non-residential segment is likely to dominate the market as governments of developing as well as developed countries are emphasizing on the development of public infrastructure. This will further accelerate the demand for cellular concrete in the non-residential segment.

Regional Frontiers

Geographically, the global cellular concrete market spans across the Asia Pacific, North America, Europe, and the Rest-of-the-World (RoW).

Considering the global scenario, Europe commanded the largest market share in 2016. Growth in restructuring and remodeling of homes fuel the market growth in the region. Europe is considered the hub of autoclaved aerated concrete blocks manufacturers. This further has a positive impact on the growth of the cellular concrete market in the region.

Asia Pacific is estimated to register the highest CAGR, mainly due to the recent boom in construction activities. India, China, Singapore, and Japan are some of the major countries in the region, contributing to the market growth. Economic growth in APAC has allowed for a greater requirement of commercial and institutional infrastructure spaces. Major players across the world are shifting their production facilities to cater to potential markets in the APAC, due to the availability of ample raw materials and low-cost labor. This has further influenced the growth of the market in the region. Moreover, the Chinese government has issued favorable policies to reduce the proportion of down payment for second house loans and to exempt of sales tax for ordinary housing, which has encouraged the market growth in the region.

North America is considered a prominent market for the cellular concrete market due to increasing residential and non-residential construction activities in the region.

Industry Updates

July 2019: CEMATRIX Corporation has recently announced that the companys wholly-owned operating subsidiaries MixOnSite USA Inc. and CEMATRIX (Canada) Inc. have secured around $1.1 million in U.S. and new Canadian infrastructure contracts.

Competitive Dashboard

The players operating in the global cellular concrete market include Xella Group (Germany), Saint Gobain (France), Cematrix (Canada), Cellucrete (U.S.), Laston Italiana S.P.A (Italy), Litebuilt (Australia), Aerix Industries (U.S.), Cellular Concrete Technologies (U.S.), B. G. Shirke Construction Technology Pvt. Ltd (India), ACICO (Kuwait), Conco (U.S.), Broco Industries (Indonesia), CellFill, LLC (U.S.), JK Lakshmi Cement Ltd (India), and Aircrete Europe (Netherlands).
At CardFlight, were committed to small businesses and the channel that supports them best, said Marla Knutson, SVP of Strategic Partnerships. Were grateful to the team at Payroc for working with us to put this program into action so quickly to help merchants across the U.S. during this crisis.

CardFlight, the leading SaaS payment technology company, today announced it has partnered with Payroc, a leading merchant acquirer and payment processing organization, to support small businesses nationwide in weathering the impact of the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic. The companies have collaborated to provide merchants from highly impacted industries with access to SwipeSimple, CardFlights signature payment acceptance solution, for no additional charge through July 31, 2020. The addition of SwipeSimple enables these restaurants and specialty food businesses to collect payment at the curbside as they rapidly pivot their businesses in order to continue serving customers.

At CardFlight, were committed to small businesses and the channel that supports them best, said Marla Knutson, Senior Vice President of Strategic Partnerships. Were grateful to the team at Payroc for working with us to put this program into action so quickly to help merchants across the U.S. during this crisis.

SwipeSimple has been added to existing Payroc merchant accounts for restaurants and other specialty food businesses, who have been especially affected as more cities and states enact social distancing measures preventing traditional retail transactions. The merchants supported through this program are primarily food and beverage merchants required to transition to take-out and delivery service only. By adding SwipeSimple features at no additional charge, CardFlight and Payroc have enabled merchants efforts to rapidly pivot to supporting curbside, contactless, and back-office payments during the pandemic.

We are dedicated to helping our merchants make it through this unprecedented time, said Adam Bloomston, President at Payroc. When CardFlight came to us with the idea for this relief program, we were immediately on board. Our teams worked together to implement it and were able to roll this out in less than a week to start helping small business owners right away.

Small businesses who have received this relief can use SwipeSimple for curbside and other contactless payments. They also gain access to the robust business insights and reporting tools within SwipeSimple, making it easier for merchants to manage and track payments. Trusted by more than 60,000 merchants in all 50 states, SwipeSimple allows small businesses to easily navigate the complex payment landscape, especially during this turbulent time when every transaction can make a difference.

About CardFlight

CardFlight is a leading SaaS payment technology company making payment acceptance effortless and simple, by creating cutting-edge solutions designed to help small businesses grow.

SwipeSimple, a signature CardFlight product, reaches businesses through a sales channel of financial institutions, independent sales organizations, and merchant service providers. Used by more than 60,000 small businesses in the U.S., across all 50 states, SwipeSimple empowers entrepreneurs to accept payments on the go, in their stores, and at their computers.

CardFlight takes pride in building forward-thinking solutions defined by reliability and driven with the end-users goals in mind. The company is headquartered in New York City, with additional offices in Lincoln, NE. For more information, visit http://www.cardflight.com.
In Afghanistan, the Taliban has dispatched health teams to far-flung provinces to confront the coronavirus. In Mexico, drug cartels are offering aid packages to those feeling its economic impact. In Brazil and El Salvador, gangs enforce curfews to prevent its spread.

As governments around the world have responded to the coronavirus, so too have armed insurgents and terrorist groups and drug cartels and gangs, a parallel underworld of public health policy and strategic messaging.

It is hardly the first time such groups have attempted to fill the role of government. But few crises in modern times have tested the limits of the world's nation-states as the coronavirus has, providing an opening for armed groups to step in where presidents, police forces and parliaments have failed.

Some groups have attempted to weave governments' failures to control the virus into their own propaganda narratives. In Somalia, al-Qaida-linked al-Shabab fighters say the pandemic was spread "by the crusader forces who have invaded the country." The Islamic State has told followers to prepare to exploit their enemies while they are overwhelmed by outbreaks. In Yemen, Houthi rebels have accused Saudi Arabia of airdropping masks infected with covid-19.

In eastern Afghanistan, where the Afghan government and the Taliban have clashed for nearly two decades, the rivalry over which group has a more effective health policy is now on full display.

Esmatullah Asim, a provincial council member from Wardak province, watched the arrival of Taliban forces in medical gear this month and was impressed. Asim said the government quarantines only those who show symptoms at the border, but the Taliban quarantines every person who has returned recently from Iran.

"The Taliban quarantine is much better than the government," he said. The group also raises awareness about the virus in the territory it controls, he said. "They stop the vehicles, telling the passengers how to prevent the spread of the virus."

Even the U.S. State Department conveyed kudos.

"We join the Afghan Ministry of Public Health in welcoming the Taliban's efforts to raise awareness against #COVID19 and their offer of safe passage to health workers & international organizations working to prevent the spread of the virus," the department wrote in a tweet.

Analysts who study the organizational structure of armed groups are now cataloguing dozens of instances of rebels and bandits making forays into public health policy.

"In some cases, the government just isn't coming to help, so this is a chance for nonstate armed groups to appear to be the responsible, accountable actor," said Sarah Parkinson, an assistant professor of political science and international studies at Johns Hopkins University. "In other cases, it's concern for their own members. And in others, it's an attempt to use a piece of evidence in their own propaganda war."

Some governments have acknowledged that armed groups could exploit their weaknesses after the virus fades, seizing on the aftermath of economic dislocation.

The mayor of the Italian city of Palermo, Leoluca Orlando, warned this month that "a den of Mafia jackals" is poised "to exploit the desperation of the new poor from coronavirus." Other Italian officials have suggested that the mafia could provide its own loans or cash handouts to undermine the government.

In Mexico, at least two drug cartels have begun providing aid packages to residents in places partially controlled by armed groups. In Michoacan, a video emerged last week of the Los Viagras cartel handing out plastic bags of food to hundreds of people. In Tamaulipas, a Mexican state that borders southern Texas, photos circulated of boxes full of sugar, oil and other staples distributed in large piles. On the top of each box was plastered the name of the donor: "Gulf Cartel," they said, "in support of Ciudad Victoria," the state capital.

Falko Ernst, an analyst with the International Crisis Group in Mexico, said there was an "obvious tension" in the effort.

"These groups are trying to be seen as catering materially and providing a notion of security in places where they are also directly preying on the population through extortion and kidnapping and violence," he said. "But in a lot of places, these groups are the least bad solution for populations that don't have anywhere else to turn."

In Brazil's favelas, the messages come through WhatsApp.

"Whoever is caught on the street will learn how to respect the measure," one gang warned a Rio de Janeiro slum. "We want the best for the population. If the government is unable to manage, organized crime resolves."

Last month, as the Salvadoran government was enforcing one of Latin America's earliest and most stringent lockdowns, leaders of MS-13 decided that they would institute their own curfew. It was a rare overlap of policy between the gang and the government, which have fought each other for years.

But it also reflected a reality in much of El Salvador: The police have limited access in neighborhoods under criminal control, and in those places, only a gang-enforced curfew would be observed. MS-13 explained its reasoning to the San Salvador newspaper El Faro: The policy was about protecting its own members, who probably wouldn't have access to medical treatment if they were infected.

"If there are no respirators left and one of us is gravely ill, all tattooed, and an old woman appears who is in serious condition, they are going to disconnect the gang member and they are going to let him die," one member said.

A similar overlap in policy has occurred in Afghanistan, where the Taliban has dispatched teams that distribute gloves, soap and masks in areas under its control.

But while the insurgents and the government agree on the need to combat the virus, they continue to fight each other.

"We can't completely stop our attacks," Taliban spokesman Zabiullah Mujahid said. He blamed the government for "compelling" them.

Advocacy groups have encouraged more coordination between the Taliban and the Afghan government to tackle the coronavirus. Human Rights Watch proposed videoconferences with "representatives from the Public Health Ministry, the Taliban's health commission, the U.N. Assistance Mission in Afghanistan and key international humanitarian agencies."

In many countries, police have been redeployed from rural to urban areas, giving criminal groups more room to operate with impunity - and to enforce their own health policy as the pandemic spreads.

In some cases, "criminal groups will play the role of enforcer with full agreement and even at the request of the state," wrote Vanda Felbab-Brown of the Brookings Institution. "Such deals in which governments outsource the rule of urban and rural peripheries to criminal groups long preceded covid-19."

Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, the militant group that dominates Syria's northern Idlib province, has used the virus to burnish its credentials as a legitimate governing body, issuing orders restricting gatherings and distributing health information to the public.

No cases have been reported in the province. Public health officials and aid workers say the spread of the virus in the crowded refugee camps of Idlib, among a population with little access to health care, would be calamitous.

"The large number of our people gathered in a small geographic space, and the monumental population density in the camps, forecasts disastrous results if the epidemic spreads," said Ayman Jibis, the health minister for the Hayat Tahrir al-Sham-created Salvation Government.

- - -

Sieff reported from Mexico City. George reported from London. Fahim reported from Istanbul. The Washington Post's Sharif Hassan in Kabul; Haq Nawaz Khan in Peshawar, Pakistan; and Sarah Dadouch in Beirut contributed to this report.
Hours after Prime Minister Narendra Modi extended the coronavirus-enforced nationwide lockdown to May 3, close to a 1,000 migrant workers gathered outside Bandra railway station, after they heard rumours that the government was running a special train for migrants to return home. The situation eventually forced the Mumbai Police to resort to lathi-charge to disperse the migrants  most of them from Uttar Pradesh and West Bengal  who were demanding the state help them return home. A police officer said the migrants, who assembled around 3pm, were dispersed two hours later.

The incident snowballed into a political blame game between the ruling and opposition parties in Maharashtra as tourism minister Aaditya Thackeray took aim at the Union government for failing to take a call on arranging a way back for these migrant workers, while the state Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) unit called the incident a failure of the state.

Home minister Anil Deshmukh, meanwhile, directed the police to investigate who spread the rumours about the train and take stern action against those found guilty.

While the Bandra police filed an FIR against 700 unidentified persons, the Navi Mumbai police detained an Airoli resident for allegedly uploading a video on social media which officers said may have helped spread the rumours.

The man has been handed over to Bandra police. They will carry out further investigation; we cant reveal anything, said Yogesh Gawde, senior inspector at Rabale police station.

Tuesdays scenes were a replay of the events in Delhi last month. Daily wage workers have been rendered jobless ever since the lockdown was announced late last month to stem the spread of coronavirus, making their life a struggle. Despite authorities and NGOs making arrangements for their food, most of them want to go back to their home to escape the hardships brought by the curbs.

Vijayalaxmi Hiremath, senior police inspector at Bandra police station, said, We received information about people having gathered outside Bandra railway station around 3.30pm. A team of police officers rushed to the spot and found close to a 1,000 people gathered there.

Additional reinforcement was called from the reserved police force zonal office and from the neighbouring police stations of Khar and Santacruz. We tried to make them understand, and asked them to return to their houses, but the crowd was not in a mood to listen, said Hiremath.

The workers were protesting against extension of the lockdown, saying they do not have access to food and other essentials, said a western railway (WR) official, who did not want to be named.

The Bandra police, in co-ordination with the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC), also arranged for a truckload of essential commodities for the people who had gathered there. But they refused to accept it, and started heckling the police personnel on duty.

There are around 10 CCTV cameras in the area and we have footage from a drone, which will help us identify the people who were part of the crowd, said Hiremath.

Farooq Shaikh, a daily-wage worker who stays at Behrampada in Bandra (East), said, I am from Malda in West Bengal. We heard the government was running a special train from Mumbai. So we packed our luggage to leave the city as we have lost our jobs.

Zahid Mistri, also from Malda and who lives in Bandra, said, We are out of food and now the lockdown has been extended. How will we survive here in Mumbai? We came to know about a special train running for migrants, so we gathered.

Abhishek Trimukhe, deputy commissioner of police, zone 9, said, We have registered an offence.

Chief minister Uddhav Thackeray, who addressed the state via Facebook Live, said no one should politicise the issue of migrants and asked labourers cooperation to fight the current situation. Thackeray also warned people against misleading them and disturbing the law-and-order situation.

He urged the migrant workers not to worry and stay in the state until lockdown continues. He said that they are safe in Maharashtra and will be allowed to go to their native places the day the lockdown is over.

The chief minister said someone must have misled them that trains are starting from today, as a result, they have gathered there. We have many people who could do this. Do not try to play with their emotions and create law-and-order situation in the state. I will take strict action against such people. I also ask people not to politicise the issue. This is the time to remain united and fight the pandemic, the chief minister said.

Thackeray switched to Hindi during his address and told the migrants, Why are you worried? You are with us, staying in my state. You will be safe here. There is nothing to worry about. We are not feeling happy to lock you like this. We have to face the challenge unitedly. The day lockdown will be relaxed, you will be allowed to go to your homes. Im in contact with the Central government regularly.

He also said that the state has made arrangements of food and stay of around six lakh migrant workers, along with medical facilities. The state also increased the scope of Shiv Bhojan thali, subsidised meal scheme, to 80,000 per day.

Devendra Fadnavis, former chief minister and leader of Opposition in Maharashtra, said the incident highlighted the failure of the state government.

The incident that happened in Bandra is serious. We have been telling the state government from day one to arrange for essential rations for migrants, who do not have ration cards. But the state government has failed to do so. Migrants coming out and demanding food or allowing them to leave for their home state is a failure of the government. It is surprising, that instead of helping the people, ministers are blaming the Central government in an attempt to hide their failure. It is shameful that the government is playing politics at such a time. I urge the state government to hear the people on how they want the ration and food, he said.

Railway authorities also stated that there were rumours on the commencement of train services, however, a notification was issued on the extension of the cancellation of train services. It is clarified that all passenger train services on Indian Railways, including premium trains, mail/express trains, passenger trains, suburban (local) trains, shall continue to remain cancelled till 12am, May 3, as per guidelines of the Government of India, said a statement from the Western railway.

Tourism minister Aaditya Thackeray took to social media to announce that the crowd had been dispersed but also took a swipe at the Central government.

Thackeray said the migrant workers wanted to go back to their hometowns and many were refusing to eat and stay in labour camps.

The current situation at Bandra Station, now dispersed or even the rioting in Surat is a result of the Union Government not being able to take a call on arranging a way back home for migrant labour. They dont want food or shelter, they want to go back home. tweeted Aaditya Thackeray.

Thackeray also reiterated the state governments demand to operate trains for 24 hours for migrant labourers.

Right from the day the trains have been shut down, the State had requested trains to run for 24 hours more so that migrant labour could go back home. Chief Minister Uddhav Thackeray raised this issue in the PM- CM video conference as well requesting a roadmap for migrant labour to reach home, he said.

The FIR against around 700 people has been registered at Bandra police station, under sections 143 (punishment whoever is a member of an unlawful assembly), 147 (punishment for rioting), 149 (every member of unlawful assembly, guilty of offence committed in prosecution of common object), 186 (obstructing public servant in discharge of public functions) , 188 (disobedience to order duly promulgated by public servant), 269 (negligent act likely to spread infection of disease dangerous to life) and 270 (malignant act likely to spread infection of disease dangerous to life) of the India Penal Code (IPC) and section 3 of the epidemic diseases act 1897.

Meanwhile, more than 100 migrant labourers came out on the streets in Mumbra on Tuesday, demanding they be sent to their homes in Uttar Pradesh and Bihar. After the lockdown was extended, they panicked. They came out in droves from their homes and blocked the roads near Rashid Compound at Mumbra around 1.30pm.

Mumbra police and State Reserve Police Force (SRPF) personnel reached the spot and stopped them from agitating. They started announcing over megaphones to disperse, saying the government will continue to give them food and shelter. It took around 20 minutes for the police to remove them from the streets.

Deputy commissioner of police, S Burse, said, Around 120 people came to the streets and started demanding transport to return to Uttar Pradesh and Bihar. Most of them stay in Mumbra on rent. We assured them that all their basic needs would be met. In Kalyan, police saw a crowd of people near Kalyan station area. They were waiting for an ST bus. The cops told them to go home and they immediately dispersed.

(with inputs from agencies)
The UK Health Secretary Matt Hancock recently announced that the UK governments National Health Service (NHS) is planning to release an app that will alert people who have been in the proximity of a self-reported symptomatic individual  via anonymous phone-to-phone alerts.

Hancock said all data would be handled according to the highest ethical and security standards, and would only be used for NHS care and research. If you become unwell with the symptoms of coronavirus, you can securely tell this new NHS app," he explained. "And the App will then send an alert anonymously to other app users that you've been in significant contact with over the past few days, even before you had symptoms so that they know and can act accordingly we wont hold it [the data] any longer than is needed.

Contact tracing in the COVID-19 pandemic. Image Credit: Bob Boz / Shutterstock B By

Why is contact tracing important?

Contact tracing, which involves tracking all individuals who have been in contact with a suspected or confirmed case, is a public health intervention that could play a huge part in mitigating the COVID-19 pandemic. It slows the virus spread by informing those who have been exposed and reminding them to self-isolate. This message is what the NHS app is designed to do.

Experts worldwide stress the importance of contact tracing, and governments are listening: Singapore released a contact-tracing app called TraceTogether in March. Now the UK looks to be next.

How does the app work?

The system is relatively simple: if you feel unwell, you enter your symptoms into the App. Local health agencies then test you, and if you test positive for the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), you use the App to find out whos been close to you. The App then alerts these people that they have been close to someone infected, without the possibility of them identifying you from the message. The identity of the infected individuals is never publicly released: its stored in an encrypted code thats only accessible to public healthcare organizations.

Apple and Google, two of the biggest phone manufacturers in the world, have teamed up to create the backend application program interface, or API, for the App. Their technology uses Bluetooth wireless radio signals called digital identifiers (which are both anonymous and change frequently) to communicate between phones, identifying whos been close enough to be at risk. Apple and Google have been developing the software for almost three weeks now, and hope to release it for government use in May.

Ultimately, they plan to incorporate the App into iOS and Android operating systems. This will allow a more significant percentage of the general population to have access to the alert system. Such an expansion of use could potentially have a huge impact: iOS and Android are the systems that run practically all the smartphones in the world.

The collaborating companies are planning to extend this software to governments first, and then integrate the software into their respective operating systems in the coming months. Google plans to do this via its ubiquitous Play Store system.

Tracing contacts without betraying the identity

One of the most important things about the NHS app is that it doesnt track the users absolute location, as some other methods do. Instead, it measures the phones proximity to other phones. This does not guarantee absolute privacy, but it is a step up from location-tracking software like those based on GPS.

A significant [and obvious] requirement of this technology is that a large number of people use them. Many worry that the government may make the use of this system mandatory. However, both Apple and Google insist that they wont allow their technology to be used in this manner. Anyone who doesnt want to participate can delete the App, and they wont track them, says an Apple representative.

The major weaknesses of this approach

Unless a large percentage of people opt in to use this App, it will not succeed in tracing contacts well enough to be of use. Experts worry that without government directives, voluntary participation will be too low to be of benefit.

A government may require the use of its own public server to participate, which will hinder participation by those who habitually distrust the authorities.

Bluetooth signals are also sometimes liable to be inaccurate or to falsely identify someone in proximity when the individual is 6 feet or more away.

Counter-arguments to public data collection

Everyone is not convinced that this is in the best interest of public privacy, though. Professor Ross Anderson of Cambridge University says, "I recognize the overwhelming force of the public-health arguments for a centralized system, but I also have 25 years' experience of the NHS being incompetent at developing systems and repeatedly breaking their privacy promises when they do manage to collect some data of value to somebody else."

A former head of MI5 Lord Evans of Weardale worries that this could be a real intrusion into peoples private lives.

This needs to be properly debated, it needs to be open in the way it is debated, there needs to be rules, and there needs to be redress if something goes wrong, Lord Evans added. Were only going to get public support if we have those criteria met. However, in a joint statement by both software giants, they said, Through close cooperation and collaboration with developers, governments, and public health providers, we hope to harness the power of technology to help countries around the world slow the spread of COVID19 and accelerate the return of everyday life.
The head of the World Health Organization, Dr. Tedros Adhanom Gebreyesus, was a senior capo for the Tigray Peoples Liberation Front (TPLF) gangster mafia that ruled Ethiopia from 1991-2018. During that time he served as Health Minister and Foreign Minister, cementing his credentials as a member of the inner circle of what was one of if not the most corrupt, brutal and genocidal regimes to set foot on this planet in the past 30 years.

From 2007 to Ethiopias Peaceful Revolution in 2018 Dr. Tedros was complicit in the TPLFs crime of genocide against the Somali people of the Ogaden with the genocidal blockade of food and medicine to the region. He was part of expelling the Red Cross and Doctors Without Borders from the Ogaden during a series of Cholera outbreaks and in

helping deny medicine to the Somali Ogadenis he oversaw the deaths of untold thousands during a series of historical droughts, famines and epidemics.

Dr. Tedros did not just cover up cholera epidemics, he was complicit in a medicine blockade to those affected.

And this ganster is today the head of the WHO? How the hell did this happen? Deja Vu Anthony Lake, the CIA and UNICEF?

In 2016 a revolutionary situation was developing in Ethiopia with the TPLF mafias days clearly numbered. Dr. Tedros read the writing on the wall and made himself available to serve the interests of Pax Americana at the UN. Being the USA is the major contributor to the WHO his vetting for its head by the CIA was a must. Having demonstrated suitablity for the job by overseeing genocide made him eminently qualified and during the early days of the Trump Regime in 2017 he made his move from the sinking ship in Addis Ababa to Switzerland and the fat salaries of the UN.

Today he finds himself on the hot seat with a 100 year global flu pandemic raging. For almost three years he remained quiet about the almost total lack of preparation at the WHO for what numerous panels had warned was inevitable, a highly contagious and deadly virus quickly spreading across the world. Where were the stockpiles of protective supplies the public health professionals called for, repeatedly. Where were the stockpiles of medical equipment? Where were the testing kits the esteemed Doctors urgently spoke of?

Where was Dr. Tedros? Holding press conferences expressing the urgency of the matter? Raising a hue and cry about the potential for disaster predicted by his professional colleagues?

Dr. Tedros was missing in action to put it simply, his silence was deafening, just as was his silence when his comrades in the once Marxist Leninist Hoxha-ite TPLF mafia in Ethiopia blockaded medicine during a cholera epidemic.

No preparation leads to crisis management and Dr. Adhanom admitting mistakes were made by this failure of leadership in the face of a global crisis. But then what should we expect from someone who made his bones complicit in mass murder in the Ogaden?

Thomas C. Mountain is an historian and educator, living and reporting from Eritrea since 2006. See thomascmountain on Facebook and he can only be contacted via email at thomascmountain at g mail dot com
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The number of daily coronavirus tests is hovering around 10,000 short of where ministers hope to be this week.

Figures released on Wednesday show there were almost 16,000 tests carried out on Tuesday, 14 April, compared to below 15,000 the previous two days.

But at the start of April Housing Secretary Robert Jenrick said ministers wanted to carry out 25,000 tests by the middle of this month.

The daily testing rates also highlight how far the government is from its official daily target of 100,000 tests by the end of April, two weeks away.

The figures have now hovered between 14,000 and nearly 16,000 for three days in a row, down from highs of 18,000 and 19,000 last week.

The commitment to 100,000 daily tests was made by Health Secretary Matt Hancock after the government came under increasing pressure over the low number of tests carried out in the UK compared to other countries, especially Germany.

Following a public outcry, ministers also announced spare capacity in the system would be used to test NHS workers, amid fears many were languishing at home unable to come to work because they did not know if they had the disease or not.

Figures released today show more than 50,000 health service workers have now received a test for coronavirus and that the number of NHS staff off sick has fallen as a result.

In England 5 per cent of doctors and 8.4 per cent of nurses are currently on sick leave, down from 5.3 per cent and 8.6 per cent on Monday.



Downing Street insisted that the 100,000-tests-a-day target remained in place.

"We continue to make progress in terms of boosting the capacity which we have in labs, and our overall commitment remains the same, which is to achieve 100,000 tests by the end of the month," the prime minister's official spokesman said.

Some 14,982 tests were carried out in the 24 hours up to 9am on Tuesday, Downing Street confirmed.

There was the capacity to test more than 19,000 people a day, No 10 said, and capacity was increasing all of the time, both in terms of drive-through sites and in NHS labs.

At the start of April Mr Jenrick said capacity at that stage had reached 12,750.

Asked when 25,000 tests a day would be performed he told Sky News: "We'd like to be at that position by mid-April."

Downing Street also said that so-called surge capacity in the NHS was "holding up well across the country.

Nightingale hospitals in London, Manchester and Birmingham are already open and caring for small numbers of patients.

Harrogate's hospital will officially open next week, while work is under way at sites in Bristol, Exeter and Sunderland.
The coronavirus pandemic has now



spread to 24 out of 52 districts of Madhya Pradesh, where 59 per cent of the state's population resides, data shows.

Within two weeks, from March 31 to the morning of April 15, the number of COVID-19 cases in the state increased 13 times.

However, officials point out that about 80 per cent of the patients have been found in Indore and Bhopal districts alone.

As per the 2011 census, the population of the state was around 7.26 crore. The 24 districts where coronavirus patients have been detected are home to 4.29 crore people.

Also, no coronavirus case was found among the local population in Satna, but it figures in the list of virus- affected districts as two persons arrested under the National Security Act in Indore and shifted to a jail in Satna tested positive.

If Satna is excluded, remaining 23 affected districts house 55 per cent of population.

"The number of affected districts looks high, but around 80 per cent of the cases are reported in two districts



Indore and Bhopal. So the virus has affected these two districts the most, especially Indore," said Mohammed Suleman, Additional Chief Secretary, Public Health and Family Welfare.

Of 874 COVID-19 cases in the state, 544 or over 62 per cent are from Indore. One hundred and fifty-eight cases -- 18 per cent -- have been reported from the state capital.

The number of COVID-19 patients in Madhya Pradesh was 66 on March 31.

As of April 14, 12,940 samples had been sent for coronavirus test across the state.

Asked about the increasing numbers, eminent cardiologist Dr Skand Trivedi said, "Imagine that 100 thieves are roaming free and police catch two, and sometimes a strict officer catches hold of ten. It does not mean the actual number of thieves has increased."



He also said that being a carrier of virus does not necessarily mean the person is suffering from the disease.

"The coronavirus may be dead or alive inside the human body. Immunity is key. Over a period of time, the human body may develop immunity against this virus, like many other diseases," he added.

Physical distancing is the best preventive cure, he added.

Dr Trivedi also pointed out that mortality rate among COVID-19 patients is only two per cent and many of the deceased also had other ailments.

"If we test more and isolate the people then this rate would come down to less than 0.7 per cent," he added.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
The president is concerned about mass incidence during the religious services

Open source

The provocations with urges to violate quarantine may occur before Easter as the Office of the President of Ukraine reported.

It is noted that before the Easter holidays the provocations may occur with the urges to violate quarantine and protection events, the message said.

President Zelensky noted that the crowds during religious services are most unsafe as for today. It may become the direct reason of coronavirus infection and facilitate the spread of Covid-19.

As we reported, 85% of pollees are not going to church on Easter, only 4% are going to attend divine services, and 7% - will just consecrate the Easter basket.

Meanwhile, President Zelensky stated that we could talk about improving the situation with coronavirus in the country after Orthodox Easter.

On March 13, the government closed the border for foreigners. Starting from midnight on March 17, Ukraine closed all types of movement through the state border within the measures on the fight against coronavirus pandemic. The ban was introduced for the international railway, air and bus traffic. However, the evacuation of the Ukrainians continued. On March 25, the Cabinet of Ministers extended quarantine for 30 days, up to April 24. Besides, the state border was completely closed on March 28.
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A decade of austerity policies left the UK unprepared for the coronavirus outbreak, leading to unnecessary deaths, a former government chief scientific adviser has said.

Professor Sir David King said that the governments imposition of lockdown measures came too late with every day of delay costing lives.

And he said that ministers who pushed ahead with a containment strategy rather than implementing widespread testing and early restrictions on social life had taken their eyes off the ball, hoping it would somehow blow away.

Comparing the UK response unfavourably to countries such as Greece and Rwanda, he said the government now needs to massively step up measures including testing on a far wider scale.

Prof King, who was chief scientific adviser to Tony Blair and Gordon Brown from 2000-07, said that a report on pandemic preparedness published set out in 2006 the need for swift restrictions on social activities.

High noon in a coronavirus-stricken world Show all 18 1 /18 High noon in a coronavirus-stricken world High noon in a coronavirus-stricken world Najaf, Iraq A man holds a pocket watch at noon, at an almost empty market near the Imam Ali shrine Reuters High noon in a coronavirus-stricken world Bangkok, Thailand Wat Phra Si Rattana Satsadaram (The Temple of the Emerald Buddha, part of The Grand Palace) Reuters High noon in a coronavirus-stricken world Prague, Czech Republic An empty street leading to the historic Old Town Square Reuters High noon in a coronavirus-stricken world Washington DC, US Lawn stretching towards the Capitol, home of Congress Reuters High noon in a coronavirus-stricken world Jerusalem's Old City A watch showing the time in front of Damascus Gate Reuters High noon in a coronavirus-stricken world London, UK The Houses of Parliament seen from Westminster Bridge Reuters High noon in a coronavirus-stricken world Wuhan, China Empty lanes in the city that saw the first outbreak of disease Reuters High noon in a coronavirus-stricken world Havana, Cuba The Malecon road and esplanade winds along the city's seafront Reuters High noon in a coronavirus-stricken world Cairo, Egypt A little busier than elsewhere: midday traffic in Tahrir Square Reuters High noon in a coronavirus-stricken world Berlin, Germany The Brandenburg Gate, the only surviving city gate in the capital Reuters High noon in a coronavirus-stricken world Caracas, Venezuela Bolivar Avenue, opened in 1949 and the site of many demonstrations and rallies Reuters High noon in a coronavirus-stricken world Moscow, Russia Spasskaya Tower (left) on the eastern wall of the Kremlin, and St Basil's Cathedral Reuters High noon in a coronavirus-stricken world Istanbul,Turkey The harbourside Eminonu district is usually buzzing with activity Reuters High noon in a coronavirus-stricken world New Delhi, India Rajpath, a ceremonial boulevard that runs through the capital Reuters High noon in a coronavirus-stricken world Amman, Jordan The Roman amphitheatre that dates back to the 2nd century AD Reuters High noon in a coronavirus-stricken world New York City, US The main concourse of Grand Central station in Manhattan Reuters High noon in a coronavirus-stricken world Kiev, Ukraine Maidan Nezalezhnosti, the site of many political protests since the end of the Soviet era Reuters High noon in a coronavirus-stricken world Accra, Ghana The odd walker out in the midday sun on Ring Road Central Reuters

Why we didnt respond so much sooner once this epidemic broke out in China, I simply dont know, he told LBC Radio.

I say this because in 2006, we published a report on actions needed to deal with a pandemic and in that report we showed that if an outbreak occurred of any new virus of this kind, anywhere in the world, within three months - due to air travel - it would be everywhere in the world.

That, of course, is what has happened  and it seems that we were unprepared and we didnt take action.

He was highly critical of decisions to allow mass gatherings like the Cheltenham horse-racing festival to go ahead as lat as 16 March, warning: We didnt manage this until too late and every days delay has resulted in further deaths in the United Kingdom.

Prof King said that the failure to include deaths outside hospitals in official statistics on Covid-19 deaths meant the authorities havent a clue of the true death toll in the outbreak.

The UK could be facing a really awful figure as much as 50 per cent above the rolling total announced each day by Public Health England, he suggested.

Asked why the UKs response was slower than in other countries, he said: It goes right back to 2010, when the government came in with a very clear policy to reduce public spending across the board, including the National Health Service.

Im afraid these austerity measures did lead to the cutting back on the risk management programmes and clearly this also managed to cause problems with flooding across the UK For me, this is very upsetting because we had set this preparation process in place, as I say, back in 2006.

When interviewer Nick Ferrari asked whether austerity measures cost lives, Prof King replied: Absolutely. That is what Im saying.

Sir David King (ANDY PARADISE)

He added: The government, at this point in time, needs to massively step up measures.

Until we get testing done on a very much wider scale, were not going to begin to manage this.

If we go around the world and see where there has been better behaviour, it isnt only in the wealthy countries.

You go to Greece and the management of the epidemic starting very, very early on has been really astoundingly good. Go to Africa, go to Rwanda, youll find the same thing.

So I think it has been taking the eye off the ball, hoping that it would somehow blow away and we are acting too late, in rugby terms, this is a hospital pass to anyone in the driving seat at this point in time.
[April 15, 2020] Pan-Canadian team launches Covidtrials.ca to match patients with COVID-19 clinical trials

New portal addresses researchers' need to identify potential clinical trial volunteers and helps Canadians access experimental COVID-19 treatments TORONTO, April 15, 2020 /CNW/ - As Canadian researchers join the global race to uncover effective treatments for COVID-19 and to develop a vaccine, there is an urgent need to connect the right people with the right clinical trial. Covidtrials.ca is the first Canadian patient portal to match those who are seeking to participate in a research project with the physicians and investigators who are working on these trials, allowing them to join a trial quickly and efficiently. Twelve clinical trials have currently been approved by Health Canada to test potential COVID-19 treatments and more are likely to begin in the days and weeks ahead. Different trials require different volunteers  that may be a patient who has been recently exposed to COVID-19, a person who is dealing with the disease at home, or someone who has recovered from the illness, among other profiles. "This idea was born out of a need we are experiencing firsthand," says Dr. Ramy Saleh, a physician with the McGill University Health Centre and founder of Covidtrials.ca. "We are currently working to enroll patients in an approved trial at the hospital. We know there are patients out there who are interested in accessing this treatment and who want to do what they can to support the research. Unfortunately, because the healthcare system and frontline physicians are under so much strain and pressure right now, it is difficult to locate and connect to those people." Covidtrials.ca works by matching people with Canadian COVID-19 clinical trials. Prospective volunteers can visit the website and fill out an online registration form with their information. That data is then shared securely with the appropriate research teams, who can then contact the person directly if their profile matches the needs of the trial. All of the information is stored on a secure cloud platform, housed in Canada, and the portal is overseen by a medical leadership made up of physicians from across the country. Already, several Canadian clinical tials have expressed their support for Covidtrials.ca, including active studies in Ontario, Quebec, Manitoba and Alberta.



"Recruiting participants to volunteer for clinical trials can be challenging at the best of times and more difficult given the current pandemic where there is a time pressure to obtain knowledge coupled with the pressure physicians and patients face to have as many options for treatment available as possible," says Dr. Todd Lee, national lead investigator on the first clinical trial for COVID-19 to recruit patients in Canada, an outpatient hydroxychloroquine trial run out of McGill University Health Centre. "We have patients and physicians contacting us who are asking for information on available trials. If they are not eligible for our study, they don't know where to go. This is an incredibly important resource." Facilitating the connection between potential volunteers and clinical trials can also help accelerate clinical research efforts.

"Canada has some of the brightest people in the world working to find treatments and a vaccine for COVID-19 and now is not the time to be working in silos," says Dr. Lauren Kelly from the University of Manitoba. "Connecting patients and researchers quickly helps to answer questions faster around what works best." Covidtrials.ca will also provide a space for healthcare professionals and researchers currently awaiting approval of their trials to share their proposals and engage with the broader Canadian clinical trials community and with potential participants. Covidtrials.ca is a not-for-profit initiative of Canadian health technology company Think Research and its subsidiary Airmed Trials with brand and website support provided pro bono by Zync , a digital branding agency. Finding effective treatments to mitigate the toll of COVID-19 demands solutions that require us to work together and be more connected than ever before. For more information on how to register or join a trial, please visit Covidtrials.ca . Lisez ce communique en francais. About Airmed Trials

Airmed Trials is a healthcare information technology company, focusing specifically on clinical trials and workflow optimization. We are dedicated to solving problems and providing systems that make the research process more efficient and more profitable. Our mission is to create unique and innovative software solutions for hospitals, hospital networks and all participants in the clinical trial enterprise. We are constantly listening to our customers' needs to provide new innovations that streamline processes and help achieve operational goals. About Think Research

Think Research , an enterprise clinical content and technology company, delivers evidence-based clinical tools grounded in best practice. Our focused mission is to organize the world's health knowledge so everyone gets the best care. Since 2006, our cloud-based, digital tools have empowered clinicians around the world and have impacted millions of patients across all sectors of care: acute, primary, long term and community. We are proud to serve as a trusted health system partner to a rapidly growing client base that spans three continents and more than 2,200 healthcare facilities. For more information, visit www.thinkresearch.com or follow us on Twitter @TRChealth . SOURCE Think Research

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Georgia Democratic Lawmaker Endorses Trump for Reelection

A Georgia Democratic lawmaker is endorsing Republican President Donald Trump for reelection.

State Rep. Vernon Jones, whose district includes parts of metro Atlanta, announced on Wednesday that hed be voting for Trump despite being a lifelong Democrat.

I didnt leave the Democratic Party. The Democratic Party left me, he said in a video statement. One would say now, why would a black man support Donald Trump? I would reverse that: why wouldnt a black man support Donald Trump?

Im a Georgia State Representative and lifelong Democrat. But in this election, Ill be casting my vote for @realdonaldtrump. I didnt leave the Democratic Party. The Party left me. #MAGA #KAG #WalkAway pic.twitter.com/BUs4kRZ7JG  Vernon Jones (@RepVernonJones) April 15, 2020

Isnt he the president that ushered in the lowest unemployment rate among blacks before the pandemic crisis? Isnt he the president that signed the criminal justice reform act? And, finally, isnt he the president that overwhelmingly supported, financially, historically black colleges? he added.

Jones called on every patriot, every great American regardless of race, gender, orientation, or age, to join him in voting for the president.

Jones is the first elected Democratic official in the state to back the presidents reelection campaign.

The endorsement spawned criticism, including from state Sen. Nikema Williams, who chairs the states Democratic Party. She told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution that Jones is an embarrassment who doesnt represent Georgias values.

Never has that been clearer than this moment, when he chose to stand with the racist president who has made an all-out assault on black Americans, who has tried to rip away American health care and who has failed our country in its greatest time of need, she said.

Jones faces a primary challenge from Rhonda Taylor, a community activist. The primary election is slated for June.

The Gwinnett County Republican Party shared Jones endorsement: Rep. Jones may not be a Republican, but he clearly understands that we need President Trump in office for another 4 years.

The county party asked people to donate to Joness campaign.
As Britains most beloved vet, James Herriots delightfully honest and at times hilarious reminiscences of a vets life in 1930s Yorkshire charmed millions in his books  and were turned into a long-running hit series.

And as this exclusive reprint reveals around 50 years after it was first published, his magical work is still able to warm a nations hearts in this darkest of times . . .

Them masticks, said Mr Pickersgill judicially, is a proper bugger.

Most farmers would have been content with the local word felon for their cows inflamed udders, rather than making a determined if somewhat inaccurate attempt at mastitis.

But Mr Pickersgill had what he considered to be a scholastic background.

A man of about 60, he had in his teens attended a two-week course of instruction for agricultural workers at Leeds University. And no capped and gowned don ever looked back to his years among the spires of Oxford with more nostalgia than did Mr Pickersgill to his fortnight at Leeds.

In ma college days I was allus told that you got dirty milk with them masticks, he continued. But this must be another kind. Just little bits of flakes in the milk. Ah dont know what to make of it.

As Britains most beloved vet, James Herriots delightfully honest and at times hilarious reminiscences of a vets life in 1930s Yorkshire charmed millions in his books  and were turned into a long-running hit BBC series

In fact, I had a good idea what was behind it. I had watched Mr Pickersgill and his daughter Olive as they milked the ten cows in their little byre and one thing was immediately obvious.

While Olive drew the milk by almost imperceptible movements of her fingers, her father hauled away at the teats as though he was trying to ring in the new year.

But how to tell him that the only solution was to learn a more gentle technique or let Olive take over all the milking?

The answer came as Mr Pickersgill pulled from his hip pocket a yellowed slip of paper almost falling apart at the folds. It turned out to be a recipe for udder salve devised by Professor Malleson, the godlike figure who had been in charge of his course.

I was about to say that I didnt think it would make the slightest difference when Mr Pickersgill groaned loudly. The very act of reaching for the recipe had brought on a twinge of lumbago.

By gaw, it does give me some stick, he grimaced. And doctor cant do nowt about it.

Im not brilliant but I do get the odd blinding flash and I had one now.

Mr Pickersgill, I said solemnly, I think it might be crouching on that little milking stool night and morning thats giving you that bad back.

You really think . . . 

Yes, I think you ought to stop milking. Olives always saying she should do it all.

D ang it, young man, I believe youre right! he said. Ill pack it in, now  Ive made my decision!

I stood up. Fine, fine. Ill take this prescription with me and make up the udder salve. Itll be ready for you tonight and I should start using it immediately.

About a month later I saw Mr Pickersgill pedalling his bicycle majestically across the market place in Darrowby. Now then, Mr Herriot, he said, puffing as he dismounted. Ive been meaning to tell you that we dont have no flakes in the milk now. Ever since we started with tsalve they began to disappear and milks as clear as can be.

Oh, great. And hows your lumbago?

Well Ill tell you, youve really capped it and Im grateful. Ahve never milked since that day and I hardly get a twinge now.

He paused and smiled indulgently.

You gave me some good advice for me back, but we had to go back to awd Professor Malleson to cure them masticks, didnt we?

Although Olive Pickersgill was in her late 30s, she had no fears of spinsterhood. She had been assiduously courted for 15 years by Charlie Hudson from the Darrowby fish shop and though Charlie was not a tempestuous suitor, there was nothing flighty about him and he was confidently expected to pop the question over the next ten years or so.

My boss Siegfried Farnon seemed to think it might also take me some time to get around to proposing to my own intended, a farmers daughter named Helen Alderson. And it was at his urging that I finally asked her to marry me. As a wedding present, he made me a partner in the practice and Helen and I took over the top floor of Skeldale House, the three storeys of mellow brick and climbing ivy which I had, until then, shared with Siegfried and his younger brother Tristan.

One of our earliest social engagements as newlyweds was an invitation to dinner with the Hodgsons, a likeable old farmer and his wife.

We were due there one Tuesday at 7pm and that afternoon I headed confidently into the country with the image of Mrs Hodgsons supper hanging before me like a vision of the promised land.

As this exclusive reprint reveals around 50 years after it was first published, his magical work is still able to warm a nations hearts in this darkest of times

I knew what it would be; a glorious mixed grill of spare ribs, onions, liver and pork fillet, garlanded with those divine farm sausages which are seen no more. It was something to dream about.

In fact, I was still thinking about it when I drew into Edward Wiggins farmyard.

I was there to vaccinate a dozen grown bullocks against the deadly Clostridium disease and I reckoned Id be here for only a few minutes because Mr Wiggins man, Wilf, was an expert beast-catcher.

Then I saw the farmer coming across the yard and my spirits sank. He was carrying his lasso.

Wilf, by his side, rolled his eyes briefly heavenwards when he saw me. He too clearly feared the worst.

We went into the barn and Mr Wiggin began the painstaking process of arranging his long, white rope while we watched him gloomily.

A frail little man in his 60s, who had spent some years of his youth in America, he talked in a soft Texan drawl and seemed obsessed with the mystique of the ranch and the open range. Anything to do with the Wild West was near to his heart  and nearest of all was his lasso. You could insult Mr Wiggin with many things and he wouldnt turn a hair, but question his ability to snare the wildest bovine with a single twirl of his rope and the mild little man could explode into anger.

And the unfortunate thing was that he was no good at it.

Mr Wiggin had now got a long loop dangling from his hand and he began whirling it round his head as he crept towards the nearest bullock. When he finally made his cast the result was as expected; the rope fell limply halfway along the animals back and dropped on to the straw.

Tarnation! said Mr Wiggin and it seemed an age before he once more advanced with the rope whirring round his head.

Bugger it! Wilf grunted as the loop end lashed him across the face. His boss turned on him.

Keep out of the dadblasted road, Wilf, he said querulously. I gotta start again now.

This time he didnt even make contact with the animal and as he retrieved his lasso from the straw, Wilf and I leaned wearily against the wall of the barn.

I was uncomfortably aware that time was passing and that our chances of doing our job were rapidly diminishing, but Mr Wiggin wasnt just catching a beast for injection; he was roping a steer, the smell of the prairie in his nostrils, the cry of the coyote in his ears. It was now nearly four oclock and I hadnt done a thing. And I dont think I ever would have if fate hadnt stepped in.

By an amazing fluke, Mr Wiggin cast his loop squarely over the horns of a shaggy projectile as it thundered past him, the rope tightened on the neck and Mr Wiggin on the other end flew gracefully through the air for about 20 feet, till he crashed into a wooden feeding trough.

Badly shaken but uninjured, he looked at us.

Doggone, I jest couldnt hold the blame thing, he murmured. Reckon Id better sit down in the house for a while. Youll have to catch that pesky lot yourselves.

Like many of the local stocksmen, Wilf was an expert with a halter. We had the whole batch inoculated within 20 minutes and five oclock saw me hurrying into the smallholding belonging to the Misses Dunn.

Their pig Prudence, a creature who was thoroughly spoiled, had cut her neck on a nail. I needed to get her out of her sty and into the Dunns calf-house, where there were narrow stalls which would stop her moving around too much as I put in the stitches.

After a bit of poking and pushing, Prudence ambled majestically out onto the cobbles. But there she stood, grunting sulkily, a stubborn glint in her little eyes, and when I leaned my weight against her back end it was like trying to move an elephant.

She had no intention of moving any farther and that calf-house was 20 yards away.

I stole a look at my watch. Five fifteen, and I didnt seem to be getting anywhere.

The little Miss Dunn broke into my thoughts. Mr Herriot. Prudence has been naughty before and we have found a way of persuading her to move.

James Herriot's books have entertained thousands of Britons for generations

I managed a smile. Great! How do you do it?

Well now, and both sisters giggled. She is very fond of digestive biscuits.

Well, thats very nice, I said. But I dont quite see . . .

The big Miss Dunn laughed. Just you wait and Ill show you.

She strolled towards the house and it seemed to me that though these ladies were by no means typical Dales farmers, they did share the general attitude that time was of no consequence.

As the minutes ticked away, I began to think that big Miss Dunn was brewing herself a cup of tea but just when I was giving up hope, she reappeared carrying a long, round paper container. She gave me a roguish smile.

These are what she likes. Now just watch.

She produced a biscuit and threw it down on the cobbles a few feet in front of the sow. Prudence eyed it impassively for a few moments, then without haste strolled forward, examined it carefully and began to eat it.

When she had finished, big Miss Dunn glanced at me conspiratorially and threw another biscuit in front of her. The pig again moved unhurriedly and started on the second course.

This was gradually leading her towards the buildings across the yard but I reckoned that it was going to take nearly 20 minutes to get there. Look, I stammered. Do you think you could throw the biscuits a bit farther ahead of her . . . just to save time, I mean?

Little Miss Dunn laughed gaily. Oh, weve tried that but shes such a clever old darling. She knows shell get less that way.

To demonstrate, she threw the next biscuit about 15ft away from the pig but the massive animal surveyed it with a cynical expression and didnt budge until it was kicked back to the required spot. Miss Dunn was right; Prudence wasnt so daft.

I just had to wait, gritting my teeth as I watched the agonising progress. But at last the final biscuit was cast into the calf-pen, the pig made her leisurely way inside and the ladies, with triumphant giggles, closed the door behind her.

I leapt forward with my needle and suture silk and as soon as I laid a finger on her skin, Prudence set up an almost unbearable non-stop squeal of rage.

Big Miss Dunn fled in terror but her little sister stayed bravely and passed me my scissors whenever I asked in sign language above the din.

My head was still ringing as I drove away, but that didnt worry me as much as the time. It was six oclock.

Tensely, I assessed my position. I could still be pushing my knees under Mrs Hodgsons table by seven oclock if all went well with my final job of the day, inserting a ring into the nose of old Ted Buckles bull.

All went well until I managed to prick the formidably large bull a little on the muzzle and he reared on his hind legs, leapt over the half-door of his stall and thundered like an express train into a nearby field.

Itll tek us an hour to catch that bugger, grunted one of Mr Buckles men gloomily and I set up a wail of lamentation.

Yes, dammit, and Ive got an appointment in Darrowby at seven oclock! I stamped over the cobbles for a moment or two, then swung round on old Ted.

Ill never make it now . . . Ill have to ring my wife . . . have you got a phone?

Nay, he said. Ah dont believe in them things.

He fished out a tobacco tin from his pocket, unscrewed the lid and produced a battered timepiece, which he scrutinised without haste.

James Herriot's best selling series of books were turned into a drama series by the BBC

Any road, theres nowt to stop ye bein back i Darrowby by seven.

But . . .but . . .thats impossible . . . hes just said itll take an hour to catch that bull!

Fiddlesticks! Ernest allus talks like that . . .es never appy unless es miserable. Ahll get bull in i five minutes.

W earily, I sank on to an old stone trough and buried my face in my hands. When I looked up, the old man was coming out of the byre and in front of him ambled a venerable cow.

Get out there, awd lass, Ted said and she trotted into the field, her pendulous udder swinging gently at each step. I watched her until she had disappeared over the hill, then turned to see Ted throwing cattle cake into a bucket.

Cush, cush! he cried. Cush, pet, cush!

Almost immediately the cow reappeared over the brow and just behind her the bull. I looked with wonder as Ted banged on his bucket and the cow broke into a stiff gallop with my patient close by her side.

When she reached the old man, she plunged her head in among the cake while the bull, though he was as big as she, pushed his nose underneath her and seized one of her teats in his great mouth. It was an absurd sight but she didnt seem to mind as the big animal, almost on his knees, sucked away placidly.

In fact it was like a soothing potion because when the cow was led inside, he followed; and he made no complaint as I slipped the ring in his nose.

Quarter to seven! I panted happily as I jumped into the driving seat. Ill get there in time now.

I could see Helen and me standing on the Hodgsons step and the door opening and the heavenly scent of the spare ribs and onions drifting out from the kitchen.

You did a wonderful job there, Mr Buckle, I said. It was amazing how that bull followed the cow in like that.

The old man smiled and I had a sudden surging impression of the wisdom in that quiet mind.

Theres nowt amazin about it, lad, its most natral thing in tworld. Thats is mother.
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Linkedin Rizki Fachriansyah (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Wed, April 15, 2020 16:39 636 fc6853813033f564188675f8bd21245d 1 National labor,jobs,COVID-19,coronavirus,virus-korona-indonesia Free

Many Indonesian workers remain anxious over the uncertain future of their employment amid the COVID-19 outbreak despite the government's social safety net policies, a recent online survey found.

The survey -- conducted by community radio station Marsinah FM in collaboration with the Labor Study Group (Kobar) between Mar. 23 to Apr. 10 -- polled 146 respondents in Greater Jakarta and Central Java who work for 83 companies in the manufacturing, production, retail, and finance sectors.

Around 78.3 percent of the respondents said they felt vulnerable as neither their employers nor the government had come up with a policy that ensures the security of their livelihoods amid the ongoing public health emergency, the survey found.

Even as the government makes daily promises of social safety nets for workers and other vulnerable demographics, the high percentage of workers who feel anxious over job security is a reflection of workers skepticism toward the governments ability to protect them, a report on the survey stated.

Read also: Millions to lose jobs, fall into poverty as Indonesia braces for recession

The survey also found that 67.8 percent of respondents were still obligated to go to work despite physical distancing measures and social restrictions in place to curb the spread of COVID-19.

Of those who still have to be physically present at their workplace, 25.3 percent said they lacked access to protective equipment, hand-washing facilities, and disinfectants.

Furthermore, the survey found that 28.08 percent of respondents had been furloughed without pay during health crisis, putting migrant workers in a difficult situation.

Workers who migrated to the city need to pay for living accommodations. Returning to their home villages is decidedly unwise as they could potentially be COVID-19 carriers, the report said.

Finance Minister Sri Mulyani Indrawati previously said that, with economic growth projected at the lowest level since the 1998 financial crisis, 1.1 million to 3.78 million people could fall into poverty and 2.9 million to 5.2 million workers could lose their jobs.

According to the official government count, there are 4,839 confirmed COVID-19 cases in the country, with 459 deaths as of Tuesday.
NEW YORK, April 15, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- EasyKnock, the first institutionalized residential sale-leaseback company in the United States, announced today the creation of a nonprofit, The Stay Mission, to help families experiencing financial hardship stay in their homes. The Stay Mission is aimed at helping Americans in danger of foreclosure or eviction to stay in their homes.

Some of their financial hardships may be due to the economic disruptions caused by COVID-19. While measures are in place to counteract the immediate threats of COVID-19, the long term effects could leave millions of Americans out of work or underemployed. While most states have implemented a moratorium on rental evictions and banks are waiving mortgage payments, the future is still uncertain for many homeowners and renters.

"We're living in unprecedented times. Due to this pandemic, more and more Americans are behind on their mortgage or rent payments and struggling to keep a roof over their heads," said Jarred Kessler, CEO and founder of EasyKnock. "Through the launch of our nonprofit, we hope to do our part to ease the burden on American homeowners."

The nonprofit is being created with the goal of helping families at risk of being evicted or having their home foreclosed.

For more information on this fund and how to participate, please contact [email protected].

About EasyKnock

Founded in 2016, EasyKnock is the United States' first technology-enabled residential sale-leaseback company that brought American homeowners Sell and Stay and MoveAbility. Through EasyKnock's programs, homeowners can receive the money they need to achieve their goals. With Sell and Stay, homeowners receive cash for the value in their home without moving, with the flexibility to buy back their house or move at any time. MoveAbility serves as a bridge product for homeowners planning on moving in the near-term. They can receive cash for the value of their home immediately without a rushed move. Headquartered in New York City and Charlotte, North Carolina, EasyKnock currently provides its innovative financial products to homeowners across 50 states.

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Actor Soundarya Sharma in an interview with a leading daily revealed that she has been writing to the Indian Embassy and the Ministry of External Affairs for evacuation as she is stuck in the USA amid ongoing Coronavirus pandemic.

Revealing the details, Soundarya said that her heart goes out to more than 400 students and other fellow Indians who are stuck in the US without any resources or housing facilities. She said she has approached the authorities in India but hasn't received any positive response yet.

Requesting the Indian embassy and MEA for assisting those in need, Soundarya hopes that there is an arrangement made to evacuate her and others back to India. Soundarya was visiting Los Angeles for an acting course at the Lee Strasberg Theatre and Film Institute.

Parineeti Chopra announces 'much needed detox' from social media; Read post

All 50 states under the Presidential disaster declaration

Meanwhile, US President Donald Trump issued a disaster declaration for Wyoming on April 12 which implies that all 50 states will be under such declaration for the first time in history. According to White House Press Secretary, Judd Deere, a US President has never before declared a major disaster in all its states at once. Donald Trump not only tweeted about the move himself but also said that the country is "winning" against the "war with the invisible enemy".

The US surpassed the COVID-19 death toll of Italy which is also one of the hardest-hit countries of the pandemic outside China, where it originated. The nationwide number of casualties in the US hiked from 10,000 to more than 20,000 in reportedly just five days. The total cases in the US have reached 579,005 and total deaths are 22,252.

COVID-19: Pak-origin actor Kumail Nanjiani takes dig at Trump over 'reopening of economy'

(Photo: Instagram)

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.
(Bloomberg) --

A Sudanese militia that once drew international condemnation for spearheading a bloody anti-insurgency campaign in the western region of Darfur has a new, unlikely message: Please wash your hands.

As Sudan girds for another sort of battle, this time against the coronavirus pandemic, the Rapid Support Forces led by Mohamed Hamdan Hemedti is taking center stage. The paramilitary force is building on its rise to near the top of Sudans transitional government after backing last years overthrow of one-time sponsor, former President Omar al-Bashir.

The militia that emerged from Darfurs Janjaweed -- the devils on horseback -- and was accused of killing 100 protesters in June now runs a quarantine center, disinfects the streets and distributes equipment and medical advice, lavishly promoting it all on social media. One cartoon on Facebook shows its fighters squaring off against a monstrous fanged depiction of the virus clinging like King Kong to the egg-shaped Corinthia Hotel in Khartoum, the capital.

The RSF under Hemedti has been very clever in attending to the practical needs of the average Sudanese with basic services, said Cameron Hudson, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council. Leading the campaign against the coronavirus is the latest push to reinvent themselves as defenders of the poor and downtrodden.

The North African country needs all the help it can get. Ravaged by years of civil conflict, international sanctions and economic bungling, Sudans democratic transition after three decades of Bashirs dictatorship remains fragile.

Its crippled medical system will struggle to cope with a large outbreak of the virus, which has so far infected 29 people and claimed four lives. Authorities in the nation of about 44 million people have followed much of the world in restricting public movement and will implement a full lockdown for three weeks starting Saturday.

While Prime Minister Abdalla Hamdok heads a civilian-led government, doubts remain over how much power the military that overthrew Bashir will surrender -- or the exact role Hemedti sees for himself.

Story continues

The moment is particularly dangerous for Hamdok as the military -- and particularly the RSF -- may move to demonstrate their ability to deliver in the absence of broader government action, said Jonas Horner, a senior Sudan analyst at the International Crisis Group. Sudanese are looking urgently for leadership and dividends from the revolution and the transitional government so it is imperative that Hamdok begins to spend his considerable political capital to respond.

Yet it is the RSF that has repeatedly taken the initiative in recent months. Its fighters made up much of Sudans contribution to the Saudi Arabia-led war against Houthi rebels in Yemen, and it is still a major recruiter of young men in Darfur. Hemedti has played a pivotal role in peace talks with Sudanese rebels. Hes even offered himself as mediator for Egypt and Ethiopias Nile dam dispute.

The RSFs response to the coronavirus has been aimed at winning Sudanese hearts and minds. While many of the youth who led last years protests against Bashir are suspicious of the groups motives, the paramilitaries do have support.

They want to help their people and they have the right to do that, said Abdul Hamid Mohamed, a 45-year-old accountant in Khartoum.

This softer side of RSF doesnt wash with political cartoonist Khalid Albaih. His most recent work depicts Sudans transition as an early 1990s-style video game, with Hemedti ascending platforms pursuing an avatar clad in Sudans flag and medical mask. The virus microbe lurks ahead; a toppled Bashir lies prone far below.

The RSF has become one of the main obstacles to the democratization of the country, Albaih said by phone.

A doctors group has in the past week accused members of the RSF and police of attacking health workers -- something the militia denies. Hamdok has described such violence as disgraceful and unacceptable, without referring to specific incidents, vowing strict legal action to protect staff.

Unlike Hamdoks government, the RSF can draw on its discipline, organization and resources, according to Hudson.

Its coordinating with the Health Ministry and other government departments and has closed some of its training camps and put fighters on furlough to limit their exposure to the virus, Major General Osman Mohamed Hamid, the head of the militias coronavirus response team, said by phone.

We are keen to help out people amid this horrible threat, he said. This is not the time for political games.

For more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.com

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Lome, Togo (PANA) - Three new coronavirus patients were cured Tuesday in Togo, sources close to the operational unit in charge of COVID-19 told PANA here
Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, April 15) - A ranking official from the United States Centers for Disease Control (CDC) said the Philippines must slow down the impact of the coronavirus pandemic while there is no available vaccine yet.

I think if we can slow things down long enough to maybe get a vaccine or some treatments, but we dont have those right now. But what we do have to do, if we slow down, is really use any time that we gain to do as much preparing as possible, so increasing testing capacity, or improving the plans at hospitals, or the training of health care workers. Theres no easy answer, said Dr. Barbara Manston, the U.S. CDCs head of COVID-19 task force, in a telephonic briefing.

The country has so far recorded 5,453 COVID-19 cases, with 353 patients recovered and a death toll of 349. Its main island is currently under an extended enhanced community quarantine until the end of the month.

Marston said the government should be careful in making critical decisions relating to the health crisis, especially on the lifting of quarantine measures.

Whatever is done, its going to have to be done carefully and kind of watched, and I think people have to be ready to possibly change their mind. So, make a decision, watch what happens, and be ready to change that decision, she said.

The factors you have to consider are: Have cases declined? What would happen if there were more cases? Is the health system ready to take on some more cases? And to balance all of those things. I think its a difficult question that everybody is grappling with now, and we wouldnt have a specific recommendation for precisely what to do in the Philippines, Marston added.

For his part, CDC Thailand office director Dr. John MacArthur said Southeast Asian nations have been communicating in dealing with highly-infectious pathogens.

They (ASEAN) also have teams addressing issues about zoonotic diseases, or those diseases that can be transmitted from animals to humans. They have teams that are looking at strengthening laboratories across the region, and they also have teams that are focused on emergency operation centers, he added.

CNN Philippines' correspondent Tristan Nodalo contributed to this report
In television appearances and essays for publications including the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, the Thernstroms went on to champion a colorblind society while opposing the use of racial preferences, which they deemed divisive, inessential and largely ineffective. Their work made them two of Americas leading conservative opponents of affirmative action  and stunned former allies on the left, who knew the Thernstroms from their earlier activism on behalf of liberal causes.
Southeast Asian leaders warned Tuesday of the crippling economic cost of the coronavirus at a summit held online, calling for trade routes to reopen to protect jobs and food supplies, as well as the stockpiling of medical equipment. Vietnam -- which chaired the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) meeting -- urged leaders to set up an emergency fund to tackle the pandemic, as the virus ravages the region's tourism and export-reliant economies. In opening remarks via video conference, Vietnam premier Nguyen Xuan Phuc hailed the work of ASEAN in fighting the virus so far. But he warned the virus "has badly impacted people's lives, their socio-economic situation... challenging stability and social security". Vietnam has so far had some success in containing the virus through extensive quarantines and social distancing. It has recorded 265 infections and no deaths, while Thailand has officially also kept its numbers relatively low with just over 2,500 cases and 40 deaths. The situation is mixed elsewhere across the region, with fears that limited testing in Indonesia has played out into the low caseload -- and under 400 deaths -- for the country of 260 million. Similarly, threadbare health systems from Myanmar to Laos are widely believed to be missing the true scale of infections, while a recent surge in cases in Singapore has raised fears the pandemic could rebound in places which had batted back the initial outbreak. Vietnam used the 10-member summit to propose funding to deal with the pandemic, building emergency medical stockpiles and sharing resources. Both Malaysia and the Philippines said they would welcome a response fund, with Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte warning he was "particularly concerned with food security". Singapore Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong echoed the group's fears, urging the region's leaders to collaborate "to keep trading routes and supply lines open". The whole region has been hit hard by the virus. In Vietnam many factories are still running, but, in a sign of the ongoing risks, dozens of workers at a Samsung unit in the north were ordered into quarantine after one tested positive for the virus. The Thai economy, the second-largest in ASEAN, is expected to shrink by 5.3 percent this year -- a 22-year low -- with millions left jobless in the politically febrile kingdom. Nearly 22 million people have registered for cash handouts. Leaders from China, Japan and South Korea also joined the summit.
Quote:

Updated March 23, 2020



The health and safety of candidates and our staff are of the utmost importance to GMAC, and we are actively working with testing centers to respond to this very difficult situation. As a part of the global effort to contain the spread and mitigate impact of COVID-19 (coronavirus), GMAT and Executive Assessment testing has been suspended in many locations worldwide. For testing centers that remain open, enhanced health and safety measures are in place including enhanced cleaning procedures, hand sanitizer and wipes provided for candidates.



As the situation develops, below you will find the most up-to-date information on testing center closures, enhanced testing center procedures, and health and safety guidance.



Please contact your GMAC Customer Care team if you have any questions or concerns.



Interim GMAT Exam - Available Online Mid-April

We all recognize this is a challenging time for testing with test center closures around the world. To help you, we are preparing an alternative GMAT exam available online.



This interim GMAT exam will provide a comparable structure, number of items, and scoring as delivered in test centers. The Quant, Verbal and IR sections (no AWA section) will have the same number of items and the same time for completion. This will allow us to maintain the same score scale for both the Section Scores and Total Score.



The check-in and security protocols will be modified to accommodate online delivery and remote proctors will be used to manage test integrity.



The alternative test will be available in impacted markets, outside of mainland China. GMAC is continuing to work with the Chinese government authorities to present appropriate, alternative solutions for test takers in mainland China.



In light of the current unprecedented situation, this interim solution will be offered at a lower price point than the standard GMAT exam to support our test takers and schools during this difficult time.



Additional details coming soon.



Test Center Closures and Special Procedures

Testing is suspended in many testing centers worldwide. Please visit mba.com/find-a-seat to check the availability of the testing center near you.

And here's the vague release from GMAC about the GMAT home edition, available in mid-April: https://www.mba.com/articles-and-announ ... oronavirus Interesting that they're calling it the "Interim GMAT". Presumably, it won't last long, so cheaters need to hop in there quickly._________________
Trump blames WHO and China to distract from his failure in coronavirus response: CNN

People's Daily Online

(People's Daily Online) 17:15, April 14, 2020

The US now has the largest number of deaths from COVID-19 in the world, with the toll reaching 23,604 as of Tuesday morning. US-based Cable News Network (CNN) published an op-ed on April 12 analyzing the reasons why the US tops global coronavirus deaths.

According to CNN's article, Americans will continue to die in large numbers until the country mounts a coherent response to the epidemic. "President Donald Trump has failed. The US still lacks even a basic plan for controlling the epidemic and restarting the economy."

The article makes a comparison between the US' death toll and that of Asian countries to demonstrate the scale of the Trump administration's failure. The US now has about 62 deaths per million people. Meanwhile, the Chinese mainland, South Korea and Singapore each have under five deaths per million, it said.

"Unlike these Asian countries, Trump failed to prepare for the pandemic even after the alarm bells went off. He ignored urgent warning signs," the article said.

It further noted that Trump, meanwhile, repeatedly fails to put public health experts truly in the lead. "He ignores the rudiments of basic public health and seems to view the epidemic in political and electoral rather than public health terms."

As usual, Trump blames others for his own disastrous failings, with his latest target of attack being the World Health Organization (WHO), which plays a key role in helping governments around the world fight this disease.

Trump tweeted on February 24: "The Coronavirus is very much under control in the USA. We are in contact with everyone and all relevant countries. CDC & World Health have been working hard and very smart." Yet now, he is turning on the WHO.

His allies in Congress follow his lead, calling for the US to cut off funds for the WHO in the midst of the pandemic. "It's hard to think of a more shameful policy that would put an end to any semblance of US global responsibility," the article said, adding the Congressmen "should be focusing on the unfolding tragedy at home, rather than being agents of Trump's propaganda."

According to the article, the attacks on the WHO are nonsensical. "All countries had access to the same information at the same time," it said, adding that the WHO was just one source of information for the US and other countries, and the US has its own experts, intelligence agencies, and a network of epidemiological surveillance that could directly observe China's growing alarm and dramatic actions.

"The alarm bells were ringing from late December onward," the op-ed said. "The director of the China Center for Disease Control personally called the director of the US Centers for Disease Control on January 3."

Trump, it said, will continue to fulminate against the WHO and China and any other targets in order to distract attention.

"Yet the record is clear: China got the epidemic under control while the US did not. China implemented a strict national lockdown while the US did not. China deployed its top technologists and companies to do the job. In fact, Trump repeatedly praised China during February, only turning on China when the situation got tough in the US."

"Unlike China, which turned to its public health experts, Trump turned to Vice President Mike Pence and son-in-law Jared Kushner," it said. "Thousands of Americans are dying unnecessarily as a result and we are still far from any coherent national plan."

The opinion writer's advice for a national plan is to contact symptomatic individuals and quickly isolate them, trace and test their contacts, use phone apps and online registries to support the process, screen the public for symptoms in public spaces, and require people to wear face masks in public and use hand sanitizers relentlessly.

"We would be doing, in short, what the Asian countries have been doing to control the epidemic," it said.

America's failure is plain for all to see, even if Trump loyalists are blind to it, the article said. "We are at the end of the 'Wizard of Oz' tale. The curtain has been pushed aside to reveal the con man behind the curtain. Our choice is like Dorothy's: to go home to the country of competence we once knew, or to remain in the deadly dream kingdom of Trump."

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Turkey Ready to Buy US Defence System, But Stance on Russian S-400 Unchanged - Cavusoglu

Sputnik News

17:26 GMT 14.04.2020(updated 18:14 GMT 14.04.2020)

WASHINGTON (Sputnik) - Turkey is ready to purchase the Patriot air defence system from the United States under certain conditions, but Ankara's position on purchasing and keeping Russian S-400 air defence systems has not changed, Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu said on Tuesday.

"We are ready to purchase Patriots if we have a good offer", Cavusoglu said.

"And our stance on the resolution of S-400 issue has not changed. We offered the US to establish a technical working group with NATO's inclusion and NATO can lead this technical working group actually. And this offer is still on the table", he added.

Cavusoglu explained that Turkey needs to purchase air defence systems given that the ballistic missile threat the country faces is very real.

"This fact is accepted by everyone, including the United States and NATO. Turkey's decision to purchase the S-400 system is a result of the United States' reluctance to meet our urgent needs for many years, for ten years", he said.

Cavusoglu noted that previous attempts by Turkey to purchase the US Patriot system were inconclusive and Congress played a negative role.

"In the future, we'll need more air defence systems. If our allies can provide it - doesn't have to be only Patriot from the United States, it can also be SAMP/T of Eurosam.. .or any similar system from other allies, and we prefer to purchase from our allies. If not, we'll have to seek alternatives", he said.

In March, US Defense Department spokesperson Jonathan Hoffman said the United States continues to condition the supply of the Patriot air defence system to Turkey on returning the already purchased S-400 systems back to Russia.

Department of information support of the Baltic region

Hoffman's comment followed the statement by Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said the United States has softened its stance on Turkey's purchase of the Russian S-400 air defence systems

and reduced its demands to asking Ankara not to put the weapon on active service.

Russia began delivering the S-400 to Turkey in July 2019. The United States has demanded that Turkey cancel all purchases of the S-400, saying it expects Ankara to purchase US-made Patriot air defence systems instead. The United States also threatened to delay or cancel any deliveries of the fifth-generation F-35 jets to Turkey.

However, Turkey has refused to make any concessions regarding the S-400 purchase.

A Sputnik

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Disadvantaged schools risk falling further behind under the coronavirus shutdown because of the state government's "middle-class perspective", a Melbourne principal says.

Epping principal Loretta Piazza said she had been inundated with requests from families to send their children to school despite government directives to keep students home where possible.

Loretta Piazza, principal of Meadowglen Primary School in Epping. Credit:Joe Armao

Dr Piazza, principal of Meadowglen Primary School, said 60 of her 540 students had attended school on Wednesday, compared with an average of 10 in middle-class suburbs.

Dr Piazza and her team had already spent weeks trying to provide laptops and internet access to many families in need, she said.
A day after the 42-year-old woman was found murdered at Bhai Randhir Singh Nagar, the police were at a loss regarding the accused and the motive behind the crime.

Assistant commissioner of police (ACP) Sameer Verma said the victims postmortem was conducted on Wednesday evening and the report revealed that she died due to strangulation.

The ACP said that they are waiting for the husband of the victim, Geeta Rani, to arrive in the city in a day or two.

Geeta lived alone in a rented accommodation at I-block in BRS Nagar and used to run a book store in BRS Nagar market.

She was found dead at her residence on Tuesday morning when her domestic help come to fetch money from her. According to the police, the woman was murdered two days ago, but the landlord was unaware about it.

Geeta had relocated to Ludhiana eight months ago. Earlier, she was living in Hyderabad with her husband. The police said that it was their second marriage after they had met on a social networking site a year ago. They had strained relations.

We are scanning the footages of the CCTV cameras installed in the area. As of now, there is no clue about the accused as well as the reason behind this murder, the investigation officer said.

They suspect involvement of two or more persons in the crime, he added.

A case under Section 302 (murder) of the Indian Penal Code (IPC) was registered against unidentified person at Sarabha Nagar police station.
A sick child died after their mother was kept on hold by the NHS 111 helpline for more than an hour as she desperately sought medical help.

The three-year-old had a cardiac arrest at home and died in hospital, according to details of critical incidents affecting London children due to the coronavirus crisis.

In another case, a six-month-old died in hospital from sepsis and liver failure because of the parents fears about the child catching Covid-19 in hospital.

The two deaths are among 14 incidents in a pan-London coronavirus incident log drawn up by the North Thames Paediatric Network that has been passed to the Standard.

Doctors are concerned that parents are failing to seek treatment for children during the pandemic. Sir Simon Stevens, chief executive of NHS England, urged them not to delay going to hospital.

All you need to know from the latest coronavirus briefing

As well as parents concerns over taking their child to hospital, the 14 incidents included cases where treatment was delayed after parents were given the wrong advice, because NHS 111 and the London Ambulance Service were overstretched.

The three-year-old who died was suffering from RICP/NS emergency, which is believed to mean raised intracranial pressure and neurosurgical emergency.

The log states: Mum on phone to 111 for [more than] 60 minutes. Waiting for answer to call. Child arrested while mother on the phone. Mum had been to GP with seven-week history of headache and vomiting.

The six-month-old baby died in hospital from sepsis and fulminant [sudden] liver failure.

Loading....

The log states: Unwell five days. Parents did not bring in as risk in hospitals of Covid. Dr Tony OSullivan, a retired paediatrician and co-chairman of Keep Our NHS Public, said such sad cases were a mixture of delayed access to care, decisions made under huge pressure slowing down treatment and parents fearful of taking their child to hospital amidst pandemic.

The log appears to have been written by a Great Ormond Street Hospital staff member. Delayed treatment was the outcome in most cases.

In one, the mother of a four-year-old called for an ambulance on multiple occasions. The log states: Seen by paramedics and advised to stay at home. When child semi-conscious and vomiting could not get ambulance as too busy. Advised to bring child in herself.
PR-Inside.com: 2020-04-15 15:33:58

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TIMMINS, ON / ACCESSWIRE / April 15, 2020 / Golden Birch Resources Inc. (CSE:GBRX) ("Golden Birch" or the "Company") is pleased to confirm the advancement of the Daru-Araboro target to prospect status ("Daru-Araboro Prospect" or "Daru-Araboro") and provide information for all technical data generated by the Company at Daru-Araboro.Highlights of the Daru-Araboro ProspectGolden Birch recognised Daru-Araboro as a potential prospect, given its strategic location near the intersection of key structural features being the main NW-SE Keveri Fault and northeast structures;Historic reconnaissance exploration in 1990 by Highlands Gold Ltd. discovered a quartz-sulphide rock float in Araboro Creek assaying 1.35% copper ("Cu") and 0.14 g/t gold ("Au") (Mt Suckling Exploration Report, Lindley et al 2012);Golden Birch geologists carried out initial exploration at Daru-Araboro Prospect in late 2018;Follow-up exploration by the Company geologists in early 2019 included traversing of creeks which uncovered multiple rock float samples with visible copper mineralization;Exploration to date has yielded best results of 8.86% Cu and 1.24 g/t Au in separate selective rock float samples with best Cu results from selective in situ outcrop of 1.64% Cu;Exploration at Daru-Araboro is at an early stage and assay values from in situ outcrop and rock float samples are selective in nature and are not representative of the overall prospect area;Further work is required before a representative grade for copper and gold can be determined for Daru-Araboro;Daru-Araboro Prospect has yielded anomalous copper and gold results in multiple selective in situ outcrops and rock float samples over an area of approximately 1.0 kilometre ("km") north-south by 1.0 km east-west; andWide-spaced, reconnaissance soil survey yields multiple anomalous and coincident copper, gold and molybdenum ("Mo") values.Alan Martin, President of Golden Birch states, "I am excited that our exploration team has advanced the Daru-Araboro Prospect from grass roots stage to our third priority prospect in our pipeline after Omu and Waki. Daru-Araboro was highlighted as a potential prospect of merit because of its location near the intersection of key structural features. It is very encouraging to see that our targeting methods are yielding positive results. The addition of Daru-Araboro as a priority prospect means the Company has multiple opportunities to create value for its shareholders. The Omu, Waki and Daru-Araboro Prospects have several characteristics of Tier 1 Cu-Au deposits in Papua New Guinea. The exploration results at Daru-Araboro are at an early stage and not representative of the entire project. Further exploration is required to determine grade and tonnage." Figure 1: Location of copper-gold targets within the Keveri Project being explored by Golden Birch. The Daru-Araboro Prospect is located approximately 12 km east of the Omu prospect (the "Omu Prospect"). Of particular note are the northeast (NE) transfer structures which form part of the overall Dimidi Trend and the northwest-southeast (NW-SE) "arc-parallel" Keveri and Nonia Faults (Mt Suckling Exploration Report, Lindley et al 2012).Exploration at Daru-AraboroGeological MappingThe Daru-Araboro Prospect was initially targeted because of the presence of circular and arcuate features (Mt Suckling Exploration Report, Lindley et al 2012) which were located near the intersection of the regional NW-SE Keveri fault and northeast structures parallel to the Dimidi Trend (Figure 1). Historic prospecting and reconnaissance exploration were carried out by Highlands Pacific Ltd. in 1990 and Papuan Precious Metals Corp in 2010. Golden Birch visited the Daru-Araboro area in late 2018 confirming the presence of visible copper mineralization in rock float in Daru and Araboro creeks.Golden Birch geologists carried out preliminary geological mapping at a scale of 1:5000 in early 2019. This work covered an area of 27 line-kms.The outcome of the geological mapping produced geological fact and interpretive maps (at 1:5000 scale). The future exploration program may extend the geological mapping in the east and southeastern part of the prospect due to the presence of several encouraging anomalies (see Figures 2 and 3).A total of 120 selective rock samples from in situ outcrops (65 samples) and floats (55 samples) were obtained from the Daru-Araboro prospect for analysis. Twenty-three rock samples of selective insitu float and outcrop returned assays of over 0.1% copper. Many of these rock samples are located within the central part of the Daru-Araboro Prospect (Figure 2). Ten of the rock samples returned assays of over 1% Cu with the highest being 8.8% Cu. Seven rock samples returned over 0.05 g/t Au with a highest gold value of 1.24 g/t Au. Results of these rock samples are shown in Table 1. Photographed examples of some of the rock samples in Table 1 are given below with brief descriptions.Preliminary geological observations show multi-phase dioritic stocks and intrusions with porphyry-style alteration illustrating a classic porphyry zoning pattern from peripheral chlorite and epidote alteration with overprints of retrograde argillic (clay alteration) and quartz + sericite to the core of a prograde weak potassic zone (including potassium ("K") - feldspar alteration, quartz veining and secondary, hydrothermal magnetite alteration). The alteration halo covers an area of approximately 1.5 kms by 1.5 kms and the potassic zone has dimensions of 800 metres ("m") x 500 m. The porphyry stocks are coincident with the circular features and Cu-Au-Mo geochemical (soil) anomalies.Copper mineralization including chalcopyrite + bornite + covellite and pyrite is associated with supergene malachite and azurite coatings occurring within brecciated quartz veins. The presence of a large diatreme breccia (a common feature for porphyry environments) in this area has been reported from historical work (Mt Suckling Exploration Report, Lindley et al 2012).Figure 2: Daru-Araboro Prospect with geological mapping (illustrating rock types and areas of alteration), soil geochemical sampling and results of selective rock sampling from both in situ outcrop and float samples.Below are photos of selected rock samples from in situ outcrop and float samples collected from the Daru-Araboro Prospect by the Company. The location of these samples is provided in Appendix 1.Photo 1: Selective rock float sample of chlorite &
In an apparent effort to extend his social media presence amid the coronavirus COVID-19 crisis, Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal has joined Likee, a pioneering short video platform by Singapore-based BIGO Technology Pte Ltd. The move is set to expand the ambit of the ongoing war of Delhi government against coronavirus. During his first live session on Likee, CM Kejriwal addressed various steps being taken by his government and appealed to people to follow the lockdown guidelines. The first session of CM Kejriwal has clocked more than 20 million views within an hour.



The coronavirus outbreak in India has resulted in a nationwide lockdown till May 3, turning tens of millions of users confined inside their homes to Likee for lifehacks and fun.

Kejriwals Likee profile carries videos of his various press conferences conducted in the wake of the pandemic, and streams governments press releases up to thrice a week. The profile also includes snippets from his joint press meet with Delhi Lieutenant Governor Anil Baijal wherein directives concerning the lockdown were first shared with media. Likers can get officially-verified Covid-19 information from the CMs Likee account as well.

Referring to the onboarding of CM Kejriwal, Likee spokesperson Mike Ong said, The prevailing situation demands all stakeholders to join hands in the global war against Covid-19. The Delhi CMs Likee profile manifests the joint need to help people in these trying times.

Notably, Kejriwal has been quite active on various social media platforms such as Facebook, microblogging site Twitter and video/photo sharing app Instagram. He is followed by thousands of users on these social networking sites.

The CMs move to join Likee appears to be propelled by the increasing popularity if Likee in India as well as abroad. According to the latest Sensor Tower report, Likee emerged as the 4th most downloaded social media apps globally. The platforms availability in more than 15 Indian languages adds to its various innovative attributes.
The mayor of Accra, Mohammed Adjei Sowah, has said the MP for Klottey Korle, Zanetor Agyeman-Rawlings, lied when she claimed food shared by the government to the vulnerable during the lockdown period, is being done on a partisan basis.



The government is feeding some four hundred thousand people in Accra, Kumasi, Tema and Kasoa  the areas which are under lockdown, as part of measures to mitigate the spread of coronavirus which has killed eight out of the six hundred thirty-six confirmed cases.



Read below the Accra mayors response to Dr Zanetor Agyeman-Rawlings:



COVID-19: Quit petty politicking on food distribution for the vulnerable



My attention has been drawn to a video of the Member of Parliament for Klottey Korle Constituency, Dr Zanetor Agyeman-Rawlings, sharing, what is believed to be food wrapped in plastic bags to some women she claimed to be Kayayee circulating on social media.



In the said video, Zanetor Rawlings alleged that in spite of claims by the government that food packages and hot meals are being distributed to poor households and the vulnerable in locked-down areas amidst the COVID-19 outbreak, the beneficiaries in her constituency are not receiving the food and those who have are being asked to show party membership cards before they are attended to.



This is sadly not the case and its unfortunate that at a time like this, such a statement would be made by an Honourable Member of Parliament who has been missing all this while [and] resurfaced out of the blue for attention.



I wish to put on record that officers from the National Disaster Management Organisation (NADMO) in branded vests working with the Assemblies share over 5000 pieces of food packages to the vulnerable including Kayayee around Ridge, Ministerial Enclave, Kinbu, Tema Station and Afua Sutherland Children Park in the Central Business District (CBD) every day. Even though the government has welcomed efforts by all to support the effort to lessen the effects of the lockdown on the vulnerable, misinformation and attempts to politicise such efforts should not be countenanced.



If Zanetor Agyeman-Rawlings decides to complement government efforts by sharing food to Kayayee, she should do so following set-down protocols which do not put vulnerable persons at further risks and would be better done by liaising with agencies that are mandated to work in the management of crisis and not attempt to score cheap political points while propagating falsehood.



This is a time when the nation and the world at large is battling a pandemic and unity of purpose with focus is expected of all in leadership.



I wish to urge all residents to continue to cooperate with national and local government and adhere to all the precautionary measures outlined by the President to slow the spread of the COVID-19 in the country.



This too, shall pass.



Signed



M. Adjei Sowah

Mayor of Accra













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I saw broken houses and I vividly remember the walls falling down one by one and crumbling into disappearances. I do not know what to figure out from this dream. Is the about the past, the present or the future, I cannot tell but I will keep figuring out, said the 30-year-old writer as she was falling short of words explaining it further. Another middle-aged man artist shared,  I felt suffocated by the colours on the palette. The colours turned into a rope and got inside me through my mouth. I couldnt scream or call for help but I remember the feeling and live it everyday since I have had this dream.

An 8-year-old girl shared,  I see animals living in my house. There are living in my room. They are in hiding. Maybe, they want to play. They are also bored, she says sighing her boredom. Many among us have been struggling with the kind of bizarre dreams that we have been experiencing in the times of an uneven lifestyle that we are currently leading. Social media is full of #pandemicdreams sequences where people share their horrors and looking for a relative space where they want to feel as well as convey that we are all together in this. The many layers of the conscious and the subconscious space have been equated as we travel into stranger domains.

As they say that dreams are the stories that our mind creates while we sleep. many researches and theories have come up in the past to validate and negotiate with the idea of dreaming. British scientist and professor of neuroscience and psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, Matthew Paul Walker wrote in an article in 2017, titled, Why Your Brain Needs to Dream for the Greater Good Magazine, ...while many of us may feel that our dreams have special meaning or a useful purpose, science has been more sceptical of that claim. Instead of being harbingers of creativity or some kind of message from our unconscious, some scientists have considered dreaming to be an unintended consequence of sleepa byproduct of evolution without benefit.

Day-to-day experiences have changed. The stories around us, the lives around us has changed. The individuality of happiness is not relevant anymore. What you do affects others around you and vice versa. The multiple films and series we are consuming or the classics that we are revisiting, the hunt for pandemic tales where many managed to survive is permanent on our search list. The dark reality of the hilarious memes that we share and circulate all day with the intention of sharing our griefs and a few laughs till we can. We are looking for measures and quick tips to make our lives easier and longer. Participating in fancy challenges is also becoming boring. How many types of dishes and cocktails you will share in the virtual space to mark yourself safe from this pandemic. The fear that has always been imaginary is taking up more space than ever and if all put into words, the world of fiction writing will change forever.

The dreaming world is a black hole. What goes into it and what comes out of it remains a mystery. Many also talk about handling and directing the dreams, for example, the last thing you consumed before you went to bed, the last person you spoke to before calling it a night, the many worries you cook up in your mind and take it to the next level, a past memory that hit you out of nowhere, missing someone you lost recently, it all keeps coming and going taking space in the holdall of life. The many traumas one goes through on a daily basis thinking about how are others dealing with the same fear. Are they stronger than us, are they facing similar obstacles, are they suffering in the same way or do they have more than we do. The idea of deja vu is weary and it makes us wonder if we have lived certain moments before. One takeaway from here is that we all are in the same boat. More or less, experiencing the same things in different ways. How do we identify with the dreams we experience? Are they prophetic or just a mirror of our conscious lives? If anything, we all have something to share with each other. The many hollow fulfilled and unfulfilled dreams that are making us stronger for the future.

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Governors can now officially apply for billions in aid intended to help public schools address the coronavirus pandemic, U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos announced Tuesday.

The $3 billion in aid for the Governors Emergency Education Relief Fund was included in the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act, which Congress passed and President Donald Trump signed into law last month. In a statement, DeVos stressed that this application is streamlined to make it easier for governors; she also said that governors have a chance to truly rethink and transform the approach to education during this national emergency.

At a time when so many school boards and superintendents have shut down learning for the balance of the school year, DeVos said in a statement, I want to encourage each and every governor to focus on continuity of education for all students. Parents, families, teachers, and other local education leaders are depending on their leadership to ensure students dont fall behind.

She also highlighted that these grants for governors are extraordinarily flexible. Individual governors will decide how much of the money goes to K-12 education versus higher education.

The $3 billion governors fund is separate from the $13.5 billion in the CARES Act earmarked just for K-12; at least 90 percent of it must go out to districts based on the Title I funding formula for disadvantaged students. DeVos has yet to announce that this larger pot of money is available for districts.

The billions in CARES Act for schools might not be enough to stave off overall cuts to education in many states, we reported last week. For example, if all states were to cut their current aid to K-12 by 8 percent, per-pupil spending would decline in all 50 states even after accounting for CARES Act assistance, according to one analysis.

See: Education Weeks Map of Coronavirus and School Closures

The application for the CARES Act governors fund is here. It is seven pages, not including the cover page and the appendices. The governors fund is based on two factors: the relative population of people ages 5 to 24, and the number of children counted under a section of Title I of the Every Student Succeeds Act.

DeVos made separate CARES Act aid for higher education available last week.

Photo: Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos visits a class at Greater Johnstown Elementary School in Johnstown, Pa. (John Rucosky/The Tribune-Democrat via AP)

Follow us on Twitter @PoliticsK12 . And follow the Politics K-12 reporters @EvieBlad @Daarel and @AndrewUjifusa .
Jeffrey Tambor is addressing his departure from Transparent, two years after he was fired amid sexual harassment allegations. Tambor, who won two Emmys playing Maura Pfefferman on the Amazon dramedy, apologized for his behavior Wednesday on Gilbert Gottfrieds Colossal Show.

"So regarding how I left the show, I just want to make it really, really clear for your listeners out there that I'm not this guy," Tambor began on the SiriusXM show. "I in no way ever, ever intended to make anyone feel uncomfortable."

Jeffrey Tambor apologizes for his behavior on tthe set of Amazon's Transparent, saying, "I'm sorry it ended the way it did." (Photo: Getty Images)

Tambor was accused of harassing three women, including his former assistant and transgender actress Van Barnes, Transparent actress Trace Lysette, who is also transgender, and makeup artist Tamara Delbridge. Barnes claimed the 75-year-old actor watched her sleep naked. Tambor denied the allegations and after his firing called Amazon's investigation "deeply flawed."

Months later, Tambor admitted to the Hollywood Reporter he was "difficult" on set. "Lines got blurred," he said, revealing he yelled at the crew. "I was mean." Tambor said his obsessive determination to accurately portray Maura, a transgender character, brought out the worst in him. He praised his former cast in the new interview.

"This cast was amazing," he declared. "It was sort of raucous, it was wonderful and irreverent and loving and personal and, you know, we told personal stories and I got to be Jeffrey and I got to play Maura and it was vital for the [LGBTQ] community, I'm so proud of it."

Tambor continued, "Regarding how I left the show, I just want to say, I never, ever, ever, ever intended to make anyone feel uncomfortable. Ever. It's just not who I am."

The actor admitted to having "character defects," joking his wife of nearly 20 years, Kasia Ostlun, "has the list."

Tambor went back to talking about the cast, explaining, "We loved each other. We were irreverent. We were honest. We were vulnerable. We had stories that were very, very personal. We trusted one another. It was a set like  we were raucous, it was a set like no other."

Story continues

However, Tambor said there were "instances" where his interaction "with these lovely people, could have been mistaken way other, way other, than how I intended." He said he has "profoundly" apologized.

"And I apologize now, if I made anyone, anyone feel vulnerable and I'm sorry," he added. "I'm sorry it ended the way it did, but I just wanted to say, you know, I have to say it, I'm so proud of playing Maura and part of the LGBT community and getting that important message out and it's a highlight of my life and I just can't let the day go and I can't leave this studio without saying something. And I love you guys."

In his May 2018 interview with THR, Tambor explained he had lifelong anger issues, but maintained he did not sexually harass anyone.

"I drove myself and my castmates crazy," he said. "Lines got blurred. I was difficult. I was mean. I yelled at [Transparent creator] Jill [Soloway]  she told me recently she was afraid of me. I yelled at the wonderful [executive producer] Bridget Bedard in front of everybody. I made her cry. And I apologized and everything, but still, I yelled at her. The assistant directors. I was rude to my assistant. I was moody. Sometimes I didnt talk at all."

Tambor continued, "And this is where the reader says, 'So what?' You know? 'Youre coming in from the Palisades, you drive in, you get a good paycheck, you get to play one of the best roles in the world. So. What.' ... But I was scared, because I was a cisgender male playing Maura Pfefferman. And my whole thing was, 'Am I doing it right? Am I doing it right? Am I doing it right?' To the point that I worried myself to death."

After his firing, Tambor's career didn't stall. He appeared in Netflix's revival of Arrested Development and has completed production on the animated film The Adventures of Drunky and Disney's Magic Camp, according to IMDB.

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Loose Women will return to ITV with a new episode on Thursday for an NHS Day special to celebrate healthcare staff amid the COVID-19 crisis.

The female-led panel show returns to daytime programming for the one-off, after spending weeks off the air due to the global pandemic.

Panelists Christine Lampard, Brenda Edwards, Stacey Solomon and Nadia Sawalha will take part from their homes as part of a day of dedicated programming on ITV to celebrate and thank NHS front line workers.

They're back! Loose Women will return to ITV with a new episode on Thursday for an NHS Day special to celebrate healthcare staff amid the COVID-19 crisis

The special edition was pre-recorded by the quartet of presenters on Tuesday via video messaging.

Featuring specially themed content across all of the flagship ITV daytime shows and beyond, ITV NHS Day will kick off at 6AM with Piers Morgan and Susanna Reid for Good Morning Britain, handing over to Lorraine Kelly at 9AM.

Eamonn Holmes and Ruth Langsford will present This Morning at 10AM and the Loose Women will then air the one off special at 12.30PM.

Across the shows, viewers will hear the stories and heartfelt gratitude from survivors of COVID-19 and their families.

Panelists Christine Lampard and Stacey Solomon will take part from their homes as part of a day of dedicated programming on ITV to celebrate and thank NHS front line workers

Honouring the NHS heroes: Nadia Sawalha will join the ladies for the special edition which was pre-recorded by the quartet of presenters on Tuesday via video messaging

ITV NHS Day then continues with bespoke content throughout the schedule including the dedicated Clap For Our Carers 'pause for applause' at 8PM.

ITV has partnered with NHS Charities Together #OneMillionClaps for the special day as the official broadcast media partner and will appeal to viewers to donate to the NHS and send messages of support to their staff.

Emma Gormley, Managing Director, ITV Daytime said: 'Like everyone else in the country we want to say a massive thank you to our NHS heroes.

'We look forward to a day of extra special programmes in celebration and gratitude for our amazing NHS staff and all they continue to do for us.'

Co-starring: Brenda Edwards will also be part of the special episode

Frontline: ITV has partnered with NHS Charities Together #OneMillionClaps for the special day as the official broadcast media partner and will appeal to viewers to donate to the NHS and send messages of support to their staff

Clare Phillips Director of Social Purpose at ITV said: 'This appeal is a vital way of helping people who work for the NHS when they need it the most.

'Were delighted to partner with NHS Charities Together and put ITVs full weight behind a campaign that will give back to the heroic NHS staff.

'Im incredibly proud that we've been able to put this together and play our part in helping the NHS in this difficult time.'
DALLAS, April 15, 2020 -- Exposure to heavy smoke during recent California wildfires raised the risk of out-of-hospital cardiac arrests up to 70%, according to new research published today in the Journal of the American Heart Association, the open access journal of the American Heart Association.

Cardiac arrest occurs when the heart abruptly stops beating properly and can no longer pump blood to vital organs throughout the body. While often referred to interchangeably, cardiac arrest is not the same as a heart attack. A heart attack is when blood flow to the heart is blocked, and sudden cardiac arrest is when the heart malfunctions and suddenly stops beating unexpectedly. A heart attack is a "circulation" problem and sudden cardiac arrest is an "electrical" problem. Out-of-hospital cardiac arrests (OHCAs) are more dangerous because they can lead to death within minutes if no one performs CPR or uses a defibrillator to shock the heart back into a normal rhythm.

The natural cycle of large-scale wildfires is accelerating and exposing both rural and urban communities to wildfire smoke, according to the study. While adverse respiratory effects associated with wildfire smoke are well established, cardiovascular effects are less clear.

"In recent decades, we experienced a significant increase in large-scale wildfires, therefore, more people are being exposed to wildfire smoke. In order to respond properly, it is important for us to understand the health impacts of wildfire smoke exposure," said study author Ana G. Rappold, Ph.D., a research scientist at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's Center for Public Health and Environmental Assessment in the Office of Research and Development.

Researchers examined cardiac arrests during 14 wildfire-affected counties in California between 2015 and 2017, using information submitted to a health registry established by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the Cardiac Arrest Registry to Enhance Survival (CARES). Smoke density exposure was rated as light, medium or heavy according to mapping data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association. The researchers compared smoke exposure on the day of the OHCA to the exposure on the same day of the week in the 3 prior weeks. They also compared the exposure 1, 2 and 3 days before the OHCA to the exposure on the corresponding days in 3 weeks prior to the cardiac arrest.

The analysis found that the risk of out-of-hospital cardiac arrests:

increased on days rated as heavy smoke density and for several days afterwards, with the highest risk (70% higher than on days with no smoke) on the second day after smoke exposure;

increased among both men and women and in people age 35 and older exposed to heavy smoke; and

increased in communities with lower socioeconomic status (20% or more people living below the poverty line) with both medium and heavy smoke exposure.

"Particulate matter from smoke that is inhaled can penetrate deeply into the lungs, and very small particles may cross into the bloodstream. These particles can create an inflammatory reaction in the lungs and throughout the body. The body's defense system may react to activate the fight-or-flight system, increasing heart rate, constricting blood vessels and increasing blood pressure. These changes can lead to disturbances in the heart's normal rhythm, blockages in blood vessels and other effects creating conditions that could lead to cardiac arrest," Rappold said.

Although the researchers had no information about the actions taken by individuals, the increased risk they found in people living in lower-income communities might reflect less access to strategies to reduce exposure. Previous studies have shown that there are more respiratory problems in lower-income communities and worsening congestive heart failure in response to wildfire smoke exposure.

"People in a higher socioeconomic status group who have pre-existing cardiopulmonary conditions may be better able to take effective action to decrease exposure, such as staying indoors, using portable air filters or using effective respirator masks. They may also be more likely to live in homes with air conditioning and efficient air filtration," Rappold said.

"While other studies have found that older adults are more affected, we also observed elevated effects among middle-aged adults (aged 35-64). It is possible that this population may not be aware of their risk and may not have flexibility to discontinue activities that involve exertion and exposure during wildfire smoke episodes," concluded Rappold.

To reduce exposure to wildfire smoke, researchers advise people to stay indoors with doors and windows closed, to use high-efficiency air filters in air conditioning systems, avoid exertion, and consider seeking shelter elsewhere if the home does not have an air conditioner and it is too warm to stay inside.

The small sample size limited the researchers' ability to determine how the risks of smoke exposure might differ among people of different ages and genders. Individuals with personal health questions or concerns should consult with their doctor, researchers said.

###

All authors were supported for this work through their professional affiliations listed in the manuscript.

Co-authors are Caitlin G. Jones, M.S.; Sumi Hoshiko, M.P.H.; Jason Vargo, Ph.D.; Wayne E. Cascio, M.D.; Martin Kharrazi, Ph.D.; and Bryan McNally, M.D.

Additional Resources:

Available multimedia is on right column of release link - https://newsroom.heart.org/news/breathing-heavy-wildfire-smoke-may-increase-risk-of-out-of-hospital-cardiac-arrest?preview=264422114b3650e30c37c1b8c08d272f

Statements and conclusions of study authors published in American Heart Association scientific journals are solely those of the study authors and do not necessarily reflect the Association's policy or position. The Association makes no representation or guarantee as to their accuracy or reliability. The Association receives funding primarily from individuals; foundations and corporations (including pharmaceutical, device manufacturers and other companies) also make donations and fund specific Association programs and events. The Association has strict policies to prevent these relationships from influencing the science content. Revenues from pharmaceutical and device corporations and health insurance providers are available at https://www.heart.org/en/about-us/aha-financial-information.

About the American Heart Association

The American Heart Association is a relentless force for a world of longer, healthier lives. We are dedicated to ensuring equitable health in all communities. Through collaboration with numerous organizations, and powered by millions of volunteers, we fund innovative research, advocate for the public's health and share lifesaving resources. The Dallas-based organization has been a leading source of health information for nearly a century. Connect with us on heart.org, Facebook, Twitter or by calling 1-800-AHA-USA1.
U.S. envoy to Afghanistan Zalmay Khalilzad and the top U.S. commander in the country, General Scott Miller, met with Pakistani military leaders in Islamabad, following talks with senior Taliban representatives in Doha.

The talks in the Pakistani and Qatari capitals came after an initial prisoner exchange between the Taliban and the Afghan government. The prisoner swap is considered key to paving the way for peace talks between the two sides aimed at putting an end to the 18-year conflict in Afghanistan.

Khalilzad and Miller, commander of the NATO-led Resolute Support mission in Afghanistan, visited Islamabad on April 14 and discussed with Chief of Army Staff General Qamar Javed Bajwa the United States ongoing efforts for a sustainable peace in Afghanistan, the U.S. Embassy in Pakistan said in a statement.

Pakistans military leaders reaffirmed their support for U.S. efforts and renewed their commitment to act to advance a political settlement to the conflict, it added.

During their talks with Taliban representatives in Qatar on April 13, Khalilzad and Miller discussed "current challenges" in implementing a peace deal signed in Doha on February 29 by the United States and the Taliban, according to the U.S. State Department.

Suhail Shaheen, a spokesman for the Taliban office in Qatars capital, said on Twitter that Khalilzad and Miller met with Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, a co-founder of Afghanistan's Taliban and its chief negotiator.

Shaheen said the two sides discussed the "complete implementation" of the U.S.-Taliban deal for a phased U.S. troop withdrawal. Shaheen said they also discussed a "delay in the release of prisoners."

According to the International Committee of the Red Cross, the Taliban on April 12 released 20 Afghan government prisoners in the southern province of Kandahar.



A Taliban spokesman told AFP that its decision to release a first group of prisoners was "a goodwill step...to accelerate the prisoner exchange process."



Earlier, the Afghan government had released 100 Taliban prisoners -- bringing to 300 the total number of Taliban inmates freed by Kabul since April 8.

Khalilzad on April 13 said the start of prisoner swaps by Kabul and the Taliban was "an important step" toward Afghan talks on a permanent peace deal and called for accelerated efforts "to meet targets specified in the U.S.-Taliban agreement as soon as possible."



He said the prisoner exchange was more important than ever because prison populations are threatened by the coronavirus pandemic.



The pact signed by the United States and the Taliban in Doha calls for the Afghan government to release a total of 5,000 Taliban fighters as a confidence-building measure ahead of formal peace talks aimed at ending the Afghan conflict.



In return, the Taliban has vowed to release some 1,000 Afghan government troops and civilian workers it is holding.



But the Taliban last week recalled a three-member team it had sent to Kabul to try to finalize the swap, originally set to happen by March 10.



The militants blamed Afghan President Ashraf Ghani's administration for delaying the exchange "under one pretext or another," while Kabul called on the Taliban not to "sabotage the process by making excuses."



Under the U.S.-Taliban accord, talks between Kabul and the Taliban and a series of security commitments from the militants are to be met by the withdrawal from Afghanistan of all U.S. troops and other foreign coalition forces within 14 months.

With reporting by Reuters, AP, AFP, and RFE/RLs Radio Free Afghanistan
When world-famous artist David Hockney wrote a letter to the Daily Mail saying he believes smoking could protect people against the coronavirus many scoffed.

Mr Hockney wrote: 'Could it not be that smokers have developed an immune system to this virus? With all these figures coming out, its beginning to look like that to me.'

Understandably the claim was brushed off as laughable and 'rubbish' by many.

But is it?

A leading infectious disease expert at University College London, Professor Francois Balloux, said there is 'bizarrely strong' evidence it could be true.

And data from multiple Chinese studies shows that COVID-19 hospital patients contained a smaller proportion of smokers than the general population (6.5 per cent compared to 26.6 per cent), suggesting they were less likely to end up in hospital.

Another study, by America's Centers for Disease Control of over 7,000 people who tested positive for coronavirus, found that just 1.3 per cent of them were smokers - against the 14 per cent of all Americans that the CDC says smoke.

The study also found that the smokers stood no greater chance of ending up in hospital or an ICU.

The reasons for this are unclear.

Evidence coming out of scientific studies is conflicting and some say doctors are just too busy to be accurately noting down everyone's smoking habits.

Some researchers suggest smoking could reverse one of the ways in which COVID-19 damages the lungs while others argue the lung damage caused by smoke makes the organs more susceptible to failure.

Governments in both the UK and US urge people to stop smoking to protect themselves from the virus, but scientists admit there is no clear proof cigarettes can worsen the disease.

The eccentric artist David Hockney, who is a smoker himself, asked in a letter to the Daily Mail 'Could it not be that smokers have developed an immune system to this virus?'

DAVID HOCKNEY'S LETTER TO THE DAILY MAIL I USED to joke that being a smoker in Malibu was the equivalent of being a non-smoker in Pasadena. They used to have very bad pollution there. Could it not be that smokers have developed an immune system to this virus? With all these figures coming out, its beginning to look like that to me. Im serious  and remember cigars and cigarettes are vegan. David Hockney, Normandy. Advertisement

In his letter, Mr Hockney wrote: 'I used to joke that being a smoker in Malibu was the equivalent of being a non-smoker in Pasadena. They used to have very bad pollution there.

'Could it not be that smokers have developed an immune system to this virus? With all these figures coming out, its beginning to look like that to me.'

The British artist, now 82 and living in France, adds 'I'm serious' and has in the past revealed he's smoked for more than 60 years but still considers himself healthy.

Around 1.1billion people around the world smoke cigarettes in spite of evidence they cause lung cancer, heart disease and numerous other life-threatening illnesses.

Whether they make people more likely to end up in hospital or die if they catch COVID-19, however, is unclear.

A study published earlier this month by scientists in New York and Athens claims the opposite.

It looked at 13 Chinese studies that had registered smoking as a precondition and found that the number of smokers across the whole sample of 5,300 patients was 6.5 per cent. An astonishingly small number in country where half of all men still smoke.

'This preliminary analysis does not support the argument that current smoking is a risk factor for hospitalization for COVID-19,' it reads.

'Instead, these consistent observations, which are further emphasized by the low prevalence of current smoking among COVID-19 patients in the US (1.3 per cent), raises the hypothesis that nicotine may have beneficial effects on COVID-19.'

A group of studies from China found that the average proportion of coronavirus patients who were classed as smokers - from a total of almost 6,000 people - was just 6.5 per cent. For comparison, more than 26 per cent of the country's population as a whole are smokers

WHAT IS AN ACE-2 RECEPTOR AND WHAT DOES IT HAVE TO DO WITH COVID-19? ACE-2 receptors are structures found on the surface of cells in the lungs and airways which work with an enyzme called ACE (angiotensin-converting enzyme) to regulate blood pressure. Its exact function in the lungs is not well understood but studies suggest it is protective against lung damage and low levels of it can worsen the impact of viral infections. Scientists say that the coronavirus which causes COVID-19 enters the body through the ACE-2 receptor, which the shape of it allows it to latch on to. This means that someone with more ACE-2 receptors may be more susceptible to a large viral load - first infectious dose of a virus - entering their bloodstream. ACE-2 receptors have a shape which matches the outside of the coronavirus, effectively providing it with a doorway into the bloodstream, scientists say People who have higher than usual numbers of ACE-2 receptors may include those with diabetes or high blood pressure because they have genetic defects which make them produce more. Emerging evidence shows that smokers may also produce more. High levels of ACE-2 receptors may also be protective, however. They are thought to be able to protect the lungs during infection and a study on mice in 2008 found that mice which had ACE-2 blocked in their bodies suffered more damage when they were infected with SARS, which is almost identical to COVID-19. Smoking has in the past been repeatedly linked to lower than normal levels of ACE-2 receptors, potentially increasing the risk of lung damage from COVID-19. Advertisement

The paper has not been reviewed by other scientists and admits that it is based on limited data, but says that nicotine and the coronavirus both interact with the same receptors on cells inside the lungs.

It was done by Dr Konstantinos Farsalinos and Dr Anastasia Barbouni, from the University of West Attica in Athens, and Dr Raymond Niaura of New York University.

They suggest that while the virus causes lung damage by depleting the numbers of those receptors - known as ACE-2 receptors - smoking can increase the number of them, reversing the effect.

ACE-2 receptors, which are found on cells in the airways and lungs, have been said to work as the coronavirus's doorway into the body and to 'facilitate' infection.

Therefore having more of them would seem to be a bad thing, but scientists say they have a protective effect in the lungs and low levels are linked to worse damage from viral infection.

A 2008 study in mice found that getting rid of ACE-2 made the animals more likely to suffer severe breathing difficulties when infected with the SARS virus, which is almost identical to COVID-19. ACE-2's function in human lungs is poorly understood.

Dr Farsalinos's study was shared on Twitter by Professor Francois Balloux, director of the genetics institute at University College London.

Professor Balloux described the paper as 'puzzling' and added: 'Whilst the study design is far from perfect - and the authors are clear about its limitations - the evidence for a protective effect of smoking (or nicotine) against COVID-19 is bizarrely strong... actually far stronger than for any drug trialled at this stage...'

It is a claim that has been emerging around the world.

French scientist Professor Jean-Francois Delfraissy, who is leading a scientific council advising the country's government on COVID-19, said: 'We have something very special with tobacco.

'We have found that the vast majority of serious cases are not smokers, as if () tobacco protects against this virus, via nicotine,' French news site Sud Ouest reported.

The study by Dr Farsalinos adds by way of explanation: 'It has been observed that decreased ACE-2 availability contributes to lung injury and acute respiratory distress syndrome development.

'Therefore, higher ACE-2 expression, while seemingly paradoxical, may protect against acute lung injury caused by COVID-19.'

This is a disputed area of science - there are studies which show smoking can both increase and decrease the levels of ACE-2 available on someone's lung cells.

An increase before infection could allow more of the viruses to get into the body in the first place, making someone more vulnerable to the disease.

A paper published by scientists at University College London offers the opposite view to Dr Farsalinos.

WHAT DO STUDIES SHOW ABOUT SMOKERS WITH COVID-19? A team of scientists at Harvard University in Boston and the University of Crete in Greece have reviewed five of the first studies on links between smoking and COVID-19. They found smokers do face a greater risk of suffering complications but others suggested they were less likely to be infected in the first place. In all of the studies, fewer than 15 per cent of the patients were smokers - a figure that clashes with China's smoking rate, which is between 20 and 26 per cent and almost half of men. The review of the evidence, led by Harvard's Dr Constantine Vardavas, was published in the journal Tobacco Induced Diseases. Here's what it found: STUDY 1 How many people were involved? 78 patients at 3 hospitals in Wuhan, China How many of them were smokers? Unclear Where were the results published? Chinese Medical Journal What did it find? The patients who progressed to severe illness had a 'significantly' higher number of smokers compared to the patients who got better  27 per cent compared three per cent STUDY 2 How many people were involved? 1,099 at 552 hospitals across China How many of them were smokers? A total of 12.6 per cent (137) were current smokers and 1.9 per cent (21) were former smokers. Where were the results published? New England Medical Journal What did it find? Among the 173 patients with severe symptoms, 16.9 per cent (29) were current smokers and 5.2 per cent (nine) were former smokers. In comparison, 11.8 per cent (108) of the 926 with milder symptoms were current smokers, and 1.3 per cent (12) were former smokers. In the group of patients that either needed mechanical ventilation, admission to an ICU or died, 25.5 per cent were current smokers and 7.6 per cent were former smokers. That was more than twice as high as the proportion of patients who did not need intensive care, 11.8 per cent of whom were current smokers and 1.6 per cent were former smokers. STUDY 3 How many people were involved? 140 in one hospital in Wuhan How many of them were smokers? 6.4 per cent were either current smokers (two) or past smokers (seven). Where were the results published? Allergy What did it find? Among the 58 patients who severely ill, 3.4 per cent (two people) were current smokers and 6.9 per cent (four) were former smokers. In comparison, of the 82 with milder symptoms, none were current smokers and 3.7 per cent (three) were former smokers. STUDY 4: How many people were involved? 191 in two hospitals in Wuhan How many of them were smokers? Six per cent (11 people) were current smokers Where were the results published? The Lancet What did it find? Among those that died (54), nine per cent (five people) were current smokers. Of those who survived, four per cent (six people) were smokers. STUDY 5 How many people were involved? 41 in one hospital in Wuhan How many of them were smokers? Seven per cent (three people) were current smokers Where were the results published? The Lancet What did it find? None of the 13 patients who needed to be admitted to ICU were current smokers. In contrast, 11 per cent (three) of those who did not need intensive care were smokers. Advertisement

It said: 'SARS-CoV-2 has been shown to enter cells through the ACE-2 receptor.

'Some evidence suggests that gene expression and subsequent receptor levels are elevated in the airway and oral [cells] of current smokers, thus putting smokers at higher risk of contracting SARS-CoV-2.

'Other studies, however, show that nicotine downregulates the ACE-2 receptor.'

Professor Jamie Brown, an addiction researcher at UCL and one of the authors who wrote that paper, told MailOnline the link is 'very difficult to understand'.

'Everything we know about other respiratory viruses and comorbidities [health problems] suggests smokers will suffer worse outcomes,' he said.

Only recently - a paper published this year claimed to be the first - have scientists started to record that smoking increases ACE-2 levels in the airways.

It had previously been reported to reduce levels, something that researchers have linked to worse lung damage in coronavirus infections.

While higher levels of the receptor may offer some protection in theory, they also offer more doorways through which the virus can enter the body.

The study in the European Respiratory Journal said: 'While the up-regulation of ACE-2 may be useful in protecting the host against acute lung injury, chronically, this may predispose individuals to increased risk of coronavirus infections, which uses this receptor to gain entrance into epithelial cells.'

Professor Brown added that, considering how smoking influences other lung infections, he would be 'very surprised' if it didn't make COVID-19 worse.

One paper suggested that a reason children appear not to be badly affected, in general, by the coronavirus could be that they have more ACE-2 receptors than adults, but it added there is 'a lack of evidence to show that ACE-2 expression varies with age'.

Dr Farsalinos and his colleagues' study even suggested that withdrawal symptoms from not being able to smoke in hospital could make cigarette users' symptoms worse.

It added: 'Hospitalization for COVID-19 will inevitably result in abrupt withdrawal of nicotine and its beneficial effect linked to this hypothesis in smokers or users of other nicotine products.

'This could, at least partly, explain the association between smoking and COVID-19 severity among hospitalized patients.'

The theory of smokers having some level of protection from the virus stems from raw hospital data which suggested only small proportions of seriously-ill patients smoke.

Hospitals in China, the US, Germany and France have had hundreds of thousands of coronavirus patients but admitted disproportionately small numbers of smokers.

According to the campaign group, Foundation for a Smoke-Free World, early data showed that in Germany six per cent to 21 per cent; and in France six per cent compared to 27 per cent.

Data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in the US showed that of around 7,000 COVID-19 patients, former smokers were more likely to be hospitalised or taken into intensive care than current smokers.

Just 22 of the hospital patients and five of those in intensive care admitted to being smokers, while 45 in hospital and 33 in ICU said they were former smokers.

Public Health England has not published any information about the people diagnosed or hospitalised with coronavirus in the UK.

Why then, scientists have asked, do smokers make up such a small proportion of patients when there are significantly more of them in the countries?

Experts have knocked this theory down and say reporting of who smokes and who doesn't has not been accurate enough.

UCL's Professor Brown told MailOnline: 'It's difficult to assess how well smoking status has been recorded in an emerging epidemic and a lot of these people have been too sick to answer or have not replied totally honestly.'

He added: 'We know generally smokers tend to come from lower income groups which have poorer access to healthcare... so may be more likely to die in the community.'

Professor Paul Hunter, a former NHS doctor and now medicine lecturer at the University of East Anglia, agreed that recording was likely to blame.

He told MailOnline: 'One interpretation is that smokers are less likely to end up in hospital.

'But actually it's more of an indication that when you've got doctors who are unbelievably busy they don't complete all of the questioning they would normally do.'

Professor Hunter added that the notion smoking could protect people from COVID-19 was 'rubbish', but admitted the ACE-2 receptor link deserved further study.

EARLY US DATA SHOWS JUST 1.3 PER CENT OF CORONAVIRUS PATIENTS ARE SMOKERS Early data from America's Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) showed that just 1.3 per cent of people diagnosed with COVID-19 were classified as smokers. From a sample of 7,162 of the nation's earliest patients, just 96 were 'current smokers'. Just 22 out of 1,037 patients in hospital were smokers, along with five out of 457 in intensive care, according to the data. This contrasts sharply with the CDC's statistics that show 14 per cent of all Americans regularly smoke cigarettes. It is not clear whether there is a link between smoking and a lower risk of catching or falling ill with coronavirus, or whether recording of who smokes and who doesn't isn't up to scratch. University College London's Professor Jamie Brown, a tobacco and public health expert, said he expects it to be the latter. He told MailOnline: 'It's really difficult to assess how well smoking status has been recorded in an emerging epidemic and a lot of these people have been too sick to answer or may not have replied totally honestly. 'We know, generally, smokers tend to come from lower income groups which have poorer access to healthcare and may be more likely to die in the commmunity.' Data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in the US showed that of around 7,000 COVID-19 patients, former smokers were more likely to be hospitalised or taken into intensive care than current smokers Advertisement

A study of 41 patients at Jin Yin-tan Hospital in Wuhan found that none of the 13 patients who needed to be admitted to ICU were current smokers. In contrast, 11 per cent (three) of those who did not need intensive care were smokers

A study of 552 hospitals across China, published in the New England Journal of Medicine, found that of the 173 patients who had severe symptoms, 16.9 per cent of them were current smokers and 5.2 per cent had previously smoked. In comparison, of the patients with less-severe symptoms, 11.8 per cent were current smokers and 1.3 per cent were former smokers

One study of 140 coronavirus patients found that among the 58 patients who severely ill, 3.4 per cent (two people) were current smokers and 6.9 per cent (four) were former smokers. In comparison, of the 82 with milder symptoms, none were current smokers and 3.7 per cent (three) were former smokers

Researchers at the Zhongnan Hospital of Wuhan University made the conclusion that only 1.4 per cent of 140 hospitalised patients were smokers

The NYU Grossman School of Medicine study found that just five per cent of coronavirus hospitalisations were current smokers - roughly the same percentage seen in the group that didn't need hospital care

SMOKING NOT LINKED TO COMPLICATIONS, CLAIMS NYU STUDY A study by New York University found that just five per cent of 4,103 coronavirus hospital patients in the city admitted to being smokers. This was far lower than the 15.5 per cent of smokers in the population there. The same proportion of smokers were found in COVID-19 patients who did not need hospitalisation, suggesting they were less likely to catch the virus or were not being accurately recorded. The New York study is not the first to find a low number of smokers in COVID-19 hospital admissions. One team of experts from Wuhan - where the pandemic began - were mystified after finding smokers were less likely to catch the deadly virus in the first place. Scientists have called for further trials to clarify if smoking poses a real threat, but admit, in general, smokers are more susceptible to infection. Public Health England has warned users face a greater risk because the tiny hairs inside the airways and lungs, which help move pathogens and mucus away, are often damaged by the toxic chemicals in cigarette smoke. The new study was published on the archive site medRxiv and not in a journal. Its authors said: 'Surprisingly, though some have speculated that high rates of smoking in China explained some of the morbidity in those patients, we did not find smoking status to be associated with increased risk of hospitalization or critical illness.' Advertisement

A researcher at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York, Jason Sheltzer, picked apart Dr Farsalinos paper on Twitter with similar logic, calling the study 'severely flawed'.

He said that the measures for what defined a smoker varied across the world and across the multiple other studies that were referenced in the paper. One of them, he said, only classified very heavy smokers and not those with lighter habits.

A deeper dive into data, Mr Sheltzer wrote, revealed that smoking actually appeared to be linked to a higher risk of severe infection.

He said: 'In order to further investigate, I emailed the authors of some of the studies on COVID-19 in China. One doctor replied that their smoking frequency was so low because some patients were literally too sick to answer the question.

'So... its clear that in these studies, the definition of a smoker is neither consistent nor consistently applied. You cant throw them all on a graph and call it a meta-analysis.'

He added: 'In short, I think that this analysis is severely flawed. Theyre comparing statistics that shouldnt be compared.

'I dont think that theres any convincing evidence that smoking protects against coronavirus.'

Government bodies are adamant that people should not consider the prospect of smoking being protective against the illness, which can be deadly, especially for people who already have health problems.

Both Public Health England and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) have urged people to stop smoking to protect their health.

British Health Secretary Matt Hancock last month said: 'It is abundantly clear from the research into previous coronaviruses that smoking makes the impact of a coronavirus worse.'

And his chief medical adviser, Professor Chris Whitty, added: 'If you are going to give up smoking, this is a very good moment to do it.'
 Flash

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau on Tuesday announced a tougher quarantine measure for those returning to Canada from abroad to prevent the COVID-19 spread.

The measure is to begin midnight Tuesday. Anyone who is asymptomatic and returning to Canada from abroad has to have a "credible quarantine plan" or they will be forced to spend 14 days in isolation in a quarantine location.

Trudeau told a press conference that it is a strengthening of current policy of the Quarantine Act, which came into effect on March 25 and made it mandatory for those arriving in Canada from abroad to self-isolate for 14 days.

Trudeau said the rule will give authorities the ability to evaluate the plan presented by the person coming into Canada and determine whether it is adequate or if they need to be placed in a location "like a hotel."

"We now have the authority to require travellers to self-isolate for two weeks at a quarantine location like a hotel," he said.

As of 2:30 p.m. Tuesday Canada Eastern Time, there were 26,897 COVID-19 cases and 898 deaths across the country, according to CTV.
"They can't do anything without the approval of the president of the United States," Trump declared. He insisted there are numerous provisions of the Constitution backing him up on this, asserting "when somebody is president of the United States, the authority is total."

President Trump on Monday, said he "calls the shots," in reply to a question from VOA about whether consortiums of states developing their own reopening plans pose a challenge to his authority to declare a national reopening amid the pandemic.

The New York governor said Trump is "clearly spoiling for a fight" with state leaders, but "I am not going to fight with him," explaining the COVID-19 pandemic, which has killed about nearly 23,000 Americans, is no time for any division between the federal and state governments.

The governor, speaking to reporters Tuesday, explained that the 10th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution is not ambiguous in stating presidents do not have "total authority," as Trump declared the previous evening during a White House coronavirus briefing. "He is wrong on the law, this is not a legal issue," Cuomo said.

"His proclamation is that he would be king," said New York Governor Andrew Cuomo. "That statement cannot stand."

The assertion from U.S. President Donald Trump that he has "the ultimate authority" on lifting stay-at-home directives and reopening the country's economy is facing backlash.

Three prominent Republican U.S. lawmakers disagree. "The federal government does not have absolute power," Congresswoman Liz Cheney of Wyoming tweeted. Senator Marco Rubio of Florida said, "How and when to modify social distancing orders should and will be made by Governors." He added on Twitter that "Federal guidelines issued by the CDC and White House will be very influential. But the Constitution & common sense dictates these decisions be made at the state level."

The constitution does not allow the federal government "to become the ultimate regulator of our lives because they wave a doctor's note," tweeted Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky. "Powers not delegated are reserved to states & the people," noted Paul. "If we dispense with constitutional restraints, we will have more to worry about than a virus."

Trump is to soon decide whether to reopen the United States to commerce at a time when governors of all but a handful of the 50 states have imposed stay-at-home edicts because of the viral pandemic.

Cuomo and five other governors of northeastern states began deliberations Tuesday on a regional plan to reopen their economies. It should be state governors who make these decisions as they have been the ones "showing great leadership," which has kept people safe, Rhode Island's Gina Raimondo told her fellow governors on Monday.

The governors of three Western states, California, Oregon and Washington, also announced Monday they are similarly taking a unified approach. The East and West Coast consortiums together represent about 100 million people, nearly a third of the country's population.

Trump on Tuesday is to unveil a second task force -- which the White House prefers to call a council -- to study the timing for the U.S. economy's re-opening. Concern is being expressed that another coronavirus-related top-level federal panel, in addition to another informal group led by the president's son-in-law, Jared Kushner, could create an additional layer of confusion to what many regard as a haphazard U.S. response to the pandemic.

The president recommended physical distancing between Americans through the end of April but is considering whether to reopen the country fully or partly May 1. Trump has said he is seeking input from not only his medical experts but business leaders, as well.



Dr. Anthony Fauci, a member of the White House coronavirus task force and the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases since 1984, on Tuesday, told the Associated Press that the United States does not yet have the critical testing and tracing procedures needed to begin re-opening the nation's economy.


YEREVAN, APRIL 15, ARMENPRESS. The ministry of emergency situations informs that on April 15, as of 08:40, the roads are mainly passable in Armenia.

The ministry told Armenpress that the roads leading to the Amberd Fortress and Lake Kari will remain closed for uncertain time.

The Georgian side reports that the Stepantsminda-Lars highway is open only for trucks.

Drivers are urged to use snow tires.

Edited and translated by Aneta Harutyunyan
Vice President M Venkaiah Naidu on Wednesday suggested tweaking of the agriculture market law to allow direct purchase of produce from farmers during the COVID-19 lockdown so that they are not forced to go to 'mandis' or resort to distress sale.

In a meeting with Union Agriculture Minister Narendra Singh Tomar, Naidu also discussed other issues being faced by farmers during the lockdown.

The vice president asked the Centre and states to accord top priority to farmers and agriculture during the lockdown, according to an official statement.

"He suggested tweaking of the APMC(Agriculture Produce Market Committee) Act so that the farm produce can be purchased directly from farmers and nobody is forced to go to mandis or resort to distress sale," it said.

Naidu pointed out that agri-producers are not organised and often their suggestions go unheard.

He wanted the interests of agri-producers and consumers to be safeguarded.

The vice president also asked the government to ensure smooth transportation of farm produce and machinery without any hindrance at state or district borders.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
It is nearly a month since the Government turned the key on a nationwide lockdown  changing the world, almost overnight, for businesses across the UK.

Despite being promised support packages, many small businesses fear they will not survive.

Figures this week revealed that banks have given vital loans to only 5,000 British firms  despite there having been 300,000 inquiries.

Helen Forsyth, who runs Find Marketing Ltd with her husband Richard, 46, has been juggling trying to save their business while home-schooling her children and battling the coronavirus

Here, in a remarkable account, one small business owner shares the diary that details her companys fight for survival.

Helen Forsyth, 45, who runs Find Marketing Ltd with her husband Richard, 46, has been juggling trying to save their business while home-schooling her children, aged 12 and nine  and battling the coronavirus.

At times the mother of two, from Bradford-on-Avon, Wilts, had to work from her sick-bed...

Friday, March 13

Im not superstitious, thank goodness, and March is going well. As a marketing agency, we employ freelancers to work on specific projects.

This year, our sixth in business, is supposed to be about growth. Weve won a place on NatWests Accelerator programme and have hired a new member of staff, Jo, who will join the team on Monday.

Restrictions: Boris Johnson at a press conference on Monday 16

Monday 16

A Busy day on site with a client. Get home late and sit with Richard, in the dark, watching Boris Johnson begin nationwide restrictions on travel on social contact.

Weve been careful in recent days, but suddenly everything sounds incredibly serious. In a heartbeat we know we could lose everything.

Tuesday 17

Car-crash of a day. Every deal in our diary has collapsed. Explanation the same  no one wants to spend money on third-party costs. Go to bed in a state of shock.

Wednesday 18

Have to let Jo go; its only her second day. I cry. She cries. I cry again. Urgently give notice on our office space. Its owned by the council  they make us a counter offer to stay with a big discount. We agree, hoping restrictions might be short-lived.

Friday 20

Spend day looking into universal credit. Ive never claimed before but am getting desperate.

Dont think I qualify. Heart sinks. Today is my kids last day at school. How can I save the firm and home-school the children? Do an emergency profit and loss forecast. Dont like the look of it. Anxiety is sky-high.

Monday 23

By 9.05am my eldest is crying at the idea of a Joe Wicks workout. By 10.30am, I am thinking about drinking wine  I dont even drink. Home-schooling is a nightmare.

Husband is starting to look ill. Please, no! Try to chase up all late payers to attempt to assess bad debt. But by the end of the day Ive achieved nothing. Feel a total failure.

By 9.05am my eldest is crying at the idea of a Joe Wicks workout. By 10.30am, I am thinking about drinking wine  I dont even drink. Home-schooling is a nightmare (stock photo)

Tuesday 24

Getting lots of calls from our team  regular freelancers and contractors we use. Many are desperate following yesterdays lockdown announcement. At the moment I have to focus on trying to save the firm.

Look at bank loans, but wed be taking out a business loan to pay our mortgage. Husband is barely able to stand and eventually gives up and goes to bed.

Wednesday 25

Rumours are growing that the Government will release a support package that could solve our problems. Feel relieved and hopeful we wont need to take out a business loan.

Thursday 26

Government announces package for self-employed workers. As far as I can tell, we dont qualify for any grants. And as directors, if we furlough ourselves we would have to suspend the business.

The disappointment is crushing. It always felt brave to be entrepreneurial, taking big risks, but now we feel we have been left high and dry. We hope that at least the freelancers we work with are eligible for more help.

Sunday 29

Not sleeping well. But had a business idea in the dark to create a national database, findtasty.co.uk, where you can find food and drink businesses which will deliver to your home.

Work all night trying to do the groundwork. After much discussion with Richard  whos still feeling ill  we decide to go for it. Its going to cost about 1,000 to do.

We dont anticipate anything more than surviving right now  but this idea could be something for us to build on.

Tuesday 31

My backs been aching for several days and today, I feel really grotty.

Richard starts the day well, but by 10am, he collapses into bed.

By 1pm, Ive gone downhill badly. I record a video for my team, but Im slurring and look like death.

By 1pm, Ive gone downhill badly. I record a video for my team, but Im slurring and look like death

I take my mobile to bed and my husband takes his and sleeps in the spare room. My temperature goes up to 38.4c and I feel awful, but have no cough.

I carry on working despite feeling ill  who else is going to do it?

Wednesday, April 1

Wake up at 4am, in pain. Cant sleep. Work until 6am. I know friends and family would tell me off, but I couldnt sleep because of worrying.

Stay in bed working from my phone for most of the afternoon. Dont see the kids all day.

We have an interest-only mortgage at around 750 a month. We do also have a personal loan that we are paying back.

Typically, our monthly cost of living is around 2,500.

Friday 3

Have an 11am video-conference call with a potential customer on Zoom, praying I wont start coughing mid-session.

The call goes nowhere  but at least I dont cough. I am wiped out. Start to worry about bad debt, most people have paid us on time this month, but next month is worrying me.

We have a very small amount of savings, only enough for about two months worth of the cost of living  even if we cut everything right back to the minimum.

Monday 6

Kids are now on Easter break  I thought it was hard when they were home-schooling, but now they have nothing to do.

How can I be a half-decent mother and run a business at the same time?

We havent taken a family holiday in years because we run our own company and dont have the time or enough spare cash.

The fear is that we will lose the house; its a bigger fear than not being able to take a holiday.

My breathing is bad and Ive had to give up on any work whatsoever this week.

I pray that the clients we have are patient and will stay with us.

Wednesday 8

Call 111 and speak to GP who tells me I need to be assessed immediately and says shes going to call an ambulance. I refuse the ambulance, but agree to go to our local hospital, which has a Respiratory Assessment Unit.

Husband drives me there at 9pm. Kids have to wait in the car. Assessment takes two hours  the NHS staff are kind, caring and amazing.

Am sent home and feel grateful I didnt have to stay in hospital, but surprised I was tested for almost everything but coronavirus since I wasnt admitted.

Friday 10

It may be Good Friday, but I must do some work. We have to keep our clients as happy as we can, as we have no other lifeline  except the option to take out a business loan, in order to pay our mortgage and put food on the table.

We cant end up in serious debt as a result of this coronavirus pandemic, but with no help from the Government, we have no choice but to try to keep our business running.

Where might we be in a months time? Ive no idea.

Our annual turnover last year was under 200,000, and we predict that this year it will be less than a quarter of that.

moneymail@dailymail.co.uk
India on Wednesday came down hard on the US Commission on International Religious Freedom for its criticism of the country based on a "misguided" report that COVID-19 patients in a hospital in Ahmedabad were segregated on the basis of their religious identities.

The US Commission expressed concerns over the way India is fighting the coronavirus pandemic following a media report that a government-run hospital in Ahmedabad segregated the infected patients on the basis of their religions.

"As if its peremptory commentary on religious freedom in India is not enough, the USCIRF is now spreading misguided reports on the professional medical protocols followed to deal with spread of COVID-19 in India," MEA Spokesperson Anurag Srivastava said.

He said no segregation of patients is being done in the civil hospital on the basis of religion as clarified by the Gujarat government.

Srivastava said the USCIRF "must stop adding religious colour to our national goal of fighting the pandemic and distract from larger efforts".

Earlier in a tweet, the Commission said it was concerned over the reports of Hindu and Muslim patients being separated in the hospital.

"Such actions only help to further increase ongoing stigmatization of Muslims in #India and exacerbate false rumors of Muslims spreading #COVID19," it said.

The USCIRF had earlier criticised India on the Citizenship (Amendment) Act.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
WASHINGTON, April 15, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- On behalf of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), NASA has awarded the Space Weather Follow-On Lagrange 1 (SWFO-L1) Magnetometer contract to Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) based in San Antonio, Texas.

This is a cost-plus, fixed-fee contract with a total value of $12,862,664. The period of performance is 75 months.

SwRI will design, analyze, develop, fabricate, integrate, test, calibrate and evaluate the magnetometer instrument that consists of two three-axis magnetometers and associated electronics that will be used to measure the vector interplanetary magnetic field. SwRI will also support launch and on-orbit check-out of the instrument, supply and maintain the instrument Ground Support Equipment and support the Mission Operations Center through mission hand-over to NOAA.

The work will be performed at SwRI in San Antonio, Texas, and at the University of New Hampshire in Durham.

The SWFO-L1 satellite, which is planned to launch in 2024 as a rideshare on the NASA IMAP, will collect upstream solar wind data and coronal imagery to support NOAA's mission to monitor and forecast space weather events.

NOAA is responsible for the Space Weather Follow-On program. NASA is the program's flight system procurement agent, and NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, is the lead for acquisition.

For information about NASA and agency programs, visit:

https://www.nasa.gov

SOURCE NASA

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Nurses Linda Isidienu, left, and Michael Manriquez watch as Tiffany Matthews, a respiratory therapist, cares for an intubated COVID-19 patient diagnosed inside a negative-pressure isolation room at Sharp Chula Vista Medical Center. (Marcus Yam / Los Angeles Times)

From doctors and nurses to technicians and maintenance employees, many healthcare workers are finding themselves learning to do long-familiar jobs in new ways as they battle COVID-19.

In emergency rooms and intensive care units, front-line workers have a universal observation: Caring for COVID-19 patients safely takes extreme levels of coordination. A reporter and photographer got a close look at those efforts April 10 when Sharp HealthCare, San Diego's largest health system, granted access to two of its main locations, Sharp Memorial Hospital and Sharp Chula Vista Medical Center.

Whether turning sedated patients in ICU beds, collecting samples from newly arrived emergency patients for testing, or monitoring blood oxygen levels at the bedside, no one works without significant backup. Workers who enter patient rooms are under the watchful gaze of colleagues on the unit. Emergency workers used to moving quickly from patient to patient have had to learn to slow down as they put on and take off layer after layer of protective equipment.

It's not, says registered nurse and infection preventionist Cindy Stuart, just about the work of doctors and nurses. Though those two categories of healthcare worker tend to get most of the attention, the cast of characters in this particular drama is much broader.

"None of this could be achieved without so many, our respiratory department, our lab workers, our support staff, engineering, IT, I mean everybody," Stuart said. "This could not happen without the entire multidisciplinary team. When I hear that phrase 'healthcare heroes,' I know people think doctors and nurses, but it's so much more than that."

Wearing personal protective equipment, nurse April Bandi cares for a patient with possible COVID-19 symptoms inside a negative-pressure isolation room Sharp Memorial Hospital in San Diego. (Marcus Yam / Los Angeles Times)

Nurse Arnold Garcia checks Michael Weiss' vital signs after he was admitted with possible COVID-19 symptoms at Sharp Chula Vista Medical Center. (Marcus Yam / Los Angeles Times)

Dr. Keith Yablonicky, center, gets help from nurse Jennifer Livengood putting on his personal protective equipment. (Marcus Yam / Los Angeles Times)

Nurse Sarah Barrile, left, gets help from nurse Brittney Grayson disinfecting her personal protective equipment after caring for a patient who is using a ventilator. (Marcus Yam / Los Angeles Times)

Nurses check the details on emergency department patients at Sharp Memorial Hospital in San Diego. (Marcus Yam / Los Angeles Times)

Nurse Arnold Garcia, center, gets help from a colleague in decontaminating and disinfecting his personal protective equipment after treating a patient with possible COVID-19. (Marcus Yam / Los Angeles Times)

Staff unload a patient who has COVID-19 symptoms at Sharp Chula Vista Medical Center. (Marcus Yam / Los Angeles Times)

Nurses perform an N95 respirator fit test at the new ICU wing at Sharp Chula Vista Medical Center. (Marcus Yam / Los Angeles Times)

Nurse Sarah Barrile cares for a patient with COVID-19 symptoms who has been placed on a ventilator. (Marcus Yam / Los Angeles Times)

Nurses Shauna Stanfill, left, and Arnold Garcia care for Michael Weiss at Sharp Chula Vista. (Marcus Yam / Los Angeles Times)

Linda Isidienu displays her visor, which has been used and cleaned repeatedly as medical staff try to preserve protective gear at the medical center. (Marcus Yam / Los Angeles Times)

Nurses stand by to aid fellow nurses working inside the negative-pressure isolation room where patients with COVID-19 symptoms are placed. (Marcus Yam / Los Angeles Times)

Linda Isidienu cares for an intubated patient at Sharp Chula Vista Medical Center. (Marcus Yam/Los Angeles Times)

A nurse gets help putting on her personal protective equipment at Sharp Chula Vista. (Marcus Yam / Los Angeles Times)

Reyna Gomez, left, communicates with Norah Pena and John Stanley, who are caring for a COVID-19 patient. (Marcus Yam / Los Angeles Times)
International travelers may have encountered some very basic screening for COVID-19 symptoms at certain airports recently, probably amounting to nothing more than a temperature check and some questioning. But a new wave of screening coming to airports this month goes way beyond that, using advanced techniques to test passengers on site for the presence of the coronavirus itself.

In Dubai, Emirates said this week it has become the first airline to start conducting on-site, pre-departure quick COVID-19 testing at Dubai International Airport. The airline, working with the Dubai Health Authority, takes passenger blood samples at the airport before departure and said it can obtain test results within 10 minutes. The first test of the system was conducted this week on passengers traveling on an Emirates flight to Tunisia.

We are working on plans to scale up testing capabilities in the future and extend it to other flights. This will enable us to conduct on-site tests and provide immediate confirmation for Emirates passengers travelling to countries that require COVID-19 test certificates, said Emirates chief operating officer Adel Al Redha. It was not clear if the Emirates is testing for the virus only, or for antibodies.

At Japans Tokyo Narita Airport, meanwhile, officials have introduced on-site COVID-19 testing for arriving passengers from widely infected countries like Italy and the U.S., who are required to undergo a virus check. However, the test can take anywhere from six hours to two days for the test results to come in, according to media reports. Arriving travelers who undergo the test arent allowed to use public transportation, so unless they arrange for someone to pick them up, they have to stay in the airport to await test results.

To help with this, Tokyo Narita has arranged some special accommodations for those unlucky travelers who must wait in its baggage claim area. Those accommodations consist of special temporary beds made of heavy-duty cardboard, along with a mattress and a quilt. The jury-rigged system probably works for now because the number of arriving international passengers is currently so small. (You can read more about one traveler's experience here.)

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Hong Kong last week started mandatory COVID-19 testing last week for all travelers arriving at its international airport. Passengers coming in from countries that are considered high-risk will be given tests that can produce results in about eight hours, and theyll have to wait out that time at a temporary testing facility in an exhibition center near the airport. Those coming from lower-risk places will get a different test that may take days to produce results. They wont have to stay at the airport, but theyll have to wear a tracking wristband that officials can check on to make sure they self-isolate.

We havent seen any COVID-19 on-site testing at U.S. airports yet, but XpresSpa Group Inc., operator of passenger spas at 23 airports including San Francisco International (which are currently closed because they are considered non-essential services), recently created a new subsidiary called XpresTest Inc. for that very purpose.

The company said it is working with health care partners to develop COVID-19 screening and testing technology for deployment in U.S. airports. But those tests, initially at least, wouldnt be for airline passengers.

While nothing definitive has yet been finalized, XpresSpa is currently in discussions with three major airports, JFK International Airport, Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport and Chicago O'Hare International Airport to pilot COVID-19 screening and testing for airline employees, contractors and workers, concessionaires and their employees, TSA agents, and U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents, the company said.

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Gandhinagar, April 15 : With 104 more cases, Gujarat's total coronavirus tally reached 766 on Wednesday, with Ahmedabad (450) accounting for over half of the cases, while three more deaths took the state's toll to 33.

On Wednesday morning, a total of 33 positive cases were reported and in the evening, another 71 positive cases and three deaths were registered. Out of these 71 cases,46 were from Ahmedabad, seven in Anand, six in Rajkot, five Vadodara, three in Surat, and two each in Bharuch and Narmada.

Ahmedabad has the maximum positive cases (450), followed by Vadodara with 121, Surat 51, Bhavnagar 26, Rajkot 24, Anand 17, Gandhinagar 16, Patan 14, Bharuch 13, Chotta Udepur and Panchmahals with five each, Kutch and Mehsana with four each, Porbandar three, Banaskantha, Dahod, Gir-Somnath and Narmada two each and Jamnagar, Morbi and Sabarkantha one each.

Three more positive patients of Corona succumbed to the virus on Wednesday, all females from Ahmedabad. A female (65) with comorbid condition like diabetes and lung disease and another female (55) with heart ailments, admitted in the SVP hospital, Ahmedabad and a female (40) admitted in the Ahmedabad's Civil hospital succumbed to the virus.

On the other hand, five positive patients were discharged after treatment - three males (8), (33) and (41) from SVP hospital and a female (33) from Civil hospital were discharged in Ahmedabad, and a male (22) from the Civil hospital Surat. Total 64 positive patients after treatment have been discharged so far.

Out of the total 669 active cases, the condition of 663 is stable while 6 are on ventilator, their condition being critical.

In the last 24 hours, the health authorities have taken 3,213 samples for testing, out of which 116 have been found positive. The total number of tests carried out by the Health Department till now is 19,197 out of which 766 are positive.

The total number of people quarantined in the state is 15,147, where 13,059 are home quarantined, 1,960 in government facilities and 128 in private facilities.

The Gujarat government has imposed a week-long curfew in the fortified City of Ahmedabad and the area of Danilimda, from Wednesday morning, as the maximum number of positive cases in Ahmedabad have been found from the clusters in these areas.

Till date, out of the total 33 deaths, 16 people have died from the virus infection in Ahmedabad.
To help meet an increased need for deliveries and provide its drivers with work, Lyft is launching a pilot program in which government agencies, nonprofits, businesses and healthcare organizations can request on-demand deliveries via Lyft drivers. The program, called Essential Deliveries, is meant to transport things like meals, groceries, medical supplies, hygiene products and other necessities.

According to Lyft, drivers will be paid similarly to Standard rides, and all deliveries will be contact-free. For now, the Essential Deliveries pilot is available in Atlanta, Austin, Dallas, Houston, Indianapolis, Orlando, Phoenix, San Francisco, San Diego, San Antonio and Seattle. In the coming weeks, Lyft plans to expand the program to more drivers and cities across the US.

So far, partners include organizations like Dole Packaged Foods, which is having food delivered from its warehouses to senior facilities, and Army of Angels, which is having school lunches delivered to low-income families. Lyft is in talks with groups in North Carolina and Atlanta, which plan to deliver food from food banks to low-income communities.

Lyft began planning Essential Deliveries last month, when it announced that its drivers would ferry food and medical supplies during the COVID-19 crisis. It piloted the food deliveries first in San Francisco. It has also promised drivers who contract COVID-19 or are required to quarantine with two weeks of paid sick time, and its offering free bike-share and scooter rides to critical workers.

Lyft isnt the only rideshare company expanding its offerings. Yesterday, Postmates announced that it will deliver products from Walgreens/Duane Reade and 7-Eleven, and DoorDash drivers are also picking up items from convenience stores. These additional services could help drivers who have seen the demand for rides drop off drastically. Hopefully, the programs wont expose them to the virus.
Kim Kardashian's long-time hairstylist has been praised for sharing a foolproof tutorial for trimming guys hair on social media during lockdown.

Chris Appleton, 36, a British hair pro who now lives in Los Angeles where he has styled the likes of Kim and Jennifer Lopez, posted a tutorial for clipping men's locks on his Instagram feed where it quickly went viral.

Within minutes of sharing the video with his one million followers, Chris was inundated with comments from fans who thanked him for his clear and simple instructions.

Pro tips: Kim Kardashian's long-time hairstylist has shared his top tips for trimming men's hair in an Instagram tutorial to help guys who can't get to a barber during lockdown

Go easy: Chris recommended opting for a length that is longer than your usual cut, to allow for any necessary corrections if you make a mistake along the way

Posting the clip, he wrote the caption: 'You all asked for it and here it is how to cut mens hair during quarantine.'

A-list: As well as Kim, Chris counts Jennifer Lopez among his celebrity clientele

The video begins with Chris explaining the equipment needed to cut men's hair at home, which includes scissors, clippers, sectioning clips and a comb.

Explaining his technique, Chris said: 'First of all what you want to do is section the hair, so that you know what's going to be short and what's going to be longer.

'So sides and back, take a section from the temple area and follow it through to the bone in the back, that's a great guideline for creating your fade.'

He warned that it's important before you start cutting to opt for a head size on your clippers that is one size longer than the one you're used to.

The celebrity hairstylist explained that following the guidance will allow for corrections if needed.

Chris recommended to always start cutting from the front, in front of the ear and working your way up to the top.

'Make sure when you get to the top, you get a bit of a flicking action with your wrist. Flick the hair out,' he advised.

He advised starting from the front when cutting hair, explaining that you can use bones as a guideline on where to cut

Chris said his top tip is having a mirror on hand whenever you're cutting your own hair at home

To create a fade, he changed the head on his clippers from a four to a three, and continued the flicking method, while only going halfway up.

Switching to his scissors, he said: 'Now to blend the top bit, take the sectioning clips out. I wet it with a bit of water. You want to imagine a half circle shape on the top of the head, which effectively is the shape of the head.

'Take a section from the side and blend in from the shortest area and follow that all around the sides. You're going to do that all around the sides and back.'

The hairdresser who also styled Dua Lipa's hair for the Grammys, explained that pointing scissors as you cut achieves a softer look.

He finished up the look by moisturizing the hair with Color Wow One Minute Transformation Cream ($24).

Popular! Chris received a stream of comments from his impressed Instagram followers who said they would be trying his technique

'My top tip is to always go a little bit longer than you want, you can always go back in after and sharpen it up of you like it shorter. Make sure you have a mirror at the back if you're doing it yourself,' he added.

Asking his followers to tag him in their attempts at following the tutorial, Chris received an overwhelming response from those praising his advice.

One person wrote: 'Thank you so much for this video. I cut my son's hair with this as a guide and it worked well! Next time I think I can go a little shorter but I appreciate this so so much!'

Another said: 'Yes! Will be doing this on my husband and son! Thank you for sharing'

A third added: 'This was great! I thought the fade was at the top to blend! You should have people post the result! I'm doing my teenage boys and boyfriend right now'
CHATHAM  A private dredging company is now clearing the Stage Harbor entrance channel, continuing the work started by the Army Corps of Engineers' dredge Currituck in January. In light of severe shoaling, the work was essential to keep the channel open for this summer's boating traffic, but the job is costing significantly more than it would have if the Barnstable County dredge had been available.

Texas-based Dredgit Corporation was hired by the town to move 15,000 cubic yards of sand for a $530,000 contract, more than twice what the town would have paid for the same service from Barnstable County. Because the county dredges booster pump malfunctioned and hasnt yet been repaired, the town was required to seek private companies to clear the channel.

Coastal Resources Director Ted Keon said the Dredgit bid was far lower than the two other bids the town received, $1.4 and $1.5 million, respectively. A key reason was that the equipment was already in Chatham carrying out dredging at Outermost Harbor Marine, so the town did not need to pay for transportation costs, Keon said.

Extreme shoaling at the harbor entrance, caused by stronger currents flowing south of Morris Island from the barrier beach inlet known as the Fools Cut, has threatened to close the harbor to deeper-draft boats.

This was crisis potential, Keon said. When the Currituck visited, it was unable to dredge in some customary locations because severe shoaling meant the channel marker buoys could not be moved. The Corps did what they could, he said, but its still not clear how much sand they were able to remove before they were required to move on to the next port. Had additional dredging not been carried out, theres a likelihood that the channel wouldve substantially silted in.

This really was a critical dredging need, Keon said. There is a chance that the town will seek to hire Dredgit to do additional work above and beyond the amount in the contract, he said.

That amount, 15,000 cubic yards of sand, may sound like a lot, Harbormaster Stuart Smith said, but its not likely to be adequate. Smith estimated that fully clearing the channel might require removing between 50,000 and 60,000 cubic yards of material.

A booster pump is required because the dredge spoils are being used to nourish beaches to the west. Some of the sand will be placed on Cockle Cove Beach, and in exchange for a financial contribution to the job, the residents of the Harding Shores neighborhood are having about 4,000 cubic yards of sand placed on their beach. The remainder will likely be placed on Harding's Beach.

Dredge crews are working hard to beat required annual closures designed to protect horseshoe crabs; additional limitations are sometimes also required to protecting nesting shorebirds.

Though the town is reassessing its spending priorities in light of the COVID-19 crisis, funds for the dredging have already been secured. The town received a state grant last year to support the effort, and town funds for the work were appropriated last year. Voters at the most recent special town meeting were expected to be asked to appropriate $500,000 for maintenance dredging, but that article was not acted upon, as town officials found the money elsewhere.

The Dredgit dredge completed its work at the Outermost Harbor entrance channel a couple weeks ago, and marina officials report that the entrance is in excellent condition and has been marked with channel buoys by the town. The sand recovered from the effort was largely placed on the Quitnesset Spit and has provided some storm protection to the Morris Island causeway, Smith said.
Fans waiting to see a song battle between 50 Cent and Ja Rule happen of IG Live are out of luck. It's not going to happen, 50 Cent makes sure everyone knows this.

On April 13, 50 Cent shut down whatever hopes some people have that he will engage in a song battle with Ja Rule with just two Instagram posts. Sorry, Ja Rule.

Ja Rule was the one who suggested that he and 50 Cent engage in a head-to-head, but it appears that 50 thinks the idea laughable.

He took to Instagram to share a video clip of himself driving away in a convertible, laughing a tad too gleefully. Who want to battle?" he captioned the video.

This is not his only response though. The other was more straightforward, with him actually questioning Ja Rule's intelligence for even suggesting that they battle it out.

He shared a photoshopped image of Ja Rule holding up a cardboard, written with the statement that reads, "I will battle 50 Cent for attention." His caption of this photo shared? "Stupid."

Just one word and it was enough to roast Ja Rule. He even added a #FyreFestival hashtag to remind Ja Rule's his involvement in the massive failure and scandalous festival.

Ja Rule, 50 Cent Long-Time Feud

True fans would know that Ja Rule and 50 Cent have been in a public feud for years. Over the years, they each have devoted some of their musical talent, time and effort to release diss tracks about each other.

With the feud having gone on for so long, the reason behind the feud may no longer be understood or known. According to 50 Cent, the feud essentially started with Ja Rule saw him hanging out at a club with an alleged robber, who had coincidentally robbed Ja Rule just a few weeks earlier.

"A friend of mine robbed Ja Rule," 50 Cent wrote in his 2005 biography From Pieces to Weight. "That's how the beef originally started. My man robbed him for a chain, and then this guy named Brown came and got the chain back for Ja. Later, Ja saw me in a club with the kid who robbed him. I went over to say, 'What's up' to Ja, and he acted like he had a problem with me. But I'm not the one who robbed him."

So this turned into YEARS of feud that people thought is over and done with, even without an actual hugging and reconciling. Until today.

But the feud just won't stop! Ja Rule revealed that he was ready for the feud to start once more when he made an appearance on Fat Joe and Swiss Beatz's Instagram Live on April 11. While on the speakerphone, Ja Rule answered the question of whether he'll do a live battle with 50 Cent. His response was quite ignorant.

"I want all the smoke, but I'll behave," he said. However, Swizz still pointed out that his swearing to 'behave' sounded quite "devilish."

Twitter Fans Set Ja Rule, 50 Cent Straight

Their rotting beef seems to be annoying the "fans" though. Some believe that they should just put things to rest and retire. Them trying to revive the feud in public is downright turn-off.

While the two might think they have a legion of fans wishing to see them get it on on Live, Twitter users set the straight. According to one, the two of them should be retiring already because they are no longer as famous and as good as the rappers today, citing Kendrick Lamar, Blue Face, and Young Thug, among others. He described 50 Cent as a GOAT and Ja Rule's Fyre Fest fiasco is a tough act to forget. Both are also singing songs "your niece liked in the nineties."

Can't they just retire and let Kodak, Young Thug, Travis Scott, Blueface, Torey, Kendrick Lamar, Gucci, migos, and other relevant rappers take over? I mean #50cent is a GOAT and #jarule did #Fyrefest and songs your niece liked in the nineties April 14, 2020

I always go back to this video when I think about 50 Cent and JA Rule. Lmao pic.twitter.com/v9tPYbHhQT April 13, 2020

50 Cent already battled Ja Rule and destroyed him. This actually happened in real life, so there's no need to re-live it.  Paul Cantor (@PaulCantor) April 14, 2020

READ MORE: 'Secret' One Direction Reunion with Zayn Malik Happening: New 1D Song in the Works?
This obituary is part of a series about people who have died in the coronavirus pandemic. Read about others here.

Kimarlee Nguyens writing was as restrained as the Cambodian elders she conjured in her fiction, short stories that sketched precarious, haunted lives in a chilly new country.

But her personality was as exuberant as the rugby she played at Vassar, with a team so determined, said Kiese Laymon, a novelist and her creative writing professor there, that the players would regularly come to class concussed.

Most people are reserved in their personality, but in their writing everything busts out, Mr. Laymon said. Kim was the opposite. She would tell stories so it appeared that nothing had happened. But, oh, man, so much was happening.
Donald Trumps top economic adviser told reporters he has no regrets about the White Houses Covid-19 response because the presidents team followed the actual facts.

Democratic legislators and its presumptive presidential nominee, former vice president Joe Biden, have criticised Mr Trump for not taking warnings about the viruss severity. They also have called the overall federal response  largely as a result of his tepid attitude  slow and uneasy.

The White Houses Larry Kudlow, however, disagrees.

Look, I and many others looked at the actual facts. The cases were very low at that point, Mr Kudlow said of the administrations actions in January and February  despite US intelligence community warnings to the president that a highly contagious novel virus was headed to the United States.

And youve had so many debates, you know, there were people criticising the president for the travel restrictions, other people, you know, as recently as early mid-March, he said.

Im not going to name names, but you have prominent people on the air saying, you know, this was going to be less than an ordinary flu, Mr Kudlow contended in the Trump White Houses latest comment showing how much of its policies are a result of what is said on cable news networks.

But former president Barack Obama, in a video endorsing Mr Biden for the Democratic nomination for president, criticised the job done by Mr Kudlow and Mr Trump.

If theres one thing weve learned as a country from moments of great crises, its that the spirit of looking out for one another cant be restricted to our homes, or our work places, or our neighbourhoods, or our houses of worship. It also has to be reflected in our national government, the kind of leadership thats guided by knowledge and experience, honesty and humility, empathy, and grace, Mr Obama said.

That kind of leadership doesnt just belong in our state capitals and mayors offices. It belongs in the White House, he said. And thats why Im so proud to endorse Joe Biden for president the United States.

While it is not yet clear the president and former VP will be able to wage a conventional campaign with rallies and other in-person events should the coronavirus outbreak not subside later this year  or if it returns this fall  the Trump campaign soon issued a reminder that whats coming will be a vicious race.

Barack Obama spent much of the last five years urging Joe Biden not to run for president out of fear that he would embarrass himself, Trump campaign manger Brad Parscale said in a statement.

Now that Biden is the only candidate left in the Democrat field, Obama has no other choice but to support him, he added. Even Bernie Sanders beat him to it. Obama was right in the first place: Biden is a bad candidate who will embarrass himself and his party. President Trump will destroy him.
Traders had been expecting a much larger purchase after the supply minister said last week the country would look to import 800,000 tonnes of the grain during its own local wheat harvesting season

Egypt, the worlds largest wheat buyer, bought a smaller quantity of wheat than anticipated on Tuesday at a rare international purchasing tender held as the countrys local buying season of the grain begins.

The state grain buyer said on Tuesday it bought 120,000 tonnes of Russian wheat as the country looks to bolster its strategic reserves amid the coronavirus outbreak.

Traders had been expecting a much larger purchase after the supply minister said last week the country would look to import 800,000 tonnes of the grain during its own local wheat harvesting season following presidential orders.

The General Authority for Supply Commodities (GASC) said its purchase was comprised of 60,000 tonnes for shipment May 15-25 and 60,000 tonnes for shipment May 26-June 5.

The prices on offer were the cheapest on the market but still high enough to discourage a large buy, traders said.

Its difficult for them to buy a lot with such difference in price between first and second (shipment periods), said one Egypt-based trader.

Russian wheat had been offered lowest at the tender.

Egypts tender was much anticipated by the grain market as buyers from the around the region seek to boost their reserves on fears that the global lockdown measures on the back of coronavirus spread could lead to further export curbs and slowdowns in supply chains.

The prices were very expensive for them, but it is a mistake not to buy more now, another trader said.

GASC issued a tender and cancelled it promptly on April 1. Traders had told Reuters last week that the buyer was considering changing its payment terms for wheat.

Tuesdays tender, however, was for wheat on a free-on-board basis with freight offered separately and no changes to the payment terms or specifications.

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April 14 marks the 30th day since Rahul Shanbhag has been holed up in his tiny cruise cabin onboard the MSC Grandiosa anchored off the coast of Italy.

With the global cruise tourism industry having dropped anchor, Shanbhag along with around 200 other Indians of which 70 are from Goa, remains on board the ship bobbing as it does on the waves waiting for some sign that the Indian government will allow the repatriation of seafarers home.

While the crew of other countries have already returned home, the 30 days of waiting has taken a toll both mental and physical on the wellbeing of the crew.

There were 12 cases (of Covid-19) onboard the ship including four who needed to be taken to the ICU. But they have all been discharged. But another of my colleagues collapsed out of weakness and needed to be revived, Shanbhag said while speaking with HT.

Hailing from Fatorda, Shanbhag is one of around 7000 people from Goa who makes his living sailing the seas.

According to documents submitted to the Prime Ministers Office, there are around 22,500 Indian seafarers who are stranded abroad around one-third of whom are from Goa.

The global shipping industry has not come to a halt but the cruise tourism industry, which employs more people, has.

Other countries, especially the Philippines, which contributes a large part to the global shipping workforce, have already repatriated their workforce, it is only the Indians who remain on board the ships.

Everyone is frustrated here and we cannot even visit each others cabins. Two among us also needed to be hospitalised because they became sick with worry, Shanbhag, who worked in the dining section of the cruise liner, said.

Also read: What Covid-19 lockdown guidelines mean for hotspots, containment zones

For the past month, Shanbhag and his colleagues have written to the ministry of external affairs, Goa government and local representative for help in getting back home.

People here are scared. We understand these are difficult situations but we quarantined here on board the ship and are willing to quarantine even upon arrival. But there needs to be some action. The situation should not be allowed to deteriorate, Shanbhag said.

The Centre has refused to repatriate those Indians stranded abroad, be it students or tourists.

It told the Supreme Court, which was hearing a petition to repatriate Indian students, that evacuation of Indian expatriates amid the lockdown to curb the spread of the coronavirus disease could pose a risk to Indias domestic population.

The top court, while posting the matter after four weeks, asked those abroad to Stay where you are.

For some, like Pizarro Andrade, that means staying put within the transit zone of the Dubai international airport. He is one among 23 Indians who were on their way to India when the government announced a cessation of International flights.

The situation is that neither the Indian government nor the Indian embassy in Dubai is helping us. Thanks to the Dubai government and Emirates (the airline) who are taking care of us here, Andrade said while speaking HT.

There are few Goans working in Dubai try to get in touch with me asking about me and see if they can try to help me any possible way they can, he said.

While those working abroad are usually taken care of by their employers, in the case of the cruise tourism industry, their stay is on board the ship and with the industry shut down, they are out of work and with nowhere to go.

Goa chief minister Pramod Sawant admitted that the seafarers situation was different than those others stuck abroad and has assured that he was seriously pursuing the issue with the ministry of external affairs.

He also stressed that there was little he could do beyond waiting for a change in stance from the central government.

Within two to three days we will place the complete data before the Prime Ministers Office. We are seriously pursuing the issue. The seafarers issue is different from others stranded abroad. We will request them to reconsider the issue, Sawant said.

Sawant is under increasing pressure both from the opposition as well as within his party as legislators have regularly been meeting him to begin repatriation.

Several legislators have also written directly to the Prime Ministers Office.

The Indian seafarers have contributed immensely to the economic growth and foreign exchange earnings of the country and particularly Goa. I humbly request your immediate intervention and request you to kindly give necessary instructions to all concerned to take steps to bring back these stranded Indian seafarers, Leader of Opposition Digambar Kamat said in a letter to the Prime Minister.

The Goa government has also set up quarantine centres with space for around 20,000 people awaiting the return of their sons, but the central government is yet to relent.

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Since March 19, 2020, Liberian security forces have attacked or intimidated at least four journalists covering the COVID-19 pandemic, according to the journalists, who spoke with CPJ in phone calls and via messaging apps, and a report posted on Facebook by the Press Union of Liberia, a local trade group.

On March 19, 20, and 21, authorities summoned Charles Bioma Yates, a publisher of the privately owned Integrity Watch Newspaper and a talk-show host on local broadcaster Super FM, for questioning at the office of Liberias National Security Agency in Monrovia, the capital, he told CPJ.

He was summoned over a post on his personal Facebook page, where he often posts political commentary and videos from his radio show, alleging corruption by the Liberian government and unequal application of quarantine rules for people coming to Liberia from abroad, according to Yates and news reports.

Yates told CPJ he was held for nearly six hours during each visit and he was questioned about his motives for being critical of government. He said he was released without charge, but National Security Agency officials told him to remain in Liberia while an investigation was pending.

Before the summons, on March 18, Yates said his neighbors told him that men in a black jeep had come to his neighborhood and asked about him and his family.

On March 20, a National Security Agency official called Joel Cholo Brooks, the publisher of the independent news website GNN Liberia, and requested that he reveal his source for a story he wrote about Liberias enforcement of social restrictions, Brooks told CPJ. He said he refused and has not been contacted again, but was concerned for his safety given the recent attacks on other reporters in Liberia.

On March 27, a group of officers from Liberias Drug Enforcement Agency attacked Frank Wornbers Payne, a reporter and producer with the privately owned Magic FM radio station, while he was reporting on compliance with government-mandated social distancing at a wake in Peachuzon, a community in Liberias coastal region, he told CPJ.

Payne told one of the agents that he was concerned by the crowd of over 50 people dancing, and a group of more than a dozen agents then slapped and kicked the journalist until his friends were able to help him escape, Payne said.

Payne told CPJ he filed a complaint with the local police station about the attack, and said the Justice Ministry had opened an investigation. Payne told CPJ on April 14 that the Justice Ministry said a report on the attack would be ready by April 17.

In that call, Payne said he was yet to resume work, and had been admitted at a local clinic for two days to treat injuries from the attack, including pains in his ribs and back, but was unable to afford x-rays recommended by the doctors.

On March 30, security officers attacked Molley Trojan Kiazolu, the radio director at the privately owned Fabrick FM broadcaster, as he tried to report live on a group of officers enforcing social distancing in Monrovia, he told CPJ.

Officers asked Kiazolu why he was recording the event, and one asked him to delete his footage, he said. When he said he could not delete the videos, because he was streaming live, one officer sprayed hand sanitizer in Kiazolus face and another seized his mobile phone, he said.

Kiazolu said his sunglasses prevented the sanitizer from damaging his eyes. He said that about four hours after the attack, he went to the police headquarters with Press Union of Liberia Vice President Daniel Nyakonah, and said the officers apologized and returned his phone.

Police spokesperson Moses Carter told CPJ via phone on April 10 that he did not know the details of the investigation into the attack against Payne and believed the matter involving Kiazolu had been settled.

Samuel K. Jacob, the head of joint security of the Grand Bassa county, where Peachuzon is located, and a spokesperson with the Ministry of Justice, did not respond to CPJs calls or messages for comment.

Liberian government spokesperson Smith Toby did not respond to CPJs calls and text messages for comment.
Harry and Meghan have been forced to shelve plans to host a celebrity-filled birthday bash in Los Angeles for their son Archie, DailyMail.com can reveal.

A source close to the couple said the pair had hoped to mix their son's first birthday on May 6 with a welcome to LA party - the perfect opportunity for the couple to mingle with family and friends.

But the Duke and Duchess Of Sussex's plans have been scuppered after coronavirus lockdown restrictions were extended.

On Friday Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti announced that the stay-at-home order would be extended through May 15 with all social gatherings still forbidden.

Harry and Meghan will now opt for a quiet birthday celebration for Archie at their new Los Angeles home - the location of which remains a mystery.

Harry and Meghan have been forced to shelve plans to host a celebrity filled birthday bash in LA for Archie (pictured together last September), DailyMail.com can reveal. A source close to the couple says the pair had hoped to mix their son's first birthday on May 6 with a welcome to LA party - the perfect opportunity for the couple to mingle with family and friends

Harry and Meghan have a long list of celebrity friends, many of which will have been on the invite list for the bash. They include James Corden, Ellen DeGeneres, Oprah Winfrey, Idris Alba, Tom Hardy, Serena Williams (right) , Elton John and George and Amal Clooney. Meghan's school friend Katherine McPhee, who lives in LA with Grammy winning music producer husband David Foster (left), will also have been invited

This comes after Harry's friend Dr Jane Goodall revealed the prince is finding life 'a bit challenging' following his move to California.

The 86-year-old primatologist has 'been in touch' with Harry, 35, after he quit frontline royal duties to live in Canada and then Los Angeles with wife Meghan, 38, and baby Archie.

Speaking to Radio Times, she said: 'I don't know how his career is going to map out, but, yes, I've been in touch  though I think he's finding life a bit challenging right now.'

The Sussexes moved to California just before the US closed the border with Canada to non-residents last month.

Meghan has purposely kept her mother Doria Ragland away from their LA home over concerns of spreading the coronavirus.

And a business associate of the pair has told DailyMail.com that the couple has no intention of flouting the rules by throwing a big party for Archie's birthday.

'That is absolutely not going to happen now the authorities have extended the restrictions,' one associate told DailyMail.com.

This comes after Harry's friend Dr Jane Goodall revealed the prince is finding life 'a bit challenging' following his move to California. The 86-year-old primatologist has 'been in touch' with Harry

The Sussexes moved to California just before the US closed the border with Canada to non-residents last month. Pictured: The Vancouver Island mansion Meghan and Harry were staying at until heading off to Los Angeles

'Los Angelenos have been told that social distancing remains a priority and parties or gatherings of any sort are out of the question.

'There is no way that Harry and Meghan could or would even consider throwing a party for family and friends. As special as Archie turning one is, now is the time to take safety more seriously than ever.

'Their close knit friend group will have plenty of other opportunities moving forward to come together. There are other events lined up throughout the rest of the year.

'It's a shame because Archie's birthday, without the lockdown, offered the perfect opportunity to host a welcome to LA bash for them and their friends.

'Just last week April 19 was the date restrictions would set to be lifted, but that's not the case any more for safety reasons.'

Harry and Meghan have a long list of celebrity friends, many of which will have been on the invite list for the bash.

Meghan has purposely kept her mother Doria Ragland away from their LA home over concerns of spreading the coronavirus. And a business associate of the pair has told DailyMail.com that the couple has no intention of flouting the rules by throwing a big party for Archie's birthday

They include James Corden, Ellen DeGeneres, Oprah Winfrey, Idris Alba, Tom Hardy, Serena Williams, Elton John and George and Amal Clooney.

Meghan's school friend Katherine McPhee, who lives in LA with Grammy winning music producer husband David Foster, will also have been invited, as well as her close friend Jessica Mulroney and former Suits co-star Abigail Spencer.

The source added that while the lockdown is impacting many of Harry and Meghan's business and charity's plans, they are still in 'full planning mode'.

'They still hope to have Archewell up and running fully by the time the lockdown is lifted,' the associate said.

'Their desire to make their foundation a success is greater than ever. And what is happening to the world makes them more determined to do good in the world.'

As of Tuesday Los Angeles County has recorded more than 9,400 coronavirus cases and more than 325 deaths.

The source added that while the lockdown is impacting many of Harry and Meghan's business and charity's plans, they are still in 'full planning mode'. 'They still hope to have Archewell up and running fully by the time the lockdown is lifted,' the associate said

The city is under lockdown with only essential trips to supermarkets, pharmacies and exercise outings allowed.

California has been one of the states hit the hardest by COVID-19, along with New York and Washington state, but recent numbers suggest social-distancing and other measures have helped slow the spread and flatten the curve.

The Sussexes officially stepped down as senior working royals on March 31. They have set up home in Los Angeles after initially insisting they would settle in Canada.

It's understood Meghan is hoping to eventually settle with her husband in the Malibu, Palisades and PCH corridor and is understood to be planning a return to show business.

Earlier this month Disney announced the release of a charity film called Elephant which is narrated by Meghan.
(Bloomberg) -- Turkeys president announced a second consecutive weekend lockdown to prevent the spread of the coronavirus and warned banks to accelerate lending.

Recep Tayyip Erdogan said that 31 cities must observe a curfew from midnight April 17 to midnight April 19. The announcement, made after a cabinet meeting on Monday, confirmed earlier comments made by a senior official on condition of anonymity that the government was considering extending weekend lockdowns.

The Turkish leader also issued a stern warning to private banks, saying they werent passing the test in extending loans to troubled businesses. Turkey wont bow down to any imposition, including an IMF program, he said.

Erdogan Gets Over Lockdown Chaos Without Losing Cabinet Member

Erdogan has repeatedly said the country must keep the economy running, and the weekend-only lockdowns are designed to limit exposure to the virus as the warm weather draws people outdoors.

The first curfew was announced just two hours before it was imposed last weekend, setting off a crush of panic-buying that resulted in throngs of people defying social-distancing guidelines.

The bungled launch of restrictions provoked an uproar. Interior Minister Suleyman Soylu submitted his resignation late Sunday, but Erdogan rejected it.

As of Monday, Turkey had reported 61,049 coronavirus cases, with 1,296 fatalities.

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(Newser)  With a tornado bearing down on their rural home, Andrew Phillips told his wife to grab their two children and get into the safest place they had: A small room built from concrete blocks. It was a decision that likely saved four lives. While the rest of their Moss, Mississippi, home was obliterated in a matter of seconds Sunday afternoon, Phillips, wife Amber, and their kids, ages 2 and 6 months, survived without a scratch inside their safe room, which doubles as a closet. The family had been watching an online Easter service on Sunday morning. Phillips, a volunteer firefighter, then started tracking the weather online and with the help of a fire radio. Realizing a tornado was close by, Phillips told Amber to get in the safe room with the kids and joined them.

story continues below

Then, after ducking outside and seeing the funnel cloud, he grabbed more bedroom pillows and jumped back inside, shielding his family with his body. "I was in there about 20 seconds when it hit," he said. "The house is gone, everything but the safe room." The family had been living in the house only a few weeks. The safe room was one of the reasons he bought it, Phillips said. Clothes were still hanging neatly inside the vault-like structure after the tumult. But the mans meat-processing business next door was smashed, as were their cars. "I'm just going to let the insurance handle it and trust in the good Lord," Phillips told the AP. "Were going to try to come back bigger and better." (A home seen in a viral photo was destroyed in a tornado.)
Source: Xinhua| 2020-04-15 15:20:07|Editor: huaxia

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BEIJING, April 15 (Xinhua) -- Chinese State Councilor and Foreign Minister Wang Yi and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov discussed the fight against COVID-19 in a phone conversation on Tuesday.

Wang noted that since the epidemic broke out, China and Russia have supported and assisted each other, which showcases the high level of the China-Russia comprehensive strategic partnership of coordination for a new era.

China has noticed that Russia is currently facing considerable pressure on epidemic prevention and control, Wang said, noting that the first batch of medical aid from China has arrived in Moscow, the protective supplies purchased by Russia are being shipped in succession, and a medical expert team despatched by the Chinese government is already working in Russia.

China will continue to firmly support Russia in its fight against the virus, and is full of confidence in Russia's victory over the epidemic, Wang said, adding that the anti-epidemic cooperation will certainly enrich relations between the two countries and lift the China-Russia comprehensive strategic partnership of coordination to a new stage.

Wang pointed out that the COVID-19 outbreak has posed a major test for countries across the world, which examines the governance system and capacity in a comprehensive manner, and has also had a far-reaching impact on the global political and economic landscape.

Wang expressed confidence that both China and Russia will hand over an answer sheet that can stand the test of history, and make due contributions to promoting world peace and prosperity.

China stands ready to strengthen communication and coordination with Russia, implement the outcomes of the Extraordinary G20 Leaders' Summit, and prompt the international community to send out a clear signal of solidarity and cooperation facing the epidemic, Wang added.

For his part, Lavrov expressed gratitude to China for providing anti-epidemic supplies and sending medical teams to Russia.

He said that Russia and China support each other politically and cooperate closely in fighting the epidemic, which fully reflects the unique and strategic nature of Russia-China relations.

Russia highly values China's accomplishments in the fight against the epidemic, approves of China's vision of building a community with a shared future for mankind, and opposes individual countries' moves to politicize the disease and shirk their responsibilities to others, Lavrov said.

Noting that the COVID-19 pandemic will have a significant impact on the international order and the world economy, and Russia and China have a high degree of consensus on major international and regional issues, Lavrov said that Russia is ready to strengthen communication and coordination with China to better cope with global challenges and safeguard common interests.

Chinese nationals in Russia have made positive contributions to promoting friendly cooperation between the two countries, Wang said, expressing his hope and belief that Russia will continue to provide convenience for Chinese nationals' stay and life there and guarantee their health, safety and legitimate rights.

China and Russia should strengthen coordination and cooperation to avoid disorderly flow of people, reduce the risk of cross infection, and scale up measures for the prevention and control of COVID-19 at border crossings, Wang said.

Echoing the view of the Chinese side, Lavrov said that Russia will treat every Chinese national fairly and equally, fully ensure their legitimate rights and offer them necessary assistance.

The two sides also coordinated stances and exchanged views on the United Nations affairs and regional hotspot issues including Afghanistan.
Kelowna, British Columbia--(Newsfile Corp. - April 15, 2020) - Citation Growth Corp. (CSE: CGRO) (OTCQX: CGOTF) ("Citation" or "Company"), a licensed multi-state Cannabis cultivator, producer and retailer, is pleased to announce that it has executed a letter of intent ("LOI") with Indigenomix International (the "Purchaser"), a private Saskatchewan-based business, dated April 8, 2020. Under the terms of the LOI, Citation will sell their 40 acres of land and two constructed buildings in Celista, BC and also include its late-stage Health Canada License to Cultivate application. Citation's management team anticipates the execution of a definitive agreement (the "Definitive Agreement") by June 15, 2020 with the closing of the transaction (the "Closing") anticipated to follow shortly thereafter upon the satisfaction of such terms and conditions precedent to the Closing, which are customary for transactions of this nature.

"We believe the accretive benefits derived from the sale of the Celista Property and late-stage application will help us continue our focus on the Nevada and California markets as well as give us a substantial non-dilutive capital injection into the company," commented Erik Anderson, CEO of Citation. "We also feel that our strong synergies with the Indigenomix group will create a dynamic strategic partnership going forward as we share our proprietary organic growing methodologies and decades of scientific research and development."

Upon completion of the Proposed Transaction, the Company will begin to fund the aggressive expansion of their Apex facility in North Las Vegas, Nevada and also finalize plans to build out cultivation facilities on their land in Desert Hot Springs, California.

Citation anticipates that the cash injection will:

provide the company with the capital needed to further expand the Apex facility in North Las Vegas in a staged approach that will result in an additional 70,000 sq ft of hybrid greenhouses being constructed on site;

provide the company with the ability to expand the extraction lab at Apex to handle the additional yield and focus on bringing high-value concentrates and extracts to the Nevada market under the Diamante brand and potential white-label (toll extraction) partnerships; and

complete its plans to build out more than 20,000 sq ft of cultivation in California, increase focus on its award-winning dispensary in Desert Hot Springs, Green Leaf Wellness, and expand its presence in the state as a vertically integrated player.

"We believe the upgrades to our lighting system in our Apex North Las Vegas facility will combine with our award-winning genetics library and refined growing methodologies acquired in the FSM acquisition to more than double our yields as well as decrease our power consumption, leading to better margins and increased profitability," stated Anderson.

Terms of the Proposed Transaction

Citation will turn over the already constructed buildings as well as the land in Celista to the Purchaser. Citation will also facilitate the transfer of the Late-Stage Health Canada Application to the Purchaser. Citation agrees that certain employees will assist the Purchaser to help finalize the Health Canada application and operationalize the facility. In return the Purchaser will pay Citation $8.5 million.

Additional details regarding the Proposed Transaction will be provided in a comprehensive press release if and when the parties enter into the Definitive Agreement. The Definitive Agreement will incorporate the principal terms of the Proposed Transaction described herein and may be modified by agreement between the Company and the Purchaser prior to finalizing the Definitive Agreement. In addition, more detailed terms and conditions of the structure and nature of the Proposed Transaction will be made available after receiving further tax, legal, securities, regulatory and financial advice from the respective advisors. The Proposed Transaction is subject to due diligence by the Purchaser as well as the customary conditions for a transaction of this nature, which include all necessary security-holder and corporate approvals, third-party consents, permits, including those of government authorities, and the approval of the CSE, if required.

Current Equity and Debt Financings

Citation also advises that the second tranche of the previous announced financing is set to close at the end of the month. The Company confirms that there was director participation in the first and second closing of the financing, namely Alnoor Nathoo, Director and Erik Anderson, CEO and Director.

The company is also in talks with a few parties regarding the proposed non-dilutive debt financing on the Apex Property in North Las Vegas.

About Citation Growth Corp.

Citation Growth Corp. (CSE: CGRO) (OTCQX: CGOTF) is a publicly traded company that has been investing in the development of medical and recreational cannabis products since 2014. Citation has expanded its operating portfolio to include cultivation, production and retail offerings in our key North American legal jurisdictions Nevada, California, Washington and British Columbia. For more information, please visit www.citationgrowth.com.

For Further Information:

Erik Anderson, President and CEO

1-877-438-5448 Ext. 713

eanderson@citationgrowth.com

Cannabis Industry Involvement:

The Company owns marijuana licenses in California and Nevada. Marijuana is legal in each state; however, marijuana remains illegal under United States federal law and the approach to enforcement of U.S. federal law against marijuana is subject to change. Shareholders and investors need to be aware that federal enforcement actions could adversely affect their investments and that the Company's ability to support continuing U.S.-based operations and its access private and public capital could be materially adversely affected.

Forward-Looking Statements:

This news release contains forward-looking statements or information that relate to our current expectations and views of future events. These statements relate to future events or future performance. Statements which are not purely historical are forward-looking statements and include any statements regarding beliefs, plans, outlook, expectations or intentions regarding the future including words or phrases such as "anticipate", "objective", "may", "will", "might", "should", "could", "can", "intend", "expect", "believe", "estimate", "predict", "potential", "plan", "is designed to", "project", "continue", or similar expressions suggest future outcomes or the negative thereof or similar variations. Forward-looking statements may also include, among other things, statements about the future business strategy; expectations of obtaining licenses and permits; expectations regarding expenses, sales and operations; future customer concentration; anticipated cash needs and estimates regarding capital requirements and the need for additional financing; total processing capacity; the ability to anticipate the future needs of customers; plans for future products and enhancements of existing products; future growth strategy and growth rate; future intellectual property; changes in laws and regulations; regulatory approvals and other matters; and anticipated trends and challenges in the markets in which the Company may operate.

To view the source version of this press release, please visit https://www.newsfilecorp.com/release/54457
Sweden reported a record 170 new coronavirus deaths today in a widely-expected surge after the Easter weekend.

The 170 new deaths - surpassing yesterday's joint-record 114 - bring the death toll from 1,033 to 1,203 in a country still refusing to go into lockdown.

Only a handful of deaths had been recorded on Saturday and Sunday, meaning that the numbers were always likely to shoot up when the weekend was properly accounted for.

The number of infections rose by 482, a less striking increase which brings the overall tally from 11,445 to 11,927.

Sweden added 170 coronavirus deaths to its official tally today in a widely-expected surge after only a handful of cases were reported over the weekend, as shown on this graph

This graph shows the daily number of infections. Today's figure of 482 was similar to that in the previous two days

Swedish officials had announced only 17 new deaths on Saturday, an implausibly low figure after an average jump of 94 during the week.

Health officials now say that 50 deaths were registered on Saturday, but many of them have not been revealed until after Easter.

Similarly, the 12 new deaths announced on Sunday were only a fraction of the 54 people who are now said to have died that day.

Many countries have experienced delays in reporting weekend figures, a problem exacerbated this week by the long Easter break.

Spain has typically seen a rise in reported new cases on Tuesdays and Wednesdays, once the weekend has been fully accounted for.

Sweden is continuing to hold out against a lockdown, making it an outlier in Europe where most countries have imposed heavy restrictions.

Bars and restaurants are still open in Sweden along with primary schools, and public gatherings of 50 people are still permissible.

Shops are also open, subject to social distancing rules, but the government has faced mounting criticism from doctors and academics for its light-touch policy.

A group of 22 doctors, virologists and researchers criticised the Public Health Agency in an op-ed published by Dagens Nyheter newspaper on Tuesday.

They accused it of having failed to draw up a proper strategy, pointing out that the mortality rate in Sweden was now way above that of its Nordic neighbours.

One of them, epidemiology professor Bo Lundback of the University of Gothenburg, claimed that 'the authorities and the government stupidly did not believe that the epidemic would reach Sweden at all'.

'Sweden was poorly or even not at all prepared,' he said as he joined in the researchers' calls for 'rapid and radical measures' to stem the outbreak.

People enjoy the sunny weather in Stockholm on Saturday, sitting outdoors at a restaurant in a type of gathering which has been banned in most of Europe for weeks

The virus in Sweden has also disproportionately affected those born abroad. The Public Health Agency pointing out that this was true whether the people hailed from Africa, Europe or the Middle East.

In contrast, health officials in Norway said there had been 'no general over-representation among foreign-born'.

According to figures released last week, some of Stockholm's most disadvantaged neighbourhoods, where many immigrants live, were up to three times more affected than the rest of the capital.

Gina Gustavsson, associate professor of political science at Uppsala University, said the government showed 'a worrying lack of knowledge' or a lack of interest in people with different social backgrounds.

Sweden's prime minister Stefan Lofven, speaking to broadcaster SVT over the weekend, conceded that 'preparedness has not been good enough.

People sit outdoors over the Easter weekend in Stockholm, which accounts for more than 40 per cent of the country's coronavirus cases

Officials insist their plan is sustainable in the long-term, rejecting drastic short-term measures as too ineffective to justify their impact on society.

The government has emphasised 'individual responsibility' and trusted Swedes to obey social distancing guidelines without enforcing them.

'People in Sweden have a high level of trust in government agencies. This means that a large proportion of people follow government agencies' advice,' officials say.

'In the current situation, people in Sweden are on the whole acting responsibly to reduce the spread of infection by, for example, restricting their social contacts.

'This crisis may continue for a long time, and in order for the measures to work over time, people need to understand and accept them.'

Nonetheless, Sweden has vowed to spend more than 100billion kronor (8billion) to address the economic impact of the pandemic.

Despite the lack of a lockdown, the Swedish economy is expected to shrink by around four per cent this year.

Finance minister Magdalena Andersson told SVT that ministers hoped to see the economy improve again before the end of the year.

'In the forecast we judge that we will see a very sharp downturn in the economy in the first half of the year and that we will then begin to turn upwards, but clearly the crisis can be both deeper and longer than that,' she said.

Young people sit around a table in central Stockholm over the Easter weekend. The number of reported deaths has risen sharply today after very low figures were released at the weekend

The new measures include subsidies for shorter working hours, tax rebates, loan guarantees and easier rules for claiming benefits.

Local authorities have also been promised billions to meet extra healthcare costs because of the crisis.

'The measures will give greater security, for those who have been hit by the crisis by limiting the spread of the infection, limit the consequences for companies and jobs and at the same time give economic security and the chance for a new start for those who become unemployed,' Andersson said.

Around 5,000 of the country's 11,927 cases are in the Stockholm region, official figures show, although the true figure may be higher.

Random sampling carried out by the public health agency suggests that at least 2.5 per cent of Stockholm residents may already have been infected, implying a much higher figure around 60,000.

The 1,203 deaths are made up of 686 men and 517 women, reflecting a pattern elsewhere which has been widely noted but is little understood.

Experts have suggested poor hygiene, smoking rates and a stronger female immune system as possible reasons why men appear to be more susceptible.
Ladakh reported one positive case of coronavirus on Wednesday taking the total number of cases in the Union Territory to 18, officials said.

However, only five cases are still active as the rest of the 13 patients have been discharged after being cured of the infection, the officials said.

A resident of Chuchot-Yokma village of Leh was tested positive for COVID-19 on Wednesday, while a patient from Kargil who was earlier tested positive was discharged from the hospital after his second test came negative, they added.

With the addition of another positive patient, the total number of active cases in Ladakh has gone up to five -- four in Leh and one in Kargil, the officials said.

Meanwhile, Ladakh Autonomous Hill Development Council-Kargil (LAHDC) Chairman and Chief Executive Councillor Feroz Ahmad Khan on Wednesday called on Lieutenant Governor Radha Krishna Mathur at Raj Niwas in Leh.

During the meeting, Khan took up several issues regarding Kargil district with the L-G and had detailed discussions especially about the evacuation of stranded pilgrims from Iran, Ghaziabad in UP, Jaisalmer and Jodhpur in Rajasthan apart from the homecoming of stranded passengers and students stranded in different parts of the country and increasing the fleet of trucks bringing essential commodities to Ladakh, an official release said.

With regard to the evacuation of stranded pilgrims from Iran and different parts of India, Mathur said the matter has already been taken up with the Ministry of External Affairs and the Ladakh administration is in constant touch with those who are in Ghaziabad, Jodhpur and Jaisalmer.

The process of evacuation of pilgrims from Ghaziabad followed by Jodhpur and Jaisalmer will start within two or three days who will be evacuated by IAF planes from their respective locations to Kargil, the Lieutenant Governor said. An all-out effort is being made to bring them back before the holy month of Ramadan and the process of clearance from the Army, Union Ministry of Home Affairs and Indian Air Force (IAF) is underway, Mathur added.

Regarding the evacuation of passengers and students from different parts of the country to Ladakh, Mathur said the process will take some more time in view of the ongoing lockdown.

However, he pointed out that a necessary support system would be strengthened in the meanwhile at the locations where they are put up by taking necessary measures, including the appointment of more liaison officers.

The LAHDC-Kargil chairman requested the L-G to give preference to elderly persons, children and students who are willing to come home after the end of the lockdown.

Mathur said the territorial administration is working on the homecoming of these stranded people at the earliest possible time and all the concerns raised by Khan will be considered.

Responding to the demand for increasing the number of trucks carrying essential commodities to Ladakh, the L-G assured Khan that there would be no restrictions on the number of trucks carrying essential items for Ladakh from Srinagar and there will be no trans-shipment at Minamarg.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Indonesian soap opera actor Galih Ginanjar was recently sentenced to 2 years and four months in prison for humiliating his ex-wife by claiming that her genitalia smelled like salted fish.

In June 2019, Galih appeared as a guest on a popular YouTube show hosted by TV personality Rey Utami, where he answered all kind of questions about his personal life.When asked about his marriage to Indonesian actress Fairuz A Rafiq, which ended in 2015, the young soap opera didnt shy away from vulgar language to describe intimate details. Among other things, he said that intercourse between them usually lasted about 15 minutes, and that her privates smelled like salted fish. This made the host burst into uncontrollable laughter, but enraged Fairuz, who quickly filed a police report for immoral content.

Those immoral words have badly hurt my heart as well as all Indonesian women, and they have brought great shame to my husband and my family, Fairuz A Rafiq said in a statement, last year. What made it hurt even more was that the [YouTube] account owners, Rey Utami and Benua, were laughing while spreading the immoral content, by encouraging everyone to subscribe and publish it as many times as possible to increase their subscriber count.

The video of Galih making the vulgar remarks about his ex-wife was taken down last summer, but copies of it have since been reuploaded on YouTube, with some getting over 3 million views. Galih Ginanjar, and the owners of the YouTube channel were the remarks were made  Rey Utami and her husband Pablo Benua  were charged with three alternative articles on immorality, humiliation, and defamation under Indonesias Information and Electronic Transactions Act.

The three defendants risked spending up to six years in prison, each, but after several months since the police report, they were sentenced to much less prison time via teleconference. Judge Agus Widodo sentenced Galih to 2 years and 4 months behind bars, while Utami got one year and four months, and her husband one year and 8 months. The defendants attorneys said they might consider appealing the sentences.

Shortly after the verdict was announced, Fairuz A Rafiq took to Instagram to applaud the outcome of the trial.

Lies can cover up the truth, but not eliminate it its only a matter of time until the truth prevails Allahu akbar (Allah is greater [than everything]). Thank you, ya Allah, she wrote.
US President Donald Trump has instructed his administration to temporarily halt funding to the World Health Organization (WHO) over its handling of the COVID-19 disease pandemic.

Trump said the WHO had "failed in its basic duty and it must be held accountable". He said it promoted China's "disinformation" about the coronavirus that was likely to have led to a wider outbreak of disease.

The United States is the biggest overall donor to the Geneva-based WHO, contributing more than $400 million in 2019, roughly 15% of its budget.

* China's Foreign Ministry

China urged the United States to fulfil its obligations to the WHO. Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian said the coronavirus pandemic, which has infected nearly 2 million people globally, was at a critical stage and that the US decision would affect all countries.

* German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas

"Apportioning blame doesn't help. The virus knows no borders," Maas said on Twitter on Wednesday.

"We have to work closely together against #COVID19. One of the best investments is to strengthen the @UN, especially the under-funded @WHO, for example for developing and distributing tests and vaccines."

* New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern

"At a time like this when we need to be sharing information and we need to have advice we can rely on, the WHO has provided that. We will continue to support it and continue to make our contributions," she said.

* Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison

Morrison said he sympathised with Trump's criticisms of the WHO, especially its support of re-opening China's "wet markets", where freshly slaughtered animals are sold and where the outbreak first appeared in the city of Wuhan late last year.

"But that said, the WHO also as an organisation does a lot of important work including here in our region in the Pacific and we work closely with them," Morrison said.

"We are not going to throw the baby out with the bathwater here, but they are also not immune from criticism and immune from doing things better."

* UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres

"Not the time" to reduce resources for WHO operations.

"Now is the time for unity and for the international community to work together in solidarity to stop this virus and its shattering consequences," he said.

* Mike Bloomberg, Founder Of Bloomberg Philanthropies

"Withholding funding from the WHO is an attempt by the president to shift blame for his own failures to prepare our country for this crisis  and tragically, it will lead to more suffering and death around the world.

"While the president points fingers, others are taking action. We must do everything we can to help them, and Congress must not let this dangerous decision stand."

* Peter Piot, Director Of The London School Of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine

"Halting funding to the WHO is a dangerous, short-sighted and politically motivated decision, with potential public health consequences for all countries in the world, whether they are rich or poor.

"This pandemic is not over anywhere until it is over everywhere. Strong support from the United States has always been key for WHO's effectiveness, and must continue."

* Liesbeth Aelbrecht, General Director For MSF Suisse (Switzerland)

"This is the wrong message to send during a pandemic when a coordinated public health response is more important than ever. Ending this pandemic will require unprecedented cooperation between nations and multilateral institutions.

The World Health Organization was established specifically to provide a forum for international cooperation during global public health emergencies

* Centeral African Republic

Pierre Somse, CAR'S health minister, said Trump's move was "a regrettable decision that will have harmful effects on the functioning of the WHO and on world health, because the WHO supports many countries in the health sector."

* Chairman, US House Of Representative Foreign Affairs Committee

"With each passing day of this worsening crisis, the president is showing us his political playbook: blame the WHO, blame China, blame his political opponents, blame his predecessors - do whatever it takes to deflect from the fact that his administration mismanaged this crisis and its now costing thousands of American lives," Democratic representative Eliot Engel.

* US Centers For Disease Control And Prevention

Directed requests for comment to the White House.

* American Medical Association President

Dr. Patrice Harris called it "a dangerous step in the wrong direction that will not make defeating COVID-19 easier" and urged Trump to reconsider.

* Johns Hopkins University Center For Health Security

"The move sends the wrong message during the middle of a pandemic," said Dr. Amesh Adalja, an infectious diseases expert and senior scholar.

Adalja said the WHO does make mistakes, as it did in delaying the response to the Ebola outbreak in 2013 and 2014 in West Africa. He said reforms may be needed, but that work needs to take place after the pandemic has passed.

"It's not the middle of a pandemic that you do this type of thing," he said.

Adalja said the WHO collects information about where the virus is active in every county in the world, which the United States needs to help guide decisions about when to open borders.

* Melinda Gates, Co-Chair Of Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation

"Halting funding for the World Health Organization during a world health crisis is as dangerous as it sounds," she said on Twitter. "Their work is slowing the spread of COVID-19 and if that work is stopped no other organization can replace them. The world needs the WHO now more than ever."

* David Heymann, Former Senior WHO Official And Current Professor At The London School Of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine

"The strength of WHO is that it is able to bring together public health experts from around the world to exchange information, review scientific evidence, and make evidence based consensus recommendations on disease prevention and control.

"I have no doubt that WHO will continue to work in this manner during the COVID-19 pandemic."

* School Of Medicine At Britain's Leeds University

Stephen Griffin, a Leeds professor, described Trump's move as "perhaps one of the least productive, most short-sighted, self-motivated and hypocritical acts I have ever witnessed".

"The situation in the US and the world over amounts to a crisis, and one in which we must stand together. WHO is perhaps one of the best means of achieving this and deserves the support and respect of all countries."

* International Council Of Nurses (ICN)

Howard Catton, head of the Geneva-based ICN, which represents 132 national nursing associations, said: "The last thing we need now is for funding to be pulled and WHO to be undermined."

"Frontline nurses and other health workers will be shocked and angered and deserve better.

"At this moment when we are facing a pandemic unprecedented in modern times, we must support WHO, not cut off its oxygen supply. We must target the virus not WHO, if we are to beat it."

* US Organisation Protect Our Care

"This is nothing more than a transparent attempt by President Trump to distract from his history downplaying the severity of the coronavirus crisis and his administrations failure to prepare our nation," said Chair Leslie Dach, who served as the global Ebola coordinator for the US Department of Health and Human Services.

"To be sure, the World Health Organization is not without fault but it is beyond irresponsible to cut its funding at the height of a global pandemic. This move will undoubtedly make Americans less safe."

Protect Our Care is a US organisation working to protect affordable coverage for all Americans.

* Vanderbilt University Medical Center

"This virus doesn't need passports. In a few short months it has travelled to all of the continents of the world except Antarctica. If there were ever an event that showed us how we need to work tougher as a global community, this is it," said Dr. William Schaffner, an infectious disease expert.

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[April 14, 2020] The Global Voice Biometric Solution Market is expected to grow from USD 1,395.38 Million in 2018 to USD 3,959.40 Million by the end of 2025 at a Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 16.06%

NEW YORK, April 14, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- The Global Voice Biometric Solution Market is expected to grow from USD 1,395.38 Million in 2018 to USD 3,959.40 Million by the end of 2025 at a Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 16.06%.



Read the full report: https://www.reportlinker.com/p05871694/?utm_source=PRN



The positioning of the Global Voice Biometric Solution Market vendors in FPNV Positioning Matrix are determined by Business Strategy (Business Growth, Industry Coverage, Financial Viability, and Channel Support) and Product Satisfaction (Value for Money, Ease of Use, Product Features, and Customer Support) and placed into four quadrants (F: Forefront, P: Pathfinders, N: Niche, and V: Vital).



The report deeply explores the recent significant developments by the leading vendors and innovation profiles in the Global Voice Biometric Solution Market including are Agnito SL,, Macy's, Inc., Nuance Communications, Inc., SayPay Technologies INC.,, VoiceTrust Ag, SpeechPro, Uniphore, ValidSoft, Voice Security Sysrems,, and VoiceTrust Holding BV.



On the basis of Component, the Global Voice Biometric Solution Market is studied across Hardware and Software.



On the basis of Industry, the Global Voice Biometric Solution Market is studied across Automotive, BSFI, Consumer Electronics, Government, Healthcare, and IT & Telecom.



For the detailed coverage of the study, the market has been geographically divided into the Americas, Asia-Pacific, and Europe, Middle East & Africa. The report provides details of qualitative and quantitative insights about the major countries in the region and taps the major regional developments in detail.



In the report, we have covered two proprietary models, the FPNV Positioning Matrix and Competitive Strategic Window. The FPNV Positioning Matrix analyses the competitive market place for the players in terms of product satisfaction and business strategy they adopt to sustain in the market. The ompetitive Strategic Window analyses the competitive landscape in terms of markets, applications, and geographies. The Competitive Strategic Window helps the vendor define an alignment or fit between their capabilities and opportunities for future growth prospects. During a forecast period, it defines the optimal or favorable fit for the vendors to adopt successive merger and acquisitions strategies, geography expansion, research & development, new product introduction strategies to execute further business expansion and growth.







Research Methodology:

Our market forecasting is based on a market model derived from market connectivity, dynamics, and identified influential factors around which assumptions about the market are made. These assumptions are enlightened by fact-bases, put by primary and secondary research instruments, regressive analysis and an extensive connect with industry people. Market forecasting derived from in-depth understanding attained from future market spending patterns provides quantified insight to support your decision-making process. The interview is recorded, and the information gathered in put on the drawing board with the information collected through secondary research.



The report provides insights on the following pointers:

1. Market Penetration: Provides comprehensive information on sulfuric acid offered by the key players in the Global Voice Biometric Solution Market

2. Product Development & Innovation: Provides intelligent insights on future technologies, R&D activities, and new product developments in the Global Voice Biometric Solution Market

3. Market Development: Provides in-depth information about lucrative emerging markets and analyzes the markets for the Global Voice Biometric Solution Market

4. Market Diversification: Provides detailed information about new products launches, untapped geographies, recent developments, and investments in the Global Voice Biometric Solution Market

5. Competitive Assessment & Intelligence: Provides an exhaustive assessment of market shares, strategies, products, and manufacturing capabilities of the leading players in the Global Voice Biometric Solution Market





The report answers questions such as:

1. What is the market size of Voice Biometric Solution market in the Global?

2. What are the factors that affect the growth in the Global Voice Biometric Solution Market over the forecast period?

3. What is the competitive position in the Global Voice Biometric Solution Market?

4. Which are the best product areas to be invested in over the forecast period in the Global Voice Biometric Solution Market?

5. What are the opportunities in the Global Voice Biometric Solution Market?

6. What are the modes of entering the Global Voice Biometric Solution Market?



Read the full report: https://www.reportlinker.com/p05871694/?utm_source=PRN



About Reportlinker

ReportLinker is an award-winning market research solution. Reportlinker finds and organizes the latest industry data so you get all the market research you need - instantly, in one place.



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The Little Mermaid (Credit: Disney)

Ann Sullivan, veteran animator for Disney who worked on a host of the studio's biggest movies, has died at the age of 91 after contracting coronavirus.

Sullivan worked on classic movies including The Little Mermaid in 1989 and the original Lion King in 1994.

She is the third resident of the Woodland Hills retirement home in Los Angeles, run by the Motion Picture and Television Fund, to die after testing positive for coronavirus.

Born in Fargo, North Dakota, Sullivan began working at Disney in the 1950s  in the studio's animation paint lab  before leaving to have a family.

Latest coronavirus news, updates and advice

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Explained: Symptoms, latest advice and how it compares to the flu

She then returned to the industry in 1973, first working for Hanna Barbera, and then once again at Disney.

Once back at the Mouse House, she worked on Oliver & Company, The Little Mermaid, The Prince and the Pauper, The Pagemaster, The Lion King, Pocahontas, Hercules, Tarzan, Fantasia 2000, The Emperor's New Groove. Lilo & Stitch and Treasure Planet.

She is survived by four children, eight grandchildren and four great-grandchildren.

Eighty-year-old actor Allen Garfield, who was also resident at the home, died last week.

Several other residents, and some members of its staff, are currently being treated for the virus after also testing positive.
Remdesivir hinders the reproduction of coronavirus which is why it is believed that it could be effective in COVID-19 treatment.

The Indian Council of Medical Research on Monday said antiviral drug remdesivir, which was used during the Ebola outbreak, may be highly effective in stopping the replication mechanism of SARS-CoV-2 that causes COVID-19.

The ICMR said research on its efficacy in the treatment of COVID-19 is a part of WHO's "Solidarity Trial".

According to a recently published study in the New England Journal of Medicine, two out of three critically ill coronavirus infected patients who were on oxygen support or on ventilators showed signs of improvement when they were administered remdesivir.

Commenting on the study, Head of Epidemiology and Communicable diseases at ICMR Raman R Gangakhedkar said that drug which was used against Ebola virus, according to the researchers, hinders the reproduction of coronavirus which is why they believe that it could be effective in COVID-19 treatment.

"Recently reported study on the use of remdesivir for COVID-19 treatment is not a clinical trial, but an observational study which found that 68 percent or two out of three patients after treatment with the drug did not require ventilator support or their need for oxygen support reduced. We will come to know of further developments through the WHO Solidarity Trial, which has an arm which is looking into this," he said.

He further said that remdesivir, developed by Gilead Sciences Inc, is not presently available in the country and the government is working on to see if any pharmaceutical company can manufacture it.

The death toll due to coronavirus rose to 324 and the number of cases in the country climbed to 9,352 on Monday, according to the Union Health Ministry.

However, a PTI tally of figures reported by various states as on Monday evening showed at least 9,975 cases and 346 deaths.

There has been a lag in the Union Health Ministry figures, compared to the number of cases announced by different states, which officials attribute to procedural delays in assigning the cases to individual states.

Also Read: All you need to know about the use hydroxychloroquine for COVID-19 cases recommended by ICMR
Hopes of eliminating the coronavirus were raised today after leading British experts revealed trials of a vaccine would begin on humans next week.

Oxford University scientists are confident they can get jab for the incurable disease rolled out for millions to use by autumn.

Tests of the experimental jab on different animals have shown promise - and the next step is to use it on humans to prove it is safe.

The Oxford team are one of hundreds worldwide racing to develop a COVID-19 jab, which experts fear could take 18 months.

More than 70 vaccines are currently in development, according to the World Health Organization (WHO).

Three different groups - one in China and two in the US - have already began trials on humans.

How a vaccine is made: Researchers racing to find a cure extract the virus' genetic code and inject part of the DNA sequence into animals to produce antibodies, which fight off diseases. These antibodies - which recognise COVID-19 and know how to beat it - are given to humans

Oxford's vaccine programme has already recruited 510 people, aged between 18 and 55, to take part in the first trial.

They will receive either the ChAdOx1 nCoV-19 vaccine - which has been developed in Oxford - or a control injection for comparison.

Professor Adrian Hill, who will lead the research, said: 'We are going into human trials next week. We have tested the vaccine in several different animal species.

'We have taken a fairly cautious approach, but a rapid one to assess the vaccine that we are developing.'

METHODS TO STOP CORONAVIRUS SPREADING Infected people can spread a contagion to others via direct or indirect exposure. An outbreak will continue to expand if the average number of people infected by each carrier is greater than one. SOCIAL DISTANCING MEASURES Prohibiting group gatherings, closing borders, advising people keep 1.5 metres apart, and confining people to their homes has been shown to halt the spread of coronavirus. In this method the public does not gain immunity in large numbers and the virus could re-surge dramatically if controls are lifted. HERD IMMUNITY People who recover from COVID-19 develop antibodies and immunity. As the virus spreads through the population and more people develop immunity there are less people the virus can infect. If enough people have immunity the outbreak will die away. It is estimated about 30 per cent of people who catch the virus will not show symptoms and for many more the symptoms will not be serious. This method produces a spike in infections which can overwhelm the healthcare system resulting in large numbers of fatalities. VACCINES A COVID-19 vaccine would be the safest and most effective way of controlling the outbreak. There are several vaccines currently in development though they need to be tested which can take many months. If a vaccine is rushed without proper testing there may be side-effects and complications. Advertisement

It is hoped the vaccine, developed by the Jenner Institute and Oxford Vaccine Group clinical teams, will be ready in September.

Speaking to the BBC World Service, Professor Hill explained they're trying to raise money to scale up the manufacturing of the vaccine.

He said: 'We're a university, we have a very small in house manufacturing facility that can do dozens of doses. That's not good enough to supply the world, obviously.

'We are working with manufacturing organisations and paying them to start the process now.

'So by the time July, August, September comes - whenever this is looking good - we should have the vaccine to start deploying under emergency use recommendations.

'That's a different approval process to commercial supply, which often takes many more years.'

Professor Hill added: 'There is no point in making a vaccine that you can't scale up and may only get 100,000 doses for after a huge amount of investment.

'You need a technology that allows you to make not millions but ideally billions of doses over a year.'

The Oxford team last week announced hopes to have the vaccine ready for autumn, saying they were '80 per cent' confident it would work.

Sarah Gilbert, a professor of vaccinology, admitted that this time frame was 'highly ambitious' many things could get in the way of that target.

The drug industry is hoping to shorten the time it takes to get a vaccine to market  usually about 10 to 15 years  to within the next year.

Dozens of research groups across the world, including Massachusetts-based Moderna, have taken a different route to traditional vaccine techniques

Drugs and vaccines tend to be tested in three stages before they get approved for human use. The first phase is a safety run

But public health officials say it will still take a year to 18 months to fully validate any potential vaccine  despite human trials beginning.

Britain's chief scientific adviser last month said that it would be at least 2021 before a vaccine was ready.

Leading researchers have called for healthy volunteers to be purposely infected with the coronavirus to speed up the race.

Drugs and vaccines tend to be tested in three stages before they get approved for human use. The first phase is a safety run.

Phase two trials involve more people, and scientists will work out the correct dosage. They will also test the vaccine against a placebo.

The final stage of testing is the real deal. It involves hundreds, sometimes thousands, of people across multiple sites for a long period of time.

Three scientists, including Harvard's Professor Marc Lipsitch, last month suggested bypassing phase three to speed up the process.

Rolling all phases into a controlled study has the potential to slash the wait time for the roll-out of an efficacious vaccine, the trio argued.

HUMAN CLINICAL TRIAL PHASES Preclinical: Testing of drug on non-human subjects. Phase I: Studies that assess the safety of a drug or device. Usually includes a small number of healthy volunteers (20 to 100). Phase II: These test the efficacy of a drug or device. Most phase II studies are trials where one group of patients receives the experimental drug, while a second control group receives a standard treatment or placebo. Phase III: Randomized and blind testing in several hundred to several thousand patients, which can last several years. 70-90 per cent of drugs that enter Phase III successfully complete this phase. Once complete, a pharmaceutical company can request government approval for marketing the drug. Phase IV: Studies that are conducted after a drug or device has been approved for consumer sale. Source: WCG Advertisement

It was revealed yesterday that there are three leading vaccine candidates  one from China and two from companies in the US.

Another 67 vaccines, developed by scientists worldwide including teams from the UK, are also working towards trials in humans.

WHO's list - published at the weekend - comes as the global COVID-19 death count passed 100,000.

The list shows Beijing Institute of Biotechnology, working with Hong Kong's CanSino Bio, are leading the charge with their vaccine, called Ad5-nCoV.

In a listing with the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, CanSino Bio said it plans to move to phase II trials with the vaccine candidate in China 'soon'.

Of the US-based drugs companies, Massachusetts-based Moderna got regulatory approval to move to human trials last month.

Forty-five participants in Seattle received the experimental jab - developed with the National Institutes of Health (NIH) - in March to test its safety.

There is no chance participants could get infected from the shots, because they dont contain the virus itself.

Moderna took a different route to traditional vaccine techniques. Normally a weaker bug is planted in the body  like the MMR vaccine.

But Modernas sees messenger RNA stimulate the immune system to make similar proteins to the killer virus, which it can then combat.

Pennsylvania-based Inovio Pharmaceuticals began its human trials last week, in 40 healthy volunteeers in Philadelphia and Missouri.

Inovio's approach is what's called a DNA vaccine, made using a section of the virus's genetic code packaged inside a piece of synthetic DNA.
Pranab Mondal By

Express News Service

KOLKATA: Ignoring her health issues and suggestions by her physician, the community health officer of Magurmari health centre in north Bengals Jalpaiguri district, Abishmita Ghosh, who is seven months pregnant, has decided not to take rest at home and has been working hard to conduct a medical check-up of the migrant labourers and their family members.

Riding the pillion of a motorcycle Abishmita is working almost round-the-clock as around 800 migrant labourers returned home from different states, mainly from Kerala.

The pocket with a population of around 7,500 is now in the district administrations top priority list because of its high percentage of outbound labourers who returned to their villages recently.

The top priority is now the coronavirus issue in my jurisdiction as a huge volume of labourers returned from other states, especially from Kerala. Though, my doctors advised me to stay at home at this stage, securing hundreds of lives from the infection is my prime concern, said Abishmita.

The area is dominated by daily wage earners who are not well aware of coronavirus and its impact if once one of their neighbours gets infected. We are organising intensive campaigns every day to make people aware of the deadly virus, she said.

She is paying a surprise visit to the villages of migrants labourers to see whether the isolation guideline is being followed. In many cases, she found the migrants labourers are not following the guideline and sent them to quarantine centres set up by the state government, said Rajesh Kumar Singh, vice-chairman of Dhupguri municipality.

Meanwhile, at least 10 more people tested positive for the virus in different parts of West Bengal.
Member of Parliament for the Manhyia South Constituency, Dr Matthew Opoku Prempeh also known as Napo has donated some foodstuff to the Kumasi Cheshire Home.



This is to help the residents of the rehabilitation centre to survive the lockdown down period, with its attendant challenges.



The Holy Bible teaches that we should support the needy in our midst in times of difficulty. As a Christian, this has been my constant motivation of delightfully sharing whatever I have with vulnerable people,



I am grateful to God for the opportunity to help others in need and I hope this gesture will help ease the huge burden on officials and users of the centre. Dr Matthew Opoku Prempeh said during the donation



Mr Owusu Adjei, Administrator of the Kumasi Cheshire Home, expressed their gratitude for the gesture.



Such a time, in the era of a lockdown that many people contemplate on what they can save for their family and friends, hardly will anyone dare come out to help us, but you have honoured your spiritual and social obligations to the poor.



May I remind you that this is not the first time the Home has enormously benefitted from your benevolence. We pray that God richly rewards you. He stated























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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Kayla Anderson had been selling brightly colored headbands in her online clothing boutique for about a month before the coronavirus outbreak.

But as images spread on social media of doctors and nurses with bruised faces and open wounds from hours endured behind personal protective equipment, Anderson began sewing buttons on the side of each headband to make wearing masks less painful.

Shes gotten an overwhelmingly positive response since she first started adding the buttons and has sold over 300 headbands since March 31.

People I don't know at all have messaged me saying like, thank you so much. This means the world to me, said Anderson.

A headband with buttons can help make wearing a mask more comfortable

Anderson is the owner of an online clothing boutique In the Ivy, which opened in November. She had been selling the headbands, called Ry-Bandz, for a month prior to the coronavirus outbreak.

Ry-Bandz were created by Ryann Jones in 2014. Jones, located in New Jersey, sells the headbands wholesale to over 70 retailers as well as on the Ry-Bandz website.

Jones first added buttons to her headbands after a friend who is a nurse complained about how raw her ears were from wearing a mask 12 hours a day. They found a pattern on Etsy that used a pin and adapted it so that they could add buttons.

Since that first headband, Jones has donated over 1,000 headbands to hospital workers across the East Coast.

Ry-Bandz were created by Ryann Jones.

When Anderson reached out to ask if she could add buttons to the headbands she was selling, Jones was happy to say yes.

We cannot keep up with the demand. So that's kind of where Kayla came in and was able to help, Jones said.

The headbands Anderson is selling are $16 dollars, but the buttons are free to add on.

Since I am a small business, I just started I don't have the funds to donate all these headbands, but I'm happy to donate at least the buttons and then my time of adding the buttons on.

Customers can also purchase headbands to donate to health care workers. So far, Anderson has received over 30 donations to distribute to Syracuse area hospitals.

Thank you SO much @shoppingintheivy for these amazing headbands!! & shoutout to my amazing friend Kayla Anderson for... Posted by Claire Michel on Thursday, April 9, 2020

Anderson has donated a few headbands herself. One of the nurses who received one, Claire Michel is a registered nurse at Upstate University Hospital. Michel said that she had seen the headbands trending before Anderson sent her one and knew she needed them for her and her co-workers. She thought the buttons were a creative solution.

Although theres a lot of uncertainty right now, its clear that Kaylas doing something which I think everyone can truly admire, said Michel.

Another registered nurse, Liz Orsini, works at Brigham and Womens Hospital in Boston. She first saw the headbands on In the Ivys Facebook page and thought they were genius.

We are wearing masks for 12 plus hours. So especially when you're working back to back shifts, it can start to hurt your ears, she said.

Orsini has been wearing the headbands to work since she got one a few days ago. Shes even gotten compliments from her co-workers who want to order one as well.

It works great. You know, it looks cute and it protects your ears and pulls some of that stress off, Orsini said.

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Vang A Thenh (L) and Ho A Manh are arrested for transporting 307 kg of meth in Quang Binh Province, April 14, 2020. Photo by VnExpress/Quang Van.

Police confiscated 307 kg of meth in the central Quang Binh Province on Tuesday, arresting four suspects.

Vang A Thenh, 20, and Ho A Manh, 20, were caught transporting the drugs via a pick-up truck on a National Highway 1A section through Bo Trach District on Tuesday, police stated.

Thenh and Manh said they were hired for VND300 million ($12,820) to transport the 15 bags from a Laos border gate in the neighboring Ha Tinh Province to Saigon.

Further investigations led to the arrest of Nguyen Van Thang, 26, and Dinh Ngoc Do, 42. Hong Van Pao, 46, is currently on the run.

Vietnam is a key trafficking hub for drugs from the Golden Triangle, an intersection of Laos, Thailand and Myanmar and the world's second largest drug producing area after the Golden Crescent in South Asia.

Though it has some of the world's toughest drug laws, including death for smuggling and trading, drug busts are frequent.

Those convicted of possessing or smuggling over 600 grams of heroin or more than 2.5 kilograms of methamphetamine face capital punishment. The production or sale of 100 grams of heroin or 300 grams of other illegal narcotics is also punishable by death.
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Linkedin Dzulfiqar Fathur Rahman (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Wed, April 15, 2020 17:56 636 fc6853813033f564188675f8bd218d27 1 Business investment,foreign-investment,COVID-19,Luhut-Binsar-Pandjaitan,BKPM Free

The COVID-19 pandemic has yet to affect investors investment plans in the country, Coordinating Maritime Affairs and Investment Minister Luhut Pandjaitan has said.

No single project sees any cancellation, Luhut told reporters in an online briefing on Tuesday, despite adding that some projects were expected to stall between April and June due to the pandemic.

There are even investors asking about the continuity of their investment, he said, stating that Australian tycoon Andrew Forrest recently talked to him on the phone about the formers planned investment in a 10,000 megawatt (MW) hydropower project in North Kalimantan.

The project was worth an estimated US$2 billion per 1,000 MW, according to Office of the Coordinating Maritime Affairs and Investment Minister spokesman Jodi Mahardi.

The Investment Coordinating Board (BKPM) plans to attract Rp 886 trillion ($56.4 billion) worth of investment both from home and overseas this year. The country managed to attract Rp 809 trillion of investments last year, slightly above the target.

We will see how things unfold, said Luhut. If the situation gets better, we will definitely start the investment projects.

More than 5,100 people had contracted COVID-19 in the country with at least 460 deaths as of Wednesday afternoon, according to official data. The government declared a public health emergency while Jakarta, the nations virus epicenter, implemented large-scale social restrictions that suspend school, business and religious activities for 14 days.
Now through June 30, 2020, 5% of all Sigma lens sales through authorized dealers will be donated to charitable organizations working on COVID-19 relief efforts

RONKONKOMA, N.Y., April 15, 2020 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Sigma Corporation of America , a leading camera, photography lens, cine lens, flash and accessories manufacturer, today announced that it is launching a charitable initiative in partnership with authorized Sigma lens dealers nationwide. From now until June 30, 2020, 5% of all Sigma lens sales made through participating dealers will be donated to a charitable organization of the dealers' choice. Donations will be made to organizations working on COVID-19 relief efforts to help ease the devastation many communities are feeling as a result of the global crisis.



Photography is a creative outlet that helps us all feel connected through the most troubling of times, promoting awareness, compassion and empathy. These qualities are at the heart of who we are as human beings, says Mark Amir-Hamzeh, President Sigma Corporation of America. This contribution is meant to help ease the many and various burdens felt by those affected by the coronavirus across the country. To that end, Sigma will donate, through our dealers, a portion of product sales to much deserving charities around the country.

Participating Dealers and Benefiting Charities Include:

Allens Camera - ERA Food Pantry

Arts Camera - Waukesha Food Pantry

ASAP Photo & Camera - Foodbank of Central & Eastern North Carolina

Bedford Camera and Video - Our Neighborhood Empowered, Inc.

Camera Mall - Senior Solutions

The Camera Shop of Muskegon - Kids Food Basket of Muskegon

Glazers - Seattle Foundation

Hunts Photo & Video - Meals on Wheels

Kenmore Camera - North Helpline

Midwest Photo - Warm Westerville Area Ministry

Precision Camera - Health Alliance for Austin Musicians

PROCAM Photo & Video Gear - The Hope Clinic

Rockbrook Camera - Foodbank for the Heartland

For the most up to date information on participating dealers and benefiting charities, please visit: https://www.sigmaphoto.com/focused-on-the-fight

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About Sigma Corporation

Craftsmanship. Precision. Dedication. Since 1961, Sigma has been devoted to the pursuit of advancing photographic technology. Unique to the industry, the family-owned business produces its high-quality, award-winning still photo and cinema camera lenses, DSLR and mirrorless cameras, flashes, filters and accessories from its state-of-the-art manufacturing facility located in Aizu, Japan.

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Nick Govoni, Zazil Media Group for Sigma Corporation of America, nick@zazilmediagroup.com

A photo accompanying this announcement is available at https://www.globenewswire.com/NewsRoom/AttachmentNg/8750294b-6925-4fc9-865d-f82f536ef9a3
Taoiseach Leo Varadkar will be forced to cull up to seven Fine Gael minsters as part of his deal to form a government with Fianna Fail.

Mr Varadkars key allies, including Eoghan Murphy, Richard Bruton, Joe McHugh and Josepha Madigan, are facing demotion under the deal.

But Simon Coveney, Paschal Donohoe and Heather Humphreys are expected to remain in the new Cabinet.

Given his role in the response to the Covid-19 emergency, Health Minister Simon Harris is expected to survive despite his well-publicised differences with Mr Varadkar over the Fine Gael leadership race in 2017.

EU Minister Helen McEntee is being tipped by her colleagues for promotion, possibly at the expense of Ms Madigan. Meanwhile, it has emerged senior Fine Gael ministers still have reservations about entering into government with Fianna Fail.

Yesterday, every councillor in Rural Affairs Minister Michael Ring's Mayo constituency unanimously told the party they opposed the deal.

During a conference call with Ms McEntee, 10 Mayo councillors said they would not support the deal with Fianna Fail.

Mr Ring, who was the only Fine Gael candidate to top the poll in the general election, is understood to have expressed doubts about the agreement in his constituency. Mayo sources said he was not involved in the decision of councillors to oppose the deal.

Local Government Minister John Paul Phelan, who was central to Mr Varadkar's leadership contest, has also privately told colleagues he does not believe the deal is in the best interests of the party.

Senior Fine Gael sources say Mr Murphy, Michael Creed and even Richard Bruton have all privately cast doubt over whether the party should end the Civil War divide and enter an arrangement with Fianna Fail.

Some in Fine Gael believe they should not be responsible for forming the next government, as they came third in the election.

They also believe a second election should be called once the Covid-19 outbreak is addressed by the caretaker government.

However, following a meeting yesterday, Mr Varadkar and Fianna Fail leader Micheal Martin officially signed off on a policy framework document which will pave the way towards the formation of a 'Grand Coalition'.

The two leaders agreed their parties will enter into coalition for the first time in the history of the State on the basis of a "full and equal partnership". They committed to forming a majority coalition with a third party which will govern for the five years.

It was agreed the policy framework document will be the basis for a programme for government.

If a deal is reached with a third party, Fianna Fail and Fine Gael will have between five and six senior cabinet positions to fill and possibly one super junior position each.

However, this will depend on the size of the smaller party that joins them in coalition and the number of Independent TDs involved in the arrangement.

A number of members of the Regional Technical Group are keen to have senior ministerial roles in return for their support.

Denis Naughten, Sean Canney and Aontu leader Peader Toibin are all expected to seek Cabinet roles in return for their backing.

A Fine Gael Cabinet minister said Mr Varadkar would have "very tough" choices to make if it got to the stage of assigning ministries.

"The decisions get tougher with Independents coming in on top of a third party," a source said.

Last night, Green Party TDs said they would consider the government proposals put forward but stopped short of saying they would enter negotiations.

The policy document which has been developed by Fine Gael and Fianna Fail negotiating teams will be sent to their parliamentary parties today.

Both parties are briefing their TDs and senators on the document tomorrow evening via teleconferencing.

Yesterday, a senior Fine Gael source said it could prove difficult to get their entire parliamentary party to get on board with the deal.

"There's a lot of lads looking at losing ministries and returning to the backbenches," the source said.

The policy proposals contain broad objectives for the next government on a range of issues.

However, the key focus will be on developing a national recovery plan for the economy in the aftermath of the coronavirus emergency.

The document does not detail the plan but both parties have been briefed by senior civil servants involved in drafting a plan.

The framework makes commitments on housing, health and climate change but those involved in the talks say they are not costed or detailed.

"This is no way a fait accompli," a source said. "We want the other parties to come along and add to the document if they don't think all their policies are being addressed."

There is a belief in both parties it could take another two months before a programme for government may no be drafted for another two months.

One Fine Gael source suggested it could be June before the next government is officially formed.

Speaking with Pat Kenny on Newstalk this morning, Fine Gael justice minister Charlie Flanagan said there will be an "equality of authority" between the two parties.

"There will be an equality of authority between Fianna Fail and Fine Gael, there will be an equality of ministers because the parties will be entering this historic government if agreement can be reached, they will be doing so on the basis of equality," he said.

He added that a lot of work has yet to be done on government formation.

"All we have is a framework and a handshake - we obviously have to ensure that flesh is good on the bones of the deal," he added.

Speaking on RTE's Morning Ireland, Fianna Fail finance spokesperson Michael McGrath said the parties are "a long way off" forming a government.

"We are a long way off the formation of a government yet because we need others to join us in that discussion.

"But it's not the priority issue for us now," he said, adding that policy is at the forefront of discussions for both parties.
Karl Stefanovic is not happy about persistent rumours surrounding his hair.

After angrily denying he had dyed his hair darker and spent $55,000 on plugs to Daily Mail Australia last week, the Channel Nine star has continued to insist studio lighting is to blame for the dramatic change of his locks.

On Wednesday, the 45-year-old explained that the breakfast show is currently being filmed in 'the B studio', which had different lighting equipment available.

'I absolutely haven't done anything': Today host Karl Stefanovic has continued to deny hair dye rumours after angrily shutting down reports he's spent $55,000 on plugs. Pictured left in January 2020, right in April 2020

'Im glad to be providing some light relief to the nation during dark times,' Karl told Confidential.

'I absolutely havent done anything to my hair.

'It is what happens when you don't have full staff on,' he added, referencing the social distancing measures the network has put into place amid the coronavirus pandemic.

Rightio: On Wednesday, the 45-year-old explained that the breakfast show is currently being filmed in 'the B studio', which had different lighting equipment available

It comes after Karl first denied reports he had spent $55,000 on hair plugs, earlier this month.

'It's just completely untrue,' a source close to the Nine journalist told Daily Mail Australia of the transplant bill rumours.

'He doesn't know where this has come from. The idea he spent $55,000 on hair plugs is absolutely ludicrous. If he paid $55,000 for that he'd want his money back.'

The source added that Karl had not had a dye job and his hair instead looked different because Channel Nine staff numbers were down during the COVID-19 crisis and the studio was poorly lit.

'Everyone looks like they've got darker hair,' the source said.

The $55,000 hair plug bill rumour began last year when Woman's Day reported Karl had spent that amount on transplants over the years.

In September, Karl joked about his 'expensive' hair on This Time Next Year.

He stepped away from a woman who was burning her bra on stage, saying: 'Don't want to burn my hair and stuff. Do you know what I mean? It's expensive!'

In January, Karl slammed his former colleague Richard Reid and called him a 'tosser' after the gossip guru discussed his hair transplant on I'm a Celebrity.

He told The Kyle and Jackie O Show: 'When he said it, I had to turn off that show and I just thought, "You are just a tosser." Richard Reid is a tosser of the highest order!'

That's different! Karl's co-star Allison Langdon (R) hasn't had the same issue with her golden blonde locks under the different lighting setup. Pictured in January 2020

Just minutes later, Richard called in to offer his side of the story.

He claimed that he and Karl didn't get along during their seven years as co-hosts on Channel Nine's Today show.

He also defended his hair transplant revelation by saying he had 'kept Karl's name in the headlines... when he didn't have a job' in 2019.

Brushing off Karl's insult, he added with a laugh: 'At least I'm a tosser of the highest order! Does that mean I get a crown or a medal?'

When Kyle Sandilands asked directly if Richard had a problem with his ex-colleague, he replied sarcastically: 'I like Karl just fine. I like him just fine... in small doses.'

The pair's feud went public in February 2019 when Richard - who hosted a daily Hollywood gossip segment on Today from 2008 until 2015 - let slip on I'm a Celebrity that Karl had undergone a hair transplant years earlier.

A hair-raising figure! Last year, Woman's Day reported that Karl had spent up to $55,000 on a hair transplant. Pictured with Georgie Gardner in 2018

Recalling the moment he discovered Karl's hair loss, he said: 'So I go into the hair room, and this guy looks up and he's kind of balding... It was Karl Stefanovic without his spray-on hair!

'And then he went away and got hair plugs. He had one of those six-week vacations and came back with [makes gesture for hair plugs]. And he still used the spray-on until it filled in!'

Of course, it wasn't the first time Karl's hair had made headlines.

In 2017, the Sydney Morning Herald reported that he'd undergone a transplant because he was feeling 'pressure' to look younger.

The publication claimed he'd had a 'subtle hair transplant' a few years earlier to cover thinning at the front and top.
The national residential rental vacancy rate remained stable in March amid the COVID-19 outbreak, but some states reported dips in vacancies, according to the latest market update from SQM Research.

The national vacancy rate stood at 2% last month, with the total number of vacancies hitting 67,371. Most states  except Sydney, Melbourne, and Darwin  recorded minor declines of around 0.1%.

"The minor decline in most capital cities' vacancy rates for March was somewhat surprising given the uncertainty around the economy," said Louis Christopher, CEO at SQM Research.

On an annual basis, the vacancy rate in the month was lower. Only Melbourne and Hobart recorded higher vacancy rates.

Christopher said it is possible that vacancy rates will rise over the next few months, given the impact of the COVID-19 outbreak on the economy and the housing market.

"With job losses, a freeze in migration and an expected sharp rise in short-term accommodation vacancies, we are likely to record significant increases in rental vacancy rates as 2020 progresses," he said.

The table below shows the vacancy rates in each capital city:

In terms of asking rents, capital cities reported declines for the week ending 12 April, down by 3.2% to $544 for houses and 2.9% to $428 for units.

Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane and Hobart all recorded decreases in asking rents for both houses and units over the month.

On the other hand, Perth and Adelaide were the only capital cities to record rent increases for both houses and units. Perth increased by 1.9% for houses and 0.8% for units, while Adelaide recorded a 0.3% increase for houses and 1.4% for units.

Here's how rents changed in each capital city:
Top Democrat in US Congress labels presidents decision to withhold WHO funds dangerous and illegal.

Reaction in the US Congress to President Donald Trumps decision to withhold funding for the World Health Organization fell sharply along partisan lines on Wednesday, with Democrats calling it unconscionable and Republicans calling it the right move at the right time.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, a Democrat from California, described the decision in a written statement as senseless.

The Presidents halting of funding to the WHO as it leads the global fight against the coronavirus pandemic is senseless, Pelosi said in a written statement.

We can only be successful in defeating this global pandemic through a coordinated international response with respect for science and data, Pelosi added.

But sadly, as he has since day one, the President is ignoring global health experts, disregarding science and undermining the heroes fighting on the front line, at great risk to the lives and livelihoods of Americans and people around the world, she wrote.

Trump accused the WHO of failing to adequately warn of the coronavirus and announced he would cut off US payments to the WHO in a briefing at the White House on Tuesday.

The WHO failed in its basic duty and must be held accountable, Trump said.

Trump signalled that such a move was likely last week when he said the WHO had been China-centric in its handling of the coronavirus outbreak in January.

The WHO receives about $400m from the US each year, or about 8 percent of its $4.8bn annual budget.

This decision is dangerous, illegal and will be swiftly challenged, Pelosi said without elaborating specifically on next steps.

The truth is a weak person, a poor leader, takes no responsibility. A weak person blames others.  Nancy Pelosi (@SpeakerPelosi) April 15, 2020

Congress and the White House appeared to differ on Wednesday on whether the law providing US funding for international organisations like the WHO, a United Nations agency, gives the president latitude to withhold the funds.

House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, the number-two Democrat in the House, argued in a statement that Trumps decision was unconscionable.

This move will jeopardize the health of millions of people just as the southern hemispheres virus season begins, Hoyer wrote.

Surely, structural changes are needed at the World Health Organization to prevent it from being exploited by China and other countries for misinformation, but the way to do that is through engagement based on American leadership, Hoyer wrote.

Trump got support from Republican Senator Lindsey Graham who tweeted on Wednesday, The current WHO leadership has proven to be incompetent and shown overwhelming evidence of China bias.

Cutting off funding to the WHO at this time is the right move, Graham said.

The current WHO leadership has proven to be incompetent and shown overwhelming evidence of China bias. Cutting off funding to the WHO at this time is the right move.https://t.co/DYv3QaSv20  Lindsey Graham (@LindseyGrahamSC) April 15, 2020

Some politicians see Trumps move to cut off funds for WHO as an attempt to shift blame away from the presidents own slow response to the virus.

Indeed, Trump was praising Chinas response to the Wuhan outbreak in February at the same time as the WHO was issuing statements in support of Chinas measures, which Trump is now criticising.

Democratic Senator Chris Murphy tweeted on Wednesday that Trump made an error when his administration refused WHOs help and decided to have the Centers for Disease Control produce tests for COVID-19 in the US.

The WHO had produced 1.4 million tests by the end of February. We took none of them, because Trump decided to produce his own test, then botched the development and roll out, Murphy claimed.

It wasnt the WHO that put us in the position we are today. It was our own President, Murphy tweeted.

Top Democrats in the US Senate laid out a plan on Wednesday to expand testing in the US. The plan, outlined by Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, calls for a strategic plan to leverage a whole-of-society response with the allocation of emergency funding to enable rapid scaling up of testing.
President Donald Trump says he is cutting U.S. funding to the World Health Organization while his administration reviews the agencys handling of the coronavirus pandemic.

Trump said late Tuesday the WHO played a "role in severely mismanaging and covering up the spread of coronavirus.

He contends the U.N. agency failed to carry out what he said was its basic duty to investigate the early reports of the virus that were coming out of China when the outbreak began in December.

There has been no reaction so far from the WHO.

Trump has been on the defensive recently because of accusations in the media and elsewhere that he failed to recognize the seriousness of the coronavirus outbreak early enough to give the U.S. more time to prepare.

During Mondays White House coronavirus task force briefing, which ran nearly 2 hours, Trump played what his critics quickly labeled a propaganda video to counter reports he ignored early warnings about the new virus.

Because we have fake news, I like to document things, Trump said of the video that he explained was produced by his social media director, Dan Scavino, and other White House staff.

The screening of the video prompted some U.S. networks, such as CBS, CNN and MSNBC, to cut away from live coverage of the briefing.

"Everything we did was right," Trump told reporters, after playing the campaign-style video.

A former executive editor of The New York Times, Howell Raines, called the video one of the most astonishing acts of disinformation from the White House since the Vietnam (War) era.

The president is also facing a backlash over his assertion that he has the ultimate authority over states on lifting stay-at-home directives and reopening the countrys economy.

His proclamation is that he would be king, said New York Governor Andrew Cuomo. That statement cannot stand.

Cuomo explained to reporters Tuesday that the 10th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution is not ambiguous in stating presidents do not have total authority, as Trump declared the previous evening during a White House coronavirus briefing.

He is wrong on the law, this is not a legal issue, Cuomo said.

The New York governor said Trump is clearly spoiling for a fight with state leaders, but I am not going to fight with him, explaining the COVID-19 pandemic, which has killed more than 25,000 Americans, is no time for any division between the federal and state governments.

President Trump said Monday he calls the shots, in reply to a question from VOA about whether consortiums of states developing their own reopening plans pose a challenge to his authority to declare a national reopening amid the pandemic.

They cant do anything without the approval of the president of the United States, Trump declared.

He insisted there are numerous provisions of the Constitution backing him up on this, asserting when somebody is president of the United States, the authority is total.

Three prominent Republican lawmakers disagree.

The federal government does not have absolute power, Representative Liz Cheney of Wyoming tweeted.

Senator Marco Rubio of Florida said, How and when to modify social distancing orders should and will be made by Governors. He added on Twitter that Federal guidelines issued by the CDC and White House will be very influential. But the Constitution & common sense dictates these decisions be made at the state level.

The constitution does not allow the federal government to become the ultimate regulator of our lives because they wave a doctors note, tweeted Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky.

Powers not delegated are reserved to states & the people, noted Paul. If we dispense with constitutional restraints, we will have more to worry about than a virus.

Trump is to soon decide whether to reopen the United States to commerce at a time when governors of all but a handful of the 50 states have imposed stay-at-home edicts because of the viral pandemic.

Cuomo and five other governors of northeastern states began deliberations Tuesday on a regional plan to reopen their economies.

It should be state governors who make these decisions as they have been the ones showing great leadership, which has kept people safe, Rhode Islands Gina Raimondo told her fellow governors on Monday.

The governors of three Western states, California, Oregon and Washington, also announced Monday they are similarly taking a unified approach.

The East and West Coast consortiums together represent about 100 million people, nearly a third of the countrys population.

Trump plans to unveil a second task force, which the White House prefers to call a council, to study the timing for the U.S. economys reopening. Concern is being expressed that another coronavirus-related top-level federal panel, in addition to another informal group led by the presidents son-in-law, Jared Kushner, could create an additional layer of confusion to what many regard as a haphazard U.S. response to the pandemic.

The president recommended physical distancing between Americans through the end of April but is considering whether to reopen the country fully or partly May 1.

Trump has said he is seeking input from not only his medical experts but business leaders, as well.

Dr. Anthony Fauci, a member of the White House coronavirus task force and the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases since 1984, on Tuesday told the Associated Press that the United States does not yet have the critical testing and tracing procedures needed to begin reopening the nations economy.

We have to have something in place that is efficient and that we can rely on, and were not there yet, said Fauci.

Faucis credibility, according to public opinion polls, is much higher than any politician's, including the president's.
(Photo: Getty Images)

SINGAPORE  StarHubs chief executive Peter Kaliaropoulos apologises for the home broadband service disruption on 15 April, in a press release shared today (16 April).

We are deeply sorry for the disruption of service and frustration experienced by some of our customers on Wednesday. Our customers place great trust and importance on our network quality and resiliency, and we regrettably fell short of giving them the service experience they deserve, said Kaliaropoulos.

The root cause has been identified as an internal network change management process, and our key priority now is to ensure service stability and quality. We have taken immediate steps to implement measures to prevent a recurrence, and we are reviewing relevant processes. We are also cooperating fully with the Infocomm Media Development Authority (IMDA) in investigations, and we welcome any infrastructure audit by IMDA as needed. This incident was not caused by any out-of-date equipment, capacity shortage or a cyber attack. Our network infrastructure is robust; we utilise hardware and software from global technology leaders, and redundancies are built-in as part of our extensive business continuity planning.

In addition to the apology, StarHub will offer affected customers a one-time 20% rebate on their Home Broadband monthly fee, which is equivalent to six days of free home WiFi service. A dedicated website will be made available for affected customers to register for the rebate.

StarHub said it had fully restored its internet service on Wednesday night (15 April), after many of its broadband subscribers experienced disruptions to their connection for a large part of the day.

We would like to confirm that all affected services have been fully restored as of 8.20pm, the telco told Yahoo Lifestyle SEA. We will continue to monitor the situation closely to ensure service stability for customers.

StarHubs Chief Technology Officer, Chong Siew Loong, said, We apologise deeply for the inconvenience caused by the intermittent disruption of home broadband services to some of our customers today.

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Chong added, Traffic on our network is well below our available capacity and ample redundancy has been built into our network to cater for high service levels to be delivered consistently. The disruption arose due to a network issue with one of our Domain Name Servers that handles internet traffic routing, which has since been rectified.

We take this incident seriously and will conduct a detailed root cause analysis so that we can prevent future recurrence. We would like to thank you for your patience and understanding.

Broadband services to enterprise customers were unaffected during the outage, said Chong.

Disruption for home-based workers and students

StarHub customers began reporting disruptions to their internet connection in the morning. Many users were frustrated as people in Singapore were going online from home to work or study remotely. The government had ordered the closure of workplaces and schools last week to curb the spread of coronavirus infections. As of Wednesday, more than 3,200 people in Singapore had been infected with the virus responsible for a worldwide pandemic, and 10 people in the country had died from the COVID-19 disease.

StarHub had said earlier at 5.30pm that it was progressively restoring affected fibre broadband services after rectifying a network issue with one of its Domain Name Servers. There was no evidence to indicate a cyber attack.

Earlier in the morning, StarHub said fibre services to some customers in the North and North-East regions of Singapore were temporarily affected for about 20 minutes due to a fault in a network equipment. The company said backup equipment took over immediately and affected services started to resume progressively. Customers were advised to reboot their modems and routers to refresh their data connection, although many continued to report service outages despite doing so. StarHub could not confirm whether the morning and afternoon outages were linked.

The Infocomm and Media Development Authority (IMDA) said in a statement after StarHub restored its services, IMDA takes a serious view of any service disruption to public telecommunications services, especially during the circuit-breaker period, where many of us are working and studying from home. IMDA has required StarHub to restore the affected services expeditiously, and to keep its subscribers updated on the progress.

The government agency added, IMDA has commenced investigations into the two service disruptions to StarHubs Internet services today, and will not hesitate to take strong enforcement action should there be any lapses on StarHubs part.

Read more:
Vietnams cybersecurity regulator has advised state agencies, lenders, and firms against using the popular video conferencing platform Zoom for their online meetings after it was alleged that the personal particulars of more than 500,000 Zoom accounts have been leaked.

The Authority of Information Security under the Ministry of Information and Communications issued an advisory on Monday about concerns over the security vulnerability of Zoom, which has boomed in popularity amid the novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic.

The authority cited findings of its own unit, the Vietnam Computer Emergency Response Team, as indicating that the personal data of more than 500,000 Zoom users has been allegedly compromised.

Such details include the victims email address, password, personal meeting URL, and host key, a six-digit pin assigned to a user hosting a Zoom meeting.

The regulator stated that Zoom is popular software for online learning, web conferencing, and telework.

However, the tool has been exposed to several serious security flaws in end-to-end encryption and generation of meeting-room IDs and universal naming convention (UNC) links.

Therefore, the regulator urged government agencies, firms, banks, and other financial institutions to refrain from using the platform for their online meetings.

It also advised these organizations to prioritize using software products from local tech giants including Viettel, VNPT, MobiFone, FPT, VNG, and CMC, among others.

The regulator called on existing Zoom users to make their passwords more complicated and avoid using the same password across multiple online accounts.

Zoom has seen a surge in popularity amid the escalating global health crisis as companies, government organizations, and schools across many countries including Vietnam have turned to the free app to hold their remote conferences and online teaching sessions.

Due to the platforms lax privacy and safety policy, such meetings are reportedly being hacked to display pornographic and racist content, a practice known as Zoombombing.

Last week, the United States Senate told its members not to use Zoom over data security fears.

Taiwan and Germany had already put restrictions on the app's use, according to Reuters.

The novel coronavirus, which first emerged in the central Chinese city of Wuhan in December 2019, has infected over two million people and killed more than 126,800 globally as of Wednesday morning, according to Ministry of Health statistics.

Like us on Facebook or follow us on Twitter to get the latest news about Vietnam!
Source: Xinhua| 2020-04-15 21:45:39|Editor: huaxia

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A man jogs near the White House during the outbreak of COVID-19 in Washington D.C., the United States, April 1, 2020. (Xinhua/Liu Jie)

- Politico: the move is to deflect scrunity of the administration's slow response

- UN chief: WHO must be supported in the fight against COVD-19

- U.S. Senator Patrick Leahy: "Not wanting to take responsibility as the deaths continue to mount, he blames others."

- American Medical Association: deeply concerned and strongly urge the president to reconsider

BEIJING, April 15 (Xinhua) -- U.S. President Donald Trump said Tuesday that his administration is halting funding to the World Health Organization (WHO), sparking worldwide criticism of undermining global efforts against the coronavirus pandemic at its most critical period.

Experts and U.S. media said scapegoating of the WHO cannot mask the White House's failings in the COVID-19 fight, which has so far claimed the lives of over 126,000 people.

Pedestrians wearing face masks are seen in a street in the Brooklyn borough of New York, the United States, on April 3, 2020. (Photo by Michael Nagle/Xinhua)

DEFLECTING BLAMES

The White House's decision to halt funding to the WHO "follows weeks of Trump's escalating attacks on the U.N. health organization as he has sought to deflect scrutiny of his own administration's slow response to the outbreak," said a report published by Politico on Tuesday.

Over the past few weeks, criticism has been mounting from U.S. politicians and scholars of the U.S. administration's late pandemic response and missing critical turning points.

On March 12, Dr. Anthony Fauci, the current administration's top infectious diseases expert, admitted the U.S. system is "not really geared to what we need right now," though the WHO has declared a Public Health Emergency of International Concern on Jan. 30.

According to a report published by the Brookings Center on Regulation and Markets (BCRM) late last month, the WHO had sent hundreds of thousands of tests to different countries by early February, but the United States insisted on developing its own test kits, delaying testing throughout nearly all of February - "a lost month during a critical period."

Nevertheless, the Inspector General's office of the Health and Human Services Department on April 6 issued a report, revealing that U.S. hospitals still faced severe shortages of coronavirus test supplies, with Trump calling the report "Another Fake Dossier!" on Twitter.

Over the month of March, confirmed cases in the United States increased rapidly, from over 100 on March 5, to 10,000 on March 18, reaching 100,000 by the end of the month, according to the BCRM report.

People wearing face masks wait in line to do shopping at a Whole Foods store during the coronavirus pandemic in the Brooklyn borough of New York, the United States, on April 14, 2020. (Photo by Michael Nagle/Xinhua)

A tally by Johns Hopkins University showed that the United States has reported more than 609,000 confirmed cases of COVID-19 and over 26,000 deaths so far, both the highest on record.

"The White House knows that it grossly mishandled this crisis from the beginning, ignoring multiple warnings and squandering valuable time, dismissing medical science, comparing COVID-19 to the common cold," Patrick Leahy, ranking member of the U.S. Senate Appropriations Committee, said in a statement.

"Not wanting to take responsibility as the deaths continue to mount, he blames others," Leahy said.

Stephanie Segal, a fellow with the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said in an online conference entitled "The Coronavirus Response" in mid-March that there was a gap for both the U.S. economic and medical response to the pandemic "on the global coordination side."

"I think ... the health side of this is clearly a global problem and requires global coordination. The global economy is also under stress and ultimately will require enhanced measures of global coordination," he said.

However, Washington's decision is undermining global efforts against COVID-19. "Trump's move to defund (the) WHO goes against the pandemic preparedness plan his administration drafted in 2017, which advocates for 'expanded international coordination on pandemic preparedness and response' and specifically calls for 'continued support' for (the) WHO," the Politico report added.

Photo taken on April 3, 2020 shows UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres speaking at a virtual press briefing at the United Nations headquarters in New York. (Xinhua)

MUCH NEEDED SUPPORT

Shortly after Trump's announcement, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said in a statement, "It is my belief that the World Health Organization must be supported, as it is absolutely critical to the world's efforts to win the war against COVID-19."

It is "not the time to reduce the resources for the operations of the World Health Organization or any other humanitarian organization in the fight against the virus," he said.

The President of American Medical Association (AMA) Patrice Harris called the U.S.' decision "a dangerous step in the wrong direction that will not make defeating COVID-19 easier."

In a statement issued on Tuesday, Harris said, "Fighting a global pandemic requires international cooperation and reliance on science and data. Cutting funding to the WHO -- rather than focusing on solutions -- is a dangerous move at a precarious moment for the world."

A man is seen in front of the U.S. Capitol building in Washington D.C., the United States, April 11, 2020. (Xinhua)

"The AMA is deeply concerned by this decision and its wide-ranging ramifications, and we strongly urge the president to reconsider," Harris said.

The United States was the biggest contributor to the Geneva-based UN agency, with a yearly fund of more than 400 million U.S. dollars.

Thomas Bollyky, director of the global health program and senior fellow for global health, economics, and development at the Council on Foreign Relations, a U.S. think tank, said Tuesday that the WHO "has largely served its purpose well" in the COVID-19 crisis.

Bollyky, in his tweets, urged Washington to strengthen and enhance the agency's independence and effectiveness, not "degrade it amid a crisis." 
Geneva [Switzerland], April 15 (ANI): The World Health Organisation (WHO) has regretted the decision of US President Donald Trump to order stopping the funding to the UN's global health body.



"The United States of America has been a longstanding and generous friend to the WHO, and we hope it will continue to be so. We regret the decision of the President of the United States to order a halt in funding to the World Health Organisation," said its Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus on Wednesday.

"WHO is reviewing the impact on our work of any withdrawal of US funding and will work with our partners to fill any financial gaps we face and to ensure our work continues uninterrupted," he said.

The US President, who has repeatedly criticised the UN health body over its handling of the coronavirus pandemic, announced the decision on Tuesday.

Tedros pointed out that WHO is not only fighting COVID-19.

"We are also working to address polio, measles, malaria, Ebola, HIV, tuberculosis, malnutrition, cancer, diabetes, mental health, and many other diseases and conditions," he said.

The WHO has faced criticism for buying the official position of the Chinese government regarding the pandemic.

Calling for unity against a common threat, the WHO D-G said: "In due course, the WHO's performance in tackling this pandemic will be reviewed by WHO's Member States and the independent bodies that are in place to ensure transparency and accountability. This is part of the usual process put in place by our Member States."

"No doubt, areas for improvement will be identified and there will be lessons for all of us to learn. But for now, our focus - my focus - is on stopping this virus and saving lives."

Tedros informed that three vaccines have already started clinical trials.

"Three vaccines have already started clinical trials. More than 70 others are in development, and we're working with partners to accelerate the development, production and distribution of vaccines," he said. (ANI)


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Linkedin Ni Nyoman Wira (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Wed, April 15, 2020 15:30 636 fc6853813033f564188675f8bd20e31f 1 News hospitality,hospitality-industry,Hotel,Fairmont-Jakarta,Hotel-Mulia-Senayan,The-Westin-Jakarta,The-Dharmawangsa-Jakarta,COVID-19,#COVID19,coronavirus,#coronavirus Free

Following the COVID-19 outbreak that has forced many countries to impose travel bans and lockdowns, hospitality and leisure naturally is one of the industries hit hardest by the pandemic.

In the capital city of Jakarta, which is the epicenter of the epidemic within the country, some five-star hotels have suspended their operations entirely, while others still welcome guests, albeit with tight preventive measures and creativity with their promotions.

Felicia Setiawan, the marketing communications director of Fairmont Jakarta in Central Jakarta, which is still open, said all of the hotel's staff were required to wear face masks and gloves  the latter is especially a must for room cleaners. The establishment also provides hand sanitizer in several areas and body temperature checks at the entrances. Access to and from the hotel is limited.

A number of our gates are closed earlier, such as the tunnel that connects the hotel to Plaza Senayan, Felicia told The Jakarta Post on Thursday, adding that the hotel still had other gates open around the clock.

Regarding occupancy, Fairmont Jakarta has been severely impacted by the outbreak. Aside from the decrease in terms of occupancy, weve also temporarily closed several of our restaurants as a preventive measure, said Felicia.

The hotel's temporarily closed restaurants include 1945 Restaurant, Peacock Lounge and VIEW Restaurant and Bar. Its all-day dining restaurant Spectrum remains open, while guests may order food from the now-closed Italian eatery Sapori Deli from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m.

Fairmont Jakarta's neighbor, Hotel Mulia Senayan in Central Jakarta, no longer operates its CJ's Bar and Cascade Lounge but still runs its restaurants, namely The Cafe, Orient8, Edogin, il Mare and Table8 -- all also provide a food delivery service with a minimum order of Rp 1 million (US$63.59).

We believe in this current situation, the hospitality industry is hit the hardest; [hence] we are doing our best to serve our guests, Rully Rahman, director of sales and marketing at Hotel Mulia Senayan, said via email.

The Westin Jakarta in South Jakarta is among the five-star hotels that no longer welcome guests.

In light of the Jakarta gubernatorial regulation and the current global COVID-19 situation, we can confirm that from April 1, The Westin Jakarta has been unable to accommodate any new bookings and will be waiving cancellation fees during this time, shared the hotel's sales and marketing director, Himanshu Kapoor, via messaging service.

According to Kapoor, the establishment is currently operating with limited access to facilities and food and beverages services for the guests who are currently staying at the hotel. This decision has been taken together with the hotel owner, as the well-being and safety of our associates and guests [is of] utmost importance."

Meanwhile around 9 kilometers from The Westin Jakarta, The Sultan Hotel Jakarta has temporarily shut down its operations, or switched to reduced-operation mode from April 1 to May 31. The Central Jakarta hotel stated that the decision was made to ensure the health of its guests and staff, as well as in response to the decline of the business and room occupancy rates."

Guests who have booked their stay are said to be transferred to The Sultan Residence apartment, which is located close to the hotel, with terms and conditions applied.

Read also: Tourism sector suffers $1.5 billion losses as Covid-19 hits hard

The Dharmawangsa hotel in South Jakarta has also announced its temporarily closure.

Some of the properties of hotel management group Archipelago International are also no longer operating because of the COVID-19 crisis. We are confident that our hotels that have to temporarily close will reopen as soon as its safe to do so, said the company's president and CEO, John M. Flood, in a statement.

Among the ones temporarily closed are those located in South Jakarta, such as Aston Rasuna and favehotel Melawai. (kes)
The stricken Ruby Princess is likely to remain in Port Kembla until at least Sunday as the death toll linked to the cruise ship rises amid warnings those left isolated on board may not be safe in their cabins.

On the same day that NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian announced a special commission of inquiry into the Ruby Princess debacle, a woman aged in her 60s who was aboard the ship during its controversial docking in Sydney last month died in a Canberra hospital.

The Ruby Princess is docked in Port Kembla, south of Sydney. It is now expected to leave on Sunday. Credit:Nick Moir

Nineteen people associated with the ship have now died from coronavirus, with 369 infections in NSW alone linked to the Ruby Princess, which was allowed to dock in Sydney on March 19.

Almost 130 of the 1100 crew still on board the ship have contracted coronavirus and, despite the fact they are self-isolating, a ventilation expert has warned they could have easily spread the virus from their cabin if infected.
The UK financial watchdog FCA has declined to intervene in the dispute over insurers not paying out business interruption claims relating to the Covid-19 pandemic.

This could spell bad news for closed Irish pubs and restaurants, who have already criticised insurers for not paying out similar claims on this side of the Irish sea.

Both the Vintners Federation of Ireland and the Restaurant Association of Ireland previously hit out at insurers and have called for the government to intervene.

However, it is the insurance industrys opinion that most business interruption insurance policies do not cover a pandemic, a belief which was echoed by the UKs Financial Conduct Authority (FCA).

In a letter, interim chief executive of the FCA Christopher Woolard, said that "based on our conversations with the industry to date, our estimate is that most policies have basic cover, do not cover pandemics and therefore would have no obligation to pay out in relation to the Covid-19 pandemic".

He said: "While this may be disappointing for the policyholder we see no reasonable grounds to intervene in such circumstances. In contrast, there are policies where it is clear that the firm has an obligation to pay out on a policy. For these policies, it is important that claims are assessed and settled quickly."

However, both the Alliance for Insurance Reform here and the Vintners Federation of Ireland have called for Irish insurers to "play their part" in the coronavirus crisis.

The Alliance for Insurance Reform has called on insurers to share the financial burden of the crisis.

"The Alliance has reviewed numerous Irish business interruption clauses in insurance policies over the last two weeks and what is abundantly clear is that some policies cover the current crisis, some do not and some are not clear as to whether they do or not.

"We call on insurers to take their share of the load in acknowledging policies which carry a business interruption liability and paying on those policies as a matter of urgency," it said. The Vintners Federation of Ireland said the Minister for Finance needs to intervene.

"We are urging the Minister to impress upon insurance companies the absolute need to treat customers fairly and to recognise that where publicans make business interruption claims they should be covered," it said.
Ramped-Up Coronavirus Testing Key to Reopening California

LOS ANGELES (AP)  Gov. Gavin Newsoms plan to eventually ease stay-at-home restrictions across California depends on widespread coronavirus testing that is still ramping up across the state and has been hampered by supply shortages, long waits for results and even a lack of data.

Without giving a timetable for when the state might begin a crawl back toward normal, Newsom unveiled the outlines of a plan Tuesday contingent on testing everyone with symptoms of the virus and being able to contact family members and friends they may have exposed.

That may be a tall order in a state that has lagged in getting a robust testing system in place, never mind having public health officials track down all those they may have infected and ordering those people to keep away from others for up to two weeks.

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I think counties are probably overwhelmed, said Dr. Yvonne Maldonado, an epidemiologist and infectious disease specialist at Stanford Medicine. Thats why we need to get to a point where this epidemic is under control. Its very hard to do contact tracing with this number of infected people.

Testing has been problematic across the U.S.  with a lack of swabs needed to collect specimens, chemicals needed to produce laboratory results and the protective masks, gloves and other clothing worn by people who administer the tests. California has faced additional challenges due to a backlog of test results and a lack of data from some labs that werent initially reporting negative results, leaving public health officials in the dark about how many had been tested.

Faced with testing problems and a backlog that equaled two-thirds of all tests conducted at one point, Newsom named a special task force to help expand and speed up testing across the state and make sure everyone can get tested regardless of their location.

Dr. Mark Ghaly, secretary of California Health and Human Services, said the goal is to be able to test tens of thousands of people per day across the state  not just the sickest  by the end of April.

Once we hit that level and we know that individuals who have symptoms can get tested and the results available rapidly, well be able to think about modifying these orders, Ghaly said. So, yes, testing becomes a very focal point, something we improve as we go along.

In order to ease restrictions, the number of people testing positive should drop and new hospitalizations should fall, said Dr. George Rutherford, a professor of epidemiology at the University of California, San Francisco. Nursing homes, jails and homeless shelters should screen aggressively for the virus and isolate the infectious together.

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People might be able to return to work sooner after testing negative for the virus or testing positive for the antibodies to the virus, which would indicate they were previously infected and are likely immune. Workers in more sensitive occupations could be required to pass both tests, Rutherford said.

Paula Cannon, a professor of immunology at the University of Southern California school of medicine, said testing is a massive logistical problem worldwide, but thinks California can meet its needs if it can overcome the shortage of testing supplies in high demand everywhere.

She said a larger challenge will be getting Americans, famous for valuing their freedom and privacy, to willingly show up for testing and if found to have the virus, agree to self-quarantine and offer the names of family and friends they had contact with.

The state also needs to figure out how to test people without insurance and how to get compliance with quarantine orders if theyre afraid theyll lose their job while staying home.

Cannon said she hoped Newsom was being advised by psychologists, as well as scientists, about what measures would be acceptable to Californians.

How do we bring people to that process with trust and also kind of understanding that there isnt a magic wand here? We cant go back to normal straight away, theres still going to be quite a high cost going forward, Cannon said. This is kind of the best we can do and ultimately its going to suck.
During World War I, the Allies faced a similar problem: Shortages for key goods were being exacerbated by uncontrolled international competition on private markets. Even as the Allied countries fought a shared enemy, the Central Powers, they competed to purchase goods they needed  such as wheat and various raw materials  from abroad, needlessly complicating their joint war effort. The shortages got so bad by 1917-18 that some officials in the European Allied countries thought that it threatened them with outright defeat, as their war economies teetered on the brink of collapse and their civilian populations grew exhausted.

To solve this problem, the Allies created a series of institutions that could make joint purchases of scarce goods at fixed prices, pool them and allocate them according to need, and arrange their shipping. The two greatest capitalist powers in the history of the world, the United States and Britain, effectively agreed to suspend the free working of the laws of supply and demand in global markets to ensure that goods were provided to whichever country was facing the worst shortages  not whoever could pay the highest prices. After the war, many recognized that this system of international coordination was critical to the Allied victory.

The success of this wartime supply system also showed how powerful international cooperation can be during a global crisis. It was no coincidence that several of the officials who had run this system moved into powerful positions at the League of Nations after the war, and one later helped to found the European Union. The League of Nations pioneered some of the earliest forms of international cooperation in matters of public health, economic policy and the policing of contraband. The collapse of this international cooperation in the 1930s left the world unable to mount an effective response to the Depression and the coming war, though these efforts did lay important foundations for the creation of bodies like the United Nations.

An improvisation for preventing needless competition among countries facing a common enemy, in other words, helped give rise to the worlds first real experiment in global governance. Could we do it again?

To beat the coronavirus, we need to empower international bodies with the resources necessary to ensure that every country has the supplies it needs to deal with the pandemic. In a highly unequal world economy, this will require some form of global redistribution, because uncontrolled markets for these goods are leading to catastrophe for those countries that cannot afford their grossly inflated prices.
By PTI

LONDON: UK Chancellor Rishi Sunak on Tuesday said he is confident that the country's economy will bounce back quickly and strongly once the coronavirus pandemic has been brought under control and stressed that the economic impact of the crisis would be "significant, but temporary".

The UK's Indian-origin finance minister led the daily Downing Street briefing soon after the Office of Budget Responsibility (OBR), Britain independent spending watchdog, released its forecast to say that the crisis-hit economy would shrink by a record 35 per cent as a result of the lockdown.

Sunak said the forecast was only one possible scenario, but it is still important that the government is honest with people about what is happening with the economy.

"These are tough times, and there will be more to come. This is going to be hard, our economy's going to take a significant hit and as I've said before that's not an abstract thing, people are going to feel that in their jobs and in their household incomes," said the minister.

"But I think the measures we've put in place will help and then as we get through this it will mean that we can recover quickly and strongly and get our lives and economy back to normal," he said.

In its report, the OBR said a three-month lockdown followed by three months of partial restrictions would trigger an economic decline of 35.1 per cent in the quarter to June alone, following growth of 0.2 per cent in the first three months of this year.

While the UK economy would contract by 12.8 per cent this year under this scenario, it is expected to get back to its pre-crisis growth trend by the end of 2020.

"The OBR have been clear that if we had not taken the actions we had, the situation would be much worse. In other words our plan was the right plan," said Sunak.

Besides the economy, the Cabinet minister gave the latest health update and revealed a daily rise of 778 to the country's COVID-19 death toll, taking the total to 12,107.

Sunak said the figures are a daily reminder about the importance of the British public continuing to comply with the government's strict social distancing measures in place.

Professor Stephen Powis, the Medical Director for the National Health Service, said there is increasing evidence now that the number of hospital admissions is stabilising and plateauing in London and other areas of the country as a result of the lockdown.

He said: "We are beginning to see the benefits of the undoubted hardship that we have all been asked to go through in terms of social distancing, in terms of not meeting with friends and family."

"It's really important that those benefits are maintained, that we continue to follow the instructions that we have all been given and we will then get on top of this virus."
Mayor Eric Garcetti Addresses Pressing Matters Surrounding COVID-19; L.A. Residents provided with Angeleno Card

Los Angeles Mayor, Eric Garcetti has taken the initiative to provide the current statistics surrounding the COVID-19 pandemic. As of Tuesday, April 14. Mayor Garcetti disclosed statistical evidence of L.A. efforts to flatten the curve; it is showing promise with daily coronavirus increase in single digits. The Los Angeles City Mayor addressed pressing matters such as relaxing the Stay at Home order. Mayor Eric and his office has studied data locally and internationally, the evidence reflects that L.A. should remain under quarantine. The L.A. elected official explained the decisions to remain under strict physical distancing guidelines as we maneuver through many waves of the coronavirus increase.

Mayor Eric Garcetti began his announcement with the data surrounding coronavirus in Los Angeles. As of April 13. there were 25 additional deaths, 11 of these individuals were between the ages of 65 and over, with underlining health conditions. This brings the total COVID-19 related deaths in the L.A. County to 320.

Although Drive-thru testing locations increased the accessibility for the L.A. County, Mayor Garcetti recognized that a good number of Angelenos do not own a vehicle. In order to overcome that hurdle, there are new walk-in facilities. The first of its kind opened a couple weeks ago at Carbon Health in Echo Park. The second one opened Tuesday April 14. Anyone with symptoms can be tested at this time. Locations were strategically placed to prioritize African American communities and others within urban areas, since evidence has proven the COVID-19 related death rate are higher within the African American ethnicity. Mayor Garcetti stated, This is very important because its the second move weve taken to serve African Americans and lower-income Angelenos, when we saw troubling statistics that this was disproportionately hitting black communities and low-income Angelenos,

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The Elected City Official foresees 2-3 more spikes in positive COVID-19 cases, one of the projected peaks landing on April 19. With that in mind the L.A. City Mayor is standing behind the currently enforced physical distancing guideline amid the flux of the virus. The study of past pandemics, proven that L.A. should remain in a state of observation of how other countries are being affected by relaxing their quarantine orders. So far, while examining Wuhan and South Korea the way the physical distancing regional guidelines are uplifted, makes a significant impact in the relapse of contracting the virus. Strategies in place for L.A. remain steadfast in flattening the curve, while not falling blind to the need of help.

The Angeleno Card is being offered to families directly hit by the menace COVID-19 has caused in L.A. The Angeleno Card is a free prepaid debit card intended for residents in Los Angeles with incomes below the federal poverty line, it provides financial assistance for households in need of assistance. The three main requirements include: You and Your household has fallen into deeper economic hardship during the COVID-19 crisis because at least one household member has lost a job or experienced a reduction in income of at least 50%. Or your household is within the City of Los Angeles, and Your household income fell below the federal poverty level prior to the COVID-19 crisis,

L.A. COVID-19 cases have reached over 10,000 reports and Eric Garcetti has not taken this lightly. With the rise of Price Gouging, raising the cost of products essential to medical care such as gloves, hand sanitizer, and toiletries, the city has been cracking down on those trying to set an unreasonable price post-pandemic. So far, there has been 10 prosecutions against non-essential businesses that refuse to comply with the Stay at Home order. The city has been monitoring stay at home tests and remedies that has not been approved by the FDA. Eric Garcetti has been working every department and nonprofit outlet to contribute to the need of the assistance to this pandemic.
Additional reporting by Daniel McConnell

The Finance Minister has not ruled out a paycut for cabinet and TDs, but says that such a measure has not yet been discussed.

Paschal Donohoe was speaking as it was announced that New Zealands Prime Minister Jacinta Ardern and her government would take 20% pay cuts in a bid to show leadership and solidarity with those who had lost their livelihoods to the Coronavirus pandemic.

The New Zealand government will take the pay cut immediately for six months.

Responding to questions from the Irish Examiner, Mr Donohoe said that while the matter has not yet been considered by the government, it will be considered in the coming weeks.

In relation to your question about further reduction in reductions in TD salaries. That is not something today which has been considered. It is the case that we got the wage increases in recent years have not applied to holders. But I absolutely understand now, that many people all over the country are facing a very severe income that they're having to deal with. And I'm sure the government will, you know, discuss this and other matters in the coming weeks, he said.

Those of us who are members of government for quite a while, have not been participants in the wage increases that have been made available as part of the family legislation for ministers. And so that has been in place for all members of this government now since I came into office. And I haven't today considered whether wages options or merits are needed for TDs or senators. It is the case that a number of TDs and stances are handed back to the state increases in which they will do happen. It's also the case that some others are not doing that, he said.

Pay cuts

Social Democrats co-leader Catherine Murphy (pictured above) said that any pay cut for TDs was complex given that the rate of pay is pegged to that of civil servants, but that any cut should happen across the board.

I think it has to happen uniformly. I think just doing it individually is not the best approach. If you were doing it, the linking of TDs pay to civil servants would have to be taken into consideration.

Personally I wouldnt be averse to (a cut) but it would have to happen universally. But going beyond that, there has to be a reframing of priorities. For example, very large incomes in boardrooms will be reflected on in the current situation with regards to the earnings of frontline workers.

Sinn Fein TD Matt Carthy said that any move to secure new allowances was bizarre.

Speaking on Newstalk FM, he said that TDs were better off than many constituents.

"I find it bizarre that any TDs would be seeking additional allowances at this time.

"TDs, yes, are working from home - but TDs are also on their full salary and allowances at this time, which is something most of our constituents don't have the luxury of saying."

Earlier: Pay cuts for TDs and Senators not being ruled out

By Digital Desk staff

Pay cuts for TDs and Senators in light of the coronavirus outbreak are not being ruled out.

However, the Finance Minister's admitted the measure hasn't yet been discussed.

It comes after the Prime Minister of New Zealand and her cabinet took a 20% pay cut for the next six months as an act of solidarity with workers who have been impacted.

Minister Paschal Donohoe said the matter will be discussed in the coming weeks.

"I haven't to date considered whether wage reductions are merited or needed for TDs or Senators," he said.

"It is the case that a number of TDs and Senators are handing back to the State increases they were due, but it is also the case that some are not doing that."
Gujarat Chief Minister Vijay



Rupani has decided to run the state administration without meeting anyone for next one week after a Congress MLA whom he met on Tuesday tested positive for coronavirus.

Rupani's health is fine and he will run the state administration through technological facilities like video conference, video-calling and tele-calling, Chief Minister's Office (CMO) secretary Ashwani Kumar said on Wednesday.

"No visitor will be allowed at the chief ministers residence for the next one week," he said.

Congress MLA Imran Khedawala, who met Rupani along with other party legislators on Tuesday morning, tested positive for coronavirus in the evening.

Kumar said Khedawala committed a big mistake by not staying at home and coming out to meet Rupani when he had given his samples for coronavirus testing.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Haryana fears losing a whopping Rs 4,600 crore revenue in April due to the ongoing coronavirus-triggered lockdown, which has brought all economic activities in the state to a grinding halt.

The stamp duty alone generated Rs 600 crore revenue every month in Haryana but no money is expected to accrue to the state coffer on this count in April as no land deals and other property transactions are taking place amid the lockdown.

Chief Minister Manohar Lal Khattar on Wednesday too voiced the revenue loss fear during a televised address on the day to the people of the state.

Kosh Muloo Dand, said Khattar, citing the crucial economic mantra occurring in Kautiliyan Arthshastra, which implies "the treasury is the backbone of administration", and pointed to the revenue losses that the state has been facing due to the lockdown.

We were expecting a Stamp duty of Rs 600 crore, but as no property transactions are taking place, no money will come. We are expecting only about Rs 100 crore from Excise Duty as against nearly Rs 1,000 crore while from nearly Rs 782 crore from VAT collections, a maximum of Rs 100 crore is expected, he said.

The chief minister said as against Rs 6,200 crore monthly revenue income from various sources, a maximum of Rs 1,600 crore is expected due to the coronavirus-triggered lockdown, which has brought all economic activities to a grinding halt. We are falling short by nearly Rs 4600 crore.

Khattar said some expenditures like salaries and pensions are fixed and these have to be met.

Nearly Rs 1,850 crore goes towards meeting salaries of government employees, Rs 750 crore towards pensions, Rs 650 crore towards social security pension that includes the money for the old, widows and physically challenged persons.

An amount of Rs 1,700 crore goes towards servicing debts which the state has borrowed.

In view of the current situation, the BJP-JJP government in the state had also announced a special financial aides to help the poor and people in low income groups like daily wagers, labourers, street vendors and construction workers who have been adversely hit.

Meanwhile, with mustard and wheat procurement respectively commencing from April 15 and 20, Khattar reiterated that we will procure every single grain of the farmers.

He appealed to the 'arhatiyas' or commission agents to extend a helping hand to farmers during this time of crisis.

He asserted that it was only a matter of time before we win the battle against corona.

In our country, everyone is fighting this battle. The problem is big. It is like a traffic signal which has turned red where all of us have stopped and are waiting for it to turn green and then we will move on. No matter how much challenge it throws, we will overcome it and come out of it.

I have been saying this 'Haryana say corona harega, bharat say bhagega' (coronavirus will be defeated in Haryana, eradicated from India), said Khattar.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
NEW ORLEANS - A white lawyer who defended black civil rights activists at the height of the movement in Louisiana, often weathering threats to his own life, has died.

Richard Barry Sobol died March 24 at his home in Sebastopol, California, of aspiration pneumonia, stemming from radiation treatment for squamous cell carcinoma found in a lymph node in his neck, his wife, Anne Sobol, told The Associated Press in an email. He was 82.

Sobols career included groundbreaking litigation involving desegregation of schools, employment discrimination against minorities and women, electing blacks to public office and a criminal case that led to a U.S. Supreme Court decision guaranteeing the right to a trial by jury in state criminal cases.

Gary Duncan, the subject of that case, said hes still at a loss for words after hearing of Sobols death.

When he passed away, I lost part of myself, Duncan said in a telephone interview from his home in Harvey, Louisiana. He was one of the greatest people in the world.

Duncan said Sobol treated him like a son and his death is a great loss to the world.

He was dedicated for what he was doing, Duncan said. There was no money involved really but he had a belief that everybody should have equal rights. He represented a lot of people in Louisiana and was threatened everywhere he went but he didnt let that get in his way. He was a strong man to be able to do that.

Duncan said Sobol was jailed for representing him but that didnt stop him.

Sobol arrived in Louisiana in 1966 as a volunteer for the Lawyers constitutionalDefence Committee. In a 2016 piece about his work for the LCDC that appears in Kent Spriggs Voices of Civil Rights Lawyers: Reflections from the Deep South 1964-1980, Sobol said that assignment saw him enter a new world from which I have never returned.

In Louisiana, people who needed help would be depending on my work, he wrote. Whether I did it and did it quickly and successfully meant the difference between jail or not jail; integrated or segregated education; fair or discriminatory employment practices; the right to demonstrate or the denial of that right; access to public accommodations or the denial of access; the right to vote or tricks to nullify that right; and so on.

He noted working for LCDC came at a time after significant milestones in the movement, including the Freedom Rides, the March on Washington and enactment of the Civil Rights Acts of 1964 and 1965.

Peter Edelman, a lifelong friend who met Sobol while clerking for judges on the 2nd Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals in New York City., said Sobol was a lawyers lawyer and just a wonderful man.

He was so smart and so committed to justice, said Edelman, a professor at Georgetown Law School.

Sobols work in Louisiana, he said, was really remarkable.

In Louisiana, at the time of the civil rights movement, lawyering was really thin and Richard was a major player. Everyone went to him; he took on complicated cases, anything that was to be done and he became kind of a hero and he absolutely deserved that, he said.

Another friend, retired Columbia Law School professor George Cooper, worked with Sobol at the LCDC.

We wanted to do more with our lives, he recalled. Richard was one of those men for whom civil rights and justice, particularly justice for black people, was the cause to which he devoted his life. And he faced a lot of danger because of that.

Cooper worked with Sobol on one of the first class action lawsuits involving employment discrimination involving a paper mill in Bogalusa, Louisiana and said after that Sobol became the go-to man for anyone who had a racial discrimination case.

A book about the Duncan case is scheduled for release this summer and a documentary about the case is in the works, Anne Sobol said.

Sobol left Louisiana in 1968 shortly after the Duncan decision, and returned to Washington to practice law. He also taught at the University of Michigans law school before returning to Louisiana in 1971. Three years later he founded a civil rights law firm in Washington, D.C. with Michael Trister. In 1991, he returned to Louisiana, where he lived for more than two decades.

Sobol is survived by his wife of 45 years, Anne Buxton Sobol, and his daughter, Joanna Sobol McCallum.

___

The location of appeals court has been corrected to New York City;
To date, 146 patients, or 55%, have been given the all-clear.

The latest patient to leave hospital is a 74-year-old man from the UK who came to Vietnam with his wife last month. She also tested positive for the virus.

On March 27 while being treated at the National Hospital of Tropical Diseases, he suffered severe respiratory failure and was sent to the intensive care unit where he was put on a ventilator.

Doctors fought for a week as the mans health deteriorated rapidly. By April 5, he started to respond to treatment and began breathing without oxygen therapy.

Both further tests for the virus taken on April 8 and 10 produced negative results.

The couple left Vietnam for the UK early on April 14 on a flight arranged by the British Government exclusively for British citizens.
A merican billionaire Bill Gates has slammed Donald Trump's decision to stop US funding of the World Health Organisation (WHO) amid the coronavirus pandemic, warning the move is as "dangerous as it sounds".

Mr Gates took to Twitter on Wednesday to condemn President Trump's move, arguing the work of the United Nations health agency was more vital now than ever given the scale of the Covid-19 crisis.

"Their work is slowing the spread of COVID-19 and if that work is stopped no other organization can replace them," the Microsoft founder and global health philanthropist said.

"The world needs @WHO now more than ever."

His comments came after Mr Trump on Tuesday said the US was pulling funding for the WHO pending a review of its handling of the coronavirus outbreak.

The country is the biggest overall donor to the Geneva-based WHO, contributing more than $400 million (316m) in 2019, roughly 15 per cent of its budget.

According to the WHO, when assessed and voluntary contributions are pooled together, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is the second biggest donor, contributing nearly 9.8 per cent of its budget.

Announcing his decision to suspend donations to the health agency, Mr Trump said Covid-19 could have been better contained and accused the WHO of covering up its spread after it emerged in China in December last year.

The organisation has previously come in for similar criticism, with a damning report into the Ebola outbreak saying it failed to act quickly when early signs of the virus spreading emerged in 2014.

Mr Trump, meanwhile, has come under intense scrutiny in recent weeks for his own handling of the Covid-19 outbreak.

He has routinely sought to deflect persistent criticism that he acted too slowly to stop the virus's spread, pointing to his decision in late January to place restrictions on travel from China.

The US has the world's highest caseload of Covid-19, with more than 600,000 confirmed infections. In excess of 26,000 people have died nationwide as a result of the outbreak.

Worldwide, nearly two million people have been infected and more than 126,000 have died since the outbreak erupted, according to the latest data collated by by Johns Hopkins University's Covid-19 tracker.

Several world leaders have echoed Gates' criticism of Trump's move to cut funding to the WHO given the magnitude of the health emergency.

UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said on Tuesday it was not the time to reduce resources for the body.
New Delhi, April 15 : FabHotels has said that it is offering quarantine stay packages to stranded guests, healthcare professionals, and medical authorities at government-prescribed discounted rates as it steps up its efforts to support the fight against the novel coronavirus pandemic .

In a statement, the company said that apart from providing accommodation facilities, the brand will offer full meals to the quarantined guests as part of the special stay package.

The company has also reached out to the central and state governments to offer the use of its hotels during the nationwide quarantine and has received positive responses from the state governments of West Bengal, Karnataka, and New Delhi.

"India's fastest growing budget hotels brand, has announced the launch of comprehensive, WHO-compliant pre-emptive safety measures at all of its 600+ properties across the country. The move underlines the budget hospitality chain's commitment to ensuring the safety and physical well-being of its guests during the COVID-19 lockdown by delivering clean and hygienic living experiences," it said.

As part of the move, FabHotels has trained the housekeeping staff at its properties across India to adhere to strict self-cleansing protocols at all times, as well as to wear sanitised masks and gloves while serving the guests.

All high touchpoints of human activity at the brand's properties are being frequently sanitised to minimise the risk of the viral contagion's spread, while recommended safety equipment like hand sanitizers, masks, and protective gloves have been made available to all of its service staff, said the statement.

Vaibhav Aggarwal, Founder and CEO,AFabHotels, said: "We are also offering quarantine accommodation facilities to those who need it. Providing a safe and secure space for our guests during the quarantine is both our business commitment and moral responsibility. FabHotels remains committed to standing with India and its citizens during this most unprecedented global crisis."
By Elizabeth Kwiatkowski, 04/15/2020



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Elizabeth Kwiatkowski is Associate Editor of Reality TV World and has been covering the reality TV genre for more than a decade.

: Before the 90 Days star Avery Mills has denied she and husband Omar Albakour have split.Avery took to Instagram on Tuesday to shut down speculation there's trouble in paradise and her marriage to Omar is over."I'm not sure why there is an article saying Omar and I aren't together, but we are very much Happily married and we have never split up," Omar captioned a selfie of the couple."So for the people that rushed to my page to see if the tabloids were true they aren't. Still my best friend."Avery also added multiple heart emojis to her Instagram post.When comments poured in questioning Avery and Omar's relationship and their intentions, Avery wrote to one critic, "We literally care less if we were in the public eye, and you can ask my mom if you want about how much she loves my husband Bc they love each other."Avery also recently revealed in her Instagram Stories that she and Omar are thriving as a couple although they are still living apart.Avery is still trying to sponsor a visa for Omar, and so she's working hard in the United States to make money, according to The Blast. Avery is also reportedly going to college and is patiently waiting for when she and Omar can be together on a permanent basis.Last month, Avery gushed on Instagram about how "love has no boundaries.""This past year and a half has been incredible. One day (in a long time lol) we will be able to show our kids how we met and how we defied all the odds. InShaAllah," Avery captioned a photo of the lovebirds.Avery was a 19-year-old former Christian who converted to Islam from Columbus, OH, and Omar was a 24-year-old Muslim man from Latakia, Syria, when they starred on Season 3 of : Before the 90 Days last year. They had met on a Muslim dating app.Avery claims she had converted to Islam six months before meeting Omar, whom she thought had "a beautiful heart."Omar's dating profile initially said he lived in America. However, Avery continued the relationship even after she found out Omar was living in Syria -- despite concerns from her family that Omar was using her to escape a war in Syria and come to the U.S.After just a month of talking, Omar asked Avery to marry him and sent her an engagement ring in the mail.Avery therefore made plans to fly to Lebanon to finally meet her fiance in person and get married. The couple decided on Lebanon since it would be a safer, nicer place to meet for the first time.Despite a U.S. travel ban on Syrian citizens, Avery hoped to bring Omar, a dental student, to the United States on a visa sometime over the next three years after they got married in Lebanon.However in the meantime, Avery's initial plan was to live in Syria with Omar so they wouldn't be apart for too long.Avery and Omar's wedding took place in February 2019, and their wedding was shown on : Before the 90 Days, but the bliss they felt died down quickly when Avery was forced to return to America following her brief stay in Lebanon."I'll remember this trip for the rest of my life. Every second I had with Omar, I am grateful for, and I hope and I pray I get more," Avery said, adding that there was a chance she might never see him again.Once Avery returned to Columbus, she and her mother Teri met with an immigration lawyer together and received some bad news about Omar's visa to enter the United States."Realistically, you can't get a visa," Avery told Omar over FaceTime."What? Are you joking?" Omar asked. "Why I can't be in America?""The lawyer said he has worked on many travel-ban cases and none of them have been approved. We can apply for a waiver, but only less than five percent of people who get waivers get approved. I would say the soonest is three years," Avery explained.Avery also said if they had any chance of Omar coming to the United States, she couldn't move to Syria because the only thing the government would acknowledge -- if they do acknowledge it -- is the fact the married couple was forced to live apart from each other.Avery started the process for Omar to come to the U.S. regardless, and so she asked him, "Do you think you could be away from me for a few years and still want to be married to me?""I don't know," Omar replied. "It's a tough situation for a long time."Avery dropped her phone and couldn't believe Omar had said something like that. It made her doubt how strong his love for her really was."Listen, I give up about America," Omar said.The couple wanted to be with each other, so they discussed the possibility of both moving to somewhere like Dubai."If we make that decision to move out of the country, we make that decision for good," Avery told her husband. "We're just giving up America altogether."Avery realized in that moment in order to start a family of her own, she may have to neglect and leave behind the family she already had, and that left the 19-year-old feeling very emotional."It breaks my heart because there is no good option for me and Omar right now. I am scared we will never be together," Avery told the cameras.On Part 1 of : Before the 90 Days' Tell-All special that aired in October 2019, Avery revealed she and Omar were still together but had no idea where they were going to live."If he doesn't have a way to get here, we'll go to a nearby country where it's safe," Avery said, after crying about how hard it was to be away from her husband.And on Part 2 of the Tell-All, Avery said she talked to Omar a few hours every day and was planning a trip back to Lebanon soon. She believed their relationship would last and they could overcome all obstacles together.Last month, TLC released three short-form Season 4 episodes of : What Now?, the spinoff available on the network's TLC GO streaming service, that showed Avery traveling back to Lebanon and reuniting with Omar and visiting with his family.: Before the 90 Days' fourth season currently airs on Sunday nights at 8PM ET/PT on TLC.Want more spoilers or couples updates? Click here to visit our homepage!
COLUMBUS, Ohio, April 15, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- Dr. Alison Hazelbaker, a global leader in lactation education, announced today the launch of Hazelbaker Lactation Institute. This online platform intends to teach the art and science of lactation to practitioners and health professionals who assess, treat, support, and advocate for parents and their newborn children.

Dr. Alison Hazelbaker, a global leader in lactation, launches Hazelbaker Digital Lactation Institute. Dr. Alison Hazelbaker, a global leader in lactation, launches Hazelbaker Digital Lactation Institute.

The digital institute is an extension of Dr. Hazelbaker's Columbus-based lactation practice and is designed to provide best in class resources and online training for lactation consultants, nurses, and other health professionals who provide lactation support to families. Hazelbaker Lactation Institute gives lactation professionals around the world access to one of the global leaders in lactation without traveling, attending a conference, or participating in an in-person training.

Dr. Hazelbaker specializes in cross-disciplinary services, and is a certified Craniosacral Therapist, a Lymph Drainage Therapy practitioner, a Rhythmic Movement Training educator, a certified NOMAS assessor, and an International Board-Certified Lactation Consultant. In 2010, she became a fellow of the International Lactation Consultant Association (FILCA). She has also served as an educator for most of her career, most recently as a graduate level adjunct professor.

Dr. Hazelbaker is adding the digital institute model to her offerings after 35 years of clinical practice. "I've supported a lot of professionals, families, and babies over the years through my clinical practice and educational offerings," stated Hazelbaker. "My hope is that the digital institute reinforces the importance of the art and science in lactation education, and gives providers an engaging, interactive way to earn their CERPS online."

The digital institute is launching with seven modules including: Using the Assessment Tool for Lingual Frenulum Function (ATLFF), Classifying Infant Sucking Problems, and Faux Tie: When Is Tongue-Tie Not A Tongue-Tie? Providers can earn between one and a half to two lactation continuing education recognition points (CERPS) per module. Investment varies by module; the educational catalog can be found at https://hazelbakerinstitute.com/hazelbaker-lactation-institute/education-catalog/.

For more information on Hazelbaker Lactation Institute visit www.hazelbakerinstitute.com. All media inquiries should be directed to Bridget Granger ([email protected]).

ABOUT HAZELBAKER DIGITAL LACTATION INSTITUTE

At Hazelbaker Digital Lactation Institute  it's all about the babies! The digital institute exists to help build strong families, by delivering exemplary online and in-person education to lactation and health professionals who support babies and caregivers worldwide.

MEDIA CONTACT

Bridget Granger

614-905-7020

[email protected]

www.hazelbakerinstitute.com

SOURCE Hazelbaker Lactation Institute
The scientific director of Italys leading infectious disease hospital says he'd like to hire Dr Anthony Fauci should US President Donald Trump remove him from the White House coronavirus task force.

Dr Giuseppe Ippolito of Romes Lazzaro Spallanzani hospital wrote a letter released on Wednesday to the Italian president and other officials, saying Italy should welcome Fauci with open arms. The country is the European epicenter of the pandemic, and Spallanzani treated Italy's first patients.

Ippolito praised Faucis expertise, experience, leadership and generous and selfless help to Spallanzani and other hospitals around the world -- a generosity that we like to associate (with) his Italian heritage, always remembered with pride.

He said removing Fauci from the US task force would be disastrous news not only for the United States, but for the whole international community.

Speculation about Faucis fate swirled over the weekend after he told CNN that the US would have obviously saved lives if virus mitigation efforts had begun earlier. Trump responded by reposting a tweet that included the line: Time to #FireFauci.

On Monday, Trump insisted Faucis job was safe, but Republicans close to the White House say the president has complained about Fauci's positive media attention and has sought to leave him out of task force briefings.

Ippolito said Italy would gladly welcome Fauci's expertise. He cited his work on the SARS, HIV, Ebola and Zika outbreaks, and praised his training of a generation of doctors and nurses. Fauci's work, Ippolito wrote, has saved the lives of millions of women, men and children in the United States and all over the world."

We need Anthony Faucis leadership, in the US or elsewhere, to tackle the challenges this pandemic pose to our health systems," Ippolito wrote. Our Institute would be honored to have Anthony as advisor and we hope that also the Italian Government and the Lazio Region could benefit (from) his great vision and expertise.

The letter was addressed to Italian President Sergio Mattarella, with copies sent to the Italian premier, health minister, foreign minister, as well as local regional authorities.

The Spallanzani hospital issued the letter in both Italian and English and sent it to news media along with a New Yorker" profile of Fauci.
Matt Hancock faced ridicule today as he unveiled a new badge for under-pressure care workers amid fury over the rising death toll of vulnerable patients in homes.

The Health Secretary used the daily press coronavirus press conference to reveal a 'single brand' for care workers to allow them to access the same perks as NHS staff.

He said he hoped it would be seen as a 'badge of honour', but his comments were criticised, coming amid rising anger over deaths in care homes and a lack of personal protective equipment (PPE) for staff.

Critics pointed out that the badge had been launched last summer as 'a unifying symbol of pride and quality in care', and so was not even new.

Fears have been raised that the death toll in care homes in England and Wales is far higher than the official 217 reported since the outbreak started, with industry figures saying the true count is much closer to 4,000.

After the announcement today, shadow health secretary Jon Ashworth tweeted: 'A badge? Really a badge??'

The Health Secretary used the daily press coronavirus press conference to reveal a 'single brand' for care workers to allow them to access the same perks as HNS staff

Critics pointed out that the badge had been launched last summer as 'a unifying symbol of pride and quality in care', and was not even new

He also outlined new measures to allow compassionate visits to nursing homes and outlaw the blanket use of 'do not resuscitate' (DNR) plans, which staff claim they've been asked to routinely sign during the crisis

Labour's shadow Treasury minister Wes Streeting tweeted: 'Are you a care worker doing a vitally important job for people we love on outrageously low pay and in dangerous conditions because you haven't been provided with PPE?

'The Government wants you to know how valued you are. Here: have a badge.'

And Hartlepool MP Mike Hill added: 'Care Workers don't need a brand or a pin badge, they need COVID testing now, PPE, proper recognition, better pay and fair contractual terms and conditions of employment.'

Rehana Azam, national officer of the GMB union, said care workers 'need more than a badge and a pat on their head to define their precious role in society'.

She said: 'They need the protective equipment and testing on the front line now to protect their lives. Ministers should be moving mountains to support our care sector to get the kit workers need available where and when they need it.

'Care workers are serially undervalued, highly skilled and massively underpaid.

'It will take far more than branding to get them the recognition and support they deserve and that battle will continue until care workers are treated the same as NHS workers.'

Former professional footballer Cyril Lawrence, 99, passed away after catching the coronavirus at a care home in Bolton

Mr Hancock confirmed care homes have been ordered to allow grieving relatives a last chance to say goodbye to loved-ones before they die from coronavirus amid shocking reports of elderly victims dying alone because of infection fears.

He also outlined new measures to allow compassionate visits to nursing homes and outlaw the blanket use of 'do not resuscitate' (DNR) plans, which staff claim they've been asked to routinely sign during the crisis.

Mr Hancock said a supply network of 'unprecedented scale' would help get personal protective equipment to care home staff.

'This badge will be a badge of honour in a very real sense, allowing social care staff proudly and publicly to identify themselves, just like NHS staff do with that famous blue and white logo,' he said.

'I know that many businesses will want to offer the same recognition and benefits as they do wonderfully to the NHS.'

Supermarkets had been asked to give the same priority access to care workers as NHS staff, he said.

Carole Foster, 77, passed away last Wednesday at the Medway Maritime Hospital in Gillingham, Kent, just one day after being admitted

His new measures for visits came after families have complained of having to say their last goodbyes over Skype or from outside buildings as facilities do not want them to enter because of the infection risk.

One family revealed they were forced to wave goodbye to a deceased loved one from a nursing home car park in Nottingham while the body was removed by undertakers on Easter Monday.

He use the daily press conference this evening to say he had been emotionally affected by the death of a teenager.

'Wanting to be with someone you love at the end of their life is one of the deepest human instincts,' he said.

'And it is a moment that will be with you forever. Done right, it can help those left behind to cope and it brings comfort to those who are dying.

'Coronavirus of course has made this much more difficult and I have been really moved and upset by some of the heartbreaking stories of people dying without a loved one nearby.

HIDDEN EPIDEMIC OF CORONAVIRUS IN CARE HOMES MAY HAVE COST 4,000 LIVES, EXPERTS WARN A 'hidden epidemic' of coronavirus in care homes may have cost 4,000 lives, experts warned last night. They believe deaths are being hugely under-reported because of a lack of testing. GPs are also sometimes reluctant to write COVID-19 on death certificates and figures from care homes are not included in the official daily toll. The latest report from the Office for National Statistics says the virus killed 217 care home residents in England and Wales up to April 3. But industry figures say the true count is much higher  potentially 4,000 since the outbreak started. Campaigners and MPs warned yesterday of an 'unfolding horror' that could end up with tens of thousands of forgotten victims. Ministers face urgent calls to get a grip and get virus tests for all staff and residents with symptoms, more protection gear and a Cabinet minister to deal with the crisis. Health Secretary Matt Hancock last night pledged action on testing and is also expected to outline a plan to address the crisis in a social care strategy. Care home operators complain they are being overlooked, with desperate short - ages of testing and staff safety equipment making it extremely hard to stop the disease ravaging their sites. Advertisement

'As a father of a 13-year-old myself the reports of Ishmael dying aged 13 without a parent at his bedside made me weep.

And the sight of his coffin being lowered into a grave without a member of his family present was too awful.'

The Government's U-turn comes after a family were made to wave goodbye to a deceased loved one from a care home car park.

Relatives watched on as the body of a resident at Wren Hall nursing home in Nottinghamshire was removed by undertakers on Easter Monday.

A lack of testing means health officials have no idea how many care home residents are dying to the virus.

Care home managers had banned families from visiting over fears they could bring the virus into homes, where it could have devastating effects on highly vulnerable elderly residents often with serious underlying health conditions.

The latest report from the Office for National Statistics says the virus killed 217 care home residents in England and Wales up to April 3.

But industry figures say the true count is much higher  potentially 4,000 since the outbreak started.

Campaigners and MPs warned yesterday of an 'unfolding horror' that could end up with tens of thousands of forgotten victims.

Ministers face urgent calls to get a grip and get virus tests for all staff and residents with symptoms, more protection gear and a Cabinet minister to deal with the crisis.

This morning it was revealed eight people have died with suspected coronavirus at Green Heys Care Home in Waterloo, Merseyside.

The virus appears to be sweeping through nursing homes up and down the country.

Stanley Park care home in County Durham lost its 13th resident to the virus on Monday, while 12 people have died at a home in Cranhill, Glasgow.

Wren Hall nursing home in Nottinghamshire has lost 10 to the virus, eight at another in Dumbarton - plus 13, 11 and 15 at homes in Yorkshire, Northamptonshire and Luton.

Mark Adams, chief executive officer for Community Integrated Care, which runs the home said: 'Whilst this is a devastating number, it may have been higher had it not been for the dedicated and selfless response of our team, who have exemplified the commitment, bravery and skill, that exists within the social care workforce.'

Debbie Cholwill said her mother, who had dementia and was living in a care home, passed away on April 10 after testing positive for coronavirus

Health Secretary Matt Hancock last night pledged action on testing and is also expected to outline a plan to address the crisis in a social care strategy.

All care home residents and staff with symptoms of Covid-19 are to be tested as the Government faces a backlash over its handling of the growing crisis.

Social Care Minister Helen Whately told BBC Breakfast this morning: 'We have been doing everything that we can to protect those really vulnerable people living in care homes or receiving care at home.

Chris Schmid told MailOnline his great aunt Isabel Francis, 94, passed away in Fieldway care home in Mitcham, South London on Friday, April 10

HEARTBROKEN FAMILIES HAVE TO WAVE GOODBYE TO DECEASED RESIDENTS FROM CARE HOME CAR PARKS The family of a care home resident in Nottingham were forced to wave goodbye from the car park as undertakers removed the body on Easter Monday. 'Broken' staff at Wren Hall nursing home had reportedly been too busy treating dying coronavirus patients to schedule a 'last goodbye' Skype call. Wren Hall has suffered 10 deaths in the space of weeks. The home's manager, Anita Astle, told The Guardian: 'The first resident started with symptoms on 24 March. Since then we have had 19 people in isolation and four have come out of isolation. We are just having deaths all the time.' Ms Astle said there was a pattern at Wren Hall where residents would rapidly deteriorate after appearing to stabilise. She said it was 'soul destroying' to watch. The rapid deterioration means it has been hard to get family to the home to say goodbye in time. 'People pick up at day five or six and seem to be stabilising and then at day eight, nine, 10 they plummet,' she said. 'It's getting harder and harder every day. We lose somebody and it gets worse. They are trying to keep up their spirits, but it's not happening  We're fighting a losing battle. 'The families are scared. There are families calling wanting to speak to their loved ones and wanting to Skype them, but we are also looking after people who are really ill. Sometimes you feel bad you can't give them the time they want.' Advertisement

'From the moment it looked like coronavirus was coming our way... we have been working really hard to do whatever we can to protect those receiving care from this truly awful, horrible illness.'

She added it had been 'harder to get heard' on social care issues than for the NHS and said the Government had 'taken huge steps to get PPE out to the care sector'.

Care home operators complain they are being overlooked, with desperate short - ages of testing and staff safety equipment making it extremely hard to stop the dis - ease ravaging their sites.

Jeremy Richardson, chief executive of Four Seasons, which has 191 care homes across the UK, told the Guardian that the official figures 'materially understated' the crisis, adding: 'From colleagues in the sector and in Four Seasons' experience, it is closer to 60 per cent (infection rate).'

It comes after furious families today accused the Government of 'sacrificing' Britain's elderly in the fight against coronavirus by discharging COVID-19 patients into care homes and signing the 'death warrant' of the most vulnerable in society.

NHS hospitals have been ordered to drastically free up beds, meaning thousands of patients have been released, with scores of elderly Britons meeting the criteria sent to care homes dotted across the UK.

In a revolt against the 'dangerous' drive, some care homes have already refused to accept patients over coronavirus fears - not everyone is swabbed for the killer virus before they are discharged from hospital.

But one home in Essex was allegedly forced to accept an elderly COVID-19 patient 'against their wishes' before they were re-admitted to hospital the next day. The daughter of a 96-year-old resident accused Number 10 of 'recklessly exposing' others to the infection.

In Herefordshire, a dementia-stricken 78-year-old was discharged from hospital to a care home, without her family being told. She also had a Do Not Resuscitate (DNR) notice along with the orders not to send back to hospital if she caught coronavirus.

Demanding action from Downing Street, her daughter said: 'My mother has worked all her life and paid into the NHS they do not have the right to sign her death warrant because she's old and has dementia.'

Despite hospitals being told to free up space, it was revealed last night that London's Nightingale Hospital at the ExCel Centre sat almost empty with just 19 coronavirus patients treated over the Easter weekend.

The Birchwood Residential Care Home, in Essex, was allegedly forced to accept an elderly COVID-19 patient 'against their wishes' before they were re-admitted to hospital the next day

Workers help prepare the ExCel London centre, which has been made into the temporary NHS Nightingale Hospital

Mark Gordon fears his mother Susan (above), a 76-year-old terminally-ill cancer patient, is too weak to fight off coronavirus after contracting the infection while at a Tayside care home. He claims staff did not use PPE when dealing with patients

George Hillhouse's 74-year-old mother, Helen Smith, died at Almond Court care home in Drumchapel, Glasgow, on Saturday

LONDON'S NEW MAKE-SHIFT HOSPITAL HAD JUST 19 PATIENTS OVER EASTER A hospital bed and respirator at ExCel London London's Nightingale Hospital sat almost empty with just 19 coronavirus patients treated over the Easter weekend. The 4,000 capacity flagship hospital was opened by Prince Charles via video link almost two weeks ago and is designed to handle a large surge in coronavirus cases. However data circulated to health chiefs and seen by the Health Service Journal (HSJ) shows some hospitals have been able to double their ICU capacity, to 1,555 beds, despite rising levels of infections. It also showed only 19 patients were receiving treatment over the Easter weekend at the facility located in the Docklands. Advertisement

It comes after care industry bosses yesterday suggested that two thirds of all homes across Britain have recorded coronavirus cases. Around 500,000 people are in care homes in the UK.

Grim statistics released yesterday also showed the number of coronavirus deaths in care homes rose ten-fold by the start of April, up from just 20 for the week ending March 27.

But the true scale of the coronavirus catastrophe in Britain's care homes is a mystery because the figures released by the Office for National Statistics are almost two weeks out-of-date.

Number 10 is under mounting pressure to start recording all coronavirus deaths, wherever they happen, amid the accusations the true toll is being swept under the carpet.

The UK's care home regulator, the Care Quality Commission, announced it would step in to collect daily numbers of coronavirus deaths.

Helen Buniak revealed her 96-year-old mother's home was 'ordered' to admit a coronavirus patient from hospital 'against their wishes' on April 8.

She alleged that the Birchwood Residential Care Home, in Ilford, was told it was 'Government policy'.

The discharged patient only stayed in the facility for one day before they were re-admitted to hospital, Ms Buniak claimed.

She told MailOnline: 'How shocking and completely reckless to allow the virus to enter into a care home that was clear of the virus.

'However much the staff did their best to isolate the patient, there is still a serious risk that the virus could spread and cause multiple deaths.'

Ms Buniak said it seemed like the lives of older people in care homes are 'invisible' and argued: 'The Government is willing to sacrifice them.'

'The Government's so called policy to shield those most vulnerable clearly does not apply to the elderly in care homes.'

The Birchwood care home, which looks after around 40 elderly patients, is one of dozens to have limited routine visits from family members.

Another MailOnline reader revealed her elderly dementia-stricken mother was discharged to a care home, without checking with her.

Her mother, of Ross-on-Wye in Herefordshire, was stuck in hospital because health officials had yet to find a care package for her.

She told MailOnline: 'Due to the COVID-19 outbreak most care homes in Hereford with places refused to take her so she was there a while.

'The hospital were getting really annoyed because they wanted her out as soon as possible and the bed freed up.

'On Sunday (April 12) they discharged her to a care home in Worcestershire without consulting me or checking the home could meet her complex needs.'

Stanley Park care home in Stanley after thirteen residents died after displaying coronavirus (COVID-19) symptoms

CARE HOMES REFUSING TO ACCEPT DISCHARGED PATIENTS OVER FEARS THEY'LL BRING VIRUS WITH THEM NHS trusts are trying to discharge patients who do not need round-the-clock care to free up capacity for the expected surge in COVID-19 cases. But care home managers are refusing to accept elderly people over fears they might bring the virus into the homes. Under guidance issued by the government last week, testing is not mandatory for discharged patients. David Steedman, the manager of Arlington House care home in Sussex, admitted he had five empty rooms but refused to take in people discharged from hospitals. He said it would be 'madness' to expose residents and staff to the risk of infection, the Guardian reports. Last week the Government promised every social care provider in the country would receive deliveries of personal protective equipment (PPE) including masks. Mr Steedman told the paper: 'The personal protective equipment issued for staff is laughable. 'These masks, as well as having an expiry date of 2016, are the sort of flimsy, paper thing that dentists wear with gaps all round the edges. 'The instructions say they should be used if a resident has symptoms of the virus or actually has it. But these masks are completely useless in those situations.' Advertisement

The woman - who wanted to remain anonymous - added: 'She arrived with a DNR, which said do not transfer back to hospital if she contracts COVID-19.

'My mother has worked all her life and paid into the NHS they do not have the right to sign her death warrant because she's old and has dementia.

'If my mum gets sick with COVID-19 she will be left to die and the hospital will refuse to admit her because the DNR will be in her notes.'

NHS trusts are trying to discharge patients who do not need round-the-clock care to free up capacity for the expected surge in COVID-19 cases.

But care home managers are refusing to accept elderly people over fears they might bring the virus into the homes.

Under guidance issued by the government last week, testing is not mandatory for discharged patients.

David Steedman, the manager of Arlington House care home in Sussex, admitted he had five empty rooms but refused to take in people discharged from hospitals.

He said it would be 'madness' to expose residents and staff to the risk of infection, the Guardian reports.

Last week the Government promised every social care provider in the country would receive deliveries of personal protective equipment (PPE) including masks.

Mr Steedman told the paper: 'The personal protective equipment issued for staff is laughable.

'These masks, as well as having an expiry date of 2016, are the sort of flimsy, paper thing that dentists wear with gaps all round the edges.

'The instructions say they should be used if a resident has symptoms of the virus or actually has it. But these masks are completely useless in those situations.'

Piers (left) slammed the minister (right) for laughing during the interview as he asked about care home deaths

She said her laughter was a reaction to him showing her the front page of the newspaper, when she was unable to see him due to not having a screen visible showing the GMB host.

Avice Howarth's mother, who was living in a care home. passed away on April 10

It comes after it was warned last night that a 'hidden epidemic' of coronavirus in care homes may have cost 4,000 lives. Experts believe deaths are being hugely under-reported because of a lack of testing.

GPs are also sometimes reluctant to write COVID-19 on death certificates and figures from care homes are not included in the official daily toll.

Jane Rudge's mother is a resident at Hopwood Court care home in Alvechurch, Worcestershire. The 94-year-old is now ill, with suspected COVID-19

NHS ORDERED TO FREE UP 30,000 BEDS BY CANCELLING OPERATIONS AND REMOVING THOUSANDS OF INPATIENTS The NHS has been ordered to free up 30,000 beds to make room for an expected surge in coronavirus cases. A letter sent to trusts by NHS chief executive Sir Simon Stevens has called on hospitals to postpone all non-urgent planned operations from today until at least three months. This will free up between 12-15,000 beds, according to the letter seen by the Health Service Journal (HSJ). It will mean thousands of patients will miss out on knee and hip replacements. Organ donors will not be able to donate until at least summer. Trusts are also being asked to discharge all inpatients who are 'medically fit to leave', which could free up another 15,000 beds. Bulk-buying beds from independent providers and using community hospital beds could see up to 10,000 additional beds for COVID-19 patients, the letter claims. NHS bosses also told trusts to free up their private patient unit beds to create extra capacity. The move could see hospitals lose millions of pounds of income. More than 1,000 beds within the NHS are available for private patients, according to think tank the Centre for Health and the Public Interest, with income of around 600m a year. Advertisement

The latest report from the Office for National Statistics says the virus killed 217 care home residents in England and Wales up to April 3.

But industry figures say the true count is much higher  potentially 4,000 since the outbreak started.

One leading statistician the numbers were being underestimated because GPs were unwilling to record 'covid' on death certificates if they hadn't seen the patient.

Professor Sir David Spiegelhalter, who is based at the Faculty of Mathematics at Cambridge University, highlighted emergency laws which came into force last month which enable doctors to certify deaths without being in physical attendance.

Under the Government's Coronavirus Act, which was passed on March 25, doctors are allowed to carry out the process of death registration over-the-phone.

The new powers were intended to reduce the likelihood of GPs contracting the infection but Sir David said the upshot was that they were less inclined to record the virus as the cause of death.

Other organisations including the Alzheimer's Society and Care England, the main representative body for social care organisations, said the death toll was being hugely underplayed by the lack of tests.

Currently only hospital patients and some frontline staff are being tested for the virus, although the Government hopes to roll this out to other key workers and the wider public if the capacity increases

Sir David said: 'Less than 10 per cent of deaths are being coded for covid deaths outside hospitals. That's at home, or in care homes.

'Under a new regulation, doctors do not actually have to see a patient to register their deaths now. They can do it over the phone with a description of their symptoms.

'I could understand many doctors or GPs not being willing to put covid on a death certificate when they've neither had a test, nor seen the patient.

'Unfortunately, we don't seem to know yet how many of these extra deaths are being registered without even seeing the patient. That seems to me very important to have that piece of information.'

Speaking to the BBC's World At One, he added: 'There are suggestions going around that doctors are kind of being encouraged not to put covid on the death certificate.'

He did not explain who was pressuring doctors not to report the virus on the death certificates or why.

Debbie Cholwill said her mother (pictured) passed away on April 10. On Facebook, she wrote: 'It is with deep sadness that I am putting this message on sadly after six years of my mum being in a care home with dementia she sadly passed away last night, after testing positive for Coronavirus'

Elaine Shirt had to put her 'lovely' father Cyril Lawrence, 99, into respite in a care home after her mother was taken ill recently and went into hospital. Pictured, Mr Lawrence (front row, third from left) with Stan Mortensen (front row, sixth from left) at Blackpool in 1939

Something funny, Care Minister? Moment grinning MP Helen Whately LAUGHS as Piers Morgan confronts her over 4,000 coronavirus care home deaths Care minister Helen Whately was blasted today for sniggering in a car crash TV interview as it was revealed a 'hidden epidemic' of coronavirus in nursing and old-people's homes may have cost 4,000 lives. She was taken to task by Piers Morgan on Good Morning Britain as he grilled her over an exclusive report in the Daily Mail that deaths in care facilities are being hugely under-reported because of a lack of testing. Mrs Whately, 43, the MP for Faversham and Mid Kent, was sent out to face the media this morning as anger and questions increased over the vulnerability of care home residents amid a lack of testing and personal protective equipment (PPE) for staff. Appearing on GMB she insisted that the Government has been working hard to tackle the crisis, but Piers insisted she answer questions about deaths in care homes, telling her he expected her to be working hard. He asked: 'Is it true that 4,000 people have died in care home? Yes or no?' Advertisement

But medical professionals are urged not to record an illness as cause of death unless they are very sure.

Nick Stripe, head of the health analysis and life events division at the Office for National Statistics said: 'It could be that the doctor certifying the death, to the best of their knowledge, is not sure enough that there is possibly covid involved to put it on the death certificate.

'It's dependent of the doctor, understanding the patient's background and recent symptoms in terms of what in their medical opinion they put on the death certificate.'

Research by the London School of Economics over the weekend suggested that about half of coronavirus deaths in Europe were occurring in care homes.

In Belgium the figure was estimated to be 42 per cent, rising to 53 per cent in Italy and 57 per cent in Spain.

Caroline Abrahams, charity director at Age UK, said the official figures were 'airbrushing older people out like they didn't matter'.

She added: 'Any suggestion that these spiralling care home deaths are somehow inevitable would be utterly wrong, sounding suspiciously like an excuse for failings of national policy and practice.'

Christina McAnea, assistant general secretary of Unison which represents many care home staff said: 'These figures are just the tip of the iceberg.

'A comprehensive programme of testing of staff and the people they look after should start at once.

'Without daily updates on the number of people dying in residential care and their own homes, it's impossible to track the spread of the virus. Hospital deaths are only part of the picture.'

Campaigners and MPs warned yesterday of an 'unfolding horror' that could end up with tens of thousands of forgotten victims.

Ministers face urgent calls to get a grip and get virus tests for all staff and residents with symptoms, more protection gear and a Cabinet minister to deal with the crisis.

Health Secretary Matt Hancock last night pledged action on testing and is also expected to outline a plan to address the crisis in a social care strategy.

Care home operators complain they are being overlooked, with desperate short - ages of testing and staff safety equipment making it extremely hard to stop the disease ravaging their sites.

Care minister Helen Whately was blasted today for sniggering in a car crash TV interview about the 'hidden epidemic' of coronavirus in care homes.

She was taken to task by Piers Morgan on Good Morning Britain as he grilled her over a Mail exclusive that deaths in care facilities are being hugely under-reported.

Mrs Whately, 43, MP for Faversham and Mid Kent, insisted that the Government has been working hard to tackle the crisis.

But Piers insisted she answer questions about deaths in care homes, telling her he expected her to be working hard.

He asked: 'Is it true that 4,000 people have died in care home? Yes or no?'

The Social Care Minister then thanked him for acknowledging what the government is doing and said the work was 'really important'.

Piers interrupted to say tell her that it was more important that 4,000 people have died, only for the Minister to start laughing.

The host said: 'Why are you laughing? What do you find funny about this?'

She said: 'I don't think it's funny in the slightest.'

He responded: 'Well why do you keep laughing then? I'm not laughing at all,' she said.

Piers replied: 'I literally just asked you is it true that 4,000 elderly people have died in hosp and all you can do is laugh what's the matter with you?'

As she continued to insist she wasn't laughing and asked Piers not to suggest she had been, he said: 'We literally just saw you.'

But she said her laughter was a reaction to him showing her the front page of the newspaper, when she was unable to see him due to not having a screen visible showing the GMB host.

From fighting fit to losing his life in just two days: 'Perfectly healthy' ex-professional footballer, 99, succumbs to coronavirus after health bosses ORDERED his care home to take in stricken patients and it rampaged through the residents A 'perfectly healthy' former professional footballer has died from coronavirus after health bosses ordered his care hoe to take in untested hospital patients. Cyril Lawrence, 99, passed away from the infection last night at Royal Bolton Hospital six weeks before his 100th birthday. The ex-Blackpool, Rochdale and Wrexham winger caught the virus at a care home which was forced to take in hospital patients following the Government's order for the NHS to drastically free up hospital beds. His daughter Elaine Shirt told MailOnline she put her father in a care home after her mother was taken ill recently and went into hospital. Ms Shirt said her parents were due to return home when the care home her father was in went into lockdown, so he remained there. She said she was now 'totally heartbroken' and supporting her mother. Ms Shirt told MailOnline: 'All was well until Good Friday. We had video calls with him, he looked really well and on Sunday enjoyed his evening meal and even asked if could have had a little more. An hour later, an ambulance arrived and he was taken into hospital. Cyril Lawrence, 99, died from coronavirus after health bosses ordered his care hoe to take in untested hospital patients Legacy: Lawrence (front row, third from left) with Stan Mortensen (front row, sixth from left) at Blackpool FC in 1939 'I then tried contacting the hospital and at 4am a lovely Consultant phoned to say my dad was extremely poorly. It was a big shock. He was put on oxygen, fluids and antibiotics and swabs for the virus taken. 'At 8pm on Monday night my mum and I said goodbye to my dad. Mum told him as I did how much he was loved. He couldn't speak but we were told he could hear us. 'It was heartbreaking and the two lovely nurses wearing masks and gloves broke down crying with us. 'I never in a million years thought this would happen at the end of life. I'm totally heartbroken supporting my mum. RELATED ARTICLES Previous

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Next WWII hero Captain Tom Moore, 99, smashes the 11MILLION mark... World's richest man gets even richer from coronavirus! Jeff... Share this article Share 'My mum will be 100 on June 3, and dad 100 on the 12th. To be cruelly taken like this is just so very sad.' When football last ground to a halt during World War II, Cyril Lawrence was a teenager on the verge of a breakthrough into the Blackpool team. They were top of Division One, having started the new season with three wins under Joe Smith, the manager who would preside over a golden post-war era when Stanley Matthews dazzled on the wing. Salford-born Lawrence was an inside forward in the ambitious ranks of young professionals alongside players such as Stan Mortensen, who went on to achieve legendary status at Bloomfield Road. Lawrence (left) poses with Cllr Jim Fitzpatrick as Hyde celebrated 125 years in 2010 At 19, Lawrence lied about his age in order to register for national service before conscription was introduced. 'I spent my childhood alongside the Salford docks,' he told The Mail last month. 'And I decided the Navy was to be my new life so I volunteered.' As he completed his military training he was able to represent Blackpool in a wartime fixture against Bolton in December 1939 and returned for another game, while on leave, against Stockport in September 1943. Wartime football was encouraged to lift morale, although the size of the crowds was strictly limited and some games had to be abandoned amid air raids. Lawrence played several times for Hyde United before he was deployed on the brand new battleship HMS King George V, assigned to the Home Fleet at Scapa Flow in the Orkney Islands. He would spend more than five years serving on the ship, which performed an active combat role and witnessed some of the most historic episodes of the war, including the pursuit and sinking of the Bismarck and the surrender of Japan. Lawrence played several times for Hyde United before he was deployed on the brand new battleship HMS King George V Lawrence's early career at sea was spent on the Arctic convoys delivering aid and essential supplies to the Soviet Union. 'He would tell us how he'd cover his face and hands with cooking fat from the galley to protect against the bitter cold before going out on deck to cut the ice from the cables,' says daughter Elaine. 'He would be locked into his gun turret from the outside because, if the ship went down, the air inside the watertight turrets would help to keep it afloat.' On a convoy bound for the northern Soviet ports in dense fog in May 1942, the battleship collided with the destroyer HMS Punjabi, which was cut in two and sank with the loss of 49 lives. 'We were zigzagging to avoid submarines,' he recalled in an article about life on the King George V. 'The weather was foul and visibility poor when we came in contact with the Punjabi. It was tragic. One of the survivors was the ship's cat. She was named Madame Punjabi. 'She remained on board for many years until we reached Sydney and it was thought she abandoned the KGV for pastures new.' Lawrence represented the Royal Navy at football, appearing in exhibition matches in Cairo and Alexandria and against New South Wales at the Sydney Cricket Ground. His footballing prowess helped him around the custom for sailors to transfer to other ships during times of repair and refitting and he became the KGV's longest- serving seaman. When the ship was in Liverpool in 1944 being prepared for its redeployment to the Eastern Fleet, Lawrence married Claire who, like her husband, will be 100 in June. They are cared for these days by their daughters Elaine and Norma and their families. HMS King George V ended its wartime service in the Pacific Ocean, involved in the allied invasion of Okinawa and the bombardment of Hamamatsu and sent to observe the atomic bombing of Nagasaki. Lawrence was in Tokyo Bay when Japan surrendered, aboard the USS Missouri. The Americans borrowed the table and chairs for the signing ceremony from the wardroom of the KGV. He was despatched onshore to help collect prisoners of war and formed part of the guard of honour when the British Embassy in Tokyo was reopened. It was Christmas 1945 when he left the KGV for the last time and re-signed for Blackpool two months later on a deal worth 5 a week with a 3 bonus when he made the first team. His football had suffered at the expense of his military service, however, unlike other players stationed at home who were able to maintain a higher level of football throughout the war. He found he could not break into Smith's excellent side, who would go on to reach the FA Cup final three times in six years, winning the trophy in 1953 and finishing runners up in Division One behind Manchester United's Busby Babes in 1956. Lawrence's playing career was over by the time Matthews and Mortensen produced their heroics at Wembley. He left Blackpool for Rochdale and then moved on to Wrexham where he suffered a serious knee injury at the age of 31, a sad landmark which provokes an amusing family story. 'Claire did not care for football and had never seen him play but she went on this occasion,' says son-in-law Rod. 'Cyril gave her the ticket and told her to wait in her seat for half an hour after the match and he would collect her and they would go to the bar. 'More than an hour after the match and she was still sitting in her seat when someone came over to ask what she was doing. 'She said she was waiting for her husband. 'Cyril Lawrence?' they asked. 'He was injured in the first half. He's been taken to hospital'.' It would be six months before he was out of hospital and walking again. 'He just got on with it,' says Elaine. 'I think his generation did just get on with things. They were a hardy lot.' Lawrence worked as a plumber and glazier and, although he became a keen follower of rugby league, he has always stayed in contact with his former football clubs. Advertisement

Families reveal harrowing stories of loved ones being abandoned to die on their own in care homes as managers ban goodbye visits

The deepening crisis unfolding in Britain's care homes amid the coronavirus crisis was laid bare today as families revealed their harrowing stories of loved ones being abandoned to die.

Grieving relatives told MailOnline how elderly family members were not admitted to hospital and refused visits by GPs, who have been accused of being 'ageist' and avoiding care homes.

Donna Millan's 73-year-old mother, who lived in a nursing home, died on April 9 with COVID-19 symptoms. But she was never swabbed for the killer infection - despite repeated pleas from her family.

Ms Millan told MailOnline: 'We believe my mum would not have contracted COVID-19 and would still be alive had things been managed better.'

And Elaine Shirt had to put her father Cyril Lawrence, 99, into respite in a care home after her mother was taken ill recently and needed hospital care.

Left, Cyril Lawrence, 99,is now in hospital after falling ill at a care home. Right, Carole Foster, 77, passed away last Wednesday at the Medway Maritime Hospital in Gillingham, Kent, just one day after being admitted

Debbie Cholwill said her mother, who had dementia and was living in a care home, passed away on April 10 after testing positive for coronavirus

But by the time her mother was sent home, Ms Shirt's father, a former footballer for Blackpool FC, had contracted coronavirus. He is now fighting for his life in hospital.

The Royal College of GPs has already urged staff to keep face-to-face visits to a 'minimum' amid the coronavirus crisis. But it says 'appropriate arrangements' should be made for patients in care homes. It has been claimed that some GPs are refusing to send elderly patients - who would be put to the back of the queue for critical care because of their frailty - to hospital.

Stricken family members who have lost loved ones to coronavirus in care homes have laid bare the devastating reality of the deepening crisis.

Chris Schmid told MailOnline his great aunt Isabel Francis, 94, passed away in Fieldway care home in Mitcham, South London on Friday, April 10

Ms Millan told MailOnline: '[My mother] had been mostly unresponsive for almost a week. She was not given IV for fluids and was kept in the care home as they considered moving her too distressing.

'Some of the residents were swabbed after showing symptoms on the Monday and Tuesday last week, and four residents and a carer were confirmed positive.

'My mum wasn't swabbed despite requests, we were told Public Health wouldn't swab there again as there were already confirmed cases. There were, and are, lots of suspected cases there and all residents are being kept in isolation.

'My mum had dementia but was otherwise healthy. We heard rumours about testing and were only told of the swabbing then confirmed cases when I asked.

'The nursing staff did as they could and said Public Health were discouraging elderly people in care from being taken to hospital.'

Debbie Cholwill said her mother passed away on April 10.

On Facebook, she wrote: 'It is with deep sadness that I am putting this message on sadly after six years of my mum being in a care home with dementia she sadly passed away last night, after testing positive for Coronavirus.

'What makes it more difficult to except we could not be with her, because of the lock down, I now have to live with the guilt of her dying alone, I know she is at peace now and suffering no more.

Mark Gordon fears his mother Susan (above), a 76-year-old terminally-ill cancer patient, is too weak to fight off coronavirus after contracting the infection while at a Tayside care home. He claims staff did not use PPE when dealing with patients

'I just hold her in my heart and treasure the memories I have of a wonderful mum, nan, and great great grandmother RIP and fly high love you mum.'

One woman on Twitter - called Lydia - wrote: 'My mum is in a care home. She has been very poorly but the GP won't go and see her as they are avoiding going into care homes.'

Chris Schmid told MailOnline his great aunt Isabel Francis, 94, passed away in Fieldway care home in Mitcham, South London on Friday, April 10.

He said: 'The official cause of death has been recorded as a stroke however we would like to have her body tested for COVID-19.'

Mr Schmid said his mother, 'raised concerns about the possibility of coronavirus due to Isabel's rapid deterioration in health.'

Mrs Francis had been a resident at the 1,000-a-week care home since September 2018.

Mr Schmid said added: 'I visited care home last week and can confirm staff are not wearing PPE. We are not aware of any other residents diagnosed with COVID-19 however no one is being tested.'

Left, George Hillhouse's 74-year-old mother, Helen Smith, died at Almond Court care home in Drumchapel on Saturday. Right, Avice Howarth's mother, who was living in a care home. passed away on April 10

Elaine Shirt had to put her 'lovely' father Cyril Lawrence, 99, into respite in a care home after her mother was taken ill recently and went into hospital.

Ms Shirt said her parents were due to return home when the care home her father was in went into lockdown, so he remained there. But he is now fighting for his life after falling ill over the weekend.

Aged 19, in 1939, Mr Lawrence lied about his age in order to register for national service before conscription was introduced.

A budding football player who was on the verge of signing for Blackpool United, he was deployed on the brand new battleship HMS King George V, assigned to the Home Fleet at Scapa Flow in the Orkney Islands.

He spent more than five years serving on the ship, which performed an active combat role and witnessed some of the most historic episodes of the war, including the pursuit and sinking of the Bismarck and the surrender of Japan.

Ms Shirt told MailOnline: 'All was well until Good Friday. We had video calls with him, he looked really well and on Sunday enjoyed his evening meal and even asked if could have had a little more. An hour later, an ambulance arrived and he was taken into hospital.

'I then tried contacting the hospital and at 4am a lovely Consultant phoned to say my dad was extremely poorly. It was a big shock. He was put on oxygen, fluids and antibiotics and swabs for the virus taken.

Debbie Cholwill said her mother (pictured) passed away on April 10. On Facebook, she wrote: 'It is with deep sadness that I am putting this message on sadly after six years of my mum being in a care home with dementia she sadly passed away last night, after testing positive for Coronavirus'

'At 8pm last night my mum and I said goodbye to my dad. Mun told him as I did how much he was loved. He couldn't speak but we were told he could hear us. It was heartbreaking and the two lovely nurses wearing masks and gloves broke down crying with us.

'I never in a million years thought this would happen at the end of life. My dad is battling on but it's just a question of time now.

'Dad is the longest surviving player of Blackpool Rochdale and Wrexham football clubs.

'He's a battler and I know he's doing his utmost to beat this but I know he won't. I'm waiting totally heartbroken supporting my mum.

'My mum will be 100 on June 3, and dad 100 on the 12th. To be cruelly taken like this is just so very sad.'

Mr Lawrence's early career at sea was spent on the Arctic convoys delivering aid and essential supplies to the Soviet Union.

He represented the Royal Navy at football, appearing in exhibition matches in Cairo and Alexandria and against New South Wales at the Sydney Cricket Ground.

Avice Howarth's mother passed away on April 10.

Posting on Facebook, Avice wrote: 'My mum passed away in a care home without any off her family at her side, she'd been ill but it was the corona virus that finally took her. RIP mum.'

Trisha Lynch paid an emotional tribute to her brother, who died in a nursing home yesterday morning.

She wrote on Facebook: 'Please pray for my brother who passed away earlier this morning.

'The nursing home where he was in, lost three patients during the night. I'm totally heartbroken. May he Rest In Peace.'

Jane Rudge's mother, Margaret Guise, is a resident at Hopwood Court care home in Alvechurch, Worcestershire.

She said: 'They have had their first confirmed corona resident in the last few days after their transfer to hospital.

'I understand several of the other residents, including my 94-year-old mother, are now ill and the manager would like all staff and residents to be tested but is receiving no help at all from any of the public bodies - CCG, PHE, Council, etc.

'This is becoming a dire situation that needs to be addressed urgently.

'There has been no attempt to test, and the manager cannot find anyone who will offer this. The staff are being amazing but it is a terrible burden for them to carry on working in such conditions.'

The daughter of a pensioner who died after contracting coronavirus has raised concerns about her care.

Carole Foster passed away last Wednesday at the Medway Maritime Hospital in Gillingham, Kent, just one day after being admitted.

The 77-year-old had been admitted there from Rochester Care Home.

Her daughter Tracey Bonfield told Kent Online she was called by a worker at the home and told her mother was unwell with a suspected urine infection.

Ms Bonfield said: 'She then said, 'I'm going to be really honest. We had residents who went to hospital with Covid-19 and we think she has got it'.'
I t was a court case that captivated Britain.

When Charles and Diana Ingram and Tecwen Whittock were tried at Southwark Crown Court in the spring of 2003, new details of the Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? cheating scandal became public knowledge.

Though the trio were eventually found guilty of procuring the execution of a valuable security by deception, all three maintained their innocence.

The case has captivated writer James Graham ever since, becoming the subject of his hit play and subsequent three-part ITV series Quiz, which stars Matthew Macfadyen and Sian Clifford as the couple at the heart of the scandal.

ITV's Quiz featuring Michael Sheen (2020) - In pictures 1 /26 ITV's Quiz featuring Michael Sheen (2020) - In pictures ITV / Left Bank Pictures Michael Sheen as Christ Tarrant ITV/Left Bank Pictures ITV/Left Bank Pictures ITV/Left Bank Pictures James Graham as Major Charles Ingram celebrating winning the million pounds ITV/Left Bank Pictures ITV/Left Bank Pictures ITV/Left Bank Pictures ITV/Left Bank Pictures ITV/Left Bank Pictures  LEFT BANK PICTURES (Television) Ltd All rights reserved

The third instalment sees the Ingrams and Whittock in the dock after being accused of cheating, as media attention intensifies around their case.

As the drama comes to a conclusion tonight, heres how Grahams script measures up to the real life case...

Was Charles Ingram accepted by Mensa?

ITV / Left Bank Pictures

The opening scenes of Quizs third and final instalment shows Charles completing the entry test for Mensa, the society which famously only allows those whose IQ falls in the 98th percentile or higher. As he arrives at court for his trial, the camera lingers on a membership badge worn on his lapel.

The Major did indeed take the test for Mensa in January 2003, just a few months before his court appearance. He passed, and Jon Ronsons Guardian report on the court case noted that he wore the badge - though nobody notices it.

He put it on as a special tough, but it is so tiny - just a little M on his lapel - that the jury cant spot it, he wrote.

Did Diana actually cough during the show - and was footage shown during the trial?

ITV / Left Bank Pictures

(ITV / Left Bank Pictures)

With Whittock apparently unsure of the correct answer to the question of which artist recorded the album Born To Do It, Diana was captured on camera coughing when Craig David was read.

After oscillating wildly between all four potential answers, her husband then settled for the correct answer - despite previously admitting that he had never heard of David. His odd back-and-forth helped to alert producers that something was amiss.

Footage from filming was prepared by Celadors editing team for use in the trial, as mentioned by Helen McCrorys barrister in Quiz, and Ingram maintained that the audio levels were not representative of his Millionaire experience.

Did Chris Tarrant really give evidence at the trial?

Michael Sheen as Chris Tarrant in the drama Quiz which will be broadcast in 2020 / PA

The quiz master did indeed attend court to testify - and his remarks in the script are taken almost verbatim from reports from the trial.

It also seems that the court was somewhat star struck by Tarrant. Answering a question about whether any contestant had ever done worse than Ingram in the opening round, he correctly noted that this had only happened in America - to laughter from the audience.

Writing in the Guardian, Ronson noted: Tarrant look[ed] surprised. He was just giving a factual answer.

Tarrant told the court that he suspected no foul play - and didnt pick up on any coughing - at the time, otherwise he would not have presented the couple with the 1 million cheque. He even told producers Dont be stupid when they raised their suspicions.

Was the trial suspended by an outbreak of coughing?

ITV / Left Bank Pictures

Once again, its a twist that seems too good to be true, but the Ingrams trial really was temporarily suspended due to an outbreak of coughing.

Reports from Southwark Crown Court told of how defence barrister QC David Aubrey was forced to give his final remarks against a backdrop of coughs from the jury box. Judge Geoffrey Rivlin QC then decided to delay his address until the next day.

Did the Ingrams dog get shot?

In a sequence of scenes showing the impact of the trial on the Ingrams personal lives, we see the Major spat upon by teenagers while out on a run, their daughters taunted by former school friends and - most upsettingly - their dog bleeding after apparently being shot at by a passer-by.

This scene appears to be a composite of two horrible instances involving the Ingrams pets.

ITV's Quiz featuring Michael Sheen (2020) - In pictures 1 /26 ITV's Quiz featuring Michael Sheen (2020) - In pictures ITV / Left Bank Pictures Michael Sheen as Christ Tarrant ITV/Left Bank Pictures ITV/Left Bank Pictures ITV/Left Bank Pictures James Graham as Major Charles Ingram celebrating winning the million pounds ITV/Left Bank Pictures ITV/Left Bank Pictures ITV/Left Bank Pictures ITV/Left Bank Pictures ITV/Left Bank Pictures  LEFT BANK PICTURES (Television) Ltd All rights reserved

Our dog was kicked and punched by six youths and subsequently died, Charles told BBC News in 2007.

Our cat was shot with an air pistol.

He added: I cant go for a run because people try to run me off the road. I know its deliberate because they slow down afterwards and cough out the window.

Did Paul Smith meet up with Paddy Spooner?

Celador boss Paul Smith never met so-called super quizzer Paddy Spooner around the time of the Millionaire trial - but in a strange case of life mirroring art, he organised a meeting with him during the production of Quiz after becoming re-intrigued by the syndicates operation.

Spooner, who was at the heart of an operation aiming to place quiz-obsessed contestants on the show by exploiting gaps in the entry process, told Smith that one in every 10 pounds given away on the show went to the syndicates operations.

Paul became re-intrigued by the story and wanted to find out more about the syndicate, writer James Graham told the Daily Mail.

He was shocked to realise that one in every 10 pounds he gave away went to this cheating operation.

We are revealing this for the first time as Paul only uncovered the truth while we were preparing the series.
Source: Xinhua| 2020-04-15 12:59:33|Editor: zyl

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PHNOM PENH, April 15 (Xinhua) -- The just-concluded special meeting of leaders from the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, China, Japan and the Republic of Korea (ASEAN Plus Three or APT) on COVID-19 has demonstrated their joint commitment to contain the spread of the coronavirus, Cambodian experts said Tuesday.

Joseph Matthews, a senior professor at the BELTEI International University in Phnom Penh, said the virtual meeting showcased the unity and cooperation among the East Asian countries in the face of the pandemic.

It is "high time" that all countries, big and small, joined one another to defeat this pandemic, he told Xinhua.

"As the ASEAN Plus Three countries are also partners in many economic, social and cultural development projects in the region, their cooperative spirit and traditional mutual trust can bring the new dynamic in the efforts to defeat this virus much earlier than Europe and America," he added.

Matthews said China has been successful in containing the virus compared with Europe and the United States, so the ASEAN countries can immensely benefit from China's experience in dealing with this plague.

"China can share its experience, technology, knowledge and resources with ASEAN to fight against this epidemic, and thus defeat the virus and restore the social and economic normality in this region," he said.

Chinese Premier Li Keqiang, who attended the video meeting on Tuesday afternoon from Beijing, highlighted the significance of joint efforts for an early victory against the virus in East Asia and announced that China will provide another 100 million face masks, 10 million protective suits and other urgently-needed medical supplies to ASEAN nations.

He proposed opening a "fast-track lane" for essential personnel on urgent visits in the fields of commerce, logistics, production and technological services among APT countries.

The premier also welcomed the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB)'s proposal of a COVID-19 Recovery Facility with an initial capitalization of 5 billion U.S. dollars.

"Premier Li's remarks show China's strong commitment and determination to help ASEAN and other countries to contain the COVID-19 and to rebuild their economies after the epidemic," Matthews said.

"In my view, we have to take Premier Li's view in Asian and global perspective because there is no country in the world that has not been affected by COVID-19 plague," he added.

Chheang Vannarith, president of the Asian Vision Institute, said China has proactively assisted other countries in the collective fight against the pandemic.

"ASEAN member countries are appreciative of China's assistance," he told Xinhua. "Enhanced regional coordination and integrated action plans can help the regional countries to effectively deal with the pandemic outbreak as well as to mitigate the social and economic risks and impacts stemming from the pandemic."

He said there is a great possibility of restoring the regional economy if all the APT countries are committed to further deepening regional integration and facilitating regional production network.

"Digital transformations and integration need to be further promoted," he said. "The ASEAN Plus Three countries should consider creating a master plan on digital connectivity and inclusive digital economy," Vannarith said.

Cambodian Prime Minister Samdech Techo Hun Sen, who attended the virtual meeting from his office in Phnom Penh, said the summit demonstrated the leaders' joint commitment to contain the spread of the virus.

He expressed his profound gratitude to China for its assistance to Cambodia for the fight against the pandemic.

"The Government of the People's Republic of China has dispatched to Cambodia a team of doctors specialising in fighting against COVID-19, both civilians and military, along with necessary medical equipment and masks," Hun Sen said in a speech broadcast live on his official Facebook page.

COVID-19 is a common challenge to all APT countries, even though each of them may be facing the spread of the virus at different stages.

"ASEAN must learn from the successes and best practices of the Plus Three countries, especially the People's Republic of China and the Republic of Korea, in effectively containing and preventing the spread of the disease," Hun Sen said.

ASEAN, which groups Brunei, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam, has so far 20,734 confirmed COVID-19 cases and 866 deaths, according to statistics site Worldometers.

Cambodia has recorded a total of 122 confirmed cases to date, with 91 recoveries, according to a statement released by the Ministry of Health on Tuesday.
DR Congo's health authorities have appealed for maximum effort to avoid "the worst" impact of an expected peak in coronavirus cases in the capital Kinshasa next month.

The pandemic in the capital city and province "is entering an exponential phase," the country's COVID-19 watchdog said in a report seen by AFP on Wednesday.

"The peak of this growth will occur between the first and second week of May," it said.

"During this period, we must expect a major influx of patients to health facilities, which will probably be overwhelmed. If current preparatory efforts are not completed in time, we must fear the worst."

The largest country in sub-Saharan Africa, the Democratic Republic of Congo suffers from chronically weak healthcare infrastructure, entrenched poverty and, in Kinshasa, crowded slums.

The DRC has so far recorded 21 dead out of 254 cases since March 10, almost all in Kinshasa.

The report was of a meeting of the multi-sector committee for response to COVID-19.

It was signed by the committee's technical secretary, Jean-Jacques Muyembe, a world-renowned virologist who is also the co-discoverer of the Ebola virus.

The document warned bluntly that in Kinshasa "social distancing measures have completely lapsed" and there were fears of an "intense" spread of coronavirus disease "in the coming weeks".

It recommended obligatory wearing of masks in public areas, especially in buses and markets, and urged that a lockdown imposed on the central business district of Gombe since April 6 be extended to neighbouring areas.

In the neighbouring Republic of Congo, also called Congo-Brazzaville, 43 new cases of coronavirus have been detected, bringing the total since March 14 to 117 cases, five of which have been fatal, Health Minister Jacqueline Lydia Mikolo said on Wednesday.

Explore further Follow the latest news on the coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak

 2020 AFP
A 38-year-old Beaverton man is accused of evading more than $65 million in employment and income taxes by allegedly paying Portland-area construction workers and subcontractors under the table.

Victor Hugo Lopez-Diaz and other unnamed conspirators cashed about $185 million in payroll checks at check-cashing businesses and then paid construction workers in cash while filing false corporation, payroll and individual tax returns, according to Assistant U.S. Attorneys Seth Uram and Gavin Bruce.

The alleged scheme continued from 2014 through February 2018, according to a federal complaint filed Tuesday in U.S. District Court in Portland.

Lopez-Diaz is charged with one count of conspiring to commit tax evasion and two counts of filing false tax returns. Hes scheduled to make his first court appearance on April 21.

Oregons U.S. Attorney Billy J. Williams called it one of the largest tax evasion cases ever prosecuted in the state.

Fraud of this variety not only impacts honest taxpayers, but significantly impacts honest competitors who follow the rules,'' said Justin Campbell, an IRS criminal investigation agent.

Lopez-Diaz and some of his co-conspirators are accused of establishing subcontracting companies, hiring unlicensed work crews and paying them cash without putting them on formal payroll systems. The construction companies were involved in residential real estate projects in the Portland area, the complaint said.

Lopez-Diaz, prosecutors said, also worked as a payroll check cashier for other companies, using the alias Miguel Lopez to cash checks and conceal his identity. He typically cashed these checks at a check cashing business in Vancouver but sometimes at a check cashing location in Beaverton, according to the complaint.

No other defendant has been named in the case.

If convicted, Lopez-Diaz could face a maximum sentence of 11 years in federal prison, three years of supervised release and $750,000 in fines.

-- Maxine Bernstein

Email at mbernstein@oregonian.com; 503-221-8212

Follow on Twitter @maxoregonian

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Defence Affairs Minister, Lieutenant-General Abdulla bin Hassan Al-Nuaimi, today paid an inspection visit to the Field Intensive Care Unit, run by the Royal Medical Services (RMS) at the Bahrain Defence Force Hospital, in the presence of RMS Commander, Major General Professor Shaikh Khalid bin Ali Al Khalifa.

Designed according to the highest standards, the 130-bed Field Intensive Care Unit was set up in seven days as part of the kingdoms efforts to combat the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) and curb its spread.

The minister toured the Field Intensive Care Units sections and was detailed about its work mechanisms, and the treatment services it delivers, amid the current circumstances the kingdom is going through.

The minister lauded the Military Hospitals medical competencies and commended the tremendous efforts they are exerting to deliver medical and treatment services to the citizens and residents, praising the effective role they are playing to combat COVID-19 and raise awareness on it.

He affirmed the readiness of the RMS and its highly-trained medical competencies to deliver the necessary medical treatment and appropriate health services to face the developments of the COVID-19 pandemic, praising the RMS provision of the latest medical equipment to provide the necessary health care for the citizens and residents.

Located at the Military Hospital, the Field Intensive Care Unit is one in a series of precautionary quarantine and treatment centres set by the kingdom to receives COVID-19 patients and suspects, who receive the necessary medical care, in accordance with the standards set by the World Health Organisation.
It comes as IMF labels coronavirus crash will be the worst hit to the world economy since the 1930s

But the watchdog also warned that most firms aren't actually covered

FCA urges insurers to act swiftly to pay out on coronavirus-related claims

Britain's financial watchdog has urged insurers to pay out to businesses affected by coronavirus as quickly as possible - but warned that most firms won't actually be covered at all.

The Financial Conduct Authority today confirmed that the majority of business interruption policies don't make provisions for disruption caused by a pandemic - meaning insurers won't pay out to most firms affected by the virus.

The statement comes as the International Monetary Fund warned this week that the global economy will suffer its worst year since the Great Depression of the 1930s due to the virus.

The FCA confirmed that most firms won't be covered if they have to close due to the virus

In a letter to the heads of insurance firms the Financial Conduct Authority today said: 'Based on our conversations with the industry to date, our estimate is that most policies have basic cover, do not cover pandemics and therefore would have no obligation to pay out in relation to the pandemic.

'While this may be disappointing for the policyholder we see no reasonable grounds to intervene in such circumstances.

'In contrast, there are policies where it is clear that the firm has an obligation to pay out on a policy. For these policies, it is important that the claims are assessed and settled quickly.'

A spokesman for the Association of British Insurers said: 'This FCA clarification confirms the scope of pandemic insurance among firms.

'Insurers recognise this is a worrying time for all businesses and ABI members are committed to swift payment of valid claims and interim payments to their customers.'

In last month's Budget Chancellor Rishi Sunak announced a 'coronavirus business interruption loans scheme', with banks to offer loans of up to 1.2million to small and medium-sized businesses.

Sunak said: 'The government will offer a generous guarantee on those loans, covering up to 80 per cent of losses, with no fees, so that banks can lend with confidence.

'This will unlock up to 1billion of attractive working capital loans to support small businesses, with more as needed.'

Banking trade body UK Finance revealed that the banking and finance sector has lent over 1.1billion to small and medium businesses so far through the scheme.
As part of its ongoing initiatives towards the COVID-19 relief efforts, Hero MotoCorp, worlds largest manufacturer of motorcycles and scooters, has announced that it will be donating 60 first-responder mobile ambulances to authorities. These mobile ambulances will be useful for reaching out to patients in rural and remote areas and comfortably moving them to the nearest hospitals.

These mobile ambulances have been custom-built as an accessory to be fitted on Hero MotoCorp motorcycles, with an engine capacity of 150cc and above. The ambulance accessories include a sleeping arrangement with essential medical equipment such as a first-aid kit, oxygen cylinder, fire extinguisher and a siren. These will be handed over to authorities in multiple regions across India.

#IndiaFightsCOVID19 | @HeroMotoCorp to donate 60 first-responder mobile ambulances. Customc-built as an accessory to be fitted on motorcycles with engine capacity of 150cc. Includes sleeping arrangement with equipment like first-aid kit, oxygen cylinder, fire extinguisher & siren pic.twitter.com/fFRizTFKP9 CNNNews18 (@CNNnews18) April 14, 2020

As can be seen from the pictures, a Hero Xtreme 200R has been modified into a mobile ambulance. It also comes with things like reading lights and gets a suspension fitted both for the carriage as well as the entire fitment that goes on to the motorcycle which means, it will be comfortable to ride for those using it.

The Hero Group has committed a corpus of Rs 100 Crore as an aid for the ongoing COVID-19 relief-efforts in India. Half of this sum  Rs 50 Crore  is being contributed to the PM-Cares Fund and the remaining Rs 50 crore is being spent in other relief efforts.

The BML Munjal University - run by the Hero Group at Dharuhera in the state of Haryana in India  has offered its 2000-bed hostel for use as isolation and treatment ward by the local health department.

Hero MotoCorp is also distributing more than 15,000 meals to daily wage-workers, stranded labourers and homeless families in several areas of Delhi-NCR, Rajasthan, Haryana, Uttarakhand, Andhra Pradesh and Gujarat every day.

Also Watch:
JACKSON, MI  Jacksons interim city manager got a pay raise Tuesday night, which brings his salary to the average of other cities of similar size and budget, city officials said.

Jonathan Greenes raise was approved unanimously at the April 14, Jackson City Council meeting. He now makes an extra $16,000, bringing his salary to $140,000 a year.

The raise is retroactive to his Feb. 25 start date as interim city manager. Prior to this raise, Greene was being paid $124,000, his salary from his previous job as director of public works.

Greene started as interim city manager after former city manager Patrick Burtch resigned. Greene is in the interim position until Aug. 25.

Jackson picks interim city manager, forgoes search process for now

We thank you for all the work youve been doing since you took the reins, Mayor Derek Dobies said during the meeting.

The citys rules and personnel policy committee looked at the salaries of city managers from cities similar to size of Jackson, including Holland, Port Huron and Midland, committee member and councilman Jeromy Alexander said. The committee took the average of the salaries which was $139,750 and rounded it to $140,000 to determine Greenes new salary, he said.

This represents a $35,000 a year savings over our previous manager, Alexander said. I definitely think we made a good call.

After starting as city manger in 2012, Burtch had a $170,000 annual salary in his final year, before leaving Feb. 21, for a job in Maumee, Ohio.

Going forward, Greene will be paid based on performance reviews, not the automatic step increases other city personnel receive, Dobies said at the meeting.

City of Jackson doles out big raises with little transparency

The city council still is working to decide whether to officially hire Greene, extend his interim appointment or launch an outside search. No decision on the next full-time manager will be made until August, Alexander said.

The city council declined to start a search when Greene was appointed in February because of the strengths Greene has, Dobies said.

I definitely feel great about Jonathan and Im looking forward to seeing how this develops with the city, Alexander said.

Greene started working for Jackson in 2009, serving as the Downtown Development Authority director, economic development director, assistant city manager and most recently the director of public works.

READ MORE JACKSON NEWS:

Man found dead in Grand River remembered for cheer, humor

Another COVID-19 death reported in Jackson County, total stands at seven

Single-lane I-94 closures are starting in Jackson County

Jackson Law Enforcement Memorial canceled amid coronavirus pandemic

Northwest seniors spotlight high school careers with front-door shadowboxes
This Week in Review

A weekly review of the best and most popular stories published in the Imperial Valley Press. Also, featured upcoming events, new movies at local theaters, the week in photos and much more.
(HedgeCo.Net) The U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York entered a final consent judgment against International Investment Group, LLC (IIG), a former registered investment adviser, which the Securities and Exchange Commission had charged with securities fraud for hiding losses and selling millions in fake loan assets to clients.

The SECs original complaint, filed on November 21, 2019, alleges that IIG grossly overstated the value of defaulted loans in the funds portfolio to conceal losses in its flagship fund. In an effort to continue its deception, IIG later doctored the firms records to show that the defaulted loans had been repaid and that the proceeds had been used to make new loans, when in fact there had been no repayment and the purported new loans were fake. The SECs complaint further alleges that IIG executives sought to raise money to meet investor redemptions and other the liabilities by selling at least $60 million in fake trade finance loans to other clients, including a collateralized loan obligation, a retail mutual fund, and two hedge funds. To deceive clients into purchasing the loans, IIG created fake loan documentation to substantiate the non-existent loans, including fake promissory notes and a forged credit agreement.

Without admitting or denying the SECs allegations, IIG consented to the entry of a final judgment, enjoining it from violating the antifraud provisions of Section 17(a) of the Securities Act of 1933, Section 10(b) of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 and Rule 10b-5 thereunder and Sections 206(1) and 206(2) of the Investment Advisors Act of 1940. The final judgment also requires IIG to pay more than $35 million is disgorgement and prejudgment interest. The SEC previously revoked IIGs registration as an investment adviser on November 26, 2019.
A Detroit lawmaker who tested positive for coronavirus last month credits a Midland lawmaker with helping try to save her life.

Rep. Karen Whitsett, D-Detroit, told the Detroit Free Press on April 6 that President Donald Trump's promotion of the drug hydroxychloroquine may have saved her life. In a national radio broadcast, Whitsett described the role state Rep. Annette Glenn, R-Midland, played in helping her receive the drug, after which she quickly recovered.

Whitsett said on The Glenn Beck Show that despite her severe and quickly deteriorating condition, her doctor refused to prescribe the drug after receiving a threat letter from the state Department of Licensing and Regulatory Affairs warning doctors and pharmacists they might face "administrative action" if they prescribed or filled prescriptions of the drug for use in treating coronavirus patients.

"I contacted state Rep. Annette Glenn on the Republican side, and she contacted (my doctor) and told him he was misinterpreting the law," Whitsett told Beck.

Whitsett said she didn't believe she'd be alive if the Whitmer administration's memo hadn't been retracted, according to a news release from Glenn's campaign manager. Whitsett then asked "how many other people didn't have access to the medication and lost their lives that day?"

Glenn, who chairs the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Licensing and Regulatory Affairs, after hearing from local healthcare professionals upset by LARA's threat memo, successfully pressured LARA officials in a conference call to issue a clarification recanting the threat and assuring doctors that they are free to prescribe the drug. She called Whitsett's physician later that same day.

Glenn has since, at the request of fellow legislators and constituents, contacted other physicians and pharmacist to ensure they understand LARA's original threat memo has been reversed.

"It's truly humbling to think the Lord may have used me in such a way that my actions may actually have helped save someone's life," Glenn said. "Nothing I may accomplish as a legislator could make me feel more blessed to have the privilege of being in a position to act on behalf of the people of Bay and Midland counties, and end up helping people all across Michigan in the process, including my dear friend Rep. Whitsett."

 Victoria Ritter, vritter@mdn.net
For many, Nose Art is perhaps one of the most interesting aviation-related phenomena which emerged from the World War II era. Please join in with the Military Aviation Museum as celebrated artist and designer Chad Hill of Django Studios walks us through the process of creating a piece of modern Nose Art, while exploring the historical significance underpinning each brush stroke. Hill started his artistic career at an early age thanks to his parents. His mother taught him how to draw, while his father and uncles instilled a love for hot rods, tractors, and WWII airplanes in his young heart. Hill has been an artist for the past 27 years, and at Django Studios he specializes in Automotive and Aviation Design, and Marketing Branding. Over the years, Hill has also performed work to add period-correct nose art to restored World War II aircraft. His illustration work is on show at a variety of aviation museums and air shows, and even at the Smithsonians National Air & Space Museum.

Please do to take a look at his wonderful portfolio of work here.

Painting History

Guest Speaker: Chad Hill Django Studios

April 16, 2020 7:00 pm EDT

Click HERE to register
North Wales Fire and Rescue Service urges people not to release sky lanterns to thank NHS

This article is old - Published: Wednesday, Apr 15th, 2020

Members of the public are being urged by the fire service to not take part in a campaign to release sky lanterns to thank NHS workers.

It comes after a calls online for individuals to release them every Sunday night as a way of showing support for the health service during the coronavirus pandemic.

The lanterns have already been banned by all councils in North Wales due to the fire risk and danger posed to animals.

A spokesperson for North Wales Fire and Rescue Service said: At a time when wildfires are on the increase we discourage the use of sky lanterns.

While we fully understand people wanting to show their support to the NHS, sky lanterns are a fire hazard and many local authorities have already banned them.

Fire crews in North Wales have been called to deal with a number of fires in the open in recent weeks.

It includes a gorse fire on Anglesey over the weekend, which the service believes may have been started deliberately.

RSPCA Cymru has also previously highlighted the dangers associated with the use of sky lanterns because of the potential to cause harm to animals.
An appeal filed by a former Massachusetts police sergeant who pleaded guilty to child pornography charges was rejected.

Attleboro Sgt. Richard Woodhead's request for his conviction to be thrown out was denied after a federal magistrate said it had no merit and missed the deadline, The Sun Chronicle reported Monday.

Woodhead, 57, also failed to show that his lawyers were ineffective, U.S. District Court Magistrate Judge Patricia Sullivan wrote in a 21-page report.

The former sergeant filed the appeal in January, citing that federal prosecutors entrapped him and that he was only engaging in a fantasy.

He pleaded guilty in August 2017 in federal court in Providence and received a five-year sentence.

A previous appeal was denied in September 2019 because it was also not filed in a timely fashion.

He pleaded guilty to communicating with a federal agent posing as an 8-year-old girls stepfather in an attempt to get nude photos of the girl.
One of the first lessons from the coronavirus, even at this early stage of the pandemic, is that you can never plan for everything.

The follow-up lesson, however, should give us all some hope. We can at least be more resilient when major, unexpected disruptions occur, as they inevitably will.

I'm seeing this first-hand. I was once the chief design officer for IBM Watson, and am now working in the property management sector. As public officials have issued shelter-in-place orders, the situation has upped the pressure on landlords and depressed traffic in commercial sites, which has led us to think hard about how to be more resilient.

Our conclusion is that we should stop wasting time planning ahead.

Instead, weve adopted a now, next, later framework for decision making during crises. Today, despite the pandemic, were efficiently making progress in matters where we have control, and were gaining precious time to gird for changes that may or might not happen in the near future.

Whats first?

Now, next, later is not a complicated time-management strategy. It guides people to focus on urgent matters immediately, keep an eye on what must be addressed tomorrow, and postpone dealing with contingencies that depend on too many unknown factors.

Notice how each step has subtasks. To know what demands a companys resources now, executives need to be able to effectively gather informationinside and outside the workplace. Which employees keep tabs on customers, investors, vendors and other stakeholders during the crisis? Are executives aware of public directives that change by the day? Are frontline employees trained in the best practices? The answers to those questions cant wait.

The same thoughts apply to determining what comes next. But to accomplish the next step, leaders must develop mechanisms for prioritizing short versus medium-term goals. Can CEOs depend on internal structures that allow for decision-making and implementation in a seamless manner on schedule? Or should they hold meetings that can be cumbersome but result in better decisions, and punch lists because of the iterative process of hashing out solutions?

Lastly, opting to postpone some decisions for later is key. Its the only way to maximize a companys response for now and the next day.

But planning is bad?

In normal times, every business should have a plan. But you can't plan for contingencies when the business climate might change, when new laws and regulations are imminent, or, as in our current crisis, public health threats are in flux. At that point, planning is simply a waste of time.

What to do instead? React fast. Spend resources in ways that help immediately. This way, you wont waste time and money revising outdated plans.

This strategy isnt about canceling responsibilities. Its about setting aside unanswerable questions until the time is right. How will you know when the time is right? Youll know in the fullness of time, if youve been properly keeping track of whats necessary now, focusing on what's next, and purposely not squandering energy on issues you know you can deal with later.

How fighter pilots do it

The U.S. Air Force has a conceptual model for fighter pilots called OODAor, "observe, orient, decide and act"that might help you think about crisis management. The most important step in the cycle is orientation, or cataloguing ones weaknesses, strengths, biases, previous experience and recent analyses, and then applying those insights to matters at hand. In other words, if you know your mission, and you and your team are honest and transparent with each other, and youve pinpointed whats urgent and whats not, then you should know what's necessary now and what can be put off for later.

Consider how risk managers unsurprisingly tend to focus on contingencies that affect their specific industries, for example. Financial institutions monitor their leverage ratios in case of a credit crunch. Tech companies beef up their security to prevent hacking. Manufacturers secure backup suppliers in case of shortages.

That planning is important, to be sure.

But when an extreme or unprecedented event takes place, those plans almost always come up shortbecause theyre geared toward maintaining business as usual, instead of coping with the kind of massive disruption that nobody could prepare for. If executives know their companys orientation, they can employ "now, next and later" immediately. Theyll be able to quickly separate pressing from less pressing needs, and weather the storm while theyre in it.

The aim here is not to understand uncertainty. Its to deploy a model for thinking for times when its easy to lose ones head. Right now its better to ditch those five-year plans... and get ready for curve balls we know we cant predict.

Related:

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Copyright 2020 Entrepreneur.com Inc., All rights reserved
The coronavirus outbreak has resulted in significant broader market gyrations, compelling investors to stay away from riskier assets including equities. But the pandemic has also opened up doors for investing in companies with solid environmental, social and corporate governance (ESG) principles since they have lesser financial risks, predominantly because of their environmental practices.

Now, these non-financial risk factors form the base of ESG investing, which dependson how much a company is prepared for disasters, its continuity planning and employee treatment.In fact, it may include a companys ability to provide employee benefits such as paid sick leave and work from home.

Coronavirus to Trigger ESG Investing

A few companies have responded well to the pandemic. For instance, carmakers like Ford have converted manufacturing facilities to make medical supplies, highlighting the role that private companies can play in addressing the pandemic.

But first, what is sustainable investing or ESG? The term covers three main factors, environment that includes issues such as climate change policies, carbon footprint, and use of renewable energies. The social' factor involves workers rights and protections and governance stands for diversity of the board and corporate transparency.

Many companies have been taking significant actions to reduce carbon footprint and save the environment. But the rapid switch of car manufacturers to making respiratory ventilators and apparel companies manufacturing PPEs and masks puts the spotlight on the social factor.

Before the virus outbreak, millennials showed interest in ESG when considering investment opportunities. This paid off well during the pandemic as research shows that ESG funds have outperformed others. Though these stocks suffered heavy losses amid last months downturn but those were notably lower than traditional stocks.

Story continues

These companies are truly focused on the well-being of their workers.

4 Stocks to Watch

The coronavirus outbreak has given opportunities to investors to ask companies questions regarding resilience and contingency planning, which are relevant to long-term performance. Hence, we have shortlisted four solid ESG stocks that investors can keep an eye on as these continue to have proper ESG ratings even during this period of crisis.

Microsoft Corporation MSFT has taken a leap in corporate social responsibility and supports its staff with regular pay even as several companies across the world have announcedlayoffs and salary cuts.

The companys expected earnings growth rate for the current year is 17.3% compared with the Zacks Computer - Software industrys projected earnings growth of 3.2%. The Zacks Consensus Estimate for the companys current-year earnings has been revised 3.9% upward over the past 90 days. Microsoft carries a Zacks Rank #3 (Hold). You can see the complete list of todays Zacks #1 Rank (Strong Buy) stocks here.

Chipmaker NVIDIA Corporation NVDA makes a mark among ESG stocks with a strict policy regarding conflict minerals. The companys due diligence policies state that minerals used in the products do not directly or indirectly finance or benefit armed groups in the Democratic Republic of Congo and adjoining countries (DRC).

The companys expected earnings growth rate for the current year is 22.1% against the Zacks Semiconductor - General industrys projected earnings decline of 12.7%. The Zacks Consensus Estimate for the companys current-year earnings has been revised 0.6% upward over the past 90 days. NVIDIA carries a Zacks Rank #3.

The Procter & Gamble Company PG provides branded consumer packaged goods. The companys expected earnings growth rate for the current year is 9.5% against the Zacks Soap and Cleaning Materials industrys projected earnings decline of 1.1%. The Zacks Consensus Estimate for the companys current-year earnings has been revised 0.2% upward over the past 90 days. The Procter & Gamble Company carries a Zacks Rank #3.

Next we have, NextEra Energy, Inc. NEE. The company is responsible for the generation and supply of energy throughout most of the state of Florida through its regulated subsidiaries. Its ESG ratings have remained unchanged amid the coronavirus outbreak.

The companys expected earnings growth rate for the current year is 8.1% compared with the Zacks Utility - Electric Power industrys projected earnings growth of 3.6%. The Zacks Consensus Estimate for the companys current-year earnings has been revised 0.1% upward over the past 90 days. NextEra Energy carries a Zacks Rank #3.

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COLUMBIA TWP., MI  A man was arrested on his third suspected drunk driving charge after leading police in a chase while driving his Porsche on his birthday.

Phillip Lamar Dawson, 47, of Columbia Township was arrested Saturday, April 11, which records show was his birthday, after a short pursuit through the township, according to the Columbia Township Police Department.

Dawson is facing one felony count each of third-degree fleeing and eluding, a third offence of operating a vehicle while intoxicated and resisting or obstructing police, records show.

Officers were called to a home in the 4000 block of Reed Road for a property security check and, while in route, were told there was a suspected drunk driver leaving the area in a silver Porsche, police said.

Officers spotted the Porsche and attempted to stop the vehicle, police said.

The driver, later identified as Dawson, fled the stop and led police on a brief chase before eventually being stopped as more police units arrived in the area, police said.

Dawson is currently lodged in the Jackson County Jail. The Napoleon Township Police Department and Michigan State Police assisted in the incident.

Dawson was discharged from the Michigan Department of Corrections in late July 2019, after serving a year and a half on probation after pleading no contest to one count of aggravated domestic violence, records show.

More from The Jackson Citizen Patriot:

Making face shields in the basement: 5 things that give us hope amid the COVID-19 crisis in Jackson County

Jackson buses to stop running weekends during COVID-19 pandemic

Man found dead in Grand River remembered for cheer, humor




Haiti - Covid-19 : More than 140,000 Haitians have lost their jobs in DR





On Tuesday, the International Organization for Migration (IOM) warned that 75% of regularized migrants in the Dominican Republic, or about 144,000 people (98% of whom are Haitians), have lost their jobs due to measures taken to combat the coronavirus Covid-19 and are in dire need of a livelihood.



Stressing that nearly 140,000 are Haitians who worked in the informal sector and are therefore not covered by the aid granted by the Dominican Government to workers who have lost their jobs.



The IOM estimates that the remaining 25% (some 50,000 regularized Haitians) who worked in the food and domestic services sectors were less affected by the emergency measures.



Josue Gastelbondo Head of Mission of the IOM. in the Dominican Republic said "This largely explains why contingents of people try daily to the Dajabon-Ouanaminthe border to return to their country, given the economic uncertainty and the loss of their sources of income."



In early April, 6,231 Haitian nationals returned to Haiti voluntarily via official border crossing points, according to figures from the Directorate General of Migration.



Given the situation at the border, Josue Gastelbondo recommended strengthening epidemiological controls at crossing points recalling "Today more than ever, the situation in one country has repercussions in the other" stressing that "Voluntary returns massifs are a painful exit for the Haitian population, with no options to improve their living conditions in either of the two countries..."



See also :

https://www.haitilibre.com/en/news-30349-haiti-social-more-than-1-000-haitians-left-the-dr-voluntarily.html



SL/ HaitiLibre


















The Midwest Auction Company has announced the addition of a new Standardbred mixed sale date.

In addition to the companys November sale, the June Midwest Mixed Sale will be held on Monday, June 22, 2020. The sale will be held at the auction companys normal venue, the Michiana Event Center in Shipshewana, Indiana.

Citing demand for the mixed sale created by other sales scheduled for April and May being cancelled, the sale company was able to secure a late June date to meet that need.

We certainly understand how fragile of a time we are in right now, not just for our industry but for the world, stated sale manager Jeff Fought. Our goal was to find a date that we felt would be late enough that we could make it work, while still early enough to fit the needs of both buyers and sellers of all classes of racehorses. We will take every precaution possible to have this be a safe environment, and we are optimistic about getting back to racing and back to business.

In addition to all the amenities normally provided at the fall Midwest Mixed Sale, including 50 per cent payment of proceeds paid the day of the sale, the June 22 event will offer live-stream online bidding.

Entries are now being accepted and will close on May 11 or earlier if full. Entries will be accepted on a first-come, first-served basis.

For further information, head to midwestauctionco.com, email [email protected] or call 260-463-1649.

(With files from the Midwest Auction Company)
The Trump administration eased a ban on exports of personal protective equipment, with the list of exemptions growing after lawyers laid out the shortcomings of the rules, people familiar with the situation said.

Exports to Canada, Mexico and U.S. entities such as military bases abroad are among the exemptions, according to an internal Customs and Border Protection memo obtained by Bloomberg News. It also singles out shipments by 3M Co., which President Donald Trump had originally blocked from sending N95 masks to Canada and Latin America. He reversed course last week after reaching a production agreement with the company.

The medical system in the U.S.  which leads the world in infections with more than 580,000 confirmed COVID-19 cases  is grappling with shortages of protective gear for health-care professionals. Competition for crucial medical supplies is fuelling confusion and suspicions between the states and federal government over conflicting priorities.

Last week, the Federal Emergency Management Agency issued a temporary rule that would require all exports of certain masks, gloves and other materials used in the U.S.s coronavirus response to get explicit approval from FEMA.

The rule included a single exemption  for covered materials that are made by or on behalf of U.S. manufacturers with continuous export agreements with customers in other countries. And the exemption only applies if at least 80 per cent of that manufacturers domestic production was distributed in the U.S. in the past year.

Within hours of publishing that rule, FEMA and CBP representatives were flooded with emails and phone calls asking for clarity.

Exemption definitions

On a conference call the agencies held last week, companies and their lawyers laid out the shortcomings of the rule: What if a multinational firm ships products to one of its offices overseas because theyre needed for personal protection, but not for sale? One participant noted that their shipment, addressed to a U.S. military base in the Middle East, was halted because it didnt fit the definition of the exemption under the rule, three people familiar with the call said.

This ban apparently happened because the president was shocked to see a story about a U.S. company exporting masks, said Rufus Yerxa, president of the National Foreign Trade Council. But it shows the danger of regulating trade in vital medical supplies unilaterally by anecdote rather than after careful review and consultations with key trading partners.

The CBP memo, dated April 9, adds that the focus of the ban is on commercial quantities, which it defines as shipments valued at $2,500 and containing more than 10,000 units of gloves, masks and other covered materials.

A CBP spokeswoman didnt respond to a request for comment.

While the internal guidance is seen as a way to help administer the export ban, the document has not been made public, leaving exporters in the dark on any modification that may have been made to the rule.

The rule reserved the right for the FEMA Administrator to establish additional exemptions that he determines are necessary or appropriate to promote the national defence and will announce any such exemptions by notice in the Federal Register.

Such a notice has yet to be published.

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One of Canadas largest private lenders is freezing redemptions.

Bridging Finance Inc. said in an letter to investors Monday that it has gated its funds indefinitely to maintain investor value and limit pandemic effects.

The non-bank lender has $1.6 billion in assets under management with the most of its direct lending funds invested in collateral-based bridging loans, inventory and accounts-receivables financing.

Request for redemptions spiked to about 15 per cent of the assets from the usual five per cent, which prompted the gating, chief executive officer David Sharpe said by phone. The news was first reported by the Globe and Mail newspaper.

If Bridging were to press existing borrowers out of the portfolio in order to satisfy unusual redemptions in the funds, the effect would be to cut off funding to these businesses during an unprecedented economic emergency, the firm said in the letter seen by Bloomberg News. It could also result in investors being treated unfairly if Bridging were to be asked to sell positions at a discount given the lack of a normal market.

The firm said in the letter that many of its borrowers  which work in everything from milling flour to delivering groceries, repairing Coast Guard vessels and monitoring train tracks  are experiencing higher demand for their products as people need more of the basic services they provide.

Last month, Sharpe said the firm had a surge in calls from companies desperate for loans. He said at the time that his team was speeding up work to accommodate some of the requests for urgent loans ranging from $10 million to $50 million, he said.

Canadian non-bank commercial mortgage lenders also froze redemptions as the underlying assets couldnt be sold fast enough to keep pace with sustained withdrawals, Bloomberg reported last month.

Vancouver-based Trez Capital gated approximately $2.6 billion. It didnt say how long the freeze would last to avoid building unrealistic expectations.

Some firms such as Morrison Laurier Mortgage Corporation have gone further and also suspended dividends and new purchases last month, according to the people familiar with the matter.
Covid-19 has likely rendered a historic "phase-one" US-China trade deal signed in January stillborn, and the need to address the economic devastation that the pandemic has caused will ratchet up the pressure on Beijing to reform its domestic economy, two experts on the bilateral relationship said on Tuesday.

China's high debt levels going into the pandemic and the likelihood that its GDP will contract as the private sector struggles to regain momentum after many businesses were closed to contain the coronavirus has sapped consumption to a degree that will make it nearly impossible for Beijing to fulfil its buying commitments, according to Rhodium Group founder Daniel Rosen and former Australian prime minister Kevin Rudd.

"The toolbox that was used to get out of the soup in [the global financial crisis of] 2008-2009, the extraordinary stimulus that China was applauded and acclaimed for, is simply not an option today" because easy credit given to support the country's state-owned enterprises in recent years is too high, Rosen said.

Citing Chinese government data, Rosen showed a graph of the country's interest payments as a percentage of GDP at over 14 per cent at the end of 2019, up from about 9 per cent in 2008. He added that Chinese companies are struggling under a burden of about US$2 trillion worth of debt service obligations.

China's interest payments as a percentage of GDP were at over 14 per cent at the end of 2019, up from about 9 per cent in 2008. Click to enlarge. Chart: Rhodium Group. alt=China's interest payments as a percentage of GDP were at over 14 per cent at the end of 2019, up from about 9 per cent in 2008. Click to enlarge. Chart: Rhodium Group.

The Chinese government "will be very reluctant to engineer a stimulus strategy at the same order of magnitude than they did last time, even though the objective economic need this time is considerably larger," Rudd said.

Story continues

The assessment by Rudd and Rosen runs counter to expectations voiced by US President Donald Trump, who said last week that he was confident that China would follow through with its pledge to buy an additional US$200 billion worth of exports "because I know President Xi [Jinping], who I like and respect, and I think he will honour the deal he made with us". Trump has been pushing to reduce China's trade surplus with the US as a major foreign policy goal since he took office in 2017. That surplus rose to a record US$276 billion in that year, prompting the US leader to start a bilateral trade war with Beijing in July 2018.

When they signed their phase-one agreement in January, the two sides pledged to start negotiations on phase two, which would address structural economic issues, including Beijing's support to state-owned enterprises.

Following through with the agreed-upon increase in purchases from the US would also damage other exporting nations already ravaged by Covid-19 and create difficulties for American suppliers, Rosen said.

US President Donald Trump and Chinese Vice Premier Liu He show the signed China-US phase-one economic and trade agreement during a ceremony at the White House on January 15. Photo: Xinhua alt=US President Donald Trump and Chinese Vice Premier Liu He show the signed China-US phase-one economic and trade agreement during a ceremony at the White House on January 15. Photo: Xinhua

"It is going to be disastrous for anybody else in the world selling fossil fuels, any kind of substitutable agricultural products, and myriad other things," Rosen said. "Boeing would win out over Airbus, despite the problems going into the past year, for China to try to fulfil that pledge at this juncture in time."

Rudd, who is now president of the Asia Society Policy Institute in New York, agreed, saying that the amount of additional exports that China pledged to buy "was huge prior to the coronavirus erupting across all of our countries' public health systems".

"I would be deeply sceptical, therefore, as to whether China will be in a position to deliver on that," he said. "And frankly, given the supply side problems in the United States, which are likely to unfold as a consequence of the virus, [I am also sceptical of] the extent to which American exporters could necessarily make that level of increase in what they sold to Chinese consumers."

"As for the phase-two deal, which was structural changes, with the US side demanding to the Chinese economy and the future role of state owned enterprises around the world and seeking to place them on the same competitive level playing field as other global players, I wouldn't hold your breath for phase-two negotiations beginning any time soon," Rudd said.

Rosen, meanwhile, suggested that Beijing may not have any choice but to veer away from the state-led economic approach that took hold under Xi, which has kept growth intact.

Harbour cranes lift containers from the loading area at Qingdao port. China's foreign trade dropped in March as the economy reeled from the coronavirus outbreak. Photo: AP alt=Harbour cranes lift containers from the loading area at Qingdao port. China's foreign trade dropped in March as the economy reeled from the coronavirus outbreak. Photo: AP

Instead of relying on government support for its state-owned enterprises, Rosen said, the Chinese government has few options except "reform and opening, and making a clear signal that the future for China is going to involve a very compatible globally market-friendly approach".

For its part, China has called for dialogue on the trade deal and the Covid-19 pandemic.

China's ambassador to Washington said in an April 3 interview that the two countries were still working to implement their trade deal despite the recent strains in their relationship prompted by the outbreak.

"As far as I know, we're still doing our part of the deal," Cui told the PBS show GZERO World in an interview broadcast on April 12.

"The global economic landscape has been drastically changed," Cui said. "So I just hope our two economic teams, if they can sit down together or just have a conference call, they can really make a good assessment of the changing realities and coordinate our response to that."

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This article originally appeared in the South China Morning Post (SCMP), the most authoritative voice reporting on China and Asia for more than a century. For more SCMP stories, please explore the SCMP app or visit the SCMP's Facebook and Twitter pages. Copyright  2020 South China Morning Post Publishers Ltd. All rights reserved.

Copyright (c) 2020. South China Morning Post Publishers Ltd. All rights reserved.
BOSTON, April 15, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- Creatio, a global software company providing a leading low-code platform for process management and CRM, today announced more partners have joined the initiative of helping organizations fight against COVID-19. Since end of March, Creatio has been offering companies that directly aid in efforts against the pandemic a 6-month subscription of Service Creatio, customer center edition for free. The company channel network has joined the campaign to provide their services and marketplace solutions with no charge to healthcare, governmental, volunteer, and other qualifying* organizations.

Together with partners Creatio is set to ensure seamless setup and launch of the system for the organizations directly assisting people and companies with measures against COVID-19. Here is the list of partners and solutions available for free as of now.

More partners are joining weekly so Creatio will be launching updates to this news regularly.

* Qualifying organizations include hospitals & other healthcare institutions, charitable or voluntary organizations, government agencies directly assisting people and companies with measures against COVID-19, and other organizations on the front line in the fight against pandemic.

About Creatio

Creatio (formerly bpm'online) is a global software company providing a leading low-code platform for process management and CRM.

The company has been highly recognized as a market leader by key industry analysts. Its intelligent products accelerate sales, marketing, service and operations for mid-size and large enterprises. Together with hundreds of partners Creatio operates in 110 countries worldwide.

For more information, please visit www.creatio.com

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The question everyone should be asking Premier Brian Pallister: why?

Hey there, time traveller!

This article was published 14/4/2020 (637 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The question everyone should be asking Premier Brian Pallister: why?

Why would he raise the prospect of laying off Manitoba civil servants at such a delicate stage of the economic lockdown prompted by the global COVID-19 pandemic?

The plan as outlined Tuesday is still vague. Pallister said he would negotiate with union leaders soon on what amounts to a variation on the federal Employment Insurance job-sharing program: two to three days of paid work and the remainder of the work week to be covered by EI. It amounts to an overall 25 per cent salary cut.

Historically, those who work in the public sector have not been allowed to access to job sharing.

A Manitoba official, who spoke on background, said Ottawa has already agreed to extend the program to all non-core public servants, covering Crown corporations, government business enterprises, school divisions (excluding teachers), and post-secondary institutions (excluding professors and instructors).

However, those who work directly for government  so-called core employees  are still excluded.

Pallister met with union leaders Tuesday to ask for help in lobbying Ottawa to further expand job sharing to include core civil servants. Lurking in the background was a clear threat of layoffs if the unions don't help out.

Whether the premier would resort to actual layoffs is hard to determine. Some employees of Crown corporations, including casino workers, have already been laid off. Would he cut deeper into the ranks of the civil service?

Such a strategy is rife with risk, both in terms of the premier's personal brand but also the economy in general.

There is no good option facing the Pallister government right now.

On the one hand, tens of thousands of Manitobans are facing economic ruination, with many unsure they will be able to afford even the most basic necessities (food, shelter). At the same time, government revenues are eroding at a record pace.

A background document, released Tuesday, estimated the province's monthly deficit could rise to more than $400 million. You read that correctly: monthly. At that pace, Manitoba could run a deficit in excess of $5 billion.

As is the case with most of the numbers cited by the Pallister government, those deficit numbers are pumped full of hyperbole  a worstcase scenario that would require the economic lockdown to continue for the remainder of the current fiscal year.

As is the case with most of the numbers cited by the Pallister government, those deficit numbers are pumped full of hyperbole  a worst-case scenario that would require the economic lockdown to continue for the remainder of the current fiscal year.

Even with the premier's tendency to exaggerate, it is true just as government is being asked to do more, it has less fiscal capacity. For a politician like Pallister, who values balanced budgets and tax cuts more than almost any other political goal, this has to be a painful experience.

Meanwhile, the Tory leader needs to tread carefully when it comes to something as potentially damaging as layoffs. The opportunity to transfer a huge portion of provincial labour costs to the federal government may be too tempting to resist, but it comes with peril.

The pandemic is a short-term challenge to government fiscal capacity, more akin to a natural disaster than a normal recession or depression that can hobble an economy for years. Although no one knows how long the lockdown is going to last, one can say with some degree of certainty it will end before the end of the 2020-21 fiscal year. With that will come a restoration of government revenues.

Government layoffs could make the bad situation even worse. Layoffs, furloughs or the job-sharing Pallister is pursuing will only swell the ranks of Manitobans unable to continue spending; less spending means less government tax revenue. Many of the benefits of a reduced payroll could be erased by a steeper decline in revenues.

MIKAELA MACKENZIE / FREE PRESS FILES Premier Brian Pallister met with union leaders Tuesday to ask for help in lobbying Ottawa to further expand job sharing to include core civil servants. Lurking in the background was a clear threat of layoffs if the unions don't help out.

For a province so dependant on federal transfer payments to make ends meet, passing on additional costs to Ottawa may turn out to be strategy that trades long-term trouble for some short-term relief.

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Pallister has repeatedly and steadfastly refused to connect the dots between his fiscal policies and the fate of the economy he oversees. Governments are huge employers and purchasers of goods and services. When governments tighten the belt, the entire economy feels the pinch.

Pallister's refusal to acknowledge that simple equation is largely behind his lacklustre response to the economic impacts of the pandemic. Manitoba is easily the least generous province in Canada when it comes to topping up federal income support benefits.

On Monday, the premier cemented his role as the resident Scrooge of the Council of the Federation when he held a news conference to announce his government was providing resources to help Manitobans apply for federal benefits. Seriously  an entire news conference to announce what amounts to a plan to buy pencils to fill out applications.

Underwhelming is the least offensive way of portraying the moment.

During every news conference, the premier likes to talk at length about how he believes Manitobans are the most generous, most compassionate people in Canada. It's time for him to start showing the same principles in the way he governs.

dan.lett@freepress.mb.ca
SAN FRANCISCO - School administrators across America are trying to re-imagine classrooms  and the prospect of reopening schools  in the era of social distancing.

Will there be staggered start times? Will students be asked to wear face coverings? Will class sizes be cut in half? What about school assemblies and sports and school buses and lunchtime?

With the majority of schools nationwide shut down, educators are scrambling to plan for the future after a chaotic few weeks that, for many districts, included closing all schools, deciding whether to waive assessment tests and whether and how to do distance learning. Next comes the important question of when schools can safely re-open.

California Gov. Gavin Newsom laid out a few possible scenarios this week for reopening the states public schools to 6 million students, saying the timeline was still unclear but when students do eventually return things will look radically different.

We need to get our kids back to school, Newsom said. And we need to do it in a safe way.

The biggest challenge for schools is how to continue physical distancing among children and adults to ensure that kids arent going to school, getting infected and then infecting grandma and grandpa, Newsom said.

That could mean requiring schools to stagger schedules, with some students arriving in the morning and the rest in the afternoon. Officials will be rethinking gym class, recess, school assemblies and all scenarios where students gather in large groups, he said. State officials, educators and unions will discuss those ideas and other possibilities for safe schooling in the coming weeks and months.

Robert Hull, president and chief executive of the National Association of State Boards of Education, said administrators across the country are asking not how, but if, schools will reopen in the fall, and planning for any number of scenarios.

Everything is being considered, he said, from masks and gloves to cutting class sizes and adding portable classrooms. Officials also are weighing the viruss impact on how school buildings and buses are cleaned, how to protect custodial staff, how food is prepared and how health care is delivered.

Everybody says we hope we return to normal, Hull said. Its not going to return to normal anytime soon because the new normal is going to be different.

For the moment, many districts are focused on trying to get through the school year while keeping an eye on what might happen in the fall.

Youre making battle plans, Hull said. Schools need to plan for a variety of possibilities: What if the virus is contained? What if the curve is flattened but there are still infections in the community? What if a new wave is starting? Schools need not just Plan A and Plan B, but it maybe Plan C and Plan D.

Newsom said he wont loosen Californias mandatory, stay-at-home order until hospitalizations, particularly those in intensive care units, flatten and start to decline. And he said the state needs more testing, treatment and the ability for businesses, schools and childcare facilities to continue the physical distancing that has come to dominate public life. He said he would revisit the question of easing restrictions in two weeks.

Similar conversations are taking place at state school boards across the country. The issue is on Idahos agenda Thursday, and several other states, including Arkansas and Mississippi, are starting to have the discussion, Hull said.

Issues of equity loom, including how to measure what students are learning and how to help those who have fallen behind. Many of the associations members are discussing what to do this summer and contemplating whether to extend the school year to offer summer learning, Hull said.

When students do return to school in Californias rural Mariposa County, they will likely have to follow the same check-in procedure that local government employees do now, county Health Officer Eric Sergienko said. Before coming in each day, government employees answer a series of screening questions in a smart phone app with a checklist of symptoms. If they answer yes to any questions they have to stay home, and then get a follow-up call from a health officer.

We would do the same thing for school, Sergienko said. If any (students) had symptoms, then we would exclude them from school.

Education funding cutbacks have already led to teacher shortages in California and made campus nurses rare, raising questions about how officials might cope with extended days and ensure kids are healthy, said Tony Wold, associate superintendent of the West Contra Costa Unified School District, which includes 55 schools.

We cant just build new schools overnight. Even if the state gives us more money, where will the teachers come from? said Wold, listing the ways schools are not built for social distancing. In his district near San Francisco, schools already stagger lunchtimes and put 8 to 10 kids at each table. Gym classes can have upwards of 50 students, and there are no empty, unused classrooms.

He said some schools will likely extend virtual learning into the fall or possibly figure out a rotation mixing online learning and classroom education.

Were trying to reinvent how to do our business in a way we never did it before, Wold said. This is probably the most Herculean challenge I have ever seen in public education.

___

Thompson contributed to this report from Buffalo, New York. Associated Press writer Don Thompson in Sacramento, California, also contributed.
ROCHESTER, N.Y., April 15, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- Heritage Christian Services has launched a COVID-19 hotline for employees and those who use its services to report symptoms and get help. An automated platform allows hotline staff to quickly log responses to a battery of questions, based on CDC guidelines. It enables reporting and contact tracing to identify and notify others who may have come into contact with the individual.

The automated system replaces a cumbersome manual, paper-based process and allows Heritage Christian Services to support more people more quickly. It frees up valuable resources so that staff can attend to the important work of meeting the needs of those they serve. It was developed through a partnership with Rochester-based LincWare, a developer of automated documentation solutions.

"We're so grateful to have had this opportunity to work with LincWare on this crucial project," said Marisa Geitner, president and CEO of Heritage Christian Services. "The system streamlines our processes and enables us to give back to our community by offering up key data that ultimately can help stop the spread of the coronavirus."

Heritage Christian Services, as one of the region's larger employers with just over 3,000 employees, provides a broad and deep portfolio of services to people throughout western New York. As COVID-19 began to spread, it quickly became clear that a better method was needed to efficiently assess the health of its own employees as well as the individuals it serves. "We realized quickly the impact we could have on slowing the spread if we could be an efficient, effective resource not only to those who choose our services but to our employees and their families as well," said Geitner. Given the size of that population, organizing and tracking something as fast-moving as COVID-19 was quite a task. Heritage Christian Services had worked with LincWare on a previous project and reached out to them for help. Within a few days, their collaborative effort produced a system that provided an automated form of detailed questions for hotline personnel to gather critical information from callers.

The platform organizes questions in a way that pinpoints where the individual works or which services they receive. The hotline staff moves through a detailed list of questions and prompts, designed to quickly conduct a health assessment, based on CDC guidelines. The data collected in the system enables Heritage Christian to reach beyond the person with COVID-19 symptoms to those people they have had contact with, both within and outside the Heritage Christian base. This added reporting capability has enabled Heritage Christian to easily share data with the local health departments across their service region and state oversight agencies seeking accurate information.

"COVID-19 requires an all-hands-on-deck effort to stem its spread, and we are honored to have had a role in Heritage Christian Services' program to reach out to the community," said Darren Mathis, CEO of LincWare. "These are unprecedented times, and it is critical for technology providers to partner with healthcare providers to help stem the spread of the coronavirus and keep everyone in our communities safer."

About Heritage Christian Services:

Heritage Christian Services partners with thousands of people throughout Rochester and to ensure that everyone feels valued and respected. Most of the agency's 3,000 employees work to support people so they can find the best place to live, work and build strong community connections through residential, day, respite, self-direction and employment supports. For more information, visit www.HeritageChristianServices.org.

About LincWare:

LincWare is the developer of a product suite of smart automation solutions, including Admit+, a Resident/Patient admissions paperwork automation tool; EOS, an employee onboarding solution; and LincDoc, an eForms application that simplifies paper-based processes where compliance and efficiency are critical. Their focus is to make processes more efficient to free up valuable employee time to focus on more important work. Founded in 2007 by Darren Mathis, chief executive officer, and Eric Lenio, chief technology officer, LincWare is a privately owned company with offices in East Rochester, New York. For more information, visit www.lincware.com or [email protected].

Contact information: Darren Mathis - [email protected]

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Salman Khan has been living at his farmhouse in Panvel with some of his family members during the lockdown period. His sister Arpita, her husband Aayush Sharma and their kids are with him, too.

Aayush has spoken in an interview about the experience of living at the famhouse. The actor said that it is like living on a safari with wild animals around.

"There are many animals here, cows, goats, ducks and there's a lot of wildlife. In fact, we found a king cobra in the gym. Two days ago there was even a leopard spotted nearby. We feel like we're living in a safari," Aayush told ETimes.

Salman had earlier spoken about having to live out their lockdown period in Panvel, unable to return to Mumbai. Aayush said that they went by chance to the farm for a weekend and now they have been stuck there for a month.

The Loveyatri actor is enjoying his time amid nature with his kids. He and Arpita welcomed a daughter, their second child, in December 2019.

"She's still rather young but she's started to react to people and associating to people. Luckily I have a lot of time to spend with my family owing to the quarantine. We take her out for strolls and she gets very fascinated by nature around. I'm just trying to fulfill my fatherly duties," he said.

A few days back, Salman had shared videos of him riding a horse at his farmhouse.

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Mr Roland Affail Monney, President of the Ghana Journalists Association (GJA) has hinted of plans by media groupings to form a Strategic Media Communication Team to deepen awareness creation on the COVID-19 pandemic.



The strategy is to weed out rumours and fake news hampering the fight against the spread of the virus.



Mr Monney said this at a press conference organised by the Ministry of Information for stakeholders on updates of the national situation and response to COVID-19 in the country.



He believed harnessing the synergies and resources of the Private Newspapers Publishers Association of Ghana (PRINPAG), GJA and the Ghana Independent Broadcasters Association (GIBA) would help stop fake news and the spread of rumours with focus on facts from legitimate sources.



Mr Monney appealed to the media to capture the national mood and carry the people along through radio, television and other media programmes.



Make use of your prime time allotments and front pages to aggressively pursue change of attitudes and communicate the science of the virus and how it is acquired.



Let us re-engineer our programmes to bring relevance and raise the stakes in combating the virus, he said.



Mr Monney said the collaboration among stakeholders would address the issues in a coordinated manner and bring clarity to the vexed issues.



Mr Kojo Oppong Nkrumah, Minister of Information said the Ministry with support from other stakeholders had trained journalists on crisis reporting and working to extend the training to regions yet to have their turn.



He urged media programme producers and editors to get scientists, virologists and epidemiologists to speak to the science and facts about the pandemic and stop empanelling political activists.



The Minister said educative materials were being produced into various local languages with the Information vans and local radio stations mainstreaming issues.



Mr Oppong Nkrumah said traditional authorities were main stakeholders and said government was counting on their cooperation to reach out to people in the communities.

Source: GNA









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The Pune police on Sunday night arrested two persons posing as Pune Municipal Corporation (PMC) staff and in possession of 219 grammes of marijuana, worth Rs 2,100.

The two have been identified as Hrushi Ravindra More, 20, and Sagar Chandrakant Surve, 25, both residents of Parvati.

One of the accused wore a khaki uniform with the PMC logo, while the other wore an apron generally used by conservancy staff of the civic body, police said.

The police officials at a check post in Khadakwasla found the two walking with a plastic bag at 6:30pm and stopped the duo.

The police arrested them and during the inquiry, the duo admitted that they procured the uniform of a civic administration employee who had passed away a few months ago.

They also made alterations to the attire and used it to procure marijuana during the lockdown.

A case under Sections 8, 20(b), (pp) of Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances (NDPS) Act, 1985 and Section 188 of Indian Penal Code has been filed at Haveli police station against the two.
WASHINGTON - In mid-March, a National Security Council team rushed to fix what they saw as a threat to the U.S. government's ability to function amid the advancing pandemic: a lack of masks to protect enough staff on the White House complex.

Alarmed by the small cache and the growing signs of an acute shortage of protective gear in the United States, a senior NSC official turned to a foreign government for help, according to people familiar with the situation.

The outreach resulted in a donation of hundreds of thousands of surgical masks from Taiwan, which had plentiful domestic production and had sharply curtailed the spread of the coronavirus on the island.

While the bulk of Taiwan's goodwill shipment went to the Strategic National Stockpile, 3,600 were set aside for White House staff and officials, administration officials said.

"While the administration had detailed pandemic response plans, somehow those did not include maintaining a supply of masks for White House personnel," said an administration official who, like others, spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe internal discussions. "That was a lesson learned. We did look at buying some, but couldn't find available supply."

A White House spokesman disputed the notion that the complex did not have a sufficient supply of masks, but declined to say how many were on hand or why the NSC turned to a foreign government for a donation.

The urgent appeal to Taiwan on March 14 highlights a stark conflict between the Trump administration's stance then on the use of masks and the race behind the scenes to obtain them for key White House personnel. At the time, the U.S. government was discouraging the public from wearing masks, saying that healthy people didn't need them and that the gear should be saved for front-line medical workers most at risk of infection.

Because of that guidance from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the White House was not issuing masks to its staff, according to two officials. But inside the NSC, a top deputy was convinced that face coverings should be used more broadly to protect both his team and the public at large.

The resulting arrangement he struck with Taipei made thousands of masks available for White House staff use two weeks before the administration reversed policy and advised that citizens should broadly begin wearing cloth face coverings in public.

The episode reveals how some top White House officials were pushing for a wider embrace of masks early on to help slow the infection's spread.

President Donald Trump resisted endorsing such guidance, the subject of sharp debate between his advisers and government health experts, and even after doing so, declared that he would not personally wear one.

But some NSC aides believed masks should be widely available to help contain the outbreak. They discovered in early March there were not enough on stock for all personnel on the White House complex, according to an administration official.

The White House Military Office, which oversees the medical unit, is responsible for girding the White House for a crisis, including supplying necessary protective equipment and ensuring the continuity of government operations.

The White House said the office had sufficient supplies to protect the president, the first family and essential personnel.

"While we would never discuss the specifics about safety and security measures at the White House, the Medical Unit and Military Office have the needed supplies to execute on long-standing continuity of government plans that essential personnel are protected by and briefed on as soon as they arrive - and quite frankly, it's ignorant, naive or intentionally dishonest for anyone to suggest otherwise," spokesman Hogan Gidley said in a statement.

The White House has enough masks for all senior personnel who are deemed essential to continue operating the government, a small subset of the staff, said another administration official said, who noted that roughly three-quarters of White House staff are now teleworking due to the crisis.

At the time the NSC secured masks from Taiwan, "it was not CDC guidance for all staff to have them, so in the same way you couldn't request a test if you were asymptomatic and had no cause for concern, we weren't giving masks from our stockpiles at that time," the official said.

If wearing masks became mandatory, "we would have enough for staff still in the building to protect them," the official said, and could obtain more from a federal agency stockpile.

When Taiwan later announced its mask donation, it did not mention that a portion were going to White House staff. A joint statement between the two countries said they would collaborate on "exchanges of medical supplies and equipment."

The deal was sensitive in Taiwan, which had banned commercial exports of masks to protect supply for its citizens. China, which claims the island as part of its territory, called the transfer of masks to the United States during a pandemic "despicable behavior" and said it was provoking a "confrontation with the Motherland."

A spokesman for the Taiwanese government declined to discuss private diplomatic discussions with the U.S. government, but pointed to public statements about its shipments of medical supplies to the United States.

After its initial shipment of masks for the U.S. government, Taiwan late last month announced it was donating 10 million masks to foreign countries to help combat the pandemic. It is now expected to send 3.5 million to the United States, earmarked for emergency medical workers.

The search at the White House for more protective masks came amid a blizzard of conflicting messages and division within the administration about the best ways to stem the spread of the virus and the deadly covid-19 disease it causes.

"It's going to disappear," Trump said on Feb. 27. "One day, it's like a miracle, it will disappear."

From January until April 3, the White House task force, the CDC and the U.S. surgeon general were all telling the American public that healthy people should not use masks or face coverings to protect themselves from coronavirus.

Surgeon General Jerome Adams stressed most Americans faced low risk of infection, but warned that mask wearers could heighten their risk because they were more likely to touch their faces as they adjusted their masks. He urged the public to save the supply for medical workers on the front lines.

"Seriously people- STOP BUYING MASKS!" Adams tweeted on Feb. 29, as stores across the country sold out. "They are NOT effective in preventing general public from catching #Coronavirus."

But inside the White House, another team had become convinced that a broader user of masks could help reduce infection and save American lives, as well as ensure the White House functioned without widespread illness, according to people familiar with the situation.

Since January, deputy national security adviser Matt Pottinger had been monitoring the coronavirus outbreak in Asia, aides said, and was warning White House leaders that he believed it posed a grave threat to the United States.

Pottinger, a former Wall Street Journal reporter who had covered the SARS epidemic in Asia, had been in regular talks with his Asian contacts about their strategies for limiting the spread of infection and focused on a striking correlation.

A handful of places that had kept infection rates miraculously low - specifically Hong Kong and Taiwan - also had citizens who broadly wore face coverings and masks in public from the earliest signs of the virus in their communities. Despite having high density populations, and being near the epicenter of the Wuhan outbreak in China, both had managed to control the outbreak.

As of Tuesday, Taiwan had 393 people infected and six die; while Hong Kong recorded 1,013 cases and four deaths. By contrast, Australia, a country similar to Taiwan in its population that has significant trade links to China, has more than 6,000 cases.

Pottinger, who began wearing a basic surgical mask before his senior peers, was in search with members of his team of both a reliable supply of face coverings for the nation and for NSC staff and other White House personnel, according to people familiar with the situation.

While health-care experts have emphasized the need for front-line medical workers to have N95 respirators, which filter at least 95% of airborne particles, widespread use of simple cloth masks in parts of Asia cut transmission there.

NSC leaders were concerned about keeping essential White House personnel safe, including those on the council and in the Situation Room, who couldn't work remotely but had to continue to work in proximity on secure systems.

And there was a growing worry about a mask crunch in the United States amid reports that the Strategic National Stockpile had not significantly replenished since the 2009 H1N1 outbreak and widespread accounts of supplies running out for emergency medical workers.

"Matt certainly has a lot of expertise in Asia, and lived there during the SARS epidemic, so I think his personal experience was informing his policy recommendations and response," said Randall Schriver, who left the Trump administration in December as the top Asia policy expert at the Pentagon.

NSC staff first consulted with the medical unit, a team of about two dozen that acts as a clinic and treats the president, vice president and White House staff, officials said.

"We were told that the medical staff had a good supply of masks, but that, like any other medical unit in the coronavirus response, they could always use more," an NSC official said.

White House aides then turned to the private market for masks and encountered a dearth of immediately available supplies, according to an administration official.

Pottinger hit on another idea: He had learned that Taiwan, an island of 24 million, had a robust domestic supply chain for cloth masks and the capacity to manufacture billions.

During a call on March 14 with an official in the Taiwanese government, he asked if the country would be willing to provide the U.S. government with some of its supply. Days later, Taiwan formally agreed to a government-to-government shipment of 500,000 masks, according to people familiar with the arrangement. The island donated surgical masks, not N95 respirators.

NSC officials decided to earmark a small portion for the White House, while the rest went to the national stockpile according to the people familiar with the situation.

At the time, Taiwan had a ban on the commercial export of masks to meet the needs of its own citizens, which were only allowed to buy a limited number a week.

The shipment of masks between the United States and Taiwan sidestepped this ban because it was a government-to-government arrangement, rather than a foreign purchase from a Taiwanese manufacturer, according to people familiar with the deal.

Around March 24, 500,000 masks arrived in the United States from Taiwan, including the shipment of 3,600 for the White House, they said.

The NSC kept half for its staff and gave the remaining 1,800 to the White House medical unit to issue to other personnel on the White House complex.

The handling of the goodwill shipment to the U.S. government concerned some U.S. officials involved in the arrangements, who were disturbed that a subset of masks went directly to the White House at a time when doctors and nurses were crafting homemade gear and U.S. policy stated that civilians shouldn't wear masks, according to a person familiar with the discussions.

White House officials noted that the vast majority of the masks from Taiwan were prioritized for medical staff and front-line responders and sent to the Strategic National Stockpile.

Taiwan's contributions to the United States also rankled China. Its Taiwan Affairs Office sharply criticized the island's announcement on March 18 that it would send hundreds of thousands of masks to the United States, calling it tantamount to "kidnapping the health and well-being of the people of Taiwan."

Taiwan's Foreign Minister Joseph Wu dismissed China's criticisms, saying his duty is to promote friendly relations with other countries, not to "flatter China."

On April 3, the CDC reversed its guidance to the public on wearing masks - three weeks after the NSC made its emergency plea to Taiwan. In doing so, the agency noted that people should use simple cloth masks, not N95 masks or surgical masks, which should be reserved for medical workers.

The reversal came as prominent infectious disease experts began arguing that wearing face coverings could help prevent the spread of the coronavirus, and amid increasing medical evidence that people without any symptoms of infection were transmitting the virus to others.

Trump was not enthusiastic about the move, which he and senior advisers feared could cause a panic, but agreed to it after briefings.

In announcing the decision, the president added that he would not likely cover his face in public.

"You don't have to do it," he said. "They suggested for a period of time. This is voluntary. I don't think I am going to be doing it."
BAKU, Azerbaijan, Apr.15

By Nargiz Sadikhova - Trend:

Farmers of Kazakhstans Turkestan region will export 250,000 tons of cabbage to Russia, Trend reports with reference to Kazakhstans Ministry of Agriculture.

This year, the area of cabbage sowing in Kazakhstans Turkestan region amounted to 8,000 ha and 300,000 tons of crops are expected this spring. In this regard, the regions farmers expressed worries about the storage and sale of the product amid the emergency state in the country.

To address their concern, executive authorities of all Kazakh regions expressed readiness to purchase a total of 50,000 tons of cabbage. Additionally, the ministry started issuing phytosanitary certificates necessary to export goods. Thus, Turkestan regions farmers will be able to export the remaining 250,000 tons of cabbage to Russia.

The ministry said that currently, 14 farmers of Shymkent city and Turkestan regions received 204 phytosanitary certificates on almost 4,000 tons of cabbage.

On Apr. 15 Kazakhstans Agriculture Ministry lifted restrictions on the export of onions, cabbage and carrots.

Earlier this year, the ministry introduced restrictions on the export of some agricultural goods in the form of complete prohibition or export on quotas (quantitative restrictions). Thus, the export of onions was prohibited completely, whereas the export of cabbage and carrots was allowed on quotas.

The corresponding decree enters into force since the day of its registration (Apr. 15) and is relevant till Sept. 1, 2020.

---

Follow the author on twitter: @nargiz_sadikh
BRUNSWICK -- The Rensselaer County Sheriffs Office is investigating a two-car crash that killed one of the drivers at the intersection of North Lake Avenue and Frear Park Road in the town of Brunswick Tuesday.

Deputies said a vehicle pulling out from Frear Park Road, heading east, collided with a vehicle traveling south on North Lake Avenue.
A 69-year-old doctor, who was the Director of Bethany Hospital in Meghalaya's Shillong, died on Wednesday (April 15) after testing positive for coronavirus COVID-19. It is to be noted that Dr John Sailo was the first COVID-19 patient in the state. Six family members of Dr Sailo, who were in contact with him, have also tested positive for the deadly virus.

It is learnt that Dr Sailo had comorbodities. He did his MBBS from AMC Dibrugarh and came to AIIMS to complete his MD in Medicine. Dr Sailo is survived by two daughters (both are doctors - one is Radiologist), two sons and his wife Achula.

Meghalaya Chief Minister Conrad Sangma has expressed sadness over Dr Sailo's death. "My heartfelt condolences to his family and loved ones. May his soul rest in peace," he tweeted.

I am deeply saddened to inform that the first #COVID19 positive patient in Meghalaya passed away this morning at 2:45 am. My heartfelt condolences to his family and loved ones. May his soul rest in peace.  Conrad Sangma (@SangmaConrad) April 15, 2020

Sources said that the deceased doctor had no travel history and he might have contracted the virus through a "silent carrier". A massive search was launched by Meghalaya government to trace the spreader but in vain. Over 2,000 people, who were in contact with Dr Sailo, have been identified.

The total number of coronavirus cases in India reached 11,439 on Wednesday and the death toll has climbed to 377 deaths. The total count includes 1,305 recoveries and 9,756 active cases. 1076 new cases and 38 deaths reported in last 24 hours, according to Union Ministry of Health data.

Meanwhile, Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Tuesday (April 14) extended the nationwide lockdown till May 3 to curb the spread of coronavirus COVID-19 spread in India.

Union Ministry of Home Affairs on Wednesday issued guidelines for the second phase of the lockdown to curb the spread of coronavirus COVID-19, stating that wearing of face mask is now compulsory in all public places and workplaces.
For the first time in West



Bengal, a police constable has tested positive for Covid-19, a state health department source said on Wednesday.

The Kolkata Police constable has been suffering from kidney ailments for quite some time and was on sick leave.

The man, who is in his early 50s, is currently admitted to the special isolation ward of the state-run MR Bangur Hospital, the source said.

Posted at a police station in the North Division of the Kolkata Police, he had been taken to a government hospital for his kidney ailments.

"As he had mild symptoms of coronavirus infection, doctors did not take any chance. His swabs were tested and the results came positive. He was then shifted to the MR Bangur Hospital," the source said.

"The policeman's family members were kept under home quarantine. Swab tests will be conducted on them," he said.

West Bengal till Wednesday has reported seven deaths while 164 people have been infected by coronavirus so far.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Acting on Prime Minister Narendra



Modi's "Saptapadi" (seven steps) advisory, the Assam police on Wednesday promised to provide assistance to senior citizens in procuring medicines and delivering it at their doorsteps in police vehicles, besides taking them out of homes in case of emergency.

Police personnel in every districts have been told to reach out to the elderly population in distress during lockdown necessitated by coronavirus, state's Director General of Police Bhaskar Jyoti Mahanta said.

A helpline number will be given to the public for assisting aged citizens facing problems while staying indoor during the shutdownn, he told reporters here.

Taking care of elders formed an important component of the PM's "Saptapadi" in his televised address to the nation on Tuesday for which he sought support of the people. The PM in his address had announced extending nationwide lockdown till May 3 to check spread of the virus infection.

"Police in every districts, particularly in Guwahati, will procure the senior citizens' medicines and deliver it at their homes in our vehicles. Any elderly person facing difficulty and needing to go anywhere for emergency purposes will be taken by the police during the lockdown", Mahanta said.

Stating that police will strictly enforce Prime Minister's directions for firmly maintaining the lockdown curbs, he said, "I request the public not to move out in their private vehicles during this period".

The police will permit only those essential services vehicles which have valid authorisation documents like identity cards, authorisation letter/slip, passes by Assam State Disaster Management Authority, he said.

"We have noticed that people with fake documents roam around in their private vehicles for personal work. Police will now be strict in not allowing vehicles movement without valid authorisation documents", he added.

Police will take stringent steps against establishments and services exempted from the lockdown restrictions if they fail to observe social distancing, the DGP added.

He said they have written to the Transport department to start a limited taxi service for convenience of public to move out in case of emergency without using their own vehicles.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Bharat Forge has decided to further extend the suspension of its operations at all the offices and manufacturing locations in India till the further notice in this regard.

This action is in line with the announcement made by the Hon'ble Prime Minister of India regarding further extension of lockdown period.

The duration of the shutdown will depend upon directives to be further issued by the Government authorities in this regard. The Company will continue to closely monitor the situation and take appropriate action as per regulatory guidance.

Powered by Capital Market - Live News

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Maharashtra Chief Minister Uddhav



Thackeray on Wednesday said that ensuring recovery of COVID-19 patients and preventing fatalities were the challenges being faced by his government as well as the medical fraternity.

In his interaction with CEOs of privatehospital in Mumbai, along with members of the newly-set up task force of medical professionals through video conferencing, Thackeray underlined the need to put in place a robust patient management system.

The deliberations focused on issues like the patient care; need for medical equipment; availability of ICU beds, and ensuring protection of medical personnel treating coronavirus positive patients.

The CM further said that the focus should be on prevention of deaths of COVID-19 patients and saving those patients who are in a serious condition.

In a worrying tend, Maharashtra on Wednesday reported 232 fresh COVID-19 cases, taking the total number of the virus infected patients in the state to 2916, a Health official said, adding that nine more people have succumbed to the infection, taking the death toll so far to 187.

Underlining the concerns of the state government, a senior officer had said that though Maharashtra stands at the fourth position in the country vis-a-vis the COVID-19 mortality rate at 7.34 per cent, the state is way ahead both in terms of the number of positive cases and fatalities.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
This article, MIT's new face-shield design could help hospitals with PPE shortages, originally appeared on CNET.com.

A team of engineers, doctors and scientists from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has developed a new technique to address one area of the shortage of personal protective equipment, or PPE, in the US.
The history of cannabis on the planet earth is a simple one, really. It all starts with the cultivation of a medicinal herb whose healing properties regaled the ancients.

Ancient Days

Although precise histories differ, cannabis cultivation is generally believed to have begun in Asia thousands of years ago. There is evidence, for example that the people in China began cultivating cannabis between the years 8,000 and 6,000 BC.

Cannabis: Evolution and Ethnobotany, by Robert. C. Clarke and Mark D. Merlin, and published in 2013, documents the cultivation of cannabis during a period in human history when civilization was at its very beginning. In the preface to the book, one of the authors notes, The culturally valuable and often irreplaceable goods derived from cannabis deeply influenced the commercial, medical, ritual, and religious practices of cultures throughout the ages, and human desire for these commodities directed the evolution of the plant toward its contemporary varieties. In ancient China, cannabis was a part of daily life.

Besides being an early adopter of cannabis, ancient Chinese culture had many proponents of the herb, including the emperor Shennong, a semi-mythological figure who is credited by some as the man who invented agricultural tools like the plough. Shennong is also credited for developing irrigation techniques, learning the importance of preserving certain seeds and creating the first farmers markets to sell fresh produce. The emperors medical text lists cannabis as one of the 365 medicines that was most valuable to health and according to at least one modern website, the emperor claimed cannabis to be harmless and said that, if taken in the right dose over a prolonged period of time, it would allow the communication with spirits.

According to modern authorities on the subject, His affection for the plant and the invention of agriculture strongly suggest this period in time to be the one during which cannabis was first purposefully cultivated by humansat least that was the recent determination made by the modern cannabis mavens at straininsider.com.

Spreading the Love

By the time the year 2,000 BC rolled around, the use of cannabis spread out of central Asia and into places like Japan, the Middle East and the Indian Subcontinent. Nomadic tribes and a flourishing trade route into and out of central China are generally credited with the herbs spread.

Chief among those cultural groups who helped the spread of cannabis culitvation and use during that formative age were a group of nomadic warriors known as the Scythians.

According to the Greek historian Herodotus, the Scythians lived in wagons; the men among the group were formidable horsemen as well, according to the famous Greek historian who also wrote a major treatise on the Peloponisian War and traced the development of Scythian culture more than 500 years after the tribe began spreading through the ancient world.

Besides the cultural aspects Herodotus wrote about, it seems cannabis use was also a part of daily Scythian life. The combination of all these cultural traits led to a very diffuse presence of the Scythians throughout the ancient world. Its no wonder that cannabis cultivation and use spread with them.

One of the most facsinating aspects of ancient Scythian Culture was their use of cannabis in religious rites. The ancient Greek historian mentioned above also reported that the Scythians would take hemp seeds and creep under the cloths and put the seeds on the red hot stones; but this being put on smokes, and produces such a steam, that no Grecian vapour-bath would surpass it. The Scythians, transported by the vapour, shout aloud.

Romans

By the beginning of the common era, during the reign of Augustus, the Roman world was awash in cannabis due to the influence and import of the Scythians.

In about 50 AD, a Roman botanist and physician named Dioscorides wrote about the physical properties of hemp; he also was interested in the plant and its seeds as a medicine to treat hypersexual desire and physical afflictions like worm infestation.

On a more positive note, Galen, the great Roman writer and physician, also studied the plant that had come west to Europe with the barbarian hordes nearly 1000 years before. Galen described the powers of the flowers that come from cannabis as he observed their use at social gathering in the Empire, noting that they were often shared around social gatherings to help induce enjoyment and laughter.

The famous Roman poet Ovid was also down with the flower of the plant, and even wrote a poetic about a man turned sea-god named Glaucus who ate a cannabis-like plant that induced joy and euphoria.

Get Medieval

As cannabis cultivation and use spread throught the Middle East and Medditerranean areas of the globe, it was just a matter of time before the herb began to see growth in Central Europe.

After the Roman Empire fellthe barbarians, againcannabis use was spread by tribes who brought the herb to Germany. From there, cannabis traveled to the British Isles courtesy of the Angles and the Saxons, yet another of the many nomadic, marijuana-using peoples that came to dominate the culture after Roman influence began to fade in the West in about 500 AD.

Reports indicate that the Vikings also became part of the wider European culture that indulged in cannabis for various reasons from medical to recreational.

Cannabis researcher Barney Warf, a professor of Geography at the University of Kansas wrote that: For the most part, it was widely used for medicine and spiritual purposes during pre-modern times. For example, the Vikings and medieval Germans used cannabis for relieving pain during childbirth and for toothaches.

Northern Africa

Between 700 or 800 AD, cannabis was introduced to Northern Africa and became a cultural phenomena in that part of the world before pushing North into Spain. While the seeds of the herb eventually came to be cultivated continent-wide, particularly in Nigeria and the Congo, it was in the North where its influence had the most impact.

Although the Koran does not speak specifically about cannabis use, many devoted practitioners of Islam consider the plant to be haraam, or forbidden. The thing is, many of the cultures where Islam took rootparticularly in in North Africa, have roots that precede Islam.

In Morocco for example, the Berbers have long been known as cannabis cultivators; cannabis was probably introduced to their culture during the Arab invasions of the 7th century AD.

After that series of invasions from the Middle Eastand despite religious differencescannabis cultivation became a big deal in Northern Africa. Nearly 1000 years later, in the 19th century, the king of Morocco reiterated the herbs cultural importance when he decreed it was the right of certain tribes to cultivate and use the plant.

Europe and Beyond

While many humans in Asia, Africa, the Middle East and ultimately, the Americas, began to use cannabis for its medical and recreational properties, it seems that, as the plant spread around the world, its use in Central Europe was focused on the strength and durability of the fiber that comes from the hemp plant.

After the end of Islamic rule in Spain, but probably because of the huge influence that the culture had on the Spanish, cannabis cultivation in Spain really took off. In this area of the world both the medicinal and the structural properties of the plant were important to its popularity on the Iberian peninsula.

In the 16th century, Spanish settlers flooded North and South America. One of the most important crops they brought with them was industrial hemp. The settlers started cultivating hemp and cannabis in Chile in about 1545.

The practice of growing cannabis as hemp spread to Spains main competitor, England, during the same time period. For the English, hemp provided a strong and sturdy resource. At the proceedings of the Virginia Assembly in 1619, a new law required all planter to sow the plant for pleasure and for profit.

Interestingly, as cannabis cultivation and use continued to grow, attempts began to be made to prohibit the use of a plant that began its journey alongside the humans as a ritual partner and medicinal wonder.

After France invaded Egypt in the early part of the 19th century, Napoleon had to ban the use of cannabis among his troops who were occupying the ancient, albeit now Muslim kingdom.

Alcohol it seems, was already prohibited in Egypt; it follows the laws of Islam, after all. But because his soliders couldnt get any culturally familiar intoxicant to help them through their soldierly duties, many turned to hashish for relief.

For some reason, this change of habits outraged the French emperor, who then quickly moved to staunch the new habits, writing a law which, in part, read, Throughout Egypt the use of a beverage prepared by certain Moslems from hemp (hashish), as well as the smoking of the seeds of hemp, is prohibited. Habitual smokers and drinkers of this plant lose their reason and suffer from violent delirium in which they are liable to commit excesses of all kinds. ... The preparation of hashish as a beverage is prohibited throughout Egypt. The doors of those cafes and restaurants where it is supplied are to be walled up, and their proprietors imprisoned for three months.

And that, as they say, is where the worm turned. After that simple act, much of Europe and later America, began to change the way they viewed cannabis. What was once a loyal helper and friend became a possible danger to all.

But thats a story for another time. That will happen in the next part of this series when Weekly Alibis Cannabis Manual takes a historical look at cannabis in the 20th century.
Many tech companies believe that apps can help us fight the coronavirus. The main form of apps that companies think can help us fight coronavirus are surveillance apps.

Such applications have the potential to track and contain the spread of COVID-19. The process is known as contact tracing, reports Reuters. That process is used to control the spread of infectious diseases.

Google & Apple announced a collaboration on an app to fight coronavirus

Now, many of you know that Google and Apple actually announced a huge collaboration last week. The two companies are collaborating on apps that can identify people who have crossed paths with a contagious patient. Once that happens, such an app would alert the user.

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This collaboration between two mobile giants, and competitors, managed to surprise quite a few people. It is also a testament to how serious the situation is. It remains to be seen what will come out of this collaboration.

How do such apps work, though? Well, they keep track of the users location via cell-tower signals, Wi-Fi signals, and the satellite-based global positioning system (GPS).

Smartphones, and apps that are installed on them, can also utilize Bluetooth connectivity if necessary. Bluetooth is only useful for nearby devices, though.

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Apps can help with social distancing

Such apps can also help with social distancing in general. They can notice when people are not in their homes, or when theyre gathering in large numbers. This can be used on people who are ordered to stay inside, or who are infected.

There are more uses for such apps. If an app detects that youve been in contact with someone who ended up being positive to coronavirus, it can ping you to get tested yourself, and to begin self-isolating completely.

Were mostly speaking in theory, at this point, as not many such apps are available. Singapore actually released a contact tracing app that utilizes Bluetooth not long ago. The app is called TraceTogether, and weve talked about it in March.

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Singapore has been quite proactive when it comes to coronavirus, and it paid off thus far. Israel, on the other hand, has also rolled out a similar app called TheShield. India followed afterward with its own iteration.

South Korea is using mobile phone location tracing as we speak. Taiwan uses it for quarantine enforcement, and it is working on an app as well. And so on. Many companies are currently working on such systems.

If Google and Apple develop one such solution together, it could have a huge impact. Those two companies basically own the smartphone market, when smartphone OS are concerned. The vast majority of smartphones ship with Android or iOS, and those two OS are developed by these two companies.

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People will still need to download the app these two companies end up releasing, in order to have any use of it. This solution will not be built into Android and iOS directly.

Apps can help us fight coronavirus, but what about privacy?

Now, some of you may wonder, but what about privacy? Privacy is always an issue, and its quite a sensitive topic. People are already feeling like theyre being watched thanks to technology, and such apps and tech certainly wont help with that.

Pretty much everyone agreed that such tracking logs should be deleted after one month, so, in theory, that should not be an issue. There are a number of such safety rules in place, though it all depends on the country and the situation.

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What should ease your fear of governments invading your privacy is the fact that no country issued mandatory installs for an app. The company that you work for may require you to do so, though, at some point. As we said, it all depends on the situation and where you live in. The bottom line is, apps can help us fight coronavirus, but privacy may be an issue.
America and Europe could be hit by up to four waves of coronavirus if it is allowed to ravage Africa, a WHO expert has warned.

Director of the World Health Organisations's Center on Public Health and Human Rights, Professor Lawrence Gostin warned that if Covid-19 gets 'out of control' in African countries, Europe and the US could see second, third and even fourth waves of the illness.

Speaking on BBC Radio 4's Today programme on Wednesday, Professor Gostin said: 'Covid-19 is about to march through sub-Saharan Africa and perhaps the Indian subcontinent like an avalanche.

Director of the World Health Organisations's Center on Public Health and Human Rights, Professor Lawrence Gostin warned that if Covid-19 gets 'out of control' in African countries, Europe and the US could see second, third and even fourth waves of the illness

Young homeless men who once were street children or Talibe get their temperatures measured in a quarantined area at a refuge for newly arrived street children outside Dakar

'Even if the United States and Europe were to get their Covid epidemics under control, if you've got Covid rages in other parts of the world, in this interconnected society we live in, it will come back to Europe and the United States.

'And in fact I could predict that if it gets out of control in these lower income countries that we will see in the US and Europe a second, and a third wave, and even a fourth wave of Covid.

'So we're truly only as safe as the weakest link in the global chain.'

Commenting on Donald Trump's decision to freeze funding to the WHO, the professor predicted the move could have a 'devastating impact globally'.

Technicians from the Angolan Ministry of Health screen passengers arriving from Lisbon for possible coronavirus infection, at the Quatro de Fevereiro International Airport in Luanda

'It's deeply concerning and dismaying that in the middle of a once-in-a-century pandemic, with tens of thousands of people dying across the world, to actually withdraw funding, or at least limit funding, to the World Health Organisation,' he said.

Trump made the drastic decision to suspend funding to the WHO while an investigation into its handling of the pandemic is carried out.

Trump singled out what he called the WHO's 'dangerous and costly decision' to argue against international travel bans to combat the pandemic.

Trump made the drastic decision to suspend funding to the WHO while an investigation into its handling of the pandemic is carried out

While praising his own decision to limit travel to and from China on January 31 - a month after the first cases of the disease were reported - Trump added: 'Other nations and regions who followed WHO guidelines and kept their borders open to China, accelerated the pandemic all around the world.

'The decision of other major countries to keep travel open was one of the great tragedies and missed opportunities from the early days. The WHO's attack on travel restrictions put political correctness above lifesaving measures.'

The US is the largest single contributor to the WHO, paying in some $893million between 2018 and 2019 which made up around 15 per cent of the agency's total budget during that period.
April 14, 2020

News

By David Vergun

Defense.gov

DOD Continues Global Military Operations Even as It Battles COVID-19

Even as the Defense Department supports the whole-of-government response to the COVID-19 pandemic, it continues its vital national security missions, Defense Secretary Dr. Mark T. Esper said.

Esper and Army Gen. Mark A. Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, held a Pentagon news conference today on DOD's support for the nation's COVID-19 response. Esper also gave examples of some of the security missions DOD has undertaken, including:

Conducting counterterrorism missions in Africa, the Middle East and Afghanistan;

Conducting freedom of navigation operations around the world;

Monitoring North Korean weapons tests;

Improving the U.S. defensive posture in Iraq;

Escorting Russian bombers out of U.S. airspace;

Deterring Iran's aggressive behavior;

Working with Afghan security forces and Operation Resolute Support partners in Afghanistan;

Continuing enhanced counternarcotics operations in the U.S. Southern Command area of responsibility;

Working with NATO allies in Europe; and

Continuing to defend U.S. interests in space.

And last month, the Space Force launched its first satellite into orbit, Esper noted.

Regarding North Korean weapons tests, Milley said the intelligence analysis of their recent missile launches would take a few days, but the tests were short-range and not particularly provocative or threatening.

Regarding COVID-19, Milley said there are going to be a lot of lessons learned, and a comprehensive after-action review will follow. It won't be business as usual after the pandemic, the chairman said.

"There are countries out there in states that are very fragile that are in various states of civil war and have violence internal to their societies," he said. "There's significant stress as a result of the COVID-19 virus on the internal politics of other countries. There's a significant stress on their economies, on resources. There's risk of instability, So, no, it's not going to be business as usual. We've got to take a hard look at how we, the Department of Defense, conduct operations in the future."

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(CNN)  This may be the new normal for quite a while.

The US may have to endure social distancing measures  such as stay-at-home orders and school closures  until 2022, researchers projected on Tuesday. That is, unless, a vaccine becomes quickly available.

That's according to researchers from the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, who published their findings in the Journal Science on Tuesday. Those findings directly contradict research being touted by the White House that suggests the pandemic may stop this summer.

The team at the Harvard School of Public Health used what's known about COVID-19 and other coronaviruses to create possible scenarios of the current pandemic.

"Intermittent distancing may be required into 2022 unless critical care capacity is increased substantially or a treatment or vaccine becomes available," they wrote in their report. "Even in the event of apparent elimination, SARS-CoV-2 surveillance should be maintained since a resurgence in contagion could be possible as late as 2024."

The Harvard team's projections also indicate that the virus would come roaring back fairly quickly once restrictions were lifted.

"If intermittent distancing is the approach that's chosen, it may be necessary to do it for several years, which is obviously a very long time," Dr. Marc Lipsitch, an author on the study and an epidemiology professor at the Harvard School of Public Health, told reporters.

Another important factor: Whether people become immune to the new coronavirus after they have been infected  that's not yet known.

Potential challenges include finding a reliable test to determine who has antibodies for the coronavirus; establishing the level of immunity conferred by previous infection and how long it lasts; and the capacity of overstretched health systems to carry out reliable, widespread antibody tests in the general population.

There's also the difficult social questions around immunity certificates, which have been floated as a possibility in the UK. Would they create a kind of two-tier society, where those who have them can return to a more normal life, while others remain locked down?

The study researchers say they are aware that such prolonged distancing, even if intermittent, would likely have "profoundly negative economic, social, and educational consequences."

They hope their research will help identify likely trajectories of the epidemic under alternative approaches, identify complementary ways to fight it, and spur further thinking about ways to get the pandemic under control.

Though coronavirus cases in the US have been soaring, social distancing appears to be effective.

Social distancing is "one of the most powerful weapons" against COVID-19, said Robert Redfield, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

"If we can just maximize that social distancing, we can limit this virus' ability," he said earlier this month.

States across the country have issued stay-at-home orders, allowing only for essential errands or tasks.

Penalties for breaking the order vary by state. In Maine, the penalty for breaking the order can be up to six months in jail and up to a $1,000 fine.

In Florida, a pastor was arrested last month for continuing to hold large services, and is charged with unlawful assembly and violation of public health emergency rules, both second-degree misdemeanors.

This week, states on the East and West coasts announced they are forming their own regional pacts to work together on how to reopen after the stay-at-home orders.

New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Rhode Island, and Massachusetts each plan to name a public health and economic official to a regional working group.

West Coast states of California, Washington, and Oregon also announced they are joining forces in a plan to begin incremental release of stay-at-home orders.

This story was first published on CNN.com "US may have to endure social distancing until 2022 if no vaccine is quickly found, scientists predict"
Twenty-nine people have been killed in two attacks in eastern DR Congo, a region in the grip of militia violence, officials said Wednesday.

"CODECO assailants attacked the people of the village of Koli while they were asleep, killing 22 civilians," said Adel Alingi, head of the Djugu administrative region in Ituri province, referring to an armed group targeting the Hema ethnic community.

The raid took place overnight Saturday-Sunday.

In the second attack on Tuesday, two soldiers, a civilian and five militiamen were killed in Beni, in neighbouring North Kivu province, the army said.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
The states effort to relaunch public life as we knew it before March began this week with an unknown timetable for when it will start up again. Leaders include three designees of Gov. Ned Lamont to work with six other Northeast states and a committee within the state, headed by those same leaders.

Indra Nooyi, the top business executive leading Connecticuts restart efforts, likes to tell the story of how she became enamored of the state on her arrival to the United States from India in 1978, to study at the Yale School of Management.

She joined PepsiCo in 1994 and became CEO in 2006, overseeing massive strategic restructuring that included the spinoff of Yum! Brands and acquisition of Tropicana, Quaker Oats, Gatorade and many others.

Nooyi, 64, became part of the Lamont administration soon after his inauguration as co-chair of the business recruitment arm, AdvanceCT, formerly the Connecticut Economic Resource Center, a volunteer role. She is a board member of Amazon and lives in Greenwich.

Albert Ko, Yale epidemiologist

Dr. Albert Ko, a professor of epidemiology and infectious diseases at the Yale School of Public Health and Yale School of Medicine, studies health problems, urbanization and social inequity. Hes chair of the Department of Epidemiology of Microbial Diseases.

Ko has been working with State Epidemiologist Dr. Matthew Cartter, along with others from Yale and UConn Health, on coronavirus modeling, trends, responses and other issues.

A graduate He is working with the World Health Organization on evaluating therapeutics and vaccines for disease-causing pathogens, including COVID-19, and has worked with WHO and the National Institutes of Health on Zika and other infectious diseases. Ko has done research in Brazil and Thailand.

Paul Mounds Jr., Lamonts chief of staff

Paul Mounds Jr. will represent Gov. Ned Lamont and work with other governors on the Reopen Connecticut Advisory Board.

Mounds, a Democratic political operations veteran, was appointed Lamonts chief of staff in late February, succeeding Ryan Drajewicz, after a year as the states first chief operating officer. Hes been immersed in the coronavirus crisis ever since, mostly but not always behind the scenes.

Previously, Mounds, a Trinity College graduate, worked for Gov. Dannel P. Malloy, Sen. Richard Blumenthal and U.S. Rep John B. Larson. Hes been praised by legislators for his communications related to Coronavirus and is already in frequent communication with staff members of governors in other states.
President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelensky has thanked international partners for their assistance in fighting coronavirus.

Today, I want to thank our international partners, with whom we are jointly combating the disease. First of all, our friends from the People's Republic of China. I thank them for their fruitful and effective cooperation with the Ukrainian party. For solving all the issues quickly and most importantly  effectively, Zelensky said in the address to the Ukrainians, the press service of the Office of the President informs.

The President also thanked to the United Arab Emirates leadership for their humanitarian assistance  high quality protective equipment needed for the safety of doctors.

I am grateful to the other states which we work closely with to provide people with everything necessary, Zelensky noted.

According to the President, Ukraine also helps and is always ready to help its partners.

Today, the whole world is being tested for cohesion, and in my opinion, it is good that we do not live by the every man for himself rule, Zelensky is convinced.

ol
By Akbar Mammadov

Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev has signed a decree to strengthen the social protection of social workers involved in the provision of services during the quarantine regime over COVID-19.

According to the order signed on April 14, employees of the city and regional branches of the State Social Protection Fund (SSPF) under the Ministry of Labor and Social Protection of the population involved in the provision of social services will receive a temporary salary supplement equal to their official salary.

The purpose of the order is to provide effective services to citizens in difficult situations and single people over 65 years old.

The Cabinet of Ministers of Azerbaijan has been instructed to determine the employees to whom the allowances will be applied, as well as the deadlines for the payment of allowances.

It should be noted that 1,197 infected people have been detected in Azerbaijan; 351 of them recovered, 13 people died, and 833 people are being treated in special hospitals.

Azerbaijan is building six modular hospitals to treat the COVID-19 patients and a new clinic to fight the disease was inaugurated recently.

Since March 24, a special quarantine regime has been operating in Azerbaijan. Under this regime, citizens over 65 are not allowed to leave their homes and apartments. In addition, the movement of residents was restricted as of April 5 until April 20.

On March 19, President Aliyev announced the creation of the Fund to Support Fight Against Coronavirus.

Initially, the government allocated $11.7 million to the fund and the president and the first lady donated their annual salaries to the fund. As of April 8, the fund had collected about $65.1 million. Donations have been made by 2,692 legal entities and 8,223 individuals.

Earlier, on March 3, President Ilham Aliyev announced the allocation of $5.8m for fight against the spread of coronavirus in the country.

---

Akbar Mammadov is AzerNews staff journalist, follow him on Twitter: @AkbarMammadov97

Follow us on Twitter @AzerNewsAz
Since the 2010 BP oil spill, marine scientists at the University of South Florida (USF) have sampled more than 2,500 individual fish representing 91 species from 359 locations across the Gulf of Mexico and found evidence of oil exposure in all of them, including some of the most popular types of seafood. The highest levels were detected in yellowfin tuna, golden tilefish and red drum.

The study, just published in Nature Scientific Reports, represents the first comprehensive, Gulf-wide survey of oil pollution launched in response to the Deepwater Horizon spill. It was funded by a nearly $37 million grant from the independent Gulf of Mexico Research Initiative (GoMRI) to establish the Center for Integrated Modeling and Analysis of Gulf Ecosystems (C-IMAGE), an international consortium of professors, post-doctoral scholars and students from 19 collaborating institutions.

Over the last decade, USF scientists conducted a dozen research expeditions to locations off the United States, Mexico and Cuba examining levels of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs), the most toxic chemical component of crude oil, in the bile of the fish. Bile is produced by the liver to aid in digestion, but it also acts as storage for waste products.

"We were quite surprised that among the most contaminated species was the fast-swimming yellowfin tuna as they are not found at the bottom of the ocean where most oil pollution in the Gulf occurs," said lead author Erin Pulster, a researcher in USF's College of Marine Science. "Although water concentrations of PAHs can vary considerably, they are generally found at trace levels or below detection limits in the water column. So where is the oil pollution we detected in tunas coming from?"

Pulster says it makes sense that tilefish have higher concentrations of PAH because they live their entire adult lives in and around burrows they excavate on the seafloor and PAHs are routinely found in Gulf sediment. However, their exposure has been increasing over time, as well as in other species, including groupers, some of Florida's most economically important fish. In a separate USF-led study, her team measured the concentration of PAHs in the liver tissue and bile of 10 popular grouper species. The yellowedge grouper had a concentration that increased more than 800 percent from 2011 to 2017.

Fish with the highest concentrations of PAH were found in the northern Gulf of Mexico, a region of increased oil and gas activity and in the vicinity of the Deepwater Horizon spill that gushed nearly four million barrels of oil over the course of three months in 2010. Oil-rich sediments at the bottom where much of the oil settled are resuspended by storms and currents, re-exposing bottom-dwelling fish.

Oil pollution hot spots were also found off major population centers, such as Tampa Bay, suggesting that runoff from urbanized coasts may play a role in the higher concentrations of PAHs. Other sources include chornic low-level releases from oil and gas platforms, fuel from boats and airplanes and even natural oil seeps -- fractures on the seafloor that can ooze the equivalent of millions of barrels of oil per year.

"This was the first baseline study of its kind, and it's shocking that we haven't done this before given the economic value of fisheries and petroleum extraction in the Gulf of Mexico," said Steven Murawksi, professor of fisheries biology at USF, who led the international research effort.

Despite the detected trends of oil contamination in fish bile and liver, fish from the Gulf of Mexico are rigorously tested for contaminants to ensure public safety and are safe to eat because oil contaminants in fish flesh are well below public health advisory levels. Chronic PAH exposure, however, can prevent the liver from functioning properly, resulting in the decline of overall fish health.

These studies were made possible by BP's 10-year, $500 million commitment to fund independent research on the long-term effects of the Deepwater Horizon spill administered by the Gulf of Mexico Research Initiative. This year marks the end of that funding.

"Long-term monitoring studies such as these are important for early warning of oil pollution leaks and are vital for determining impacts to the environment in the case of future oil spills," Pulster said.
Many schools throughout the United States are shut down amid the coronavirus outbreak, with some starting online classes to keep kids learning. VOAs Saqib Ul Islam met a family in the state of Maryland trying to fit in this new routine, as schools there remain closed at least until April 24. VOA Khmer Reasey Poch narrates.
The College Board announced plans Wednesday to offer the SAT at home this fall if schools remain closed because of the coronavirus. (Joe Raedle / Getty Images)

High school students will be able to take an at-home online SAT if the coronavirus outbreak keeps schools closed into the fall, the College Board announced Wednesday, a radical shift that is raising concerns about equity and the security of the standardized college admissions test.

If administered at home, the College Board intends to keep the format of the exam "as close to the SAT students have been preparing for," with some possible changes to ensure security of the exam, officials said. The organization said it would share more details about the at-home test should it look like that version will be required.

The announcement comes as colleges across the country  including the University of California  are making the SAT and ACT tests optional as an admissions requirement for students entering college in fall 2021. At the same time, the test is coming under increasing scrutiny as a barometer of college success, especially for underserved minority students.

College Board officials said in a conference call Wednesday that they support colleges "in whatever flexibilities they adopt" to deal with the COVID-19 pandemic and that they don't know how test-optional admissions might affect students' participation.

"Were utterly committed to making sure that all students, particularly low-income students, have the option to distinguish themselves in admissions" by submitting test scores as well as grades, Chief Executive David Coleman said.

About 770,000 students scheduled to take the SAT this spring were unable to do so. March, May and June exam dates were canceled.

If it is safe to do so, testing could resume as normal in August and the College Board would offer a weekend test date every month through the end of the calendar year as well as in-school tests, officials said.

If schools do not reopen in the fall, a digital, at-home exam will be offered.

"The College Board would ensure that at-home SAT testing is simple; secure and fair; accessible to all; and valid for use in college admissions," the organization said in a statement.

Story continues

With millions of students nationwide attempting to continue their schooling through online learning, however, inequities have become readily apparent, with many low-income, minority and disabled students unable to access remote instruction.

Mark Rosenbaum, a legal director at Public Counsel, is the lead attorney in a lawsuit against the UC system that alleges use of the SAT in admissions decisions is inequitable and discriminatory by race, class and disability status. He said shifting the test to an at-home, online environment would worsen inequities.

"For those individuals who dont have online capacity or dont have the same sort of opportunities to work at home as more privileged students do, that inequity is going to be exacerbated," he said. "I don't think it's a solution for anything other than the College Board's economic interests."

The nonprofit organization took in more than $1 billion in revenue in 2017, according to its tax filings.

The College Board previously announced that it would deliver digital exams for 3 million Advanced Placement students this spring. Those exams, which will not be proctored, may be taken with open notes and books. They will also be shortened to just 45 minutes from the usual three to four hours and will only assess content learned up to early March.

The at-home SAT would be proctored remotely, an issue that is raising privacy concerns.

A College Board official said software applications would lock other programs on a test-taker's computer and use its microphone and camera to monitor the surrounding environment.

Ana Mendoza, staff attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California, said such measures bring up questions about how information will be stored, for how long and who may access it.

"Some people arent comfortable being recorded out in public, much less in their own homes," Mendoza said.

Students have a legal expectation of privacy when it comes to their homes, biometric information such as facial characteristics and their educational records, Mendoza said. Students younger than 18 have even greater protections.

The College Board did not specify how it might modify the test or address privacy concerns if it is administered in students' homes.

"We are working to understand students environmental challenges and requiring only what is most necessary to ensure test security. Were also exploring partnerships to ensure students have access to technology, and quiet and safe testing spaces, should they not have these in their homes," the College Board said in an email.

Times staff writer Teresa Watanabe contributed to this report.
A Georgia construction company was fined around $170,000 after a worker fell to his death in February at the Interstate-285/Georgia 400 interchange, officials said.

Martin-Pinero Construction was cited by the U.S. Department of Labors Occupational Safety and Health Administration for exposing employees to fall hazards, news outlets reported, citing a press release. The construction contractor, located in North Druid Hills, was fined $170,020.

Leoniso Sandoval, 49, was working on the interchanges improvement project in Sandy Springs when on Feb. 13 he fell and suffered fatal injuries.

OSHA said the worker fell while attempting to install permanent metal decking on the Ga. 400/I-285 flyover bridge ramp. The agency said Martin-Pinero failed to ensure workers used a horizontal lifeline system and failed to secure metal decking before workers were allowed to walk on it.

The agency said the contractor also failed to provide fall protection training or conduct regular job site instructions.

The contractor has 15 days to either comply, request an informal conference or contest the findings, the agency said.

Its unclear whether the contraction company could be reached for comment.

Copyright 2022 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Topics Georgia Contractors
The Red Cross Motor Corps on duty in St Louis, Missouri, in October 1918.

The Spanish Flu of 1918 was one of the worst pandemics in history, eventually killing 50 million people worldwide.

The virus hit in three waves, with the second during the fall of 1918 specifically spelling devastation on US soil.

Cities across the country shut down churches and schools, required residents to wear masks, and erected makeshift hospitals to help fight the disease.

Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

A century before the coronavirus disease  known as COVID-19  dominated the global consciousness, another deadly virus rampaged across the world.

Researchers have since established that the Spanish Flu of 1918, now known as H1N1, originated from an avian strain that mutated to be able to infect humans. The flu's symptoms resembled those a cold's. Patients would sometimes present with a liquid that would pool in their lungs and eventually suffocate them.

The influenza virus eventually killed 50 million people across the globe, and including 675,000 Americans, the equivalent of 225 to 450 million people today, as CBS News reports.

But cities across the country, from St. Louis to San Francisco, implemented measures in an attempt to fight the contagion head-on.

From fresh-air treatments to gargling saltwater, here are some of the precautions that public health and city officials took when the Spanish Flu ravaged the US in 1918 and 1919.

The contagion was dubbed the Spanish Flu for its believed origin in Spain. However, the exact origin is still unclear  some have suggested France, China, or the US.

Paris during the Spanish Flu pandemic in March 1919.

Source: Business Insider

There were three waves of the Spanish Flu, but the second bout of the disease was especially catastrophic for the US in the late summer of 1918.

A barracks hospital on the campus of Colorado Agricultural College, Fort Collins, Colorado in 1918.

Source: History

It was brought by World War I soldiers returning home from Europe, and as the men dispersed to their respective home cities or stations, the contagion burgeoned across the country.

Doctors giving treatment to an influenza patient at the US Naval Hospital in New Orleans, 1918.

Source: History

There wasn't a vaccine for the virus, so the primary precautions that local and state governments took were banning public gatherings and shutting down schools, churches, and movie theatres.

Story continues

Precautions taken during the influenza epidemic in 1918.

Source: Business Insider

Military personnel was told to gargle saltwater as a preventive measure against the contagion, since the virus was thought to be spread by nasal and throat mucus.

Men are seen gargling with salt and water at the War Garden at Camp Dix, New Jersey, September 1918.

The US had funneled most of its resources into World War I efforts, so additional funding was passed to hire healthcare workers, such as nurses, to help with the outbreak.

Women enroll nurses in 1918.

Source: NBC Bay Area

Mask-wearing was widely adopted in the US.

Baseball players wear masks during the influenza epidemic of 1918.

Cities mandated that residents wear masks at all times, a requirement that lasted well after quarantines ended in some locales.

A typist wears a mask while working at her office desk during the 1918 influenza epidemic.

Source: Variety

Law enforcement, like the 1,700 officers within the Boston Police Department, were given masks to wear while on duty.

An American policeman wearing a 'Flu Mask' to protect himself from the outbreak of Spanish flu in November 1918.

Cities like San Francisco took that advice to the next level, even writing a law around it. If a person was caught without a mask in public or even wearing it improperly, they were arrested or fined.

San Francisco was lauded for its proactive response to the virus, but city officials relaxed their restrictions following the fall of 1918. After the third wave in the spring of 1919, San Francisco ended up with some of the highest death rates of the flu in the US.

Source: CBS News

Though some studies conducted later on found mask-wearing was not as effective as previously believed in containing the outbreak.

Red Cross volunteers in Oakland from the Piedmont Chapter of the Red Cross create masks during the Spanish Flu pandemic in October 1918.

Source: Stanford, History

San Francisco was eventually one of the worst-hit US cities, but Philadelphia was hit hard early on because of a lack of social distancing efforts.

Philadelphia society matron, Mrs. JL Ackerson, as she acts as a chauffeur for Fleet Hospital during the 1918 Spanish Flu epidemic.

Source: History

Cities like St. Louis, Missouri, were more proactive in initially addressing the spread of the flu by enforcing social distancing early on, a feat that proved useful in stunting the spread of the flu.

The Red Cross Motor Corps on duty in St Louis, Missouri, in October 1918.

The city's health commissioner quickly called for schools and movie theatres to close and for public gatherings to be banned after an outbreak was found at a military barracks nearby.

As infections grew by the thousands, volunteer nurses treated residents in their homes.

The Red Cross Motor Corps carry a patient on a stretcher in St. Louis, Missouri, in October 1918.

The precautions that St. Louis took helped the city in "flattening the curve," but the Missouri city was hit hard when the flu returned the following spring in 1919 in what would be the third wave of the flu, just as San Francisco was.

City buildings and venues across the US were converted into hospitals and treatment sites, like Oakland's Civic Auditorium to accommodate the growing number of cases grew.

The Oakland Civic Auditorium was converted into a makeshift infirmary in 1918.

A makeshift flu hospital was set up in San Francisco's Civic Center to help care for infected patients.

An emergency flu hospital staffed by US Navy Hospital corpsman in Civic Center in San Francisco in 1918.

Another practice that officials, specifically in Massachusetts, believed to be effective was "fresh air treatments."

An outdoor fresh air cure in Lawrence, Massachusetts, in 1918.

Source: The Boston Globe

Some public health officials believed that fresh air counteracted the spread of the virus, so some events like court proceedings were held outside.

Court is held outdoors in a park due to the Influenza Epidemic, San Francisco, 1918.

The idea was that the ventilation provided by fresh air would help in curing the disease, which was believed to be spread through respiratory mucus.

An influenza camp in Lawrence, Maine, where patients were given fresh air treatment.

Source: The Boston Globe

Walks and breaths of fresh air were also encouraged to help stave off infection.

Women from the Department of War take 15-minute walks to breathe in fresh air every morning and night to ward off the influenza virus during World War I in 1918.

Read the original article on Business Insider
DECATUR  The school district hired two new administrative positions, including a Hope Academy principal, and is swapping the South Shores and Stephen Decatur Middle School principals.

Because of the government orders that allow for only 10 people at a gathering, members of the public were not allowed in the meeting Tuesday evening at the Keil Building, 101 W. Cerro Gordo. Several board and district staff members dialed in for the meeting by phone.

The board approved in a unanimous vote to hire Judith Campbell to fill the new role of P-12 Director of Teaching and Learning at the Professional Development Institute. Campbell has worked in education in Kansas City, Missouri since 1998 and started her career as a special education teacher.

Assistant Superintendent Jeff Dase during the meeting said she has extensive work in cultural competency.

Campbell has had several roles in administration, including managing director of teacher leadership and development with Teach for America. Her base salary with Decatur Public Schools will be $127,000.

"I am looking forward to the opportunity to embrace and meet the diversified needs of our students, staff and family," said Campbell, who dialed into the meeting. "It will take productive conversation, collaboration, relationships and trust while operating collectively with the goal of educating our students for life long success."

Board members also approved to hire a principal for Hope Academy. Tasia Spencer-Burks will be the principal of the K-8 school beginning July 13. Spencer-Burks is a former Stephen Decatur Middle School teacher and previously worked as Hope Academys dean of students from 2014 to 2016.

Dase said Spencer-Burks participated in a recent event for those who were interested in Decatur Public Schools.

"When I asked them to present anonymously, if given a choice which school they would love to be principal at, her only choice was Hope Academy," Dase said.

Spencer-Burks has also worked in Champaign 4 Unit School District as an assistant principal. Her salary will be $90,575. She also joined the meeting Tuesday over the phone and said she was happy to have the opportunity to come back and serve Decatur students.

"I look forward to reuniting with some of the families, students and staff as well as meeting new ones," she said. "I look forward to helping students reach the optimal levels of success."

Eldon Conn, elementary principal of South Shores, and Matt Fraas, principal of Stephen Decatur Middle School, will switch roles next school year. Denise Swarthout, spokesperson for the district, said the decision is based on an administrative recommendation and would not elaborate, saying it is a personnel matter.

A $40,000 grant from the Macon County Community Foundation was also approved during Tuesdays board meeting. The funds would go toward replenishing the districts iPad supply, which is a growing need especially while students are participating in e-learning under Gov. J.B. Pritzkers stay-at-home order.

Pritzker last month closed Illinois schools to contain the coronavirus. Students are using iPads and other technology to do homework, study and take tests.

Superintendent Paul Fregeau said there was an error in a memo in the board packet posted on the district's website that said the funding would be used to replenish iPads that were donated to local hospitals to help with the personal protective shortage in light of the coronavirus pandemic.

Fregeau said the funds would go toward replenishing the district's stock of iPads but not specifically those related to the donation to local hospitals. He apologized and said it was an error on the district's part.

"We have to make sure kids have the access to remote learning during these difficult times of stay at home orders," Fregeau said.

Parents, staff and other members of the public were allowed to submit comments that were read during the public comment portion of Tuesdays meeting.

Two comments were read including words from Decatur Education Association President Chrissy Petitt who said she was disappointed in the consideration of a state after-school program grant that district officials applied for to put toward Innovation Learning, the organization that hosts their before- and after-school programs.

According to the district memo, the Illinois State Board of Education awarded Decatur for $128,322 through the After School Programs Grant to fund after school programming.

"What metrics have we utilized to measure student success in a program that was not utilized to the best of its ability," Petitt said. "...The program did not welcome special education, life skills and essential skills students as well as preschool students."

The last public comment read during the meeting was from a senior DPS student who presented an idea to the school board to combine Eisenhower and MacArthur high schools proms.

TUESDAY UPDATE: Coronavirus and Central Illinois

Contact Analisa Trofimuk at (217) 421-7985. Follow her on Twitter: @AnalisaTro

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He's always been desperate for fame, and finally found himself known around the world while incarcerated and serving out his 22 year sentence.

And now, Joe 'Exotic' Maldonado-Passage, 57, is in talks with a US broadcaster to host his own radio show from prison, after being approached with the idea following his star turn in Netflix docuseries Tiger King.

The former GW Exotic Animal Park owner was recently moved to a Texas prison after being convicted in April 2019 of 17 accounts of animal abuse and conspiring to kill Carole Baskin, 58.

Guess who's back? Joe 'Exotic' Maldonado-Passage, 57, is in talks with a US broadcaster to host his own radio show from prison, after starring in Netflix docuseries Tiger King

Joe's husband Dillon Passage, who wed the former zookeeper in 2017, told Metro: 'This radio station here in the US wants him to have his own radio show from inside the prison.

'So we'll see what happens with that. It's kind of mind-blowing.'

Talking about Joe's reaction to the monumental success of Tiger King, Dillon said: 'I know he absolutely loves the attention. He's got a load of really good feedback, a lot of letters, a lot of emails.'

Dillon also revealed that Joe has tested negative for coronavirus, and that their usual five calls a day have been cut down as inmates are separated further amid the pandemic.

Convicted: Joe is currently in prison for 17 federal charges of animal abuse, in addition to two counts of murder for hire, a saga which played out in the hit Netflix documentary Tiger King

Married: Joe's husband Dillon Passage, who wed the former zookeeper in 2017, told Metro: 'This radio station here in the US wants him to have his own radio show from inside the prison'

The revelation about the possible radio show comes a week after President Donald Trump spoke about Joe Exotic's lengthy incarceration.

He told a New York Post reporter he'd 'look into' possibly pardoning the gun-toting openly gay polygamist, who ran for President in 2016 and Oklahoma Governor in 2018.

Tiger King tells the story of a zoo owner, [Joe Exotic], who spirals out of control amid a cast of eccentric characters in this true murder-for-hire story from the underworld of big cat breeding.

Finally! He's always been desperate for fame, and finally found himself known around the world while incarcerated and serving a 22 year sentence

Arch nemesis: In April 2019 Joe was sent to prison for 22 years after being convicted of 17 accounts of animal abuse and conspiring to kill Big Cat Rescue owner Carole Baskin, 58

While Joe loves the docuseries, and the fame it's brought him, his nemesis Big Cat Rescue CEO Carole Baskin has been receiving death threats over the allegations she murdered her millionaire first husband Don Lewis, who went missing in 1997.

Meanwhile, on Sunday Netflix released Tiger King bonus episode titled 'The Tiger King and I,' which reunited eight people featured in its No. 1 docuseries.

The biggest revelation was when Joe Exotic TV producer Rick Kirkham told host Joel McHale that former GW Exotic Animal Park owner Joe 'Exotic' Maldonado-Passage is actually 'terrified of big cats.'
With the government asking the companies to operate with only 50 per cent staff strength, and exports dipping to almost zero, the truck and bus drivers idling at the petrol pump say they hardly have any work now.

At a petrol pump on the deserted Bavla-Changodar highway near Ahmedabad in Gujarat, several trucks and buses are neatly parked in a row.

Some of the drivers are taking a nap, while some others play Ludo on their mobile phones, even as they maintain physical distance from each other.

The highway cuts across one of the busiest pharmaceutical hubs in the country.

But that was before the nationwide lockdown to battle the coronavirus pandemic came into force.

Today, the hub, which consists of big, mid-sized and small pharma companies, wears a desolate look.

With the government asking the companies to operate with only 50 per cent staff strength, and exports dipping to almost zero, the truck and bus drivers idling at the petrol pump say they hardly have any work now.

The number of trucks plying here have fallen by more than 70 per cent.

"This is because exports are almost at a standstill and the pharma companies are now catering only to the domestic market.

"Raw material from other states are also not coming as often as they used to, says Kalubhai Damor, a driver for one of the big companies in the pharma Special Economic Zone (SEZ) in Changodar.

Kamlesh Prajapati, who operates a commercial tempo for pick-up and delivery of goods for companies like Zydus Cadila and Intas, says his weekly trips have fallen from three to one.

Transportation has been hit also because the number of drivers has dwindled.

Prakash Singal, who usually delivers metal parts for auto companies, is now serving pharma companies since his colleague got stuck in the village when the lockdown began.

Pharma companies say that they are doing the best they can under the circumstances.

All our plants are functional to ensure that the essential requirements are met.

"We are taking all precautions as per the government and Indian Pharmaceutical Association guidelines.

"The plants are operating with minimal manpower to prevent overcrowding.

"Wherever possible, we are ensuring the delivery of medicines to the stockists.

"One of the initial challenges we faced was the availability of drivers and loaders, but things have improved gradually, says KVR Sarma, vice-president and head-supply chain, at Cadila Pharmaceuticals Ltd (Zydus Cadila).

Though the pharma industry is coping with the lockdown by focusing on the domestic market, the sourcing of raw materials has become an issue.

As Vijay Shah, member of the Committee of Administration (CoA) at Pharmaceutical Export Promotion Council (Pharmexcil), points out, Flights and ports are closed and workers are not available.

"Transportation is not fully operational and hence, sourcing of raw materials, such as active pharmaceutical ingredients (API), has become very difficult.

Shah, who also runs a small drug firm called Stallion Laboratories Pvt. Ltd, goes on to add that though there are warehouses in Bhiwandi and other areas of Mumbai which stock API, it is not able to move beyond state borders.

While mid-sized companies like Lincoln Pharmaceuticals Ltd. have a decent inventory of API that could last the duration of the lockdown, smaller ones like Stallion are concerned about depleting resources.

The government has been making efforts, but because of the lack of workers and hiccups in supply logistics, our API stock of 45 days could get exhausted soon, says Shah.

Viranchi Shah, chairman, Gujarat, Indian Drugs Manufacturers' Association (IDMA), says that pharma companies are trying to adapt to the new reality of almost zero exports.

"Challenges such as non-availability of ample workers as well as international logistics remain.

"Gujarat is one of the leading pharma export hubs globally.

"But since airports and ports are shut and freighter cargo movement is almost at a standstill, production capabilities have been shifted from exports to the domestic market, says Shah of IDMA.

For instance, Lincoln Pharma, which manufactures oral solid doses (OSDs) and parenterals (drugs administered via infusion or injection) largely for markets in the African countries, has quickly adapted itself to serve the domestic market.

The company is running on a 70 per cent capacity utilisation since the beginning of the lockdown at its plant at Khatraj, which is otherwise capable of making 150 million OSDs, seven million injectables and 1-1.2 million liquid oral doses per month.

The drugs we manufacture, including paracetamol and azithromycin, are needed in the domestic market.

"Hence, production has not been impacted even as we take the necessary precautions of engaging only 50 per cent staff and ensuring thorough screening and sanitisation of personnel, vehicles and premises.

"We also have an API inventory of over one month, which is sufficient for now, says Sanjay J Bhatt, general manager, operations and plant head, at Lincoln Pharma.

The pharma industry has been trying to resolve the issues that the companies are facing.

In a letter to the minister of commerce and industries, industry body Pharmexcil has written that several of its members are reporting cancellation of orders.

India is being replaced by other countries like Brazil, China, Turkey and some other countries in East Asia.

"Member companies are facing considerable problems in bringing their import shipments from airports and ports to their warehouses.

"The imports are essential raw materials for manufacturing essential products/medical devices to fight Covid-19, the letter states.

Pharmexcil has also requested that the lockdown be lifted in the case of factories engaged in exports, since foreign buyers have started cancelling orders and switching to competing countries.

Moreover, in its letter to the Governor of the Reserve Bank of India, Pharmexcil has stated that its roughly 3500 member companies, that generate a turnover of $50 billion, are seeking an extension of six months for making payments to the banks against the letters of credit for exports.

This is very urgently needed on account of the huge disruption which has been created all over the world on account of Covid-19, states Pharmexcils letter to the central bank.

Photograph: PTI Photo
Chinese leaders covered up their knowledge of a possible coronavirus pandemic for six days after realising the grim situation, it has been revealed.

Beijing's top officials secretly determined that they were likely dealing with a major health crisis on January 14, evidence suggested, but President Xi only warned the public of the emergency on January 20.

Thousands of people were believed to contract the deadly disease during the six days in mid-January when the government kept the information from them.

Internal documents leaked by a whistle-blower show Ma Xiaowei, the head of Chinas National Health Commission, assessing the situation on January 14 in a private teleconference.

The news comes as a former head of MI6 said today that Beijing concealed coronavirus from the West and is 'evading' blame for the pandemic.

It also comes as China warned it has 'serious concerns' after Donald Trump suspended all US funding to the World Health Organization (WHO) for what he called 'its role in severely mismanaging the spread of coronavirus'.

Britain also responded, saying it would not follow President Trump's example, and would continue to contribute to the WHO.

Top Chinese officials secretly determined they were likely facing a pandemic from a novel coronavirus in mid-January, it has been revealed. Chinese President Xi is pictured talking by video with patients and medics at the Huoshenshan Hospital in Wuhan, China, on March 1

Thousands of people were believed to contract the deadly disease during the six days in mid-January when the government kept the information from them. Patients are pictured resting at a temporary hospital at Tazihu Gymnasium in Wuhan in central China's Hubei on February 21

During the six days, Wuhan, where the outbreak first emerged in December, hosted a mass banquet for tens of thousands of people.

Meanwhile, millions began travelling through the transport hub situated in central China for Lunar New Year celebrations.

President Xi Jinping warned the public on the seventh day, January 20.

But by then, more than 3,000 people had been infected during almost a week of public silence, according to internal documents obtained by The Associated Press and estimates based on retrospective infection data.

The coronavirus pandemic has claimed more than 130,000 lives and infected over two million

A picture released by Hubei's Chutian Urban Daily shows residents at Wuhan's Baibuting community gathering for a huge banquet on January 18. The event reportedly invited more than 40,000 families to welcome the Lunar New Year days before the city went into lockdown

The delay from January 14 to January 20 was neither the first mistake made by Chinese officials at all levels in confronting the outbreak, nor the longest lag, as governments around the world have dragged their feet for weeks and even months in addressing the virus.

But the delay by the first country to face the new coronavirus came at a critical time - the beginning of the outbreak.

China's attempt to walk a line between alerting the public and avoiding panic set the stage for a pandemic that has infected over two million people and taken more than 130,000 lives.

China 'concealed' coronavirus from West and is trying to evade blame, says ex-MI6 chief China concealed coronavirus from the West and is 'evading' blame for the pandemic, a former head of MI6 said today. Sir John Sawers said Beijing was not honest when the disease first surfaced and faced 'anger' from the international community. He also insisted the WHO faced 'serious questions' for failing to scrutinise China's activities - although he suggested Donald Trump should direct his fury at the country rather than the UN agency. Sir John Sawers (left) said Beijing was not honest when the disease first surfaced and faced 'anger' from the international community. Ex-foreign secretary Lord Hague (right) warned the UK cannot be dependent on the Asian superpower for technology after the crisis demonstrated it does not 'play by our rules' The comments came after ex-foreign secretary Lord Hague warned the UK cannot be dependent on the Asian superpower for technology after the crisis demonstrated it does not 'play by our rules'. The US president launched an extraordinary attack on the 'China-centric' WHO overnight, declaring that he was freezing millions of pounds in funding. MPs have been demanding a major overhaul of British relations with Beijing, saying its companies should not be allowed to play a part in the new 5G telecoms network. Speaking on BBC Radio 4's Today programme, Sir John said: 'There is deep anger in America at what they see as having been inflicted on us all by China, and China is evading a good deal of responsibility for the origin of the virus, for failing to deal with it initially. 'At the same time we cannot find a way out of this without working with China... The world will not be the same after the virus as it was before.' It took a confirmed case in Thailand to jolt Beijing into recognising the possible pandemic before them, documents showed. In this March 17 photo, a medical worker looks at CT scans at the Huoshenshan field hospital in Wuhan in central China's Hubei Sir John said 'intelligence is about acquiring information which has been concealed from you by other states and other actors'. 'There was a brief period in December and January when the Chinese were indeed concealing this from the West,' he said. Sir John said China increasingly appeared 'completely at odds' with the West. But he said Mr Trump's decision to target the WHO was not the best response. 'It would be better to hold China responsible for those issues than the WHO... heads of UN agencies are wary of offending one of the major powers. But that doesn't excuse the head of the WHO for failing to stand up for the facts, the data, and making the right demands of China,' he said. 'I think the WHO has got serious questions to answer about its performance, but anger should be directed against China rather than the UN agencies.' Advertisement

'This is tremendous,' said Zuo-Feng Zhang, an epidemiologist at the University of California, Los Angeles. 'If they took action six days earlier, there would have been much fewer patients and medical facilities would have been sufficient.'

However, another epidemiologist, Benjamin Cowley at the University of Hong Kong, noted that it may have been a tricky call. If health officials raise the alarm prematurely, it can damage their credibility - 'like crying wolf' - and may cripple their ability to mobilise the public, he said.

The six-day delay by China's leaders in Beijing came on top of almost two weeks during which the National Center for Disease Control did not register any new cases, internal bulletins obtained by the AP confirmed.

Yet during that time, from January 5 to January 17, hundreds of patients were appearing in hospitals not just in Wuhan - which finally reopened last week - but across the country.

President Xi Jinping warned the public on the seventh day, January 20. But by then, more than 3,000 people had been infected during almost a week of public silence. Pictured, a doctor checks the conditions of a patient in Jinyintan Hospital in Wuhan, China, on February 13

The delay by the first country to face the new coronavirus came at a critical time - the beginning of the outbreak. Pictured, medical workers donning full-body protective suits and masks move a person who died from COVID-19 at a hospital in Wuhan, China, on February 16

China's rigid controls on information, bureaucratic hurdles and a reluctance to send bad news up the chain of command muffled early warnings, experts said.

Without these internal reports, it took the first case outside China, in Thailand on January 13, to galvanise leaders in Beijing into recognising the possible pandemic before them.

The Chinese government has repeatedly denied suppressing information in the early days, saying it immediately reported the outbreak to the World Health Organization.

'Allegations of a cover-up or lack of transparency in China are groundless,' said foreign ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian at a Thursday press conference.

The documents show that the head of China's National Health Commission, Ma Xiaowei, laid out a grim assessment of the situation in a confidential January 14 teleconference with provincial health officials.

A memo states that the teleconference was held to convey instructions on the coronavirus from President Xi Jinping, Premier Li Keqiang and Vice Premier Sun Chunlan, but does not specify what those instructions were.

Beijing warns it is 'seriously concerned' about US decision to suspend $500m WHO funding China has warned it has 'serious concerns' after Donald Trump suspended all US funding to the World Health Organization for what he called 'its role in severely mismanaging the spread of coronavirus'. Zhao Lijian, a spokesman for Beijing's foreign ministry, said the global battle against the pandemic is at a 'critical moment' and that suspending funding will 'undermine international cooperation against the epidemic.' His warning came after President Trump said the US with withhold some $500million in WHO funding while an investigation into its handling of the pandemic is carried out. President Trump announced Tuesday from the White House Rose Garden (pictured) that he was halting all US funding to the WHO over its response to the coronavirus pandemic Trump singled out what he called the WHO's 'dangerous and costly decision' to argue against international travel bans to combat the pandemic. While praising his own decision to limit travel to and from China on January 31 - a month after the first cases of the disease were reported - Trump added: 'Other nations and regions who followed WHO guidelines and kept their borders open to China, accelerated the pandemic all around the world. 'The decision of other major countries to keep travel open was one of the great tragedies and missed opportunities from the early days. The WHO's attack on travel restrictions put political correctness above lifesaving measures.' Zhao Lijian (pictured on April 8), a spokesman for Beijing's foreign ministry, said today that the global battle against the pandemic is at a 'critical moment' and that suspending funding will 'undermine international cooperation against the epidemic' The US is the largest single contributor to the WHO, paying in some $893million between 2018 and 2019 which made up around 15 per cent of the agency's total budget during that period. By comparison the UK - the third-largest contributor to the WHO overall and the second largest among nation states - paid in some $435million between 2018 and 2019. On Tuesday, Downing Street said it has no intention of following Trump's example and withholding fundsto the WHO, saying it 'has an important role to play in leading the global health response.' 'Coronavirus is a global challenge and it's essential that countries work together to tackle this shared threat,' Boris Johnson's official spokesman added. Advertisement

'The epidemic situation is still severe and complex, the most severe challenge since SARS in 2003, and is likely to develop into a major public health event,' the memo cites Ma as saying.

In a faxed statement, the National Health Commission said China had published information on the outbreak in an 'open, transparent, responsible and timely manner,' in accordance with 'important instructions' repeatedly issued by President Xi.

The documents come from an anonymous source in the medical field who did not want to be named for fear of retribution. The AP confirmed the contents with two other sources in public health familiar with the teleconference.

Chinese Premier Li Keqiang, center, speaks with medical workers at Wuhan Jinyintan Hospital in the picture from January 27. The Chinese government has repeatedly denied suppressing information in the early days, saying it immediately reported the outbreak to the WHO

China's rigid controls on information, bureaucratic hurdles and a reluctance to send bad news up the chain of command muffled early warnings, experts said. In this February 17 photo, patients infected with the coronavirus take rest at a temporary hospital in Wuhan, China

Under a section titled 'sober understanding of the situation,' the memo singled out the case in Thailand, saying that the situation had 'changed significantly' because of the possible spread of the virus abroad.

'All localities must prepare for and respond to a pandemic,' it said.

The National Health Commission distributed a 63-page set of instructions to provincial health officials, obtained by the AP.

The instructions, marked 'not to be publicly disclosed,' ordered health officials nationwide to identify suspected cases, hospitals to open fever clinics, and doctors and nurses to don protective gear.

Workers in protective gears are pictured catching a giant salamander that was reported to have escaped from the Huanan Seafood Market in Wuhan, China, on January 27

Travelers wearing face masks are pictured walking with their luggage at Hankou Railway Station in Wuhan on January 21. Millions began travelling through Wuhan, a transport hub situated in central China, for Lunar New Year celebrations during the six days of public silence

In public, however, officials continued to downplay the threat.

'The risk of sustained human-to-human transmission is low,' Li Qun, the head of the China CDC's emergency center, told Chinese state television on January 15.

Under the new orders, on January 16 officials in Wuhan and elsewhere finally got CDC-approved testing kits and a green light to start confirming new cases.

Across the country, dozens of reported cases then began to surface, in some cases among patients who were infected earlier but had not yet been tested.

China reports fewer coronavirus cases but local infections rise China reported a decline in new confirmed cases of the coronavirus in the mainland on Wednesday, but there was an increasing number of local transmissions in its far northeast bordering Russia. China had 46 new confirmed cases on Tuesday compared with 89 a day earlier, according to the National Health Commission. Of the new cases, 36 involved travellers arriving from overseas, compared with 86 a day earlier. The 10 remaining cases were new locally transmitted infections, with the northeastern Heilongjiang province accounting for eight and the southern Guangdong province two. A makeshift hospital has been built in Suifenhe in north-eastern China's Heilongjiang province to prevent a second outbreak. The 13-storey field hospital (pictured on April 10) is ready to receive patients after being converted from an office building in six days Having largely succeeded in stamping out local transmission of the virus, Chinese authorities on guard against a second wave of contagion fear imported cases now pose the greatest danger. In Beijing, where prevention measures remain stringent, an imported case from the United States was also reported on Tuesday, state television said. The patient started to show symptoms two days after arrival, despite testing negative initially. Heilongjiang has become a front line in China's fight to keep out imported cases as infected Chinese nationals return overland from Russia. China has closed the border with Russia at the Heilongjiang city of Suifenhe. New infections involving travellers arriving from Russia have also hit other parts of China such as Inner Mongolia and the financial hub of Shanghai. As of Tuesday, the total number of confirmed cases in mainland China had reached 82,295. Authorities said 3,342 people have died from the virus in China. Advertisement

On January 20, President Xi issued his first public comments on the virus, saying the outbreak 'must be taken seriously'. A leading Chinese epidemiologist, Zhong Nanshan, announced for the first time that the virus was transmissible from person to person on national television.

The delay may support accusations by U.S. President Donald Trump that the Chinese governments secrecy held back the worlds response to the virus. However, even the public announcement on January 20 left the U.S. nearly two months to prepare for the pandemic - time that the U.S. squandered.

Some health experts said Beijing took decisive action given the information available to them.

The picture from March 31 shows a child taking a COVID-19 test at a quarantine hotel in Wuhan

In this April 15 photo, a woman wearing a mask looks at a globe showing China in Wuhan

'They may not have said the right thing, but they were doing the right thing,' said Ray Yip, the retired founding head of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control's office in China. 'On the 20th, they sounded the alarm for the whole country, which is not an unreasonable delay.'

But others say an earlier warning would have saved lives. If the public had been warned a week earlier to practice social distancing, wear masks and cut back on travel, cases could have been cut by up to two-thirds, one paper later found.

'The earlier you act,' said Los Angeles epidemiologist Zhang, 'the easier you can control the disease.'

No human-to-human transmission, no travel bans, but plenty of praise for Beijing: How WHO parroted Chinese lies as coronavirus pandemic unfolded

By Chris Pleasance for MailOnline

The World Heath Organisation has found itself with serious questions to answer after President Trump accused the UN agency of 'severely mismanaging' its response to the coronavirus pandemic and withheld $500million in funding.

The WHO has been spearheading global efforts to fight the virus, but has come under attack for playing along with China as the country sought to minimise its initial outbreak and the threat the disease posed.

Critics point to its uncritical parroting of Chinese government data, early claims that the disease was not spreading person-to-person, and praise for the country's leaders as evidence that it was not fulfilling its role.

Trump - who is facing heavy criticism for his own response - has blasted the WHO for advising against travel bans, which he claims 'accelerated the pandemic all around the world', and called for an investigation.

Here, the Mail Online has tracked key WHO statements about coronavirus - from the first cases, through China's outbreak, and beyond - to reveal what the world's largest health body said and when as the disease spread...

Donald Trump gives a briefing at the White House on Tuesday announcing that he will suspend all US funding to the World Health Organisation

December 31  China first reports a cluster of unusual pneumonia cases in Wuhan to the WHO

January 4  WHO tweets about a cluster of pneumonia cases in Wuhan with no deaths, saying investigations into the cause are underway

January 5  The WHO issues its first guidance on pneumonia of unknown cause, saying there are a total of 44 patients and 11 in severe condition. The main symptom is listed as fever, with a few patients having difficulty breathing

The WHO says there is no evidence of human-to-human transmission and that no health care worker infections have been reported

January 7  China says it has identified the cause of the pneumonia as a novel coronavirus, initially named 2019-nCoV by the WHO

China first reported cases of 'pneumonia of unknown cause' to the WHO on December 31, and the agency put out its first tweet on January 4 saying the cause was being investigated

January 9  The WHO praises China for identifying the new virus in a short space of time and repeats its assessment that the virus does not transmit readily between people. It also advises against travel or trade restrictions on China

January 13  The WHO says it is now working with authorities in Thailand after reports of a case there, and may call a meeting of the Emergency Committee

January 14  The WHO tweets saying there is no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission in China, though later clarifies and says there may have been limited transmission via family members

Jan 20-21 - WHO's field team in China conducts a brief field visit to epicentre Wuhan

Jan 21  The first case is confirmed on US soil in Washington, in a person who had travelled from China a week before

Jan 22  A report from the WHO team sent to Wuhan notes human-to-human transmission is taking place, but says more research is needed to assess the full extent. The report notes confirmed infections in 16 medics, a clear sign of transmission from patients

The team recommends avoiding large gatherings, isolating infected people, and a focus on washing hands as the best way to combat the viruss spread

The same day, that WHO Emergency Committee convenes for the first time. Afterwards, Dr Tedros says he has spoken with the Chinese Minister for Health, and praises the government for its invaluable efforts to halt the virus. He calls a second meeting for the following day

Jan 23  With the Emergency Committee split, Dr Tedros says he has decided not to declare the virus a public health emergency of international concern. Referencing the lockdown of Wuhan, which was announced the same day, he says he hopes it will be effective and short in duration. He praises Chinas cooperation and transparency in tackling the virus

Dr Tedros says there is limited evidence of human-to-human transmission, mostly among families or doctors treating the virus. At this point, there are 584 confirmed cases and 17 deaths globally, including in Vietnam, South Korea, Japan, Thailand and the US

On January 14, more than a month after the first infections at this seafood market are thought to have taken place, the WHO tweeted saying China had found no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission

He recommends screening at airports and tells countries to put testing facilities in place, but stops short of recommending a travel ban

Jan 28  Dr Tedros and other senior WHO officials meet Xi Jinping in China, agreeing that a panel of experts should be sent to monitor the outbreak. He praises the seriousness with which China is taking this outbreak, especially the commitment from top leadership and the transparency they have demonstrated

Jan 29  Dr Tedros gives a speech praising Chinas efforts to contain the virus, saying the country deserves our gratitude and respect for locking down swathes of the country to prevent the spread.

He notes a few cases of human-to-human spread outside China, which he says is of grave concern and will be monitored closely

Jan 30  The WHO Emergency Committee reconvenes early and declares a public health emergency of international concern. It comes after confirmed cases of human-to-human transmission in Germany, Japan, Vietnam and the US

Dr Tedros again praises China for setting a new standard for outbreak response with its lockdowns, and says the small number of cases outside the country  98  is thanks to their efforts

Despite noting that a majority of cases outside China have a history of travel to or from Wuhan, he again recommends no measures to curb international travel or trade

Jan 31  Donald Trump announces travel restrictions on people coming from China

Feb 3  Dr Tedros gives a speech to the WHO updating on coronavirus, saying there are 17,238 cases in China and 361 deaths  now thought to be an under-estimate

He praises Xi Jinping for his individual leadership, and insists that cases outside China can be managed if world authorities work together and follow recommendations which include  no ban on travel or trade, supporting countries with weak health systems, investment in vaccines and diagnosis, combating disinformation and urgent reviews of emergency preparedness

Feb 7  Dr Li Wenliang, a doctor who first reported the existence of coronavirus and was initially silenced by China, dies from the virus

Feb 10  The WHOs team of experts arrives in China to assist with the outbreak

Feb 11  The WHO names the disease caused by the virus COVID-19, saying it avoided including a geographical name because it risks stigmatizing people. It says it will not be using the name SARS-CoV-2 because it risks causing unnecessary fear by linking it to the 2003 SARS outbreak

Tedros Ghebreyesus, WHO Secretary-General, pleaded for world leaders to refrain from politicising the virus 'unless you want more body bags'

Feb 12  Dr Tedros says the number of new cases being reported in China has stabilised but adds that it must be interpreted with extreme caution and the outbreak could still go in any direction

Feb 16-24  WHO team of experts convenes in China, visiting affected sites and sharing information on the best ways to tackle the crisis

Feb 17  Dr Tedros begins chairing daily updates on the coronavirus response, with each briefing beginning with an update on the number of infections including from China, which are repeated without caveats

He give an analysis of Chinese data on some 44,000 confirmed cases. He says the data shows that 80 per cent of cases are mild, 14 per cent lead to severe disease, and 2 per cent are fatal. The disease is more severe in older people, with the young largely spared.

He urges world leaders not to squander a window of opportunity to get ahead of the virus and prevent it from spreading

Feb 26  Donald Trump announces a dedicated coronavirus response team, which Mike Pence will lead

Feb 28  The team of WHO experts delivers its first report on the coronavirus. Among its major findings are that the disease likely came from bats, that it is spread through close contact with infected people and not through the air, and that most common symptoms include fever, dry cough and fatigue

The report praises Chinas response as perhaps the most ambitious, agile and aggressive disease containment effort in history saying lockdowns were achieved due to the deep commitment of the Chinese people to collective action and had achieved a rapid decline in cases

Mar 9 - The whole of Italy is placed on lockdown as the virus spreads, the first European nation to enter total lockdown

Mar 11 - The WHO declares coronavirus a pandemic, meaning it is spreading out of control in multiple locations around the world. At this point, cases have been reported in more than 100 countries

Mar 13 - WHO says Europe is now the new epicentre of the virus after cases increase steeply, with Dr Tedros noting more cases are now being reported every day than were reported in China at the height of its epidemic

Mar 19 - China reports no new domestic infections from coronavirus since the pandemic began

The pandemic has now infected some 2million people worldwide, with 128,000 confirmed deaths (pictured, a hospital in Italy)

Mar 20 - Dr Tedros issues a warning that 'young people are not invincible' to the virus after data from outside showed large numbers of people under the age of 50 ending up in intensive care

Mar 25 - As Donald Trump begins touting hydroxychloroquine as a potential coronavirus treatment, WHO warns that no drugs have so far been approved for treating the virus

The same day the organization calls for an extra $2billion in funding to help tackle the virus

Apr 3 - As millions of US citizens sign on for unemployment benefit, Dr Tedros and the IMF call for debt relief and social welfare to help people through the pandemic

Apr 6 - The WHO updates its guidance on masks to say they are effective at stopping spread of the virus, but must be used in conjunction with other methods.

It comes after the CDC updated its guidance to advise people to wear masks in public

Apr 8 - Following Trump's first barrage of criticism for the WHO, Dr Tedros urges world leaders to 'stop politicising the pandemic' unless they want 'more body bags'

Apr 13 - A group of scientists convened by WHO to research a vaccine for coronavirus issue a joint statement urging world leaders to keep listening to the scientific community when responding to the virus
Aizawl, April 15 : Mizoram Chief Minister Zoramthanga has asked the Assam Rifles and BSF officials to further tighten security along the state's border with Myanmar and Bangladesh, officials said on Wednesday.

Mizoram Health Minister R. Lalthangliana in a separate press release said in Aizawl that the 22-year-old woman from the state, who has tested positive for novel coronavirus in Mumbai hospital, is a breast cancer patient.

"A doctor from Mizoram, who worked in a hospital in Meghalaya, also tested positive for coronavirus in Shillong on Tuesday night. The lone COVID-19 patient being treated at the Zoram Medical College in Aizawl for the last month, is showing good progress, and in fact on Monday, his ventilator was removed and he was breathing normally again," the release quoted the Minister as saying.

An official in Aizawl said the Mizoram Chief Minister held a meeting in Aizawl on Tuesday evening and asked the Assam Rifles and Border Security Force officials to further tighten the security along the state's border with Myanmar and Bangladesh.

"The Chief Minister said the state borders must be more strictly guarded as positive novel coronavirus cases have now been confirmed in all neighbouring countries and states. Security forces along the borders must make sure that no illegal trespassers and migrants clandestinely cross over into Mizoram," the official quoted the Chief Minister as saying.

The Chief Minister also emphasised the need for good and transparent coordination between Assam Rifles, BSF, Mizoram Police, the village-level task force and the NGOs in order to combat the threat of Covid-19.

Mizoram Home Minister Lalchamliana, Chief Secretary Lalnunmawia Chuaungo, Additional Chief Secretary J.C. Ramthanga senior Assam Rifles and BSF officials were present in the meeting.

Mizoram has an unfenced international border of 404 km with Myanmar and 318 km with Bangladesh. While the BSF guards the Bangladesh border, the border with Myanmar is secured by Assam Rifles.
BMW Group India on Wednesday pledged Rs 3 crore for the ongoing battle against the coronavirus pandemic

New Delhi: BMW Group India on Wednesday pledged Rs 3 crore for the ongoing battle against the coronavirus pandemic.

The company said it has partnered with government and non-government organisations for on-ground implementation in Delhi-NCR and Chennai.

It will also participate in setting up an isolation ward for COVID-19 patients at the government hospital in Chengalpattu, near its Chennai plant, BMW Group India said in a statement.

Further, critical care equipment and services will be provided for medical facilities in Delhi-NCR and Chennai, while personal protection equipment will be provided for frontline medical personnel and law enforcement agencies in the two locations, it added.

The coronavirus pandemic presents a mammoth challenge to public health, industry, economy and business. Responsible action and sincere efforts are immensely crucial for minimising the impact on human life, providing immediate relief to the underprivileged and reinforcing those engaged at the frontline of this crisis," BMW Group India President and CEO Rudratej Singh said.

Stating that the need of the hour is to flatten the curve of coronavirus infections, and ensure social distancing, he said, "It is a top priority and responsibility that we are taking very seriously...The resolve and commitment of our employees and dealer partners across India to fight this unprecedented threat to mankind is strong and undeterred. We will remain resilient and responsive."

Employees of BMW Group India, BMW Group Plant Chennai and BMW India Financial Services voluntarily contributed towards the cause, the company said.

It said work-from-home has been implemented across BMW Group offices in India. Local production at BMW Group Plant Chennai has been stopped till 3 May, 2020 following the extension of the lockdown although essential services such as security, facility management and health centre continue to operate.

Across the BMW, MINI and BMW Motorrad dealerships in India, staff are working from home to offer services to customers, it said adding aftersales and breakdown services staff are operating as per the local government directives and are functional with limitations. All showrooms are presently closed and will reopen as per government advisory.
Louis T. Mastos was stepped in myriad sectors of Nevadas insurance community, and he was someone who early on recognized the value of surplus lines, those who knew him say.

Mastos, who served as Nevadas second insurance commissioner, died on March 21 in Reno, Nev., at age 98.

Mastos was heavily involved in many aspects of the insurance community for decades.

He served as president of the American Association of Managing General Agents, now part of the Wholesale Specialty & Insurance Association (WSIA), from 1985 to 1986. During his term as AAMGA president, Mastos is credited with introducing more structured financial control and creating the office of secretary-treasurer for the association.

He was also a member of NAPSLO, now part of WSIA, the Prospectors Club, the Nevada Surplus Lines Association and he served on the board of directors of Frontier Adjusters of America, Inc.

The Nevada Independent Insurance Agents ran an extensive write up on Mastros and his contributions to the industry.

Mastos was born in Los Angeles, Calif. on April 7, 1921. After attending Louisiana Tech and Tulane University, he served in the U.S. Navy Reserve during World War II.

He moved to Reno in 1956 and became the Nevada insurance commissioner, a role he held from 1965 to 1971.

Following his stint as commissioner, he founded Louis T. Mastos & Associates Inc. in Reno, a managing general agency and surplus lines broker, in 1971. The firm eventually expanded to include offices in Reno, Las Vegas, Phoenix, Ariz., and Santa Rosa, Calif.

There has been no word yet on any planned memorial services.

Topics Excess Surplus Nevada
Egypt has not filed a request so far to receive urgent facilities from the IMFs appropriated allocations for countries to help them contain the coronavirus

The International Monetary Funds (IMF) Director of the Middle East and Central Asia Department Jihad Azour said on Wednesday that the economic reform program Egypt launched prior to the coronavirus pandemic has helped it absorb economic shocks, uplift economic growth rates, and boost the countrys banking sector.

Azour said that the tourism and export sectors, as well as Egyptian expat remittances, which are a key source of hard currency for the country, are the most affected by the crisis.

Azours statements were made during a press conference held online on Wednesday as part of the World Bank and the IMF spring meetings that kicked off on Tuesday.

Egypt has not filed a request so far to receive urgent facilities from the IMFs appropriated allocations for countries to help them contain the coronavirus.

The IMF is in contact with Egypts concerned bodies, in particular with Egypts government, the Central Bank of Egypt, and the finance ministry, to discuss the countrys policies, plans, and procedures to contain the outbreak, he added.

CBE Governor Tarek Amer is Egypts governor at the IMF, Finance Minister Mohamed Maait is the deputy governor, and Minister of International Cooperation Rania Al-Mashat is Egypts governor at the World Bank.

Meanwhile, the IMF unveiled on Wednesday that countries across the world have taken fiscal actions amounting to about $8 trillion to contain the COVID-19 pandemic and its damage to the economy.

In a report, the IMF showed that emergency lifelines provided globally include higher spending and foregone revenues amounting to $3.3 trillion, public sector loans and equity injections of $1.8 trillion, and guarantees of $2.7 trillion.

The Group of Twentys advanced and emerging economies are at the forefront with actions totaling $7 trillion, according the report.

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Marthe Cohn, the subject of the documentary "Chichinette: The Accidental Spy." (Kino Lorber)

In Chichinette: The Accidental Spy, its not the Holocaust-era exploits of its intrepid subject, Marthe Hoffnung Cohn, that are especially memorable (though they should be) but the more recent, workaday activities of the documentarys wise, feisty and diminutive star who turned 100 on April 13 and exhibits a joie de vivre here thats both captivating and deeply inspiring.

Writer-director Nicola Hens (she also co-shot with Gaetan Varone) eschews the classic documentary mix of archival footage, interviews with outside observers, dramatic re-enactments and the like to support her narrative  and it tends to work against her. The result is an often static visual mix of travelogue-like backdrops with a smattering of personal photos and disposable bits of rudimentary animation as the Jewish, French-born Cohn  in on-camera chats and extended voiceovers  recounts how, toward the end of World War II, she joined the French army, posed as a German nurse (she was blond, blue-eyed and fluent in German) and crossed enemy lines to gather strategic information for Allied forces.

The inquisitive Cohn received the nickname Chichinette, French for little pain in the neck, from her colleagues in Army Intelligence, but from all evidence they were lucky to have her.

But Hens largely holds back these details until the latter part of the film, which somehow drains this intriguing, potentially pulse-pounding period, first publicly discussed in Cohns 2002 memoir, of much of its inherent scope and impact.

The same goes for the recap of her familys wartime trials: Cohns parents and siblings fled to the free zone in the South of France after the Nazi occupation, her sister was arrested and sent to Auschwitz, and Cohns fiance joined the Resistance and was murdered. As presented, these pivotal events are affecting but not quite as vivid or gripping as one might expect.

The film more successfully follows the Palos Verdes,-based Cohn and her longtime doctor-husband, Major (for many years, she served as his research assistant), on a 2016 European speaking tour, visiting relatives and several locales from Cohns past en route. Watching this devoted, still energetic pair of nonagenarians prepare for their trip, navigate travel, work laptops, ensconce in apartments and hotels, do laundry, explore the sights and just generally support each other is a lovely thing to behold.

The highly decorated Cohn is a feminist heroine who definitely deserves her own cinematic close-up. This ones a start, but perhaps theres a star-driven narrative feature to be had that can more richly bring her striking story to life.
Australian defence officials are looking to how a plane from China held up a Royal Australian Air Force aircraft from landing in Vanuatu while carrying vital humanitarian supplies for the cyclone-struck nation.

The RAAF plane carrying aid was due to land in Vanuatu's capital Port Vila on Sunday, but turned around and returned to Australia when it realised a Chinese plane with medical equipment was also on the airport's tarmac.

A destroyed building in Luganville, Vanuatu. Credit:AAP

The plane from China carrying donated medical supplies to fight COVID-19 had landed at the airport the previous day.

The Australian plane had been given full approvals to land by local authorities and was circling the airport, but the decision was made to return to Brisbane when it reached its fuel limit.
For high school seniors, the coronavirus pandemic has derailed several of the traditional spring rites of passage, including proms, graduation ceremonies, senior class trips and post-prom weekends at the shore.

For those planning post-prom or senior week time in New Jersey, its not known yet when the states emergency declarations banning large gatherings will be lifted.

For a South Jersey group of seniors, the ongoing health emergency could also end up costing them a lot of money.

A group of 27 seniors from Gateway Regional High School went in together to rent a house in Wildwood for prom weekend on May 8-11.

Even if the school doesnt cancel prom, it now seems unlikely they will be allowed to gather that weekend because of ongoing bans on rentals in Cape May County and a parent says the group is having trouble getting its money back.

Theyve already put down about $5,000 toward a total tab of $7,300 to rent the house, said Kara Hickey, mother of one of the seniors. The rental business has resisted requests for a refund, instead offering a new date, according to Hickey.

I think its completely unfair, she said. This was out of everyones control. Its not like they dont want to go.

Efforts to contact the business by phone and email were unsuccessful on Monday.

Hickeys son, Tyler, signed the rental agreement and collected money from his friends, she said. They booked the house in November and have been paying toward the weekend since December.

The rental company has offered to book the group for a different weekend, but said refunds are not possible under the contract, according to Hickey. With dates for graduation, senior trip and other activities still up in the air, the group cannot simply book another date, she said.

A representative for the business is also telling her that a ban on rentals in the shore town lasts only until April 30, and that May should be fine, Hickey said.

Wildwood and some other shore towns banned short-term rentals for hotels, motels and private homes until April 30, but Cape May County then issued a blanket ban on these rentals with no date specified on when the order would be lifted.

From what I understand, there is no end date to this, Hickey said. They dont know when they are going to lift the ban.

Bans and uncertainty over how long the health crisis could last have created turmoil in the shore rental industry.

To stave off similar problems in the future, some renters are now adding coronavirus clauses to their summer lease agreements, which would allow refunds if travel plans are scuttled by the pandemic.

Hickeys son is disappointed about the entire situation.

He doesnt really talk about it, she said. Hes pretty upset. Its very upsetting for all of us. They are a close-knit group of kids. Its sad for all of the seniors. I cant imagine.

Matt Gray may be reached at mgray@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter @MattGraySJT. Find NJ.com on Facebook.

More: The N.J. beaches and boardwalks that are still open during coronavirus closures
Agency's creatives and creative partners join forces on two of six critical public health messages

NEW YORK, NY, April 15, 2020, the global brand storytelling agency, has submitted two pieces of creative to the United Nations (UN) global call out, in a move designed to help the organization translate its key COVID-19 public health messages into engaging and informative work that resonates with people across different cultures, languages, communities and platforms.

Responding to the UN's myth-busting health message, the Captain CO-RID: RealHeroesStopTheSpread animation campaign follows the adventures of an everyday Aussie who swaps a uniform of khaki and cork hats for his superhero get up when his comrades need him most.



Captain CO-RID educates the public at rapid fast rates and calls on them to become everyday heroes-and villains-like him, by both adopting and helping him communicate these myth-busting messages faster than the spread of the coronavirus.



The work represents a collaboration between INVNT, who identified the opportunity, devised the core campaign idea, and wrote the script, Melbourne-based animation studio, Viskatoonsled by Peter Viska, who brought Captain CO-RID to life visually, provided script writing support, animated the script and identified a suitable voice over partner, and voice over and audio production specialists Abes Audio, who provided sound design and recorded the script.



Responding to the UN's public health message of personal hygiene-specifically respiratory hygiene, The Box of Home Heroes: Every Tissue Can Stop the Spread! creative takes the form of a craftily designed tissue box which features heroic characters and respiratory hygiene practices localized in Aussie slang, to inspire the public to become heroes in the fight against COVID-19.



The tissue box surface was chosen because not only does the UN recommend the use of tissues for good respiratory hygiene, tissue boxes tend to be prominently displayed on kitchen benches, coffee tables and bedside tables-ensuring they act as a practical and unmissable in-home reminder for people to adopt good respiratory hygiene practices.



Every Australian household would receive a complimentary box of tissues-a welcome gift given they are a scarce commodity in our current climate, and the campaign can live on through partnerships with key supermarket chains, who would stock the tissue boxes throughout the duration of the pandemic.

"INVNT is aligned with a number of charities because we are passionate about doing good work, and about doing work that does good for others. So, the opportunity to respond to the United Nations' global creative call out was a must for us. The coronavirus has had a dramatic impact on countries and lives across the world, and we want to do our bit and lend our support wherever we can," explains INVNT CEO, Scott Cullather.

Adam Harriden, Executive Creative Director, INVNT adds: "We are really proud of both pieces of work, which highlight that when creatives from different backgrounds and specialties collaborate, amazing things can happen.

"Both responses draw on the idea that to be a true hero, we need to be villains too, by joining forces to kill the coronavirus. They have also been designed with a global lens, and we see the work evolving accordingly. The Captain CO-RID script and character can be localized so that he or she resonates with viewers in-region, and we can translate the on-box tissue messages and partner with local manufacturers and supermarket chains on the production and distribution of the tissue boxes, with donations going to the UN or its affiliated organizations in different countries or regions," he explains.

###



About INVNT

Founded in 2008 by Scott Cullather and Kristina McCoobery, INVNT is the global brand storytelling agency. The company's 'challenge everything' positioning statement helps clients including General Motors, Grant Thornton, Merck, PepsiCo, Samsung and Subway - share their stories - live and virtually - with every audience that matters. 'The tribe' is INVNT's diverse, talented and creative team behind the stories and brand experiences that people just can't stop talking about. INVNT's offices are strategically located in New York, where INVNT's story studio, HEVE and brand strategy firm, Folk Hero are also based, London, Sydney, Detroit, San Francisco, Washington D.C., Stockholm and Singapore. For more information visit www.invnt.com

About VISKATOONS

As Australia's longest running animation studio, Viskatoons creates and produces original content for global markets, local networks and internet viewing. Series to date include the iconic Li'l Elvis Jones and the Truckstoppers, Monster Chef, Suspect Moustache and two series of Jar Dwellers SOS. Short form productions like Be Deadly Online and works for Government departments showcase the talents of the creative team, who use animation for its intended purpose: to communicate with viewers anywhere. While creating and developing new concepts for children's screens Viskatoons animates TVC's, explainer videos and music videos. For more information visit www.viskatoons.com

About Abes Audio

Head to www.abesaudio.com.auto learn more.

Attachments
So what will they say now about Karofskys inroads into conservative areas that allowed her to build a margin of more than 160,000 votes? Yes, Karofsky was helped by the presidential primary between Biden and Sanders that drew Democrats to the polls. But in going to court to force an election in the midst of a pandemic, Republicans figured they would win by holding down turnout in Democratic urban areas most affected by the virus. A shameful ploy was foiled because Democrats mobilized absentee ballots in unprecedented numbers. This speaks to where the energy in politics is right now. Its not on Trumps side.
OTTAWA

April 14, 2020

Canada

Justin Trudeau

transfer $72.6 million to the governments of Yukon , Northwest Territories , and Nunavut to support their COVID-19 health and social services preparations and response. This funding will help territories address the critical priorities they identified to minimize the spread of the virus.

to the governments of , , and to support their COVID-19 health and social services preparations and response. This funding will help territories address the critical priorities they identified to minimize the spread of the virus. Provide up to $17.3 million to the governments of Yukon , Northwest Territories , and Nunavut to support northern air carriers. This funding, in partnership with investments by the territorial governments, will ensure the continued supply of food, medical supplies, and other essential goods and services to remote and fly-in communities.

to the governments of , , and to support northern air carriers. This funding, in partnership with investments by the territorial governments, will ensure the continued supply of food, medical supplies, and other essential goods and services to remote and fly-in communities. make available $15 million in non-repayable support for businesses in the territories to help address the impacts of COVID-19. This support will assist businesses with operating costs not already covered by other Government of Canada measures.

in non-repayable support for businesses in the territories to help address the impacts of COVID-19. This support will assist businesses with operating costs not already covered by other Government of measures. provide an additional $25 million to Nutrition North Canada to increase subsidies so families can afford much-needed nutritious food and personal hygiene products.

$500 million

$305 million

Canada's

Justin Trudeau

Canada

Daniel Vandal

Marc Garneau

Marc Miller

$15 million

Joly

The Government of Canada will provide funding to the governments of Yukon , Northwest Territories , and Nunavut as follows:

will provide funding to the governments of , , and as follows: $18.4 million for Yukon and up to $3.6 million for air services

for and up to for air services

$23.4 million for the Northwest Territories and up to $8.7 million for air services

for the and up to for air services

$30.8 million for Nunavut and up to $5 million for air services

for and up to for air services To support critical air services to northern and remote communities, the territorial governments will manage contracts with air carriers so they can maintain a basic network of routes and services to provide access to critical goods to fly-in communities in the North.

The Canadian Northern Economic Development Agency (CanNor) will make available $15 million in funding to support northern businesses. CanNor works with Northerners and Indigenous peoples, communities, businesses, organizations, federal departments, and other orders of government to help build diversified and dynamic economies that foster long-term sustainability and economic prosperity across the territories.

in funding to support northern businesses. CanNor works with Northerners and Indigenous peoples, communities, businesses, organizations, federal departments, and other orders of government to help build diversified and dynamic economies that foster long-term sustainability and economic prosperity across the territories. Nutrition North Canada is a Government of Canada subsidy program that makes safe and nutritious food more affordable and accessible to isolated communities eligible for the program. It subsidizes a list of foods, as well as essential items such as cleaning and personal hygiene products, sold by registered retailers, suppliers, and food processors.

is a Government of subsidy program that makes safe and nutritious food more affordable and accessible to isolated communities eligible for the program. It subsidizes a list of foods, as well as essential items such as cleaning and personal hygiene products, sold by registered retailers, suppliers, and food processors. The Government of Canada remains committed to ensuring ongoing support to improve food security in the North, including through the Harvesters Support Grant. This grant will increase access to traditional foods by alleviating the high costs associated with traditional hunting and harvesting activities.

remains committed to ensuring ongoing support to improve food security in the North, including through the Harvesters Support Grant. This grant will increase access to traditional foods by alleviating the high costs associated with traditional hunting and harvesting activities. The Harvesters Support Grant is delivered through Nutrition North Canada. The grant provides $40 million over five years beginning in 2019-2020, and $8 million per year in ongoing funding. Funding for the first year of the grant program has been allocated to Indigenous partners, and the Government of Canada is working to deliver the next wave of money quickly.

over five years beginning in 2019-2020, and per year in ongoing funding. Funding for the first year of the grant program has been allocated to Indigenous partners, and the Government of is working to deliver the next wave of money quickly. On March 18, 2020 , the Government of Canada announced that it would provide $305 million for a new distinctions-based Indigenous Community Support Fund, to address immediate needs in First Nations, Inuit, and Metis communities. This complements the previously announced $82 billion in support that is available to all Canadians, including Indigenous peoples.

Coronavirus disease (COVID-19)

Canada's COVID-19 Economic Response Plan

COVID-19 Economic Response Plan Prime Minister outlines Canada's COVID-19 response

COVID-19 response Prime Minister announces more support for workers and businesses through Canada's COVID-19 Economic Response Plan

COVID-19 Economic Response Plan Canadian Northern Economic Development Agency

Nutrition North Canada

/CNW/ - As the COVID-19 pandemic continues to evolve, it is more important than ever to make sure that all Canadians have access to the quality food and essential health care they need. That is why the Government ofis working with partners, including territorial governments, to address the unique needs of Northerners.The Prime Minister,, today announced additional support to address immediate health, economic, and transportation needs in the North. These measures will:Northerners are also receiving help through the Harvesters Support Grant, which was developed in direct collaboration with Indigenous partners. The grant helps to improve food security by increasing access to traditional foods and alleviating the high costs associated with traditional hunting and harvesting activities.The funding announced today builds on both theprovided to provinces and territories, and theprovided to Indigenous communities, as part of the Government ofresponse to COVID-19. The government will continue to work with all of our partners to keep Northerners and all Canadians safe and healthy. Together, we will provide all communities with the support they need to respond effectively to this crisis."No Canadian should ever have to worry about where to get their food or how to receive essential health care services. That is why we are working with the territories and Indigenous partners to address the unique needs of northern communities as they respond to COVID-19. Together, we will make sure that Northerners can access the food, supplies, health care, and services they need during this challenging time."The Rt. Hon., Prime Minister of"Our government has been working with northern and Indigenous partners to address the unique and critical needs of Northerners. These supports will ensure that northern residents have the supports they need to prepare for and respond to the COVID-19 pandemic. From access to health services, to the continuation of the supply chain through air supports, and greater subsidies on essential items, we are taking actions to help Northerners when they need it most."The Hon., Minister of Northern Affairs"We must all work together to take care of Canadians during this challenging time. Our northern and remote communities rely on air service to bring them food, medical supplies, mail, and other essential goods and services. Our government remains committed to maintaining a focused, safe, and reliable air transport network for these communities."The Hon., Minister of Transport"Northern communities, in particular those in remote and fly-in only parts of the country, are uniquely vulnerable during this crisis. Communities are incredibly resilient and full of solutions and innovative ideas, and I want to recognize their strength. These measures are the product of vital discussions with northern and Indigenous partners and will ensure access to food and to essential supplies. They will also ensure vital economic support during this pandemic. This is only the beginning. We will continue to work with Indigenous partners to identify and deliver on their specific needs and to make sure no one is left behind."The Hon., Minister of Indigenous Services"In recognition of the unique challenges of the northern business community, the Canadian Northern Economic Development Agency will immediately make availablein funding, including direct support for ongoing costs incurred by northern small- and medium-sized businesses, in order to help them continue to play their vital role in northern communities. CanNor's strong relationships with territorial governments best position the Agency to ensure relief efforts are complementary and that funding gets to the businesses that need it the most."The Hon. Melanie, Minister of Economic Development and Official Languages, and Minister responsible for the Canadian Northern Economic Development AgencyThis document is also available at https://pm.gc.ca/SOURCE Prime Minister's Office
Representative image

Ahmedabad Civil Hospital has created separate wards to admit Hindu and Muslim patients with COVID-19 infections and suspected cases, The Indian Express has reported.

According to the Medical Superintendent Dr Gunvant H Rathod, two different wards for Hindus and Muslims had been created as per a state government decision, said the report. However, Deputy Chief Minister and Health Minister Nitin Patel denied any knowledge of it, it said.

Generally, there are separate wards for male and female patients. But the hospital has made separate wards for Hindu and Muslim patients, said the report quoting Dr Rathod.

Asked about the reason for such segregation, the doctor said it was a decision of the government and they can be asked to give a reason, the report stated.

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

A new block of the hospital was designated as COVID-19 centre for the Ahmedabad-Gandhinagar zone in the last week of March, the report suggested.

According to the report, the protocol of the hospital states that a suspected COVID-19 patient is kept in a separate ward from those who tested positive, as long as their test results are pending. At present, 150 of the 186 people admitted to the hospital for coronavirus are positive. Of these, at least 40 are Muslims, said the report citing sources.

Coronavirus state-wise tally

In talks with the publication, a patient said on April 12, the names of 28 men admitted in the first ward (A-4) were called out. They, including the patient, were then shifted to another ward (C-4). While they were not told why they were being shifted, all the names that were called out belonged to one community, the patient was quoted as saying.

We spoke to one staff member in our ward today and he said this had been done for the comfort of both communities, the patient added.

Also read | New normal: How coronavirus pandemic will change lives

When Deputy CM Patel was contacted by the publication, he said he was not aware of such a decision (on wards as per faith). Generally, there are separate wards for males and females. I will inquire about it, Patel said.

Ahmedabad Collector KK Nirala also denied any knowledge of the matter and said there had been no such instruction from their side, added the report.

Also read | Home ministry issues strict social distancing rules for offices

The total number of coronavirus cases in Gujarat rose to 695 as 56 more people were found infected with the disease on April 15, the health department said. Of the new cases, 42 were reported from Ahmedabad, six from Surat, three each from Vadodara and Panchmahal, and one each from Botad and Kheda, it said.

(With inputs from PTI)

Follow our full coverage here
A 56-year-old Nigerian man has died of COVID19-related complications in Lagos.

The state Commissioner for Health, Prof Akin Abayomi, made the announcement via Twitter on Tuesday April 14.

According to the Commissioner, the deceased recently returned to the country from the US.

13 new cases of #COVID19 infection confirmed.

Total number of confirmed cases in Lagos are now 192. 6 additional fully recovered #COVID19 patients; 5 males and 1 female were discharged.

Total number of #COVID19 patients that have recovered and discharged are now 61.

A 56 year old NigeriaN; male who recently returned from the United States has died of #COVID19 related complication. This brings the total number of #COVID19 related deaths in Lagos to 6. he wrote
UPPER THUMB  Here are some things you should know as you begin your Wednesday:

Michigan surpasses 27,000 coronavirus cases

The Upper Thumb saw an increase of two coronavirus deaths in Tuesdays report from the state, bringing the total number of deaths to 11. The state saw an increase in coronavirus cases, bringing the total number of confirmed cases to 27,001.

Unemployment woes leaving Huron County residents struggling to make ends meet

Displaced Huron County workers, along with more than 1 million others in the state, have been forced to file  or attempt to file  for unemployment in the past month. But an overburdened system is leaving many without the means to make ends meet.

Great Lakes Bay Health working on getting virus test results faster

The number of drive-thru testing offerings are expanding throughout Michigan, but one in Huron County has not been seeing the numbers it expected.

Residential centers amp up the fun inside: When outings are canceled staff finds creative ways to keep spirits high

The coronavirus pandemic may have things gloomy, but they are in full bloom at local assisted living centers thanks to staff and community members who are taking measures to ignite and preserve hope.

Gov. Whitmer addresses confusion and rumors with FAQs

As directives in Lansing change amid the coronavirus pandemic, so does the laws and rules surrounding them, causing confusion among residents throughout the state. To combat the misconceptions and rumors, the Executive Office of the Governor has published several Frequently Asked Questions to address many topics.

ICYMI

Local nurse battling coronavirus

Registered Nurse Melissa Leggieri, a public health nurse with the Tuscola County Health Department, has been battling with coronavirus. Leggieri said her symptoms started April 1, and she was still in the hospital Friday.

Nominate your heroes

The Tribune is taking nominations for a new feature called Heroes Unmasked, where we will report on different "heroes" in our community that are helping in the fight against the coronavirus.

Life after quarantine: 50 things Americans say they'll do when the pandemic ends

The quarantine has undoubtedly changed our way of life for the time being, but a recent survey details the top 50 things Americans say they will do after the pandemic is over.

Funny quarantined couples memes show life amid stay-at-home order

With stay-at-home orders extended, couples took to Twitter to share how they really feel about being quarantined with their spouse or significant other.

Coronavirus cases across the U.S.

Here is a look of where coronavirus cases are being reported across the country.

Have questions about coronavirus?

Need a question answered about coronavirus? Fill out the form below and we will try to get the answer in a future article.
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.
British crops may 'rot in the fields' unless 80,000 farm workers are found, a farming association has warned - with a private charter plane of 180 Romanian fruit pickers due to land at Stansted airport tomorrow to tackle the shortages.

The stark warning comes after producers issued a nationwide appeal for Brits join a new 'Land Army' of farm workers to pick fruit and vegetables amid the coronavirus lockdown.

So far, more than 32,000 people have signed up - but only around 4,000 have actually opted to interview for a role.

Around 80,000 workers are required every summer to work the fields, with British farmers usually being able to call on seasonal workers from Europe.

However, with the coronavirus pandemic stopping commercial flights and causing lockdowns all over the continent, farmers have appealed to Brits, many furloughed and not currently working, to fill the gap.

But some farmers are still struggling, prompting one Lincolnshire-based food producer to charter a private plane of 180 Romanian fruit pickers, which gets into Stansted tomorrow.

Though more than 30,000 workers have signed up to pick crops this summer, only 4,000 have actually interviewed for a job (file photo)

The Country Land & Business Association's president Mark Bridgeman has warned that more workers are needed to ensure fruit and vegetables are picked this summer

They will then be taken to Lincolnshire by bus, with the flight believed to be just the first of six.

The Country Land & Business Association has admitted the number of British volunteers is still not enough, with a spokesman telling Mail Online that they wouldn't be surprised if more foreign workers are flown in to avoid food 'rotting in the fields'.

CLA President Mark Bridgeman said: 'Over 30,000 people have come forward to help farmers, following the call to 'Feed the Nation', through the COVID-19 pandemic.

'This is great news and shows a tremendous attitude at these difficult times. But this excellent response in not enough  we need 80,000 people to ensure fruit and vegetables are picked on time this summer.

'Where it is possible and safe to do so in the current circumstances, bringing in workers from overseas to help meet the shortfall is the right thing to do if we want to keep the supermarkets stocked.

'However we would strongly encourage people from across the country to keep coming forward and signing up with recruitment agencies.

A charter plane of about 180 Romanian fruit pickers is due to land at Stansted tomorrow to fill labour vacancies to keep up with demand amid the coronavirus crisis. Stock picture

'There are good jobs available and great opportunities for those currently furloughed, unemployed or students.'

Tomorrow's flight is coming from Bucharest to London.

Surrey-based Air Charter Service said a private farming company in the UK has paid for Thursday's flight. It did not name the firm.

An Airbus A320 aircraft will be used, at an estimated cost of 200-250 per seat.

Air Charter Service confirmed that an airline based at Stansted would operate the flight, which was booked last week.

Carriers based at the Essex airport include Ryanair, Jet2.com and Tui Airways.

The workers on the Boeing 737 will be taken by bus to farms across the southeast of the UK and Lincolnshire.

Passengers on board the aircraft will be required to maintain social distancing guidelines and will not be allowed to leave Romania if they display any symptoms of Covid-19.

At least 10 other flights have been arranged by Air Charter Service to take farm workers from Romania and Bulgaria to Germany.

The move has shone the spotlight on the so-called 'Land Army' initiative, which was supposed to fill Britain's farming needs with British workers currently at home amid the lockdown.

The 'Land Army' scheme is being led by Concordia, a charity which provides seasonal labour for farms, as well as HOPS and Fruitful.

Concordia says almost 90 per cent of applicants are British citizens - and half have either been furloughed or out of work completely because of coronavirus.

They add their roles for April have been filled, but they are still looking for more workers from May onwards.

The plane coming from Bucharest to London tomorrow is the first of up to six which will arrive in the coming months so that UK farms stay staffed with labourers. Stock picture

Stephanie Maurel, the chief executive of Concordia, said pickers earn an average of 350 a week for around 40 hours of work.

The least they will be paid is the national minimum wage of 8.72 per hour - but the faster workers could be paid up to 15 per hour depending on how much they pick.

The working day will begin between 5am and 6am, finishing in the early afternoon to avoid physical work in the hottest part of the day,

A spokesman said: 'Concordia is working with Fruitful and HOPS to help find people to fill positions on UK farms.

'Successful applicants will receive training on the farm (and are paid to undertake this training) and can be assured that all farms, many of which are open fields, are following the correct procedures around safe working conditions during the Coronavirus outbreak.

'Housing is always provided although participants do not have to take it up.'

'To date we have had more than 32,000 applications of interest in the programme  from people all over the UK, and beyond.

'Of those 13% are then opting to interview for a role (an automatic process)  currently just over 4,000. We are now matching these people to roles and placing them on UK farms.

It is believed that not enough British workers have applied for farming jobs since becoming unemployed during lockdown

'Almost 90% of applicants are from UK citizens. Half of whom have lost their livelihoods due to the COVID-19 outbreak. Only 30% have worked in farming in the past.'

The British Growers Association says around 6,000 pickers are needed from mid-April to pick asparagus, and the same again to pick salads and lettuce.

By May at least 30,000 people will be needed to pick strawberries and at least 10,000 more to pick soft fruits such as raspberries. Later in the summer another 10,000 will be needed to pick apples and pears.

Next month tens of thousands will be needed cauliflowers, cucumbers and spring greens and other common vegetables like onions.

Farmers and food plants hit with staff shortages will be allowed to recruit furloughed workers from other businesses to 'feed the nation'.

The move comes in response to warnings of chaos in some sectors and fears crops will be left to rot in the fields.

Thousands of businesses, from retailers to pubs, have put their staff on furlough, which means the taxpayer will pay them 80 per cent of their wage.

Originally, this payment was denied to the company if these workers went on to find a second job to bring in cash.

However, the Treasury has updated its guidance to say: 'You may undertake other employment while your current employer has placed you on furlough, and this will not affect the grant that they can claim under the scheme.'

The net effect is that people on furlough could receive 80 per cent of their pay from their main employer while collecting a second wage for fruit picking.

Importantly, these people must be able to return to work for their main employer as and when required.

It comes as the Government's watchdog, the Office for Budget Responsibility, today warned the economy could shrink by more than a third this quarter alone with two million people made jobless if the lockdown continues for two more months.

Shocking analysis from the OBR underlines the trade-offs being made to combat the deadly disease by putting the country into lockdown.

It warns curbs staying in place for three months will slash GDP by 35 per cent, with unemployment soaring to 10 per cent and the government's deficit hitting 273billion - the highest level since the Second World War.

The watchdog ominously said it was assumed 'for now' there will not be any permanent economic damage, and much of the crash will be unwound as pent-up demand is unleashed when the lockdown finally ends. However, the resulting 13 per cent year-on-year drop will still be worse than anything in the last century.

Responding to the chilling scenario - which emerged as the International Monetary Fund (IMF) predicted the worst global downturn since the Great Depression in 1929 - Chancellor Rishi Sunak said: 'People should know there is hardship ahead.'

The apocalyptic figures emerged after Dominic Raab moved to quash the idea of an imminent loosening, with the UK now facing restrictions until at least May 7.

But there is growing alarm about the potential death toll from economic misery, with life expectancy set to take a major hit. Doctors have also warned that suspending all non-urgent NHS operations to focus on coronavirus cases means more cancer and heart disease patients will die.

The Cabinet is divided over whether to push to ease the lockdown soon, with some saying the public is obeying social distancing too well and that people must be urged to keep working where possible.

But concerns have been raised that it is impossible to lift the curbs at the moment anyway because the public is so strongly in favour of them staying in place, and would simply refuse to go back to normal.
Hours, Prevenge, Short Circuit.

Pregnant protagonists, darkly dreamlike fantasies and mouthwatering cookery all feature today as TopFilmTip brings you the best films on TV: Wednesday, 15 April.

The Duke protects a woman and her niece from an imminent onslaught and the amorous interests of his soldiers in She Wore A Yellow Ribbon 12pm Sony Movies Action

Sentient sentinel craves input, befriends beleaguered hippy and flees for its life in endearing robotic adventure Short Circuit 1:40pm Film4

Unknowingly half-brothers, two Odin worshippers battle each other and pillage England for its crown in sword-swinging gem The Vikings 2:20pm BBC2

American actor Johnny Depp on the set of Edward Scissorhands, written and directed by Tim Burton. (Photo by Twentieth Century Fox Film Corpo/Sunset Boulevard/Corbis via Getty Images)

Johnny Depp explores alienation, drenditic utensils and dirty dog grooming in Tim Burton's gothically iconic fantasy Edward Scissorhands 3:40pm Film4

Grieving dad Paul Walker battles to keep his newborn alive in hurricane-hit hospital: a powerful tale of paternal protection Hours 6pm Sony Movies

Read more: The best 4K TV deals

Five narrative archetypes uncover colossal conspiracy in Joss Whedon's wolf-kissing love-letter to the horror genre The Cabin In The Woods 11:15pm Film4

Guided by bitter foetus, bereaved expectant assassin exacts bloody bladed vengeance in Alice Lowes knife wielding wonder Prevenge 1:05am Film4

Train traveler Emily Mortimer slips further into murky misadventure of murder and smuggling in icy psychological thriller Transsiberian 1:10am Sony Movies

Parallel narratives interweave present day food blogger with influential 1950s French cookery guru in the delectable Julie And Julia 3:25am Sony Movies

Everything new on streaming in April:

Netflix UK: Aprils new releases

Everything coming to Now TV in April

Amazon Prime Video UK: The biggest April releases

Everything coming to Disney+ in April

Follow TopFilmTip on Twitter for daily film recommendations.

Some films may require a Sky subscription.
STATEN ISLAND, N.Y. -- As horns blared and residents cheered for healthcare workers across New York City during the Tuesday night 7 p.m. shift change, and the daily movement  #ClapBecauseWeCare  serenaded more frontline workers across the city, salutes to the two Staten Island Hospital systems took place on opposite ends of the borough.

The third drive-by thank you for hospital workers on Staten Island organized by Bay Terrace native Joe Bove, 54, was held for the staff of Staten Island University Hospitals (SIUH) Princes Bay Campus.

Previously, a caravan organized by Bove thanked hospital staff at SIUHs Ocean Breeze campus and Richmond University Medical Center.

Island residents, along with members of the FDNY and NYPD, honked their horns and showed signs of appreciation to staff at the hospital.

Staying Sane w/ Shane: Parade for health care workers at Staten Island University Hospital-South Posted by Staten Island Advance on Tuesday, April 14, 2020

Just before the drive-by caravan was conducted in Princes Bay, a concert of fun and inspirational music was held in West Brighton for RUMC staff and patients inside the hospital at 6 p.m.

Then, at 7 p.m., New York state court officers, FDNY firefighters and NYPD officers cheered in a drive-by showing of appreciation to the medical workers at the hospital.

Firefighters and officers applauded the hospital staff outside of the hospitals main entrance, and also showed appreciation outside the emergency department entrance  where staff was unable to come outside.
The Supreme Court is about to step boldly into the 20th century.

Though the high court had canceled oral arguments scheduled for March and April because of concerns about the novel coronavirus pandemic, the justices on Monday said theyd be restoring to the current terms calendar 10 cases that theyd hear via teleconference in May. Sure, the telephone isnt the most cutting-edge of technologies, but for the hidebound Supreme Court, which only grudgingly and rarely makes changes to the way it does business, its something akin to a marvel.

With the high court still decidedly low-tech, even a teleconference is, well, modern.

In a prepared statement, the court said: "In keeping with public-health guidance in response to COVID-19, the Justices and counsel will all participate remotely." The court added that it will provide additional details "as they become available."

One of the cases that's now back on the court's docket concerns President Donald Trump's financial records. Though committees from the House of Representatives as well as a New York prosecutor have issued subpoenas demanding a look at the documents, the president has flatly refused to allow access to his tax records and other financial statements. While lower courts have supported the subpoenas, the businessman-president maintains that he does not need to comply because of the office he holds. Or, put another way, lawyers for Trump assert that the president of the United States is above the law.

One would like to assume that even the current, often hyper-partisan Supreme Court would brush aside such claims -- unanimously, too.

That's exactly what happened twice before when justices were presented with cases concerning a president's efforts to keep information under wraps. Back in 1974 the court ruled, 9-0, against President Richard Nixon, who was endeavoring to shield audiotapes of his Oval Office conversations from congressional investigators. Twenty-three years later, the Supremes, again unanimously, turned aside President Bill Clinton's claims of immunity in a case filed by Paula Jones, who'd been a state employee when Clinton had been Arkansas governor.

One worries, though, about the current court. Will precedent be seen as more important than partisanship when justices decide the financial records cases?

With the audio feed of the arguments to be made available, live, the people will soon get an inkling of what justices are thinking.
James Marsden is Republican Rep. Phil Crane and Cate Blanchett is Phyllis Schlafly in "Mrs. America." (Michael Gibson / FX)

The cast of "Mrs. America" is full of recognizable women: Cate Blanchett, Uzo Aduba, Elizabeth Banks, Rose Byrne and Tracey Ullman, to name a few.

But in this new FX on Hulu project, set in the 1970s amid the second wave of feminism, they are all playing people who were political stars in the fights for and against passage of the Equal Rights Amendment.

Hollywood has worked its magic once again with the miniseries, transforming those players and others nearly seamlessly, via hair, makeup and costumes, into historical figures including Phyllis Schlafly, Shirley Chisholm and Gloria Steinem.

Take a trip back in time and check out some of the "Mrs. America" actors in character, below, pictured with their real-life counterparts.





Cate Blanchett as Phyllis Schlafly

(Sabrina Lantos / FX, left; Associated Press, right)

Oscar-winning Australian actress Blanchett slips right into the role of Schlafly, a successful crusader against ratification of the ERA who defended traditional gender roles. Schlafly also opposed abortion, calling Roe vs. Wade the worst decision the U.S. Supreme Court had ever made. Schlafly, who was also an author, founded the conservative Eagle Forum in 1972 and remained chair and chief executive of the political interest group until her death in 2016.





Uzo Aduba as Shirley Chisholm

(Sabrina Lantos / FX, left; Associated Press, right)

"Orange Is the New Black" breakout Aduba channels Chisholm, the first black woman elected to Congress, who gave a memorable speech in favor of the ERA in 1970. In addition to serving seven terms in the House of Representatives, the Democrat ran for president in 1972. She was the first black candidate for a major party's presidential nomination, the first black woman to run for the Democratic nomination and the first woman to appear in a presidential debate. Chisholm died in 2005.





Rose Byrne as Gloria Steinem

(Sabrina Lantos / FX, left; Associated Press, right)

Bouncing back from the flop comedy "Like a Boss," Byrne effortlessly rocks Steinem's trademark straight hair and glasses that the feminist icon had in the 1970s. In 197`1, the journalist-turned-activist was among the many founders of the National Women's Political Caucus (NWPC) and delivered her historic "Address to the Women of America" speech when the group first convened in 1971.





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Margo Martindale as Bella Abzug

(Sabrina Lantos / FX, left; Stephen Verona, right)

A two-time Emmy winner for her work on "The Americans," Martindale embodies Abzug, who was another NWPC founder. The author of "The Gender Gap" was known for her trademark hats, though they were not allowed on the floor of the House, where she served for three terms in the '70s before running unsuccessfully for a Senate seat. Abzug died in `1998.





Tracey Ullman as Betty Friedan

(Sabrina Lantos / FX, left; Associated Press, right)

Ullman, the chameleonic British comedian and actress, plays Friedan, a key figure in second-wave feminism. After serving as the first president of the National Organization for Women, which she co-founded in 1966, the author of "The Feminine Mystique" moved on to advocate strongly for ERA ratification after it was passed in 1972 by the House and Senate. She would remain an activist, author and highly regarded intellectual into the late 1990s, including a late-'80s stint as a visiting professor at USC's Annenberg School. Friedan died in 2006.





Elizabeth Banks as Jill Ruckelshaus

(Sabrina Lantos / FX, left; Associated Press, right)

Actress and "Charlie's Angels" filmmaker Banks portrays Ruckelshaus, another of the many founders of the NWPC. An advocate for ERA ratification, she was briefly a White House assistant and head of the White House Office of Women's Programs. The early '80s saw her as commissioner of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, and in 1996, she joined the boards of Costco Wholesale Corp. and Lincoln National Corp.





John Slattery as Fred Schlafly

(Sabrina Lantos / FX, left; Associated Press, right)

The "Mad Men" actor takes on the role of Mr. Schlafly, a lawyer and husband of Phyllis. According to the Eagle Forum, Fred encouraged Phyllis, "was immensely proud of her, and he read what she wrote and freely 'censored' and edited her work." An Eagle Forum award recognizing supportive husbands bears his name. The couple had six children during their 43 years of marriage, and he died in 1993.
Source: Xinhua| 2020-04-15 00:50:37|Editor: huaxia

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KUNMING, April 14 (Xinhua) -- Southwest China's Yunnan Province on Tuesday announced it plans to gradually reopen schools from late April in line with their respective conditions.

Middle schools and secondary vocational schools can resume classes from April 20, according to a notice released by the provincial bureau of education.

Grade four to six students in elementary schools will return to school from April 26, with students of lower grades returning from May 6.

The notice said universities and colleges are expected to restart classes for graduating students from May 6, while students of other grades will resume classes from May 11.

Schools that failed to meet the requirements were suspended from reopening and schools across the province should strictly carry out epidemic prevention and control work in campuses, said the bureau.

The school reopening dates for students of kindergartens and special education schools are yet to be decided, it said.
The Chief of Ahenema Kokoben, Nana Gyamfi Berko II and his queenmother have donated assorted food items to over 250 households in Ahenema Kokoben within the Atwima Kwanwoma District of the Ashanti Region.

It will be recalled that the President of Ghana, H.E Nana Addo-Dankwa Akufo-Addo have announced a lockdown in certain parts of Greater Accra, Ashanti and Central regions.

For this reason, the Chief and elders of Ahenema Kokoben in their bid to lessen the burden of hardship imposed on the indigenes as a result of the lockdown have donated over 250 bags of 5kg rice, cooking oil, Sardines and other assorted food items to some needy persons in the community.

Some of the target beneficiaries were the aged, widows, disabled persons and persons known to be facing serious economic and financial crises in the area.

Nana Agyeimaa Akenten II, Queen of Ahenema Kokoben who donated the items to the beneficiaries on behalf of the Asona Royal Family said, they were very much aware that, the restrictions imposed by the President have invited some level of hardships on the people and so, Nananom agreed to at least identify some vulnerable persons in the community to come to their help.

Speaking to the media, Nana Hemaa said, "we are all aware the measures government have placed in the midst of this deadly virus and we cannot also forget about some of the negative impacts it leaves of society especially some of these people we've come to support (the vulnerable). Even though, it is a very challenging situation now, we should all agree with the president to do what is best for us in order the curtail the spread of the virus. Today, we've not come to say we're giving you all that you need but we are here to give our widow's mite and also admonish all of us to come together to fight this disease".

She also called for more of such supports to the needy from organizations, individuals and government.

Nana Agyeimaa Akenten II took the opportunity to also advise everybody to adhere to all measures that the government have outlined in our fight against the global pandemic.

Some of the beneficiaries who also couldn't hide their joy heaped praises on Nananom to have taken this Godly step in these difficult times.
A raft of weak economic data around the world rammed home the risks to corporate earnings from coronavirus disruptions, contributing to another fall for local equities on Thursday.

The benchmark S&P/ASX 200 fell 50.4 points, or 0.9 percent, to 5416.3, hit by big decline in banks, miners, retailers and REITS.

The slide followed a raft of ugly economic data from the United States, including record monthly declines for retail sales and industrial production during March.

Equities have moved higher as markets price the peaking of viral spread in Europe and the US, while life in China starts to resume, said Kerry Craig, global market strategist at JP Morgan Asset Management. However, earnings expectations havent kept up with the fast-paced changes to the economic outlook and further downgrades to earnings may create another leg down in the equity market.

Mr Craig cautioned that while markets are forward looking and will likely lead the economic recovery, history suggests the economy can recover faster from a recession than equity market back to previous highs.

While valuations have made the long-run outlook for equities better, we remain cautious until the earnings picture becomes clearer, he said. Investors should remain vigilant to what the market is pricing and realise that market rallies in a longer bear market are not unusual.

All the big four banks fell during the session, led by Westpac which slid 2.3 per cent to $15.92. Bendigo Bank and Bank of Queensland were hit even harder, falling 4.7 per cent and 3.4 per cent respectively to $5.90 and $4.91.

The big miners were also pressured with BHP sliding 2 per cent to $30.79 while Rio Tinto shed 1.4 per cent to $88.55.

Lynas Corporation made those declines look small, tumbling 8.6 per cent to $1.48 on uncertainty over its Malaysian operations.

Other notable falls included James Hardie which slumped 6.9 per cent to $18.54 following a huge drop in US homebuilder confidence in April. Aristocrat Leisure also eased 6.2 per cent to $22.50 following trading updates from Australias casino operators.

Helping to partially offset those falls, Aurizon added 3.9 per cent to $4.58 following its quarterly update while IAG added 3.3 per cent to $6.27. Woolworths also rose 2.8 per cent to $37.24.
chinese laboratory coronavirus

Getty

Amid questions about the origin of the novel coronavirus outbreak, diplomatic cables obtained by The Washington Post showed that US officials had sounded the alarm about possible safety breaches at a lab in Wuhan, China.

The diplomats and scientists were worried about the safety of the lab's research on coronaviruses in animals like bats as early as January 2018.

The Post said they warned that sloppy safety protocols for handling contagious viruses in the lab "represented a risk of a new SARS-like pandemic."

While there is no evidence to suggest that the virus was created in a lab as a bioweapon, the diplomatic cables shine more light on a theory that the virus leaked out of the lab by accident.

Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

Amid questions about the origin of the novel coronavirus outbreak, newly reported diplomatic cables showed that US officials had sounded the alarm about possible safety breaches at a lab studying coronaviruses in animals in Wuhan, China.

In the cables, obtained by the Washington Post national-security columnist Josh Rogin, US officials raised concerns about safety at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in 2018, two years before the novel coronavirus outbreak.

The lab, which holds a level-four biosafety research certification, the highest possible rating, was conducting research on coronaviruses in bats.

After multiple visits to the lab from a US diplomat in Wuhan and a science diplomat at the US Embassy in Beijing in early 2018, the officials became concerned about the safety of the research and sent two "sensitive but unclassified" cables back to Washington, DC, asking for assistance to help the lab tighten its safety protocols.

According to The Post, a cable dated January 19, 2018, said that "during interactions with scientists at the WIV laboratory, they noted the new lab has a serious shortage of appropriately trained technicians and investigators needed to safely operate this high-containment laboratory."

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The Post said that diplomats and scientists were particularly worried about the safety of the lab's research on the transmission of bat coronaviruses and warned that sloppy safety protocols for handling contagious viruses in the lab "represented a risk of a new SARS-like pandemic."

To be clear, there is no evidence to suggest that the novel coronavirus was created in a lab as a bioweapon. But the newly reported diplomatic cables shine a light on a theory that the virus may have leaked out of the lab by accident or through biowaste, infecting the surrounding population.

Like the severe acute respiratory syndrome outbreak that originated in southern China in 2002, the novel coronavirus outbreak began with animal-to-human transmission.

The Wuhan Institute of Virology had previously published research locating the cluster of bats believed to have transmitted SARS to humans. And the lab's researchers were the first to report, in February, that the novel coronavirus originated in bats.

In the cable, the diplomats said the researchers' work "strongly suggests that SARS-like coronaviruses from bats can be transmitted to humans to cause SARS-like diseases," adding that "from a public health perspective, this makes the continued surveillance of SARS-like coronaviruses in bats and study of the animal-human interface critical to future emerging coronavirus outbreak prediction and prevention."

While such research is important to fully understand animal-to-human transmission of coronaviruses, the cable raised concerns that the highly dangerous research could cause more harm than good without immediate intervention to improve the lab's safety protocols.

"The cable was a warning shot," a US official told The Post. "They were begging people to pay attention to what was going on."

As Rogin noted, researchers have previously raised concerns about the safety of so-called gain-of-function studies that increase the strength or contagion of dangerous pathogens and raise the risk of disease outbreaks.

While the Chinese government has said the novel coronavirus was first transmitted to humans in a wet market in Wuhan, there are still many questions about the virus' origins. Those have been compounded by the government's obfuscations, lack of transparency with other nations, restrictions on research about the virus, and silencing of those who first spoke out about it.

Chinese diplomats have inflamed tensions with the US and spread conspiracy theories of their own, including one claiming that the US Army brought the coronavirus to Wuhan.

Gen. Mark Milley, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told reporters on Tuesday that US intelligence was carefully examining the possibility that the virus accidentally got out of a lab in Wuhan.

"There's a lot of rumor and speculation in a wide variety of media, blog sites, etc.," Milley said, according to DefenseOne. "It should be no surprise to you that we have taken a keen interest in that, and we have had a lot of intelligence take a hard look at that."

"At this point it's inconclusive," he added, saying that while "the weight of evidence seems to indicate natural, but we do not know for sure."

As The Post's David Ignatius and others have noted, the argument that the virus originated in the Wuhan market has some unresolved inconsistencies.

The market did not sell bats (though it's possible that some of the other animals had connections with bats), and research published in The Lancet in January found that neither the first known person to be infected nor many in the first cluster of patients had any connection to the market.

Ignatius also said that another lab, the Wuhan department of the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention, was researching animal coronaviruses right next to the market and holds only a level-two biosafety certification.

"I don't think it's a conspiracy theory. I think it's a legitimate question that needs to be investigated and answered," Xiao Qiang, a research scientist at the University of California at Berkeley, told Rogin of the evidence that the virus may have got into the population from a lab accident. "To understand exactly how this originated is critical knowledge for preventing this from happening in the future."

Read the original article on Business Insider
KFC has reopened a number of stores as takeaways until Britain's coronavirus lockdown ends.

The fast food giant is serving meals at 11 branches across the country but with a limited menu and no eating in.

The chain shut up all shops on March 25, two days after the government told all Britons to self isolate.

The fast food giant is serving meals at 11 branches across the country but with a limited menu and no eating in (file photo)

KFCs in London, Manchester, Birmingham and Glasgow are among those that have reopened.

Which KFC branches have reopened? Manchester (Deansgate)

Manchester (Hulme)

Stockport (Heaton Chapel)

Birmingham (New Oscott)

Tamworth

Portsmouth

Aldershot, Hampshire

Ipswich (Cardinal Park)

Glasgow (Pollokshaws Road)

Glasgow (Great Western Retail Park)

Enfield (Coliseum Retail Park) Advertisement

But the company is hoping to expand this to other branches if it is deemed safe amid the rampaging pandemic.

Staff in the stores and delivery drivers will abide by social distancing rules, including taping the floor to indicate two-metre distances.

There will be fewer workers in the kitchens and the reduced menu will lessen the need for them to come into contact.

KFC spokesman said: 'Over the last week, we've reopened 11 of our restaurants in the UK.

'They're open for delivery only and are serving a limited menu, operated by fewer team members with new procedures in place to help ensure we're following social distancing guidelines.

'There's still a need for affordable, accessible food at this time - so we want to do our part.'

KFCs in London, Manchester, Birmingham and Glasgow are among those that have reopened

The company has donated more than 3,000 meals to NHS staff and key workers who are still grinding while much of the country is shut down.

And the 11 open restaurants will give up to 100 free dinners on Tuesdays to the heroes on the frontline.
Vancouver, British Columbia--(Newsfile Corp. - April 9, 2020) - Para Resources Inc. (TSXV: PBR) (WKN: A14YF1) (OTC: PRSRF) (the "Company" or "Para") announces that due to circumstances created by the COVID-19 pandemic, the British Columbia Securities Commission and other members of the Canadian Securities Administrators granted "Issuers" in the Canadian securities industry up to an additional 45 days, to complete year-end statutory filings. The Company does not believe that it will be able to file its December 31, 2019 audited annual financial statements by its usual 120 day deadline of April 29, 2020, and will be relying on the extension. Accordingly, as required by the conditions of the extension, the Company's management and other insiders will be subject to a trading black-out that reflects the principles in Section 9 of National Policy 11-207 until its financial statements are filed, which will be by June 16, 2020. Other than as previously disclosed by the Company in news releases, including the information herein, there are no other material business developments since the date of the Company's most recent filing of its interim financial statements and management discussion and analysis for its Q3 ended September 30, 2019. The Company will be providing an update news release on the status of filing its December 31, 2019 audited financial statements by May 29, 2020.

ABOUT PARA RESOURCES:

Para Resources Inc. ("Para") is a junior gold mining and exploration company. The Company owns the El Limon Mine in Zaragoza, Colombia, a project that includes both near-term mining and milling operations as well as highly prospective exploration properties. The Company has acquired a fully permitted mine and facility with adjacent properties that have an abundance of small scale artisanal miners, dramatically reducing the exploration risk. It is anticipated that the operating mine will be profitable in the short term, providing a return on capital as a stand-alone entity, and funding regional exploration to expand resources.

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Para is unique in that the Insiders have invested more than US$30 million of their capital and own approximately 70% of the Company's equity.

Para's new management team is seasoned and proven, having discovered, built, managed and sold several different mines over the last 40 years.

On behalf of the Board of Directors

"Javier Cordova"



Javier Cordova, President & Chief Executive Officer

For further information, please contact Andrea Laird, telephone: +1-604-259-0302.

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/54324
Central New York's congressional representatives are asking House and Senate leaders for more funding to support services for domestic violence and sexual assault victims.

In a letter to congressional leaders, U.S. Reps. Anthony Brindisi and John Katko wrote that more aid is needed for organizations working to address domestic violence and sexual assault.

The $2.2 trillion coronavirus stimulus measure approved last month included $45 million for the Family Violence Prevention and Services Act, which helps domestic violence victims and their children, and $2 million for the National Domestic Violence Hotline. Brindisi, D-Utica, and Katko, R-Camillus, are asking congressional leaders for more funding under the Violence Against Women Act.

Like the other laws, the Violence Against Women Act funds organizations supporting domestic violence victims. It also provides assistance to groups working with sexual assault victims.

"Organizations like Vera House, the Young Women's Christian Association, the House of the Good Shepherd and many others have adapted their procedures to maintain services and respond to the needs of our community," Brindisi and Katko wrote. "It is critical that the federal government provide support for these organizations, their mission and their partners nationwide."

Brindisi and Katko have heard from central New York groups about the challenges of providing services during the COVID-19 pandemic. With stay-at-home orders in place and social distancing mandated, there are limits on how these organizations can help domestic violence and sexual assault survivors.

There have been reports in New York of an uptick in the number of domestic violence cases. The National Domestic Violence Hotline has received more calls during the outbreak, according to Brindisi and Katko.

"We appreciate Congressman Katko and Brindisi advocating for the needs of domestic violence programs and rape crisis centers in the midst of these very challenging times," said Randi Bregman, executive director of Vera House in Syracuse. "We are in desperate need of additional support to ensure that we can continue providing essential services."

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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Dalmia Bharat Sugar & Industries informed that the company has started manufacturing hand sanitizers at its distillery units in Jawaharpur and Nigohi, Uttar Pradesh and Kolhapur unit in Maharashtra.

The announcement was made post trading hours on Monday (13 April 2020).

The company is distributing the same pro bono to the government hospitals and police and is also packing in 5, 10, 20 litre bottles for commercial organisations.

However, the company feels that on as is basis it may not have significant incremental revenue from the hand sanitizers.

Shares of the sugar maker slipped 0.96% to end at Rs 61.65 on Monday (13 April 2020).

Dalmia Bharat Sugar and Industries is engaged in manufacturing of sugar, generation of power, manufacturing of industrial alcohol and manufacturing of refractory products.

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The good news around a continued drop in the number of new coronavirus cases in Queensland has been offset by a reported rise in racist attacks related to the virus.

The state posted just nine new cases of COVID-19 on Wednesday, the lowest number of new cases since March 10.

Because a handful of cases were reviewed as false positives, Queensland is sitting just shy of 1000 overall cases of the virus on 999, with 552 active cases, 23 of whom are in hospital.

A total of 11 of those cases are in intensive care wards, 10 of them ventilated, while 442 people are now confirmed to have recovered from the disease, while the death rate remains at five.
Air evacuation pod for coronavirus patients developed by Navy

India

oi-Vicky Nanjappa

Kochi, Apr 15: The Indian Navy's Naval Aircraft Yard here has developed a smart evacuation pod for evacuation of Covid-19 patients safely from remote areas such as islands and ships. The indigenously designed and fabricated an Air Evacuation Pod (AEP) will help the evacuation team to safely shift coronavirus-infected persons from ships and islands in a fully sealed patient transfer capsule.

There will be no risk of cross-infection to pilots and evacuation team using the pod with no requirement of sanitation of aircraft post evacuation, a Defence spokesman said here.

Coronavirus outbreak: COVID-19 cannot be cured by BCG vaccine, says WHO

The evacuation pod was designed under guidance of Principal Medical Officer of the naval air station here, INS Garuda in consultation with specialist from the naval hospital INHS Sanjivani and Head Quarters of Southern Naval Command, the spokesperson said.

It is made of aluminium, nitrile rubber and perspex.

The highlight of the pod is that it weighs only 32 kg and has incurred a manufacturing cost of Rs 50,000 which is only 0.1 per cent of cost of an imported equivalent (Rs 59 lakh), the spokesman said.

"Trials of patients inside AEP were undertaken on board Advance Light Helicopter (ALH) and Dornier aircraft of Indian Navy at Southern Naval Command and successfully completed on April 8. Twelve AEPs are planned for distribution across Southern, Western, Eastern and Andaman and Nicobar Naval commands," the spokesman said.

WHO funding halted by Trump over handling of coronavirus

The successful induction of the AEP will vastly increase the Indian Navy's abilities in its relentless efforts towards aiding Covid-19 prevention across the nation, the spokesman added.
Rachel Stovall is a longtime community advocate and organizer. Also a fundraising, media and marketing consultant, Stovall is most known for singing with her dance band Phat Daddy and the Phat Horn Doctors.
Less than 24 hours after the launch of the GH COVID-19 Tracker App by government, the initiative has been described as useless by the National Communications Officer of the National Democratic Congress (NDC).



Bawumia Launches GH COVID-19 Tracker App



Vice President Dr. Mahamudu Bawumia on Monday launched the GH COVID-19 Tracker App to enable individuals to access and provide basic information to contact tracers to facilitate easy tracking, testing, and treatment of the respiratory disease.



The Tracker, developed by the Ministries of Communication and Health, would also aid health authorities to identify high-risk communities and prioritise contact tracing and testing to prevent further spread of the virus.



The Vice President, at the launch, urged Ghanaians to download the App from www.ghcovid19.com or use the shortcode *769#, especially those without smartphones.



The Tracker provides advanced information on persons infected by the virus through various telephone-related data to link them to health professionals.



It also provides detailed information about people who have been at the same event, location, country or other defined locations to help health authorities know where they might have exposed others to the virus over time. The App will be available on App stores later this week.



COVID-19 Testing: "Ghana Way Ahead Of US, UK"; Among World's "Top 20" In Per Capita Testing



Dr. Mahamudu Bawumia also indicated that the countrys aggressive contact-tracing and testing procedures have been a major tool in the fight against the spread of the deadly pandemic since the country confirmed its first official case on March 11, 2020.



According to him, the number of tests Ghana has conducted, 37,954 as of 11 April, ranks the country among the top 20 nations in the world, and amongst the top in Africa, of countries who are testing for COVID-19 per capita.



Our focus has been on tracing, testing, treatment, as well as observing social distancing. Ghana has adopted an aggressive testing strategy. In terms of testing for coronavirus per capita, Ghana is, on the basis of available data, in the top 20 of Countries in the world. He said



Unserious Gov't



But moments after the launch, Sammy Gyamfi is wondering if the Nana Addo-led government is really serious in the fight against the worlds most deadly virus, also known as COVID-19, after arguing that the vice president lied in his analysis.



You [Government] dont have test kits, you dont have PPEs yet they dont care. Is President Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo and his Vice Dr. Bawumia serious? They dont have any plan and they are not thinking ahead, he said in an interview with NEAT FMs morning show "Ghana Montie".



Useless App



According to the outspoken NDC communicator, the tracker app which was widely publicized is not even ready for use.



So, theyre happy to organize a concert to launch an app which isnt working. The app is not on any platform so why are they wasting money on an app which is not ready? We need money for isolation centers...and they are talking about an app...How does this app help fight Coronavirus? he quizzed.



Watch Video Below





Source: King Edward Ambrose Washman Addo/Peacefmonline.com/Ghana









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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Minister of Health, Osagie Ehanire refuted claims of the federal government inviting Chinese doctors to help in the fight against Coronavirus in the country.

The health Minister made this clarification while appearing on Channels TVs News at 10, saying the China Civil Engineering Construction Corporation (CCECC) brought in the doctors to help the FG.

Osagie also disclosed that the doctors are currently in isolation and they will soon start a video conferencing with them to learn from their experience.

He said;
A total of 3,203 fines were issued by police forces in England between March 27 and April 13 for alleged breaches of the new coronavirus lockdown laws.

However, not all areas have seen the same number of fines.

Lancashire had the highest number of fines in England with 380 handed out. Meanwhile, Humberside had the lowest, with only two issued by police.

Members of the public as old as 100 were slapped with a 60 penalty, that is reduced to 30 if paid within two weeks.

Police have issued over 3,000 fines / AFP via Getty Images

A third of the fines went to those aged 18-24, with a further third going to those aged 25-34. In total 26 people aged between 65 to 100 also received notices.

Police said that 83 people were brought straight to court for allegedly breaking the rules.

It comes as 39 fines issued to children for alleged breaches of coronavirus lockdown rules have had to be withdrawn due to the law exempting under-18s from fixed penalty notices.

The lockdown rules have proved controversial / AFP via Getty Images

The new lockdown rules have proved controversial, with some posts on social media accusing police of being over-zealous.

Home Secretary Priti Patel warned the public not to blow the police enforcement of coronavirus rules out of proportion based on a few social media posts.

Ms Patel said that the majority of police officers were following the guidance really well but would be unafraid to act if people put lives at risk by not doing the right thing.

Take a look below at where fines have been issued by police:

Fines issued in England between March 27 and April 13:

 Avon & Somerset: 89

 Bedfordshire: 63

 British Transport Police: 148

 Cambridgeshire: 27

 Cheshire: 17

 Cleveland: 91

 Cumbria: 40

 Derbyshire: 61

 Devon & Cornwall: 169

 Dorset: 23

 Durham: 14

 Essex: 20

 Gloucestershire: 37

 Greater Manchester: 38

 Hampshire: 103

 Hertfordshire: 104

 Humberside: 2

 Kent: 53

 Lancashire: 380

 Leicestershire: 58

 Lincolnshire: 31

 Merseyside: 42

 Metropolitan: 81

 MoD Police: 2

 Norfolk: 126

 North Yorkshire: 150

 Northamptonshire: 12

 Northumbria: 32

 Nottinghamshire: 21

 South Yorkshire: 118

 Staffordshire: 4

 Suffolk: 95

 Surrey: 205

 Sussex: 163

 Thames Valley: 219

 Warwickshire: 5

 West Mercia: 30

 West Midlands: 139

 West Yorkshire: 121

 Wiltshire: 69

Fines issued in Wales between April 10 and April 13:

 Dyfed Powys: 123

 Gwent: 80

 South Wales: 61

 North Wales: 26
LONDON, UK / ACCESSWIRE / April 15, 2020 / Anglo Pacific Group PLC (the "Company" or "Anglo Pacific") (LSE: APF, TSX: APY) announces the publication of its Notice of Annual General Meeting (the "AGM Notice") and Form of Proxy for the 2020 Annual General Meeting on the Company's website, www.anglopacificgroup.com.

Annual General Meeting

The 2020 AGM will be held at 2:00pm on 27 May 2020 at the Company's registered office, 1 Savile Row (entrance via 7 Vigo Street), London W1S 3JR. In order to comply with the UK government's "Stay at Home" measures, shareholders will not be permitted to attend the AGM in person and should therefore vote by proxy.

The Board understands that beyond voting on the formal business of the meeting, the AGM also serves as a forum for shareholders to raise questions and comments to the Board. Therefore, following the AGM, the Board will hold a webcast meeting at 3:00pm on 27 May 2020 for registered shareholders and their corporate representatives or proxies. This will include a short presentation from Patrick Meier, Chairman and Julian Treger, Chief Executive Officer. Following the presentation, all members of the Board will be available to respond to questions from shareholders and their corporate representatives or proxies. Shareholders are invited to also submit any questions by email to company.secretary@anglopacificgroup.com by 5.00pm (UK time) on 25 May 2020.

AGM Webcast

Please join the event 5-10 minutes prior to scheduled start time.

Company Name Anglo Pacific Event Title 2020 AGM Presentation Webcast Time Zone Dublin, Edinburgh, Lisbon, London Start Time/Date 15:00pm Wednesday, 27 May 2020 Duration 60 minutes Webcast Link https://webcasting.brrmedia.co.uk/broadcast/5e95e10b31da814c9fc69336

A hard copy version of the AGM Notice and the Form of Proxy will be sent to those shareholders who have elected to continue to receive paper communications on 24 April 2020. Shareholders who have not elected to continue to receive paper communications, will be sent a notification of the availability of these documents on the Company's website by post or, where they have elected, by email.

Story continues

Anglo Pacific will submit to the UK National Storage Mechanism a copy of its AGM Notice in accordance with LR 9.6.1R. The documents will shortly be available for inspection through the National Storage Mechanism at https://data.fca.org.uk/#/nsm/nationalstoragemechanism and through SEDAR at www.sedar.com.

For further information:

Anglo Pacific Group PLC +44 (0) 20 3435 7400 Julian Treger - Chief Executive Officer Kevin Flynn - Chief Financial Officer and Company Secretary Website: www.anglopacificgroup.com Berenberg +44 (0) 20 3207 7800 Matthew Armitt / Jennifer Wyllie / Detlir Elezi Peel Hunt LLP +44 (0) 20 7418 8900 Ross Allister / Alexander Allen / David McKeown RBC Capital Markets Farid Dadashev / Marcus Jackson / Jamil Miah +44 (0) 20 7653 4000 Camarco +44 (0) 20 3757 4997 Gordon Poole / Owen Roberts / James Crothers

Notes to Editors

About Anglo Pacific

Anglo Pacific Group PLC is a global natural resources royalty and streaming company. The Company's strategy is to become a leading natural resources company through investing in high quality projects in preferred jurisdictions with trusted counterparties, underpinned by strong ESG principles. It is a continuing policy of the Company to pay a substantial portion of these royalties and streams to shareholders as dividends.

This information is provided by RNS, the news service of the London Stock Exchange. RNS is approved by the Financial Conduct Authority to act as a Primary Information Provider in the United Kingdom. Terms and conditions relating to the use and distribution of this information may apply. For further information, please contact rns@lseg.com or visit www.rns.com.

SOURCE: Anglo Pacific Group PLC





View source version on accesswire.com:

https://www.accesswire.com/585184/Anglo-Pacific-Group-PLC-Announces-Notice-of-2020-Annual-General-Meeting




Cambodias national assembly has approved a state emergency law on Friday, April 10 that will give the government powers to monitor communications, control media and prohibit or limit the distribution of information deemed to trigger public fear and damage national security. The International Federation of Journalists (IFJ) condemns the legislation which will further weaken press freedom and democratic rights in the country.

A man rides his food motor-cart past a barricade as police block motorists from passing at a checkpoint set up at the border between Phnom Penh and neighbouring Kandal province, as part of efforts to contain the spread of the COVID-19 coronavirus, in Phnom Penh on April 10, 2020. Credit: Tang Chhin Sothy/AFP

Prime Minister Hun Sen had indicated earlier that emergency powers would be called for to tackle the outbreak. As Hun Sens Cambodian Peoples Party holds every seat in the National Assembly, the law passed unanimously.

Hun Sen strongly defended the new legislation and rejected any criticism that the government was using the pandemic as an opportunity to enact the state of emergency law to silence people and abuse freedom of expression. In the case of a rebellion or overthrow of the government, Hun Sen emphasized that authorities could still take stern measures, even without the state of emergency law.

Cambodias government under Hun Sen is known for controlling the media and curtailing press freedom. IFJs South East Media Freedom Report 2019 revealed that media freedom in the country is seriously declining, with ongoing threats of arrest and detainment by authorities. A series of repressive policies have been blamed for the deterioration.

Cambodia had reported 122 positive cases of Covid-19, with no new cases for two consecutive days with zero death as of Tuesday, April 14.

The IFJ said: Tackling the pandemic should in no way be used as a justification to further crackdown on human rights and media freedom in Cambodia. The IFJ condemns the approval of the state of emergency legislation and calls on the government to protect the health of its citizens rather than violating democracy.
BAKU, Azerbaijan, April 15

Trend:

Turkmenistan discussed joining a number of international UN documents, Trend reports with reference to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Turkmenistan.



The discussions were held in the building of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Turkmenistan on April 14, 2020.



During the working meeting, issues related to Turkmenistan's cooperation with UN in various areas were discussed.

Attention was paid on Turkmenistan's accession to a number of international agreements and conventions in the field of transport and trucking industry. This agreement has a special contribution to the development of trade and economic ties between the countries of the region.



Importance of the framework program for cooperation in the field of sustainable development between Turkmenistan and the United Nations from 2021 through 2025, which was signed on March 14, 2020 in Ashgabat, was also noted.



Representatives of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and other departments of Turkmenistan attended the working meeting, and foreign experts participated in the meeting via a video link.


Screen image of vessel collision prediction technology



Evaluating the practicality of control operations



Evaluation by operation controller at the Tokyo Wan Vessel Traffic Service Center

TOKYO, Apr 15, 2020 - (JCN Newswire) - Fujitsu Limited today announced the results of a joint field trial with the Japan Coast Guard to predict vessel collisions with AI technology, demonstrating its usefulness in detecting collision risks early and minimizing the danger of such accidents. The trial in Japan marine traffic control was conducted from December 2019 to March 2020 at the Tokyo Wan Vessel Traffic Service Center(1), which offers navigation support services, under an outsourcing contract with the Japan Coast Guard.Leveraging Fujitsu Human Centric AI Zinrai developed by Fujitsu Laboratories Ltd., this technology can detect near-misses between vessels and predict areas where collision risks are concentrated in the Tokyo Bay. By applying this technology to the Vessel Traffic Services (VTS) system(2) used in maritime traffic control operations, Fujitsu has confirmed that it can contribute to the risk prevention of vessels and improve maritime traffic safety.Beginning in April 2020, Fujitsu will bolster its business structure in safe navigation support, promoting the use of this technology in marine traffic control and offering safe navigation support services for marine traffic control and operating vessels.BackgroundAccording to a report by the Japan Transport Safety Board(3), there were 2,863 marine collision accidents in Japan alone between 2009 and 2019, with an average of 286 accidents per year. Collisions involving large vessels can have a major impact on society, in terms of crew safety, damage to vessels, and marine pollution. The Japan Coast Guard operates a navigation support system that combines radar and the Automatic Identification System (AIS) for high-traffic routes, as they ensure maritime traffic safety by conducting navigation support services at such places including the Traffic Advisory Service Center.However, it is not easy to recognize and predict the movements of a large number of vessels in addition to detecting risks. Therefore, the detection of risks and the timing of risk recommendations to vessels depends on the experience and skill of the operation controllers. To solve these challenges, the Japan Coast Guard took the initiative to apply this technology to control operations in Tokyo Bay. The Coast Guard conducted field trials to verify the effectiveness of this technology in improving the safety of marine traffic by detecting collision risks early and optimizing the timing of sharing information to the vessels.Details about the Field TrialUsing the training environment of the Tokyo Wan Vessel Traffic Service Center, with the cooperation of six experienced maritime traffic control operation controllers and instructors, control tasks based on past near miss accidents were simulated to demonstrate the effectiveness of practical operations.Two methods of control operation were evaluated:1) The conventional method, where operation controllers recognized and predicted the movement of vessels based on their own experience and skills to determine danger (Evaluation 1, below).2) In addition to conventional control operations, risk information was calculated with collision risk prediction technology by utilizing past AIS data and risk recommendation records from the Japan Coast Guard (Evaluation 2, below).Changes in the analysis of 36 patterns were examined, including differences in monitoring areas, experience and skills of operation controllers.Field Trial ResultsAs a result of the statistical analysis of both Evaluation 1 and 2, it was found that this technology could shorten the time before a risk warning is sent to a vessel by the operation controller by an average of approximately two minutes, enabling the early detection of vessels at risk of collision.It was also confirmed that the number of warnings issued for risk-prone vessels nearly doubled with the technology, indicating proactive preventive measures and the potential to enhance safety in Tokyo Bay.As this technology assists marine control operations by analyzing the qualitative conditions of collision risks, operations could be performed at acceptable levels, regardless of the experience and skill of the operation controllers. It was particularly effective for newcomers, and in some cases they could even perform the same control actions as those conducted by highly skilled controllers. It was also found to be effective in leveling the skills of experienced controllers.Future DevelopmentsBased on the field trial results, Fujitsu will continue to collaborate with the Japan Coast Guard to improve the technology. Accordingly, the company aims to offer services for maritime traffic control as well as services to support safe navigation for operating vessels in the near future.Comment from the Maritime Traffic Department Japan Coast GuardThe field trial has demonstrated that Fujitsu's collision risk prediction technology is effective in assisting operation controllers. Going forward, we will verify more complex traffic conditions and improve the accuracy of the technology, as we plan to implement the development.(1) Tokyo Wan Vessel Traffic Service Center By providing information necessary for safe vessel operation and conducting integrated navigation control, the Center manages the safety of marine traffic in congested sea areas. Tokyo Wan is the Japanese term for Tokyo Bay.(2) VTS (Vessel Traffic Services) system System used for the management of Vessel Traffic Services. Used to provide essential information on shipping and maritime traffic such as those obtained by Automatic Identification Service (AIS), collecting relevant data to improve the safety and efficiency of navigation.(3) Japan Transport Safety Board One of the extra-ministerial bureaus of the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism. The Board aims to prevent accidents and mitigate damage by investigating the causes of serious incidents and accidents by aircraft, railway, and marine vessels, and advising the Ministry and other concerned parties on the implementation of necessary measures based on their investigation.About FujitsuFujitsu is the leading Japanese information and communication technology (ICT) company, offering a full range of technology products, solutions, and services. Approximately 132,000 Fujitsu people support customers in more than 100 countries. We use our experience and the power of ICT to shape the future of society with our customers. Fujitsu Limited (Code: 6702) reported consolidated revenues of 4.0 trillion yen (US $36 billion) for the fiscal year ended March 31, 2019. For more information, please see www.fujitsu.com.Source: Fujitsu LtdCopyright 2020 JCN Newswire . All rights reserved.
New Delhi, April 15 : Union cabinet may give post facto approval to the proposal of EPF contribution by the government announced under PM Garib Kalyan Yojana by Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman on March 26.

Official sources said that the cabinet approval is required to implement the proposal as it is expected to require additional budgetary allocation of around Rs 4,960 crore during the current year.

Moreover, the proposal to allow subscribers to withdraw 75 per cent of their EPF contribution or three months wages whichever is lower as contingency expenditure non-refundable advance would need an amendment to EPFO regulation.

The cabinet is scheduled to meet later in the day on Wednesday.

As part of the Rs 1,70,000 package announced by Sitharaman last month she also proposed that the government will bear entire 24 per cent EPF contribution of employer and employees (12 per cent each) for next three months. This support will be for employees of establishments that employ up to 100 employees and wages of 90 per cent of their employees is less than Rs 15,000 per month.

The measure was announced to provide relief to establishments facing disruptions due to lockdown and were facing shortages in cash flow even to meet statutory obligations.

For organised sector, EPFO regulation is being amended to implement the proposal on non-refundable advance.

"The PM Gareeb Kalyan scheme under which the government proposes to pay both the employer and employee PF contributions will ease liquidity challenges on the employer and ensure continuity of PF contributions for the employee.

"While the scheme is applicable to companies with up to 100 employees, the additional condition that 90 per cent of employees should earn less than Rs 15,000 per month will limit the applicability. The government should also clarify whether the Rs 15,000 refers to wages for the purpose of PF contribution or total wages," said Saraswathi Kasturirangan, Partner, Deloitte India.

As per the government data, as on April 13, about 2.1 Lakh members of EPFO have taken benefit of the online withdrawal of non-refundable advance from EPFO account amounting to Rs 510 crore. Besides, an amount of Rs 1,000 crore has already been released to EPFO for the Scheme (payment of EPF contribution) for the month of April, 2020. About 78.74 lakh beneficiaries and concerned establishments have been informed.

-- The story has been published from a wire feed without any modifications to the text
OMAHA, Neb. (AP)  An upscale outlet mall near Omaha plans to reopen later this month even as the number of coronavirus cases and deaths continue to grow and even though a statewide order prohibits gatherings of more than 10 people.

The owner of the Nebraska Crossing Outlets says their experience will be a case study of best practices for other malls, though it is not immediately clear how many stores will reopen when the mall does and how the facility will comply with state-ordered social distancing protocols.

Were looking at the great opportunity to set some best practices and help our retailers open their portfolios across the country, owner Rod Yates said to the Omaha World-Herald. Yates didn't immediately respond Tuesday to a message from The Associated Press.

Retail analyst Jon Reily said he doesnt think the mall will be successful with its reopening plans because consumers will likely be reluctant to shop there.

People are very cautious, said Reily, who is senior vice president of global commerce strategy at Isobar. I dont know if old patterns of going to the mall to buy nonessential items are really going to stick.

Nebraska is one of the few states that still allows malls to be open even though many businesses are closed because the state prohibits gatherings of more than 10 people and limits restaurants and bars to take out and delivery services.

The outlet sits next to a heavily traveled stretch of Interstate 80 about halfway between Omaha and Lincoln. Douglas, Sarpy and Lancaster counties, which include Omaha and Lincoln and their suburbs, had seen a total of 349 cases as of Tuesday morning. Thats about 40% of the statewide total of 871 cases of COVID-19 and 18 deaths linked to the disease.

The mall plans to reopen April 24, which would be roughly the same time state officials expect the number of Nebraska coronavirus cases to peak.

Gov. Pete Ricketts said Tuesday the stores are free to reopen as long as they follow the states social-distancing guidelines.

Story continues

We didnt ask them to close, and we didnt ask them to open, he said at his weekday coronavirus news conference.

Ricketts, a Republican, has encouraged residents to shop alone and limit their excursions to one trip per week, but he hasnt ordered any formal restrictions. He said he discussed the matter with the shopping centers managers, and told them that if they chose to open, they needed to follow the state rules.

Mall officials say they have purchased 100 thermometers for each store to use to check employees at the start of each day, and they plan to install 200 plastic shields at registers to separate customers and employees. Officials plan to encourage employees and customers to wear masks and gloves and avoid walking around in groups at the outdoor mall.

Anything we do is going to be very controlled, Yates said. Were not going to do any mass events that attract hundreds of people. Were going to slowly ease ourselves into the process of getting ourselves open.

It could be difficult for stores to maintain social distancing if crowds of shoppers returned, but Craig Johnson, president of consumer consultancy Customer Growth Partners, said he doesn't think the mall is likely to have that problem.

My guess is they will be happy and delighted if a store gets crowded enough where people have to worry about their six-foot radius, Johnson said. I just don't think they're going to get a big crowd.

___

Associated Press Writer Grant Schulte contributed to this report from Lincoln, Nebraska.
Houstonians are remembering one of the best local campus pranks in history: the rotation of the William Marsh Rice statue on the Rice University campus.

Thirty-two years ago, Rice undergrads gathered to turn the figure on its base, so it faced the library.

More than a statue, actually, it's a tombstone. Rice's ashes fill the base of the marker.

HoustonChronicle.com: Rice University will open its residence halls to health care workers fighting the coronavirus

The elaborate prank took years to devise, a handful of failed attempts and roughly a dozen students, several of whom claimed engineering-study backgrounds.

Houston Chronicle editor Lisa Gray describes the day of the fateful orbit:

"At 5:45 a.m. on April 12, 1988, a crew of 11 10 students and the Mastermind, an alumnus who even now wants to remain anonymous  smuggled the parts for their prank onto the campus's main quad. They'd spent weeks building the collapsible assemblage to strict engineering standards, and had tested it by lifting the Mastermind's Corolla. The crew lashed the two A-frames around the statue, then added the crossbar and a hoist. At 6:10, using straps made of seat-belt fabric, they lifted the statue a few inches above its base."

Just one person was caught: Patrick Dyson. The senior, who'd attempted to escape via the main plotter's pickup truck was detained and faced a large fine. He later sold T-shirts on campus that more than paid for the fee.

The mastermind behind the plan has yet to be identified, but years later, a number of other conspirators were revealed. These were involved in the scheming but not the execution: Alex Kazim, T.J. Brudner, Chris Cannon, Kelly Miller, Brian Sweeney, Greg Heath, Debbie Schmidt Dyson, Christopher Ryan and Tom Reeves. John Q. Smith.

Of note: many of those involved have gone on to find great success in the startup community, including Alex Kazim, who was among eBays' early investors. Others have had their hands in other successful launches in Silicon Valley.

Clearly, their college-days ingenuity and boldness has been put to good use.
This is the heartwarming moment hospital staff broke into applause as a 94-year-old 'Wonder Woman' was released after beating coronavirus.

Nurses and doctors gathered in a hallway at Austin Hospital in North Melbourne on Wednesday to farewell Maureen Appleby as she was discharged.

Ms Appleby fought off the deadly bug after spending a week in the isolation ward, 9News reported.

Hows this send off for 94yo Maureen. She is being released from The Austin after fighting off COVID-19. She spent a week on the ward, but is finally well enough to be released today #7newsmelb pic.twitter.com/iAwqaWfwda  Teegan Dolling (@tdolling) April 15, 2020

Medical staff applauded for 94-year-old Mareen Appleby (pictured) as she was discharged from Austin Hospital in Melbourne on Wednesday after beating the coronavirus

'I fought it back, I got there,' she told reporters on Wednesday.

'Two men came to visit me - I thought they were out of Mars. They were in white uniforms with big black glasses, I thought I was dreaming.'

Footage showed Ms Appleby being pushed through the hospital corridor in a wheelchair as doctors and nurses cheered.

Ms Appleby wore a face mask as she clapped and waved to the nurses who cared for her.

The 94-year-old was admitted to the hospital after she fell and broke four ribs.

Hospital staff treating Ms Appleby's injuries noticed that she was displaying coronavirus symptoms and was soon diagnosed.

She contracted the virus from her 69-year-old son, John, before her fall, doctors believe.

Ms Appleby (pictured) and her son spent a week in the Austin Hospital isolation ward

Both Ms Appleby and her son were admitted to Austin Hospital's isolation ward and made full recoveries.

Austin Hospital's Associate Professor Jason Trubiano said Mrs Appleby 'has defied all odds', and was in the high risk category.

'She is over 90 and really that is an amazing effort,' he told reporters.

Ms Appleby was deemed well enough to leave hospital on Wednesday and was allowed to go home in the neighbouring suburb of Rosanna.

Her words of advice were 'To not get scared. Just to take life as it comes and to fight back.'

She joins about 3,600 other Australians who have successfully fought off COVID-19.

The number of positive coronavirus cases has risen to 6,440 and the death toll stands at 63.
Bato Dela Rosa had been living a normal life without so much public attention. The freedom didnt last much after he was given prominent roles in the government.

Image: instagram.com @BatoDelaRosa

Source: UGC

Bato Dela Rosa is a former police officer and currently serving as a politician in the position of Senator of the Philippines since 2019. Previously, he served as the Chief of Philippine National Police and as the Director of the Bureau of Corrections.

Bato Dela Rosa profile summary

Full name : Ronald Marapon Dela Rosa

: Ronald Marapon Dela Rosa Celebrated name: Bato Dela Rosa

Bato Dela Rosa Date of birth : 21st January 1962

: 21st January 1962 Place of birth : Santa Cruz, Philippines

: Santa Cruz, Philippines Bato Dela Rosa age : 58 years

: 58 years Birth sign : Aquarius

: Aquarius Nationality: Filipino

Filipino Ethnicity : White

: White Bato Dela Rosa height : N/A

: N/A Marital status: Married

Married Profession : Filipino police officer, politician

: Filipino police officer, politician Net worth: $1.2 million.

Bato Dela Rosa biography

Dela Rosa was born on 21st January 1962 as Ronald Marapon Dela Rosa at Barangay Bato, Santa Cruz in the Philippines. He is the son of Teodoro Diamaton Dela Rosa Sr. (father) and Anesia Cruspero Marapon (mother). He came from a humble background where his fathers earned little from serving as a tricycle driver. Bato worked as a bus conductor and fish market porter when he was young.

Bato Rosa attended Bato Elementary School before joining Sta. Cruz National High School. Later on, he enrolled at the Mindanao State University (MSU) where he studied for a Bachelor of Science degree in public administration.

In 1982, Rosa left the Mindanao State University and joined the Philippine Military Academy (PMA). He graduated from PMA in 1986 as part of the PMA Sinagtala class.

In 1998, he earned his Masters of Public Administration and in 2006, he attained his PhD in development administration. He attained both his masters and PhD degrees from the University of Southeastern Philippines in Davao City.

READ ALSO: Nick Jonas bio: Wife, brothers, net worth, baby, health, photos

Bato also undertook several military courses as follows:

Police Intelligence Officer Advanced Course

Scout Ranger Orientation Course

Police Safety Officer Course

Police Officers' Comptrollership Course

FBI Academy training course

U.S Army Ranger School

Air Marshal Instructors course

Bato Dela Rosa wife

Image: instagram.com @BatoDelaRosa

Source: UGC

Behind every successful man, there is a woman. Nancy Dela Rosa is the woman behind Senator Bato Dela Rosas greatness. Bato Dela Rosa has been married to Nancy Johnson Comandante since 1989.

The pair has three children together, two daughters and one son. Bato Dela Rosa children names and details are some of the things the couple has chosen to keep private.

Bato Dela Rosa career

Bato has served the country in the military as well as in the political arenas. Here is a breakdown of his career in both sectors.

Military career

1986 - Lieutenant of the Philippine Constabulary in Davao City.

1992 - Chief inspector and one of the staff members at the Police Regional Office (PRO)-Davao.

1997 - Police provincial director of the Compostela Valley province.

1999 - Police director of the Philippine National Police (PNP) at the Camp Crame in Quezon City.

2001 - Deputy Chief of the Office of the Regional Personnel and Human Resource and Development Division (ORPHRDD) of Region XI.

2003 - Police Superintendent and was assigned to Camp Catitipan in Davao City.

2004 - Head of training at the Directorate for Human Resources Doctrine and Development.

2005 - City personnel at the Davao City Police Office (DCPO).

2005 - Chief of the Regional Intelligence and Investigation Division (RIID) at the Police Regional Office (PRO)-Davao.

2007 - Director of the Compostela Valley Provincial Police Office (CVPPO) as its police chief.

2008 - Senior Superintendent at the - Director of the Compostela Valley Provincial Police Office (CVPPO).

2009 - Director of the Davao Del Sur Provincial Police Office (DSPPO) at the Davao del Sur.

2011 - Chief of the Regional Logistics and Research Development Division (RL-RDD) in PRO-Davao.

2012 - New Director of the Davao City Police Office in Davao City.

2013 to 2014 - National headquarters of the Philippine National Police in Camp Crame serving with the PNP Intelligence Group.

2015 - Member of the PNP Board of Inquiry which was responsible for investigating the Mamasapano clash.

2015 - Executive officer of the Directorate for Human Resource and Doctrine Development (HRDD).

2016 to 2018 - President Rodrigo Duterte appointed him as the Chief of Philippine National Police.

2018 - Director-General of the Bureau of Corrections.

READ ALSO: Sonny Angara bio: wife, age, family, Instagram, net worth

Political career

30th 2019 to date - He took the office of the Senate with more than 19 million votes during the 2019 Philippine Senate elections.

Ronald Bato Dela Rosa achievements

Image: instagram.com @BatoDelaRosa

Source: UGC

Some of the notable accomplishments in his name include:

1998 - PRMG of the Year.

1999 - PAOCTF Satellite Office of the Year.

2012 - PNP Senior PCO of the Year for Operations.

2013 - PNP Achievement Award in the Field of Operations (PCO Level).

2015 - PMA Alumni Association Cavalier Award for Outstanding Performance as Police Professional in Police Operation.

Bato Dela Rosa movie

In December 2018, Bato expressed his desire for Sharon Cuneta and Robin Padilla to act as his wife and him respectively if ever a movie was made. He was interested in the film focusing on his biography as opposed to his romantic life and partnership with his wife.

True to his wishes, a Filipino biographical film titled Bato (The General Ronald Dela Rosa Story) was created. On 27th December 2018, Robin shared a teaser through his Instagram account.

On 22nd January 2019, another version of the teaser was released arousing lots of curiosity among many individuals across the world. The full trailer of the film was released on 23rd January 2019 with the official poster coming out on 24th January 2019.

The film premiered on 30th January 2019 at the SM Megamall in Ortigas Center, Mandaluyong with Rodrigo Durtete the Philippine President in attendance.

Bato Dela Rosa net worth

According to the list ranking Philippine senators based on their latest declared net worth, Senator Bato Dela Rosa is at position 19 with an estimated value of P28, 258,908 which is equivalent to $1.2 million.

Latest updates

The recent news revolves around Bato Dela Rosa US visa cancellation. The visa cancellation took place as the United States was strengthening its crackdown on the violators of human rights.

Bato Rosa had been the mastermind behind Duterte administrations bloody campaign against the illegal drug traffickers. This took place when Bato was serving as the chief of Philippine National Police.

Bato Dela Rosa is a force to reckon with not only in the military endeavours but also in politics as well. He has continually enacted remarkable changes, especially in his fight against drug abuse, among other positive changes in the country.

READ ALSO: Andre Iguodala bio: Wife, current team, trade, age, net worth

Source: KAMI.com.gh
ONEONTA, Ala., April 15, 2020 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Otelco Inc. (OTEL), a wireline telecommunication services provider in Alabama, Maine, Massachusetts, Missouri, New Hampshire, Vermont and West Virginia, announced today a change in the location for its annual meeting of shareholders. The meeting date and time are unchanged.

Meeting Date: Thursday, May 14, 2020

Meeting Time: 11:00 a.m. (Eastern Time)

Virtual Shareholder Meeting access link: https://web.lumiagm.com/224587560

Due to the emerging public health impact of the coronavirus outbreak (COVID-19) and to support the health and well-being of our employees, shareholders, and our community, please note that the location of the 2020 Otelco Annual Meeting of Shareholders (Annual Meeting) has been changed and will be held in a virtual meeting format only. You will not be able to attend the Annual Meeting in person. To access the virtual Annual Meeting on May 14, 2020, at 11:00 a. m. (Eastern Time), please click the Virtual Shareholder Meeting access link referenced above, or type the address into your web browser, fifteen minutes before the start of the meeting. The meeting link can also be found on our web site at https://otelco.gcs-web.com/ .

As described in the proxy materials for the Annual Meeting previously distributed, you are entitled to participate in the Annual Meeting if you were a shareholder of record as of the close of business on March 16, 2020, the record date, or hold a legal proxy for the meeting provided by your bank, broker, or nominee. You will have the opportunity to cast your vote during the Annual Meeting by emailing a copy of your ballot and legal proxy to EQSSProxyTabulation@equiniti.com . If you are a Beneficial Owner and you would like to vote during the meeting, you must contact the broker or agent that holds your shares to request a legal proxy giving you the right to vote your shares. Shareholders are encouraged to vote their shares prior to the meeting as they normally have voted in previous years.

Story continues

How can I participate in the virtual Otelco Inc. Annual Meeting? To participate, visit https://web.lumiagm.com/224587560 15 minutes prior to the meeting. An up-to-date browser is required to work effectively with the virtual meeting software.



How can I vote at the meeting? We encourage you to vote in advance as directed in the proxy statement and through the material provided by your broker. To vote at the meeting, you must contact the broker or agent that holds your shares to request a legal proxy. You may cast your vote during the Annual Meeting by emailing your completed ballot along with a copy of your legal proxy to EQSSProxyTabulation@equiniti.com.

How can I submit questions at the meeting? Shareholders can submit questions from the time they join the virtual meeting until the conclusion of the virtual meeting. Please follow the instructions provided on the portal for submitting a question. The Chairman of the Board and the Chief Executive Officer of the Company will make a short presentation immediately following the conclusion of the meeting and answer shareholder questions.

ABOUT OTELCO

Otelco Inc. provides wireline telecommunications services in Alabama, Maine, Massachusetts, Missouri, New Hampshire, Vermont and West Virginia. The Companys services include local and long distance telephone, digital high-speed data lines, transport services, network access, cable television and other related services. Otelco provides over 67,000 services to more than 32,000 customers, with approximately 10% of those customers served over its Lightwave product. Otelco operates eleven incumbent telephone companies serving rural markets, or rural local exchange carriers. It also provides competitive retail and wholesale communications services and technology consulting, managed services and private/hybrid cloud hosting services through several subsidiaries. For more information, visit the Companys website at www.Otelco.com .

Please note that the proxy card included with the proxy materials previously distributed will not be updated to reflect the change in location and should continue to be used to vote your shares in connection with the Annual Meeting. You may access copies of our proxy statement, form of proxy and 2019 annual report on the Investor section of the Companys web site, https://otelco.gcs-web.com/ .
The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) has called on authorities in the Russian republic of Daghestan to release journalist Abdulmumin Gadzhiev and drop all charges against him.

Gadzhiev, the religious affairs editor of the independent weekly Chernovik, was detained on June 14 on charges of financing terrorism.

He has been held since in pre-trial detention, the CPJ said in a statement on April 14.

On March 27, authorities filed new charges against Gadzhiev, accusing him of participation in an extremist organization, according to Mairbek Agaev, the editor in chief of Chernovik.

Agaev told the CPJ he learned about the new charges on April 14 and said he believed they were in retaliation for Gadzhievs journalism.

He also said he believed authorities invented the new charges because the first case is falling apart due to lack of evidence.

If convicted of participating in an extremist organization, Gadzhiev could face up to 10 years in prison under the Russian criminal code. If convicted on the original terrorism charges, he could face another 20 years.

Authorities in Daghestan should stop cooking up new charges against journalist Abdulmumin Gadzhiev and instead should release him immediately, said Gulnoza Said, CPJs Europe and Central Asia program coordinator.

She added that with the coronavirus spreading in the Northern Caucasus it will inevitably hit its prisons and further endanger Gadzhiev's life.

The CPJ last month wrote an open letter to world leaders urging them to immediately release all journalists behind bars amid the coronavirus pandemic.
President Donald Trump said he will announce Thursday the first plans for lifting coronavirus lockdowns across the United States after the country passed the pandemic's "peak," mirroring a gradual easing in Europe. His comments came shortly before the number of US fatalities -- already the world's highest -- reached a new daily record and became the heaviest one-day death toll of any nation. "It is clear that our aggressive strategy is working," he told a news conference late Wednesday in Washington. "The battle continues but the data suggests that nationwide we have passed the peak on new cases." Trump said he would be announcing guidelines for a reduction in the lockdown in some states, possibly taking effect before the end of this month. Earlier, Germany also unveiled its plans for cautious reopening, becoming the first major European nation to take on the delicate task of restarting its economy without triggering a new wave of infections before a vaccine can be developed. Facing a difficult reelection in November, Trump predicted that the US economy, the world's largest, would "come back quickly" from the paralysis induced by measures taken to slow the virus. Around the world, the total number of COVID-19 cases soared past two million, according to an AFP tally, and the death toll topped 134,000, according to Johns Hopkins University. The US saw 2,569 deaths over a 24-hour period, data from Johns Hopkins showed, with total US deaths above 28,300 In Riyadh, G20 nations of the world's major economies announced a one-year debt moratorium for the world's poorest nations, as the global economy enters the worst recession in a century. Fallout, meanwhile, continued over Trump's attack on the World Health Organization and suspension of US funding to the UN agency. Despite criticism, Trump repeated his accusations Wednesday, saying the WHO covered up the extent of the virus when it first appeared in China, and that as a result France, Italy and Spain were caught unawares. "Tragically, other nations put their trust in the WHO," he said. UN chief Antonio Guterres said this is "not the time" to cut WHO funding, while billionaire Bill Gates, a major WHO contributor, called the move "dangerous." European allies were similarly disapproving and Washington's rivals also took aim -- Russia condemning the "selfish approach" of the US, and China and Iran blasting the decision. - Edging back toward normal - In Europe, Denmark began reopening schools for younger children after a month-long closure and Finland lifted a two-week rail and road blockade on the Helsinki region. Lithuania said it would allow smaller shops to reopen from Thursday. Other countries are tweaking confinement rules, with Iran set to let some small businesses reopen and India allowing millions of rural people to return to work. In South Korea, people went to the polls on Wednesday and delivered a strong show of support for President Moon Jae-in, commending his handling of the epidemic. Once home to the world's second-largest outbreak, South Korea has largely brought the virus under control through widespread testing, contact-tracing and social distancing. A full-scale return to normality still appears a long way off in most other countries. Harvard scientists have warned that repeated periods of social distancing could be needed as far ahead as 2022 to avoid overwhelming hospitals. Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez, who has allowed work to restart in some factories and building sites, warned that "nothing will be the same until a vaccine is found." Belgium extended its stay-at-home order until at least May 3 and banned mass gatherings until the end of August. - 'Extreme caution' - In Germany, Chancellor Angela Merkel announced first steps in undoing coronavirus restrictions that have plunged the economy into a recession. Most shops will be allowed to open once they have "plans to maintain hygiene" although schools must stay closed until May 4 and a ban on large public events will remain in place until August 31. "We have to proceed with extreme caution," Merkel told reporters in Berlin. Schools will gradually be reopened with priority given to pupils about to take leaving examinations. The government urged people to wear face masks when out shopping or on public transport, but stopped short of making it a requirement like in neighboring Austria. - Trouble yet to come - On the horizon looms the worst economic downturn in a century, which the IMF has said could see $9 trillion wiped from the global economy. Germany is already in recession and US manufacturing production plummeted 6.3 percent last month, its biggest fall in seven decades. In France, more than a third of workers are on temporary unemployment, the government said. In poorer, more densely populated countries, governments are still struggling to enforce restrictions on movement that are piling misery on the needy. Fears over hunger and possible social unrest are especially acute in parts of Africa and Latin America. In Ecuador hunger trumps fear of the virus for residents in rundown areas of the badly affected city of Guayaquil. "The police come with a whip to send people running, but how do you say to a poor person 'Stay home' if you don't have enough to eat?" said Carlos Valencia, a 35-year-old teacher. burs-sms/it US President Donald Trump says some states could reopen for business before May, 2020 World toll of coronavirus infections and deaths as of April 15 at 1900 GMT German Chancellor Angela Merkel announced plans to lift some of the restrictions imposed because of the coronavirus pandemic A man wearing a protective suit to identify a relative outside the morgue of the Hospital General Guasmo Sur in Guayaquil, Ecuador A full-scale return to normality still appears a long way off in countries including Italy A sanitation worker disinfects a camp for displaced Syrians in the northwestern city of Idlib
Alleging a political conspiracy to impose President's rule in Maharashtra, the Congress on Wednesday demanded a thorough probe into the gathering of migrants at Mumbai's Bandra Railway Station.

Maharashtra PWD Minister Ashok Chavan cited a South Central railway communication of April 13 about running special trains for migrants, saying it could have triggered the gathering at Bandra.

He said the incident is an attempt to disrupt communal harmony in the state and negate the state's efforts in fighting coronavirus.

Addressing a press conference through a video link, Chavan said the police is investigating the matter to ascertain who is behind the instigation of migrants, and the guilty will be brought to book.

Chaotic scenes were witnessed at the Bandra Railway Station on Tuesday, after a large number of migrant workers gathered there forcing the police to resort to lathicharge to disperse them.

Meanwhile, Congress general secretary Priyanka Gandhi Vadra urged Prime Minister Narendra Modi to help the stranded migrant workers reach their native villages.

"For God's sake, Narendra Modi ji please help them," she said.

Migrant workers have been stranded at various places, including at state borders, ever since the nationwide lockdown was imposed on March 24 to curb the spread of coronavirus.

The Congress also asked the Centre to probe the alleged role of the railway ministry in the Bandra incident.

Chavan cited the April 13 letter by deputy chief commercial manager of South Central Railways in Secunderabad which stated that 'Jansadharan specials' will be started to clear stranded migrant workers.

Asked if he saw a conspiracy behind the Bandra gathering, the Maharashtra minister said, "The matter is being investigated. The chief minister has made a statement that this matter is going to be investigated."



He added that social media is already trying to play out this matter, putting the entire blame on the government authorities.

"I think we all know who is patronising the social media people in the country. There was this trending in the social media about imposition of President's rule in the state of Maharashtra which certainly smacks of a political conspiracy. As you can see, this is not a time to play politics. Let us first investigate into it and this was a very serious incident," he noted.

there are some people behind this who want to disturb the communal harmony in Maharashtra, disrupt the efforts taken by the government to prevent coronavirus and create a very difficult situation, Chavan said.

The Congress also questioned the central government on why railway bookings continued during the lockdown.

"After all, why does every disaster break on the poor and the workers? Why are decisions not taken while taking them into consideration? Why are they left on God? Why was booking of railway tickets allowed to continue during the lockdown?" Priyanka Gandhi said.

She asserted the workers were the backbone of the country and the government should help them reach their villages.

"Why were special trains not arranged? Their money has finished and so have their stock of ration. They are feeling insecure and want to go home. Arrangements should have been made for them. They can still be helped with proper planning," the Congress general secretary said in a tweet in Hindi.

Congress leader Ahmed Patel also called for probing the alleged role of the railway ministry for the crisis among the migrants.

"Why were train services abruptly stopped leaving migrants stranded? Why was railway accepting bookings despite no clarity on lockdown extension?" he said.

Chavan also demanded allowing of CSR funds for CM-Relief Fund, wondering where will the money come from for the state government as states were not getting their share of GST.

On the Centre's economic package of Rs 1.7 lakh crore, he said it is necessary to waive off the interest on these loans.

The former chief minister of Maharashtra also demanded for more masks, PPE kits and ventilators from the central government.

The state, he said, has identified 30 hospitals for treatment of coronavirus and made availability of 2,305 beds. Besides, the PWD department has identified 22,000 places where 55,000 beds are available, he said.

Maharashtra Revenue Minister Balasaheb Thorat, who is also the PCC chief, said the state government is providing ration to 7.5 crore people through the Food Security Act.

He said the state is also providing food to 7 lakh poor and vulnerable people everyday.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Manitoba RCMP fielded more than 60 calls related to the pandemic in a six-day period.

Hey there, time traveller!

This article was published 15/4/2020 (636 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Manitoba RCMP fielded more than 60 calls related to the pandemic in a six-day period.

The majority of the 64 calls the RCMP received between Wednesday and Monday were reports of 10 or more people gathering in a location and "not respecting the orders in place under the Public Health Act," a news release said.

Officers issued verbal warnings in connection with 18 of the calls. No arrests or fines were made.

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The other 46 calls did not fall under the responsibilities of the RCMP or were resolved through "education" or "guidance" given by responding officers, the release said.

The RCMP announced Thursday it had been asked to assist in enforcing the federal Quarantine Act, meaning officers can visit homes to ensure anyone entering Canada is self-isolating for 14 days, and can arrest anyone found in violation of the act.

In Manitoba, fines were set at $486 per individual and $2,542 per business for someone who violates any of the provinces three public health orders.

Those orders include restricting public gatherings to a maximum of 10 people, mandating the closure of non-essential businesses, and maintaining a two-metre distance between people.

On Tuesday, the City of Winnipeg said community service ambassadors and bylaw enforcement officers patrolled 234 parks between Saturday and Monday. The city issued 12 verbal warnings, one large-group warning, and 32 closed-facility warnings.

The city said as many as 44 ambassadors and more than 20 bylaw enforcement officers might be patrolling Winnipeg on any day.
Today, the first relocations of unaccompanied migrant children from the Greek islands have taken place, EU News reported.

12 children are being relocated to Luxembourg as part of a scheme organised by the Commission and the Greek authorities, with the support of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), the International Organization for Migration (IOM) and the European Asylum Support Office (EASO), to help address overcrowding in the reception centres in Greece. This is the first in a number of relocation exercises currently underway. The next operation will take place this weekend as around 50 people will be relocated to Germany.

Vice-President for Promoting our European Way of Life Margaritis Schinas said: This scheme is Europe at its best. In times where coronavirus is taking its toll on everyday life, it is commendable to see Member States honouring their commitments and working together to help vulnerable migrants on the Greek islands. I am grateful to Member States participating in the scheme and hopeful that more will continue to join us.

Commissioner for Home Affairs Ylva Johansson said:Today 12 migrant children will start a new life in Luxembourg. This is just a first step. The situation on the Greek islands has been critical for far too long. I am happy we are working together as Europeans to address it and find a safe place at least for the most vulnerable. Our efforts continue with more relocations planned for the coming days and weeks.

Greek Alternate Minister of Migration Policy Giorgos Koumoutsakos said: Today, 12 unaccompanied minors swept onto the Greek Aegean islands by the waves of migration are departing to be relocated in the heart of the Europe. Luxembourg  a firm friend of Greece and staunch supporter of European Union  is the first country to actively respond to the Greek government's initiative calling on its European partners to accept unaccompanied minors from Greece. Brussels and Luxembourg worked really hard. I wanted to express my gratitude to the UNHCR and the European Commission and especially I want to thank one of its driving forces Commissioner Ylva Johansson.
Two Brazilian Governors Test Positive for CCP Virus

RIO DE JANEIROTwo Brazilian state governors tested positive for the CCP virus, also known as the novel coronavirus, on Tuesday, in the tourist hotspot of Rio de Janeiro and the Amazon rainforest state of Para, becoming the latest leaders to get the disease as it spreads across the country.

In a video posted on Twitter, Rio Governor Wilson Witzel said that after not feeling well in recent days, with a fever and sore throat, he requested a test and received the positive result for the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus on Tuesday.

Witzel visited a hospital later on Tuesday, where he was undergoing tests to see if he needed to be hospitalized, staffers in his office said.

Para Governor Helder Barbalho, in a social media post, said he had also tested positive after members of his staff came down with the virus, although he had no symptoms.

Both governors called for people of their states to obey home shelter guidelines to avoid spreading the virus.

I ask you once again to stay at home. As everyone can tell, the disease doesnt make exceptions for anyone and the contagion is fast, Witzel said.

Brazil had a record 204 deaths on Tuesday from COVID-19, the severe respiratory disease caused by the new coronavirus, the highest death toll for a single day since the outbreak began. More than 1,500 people have died of COVID-19 in Brazil, with more than 25,000 confirmed cases of the disease.

Governors have played a critical role in curbing the spread of the virus by ordering people to stay inside and most businesses to close.

Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro has criticized lockdowns at the local level, saying the outbreak has been blown out of proportion, even though several of his cabinet ministers and closest aides have been infected.

By Rodrigo Viga Gaier and Jake Spring

Additional reporting by Marcelo Rochabrun and Eduardo Simoes
The exhibition Daughter of the Sun opened on 29 February at the ZagPick Gallery in Sheikh Zayed but was suspended a week later when the shut-down of cultural venues began

When boredom began to peak during the third week of quarantine I managed to arrange a private gallery visit  including a meeting with the artist  to make up for what I had missed when there had been too much art to see.

Hassan Kamels sculpture exhibition Daughter of the Sun opened on 29 February at the ZagPick Gallery in Sheikh Zayed but was suspended a week later when the shut-down began. I was fascinated to enter through a gate adorned with two enormous resin Maat (or Justice) feathers (dated 2008-2020), which evoked a sacred space.

Facing me was the main piece in the collection, Daughter of the Sun, a sculpture assemblage featuring a life-size, elegantly shaped young woman in bronze and an installation of a rectangular basin in wood, plexiglass, fabric and gold plate  a sacred lake  flanked by mini sculptures of lotus flowers and feathers. The Daughters face can be seen reflected on the surface of the basin, and a positive sense of serenity emanates from the whole.

A professor of sculpture at the Faculty of Art Education, Helwan University, Kamels fascination with ancient Egypt began while he was studying for his masters degree, which dealt with clothing in sculpture in ancient Egyptian, Roman and Chinese art.

Starting then ancient Egyptian arts became my main source of inspiration. I settled down in this holy land. The concept of art adopted by ancient Egyptian artists is different, characterised by a broad vision, and daily dialogue with nature covering all aspects of life.

It was a civilisation pervaded by sculpture. Unlike Mahmoud Mokhtar, the father of modern Egyptian sculpture, who sought the connection between ancient Egyptian and European art, after studying the dimensions and aesthetic principles of specific sculptures through his PhD, Kamel developed his own concept of Abstract Value, which is different from a symbol in that  rather than referring to it  it embodies its core aesthetic value. In his own work, rather than imitating ancient art, Kamel reproduces this idea in his own idiom.

The problem with ancient Egypt is that people think its a dead civilisation, that were already separate from our ancestors. I believe we remain connected with them. After years of sketching, studying and fieldwork on ancient sites, I could see how closely connected to life and nature art is.

Born in 1967, Kamel was also inspired by such pioneering sculptors as Mahmoud Mokhtar, Abdel Badie Abdel Hay and Adam Henein. But the ancient masters remain his most effective teachers, and to this day he is finds inspiration in Sakkara, one of the earliest construction sites in the world, Luxor and the Egyptian Museum.

He also feels affinities with ancient Japanese and Mexican art and architecture and to such Europeans as Henry Moore, who in turn was influenced by ancient Egyptian sculpture at the British Museum.

Though this is his 10th solo exhibition, Kamels present philosophy began to form only eight years ago with his Cache exhibition series. I realized some eight years ago that the sculptors mission is not to make a perfect statue. It is rather the project, the overall philosophy, the umbrella under which different and even unrelated sculptures denote one message. This is very clear in the present collection, where the exhibits vary widely from a head with one arm raised (The Salute) to a marble house (Secrets). In the third installment of Cache, Kamel said what he meant by that was a treasure the artist would keep uncovering over his career.

The first Cache exhibition, Season, which was held at the Nile Gallery in 2016, focused on the lotus flower, symbol of the sun and of regeneration, which also took on the significance of the January Revolution.

The second, at Al Bab Gallery in 2017, was a miscellany of pieces from different times in their own unique dialogue and for which he designed his own layout for the space, creating paths with low ceilings. The same collection was held again at the Egyptian Museum in 2018  the first of its kind.

My work, Kamel explained, is influenced by the idea of Gods manifestation.

The ancients did not create idols to be worshipped in themselves, but containers for the divine presence. The secret of these sculptors genius is their spiritual connection to nature. They would meditate for hours in the open, contemplating eternity.

The idea is far from limiting. Ancient Egyptian art and philosophy covers all aspects of life. I can find a reference for every new idea that crosses my mind. Roman sculpture might appear more lifelike and dynamic, though.

But I believe ancient Egyptian sculptures reflected all schools of art: abstraction, realism, even surrealism. There are so many different things within it. Its diversity in itself is an inspiration.

Concepts such as justice and light take on new form in the present exhibition. Kamel imagined that the sun had a daughter with a moon on her belly, and he decided to place her next to a body of water representing the eternal ocean that is the source of all living things.

The three pieces he made in 1998 were developed some 20 years later. And here as elsewhere Kamel skillfully handles a range of media: bronze, ceramic, granite, resin, and marble. This variety makes for a unique experience. Soliloquy, for example, is a medium-sized piece featuring a bronze figure absorbed in a monologue. Standing on a base of light green lotus flowers, this pivotal piece took 12 years to complete.

The Sailor, another bronze piece, features a head and two outstretched arms suggesting the shape of a boat and a desire for purity. Human Boat is a more explicit take on the same theme. Secrets, on the other hand, in Carrara marble, is a serene temple with two tiny gates ready for the resurrected dead to pass through. Two abstract heads with feathers recall the Amarna period statues of Queen Tiye, while Winged Entity is a headless bird that circles back to Soliloquy, suggesting a flight out of the physical body.

Kamel is currently working on a book on his philosophy of sculpture and its connection with ancient Egyptian art. His sculptures distinctive blend of abstract expressionism and symbolism reflect the erudition as originality, and encourage you to read up on ancient Egypt. Perhaps the quarantine is an opportunity to end our isolation from our ancestors.

The exhibition can be viewed by private appointment

*A version of this article appears in print in the 16 April, 2020 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly

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April 14, 2020

News

By Army Staff Sgt. Flor Gonzalez, DOD News

Defense.gov

Africom's Partnership Endures During COVID-19 Pandemic

As the world fights to contain the COVID-19 pandemic, the United States, through U.S. Africa Command, is doing its part to help African partner nations combat this new enemy.

In 2019, four African partner nations  Ghana, Senegal, Uganda and Rwanda  were provided with the training and equipment to efficiently and effectively set up, take down and operate a United Nations-standard level 2 hospital through the African Peacekeeping Rapid Response Partnership program.

The program, funded by the State Department, helps African nations enhance peacekeeping and security capabilities. Of these four partner nations, three are now deploying their level 2 hospitals as part of their response to the COVID-19 pandemic.

"We are proud to stand by our partners as we battle this deadly virus in Africa and around the globe," Air Force Lt. Gen. James Vechery, Africom's deputy commander, said. "As we work shoulder to shoulder, it is exciting to see our African partners putting the capabilities we've developed over the past few years to such great use during this global pandemic."

The hospitals are one example of Africom efforts to assist African partners to enhance their medical capabilities and pandemic response. Programs such as tactical combat casualty care training, medical readiness exercises and conferences focused on pandemic response efforts all demonstrate the long-term investment by the command.

Ghana, Senegal and Uganda independently decided to deploy their hospitals in support of their national response, said Air Force Maj. Mohamed Diallo, Africom international health specialist. Senegal and Uganda are using the hospitals as overflow facilities for existing hospitals. "We are going to start treating people," Lt. Col. Henry Obbo, Uganda Land Forces spokesman, said. "It's just put here... in case the means of health might require additional facilities."

Ghana, which has nearly 300 confirmed cases of COVID-19, is using the facility to treat those affected by the virus.

"Now more than ever, the United States is pleased to work together with the government, armed forces and people of Ghana," U.S. Ambassador to Ghana Stephanie Sullivan said. "This mobile hospital will directly serve those most in need. Together, we will emerge from this stronger and more united."

Sullivan echoed Ghanaian President Akufo Addo's call for all Ghanaians and residents of Ghana to stay home as much as possible, as it's one of the most effective ways to combat the pandemic and "flatten the curve."

Each hospital package includes 14 shelters with a total of 7,427 square feet of shelter space, consisting of an intensive care unit, a radiology unit and 20 beds.

"While these hospitals were originally designed to support Senegalese soldiers on the battlefield, the Senegalese military has now deployed one of these hospitals and personnel to the city of Touba to assist in the emergency response to the COVID-19 outbreak," said U.S. Ambassador to Senegal Tulinabo S. Mushingi.

Combined with the support from other U.S. agencies such as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the U.S. Agency for International Development, known as USAID, these contributions have greatly strengthened Senegal's ability to respond to the COVID-19 threat and demonstrate the strength of the strong 60-year U.S.-Senegalese partnership, the ambassador added.

The effort highlights a whole-of-government approach aimed at ensuring African partners are educated, resourced and supported to contain the spread of the virus, Africom officials said.

"This program, and the medical capabilities it brings to the COVID-19 fight on the African continent, is a prime example of the unique, continuing commitment that U.S. Africa Command pledges to our Africa partners throughout Africa," Air Force Col. Krystal Murphy, Africom's deputy command surgeon, said. "It is our hope that the support we provide to our partners enables them to lessen human suffering and strengthen their nations, their people and the global community."

(Army Staff Sgt. Flor Gonzalez is assigned to U.S. Africa Command.)

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STOCKHOLM, April 15, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- Three new honorary doctors have been appointed by The Board of Research at Karolinska Institutet. Pascale Cossart, Sven Hagstromer, and Thomas Sakmar will have their doctorates formally conferred at Stockholm City Hall on 13 November 2020.

An honorary doctorate can be awarded to researchers who have contributed to science, humanity, or Karolinska Institutet. It can also be awarded to individuals who lack the official requirements of a PhD but have contributed to research and development relevant to KI.

Pascale Cossart

Pascale Cossart is a world-leading expert in the field of infection biology. Through groundbreaking research combining microbiology and cell biology, she has shown how interaction between the bacterium Listeria - that she uses as a model- and human cells can cause an infection. She pioneered the research field today known as cellular microbiology. In addition to her work as professor at the Pasteur Institute, Pascale Cossart has acted to strengthen European research on microbiology and cell biology.

For many years Pascale Cossart has supported the scientific careers of young and female researchers. She has also greatly contributed to European collaboration within the research field of infection biology. During her career, Pascale Cossart has received several awards. Among them are the Robert Koch Prize (2007), the Balzan Prize (2013), and FEBS/EMBO Women in Science Award (2014). Pascale Cossart is a member of the American National Academy of Sciences (NAS) as well as the British Royal Society. She also serves as Secretaire perpetuel of the French Academy of Sciences.

"I felt really honored to hear that I was awarded this honorary doctorate. I feel honored because for me the Karolinska Institute is the magic name of a place where science is honored more than anywhere else. Receiving an honorary doctorate in medicine for someone who was originally a chemist is in addition quite flattering meaning that the science I did with all my collaborators really reached the level I was looking for and has been really appreciated," says Pascale Cossart.

Sven Hagstromer

The economist Sven Hagstromer has founded the investment company Creades as well as the Swedish bank Avanza. Today he serves as chairman in both companies. Sven Hagstromer is highly dedicated to social entrepreneurship and was the founder of Allbright - a foundation that aims for equality and diversification amongst high-ranking positions in the swedish business world. He is also the founder of Berattarministeriet and the scientific publishing house Fri Tanke.

Sven Hagstromer is an able and passionate book collector. For many years he has taken an active interest in the Hagstromer Medico-Historical Library at Karolinska Institutet. Sven Hagstromer has funded purchases of notable works on medical history and enabled employment of staff with expert knowledge. Furthermore, he has founded an association called Hagstromerbibliotekets vanner ("Friends of Hagstromer Medico-Historical Library"), which organizes showings, seminars, and lectures in the library.

"When I first got the notice about my appointment, I thought it was some kind of prank. How can I receive such appreciation by Karolinska Institutet, just for doing what was fun? I aim to make the world a better place, which in itself really is a pleasure. This acknowledgement gives me strength to try even more," says Sven Hagstromer.

Thomas Sakmar

Thomas Sakmar is a highly qualified researcher within the fields of cellular signal transduction and G protein-coupled receptors. Broadly, these fields of research investigate how human cells react to stimuli from their surroundings and in response can activate certain proteins within the cell. Thomas Sakmar's knowledge on protein chemistry, for example how antibodies against the peptide amyloid beta are produced, has been of great value to KI. He is a former visiting professor at the Department of Neurobiology, Care Sciences and Society at Karolinska Institutet.

Thomas Sakmar is a researcher from Rockefeller University. By initiating bilateral exchanges of scientist between KI and Rockefeller, he has strengthen the collaboration, which in turn has given researches from both universities access to new methods, equipment, and important material. Furthermore, Thomas Sakmar has taken an active interest in the work KI in general by, among other things, hosting lectures on leadership and supervision.

"I feel a tremendous sense of gratitude to receive this great honor from the Karolinska Institute. I have been fortunate in my career to have benefited from close associations with several leading medical research universities, and I feel a particular close bond to KI, which has welcomed me with open arms. I have learned so much over the past decade from so many colleagues, and I am delighted that this honor will cement my relationship with the KI community. As a physician-scientist, there is no greater honor than being associated in this way with KI," says Thomas Sakmar.

The first honorary doctors of medicine at Karolinska Institutet were appointed in 1910. Each year, about 20 nominations are submitted to The Board of Research. Nominations are accepted from permanent staff members at Karolinska Institutet with a doctorate. Between 2000 - 2019, 77 new honorary doctors have been appointed, of which 22 were women.

For more information, contact:

Anne Thyrfing

+46-8-524-863-44

anne.thyrfing@ki.se

This information was brought to you by Cision http://news.cision.com

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Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, April 15)  Valenzuela City Mayor Rex Gatchalian on Wednesday said more residents and frontliners suspected of having COVID-19 can undergo testing in the next days after the city inked a new partnership with a testing laboratory.

The city can now process up to 115 COVID-19 samples daily from suspected and probable cases through the help of The Medical City and Detoxicare Molecular Diagnostics Laboratory. The Pasig hospital can process 25 to 40 samples daily, while the accredited laboratory can examine 90 samples daily in the next two weeks. The two medical facilities will use reverse transcriptasepolymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) test. Test results are expected two days after the procedure.

Valenzuela was one of the first cities to start localized testing. It has tested around 150 people since April 11. From the first batch of testing over the weekend, two turned out positive, while 18 people tested negative.

Gatchalian expects the backlog of tests for around 200 persons to be cleared by this weekend. Once that is done, the city will start testing medical frontliners in public and private hospitals, security frontliners, OFWs, and dialysis patients.

"The beauty of this is, rather than just isolating people by mere suspect, were actually going to test everybody, pin down who will be positive, isolate that person or quarantine that person, or give them the necessary medical intervention," he told CNN Philippines.

The mayor explained that when a resident tests positive for coronavirus disease, the entire household of the patient will be "barricaded" and placed under lockdown. Healthcare workers and police officers will ensure they strictly follow quarantine procedures to prevent the spread of COVID-19 in their community. He admitted this will require more human resources as the city expands its testing capacity.

"What were going to do now is isolate only those that are positive, making sure that their houses are put in lockdown or we can move some of them to our central isolation unit," Gatchalian said.

Senator Sherwin Gatchalian, the Valenzuela mayor's brother, emphasized the importance of mass testing in lifting the Luzon lockdown, which is slated to end on April 30. But he said local governments are still waiting for the Department of Health's guidelines on how they will go about the mass testing.

"Kung mahahanap natin itong mga COVID positive, pwede na nating dahan-dahang buksan ang ekonomiya ng ating bansa or ekonomiya ng ating lokal na pamahalaan," said the senator, who was also a former mayor and congressman of Valenzuela.

[Translation: If we can trace the positive cases, we can slowly work towards opening the economy of the country or the economy of the local government.]

There are 46 confirmed cases in Valenzuela, with four deaths and three recoveries.

CNN Philippines correspondent Carolyn Bonquin contributed to this report.
The state government of Queensland has pledged over $400m to support commercial and residential landlords and tenants affected by the COVID-19 outbreak.

The initiative includes up to $400m in land tax relief for eligible landlords, which must be passed on to tenants. Eligible landowners can apply for up to three months waiver and three months deferral of land tax if they fulfill the following eligibility criteria:

They are a landowner who leases all or part of a property to one or more tenants and all the following apply: The ability of one or more tenants to pay their normal rent is affected by the COVID-19 pandemic. They will provide rent relief to the affected tenants of an amount at least commensurate with the land tax relief. They will comply with the leasing principles even if the relevant lease is not regulated.

They are a landowner and all the following apply: All or part of their property is available for lease. Their ability to secure tenants has been affected by the COVID-19 pandemic. They require relief to meet their financial obligations. They will comply with the leasing principles even if the relevant lease is not regulated.



The Office of the State Revenue will manage the land tax relief applications.

Also read: NSW unveils rent relief package

Eligible landlords must also commit to comply with a set of principles, which include not evicting their tenants and not charging break-lease fees. More information about this policy can be found here.

Any land tax relief to commercial landlords must be passed onto eligible tenants.

The state government also unveiled a crisis payment of up to $500 a week for up to four weeks for Queenslanders who are homeless, or at imminent risk of becoming homeless and have exhausted these options:
The Justice Department (DOJ) has weighed in on a dispute between the right to exercise ones religious freedom with local and state officials efforts to contain the spread of the CCP virus. This tension has sparked multiple lawsuits across the country.

As the burgeoning CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus pandemic continues to reshape American society, many churches and religious institutions have also come up with creative ways to continue with faith-based activities while abiding by social distancing requirements. But in some areas, churches have faced challenges from local and state authorities for their efforts.

The DOJ recently filed a statement of interest (pdf) in support of a Mississippi church that sued the city and mayor for ticketing congregants during a drive-in service. The department argued in its filing that individual rights under the constitution do not disappear during a public health crisis.

There is no pandemic exception  to the fundamental liberties the Constitution safeguards, the DOJ said. Indeed, individual rights secured by the Constitution do not disappear during a public health crisis.'

These individual rights, including the protections in the Bill of Rights made applicable to the states through the Fourteenth Amendment, are always in force and restrain government action, it continued.

At the same time, the Constitution does not hobble government from taking necessary, temporary measures to meet a genuine emergency, it added.

This comes as many local and state officials across the country have taken action to stop people of faith from any form of gatherings in an effort to slow the spread of the CCP virus pandemic. For example in New York City, Mayor Bill de Blasio said he would impose fines or potentially close down buildings of worship if services continued in the city.

This has fueled tension between localities and religious leaders as they attempt to navigate the uncertainties of how to operate during the pandemic.

In the case at hand, the Mississippi governor had designated churches and other religious entities as an essential business or operation that can operate as long as they abide by the Centers for Disease Prevention and Control (CDC) guidelines.

But the City of Greenville issued an executive order on April 7 barring churches from holding in-person or drive-in services until the governors shelter-in-place order is lifted.

Although churches have moved services online or on teleconference calls, Temple Baptist Church does not have a website for live streaming and its congregants do not have social media accounts, the church said.

On April 8, the church broadcasted its service over a low-power FM transmitter to congregants who sat in parked cars outside the church with their windows rolled up and shut. As they listened to the sermon, eight police officers began issuing $500 tickets to congregants who refused to leave even though nobody was outside his or her car, the church alleged.

The DOJ notes the city has since dropped the fines but continues to enforce the order.

The church subsequently sued the city on April 10, seeking to block the mayors order. It alleges that the order violates the constitutional right of freedom to exercise religion.

The DOJ intervened in the case on Tuesday, filing a statement of interest to support the Mississippi church. The department argued that although it was important for local and state officials to impose restrictions to enforce social distancing in order to curb the pandemic, they are not allowed to single out church and religious entities for distinctive treatment.

Attorney General William Barr explained in a statement that any government restriction must be neutral, in that any restriction applied on religious activity must be applied the same as to a non-religious activity.

For example, if a government allows movie theaters, restaurants, concert halls, and other comparable places of assembly to remain open and unrestricted, it may not order houses of worship to close, limit their congregation size, or otherwise impede religious gatherings, he said. Religious institutions must not be singled out for special burdens.

DOJ argued in its filing that the facts support the allegations that the City of Greenville had singled out churches for distinctive treatment because churches are forbidden to hold drive-in services even though citizens are permitted to sit in a car at a drive-in restaurant with their windows rolled down.

[E]ven in times of emergency, when reasonable and temporary restrictions are placed on rights, the First Amendment and federal statutory law prohibit discrimination against religious institutions and religious believers, Barr said.

The pandemic has changed the ways Americans live their lives. Religious communities have rallied to the critical need to protect the community from the spread of this disease by making services available online and in ways that otherwise comply with social distancing guidelines, he added.

Alliance Defending Freedom Senior Counsel Ryan Tucker, a religious rights organization representing the church, welcomed the departments intervention.

In Greenville, you can be in your car with the windows rolled down at a drive-in restaurant, but you cant be in your car with the windows rolled up at a drive-in church service. To target churches that way is both nonsensical and unconstitutional, Tucker said in a statement.

We appreciate the DOJs support for our position that this type of government action isnt necessary to protect health and safety. It only serves to unnecessarily violate Americans freedoms protected by the First Amendment, he added.

Temple Baptist Church is not the only church fighting to protect their constitutional rights amid the pandemic. On April 11, a federal district court granted a temporary restraining order to a Kentucky church, On Fire Christian Center, that sued Louisvilles Mayor Greg Fischer over a ban on all Easter church service gatherings in the city, including drive-in services.

In his opinion (pdf), U.S. District Judge Justin Walker called the mayors decision stunning and beyond all reason, unconstitutional.

In reaction to the DOJs intervention in the Mississippi case, Jeremy Dys, a special counsel for First Liberty Institute, told The Epoch Times in an email that he hopes that mayors and municipalities will take care to ensure their orders in the defense of the public health do not single out or target churches, synagogues, or houses of worship. First Liberty Institute represented On Fire Christian Center in the Kentucky case.

Dys agreed with the departments arguments, saying that government officials are required by law and the constitution to treat religious organizations equally. He added that places of worship are important during these uncertain times.

America needs its churches to provide the calm, comfort, and care they uniquely provide to communities across the country, he said. And the government needs churches and other houses of worship to do just that during this pandemic.

Katabella Roberts contributed to this report.

From The Epoch Times
The forces of Libyan military strongman Khalifa Haftar rained rockets on Tripoli on Tuesday after being ousted by government loyalists from a string of strategic towns west of the capital. The capture Monday of the coastal towns of Sorman and Sabratha and smaller settlements further south was seen as a major blow to Haftar, who in April last year launched an offensive to seize Tripoli. Sorman and Sabratha lie respectively 60 and 70 kilometres (40 and 45 miles) west of the Libyan capital, about half-way to the Tunisian border. The oil-rich but poverty-stricken North African country has suffered almost a decade of conflict since longtime dictator Moamer Kadhafi was toppled and killed in a 2011 uprising backed by several Western powers. The UN says hundreds have been killed and more than 200,000 displaced since Haftar launched his battle for Tripoli last year, which then quickly ground to a bloody stalemate. Late Monday, salvo after salvo of rockets began raining down on Tripoli, the city where the UN-recognised Government of National Accord (GNA) is based, and loud explosions could still be heard Tuesday morning, AFP correspondents said. Several homes were hit around Mitiga airbase in the eastern suburbs, the capital's sole and only intermittently functioning airport. One person was wounded, rescuers said late Monday. Since then there have been no casualty updates. The latest escalation comes as concern runs high over the spread of the coronavirus pandemic in Libya, where 25 cases and one death have been officially confirmed. The UN has warned that health services in the country are already fragile and that many hospitals near fighting zones south of Tripoli have been damaged or closed. - 'Taking out anger' - Fighting also raged Tuesday south of the capital, a GNA military source said. The GNA accused pro-Haftar forces of pounding Tripoli, saying they were taking revenge against the civilian population following Monday's losses. "The criminal militia and mercenaries have taken out their anger on residential neighbourhoods of Tripoli to avenge their defeat, firing dozens of rockets and missiles on the capital indiscriminately," spokesman Mohamad Gnunu said. The commander of pro-GNA forces, Oussama al-Jwili, late Monday said the operation to capture Sabratha and Sorman was launched after he received information that Haftar fighters were moving west. The strongman's forces were planning to advance on the city of Zouara near the Tunisian frontier in an attempt to seize it and then push further towards the Ras Jedir border post. GNA forces were now also surrounding the key Al-Watiya airbase southwest of Tripoli, a rear base for Haftar forces and launchpad for the aircraft they use to bombard the capital. Fighting was also raging between the rival forces east of Tripoli, between the cities of Misrata and Sirte. Misrata is the hometown of many GNA loyalists while the strategic coastal city of Sirte was captured in early January by Haftar forces. Fighting was also reported in the region of Abu Grein, southeast of Tripoli and halfway between Misrata and Sirte. - Significant victory - The seizure of Sorman and Sabratha was the GNA's most significant victory since June last year, when its forces retook the town of Gharyan, the main supply base for Haftar's forces southwest of the capital. Jalal Harchaoui, a Libya analyst at The Hague-based Clingendael Institute, said Monday's setback meant Haftar had lost the entire coast west of Tripoli. According to Harchaoui, the Turkish-backed GNA forces have in recent week been more "aggressive... on multiple fronts, often successfully". "High-precision artillery on the ground, Turkish drones and better coordination" were proving a "formidable" combination against Haftar forces, he said. Advanced drones supplied by the United Arab Emirates have given Haftar, who also relies on backing from Russia, an advantage in the skies. Several UN-backed attempts to reach a ceasefire between Libya's two rival forces have failed, and the world body has slammed repeated violations of a 2011 weapons embargo.
While the world grapples with the ongoing coronavirus crisis, scientists are obsessively looking at data of the affected and recovered across the world to find patterns that can help us in any way possible. A country's government is responsible for giving out data that is authentic to the country's situation.

 Shutterstock

For Chile, the situation is slightly different. Chile is counting the dead (because of Coronavirus) as a part of the recovered figure. This is because they no longer show symptoms, the countrys top health official said this week.

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We have 898 patients who are no longer contagious, who are not a source of contagion for others and we count them as recovered. These people have completed 14 days since their diagnosis or unfortunately died, Health Minister Jaime Manalich said at a news conference.

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The news is rather amusing and difficult to understand even for citizens of the country. Jaime Manalich claimed the method of counting casualties was based on the recommendation of international experts, local media reported.



Chiles first COVID-19 case was confirmed on March 3, 2020. The virus began to spread like wildfire in the following weeks, with now more than 7,900 confirmed sick and another reported 92 related deaths, according to data from Johns Hopkins University.

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In such a scenario, according to Chilean data, more than 2,646 coronavirus cases have recovered from the virus in the country.



Chilean President Sebastian Pinera had declared a 90-day State Of Catastrophe a couple of ago, commanding a nationwide curfew between 10:00 p.m to 5:00 a.m and further closing its borders to nonresidents.

However, Chile is not the only country that has been accused of fudging data. Health officials and governments across the world have faced allegations of incomplete or misrepresented Coronavirus data for their respective countries, either intentionally or accidentally. This can be attributed to a number of reasons like low availability of test kits, accessibility for the entire population etc.

US officials have accused China to be undercounting the number of infections and deaths in the country, and also WHO for not taking the coronavirus seriously in its initial stages.
NEW YORK, April 15, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- The stem cell therapy market was valued at US$ 1,534.55 million in 2019 and is estimated to reach US$ 5,129.66 million by 2027; it is expected to grow at a CAGR of 16.7% from 2020 to 2027.



Read the full report: https://www.reportlinker.com/p05882135/?utm_source=PRN



The increasing awareness related to the stem cells therapy in effective disease management and growing demand for regenerative medicines are the key factor driving the stem cell therapy market. However, high cost related of the stem cell therapy limits the growth of the market.

Stem cell research has been widely investigated globally for various medical applications, especially for the treatment of humans.This raises the importance of creating public awareness about stem cell research and its clinical potential.



The main role of stem cells is in the replacement of dying cells and reconstruction of damaged tissues. Based on the extensive stem cell research, many scientists have claimed that these cells could probably be used in the treatment of various diseases, including cancer and cardiovascular disease.

There is a large number of potential treatment procedures that are undergoing clinical trials, and a notably few stem cell therapies have won FDA (i.e., US Food and Drug Administration) approval for clinical usage. For instance, in 2019, the FDA approved Fedratinib for the first-line treatment for myelofibrosis. Moreover, stem cell therapies are widely used in bone marrow transplantation, and these therapies have benefited thousands of people suffering from leukemia. Hematopoietic stem cells are used for treating more than 80 medical diseases, including immune system disorders, blood disorders, neurological disorders, metabolic disorders, genetic disorders, and several types of cancers, such as leukemia and lymphoma; this is also likely to boost the demand for this treatment procedure during the forecast period. Researchers are further investigating the use of stem cell therapies in the treatment of autoimmune disorders.



The global stem cell therapy market has been segmented on the basis of type, treatment, application type, and end user.Based on type, the market has been segmented into adult stem cell therapy, induced pluripotent stem cell therapy, embryonic stem cell therapy, and others.



The adult stem cell therapy held the largest share of the market in 2019; however, induced pluripotent stem cell therapy is estimated to register the highest CAGR in the market during the forecast period.Based on treatment, the stem cell therapy market has been segmented into allogeneic and autologous.



The allogeneic segment held a larger share of the market in 2019; however, the market for the autologous segment is expected to grow at a higher CAGR during the forecast period.Based on application type, the stem cell therapy market has been segmented into musculoskeletal, dermatology, cardiology, drug discovery and development, and other applications.



The musculoskeletal segment held the largest share of the stem cell therapy market in 2019, whereas the drug discovery and development segment is expected to report the highest CAGR during 20202027. Based on end user, the market has been segmented into academic and research institutes, and hospitals and specialty clinics. The academic & research institutes held the largest share of the market in 2019, and it is also expected to report the highest CAGR during the forecast period.

Several essential secondary sources referred to for preparing this report are the FDA, World Health Organization (WHO), Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, National Institutes of Health, Spanish Agency for Medicines (AEMPS), Japanese Society for Regenerative Medicine, and Indian Council of Medical Research, among others.



Read the full report: https://www.reportlinker.com/p05882135/?utm_source=PRN



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An elderly resident in China has become the world's oldest volunteer to receive a potential coronavirus vaccination.

Xiong Zhengxing, 84, along with his daughter, Xiong Ying, participated in the second trial of the vaccine candidate in Wuhan on Monday. They are said to remain healthy.

The vaccine, which was developed by the country's top military bio-warfare expert, is one of China's three potential vaccinations for the deadly disease that has infected over two million people worldwide.

All the participants from the first trial have remained healthy and returned home after 14-day medical observation, according to the press.

Xiong Zhengxing (middle), 84, along with his daughter, Xiong Ying (left), participated in the second trial of the vaccine candidate in Wuhan on Monday. They are said to remain healthy

The researchers recruited 500 new volunteers after starting the second trial on Sunday. 273 participants have received injections by the end of Monday, Chinese media report.

It is the first COVID-19 vaccine candidate in the world that has entered the second phase of clinical trials, according to state media Xinhua.

Mr Xiong requested to be a volunteer after his daughter, who is a paediatrician, was selected as a participant.

'I signed up for my dad after the researchers told me that there was no age limit,' said Ms Xiong.

Elderly residents who are over the 60s were allowed to participate in the second trial after the age limit was removed. A placebo-controlled group was also introduced to the second trial to evaluate the safety and efficacy of the potential vaccine.

'It's been over a day [since the injections], we feel fine,' Ms Xiong added. 'Our temperatures are normal as well.'

The 84-year-old retired soldier, Xiong Zhengxing, is considered to be the world's oldest volunteer for a potential coronavirus vaccine. He is pictured receiving the injection

The 84-year-old retired soldier is considered to be the world's oldest volunteer for a potential coronavirus vaccine.

'As long as it's something beneficial for the people and the country and I'm capable, I would do it,' the pensioner told Pear Video.

Chen Wei, the lead researcher, told the press that the vaccination needs to protect elderly people who are more susceptible to the killer bug.

The Recombinant Novel Coronavirus Vaccine was successfully developed following over a month of research, including the study of the vaccines for Ebola.

The first clinical trial for the vaccination was given a green light in mid-March. A total of 108 healthy adults, aged between 18 and 60, volunteered to receive the injections.

They were divided into three groups which were injected with different amounts of the inactivated vaccine.

All the participants of the first trial have completed their 14-day quarantine and returned home.

The first clinical trial for the vaccination was given a green light in mid-March. A total of 108 healthy adults, aged between 18 and 60, volunteered to receive the vaccinations

'My health has been absolutely fine during this period. I don't feel sick or painful anywhere,' a participant told Pear Video as he was leaving the facility.

'There was a slight pain in where I was injected for the initial few days.

'I feel very confident about the vaccine,' he added. 'I believe it will be introduced to the public very soon.'

Another volunteer told the press that she has returned to her daily life after 'everything feels normal.'

'It felt nothing different from receiving a regular injection, like being bitten by a mosquito,' said Jin Guanping to Southern Metropolis Daily.

The research team will monitor all the volunteers for another six months and take their blood samples to examine the antibodies.

Scientists said that they plan to conduct additional trials overseas if the vaccine is proved to be effective and safe.

The news comes as another Beijing-based company Sinovac Biotech has secured approval in China to move ahead with a human clinical trial for its vaccine candidate on Monday.

China's CanSino Biologics also begun its second phase of testing its vaccine candidate, China's Ministry of Science and Technology said on Tuesday.

This means that three potential COVID-19 vaccinations are making fast progress in their testing in China.

Meanwhile, Oxford University scientists are confident they can get the jab for the incurable disease rolled out for millions to use by autumn.

Oxford's vaccine programme has already recruited 510 people, aged between 18 and 55, to take part in the first trial.

More than 70 vaccines are currently in development, according to the World Health Organization (WHO).

The first group of Chinese volunteers who received potential coronavirus vaccinations have claimed to maintain good health after finishing two-week quarantine for observation
Source: Xinhua| 2020-04-01 03:06:59|Editor: Mu Xuequan

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NICOSIA, March 31 (Xinhua) -- Chinese Ambassador to Cyprus Huang Xingyuan announced on Tuesday the arrival of the first batch of China-donated medical supplies to Cyprus, as COVID-19 cases continue to rise in the country.

"Happy to announce that the 1st batch of China-donated medical supplies has reached Cyprus, including 5,000 KN95 masks, 5,000 medical masks and 1,320 protective uniforms," Huang told Xinhua, adding that the second batch is ready in China to be picked up by a Cyprus chartered flight.

The lack of protective gear was a major cause that many doctors and nurses got infected by COVID-19, especially in the hospital of Paphos in western Cyprus.

The Health Ministry announced one more coronavirus death and 32 new infections on Tuesday, raising the death toll to nine and cases of COVID-19 to 262.

The total included nine cases in the British Sovereign Base Areas, an official said.

Adding one death and 70 cases in the Turkish controlled part of Cyprus, the total for the eastern Mediterranean island climbed to 10 deaths and 332 infections.

Marios Loizou, scientific director of the Nicosia directorate of the State Health Services Organization, said that a woman with COVID-19 gave birth to a boy via cesarean section at a children's hospital in Nicosia.

He said the mother and boy are doing well, adding that the baby will be also tested for the virus.

In announcing the new figures, Leondios Kostrikis, professor of biological sciences at the University of Cyprus and member of the government's advisory body on the pandemic, said Tuesday's large figures were expected and came not as a surprise.

This was the reason that the scientific team advised the Health Ministry to introduce stricter measures.

"We expect a change for the better in the number of new infections from now on, provided that people abide by the new regulations," Kostrikis said.

Tuesday's COVID-19 data were announced as new measures to prevent the spread of the coronavirus came into effect, including an unprecedented peace time night curfew and a ban on visits to the homes of relatives and friends.

Cyprus President Nicos Anastasiades posted on social media a message in response to criticism on the new restrictions imposed on people.

He said he preferred to face strict criticism for introducing harsh measures rather than being accused later that he failed his duty to take action that would save lives.
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The National Guard helped deliver food to needy residents suffering under the coronavirus quarantine in both Brooklyn and Dallas on Tuesday.

In New York City, the New York Army National Guard were at a Crown Heights pantry filling taxis, Ubers, Lyfts and other for-hire vehicles with take-away meals to be delivered to the elderly and others who can't leave their homes.

Meanwhile, the Texas National Guard have been handing out boxes of free food to those in need in Dallas, Texas.

The Guard worked alongside the North Texas Food Bank and prepared 4,000 boxes of food with help from the Texas Emergency Food Assistance Program. Cars had to line up in order to receive the handout.

The Texas National Guard prepared 4,000 boxes of food to hand out to those in need and struggling financially

The Guard assisted a local charity, North Texas Food Bank, in helping distribute the food packages

The North Texas Food Bank conducts a mobile distribution of emergency food in Dallas to people suffering as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic

Hundreds lined up along a street for their food parcels as people struggle during the coronavirus outbreak

Each driver had to fill out a form asking for a name, address, monthly income and household size.

The Campaign Against Hunger food pantry in Brooklyn expected to feed more than 6,400 homes this week.

Mayor Bill de Blasio visited the food pantry on Tuesday.

'What we've been seeing since COVID-19 is astronomical,' said Melony Samuels, director of Campaign Against Hunger, a food pantry in Crown Heights to the Daily News.

Members of the New York Army National Guard join with others in filling cars with take-away meals to be delivered to the elderly and those that can not leave their housing due to the coronavirus at a community center in Brooklyn

The National Guard joined other New York City agencies in loading up taxi's, Uber's, Lyft's and other 'for hire' vehicles which have joined the effort in delivering meals across the city

City employees fill-up cars with take-away meals to be delivered to the elderly and those that can not leave their homes

New York has been the hardest hit city in the nation from the COVID-19 outbreak with more than 10,000 deaths

The Campaign Against Hunger food pantry in Brooklyn expected to feed more than 6,400 homes this week.

Last week the city's Mayor, Bill de Blasio, and the City Council announced $25 million in emergency funding for pantries after about a third of them were forced to shut down

National Guard soldiers along with members of the New York City Taxi and Limousine Commission load cars with meals to be distributed at the Brownville Recreation Center in the Brooklyn borough of New York City

New York City has created GetFoodNYC, a food delivery program for the COVID-19 vulnerable

TLC-licensed drivers are being paid to deliver meals while being compensated $15 an hour, plus millage and tolls

The Big Apple's food supply is just one front where New York City is waging war against the disease

A driver pauses as city employees fill up cars with take-away meals to be delivered to the elderly

'The increase is because of loss of jobs, unemployment. We understand what it is. We know that even after things look like they've settled, there will still be a long line because families will not be adjusting yet.'

Last week the city's mayor, Bill de Blasio, and the City Council announced $25 million in emergency funding for pantries after about a third of them were forced to shut down.

'Whatever you need to feed people, you will get it,' de Blasio said while visiting the site on Tuesday.

'People right now are afraid. This is like nothing we've experienced. Even if it's one more person we have to reach, we're going to reach that person, no matter what it takes.'

'The food will help us, for real,' Stephanie Rodriguez, of Bushwick said to the News. 'The supermarkets right now  the prices are up for everything. This can help us throughout the whole time.'

Vehicles queued up along roads in Dallas leading to the university grounds where the handout was being made and there were also lines once inside

Thirty personnel from the Texas National Guard were on hand to distribute 3,750 27lb boxes of dry pantry staple foods

The food included dry produce like rice, canned fruit & vegetables, canned protein, peanut butter, legumes and dried fruit

The 4,000 15lb boxes also contained fresh produce including apples, oranges, and potatoes

The food was handed out at the University of North Texas at Dallas campus in south Dallas, Texas

Huge lines of vehicles lined up outside campus to receive emergency food

There were thousands of boxes all lined up and ready to be distributed to those who were in need in the Dallas area

The packages were loaded into the trunk of vehicles or attached to roof racks

Each package contains a variety of canned vegetables, grains, fruit, peanut butter and other food staples.

In Dallas, the servicemen took precautions as they distributed the food and loaded the boxes into the trunk of each vehicle.

Members of the National Guard were also deployed earlier this month to help with the food bank's efforts.

The nonprofit group's mobile pantry distributions surged from 1,000 to almost 2,000 households amid the coronavirus pandemic.

The food parcels had taken days to prepare, pack and finally seal before being brought to the university grounds in Dallas

The Texas National Guard helped speed things along

Each vehicle appeared to receive a couple of boxes of food, some containing fresh produce and the other canned goods

The Guard were there for 3 hours handing out the emergency food parcels ensuring that everyone who shows up received one

Thirty personnel from the Texas National Guard were on hand to help with the distribution on Tuesday at the University of North Texas at Dallas campus in south Dallas.

Each box contained around 27lbs of food and included canned goods as well as fresh produce.

Huge lines of vehicles queued outside the campus grounds and along roads leading to the handout, which served to show the scope of those in need of additional support at this time.

Those in need pulled up while members of the guard loaded up the trunk of cars ensuring as little human contact as possible

The boxes were carefully marked so the members distributing the goods knew what was inside each of the packages

The amount each vehicle received varied depending on the size of the family the designated driver was collecting on behalf

The Guardsmen took precautions and remained gloved and masked throughout the military-like operation

Texas National Guard working with North Texas Food Bank are aiming to deliver nearly 60,000 meals over the next 30 days

It must have very very satisfying for the members of the guard involved after helping to pack the boxes days earlier

A state National Guard soldier drinks water as he takes a short break from handing out food at at a North Texas Food Bank mobile pantry distribution location

Members of the Texas National Guard organize thousands of produce boxes at the North Texas Food Bank Warehouse, pictured last week

Members of the Texas National Guard organize thousands of produce boxes at the North Texas Food Bank Warehouse in Plano, TX for distribution at multiple NTFB events over the next month

Mass Care Task Force was created by North Texas Food Bank, the American Red Cross, the Salvation Army and Volunteer Now
Russia and Turkey hold another joint patrol for Syria's M4 Stopped by locals on highway cutting through Idlib in NW

(ANSAmed) - BEIRUT, APRIL 15 - For a short five-kilometer section, Turkish and Russian soldiers on Wednesday carried out a joint patrol in the contested Syrian region of Idlib on the basis of a March 5 ceasefire agreement. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR) reported the news, saying that the patrol happened in the morning between the town of Tronba, near Saraqeb, and Nayrab in eastern Idlib. The patrol was held along the brief section of the Aleppo-Latakia M4 highway. Turkish forces on Tuesday intervened against the local population in the Tronba zone to disperse a demonstration against the Russian-Turkish agreement to share the area and to reject the presence of Russian military police. Since March 15, there have been few joint Turkish-Russian patrols and those that were had been conducted along short sections of the highway in the Saraqeb area.(ANSAmed).




A former Darien schools crossing guard has been arrested for possession of child pornography charges in the second degree, according to Darien Police.

Daniel Poccia, 66, of Hollow Tree Ridge Road, turned himself in around 1 p.m. Tuesday, accompanied by his Attorney Mark Sherman.

Sherman, while declining to comment on specifics of the case, said that his client has no criminal history of any kind. Darien Police also confirmed Poccia has no previous criminal history and was subjected to a pre-employment background check prior to being hired by the Town of Darien.

On Feb. 28, a Darien Police officer assigned to the Tactical Investigation Unit of Southwestern Connecticut received a Cyber-Tipline Report from the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children, indicating that images of suspected child pornography had been downloaded to an IP address located in Darien.

An investigation was initiated which included obtaining search warrants to obtain more detailed information about the location and ownership of the IP address.

On March 3, an Ex Parte Order for disclosure of records was submitted to the Internet Service Provider for the IP address in question. On March 20, the Internet Service Provider indicated the basic subscriber information belonged to Daniel P. Poccia of Hollow Tree Ridge Road.

Police then determined that Poccia was currently employed in a part-time capacity as a crossing guard for the Town of Darien. Poccia was hired as a crossing guard on Aug. 26, 2019, and last worked on March 11, just before Darien Public Schools closed due to the coronavirus pandemic.

Over the next week, officers secured a search and seizure warrant for Poccias residence. On March 31, Darien Police detectives, assisted by patrol officers, searched the house. Officers seized 20 printed images depicting child pornography. Several electronic items were also seized, police said.

At this point, Poccia was advised that his employment with the Town of Darien was terminated based on this investigation.

Evidence seized from the residence was forensically examined and analyzed. It was determined that no additional evidence related to child pornography were present other than the printed images seized during the execution of the search warrant.

At the conclusion of the forensic examination, officers submitted an arrest warrant affidavit to the Stamford Superior Court. On April 14, the arrest warrant was approved and signed by the Honorable Judge White.

Poccia was then fingerprinted, photographed, and fully processed for second-degree possession of child pornography.

He was released on a $150,000 court set bond and is scheduled to appear in court on June 15.

Darien Police said there is no evidence to suggest that Poccia had any inappropriate contact with any minors from Darien or any other area, nor is there any evidence that local minors are depicted in the images. Schools Superintendent Dr. Alan Addley could not be reached for comment.

No further details are being released pertaining to this investigation, according to police.

Sherman said the Covid-19 quarantine has pushed the internet to its legal limits, at times making the line between legal content and illegal dark web content blurry.

Connecticut arrests arising from dark web searches are not always the product of an intentional search for illegal child pornography. Some dark web sites can transfer child pornography without the users knowledge. We will investigate these accusations and respond at the appropriate time during the court process, Sherman said.
(Left to right) Chief Medical Officer Chris Whitty, Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab and Chief Scientific Adviser Sir Patrick Vallance during a media briefing on coronavirus. (PA)

Government statistics on coronavirus deaths compared to those in France have misled the public, according to a medical journal.

The Health Service Journal (HSJ) cites figures from Public Health France, that records deaths from COVID-19 by taking in data from deaths outside hospitals as well as those from patients who were hospitalised.

The publication states that the global death comparison used by the government on Monday shows Frances deaths tallied at just over 14,000  compared to 11,329 for the UK.

However, hospital-only deaths from COVID-19 totalled 9,588  below the like-for-like UK figure, the HSJ said.

Speaking at Monday's daily briefing, chief scientific adviser Sir Patrick Vallance said the date doesnt carry all deaths in this, it looks at the deaths in hospital.

The Office for National Statistics (ONS) revealed on Tuesday that there were 3,475 deaths registered in England and Wales in the week ending 3 April that mentioned COVID-19, the disease caused by coronavirus.

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That means about one in five deaths across the two countries right now is linked to COVID-19.

The disease helped contribute to the total number of deaths in that week of 16,387, which was 6,082 more than expected at this time of year.

Vallance said the global death comparison chart looks at hospital deaths because thats the international standard and which everyone else is doing in terms of reporting deaths

He added: There are of course unfortunately many deaths that also occur outside hospital. Were tracking behind Italy, were following the same sort of path.

Tuesdays briefing also showed the UK as being below Frances deaths trajectory.

Responding to a question on the figures, Yvonne Doyle, medical director of Public Health England, said: There are so many measures of death that it can be very difficult to understand what exactly youre looking at.

Story continues

One of the things were doing all the time is speaking to our European neighbours to understand not just what theyre measuring but what they consider best practice to be and how we can learn together about that.

Stephen Powis, national medical director for NHS England, added: There are differences in the reporting of all sorts of statistics from different countries and its really important to ensure that is taken into account when you are doing that comparison.

Yahoo News UK has contacted the Department of Health and Social Care for comment.

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As Portlaoise hospital staff are on the Covid-19 front line, Laois-Offaly TD Carol Nolan, has written to the Minister for Health, Simon Harris, asking him to bring immediate clarity to its future.

The Independent TD says that the continuation of all services at the Midland Regional Hospital Portlaoise, including the urgent development and continued upgrading of its maternity unit, has been subjected to unsustainable levels of uncertainty because of a failure of the HSE to provide definitive regional and national guidance on the future of the facility.

A HSE plan exists to remove maternity, paediatrics, A&E and most surgery from the hospital. The plan would also see the ICU department, which is central to the Covid-19 challenge, removed.

In November of 2019, I wrote to Minister Harris asking him if the independent external facilitator had been appointed to engage in a consultative process in respect of Midlands Regional Hospital, Portlaoise.

"All he could offer by way of reply was that the appointment of the independent facilitator was being progressed.

"Since then it would appear that absolutely nothing has been done in terms of providing a formal, approved action plan for the retention and expansion of the services at Portlaoise.

"This is just not acceptable. We have had reports and reviews on the hospital almost every year since 2015.

"We also know that the management and staff at Portlaoise are engaging in a very constructive manner to ensure the delivery of the best possible model of care.

"That work needs to be supported and supplemented by the provision of clear guidance on the future of the hospital with an emphasis on avoiding any downgrading of services.

"At present, Portlaoise hospital is trying to operate and plan for the future in the face of a regional and national policy vacuum.

"The Minister must engage with all stakeholders, including the Portlaoise Hospital Action Committee, and end the uncertainty that hangs over this entire process, concluded Deputy Nolan.
In a good news for millions of farmers, the India Meteorological Department (IMD) said on Wednesday that India is likely to have a normal monsoon in 2020.

We will have a normal monsoon this year. Quantitatively the monsoon rainfall during the monsoon season 2020 is expected to be 100% of its long period average with an error of +5 or -5% due to model error, Madhavan Rajeevan, the secretary with the ministry of earth sciences (MoES), told the media.

The IMD also released the dates of onset of monsoon in several places in its first stage Long Range Forecast (LRF) for south-west monsoon season, which falls between June till September.

According to Rajeevan, the monsoon in Kerala would arrive on June 1, in Chennai on June 4, in Panjim on June 7, in Hyderabad on June 8, in Pune on June 10 and in Mumbai on June 11.

According to IMD, the monsoon is expected to hit Delhi on June 27.

LRF is the operational monsoon season forecast issued by IMD from June to September for the country but it does not include regional level rainfall or specify quantum rainfall for the forecast period

It is to be noted that LRF is issued by the IMD in two stages - first stage forecast in April and the second one is issued in June.

The IMD officials use use Statistical Ensemble Forecasting System (SEFS) and dynamical coupled ocean-atmospheric models to issue these forecasts.

In India, monsoon season begins in June and it starts to retreat by September. The monsoon rainfall is very impportant for Indian farmers as it is required for the cultivation of rice, wheat, sugarcane and oilseeds.
New Delhi, April 15 : The Delhi High Court on Wednesday granted bail to a man arrested for assaulting two female doctors of the Safdarjung Hospital after accusing them of spreading Covid-19 in residential areas.

While hearing the matter, a single judge bench of the high court presided by Justice Rajnish Bhatnagar said, "The country is passing through a very difficult phase and the doctors are rendering yeomen service to the nation." After hearing the arguments of both the sides, the court granted bail to the man saying that he has been in judicial custody since April 10 and "no useful purpose would be served by keeping the petitioner in jail, overcrowding Tihar Jail." The court also remarked that the man being educated -- his counsel said that he is an interior designer by profession -- should have been more respectful to the doctors rather than abusing and threatening them.

The 42-year-old was arrested in the intervening night of April 9 and 10, Deputy Commissioner of Police (DCP), South, Atul Thakur said.

The incident took place on April 9 at around 9 p.m. where the man allegedly assaulted two women resident doctors of Safdarjung Hospital after accusing them of "spreading" Covid-19.

Speaking to IANS, Manish, President, Resident Doctors Association, Safdarjung Hospital, had said, "The two doctors are posted in the Emergency Ward. At around 9 p.m. while they were buying vegetables, a man asked them to step aside accusing them of spreading coronavirus." "The man said that 'you come from the hospital and spread coronavirus'. When the doctors resisted and argued, the man slapped them and even twisted their hand. The local residents came in and helped the two women, but the man escaped from the spot," he had said.
She was propelled to fame when appearing on last year's Love Island where she finished as runner-up with her boyfriend Tommy Fury.

And Molly-Mae Hague displayed her jaw-dropping physique in a sizzling bikini snap as she celebrated reaching an impressive 4million followers on Instagram.

The reality star, 20, looked nothing short of sensational in the photo as she posed on a boat with an idyllic view of the evening sea.

Wow: Molly-Mae Hague, 20, displayed her jaw-dropping physique in a sizzling bikini snap as she celebrated reaching an impressive 4million followers on Instagram

Showcasing her toned torso, Molly-Mae wore a gold patterned bikini while she styled her platinum blonde locks into a ponytail.

Placing her hand on her forehead, the social media star displayed her modelling chops as she posed with her eyes shut.

Alongside the snap, the Love Islander wrote: 'Thank you for 4MILLION'.

It comes after Molly-Mae won not one but two awards on Sunday nights virtual PrettyLittleThing Influencer Award ceremony amid the coronavirus lockdown.

Thrilled: Alongside the snap, the Love Islander wrote: 'Thank you for 4MILLION'

The beauty, who picked up the award for both Fashion Influencer Of The Year as well as Influencer Of The Year, made her acceptance speech on their Instagram live stream.

American actor Terrence J, 37, hosted the awards live on PrettyLittleThing's Instagram from his own living room, dishing out gongs to celebrate those in the celebrity and influencer industry.

Due to the pandemic, Molly and the other winners were forced to record their acceptance speeches via video link after the glitzy ceremony was cancelled amid government guidelines.

Either way, she still looked gorgeous in her acceptance video wearing her platinum locks swept to one side with a nude zip up body suit on.

Winner: Molly-Mae won not one but two awards on Sunday nights virtual PrettyLittleThing Influencer Award ceremony amid the coronavirus lockdown

Gorgeous: The beauty, who picked up the award for both Fashion Influencer Of The Year as well as Influencer Of The Year, made her acceptance speech on their Instagram live stream

The blonde bombshell, who is currently in isolation with her boxer boyfriend Tommy, 20, began her speech: 'I literally cannot believe that you guys have voted for me to be PLT's fashion influencer of the year. I am in shock still about this. I cannot believe it.'

She continued: 'Thank you so so so much to everyone who voted for me. This means the world to me.

'Like I studied fashion for three years at collage so it is my passion and obsession in my life. I also want to say a huge thank you to Sophia my stylist at PLT.

Happy: Due to the pandemic, Molly and the other winners were forced to record their acceptance speeches via video link after the glitzy ceremony was cancelled amid government guidelines

'You are the best and this is dedicated to you because I think you are the reason I won this. And to every person who voted for me, I love you and thank you so much.'

Molly then gave her acceptance speech for the coveted 'Influencer Of The year Award' which she described as being 'over the moon' about winning.

She shared: 'I am honestly in shock that I was nominated as one of PLT's influencer of the year, the girls in this category for this award, I never thought in a million years this would come through my door.

In love: She was propelled to fame when appearing on last year's Love Island and finished in second place with boyfriend Tommy Fury

'Thank you so much again to every one person who voted, I am over the moon to have received this

'To Emma especially as well, thank you of believing in for having me as your ambassador the relationship I have with PLT is just incredible and I love every person who works for PLT like so so much you've all become my friends, close friends, without you this wouldn't be possible.

'So again thank you so much to everyone who voted and thank you to PLT for believing in me from the start back when i had 10K and you gifted me a trip to Ibiza I'll never forget it. Since then this relationship has grown and grown and working with you is a dream so thank you so much.'

Beauty: Molly looked gorgeous in her acceptance video wearing her platinum locks swept to one side with a nude zip up body suit on

Following her reality TV stint on Love Island, Molly secured a 500,000 deal with the clothing brand.

Despite not winning the show, Molly appears to have matched the record-breaking fee earned by former Love Island winner Dani Dyer, who reportedly signed a half-a-million pound deal with In The Style following her triumphant stint in 2018.

Molly-Mae has joined the growing host of PrettyLittleThing ambassadors, which also includes the likes of Ashley Graham and Malika Haqq and Kourtney Kardashian.

Last December she appeared on the PLT Podcast where she discussed life before the villa and admitted: 'As an influencer you have to give off this persona of having a great life... before I went on the show, I didnt have money at all.

'I think it's really important people know that what you see on Instagram isnt a true reflection of whats going on in that person's life.'

She added: 'This time last year, I was living by myself in a flat in Manchester, I had literally no one around me, I was really just trying to create this social media career for myself.'

Virtual: She began her speech 'I literally cannot believe that you guys have voted for me to be PLT's fashion influencer of the year. I am in shock still about this. I cannot believe it'

Talking about her relationship with Tommy (Fury), who she met on Love Island over the summer, she gushed that she wants to marry the boxer.

She said: 'We're just so happy right now doing our thing. I've found the person Im going to marry!'

Other winners on Sunday night's awards included Jesy Nelson, Caitlyn Jenner, Paris Hilton and Amber Gill.
<! Buhari and Boris Johnson >

Nigerias President, Muhammadu Buhari has congratulated British Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, following his discharge from hospital over Coronavirus.

In a congratulatory letter dated April 14, 2020 to Mr Johnson, Buhari said he received with great relief the news of your discharge from hospital after being successfully treated for COVID-19.

Expressing delight on behalf of his family, government and people of Nigeria, at the Prime Ministers recovery, the Nigerian leader said: We all join you in appreciating the wonderful staff at both the hospital and the NHS who worked round the clock to look after you and those afflicted by COVID-19.

Buhari also wished the Prime Minister full recovery and good health in the coming days.

Johnson recently left the hospital after he overcame the deadly Coronavirus.

The British PM was rushed to the hospital after his case became critical. He was admitted at the Intensive Care Unit for adequate care.
State officials give Wednesday's COVID-19 briefing.

COVID-19 Recovery Center Planned in Great Barrington

BOSTON  A COVID-19 recovery center is being stood up in Great Barrington, one of five new facilities planned in the next week across the state to address the predicted surge in patients.

Gov. Charlie Baker on Wednesday said the care centers are being developed in conjunction with disbursement of personal protective gear and ongoing testing and tracing to address the novel coronavirus pandemic. Two centers setup to care for people who are symptomatic but may not need hospitalization or who are in recovery were opened over the past week in Worcester and Boston and a third was recently completed on Cape Cod.

There are three models being used to create these extra beds: converting buildings, using empty facilities or using dedicated wings within nursing facilities.

"As of the end of the day Monday, there were 17,500 beds statewide in Massachusetts that were suitable for COVID-19 treatment. That includes just under 6,000 acute care beds, just over 2,500 ICU beds, and approximately another 750 that are available in the field hospitals that we put up for patients if needed," Baker said at the daily COVID-19 briefing on Wednesday. "The last number will increase as we bring more field hospitals online. ...

"The commonwealth currently has five dedicated COVID-19 facilities opening within the next seven to 10 days in Brewster, Falmouth, New Bedford, East Longmeadow and Great Barrington with a couple of others and planning stages."

The Department of Public Health had initially been interested in Fairview Commons as a COVID-19 facility because it had been considered "clean" in having no reported cases of the coronavirus. However, testing of residents in the Great Barrington facility uncovered five cases in which the individual was not showing any symptoms.

Those residents had been all been in one area of the nursing home and have been kept in that unit since.

"We have since discontinued the plan with DPH for Fairview Commons to be a COVID-19 recovery center," Rosemary McLaughlin, regional director of operations for parent company Berkshire Healthcare, posted on the nursing home's website on April 8.

Another nursing home, Great Barrington Health and Rehabilitation, closed earlier this winter although its not clear when that happened. Health and Human Services Secretary Marylou Sudders had said in past briefings that the state had been considering nursing homes or similar medical facilities that had recently closed as candidates for such recovery centers. iBerkshires has made some inquiries but has not yet heard back.

The governor said the number of patients at the two open sites (Cape Cod will open Monday) are "relatively low."

"But these sites are being built to augment existing hospital capacity, and we hope the surge in cases is not significant enough that we'll need to rely heavily on those beds," he said. "But we think it's important that they be there, and that we have them, because all along, the goal has been to plan for the worst. And that's exactly what we've been doing."

The state's epidemiological model is predicting a surge in cases of between 47,000 to 172,000 over the next week or so with a peak in hospitalizations around April 20. Since the estimated beginning of the surge on April 10, the state has seen 9,500 new confirmed cases and nearly 400 deaths.

"We're working around the clock to attain and distribute large quantities of personal protective equipment to support frontline workers," the governor continued. "The command center, working with state and local partners, has helped distribute over 3.7 million pieces of [personal protective equipment] to hospitals, nursing homes, community health centers, public safety personnel, local boards of health and state agencies."

Distributed equipment includes more than 2 million gloves, more than 870,000 masks and more than 170,000 gowns.

"And in addition to that, FEMA notified us this morning that we'll be given 1 million pieces of personal protective equipment including 650,000 masks and 260,000 Tyvek suits," he said. "State officials have counting all this inventory and MEMA will work quickly, the distributed these mice and needed gear to our front-line workers once the inventory count and the inspection is completed."

Occupied nursing homes have been highly vulnerable to the spread of COVID-19 largely because of the fragile health of their residents. A spread of the contagion at the Soldiers' Home in Holyoke has lead to the deaths of at least 36 residents; Williamstown Commons has lost 14 residents to the virus but now has 13 who are recovering.

There are 383 nursing homes in Massachusetts caring for some 38,000 residents, 255 assisted living residences with 16,500 residents and 93 rest homes with approximately 3,000 residents.

"We're working with long-term care facilities to detect mitigate and manage the outbreak of COVID-19 throughout the state," said Sudders. "And we're intensely focused on the spread of illness and making certain that our nursing home residents are receiving the care they need during this pandemic."

The state has committed $130 million to stabilize and support nursing homes and increased rates across the board by 10 percent and by another 15 percent for those facilities creating COVID-19 wings or units.

"Those funds support additional staffing infection control, dedicated staffing units so that the staff are now migrating from non COVID units and the additional costs of supplies throughout the emergency," said Sudders. "And we believe that these different build outs, provide the appropriate setting for seniors and for staff to get and provide the best care."

The secretary also reported that updates on personal protective equipment disbursement, bed capacity and COVID-19 cases by municipalities (above a certain number) will now be posted on the state's website daily or weekly.
Mount Greylock Subcommittee Discusses Bus Contract Adjustment During Prolonged Closure

WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass.  The Finance Subcommittee of the Mount Greylock Regional School Committee asked the district's superintendent Tuesday to negotiate an amended bus contract for the remainder of the COVID-19 closure.

The issue is that the buses are not running while school is not in session by order of Gov. Charlie Baker, but school officials are concerned that if the bus drivers, who currently are laid off, find other jobs, contractor Dufour Tours could have trouble filling those positions when schools reopen, whether that is next month or in September.

The district's assistant superintendent and business manager advised the subcommittee that it is a fluid situation as districts and the commonwealth attempt to navigate the budgetary impacts of the global pandemic.

"Mass General Law says you should only pay for services rendered," Andrea Wadsworth said. "They're working on legislation to address that. [The Department of Elementary and Secondary Education] is saying if you can keep people whole, you should  especially since bus drivers are hard to find in the first place. They may find other jobs."

Wadsworth said that the state also advised that school districts work together to negotiate a single contract amendment, but that did not happen in the Berkshires, where individual districts worked out their own deals with Dufour.

She also explained that since any adjustment to the contract would be a reduction in what the district already has budgeted, a change does not need the approval of the School Committee. But Superintendent Kimberley Grady joined Tuesday's meeting to get input from the subcommittee.

"If [the drivers] are out on unemployment, there's a conversation that needs to be had with [Dufour] about whether they can agree to recall those employees  which may have a payroll tax benefit to Dufour," subcommittee chair Jamie Art said. "Under the CARES act, there is a provision that when you're paying employees to not work, it allows you to recover a portion of what you pay them in your payroll tax burden going forward.

"Unless we know they're going to recall all the drivers on their payroll  "

"I believe they'll do whatever you ask them to do," Wadsworth said. "If you say you want to make the workers whole, they'll do that."

Grady advised the subcommittee that based on past conversations with Dufour, the contractor's cost per bus works out to be about a 50/50 split between labor and other overhead, including the leases on the buses, maintenance of the bus barns and fuel.

Art asked what the percentages are within the non-labor half of the cost. Grady sent Dufour Tours a message during the meeting but did not get an immediate response.

"I would be open to a motion to authorize Kim to negotiate a reduced contract price, contingent on the preservation of employees and the maintenance of the bus fleet  keeping them ready to go when they need to get rolling  somewhere in the range of 50 to 75 percent of the bus contract depending on where his cost breakdown is," Art said.

DiLego made that motion, adding that Grady be directed to review the reduced price agreement with Art, and the motion passed, 3-0.

In other business on Tuesday, the subcommittee approved the new tuition rates for Mount Greylock's sending towns, Hancock and New Ashford, for the 2020-21 school year and received a heads-up from Grady that the district may need to adjust its FY21 budget in light of the COVID-19 crisis and its impact on municipal finances.

"Town budgets will play into [school budgets]," Grady said. "Right now, our budget at the School Committee level was approved. It has to go to the two towns for approval.

"When we set it, it was set on the Minimum Local Contribution we were aware of. There's a potential change there. We have heard nothing from our towns of a change, but be aware that could happen."

The MLC is determined by the commonwealth as a baseline for contributions from local property taxes to a school budget.

"The required local contribution is basically a measure of how much local tax revenue a city or town can reasonably raise and dedicate to the operation of its schools," according to the website of the non-profit Massachusetts Budget and Policy Center. It is related to the foundation budget, which "is designed to represent the total cost of providing an adequate education for all students."

Mount Greylock's budget assessments to its member towns need to be approved at the annual town meetings in Lanesborough and Williamstown. Williamstown's Select Board voted on Monday night to postpone its town meeting (previously scheduled for May) to a date to be determined.

At a special meeting of the full School Committee on Wednesday afternoon, the panel is scheduled to begin addressing the impending departure of Wadsworth, who is leaving the district to accept a position at Berkshire Community College.

"I had an unique opportunity for professional growth by applying for the position at BCC," she said on Tuesday morning. "I am humbled and honored to be selected for this prestigious role and to join an exceptional team at BCC."

Grady praised Wadsworth for her time in Mount Greylock's central office and noted, among other things, her contribution to Berkshire County as a longtime member of the Lee School Committee and chair of the local chapter of the Massachusetts Association of School Committees.

"She does so much great work with political figures to advocate for education in the county," Grady said. "She works tireless hours with the [Berkshire County Education Task Force]. She attends forums at the state level with Rep. Smitty Pignatelli and Sen. Adam Hinds.

"She sets up great events for students of all ages. Higher ed is so important in Berkshire County and all over."
GENEVA  Nations around the world reacted with alarm Wednesday after President Donald Trump announced a halt to the sizable funding the United States sends to the World Health Organization. Health experts warned the move could jeopardize global efforts to stop the coronavirus pandemic.

At a briefing in Washington, Trump said he was instructing his administration to halt funding for the WHO pending a review of its role "in severely mismanaging and covering up the spread of the coronavirus." The United States is WHO's largest single donor, contributing between $400 million and $500 million annually to the Geneva-based agency in recent years.

Trump has repeatedly labelled COVID-19 the "Chinese virus" and criticized the U.N. health agency for being too lenient on China, where the novel virus first emerged late last year.

Outside experts have questioned China's reported infections and deaths from the virus, calling them way too low and unreliable. And an investigation by The Associated Press has found that s ix days of delays between when Chinese officials k new about the virus and when they warned the public allowed the pandemic to bloom into an enormous public health disaster.

The WHO has been particularly effusive in its praise for China, calling on other countries to emulate their approach and repeatedly praising their transparency.

But China only agreed to a proposed WHO-led mission to investigate the coronavirus outbreak after WHO's chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus personally paid a visit to Chinese President Xi Jinping, a highly unusual move to secure a country visit during an outbreak.

The European Union on Wednesday said Trump has "no reason" to freeze WHO funding at this critical stage and called for measures to promote unity instead of division. EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell said the 27-nation bloc "deeply" regrets the suspension of funds and added that the U.N. health agency is now "needed more than ever" to combat the pandemic.

Borrell said "only by joining forces can we overcome this crisis that knows no borders."

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Even though the EU and the U.S. have been traditional allies for decades, the EU has increasingly been critical of the Trump administration over the past years.

Worldwide, the pandemic has infected nearly 2 million people and killed over 127,000, according to a tally by Johns Hopkins University. The virus is spread by microscopic droplets expelled into the air or left on surfaces when people sneeze or cough.

Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison said he sympathized with some of Trump's criticisms of WHO and China but that Australia would continue to fund the U.N. health agency.

"We work closely with them so that we're not going to throw the baby out with the bathwater here," Morrison told Perth Radio 6PR. "But they're also not immune from criticism."

Germany's foreign minister, Heiko Maas, pushed back at Trump's announcement.

"Placing blame doesn't help," he wrote on Twitter. "The virus knows no borders. We must work closely against COVID-19. Strengthening the U.N., in particular the underfunded WHO, is a better investment, for example, to develop and distribute tests and vaccines."

The Netherlands has also thrown its support behind the WHO. "Now is not the time to hold back funding. Once the pandemic is under control, lessons can be learned. For now, focus on overcoming this crisis," Sigrid Kaag, minister for foreign trade and development cooperation, said on Twitter.

Devi Sridhar, chair of global public health at the University of Edinburgh, called Trump's decision "extremely problematic," noting that WHO is leading efforts to help developing countries fight the spread of COVID-19.

"This is the agency that's looking out for other countries and leading efforts to stop the pandemic," Sridhar said. "This is exactly the time when they need more funding, not less."

Sridhar said Trump's move was a short-sighted political decision that would likely have lasting consequences.

"Trump is angry, but his anger is being directed in a way that is going to ultimately hurt U.S. interests," she said.

Sridhar and others said it was still unclear what the precise impact of Trump's funding cuts might be, but that other health priorities funded by the U.S., like polio eradication, malaria and HIV, were likely to suffer.

In Beijing, Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian says the country is "seriously concerned" about the U.S. government's decision to suspend funding.

The WHO did not respond to repeated requests from The Associated Press for comment, but its Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus and other top WHO officials were expected to attend a news conference on the pandemic later Wednesday.

Some experts say WHO dallied in declaring a pandemic; it did so only on March 11, long after the surging outbreaks on multiple continents met the agency's own definition for a global crisis.

"They were really behind the curve," said Mark Woolhouse, professor of infectious disease epidemiology at the University of Edinburgh.

The U.N. health agency also insisted for months that the virus could be contained and was not as infectious as influenza. But many outbreak experts, including at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, say COVID-19 is spreading many times faster than flu and that its rate of spread was apparent in January.

Still, some global health academics said Trump's attacks on WHO might actually strengthen the agency's credibility.

"If Trump was making a great success of the pandemic response in the U.S., if there were minimal cases and deaths there, that might be different," said Sophie Harman, a professor of international politics at Queen Mary University of London. "But things are getting worse and that reinforces the need for WHO."

 The Associated Press

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West Bengal Governor Jagdeep Dhankhar on Wednesday said that police and administration in the state are "failing to effect 100 percent social distancing" amid nationwide lockdown to contain the spread of COVID-19 and called for "examining central para forces requisitioning".

Dhankhar stated that COVID-19 lockdown protocol has to be "thoroughly implemented to ward off coronavirus".

"Lockdown protocol has to be thoroughly implemented to ward off coronavirus. Police and administration failing to effect 100 per cent social distancing or curbing religious congregations be shown door. Lockdown must succeed - examine central para forces requisitioning," Dhankhar tweeted while tagging West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee.

This comes a day after Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Tuesday announced the extension of COVID-19 lockdown till May 3.

According to the Union Ministry of Health and Family Welfare, there are 213 COVID-19 cases in West Bengal, including 37 cured/discharged/migrated and seven deaths.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Across the nation, differing visions of how and when to reopen school buildings that were closedmany for the rest of the school yearto slow the spread of the coronavirus are creating tension among local, state, and federal officials.

While President Donald Trump casts an ambitious goal of reopening the country in early May, some of his own federal agencies say getting the economy back up to speed is closely linked to having schools safely open their doors, freeing up parents to re-enter the workforce.

At the same time, 25 states and three U.S. territories have ordered or recommended school building closures for the rest of the academic year, well beyond Trumps May 1 target, according to Education Weeks tracker . And, even in states that have not made such a decision, state school chiefs planning for students eventual return have warned that schools may have to close again in the fall if the pandemic resurges.

There is no research and there is no best practice for this kind of mass extended closure, said Stephen Pruitt, the president of the Southern Regional Education Board and a former education commissioner in Kentucky. This is going to be new for everyone.

Governorsworking alone or in cooperation with newly created multistate consortiaare considering a variety of factors as they determine when to ease their stay-home directives in general and when to reopen schools.

Those factors include whether public health officials can effectively track the spread of the virus to allow for more targeted mitigation efforts; whether hospitals are prepared and equipped to treat patients; and what modifications schools should make to their operations to allow for social distancing in classrooms.

See Also Coronavirus and Schools

Theres no light switch here. I would argue its more like a dimmer, California Gov. Gavin Newsom, a Democrat, said at a news conference April 14. This is an imperfect science. There is no playbook that someone else has put together.

Californias governor and state superintendent have recommended that schools remain closed for the rest of the academic year, although the decision is up to individual districts in that state.

Newsom unveiled criteria he would consider before modifying the states stay-home order, which has no set end date. He said that when schools reopen, they may have to alter activities that lead to large clusters of students, like physical education classes and lunch service. And schools and businesses will need plans to screen visitors and employees for potential illness, he said.

Newsom spoke the day after he and the governors of Washington and Oregon announced a pact to coordinate plans to reopen schools and businesses.

That same day, seven northeastern statesNew York, New Jersey, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, and Delawareannounced a similar regional agreement. Governors of those states plan to form a council made up of health and economic experts to guide their reopening plans. Among those states, Pennsylvania has already ordered its schools closed for the remainder of the school year.

New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, a Democrat, also rejected the idea that the economy of a state could be restarted like flipping a light switch. He presented a graphic at a news conference Tuesday that showed schools, businesses, transportation, and health care working together like interconnected gears.

Cuomo had spent the weekend sparring with New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio, who made the independent decision to keep buildings in the nations largest school system closed for the remainder of the year. New York City schools are under mayoral control.

The decision about when and how to reopen schools must be made in collaboration with other leaders in the region, said Cuomo, who has ordered all schools in the state, including those in New York City, to close until the end of April. As New York has become the epicenter of the pandemic in the U.S., adjoining states like Connecticut have also seen surges.

When we made the decision to close the schools, we made it for the entire region, Cuomo said at his Saturday press briefing. Any decision to reopen them will also be a coordinated decision.

State-Federal Sparring

Sparring between state and local leaders mirrors emerging tensions between governors and Trump as he pushes to reopen the economy as early as May 1.

Trump said at an April 10 White House briefing that he has the power to override governors on their decisions about school closures, but he would rather not use that authority. His answer came in response to a question a reporter asked the president about a report that Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, a Republican and Trump ally, is considering reopening schools in May.

This week, Trump has made assertions in the opposite direction, suggested he has absolute authority to reopen states businesses and schools, even if their governors want them to remain closed.

The federal government has absolute power. It has the power, Trump said Monday. As to whether or not Ill use that power, well see.

The comment led to rebukes from state leaders and concerns from legal analysts about a violation of states authority.

Trump announced a reopening the country council Tuesday to advise him on easing social distancing efforts. The list of participants includes hundreds of leaders from business, technology, health care, agriculture, and sports, but it does not include anyone from the education sector.

Thats despite the important role schools play in charting a path forward.

The first priority is to reopen community settings where children are cared for, including K-12 schools , day cares, and locally attended summer camps, to allow the workforce to return to work, says a draft document created by officials at the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Other community settings will follow with careful monitoring for increased transmission that exceeds the public health and health care systems.

That document, published by the Washington Post Tuesday, also proposes grants for school districts to train teachers over summer break to develop curricula and teaching methods appropriate for periods of school closure, suggesting that schools may have additional closures in the future.

It proposes a staged reopening process with a time frame that would be adjusted depending on local conditions.

Models indicate 30-day shelter in place followed by 180-day lifting of all mitigation results in large rebound curve  some level of mitigation will be needed until vaccines or broad community immunity is achieved for recovering communities, the document says.

States Roles

While federal agencies have issued guidelines about issues like crowd size, Trump has not made any federal orders regarding the closures of schools and businesses. And authority over schools largely rests with governors.

The wave of school closures that started on a district-by-district basis when the virus first emerged in the United States quickly picked up speed as governors issued statewide orders throughout March, and it will be up to governors to lift those orders, they say.

In Maryland, where state leaders are constantly revisiting their timeline for reopening, state education officials are preparing for the possibility of further periods of remote learning in the fall, State Superintendent of Schools Karen Salmon said April 8.

Im not sure we are going to be doing school in the same way going forward, she said, echoing a similar caution by leaders in Washington State.

Maryland has seen significant spread of the coronavirus in Baltimore and counties that are part of suburban Washington, D.C. The state, like others around the country, is working on a system for contact tracing that will allow public health officials to quickly identify and isolate people who catch the virus and anyone who may have been exposed through interactions with them.

But health officials around the country have warned that shortages of tests and related supplies might throw sand in the gears of those efforts. A study by researchers at Johns Hopkins University estimates it could take 100,000 public health officials nationwide to effectively trace the virus and slow its spread.

How Will Schools Reopen?

Even as state and national leaders, and the public, continue to debate when schools will reopen, education leaders are focusing their discussions on what it will look like when they do.

Weve got to provide better support, better guidance, better [professional development], better everything than weve always done, said Pruitt of the Southern Regional Education Board. We cant go into August hoping things will be like theyve always been because they will not. Hope is not a strategy.

The SREBs 16 member states announced Wednesday plans to create an education recovery task force that will be co-chaired by Pruitt and Virginia State Superintendent James Lane.

The group, which will meet for the first time next week, plans to make a road map for how schools can restart in-person instruction when they get the green light from health and government officials.

Among the areas they will address: how to effectively spend federal recovery dollars targeted at schools; how to recruit educators to meet new learning needs students may have after being away from school; how to prepare for possible future closures; and how to assess and meet the emotional and academic needs of students who may have had limited or insufficient exposure to remote learning opportunities.

These are real gaps where students may not have even been exposed to the instruction that we expect in a school year, Lane said, adding that the task force would pay particular mind to the needs of English-language learners, students with disabilities, and students in poverty.

Around the country, schools are also facing logistical questions about how to space students in cafeterias to avoid crowding, whether to rearrange bus routes to transport smaller groups of students, and how to compensate for lost learning time. They are also discussing how to confront other disasters, like tornados, that may occur as schools continue to face the fallout of the pandemic, Pruitt said.

And they are facing those questions under the threat of cratered state funding during a national economic crisis, Lane said.

Im not sure everyone understands the balance that states and superintendents are going to have to do in order to be able to address these things, he said.

Many of the states involved in the collaborative, including Virginia, have already ended in-person instruction for the remainder of the school year.

Will any others reopen buildings before then?

I think thats getting more and more unlikely, Pruitt said.
An animal rights group is demanding the Oregon Health and Science University stop some experiments on ferrets after photographs emerged showing the animals in restrained in dirty conditions and the university was cited for violations of the Animal Welfare Act.

The experiments, which were briefly suspended last summer, were blasted by Michael Budkie, executive director of Stop Animal Exploitation Now, who obtained the pictures through a records request.

The photos of the ferret in the restraint device ... prove that this project is nothing short of barbaric, Budkie wrote in an April 8 letter to OHSU President Danny Jacobs. These images are the stuff of nightmares.

Officials from the university said they self-reported some of the issues Budkie cited and that changes had been made to lab protocols, which had resulted in violations issued by the U.S. Department of Agriculture during a surprise inspection last year.

We strive for perfection but unfortunately that cant always be met, said Kim Saunders, a veterinarian and director of the Department of Comparative Medicine at the university. When something goes wrong, we take it seriously.

For the experiments in question, which focus on how the brain processes sound, small holes were drilled through the skulls of ferrets, and electrodes were inserted into the brain to measure how audible stimulation was interpreted by the animals. After the surgery, the animals are fitted with pink acrylic caps to protect their skulls.

The experiments help researchers develop cochlear implants and other aides for people experiencing hearing loss, Saunders said.

During one surgical procedure on a ferret in April of 2019, some people in the operating room failed to keep the area sterile. The animal proved to be unsuitable for the experiment and was euthanized using an unapproved method, Saunders said, though she noted the method used was similar to how domestic animals are put down in veterinarian offices on a regular basis.

In June, a federal inspector came to the universitys Portland lab and found a ferret had an infection around its head cap, including crusty, foul-smelling exudate, and several pieces of equipment in the operating room were corroded and dirty looking.

An inspector from the USDA cited Oregon Health and Science University for have equipment that appeared dirty and corroded in June of 2019.

Saunders said infections are not uncommon in animals that have head caps and that, while the containers appeared corroded on the outside, the insides were sterile.

Still, the research was suspended soon after the inspection while the university worked to put more protections in place. The work to resume after the university hired additional personnel to monitor the lab and corrected other issues flagged by the USDA.

Ive been here for over 20 years, and this is the only suspension Ive ever seen, Saunders said. They are rare occurrences but we take them very seriously.

While the pictures may be shocking to the public, Sauders said the research conducted in OHSU labs is important.

We do believe biomedical research is important to finding treatments and cures for our loved ones, she said.

Budkie, though, argued that whatever benefits are outweighed by the costs to the animals involved and that the research should be terminated.

The lab staff connected to this ill-fated experiment has bungled this project so seriously that no useful information can come from it, he wrote. This assault on human decency which is masquerading as a supposedly scientific experiment must not be allowed to continue.

Graphic images below

A ferret with an acrylic skull cap is immobilized as part of an experiment at Oregon Health and Science University. An animal rights group blasted the institution for what it called "barbaric" violations of the Animal Welfare Act.

Correction: A previous version of this post referenced electric shock experiments done on ferrets at Oregon Health and Sciences University. That research took place at another lab, not at OHSU.

-- Kale Williams; kwilliams@oregonian.com; 503-294-4048; @sfkale

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With coronavirus lockdown in place around the world, people are turning to other ways to satisfy their wanderlust.

For one couple from Victoria in Australia, this meant sorting out their old travel photos.

But after posting the pictures of their 2019 holiday onto Facebook, Jaz and Garry Mott ended up receiving a fine from the state police for "infringement" of lockdown rules due to their "non-essential travel".

Ms Mott posted 12 photos of herself and her husband onto Facebook on 5 April, tagging in the location as Lakes Entrance, around two hours from their home in Traralgon.

A few days later, on 9 April, the couple were shocked to find a police officer at their door.

Ms Mott told The Independent that the officer "just handed me the fine and walked off". She was then forced to contact the station, where she was told she had to pay the fine.

In infringement notices seen by The Independent, the couple were handed fines of AU$1,652 (840.70) each for "failure to comply with a direction given to a person in the exercise of a power under an authorisation given under section 199".

Specifically, they were fined for "going for a drive to Lakes Entrance (non-essential travel)".

The fine has since been revoked by the police, Ms Mott says, after she contacted local media.

However, Ms Mott says she will not be allowed to post any more holiday snaps for the foreseeable future.

Ms Mott had shared her old holiday snaps online (Jaz Mott)

She told The Independent: "The Sargent told me if I posted any more photos I will be arrested."

A spokesperson for the Victoria Police Department told The Independent: "This incident has been reviewed and the decision has been made to withdraw the infringement notice.

"On occasion, errors will be made however that is why a review process exists to ensure instances such as these are identified and rectified.

"Police are not specifically monitoring social media accounts to identify breaches of the Chief Health Officer directives.

"In general, police will follow up and investigate the circumstances surrounding individual potential breaches reported by the public."

One of the infringement notices issued to the couple (Jaz Mott)

The state of Victoria is currently on lockdown, will stay-at-home notices issued to all residents.

People are only allowed to leave their homes to shop for food and other necessary goods and services, access medical services or provide caregiving, attend work or education where you cant do those things from home, exercise and certain emergency situations.

Going for a drive and other leisure activities are all considered non-essential travel.

Those who do not comply could face fines of up to AU$20,000 (10,186.20).

It comes as the Australian Department of Home Affairs released data indicating that, between 19 and 30 March, 16,000 citizens ignored non-essential travel rules and flew abroad.

Some 3,800 Australians also took flights after 24 March, when the government issued an official ban on overseas travel.

However, passengers needed government exemption after this point (granted for reasons including that the traveller normally lives in another country and is returning home, or is travelling to do essential work abroad).

Australians returning to the country are now are being forced to quarantine in government-mandated accommodation for 14 days before they can go home.
A paint supply company has been ordered to pay a female forklift operator 84,759 in compensation after she was unfairly dismissed for raising health and safety concerns.

The worker had a 31-year unblemished record with the employer but was dismissed shortly after raising concerns over the use of a chemical, DB20, in the cleaning water supply at her workplace.

The employee also raised a health and safety complaint in relation to having to sweep, as opposed to vacuum clean, the talc and metallic powder at her workplace.

Workplace Relations Commission adjudication officer Emile Daly found that the reason the adverse treatment was meted out to the worker was as a result of her raising the reasonable health and safety complaints - and that the penalisation dismissal would not have occurred but for the two complaints in relation to the worker's health and safety being made.

Ms Daly found that the forklift operator was penalised under the Safety, Health and Welfare at Work Act 2005, and awarded her 82,351 for the penalisation dismissal.

She also found that the worker was unfairly dismissed.

Ms Daly awarded the worker a further 2,228 for a breach of her terms of employment.

The paint/coatings supply firm dismissed the worker without notice in June 2019, and did not engage with the commission prior to the hearing or attend the adjudication hearing into the case.

The worker was dismissed, according to her employer, for taking home empty paint buckets and adding a small amount of personal rubbish to the company refuse pile.

Following her dismissal, 40 of her fellow work colleagues signed a petition in support of her and asked management that the decision be reconsidered, but it was not.

The forklift operator believes that the real reason for her dismissal was because she had become regarded, wrongly, as a trouble maker, after making the complaints concerning the use of a chemical product and for two health and safety breaches.

Ms Daly stated that the award of compensation is just and equitable given the worker's unblemished work history.

She also noted that in most other workplaces, the role of forklift operator is performed exclusively by men, "and I have no doubt that, certainly early on, if not throughout her employment, this probably gave rise to a degree of adverse reaction and for that reason alone, apart from any other, her successful and blemish-free work history is even more impressive".

Ms Daly also took account of the likelihood that the employer acted in the way that it did to discourage other workers from making any health and safety complaints.

She stated that the award took into account the need to act as a deterrent to any such future conduct.
New Jersey was the first state to propose a bill that would mandate insurers cover COVID-19-related losses under their business interruption policies, and the insurance industry was quick to express its concern. But that hasnt stopped some states from rolling out similar proposed legislation.

New York and Pennsylvania have recently proposed their own COVID-19 business interruption bills, bringing the total to seven states that have introduced legislation like this. Similar to proposed bills in New Jersey, New York and Pennsylvania is legislation that has been floated in Louisiana, Ohio, Massachusetts and South Carolina. None of the proposed bills have yet passed.

The concern among the insurance industry is that legislation like this could place too much financial strain on insurers that didnt price for virus-related losses, which were initially excluded from policies nearly 15 years ago through an Insurance Services Office (ISO) exclusion for loss due to virus or bacteria. The ISO exclusion was introduced in July 2006 and later approved by regulators. Similar exclusions exist in forms issued by other insurance organizations or in insurer-drafted forms, Insurance Journal previously reported.

I think in laymans terms, it would implode the industry, Doug Jones, managing director of JAG Insurance Group, told Insurance Journal in a March webinar on business interruption and the coronavirus. At the end of the day, the ripple effect of what that would cause down the road, and Im talking short-term, not long-term; Im talking about months from now, not years from now. It would be difficult for anybody to buy any type of insurance.

Additional concerns among the insurance industry about this type of legislation surround The Contracts Clause in the U.S. Constitution, which places limitations on states ability to interfere with private contracts.

Its just not constitutional, Don Hayden, co-founder and partner of Mark Migdal & Hayden, added. I mean, what youre essentially doing is creating insurance where there is nothing. Youre essentially throwing out the underwriting and the risk evaluation that insurance companies have done before writing a policy and saying, You have to cover this. Even though you had expressly said that you would not cover it in your exclusion and in your insurance agreement.'

Proposed Bills in Pennsylvania, New York

In Pennsylvania, HB 2372  or An Act Providing For Insurance Coverage For Business Interruption  has been introduced. While the bill has not yet seen a vote, it calls for any insurance policy that covers loss or damage to property, including the loss of use and occupancy and business interruption, to cover business interruption losses due to global virus transmission or pandemic. If enacted, the legislation would be retroactive for policies in force on March 6, 2020, when a Proclamation of Disaster Emergency was first declared in the state regarding this pandemic.

The proposed bill applies to insurance policies that have been issued to insureds with fewer than 100 eligible employees in Pennsylvania, meaning full-time employees who work a normal week of at least 25 hours, according to the proposed legislation. The bill also states insurers that pay claims related to business interruption stemming from the coronavirus pandemic can apply to the Pennsylvania Insurance Commissioner for relief and reimbursement.

As a general matter, business interruption insurance will only pay when there has been a physical loss (such as a fire) to the premises of the building, Pennsylvania Insurance Commissioner Jessica Altman said in an emailed statement regarding the proposed legislation. The product generally was not designed or priced to cover communicable diseases, such as COVID-19, and generally policies that we have seen in mediating complaints contain clear exclusions.

This is an issue that has garnered attention in Washington, D.C., as U.S. Congress considers strategies to assist business owners, Altmans statement continued.

The industry argues that proposals to retroactively apply coverage to policies that excluded benefits in such policies, though beneficial to the policyholder, are unconstitutional and threaten the viability of the broader industry, Altman said. We understand those concerns and recognize the need for a national solution to this growing challenge confronting businesses across the nation.

Similarly, New York has proposed A 10226 in the State Assembly, which would require certain perils to be covered under business interruption insurance during the COVID-19 pandemic. The bill was introduced by State Assemblyman Robert Carroll and has not yet been voted on.

The proposed New York bill reads similarly to the Pennsylvania legislation, applying to policies issued to insureds with fewer than 100 eligible employees, meaning full-time employees who work a normal week of 25 or more hours, according to the bill. The legislation would be retroactive for policies issued on or after March 7, 2020. If enacted, insurers required to pay business interruption claims related to the coronavirus would be eligible for reimbursement with the New York Department of Financial Services. A spokesperson for DFS said it does not comment on proposed or pending legislation.

Carroll told Insurance Journal that he is currently working with advocates and members of the state legislature to gain more cosponsors for the bill and move it forward.

I hope it moves as quickly as possible, he said. Obviously, these are very unique times for all of us, so I dont have a specific timeline, but as soon as possible is what were trying to do.

Industry Opposition

Insurance industry associations have continually expressed opposition regarding such legislation. In an April 13 letter to Pennsylvania Representative Tina Pickett, Chair of the Pennsylvania House of Representatives Insurance Committee, The Wholesale & Specialty Insurance Association (WSIA) stated it believes HB 2372 in Pennsylvania, as proposed, would have far-reaching, significant negative impacts to all consumers and businesses relying on the insurance market to protect them now and in the future.

Any action to fundamentally alter business interruption provisions specifically, or property insurance generally, to retroactively mandate insurance coverage for viruses by voiding those exclusions, would immediately subject insurers to claim payment liability that threatens solvency and the ability to make good on the actual promises made in existing insurance policies, the letter stated.

In a statement released by the National Association of Mutual Insurance Companies (NAMIC), President and CEO Charles M. Chamness said calls for the insurance industry to provide coverage for perils that are excluded in a business interruption policy are misguided, Insurance Journal previously reported.

If elected officials require payment for perils that were excluded, never underwritten for, and for which no premium was ever collected, catastrophic results will occur and we may deal with a second crisis: insurance insolvencies and impairments. There will also be irreparable harm done to contract law, and the impact of this will be felt by every business in America, Chamness said.

Seeking Relief for Small Businesses

On the other hand, Carroll said he believes legislation like this is important because it represents a push for relief for businesses suffering amidst the coronavirus crisis.

There are thousands and thousands of small businesses in New York that pay business interruption premiums for instances just like this, Carroll said. The fact that insurance companies are not paying out these claims, both to contracts that are silent and contracts that I would say surreptitiously carved out viruses and bacteria, I think, is unconscionable.

As New York has served as the epicenter of the coronavirus outbreak so far, Carroll said he sees this legislation as particularly imperative for small businesses within the state.

This is devastating to New York, more than almost any other place in the country as New York is the epicenter of this outbreak, he said. New York City, specifically, has some 26,000 bars and restaurants. And there are, of course, thousands and thousands of other bars and restaurants throughout the state, as well as theaters and clubs and museums and a whole host of other places. This is essential for the tens of thousands of small businesses that have been affected by this, so that when we do get an all clear sign, there is some type of ability to get these businesses back up and running as quickly as possible.

In response to the insurance industrys concerns about the legislations constitutionality and the potential financial impact to the industry if passed, I disagree with both, he said.

[Is the insurance industry] suggestingthat they dont have some obligation to pay out any claims for the mass amount of loss of business that has gone on throughout our country? he continued. That just is baffling to me.

With this in mind, Carroll is calling on courts and state governments to take action.

Courts and state governments have found clauses of contracts unconscionable before, he said. It is within the right of state governments to do that. Insurance companies dont have to like it. But its within our power; its clearly within our power.

However, Jones said he sees federal, state and local government as the way forward in terms of addressing the concerns of small businesses, not the insurance industry.

Its really on our governments, whether it be at the federal level, the state or the local level, to address this, he said. It should not be put at the feet of the insurance industry to resolve this problem.

Jones added he is sympathetic to the concerns of small businesses being impacted by COVID-19 right now. Although he said he believes legislation like what has been proposed in several states would result in great consequences for the insurance industry, he is optimistic relief for businesses hurting due to this pandemic is on the horizon.

I think keeping hope alive is human nature, Jones said. I dont blame any one of my clients that calls me expecting for this to be covered by their policy, because they may or may not understand the terms of the contract. Im not mad at those people for thinking that or for being optimistic that legislation may pass. I think that ultimately, there will be other avenues for small businesses like the stimulus package and whatever else is going to follow-up with the payroll protection program  things of that nature. That is where youre going to get or have the ability to get the funds that you need to stay open.

This article has been updated to include comments from the Pennsylvania Department of Insurance and New York Assemblyman Robert Carroll. For related articles, check out Insurance Journals Complete Coronavirus Coverage.

Topics Carriers COVID-19 Legislation New York Market Pennsylvania
Camping store Aussie Disposal has collapsed into administration after a year of financial loss due to the bushfires followed by the coronavirus pandemic.

There are 36 stores in total, including 23 that are company-owned and another 13 owned by franchisees.

Each of the stores located in NSW, Victoria and South Australia sell a variety of camping equipment alongside gold prospecting items and military clothing.

But after the recent bushfires ravaged Australia and now people have been told to stay indoors due to the coronavirus pandemic, staff were told on Wednesday that 12 Aussie Disposal stores will be permanently closed.

Camping store Aussie Disposal has collapsed into administration after a year of financial loss due to the bushfires followed by the coronavirus pandemic

Bushfires meant that many keen campers were forced to stay home (pictured: A firefighter conducting back-burning measures north of Sydney)

Mark Purvis, son of Aussie Disposals founder Jack, bought out his father's business with three partners in 1992.

The company has been working through a major restructure over the past two years, with the help of their main lender ANZ.

But the restructuring was derailed and sales of camping equipment and other outdoor items have dropped significantly due to both the bush fires and COVID-19 forcing campers to stay at home.

For five months, hundreds of bushfires ripped through 18.6million hectares of land, destroying tens of thousands of buildings and claiming 30 lives.

The ferocious fires became international news and hurt the tourism industry during what should have been the peak summer season.

As of Wednesday afternoon, there have been 6,440 cases of coronavirus in Australia and 63 people have died.

Mr Purvis said that a restructure of the company after these two events would only see 11 corporate-owned able to keep their doors open.

'Our intention is to trade through this and reduce the number of stores so we can ultimately come out the other side with a smaller group of stores and be in a better position than what we are now in,' Mr Purvis told The Sydney Morning Herald.

'We are an Australian-born business and we hope to stay as a core Australian retailer,' he said.

As of Wednesday afternoon, there have been 6,440 cases of coronavirus in Australia and 63 people have died and the government and health experts have warned people to stay home and practice social distancing (pictured: People with masks lining up at Centrelink)

Aussie Disposal staff were told on Wednesday that 12 stores will be permanently closed and the company will be restructured

Aussie Disposals employs about 120 people, with more working at franchisee-owned stores.

Mr Purvis said how many staff members will lose their job due to store closures is unknown.

'There will be some people made redundant through this unfortunately, it's not something we want to happen and we are desperately trying to keep as many of those people as we can under the Job Keeper program which will assist us,' Mr Purvis said.

The International Monetary Fund forecast that the impact of the lockdown would cause the worst contraction in the Australian economy since the 1930s Great Depression.

The IMF predicted a 6.7 per cent plunge in Australia's gross domestic product for 2020 - dwarfing the deep downturns suffered during the early 1980s and early 1990s recessions.

Australia was also expected to be among the world's worst affected economies, with the forecast contraction this year more than double the three per cent decline predicted for the global economy.

The federal government had committed over $300 billion in stimulus to alleviate the coronavirus crash, significantly increasing public sector debt.
Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, April 15)  The Philippine government will send its navy ship to China next week in a bid to hasten the transport of medical supplies it is importing from Beijing, a senior official said.

Manila has ordered about a million sets of PPE worth P1.8 billion under a "government to government arrangement," according to Carlito Galvez, who is in charge of the national coronavirus task force. Several flights have already brought in some of the supplies.

About 12,000 sets of personal protective equipment or PPE arrived at the Ninoy Aquino International Airport on board a a special commercial flight on Tuesday afternoon.

The supplies include disposable protective suits, N95 masks, goggles, gowns, gloves, surgical caps and shoe covers.

The Chinese government is chartering at least three "goodwill flights" to help the Philippines speed up the shipment of the supplies.

"I think the Philippines now is facing a very crucial time to fight the epidemic and as always, we stand together with the Philippines as brothers and sisters," Chinese ambassador Huang Xilian told reporters, "We will do our best to extend our helping hand to our friends, the Philippines."

Galvez explained the two government's contract was made to ensure that the medical supplies "will be within the standard."

The Philippine Air Force earlier said it has made at least five trips to Xiamen, China beginning April 6, to pick up the supplies.

"Nung makita ng China na talagang nahirapan tayo," Galvez said, the Chinese government offered to charter the "goodwill flights."

But since the shipments began early this month, only about 70,000 sets, or less than ten percent of the total supplies have been transported to Manila.

"Most probably ten days from now (April 25), baka gagawin natin is papakuha natin sa ating navy ship yung more or less 250,000 na cargoes," Galvez said.

[Translation: Most probably ten days from now (April 25), we will deploy our navy ship (to pick up) more or less 250,000 cargoes.]

The Philippine Navy has yet to release details on which among its ships will sail to China.

While some countries have rejected Chinese-made equipment designed to fight the coronavirus pandemic, Galvez said he is getting positive feedback from Filipino frontliners on the quality of the imported supplies.

"Ang sinabi nila, that is one of the best PPE that they ever had because this is "level 4"," Galvez pointed out, "Magandang isuot, malamig at saka very soft. Yung iba kasing PPE mabigat, makati, mainit."

[They are saying that is one of the best PPE that they ever had because is "level 4," Galvez pointed out, "It is ideal to wear, cool and very soft. Other PPEs are heavy, itchy and unpleasant to wear."]

The Office of Civil Defense is tasked to distribute the medical kits to both hospitals and other medical facilities nationwide.
Deep Staff Cuts Begin At Billboard, Vibe, Hollywood Reporter

Layoffs began on Tuesday at Billboard, Hollywood Reporter, and Vibe in an effort by owner Valence Media to dramatically reduce costs.

The cuts will total $9-$10 million of personnel and headcount expenses, an insider at the company told The Wrap. Deeper cuts were initially planned since losses at the media company are said to be $18-$19 million per year, according to the source. Other reports suggest a broader financial crisis at Valence Media

The staff at Vibe appears to have been all but eliminated. At least 8 were let go at Valence owned TV producer DCP.

The Hollywood Reporter will reportedly also be hit hard with staff cuts starting on Wednesday. On Monday HR editorial director Matthew Belloni exited abruptly after clashing with Valences chief executives over journalistic ethics and editorial oversight.

Billboard was hacked, apparently by its own former IT staff.

Wow. Billboard & Hollywood Reporter laid off their entire IT staff, so the IT staff posted it to the website. It reads: Fat drunk and stupid is no way to go through life#SavingABuckAtYourExpense pic.twitter.com/Z5nrMD7Hzo  Zack Whittaker (@zackwhittaker) April 15, 2020

Former Staffers Took To Social Media

Today was my last day as deputy editor at @VibeMagazine. My position was eliminated as a result of various layoffs across the parent company in response to the coronavirus. Grateful to have nearly two years with one of the most iconic brands in music/cultural journalism. pic.twitter.com/sCvpzfKdlh  William Ketchum III (@WEKetchum) April 14, 2020

After so many trips around the sun with VIBE, Im sad to see it end like this. Myself, the rest of the staff and some great folks at Billboard were laid off today. This job changed my life in so many ways and Im forever grateful for it. Excited to see where God takes me next.  Desi  (@Desire_Renee) April 14, 2020

Im not even sure how to type this. I was laid off today with countless others at Billboard. It has been such a joy getting to know so many people in the industry & covering country music and Nashville. My email is in my bio as I try to figure out next steps.  Annie Reuter (@yousingiwrite) April 14, 2020

Very rough day at Billboard, we lost a lot of good people. Taylor and I are OK but a lot of people arent and it really fucking sucks. Be kind to each other please.  Dave Brooks (@RealDaveBrooks) April 15, 2020

Today myself & many colleagues at Billboard, Vibe & THR were laid off. Im very proud of what we did in my 7 years at Billboard & ready to keep writing, editing, podcasting, creating. Hit me up for all things freelance (music, culture, sports, etc). Email & website are in bio   chris payne (@cpayneonaplane) April 14, 2020

Im one of the many who were laid off at Billboard today. Working with these incredible journalists has been a dream the last 2+ years. Many dreams came true while I was there  I hung out with Mariah and Patti Smith, cmon!  and Im grateful for all of it, every minute. <3  Hilary Hughes (@hilmonstah) April 14, 2020

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A 64-year-old coronavirus patient died at the Lucknow's KGMU on Wednesday, a day after the Uttar Pradesh authorities ordered to shut a private hospital and a diagnostic centre visited by him.

The authorities had also quarantined 20 staff members at the government-run King George's Medical University after it was confirmed that he had contracted the infection.

In a statement, the KGMU said the patient suffered from many complications.

He was suffering from diabetes because of which his kidneys were impaired. He had infection in lungs. He had tested positive for coronavirus, the statement read.

The hospital said the patient was put on a ventilator in the isolation ward.

All efforts were made but he could not be saved," the KGMU said.

The patient had visited Lucknow's Medwell Hospital, complaining of fever and cough, over a week ago. He was told to get an X-ray done, for which he went to Charak Diagnostic Centre.

As the man's condition deteriorated and he complained of breathlessness, he was brought to the KGMU trauma centre on Saturday. He then came under the treatment of the hospital's neurology department. Later, he tested positive for coronavirus and was sent to the isolation ward.

Chief Medical Officer Dr Narendra Agarwal on Monday wrote to the private hospital and the diagnostic centre, asking them to shut all operations.

He also asked them to provide a full list of their staff members who attended to the patient, so that they can be tested.

"Ensure that all staff of the centre be kept in home quarantine for 14 days," the letter read.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
PHOENIX  A Phoenix man is the first in Arizona to survive COVID-19 through a rare form of treatment called extracorporeal membrane oxygenation (ECMO) therapy.

Enes Dedic, 53, was on the brink of death with a ventilator until his doctors at HonorHealth used ECMO as a last resort. Dedic is among the first U.S. COVID-19 patients to survive the disease by using the treatment and is among around 10 worldwide.

ECMO works by helping oxygenate blood outside the body so blood doesn't need to transfer through damaged or filled lungs. Instead, tubes carry blood from the body to an external artificial lung that removes carbon dioxide and adds oxygen, at which point an artificial heart pumps the blood back into the body.

It's a last hope treatment, as the mortality rate on ECMO is around 40%  "extraordinarily high for almost any medical procedure"  according to Dedic's doctors.

After 10 days in a medical coma on ECMO, Dedic woke up responsive and soon was able to FaceTime his wife.

"I can't even express myself," his wife Olivera Dedic said. "I was jumping through the roof when I heard that they woke him up and he's doing better."

Dr. Robert Riley, Olivera Dedic and Dr. Anselmo Garcia after the successful treatment of Olivera's husband Enes Dedic.

Doctor used therapy as a last resort: 'ECMO or death for him'

After returning from travel overseas, Enes Dedic spent a few weeks at home in the Deer Valley area of Phoenix battling fevers, chills, aches and nausea.

He first checked into HonorHealth's Deer Valley Medical Center on March 15 and quickly deteriorated. He was intubated and transferred to the HonorHealth John C. Lincoln Medical Center in Phoenix for increased mechanical ventilation.

A team of doctors tried everything to save him, said Dr. Anselmo Garcia, a pulmonologist and critical care physician. Enes Dedic was treated with all the potential drugs used for COVID-19 including hydrochloroquine, azithromycin, Kaletra, Actemra, antibiotics and anti-inflammatories.

Enes Dedic surrounded by his care team after recovering from COVID-19 through ECMO treatment.

None of these worked.

As a last resort, doctors turned to ECMO, said Dr. Robert Riley, chief of cardiothoracic surgery at HonorHealth. Riley performed the surgical procedure for ECMO.

Story continues

"At that point, it was either ECMO or death for him," Dr. Ace Ovil, a trauma and clinical care surgeon, said. "Even though ECMO is a risky procedure and has some associated potential risks, we felt like we needed to give him a fighting chance of surviving his disease."

The procedure allowed Enes Dedic's lungs to rest while the machine worked for them.

Riley said it was uncertain whether this would work. At the beginning of COVID-19, early evidence suggested ECMO was not a useful treatment and that its complications outweighed potential benefits. But given this patient's critical situation, the benefits were worth the risks, Riley said.

In the bottom of my heart I was thinking that hes a strong man, hes going to survive," Olivera Dedic said. "But at the same time, I was scared with all of this technology, everything, machines, ventilators and everything they have to do for him, all those medications. I was very, very scared what was going to happen.

Part of the ECMO machine that oxygenates blood outside a patients body to ease impact on damaged lungs.

Enes Dedic was evaluated each day for oxygen levels, X-rays, lab values and organ damage. He steadily improved every day, Garcia said.

After 10 days in a coma while treated with ECMO, doctors woke him up and he was quickly responsive.

"This was a complete team effort," Garcia said. "There are round-the-clock nurses, respiratory physicians, aides that helped, even housekeeping, just to keep everything going just so that we can maintain the therapy that's needed for one patient on a day-to-day basis."

In recent days, he's been feeling "much better" but is still "very weak," Olivera Dedic said. He does physical therapy and has been working on standing next to his bed. He's still in the hospital and she's not sure when he will be released.

Olivera Dedic has not seen her husband in person for a month. While he was in a coma, she couldn't sleep, cried often and tried hard to remember their happy times together. She felt "50/50" he would survive the ECMO treatment.

It was very emotional and scary," she said. "Im very thankful to doctors and nurses and all the entire staff in the hospital who saved my husband, and today I'm still the wife of Enes Dedic."

Enes and Olivera Dedic.

Will ECMO be used more widely to treat coronavirus?

ECMO has been used for H1N1, flu and lung injury patients for many years, Ovil said. But it's a resource- and labor-intensive treatment and also a scarce resource.

For approximately every 50 to 100 ventilators, there is just one ECMO machine available, Riley said. HonorHealth has five in its system. If the treatment continues to prove successful for other critical COVID-19 patients, there may not be enough devices to help all the patients in need.

Most patients with COVID-19 can be supported with a ventilator, but a subset of them get so ill that a ventilator no longer helps. ECMO could be most useful for that type of patient, Ovil said.

A bridge between life and death:: Most COVID-19 patients put on ventilators will not survive

Who gets a ventilator in a shortage?: 'Can't buy your way into salvation,' NJ governor says

The Food and Drug Administration last week issued guidance to expand the availability of ECMO devices to help address COVID-19.

Garcia said the team is being contacted by medical centers across the country for advice. Riley hopes their example of an "out-of-the-box approach to care" will lead to more COVID-19 survivors.

The proof of concept is pretty important," Riley said. "At first, we were discouraged from even trying this, and people were dying. Now that we do have some success, we have learned ourselves very much of how patients respond from this initial patient, and were using that to help treat our subsequent patients.

Follow Alison Steinbach on Twitter: @alisteinbach

This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: Arizona patient survives coronavirus with rare blood treatment ECMO
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Mumbai, April 15 : Television actress Chahat Khanna denies breaking lockdown protocol to shoot the music video of her new song "Bade acche lagte hain with Mika Singh, saying that she shot for the song before the lockdown.

"He (Mika) stays next to my building, and this happened before my building was seized. I had gone to his house, we were making a video on our iPhone and we were planning to come up with something that would have be timepass for people during quarantine. We were trying to make something for the quarantine period," claimed Chahat.

She added: "Mika Singh has sung the song and I feature in the video. It is something new. We both have shot at home. It's about quarantine, and how couples can spend time in at home during quarantine".

Talking about spending time in lockdown, Chahat Khanna said it's the same for her like all others, as she is a mother looking after her kids.

"I am a mother looking after kids. So, spending time creatively is difficult. Had I been alone I might have had time to read, paint, write or exercise, but with me it's other way round. I don't get a single second to spare on creativity as my kid doesn't leave my back -- not even for five minutes. So it's becoming next to impossible for me to indulge myself. It's kind of a mad house right now for me," she said.

Lockdown has affected daily wagers badly, she noted: "I know this is a very difficult time. I have been calling up my house help to ask if they need something. We are all privileged but there are people who don't have cars, or means of transport or survival. So I have been calling up to check, especially my maids who are daily wage earners." Chahat Khanna was last seen in "Prassthanam", starring Sanjay Dutt, Jackie Shroff, Manisha Koirala, Chunky Pandey, Ali Fazal, Satyajeet Dubey, and Amyra Dastur.

- IANS iv/vnc
Firefighters work beneath the destroyed mullions, the vertical struts which once faced the soaring outer walls of the World Trade Center towers, after a terrorist attack on the twin towers in New York on Sept. 11, 2001. (Mark Lennihan/AP)

US Senators Seek Answers From Inspector General on Behalf of 9/11 Families

Three U.S. Senators called on the Inspector General to investigate the mishandling of subpoenas in a lawsuit by 9/11 families, as they seek to hold the Saudi government accountable for its part in the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

We write to bring to your attention troubling reports concerning the FBIs irregular treatment of a civil subpoena issued by the September 11 families for evidence critical to their pending lawsuit pursuant to the Justice Against Sponsors of Terrorism Act (JASTA), wrote the senators.

In a letter sent Monday to I.G. Michael Horowitz, the lawmakers asked the Department of Justice to investigate any lack of integrity on the FBIs part in the handling of the subpoenas.

The office of the Inspector General declined to comment on their response to the senators letter.

The 9/11 families are seeking information about Saudi government employees Fahad al Thumairy, Omar al Bayoumi, and any accomplices, who are known to have assisted the hijackers in preparing for and carrying out the attacks.

The 9/11 families served a civil subpoena on the FBI in April of 2018 seeking this information, stated the senators.

The letter was sent by Senator Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.), Senator Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) and Senator Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa).

The lawmakers said that the families claims raise questions about how and why the FBI may be withholding information from 9/11 families.  any irregularities, abuse, fraud, or improprieties in the handling of the 9/11 families subpoena for evidence are entirely unacceptable.

Terry Strada, the national chair of the 9/11 Families & Survivors United for Justice Against Terrorism, praised the senators for their support.

We greatly appreciate that these senators are urging this long-overdue investigation because we are sick and tired of our governments fixation on secrecy at the expense of the truth, Strada said in a statement to Courthouse News. First our government pointlessly hid the 28 pages of the 9/11 Joint Inquiry report and then urged Congress to deny us the right to expose the Saudi role in the mass murders of September 11. Now, they are hiding the evidence that shows they have been lying all along. Enough already.

The Lawmakers criticized the FBI for not being transparent and providing the necessary evidence to the terrorist attack victims families. Circumstances that leave the impression that our government is hiding facts about 9/11 from the families and public tear at the very fabric of our democracy, and erode trust in our government.

We urge you to conduct an immediate and expedited review of the FBIs response to the families subpoena, and to publish a public report of your findings as soon as possible.

The subpoenas were in connection to a March 2017 lawsuit against the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia by injured survivors and family members of 9/11 victims. The plaintiffs allege that the Saudi Arabian government had pre-existing knowledge that some of its employees were al Qaeda operatives or sympathizers.

The lawsuit created tensions between the United States and the Saudi Government and was only able to be filed after the Justice Against Sponsors of Terrorism Act (JASTA) was passed in 2016.

After former President Obama vetoed the Act, the House and Senate members overwhelming voted to pass the bill to give victims the power to hold foreign governments responsible for terrorism on U.S soil.

The law expressly targets those inexcusable instances where foreign governments knowingly and willingly supply the funds and support what terrorists need in order to successfully execute their plans, said the 9/11 Families & Survivors United for Justice Against Terrorism.
Large gatherings of people are out of the question for some time in Pennsylvania, but Hersheypark is hoping they may be possible by early this summer.

While Hersheypark had canceled their Springtime in the Park season in mid-March, as of last week, no decisions had been made regarding the 2020 summer season.

Today, the amusement park released a statement saying that, while they are keeping the safety of their guests and staff as a priority, they are cautiously optimistic about opening the park for the 2020 summer season sometime near the beginning of June.

Given the information currently available, and assuming Pennsylvania lifts the closure order of non-life sustaining businesses, Hersheypark is working to open in early June, the statement reads. In preparation for opening, we continue to research and implement preventative measures as recommended by state and federal agencies that will enhance our existing high standards of cleanliness through additional rigorous cleaning procedures.

The statement also says that Hersheypark season passes purchased for the 2020 season will be honored through June 30, 2021, as will any individual tickets purchased before the summer season begins.

Season pass holders for 2020 will all receive a free bring a friend ticket, and payments for all season passes will be halted effective today. An additional season pass holder event is being planned for later in 2020 once the park re-opens.

And as with all plans for rescheduling public events, these details may change as new information becomes available regarding the coronavirus pandemic.

As we manage through this rapidly evolving situation, we are grateful for your support and look forward to making new memories with you in the Sweetest Place on Earth, the statement concludes.

You can read the full statement in the Facebook post below:

More Life & Culture news:
Three whistle-blowers who tried to inform the world about the true scale of the coronavirus outbreak in Wuhan are still missing two months after vanishing from the public sight.

The whereabouts of Chen Qiushi, Fang Bing and Li Zehua have been a mystery since February, and Chinese officials have not publicly commented on them.

The three citizen journalists had sought to expose the true scale of the outbreak from the then epicentre by uploading videos to YouTube and Twitter, both banned in mainland China.

All of their dispatches revealed a grim side of Wuhan unseen on state-run Chinese media outlets.

Chen, 34, who went to Wuhan to report about the coronavirus outbreak independently, has not been heard from since 7pm local time on February 6, according to posts on his Twitter account

Chen, 34, has not been heard from since 7pm local time on February 6.

He arrived in Wuhan just before the city went into lockdown in hopes of providing the world with the truth of the epidemic, as he said himself.

His reports detailed horrific scenes including a woman frantically calling family on her phone as she sits next to a relative lying dead in a wheelchair and the helpless situation of patients in the overstretched hospitals.

He had been planning to visit a 'fang cang' makeshift hospital before evaporating.

His disappearance was revealed by a post on his Twitter account, which has been managed by a friend authorised to speak on his behalf.

His mother has posted a video calling for his safe return.

The latest post on his Twitter, posted on Wednesday, read: 'Who can tell us where and how Chen Qiushi is right now? When will anyone get to speak with him again? Chen Qiushi has been out of contact for 68 days after covering coronavirus in Wuhan. Please save him!!!'

Fang Bin (pictured), a Wuhan resident, went missing on February 9 after releasing a series of videos, including one showing piles of bodies being loaded into a bus (below)

Fang Bin, a Wuhan resident, went missing on February 9 after releasing a series of videos, including one showing piles of bodies being loaded into a bus.

He had been arrested arrested briefly before disappearing, it is alleged.

His last video showed hazmat-donning officers knocking on his door to measure his body temperature.

Fang is seen in the video trying to fend off the officers by telling them his temperature is normal, according to Radio Free Asia (RFA).

Li Zehua, 25, is the youngest of the three and the most high-profile reporter.

A former employee of state broadcaster CCTV, Li was reporting from Wuhan independently. He was said to be last heard on February 26.

Li Zehua (pictured) is a former reporter of CCTV and said to be last heard on February 26. Li was likely targeted by secret police after visiting the Wuhan Institute of Virology, a report said

Before that, he had visited a series of sensitive venues in Wuhan, such as the community that held a huge banquet despite the epidemic and the crematorium which was hiring extra staff to help carry corpses, RFA added.

The news outlet said Li was likely targeted by secret police after visiting the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

The 34million institute has been at the centre of conspiracy theories, which suggest that the killer virus originated there.

The Wuhan Institute of Virology has been at the centre of conspiracy theories, which suggest that the killer virus originated there. The above picture, taken on January 31, 2015, shows researchers taking part in a drill at the newly-completed virus lab

A US congressman recently called on the State Department to urge China to investigate the disappearance of the three journalists.

In a letter dated March 31, Republican Representative Jim Banks asked the US government to seek a probe into the fates of Chen, Fang and Li.

'All three of these men understood the personal risk associated with independently reporting on coronavirus in China, but they did it anyway,' Banks wrote, alleging that the Chinese government 'imprisoned them - or worse'.

Chen, Fang and Li were among several Chinese citizens who were believed to be punished for speaking out about the pandemic.

Ren Zhiqiang, a tycoon and prominent Communist party member, went missing after calling President Xi a 'clown' over his handling of the crisis.

Ren Zhiqiang, a prominent Communist party member who criticised Xi Jinping's handling of the coronavirus outbreak, is being investigated on suspicion of a 'severe violation of discipline and law'. In this file photo from 2012, the then real estate mogul is seen in his office in Beijing

Xu Zhiyong (pictured in 2009) was detained after publishing a series of blog posts criticising the Communist Party's response to the coronavirus outbreak that has now killed at least 3,893

Ai Fen (left), a Wuhan doctor who was among the first to alert other medics about the spread of coronavirus was also thought to be detained, reports suggest. The ER doctor said she was safe and working in a short video uploaded to her social media account on Monday (right)

The 69-year-old is being investigated on suspicion of a 'severe violation of discipline and law', a Chinese authority said last week.

An outspoken activist who openly called Chinese President Xi 'not clever enough' and demanded the leader step down over 'the coronavirus catastrophe' could be facing months of torture in secret detention, human rights groups have warned.

Xu Zhiyong, a former law lecturer, has allegedly been charged with 'inciting state subversion' after being detained on February 15.

The 47-year-old is being kept in a classified location and at 'serious risk' of torture and ill-treatment, according to experts.

Ai Fen, a Wuhan doctor who was among the first to alert other medics about the spread of coronavirus was also thought to be detained, reports suggest.

The ER doctor said she was safe and working in a short video uploaded to her social media account on Monday.

No human-to-human transmission, no travel bans, but plenty of praise for Beijing: How WHO parroted Chinese lies as coronavirus pandemic unfolded

By Chris Pleasance for MailOnline

The World Heath Organisation has found itself with serious questions to answer after President Trump accused the UN agency of 'severely mismanaging' its response to the coronavirus pandemic and withheld $500million in funding.

The WHO has been spearheading global efforts to fight the virus, but has come under attack for playing along with China as the country sought to minimise its initial outbreak and the threat the disease posed.

Critics point to its uncritical parroting of Chinese government data, early claims that the disease was not spreading person-to-person, and praise for the country's leaders as evidence that it was not fulfilling its role.

Trump - who is facing heavy criticism for his own response - has blasted the WHO for advising against travel bans, which he claims 'accelerated the pandemic all around the world', and called for an investigation.

Here, the Mail Online has tracked key WHO statements about coronavirus - from the first cases, through China's outbreak, and beyond - to reveal what the world's largest health body said and when as the disease spread...

Donald Trump gives a briefing at the White House on Tuesday announcing that he will suspend all US funding to the World Health Organisation

December 31  China first reports a cluster of unusual pneumonia cases in Wuhan to the WHO

January 4  WHO tweets about a cluster of pneumonia cases in Wuhan with no deaths, saying investigations into the cause are underway

January 5  The WHO issues its first guidance on pneumonia of unknown cause, saying there are a total of 44 patients and 11 in severe condition. The main symptom is listed as fever, with a few patients having difficulty breathing

The WHO says there is no evidence of human-to-human transmission and that no health care worker infections have been reported

January 7  China says it has identified the cause of the pneumonia as a novel coronavirus, initially named 2019-nCoV by the WHO

China first reported cases of 'pneumonia of unknown cause' to the WHO on December 31, and the agency put out its first tweet on January 4 saying the cause was being investigated

January 9  The WHO praises China for identifying the new virus in a short space of time and repeats its assessment that the virus does not transmit readily between people. It also advises against travel or trade restrictions on China

January 13  The WHO says it is now working with authorities in Thailand after reports of a case there, and may call a meeting of the Emergency Committee

January 14  The WHO tweets saying there is no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission in China, though later clarifies and says there may have been limited transmission via family members

Jan 20-21 - WHO's field team in China conducts a brief field visit to epicentre Wuhan

Jan 21  The first case is confirmed on US soil in Washington, in a person who had travelled from China a week before

Jan 22  A report from the WHO team sent to Wuhan notes human-to-human transmission is taking place, but says more research is needed to assess the full extent. The report notes confirmed infections in 16 medics, a clear sign of transmission from patients

The team recommends avoiding large gatherings, isolating infected people, and a focus on washing hands as the best way to combat the viruss spread

The same day, that WHO Emergency Committee convenes for the first time. Afterwards, Dr Tedros says he has spoken with the Chinese Minister for Health, and praises the government for its invaluable efforts to halt the virus. He calls a second meeting for the following day

Jan 23  With the Emergency Committee split, Dr Tedros says he has decided not to declare the virus a public health emergency of international concern. Referencing the lockdown of Wuhan, which was announced the same day, he says he hopes it will be effective and short in duration. He praises Chinas cooperation and transparency in tackling the virus

Dr Tedros says there is limited evidence of human-to-human transmission, mostly among families or doctors treating the virus. At this point, there are 584 confirmed cases and 17 deaths globally, including in Vietnam, South Korea, Japan, Thailand and the US

On January 14, more than a month after the first infections at this seafood market are thought to have taken place, the WHO tweeted saying China had found no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission

He recommends screening at airports and tells countries to put testing facilities in place, but stops short of recommending a travel ban

Jan 28  Dr Tedros and other senior WHO officials meet Xi Jinping in China, agreeing that a panel of experts should be sent to monitor the outbreak. He praises the seriousness with which China is taking this outbreak, especially the commitment from top leadership and the transparency they have demonstrated

Jan 29  Dr Tedros gives a speech praising Chinas efforts to contain the virus, saying the country deserves our gratitude and respect for locking down swathes of the country to prevent the spread.

He notes a few cases of human-to-human spread outside China, which he says is of grave concern and will be monitored closely

Jan 30  The WHO Emergency Committee reconvenes early and declares a public health emergency of international concern. It comes after confirmed cases of human-to-human transmission in Germany, Japan, Vietnam and the US

Dr Tedros again praises China for setting a new standard for outbreak response with its lockdowns, and says the small number of cases outside the country  98  is thanks to their efforts

Despite noting that a majority of cases outside China have a history of travel to or from Wuhan, he again recommends no measures to curb international travel or trade

Jan 31  Donald Trump announces travel restrictions on people coming from China

Feb 3  Dr Tedros gives a speech to the WHO updating on coronavirus, saying there are 17,238 cases in China and 361 deaths  now thought to be an under-estimate

He praises Xi Jinping for his individual leadership, and insists that cases outside China can be managed if world authorities work together and follow recommendations which include  no ban on travel or trade, supporting countries with weak health systems, investment in vaccines and diagnosis, combating disinformation and urgent reviews of emergency preparedness

Feb 7  Dr Li Wenliang, a doctor who first reported the existence of coronavirus and was initially silenced by China, dies from the virus

Feb 10  The WHOs team of experts arrives in China to assist with the outbreak

Feb 11  The WHO names the disease caused by the virus COVID-19, saying it avoided including a geographical name because it risks stigmatizing people. It says it will not be using the name SARS-CoV-2 because it risks causing unnecessary fear by linking it to the 2003 SARS outbreak

Tedros Ghebreyesus, WHO Secretary-General, pleaded for world leaders to refrain from politicising the virus 'unless you want more body bags'

Feb 12  Dr Tedros says the number of new cases being reported in China has stabilised but adds that it must be interpreted with extreme caution and the outbreak could still go in any direction

Feb 16-24  WHO team of experts convenes in China, visiting affected sites and sharing information on the best ways to tackle the crisis

Feb 17  Dr Tedros begins chairing daily updates on the coronavirus response, with each briefing beginning with an update on the number of infections including from China, which are repeated without caveats

He give an analysis of Chinese data on some 44,000 confirmed cases. He says the data shows that 80 per cent of cases are mild, 14 per cent lead to severe disease, and 2 per cent are fatal. The disease is more severe in older people, with the young largely spared.

He urges world leaders not to squander a window of opportunity to get ahead of the virus and prevent it from spreading

Feb 26  Donald Trump announces a dedicated coronavirus response team, which Mike Pence will lead

Feb 28  The team of WHO experts delivers its first report on the coronavirus. Among its major findings are that the disease likely came from bats, that it is spread through close contact with infected people and not through the air, and that most common symptoms include fever, dry cough and fatigue

The report praises Chinas response as perhaps the most ambitious, agile and aggressive disease containment effort in history saying lockdowns were achieved due to the deep commitment of the Chinese people to collective action and had achieved a rapid decline in cases

Mar 9 - The whole of Italy is placed on lockdown as the virus spreads, the first European nation to enter total lockdown

Mar 11 - The WHO declares coronavirus a pandemic, meaning it is spreading out of control in multiple locations around the world. At this point, cases have been reported in more than 100 countries

Mar 13 - WHO says Europe is now the new epicentre of the virus after cases increase steeply, with Dr Tedros noting more cases are now being reported every day than were reported in China at the height of its epidemic

Mar 19 - China reports no new domestic infections from coronavirus since the pandemic began

The pandemic has now infected some 2million people worldwide, with 128,000 confirmed deaths (pictured, a hospital in Italy)

Mar 20 - Dr Tedros issues a warning that 'young people are not invincible' to the virus after data from outside showed large numbers of people under the age of 50 ending up in intensive care

Mar 25 - As Donald Trump begins touting hydroxychloroquine as a potential coronavirus treatment, WHO warns that no drugs have so far been approved for treating the virus

The same day the organization calls for an extra $2billion in funding to help tackle the virus

Apr 3 - As millions of US citizens sign on for unemployment benefit, Dr Tedros and the IMF call for debt relief and social welfare to help people through the pandemic

Apr 6 - The WHO updates its guidance on masks to say they are effective at stopping spread of the virus, but must be used in conjunction with other methods.

It comes after the CDC updated its guidance to advise people to wear masks in public

Apr 8 - Following Trump's first barrage of criticism for the WHO, Dr Tedros urges world leaders to 'stop politicising the pandemic' unless they want 'more body bags'

Apr 13 - A group of scientists convened by WHO to research a vaccine for coronavirus issue a joint statement urging world leaders to keep listening to the scientific community when responding to the virus
Foreign Minister of Ukraine Dmytro Kuleba and Foreign Minister of Canada Francois-Philippe Champagne discussed during a phone conversation the ways to counter the spread of coronavirus and the investigation into the UIA plane crash in Iran.

With my Canadian counterpart Francois-Philippe Champagne we discussed challenges the COVID-19 pandemic poses and how we can deal with them. We also coordinated further steps to ensure a full and transparent investigation of the Flight PS752 downing, Kuleba posted on Twitter.

In turn, Canadas Minister of Foreign Affairs noted that he had held a great conversation with the Ukrainian minister.

Great conversation earlier today with my counterpart from Ukraine, Dmytro Kuleba. We discussed the COVID-19 crisis and what lies ahead as well as our continued pursuit of justice for the families of victims of Flight PS752, Champagne tweeted.

The Ukraine International Airlines (UIA) plane (Flight PS752) heading from Tehran to Kyiv crashed shortly after taking off from the Imam Khomeini International Airport at about 06:00 Tehran time (04:30 Kyiv time) on January 8. There were 176 people on board  nine crew members (all Ukrainians) and 167 passengers (citizens of Ukraine, Iran, Canada, Sweden, Afghanistan, Germany, and the UK). They all died.

Last month, an Iranian official at the International Civil Aviation Organization agreed to hand over flight recorders to France or Ukraine for analysis, but this has not been done so far.

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Jaipur, April 15 : This is the story of a couple in Bhilwara who have been locking up their minor daughter each day as they fight Covid-19 on the frontline.

This corona warrior-couple -- husband working as a compounder and wife a police constable -- keeping the nation first in the tough times.

They step out of their home each day only after locking up their 7-year-old daughter, Dikshita, for straight 8 hours.

While the husband has been serving his duty in an isolation centre and hence has not visited his house for over 15 days, the wife is busy ensuring people stay indoors during curfew in Bhilwara that had erupted as the epicentre of the coronavirus outbreak in the state.

With no one else at home, the mother is left with no other option but to lock up her young one.

Saroj Kumar, constable with Rajasthan police said: "It's quiet tough to leave my 7-year-old daughter Dakshita for 8 hours but then nation comes first." "My husband has been working in Mahatma Gandhi Hospital's isolation centre and hence has not come home for past 15 days, fearing infection. In such situations, there is only one option -- leaving my daughter at home, she says.

Bhilwara emerged as a major hotspot in the country after a well-known hospital became the epicentre of the virus spread. Measures by the administration and people's cooperation since helped in breaking the corona chain here.

Bhilwara, in fact, was the first town where 'maha curfew' was clamped in the state to make the town corona-free. Curfew was clamped here right from March 20.

Little Dikhita, understands that her parents are working hard to shoo away a monster virus.

"My mother fights with the coronavirus on a daily basis. She locks me inside the house and goes out to perform her duty. I do not feel scared, in fact I sit at home and study or watch television," she says.

"Being with Rajasthan Police, I am performing my duty towards my country so that I can save the people from this deadly disease. I ask the people to stay at home as it is safe at home," Saroj said.

According to the Rajasthan State Health Department, over 1,034 positive coronavirus cases have been reported so far in the state.

Bhilwara recently emerged on global map by managing to break the corona chain with the people supporting in the fight against this dreadful virus.

A woman sarpanch was at the forefront of that success.
French President Macron on Monday opens possibility of cancelling debt for some African countries and extends lockdown.

By Fr. Benedict Mayaki, SJ

French President Emmanuel Macron addressed French citizens on coronavirus and confinement measures on Monday. In that address, he announced the possibility of canceling the debt of African countries to assist them in their fight against the Covid-19 virus.

The French President made this statement toward the end of his speech during which he extended lockdown measures in the country till 11 May. He also called for unity in the fight against the virus. The world is at a moment of truth, he said, and it is our responsibility to build new forms of solidarity and cooperation.

Turning his thoughts towards Africa, he said: We must also know how to help our African neighbours fight the virus more effectively. We must help them economically too by canceling their debts.

Pope Francis call

During his Urbi et orbi blessing on the occasion of Easter Sunday on 12 April, Pope Francis appealed for international sanctions to be relaxed in the light of the present circumstances caused by the pandemic. Noting that vulnerable people tend to be abandoned, Pope Francis made this call so that the countries on which sanctions have been imposed would be able to provide adequate support to their citizens. The Pope also reminded the world that this is not the time for indifference, self-centeredness or division.

May all nations be put in a position to meet the greatest needs of the moment through the reduction, if not the forgiveness, of the debt burdening the balance sheets of the poorest nations, Pope Francis said.

Coronavirus

France has been the third country most affected by the coronavirus in Europe, after Italy and Spain. There have been 136,779 confirmed cases with over 14,000 deaths and 35,435 recovered patients. Since 17 March, the French population has been asked to stay home as a precautionary measure against the spread of the Covid-19 virus. The lockdown was originally scheduled to end on 14 April.
University of Manitoba international students who remain on campus are feeling the crunch as the school's residence move-out date nears and Canadas borders remain closed.

Hey there, time traveller!

This article was published 14/4/2020 (637 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

University of Manitoba international students who remain on campus are feeling the crunch as the school's residence move-out date nears and Canadas borders remain closed.

The U of M will require international students who have not yet been able to return home to leave its residence facilities by April 30; they are expected to move out within 48 hours of their last assignments. Domestic residents had been asked to move by March 25.

While most have since left the country and are finishing the term online, some remain on campus.

Ishaanee Didwania is an international student from Oman studying criminology, and acts as a residence adviser. She was also in the same position for a time, but was able to find a roommate off-campus.

"I know the other students are all looking for places to move out because living on campus is so isolating right now, were all just in our tiny dorm rooms," she said.

In a statement Tuesday, the University of Manitoba Students Union said those with a need to stay longer than April 30 can apply for an extension online.

"Right now, there is a process in place for people to apply for an extended stay, and I would recommend that those who wish to attempt that option first," UMSU president Jakob Sanderson told the Free Press.

"If thats unsuccessful, I would welcome them to come to us and well do everything we can for them."

U of M student residences director Barry Stone said the school is "in the process of responding to all of our extension requests and some additional spaces will be made available for both short and long term."

"Some need a few extra days, and others are asking to stay for the entire summer. Given this, we are going to attempt to support as many of these students by being as flexible as possible in terms of occupancy after April 30," Stone told the Free Press in an email Tuesday.

"Ultimately, we are attempting to balance student support and the need to mitigate the numbers of students in a community living environment-like residence  where social distancing and isolation requirements can be very challenging."

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.

In the meantime, impacted students wait for the final word.

"I can sum the whole thing up with the word uncertainty," said Melika Zamani, a second-year international student from Iran who is studying business. "Because nothing is for sure.

"Since the classes moved online, I really wanted to go back home and study there, but the borders are closed so I can not go back home for at least a month," she said.

"I havent found a place yet because the places are either the rent is high, or it requires you to go see the place and because of the coronavirus situation, its not possible."

malak.abas@freepress.mb.ca

Twitter: malakabas_
Source: Xinhua| 2020-04-16 00:47:09|Editor: huaxia

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GENEVA, April 15 (Xinhua) -- World Health Organization (WHO) Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus on Wednesday said the WHO regretted the U.S. decision to halt its funding to the WHO.

Speaking at a virtual press conference from Geneva, Tedros said that WHO is reviewing the impact of any withdrawal of U.S. funding and will work with its partners to fill any financial gaps to ensure the work continues uninterrupted.

"Our commitment to public health, science and to serving all the people of the world without fear or favor remains absolute. Our mission and mandate are to work with all nations equally, without regard to the size of their populations or economies," he said.

"The U.S. has been a longstanding and generous friend to WHO, and we hope it will continue to be so," the WHO chief said.

"WHO is not only fighting COVID-19. We're also working to address polio, measles, malaria, Ebola, HIV, tuberculosis, malnutrition, cancer, diabetes, mental health and many other diseases and conditions," he noted.

Tedros called all the nations to be united in the common struggle against a common pandemic, because "When we are divided, the virus exploits the cracks between us."

"WHO is committed to serving the world's people, and to accountability for the resources with which it is entrusted," he said.

Earlier on Tuesday, U.S. President Donald Trump announced that he had instructed his administration to suspend funding to the WHO, which he accused of "severely mismanaging and covering up the spread of the coronavirus."

Shortly after the announcement, United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said that the WHO must be supported, as it is "absolutely critical" to the world's efforts to win the war against COVID-19.
[April 15, 2020] Boeing, FAME Inc., Tallo Virtual Event Celebrates the Next Generation of STEM

Just like college signing days for athletes, the next generation of STEM talent in Delaware signed a letter of intent to pursue a two- or four-year degree in the STEM field after high school on Tuesday morning. In light of the COVID-19 pandemic, this traditionally in-person ceremony was held as a virtual event. The event featured personal videos and photos from each of the 20 selected students signing their letter of intent (which can be seen here), as well as keynote remarks from Senator Chris Coons, Lt. Governor Bethany Hall-Long, and Boeing (News - Alert) and FAME Inc. executives (the full recording can be seen here). "This is an exciting day for all of the young people who are signing up for a career in STEM. We're doing this remotely because of a global health pandemic. The best way we're going to get out of this is through the research, the innovation, the designs, and the developments that STEM majors are going to make possible. " -Senator Chris Coons (D-DE) Lt. Governor Bethany Hall-Long presented a proclamation declaring April 14, 2020 as STEM Signing Day in the state of Delaware. Students from throughout the state applied to be a part of STEM Signing Day through Tallo, an online platform that connects talent with opportunities. The 20 students who signed with major colleges and universities on Tuesday were chosen based on their involvement in STEM education. A full list of the honorees, alng with their current high school, future college, and intended program of study is available here.



Education, business, and community leaders from around the state joined Boeing, FAME Inc., and Tallo in recognizing these students' talents and drive for success. "Boeing created STEM Signing Day to honor students for their accomplishments and commitment to further their education in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM). STEM disciplines help create and innovate - two of the core principles we use every day at Boeing. We celebrate how incredibly hard these 20 students have worked for many years to get to this point and we congratulate all of them as they embark on the next chapter of a journey to gaining the 21st Century skills needed to fill the future talent pipeline." -Cheri Carter, Vice President of Boeing Global Engagement

"Even prior to the covid-19 pandemic, we wanted to offer students and other opportunity seekers with leading edge virtual connectivity with workforce programs, colleges/universities, and employers. Tallo is the go to virtual ecosystem for exploring, tracking, and introducing talent to opportunities! Additionally, our partnership with Boeing starts with great people, an understanding of shared values and goals, and ultimately lives and breathes through the impact we collectively have on students and communities. Whether it's volunteers spending time in classrooms experimenting alongside students or working with our executive team to launch transformational initiatives like this signing day, Boeing supports what it believes in." -Don Baker, President and CEO of FAME, Inc. "Students shouldn't have to sacrifice career and educational opportunities for their safety. With the technology that's available to us today, many of these events can and should continue virtually, and Tallo is proud to help make these connections possible." - Casey Welch, CEO & Co-Founder of Tallo About the Boeing Company: Boeing is the world's largest aerospace company and leading provider of commercial airplanes, defense, space and security systems, and global services. A top U.S. exporter, the company supports commercial and government customers in more than 150 countries. Boeing employs more than 160,000 people worldwide and leverages the talents of a global supplier base. Building on a legacy of aerospace leadership, Boeing continues to lead in technology and innovation, deliver for its customers and invest in its people and future growth About FAME Inc.: Established in 1976, FAME, Inc. is one of the nation's oldest non-profit STEM education organizations with a mission to, "Prepare and motivate students in grades K-12, with a specific focus on girls and underrepresented minorities, to complete a college degree and/or seek a career in STEM or other STEM related pathways;" and a vision to Inspire Career Confidence. Over the past 43 years, FAME, Inc. has served thousands of students, challenging youth to form skills in critical thinking, problem solving, and collaboration. To learn more about FAME, Inc. please visit: https://www.famedelaware.org. About Tallo: Tallo is an online platform that connects talent with opportunities. The Tallo app assists students in designing a career pathway, educators in recruiting top talent to their schools, and employers in developing a stable, continuous talent pipeline. Over 850,000 students (age 13+) and professionals showcase their skills and abilities in their online profile, connect directly with companies and colleges looking for the next generation of talent, and match with over $20 billion in scholarships. Learn more at tallo.com. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20200415005676/en/

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The New Orleans Business Alliance, a public-private partnership with the city and local community investors, said Tuesday that a relief fund it started last month to help gig workers in the city who have lost income amid coronavirus-related cancellations had reached $640,000.

The alliance started the fund with a pledge of $100,000, which was quickly matched by Saints and Pelicans owner Gayle Benson and had an original target of $500,000.

Relief resources for musicians, artists and service industry workers A running list of relief funds and resources for musicians, service industry workers and artists.

The alliance said on Tuesday that it had received significant, but unspecified, donations also from the Kresge Foundation, the Baptist Community Ministries, Grubhub, Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Louisiana, JPMorgan Chase Foundation, Verizon, Gulf Coast Bank & Trust and Capital One.

The virtual concert "Live from the Porch"  featuring New Orleans artists such as Shamarr Allen, Robin Barnes and Pat Casey, Susan Cowsill, Walter Wolfman Washington and DJ Raj Smoove  that was live-streamed on Facebook and broadcast by WWL-TV on April 4, also raised $8,500 in donations from the public, the alliance said.

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In total, the fund had received $50,000 in donations from members of the public.

At a time when so many are struggling to stay afloat, its truly remarkable how many New Orleanians found a way to donate to support their friends and neighbors in need, said alliance CEO Quentin Messer.

The alliance said that to date it had approved 200 to receive a grant from the fund.
Another Ruby Princess cruise ship passenger has died from coronavirus, taking Australia's death toll to 63.

The woman from Canberra aged in her 60s reportedly caught the virus on the cruise ship.

She died at Canberra Hospital, and is the third person to die from coronavirus in the Australian Capital Territory.

Her death was announced by ACT chief health officer Dr Kerryn Coleman on Wednesday.

Another Ruby Princess cruise ship (pictured) passenger has died from coronavirus , taking Australia's death toll to 63

Meanwhile, investigators tasked with delving into the Ruby Princess fiasco will be given unprecedented powers as part of a special commission.

Thousands of passengers from the coronavirus-infected ship were allowed to disembark in Sydney with no medical checks on March 19.

New South Wales Premier Gladys Berejiklian vowed to leave 'no stone unturned' in the inquiry, surrounding the events which allowed the ship to dock unchecked.

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

So far, 19 passengers from the cruise liner had died of COVID-19.

Many more people in the community had become infected after coming into contact with passengers, who were allowed to disembark without any medical checks despite officials knowing there were many cases of illness onboard.

Around 700 of its passengers have since tested positive for COVID-19, with many more put at risk - accounting for around 10 per cent of all Australia's cases.

'The inquiry will be led by eminent barrister Bret Walker SC,' NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian said.

'He has unlimited powers and he can use those powers how he wants to use them.

'Thats a matter for him.'

Mr Walker is one of Sydney's top lawyers, and only last week helped secure the release of his client, Cardinal George Pell, from prison after his sex abuse convictions were quashed.

The report into the Ruby Princess will be delivered to state officials within four months.

'Im looking forward to that. Everybody wants answers, everybody wants to get to the bottom of that issue,' she said.

'It is important that answers are provided quickly for the people of NSW.'
The debate over whether people should wear face masks in public during the Covid-19 crisis has re-ignited again.

(Q) Why is it back on the agenda?

(A) It follows remarks by Dr David Nabarro, the World Health Organisations Covid-19 envoy, who says people should get accustomed to a new reality of always wearing a facial covering.

(Q) Is he talking about after some severe lockdown restrictions have been eased?

(A) His idea is that if hairdressing salons, for instance, are allowed re-open they would be useful. Ireland will face dilemmas on how far restrictive measures should be relaxed after May 5 when this extension ends. So its worth discussing any suggestions that might make that easier and safer.

(Q) In what context was he speaking?

(A) He has made the suggestion on a number of broadcast media outlets. He says that the coronavirus will stalk the human race for some time.

The masks could provide a form of reassurance for people while we wait for a vaccine. The coronavirus could paralyse countries into a set of strict measures  but we dont know when we will have a vaccine. We have to learn to live with Covid-19.

He pointed out the wearing of masks does not mean physical distancing or handwashing will be abandoned.

(Q) Is there not a shortage of face masks?

(A) He said they should be given to health workers first, and then to people who have the virus. For the wider population, it will not be possible to ensure everybody quickly can access the good masks, the N95 version, but they may have some form of facial protection.

(Q) What is the WHO advice on facial masks or facial protection?

(A) The WHO recently said that it remains the case that medical masks should be reserved for healthcare workers, not the general public.

They can be worn by people with the virus who have symptoms, and by carers of people who are infected. They may give the public a false sense of security, people put their hands to their face more to fix them and the covering can become contaminated.

(Q) What is the view of the Department of Health here?

(A) Dr Tony Holohan, chief medical officer, said the issue of the wearing of facial masks was discussed at a meeting of the National Public Health Emergency Team.

It decided that it would not recommend it on the grounds that it would give a person a false sense of security and they might be less inclined to practise physical distancing and hand washing.
Blasting what he called a shameful decision, Irans Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif compared the US pause in World Health Organization (WHO) funding to American sanctions on Iran.

The world is learning what Iran has known & experienced all along: US regime's bullying, threatening & vainglorious blathering isnt just an addiction: it kills people, Zarif wrote on Twitter.

"Like maximum pressure against Iran, the shameful defunding WHO amid a pandemic will live in infamy, he added.

Zarif joined condemnation from a range of countries over President Donald Trumps move to suspend funding to the United Nations global health agency, which Trump accused of mishandling the coronavirus and covering up its spread in China. The United States is the largest overall donor to the organization, contributing more than $400 million a year.

Officials in Iran have increasingly taken to social media to condemn the United States for what it calls "economic terrorism" amid the coronavirus pandemic, while at the same time rejecting offers of humanitarian assistance from Washington.

Iran has been hard hit by sanctions the United States imposed in 2018 after withdrawing from the landmark nuclear accord struck between Iran and six world powers three years prior. In its forecast for the region published Wednesday, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) said Irans economy is expected to contract by 6% this year, against a 7.6% contraction in 2019. Notably medical equipment is exempt from US sanctions on Iran.

To shore up its sanctions-weakened economy, Tehran has asked the IMF for a $5 billion emergency loan  its first such request in nearly 60 years. A senior IMF official told Reuters the agency is still assessing the request.

With 4,777 dead and more than 76,300 infected, Iran remains the Middle East country worst affected by the coronavirus. A number of senior officials, including a member of Irans Council of Experts, are among the dead.

Despite the rising death toll, Iran has lifted its ban on travel between provinces and allowed certain shops and factories to reopen. Restaurants, theaters, swimming pools, shopping malls and other high-risk facilities remain closed.
Summary Slovakia Cards and Payments: Opportunities and Risks to 2023 report provides detailed analysis of market trends in the Slovakian cards and payments industry.

New York, April 15, 2020 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Reportlinker.com announces the release of the report "Slovakia Cards and Payments: Opportunities and Risks to 2023" - https://www.reportlinker.com/p05878055/?utm_source=GNW

It provides values and volumes for a number of key performance indicators in the industry, including cash, cards, credit transfers, direct debits, and cheques during the review-period (2015-19e).



The report also analyzes various payment card markets operating in the industry, and provides detailed information on the number of cards in circulation, transaction values and volumes during the review-period and over the forecast-period (2019e-23f). It also offers information on the countrys competitive landscape, including the market shares of issuers and schemes.



The report brings together research, modeling, and analysis expertise to allow banks and card issuers to identify segment dynamics and competitive advantages. The report also covers details of regulatory policy and recent changes in the regulatory structure.



Slovakia Cards and Payments: Opportunities and Risks to 2023 report provides top-level market analysis, information and insights into the Slovakian cards and payments industry, including -

- Current and forecast values for each market in the Slovakian cards and payments industry, including debit, credit, and charge cards.

- Detailed insights into payment instruments including credit transfers, direct debits, cheques, cash, and cards. It also, includes an overview of the countrys key alternative payment instruments.

- E-commerce market analysis.

- Analysis of various market drivers and regulations governing the Slovakian cards and payments industry.

- Detailed analysis of strategies adopted by banks and other institutions to market debit, credit, and charge cards.



Scope

- The proliferation of digital-only banks is driving competition in the banking space, which helps to boost debit card holding. 365.bank, a Slovakia-based digital-only bank, was launched in the country in November 2018, after the completion of a pilot phase for six months. The bank offers a free account which comes with a Mastercard contactless debit card. Furthermore, it was the first bank in Slovakia to launch the payments service through wearable devices such as Fitbit Pay and Garmin Pay, in June 2019. - In September 2019, Strong Customer Authentication (SCA) was enforced by the European Commission to increase payment security. The rule mandates all payment service providers (PSPs) to adopt a procedure to verify customer identity while making online card payments. PSPs can use any method including SMS, passwords, PIN numbers, biometric data/fingerprints, tokens, or control questions to authenticate payments. Furthermore, another regulation was passed in September 2019 that requires customers to enter the PIN for contactless payments by credit card, if they pay an amount less than or equal to 20 ($22.91) for five times in a row or if the total value of multiple transactions worth 20 ($22.91) exceeds 150 ($171.83). - The Slovak government and central bank are taking several initiatives to bring more of the population under the purview of a formal banking system. One such initiative is the introduction of law on basic bank accounts, which came into effect in January 2016. All the Slovak banks are mandated to offer free basic bank accounts to individuals whose monthly income is less than 400 ($458.2). However, this limit was revised in January 2019, with the minimum wage being changed to 520 ($595.7). Now, individuals can opt for a basic bank account if their income is less than 1.1 times of the monthly minimum wage, 572 ($655.3), and 15 times of the annual minimum wage, 7,800 ($8,935.3).



Reasons to Buy

- Make strategic business decisions, using top-level historic and forecast market data, related to the Slovakian cards and payments industry and each market within it.

- Understand the key market trends and growth opportunities in the Slovakian cards and payments industry.

- Assess the competitive dynamics in the Slovakian cards and payments industry.

- Gain insights into marketing strategies used for various card types in Slovakia.

- Gain insights into key regulations governing the Slovakian cards and payments industry.

Read the full report: https://www.reportlinker.com/p05878055/?utm_source=GNW



About Reportlinker

ReportLinker is an award-winning market research solution. Reportlinker finds and organizes the latest industry data so you get all the market research you need - instantly, in one place.



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BOSTON, April 15, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- Today, Her Campus, the number one media brand for college women with over 400 chapters, announces "I'm Still Graduating" a live, virtual, mega graduation ceremony for the nation's Class of 2020 graduating seniors, taking place on Friday, May 15 at 12pm ET for free on ImStillGraduating.com , sponsored by Procter & Gamble's Aussie Hair Care brand. Commencement speakers to be announced, will be made up of noted politicians, CEOs, athletes, authors and celebrities who will share their words of hope, promise, and encouragement for the Class of 2020. The day will be punctuated with musical performances from stars and students alike, along with special giveaways, shout-outs, toasts and more.

In conjunction with #ImStillGraduating, Aussie Hair Care is partnering with Her Campus to launch a new business plan competition, 'Roo Crew Business Plan Competition,' to award grants to '20 in 2020' innovative Gen Z women to support their personal start-ups and passion projects. This comes in addition to elevating Gen Z women entrepreneurs to create their own success in a job market that's been largely compromised, similar to how the Her Campus founders formed their company in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis.

Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, college students across the country have been impacted in major ways, as they have been required to leave their campuses with only days' notice, complete the remainder of their semesters remotely, and will have to endure the hardship of finding employment in an uncertain job market. On top of that, they are facing the prospect of a graduation with no ceremony and no celebration. On May 15, Her Campus invites graduates, parents, friends, relatives, and everyone who wants to rally behind this resilient class, to take part in a momentous, inspiring day of celebration.

"Our mission has always been to support and serve college students, and now, more than ever, we recognize a need for togetherness, community, and celebration around this pivotal milestone in students' lives," said Stephanie Kaplan Lewis, co-founder, CEO and Editor-in-Chief of Her Campus Media.

"In addition to the virtual graduation ceremony, we're excited to fuel innovation with '20 in 2020' Fellows emerging from our business plan competition to help them launch their own businesses. Having started Her Campus as students ourselves, we understand better than anyone the huge impact that early support from an industry leader can mean for your business," said Windsor Hanger Western, co-founder, President & Publisher of Her Campus Media.

On ImStillGraduating.com, graduating students are encouraged to create their own virtual graduation page, allowing students to share their accolades, interests and college memories with their friends, family and loved ones to virtually engage, reminisce and socialize with the Class of 2020 community across the country.

"We are excited to partner with Her Campus to lift up and inspire the graduating Class of 2020. This answers a true need for students who have worked hard and deserve a true celebration of their efforts," said Jen Thompson, Brand Director, Aussie Hair Care North America. "We are also thrilled to offer '20 in 2020' Aussie Roo Crew business competition grants to provide an important opportunity for our Gen Z community to start their own businesses. We greatly admire the creative spark that this community brings, and we are proud to invest in these young entrepreneurs as the next generation."

Her Campus is dedicated to acknowledging the hard work and effort the graduating class of 2020 has put forth. In that vein, they have launched two student commencement applications for students to apply to either speak or perform in the event. Her Campus will select winners in both categories to address the nationwide class. Applications for student speakers and performers are due April 23 and below, are both applications:

To learn more, please visit ImStillGraduating.com and be sure to tune in on Friday, May 15, 2020 at 12pm ET on ImStillGraduating.com and share on social with #ImStillGraduating.

Follow Her Campus on Instagram: instagram.com/hercampus

Follow Her Campus on Facebook: facebook.com/hercampus

Follow Her Campus on Twitter: twitter.com/hercampus

Follow Aussie Hair Care on Instagram: instagram.com/aussiehairusa

About Her Campus Media

Her Campus Media is the #1 media portfolio for college and GenZennial women and 360-degree college marketing agency, reaching over 35 million users monthly across its family of brands Her Campus, Spoon University, College Fashionista, and InfluenceHer Collective. Leveraging its digital, social, experiential, influencer and on-campus reach, Her Campus Media provides award-winning integrated marketing programs for leading brands. Her Campus has been featured in The New York Times, Forbes, PR Week, CNN Money, & more, and has been named to Entrepreneur magazine's Best Entrepreneurial Companies in America, Forbes 100 Best Websites for Women and 10 Best Websites for Millennial Women among other accolades.

About Aussie Hair

Aussie Hair strives to bring the fun into haircare with a diverse line-up of products. Aussie Hair has a variety of shampoos, conditioners, and styling products for all hair types to help you look and feel your best every day. . All Aussie products are PETA certified cruelty-free. Aussie believes everyone is a creator and inspires you to live creatively and use hair as a playful canvas for expressing yourself and showing off your confidence to the world.

Aussie was established in 1979. To learn more about Aussie Hair visit www.aussie.com, or follow us on Facebook: facebook.com/Aussie, Twitter: twitter.com/AussieHair and Instagram: @AussieHairUSA.

Press Contact:

Sunshine Sachs

Jamie Warner/Kevin Sweeney

212.691.2800

[email protected]

SOURCE Her Campus Media
Amy Schumer arranged for a supply of 2,500 KN95 and other crucial supplies to be donated to a New York hospital where her childhood friend Jen Cloudman is among the ranks of brave healthcare workers waging the fight against the coronavirus.

'This is Jen, my best friend since I was 12 years old,' the 38-year-old actress said of her friend, who was in a clip she shared talking to the staff at Mount Sinai South Nassau in Oceanside, New York in a FaceTime exchange.

After Cloudman remarked she was 'so afraid of running out' of the KN95 masks, Schumer arranged for the care package - which also consisted of 2,500 surgical masks, 2,500 'corona kits' and sanitizer, People reported.

The latest: Amy Schumer, 38, arranged for a supply of 2,500 KN95 and other crucial supplies to be donated to a New York hospital where her childhood friend Jen Cloudman is among the ranks of brave healthcare workers waging the fight against the coronavirus

Schumer added: 'I was able to rush masks to the her hospital. This morning we got to thank each other.'

She added a link to Bethenny Frankel's charity organization BStrong, which the Bravo star set up to aid with emergency assistance amid times of crisis.

Cloudman told the publication about her longtime friendship with the Trainwreck actress.

'We've been friends for probably almost 30 years now, since we were 11 years old. We talk all the time,' Cloudman told the outlet. 'So we have a group chat where we just kind of support each other, especially in this time, and it was there that she reached out and said like, "We're going to do this, I can do this, I can help."'

Heroic: The medical staff posed after Amy's donation on behalf of her best friend

Gracious: In the Instagram clip, Cloudman told the New York City native that she and the nursing staff were grateful to have the protective supplies as they treat people battling the pandemic

In the Instagram clip, Cloudman told the New York City native that she and the nursing staff were grateful to have the protective supplies as they treat people battling the pandemic.

'You don't even know how much it means to us. It makes us feel safer,' Cloudman told her longtime friend. 'We are extremely grateful. Everybody here has really, really been through a lot the last few weeks and to know there's people looking out for us, doing whatever they can, makes a big difference.'

Schumer reciprocated the warm feelings toward the hospital workers, saying, 'I'm so grateful to you guys, I'm so sorry you have to go through this. I'm so proud to know you Jen.'

Appreciative: Schumer reciprocated the warm feelings toward the hospital workers, saying, 'I'm so grateful to you guys'

Trademark: Schumer also delivered a bit of comic relief to the staff aimed at her friend

Schumer also delivered a bit of comic relief to the staff aimed at her friend.

'I want you all to know that Jen has been my best friend my whole life and she's an amazing friend and an amazing mom - but you guys need to know that she was a total slut in high school,' she joked, to which Cloudman added, 'She's kidding!'

Cloudman told the outlet of the staff's brush with her famous pal: 'They thought it was funny, but really more than anything, everybody was just happy to get the masks.'

As of Tuesday, the death total for COVID-19 was at 25,668 people in the U.S., The COVID Tracking Project reported, with 602,473 total positive diagnoses. On a global level, 126,557 people have died amid 1,980,003 positive diagnoses worldwide, Johns Hopkins University reported.
The Cubano sandwich from Porco's Porchetteria layers herb-roasted pork and cracklings with whole grain mustard aioli, house giardiniera and Gruyere cheese on a ciabatta baked in-house by the Small Oven Pastry Shop. Read more

Were in a carryout and delivery world. The Inquirers Craig LaBan, who has been otherwise cooking, shares some of his prime finds, and Ill show you where else to look.

On the grocery side, our colleague Grace Dickinson quizzed local chefs for their most versatile pantry staples. How about miso, coffee, and ... nooch? Read on and Ill also tell you about a game we call Grocery Roulette that might save you trips to the supermarket.

If you need food news, click here and follow me on Twitter and Instagram. Email tips, suggestions, and questions here. If someone forwarded you this newsletter and you like what youre reading, sign up here to get it free every week.

 Michael Klein

Adventures in carryout

Though he cooks for his family, Craig LaBan is searching for quality takeout and delivery food. He runs down 10 current favorites for us, including the Cubano from Porcos Porchetteria, the house bun noodle bowl from Vietnam Cafe, and a floagie from Little Fish BYOB.

Where to find takeout and delivery food? Databases abound. Weve been collecting them in one handy place. Restaurant owners can email me for inclusion in our list (use the subject line corona and specify carryout, delivery," or both).

Also this week, the Pennsylvania Restaurant & Lodging Association created CarryOutPa.com, which has a snazzy user interface but needs data.

If you have been putting it off, now is the time to join Instagram so you can keep tabs on your favorite restaurants and their offerings. And  heh-heh  follow your favorite news sources.

If you find something tasty, or convenient, or otherwise worth sharing out there, let me know by email.

A few notes:

This crisis has brought out the best in people, including those sending meals to hospital workers and first responders. Matt Rossi, who is the soft touch who owns the Nicks Roast Beef locations at 2210 Cottman Ave. and 4501 Woodhaven Rd. in Northeast Philadelphia, wants to help his neighbors. He is generously giving away food from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Thursday, April 16. Just drive up and youll be served. No questions asked, he writes on Facebook.

A reminder that food distributors that usually sell to restaurants are selling quality merch to everyday folks. And also remember that some restaurants have been selling grocery items. Capital Grille in Center City just started offering uncooked steaks for people who want to play chef and eat their food right off the grill.

While most of the fancy-pants restaurants have shut down for now, Starr Restaurant Organization, which has been doing carryout and delivery out of Parc and Pizzeria Stella, is adding Buddakan, effective Wednesday, April 15. Next up: Barclay Prime.

What should be in your pantry? Chefs give their picks

You might already know how to stock a pantry with the basics. Grace Dickinson asked a few Philly chefs for the secret weapons they use in their own quarantine meals. Shes also included recipes from Kenneth Sze of Tuna Bar, Nick Elmi of Laurel, and Kelsey Bush of Bloomsday Cafe.

SNAPs rules: Low-income people cannot get groceries delivered

Under federal rules, it is nearly impossible for the more than 1.7 million recipients in Pennsylvania and 682,000 in New Jersey to use the benefits  known as SNAP, for Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program  to order food by phone or online and have it delivered. Thats why people like Gloria Santiago have to take their chances in public, as Alfred Lubrano writes.

'Grocery Roulette: Its time to game those supermarket apps

Youre trying to avoid the supermarkets, so you sign up for pickup or delivery at your local supermarket. Then you learn that the next available time slot is two weeks away. I get that.

Meanwhile, you can continue to add to your app order until the day of delivery or pickup. That doesnt help you if your item happens to be out of stock when store employees fill your order, and the deadline has passed. Stores are not offering substitutions.

On my order at Giant last week, nearly half of the items were out of stock, sending me into the store in person. Then my cousin told me about a hack she calls Grocery Roulette. Its simple: Order several options, hoping they have one. Maybe youll get that big bottle of Heinz ketchup, but you also could end up with Hunts or the store brand. (#firstworldproblems, I know.) If your roulette wheel hits and you end up with more than one, consider donating to a local pantry.

DoorDash and Caviar cut their delivery commissions

Food delivery is the way to go, and cash-strapped restaurants have been complaining about the high fees charged by services such as Grubhub, DoorDash, and Caviar. Grubhub, the largest of the bunch, magnanimously offered to defer its commissions last month, while DoorDash and its Caviar subsidiary recently announced they would cut their commissions 50%. Meanwhile, a class-action suit was filed in New York against Grubhub, DoorDash, Uber Eats, and Postmates, accusing them of charging exorbitant fees and forcing restaurants to raise prices for dine-in customers.

Reading Terminal Market hits pause on delivery

Reading Terminal Market has stopped taking online orders at least through April 20 after a surge in demand led to incorrect and incomplete orders in the days leading up to Easter. The market introduced delivery and e-commerce through the grocery delivery platform Mercato in 2018, and filled about 50 orders a day before the coronavirus pandemic, general manager Anuj Gupta told colleague Erin McCarthy.

Last week, they averaged between 8,000 and 10,000 daily orders, he added. The growth overwhelmed the system, Gupta said Tuesday in a letter to customers posted on Twitter, and as result incomplete/erroneous orders became numerous.

The market has paused online ordering and delivery through Monday in order to improve the system. As an essential business, it remains open from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday through Saturday, while implementing social distancing measures, including limiting customers in the store at one time, and enhancing cleaning efforts. A Reading Terminal employee tested positive for the virus last week, and the merchant ceased operation there so that employees could self-quarantine.

Restaurant sues its insurance company over coverage

Business-interruption insurance covers fires and such. Word, however, is spreading that restaurants will not be compensated over their losses during the government-mandated shutdown. Here comes River Twice, a new restaurant in South Philadelphia, which has gone to federal court to argue why it should be covered. Thousands of other businesses are in the same situation, and various legislatures, including those of Pennsylvania and New Jersey. are taking up the issue.

Craig LaBans Q&A does not appear this week.
gift city gujarat

The Gujarat government has decided to refund stamp duty to brokers for stock transactions if broking firms have their registered offices in the Gujarat International Finance Tech (GIFT) City. The move is expected to attract more broking companies to the special zone.

The state government issued a notification to this effect on March 30. Moneycontrol has reviewed a copy of the order.

In the past, different states in the country were charging different stamp duty rates for equity, currency and commodity transactions. Later, the Central government issued a uniform stamp duty structure across states. As per the new rule that came into force in January 2020, the responsibility for collecting stamp duty on transactions lies with exchanges, clearing corporations and depositories.

Currently, a 0.2 percent uniform stamp duty is collected by the government on all transactions.

Earlier, brokers used to shift their registered offices to states charging lower stamp duty as it was a state subject. A broker told Moneycontrol: "Sometime back, many brokers shifted their registered office from Delhi to Uttar Pradesh to gain the benefit of a lower duty regime."

Last year, Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman had announced that exchanges would collect stamp duty for stockbroking transactions and submit it to the state government. The decision was taken after several representations by brokers associations.

Another Mumbai-based broker cheered the Gujarat governments move. "Gujarats refund policy will prompt several brokers to move their registered offices to GIFT City, especially proprietor traders who trade mainly in derivatives. They give the maximum amount of stamp duty. In derivatives trading, a large number of transactions are executed by proprietor traders," he pointed out.

GIFT City in Gandhinagar, Indias first international financial services centre, is the dream project of Prime Minister Narendra Modi. The zone was opened in late 2016.

The Bombay Stock Exchange and the National Stock Exchange have already established their subsidiary exchanges in the international financial services centre. Multi Commodity Exchange also has acquired land in this area.
(Bloomberg Opinion) -- Its no surprise that President Donald Trump wants to let the U. S. Postal Service die.

Remember in the spring of 2018, when Trump created a task force to conduct a thorough evaluation of the operation and finances of the USPS? His primary complaint then  and presumably now  was not so much that the Postal Service was losing billions every year but that it was aiding and abetting Amazon.com Inc., whose chief executive is Jeff Bezos, owner of the Washington Post, which Trump despises.

According to Trump, the Postal Service was delivering Amazon packages at a discount, which was supposedly adding to its growing deficit. Needless to say, that was exactly the opposite of the truth. Indeed, the Postal Services package business was one of the few areas where it made a profit.

Now it appears as if Trump is hoping to use the coronavirus crisis to finish off the Postal Service. As my Bloomberg Opinion colleague Timothy L. OBrien pointed out in an earlier column, Postmaster General Megan Brennan has said the Postal Service needs $89 billion in federal aid or it will run out of money by the end of the year.

But when Congress tried to add money for the Postal Service in the $2.2 trillion bailout bill it passed late last month, the administration insisted that the aid be stripped out of the bill before Trump would sign it. The Postal Service is now saying it will run out of money by September.

In his column, OBrien explains why the Postal Service remains a vital service for the U.S.  especially rural America  and that the way to fix its woes is to free it from congressional mandates that prevent it from taking cost-saving measures and seizing new revenue opportunities. Id like to point out something else: the sheer idiocy of trying to cripple it  especially right now.

There is both a business and a political dynamic, neither of which works in Trumps favor. First, the idea that damaging the Postal Service will somehow hurt Amazon is ludicrous. It is true that the Postal Service performs an important function for the online giant. It delivers millions of packages the last mile, especially in rural communities that private delivery companies dont serve.

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Lets suppose the Postal Service could no longer perform that service, either because it ran out of money or because it was forced to end its contract with Amazon. The Postal Service would be hurt because it would lose a profitable line of business. But Amazon? It might become more profitable.

It has already begun establishing its own delivery services to cut back on tens of millions of dollars it pays to FedEx and United Parcel Service. It has long talked about using drones to deliver packages. Amazon would almost certainly use the end of its relationship with the Postal Service to extend its own delivery network into every nook and cranny in America. There are few companies as customer-obsessed as Amazon. You can bet that, having heard the presidents threats, it already has a plan to fill the vacuum should it lose access to the Postal System. To everyone but the president, this seems pretty obvious.

As for the politics, consider who would be hurt the most if the Postal Service went broke. The elites in the big, blue cities? Hardly. They use email and texts and go online to read their favorite magazines or conduct financial transactions. Its the people in rural America, who often have substandard WiFi and mobile phone service and still count on mail delivery for, say, their Social Security checks, who would be hurt the most. That is, Trump would be hurting his supporters far more than his detractors.

Then there is the timing. If the post office were to go broke in late September, that would leave only five weeks or so before the presidential election. One theory holds that Trump wants to damage the Postal Service before the election to prevent voting by mail, believing that depressing the turnout will help his re-election chances. The recent Wisconsin results would seem to suggest thats a fools errand.

But also, just imagine if Americans stopped receiving mail in October. Imagine if there were a delay in all those Social Security checks. Millions of people  millions of voters, many of them Trump supporters  would be furious. And though Trump would undoubtedly attempt to blame others, those voters would most likely blame him. Presidents simply dont let the Postal Service go bust.

Which, for those of us who cant wait for Trump to be swept out of office, might be the best-case scenario. So go ahead, Mr. President, keep putting the hurt on the Postal Service. By the time you realize what an enormous mistake youve made, itll be too late.

This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of Bloomberg LP and its owners.

Joe Nocera is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering business. He has written business columns for Esquire, GQ and the New York Times, and is the former editorial director of Fortune. His latest project is the Bloomberg-Wondery podcast "The Shrink Next Door."

For more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.com/opinion

Subscribe now to stay ahead with the most trusted business news source.

2020 Bloomberg L.P.
(Newser)  Late last month, President Trump invoked the Defense Production Act to mandate that General Motors start cranking out ventilators in bulk to help in the fight against the coronavirus. Now GM and Ventec Life Systems, the medical tech firm it's working with, say they'll deliver their first batch to FEMA ahead of schedule, NBC News reports. GM chief Mary Barra attributes the earlier-than-expected delivery out of its Kokoma, Ind., plant to "our people," noting that "many ... have been working virtually around the clock, 20-hour days, to make sure we can start building ventilators as quickly as possible." A GM statement says more than 600 ventilators will be shipped by the end of this month, about 15,000 will be delivered by the end of the June, and the rest of the 30,000-ventilator order will come by the end of August.

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GM adds that it "has the capacity to build more ventilators after August if needed." Meanwhile, one of the world's favorite toymakers is also diving into the coronavirus battle. Good Morning America reports that the Lego Group has turned its Denmark factory into a temporary personal protective equipment (PPE) plant. "This week we began to make visors at our factory in Billund for healthcare workers on the frontline in Denmark," the company wrote in an Instagram post last week. It says roughly 100 employees are involved in the effort. "They worked around the clock to create designs and make molds that can produce more than 13,000 visors a day." (Read more coronavirus stories.)
EAST LANSING, MI  Michigan State University has established a fund to aid students experiencing financial hardship during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The Support our Spartans Student Emergency Needs Fund for COVID-19 can be used for any student currently enrolled at MSU who completes an application and provides documentation of the expense or circumstances for which theyre requesting funds, an letter to students said.

MSU spokeswoman Emily Guerrant said expenses might include rent, food, doctors bills, personal expenses due to the loss of a job. The aid program is not new, she said, but it is more important now because of the COVID-19 pandemic.

We are promoting it more right now because were aware of the financial strain the pandemic places on students or becomes an extra layer to already strained situations and lifestyles, Guerrant said.

Students who qualify will receive a one-time grant of up to $500, the letter said. Funds may be issued through the students account and recipients are not obligated to repay the award, the letter said.

The fund is supported by donations from alumni and employees, Guerrant said. The Association of Students at MSU also made a large donation.

Since a letter was sent Monday to students, Guerrant said there have been more than 2,000 applications for aid. The fund had more than $200,000 in it Tuesday, but more aid funding was expected to become available.

We know MSU will receive at least $14.9 million in emergency funds for students under the Relief Fund, Guerrant said. MSUs financial aid office is developing a plan to disburse money to eligible students and will be sharing that information in the coming days.

As long as there are funds remaining, applications will be accepted, the university said in its letter. Applicants will be notified within five business days following the decision of a review committee.

Applications for aid can be accessed in Qualtrics or on the student affairs website. Students can also request an application be sent to them by calling student affairs and services at 517-355-7535 or by emailing studentaffairs@msu.edu. Printed copies are available in the lobby of the student services building, the university announced.

Guerrant said donations can be made here.

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 more at MLive.com/coronavirus.

READ MORE:

Michigan State University offering Adulting 101 seminars for high school juniors, seniors

University of Michigan, Michigan State University leading efforts to decontaminate N95 masks for reuse

Eastern Michigan University offering one-time grant for online summer classes

Michigan State University moving summer courses online, suspending some summer programs
Safety Insurance has announced a premium reduction plan and several other steps to meet policyholder and community needs during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.

The Safety Personal Auto Relief Credit offers eligible Safety Insurance personal auto policyholders that have a policy in effect as of April 1st a 15% credit off their premium for the months of April and May.

Credits will be applied automatically and any policyholder that has already paid in full will receive a refund. This credit is pending regulatory approval.

We recognize that this unique circumstance has both created economic hardship for our policyholders and dramatically shifted typical driving patterns, said George Murphy, president and CEO of Safety Insurance, in a company press release. We have an opportunity to support our policyholders and provide direct relief.

In addition to this credit, Safety has taken several other steps, including:

Providing auto coverage for customers who are now using their personal vehicles to make food deliveries as a result of changes to their business operations.

Placing a hold on all non-payment policy cancellations until further notice.

Waiving all late and NSF fees.

Providing funding through its Charitable Foundation to help support the communities in which it does business. It is providing financial support to the following local charities: Massachusetts COVID -19 Relief Fund; Boston Resiliency Fund; Project Bread and Healthcare Heroes to benefit the Massachusetts General Emergency Response Fund.

Our entire team is focused on making decisions that support our policyholders, agents and employees during these difficult times, Murphy continued in the release. We continue to monitor the changing dynamics and will do everything possible to support our community.

Safety Insurance Group Inc., based in Boston, Mass., is the parent of Safety Insurance Company, Safety Indemnity Insurance Company, and Safety Property and Casualty Insurance Company. Operating exclusively in Massachusetts, New Hampshire and Maine, Safety is a writer of property and casualty insurance products, including private passenger automobile, commercial automobile, homeowners, dwelling fire, umbrella and business owner policies.

Source: Safety Insurance Group Inc.

Topics COVID-19 Auto Pricing Trends Massachusetts
The Metropolitan Police Service has paid tribute to a 'cherished friend and colleague' killed after being hit by two vehicles.

Rachel Brown, 25, from Surbiton, Kingston upon Thames, was employed within the Met's Intelligence division as an Analyst.

She was killed at the A24 London junction with Tudor Avenue and Palmer in Worcester Park, while riding her bicycle, on Tuesday, 7 April.

Brown was struck by two vehicles on her way to work and died at the scene, police said.

Tracy Dancy, the Met's Head of Analysis and Research, said: 'Rachel's positivity, drive and enthusiasm for her role in the MPS, inspired those around her and left a marked impression on anyone who met her'

Tracy Dancy, the Met's Head of Analysis and Research, paid tribute to Brown in saying she 'was hugely popular and a cherished friend and colleague'.

Brown joined as an Intelligence Analyst in February 2019.

Police were called to reports of a road traffic collision in Worcester Park, at around 8.55am, on 7 April.

The London Ambulance Service was also summoned.

Despite the efforts of emergency services and members of the public, Brown died at the scene.

Her next of kin have been contacted.

The Metropolitan Police Service said no one else was injured. The Force also said all parties involved remained at the scene in Worcester Park.

There have been no arrests, but the Met's Serious Collision Investigation Unit (SCIU) is leading inquiries.

Brown's colleague within the Met's Intelligence division, Dancy, said: 'Rachel was a keen member of the analysis team within Met Intelligence.

'Joining as an Intelligence Analyst in February 2019, Rachel was hugely popular and a cherished friend and colleague.

'Rachel's positivity, drive and enthusiasm for her role in the MPS, inspired those around her and left a marked impression on anyone who met her.

'Rachel will be fondly remembered and sorely missed.'

Any witnesses to the incident or anyone with any information, particularly dash-cam footage, is asked to call SCIU detectives on 020 8543 5157, or contact via Twitter @MetCC.

Please quote CAD 1576/07APR.

To give information anonymously, contact Crimestoppers on 0800 555 111, or online at crimestoppers-uk.org
Prime Minister of Armenia Nikol Pashinyan has sent a congratulatory message to likely president-elect of the Republic of Artsakh (Nagorno-Karabakh Republic) Arayik Harutyunyan.

The message reads as follows:

Distinguished Mr. Harutyunyan,

On behalf of myself and the Government of the Republic of Armenia, I congratulate you on being elected President of the Republic of Artsakh.

During the presidential and parliamentary elections, the people of Artsakh expressed their political will by exercising their inviolable right to form public administration bodies through competitive elections.

Once again, the people of Artsakh affirmed its will and right to live and work on its land and proved that Artsakh is an independent and democratic state with its well-established institutions.

Distinguished President of the Republic of Artsakh,

You have received the mandate of the people of Artsakh to strengthen Artsakhs security, enhance the economy and build a society hinged on democratic values, human rights and fundamental liberties.

To achieve this goal, you have adopted an agenda to implement in-depth and coordinated reforms in the public administration system, the economy, politics, judicial-legal field and other sectors of public life, and in this process, you can rely on the support of the Government of Armenia and my support.

I wish you and the heroic people of Artsakh success and several achievements that I believe we can achieve by combining our efforts.
ShoeX spent four months researching and developing the world's first face protective mask made from coffee grounds. The biodegradable filter membrane is replaceable.

Le Thanh, the founder of ShoeX, said in January 2020, when people began hearing the news about the spread of the epidemic originating from Wuhan, China, he set to work on the project on making face masks in anticipation of the huge demand for products in the future.





However, instead of making cloth face masks like other enterprises, Thanh and ShoeX decided to create a type of mask which is antibacterial, fashionable and friendly to the environment.



Thanks to the sensitivity to the market demand and adaptive thinking, ShoeXs new product  AirX, the face mask made of coffee  has been welcomed by consumers. With the product, the company hasn't seen its revenue decreasing in the epidemic and it hasn't laid off workers.

ShoeX spent four months researching and developing the world's first face protective mask made from coffee grounds. The biodegradable filter membrane is replaceable.

With these face masks, the decline in sales of coffee-made shoes, however, has been offset.



Owning the formula for making coffee shoes, it is quite possible for ShoeX to make coffee masks, Thanh said.



AirX is a product quite different from ShoeXcoffee, but both of them bear the DNA of ShoeX, Thanh said.



AirX has two parts. The cover is made by ShoeX in cooperation with partners working for coffee shoes. The other, the biodegradable, environmentally friendly and replaceable filter, is created by technology developed specifically by Thanh and other co-workers.



AirX mask uses the dual 99.99 percent antibacterial technology with two protective layers. The outer layer is made of soft coffee fibers, using PowerKnit technology, and is washable.



The inside layer is a biodegradable filter membrane, using technology that combines nanosilfer and coffee. Each filter can be used for up to 30 days without washing. The product is certified by QUATEST 3 (Quality Assurance and Testing Center 3) as meeting AATCCC 100 standard.

On January 30, 2020, the first two patients with coronavirus in Vietnam were diagnosed. As of 6 pm of April 14, 2020, there had been 266 confirmed cases, with 169 recoveries and 0 death.

Mai Lan

Vietnamese scientists develop COVID-19 early warning system An early warning system for COVID-19 has been launched by the Institute of Prevention Medicine and Public Health (IPMPH) at the Hanoi University of Medicine.
OPEC+ and large producers such as Canada, Norway, Mexico and Brazil came to an output cut agreement this weekend, but a coordinated output reduction in the United States isnt likely to happen any time soon.

The Railroad Commission, Texas oil regulator, failed to propose a concrete plan on Tuesday after more than 10 hours of talks. The three commissioners, Christian, Craddick and Sitton may be forced into action soon though as storage space is expected to run out within weeks.

Texas oil drillers have mixed opinions about output restrictions, with oil majors such as ExxonMobil and Chevron opposing any form of government intervention while shale specialists Pioneer Resources and Parsley Energy are in favor of a state-wide 20 percent production cut.

In an interview with Bloomberg TV, Parsley CEO Gallagher came out saying that his company is happy to reduce production by 20 percent if other companies follow suit. He also mentioned that Parsley is already shutting in production at 400 lower-producing wells.

Premium: U.S. Oil Production Has Already Peaked

Scott Sheffield, chief executive at Pioneer Resources, also in favor of a production curtailment said that the industry is in dire need of some regulation after years of expansion fueled by cheap money. Looking at the shale industry he said No one wants to give us capital because we have all destroyed capital and created economic waste,.

Oilprice.coms Irina Slav stated today that For the smaller companies, statewide production cuts would be beneficial, helping them continue to sell some oil, according to one industry executive. Larger companies are naturally opposed because they have more cash reserves and lower production costs that will ensure their survival anyway.

Yesterdays 10-hour meeting raised a couple of important and painful questions for oil producers and for the commission itself.

Which companies will be forced to cut, by how much and for how long? And perhaps more importantly, how will the commission organize these cuts?

The current three commissioners arent old enough to have experienced the last time that production was prorated back in the 1970s and asked some of the veteran attendants for advice during yesterdays virtual meeting.

Commissioner Craddick perhaps voiced the lack of experience best, We dont know how to do it at the agency anymore, Craddick said. Do we start on Jan. 1? Where do we start? How do we start?

Related: Oil Prices Plunge On Grim IMF Economic Forecast

The date mentioned by Craddick is both interesting and confusing as the commission doesnt have much time to come up with a solution, and January 1 would be far too late. A string of bankruptcies will follow in the next couple of months if regulators cant agree on a state-wide output quota.

Has the urgency of the demand-crisis not resonated in the Commissioners boardroom? Or is there simply no consensus about any form of state-wide output cut?

Drillers in North-Dakota didnt have much time to discuss output cuts and have already idled more than a quarter of oil wells in the northern state.

As the demand crisis continues, Texas drillers are likely to shut in more production in May when the storage hub Cushing in Oklahoma reaches its limit.

State regulators agreed to hold the next meeting on the 11th of May, and one can only hope that it proves more fruitful the second time around.

By Tom Kool for Oilprice.com

More Top Reads From Oilprice.com:
WASHINGTON, April 15, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- TEACH-NOW Graduate School of Education, one of the nation's largest technology-centric teacher preparation and degree-granting institutions, announced today that it will offer free training to teachers across the country who have been struggling to teach children online as a result of the recent mass school closures.

As schools closed due to the pandemic and reports of poor quality virtual instruction emerged, TEACH-NOW last month began offering free webinars for educators to learn about teaching online. Thousands of teachers signed up, and as a result it has now dropped its fee through the end of June for online professional development classes and launched a new website that makes it easy for educators to sign up.

"Our schools have found themselves unprepared for this crisis," said Dr. Emily Feistritzer, CEO and founder of TEACH-NOW. "With millions of schoolchildren sent home for what could be several months, their teachers have been scrambling to learn how to educate them remotely. Our country's schools by and large have failed to prepare teachers for the world of online education."

"We have trained our aspiring teachers in how to teach in an engaging online environment for years," Feistritzer said. "It has become clear that online education will be the primary method of instruction for the foreseeable future, and we feel it is crucial to provide teachers with this expertise. It is our way of giving back to the education community."

TEACH-NOW is the country's leader in collaborative, technology-centric teacher preparation and online training programs. The professional development sessions support teachers in virtual instruction with courses such as "Online Learning for Diverse Learners," and "Managing the Online Learning Environment."

"With the current worldwide pandemic, it is obvious that Teach-Now prepared educators like me for the future," said Queenette Nwibani-Auta, a TEACH-NOW graduate and current teacher. "Thanks to TEACH-NOW, the digital assignments my professors made me do, are now paying off as I share my knowledge of Zoom, YouTube, rubric preparation, Storyboard, Powtoon and other Online Apps with my colleagues and school administration."

Teachers can sign up for these opportunities by visiting www.TEACH-NOW.edu.

ABOUT TEACH-NOW

Founded in 2011, TEACH-NOW Graduate School of Education is a collaborative, activity-based, technology-centric teacher preparation program and degree-granting institution whose mission is to empower tomorrow's teachers for tomorrow's students in tomorrow's world.



Dr. Emily Feistritzer, a veteran educator and CEO and founder of TEACH-NOW, is nationally recognized for her innovative approach to education. She was named one of Fast Company's "Most Creative People 2019" and Inc. magazine's 2019 Top Ten Groundbreakers."

TEACH-NOW offers a nine-month post-baccalaureate teacher certification program and 12-month Master's in Education degree programs with a focus on either globalization of education, educational research, early childhood education, teaching multilingual learners, special education, educational technology or educational leadership.

TEACH-NOW boasts a 90 percent program completion rate and nearly 100 percent of graduates who want to teach can do so through certification and placement assistance.

TEACH-NOW has enrolled over 4,000 students from 130 countries, and 98 percent of graduates say they would recommend the program to others.

For more information or to enroll in a free program, visit www.TEACH-NOW.edu

Interview Requests: David Weiner (646-491-0574)

Email: [email protected]

SOURCE TEACH-NOW

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AUSTIN, Texas, April 15, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- Summit Hotel Properties, Inc. (NYSE: INN) (the "Company") today announced that due to the COVID-19 pandemic, its 2020 Annual Meeting of Stockholders (the "Annual Meeting") will be held at the Company's corporate offices located at 13215 Bee Cave Parkway, Suite B-300, Austin, Texas 78738. As previously announced, the Annual Meeting will be held on Thursday, May 14, 2020, but with the new starting time of 8:00 a.m. Central Time.

The timing and process for voting by proxy remains unchanged. Stockholders of record as of the close of business on March 6, 2020 can participate in, and vote at, the Annual Meeting.

About Summit Hotel Properties

Summit Hotel Properties, Inc. is a publicly traded real estate investment trust focused on owning premium-branded hotels with efficient operating models primarily in the Upscale segment of the lodging industry. As of April 15, 2020, the Company's portfolio consisted of 72 hotels, 67 of which were wholly owned, with a total of 11,288 guestrooms located in 23 states.

For additional information, please visit the Company's website, www.shpreit.com and follow the Company on Twitter at @SummitHotel_INN.

SOURCE Summit Hotel Properties, Inc.

Related Links

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The Department of Justice on Tuesday sided with a Mississippi church in its legal battle against the city of Greenville, which is preventing the congregation from holding drive-in services during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Temple Baptist Church in Greenville, Miss., was holding a drive-in service in its parking lot April 8 when eight police officers arrived at the church and began handing out $500 fines to attendees.

The drive-in service involved fewer than 20 cars that parked far enough apart to practice social distancing. Attendees kept their windows rolled up and listened to Pastor Arthur Scotts sermon on a lower-power FM frequency.

The day before the service, Greenville Mayor Errick Simmons issued an executive order banning such assemblies.

Temple Baptist had conducted other drive-in services prior to Simmons order.

The Department of Justice filed a Statement of Interest in support of the church Tuesday.

The facts alleged in the complaint strongly suggest that the citys actions target religious conduct, the DOJs brief says. If proven, these facts establish a free exercise violation unless the city demonstrates that its actions are neutral and apply generally to nonreligious and religious institutions or satisfies the demanding strict scrutiny standard.

The DOJ has a substantial interest in the preservation of its citizens fundamental right to the free exercise of religion, expressly protected by the First Amendment, the brief says.

The brief also notes that the city allows citizens to sit in a car at a drive-in restaurant with [their] windows rolled down but not at a drive-in church service with [their] windows rolled up.

Alliance Defending Freedom, which is representing the church, applauded DOJ for getting involved.

We appreciate the DOJs support for our position that this type of government action isnt necessary to protect health and safety, said ADF senior counsel Ryan Tucker. It only serves to unnecessarily violate Americans freedoms protected by the First Amendment.

Related:

Mississippi Church Sues City after Police Ticket Congregants Attending Drive-in Service

Greenville Mayor Waives $500 Tickets Given to Congregants Attending Drive-In Church Service

'If Beer Is Essential, So Is Easter': Judge Overturns Ban on Drive-In Church Service

Photo courtesy: Pixabay

Michael Foust has covered the intersection of faith and news for 20 years. His stories have appeared in Baptist Press, Christianity Today, The Christian Post, the Leaf-Chronicle, the Toronto Star and the Knoxville News-Sentinel.
The seven-day-long curfew to



check the spread of coronavirus infection in the walled city and Danilimda areas of Ahmedabad in Gujarat kicked in at 6 am on Wednesday, officials said.

The curfew will continue till 6 am on April 21.

Out of over 400 COVID-19 cases reported from Ahmedabad so far, the Fort area (Old City) accounts for about 60-70% of cases.

"The curfew has been imposed in areas which are under the jurisdiction of Shahpur, Karanj, Kalupur, Khadia, Gaekwad-Haveli, Dariyapur police stations of walled city and the Danilimda police station," Ahmedabad Police Commissioner Ashish Bhatia tweeted.

"Strict implementation of curfew in walled city and Danilimada area of Ahmedabad, for a week will aid in arresting the spread of coronavirus. All residents of the area are requested to assist in this endeavour," the police commissioner said.

A three-hour relaxation between 1 pm and 4 pm will be given, but only women are allowed to come out, he tweeted.

"For an effective implementation of the curfew, over 2,100 uniformed men from local police and paramilitary forces are deployed in both the areas," he added.

Ahmedabad Police have set up 374 check-points and deployed 159 vans to keep a check on people's movement in these areas, Bhatia addded.

A total of 2158 uniformed men from police and para-military are deployed in walled city and Danilimda areas.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
YEREVAN.  According to the decision of the Criminal Court of Appeal of Armenia, third President Serzh Sargsyans current pretrial measure of a signature bond not to leave the country will not be abolished. Gor Abrahamyan, Adviser to the Prosecutor General, confirmed this information to Armenian News-NEWS.am.

Sargsyan's lawyers had appealed to the aforesaid court the decision by the Court of General Jurisdiction of Yerevan, which had denied their appeal.

Serzh Sargsyan is charged with organizing the theft of half a billion drams from the state budget. But he does not accept the charge, and his attorney Amram Makinyan argues that this charge is concocted.
Leading supplier to Singapore government and military launches in UK with a spotlight on secure data and remote working

LONDON, April 15, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- SecureAge Technology, a provider of next-generation data security, is expanding its global footprint with the launch of a new UK operation. The Singapore-based company - the preferred data security partner for the Singapore government and military - provides 100 percent, transparent file-level encryption to protect all information at rest, in use and in motion.

With the exponential growth in remote working as a result of COVID-19, SecureAge is ideally placed to ensure that data is useless if it falls into the wrong hands - whether by accident, through insider theft or by malware attack. Even if a home worker goes "rogue" or a laptop is lost or stolen and the username and password compromised, SecureAge ensures that it is still not possible to access or exfiltrate data. And with its transparent, universal encryption, data security is completely invisible to the user - removing the human element entirely.

The new UK business is headed up by experienced technical director Nigel Thorpe and sales director Nick Maslen, who has worked with the likes of Silent Circle, General Dynamics, InfoBlox and IBM. "With the current COVID-19 pandemic causing global chaos, the need for businesses to enable more people than ever before to work from home securely, has put the spotlight on data security," said Nigel Thorpe. "Home working increases the chances of theft or the accidental loss of sensitive data by the employee. Our flagship enterprise encryption solution, SecureData, ensures that lost or stolen data is useless because it cannot be decrypted once it is outside the control of the organisation."

While persistent encryption inherently protects data, SecureAge's "process execution control" blocks malware, ransomware and keyloggers. "Rather than taking the conventional approach of identifying bad stuff then blocking it, SecureAge simply blocks all previously unknown processes," said Thorpe. "Keyloggers attempting to steal your corporate VPN passwords simply don't stand a chance."

"We established SecureAge back in 2003 with the aim to make PKI-based encryption an inherent component of data protection with no trade-off between security and usability," said Dr. Teow-Hin Ngair, Founder and CEO at SecureAge. "Our ability to protect all of the information all of the time - at rest, in use and in motion - is well-proven through collaboration with the government and military of Singapore, as well as with government offices in Tokyo and Hong Kong, which depend on our technology to prevent the compromise of extremely sensitive data. Following the opening of our US offices last year, we are now focused on positioning SecureAge in the UK, initially focusing on core markets such as government, finance and energy."

For more information about SecureAge Technology please visit: https://www.secureage.com/.

About SecureAge Technology

Placing real security and usability on equal footing, SecureAge Technology is a data security company headquartered in Singapore and historically known for protecting government and enterprise data from the most advanced and persistent cyber threats. The user-centric and simple solutions arising from the SecureAge philosophy offer clarity and calm within the most complex security environments. SecureAge's patented technologies provide total data protection, leveraging advanced encryption techniques designed to provide everyone the world's highest level of data security.

For more information, please contact:

Peter Rennison / Allie Andrews, PRPR, pr@prpr.co.uk / Allie@prpr.co.uk + 44-1442-245030
YOUNGSTOWN, Ohio  For reasons that remain puzzling, the city of Youngstown and surrounding Mahoning County have nearly 500 confirmed coronavirus cases, more than three times the statewide per capita average for COVID-19.

As of Wednesday, the county also had 41 coronavirus-related deaths - two more than Cuyahoga County, which has more than quadruple the population and is an economic hub that makes it more susceptible to the deadly disease because of international travel.

So, what makes Mahoning County different?

Cleveland.com reached out this week to Dr. James Kravec, medical director for Mahoning County Public Health and chief clinical officer for the areas Mercy Health hospitals.

Kravecs short answer: Its too soon to tell.

As we continue to trace these cases and look at data, working with the Ohio Department of Health and the [Centers for Disease Control and Prevention], its going to take a few months to really know why we have the larger number of cases in Mahoning County, Kravec said.

Kravec has a few theories though, including his regions aging population and the fact that older people tend to become more ill from COVID-19.

All three of the Mahoning Valleys counties  Mahoning, Columbiana and Trumbull - are in the top third of Ohio counties with the oldest median age, according to census data taken from 2014 to 2018 and released in mid-December 2019.

Trumbull is the 11th oldest county in Ohio, with an average age of 44.2, with Columbiana at 13th with an average age of 44 and Mahoning at 16th with an average age of 43.5.

By contrast, Cuyahoga County is ranked 55th, with an average age of 40.3, and Summit County is 44th with an average age of 40.9. During the same time period, the average age in Ohio was 39.3, and 37.9 across the United States.

It should be no surprise that the percentage of Valley residents age 65 and older is much higher than the state and national averages. About 16% of U.S. residents, and about 17.1% of Ohioans, are 65 and older. In Mahoning, Columbiana and Trumbull counties, those figures are 21%, 20.5% and 21.6%, respectively.

According to Mahoning County Public Health, only 6% of coronavirus deaths have been among patients younger than 60. Forty-one percent of the patients who died were between 60 and 79, and 53% were 80 or older. The median age is 79, and 96% of patients who died had underlying health conditions.

Despite some speculation that the high number of deaths has been a result of outbreaks in nursing homes, as is the case in Miami County, only 54% of Mahoning Countys COVID-19 deaths have been residents of long-term-care facilities, according to the health department.

Were seeing it in the community as well as nursing homes, so I dont know that Im able to tie the large number of cases to nursing homes, Kravec said.

Other theories Kravec has for why Mahoning County is being hit so hard involve its location  bordering Pennsylvania, roughly equidistant between Pittsburgh and Cleveland, and between Chicago and New York. Sitting along the Interstate 80 corridor, the Youngstown area is frequented by long-distance travelers, many of whom could have come through the area before the outbreaks were recognized and stay-at-home orders were enacted.

It could be that our county had seen an influx of virus cases prior to it really hitting anywhere else in Ohio, he said. Someones got to go first  it might have been our county that was first, before it ramped up everywhere else and the social distancing went into place.

More definitive explanations might be months away. Meanwhile, many in the community are working to enforce social distancing, including police officers who are issuing citations for people holding large gatherings, according to WKBN Channel 27 in Youngstown.

Mahoning County Sheriff Jerry Greene posted a video to Facebook late last month, urging everyone to take a good look at ourselves and make sure were only going out when something is absolutely necessary.
Talk: How to Encourage Clicks Without the Shady Tricks with UX Consultant Paul Boag at Awwwards Conference Amsterdam

Awwwards in Inspirational talks - April 15 Article byin
Three Toronto shelters are being investigated by Toronto Public Health as the number of COVID-19 cases rose to 30 in seven locations across the system that serves the citys homeless and refugee populations.

Willowdale Welcome Centre, a refugee shelter at Yonge Street near Drewry Avenue, has 14 confirmed cases; Dixon Hall on Lakeshore Boulevard East has nine cases, and Seaton House at 339 George St. has three cases, according to TPH.

Torontos medical officer of health, Dr. Eileen de Villa, said TPH is ensuring infection prevention and control measures are in place at the facilities and the cases are being followed up to determine how clients were exposed to the coronavirus and who they subsequently came into contact with.

We were prepared for this unfortunate situation of having cases in the shelter system and I am relieved to report that there have not been any COVID-19 deaths amongst clients in our shelter settings, said de Villa.

De Villa said that people experiencing homelessness are already at increased risk of dying prematurely and suffer a higher incidence of health problems, including infectious diseases.

She said that early studies from the United States suggest that there may be a higher incidence of COVID-19 in the homeless population, compared to people with secure housing.

She also expects that people experiencing homelessness will be sicker, as they are more likely to have pre-existing hypertension, diabetes, cardio-vascular disease and respiratory disease, which have been associated with poorer outcomes among those who get COVID-19.

This deeply concerns me, said de Villa.

Seven facilities have reported cases, but only the three being investigated were identified.

Patricia Mueller, chief executive officer of Homes First, which runs Willowdale, said Tuesday that 16 staff across eight shelters and 13 rental housing sites operated by Homes First also have the illness.

Homes First staff have reached out to the Star to say they dont believe they were properly supplied with personal protective equipment (PPE), but Mueller said Homes First followed all the recommendations made by public health when it came to distributing PPE, adding that it has been a rapidly moving target.

Speaking at a press conference on Tuesday, Mary-Anne Bedard, general manager of the citys shelter, support and housing administration, pointed out that Toronto has the largest shelter system in Canada, with 72 separate respite and shelter sites accommodating more than 7,000 people each night.

She said the city has provided community agencies with more than $1 million for their own PPE and cleaning supplies and increased wages for frontline workers.

Hours have been extended at some shelters; portable toilets and hand-washing stations have been set up in the downtown; social distancing cues, similar to the arrows in grocery stores directing which direction people should walk and where they should stand, have been added to facilities. Meal times have been staggered and so has use of common areas.

Given that there are more than 70 separate shelter locations in the city with varying layouts, maintaining adequate physical distancing has been one of the biggest challenges, said Bedard.

Capacity has been reduced at some shelters  more than 1,000 clients have been moved to spaces in community centres, hotel rooms and permanent housing, and another 1,000 will be moved into new spaces by April 30 to improve social distancing, among other things.

A moratorium has been placed on clearing homeless encampments and the focus has shifted instead to safety in the encampments, including increased cleaning and garbage removal, said Bedard. Street outreach teams are continuing to work with those living outdoors.

Given the scale of this pandemic, we knew that despite our best efforts it would unfortunately only be a matter of time before we saw cases of COVID-19 within the shelter system, said Bedard.

A 400-bed site for the homeless recovering from COVID-19 is in the works. In the meantime, an interim location was opened on Tuesday.

These steps will require tens of millions of dollars in partnership with other levels of government to get us through the next 90 days, said Bedard.

She said that the final figure will be reported at the conclusion of the pandemic.
NEW YORK, April 15, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- ByHeart, a company focused on the evolution of one of our most fundamental nutrition markets  infant & baby  announced the recent closing of $70 million in Series A funding led by Polaris Partners, D1 Capital Partners, and OCV Partners, in advance of its first infant formula product launch in 2021. Additional investors in the round include Red Sea Ventures, Sean Parker, and existing investors including Bellco Capital and affiliates of Two River.

Co-founded by Mia Funt and Ron Belldegrun in 2016, ByHeart grounds innovative products in next-to-nature quality, leading nutrition science, and production transparency, and strives for its baby foods and formulas to sit at the forefront of immune, cognitive, digestive and microbiome health.

"We founded ByHeart to unlock real choice for parents in a moment that can be overwhelming: formula and baby food products are not optional for most parents  they are crucial  which is why they must be accessible, uncompromised, holistic sources of nutrition. We want parents to feel engaged with what their baby eats and empowered as they create a foundation of health for their babies' lives to follow," explained Ron Belldegrun, CEO of ByHeart, and newly a father himself.

With ownership of manufacturing and research & development facilities, ByHeart seeks to maximize both quality and safety for its consumers, and is in a unique position to circumvent significant channel markups and invest those savings into what truly matters: hand-picked ingredients, small batch blending, evolved nutrition science, rigorous quality controls, and ultimately an elevated consumer experience. This experience will position community and education as paramount to transforming the baby nutrition category.

Mia Funt, ByHeart President and mother of two, said, "Feeding is one of the very first decisions we make as parents. It's incredibly intimate and personal, and often defines how successful we feel in a completely new role. At ByHeart, we believe in feeding freedom, which means that every parent has access to the very best choices, whenever and wherever they need them."

After three years of building and developing its products, team and facilities, as well as a network of nutrition, regulatory and parenting experts, the company is conducting a multi-site, infant-growth monitoring clinical study in accordance with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration's rigorous requirements, to support ByHeart's first product launch in 2021. The Series A investment evidences investors' confidence in the company's considered approach.

ByHeart welcomes representatives from two of the lead Series A investors onto its Board of Directors: Amy Schulman and Hemi Zucker. Ms. Schulman, Managing Partner at Polaris Partners, previously led Pfizer Baby Nutrition prior to its sale to Nestle, and helmed Pfizer Consumer Health's business. Mr. Zucker is Managing Principal of OCV and a founding member of J2 Global, owner of the leading parenting and health sites What to Expect, Baby Center and Everyday Health. Mike Tully joins the board as an observer on behalf of D1 Capital Partners, a $10 billion global investment firm founded by Dan Sundheim whose private investments include Sweetgreen, Stripe and Instacart. These new Board members join biotechnology entrepreneur and Co-Founder of Bellco Capital, Arie Belldegrun, M.D., FACS, as well as Josh Bradley, Chief Investment Officer of Bellco Capital, Joshua Kazam, Co-Founder and Partner of Two River Group, and Guy Oranim, Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer of First Media.

Ms. Schulman explained ByHeart's distinction: "The impressive blend of pediatric professionals, nutrition scientists, proprietary blendmasters, and content media visionaries behind ByHeart position the company uniquely to invigorate the existing baby nutrition market and serve as a partner for all parents to embrace their babies' health in more proactive ways."

Founded in 2016, and based in New York City with facilities in Pennsylvania, ByHeart produces evolved formula and food products to support babies' nutrition and parents' peace of mind.

Find out more at www.byheart.com.

Press contact: Elyssa Dimant ([email protected])

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SOURCE ByHeart

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[April 15, 2020] AdvisorHub Now Featuring Kitces & Carl Podcast

AdvisorHub - the nation's leading news site for financial advisors, is pleased to announce that the Kitces & Carl - Real Talk For Real Financial Advisors podcast will now be available to listeners on AdvisorHub.com. Financial planner, commentator, speaker, blogger, and educator Michael Kitces, and financial advisor communication expert Carl Richards, discuss industry topics from their own unique perspectives. The show, designed to champion and educate financial advisors, launched in June of 2019. Kitces & Carl covers topics ncluding tips for communicating with clients to alleviate their Coronavirus fears, building a practice with intent, talking about the value of financial planning itself, pricing your financial planning services, whether advisors really need to get involved in social media (or not), and the importance of building resiliency for yourself to handle the stress of being a financial advisor.



"Our underlying core set of values, what we're trying to accomplish, and what we believe, has 99%+ overlap. But the way we go about it is so different. It's not right or wrong. It's just totally different," said Carl Richards. "Which allows us to provide very different perspectives to inform and support the financial advisor community," added Michael Kitces. "I'm excited to partner with AdvisorHub to bring this podcast to their audience." "I've always been an admirer of Michael Kitces and have followed his career over the years," said Tony Sirianni, Publisher and CEO of AdvisorHub. "The alignment of the Kitces & Carl podcast with AdvisorHub just seemed like a perfect fit."

About AdvisorHub: AdvisorHub expands upon traditional trade industry coverage. In addition to investigative journalism and sophisticated commentary on the wealth management industry, we provide recruiting deals and compensation information crucial to advisors' business and careers. With a management team led by former advisor, industry CEO, and thought leader - Tony Sirianni, AdvisorHub produces content that is of unique value to financial advisors. AdvisorHub has offices in New York, NY and Middleburg, VA. www.advisorhub.com View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20200415005652/en/

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The Bihar government seems to tighten the grip over those who attended the congregation in Delhi's Nizamuddin Markaz, as 57 foreigners of different countries were arrested in Patna, Buxar, Kishanganj and Araria for violating visa rules.

According to the police, all the arrested were associated with Tablighi Jamaat.



18 have been arrested from Araria while 17 from Patna and 11 each from Kishanganj and Buxar. All of them were tested of coronavirus but they tested negative.





Kishanganj Superintendent of Police Kumar Ashish said 10 Indonesia and one Malaysian were arrested from near the Khanka Mosque a few days ago. They were tested of coronavirus however, they tested negative but still we kept then in quarantine in the Mosque itself. FIR has been lodged against them and all of them were arrested on Tuesday, after their quarantine period was over, for violating visa rules.



Similarly, seven Indonesian and four Malaysian from Naya Bhojpur in Buxar district.



Buxar Superintendent of Police Upendranath Verma said these foreign tourists had come to India on tourist visas and were preaching religion. They also participated in the congregation organised by Tablighi Jammat.



After being caught from a Mosque in Bhojpur area in March, all of them were sent to a quarantine centre. After the quarantine period got over, a FIR was lodged against them and they were sent to jail after being produced in the court.



18 foreigners, nine Malayasian and nine Bangladeshi, were arrested from Araria also for violating visa rules. Of 18, nine were staying at Jama Masjid in Araraia while nine were at Revahi Mosque in Narpatganj.



Earlier, on March 23 a FIR was registered against 17 foreigners for violating visa rules.



Among the foreigners sent to jail, nine are from Kyrgyzstan, seven from Malaysia and one from Kazakhstan.



Senior Superintendent of Patna Police Upendra Kumar Sharma, said, "FIRs against seven have been registed in Fulwari Shareef and against 10 in Digha for violating visa rules. All the accused came on tourist visa but were promoting religious congregation."



Police sources said, all of them were associated with the Tablighi Jammat and the police is investigating the case.
Two members of a family, including a 10-year-old girl, were injured in overnight shelling by the Pakistan Army along the Line of Control in Rajouri district of Jammu and Kashmir, officials said on Wednesday. A mortar shell from across the border hit the house of Nazir Hussain at village Lamibari in Rajdhani area of Manjakote sector, resulting in injuries to two persons, the officials said.

They said the injured 70-year-old Rafiq Khan and Sonia Shabir were rescued by a police party headed by station house officer of the local police station Manzoor Kohli amid intense shelling and shifted to district hospital Rajouri. The Pakistani Army shelled forward villages in the sector besides Balakote and Mendhar in nearby Poonch district late Tuesday.

The Indian Army retaliated and the cross-border shelling between the two sides continued intermittently for several hours, the officials said adding the casualties suffered by Pakistani Army in the retaliatory action was not known immediately. The officials said a live mortar shell was found lying unexploded near a residential area in Mendhar town this morning. An Army team is at the scene to neutralize the shell, they said.

Pakistani rangers also shelled areas along the IB in Hiranagar sector of Kathua district, causing panic among border residents. The firing and shelling in Chandwa area of Hiranagar began at around 9.30 pm Tuesday and continued throughout the night, they said, adding Border Security Force (BSF) personnel retaliated effectively. The guns fell silent around 4 am.
Today's Karl Stefanovic has warned Australia off blindly following coronavirus ravaged Europe in lifting its strict lockdown rules during a fiery debate with colleague Allison Langdon.

The co-hosts vehemently disagreed during a discussion about whether Australia should begin easing COVID-19 restrictions as the infection rate falls.

Latest figures showed that, for the first time, there more people who had recovered from the illness than there were people who had it.

Since the outbreak began on January 25, 6,415 Australians have been diagnosed with COVID-19 and more than half have recovered with only 62 deaths recorded.

The rate of infections has also dropped to its lowest in Europe and several nations including Spain and Italy - two of the hardest hit - are now reopening for business.

Langdon argued Australia should slowly follow suit during an interview with father-of-two Paul Johnson who is living in Denmark which is beginning to return to normal after a week-long decline in new cases and deaths.

Stefanovic quickly hit back and said Australians must be more cautious to avoid a second wave of infections which could prove more deadly than the original outbreak.

'I don't think Australia needs to be taking any lead out of Europe,' he said, before adding he thinks 'our medical authorities are right on top of it.'

Australia has made significant progress in the fight against coronavirus, with a clear flattening of the curve on the graph that measures the daily infection rate

Pictured: Customers queuing to enter a store in Austria after the government eased lockdown restrictions following the coronavirus pandemic

'We have to be very much on our toes about clusters coming up as a result and these second wave of infections as we've seen in Tasmania, when you have clusters fire up,' he said.

Langdon disagreed, and pointed out 'not every European country is the same'.

'Countries like Denmark, they got on top of this really quickly and locked down,' she said. 'They haven't had the same outbreaks as other places.'

Spain and Italy accounted for nearly a third of the global coronavirus death toll but surprisingly this week began a phased return to normality after their rise in new infections fell to just 2 per cent.

In Italy, the death toll topped 20,000 after 566 died on Monday  down from a peak of 919 just over two weeks ago.

Book stores and children's clothes shops reopened yesterday but social distancing rules, bans on non-essential travel and the closure of non-essential industries remained in place.

In Spain, all non-essential industries were shut down two weeks ago as the virus peaked and deaths hit 900 a day.

Meanwhile Australia is still in the midst of a restrictive lockdown where people cannot leave the house unless for essential travel. Pictured: Maroubra Beach on April 12

Denmark, by comparison, has recorded only 6,511 known cases of COVID-19, including 299 deaths with 2,515 patients who have now recovered.

Mr Johnson, an Australian expat, said he wasn't concerned about a second wave of infections.

'We're feeling fairly cautious but optimistic as well... It's not as if there are new cases coming into the country,' he said.

'From what we can ascertain from authorities, we've got no major risk.'

Several other European countries, such as Austria and the Czech Republic had begun to loosen their lockdowns as the move into the warmer weather of spring while German chancellor Angela Merkel was under pressure to reopen schools.

Langdon and Stefanovic were at odds over their differing opinions in Australia's next step against 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

Stefanovic said a single week of positive results shouldn't warrant the reopening of schools and daycare centres.

'Based on the world example, there is some concern if you open it up too early... A week is not a long time,' he said.

'Its really interesting that some countries will be doing that and opening up schools on a day when we're fiercely debating that.'

On Wednesday, Prime Minister Scott Morrison urged parents to send their children to school following the Easter break, despite some state premiers giving opposite advice by telling families to keep kids home if possible.

'We will lose many things in the course of fighting this virus,' he said.

'One thing that I know teachers are united on, with their parents, is we do not want one of those things to be the loss of a child's education, giving up a whole year of their learning.'

Students in Denmark will be required to wash their hands 25 times per day and there will be reduced numbers of kids per classroom.

Langdon said the details of exactly how Denmark is planning to return to normal is 'something we could potentially look at,' while Stefanovic said its too early to even consider.

'I'm just saying... We should be erring on the side of medical professionals,' he said, before Langdon could interject.

'You can say. And I can disagree,' she said.
On April 9, a joyful Wang Xin, an 87-year-old man who had been diagnosed with the novel coronavirus pneumonia, walked out of the east branch of Renmin Hospital of Wuhan University in Wuhan, capital of central Chinas Hubei province and also the previous epicenter of the COVID-19 outbreak in China.

Wang Xin (center) thanks the doctors as he leaves the hospital.

About a month ago, a picture of Wang and doctor Liu Kai watching the sunset on their way to a CT scan room went viral, touching the hearts of many people.

Last Thursday, the senior citizen was cured and discharged from the east branch of Renmin Hospital of Wuhan University, and sang happily as he left the building.

Wang Xin and doctor Liu Kai watch the sunset on their way to a CT scan room on March 5.

In fact, Wang is one of the more than 3,600 COVID-19 patients aged over 80 who have been cured in Hubei province, seven of whom are aged over 100, thanks to the joint efforts of local medical workers and medical teams dispatched from various parts of the country to help the province fight the virus.

According to Jiao Yahui, an official with Chinas National Health Commission (NHC), over 90 percent of the severe and critical COVID-19 patients who are of an advanced age have underlying health problems and are difficult to treat.

The COVID-19 patients in Hubei province were classified into different groups according to their condition. Patients aged 65 and older were put into hospitals with better conditions.

Many of the countrys renowned medical experts, including Zhong Nanshan, Li Lanjuan, Wang Chen, Qiao Jie, and Huang Luqi, have led medical teams on the front line of the battle against the COVID-19 to provide guidance in the clinical treatment of severe patients.

With the countrys finest medical teams sent to aid Hubei in its fight against the novel coronavirus and local medical experts working together to make full use of their strengths, the recovery rate for severe and critical cases of COVID-19 in Wuhan has significantly improved, with that for patients aged over 80 reaching nearly 70 percent.

In addition, medical teams from across the country have constantly been optimizing diagnosis and treatment plans for severe and critical COVID-19 patients in Hubei based on their previous experience, formulating targeted treatment plans for each patient.

According to Wang Gaohua, president of Renmin Hospital of Wuhan University, medical teams from various parts of the country and medical staff at the hospital formed different groups that took charge of specific treatment procedures, and carried out targeted treatments for patients.

Moreover, medical staff in hospitals and health centers have been working meticulously to take care of senior patients, treating them like their own family.

One community health service center in Wuhan Donghu Technological Development Zone has set up a dedicated team that provides daily living and medical services for senior COVID-19 patients.

After learning that a senior female patient surnamed Wang preferred milk and steamed egg with ham to rice congee and vegetables that she found hard to chew, medical workers in the Guanggu branch of Tongren Hospital of Wuhan University cooked meals specially for her, and sent the food and fruit she liked to her ward three times a day.

Thanks to this kind of particularly attentive care and treatment, Wang was cured and discharged from the hospital on March 16.

Initially, one 95-year-old male COVID-19 patient surnamed Liu was uncooperative and refused to eat, according to Lai Xiaodong, head of the third batch of medical teams sent from southwest Chinas Chongqing municipality to Hubei.

I found out that he liked Peking Opera, then I knew what to do, Lai said, revealing that medical workers downloaded audio and video materials of Peking Opera and played it for him whenever he was upset.

Thanks to this Peking Opera therapy, Liu was eventually cured and discharged from hospital.

Because of efforts like this, Wuhan has constantly set new records for having the oldest COVID-19 patient to be cured of the disease.

By April 11, Wuhan had eight COVID-19 patients aged over 100, of whom seven have been cured and discharged from hospitals.
In the last three weeks, the war against Boko Haram in the northeast (Borno state) got more intense. ISIL (Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant) affiliate ISWAP (Islamic State West Africa Province) has been the most effective Boko Haram faction and deliberately goes after security forces in those areas (northern Borno state) while the less violent Boko Haram faction, which is about half the strength of ISWAP, dominates central Borno State.

ISWAP has dominated the northern Borno for several years and resisted repeated efforts to destroy or greatly diminish the Boko Haram presence in Borno and adjacent countries (Chad, Niger and Cameroon) and Nigerian states (Yobe and Adamawa) . The main opponent to ISWAP has been the Nigerian military and the MNJTF (Multi-National Joint Task Force). The 8,700 man MNJTF force maintains bases and camps near Lake Chad and concentrates on hunting down and killing ISWAP gunmen. MNJTF has taken the lead in containing ISWAP and blocking the Islamic terrorist efforts to once more control territory in the region.

Formed in early 2015 the MNJTF consists of troops from Niger, Chad, Cameroon, Benin and Nigeria. At first, the MNJTF was used mainly inside Nigeria but by early 2017 MNJTF was spending most of its time clearing Boko Haram out of border areas, especially the Lake Chad coast. Each member country assigns some of their best troops to the MNJTF and the Boko Haram have suffered heavy losses trying to fight MNJTF. This played a role in the 2016 Boko Haram split that turned Boko Haram operating near Lake Chad into ISWAP. MNJTF concentrated more and more on the areas around Lake Chad and has been successful at curbing ISWAP operations there. Unfortunately, MNJTF is not present in most of Borno State and there are already some Borno areas where ISWAP collects taxes and maintains order because MNJTF isnt present. These taxes are actually an extortion scheme but it is how Islamic terrorists or ambitious bandits began establishing control over the territory.

Although still a faction of Boko Haram, ISWAP also considers itself the primary ISIL province (chapter, division, franchise or whatever) in Africa. As a result, national borders are less important and ISWAP has become a threat to all the countries (Chad, Cameroon, Libya, Niger, Nigeria and the Central African Republic/CAR) bordering Lake Chad. This is nothing new because in 2015 these Lake Chad nations agreed to cooperate in dealing with the growing Boko Haram violence along the southern shore of Lake Chad. While that effort had some success ISWAP refused to abandon the area,

This Boko Haram presence had reached the point where the Islamic terrorists would regularly steal fishing boats and move along the coast and increasingly occupy some of the many small islands as bases. As the Boko Haram groups operating in northern Borno State evolved into ISWAP, ISIL sent experienced personnel from Syria and Iraq who helped ISWAP with technical matters like bomb-building techniques and how to use commercial quadcopters for planning attacks and tracking the local soldiers and police. American and French aerial and electronic intelligence in the region and the Middle East have confirmed the connection to what is left of the ISIL base area in Syria/Iraq. Contact between ISIL headquarters and ISWAP, while irregular, is maintained. ISWAP is, just from monitoring mass media reports, the most active ISIL faction at the moment and the Nigerian leaders of ISWAP want to keep it that way. This pays propaganda dividends in Nigeria and neighboring countries where it makes recruiting easier and extortion victims more willing to pay their taxes. All this has also made ISWAP a primary target for Nigerian and international forces. ISWAP is learning that being in that kind of spotlight makes it a primary target for a lot more attackers.

Recent events demonstrate that ISWAP can take heavy losses and keep going. ISWAP now claims that they have driven Chad troops out of Nigeria because Chad now says it will no longer send troops into Nigeria as part of MNJTF. In reality, Chad has stopped sending troops into Nigeria unofficially during the last year. This was so Chadian forces could concentrate on expelling ISWAP groups from southern Chad. That is now the official Chad priority.

Borno State is still where most of Boko Haram forces are based and operate. Since Boko Haram sustains itself via looting, it is always looking for easy (unguarded) targets in the form of rural villages and towns. More and more of these places either get a military or police garrison or form a self-defense militia. These places are less likely to be attacked as Boko Haram seeks out the less lethal (for the attackers) targets. It is bad for Boko Haram morale (and recruiting) if too many looting raids turn into battles that the Islamic terrorists sometimes lose. ISWAP organizes its forces into dozens of dispersed groups that get a territory to live off and establish informants to determine where the most vulnerable targets are. Raiding an area too often either leads to better defenses there or most of the population fleeing their homes and heading for refugee camps. As a result, Boko Haram had had to expand its raiding activities into the neighboring states of Yobe and Adamawa as well as neighboring countries.

When enough ISWAP groups have made themselves comfortable and secure in their assigned area they can contribute mobile (using trucks and motorcycles) fighters that become part of a larger attack force that can inflict a major defeat on the military. Thats what happened on March 23rd to the Chad army base on Bohoma Island. The Chad forces got sloppy and ISWAP took advantage of that. The Chad Army is usually more professional and effective than that and the Bohoma raid will motivate commanders to do better. This may backfire on ISWAP but at the moment ISWAP is ignoring the recent losses on the Lake Chad coast and Abubakar Sheka, the ISWAP leader, declared a victory. He also sent out a second video message urging his followers to remain firm and defeat enemy attacks. This message was an acknowledgment of recent heavy ISWAP losses in southern Chad.

Other Ways To Die

Tribal feuds and large scale banditry continue to kill more people in Nigeria than Boko Haram. Their problems are more of a constant than periodic outbreaks of Islamic terrorism in Moslem majority areas of northern Nigeria.

Coronavirus (Covid19) has reached Nigeria but so far there are only 373 confirmed cases and 11 confirmed deaths. There are probably more of both because Nigeria does not have a national health system capable of widespread testing for covid19 or treatment of all those found to have it. Most of the cases detected so far have been down south in the port city of Lagos. A densely populated and relatively prosperous place, Lagos gets lots of foreign visitors and it was expected that this was where covid19 would first show up in Nigeria. For most of the country the virus will probably not show up at all and if it does will cause some additional fever related deaths. There are a lot of afflictions in Nigeria that result in a fever and eventual death. The government says it will deal with covid19 but wont discuss how because there are no resources for a nationwide response other than warning people to stay away from anyone who appears to be infected. This will result in some mistaken identity incidents but without widespread testing it will never be known how many were infected and died from this virus. That is what happened with earlier pandemics which were hardly noticed.

April 11, 2020: Chad claims that operations against Boko Haram near Lake Chad have eliminated 90 percent of Boko Haram personnel in northeastern Nigeria and adjacent countries. This offensive cleared all the Lake Chad islands off the coasts of Chad, Nigeria, Niger and Cameroon in that area. These islands have long been used as bases and hideouts by Boko Haram.

April 9, 2020: In response to recent defeats versus ISWAP in Borno and Chad, the Nigerian Army chief of staff have moved to an army camp in Borno State to oversee retaliatory operations against ISWAP.

April 7, 2020: In the northeast (Borno state) soldiers clashed with Boko Haram at Ngala, near the river that forms the border with Cameroon. Two Boko Haram men were killed and the rest got away.

Elsewhere in Borno troops from Niger and Nigeria cornered a large group of Boko Haram Haram at Kukawa, near Lake Chad and killed about forty of the Islamic terrorists.

In the northeast corner of Borno Boko Haram raiders killed three people.

Troops from Chad have been very active against Boko Haram in the Lake Chad area and in the last month have clashed with Boko Haram numerous times, killing about a thousand of them while losing 52 soldiers with about 200 wounded. The offensive was triggered by a March 23 Boko Haram attacks on a Chad army base that killed nearly a hundred soldiers. Chad also said it would no longer send troops into Nigeria

April 6, 2020: In the northeast (Borno state) soldiers clashed with Boko Haram at Kukawa, near Lake Chad and killed nineteen of the Islamic terrorists.

April 5, 2020: In the northeast, across the border in Cameroon two Boko Haram suicide bombers killed seven civilians in a remote village. Northern Cameroon has been a battle zone for years because of Boko Haram. In 2019 the area suffered 275 Boko Haram related deaths. The casualties continue into 2020 but at a lower rate, at least so far.

April 3, 2020: In the northeast (Borno state), troops caught up with a group of ISWAP Islamic terrorists at Kukawa, near Lake Chad and killed at least six of the Islamic terrorists.

March 31, 2020: General Olusegun Adeniyi, the commander of troops in the northeast, mainly Borno state, was replaced. Adeniyi was known as a good commander but he had recently gone public with complaints about lack of weapons and equipment and poor performance by military intelligence. These are legitimate complaints but as previous officers in Adeniyis position discovered, speaking out publicly gets you fired.

In the northeast (Borno state), outside Gwoza, a town near the Cameroon border, an airstrike killed 5-10 Boko Haram men as the air force continued its armed aerial patrols of the area. On the ground troops killed another seven Boko Haram men in the same area.

March 28, 2020: In the northeast (Borno state), ISWAP Islamic terrorists killed five people. Near Maiduguri, the state capital, Boko Haram raiders killed six civilians.

March 23, 2020: In the northeast (Borno State), Boko Haram gunmen ambushed an army supply truck carrying ammunition from Maiduguri (the state capital). The gunfire killed some troops and the cargo exploding killed some more. The army sent reinforcements who were also ambushed. Total army casualties were at least fifty dead and many more wounded.

Further north across the Chad border on the island/peninsula of Bohoma off the Lake Chad coast Boko Haram attacked the Chad army base there, killing about a hundred soldiers and wounding even more. ISWAP looted the base and used captured boats to get the loot back to the Nigeria shore. This rare defeat at the hands of Boko Haram enraged Chad and more troops were brought in and a major offensive launched against Boko Haram groups on Lake Chad islands. Chad army commanders thought they had defeated and scared off ISWAP in the area around Bohoma. That led to part of the Bohoma garrison being sent somewhere else. Chad Army intelligence did not adequately monitor the ISWAP reaction, which was to note the vulnerability of the Bohoma base and realize that ISWAP was strong enough to create a large attack force and hit the Bohoma base with a surprise attack.

March 18, 2020: In the northeast (Borno State), an airstrike near Abadam, on the Lake Chad coast, killed several ISWAP Islamic terrorists.

March 15, 2020: In the northeast (Borno State), outside Bama, near the Cameroon border a brief battle left six soldiers and three Boko Haram gunmen dead.

March 14, 2020: In the northeast (Borno state), an airstrike against Boko Haram outside Kukawa, near Lake Chad killed 5-10 gunmen.

March 12, 2020: In the northeast (Borno state), Nigerian and Chadian soldiers operating against Boko Haram around Kukawa, near Lake Chad found and killed several of the Islamic terrorist leaders they were searching for.

Elsewhere in Borno the air force carried out an airstrike outside Gwoza, a town near the Cameroon border that killed several dozen Boko Haram gunmen.
The moral issue is based on whether each human should be treated as an end and not a means to an end, in which case the value of each human life, irrespective of age and the use of that human to society, is equal.





by Ruwantissa Abeyratne

writing from Montreal





We are not going to put a dollar figure on human life

New York Governor Andrew Cuomo





The moral dilemma presented by the Covid-19 pandemic starts with the disturbing fact that there are just not enough ventilators to go around and eventually the decision will have to be taken in an instance when two patients are in equal need of a ventilator, as to who receives the ventilator and who does not. Should the deprived patient be allowed to suffocate and die? And if so, what would the criteria for selection be? Age? The economic value of the person to society?













For the entirety of 2019, only 77,000 new ventilators were required to meet the market demand of the entire world. For the month of April 2020, New York City alone needed 30,000 additional machines. Healthmanagement.org recorded that: Italy's experience has already shown that approximately 10 to 25% of hospitalised COVID-19 patients will require ventilation for several weeks. How will this problem be handled as COVID-19 cases across Europe, USA and Canada continue to increase? Based on the estimates from Italy, the number of patients that could possibly need ventilation could range from 1.4 to 31 patients per ventilation. Will it become necessary to ration ventilators? This certainly depends on the pace of the pandemic, but most experts warn that this could be a real possibilityThe goal is to save the most lives hence the decision to save which life is usually defined by a patient's likelihood of surviving an acute medical episode. But how does one allocate or ration ventilators? Should patients who have been placed on mechanical ventilation be withdrawn? There was a time when withdrawing a ventilator was akin to killing. Today, withdrawal of ventilatory support often happens in the ICU at the request of a patient or surrogate and is considered a legal and ethical obligation. But withdrawing it without the consent of a patient or surrogate is only allowed in a few regions and only when treatment is determined to be futile. But when its a pandemic like COVID-19, it's not the futility of treatment that is the driving force. It is a shortage of resources.





It is also recorded that this dilemma has left many healthcare workers crying in the corridors and staircases, filled with remorse, despair and sorrow at the hard choices they are faced with.





The moral issue is based on whether each human should be treated as an end and not a means to an end, in which case the value of each human life, irrespective of age and the use of that human to society, is equal. This is essentially based on human dignity and not on a utilitarian equation of the ultimate happiness of the majority of a community or society.





Suzanne Dovi, in her article Sophies Choice: Letting Chance Decide published in Philosophy and Literature, (University of Arizona:2006) argues that genuine moral dilemmas do not carry specific answers and require those who have to take decisions to follow a random selection process when there is clearly no better outcome from the range of choices available to the agent; when particular kinds of moral burdens (guilt burdens) can be alleviated by that agent adopting a random decision procedure; and when the alternatives were given to, and not made by, the agent, say by a committee of sages so appointed to establish guidelines.





In such an unbearably emotional situation does one pick or does one choose. Does one flip a coin? Would one try to hitch both patients to the same ventilator to avoid guilt even if both may die of lack of an adequate flow of service from the ventilator?





There are some guidelines from 19th Century philosophy reflected in the theories of Emmanuel Kant (1724-1804) which say that at the centre of human life is dignity - the right of a person to be valued and respected for his own sake - and to be treated ethically. Therefore, how we judge the right thing to do does not depend on consequentialism which is based on the maximum happiness of the maximum number of people. Kanrts theory, called the categorical imperative, goes against the pick or choose criterion of utilitarian positivism and espouses that lives of both patients in need of the ventilator, or of many for that matter, as the case might be, have to be treated as being equal in value. Kant held that human life is centered on dignity which cannot be distinguished or treated by any other characteristics or social needs. Philosophically, the dichotomy would lie on the one hand in Kants theory of human dignity and the value of human life and Jeremy Benthams utilitarian theory of consequentialism and happiness and the good of the majority, on the other.





Lisa Tessman in her article How to make a difficult decision, when all the options are bad says: No one should be forced into this position. Not all situations that present these sorts of choices can be prevented  there's always the possibility of bad luck  but at least we shouldn't knowingly bring them about. Tessman quotes Kant by saying: for an act to be morally obligatory, it must also be possible: so the impossible cannot be morally required. This principle is typically expressed by moral philosophers with the phrase: "Ought implies can." In other words, you can only be obligated to do something if you're also able to do it.





Clearly, those faced with this dilemma  the frontline health services providers  should not feel moral inadequacy and remorse, nor should they ascribe guilt and responsibility for their inability to save lives under these circumstances. The moral blame and indeed responsibility should lie on those who can do something about this grave situation. The answer lies in the provision of adequate ventilators to meet the global needs. An article published in The World Economic Forum titled A better answer to the ventilator shortage as the pandemic rages on says the challenge is not impossible, only difficult: To help all those people, ventilator manufacturers will need the support of a larger, global supply chain. The World Health Organization doesnt need to commandeer all the ventilation-related manufacturing capacity and transportation, but the worlds most advanced supply chains  UPS, FedEx, DHL, Kuehne + Nagel, Panalpina, Nippon Express, the national post services and even national military procurement arms  should be working together to help ventilator manufacturers and their suppliers meet this single aim. Just as pharmaceutical companies and researchers are working together to produce a vaccine, the worlds top supply chains could pool resources and expertise to make sure these companies get what they need.





As for those caring health service workers, they should be comforted by the words of the of the scriptures Do Your Best and Let God Do the Rest! (Colossians 3:23-24).




How is Prince Harry doing after he and Meghan, Duchess of Sussex left the royal family behind? One famous friend in his inner circle said that hes finding life a bit challenging, though its unclear if thats because hes adjusting to the non-royal life or because of the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic that has everyone social distancing.

Prince Harry | PAUL EDWARDS/POOL/AFP via Getty Images

Prince Harry and Meghan officially left the royal family

In January, Prince Harry and Meghan announced a plan to step back from their royal duties and a Mar. 31 exit date was agreed upon. While the announcement might have been surprising to many, Prince Harrys friend, primatologist Dr. Jane Goodall, revealed that he had dropped a hint about their plans six months before they shared it with the world.

Prince Harry interviewed Dr. Goodall for the 2019 Vogue issue that Meghan guest-edited and she had some inside information about the Sussexes desire to provide Archie with a normal upbringing.

During an interview with the Daily Mail Weekend Magazine, Goodall shared how she visited the couple at Frogmore Cottage and spent time with Harry for their interview.

At the end [of the conversation] Meghan came in to listen with Archie, Goodall recalled. He was very tiny and very sleepy  not too pleased to be passed from his mummy. I think I was one of the first to cuddle him outside the family.

Prince Harry seemed to hint at the couple planning their move to a normal life. I made Archie do the queens wave, saying, I suppose hell have to learn this, she explained. He said No, hes not growing up like that, Goodall said.

Prince Harry is finding the transition challenging

During an interview with Radio Times, Goodall was asked if shes been in touch with Harry and how hes currently doing since the couple moved on, first to Canada and then to Los Angeles, after leaving the royal family.

I dont know how his career is going to map out, but, yes, Ive been in touch  though I think hes finding life a bit challenging right now, Goodall shared.

The Sussexes royal exit to a normal life isnt quite how they envisioned it, as a global pandemic was not on their radar at the time they announced their plan to leave their royal duties. The current situation may, in part, be why Prince Harry is finding things challenging, as Goodall put it.

Prince Harry may be feeling isolated

Royal commentator Angela Mollard shared her concerns about how Prince Harry leaving his royal life behind and being in quarantine may be impacting his mental health.

I really worry about Harry, Mollard shared during the Royals podcast. He is someone who is very connected to his family  its all he has ever known.

Of all the times to move apart from the royal family, I can imagine that right now he feels tremendously isolated, Mollard noted. Everybody, of course, is isolated but he is not just isolated from his family, he is isolated on the other side of the world.

She continued, He is just with Meghan and their son, they will be having no contact with friends and he cant engage with anything purposeful at the moment. Mollard worried that the isolation could impact Prince Harry as he has no sense of purpose currently.
Chris Courter and Jennifer Kirby, who own and operate Piggyback Treats Company, with their dogs  Atlas (left) and Candy. Read more

Animal shelters and rescue organizations across the country are reporting unprecedented surges in pet fostering and adoption, as families suddenly have more time on their hands and the lonely seek companionship amid life in coronavirus quarantine.

Thats consistent with trends dating to the Great Recession and the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, after which rates of dog ownership increased. The $95 billion pet industry emerged from the 2008 financial crisis in a relatively strong position and strengthened its reputation as recession resistant.

But the coronavirus pandemic poses a new challenge.

Many pet service providers are mom-and-pops whose businesses might not survive the crises, the market research firm Packaged Facts said in a report last month.

Pet owners who are now working from home are less likely to hire dog walkers. Many groomers and dog day care centers have temporarily closed as part of the broad shutdowns of businesses. Pet boarders are losing business from travel restrictions. Total U.S. retail sales of pet products and services will drop 17% this year, according to projections by Packaged Facts, compared with the 5% growth anticipated before the outbreak.

Pet businesses are adjusting, and some may even be well-positioned to capitalize on an increasingly health-conscious public.

 READ MORE: Shelter pets in Philly are being fostered at unprecedented rates amid the coronavirus, but the need is only expected to grow

Consider the Philadelphia-based start-up Because Animals. The company sells supplements for dogs and cats that it says promote coat, immune, and digestive wellness, powered by probiotics, omega 3 and omega 6 fatty acids, and organic ingredients such as pumpkin powder and blueberries. Another product: organic dog cookies with B vitamins. (Some skeptics say the benefits of these kinds of products remain unproven.)

Through the first week of April, the companys online sales had already exceeded its total for March, said co-founder and chief revenue officer Joshua Errett. He expects April sales to double from last month.

Errett attributed that to consumer stockpiling amid coronavirus-related uncertainty, as well as a search for something healthier. Theres long been a demand for high-quality products among super premium customers, in retail parlance, and Errett said more consumers were now giving a closer look at pet foods possible health benefits.

Most of the growth came from sales on Amazon. I have to chalk that up to consumers entering the online space who dont normally shop there and seeing a wide world of other pet products  other than whats in grocery stores, Errett said.

Indeed, the pandemic may well accelerate the growth of e-commerce in pet product retail. E-commerce accounted for 22% of sales in 2019, according to Packaged Facts, a share that is projected to grow to 31% by 2024. E-commerce growth in the industry has been supercharged by the success of Chewy, the online pet food marketplace that went public last year. Chewys stock price jumped almost 27% in March, even as the broader S&P 500 index dropped 13%.

Suppliers for Because Animals in Vermont and Iowa have been designated essential businesses. The company is still scaling back production a bit, holding off on plans to roll out some new products, Errett said. The virus is not slowing Because Animals work in the lab on its marquee product, which it plans to bring to market next year: cultured meat, or meat that is grown from bovine cells without raising and slaughtering animals.

Because Animals is backed by venture capital funding; it isnt wholly dependent on sales to remain in business.

I used to say to investors, pet food is recession-proof as an industry. ... It might actually be true, Errett said. Seeing the world come crumbling. Nothing is going to break the love you feel for your cat or your dog. Youre not going to let anything come in the way of that, be it a pandemic or recession or whatever it may be.

Businesses that focus on pet health are likely to do well amid the pandemic, said David Lummis, a pet market analyst for Packaged Facts.

People want the same kind of products for their pets that they are using for themselves, he said. And as were more health-focused we become the same way for our pets.

He added that businesses promoting super premium brands are somewhat insulated from a shrinking economy, in part because that market is driven by relatively affluent households.

But Lummis questioned how long these businesses  many of them relatively new with just a handful of employees  would be able to weather the economic storm.

Its a question that is top of mind for Jennifer Kirby and Chris Courter, founders of Piggyback Treats Co.

They partner with restaurants and farmers to collect food that would otherwise go to waste, and use it to make pet treats in their Chestnut Hill home. Sustainability is a big part of their pitch  even the packaging is compostable. Popular items include dehydrated salmon skins and beer bones made with spent grains, byproducts from brewing beer.

When the coronavirus hit, it was initially really scary for us, said Kirby, a pastry chef by training. They had already spent $8,000 to book spaces at shows and festivals in March and April, which they expected to generate $28,000 in sales. These in-person events had been the primary source of revenue since Kirby and Courter founded the business in 2017.

Suddenly, they were postponed or canceled.

The couples plan had always been to make the business a boutique online brand. The pandemic has accelerated their digital transition. Online sales rose sharply over the four weeks ending April 10, Kirby said. It likely wont be enough to make up for the lost revenue, but were keeping our head above water, Courter said.

While pet food is the most resilient part of the industry, non-medical services such as training, grooming, and pet sitting are most vulnerable in a downturn. Packaged Facts projects that sales in this area will drop nearly in half from $10.3 billion in 2019 to $5.5 billion this year.

Leigh Siegfried feels those headwinds. The owner of the dog-training business Opportunity Barks, she had to halt dog day school and other services at her three stores in Old City, East Falls, and Quakertown. Now shes doing virtual training, offering one-on-one sessions and smaller group classes.

Weve been busy building online platforms and getting that rolling, she said.

Most clients are OK with the switch, Siegfried said, and shes been able to retain her full workforce of nine employees.

Were trying to up our ante with a lot more one-on-one face-time with class clients than we normally would, she said.

The greatest hope for the industry is that growing rates of pet ownership will translate into more business later.

There seems to be something about economic and emotional trauma that causes a spike in pet ownership," Lummis said. "I think its going to be even more pronounced this time.

A lot of people have been buying puppies in recent months anyway, Siegfried said, and many of them wont want to wait out the pandemic to start in-person training.

Shes also offering free consults for people who have new foster dogs.

I just felt like people are  making the move to get these dogs, Siegfried said. Maybe its going amazing and thats cool. And if its a little more than they bargained for, they need support.

She added: Well probably see them in class or lessons down the road.
Some parents refuse to send their children back to schools and nurseries as coronavirus lockdown measures are eased.

Denmark has eased its coronavirus lockdown measures by reopening schools and daycare centres, but concerns they might become breeding grounds for a second wave of infections have convinced thousands of parents to keep their children at home.

The rate of new cases is falling, but the governments decision on Wednesday led to a heated debate over how to balance the needs of the economy and the safety of the population  in this case, its youngest citizens.

I wont be sending my children off no matter what, said Sandra Andersen, the founder of a Facebook group called My kid is not going to be a Guinea Pig that has garnered more than 40,000 followers.

I think a lot of parents are thinking, why should my little child go outside first, said the mother of two girls aged five and nine.

The month-long lockdown in Denmark, where the virus infected more than 6,600 people with close to 300 deaths, also closed shops, bars, restaurants, cinemas and gyms.

On Wednesday, Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen defended the move, undertaken on health authority recommendations, to ease it by resuming teaching up to fifth grade, saying this would allow parents to return to work and get the economy going again.

Christian Wejse, a scientist at the department of infectious diseases at Aarhus University, said he understood peoples concerns because weve spent a month trying to avoid contact.

But any new infections would be unproblematic in an age group where few fall ill, and those who do wont get very sick.

Looking at neighbouring Sweden, which has kept schools open without a drastic rise in infections, children also appeared not to be an important driver for transmission of the virus, he said.

Teaching staff are under instruction to keep social distancing in place between children and, with many school buildings staying closed, in some cases preparing chalk for pupils to write with on the playground tarmac.

I dont think its right for the kids not to hug their friends, said Nonne Behrsin Hansen, a mother of two aged two and four.

We keep the kids home, because the situation in the day cares before the COVID-19 outbreak were not okay, and the conditions they are setting up now are even worse.

For now, at least, most members of Momster, an online network of thousands of Danish mothers, do not believe authorities have things under control, according to its founder and CEO Esme Emma Sutcu.

Suddenly, these moms feel like they just have to throw their kids to the frontline and I think their reaction is: Dont mess with our kids, she said.
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While Gov. Tom Wolf is now working with other states on a coordinated regional plan for reactivating their economies, the GOP-controlled House of Representatives is upping the pressure on the governor to adopt a Pennsylvania-centric strategy that would allow more of its businesses to reopen now.

The House on Tuesday passed Senate Bill 613 on a 107-95 near party-line vote that would have the effect of scrapping the governors more restrictive list of life-sustaining businesses allowed to be open during the COVID-19 crisis.

In its place, the legislation requires the governor to immediately plan to allow businesses that conform with the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and federal Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agencys guidance to reopen.

The measure now goes to the Senate for concurrence. The Senate is going to come into session on Wednesday. A spokeswoman for Gov. Tom Wolf said the governor will consider the bill once it reaches his desk.

But during a phone call with reporters on Wednesday afternoon, the governor said, If we dont do this right, the economy is going to be in even worse shape than it is now.

House Majority Leader Bryan Cutler, R-Lancaster County, pointed out under this bill, it could take another three weeks before a plan can be implemented that would allow businesses to reopen. He said 42 states use the federal guidelines included in this bill in determining which businesses can be open.

Several supporters of the bill argued that it was the onslaught of heartbreaking calls from constituents frustrated over and financially hurting from the governors list of life-sustaining businesses issued on March 19 along with the associated waiver process that gave rise to the need for this action.

Rep. Dawn Keefer, R-York County, who led off the more than two hour-long debate, said the governors process of deciding which businesses could be open and which ones cant "has been chaotic and confusing at best.

Using the guidance that this bill provides places trust on business owners to operate in a responsible, safe manner for their employees and customers and gets people back to work, she and other proponents said.

If we continue down this unplanned path, we will most certainly have a much larger catastrophe than we face now," Keefer said.

Cutler referred to the bill as planning for the future and having a vision that goes beyond dealing with the immediate crisis.

While not downplaying the terrifying statistics surrounding the number of coronavirus cases and deaths in the state and the possibility this virus may be around for a long time to come, he said there does reach a point where people have to get back to work.

Now is the time to plan for the future, Cutler said. The quarantine was an immediate short term and successful goal but it severely impacted everyones daily lives but its not a long-term solution. If we, like the experts, believe this could go into the summer and resurface in the fall then the answer cannot simply be we will wait until its over. Our people cannot serve that length of uncertainty or lack of long-term plans."

Rep. Matt Gabler, R-Clearfield County, another of the more than a dozen lawmakers who offered comments on the House floor, said, this is the right response at the right time.

But opponents maintained it is too premature to allow businesses to reopen. Several referenced the vote as as a life or death decision and pointed to health experts admonition that reopening the economy at this time poses too great a health risk.

Some recited portions of a letter from state Health Secretary Dr. Rachel Levine who warned that a random and uncoordinated reopening of business would lead to a tsunami of cases" that could overwhelm the states health care system.

House Minority Whip Jordan Harris, D-Philadelphia said he understands small businesses are economic engines but the truth is, we can revive our economy but we cannot revive lives.

While well-intentioned, this measure goes too far, said Rep. Mark Longietti, D-Mercer County. It would risk all of the sacrifices and pain endured to date and likely lead to prolonging the misery.

Beyond the House chamber, members were hearing from interest groups whose stance on the bill was just as divided as the members themselves.

Nurses and health care professionals raised concern that it could reverse the progress the state has made to control the virus spread while they still remain without adequate supplies of personal protective equipment and widespread available public testing for the virus or antibodies remain a distant goal.

But small business advocates said the financial damage that this crisis is causing needs to be a high priority as well.

Gordon Denlinger, Pennsylvania state director for the National Federation of Independent Businesses, said, "Small business is the economic backbone of our state, and without a comprehensive strategy to restart these businesses, the loss of jobs and opportunity will result in an extended downturn that will harm every community in the commonwealth.

Meanwhile, Wolf has emphasized a more measured approach to dealing with the coronavirus that puts public health concerns ahead of economic ones in the initial response.

In announcing the formation of a council involving six other states along with Pennsylvania, the governors indicated the goal is to rely on data and science to develop a set of guidelines within weeks that determines when and how their economies can be reactivated.

Wolf further shared his broad outline for transitioning to the new normal in a statewide message that aired on Monday evening. It includes ensuring cases of the virus are diminishing to avoid overwhelming the states health care system. The next phase involves having testing available to determine who is sick and who is immune to the virus as businesses start to reopen.

The final stage, Wolf said, entails stockpiling supplies to ensure health care professionals are prepared to handle infectious diseases as "we rebuild our lives and our communities in ways that conform to the new altered normal.

But Republican lawmakers fear that waiting could lead to economic devastation for the commonwealth and many of its citizens so they are not only resting their hopes on Senate Bill 613 alone. They also have a Plan B in the works.

On Tuesday, they positioned more targeted business reopener bills for a House vote at a later date in the event Senate Bill 613 gets derailed in the Senate or is vetoed by the governor.

These bills, approved by the House State Government Committee with only majority Republican votes last week, would allow construction activity and small businesses to resume in a controlled or limited fashion during the emergency declaration.

Members from all corners of Pennsylvania are hearing from thousands of impacted workers and business owners who are watching their livelihoods fall apart during this shutdown, said House GOP spokesman Mike Straub. Our members will continue to pursue ways to address these challenges, and both of these bills are examples of more focused answers to segments of the economy especially impacted during this pandemic.

The one bill, sponsored by House Speaker Mike Turzai, R-Allegheny County, would allow public and private construction activity to resume provided companies adhere to the CDC and federal Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency guidelines.

The other bill, sponsored by Rep. Brad Roae, R-Crawford County, would allow retail businesses identified by the governor as not life sustaining to open. This bill requires those retailers who do open to allow only one customer and one employee in the store at a time.

In the state government committees debate over these bills, Republicans argued that Wolfs business closure order is perhaps the strictest in the nation and puts small businesses at a disadvantage to larger big-box stores that are allowed to be open. Democrats maintained they put profits ahead of saving lives.

Yet another bill specific to reopening auto sales won passage along party-lines in the state government committee on Monday. It would require the state Department of Community and Economic Development to grant a waiver to allow auto dealers to open. Auto sales were among the commerce activities that the governors business closure order halted although dealerships were allowed to sell parts and perform service.

This bill, sponsored by Rep. Natalie Mihalek, R-Allegheny County, would allow dealerships to open up provided they adhere to the social distancing practices and other Centers for Disease Controls COVID-19 mitigation measures.

During the committees discussion of this bill, Keefer said, We know we can do these transactions safely. They can do this from afar. They can do virtual transactions.

But Rep. Pam DeLissio, D-Philadelphia, said the bill as written would apply broadly to all car dealerships and not all of them have the same capacity to abide by the safety precautions that the legislation requires.

I would be concerned about the fact that if somebody wasnt doing this correctly they could be helping to spread this horrible virus and the fact that theres probably not a reasonable mechanism we can enforce to ensure that this happens safely, she said.

Committee Chairman Garth Everett, R-Lycoming County, said the same guidance the bill would require of auto dealers isnt provided to grocery stores and big-box stores that the governor has allowed to remain open.

When I drove by Walmarts parking lot and Lowes parking lot and Wegmans parking lot and I see it as full as it normally is , Im thinking what were asking here is a much safer process than some of the other things we are doing without enforcement mechanism either," Everett said.

Mihaleks bill now goes to the full House where it is in position to be subject to amendments on the House floor.

Jan Murphy may be reached at jmurphy@pennlive.com. Follow her on Twitter at @JanMurphy.

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"We are thrilled to have someone of Alex's caliber join us at Trailer Bridge," commented Mitch Luciano, CEO and President. "His military background paired with his proven experience in the corporate arena make him the ideal individual for the position. He's also just a great all-around guy who is certain to contribute to the amazing culture we have here at Trailer Bridge from day one." Vohr brings 30 years of impressive experience to his new role at Trailer Bridge, including leadership, strategic planning, operations, organizational development and management. He's managed business development from the ground up and has a wealth of varied and related experience from his service with the Marines. He holds advanced degrees and a BS from the United States Naval Academy.

In his new role with Trailer Bridge, Vohr will lead the company's government relations activities in North America and beyond as the company continues its expansion into new markets. Specifically, Vohr will oversee government affairs, support public policy work, and aid the company in federal procurement programs.

Trailer Bridge has also added 300 new ocean containers (53') and 297 chassis to its fleet, offering the highest interior height clearances, greatest cubic capacity and the largest maximum payload. With the addition of these assets, Trailer Bridge's fleet now consists of over 3,500 containers and more than 3,000 chassis which support its Caribbean ocean shipping line of business between The United States mainland and Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic and US Virgin Islands.

Luciano added, "As customer demand warrants the addition of these assets, we are also excited to continue to expand into markets to better geographically serve our customers' truckload and ocean shipping needs across all industries and sectors."

The addition of offices in Oregon and Colorado bring the company's locations now to 17 across the United States and Caribbean. The strong growth of Trailer Bridge, combined with the government inroads Vohr is making, will continue to chart a promising course for the company whose mission is to deliver an unparalleled level of customer service to raise the standards across the transportation and logistics industry. This level of service has earned Trailer Bridge multiple excellence awards. For more information, visit trailerbridge.com.

Trailer Bridge is a privately held asset-owned logistics company that transports cargo across land, air, rail and sea. Trailer Bridge has quickly become a leader in transportation services by striving to provide customers with the best possible service. This level of service earned Trailer Bridge the Quest for Quality Award as #1 Ocean Carrier, and recognition as Best Places to Work in Jacksonville and as a Fastest Growing Company. Trailer Bridge is headquartered in Jacksonville, FL, operates in 17 offices with over 200 employees around North America. For more information about Trailer Bridge, visit https://www.trailerbridge.com.

CONTACT: Ilona Fischer, 904-751-8661, [email protected]

SOURCE Trailer Bridge

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WHO warns of COVID-19 resurgence as countries ease restrictions

People's Daily Online

(Xinhua) 13:10, April 14, 2020

BEIJING, April 14 (Xinhua) -- The World Health Organization (WHO) has warned that lifting restrictions too soon could lead to a deadly resurgence of COVID-19 as some countries are easing their social and economic restrictions amid the outbreak.

On Monday, WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus told a virtual press conference from Geneva that a new strategy will be published to summarize what the world has already learned about the new virus.

"The decisions must be based first and foremost on protecting human health, and guided by what we know about the virus and how it behaves," he said.

The new strategy will include six criteria for countries which consider lifting restrictions:

First, transmission is controlled;

Second, health system capacities are in place to detect, test, isolate and treat every case and trace every contact;

Third, outbreak risks are minimized in special settings like health facilities and nursing homes;

Fourth, preventive measures are in place in workplaces, schools and other places where it's essential for people to go;

Fifth, importation risks can be managed;

And sixth, communities are fully educated, engaged and empowered to adjust to the "new norm."

"Every country should be implementing a comprehensive set of measures to slow down transmission and save lives, with the aim of reaching a steady state of low-level or no transmission," Tedros added.

On Friday, Tedros told a regular press briefing that a welcome slowing has been seen in some of the hardest-hit countries in Europe, like Spain, Italy, Germany and France.

As "some countries are already planning the transition out of stay-at-home restrictions," the WHO chief warned that "lifting restrictions too quickly could lead to a deadly resurgence."

"The way down can be as dangerous as the way up if not managed properly," he said, underlining that the WHO is working with affected countries on strategies for gradually and safely easing restrictions.

On Monday, workers from some non-essential sectors of the economy, mainly industry and construction, return to work in Spain, although experts warned of a possible new rise in coronavirus cases.

RESTRICTIONS EASED

Spain's temporary ban on all non-essential work was imposed for two weeks by Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez on March 30, two weeks after imposing a State of Alarm and the corresponding lockdown on most of the population on March 14, in an attempt to halt the spread of the coronavirus.

The spread of the infection has slowed in Spain over the last month from around 20 percent on a daily basis to approximately 3 percent now. But the country had 169,496 confirmed cases and registered 17,489 deaths as of Monday. There are fears that allowing some people back to work will lead to a new rise in caseload.

In reality, reopening the economy will only affect a small percentage of the workforce, given that all shops (except those selling necessary items) remain closed, along with bars, restaurants, hotels, schools and cultural venues.

Meanwhile, many people have been adapted to home working over the past month and the fact that thousands of companies have opted to use a temporary regulation of work to lay off workers for the duration of the crisis will severely limit the number of workers returning to their posts on Monday.

In such Spanish regions as Catalonia, around 300,000 people will go back to work, mainly in the industrial and construction sectors.

The central government has issued guidelines advising workers to maintain distances of at least two meters between each other. Police were on duty in Madrid and other towns and cities on Monday morning to hand out face masks to those traveling on public transport.

Spanish Interior Minister Fernando Grande-Marlaska said the day was "developing within the normality of the exceptional situation which we are currently in."

"If the safety of workers is affected, then their activity cannot restart," he said.

However, not everyone agrees with the decision to reopen the economy. Daniel Prieto-Alhambra, a professor of epidemiology at Oxford University told Spanish national radio network RNE that the measure poses a "risk of new infections."

Also on Monday, three U.S. West Coast states of California, Oregon and Washington, announced an agreement on a shared vision for reopening their economies and controlling COVID-19 into the future.

"We are announcing that California, Oregon and Washington have agreed to work together on a shared approach for reopening our economies -- one that identifies clear indicators for communities to restart public life and business," governors Gavin Newsom, Kate Brown, and Jay Inslee said in a joint statement.

The governors also pointed out that health outcomes and science, not politics, will guide their decisions.

"Through quick and decisive action, each of our states has made significant progress in flattening the curve and slowing the spread of COVID-19 among the broader public," according to the governors.

"COVID-19 doesn't follow state or national boundaries. It will take every level of government, working together, and a full picture of what's happening on the ground," said the governors.

There are more than 22,000, 1,500, and 10,000 confirmed cases of COVID-19 in California, Oregon and Washington respectively so far.

In Iran, President Hassan Rouhani said that the ban on inter-province travels placed to curb the spread of the novel coronavirus will be lifted on April 20, as Iran's daily infections decline, Financial Tribune daily reported on Monday.

During a meeting of the National Headquarters for Managing and Fighting the coronavirus, Rouhani said that restrictions on road trips across Iran's 31 provinces will be removed and low-risk businesses in the capital Tehran will resume activities later in April.

Following a decision by the Iranian authorities, all the low-risk business activities have reopened across the country except in Tehran since April 11.

The scheme allows some workplaces to reopen if they commit to complying with strict protocols of "a smart social distancing" introduced by the Health Ministry.

"The government is planning to make a decision on high-risk businesses" which requires mass gatherings, including gymnasiums, cinemas, beauty salons and stadiums as well, Rouhani added.

"High-risk businesses will resume work after careful analysis and planning," Rouhani was quoted as saying by Financial Tribune.

On Monday, Iraj Harirchi, Iranian Deputy Minister of Health and Medical Education, urged people to still remain at home and avoid any unnecessary trips, visits and shopping, despite the ease on social activities.

"Eighty percent of infected people have either little or no symptoms. These individuals can transmit the virus in society," Harirchi was quoted as saying by the state TV.

"Our efforts are aimed at identifying them in the early stages ... and to isolate those who have been in contact with such people," the official added.

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NASHVILLE, Tenn., April 15, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- FB Financial Corporation ("FB Financial" or "the Company") (NYSE:FBK) announced today that it will release its 2020 first quarter results of operations on Monday, April 27, 2020, after the close of the market. The Company will host a conference call at 8:00 a.m. CT on Tuesday, April 28, 2020 to discuss its first quarter results of operations, and the conference call will be broadcast live over the Internet at https://www.webcaster4.com/Webcast/Page/1631/33951. For investors or analysts who want to attend the call, the listen only dial-in number is 844-394-5144, confirmation code 6172106. For those unable to listen live, a 12 month online replay of the webcast will be available approximately an hour following the conclusion of the live broadcast. A link to these events can be found on the Company's website at investors.firstbankonline.com.

About FB Financial Corporation

FB Financial Corporation (NYSE: FBK) is bank holding company headquartered in Nashville, Tennessee. FB Financial operates through its wholly owned banking subsidiary, FirstBank, the third largest Tennessee-headquartered bank, with 73 full-service bank branches across Tennessee, North Alabama, North Georgia and Central Kentucky and mortgage offices across the Southeast. FirstBank serves five of the largest metropolitan markets in Tennessee and has approximately $6.4 billion in assets.

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Military medical staff are departing underused Navy hospital ships and field medical centers to relieve overburdened civilian doctors in New York City's hard-hit hospitals as the coronavirus crisis wears on.

"We're a fresh face, we've got the energy and enthusiasm," said Air Force Col. Jennifer Ratcliff, who has brought medical teams to Lincoln Hospital and Jacobi Medical Center in the Bronx.

The staff there "are tired and have been working very, very long days and weeks," said Ratcliff, commander of the 927th Aerospace Medical Squadron at MacDill Air Force Base in Florida.

The Navy's 1,000-bed hospital ship Comfort was sent to the city, arriving at Pier 90 in Manhattan on March 30, to take on the expected overflow of trauma patients from city hospitals as local doctors treated COVID-19 cases. But the patient flow has not materialized, Defense Secretary Mark Esper said at a Pentagon news conference Tuesday.

"The strategy has changed," he said. "We're moving off the Comfort our doctors, a portion of our doctors, and putting them into New York City hospitals to provide relief."

Related: Army Deploys Reserve Medical Specialists to Aid Overwhelmed City Hospitals

He did not give the number of doctors being reassigned from the Comfort, but said a total of 2,100 military physicians, nurses and medical aides are now in the city and will be augmented soon by additional medical teams coming from the Army.

Ratcliff said the military reinforcements have been well-received.

"You can walk around the hospital and just see that the attendings and the residents are really happy to have us," she added.

"We're onboarding hospitals pretty much since we arrived," Navy Capt. Joe Kochan said of the 1,100 volunteer doctors, nurses and medical aides from the reserves who deployed to the city last week.

"As it stands right now, we're really pushing out into the hospitals to support their needs," said Kochan, executive officer of the Operational Health Support Unit based at Portsmouth, Virginia.

When he announced the deployment of medical personnel into the city on April 5, Esper said about 300 would go to 11 city hospitals. It was unclear Tuesday whether that number had increased.

Kochan and Ratcliff joined Army Lt. Col. Leslie Curtis, chief nurse at the 9th Field Hospital out of Fort Hood, Texas, in a telephone conference from New York City to the Pentagon to stress the ongoing needs of the city despite the converted Javits Center and the Comfort being underused thus far.

In addition to the 1,100 medical personnel already deployed, the Army announced plans Monday to send more teams to the city.

Fifteen Urban Augmentation Medical Task Forces will be deployed nationwide to assist cities in the fight against coronavirus, and four of those task forces, each consisting of 85 personnel, will be sent to New York City, the Army said.

The military has sought to adjust its efforts in New York City to the shifting requests coming from city and state authorities.

The original intent was to have the Comfort and a field medical facility at the Javits Convention Center treat non-COVID-19 patients to ease some of the burden on overcrowded local hospitals. But the demand to treat non-COVID patients did not emerge in a city on lockdown.

The city then asked that the Comfort and the Javits Center be used only for COVID-19 patients, and the military agreed, but bureaucratic and logistical problems hindered the transfer of patients.

COVID-19 patients first had to be taken to local hospitals to be screened, but the agreement now is to have ambulances take patients directly to the Javits Center or the Comfort.

As of Monday, about 320 patients were at the 1,500-bed capacity Javits Center. The last report Friday from the Pentagon on the Comfort said that there were more than 50 patients aboard the 1,000-bed ship.

Curtis, who has been working at the Javits Center, acknowledged the delays in bringing in patients. "First, we had to determine what the needs were," she said. Then, the focus turned to "streamlining the bureaucracy, which everyone wants to do at every level."

"Every day, we're finding more ways," she said. "I think this is moving in the right direction.

"We do want to do this. We have the ability to scale up to whatever the demands are, based on the needs of the city or any particular mission that is required," Curtis added.

There has been speculation that the Comfort might be pulled out of New York City and sent elsewhere, but Ratcliff said she had seen no signs that the military's efforts in the city would slacken.

"The city, I believe, still needs our assets," she said. "I don't think there's talk of scaling that back but, again, we'll do whatever the government of New York needs."

New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo on Tuesday described a city still in need of support despite continuing signs that new coronavirus cases had hit a plateau.

"We're reducing the rate of infection," he said. But another 778 deaths from coronavirus were recorded in the city Monday.

"That is terrible, terrible, terrible news," he said.

-- Richard Sisk can be reached at Richard.Sisk@Military.com.

Read more: SecDef Announces Plans to Extend Force-Wide Travel Restrictions
Another 778 patients with coronavirus have died in hospitals across the UK, taking the nationwide total to 12,107.

The number of tests for COVID-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus, has also risen by 14,982 to 382,650, although this figure includes some patients being tested more than once.

According to the Department of Health, 93,873 people have now tested positive in the UK.

Once again, figures were also provided by health authorities in each of the home nations, which collate their stats at different times throughout the day and so may not tally up to the government's overall total.

NHS England announced another 744 coronavirus patients had died in hospitals in England, taking the total in the country to 11,005.

Those latest fatalities were aged between 34 and 102 - and 58 of those (aged between 38 and 96) had no known underlying health conditions.

London recorded the most new deaths with 206, followed by the North West with 143 and the Midlands with 109.

There were 95 in East England, 93 in the North East & Yorkshire, 73 in the South East and 25 in the South West.

Earlier, First Minister Nicola Sturgeon announced that there had been another 40 deaths in hospitals in Scotland.

Public Health Wales confirmed another 19 deaths, while Northern Ireland announced another 10.

According to the regional statistics, the number of deaths of COVID-19 hospital patients stands at:

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However, the latest figures from the Office for National Statistics released earlier on Tuesday suggested the UK's true coronavirus death toll is far higher than the government's tally.

The numbers showed that 10% of coronavirus-related fatalities in the week ending 3 April did not happen in hospital, with more than half of those happening in care homes.

It came after news at Monday's government coronavirus briefing that 92 care homes had reported outbreaks of the disease in the 24 hours before the conference.

Story continues

England's chief medical officer Professor Chris Whitty said 13.5% of care homes have been affected by the virus, admitting that he would like to see testing increased at care homes.

According to data from some European countries, about half of COVID-19 deaths are happening in care homes.

With the death toll continuing to climb, the UK lockdown is set to be officially extended when the unprecedented measures are formally reviewed on Thursday.

Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab, who is deputising for the prime minister as he recovers from COVID-19, said social distancing was having an impact but that the UK had still not reached the peak of the outbreak.

Speaking at the same Downing Street news briefing on Monday evening, chief scientific adviser Sir Patrick Vallance predicted that this would be a "difficult week" for the UK in terms of deaths.

He said once the UK reaches the peak of its outbreak, the number of cases and deaths will plateau for a few weeks before starting to head downwards.
Everything seemed distant till February,' and one assumed that the coronavirus was not going to spread, but in March things got ugly in Italy, says an Indian student recounting the days before lockdown in Europe

Editor's Note: Thousands of Indians are stranded in foreign lands across the world, some by choice, others due to geopolitical, financial and academic constraints. In this multi-part series, Firstpost takes a look at how they are managing through the lockdown due to the coronavirus pandemic

***

Suhail Rashid Bhat (26), a Kashmiri student pursuing LLM at the SOAS University in London, chose to stay back in the United Kingdom as being there would allow him access to faster internet connection.

His hometown Sri Nagar in the Union Territory of Jammu and Kashmir has been managing the coronavirus pandemic with a 2G internet connection.

We ask Bhat how is he managing the ongoing lockdown due to COVID-19 away from home.

I am used to lockdowns and that helps in a different way," he says.

"It is sad but it comes in handy. I have been raised as a child of conflict. I am a person of privilege even though I earned that privilege in tough times. So, I have learned a lot of coping mechanisms to take care of myself," he adds.

COVID-19 has reached the stage of community transmission (where one is unable to locate the source of the infection and the vectors do not have a history of travel to infected nations) in several countries with varied degrees of lockdown as a response.

Though some nations are still not in favour of suddenly halting everything, and don't believe that the lockdown is going to help the fight against the coronavirus in the long run, there are countries like the UK, Italy, France and Spain where nationwide lockdowns have been ordered. How effective have imposing restrictions been in such places, and were the measures leading up to the lockdown laid out smoothly?

The desire to be surrounded by the familiar during a crisis is commonplace. However, making the decision of coming back to India has not been without complexities for many Indians. While some decided to not travel back to India fearing exposing their family to the virus, especially, their old parents, others could not come back to India because of geopolitical, financial and academic constraints.

Indian writer Janice Pariat was stranded in Rome in March because of immediate travel restrictions put in place by the Indian embassy. People were not allowed to fly to India from Italy and South Korea unless they had a health certificate in their name stating that they were COVID-19 negative.

The situation was tricky because the Italian healthcare system was already overwhelmed to fulfil this need, and the Indian embassy did not relay assuring details about when the stranded people could travel out of Italy.

Pariat could finally reach Delhi by taking a flight from Rome to Berlin to Helsinki and then finally to Delhi.

For 28-year-old Visvak, an MA student at SOAS University in London, however, the decision was guided by whether or not his scholarship would remain available if he left London.

I decided to stay back in London because I live in a dorm, which I have to pay for the whole year even if I leave. And there was some uncertainty about whether my (Chevening) scholarship, which I rely on to pay the rent, would continue to fund me if I left London," he says.

Visvak informs that other students who dont have scholarships are in an even worse position in the UK.

"Some rely on part-time jobs to cover rent, which dont exist anymore, and some who have already left, still owe rent. We are currently engaging in a rent strike arguing that our situation must be considered under exceptional circumstances. The Students Union is attempting to negotiate with the accommodation providers but they are not listening at the moment, he adds.

Twenty-five-year-old Jo, who is based in London and pursuing PhD at SOAS, shared that many students in the UK do not have a steady income.

Students need a UK-based guarantor who signs contract with the landlord stating that he/she will pay the rent in case we, the students, fail to pay it. But my landlord has been very understanding and understands that the guarantor might not be able to provide pay slips as proof for guarantor checks.

Thinking about going back home, Ramya Maddali, 27, an English language assistant in Orleans, France, had concerns about contracting the virus at the airport.

"I wasnt planning on coming back because I had no intention of spending nearly Rs 30,000 on a flight ticket when I had already bought one for mid-May. Moreover, I read horror stories about less than sanitary quarantine conditions at the Delhi airport (where I would land) and we (my Indian friends and I) decided collectively that we were better off waiting it out in France. Moreover, the French government has been thoughtful enough to extending our visas for three months at no extra cost.

Maddali is also worried about one of her friends (a non-French resident), who is living as a guest with a French family.

They are putting pressure on her to leave even though the borders to her country of origin are closed," she informs.

With the lockdown in place, it would be difficult to move or shift to another place.

Following the lockdown, most stores in major towns and cities faced an abrupt increase in demand of essentials like eggs, milk and meat. People horded toilet papers and hand sanitisers. Amidst an ongoing lockdown and while practising self-isolation, coping with panic-buying and limited supplies have been a challenge.

Supermarkets were not able to keep up with the demand when the restrictions were initially announced and shelves were empty for a while," says Visvak.

"But that issue has largely been resolved now. I have also been lucky because some of my flatmates left behind some essentials before leaving for home that I could use, he adds.

Maddali said that since she lives with a group of friends in a hostel. They prepare a weekly or bi-weekly list and one person from the group gets the groceries for the rest on an alternate basis.

Himanshi Nagpal (25) who lives in Gottingen, Germany, said that the stores around her are well-stocked.

I live in a small town so the stores here are well-stocked even though there was a shortage of food and toilet paper in between. Public transport is going on but there is not much crowd, she informs.

Nagpal is a Masters student in Modern Indian Studies at the University of Gottingen.

COVID-19 did not announce its arrival before hitting the world hard and the nonchalance of some world leaders did not help curbing its spread. This unpreparedness translated into people struggling with the seriousness of the extent of this disease.

Kaushika (23), a student of Sciences Po, a research institute in Paris, France, said that everything seemed distant till February" and one assumed that the disease was not going to spread, but in March things got ugly in Italy.

"Then the semester classes were shifted online. People in France started getting infected. Even after the online courses started, we did not realise how serious and bad it was going to get. Then the prime minister said there will be a lockdown  on 17 March  and within a few days, the numbers started rising like they were rising in Italy. Doctors are now working to the point of exhaustion. I saw a video of military trucks being used to carry the bodies of the dead because no other vehicles had the capacity. We have realised the lockdown is a better precaution, she says.

Abhijit Banare (27), an MPhil student of Public Policy at University of Cambridge shared that if the local police found a congregation of more than two people, they would be fined.

Earlier the government was not clear on the employment front, so people tend to leave for work. But a few days ago, the government released a statement strictly urging people to work from home unless it was impossible for them to do so. Public transport has been running on reduced service. National Express, the main bus service across the UK has been indefinitely suspended, says Banare.

Samanvay (27), a PhD student in Paris said that France is under strict lockdown, and people are permitted to leave their houses only for essential jobs, supplies, medical reasons, essential legal/administrative reasons and physical exercise in a one-kilometre radius.

"People are generally following the rules quite strictly as the fine for leaving the house without good reason and without carrying a signed piece of paper, printed or handwritten, is high  from 135 up to 375. More than three violations in the space of 30 days are subject to six months imprisonment or community service and fine. This is all quite strongly enforced at least in the big cities which are the pockets of high population density."

Samanvay says that about 100,000 police and gendarmes have been mobilised for this across the country. He also informs that horror stories from across the border in Italy are widely shared and read, and has "certainly influenced the public's understanding of the crisis".
Japans global public relations budget has risen sharply since Abe took over as prime minister in 2012, in an attempt to bolster Japans reputation as a reliable ally of the United States and as a democratic leader in Asia to counter authoritarian China. But money is also spent on attempts to whitewash Japans wartime past, critics say.
A new decree took effect in Vietnam on Wednesday introducing fines for the dissemination of fake news or rumours on social media, amid the rapid spread of comment online about the novel coronavirus in the Southeast Asian country.

The first Covid-19 cases were detected in Vietnam this January and the health ministry has reported 267 infections so far with no deaths, numbers well below those seen in some other Asian countries.

Local authorities have already fined hundreds of people for posting what they described as fake news about the virus, using the term popularised by US President Donald Trump, based on existing legal provisions. But the new decree, drafted in February, supersedes one from 2013 which does not specifically cover fake news, new guidelines say.

A fine of 10-20 million dong ($426-$853), equivalent to around three to six months basic salary in Vietnam, will be imposed on people who use social media to share false, untruthful, distorted, or slanderous information, according to the decree.

The new rules were not specifically drafted to deal with coronavirus social media comment and extend far beyond that topic, raising concern among human rights groups already heightened by a cybersecurity law that has been in effect since last year.

A woman in the northern-central province of Ha Tinh was fined for a Facebook post within which she incorrectly said the coronavirus had spread to her local community (Getty)

Penalties can now be imposed on anyone sharing publications that are banned from circulation in Vietnam, state secrets, or maps which fail to show Vietnams claims in the South China Sea, according to the decree.

This decree provides yet another potent weapon in the Vietnamese authorities arsenal of online repression, said Tanya OCarroll, Director of Tech at Amnesty International.

It contains a raft of provisions that blatantly violate Vietnams international human rights obligations.

As part of the crackdown on misinformation on the coronavirus, authorities have launched a public poster campaign bearing the slogan Fake news, real consequences.

Hundreds of fines have already been handed out, while three celebrities were also forced by authorities to offer public apologies.

Last month, a woman in the northern-central province of Ha Tinh was fined for a Facebook post within which she incorrectly said the coronavirus had spread to her local community. The post had just a handful of likes before police took action.

Reuters
CHICAGO, April 15, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Illinois (BCBSIL) has launched a multi-pronged community response effort to help first-responders, non-profit organizations and residents across Illinois impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic, including a new rapid response funding program.

"This crisis is bigger than just a public health emergency, and it is reaching into the homes and lives of countless people in Illinois, even those fortunate enough to remain healthy," said Steve Hamman, president of Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Illinois. "We're continuing to ensure our members are informed about COVID-19 and have access to the care and coverage they need while also broadening our efforts to help make a difference in the lives of others, including those fighting on the front lines to keep our local communities safe."

BCBSIL today opened a $1.5M funding program to support community-based organizations with missions focused on access to health care, hunger and shelter. The BCBSIL COVID-19 Community Collaboration Fund will release $20,000 grants to organizations around the state. The program is designed to distribute the funds quickly to respond to the current health crisis.

April 15, 2020  Application opens

Application opens April 24, 2020  Application closes

Application closes Week of May 4, 2020  Applicants notified of funding decisions

BCBSIL is also supporting non-profit organizations that serve our most vulnerable neighbors through a $1 million donation to Governor J.B. Pritzker's Illinois COVID-19 Response Fund and $500,000 to the Chicago Community COVID-19 Response Fund.

"The response to the COVID-19 health crisis has demonstrated the strength of our community as individuals and organizations across the Chicago region have come together for our neighbors in this time of need," said Sean Garrett, president and CEO of United Way of Metro Chicago. "We're thankful to work with key partners like Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Illinois, the Chicago Community Trust, and the City of Chicago who are committed to getting Chicagoans access to the resources they need most daily."

In direct support of health care workers, Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Illinois on April 8 purchased and donated 150,000 KN95 masks, to meet the urgent need for personal protective equipment (PPE). The masks were donated to the Illinois Emergency Management Agency (IEMA) for distribution to providers most in need. To make the donation happen, BCBSIL collaborated across multiple industries - Optimal Design sourced the masks and Teamsters Joint Council 25 handled transportation. The donation was coordinated with the state's Essential Equipment Task Force.

"Illinois companies are rising to the challenge and helping our state address this global pandemic. This fantastic partnership between Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Illinois, Optimal Design Company, and Teamsters Local #25 is providing life-saving medical equipment for our doctors, nurses, and first responders across Illinois," said Mark Denzler, president & CEO of the Illinois Manufacturers' Association and co-chair of the Governor's Essential Equipment Task Force. "This amazing donation shows that the American spirit is alive and well. It's heartening to see Illinoisans standing up to help address this challenge."

Other ways BCBSIL is helping to make a difference:

April 6-April 12 , we lit our Chicago headquarters building at 300 E. Randolph with the message #ALL IN ILLINOIS , in support of Governor Pritzker's statewide effort to reinforce the message: stay at home and stay safe. The building lighting is an important way for us to help spread awareness of how we can all help fight against the COVID-19 pandemic.

, we lit our headquarters building at 300 E. Randolph with the message #ALL IN , in support of Governor Pritzker's statewide effort to reinforce the message: stay at home and stay safe. The building lighting is an important way for us to help spread awareness of how we can all help fight against the COVID-19 pandemic. Since March 9 , one of the vehicles in the BCBSIL Care Van program has been provided to the Chicago Department of Public Health (CDPH) for use at a mobile testing site.

, one of the vehicles in the BCBSIL Care Van program has been provided to the Chicago Department of Public Health (CDPH) for use at a mobile testing site. Our "Blue Corps" employee volunteer force is now taking advantage of virtual volunteering to continue doing good while staying safe. Last year, our employees spent nearly 89,000 hours of time in service to others.

To learn more about how we are responding to the COVID-19 pandemic for our members, including expanding access in areas such as testing, treatment, pharmacy and telehealth related to COVID-19, please visit https://www.bcbsil.com/covid-19.html .

About Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Illinois

Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Illinois (BCBSIL) is committed to expanding access to quality, cost-effective health care to as many people as possible in Illinois. BCBSIL is dedicated to innovation and exploring, nurturing and activating future possibilities to make the health care system work better for our members and our communities.

SOURCE Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Illinois
CHISINAU (UrduPoint News / Sputnik - 15th April, 2020) Four more patients infected with the novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19) died in Moldova on Tuesday, the death toll rose to 40, the republic's Health Ministry said.

"The total number of deaths due to COVID-19 in Moldova has reached 40," the ministry said on its Facebook page.

Earlier, the Moldovan authorities reported 1,799 registered cases of the new coronavirus. The parliament on March 17 imposed a state of emergency for 60 days. The republic suspended flights with all countries, and land borders were also closed. Mass cultural and religious events are forbidden, classes at educational institutions are canceled, shops and public catering establishments are closed.

The World Health Organization (WHO) on March 11 declared the outbreak of the new coronavirus a pandemic. According to the latest WHO data, more than 1,844,000 cases of COVID-19 have been registered in the world, and over 117,000 people have died from the disease.

According to Johns Hopkins University's latest data, the number of confirmed cases worldwide amounts to 1,970,879, with 125,678 deaths and 472,948 recoveries.
Source: Xinhua| 2020-04-15 09:03:29|Editor: huaxia

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BEIJING, April 15 (Xinhua) -- The world is now in a battle against COVID-19, a disease caused by a previously unknown coronavirus that has spread to over 200 countries and regions.

The following are the updates on the contagious disease.

- - - -

NEW YORK -- The number of COVID-19 cases in the United States topped 600,000 Tuesday evening, according to the Center for Systems Science and Engineering (CSSE) at Johns Hopkins University.

The country has seen 602,989 cases with 25,575 deaths by 6:50 p.m. (2250 GMT), according to the CSSE.

- - - -

WASHINGTON -- U.S. President Donald Trump announced on Tuesday that his administration is halting the nation's funding to the World Health Organization (WHO), a move experts have warned against, as COVID-19 continues to take a toll globally.

Speaking to reporters at the White House, Trump also said a review is being conducted to assess the WHO's role in addressing the spread of the coronavirus.

- - - -

ROME -- The COVID-19 has claimed another 602 lives in locked-down Italy over the past 24 hours, bringing the total number of infections, fatalities and recoveries to 162,488 since the pandemic began here in late February, the country's Civil Protection Department said Tuesday.

Speaking during a nightly televised press conference, Civil Protection Department Chief Angelo Borrelli confirmed that there were 675 new active coronavirus infections compared to Monday, bringing the nationwide total to 104,291 cases.

- - - -

LISBON -- Portuguese Prime Minister Antonio Costa reiterated on Tuesday that almost all measures of containment and social isolation will be maintained beyond April 17, amid mounting pressure of conditionally reactivating the national economy.

In an interview with the Radio Observador, the prime minister said the country will continue to restrict the movement of people and economic activities during the state of emergency, which is widely believed to be renewed until the beginning of May, adding that the right to strikes will be one of the few exceptions.

- - - -

LILONGWE -- The Malawi government has declared a 21-day lockdown throughout the country starting from the midnight of April 18 through the midnight of May 9 in an effort to stop the spread of COVID-19.

Minister of Health and Population Services Jappie Mhango, also chairperson of the Special Cabinet Committee on COVID-19, made the announcement Tuesday evening in a televised statement in the presence of President Peter Mutharika.

- - - -

GENEVA -- There had been 189 confirmed cases and three deaths of COVID-19 among the United Nations staff, a senior UN official said here on Tuesday.

Alessandra Vellucci, head of the United Nations Information Service in Geneva, told a press briefing here Tuesday that as of the previous week, there had been 10 confirmed cases among the staff of the United Nations secretariat in Geneva, and new figures were expected to be available soon.
JEFFERSON CITY  Missouri lawmakers will return to the capital city on April 27, House and Senate Republican leaders said Wednesday in a joint news release.

The Legislature, besides returning briefly last week to approve a $6 billion emergency spending package, has not met to debate legislation since mid-March, as concerns over the novel coronavirus intensified.

Lawmakers face a May 8 constitutional deadline to approve the states budget for the fiscal year that begins July 1.

It was not clear from the Wednesday statement whether lawmakers would take up anything besides the spending plan when they return.

House Speaker Elijah Haahr, House Majority Leader Rob Vescovo, Senate President Pro Tem Dave Schatz and Senate Majority Leader Caleb Rowden in a joint statement acknowledged the Legislatures constitutional obligation to approve a budget by May 8.
Ellison said in the video posted Monday he believes Zoom will continue to be an important to businesses once workers return to the office.

Zoom has seen enormous growth as more and more workers have been instructed to stay at home during the coronavirus pandemic. Zoom said its daily users spiked to 200 million in March compared with 10 million in December. The service's growth has been credited in part to its availability across many different platforms and it's free use for calls up to 40 minutes.

"We're looking forward to the economy being reopened, we're looking forward to going back to work, but the way we work will never again be the same," Ellison said. "We will now meet not just face-to-face, we'll meet sometimes face-to-face and sometimes digitally via Zoom."

Along with is growth in users, Zoom has seen concerns spike about how it is protecting users' privacy. The Senate advised members not to use the service, according to Ars Technica and the New York City Department of Education banned its use for remote learning. A group of state attorneys general are probing the company after one of the officials was "zoombombed" on a forum about the Census, meaning the chat box was filled with profanities.

Ellison's support could prove useful to Zoom as it wades through the new challenges of becoming a consumer tech company. Ellison is an influential billionaire with ties to the Trump administration. He has supported Trump's campaign and even told the President about an anti-malaria drug Trump ended up touting as a possible treatment for the coronavirus, according to The New York Times. Oracle CEO Safra Catz served on Trump's transition team in 2016.

Subscribe to CNBC on YouTube.

WATCH: How Zoom rose to the top during social distancing
Keralas decision to set a 28-day incubation period for the virus although the World Health Organisation (WHO) had suggested a 14-day term, has paid off after the virus started showing a longer incubation period, say health experts.

Initially many questioned this but the states health department maintained that extension was meant to make it doubly sure that asymptomatic person or concerned patient is disinfected completely. Some of the recent instances show the state was right - at least seven cases have come to light that show patients had contracted the virus 18 to 26 days after exposure.

Follow coronavirus latest updates here.

A person who had returned to Kannur from Dubai had tested positive after 26 days of his arrival. In Pathanamthitta, a student who travelled in a compartment in which some Tabligi Jammat members were also present, tested positive after 22 days of her trip. Under observation she remained asymptomatic throughout but turned positive when her observation period was about to end.

The unusual behaviour of the virus has left the overworked health workers worried as they are running against time to flatten the curve. On Tuesday, eight people tested positive but the number of discharged was 13.

One more person tested positive on Wednesday to take the total number of patients to 387 in the state out of which 211 have been discharged, 173 are undergoing treatment and three have died.

When first few cases were reported in the state we sought the advice of the experts and they said it was always safe to keep an extended incubation period. So we took a decision on 28 days. Even those discharged were also told to comply with 14-day quarantine in their homes. We dont want to take any chance, said State health minister K K Shailaja.

Experts say in 90 per cent cases incubation period may be right but in 10 per cent there are chances of aberrations. Since most of them are under observation they also rule out chances of local transmission.

It is a new virus and its behaviour is yet to be ascertained fully. So we need more tests. People who are under observation will have to be checked. Since there is no vaccine, isolation and testing are the best ways to check its spread, said Dr B Ramankutty, a public health expert.

People who came from abroad and other states were advised to go on home quarantine and were told that if they show symptoms during this period they would be tested and transferred to hospital in case the test turned positive. In Pathanamitta girls case she turned asymptomatic even after she tested positive on April 6, said district medical officer Dr N Sheeja.

We cant give a definite incubation period to a new virus like this. In Wuhan also some cases cropped up after 32 days of isolation. So we have to be careful. We are really lagging in tests. Our current testing rate is 19 per million population. Norway tops the list with a rate of 14,537 tests per million followed by South Korea at 7,353 and the US 1,647, said another medical

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Before the coronavirus pandemic, Irene Priestley, 91, would take a short bus ride to the nearest Santander branch and withdraw all the cash she needed for a month.

But now, confined to her home and without internet access, she is running out of money.

Santander, like all other UK banks, has this week outlined how vulnerable customers like Irene can get hold of cash with the help of trusted family and friends. Some will even deliver cash to your doorstep.

Some bank branches are still open during lockdown, albeit with shorter hours, but customers are asked to go in only if absolutely necessary

However, Santander and other banks have been swamped by a record number of customer phone calls. Irene's concerned son Geoffrey, 66, says he has been unable to get help from Santander as all lines are busy.

Irene, whose name we have changed, has a cash-only account and no debit card. Neighbours in her Yorkshire village have been delivering food and vital supplies, but she has no way of refunding them.

She was a customer with Bradford & Bingley Building Society for 40 years until Spanish bank Santander bought its branch network in 2008. Her nearest branch is two miles away, but it has been closed for a month. And without a debit card or the internet, she cannot get any cash.

Son Geoffrey says: 'She has always dealt in cash and did not have a problem until the Government told us to stay in. There must be others. Not everyone goes online and has a smartphone. Why should they?'

Former pensions minister Baroness (Ros) Altmann says it is very difficult to access cash in the lockdown: 'The reality for many, especially in remoter parts, is that they are used to paying for vital supplies, services or help in cash. Many of these individuals need to know how they can get cash or otherwise pay what they owe.'

'Digital payments don't yet work for everyone', Access to Cash Review chair Natalie Ceeney said

Natalie Ceeney, chairman of the Access to Cash Review, also warned the pandemic had 'significantly quickened' the UK's cashless trend.

She says: 'Digital payments don't yet work for everyone, and until they do, we are not ready to go cashless.'

Some bank branches are still open, but customers are asked to go in only if absolutely necessary.

Banking body UK Finance has put guidance online about managing money in the lockdown. It says most major banks have dedicated phone lines for vulnerable customers.

Chief executive Stephen Jones has warned anyone wanting to let someone else make withdrawals for them to be aware of fraud and coercion.

Santander says customers should use cheque and bank transfers where possible, and never hand over their Pin or card.

It says customers can call its coronavirus line if they need cash urgently. They can also ask someone to pick up cash for them at a post office.

UK banks have this week outlined how vulnerable customers can get hold of cash. Some will even deliver it to your doorstep

Banking group Lloyds allows customers to give another person access to their account. It says it will carry out strict security checks and cap withdrawals at 100.

Barclays is offering to deliver cash free of charge to vulnerable customers. Temporary third-party access to their account can also be arranged.

Royal Bank of Scotland and NatWest customers can get up to 500 delivered. The group is also giving codes over the phone that customers can give to someone to withdraw cash within hours.

HSBC customers can nominate another person to help manage their money. TSB has a similar scheme and has also sent ATM cards to all those who had just passbooks before.

Building society Nationwide says those needing cash could transfer some to a trusted individual who could then withdraw it and hand it to them.

The Post Office this week launched two schemes that allow people to access cash for vulnerable people.

The Payout Now service sends vouchers by text, email or post, which customers give to a trusted individual to withdraw cash.

Fast Pace allows a nominated person to cash a cheque on their behalf at a post office in one to two days. All UK banks, building societies and credit unions can use the service, but just HSBC has signed up so far.

See the UK Finance guide at ukfinance.org.uk/covid-19-making- payments-safely-lockdown

b.wilkinson@dailymail.co.uk
In connection with the epidemic of the coronavirus Covid-19, another 10 border checkpoints will be closed in Ukraine. Denys Shmygal, Ukraine's Prime Minister, reported that during government session, which was broadcast by the 112 Ukraine TV channel.

According to the prime minister, at these checkpoints, the flow of Ukrainian citizens reduced to the uttermost.

"In fact, we close another ten border crossing checkpoint in order to minimize traffic. There, as far as we know, the flow of our citizens has already been reduced to the uttermost, thus these border crossing checkpoints may be closed to enhance security for a period of lockdown," Shmygal said.

According to the Minister of Internal Affairs of Ukraine Arsen Avakov, these checkpoints are located on the borders with Moldova, Poland and Romania.

As we reported earlier,

However, the border guards note a significant increase in the number of Ukrainians returning from abroad through the Tysa checkpoint in Zakarpathia. The same situational number of citizens is awaiting in front of the Hungarian Zakhon border crossing point.

To speed up control operations at the Tysa checkpoint, twice as many personnel were hired and additional lanes were equipped.

Besides, every few hours, meetings are held with Hungarian colleagues at which issues regarding the procedure for launching and registering citizens are decided.

The Tysa checkpoint is the only checkpoint with Hungary, which now operates in Ukraine.
NEW YORK, April 14, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- The Global Tire Material Market is expected to grow from USD 58,125.13 Million in 2018 to USD 86,125.13 Million by the end of 2025 at a Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 5.77%.







Read the full report: https://www.reportlinker.com/p05871680/?utm_source=PRN







The positioning of the Global Tire Material Market vendors in FPNV Positioning Matrix are determined by Business Strategy (Business Growth, Industry Coverage, Financial Viability, and Channel Support) and Product Satisfaction (Value for Money, Ease of Use, Product Features, and Customer Support) and placed into four quadrants (F: Forefront, P: Pathfinders, N: Niche, and V: Vital).



The report deeply explores the recent significant developments by the leading vendors and innovation profiles in the Global Tire Material Market including are Chevron Corporation, Goodyear Tire & Rubber Company, KURARAY CO., LTD., PetroChina Company Limited, Sinopec Corp, Exxon Mobil Corporation, JSR Corporation, Phillips 66 Company, Royal Dutch Shell, and Umicore N.V...



On the basis of Type, the Global Tire Material Market is studied across Chemicals, Elastomers, Metal Reinforcements, Plasticizers, Reinforcing Fillers, and Textile Reinforcements.



On the basis of Vehicle Type, the Global Tire Material Market is studied across Buses, Heavy Trucks, Lightweight Commercial Vehicles (LCV), and Passenger Cars.



For the detailed coverage of the study, the market has been geographically divided into the Americas, Asia-Pacific, and Europe, Middle East & Africa. The report provides details of qualitative and quantitative insights about the major countries in the region and taps the major regional developments in detail.



In the report, we have covered two proprietary models, the FPNV Positioning Matrix and Competitive Strategic Window. The FPNV Positioning Matrix analyses the competitive market place for the players in terms of product satisfaction and business strategy they adopt to sustain in the market. The Competitive Strategic Window analyses the competitive landscape in terms of markets, applications, and geographies. The Competitive Strategic Window helps the vendor define an alignment or fit between their capabilities and opportunities for future growth prospects. During a forecast period, it defines the optimal or favorable fit for the vendors to adopt successive merger and acquisitions strategies, geography expansion, research & development, new product introduction strategies to execute further business expansion and growth.



Research Methodology:

Our market forecasting is based on a market model derived from market connectivity, dynamics, and identified influential factors around which assumptions about the market are made. These assumptions are enlightened by fact-bases, put by primary and secondary research instruments, regressive analysis and an extensive connect with industry people. Market forecasting derived from in-depth understanding attained from future market spending patterns provides quantified insight to support your decision-making process. The interview is recorded, and the information gathered in put on the drawing board with the information collected through secondary research.



The report provides insights on the following pointers:

1. Market Penetration: Provides comprehensive information on sulfuric acid offered by the key players in the Global Tire Material Market

2. Product Development & Innovation: Provides intelligent insights on future technologies, R&D activities, and new product developments in the Global Tire Material Market

3. Market Development: Provides in-depth information about lucrative emerging markets and analyzes the markets for the Global Tire Material Market

4. Market Diversification: Provides detailed information about new products launches, untapped geographies, recent developments, and investments in the Global Tire Material Market

5. Competitive Assessment & Intelligence: Provides an exhaustive assessment of market shares, strategies, products, and manufacturing capabilities of the leading players in the Global Tire Material Market



The report answers questions such as:

1. What is the market size of Tire Material market in the Global?

2. What are the factors that affect the growth in the Global Tire Material Market over the forecast period?

3. What is the competitive position in the Global Tire Material Market?

4. Which are the best product areas to be invested in over the forecast period in the Global Tire Material Market?

5. What are the opportunities in the Global Tire Material Market?

6. What are the modes of entering the Global Tire Material Market?



Read the full report: https://www.reportlinker.com/p05871680/?utm_source=PRN



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A $3.6 million award from the US Department of Energy is part of $128 million dedicated to new projects that advance solar technologies.

Distinguished Professor Alan Mantooth of the University of Arkansas received a $3.6 million award from the U.S. Department of Energy Solar Energy Technologies Office to advance technologies that integrate solar power systems to the national power grid.

Mantooth and engineering researchers at the university's National Center for Reliable Electric Power Transmission will lead a large, multi-institutional research group that will develop systems to protect solar technologies from cyberattack.

"As U.S. energy policy shifts toward more diverse sources, particularly solar, the Energy Deparment understands the critical importance of protecting these systems and technologies," said Alan Mantooth, Distinguished Professor of electrical engineering and principal investigator for the project. "Our group is nicely qualified to address these problems. We're already developing systems to protect the power grid from cyberattack, and this work will be a logical extension of that effort."

Mantooth will lead a team of researchers from the University of Georgia, University of Illinois at Chicago, Texas A&M University-Kingsville, the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, Argonne National Laboratory and General Electric. Two Arkansas companies, Ozarks Electric Cooperative and Today's Power, will also contribute to the project.

The research will focus on developing cybersecurity systems for photovoltaic energy technology and devices, especially solar PV inverters, the power electronic devices that link solar power arrays to the grid. Researchers will address issues such as supply-chain security, real-time intrusion detection methods, identifying and mitigating vulnerable spots, control system security and safety protocols.

Their project, "Multilevel Cybersecurity for Photovoltaic Systems," is a part of the Solar Energy Technologies Office Fiscal Year 2019 funding program, an effort to invest in new projects that will lower solar electricity costs, while working to boost solar manufacturing, reduce red tape and make solar systems more resilient to cyberattack. It will help improve the ability of grid operators to integrate increasing amounts of solar generation onto the grid in a cost-effective, secure, resilient and reliable manner.

Mantooth is the executive director of the National Center for Reliable Electric Power Transmission, the highest powered power-electronics test facility at any U.S. university. He is also executive director of the Cybersecurity Center for Secure Evolvable Energy Delivery Systems, a consortium of university and industry partners focused on protecting the U.S. power grid from cyberattacks. The Cybersecurity Center is funded by the Department of Energy and Department of Homeland Security. Its researchers have developed numerous detection and mitigation algorithms for the electric grid sector, as well as power electronics-based methods, including control boards and power routers along with software modules that control these systems.

Jia Di, professor of Computer Science and Computer Engineering; Qinghua Li, associate professor of computer science and computer engineering; Chris Farnell, NCREPT managing director and test engineer; and several students will contribute to this project.

Mantooth is an Arkansas Research Alliance fellow and holds the Twenty-First Century Research Leadership Chair in the College of Engineering.

###
Coronavirus Outbreak: Divyanka Tripathi's husband Vivek Dahiya through his Instagram post urges people to spread positivity in the time of coronavirus. Check the post here.

Coronavirus Outbreak: Bollywood and TV celebs are playing an active role in creating awareness related to deadly COVID-19. Through video and social media posts, the actors are urging people to stay indoors and do their bit as a responsible citizen.

Divyanka Tripathis husband Vivek Dahiya shared a long note about the current scenario, India is facing. In an open letter, Vivek wrote, its the opportunity to develop bonds within self and with dear ones. The virus sees no border and can infect anyone. People all around the world are confined to their homes, and yet some are choosing the negative side of every matter.

The question is floating on the internet that, should we ban using app originated from china. So, for those who think in this way, heres a suggestion  the phone we are using to put our viewpoint socially, its also assembled in China, it reads.

Check the post here:

Thus, all are interconnected and independent in this global marketplace. If one country is a consumer other is a supplier, things go vice-versa. Under this unprecedented situation, social media is a great platform to spread the message of solidarity unity. Vivek further wrote: he uses this app to entertaining his fans and family, currently all should work on a single goal of prosperity which is world free from COVID-19, Vivek further wrote.

Talking about Divyanka and Viveks quarantine, the duo is utilising the period to the fullest, as they post videos and photos cooking, exercising, and reading.

For all the latest Entertainment News, download NewsX App
Bakers across the nation are supporting hardworking NHS heroes by donating baked goods and meals, as well as taking part in the Clap for Carers campaign.

Here are a few examples of how the baking industry is showing support for the countrys healthcare workers.

Roberts Bakery

The bakery turned on its blue lights last week to support the Clap for our Carers campaign and show appreciation for NHS staff.

Its Rudheath bakery will remain blue at night for the duration of the campaign.

All Roberts bakery workers took a moment from the production line to show their respect, giving a round of applause.

This is our way of showing our appreciation for NHS workers  heroes all  in difficult times for many people, said Mike Roberts, deputy chairman at Roberts.

The Clap for our Carers campaign has become a symbol of strength and unity in adversity and, by lighting up the bakery, we can demonstrate our support and remind everyone to keep clapping.

Original Biscuit Bakers

Original Biscuit Bakers last week donated thousands of hand-decorated gingerbread biscuits to NHS workers, the homeless and those in food poverty via food redistribution charity City Harvest London and the non-profit Market Drayton Foodbank.

It also distributed 1,200 hand-iced, Easter-themed gingerbread biscuits to staff and patients at the Royal Stoke University Hospital through the University Hospital of North Midlands (UHNM) Charity.

Due to the current health crisis, our stock levels were high and we could see an opportunity to donate to worthy causes, both locally and further afield, said Sarah Hopcroft, sales and marketing director at Original Biscuit Bakers.

We really hope our Easter gingerbread biscuits brought cheer and joy to those on the front line, as well as those struggling with homelessness and food poverty in such turbulent and difficult times.

Laduree

Laduree is donating Easter Eggs, macarons and Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) to thank NHS staff for all their hard work.

The donations will be delivered via the Hospitality for Heroes charity to the Chelsea & Westminster and Royal London Hospitals.

Gails Bakery

Gails partnered with social club The Conduit and fashion brand Ralph Lauren to launch a nutritious food campaign for NHS staff.

Fuel for NHS Heroes has delivered 2,000 meals and more than 2,000 loaves of bread to frontline NHS health workers, said the company. It hopes to deliver 2,400 meals a week including bread, fresh salads and sausage rolls.

We are open and baking to stay true to our purpose of feeding people, supporting our producer partners, keeping people in jobs and getting food to those who need it most, said Tom Molnar, co-founder and CEO at Gails.

From neighbourhood Gails bakeries, we are baking for takeaway service, home delivery and click-and-collect, and walking orders to those who may not be able to get down to the shops.

Allied Bakeries

Caption: NHS staff from Imperial Hospital London

Allied Bakeries is donating bread, pancakes, crumpets and hot cross buns to NHS Trusts and emergency services, including the police and fire service.

The bakery has delivered bread to Lister Hospital in Stevenage and care homes across Stoke, as well as pancakes to Coleraine Hospital in Belfast.

It has also donated to the Royal Alexandra, Queen Elizabeth University and Ruchill Hospitals in Glasgow.

All Allied sites were helping communities by showing thanks and support to those struggling to get to the shops and find produce after their shifts, said the company. Allied has also donated bread to food banks and continued its contribution to food waste charity FareShare.
Coffins arriving from Bergamo, Italy are being unloaded from a military truck that transported them to the cemetery of Cinisello Balsamo in Milan, Italy on March 27, 2020.

Claudio Furlan/LaPresse via AP

Death rates from the coronavirus  a calculation that divides the number of known deaths by the confirmed case total  vary widely by country.

As of Tuesday, the US's death rate is 4.1%, whereas Belgium and Italy's death rates are each 12.8% and the UK's is 12.7%.

The global death rate is currently about 6%.

Spain has the highest number of deaths per 100,000 residents: 38.

The chart below compares death rates and deaths per capita in 13 countries that each have more than 1,000 confirmed deaths.

Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

The US has reported more than 584,000 coronavirus cases and at least 23,600 deaths  the highest counts worldwide.

But the US's COVID-19 death rate  a calculation that divides the number of deaths by the total number of cases  is among the lowest of the world's 13 hardest-hit countries.

The US's coronavirus death rate is currently 4.1%, the same as the rate in China. The US also has one of the lowest rates of death per capita, according to data from Johns Hopkins University  seven Americans have died per 100,000 residents.

Italy and Belgium's death rates, by contrast, are 12.8%, and the UK's is 12.7%. Italy has reported at least 20,400 deaths, the UK has reported more than 11,300, and Belgium had nearly 4,000 as of Tuesday morning.

covid 19 death rates per country april 14

Shayanne Gal/Business Insider

Germany and Turkey have the lowest death rates among the countries on the list  2.5% and 2.1%, respectively.

Spain tops the deaths-per-capita list, with 38 people dying per every 100,000. Italy and Belgium both have a per-capita death rate of about 34 per 100,000 people.

A Spanish soldier stands next to beds set up at a temporary hospital for vulnerable people at the Fira Barcelona Montjuic centre in Barcelona on March 25, 2020.

PAU BARRENA/AFP via Getty Images

Global and country-specific death rates change over time

More than 1.97 million people worldwide have been infected with the coronavirus, and at least 124,500 have died.

Because countries' case totals and death tolls are constantly changing, their death rates are not static  nor is the global rate. Instead, the rates fluctuate constantly as new cases and deaths get reported. On March 27, the US's death rate was 1.6%, Italy's was 10.5%, and Spain's was 7.70%. All three are now higher.

Story continues

Death rates also depend on how many people get tested for COVID-19 (people whose cases aren't confirmed don't get included in the official case counts) and don't include most asymptomatic carriers.

Additionally, any calculation or comparison of death rates (or case or death totals) depends on governments' officially reported numbers, but it's of course possible that some countries could intentionally underreport theirs. Some experts have suggested that's the case in China, and a study published Monday suggests the Brazilian government has done the same thing. The study found that the true total is likely 12 times higher than the government's official number.

Medical staff, wearing protective gear, move a patient infected with the coronavirus (COVID-19) from an ambulance to a hospital on March 9, 2020 in Seoul, South Korea.

Chung Sung-Jun/Getty Images

As of Tuesday, the global coronavirus death rate was around 6.3%  nearly double the World Health Organization's estimate of about 3.4% from early March.

Some health experts have predicted that the global death rate will decrease as the number of cases rises and testing continues to expand. Widespread testing could mean a lower death rate because most COVID-19 cases  about 80%, according to one study  are considered mild. But often, the cases tested and reported first are those with severe symptoms, since those people go to the hospital. Milder cases, on the other hand, could go uncounted or get reported later on, so the true number of infected people is likely much higher than the reported total.

Healthcare workers test a person at a COVID-19 drive-thru testing site at Henry Ford West Bloomfield Hospital in Michigan on March 25, 2020.

Carlos Osorio/AP

The death rate of a disease is different from its mortality rate  the latter is the number of deaths out of the number of people in an at-risk population. A death rate is not a reflection of the likelihood that a given person will die.

Dr. Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said in March that COVID-19's mortality rate is probably about 1%, which is still nearly 10 times the flu's mortality rate.

Read the original article on Business Insider
After supplying to most affected countries such as the US, Spain and the UK, India is all set to bulk supply hydroxychloroquine and paracetamol to close allies Russia, United Arab Emirates, Jordan and key partners in Latin America and Africa. A shipment of HCQ is also being sent to Dominican Republic, the current President of the UN Security Council, as well as Uganda and Ecuador, people familiar with the development said.

An official said India is also committed to supplying the two drugs to its special strategic partner Russia; Russian President Vladimir Putin had spoken to PM Modi on March 25. But the special focus of the government at this point are the Gulf countries, particularly the UAE. External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar and Foreign Secretary Harsh Shringla are in constant touch with their Gulf counterparts. India has already sent a 15-member army medical team with supplies to Kuwait and supplied HCQ to Bahrain.

Global demand for hydroxychloroquine manufactured by India boosted after some studies indicated that the drug, when paired with azithromycin, helped clear patients of the virus at a much faster rate than seen usually.

The decision to quickly send the drugs to Abu Dhabi and Dubai was taken after UAE sent a request for 3.25 crore HCQ 200 mg tablets and 10 metric tonnes of active pharmaceutical ingredients. These commercial supplies will go through six Dubai-based consignees having contracts with Indian pharma majors in Mumbai, Chennai and Bengaluru.

Also Watch | No shortage of hydroxychloroquine in India, will be available in future: Govt

According to South Block officials, India has put the drug supplies to UAE and Jordan on a fast track as PrIme Minister Narendra Modi has a personal rapport with both UAE Crown Prince Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan and King Abdullah of Jordan. India has also offered to send more medical teams to the Gulf if required.

While India has been on the front foot in its fight against coronavirus by supplying drugs to other countries, it is also leveraging the drug to get supplies of rapid testing kits, N 95 masks, ventilators and PPE suits from a host of countries. Apart from China, whose first consignment of rapid testing kits has landed, India is getting supplies from the US, UK, Ireland, Korea, Japan, Singapore, Germany and Malaysia.

All the heads of missions have been instructed to help procure key medical supplies that could include aluminium, ventilators and cylinders. Singapore is a hub for procurement with some friends such as Vietnam sending limited amounts of medical supplies as gifts, said a senior official. PM Modi had spoken to his Vietnamese counterpart Nguyen Xuan Phuc on Monday.

According to South Block officials, all drug supplies are being sent after reconciling the domestic demands, the requirements assessed by the Health Ministry and the capacity of Indian pharma industry.

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Publicly available official documents reveal that in January this year alone, the 1984-founded organization InterAction which has over 180 member organizations, received $5 million from the US government. In the last decade, the US Agency for International Development and the State Department (USAID) granted tens of millions of dollars to InterAction.

The DC-based organization, InterAction in 2017 launched a new platform called Together Project (TP) "to confront discrimination or targeted prejudicial regulations in the US due to their operating principles or religious faith".

Interestingly, contradicting its stated objective, the TP picked the most controversial Islamic charities -- Helping Hand for Relief & Development (HHRD), Islamic Relief (IR) USA, Zakat Foundation (ZF), American Relief Agency for the Horn of Africa (ARAHA) and United Muslim Relief (UMR) -- all linked to radical groups in the Middle East and Pakistan. The five charities form the core of the TP.

As per an IANS open source research, while HHRD organizes conferences in Pakistan with Falah-e-Insaniat Foundation and the Milli Muslim League, the charitable and political wings respectively of the Pakistani terror outfit Lashkar-e-Taiba. Incidentally, Financial Action Task Force (FATF), the global watchdog on terror funding, has put Pakistan on its 'grey list' for its failure to curb terror financing.

The IR-USA is a branch of Islamic Relief Worldwide (IRW) which has been designated as a terror organization by the UAE. German and Swedish governments have claimed that IRW has significant ties to Muslim Brotherhood, a Sunni Islamist transnational political movement.

Similarly, Zakat Foundation was founded by Halil Demir, a former public relations officer for Benevolence International Foundation, a US-designated terror group. The charity partners with the Istanbul-based NGO, Foundation for Human Rights, Liberties and Humanitarian Relief (IHH) in Iraq and Afghanistan. The NGO has allegedly been tied to Al-Qaeda.

ARAHA is known to have ties with extremists like Yusuf Estes who publicly supports death for apostates. He participated in one of their fundraisers in May 2019. UMR's officials publicly support Hamas, the Islamic terror group of Palestine.

DC-based sources investigating the Islamist terror-funding said the Together Project has been lobbying with the US Congress to "weaken counter-terror mechanisms, deploying InterAction's immense resources to, first, delegitimize claims of wrongdoing aimed at its members organizations and second, advance legislation designed to weaken counter-terror finance laws."

Recently, TP's member partners from IR-USA and HHRD held meetings with members of the Congress and their staff to discuss "disinformation campaigns" and "bank de-risking". To discredit allegations against HHRD and other Islamist groups, they even hired Perkins Coie, the law firm responsible for the infamous 'Steel dossier' relating to the alleged cooperation between President Donald Trump and Russia during the 2016 elections, sources said.

The TP, sources said, distributes a "disinformation toolkit" that instructs members on how to control negative press and "promote alternative messages" or "new narratives". "By tying legitimate criticism of its members with 'fake news', internet 'trolls' and 'bots' and even Russian interference, TP teaches nonprofits to blur the line between fact and fantasy," an investigative researcher said.

The platform has endorsed letters to the US House and the Senate pushing for terror finance reform, met lawmakers from key committees, opposed legislation targeting terror financing in Pakistan and tried to enter special training in the bank examination manual that would downplay the risks associated with money laundering and terror financing, sources said.

It lobbied hard to put forth a bill, House resolution 2514 which would "reduce compliance costs" and lower "penalties and federal actions" against smaller foreign banks in developing countries that violate terror finance laws, sources said.

The FATF is going to review Pakistan's performance to meet international commitments in ending terror funding during a meeting in June. "But as long as InterAction and the Together Project continue to protect Islamist charities linked to terror groups, all the measures taken at FATF remain futile," an investigator in DC said.

--IANS

at/prs


"More than one-third of people in Montana's prisons and jails have at least one disability," said Disability Rights Montana executive director Bernadette Franks-Ongoy in an email. "The state has a constitutional and moral responsibility to protect these peoples' lives. Some jurisdictions are taking proactive steps to reduce their incarcerated populations, among other actions. But not everyone is taking the necessary steps to address this pandemic."

Judges across the state responded to the petition in opposition. In Ravalli County, a judge, the public defender's office, county prosecutor and sheriff have been at work reviewing inmate statuses, resulting in the release of 12 inmates charged with felonies and five inmates with misdemeanors to "appropriate terms of supervision." Yellowstone County officials reported their jail population has fallen 25%. Cascade County District Judge Elizabeth Best noted she has been proactively releasing inmates at their initial appearances and reducing bail "as much as possible."
- Full data of Phase I single-ascending dose safety and tolerability study of CT-044 expected in mid-2020

- Teresa Byrne joins as Director of Clinical Operations

DALLAS, TX / ACCESSWIRE / April 15, 2020 / CerSci Therapeutics ("CerSci"), a clinical-stage pharmaceutical company developing a portfolio of non-opioid, non-addictive treatments for pain relief, announced today a development update related to its novel product candidate CT-044, the clinical impact of the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic and the addition of Teresa Byrne to the CerSci executive team as Director of Clinical Operations.

CerSci is currently developing CT-044, a non-metal based, orally bioavailable, small molecule Radical Species Decomposition Accelerant (RSDAx) of peroxynitrite and hydrogen peroxide, for the treatment of acute and chronic pain, including acute post-surgical pain and painful diabetic neuropathy.

Clinical Development Update

In June and December of 2019, CerSci initiated Phase I human safety and tolerability studies of CT-044. The primary objective of the Phase I studies was to investigate the safety and tolerability of CT-044 in healthy volunteers. The single-ascending dose (SAD) study was initiated in June 2019 and consisted of four cohorts of eight subjects each, with cohorts receiving a 150mg, 450mg, 1100mg, or 2000mg oral dose of CT-044. Dosing was completed in November 2019.

The multiple-ascending dose (MAD) study was initiated in December 2019. The study consists of three cohorts of eight subjects each, with cohorts receiving three doses per day of 200mg, 400mg, or 600mg. To date, CerSci has completed enrollment and dosing of two of the three cohorts. Due to the current COVID-19 pandemic, CerSci has paused the enrollment of the third cohort. When appropriate, CerSci will begin enrolling and dosing the final cohort.

In addition, CerSci has completed dosing for a food effect study of CT-044 on ten volunteers in both fed and fasted states.

Full results from the SAD and food effect studies are currently expected in mid-2020.

Once CerSci has completed all required Phase 1 studies, the company plans to proceed with proof-of-concept Phase 2 trials.

Impact of COVID-19

CerSci is currently monitoring the impacts of COVID-19 at its clinical sites with a focus on ensuring the continuing safety and wellbeing of study participants.

To date, COVID-19 has had a manageable impact on the clinical development of CT-044. The ultimate impact of the pandemic on CerSci's business, however, remains uncertain and subject to future developments, including the duration of the pandemic, the ultimate spread of the disease and new information that may emerge.

"Dosing of our final cohort of our MAD Phase 1 study has been postponed as the health and safety of our employees, healthcare workers, and subjects are our highest priority at this time," said Dr. Lucas Rodriguez, Chief Executive Officer of CerSci Therapeutics. "During this period, we continue to execute our fundraising strategy as well as discuss the potential of initiating our Phase 2 studies of CT-044. We remain committed to completing all necessary Phase 1 studies and advancing to Phase 2 proof-of-concept and efficacy studies. Our ultimate goal is to get this technology in the hands of the patients and caregivers who are desperate for alternatives to opioid pain relief."

Executive Team Expansion

In March, Teresa Byrne joined the company as Director of Clinical Operations. Teresa will help lead and execute CerSci's clinical and regulatory strategy as the company progresses in the development of CT-044 for acute and chronic pain indications.

CerSci Chief Medical Officer, Dr. Marco Pappagallo, reports "Our ongoing safety studies are currently on track to complete dosing and we are pleased with our blinded top-line data to date. We believe we are in a strong position to continue our development into Phase 2 and we are very pleased and excited that Teresa has joined our team. She brings expertise and horsepower necessary to continue pushing this asset towards commercialization."

About CerSci Therapeutics

CerSci is a clinical-stage pharmaceutical company developing non-opioid analgesic drug products without the deleterious side effects (e.g., abuse liability, cognitive impairment, respiratory depression, etc.) of many current pain treatments on the market. CerSci's novel clinical candidate, CT-044, is designed as an orally bioavailable compound that will initially target post-operative and chronic neuropathic pain indications.

Forward-Looking Statements

This press release contains forward-looking statements that are based on management's beliefs and assumptions and on information currently available to management. All statements contained in this press release that do not relate to matters of historical fact should be considered forward-looking statements, including, but not limited to, statements regarding the clinical progress of our product candidate. These forward-looking statements include information about possible or assumed future results of our business, financial condition, liquidity, plans and objectives. In some cases, you can identify forward-looking statements by terminology such as "believe," "may," "estimate," "continue," "anticipate," "intend," "should," "plan," "expect," "predict," "potential," or the negative of these terms or other similar expressions. Forward-looking statements are based on information we have when those statements are made or our management's current expectation and are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause actual performance or results to differ materially from those expressed in or suggested by the forward-looking statements. In light of the significant uncertainties in these forward-looking statements, you should not regard these statements as a representation or warranty by us or any other person that we will achieve our objectives and plans in any specified time frame, or at all. The forward-looking statements in this press release represent our views as of the date of this press release. We anticipate that subsequent events and developments will cause our views to change, including related the effects of the COVID-19 (coronavirus) pandemic. However, while we may elect to update these forward-looking statements at some point in the future, we have no current intention of doing so except to the extent required by applicable law. You should, therefore, not rely on these forward-looking statements as representing our views as of any date subsequent to the date of this press release.

Investor Relations Contact:

Chiara Russo

Solebury Trout

617-306-9197

crusso@troutgroup.com

www.CerSci.com

SOURCE: Solebury Trout

View source version on accesswire.com:https://www.accesswire.com/585272/CerSci-Therapeutics-Provides-Clinical-and-Corporate-Update
By PTI

NEW DELHI: Senior officials of the Railways on Tuesday said suspension of train services and other public transport is necessary to ensure social distancing which is the only way to prevent the spread of coronavirus.

Fearing a repeat of what happened in Mumbai earlier during the day when thousands of migrants gathered at Bandra railway station hoping to catch trains to their native places, the Northern Railway also issued an advisory.

"The general public is informed that a decision has been taken to not run any trains by Northern Railways till 3rd May 2020 in view of COVID-19, hence such fake news in circulation may not be believed," a Northern Railways spokesperson said.

The official also asked media persons to publicise that Northern Railways is not running any train from Delhi or anywhere else.

Amidst rumours that train services in the country will be resumed from April 15, the Railway Ministry also issued a clarification on Twitter.

"It is clarified that all passenger train services are fully cancelled across the nation till 3rd May 2020 and there is no plan to run any special train to clear the passenger rush.

All concerned may please take note of the same and help us in resisting any wrong news in this regard," the railway ministry said on the social networking website.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi Tuesday announced extension of the lockdown across the country till May 3 to fight the coronavirus pandemic, saying the measure has produced a significant outcome in containing the infection.

Even as the announcement stalled the prospective functioning of 15,000 passenger trains of the railways, thousands of migrant workers converged near the Bandra railway station in Mumbai hoping to catch trains back to their home states.

Railways, however, said all passengers will get full refund for tickets booked for the cancelled trains as well as for those booked in advance.

Sources said that after the Bandra incident, numerous messages were circulated on social media groups with false information that passenger train services will resume from April 15.

Some messages also suggested that railways will clear the rush of passengers, mostly migrant workers, in special trains, they said.

"The only way to prevent the spread of COVID-19 is by social distancing. Movement of public by public transport system cannot ensure social distancing. It is in this context that trains and buses are not being allowed to run in this crucial lockdown period. Even a single infected person travelling in a train can pass on the infection to thousands of passengers," a senior official of the railways said.

The official said in the early days of the spread of the pandemic, at least 12 cases were reported where those marked with home quarantine travelled in trains and could have spread the virus.

The official further said boarding and deboarding at different stations will continue to aggravate the situation further.

India has reported 10,363 cases of the virus and 339 deaths so far.

"With many trains running, this number will get multiplied manifold. Moreover, once this large no of people will reach their respective villages, the infection will spread there as well and it all will become unmanageable. The contact tracing will become impossible in such a scenario," the official said, adding that it was in public and national interest that social distancing be ensured at any cost.

Around 15,523 trains run by the railways have been affected due to the lockdown including 9,000 passenger trains and 3,000 mail express services which are run daily during normal circumstances.
Press Release

April 15, 2020 De Lima to Duterte: Stop being a tool for Beijing's COVID-19 propaganda Opposition Senator Leila M. de Lima blasts the President's use of televised late-night meetings with his COVID-19 team in order to further Beijing's propaganda to downplay its mishandling of the ongoing global pandemic. De Lima's statement came after Mr. Duterte repeatedly praised Beijing's management of the crisis despite accusations of other governments and international experts that they be held responsible for the apparent withholding vital information regarding the spread of the novel coronavirus around the world. "Recent history is clear on his failure to act sensibly, quickly and decisively on the COVID-19 pandemic. He tried to downplay the contagion and failed to initiate any semblance of preparation early on," she said in a handwritten statement last April 14. "His subservience to the Chinese government should have allowed us to be informed earlier and prepared better. But it did not. The opposite happened. He bought into the China propaganda--hook, line, and sinker. By the time he appeared to be moving finally, we were already playing catch up. No amount of propaganda will change that," she added. Last April 13, Malacanang has broadcasted Mr. Duterte's supposed meeting with his COVID-19 team regarding government efforts to aid millions of Filipinos affected by the lockdown measures implemented to curb the spread of the novel coronavirus. In the meeting, Mr. Duterte lauded China's President Xi Jinping for his alleged decisiveness on what he believes to be a successful strict lockdown of the Hubei province for almost three months, which - according to Chinese-controlled reports - has successfully eradicated the virus in the area. Duterte also heaped his thanks to Xi for his commitment to "support" his administration in its fight against COVID-19. The President also believes that the Philippines will be the "priority" in receiving the vaccine, if and when China develops it. "We are already making great strides towards extending help to our countrymen and preventing the spread of COVID-19. But instead of taking control of these efforts and focusing on ensuring that everything is implemented properly, Mr. Duterte is still finding time for Chinese propaganda," De Lima said. "Alam na ng buong mundo ang kasinungalingan at kalokohan ng China sa nangyayaring krisis sa COVID-19. Naghahanda na ang mga gobyerno ng ibang bansa na pagbayarin ang China sa kanilang kasinungalingan. Pero si G. Duterte, tuloy pa rin ang pagyuko at pagsamba sa kanila. Pag hindi pa sya tumigil, baka madamay pa tayo sa magiging maaaring parusa sa China," she added. Some political pundits believe that China has suppressed significant information about the virus in the early stages of the outbreak, including its human to human transmission and even censored and detained doctors and other whistleblowers who attempted to sound the alarm. The United States of America, citing intelligence reports, has accused the South East Asian giant of lying about its published numbers of infected cases, as well as its deaths to save face in the international community. The lady senator from Bicol also opposed the oft-repeated suggestion of Mr. Duterte to sell Philippine owned assets and properties, even after receiving special powers from Congress to gather and use over PhP500 billion to fund COVID-19 related efforts. "[Selling off Philippine properties] should be the last resort. His economic team is already doing a decent job raising funds. Meron ba si Duterte na buyer na pinag-iinteresan ang mga ari-arian ng taumbayan? China ba yan o crony niya?" De Lima said. "Meanwhile, as Mr. Duterte continues to spout praises and gratitude to Mr. Xi Jinping, China is plowing deeper into our sovereign waters, further undermining our hold over the West Philippine Sea," she added. As of April 14, the Philippines has continued to observe an upward trend of COVID-19 cases with 5,223 of confirmed infected, 335 deaths and 295 recoveries despite lockdowns in Luzon and other regions around the country. However, there are concerns that the real numbers of those impacted by the novel coronavirus could be much higher than those published as mass testing efforts have yet to be rolled out. "In order to pursue our COVID-19 measures to complete success, we need to stop being tools to Chinese propaganda. The Chinese government placed us in this situation," De Lima said. "We need to focus on our own efforts, and prioritize our own people and our own country. Tama na po ang pagiging pro-China. Maging pro-Filipino na tayong lahat," she added.
Mystery surrounding the absence of Nicaraguan president Daniel Ortega continues to grow, with the leader having not been seen in public for the last 40 days.

Ortega, 74, has not been seen in person since a televised military event on 21 February, prompting doubts about the status of his health.

Although he did take part virtually in a conference call among the heads of state from Central Americas System of Integration (SICA) on 12 March, his lack of visibility has seen Nicaragua come under fire for the manner in which they are handling the pandemic. The countrys response to the crisis has been labelled reckless by Human Rights Watch.

There are, however, only nine confirmed cases and one fatality in the country as of Wednesday morning, according to Johns Hopkins University, though there are many more cases in neighbouring Costa Rica (618) and Honduras (419).

Daniel Ortega has not appeared publicly for 40 days (AFP via Getty)

The response from these nations, now operating under stricter preventative measures, is in stark contrast to Nicaragua, whose border, public schools and universities remain open.

There has been no social distancing policy implemented from the top, while popular events for tourists such as Managuas market festival  which included tasting events - and the traditional Easter festival of Matagalpa took place as planned.

Dr Carissa F. Etienne, a director of the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO) and WHO Regional Director of the Americas, admitted there are growing fears concerning the lack of initiative from the government.

We have concerns for the lack of social distancing, the convening of mass gatherings, Dr. Etienne said. We have concerns about the testing, contact tracing, about the reporting of cases. We also are concerned about what we see as inadequate infection prevention and control.

Dr. Etienne confirmed these concerns have now been raised informally and formally, while PAHO are ready to collaborate with the government in a way that will save lives and avoid too much illness.

Adding to their criticism of the government though, Human Rights Watch claimed the governments tactics blatantly contradict global health experts advice and put peoples health and lives at risk.

Ortegas family meanwhile continue to ignore the impending danger of the virus spreading, with Juan Carlos Ortega, the presidents son, posting at the start of the month a picture with his children and the caption: We have a unique country . . . and its best to enjoy it with your family!

Vice president Rosario Murillo alongside president Daniel Ortega in March (AFP via Getty)

His wife and the countrys vice president Rosario Murillo has also barely mentioned her husband since assuming public duties.

Our commander Daniel is here, working and directing, coordinating all the efforts we make, that we are and will continue to make because we have a firm compromise with the country, she said earlier this month.

While her latest announcement on Sunday also failed to provide any update on his whereabouts: Everything is calm, families celebrating in union at home and the places they visit this Sunday of resurrection, enjoying our traditions, our traditional gastronomy.

The hug of our commander Daniel to each home, to each family. Lets go forward because we are a nation of hope, of faith.

The situation in Nicaragua has left Costa Rica president Carlos Alvarado concerned about the knock-on effects of their neighbours approach, admitting: Were worried about their approach, because the recommendations of the [World Health Organization] are for social distancing. Calling for marches and crowds of people goes against these recommendations.
They come to say good morning and good night. They tell him that spring has arrived and that the cherry blossoms are blooming. They share that they are falling in love, falling out of love or getting divorced. They send him photos of fried chicken drumsticks, his favorite snack.

They whisper that they miss him.

Li Wenliang, a doctor in the Chinese city of Wuhan, died of the coronavirus Feb. 6 at age 34. More than a month before that, he went online to warn friends of the strange and deadly virus rampaging through his hospital, only to be threatened by government authorities. He became a hero in China when his warnings proved true, then a martyr when he died.

After his passing, people began to gather, virtually, at his last post on Weibo, the Chinese social media platform. In the comments section, they grieve and seek solace. Some call it Chinas Wailing Wall, a reference to the Western Wall in Jerusalem where people leave written prayers in the cracks.

Dr. Li, what is heaven like? Dr. Li, my cat died today. Dr. Li, the cherry blossoms are blooming. Remember to check it out. Good morning, Dr. Li. Heres a drumstick for you. Dr. Li, thank you for trying to save the world.

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

As the deadly virus killed tens of thousands around the world, each society will have its unique way of coping with the loss and grief. In a largely atheist yet spiritual nation with little tradition of praying, the digital Wailing Wall allows the Chinese people to share their sadness, frustration and aspirations with someone they trusted and loved.

It may be the gentlest place on the often polarizing and combative Chinese internet. People write down their thoughts and leave. They dont argue or make accusations. When they do respond to each other, they leave digital hugs and encouragement. I cried as I read through the comments. I found the experience cathartic.

Its a refuge for a traumatized people. Many people, I believe, feel the same way.

Li had been an avid user of Weibo, Chinas rough equivalent of Twitter, since 2011. He posted his last message Feb. 1. Today the nucleic acid test result is positive, he wrote of the test that confirmed he had been infected by the coronavirus. The dust has settled, and the diagnosis is finally confirmed. He died five days later.

Under that post, Weibo users have left more than 870,000 comments. Some people post a few times a day, telling him how their mornings, afternoons and evenings went. Only posts by Chinas biggest actors and pop stars can match those numbers, but even those lack the visceral response that Lis last post has drawn.

Users feel comfortable talking to Li. They know he will never scold them or judge them for what they say. They know, after reading his more than 2,000 posts, that he was a gentle and kind soul. He was an ordinary person just like them who enjoyed food and fun and sometimes got tired of working such a demanding job. He would understand.

Dr. Li, I have a crush on a girl. My life is a mess. Ill probably get divorced soon. I think I may have depression. Too much stress. But what is better than being alive, right? We can have spicy hot pot in Chengdu now. Missing you. I havent been paid in more than two months. Really scared that the landlord will call. "I quit before the epidemic broke out. Now Im worried that I wont be able to find a job. I lost my job because of the outbreak in Europe and America! 2020 is too difficult." Its raining now. I like the rainy days the best because I can cry in the rain and no one would notice. This is the first time Ive shared this secret with anyone, and probably the last time. I played with my phone for a long time but couldnt find anybody to talk to. So here I am. I can talk to you.

I read thousands of messages people left just March 26, the 49th day  the seventh day of the seventh week  since Lis death. Many Chinese believe that is the day that a persons soul will finally leave the body and be reincarnated as a newborn.

March 26 is also when Wuhan began to allow its residents to take back the ashes of their loved ones. People queued in long lines at funeral homes. The photos triggered social media discussions of the real scope of the outbreak and the credibility of governments official toll of Wuhans dead. Many of the photos were subsequently censored.

Dr. Li, some comments said that you have probably been reborn as a baby by now. If youre reincarnated, I hope youll be a good-looking baby. Dr. Li, today is the 49th day of your death. Ill blow a whistle like you did in an hour. Hope youll be born a good person in your next life too. Dr. Li, did your family go to pick up your ashes? Miss you, and thanks again. Dr. Li, why were the Weibo posts about taking back loved ones ashes deleted? Have we learned nothing from this outbreak? What would you say? It seems that another doctor in your hospital died today. How can the people in power sit so securely?

Because many people see him as an ordinary person wronged by authorities and as a hero who stood up to power, they come to him to express their frustration that justice and righteousness havent prevailed.

They are angry that only two police officers have been punished for reprimanding him. Many believe the police were acting on orders from higher up.

They also share their relief that Chinas lockdowns appear to be nearing an end, their distrust of the official news and their lingering fear of the pandemic.

I cant keep my tears from falling every time I think of all the suffering and trauma Wuhan people have endured. The day will come when the people can rewrite the investigation report of your case. Dr. Li, the lockdown is ending in Wuhan! Its ending! Its ending! I heard this is the only place on the Chinese internet where you can say anything. So here I am. The media is full of good news. Brother Wenliang, do you believe the media? Dr. Li, can you tell me the real situation of the outbreak now? The outbreak is very serious abroad. I hope they can get over it safely. In some places the subsidies for front-line medical workers were distributed then taken back. Im very disappointed. I am a first-year medical student. I kind of want to give up. Dr. Li, is accountability something achievable?

Some people complain that the comments are censored, an allegation that is difficult to prove. They worry that his Weibo account could be deleted, just like many others. Then they will lose the only place they can take a break from a world that has been turned upside down.

They watch warily and helplessly as the pandemic spreads to many parts of the world, and the two super powers, China and the United States, engage in reckless and meaningless diplomatic squabbles. Like people everywhere, they dont know how this is going to end.

But most people just want to tell him that they miss him and wish him the best in the next world.

I talked about you in my writing class. Hope the children will remember that you sacrificed your life for them. More than 10,000 people came to see you here today. You live in our hearts. You will not be forgotten! It seems everyone becomes gentle as soon as they come here. Its so nice. Dr. Li, I'll watch a bit of TV before going to bed. Please go to bed early too. Love you. Good night, Dr. Li. Hope you have sweet dreams every night. Good night. Good night. Good night.

c.2020 The New York Times Company
This article is part of the On Tech newsletter. You can sign up here to receive it weekdays.

Join us for a live conversation about tech and the coronavirus. Today at 4 p.m. Eastern time, my Times Opinion colleague Charlie Warzel and I are hosting a conference call to talk about the use of smartphone location data to fight the coronavirus and other aspects of using technology in this pandemic. Lend us your ears, and ask your burning questions. You can RSVP here.

This sure feels like a strange time for Apple to release a new iPhone. But heres a hard truth: Our habits show that new phones are irrelevant to most of us  in a pandemic or otherwise.

Brian X. Chen, a New York Times personal technology writer, wrote about Apples plan to release a new version of the iPhone SE next week. Thats the four-year-old model with a relatively small screen and a relatively low price of $399 and up in the United States.




Mining companies in Mexico are asking the government for security assistance due to the increasing incidences of the exploitation of criminal groups to the vulnerability of the industry brought by the COVID-19 crisis, says an article.

Armed Robberies in the Mining Sector

The request comes after two armed robberies were reported in two weeks in Sonora, the key gold mining state in Mexico. Also, there are growing fears of organized crime cartels that are targeting mining operations. The mining sector in Mexico is also affected by the lockdown orders of the government.

Recently, it was reported that armed criminals had stolen the gold-silver dore bar the Mulatos mine of Alamos Gold in Sonora on April 8. They escaped through a light aircraft.

The company had not yet disclosed the value of the bars stolen by the criminal group. However, some local press reveals that the value of the stolen bars is more or less $3 million. The insurance covers the losses from the robbery, says Alamos.

According to AMSAC, a Sonoran mining association, the incident came after a robber where an unknown private property was taken from Fresnillo, a local subsidiary, in Sonora's Caborca municipality on March 26.

Check these out:

The Powerful Cartels in Mexico

The powerful cartels in Mexico were seen to have been conducting robberies of metal and mineral products after a sudden fall of revenue from illegal drug trade caused by the widespread lockdown orders in the United States of America.

The mining sector has been seen as an easy target due to the government's focus on the COVID-19 crisis.

The latest robbery incident involving the usage of a light aircraft in a highly planned operation is an alarming reminder of the powers of the organized crime groups in Mexico.

A lot of Mexican miners had already shifted to air shipments to deliver high-value metals due to the increasing number of road cargo theft in the country. However, the Mulatos incident reveals the risk of air shipment.

The use of an aircraft for an organized crime to steal a precious metal such as gold from the Alamos subsidiary reveals their ability to comprehend the transportation and logistics schedule of different mining sites, says Carlos Cadenas, HIS Market's director of Latin America.

Exploiting the Current Weakness of the Mining Sector

Despite the presence of already costly and sophisticated security measures being implemented by Mexican mining businesses, organized Mexican criminal groups continue to take advantage of the industry's weaknesses.

In the past few weeks since the spread of COVID-19, only two robberies on the mining sector have been confirmed. However, a lot of theft activities are not reported.

Crime cartels are operating in a lot of major mining areas, such as in Chihuahua, Durango, Sinaloa, Sonora, Michoacan, and Guerrero.
Prolonged or intermittent social distancing may be necessary even until 2022 to prevent future Covid-19 seasonal outbreaks, a new study has said.

Researchers from Harvard University, led by Stephen Kissler, used estimates of seasonality, immunity, and cross-immunity for two betacoronaviruses from time series data from the United States, to inform a model of Covid-19 transmission, Xinhua news agency reported.

Recurrent wintertime outbreaks of Covid-19 "will probably occur after the initial, most severe pandemic wave," researchers wrote on in the study 'Projecting the transmission dynamics of SARS-CoV-2 through the postpandemic period', published in the online journal Science.

The researchers added that without a vaccine or other interventions, "prolonged or intermittent social distancing may be necessary into 2022."

Noting that "a key metric for the success of social distancing is whether critical care capacities are exceeded," the study said that "additional interventions, including expanded critical care capacity and an effective therapeutic, would improve the success of intermittent distancing and hasten the acquisition of herd immunity."

Longitudinal serological studies are urgently needed to determine the extent and duration of immunity to the virus, the researchers said.

Even in the event of apparent elimination, Covid-19 surveillance should be maintained since a resurgence in contagion could be possible as late as 2024, according to the study.

The number of people infected with the new coronavirus worldwide has surpassed 1.8 million with 71,779 cases verified over the past 24 hours, the Health Organization (WHO) said on Tuesday.

According to the update, the global count of confirmed COVID-19 cases has reached 1,844,863, with the majority of them concentrated in Europe (943,272) and the Americas (644,986). The death toll has grown by 5,369 cases over the past day to a total of 117,021 fatalities, the report read.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Thousands of casual nurses have been left jobless after the outbreak of coronavirus with many now turning to roles offered in supermarkets.

As health departments crack down on elective surgeries and non-essential hospital visits, hours have been cut and nurses are struggling to keep a shift.

Stephenie Wardle, a casual nurse who worked full time hours across South Australia has not worked in a month and now can't even afford the annual nursing registration fee of $175 - due next month.

Thousands of casual nurses have been left jobless after the outbreak of coronavirus with many now turning to roles offered in supermarkets (pictured: Nurses preparing for patients at COVID-19 clinic in Adelaide)

Ms Wardle said that due to the care needed for patients with coronavirus, other medical departments were not needed.

'You're not getting car crashes or accidents  surgical and major departments [have shut down] so nurses like me don't get that work,' Ms Wardle told the ABC.

'I've applied for jobs now that I would never have considered before - retail, packing for Coles and Woolworths.'

Ms Wardle is employed by a casual nursing agency and said her along with others struggling to pay the Australian Health Practitioner Regulation Agency (AHPRA) registration fee would soon be left unemployed.

She said she was desperate to help those working on the front line but knew she would be soon left with no other choice then to find another job.

The nurse said it was a legal obligation to have the registration and with many unable to afford the payment, fewer nurses would be left in the workforce.

Some nurses say they are struggling so much that they are unable to pay the annual registration fee of $175 (pictured: hospital staff testing patients for coronavirus in testing clinic in Barossa Valley, SA)

Around 40,000 retired nurses, doctors and other healthcare workers were recently called back to work and placed on a register.

These workers are not required to pay the $175 fee and can return to the workforce if they are needed.

But Ms Wardle is questioning why nurses struggling like her can't be given the same opportunities.

'Why can't they use those nurses and put them into the system before taking those people out of retirement?' she said.

A spokesperson for the AHPRA told Daily Mail Australia they were working to support struggling healthcare workers.

'Registration fees go directly to regulating for safety in each health profession and keeping the public and practitioners safe. Our regulatory work is entirely funded by registrant fees and we receive no government funding for this work,' they said.

'The Nursing and Midwifery Board of Australia (NMBA), which is currently in its annual registration renewal period, has announced that a payment plan will be available for nurses and midwives experiencing genuine financial hardship due to COVID-19. It is expected that a similar approach will be rolled out to other regulated professions for the duration of the pandemic response.

'More widely, we are modifying our regulatory approach to support health practitioners in these exceptional circumstances.

'While maintaining standards for safety, we are introducing new policies that will get more experienced and qualified practitioners into the health system to support the existing health workforce, increase employer flexibility and cut red tape.'
BAKU, Azerbaijan, April 15

By Leman Zeynalova - Trend:

So-called elections in Nagorno-Karabakh are not helpful for creating a positive atmosphere surrounding the talks, former OSCE Minsk Group co-chair from the US Matthew Bryza told Trend.

The holding of elections by one country in the occupied territory of another country is of course, not at all helpful to building the psychological mood that is necessary for two opposing countries to reconcile with each other. In the case of Nagorno-Karabakh, it is legally a part of Azerbaijan, as is recognized by every country in the world. It would be better if these so-called elections did not happen, said Bryza.

Bryza pointed out that the statements he has seen from several governments have been the same, which say these so-called elections dont mean anything, because they dont recognize the so-called independence of Nagorno-Karabakh.

But generally, as I said, these so-called elections are not helpful for creating a positive atmosphere surrounding the talks. Basic principles for the settlement of Nagorno-Karabakh conflict that have been negotiated for a long time and in fact were agreed in principle in January 2019 do foresee that the residents of Nagorno-Karabakh would have the right to elect their own representatives, but that would happen once there was a framework agreement based on the basic principles reached for the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict, he concluded.

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 districts.

The 1994 ceasefire agreement was followed by peace negotiations. Armenia has not yet implemented four UN Security Council resolutions on withdrawal of its armed forces from Nagorno Karabakh and the surrounding districts.

---

Follow the author on Twitter: @Lyaman_Zeyn
Brazil has suspended its 17th licensing round which would have seen the state oil regulator ANP offering 128 offshore exploration blocks throughout the country, fearing that the plummeting oil prices and unprecedented declines in global crude demand entailing double-digit-percent CAPEX cuts will set the stage for another fiasco. With two failed pre-salt licensing rounds in November 2019 tarring the overall successful year of both Brazil and Petrobras, clouds are growing heavier around the upstream future of Brazil, once the leading deep-water investment hotspot of the Americas. This time it is not even the governments fault  it has tried to redeem its past errors with a couple of new initiatives, however coronavirus got in the way.

Up until November 2019 everything seemed to be going in the right way for Brazil  as recently as last October it had held a rather successful pre-salt auction when it managed to award 12 out of 36 blocks on offer, bringing in a record amount of signature bonuses ($2 billion). In a telling illustration of how competitive the auction was, the Brazilian NOC Petrobras managed to get only one block. With hopes riding high, no one really expected that the upcoming license rounds are to be distressingly bleak. Sure enough, the transfer of rights (TOR) auction had its fair share of peculiarities  for instance, the offers were to be bid on a part of 12.4 billion boe of recoverable resources, not the entire volume. The thing is that under a 2010 agreement Petrobras holds exclusive rights to the first 5 billion boe of recovered resources, whilst the auctioning were to be held only for the remaining 7.4 billion boe.

In the TOR bidding session Petrobras won all the prime blocks like Buzios and Itapu, with the Brazilian NOC bidding the minimum profit oil level and won in both cases. This garnered some $17.5 billion for the Federal government, although it remains questionable whether such a gambit of moving money from one pocket into another was actually worth it. The day after the TOR auctioning, the 6th Production Sharing Licensing Round took place, the purpose of which was attract even more international majors who could provide new technological solutions to Petrobras already extensive deepwater expertise. Oddities have marred the prospects of 6th pre-salt rounds, too  Brazils National Energy Policy Council (CNPE) has increased the minimum state oil profit share by 5-6% just a couple months before the auction.

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Moreover, 3 blocks in the pre-salt offering would have required unitization agreements with Petrobras as theyre adjacent to acreage held in adjacent Petrobras-operated blocks: in such cases international NOCs have little to no chance of acting as operators of the deepwater projects. If all 4 pre-salt and all 5 pre-salt blocks were to be allocated, the aggregate of signature bonuses going towards the Brazilian authorities would rise to a whopping $27 billion  roughly half would have gone to the Federal Government. Yet even though 14 international majors were approved to participate in the TOR offering, in the end none of them participated  only the Chinese CNODC and CNOOC took minor parts, with Petrobras essentially refinancing the Brazilian state with its applying for all the licenses taken.

If one is to judge all the developments taking place from November 2019 onwards, the palpable lack of foreign investment into Brazils oil and gas in terms of project financing might transform itself into a worrying trend  the Brazilian Ministry of Mines and Energy expects that the nations aggregate output would increase to 5.5mbpd by the end of this decade, yet it fails to mention that all big FIDs have already been take some time ago. The objectives set are nevertheless very ambitious. Following the development of the Buzios field (some $18 billion of upstream spending in 2020-2024, i.e. almost a third of Petrobras total), the production capacity of which should reach 1.86mbpd by the end of the 2020s, one can safely assume that the thrust of Brazils upstream future lies in its pre-salt basins, expected to represent 77% of aggregate national output by 2029.

Here comes the difficult part - at the end of 2019 Petrobras net debt stood at a whopping $79 billion. Although much better than the $105 billion five years ago thanks to an ambitious divestment and optimization program, the Brazilian NOC remains one of the worlds most indebted oil companies that still has a lot to do to knock the firms financials back into health. Briefly put, the heavy debt repayments commitments of the NOC might endanger Brazils assumed output surge and Petrobras needs external participation to cope with the ambitious goals. Needless to say, it seems that the time of major discoveries with reserves counting in the billions is gone for good  if Brazil wants to see the smaller assets being developed, it needs to give up some of the economic interest involved.

The Brazilian parliament has taken several steps in the right direction after the fiasco of the November auctions  primarily it had aimed to render pre-salt projects more accessible by means of revoking the pre-salt polygon status from the Santos and Campos basins. The main objective is to allow the national regulator to choose flexibly on the contract regime for any given pre-salt block (i.e. concession contracts instead of a fixed-regime production sharing contract) and to renounce on Petrobras strategic status in all matters related to pre-salt. Although a more frequent usage of concessions would most probably lead to respective governments having a bigger say in policy matters, they also present an opportunity for regional governments as they would receive a higher share of oil revenues (versus the federal government).

By Viktor Katona for Oilprice.com

More Top Reads From Oilprice.com:

Read this article on OilPrice.com
TAOISEACH Leo Varadkar has said it will take until at least June to form a government - as he faced opposition from Fine Gael Ministers to a grand coalition with Fianna Fail.

Mr Varadkar defended his deal with Micheal Martin in a teleconference with TDs and Senators on Wednesday, insisting the framework document negotiated between the two parties contains solid Fine Gael thinking on areas like tax and capital investment.

On the day their historic plan to govern together was published, the two party leaders faced contrasting moods in their respective parties.

Fianna Fail TDs broadly backed Mr Martins approach in a teleconference call described as "all love and light" by one TD afterwards.

Mr Varadkar told his party that Fine Gael needs to play a role in government and that while he had no doubt it was the right thing for the country, he admitted it was "harder to judge" whether it is right for Fine Gael.

Read More

While Mr Varadkar was given the green light to proceed with efforts to form a government by reaching out to smaller parties, a number of ministers expressed opposition to coalescing with Fianna Fail.

Rural Affairs Minister Michael Ring was said to be "firmly against" the idea. Local Government Minister John Paul Phelan warned "that far from stability this will bring instability".

A number of other ministers including Agriculture Minister Michael Creed and newly-elected Senators Sean Kyne and Michael DArcy expressed reservations about governing with Fianna Fail - but did not openly oppose the deal. Fine Gael Senator Jerry Buttimer raised concerns about Micheal Martin becoming Taoiseach.

By contrast the Fianna Fail meeting was said to have passed off without any opposition being expressed to the efforts to form a government progressing.

Senior TD Jim OCallaghan expressed concern about the party coming under attack from Sinn Fein for going into government with Fine Gael.

Mr OCallaghan said Fianna Fail needs to explain clearly that it is only going into Government because circumstances have changed and the country is facing the Covid- 19 national emergency.

He told colleagues that being in government will be difficult and Fianna Fail needs to be ready for Sinn Fein attacks in "online videos".

Carlow-Kilkenny TD John McGuinness told the meeting the only thing missing from the framework document is "free WiFi and Netflix" and that he cannot see how any politician could not support it.

Those involved in the meeting said Mr McGuinness did not express a view either way on going into government with Fine Gael, but asked about how any programme for government would be approved.

Several TDs and Senators raised the issue of there being a lack of detail in the document and the need for the parliamentary to have more input into any programme for Government.

"Micheal has accepted that point and noted that people have already emailed suggestions for a programme for government and he wants to hear from members on what should be inputted," said one source source at the meeting.

Senator Fiona OLoughlin suggested tax increases could be needed to fund spending commitments in the document.

Veteran TD Eamon O Cuiv criticised the lack of accountability in the Dail, at present, and again raised the prospect of a national unity government.

Both parties encountered technical difficulties with their respective teleconferences.

Fianna Fails meeting was delayed as a number of TDs and senators had trouble connecting.

Meanwhile, Fine Gael chairman Martin Heydon, fearing the call had been infiltrated by non-parliamentary party members, inadvertently disconnected a number of members whose numbers were not recognised.

"These things are not great," said one TD afterwards.

Earlier, senior figures in both parties were scrambling to sell the prospect of a Fianna Fail-Fine Gael coalition to the grassroots.

Fianna Fail deputy leader Dara Calleary wrote to all members insisting the party's core principles are protected in the framework document. He wrote: "I know that for many of you that this is a difficult proposition.

"However, our country is going through one of its greatest tests and faces more such tests in the immediate future.

"Our party has never shirked from the challenge of government in testing times. I believe we cannot shirk that challenge on this occasion."

Fine Gael Ministers Josepha Madigan and Richard Bruton were deployed to gauge the views of councillors in Limerick and Dublin respectively.

It is understood there were some calls among the Limerick representatives for a possible second election after the coronavirus crisis.

Cllr John Sheahan said councillors didn't come down one side or the other on doing a deal with Fianna Fail.He said "it's a suck it and see situation with the Grand Coalition but there were concerns about it."

In Dublin, Fingal councillor Tom O'Leary who was on the conference call with Mr Bruton said there was a "large majority" in favour of a coalition subject to a detailed Programme for Government being agreed.
A man has been jailed for at least three and a half years after he offered rides to two different women he met on a couchsurfing app, then forced himself on them in remote locations.

Mahmudul Bobbe, 32, attacked the women within days of each other in August 2018 after contacting them through the app. Both of the women were international tourists who had just arrived in Sydney  one from Japan and the other from Brazil.

Bobbe (not shown in this generic picture) assaulted the women after meeting them on a couchsurfing app. Credit:Glenn Hunt

One of the women had dinner with Bobbe at Wolli Creek in Sydney's south on August 16 before they planned to drive to a nightclub in the CBD to meet with a group of people. When the pair got into Bobbe's car about 11pm, he got out and went to the passenger side claiming to look for a cigarette lighter.

He then pinned the woman down in the passenger seat, groped her and put his hand down her pants. The panicked woman managed to push Bobbe away and fled through his unit's car park, slipping under an electric roller door before it completely closed.
[April 15, 2020] COVID-19 has Brought About a Demand Vaporization in the Automotive industry, Says Zinnov

- Changing consumer demand, a disrupted supply chain, and production stoppages are impacting the Automotive industry - Ride sharing firms have been impacted as Uber, Lyft, and other mobility providers have lost upwards of 60% market value as consumers opt out of the "sharing economy." There will be business model pivots to create alternative revenue streams - On the other side of recovery, Industry 4.0 and Automation-led initiatives will take center stage as carmakers seek enhanced manufacturing productivity SANTA CLARA, California, April 15, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- Zinnov, a leading global management and strategy consulting firm, has assessed the shifting gears of the Automotive industry in the shadow of the COVID-19 situation. Zinnov evaluated the impact of COVID-19 on the Global Automotive industry as a whole and on the various players across the automotive value chain including OEMs, Tier-1s, and ride sharing firms. The assessment identified the expected shifts in consumption patterns as well as changing R&D and digital priorities for carmakers on the other side of COVID-19. The Automotive industry enjoyed an incredible bull run from 2010 to 2018 wherein even developed markets like the US and Europe saw ~5% CAGR growth. This period was defined by technological and consumption pattern disruptions. Carmakers expended budget and effort on large programs focusing on the four key trends that defined this golden age namely Electrification, Autonomous, Connected, and Shared Mobility. The growing market attracted investments even from outside the traditional OEM/Tier-1 supplier community including new-age OEMs (Tesla, Nio, etc.), asset-light companies (Uber, Lyft, etc.), and enterprises from other industry verticals such as Alphabet. However, the Auto industry started witnessing the initial signs of a slowdown in the first quarter of 2019, which has been exacerbated by COVID-19, because of the direct impact on consumer demand. Taking a data-led approach, Zinnov evaluated multiple factors like shifts in consumer spending as a result of changing risk appetites, supply chain disruptions, industry fiscal health, existing globalization levels of the automotive workforce, and digital readiness, to assess the impact of COVID-19 on the Auto industry. What is irrefutable, is that the ongoing situation has impacted OEMs and Tier-1s alike, who have collectively lost ~20-40% of their market value since the start of the outbreak. The initial impact of COVID-19 on the automotive supply chain and production was localized to China, up until January 2020. owever, with the spread of the virus to Europe in February and the US in March, Zinnov's analysis found that the Automotive industry's key concern shifted from supply chain disruption to demand vaporization.



Zinnov also shared that the sharing/ride-as-a-service economy has been impacted to a greater degree. Uber and Lyft have lost upwards of 60% of their market value/valuations as consumers are increasingly opting out of the sharing economy. The forced lockdowns and social distancing norms have further intensified this problem. All these factors are causing future revenue concerns as well as delay in realization of the already elusive profitability in this space. The industry is now in the middle of one of its toughest bear phases. Automakers are aggressively leveraging technology, pivoting their business models, and re-engineering their processes and talent to recover from this crisis. There will be an increase in the leverage of online sales channels with carmakers enabling digital showrooms and touchless delivery/shopping through Virtual Reality (VR) solutions. Initial anecdotal evidence points towards an easing of environmental regulations as governments across the globe prioritize spending on economic activity over the environment and EV-related subsidies.

Given the changes across the value chain, automakers will reprioritize their R&D initiatives on the other side of recovery and only two of the four key trends namely Connected and Autonomous are likely to attract a majority of this spend, stated Zinnov. Shared Mobility programs are expected to take a hit given the shift in consumer preference towards "self-owned" cars. However, evidence suggests that "vehicle subscription" will become a trend, with automakers and software companies spending on software to enable such subscription platforms. Auto companies are also most likely to focus on enhancing manufacturing productivity and efficiency by leveraging Plant Automation, Industry 4.0, Cloud-based ERP and PLM systems. In addition to the measures being taken by the industry and the auto players themselves, governments across the world are also expected to play a crucial role in these extraordinary conditions, stated Zinnov. Auto companies are likely to benefit from their respective governments' expansionary fiscal policies including explicit bail-out packages. Speaking about the Auto industry, Sidhant Rastogi, Managing Partner, Zinnov, said, "There will be a definitive shift in the way Auto companies will channelize their investments in the aftermath of COVID-19. In the near-term, the relaxation of emission norms, drying up of environment/EV-related subsidies might force certain automakers to put high investment electric powertrain programs on the back burner. In the long term however, there will be renewed focus on making their digital investments count by enabling digital/touchless walkthrough and delivery experiences, bringing in greater efficiencies by leveraging Industry 4.0 and Automation, and innovating on the existing business models to align to the post COVID-19 reality." "Over the next 18-24 months, we see a paradigm shift happening in the way traditional automakers and the new-age players will operate. Auto players will, in all probability, realign their demand generation initiatives and business models, thereby creating opportunities for strategic partnerships and alliances to sustain in a new reality," he added. About Zinnov Founded in 2002, Zinnov is a leading global management and strategy consulting firm, with presence in Santa Clara, Houston, Bangalore, Gurgaon, and Paris. Over the past 18 years, Zinnov has successfully consulted with over 250+ Fortune 500 enterprises and technology companies to develop actionable insights that help them create value  across dimensions of both revenue and optimization. With core expertise in Product Engineering, Digital Transformation, Innovation, and Outsourcing Advisory, Zinnov assists clients by: Enabling global companies to develop and optimize a global engineering footprint through center setups, and technology and functional accelerators to achieve higher R&D efficiencies, innovation, and productivity;

Advising global PE firms in asset shortlisting and target evaluation, commercial due diligence, and value creation;

Growing revenue for companies' products and services in newer markets through account intelligence, market entry, and market expansion advisory;

Structuring and implementing Digital Transformation levers enabled by technologies like AI/ML, Cloud, IOT, and RPA;

Helping global companies outline and drive their open innovation programs, design and operate accelerator programs, and enable collaboration with start-ups across specific use cases and predefined outcomes. With their team of experienced consultants, subject matter experts, and research professionals, Zinnov serves clients from across multiple industry verticals including Enterprise Software, BFSI, Healthcare, Automotive, Retail, and Telecom in the US, Europe, Japan, and India. For more information, visit http://zinnov.com. Media contact Nitika Goel

Chief Marketing Officer, Zinnov

[email protected]

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Guatemala's health minister said Tuesday that deportees from the United States were driving up the country's COVID-19 caseload, adding that on one flight some 75% of the deportees tested positive for the virus.

Health Minister Hugo Monroy's comments were dramatically out of line with what the government had previously said about infected deportees. Later, presidential spokesman Carlos Sandoval told reporters that Monroy was referring to a March flight on which between 50% and 75% (of the passengers) during all their time in isolation and quarantine have come back positive.

Before Tuesday, Guatemala had only reported three positive infections among deportees flown back by the United States.

Joaqun Samayoa, spokesman for the foreign affairs ministry, confirmed a fourth positive case for a migrant who arrived on a flight Monday. At least three of the migrants who arrived Monday were taken directly to a hospital for COVID-19 testing.

President Alejandro Giammattei addressed the nation later, but made no mention of the deportees.

It remained unclear why before Tuesday the government had only reported three deportees who tested positive and how many more would have been among the high percentage who tested positive aboard that March flight. Giammattei said Tuesday there were a total of 175 people who had tested positive in Guatemala and five who had died.

There are really flights where the deportees arrive ... citizens who come with fever, and they get on the planes that way, Monroy said.

We automatically evaluate them here and test them and many of them have come back positive. He added that the United States had practically become the Wuhan of the region, referring to the Chinese province where the pandemic began.

Guatemala again began receiving deportation flights from the United States Monday after a one-week pause prompted by three deportees testing positive for COVID-19.

The Guatemalan government had asked the United States to not send more than 25 deportees per flight, to give them health exams before departure and to certify that they were not infected.

However, the flights resumed Monday with 76 migrants aboard the first and 106 on the second. Guatemala's foreign ministry did not immediately clarify why the U.S. had not complied with its requirements, but the flights came on the same day that the U.S. State Department announced that aid would continue to Guatemala and the other Northern Triangle countries.

One of Monday's flights also included 16 unaccompanied minors, according to the Guatemalan Immigration Institute.

Since January, the U.S. has deported nearly 12,000 Guatemalans, including more than 1,200 children.

Citing the epidemic, the U.S. has started swiftly deporting unaccompanied minors rather than holding them in protective settings as specified by law.

Also on Monday, U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said in a statement that he had informed Congress that the U.S. government would continue assistance for Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras in order to continue to lower illegal immigration and accomplish other policy objectives.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
The total blockade imposed by the polisario leaders on the Sahrawis sequestered in the Tindouf camps under the pretext of the coronavirus pandemic has boosted the million-dollar smuggling business of the corrupt Polisario chiefs.

Six trucks loaded with 25 tons of flour, semolina or pasta, four tank trucks filled with 100 tons of diesel and gasoline and two trucks carrying 750 propane gas bottles have left the Rabouni camps under the pretext that they are heading to the populations in liberated zones in the buffer strip between Morocco and Mauritania.

But its a lie which neither the sequestered Sahrawis nor the international relief agencies believe. They are convinced that this humanitarian aid has been hijacked by the polisario leaders and will be resold as usual in the black markets in Southern Algeria and sub-Saharan countries.

Several NGOs have decried the corruption of the Polisario separatists and their embezzlement of the international aid destined for the Sahrawis of Tindouf Camps.

The anti-fraud office of the European Union (OLAF) had conducted a very thorough investigation on the massive diversions of humanitarian aid and released in 2015 a report documenting the involvement of the polisario and Algeria in these diversions.

OLAF had managed to track down the whole system put in place by the Polisario leaders with the complicity of Algerian officials, from the unloading of international humanitarian aid in the port of Oran until it is displayed for sale in markets in Algeria, Mauritania and even Mali.

Trapped in lamentable living conditions, the Sahrawis of Tindouf camps, who are held against their will by polisario armed militiamen, have been used and abused by the separatists for political and criminal gains.

It is high for time for the international community to shoulder its responsibilities and to hold Algeria accountable as it hosts these Sahrawis on its territory.
Members of the Los Angeles Tenants Union and their supporters hold a demonstration at Mariachi Plaza in Boyle Heights on April 1 to demand rent forgiveness for the month because of the coronavirus pandemic's economic fallout. (Los Angeles Times)

A growing number of states and cities have enacted eviction moratoriums to protect tenants from losing their homes if they cant pay the rent during the coronavirus emergency.

This is just common sense. Governments have ordered businesses to close and people to shelter in place to avoid spreading COVID-19; it would be cruel and counterproductive if people who've lost their jobs and their incomes also lose their homes.

But this temporary reprieve is not easy to grant or without pitfalls.

Most moratoriums simply halt evictions for non-payment. Tenants will eventually have to come up with the rent payments they missed. If they cant pay off their rent debt, theyll still face eviction and hardship. Tenant groups are pushing governors in California, New York, Washington and other states to go further and use their emergency powers to fully cancel rent obligations until communities reopen. And others are calling on tenants to withhold payments in a coordinated rent strike on May 1 to force the issue.

What about the landlords? Eviction moratoriums force property owners to go without rent payments for two to six months, or possibly even longer if the social-distancing-driven shutdowns drag on. How are landlords supposed to pay their property taxes or utility bills? How can they pay the employees who manage the day-to-day operations of properties?

Renters need help, but so do landlords. We want landlords to stay in business. They provide an essential service: a roof over ones head.

It should be clear to lawmakers that the next federal relief package has to help landlords stay afloat too.

Most landlords are small-business owners who rely on rent payments for their income or retirement. Nearly three-quarters of apartment properties in the U.S. are owned by individuals, not corporations or investor groups, and most apartment buildings have only a handful of units. In California, about half of rentals are in properties with five units or less. If two tenants in a small complex cant pay the rent, thats a serious financial hit.

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Without rent coming in, these landlords risk foreclosure if their lenders dont give them the option to delay mortgage payments. Some landlords are entitled to that relief; under the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act that Congress passed last month, rental properties with federally backed loans can get their mortgage payments delayed if they do not evict tenants who cant pay the rent during the coronavirus emergency. But only about half of landlords have government-backed mortgages; the rest have to individually negotiate an agreement with their lenders.

And thats just the mortgage payment. Landlords still need to pay property taxes, insurance and maintenance, even if the rent checks stop coming.

Theres a real concern that the financial toll caused by lost rental income could prompt landlords to sell their properties in droves. That could also hasten the shift from mom-and-pop landlords to investment firms that own and manage huge numbers of rental properties. Advocates say that shift, which accelerated after the last recession, has already resulted in the loss of older, more affordable apartments as investors buy up properties to remodel and raise the rents.

And while the immediate concern is the fate of small landlords, policymakers should also worry that tenants inability to pay will eventually hit corporate owners of rental properties and large investors, too. Public employee pension funds have invested heavily in real estate and mortgage securities. If the value of the funds drop and the return on those investments declines, taxpayers have to make up the difference.

Again, the need to provide some kind of help to landlords is clear. The tougher question is, who will end up paying the cost?

One idea is to use federal tax dollars to provide rent vouchers to people whose incomes have dried up in the pandemic. That would help renters and landlords alike, albeit at the taxpayers' expense. But policymakers would need to avoid the moral hazard of shielding giant corporate property owners and Wall Street investors from risks they chose to take, while also not duplicating the other forms of aid Congress has provided to help laid-off workers and small-business employees.

The complexities shouldn't deter Congress from tackling the issue; the stakes are just too high. The COVID-19 pandemic is a stark reminder that communities have a shared interest in keeping people housed and keeping landlords in business. Eviction moratoriums were an important first step, but Congress and the Trump administration should be prepared to spend more time and money to ensure this temporary public health emergency doesn't fuel another housing crisis.
Saudi Arabia praised the efficiency of the Egyptian security services and their success in foiling an imminent terrorist attack by neutralising the members of a terrorist cell who were planning terrorist acts on the upcoming Easter, according to a statement.

Egyptian security forces killed seven terrorists in a raid on a hideout in El-Amiriya neighbourhood in eastern Cairo on Tuesday evening. The cell was planning to carry out terrorist operations during the Easter holiday, according to a statement by the interior ministry. One officer was killed and three other policemen were injured during the security raid.

The Saudi foreign ministry said in a statement on Wednesday that the Kingdom stands firmly with the sisterly Arab Republic of Egypt and its measures to ensure the safety of citizens.

The ministry also offered condolences to the family of the victim and to the government and people of Egypt, wishing a speedy recovery for the injured.

The Egyptian president, Cabinet, and the Armed Forces issued statements mourning the death of Lieutenant-colonel Mohamed El-Houfy, the National Security Agency officer who was killed during the incident.
In late December 2019, a cluster of pneumonia cases caused by an unknown pathogen was reported in Wuhan, a city of 11 million residents. A novel coronavirus was identified as the etiological agent and human-to-human transmission of the virus (SARS-CoV-2) has been since confirmed. Novel Coronavirus (COVID-19) is now a global terror. Everybody in the world is worried and scared about it.

As there is neither a vaccine nor a specific drug treatment for COVID-19, and a lot of the relevant information about the virus is still unknown, a range of public health (non-pharmaceutical) interventions has been used to control the epidemic. The city of Wuhan was locked down from 23 January 2020. At that time, I was on a tour to the UAE. As a foreign doctor who has lived in China for many years, I immediately cancelled my further plans and returned to Beijing the next day.

I had first-hand experience of this war and will share the measures taken by China, which may be categorized as below:

Lockdown

Prevention is better than cure. China took the appropriate approach to the virus. As there is no vaccine or medicine, the best idea was to isolate all confirmed cases and put all suspected cases under quarantine. Since people can spread the virus before they know they are sick, Wuhan, the epicenter of the disease in China, was totally isolated from rest of the country through a lockdown. With a few exceptions, nobody could enter or leave the city. Daily and emergency essentials such as food and supplies flowed through organized and government-controlled arrangements. Infectious disease care and management facilities were introduced to isolate, monitor and treat positive cases. The wearing of masks in public was encouraged, which played an effective role in preventing the virus. Later, similar measures were also taken in other parts of China, which successfully reduced the spread of the virus.

Quick identification and detection

Within a week of the emergence of this new unknown virus, China reported its genetic information to the World Health Organization (WHO). In order to control a major epidemic, it is important to have reliable, specific, accurate and fast detection methods to screen infected and non-infected people. There were no test kits available to identify the infected in the early days of the outbreak apart from screening that depended on laboratory nucleic acid sequencing analysis, which is a labor-intensive and costly method. The immediate action taken by Chinese biotech companies in developing detection kits resulted in the first kit being introduced on 13 January.

Time management

China took the necessary decisions at the right time for the right people. Chinas unprecedented systematic and proactive risk management, based on collaboration between government officials and health experts, has proven to be effective in controlling COVID-19. The risk management response was raised to the highest level in the early days of the outbreak.

Health databank

A health databank was found to be very effective in controlling the spread of the virus. Each individual was asked to inform their respective authorities of their details including location, body temperature, symptoms, and so on to in order to maintain their health status level on a daily basis, and immediate actions were taken if anyone was found to have clinical symptoms or risk of contracting COVID-19.

Electronic recording and tracking systems were established and local response teams were ready 24/7 to handle the identified cases. Moreover, QR Codes were introduced for everyone entering or leaving their locality. The green code allows one to move freely. The yellow code requires a seven-day self-quarantine, while the red code requires a 14-day self-quarantine.

Mobilization of resources

The government immediately mobilized and allocated resources to manage and monitor the evolving epidemic in a proactive fashion, achieving impressive results. The shortage of protective medical supplies and lack of knowledge about COVID-19 were the main factors causing the large number of healthcare workers to contract the virus in the early weeks of the outbreak in Wuhan. Some 42,000 doctors and nurses were sent to the city to combat the outbreak. Educational institutions such as Peking University and Capital Medical University, where I studied, also sent medical teams to Wuhan. Two new hospitals with over 1,000 beds each were built in less than 10 days in Wuhan.

Public participation

China continuously provided factual and scientific information to people and led the way in fighting the disease. Clear guidance about the degree and scope of lockdowns was given. Centralized reporting and communication channels were established to keep people informed. Major news outlets provided daily updates on the number of COVID-19 cases. Clinical treatment outcomes, plans to be implemented and guidelines on which procedures to follow were disseminated to the people. Educational institutions have been fully engaged since the beginning of the outbreak. They developed easy-to-understand educational materials for students and the public with information about COVID-19 and how to prevent the disease.

Effective implementation

Careful planning and clear guidance are very important. All government orders, decisions and guidelines were successfully executed. A tracking system was implemented covering individuals, apartments, houses, communities, organizations, public facilities and city management. In fighting COVID-19, everyone has the same responsibility. The key to success is making everyone responsible, getting every unit involved and holding officials accountable. People also changed their lifestyles in response to the new challenges. Many businesses, organizations, schools and universities such as Peking University and Capital Medical University successfully implemented computer-based online learning using technology, which can serve as models for future development.

The victory

China successfully utilized robotics and many advanced technologies such as 5G to play a vital role in this war. After months of combatting the virus, China is restarting its economy, reopening schools and returning to normalcy. China may have lost billions of dollars by essentially stopping all business, but in the end, this was a wise decision and the correct action to take.

The Wuhan lockdown ended and communications were established again.

In short, COVID-19 teaches us the importance of preparedness to prevent and control an infectious disease outbreak as well as to modernize disease control and prevention around the world.

Dr. Nazmus Sakib is a Bangladeshi pediatrician, received his MBBS and MD at Capital Medical University, and has worked at Beijing Childrens Hospital. He is currently a PhD Fellow at Peking University First Hospital.
Chinese property developer Yida China is battling to avoid defaulting on its debt as the coronavirus pandemic slams sales, borrowing costs spiral and police detain a director on suspicion of embezzlement.

Heavily indebted developers like Yida act as an early warning system for trouble in Asia's financial system because their foreign-denominated debt is frequently traded and they are a large contributor to local government budgets in the world's second-largest economy.

Alarm bells are ringing as Asia's financial system strains to fund struggling companies, from such small Chinese developers to Indonesian oil exporters and Singaporean airlines.

As the International Monetary Fund predicts a global slump unmatched since the Great Depression, the region's borrowers are queuing up for credit. Only the largest, safest names are confident of securing funds.

"Despite the slow return to normalcy in mainland China, the sharp rise in Covid-19 cases in the rest of the Asia-Pacific is translating to an environment at least as challenging as the 1997-98 Asian financial crisis for borrowers," said Terry Chan at credit ratings agency S&P Global Ratings.

The bottom line is that a short-term cash shortfall is hardening into a solvency crisis for a growing cohort of zombie companies as the coronavirus pandemic stifles demand for their goods and services. Bailout packages vary dramatically, from India's relief measures equating to about 1 per cent of GDP to Japan's bazooka of roughly 20 per cent.

The region's bankers are struggling with the moral hazard of propping up deadbeat borrowers under pressure from governments and the public to protect jobs.

"The companies that have a solvency problem, not just a liquidity problem, will find it harder to get access to finance once the government taps are turned off," said Piyush Gupta, the CEO of regional bank DBS.

He expects banker-bashing to reach a crescendo when government relief packages wind down and companies that are no longer viable go bankrupt because lenders refused to save them.

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The financial crisis has evolved swiftly. As demand slumped, missed payments snowballed along supply chains, leaving companies with less cash to cover costs.

"The supply chain is a payments chain in reverse " so an abrupt halt in production can quickly lead to missed payments elsewhere," said Zoltan Pozsar, an investment strategist at Credit Suisse who previously gathered market intelligence for the US Federal Reserve during the 2007-08 global financial crisis.

Shortly afterwards, the equity and debt capital-raising machines of Hong Kong and Singapore all but ground to a halt as investors pulled a record US$55 billion from Asian emerging markets in March.

The region's companies, which were already grappling with fallout from the US-China trade war, face the spectre of a global financial shock and economic recession.

Some companies, such as Singapore Airlines, have already taken the drastic step of launching highly dilutive equity rights issues to keep operations running. Investment bankers expect more emergency offerings, massive industry consolidation and a spike in debt-restructuring work.

Cash-strapped Chinese conglomerate HNA hastily convened a teleconference on Tuesday with creditors to postpone paying the principal and interest on its 7-year bonds worth 1.15 billion yuan (US$163 million) due on April 15.

Singapore Airlines secured US$13 billion from a rights issue in March. Photo: Reuters alt=Singapore Airlines secured US$13 billion from a rights issue in March. Photo: Reuters

The pandemic has exposed weaknesses in Asia's financial system. Since the 1997-98 financial crash and the 2007-08 global financial crisis, the region's financial plumbing has become more interwoven with the rest of the world, multiplying pathways for financial contagion.

The IMF on Tuesday forecast that the global economy would shrink by 3 per cent this year as the deadly coronavirus plunged developed and emerging economies into recessions.

"I'm watching for the rolling unintended and unexpected consequences of this financial crisis," said Eric Solberg, chairman and chief executive of private investment firm EXS Capital Group, who has been buying and selling property companies in Asia since the 1990s.

While Asia's governments and banks have fatter capital buffers to ward off contagion and the region's local currency markets have swollen since 2008, they are still susceptible to the sheer volume of debt in the system.

China's debt as a percentage of GDP, for instance, ballooned from early 1997 when it stood at 7.8 per cent, to 54.3 per cent late last year, according to the Institute of International Finance.

Chinese developers saw sales crash early this year as coronavirus disrupted business. Photo: Getty Images/iStockphoto alt=Chinese developers saw sales crash early this year as coronavirus disrupted business. Photo: Getty Images/iStockphoto

Another channel for financial contagion is foreign direct investment (FDI). Chinese overseas direct investment has expanded from about 1 per cent of the global pie in the early 1990s to roughly 10 per cent, said the World Bank. The Middle Kingdom has financed power projects in Laos, real estate in Cambodia and mining in Mongolia.

An early sign that China is cutting back on this largesse is mergers and acquisitions data, a major component of FDI. Chinese purchases in the rest of Asia slumped to US$1.3 billion during the first quarter of the year, the slowest quarter by value since early 2010 according to Refinitiv data. The drop is especially notable given that China's economy has almost tripled in size over the past decade.

To make ends meet, Asian borrowers rely more heavily on relationship banking, short-term and uncommitted lines of credit, than they do in the west where companies can tap deeper and more liquid capital markets.

"To support clients requiring inventory management during this time, we are working with them to either provide extensions of tenors or, where required, incremental working capital facilities," said Farhan Faruqui, head of ANZ's institutional business outside Australia.

Businesses are rapidly drawing down on dollar-denominated credit lines in the region, so much that bankers said they are punching their calculators every day to check credit exposures by division and by client. Bankers are conserving credit for their best clients, setting the bar high for new business.

Governments are lowering the amount of capital they require banks to hold to keep capital flowing. Hong Kong's de facto central bank, for example, cut the level of regulatory reserves by half, releasing HK$200 billion (US$26 billion). Still, regulators are not forcing banks to lend and banks are wary of taking on more bad debt.

State-led rescue packages have bought the strongest companies time to recover but have kicked the can down the road for others.

"The worst of the problems will surface down the road because of all the relief measures that the authorities are providing," said DBS's Gupta. He expects some pickup in non-performing loans and credit costs in the first half of this year, more in the second half, but with the full extent of the problem only becoming clear next year.

Asian banks' credit costs will spike by US$300 billion and non-performing assets will rise by US$600 billion in 2020, credit rating agency S&P Global Ratings forecast in a report on April 6.

DBS's Gupta worried about moral hazard. Photo: Reuters alt=DBS's Gupta worried about moral hazard. Photo: Reuters

That leaves many companies in a bind. Chinese property developers, for instance, have around US$57.9 billion of onshore bonds and US$34.9 billion of offshore bonds coming due in the next 12 months, according to credit ratings agency Moody's calculations.

"Low-rated companies face a challenging time, especially if they need to refinance bonds this year ... There will be more negative rating actions by rating agencies," said Stan Ho, CEO at China-focused Lianhe Ratings Global.

Fallen angels, once investment-grade companies relegated to junk bond status, are likely to multiply. A cascade of credit rating downgrades means even more expensive financing.

Private investors are unlikely to step at scale. While private equity funds had US$1.46 trillion of dry powder as of June, according to Preqin, many funds are too busy helping existing portfolio companies. Those that have capital are discerning on price.

"I see a lot of financial stress in the economy, in terms of cash flow management," said Tony Zhang, a partner at private equity investor Jeneration Capital, who warned that companies looking to secure funds will have to be price-takers and prove that they can weather the storm.

The small Chinese property developer, Yida, narrowly avoided default in March by swapping US$300 million of offshore debt for cash and new notes as well as extending a bank loan repayment. However, credit rating agencies downgraded its debt to deep junk and warned the risk it would not secure refinancing over the next 12 months is high.

Sign up now and get a 10% discount (original price US$400) off the China AI Report 2020 by SCMP Research. Learn about the AI ambitions of Alibaba, Baidu & JD.com through our in-depth case studies, and explore new applications of AI across industries. The report also includes exclusive access to webinars to interact with C-level executives from leading China AI companies (via live Q&A sessions). Offer valid until 31 May 2020.

This article originally appeared in the South China Morning Post (SCMP), the most authoritative voice reporting on China and Asia for more than a century. For more SCMP stories, please explore the SCMP app or visit the SCMP's Facebook and Twitter pages. Copyright  2020 South China Morning Post Publishers Ltd. All rights reserved.

Copyright (c) 2020. South China Morning Post Publishers Ltd. All rights reserved.
A new study estimates that as many as 270,000 Californians are infected with the coronavirus, more than 10 times the number reported, and that New York is much worse off than even the most pessimistic disease trackers believe.

The 61-page report appears to bolster the long-held belief by medical specialists that there is a huge population of untested virus carriers who could be infecting others, but Bay Area epidemiologists are skeptical that the infection rate could be as high as the authors predict.

Dayton Thorpe, an independent San Francisco data scientist, and Kelsey Lyberger, a doctoral candidate in population biology at UC Davis, used extrapolations from reported deaths in the United States to postulate that the number of people infected with the coronavirus in all 50 states is 39 times higher than reported.

The study claims almost half of New Yorkers are probably infected, by far the most in the nation.

There are more cases than I thought, Thorpe said. That is absolutely a concern. The virus is in more people and in more places than anyone thought.

Local experts, however, questioned the report, particularly the projected numbers in New York. They say that even if the model is sound, coronavirus projections like this one are based on incomplete and faulty data, particularly in the United States, which is hampered by a lack of testing.

Sounds like a massive stretch to me, said George Rutherford, a professor of epidemiology and biostatistics at the UCSF School of Medicine. Im highly, highly skeptical.

But the projections arent completely out of line with previous studies, including one in the academic journal Science last month that estimated 86% of all infections were undocumented. Harvard epidemiologist Marc Lipsitch told the Atlantic in February that 40% to 70% of people worldwide could be infected within the year.

Gov. Gavin Newsom warned last month that as many as half of Californians  about 20 million people  could end up with the coronavirus in two months if nothing were done to stop the spread. To prevent that, the entire state has been shuttered since then. Experts now say Newsoms projection would have taken a year or two even if no actions were taken to halt the spread.

The general consensus among the various studies seems to be that there are about 10 infections for every 1 that is diagnosed.

Thorpe and Lyberger said they used the same method that researchers at Imperial College London used to calculate infection rates around the world, including the prediction that 2 million people could die if the United States did nothing.

It was the Imperial College study that purportedly persuaded President Trump to release a 15-day plan on March 16 asking Americans to work from home and take other measures to slow the spread of the virus.

The latest study, which was provided to The Chronicle but has not yet been published, took the number of fatalities, and used death and infection percentages taken from 1,300 people placed on repatriation flights in China to extrapolate the percentage of infected people in the United States.

The death rate of 0.8% commonly used by researchers was calculated from the studies done on the repatriation flights. Thats eight times worse than the flu.

The calculations took into account the three to four weeks it usually takes the sickest people to die and the average speed of the virus spread and factored in the shelter-in-place and other measures taken to reduce the infection rate. Out of that came estimates of the total number of infections  known and unknown  in every state.

Todd Trumbull

The model estimated 9 million infections in New York state. Thats 46% of the states 19.5 million residents. Second worse was New Jersey, where the model said 1.4 million people were infected, or 16% of the population. Louisiana was third with 10% of its population projected to be carrying the virus.

The estimated value in New York is so high that it is likely close to herd immunity, Thorpe and Lyberger wrote in the report, referring to the level at which so many people are infected that the spread slows because so many people are immune.

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 other state is close to herd immunity, the study said.

The 270,000 people estimated to be infected in California represent 0.69% of its 39 million residents. As of Tuesday, 25,367 positive cases had been reported in California, including 766 deaths. In the Bay Area, there were 5,307 reported cases and 146 deaths.

Overall, 4.8% of the U.S. population was carrying the disease by early April, according to the model. Excluding New York state, which accounts for half the estimated infections in the country, the infection rate is 2% of the population, according to the calculations.

As of Tuesday, there were 592,743 reported cases in the United States, according to Johns Hopkins University.

The huge number of undocumented infections outlined in Thorpe and Lybergers study could explain the rapid geographic spread of SARS-CoV-2  the virus formal name  and indicate how challenging containment of this virus will be. But like some of the previous studies, the projections used statistics from a limited number of cases in China, which experts say could be problematic.

Joseph Lewnard, an assistant professor of epidemiology at the UC Berkeley School of Public Health who uses mathematical and statistical modeling to study infectious diseases, said the study doesnt pass the smell test.

Even if the situation seems to have come under control earlier in California, it is highly suspect that the cumulative infections would be roughly 100 times higher in New York than in California, Lewnard said. For a virus that first emerged in humans around December 2019 in China, it is very hard to picture that there have been enough generations of spread to result in 9 million infections in New York alone, given what we know about transmissibility.

Thorpe, who works at a venture capital firm, Valor Equity Partners, said his study makes assumptions based on statistical analysis and, whether or not one agrees with the final tally, the point is crystal clear.

The takeaway is there are a huge number of people infected  many more than have had positive test results, Thorpe said. It means the best thing for policymakers to do is exactly what we are doing in California. This is still spreading quite widely. If we were to relax these restrictions, the spread would start to accelerate again and you would see more cases and more fatalities.

Peter Fimrite is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: pfimrite@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @pfimrite
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Linkedin Made Anthony Iswara (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Wed, April 15 2020

Researchers say they see themselves walking a long, winding road in helping the government battle the COVID-19 outbreak, as broader research is needed to improve countermeasures nationwide.

According to Indonesian Young Academy of Science (ALMI) secretary-general Berry Juliandi, the government has either been slow to adopt or ignored some of the association's science-based recommendations.

For instance, the governments decision to release inmates was contrary to the researchers suggestion to close prison doors for outside visitors to slow the virus spread. Their recommendation to ban this years Idul Fitri exodus and to use polymerase chain reaction (PCR) tests instead of serum-based rapid tests are examples of slow adoptions of their advice.

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Five people were reported dead after a tornado swept through the region around Nixville, South Carolina, early on the morning of April 13.

The fatalities were reported in Hampton County, where it was estimated that the damage spanned up to 20 square miles, local media reported.

Violent storms caused damage across several southern states  including Louisiana, Mississippi, Georgia, Tennessee and Alabama  during the night of April 12 and 13.

This video shows damage around Nixville following the storm, with destroyed homes and shredded trees visible in the footage.

Here we are in the middle of it. God, somebody help these people, a voice can be heard saying in the background. Credit: Rodney T Housey via Storyful
The class structure . . . make(s) it very easy in spreading things out, so students arent getting overwhelmed, Lavorato wrote in an email. Its nice to have three classes one day and then the other four the next day and not having to stress over it all in one day.
Indonesia has declared the COVID-19 outbreak a national disaster as confirmed infections approach 5,000; while Malaysia has introduced a price control scheme as its latest lockdown measure.

Singapore continues to grapple with hundreds of new daily cases affecting migrant worker dormitories while Hong Kong has seen another record low daily spread with just three new cases reported today.

Popular musicians in the region have also contracted the disease. They include Hong Kong opera star Warren Mok, who became infected after visiting Thailand. In Myanmar, rock icon Myo Gyi has taken ill.

More COVID-19 testing is expected to take place in the Philippines following Fridays opening of a new testing lab.

Markets throughout the region saw gains Tuesday, a positive sign attributed to better-than-expected trade numbers from China.

More updates from Coconuts newsrooms in Southeast Asia and Hong Kong:

Singapore

Confirmed coronavirus cases rose to 2,918 after 386 new cases were reported last night. Most involved patients living in migrant worker housing. The death toll rose to nine with the latest being a 65-year-old Singaporean man, aka case No. 1,836.

The government said it has stepped up inspections at dormitories to ensure living conditions are acceptable.

Thirty-one workers deemed to be healthy have been moved to vessels berthed at the Tanjong Pagar Terminal to prevent the disease from spreading further. They are a part of a group of 1,300 migrant workers who will progressively move to a floating isolation facility over the next few weeks. The Maritime and Port Authority did not say which dormitories they were from. More than 10 migrant worker dormitories have been hit by the virus.

Malaysia

The Malaysian government will begin controlling prices of 12 essential items such as eggs and cooking oil starting tomorrow as part of a new Movement Control Order rule after many errant traders were found to have increased prices arbitrarily.

Popular shopping district Masjid India in Kuala Lumpur has been put on lockdown after more than 40 people tested positive. Nobody is allowed to leave or enter the area, where shopping malls, hotels, and residential flats Selangor Mansion, the Malayan Mansion, and the Menara City One are located. Nearly 10,000 people live across the three residential places.

Confirmed coronavirus cases rose to 4,987 after 170 new infections were reported today. The death toll has risen to 85 after five new deaths were reported.

Story continues

Thailand

Confirmed coronavirus cases rose to 2,613 with 34 new infections. The death toll rose to 41. The latest death involved a bus driver in Bangkok who reportedly went out drinking with nine infected people.

Prime Minister Prayut Chan-o-cha today proposed to ASEAN leaders to establish a fund to finance medicine, medical equipment, and COVID-19 research.

The governor of one province comprising metro Bangkok hastily rescinded orders to reopen some businesses there after a backlash.

Hong Kong

City authorities reported only three new cases today, bringing the total number of infections to 1,012.

Opera star Warren Mok has also contracted the disease after a recent trip to Thailand.

Indonesia

President Joko Widodo today declared the COVID-19 outbreak a national disaster in the country, providing the disease task force greater authority to manage the crisis.

1.6 million Indonesian workers have either been laid off or placed on unpaid leave since the outbreak began in the country, government officials announced yesterday.

Confirmed coronavirus cases rose to 4,839 with 282 new cases. The death toll rose to 459.

Philippines

At least 50 police officers have tested positive in Manila.

A COVID-19 testing lab will open in Marikina City on Friday despite the absence of approval from the Health Department.

Confirmed coronavirus cases rose to 5,223 and the death toll to 335.

Myanmar

Confirmed coronavirus cases rose to 62 after 21 new infections were reported today. They include Myanmar rock icon Myo Gyi, according to Myanmar Times.

This article, COVID-19 Report: Indonesia declares outbreak a national disaster; Malaysia sets price controls, originally appeared on Coconuts, Asia's leading alternative media company. Want more Coconuts? Sign up for our newsletters!
- Sara Duterte, the current mayor of Davao City, said that she will donate her salary for one year to frontliners

- She disclosed that her total annual wage as city mayor is amounting to 2.1 million pesos

- Her target is the healthcare workers in Davao City who tested positive for the novel coronavirus disease

- The politician said that the amount will be used to create a trust fund for her beneficiaries

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Davao City Mayor Sara Duterte vowed to donate her entire salary for one year to medical frontliners who are battling the novel coronavirus disease.

KAMI learned that the presidential daughter said that she will use the money to create a trust fund for the employees of the Southern Philippines Medical Center (SPMC).

The female politician revealed that she earns up to P2,144,266 per year as a city mayor and it will be allotted this time for frontliners.

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Duterte admitted that it bothers her to think that there is a dozen of healthcare workers in the said hospital who tested positive for the dreadful virus.

She knows that no amount of money is enough to compensate for the hardwork of the medical frontliners but she believes that her one-year salary will be able to help them.

I contemplated to use this as trust fund for SPMC employees who tested positive, the Mayor told The Inquirer.

I know this cannot compensate for all the fear, anxiety, and exhaustion. Money cannot make up for everything but at least they would have some money that they can use, she added.

In a previous article by , Mayor Sara said that she is against federalism.

Sara Duterte is one of the most prominent politicians in the Philippines. She was elected for the second time as the Mayor of Davao City during the 2016 national elections.

POPULAR: Read more news about Sara Duterte!

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A Filipino found his own way to help frontliners amid pandemic. They had to walk an hour, an hour and a half to get to work. I mean, coming from an 8-hour shift sa hospital, tapos palalakarin mo pa yung nurse o kahit security guard. Parang hindi makatarungan, diba?  on HumanMeter!

Source: KAMI.com.gh
Tablighi Jamaat leader Maulana Saad Kandhalvi has been booked for culpable homicide after some of the attendees of the religious congregation died due to coronavirus, police said on Wednesday.

Kandhalvi had organised the religious gathering at Nizamuddin Markaz last month against the social distancing protocol imposed by the Centre to curb the spread of the deadly disease.

An FIR was registered against the cleric on March 31 at Crime Branch police station on a complaint of the Station House Officer of Nizamuddin.

He was earlier booked for holding the event, police said.

After several attendees of the Tablighi Jamaat event succumbed to coronavirus, we added IPC section 304 (culpable homicide not amounting to murder) in the FIR against the leader, a police official said.

Some foreigners who attended the event have also been booked for violation of visa norms.

In an audio message, Kandhalvi had said that he was exercising self-quarantine after several hundreds who visited the Tablighi Jamaat congregation at Nizamudddin Markaz tested positive for coronavirus.

The FIR registered against the Tablighi Jamaat event says that the Delhi Police contacted the authorities of Nizamuddin Markaz on March 21 and reminded them of the government order which prohibited any political or religious gathering of more than 50 people.

It says that despite repeated efforts, the event organisers failed to inform the health department or any other government agency about the huge gathering inside the Markaz and deliberately disobeyed government orders.

The sub district magistrate of Defence Colony inspected the premises several times and found that around 1,300 people, including foreign nationals, were residing there without maintaining social distance. It was also found that there were no arrangements of hand sanitizers and face masks, the FIR adds.

The Nizamudddin centre, attended by thousands, turned out to be a hotspot for spread of coronavirus not only in the national capital, but the entire country.

More than 25,500 Tablighi members and their contacts have been quarantined in the country after the Centre and the state governments conducted a "mega operation" to identify them.

At least 9,000 people participated in the religious congregation in Nizamuddin. Later, many of the attendees travelled to various parts of the country.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
She revealed last year that she was renovating a property ahead of giving birth.

And Lydia Bright has given her legions of social media followers a look at her newly refurbished kitchen along with her dining room.

Taking to Instagram, the former TOWIE star, 29, uploaded several videos where she gave her fans a look at the pristine interior of her home.

Tour: Lydia Bright, 29, has given her legions of social media followers a look at her newly refurbished kitchen

Sharing a glimpse at the kitchen, Lydia has installed white cupboards under matching marble counter tops.

The floor is covered with dark brown wood while Lydia also has a turquoise Smeg toaster and an old-fashioned kettle with a floral print on her cooker.

Alongside the video, Lydia wrote: 'Wow my homepage @lydiabrightshome has hit over 100k followers. Thanks for the love guys 

'Here is a little tour of my ground floor (minus the utility room this is yet to be completed.)'

Abode: Taking to Instagram, the former TOWIE star uploaded several videos where she gave her fans a look at the pristine interior of her home

Classic: Sharing a glimpse at the kitchen, Lydia has installed white cupboards under matching marble counter tops

Lydia then took viewers into her dining room which features a wooden table with wicker chairs in front of a black fireplace.

An oval mirror in an elegant gold frame hangs from the wall while the reality star also has a large giraffe stuffed animal placed next to a white cupboard.

It comes after Lydia was reunited with her younger sibling on Tuesday after the coronavirus pandemic forced him to return to Britain.

Following his period of isolation, Freddie wasted no time meeting his baby niece, Loretta Rose, who was born six weeks ago in February.

Interior: Lydia then took viewers into her dining room which features a wooden table with wicker chairs in front of a black fireplace

Toys: The reality star also has a large giraffe stuffed animal next to a white cupboard

Cosy: Lydia's sitting room features a large L-shaped couch with throw pillows

The beauty took to Instagram to share an adorable video of the pair meeting for the first time after Freddie returned to the family home for lockdown.

The reality star was moved to tears as Freddie picked up Loretta for a big hug and snuggle before cooing after the newborn in her pram.

The Brights will no doubt be pleased to have Freddie back home with them, as Lydia and sisters Georgia and Romana have been staying with parents Debbie and Dave at the family home in Essex.

Lydia recently shared the emotional moment she visited her grandmother with her newborn daughter amid the pandemic.

In the social media clip, she is seen holding baby Loretta on the other side of her nan's window while the new great-grandmother waves from inside her home as she self-isolates.

Adorable: Lydia shared an adorable video of her brother Freddie meeting her six-week-old daughter Loretta Rose for the first time on Tuesday

Sister act: Lydia hadn't seen her brother for four months whilst he's been travelling in Asia, and gave birth to her daughter whilst Freddie was out of the country

Adorable: The reality star was moved to tears as Freddie picked up Loretta for a big hug and snuggle before cooing after the newborn in her pram

The heartwarming video, which she shared on TikTok and Instagram, shows baby Loretta in a fluffy white coat while the song You Are My Sunshine plays in the background.

Lydia explained in the caption that her family have been taking turns to visit their gran each day and hopes once the current COVID-19 crisis is tackled, people will give more support to the elderly.

She began: 'Bringing my nan a ray of sunshine during self isolation. I have never been so grateful to live on the same road as my grandma.

'Were a close knit family and we make sure my nan always has at least one visitor daily, however during self quarantine she has been so teary with not seeing her family and being able to hug us all.

Adding: 'Its made me think of all the elderly out there, even before quarantine, who dont see people on a weekly basis. Hopefully, through all this devastation, it has taught us that we must look after our elderly more. Family means everything.'
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The global ride sharing market size is projected to reach USD 11.94 billion by 2025, according to a new report by Grand View Research, Inc. It is projected to register a CAGR of 7.5% during the forecast period. Increasing awareness in regular commuters regarding environmental deterioration due to vehicle emission is expected to drive the growth.

The unprecedented expansions of cities and towns and the inherent traffic congestion issues are anticipated to play a crucial role in driving the market for ride sharing in the forthcoming years. Growth in international trade and globalization has facilitated development of many major and minor economies all over the world. This economic and industrial growth has directly impacted the demographics and helped rapid urbanization in many countries.

The B2C business type ride sharing segment is estimated to lead the ride sharing market in 2017 and is expected to continue its dominance through the forecast period. This expansion is attributed to the introduction of ride sharing module in the existing platforms provided by established ride hailing players. The peer-to-peer ride sharing segment is expected to register the highest CAGR over the forecast period, attributed to rising awareness among commuters and also to introduction of newer user-friendly platforms.

The corporate type of commute is estimated to lead the ride sharing market with a slight edge; however, the short distance commutes segment is expected to take the lead in the market over the forecast period. The long-distance commute type is also projected to register healthy growth amid growing trend of sharing personal vehicles through ride sharing platforms in North America and Europe.

North America led with a market share of around 45.0% in 2017. The region is home to the two major players - Uber and Lyft - competiting to gain more customer base. Asia Pacific followed North America to take the second spot in terms of market share. However, the region is expected to overtake North America over the forecast period. Didi Chuxing and OLA are the two major players in the Asian market.

Further key findings from the study suggest :

The North American short distance segment was valued at USD 1.04 billion in 2017

Indian B2C market is expected to reach USD 815.0 million by 2025, registering a CAGR of 12.7% from 2018 to 2025

B2C business model and short distance commute is expected to lead the ride sharing market till 2025

Latin American long-distance segment is expected to expand at a CAGR of 9.1% from 2018 to 2025

South East Asia is another prominent market with the presence of many developing countries such as Indonesia and Thailand in ASEAN nations

Key market players include GRAB, Uber, and Didi Chuxing among others.

Request a Sample Copy of the Global Ride Sharing Market Research Report @ www.grandviewresearch.com/industry-analysis/ride-sharing-market/request/rs1

Grand View Research has segmented the global ride sharing market on the basis of business model and commute type:

Ride Sharing Business Model Outlook (Revenue, USD Million, 2015 - 2025)

P2P

B2C

B2B

Ride Sharing Commute Type Outlook (Revenue, USD Million, 2015 - 2025)

Long Distance

Corporate

Short Distance

Ride Sharing Regional Outlook (Revenue, USD Million, 2015 - 2025)

North America US Canada

europe UK france

Asia china India South Korea

South East Asia ASEAN Australia

Latin America brazil mexico

RoW

Access full research report on global ride sharing market: www.grandviewresearch.com/industry-analysis/ride-sharing-market
No one knows what Britain's High Street will end up looking like once the coronavirus pandemic subsides.

Oasis and Warehouse have fallen into the hands of administrators with 2,300 jobs on the line, while the likes of Debenhams and Cath Kidson remain on the brink.

Many of Britain's retailers, and particularly those with bricks-and-mortar based operations forced to close or selling 'non-essential' goods, are suffering as the coronavirus lockdown rolls on.

Empty: You can shop online to help save Britain's High Street shops and bag a bargain

To boost their chances of survival during the pandemic, a string of retailers are now offering deep discounts and cheaper or free delivery online, giving locked-down shoppers the chance to snap up a bargain.

There are so many deals on offer that it is impossible to cover everything, but This is Money has selected some of the most eye-catching running now.

Deals can change and expire quickly so you might have to move quickly, but all the offers were correct and live at the time of publishing:

FASHION

The lingerie, swimwear and nightwear retailer is currently offering up to 70 per cent off on a long list of its lines.

Sale: Boux Avenue's lace polka dot cami pyjama set is down from 35 to 15

Knickers can be snapped up for as little as 2, while swimwear and bras are available from 6 and 10 respectively.

Returns have been extended to 90 days and delivery is free on orders over 30.

There's a host of pretty items on sale, including Boux Avenue's black and white lace polka dot cami pyjama set, reduced from 35 to 15 and perfect for when you want to be glamorous yet comfortable at home.

Looking ahead: H&M is offering male shoppers 70% off on this grey wool slim fit jacket

There are deals of up to 70 per cent off across H&M's menswear, womenswear and kids clothing at present.

While work clothes may seem like a thing of the past for now, at some point many of us will be back wearing suits and smart formal attire.

In its menswear department, H&M is offering shoppers 70 per cent off its smart wool slim fit jacket, currently reduced from 99.99 to 30.

H&M is offering free standard delivery on all orders and shoppers now have 100 days to return items free of charge.

Divine: Miss Selfridge's stacy floral button maxi dress is down to 24.50 at present

Miss Selfridge is offering up to 50 per cent off everything across its entire website.

The deal finishes on Wednesday night at midnight, so you will need to be quick.

Free standard delivery and free extended returns are available on all orders.

The chain's gorgeous Stacy Floral Button Maxi Dress manages to be elegant yet fashionable and has been reduced from 35 to 24.50.

Bumper sale: Nasty Gal is offering 48 per cent off everything on its website for 48 hours only

Aimed at trendy youngsters, Nasty Gal is offering 48 per cent off everything on its website for 48 hours.

This deal expires in less than nine hours now so you'll need to be quick if you want to make the most of it.

Nasty Gal's pink Flip 'Em Off Ribbed Mini Dress has been reduced from 14 to a mere 7.28 and will be perfect for when the summer party season gets into full swing.

Bargain: The Tahlia skirt at Hobbs is down from 119 to just 35

Lockdown doesn't mean you have to spend everyday in jogging bottoms and jeans and high-end Hobbs is currently offering 25 per cent off all its full price items.

The retailer is also offering up to 50 per cent off across its sale items, with prices starting at 49.

Some of the items on sale are, however, offering discounts even better than 50 per cent, with the Tahlia skirt down from 119 to just 35, marking a reduction of around 75 per cent.

Any orders placed from 16 March 2020 are subject to Hobbs' 'extended returns policy' and can be returned up until and including 31 May.

Standard delivery is 3.95 or free for orders of 100 or more.

Lockdown attire: One fashion-forward piece with a chunky discount on offer is Topshop's Idol black denim boiler suit , reduced from 59 to 25

Topshop is currently offering up to 30 per cent off a selection of its spring lines, with everything from dresses, skirts and blouses to pyjamas on sale.

One fashion-forward piece with a chunky discount on offer is Topshop's Idol black denim boiler suit, reduced from 59 to 25.

Some sizes have already sold out, which is unsurprising given it's made from 100 per cent cotton and will work perfectly on the comfort-front while on lockdown.

With all its stores closed, Topshop is currently offering shoppers free standard delivery on orders of 30 or more.

Zara matters: The Jacquard dress at Zara has been reduced from 49.99 to 19.99

It's stores may be closed, but Zara still has some serious offers available online and is giving customers extended returns for up to 30 days after its stores reopen.

The weather has been unseasonably warm and Zara has some great items for spring and summer on sale, including its billowing blue and white Jacquard dress now half price, down from 49.99 to 19.99 and available in small, medium or large.

Home office chic: The Cotswold Company is having a furniture clearance sale across its lines

HOMEWARE

The Cotswold Company is having a furniture clearance sale across its lines, with up to 50 per cent off products like desks, TV stands and chests of drawers.

A lot of people have hastily put together a home office in the last few weeks, but many remain uncomfortable to work at and are not really fit for purpose.

If you're looking to get your home office sorted out, Habitat's Chalford painted corner desk with topper and filing cabinet is now 573, down from 673, meaning you can save 100 and look a little professional for those online Zoom team meetings.

Hunker down: The Fredd bed at Habitat is now 599, down from 850

Home is where the heart is at the moment and Habitat is offering up to 30 per cent off some of its ranges, including dining chairs, sofas, beds and bed linen.

Excluding bulky items like furniture, delivery is free on orders over 50 and the retailer is offering extended returns.

For any purchases made from 1 March 2020 Habitat has extended its returns period for online orders to 30 days beginning on the day its stores re-open.

Habitat's dreamy king size Fredd bed is one of a string of items currently on sale, and has been reduced from 850 to 599.

Offer: Bosch's eye-catching Tassimo coffee machine is currently reduced from 99.99 to 34.99 online at Currys

ELECTRICAL

The electrical retailer has gone an abundance of 'Easter Mega Deals' on offer at the moment.

If you still need your morning coffee but can't go to your local cafe, you can save 65 and snap up Bosch's eye-catching Tassimo coffee machine, currently reduced from 99.99 to 34.99.

Delivery charges vary depending on how big an item is and how speedily you want it delivered, but is generally free for 'all day' standard delivery slots.

Return times have been extended for store purchases and Currys won't count any days that your local store was closed.

For online orders, you may have to phone up or email the company to see how you can send an item back.

If you want to get through to Currys' phone line, be prepared for a hefty wait. The retailer says shoppers can expect to wait over an hour to speak to someone from its customer services team at the moment.

Waitrose is busy helping to feed the nation, but you can still shop online at John Lewis & Partners and save some cash on bigger ticket items like vacuum cleaners, laptops and televisions to keep you occupied during the lockdown.

The importance of cleaning has shot up in many people's mindsets over the last few weeks and John Lewis is currently offering a saving of 75 on the Dyson V7 Motorhead Plus Cordless Vacuum Cleaner, bringing the cost down to 199.99.

Snazzy: The Dyson Dyson V7 Motorhead Plus Cordless Vacuum Cleaner

With a 'direct-drive' cleaner head for a strong pick-up and up to 30 minutes run time, the Dyson model has a hygienic emptying bin for a fuss-free clean-up afterwards.

John Lewis is offering click and collect delivery services at its Waitrose stores and selected Co-op & Booth stores.

Click and collect orders are free for orders 30 or over, or under that level, 2 a pop.

Home delivery is free when you spend 50 and over or 3.50 for orders under 50.

For items purchased in-store at John Lewis on or before 18 February, John Lewis is offering extended returns for up to 35 days after its stores reopen.

But, for items snapped up online, the standard returns period remains at 35 days from the date you receive your purchase from John Lewis.

John Lewis added: 'If you have been unable to return an unwanted item due to self isolation restrictions, we will honour a late return as long as the item meets the other terms of our returns policy, including a valid proof of purchase such as a receipt or delivery note.'
The UAE on Wednesday announced the country's first full genome sequencing of COVID-19, an important tool to trace the origin of the deadly infection.

The COVID-19 Command and Control Centre (CCC), which has been established to enhance the country's efforts to tackle COVID-19, in the finding reveals the genome of the virus causing COVID-19 (known as SARS-CoV-2) consists of 30,000 genetic bases or letters.

Many countries have started reporting genomic sequences of the virus from patient samples.

"As a virus spreads and continues to reproduce, small changes in its genetic material take place," it said.

The successful sequencing of the virus from a patient in Dubai was performed by researchers at the Mohammed Bin Rashid University of Medicine and Health Sciences (MBRU).

Scientific research is a critical resource to inform the Center's strategies and actions against this virus. We are fortunate to have academic institutions that can join other sectors in Dubai in the fight against COVID-19, said Amer Sharif, the Vice Chancellor of MBRU and head of Dubai's COVID-19 Command and Control Center.

The novel coronavirus, which originated from Wuhan City of central China's Hubei province in November last year, has so far killed at least 1,19,000 people globally, including more than 25,000 in the US, according to Johns Hopkins University.

In the UAE, the infection has claimed the lives of 25 people and left over 4,000 affected, the Khaleej Times reported.

Recent studies on the virus causing COVID-19 show that these genetic changes, known as mutations, occur every two weeks on average.

By studying the genetic sequence of the virus and the minor changes over time from many patients, scientists can get a better understanding of how the virus spreads which can also inform measures to control the outbreak.

This development highlights the critical role of science and the scientific community in enhancing our capacity to fight emerging diseases. It is an important first step of a larger study in collaboration with colleagues from Dubai Health Authority and the Al Jalila Children's Genomic Center," Alawi Alsheikh-Ali, MBRU's Provost, member of the Emirates Scientist Council, said.

"We aim to fully sequence viral samples from 240 patients with COVID-19 across various age groups and at different time points of this pandemic. We will also collect information on the severity of disease in our patients which can help us understand if different strains of the virus are associated with different levels of disease severity,Alawi, who is also the Chair of the Scientific Advisory Group for the Command and Control Center, said.

The finding would help in tracing the origin of the deadly COVID-19.

This is a specific example of how this information can help trace the origin of infection in this specific patient from the UAE, and can tell us a lot about viral transmission in the country . Moreover, given Dubai's role and geographic position as a bridge between the East and the West, this information will also help in understanding how the pandemic has been spreading globally,Ahmad Abou Tayoun, an associate professor of genetics at MBRU, said.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
The agencies that oversee the health of U.S. military personnel and veterans were pushing ahead this spring with the biggest overhaul of their health systems in three decades. The initiatives aimed to shift up to 15 million patients to private care providers, shutter clinics and hospitals, and reduce the number of military doctors and nurses.

The Army, Navy and Air Force, along with the Defense Health Agency, had begun shedding patients and providers under reforms set into motion in 2017 under the National Defense Authorization Act. Veterans Affairs was due to send scores of veterans to neighborhood doctors and hospitals instead of VA facilities, also under legislation passed more than a year ago.

Supporters of the change called it good for patients  because they'd gain access to improved care  and for the government  because it would save millions of dollars by eliminating redundant services.

What no one saw coming was the novel coronavirus, which has thrown those plans into a tailspin and exposed gaps in health care for America's service members and veterans.

"COVID-19 has shown the overall weakness of trying to base all of our systems on a goal of maximum efficiency," said Kayla Williams, an Army veteran and director of the military, veterans and society program at the Center for a New American Security think tank in Washington, D.C. "When you are running on total efficiency models, you don't have any capacity to adjust to crises."

As part of the restructuring, the Department of Defense in February released a list of 50 military health facilities that would stop seeing non-active-duty patients or be downsized, reconfigured or closed. The Army, Navy and Air Force medical commands were on schedule to trim their medical billets by nearly 18,000 front-line health care workers.

The reform efforts coincided with a Veterans Health Administration shortage of 49,000 employees, including medical officers and nurses.

But the global pandemic has put those staffing shortages in stark relief  and prompted a halt to the system overhaul. Veterans and military advocates say that, with the focus on fighting COVID-19, now is not the time to pursue major changes.

On March 24, Defense Health Agency officials placed a 60-day hold on reform. The Pentagon plans to reassess the situation every 30 days thereafter, DHA spokesperson Kevin Dwyer said.

"We are shifting our focus to support the nation in this effort and devoting all available resources to combat COVID-19," Dwyer told Kaiser Health News. "We are assessing all available medical facilities, services and personnel that can be used to provide assistance to our nation's health care providers."

The pandemic response is a call to duty for the Pentagon and VA. The Defense Department has a front-line role in treating U.S. forces and dependents, conducting medical research and opening its holdings of gear in the National Strategic Stockpile.

The VA provides backup for the Defense medical system and supports the National Disaster Medical System and Department of Health and Human Services as needed, which means its empty beds can be made available to care for non-veteran patients.

As a result, the departments are set to receive funding from the $2.2 trillion coronavirus disaster relief bill signed by President Donald Trump. The VA is slated to receive nearly $20 billion to cover the treatment of veterans for COVID-19, the cost of overtime for staff as well as personal protective equipment and test kits, and construction of temporary hospitals, clinics and mobile treatment centers.

The Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences in Bethesda, Maryland, announced it would graduate its fourth-year medical students and advanced-degree nurses early to assist with the national coronavirus response. And the Army sent a message to retired military doctors, nurses and medics to gauge their interest in returning to the service in a volunteer capacity to assist during the pandemic.

The VA has also been cleared to hire retired health care workers to boost medical staff, including doctors, nurses, pharmacists, respiratory therapists and other technicians.

The staffing gaps have been evident at VA medical facilities nationwide. At the New York Harbor Health Care System's Brooklyn campus, intensive care nurse Maria Lobifaro said last week that before the pandemic she would typically care for two patients at a time with ample personal protective equipment, including face shields and N95 masks, to do her job.

Now she is responsible for five patients, all on ventilators and seriously ill from the pneumonia-inducing coronavirus. She is working overtime to make up for vacancies and has been conserving supplies, limited to one face mask a day, which she stores in a paper bag when not in use.

"We can't take on any more patients," said Lobifaro, who told KHN she was speaking as a representative of National Nurses United and not the VA. "Everyone is anxious for the day we may be drowning, when we don't have enough PPE or staffing. It's going to get worse."

As of Monday, 4,097 veterans under VA care had tested positive for COVID-19 and 241 had died.

The Defense Department had 4,528 total cases among troops, families and civilian employees and contractors as of Monday, including 2,941 among active-duty personnel. Two service members have died: Capt. Douglas Linn Hickok, a physician assistant and member of the New Jersey National Guard, who died March 28, and an unidentified sailor assigned to the aircraft carrier USS Theodore Roosevelt, one of the nations largest coronavirus hot spots, with nearly 600 cases.

"I think right now, [the Defense Department] needs to put a freeze with regard to all the changes," said Dr. Terry Adirim, a pediatric emergency medicine physician who left her job at the Pentagon as deputy assistant secretary of defense for health services policy and oversight in February. "The drivers to do this made so much sense because there were so many redundancies. But all the additional changes  cuts to the medical force, cuts to the budget, cuts to research and development  they are not the right thing to do.  It's just wrong."

Critics say the reform efforts are a thinly disguised attempt to privatize both systems, gutting services and undermining the departments' obligations to provide care for military personnel, veterans and families.

"There are forces within [the department] that would like to see more privatization," Adirim said. "You see it at the VA probably more openly because they've needed legislation, but there are forces that would like to comb down the [military] health system above and beyond what was approved by Congress."

In 2013, the Pentagon launched a major effort to reform its then-$50 billion health care system with an aim to improve service and streamline programs such as administration, IT, logistics and training that existed in triplicate under the separate Army, Navy and Air Force medical commands.

Three years later, the initiative ballooned, with plans for the oversight office, known as the Defense Health Agency, to assume ownership of 51 hospitals and 424 health clinics operated by the military services. The services were to trim their medical forces and focus on caring for active-duty personnel, while some family members and millions of retirees would be sent to the private sector under the Pentagon's purchased care program, Tricare.

Over at the Department of Veterans Affairs, similar changes have been underway since 2014, when a scandal erupted over secret appointment lists kept by some facilities that hid the length of time veterans waited to see a doctor  for months and sometimes more than a year. The solution was to send more veterans to private providers, reimbursable by the VA. And like the Defense Department initiatives, those efforts expanded exponentially in 2018 with legislation that gave millions more former service members access to care at non-VA facilities.

But with both departments supporting the federal government's response to COVID-19, some reforms have been delayed.

The Pentagon also decided to suspend rollout of its $5.5 billion electronic health record system, called MHS Genesis, which has been in use at six hospitals and clinics in Washington since 2017 and was introduced to four more sites in California and Idaho in September 2019.

Williams, of the Center for a New American Security, said health system changes at both the VA and the Defense Department should be put on hold until after the November presidential election.

"It might make more sense to put a pause on a lot of this government reform," she said, "and revisit what we as a society think would be best with fresh eyes after weve learned some lessons from this."
WASHINGTON  The Department of Veterans Affairs had a problem: Some of its workers appeared to be taking home extra masks and other protective gear, most likely fearing that they might not have enough supplies to do their jobs. So the department decided it would start checking everyones bags before they left for the day, and officials drafted a memo to explain the new policy.

But White House officials, not wishing to draw attention to shortages of protective gear at the V.A., the nations largest health care system, balked at the memos language, which was ultimately rescinded, officials said.

Since the moment the coronavirus arrived in the United States, doctors, nurses and other medical workers have been faced with a dangerous shortage of masks and other protective gear.

In response, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention loosened many of its health care safety guidelines, permitting the frequent reuse of masks. These amended guidelines have raised alarms during internal meetings for health care experts within the Department of Veterans Affairs, and have caused fear and anger among workers.
Source: Xinhua| 2020-04-15 18:50:16|Editor: huaxia

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WUHAN, April 15 (Xinhua) -- A plane carrying medical supplies left Wuhan, the city once hardest hit by the novel coronavirus, on Wednesday for northeast China's Heilongjiang to aid the border province in the fight against COVID-19.

The supplies, which is worth around 30 million yuan (about 4.25 million U.S. dollars), include 50,000 medical protective suits, dozens of ventilators, 100,000 N95 respirators, and millions of other types of masks, according to Guo Tao, deputy head of the Department of Economy and Information Technology of Hubei Province, where Wuhan is the capital.

It was the first batch of medical supplies sent to Heilongjiang by the Hubei provincial government.

Since the COVID-19 outbreak, various provincial-level regions across China have dispatched medical staff and aid goods to Hubei, the former center of the epidemic. Heilongjiang has sent more than 1,500 medical workers and around 3,000 tonnes of rice to the province since Jan. 27.

Heilongjiang Province, which borders Russia, reported 22 new confirmed COVID-19 cases on Tuesday, the local health authority said Wednesday.
Millions of Brits are working from home due to the coronavirus pandemic with a huge 96% of UK workers currently having up to four virtual meetings a day. (Getty)

Three-quarters (76%) of Brits believe virtual meetings are a waste of time, a new survey has found.

One in three (34%) UK works admitted that they excuse themselves from online meetings that they get bored of, according to the survey of 2,000 professionals by job board CV-Library.

Millions of Brits are working from home due to the coronavirus pandemic with many using video conferencing apps to attend virtual meetings.

Users of video conferencing app Zoom (ZM) surged from 10 million at the end of December last year to more than 200 million daily users in March this year.

A huge 96% of UK workers currently having up to four virtual meetings a day, each lasting an hour on average.

Over one in 10 (14%) said they spend around six-and-a-half hours in online meetings every day.

This is despite over half (55%) of respondents saying their most productive meetings are under 30 minutes long.

READ MORE: Zoom users surge from 10m to 200m as world works from home

Some 19% of workers said the ideal online meeting was 45 minutes long, 15% an hour, 6.2% an hour and a half, and 4.7% over two hours.

Lee Biggins, founder and CEO of CV-Library said: Research from a few years back found that the average Brits attention span is just 14 minutes; so think about this when scheduling in your next virtual meeting. Often, shorter, more frequent, meetings can be a lot more productive.

The survey found that men (81%) were more likely to see online meetings as a waste of time, with 41% saying they would leave a virtual meeting altogether.

This is compared to 68% of women who reported feeling online meetings were pointless, with 27% saying they would try to get out of them.

READ MORE: Four ways to hold a virtual meeting

Biggins said: We know that more people are working from home right now than ever before and its definitely taking some getting used to.

While its great to keep the momentum going and connect with colleagues via conference calls or video chats, there is an argument that these can sometimes be counter-productive  especially if theyre filling up your entire day or nothing positive ever comes out of them.

Story continues

Try to get a good balance of personal and professional chat. It doesnt need to be business all the time! For some people, virtual meetings may be all the interaction they have with others right now, so be sensitive of everyones situations.

If youre worried that youre not getting much out of the meetings youre attending, why not suggest that you shake them up a bit by introducing presentations or setting a clear agenda.

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By Ban Barkawi

AMMAN, April 15 (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - Rumours of a gay character in a new Turkish Netflix series, "Love 101", have ignited calls for a boycott of the streaming service and sharp criticism from the broadcast regulator.

A furore erupted after a now-deleted Twitter account @love101netflix suggested one of the main characters in the show - a story about students helping their teacher find love, which is set to air when Ramadan begins on April 24 - could be gay.

"We will not tolerate broadcasts that are contrary to the national and spiritual values of our society," Ebubekir Sahin, president of the Radio and Television Supreme Council, was quoted as saying by Turkish newspaper Yeni Akit this week.

Netflix Turkey did not immediately respond to requests to confirm whether @love101netflix was a fake account or whether the show included a gay character.

"A lot of false information is spreading from fake accounts ... believe only what you hear from us about the series and the characters, not the rumours," Netflix Turkey said in an earlier statement.

Although homosexuality is not a crime, there is widespread hostility to it across Turkish society. Authorities have cracked down on LGBT+ events since an attempted coup in 2016 gave them power to ban public gatherings including Pride marches.

The government says it has improved rights and freedoms since it came to power in 2003, but a 2019 report on LGBT+ rights from the advocacy group ILGA Europe ranked Turkey second to last out of 49 countries.

Thousands of Turks took to social media, using the hashtag #NetflixBeAMan to condemn the appearance of LGBT+ characters in Turkish shows, with some calling it an insult to Islam.

"Netflix is trying to normalise immorality under the name of 'Love 101'," said Omer Farukii in a post on Twitter that received about 13,000 likes.

Another online critic named Osman Cekir called Netflix "Islam's enemy" and called for it to be banned in Turkey, while some said the airing date was intentionally provoking Muslims during the holy month of Ramadan.

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Others voiced support for "Love 101", with one Twitter user called Chlo rejecting people's use of "religion to legitimise their hate".

Netflix is likely to face calls to reveal more about the sexuality of the show's characters during an online question and answer session with the cast before it airs.

(Reporting by Ban Barkawi @banbarkawi; Editing by Katy Migiro. Please credit the Thomson Reuters Foundation, the charitable arm of Thomson Reuters, that covers the lives of people around the world who struggle to live freely or fairly. Visit http://news.trust.org)
Britney Spears said she was learning lessons about self-acceptance from her pop rival Beyonce while blasting 'mean' trolls on Tuesday.

The 38-year-old Grammy winner only collaborated with 38-year-old Queen Bey once in 2004 for a Pepsi commercial, in which they played gladiators singing a cover of Queen's 1977 rock anthem We Will Rock You.

The Roman colosseum-set Super Bowl XXXVIII spot also featured acrobatic pop belter Pink, the surviving members of Queen, and Latin pop idol Enrique Iglesias.

One of her idols: Britney Spears said she was learning lessons about self-acceptance from her pop rival Beyonce while blasting 'mean' trolls on Tuesday (pictured Friday)

'[I will] take note from @Beyonce because I am FLAWLESS!' Britney - who boasts 122.7M social media followers - wrote referencing her 2013 hit.

'But seriously ... keep your mean comments to yourselves.'

Spears - whose uniform consists of puff-sleeved tops with chokers and Daisy Dukes - said she would 'post whatever the heck I want' even if that means pictures of herself wearing 'the same outfit three times.'

The former Mouseketeer just celebrated her first Easter since her custodial rights to her sons - Sean, 14; and Jayden, 13 - with ex-husband Kevin Federline went from 5050 to 70-30 in September, according to TMZ.

Soft drink: The 38-year-old Grammy winner (R) only collaborated with 38-year-old Queen Bey (L) once in 2004 for a Pepsi commercial, in which they played gladiators singing a cover of Queen's 1977 rock anthem We Will Rock You

Remember? The Roman colosseum-set Super Bowl XXXVIII spot also featured acrobatic pop belter Pink (M), the surviving members of Queen, and Latin pop idol Enrique Iglesias

Referencing her 2013 hit, Britney wrote: '[I will] take note from @Beyonce because I am FLAWLESS! But seriously ... keep your mean comments to yourselves'

The change came after the Mississippi-born blonde's 30-day stint at an 'all-encompassing wellness facility' ended a year ago.

Britney has been under court-ordered permanent conservatorship of her father Jamie Spears (and various attorneys) since being put on 5150 involuntary psychiatric hold way back in 2008.

It's unclear if Spears' boyfriend of three years - fitness trainer Sam Asghari - is quarantining with her in her $7.4M five-bedroom mansion in Thousand Oaks.

And while the Make Me... hitmaker publicly thanked all of the 'workers putting so much time and dedication into helping us during the coronavirus' she has not made donations or volunteered for remote benefits like her peers.

My prerogative! Spears - whose uniform consists of puff-sleeved tops with chokers and Daisy Dukes - said she would 'post whatever the heck I want' even if that means pictures of herself wearing 'the same outfit three times'

'My boys!' The former Mouseketeer just celebrated her first Easter since her custodial rights to her sons - Sean, 14; and Jayden, 13 - with ex-husband Kevin Federline went from 5050 to 70-30 in September (pictured August 4)

All by herself? It's unclear if the Mississippi-born blonde's boyfriend of three years - fitness trainer Sam Asghari - is quarantining with her in her $7.4M five-bedroom mansion in Thousand Oaks (pictured March 2)

On March 17, the Corporate Animals actress' Broadway-bound musical Once Upon a One More Time canceled its April 14-May 17 at Chicago's James M. Nederlander Theatre due to the fast-spreading respiratory illness.

Spears' 30K-square-foot 10-room immersive interactive experience celebrating her music, Britney The Zone, in West Hollywood was also shut down due to COVID-19 before the end of its January 31-April 26 run.

Both ventures didn't depend on Britney's physical presence as she has been enjoying a career hiatus since the January 2019 cancellation of her Las Vegas residency Dominion.

Canceled! On March 17, Britney's Broadway-bound musical Once Upon a One More Time canceled its April 14-May 17 at Chicago's James M. Nederlander Theatre due to COVID-19
Trump halts funding to WHO

The WHOs attack on travel restrictions put political correctness above life-saving measures, US President said.

The US is halting funding to the World Health Organization (WHO) amid the novel coronavirus pandemic, the nations president announced Tuesday.

"Today I am instructing my administration to halt funding of the World Health Organization while a review is conducted to assess the World Health Organization's role in severely mismanaging and covering up the spread of the coronavirus," Donald Trump said during a White House Coronavirus Task Force briefing.

"WHO FAILED TO ADEQUATELY OBTAIN"

He said American taxpayers provide between $400-$500 million per year to the organization whereas China gives only $40 million. "As the organization's leading sponsor, the United States has a duty to insist on full accountability. One of the most dangerous and costly decisions from the WHO was its disastrous decision to oppose travel restrictions from China and other nations," said Trump.

He also said the WHO opposed travel restrictions introduced by the US on China and other nations in January but he was not convinced and suspended travel from China, "saving untold lives."

"Had other nations likewise suspended travel from China, countless lives would have been saved," he said. "The WHOs attack on travel restrictions put political correctness above life-saving measures. The reality is that the WHO failed to adequately obtain, vet and share information in a timely and transparent fashion," the president added.
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Six persons were arrested on Wednesday for allegedly slaughtering a cow in central Nepal, police said.

Cow is the national animal of Nepal and its slaughter is strictly prohibited in the country.

According to police, the six persons were arrested from Hetauda city in central Nepal.

They are in the age group of 20-63, police said.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Donald Trump accused the WHO of being too China-centric and stopped the US's contribution to the health agency. The US contributes about 15 per cent of total WHO funding while China's share is half of India's and even less than Pakistan's, India Today writes in the article Who funds WHO? US President Donald Trump has stirred a debate over the impartiality of the World Health Organisation (WHO) accusing it of being too China-centric and thus failing to stop novel coronavirus pandemic.

The US has been the biggest contributor to the WHO purse, which has a budget of $6.2 billion. The WHO is funded by its members and philanthropic organisations.

According to the WHO website, the US with 14.67 per cent of total contribution is the largest funding source for the United Nations health agency. The next big contributors are the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (9.76 per cent) and GAVI Alliance (8.39 per cent). The GAVI Alliance is a Geneva-based public-private partnership organisation to which Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation makes a sizeable contribution.

The UK (7.79 per cent) and Germany (5.68 per cent) are the only other country after the US to make over 5 per cent of total financial budget of the WHO.

The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (UNOCHA) is other body to make over 5 per cent contribution. The World Bank (3.42 per cent), the Rotary International (3.3 per cent), the European Commission (3.3 per cent) and Japan (2.7 per cent) are among other major contributors to the WHO's finances.

China, which is at the centre of the current WHO controversy in the wake of novel coronavirus pandemic, contributes only 0.21 per cent of total money flowing into the global health agency.

India's share of contribution is more than double the China's at 0.48 per cent and much closer to France's (0.5 per cent). Interestingly, even Pakistan contributes (0.36 per cent) to the WHO more than China.

There are four ways in which the WHO gets its fund. Voluntary contributions are the biggest category of funding that the WHO receives - almost 80 per cent of all contributions. Voluntary contributions can be made by member states - 194 at present -- or NGOs. These funds come in two forms - core voluntary contributions and specified voluntary contributions.

Core contributions give the WHO flexibility to use the money according to its need and priorities, specified contributions need to go towards the specified cause.

The next big category of funding is assessed contributions. These are like membership fees. Being a WHO member for a country does not come free. The WHO assesses stipulated fee for each member country depending on its financial health and population. For some reason, world's biggest economy, the US, contributes almost 15 per cent of total WHO funds and the second largest less than 0.25 per cent.

The assessed contributions or WHO membership fee accounts for 17 per cent of total funding of the health agency, which introduced a special funding framework in 2011, two years after swine flu pandemic hit the globe.

Pandemic Influenza Preparedness (PIP) contributions make up about 3 per cent of total WHO funds. Its stated goal in 2011 was "to improve and strengthen the sharing of influenza viruses with human pandemic potential".

Novel coronavirus is much like an influenza virus causing similar symptoms in humans with a difference that it complicates pre-existing health conditions particularly among elderly people.
Staff working for Irish Water suffered 21 cases of assault or abuse in the past three years, records show.

They included threats with a machete, cars speeding towards them, rocks being thrown at vans and intimidation in the early hours.

There were 10 instances of aggression against staff or contractors working for the water utility last year alone.

The machete incident happened in Galway when a crew were threatened by an angry homeowner.

"The male was standing on his property waving the 500mm machete at the contractor crew installing boundary boxes in the footpath outside his house," it was reported.

Two attacks happened in Co Donegal on people working for Irish Water.

In March, "one of a contractor's traffic-management operatives was assaulted by a member of the public. Unsure if he needed medical treatment. The operative reported the incident to gardai".

The second attack came in June.

"Contractor operative was attacked by a stranger. Operative received several blows to the head before gardai arrived and arrested the attacker. Operative taken to hospital," the report said.

Three Dublin City Council employees working for Irish Water were verbally abused by a gang last year.

"While one individual shouted obscenities and referred to employees as 'scumbags', 'kn**kers', and 'Irish Water scum', another photographed their vehicles," it was reported.

In Tipperary, a "contractor operative was confronted by an aggressive member of the public who threatened and verbally abused him".

SINISTER

In 2018, five assaults or threats were recorded, including a sinister incident in the early hours in Dublin.

"The incident took place at 2am when gang of 4/5 persons questioned crew about their work and looked for ID," said the Irish Water records.

In Mayo in 2017, an Irish Water worker started to reverse her vehicle when she noticed a cardboard box had been placed against the rear wheel.

When she got out to remove it, she saw abusive graffiti had been daubed on the vehicle.

Six other incidents were reported in 2017, including a member of the public harassing a staff member on the phone then turning up at Irish Water offices to continue the abuse.

In north Dublin in March 2017, two cars, one silver, one red, approached a work site at speed.

"As the vehicles passed by, silver car swerved towards an operative. Operatives had to jump on to the bank to avoid the car," the report said.

"There were four people in the silver car and three in the red car. They started roaring down towards the crew."

The two cars crashed into each other, and the gang later returned to threaten the workers again.

In Limerick, a contractor who drove to repair a leak had his van damaged when children threw rocks at it.

Asked about the attacks and threats to employees and contractors, a spokeswoman for Irish Water said: "We have no further comment to make."
By Hyunjoo Jin and Heekyong Yang SEOUL (Reuters) - South Korea's SolGent has secured an order to supply a U.S. government agency with an additional 7,500 kits which can each perform 100 coronavirus tests, the CEO of the biotech firm told Reuters. That will double the number of tests U.S

By Hyunjoo Jin and Heekyong Yang

SEOUL (Reuters) - South Korea's SolGent has secured an order to supply a U.S. government agency with an additional 7,500 kits which can each perform 100 coronavirus tests, the CEO of the biotech firm told Reuters.

That will double the number of tests U.S. authorities can perform using kits sourced from South Korea to 1.5 million.

SolGent has already sent kits for 150,000 tests while South Korean peers Osang HealthCare and SD BIOSENSOR are due to ship kits capable of performing 600,000 tests on Tuesday, company sources told Reuters.

The kits are being sent to the U.S. Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) after an appeal from U.S. President Donald Trump.

Trump made a request for medical devices in a telephone call with South Korean President Moon Jae-in on March 25.

The U.S. death toll from COVID-19, the lung disease caused by the virus, topped 23,600 on Monday, the highest of any country.

SolGent CEO You Jae-hyung told Reuters that the company is in talks on a long-term contract with FEMA and about building a factory in the United States to manufacture the testing kits, but that a decision has not been made.

U.S. Ambassador to South Korea Harry Harris said on Twitter Tuesday that testing kits had been loaded at Incheon Airport bound for the United States.

He called the alliance between the two countries "ironclad" and thanked South Korea's foreign ministry for its help.

FEMA did not immediately respond to Reuters' emailed inquiries. The foreign ministry declined to comment.

The ministry had said that three companies had won preliminary approval from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to export kits, but did not identify the firms.

After struggling with the first large outbreak of the virus outside of China, South Korea has largely managed to curb its spread without lockdown orders helped by a massive testing campaign and intensive contact tracing.

(Reporting by Hyunjoo Jin and Heekyong Yang; Additional reporting by Sangmi Cha; editing by Jason Neely)

This story has not been edited by Firstpost staff and is generated by auto-feed.
For the first time, the number of COVID-19 patients at Yale New Haven Hospital topped 400 Tuesday, but the largest increases in the health system were at Bridgeport Hospital as the coronavirus surge moves north from Greenwich.

On Tuesday, there were 191 COVID-positive patients at Bridgeport, 57 of them in intensive care and 41 on ventilators, according to hospital President Anne Diamond.

Across the Yale New Haven Health System, there were 700 patients Tuesday, including 130 on ventilators, according to Dr. Thomas Balcezak, chief clinical officer. Its really important to outline that we have more than 650 discharges, so there are patients that are getting through this disease successfully and getting discharged to home, he said.

Since March 19, when Bridgeport admitted its first COVID-19 patient, 432 inpatients have tested positive and 270 have been discharged, Diamond said. The last few days, were seeing admissions of 21 per day, she said. We do believe we are easing into our peak and probably within the next week or so we will be there.

She said the peak likely would not be a sharp spike but more of a plateau.

She said 61 percent of the 432 Bridgport patients have been male, 36 percent white, 29 percent black, 32 percent other, including Hispanic, and 3 percent Asian. Fifty-five have been 18 to 39 years old, 125 between 40 and 60, and 252 over 60.

Diamond said a mobile field hospital has increased Bridgeport Hospitals capacity by 32 patients and patients are moving in there as we speak.

Marna Borgstrom, CEO of Yale New Haven Health, said, Right now we have the largest number of COVID-positive patients in the system that we have ever had, and that includes as of this afternoon 413 COVID-positive patients at Yale New Haven Hospital, with 105 people in addition pending results. So its our first day there over 400.

She said the numbers are staggering to me at Bridgeport Hospital. Greenwich Hospital, a 200-bed facility, is running 115 COVID-positive inpatients with an additional 19 awaiting test results.

Our great hope is that those numbers will not peak to the levels that some of the models have been going because the social distancing and other impositions on all of our daily lives are working, and they are actually reducing the spread of this virus, which is obviously something that we all hoped, Borgstrom said.

She said the health system had conducted more than 18,000 tests since we started them and about 5,200 of those have produced positive results.

Balcezak said the systems five hospitals have enough testing capacity so all admitted patients are being tested, all symptomatic health care workers are being tested, and were also beginning to roll out testing to other patients that are not suspected of having COVID but are undergoing procedures that may put health-care workers at high risk because up to 20 percent of patients may have the coronavirus but not have symptoms.

Balcezak said mathematical models for determining the peak of the virus in Connecticut have actually been pushing the date out later. Our absolute number of patients infected at any one time is down.

He said the predicted peak in New Haven seems to be coalescing around the 20th or 23rd of April. We are seeing a doubling rate about every 10 days, he said, substantially less than earlier in the month, when the number of new cases doubled every three or four days.

But we are not yet at the peak of this illness, and that means  when we get to the peak its very likely we are going to see three or four or more weeks where we are on the downside of that curve, Balcezak said.

He said we have had very little need to decant any patients to outpatient sites, including the Lanman Center at Yales Payne Whitney Gymnasium and at Southern Connecticut State Hospital.

Borgstrom and others said shifting staff and equipment from the hospitals that have not felt a great impact of the coronavirus, in New London and Westerly, R.I., has helped meet the demand in Fairfield County.

Also, by eliminating elective surgeries throughout the Yale New Haven Health System, we have been able to create between 30 and 40 percent capacity that has yet to be needed, Borgstrom said.

She said she expects the health system to take a big financial loss as a result of the pandemic. One hospital system outside Detroit of about the same size as Yale New Haven expects a $250 million loss, she said.

The challenge we are all experiencing  is we took down capacity, we took down elective cases  and we dramatically increased spending, including on anticipated needs, such as a mobile field hospital on Bridgeport Hospitals campus.

Balcezak said there are no shortages of personal protective equipment, including N95 respirator masks. We have enough ventilators, we have enough equipment, he said. He said medical staff are told not to use N95 masks for more than one shift.

Used respirators are being reprocessed using hydrogen peroxide vapor. We have not yet begun to reuse those reprocessed respirators, but we will hold them in reserve, he said.

Borgstrom said Yale New Havens call center has received 53,000 calls, including from Asia and Europe. She also said the health systems employees are grateful for donations of medical equipment and meals from local restaurants. It never gets old and people really appreciate it, she said.

Balcezak said relaxing social distancing and business closures should not occur soon. Responding not as a citizen  but merely from a clinical perspective, the more we delay moving into that normalcy, the better the chance that we are going to have that we dont get a second bump.

Until there is a vaccine for this virus, we are all at risk of getting sick and until we have enough immunity within the community that we cant spread it from one another, then we will be at risk of spreading it to people when we begin stopping the social-distancing work that weve been doing, Balcezak said. So the physician in me, the public health person in me says we need to delay that for at least the next four weeks.

He said hydroxychloroquine treatments, antibody testing and blood plasma treatments all are experimental and there are no known proven therapies that work against this virus.

edward.stannard@hearstmediact.com; 203-680-9382
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New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio is holding a press conference Wednesday to update the public on the coronavirus outbreak, which has infected more than 110,465 people in New York City, according to data compiled by Johns Hopkins University.

On Tuesday, confirmed cases in New York state surpassed 200,000  more than any country outside the United States  but the outbreak has shown signs of peaking in recent days. On Monday, de Blasio said the city was having a "very good day" as the rate of new coronavirus cases and hospitalizations continued to fall.

De Blasio announced Tuesday that the city will purchase 100,000 coronavirus test kits per week from a mix of local contractors and a Carmel, Indiana-based company as the city works to identify more Covid-19 cases. Broad testing will help health officials identify pockets of transmission as the city seeks to gradually lift social distancing restrictions that were implemented to curb the spread, Dr. Oxiris Barbot, commissioner of the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, said.

"For the first time, we're going to have a truly reliable major supply of testing," de Blasio said Tuesday at a news conference. "The No. 1 one issue from day one has been testing."

Read CNBC's live updates to see the latest news on the COVID-19 outbreak.
Tesco has slashed the price of its leftover Easter eggs with the cheapest costing just 18p as shoppers reveal 'they can't give them away'.

Shoppers rushed to get their hands on a bargain as surplus stock was seen piled high in the stores following the coronavirus lockdown measures over the weekend.

The supermarket has cut the cost of its smallest eggs including Cadbury Creme egg down to 18p from their original price of 75p.

And the savings have been rolled out to larger Easter eggs which have seen a mark-down of 75 per cent from 4 to just 1.

The cheapest find was Creme Eggs priced at just 12p with Aldi, B&M and Sainsbury's also offering reductions on seasonal chocolate.

Eagle-eyed shoppers spotted the yellow posters and shared their bargains on Twitter with people questioning 'who pays full price for eggs anyway?'

Simone Adele posted Easter eggs piled high in Tesco with reduction posters showing the discount

Jane West showed off her Easter bargains after picking up two Smarties eggs for just 18p

However some people could not believe the amount of leftover stock claiming the supermarket 'went a bit mad' with ordering.

Simone Adele shared a picture of Cadbury Creme Egg and Twirl Easter eggs piled high in Tesco captioned: 'Tescos selling Easter eggs for 18p.

'Ive got enough to feed the whole street honestly.'

Brian posted a picture of his Nestle Caramel egg and Galaxy Truffles and said: 'I mean who pays full price for eggs anyway. Today Tesco are getting rid for 1.50 that's worth waiting a day for.'

Dan Rhys Hill posted footage (right) of the Easter eggs in Exmouth, Devon, captioned: All the unsold Easter Eggs in Tesco's... #COVID2019 #Tesco #Easter'

Shoppers revealed how the supermarket 'can't give them away' as others urged 'this is not a drill'

Leon Barrington revealed how he had to reign in his chocolate fix and said: '18p eggs at Tesco. They told me to buy a crate but I said I can't as I would eat them all.'

However others were startled at how many eggs were leftover as many posted footage of the eggs piled high.

One filmed the Banbury Tesco and commented: 'I know we are in lockdown so less people are buying non essentials, and when orders were put in for Easter stock all those months ago no one would have known about the coronavirus.

Brian posted a cost picture of his two bargain Easter eggs claiming 'who pays full price for eggs anyway'

'But I think Tesco went a bit mad with eggs this year. There was at least four times this in Banbury today!

However the deals have not been listed on the Tesco website and stock varies across the 3,961 UK stores.

It comes after Tesco donated 10,000 Easter eggs to children who were in hospital over the bank holiday weekend.
STRANEK-Africa is urging Telcos in the country not to furnish President Akufo-Addo with personal information of all subscribers.

The policy think tanks in a letter to the telcos say the move by the President is a cunning way to undermine and subvert individual freedoms using public interest or national security as an excuse.

According to STRANEK-Africa, On 23rd March, 2020, a fiat was issued by President Akufo-Addo mandating all telecommunication service providers to furnish him with the personal information of all subscribers using section 100 of Executive Instrument 63 (E.I. 63).

STRANEK-Africa is worried that this power will enable the President to suspend the fundamental rights of citizens at any time. "We consider it exploitative in the name of the pandemic COVID-19, unconstitutional autocratic, unjustifiable and unproportionate."

Read full statement below:

9th April, 2020.

Dear Sir,

PROTECT PRIVACY RIGHTS IN THE REPUBLIC OF GHANA

We hope this finds you in good health.

STRANEK-Africa is a Policy think tank/Civil Society Organization with interest in policy research, reform, security and anti-corruption.

We write in respect of certain special powers given to the President, H.E. Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo under section 100 of the Establishment of Emergency Communications System Instrument, 2020 (Executive Instrument 63).

Per section 100 of Executive Instrument 63 (E.I. 63), the President could assume direct control of the telecommunications and determine their operations. This power will enable him to suspend the fundamental rights of citizens at any time. We consider it exploitative in the name of the pandemic COVID-19, unconstitutional autocratic, unjustifiable and unproportionate.

On 23rd March, 2020, a fiat was issued by the President mandating all telecommunication service providers to furnish him with the personal information of all subscribers.

We humbly request you to protect the privacy rights of your cherished customers in Ghana since the E.I. is a cunning way to undermine and subvert individual freedoms using public interest or national security as an excuse.

We look forward to your expedited response.

Yours faithfully,

Nii Tettey Tetteh Emmanuel Osei

Executive Director Director of Policy and Political Affairs

+233 559 042 914 +47 412 45 303

[email protected]

Cc: Vodafone Group Plc

MTN Group Limited Innovation

Globacom Limited

Airtel Tigo Limited

National Communication Authority

Bank of Ghana
Actor Jason Alexander recently hosted a star-studded Saturday Night Seder performance that raised more than $2 million for the CDCs Coronavirus Emergency Response Fund.

Now, the Jersey guy, who is isolating at home in California, has his mind on his old home.

Was thinking about my family and friends in NY/NJ and got drawn to this song, Alexander, 60, tweeted Tuesday. I know its still frightening but the tide is hopefully starting to turn due to all your efforts. So sending this to you with love.

The song? New York State of Mind," the 1976 classic from Billy Joel.

Alexander grew up in Irvington, Maplewood and Livingston. While hes best known for playing George Costanza on Seinfeld," hes also a noted Broadway performer. He won a Tony in 1989 for his role in the musical anthology show Jerome Robbins Broadway.

Was thinking about my family and friends in NY/NJ and got drawn to this song. I know it's still frightening but the tide is hopefully starting to turn due to all your efforts. So sending this to you with love. JA pic.twitter.com/qAwHpElYBK  jason alexander (@IJasonAlexander) April 14, 2020

Alexander, who was inducted into the New Jersey Hall of Fame in October, tenderly belted out the Joel tune and provided piano accompaniment as a heartfelt dedication to the city.

I love you, New York, Alexander said. Youre getting there. Stay in, stay safe, stay healthy.

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? Amy Kuperinsky may be reached at akuperinsky@njadvancemedia.com. Follow her on Twitter @AmyKup or on Facebook.

Get the latest updates right in your inbox. Subscribe to NJ.coms newsletters.
Asante Berko

15.04.2020 LISTEN

The Managing Director of Tema Oil Refinery (TOR), Asante Berko, has resigned following allegations by US regulators, Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) that he arranged a $4.5 million bribes on behalf of Turkish power company for some Ghanaian Government officials.

Mr Berko tendered in his resignation to President Akufo-Addo on Wednesday, April 15, two days after the allegations came public.

A statement issued by the Director of Communications at the Presidency, Eugene Arhin, says President Akufo-Addo has accepted Mr Asante Berko's resignation, and duly notified the Board of Directors of TOR of this development.

The President wished him well in his future endeavors, it says, revealing that Mr Berko submitted his resignation letter on April 15.

It would be recalled that in a statement, US regulators had accused Mr Berko of facilitating the bribes.

But Mr Berko in a statement denied the bribery claims that while serving as an official of Goldman Sachs, he arranged a $4.5 million for a Turkish company to bribe Ghanaian government officials.

Rather he said he only got $2million as arrangee fee.

The Turkish IPP agreed to pay me fee of $2million (1.3% of the capital raise) as I have spent the bulk of two years working on this transaction, he stated in a statement issued yesterday.

According to him, while it is true that the Securities and Exchange Commission this week issued such proceedings against him, the allegations that government officials and members of parliament were bribed by him, are completely false. I am therefore compelled to set the record straight.

US Regulators had in a lawsuit accused Mr Berko, of arranging a $4.5 million in bribes to government officials in Ghana.

The amount, say the US regulators, was aimed at helping a Turkish company to secure a power contract in Ghana.

From approximately 2015 through at least 2016 (the relevant period), while employed at the Subsidiary, Berko schemed to bribe various government officials in the Republic of Ghana (Ghana) so that a client of the Subsidiary, a Turkish Energy Company (the Energy Company), would win a contract (the Power Purchase Agreement) to build and operate an electrical power plant in Ghana and sell the power to the Ghanaian government (the Power Plant Project or Project), according to SEC in its lawsuit.

To effect the corrupt scheme, Berko arranged for the Energy Company to funnel between $3 million to $4.5 million to a Ghana-based company (the Intermediary Company) to bribe various government officials responsible for approving the Power Plant Project.

The Energy Company transferred at least $2.5 million of the planned $3 million to $4.5 million to the Intermediary Company, all or most of which was used to bribe Ghanaian government officials.

But Mr Berko insists the allegations are not true.

He added that I state categorically that I have not paid any bribes to government officials, members of Parliament not officials of parliament regarding the approval of this transaction.

He admitted being an employee of Goldman Sachs up until December 2016.

Daily Guide
Weve been self-isolating ... The symptoms are from her cancer, not from having coronavirus. Peninsula Health, which operates Frankston Hospital, would not reveal if the circumstances around Mrs Raysons death would be reviewed, citing privacy and patient confidentiality. Gill Rayson holidaying in Thailand in 2018. Her family said she lived a charmed life, full of holidays and fun. Instead, in a short statement, chief medical officer Associate Professor Vikas Wadhwa said the thoughts of everyone at Peninsula Health were with Mrs Raysons family and friends. Mrs Rayson, a doting mother of two children in their early 20s, was diagnosed with lung cancer in August last year after a whirlwind trip around the world, when she developed a severe cough cruising through the Mediterranean.

Gill Rayson on holiday in Thailand in 2018. Birthdays and celebrations were always big events in the Rayson household, so it was clear by mid-March that she was extremely unwell, waking up one morning spacey, having forgotten it was her wedding anniversary and husbands birthday. It was so unlike her, Mr Rayson said. By this time, COVID-19 was dominating the headlines and she was tested as a precaution, having recently had two friends visit from Britain. The test came back negative. Mrs Rayson, who divided her time between homes in Warrandyte and Mount Martha, then spent a stint at the Epworth Hospital with pneumonia, isolated there because doctors were concerned she could have the flu, before returning home, where she slipped further into illness.

On the morning of March 30 she was taken by ambulance to Frankston Hospital awaiting a palliative care bed. Soon after she arrived, a call confirmed one had been found but Mr Rayson said the admitting doctor told him his wife couldn't leave the ward because she needed a coronavirus test. Mr Rayson describes an agonising four-hour wait in the emergency department before he was told his wife would be moved to an isolation ward but he would have to leave by 8pm and no one else could visit. I actually said to them What, you want me to drop my wife off, drive home and youll ring me when she is dead'." Staff at the hospital eventually relented and allowed him to stay, giving permission for her children to visit for five minutes but his mother-in-law had to stay away because she was over 70, Mr Rayson said.

In the isolation ward he describes battling to get his wife adequate medication to calm her. Each visit from medical staff was delayed as they had to put on and take off coronavirus protective gear. Mr Rayson fears his wife died in agony. I said to the doctor, she needs more sedative and they are saying 'We dont have any authorisation to give her more until 9pm'. Mr Rayson said his wife eventually calmed after she was given an accidentally large dose of morphine  80 per cent of her daily dose within 15 minutes. Hes not angry about that but feels it could be evidence the ward was not equipped to deal with palliative care.

About 2.30am, Mr Rayson said a nurse told him they had finally got approval for the children to come back in, but he couldn't bring himself to disturb them. Mrs Rayson died at 8.30am the next morning. Mr Rayson has a photo of the view from the window in the isolation ward  overlooking a skip stacked with discarded crutches, old furniture and a fridge. He is concerned that other people might present to hospitals with symptoms similar to coronavirus and not get the treatment they deserve. Mark Rayson took this photo from the room in the isolation ward where his wife died. I just want to make sure medical people balance some of these things, so they dont make irrational decisions because of paranoia about coronavirus," he said.

Mrs Rayson's test confirmed after her death she did not have coronavirus, he said. Her family says she lived for being a mum to Joshua, aged 24, and Christie, 21. She was always so happy and caring and understanding, Christie said. She just loved being a mum and was upset she wouldnt be around for grandkids. If you or anyone you know needs support call Lifeline on 131 114, or Beyond Blue's coronavirus mental wellbeing support service on 1800 512 348.
To-go sushi bento from Shunji in Sawtelle. (Bill Addison / Los Angeles Times)

The crisis were living through has paralyzed our economy, our mobility, our way of life. Relentlessly, the calendar keeps marking time: Birthdays, anniversaries and holidays arrive. A reason to splurge on exceptionally good takeout might arise, even to ease the soul after a particularly rough day. I have suggestions.

Fighting for the survival of their businesses, many of our most decorated chefs swiveled from opulent tasting menus to family-style comfort foods. Ordering from their places now doesnt  cant  compare to experiencing meals in their dining rooms. Many have nonetheless found ways to cram their imagination, skill and optimism into carryout boxes we then unpack in our own kitchens.

Since the shutdown, readers have asked consistently for takeaway recommendations to brighten a special occasion. I dont put these forth blithely. A boggling number of factors cross the brain when eating away from home right now. Chief among them is safety  for ourselves and for the people making the food.

Each of these places follows practices for organized, contactless pickup. I started my research either by calling each restaurant, rather than using delivery systems that might charge unreasonable commissions, or by following links on their respective websites. More and more upscale L.A. restaurants have joined Tocks to-go reservation platform; its worth a look to see whos there.

And if you happen to need a birthday cake (or pie) but cant bring yourself to make one? Im a big fan of Cake Monkey on Beverly Boulevard.





Auburn

Eric Bosts mix-and-match tasting menus, when we could linger in the restaurants terrarium of a dining room, balanced braininess with earthly pleasure. The precision technique remains, though now his cooking calms like soothing words. Weekly-changing to-go menus, priced at $39 per person, include a salad, entree, vegetable side, bread and dessert. Bosts background in French cuisine came ringing through in a recent main dish of braised oxtails, the delicate meat pulled from the bones, over polenta so rich it registered as custard. Pickup only, Wednesday through Saturday.

Story continues

6703 Melrose Ave., Los Angeles, (323) 486-6703, auburnla.com

Family-style meal (with pizzas occasionally available as specials) from Bestia in the Arts District. (Bill Addison / Los Angeles Times)

Bavel/Bestia

It is surreal, when picking up meals from either of Ori Menashe and Genevieve Gergis Arts District restaurants, to peer into their emptiness. These dining rooms have been among the most consistently raucous draws in Los Angeles. People are still clamoring. The couples family-style meals (packaged for two, four or six people at $49 per person) usually sell out weekly; check early in the week to reserve.

Bavel whirls together Israeli, Egyptian, Moroccan and Southern California flavors; there will be a variation on hummus and a sunny centerpiece like chicken leg fragrant with saffron or short rib tagine over couscous.

Bestia still goes full-blast Italian. Expect house-made salumi to kick off a meal of endive salad, butternut squash soup garnished with pickled shiitakes, and nicely rendered duck confit over celery root puree. At either restaurant, Gergis pastries reassure; the strawberry crostata that completed the Bestia feast last week felt more like springtime than a brisk walk. Pickup only.

Bavel: 500 Mateo St., Los Angeles, (213) 232-4966, baveldtla.com; Bestia: 2121 E. 7th Place, Los Angeles, (213) 514-5724, bestiala.com

A selection of pastries available on weekends from Bon Temps in the Arts District. (Bill Addison / Los Angeles Times)

Bon Temps

Looking to celebrate at breakfast time? Lincoln Carson is one of Californias most accomplished pastry chefs, and his weekend assortment of viennoiserie is a spectacular display of talent. Two favorites: the shattering danish filled with ricotta and strawberries, and the everything croissant filled with cream cheese that is, indeed, everything. Carsons banana bread with burnt honey ganache is among the delights; find the recipe in our online database to replicate it at home. Hes also creating $32.50-per-person family dinners starring Gallic-inspired mains like chicken paillard with green olive pistou or lamb roulade with chermoula. Pickup only.

712 S. Santa Fe Ave., Los Angeles, (213) 784-0044, bontempsla.com





Broken Spanish

The entrees on Ray Garcias family meals ($32 per person) rotate weekly  maybe achiote-roasted chicken or pork chile verde, and theres always a vegetarian option  but fragrant blue corn tortillas and creamy refried lentils always anchor the spread. On Tuesdays only, Garcia reincarnates the spirit of his B.S. Taqueria (which closed last year) into a build-your-own-taco set, with fillings (carne asada, chorizo and potato, garlicky mushrooms), salsas, tortillas and beans included. Pickup only.

1050 Flower St., Los Angeles, (213) 749-1460, brokenspanish.com

Nigiri and a cut roll from the Brothers Sushi in Woodland Hills. (Bill Addison / Los Angeles Times)

The Brothers Sushi

Mark Okuda, a longtime chef at Studio Citys Asanebo, took over this Woodland Hills sushi staple in 2018, keeping the name but making the menu entirely his own. I had a reservation to review the restaurant the week the shutdown was announced. Okuda is still making an ambitious number of dishes: For a lunchtime splurge, opt for the $50 chirashi bowl, a piscine rainbow over sushi rice. (If youre avoiding bluefin tuna, be sure to let them know.) Its an equal pleasure, though, to order a yellowtail-scallion hand roll alongside a few pieces of nigiri (buttery nodoguro, silky hotate, mild kanpachi) or a sashimi plate like halibut and cucumber dressed in yuzu vinegar and shiso oil. Pickup only.

21418 Ventura Blvd., Woodland Hills, (818) 456-4509, thebrotherssushi.com





Cassia

The crunch and herbaceous nip of Bryant Ngs green papaya salad tastes especially vitalizing right now, as does his beef rendang electric with lime and sambal. Cassias menu has narrowed but the singular merge of cultures (Vietnamese, Malaysian, Singaporean and Southern Californian among them) is as honed as ever. Order standouts like kaya toast sandwiching coconut jam; wontons filled with shrimp, cod and country ham in chile oil; and the ever-wonderful seafood laksa. Theyre available as individual meals or bundled into family meals with multiple choices. Delivery or pickup.

1314 7th St., (310) 393-6699, cassiala.com





Crustacean

Helene Ans garlic noodles have been famous for decades. She developed the recipe in the 1970s at her familys first restaurant, Thanh Long in San Francisco, combining Vietnamese traditions with the spaghetti aglio e olio she tried in the citys North Shore Italian restaurants (and thought she could improve upon). She brought the recipe to Los Angeles with Crustacean in 1997. Currently you can order luxe versions of the noodles with roasted Dungeness crab or lobster or massive tiger prawns, but their savory-sweet pungency also gratifies unadorned or with simpler shrimp. Ans cooking has always been eclectic; round out the meal with grilled chicken oyster satay, an extra-citrusy take on crisp orange chicken or a banh mi-Philly cheesesteak hybrid that improbably works. Delivery or pickup.

468 N. Bedford Drive, Beverly Hills, (310) 205-8990, crustaceanbh.com

Fried chicken and black truffle pot pie from Dialogue in Santa Monica. (Bill Addison / Los Angeles Times)

Dialogue/Pasjoli

Dave Beran has to channel his perfectionism somewhere. If he cant be directing his energies into cerebral tasting menus, hes shifted to fussing over deftly engineered beef Wellingtons or an outrageously good fried chicken pot pie with black truffles and ornate puff pastry. His three-course family meals (typically $35 to $69 per person) rotate weekly, though he wouldnt dare change the dessert  a slice of his near-molten Basque cheesecake.

Two miles away, the team at Berans Pasjoli (led by chef de cuisine Matthew Kim) funnel their restlessness into French-influenced menus that can change three times in a week; cassoulet with apple-fennel salad and profiteroles; chicken fricassee over buttered noodles with salad and opera cake; soup au pistou with bread and lemon frangipane cake. One constant: Kims Gruyere and cheddar grilled cheese with Mornay and caramelized onions, a ready-to-heat masterpiece. Pickup only.

Dialogue: 1315 3rd Street Promenade, Santa Monica, dialoguerestaurant.com; Pasjoli: 2732 Main St., Santa Monica, (424) 330-0020, pasjoli.com





Felix

Focaccia and pizzas from Evan Funkes Venice trattoria reheat beautifully, and a lemony chicory salad jolts the palate out of hibernation. Pasta, though, is the center of Funkes universe; he recently published a book on mastering it at home. Rather than preparing hot pasta to-go at Felix, the restaurant sells kits of freshly extruded rigatoni, pappardelle, spaghettone and other shapes with sauces  an easy boil-and-serve situation. Funke, resolutely and perhaps infamously, prefers his pasta molto al dente, and he serves it that way in his dining room. Nows the opportunity to prepare his take on a classic like rigatoni allAmatriciana to your own taste. It will be magnificent. Delivery or pickup.

1023 Abbot Kinney Blvd., Venice, (424) 387-8622, felixla.com

Kaiseki jubako from n/naka. (Bill Addison / Los Angeles Times)

n/naka

A 2015 episode on Netflixs Chefs Table introduced Niki Nakayama and her kaiseki restaurant in Palms to the world; its been one of the countrys hardest reservations to score since. That remains true: Weekly bookings for her takeout options go live every Saturday at 10 a.m. and sell out in seconds. There are two options. A $38 bento combines several pieces of nigiri and a sushi roll with grilled miso black cod over sunchoke puree, a panko fried shrimp, koji-roasted sweet potato and matcha white chocolate cake. The $85 jubako distills the crux of her kaiseki meals into a two-tiered box: a sliver of braised abalone draped back into its pearl shell; gingery Wagyu tataki salad; a couple bites of marinated and fried lobster; and mochi filled with a bright strawberry and red bean paste. Some of the 16 small dishes are hot, so eat this quickly, perhaps with one of the chilled bottles of sake you can order with your boxes. Pickup only.

3455 Overland Ave., Los Angeles, n-naka.com





Shunji

Nothing contained in a box can match the unbridled omakase Shunji Nakao serves from his sushi bar, but the bento boxes he composes still communicate his creative essence. If you find yourself celebrating solo, this might be the ticket: Ten exquisite pieces of nigiri, the rice underneath tinted with red vinegar, and a crab roll sliced into six uniform pieces. Its purity clears the mind and encourages a few moments of stillness. A deluxe sushi bento for $70 adds an appetizer box (tamago, pickled vegetables, fried meats and seafood in artful geometries) that gives the meal a grander sense of occasion. Pickup only.

12244 W. Pico Blvd., Los Angeles, (310) 826-4737, shunji-ns.com





Vaca

Paella Valenciana is always a festive dish. Aromatic with saffron and shot through with chicken, chorizo, scallops and shrimp, the version by chef Amar Santana is a menu highlight at his Spanish restaurant near Costa Mesas South Coast Plaza. It nabs the spotlight again among several options for takeout family meals. Portioned for two, four or six people (and priced respectively at $85, $160 and $210), it comes with three filling vegetable sides and both flan and tres leches cake for dessert. Important: Order same day before 5 p.m. for pickup only between 1 and 7 p.m.

695 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa, (713) 463-6060, vacarestaurant.com





Vespertine

We need artists in the heart of darkness; Jordan Kahn is as much an artist as he is a chef. Among restaurants serving takeout, unearthly Vespertine was perhaps the biggest surprise: How would Kahn, whose food can look like astronomical phenomena, express himself in the medium of to-go containers? Beautifully, it turns out. His first family-style meal was a generous, eclectic expression of comforts: chicken thighs overlaid with herb sauce, Wagyu beef brisket for wrapping in roti, squash gratin with shishito peppers, farro risotto and a black carrot salad buried among endive petals that was, indeed, the loveliest thing Ive ever seen in a cardboard bowl. Kahns second menu revisited dishes from his time at Red Medicine, including rice porridge with egg yolk, broccoli and hazelnuts, and caramel-glazed brisket aromatic with nuoc cham. Then, in a head-spinning pivot, he delved into Low Country recipes from his coastal Georgia childhood. Who can know what comes next? Kahns menus sell out in minutes. Keep an eye on the restaurants Instagram account. Pickup only.

3599 Hayden Ave., Culver City, (323) 320-4023, vespertine.la
LONDON, April 15, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- The Federation of St Kitts and Nevis pioneered the concept of citizenship by investment (CBI) in 1984. It has a 36-year history as a leader in the investor immigration industry and has encouraged other countries to adopt their own CBI programmes. Speaking to CS Global Partners earlier this month, the CEO of the Citizenship by Investment Unit (CIU), Mr Les Khan said that the fund option is ideal for families that apply jointly to obtain second citizenship.

Prime Minister Timothy Harris introduced the Sustainable Growth Fund (SGF) in 2018 as the most affordable, direct, and secure route to second citizenship. The Fund then supports areas like infrastructure advancement, tourism development, social assistance and local entrepreneurship. The SGF route requires a one-off contribution as qualifying investment for citizenship. Single applicants are asked to make a US$150,000 contribution. However, Mr Khan says it is particularly suited for applicants with larger family structures.

"If a family joins us, they can add dependants and when their children have children, they will become citizens and so on," Mr Khan explains. Families of four can apply by making a minimum contribution of US$195,000, plus US$10,000 for each additional dependant. "This makes it attractive to families," says Mr Kahn.

Another key advantage of the SGF is the speed with which applications are processed, with applicants frequently receiving approvals in three months. For investors requiring faster results, St Kitts and Nevis offers a 60-day Accelerated Application Process (AAP) for a premium.

To ensure that high quality applicants alone obtain citizenship, St Kitts and Nevis remains strongly committed to the performance of thorough due diligence on all applicants. It is a multi-layered process, performed in-house in the CIU and outsourced to independent firms specialising in obtaining background information on people and entities, as well as international and regional crime enforcement agencies, such as Interpol and the JRCC.

The Sustainable Growth Fund is a straightforward option for busy investors seeking second citizenship, as it requires a one-time contribution, can be accelerated to 60 days, ensures high security standards and safety for future generations. It is unique in its ability to help the citizens of St Kitts and Nevis directly, enabling them to forge a stronger economy and a higher quality of life.

Contact:

[email protected]

www.csglobalpartners.com

SOURCE CS Global Partners

Related Links

https://csglobalpartners.com


Although hope for peace initially filled the country a few weeks ago due to the plummeting COVID-19 cases, South Korea is now tracking patients who can possibly experience a "reactivation" of the coronavirus.

In the data presented by John Hopkins University, last week, the country had over 10,000 positive cases and over 6,000 patients released.

Despite the firm control of the administration to limit the death count to less than 300, doctors in the Korean Center for Disease Control and Prevention (KCDC) are looking into vaccines for immunity, but they are faced with an obstacle. There are 91 recorded cases of recovered patients who are then tested positive again for coronavirus.

This discovery created a domino effect. China, who allegedly lifted quarantine recently, is dealing with an influx of patients who appear to be re-infected with COVID-19, which results in death for some the second time they were diagnosed.

More Dangerous the Second Time Around

At first, believed to be inaccurate testing, the director-general of KCDC Jeong Eun-kyeong said that this was untrue. The patients were not at all re-infected, but the virus was actually reactivated.

Measures in South Korea require patients to test negative twice before being discharged from the hospital. This must be done within 24 hours.

While the scientists were studying the immunity of patients towards the coronavirus, it appeared that none was present after all. A lot of experts believe that a brief period of resistance against the virus is demonstrated by the patients when symptoms were absent. Because of the notion of the coronavirus possibly reactivating, the previous contention stunned researchers.

This might be owed to inconsistent test results or inappropriate diagnosis, which would only add to the problems of the frontline medical workers. Previously immunocompromised people who already recovered might even be at higher risk.

Check these out!

Similarities to chickenpox?

It seemed as though South Korea already flattened the curve, but apparently, the patients are reporting recurring symptoms of the disease, and appear to have contracted it again. Medical researchers liken this possible reactivation pattern to that of chickenpox.

More data from the KCDC suggest the possibility of the virus becoming dormant after the apparent absence of the symptoms, only to become "reactivated" and, like chickenpox, cause more infection to other cells.

Shingles is a condition that implies the reactivation of varicella-zoster, the chickenpox virus. However, unlike chickenpox, patients who recover from coronavirus are not immune to it.

The World Health Organization (WHO) planned an investigation on the reactivation of the said virus. They added that the organization was aware of the reports about the patients who tested positive again and that they were carefully studying with experts to acquire more information.

"We are aware that some patients are PCR positive after they clinically recover," they said in a statement. They concluded that a more systematic collection of samples was needed to better understand how long the patients shed the live virus.
Former U.S. President Barack Obama on Tuesday endorsed his former second in command, Joe Biden, for president, saying he was a clear choice to replace President Donald Trump in Novembers national election.

Our countrys future hangs on this election, Obama said, but added that it would not be easy to defeat Trump, who won an upset victory in 2016 over former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

Obama urged Americans to keep believing in the possibilities of a better world by supporting Bidens campaign.

Obama praised the courage and skills of health care workers treating coronavirus victims. But he said national leadership in combating the disease was missing in Trumps White House.

Choosing Joe to be my vice president was one of the best decisions I ever made. And he became a close friend, Obama said. I believe Joe has all the qualities we need in a president right now.

Joe was there when we rebuilt from the Great Recession (in 2008 and 2009) and rescued the American auto industry, Obama recalled. He was the one asking what every policy would do for the middle class.

Joe gets stuff done, Obama said, pointing to his help in combating the H1N1 virus and preventing the Ebola epidemic from becoming a pandemic.

That Obama would endorse his fellow Democrat Biden in the November national election over Trump, an opposition Republican, is not on its face surprising.

But the early pledge of support from Obama marks a turning point in the former presidents political activity against Trump. While Trump during his three-years-plus presidency has frequently assailed Obamas actions and sought to overhaul his trade, environmental and health care programs, Obama has largely avoided public rejoinders.

Obama consulted privately with several of the two dozen or more Democratic candidates who sought the 2020 party nomination to run against Trump. But Obama endorsed no one during the months-long campaign that started in mid-2019, opting to let voters and the give-and-take of numerous spirited debates among the candidates dictate the outcome.

Obama and Biden have reportedly had several conversations in the past couple of weeks. Biden told donors at a virtual fundraiser earlier this month that he had asked his old boss for advice on choosing a running mate, who he has said will be a woman.

So, I called President Obama, not as to who but how soon you have to start, the former vice president said.

The support of Obama, who polls show remains very popular among Democrats, could help Biden unite fractious Democrats after the long party nomination process.

Bidens last major challenger, Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, suspended his campaign last week after concluding that Biden had amassed an insurmountable lead in pledged delegates to the partys national presidential nominating convention in August. Then, on Monday, Sanders appeared on Bidens webcast and wholeheartedly endorsed him.

Weve got to make Trump a one-term president, and we need you in the White House, Sanders told Biden. I will do all that I can to see that that happens, Joe.

Biden was vice president from 2009 to early 2017 during Obamas presidency. Biden often played a key role in advancing Obamas policy goals, key among them the 2010 passage of a national health care plan that gave millions of Americans without health insurance a chance to buy coverage on a government web site to help pay medical bills.

The health plan, popularly known as Obamacare, was approved with no legislative support from opposition Republicans, but has survived legal attacks and Trumps attempts to repeal or undermine it. Even with Obamacare, however, millions of U.S. citizens still have no health insurance.

Brad Parscale, Trumps reelection campaign manager, belittled Obamas Biden endorsement, saying the former president spent much of the last five years urging Joe Biden not to run for president out of fear that he would embarrass himself, and now has no other choice but to support him.

Obama was right in the first place: Biden is a bad candidate who will embarrass himself and his party, Parscale said in a statement. President Trump will destroy him.
[April 14, 2020] HAGENS BERMAN, NATIONAL TRIAL ATTORNEYS, Urges GSX Techedu (GSX) Investors with Significant Losses to Contact its Attorneys: Firm Investigating Possible Securities Fraud

SAN FRANCISCO, April 14, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- Hagens Berman urges investors in GSX Techedu Inc. (NYSE: GSX) who have suffered significant losses to submit their losses now. The firm is investigating possible securities law violations.







Relevant Holding Period: Before Apr. 14, 2020 Sign Up: www.hbsslaw.com/investor-fraud/GSX Contact An Attorney Now: [email protected]

844-916-0895

GSX Techedu (GSX) Investigation: The investigation focuses on the accuracy of GSX's reported financial results, effectiveness of its internal controls and procedures over financial reporting, and the company's compliance with accounting rules for revenue recognition. GSX and its senior management have repeatedly hyped the company's reported record revenue and gross billings growth, most recently on Feb. 18, 2020, in connection with GSX's Q4 and FY 2019 financial results. But, on Apr. 14, 2020, Citron Research published a scathing report, "GSX Techedu Inc.  The Most Blatant Chinese Stock Fraud Since 2011," accusing GSX of fabricating up to 70% of its revenues. According to the report, GSX's Chinese official government financials and SEC financials are irreconcilable and show a 75% overstatement of net profits for FY 2017  2018 alone. On this news, the price of GSX ADSs dropped sharply during intraday trading on Apr. 14, 2020. "We're focused on investors' losses and determining the true scope of this potential financial fraud at GSX," said Reed Kathrein, the Hagens Berman partner leading the investigation. Whistleblowers: Persons with non-public information regarding GSX should consider their options to help in the investigation or take advantage of the SEC Whistleblower program. Under the new program, whistleblowers who provide original information may receive rewards totaling up to 30 percent of any successful recovery made by the SEC. For more information, call Reed Kathrein at 844-916-0895 or email [email protected]. About Hagens Berman

Hagens Berman is a national law firm with nine offices in eight cities around the country and eighty attorneys. The firm represents investors, whistleblowers, workers and consumers in complex litigation. More about the firm and its successes is located at hbsslaw.com. For the latest news visit our newsroom or follow us on Twitter at @classactionlaw . Contact:

Reed Kathrein, 844-916-0895 View original content to download multimedia:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/hagens-berman-national-trial-attorneys-urges-gsx-techedu-gsx-investors-with-significant-losses-to-contact-its-attorneys-firm-investigating-possible-securities-fraud-301040610.html SOURCE Hagens Berman Sobol Shapiro LLP

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The MI6 building at Vauxhall is the headquarters of the British Secret Intelligence Service (SIS), in London, England, on May 17, 2016. (Chris Ratcliffe/Getty Images)

British Intelligence Agencies Urge Reassessing China Relationship

News Analysis

Britains intelligence agencies called for restrictions on Chinese takeovers of UK tech firms.

The Express reported that MI6 foreign intelligence service and its domestic counterpart, MI5, urged the UK to reassess its relationship with China, to include tighter controls on Beijings dealings with British high-tech and other strategic industries.

British lawmakers expressed concern that the Chinese regime is exploiting the global crisis triggered by the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus pandemic by taking control of companies, such as UK chipmaker Imagination Technologies.

What we think is going on is the Chinese are trying to export the technology base from here to China and thats inappropriate, David Davis, a lawmaker from Prime Minister Boris Johnsons Conservative Party, told Reuters on April 14.

Imagination Technologies, a supplier of semiconductor intellectual property, was acquired for $742.5 million in 2017 by U.S.-based private equity firm Canyon Bridge Capital Partners, led by former Oracle executive Ray Bingham.

Canyon Bridge is in turn backed by Chinese state-owned China Reform Holdings.

China Reform had attempted to take control of Imaginations board by appointing members who would support them.

A board meeting that was scheduled last Tuesday was delayed after the British government intervened, Reuters reported.

Imagination announced on April 10 that its chief executive officer, Ron Black, had stepped down and would be replaced by Ray Bingham.

Black tendered his resignation a few days earlier with a letter stating that he resigned after assurances that China Reform would remain a passive limited partner. However, it had proven not to be the case, and China Reform was now attempting to assert its control in a boardroom coup by appointing four of the seven board members.

Black stated that the takeover was an effort to undermine Imaginations neutrality in the Sino-U.S. tech war confrontation to favor Chinas 5G leader Huawei.

He added that the tactic would undermine the UK firm perhaps fatally and suggested that the Chinese might move the company and its 600 jobs to China.

After the contents of Blacks resignation letter were leaked to the Financial Times, UK culture minister Oliver Dowden wrote to Bingham to demand more information on the developments, resulting in the cancellation of Imaginations board meeting.

Davis said the British government should ensure that Imaginations technology base does not transfer to China, and should even look for a Western buyer for the company, according to Reuters.

Imagination Technologies is located in Englands Oxford-Cambridge Arc. The Arc, which runs between Oxford and Cambridge universities, has become Englands high-tech economic heartland with 23 science parks and innovation districts.

The Arc is known for its global expertise in life sciences, healthcare, space, satellites, energy, big data, artificial intelligence, advanced engineering, electronics, sensors, environment, and digital media.

In 2017, Canyon Bridge tried to buy U.S. chip-maker Lattice Semiconductor for $1.3 billion before it signed the deal with Imagination. The Trump administrations Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS) blocked the buyout of the field-programmable gate array maker on national security grounds.

CFIUS highlighted that Portland-based Lattice had been a major producer of semi-conductor chips for the U.S. military. It stated that Canyon Bridge shall take all steps necessary to fully and permanently abandon the proposed transaction.

To further protect British technology, MI6 and MI5 suggested the UK to reduce Chinese student access to research at its universities. In 2019, around 32 percent, or 86,485, of first-year non-UK students were international students from China.

A government source told The Express that the British intelligence services are emphasizing that the UK must ensure diversity of supply for 6G and 7G, and to protect highly important UK crown jewel industries of technology, research, and innovation.
SAN FRANCISCO, April 15, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- Forethought , leading AI startup for customer support, today announced the appointment of Dan Watkins as President. The two-year-old AI company and 2018 Disrupt Battlefield winner signed sales and operational expert Watkins to lead go-to-market, talent, operations, and customer experience.

A highly experienced executive, Watkins joins Forethought after 13 years at Qualtrics, where he most recently served as VP of Sales, overseeing product sales in the Americas and research services globally. His efforts helped lead Qualtrics from a basement to SAP's $8B acquisition . Separately, Watkins serves as Chairman of the Board for Databased , an up-and-coming sales engine evaluator.

"Watching Forethought's Agatha in action, I immediately recognized the brilliance of co-founders, Deon Nicholas and Sami Ghoche (honored on the coveted 2019 Forbes 30 under 30 list). The demand for AI exists in every part of business. Forethought's Agatha meets that demand," said Watkins,

"We're just getting started," said Deon Nicholas, co-founder and CEO of Forethought. "Dan is a proven business leader and go-to-market visionary. I'm incredibly excited to welcome Dan and transform AI and customer support together." Watkins joins Forethought during a period of rapid momentum and expects employee headcount to triple in 2020. Last year, Forethought launched with tech giants including Gusto, Carta, MasterClass, and other Fortune 500 companies.

"The goal is simple: scale Forethought and revolutionize what we know AI can be," Watkins notes.

"We're thrilled to have Dan join the Forethought leadership teamhe is a valuable addition and a great compliment to Deon and the team," said Pete Sonsini, NEA general partner and Forethought board member. "Dan's experience advancing Qualtrics will help propel Forethought as they continue to grow their leading AI platform."

Forethought is assisting during the COVID-19 global pandemic; providing free access to recently launched Agatha Deflections , a tool to automatically respond to support tickets, until June 1, 2020 to help teams in need. As support tickets continue to increase and escalate throughout the crisis, Agatha's capabilities support customers and enterprises worldwide.

"In these uncertain times, essential businesses are seeing unprecedented support loads," said Deon Nicholas, "Financial institutions, supermarkets, healthcare providers, and governments are turning to AI to maintain and increase efficiency despite massive shifts in work. We're fortunate to be part of the solution during an otherwise chaotic period."

ABOUT FORETHOUGHT

Forethought builds AI-driven user experiences that embed intelligence into employee workflows, starting with their AI solution for customer support teams: Agatha.

MEDIA CONTACT

Deon Nicholas, Forethought

[email protected]

Shannon Wilsey, Sparkpr

[email protected]

SOURCE Forethought

Related Links

https://www.forethought.ai


The secretary of defense announced Tuesday that the stop-movement order in place for all U.S. military personnel and their families, intended to control the spread of coronavirus, will be extended beyond the current May 11 expiration date.

"We are currently working to extend a Department [of Defense] stop-movement order restricting domestic and international travel for all DoD personnel," Defense Secretary Mark Esper told defense reporters at the Pentagon today.

The original travel restrictions, enacted March 13, halted essentially all permanent change of station (PCS) moves except for cases of extreme hardship. Those restrictions will stay in place past the planned May 11 expiration date, said Esper, who said the Pentagon would release more details in the next couple of days.

"We want to give our folks sufficient time to make adjustments, and to socialize it with them, that we will be extending beyond that May 11 date," Esper said. "We want to make sure we have a more comprehensive way in which we address exemptions -- we will still allow for exceptions for hardship, things like that."

Last week, Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. David Goldfein suggested during a Facebook town hall event that the halt in military moves could be extended into July or later.

Related: Pentagon Bans Domestic Travel for Troops, Families As Coronavirus Spreads

Esper said he is trying to manage the expectations of the 2.2 million service members and their spouses and children.

"There is a lot more people affected by this, people that have suspended their lives who are anticipating a PCS move," Esper said. "We are trying to take all these factors into account."

Going forward, Esper said he plans to review the length of the stop-movement orders every 15 days "to see if we can curtail it sooner or if we need to extend it further."

"While I understand the impact that this has on our troops and our families, this is a necessary measure to keep our people safe and our military ready to act," Esper said.

"We will continue to remain flexible, agile as we work to defeat this invisible enemy. It will take time, but we will get through this, and we will get through this together."

Matthew Cox can be reached at matthew.cox@military.com.

Read More: Here's What the Coronavirus Travel Ban Means for Military Families
Nominations for two awards honoring Major Stephen Reich are being sought from the community.

The awards are presented annually to a Shepaug High School student and to a citizen of Washington who demonstrate character, service, leadership and achievement.

Major Reich was commanding a rescue operation in eastern Afghanistan when his Chinook helicopter was shot down June 28, 2005, killing all 16 aboard.

Major Reich grew up in Washington, graduated from Shepaug Valley High School in 1989, and from the United States Military Academy in 1993.

Stephen Reich Memorial Award

This award is presented annually to a Shepaug High School student who demonstrates the qualities of character, service, leadership, and achievement.

The award honors Stephen Reichs memory by recognizing a Shepaug High School student who exhibits these qualities in school and in the community.

The presentation of this award will be at the end of May, and the method of presentation will be determined based on the ongoing COVID-19 situation.

Nominations from the public are encouraged and should be sent to Scott Werkhoven at werkhovens@region-12.org. Please include a brief description of the students qualifications for the award, your connection to the student, and your contact information.

Nominations will be accepted through April 24.

The Major Stephen Reich Award for Exceptional Citizenship

The purpose of this award is to recognize a Washington citizen who stands out among the many people who give so much, in so many ways, to the community.

This award honors Stephens memory by honoring an individual that demonstrates the qualities of character, service, leadership, and achievement that exemplified Stephens life.

This award is presented on Memorial Day during the ceremony in front of the Town Hall following the parade, however this may be impacted by the ongoing COVID-19 situation as well.

As in the past, nominations are being sought from the community.

Nominations need to be in writing and should chronicle the nominees contributions in as much detail as possible.

All nominations will be considered by the criteria of character, service, leadership, and achievement.

Nominations can be submitted in three ways: by visitingwww.majorreichaward.com and clicking on Submit a Nomination; by emailing it to majorreichaward@gmail.com ; or by mailing it to Sheila Anson, Town Clerk, Town of Washington, P.O. Box 383, Washington Depot, CT 06794.

Nominations will be accepted through April 30.

The committee is committed to committed to selecting recipients for both awards this year, however the manner of presentation will be in accordance with any guidelines in place at the time due to the COVID-19 situation.

For more information about the awards, as well as bios of past winners and an online nomination form can be found at www.majorreichaward.com.
Senate Democrats on Wednesday proposed a $30bn plan for a comprehensive national testing strategy that party leaders hope to include in the next coronavirus response package.

The $30bn proposal fills the void left by the Trump administration, which has yet to roll out a comprehensive federal testing plan of its own, despite the president and many of his top advisers expressing their desire to begin reopening parts of the economy in May.

Health experts have warned that reopening the economy without proper testing or contact tracing  the ability to track and quarantine people who have come into contact with others who have tested positive for Covid-19  could lead to a resurgence of the coronavirus infection rate.

Those experts have said the US needs to be testing 500,000 people per day at a minimum. Thats far more than the roughly 140,000 Americans who are now being tested per day.

If the president wont do this, we have to do it, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer told reporters on a call.

We would very much like it to be part of the next [legislative coronavirus] package because it is so necessary, the New York Democrat added.

Mr Trump on Tuesday evening tried to shift blame for what experts say is a low testing rate to state executives, contending during his daily coronavirus briefing that his administration has "created incredible tests."

"Individual states and the governors will be held accountable," the president said of plans he wants those governors to present to the White House for opening their states. "If they need things, we will help them get those things. But we want them to do their testing. We want them because they're equipped to do testing." Many governors, however, report the opposite.

Administration officials have been drafting plans to phase in the reopening of the economy beginning in May that calls for a surge in testing before 15 May, The Washington Post reported earlier this week.

But healthcare administrators have complained that the countrys health infrastructure is not nearly ready to test on the requisite scale to get Americans safely back to work. Among myriad other issues, there is a shortage of the types of swabs needed for testing, and only one factory in the US is manufacturing them right now.

Senate Democrats on Wednesday urged Mr Trump to use his powers under the Defence Production Act (DPA) to compel other American companies to begin producing more testing equipment.

The president has been reluctant to pursue that, suggesting that states should take charge of procuring their own testing equipment. He also contends he has used the DPA like a "hammer" to get companies to bend to his whims, despite widespread reports of shortages.

One of Democrats top priorities is ensuring free testing reaches every community, including those with predominantly minority, tribal, and older populations, said Oregon Senator Patty Murray, the top Democrat on the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labour, and Pensions.

The virus is doing the most harm to people whom the healthcare system has left behind, Ms Murray added, alluding to data released by many states and cities that show Covid-19 is infecting and killing black people at disproportionately high rates.

As just one example, 70 per cent of people in Louisiana who have died from the disease are black  even though black people represent roughly one-third of the states population, according to data released earlier this month.
As Singapore earns global praise for mitigating its spread of the coronavirus -- migrant workers there are facing a different reality.

Infections are mounting among them, and it may expose a weak link in the city state's efforts.

As of Tuesday, over 1,600 of Singapore's roughly 3,300 cases were migrants.

Medical experts had previously flagged the potential for mass infection among them.

Singapore has more than 300,000 migrant workers living in cramped and unsanitary dormitories - with often 12 or 20 to a room.

Rights groups have also criticised the governments initial policy response. They say it left this community behind.

For example, a nationwide mask distribution at the start of the outbreak excluded migrant workers living in the dorms.

For many, the situation highlights the different standards applied to the workers who have helped build Singapore.

While the government put up Singapore residents returning from overseas in expensive hotels to limit contagion -- some migrant workers have been confined to bunk rooms that they said had blocked toilets and overflowing bins.

The government has defended its virus-prevention measures in dormitories, which include advising operators to monitor workers for fever and preventing mingling in common areas.

Singapore has also ramped up testing in dorms and started to move some workers deemed "essential" into public housing, military camps and industrial accommodation ships -- authorities say this is helping create more room in the complexes.
Fears have been raised that care home residents who are seriously ill with coronavirus are being kept away from hospital after national guidelines suggested they should only be admitted if 'appropriate'.

The advice, in two separate sets of guidance, says care home managers should consider whether being sent to hospital is 'the best course of action' for a resident and warns that ambulances may not be sent if 'conservative care' at the home is deemed preferable.

Recommendations from the British Geriatrics Society, a professional body representing 3,900 doctors and specialists in healthcare for the elderly, say care home managers should discuss possible admissions with paramedics, doctors and other healthcare staff.

Fears have arisen that elderly people who are seriously ill with coronavirus are being kept away from hospitals after unclear guidelines suggested they should only be admitted if 'appropriate'

The advice adds: 'They should be aware that transfer to hospital may not be offered if it is not likely to benefit the resident and if palliative or conservative care within the home is deemed more appropriate.

'Care homes should work with healthcare providers to support families and residents through this.'

Caroline Abrahams, charity director at Age UK has urged for decisions regarding patients to be made by doctors themselves

Separate guidance from the Department of Health, Public Health England and the NHS instructs care home managers to 'assess the appropriateness of hospitalisation' if residents become seriously ill with the virus.

It adds that they should hold discussions with a resident and their family to 'determine if hospitalisation is the best course of action for the resident'.

Charities fear that the policies will result in patients not being taken to hospital even when it is in their best interests.

The Alzheimer's Society warned that the guidance would be 'misinterpreted' by staff and 'inadvertently prevent access to critical care to people who need it'.

Age UK stressed that decisions on whether to take a patient to hospital must always be based on 'individual circumstances' rather than a blanket policy,

Earlier this month care homes in Brighton were told that residents would not be admitted to hospital because it might increase their suffering.

One care home manager said they felt 'shocked and numb' at the advice issued by Brighton and Hove Clinical Commissioning Group (CCG), adding that a GP had even told them 'none of your residents aged over 75 will be admitted to hospital'.

Another said: 'We have been told flatly that it would be highly unlikely that they would be accepted into hospital.' Similar guidelines were sent out to family doctors in north-west London, who were told that they would face 'difficult decisions' about whether to admit care home residents to hospital.

Earlier this month care homes in Brighton were told that residents would not be admitted to hospital because it might increase their suffering

Why can't they all be treated here? NHS Nightingale hospitals remain largely empty with just a few dozen patients being treated at the three biggest sites. It led to calls last night for the temporary hospitals to be adapted to cater for care home residents who had tested positive for coronavirus amid fears that homes are struggling to cope. Temporary hospitals have recently opened in London, Manchester and Birmingham, which combined have the capacity for as many as 10,000 patients. Others are being set up in Bristol, Harrogate, Exeter and Sunderland. But only 19 patients needed to be treated at the ExCel centre hospital in east London over the Easter weekend, leaving hundreds of beds with ventilators spare, the Health Service Journal reported. The temporary hospital has 500 beds with ventilators and room for 3,500 more patients. The Prime Minister's spokesman said NHS Nightingale in Birmingham was ready to take patients and NHS Nightingale in Manchester had already received patients. But it is understood that the three sites have only received a few dozen patients because normal hospitals have had spare capacity. Liz Kendall, Labour's social care spokesman, said: 'If there is any spare capacity in NHS Nightingale hospitals we need to make sure they are used for those who need it most, including elderly people with coronavirus who would otherwise have to go into care homes with all the risks that brings.' Advertisement

The documents, obtained by Pulse magazine from the region's eight CCGs, stated that frail, older patients 'do not benefit from aggressive hospital treatment'.

Care home residents are far less likely to survive if they are given intensive oxygen therapy or put on a ventilator compared with otherwise healthy patients.

That said, they will still benefit from the close monitoring of doctors and less invasive oxygen treatments that will be offered in hospital.

Sally Copley, director of policy and campaigns at Alzheimer's Society, said: 'People with dementia who have Covid-19 and need to go to hospital should be able to, just like anybody else.

'These guidelines should always be applied on a case-by-case basis, and take into account the person's needs. Our worry would be if stretched and exhausted health and care workers misinterpret these guidelines, and inadvertently prevent access to critical care to people who need it.'

Caroline Abrahams, charity director at Age UK said: 'Decisions about transferring care home residents to hospital must be made by doctors, together with the older people themselves wherever possible, and with their families too.

'They need to take into account any wishes older people have already expressed about treatment and going into hospital and recognise that unfortunately, any admission at present runs the risk of exposing residents to the virus.

'Above all, these decisions must always be based on individual circumstances, not a blanket policy.'

Professor Martin Marshall, chair of the Royal College of GPs, said: 'Whether during a pandemic or not, decisions about a patient's care must be made based on their individual medical needs, as well as their individual wishes.

'Some patients will not want to die in hospital, so if it sadly gets to this stage, whether related to Covid-19 or not, admittance to hospital would not be appropriate.'

The recommendations from the British Geriatrics Society, published at the end of last month, explain: 'Care homes should be aware that escalation decisions to hospital will be taken in discussion with paramedics, general practitioners and other healthcare support staff.'

First Minister Nicola Sturgeon said all care home residents showing symptoms of the disease will now be tested

The Department of Health's guidance, produced with PHE, the NHS and the Care Quality Commission at the beginning of the month, states that if a resident might need to go to hospital with coronavirus symptoms, staff should 'consult the resident's advance care plan or treatment escalation plan and discuss with the resident and/or their family'.

A quarter of coronavirus deaths in Scotland have been in care homes, the country's National Records office revealed yesterday  237 of the 962 suspected victims north of the border.

First Minister Nicola Sturgeon said all residents showing symptoms of the disease will now be tested.
Story Highlights African countries round out the top 12 populations plagued by health problems

51% sub-Saharan Africa dissatisfied with availability of quality healthcare

Six in 10 (60%) aged 60 or older report health problems

WASHINGTON, D.C. -- Since sub-Saharan Africa reported its first confirmed case of COVID-19 in late February in Lagos, Nigeria, African governments and much of the international health community have prepared for a potential humanitarian calamity. And yet, two and a half months later, the region has roughly 10,000 confirmed cases and fewer than 700 deaths to date.

While African populations and their national health systems continue to prepare for the potential for increased transmission across the continent, recent World Poll data indicate how Africa might handle a virus that has already stretched health systems in some rich countries to the breaking point.

Among 144 countries and areas polled in 2019, the 12 countries with the highest percentage of their population experiencing health problems were all found in sub-Saharan Africa. Chad, Guinea, Comoros and Eswatini led the world, with at least half of adults in those countries reporting health problems that prevent them from doing what people their age normally do.

Adults in sub-Saharan Africa in general consistently report high rates of underlying health problems. In 2019, nearly three in 10 (28%) said they have health problems that prevent them from doing things people their age normally can do. This is similar to rates in former Soviet States (29%), but it is significantly higher than in regions such as Europe (20%) and Asia (24%) where the coronavirus has already taken a huge toll.

The elderly and those with comorbidities are at an elevated risk once infected with the coronavirus. According to a recent paper in the Lancet Infectious Diseases Journal, those infected over age 60 have a fatality rate three times higher than those under 60 (4.5% vs. 1.4%). Among Africans in this most vulnerable age group, six in 10 (60%) report health problems, which is again higher than the percentages in Europe and Asia.

Self-Reported Health Problems Do you have any health problems that prevent you from doing any of the things people your age normally can do? Yes overall Aged 60+ % % Former Soviet Union 29 63 Sub-Saharan Africa 28 60 Asia 24 45 Middle East and North Africa 23 60 Americas 21 38 Europe 20 41 Ranked by percentage yes Gallup World Poll, 2019

Majority in Sub-Saharan Africa Dissatisfied With Availability of Quality Care

African health systems suffer from a chronic lack of funds, doctors and equipment. Ventilators, key in the treatment of COVID-19 patients, are in short supply: Sierra Leone has 13, Liberia and the Central African Republic each have three. Sub-Saharan Africa averages 0.2 physicians per 1,000 people, compared with 2.9 in wealthy OECD countries. And while the U.S. can deliver $100 billion in funds to hospitals and community health centers through its recent stimulus bill, cash-strapped African governments are unlikely to be able to raise funds quickly enough to confront a potential crisis.

These shortcomings are reflected in Africans' attitudes toward their own healthcare systems. A slim majority of adults in sub-Saharan Africa (51%) are dissatisfied with the availability of quality healthcare in their communities. Still, these percentages soar far higher than the average in a number of countries, including Gabon and Mauritania, which rank among the most dissatisfied countries in the world.

African States Most Dissatisfied With Healthcare In the city or area where you live, are you satisfied or dissatisfied with the availability of quality healthcare? Dissatisfied % Gabon 75 Mauritania 73 Togo 70 Liberia 69 Congo Brazzaville 65 Chad 63 Comoros 63 Madagascar 60 Sierra Leone 60 Mali 58 Ranked by percentage yes Gallup World Poll, 2019

Implications

Experts have struggled to explain the virus' still-limited foothold in sub-Saharan Africa. Some have said that the region's warmer climate has slowed its spread or that the lead time governments had to close borders limited its arrival. Less positively, others put forward that testing regimes remain too poor to identify the growth of the virus, though today, more than 40 African countries can test for COVID-19, up from just two in February.

To its advantage, sub-Saharan Africa remains home to the world's youngest population, with an estimated 60% of residents younger than age 25. Africa simply has proportionally fewer older adults who are much more likely to be at risk from the coronavirus. Further, many African countries are already deeply experienced in handling infectious diseases, while several are veterans of recent Ebola outbreaks in West Africa and the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Still, Africa's poorly funded and under-resourced healthcare systems leave it in a perilous position should COVID-19 take root. High instances of underlying health issues such as HIV and tuberculosis, which compromise immune systems, leave large swathes of African populations uniquely vulnerable.

Africa has thus far been fortunate to largely escape the worst effects of this global pandemic. However, should transmission increase as it has in parts of southern Europe or the U.S., African countries remain in a difficult position to effectively combat it with potentially devastating consequences.
S&P Global Ratings on Wednesday said it has lowered its ratings outlook on Tata Steel as the agency does not foresee improvement in the steel maker's earnings and financial profile over the next 12-18 months.

The outlook reflects risks of further weakening in Tata Steel's credit profile if the effect of economic conditions and lower commodity prices are more prolonged than our current expectations, S&P Global Ratings said in a statement.

The agency lowered its long-term foreign currency issuer credit rating on Tata Steel and subsidiary ABJA Investment Co. Pte. Ltd., and the issue rating on various US-dollar denominated senior unsecured notes ABJA has issued, to 'B+' from 'BB-'.

"The downgrade mainly reflects our expectation that the improvement in Tata Steel's earnings and financial profile, on which the 'BB-' rating was based, is unlikely to materialise in the next 12-18 months. This is mainly due to Covid-19 related disruptions and the consequent economic effects," it said.

S&P Global Ratings has also lowered its rating on Tata Steel UK Holdings Ltd (TSUKH) to 'B' from 'B+' in line with the rating action on its parent, Tata Steel.

Even before recent developments, the agency said, Tata Steel's earnings in the first nine months of fiscal year ended March 31, 2020, had under-performed its expectations.

However, meaningful price hikes between December 2019 and March 2020, together with a seasonally stronger January-March quarter meant there was still potential for the company's financial profile to improve, but now S&P Global Ratings sees this as unlikely.

"(Instead) We see a more significant impact on Tata Steel's credit profile coming from its higher cost European operations," it said.

While both the company's Europe plants (in the UK and the Netherlands) are still running, they are doing so at significantly reduced capacity. "In our base case, we assume depressed volumes for at least one quarter, followed by a recovery to more normal levels," it noted.

The agency further said it could lower the rating on Tata Steel if the company's credit profile remains pressured for longer than current expectations.

The outlook would be revised back to stable only if the impact of the economic slowdown is less than our current expectation, it said.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
ASSE International Student Exchange Programs, in cooperation with community high schools, is looking for local families to host boys and girls ages 1518 for the next academic year. Students from all over the world  places like Germany, Spain, Italy, Japan and Ukraine, to name a few  have already received scholarships to study in the USA.

"All they need now is you," officials said. "Loving and caring host families are the cornerstone of our program and vital to its mission of bridging the gap between people, cultures and nations. During this temporary period of social distancing, more than ever we need to look forward to and celebrate opportunities to bring humanity back together. By generously opening your home to a young person from overseas, you can help us continue our global commitment to increasing international peace and understanding."



ASSE is designated and supervised by the U.S. Department of State. Preparations are underway for the 2020-21 program year and the arrival of new future leaders this Fall.

"ASSE students come with an enthusiasm to practice their English and experience American culture -- food, sports, shopping and more," officials said. "They also love to share their own culture with their host families  who welcome them not as a guests, but as family members  giving both the students and families a rich cultural experience."



ASSE students have pocket money for personal expenses, along with health, accident and liability insurance. ASSE students are selected for participation based on academics and good citizenship. Host families can choose their students from a wide variety of backgrounds, countries and personal interests.



"ASSEs top concern is the health of our host families, host communities and exchange students. Even as the U.S. and many other countries continue to live under temporary stay-at-home orders, we would like to reassure you that these students will not travel unless it is considered safe to do so by the U.S. and foreign governmental agencies entrusted with public health and safety," officials said.



To become a host family, or to find out how to become involved with ASSE in your community, call Pamela at 205-577-9323 or the ASSE Southern Regional Office at 1-800-473-0696, or go to www.host.asse.com to begin your host family application.

"There are many students to choose from, so begin the process of welcoming your new son or daughter into your family today," officials said.
IT Support Technician, Vienna, Austria

Organization: International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA)

Country: Austria

City: Vienna, Austria

Office: IAEA Vienna, Austria

Grade: G-5

Closing date: Thursday, 7 May 2020

IT Support Technician(G5)

( 2020/0192 (209729) )

Organization: MTIT-AIPS Management Section

Primary Location: Austria-Vienna-Vienna-IAEA Headquarters

Job Posting: 2020-04-09, 12:44:12 PM

Contract Type : Temporary Assistance

Regular

Probation Period : 1 Year

Organizational Setting

The Department of Management (MT) provides a platform of services that serves as a foundation for the successful delivery of the IAEAs scientific and technical programmes. Its mission statement is as follows: MT is a partner and a business enabler that champions change and efficiency, leveraging a common purpose. Thus, among other support activities, it assists a scientific manager in recruiting the right expert, helps a technical officer coordinate the purchase of radiation equipment, and ensures that all Board documents are translated and distributed on a timely basis to Member States.

The Division of Information Technology provides support to the IAEA in the field of information and communication technology (ICT), including information systems for technical programmes and management. It is responsible for planning, developing and implementing an ICT strategy, for setting and enforcing common ICT standards throughout the Secretariat and for managing central ICT services. The IAEAs ICT infrastructure comprises state of the art hardware and software platforms in a partially decentralized environment. The Division has implemented an IT service management model based on ITIL (IT Infrastructure Library) and Prince2 (Projects in a Controlled Environment) best practices.

The IAEAs Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system, known as the Agency-wide Information System for Programme Support (AIPS), was implemented in a multi-phased phased approach beginning in 2011 and completing in 2017. AIPS provides a single, fully-integrated solution that standardizes and improves efficiency of business processes by leveraging the Oracle ERP suite of products. AIPS encompasses 8 business domains: finance, procurement, programme and project management, planning and budgeting, human resources and payroll, contacts, travel and events management. The AIPS Management Section (AMS) within the Division of Information Technology manages the operations, maintenance, improvements, and support for the AIPS system in collaboration with business process owners. The AMS Section consists of approximately 20 staff members and is led by a Section Head, who reports to the Director of Information Technology/CIO.

Main Purpose

Under the Supervision of the Head of the Service Delivery Unit, Client Services Section , the IT Support Technician provides support for the maintenance, installation, configuration, repair, and removal of hardware and software items, and follows up and resolve incidents received by the MTIT Service desk. He/she provides efficient support to clients in the utilization of IAEAs information systems resources and ensures that issues reported are logged and addressed. The IT Support Technician is responsible for first level support related to regular maintenance of end user systems and software, such as desktops, laptops, mobile devices and other multifunctional devices. The IT Support Technician provides first level support for the ERP System, Agency-Wide Information System for Programme Support (AIPS).

Functions / Key Results Expected

Act as point of contact for responding, resolving, and tracking all incidents and service calls received by the MTIT Service desk. Manage calls (incidents and service requests) received by logging it to the online system, prioritize and monitor until completion.

Respond and solve incidents/service requests including troubleshooting, installation, and removal of hardware/software using supplied installation instructions and tools, following agreed testing and implementation standards. Deploy new or upgraded desktops, laptops or core application images.

A support agent providing first level support, addressing ERP related incidents, issues and requests.

Contribute to the development and implementation of ERP user support and training modules and manuals.

Deploy, test and support IAEAs standard desktops, laptops, tablets, mobile devices and all other peripherals including supply of consumables. Develop and/or enhance installation and configuration procedures as well as documentation.

Assist with resolving problems (e.g. poor performance) and faults (e.g. system failure) occurring in the operation of hardware and software

especially those requiring greater installation expertise.

Conduct tests of hardware and/or software using test procedures and diagnostic tools; correct malfunctions, calling on other experienced colleagues and external resources as required, documenting results in accordance with agreed procedures.

Maintain IT equipment in meeting rooms, training rooms and conference centre.

Troubleshoot issues related to LAN network and wireless network.

Tags civil servants communication technology computer science enterprise resource planning human resources information security information systems information technology library oracle payroll prince2 procurement project management service management

Participate in projects, including implementation of hardware and software tools and systems.

Competencies and Expertise

Core Competencies

NameDefinition

Planning and Organizing

Plans and organizes his/her own work in support of achieving the team or Sections priorities. Takes into account potential changes and proposes contingency plans.

Communication

Communicates orally and in writing in a clear, concise and impartial manner. Takes time to listen to and understand the perspectives of others and proposes solutions.

Achieving Results

Takes initiative in defining realistic outputs and clarifying roles, responsibilities and expected results in the context of the Department/Divisions programme. Evaluates his/her results realistically, drawing conclusions from lessons learned.

Teamwork

Actively contributes to achieving team results. Supports team decisions.

Functional Competencies

NameDefinition

Analytical thinking

Gathers and analyses information, identifying critical relationships and patterns among data and proposes workable solutions.

Client orientation

Establishes effective relationships with clients to understand and meet or exceed their needs. Finds ways to ensure client satisfaction.

Resilience

Able to remain calm in emotionally charged situations. Accepts constructive feedback in a positive manner and is able to cope with setbacks.

Required Expertise

FunctionNameExpertise Description

Information Technology

IT Help/Service Desk

Experience in providing IT Service Desk related support to end users following best practice such as ITIL.

Information Technology

Information Security

Strong knowledge of Information Security.

Asset Expertise

FunctionNameExpertise Description

Information Technology

Oracle

Oracle ERP Functional Services

Some or basic knowledge of Oracle ERP products.

Qualifications, Experience and Language skills

Completed secondary school, post-secondary training/diploma in computer sciences is desirable.

Minimum of five years of relevant working experience providing IT support to ERP (Oracle) users as well as IT support to end users in the LAN environment.

Hands-on experience and familiarity with end user device software and hardware.

Technical knowledge and troubleshooting skills of Windows 10, O365, and Office 2016 as well as other related software is desirable.

Strong IT Service Desk related experience with ability to deal with established deadlines and priorities.

Knowledge and experience in emerging technologies such as cloud computing, mobile device management is an advantage.

Organizing skills: Ability to prioritize work assignments, organize own schedule, perform routine work independently, act pro-actively, meet deadlines, adapt to changing demands and multitasking.

Knowledge of ITIL processes is an asset.

Good oral and written command of English. Knowledge of other official IAEA languages (Arabic, Chinese, French, Russian and Spanish) is an asset.

English language test (Level 2) to IAEA standard.

Remuneration

The IAEA offers an attractive remuneration package including a tax-free annual net base salary starting at EUR 46536 (subject to mandatory deductions for pension contributions and health insurance), 6 weeks annual vacation, pension plan and health insurance

Appointment is subject to a satisfactory medical report. Recruitment will be on a LOCAL BASIS only. Outside applicants are required to supply to the IAEA or to authorize it to seek all information relevant to their suitability for employment by the IAEA. Testing may be part of the recruitment process.

Applicants should be aware that IAEA staff members are international civil servants and may not accept instructions from any other authority. The IAEA is committed to applying the highest ethical standards in carrying out its mandate. As part of the United Nations common system, the IAEA subscribes to the following core ethical standards (or values): Integrity, Professionalism and Respect for diversity. Staff members may be assigned to any location. The IAEA retains the discretion not to make any appointment to this vacancy, to make an appointment at a lower grade or with a different contract type, or to make an appointment with a modified job description or for shorter duration than indicated above.
Saif Ali Khan is all set to unite with Rani Mukerji after 11 years for the film Bunty Aur Babli 2. The film also marks his union with producer Aditya Chopra after unspecified disagreements in the past. Saif has now revealed how much it meant for him to receive a message from Aditya that read, welcome back home.

Opening up about working with Aditya all over again, Saif told Film Companion in an interview, It was nice to reconnect with Adi again. We had a couple of disagreements in the past and I think he was slightly disappointed in my attitude towards certain things and we hadnt worked together in a very long time. This just meant that theres peace again and everything is fine. That is the most important aspect of this.

Saif also feels glad to be working with a producer who knows what they are doing. He added, I have produced films, (I can say that) its really a relief to work with someone who has all the headache of choosing the right music, figuring out how to shoot and release it and you just do your work as an actor. I mean getting a SMS from Adi saying Welcome back home means a lot to me.

Also read: Tiger Shroffs sister Krishna deletes pics with boyfriend Eban Hyams, he says she reminds me of my mother

While Saif replaces Abhishek Bachchan as the original Bunty and Rani will reprise her titular role of the original Babli, Siddhant Chaturvedi of the Gully Boy fame will feature in the film along with Sharvari.

The cast of the film wrapped up an elaborate sequence in Abu Dhabi last month just before all shoots were cancelled due to coronavirus crisis. We are shooting a highlight con in Abu Dhabi. The landscape of Abu Dhabi just gives a lot of scale to the film and the team is going to spend around 10 days shooting the con and also some parts of the film. We want to make Bunty Aur Babli 2 a cool entertainer for all, Sharma had said.

The sequel of the 2005 release is set to hit the theatres on June 26 but may now be postponed due to lockdown.

Follow @htshowbiz for more
(RNS) The scene in New York Citys Central Park was a snapshot of the nations cultural and religious divide.

On Tuesday (April 14) a group of LGBTQ activists stood several yards away from the Samaritans Purse field hospital on the East Meadow lawn and blasted city and state officials and Mount Sinai Hospital for partnering with the evangelical humanitarian relief organization treating overflow patients suffering from the coronavirus.

Activists with the Reclaim Pride Coalition holding signs saying help not hate called out New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio, Gov. Andrew Cuomo and the leadership of Mount Sinai just across the park, for allowing the organization headed by evangelist Franklin Graham to treat New Yorkers while adhering to an anti-gay statement of faith.

How was this group ever considered to bring their hatred and their vitriol into our city at a time of crisis when our people are fighting a pandemic? asked Jay W. Walker, an activist with the Reclaim Pride Coalition.

The LGBTQ coalition is the latest in a series of barbs aimed at Samaritans Purse since it opened a 68-bed field hospital in Central Park two weeks ago. The conflict pits the countrys growing acceptance of LGBTQ rights with the conservative values of a premier evangelical relief organization.

The hospital is staffed with Christian doctors and nurses experienced in treating infectious diseases. But Samaritan Purse's policies require most contractors and some full-time volunteers to sign a statement of faith that includes a declaration that we believe that marriage is exclusively the union of one genetic male and one genetic female.

Graham, president and CEO of the charity is a controversial figure. A vocal opponent of same-sex marriage, he has filled the airwaves with condemnations of gays and lesbians and Muslim Americans, among others.

He has also repeated that the field hospital does not discriminate in who it treats.

We provide our services to everyone regardless of race, ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation, Graham told Religion News Service. We dont discriminate. Period.

Samaritans Purse has played a high-profile role in past health crises, such as the 2014 Ebola outbreak. Earlier this year, it set up a field hospital to treat Italians suffering from the coronavirus.

New York City is one of the most gay-friendly cities in the world, a liberal metropolis with broad anti-discrimination provisions in employment, housing and public accommodations. It is also the epicenter of the coronavirus, with more than 10,000 deaths and nearly 200,000 infections.

Mount Sinai Hospital, on New Yorks Fifth Avenue, partnered with Samaritans Purse as a way to relieve the overstretched hospital system grappling with a shortage of hospital beds and equipment. Mount Sinai does not oversee the field hospital.

As of Tuesday, Samaritans Purse has treated 119 patients at its field hospital. A total of 51 patients are now hospitalized there, including five in its ICU; 44 patients have been discharged, spokesperson Kaitlyn Lahm said.

But once word got out about the evangelical groups statement of faith, objections began to mount.

De Blasio, a champion of LGBTQ rights, was immediately pressed to ensure the relief organization was truly consistent with the values and the laws in New York City.

The citys attorney general issued a news release assuring New Yorkers her office would remain vigilant to ensure discrimination does not occur.

That hasnt stopped the growing chorus of dissent. One LGBTQ activist, A. Timothy Lunceford-Stevens, said he has filed a complaint with the citys Human Rights Commission after he tried to volunteer at the field hospital but was turned away because he refused to sign the statement of faith.

Mount Sinai was prepared to expand the number of field hospital extensions earlier this month when it asked Samaritans Purse to extend help at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, on the West Side.

But The New York Times reported that plans to turn the cathedral into a field hospital were abruptly shelved, in part because the cathedral, affiliated with the Episcopal Church, did not realize that Samaritans Purse would be involved in the project.

The Episcopal Church, unlike Samaritan Purse, is the leading mainline denomination supporting LGBTQ people, the first in the United States to ordain an openly gay bishop and one of the leaders in special liturgies to marry LGBTQ people.

The scuttled plans for the cathedral hospital may also have fallen apart because of the slowing rate of hospitalizations.

The Central Park field hospital is the first Samaritans Purse has deployed in the United States. It set up a hospital in Cremona, Italy, in the hard-hit Lombardy region.

The first field hospital set up by Samaritans Purse was deployed in 2016 in response to the earthquake in Ecuador. The organization also set up an emergency field hospital about 12 miles from Mosul, Iraq, during the 2016-17 battle for the city. Last year, it installed a field hospital in the Bahamas in response to Hurricane Dorian.

READ THIS STORY AT RELIGIONNEWS.COM

Article originally published by Religion News Service. Used with permission.

Photo courtesy: RNS/AP Photo/Mary Altaffer
Gov. Steve Bullock said he does not have a timeline for things to return to normal after the coronavirus outbreak, but Republican legislative leaders say he should start moving in that direction because the states economy is in a freefall.

Bullock said during a Tuesday news conference and a Monday telephone town hall that he will continue issuing his stay-at-home orders in two-week intervals based on advice from medical professionals.

Indicators such as a decline in cases over a two-week period or increased testing capability could lead to easing restrictions, but the state would take a gradual and measured approach toward reopening, he said.

We cant just flip the switch, he said.

The directives in place in Montana include school and business closures that started in March, temperature screenings of passengers at airports, social distancing and a recommendation to wear masks in establishments like grocery stores, where social distancing is difficult.

Republican legislative leaders, including Senate President Scott Sales and House Speaker Greg Hertz, wrote to Bullock Tuesday complaining that he hurt private businesses by arbitrarily deciding which were essential and could stay open, but apparently has not furloughed any state employees.

It is past time to rethink your response to COVID-19 as it pertains to the citizens of Montana and implement more strategic measures in an effort to re-engage our economy once again, they wrote.

The lawmakers suggested allowing local school districts to decide to bring students back into classrooms and businesses in counties with no recent COVID-19 cases to reopen, while keeping areas with high numbers of infected people such as Gallatin County under heavier restrictions. They also suggest following the example of states like Florida, by directing at-risk populations, such as older residents and those suffering from chronic health conditions, to stay home.

If businesses remain closed, income and property taxes, fees and other collections will plummet, causing widespread and catastrophic results to people employed in both the public and private sectors, the Republican lawmakers wrote.

Bullock said those decisions would be based on data and science, not politics. We have to have a healthy population to have a healthy economy, he said.

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.

Montana reported 399 cases on Tuesday morning and seven deaths.

Fifty people have been hospitalized with COVID-19 and 24 remain in hospitals. Five new cases were confirmed Monday. None were in Gallatin County, which has just over one-third of the states cases.

In other Montana coronavirus-related developments

 The Montana Department of Labor and Industry has begun paying the additional $600 weekly unemployment benefit established in the recent federal stimulus package, the agency said Tuesday. The state issued the enhanced payments Monday via direct deposit. People who get unemployment checks should receive the extra money this week.

 Missoula County health officials say they will treat suspected cases of COVID-19 as though they were infected because a shortage of testing supplies means they cant always confirm them. After people test positive, their close contacts are identified. If any develop symptoms within 14 days, they will be considered unconfirmed cases, the Missoulian reported. The state is asking counties to track those cases, but it is not tallying them until it gets permission from the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said Stacey Anderson, an epidemiologist for the state health department.

 Six cases have been tied to a construction site in Big Sky, Gallatin City-County Health Officer Matt Kelly told the Bozeman Daily Chronicle . Suffolk Construction, which is building a $400 million ultra-luxury resort at the Spanish Peaks Mountain Club, said two employees of a subcontractor tested positive on March 24. People who had close contact with them were asked to self-quarantine for 14 days and four more workers tested positive, said Joel Nickel, executive project director for Montage Big Sky.
Regulatory News:

GenSight Biologics (Paris:SIGHT) (Euronext: SIGHT, ISIN: FR0013183985, PEA-PME eligible), a biopharma company focused on discovering and developing innovative gene therapies for retinal neurodegenerative diseases and central nervous system disorders, today announces the completion of the pre-submission meeting with the European Medicines Agency (EMA) for the Company's lead productLUMEVOQ (GS010; lenadogene nolparvovec).

The EMA pre-submission meeting is a procedural milestone in the preparation of a marketing authorization application (MAA). Based on its successful conclusion, GenSight Biologics confirms its intention to submit the MAA for LUMEVOQ in September 2020.

LUMEVOQ is the gene therapy developed by the Company for the treatment of Leber Hereditary Optic Neuropathy (LHON), a rare blinding disease marked by sudden, irreversible vision loss. The pivotal trials for LUMEVOQ in Europe, RESCUE and REVERSE, were completed in 2019; patients from those trials have been invited to participate in a long-term follow-up study. In addition, GenSight Biologics has been conducting a natural history study (REALITY) and mechanistic studies in animals to supplement the data from RESCUE and REVERSE.

In its meeting with GenSight Biologics, the EMA confirmed the information needed for the Company's September submission. The agency also provided updated guidance on various administrative topics, as well as advice on topics to be discussed in meetings between the Company and the Rapporteurs and Co-rapporteurs planned for June 2020.

"We are excited about our progress towards our regulatory filing of LUMEVOQ in Europe, as this brings us closer to making a novel, effective and safe treatment available to a large proportion of LHON patients," said Bernard Gilly, Co-founder and Chief Executive Officer of GenSight Biologics. "We have been and continue to be extremely grateful for the support and guidance we have received from the European authorities."

As a final step before actual submission, and as part of EMA's procedures, GenSight Biologics expects to re-confirm by July its intent to submit in September.

About GenSight Biologics

GenSight Biologics S.A. is a clinical-stage biopharma company focused on discovering and developing innovative gene therapies for retinal neurodegenerative diseases and central nervous system disorders. GenSight Biologics' pipeline leverages two core technology platforms, the Mitochondrial Targeting Sequence (MTS) and optogenetics to help preserve or restore vision in patients suffering from blinding retinal diseases. GenSight Biologics' lead product candidate, LUMEVOQ (GS010; lenadogene nolparvovec), is in Phase III trials in Leber Hereditary Optic Neuropathy (LHON), a rare mitochondrial disease that leads to irreversible blindness in teens and young adults. Using its gene therapy-based approach, GenSight Biologics' product candidates are designed to be administered in a single treatment to the eye by intravitreal injection to offer patients a sustainable functional visual recovery.

About LUMEVOQ (GS010; lenadogene nolparvovec)

LUMEVOQ (GS010) targets Leber Hereditary Optic Neuropathy (LHON) by leveraging a mitochondrial targeting sequence (MTS) proprietary technology platform, arising from research conducted at the Institut de la Vision in Paris, which, when associated with the gene of interest, allows the platform to specifically address defects inside the mitochondria using an AAV vector (Adeno-Associated Virus). The gene of interest is transferred into the cell to be expressed and produces the functional protein, which will then be shuttled to the mitochondria through specific nucleotidic sequences in order to restore the missing or deficient mitochondrial function. "LUMEVOQ" was accepted as the invented name for GS010 (lenadogene nolparvovec) by the European Medicines Agency (EMA) in October 2018.

About Leber Hereditary Optic Neuropathy (LHON)

Leber Hereditary Optic Neuropathy (LHON) is a rare maternally inherited mitochondrial genetic disease, characterized by the degeneration of retinal ganglion cells that results in brutal and irreversible vision loss that can lead to legal blindness, and mainly affects adolescents and young adults. LHON is associated with painless, sudden loss of central vision in the 1st eye, with the 2nd eye sequentially impaired. It is a symmetric disease with poor functional visual recovery. 97% of patients have bilateral involvement at less than one year of onset of vision loss, and in 25% of cases, vision loss occurs in both eyes simultaneously. The estimated incidence of LHON is approximately 1,400 to 1,500 new patients who lose their sight every year in the United States and Europe.

About RESCUE and REVERSE

RESCUE and REVERSE are two separate randomized, double-masked, sham-controlled Phase III trials designed to evaluate the efficacy of a single intravitreal injection of GS010 (rAAV2/2-ND4) in subjects affected by LHON due to the G11778A mutation in the mitochondrial ND4 gene.

The primary endpoint will measure the difference in efficacy of GS010 in treated eyes compared to sham-treated eyes based on Best-Corrected Visual Acuity (BCVA), as measured with the ETDRS at 48 weeks post-injection. The patients' LogMAR (Logarithm of the Minimal Angle of Resolution) scores, which are derived from the number of letters patients read on the ETDRS chart, will be used for statistical purposes. Both trials have been adequately powered to evaluate a clinically relevant difference of at least 15 ETDRS letters between treated and untreated eyes adjusted to baseline.

The secondary endpoints will involve the application of the primary analysis to best-seeing eyes that received GS010 compared to those receiving sham, and to worse-seeing eyes that received GS010 compared to those that received sham. Additionally, a categorical evaluation with a responder analysis will be evaluated, including the proportion of patients who gain 15 ETDRS letters from baseline and nadir and the proportion of patients with Snellen acuity of >20/200. Complementary vision metrics will include automated visual fields, optical coherence tomography, and color and contrast sensitivity, in addition to quality of life scales, bio-dissemination and the time course of immune response. Readouts for these endpoints are at 48, 72 and 96 weeks after injection.

The trials are conducted in parallel, in 37 subjects for REVERSE and 39 subjects for RESCUE, in 7 centers across the United States, the UK, France, Germany and Italy. Week 96 results were reported in 2019 for both trials, after which patients were transferred to a long-term follow-up study that will last for three years.

ClinicalTrials.gov Identifiers:

REVERSE: NCT02652780

RESCUE: NCT02652767

About REALITY

REALITY is a multi-country retrospective and cross-sectional observational study of affected LHON subjects, based on subjects' medical charts and the administration of surveys on Health-Related Quality of Life (HRQoL) and direct and indirect costs associated with the disease.

The study will recruit at least 50 subjects (both adult and pediatric) chiefly in the following countries: Spain, Italy, France, United Kingdom, and the United States.

The primary objectives for the REALITY study are: to describe the evolution of visual functional and structural changes and other associated symptoms in patients with LHON; understand the impact of LHON-related vision loss on the HRQoL; and understand the economic burden for patients and their families arising from direct and indirect costs associated with the disease. The secondary objective is to describe the relationship between genetic, lifestyle and/or environmental factors and the expression of the LHON phenotype.

The first subject was enrolled on 3 January 2018, and enrollment is targeted to be completed in early Q2 2020.

ClinicalTrials.gov Identifiers:

REALITY LHON Registry: NCT03295071

View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20200414005956/en/

Contacts:

GenSight Biologics

Thomas Gidoin

Chief Financial Officer

tgidoin@gensight-biologics.com

+33 (0)1 76 21 72 20

RooneyPartners

Media Relations

Marion Janic

mjanic@rooneyco.com

+1-212-223-4017

LifeSci Advisors

Investor Relations

Guillaume van Renterghem

gvanrenterghem@lifesciadvisors.com

+33 (0)6 69 99 37 83

James Palmer

Retail Investors

j.palmer@orpheonfinance.com

+33 (0) 7 60 92 77 74
Tauranga Mayor Tenby Powell is calling on the Government to start the process of a staged move out of Level 4 lockdown to save jobs, livelihoods and shore up the economy.

He says following Treasurys once in a century' report which states COVID-19 will have a profound impact on economic and financial systems in New Zealand and around the world, now is the time to move.

I commend the Government for the responsive and substantial business support packages they have been rolling out, including the new Tax Relief Package for small business, and I fully support the need to maintain a continued lockdown approach to mass gatherings to stamp out contagion.

"However, what we need now is a commitment to the immediate, staged reopening of small businesses, to save thousands of jobs and mitigate the potentially irreparable damage to our economy.

New Zealands business landscape has cataclysmically shifted and we need to respond accordingly with an immediate and disciplined pathway for the recovery of our economy. This will come via small business, our economic backbone and generator of innovative new enterprises and jobs."

To quantify this, Tenby says four weeks ago Tauranga's small business economy comprised over 480,000 enterprises, representing 97 per cent of all businesses, employing 30 per cent of the work force and contributing close to 27 per cent of GDP.

"While this will have changed dramatically in the post COVID-19 environment, it's sub-sectors of the SME economy which will most quickly recover and lift the wider economy with it - and we must support them urgently.

Nearly 10 years ago, Tenby established the New Zealand SME Business Network on Linkedin, and now with almost 12,500 members he wants to see this group leverage digital technologies, unavailable a decade ago, to communicate with each other via digital meetings, generate ideas, and deliver tangible outcomes to the small business sector.

Tenby says professional business organisations might consider using, as a baseline, the ideas presented to government in the Small Business Council report submitted in July last year.

A group of intelligent and experienced people spent a year developing strategies to enable a step change in New Zealands small business economy. There are a number of initiatives sitting in this report that now urgently need executing, including those related to taxation.

While the governments financial packages address immediate pain points, the ideas contained within the Small Business Councils report provide guidance on sustainability in a changed environment.

While my prime focus as Mayor is on Tauranga and collaborating with our regional partners in the BOP region, we need to be boundaryless in our thinking post COVID-19 and support each other nationally. And our planning now needs to move as fast to reopen our economy as COVID-19 moved to shut it.

He says while some commentators question the Governments approach to the management of the pandemic in New Zealand, the reality is the curve is flattening.

"The Bay of Plenty only has 41 confirmed cases; lets use this opportunity to re-open parts of our regional economy to SME businesses including roading and infrastructure sub-contractors while the traffic is at an all-time low, residential house builders, warehouse and distribution companies, the professional services sector, and key retailers, many of which are SMEs and all of whom can manage physical distancing in the work place.

It is this group of small business owners, and others like them, who will lead the vanguard of economic recovery. Lets pave the way for them immediately.
Syrian refugees living in Lebanon are facing an increased number of violations committed by the authorities and in one case, a political party writes Zaman Al-Wasl.

The Lebanese Access Center for Human Rights has reported a high surge in violations against Syrian refugees since 2019, including arbitrary arrests, torture and enforced disappearances.

The Lebanese monitoring group has directly contacted victims of torture both in person and through telephone interviews, also by contacting their relatives.

The center has documented 100 cases of arbitrary detention, one of which was by a political party, and the rest by local authorities.

At least 11 Syrian refugees have been forcibly disappeared by the Lebanese security, and eight more people were forcibly disappeared by the Lebanese authorities and another was disappeared by a political party, according to the Access Center.

Lebanese security had also deported 42 refugees from the country, while eight others were forcibly evicted from their homes. The report has listed 47 refugees who were abused, mostly by local authorities, Lebanese citizens and employees of the HCR. The countrys residency policy makes it difficult for Syrians to maintain legal status, but according to the report, even those registered with the UNHCR, still risk detention or eviction.

Because of its proximity to displacement areas, including the border strip from Qusayr, through Qalamoun to Zabadani, Lebanon is considered the only refuge for some of the displaced who fled the regimes bombing and sectarian militias.

According to official statistics, 945,000 Syrian refugees are currently registered with the UNHCR in Lebanon. The Lebanese government estimates the true number to be 1.5 million.

As the waves of hostility persist, refugees in Lebanon continue to suffer from dire humanitarian and economic conditions, as well as rampant discrimination.

Amnesty International had previously accused the Lebanese authorities of deliberately pressuring refugees to return to Syria, after being classified as the poorest refugees in the world, according to a study conducted by the HCR. The harsh policies and unbearable conditions in Lebanon have forced many to return despite the ongoing conflict.

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.
At a time when the coronavirus pandemic has spread among the states nursing homes and assisted living facilities, the Actors Fund Home is no exception.

The Englewood facility is home to retired entertainers, from actors of stage and screen to screenwriters, dancers, producers and directors. Staff recently informed residents families of the homes first encounters with the coronavirus disease.

Unfortunately, as of last week, weve had our first positive," administrator Jordan Strohl tells NJ Advance Media.

He says 12 residents of the Bergen County home, also known as the Lillian Booth Actors Home, have tested positive for COVID-19 and seven have tested negative. The facility houses 112 people.

Weve tried to contain it to the best of our ability," Strohl says of the virus. Those who have tested positive, or are presumptive positive, have been isolated from other residents in internal coronavirus units, he says.

Were throwing everything at it trying to limit how many residents get it," Strohl says. Obviously our residents are elderly and vulnerable.

On Monday, State Health Commissioner Judith Persichilli announced that 324 long-term care facilities have confirmed cases of the coronavirus disease.

Were making the assumption that COVID-19 is in most, if not all, of our nursing homes, Persichilli said. She added that about 10% of those in New Jersey nursing homes  more than 60,000 people  have the coronavirus disease.

Staff at the Actors Fund Home placed one resident in isolation on April 2 as a precaution before getting the first test results back Thursday. That person is now doing well enough to leave isolation soon, Strohl says. Of the 12 who tested positive, 10 have been stable and doing well, he says.

In all the bad thats out there, there are some good stories," Strohl says.

Two residents who exhibited more symptoms have gone to the hospital for treatment. Though the home is staffed with doctors and nurses, families have chosen to seek outside care, due to the nature of the coronavirus disease.

We are not a ventilator facility," Strohl says.

On April 4, the state Department of Health announced that all nursing homes must notify staff, residents and families within 24 hours when either a resident or staff member is under investigation for the coronavirus disease or tests positive.

Staff have been helping residents video chat with their families and loved ones. Strohl says the facility has a good supply of personal protective equipment, including masks and gowns.

With COVID, youre up against a beast thats so much more powerful than anything thats ever been created," he says.

The Actors Fund Home, which is supported by the Actors Fund, a national nonprofit that provides a safety net for entertainers, is also a place where entertainers and performing artists of all stripes can come for short-stay rehabilitation. The home has been in New Jersey since 1928.

The facility stopped allowing visitors on March 10.

We tried our best to keep this thing outside our building," Strohl says. Unfortunately, like every facility, its pretty much found its way in ... At the end of the day, nobody has been able to keep this thing at bay. Its been a tough couple weeks."

Where is the light at the end of the tunnel?" he says. "Were trying to be positive and we are positive, but we want to be able to see that light.

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? Amy Kuperinsky may be reached at akuperinsky@njadvancemedia.com. Follow her on Twitter @AmyKup or on Facebook.

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Ukrainian emergency officials said Tuesday they have extinguished forest fires in the radiation-contaminated area near the Chernobyl nuclear power plant, but acknowledged that grass was still smouldering in some areas.

Hundreds of firefighters, backed by aircraft, have been battling several forest fires around Chernobyl for the past 10 days.

They contained the initial blazes, but new fires have burnt closer to the decommissioned plant.

Emergency Services have reported that rains helped firefighters put out the flames, but said that it would take a few more days to extinguish smoldering grass.

Chechetkin said emergency workers have prevented the fire from engulfing radioactive waste depots and other facilities in Chernobyl.

The 2,600-square-kilometer (1,000-square-mile) Chernobyl Exclusion Zone was established after the 1986 disaster at the plant that sent a cloud of radioactive fallout over much of Europe, and remains largely unpopulated, with only 200 remaining despite orders to leave.

Ukraine's emergencies service said radiation levels in the capital, Kyiv, about 100 kilometers (60 miles) south of the plant, were within norms after the forest fires.
With the coronavirus pandemic ruling out their original wedding plans, a Utah couple threw tradition out the window and held a drive-in ceremony on April 10.

Not wanting to let COVID-19 delay their matrimony, initially penciled in for April 25, Abby Holman and Brennan Norman moved the date forward and exchanged their vows in a field in the mountain-rimmed town of Morgan.

The couple told Storyful that they had been dating for almost five years and we just wanted to start our lives together so we thought, why wait?

The pair added, We had to cancel our honeymoon because of everything going on so we just went and stayed at a little cabin for the weekend. We havent planned anything else so far.

In footage of the wedding provided to Storyful, friends and family of the bride and groom can be seen gathered in the field either in their cars or at a safe distance from each other. Credit: Tenzin Lazerson via Storyful
STATEN ISLAND, N.Y. -- Gov. Andrew Cuomo announced Wednesday that he will be signing an executive order mandating New Yorkers wear face coverings in public spaces where social distancing is not possible.

Individuals will need to wear a mask or cloth covering in situations, like public transit, where they are unable to maintain a distance of 6 feet from other individuals, Cuomo said.

The governor did not lay out a way of holding people accountable for not adhering to the mandate, but said that civil penalties enforced by local governments could be possible. There will be a three-day grace period before any enforcement begins.

Theres a possibility for a civil violation. You could get a penalty, he said. I dont want to go to a penalty yet...We havent seen flagrant non-compliance, so there wont be a penalty.

*** CLICK HERE FOR COMPLETE COVERAGE OF CORONAVIRUS IN NEW YORK ***

The mandate comes as the state continues to develop a plan that would allow some people to go back to work. Cuomo said those decisions will be based on how essential certain businesses are and what risk there is of their employees spreading the disease.

The governor has not yet offered a date for when he expects New Yorkers to be able to end isolation, but his New York on Pause initiative is in place until April 29.

Rigorous testing is key to returning to some semblance of normalcy, Cuomo said. So far, New York has tested about 500,000 people, the most of any state in the nation, but the governor said more needs to be done.

Weve been very aggressive here, but in all this time weve only done 500,000 tests, Cuomo said. Youre talking about a state with over 19 million people.
Ansarullah reports rise in Saudi-led aggression after truce claim

Iran Press TV

Tuesday, 14 April 2020 3:12 PM

Yemen's Houthi Ansarullah movement says the invading Saudi Arabia-led coalition has even ramped up its acts of aggression against the impoverished country after claiming it had initiated a voluntary ceasefire.

Tweeting on Monday, the popular Yemeni defense group's spokesman Mohammed Abdul-Salam called the ceasefire claim "false and misleading."

He denounced any claim on the part of the coalition alleging that it had begun observing "self-restraint" and accusing the Houthis of violating the ceasefire as "ridiculous."

The coalition has been launching indiscriminate attacks against Yemen since March 2015 to put the country's former Saudi-allied officials back in the saddle. The war has killed tens of thousands of Yemenis and rendered at least 80 percent of its 28-million-strong population dependent on aid for survival.

Last week, the invaders claimed they were halting military operations in support of United Nations peace efforts and to avoid further spread of the new coronavirus in Yemen.

The Yemeni Army, however, reported days afterwards that it had been forced to repel several Saudi-led assaults on various fronts in just one day.

Abdul-Salam likewise said not only had not the aggressors initiated any truce, but also they had escalated their offensives.

On Tuesday, Yemeni Armed Forces' Spokesman Brigadier General Yahya Saree said allied Yemeni defense groups had thwarted a large-scale advance by Saudi-led mercenaries in west-central Ma'rib Province, Yemen's al-Masirah television network reported. The retaliation "inflicted heavy losses" on the militants, he added.

The coalition had also launched six raids against the province's Sirwah District and 14 aerial attacks against the Khabb wa ash Sha'af District in al-Jawf Province that neighbors Ma'rib to the north, Saree said.

Elsewhere, the coalition staged advances across the al-Bayda Province that lies to the south of Ma'rib and the Ta'izz Province that is located in Yemen's extreme southwest, the official said.

A local official in the eastern Yemeni al-Mahrah Province that borders Oman, meanwhile, told Turkey's state Anadolu news agency that Saudi Arabia had begun bringing military vehicles into the province.

Yemen reserves right to self-defense

The Ansarullah spokesperson said amid the increase in the offensives that "the Yemeni Army and Popular Committees reserve the right to decisively defend the Yemeni nation."

The army and the committees have been acting as Ansarullah's allies in the movement's efforts to fend for the Arab world's poorest nation.

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With lockdowns and economic disruption caused by the coronavirus pandemic, University of Michigan researcher William Axinn suspects that in a setting in which it is harder to end or escape a "bad" marriage, marriage itself has the potential to become a powerful, independent risk factor for major depressive disorder.

Axinn and colleagues recently published an article examining the consequences of marriage for depression in Nepal. The study found that women are three times more likely to develop major depressive disorder after they are married, while men's likelihood remains the same. Studies like this are more often done in Western countries such as the United States, where risk of major depressive disorder declines greatly for men and, to a lesser extent, for women.

Axinn addresses how his study, "The association between marital transitions and the onset of major depressive disorder in a South Asian general population," applies to marriage in the U.S.

Can you give an overview of your research on marriage in Nepal?

We study the causes and consequences of marriage and related behaviors. There are many dimensions of marriage we study, including courtship, reproductive health, childbearing, childrearing and relationships within the family. These relationships sometimes include domestic violence.

Throughout the social sciences, determining the strength and direction of causal relationships is a challenge. There are many topics we cannot randomize. Our 25-year whole-family panel study in Nepal is designed to investigate the causes and consequences of family events and family change, most of which we cannot randomly assign.

One key motivation to do this research in a remote part of the world is to learn whether or not the consequences of family events depend upon the situation in which they occur. Our panel study is in a remote part of Nepal called Chitwan Valley. It is explicitly designed to test the extent to which associations observed in settings like the United States (or other countries) are the same in a setting that is very different. Marriage in Nepal is very different from the U.S. For example, arranged marriage is common and divorce is rare. This gives us an opportunity to study how multiple dimensions of marriage might work differently under such different circumstances.

What similarities do you see between your study in Nepal and how marriage might be affected during the coronavirus pandemic in the U.S.?

Unfortunately, domestic violence is widespread in all settings, with clear adverse consequences for mental health. However, the COVID-19 pandemic has changed the U.S. experience of marriage. We are seeing press reports of higher domestic violence all over the world.

Widespread stay-at-home orders give victims of violence very little opportunity to escape. We also know that times of substantial economic hardship reduce the rate at which unhappy couples divorcea likely reason is the high costs of separation and divorce, especially the creation of two separate households. These costs combine with economic hardship to act as a powerful barrier to divorce. Together, these factors mean that the COVID-19 pandemic likely moved the social context of marriage in the U.S. to be more like the social context of marriage in Nepal.

Time will tell, but if this is true, then rates of major depressive disorder among the married are likely to increase, especially among women, at least relative to what they were before COVID-19. Of course, many other factors related to the pandemic are also likely to have adverse consequences for mental health, especially the death of a loved one. Even in the Nepal social context, death of a spouse is strongly associated with onset of major depressive disorder for both men and women. I believe the end of a good marriage has the potential to be just as depressing as the inability to escape a bad marriage.

What were the main findings of the Nepal longitudinal study that examined the risk of major depressive disorder among married couples?

The relationship between marriage and major depressive disorder has mostly been studied in the United States, Europe and similar places. In these types of settings, going from being single to being married usually reduces the chances of experiencing major depressive disorder. Evidence from these settings indicates that this effect is usually stronger for men than for women, so much so that sometimes there is no reduction in the chance of major depressive disorder for women.

In rural Nepal, not only is marriage arranged, but often the wife has virtually no say in choice of a husband even when the husband might have some say in the choice of a wife. Also, divorce remains rare and there is some evidence the legal terms of divorce favor husbands over wives. In this setting, going from being single to being married increases the chances of experiencing major depressive disorder by three times for women. A huge increase. This same transition to marriage does not change men's chances of experiencing major depressive disorder. That is, different from the U.S. or Europe where getting married reduces this chance for men, it does not reduce the chance for men in Nepal.

Why do you think the risk for major depressive disorder remains the same for men and rises for women after marriage in this particular population?

I think the context of marriage is so different that when the marriage is "bad" (in the broadest sense), people feel it is nearly impossible to escape. In Nepal, we find that experiences of being a victim of domestic violence increases the chances of major depressive disorder among both men and women. This is not surprising. We also find that having a marriage entirely arranged by parents increases the chances of major depressive disorder among both men and women. This is newnot documented in large-scale general population panel studies before now. But interestingly, even these two issues together do not explain all of the relationship between marriage and depression in Nepal.

Both of these factors are much more common among women than among men, so they are both part of the strong gender difference in how marriage relates to depression in Nepal. However, I suspect that the social context of tremendous barriers to divorce also plays a role. The difficulty of ending a marriage through divorce likely contributes to these very different results in Nepal. Divorce is not easy for anyone, but it is very hard in Nepal and especially hard for women in Nepal.

Explore further Follow the latest news on the coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak

More information: William G. Axinn et al. The association between marital transitions and the onset of major depressive disorder in a south asian general population, Journal of Affective Disorders (2020). Journal information: Journal of Affective Disorders William G. Axinn et al. The association between marital transitions and the onset of major depressive disorder in a south asian general population,(2020). DOI: 10.1016/j.jad.2020.01.069
Doctors, nurses and other medical staff in state-run hospitals in West Bengal will now get a week-long holiday every alternate week, chief minister Mamata Banerjee said on Wednesday.

Making another announcement she said that the state government will send small help, including monetary help, to migrant labourers, tourists and patients from Bengal who are stranded in other states because of the lockdown.

The doctors, nurses and other medical staff are not getting any rest. Hence from now on they will work for one week and then a week long leave. This will boost their energy level. The chief secretary has been asked to speak with the state health department and work this out, said Banerjee, who also holds the portfolio of state health minister.

The top brass of the police force have also been asked to see if the duty hours of police personnel could be curtailed by a few hours every day.

We will try to send some money to migrant labourers from Bengal stuck in other states. Some tourists from Bengal and some who had gone for treatment have also been stranded. If we get information, we will try to help them through our local sources. We have also sent help to a team of tourists stranded at Vrindavan in Uttar Pradesh, she added.

Banerjee had earlier written letters to chief ministers of 18 states requesting them to help migrant labourers from Bengal stranded in those states. In West Bengal more than two lakh labourers from various states have been given shelter in more than 700 camps.

The chief minister also said that in some places doctors and nurses are being ostracized for treating Covid-19 patients.

I have got at least eight such cases. At Ranaghat in Nadia locals had protested when a nurse went to meet her family. I have allotted the nurse a rented government flat she can stay there, Banerjee added.
Abigail Thernstrom, a political scientist who was steeped in left-wing politics from childhood but became an influential conservative voice on racial equality, voting rights and education, died April 10 at a hospital in Arlington, Virginia. She was 83.

Her death was confirmed by her daughter, author and journalist Melanie Thernstrom, who said that Dr. Thernstrom went into a coma about a week earlier. She had tested negative for the novel coronavirus, and it was unclear what had caused her decline, her daughter said.

Thernstrom was launched to national prominence with the publication of "America in Black and White: One Nation, Indivisible" (1997), an optimistic and polarizing survey of race relations in America written with her husband, Harvard historian Stephan Thernstrom. Across 700 pages thick with charts, graphs and academic citations, they argued that African-Americans had made extraordinary gains over the past five decades, while lamenting that not enough progress had been made.

In television appearances and essays for publications including the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, the Thernstroms went on to champion a "colorblind" society while opposing the use of racial preferences, which they deemed divisive, inessential and largely ineffective. Their work made them two of America's leading conservative opponents of affirmative action - and stunned former allies on the left, who knew the Thernstroms from their earlier activism on behalf of liberal causes.

Thernstrom, who was raised on a left-wing commune outside New York City, had sung alongside Pete Seeger at the progressive Little Red Schoolhouse in Greenwich Village, picketed a Woolworth's department store to protest segregation and campaigned for presidential nominee George S. McGovern, voting for a Republican presidential candidate for the first time in 1988.

A year earlier, she challenged the creation of "majority-minority" electoral districts in her book "Whose Votes Count?," arguing that the Voting Rights Act of 1965 successfully opened polling booths to Southern blacks but should never have been used to create "safe" seats for minority politicians.

The book was later described by the American Prospect as "a virtual bible among conservative jurists, including Supreme Court Justices Sandra Day O'Connor and Clarence Thomas." But it was far from a right-wing treatise, winning the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award (given to works focused on racism and diversity), and marked what Thernstrom described as a continuation of her longtime views.

"I'd say we've stuck to our principles over the years: Don't judge people on the basis of the color of their skin," she told The Washington Post in 1997. It was a shame, she said, that "the classic civil rights message is now called conservatism."

Thernstrom ultimately identified with the neoconservative movement, her husband said, and developed affiliations with a host of libertarian and conservative organizations, including the Center for Equal Opportunity, the Institute for Justice, the American Enterprise Institute and the Manhattan Institute, where she was a senior fellow.

She also served on the Massachusetts Board of Education for more than a decade, championing charter schools and overhauls to state testing, and was vice chair of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights during the George W. Bush administration. In an email, her daughter recalled that Thernstrom "infuriated her fellow Republicans (whom she disliked and referred to as 'political hacks') by voting with the Democrats more than with them."

Thernstrom remained best known for "America in Black and White," which she and her husband described as a spiritual sequel to "An American Dilemma," Gunnar Myrdal's classic 1944 study on race relations. Progress had been made since then, they argued, but "black crime," black nationalism and race-conscious programs such as affirmative action had stalled the march toward racial equality.

"I really believe it is the biggest book on race in a long time," Clint Bolick, then litigation director of the Institute for Justice, told The Post after its release. "I think that it is testimony to the deep substance of the book. They are out to prove their case, not simply throw rhetoric."

Some scholars, including economist Glenn Loury, argued with the Thernstroms' interpretation of crime and education data. Liberal critics said that the authors' opposition to preferences for African Americans ignored the enduring effects of slavery and racial discrimination; others accused them of striking a condescending tone.

"Here are two white people who are essentially lecturing black Americans," political scientist Andrew Hacker told the Times, "saying: 'What are you complaining about? Stop your griping. Here are the data. You're better off than ever before.' "

Thernstrom, who said she had hoped to elevate the national dialogue surrounding race, was invited to a confrontational town hall meeting on race by President Bill Clinton, who sparred with her over abolishing the Army's affirmative-action program and later invited the Thernstroms to the Oval Office for further discussion.

"This is simply an effort to draw a series of maps, to supply data, to teach how to weigh evidence," Thernstrom told The Post in 1997, responding to some of the criticism of her book. "Other people are going to be critics of our analysis. That's great. The data are there for them to analyze."

Abigail Mann was born in New York City on Sept. 14, 1936, and grew up in nearby Croton-on-Hudson. Her mother was a Jewish emigre from Germany, and her father owned a collective farm, home to left-wing intellectuals as well as Holocaust refugees.

"Unfortunately neither he nor any of the other people involved knew anything about farming," Thernstrom's daughter said in a phone interview. "They were all highly educated radicals, with the idea of living on the land and creating this utopia. . . . Animals were always dying, and nothing ever worked out."

Both parents sympathized with the Soviet Union, turning toward secular communism as a replacement for the Orthodox Judaism in which they were raised, and Thernstrom recalled early years "in a very racially integrated scene." She graduated from Elisabeth Irwin High in Manhattan and studied modern European history at Barnard College.

After receiving a bachelor's degree in 1958, she entered Harvard as a graduate student. She soon met Stephan Thernstrom, then a PhD student in American history, and switched from Middle Eastern studies to the government department, with a focus on constitutional law. "We just seemed to magically fit," her husband said in a phone interview, recalling their initial attraction.

They were married in 1959, a few months after they started dating.

While Stephan launched his academic career at the University of California at Los Angeles, Abigail delayed her doctoral research to focus on raising their two children: Melanie, of Palo Alto, California; and Samuel, of Arlington, Virginia. They survive her, in addition to her husband, of McLean, Virginia; and four grandchildren.

Thernstrom received her master's in 1961 and doctorate in 1975. She began teaching in Harvard's social studies program that same year and also reviewed books for the New Republic (then owned by a friend from Harvard, Marty Peretz), wrote for the Economist magazine and published some of her first voting rights articles in the Public Interest, a neoconservative journal.

With her husband, she edited the essay collection "Beyond the Color Line" (2001) and wrote "No Excuses: Closing the Racial Gap in Learning" (2003). She later published the solo volume "Voting Rights - and Wrongs: The Elusive Quest for Racially Fair Elections" (2009).

Thernstrom could be mischievous, telling the American Prospect that she and her husband had hung a framed photograph of Thomas, the Supreme Court justice and conservative icon, above their office fireplace "to make reporters faint."

"I've got a problem with being stuffed into boxes," she told the magazine. "Put me in a room of conservatives and I start running to the left; put me in a group of liberals and I start running to the right. I mean, I just have problems with ideologically coercive environments - I get claustrophobic."
Monica Mileur packs grocery items into a box at Union Loafers restaurant Friday, April 10, 2020, in St. Louis. Some restaurants have turned to selling groceries and other provisions to customers as a way to help make up for revenue lost during the coronavirus outbreak. (AP Photo/Jeff Roberson)

Associated Press

Americans are starting to get their direct payments mandated by Congress's $2 trillion coronavirus stimulus bill.

People are primarily spending the relief money on groceries and other basics.

Let Business Insider know how you're spending the extra cash by emailing reporter Haven Orecchio-Egresitz.

Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

Related Video: What Could Be the Fastest Way to End the Coronavirus Crisis?

More than 80 million Americans are expected to see their stimulus payments hit their bank accounts this week.

As of Monday, online finance company Netspend had processed nearly $1 billion in government relief payments, according to The Washington Post. Most customers have been using their checks for groceries and food, as well as at pharmacies, the Post reported. Others are using their pre-paid debit cards to withdraw cash at ATMs.

"I've just been stocking up on food and paying all of the bills," Daniel Ruffner, a Rochester man who received a prepaid debit card from Netspend, told the Post. "It's nice to finally be able to see my bills go to zero."

Most Americans who are eligible for a payment will receive $1,200. The first set of people receiving the money are mainly those who gave the IRS their direct deposit information on their 2018 or 2019 tax returns.

Paper checks will be sent after April 24, Business Insider's Tanza Loudenback reported.

For Americans like Ruffner, a cook who's now out of work, the money comes as a huge relief.

But many Americans are still waiting.

Camilla Chavez, of Delaware, was notified that her money has arrived, but it remains pending in her bank account, according to the Post. The money was deposited on Friday, but millions are waiting for banks to clear the payments, the Post reported.

By the end of the week, the IRS plans to have a "Get My Payment" website up so people can check on the status of their money and include their direct deposit information, the Post reported.

Story continues

Like Ruffner, Chavez also lost her job, the Post reported. It's been a strain on her and her parents.

Her mother tested positive for COVID-19, and she and her husband have also had to stop working.

Chavez has been unable to get unemployment benefits, so her parents, who own her home, gave her a break on rent this month, the Post reported. She plans on using the relief check to pay them back this week.

"Losing my job and not working for four weeks now has put me in a position where I had to use my savings and put charges on my credit card," Chavez told the Post. "This really put me in a tough situation."

Let Business Insider know how you plan on spending your relief check by emailing Haven Orecchio-Egresitz at horecchio@businessinsider.com.

Read the original article on Business Insider
Sinn Fein leader Mary Lou McDonald celebrates with her supporters after being elected in February

Sinn Fein leader Mary Lou McDonald has become the latest high-profile person in Irish public life to be struck down by the coronavirus.

She confirmed last night she had tested positive for Covid-19, having been off the political stage in recent weeks.

And she warned: "You do not want to get this virus."

Taoiseach Leo Varadkar, Fianna Fail leader Micheal Martin and Eamon Ryan of the Green Party were among politicians to wish her well in her recovery.

Ms McDonald joins other well-known people including broadcasters Claire Byrne, Ryan Tubridy and Dr Ciara Kelly to have caught the virus.

Tougher

Expand Close Mary Lou McDonald in her video yesterday / Facebook

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Sinn Fein had been at the forefront of calling for tougher restrictions in the early weeks of the Covid-19 crisis.

The party postponed some of the public meetings it had planned after the election.

One of the first cases of coronavirus in the country led to the closure of Ms McDonald's children's school at the start of March.

The Dublin Central TD missed a Dail sitting earlier this month, tweeting at the time she was "under the weather" and staying at home while "taking all necessary precautions".

Ms McDonald was tested for coronavirus on March 28, but only got the results on Monday. In a video message she said her doctor told her she was no longer infected or infectious, and added: "This is a great relief after weeks of being very unwell."

Ms McDonald also said she had a setback in her recovery at the weekend after developing post-viral pleurisy in her right lung.

"I am on medication and responding very well and fully expect to be back at work next Monday," she said.

Ms McDonald thanked medical staff and carers and said: "My thoughts and solidarity are with everyone who is sick at this time.

"My sympathy is with every bereaved family. I am heartbroken for you.

"My appeal to everyone is to stay safe, stay home and stay apart. You do not want to get this virus.

She thanked people for their good wishes, adding: "Your kindness is much appreciated and I'll be back next week. There is much work to be done. Ireland must change for the better."

Mr Varadkar tweeted last night that he was wishing Ms McDonald well in her recovery.

He said: "Our thoughts today and every day are with all those affected by Covid-19, with all those sick or recovering and with the bereaved who have lost loved ones and friends."

Mr Martin wished her a "full and speedy recovery".

Elsewhere, it was revealed that 533,000 people are now receiving the Covid-19 Pandemic Unemployment Payment (PUP), having lost their jobs due to the emergency shutdown of the country.

This is in addition to the 210,000 people who were already unemployed.

By far the largest proportion of the group receiving PUP - nearly 28pc or 152,700 people - is in Dublin.

That is followed by Cork on 10pc or 55,600 people.

Nationwide, 115,500 people have at least temporarily lost jobs in the accommodation and food-services sectors, while 81,400 workers from the wholesale, retail and repair of motor vehicle sectors are also in receipt of PUP.

More than 71,000 construction workers are receiving the payment.

It has also emerged that more than 1,700 people denied the emergency payment in error have received an apology from the Department of Social Protection.

Entitled

Senior government official Liz Canavan said the department mistakenly issued an email to some applicants for the payment, suggesting they were not entitled to it and that they would not be getting a further payment.

"As soon as the department became aware of the issue, it carried out an investigation and it has determined the source of the error," she said. "It has apologised to these individuals for the error and the distress it caused them."

She said the 1,700-plus people involved had been emailed to reassure them the payment would continue.

Ms Canavan said there was still a small number of people who had entered incorrect PPS or Iban numbers in their PUP applications.

The department is said to be contacting them to obtain the correct information so the payment can be made.

Ms Canavan said the number of applications submitted online through MyWelfare.ie was still increasing.

She said 42,000 employers had now signed up to the separate temporary wage subsidy scheme and that 199m had been paid out so far.
Living through the coronavirus quarantine can feel like the hit comedy Groundhog Day starring Bill Murray.

Each day as we shelter in place, we get a little bit more comfortable with our newfound time at home and more productive with our daily routines.

From working at makeshift desks to lounging on the couch and binge-watching another Netflix show, the right robe and slippers can make it all better.

Get comfortable: Emily Ratajkowski and her husband Sebastian Bear-McClard looked like they've reached peak coziness in hooded robes

COMFY COZY ROBES

In such uncertain times, it's important to engage in calming activities to reduce stress.

A plush robe - like the kind you get at a luxury spa - can bring ultimate comfort when relaxing, whether you're masking, binge-watching, snacking or drinking a glass of wine.

Emily Ratajkowski and her husband Sebastian Bear-McClard looked like they've reached peak coziness in hooded robes.

Feel like you've just checked in to a 7-star hotel by slipping into a terrycloth or waffle knit style and accessorize it with a pair of furry slippers.

The Cozy Chic Adult Robe by Barefoot Dreams, $127; barefootdreams.com

Left: Organic Terry Robe by L.L. Bean, $84; llbean.com. Right: Women's Cotton Terry Long Spa Bath Robe by Lands'end, now $41.97; landsend.com

Left: Sheepskin Mule by Mou, $125; mou-online.com. Right: Sheepskin Fur Zori, $105; mou-online.com

Queen of the house: A silk full length style like the Olivia Von Halle one that Kate Hudson has been rocking while in quarantine is as glamorous as it gets

SILK DRESSING GOWN

A beautiful robe is enough to inspire you out of bed in the morning.

A silk full length style like the Olivia Von Halle one that Kate Hudson has been rocking while in quarantine is as glamorous as it gets.

A beautiful robe is not just a luxury, it is an essential for at-home elegance. Wear it while drinking your morning coffee or in the evening before bed and you'll feel like you're on vacation.

The body-wrap can add a level of opulence and mystique to anything it is paired with - sassy slippers recommended!

Left: Mimi printed silk-satin robe by Olivia Von Halle, $485; net-a-porter.com. Right: Satin Long Robe by Victoria's Secret, $79.50; victoriassecret.com

Left: The Songbird by Birdies, $95; birdies.com. Right: The Phoebe by Birdies, $120; birdies.com.

CLASSIC EVERYDAY ROBE

While in quarantine it's important to have a routine for optimum productivity. That includes getting dressed in a confidence boosting ensemble.

A no-frills lightweight cotton or cashmere robe is perfect to throw on for regular everyday activities, as it doesn't sacrifice style for comfort.

Top it over your pajamas to do your hair, make breakfast or grab the mail.

While working at your computer, balance one over your shoulders if you catch a chill instead of throwing on a tired sweatshirt.

Jovani has announced that they are donating 100% of the proceeds from sales of their JOVANI robe towards @feedamerica.

With each robe, Feeding America will be able to donate 400 meals to families in need across the United States.

Left: Bliss Cashmere Robe by Figleaves, $315; figleaves.com. Right: Cecilia waffle-knit cotton robe by Skin, $145; net-a-porter.com

Give back: Jovani has announced that they are donating 100% of the proceeds from sales of their JOVANI robe towards @feedamerica. With each robe, Feeding America will be able to donate 400 meals to families in need across the United States
Atmos Energy Corporation ATO, through its subsidiaries, is engaged in regulated natural gas distribution and storage businesses.



This Zacks Rank #1 (Strong Buy) stock is a promising bet at the moment, as it is focused on producing more electricity from clean sources and aims at lowering methane emissions by 50% within 2035.



Growth Projections



The Zacks Consensus Estimate for fiscal 2020 earnings is pegged at $4.72 on revenues of $3.18 billion. This implies 8.05% and 9.71% increase in the bottom and top lines, respectively, from the year-ago reported figures.



The companys long-term (three to five years) earnings growth rate is projected at 7.2%.



Capital Expenditures



During the fiscal 2015 to 2019 period, the company invested $6.4 billion in replacing aging infrastructure and modernizing the system. The company has a long-term capital expenditure plan in the tune of $10-$11 billion over the next five years, indicating an improvement of 7-8% annually.



Courtesy of constructive regulatory outcomes, it is able to recover 90% of annual capital investments within six months and nearly 99% in no more than 12 months of investment. This in a way enables the company to fund its long-term capital plans and provides a clear visibility of earnings.



Gas Storage and Reduction of Methane Emissions



Atmos Energy is carrying out investments for the expansion of gas storage facility. The company plans to invest between $100 million and $120 million to develop a third salt-dome cavern at the Bethel storage facility. The company anticipates finishing required compliance work on all 3 caverns, which should come into service by late 2025. These storage facilities will allow Atmos Energy to meet the growing demand in the North Texas market and in turn enable it to gain from the same.



In addition, the planned capital investment will allow Atmos Energy to lower emissions. It aims at reducing methane emissions by 10-15% in the next five years from the current levels. The company also aims at lowering methane emissions by 50% within 2035.



Regular Dividend



Consistent performance of the company has enabled it to reward shareholders through steady increase in annual dividend rates. The company has raised annual dividend for 36 consecutive years. Its board of directors has declared a quarterly dividend of 57.5 cents per common share. The new dividend for fiscal 2020 is $2.30, which represents a 9.5% increase from fiscal 2019.



Price Performance



Shares of Atmos Energy have outperformed the industry in the past 12 months.

Story continues





Other Stocks to Consider



Other top-ranked stocks from the utility sector include NorthWestern Corporation NWE, American States Water Corporation AWR and MYR Group Inc. MYRG, each sporting a Zacks Rank #1. You can see the complete list of todays Zacks #1 Rank stocks here.



NorthWestern Corp., American States Water and MYR Group delivered average positive surprise of 7.6%, 6.5% and 7.4% in the last four quarters, respectively.



The Zacks Consensus Estimate for 2020 earnings for NorthWestern Corp, American States Water and MYR Group has moved up 0.3%, 3.2% and 5%, respectively, in the past 60 days.



The Hottest Tech Mega-Trend of All



Last year, it generated $24 billion in global revenues. By 2020, it's predicted to blast through the roof to $77.6 billion. Famed investor Mark Cuban says it will produce "the world's first trillionaires," but that should still leave plenty of money for regular investors who make the right trades early.



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American States Water Company (AWR) : Free Stock Analysis Report



MYR Group, Inc. (MYRG) : Free Stock Analysis Report



Atmos Energy Corporation (ATO) : Free Stock Analysis Report



NorthWestern Corporation (NWE) : Free Stock Analysis Report



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US president withdraws funding for the UN health body after weeks of escalating attacks for mismanaging the pandemic.

United States President Donald Trump has decided to suspend millions of dollars in funding to the World Health Organization (WHO), accusing the UN body of severely mismanaging the coronavirus pandemic.

The US, where almost 26,000 people have died from COVID-19, is the largest single contributor to the WHO.

More:

It gives the body about $500m each year, with $116m mandated by the UN and about another $400m in voluntary payments.

The move on Tuesday follows weeks of escalating attacks by Trump on the Geneva-based UN health agency as he has sought to deflect scrutiny of his own administrations response to the outbreak.

Here is a timeline:

January 30  WHO issues travel guidelines

An emergency committee on the coronavirus outbreak convened by the WHO chief in Geneva concluded that travel or trade restrictions were not recommended at the time.

January 31: Trump blocks travel from China

Trump issued an executive order blocking entry to the US from anyone who has been in China in the last 14 days. It does not apply to US residents and family members or spouses of US residents or citizens.

Chinas government criticised the measure, which it said contradicted the WHOs appeal to avoid travel bans, and slammed unfriendly comments made by the US that Beijing was failing to cooperate.

Just as the WHO recommended against travel restrictions, the US rushed to go in the opposite way. Certainly not a gesture of goodwill, said foreign ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying.

March 13  Trump declares national emergency

As confirmed cases increased in the US, Trump declared a national emergency, granting access to $50bn in funding for US states and territories.

The move allows for waivers for doctors and hospitals in their response to the virus.

March 24: Trump says he wants US to open by April 12

Despite warnings from health experts, Trump said on Fox News he would love to have the country opened up, and just raring to go by Easter.

Our people want to return to work  The cure cannot be worse than the problem, the president tweeted.

Our people want to return to work. They will practice Social Distancing and all else, and Seniors will be watched over protectively & lovingly. We can do two things together. THE CURE CANNOT BE WORSE (by far) THAN THE PROBLEM! Congress MUST ACT NOW. We will come back strong!  Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 24, 2020

April 7  Trump threatens to freeze WHO funding

As the deaths in the US surpassed Chinas official death toll, Trump faced increased scrutiny about his reponse to the crisis.

He denied seeing a memo by a senior US official, Peter Navarro, warning of mass casualties and economic devastation from the new coronavirus, months before the pandemic began inflicting thousands of deaths in the US.





I read about it maybe a day, two days ago, Trump said when asked about the January 30 memo sent by the White House trade adviser at a news conference. It was a recommendation that he had, I think he told certain people on the staff, but it didnt matter. I didnt see it.

Attempting to shift the blame, Trump threatened to freeze US funding to WHO, saying it missed the call and was very China-centric in its approach.

The W.H.O. really blew it. For some reason, funded largely by the United States, yet very China centric. We will be giving that a good look. Fortunately I rejected their advice on keeping our borders open to China early on. Why did they give us such a faulty recommendation?  Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) April 7, 2020

April 8  WHO officials deny accusations, Trump continues attack

WHO officials denied it was China-centric and said the acute phase of a pandemic was not the time to cut funding.

WHO General-Director Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus also urged world leaders not to politicise the situation.

The focus of all political parties should be to save their people. Please dont politicise this virus. It exploits the differences you have at the national level, he said at a press briefing in Geneva.





Trump again fired back at the UN agency, accusing its head of initially minimising the coronavirus outbreak and then siding with China in its response.

He [Tedros] would have been much better serving the people hes supposed to serve if they gave a correct analysis. Everything was China-centric: Everything is going to be fine, no human-to-human [transmission], said Trump.

He wanted me to keep the borders open. I closed the border to spite him, it was a hard decision to make at the time. We made a decision against the World Health Organization.

April 14  Trump cuts WHO funding

Trump announced that he had instructed his administration to temporarily halt funding to WHO over its handling of the coronavirus pandemic.

Speaking at the White House on Tuesday, Trump said the WHO failed in its basic duty and it must be held accountable. He said it promoted Chinas disinformation about the virus that likely led to a wider outbreak.

The WHO did not immediately comment.

United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said it was not the time to be reducing funds to the WHO or any other organisation fighting the pandemic.

Now is the time for unity and for the international community to work together in solidarity to stop this virus and its shattering consequences, Guterres said in a statement.
wikimedia

Most of the cannabis bills that were considered during this year's legislative session faced an almost completely disengaged media audience, overshadowed as they were by the almost nervous excitement surrounding the doomed recreational marijuana legalization bill. That's probably why most of them failed to lift off the ground.

You Ain't From 'Round Here

The madness has finally come to an end. The New Mexico Department of Health is no longer required to issue medical cannabis cards to non-residents. Last week, the governor signed a measure that once again requires medical cannabis program applicants to be residents of New Mexico.

That means at least 613 out-of-state patients are probably pretty bummed this week. But I think I'm pretty confident in saying that we all expected this to come. The argument was made last year that because of a wording change made to a medical expansion bill that defined a patient as a person instead of a resident of New Mexico, the Medical Cannabis Program had to be opened up to nonresidents. A judge repeatedly ruled in favor of this interpretation, but the state wasn't having itprobably because it was turning our program into a quick-stop pot supplier for out-of-staters. The bill's authors repeatedly told reporters that it wasn't their intention to open the program to nonresidents, but that was neither here nor there.

And before anyone starts complaining about non-resident visitors in need of their medication, keep in mind that the new reciprocity rule kicks in July 1, allowing individuals enrolled in other states' medical cannabis programs to make purchases at New Mexico dispensaries. It will still be illegal to cross state lines with cannabis, though.

For those out-of-staters who already have a New Mexico medical cannabis card, state Health Secretary Kathyleen Kunkel told reporters that they would be allowed to keep their cards until they expireabout three yearsbut will not be able to renew them. So, yes. For the time being, you still have to continue being polite to those Texans you keep bumping into at the dispensary, no matter how painful that might be.

Cannabis in Schools Fix Fails

Another hot topic last year was a new rule that allows cannabis patients enrolled in public school to have medical marijuana administered while on campus. The rule gave schools some discretion when it came to implementation, but many complained that the language was too vague and open to interpretation.

The new rule gave schools the option of allowing students to receive their medication from a designated faculty member or their guardian. Many school leaders said that requiring staff to administer cannabis could endanger their jobs and chose the other option.

Parents were upset. For many, that choice meant they had to find a way to leave work and travel to the school multiple times a day just to give their children medication. Concerns were also raised over an exception that allowed schools to ignore the regulation if they could provide written proof that they would lose federal funding by following it.

Senate Bill 276 was set to change some of that. It would have barred schools from restricting the types of faculty who may administer the drug and prohibited the schools from discouraging or disciplining faculty who volunteered for the job. It would also only allow schools to opt out if they received notice from a federal agency that they would lose federal funding for the policy.

But it didn't pass, so the battle will continue to rage on this year.

Native Patient Protection Flubs

A bill that would have potentially protected Native cannabis patients living on tribal land from federal prosecution stalled on the house floor.

Under Senate Bill 271, Tribe and Pueblo Medical Marijuana Agreements, the New Mexico Department of Health would have been authorized to enter into intergovernmental agreements with tribes and pueblos that would have allowed tribal groups to come up with their own medical cannabis programs.

This would have gone a long way in protecting patients from federal scrutiny. While a patient is able to purchase and possess medical cannabis on state land, the moment they enter federal trust lands, they are considered a criminal.

Apparently that will continue for at least another year.

Research Bill Fails

A bill that would have allowed research facilities to grow or buy cannabis for research purposes was also put into the ground before the session was out.

House Bill 334 would have established a Cannabis Control Division to regulate licensing for research facilities. The facilities would be allowed to purchase and cultivate their own cannabis to be used in much needed studies. Currently, scientists can get authorization to grow cannabis for research, but they can only use plants provided by the Drug Enforcement Agencyplants that are well known to be subpar in quality and useless for these purposes.

So don't expect any of that research that our dear lawmakers keep crowing for, since they keep missing opportunities to make it happen.
It is no secret that the coronavirus pandemic is on an exponential rise, resulting in multiple casualties and infecting scores of people globally. This, in turn, crippled equity markets, keeping investors in the lurch. Even though almost all corners of the investing space have been affected by this unprecedented crisis, airlines are among the worst-hit. The fact that the Zacks Airline industry has plunged 54.3% since the beginning of March bears testimony to its struggles.

With passenger demand for air travel almost evaporating in the face of this global health peril, airline stocks appear to be dealt a body blow. As an evidence, February air traffic touched the lowest level since the 9/11 terror attacks on the United States in 2001. The traffic picture is likely to be more lackluster in the coming months.

With air-travel demand hitting rock bottom, airlines including the likes of Delta Air Lines DAL, American Airlines AAL and JetBlue Airways JBLU slashed their capacity. Moreover, they are undertaking a host of cost-cutting measures like freezing hiring and deferring capital expenses. However, these desperate moves seem inadequate for the battered airline stocks to stay afloat as evident from the US airlines application for a financial aid from the government to tide over the ongoing crisis.

Each of the above-mentioned stocks carries a Zacks Rank #3 (Hold). You can see the complete list of todays Zacks #1 Rank (Strong Buy) stocks here.

Airline Dividends & Buybacks Halted

As a condition for receiving the above-mentioned relief package, airlines had to suspend share buybacks and dividends. Consequently, the likes of Delta, Alaska Air ALK, Southwest Airlines LUV and SkyWest SKYW stalled their shareholder-friendly initiatives while applying for the grant.

In fact, airlines faced severe criticism for seeking government funds as prior to the COVID-19 outbreak, they had not saved money prudently and spent rather lavishly on rewarding their shareholders through dividends/buybacks. Per Guardian research, over the last five years, Delta, American Airlines, United Airlines, Southwest Airlines and Alaska Airlines shelled out $44.9 billion to investors via the above endeavors.

Story continues

Airlines Fly High on Payroll Support

Airline stocks, which took a massive hit from the advent of the coronavirus disaster, finally had something to cheer about on Apr 14 following an agreement (announced by President Trump) with the Treasury Department pertaining to worth $25 billion in payroll grants. As a result, most airline stocks gained significantly in yesterdays after-hours trading.

For instance, JetBlue shares were up in excess of 16% as it stands to receive $935.8 million under the Coronavirus Aid, Relief and Economic Security (CARES) Act. Of the stimulus amount, $685.1 million will be through grants, which the company does not have to repay. The balance will be obtained via low-interest loans. Southwest Airlines rose around 5% as it is entitled to earn more than $3.2 billion in aid comprising $2.3 billion plus in payroll grants.American Airlines will receive $4.1 billion in direct support and $1.7 billion in loan.



Will the Aid Suffice?

The package under the CARES Act will take care of sustaining jobs only through Sep 30, 2020. However, the current scenario of extremely tepid air-travel demand is unlikely to reach the pre-coronavirus levels any time soon. Evidently, United Airlines CEO Oscar Munoz and president Scott Kirby expect "demand to remain suppressed for months after that, possibly into next year." Moreover, JetBlues CEO Robin Hayes warned that "the writing is on the wall", emphasizing that travel demand will not be restored anytime soon.

Whatever be the final outcome, we expect investor focus to remain on this burning issue. To this end, we advise investors to watch this space for further updates.



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Ukraine urges Russia, as the state-occupant, to provide the protection of life and health of the population in the temporarily occupied territories of Donetsk and Luhansk regions and annexed Crimea in terms of Covid-19 pandemic as the Foreign Ministry of Ukraine reported.

We urge the Russian Federation to provide in its entity the right for life and access to the medical provision of illegally inmate citizens of Ukraine, provide unhindered and safe access for the representative of the international monitoring missions and the International Committee of the Red Cross, as well as doctors to the population of the temporarily occupied territories to hold qualified medical examination and treatment and provision of the humanitarian aid, the document said.

Ukraines Foreign Ministry also demanded from Russia to regularly provide full information toward the situation with the spread of coronavirus disease in the temporarily occupied Ukrainian territories and measures on the provision of help to the population of these territories due to the pandemic.

The ministry explained that the continued armed aggression from the side of Russia makes it impossible for the Ukrainian side to provide direct aid to the population of the temporarily occupied territories. In the terms of the continuation of the combat actions and actual closure of the access by the occupation administration for OSCE, UN agencies, ICRC and other humanitarian organizations also complicate the aid from the side of the international society.

Once more we note the commitment of the Russian Federation as the state-occupant in accordance with the norms of the international humanitarian right to assume all necessary measures aiming for provision of the protection of life and health of the population of these territories, the ministry stated.

Particularly, the Foreign Ministry pointed out that according to Article 56 of Geneva Convention relative to the Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War dated August 12, 1949, the occupation authority is obliged to provide and maintain in occupied territory the conditions, which are satisfactory from the point of view of healthcare and sanitation; it should assume prevention and precaution measures necessary for the prevention of the spread of the infectious diseases and epidemics.

Earlier, Ukraines Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba stated that Ukraine would not relax or ease sanctions against Russia due to the spread of Covid-19.
A 42-tonne fatberg  a giant mass of congealed wet wipes, cloth and oils flushed into our drains and toilets  that was found north of Melbourne is the biggest authorities have seen in the state.

The massive blockage was not related to recent toilet paper shortages, though plumbers have reported a rise in blocked drains with people turning to a range of less suitable substitute materials.

A 42-tonne fatberg has been discovered in a Melbourne drain, prompting calls for people to be mindful of what they flush down the toilet. Credit:Yarra Valley Water

Yarra Valley Water managing director Pat McCafferty said maintenance workers removed the fatberg, which was found earlier this week, by blasting it with high-pressure hoses and sucking pieces out of the sewer with a high-velocity vacuum.

"Its bigger than a petrol tanker. It took nine hours and eight people to extract it," Mr McCafferty said of the fatberg found in Wallan, about an hour north of Melbourne.
WITH the 24/7 non-stop port operation in Cebu Province, Cebu Port Authority (CPA) General Manager Leonilo Miole expressed his great appreciation to the Philippine National Police, Armed Forces of the Philippines, other law enforcement officers and border control guards for heeding to the request to allow passage of all Cebu port frontliners and stakeholders including cargo owners, shippers and consignees to ensure that cargo and supply chain remain unhampered amid the Covid-19 pandemic.

To recall, the CPA chief executive officer requested all law enforcement officers assigned at checkpoints or at border control to allow the entry of CPA employees upon presentation of their CPA IDs and/or Certificate of Employment to be able to report to their respective areas of assignment in CPA ports and offices scattered in the entire province of Cebu.

This is to give due credit and appreciation to our patriotic and courageous enforcement officers manning our borders for allowing CPA frontliners to perform essential functions at the port, said Miole.

He further thanked all law enforcement agencies for recognizing the importance of the smooth flow of cargoes in and out of ports.

Miole assured that port frontliners and skeletal workforce continue to follow and implement stringent security and health measures in seaports consistent with the protocols set by the Department of Health to minimize risk of Covid-19 transmission via ports. (PR)
Children of migrant workers play outside their home at a construction site north of Bangkok, April 12, 2020.

Updated at 5:21 p.m. ET on 2020-04-16



Migrant workers in Asia are bearing the brunt of the coronavirus pandemic lockdown in the region as they lose jobs, run out of food or even succumb to the contagious disease.

Governments appear to be concerned as many of these workers are sole bread-winners of their families living in Indonesia, Bangladesh and other labor-exporting countries.

During a special online meeting with his Southeast Asian counterparts to discuss regional efforts to combat COVID-19, Indonesian President Joko Jokowi Widodo spoke up for migrant workers affected by the pandemic.

The leaders of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) bloc agreed later on Tuesday to ensure a social safety net for their countries most vulnerable people. But they but did not mention migrants in a joint statement issued after their meeting and a similar online meeting with officials from Japan, South Korea and China.

I appreciate the good cooperation among Indonesia, Malaysia and Singapore to protect migrant workers, Jokowi said during the meeting.

Indonesian Foreign Minister Retno Marsudi pointed out that nearly 7 million workers migrate among ASEAN nations, calling them the heart of our community building process.

As each ASEAN country adopts their own national measures to contain COVID-19, we must not lose sight of our commitment to assisting and protecting our nationals, particularly the vulnerable ones, in other ASEAN countries, Retno wrote in an op-ed published in the Jakarta Post on Tuesday.

With more than 1 million Indonesians working in Singapore and Malaysia, I have been in close contact with my counterparts to ensure the protection of our migrant workers in their respective countries, she wrote.

Throughout the region, migrants are facing tough times coping with the COVID-19 outbreak, workers and NGOs that advocate for them say.

In Thailand, Nich Wan, a Cambodian from Battambang, who had worked at a construction site and runs a small grocery business north of Bangkok, said he was stuck in place with little income from his business and no construction work.

I could not make enough money with little sales as COVID rages on and I have to stay here. I thought I could go home during Songkran [the Thai New Year], but the border was shut down, Nich told BenarNews.

Bangladeshi Abdul Salam, 47, who has been working in Malaysia for five years, recently took a job at a hardware store where he was paid 25 ringgit ($5.75) a day. A week later, the government imposed its movement control order (MCO), a partial lockdown on industries and services except for those listed as essential.

The MCO extension through April 28 has caused him to fear he will not have money for food. He is spending as little as possible and, like his 15 housemates, eats once a day.



I asked for a 500 ringgit ($115) advance from my boss at the beginning of the MCO as I needed to send money home. I sent most to my family in Bangladesh, leaving me with a small amount to spend, he told BenarNews, adding that he and his housemates had chipped in three to five ringgit (69 cents to $1.16) to buy food supplies.

NGOs reach out

Siti Nursuraya Ali, the founder of Malaysian-based NGO Anak Kami, has been working with the Indonesian embassy in Kuala Lumpur to provide aid to Indonesian migrants, and had hoped to have a similar role with Bangladeshis.

We tried to engage with the Bangladesh embassy but they were not very cooperative, at least to us, she told BenarNews. They wanted a database from us but did not want to give us proper documentation for us to help.

Indonesians in Mindanao, in the southern Philippines, have appealed for food assistance from the government in Jakarta, the foreign ministry said.

There are 3,000 Indonesian citizens in the southern Philippines. The Indonesian consul general in Davao City is trying to reach out to the most vulnerable of them, said Judha Nugraha, director for protection of Indonesians overseas at the foreign ministry. The mosque at the consulate general in Davao has handed out cash and staples to Indonesians in nine areas of the southern Philippines.

Meanwhile, officials with the Human Rights Commission of Malaysia (Suhakam) said they were seeking government assistance in aiding refugees and asylum seekers who have been affected by the Movement Control Order.

Suhakam pointed to a government pledge that no one would be left behind as part of its economic stimulus package in response to the pandemic.

On March 27, Prime Minister Muhyiddin Yassin announced a stimulus package that allocated $29.6 billion for public welfare, $23.1 billion to support businesses and $460 million to bolster the economy, under what it dubbed as The People-Centric Economic Stimulus Package. Since then, it has allocated another $2.3 billion to help small businesses.

Allocations should be made to assist and provide for the basic needs of the refugee and asylum seekers community. This includes funds for temporary shelter for those facing eviction by landlords, the statement said.

In Thailand, the majority of almost 3 million migrants from Cambodia, Laos and Myanmar work in factories, construction site, eateries, department stores and fisheries in Bangkok and its adjoining provinces, according to rights groups.

Many lost their jobs after the Bangkok metropolitan administration and provinces ordered non-essential businesses closed on March 22. More jobs were lost when Prime Minister Prayuth Chan-o-cha issued an emergency decree and night-time curfew to curb the virus spread.

The government recently launched a $58 billion (1.9 trillion baht) stimulus package, but it does not include aid for migrant workers.

To make matters worse, some migrants who were laid off did not receive compensation owed to them under the law, rights workers told BenarNews.

We dont know exactly how many migrant workers left the country and how many remain here, Patima Tungpuchayakul, director of the Labor Rights Promotion Network (LPN) told BenarNews. The government doesnt either and it is asking about the number as well.

Government social security officials did not respond to requests for comment.

Assistance for returnees

According to NGO officials on Indonesia, citizens who have returned from jobs overseas face similar needs amid the pandemic.

Nearly 33,000 workers had returned from Malaysia, Hong Kong and Taiwan by the end of March, according to the Indonesian Migrant Workers Protection Agency (BP2MI).

We want to provide guarantees to migrant workers because they are foreign exchange heroes, Benny Ramdhani said after being sworn in as the BP2MI chief by Widodo on Wednesday.

Bangladesh, which is not a member of ASEAN, has been dealing with its own influx of citizens who have been sent home from foreign nations  including many who had been jailed for overstaying visas.

The Bangladesh state-run news agency BSS reported that 366 Bangladeshis, mostly migrant workers and some stranded travelers, returned from Saudi Arabia on a special chartered flight Wednesday night.

Those people boarded the flight after a health check and none of them were COVID-19 positive, Golam Moshi, Bangladesh ambassador to Saudi Arabia, told BenarNews.

He said 15 Bangladeshis infected by the coronavirus had died in Saudi Arabia.

The United Arab Emirates has provided a list of more than 200 Bangladeshi workers who had been in their jails, Foreign Minister A.K. Abdul Momen told BenarNews.

We are examining whether they are genuinely Bangladeshi nationals.

Syed Saiful Haque, chief of the WARBE Development Foundation, an NGO dedicated to the welfare of expatriate workers, said at least 250,000 Bangladeshis from different countries had returned home on their own or had been deported because of the pandemic in host countries in the Middle East as well as in Malaysia and Italy.

Of course, the coronavirus causes a crisis in the host countries, but sending foreign workers back is unfair because these migrant workers hugely contributed to their economy, Abdul Momen said.

Last year, Bangladeshi migrant workers sent back $15.5 billion (1.3 trillion taka) to their families, according to government estimates.

Those who have returned are receiving a stipend and are eligible for government loans, Expatriate Welfare Minister Imran Ahmad told BenarNews.

Every returnee will get 5,000 taka ($59) upon arrival at an airport. The family members of an expatriate worker who died of coronavirus will get 300,000 taka ($3,541), he said.

We will give each of the workers a loan ranging from 500,000 taka ($5,902) to 700,000 taka ($8,263) if they invest in economic activities especially in the agriculture sector, Ahmad said.

Armies of workers

According to Haque of WARBE, the number of Bangladeshi migrants working overseas, including undocumented workers is close to 10 million worldwide.

That figure is about the same as the army of overseas workers from the Philippines, a sector that has also been heavily affected by the virus. Many of these Filipinos and Filipinas work abroad as domestic servants, service sector workers and seamen.

Joanna Concepcion, chair of Migrante International which looks out for the welfare of Philippine overseas workers, said many more workers had lost their jobs because of COVID-19, and that their expected return home was likely to impact the economy.

Over 400,000 OFWs [Overseas Foreign Workers] are expected to return home in the coming months due to COVID-19, she said.

Latest statistics from the Philippine foreign office show that currently there are 736 Filipinos working abroad known to have been infected with the virus, and 88 deaths so far. They are spread to about 41 countries and regions around the world.

Manila, at the same time, has not stopped workers from leaving, especially those who already have contracts. The foreign office, in fact, has said that it would not stop Philippine nurses and health workers from leaving to help other countries fight the pandemic.

Ronna Nirmala in Jakarta, Nisha David in Kuala Lumpur, Nontarat Phaicharoen in Bangkok, Kamran Reza Chowdhury and Jesmin Papri in Dhaka, and Jason Gutierrez in Manila contributed to this report.

CORRECTION: An earlier version misidentified the embassy that NGO Anak Kita works with to provide aid to immigrants.


Hotel and guesthouse owners in Offaly and across the country are calling on Paschal Donohue TD, Minister for Finance, and the Government to introduce a series of urgent measures that are required to mitigate the impact of Covid-19 on the economy, including the tourism and hospitality industry.

Over the past few weeks, the industry has been decimated with over 85% of hotels closed nationally and the majority of the 260,000 employees laid off or on short-time.

Dara Cruise, Chair of the Midlands branch of the Irish Hotels Federation stated that hoteliers appreciated that the country is experiencing the greatest health crisis in living memory and that significant resources are being committed to address the overriding issue of public health. However, he warned: every days delay in implementing the measures, results in greater risks to our tourism and hospitality industry."

Mr Cruise noted the willingness of hotels to play their part in providing assistance to essential services where required by the HSE and other Government departments. He said that mitigating the impact of Covid-19 must go hand in hand with ensuring that Irish people have a viable economy to return to in the coming months.

"The health and wellbeing of all citizens is intertwined with the economy, and people will need livelihoods after the crisis is over. Tourism supports 11% of total employment nationally. It is important to note that 70% of these jobs are outside of Dublin which highlights its vital role in spreading employment opportunities and prosperity across the entire country. Here in Offaly tourism supported 2,100 jobs and generated 35m in local revenues before this crisis, he said.

Irish tourism has been a key driver of job growth over the last decade, and it is essential that our industry remains to the fore of the national economic agenda, including in negotiations on the Framework for Government. Whilst discussions are ongoing, further measures are now urgently required to protect tourism livelihoods and address the enormous challenges we face. These challenges are existential for many tourism businesses and of a significantly greater scale than anything experienced during the last financial crisis.

Offaly hoteliers are calling for a range of measures that will allow businesses to plan now for their recovery. These include:

1. Local Authority rates and water charges: to be waived for a minimum period of 12 months.

2. Cash flow & finance: measures to assist with cash flow for businesses facing short term problems, including interest free loans and a minimum 12-month deferment on Senior debt (both Capital and Interest).

3. Taxation: tourism VAT rates to be reduced to zero for a minimum of 12 months and until the industry has recovered, then restored to 9% on a permanent basis. Employers PRSI to be reduced to 0.5% for a minimum of 12 months and until the industry has recovered.

4. Government grants: business interruption grants to help businesses survive and reopen.

5. Seasonal employees: Supports for seasonal workers in tourism who do not currently qualify for Covid-19 related payments.

Mr Cruise added: At present most of our industry nationally is closed. We are seeking an urgent response to ensure that hotel and guesthouse properties are preserved and ready to scale up when the Covid-19 related restrictions are lifted. Tourism and hospitality businesses are now working to secure the necessary funds to survive and restart.

"That process involves making predictions around the period of closure and the length of time it will take for various categories of revenue to recover. Government controlled costs such as local authority rates, VAT and employers PRSI are having an enormously negative impact on viability scenarios during the recovery period.

"We recognise that the Government is being forced to increase the level of national debt to fund the health crisis and must protect the exchequer to fund ongoing services. However, these urgent measures are required now to help our industry recover and play its part in ensuring that the Irish economy will be strong enough to service post COVID-19 national debt.
TUNIS - Tunisia has asked the UN agency for refugees UNHCR for aid if a large number of refugees were to cross into the country from Libya due to ongoing conflict in the neighbouring country. In meeting with Defence Minister Imed Hazgui, UNHCR representative in Tunisia Hanan Hamdan expressed concern that the security situation in Libya might lead to large refugee flow into Tunisia. A defense ministry statement said that Hazgui underscored the UNHCR's responsibility to provide material and logistics support to Tunisia if a large number of refugees were to come into the country from Libya.

''Tunisia is closely monitoring developments in Libya and it is prepared to deal with any contingency, reaffirming the will of the military institution to cooperate with UNHCR in all areas,'' the statement said. After the recent retaking of some strategic centers in western Libya, Tripoli government forces now control all the coastal area from Tripoli to the Tunisian border.
Two Lehigh Valley airports will receive federal stimulus grants amid the coronavirus pandemic and the drastic toll it has taken on air travel across the world.

The Lehigh Valley International and Queen City airports are two of the 63 Pennsylvania airports sharing more than $239 million in Federal Aviation Administration grants under the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act.

All told, $10 billion was allocated for airports across the country. In addition to airports, on Tuesday it was revealed several U.S. airlines will receive part of the $25 billion in payroll grants in the CARES Act.

With a steep decline in travel and revenue due to the COVID-19 pandemic, our airports need help to continue operations and save employees jobs, U.S. Sen Bob Casey said in a news release.

Philadelphia International tops the states list with a $116 million grant, followed by Pittsburgh International with a $36 million grant.

LVIA in Hanover Township, Lehigh County, is getting $6,191,170 and Queen City in Allentown $30,000. Braden Airpark in Forks Township receives only state funding, not federal funding, and was not eligible for the grants.

This critical funding certainly delivers an essential lifeline to alleviate the significant loss of revenue and will help the airport authority cover the costs necessary to maintain the daily operation of a critical piece of transportation infrastructure in the Lehigh Valley, Executive Director Tom Stoudt said in a news release.

Stoudt thanked senators Casey and Pat Toomey, and Congresswoman Susan Wild for their unwavering support.

COVID-19 has decimated the aviation industry since February, and Lehigh-Northampton Airport Authority operations have not been spared by this pandemic, Stoudt said. If health officials are accurate, the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic have the potential to extend over the remaining months of 2020. The LNAA must be vigilant in our path forward which will include constant reevaluation and adaptation to maintain financial sustainability.

To cut costs, the airport authority has implemented a 10% pay cut for executive staff and senior managers, stopped all non-essential expenditures, reduced the capital project budget by $4 million, and offered voluntary furloughs for employees.

LNAA can use the federal grants for things like operational costs, including payroll, and critical airport improvement projects, like the four-phase, four-year $80 million runway rehabilitation project underway.

The coronavirus has also affected the people who work at LVIA. One airport authority administrative employee tested positive, as well as four people who worked in the terminals.

Besides the airports, the Lehigh Valleys public transit provider LANTA is splitting about $22 million in coronavirus relief with NJ Transit and SEPTA.

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.

Sarah Cassi may be reached at scassi@lehighvalleylive.com. If theres anything about this story that needs attention, please email her. Follow her on Twitter @SarahCassi. Find lehighvalleylive.com on Facebook.
Thailands Prime Minister Prayut Chan-o-cha (centre) speaks at the summit. (Photo: VNA)

During the summit chaired by Vietnamese Prime Minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc, Thailand and its ASEAN partners agreed to set up the COVID-19 ASEAN Response Fund and draw upon related lessons and experience.

Thailand was of the view that all parties must work together to control the spread of the virus and flatten the curve, as well as craft a collective approach to mitigate socio-economic impacts in a comprehensive manner.

The Thai PM also proposed five significant approaches, saying ASEAN needs to mobilise the energy and efforts of all sectors to jointly address this challenge in a holistic manner.

He proposed ASEAN and the ASEAN Plus Three Countries jointly establish a COVID-19 ASEAN Response Fund by reprioritising 10 percent of existing funds from the ASEAN Development Fund and cooperation funds with China, Japan, the Republic of Korea (RoK) and ASEAN Plus Three, or another agreed upon rate. The Fund shall be used to procure test kits, personal protective equipment and medical tools as well as support research and development in medicines and vaccines to help ASEAN become more self-reliant.

ASEAN should build understanding and empathy in the cooperation to facilitate transport of goods and logistics, customs clearance, and border trade. This will ensure that consumers will have access to a sufficient supply of medical tools and equipment, medicines and essential goods in a timely manner during this crisis, Prayut said.

According to the Thai PM, the role of technology should be promoted in providing innovative solutions to tackle challenges. ASEAN should also support the wider use of digital economy, innovative technology and e-commerce in the region, especially in helping MSMEs to take advantage of online platform. Digital Payment Connectivity and the use of Interoperable QR Code should be expedited to further facilitate regional trade and commerce.

ASEAN should draw upon the lessons and experience from the fight against COVID-19 to help build self-immunity to economic impacts from future public health emergencies or environmental challenges, he said.

The Sufficiency Economy Philosophy is an alternative approach to promote sustainable socio-economic development and enhance internal strengths with an emphasis on self-reliance, he said.

The role of the ASEAN Secretary-General, in his capacity as ASEANs coordinator for humanitarian assistance, should be strengthened to cover cooperation in the case of emergency situations such as epidemics, the Thai PM said.
Switzerland's tax authorities on Wednesday issued public notices for Indian businessman Ratul Puri, his father and two offshore firms linked to them after India sought details of their Swiss bank accounts for allegedly having illicit funds.

In separate notices published in the Swiss government's federal gazette, Ratul Puri and his father Deepak Puri have been asked to notify Switzerland's Federal Tax Administration within 10 days about their authorised representatives in case they want to appeal against "administrative assistance" requested by India.

An administrative assistance typically involves sharing of banking and other financial details by Swiss authorities after it prima facie finds the request made by a foreign jurisdiction involving an individual or company suspected to have indulged in tax evasion or other financial irregularities.

In the first step towards providing such an assistance, the Swiss government issues a notice in the name of the concerned individual or company, giving 10 days' time to appoint a representative, followed by further one-month period to appeal against the decision.

If the appeal is found to be without merit, the requested information is shared with the foreign jurisdiction.

Similar notices have been issued to Hendon Global Limited and Bronson Financial Inc, two British Virgin Islands (BVI)-based entities that are being probed by Indian authorities for alleged money laundering by the Puris who have been at the centre of a major investigation in connection with the Rs 3,600-crore VVIP chopper scam and also a separate bank fraud case.

Ratul Puri, nephew of former Madhya Pradesh Chief Minister Kamal Nath and Chairman of Hindustan Powerprojects, has been accused of money laundering and is being probed by the Enforcement Directorate (ED) and the Income Tax Department, among other agencies and regulators.

There was no immediate response by Puri and his group regarding the Swiss government notices, though they have been denying association with the scam or any other wrongdoing.

On its website, Hindustan Powerprojects describes itself as an independent power producer with a portfolio of 6,000 MW in projects under various stages, amounting to an asset size of USD 2 billion and employing more than 800 associates across sites.

Puri was arrested in August last year under the Prevention of Money Laundering Act (PMLA) in connection with a bank fraud case, while he was still being probed in the AgustaWestland VVIP chopper scam.

However, he was granted bail on December 2, 2019, in the AgustaWestland case, followed by another court order on December 13 by which he was released on bail in the bank fraud case as well.

While granting bail in the bank fraud case, the trial court had directed him not to leave the country without its prior permission and to join the probe as and when called for. The bail was later challenged by the ED in Delhi High Court, which on February 10 this year listed the matter for further hearing on April 27.

Besides Ratul Puri, his father Deepak Puri, mother Nita (Nath's sister) and others have also been booked in connection with the Rs 354-crore bank fraud case.

While the notices published in Switzerland's federal gazette did not disclose many details about the two companies linked to Puri, funds linked to Bronson Financial Inc was allegedly used for purchase of a Rs 300-crore bungalow in a posh locality of New Delhi. The property was attached by the Income Tax Department in August last year.

Hendon Global Ltd, another BVI-based entity that has been served the notice, figured among the shell companies named by the ED for being used by Puri for money laundering and for parking of funds related to their alleged financial crimes. In court hearings, Puri's lawyers have been denying these allegations.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
CHICAGO  Gov. J.B. Pritzker on Tuesday said Illinois is bending the curve on the coronavirus pandemic, citing a slowdown in the growth rate of new cases and stability in the number of patients using intensive care unit beds.

A key barometer is how quickly the state is doubling the number of new COVID-19 cases. About two weeks ago, cases were doubling every 3.6 days, he said. As of Sunday, that was stretched to about 8.2 days.

The same trend can be seen with the rate of deaths. At the beginning of April, COVID-19 deaths doubled every 2.5 days, but now theyre doubling every 5.5.

To be clear, there is nothing good about twice as many people having this virus or, worse, dying from it, no matter how long the increase takes, Pritzker said during a daily news briefing Tuesday. But we wont get to zero cases overnight. The fact that our doubling rate continues to increase in every metric is a clear demonstration that there is a deceleration of virus transmission.

We are, in fact, bending the curve, he added.

Still, the number of confirmed cases continues to grow by more than 1,000 each day. On Tuesday, the state announced 1,222 additional cases of COVID-19, bringing the total to 23,247. Officials announced another 74 deaths for a total of 868.

Along with the governors optimistic words came a reminder for residents to continue to stay home. The state has been working to flatten the curve to ensure that hospitals dont become overwhelmed with severely ill patients. Most people who get COVID-19 dont require hospitalization, but those who are older and/or have underlying health conditions may develop severe cases that require overnight care.

This curve may not flatten, and it may go up again if we dont adhere to the stay-at-home order, Pritzker said. We need to stay the course for now, for our efforts to truly remain effective.

Pritzkers comments came as pressure is expected to mount in the coming weeks to ease up on his directive, which is scheduled to expire April 30. President Donald Trump has empaneled an economic task force packed with business people, and on Tuesday he indicated he was hopeful some states without large outbreaks would reopen before May 1. In Illinois, the Senate Republican leader asked to start discussions on reopening the states economy.

Pritzker has suggested hell be cautious so that the states positive trends continue. Statewide, Illinois hospitals still have room for more patients. As of Monday, 4,283 COVID-19 patients and patients with suspected cases of the illness were hospitalized in Illinois, up from 4,091 Sunday.

Though the number of hospitalized COVID-19 patients has increased, so has hospital capacity, Pritzker said. Many hospitals have been working in recent weeks to add beds. The states hospitals have about 4,600 more beds than they did in August, he said.

In all, about 37% of Illinois 30,134 beds were available Monday, compared with a week earlier when 43% of 28,139 beds were available.

Intensive care unit beds are another top metric. As of Monday, about one-third of the states 2,987 ICU beds were available. A week earlier, about 35% of 2,709 ICU beds were open.

COVID-19 patients occupied about 40% of the states ICU beds as of Monday, down from 43% a week earlier. COVID-19 patients also were using 25% of the states 3,140 ventilators on Monday, compared with 29% of 2,791 ventilators a week earlier.

No region of the state had less than 15% availability of ICU beds or ventilators as of Tuesday, Pritzker said.

The southwest suburbs had the lowest percentage of available ICU beds, at 16.6% of 427 beds open, down from 20.7% of 372 beds open a week earlier. The next lowest percentage was in the city, which had 22.6% of 916 ICU beds available, down from 24.7% of 774 beds a week earlier.

A week ago, the northeast suburbs also had a low percentage of available ICU beds at 16.7% of 150 beds open. But this week, numbers there improved, with 26% of 150 beds open.

Pritzker did, however, note that there are individual hospitals operating at or near maximum capacity.

Roseland Community Hospital, on the far South Side, had filled its 10 ICU beds with patients as of Tuesday, though not all of them had COVID-19, said President and CEO Tim Egan. Some patients needing ICU care were being treated in the emergency department, he said.

And Vista Medical Center East in Waukegan filled all its ICU beds for which it could provide appropriate staffing at one point last week, Norman Stephens, CEO of Vista Health System, told the Tribune. The hospital was able to provide care for all the ICU patients who needed it, but if more ICU patients had showed up that night, they would likely have had to be treated in the emergency department until more ICU beds opened up, he said. The hospital has since gotten more nurses, opened up more ICU beds and discharged many patients.

The governor said hospitals are mostly doing a great job of directing patients amongst themselves, but he would step in to direct ICU patients to hospitals that are more available if needed.

A number of alternate care sites also are being set up should Illinois need more beds than hospitals can provide, including at convention center McCormick Place, and the previously closed Westlake, MetroSouth and Advocate Sherman hospitals.

Also Tuesday, Pritzker said hes had conversations in recent days with leaders in neighboring states about coordinating efforts to eventually ease stay-at-home restrictions. On Monday, groups of Democratic governors in the Northeast and on the West Coast announced that they were in such discussions.

Our goal, of course, for this is to start to think about, what are the preconditions for beginning to allow certain kinds of businesses to open their doors again, to expand the definition of those who can work or those businesses that can have the doors open? Pritzker said.

The other governors hes spoken with have all been thinking about it individually for their states and understand that speaking with a common voice might be a positive move, he said.

A spokeswoman did not respond immediately to a request for comment on which neighboring governors Pritzker has spoken with about reopening plans.

A day earlier, Pritzker said its likely adjustments will be made to his stay-at-home order in the coming weeks. He suggested, for example, that public health departments could issue rules for how many people can be in a store at a given time if more businesses are allowed to open.

What we have to do is to design a new normal way of life to carry us to the other side," Pritzker said Tuesday. "And while that day is not here yet, my team and I are working to bring that about, as are experts around the state and across the globe.

With just over two weeks remaining on the current order, Illinois Senate Republican leader Bill Brady of Bloomington is urging Pritzker to convene a meeting with the four legislative leaders to share what planning is underway as it relates to the reopening of our state.

"I believe we need to begin discussions on an eventual, responsible opening of our states economy, Brady said in a statement. And while I appreciate the governors willingness throughout this crisis to talk with me one-on-one, it is important for the leaders to meet.

Asked about Bradys request, Pritzker said hes in regular communication with Brady as well as Senate President Don Harmon, House Speaker Michael Madigan and House Republican leader Jim Durkin.

We can convene a Zoom conference or a teleconference, all of that, Pritzker said. Im happy to do that anytime with any of them.

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As India continues to battle the coronavirus pandemic with lockdown in place, many people are being the good samaritans and helping people, one way or the other, in these times of desolation.

Twitter

In Arunachal Pradesh, a documentary filmmaker and journalist, Kamtey Ringu, is doing his bit - not only is he providing daily updates to people and raising awareness on COVID-19, but he is also helping raise the concerns of slum dwellers and poor in Itanagar.



Occasionally, Ringu is also providing a helping hand in distribution of food.

His videos on Facebook are being viewed by thousands of social media users and it has also led to people chipping in to help those in need of food or any financial assistance. He is doing his job as a journalist and also playing his part as a citizen.

Ringu runs a small media firm working under the name of Himalayan Watchdog. He and his team have being reporting from various parts of the state and lending voice to the voiceless and helping draw attention to their needs.

For his selfless efforts, people have been praising him on Twitter.

The video with Habung Ape & Tadu Lampung in harek maal colony inspired me. Have donated rations to many needy since. Beautiful young souls.  Babin (@tadarbabin) April 15, 2020

Saw you with Kani mam in his latest video 

Glad to see him bringing the required attention on the section of people.  Ceemona Taku (@CeemonaT) April 14, 2020





People like Kamtey Ringu are what we need in crisis like today - not only is he raising awareness, but he is doing much more to ensure the poor are taken care of by urging people to donate and also helping in providing relief material during testing times due to coronavirus.

A real life hero if there ever was one.
A serial domestic abuser who allegedly threatened his partner with scissors told her she would "end up like Natasha Melendez", a court has heard.

The 32-year-old Venezuelan was murdered in her Lisburn home earlier this month.

Yesterday the city's Magistrates Court heard allegations that Daniel Milligan (33) threatened his partner with the same fate.

Milligan, with an address on the Antrim Road in north Belfast, is charged with six offences including making a threat to kill, four counts of assault, and possessing scissors with intent to commit GBH.

All are alleged to have been committed on Easter Sunday.

A detective said she believed she could connect Milligan to the offences and police were objecting to him being freed on bail.

She revealed that Milligan's partner had been deemed as "high risk" and that the defendant was a "serial perpetrator of domestic violence" who had served a jail sentence after he used scissors and then clippers to shave the head of his previous partner.

The detective described how officers were called to an address on Mercer Street in Lisburn on Sunday after the complainant made a 999 call that Milligan had "threatened to kill her".

"She was reluctant for police to call, saying that would make the situation worse," said the detective, adding that police attended and arrested Milligan.

She said the woman has told them "that things will be 10 times worse now that the police are involved".

Following Milligan's arrest the alleged victim made a statement to police that she had been in a relationship with him since he was freed from jail last July but that he "had been abusive from the start and she was subjected to violence on an almost daily basis".

The woman also claimed she was being "financially controlled" and Milligan has put images of her on the internet.

In relation to the alleged incident on Sunday when she reported the assault, the detective told the court how it was the police case that Milligan punched her, kicked her in the jaw, "wrapped his arms around her neck so she struggled to breathe, resulting in her suffering an asthma attack" and threatened that "she would end up the same way as" Natasha Melendez.

When he was arrested Milligan was "aggressive and irate to police".

The detective said that during interviews he denied threatening to kill her, denied assaulting her and although he initially denied that he held financial control over her, he later admitted that he "controlled the finances of the house", which was why he had her bank card.

Milligan also denied he had uploaded photographs of her on the internet or that he had been paid for them. He counter-claimed that opposite to her account, she had attacked him with the scissors which he had taken from her.

Turning to bail objections, the detective described Milligan as "volatile and dangerous... likely to seek retribution" if freed, highlighting his 94 previous convictions including entries for assault, the fact that he is under prison licence from an earlier sentence and has also breached court orders in the past.

"Police do not feel there are any conditions that could be put in place which would protect this vulnerable woman," the detective said.

Defence barrister Joel Lindsay conceded that while Milligan did have convictions for domestic abuse, "he is saying it's very easy to make allegations against me, she knows my history".

He claimed that Milligan's partner "has a lengthy suspended sentence for assault" and that, according to Milligan, she is claiming she was attacked "so that she isn't investigated for attempting to stab him and it allows her to apply for a house", further claiming that Milligan has injuries which are "consistent" with his account.

Refusing to free Milligan, District Judge Amanda Henderson said: "While I'm not trying the case, I cannot ignore this very significant record, the very serious allegations that have been made and domestic violence history."

Milligan was remanded into custody and the case relisted for May 11.
Anand Paranjpe, a Former Member of Parliament and NCP leader from Thane, has been tested positive for the coronavirus. According to reports, Paranjpe had come in contact with Maharashtra Housing Minister Jitendra Awhad. Around 15 persons who had come in contact with Awhad have also tested positive for coronavirus. These include five of Awhad's police bodyguards and some house helps, cook and party workers. All have been hospitalised.

Awhad remains under quarantine with his family and has tested negative for the coronavirus. Paranjpe has been identified as the sixteenth person who has been tested positive after meeting with Awhad.

Awhad is an MLA from the Mumbra constituency of Maharashtra, he had met with Senior Police Inspector (SPI) of Mumbra Police a couple of weeks back to discuss the lockdown and the law and order situation in Mumbra.

The SPI was tested positive for coronavirus last week after he had carried out an operation to arrest Tablighi Jamaat members in Mumbra. The SPI had arrested 21 foreign nationals which included 13 Bangladeshi, eight Malaysian nationals. After testing, all Tablighi Jamaat members were confirmed negative but the SPI that had nabbed them was confirmed positive. After this revelation, it was suspected that some residents of Mumbra have already been infected and have become carriers of the virus.

Thane Municipal corporation authorities tested over 100 persons who had come in direct contact of the SPI over the last couple of weeks which included Awhad, other policemen from the station house, journalists and few others.

After the reports started coming in, over 90 per cent of the Mumbra Police Station staff were sent into quarantine. Staff from other stations in the area has been placed at the Mumbra police station for now.

Meanwhile, Maharashtra has reported 2,687 active cases of coronavirus (as of 8 am, April 15), according to the Health Ministry. Total deaths stood at 179. As many as 259 patients have been cured or discharged.

Also Read: Coronavirus India Lockdown Live Updates: COVID-19 Guidelines to be issued today as migrant crisis hit nation

Also Read: Coronavirus lockdown 2.0 guidelines issued: Check full list of relaxations, restrictions by MHA
ST. LOUIS  Dominos and its nationwide system of franchisees are banding together during this unprecedented crisis to do something they already do well every day: feed people pizza. Dominos locally owned stores throughout Greater St. Louis will donate 19,000 pizzas within their local communities, starting this week.

We realize that there is a great deal of hardship and uncertainty at this time, said Mark Ratterman, a St. Louis-area Dominos franchisee. Dominos wants to do whatever it can to help, and that means spreading a little bit of joy through pizza.

About 95 Dominos stores throughout the Greater St. Louis area will each donate 200 pizzas as part of this national effort, so that hospitals and medical centers, schoolkids and their families, health departments, grocery store workers and others in need can enjoy a hot, delicious pizza.

We want to show how much we appreciate and support those who are in need of a hot meal, and those who are on the frontline, working to save lives, said Ratterman. We hope that this simple act will bring a small sense of normalcy and a smile to their faces.

The Edwardsville Dominos at 120 E. Vandalia St. (618-692-1515) is among the stores participating in the promotion.

The stores can donate to different organizations in their community and were letting the managers and their crew pick who they want to donate to, said Jennifer Prante, who is the central Illinois marketing manager for MBR Management, a franchisee of 90 Dominos locations, including 52 in Illinois. Well probably reach out to the Edwardsville Police Department and the Edwardsville Fire Department.

We can also do things on a larger scale too, so we have partnered with Schnucks and were donating pizzas to about 70 Schnucks stores across Illinois and Missouri.

Other nearby Dominos locations that will be participating in the promotion include stores in Troy at 427 Edwardsville Road (618-667-6100) and in Collinsville at 608 Vandalia St. (618-345-8825).

Prante added that people in the community can call their local Dominos to pass along suggestions for who should receive the free pizzas.

Obviously schools are not in session, but if they are providing hot meals to students that normally count on the meals at school, were trying to coordinate with our corporate office to see if we can reach some schools in our area, Prante said. Weve also thought about giving pizza to volunteers at the schools, like the people who are handing out homework packets.

Together, Dominos stores nationwide will donate more than 1.2 million pizzas, or about 10 million slices, across their communities. To read about how Dominos franchisees and team members are giving back in their local neighborhoods, visit biz.dominos.com/web/media/stories.
Hyderabad, April 15 : Telangana Chief Minister K. Chandrashekhar Rao on Wednesday said that the state has made all arrangements, which are adequate to handle even one lakh Covid-19 patients.

He told a review meeting with top officials that the government is ready to conduct tests on any number of people and offer treatment to those found infected with coronavirus.

KCR, as Rao is popularly known, said the state had adequate test kits to conduct tests on any number of people.

There is no scarcity of the Personal Protection Equipment (PPE) kits, he informed.

"We have 2.25 lakh PPE kits. The number will increase to 5 lakh shortly. We have placed orders for another 5 lakh kits. As on date, we have 3.25 lakh N95 masks. The number will increase to 5 lakh very soon. We have placed orders for another 5 lakh N95 masks.

"Besides this, ventilators, other medical equipment, number of doctors, other medical staff, hospitals, beds -- all are ready. So far 20,000 beds are ready. Even if the number of patients increases to one lakh, the government has made all arrangements for their treatment," he was quoted as saying by a statement from the CMO.

The Chief Minister said that 259 containment centres have been opened in the state and stringent measures were being taken to check the spread of the virus.

The CM made it clear that as per the guidelines issued by the Centre, lockdown in the state would continue till April 20. Later, based on the circumstances prevailing then, changes would be made.

He desired that the initiative shown by the people's representatives, and the cooperation extended by the people for the implementation of the lockdown and assistance to the poor should continue.

Medical and Health Minister Eatala Rajender said that there are 514 active cases in the hospitals. Eight patients were discharged on Wednesday and another 128 would be discharged on Thursday.
STATEN ISLAND, N.Y. -- In support of the brave men and women keeping the region moving during the ongoing coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic, local transit agencies will share in a moment of solidarity.

On Thursday, the MTA, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, NJ Transit, Amtrak, NYC Ferry and other regional transit agencies will participate in the #SoundTheHorn campaign.

At 3 p.m., transit operators will simultaneously sound the horns on their fleets of trains, buses and boats to honor transportation workers across the region.

The showing of support and solidarity furthers the MTAs #HeroesMovingHeroes campaign, highlighting the heroic work undertaken by transit workers in the face of the pandemic.

Our employees are heroes, said MTA Chairman and CEO Pat Foye. They are courageously coming to work each day to perform their essential duties, which are critically important to this region during the pandemic. We hope this action will draw attention to their efforts and help further our employees spirit of solidarity with all New Yorkers.

Theres expected to be nearly 4,400 trains, buses and ferries in service on Thursday afternoon to participate in the sounding of the horns, with anyone who hears or sees the event encouraged to post photos and videos to social media using #SoundTheHorn.

The Staten Island Ferry is honored to help transport these Heroes between Manhattan and Staten Island and to #SoundTheHorn on Thursday along with our regional partners, said Department of Transportation Commissioner Polly Trottenberg. While ridership is down nearly 90% and Ferry personnel ranks have been reduced by COVID-19, our employees remain dedicated to providing this critical transportation service for our essential workers as we all confront these challenges. I thank all the regions transportation workers for their incredible commitment and service."

#ClapBecauseWeCare

The campaign is similar to the popular #ClapBecauseWeCare movement, which has seen frontline workers across the city serenaded with rousing rounds of applause to thank them for their hard work and dedication.

Each night, at 7 p.m., residents from around the city are offering their applause, banging on pots and pans and screaming at the top of their lungs from their windows, balconies and rooftops to salute those who are out battling the pandemic.

The Advance/SILive.com has received clips of the heartwarming gesture from various neighborhoods throughout Manhattan, including the Upper East Side, Upper West Side and Battery Park City.

Watch the video below to see New Yorkers salute the citys frontline workers in a moving display of solidarity.
S ir Keir Starmer today ramped up his criticism of the Government over an exit strategy from the lockdown which he said had been imposed too slowly in the first place.

In his strongest intervention yet over ministers handling of the coronavirus crisis, the new Labour leader stressed that searching questions would be asked if Britain ends up with the worst death rate in Europe.

As millions of people were in the fourth week of lockdown, Sir Keir said the Government now needed to show the public the light at the end of the tunnel, to keep its trust in these very difficult times, by signalling how it would be eased.

Crucially, it also had to start planning now for key planks of the exit strategy, for example to ensure it could deliver mass community testing and tracing if necessary.

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

On the lockdown, Sir Keir told BBC Radio 5 Live: We were too slow, Im afraid. I and others called on the Government to speed up not just the announcement of the lockdown, but then implementing it and making sure it was actually policed.

We were slow, I dont think we took decisions when we should, I dont think we learned enough quickly from other countries.

Lets not repeat that for the exit strategy.

The nation wanted politicians from all parties to put their shoulder to the wheel to deal with the epidemic, he added, and backed the lockdown being extended.

Europe takes it's first steps out of Coronavirus lockdown 1 /25 Europe takes it's first steps out of Coronavirus lockdown People queue at a hardware store during a partial reopening after the Austrian government eased lockdown restrictions Reuters A worker checks the temperature of a customer at the entrance of a supermarket in Itay Reuters Customers hold flowers in front of a DIY store in Graz, Austria, after it re-opened on April 14, 2020, following a "shutdown" in a measure to limit the spread of the new coronavirus APA/AFP via Getty Images People wearing protective face masks and gloves walk in the streets as the Italian government allows the reopening of some shops while a nationwide lockdown continues following the outbreak of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19), in Venice, Italy, Reuters People queue to enter a hardware store during a partial reopening after the Austrian government eased restrictions following the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) outbreak in Eisenstadt, Austria Reuters Camilla Cocchi wears a face mask and gloves as she sorts out clothing in her children's clothes shop after it was allowed to reopen following lockdown measures to contain the spread of Covid-19, in Rome AP A man wearing a face mask shops in a hardware store during a partial reopening after the Austrian government eased restrictions following the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) outbreak in Eisenstadt, Austria Reuters "Respect the 2 meters distance" banner is seen at a fish stand as the Italian government allows the reopening of some shops while a nationwide lockdown continues following the outbreak of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) in Venice, Italy, Reuters Customers wearing face masks push shopping carts in front of a DIY store in Vienna, Austria, after it re-opened on April 14, 2020, following a "shutdown" in a measure to limit the spread of the new coronavirus APA/AFP via Getty Images A worker checks the temperature of a customer at the entrance of a supermarket, as the spread of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) continues, in Turin, Italy Reuters Customers line up in front of a DIY store in Graz, Austria APA/AFP via Getty Images Gianfranco Mandas wears a face mask as he sorts out clothing in his children's clothes shop after it was allowed to opens following restriction measures to contain the spread of Covid-19, in Rome AP Customers wearing face masks push shopping carts in front of a DIY store in Vienna, Austria, after it re-opened on April 14, 2020, following a "shutdown" in a measure to limit the spread of the new coronavirus APA/AFP via Getty Images Customers queue at the Trastevere market, as new restrictions for open-air markets are implemented to prevent the spread of coronavirus disease (COVID-19) in Rome, Italy, Reuters Customers wearing face masks push shopping carts in front of a DIY store in Vienna, Austria, after it re-opened on April 14, 2020, following a "shutdown" in a measure to limit the spread of the new coronavirus APA/AFP via Getty Images A man wears a protective face mask and gloves at the newsstand as the Italian government allows the reopening of some shops while a nationwide lockdown continues following the outbreak of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19), in Venice, Italy Reuters People wearing face masks work in a hardware store during a partial reopening after the Austrian government eased restrictions following the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) outbreak in Eisenstadt, Austria Reuters Customers queue at the Trastevere market, as new restrictions for open-air markets are implemented to prevent the spread of coronavirus disease (COVID-19) in Rome, Italy Reuters A general view of the parking area of a hardware store during the partial reopening of shops after the Austrian government loosens its lockdown restrictions during the global coronavirus disease (COVID-19) outbreak in Vienna Reuters

However, he wants ministers to set out the criteria they will use to inform how and when they intend to ease the lockdown, to publish the exit strategy now or in the coming week; and to outline the sectors and core public services that are most likely to see restrictions scaled back.

He appeared to accept that he was putting himself at odds with the chief medical officer Professor Chris Whitty and the chief scientific adviser Sir Patrick Vallance. They have so far backed not giving more details of how to end the lockdown.

A government source said: Every measure that has been taken since the start of the coronavirus outbreak has been taken at the right time based on very precise scientific and medical evidence.

Talk of an exit strategy before we have reached the peak, risks confusing the critical message that people need to stay at home in order to protect our NHS and save lives.

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Peter Openshaw, professor of experimental medicine at Imperial College London, also told BBC Radio 4s Today programme that it was much too early to think about trying to reverse the lockdown or even to say which measures might be lifted initially.

However, Dr David Nabarro, the World Health Organisations coronavirus envoy for Europe, stressed that any strategy had to be based on rapid detection, rapid action. He added: Otherwise the prospect of continuing lockdowns from time to time looms and they are super-damaging to the economy.

He also backed the widespread use of face masks in the community, particularly for supermarket workers, hairdressers and other shop staff who come into close contact with customers, as well as elderly people with underlying health conditions.

Sir Keir, writing last night on the exit strategy to Dominic Raab who is deputising for Boris Johnson, insisted he was not out to score party political points.

Listen to The Leader: Coronavirus Daily podcast
MDARD Director Gary McDowell urges USDA to use federal funds to support Michigan growers, farmers during COVID-19 response

MDARD Director Gary McDowell urges USDA to use federal funds to support Michigan growers, farmers during COVID-19 response

For Immediate Release: April 14, 2020

Media Contact: Jennifer Holton, 517-284-5724

LANSING, MI  As Michigans food and farming community was already struggling to overcome the severe weather and low commodity prices from 2019, the COVID-19 global pandemic created even more dire and daunting economic hardships for the states farmers, growers, processors and agri-businesses.

Today, Michigan Department of Agriculture and Rural Development (MDARD) Director Gary McDowell sent a letter to United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) Secretary Sonny Perdue urging him to support Michigan when distributing the $14 billion from the Commodity Credit Corporation and the $9.5 billion appropriated in the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act.

Michigans farming and agriculture community is facing extraordinary challenges to keep food on the shelves, said McDowell. Were grateful for the aid our farmers received when 82 of the states 83 counties were declared disasters last year. I am hopeful we can count on USDAs continued support in these unprecedented times.

Highlights of McDowells letter to Perdue include:

Dairy: Michigan dairy producers have seen falling prices and demand fluctuations leading to milk dumping. MDARD is asking USDA to work to ensure farmers have markets for their products and make direct payments to producers.

Specialty crops: As a large specialty crop state. From greenhouses and nurseries to cherries and dry beans to apple and asparagus  Michigan grows it all. MDARD supports the idea of a Produce Stabilization Program.

Livestock: With consumer demand down, difficulty getting labor, and multiple processing facilities closing, the beef, lamb, pork, and poultry industries are facing increased pressure to stay in business. MDARD is asking for increased market access, possible emergency federal load assistance, and direct payments to producers.

Farmer specific need: MDARD is asking for temporary flexibilities on farm loans recently announced by USDAs Farm Service Agency to be made permanent for the duration of the pandemic response and subsequent economic recovery.

The full letter to Secretary Perdue can be read here.

Michigans food and agriculture industry generates $104.7 billion in total economic activity for the state. Our farmers and producers need USDAs help to survive this, added McDowell.

For more information on Michigans Covid-19 response, visit Michigan.gov/Coronavirus.

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Chinas ambitious march towards emerging as world super power is continuing.





by N.S.Venkataraman





There is no doubt that after the second world war, COVID 19 is the most decisive development in the world, that is likely to turn upside down the relations between different countries and the way that humanity would view things in life.





Chinas ambition for world dominance :





In the last few decades, China has been steadily and cleverly improving its strategic importance in the world by strengthening its industrial, technological, economic and military base, by launching schemes such as OBOR and several others, which appear to be successful to some extent, as far as China is concerned.













China has been emboldened in launching several strategies with least concern for fairness and with high level of self centredness , as it has remained largely unchallenged. For example, China occupied Tibet by aggressive methods several decades back , when the Tibetan dissenters were ruthlessly massacred and it drove out the protestors including the venerable the Dalai Lama . The world conscience remained silent.





China launched a big war against India in 1962 which it decisively won and now is occupying large Indian area. It now claims Arunachal Pradesh, an Indian state as its own. The world remain unconcerned.





With the nearby countries like Japan, Vietnam, Phillipines and others China has raised disputes in several areas such as Senkaku Island , South China Sea where China claims sovereign power. While the affected countries have been protesting, China remains unconcerned about such protests and the world view on these disputes..





China is rapidly expanding trade and investment activities and taking over several mines in different countries and acquiring assets abroad in a well planned and systematic way to gradually increase its world dominance.





So far, rest of the world has largely remained as if it is unconcerned about Chinas efforts to rapidly increase its dominance in the world arena , since China has opened its large market to the rest of the world and multinational companies , who want to exploit market potential in China, particularly since, the market in developed countries have become nearly saturated for several products. Today, no country or any multinational company want to miss the trade opportunities that China offers.





Chinas ambitious march towards emerging as world super power is continuing.





Why concern about Chinas increasing dominance? :





There is nothing wrong if any country would want to strengthen itself economically and become a major power in the world. This could be a legitimate ambition for any nation.





However, this logic cannot be straightaway applied in the case of China, as China is known to have expansionist ambitions not only in terms of economy but also in terms of territory.





China has a totalitarian regime with freedom of speech heavily suppressed and personal liberty severely curtailed. Dissenters in China are known to be eliminated ruthlessly.





The concern is that if a country with totalitarian regime and not having any concern about ethical and fair practices would happen to dominate the world, then the world would become an unsafe place.





One cannot but compare Chinas methods and ambitions to that of Hitlers Germany which cause World Ward II.





Now, there is rapidly developing world view that Chinas increasing dominance in the world affairs could upset the world balance of power and create conflicts of interest and in the process creating different types of tensions.





This is one of the primary reasons why US President Trump launched trade war against China. However, the trade war has not discouraged China so far or dissuaded it from ambition of world dominance at any cost. Now, at this juncture many people wonder as to who would be the bigger loser in trade war, whether China or USA.





Is COVID 19 an opportunity for China to claim super power status ?





China is the originator of COVID 19 and is accused of playing a trick on the world by not sharing with the world information about COVID 19 at the right time, that has now engulfed the entire world.





In the present ongoing COVID 19 crisis, it appears that China looks like having the last laugh.





USA and West European countries as well as Japan which have considered themselves as the leading lights among the world countries and scientifically advanced now stand humiliated, with the rapid spread of the virus in their regions causing huge loss of lives and the governments lacking sense of direction as to how to overcome the crisis.





Humiliation is complete for these countries severely affected by COVID 19, , (which have been accusing China of concealing information about the spread of COVID 19 in China which has now spread around the world ) , as they seem to have no alternative other than procuring safety masks , testing equipment etc. from China to tackle the COVID crisis in the regions, even as China is quoting fancy price and dictating delivery schedules.





As the world is struggling to tackle the crisis and now facing distress and uncertain conditions, China claims that it has sorted out the issue and it has become free of the virus in the region. When some people were affected by the virus after China lifted the lockdown China says that it has happened only due to the overseas visitors and not due to any development within.





In this scenario, China is deliberately trying to create an impression, by launching massive propaganda campaign that it has the capability to control the virus . This campaign obviously implies that when the other countries do not know how to go about China has wiped out the virus in its region.. In the process, China is deliberately trying to create an impression around the world that China is more advanced than other countries..





In other words, China seems to convey the view that it has the merits to claim that it is the super power and not USA ,which has recorded the highest deaths in the world due to corona virus.





Anger of USA and West European countries, Japan inevitable :





Obviously, USA and most European countries and Japan are seething with anger and frustration at the humiliation that they have suffered due to COVID crisis. This is more so, in view of Chinas arrogant assertion that the COVID 19 did not first happen in China but elsewhere such as Italy or USA or anywhere else.





There is clear realization amongst these countries that Chinas ambition to dominate the world should be defeated ,if they were to hold their place in the world scenario. This realization would be the ultimate driving force for any possible coordinated action against China.





While there is no formal coordinated efforts between USA, West European countries and Japan in tackling China dragon, the pointers are clear that they would soon discuss the strategies in coordinated manner with mutual interest in view.





The first step to control China has already been taken by Japan, which has said that it would fund firms of Japanese companies to shift production out of China.





Will World War III happen ?:





Certainly, in the post COVID 19 period, World War III to control the dominance of China is likely to commence, once the COVID 19 crisis would be overcome by the world community.





.





The World War III would last for several years just as World War II and it would be an economic and trade war ,though not as much as military warfare.





-How will China fare in this forthcoming economic and trade war? Is China strong enough to face this onslaught or will it realize before long that it has bitten more than what it can chew?





Chinas strength :





Chinas present economy is huge in size. It is estimated that the contribution of China's economic growth to the world economy is expected to remain at 25 to 30 percent.





China has one of the biggest armies in the world and has big fire power but this strength would not help in the impending World War III, as it would be fought on trade and economic front.





Since the late 1970 , realising that it lacks technology capability and investment constraint, China opened its economy to the multi national companies and adopted policies and procedures that encouraged multinational companies and other countries to invest in China in a big way. Encouraged by the conducive climate guaranteed by China, almost all multinational companies and even smaller companies from abroad set up projects with updated technologies as well as research centres and trade offices in China.





While USA ranked first in terms of incoming Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) , China ranked second internationally in terms of incoming FDI in 2018, which increased 3.7% per year on year to a record 139 billion USD and accounted for over 10% of the global total.





Natives in China got exposure to modern technologies and Chinas technology base considerably strengthened and expanded. Today, several Chinese companies are in a position to compete with multinational companies all over the world.





China is rapidly emerging as a technology super power.China has invested billions of dollars in recent years to develop the civilian and military applications of emerging technologies such as 5G, semiconductors, microchips, artificial intelligence (AI), quantum computing and others to transform China from an assembly line of low tech manufactured goods into the pre eminent economic and technological power, manufacturing high tech goods.





In the process, Chinese economy and industry developed in a spectacular manner.





The strategies and efforts of Government of China have turned China into the world's large manufacturing base.





As long term strategy to increase its global influence and possibly anticipating issues that would arise due to Chinas export dumping practices, China has been making substantial investments abroad during the last several years.





Overseas investments offer China an opportunity to not just bolster its own economy, but also to leverage its economic strength to increase its influence abroad.





Export dependent economy :













China became the world's largest exporter in 2010, and the largest trading nation in 2013





While the investments in China have gone up in a big way, too much of capacities have been built up in several areas such as steel aluminium and several others such as chemical / polymer and allied products. As a result, the capacity utilization of industries in China have gone down to unacceptable level in many cases, leading to losses,closures and mergers.













Since 2009, China has been trying hard to rejig its export dependent economy to the one more dependent on domestic consumption. However, such efforts to increase domestic consumption are not making big impact, since China's per capita income is below the world average.













Import dependence :













Even as China is a large exporter, it is also dependent on import in big way for several products and services.





China is dependent on imports of crude oil to around 70% of its requirement and is the largest importer of crude oil in the world.





About 80% of its microchip requirement is met by imports. It has been spending $260 billion every year on import of semiconductors and chips, which is more than the money spent on import of crude oil.





High level of debt :





Chinas total debt is building up in the economy to support growth. Chinas debt surpassed 303.6% of GDP in July, 2019 and makes up about 15% of all global debt. That is up from just under 297% in the first quarter of 2018. (Source: International Institute of Finance)





Chinas efforts to shore up sagging economic growth are leading to a resurgence in indebtedness, underlining the challenge the government faces in curbing financial risk.





Chinas economic growth is being held up through extremely high credit generation, that is not sustainable for long without substantial damage to the economy and financial system.





China vulnerable to economic and industrial aggression





While size of Chinas economy is huge, the ground reality is that it cannot sustain the growth, if its exports would be curtailed to any significant extent.





Government owned companies and private Chinese industries are already reeling under low capacity utilization.





Chinese economy is now an integral part of global economy and any trade aggression against China by Japan, European countries and USA will force China to bend its knees, as China is highly vulnerable to any slackening in the export market.





While China is strengthening its export base by launching OBOR scheme, most of such investments are in developing countries with low purchasing power and are unlikely to benefit Chinas export economy in the foreseeable future.





What options for countries wanting to control Chinas domination?:





Large part of investment in China have been made by multinational companies with base in Europe, USA and Japan. They just cannot withdraw from China on any count in the immediate future in view of the investments already committed in China, technologies already shared with Chinese technologists and the fact that equipment and the infrastructure facilities built cannot just be lifted out of China at will.





Further, the market base in China is large and cannot be surrendered in quick period by any multinational companies and regions like USA, Western Europe and Japan. Their alternate strategies to teach China a lesson will take time to evolve and implement.





Where will China go from here?





In the event of trade and economic warfare launched by USA, West European countries and Japan, China will not be able to hold on to its present economic strength.





In a war of this nature, Western countries, Japan and USA will have a share of loss but loss of China would be much more and unsustainable for China.





In the event of World War III , Chinas economy will suffer to such an extent that unrest would become inevitable in China due to loss of jobs.





Totalitarian regime that China has is an unnatural form of governance, that goes against human instincts for freedom of speech and liberty.





China with disturbed economy will find that the existing leaders controlling China with vice like grip will face challenges from its own people due to the slowing economy and the rulers will face unenviable situation. This may result in visible changes in the leadership and governing style of China , as it has happened in the past in the case of Russia and several East European countries, when economy suffered and loss of jobs happened due to dictatorial form of governance.
Princess Sofia of Sweden is working alongside healthcare staff after undergoing health training to help during the coronavirus crisis.

The princess, who is married to Prince Carl Phillip, took a three-day medical course at Sophiahemmet University College in Stockholm, where she is an honorary chair member.

After completing the course, Sophia was able to begin assisting with healthcare work during the pandemic.

Princess Sofia of Sweden is undergoing health training to help during the coronavirus crisis

The university has started training up to 80 people a week to help lift the heavy burden placed on doctors and medical workers in the country, according to local media reports.

Director of the Information and Press Department at the Royal Court Margaretha Thorgren said the princess wants to make a voluntary contribution to healthcare at at time where resources are stretched.

Princess Sofia became part of the Swedish royal family in 2015, after marrying Phillip. The couple have two children, Prince Alexander and Prince Gabriel, who are fifth and sixth in line to the throne.

Princess Sofia became part of the Swedish royal family in 2015, after marrying Prince Carl Phillip

Sweden reported a record 170 new coronavirus deaths today in a widely-expected surge after the Easter weekend.

The 170 new deaths - surpassing yesterday's joint-record 114 - bring the death toll from 1,033 to 1,203 in a country still refusing to go into lockdown.

Only a handful of deaths had been recorded on Saturday and Sunday, meaning that the numbers were always likely to shoot up when the weekend was properly accounted for.

The number of infections rose by 482, a less striking increase which brings the overall tally from 11,445 to 11,927.

Sweden added 170 coronavirus deaths to its official tally today in a widely-expected surge after only a handful of cases were reported over the weekend, as shown on this graph

This graph shows the daily number of infections. Today's figure of 482 was similar to that in the previous two days

Swedish officials had announced only 17 new deaths on Saturday, an implausibly low figure after an average jump of 94 during the week.

Health officials now say that 50 deaths were registered on Saturday, but many of them have not been revealed until after Easter.

Similarly, the 12 new deaths announced on Sunday were only a fraction of the 54 people who are now said to have died that day.
MOD Officials Arrive By Military Helicopters



Picture: Douglas Coastguard

Logistics experts from the Ministry of Defence in the UK are meeting with senior officials in the Isle of Man.

They arrived by Army helicopters which landed at Nobles Hospital a short time ago.

This visit is part of the coronavirus contingency planning and preparations across the British Islands

Photos
The U.S. Air Force is preparing for possible mass evacuations of coronavirus-infected patients by testing whether it can transport dozens of people onboard its aircraft without first isolating them in containment capsules.

Earlier this month, Air Mobility Command, in tandem with researchers from the National Strategic Research Institute at the University of Nebraska and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, conducted weeklong airflow experiments on six different aircraft. The goal was to analyze how air travels through a cargo hold using specialized, traceable droplets, said Maj. Dave Sustello, AMC's Test and Evaluation Squadron operations officer.

Organized by the 155th Air Refueling Wing at the Nebraska Air National Guard base, crews studied particle flow on the KC-135 Stratotanker, C-17 Globemaster III and C-130J Hercules aircraft, followed by tests on the KC-46 Pegasus, KC-10 Extender and C-5M Super Galaxy aircraft, which all have the capacity to transport multiple passengers, he said.

Related: Air Force Uses Cutting-Edge Isolation Pod to Evacuate COVID-19 Patients from Afghanistan

"In any of these aircraft, the air flows from the front to the back, which is a good thing," Sustello said in an interview with Military.com Tuesday. "It's pushing air away from the crew members.

"But these aircraft are very different," he said. "They have different configurations inside, different environmental systems, so we're looking to see where that air flows and if any of the air could flow back towards the pilots or the aircrew compartments."

Loadmaster airmen can reconfigure the belly of these aircraft to accommodate seats or stacked, bunk-bed-like cots for personnel transport. In cases of aeromedical evacuation, crews can even construct a portable medical care system, turning the inside of the aircraft into a makeshift emergency room.

"There are many different configurations for each plane, because you can set up as many [bunk bed-like] litters as it can hold, but also balanced with how many seats are available for ambulatory patients," Sustello said.

With that in mind, the operations officer explained engineers first took geometric scans within each aircraft to determine internal compartment scale, which would help them recreate similar models via computer-aided design. Then, multiple tests were done while in flight and also on the ground, he said, aided by experts from the 711th Human Performance Wing and the Air Force Research Lab, both headquartered at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio.

NSRI researchers released polystyrene latex microspheres, or particles roughly one to three microns in size "to simulate the size of the novel coronavirus," he said. The particles also had a signature, so they could be tracked whenever they traveled within the plane.

"They were tagged with fluorescent dye with a specific DNA signature," Sustello said. The test would not only evaluate how many of the spheres were found in each part of the aircraft, but also exactly "where they came from," he said.

The goal is to understand if patients could be moved safely without using the Transport Isolation System, or TIS. Earlier this month, aircrew and medical personnel used the TIS for the first time since the Ebola outbreak to carry three U.S. government contractors who tested positive for coronavirus on board a C-17 from Afghanistan to Landstuhl Regional Medical Center in Germany. The TIS, however, can only carry two to four patients within the airlocked unit.

The TIS "is a very conservative system," Sustello said. The Air Force has 13 fully configured mission-ready TIS units.

"We're looking at more of an open-air approach [where we] can take a lot more passengers that are possibly infected or definitely infected and move them to where they need to get care while still minimizing the risks to the crew."

Results from the experiment for the KC-135, C-130 and C-17 are expected to be delivered to Air Mobility Command and U.S. Transportation Command by the end of the week. Results from the remaining three aircraft should be ready next week, Sustello said.

The findings may also benefit other agencies, he said.

"It's up to Air Mobility Command leadership to decide how that would be shared," Sustello said. "It's likely that the Civil Reserve Air Fleet [could] be activated ... as a civilian component of the United States Transportation Command's mission, and I would imagine that we would share these results with them."

TRANSCOM "expressed a need for a high-capacity airlift of COVID-19 infected passengers," Sustello said. "There are a lot of cases popping up and we're always looking for ways to be ready for the next fight, and that fight is here in COVID-19.

"We need to figure out how we're going to get a mass amount of patients or COVID-19 positive personnel to where they need to get the best care," he said.

-- Oriana Pawlyk can be reached at oriana.pawlyk@military.com. Follow her on Twitter at @Oriana0214.

Read More: 'Elephant Walk' on Guam Serves As Timely US Airpower Demonstration
In Finland, the National Museum has a long history of rapid response collecting during historical turning points, even if they did not call it that during the 1918 Finnish Civil War or during World War II. Some of the photographs taken recently by Maria Ollila, curator of contemporary history for the museum, and her collaborators  shots of panic buying and home schooling, for instance  will go onto the website of the Finnish Heritage Agencys Picture Collection as soon as they have been cataloged. And, if the crisis is over by fall, she said, some of the material she is gathering could go on display in a section of the National Museum devoted to contemporary collecting.
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Linkedin Marchio Irfan Gorbiano and Ardila Syakriah (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Wed, April 15, 2020 15:22 636 fc6853813033f564188675f8bd20d37f 1 National COVID-19,transparency,Jokowi,Achmad-Yurianto Free

President Joko Jokowi Widodo has now called for greater transparency in how the nation is handling the coronavirus outbreak, ending his previous policy to withhold some information regarding the outbreak to prevent mass hysteria.

The President ordered that all information regarding the pandemic in the country be integrated in a single channel managed by the nations COVID-19 task force. The integrated data, he said, should include information regarding patients under treatment (PDP), people under surveillance (ODP) in every region, positive cases, fatalities and recovered patients, and should be updated on a daily basis.

[It should] cover all and be made transparent so that everyone can access the data, Jokowi said during a Cabinet meeting on Monday.

Previously, on March 14, Jokowi acknowledged that he was deliberately holding back some information on COVID-19 cases to prevent the public from panicking.

Indeed, we did not deliver certain information to the public because we did not want to stir panic. We have worked hard to overcome this, since the coronavirus outbreak can happen regardless of the country border, he said at the time.

The about-face came shortly after Jokowi declared the COVID-19 outbreak a national disaster on Monday, giving him a legal basis to grant the National Disaster Mitigation Agency (BNPB) a greater degree of authority and flexibility to mitigate the disaster.

The declaration was made after the President was informed that confirmed coronavirus cases had been detected in all provinces across the country.

Following the Presidents order, Achmad Yurianto, the governments spokesperson for COVID-19 affairs, revealed for the first time on Tuesday the number of suspected COVID-19 patients in the country. As of Tuesday afternoon, Indonesia had had 4,839 confirmed coronavirus cases, with 459 fatalities and 426 recoveries, he said, adding that the government had tested 31,628 people for the deadly virus and was monitoring 139,137 people with ODP status and 10,482 people with PDP status.

Yurianto claimed that the COVID-19 task force had integrated all of the data related to the disease under one system. After [the outbreak] was declared a national disaster, all of integrated data from villages, districts, cities, provinces, all the way to the central [government] are under one system, he said on Tuesday. So that all [data] could be seen and accessed openly and transparently.

On Wednesday, the Health Ministry's website, www.infeksiemerging.kemkes.go.id, added a new feature revealing the number of people under surveillance (ODP) and patients under treatment (PDP) in the country.

The website previously only revealed the number of specimens collected by the ministry, confirmed cases, negative results, death toll, recoveries and cases under treatment. Previously, only local administrations would announce the number of people under surveillance and patients under treatment in their respective regions.

On the governments official website, covid19.go.id, the task force also now shows the data of both national and provincial cases, including confirmed cases, fatalities and recoveries, along with charts highlighting the national trends of additional cases, fatalities and recoveries.

Critics have slammed the government for not being transparent in handling the outbreak from the get-go, saying that such a policy would only undermine efforts to contain the deadly disease.

Some scientists have complained about the difficulty of creating a reliable mathematical model to predict the peak of the outbreak due to the dearth of information regarding COVID-19 cases in the country.

The BNPB, which heads the countrys COVID-19 task force, admitted on April 5 that there were discrepancies between COVID-19 case data in central and regional government.

The governors of Jakarta and West Java, the two regions of the country hit hardest by the coronavirus outbreak, have suggested that the numbers of people infected and killed by the disease in the country are significantly higher than the central governments official count.

They have said the Health Ministry has not been swift enough in testing potential COVID-19 patients.

On Monday, the President also called on the Health Ministry and the COVID-19 task force to conduct more polymerase chain reaction (PCR) testing, saying that they should aim to conduct at least 10,000 tests a day.

Experts have welcomed the policy shift, saying that transparency is key to gaining public trust during this pandemic.

The government should disclose how many people were tested on a certain day and how many people were confirmed to have contracted COVID-19 from the tests, considering there was a backlog of samples that were waiting to be tested by the labs, said University of Indonesia (UI) epidemiologist Pandu Riono.

[The data] should include not only ODP, PDP and fatalities, but also how many people are being treated in hospitals and of those people, how many have been tested, he said.
Global online learning platform Coursera has launched a new machine learning solution that will help universities across the world match their on-campus courses with the ones already present on this platform. Called CourseMatch, this solution will help university students access these programmes from home to maintain academic continuity amidst the coronavirus outbreak.

Emily Glassberg Sands, vice president of Data Science, Coursera, told Moneycontrol this solution will come in handy at a time when educational institutions are now opting to conduct online classes for students stuck at home.

"Universities can access our catalogue of 3,800 courses to find programmes that match their curriculum. Earlier, the institutes had to manually map the curriculum but now this is automated," she said.

What is CourseMatch?

CourseMatch is a machine learning solution that takes an institutes on-campus course catalogue and matches each course to the most relevant courses in Coursera's catalogue of 3,800 courses. It can ingest catalogues in more than 100 languages and map them to the most relevant courses in English or in any of the 50 plus languages (translated and subtitled) available on Coursera.

Sands explained that the solution has already matched more than 2.6 million on-campus courses across 1,800 schools to courses on Coursera, from Johnson C Smith University in the US to Universidad Autonoma de Barcelona in Spain to the AICTE curricula in India.

Colleges and universities can access the solution directly at CourseMatch and search for their institution's catalogue. If their catalogue is not yet among the 1,800 available, these details can be sent to Coursera and this would be included on CourseMatch within two business days.

In India specifically, higher education institutions have not yet started full-fledged online lectures. Currently, these institutes are in the process of developing online relevant content that is engaging for the students.

Sands added that Coursera would also be open to collaborate with institutes to create relevant academic content for these educational institutions. Further, she said that the modules and assessments will be available offline so that students can access it even in areas with low internet connectivity.

What about other higher education programmes at Coursera?

Apart from this initiative, Coursera for Campus is a solution offered by this e-learning platform that can be used by universities to deliver online content to students and staff.

Sands said that since March 12, more than 2,600 colleges and universities around the world have activated Coursera for Campus programmes to take learning online and minimise student disruption. Were humbled by the global response and are working hard to be even more useful to universities who need to move online quickly.

Coursera for Campus is a solution for educational institutions to offer relevant study programmes to their students. Amidst COVID-19, Coursera is offering this solution free of cost to institutions till July 31, 2020. Students will have access to these programmes till September 30, 2020, to complete their respective courses.
Press Release

14 April 2020

CHICAGO - Hospitality Technology Next Generation (HTNG) and Hospitality Upgrade today jointly announce the launch of the HTNG Career Center, a premier, industry-exclusive job portal designed to connect qualified hospitality professionals with potential employers, and provide a wide range of helpful career and recruiting resources to the hospitality market.

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The HTNG Career Center is being launched at a critical point in the history of hospitality, as the industry reacts to dramatic new market conditions brought on by the global Coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic that has produced widespread employee layoffs, furloughs and other unprecedented changes in the hospitality employment sector.

"The hotel industry has been severely disrupted by recent events, and HTNG wants to do our part to help ensure a rapid recovery and future success for both our member companies and the people who serve this dynamic global market sector," said David Sjolander, Chief Operating Officer of HTNG. "The association has always played an informal role in the recruiting and job-seeking process through referrals and networking, so now we are taking that a step further by teaming up with Hospitality Upgrade in the launch of the HTNG Career Center."

In addition to meeting a long-term need for hospitality-specific career resources, the portal will also serve the current vital role of connecting newly displaced hospitality professionals with potential employers who need their specific experience and expertise.

"With Hospitality Upgrade's extensive reach and loyal following in the hospitality technology sector, partnering with HTNG to help promote this much-needed industry resource makes a great deal of sense," said Rich Siegel, president of Hospitality Upgrade. "By combining our organizations' resources and skill sets, we plan to help our many industry friends and colleagues as they navigate to new opportunities."

The new HTNG Career Center provides a searchable database for potential employers and both active and passive jobseekers, as well as access to an array of helpful resources, such as free resume review, interview tips and advice on networking opportunities and career advancement. Employers can post open positions on the site and search the resume bank for available qualified candidates. They also have the ability to reach out to as many candidates as they like via the portal at no charge, since a fee only applies if the candidate is interested.

Hospitality professionals can upload their resumes anonymously, search and apply for open positions though the HTNG Career Center. In addition, they can respond to employers who inquire on their resume and are interested in interviewing them.

"If there is a silver lining for employers in the newly disrupted economy, it is that many very qualified people who wouldn't normally be available now are seeking new opportunities," continued Sjolander. "Many of those can now more easily be found on the HTNG Career Center site. We would like the Career Center to become THE place to go for the global hospitality technology community to find a new employee or to secure a new position."

In order to further assist hospitality companies and professionals during the crisis, HTNG is offering a reduced introductory rate of $99 for a 30-day job posting through May 30, 2020. To take advantage of the offer or for more information on the HTNG Career Center, please visit www.careers.htng.org.

About Hospitality Upgrade | Since 1992, Hospitality Upgrade brings the latest news and technology software and hardware solutions to readers. Regular coverage focuses on industry trends and products, industry CIO surveys, articles by leading hospitality consultants, insider news and gossip, interviews with top industry executives, and profiles and installation lists from many of the industry's leading solution providers. Hospitality Upgrade also produces the annual CIO Summit for hotel and hospitality CIOs and the annual Executive Vendor Summit, a unique industry event focused to C-level executives from the hospitality technology solutions industry. For more information, visit www.hospitalityupgrade.com.
Pre-ministerial press conference by NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg

NATO - North Atlantic Treaty Organisation

14 Apr. 2020

(As delivered)

Good morning.

And thank you for joining me for this online press conference.

The COVID-19 pandemic continues to affect us all.

Even though we have seen that the rate of increase is slowing down in some countries, the illness continues to take a terrible toll.

I want to begin by expressing my condolences to all those who have lost loved ones.

And my deep thanks to the heroic health workers and all the others on the front lines.

Tomorrow, I will chair an extraordinary meeting of Defence Ministers by secure video conference.

We have just one issue on the agenda: the COVID-19 crisis.

Defence Ministers will review the actions NATO and Allies are taking and decide on the next steps.

NATO has been responding since the beginning of the crisis.

Implementing preventive measures, assuring the continuation of our operations and assisting Allies in combating the virus.

NATO Foreign Ministers met two weeks ago.

They asked our top military commander, SACEUR, to set up a task force to step up and speed up military support to allies in response to the pandemic.

NATO Allies are cooperating to airlift critical supplies from across the globe.

Hundreds of tons of medical equipment have been donated and delivered.

Allies are sharing medical expertise, and spare hospital capacity.

Let me give you just a few examples from the past few days:

The Czech Republic, Hungary, the Netherlands, Norway, Slovenia, Turkey and the United States have sent medical and financial support to our newest Ally, North Macedonia;

NATO's disaster response centre has facilitated Denmark's delivery of ventilators and a field hospital to Italy, and Germany's delivery of ventilators to Spain;

Turkey has delivered medical supplies to Allies and partners across the Balkans, following similar deliveries to Italy and Spain;

For the first time, the unique NATO call sign has been used to facilitate the delivery of aid from Turkey to the United Kingdom;

Luxembourg has donated protective equipment material to Spain;

Allied strategic airlift has brought crucial supplies to Allies including Bulgaria, Lithuania, Poland and Romania.

US military forces stationed in Europe have been directed to provide support to Allies as part of this joint NATO effort.

And we are working to deliver innovative solutions, including 3D-printed respirators.

Allied armed forces are also providing essential support to civilian responses in our nations.

Including with logistics and planning, field hospitals and hospital ships, transport for patients, repatriation of citizens abroad, disinfection of public areas, and at border crossings.

So our Alliance is helping to get the right support to the right places at the right time.

Helping our nations save lives.

***

NATO's core task remains to preserve the security of our almost 1 billion citizens.

We must continue to work hard to ensure that this health crisis does not become a security crisis.

And that we are better prepared when the next crisis comes.

The coronavirus crisis has shaken us all.

And it will have far-reaching consequences for how we think about security, and about national resilience.

Tomorrow, we will also address how to maintain NATO's deterrence and defence and sustain our missions and operations throughout the pandemic.

Our forces remain ready, and our work goes on.

From our battlegroups in Eastern Europe to our air policing and maritime deployments.

And from Afghanistan to Kosovo.

***

Finally, we will address the importance of countering disinformation.

We have seen state and non-state actors try to take advantage of the pandemic to spread false and harmful narratives.

And to try to divide us.

So Allies need to work closely together to identify, monitor and expose these efforts.

An open and transparent press is the best bulwark against disinformation and propaganda.

***

The challenges posed by COVID-19 know no borders.

And we are stronger and safer when we work with our partners.

So, we will be joined tomorrow by our partners Finland and Sweden, as well as EU High Representative Borrell.

NATO is committed to learning the right lessons.

So that we can all emerge stronger.

And as determined as ever to protect our people and our nations.

And with that, I'm ready to take your questions.

OANA LUNGESCU [NATO Spokesperson]: And we're taking questions by Skype, and we go first to Robin Emmott from Reuters. Robin, go ahead, please.

ROBIN EMMOTT [Reuters]: Thanks very much, Oana. Thank you Secretary General for this question. My question is: given this worsening situation in Russia, with COVID-19 and given that Russia provided Italy with help, are there any NATO Allies who are providing urgent medical supplies to Russia? And would NATO be willing to provide Russia with urgent medical supplies? Thank you.

JENS STOLTENBERG [NATO Secretary General]: The situation in Russia reminds us of the fact that this is a truly global crisis. Countries all over the world are affected and therefore this is a common challenge we have to address together. And I welcome efforts by countries all over the world, including NATO Allies, to mobilise a global response, including working with the World Health Organization, organising, facilitating international responses to the COVID-19 crisis.

There has been no request from Russia. My main focus now is on how to coordinate and mobilise support among NATO Allies, and that's also what we have tasked our top military commander SACEUR to coordinate and to do.

OANA LUNGESCU: The next question will be from Helen Warrell, the Financial Times in London.

HELEN WARRELL [Financial Times]: Thank you for taking this question. There have been some concerns that China is perpetrating disinformation in relation to this . . . in relation to this COVID crisis, and as a result that some NATO countries need to take a more strong response, security response, against China and that maybe coming out of this we need to be more careful about including China in critical infrastructure. What is your response to these concerns?

JENS STOLTENBERG: So, we have seen examples of efforts to, what should I say, convey message of . . . messages of disinformation. We have seen examples of disinformation and propaganda, trying to use, utilise this health crisis for propaganda purposes. And of course, that should not happen.

And one of the issues we will address together tomorrow, all the defence ministers, is how to respond to disinformation, propaganda and efforts to try to divide us. The best way of doing that is to provide the facts, the truth. And as I've stated again and again, the best weapon we have against disinformation is a free and open and independent press. So therefore, the work journalists are doing is so extremely important, always, but especially in difficult times, in crises, as we are faced with today.

There will be a time . . . our focus now is to deal with the immediate consequences of the COVID-19 crisis, to help to save lives. And that's what the military personnel, NATO Allies are doing every day, 24/7.

But at the same time, we will also at the meeting tomorrow start the work on looking into the medium- and long-term consequences. And it's too early to conclude that work now, of course. But I think it's obvious that one of the lessons we all have to learn is lessons about . . . is a lesson about the importance of resilience. And we have to look into the issues like supplies of medical equipment, protective suits, medicines, all that kind of stuff. And also ask questions whether we are too dependent on production coming from outside, whether we need to produce more of these equipments in our own countries. And also the issue of stocks.

Resilience is an important part of what NATO is doing. It's actually enshrined in Article 3 of our treaty, that national resilience is a NATO responsibility. We have baseline requirements, guidelines for national resilience, including health and dealing with mass casualties. And all of these issues, resilience, national resilience, including how to make sure that we have the necessary medical equipment, will be part of the lesson-learned process, which will have to take place after this crisis.

OANA LUNGESCU: Thank you. We now have the next question from Michel Winder from Deutsche Presse-Agentur in Brussels.

MICHEL WINDER [DPA]: Hello Sec Gen, thanks a lot. You always stress that NATO remains operable during this crisis and that missions continue. However, training activities in Iraq have been paused due to the coronavirus crisis. So obviously, NATO isn't operable there for the moment. For how long this pause is foreseen? What is also the timeframe regarding the decision to take over some troops from the international coalition in Iraq? And how have other missions, meanwhile, been affected by the crisis? Thanks a lot.

JENS STOLTENBERG: It's correct that the training activities in Iraq have been reduced, and that's actually very much to do with, not the corona crisis, but with the security situation on the ground. So they were actually . . . the level of training, both in NATO and in the Global Coalition to Defeat the Daesh was reduced, also, before the COVID-19 crisis. Then the COVID-19 crisis add to the challenges in Iraq.

We are still present in Iraq. Our commander is there. We provide some support to the Iraqi security forces, also actually helping them to deal with the COVID-19 crisis. And we have just taken the decision to scale up, step up, our training efforts in Iraq and we will increase our activities on the ground as soon as the conditions permit, and we are ready to do so as soon as possible.

But as I said, the reason why we reduced our presence in Iraq was security conditions, actually a decision taken before the COVID-19 crisis. But we will step up as soon as the conditions on the ground permit. And we have made a decision to do so and also welcome the decision by the, by the German Bundestag, the German parliament, to be part of these efforts, that Germany should be part of the NATO training efforts in Iraq.

Of course, for all other NATO missions and operations, we have implemented preventive measures, to minimise the risk for our personnel, for our soldiers, but also to be able to continue our missions and operations in the midst of the coronavirus challenges. And that's exactly what we are doing. Our mission in Afghanistan continues. Our mission in Kosovo continues, with some preventive measures. But the missions are maintained.

And we also maintain our battlegroups in the Baltic countries and in Poland, one of them led by Germany. We maintain our air policing missions and we maintain our naval deployments, including in the Mediterranean and the Aegean Sea. So NATO's . . . and most of all, we maintain our operational readiness. So, if there is a need NATO is able to deploy forces to respond to any threat and any challenge, also in the midst of the coronavirus crisis.

So, we have adapted, we have implemented preventive measures, but the operational readiness of our troops and our missions and operations are maintained.

OANA LUNGESCU: Thank you. The next question comes from Serife Cetin from Anadolu.

SERIFE CETIN [Anadolu]: Thank you, Secretary General. You've mentioned that NATO continues to deliver its . . . on its core task of defence, deterrence and security. I would like to ask, as you may recall, Turkey, following its soldiers being targeted by the Assad regime, end of February, invoked Article 4 and asked for additional security guarantees. I'd like to know what the latest developments are regarding these? Thank you.

JENS STOLTENBERG: NATO's core task is to protect close to one billion citizens in NATO-Allied countries. And we do that by maintaining our missions and operations, but also maintaining the readiness to deploy forces. The NATO Response Force, the High Readiness Joint Task Force and all the other parts of what NATO can deliver if called for.

We are also, of course, supporting our Ally, Turkey. We have some what we call . . . we call them Tailored Assurance Measures already in place in Turkey. Spain is delivering a Patriot battery, augmenting the air defences of Turkey. We have AWACS surveillance flights. And we have also provided some other types of assurance measures for Turkey, increased NATO presence in Turkey.

But we still work with Allies to do more. And I'm in constant dialogue with the Allied capitals to see whether we can further step up our assurance measures for Turkey, because Turkey is an important Ally for our Alliance, not least in the fight against terrorism. Turkey is the only Ally bordering Iraq and Syria. Turkey has been extremely important in helping us to make all the progress we have made in the fight against Daesh/ISIS. And we need to continue, of course, to work, all NATO Allies together, including Turkey, making sure that ISIS is not able, or Daesh is not able to return. So we will continue to work with Turkey, we will continue to provide assurance measures, and I will continue to also work with Allies on how we can further step up our support to Turkey.

OANA LUNGESCU: Thank you. We will now go to Bratislava for a question from Andrej Matisak from Pravda Slovakia.

ANDREJ MATISAK [Pravda Slovakia]: Thank you very much. Thank you for this opportunity. And my question would be: does NATO have some early estimates regarding near- medium-term decrease of defence expenditures in member states, because, of course, the corona crisis is also an economic crisis, so how . . . how do you estimate what kind of impact that may have on defence spending? Thank you.

JENS STOLTENBERG: NATO Allies have not provided any updated estimates on defence spending. And I don't expect them to do so either, because the reality is that their focus now is on the immediate challenges posed by the COVID-19 crisis. Their focus and my focus, NATO's focus, is on how to save lives. And that's exactly what we all are doing, mobilising as much support as possible. And we also see the important role of military personnel in helping the civilian society dealing with a health crisis.

So it illustrates, in a way, that the military, NATO military capabilities can play, and actually is playing, an important role in supporting civilian efforts in dealing with the health crisis.

What we know is that, of course, there will be economic consequences of the coronavirus, the COVID-19 crisis. How severe these economic consequences will be will depend, of course, on how long the crisis will last. But there will be, and we have already seen economic consequences on overall economic growth and, of course, also on public expenditure.

At the same time, what we also have seen during this crisis is that the threats and challenges that made us decide to invest in defence, they have not disappeared. There is still a terrorist threat out there. There are threats in cyberspace. And we see the global balance of power shifting with the rise of China. And we see a more assertive Russia. We, for instance, we see continued violations of the ceasefire in Ukraine. We see Russia's military presence, activities, in Syria.

So the challenges we are faced with as a security Alliance have not disappeared because of the COVID-19 crisis. And then, the COVID-19 crisis also demonstrates that military capabilities which Allies have invested in, everything from airlift to medevac to medical evacuation, to logistics, to transportation capabilities, all of these capabilities, military capabilities, have proven extremely important and helpful in the civilian efforts to fight the COVID-19 crisis.

OANA LUNGESCU: Thank you. And the next question will go to Hans-Uwe Mergener from Mittler Report. Hans-Uwe?

HANS-UWE MERGENER [Mittler Report]: Thank you. Thank you Sec Gen for this opportunity. Thank you for the question. I have two questions. The first one is a little bit out of the subject of corona. It is concerning the situation around the Mediterranean. And as I understand, foreign ministers agreed two weeks ago to engage more in the NATO southern flank. You enumerated Tunisia, Iraq, Jordan, the Sahel. Efforts needs to be coordinate, to my mind, with the European Union as there will . . . as there is also an emphasis laid upon the same areas. In particular, it has been declared to reinforce the footsteps of the . . . of the EU in Sahel. What kind of coordination do you foresee? What can we expect in terms of objectives, timelines and measures? And my second question is more corona-related, as it will have an impact on national budgets. In previous events, you Secretary General defended this empathy . . . this emphasis that there will be no major concern. In fact, this is hard to believe. How can we cope with the situation? You've just outlined your emphasis on resilience and may this, let's say, put more weight on resilience, not divert assets, budgetary assets from the more fight . . . more war-fighting capabilities, what we are looking for and struggling so hard in NATO. Thank you, sir.

JENS STOLTENBERG: First on the Mediterranean. You are right that NATO has decided to step up our efforts in the wider Middle East region and North Africa. And we do that stepwise and we do that through different efforts.

We have already decided to step up our training activities in Iraq. So as soon as the security conditions permit, we will do more training in Iraq, taking over some of the activities, also, today conducted by the Global Coalition, the US-led the Global Coalition, and Germany will be part of those efforts, the NATO efforts, and I welcome that. So we have agreed to step up training in Iraq.

Then we have also agreed to do more in the whole region, including North Africa. We have already partners in the region, partners like, for instance, Tunisia. And we are working closely with Tunisia to try to help them. We have different programmes where we work with them on border security, on special operation forces, intelligence and so on. We also have a country like Mauritania, which is a partner nation. We are also discussing with them what more we can do. And there are, of course, many other partners in North Africa, where we now are sitting down and looking into what more we can do.

It's a bit early to speculate about exactly what kind of concrete activities we will add to the work we already do, but these can be everything from, you know, political consultations, political capacity-building, helping countries who are build . . . building their security institutions, to different kinds of training activities. It's a bit too early.

We are also looking into the challenges we face in the Sahel. And of course, anything we do in North Africa, Sahel, the Middle East, is something we will do in close coordination with other international institutions, including the European Union. And we only do that if we are requested, or there's a demand for NATO activities in different forms.

Let me highlight that NATO values the cooperation with the European Union very much. And we have been able to bring the NATO-EU cooperation up to unprecedented levels over the last years. We continue to step up and we work together, for instance, in the Mediterranean, where the NATO mission, Operation Sea Guardian, provides support to EU efforts. And also in the Aegean Sea, where we have naval presence, where we help to implement . . . there is a NATO naval presence in the Aegean Sea, or deployment, where we help to implement the agreement between the European Union and Turkey addressing the migrant and refugee crisis.

So we work closely with the European Union. And that's also the reason why I welcome the fact that we will have Josep Borrell, the High Representative, Vice President, present at our meeting, together with two other EU members, Finland and Sweden.

OANA LUNGESCU: And for the next question, we'll go to Kabul, Miraqa Popal from TOLO News.

MIRAQA POPAL [TOLO News]: Thanks Mr Secretary. My question is that, that we have some reports that the Taliban have increased their attacks against Afghan forces. How do you assess these attacks and how much it will be harmful for the peace process? Meanwhile, what is the NATO position on the Afghan/Taliban prisoner swap? Thank you.

JENS STOLTENBERG: The Taliban attacks are harmful and therefore we call on Taliban to cease the attacks, to fully implement the agreement between the United States and the Taliban and to reduce violence, because that's the only way towards a peaceful negotiated solution. And we strongly support all efforts to initiate intra-Afghan negotiations. We welcome the fact that the Afghan government has appointed an inclusive negotiating team and we support the agreement between the US and Taliban, which also then includes provisions about exchange of prisoners.

But it's not for me to . . . well, what I would say today is only that we urge all parties to fully respect the promise to reduce the violence and make all their efforts to implement the agreement and to initiate intra-Afghan negotiations. I also, therefore, welcome that NATO's Commander in Afghanistan, our top Commander in Afghanistan, Scott Miller, recently met with the Taliban and also the US envoy, Ambassador Khalilzad is also in close contact with them, to try to facilitate a peace process, which is the only way to reach a peaceful negotiated solution in Afghanistan.

NATO will continue to stay committed to Afghanistan with financial support, with our Resolute Support mission, with training, because we believe that the best way for us to support the peace process is to continue to support the Afghans, so Taliban understands that they will never win on the battlefield, they have to sit down at the negotiating table and make real compromises.

If I then just briefly can move back to the last question, because I only answered one of two questions, there was the second question, was about resilience. And I say, yes, resilience will be extremely important as a lesson learned after the COVID-19 crisis. There will be economic consequences. But I think it's a bit too early to say exactly how large they'll be, because that will depend on how long this crisis will last and the threats which we are faced with will . . . or, have not disappeared, despite the fact that . . . have not disappeared because of the coronavirus crisis, they are still there. And we have to make sure that we continue to be able to defend us against threats and challenges from whatever direction. That was for the previous question.

OANA LUNGESCU: And now from Kabul, we can go over to Podgorica and Jovana Djurisic from Daily Pobjeda.

JOVANA DJURISIC [Daily Pobjeda]: Good afternoon, Secretary General, can you please answer my following question? Government of Netherland has helped Montenegro in transport of medical equipment from China to Podgorica, is this the only kind of help which NATO will provide to Montenegro, bearing in mind that government requests from . . . Montenegrin government requests  [audio cuts out]

JENS STOLTENBERG: Thank you so much. I heard, what should I say, not everything you said, but my understanding was that you asked about NATO support, NATO Allied support to Montenegro and whether there could be some more. Well, what I can say is that we will discuss tomorrow how we can step up, speed up support NATO Allies are giving to each other.

NATO started to respond to this crisis very early. We implemented the first preventive measures in January and February. And then different NATO agencies have helped Allies coping with the COVID-19 crises, including transportation and setting up different medical facilities. And this, of course, includes Montenegro. But what we have done over the last weeks is to ask our top Commander, SACEUR, to further step up and to continue to mobilise support. And of course, that's also something that is relevant for Montenegro.

I think you mentioned that the Netherlands have already provided some help with airlift, equipment to Montenegro. And Turkey has, as a NATO Ally, has provided medical equipment. And what NATO does is that we try to identify where is there any spare capacity, where do we have any surplus stocks of medical equipment and where do we have surplus lift capacity, and then match that with the requests from different NATO Allies. So that's exactly the coordinating and mobilising role NATO has. We also use NATO capabilities to provide direct support. We will continue to look into what more we can do. That's exactly why we meet tomorrow.

Let me also highlight that, normally, when we are faced with crises, there are one or two or three countries affected by a natural disaster or earthquake or some other kinds of crises, and then all other Allies, all the countries can mobilise support to the Ally which is affected. This time, all Allies are affected at the same time. And that makes, of course, the situation even more difficult, because all our Allies, all nations all over the world are focussed on their own national needs. So what we have to then realise that, well, all Allies are affected, but not all Allies are affected in the same way at the same time, not all Allies are at the peak at the same time. So there is some spare capacity. There are some surplus stocks. And then we need to mobilise those surplus stocks, those surplus capacities, and also fully utilise, for instance, our airlift capabilities, fill the planes, fill the different transportation means, so we utilise them in the most effective way. And that's exactly what we are doing. And Montenegro has benefited from that. But we will, of course, continue to constantly assess what more we can do for all Allies.

OANA LUNGESCU: The next question comes from Iryna Somer from Interfax, Ukraine.

IRYNA SOMER [Interfax Ukraine]: Good morning, Secretary General. I would like to know if also partners countries are involved in the fight with coronavirus, because as far as I do know, the biggest in the world aircraft, Ukrainian Mriya and Ruslan also participating in the operation. And second part of my question is: I would like to know if this experience of the cooperation, these allies will be taken into consideration during the assessment to grant Ukraine, the Enhanced Opportunity Programme? Thank you.

JENS STOLTENBERG: Yes. We are also working with partners in different ways and we welcome the fact that NATO has so many partners and that we can stand together and address common challenges, as the COVID-19 crisis is. And Ukraine helps NATO Allies, because Ukraine provides strategic airlift, or actually, there are Ukrainian planes which are used by NATO to provide strategic airlift. And I've seen these planes. They are huge. They have an enormous capacity. And the Ukrainian planes show, in a way, how NATO works with a partner, Ukraine, to provide airlift for NATO Allies. And these planes have been important for a long period of time to lift medical equipment all the way from China, across the globe into NATO Allied countries in Europe.

So, yes, we work with Ukraine. We welcome the close partnership with Ukraine. We are all affected. This is a common challenge. We need to respond in a common way.

And of course, we are now looking at how we can further strengthen the partnership with Ukraine. The issue of Enhanced Opportunity Partnership is one of the elements in that discussion. It's too early for me to conclude, but everything we do together strengthens the partnership between NATO and Ukraine.

OANA LUNGESCU: Thank you. For the last question, we'll go to Bucharest and Robert Lupitu from Calea Europeana.

ROBERT LUPITU [Calea Europeana]: Good morning. Mr Secretary General, what's NATO's assessment on Russia's overall conduct with disinformation and military posture in the eastern flank and the Black Sea during this pandemic of COVID-19? Thank you.

JENS STOLTENBERG: Well, what we have seen is that Russia maintains military presence close to NATO borders and NATO countries, including in the Black Sea. But of course, we see them also continuing to support the separatist in . . . separatists in . . . in Ukraine, in eastern Ukraine. We see their significant military build-up that has taken place in Crimea and we see also their naval presence in the Black Sea.

So this is part of the security challenges we are faced with. We were faced with them before the COVID-19 crisis and we are faced with them during the COVID-19 crisis. And I expect them to be there also after this crisis has ended.

So it just highlights the fact that NATO has to be able to both provide support to the civilian efforts in combating COVID-19, but at the same time deliver on what is our core responsibility, the protection of all Allies. And that's exactly what we're doing.

And we also have increased our presence in the Black Sea Region on land with the Tailored Presence in Romania, but also at sea and in the air. And we work closely, also, with partner countries in the Black Sea Region, like Georgia and Ukraine.

So, yes, so we just have to understand that the corona crisis is of . . . is affecting us all, but it doesn't remove the security challenges we faced before the crisis. And that's also the reason why, when ministers meet tomorrow, they will also address how to maintain our military posture and our deterrence and defence in the midst of the corona crisis.

OANA LUNGESCU: Thank you very much, Secretary General. This concludes the press conference. Over to you for your last words.

JENS STOLTENBERG: Thank you so much for joining me for this online press conference. I think this works quite well and it shows that we need to be able to work and to operate also in times where we cannot have the in-person, physical meetings, but using online platforms to communicate. So that is exactly what we'll do tomorrow with the secure videoconference with the ministers. And that's what we do now with engaging with the press. And thank you for the important work you do as journalists. As I said, that's the best response to disinformation, is a free and independent press, and stay safe.

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The US has the largest number of cases with 609,685, followed by Spain at 177,633 and Italy at 162,488.

This blog is now closed. Heres a summary of Wednesdays key developments:

The total number of coronavirus cases in the world has surpassed two million, according to the data compiled by the Johns Hopkins University.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel has announced first steps in undoing coronavirus lockdowns for the coming weeks.

The head of the World Health Organization has said he regrets US President Donald Trumps decision to halt funding for the organisation, but called on world unity to fight the coronavirus pandemic.

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) says the global economy is expected to shrink by three percent this year  the biggest contraction since the Great Depression of the 1930s.

Wednesday, April 15

23:50 GMT  Trump to present new guidelines on reopening US economy

Trump says he will present new guidelines allowing some states to reopen, arguing data indicates the US is past the peak of the coronavirus pandemic.

The encouraging developments have put us in a very strong position to finalise the guidelines for states on reopening the country, he says, adding the new rules will be revealed at a press conference on Thursday afternoon.

23:40 GMT  US tests more than three million people

Mike Pence, the US vice president, says more than three million people have been tested for the new coronavirus across the country.

Its reported to us that weve conducted and completed three million, 324,000 tests across the nation, more than 619,000 Americans have tested positive, he says at a White House press briefing.

More than 27,000 Americans have died and 45,000 have fully recovered, he says.





23:04 GMT  Trump threatens to adjourn Congress

Trump is threatening to adjourn the US Congress despite the coronavirus pandemic, accusing Democrats in the Republican-controlled Senate of stalling his nominations for federal judgeships and top government positions.

I will exercise my constitutional authority to adjourn both chambers of Congress, he says.

Id rather not use that power  Well probably be challenged in court and well see who wins.

He adds: The current practice of leaving town, while conducting phony pro forma sessions, is a dereliction of duty that the American people cannot afford during this crisis.

No US president has used the constitutional authority to force Congress to adjourn if they cannot agree on a date to adjourn.

20:32 GMT  Pakistan relaxes restrictions for some key industries

Pakistans government has loosened restrictions on a range of industries across the country in a bid to battle the economic fallout of a continuing lockdown, in place to curb the spread of the coronavirus.

Prime Minister Imran Khan announced that the construction industry would be foremost among more than a dozen sectors that would be allowed to reopen operations on Wednesday.

Read more here.

Daily-wage workers wait to get hired during full lockdown in Hyderabad, Pakistan [Nadeem Khawer/EPA]

20:16 GMT  Libya to impose 24-hour curfew for 10 days

Libyas internationally recognised government, in the west, will impose a 24-hour curfew for 10 days effective from Friday, April 17, the Tripoli-based Government of National Accord said in a statement.

Libyas National Centre for Disease Control reported 36 cases of coronavirus in Libya and only one death.

20:03 GMT  France death toll rises by record 1,438

The number of people who died from coronavirus in France jumped by 1,438 or 9.1 percent to 17,167 in the biggest single-day increase as a number of nursing homes reported cumulative tolls following the three-day Easter weekend, the health ministry said.

The number of people who died in hospitals rose by 514 or 5 percent to 10,643, less than the 541 reported on Tuesday, but the cumulative death toll in nursing homes rose by 924 or 17 percent to 6,524, compared with 221 on Tuesday.

This increase is not the mortality rate over 24 hours but is due to a catch-up in reporting of data following the three-day weekend, Health Ministry Director Jerome Salomon said.

19:51 GMT  Malawi announces virus lockdown

Malawi has announced a three-week lockdown to try and curb the spread of the coronavirus, joining other southern African countries like South Africa, Angola and Zimbabwe which have previously announced full or partial lockdowns.

Minister of Health and Population Jappie Mhango said the lockdown will be in effect from April 18 to May 9, adding that all non-essential businesses would close and services would stop.

Read more here.

18:25 GMT  Belarus postpones womens Premier League season opener

The Football Federation of Belarus said it was postponing the start of its womens Premier League after several players were found to have been in contact with possible carriers of the coronavirus.

Belarus is the only country in Europe still playing a mens national football league, making it an unlikely draw for fans overseas where matches have been cancelled.

The federation said the Belarusian womens Premier League, which had been set to kick off on Thursday, would not open its 2020 season until further notice.

A black doctor who provides #coronavirus tests for homeless people in the US, was handcuffed outside his home by police while loading his van. pic.twitter.com/wofWGSiS5O  Al Jazeera English (@AJEnglish) April 15, 2020

18:17 GMT  Qatar: Nepali workers expelled for illegal, illicit activity

Amnesty International has accused Qatar of detaining dozens of migrant workers and expelling them last month after telling them they were being taken to be tested for the coronavirus.

Qatars government denied the allegations, saying the repatriated migrant workers had been found to be engaged in illegal and illicit activity uncovered during inspections carried out to halt the spread of COVID-19.

Read more here.

17:28 GMT  Colombia to put 4,000 prisoners on house arrest

Colombia will temporarily release some 4,000 prisoners to house arrest in an attempt to stem the spread of the coronavirus, Justice Minister Margarita Cabello said, adding that additional people may be released in the coming days.

Two people recently released from a prison in the central city of Villavicencio died after contracting the coronavirus. Thirteen other prisoners, two guards and an administrator in the same institution also have confirmed coronavirus infections.

We analysed the projections to get to the highest number of prisoners who could benefit, Cabello said. But I have to be realistic; no measure that I could take is going to guarantee 100 percent that we will avoid infection.

17:15 GMT  Turkey reports new cases, deaths

Turkey on Wednesday confirmed 115 more deaths from the coronavirus in the country over the past 24 hours, bringing the death toll to 1,518.

The total number of registered coronavirus cases surged to 69,392 as 4,281 more people tested positive for the virus, Health Minister Fahrettin Koca said on Twitter.

16:55 GMT  Germany to begin easing virus curbs

German Chancellor Angela Merkel announced first steps in undoing coronavirus lockdowns for the coming weeks, with most shops allowed to open although schools must stay closed until May 4.

Shops up to 800sq metres (8,600 sq ft) will be allowed to reopen once they have plans to maintain hygiene, Merkel said, while schools will gradually be reopened with priority given to pupils about to take exams.

Meanwhile, a ban on large public events will be upheld until August 31.

Read more here.

Residents exercise on their balconies according to the instructions of fitness trainer Patricio Cervantes during the spread of coronavirus disease (COVID-19) in Hamburg, Germany [Fabian Bimmer/Reuters]

16:52 GMT  Canada reports new cases

Canadas confirmed cases rose to 27,540, while the death toll from the coronavirus rose to 903, according to data by the Public Health Agency.

16:50 GMT  Jordan says it will ease lockdown measures

Jordans Prime Minister Omar al-Razzaz said the government would soon ease a tight lockdown by allowing more businesses and industries to return to work.

However, it will not yet lift a curfew imposed nearly a month ago that restricts the movements of Jordans 10 million people, al-Razzaz said.

The prime minister said the new measures could also include allowing people to move more freely in some regions outside the capital, but he warned that they could be rescinded if Jordan sees a further spike in cases of the coronavirus.

16:47 GMT  Italy death toll climbs by 578

Deaths from the coronavirus in Italy rose by 578 in the past 24 hours, down from 602 the day before. Meanwhile, the number of new cases slowed to 2,667 from a previous 2,972, continuing the recent downward trend.

The number of new cases was the lowest since March 13, but the daily tally of deaths remains stubbornly high.

The total death toll since the outbreak came to light on February 21 rose to 21,645, the Civil Protection Department said, the second highest in the world after that of the United States.

A member of the Civil Protection service collects a flower to rest on the coffin of a victim of COVID-19 in the hangar where 18 coffins wait to be transported by the Italian Army to be cremated in Florence on April 7, 2020 in the village of Ponte San Pietro near Bergamo, Italy [Marco Di Lauro/Getty Images]

16:41 GMT  US House Speaker Pelosi calls Trumps decision senseless

United States House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi called Trumps decision to halt funding for the WHO senseless and dangerous, and said it would be challenged.

The Presidents halting of funding to the WHO as it leads the global fight against the coronavirus pandemic is senseless, Pelosi said in a statement. This decision is dangerous, illegal and will be swiftly challenged.

16:34 GMT  Northern Ireland restrictions extended

Northern Ireland will keep coronavirus restrictions in place for another three weeks, First Minister Arlene Foster said, keeping the British-run region in line with similar measures in the neighbouring Republic of Ireland that are due to run until May 5.

We have decided restrictions will remain in place for another three weeks and we will review that coming up to that time, Foster told a news conference, saying Northern Ireland was still in the middle of its first wave of infections.

If we relax our guard now all will have been in vain.

A Gardai police officer mans a checkpoint on the border between the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland as they check for non-essential travel between the two countries [Charles McQuillan/Getty Images]

16:24 GMT  WHO chief regrets US decision to cut funding

The head of the World Health Organization said that he regretted the decision by US President Donald Trump to pull funding for the organisation, but called on world unity to fight the new coronavirus pandemic.

The United States of America has been a long-standing and generous friend of the WHO, and we hope it will continue to be so, WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus told a press conference. We regret the decision of the president of the United States to order a halt in the funding to the WHO.

WHO was still assessing the impact and would try to fill any gaps with partners, Tedros said. But he noted now was the time for the world to be united in its common struggle against the outbreak, which he described as a dangerous enemy.

15:57 GMT  What US funding cut means for WHOs fight

Concerns have been raised over the WHO future after US President Donald Trump announced a funding cut for the body amid the coronavirus pandemic.

Trumps decision could mean as much as $720m in health programmes could go unfunded this year and next.

Read more here.

16:13 GMT  Brazils health secretary resigns

Brazils Health Ministry said that Health Secretary Wanderson de Oliveira has resigned, as tensions between Health Minister Luiz Henrique Mandetta and President Jair Bolsonaro over the handling of the coronavirus crisis escalate.

15:37 GMT  Singapore reports 447 new cases

Singapores health ministry confirmed 447 new coronavirus cases in the biggest daily jump, to bring the total number of cases in the city-state to 3,699.

Four hundred four of the new cases were linked to migrant workers dormitories.

While Singapore won global plaudits for its handling of the coronavirus, the disease has spread rapidly within its large migrant worker community, highlighting what rights groups say is a weak link in the city-states containment efforts.

A man wearing face mask is seen in Singapore [Zakaria Zainal/Anadolu]

15:33 GMT  No country will be spared in sub-Saharan Africa: IMF

Sub-Saharan Africa is facing an unprecedented health crisis and a severe economic downturn that could drag on economies for years to come, the International Monetary Fund said, warning: No country will be spared.

Read more here.

15:21 GMT  G20 agrees to temporary debt standstill for poorest countries

The Group of 20 nations announced support for a temporary halt to debt payments by the worlds poorest nations as they struggle to deal with the coronavirus pandemic.

We support a time-bound suspension of debt service payments for the poorest countries that request forbearance, the G20 finance ministers and central bankers said in a communique following their virtual meeting. All bilateral official creditors will participate in this initiative.

The group also called on private creditors, working through the Institute of International Finance, to participate in the initiative.

15:17 GMT  Aston Martin extends manufacturing suspensions

Luxury carmaker Aston Martin is extending by a week the manufacturing suspensions in place at its two factories as lockdown measures remain in place in Britain.

Considering the current global and local position on suppliers and employees, the business is now extending this temporary suspension until Monday 27 April, subject to ongoing review of the changing circumstances, the company said in a statement.

The business will look to resume operations as soon as it is reasonable to do so.

14:58 GMT  IMF, World Bank leader praise G20 debt relief initiative

International Monetary Fund Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva and World Bank President David Malpass praised a new G20 debt relief agreement that suspends bilateral debt servbice payments by poor countries.

A source familiar with a G20 meeting of finance ministers and central bank governors said the debt service suspension would run from May 1 through December 31, with an option for renewal in 2021.

Georgieva, in a statement to a meeting of G20 leaders, also said the IMF was urgently seeking some $18bn in new resources for the Funds Poverty Reduction and Growth Trust for poor countries and was exploring how the use of special drawing rights could aid this effort.

14:52 GMT  #YouClapForMeNow: UK immigrants read poem in widely shared video

This social media video of key workers from minority backgrounds in the UK is being widely shared and celebrated online.

In the footage, first, second and third-generation immigrants including doctors, nurses, teachers, shopkeepers, dentists, social workers, care workers, delivery drivers and broadcasters read a powerful poem about their contributions during the pandemic.

Creative director Sachini Imbuldeniya made the video, using the poem by her colleague Darren Smith.

14:46 GMT  Portugal flattens the curve: ministers

Portugals coronavirus curve has flattened but the good news is still not enough for the country to lift lockdown measures and reopen its tourism-dependent, export-oriented economy, government ministers said.

Sales said told a news conference the curve flattened due to the excellent behaviour and civism of the Portuguese people who obeyed lockdown rules imposed by the government from March 18.

Portuguese President Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa will extend the nationwide lockdown until May 1.

Though the developments are positive, Prime Minister Antonio Costa said earlier the time to gradually and progressively reopen the economy had yet to come.

A view of deserted Cais das Colunas, in Lisbon, Portugal [Sara Matos/Anadolu]

14:43 GMT  Norway PM tells children it will take time before normal life is back

Prime Minister Erna Solberg told Norwegian children it would take time for life to return to normal with the country, like others in Europe, preparing to reopen parts of society shut down by the coronavirus outbreak.

It will still be a while before everything returns to normal. How long it will be, we dont know, she said, flanked by her ministers for education and for family. No children were present, in keeping with social-distancing rules.

One of the things I miss the most is to give a good hug to my friends, Solberg told her young viewers. For now it is not possible with the rules to maintain distance that we have now. But other things will soon be possible.

14:28 GMT  G20 finance officials meeting runs late

Finance ministers and central bank governors from the Group of 20 major economies (G20) are still meeting, and a news conference expected at 9:15 ET (13:15 GMT) has been delayed, the Saudi G20 secretariat said in a statement.

The meeting communique will be sent at the conclusion of the meeting and the time of the press conference will then be advised, the secretariat said.

This pandemic has been tough on a lot of people. Theyve lost family, jobs, their personal freedom. But in some parts of the world the coronavirus will make an already hard life unimaginably harder  #AJStartHere explains. pic.twitter.com/XQN6ocn6tg  Al Jazeera English (@AJEnglish) April 12, 2020

14:25 GMT  Russian veterans urge Putin to postpone parade

Russian veterans urged President Vladimir Putin to postpone a military parade to mark the 75th anniversary of Soviet victory in World War II, due to the coronavirus risk to participants.

Russia has so far not dropped plans to hold a massive parade with thousands of troops marching through Red Square on May 9, despite a national lockdown over the pandemic and a ban on large public events.

14:19 GMT  New quarantines in 58 Turkish provinces

Turkey is imposing quarantines on 227 residential areas in 58 provinces, the Interior Ministry said.

The areas are home to some 250,00 people, the ministry said in a statement, but did not supply further details.

The ministry also said it is lifting quarantine measures on 41 residential areas in 14 provinces of the country.

Turkey on Tuesday confirmed 107 more deaths from the virus, bringing the death toll to 1,403. The total number of registered cases surged to 65,111.

Tarlabasi Boulevard and surrounds are empty during a two-day lockdown imposed prevent the spread of COVID-19 on April 12, 2020, in Istanbul, Turkey [Burak Kara/Getty Images]

14:06 GMT  Global number of cases tops 2 million

The global number of cases stands at 2,000,984, according to data gathered by Johns Hopkins University in the US.

Meanwhile, a total of 128,011 died from the virus around the world.

14:00 GMT  WHO COVID-19 envoy: Leave recriminations for when virus is defeated

The WHO special envoy for the COVID-19 urged any recriminations about the organisation to be left until after the virus has been defeated.

We say to everybody, we plead with everybody, look forward. Focus on the epic struggle right now and leave the recriminations till later, said special advisor David Nabarro in a webinar.

If in the process you decide you want to declare that youre going to withdraw funding or make other comments about the WHO, remember this is not just the WHO, this is the whole public health community that is involved right now and every single person in the world is a public health worker now, everybody is taking responsibility, everybody is sacrificing, everybody is involved.

People who lost their jobs wait in line to file for unemployment benefits, following an outbreak of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19), at Arkansas Workforce Center in Fort Smith, Arkansas [Reuters]

13:56 GMT  Qatar reports new cases

The State of Qatar reported 283 new cases in the past 24 hours, brining the total number of positive cases in the country to 3,711.

13:52 GMT  UK death toll rises to 12,868

The United Kingdoms hospital death toll rose by 761 to 12,868 as of 16:00 on April 14, the health ministry said.

313,769 people have been tested of which 98,476 tested positive, it added.

The true UK death toll however far exceeds the hospital toll as people have also died in nursing homes and in the wider community, broader data showed on Tuesday.

Hello, this is Farah Najjar taking over from my colleague Usaid Siddiqui.

12:45 GMT  CDC director says 19-20 US states may be ready to reopen on May 1

The director of the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says he believes 19 or 20 US states have had limited impact from the new coronavirus and their governors believe they may be ready to reopen by President Donald Trumps May 1 target date.

There are a number of counties within this country that have not experienced really any coronavirus despite testing, Robert Redfield said in an interview with ABCs Good Morning America.

More than 26,000 people have died in the US from the coronavirus outbreak to date [Spencer Platt/Getty Images/AFP]

12:20 GMT  WHO focused on saving lives, says Tedros after US funding freeze

The WHO is purely focused on saving lives and halting the coronavirus pandemic, its chief said Wednesday after US President Trump announced he was freezing funding for the WHO.

There is no time to waste. WHOs singular focus is on working to serve all people to save lives and stop the COVID-19 pandemic, Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said on Twitter following Trumps decision.

12:00 GMT  74 million in Arab world lack hand-washing facility: UN

Some 74 million people in the water-scarce Arab region are at greater risk of catching the novel coronavirus because they lack a sink or soap at home, the United Nations has said.

This includes 31 million people in Sudan, more than 14 million in war-torn Yemen and 9.9 million in Egypt, a UN report said.

While it has been agreed worldwide that hand-washing with soap and water is the best prevention against COVID-19 contagion, this simple act proves to be difficult in a region where 74 million people lack access to a basic hand-washing facility, the UNs Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia said.

11:40 GMT  24-hour curfew in Maldivess capital after first case of local transmission

Health authorities in the Maldives are imposing a 24-hour curfew in the countrys capital, Male, and several nearby islands following the first detected case of domestic transmission of the coronavirus.

The island nation had previously recorded 20 cases, but all involved travellers from overseas. The aim of Wednesdays total lockdown is to trace contacts of the infected person and conduct tests on them, say authorities.

The police is urging residents of the capital to return to their homes by 15:30 local time (11:30 GMT).

Your cooperation is needed to control a potential community spread in greater Male area, the police said.

11:20 GMT  Swiss coronavirus death toll soars

The Swiss death toll from the virus has reached 973, the countrys public health ministry said, rising from 900 people the day before.

The number of positive tests also increased to 26,336 from 25,834, it said.

11:06 GMT  Timeline of Trumps fight with WHO

The US presidents move to temporarily halt funding to the WHO follows weeks of escalating attacks by Trump on the Geneva-based UN health agency, as he has sought to deflect scrutiny of his own administrations response to the outbreak.

Here is a timeline of events that led to Trumps decision to cut funding.

Donald Trump and WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus [Reuters]

10:54 GMT  World reacts to Trump withdrawing WHO funding

US President Trump has instructed his administration to temporarily halt funding to the WHO over its handling of the coronavirus pandemic.

Trump said the WHO failed in its basic duty and it must be held accountable. He said it promoted Chinas disinformation about the virus that likely led to a wider outbreak.

Reaction to Trumps move was fast and furious worldwide. Read more here.

10:28 GMT  EU deeply regrets Trumps cut to WHO funding, says unjustified

The European Union joined worldwide condemnation of the US presidents decision to halt funding to the WHO, saying it was unjustified during the coronavirus pandemic.

Deeply regret U.S. decision to suspend funding to WHO. There is no reason justifying this move at a moment when their efforts are needed more than ever, EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell said on Twitter.

The US is the WHOs biggest overall donor.





10:06 GMT  Irans coronavirus death toll rises to 4,777  health official

Irans new coronavirus death toll has reached 4,777, health ministry spokesman Kianush Jahanpur has said in a statement on national TV.

Ninety four people died in the past twenty four hours, he said.

09:40 GMT  Germany slams Trumps WHO payment freeze

Germany has slammed the US decision to suspend payments to the WHO, as Foreign Minister Heiko Maas warned against blaming others for the coronavirus crisis.

US President Trump announced the funding freeze on Tuesday, accusing the WHO of severely mismanaging the spread of the virus.

Blaming others wont help. The virus knows no borders, Maas wrote on Twitter.

One of the best investments is to strengthen the UN, above all the under-financed WHO in the development and distribution of tests and vaccines.

The US is the biggest contributor to the WHO, making payments of $400m last year.





09:30 GMT  Spains daily death toll from coronavirus slips to 523, total at 18,579

The number of deaths from the coronavirus in Spain in 24 hours has dropped again to 523 from 567 reported on Tuesday, the countrys health ministry said.

The daily death toll on Wednesday brought the total number of deaths to 18,579.

09:27 GMT  Gold glitters as cash-strapped Thais sell jewellery

Thais are flocking to Bangkoks Chinatown to sell their gold jewellery as the price of the precious metal spikes and the economy tanks due to the coronavirus pandemic.

Gold surged to a seven-year high on Tuesday to $1,731.25 an ounce, following global moves led by the US to reinflate economies with trillions of dollars of stimulus measures.

That has boosted the price of gold across the world, tempting many to sell their stocks of the precious metal at a time of economic hardship without recent precedent.

09:10 GMT  China failed to warn public of COVID-19 pandemic for six days: AP

In the six days after top Chinese officials secretly determined they were probably facing a pandemic from the new coronavirus, the city of Wuhan hosted a mass banquet for tens of thousands of people and millions began their annual trips home for the Lunar New Year celebrations.

President Xi Jinping warned the public on January 20  the seventh day  but by then, more than 3,000 people had been infected during almost a week of public silence, according to internal documents obtained by The Associated Press (AP) news agency and estimates based on retrospective infection data.

Read more here.

08:40 GMT  Oman to cut ministries development budgets by 10 percent  state media

Omans finance ministry has told all ministries and civilian government units to reduce approved liquidity for development budgets by 10 percent, state media said.

It also said the creation of government companies performing business activities would cease and priority would be given to the private sector.

08:15 GMT  India to ease restrictions next week in rural areas

India will permit several activities in rural areas starting next week, including manufacturing and infrastructure building, to provide relief to workers impacted by the COVID-19 lockdown, the government said.

The Ministry of Home Affairs guidelines came a day after Prime Minister Narendra Modi extended a nationwide lockdown to May 3.

The easing of the lockdown would start next Monday and take place only in those rural areas where there were no COVID-19 containment zones or hotspots, a ministry press release said.

A farmer feeds iceberg lettuce to his buffalo during a 21-day nationwide lockdown to slow the spreading of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19), at Bhuinj village in Satara district in the western state of Maharashtra, India [File: Rajendra Jadhav/Reuters]

07:48 GMT  China urges United States to fulfill its obligations to WHO

China has urged the US to fulfill its obligations to the WHO, after US President Trump halted funding to the body over its handling of the coronavirus pandemic.

Foreign ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian told reporters during a daily briefing the situation with the pandemic, which has infected nearly two million people globally, was at a critical stage and that the USs decision would affect all countries of the world.

The US announced it was halting funding to WHO on April 14 [File: Denis Balibouse/Reuters]

07:24 GMT  Finland to lift capital region lockdown -PM

Finland will lift the roadblocks in place around its capital region after nearly three weeks, Prime Minister Sanna Marin has said, in a first act of easening the Nordic countrys coronavirus-related restrictions.

The travel restrictions to and from the capital region, Uusimaa, to the rest of the country began on March 28 and were introduced to prevent people from spreading the virus to other parts of the country.

07:04 GMT  Danish schools begin reopening after month-long closure

Denmark has started reopening its schools after a month-long closure over the novel coronavirus, becoming the first country in Europe to do so.

Nurseries, kindergartens and primary schools were reopening on Wednesday , according to an AFP correspondent, after they were closed on March 12 in an effort to curb the COVID-19 epidemic.

However classes are only resuming in about half of Denmarks municipalities and in about 35 percent of Copenhagens schools, as other have requested more time to adjust to health protocols still in place.

All are expected to reopen by April 20.

06:41 GMT  IMF board approves emergency support for Burkina Faso, Niger  statements

The IMF Executive Board has approved support for Burkina Faso and Niger under its Rapid Credit Facility to help the West African nations confront the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Fund said.

The IMF said the board had approved a $115m disbursement for Burkina Faso and another $114m for Niger.

So far there are 528 confirmed cases and 30 deaths from the virus in Burkina Faso [EPA]

Hello, this is Usaid Siddiqui in Doha taking over from my colleague Kate Mayberry.

05:55 GMT 

Im now handing over the blog to my colleagues in Doha. Thank you for reading and do get in touch with any tips or suggestions.

05:30 GMT  Pakistan to ease some lockdown restrictions

Pakistan is easing restrictions on several areas of its economy, including the construction and cement industries, to address rising unemployment and economic stagnation.

Senior Muslim community leaders have also promised to resume prayers in mosques on Friday, defying government orders to limit congregations.

Mufti Taqi Usmani, a prominent Sunni Muslim leader, said mosques would also hold daily congregational prayers at each of the five prescribed Muslim prayer times.

04:50 GMT  Vietnam cracks down on fake news with new decree

Vietnam has introduced hefty new fines equivalent to as much as six months of basic income for those found guilty of disseminating fake news or rumours on social media, including on coronavirus.

A new decree says a fine of between 10 and 20 million Vietnamese dongs ($426-$853) will be imposed on those who use social media to share false, untruthful, distorted, or slanderous information.

The new rules extend far beyond the coronavirus, raising concern among human rights groups already heightened by a cybersecurity law that came into effect last year.

This decree provides yet another potent weapon in the Vietnamese authorities arsenal of online repression, said Tanya OCarroll, director of technology at Amnesty International.

04:43 GMT  Japans Fujifilm ramps up capacity for possible COVID-19 drug

Japans Fujifilm Holdings says it has expanded manufacturing capacity to significantly increase production of its anti-flu drug Avigan that is being tested as a treatment for COVID-19.

Fujifilm expects to increase the production of Avigan up to 100,000 treatment courses by July 2020, about 2.5 times more than at the beginning of March. By September, it expects to be able to produce 300,000 courses, it said in a statement on Wednesday.

Fujifilm is conducting clinical trials of Avigan on patients of COVID-19 both at home and in the US.

04:15 GMT  Thailand extends ban on passenger flights until end of April

Thailand has extended a ban on incoming passenger flights until the end of the month, the Civil Aviation Authority of Thailand said on Wednesday.

The coronavirus has emptied airport terminals around the world, including Suvarnabhumi International Airport in Bangkok [Jiraporn Kuhakan/Reuters]

Earlier this month, the countrys interior ministry said land borders in 21 provinces would be reopened on Saturday to allow Thais in neighbouring countries to return home.

Up to 100 people will be allowed to enter at each border checkpoint a day, and they will be subject to a 14-day state quarantine.

04:10 GMT  Japan urges people to curb interactions

Japans citizens should do everything they can to limit interactions with others and curb the spread of the coronavirus, government spokesman Yoshihide Suga said on Wednesday as the country reported 457 new confirmed cases.

Japan wants people to reduce interactions by 70 percent and a state of emergency came into force at the weekend.

However, compliance is not mandatory and the authorities have offered no financial support for those who cannot work from home and risk losing their income.

The government is now considering a proposal to hand out 100,000 yen ($933.45) to each person to help cushion the blow.

03:50 GMT  Human rights groups call on Thailand to release prisoners

A group of 11 Thai and international human rights groups are calling on the government to release prisoners to protect them against the risk of contracting the coronavirus in severely overcrowded jails.

In a joint letter to the director general of the Department of Corrections, they noted there were more than 379,000 people in detention, and urged the authorities to release a number of categories of prisoner including those above the age of 60, the sick, those on pre-trial remand and inmates who have nearly completed their sentences.

.@ManushyaFdn joined 11 human rights organizations in the joint letter urging the Department of Corrections in #THAILAND to immediately release prisoners & ensure the health & safety of prison population & staffs during #COVID19 crisis. Access it herehttps://t.co/HjMUwN1LDj pic.twitter.com/CXyXXoepPf  Manushya Foundation (@ManushyaFdn) April 15, 2020

A number of other countries, including Turkey, are releasing prisoners to reduce the risk of the virus spreading.

You can read more about the effect that coronavirus is having on prison systems around the world in the stories below.

02:40 GMT  Masks made compulsory in Singapore

Everyone in Singapore must now wear a mask when they go outside after a sharp jump in coronavirus cases over the past two days.

Anyone found without a mask will be fined 300 Singapore dollars ($212), while repeat offenders could be prosecuted in court and face higher fines, the Health Ministry said in a statement late on Tuesday. It said exemptions would be made for children below two years old or those with special needs.

Singapore now has 3,252 cases after reporting 386 new infections on Monday, and 334 on Tuesday. The government distributes masks free of cost to all residents.

Residents receive free reusable masks distributed by the government at a community centre; all people now need to wear one when they go outside [Edgar Su/Reuters]

02:20 GMT  New Zealands Ardern takes pay cut amid coronavirus lockdown

New Zealands Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern is taking a 20 percent pay cut for the next six months. The salary cut also applies to government ministers and public service chief executives, Ardern said in a news conference on Wednesday.

Its about leadership, she said.

If there was ever a time to close the gap between different positions, its now.

01:50 GMT  Trump move to cut WHO funding under fire

The United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres has said now is not the time to be cutting funding to the WHO, and the medical community has also criticised the move.

Dr Patrice Harris, president of the American Medical Association called it a dangerous step in the wrong direction that will not make defeating COVID-19 easier.

Dr Amesh Adalja, an infectious disease expert and senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins University Center for Health Security, said while reforms might be needed, it is not the time.

Its not the middle of a pandemic that you do this type of thing, he said.

Dr William Schaffner, an infectious disease expert at the Vanderbilt University Medical Center

This virus doesnt need passports. In a few short months, it has travelled to all of the continents of the world except Antarctica. If there were ever an event that showed us how we need to work tougher as a global community, this is it.

01:30 GMT  South Koreans voting in parliamentary election

Polling stations opened in South Korea at 6am (21:00 GMT) for the countrys 21st legislative elections.

300 seats are up for the grabs in the National Assembly, chosen by a combination of direct votes and proportional representation.

Turnout is expected to be high (it reached a record during last weeks early voting) despite the continuing coronavirus pandemic. Voters have to wear masks, gloves, undergo a fever check and maintain social distance while moving only in a guided path in polling stations.

People must wear masks and gloves to vote in South Koreas election for a new National Assembly [Ahn Young-joon/AP Photo]

The governing Democratic Party has benefitted from the governments response to the coronavirus. Having once been the location of the largest outbreak outside China, the country has just reported 27 new cases, 16 of them imported from overseas.

Kelly Kasulis explored the mood of the nation ahead of the vote. Results are expected by Wednesday evening.

23:45 GMT (Tuesday)  Iceland to start lifting restrictions from May 4

Iceland is planning to lift restrictions it introduced to curb the spread of the coronavirus.

From May 4, universities and high schools will reopen with some limitations while schools for younger children will operate as normal.

Hair salons, dentists and museums will be allowed to operate, while gatherings of as many as 50 people will be allowed. A two-metre (6.5-feet) social distancing rule will remain in place.

The government estimates the prevalence of the virus in the general population is about 1 percent.

23:30 GMT (Tuesday)  Trump to withhold WHO funding over pandemic response

Trump says he will, at least temporarily, halt funding to the World Health Organization (WHO) over its handling of the coronavirus pandemic.

Trump claimed the WHO had failed in its basic duty and it must be held accountable.

He also accused the UN agency of promoting Chinas disinformation about the virus, which he said probably led to a bigger outbreak than would otherwise have happened.

-

Hello and welcome to Al Jazeeras continuing coverage of the coronavirus pandemic. Im Kate Mayberry in Kuala Lumpur.

You can read all the updates from yesterday (April 14) here.
Dharavi, the largest slum in India, has reported 55 Covid-19 positive cases, making it an emerging hotspot in Mumbai.

Dharavi reported the first case on April 1, when a 56-year-old garment shop owner succumbed to the infection. The civic authorities swung into action, targeting high-risk as well as low-risk contacts. By April 9, Dharavi had recorded 17 positive cases. The BrihanMumbai Municipal Corporation, Mumbais civic body, has created a total of 29 containment zones to restrict public movement in the area.

The 240-hectare slum pocket has 8,50,000 residents and a population density of 66,000 per sqkm, making it one of the more cramped spaces in Mumbai, the worlds fifth most densely populated city.

Activists and health workers had expressed concerns over how social distancing is practically impossible in an area where an average of 10-12 people stay in each of 57,000 housing units measuring around 250 sq ft.

Six new coronavirus cases, including two deaths, were reported from Dharavi on Tuesday, taking the total number of people affected by the disease in Mumbais slum area to 55.

Cases are increasing day by day, but this is the result of our proactive search operation of high-risk contacts and testing methods. We have successfully tracked 1,381 high-risk contacts and 3,450 low-risk contacts to avoid further spread of the disease, said Kiran Dighavkar, assistant commissioner, G-North Ward (which covers the area).

The Maharashtra government plans to deploy additional police forces around containment areas for controlling crowds, especially in crowded areas such as Dharavi

The civic body has quarantined 2,184 Dharavi residents and tested 138 high-risk contacts and 3,450 low-risk contacts of the patients from the slum so far. The BMC authorities are also ensuring that the quarantined people get essential supplies such as food and medicine.
Have Sheriff Offices in North Carolina, possibly even Beaufort County's Sheriff Office, become too political in the discharging of their sworn constitutional duties?

No, the sheriff is a constitutional officer.

Yes, the Sheriff Office, on strong occasion, often reverts back to political patronage in the dispensation of their sworn constitutional duties.
Robert Koske tried his best to stay ahead of the coronavirus, wiping down the door handles of his Sarasota, Florida, salon with bleach and making sure hand sanitizer was always nearby.

We tried as much as we could to keep this thing at bay, says Koske, owner of the Running With Scissors Hair Salon, who says the days before Easter would typically be his busiest, but in recent weeks the number of customers slowed to a trickle.

On April 2, the salon had to shut down because of a statewide order. And Koske is now trying to piece together loans to make ends meet.

My job is hands-on, he says, rattling off his bills from rent to electricity. "I need income.''

Robert Koske is trying to make ends meet after having to close his Florida salon because of the coronavirus

For millions of Americans, a trip to the barbershop or manicurist is as routine as a run to the grocery store. But that was before COVID-19, when many of those businesses had to shut their doors to slow the spread of the potentially deadly virus.

Now, weeks into mandatory shutdowns and orders to stay home, hairstylists, manicurists and masseuses are among the many personal care entrepreneurs struggling financially, tapping into their savings and applying for federal loans.

They worry that concerns about the virus may have a long-lasting impact on how they make a living. Customers may be wary of getting too close, no matter how badly they need their nails buffed or hair done. And some professionals admit they'd feel the same.

"I feel we would need to take necessary precautions with gloves and masks,'' says Alex Teyf, co-owner of Gino's Classic Barbershoppes in Atlanta, adding that it will take months for him to feel comfortable again. "It's ... surreal.''

Gino Teyf (left) and his son Alex own a trio of barber shops in Atlanta that have had to close because of the coronavirus crisis.

Dwindling business, then a shutdown

Koske says at this time of year, customers would typically flow in to his salon eight to 10 hours a day. But in March "our business was starting to slow,'' he says. "People were canceling appointments  We only had a couple of clients who wanted to come in.

Story continues

When Florida officials ordered nonessential businesses to shut their doors as of April 3, Koske, who's been in business since 2004, suddenly found himself out of work, along with a nail technician and three fellow stylists who work in his shop.

Now he is trying to get a loan through the Payment Protection Plan program that is part of the federal government's $2.2 trillion stimulus package.

I do have a little money saved, but not much,'' Koske says, adding that his landlord has given him a one-month abatement on rent. "It could get me to the first or second week of May.''

Among small business owners, 71% fear they'll never get back on their feet in the wake of the economic crisis sparked by COVID-19, according to a survey by LendingTree.

Nearly one out of every two entrepreneurs said they've taken on debt to survive, while 34% say they have tried to get aid but were not approved, and 69% say they do not have enough money to keep operating for another 90 days.

Small businesses in virtually every industry and state have been hit hard by the coronavirus, and some will never reopen, Hunter Stunzi, senior vice president of small business and investments at LendingTree, said in a statement. Unfortunately attempts by lawmakers to clear a path for rapid funding have so far fallen short, as too many businesses are unsure or unable to access funds fast enough to save jobs."

Alex Teyf and his family shuttered their trio of barbershops in mid-March, long before they were ordered to, intending to give them a deep cleaning then reopen within three days.

"Weve been extending every week now since then,'' he says of the shutdown. "I feel like I'm in Alfred Hitchcock's version of 'Groundhog Day.'''

If rapid testing for the coronavirus isn't available whenever they do reopen, Teyf says he believes his more than two dozen employees should wear protective gear, though "cutting hair with gloves isn't very easy,'' he says.

But Teyf says they need to get back to work. He filed for unemployment on his employees' behalf, and they have started receiving benefits, but the maximum state payment of $365 a week equals only about 20% of their usual pay.

"What really hits home every day is that Ive got a staff of over 25 people that Im concerned about putting food on the table,'' Teyf says. "They need to work, want to work. There's demand for our services, so it's frustrating.''

But is it safe?

Kyle Hargis, who hasnt had a hair cut in three weeks, says fears of COVID-19 won't keep him from hopping back into a barber's chair.

I would go right now if I could, says Hargis, who lives in Las Vegas and works at one of the local hotels.Its just like anything else. You could be scared to go to the grocery store, but youve got to get food ... Im not going to be scared of life because of this.

Others worry that even if local officials give businesses an all-clear, how safe will it be to be touched by a manicurist, masseuse or make up artist?

Any contact you make has a potential for you contracting something that they may have,'' says Philip M. Tierno, Jr., professor of microbiology and pathology at New York University's School of Medicine, who noted that 25% of those who contracted coronavirus got it from people who never knew they had it. "So yes, there is a risk.''

He feels that masks and other safeguards should have been standard practice even before the outbreak. "We make each other sick from respiratory infections simply by coughing, talking, sneezing into the face of a person,'' he says. "Even breathing into the face of a person can transmit organisms.''

Cynthia Bourghol is concerned about returning to a nail salon in the wake of the COVID-19 crisis

Cynthia Bourghol says those are exactly her concerns.

"Its probably going to be anywhere from three to six months for me to feel comfortable,'' said Bourghol, a college student in Costa Mesa, California, who used to get her nails done every three weeks, but hasn't had a manicure or hair treatment since before Valentine's Day. "Ive decided not to do my hair (professionally)  and I removed all nail polish. Im natural for now.''

She's dying her own hair for the first time. But she'll likely visit her hairdresser sooner than she will her nail salon.

Relief for businesses?: Fed launches programs to provide $2.3 trillion in loans aimed at businesses, states and cities

How to get unemployment: Laid off or furloughed because of COVID-19? We answer your questions about unemployment benefits

"The fact theyre touching our bare hands with their bare hands just makes me very uncomfortable,'' Bourghol says of getting a manicure. She also fears being in busy spaces where people could have the virus and not know it. "That's pretty alarming to me.''

Chaiya Sherman is relying on help from her family to weather the coronavirus crisis after patients stopped visiting her acupuncture business.

New businesses in peril

As an acupuncturist, Chaiya Sherman's practice in Seattle, Washington, is considered essential. But she stopped going to the office weeks ago when clients stopped coming.

"It's taken me a year to build a practice, and in a month I watched it fall apart,'' says Sherman, who went from seeing a record number of clients in February to watching her patient list drop precipitously over the next three weeks. Finally "I was like I might as well just go home and take care of my kids.''

Sherman used up her savings last month and has filed for unemployment. For now, she is relying on her family for financial help.

While her decision to return to work will depend largely on what state officials say, she hopes to resume seeing clients in May and she believes they will come back.

"I think in general they will trust us to make the right decision,'' she says of herself and her peers. But Sherman admits it may take a little time to feel at ease.

"Personally, I want to see widespread testing,'' she says "We need to just protect each other at this point.''

Sam Johnson was also just getting her business on its feet when a statewide order in March forced her to shutter her hair salon in South Orange, New Jersey.

"Literally, it was my (one) month anniversary when they told us I had to close down,'' she says. "I'm not getting any news on when we're going to open back up, so now I'm getting nervous.''

To stay afloat, she's relying on savings, applying for grants, and looking at launching a gift card program where clients prepay for appointments.

"I put all my money into getting this salon up and running with no loans or grants,'' she says. "Now I'm here applying ... I got the place up and running (and) I really dont want to lose it.

Not essential, but necessary

Brittney Chin says she understood why state officials ordered her nail salon in Chino, California, to close late last month. But she says her service is more necessary than some might realize.

"I know that nails to the general public (aren't) essential,'' she says, but "I do what I do because it makes people happy. It gives them confidence. It's time they get to get away from their family, or issues going on in their lives. It's a safe space.''

Chin's filed for unemployment, but she is faring financially better than some other small business owners because she still lives at home with her parents.

For now, she's spending much of her time shaping and painting press on nails for clients, leaving them on her doorstep for pick up, and even sending a pair to a customer in New York who follows her on Instagram and wanted them for her birthday.

"Im not charging as much as I used to make per hour working in a salon,'' she says, "but it's something I want to be able to offer my clients. Some dont have jobs ... and I know things are difficult right now.

A new normal

While testing for COVID-19 still isn't widespread, a second wave of checks to determine who's developed antibodies to the virus would be necessary for large numbers of people to safely return to their routines, says Tierno.

"I think everybody is a little bit more aware than they ever were before,'' Tierno says. When you hear the number of people that died, or the number of people who could have died ... thats going to be indelible. Thats going to be with all of us for our lifetime.

Even if there's no immediate return to normal, Sam Johnson is preparing to get back to business. When she reopens, she'll continue to wear a mask and refrain from crowding the salon to make her clients feel comfortable.

After this is over, Im not going to be afraid to go back out there and do hair,'' she says. "I'm going to try to rest up right now and I will be ready and excited when we do open back up.''

Contributing: Michael Braga

Follow Charisse Jones on Twitter @charissejones

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Coronavirus: Barber shops, salons suffer amid concerns about the virus
A man wearing a face mask walks at the Gwanghwamun Square in downtown Seoul, Thursday, April 9, 2020. AP



The International Monetary Fund (IMF) predicted Tuesday that South Korea's economy would shrink 1.2 percent this year as the coronavirus pandemic disrupts global businesses and lockdown measures ravage consumer demand.



The IMF forecast is in line with projections by many global ratings agencies, which expected South Korea to suffer the first annual contraction of its economy since 1998, when the Asian financial crisis hit the nation.



In January, the IMF expected South Korea's economy to grow 2.2 percent this year.



The IMF said the "forecast embodies Korea's comprehensive approach in containing the COVID-19 outbreak and quick economic policy response, which have helped mitigate the negative impact on domestic activity."



"However, given Korea's high degree of openness, the growth prospects are constrained by very weak external demand, as reflected in sharply lower growth projections for Korea's main trading partners," it said.



If the pandemic is brought under control in the second-quarter of this year, the IMF predicted that South Korea's economy could grow 3.4 percent in 2021.



The rapidly-spreading coronavirus pandemic is expected to cause a global recession this year as it has shut down factories and cities.



The global economy is expected to shrink 3 percent this year, compared with its January prediction of a 3.3 percent expansion, the IMF said.



Under the scenario that the pandemic is waned in the second quarter, the global economy could grow 5.8 percent next year, the IMF said.



The U.S. economy is expected to shrink 4.7 percent this year, while the Chinese economy is forecast to grow 1.2 percent this year, the IMF said.



Global trade is likely to fall 11 percent this year and oil prices are predicted to be averaged at $35.61 per barrel this year, down 42 percent from a year ago, the IMF said.



Last week, the Bank of Korea (BOK) kept its policy rate frozen at an all-time low of 0.75 percent, after delivering an emergency rate cut on March 16.



But the central bank said its annual growth target of 2.1 percent may not be met this year.



Last month, the Korean government unveiled plans to double the size of its emergency-financing aid package to 100 trillion won for businesses here under growing stress from the coronavirus pandemic.



Many analysts at home and abroad expected Korea's economy to shrink in the first half of this year.



Global rating agency Fitch forecast the Korean economy to shrink 0.6 percent in the first quarter and 0.9 percent in the second quarter. The country last saw its economy shrink for more than two consecutive quarters in 2003.



Some believe two consecutive quarters of contraction may place the country's annual figures in the red as well.



S&P Global Ratings forecast Korea's economy to shrink 0.6 percent on-year this year.



In the first 10 days of April, Korea's exports dropped 18.6 percent on year to $12.2 billion.



By segment, exports of memory chips, a key item, fell 1.5 percent, and those of automobiles also declined 7.1 percent over the 10-day period from a year earlier.



By country, shipments to China dropped 10.2 percent on-year, while shipments to the United States fell 3.4 percent.



The Korean economy grew 2 percent from a year earlier last year, the slowest on-year growth since 2009. (Yonhap)


A savvy homeowner has told how she turned an empty and unused cupboard into the pantry she'd always dreamed of - using budget buys from the likes of Ikea and Amazon.

Carla Yearsley, from the UK, took to Facebook group DIY On A Budget Official and explained how after spending over a year looking for their together home, she and her partner found their perfect house in November 2019.

Alongside impressive before and after photos of the converted room, she continued: 'Im such a home bird and have wanted a pantry since I was little. This weekend, besides a lot of gin, we (he did most of it) turned this... into this... I love it!'

And DIY fans from across the nation were quick to comment on the unrecognisable transformation - with one going so far as to brand the chic new pantry, 'heaven.'

Carla Yearsley, from the UK, took to Facebook group DIY On A Budget Official, and shared before and after photos of what is now, an impressive pantry. Pictured, before the transformation

The savvy homeowner achieved the finished look using budget buys - including flooring from Amazon and shelving units from from Ikea. Pictured, after the transformation

In the initial post, Carla penned: 'Im such a home bird and have wanted a pantry since I was little. This weekend, besides a lot of gin, we (he did most of it) turned this... into this... I love it!' (pictured)

Carla went on to say how the room was converted on a budget - using self-adhesive vinyl tile flooring from Amazon, while the brackets, plant, cereal tubs and shelving units were bought from Ikea.

She added: 'We already had all the bits as I was planning on doing this before we went away in February but never got around to it - and just do happens we got back to COVID-19 so no excuses.

'I had this pasta already, I promise! I didnt get chance to panic buy, not that I would have, we were in Thailand and everything was gone by the time we got back.

'This is just healthy food I should have been eating in place of all the take outs.'

Carla already had all of the bits for the transformation before the lockdown - but had never got around to doing it before. Pictured, after the transformation

The chic new pantry features a stylish patterned floor - which was bought from Amazon (pictured)

Amongst the hundreds of comments, on impressed DIY fan wrote: 'So jealous, love love a good pantry' (pictured)

The post, which has since garnered over 6, 300 likes, was also inundated with thousands of comments.

'So jealous, love love a good pantry,' commented one, while a second enthused: 'Looks brilliant. I would love a pantry!'

A third added: 'Wish I had the space for something like this!! Looks amazing,' while a fourth penned: 'I need this. It looks so good!'

A further tagged her partner and commented: 'Thats what you could do in my cupboard upstairs,' while another agreed: 'It all looks stunning very tidy and organised.'
Amid spurt in coronavirus



cases, the Odisha government is set to have 36 dedicated hospitals soon for treatment of COVID-19 patients, an official said on Wednesday.

These hospitals covering all the 30 districts of the state will have a combined bed capacity of 6,000, he said.

As of now, "20 exclusive Covid hospitals" have already been made operational in 18 districts in the state with a total bed strength of 3,420 and 197 ICU facilities as part of the government's preparedness to deal with the pandemic, he said.

"We are taking concrete steps to make 16 more dedicated Covid hospitals in rest of the districts within the stipulated time frame.

"The aim is to add 2,282 more beds and 38 ICU beds very soon to strengthen our preparedness to contain COVID-19," the senior official said.

Chief Minister Naveen Patnaik has given direction for making functional all the proposed Covid hospitals in the state within a week, he said, adding that officials are working on a war footing to achieve the goal.

Among the upcoming dedicated Covid hospitals is a 110 -bedded facility being established at Jharsuguda.

All the preparations in this regard are in full swing to ensure that the hospital is operational at the earliest, the official said.

Jharsuguda district administration has already signed an MoU with HITECH Medical College which will ensure operationalisation of the hospital.

The facility is being developed at the old district headquarters hospital at Mangal Bazar, he said.

As part of the corporate support to fight COVID-19, Vedanta Jharsuguda has committed more than Rs 2 crore to mobilise medical equipment, medicines, ventilators, beds, etc for the upcoming hospital, a company official said.

Two more new Covid hospitals with a total 300 bed capacity are coming up in partnership with National Aluminium Company (NALCO) and Paradip Port Trust (PPT) as part of the preparedness to deal with corona menace.

While Nalco has come forward to fund an exclusive 200 bedded hospital at Nabarangpur, PPT will set up a dedicated facility with 100 beds for corona patients in Paradip in Jagatsinghpur district, officials said.

Similar hospitals exclusively for treatment of coronavirus-infected patients are going to be readied very soon in Sundargarh, Sambalpur, Deogarh, Sonepur, Nuapada, Baripada, Angul, Puri, Phulbani, Cuttack and Nayagarh district, they said.

"The aim is to ensure faster tests, diagnosis and proper treatment of suspected cases and confirmed patients," an official said.

At present, there are two dedicated hospitals in Bhubaneswar with a combined bed capacity of around 1,100, while Cuttack city also has an exclusive facility.

Regarding testing of samples of suspected cases, he said Covid tests are now being conducted in a large number of centres located at almost all regions of the state.

Apart from RMRC, AIIMS and ILS in Bhubaneswar and SCB Medical College and Hospital in Cuttack, the MKCG Medical College and Hospital in Berhampur and IGH, Rourkela have started testing of samples.

Steps are also being taken to ensure availability of medicines and equipment, personal protective gears and oxygen cylinders, the official said, adding that the state has adequate stocks of these materials at presents.

As per the chief ministers directions, officials are ensuring a balanced distribution of medicines and equipment among exclusive hospitals, testing centres and other government health institutions.

"Adequate stocks of essential medicines including antibiotics are available for five months of consumption. We also have enough stock of three-layer masks, PPEs and hand sanitisers," the official said.

So far, 1.53 lakh people including doctors and healthcare personnel have been given special training to fight COVID-19 in the state, he added.

Odisha has reported 60 COVID-19 cases so far while 18 persons have recovered from the disease.

A 72-year-old patient from the state capital died of the disease on April 6.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Governor Tom Wolf has advised all Pennsylvanians to wear facial coverings when they venture outside their homes during the coronavirus pandemic. But when it comes to face masks, there are three that people talk about the most: N95s, surgical masks and the homemade cloth masks. So what are the differences between them? And what are the requirements for a good homemade cloth mask? The video above answers all those questions and more.

The information in the video comes from the Centers for Disease Control, which made a handy infographic describing the differences between the N95 respirators and surgical masks. Its also released a guide on cloth face coverings, including how to make one at home.

Making masks has been one way the public has been able to help the fight against the spread of COVID-19. One Pennsylvania woman has already made thousands for healthcare workers.

One thing to remember with masks is to always take them off properly. You need to remember that the front could be contaminated, so you dont want to touch it. Instead, remove the mask through the ties or loops that kept it on your face. Also be sure to wash your hands immediately after taking the mask off. You can see some other tips on the best way to wear and care for homemade masks here.

More videos about COVID-19:

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The U.S. government has started sending $1,200 checks to Americans to help ease the financial pain caused by shutting down the economy to fight the deadly coronavirus. By Wednesday, 80 million people are expected to receive a direct deposit in their bank account, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said.

The checks are the centerpiece of the U.S. government's economic relief package, and many Americans have taken to social media to celebrate the arrival of the money by posting photos of the money hitting their bank account. Singles earning up to $75,000 a year receive a payment of $1,200. Married couples earning up to $150,000 a year receive a payment of $2,400. Parents receive an additional $500 for each child under 17.

Early evidence indicates Americans are using the money to buy the basics, including food and gas. Netspend, which processed nearly $1 billion in relief payments by Monday, said its customers are using the government money "for groceries, fast food, pharmacies and gas, as well as withdrawing cash from ATMs." More than half of the transactions were PIN-based at AMTs or grocery stores, and about a quarter were done online.

Daniel Ruffner received his payment Friday night on his Netspend prepaid debit card. It was a huge relief since he's out of work. He is a cook at a little restaurant that's currently closed at a popular upstate New York campsite. He used some of the $1,200 money to buy groceries and pay the heating and internet bills. The rest is going toward rent.

"I've just been stocking up on food and paying all of the bills. It's nice to see finally be able to see my bills go to zero," said Ruffner, who lives in Rochester and takes care of his mother and son.

Some Americans like Camilla Chavez of Delaware say their check is "pending" in their bank account. Chavez banks with a credit union and saw the pending notice on Sunday. Although the government sent the money out Friday, many banks needed three business days to process the checks, which is why millions of Americans will have the money available in their bank account on Wednesday.

About 125 million Americans are expected to receive the one-time payment. The first wave of recipients includes mainly people who filed a 2018 or 2019 tax return and gave the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) their direct deposit information.

The IRS plans to have a "Get My Payment" website running by the end of the week where people can check the status of their payment if they have not received it and input their direction deposit information. Seniors and disabled Americans on Social Security will automatically receive the checks in the coming weeks. Other low-income Americans who do not normally file a tax return need to input their basic information on a new website the IRS set up. It will take time for the IRS to send people checks in the mail who do not have their direct deposit info on file with the government.

More for you U.S. stocks plunge amid steep falls in oil prices, bank earnings and retail sales

On Twitter, people said they plan to spend the money on everything from paying credit card bills and child support to buying wish list items like shoes and video games. The last time the government sent most Americans checks was 2008. A study found that 50 to 90 percent of the check was spent over three months, a boost to the economy and much needed help for many families out of work.

Financial planners have urged people to use the money to buy basic necessities or to pay off debt. As the nation has opted to shut down the economy to try to stop the spread of the coronavirus, many people have lost their jobs and are struggling to pay bills. Others worry their job could be axed if business doesn't pick up soon.

In the past three weeks, nearly 17 million Americans have applied for unemployment. Economists say the nation's unemployment rate is likely to hit 15 percent this month, the worst since the Great Depression era.

Chavez is one of the millions who lost their jobs. She worked at an outlet mall near Rehoboth Beach, Delaware. The mall shut quickly after President Donald Trump announced on March 16 that it wasn't safe for more than 10 people to gather. The mall where Chavez works is popular with tourists who come from around the world. She understands why it closed, but the past month has been a huge strain on her and her parents. Her mother tested positive for covid-19, so both of her parents have stopped working as well.

"Losing my job and not working for four weeks now has put me in a position where I had to use my savings and put charges on my credit card," Chavez said. "This really put me in a tough situation."

Chavez, 22, bought her parents groceries and left it on their door so they would not have to leave their home. Her mother is improving, but the family remains careful. Chavez applied for unemployment but was denied. She has tried to call numerous times, but the phone lines are always busy. Her parents gave her a break on April rent, but she plans to use the relief check to pay them by the end of the week.

The Washington Post spoke with four others who had received their check or saw it pending in their bank account. Two were putting it toward students loans or college fees. Another was saving it out of fear of being furloughed soon. And another planned to donate the money.

Congress intended for most middle-class and less affluent Americans to receive a check, but there are some groups that were left out. Most high school seniors and college students are not getting any money, even if they lost a job. People who are claimed as a "dependent" on someone else's tax return, as many college students are, do not qualify for the stimulus checks. And parents only receive payments for children under 17. Adult dependents, including some disabled who live with relatives, are also excluded.
South Africa: Suspect arrested for selling fake permits

Police have arrested a 22-year-old suspect for selling fraudulent permits to informal business owners.

It is alleged that the suspect from Olivenhoutbosch, Centurion in Pretoria, was selling permits to business owners who are not part of essential services.

The Hawks Serious Corruption Investigation office was alerted. The team made contact with the suspect under the pretext of wanting to buy the permits.

The suspect met with a team member and was immediately placed under arrest after he produced a permit for a R300 payment, Police said in a statement.

The team proceeded to his house where they seized a laptop and other documents. He is expected to appear in the Pretoria Magistrate Court on Wednesday.

Meanwhile, the Acting Director-General of the Department of Social Development, Mzolisi Toni, has noted with concern the circulation of a letter on social media platforms which authorises Scientology Volunteer Ministries, an NPO, to render sanitising services to DSD National and DSD Provincial facilities during the COVID-19 lockdown.

The letter, dated 02 April 2020, which is on the Department of Social Developments official letterhead under the signature of the Acting Director-General is legitimate.

The Acting Director-General, however, wishes to put it on record that the only agreement that existed between the Department of Social Development and Scientology Volunteer Ministries was a once-off agreement that involved the fumigation of its premises and facilities, the Department of Social Development said in a statement.

To date, the NPO has rendered free fumigation services at the departments head office in Pretoria, the Gauteng Social Development head office in Johannesburg and a number of DSD facilities in the Gauteng region.

Unfortunately, due to the fact that there are currently persons calling door to door claiming to represent the Scientology Volunteer Ministries and carrying out COVID-19 sanitisation on behalf of the department, the Department and the Scientology Volunteer Ministries have agreed to terminate the fumigation agreement.

The department acknowledges the good work of the church but cannot be drawn into misrepresentation when the prime focus of the department is on rolling out interventions to mitigate against COVID-19.

The Acting Director-General wishes to warn members of the public that the department has not contracted or partnered with any organisation to conduct door to door sanitisation for COVID-19, the department said.

Toni advises members of the public to remain vigilant of opportunists and criminals who want to take advantage of them during the lockdown period.

Under no circumstances would the Acting Director-General direct an Accounting Officer of another public entity/organisation or a household to use an NPO for unsolicited services, more so when the services in question do not relate to the core mandate of the department.

The Department of Social Development is committed to playing a role in offering services and relief to vulnerable groups during the countrys fight against the COVID-19 pandemic, the department said.  SAnews.gov.za

This story has been published on: 2020-04-15. To contact the author, please use the contact details within the article.
A Toronto man has been found not criminally responsible for stabbing his beloved grandmother to death and trying to kill a health-care worker inside the seniors Etobicoke home on Aug. 18, 2018.

Michael Colatosti, 33, fatally stabbed 84-year-old Elena Marcucci and attacked Osayuki Erhabor believing the two women were evil robots whom he had to stop from taking over the world, court was told.

Superior Court Justice John McMahon said Wednesday that after considering the evidence of a forensic psychiatrist, he had no hesitation finding that this was a motiveless crime based on Colatostis delusional state, which rendered him incapable of knowing his actions were legally and morally wrong. He noted psychological testing determined Colatosti was not malingering.

At the time, Erhabor was in the Etobicoke home caring for Colatostis grandfather, who was blind, had dementia and was in a wheelchair.

Because of the COVID-19 pandemic, Wednesdays trial proceeded by way of a virtual court, with the accused at the Toronto South Detention Centre and everyone else communicating via video and audio conference. A court reporter recorded the proceeding.

The victims final moments were horrifying. On Aug. 18, 2018, around the supper hour, Colatosti suddenly emerged from the basement carrying with a kitchen knife, yelling You are going to die today.

The two women fled to the bathroom and Colatosti, speaking incoherently, followed, smashing through the door and stabbing his grandmother 11 times. He then stabbed Erhabor in the neck and head, while she desperately tried to defend herself. She escaped and ran to a nearby plaza, where police were called.

Colatostis grandfather, John Marcucci, was unharmed.

Reviewing the evidence, McMahon said that after Colatosti became estranged from his parents, he moved in with his grandparents, with whom he had a loving relationship. They were like second parents to me, Colatosti told a psychiatrist. He helped care for his grandfather.

Court heard Colatosti had problems with alcohol and excessive cannabis consumption but had no criminal record. He lost his banking job due to erratic behaviour and two years before the murder was ordered to undergo a psychiatric assessment after an altercation with his father.

In the months leading up to the tragedy, Colatostis episodes of delusional and paranoid behaviour increased, the judge said.

Colatosti was arrested at the scene and taken to the police station, where he continued to speak incoherently and exhibit psychotic behaviour captured by police video.

McMahon said he accepted the opinion of Dr. Ian Swayze who, after interviewing Colatosti and family members, concluded he was suffering from an unspecified psychotic disorder.

The judge noted there was no history of animosity, aggression or any financial motive.

Given his impostor delusions, and his fixed false belief the malevolent robots needed to be stopped, there was no way for him to know ... right from wrong, McMahon said.

At the outset of the virtual hearing, Crown attorney Patrick Travers reduced Colatostis charge of first-degree murder to second, since there was no evidence of planning or deliberation.

Travers and defence lawyer Robert Karrass joined the defence in supporting an NCR defence and verdict.

In a victim-impact statement read into the court record, Elena Marcuccis family said their hearts are broken forever, particularly since she was killed by her grandson whom she had tried desperately to help.

Her husband of 67 years had to listen to his wife being murdered, the statement said. He died traumatized five weeks later. While the family tries to move forward, they hope Colatosti receives the treatment he needs.

Erhabors victim-impact statement said she has gone from someone with a zest for life to sometimes wishing she was never born. She can no longer trust people, nor work. She continues to undergo physiotherapy and has no insurance or financial support.

McMahon said it will be up to the Ontario Review Board to determine what treatment Colatosti should receive.
MARGATE  Jewish Family Service of Atlantic and Cape May Counties on Wednesday called for donations to support its outreach work.

The organization supports more than 8,000 individuals and families each year, according to a news release from the nonprofit, through their food pantry, housing resources, counseling and older adult services, among others.

JFS is committed to helping those in need. However, we cant do it alone, according to the release. As a JFS Friend, your contribution ensures we can provide assistance as well as programs and events for residences throughout our community, and with todays economic environment, your support is needed now more than ever.

Every dollar helps, according to the release. The organization said that:

$36 will feed a family through food pantry services

$50 will offset the cost of a counseling session for someone with anxiety

$100 will assure a month of kosher meals for a senior sheltered in their home

$250 will provide emergency shelter for a family who otherwise might be homeless

Contributions can be mailed to Jewish Family Service, 607 N. Jerome Avenue, Margate, NJ 08402, or made online at jfsatlantic.org.

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Bank of Americas pre-tax income fell by about half in the first quarter as the bank set aside billions in reserve to prepare for coming defaults caused by the economic consequence of the new coronavirus pandemic.

The bank joined all of its peer banks in setting aside billions to gird for the impact that mass unemployment and a worldwide economic slowdown will have the global economy, setting aside $3.6 billion, it said Wednesday. Wells Fargo set aside $3.1 billion for the same purpose Tuesday.

Bank of Americas net income for the quarter fell to $4 billion, from $7.3 billion in the same quarter last year. Excluding the reserve it set aside, pre-tax income fell 5%. Shares fell about 5% as of mid-day Wednesday trading.

The struggles of many small businesses and individuals shone through in the earnings.

The bank deferred nearly a million payments through April 8, four out of five of which were credit card payments. About a third of the banks small business loan portfolio are in accounts that have requested payment deferrals.

Growing in a crisis

We remain a source of strength, CEO Brian Moynihan said in a statement. Our customers trusted us with $149 billion in additional deposits since year-end, which enabled us to provide liquidity to people, small business owners and corporate clients.

Bank assets rose, as consumers moved their holdings into cash and companies drew down more of their loans. Total assets at the ended of the quarter were higher, at $2.62 trillion, up from $2.43 trillion at the end of last year.

After Bank of America limped through the financial crisis and its wake, Moynihan aggressively sought to avoid a repeat of 2008 when he took the top job in 2010. The bank has reduced its risk, some on its own volition, some because of new financial regulation, and enters the current economic crisis in a far stronger position than it came into the last one.

Weve run this company over the past 10 years so we could be part of the solution in a crisis like this, said Paul Donofrio, the banks chief financial officer, on a call with reporters. He pointed to the psychology that may have underpinned the flow of billions in deposits into the bank the last quarter.

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Customers were drawn to the safety and soundness of Bank of America, he said.

The banks digital products, a huge investment in recent years, saw massive growth as consumers and businesses avoided going into branches during the pandemic. Active mobile banking users rose 10% to 29.8 million, while Merrill Lynch saw a 40% jump for the wealth management brands mobile app.

Zelle, the digital payments platform owned by a consortium of banks including Bank of America, saw volume rise 73% during the quarter to $27 billion, the bank disclosed. The app now has 10.4 million users.

Bank of America reported its first earnings since the global coronavirus pandemic hit Wednesday.

No layoffs

The Charlotte-based bank, which employs 16,000 in the city, has already said it wont lay people off during the pandemic.

It has shifted over 150,000 workers to work-from-home during the pandemic, including many call center workers, who are not traditionally able to work remotely. The bank has distributed 90,000 laptops to employees, it said.

Bank of America has kept all of its 4,300 branches open with limited hours so far, unlike other banks which have selectively closed some locations. Bank of America also plans to donate $100 million to help communities recover from the effects of the virus.

While some critics have called for big banks to stop paying out their dividend to shareholders and instead use the capital to lend, bank executives said Wednesday that they planned to keep the money flowing to shareholders. Wells Fargo also said yesterday it would continue its dividend.

Both banks said last month that they didnt plan to buy back shares, as part of an industry agreement from major banks.

On Tuesday, Wells Fargo, facing challenging regulatory restrictions, reported a penny of profit per share. Truist, the other major bank headquartered in Charlotte, reports earnings Monday.
Kwara State Government has dismissed claims going round the state, which suggests that the local delicacy, Amala, cures COVID-19.

Permanent Secretary, state Ministry of Health, Dr Abubakar Ayinla, dispelled the claims on Tuesday, April 14, in Ilorin during the daily routine meetings of the Medical Team of the Kwara COVID-19 Technical Committee in the state.

Ayinla said that the state government has set up the Risk Communication teams, among others, to manage rumours and fake news circulating as regards COVID-19 in the state.

He explained that the Risk Communication teams were set up to allay fears of misconception, while reiterating that COVID-19 has no cure for now and that amala cannot cure it.

Ayinla said that the confirmed patients with COVID-19 at the Sobi Isolation Centre were faring well, adding that the state government is caring for their necessary needs.

Also speaking, Dr Michael Oguntoye, the Director Primary Health Care at the Ministry of Health, explained that the state presently has three COVID-19 isolation centres across the state.

According to him, the Sobi Isolation Centre currently has 300 bed space for different levels of care as well as the intensive care unit together with high risk unit.

He noted that the whole of the Sobi hospital has been converted to an Isolation centre.

The other Isolation centres, he said, included the Hajj Transit Camp which has been turned to an Isolation centre and establishment of another Isolation camp at Offa.

The state currently has four confirmed cases of COVID-19, according to the Nigeria Centre for Disease Control (NCDC).
ST. LOUIS, April 15, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- Bunge Limited (NYSE: BG) will announce its results for the quarter ended March 31, 2020, on Wednesday, May 6, 2020, prior to the market opening. The company's management will also host a conference call at 8:00 a.m. Eastern (7:00 a.m. Central) to discuss the results. A slide presentation to accompany the discussion will be posted on www.bunge.com .

To listen to the call, please dial 1-844-735-3666. If you are located outside the United States or Canada, dial 1-412-317-5706. Please dial in five to 10 minutes before the scheduled start time. The call will also be webcast live at www.bunge.com .

To access the webcast, go to "Events & presentations" in the "Investors" section of the company's website. Select "Q1 2020 Bunge Limited Conference Call" and follow the prompts. Please go to the website at least 15 minutes prior to the call to register and download any necessary audio software.

A replay of the call will be available later in the day on May 6, 2020, continuing through June 6, 2020. To listen to it, please dial 1-877-344-7529 in the United States, 855-669-9658 in Canada, or 1-412-317-0088 in other locations. When prompted, enter confirmation code 10142737. A replay will also be available in "Past events" at "Events & presentations" in the "Investors" section of the company's website.

About Bunge Limited

Bunge (www.bunge.com,NYSE: BG) is a world leader in sourcing, processing and supplying oilseed and grain products and ingredients. Founded in 1818, Bunge's expansive network feeds and fuels a growing world, creating sustainable products and opportunities for more than 70,000 farmers and the consumers they serve across the globe. The company is headquartered in St. Louis, Missouri and has almost 25,000 employees worldwide who stand behind more than 350 port terminals, oilseed processing plants, grain facilities, and food and ingredient production and packaging facilities around the world.

Website Information

We routinely post important information for investors on our website, www.bunge.com, in the "Investors" section. We may use this website as a means of disclosing material, non-public information and for complying with our disclosure obligations under Regulation FD. Accordingly, investors should monitor the Investors section of our website, in addition to following our press releases, SEC filings, public conference calls, presentations and webcasts. The information contained on, or that may be accessed through, our website is not incorporated by reference into, and is not a part of, this document.

SOURCE Bunge Limited

Related Links

http://www.bunge.com


EUGENE, Ore.  Hands-on learning online is a new challenge in getting students ready for skilled jobs.

Northwest College of Construction is in Portland, but right now, all classes are online. They call their apprenticeships the original four-year degree.

Whether its construction, carpentry, concrete work or getting behind the wheel of heavy equipment, the first thing the college does is place you in a job with a contractor. From there, the construction industry pays for your tuition and books while you get paid and get hands-on training.

The training requires exams, which will come later when Gov. Kate Browns stay at home order is lifted.

Our classes are in modules rather than a classroom for the entire quarter unlike a regular college, so weve designed the courses so at the end, the instructors will do a quick refresher, and theyre going to do their hands-on performance and their exams, said Katrina Cloud with the Northwest College of Construction.

Cloud said construction workers in Oregon are fortunate. Brown ruled construction work essential amid the pandemic

Bridges are still being built, Cloud said. This is a great time to be looking at our infrastructure for roads and that sort of stuff and some of our contractors are really, really busy with schedules. Some have been pushed up, there have been layoffs for some folks but luckily we have a lot of contractors that are still able to pick up the other people who are laid off.

In Washington, construction is not considered essential, but there are some exceptions.
An international team of researchers have found a new way to speed up quantum computing that could pave the way for huge leaps forward in computer processing power.

Scientists from the University of Nottingham and University of Stockholm have sped-up trapped ion quantum computing using a new experimental approach -- trapped Rydberg ions; their results have just been published in Nature.

In conventional digital computers, logic gates consist of operational bits that are silicon based electronic devices. Information is encoded in two classical states ("0" and "1") of a bit. This means that capacities of a classical computer increase linearly with the number of bits. To deal with emerging scientific and industrial problems, large computing facilities or supercomputers are built.

Quantum entanglement enhancing capacity

A quantum computer is operated using quantum gates, i.e. basic circuit operations on quantum bits (qubits) that are made of microscopic quantum particles, such as atoms and molecules. A fundamentally new mechanism in a quantum computer is the utilisation of quantum entanglement, which can bind two or a group of qubits together such that their state can no longer be described by classical physics. The capacity of a quantum computer increases exponentially with the number of qubits. The efficient usage of quantum entanglement drastically enhances the capacity of a quantum computer to be able to deal with challenging problems in areas including cryptography, material, and medicine sciences.

Among the different physical systems that can be used to make a quantum computer, trapped ions have led the field for years. The main obstacle towards a large-scale trapped ion quantum computer is the slow-down of computing operations as the system is scaled-up. This new research may have found the answer to this problem.

The experimental work was conducted by the group of Markus Hennrich at SU using giant Rydberg ions, 100,000,000 times larger than normal atoms or ions. These huge ions are highly interactive, and exchange quantum information in less than a microsecond. The interaction between them creates quantum entanglement. Chi Zhang from the University of Stockholm and colleagues used the entangling interaction to carry out a quantum computing operation (an entangling gate) around 100 times faster than is typical in trapped ion systems.

Chi Zhang explains, "Usually quantum gates slow down in bigger systems. This isn't the case for our quantum gate and Rydberg ion gates in general! Our gate might allow quantum computers to be scaled up to sizes where they are truly useful!"

Theoretical calculations supporting the experiment and investigating error sources have been conducted by Weibin Li (University of Nottingham, UK) and Igor Lesanovsky (University of Nottingham, UK, and University of Tubingen, Germany). Their theoretical work confirmed that there is indeed no slowdown expected once the ion crystals become larger, highlighting the prospect of a scalable quantum computer.

Weibin Li, Assistant Professor, School of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Nottingham adds: "Our theoretical analysis shows that a trapped Rydberg ion quantum computer is not only fast, but also scalable, making large-scale quantum computation possible without worrying about environmental noise. The joint theoretical and experimental work demonstrate that quantum computation based on trapped Rydberg ions opens a new route to implement fast quantum gates and at the same time might overcome many obstacles found in other systems."

Currently the team is working to entangle larger numbers of ions and achieve even faster quantum computing operations.
Routine maintenance items took up much of the Hale County Commissioners agenda Monday morning when the court met for a regular meeting.

Each of the following items were approved with unanimous votes:
The Nigerian police has confirmed the arrest of Fatima Garba, a 28-year-old female armourer of a dreaded kidnap and armed robbery gang terrorising Sokoto, Kebbi, Kaduna and Niger states axis.

According to the Force Public Relations Officer, DCP Frank Mba who confirmed the arrest, Fatimas was recruited into the gang by her boyfriend, Abubakar Usman.

As an armourer, Fatima was responsible for ensuring the safety of the weapons used by the gang whenever not in use.

Fatima, who confessed of being the gangs armourer for over a year, claimed to receive a handsome reward each time the weapons were returned to her after each operation.

Read Also: Motorist Extorted By Nigerian Police Officer Gets Back His N40,000

She acknowledged knowing that the arms, which she usually keeps in a neatly dug hole in her compound were used for robberies, kidnappings and other criminal purposes.

Investigations show that Fatima, who is a trader and single mother of two, was recruited by her boyfriend, Abubakar Usman.

Other members of the gang include Samaila Usman , 28; Mohammed Ibrahim, 30; Mohammed Agali, 22; Dahiru Bello, 33; Shamsu Mohammed, 30; Mohammed Usman, 37; Umar Abdullahi, 33; Buhari Abubakar, 33 and Abubakar Garba, 37.

Since they began operations, the gang is estimated to have made over N12 million from their various criminal escapades.

Recovered from the gang are five AK-47 rifles, one G3 rifle, one Berretta pistol, 1,476 rounds of ammunition, 36 rounds of G3 ammunition, six AK-47 magazines, on operational vehicle, eight mobile phones, a box containing operational tools.

All the suspects will be charged to court after investigations.
Corigin Ventures has traditionally invested in real estate startups using capital from its parent company, New York real estate developer Corigin. The venture investment arm, founded in 2012, has its roots tied to property all over the east coast, from Miami multi-family residences to New York University student dorms. Thus, in the past, Corigin Ventures' investments have reflected more of the same: portfolio companies include real estate startups Compass and Bowery Valuation.

Now, Corigin's appetite is changing. Today, Corigin Ventures closed its first institutional fund at $36 million to invest in seed startups; this is the first independent fund from Corigin. With new limited partners in the mix, Corigin is pushing an investment strategy that includes marketplace and consumer startups. The firm also hired a new partner, Aubrie Pagano .

With new capital in hand, Corigin is looking to write large checks and lead seed rounds. The firms partners will use the debut fund to write checks between $500,000 to $1 million for pre-seed and seed-stage startups. Corigin will invest across 25 companies with this fund, at roughly six to 10 deals a year, according to David Goldberg, general partner at Corigin Ventures.

In the past, Corigin Ventures has invested in non-real estate startups like Imperfect Foods, a grocery and food waste startup, and Core, a meditation startup. However now, the firm is markedly moving beyond its original focus with this step outside its parent company. Corigin is looking at startups tackling areas like alternative healthcare and blue-collar needs. Its a focus that Pagano says is leaning into the experiences for the everyday person who is in Des Moines, Iowa.

So much technology has been built for a desktop and an office, Pagano said during an interview with TechCrunch. Were thinking about where the 99% is for daily life experiences.

Pagano is not new to investing and building out startups. In 2012, she launched Bow & Drape, a women's clothing and personalization company. She scaled her company to be featured in more than 350 department stores.

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From there she went into investing, which started as a side gig before Pagano worked with XFactor Ventures, a firm focused on female founders.

Corigins first fund is being announced at a time when many venture capitalists are slowing operations and doubling down on current investments in light of the pandemic and economic uncertainty.

Pagano says that Corigin has just finished communicating with portfolio companies on concerns and stresses theyre having during the pandemic. Now, Corigin is looking at strategically supporting our own company.

After, Pagano said, they will resume deal-making. Looking ahead, Pagano thinks there will be new opportunities to join in on rounds that before might have been too competitive to join. Sometimes the round moves so fast we dont even have a chance to look at it, Pagano said.

Now, she says, the slowing pace of the investor world means that new investors to the block can get a second look, and for startups, that might just mean a second chance at a term sheet.
Toronto, Ontario--(Newsfile Corp. - April 15, 2020) - Veta Resources Inc. ("Veta" or the "Company") announces that further to its press release dated December 23, 2019 it has converted the $200,000 convertible promissory note into 6,000,000 common shares in the capital of Veta.

The Company also announces that due to unprecedented circumstances relating to the access of capital as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, it has dropped its interest in the JOY Properties located in Chile.

Veta also intends to participate in the blanket relief program announced on March 18, 2020 (the "Blanket Order") by the Canadian Securities Administrators (the "CSA") extending deadlines to file financial statements, Management Discussion and Analysis ("MD&A"), the Company confirms that is relying on the relief therein in respect of its annual 2019 financial statements and MD&A, which it expects to file by June 15, 2020. Until the Company has filed such financial statements and MD&A, insiders of Veta are subject to the Company's share trading and black-out policy.

Other than as previously disclosed by the Company and disclosed in this release, there have been no material business developments since the date of the interim financial statements that were filed on November 19, 2019.

For more information, please contact:

Brian Jennings, President and CEO

Phone: (647) 348-0600

To view the source version of this press release, please visit https://www.newsfilecorp.com/release/54480
One in four of the biggest companies listed in London has slashed the amount of money paid to chief executives in the face of the coronavirus pandemic.

Most bosses at the 25 firms who have reduced pay have also cut their salaries and fees by 20 per cent, which is the same proportion furloughed workers are forfeiting.

However, some have gone further, according to a survey and analysis of FTSE 100 companies' announcements by the High Pay Centre.

The chief executive of Rentokil, Andy Ransom, has slashed his salary by 35 per cent, and donated the rest of it to an employee fund. However, three other companies are still paying shareholder dividends despite using the government's furlough scheme.

It comes as an official watchdog warned the economy could shrink by more than a third this quarter with two million people made jobless as the virus wreaks havoc.

The chief executive of Rentokil, Andy Ransom (left), has slashed his salary by 35 per cent, and donated the rest of it to an employee fund. Whitbread chief executive Alison Brittain (right) has agreed to a 30 per cent salary cut and will not take a bonus for the 2019-20 financial year

Ten companies intend to take advantage of the UK's job retention scheme, which allows businesses to furlough staff with 80 per cent of their salaries covered by the Government. This figure is likely to grow.

Bosses at Premier Inn owner Whitbread have agreed to cut their pay by 30 per cent as part of measures to mitigate the impact of coronavirus.

What are the FTSE 100 bosses doing about pay amid the pandemic? Andy Ransom , Rentokil chief executive - cuts his salary by 35% and donates rest of it to employee fund

, Rentokil chief executive - cuts his salary by 35% and donates rest of it to employee fund Alison Brittain , Whitbread chief executive - cuts her pay by 30% and will not take a bonus this year

, Whitbread chief executive - cuts her pay by 30% and will not take a bonus this year Alison Rose, RBS chief executive - 25% salary cut and will not be receiving a bonus

RBS chief executive - 25% salary cut and will not be receiving a bonus Carolyn McCall , ITV chief executive - salary cut by 20% and won't receive bonus this year Advertisement

Chief executive officer Alison Brittain and executive directors Nicholas Cadbury and Louise Smalley have all agreed to the salary reduction and will not take bonuses for the 2019-20 financial year.

The company said all other staff will receive full wages, with staff furloughed under the Government's coronavirus job retention scheme seeing their wages topped up by the firm.

RBS boss Alison Rose has seen her salary cut by 25 per cent, while she will also not be receiving a bonus.

ITV's Carolyn McCall will also not receive a 2020 bonus, with her salary being cut by 20 per cent.

'With the economy facing great uncertainty, and people's jobs and livelihoods, as well as a considerable amount of public money, now at stake, it's vital that companies make savings.

'Very high pay for top earners, who can easily afford a pay cut while still maintaining a lifestyle beyond the wildest dreams of most people, is the obvious place to start,' said Luke Hildyard, director of the High Pay Centre said.

RBS boss Alison Rose (left) has seen her salary cut by 25 per cent, while she will also not be receiving a bonus. ITV's Carolyn McCall (right) will also not receive a 2020 bonus, with her salary being cut by 20 per cent

It added: 'Our figures show that some companies are taking meaningful action in this respect by cancelling bonuses and incentive plans, or making donations to employee funds or the NHS. Too many, however, are making token gestures or doing nothing at all.'

Meanwhile, three firms on the FTSE 100 have send staff home without slashing dividends. Primark-owner Associated British Foods has said it will furlough 30,000 staff, but has not committed to slashing its dividend.

EasyJet is furloughing around 7,500 employees, however has been criticised for paying out 174 million in dividends last month, even as the coronavirus pandemic was hitting the airline sector hard.

Auto Trader has also said it would furlough staff and has not yet confirmed plans to slash dividends. However, it has warned that if things do not get better, shareholders might have to take a hit.

Bosses at the 25 FTSE 100 companies in London who have cut pay have also reduced their own salaries and fees by 20 per cent, the same proportion that furloughed workers are forfeiting

'No decision has yet been made regarding the final dividend for the 2020 financial year, although if the current environment persists then it is unlikely that one will be declared,' the business said in its most recent statement to shareholders.

Nine companies have cancelled or suspended their dividends, but have not yet said they will slash executive pay.

'As the country faces the long-term implications of this crisis, it is clear that we are going to have to achieve a much fairer balance between those at the top and everybody else in future,' Mr Hildyard said.

Yesterday, shocking analysis from the Office for Budget Responsibility underlined the trade-offs being made to combat the deadly disease by putting the country into lockdown.

It warned curbs staying in place for three months will slash GDP by 35 per cent, with unemployment soaring to 10 per cent and the government's deficit hitting 273billion - the highest level since the Second World War.

The watchdog ominously said it was assumed 'for now' there will not be any fundamental economic damage, and much of the crash will be unwound as pent-up demand is unleashed.

However, the resulting 13 per cent drop year-on-year is still worse than anything in the last century.

Responding to the chilling scenario - which emerged as the IMF predicted the worst global downturn since the Great Depression in 1929 - Chancellor Rishi Sunak said 'people should know there is hardship ahead'.

At the Downing Street briefing yesterday, he said the UK was facing 'tough times and there will be more to come'.
Energy conservation lies at the core of every physical theory. Effective mathematical models however can feature energy gain and/or loss and thus break the energy conservation law by only capturing the physics of a subsystem. As a result, the Hamiltonian, the function that describes the system's energy, loses an important mathematical property: it is no longer Hermitian. Such non-Hermitian Hamiltonians have successfully described experimental setups for both classical problems - in e.g. some optical systems and electrical circuits - and quantum ones, in modelling the motion of electrons in crystalline solids. In a new paper in EPJ D, physicists Rebekka Koch from the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands and Jan Carl Budich from Technische Universitat Dresden, in Germany, describe how these functions provide new insights into behaviour at the edges of topological materials.

However, non-Hermitian Hamiltonians break with concepts that are known from energy-conserving systems such as the bulk-boundary correspondence (BBC) in these materials. This correspondence relates the topological properties of the bulk of the material to the physics of the edges. In the Hermitian case, the bulk of such a material can be described by neglecting the edges and just assuming the material to be infinite or periodic, since boundary effects do not affect the physics of the inside.

Surprisingly, this holds no longer true if the energy is not conserved: the properties of the boundary suddenly have a huge influence on the bulk system and subsequently have to be taken into account. It leads to a drastically altered BBC (bulk-boundary correspondence) for non-Hermitian systems. In particular, Koch and Budich studied different strengths of the coupling between boundaries and their effect on the bulk system. Knowing that in realistic quantum mechanical systems there is always an interaction between the edges - admittedly an extremely small one - they explored the extent to which decoupled edges are generally observable. Koch and Budich found that the spectrum of the topological material is stable under physically motivated perturbations such as the suppressed interactions between the boundaries.

###

Reference

R Koch and J C Budich (2020) Bulk-boundary correspondence in non-Hermitian systems: stability analysis for generalized boundary conditions, European Physical Journal D 74:70, DOI: 10.1140/epjd/e2020-100641-y
- Health CS Mutahi Kagwe served as ICT Minister in retired president Mwai Kibaki's government

- The 62-year-old was credited with overseeing the construction of the first fibre optic cable project for Eastern Africa

- Kagwe was elected Nyeri senator in 2013 and served for one term before losing his seat to Ephraim Maina in the 2017 General Election

- Political analyst, Mutahi Ngunyi, said he was ripe to take over from Uhuru as the leader of the GEMA nation due to his "great" leadership skills in handling the coronavirus pandemic

Political analyst Mutahi Ngunyi has said Health Cabinet Secretary Mutahi Kagwe went to retired president Mwai Kibaki's school of politics and is a Mt Kenya kingpin in waiting.

Kagwe, a tenured politician, left a rich legacy as an energetic and results-oriented Cabinet Minister for Information and Communication in Kibaki's government and his appointment as Health CS was hailed by many.

READ ALSO: Govt quarantines 45 people who had contact with deceased Siaya COVID-19 patient

Health CS Mutahi Kagwe giving a press briefing on the coronavirus situation in Kenya. Photo: Ministry of Health.

Source: Facebook

READ ALSO: Mathira MP Rigathi Gachagua's mother-in-law dies in US, family unable to fly her home

Speaking to K24 TV in the evening of Sunday, April 12, Ngunyi opined the former Nyeri senator was ripe to take over the leadership mantle from President Uhuru Kenyatta when his second and final term expires in 2022.

"Mutahi Kagwe was created and nurtured in the Kibaki school of politics. If you hear him talk, he talks like Kibaki both in English and Swahili. He also shrubs the Kibaki way. When we talk about the ultimate succession of Uhuru Kenyatta, I think Kagwe places himself as a possible chief in waiting among the Kikuyus," Ngunyi said.

Political analyst Mutahi Ngunyi. Photo: Nairobi Wire.

Source: UGC

READ ALSO: Serikali yajitetea kuhusu mazishi ya kutatanisha yaliyofanyika Siaya

Kagwe's appointment as Health CS was a shot in the arm given he had been leading the Building Bridges Initiative (BBI) rallies in his native Nyeri county, that had emerged as one of the vote rich counties being eyed by William Ruto in his quest for the 2022 presidency.

The eloquent CS took the Health Ministry by storm and was recognised by an American based business daily - the Wall Street Journal, as an unlikely hero in the fight against coronavirus pandemic.

President Uhuru Kenyatta (r) greets Health CS Mutahi Kagwe at a past event. Photo: State House.

Source: Facebook

"Kenya's unlikely coronavirus hero is Health Minister Mutahi Kagwe. He was seen as a technocrat; too ordinary and emotionally distant in politics but these traits have become traits in coronavirus briefings," the paper reported.

In the Uhuru succession battle, Kagwe has emerged as his own man but it remains to be seen whether he would be able to succeed the president after he lost his Nyeri senatorial seat to Ephraim Maina in the 2017 General Election.

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.

Kenyans in China speak out on the discrimination of Africans by Chinese citizens | Tuko TV

Source: TUKO.co.ke
The decision by US President Donald Trump to freeze funding to the World Health Organization (WHO) amid the coronavirus pandemic is "deeply regrettable," Moussa Faki Mahamat, the chairman of the African Union Commission, said Wednesday.

"Today more than ever, the world depends on WHO's leadership to steer the global #Covid_19 pandemic response. Our collective responsibility to ensure WHO can fully carry out its mandate, has never been more urgent," Faki said in a Twitter post.

Trump on Tuesday announced that he would halt payments to the UN body that amounted to USD 400 million (366 million euros) last year.

He said the payments would be frozen pending a review of the WHO's role in "severely mismanaging and covering up the spread of the coronavirus" and accused the Geneva-based body of putting "political correctness above life-saving measures."



Trump charged that the outbreak could have been contained "with very little death" if the WHO had accurately assessed the situation in China, where the disease broke out late last year.

Africa has so far not been hit by the coronavirus as hard as other regions, but experts worry that weak health systems could quickly become overwhelmed by an influx of cases.

As of mid-Wednesday, there were 16,215 COVID-19 cases across all of Africa, resulting in 869 deaths, according to a toll compiled by AFP.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Archaeologists Discover Ancient Assyrian Treasures in Iraq Site Blown Up By ISIS

(DPA) -- German archaeologists have explored an ancient palace in Iraq that they could only access after the area was blown up by the Islamic State (IS) terrorist militia.

"The extremists caused a great deal of destruction, but we were able to gain insights because of it," Peter Miglus, Professor of Archaeology at the University of Heidelberg, said.

In the summer of 2014, IS supporters overran the city of Mosul in northern Iraq and later blew up a mosque on a hill above the grave of the biblical prophet Jonah. The mosque had been built over a military palace of the Assyrian Empire. After the blasting, the IS followers began to dig a system of several hundred metres of tunnels under the rubble, Miglus said.

When Iraqi security forces regained control of the city in 2017, the tunnels were preserved -- and with them access to the military palace.

At the Iraqi antiquities authority's request, researchers from the University of Heidelberg began to explore the site. The scientists discovered rare archaeological treasures in the tunnels. Inside the tunnel system, they came across the throne room of the military palace, which was once about 55 metres long. "The palace is partly well preserved," said Miglus.

Islamic State destroyed numerous archaeological remains during its rule over large areas of Iraq and Syria. South of Mosul, they blew up an approximately 3,000-year-old Assyrian palace in the former royal city of Nimrud. As elsewhere, they wanted to destroy everything they considered to be the places of "unbelievers". Above all, they reject any form of veneration of saints.
The CipherTrace offering provides us with quality information to be able to assess risk associated with digital asset wallets and allows us the flexibility to establish our own blockchain analysis processes on top of data that is used by the best and brightest.

Zaftr Inc. (Zaftr), a leading digital asset seller for investment funds, family offices and high net-worth individuals, is pleased to announce its use of CipherTraces monitoring service to ensure compliance and privacy in trusted, high-value, peer-to-peer cryptocurrency transactions. By utilizing CipherTraces risk mitigation, anti-money laundering, and anti-terrorist financing solutions, Zaftr can ensure it operates at the highest standards of integrity.

We see incredible potential in the nascent digital asset space for those who are willing and knowledgeable to conduct themselves the right way  in a trusted and fully compliant manner. As we have seen, companies that are not committed to that ideal will not be able to survive in the cryptocurrency space, and nor should they. explains Nathan Montgomery, the President & CEO of Zaftr. The CipherTrace offering provides us with quality information to be able to assess risk associated with digital asset wallets and allows us the flexibility to establish our own blockchain analysis processes on top of data that is used by the best and brightest. Through the CipherTrace solution, we can identify questionable or verifiably criminal activity and act accordingly to ensure the security of ourselves, our suppliers, and our customers.

Zaftrs development of state-of-the-art transaction facilitation procedures for high value, person-to-institution and whale-to-whale transactions requires the implementation of automated and trusted due-diligence solutions. A core element for Zaftrs privacy and anti-money laundering program involves utilizing CipherTrace Sentry monitoring service to identify any funds from criminal or suspicious activity that would otherwise remain undetected while maintaining client privacy.

At CipherTrace we believe in the longevity of the cryptocurrency industry, and so supporting companies like Zaftr that prioritize making the digital asset economy more private, secure, and compliant is a big part of our mission, expressed Dave Jevans, CEO and a founder of CipherTrace. Zaftrs clients, among other major financial players, should feel confident in the legality of peer-to-peer trades within the trusted digital asset class. Weve structured our monitoring services to provide that assurance to companies like Zaftr.

For media inquiries, please contact Kili Wall at (310) 260-7901 or Kili(at)MelrosePR(dot)com.

About Zaftr

Zaftr is a premiere digital asset service provider and direct buyer and seller of digital assets based in Canada. Founded by leading legal and cybersecurity professionals, Zaftr provides a trusted, streamlined and sophisticated solution for investment funds, investment advisors, family offices and high net worth individuals to buy and sell digital assets. Through the facilitation of more than $10 billion in corporate and financial transactions, Zaftrs founders have created a proprietary transaction closing procedure to ensure security for all parties. Zaftrs ability to close multimillion dollar digital asset sales transactions at globally competitive market rates has earned its reputation as the ideal counterparty for institutional investors seeking to acquire a large position in digital assets. Visit http://www.zaftr.com for more information on Zaftr.

About CipherTrace

CipherTrace, industry-leading cryptocurrency intelligence firm, aims to protect financial institutions from crypto laundering risk and grow the crypto economy by making virtual assets trusted by governments and safe for mass adoption. CipherTrace delivers the worlds most comprehensive cryptocurrency intelligence to detect money laundering, power law enforcement investigations, and enable regulatory supervision. Created to develop digital currency and blockchain tracing and security capabilities, CipherTrace provides visibility into 87% of global trading volume with hundreds of millions of attribution data points and can trace more than 800 virtual assets, including BTC, BCH, ETH, ERC-20, Tether, and LTC tokens. The company was founded in 2015 by experienced Silicon Valley entrepreneurs with deep expertise in cybersecurity, eCrime, payments, banking, encryption, and virtual currencies. The US Department of Homeland Security Science and Technology (S&T) and DARPA initially funded CipherTrace. For more information, visit http://www.CipherTrace.com or follow us on Twitter @CipherTrace.
The National Weather Service says there is a slight chance for precipitation tonight as a cold front moves through.

It may be cold enough for snow or a mix of rain and snow away from the coast. No accumulation is expected as temperatures at the surface will generally be above freezing and precipitation amounts will be very light, it says.

As the front moves in it will pick up a little moisture off the Great Lakes and some low level forcing along the leading edge of a little reinforcing shot of cooler air will support scattered snow showers tonight. Snow showers could start as rain showers in valley areas this evening, but then switch to snow showers.There could be dustings on grassy areas in some areas, maybe an inch or so in higher elevations.

In northwest Connecticut, temperatures are forecast to fall into the low 20s tonight. The forecast for Litchfield County calls for scattered snow showers, mainly between 11 p.m. and 5 a.m. Thursday.

In southern Connecticut, rain is likely tonight with low temperatures in the mid-30s

Clear skies Thursday night could allow temperatures to dip below freezing in interior Connecticut.

Temperatures will continue to be below normal through the end of the week.

The next chance for precipitation will be Friday afternoon with the approach of a low pressure system from the southwest.

The forecast

Today: A 20 percent chance of rain before 10am. Mostly sunny, with a high near 51. Northwest wind 8 to 11 mph, with gusts as high as 21 mph.

Tonight: A 20 percent chance of rain after 2am. Increasing clouds, with a low around 35. Southwest wind 3 to 5 mph.

Thursday: Mostly sunny, with a high near 48. West wind 8 to 13 mph.

Thursday Night: Mostly clear, with a low around 31. West wind 5 to 9 mph.
In this article GS

A woman wearing a face mask smells flower blossoms. Robert Michael | picture alliance via Getty Images

Goldman Sachs is optimistic that recent public safety measures to contain the spread of the coronavirus are working based on an unusual data source: Google searches for "loss of smell." Queries for "loss of smell" on the internet search giant spiked in the week that began March 22 to an intensity reading of 100. That means that U.S.-based searches for the phrase "loss of smell" peaked relative to any other period in the last 12 months during the last full week of March. Since then, however, Google searches for "loss of smell" have more than halved, a sign Goldman Chief Economist Jan Hatzius says could suggest a fall in official case counts over the next few weeks.

Source: Johns Hopkins University, Kinsa, Google, Goldman Sachs Investment Research "The latest data on the pace of virus spread are encouraging, suggesting that lockdowns have paid large dividends," Hatzius wrote Wednesday. "Measures of virus spread based on big data are even more encouraging and suggest that the true number of new cases actually peaked a while ago." "Google searches for 'loss of smell'  a symptom that has proven an effective way to track the virus spread  have fallen to roughly one-seventh of their peak US level," he added. "These measures appear to lead the official count of cases confirmed by testing by 2-3 weeks." The latest Google search data as cited by Goldman Sachs suggests that U.S. queries for "loss of smell" have fallen to about 15% of their peak level.
A team of faculty and alumni from Rowan Universitys program in Disaster Science & Emergency Management (DSEM) is literally on the front lines in the fight against COVID-19, working with federal, state, county and local agencies while researchers seek a cure and vaccine.

The professionals serve during crises and bring to the classroom expertise that prepares students to manage resources and information in virtually any emergency.

Unfortunately, said program director Dr. DeMond Miller, there will always be a need for our graduates.

Alleviating harm and suffering

Dr. Len Clark 87 is a former deputy director of emergency management for Gloucester County who now runs emergency operations for St. Christophers Hospital for Children in Philadelphia and teaches at Rowan.

Were a specialized resource, being a pediatric facility, he said. We provide service to Einstein Medical Center and Temple University Hospital, and they reciprocate. When a disaster occurs, youre never able to solve it yourself.

The focus is always on taking care of people, whoever those people are, Clark added. Basically, when something happens, your resources are stressed and youre unsure what the outcome will be. And thats exactly what were seeing now.

Ultimately, Clark said, emergencies change but the goals remain the same.

The job is about alleviating harm and suffering, he said. The priority is to have the fewest number of people impacted so we prioritize life safety first, then incident stabilization and then property conservation. If we keep those three in mind, its hard to go wrong.

Always planning

Dr. Patrick Gorman 88, who teaches in Rowans program and retired in March as a New Jersey State Police captain, said educating about emergency management comes naturally. In addition to his State Police career, hes been a firefighter since he was a teenager, and has held every position, from member to chief.

Existing pandemic response plans compiled as early as 2004 by the State Police, FEMA and other agencies enabled emergency managers to respond quickly, despite numerous challenges, to the unfolding COVID-19 crisis, Gorman said.

Emergency managers are always planning, he said. When were not responding to an emergency, were exercising for one. When were not exercising for one, were planning and reviewing after-action reports to see how things went.

Learning from living it

Timothy Luko, a senior master sergeant with the Air Force in New Castle, Del., who also teaches in the DSEM program, said much of what he does professionally includes the management of information and resources for military operations on base and in the surrounding communities.

For the time being, Delaware hasnt been hit as bad as the surrounding states but were on standby, Luko said. There could be a statewide activation to get out and help the citizens and the response can vary. We can be setting up testing centers, helping out with transportation, helping out hospitals.

Luko said, like their civilian counterparts, military emergency managers will learn from the COVID-19 pandemic and lessons quickly will make their way to the classroom.

Its going to shape the classroom experience like few events in our past, he said. The students in our program are not just living it, theyll be studying it for the future.

~

Rowan University is the only school in the state to offer a traditional bachelors degree focusing exclusively on emergency preparedness. It also offers two certificate programs and, this fall, will offer a Master of Science in Emergency and Threat Response Management.
3. I dont believe kids should be vaping, and so I do support age restrictions on the purchase of vaping products. I also believe the governor was justified in ordering the temporary sales ban on flavored vaping products. By and large, it seems that vaping products were rushed to market without enough testing of their potential health effects, and more testing is needed so policymakers can make more informed decisions on regulation.

4. If theres going to be a private school tax credit, I believe religious schools should be included. Here in Montana, putting all other arguments aside, I believe it is right simply for pragmatic reasons. I cant think of a private school in the entire Eastern Montana region that does not have a religious affiliation. Therefore the Legislature was right to include religious schools in the program. But if stricken down by the Supreme Court, it may be impractical to make another attempt, and, particularly for rural Eastern Montana, which lacks private schools without religious affiliation, of little to no benefit.

5. If elected, my first and foremost concern will be ensuring that House District 36 receives its full, fair share of funding support from state tax revenues, so much of which were generated in Eastern Montana. I believe that it is my first duty to ensure that the infrastructure, schools, services, and agricultural producers of Dawson and Wibaux counties  and of the incorporated communities of Glendive, Wibaux, and Richey  receive the state funding support they need not just to continue on as usual, but to grow and thrive, and I will never put partisan politics ahead of that duty.

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Princess Diana felt like a lamb to the slaughter on her wedding day to Prince Charles, former royal correspondent Jennie Bond has revealed.

Speaking in Channel 5's documentary, Charles & Camilla: King and Queen in Waiting, which aired on Sunday, the former BBC royal reporter said Diana confined to her about her doubts on her big day.

The documentary explored Prince Charles' early love life, his marriage to Princess Diana and his relationship with his second wife Camilla.

Princess Diana felt like a lamb to the slaughter on her wedding day to Prince Charles, former royal correspondent Jennie Bond has revealed. The couple are pictured on their wedding day in 1981

It revealed how the Duchess of Cornwall went from being 'the most hated woman in Britain' after the infamous 'Camilla tapes' were leaked showing Charles relationship with her began while he was still married to Diana, to becoming loved by the public.

Ms Bond, who grew close to Princess Diana while working as a royal correspondent from 1989 to 2003, revealed the fairytale appearance of the 1981 royal wedding was very different behind closed doors.

She said: 'Diana told me much later in one of our private conversations that she had felt like a lamb to the slaughter as she walked up the aisle, which is very sad, but I think she knew that things weren't quite right.

'When she saw Camilla in the congregation she was immediately uneasy about it.

Prince Charles is pictured with Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall on their wedding say in 2005

Ms Bond added that Diana found a bracelet that Prince Charles given Camilla during their engagement, which he had engraved with her initials.

'She was enraged by it and she wanted to know why he had gifted this to Camilla'.

Charles even wore a set of personalised cuff links, which read C & C, for Charles and Camilla, on the couple's honeymoon.

Charles and Diana tied the knot in front at St Paul's Cathedral in front of 2,000 people on July 29, 1981.

Ms Bond, who grew close to Princess Diana while working as a royal correspondent from 1989 to 2003, revealed the fairytale appearance of the 1981 royal wedding was very different behind closed doors. The couple are pictured on their wedding day

In 1992, Prime Minster John Major announced the couple were to separate, but continue living together at Kensington Palace.

They divorced in 1996 and a year later Diana died in car crash in Paris. In 2005 he married Camilla Parker Bowles at Windsor Guildhall.

The documentary also explains how Camilla went from being the most hated woman in Britain, to being loved by the public and the royal family, and being a mother figure to Kate Middleton and Meghan Markle by giving them advice when they joined the royal family.

Victoria Howard, editor of the Crown Chronicles, explained that following his divorce to Diana, Charles lost favour with the public.

The documentary also explains how Camilla went from being the most hated woman in Britain, to being loved by the public and the royal family, and being a mother figure to Kate Middleton and Meghan Markle by giving them advice when they joined the royal family. She is pictured with Meghan at Charles 70th birthday

'No on would ever think of him as King. He was widely considered unfit to be the monarch of Britain,' she explained.

The release of an intimate conservation between the couple, which was published while he was still married to Diana, was dubbed 'incredibly cruel' by the public and marked the beginning of the public's hatred toward Camilla, royal expert Carole Malone explained.

Kate Nicholl, Vanity Fair's Royal Correspondent added that Camilla was spat at on the street and had bread pelted at her in supermarket aisles.

But over many years, and a gradual easing into public life with the Prince of Wales, Camilla and Charles both ended up in the public's good graces again.

Ms Nicholl also explained how Camilla became a rock for Meghan and Kate when they became engaged to her step-sons.

Experts also revealed how Camilla gives 'step-motherly' advice to Kate Middleton, and took her out for lunch before the royal wedding. The pair are pictured at Trooping of the Colour in 2019

'In the run up to the royal wedding she took Kate out for lunch and gave her some step motherly advice. She has been there for the Duchess of Cambridge,' he said.

Kate didn't know how to be royal, so she would have been an outsider, she was pursued by the press and Camilla knew how that felt' explained Ms Malone.

'In many ways, Camilla had paved the way for Meghan. Camilla would have been there to tell her not to take any criticism personally, but this is just what happens when you're an outsider' she added.
Armenias Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan visited Georgia on March 3-4 to discuss bilateral relations and held several high-profile meetings with top politicians including his Georgian counterpart Giorgi Gakharia and president Salome Zurabishvili. This is Pashinyans third visit to Georgia since he assumed office in 2018, following a peaceful power shift ousting the previous unpopular regime. His government has made a broader effort to reinvigorate ties with Georgia. Despite fundamentally different geopolitical outlooks and various challenges, Tbilisi and Yerevan have maintained good neighborly relations based on political pragmatism. Yet their partnership still has room for improvement.

BACKGROUND: Pashinyans visit to Georgia was marked with cordial gestures and several important meetings with Georgian top politicians and religious figures. Pashinyan met with his Georgian counterpart Giorgi Gakharia to discuss a wide range of bilateral issues, including regional transit projects and cooperation in the energy sphere. Both politicians expressed their readiness to work for closer bilateral ties and expand cooperation in the areas of trade, new technologies, education and tourism. Armenias prime minister also met with President Salome Zurabishvili, who visited Armenia last year. During their meeting, Zurabishvili and Pashinyan discussed matters of bilateral importance and measures to ensure peace and stability in the region. In Tbilisi, Pashinyan also met the Catholicos of the Georgian Orthodox Church, Patriarch Ilia II, and Speaker of Parliament Archil Talakvadze.

Pashinyan also took part in a meeting with representatives of the Armenian minority from Tbilisi and Samtskhe-Javakheti, a region located in the southern part of Georgia and inhabited by a large ethnic Armenian population. During the meeting, Pashinyan publicly ensured Georgian authorities and citizens that neither Armenia, nor Armenians, will take part in an anti-Georgian conspiracy, clearly alluding to the fact that the situation in Javakheti has often been a source of friction in Armenian-Georgian relations.

Pashinyans visit brought immediate positive results as Georgia and Armenia signed an agreement that will allow citizens of both countries to cross the common border using only ID cards. Beyond concrete outcomes, Pashinyans declarations left little doubt that Yerevan is more than keen to reinvigorate ties with its northern neighbor. Aside from deepening bilateral cooperation in a vast number of fields, Pashinyan declared his intention to bring relations with Georgia to the level of strategic partnership. Beyond friendly declarations, relations between Armenia and Georgia still have a long way to go before reaching the level of strategic partnership, which encompasses cooperation in a much wider range of sectors including defense, economy, politics and culture. Yet Pashinyans declaration remains highly important, since Armenias only existing strategic partnership is with Russia.

During the visit, Pashinyan put a lot of diplomatic effort into finding common ground with Georgia and underlined the importance of putting aside old prejudices and mutual distrust. He also sought to downplay the existing and important differences between Yerevan and Tbilisi. The Georgian counterparts were more restrained in their declarations but ensured that Pashinyans visit to Georgia will bring bilateral ties to a qualitatively new level.

IMPLICATIONS: In the decades following the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Armenia and Georgia strived to maintain functional relations but bilateral ties have never been particularly close despite their geographical and cultural proximity. Several contributing factors include their divergent geopolitical orientations, the uneasy situation in Samtskhe-Javakheti and differing views on separatist conflicts in the region. Georgia prioritizes ties with the West and is part of a tripartite alliance with Azerbaijan and Turkey, while Armenia has cultivated relations with Russia and joined Moscow-led integrative projects. Consequently, their participation in two different trade blocs  the Eurasian Economic Union in the case of Armenia and Georgias Deep and Comprehensive Free Trade Agreement with the EU make the development of closer commercial ties problematic. Georgia and Armenia also have conflicting views on separatist conflicts in the region, since Tbilisi understandably promotes territorial integrity when it comes to Abkhazia and South Ossetia while Armenia pursues the self-determination principle in the resolution of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict.

The situation in Samtskhe-Javakheti has frequently been a source of discord and mutual suspicions between the two neighbors. Unlike other inter-ethnic conflicts in the South Caucasus, the situation in this Georgian region inhabited mostly by ethnic Armenians never escalated into a war but tensions have remained. Local Armenians often complain that Tbilisi does not respect minority rights and cares little about the regions economic underdevelopment. Moreover, calls for greater autonomy from ethnic activists in Samtskhe-Javakheti, which were exploited by some Armenian politicians, have sparked fears in Georgia over another possible secessionist conflict. Other, smaller incidents have also clouded Armenian-Georgian relations, including a legal conflict over Armenian churches in Tbilisi between the Armenian Diocese in Georgia and the Georgian Patriarchate.

Since coming to power in 2018, Pashinyan and his government have sought to advance relations with multiple actors in pursuit of a more balanced and multi-vector foreign policy, which could help boost Armenias economic performance. The countrys decades-long regional isolation has put landlocked Armenia into an uneasy dependence on Russia. Part of the Pashinyan governments effort has aimed to expand ties with Armenia's immediate neighbors, Georgia and Iran, to counter Armenias geographical isolation and expand its economic and political options. Georgia in particular has strategic importance for Armenia since it serves as a gateway for its imports and exports as well as the only land route connecting Armenia with its largest trading partner Russia. Armenia is less geopolitically significant for Georgia; however, cooperation with Yerevan offers a counterweight to its relations with Azerbaijan, which have recently been affected by tensions regarding the demarcation of their common border.

While Armenias new government has not so far achieved any major breakthrough, it has been able to re-energize ties with Georgia, which has led to some positive outcomes particularly in the economic and political spheres. Over the last two years, the number of high-level meetings between Georgian and Armenian politicians have risen significantly, including on the presidential and prime ministerial level. Georgia was the destination of Pashinyans first official trip after becoming prime minister, which also bears diplomatic significance. Georgia and Armenia have now laid the groundwork for expanding economic cooperation. After a long hiatus, they re-launched the Armenia-Georgia Inter-Governmental Commission on Trade-Economic Cooperation in 2019, to facilitate commercial cooperation. Plans are underway to boost trade turnover between Georgia and Armenia to US$ 1 billion and it has already risen from US$ 489 million in 2017 to US$ 679.7 million in 2019, according to official Georgian statistics.

Pashinyans government has ambitious plans to boost transit and energy cooperation with Georgia as a link in the north-south transit route including Iran and Russia, which would run parallel to the International North-South Transport Corridor linking Iran, Azerbaijan and Russia. However, these far-reaching plans might not materialize due to political and economic constraints. Armenia placed much hope in an agreement between Georgia and Russia over transit corridors in separatist South Ossetia and Abkhazia, which would facilitate land trade between Armenia, Georgia and Russia. However, the de facto representatives of the breakaway regions torpedoed the agreement last year. Likewise, Armenia was interested in the planned Anaklia deep-sea port, which could boost its overseas imports, but the Georgian government cancelled the contract to build Anaklia in January this year. In 2019, Pashinyan resurrected the old idea of establishing a gas corridor from Iran through Armenia to Georgia, but despite signing a transit agreement with Tehran the project has not so far taken off due to technical constraints and the high risk of serious opposition from both Russia and U.S.

CONCLUSIONS: Pashinyans plans for improving Armenias problematic geopolitical position by employing real, not declarative, multilateralism in the countrys foreign policy is not new  previous governments have tried the same but for the most part achieved modest results due to a lack of financial resources and geopolitical constraints. The same factors might hinder the ambitious plans of Pashinyans government when it comes to transit and energy cooperation with Georgia. However, it remains possible to expand cooperation in many fields including economy, cultural heritage and people-to-people contacts. Pashinyans rhetoric, which aims to find common ground with Georgia despite existing differences, and to improve the climate of bilateral contacts by tackling mutual suspicions, will be also helpful in bringing the two neighbors together beyond mere pragmatism based on geopolitical considerations.

AUTHOR'S BIO:

Natalia Konarzewska is a graduate of University of Warsaw and a freelance expert and analyst with a focus on political and economic developments in the post-Soviet space.

Image Source: Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons accessed on 4/13/20
In the six days after top Chinese officials secretly determined they likely were facing a pandemic from a new coronavirus, the city of Wuhan at the epicenter of the disease hosted a mass banquet for tens of thousands of people; millions began traveling through for Lunar New Year celebrations.

President Xi Jinping warned the public on the seventh day, Janaury 20. But by that time, more than 3,000 people had been infected during almost a week of public silence, according to internal documents obtained by The Associated Press and expert estimates based on retrospective infection data.

That delay from Jan 14 to Jan. 20 was neither the first mistake made by Chinese officials at all levels in confronting the outbreak, nor the longest lag, as governments around the world have dragged their feet for weeks and even months in addressing the virus.

But the delay by the first country to face the new coronavirus came at a critical time the beginning of the outbreak. China's attempt to walk a line between alerting the public and avoiding panic set the stage for a pandemic that has infected almost 2 million people and taken more than 126,000 lives.

This is tremendous, said Zuo-Feng Zhang, an epidemiologist at the University of California, Los Angeles. If they took action six days earlier, there would have been much fewer patients and medical facilities would have been sufficient. We might have avoided the collapse of Wuhan's medical system.

Other experts noted that the Chinese government may have waited on warning the public to stave off hysteria, and that it did act quickly in private during that time.

But the six-day delay by China's leaders in Beijing came on top of almost two weeks during which the national Center for Disease Control did not register any cases from local officials, internal bulletins obtained by the AP confirm. Yet during that time, from Jan 5 to Jan 17, hundreds of patients were appearing in hospitals not just in Wuhan but across the country.

It's uncertain whether it was local officials who failed to report cases or national officials who failed to record them. It's also not clear exactly what officials knew at the time in Wuhan, which only opened back up last week with restrictions after its quarantine.

But what is clear, experts say, is that China's rigid controls on information, bureaucratic hurdles and a reluctance to send bad up the chain of command muffled early warnings. The punishment of eight doctors for rumor-mongering, broadcast on national television on Jan. 2, sent a chill through the city's hospitals.

Doctors in Wuhan were afraid, said Dali Yang, a professor of Chinese politics at the University of Chicago. It was truly intimidation of an entire profession. Without these internal reports, it took the first case outside China, in Thailand on Jan 13, to galvanize leaders in Beijing into recognizing the possible pandemic before them. It was only then that they launched a nationwide plan to find cases distributing CDC-sanctioned test kits, easing the criteria for confirming cases and ordering health officials to screen patients, all without telling the public.

The Chinese government has repeatedly denied suppressing information in the early days, saying it immediately reported the outbreak to the World Health Organization.

Allegations of a cover-up or lack of transparency in China are groundless, said foreign ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian at a Thursday press conference.

The documents show that the head of China's National Health Commission, Ma Xiaowei, laid out a grim assessment of the situation on Jan. 14 in a confidential teleconference with provincial health officials.

A memo states that the teleconference was held to convey instructions on the coronavirus from President Xi Jinping, Premier Li Keqiang and Vice Premier Sun Chunlan, but does not specify what those instructions were.

The epidemic situation is still severe and complex, the most severe challenge since SARS in 2003, and is likely to develop into a major public health event, the memo cites Ma as saying.

The National Health Commission is the top medical agency in the country. In a faxed statement, the Commission said it had organised the teleconference because of the case reported in Thailand and the possibility of the virus spreading during New Year travel. It added that China had published information on the outbreak in an open, transparent, responsible and timely manner," in accordance with important instructions repeatedly issued by President Xi.

The documents come from an anonymous source in the medical field who did not want to be named for fear of retribution. The AP confirmed the contents with two other sources in public health familiar with the teleconference. Some of the memo's contents also appeared in a public notice about the teleconference, stripped of key details and published in February.

Under a section titled sober understanding of the situation, the memo said that clustered cases suggest that human-to-human transmission is possible. It singled out the case in Thailand, saying that the situation had changed significantly because of the possible spread of the virus abroad.

With the coming of the Spring Festival, many people will be traveling, and the risk of transmission and spread is high, the memo continued.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
London, April 15: The United Kingdom is set to receive nearly 3 million units of paracetamol following talks with India in its fight against coronavirus. According to a tweet by ANI, the medicines will arrive in UK in the next two weeks. The Foreign & Commonwealth Office, UK Government informed that the medicines will then be stocked in the UKs leading supermarkets.

The British government on Wednesday lauded India-UK trade ties as the first consignment of paracetamol packets from India will be distributed across the supermarkets to fight the spread of coronavirus pandemic. The shipment of the medicines came after India lifted its export restrictions on essential drugs. India to Supply Hydroxychloroquine & Paracetamol to Nations Badly Affected by COVID-19 Pandemic on Humanitarian Grounds.

Here's the tweet:

The United Kingdom to receive nearly 3 million units of paracetamol following talks with India. This will arrive in the next two weeks & will be stocked in the UKs leading supermarkets: Foreign & Commonwealth Office, UK Government. #COVID19  ANI (@ANI) April 15, 2020

UK International Trade Secretary Liz Truss said in a statement on Tuesday informed that COVID-19 is the largest threat the world has faced in decades. "It''s imperative that we work together to continue global trade and keep supply chains open. I''d like to extend a big thank you to officials both in the UK and India who worked hard on this agreement and I look forward to working with India and other countries soon to ensure we beat COVID-19," she said. What is Hydroxychloroquine? Know All About The Drug That India Will Export to Coronavirus-Hit Countries.

Earlier this month, India decided to partially lift a ban on export of anti-malarial drug hydroxychloroquine, paving the way for its supply to the US and several other countries hit hard by the coronavirus pandemic. The government in India had stated that it will export hydroxychloroquine and paracetamol on a case-by-case basis to the countries which have already placed orders for them after meeting the domestic requirements

(The above story first appeared on LatestLY on Apr 15, 2020 06:02 PM IST. For more news and updates on politics, world, sports, entertainment and lifestyle, log on to our website latestly.com).
In his op-ed, (Ensuring public safety remains an essential duty during pandemic, April 8), Kevin Barton wrote about parts of our criminal justice system being essential, with a big pat on the back to his district attorneys office and other governmental bodies. But in his zeal to congratulate those entities, he left out others necessary to our participatory democracy. Specifically, he fails to mention the accused, their attorneys and the jurors, all of whom are essential to our justice system.

Imagine the trial Mr. Barton mentioned with a judge at the free-throw line and jurors spread out in a gymnasium. Such an arrangement is in support of social distancing and flattening the curve. But how is an accused person supposed to interact confidentially with their lawyer six feet away? While its admirable to offer alternative and creative ideas for holding trials, we cannot sacrifice someone's right to a fair trial and due process.

Mr. Barton also seems to ignore a fundamental fact of our justice system: An accused person is innocent unless and until the government proves guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. All of the people sitting in jail awaiting resolution of their cases are innocent people. What happens when someone at the jail contracts COVID-19? If social distancing means closing businesses and giving "stay home, save lives orders, how does that translate to the jail? Inmates cannot stay home. They are locked in overcrowded jails. Does protecting fundamental rights and liberty interests, in Mr. Bartons words, include sacrificing hundreds of innocent peoples health?

Robert Crow, Portland
A photo taken from the roof of Ukraine's Chernobyl nuclear power plant shows a distant forest fire in the exclusion zone. (AP)

Wildfires raging in the radiation-contaminated area near the Chernobyl nuclear power plant have been extinguished although grass is still smouldering in some areas, Ukrainian officials have said.

Hundreds of firefighters backed by aircraft have been battling several forest fires around Chernobyl for the past 10 days. They contained the initial blazes, but new fires raged closer to the decommissioned plant.

Emergencies Service chief Mykola Chechetkin reported to president Volodymyr Zelenskiy that rain helped firefighters put out the flames, but acknowledged it would take a few more days to extinguish smouldering grass.

A Geiger counter shows increased radiation level against the background of the forest fire burning near the village of Volodymyrivka in the exclusion zone. (AP)

Chechetkin said emergency workers have prevented the fire from engulfing radioactive waste depots and other facilities in Chernobyl.

The emergencies service said radiation levels in the capital Kyiv, about 60 miles south of the plant, are within norms.

On Monday, activists warned that the blazes were getting dangerously close to waste storage facilities.

Yaroslav Yemelyanenko, a member of the public council under the state agency in charge of the closed zone around the plant, said one fire was raging just over a mile from one of the radioactive waste depots.

A checkpoint on the edge of the exclusion zone. (AP)

Last week, officials said they tracked down a man suspected of triggering the blaze by setting dry grass on fire in the area. The 27-year-old said he burned grass for fun and then failed to extinguish the fire when the wind caused it to spread quickly.

On Monday, police said another local resident burned waste and accidentally set dry grass ablaze, triggering another devastating forest fire. They said he failed to report the fire to the authorities.

The 1,000 square mile Chernobyl Exclusion Zone was established after the April 1986 disaster at the plant that sent a cloud of radioactive fallout over much of Europe. The zone is largely unpopulated, although about 200 people have remained despite orders to leave.

Blazes in the area have been a regular occurrence.

Story continues

They often start when residents set dry grass on fire in the early spring  a widespread practice in Ukraine, Russia and some other ex-Soviet nations that often leads to devastating forest fires.

The 1,000 square mile Chernobyl exclusion zone was established after the April 1986 disaster at the plant that sent a cloud of radioactive fallout over much of Europe.

The zone is largely unpopulated, although about 200 people have remained despite orders to leave.
Source: Xinhua| 2020-04-15 21:06:35|Editor: huaxia

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Foreign Ministry spokesperson Zhao Lijian speaks at a press briefing on April 15, 2020. (Photo from Foreign Ministry website)

BEIJING, April 15 (Xinhua) -- The Chinese government has decided to send teams of medical experts to Ethiopia, Burkina Faso and Saudi Arabia to help the countries fight the COVID-19 pandemic, Foreign Ministry spokesperson Zhao Lijian announced Wednesday.

China and African countries are longtime brothers who share weal and woe. African countries had supported China during China's most difficult times fighting the pandemic, which China will never forget, Zhao said at a news briefing, adding that China is paying close attention to the situation of the pandemic in Africa, and has overcome its own difficulties and provided anti-epidemic materials and aid to the African Union and all African countries with diplomatic relations with China.

"These steps are all a reflection of building an even stronger China-Africa community with a shared future," said the spokesperson.

He said after the outbreak in China, the Saudi leaders immediately expressed their condolences and support. The Saudi government and public have provided China with many batches of aid materials.

Saudi Arabia is also facing severe challenges amid the pandemic. China also firmly supports Saudi Arabia's anti-epidemic efforts and is willing to provide assistance within its capability, he said.

He said as comprehensive strategic cooperation partners, China will maintain close cooperation with Saudi Arabia to safeguard the safety and health of peoples of the two countries.

The team of Chinese medical experts to Saudi Arabia left for the country Wednesday morning. 
Beijings iconic Summer Palace tourist resort is the home of a huge new ice rink thats opened just ahead of the Winter Olympics. The rink measures 300,000 square meters and consists of two areas designed for different types of activities. The city has opened seven municipal ice rinks and four snow resorts to the public. Since 2014, ice and snow activities in municipal parks have attracted nearly 2 million visitors, according to the Beijing Municipal Administration Center for Parks

Jan 11, 2022 07:26 PM
Stay home, stay safe  thats been a consistent public health message during the novel coronavirus pandemic.

But for survivors of domestic violence, home can be a dangerous place, especially during a public crisis, officials at shelters in the Bay Area and Pasadena say.

ON HOUSTONCHRONICLE.COM: Coronavirus live updates: Houston approves airlines deal, Texas businesses fight to be 'essential'

Wykesha Dixon, programs director the Bay Area Turning Point shelter, is watching a trend repeat as increased calls come in from those experiencing abuse and from families and friends worried about people who may be in violent situations.

Trapped at home with abusers

Houston has experienced natural disasters before, and as service providers this is something we see when victims are stuck in a home with their abuser, Dixon said.

That feeling of anxiety is there (under ordinary circumstances) even as the abuser is going off to work, and it gets greater when the survivor is stuck at home with him or her during a crisis, she said. The abuser is not leaving to go to work or his friends house to where she can get a breather or chance to call a hotline or friend when she needs a moment.

MORE FROM YVETTE OROZCO: Pasadena homeless shelter issues urgent call for donations

More Information Domestic abuse help Bay Area Turning Point This nonprofit group has a crisis intervention center and shelter facility serving Harris and Chambers counties and portions of Brazoria and Galveston counties. 24-hour hotline:281-286-2525. Donations: Financial donations can be made at bayareaturningpoint.org or by mail to BATP P.O. Box 58537, Webster TX 77598 Information: BATP has a Faceebook site and a website at bayareaturningpoint.org The Bridge Over Troubled Waters This Pasadena-based shelter is for men and woman and their families impacted by domestic violence and/or sexual assault that serves southeast Harris County and the greater Houston area. 24-hour hotline: 713-473-2801 Information: 713-472-0753; http://tbotw.org; thebridge@tbotw.org Donations needed: foods like meat, fresh vegetables an bread. Monetary donations can be made at http://tbotw.org/donate-now/ See More Collapse

The Bridge Over Troubled Waters a nonprofit Pasadena-based shelter for men and woman and their families impacted by domestic violence and/or sexual assault, has not seen an increase in domestic violence calls, but executive director Deborah Moseley said that doesnt mean abuse isnt spiking in the region.

CORONAVIRUS UPDATES: Stay informed with accurate reporting you can trust

I think (the coronavirus) might make it more hidden, Mosely said. We know there are still people in their homes that are being abused, and weve been doing this long enough to know that the fear of the unknown (for victims) is unbelievable, and now with (the added) fear of the coronavirus, they would probably rather stay there.

The pandemic makes for a dangerous mix of factors.

Its the perfect storm because (abusers are) at home either because they got laid off or cant go to work and then if theyre drinking alcohol  everything is happening there at home and victims become prisoners, Mosely said.

Adjusting to pandemic precautions

BATP, which in addition to providing a shelter, provides services such as counseling, advocacy, childcare and housing, continues to update events and programs through social media outlets like Facebook. Its stripped-down staff alternates shifts as members work the groups emergency hotline, providing counseling for those fleeing violence at home while also trying to guard against the pandemic.

CORONAVIRUS CHRONICLE: Subscribe to our new daily podcast for pandemic insights through a Houston lens

COVID-19 is a whole new ballgame and were doing everything we can to keep people safe from the virus, which can be hard in a communal living situation, said Leigh Ann Fry, BAPTs president and CEO.

The shelter, which is housing close to its maximum of 72 people, has new house rules. Dinner time is no longer a gathering but conducted room by room, and travel is restricted. Residents are urged to stay in personal, contained spaces. The group has not admitted additional people because of safety and social-distance concerns.

But even under those modifications, the shelter has been able to operate as clients work their way toward independent living.

Were trying, Dixon said. We hear the need and were here to still meet the need because COVID-19 is not going to stop to the (domestic violence) epidemic, its growing it.

BAPTs nonresidential services, which include counseling, legal assistance, case management and housing, have gone from face-to-face contact at the groups crisis intervention center to virtual or phone communication with staff working from home to operate crisis lines and schedule individual counseling sessions.

The shift was sudden, but staff members adjusted quickly, Fry said.

Its been working really well and were able to keep our clients safe (from exposure) and were able to meet their needs, Fry said.

One of the biggest changes has been in how staff supports sexual assault survivors, with hospitals now prohibiting additional people from attending examinations.

We are able to be there by phone, talking the person through, listening and helping them to understand whats happening, Fry said.

BATP serves Harris and Chambers counties and portions of Brazoria and Galveston counties. The average stay for residents is 70 days, although its on a case-by-case basis.

Were big on empowerment, but (residents) are welcome to stay as long as possible, Fry said. It takes a while to get your feet back on the ground (after a domestic violence situation), and our job is to help them do that.

For victims that experience the usual cycles of domestic violence during normal times, the feeling of helplessness is always there, especially if children are present, Dixon said. That hopelessness only intensifies during a crisis.

In 2019, the Texas Council on Family Violence released a study on the impact of Hurricane Harvey on domestic violence survivors, finding that victims become more vulnerable because of limited access to resources when agencies own resources are compromised. .

We are still here

The prospect of missed or lost employment and no income also cancels out any possibility of escape for many currently living with their abuser, said Dixon.

What if they get laid off  and that income was helping the household or that income was going to allow him or her to leave the abuser? Weve seen clients in our shelter whose hours have been cut, she said. They came to the shelter because theyre trying to start over  they found employment, theyre making their way toward recovery. And then here it is  their hours are being cut and now theyre back to relying on someone else to try to help when they had pulled their bootstraps up. Its all of these things that are going through a victims head, their spirit and aura and all of this can put a stop to survivors making a full recovery.

We know the complexity of the situation and are not blind to whats going to happen, Dixon said. We are prepared now for the calls, but were even more prepared  once (pandemic restrictions) lift  for people who are going to be calling our hotline who are going to be looking for shelter, who are going to be making a decision in this moment to say, I need to leave  because they realize that this is not a healthy situation. Were still here.

Like BATP, The Bridges staff is working from home by phone to continue counseling, advocacy and financial education services as well as coordinating emergency housing accommodations for anyone in eminent danger. Seven staff members are living at the facility and sleeping on air mattresses so they can continue to serve residents around the clock.

They are making sure our residents are safe, Mosely said.

Before the official quarantining at the shelter, one Bridge resident made the decision to leave with the understanding that she could not return because of possible exposure to COVID-19. Three days later, she called the Bridge back.

She had wanted to go home, and we didnt know she was going back to her batterer, and he abused her, said Mosely. We could not take her in, but we found a place for her. We have made the decision that if anybody calls and they are in eminent danger and need to leave because of domestic violence or sexual assault, we will put them in a hotel.

Of the 89 residents living at The Bridge for the duration of the shutdown, 55 are children under the age of 18, and one is a newborn.

BATP relies on public and private donations and support from civic, public and private donors. The Bridge also seeks monetary donations, food and hotel vouchers for housing.

Mosely had one other request from the public.

They can pray for us, she said.

yorozco@hcnonline.com
Source: Xinhua| 2020-04-15 20:04:28|Editor: xuxin

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BANGKOK, April 15 (Xinhua) -- Thai Deputy Prime Minister and Health Minister Anutin Charnvirakul said on Wednesday the Thai authorities are discussing the possibility of easing measures imposed to contain the spread of the COVID-19.

"The numbers of daily new cases had been stable for two weeks and shown that people were cooperating with disease control measures," the minister said.

"Medical doctors are discussing on how people in Thailand can lead a normal life after the measures are relaxed, how to prevent another outbreak," said Anutin.

Thailand on Wednesday reported 30 new COVID-19 cases, raising the total to 2,643 with two new deaths, bringing the death toll to 43.
Source: Xinhua| 2020-04-15 22:18:33|Editor: huaxia

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CAIRO, April 15 (Xinhua) -- Egypt's Prime Minister Mostafa Madbouly ordered on Wednesday the full closure of all public parks, beaches and other gathering places during the coming holidays to curb the spread of the novel coronavirus.

April 19 and 20 mark respectively the Coptic Easter and the traditional Egyptian spring holiday of Sham El-Nessim, which are often celebrated with family outings to parks or other outdoor excursions.

Madbouly urged the governors of the coastal provinces and the Delta cities "to curb ... any violations of the decision," state-run Ahram online reported.

The cabinet said earlier in April that all shops and restaurants would be completely shut on Sham El-Nessim.

Meanwhile, the country's Ministry of Endowment (religious affairs) said in a statement on Wednesday that "Egypt's mosques will remain closed until no new coronavirus cases are detected."

Egypt on Tuesday reported its highest daily increase in coronavirus cases with 160 new infections, bringing the total number of confirmed cases to 2,350 with 178 deaths.
Updates related to COVID-19 and its effects on Albuquerque and the rest of NM.

PICTURES





UPDATES

6:33 p.m.

Navajo Nation COVID-19 cases reach 921

The Navajo Department of Health and Navajo Area Indian Health Service reported 83 new COVID-19 cases Wednesday, for a total of 921 cases. The Navajo Nation also reported an additional five COVID-19 deaths. There are now 38 COVID-19 deaths on the Navajo Nation. The agencies reported a total of 3,239 negative tests.

In a short video update Wednesday, Navajo President Jonathan Nez said the Navajo Area Indian Health Service had received rapid test kits and 50 ventilators from the federal government.

President Nez said many residents on the reservation are starting to receive stimulus checks from the federal government. He urged Dine to shop local, follow social distancing guidelines, and wear masks and gloves when shopping at grocery stores and other essential businesses.

Navajo Vice President Myron Lizer encouraged Navajo residents to save what money they could, and to fight the urge to ride off into our border towns to spend that money.

For those of you who can, sit tight, stay home, and let others who desperately need to get out there to our local supermarkets get their necessities, Lizer said.

The Navajo Health Command Operations Center hotline is (928) 871-7014.

 Theresa Davis

4 p.m.

State airports to receive $25.2 million from CARES Act

New Mexico will receive over $25.2 million in federal grants to help airports in the state maintain operations, the states congressional delegation said .

The airports play a vital role in sustaining supply chains during the COVID-19 pandemic, the lawmakers said in a news release.

The funds are part of the $2 trillion Coronavirus Aid, Relief and Economic Security Act passed by Congress last month. The money is to help airports that are experiencing declining revenue because of decreased air travel.

The Albuquerque International Sunport will receive nearly $16.7 million, Santa Fe Municipal Airport will receive over $1.8 million, Lea County Regional Airport will receive over $1 million, and the Roswell Air Center will receive over $1.2 million, the release said. Over 45 additional airports around the state will receive amounts ranging from $20,000 to $69,000 each, according to the delegation.

 Scott Turner

2:35 p.m.

Campfires prohibited on New Mexicos national forests

The U.S. Forest Service is prohibiting campfires on all five national forests in New Mexico until further notice, in an effort to prevent human-caused wildfires and a strain on first responder resources during the COVID-19 pandemic. The Forest Services Southwestern Region announced the restrictions in a news release Wednesday.

While spending time outside provides forest visitors needed space, exercise and satisfaction, we are taking the risks presented by COVID-19 seriously, Lincoln National Forest Supervisor Travis Moseley said in a statement. We are providing some recreation opportunities where we can while protecting and keeping employees, the public and our communities safe from the virus, as well as protecting and keeping communities and natural and cultural resources safe from unwanted human-caused wildfires.

The agency said the campfire restriction will prevent an unnecessary depletion of medical and fire resources and reduce firefighter exposure to COVID-19.

The order prohibits igniting, building, maintaining, attending or using a fire, including charcoal grills and barbecues, coal and wood burning stoves. Consequences for violating the order include possible fines and jail time.

The Forest Service said visitors are allowed to use pressurized liquid or gas stoves, grills or lanterns with shut-off valves.

Many amenities on the forests have closed in response to the pandemic, but dispersed camping is still allowed in many areas. The Forest Service has an interactive map with information about what sites are open: www.fs.usda.gov/goto/ivm.

 Theresa Davis

2:25 p.m.

Lujan Grisham announces 80 new virus cases, no new deaths

Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham said Wednesday that 90 coronavirus patients are now hospitalized in New Mexico  a 10% increase over the last day.

But she also shared some good news: The state had no new deaths to announce, and the growth of new cases may be slowing.

What youre doing is making a difference, Lujan Grisham said of New Mexicans willingness to stay home and engage in social distancing.

Earlier this week, New Mexico had been announcing five or six deaths a day.

Altogether, Lujan Grisham said, testing had confirmed 80 new virus cases Wednesday, and the state now has 1,484 cases total.

Read more >>

 Dan Boyd, Dan McKay

12:45 p.m.

Hospital workers protest at UNMH

Several nurses and other frontline hospital workers at the states only Level 1 Trauma Center have used up their paid-time off when they were sent home to stay in isolation after being exposed to the coronavirus at work.

That was one of the grievances of the roughly 60 University of New Mexico workers who lined up along Lomas outside of University of New Mexico Hospital on Wednesday the morning. Standing six feet apart from each other on the sidewalk, the workers held up signs drawing attention to personal protective equipment, or PPE.

Please Protect Everyone, one sign read.

The nurses, respiratory therapists and other employees are upset about having to use paid-time off if they are quarantined after possibly being exposed to the coronavirus at work, and about access and transparency of the hospitals supply of protective equipment, said Eleanor Chavez, the executive director of the local chapter of the National Union of Hospital and Health Care Employees, which represents nurses and other employees at UNMH.

In an Intensive Care Unit at the hospital assigned to treat patients with COVID-19, 10 hospital employees, including seven union members, have been sent home to stay in isolation after being exposed to the virus, Chavez.

 Ryan Boetel, Anthony Jackson

7:44 a.m.

New Mexico delegation concerned about CARES ACT rollout

New Mexicos congressional delegation is expressing concerns over the rollout of the coronavirus relief package passed by Congress last month.

U.S. Sens. Martin Heinrich and Tom Udall, and U.S Reps. Ben Ray Lujan, Deb Haaland, and Xochitl Torres Small  all Democrats  sent letters to Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and Small Business Administration Administrator Jovita Carranza voicing those concerns.

They are urging Mnuchin and Carranza to improve implementation guidance about the Paycheck Protection Program and the Economic Injury Disaster Loan process.

SBAs Paycheck Protection Program is expected to provide $349 billion to struggling small businesses and nonprofits across the nation, the lawmakers said in a news release. The CARES Act also created a new SBA disaster grant available as a part of the EIDL process, the lawmakers said.

Neither of these programs is fully serving the needs of businesses and nonprofits in New Mexico as Congress intended, the lawmakers wrote. The first-come, first-served distribution of the $349 billion in the PPP has strongly disadvantaged community banks and mission-based nonprofit lenders in New Mexico that serve the majority of our small businesses.

They pointed to reports that local SBA offices do not have access to the SBAs loan or emergency systems.

As such, they are unable to assist businesses with specific questions related to their applications, the delegation wrote.

 Scott Turner

6:05 a.m.

Navajo Nation to get rapid tests and ventilators, two police officers test positive for COVID-19

There are now 838 COVID-19 cases on the Navajo Nation, according to numbers released Tuesday evening by the Navajo Epidemiology Center, the Navajo Department of Health and the Navajo Health Command Operations Center. The cases increased by 25 since Mondays reports. The Navajo Nation reported 5 more confirmed COVID-19 deaths, bringing the diseases death toll to 33.

During a virtual town hall on Tuesday, Navajo Nation President Jonathan Nez said that in addition to rapid test kits, the Navajo Area Indian Health Service would soon receive 50 ventilators from the federal government.

He said the rapid tests, which can confirm the presence of coronavirus in less than an hour, will likely contribute to a spike in COVID-19 cases reported on the Navajo Nation.

Nez and Navajo Chief of Police Phillip Francisco also announced two Navajo police officers have tested positive for COVID-19.

Our first responders  our warriors  on the frontline are beginning to contract this virus, and we need to stay home, Nez said. It is no joke.

A new data portal from the New Mexico Department of Health shows that Native Americans make up 36.7% of the states COVID-19 cases.

Nez said the epidemiology team is working on a dashboard to provide more detailed information about locations of COVID-19 cases on the reservation. The Navajo Health Command Operations Center currently reports cases by county.

Right now were looking at maybe reporting these cases on the map by zipcodes or going back to locating by the Navajo Area IHS service unit areas, Nez said.

A daily curfew from 8 p.m. to 5 a.m. remains in effect throughout the reservation. The Navajo Health Command Operations Center hotline is (928) 871-7014.

Heres how to help.

 Theresa Davis

6 a.m.

Police say woman with COVID-19 violated public health order

A woman with COVID-19 allegedly walked into an Estancia restaurant last week and announced she had the virus before using the restroom, leading the owner to shut down for three days to sanitize the business.

Now 67-year-old Gina Peterson is charged with violation of a public health act and public nuisance, both petty misdemeanors. Peterson was issued a summons to appear in Moriarty Magistrate Court.

(Peterson) did violate the public health order by appearing in public telling citizens she was infected with COVID-19, and refused to self quarantine as ordered by her doctor, an officer wrote in the document charging Peterson.

Peterson could face a fine of up to $100 and/or up to six months in jail if convicted of violating the public health order.

Matthew Reisen
Around 400 Pakistani prisoners have been released from jails across the United Arab Emirates in view of the coronavirus pandemic, which has claimed 28 lives and infected over 4,900 people in the Gulf kingdom so far.

The released Pakistanis were jailed for minor offences, the Pakistani Embassy in Abu Dhabi said on Tuesday, adding that the UAE government was arranging special flights to repatriate them.

Of the 400 prisoners, 189 people already reached Peshawar on a FlyDubai flight, the Dawn newspaper reported on Tuesday. The second flight is expected to land in Faisalabad.

All the repatriated prisoners would be kept in isolation till they are tested for COVID-19, Additional Deputy Commissioner Ashfaq Khan told the daily.

The decision to release the prisoners follows demonstrations by hundreds of Pakistanis outside the Embassy in Abu Dhabi and Consulate in Dubai last week, demanding they be sent back home.

Around 25,000 Pakistanis have requested repatriation from the UAE in recent weeks. Many have lost jobs and closed businesses due to the coronavirus outbreak.

Similarly, 25,000 Indians are stranded in various parts of the globe, including the UAE. However, the Supreme Court of India has ruled that stranded expatriates cannot be flown back home till May 3, when the coronavirus lockdown ends in the country.

The coronavirus which originated in China's Wuhan city in December last year has claimed 28 lives and infected 4,933 people in the UAE.

Across the world, the virus has killed over 126,000 people with nearly 2 million positive cases so far.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
A district magistrate court in Rohtak opened its doors on the night of April 13 to solemnise the wedding of a local boy marry a Mexican girl under the Special Marriage Act as both could not tie the knot due to the ongoing lockdown imposed to curb the spread of coronavirus.

The couple met on a language learning app in 2017 and got engaged the next year.

According to Niranjan Kashyap, who hails from Surya Colony in Rohtak he and and his Mexican-origin partner Dana Joheri Oliveros Cruise applied to get married under the Special Marriage Act on February 17.

"We met on a language learning app. In 2017, she came to India on my birthday. Then this February 11, Dana and her mother came to India for the wedding. On February 17, we applied for marriage under the Special Marriage Act which has a 30-day notice," Kashyap told ANI.

"The notice was to end on March 18 but by then the lockdown began so we could not get married. We submitted an application to the District Collector after which he conducted our wedding," he said.

He further said that Dana had booked a flight back to Mexico on March 24 but with the lockdown being extended further till May 3 she has now rescheduled her flight to May 5.

Dana said, "I came to meet him in 2017. We later got engaged in December 2018 and I returned to Mexico. I spent two years in Mexico. Due to lockdown, we couldn't marry. Deputy Commissioner helped us to marry."

Advocate Niranjan Kashyap, who helped the couple get married said: "Both of them came to us. Since the girl was from Mexico, they can marry under the Special Marriage Act. Later, we approached the District Magistrate and he sent requests to the Mexican Embassy and other offices for a no objection certificate. After NOC was obtained, the District Magistrate opened the court and performed the marriage on April 13 at 8 pm.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
N ine days after a mother-of-two was told her husband had no chance of surviving Covid-19, doctors say he is now ready to take a step towards recovery and start to wean off the ventilator.

As he deteriorated over the next week and showed no signs of improving, the hospital told Sue and her two children, Wiliam, 13, and Hana, 16, to prepare for the worst.

The family were given 10 minutes to say goodbye.

Sue told her story to Radio 4's Today programme last week / Sue Martin

But Mal is now moving into the weaning phase after 17 days on a ventilator, which Sue says will be an "extremely long, slow and painful process" with no guarantees.

"Incredibly, nine days after being told that Mal had almost zero chance of survival and myself and the children going to say our goodbyes, Mal is still with us," Sue said in a message to BBC Radio 4's Today programme.

"It's now day 17 on the ventilator and the hospital has said he is moving into the weaning phase.

"Weaning from the ventilator and rehabilitation is going to be an extremely long, slow and painful process and there are no guarantees it will be successful, but we are prepared for whatever it brings."

Sue and her children were told to prepare for the worst and say goodbye to Mal / Sue Martin

Sue thanked the ICU team for looking after her husband, and described all workers on the frontline as "wonderful human beings".

"We are overwhelmed by all the support we have received from around the world - thousands of lovely, caring and hopeful messages from people all rooting for Mal," she said.

"I'm just sorry I can't reply to every one of them.

"Our friends and neighbours have been just incredible - constantly checking in, providing meals, bread, cakes and plants."

Mal, who has been married to Sue for 28 years, first started feeling unwell on March 19, complaining of flu-like symptoms.

Doctors say Mal is now ready to wean off the venilator after 17 days / Sue Martin

He is type 2 diabetic and suffered a heart attack four years ago but Sue said he has been fine since and lives a healthy life.

But his condition deteriorated rapidly and he was admitted to hospital.

Before he was taken to intensive care, Mal texted Sue and promised he was going to fight it.

He said "it was not his time".

Before he was taken to the intensive care unit, Mal texted Sue to say it was "not his time" to go / Sue Martin

"He promised he was going to fight it and he said to my daughter, who is 16, 'don't worry, I'm going to be around a while yet, I'm going to be here for your wedding, for you growing up'," Sue said.

Although Mal is still very sick with the coronavirus, and remains in intensive care, the family is hopeful he will one day be able to come home.

"Whilst we are trying to keep our feet on the ground, we continue to hope," Sue said.
Scientists think the Interstellar Object Oumuamua is a larger piece of something significant that was part of something huge, torn apart by immense gravitation unimaginable.

This cigar-shaped object floating in the gravitational wells that sent it on a path directly to our solar system. Some even speculate that it can be more if there were no limitations of imaging technology on earth.

Oumuamua is the word for envoy in Hawaiian. It was first seen in 2017 and one that received much interest. Still, there are no answers for this extraterrestrial enigma which befuddles scientists a lot.

Is it a Comet? Or something else?

Another view is the gases were super-accelerated that it was like turbo-jets until the water vapor was gone, this is most seen with comet tails, not asteroids. Oumuamua might be a comet but there is no way of finding out conclusively.

There are speculations about the mystery of this space rock (?). Scientists might have the jigsaw pieces needed.

The first speculation, any guesses might be just the same

Oumuamua, an active asteroid riding the space-lanes that was part of a body, later torn apart by its binary partner. Its shot into our patch uncountable years and it traveled vast stellar space.

Call it pieces of rock that bunched up under extreme gravity and looking like a giant ball of rock before it broke apart. This huge body later was shattered by the gravity of a partner binary.

In the journal Nature Astronomy, Zhang and Prof Doug Lin of the University of California's Lick Observatory used computer simulations to visualize the process that created it and explain how and why it looks and moves.

Also read: Planet-Killing Asteroid Currently Hurdling Towards Earth, ETA Saturday Morning

Their conclusion is that gravity pulled hard on part of the larger body to make the elongated shape. Oumuamua is connected by surface material which melted close to the star, then froze in deep space.

It got its extreme speed from frozen water in the sub-surface layer that acts as jets in space.

It used to be part of a planet or a comet, though the surface water is better for the comet narrative. Also, the binary star it had before was like the or a white dwarf.

Zhang and the spaceship argument

His finding negates the starship argument on how asteroidal interstellar objects are formed that are based on his hypothesis.

It might be that objects like it that pass through habitable zones are like the solar system that can carry the seeds of life to other parts of the cosmos it goes.

Another scientist, Dr Alan Jackson, of Arizona State University, was not privy into the interstellar object Oumuamua and was interested to add his observations.

He added, "The idea of 'Oumuamua being a fragment of a larger body that was tidally disrupted by passing close to its parent star was suggested by Matija Cuk in 2018." He further commented that the object has mysterious and interesting features to it.

It seems the interstellar object Oumuamua is attracting attention and move speculation until the means to see the object wore tools.

Related article: Asteroid Alert: NASA Detects Four Asteroid Passing Earth's Orbit With One Closer Than Others

@ 2022 HNGN, All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission.
BAKU, Azerbaijan, April 15

By Elnur Baghishov - Trend:

The loan for citizens related to the coronavirus will be repaid within 30 months in Iran, said the Head of Iran Central Bank Abdolnasser Hemmati, Trend reports citing IRIB.

According to Hemmati, 4 million low-income families will receive loans of 10-20 million rials (about $237-$476) at 12 percent. Four percent of the 12 percent loans will be repaid by citizens and the remaining eight percent by the state.

Hemmati added that a total of 250 trillion rials (about $5.95 billion) in loans was expected. The monthly loan repayment is 350,000 rials (about $8.3).

"The Iranian government is facing US sanctions against Iran, as well as a budget deficit. At the same time, the coronavirus epidemic has a negative impact," he said.

The director said that the citizens are not expected to register in any system. The Iranian Ministry of Cooperatives, Labour, and Social Welfare will send a short message to the citizens receiving subsidies. This loan will be repaid at the expense of citizens by April 25.



According to the official, a total of 90 million rials (about $2,140) will be given to entrepreneurs for a period of 3 months, 30 million rials (about $714) per worker.

Hemmati said that the government pays special attention to the activities of small and medium enterprises.



"The Central Bank of Iran does not forecast a 40 percent inflation for the current year (started from March 20, 2020). However, shortly before the coronavirus, inflation was forecast at 40 percent," he said.



Hemmati said that as for the idea that 750 trillion rials (about $17.8 billion) allocated for the fight against coronavirus will increase liquidity, the effect of liquidity is not the same as the effect of liquidity. Liquidity can be managed by other means. Efforts will be made to increase liquidity by no more than 23-24 percent," he said.



The Iranian government has allocated 1 quadrillion rials (about $ 23.8 billion) funds for the coronavirus. Some parts of it free financial assistance to low-income families and some parts of it will be given as loans to citizens and manufacturing enterprises.
Dividends at the biggest banks will probably amount to about $40 billion this year, according to estimates by Gregg Gelzinis, a senior policy analyst at the left-leaning Center for American Progress. While substantial, that is less than what they will retain by halting share buybacks.

If banks do not do any buybacks this year, it will probably give them an additional $150 billion in capital, he said. So far, theyve committed to a two-quarter suspension, so are set to preserve about half that.

While Mr. Powell does not appear ready to impose restrictions, minutes of the Feds March 15 meeting show that some Fed officials believe the central bank should be making sure that firms hang on to all the cash that they can in an uncertain environment.

Several participants commented that banks should be discouraged from repurchasing shares from, or paying dividends to, their equity holders, according to the minutes, which were released last week.

And the Bank for International Settlements, which advises global central banks, said in a new brief that while a blanket restriction on payouts would reduce banks attractiveness to investors, it would also limit the risk of signaling a banks relative weakness.

Some former Fed officials agree that the central bank should consider constraining payouts.

We learned that we let way too much money out the door in that crisis, Janet L. Yellen, the former Fed chair, said of 2008. She hasnt talked to Fed officials about their current thinking, but believes they should ask banks to halt dividends. We dont know where this is going, this is really a tail event and a great threat to the country.

If the Fed halts dividends while banks are still functioning normally, it would come across as precautionary to investors, said Daniel K. Tarullo, a former Fed governor and a key architect of much of the post-crisis bank regulatory regime. If it waits to take that step further down the road, when signs of financial system trouble are mounting, it could instead be read as a signal of trouble.
The Benue State government on Wednesday extended the dusk-to-dawn curfew it imposed on the state for two weeks.

Governor Samuel Ortom said this while briefing journalists after the Expanded Executive Council Meeting and the State Action Committee on COVID-19.

The governor said that due to the rising cases of COVID-19 in the country, the state had decided to extend the curfew it imposed in the state to two weeks.

The curfew is from 7:00 p.m. to 6:00 a.m. It is extended because of the rising cases of the pandemic in some states. Our people travel to these states and this is a big problem, he said.

He, however, noted that all the staff of the Grace Cottage Hospital, Makurdi, where the index case in the state was first admitted, were isolated for 14 days after which their vital signs were taken to Abuja for tests and they all tested negative.

This is because they adhered strictly to the preventive aspects of the disease while handling her case. So, there is no cause for alarm, he said.

Mr Ortom also said that COVID-19 had a negative toll on the economy as such, the state government had reviewed its 2020 budget of N195 billion to N119 billion owing to the harsh economic situation occasioned by COVID-19.

The governor said the decision became necessary due to the economic challenges caused by COVID-19.

He said the decision for the review would soon be transmitted to the State Assembly for affirmation.

He maintained that the International Monetary Fund (IMF) had projected that the 2020 recession would be worse than that of 2016.

It is in view of this reason among others that the decision for the review was arrived at.

IMF further said that the 2016 recession was 1.5 per cent while it projected 2020 recession to be 3.4 per cent. It has even doubled that of 2016, the governor said.

According to him, we have to take advantage of our arable land by venturing into massive cultivation of crops.

There should be no empty land. Even your backyards should be cultivated. Do not leave any land empty.

We have to work very hard to have enough food. This is not just for Benue indigenes but for everyone who resides in the state.

I want all and sundry to add value to agriculture. We have formed a committee to champion this cause and it will be headed by me.

The state government will support massive agricultural activities in the state. The government will clear large portions of land for enhanced agricultural production, he said. (NAN)
Trump's Assertion of Authority to Reopen Economy Challenged

By Steve Herman April 14, 2020

The assertion from U.S. President Donald Trump that he has "the ultimate authority" on lifting stay-at-home directives and reopening the country's economy is facing backlash.

"His proclamation is that he would be king," said New York Governor Andrew Cuomo. "That statement cannot stand."

The governor, speaking to reporters Tuesday, explained that the 10th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution is not ambiguous in stating presidents do not have "total authority," as Trump declared the previous evening during a White House coronavirus briefing.

"He is wrong on the law, this is not a legal issue," Cuomo said.

The New York governor said Trump is "clearly spoiling for a fight" with state leaders, but "I am not going to fight with him," explaining the COVID-19 pandemic, which has killed about nearly 23,000 Americans, is no time for any division between the federal and state governments.

President Trump on Monday, said he "calls the shots," in reply to a question from VOA about whether consortiums of states developing their own reopening plans pose a challenge to his authority to declare a national reopening amid the pandemic.

"They can't do anything without the approval of the president of the United States," Trump declared.

He insisted there are numerous provisions of the Constitution backing him up on this, asserting "when somebody is president of the United States, the authority is total."

Three prominent Republican U.S. lawmakers disagree.

"The federal government does not have absolute power," Congresswoman Liz Cheney of Wyoming tweeted.

Senator Marco Rubio of Florida said, "How and when to modify social distancing orders should and will be made by Governors." He added on Twitter that "Federal guidelines issued by the CDC and White House will be very influential. But the Constitution & common sense dictates these decisions be made at the state level."

The constitution does not allow the federal government "to become the ultimate regulator of our lives because they wave a doctor's note," tweeted Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky.

Powers not delegated are reserved to states & the people," noted Paul. "If we dispense with constitutional restraints, we will have more to worry about than a virus."

Trump is to soon decide whether to reopen the United States to commerce at a time when governors of all but a handful of the 50 states have imposed stay-at-home edicts because of the viral pandemic.

Cuomo and five other governors of northeastern states began deliberations Tuesday on a regional plan to reopen their economies.

It should be state governors who make these decisions as they have been the ones "showing great leadership," which has kept people safe, Rhode Island's Gina Raimondo told her fellow governors on Monday.

The governors of three Western states, California, Oregon and Washington, also announced Monday they are similarly taking a unified approach.

The East and West Coast consortiums together represent about 100 million people, nearly a third of the country's population.

Trump on Tuesday is to unveil a second task force  which the White House prefers to call a council  to study the timing for the U.S. economy's re-opening. Concern is being expressed that another coronavirus-related top-level federal panel, in addition to another informal group led by the president's son-in-law, Jared Kushner, could create an additional layer of confusion to what many regard as a haphazard U.S. response to the pandemic.

The president recommended physical distancing between Americans through the end of April but is considering whether to reopen the country fully or partly May 1.

Trump has said he is seeking input from not only his medical experts but business leaders, as well.

Dr. Anthony Fauci, a member of the White House coronavirus task force and the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases since 1984, on Tuesday, told the Associated Press that the United States does not yet have the critical testing and tracing procedures needed to begin re-opening the nation's economy.

"We have to have something in place that is efficient and that we can rely on, and we're not there yet," said Fauci.

Fauci's credibility, according to public opinion polls, is much higher than any politician, including the president.

During Monday's White House coronavirus task force briefing, which ran nearly 2 hours, Trump play what his critics quickly labeled a "propaganda" video to counter reports he ignored early warning about the new virus.

"Because we have fake news, I like to document things," Trump said of the video that he said was produced by his social media director, Dan Scavino, and other White House staff.

The screening of the video prompted some U.S. networks, such as CBS, CNN and MSNBC, to cut away from what live coverage of the briefing.

"Everything we did was right," Trump told reporters, after playing the campaign-style video.

A former executive editor of the New York Times, Howell Raines, called the video "one of the most astonishing acts of disinformation from the White House since the Vietnam (War) era."

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Kean said it would also be important for a commission to demonstrate at every step that it is conducting itself in a truly bipartisan fashion. While he was running the 9/11 Commission, Kean said, he never made a decision without making sure his Democratic vice chairman, former Indiana congressman Lee H. Hamilton, was on board. The commission also operated under informal rules in which every member was seated with someone of the other party on either side, and none agreed to make television appearances unless they would be accompanied by a colleague from the other party.
NEW YORK, April 14, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- Laparoscopic Device Market Research Report by Product (Energy Device, Insufflations Device, Closure Device, Robotic Assisted Device, and Laparoscope), by Application (Bariatric Surgery, Colorectal Surgery, General Surgery, Urological Surgery, and Gynecological Surgery), by End User - Global Forecast to 2025 (Cumulative Impact of COVID-19)



Read the full report: https://www.reportlinker.com/p05878022/?utm_source=PRN



The Global Laparoscopic Device Market is expected to grow from USD 13,464.54 Million in 2019 to USD 19,356.48 Million by the end of 2025 at a Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 6.23%.



Market Segmentation & Coverage:

This research report categorizes the Laparoscopic Device to forecast the revenues and analyze the trends in each of the following sub-markets:



"The Closure Device is projected to witness the highest growth during the forecast period"



On the basis of Product, the Laparoscopic Device Market is studied across Energy Device, Insufflations Device, Closure Device, Robotic Assisted Device, Laparoscope, Suction/Irrigation Device, and Handheld Instrument. The Laparoscope commanded the largest size in the Laparoscopic Device Market in 2019. On the other hand, the Closure Device is expected to grow at the fastest CAGR during the forecast period.



"The Gynecological Surgery is projected to witness the highest growth during the forecast period"



On the basis of Application, the Laparoscopic Device Market is studied across Bariatric Surgery, Colorectal Surgery, General Surgery, Urological Surgery, and Gynecological Surgery. The Bariatric Surgery commanded the largest size in the Laparoscopic Device Market in 2019. On the other hand, the Gynecological Surgery is expected to grow at the fastest CAGR during the forecast period.



"The Ambulatory Center is projected to witness the highest growth during the forecast period"



On the basis of End User, the Laparoscopic Device Market is studied across Ambulatory Center and Hospital & Clinic. The Hospital & Clinic commanded the largest size in the Laparoscopic Device Market in 2019. On the other hand, the Ambulatory Center is expected to grow at the fastest CAGR during the forecast period.



"The Asia-Pacific is projected to witness the highest growth during the forecast period"



On the basis of Geography, the Laparoscopic Device Market is studied across Americas, Asia-Pacific, and Europe, Middle East & Africa. The Americas region is studied across Argentina, Brazil, Canada, Mexico, and United States. The Asia-Pacific region is studied across Australia, China, India, Indonesia, Japan, Malaysia, Philippines, South Korea, and Thailand. The Europe, Middle East & Africa region is studied across France, Germany, Italy, Netherlands, Qatar, Russia, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, Spain, United Arab Emirates, and United Kingdom. The Americas commanded the largest size in the Laparoscopic Device Market in 2019. On the other hand, the Asia-Pacific is expected to grow at the fastest CAGR during the forecast period.



Company Usability Profiles:

The report deeply explores the recent significant developments by the leading vendors and innovation profiles in the Global Laparoscopic Device Market including B. Braun Melsungen AG, Boston Scientific Corporation, CONMED Corporation, CooperSurgical Inc, Johnson & Johnson, Karl Storz SE & Co. KG, Matrix Meditec Private Limited, Mediflex Surgical Products, Medtronic plc, Olympus Corporation, Purple Surgical International Ltd., Richard Wolf GmbH, Smith & Nephew plc, Stryker Corporation, and Surgical Innovations Limited.



FPNV Positioning Matrix:

The FPNV Positioning Matrix evaluates and categorizes the vendors in the Laparoscopic Device Market on the basis of Business Strategy (Business Growth, Industry Coverage, Financial Viability, and Channel Support) and Product Satisfaction (Value for Money, Ease of Use, Product Features, and Customer Support) that aids businesses in better decision making and understanding the competitive landscape.



Competitive Strategic Window:

The Competitive Strategic Window analyses the competitive landscape in terms of markets, applications, and geographies. The Competitive Strategic Window helps the vendor define an alignment or fit between their capabilities and opportunities for future growth prospects. During a forecast period, it defines the optimal or favorable fit for the vendors to adopt successive merger and acquisition strategies, geography expansion, research & development, and new product introduction strategies to execute further business expansion and growth.



The report provides insights on the following pointers:

1. Market Penetration: Provides comprehensive information on sulfuric acid offered by the key players

2. Market Development: Provides in-depth information about lucrative emerging markets and analyzes the markets

3. Market Diversification: Provides detailed information about new product launches, untapped geographies, recent developments, and investments

4. Competitive Assessment & Intelligence: Provides an exhaustive assessment of market shares, strategies, products, and manufacturing capabilities of the leading players

5. Product Development & Innovation: Provides intelligent insights on future technologies, R&D activities, and new product developments



The report answers questions such as:

1. What is the market size and forecast of the Global Laparoscopic Device Market?

2. What are the inhibiting factors and their impact analysis shaping the Global Laparoscopic Device Market during the forecast period?

3. What is the competitive position if vendors in the Global Laparoscopic Device Market?

4. How Porters Five Forces define the Global Laparoscopic Device Market landscape?

5. What are the technology trends and regulatory frameworks in the Global Laparoscopic Device Market?

6. Which are the products/segments/applications/areas to invest in over the forecast period in the Global Laparoscopic Device Market?

7. What is the competitive strategic window for opportunities in the Global Laparoscopic Device Market?

8. What are the modes and strategic moves considered suitable for entering the Global Laparoscopic Device Market?



Read the full report: https://www.reportlinker.com/p05878022/?utm_source=PRN



About Reportlinker

ReportLinker is an award-winning market research solution. Reportlinker finds and organizes the latest industry data so you get all the market research you need - instantly, in one place.



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MasterChef has been a ratings hit in Australia for more than a decade.

But there are still some secrets of the popular franchise that even long-standing fans may not know.

From long days on set to stone cold dishes being consumed, and footage that never makes it to air, here are the eight little-known facts about the popular Channe1 10 cooking series.

Scroll down for video

From tasting COLD dishes, to unaired judging and 17-HOUR filming days: The little known secrets of the MasterChef Australia franchise are finally revealed. Pictured: 2020 judges Jock Zonfrillo, Melissa Leong and Andy Allen

Former MasterChef judge George Calombaris spilled some secrets from the show to Daily Mail Australia back in 2015.

Gone! MasterChef Australia's long-running hosts Gary Mehigan, Matt Preston and George Calombaris, left the show last year after a decade of fronting the popular cooking program

'It has always been cold and it always will be cold': Former judge George Calombaris said in 2015 that dishes being judged are actually served to them cold, and they taste things hot off camera at the contestants' benches. Pictured: New 2020 judges with Gordon Ramsay

1. The food is COLD

The Melbourne chef said that while viewers are fascinated by the 'hot' appetizing food they see, the dishes being judged are actually served to them cold.

'It has always been cold and it always will be cold, but we taste everything hot off camera,' Calombaris said at the time.

'So at the end of the cook, you [viewers] don't see that - no one sees that apart from the three of us and the executive producer. We will go around the room and the three of us will taste everything hot out of their [contestants] pot first.

'It looks sexy on TV but it takes time to film': Calombaris said that as the judges taste the contestants' food while it's fresh and hot - they have time to decide a winner early. Pictured: 2020 judge Melissa Leong

2. The judges have already picked a winner before the dishes are served to them

Calombaris said that as the judges taste the contestants' food while it's fresh and hot - they have time to decide a winner early.

'It looks sexy on TV, but it takes time to film. So when you see us tasting at the end - it's cold, but I've already made the decision, I already know what it tastes like,' he explained.

This was also confirmed by season four star Alice Zaslavsky, who told Domain's Weekly Review in 2018: 'The best early indicator that you had a winning dish was when the whole production crew came down and licked your plate clean.'

'A shooting day can be up to 17 hours': Season four star Alice Zaslavsky (pictured in 2012) claimed shooting days were often very long and drawn out, with one challenge on her season taking four days to film

3. The contestants spend LONG days on set

Alice, who now hosts kids' cooking shows on 9GO! and ABC, also revealed shooting days were often very long for stars, with one challenge on her season taking four days to film.

'A shooting day can be up to 17 hours, sometimes at least four of those hours are spent driving up and down, from the house, to the studio, up the driveway, out of the driveway; and at least another seven spent waiting around, some interviews can take like 3 hours  sometimes more and then one of those hours is spent cooking,' she said.

This has also previously been backed up by former judges Calombaris, Matt Preston and Gary Mehigan, and the season's executive producer.

Lucky for them! MasterChef Australia's executive producer Margaret Bashfield told OK! Magazine this month that they had ONE dishwasher responsible for the contestants' mess. Pictured: 2020 MasterChef Australia stars

4. There is ONE person responsible for cleaning all the dishes

This month, MasterChef Australia's executive producer Margaret Bashfield told OK! Magazine that they had one dishwasher responsible for the contestants' mess.

'Leigh Dowling washes everything you see... He's the happiest bloke on the team, even when he gets pots that are horribly burnt on the bottom,' she said at the time.

'Each home cook is given professional training before the challenges': A former runner-up on the US version of MasterChef claimed in 2014 that contestants were given cooking classes on challenges where there was a level of technique required. Pictured: Australia's 2020 cast

5. The stars get special training ahead of technique-based challenges

A former runner-up on the US version of MasterChef wrote a blog in 2014, in which she claimed contestants were given cooking classes ahead of challenges where there was a level of technique required.

An inside source told The Mail on Sunday at the time: 'The entire show is not at all how it seems. Each home cook is given professional training before the challenges to ensure they can cook something decent when they start recording.'

However, this might not be the case for the Australian version and especially on this season's all-star version.

'It usually doesnt make it to TV': 2012 MasterChef Australia star Alice previously claimed stars often shout at people on the balcony to 'shut up'

6. Balcony footage is cut from the show

In another revelation by 2012 MasterChef Australia star Alice, she said there were often heated moments on set during her season that never make it to air.

'A couple of times, and it usually doesnt make it to TV, the contestants specifically looked up [at the balcony] and said: can you guys just shut up!'

No waste! MasterChef Australia has a special arrangement where it donates its food waste to food rescue organisation, SecondBite

7. Food waste is donated to charity

MasterChef Australia has a special arrangement where it donates its food waste to food rescue organisation, SecondBite.

The CEO of SecondBite Jim Mullan told 10Daily in 2019: 'The MasterChef pantry is replenished on an almost daily basis while the program is shooting and we collect daily from the MasterChef studios - everything that we can possibly salvage, we collect and divert it to people in need.'

Shelved: Half of the show had already been filmed for MasterChef Australia when stricter coronavirus restrictions were brought into affect for the production. International judges Nigella Lawson and Heston Blumenthal had to cancel their scheduled appearances, while outdoor challenges with crowds have been shelved

8. Coronavirus has changed a few things going forward with production

Half of the show had already been filmed for MasterChef Australia when stricter coronavirus restrictions were brought into affect for the production.

International judges Nigella Lawson and Heston Blumenthal had to cancel their scheduled appearances, while outdoor challenges with crowds have been shelved.

Planned travel has also been cancelled, while shooting outside of the set has been banned, according to The Daily Telegraph.

No more sharing! Contestants will reportedly serve up individually-sized dishes for judges to sample, as opposed to share plates, in coming episodes

The publication understands producers have made it their priority to ensure greater hygiene procedures are followed, including contestants wearing gloves.

Contestants will reportedly serve up individually-sized dishes for judges to sample, as opposed to share plates, in coming episodes.

MasterChef Australia airs weeknights from 7:30pm on Channel 10
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Indias poor say lockdown extension until May 3 leaves them without money, food and promised government aid.

Several protests have broken out in India over the lockdown to fight the coronavirus pandemic as migrant workers call for food and aid.

The government has promised to help 800 million poor Indians but they say they have been left to fend for themselves.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi has extended the nationwide lockdown to May 3.

Al Jazeeras Elizabeth Puranam reports from New Delhi.
A junior doctor has warned Covid-19 is not confined to the elderly and infirm and can 'wreak havoc' in young, healthy people - after her boyfriend battled the virus.

Madeleine Openshaw, who works in A&E department of a hospital in a major UK city, is currently self-isolating and caring for her partner, who is now on the mend.

She said it is a 'very unusual virus' which can present itself with a wide variety of signs and symptoms, making it difficult to manage.

Writing in British Vogue, she told how her boyfriend - who works in mental health at a different hospital - was diagnosed with pneumonia when they went to A&E, but did not need to be admitted.

Madeleine Openshaw (pictured) told how she is currently training to be a GP, after six years at medical school and two years of basic hospital training, but was called back to A&E

'It's worrying to think that Covid-19 can wreak such havoc in a young and healthy person; it was an important reminder to me that this isn't a disease entirely confined to the elderly and infirm,' she wrote.

Madeleine told how she is currently training to be a GP, after six years at medical school and two years of basic hospital training, but was called back to A&E.

She explained: 'I was meant to be starting paediatrics last week, but instead, like thousands of doctors across the country, I have been redeployed to help staff the frontline services that are seeing a surge in demand because of coronavirus  A&E, intensive care, and acute medicine.'

Madeleine said her hospital - coincidentally where her grandparents worked as doctors during the Blitz, where her parents met here at medical school and where she was born - has been planning for the pandemic since January and currently has enough personal protective equipment.

While morale there is 'good', she highlighted that this is not the case in many other hospitals across the country, which are low on PPE and supplies of oxygen.

When her boyfriend began showing symptoms of Covid-19, which manifested in a mild cough, aches and pains and exhaustion, her hospital tested him and it came back positive.

Common symptoms of coronavirus The most common symptoms are fever, cough, shortness of breath, and breathing difficulties. In more severe cases infection can cause pneumonia, severe acute respiratory syndrome, and even death. The period within which the symptoms would appear is 2-14 days. Advertisement

She is currently on day nine of isolation and remains symptom free, and admitted to feeling 'guilty' at first that she couldn't return to work.

When her boyfriend took a turn for the worst, they contacted NHS 111 and followed their advice.

Madeleine said she worries she will have some catching up to do when she does return to work, as other than her boyfriend she hasn't yet had to deal with an acutely unwell patient with the virus.

'It is a very unusual virus, it hasn't yet learned how to behave in its new human host and can present with a wide variety of signs and symptoms, all of which will take some getting used to managing,' she added.

Last month Madeleine wrote in The Guardian that she hopes the pandemic makes people realise how important the NHS is and that she 'couldnt be prouder to feel part of it'.

She urged people to follow government advice and stay home, and to continue clapping for the NHS and care workers every Thursday evening at 8pm.
Filmmaker Denis Villeneuve says the world created by author Frank Herbert in his classic novel "Dune" is quite complex and that is why he wanted to tell the story in two parts.

Set in the distant future, the 1965 cult classic novel follows Paul Atreides, whose family assumes control of the desert planet Arrakis, which is the only known location of the galaxy's most vital and mind-altering mineral called "spice".

After Paul and his family are betrayed, the story explores themes of politics, religion, and man's relationship to nature, as Paul leads a rebellion to restore his family's reign.

The novel was previously adapted by veteran filmmaker David Lynch into a 1984 movie which made back then for the director's frequent clashes with the producers.

Villeneuve, whose last directorial was "Blade Runner 2049", the critically-acclaimed sequel to Ridley Scott's "Blade Runner", said he knew right from the start that it would be impossible to tell the story of "Dune" in just one film.

"I would not agree to make this adaptation of the book with one single movie. The world is too complex. It's a world that takes its power in details," the director told Vanity Fair.

He said the themes explored by the author in his novel, such as the over-exploitation of the planet, is quite relevant for the present day audiences.

"No matter what you believe, Earth is changing, and we will have to adapt. That's why I think that'Dune',this book, was written in the 20th century.

"It was a distant portrait of the reality of the oil and the capitalism and the exploitation, the overexploitation, of Earth. Today, things are just worse. It's a coming-of-age story, but also a call for action for the youth," he added.

Villeneuve said "Dune" was the most "difficult" project of his career.

"It's a book that tackles politics, religion, ecology, spiritualityand with a lot of characters. I think that's why it's so difficult. Honestly, it's by far the most difficult thing I've done in my life," the filmmaker added.

"Dune" will see Timothee Chalamet leading a star-studded cast of Rebecca Ferguson, Oscar Isaac, Josh Brolin, Stellan Skarsgard, Dave Bautista, Zendaya, David Dastmalchian, Stephen McKinley Henderson, Charlotte Rampling, Jason Momoa and Javier Bardem.

Villeneuve has adapted the novel in collaboration with Eric Roth and Jon Spaihts.

The first part of "Dune" will release on December 18 this year.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
The article Caring for Connecticuts Southeast Asian-American Communities during COVID-19 (CT Mirror, April 7th, by Jason Oliver Chang), hereafter referred to as the article, begins by discussing the severe consequences of COVID-19 and, specifically, its impact on the Southeast-Asian population in Connecticut. My heart goes to all who suffer, and hats off to those who are battling the pandemic fearlessly.

I cant help noticing though, that the article digressed from its title and focused almost entirely on other marginally related issues, some controversial or even divisive, which raised questions regarding its intent.

Ethnicity data disaggregation (or Asian Registry)

The most noticeable advocacy of the article is for the government to collect finely defined ethnicity-specific data, especially on the Asian-American population, and to formulate public policies based on this data.

Ethnicity data disaggregation, as frequently referenced in legislative language, is a controversial practice of mandating government agencies to collect data on ethnicity, ancestral country of origin, and sometimes language, from residents including school children. This is in addition to the data based on commonly used racial groups. In recent years, this issue has increasingly become a focal point of debate, statewide as well as nationally, as exemplified in the Connecticut General Assembly where opposing legislation (e.g., 2018 SB 359, 2018 SB 465, and 2019 HB 851) was proposed, albeit none has been passed or enacted.

Proponents of ethnicity data disaggregation advocate that the commonly used racial groups are inadequate and should be subdivided into numerous subgroups based on ethnicity, ancestral country of origin, and perhaps language. The push mainly focuses on subdividing the already small Asian- American population (5% of the national population) into even smaller finely defined subgroups, thus earning the colloquial name Asian Registry.

Ethnicity data disaggregation or Asian Registry is divisive, unnecessary, and wasteful of public resources. Its underlying goal can be traced back to the desire of certain advocacy groups for securing more government funding through a narrative of disparity and inequality. It has triggered strong opposition, noticeably from Chinese Americans, even in our small state.

Regardless of where you stand on the controversial Asian Registry, the issue is certainly far from a top priority to be addressed during the current crisis.

COVID-19 is tearing through Connecticut like a wildfire. It hurts the disadvantaged population even more than it does the rest of us. In this scenario, however, the disadvantaged population includes those who are old, in poverty, living in over-crowded inner cities, or suffering from background health issues. More resources should definitely be provided to the disadvantaged population; however, the age, health, and socio-economic factors should not be comingled or confused with race, ethnicity, or ancestral country of origin. Within any ethnicity group, there are disadvantaged people, all of whom deserve equal attention regardless of their ethnicities.

Making use of the COVID-19 crisis, the article maintained that the Southeastern-Asian population in Connecticut should be separately recognized in government data collection. Its reasoning was that the Southeast-Asian people are distinct from other more privileged Asian-American populations such as those with origins from India or China, who allegedly fit better to the model minority pattern due to their higher academic achievements, technical skills and higher incomes.

Unfortunately, this type of gross generalization, or more accurately, stereotyping, is inaccurate and misleading. No ethnic group is homogeneous, and the disparity among individuals within any group is always greater than the collective disparity among different groups. For example, many immigrants from Fujian, a province in mainland China, have come here undocumented, mostly speaking limited English if any at all, and working low-paying jobs in the kitchens of small Chinese take-out restaurants. Under the Asian Registry scheme, nevertheless, these folks and their children would be inappropriately placed in a privileged bucket using the ancestral country of origin criterion, assuming Chinese Americans are somehow considered privileged.

The article made references to the historical legacy of war-time trauma suffered by many immigrants from Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia, and suggested that the way to alleviate the problems caused by past suffering would be to have the Southeast-Asian population distinguished from other, more privileged, Asian-Americans for government data collection purposes.

While I am very sympathetic to victims of war atrocities, it needs to be recognized that Asian Registry or any kind of Ethnicity Data Disaggregation is not an effective or practical means of remediation. Many ethnicity groups have suffered from historical trauma. Examples include the Armenian genocide, the Holocaust, Rwanda genocide, and the atrocious Chinese cultural revolution. Nevertheless, Armenian, Jew, Tutsi or Chinese have not been disaggregated for most governmental data collections. For sure, historical trauma needs healing and reconciliation, and the society has the obligation to help. However, making finer and finer distinctions on governmental data collection based on ancestral countries of origin simply does not address the issue, and would not be practical to broadly cover all historically traumatized ethnic groups.

Data does provide a foundation for public policy. However, the issue is that ethnicity and ancestral country of origin are not relevant, but rather divisive, data. Instead, socio-economic status would be a much more meaningful criterion for formulating public policy.

I truly believe that people should be treated as individuals and not thrown into politically convenient categories that capture only an infinitesimal part of what makes each individual who he or she is.

I wish that one day the citizens of this nation need only fill in one box to identify themselves: American.

Alleged racism

The article also made references to an increase of racially based attack towards Asians during the current pandemic, stating that more than 1,000 incidents have been reported in February across the country. While the accuracy and statistical significance of the above statement warrant further review, it is admittedly an unfortunate reality that racially based attacks do occur. Although, based on my personal experience as an Asian-American, there has been an abundance of tolerance, support, and a strong sense of community during this pandemic.

The article further asserted that Racist language, scapegoating, and conspiracy theories continue to be a part of the Trump administration and GOP response to the COVID-19 pandemic, fueling racial violence and hatred of Asians I have been following the news stories. It is true that President Trump fought back with direct, bold language after an official of the Chinese Communist Party had accused the U.S Army for bringing the coronavirus to China. While it might be debatable to some whether the President had chosen the best wording, his rebuttal on the vicious, absurd accusation from CCP was clearly powerful and justified, and proved very effective in stopping that accusation. In this regard, he was defending America.

Together, we win

During the current battle against COVID-19, I have witnessed many residents and communities, regardless of their races, ethnicities, ancestral countries of origin, or political party associations, caring for each other, supporting the medical and emergency workers, and striving together with the government. Asian-American communities throughout the state have been very active in collecting and donating PPE, food and other supplies to our frontline warriors. Hopefully we, together, will get out of this mess soon.

It is a time to unite, not divide.

Monty Du is a resident of Wilton.
Scott Morrison has dismissed the idea of a pay cut for federal government ministers and public service bosses during the coronavirus crisis.

The Australian Prime Minister who earns an annual salary of $549,250, is not planning to follow in the footsteps of New Zealand after Kiwi leader Jacinda Ardern announced all ministers and public service chiefs would take a 20 percent pay cut for a period of six months.

'It's not something that's being considered,' he told 6PR radio on Wednesday.

In contrast to New Zealand, the Australian Government has introduced a pay freeze for politicians and high-ranking public servants, which restricts them from receiving any salary increases during the pandemic.

Scott Morrison has dismissed the idea of a pay cut for federal government ministers and public service bosses during the coronavirus crisis

New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern (pictured), ministers in her government and public service chief executives will take a 20 per cent pay cut for the next six months

Mr Morrison said he doesn't support any pay cuts for public servants because they are working tireless to deliver important coronavirus response measures including wage subsidies and stimulus packages.

'They do a great job and they're as much on the frontline saving people's livelihoods frankly as nurses working in hospitals,' he said.

'Everyone is working hard here. Everyone who is in a job is in an essential job. I just want to support them in those jobs so I'm not keen to get into a competition.'

Earlier on Wednesday, Treasurer of Australia Josh Frydenberg also poured cold water on the idea of a pay cut.

On the other side of the Tasman Sea, Ardern said the move to slash salaries was made to show solidarity with New Zealanders who had lost jobs and income as a result of the disease outbreak.

One way to save money to pay back debts would be to reduce the wage bill in the public sector, including politicians.

Prime Minster Scott Morrison was asked if he was considering reforming franking credits or cutting ministers' salaries.

Mr Morrison replied: 'No, we're not reconsidering franking credits and these sort of things.'

Franking credits are a tax rebate to shareholders who get dividends, including retirees. Labor pledged to scrap them in the 2019 election campaign, and that policy was identified as one which cost the party an election it was expected to win.

Dozens of high-earning figures in the private sector have vowed to take pay cuts.

Qantas CEO Alan Joyce, whose base salary is $2.1million, has said he will not take a penny of his salary as long as coronavirus lasts.

Qantas CEO Alan Joyce, whose base salary is $2.1 million, has said he will not take a penny of his salary as long as coronavirus lasts

NRL CEO Todd Greenberg, who earns $1.2million, will take a 25 per cent pay cut - and has said he will sacrifice more if the players have their salaries cut further.

Politicians, judges and officials holding senior public office have had their pay frozen until the crisis is over - but some commentators say the freeze is not enough.

MPs wages in Australia As at 1 July 2019, the base salary of federal MPs is $211,250 per annum. This is before travel allowance and electorate entitlements. Prime Minister Scott Morrison gets $549,250. Deputy Prime Minister Michael McCormack is on $433,063. Treasurer Josh Frydenberg is paid $396,094. Finance Minister Mathias Cormann, who is also Leader of the Government in the Senate, gets $396,094. Opposition Leader Anthony Albanese is on $390,813 Advertisement

John Roskam, Executive Director at the Institute of Public Affairs, said: 'Not all this extra spending has to be new money and debt. There should be a 20 per cent reduction in public service pay until the crisis is over.

'There needs to be a sense of shared sacrifice from the public service. We have seen a disconnect of bureaucrat elites from the productive economy.'

In late March One Nation leader Pauline Hanson demanded politicians take a pay cut.

'I have no problems with politicians wages being cut back in areas, and I'm happy to tell the Prime Minister where to start,' she said.

The base salary for a federal MP is $211,250.

Ms Hanson also said politicians' perks should be removed, such as flying business class instead of economy and that committee payments should cease.

Last month Malta's Prime Minister said he would forgo a month's salary to send a message to the nation that he was also making sacrifices during the pandemic.
BAKU, Azerbaijan, April 15

By Eldar Janashvili - Trend:

As opposed to the regional countries, Azerbaijan did not prefer external borrowing or devaluation but relies only on its own resources in the fight against the crisis associated with the threat of coronavirus, Executive Director of the Azerbaijani Center for Economic Reforms Analysis and Communication Vusal Gasimli said, Trend reports on April 15.

Gasimli stressed that the biggest global economic crisis of the 21st century, record low oil prices and global COVID-19 pandemic affect the income of the Azerbaijani consolidated budget.

The revenues to the state budget amounted to 7.8 billion manat ($4.6 billion), expenses - 5.2 billion manat ($3 billion) in the first quarter of this year, which ensured a surplus of 2.6 billion manat ($1.5 billion), but the situation may worsen in the second quarter, he added.

Despite in the first quarter, tax and customs bodies exceeded the income forecast by more than 312.2 million manat ($183.6 million), the uncertainty in connection with deepening of global recession and pandemic negatively affects income, Gasimli said.

As long as global shocks continue, revenues and expenditures are reviewed as part of a fiscal support policy for the national economy, the executive director said.

Gasimli stressed that many countries of the former Soviet Union have already decided to take the measures regarding the budget.

So, Russia decided to change the budget parameters for 2020-2022, the executive director said. Under the influence of global shocks, the Kazakh government also prepared the proposals to increase revenues and expenses in the budget for 2020. The Ukrainian government hopes to cover the budget deficit by borrowing $5 billion from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) as part of the Extended Fund Facility (EFF) tranche in exchange for certain commitments. Georgian government, predicting losses of $4.3 billion, began negotiations with international financial institutions on borrowing in the amount of $1 billion.

All regional countries, except Azerbaijan, Russia and Kazakhstan, which have a "safety cushion", are trying to balance the state budget for 2020 by increasing external public debt and revising the budget deficit, which is very expensive, the executive director said.

Within the current budget legislation, 1.3 billion manat ($764.7 million) has been allocated from the presidential reserve fund and other reserve sources to combat the crisis, in particular, to change and set a number of expenses by re-assessing the priority of budget expenditures, Gasimli said.

Moreover, the efficiency of investments and current expenses is expected to further increase, as well as new financial sources are expected to be searched to ensure the budgetary funds to combat the crisis, the financial burden of which exceeds 2.5 billion manat ($1.5 billion), said the official.

Not only budget parameters are being reviewed in Azerbaijan, but also the macroeconomic framework is being changed as the need arises to revise fiscal and, accordingly, macroeconomic policy to change the budget framework, Gasimli said. The correct preparation of macroparameters stipulates the forecasting of budget indicators.

For this purpose, the accounts of production, primary and secondary distribution and final use must be analyzed in the National Accounts System, Gasimli said.

It is also necessary to reevaluate GDP on the basis of an analysis through the expenditure method to match the functional classification (including economic classification) of the state budget, the executive director said.

An analysis of GDP through the expenditure method shows that in the remaining part of the year, the consumption of households and state agencies, as well as net export, will tend to decrease, but, on the other hand, due to low prices, oil revenues, as well as twenty spheres of the non-oil sector most affected as a result of the pandemic will decrease, Gasimli said.

Gasimli stressed that the Azerbaijani president determined three main goals of economic policy for the current year, namely, economic stability, employment and welfare, economic growth.

Proceeding from these goals, determining of the priorities in spending in the budget policy, further increasing of transparency and increasing of the efficiency of spending have been determined as the main directions, the executive director added.

"Such measures as amnesty of capital and property, privatization, reducing the budget load by increasing the efficiency of managing state enterprises, increasing the transparency and economic efficiency of investment programs and increasing the transparency of public procurement have been determined to ensure fiscal sustainability, the executive director said.

Moreover, the attraction of private investments will be decisive in ensuring sustainable economic growth," Gasimli added.
Germany plans to let smaller shops reopen next week after the coronavirus shutdown, and to start reopening schools in early May.

But Europes biggest economy is keeping strict social distancing rules in place for now.

After much-anticipated talks with Germanys 16 state governors, Chancellor Angela Merkel set out a plan for the first steps of a cautious restart of public life  following neighbouring Austria and Denmark and other countries in launching a slow loosening of restrictions.

New infections in Germany have slowed in recent weeks, but Ms Merkel cautioned that the country has achieved only a fragile intermediate success so far and does not have much room for manoeuvre.

She said a ban on gatherings of more than two people in public and an obligation to keep at a 1.5-metre distance from others, which has been in place since March 23, will remain in place beyond Sunday when it was previously set to expire.

Nonessential shops, which have also have been closed for nearly four weeks, will be allowed to start reopening, with hygiene precautions, if they are up to 800 square metres in area. So will car showrooms, bike shops and bookshops, irrespective of their size.

Ms Merkel said the decisions apply to the period from Monday though May 3, and officials will review the situation again on April 30.

She said authorities also will recommend that people wear face masks on public transport and when shopping, but are stopping short of making their use obligatory for now.

Schools have been closed since mid-March. Ms Merkel said preparations will be made for them to reopen step by step from May 4, with the oldest students returning first.

Hairdressing salons also should prepare to reopen starting May 4, officials said.

State governors and Germanys interior minister will hold talks this week with religious communities on what to do about religious gatherings, which have not been allowed in recent weeks, Ms Merkel said.

It remains unclear when bars, cafes and restaurants  which also are closed, apart from for takeouts  will be allowed to reopen.

We are moving forward in small steps and must see what effect they have, Ms Merkel said.

Germany has confirmed more than 130,000 coronavirus infections, according to a tally by Johns Hopkins University.

It has recorded over 3,500 deaths, but that is a lower number than in countries with comparable case figures and Germanys health system has not been overwhelmed.
President Donald Trump has announced halting America's funding of up to USD 500 million annually to the World Health Organization while a review is being done to assess its role in "severely mismanaging and covering up" the spread of the deadly coronavirus when it first emerged in China.

The novel coronavirus, which originated in the central Chinese city of Wuhan in Hubei province in November, has so far killed at least 1,19,000 people globally, including more than 25,000 in the United States, according to Johns Hopkins University.

"Today I am instructing my administration to halt funding of the World Health Organization while a review is conducted to assess the World Health Organization's role in severely mismanaging and covering up the spread of the coronavirus. Everybody knows what has gone on there," Trump told reporters at his daily White House conference on the pandemic on Tuesday.

Trump and his senior officials have previously accused the Geneva-based UN health body of taking side with China in the coronavirus outbreak that has brought America's economy, the world's largest, to a standstill.

Reacting to Trump's remarks, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said now was "not the time" to be cutting resources for the WHO.

American taxpayers provide between USD 400 million and USD 500 million per year to the WHO, in contrast, China contributes roughly USD 40 million a year and even less, the president said.

"As the organisation's leading sponsor, the United States has a duty to insist on full accountability, one of the most dangerous and costly decisions from the WHO was its disastrous decision to oppose travel restrictions from China and other nations, Trump alleged.

"They were very much opposed to what we did, fortunately, I was not convinced and suspended travel from China saving untold numbers of lives...thousands and thousands of people would have died, he said.

The world, he asserted, depends on the WHO to work with countries to ensure that accurate information about international health threats is shared in a timely manner.

The WHO failed in this basic duty and must be held accountable, he emphasised.

The president alleged that WHO failed to investigate credible reports from sources in Wuhan that conflicted directly with the Chinese government's official accounts. There was credible information to suspect human-to-human transmission in December 2019, which should have spurred the WHO to investigate and investigate immediately, he observed.

Through middle of January it parroted and publicly endorsed the idea that there was not human-to-human transmission happening despite reports and clear evidence to the contrary, he said.

According to Trump, the delays the WHO experienced in declaring a public health emergency cost valuable time.

The inability of the WHO to obtain virus samples to this date has deprived the scientific community of essential data. New data that emerges across the world on a daily basis points to the unreliability of the initial reports and the world received all sorts of false information about transmission and mortality, he said.

Trump alleged that the silence of the WHO on the disappearance of scientific researchers and doctors and new restrictions on the sharing of research into the origins of COVID-19 in the country of origin is deeply concerning, especially when the US gives by far the largest amount of money to the global health body.

"Had the WHO done its job to get medical experts into China to objectively assess the situation on the ground and to call out China's lack of transparency, the outbreak could have been contained...with very little death..., he said.

Instead the WHO willingly took China's assurances at face value...and defended the actions of the Chinese government, even praising China for its so-called transparency....

"The WHO pushed China's misinformation about the virus, saying it was not communicable, and there was no need for travel bans.... The WHO's reliance on China's disclosures likely caused a 20-fold increase in cases worldwide, and it may be much more than that, Trump said.

He said the WHO has not addressed a single one of these concerns nor provided a serious explanation that acknowledges its own mistakes.

Trump said for the WHO, it would have been so easy to be truthful, and so much death has been caused by their mistakes. We will continue to engage with the WHO to see if it can make meaningful reforms. For the time being, we will redirect global health and directly work with others, he said.

According to Trump, had other nations like the US suspended travel from China, countless more lives would have been saved. Instead look at the rest of the world, look at parts of Europe other nations and regions who followed WHO guidelines, and kept their borders open to China accelerated the pandemic all around the world, he said.

The WHO's attack on travel restrictions put political correctness above life-saving measures, he alleged.

Since its establishment in 1948, the American people have generously supported the WHO to provide better health outcomes for the world and, most importantly, to help prevent global health crises, he said.

"With the outbreak of the COVID-19, we have deep concerns whether America's generosity has been put to the best use possible. The reality is that the WHO failed to adequately obtain, vet and share information in a timely and transparent fashion," Trump added.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Still, the scene of dozens of elected officials shouting at once while trying to conduct business from their homes and the mayor urging them to mute their feeds promises to be one of the lasting moments of a city brought to heel by the coronavirus.
Nigeria must not allow the bitter lessons of the coronavirus pandemic to go to waste, the Governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN), Godwin Emefiele, has advised.

Rather, he said, Nigerians should learn from other countries around the world that adopted drastic measures to protect their people and economies, by looking inwards.

Mr Emefiele, who noted the devastation of the COVID-19 pandemic on countries and the global economy, said the novel disease has rapidly permeated and profoundly changed the world.

He said the crisis, which has led to a public health challenge, claiming the lives of over 123,600 people worldwide, has done incalculable damages to the global economy.

Apart from crude oil prices, which have declined, he said global airlines lost about $252 billion in revenue, with the pain growing across other industries, from hospitality to services.

These outcomes have expectedly thrown the global economy into a recession, the depth and duration of which is currently difficult to fathom, the CBN governor said.

In fact, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) predicts that the global economy would decline by 3 percent this year, he added.

The crisis, Mr Emefiele said, has forced countries to move away from multilateralism, by fighting for themselves with several measures to protect their own people and economies, regardless of the spillover effects on the rest of the world.

How economies reacted to COVID-19

Citing the World Customs Organisation (WCO) statistics, Mr Emefiele said about 32 countries and territories adopted stringent and immediate export restrictions on critical medical supplies and drugs specifically meant to respond to COVID-19 pademic.

As of April 10, the Global Trade Alert Team at the University of St. Gallen, Switzerland said about 75 countries adopted 102 export restriction policies, with Germany announcing export ban on all medical protection gears, including breathing masks, medical gloves and protective suits.

Also, French President Emmanuel Macron announced his countrys requisition of all face masks produced in the country, while India, between February 8 and April 6, released eight different export notifications banning several drugs and medical supplies.

The drugs and equipment included hydroxychloroquine, ventilators, personal protections masks, oxygen therapy apparatus, and breathing devices.

Besides, on April 3, he said the United States government invoked the war-era U.S. Defence Production Act to stop major U.S. mask manufacturer, 3M, from the export of respirator masks, N95, to Canada and Latin America.

Again, the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) reported that about 37 countries also enacted various food and agricultural produce export restrictions in response to COVID-19.

For instance, he said Vietnam, reputed to be the worlds third largest exporter of rice, suspended granting rice export certificates until the country reviews domestic inventories.

Likewise Russia, the worlds largest wheat exporter, announced a ten-day ban on the export of buckwheat and rice due to concerns over panic buying in local supermarkets.

Need to look inwards

Mr Emefiele said Nigerians should begin to feel concerned about their future should the current wave of restrictions result in countries shutting their borders against food imports, medical care outside Nigeria.

For how long shall we (Nigerians) continue to rely on the world for anything and everything at every time? he asked.

These restrictions as a result of the COVD-19 pandemic present a clear opportunity to re-echo a persistent message the CBN has been sending for a long time, which is even more urgent today: we must look inwards as a nation and guarantee food security, high quality and affordable healthcare, and cutting-edge education for our people.

For a country of over 200 million people, and projected to grow to about 450 million in a few decades, he said Nigeria can no longer ignore repeated warnings about the dangers that lie ahead if we do not begin to depend largely on what we produce locally.

For him, the security and well-being of Nigeria is contingent on building a well-diversified and inclusive productive economy.

In June 2014, Mr Emefiele said the CBN disbursed over N1.3 trillion worth of foreign exchange for rice, fish, wheat and sugar imports in Nigeria.

Despite being one of the worlds largest producers and exporters of palm oil, cocoa and groundnuts a few decades ago, he said Nigeria today imports nearly 600,000 metric tonnes of palm oil.

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In the contrary, he said Indonesia and Malaysia, two countries that were far behind Nigeria in palm oil, today export over 90 per cent global of demand, while Indonesia earned $12.6 billion from its oil and gas sector in 2017, against $18.4 billion realised from palm oil exports.

I believe the COVID-19 pandemic and the immediate response of many of our trading partners suggest it is now more critical than ever that we take back control, not just control over our economy, but also of our destiny and our future, the CBN governor said.

Noting the effort of the President Muhammadu Buhari administration to promote backward integration, he said the CBN on its part created several lending programmes to provide hundreds of billions to smallholder farmers and industrial processors in several key agricultural produce.

These policies and programmes, he said, were to reposition Nigeria to become a self-sufficient food producer, creating jobs, supplying key markets across the country and dampening the effects of exchange rate movements on local prices.

He said the CBN has consistently harped on the need to take decisive actions to fundamentally transform the structure of our economy against the damaging effects of unsustainable propensity to import.

COVID-19 stimulus package

He said the CBNs N3.5 trillion stimulus package, to tackle the effect of COVID-189, was aimed at strengthening the Nigerian economy through the funding of targeted measures to households, businesses, manufacturers and healthcare providers.

These measures, he said, were deliberately designed to support the federal governments immediate fight against COVID-19 and build a more resilient, more self-reliant Nigerian economy.

We do not know what the world will look like after this pandemic. Countries may continue to look inwards and globalisation as we know it today may be dead for a generation, he said.

Therefore, as a nation, we cannot afford to continue relying on the world for our food, education and healthcare.

The time has come to fully transform Nigeria into a modern, sophisticated and inclusive economy that is self-sufficient, rewards the hardworking, but protects the poor and vulnerable, and can compete internationally across a range of strategic sectors, he added.

Towards self-sufficiency

To achieve self-sufficiency in food production, education and healthcare, the CBN boss urged Nigerians to support the government to immediately build the infrastructure, including reliable power for industrial activity, and support both smallholder and large scale agriculture production in select staple and cash crops.

Other steps, he added, include the creation of an ecosystem of factories, storages, and logistics companies to move raw materials to factories and finished goods to markets; deploy fiscal priorities to create a robust educational system that enables critical thinking and creativity.

Also, he said the government should develop a healthcare system that is trusted to keep all Nigerians healthy, irrespective of social class; facilitate access to cheap and long-term credit for SMEs and large corporates; develop and strengthen pro-poor policies to bring financial services and security to the poor and the vulnerable.

In addition, he wants government to expedite the development of venture capitalists for nurturing new ideas and assisting Nigerian businesses to compete globally.
Dr. Mark V. Morocco oversees the coronavirus testing at UCLA Medical Center. (Carolyn Cole / Los Angeles Times)

Mayor Eric Garcetti announced Tuesday that, thanks to increased testing capacity, anyone with coronavirus symptoms can now book a same or next-day appointment.

"Great news for anybody who's feeling under the weather and has the symptoms," he said at a news briefing.

More information about getting tested is available here.

Of more than 63,000 people who have been tested in Los Angeles County, 11% were positive, officials said Tuesday.

Public Health Department Director Barbara Ferrer said that percentage could indicate that of Los Angeles Countys 10 million residents, we could have as many as 1 million people at some point in time who are infected. Of course, not every individual will obtain testing for COVID-19.

Testing is considered a crucial way of tracking and potentially slowing the coronavirus.

The number of those tested has been collected via an electronic reporting system, Ferrer said. Commercial labs, medical providers and hospitals are recording those numbers, and a public health team checks for duplicate reports. Ferrer said the numbers are reported once a test result is obtained.

At some point, certain labs did not have access to the reporting system, which is one possible reason the reported number of those tested jumped by more than 10,000 Tuesday.

Los Angeles County health officials on Tuesday confirmed 40 more deaths linked to the coronavirus, the highest number reported in a single day.

The countys death toll now stands at 366, and Ferrer said the mortality rate has increased to 3.6%.

Ferrer confirmed 670 additional COVID-19 cases, bringing the countys total to more than 10,000. Officials have previously said that the case count includes individuals who have recovered, but there is currently no way to track those numbers.
COLUMBUS, Ohio - Three hundred sixty-one people in Ohio have died of the novel coronavirus, including 15 people who had died of probable COVID-19, according to Ohio Department of Health figures on Wednesday afternoon.

There were 7,791 cases, including 163 under the new definition, which includes diagnosis through new tests and physicians, clinics and hospitals that have ruled out other diseases and have a case that presents as COVID-19.

This is up from Tuesday, when the state reported COVID-19 had killed 324 Ohioans, and infected 7,280 people.

The new cases didnt necessarily occur in the past 24 hours. State officials said Tuesday that the new numbers sometimes reflect people who died or were infected in prior days, but the Ohio Department of Health wasnt notified immediately.

By Thursday, there were cases in 87 of Ohios 88 counties.

its important to say we know these numbers are the tip of the iceberg, Ohio Department of Health Director Dr. Amy Acton said.

Due to testing shortages and hospitals or local health departments not reporting cases and deaths in a timely manner, there are likely far more people with COVID-19 than is being reported.

About 71,000 tests have been run in Ohio.

Gov. Mike DeWine announced new innovations in personal protective equipment and testing for COVID-19, during his Wednesday briefing.

Over 2 million people have become sick with coronavirus globally, including 130,000 who have died, according to Johns Hopkins Universitys COVID-19 tracker.

In the U.S. 613,000 people have confirmed cases, and just under 27,000 people have died.

Expanded Battelle partnership

Gov. Mike DeWine said that the Ohio Department of Public Safety has entered a partnership with Battelle to sanitize masks. Battelle is not charging for the service, which is currently underway for Ohio hospitals.

The need for PPE not only impacts our frontline health care workers but also certainly first responders, DeWine said.

Police, ambulance workers and others can drop masks off at highway patrol offices, and theyll be sent to Columbus, to Battelles headquarters.

Unemployment update

Lt. Gov. Jon Husted said state employees working in unemployment for the Ohio Department of Job and Family Services understand they need to step up customer service. Nearly 700,000 Ohioans have filed unemployment claims.

The system was built in 2004 and when the unemployment rate was 4%, it worked fine, Husted said.

Pre-pandemic, 42 people worked in the call center. Now there are 1,194 people and that still is not enough, he said. There are many other agencies that have loaned employees to ODJFS to do this.

More claims were filed in the last month than the last two years, Husted said.

Because of the pandemic we cant have people physically there, DeWine said, and people are working remotely from home.

This week, Husted hopes there will be over 300 newly trained staff, add voice to text capabilities, among other improvements. ODJFS wants next week to process additional $600 a week payments that Congress authorized recently.

Unemployment for the self-employed

The agency will start an online application process for 1099 workers, which refers to the Internal Revenue Service form for self-employed people. That part of the website will be live next week.

Payments wont be processed until May 15, Husted said.

This process will not stop improving until everybody is served, he said.

52 percent

Just over half of Ohioans have filled out their U.S. Census, now being done online.

DeWine asked people who havent completed it to get cracking.

Ohios response rate is lower than Michigans, which is around 55%.

Prison deaths

Two more inmates in state prisons have died of COVID-19, DeWine announced.

Earlier today I approved early release of 105 inmates, DeWine said, explaining that the process began last week of inmates who had 90 or fewer days of their sentence left and hadnt been convicted of violent crimes.

The inmates will be tested before released.

DeWine said he told the prison system to continue to look for this criteria -- inmates with 90 days or less on a sentence and non-violent convictions -- to be recommended for release.

Elective surgeries plan

DeWine said Wednesday morning he had a two-hour conversation with Ohio hospital executives. He asked them for a plan to deal with deferred health care.

DeWine had previously asked no elective surgeries be performed due to a lack of personal protection equipment, which he wanted preserved for people caring for coronavirus patients.

We have seen in the last week we have flattened the curve, he said. ... But the problem still remains in personal protective equipment and having enough of that.

DeWine said he was concerned that people who need colonoscopies or other procedures, need to be served as soon as the worst of coronavirus hospitalizations is behind Ohio.

I have asked them, as they put the plan together, to still be mindful of the PPE challenge, DeWine said.

Data from health department

Today there were 37 deaths in Ohio.

There are actually people who died today that we will not learn about for days to come," Acton said.

She said the health department doesnt always get death data immediately. Sometimes, hospitals are performing coronavirus tests on a person who has died, and that takes time.

Then there is new infection data, which also lags, she said.

New infections dont always get reported immediately. A new case from Wednesday may not be reported until Friday, she said.

Weekends can be tricky, due to staff levels at smaller hospitals, which means the cases dont get reported until later.

For kids

Acton, who was trained as a pediatrician before going into preventative health, said the Ohio Department of Health is working on a coronavirus website for children.

She said parents should limit childrens media consumption. Parents should also realize that they arent going to be perfect each day.

More coronavirus coverage:

Gov. Mike DeWine gives Wednesdays coronavirus update: Watch live

Ohio coronavirus deaths increase by 50, peak still expected Sunday: Gov. Mike DeWines Tuesday, April 14 briefing

Ohio plans random population testing to help determine how many people have coronavirus

Groups ask AG Dave Yost to halt student-debt collection until coronavirus crisis ends

How to track your federal stimulus check
Source: Xinhua| 2020-04-16 06:24:03|Editor: huaxia

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Workers unload boxes containing Chinese aid at the international airport of Damascus, Syria, on April 15, 2020. China on Wednesday donated 2,016 COVID-19 test kits to the Syria to help its fight against the novel coronavirus. (Photo by Ammar Safarjalani/Xinhua)

DAMASCUS, April 15 (Xinhua) -- China on Wednesday donated 2,016 COVID-19 test kits to the Syria to help its fight against the novel coronavirus.

An aircraft carrying the detection kits landed in Damascus' International airport on Wednesday night and was received by Syria's Deputy Foreign Minister Faisal Mekdad and China's Ambassador to Syria Feng Biao.

At a handover ceremony, Feng told reporters that more Chinese aid will be sent to Syria in batches.

Addressing the Syrian people, the Chinese envoy said that "there is no need for fear or panic as this pandemic is curable and preventable and the Chinese people are with you."

Feng said that the coronavirus is a common enemy to the mankind, and international cooperation is the way to defeat the pandemic.

"We will work together with Syria and the international community and cooperate to face this pandemic, and I think that through our cooperation, we will finally win over this pandemic," he said.

For his part, Mekdad said that the Chinese aid reflects the genuine Chinese keenness to help Syria and other countries.

"The international community must work together to fight against the pandemic. Without real international cooperation, the countries cannot overcome the catastrophe of this pandemic," he said.

This is the first batch of China's donation to Syria since the outbreak of COVID-19 in the country.

The Syrian Health Ministry said in a statement that four new COVID-19 cases were confirmed on Wednesday, bringing the total number of the confirmed cases to 33, including five recoveries and two deaths.

The Syrian government has taken several measures such as imposing a partial curfew, suspending schools and universities, and shuttering non-essential businesses, to curb the spread of the novel coronavirus.
New Delhi, April 15 : One of Indias most respected companies, Asian Paints has flagged cash flow problems during the lockdown and is seeking 30 days of additional credit from business partners.

In a communication to the business partners, Harish Lade, Vice President, Supply Chain, has written that the situation has now become extremely difficult as cash flows have been severely impacted, with virtually no inflows. This follows the lockdown put in place to control the coronavirus pandemic.

"In this context, we seek your support and cooperation with an increase in payment terms by 30 days over and above the currently prevailing payment terms," the communication says.

"Hence, the payments that are currently in process shall also get paid after 30 days of additional credit. We do understand that this will have an impact on your operations, but we are hoping that the situation comes back to normal in the near future. We shall endeavour to keep you informed about any changes as the situation develops," the Asian Paints official said.

"You have stood by our side during earlier difficult situations and we are sure that this situation will be no different. Our business partners are out greatest strength and Asian Paints is committed to this relationship," the company said.

"During the lockdown, we continue to work from home and strive to ensure that our business partners are not impacted and continued to process transactions and make payments wherever they are due," it has said.

Following the government directives, Asian Paints has closed its business establishments like offices, factories and warehouses to ensure safety of its employees, stakeholders and the general public.
Silicon Valley is no stranger to disaster. The start-ups and venture capital investors that make up the US tech hub around San Francisco recovered from the dotcom crash and pressed on through the financial crisis.

However, the coronavirus crisis creates a third challenge that could be even worse than the first two.

Silicon Valley darling Airbnb's latest fundraising last week came at a valuation of $US18 billion, compared to $US31 billion in 2017. Credit:Ryan Stuart

"To me, this is more serious. I think to most people it would be," says Mark Cannice, a professor at the University of San Francisco who puts together quarterly studies of investor sentiment in Silicon Valley.

"There hasn't been a strict financial collapse, and of course the Federal Reserve has come in strong to support the function of the financial markets. But we're dealing with something where there isn't necessarily, at least in our lifetimes, a clear endgame.
More than 100 Australians are back on home soil after a Qantas mercy flight rescued them from Peru and touched down at Brisbane Airport late on Tuesday.

It was the first flight from South America to Brisbane, according to Brisbane Airport Corporation, and the flight was carrying 115 passengers, plucked from a novel coronavirus lockdown.

Australians evacuated from South America due to COVID-19 were met by police at Brisbane Airport on Tuesday. Credit:Darren England - AAP

The flight took off from the Peruvian capital of Lima on Monday afternoon local time and was due to touch down in Brisbane about 5.40pm on Tuesday, but was delayed by three hours.

All travellers arriving in Australia by air or sea must be isolated in quarantine accommodation for two weeks from their arrival, according to Queensland Health travel restrictions.
South African police on Tuesday fired rubber bullets and teargas in clashes with Cape Town township residents protesting over access to food aid during a coronavirus lockdown.

Hundreds of angry people fought running battles with the police, hurling rocks and setting up barricades on the streets with burning tyres in Mitchells Plain over undelivered food parcels.

"We have small children. We want to eat. They must also eat," said resident and mother Nazile Bobbs.

"They said we are going to get parcels, where (are) the parcels? How long are we (going to be) in the lockdown?"

South Africa is currently in the middle of a five-week lockdown to curb the spread of coronavirus which has so far infected more than 2,400 people.

President Cyril Ramaphosa has promised to provide basics such as water and food supplies to the poorest South Africans.

Many people, especially those working in the informal economy, are unable to ply their trade and have lost income due to the lockdown which came into effect on March 27.

Community leader Liezl Manual said people came out of their homes "frustrated wanting to know" where the food parcels were.

"I don't think Ramaphosa is doing something," said another resident Denise Martin, adding that people would "rather die of coronavirus than to die in our homes of hunger".

Some government officials were starting to become overwhelmed by the surging needs in a country ranked among one of the world's most unequal.

"People are so desperate for aid such that even those people that would not be provided by us think they can get support from us," Busisiwe Memela-Khambula CEO of SA Social Security Agency (Sassa), a government department responsible for distributing food aid.

The department normally helps people with disability, those who failed to access their social security grants or those generally experiencing hardships, she said.

"But unfortunately now everybody is experiencing hardships," she said on local television.
The World Health Organization (WHO) has reported that there are already 70 coronavirus vaccines being developed around the world. Various biotech companies are already developing vaccines with at least three companies or candidate vaccines undergoing clinical evaluation, and 67 candidate vaccines in preclinical evaluation. (Photo : Pexels)

The World Health Organization (WHO) has reported that there are already 70 coronavirus vaccines being developed around the world. Various biotech companies are already developing vaccines with at least three companies or candidate vaccines undergoing clinical evaluation, and 67 candidate vaccines in preclinical evaluation.

Big and small pharmaceuticals have taken part to try and develop a vaccine, and this is crucial to contain the virus. Progress in developing vaccines is happening at unprecedented speeds, as the infectious pathogen seems to be difficult to eradicate through simple measures alone. The drug industry is hoping to compress the time needed to develop a vaccine to market which usually takes 10 to 15 years, into just a year as a response to the gravity of the current situation.

WHO published its updated list of COVID-10 candidate vaccines on April 11, 2020. Of the three companies already in clinical trials, Chinese biotech company CanSino Biological Inc. in partnership with the Beijing Institute of Biotechnology is already in Phase 2 of human trials, while American biotech startups Inovio Pharmaceuticals and Moderna are both in Phase 1, and have begun human testing.

CanSino Biological is known for its help in producing Ad5-EBOV, an Ebola Virus vaccine in 2017. Its research with Beijing Institute of Biotechnology is funded by China's Ministry of Science and Technology.

Inovio Pharmaceuticals, a small biotech company in Pennsylvania, said on April 6 that it has started a trial for 40 healthy volunteers in Philadelphia and Kansas City, Missouri. Inovio's vaccine project has been supported by The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and other nonprofits. The biotech hopes to have early safety results by late summer and it targets production of 1 million doses by the end of this year.

The small biotech company Moderna, has enrolled healthy volunteers in Washington and Georgia to test a potential coronavirus vaccine. The biotech has sequenced the virus and studied patient dosages in two months, and it hopes to have a coronavirus vaccine ready by this fall.

Some of the biotech and pharmaceutical companies developing their vaccines according to reports from Bloomberg and Business Insider are pharma giants Sanofi, Pfizer, Johnson & Johnson, and GlaxoSmithKline.

According to a report from Science Alert, Anthony Fauci, the director of the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases said, that it might take at least a year or a year and a half for the United States to see a coronavirus vaccine. This estimate is an optimistic projection according to Paul Offit, co-inventor of a rotavirus vaccine in the late 90s.

A 12-18 month-target is a blink, according to vaccine experts, because new vaccines are required to be tested first in a laboratory, followed by animal testing, then in a small group of people for safety. However, due to the urgency, several steps are being bypassed to get a vaccine approved. Experts are concerned that this urgency may lead to a vaccine that weakens a person's reaction to the virus.

Peter Hotez, dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine said that conducting animal testing reduces the risk when it does not occur in laboratory animals.
Joaquin Phoenix accepting an Oscar for his performance in "Joker" in February. (Los Angeles Times)

Although it may seem like a lifetime ago, a mere two months have passed since Joaquin Phoenix accepted his Oscar for his virtuoso performance in Joker with a speech about cows that had many in the bejeweled audience writhing in embarrassment. Why was this famously difficult actor interrupting the ceremony to haltingly speak about the distress of livestock?

I think that weve become very disconnected from the natural world and many of us, what were guilty of, is an egocentric worldview, the belief that were the center of the universe. We go into the natural world and we plunder it for its resources. We feel entitled to artificially inseminate a cow and when she gives birth we steal her baby even though her cries of anguish are unmistakable.

And then we take her milk thats intended for her calf and we put it in our coffee and our cereal. And I think we fear the idea of personal change because we think that we have to sacrifice something, to give something up. But human beings at our best are so inventive and creative and ingenious, and I think that when we use love and compassion as our guiding principles, we can create, develop and implement systems of change that are beneficial to all sentient beings and to the environment.

These words caused Hollywood A-listers to shift awkwardly in their seats and, overriding their own instincts, avert their eyes from hovering cameras. Their reactions were completely legible: If he had to get political, couldnt he go after Donald Trump? Does he really expect us to give up milk? Why, for the love of God, is he talking about artificial insemination and cows when we're dressed to the nines in Chanel and Dior?

Twitter naturally had a lot to sarcastically say. At the time, I defended Phoenix, suggesting that his ethical commitments and heightened sensitivity werent unrelated to his acting brilliance. Maybe the reason he was winning another award had something to do with his highly developed capacity to inhabit another life from the inside out?

Story continues

Granted, it was a weird acceptance speech. But no one wanted to think too much about a possible cause of the weirdness: the sheer frustration with our refusal to recognize the suffering were collectively inflicting.

Joaquin Phoenix, winner of the lead actor Oscar for "Joker," congratulated by Jane Fonda backstage at the Academy Awards in February. (Al Seib / Los Angeles Times)

Phoenixs words came back to me while I was contemplating a line from an Ibsen play that has lodged itself in my brain since weve been under stay-at-home orders. In The Wild Duck, Old Ekdal, hearing that the trees in his old hunting grounds have been cut down, warns that the woods take revenge.

The coronavirus pandemic has me wondering if animals might be having theirs.

Not much is definitively known about COVID-19, but scientists are clear that this is a zoonotic disease, a classification for pathogens that make the leap from animals to humans. Whether this novel coronavirus was launched in a wet market in Wuhan, China, is a matter of debate. The sale and slaughter of exotic animals may have provided a link between bats, the suspected source of the virus, and the cells lining our respiratory tracts. But where scientists raise questions, politicians are quick to assign blame.

Whatever the route of initial transmission, it seems likely our predatory relationship to the natural world has played a role. Humans congratulate themselves on being, in Shakespeare's words, "the paragon of animals"  "how noble in reason and how infinite in faculty!" Yet the planet's most intelligent species has treated the Earth as a resource to be ransacked for short-term gain, regardless of the long-term harms.

Not even global warming has roused us from our suicidal folly. Its doubtful a pandemic will do what rising sea levels, devastating weather events and ruinous wildfires have been unable to accomplish. But now that the world is in shutdown, let us take a moment to reflect on the way culture, long complicit in concealing our nature, is our only chance at rescuing our consciousness.

In Chekhovs Uncle Vanya, Astrov, the lonely doctor whose great passion (beyond vodka) is forestry, delivers a monologue condemning the way the land is being plundered for fuel when alternative sources exist. His rant has as much effect on the estate owner he's talking to as Phoenixs had on studio executives, but its astonishing how these words from an 1897 play resonate today:

Man has been endowed with reason, with the power to create, so that he can add to what hes been given. But up to now he hasnt been a creator, only a destroyer. Forests keep disappearing, rivers dry up, wildlifes become extinct, the climates ruined and the land grows poorer and uglier every day.

Astrov might have added that new diseases are emerging from our encroachment into areas that humans have no business occupying. The politics of these issues, which have profound economic consequences, arent going to be solved by artists. But I want to once again echo an appeal that the biologist Edward O. Wilson made in his 2014 book The Meaning of Human Existence that the humanities and the creative arts must stop pretending that science is not in their purview. Humanity can no longer afford to be mystically removed from its biological context. Our future hinges on recognizing our origins.

If nothing else, Wilson argued, there must be an awareness that human impact on biodiversity  is an attack on ourselves. Great realistic playwrights, such as Ibsen and Chekhov, have allowed the wilder truths of the outdoors to make cameo appearances in their drawing rooms. But in literature, cinema and drama, the societal backdrop has taken precedence over the web of life. As normal as that may seem, it reinforces a mental fault that Nietzsche identified in our thinking  the tendency to detach human nature from nature itself.

Im not a vegetarian, never mind a vegan, and while I love animals and have two rescue cats who boss me around all day, Im hardly an animal rights activist. What I am is self-interested. I want to live in a way that reduces climatic chaos and pandemic horror. I want us to use the creative intelligence that, as Astrov contends, allows us to add to the world rather than to steadily subtract from it.

Joaquin Phoenix, as seen from backstage during his acceptance speech at the Academy Awards. (Al Seib / Los Angeles Times)

I hope there are some in the movie business who can separate Phoenix's kooky delivery from his heartfelt sentiments. When film, TV and theater resume, the world will seem at once smaller and scarier. We need our artists to deploy something more powerful than their activism  their artistry  to awaken our species to the interconnectedness of life before we end up on the endangered list.

Caryl Churchill, in my opinion the greatest living playwright in the English language, wrote an enigmatic play called "Escaped Alone" about a group of older women gathered in a backyard as the world crashes and burns around them. A world in which money leaks toxic chemicals, dog owners are fined if they dont clean up their pets vomit and gas masks are available in a variety of colors through the health service.

The image of a planet sickened to death is a fictional exaggeration that each day becomes shockingly less far-fetched. The women, all in their 70s, make banal small talk that cryptically glimpses a reality that fills them with a terrible rage they have no choice but to screen out. (Before all scheduling was thrown out the window, the Fountain Theatre announced it would produce the Los Angeles premiere of "Escaped Alone" this fall.)

Churchill is one of the few artists able to keep up with the dystopian pace of reality. Yes, apocalyptic narratives are in abundance, and no one can say that Steven Soderbergh didn't warn us nine years ago in "Contagion." But the quasi-religious escapism that pervades the genre seems like a cop-out when science fiction has so much real science to work with.

Many are calling this pandemic unimaginable. Had artists taken Hamlets advice of holding the mirror up to nature more literally, perhaps the tragic situation we find ourselves in wouldnt be such a surprise.
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The coronavirus has hit Floridas long-term care facilities hard. Statewide, 1,222 residents and staff of nursing homes and assisted living facilities have contracted the virus. The number has more than tripled since last week, when there were 380 cases. Gov. Ron DeSantis, a Republican, announced on Monday that the state will ramp up testing in the facilities. (DeSantis administration has largely refused to release data on the spread of the virus in facilities.) At a press conference a few weeks ago, DeSantis attacked one assisted living facility with a known outbreak where at least seven residents died. The governor said the facilitys conduct was negligent and possibly criminal. Yet now the governor is considering a request to grant legal immunity to long-term care facilitiesin fact, to all health care providers.

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Miami Herald reporter Carol Marbin Miller recently explained that the long-term care industry in Florida has been one of the most powerful industries and interest groups in the state for a long, long time. The industrys lobbying group is the Florida Health Care Association. On April 3, FHCA sent a letter to DeSantis with a startling request. FHCA wrote: Governor DeSantis, we ask you to extend sovereign immunity to health care professionals and health care facilitiesnot just long-term care facilitiesengaged in responding to the COVID-19 outbreak. Sovereign immunity is the general rule that people cant file tort lawsuits against the state unless the conduct falls within a limited exception. In an emailed statement to me, Kristen Knapp, FHCAs spokesperson, told me: In the midst of this unprecedented crisis, long term caregivers should be able to direct their skills and attention to helping individuals who need them, and not have to worry about being sued for making tough decisions while trying to comply with government directives.

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If the governor grants the request, all health care providers would enjoy sweeping protections from pandemic-related lawsuits for everything but gross negligence, reckless misconduct, or intentional misconduct. Importantly, health care providers would be immune for anything caused by resource or staffing shortages. FHCA also asked for similar immunity from criminal prosecution. (Disclosure: My practice includes the representation of plaintiffs in medical malpractice cases.)

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DeSantis is considering FHCAs request. On Tuesday he said that its under review but he hasnt made a decision yet. According to the News Service of Florida, which broke the story last week, the head of the states Agency for Health Care Administration told nursing home providers that [t]he governors office, their legal team, legal teams from the other state agencies, are currently evaluating what can be done and what is in the best interest in addressing the concerns that youve identified.*

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Let me help: The governor does not have the power to grant the request.

The starting point is something the federal Constitution doesnt havean express codification in the Florida Constitution of the separation of powers doctrine. Article 2, Section 3 says: The powers of the state government shall be divided into legislative, executive and judicial branches. No person belonging to one branch shall exercise any powers appertaining to either of the other branches unless expressly provided herein. The Supreme Court of Florida strictly applies the doctrine, which, it has explained, encompasses two fundamental prohibitions. The first is that no branch may encroach upon the powers of another. The second is that no branch may delegate to another branch its constitutionally assigned power.

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If the governor grants the request, all health care providers would enjoy sweeping protections from pandemic-related lawsuits.

To assess the legality of FHCAs request, we have to identify the powers it implicates and to which branch they belong. The request really concerns two things: an individuals ability to bring a lawsuit for some misconduct (the cause of action) and the states shield against such a suit (sovereign immunity). Here, the most likely causes of action are common-law negligence and medical malpractice, as well as several established by the Legislature: wrongful death and violations of the nursing home residents and assisted living facility residents respective bills of rights.

Take the causes of action first. The Florida Supreme Court said in 1948 that the legislature has the power to, and may, limit or abolish [causes of action]. FHCAs request, if granted, would affect patients causes of action against health care providers by limiting their ability to bring lawsuits against them. Second, there is one constitutional provision, Article 10, Section 13, that assigns the power over immunity to the Legislature, not the governor. As one Florida appellate court said, The legislature has the discretion to place limits and conditions upon the scope of the sovereign immunity waiver.

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So DeSantis cant just extend sovereign immunity by executive fiat to health care providers whove provided negligent treatment to coronavirus victims. Doing so would usurp two of the Legislatures powers.

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The Legislature also cannot delegate these powers to the governor. Under Florida case law, the Legislature cannot delegate the power to enact a law or the right to exercise unrestricted discretion in applying the law. Yet thats exactly what the Legislature would have to do to give FHCA what it wants.

The governor could get creative within the existing legal framework. The statute granting a limited waiver of sovereign immunity provides that corporations primarily acting as instrumentalities or agencies of the state, counties, or municipalities also enjoy immunity. Knapp, FHCAs spokesperson, may have hinted at this provision when she said caregivers are trying to comply with government directives. But the key word here is primarily; generally, to fit into this exception, a corporation must be subject to substantial government control of its day-to-day operations. This makes sense. If the state controls a corporation, the corporation should benefit from the states immunity. Most corporations that FHCA has in mind wont meet this standard, however, since theyre merely following the governments directions, not ceding control to the state.

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FHCA appears to be requesting an executive order, but it is also worth considering whether the Legislature could pass a law granting FHCAs request at its next regular session. The answer is no. The law would run headlong into the rule that a law cannot apply retroactively if it would destroy a vested right. A cause of action that has accruedthat is, has become a legally enforceable claimis a vested right. Many coronavirus-related causes would become enforceable by the next legislative session. The Florida Supreme Court has already held that legislation extending sovereign immunity to people not previously covered cannot be applied to someone who already has a legally enforceable claim. Not even the Legislature could exercise its powers to extend immunity and abridge causes of action in these circumstances.

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Health care providers in Florida are dealing with a public health emergency. They will have to make tough decisions when caring for patients. Sometimes those decisions will be negligent and result in injury or death, and it is a certainty that lawsuits will be filed over this coronavirus-era treatment. Indeed, health care providers in Florida could be facing an unprecedented exposure to liability. But DeSantis does not have the power to extend sovereign immunity to health care providers with the stroke of a pen. As he said on Tuesday when criticizing other states mitigation efforts, Just because theres an emergency, that does not give the governor unlimited authority. Hopefully the governors lawyers will tell him so before he violates the Florida Constitution yet again.
The Bryan school district has set graduation dates for seniors at its four high schools.

In an announcement sent to students this week signed by Superintendent Christie Whitbeck and the four high school principals, the district said all graduations will be held at Merrill Green Stadium in May.

The decision to move the graduations to the district facility comes after Texas A&M University said Reed Arena would not be available through the end of May because of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The graduation for Mary Catherine Harris High School is set for May 20; Bryan Collegiate High School students will graduate on May 21; Bryan High School seniors will have their graduation May 22; and Rudder High School will have a graduation ceremony May 23.

All four events will begin at 8 p.m.

May 24 has been reserved as a make-up day in the event of a cancellation because of weather.

Alternate graduation dates were set for June 24-27.

Students will be allowed to decorate their graduation caps, a first in district history, the announcement said.
(Bloomberg) -- The U.S. returned to Malaysia another $300 million that was recovered as part of the Justice Departments forfeiture lawsuits targeting assets that fugitive financier Low Taek Jho and his associates bought with funds allegedly stolen from the countrys 1MDB investment fund.

With the latest repatriation, the U.S. has sent $600 million back to Malaysia as part of the continuing effort to seize and liquidate the assets, including real estate, business investments, art work and jewelry, that Low, commonly known as Jho Low, his family and his cronies acquired with the money they are accused of siphoning from the state fund after it was set up in 2009.

While Low has denied wrongdoing, he and his family last year dropped their defense of the forfeiture lawsuits that have been pending in federal court in Los Angeles, which has allowed the government to seize more than $700 million in assets. Some of the real estate, including luxury condominiums in New York and mansions in Beverly Hills, have been put on the market.

The 1MDB global corruption scandal toppled the previous Malaysian government of Najib Razak, ensnared a Wall Street powerhouse and set off investigations across the globe. In February, a political upheaval led parties that had backed Najib to return to power, placing the local probe and efforts to recover 1MDB funds in question.

New Prime Minister Muhyiddin Yassin has since pledged to keep fighting corruption and thanked the U.S. and Malaysian authorities for the return of the funds. The government will continue working with jurisdictions across the world to bring back more 1MDB-linked assets, he said in a statement on Wednesday.

The U.S. has helped to recover more than $1 billion in assets linked with the 1MDB money laundering and bribery scheme, making it the Justice Departments largest-ever civil forfeiture, according to a statement Tuesday by the U.S. attorneys office in Los Angeles.

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US crude oil stockpiles rose by 19 million barrels last week, the biggest one-week increase in history, the US Energy Information Administration said, as refiners throttled back activity due to slumping demand as a result of the coronavirus pandemic.

The build for the week ended April 10 was much larger than the Reuters poll calling for a 11.7 million-barrel rise and offsets some of the optimism that had bloomed as a result of a worldwide pact between oil producers to cut output sharply. Crude futures slumped on the news.

Even though we knew it was going to be bad, it's worse than people thought," said Phil Flynn, an analyst at Price Futures Group in Chicago. "You look at gasoline demand and it's pathetic. If you were going to write a nightmare report about petroleum, this is it.

Worldwide fuel demand has dropped by roughly 30 percent as businesses have shuttered, and residents avoid public gatherings and travel due to the pandemic, which has killed more than 130,000 people and infected 2 million. Most US states have issued orders asking people to stay at home; gasoline demand over the last four weeks has dropped by 32 percent from the year-ago period, EIA said.

Refiners have responded by cutting crude purchases and processing; they were operating at 69 percent of capacity nationwide, lowest since September 2008, and their actions to counter weak demand is rippling through pipeline companies and oil producers. The latter are being forced to cut production, as some pipeline companies have said they cannot ship oil unless it has a proven destination.

Storage, meanwhile, continues to fill. Crude stocks at the Cushing, Oklahoma, delivery hub for US crude futures rose by 5.7 million barrels last week, the EIA said, and now total 55 million barrels. The hub has about 76 million barrels of capacity, and could be full by mid-May, pipeline companies have said.

Crude prices dropped on the news, with US crude down 3.5 percent, or 71 cents, at $19.40 a barrel as of 11:15 a.m. ET (1515 GMT) and Brent lost 8 percent to $27.24 a barrel.

Refinery crude runs fell by 969,000 barrels per day (bpd) in the last week, EIA said. Refinery utilization rates fell by 6.5 percentage points on the week.

"Refiners have moved a lot closer to the balance needed from a production perspective," said Tony Headrick, Tony Headrick, energy markets analyst at CHS Hedging.

Distillate stockpiles, which include diesel and heating oil, rose by 6.3 million barrels in the week to 129 million barrels, versus expectations for a 1.4 million-barrel rise, the EIA data showed. Demand for distillate products has held up better than gasoline, down 8 percent over the most recent four-week period.

US gasoline stocks rose by 4.9 million barrels in the week to record high at 262.2 million barrels, the EIA said, compared with expectations for a 6.4 million-barrel rise.
Get your potassium while you can.

The coronavirus pandemic may limit supplies of bananas in Asia. Growers in the Philippines, the world's second-biggest exporter, said overseas shipments may drop by nearly 40% this year as lockdowns and social distancing measures curb output and transport.

The country's exports of the fruit are expected to plunge to about 2.5 million tons this year from 4 million last year, said Stephen Antig, executive director of the Pilipino Banana Growers and Exporters Association. Producers, including Unifrutti Tropical Philippines Inc., have halted some operations, he said.

"Bananas have to be harvested every day," said Alberto Bacani, president of Unifrutti Philippines. "By the time we come back, a lot of that fruit will be spoiled and will have to be thrown away."

The Philippines accounted for an estimated 20% of global banana shipments in 2019 and about 90% of total export volumes in Asia, with its two major markets being China and Japan, according to a 2020 report from the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. Ecuador is the largest exporter.

The country's main island of Luzon has been under a lockdown since mid-March that will last through the end of April. Provinces in the southern Philippines, which is home to many plantations, have also imposed quarantine measures. Exports of the fruit will continue to be impacted after restrictions are lifted, according to Antig, as social distancing measures are expected to remain in place that limit the number of workers.

Agriculture Secretary William Dar on Wednesday urged local governments, particularly in Bukidnon province where several banana farms and packing houses are located, to allow farmers, fishers, and employees of food processing and manufacturing facilities to work to avoid artificial food shortages and price spikes. If the Bukidnon lockdown, which is scheduled to run April 13-26, is eased, the country could export 3 million tons of bananas this year, according to Antig.

The coronavirus outbreak has snarled food production and shipments globally as quarantines, sick workers, export bans and panic buying result in some empty grocery store shelves, despite mostly ample supplies.

Bacani said Japan banana imports may be impacted because many farms that export the fruit to the East Asian country are under quarantine. "In the next two weeks, you will see a drastic reduction in the banana volume in Japan," he said, while adding that other exporters like Ecuador may fill in the gap.

Yuko Yamada, a spokeswoman for the Japan Banana Importers' Association said the country depends heavily on imports from the Philippines but she wasn't aware of shortages or price increases, or any notices from Philippine exporters that shipments will be reduced.

Meng Wei, an official with China Fruits Marketing Association, said the group hasn't noticed any change in Philippine banana imports but noted that domestic production of the fruit and imports from Myanmar have increased.
A female Alabama police detective has been charged with capital murder after allegedly killing a woman as part of a 'love triangle' dispute with her male colleague.

Birmingham police Detective Alfreda Fluker, 39, was formally charged with murder on Tuesday in the Friday killing of Kanisha Fuller. She was also charged with the attempted murder of Detective Mario Theodore White, her coworker on the Birmingham Police Department's Crime Reduction Team.

Officers responding to a reported shooting at Birmingham's Germania Park at around 11.15pm found Fuller, 43, inside White's unmarked police car suffering from multiple gunshot wounds, including at least one to the head.

Birmingham police Detective Alfreda Fluker, 39 (left), has been charged with capital murder in the shooting death of her alleged romantic rival, Kanisha Fuller, 43 (right)

Fuller was found dead in an unmarked police car Friday night after being shot near Germania Park in Birmingham, Alabama

She was taken to UAB Hospital's Trauma Center where she was pronounced dead early Saturday.

White was there too, but he wasn't wounded. There is no indication he called 911 following the shooting, authorities said. He was off duty at the time of the incident.

'This is not a press conference that I wanted to give today or any other day, but it's about the facts and the realities of life,'' Birmingham Police Chief Patrick Smith said on Saturday morning, as Al.com reported.

Investigators determined Fluker was the shooter and she was arrested at 7am on Saturday at her home in west Birmingham. She is a 15-year veteran of the department.

Smith said he didn't know the exact relationship between White, Fluker and Fuller but said both women at one point were in a relationship with White.

Fluker is a 15-year veteran of the department who served on Birmingham Police Department's Crime Reduction Team along with White. Authorities said both Fluker and Fuller at one point were in a relationship with the male cop

Social media posts indicate that Fuller lived in Bessemer, Alabama, with her teenage son

'It's something that's been going on for a little while,' he said, 'but without our knowledge.'

White is currently on leave pending the outcome of the investigation.

'We followed every protocol to make sure we were doing everything the right way and even it when it leads to one of our own, we're going to make the tough call and take the right actions,' Smith said.

The Alabama Law Enforcement Agency's State Bureau of Investigation is now in charge of the investigation of the case.

'Today has been a very difficult day for the Birmingham Police Department as we've investigated and watched this tragic event unfold and three lives have been forever changed,'' the department said in a statement. 'Our thoughts, prayers and condolences go out to the victim and her family.'

According to social media posts, Fuller lived in Bessemer with her teenage son.
Hong Kong's top judge on said the city's Court of Final Appeal had never been interfered with by the ruling Chinese Communist Party, following a media investigation that found "multi-pronged" erosion of the city's promised judicial independence.



"Since taking office in 2010, the Chief Justice has not at any stage encountered or experienced any form of interference by the mainland [Chinese] authorities with judicial independence in Hong Kong, including the appointment of judges," Geoffrey Ma, chief justice of the court, said in a statement on the government's website.



"Judicial independence is guaranteed under the Basic Law and is a main component of the rule of law in Hong Kong," Ma said, in response to an report from Reuters that described the city's independent judiciary as being "in a fight for its survival."



Under the terms of the 1997 handover to China, Hong Kong was promised a high degree of autonomy underpinned by an independent judiciary, freedom of speech and association, and the principle of Hong Kong people ruling Hong Kong, under the city's Basic Law.



But in recent years, pro-democracy lawmakers have been stripped of their seats after Beijing ruled their oaths of allegiance invalid, while pro-democracy candidates have been barred from standing in elections on the basis of their political views.



In 2014, Beijing decreed that while it would allow Hongkongers to each have a vote in popular elections, they would only be allowed to choose from among candidates approved by China, triggering the 79-day Umbrella movement for fully democratic elections.



Protests also erupted in in response to plans to allow extradition to mainland China.



Since then, millions of pro-democracy supporters have taken to Hong Kong's streets with demands for a public inquiry into police violence, fully democratic elections, an amnesty for thousands of arrested protesters, and an end to the use of the word "rioters" to describe the movement.



'Beijing's effort to hobble the judiciary is multi-pronged'

While chief executive Carrie Lam formally withdrew hated amendments to the city's laws in October, protesters slammed her response as too little, too late, and demanded she address the rapid erosion of the city's promised freedoms.



"Beijing's effort to hobble the judiciary is multi-pronged, according to more than two dozen interviews with judges, leading lawyers and diplomats in Hong Kong," the Reuters report said, citing warnings from Chinese state media to Hong Kong judges not to let protesters off lightly.



"Judges and lawyers say there are signs Beijing is trying to limit the authority of Hong Kong courts to rule on core constitutional matters," it said, adding that Ma himself is under direct pressure from Beijing, citing a protest by a mainland Chinese law firm after he addressed a lunch event in South Korea.



"Some in the city's legal establishment are now bracing for the possibility that China will begin to meddle in the appointment of new judges, following objections by some pro-Beijing lawmakers in Hong Kong to two recent appointments on the top court," Reuters reported.



Judges fear the search to fill at least one position on the Court of Final Appeal's panel of judges could give Beijing the opportunity it is looking for, it said.



"We know from our interactions with senior mainland judges that they just don't get Hong Kong at all," the agency quoted one judge as saying. "They always want to know why Hong Kong is so confused and chaotic, and not 'patriotic.'"



The report said the battle for Hong Kong's judiciary is playing out behind the scenes, in the corridors of judicial power, but could ultimately threaten the right to a fair trial and equality before the law.



But Beijing has repeatedly issued edicts on political matters, including the debarring of lawmakers, because its National People's Congress (NPC) standing committee has the final say on how the Basic Law must be interpreted.



Pressure to enact security law

According to Reuters, judges now fear that China will begin to wield this power more frequently, potentially undermining the city's courts.



After a Hong Kong court overturned a government emergency ban on protesters wearing masks in November, China's state news agency Xinhua quoted an NPC standing committee member as saying that it had no right to rule on the ban's constitutionality.



Last week, Hong Kong government partially won an appeal last week against the November decision.



The Global Times newspaper, a tabloid published by the Communist Party's People's Daily, also wrote in November that "rioters" must be punished.



"Just like the rioters, the judges and lawyers who absolve rioters of their crimes will be despised," it said. President Xi Jinping, who is now serving an indefinite second term courtesy of the NPC, has ordered China to eschew all forms of Western liberalism, including judicial independence.



Chinese officials repeated calls on for Hong Kong to enact national security laws on sedition and subversion, colonial-era versions of which have already been used to jail or charge people for what they say, rather than their actions.



Last month, Hong Kong police arrested Cheng Lai-king, the chairwoman of Central and Western District Council, on suspicion of "seditious intention" under existing colonial-era laws, after she shared a Facebook post containing personal details of a police officer.



Pro-democracy politicians fear that the use of colonial-era sedition laws could be a way of testing the waters in the light of the ruling Chinese Communist Party's insistence that Hong Kong enact sedition and subversion laws as required by Article 23 of the Basic Law.



Mass protests against the Article 23 legislation led to the early resignation of then chief executive Tung Chee-hwa, after which the bill was shelved. Officials are now repeatedly calling for its reintroduction to the Legislative Council, which is heavily weighted with pro-Beijing lawmakers.



Among them, Luo Huining, newly-appointed director of the Beijing's Central Liaison Office in Hong Kong, said on that national security has been a "prominent weakness" in Hong Kong since the handover.



"This weakness could prove fatal at a crucial time," he said. "Laws protecting national security must be enacted as soon as possible."



Reported by Lau Siu-fung for RFA's Cantonese Service. Translated and edited by Luisetta Mudie.
MIAMI, FLAward-winning top MILF site MYLF has declared Joslyn James as its MYLF of the Month (MOM) for April. Awarded monthly, the MOM accolade highlights an adult star who represents a "Mom Youd Like to Fuck" in every way, shape, or form. And to go along with this honor, Joslyn plays a courtroom queen exclusively on the site, in a Legally Blonde themed scene, available now for MYLF members here.

To view MYLF's tribute to Joslyn James, including a Q&A with the star, click here.

In the above-noted scene, titled "Legally Blonder", Joslyn is a hard-hitting lawyer who will do anything to persuade a judge and jury, even if it means using her luscious curves and impossible-to-miss aura of sexuality to do it. As an ode to the popular 2001 film Legally Blonde starring Reese Witherspoon, Joslyn truly makes a case for hot blonde lawyers everywhere.

When you think blonde bombshell, Joslyn James is the first person that comes to mind, opined scene Producer Anthony Bennett. Shes one of the hottest MILFs out there, and her illustrious career proves in more ways than one that she deserves the MYLF of the Month accolade.

MYLF features unique content showcasing some of the adult industrys hottest MILF performers, shot by some of the industrys top filmmakers. The site is part of the MYLF Network, which includes MYLFWOOD, Milfty, GotMylf, MomDrips, Mylfed, MilfBody, LoneMilf, FullOfJoi, and Shoplyfter MYLF. Recently, MYLF was nominated for Best New Production Banner for the 2020 AVN Awards.

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For more information about Joslyn James, visit her Official Instagram Page.
RIYADH (Reuters) - Saudi Arabia's King Salman has approved an additional package of measures to help the private sector deal with the economic impact of the coronavirus outbreak, its finance minister said.

The package includes 50 billion riyals ($266 million) to accelerate payment of private sector dues, provide liquidity to several sectors and cover wages of those working in passenger transport, Mohammed al-Jadaan said on Wednesday.

Another 47 billion riyals has been set aside for the health sector, to be disbursed as needed to build capacity, he added.

The country of some 30 million people reported 493 more cases of the novel coronavirus and six deaths on Wednesday to take its total to 5,862 with 79 deaths, the highest among the six Gulf Arab states.

The number of infections has steadily risen despite containment measures including suspending passenger flights, the umrah pilgrimage and most commercial activities and imposing a 24-hour curfew in major cities including the capital Riyadh.

In March, Jadaan announced the allocation of 70 billion riyals to support businesses as well as the postponement of some government fees and taxes.

Earlier this month, the king earlier ordered up to 9 billion riyals be disbursed to cover part of the wages of private sector workers to deter layoffs.

(Reporting by Marwa Rashad; writing by Raya Jalabi; Editing by Jon Boyle and Alexander Smith)
GRAND RAPIDS, MI  Gov. Gretchen Whitmers stay-at-home order cant prevent a man from protesting out of a Detroit abortion clinic - as long as he practices social distancing.

Whitmer issued the stay-at-home order to slow the spread of the coronavirus. As of Tuesday, April 15, over 27,000 in Michigan have been afflicted with COVID-19.

Whitmer acknowledged in a court filing that Andrew Belanger, who was cited by police for violating her executive order, had First Amendment rights to protest. Belanger and others still have to stay at least six feet from others outside of their household when engaged in expressive religious activities.

A citation against Belanger for violating the governors stay-at-home order will be dismissed. The parties agreed to dismiss the federal case Belanger and two other men filed against Whitmer and Detroit police.

U.S. District Judge Janet Neff in Grand Rapids signed the order closing the case on Tuesday, April 14. Both sides are responsible for their own legal fees.

A week ago, Whitmer issued guidance regarding First Amendment protections under her stay-at-home order.

Persons may engage in expressive activities protected by the First Amendment within the State of Michigan, but must adhere to social distancing measures recommended by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, including remaining at least six feet from people from outside the persons household.

Belanger was cited March 31 by Detroit police while he was preaching outside of Scotsdale Womens Center. He was holding a pro-life sign and said he kept away from others.

Belanger, represented by the American Freedom Law Center, contended he was engaged in peaceful expressive activity.

He also said he was denied equal-protection rights under the 14th Amendment because others were allowed to walk or bike on sidewalks but he was punished for religious expression on the same sidewalks.

READ MORE

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The Project host Waleed Aly has spoken out strongly against the idea of monitoring the movements of Australians through a government mobile phone app.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison and Chief Medical Officer Brendan Murphy are open to the concept of using Singapore technology to track the everyday movements of individuals to combat the spread of coronavirus.

This would effectively enable the lockdowns to end sooner.

Under the proposal, Australians would voluntarily install an app on their phone that would be able to determine how many others they had come into close contact with via Bluetooth.

Scroll down for video

Television personality Waleed Aly (pictured with wife Susan Carland) has spoken out strongly against the idea of monitoring the movements of Australians through a mobile phone app

Poll Do you think Australia's lockdown should be lifted and replaced with tracking devices? Yes No Do you think Australia's lockdown should be lifted and replaced with tracking devices? Yes 62 votes

No 146 votes Now share your opinion





Should they test positive to COVID-19, health authorities would have access to the data from the Trace Together app designed in Singapore, a much more authoritarian society than Australia.

Aly, a Gold Logie-winning co-host of The Project, suggested the app would be an unnecessary infringement on civil liberties and privacy.

'It's the three words that put together scare the hell out of me: government tracking device,' he told Network 10.

'And this came out of Singapore, right? That's an autocracy.'

Mr Morrison insisted on Wednesday Australians would not be forced to sign up to the app, with the data only accessed in circumstances 'where someone had coronavirus'.

Nonetheless, he talked up the idea of using surveillance technology to monitor the movements of individuals in a bid to lift the lockdowns sooner.

Aly, a Gold Logie-winning co-host of The Project, suggested the app would be an unnecessary infringement on civil liberties and privacy. 'It's the three words that put together scare the hell out of me: government tracking device,' he said

Prime Minister Scott Morrison is open to the adopting a Singapore-design app, Trace Together, to monitor the movements of those who have tested positive to coronavirus

'We could trace people's contacts quicker and tracked down the coronavirus faster and save people's lives, which meant we could open our economy up more,' he told Perth radio station 6PR.

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 Prime Minister said privacy would also be worth sacrificing.

'I mean, there are things that we might not ordinarily do,' he said.

'But in these circumstances, to keep people safe, to save lives and to save people's livelihoods and get them back to work.

'If that tool is going to help people do that, then this may be one of the, one of the sacrifices we need to make, we're working on the privacy issues very hard.'

Singapore, where about 20 per cent of people have signed up to the app, has provided coding information to Australia for development.

Professor Murphy told a New Zealand parliamentary hearing that Australia is 'very keen to use it perhaps even more extensively than Singapore'.

He acknowledged there were privacy concerns.

'Obviously there's a conversation to have with the community about the acceptability of it but we think that idea, the TraceTogether app, is a really excellent one,' he said.
From Palestine to the U.S., coronavirus exposes institutional racism

by Dr. Reem Khamis-Dakwar, Professor of Communication Sciences and Disorders at Adelphi University, Long Island, New York

April 15,2020 | Source: Mondoweiss

Most people imagine that voting rights and citizenship hold a protected status in Western democracies. Yet todays reality reveals how flimsy those protections are, with the coronavirus pandemic further revealing the ugly face of institutional racism.



The many assaults perpetrated by racist social systems against the human dignity of people of color should be fertile ground for communal outrage and a demand for systemic change. In fact, as a Palestinian from Israel currently living in the United States, it is startling to realize the many commonalities between our two systems of oppression: limited access to health care for marginalized communities, the stereotyping of people of color as disease-spreaders, and the increased impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on these populations.



When the Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, accused the Palestinian population in Israel of being the least likely to abide by social distancing orders he was scapegoating Palestinian citizens as spreaders of the disease to Jewish Israeli citizens. No wonder similar messages inciting prejudice towards immigrants and minorities have been uttered by the President of the United States, Donald Trump, in his repeated reference to COVID-19 as the Chinese virus.



Discussions about the disparate impact of COVID-19 on Palestinian communities in Israel and Latinx and African American communities in the U.S. is growing. For example, there is growing evidence of a heightened infection and mortality rate among Black people living in low-income communities. Even though Arabs in Israel are represented relatively well among health professions, they are not represented in the Israeli Ministry of Healths contingency planning committee (as Haaretz reports). In 2017, Arabs filled 12.4% of government health jobs, and made up 42% of nursing students, 38% of pharmaceutical professionals, and 17% of MDs in Israel. In fact, health care in Israel has been described as a model of genuine commonality between Arabs and Jews. Yet, there is not a single governmental hospital in any of Israels Arab cities or towns. Additionally, the Arab communities residing in Israel have relatively very little access to COVID-19 test kits orany reliable information about the spread of the virus. A governmental plan to build drive-in testing stations provided resources for seven Jewish cities but not one Arab community. Only one clinic in an Arab city has been designated as a primary corona clinic, compared to the 45 in Jewish cities. Furthermore, public information about the pandemic has almost entirely been disseminated in Hebrew. Arab Knesset members are scrambling to advocate for the development of health information in Arabic and increased testing in Arab communities as well as developing an economic support plan. So much for a model of equality.



Similar inequalities are observed across the US. These issues exist in a shared context of systemic inequality whereby the same populations are being most neglected with respect to the current pandemic are also those who live in poverty, are part of the working class, and are disproportionately affected by pre-existing health conditions that increase vulnerability to the effects of COVID-19.



Ultimately, the increased impact of coronavirus on Arab communities in Israel and the Latinx and African American communities in the US will be overlooked by formal institutions all while members of these communities are most in need of support. This neglect is more stark for Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza who continue to suffer under an illegal military occupation, blockade, and denial of human rights. This is a lesson in the real limitations of citizenship, but it is probably not on the minds of most of those outside of these communities. People of color know how these systems work first hand, because they are the most impacted by the failures and inequities of those systems.



This reality is also the largest contributor to additional grief, anxiety and bitterness that I am experiencing  I hope alongside many others of all different backgrounds who believe in human dignity. Government health agencies should work to live up to the core ideals of helping professions.

 2020 Mondoweiss

Theme(s): Others.
Melvin, a soft-spoken native of Guatemala, lost his hotel job a month ago.

But hes grateful to have a place to live, a four-bedroom house in East Oakland where his family of four rents a bedroom.

Yes, he shares a single room with his wife and two children. Two other families also live there for a total of 11 people in the house, he told me.

The rent for the room is $1,000, Melvin said, but he and his wife, who was laid off from her job at a car wash a week before he was let go, only had $700 to their names on April 1. He said they paid $650, keeping $50 for food.

Let that sink in: One family has $50 to make it through the economic shutdown caused by the coronavirus.

On March 27, the Oakland City Council adopted a two-month moratorium on residential and commercial evictions for tenants who cant afford rent because of the pandemic. On April 6, my colleague Bob Egelko reported that the state Judicial Council barred courts from enforcing any eviction orders against renters. The action will remain in effect until 90 days after Gov. Gavin Newsom declares an end to the current state of emergency.

If hed been aware of local and state protections, Melvin couldve kept his money. But information, like money, trickles down slowly to immigrant communities.

Im getting so desperate. I want to go out and look for work, said Melvin, an undocumented immigrant who asked that his last name not be published because he fears action by immigration authorities. The Chronicle granted him anonymity based on its anonymous sources policy.

Yalonda M. James/The Chronicle

I met him last week at Bridges Academy at Melrose, the elementary school on 53rd Avenue in East Oakland that his children attend. Ostensibly, he was there to get a laptop for them to use at home but, like the dozens of other parents who showed up, he was also there to learn what support is available for his family.

The schools immediate focus has shifted from teaching students how to read, add and subtract to calculating the amount of financial support needed by parents who already exist on the fringes of society. All students at Bridges qualify for free lunch and, according to Anita Iverson-Comelo, the schools principal, more than half of the 435 students have at least one parent who is undocumented.

The astronomical unemployment tally  more than 16 million people in the U.S. out of work in just three weeks  doesnt account for undocumented immigrants working at our bars, restaurants, hotels and offices but who cant file claims. An estimated 7.6 million undocumented immigrants hold jobs in this country, according to the Pew Research Center, a nonpartisan think tank that conducts public opinion polling, demographic research and content analysis.

But they wont be receiving federal aid because they dont have Social Security numbers.

A lot of families who do work in the back of restaurants and cleaning offices, its often under table, Iverson-Comelo said. They will not be bringing home an income. The economy is going to hit hardest for our families.

Now Playing: We spoke with workers from San Franciscos Mission District who continue to work  and potentially risk their health  amid the coronavirus shelter in place orders. These are their stories. Video: Erika Betty Carlos

She launched the website stimuluspledge.org to encourage financially secure people to pledge all or part of their stimulus checks. Shes pledged, as have several Oakland Unified School District principals and teachers. Educators in San Francisco started a similar effort. Bridges also launched a GoFundMe campaign so it can provide quicker cash grants to its neediest families.

At Bridges, 80% of students are English learners, according to Jessica Jung, who coordinates English language development. The school set up a YouTube channel for students to practice their listening and speaking skills by singing songs. Iverson-Comelo said the school handed out 158 Google Chromebooks. Still, online learning presents a challenge for families without internet access.

Numerous financial campaigns, like the school districts Rapid Relief Fund, have been established, but during this time of chilling upheaval, the staff at Bridges understands that parents will be hesitant to tap a source they dont trust. Sure, parents can go to school district sites to pick up food twice a week, but what about money for cell phones, electricity and diapers?

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.

This whole pandemic is really bringing a light to how our most vulnerable community members are even more at risk, Jung said. Its exposing the fact that our safety nets arent for everybody.

Im definitely worried about the academic progress of our students, but really Im literally losing sleep over the health and well-being of our students and our families.

Harley Shaiken, a professor at UC Berkeleys Graduate School of Education and chair of the universitys Center for Latin American Studies, told me that inequality during the coronavirus isnt simply about having less income or fewer resources. Its really about life and death.

That is what the virus has exposed  that we remain two Americas, separate and unequal, he said. Under normal circumstances, that is damaging to the society and it undermines democracy, but this adds a particularly urgent dimension to that.

Another person I met while at Bridges was Nicole, a 37-year-old mother of three who moved to this country in 2004 and is undocumented. She sold corn, fruit and creamy rice pudding in front of the school to make extra money. The restaurant where her husband worked is closed. As the familys food supply dwindled, she called a parent-leader at Bridges, panicked.

Last weekend, food was delivered to her home.

My heart was filled with happiness, said Nicole, who also fears immigration action. At least now theres hope.

San Francisco Chronicle columnist Otis R. Taylor Jr. appears Mondays and Thursdays. Email: otaylor@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @otisrtaylorjr
The Chinese Government says authorities in Guangzhou resorted to strict measures against Nigerians and other Africans stranded in the region owing to the prevalence of the coronavirus among foreigners, especially Nigerian nationals.

Chinese Ambassador to Nigeria Zhou Pingjian gave the explanation on Tuesday in Abuja during a media briefing with Foreign Affairs Minister Geoffrey Onyeama on the alleged maltreatment of Nigerians and other Africans stranded in China.

He said the current statistics of COVID-19 in Guangzhou showed that Nigerians and other Africans were most vulnerable, hence the measures were meant to protect them.

Pingjian noted that China has zero-tolerance for discrimination, saying Guangzhou was only fighting COVID-19 and not any Nigerian or any African or any foreign nationals or Chinese.

Onyeama, on his part, recounted that there was a flight which conveyed a group of Nigerians to Guangzhou in which some Nigerians on the flight tested positive for COVID-19.

According to him, a lady who owned a restaurant in Guangzhou was among those who tested positive to the disease.

Read Also: Gbajabiamila Summons Chinese Ambassador Over Inhuman Treatment Of Nigerians In China

He said: An African restaurant, a Nigerian restaurant frequented predominantly and almost exclusively by Africans and Nigerians and that the Chinese authorities obviously picked up on this that there was this group of people who had tested positive.

And so, automatically demanded and insisted that they all be quarantined, with nobody allowed to come out in 14 days and if anybody came out from that quarantine, that they should not be allowed in if it was a hotel, back into that hotel or that residence.
With stanzas written by Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish drawn on masks or sand sculptures of people wearing masks with messages telling them to stay home, Gazan artists are finding inspiration in the coronavirus pandemic and using their skills to help others stay safe.

We drew the same masks used by characters of [Netflixs] 'La Casa de Papel' on masks for young people. We opted for stanzas or quotes by Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish for older people, artist Dorgham Qreiqa, 23, told Al-Monitor, as he drew the image of a spiky coronavirus on a mask in his Shujaiyah home studio in eastern Gaza City.

Qreiqa and his fellow artists, Samah Saad, 30, and Tamer al-Deeb, 22, started drawing on masks and distributing them to the people in marginalized areas after the Palestinian Ministry of Health announced the first two cases of COVID-19 in the Gaza Strip on March 22.

We noticed that the children refused to wear plain white masks, so we made colorful drawings on dozens of medical masks, and we posted pictures online. Everyone loved them. Then we headed to al-Shati refugee camp, west of Gaza City, which is the poorest area in the Strip, and distributed the masks after disinfecting them, he said, adding, We felt we were able to make a small difference.

Qreiqa and his team work five hours a day to paint faces and pictures or write quotes from Darwish or Russian writer Fyodor Dostoyevsky on about 40 masks every day. The only problem is that these medical masks are becoming too expensive. A few months back, a 50-piece pack was 25 shekels (around $6); now it is 150 shekels (around $41), and the type of masks over which we draw is hard to find, he said.

He and his team also decided to make murals to create awareness on measures to take against the spread of the coronavirus. On April 4, they drew Earth wearing a medical mask on a wall opposite the Legislative Council in central Gaza City. They will draw a similar mural in the coming days in al-Shati refugee camp.

Life is not easy for artists in Gaza, where most of the people live hand to mouth and think that paying for art or concerts is a luxury they cannot afford. Qreiqa, who dropped out of the University College of Applied Sciences in Gaza, sold only one painting to a local institution for $400 in 2016 and is currently working on one to be delivered in a few days to a local woman for 1,000 shekels (around $278). His few customers mostly ask him to draw on the walls of their own homes, for which he charges 200 shekels (around $55). He also sells A4 charcoal drawings for 30 shekels (around $8).

What he earns will go to his initiative to make masks. The cost of the initiative is approximately 800 shekels (around $223). For us, this is a charitable project, and all we want is for people to protect themselves, Qreiqa said.

Two young Gazans, Ahmad Abo Suker, 21, and Ibrahim al-Qarnawi, 25, came up with another initiative to use performance art to create awareness of the coronavirus. Dressed as crowns, they visited children in the Bureij refugee camp in the central Gaza Strip April 3. They distributed medical masks they had bought themselves, as well as five boxes of local sweets worth 50 shekels (around $13).

We gave the children masks, taught them how to put them on and gave them sweets with a paper over which we wrote, Stay home for yourself, your family and your country, and we explained to them what it meant, Abo Suker told Al-Monitor.

The refugee camps in the Gaza Strip are overpopulated.  This is why children need to be educated on the importance of protection and prevention.

Fida al-Qarnawi, a mother of seven children, lives in a run-down house in the eastern Bureij refugee camp. Lamis, Qarnawis 11-year-old daughter, told Al-Monitor, Uncle Suker and Uncle Hima (the names by which the clowns go) taught us to always wash our hands and keep them away from our eyes when we use disinfectants. They told us to stay home so we can protect ourselves and our families.

Qarnawi, carrying her infant child, told Al-Monitor, The initiative is excellent given the quarantine because the children need to let some energy out. My children were very happy, and they learned from Uncle Suker and Uncle Hima how to wear a medical mask and disinfect their hands.

Meanwhile, in the Tel al-Hawa neighborhood in central Gaza City, sculptor Rana al-Ramlawi, 25, painted the words Stay Home on a small sand mountain. Ramlawi, who learned to make statues out of sand from YouTube videos, describes herself as the first sand sculptor in the Gaza Strip.

Artists express the issues of their community, she told Al-Monitor, adding, I felt like I needed to express my compassion for COVID-19 patients all over the world and deliver a message for everyone to stay in their homes.

She had never made any political sculptures until after the Great March of Return on March 30, 2018. One of her best-known pieces of art was a sculpture of a mother crying while embracing her son whose leg had been amputated.

On April 3, Ramlawi made a sand sculpture of 11 individuals wearing blue medical masks; the words Stay Home were spray-painted on the sculpture. A photo of the work went viral. A sculpture with only one figure takes about six hours. Some sculptures take an entire week, like the most recent one I made about the coronavirus, she noted.

Although Ramlawi charges $200 per sculpture, she hardly gets any offers for such a price in Gaza. She received an offer in February from the administration of the Sabah Al-Ahmad Heritage Village in Kuwait to work as a sculptor in the village, but she was unable to travel because Egypt had suspended flights due to the coronavirus.

My message to citizens is to take care of themselves and stay home to protect their families, Ramlawi said, adding that she was hopeful for the future. I aspire to create the first exhibition of sculptures that embody the lives of Palestinians under occupation since the Nakba (the creation of Israel and the displacement of Palestinians), so I can present Palestine to the entire world through art because the world now refers to historic Palestine as Israel, she said.
Voters line up to cast their ballots at a polling station in Seoul's Mapo-gu, Wednesday, in this year's general election to form the 21st National Assembly. Yonhap





By Jung Da-min







The highest-ever turnout for early voting ahead of the April 15 general election led to the highest turnout for overall voting in such an election in 28 years.







As of 6 p.m. Wednesday, the overall turnout reached 66.2 percent, 8.2 percentage points higher than the 58 percent recorded in the previous general election in 2016, and the highest for a general election since 1992, according to the National Election Commission (NEC).







More than 29.1 million out of 43.9 million eligible voters cast ballots at 14,330 polling stations to elect 300 lawmakers to form the 21st National Assembly. The voters cast two ballots, one for the 253 single-member constituencies and the other for the remaining 47 proportional representation seats.






Three people, including a doctor and a pharmacist, suffered injuries when stones were pelted at the ambulance carrying a team of health workers and police personnel in Uttar Pradeshs Moradabad on Wednesday, Chief Medical Officer (CMO) Dr SP Garg said.

A group of health workers had gone to check a suspected coronavirus positive patient, and was attacked while they were convincing the suspected patient to be quarantined. An unruly mob pelted stones at the medical team and police personnel accompanying them in Haji Neb Masjid area of Moradabad.

A number of parked vehicles were also vandalised in the incident.

When our team boarded the ambulance with the Covid-19 patient, suddenly a crowd gathered and started pelting stones. Some doctors are still there in the area. We were injured in the attack, the driver of the ambulance which had gone to the area said.

As news of the attack on health workers spread in the area, both the District Magistrate and the SSP reached the site.

A coronavirus patient had allegedly died in the area a few days ago after which the health workers had gone to check on the family members of the victim. They were heading to a quarantine center at the time of the incident.

Dr HC Mishra and another member of the medical team have received injuries after stones were pelted at them by the mob.

Taking note of the incident, Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath has said that the National Security Act (NSA) would be slapped against those responsible for such acts.

Doctors, health workers and officers and workers associated with sanitation work, police officers are working day and night at this time of crisis, the Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister said in a statement.

Attacking these people is an unforgivable crime. Action will be taken against those guilty under the Disaster Management Act and the NSA. Moreover, the loss of state property will be strictly compensated from them, reads the statement.

Amit Pathak, Senior Superintendent of Police (SSP), Moradabad, has said that strict action will be taken after identifying those who were involved in the incident.

Some members of the medical team have been injured. This is a violation of Section 144 and the Epidemic Diseases Act and the Disaster Management Act. Action will be taken under the National Security Act, Pathak said echoing Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath.
Governor Andrew Cuomo announced Wednesday that all New Yorkers will soon be ordered to wear masks, meaning a lot of people find themselves needing to buy a maskespecially considering just a few weeks ago, the official word was that aside from at-risk people and healthcare workers, nobody was supposed to wear masks at all.

If you're looking to buy a mask, consider buying something locally. Plenty of people with sewing and crafting skills are producing masks, and some businesses are producing them, too. And if you can't find anything you can just pick up, weve compiled your best options below, starting with the cheapest.

Etsy

Best known as the website where you can buy all sorts of one-off oddities and things like kitten-themed handcuffs and Christmas ornaments with python ribs inside it, Etsy is one of your best options for picking up pandemic facemasks that are not only functional, pretty stylish as well.

The stock is likely to shift, but right now the top options are ToughCookieClothings for $5.99 each, available in black and pink, and infinitekidscos multi-colored options for $6.99.

More importantly, you can narrow your search to a specific geographic region using filters on the Etsy website. By doing that, you can help support local artists and artisans. Here are a few searches:

Facemasks made in Albany

Facemasks made in New York state

Facemasks made in New York, New York

Bandanas on Amazon

Amazon's inventory of specialized masks is thin at the moment, and they won't be made in New York. But the online megaretailer does have bandanas available (and remember, theyre a perfectly acceptable substitute), as well as these:

Neck Gaither Breathable Bandanas for $20.09

Simes Bandana 12-Pack for $8

Facemask Bandana from Easy Hitech for $5.99

Rothco Trainmen Paisley Bandana for $7.99

Naturepedic

Shortly after the pandemic, the mattress company Naturepedic pivoted a portion of their factories to providing masks to consumers at cost. You can buy a pack of 6 for $39.

Other New York options

Caraa

Caraa is a New York0based fashion company that pivoted to making masks, and each purchase will be matched with a donation to the New York relief fund.

KES NYC

KES masks are particularly stylish, but only $17. For each mask purchased, KES will donate one mask to a healthcare professional.

Alice and Olivia

New York City-based Alice and Olivia are selling these multi-color masks for just $10, and for each mask sold, one will be donated to a community in need.

Special Investigation 147 NY dams are 'unsound,' potentially dangerous Thousands of dams have not been inspected in over 20 years.

Buck Mason

Starting May 18, you can pre-order 3-layer masks made from the same heavy cotton that Buck Mason uses to make T-Shirts. 5-packs are priced at $20.

Caraa Mask Packs

A 5-pack of reusable Caraa Masks is $25, and for every sale Caraa will donate five masks to New York City's COVID-19 Response Fund.

Christine Alcalay

Christine Alcalay is prioritizing manufacturing masks for healthcare professionals  the ones you can buy are extra, from a limited run developed to offset the costs of their donations. Each mask is $29.

Nordstrom

Nordstrom is selling Brooklyn-made bandanas in stylish plaid for $18 to $22.

Abacaxi

New York based Abacaxi is selling multi-color masks for $30, and the batch will ship on April 30.

Inkerman

The NYC shoe-company Inkerman has fully reallocated all their resources to mask production. You can buy three masks and donate three masks for $20, or choose to donate masks directly through their site.

Hearst Newspapers participates in various affiliate marketing programs, which means we may get paid commissions on editorially chosen products purchased through our links to retailer sites.



Joshua Sargent is an editor for Hearst Newspapers. Email him at josh.sargent@hearst.com.
A mother was left speechless after she gave birth to her first daughter - and a surprise twin followed just two minutes later.

Lyndsey Altice, 30, and husband Wesley, 33, from Wisconsin, had only just been introduced to daughter Ada Maze when medics realized she was still in labor.

A contraction later, and the couple, who already share toddler son Django, met their second daughter Billie June in July 2019.

The pair have now shared the remarkable pictures from the twins' birth, where Lyndsey is seen sitting open-mouthed in a birthing pool as she is handed her second child.

Lyndsey measured her own weight throughout the pregnancy to make sure her baby was healthy and only had one scan - but it failed to show Billie June.

A mother (pictured) was left speechless after she gave birth to her first daughter - and a surprise twin followed just two minutes later

Lyndsey Altice (pictured right, during her pregnancy), 30, and husband Wesley, 33, from Wisconsin, had only just been introduced to daughter Ada Maze when medics realized she was still in labor. Pictured left: The twins shortly after their birth

Most experts suggest mothers-to-be have at least two ultrasounds, one in the first trimester and another in the last. However, some parents who prefer a natural approach opt to have only one towards the end of their pregnancy, having checked that the fetus is growing at a healthy rate themselves.

The mother-of-three admitted that her only regret was that she didn't have a picture of her husband's face when he saw a second baby being born.

She recalled: 'I was immediately suspicious when Ada came out so small, because I had put on double the weight I did with my last birth so I didn't understand how she could be so tiny.

'When I had my son Django a few years previous, he was 9lbs and I put on less weight with him, so it was really odd.'

HOW A TWIN CAN BE MISSED ON A SCAN There is a very small chance that a twin can be missed on a scan, according to The Birth Company, which runs a practice on Harley Street in central London. They said: 'If one of the tiny twins happens to be hidden behind the other when the scan is performed, then there might not be any clue that youre carrying more than one baby. 'Also the babys heartbeat cant usually be detected before about 7-8 weeks, but some scans are performed before this.' A twin sharing the same sac could also be sitting so closely to their sibling that they are wrongly thought to be just a shadow outline. It is also very difficult to distinguish two heartbeats. Especially if the heartbeats are in sync or if the mother's own heartbeat is sending mixed results. Advertisement

Lyndsey added: 'There are no words to describe what I was thinking when I realized I was about to have another baby right there and then.

'The next contraction was almost instant, I knew before the nurses started saying what they thought it was. I could feel the baby coming but could not communicate it through the contraction.

'The nurse thought it was the water sack, which she hadn't seen happen before, so we were all a bit confused. Then I felt it happening but I couldn't get the words out, I knew a second baby was coming and then two minutes later there she was.

'The whole room went crazy, everyone was having conversations with each other, my husband was in shock, my sister was taking pictures and I don't think any of us had a clue how to feel.

'I was in pure shock too, I had a million thoughts that I couldn't process because I was completely overwhelmed so I just submitted to the moment, I think my face says it all.

'I must have set a world record for how many times someone can scream "oh my god" in 10 minutes. Now we have settled in we are so happy and I would not change a thing.'

Lyndsey gave birth to her twins last July and her pregnancy showed no signs that she had a second baby growing inside her at any point.

She said: 'I found a midwife when we knew I was pregnant and through the whole pregnancy everything was just like when I had my son, I measured my fundal height which always matched what it would be for having one baby for each week I measured.

Lyndsey (pictured at home with the twins following their birth) measured her own weight throughout the pregnancy to make sure her baby was healthy and only had one scan - but it failed to show Billie June

A contraction later, and the couple, who already share toddler son Django, met their second daughter Billie June in July 2019. The pair have now shared the remarkable pictures from the twins' birth (pictured)

'I wasn't doing ultrasound because I wasn't a high risk so unless I needed too, if I felt something was wrong for example. When I did have an ultrasound, it still didn't show Billie-June.'

She even got a recording of her ultrasound, and after having her babies she checked back and still couldn't see a second baby.

Lyndsey said: 'I think because they were just checking fluid levels and not checking for a second baby, all they saw was that Ada had moved a little.

'I'm sure if they were looking for two babies, they would have found two. I even got a recording of the ultrasound and you just can't see a second baby at all, so even when I look, and know she's there, I can't see her.

The mother-of-three admitted that her only regret was that she didn't have a picture of her husband's face when he saw a second baby being born (pictured all together)

Lyndsey gave birth to her twins (pictured) last July and her pregnancy showed no signs that she had a second baby growing inside her at any point

'When I went into labor they hooked me up to the baby monitor and there was only a reading of one heartbeat.'

Now, with the twins coming up to their first birthday, Lyndsey feels ready to share what happened and explains it was one of the biggest, and best surprises she has ever had.

She said: 'When it first happened we were just having a total "oh c***" moment, but now that we have settled and we know how to look after twins we just love it.

The mother-of-three (pictured with her twins after their birth) even got a recording of her ultrasound, and after having her babies she checked back and still couldn't see a second baby

Now, with the twins (pictured as newborns) coming up to their first birthday, Lyndsey feels ready to share what happened and explains it was one of the biggest, and best surprises she has ever had

'It's a total blessing in disguise, and the kids themselves are great, my son Django adores them and they all get on so well.

'I love looking back at the photographs because I think they show exactly how I was feeling, there's no hiding how I felt.

'I was a little worried about sharing the pictures because it's such an intimate moment, but I'm thrilled we have them, I look at them all the time. I'll show them to the kids when they're older.'
DOVER, Del., April 14, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- The Irish Laboratory Awards recently awarded Molecule RnD Ltd., the research and development division of impact-focused incubator Molecule USA, Inc. ( https://molecule.us ), with the 2020 "Innovation of the Year" award to celebrate the importance and rapid development of the company's game-changing, humanitarian, water sorbent technology.

Molecule 's revolutionary technology, called "Regeneration Optimized Sorbent" (a.k.a. "ROS"), makes it possible to pull clean drinking water directly from the air. The technology was developed to support humanitarian water accessibility, disaster-relief challenges and solve the global water crisis. The revolutionary new technology is part of a new suite of materials, aimed at addressing global challenges such as potable water, improved health and food security. ROS is the result of a collaborative research agreement between Molecule and Professor Dr. Michael Zaworotko, Ph.D. and his research team at the University of Limerick, Ireland. Dr. Zaworotko is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry, the Learned Society of Wales and the Institute of Chemistry of Ireland. He is also a Member of the Royal Irish Academy and one of the most highly-cited chemists in the world.

Molecule's globally-impactful water technology is set to revolutionize how industries, governments, NGOs, defense organizations and civic institutions worldwide secure clean water sources for their citizens, even during global pandemics and times of water shortages.

"Without water, there is no life, no Plan B," says Professor Michael Zaworotko. "Today, 900 million people globally lack access to clean drinking water. Waterborne diseases are the number one killer globally, claiming 3.4 million lives a year, most of them children. The COVID-19 pandemic has significantly exacerbated the human cost of this lack of access. The ROS materials will allow us to help solve this problem, especially during these urgent times."

"The global COVID-19 pandemic has now uncomfortably brought clean water access and food security issuesproblems previously thought to be relegated to only developing countriesto the forefront of everyone's minds," says Bjorn Simundson, Molecule's CEO.

"This global pandemic highlights the need for citizens globally to have access to clean drinking water and food without the need for overreliance on centralized logistics, fragile infrastructure and increasingly depleted current water reserves. I wish the external circumstances weren't so dire, but the fact is that we are among a select few coming to market with humanitarian pure water technology designed to save lives and enable off-grid food production. We simply couldn't be coming at a better time. It's our moment to unite with solutions for a better future."

About Molecule RnD LTD & Molecule USA, Inc.

Molecule is an impact-focused innovation incubator in the business of identifying human challenges and solving them with disruptive technologies. We do this by collaborating with some of the world's best scientists, engineers and manufacturers to bring humanitarian focused solutions to market as turn-key products housed in spinout companies ready for acquisition, licensing or investment. Learn more at https://molecule.us

About the Irish Laboratory Awards

Launched in 2013, the Irish Laboratory Awards recognise excellence and celebrate the accomplishments and achievements of those working in the laboratory environment, covering management, innovation, collaboration, personnel development and laboratory equipment supply.

https://www.labawards.ie/

For inquiries, contact:

[email protected]

(646) 450-8881

SOURCE Molecule RnD

Related Links

www.molecule.ie


LANSING, MI -- Gov. Gretchen Whitmer has extended two more March executive orders to relax the requirements of public municipal meetings and enhance capacity at the states medical care facilities.

Michigans governor signed the orders Tuesday, April 15, which extended their relaxed requirements until May 12 as the state continues to deal with the coronavirus COVID-19 health crisis.

By extending these executive orders, we can ensure our hospitals and health care centers have the capacity needed to serve the health care needs of all Michiganders, while protecting the health of our local officials and residents by allowing public meetings to be held electronically, Whitmer said in a press release.

These order help give our front line health care workers the support they need to do their jobs safely, and help local officials safely conduct the peoples business during this unprecedented crisis.

Executive Order 2020-48 extends the ability of local boards, commissions, committees, subcommittees, authorities, councils and non-profit boards to use telephone or video conferencing methods to host meetings and conduct business while ensuring the public has access to join the meetings.

The order relaxes requirements of the Open Meetings Act, but public bodies must still provide detailed procedures so the public can participate in the meeting remotely. Government bodies must:

Ensure two-way communication for members and the public to hear and address each other.

Provide adequate notice to the public of the meeting.

Post a public meeting notice on their website.

Permit participants to record or broadcast the public meeting.

Allow participants to address the public body during a public comment period.

Whitmer initially suspended the Open Meetings Act on March 18, with the order set to expire Wednesday, April 15.

Executive Order 2020-49 extends the authority of the states Department of Licensing and Regulatory Affairs and Department of Health and Human Services to waive or defer certain requirements in order to expedite the process of opening additional care facilities during the COVID-19 crisis.

The order is meant to temporarily enhance operational capacity and efficiency of health care facilities. It allows for greater flexibility in licensing, registration and workflow requirements to ensure an adequate number of care providers during the state of emergency.

Whitmer declared a state of emergency in Michigan on March 10, the same day the state announced its first two presumptive-positive cases of COVID-19.

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:

Whitmer sees reasons to believe stay-at-home is working against coronavirus

Michigans coronavirus survivors describe battles to stay alive

Nearly a quarter of Michigan workers have filed for unemployment

As coronavirus scare relaxes Michigan transparency laws, experts question long-term effects

Whitmer sued by residents, landscaping business over stay-at-home order
CHANDIGARH: Wheat arrivals in the grain markets and purchase centres of Punjab were nearly negligible on the first day of procurement on Wednesday amid a sense of uncertainty and fear among farmers about the Covid-19 pandemic.

Of the 8,213.5 tonnes of produce that arrived in the states 252 mandis, or grain markets, mostly in south-west Punjab, 3,645.5 tonnes were procured by government agencies, officials said.

Gurjeet Singh, a farmer from Badesha village near Samrala town of Ludhiana district, went to the Khamano mandi on Wednesday morning to meet his commission agents and find out when he should bring his produce for sale.

The crop I have sown on 12 acres of land is ready for harvesting. But the government wants us to keep it as long as we can even as we want to dispose of it at the earliest. This is the dilemma every farmer is facing, Gurjeet Singh said. We dont have adequate storage space at home. Also who would unload, load and then unload again. It will be a cumbersome task.

Raghbir Singh of the nearby Ramgarh village was asked to take back the 70 quintals of produce he unloaded outside the office of a commission agent. I got a pass three days ago and was told to come today. Now, the market committee is forcing me to take back my produce as the moisture content in it is 12.4%, barely 0.4% more than the limit, he said.

Khamano market committee chairman Surinder Singh said the government had directed the committee to ensure social distancing is maintained at the market to prevent the spread of the coronavirus disease.

Since there is no facility of drying grain in the mandis, the farmers have to keep the produce at home as long as the permissible moisture limit is achieved, he said.

Those arhtiyas {commission agents} found defying government directions on maintain social distancing or helping farmers make out-of-turn sale would invite cancellation of their licences for the entire season, Surinder Singh added.

Not even a single farmer brought his produce to the grain markets in Majha region on Wednesday. Farmers and officials of the agriculture department and the Punjab mandi board said the delay in the arrival of the crop was due to the presence of moisture in the grains because of recent rains.

Officials in the four border districts of the Majha region - Tarn Taran, Amritsar, Gurdaspur and Pathankot  said the produce was likely to start arriving in the mandis from April 20.

Most of the farmers have not started harvesting due to moisture in the crop. The pace of arrival of wheat will pick up after April 20, said Sarwan Singh Pandher, secretary of the Kisan Sangharsh Committee, Punjab.

Wheat procurement in south Malwa districts was negligible on Wednesday. In Bathinda, only one farmer arrived with his crop. Two two farmers arrived with their wheat in Mansa. Moga did not witness any wheat arrivals. In Faridkot, 75 farmers sold their wheat crop.

In neighbouring Haryana, few farmers brought their crop to the mandis on the first day of mustard procurement in Bhiwani, Jind, Dadri and Mahendergarh districts on Wednesday.

Farmers union leader Balbir Singh Takhan, who visited Bhiwanis Behal Mandi, said, Many farmers failed to turn up as they did not receive the governments message asking them to bring their produce to the mandis.

A farmer, Ram Chander of Dadris Ranila village, said he had brought 40 quintals of mustard to the grain market but was still waiting to sell it. Amit Sangwan, a farmer from Bhiwanis Mitthi village, fared better. He said he had brought 40 quintals of mustard to the mandi and a local sarpanch procured his produce at 4,425 per quintal.

Hariyawas sarpanch and Sidhanwa procurement centre in-charge Sunil Sheoran said, We bought mustard from 10 farmers in two shifts. We will put all our efforts to purchase farmers produce even with limited resources. The farmers covered their faces and maintained social distancing at the mandi.

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We are more than a month into the outbreak of the coronavirus in South Carolina. My hometown, Camden, was initially the hardest hit community in our state. We learned valuable lessons early of what to do, what not to do and building community support. Most importantly, we learned that short-term and long-term planning matters.

Our state has now seen the virus affect every aspect of its government, private sector and nonprofits. We weathered the initial storm with tactical, ad hoc decision-making, much of this by the governors office.

Now the time has come to chart out our next steps so we can develop a comprehensive, strategic approach to the long-term presence of the virus, and ensure that our government services continue to function. Too often we are reactive in South Carolina. Its time to be proactive.

This crisis is nothing like a natural disaster nor are its effects typical of an economic crisis. Like the virus, our current experience is novel. Therefore, our normal crisis responses are inadequate. We need new tactics, and quickly.

There are many unprecedented circumstances facing our state as we navigate this situation. For example, since the Great Recession, South Carolina has dramatically reduced funding for our colleges  making their operating budgets almost exclusively reliant on tuition, fees and other revenues. When students arent on campus, these funds disappear. This loss will exceed $100 million through the end of May alone. Some of our colleges could collapse financially if we dont take action.

Our hospitals are working overtime and expending vast sums to fight the coronavirus. While doing this, they are not performing the elective procedures that generate most of their revenue. Our state has already seen mass layoffs in health care. We must develop long-term plans to maintain the financial viability of our hospitals.

So many questions arise: How would we handle a coronavirus outbreak in our prisons? How will our state parks be maintained without revenue? What steps will we take to ensure that students can return safely to school in the fall? Are we ensuring that day cares, many of which are still open, are keeping children and staff safe? Will South Carolina need a jobs or public-works program to assist unemployed workers when we are able to reopen? How will we reboot our tourism and nonprofits?

The Legislature took good first steps meeting this month, agreeing to disburse funding and ease regulations to assist colleges, hospitals, schools and counties while also allowing the governor to receive and spend federal funds. This legislation must be finalized, but it is important to note that we do not have detailed plans on how these funds will be managed or expended.

Our state has not created mid- or long-term plans on managing this crisis in its government or private sector. South Carolina needs executive and legislative leadership that is aggressive, flexible and quick to address our next steps to weather this crisis.

Our governor clearly loves this state and has worked to manage the immediate medical crisis. However, South Carolina has not yet recovered from the Haley and Sanford years of treating government as the enemy, gutting state agencies, high leadership turnover and inexperienced appointees. As a result, our agencies have not performed as well as we deserve.

Too many people have been unable to access unemployment benefits through the Department of Employment and Workforce. Our health department was quickly overwhelmed because of inadequate staffing, and many other agencies have no real contingency plans. Unfortunately, in South Carolina we dont seem to want professional and competent government until we need it  and often thats too late. Its time to catch up.

Immediately, we need our governor and legislative leaders to appoint a coronavirus task force with strong, knowledgeable leaders. These leaders should demonstrate a deep understanding of our state operations, health care system, economics, education system and nonprofit sector. This task force should be led by someone willing to commit full time with the proven ability to get things done. This task force should be fully staffed, and must quickly assemble a plan for our governor and state leaders to execute.

We need this designated group to design how to fund needed areas, change laws and regulations to assist our government and private sector, and plan the management of the crisis during the coming months and beyond. We must act now. We have no time to waste.

State Sen. Vincent Sheheen, D-Camden, represents District 27, which includes Kershaw, Lancaster and Chester counties.
New data throws more support behind the theory that neutrinos are the reason the universe is dominated by matter.

The current laws of physics do not explain why matter persists over antimatter - why the universe is made of 'stuff'. Scientists believe equal amounts of matter and antimatter were created at the beginning of the universe, but this would mean they should have wiped each other out, annihilating the universe as it began.

Instead, physicists suggest there must be differences in the way matter and antimatter behave that explain why matter persisted and now dominates the universe. Each particle of matter has an antimatter equivalent, and neutrinos are no different, with an antimatter equivalent called antineutrinos.

They should be exact opposites in their properties and behaviour, which is what makes them annihilate each other on contact.

Now, an international team of researchers that make up the T2K Collaboration, including Imperial College London scientists, have found the strongest evidence yet that neutrinos and antineutrinos behave differently, and therefore may not wipe each other out. The results are published today in Nature.

Dr Patrick Dunne, from the Department of Physics at Imperial, said: "This result brings us closer than ever before to answering the fundamental question of why the matter in our universe exists. If confirmed - at the moment we're over 95 per cent sure - it will have profound implications for physics and should point the way to a better understanding of how our universe evolved."

Previously, scientists have found some differences in behaviour between matter and antimatter versions of subatomic particles called quarks, but the differences observed so far do not seem to be large enough to account for the dominance of matter in the universe.

However, T2K's new result indicates that the differences in the behaviour of neutrinos and antineutrinos appear to be quite large. Neutrinos are fundamental particles but do not interact with normal matter very strongly, such that around 50 trillion neutrinos from the Sun pass through your body every second.

Neutrinos and antineutrinos can come in three 'flavours', known as muon, electron and tau. As they travel, they can 'oscillate' - changing into a different flavour. The fact that muon neutrinos oscillate into electron neutrinos was first discovered by the T2K experiment in 2013.

To get the new result, the team fired beams of muon neutrinos and antineutrinos from the J-PARC facility at Tokai, Japan, and detected how many electron neutrinos and antineutrinos arrived at the Super-Kamiokande detector 295km away.

They looked for differences in how the neutrinos or antineutrinos changed flavour, finding neutrinos appear to be much more likely to change than antineutrinos.

The available data also strongly discount the possibility that neutrinos and antineutrinos are as just likely as each other to change flavour. Dr Dunne said: "What our result shows is that we're more than 95 per cent sure that matter neutrinos and antineutrinos behave differently. This is big news in itself; however we do already know of other particles that have matter-antimatter differences that are too small to explain our matter-dominated universe.

"Therefore, measuring the size of the difference is what matters for determining whether neutrinos can answer this fundamental question. Our result today finds that unlike for other particles, the result in neutrinos is compatible with many of the theories explaining the origin of the universe's matter dominance."

While the result is the strongest evidence yet that neutrinos and antineutrinos behave differently, the T2K Collaboration is working to reduce any uncertainties and gather more data by upgrading the detectors and beamlines, including the new Hyper-Kamiokande detector to replace the Super-Kamiokande. A new experiment, called DUNE, is also under construction in the US. Imperial is involved in both.

Imperial researchers have been involved in the T2K Collaboration since 2004, starting with conceptual designs on whiteboards and research and development on novel particle detector components that were key to building this experiment, which was finally completed and turned on in 2010.

For the latest result, the team contributed to the statistical analysis of the results and ensuring the signal they observe is real, as well as including the effects of how neutrinos interact with matter, which is one of the largest uncertainties that go into the analysis.

Professor Yoshi Uchida said: "When we started, we knew that seeing signs of differences between neutrinos and antineutrinos in this way was something that could take decades, if they could ever be seen at all, so it is almost like a dream to have our result be celebrated on the cover of Nature this week."

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LITCHFIELD  Like other municipal leaders across the state, First Selectman Denise Raap is doing her best to keep residents aware of the impact of the coronavirus pandemic. On Wednesday, Raap said Litchfield had 13 confirmed cases of COVID-19.

She broadcasts often on Facebook Live, catching people up with the latest developments of community outreach in town, how to get emergency alerts, and how to get help with grocery shopping or prescription pickups and other errands. She also uses her talk to encourage people.

Were now up to 41 CERT voluteers, and theyve been helping seniors who really shouldnt be going out shopping, she said. Theyve been helping with online prescriptions and grocery shopping, and making sure people with compromised health arent out shopping either.

Anyone who has a COVID-19 diagnosis can call the town at 860-567-7567 or 860-567 1333 for help. Make sure youre self-quarantining, Raap said. We will help you, and make sure youre staying safe at home.

Raap, a business owner, also will reach out to the business community with a Zoom meeting Friday at 4 p.m. Ive had a lot of calls from different members of our business community, and I ... want to have a conversation about what kinds of help (theyre) looking for, she said. Id just like to hear if a businesse has applied for federal or state support, or if theyre unaware of whats out there, I can share information about it.

To attend Fridays Zoom meeting, email 1stselectman@townoflitchfield.org and Raap will send an invitation.

The first selectwoman plans on resuming her Monday morning coffee chats at 9 a.m. on Zoom; email her for an invite, or call 860-567-7550.

I think our community has been doing a terrific job with social distancing, she said. We have all paid attention to how important it is.

Residents can find information on the CERT teams Neighbors Helping Neighbors program, tax payments and other services at townoflitchfield.org or Facebook.com/townoflitchfieldCT. Town Hall is closed to the public.

Barkhamsted warns residents

Wednesdays email blast from Barkhamsted First Selectman Don Stein started off on a serious note with a warning about car theft.

The Connecticut State Police and the Barkhamsted Resident State Trooper are aware of an increase in car thefts and items stolen from cars that are left outside and unlocked, Stein wrote. These incidents are due to increased traffic from juveniles from other municipalities within our state. The State Police are actively patrolling the towns in an effort to mitigate these incidents from occurring. They are also working very closely with law enforcement from the municipalities in which these juveniles reside.

Stein advised residents not to leave keys, key fobs, purses or any other valuables on the seats, and to lock their cars. Unfortunately, if there are valuables that can be seen, they will break the window of the car, so be sure everything of value is out of the car, he said. Just locking it is not enough if you have left items on the seat or center console.

He reported late Tuesday that Barkhamsted has seven confirmed COVID-19 cases.

The number has gone up by one a day for the last six days, he said. That makes it even more important that you and your family do everything you can to avoid exposure by social distancing, self-isolation, and wearing masks and gloves when you are going to the store or out in public. And make sure you know how to properly put the gloves and masks on, and how to take them off, and please, always dispose of them in the garbage, not by dropping them on the ground.

Following the example of other towns in Connecticut, the town hall is closed to the public, and residents can conduct regular business such as tax payments online at barkhamsted.us. All meetings are being held on Zoom, and login information is posted on the towns website.

Next week, the Economic Development Commission is scheduling a virtual meeting, in an effort to provide information from the state and federal government that is intended to help businesses and residents who are out of work. The date and time of the meeting is to be announced.

We hope to have representatives from the Chamber of Commerce, the Workforce Investment Board, the Community College and the United Way, who will tell you about the programs that are available and how to apply for help, Stein said. It will also allow local business people to discuss their issues and to trade best practices with each other.

Residents who need help getting groceries, prescriptions or any other errands can call Barkhamsteds volunteer corps, a group of about 20 people. The towns Cookie Jar Fund is also available to people who are in severe financial need. Residents can call 860-379-1314 for more information, or call Stein at 860-379-8285.

Food pantries are open

In Torrington, Friendly Hands Food Bank is continuing with its added Saturday hours from 10 a.m. to noon, to provide more time for families to pick up food if its needed. The food bank is located at 50 King St.

FISHs food pantry is also providing groceries to needy families. Both of these organizations are always in need of donations of food and supplies from individuals and groups.

To reach Friendly Hands, call 860-482-3338; to reach FISH, call 860-482-7300.

The Salvation Armys Torrington and Winsted food pantries are also open and available to serve those in need.

The Torrington food pantry serves residents of Torrington and Goshen, and is open from 10 a.m.-1 p.m. Thursdays. No appointment is required. For information, call 860-482-3569.

The Winsted food pantry serves residents of Winsted, Colebrook and Norfolk, and is open from 2-5 p.m. Tuesdays and 10 a.m.-noon Fridays. No appointment is required. For information, call 860 379 8444.

Residents of these towns do not need to be previous recipients of the food pantry. The groceries are pre-bagged and provided to recipients outside to keep everyone safe.

The Salvation Army has also set up an Emotional & Spiritual Care Hotline for anyone that needs a listening ear. Call 844-458-HOPE (4673) from 9 a.m.-9 p.m. Trained Salvation Army Officers and employees are available to talk, advise, and above all pray for individuals, families and situations.

For more information visit ctri.SalvationArmy.org.
President Donald Trump speaks during the daily briefing on the CCP virus in the Rose Garden of the White House in Washington on April 14, 2020. (Mandel Ngan/AFP via Getty Images)

Trump Announces List of Nearly 200 Advisers to Help Reopen US Economy

President Donald Trump on Tuesday announced he will be enlisting advisers from nearly all sectors of American commerce, the medical field, and elected office to join a new task force dedicated to reopening the United States economy after it was ravaged by the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus.

Speaking at the White House, Trump read dozens of names of executives and companies from sectors including technology, agriculture, banking, financial services, defense, energy, transportation, as well as leaders from unions, professional sports, think tanks, and health care, as members of his task force, dubbed the Great American Economic Revival Industry Groups.

The president said his administration will be speaking to the groups over the next very short period of time, in many cases, tomorrow, and will do so by telephone, because we dont want people traveling right now. Trump said that those named on the list were the best and the smartest, the brightest and theyre going to give us some ideas, on how to reopen the economy following its CCP virus-induced shutdown.

Shortly after the presidents briefing, the White House released a list of nearly 200 executives, economists, scholars, and industry leaders who together will form various Great American Economic Revival Industry Groups. The groups will work together with the White House to chart the path forward toward a future of unparalleled American prosperity, and produce a more independent, self-sufficient, and resilient nation, according to a White House press release.

Names among the list include Apples Tim Cook, some of the nations largest banks, such as Bank of America, Goldman Sachs, and Morgan Stanley, massive defense contractors such as Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman, and former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and billionaire entrepreneur Mark Cuban, who have both been critical of Trump in the past. Trump and the White House did not explain exactly what role the groups would have in the process of reopening the U.S. economy.

Elsewhere during Tuesdays press conference, Trump said that plans to reopen the country were close to being finalized and that some governors across the United States can very, very shortly, if not almost immediately, open up their states, but said he will announce a specific date soon, adding that the date will be in the very near future. Trump said he was aware of over 20 states that were in extremely good shape and could potentially reopen before the date of May 1, while other states will follow.

Trumps comments contrast with warnings by Dr. Anthony Fauci, the governments top infectious disease expert, who on Tuesday cautioned against reopening the nation too early as it does not yet have the critical testing and tracing procedures needed to do so. We have to have something in place that is efficient and that we can rely on, and were not there yet, Fauci told The Associated Press, before calling the May 1 target date a bit overly optimistic for many areas of the country.

Fauci expressed concerns that new outbreaks may arise in locations where social distancing has eased, and that public health officials dont yet have the capabilities to rapidly test for the virus, isolate any new cases, and track down everyone that an infected person came into contact with. The infectious disease expert said that social-distancing rules in place in much of the country would have to occur on a rolling basis, and not all at once.
Before the novel coronavirus outbreak, members of airline and hotel loyalty programs could redeem their miles and points for items such as gift cards and services not directly related to travel. However, in response to the crisis, several companies have temporarily removed this wider category of offerings.

Members of Southwest's More Rewards program, for instance, can only use their Rapid Rewards points to book flights. One exception: Chase Southwest Rapid Rewards cardholders, who are eligible for such items as Dyson vacuum cleaners, designer sunglasses and fitness gear. A company representative said the change is temporary. American Airlines has eliminated gift cards, hotel stays and rental cars, but members can still spend their miles on newspaper subscriptions and an identity theft protection plan. Delta has removed its gift card redemption option, but Medallion members and Delta SkyMiles American Express cardholders can continue to shop for other merchandise from the SkyMiles Marketplace, including products from Apple, FitBit and Sonos.

The suspension "was a decision made as Delta continues to manage the unprecedented impact of the covid-19 pandemic on its business," a Delta spokesman said.

JetBlue and United have not altered their redemption programs; Alaska Airlines has not offered a merchandise or gift card option for some time.

Among hotels, Best Western has removed gift cards and merchandise from its Redemption Mall. However, customers can still redeem their virtual Best Western Travel Cards and use their points for free stays.

"In that our associates are working from home, we are unable to process gift card redemptions related to the Best Western Rewards program other than virtual redemption options," said Katie Ray, a company spokeswoman. "We hope that our valued Best Western Rewards members understand that we are focused on the health and safety of our team members, and we apologize for any inconvenience."

Many hotel chains have left their programs untouched, such as InterContinental Hotels Group and Wyndham, whose members can pick up gas discounts and gift cards for Sephora, Target and PetSmart, among other stores. For the "Tours and Activities" category, Wyndham's website warns: "Due to covid-19, booking local experiences may be temporarily unavailable."

Brian Kelly, founder and chief executive of the Points Guy, said he was not surprised by the tweaks the travel industry is making to its loyalty programs. When travel is robust, he explained, airlines and hotels push members toward less pricey items issued by their partners - a $250 Amazon gift card is much better for the bottom line than, say, a $1,400 plane ticket to Hawaii. But with the curb on nonessential travel, the companies are desperate for loyalty members to use their miles and points on future trips and start filling up empty planes and guest rooms.

"They are in survival mode," Kelly said. "There is so much capacity on planes, they are trying to dissuade people from non-travel items."

Kelly encourages travelers to use their miles and points to take advantage of the avalanche of deals, but, considering the uncertainty of the industry, understands their hesitancy. For the more immediate future, homebound adventurers might want to use their Hilton Honors points to, say, stock up on supplies through Amazon or donate their United MileagePlus miles to a charity helping battle the coronavirus crisis, such as Airlink, the American Red Cross and Americares Foundation. In addition, United recently announced a matching program for donated miles that will benefit seven organizations through June 30.
WASHINGTON (dpa-AFX) - Battery manufacturer Energizer Holdings, Inc. (ENR) announced Wednesday that it is withdrawing its previously disclosed full year 2020 outlook, due to the uncertainties in this rapidly changing environment, including the possible impact of the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic on the global economy and consumer demand. On a preliminary basis, Energizer said it expects net sales for the second quarter to be approximately $587 million, with organic sales growth of approximately 2.7 percent. On average, analysts polled by Thomson Reuters expected the company to report earnings of $585.1 million for the quarter. The company noted that it has been able to operate effectively thus far in the environment relating to the COVID-19 and continues to move forward with its integration efforts for the acquired battery and auto care businesses, with expected synergy realization remaining unchanged. 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.
Farmers markets launching online sales

The Washington Park and Guilderland farmers markets have launched an online market. So far a few purveyors have signed up, with available products including chicken and duck eggs, maple syrup and other maple products, pasta sauce and various cuts and types of chicken, duck, beef, pork and sausage. Founder Scott Abraham said he hopes to have up to 20 vendors online by the end of this week.

Order online for pickup at noon on Sunday starting April 26 at Star Plaza, located at Western Avenue and Route 155 in Guilderland. Artists, crafters, farmers, distilleries, hot-food vendors and others are invited to participate in the online market. Contact Abraham at 949-973-8785.

Abraham founded the Guilderland Farmers Market in 2018. It is open on Sundays in Star Plaza from July though October. Its Washington Park sibling, established last summer, will return on Saturdays in August and September.

Taco cart establishing Guilderland storefront

Buena Comida, a taco cart that has been serving at regional events, festivals and breweries since fall 2017, is developing a bricks-and-mortar location at 1810 Western Ave., Guilderland, former home to an Inferno Pizza location.

The restaurant is due to open in a few months, according to a post on its Facebook page.

Bread baker starts delivery service

A baker and former pharmacist  who has also been a Navy corpsman and computer programmer and owns a local escape room  a few months ago launched The Bread Butler, which brings organic bread to your door for slightly more than what youd pay for an artisan loaf from a scratch bakery.

Andreas Mergner has been baking bread at home for decades and considered starting a company to make it professionally several years ago, but he didnt officially launch The Bread Butler until a few months back. He said that after his escape room, called Pursue the Clue and located in Colonie, was forced to close by the COVID-19 pandemic, he decided to fully pursue the bakery option.

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The Bread Butler currently makes two types of bread, both from a sourdough starter and organic flour that he mills himself. One, called the Carla, is Mergners take on a sesame-crusted Italian white, though it has 10 percent wheat flour. The other, heartier loaf, called the Zeta, has 30 percent whole wheat and a denser crust with sesame and poppy seeds.

The companys commercial kitchen, in the back of the escape-room space on Central Avenue, includes a professional hearth oven that potentially can produce 90 loaves a day. Currently, Mergner bakes twice a week, for delivery on Wednesday or Friday, depending on location. The delivery radius extends from southern Saratoga County to Schenectady, plus Rensselaer and Albany county suburbs, Colonie and Albany. In his first few weeks Mergner baked one to two dozen loaves, but that has grown to a recent weeks high of 120 loaves.

Loaves cost $7.50 apiece, including delivery, with discounts available for orders with multiple loaves or for a multiweek commitment.

See the website, thebreadbutler.com, for full details and ordering.
No matter where you live in NSW, if you have a cough, temperature or a sore throat, you should get tested for coronavirus.

NSW has widened its testing criteria to include anyone with symptoms as daily testing numbers continue to drop and cases of community transmission remain a concern for health officials.

More than one-third of the states 2886 confirmed cases are locally acquired, and more than 350 of those cases have not been linked to a known source. Testing has also dropped from a peak of 4500 tests last week to 1305 on Tuesday.

Earlier this week testing was ramped up in council areas deemed at risk of wider community outbreaks in an effort to tamp down on the local spread of coronavirus.
Mumbai, April 15 : Barely 24 hours after a massive migrants' morcha demanding 'ghar-wapsi' shocked the nation, the Mumbai Police on Wednesday evening arrested a television journalist, Rahul Kulkarni, on charges of spreading fake news.

"Rahul Kulkarni has been arrested by the Bandra Police and will be produced before the court on Thursday morning. He has been charged under various sections of Indian Penal Code and Epidemic Diseases Act," Mumbai Police spokesperson and DCP Pranaya Ashok told IANS.

Kulkarni is the Osmanabad-based correspondent of ABP Majha, a Marathi language TV channel, who had came to Mumbai from where he was nabbed.

Shortly afterwards, state Home Minister Anil Deshmukh said the misinformation regarding the commencement of trains from April 14 appeared to be a 'big conspiracy'.

"The wrong information regarding the starting of trains was disseminated using 11 different methods. Those accounts have been tracked, police cases are being filed and due process of law will follow," the minister said.

Simultaneously, the Mumbai Police and the Cyber Crime Branch are working on the probe with new revelations of a viral video suggesting a possible conspiracy theory.

Taking serious note of the incident near the Bandra railway station, Chief Minister Uddhav Thackeray ordered a thorough investigation, resulting in the arrest of a Navi Mumbai-based self-styled activist, Vinay Dube. He has been remanded to police custody till April 21.

DCP Abhishek Trimukhe said that the Bandra Police have so far filed three FIRs in connection with the migrants' morcha, and against the journalist for airing a report suggesting that trains would run and ferry the migrant workers back home.

Meanwhile, state Bharatiya Janata Party Vice President Kirit Somaiya has written to Police Commissioner Parambir Singh, demanding a probe into a viral video, which he claimed, points to a conspiracy.

"I sent this video, which seems genuine, to the police and the Home Secretary. It appears to be planned," Somaiya said.
Francis Chan offers prayer topics and encouragement to Christians during this time of the pandemic through his YouTube channel. Chan was a former pastor at Cornerstone Community Church in California and recently headed to Hong Kong for mission.

He mentions that people tend to lose their genuine thoughts as time passes, and "naturally default to myself, and I don't think about what's going on. And during this time, it's crazy. It's so easy for us to lose what we're supposed to be all about which is to be these people who are loving, that are concerned that hundreds of people every day are dying, and many headed to an eternity apart from Christ. I used to be like this in high school. When I first believed, I would just look at all my friends and I would just be just so concerned about the eternal salvation but sometimes the longer you're in church you can almost get sidetracked by other things and believing they're the most important."

The First prayer topic Chan presented was to not lose your love. He mentions that "you stay loving during this time. Really be thinking God I love you, what do you want me to do out of love for you and to be looking at the others around you in love and going God, how can I serve these people because this is one of the greatest opportunities we've ever had as a church where people are open to talking about serious things, life-and-death things, and suddenly we're no longer in control."

The second topic is not to lose your joy. He declares "Don't lose your joy like the bible commands as Philippians 4 says, rejoice in the Lord always." He goes on to say "I know it's a weird time where you can't gather together as a big church and we're even trying to break up the churches into smaller clusters and you can find some disappointment where I wish it was like this, I wish it was that, but man don't stop. Don't stop rejoicing in the fact that right now, you can be alone in your room, even if you're isolated, and be in the presence of almighty God. You and Him in a room together. You alone with the Creator of the universe. We have to rejoice in that always. And not just that, but the joy it brings. And this is what we've been talking about for years now, that we don't need the giant crowds or anything else. If I just have a couple of people in the room with me and we take of communion, there's a way in which Christ is present there like in no other setting."

The third topic is to not lose your peace. "And, finally, I just want to say don't lose your peace. We are people who are supposed to be fearless, absolutely fearless. The number one command, the most oft repeated command in Scripture, is fear not. I think of Christ's words in John 14 when he says something like this: Peace, I leave with you. My peace I give to you. I do not give to you like the world gives. Do not let your hearts be troubled and do not be afraid."

"In my Father's house are many rooms, and if it were not so I would have told you. I'm going there to prepare a place for you. And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come back and take you to be with me, so you can be with me where I am. What do I have to fear? If I die, for me to live is Christ and to die is gain. When have you ever feared gain? Or getting into the presence of God? I hope you have this peace with you."

He then encourages people more about expelling their fear. "We have the peace that He says that if you seek first the kingdom of God, all these things shall be added to you. So, I walk around going, man, what could go wrong with me today? I know Him. I don't fear death. He's going to take care of me while I'm on this earth. And when it's my time to go, it's my time to go."

"You guys, this is at the core that the resurrection of Christ took away all of that fear. This is a time where we can thank God and say: God, it is so good that I am with you and nothing, nothing can separate me from your love. I'm loved by you and nothing can separate this. No disease, no death, no life, angels, principalities-nothing can separate me from the love of God. Thank you, God, thank you that I can be alone with you. Thank you that you dwell in me, that I'm not alone, and that I don't have to worry about the future."

Chan also adds that people should not isolate themselves, mentioning that people will just go easy on themselves during this time they can get use to being isolated. He then continues "But we know that is not the Church that Christ wanted. He wanted such intimacy between His children, just like every parent does. You want your kids to have this bond this inseparable bond. And, so, we can do all things through Christ. That means even during this time."

Finally, Chan asserts that this time was what people have been working for and thus should not waste this opportunity. He states "We Are Church, you know this is what we've been working for, for seven years. And it's kind of crazy that for seven years we've been preaching: Come on guys, we've got to get ready. There's going to come a day when we can't get in these big gatherings. And there's going to come a day when you're going to need to know how to by yourself, no matter where you are thriving in your walk with God."

"And that you can gather with other believers and you can build each other up. Take advantage of this time. Don't miss this opportunity. This is one of our greatest opportunities for reaching out to our lost world and showing them that we haven't lost our love, joy, or peace even at this moment. The enemy can't take that away from us."

"We love the Lord Jesus Christ, and His Church is alive and well."
Barbara Dudley

Dudley is senior policy advisor to the Working Families Party and a senior fellow at the Center for Public Service at Portland State University. She served as executive director of Greenpeace USA from 1992 to 1997.

I cant and would not argue that this coronavirus pandemic is upon us because of climate change, although certainly there will be many other diseases that will cross borders and decimate many plant and animal species, including humans, with greater ease because of climate change. And in addition to new diseases, there will be droughts and floods and extreme storms, hurricanes, typhoons, blizzards, and wildfires. We know all this. And yet we do nothing to avert that disaster nor flatten that curve. Why? Because the climate change disaster curve is just starting to rise, and when it peaks, the people now in power will be gone. It will be their children and grandchildren who will suffer, and they will suffer a far worse fate than what the coronavirus has in store for the current population.

There has been a lot of scolding of some young people for their casual disregard of the dangers of the coronavirus. We ask them to worry about their vulnerable elders. But those elders too often disregard the very real dangers of climate change. We party as though the warning of carbon emissions leading to a global climate crisis is a hoax, even if we know better. We can take extraordinary measures to flatten the curve of infection by the coronavirus but cant even begin to meet the milquetoast targets of the Paris Climate Accords.

Share your opinion Submit your essay of 500-700 words on a highly topical issue or a theme of particular relevance to the Pacific Northwest, Oregon and the Portland area to commentary@oregonian.com. Please include your email and phone number for verification.

We seem perfectly capable of coming up with sudden infusions of trillions of dollars into the economy to rescue airlines, cruise lines, retailers and restaurants with instant cash bailouts. We build hospitals overnight. We even bail out workers displaced by the COVID-19 outbreak  unheard of in the United States since the Great Depression  but cant wrap our heads around the need for a Just Transition for workers in the fossil fuel industry, with income support and job retraining as we transition to a clean-energy economy. We can use emergency measures to instantly transform auto factories into manufacturing ventilators and protective gear. But we havent the imagination to transform those same factories into making wind turbines and solar panels. We can mandate closures of entire cities, but we cant mandate energy efficiency in those cities buildings. We can order everybody to stay in their homes, but we cant ask them to insulate their attics.

Maybe there will be lessons from this experience. Maybe our young people will demand that we look at ourselves and what we are capable of when we take a threat seriously. And maybe they will demand that we take equally drastic measures to address the most serious threat facing this planet and their generation  climate change. We can hope.
: Amid the nation-wide



lockdown, the first flight from Kerala to the UK took off on Wednesday evening with 268 tourists who had been stranded in south India since the coronavirus pandemic put a check on public transportation.

The British Airways plane left the state capital at 7.30 pm with London as the destination and Kochi as a stopover to pick up 158 passengers. As many as 110 tourists boarded from here,apress release said on Wednesday night.

The passengers includedseven who had tested positive for COVID-19 and were treated successfully in Kochi. They were part of a group of 19 Britons.

This is the third aircraft to repatriate stranded passengers in Kerala from Europe since the lockdown. An Air India aircraft with 232 passengers left for Germany on March 31. Four days later, the second aircraft flew 112 people to France.

Deputy High Commissioner, British Deputy High Commission, Bengaluru, Jeremy Pilmore-Bedford was at the Kochi airport supervising the repatriation operations.

Out of the 268tourists, there are a few from Austria, Canada, Portugal, Ireland, Lithuania among others.

The spread of COVID-19 had led Kerala to impose a state-wide shutdown on March 23. The next day, the Union government announced a similar exigency across the country for three weeks and subsequently till May 3.

Keralas Tourism Minister Kadakampally Surendran expressed happiness over facilitating the air travel. Upholding our spirit of treating guests like gods, we bore the expenses of those who had tested positive for the coronavirus.

Secretary, Kerala Tourism, Rani George said the tourism department had facilitated accommodation and food for those stranded in the state owing to the shutdown. Right from setting up a coronavirus-time helpdesk for foreign tourists a month ago, our hospitality has been exemplary as usual, she added.

Director, Kerala Tourism, P Bala Kiran noted that British nationals continue to top the list of foreign tourists in the state by totalling one-fourth of the visitors from abroad.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
New Delhi, April 15 : To mitigate the economic fallout of Covid-19, full service carrier Vistara on Wednesday instituted a compulsory "no-pay" leave for a section of its employees.

These leaves without pay range from one to three days, depending on employment grades. Accordingly, senior-most employees will have to take three days of compulsory no-pay leave.

"The extension of lockdown and suspension of our services till May 3 further impacts our cash flow significantly. As part of a number of steps we are taking to conserve cash and save costs, we had to make the difficult decision of further reducing our staff costs with the objective of preserving jobs," a Vistara spokesperson was quoted as saying in a statement.

"For the period between April 15 and April 30, about 30 per cent of Vistara's workforce will take compulsory no-pay leave of one to three days, depending on their employment grades (three days for senior-most employees). This decision does not impact the remainder 70 per cent of Vistara staff," the statement added.
Republicans Call For Plan

Testing Crucial

How It Would Work

(TNS)  Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz threw down a gauntlet Monday on when the state can restart the economy he shut down last month to gird against the spreading coronavirus pandemic:5,000 tests per day.And a robust ability to trace infections and isolate those carrying the virus.Its an ambitious standard  one he likened to the quest to put a human on the moon  and its not clear how soon it can be achieved.He refused to commit to a date, leaving those hoping for some sense of how to schedule their hopes without an answer.Those who keep asking Whats the plan to reopen? The plan to reopen is very clear: test, trace, isolate, open back up, Walz said during an afternoon conference call with reporters.For perspective on the size of the task: Testing 5,000 people a day would amount to 25,000 in a work week. To date, Minnesota has tested fewer than 38,000 people since the start of the pandemic.We need to get there within the next few weeks, Walz said of the goal. He said he has issued it as a challenge to his staff and collaborators at the University of Minnesota, as well as those in the private sector. Im speaking here as the governor who needs to make sure that this happens. Our folks know that this is gonna be a hard lift.Walz, a Democrat, laid down the herculean hope as he faced increasing intonations of impatience, especially from some Republicans, as the state enters its third week of a stay-at-home order set to continue until May 4.He said that date wasnt out of the question, but presumably, if the tests arent in hand, major restrictions would continue.Shortly before Walzs call Monday, the states top Republican, Senate Majority Leader Paul Gazelka, R-Nisswa, issued a statement that read, in part: Our hope is Governor Walz will soon lay out his plan to reopen Minnesotas schools, churches, businesses, and activities after May 4, 2020. He clearly understands the healthcare emergency caused by the COVID-19 virus. We need to be assured he also understands the economic emergency caused by his response.House Minority Leader Kurt Daudt, R-Crown, released a statement around the same time, calling for transparency in how Walz determines what the standards will be for businesses, schools and other sectors to reopen  and which will be given priority.With the state shut down as a result of the Governors executive order, Minnesotans deserve greater transparency and input into the process of eventually reopening our economy and getting folks back to work, Daudt said. It should not be up to a few commissioners in Saint Paul to be the sole decision-makers for thousands of businesses and millions of employees. We need a transparent process that includes the public, business leaders, health experts, and legislators  together, we can create a Minnesota plan to reopen our economy, and do it in a way that protects peoples health and well-being.Walz and Steve Grove, state commissioner of the the Department of Employment and Economic Development, said theyve generally been consulting with business leaders, including regular calls with statewide chambers of commerce, to discuss the situation. There doesnt appear to be a formal panel or commission at this point.They said officials with the Minnesota Department of Health are developing new guidelines, with guidance from the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, on what specific standards businesses might have to meet.However, neither Grove nor Walz indicated when those guidelines might be ready. In response to a reporters question suggesting businesses might want to know when the guidelines would be available, to prepare ahead of time, Grove suggested they would be available when the testing-and-tracing needs are met.Walz has medical experts  and real-world COVID-19 experience  on his side in focusing on a strategy of testing, tracing and isolation.Most well-known is the example of South Korea, the only Democracy that appears to have succeeded in suppressing and containing the nations outbreak before it ran amok, as it has done to varying degrees in practically every other free nation thus far.South Korea flattened its curve in early March through an exhaustive testing protocol that continues to this day, albeit much more toned down, as the number of cases continues to rise but at a snails pace compared with other nations. As of Wednesday, the nation of 51 million had tested nearly 519,000 people. Total deaths: 273. South Korea has enacted enhanced social distancing, but businesses have been allowed to remain open.Iceland recently announced plans to test every one of its 364,000 people  a number that puts it on par with the population of St. Paul  and has begun literally picking names randomly out of a national phone book. Over the weekend, it reached the 10 percent-of-its-people-tested threshold, the first of any nation to achieve that. Iceland has also flattened its curve without hospitals becoming overwhelmed.One eye-popper that Iceland has discovered: At any given moment, perhaps half of its population who has the virus doesnt know it because they have no symptoms at the time  further evidence to support the idea that opening without ample testing will only lead to new outbreaks that will ultimately shut down the economy on their own.Walz said look no farther than Sioux Falls, S.D., where a massive pork plant was closed Sunday after nearly 300 workers tested positive. The Smithfield Farms plant accounts for nearly 5 percent of Americas pork-producing capacity.The lack of widely available testing has dogged the United States response from Day 1, as experts now believe the virus blew past any chance of suppression and was widely circulating in the community before even modest testing was available  and any real chance of containment was even possible.Numerous public health experts, as well as economists, have said that increased testing is a key part of any efforts to re-open the American economy.However, it remains unclear what the national plan is to scale testing to those levels, and Walz and some other governors have frequently expressed frustration over that.This is a broken system across the country, Walz said. Weve tested less than 1 percent of the American population. Here in Minnesota, I can no longer wait. Employing the phrase Minnesota moonshot, Walz has said he is engaging scientists and labs at the University of Minnesota and the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, as well as other private companies, in an effort to create a testing capacity that is essentially independent of any federal limitations.Under Walzs vision, two types of testing would be employed.One would test for antibodies to the virus. This determines if someone has already been infected and, presumably, has immunity, such people would be able to resume their normal lives.Efforts to make such blood tests widely available are already underway. The Mayo Clinic can already run 20,000 tests a day and is hoping to increase that capacity to 100,000. However, its unclear what portion of those tests will be available for Minnesotans.At this point, Minnesota might have about 165,000 people who have already been exposed to the virus, according to a Department of Health estimate of 100 cases for each lab-confirmed case. But with more than 5.6 million residents, the overwhelming majority isnt likely to have antibodies.While Walz suggested that young and healthy people might be allowed to go back to work if they so desire and practice social distancing, there would be a bounty of fresh hosts for the virus.That would put a burden on the other type of test  the one that looks for signs of the virus to identify those who are infected.Under this strategy, once a positive case is found, that person is isolated, either at home or elsewhere, while a team traces their movements and contacts. That sort of contact tracing is generally labor intensive, and Walz didnt elaborate on whether Minnesota currently has the manpower in place for that. Currently, contact tracing appears to be focused on outbreaks among health care workers and hospitals and long-term care centers. Some have suggested portions of the task could be automated via smartphone apps.But the primary hurdle is that the tests for the virus have been limited in quantity by delays in supplies of materials and chemical ingredients needed to perform them. Walz suggested it might be possible to manufacture in Minnesota a type of swab used to collect samples for testing.Walz was asked whether it was realistic to think that all of this could be achieved by May 4.Were gonna find out. I have not guaranteed that, he said. Some of it is constrained by supply chain constraints, but Im asking our people to think differently.  I dont know if its realistic but it certainly needs to be a goal that we need to shoot for.This article has been edited to better describe recent data from Iceland about people who have the coronavirus but dont know it. Another section was edited to correct how many coronavirus tests would be completed in a work week at a rate of 5,000 per day.
Just yesterday, images of what appear to be the 2020 MG6 have made their way onto the internet. If the images are legitimate, MG appears to have given their fastback an Audi-like makeover.

It looks like it won't only be the 2020 ZS that will be making its way in the Philippines soon. After giving their very popular B-segment crossover a facelift inside and out last August 2019, the 4-door MG6 is also set to get an update.

The MG6 fastback gets a new pair of sleek LED headlights, a bolder front grill with a large MG logo, a sportier front bumper, a slightly tweaked rear bumper, new alloy wheels, and bigger exhaust pipe finishers.

Aside from giving it a nip and tuck, MG also introduced a plethora of optional exterior upgrades. These include accented door trim pieces, shark-fin antenna, a sunroof, as well as a rear wing. For those that prefer the fastback with a more sinister look, the MG6's front grill, trunk lid trim, and window decor can be specified in black.

Under the hood, the 2020 MG6 will be powered by a new 1.5-liter turbocharged, direct-injection engine dubbed the 330 TDI. While it may be similar in size as the outgoing version, the new motor will supposedly produce 178 PS; 12 PS more than the current 1.5-liter turbo. With the new engine, MG claims that the MG6 will have a claimed top speed of 210 km/h, and average fuel consumption of around 16 km/l.

There is no official word as to when the updated MG6 will be released. But given that the leaked photos appear to show the production car in full, it may not be long before the automaker officially unveils it to the public. As to when it will be arriving in the Philippines, we'll venture a guess that it will be either late in 2020, or in the first semester of 2021.

SOURCE: CarnewsChina
BOISE, Idaho  The Idaho attorney general has agreed to investigate the mother of two missing children and her new husband in connection with the death of his first wife. The mystery of the childrens disappearance and the deaths of three people close to the couple, including their spouses, has sparked investigations in several states and worldwide headlines.

Tammy Daybells death on Oct. 19, 2019, was described in her obituary as being from natural causes, and her husband Chad Daybell reportedly told authorities that she died in her sleep. But law enforcement became suspicious when he married Lori Vallow about two weeks later, and in December authorities had Daybells body exhumed. Autopsy and toxicology tests have not been released.

Lori Vallow came under police scrutiny in November after authorities learned that her two children, 17-year-old Tylee Ryan and 7-year-old Joshua JJ Vallow, had not been seen since September. Rexburg, Idaho, police say both Lori and Chad Daybell lied about the childrens whereabouts, and Lori Daybell is currently being held in jail on charges that she deserted or abandoned the kids, asked a friend to lie for her and obstructed the officers investigating the case. Shes pleaded not guilty.

Investigators say the tangled case includes two other mysterious deaths. Lori Daybells estranged late husband, Charles Vallow, was shot and killed by her brother, Alex Cox, in Phoenix last July. Cox, who said the shooting was in self-defense, then died of unknown causes several months later.

Police in Rexburg have said they are gravely worried about the kids safety. Theyve asked people who visited Yellowstone National Park on Sept. 8, 2019, to scour their photos for any sign of the kids, Lori Daybell or Alex Cox. Thats the last known time that Tylee Ryan was seen, during a trip the family took to the park. JJ Vallow was last seen a few weeks later. Authorities have also indicated that they will search the remote wilderness in and around Yellowstone once weather conditions allow.

Idaho Attorney General Lawrence Wasden agreed last week to take over the investigation of Tammy Daybells death after a request from a local prosecutor, according to documents The Associated Press obtained through a public record request.

Fremont County prosecutor Marcia Murdoch asked Wasdens office this month to consider the possibility of filing conspiracy, attempted murder and murder charges against Lori and Chad Daybell in Tammy Daybells death. The attorney general had initially turned down the request citing a lack of resources, according to Murdoch.

Scott Graf, the attorney generals spokesman, said that when Murdoch first made the request it wasnt clear if the state office would have the capacity to take over the case, based on current and anticipated caseloads. The attorney generals office asked Murdoch to see if other county-level prosecutors were available to take over the case first.

None of the other county prosecutors she approached were able to take the case, Murdoch told the state office when she made the request again on April 7.

I am again requesting that the AGs office take over this case because my office does not have the resources or the experience to handle the case, Murdoch wrote in the letter obtained by The Associated Press. We would be willing to assist in any way to help the AGs office, as needed at your request and at your discretion.

Its not yet clear if the attorney generals decision to take over the case will have an impact on Daybells request to have her $1 million bond reduced on the child abandonment charges. A judge in eastern Idaho is set to consider that request on Friday.

Neither Lori Daybells attorney Mark Means, nor Chad Daybells attorney Sean Bartholick immediately responded to requests for comment.
Tempers are getting short. Supplies of ground beef even shorter. People are looking into each other's shopping carts. Is that guy really going to use all four cans of chickpeas? That's a lot of emergency hummus.

But maybe a little supermarket paranoia is warranted after all.

A month ago, as the economy began to shut down and Americans started hoarding canned goods and other foods out of fear of shortages, industry giants offered assurance there was plenty of food and no reason for worry.

Yet availability remains spotty around the country, some shelves stocked and others empty, with Americans having particular difficulty locating all-purpose flour, yeast and beef.

And even as the industry rushes to get distribution problems smoothed out, other red flags are emerging. JBS, the world's top meat company, shuttered its beef facility in Greeley, Colorado, this week because of a coronavirus outbreak. In South Dakota, more than 300 workers at a Smithfield Foods pork processing plant tested positive for the virus, shutting the plant down.

The closure of the latter plant, which accounts for 5% of the nation's pork production, is "pushing our country perilously close to the edge in terms of our meat supply," said Kenneth Sullivan, president and chief executive of Smithfield.

Experts agree there is no aggregate shortage of food or other retail items offered at the supermarket. But many factors are causing product deficits in particular regions and in particular stores.

The biggest is that while about half of American expenditures for food used to be at restaurants and other such establishments, now almost all meals are being made in the home kitchen, so a distribution system that was built to supply restaurants with bulk items is struggling to adapt to far smaller packaging for home use.

In addition, while supermarkets and food companies have based their business model in the past on offering a wide variety (grocery stores often have 40,000 items), now most consumers focus on a smaller sliver of products, so supply chains are overwhelmed.

Consumer goods become hot-ticket items with little warning: This week's unexpected supermarket product is hair dye, as people go without a visit to the salon.

And finally, both in grocery stores and in the food distribution system, significant new efforts are being undertaken to protect workers - but they introduce delays and complications in getting food to its final destination.

Fred Boehler, president and CEO of Americold, which provides a temperature-controlled supply chain to manufacturers, said U.S. grocery stores, food-service distribution centers, regional distribution centers and manufacturing facilities traditionally each hold up to about 30 days of product. Together, that's four months of food in the system.

"But at the flip of a switch, the food-service sector slowed down and people wiped the grocery stores clean," he said. "It's sitting in everyone's home fridges and freezers, and we have to backfill the grocery stores."

In one of the two Safeway stores in Butte, Montana, cashiers work behind sneeze guards and daily customer traffic has slowed from 2,000 a day two weeks ago to 1,400 last week.

As with many stores around the country, this Safeway reduced hours to allow for deep cleaning and restocking, instituted special hours for seniors and people with compromised immune systems, and will soon install one-way paths through the store to maximize space between customers.

Nonetheless, essentials are flying off the shelves: toilet paper, hand soap and sanitizer, pasta, rice and beans.

For the most part, people have been friendly and understanding, but more customers than usual have been short-tempered.

"I haven't been yelled at as much in nine years as I have in the last two weeks," said Ellen Ott, store administrator and bookkeeper at that Butte Safeway.

At a Kroger in north Dallas on a recent morning, there was no corn or bananas. And where toilet paper normally would have been were two pallets in the middle of the aisle. Tacked to the empty shelves were signs that read, "1 each per customer."

On Wednesday evening, at the Hy-Vee store on the east side of Iowa City, there were no potatoes. Forty people shopped with a one-person-per-cart rule and one-way arrows on the floor. The place felt empty and eerie. Two weeks ago, a store employee was diagnosed with the novel coronavirus. Before that, a DJ who had done a music gig in the store's dining area had tested positive.

Small behavior changes are having huge effects, and the industry is having trouble keeping up, said Karen Smilowitz, a professor of industrial engineering at Northwestern University.

Trying to minimize the risks associated with frequent shopping, people are buying greater quantities less frequently, relying on shelf-stable foods that may have a longer supply chain.

And then manufacturers, pressed to produce more, are decreasing the number of discrete items to maximize efficiency. So there will be empty grocery store spots as a company's 20 flavors of yogurt winnow down to eight.

"In companies there is always conflict between operations and marketing," Smilowitz said. "Marketing wants more variety; operations says anytime you have to change out something in your machinery, that costs time."

The fundamental problem is that so much of America's food supply was heading toward restaurants in massive packages before covid-19 hit. Now, a 50-pound bag of flour or a 48-ounce tub of sour cream doesn't have many takers at Kroger or Safeway.

Nutrition labeling also frequently doesn't comply with Agriculture Department and Food and Drug Administration guidelines for consumer sales, said Geoff Freeman, president and CEO of the Consumer Brands Association, a trade organization for the food industry. A company that sold hamburger buns to major fast food outlets could try to pivot to retail, but that entails changing packaging on the fly, a relaxation of labeling requirements and new distribution contracts.

The shifts being spurred now could be long-lasting. Freeman predicts consumers will see "a greater volume of fewer products. And in theory we'll see fewer new products on the market."

Ananth Iyer, a department head at the Krannert School of Management at Purdue University, said Americans are in a cycle of hoarding. Not only are people buying more food at the grocery store to eat at home, they're seeing reports of price gouging or import restrictions or stricter stay-at-home orders, which drives consumers to stock up even more, which leads to photos of empty shelves, which sends the cycle into a faster spin.

Grocery stores are having a hard time pivoting. The business is extremely competitive, and stores gain customer loyalty by offering wide variety. But 20% of the individual products account for 80% of the sales. As manufacturers cut back on different items, the grocery store is still stocked with things people don't necessarily need.

At a Whole Foods in Manhattan, shoppers on a recent evening spaced themselves out to socially distance alongside potted hydrangeas for $18 and bagged soil for $5. The deli counter was quiet and the pizza oven cold.

Beef and produce options were limited, but the chicken section was fully stocked, and there were plenty of cheeses and prepared foods - more than enough available to put together proper meals for weeks.

Still, there was no ground beef.

Jayson Lusk, head of the agricultural economics department at Purdue, said because agriculture is seasonal, commodity grains and meats were produced months and months ago, but that the real vulnerability lies in the people.

"We have plenty of hogs, chickens and cows. But they all have to go through these packing plants that are big enough that if one closes down because workers get sick, it's not a trivial amount."

And imports, he said, could be a problem. The United States imports about half of its fruit, such as grapes and bananas, and about 20% of its vegetables at this time of year are from Mexico.

"Trade of goods isn't being hindered at the moment, although global trade has fallen in the last month pretty significantly," he said. "There are some pressure points, but by and large it's a very positive story."

This pivot from restaurant to grocery store purchases doesn't come without risks, said Matt Wadiak, Blue Apron co-founder and CEO of Cooks Venture, which sells pasture-raised, slow-growth, heirloom chickens.

The USDA and FDA have deregulated labeling and packaging for 60 days to allow food to be redistributed. While there are usually four or five USDA food recalls each month, there hasn't been a single one since the beginning of February, worrying food safety experts about lack of oversight. Still, Wadiak said, the pandemic may change for the better the paradigm of how people shop.

"I'm seeing folks interacting with real foods in a way that I haven't seen in my lifetime, buying whole chickens, pork butts, things they might have previously thought of as daunting. They have the time now; they are learning and YouTubing."

Outside the Dallas Kroger, customer Eric True loaded half a dozen plastic bags full of groceries into his car. The retired 72-year-old described his anxiety level as low.

"This is the first time I've been to the store in four weeks," he said. "I pay attention to the rules and follow the Boy Scout motto, 'Be prepared.' I have friends who are in a state of denial who don't understand the consequences."

There are segments of the food system that might endure long-term stress because of supply-chain shifts. Sean Wittenberg, the president of Safe Catch, a company that specializes in canned and pouch tuna, sardines and salmon, is feeling strain that worries him.

"Canned tuna is up 200%; Safe Catch is up 400%," he said. "People are concerned about their future, and canned tuna is a cost-effective protein."

Canned tuna is the third-most-popular seafood item in the United States. If there is a disaster somewhere in the world, he said, there are four major hubs where most of the shelf-stable fish is produced.

"Because of this pandemic, the demand has exploded worldwide," he said. "The stress on the production system is everywhere. We can't hire more people to build up our lines. We have certain limitations, and all of the infrastructure is under stress, from the fisherman to the clerk putting cans on the shelf."

- - -

The Washington Post's Shayna Jacobs in New York City; Shirley Wang in Iowa City; Kathleen McLaughlin in Butte, Montana; and Lisa Kanarek in Dallas contributed to this report.
S&P 500 INDEX GIVES BACK GAINS AS EARNINGS SOUND THE ALARM, OIL PRICE PLUNGES BELOW $20 DESPITE SUPPLY CUTS, US DOLLAR RISES ON SAFE-HAVEN FLOWS

S&P 500 Index spikes lower on the back of alarming earnings reports from big banks that hint at the potential avalanche of defaults looming due to the coronavirus recession

Crude oil trades beneath the $20.00 price level and at fresh 18-year lows after dropping another 30% from its month-to-date high despite historic OPEC+ supply cuts

US Dollar leaps higher as the broader DXY Index bounces off its 50-day moving average and the IMF rekindles risk aversion with its gloomy GDP growth forecast

Market volatility is back on the rise alongside fading coronavirus optimism. As investor risk appetite begins to recede, possibly fueled by the latest IMF report and its ominous World Economic Outlook for 2020, the S&P 500 Index looks primed to resume its slide.

A somber start to S&P 500 earnings season threatens to pressure stocks lower as well. Traders initially looked past downtrodden bank earnings from JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Wells Fargo and Citigroup, but details from their quarterly results nonetheless struck a pessimistic tone for the broader market.

S&P 500 INDEX PRICE PRESSURED BY SOMBER BANK EARNINGS, EXPECTED LOAN DEFAULTS AS CORONAVIRUS RECESSION WEIGHS

Chart created by @RichDvorakFX with TradingView

The four largest US banks by market cap have materially underperformed the S&P 500 Index since the sharp selloff from its record high printed mid-February. That said, sharp declines in top bank stocks could cause the S&P 500 to gravitate lower and erase its recent rebound amid an earnings season like none other.

Not only were earnings from JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Wells Fargo and Citigroup disappointing on the surface, their financial statements all shared an alarming anecdote: skyrocketing loan loss provisions set aside to cover debt defaults. Specifically, they earmarked a staggering $24 billion in cash to cushion the amount of nonperforming loans expected to spike due to the likely unavoidable coronavirus recession.

CRUDE OIL PRICE CRASHES TO 18-YEAR LOW DESPITE HISTORIC OPEC+ SUPPLY CUTS

Chart created by @RichDvorakFX with TradingView

Also, another plunge crude oil prices, even despite historic supply cuts from Saudi Arabia, Russia and other OPEC+ members, likely leaves the recent S&P 500 rally in jeopardy. It is possible that more pain lies ahead for the economy, as well as the S&P 500 Index, considering the break-even price for US shale oil producers is approximately $50.00 per barrel  far below where spot crude oil trades currently.

After sinking about 70% from its January high, crude oil now fluctuates around the $20.00 handle and 18-year lows. Yet, the commodity still might face further downside. This is seeing that crude oil demand woes will likely trump OPEC+ supply cuts as recession risk intensifies and global GDP growth forecasts continue to nosedive. In turn, this has potential to aggravate already-stressed financial market conditions and deal another major blow to investor risk appetite.

US DOLLAR DOMINANCE MAY LINGER AS SAFE-HAVEN ASSETS LIKELY REMAIN IN DEMAND

Chart created by @RichDvorakFX with TradingView

However, as the mood on Wall Street sours while crude oil drops and the S&P 500 earnings season disappoints, the US Dollar might snap back to recent highs. On that note, the parabolic climb notched by the US Dollar against its Mexican Peso peer, owing to a 30% surge in USD/MXN price action since February 17, stands out in particular. Measured by the broader DXY Index, the US Dollar has gained 3% year-to-date on balance, but the benchmark is currently perched 3% below its March 23 peak.

Nevertheless, with the S&P 500 Index more than 25% off its lows, it appears increasingly likely that overexuberant investors may soon face a harsh reality check as equity earnings, in addition to key leading economic indicators, reveal the dire impact COVID-19 has had on businesses and consumers. Correspondingly, if another wave of risk aversion prompts traders to liquidate stocks and hoard cash, the US Dollar might get a boost from its posturing as one of the top safe-haven currencies once again.

Keep Reading: US Dollar Eyes Coronavirus Impact on S&P 500 Earnings Season

-- Written by Rich Dvorak, Analyst for DailyFX.com

Connect with @RichDvorakFX on Twitter for real-time market insight
European police have foiled an attempt to cheat German health authorities out of millions of euros by selling them non-existent face masks during the coronavirus pandemic, Europol said Tuesday. Police action in two countries came as Germany moved towards the progressive lifting of restrictions against COVID-19 which has claimed around 3,000 lives in the country. Experts say however that any easing would be accompanied by an obligation to wear a face mask while using public transport, to prevent a resurgence of infections. Europol said two companies were contracted by the German government in mid-March to buy face masks valued at 15 million euros ($16.4 million) as global stocks ran low. After a sale failed to materialise off a website supposedly based in Spain, the two companies were referred to a 'trusted" dealer in Ireland. "The Irish middleman promised to put them in touch with a different supplier, this time in the Netherlands," who could supply the masks, Europol said. An initial deal was made in which the companies paid 1.5 million euros for the delivery of 1.5 million masks. "The buyers initiated a bank transfer to Ireland and prepared for delivery, which involved 52 lorries and a police escort to transport the masks from a warehouse in the Netherlands to the final destination in Germany," Europol said. However, just before the delivery was due, the criminals said they needed another 800,000 euros "in order to secure the merchandise". The buyers sent the wire transfer but the masks never arrived. "It turns out the Dutch company existed, but their website had been cloned. There was no official record of the order," Europol said. Police and law enforcement agencies including Europol and Interpol quickly scrambled in a race to recover the money. The Irish police's Economic Crimes Bureau on a tip-off from Interpol froze 1.5 million euros in an account in n Irish bank and identified an Irish company involved. The Dutch Fiscal Information and Investigation Service (FIOD)tracked down the 800,000 euros -- of which 500,000 had already been paid into a British bank account, destined for an account in Nigeria. Thanks to an alert raised by investigators, the British bank was able to recall the full amount. Those funds have now been returned to the Netherlands and frozen by authorities. Dutch police arrested two suspects in the ongoing probe, Europol said.
A Korean man in his 60s who recently returned from the U.S. has been arrested for breaking self-quarantine by visiting a sauna and a restaurant.

This is the first arrest of a self-quarantine breaker.

A district court in Seoul issued an arrest warrant for the 68-year-old on Tuesday for violating quarantine rules. He had flown in from the U.S. last Friday and was placed in self-quarantine in temporary accommodation because he has no permanent residence here.

But he sneaked out around 2 p.m. Saturday to visit a sauna in Songpa, Seoul, where he was caught by police who had been tipped off. He was let off with a warning and returned to the facility.
LOS ANGELES, April 15, 2020 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- OG DNA Genetics (DNA or the Company), a globally recognized leading cannabis brand, today announced their first official U.S. launch of premium DNA Genetics branded cannabis products with partner, Copperstate Farms LLC (Copperstate)  a vertically integrated cannabis company in Arizona. DNA-branded products are now available at Copperstates Sol Flower dispensaries in Sun City and Tempe, Arizona.



Across the country many states have deemed cannabis operations to be an essential service during the COVID-19 crisis, and DNA Genetics and Copperstate Farms are grateful to be able to provide quality cannabis to patients in Arizona during these difficult times. Arizona medical cannabis patients will have access to a wide variety of highly sought-after DNA Genetics cannabis strains, including Holy Grail, Skywalker Kush, Recon Kush, and Citradol. Additional strains like Lemon OG, Kosher Dawg, 4 Prophets, 24K Gold, and Tangie will be available in the upcoming weeks.

Todays announcement builds on the strategic partnership agreement DNA and Copperstate signed last May allowing Copperstate access to DNAs proprietary library of award-winning genetics for use at their cultivation facility in Snowflake, Arizona. DNA and Copperstates agreement provides Copperstate with the exclusive license to cultivate, manufacture, sell and distribute DNA Genetics branded premium cannabis flower and products in the Arizona market.

We have been greatly anticipating the U.S. launch of DNA-branded products with our partners, Copperstate Farms, said Aaron Yarkoni, Co-Founder and Chief Research Officer at DNA Genetics. We believe that the combination of our award-winning genetics and Copperstates extensive facility and commitment to quality will bring our unique strains to life in Arizona.

Copperstate Farms is one of the largest permitted greenhouse cultivation facilities in North America. They are dedicated to cultivating the highest quality cannabis and are an esteemed industry leader in horticulture. The company is devoted to providing patients with a diverse selection of premium products by aligning with brands committed to quality and innovation.

We are excited to debut these world-class and award-winning strains from DNA Genetics. This has been a collaborative effort over twelve months time that involved starting with 12,000 seeds before narrowing this down to the exact genetics that deliver on the DNA brand as well as can function well in our greenhouse environment, said Copperstate Farms CEO Pankaj Talwar.

For more than 15 years, genetics developed by DNA have won more than 200 awards in all categories at the most prestigious cannabis events around the world, making DNA the global standard in breeding and growing truly best-in-class strains. These awards include the High Times Top 10 Strain of the Year, which was inducted into The High Times seedbank hall of fame in 2009, the High Times 100 list of the most influential people in the industry and the High Times Trailer Blazers Award, for contributions made towards uniting the fields of entrepreneurship, politics and medicine.

About OG DNA Genetics Inc.

DNA was rooted in Los Angeles and founded in Amsterdam in 2004 by Don Morris and Aaron Yarkoni. Over the last decade, the Company has built and curated a seasoned genetic library and developed proven standard operating procedures for genetic selection, breeding, and cultivation. In a world that is increasingly opening up to commercial cannabis activity, DNA is positioned to become the first, truly geographically-diversified company with multiple partnerships with top-licensed producers and brands that have built their companies and global presence utilizing the Powered by DNA model.

For more information, please visit www.dnagenetics.com

About Copperstate Farms, LLC

Established in 2016, Copperstate Farms Management, LLC, is a vertically integrated cannabis company headquartered in Phoenix, Arizona. The company is a licensed producer and distributor of medical cannabis in the U.S. and operates a 1.7-million-square-foot facility and 40-acre greenhouse grow in Snowflake, Arizona. Copperstate Farms is the parent company of multiple product suites and dispensary retail concept Sol Flower, which includes a public-facing cafe and wellness classroom. The multi-use dispensary brand has locations in Tempe and Sun City, Arizona.

Copperstate Farms is dedicated to bringing growth to the local and state economy through the hiring of local laborers, material suppliers, and contractors.

For more information, visit CopperstateFarms.com.

For further information please contact:

Rezwan Khan, Vice President Global Corporate Development, DNA Genetics

rezwan@dnagenetics.com
NEW HAVEN  Clifford Beers Clinic is offering a warmline service for people who find themselves stressed, part of the fallout from the pandemic, and needing to hear a friendly voice or get some specific information on services.

That announcement was made Tuesday by Mayor Justin Elicker at his usual virtual press conference on COVID-19, where he reported the number of residents testing positive for the disease has now climbed to 730, with 18 deaths.

Also, new figures put out by the city, based on reports from the testing centers, continue to show a higher percentage of African Americans testing positive for the respiratory ailment than Hispanics and whites.

Also consistent however is the high percentage of missing information on the race of the individuals. In the citys graphic, for 54 percent of those testing positive in New Haven, their race was not identified.

For the rest who tested positive and were identified by race, 148, or 21 percent, are African Americans; 95, or 13 percent, were Hispanic; 79, or 11 percent, are white.

Of the persons with hospitalizations related to COVID-19, 68 individuals, or 43 percent, are African American; 44 residents, or 28 percent, are Hispanic; 27 people, or 17 percent, are white. For 21 residents, or 13 percent, their race was not noted.

Only for the deaths reported to the city was each of the individuals identified by race. Seven of them, or 44 percent, were African Americans; 6 or 38 percent, were white; 3, or 19 percent, were Hispanic.

Local Public Health Director Maritza Bond said incomplete data is a statewide issue and the city has sent reminders to the testing groups to fill out the forms completely.

Funeral directors, who serve the African American community told the New Haven Independent that they have had services for 14 New Haven African Americans who died from complications with COVID-19, twice the number of deaths reported to the citys Public Health Department.

Obviously, if there is a discrepancy there that is a real concern for us ... we want to ensure that we have an accurate picture of what is going on, so that we can respond accordingly, Elicker said. We will be looking into that.

Alice Forrester, who is the CEO of Clifford Beers, a mental health facility that is particularly focused on children and families, said its newest program is not a COVID-19 hotline. She said it is really for anyone, who may be living alone and needs someone to talk to.

The full name of it is Reach Out New Haven, a warmline for our community.

She said warmlines are up and running in New York City and in San Francisco. Forrester said they are considering starting one here specifically for first responders.

The program is being staffed by the agencys trained peer specialists. The hours are 9 a.m. to 7 p.m. Monday through Thursday and 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. on Friday. It is just a place where people can talk, but we also have access to resources, both some gift cards in terms of food support, but also around how to get other resources in the community, Forrester said.

The number is 203-287-2460.

Forrester said they will be referring people to mental health services and are working with people who can make food service delivery. It is one of the biggest things popping up for us, she said.

The CEO said they are working with the State Department of Mental Health and Addiction Services and the Connecticut Mental Health Center.

Shayla Moye, director of client services, said Beers has 12 trained support staff who are experienced in mental health guidance and working directly with families to triage what their needs are. They are very resourceful people, they are creative, they are dedicated, Moye said.

We just want to be compassionate, be an ear for the community. We are here to listen, Moye said.

Bond reported that the city continues to be in touch with several nursing homes in New Haven that have patients with COVID-19.

Of the two reporting last week, the Mary Wade Home had 10 residents with the disease; at the Grimes Center, part of Yale New Haven Health, she said there was an increase, but did not give a number. Last week it was 49 out of 70 patients. Bond said there is a third home the city is monitoring, but she did immediately name it.

The health director said the homes got a delivery of personal protective equipment from the state on Tuesday to help keep down the spread of the virus.

The public health director blamed the missing demographic information on the quick evolution of the disease and human error. She said agencies requesting these forms are just moving too fast.

Bond said she has now reminded them twice to completely fill out the forms so there will correct information. She said the test date is accurate. She said it will be a big lift to get the agencies to back track as the number of cases grow.

It is our hope that they start correcting these measures as of today, Bond said.
As coronavirus cases continue to rise in the US, President Donald Trump on Tuesday said the govt is close to completing a plan to end the shutdown and reopen the battered economy, with some parts of the country may get ready before May 1. Trump said he would speak and "authorise" all 50 governors to implement plans in their states at an appropriate time, probably on Thursday by video conference, Reuters reported.

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Linkedin (Agence France-Presse) Berlin, Germany  Wed, April 15, 2020 09:06 636 fc6853813033f564188675f8bd1ef01a 2 Art & Culture Berlin,Germany,artist,art-and-culture,arts,coronavirus,COVID-19,pandemic,quarantine Free

Berlin's art galleries are closed, but the art scene is rising to the occasion as around 50 artists join a community exhibition from their balconies.

"While our freedom of mobility is on hold, (balconies) become unique sites of everyday performance," organizers said as they launched the project in the trendy Prenzlauer Berg district of east Berlin.

Balconies are "emergency exits to take a breath of fresh air, catch a moment of sunshine or a smoke", said Ovul Durmusoglu and Joanna Warsza, whose project "Balconies, Life, Art, Pandemic and Proximity" gives artists a 48-hour showcase for their work.

The rules of isolation in the face of the coronavirus pandemic are less strict in Berlin than elsewhere in Germany, allowing people a chance to admire the works while out for a stroll.

One installation presents ribbons of toilet paper cascading down a building's facade, a reference to Germans' rush to stock up on the must-have commodity as soon as the coronavirus pandemic arrived in Europe.

Read also: Berlin artists' colony finds creative answer to shutdown

One artist displayed black and white photographs of people on their balconies in Athens and Cordoba, while another hung a ladder made from rope and sticks.

"With zero budget, no opening, and no crowds, the project proposes an intimate stroll (within current regulations) to search for signs of life, art and points of kinship and connection", the organizers said.

"When some of us are cut off from our plans and our loved ones, we reach out to the balconies of the world, against isolation and individualization, not leaving everything in the hands of the virus and the fear it generates," they added.

The 48 hours end on Monday evening, when the artists will retract their works and return to their usual solitary endeavors.
Senator Elizabeth Warren on Wednesday endorsed former vice-president Joe Biden for the 2020 race for the White House, paving the way for further coalescing of Democratic partys progressives ty around his candidacy. Notably, also, she has been on his shortlist for running mate.

In this moment of crisis, its more important than ever that the next president restores Americans faith in good, effective governmentand Ive seen Joe Biden help our nation rebuild, Warren said in a video message. Thats why Im proud to endorse Joe Biden as president of the United States.

Warrens endorsement was the third in a quick succession of high-profile announcements coming Bidens way this week. Senator Bernie Sanders, another icon of the partys progressives, announced his endorsement Monday, weeks after he became the last of the contenders to drop out of the race.

Former president Barack Obama announced his support for his former deputy on Tuesday, with a message that Biden was what Americans needed one of our darkest time. Obama added an appeal to the country to unite in a great awakening and defeat current day politics characterized by plain meanness.

Now Warren, the firebrand senator from Massachusetts, who excited legions of young supporters in the party, tapping into about the same constituency that also rooted for Sanders, with her meticulous plans on almost every issue facing the country. She had even led the crowded field of contenders briefly.

Biden needs this constituency of progressive Democrats, who support state-led medicare for all, aggressive and comprehensive measures to combat climate change, lower college tuitions higher taxes on the super-rich. Leading members of this wing include New York lawmaker Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Indian American lawmaker Pramila Jayapal. The former vice-president has already begun reaching out to them, and will expect Warren and Sanders to weigh in.

Ive been proud to work with her over the past few weeks to identify and adopt important policy proposals that will strengthen us as a people, Biden said in a statement. He has adopted Warrens bankruptcy plan last month.

Warren is also on the former vice-presidents shortlist for a running mate, as he said December. He has publicly committed himself to picking a woman for the ticket, and others on his list, according to speculation, are Indian American senator Kamala Harris, Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer and former candidate for Georgia governor Stacey Abrams.

Biden has not given any further indications about his thinking. On her endorsement, he he said Tuesday, he is proud to have her in his corner. Not just as we work to defeat Donald Trump in November, but in the years to come, as we push through a bold and progressive policy agenda for the American for the fight ahead.

Warrens failed bid may be remembered for ever for, among other things, her epic take down of the New York billionaire Michael Bloomberg who had invested an millions from his private wealth into ads to blow out the competition and propel him to the top of the race.

The strategy worked for him, but only till he got into the debate stage, where he became fair game for everyone. Warrens attacks on him were most devastating, and he quietly ended his race after only his second debate, and poor showing in the primaries and caucuses.

Warren, however, failed to turn these debate performances into wins in primaries and ended her race.

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A Lynchburg Police Department officer has tested positive for COVID-19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus, the department announced Tuesday.

The police department said in a news release this is the first Lynchburg police officer to test positive for the virus and the officer is in isolation.

In consultation with Virginia Department of Health officials, the police department is reviewing calls for service and interactions to ensure that we take appropriate measures for anyone in the department who had extended contact with the officer.

One additional officer has been quarantined based on that review.

The LPDs utmost priority is the health and safety of our employees and the community. Since the start of this pandemic, the department has had protocols in place to mitigate the spread of the virus. Our officers practice social distancing whenever possible, wear personal protective equipment, and answer some calls over the phone rather than in person when possible. Additionally, all LPD facilities are closed to the public, the police department said.

State COVID-19 cases top 6,000

The Virginia Department of Health reported Tuesday 6,171 people in Virginia have tested positive for COVID-19 and 154 people have died as a result of the virus.

Thats an increase of 424 cases from the 5,747 reported Monday.

The VDH also said that 42,763 have been tested for the virus in Virginia and 978 have been hospitalized.

Locally, there were 77 cases in the Central Virginia Health District on Tuesday, with 33 of those cases in Lynchburg, 16 in Bedford County, 11 in Campbell County, 10 in Amherst County and seven in Appomattox County. Nelson County, located in the Thomas Jefferson Health District, had reported five cases.

On March 19, state health officials said theres a lag in the reporting of statewide numbers on the VDH website. Figures on the website might not include cases or deaths reported by individual localities or local health districts.

Poll: Virginians approve of Northams response to pandemic

About three in four Virginians approve of Gov. Ralph Northams handling of the coronavirus pandemic, according to a new Virginia Commonwealth University poll.

The poll, conducted by the Center for Public Policy at the L. Douglas Wilder School of Government and Public Affairs at VCU, showed that 76% of those surveyed said Northam, a doctor by trade, was handling the public health crisis well.

Northam made Virginia one of the first two states to close schools for the rest of the academic year when he extended his closure order beyond the initial two weeks March 23 and the states stay-at-home order, announced a week later, extends to June, one of the latest such orders in the country.

The survey of 812 Virginians was conducted via phone between March 25 and April 8. It has a margin of error of plus or minus 4.51 percentage points for all adults and 5.68 percentage points for likely voters.

Northam, a Democrat, has support from Republicans (68%), independents (70%) and Democrats (90%), according to the poll. The Richmond regions 78% support figure is in line with the governors statewide favorability.

The same poll found 50% of Virginians strongly or somewhat approve of how President Donald Trump is handling the crisis, while 48% strongly or somewhat disapprove. Much of that support (83%) comes from Republicans, while 79% of Democrats disapprove of Trumps crisis response.

The VCU poll also reported that likely Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden leads Trump by 10 percentage points among likely voters in Virginia.

UVa announces hiring freeze

The University of Virginia has instituted a hiring freeze and wont give pay raises as the school deals with the economic fallout of the coronavirus pandemic.

UVa announced Tuesday it is putting a pause on hiring for open faculty, staff and health system team jobs  unless an exception is approved by UVa executives  and wont give merit increases for fiscal year 2021, which starts July 1.

The Charlottesville school also said it is limiting capital projects  only moving forward with projects that are in design or construction and are fully funded. UVa is cutting or eliminating non- essential expenses and the colleges executive leadership team is taking a 10% salary cut, according to a news release.

As always, but especially now, we must be exceptionally good stewards of our resources so that we can continue to carry out our core mission, and in so doing be of service to the commonwealth and beyond, President Jim Ryan and his leadership team said a message to the UVa community.

They added: At the same time, we must never forget that the people at UVa  our faculty, staff, and students  remain our greatest asset, and will be the key to our ability to weather this crisis and recover with strength.

UVa classes have moved online for the rest of the spring semester, and the school has canceled all events on campus until at least May 15.

Students are receiving prorated refunds to cover part of spring semester room and board costs.
A Queensland doctor will run a pop-up hospital in north-west Tasmania where a COVID-19 outbreak has forced the closure of two hospitals.

The southern state closed two hospitals in Burnie on Monday after more than 40 hospital workers tested positive to COVID-19.

Rob Cardwell treks through bushlands and creeks to deliver aid and supplies to a village in Fiji. Credit:National Critical Care and Trauma Response Centre

About 1200 staff and their families were ordered into quarantine for two weeks and both hospitals will undergo a deep clean.

The Australian Defence Force as well as an Australian Medical Assistance Team have been called in to help run a makeshift hospital.
The Icelandic Forestry Service is giving lessons in hugging trees, literally, and we are here for it.

During New York Governor Andrew Cuomo's daily coronavirus press briefings, he usually offers an empathetic lament about how hard this pandemic is for us emotionally. "There is something to this lack of ability to connect," he said in one briefing. "Don't hug, don't kiss, stay six feet away. We are emotional beings and it is important for us, especially at times of fear, times of stress, to feel connected to someone, to feel comforted by someone."

Well the Icelandic Forestry Service has a solution for that: Hug a tree.

Larissa Kyzer reports in Iceland Review that the service is encouraging people to cuddle up to

a tree while social distancing is keeping loved ones out of arm's reach.

When you hug [a tree], you feel it first in your toes and then up your legs and into your chest and then up into your head, forest ranger or orfinnsson tells the Icelandic National Broadcasting Service (RUV). Its such a wonderful feeling of relaxation and then youre ready for a new day and new challenges.

Donald Iain Smith / Getty Images

Given the name of the site where you are reading this story, we are obviously on board for treehugging. But aside from the novelty of the idea, there's plenty of science to back it up. The Japanese have been practicing and studying "shinrin-yoku" (forest bathing) for years and the evidence is clear: Spending time in nature has numerous benefits for both mind and body.

Back in Iceland, forest rangers in the Hallormsstaur National Forest have been clearing paths to allow visitors to safely amble among the arboreal huggees. (Yes, they do have trees and forests in Iceland.) Just like supermarket checkout lines in the United States and elsewhere, the rangers have marked spaces of six feet distance to help maintain social distancing. And as with everything else in the time of COVID-19, precautions should be heeded.

orfinnsson recommends that not everyone should embrace the first tree they see; potential huggers should venture deeper into the forest. There are plenty of trees...it doesnt have to be big and stout, it can be any size.

And since this is Iceland, of course the rangers have a prescription for treehugging.

Five minutes is really good, if you can give yourself five minutes of your day to hug [a tree], thats definitely enough, he says. You can also do it many times a day  that wouldnt hurt. But once a day will definitely do the trick, even for just a few days.

Its also really nice to close your eyes while youre hugging a tree, he adds. I lean my cheek up against the trunk and feel the warmth and the currents flowing from the tree and into me. You can really feel it.

Its recommended that people get outdoors during this horrible time, says Bergrun Anna orsteinsdottir, an assistant forest ranger at Hallormsstaur. Why not enjoy the forest and hug a tree and get some energy from this place?

So there you go; take it from Iceland and TreeHugger and go hug a tree. And if you need me, I'll be outside with my arms around the Callery pear tree in front of my building.
Introduction: Universities Response To COVID-19

Victor Hugo, a French poet, novelist, and playwright once noted, there is only one thing stronger than all the armies of the world, and that is an idea whose time has come.

Indeed, there is no denying the fact that the outbreak of the novel coronavirus (COVID-19), despite all its ills, is bringing to the limelight the creativity and innovativeness of institutions of higher learning across the world.

Despite their current shutdowns, universities are dispensing of their other core functions of research and community engagement in response to managing and finding a cure for COVID-19.

The John Hopkins University (JHU) in the United States of America makes daily headline news as, arguably, the utmost frontrunner university in calling accurate and up-to-date statistics on the global infection rate of COVID-19. Africa has not been left out and in the week just gone past, universities in Zimbabwe have responded to their governments overture of US$1.3 million to provide personal protection equipment (PPE) for the country. One of them, the Harare Institute of Technology, has already developed a ventilator and indicated its capacity to produce 40 per day.

In Kenya, a group of sixteen students from the faculties of Biomedical Engineering, Electrical, Pharmacy, Medicine, and Nursing of Kenyatta University under the guidance of two supervisors have invented a prototype ventilator, TZBA-VENT, at the Universitys Chandaria Business Innovation and Incubation Centre.

And in Ghana, scientists at the Noguchi Memorial Institute for Medical Research (NMIMR) and the West African Centre for Cell Biology of Infectious Pathogens (WACCBIP) all at the University of Ghana have successfully found the sequenced genomes of SARS-CoV-2, the virus responsible for the COVID-19 disease. This discovery will aid the strengthening of surveillance to track mutations of the virus as well as trace the sources of community infections in people with no known contact with confirmed cases.

The Relevance of Research and Development

While commending the African universities for shining the light of higher education on the continent, we can do more with more resources!!! Research is not cheap, and research that does not lead to innovation is a non-starter. In the global economy, when countries are said to be competitive, it is not actually governments that are. Rather, competitiveness is bolstered by a vibrant productive sector that draws from research and development (R&D).

In our universities, R&D follow as certain trajectory: a) idea generation; b) the actual research carried out); c) discoveries from the research; d) actualisation of the discoveries into innovations, and e) the commercialisation of the innovations.

Innovation thus does not just happen by chance. It has to be nurtured and funded and it is not surprising that renowned universities steeped in R&D traditions benefit tremendously from research grants. Without funding, innovations remain prototypes and this kills the creativity of researchers in many universities.

Comparing Apples and Oranges

I stand the risk of being labelled intellectually dishonest as I try to compare African universities with those of the West. However, it is in my reckoning to draw these parallels to stimulate a discourse to support R&D in Africa.

Universities in the USA spend billions of United States dollars annually on R & D. In fact, annual expenditures by some individual universities are much higher than the gross domestic products (GDPs) of some small economies in Africa. In the 2017 financial year, the R&D expenditure of JHU was US$2.56 billion.

It was US$1.53 billion for the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor; and US$1.40 billion for the University of California, San Francisco. Indeed, the top 10 universities in the USA, including Pennsylvania, Stanford and Harvard all spent over US$1 billion each on R&D in 2017.

The relevance of their research, effective utilisation of the grants and their tenacity have continuously aided them to reach out for more research funding from private foundations and for-profits organisations. The annual expenditures for JHU has been on a year-to-year rise since 2013: from US$2.16 billion (2013); US$2.24 billion (2014); US$2.30 billion (2015); US$2.43 billion (2016) to US$2.56 billion (2017). It will not be surprising that this COVID-19 disease will see JHU raising over US$3billion in 2020 for R&D.

Back in Africa, our countries assembled in Lagos, Nigeria as far back as 1980 to commit to a set of strategies to increase the continents self-sufficiency within a 20-year span (1980  2020). In what became known as the 1980 Lagos Plan of Action, the countries resolved to commit 1% of their GDPs annually to support R&D. This ended as yet another wish list. I must re-echo what is widely known that no country can develop without emphasis on research and development, which provides the stimulus for science and technology growth.

According to the greatest American inventor, Thomas Edison, who incidentally was self-educated we dont know a millionth of one percent about anything. In essence, he meant that the opportunities in research are a huge area for exploitation. But again, research needs sustainable funding.

Available records of GDP contribution to R&D in selected African countries were 0.54% in Algeria (2017); 0.03% in Angola (2016); 0.30% in Chad (2016); 0.10% in Ivory Coast (2015); 0.72% in Egypt (2018); 0.27% in Ethiopia (2017); 0.01% in Madagascar (2017); 0.34% in Mauritius (2018); 0.58% in Senegal; 0.82% in South Africa (2016) and 0.60% in Tunisia (2018) [1] . If Nigeria, the largest economy in Africa, were committing 1% of its GDP to R&D, that would have been US$3.76 billion in 2017 [2] .

Likewise, if South Africa, the second-largest economy were also contributing 1% of its 2017 GDP to R&D, it would have put about US$3.5 billion into the kitty. However, due to conflicting national priorities, the 1% GDP contribution have generally not been met. It must be noted that Africa is not a standalone case as many other countries in the world do not commit up to 1% of their GDP to R&D.

Call for Sustainable R & D Investment

It is good to reiterate our faith in universities and other research institutions as they have shown their resilience over time and will respond to the emerging needs of society and industry. The new coronavirus outbreak which is decimating life and economy with wanton abandon is a test case for researchers. The Ebola virus disease is still a canker Africa wants to wish away. The continent is also home to the highest HIV infection rate in the world. We stand at the crossroads fighting several battles simultaneously.

While African universities will endeavour to raise research grants from various avenues, many of such initiatives in Africa are from the effort of individuals and not their institutions as a whole. These efforts need to be documented, synergised, supplemented and scaled up for sustainability by the State and industry. Short-term responses will generate short-term solutions.

We need to value the importance of research for development and any inconsequential investments in this will continue to plague Africa as an impoverished continent. Innovative funding models such as Ghana Education Trust Fund (GETFUND) and the Tertiary Education Trust Fund (TETFUND) in Ghana and Nigeria, respectively should be thoroughly explored as principal R&D funding sources that can be improved and replicated in other countries.

[1] https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/gb.xpd.rsdv.gd.zs
By Sam Richards

Bay City News Foundation

MARTINEZ (BCN)

Between the early release of some prisoners, home monitoring for others and greatly reduced bookings into the county jails in recent weeks, 89 percent of all Contra Costa jail inmates are now alone in their cells, which should curb the spread of the coronavirus within the jails.

"And I expect that number to increase as we go forward," Sheriff David Livingston told the Contra Costa County Board of Supervisors on Tuesday. No inmates in Contra Costa County's two jails, in Martinez and Richmond, as of Tuesday have tested positive for the virus, he said.

One deputy who earlier had tested positive has since recovered, Livingston said.

Starting last month, officials in Contra Costa - as in many counties in California - have released low-risk prisoners deemed safe enough, to cut down on crowding at the jails to curb the spread of COVID-19. Many have had six months or less remaining on their sentences. Prisoners convicted of, or awaiting trial for, violent crimes, sex offenses or domestic abuse are not eligible for early release.

Livingston said that, as of Monday, there were 766 jail inmates in Contra Costa County, down from 1,117 in early March as the coronavirus was spreading in the Bay Area. That is a drop of about one-third. During that time, Livingston said, new bookings into the jails have dropped by 84 percent.

One factor, he said, is that there has been less reported crime since the state's shelter-in-place order was issued March 16. For example, reports of residential burglaries in Contra Costa County are down 20 percent since the shelter-in-place order went into effect, Livingston said. Calls about domestic disturbances have "ticked up a little bit" since March 16, he said, but not substantially.

Other measures to help prevent the spread of COVID-19 in Contra Costa County's jails, Livingston said, include a 14-day quarantine period for all new prisoners, temperatures of all arriving staff each day being taken, all prisoners being issued face masks and suspending visits of prisoners by families and friends. To help offset the cancellation of visitors, he said, prisoners are being allowed more telephone time.

In addition, the prisoners are taking the COVID-19 situation seriously, Livingston said. A fight broke out recently among jail prisoners, he said, when some inmates felt others were being too lax about wearing their face masks.

As for the general public, the sheriff's office has gotten about a dozen reports since the pandemic began of inappropriate gatherings or other situations where proper social distancing, or sheltering in place, was not being observed.

"Generally, people are more than willing to comply once we show them the (county) health officer's order," Livingston told the supervisors.

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.
Randeep Hooda All Set To Star Opposite Chris Hemsworth In the Netflix Film Titled Extraction
Two British friends backpacking around Australia have recalled their horror in being inundated with lewd messages in response to online ads looking for work.

Caitlin Fraser, 26, and Mollie Smee, 25, were quickly running out of funds as their desperate hunt to find work continues after recently losing their jobs due to the coronavirus crisis.

After their last jobs at the Adelaide Fringe Festival ended, the pair got on the last flight to North Queensland before the state's borders closed and have spent the last three weeks in Airlie Beach, where their job hunt has been unsuccessful so far.

Willing to take on any job in their desperate quest for cash, Ms Fraser from Glasgow, Scotland and Ms Smee from Peterborough, England placed online ads on Gumtree and Facebook and have been left horrified at some of the offers.

Caitlin Fraser, 26, and Mollie Smee (pictured), 25, are quickly running out of funds as their desperate hunt to find work continues after losing their jobs due to the coronavirus crisis

After their last jobs at the Adelaide Fringe Festival ended, the pair got on the last flight to North Queensland before the state's borders closed and have spent the last three weeks in Airlie Beach, where their job hunt has been unsuccessful so far. Pictured: Caitlin Fraser

One man emailed offering work for $42 hour on a nudist farm.

'I currently have 10 people working here that all live a nudist lifestyle,' the email obtained by Daily Mail Australia states.

Another offer in Sydney replied saying the job entailed 'basic cleaning and a relaxing massage'.

'I will give you both whatever you want to,' another man from Sydney wrote. 'Have you been spoilt before?'

One man emailed (pictured) offering work for $42 hour on a nudist farm while another offer in Sydney replied saying the job entailed 'basic cleaning and a relaxing massage'

A weeding job quickly turned into a barbecue hosting gig with a request to wear a short skirt.

'We were in shock and didn't know how to respond,' Ms Fraser told Daily Mail Australia.

'I thought it was a prank call at first. We're 26-year-old strong, streetwise women who have never been faced with anything like this.'

Ms Smee added: 'Some of the work they've wanted us to do is scary.'

The pair have since taken down their Gumtree ad.

They shared their story to make other young female backpackers aware that online sexual harrassment is not acceptable.

Another man who offered cleaning work in Sydney vowed to give them 'whatever they want'

Ms Smee says she may have accepted the inappropriate offers if she was younger and backpacking around Australia on her own.

'My message to young backpackers out there is to do your research,' she said.

Their experience of sexual harrassment has changed their outlook on Australia.

'I don't feel welcome or safe here anymore, which makes me want to go home,' Ms Smee said.

On Wednesday morning, the woman had applied for 34 jobs within two hours.

Willing to take on any job in their desperate quest for cash, Caitlin (right) from Glasgow, Scotland and Mollie (left) from Peterborough, England placed online ads on Gumtree and Facebook and have been left horrified at some of the offers

It's first time in their 18 months backpacking around Australia they've experiencing difficulty in finding work.

'We've been to Centrelink, gone to our own government and neither of them can help. We can't even access our super or get back home,' Ms Fraser told Daily Mail Australia

'Not even our parents can help as they're also struggling during this pandemic.

'We're not asking for a handout. We want to help keep the economy going during this difficult time.'
Thousands of undocumented Ethiopian workers are being abruptly deported from Saudi Arabia in cargo planes amid efforts to contain the spread of the deadly coronavirus pandemic.

The Saudi government claimed that the Ethiopians were vulnerable to spreading the coronavirus. Therefore, some were deported with symptoms and many without.

This week, Ethiopias health minister, Lia Tadesse confirmed the mass deportation, undermining the nations effort to reduce the rising number of COVID-19 cases in Ethiopia.

There are now 82 positive cases of the virus and more than half of these are recent travelers to gulf countries.

More than 2,000 migrants arrived in the capital Addis Ababa in the first half of April with more expected in the coming weeks, according to the BBC.

The number of Ethiopians illegally living and working in Saudi Arabia is unknown, although most estimates suggest over half a million.

In a similar crackdown between 2013 and 2014, hundreds of thousands of Ethiopians were deported, and human rights organisations have since highlighted Saudi Arabias brutality with its deportation process.

The returnees of this month  like any other incoming travellers  are expected to spend 14 days in mandatory quarantine.

The UN has warned that large-scale migratory movements could exacerbate the spread of the virus.
After several warnings to the World Health Organization (WHO), United States President Donald Trump on Wednesday, halted US funding to the UN body after alleging mismanaging the coronavirus crisis. He announced this decision during his daily White House briefing. Trump has blamed WHO's "very much sided" approach to China on coronavirus crisis, asserting that many people are unhappy with the global health agency and feel that "it's been very unfair".

Trump said: "Today I am instructing my administration to halt the funding of WHO while the review is conducted is assessing WHO's role in severely mismanaging and covering up the spread of the Coronavirus. In an obvious reference to China, he said "Everybody knows what's going on there." American taxpayer provides about 400 million to 500 million dollars per year to WHO in contrast China contributes only 40 million dollars or less. As the highest contributor, it is our duty to insist on full accountability."

President @realDonaldTrump is halting funding of the World Health Organization while a review is conducted to assess WHO's role in mismanaging the Coronavirus outbreak. pic.twitter.com/jTrEf4WWj0  The White House (@WhiteHouse) April 14, 2020

Trump had threatened to cut US funding to WHO. We're going to put a hold on money spent to the WHO and added, We pay for a majority or the biggest portion of their money, he had said. In response, WHO director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus had urged the United States to join hands with China in combating the disease rather than indulging in a blame game saying, "If you don't want more body bags, then you refrain from politicizing it."

Meanwhile, on April 11, Trump had teased an announcement about the WHO saying "As you know, we give them (WHO) approximately $500 million a year and we're going to be talking about that subject next week. We'll have a lot to say about it."

READ | 'China will find out': Donald Trump implies Coronavirus consequences; won't be precise

Coronavirus crisis in the US

Leading the number of worldwide cases of novel coronavirus COVID-19 infection, the United States has become the new epicentre of the pandemic surpassing China, Italy, and Iran. With over 600,000 cases to date, the Trump administration has been facing momentous criticism for failing to contain the outbreak. Trump has also not announced a nationwide shutdown to deal with coronavirus.

READ | WHO chief 'hopes' US would continue funding amid COVID-19 pandemic

Meanwhile, New York -- one of the worst-hit spots in the US, has seen a total of 10,834 deaths and over 202,208 COVID-19 positive cases. However, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo on Tuesday during his daily briefing asserted that the worst phase of the coronavirus pandemic is over. According to him, the numbers are saying that they can now control the spread of the virus. First detected in China's Wuhan, at present, there are around 1,986,554 confirmed cases of COVID-19 infection across the globe and the disease has led to the death of around 125,421 people. In a ray of hope, around 466,635 people are also reported to have recovered.

READ | COVID-19 death toll in US surpasses 24,000 mark, highest in the world

Trump hints at consequences for China

Earlier on Tuesday, Trump in his press address hits out at a reporter when asked about consequences for China. A visibly irked Trump asked the reporter as to how she knows there "won't be consequences for China." Trump went on to say that China will find out the consequences as and when it happens.

READ | Coronavirus LIVE Updates
UFC champion Israel Adesanya has donated 10,000 face masks to frontline health workers in the fight against coronavirus.

Adesanya is providing 10,000 three-ply face masks and 1,000 eye protection face shields with his own money to healthcare workers at Whanganui Hospital in New Zealand.

His mother Tai, is a nurse working in the emergency department at Whanganui Hospital.

The MMA fighter is also donating personal protective equipment to staff in Auckland, and Lagos in Nigeria where he was born.

Israel Adesanya (pictured) is providing 10,000 three-ply face masks and 1,000 eye protection face shields with his own money to healthcare workers at Whanganui Hospital

His mother Tai, is currently a nurse in the emergency department at Whanganui Hospital (pictured)

'I can't do it for the whole world, but I can help the communities I know, the places that I have been a part of,' he told the Whanganui Chronicle.

The equipment is expected to arrive within two weeks.

Whanganui District Health Board (DHB) chief executive Russell Simpson thanked the 30-year-old for his generosity and for helping staff keep safe during the pandemic.

'The DHB is extremely grateful that Israel has DHB staff and the healthcare community in his thoughts as we fight against Covid-19,' he said.

'On behalf of all of the staff at Whanganui DHB, we thank him for his generous donation.'

Director General of Health Ashley Bloomfield said there is a good amount of protective equipment for healthcare workers.

He however did not want to give any assurances due to there being 100,000 healthcare workers in New Zealand.

New Zealand has reported 1,078 positive cases of coronavirus with 728 of them recovered. The nation has also reported a total of nine deaths.

Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern will announce on Monday if the country will remain under stage four restrictions or if they will ease.
BAKU, Azerbaijan, April 15

Trend:

On the initiative of the Georgian side, President of Georgia Salome Zourabichvili and President of the Republic of Azerbaijan Ilham Aliyev have had a conversation through a video conference on April 15.

President Salome Zourabichvili:

- Mr. President, I would like to talk to you not in such difficult but better times. I do hope that everything is good with you, your family and your team. I look forward to continuing our cooperation in this difficult situation as soon as possible.

President Ilham Aliyev:

- Thank you, Mrs. President. I am very glad to see you. Of course, this kind of communication is rather unusual. However, this is a peculiarity of the time. It is good that we have new technology enabling us to see and talk to each other. Thank you for your cooperation. I remember your very successful official visit to our country.

The Georgian President thanked for the solidarity shown to Georgia yesterday. President Ilham Aliyev noted the importance of solidarity the two countries and peoples demonstrated amid the coronavirus pandemic, as they always did standing by each other.

The heads of state exchanged views on measures taken to combat the coronavirus pandemic and the work to be done in this regard.

During the conversation, the sides described Azerbaijan and Georgia as important participants of the international transit corridor, and emphasized the significance of continuing trade relations and the work in transit and transport area.

The heads of state also discussed prospects for future cooperation in the fields of economy, trade and transport.
Amaravati, April 15 : A communication sent from the Andhra Pradesh Director General of Police's officer to police force highlighted the possibility of catching coronavirus infection through currency notes but the office later clarified there is no evidence of it yet.

"It's just one of the possibilities of catching infection which our staff in office have incorporated in one of the many routine messages which are sent on a daily basis to keep alerting units on the ground. Just to be aware of the possibilities and to keep them alert all the while," said a statement from Director General of Police Gautham Sawang "As on date. There is no proof or any established evidence of contamination by currency notes of any kind whatsoever in the state," it added.

The clarification came after an internal circular to police units surfaced. It mentioned that health officials grew suspicious about the role of currency in spread of coronavirus while analysing three positive cases without any travel history or contact with such returnees.

Of the three, one is a teacher from East Godavari district, another is a woman from Krishna district and the other a RMP doctor from Guntur district.

Mentioning these examples, the DGP office advised the police heads of all cities and districts in the state to encourage digital transactions for safety.
Guatemalas health minister says on one flight, 75 percent of the deportees had tested positive for coronavirus.

Guatemalas health minister said on Tuesday that deportees from the United States were driving up the countrys COVID-19 caseload, adding that on one flight some 75 percent of the deportees tested positive for the coronavirus.

Health Minister Hugo Monroys comments were dramatically out of line with what the government had previously said about infected deportees. Later, presidential spokesman Carlos Sandoval told reporters that Monroy was referring to a March flight on which between 50 percent and 75 percent [of the passengers] during all their time in isolation and quarantine have come back positive.

Before Tuesday, Guatemala had only reported three positive infections among deportees flown back by the US.

Joaquin Samayoa, spokesman for the foreign affairs ministry, confirmed a fourth positive case for a migrant who arrived on a flight Monday. At least three of the migrants who arrived on Monday were taken directly to a hospital for COVID-19 testing.

President Alejandro Giammattei addressed the country later, but made no mention of the deportees. It remained unclear why before Tuesday the government had only reported three deportees who tested positive and how many more would have been among the high percentage who tested positive aboard that March flight. Giammattei said Tuesday there were a total of 175 people who had tested positive in Guatemala and five who had died.

There are really flights where the deportees arrive  citizens who come with fever, and they get on the planes that way, Monroy said. We automatically evaluate them here and test them and many of them have come back positive.

Guatemalan migrants walking toward a bus after being deported from the US in Guatemala City, Guatemala [File: Fabricio Alonso/Reuters]

He added that the US had practically become the Wuhan of the region, referring to the province in China where the pandemic began.

Guatemala again began receiving deportation flights from the US on Monday after a one-week pause prompted by three deportees testing positive for COVID-19.

The Guatemalan government had asked the US to not send more than 25 deportees per flight, to give them health exams before departure and to certify that they were not infected.

However, the flights resumed Monday with 76 migrants on board the first plane and 106 on the second. Guatemalas foreign ministry did not immediately clarify why the US had not complied with its requirements, but the flights came on the same day that the US Department of State announced that aid would continue to Guatemala and the two other Northern Triangle countries, El Salvador and Honduras.

One of Mondays flights also included 16 unaccompanied minors, according to the Guatemalan Immigration Institute.

Since January, the US has deported nearly 12,000 Guatemalans, including more than 1,200 children.

Citing the epidemic, the US has started swiftly deporting unaccompanied minors rather than holding them in protective settings as specified by law.

Separately on Monday, US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said in a statement that he had informed Congress that the US government would continue assistance for Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras in order to continue to lower irregular migration and accomplish other policy objectives.

Guatemalan migrants walking toward a bus after being deported from the US in Guatemala City, Guatemala [Fabricio Alonso/Reuters]

Pompeo said that since undocumented migration from those three countries peaked in May 2019, encounters with migrants from those countries had fallen by 76 percent. The US government has effectively ended any possibility of seeking asylum at the southern border with emergency restrictions applied in the face of the coronavirus epidemic.

Before the epidemic, the US had also started sending Hondurans and Salvadorans to Guatemala and similarly had agreements in place to begin doing so in Honduras and El Salvador.

Deportations from the US have continued despite the outbreak. The US holds about 34,000 people in immigration detention, down from about 37,000 last month.

US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officials say 77 detainees have tested positive for the coronavirus.

Acting Deputy Homeland Security Director Ken Cuccinelli told reporters Tuesday that ICE has released nearly 700 people from immigration detention around the country because their age or health conditions made them vulnerable to the virus. He also said authorities were taking steps to ensure that people who may have been exposed in custody are kept separate from other detainees.

ICE is certainly committed to ensuring that comprehensive medical care is provided for all of their detainees from the moment they arrive in ICE custody through the entirety of their stay, Cuccinelli said.

The administration on Friday issued a memo authorising the use of visa sanctions to punish any nation that denies or unreasonably delays taking its citizens as they are deported from the US amid tightened border enforcement imposed last month as a result of the COVID-19 outbreak. Officials have declined to identify any countries that may have prompted the announcement.

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 pre-existing health problems, it can cause more severe illness, including pneumonia and death.
LONDON, April 15, 2020 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- ThinkOn Inc. , an industry leader in wholesaling secure cloud infrastructure and data management services underpinned by the powerful VMware and Veeam technology stacks has now achieved a new milestone in its efforts to drive global expansion. ThinkOn has announced a new cloud operating environment in the United Kingdom that is supported by Datanet.co.uk, a leading Data Centre facility based just out of London, in Fleet. This new data centre joins ThinkOns other 20 cloud regions across Canada, the US and Caribbean.



This expansion will provide access to the companys range of backup solution offerings like ThinkOn RansomGuard powered by Veeam Cloud Connect and Secure Cloud Backup for Office 365 , disaster recovery solutions with Veeam Cloud Replication. ThinkOn has also deployed the technology resources required to building a secure and sophisticated VMware Powered Public/Private Cloud and intelligent object storage powered by Hitachi Vantara. Additional services to this market will be rolled out within the coming months.

With this new market in ThinkOns service delivery roadmap, the company is aiming to grow its Channel Partner base in the UK, while opening new growth avenues for existing partners and subscribers.

ThinkOns expansion into the UK is an impactful decision in ThinkOns history and a strategic step towards the organizations growth. We are committed to deliver unmatched service delivery and experience to our partners in the UK as in other regions. This new site will help us address cloud adoption challenges in the European landscape while meeting UKs data security and compliance standards said Craig McLellan, CEO and Founder of ThinkOn Inc.

Data Protection Driven by Customer Focus

ThinkOn will continue to provide 24/7 support to partners and subscribers with dedicated workforce. This facility meets all certification requirements of ISO 27001, SOC 2 Type 2, as well as stringent privacy regulations in the UK. Any existing workload on the North American cloud will remain sovereign to the location as requested by the partners.

About ThinkOn Inc.

ThinkOn is an exclusive wholesale provider of cloud infrastructure and data management services with over 150 partners and over 1,100 end subscribers in the commercial and public sector. ThinkOns cloud is engineered for high availability, reliability and scalability supported by simple and easy to understand suite of cloud services. Headquartered in Toronto, Canada, the company supports its channel across 20+ DCs in North America, Caribbean and now the UK to deliver un-paralleled data management and information asset protection solutions.
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The premium segment of the UKs Main Market offers investors the benefit of a gold plated package of shareholder rights, corporate governance and corporate disclosure above mandated EU-wide minimum standards that apply to all companies traded on regulated markets. In times of crisis these additional regulatory standards can hinder the efforts of a premium-listed company to self-help effectively with the required speed.

While there has been no forbearance from a listed companys key obligation to announce inside information to the market as soon as possible under the EUs Market Abuse Regulation (MAR), UK regulators and industry bodies have moved quickly to address the impact on listed companies of the coronavirus (Covid-19) pandemic and the UK governments social distancing and stay-at-home measures. This is in stark contrast to the approach taken in the financial crisis of 2008 to 2010.

We look at the unprecedented measures taken, and key guidance issued, over the three-week period in the run-up to the Easter weekend, to provide comfort to, and alleviate the regulatory burden on, the UKs 480 or so premium-listed commercial companies.

Corporate reporting

The pandemic hit the UK in the middle of the annual corporate reporting season, with a large number of premium-listed companies releasing preliminary results announcements, publishing their annual report and accounts, and convening their annual general meetings (AGMs). It is therefore not surprising that regulators and industry bodies first focused on measures to help companies meet their reporting obligations.

Finally, consistent with the preservation of cash resources, a number of companies have withdrawn AGM resolutions for the approval of final dividends.

Moratorium on preliminary statements of results

Under the Listing Rules, with the consent of its auditors, a premium-listed company can publish a preliminary statement of its results for the year, with the formal annual report and accounts to follow. On March 21, one of the first steps taken by the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) was to write to all listed companies that had indicated imminent plans to publish preliminary statements requesting they observe a moratorium on publication for at least a couple of weeks. The FCA noted that the unprecedented events meant that the basis on which companies were reporting was changing rapidly and it was important that due consideration was given to preparing appropriate disclosures. The FCA was of the view that observing timetables set before the crisis would not give companies time to do this.

Extended period to publish annual report and accounts

On March 26, as part of a joint statement with the Financial Reporting Council (FRC) and the Prudential Regulatory Authority (PRA), the FCA published a statement of policy extending the deadline for the publication of a listed companys annual report and accounts from four to six months from the end of its financial year. The FCA noted that this temporary policy would be kept under review and encouraged all companies to make appropriate use of the additional time. The FCA also urged market participants not to draw undue adverse inferences where a company makes use of the extra time available. On March 27, the European Securities and Markets Authority (Esma) announced its support for national competent authorities, including the FCA, demonstrating forbearance to the reporting

deadlines set by the EUs Transparency Directive, which has direct effect in the UK within the provisions of the Disclosure Guidance and Transparency Rules.

Focus on disclosure of material risks and uncertainty

As part of the joint statement with the FCA and PRA, the FRC provided guidance on how companies should approach the preparation of their financial statements, which supplemented its previously published ordinary course guidance on the forthcoming reporting season and initial guidance on the developing coronavirus pandemic. In terms of general advice, the FRC suggested companies:

develop and implement mitigating actions and processes to ensure that they continue to operate an effective control environment, by addressing any existing key reporting and other controls which may not prove effective in the current circumstances;

consider how to secure a reliable and relevant information flow, including from significant subsidiary, joint venture and associate group entities;

pay attention to capital maintenance, ensuring that sufficient reserves are available when a dividend is made, not just proposed; and that there are sufficient resources to continue to meet the companys needs; and

focus on those areas of reporting of most interest to investors and provide clarity on the use of key forward-looking judgements. In relation to the fourth of these suggestions, the FRC also provided specific additional guidance relating to the basis of judgements and matters to consider when confirming the preparation of the financial statements on a going concern basis, disclosure of significant judgements applied to the financial statements and forward looking information, and appropriate reporting of post-balance sheet events.



On March 16 2020,the FRC offered initial guidance to auditorson how they should seek to discharge theirobligations. The FRC noted the practicaldifficulties in preparing accounts and carryingout audits at this time but underlined itsconcern to ensure that the quality of audits isnot undermined. Accordingly, the FRCencouraged auditors to look at developingalternative audit procedures to gathersufficient and appropriate evidence, notingthat auditors will need to consider the impactof the pandemic on their assessment of risk,how sufficient and appropriate evidence isgathered and the work of componentauditors is reviewed, their assessment of goingconcern and prospects of a company, and theadequacy of management disclosure on the companys prospects. The FRC also noted that auditors will need to manage companies expectations and that audit committees in particular will need to understand that auditors will require sufficient time and support to carry out their work, including reassessing work done where circumstances change before the audit is finalised, and some companies may have to revisit their reporting timetable. As part of the joint statement with the FCA and the PRA on March 26, the FRC updated its guidance with a non-exhaustive list of factors that auditors should consider when carrying out audit engagements (including communicating with audit committees, access to audit evidence, scope limitations to audit opinions, going concern assessments, and setting materiality levels) and suggestions as to how such factors might be addressed. Further guidance on evidence gathering was then subsequently issued on April 9. Adapting the approach to AGMs On March 17, The Chartered Governance Institute published guidance for listed companies on how to adapt their AGMs in light of the pandemic. The guidance,supported by the various industry bodies and reviewed by the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, explores a number of possible options including: adapting the basis on which the AGM is held; for example, by encouraging proxy voting, live streaming, and, if permitted under the companys articles of association,conducting a hybrid AGM consisting of a physical and virtual meeting; and

adjourning or, if permitted under the companys articles of association, postponing an AGM for which notice has been issued, or delaying the convening of the AGM, if notice has not yet been issued, recognising that the latest date to hold an AGM is six months after the financial year end. On March 27, in response to the U governments stay-at-home measures, the guidance was updated to explain how a compliant meeting could be held with only quorum in attendance. While some companies have postponed their AGMs in the last couple of weeks, broadly most companies have proceeded with their AGMs but with the chair and company secretary (or a second director) constituting the quorum, other shareholders have been prevented from attending in person and have been encouraged to vote by proxy, and only essential business has been conducted. Similar arrangements appear to have been put in place for those companies with meetings scheduled to be held through to the middle of May. Finally, consistent with the preservation of cash resources, a number of companies have withdrawn AGM resolutions for the approval of final dividends. Capital raising and corporate transactions As the extent of the impact of the pandemic and the UK governments measures required to combat the same have become clearer, the focus of industry bodies and regulators alike has shifted to assisting issuers in accessing equity financing more easily, to meet both their short and medium-term funding requirements.

Acceptance of non-pre-emptive cash placings of up to 20% Shareholders in UK companies benefit from pre-emptive rights to subscribe for new shares issued for cash. However, to facilitate issuing shares on a nonprenonpre- emptive basis, listed companies typically seek authority from their shareholders at each AGM to disapply such rights (typically, in compliance with the Pre-Emption Groups 2015 Statement of Principles, five percent of issued capital, or 10% if the share issue is in connection with an acquisition or specified capital investment). Following implementation of the new Prospectus Regulation in summer 2017, which increased the threshold for the exemption from the obligation to publish a prospectus for an issue of shares from 10% of the number of shares admitted to trading to 20%, the Pre-Emption Group confirmed that it did not intend to amend its guidance. However, on April 1, the Pre-Emption Group changed its position, announcing that until September 30 2020, investors should consider supporting non-pre-emptive issuances of up to 20% of a companys issued capital, where an issuer: fully explains the particular circumstances surrounding the capital raise;

consults with a representative sample of its major shareholders; and

allocates the new shares with the involvement of company management on a basis that allows existing shareholders to subscribe for shares in proportion to their existing holdings. The effect of the guidance is that it endorses a listed company, if the above conditions are met, using a cashbox placing to issue new shares of up to 20% of the companys existing issued capital without obtaining any additional shareholder authorities and publishing a prospectus. A cashbox placing involves an accelerated non-pre-emptive offering of shares to institutional investors. The structure is intended to allow UK-incorporated issuers to make use of the provisions of the 2006 Companies Act that allow the issue of shares on a non-pre-emptive basis for non-cash consideration  instead of paying cash directly to the issuer for the new shares, the underwriter uses the placing proceeds from investors to subscribe for preference shares in an SPV (typically a new Jersey-incorporated subsidiary of the issuer), which are then transferred to the issuer in consideration of the issue of new shares in the issuer to the investors. Since the announcement by the Pre-Emption Group, which was supported by the FCA in its statement of policy published on April 8, premium-listed companies including Hays, WHSmith and the Restaurant Group have raised equity capital using the cashbox structure. SSP also used the same structure, pre-empting the Pre-Emption Group announcement by one week. Encouraged use of simplified prospectuses for secondary offers of 20% ormore The FCAs statement of policy released on April 8 also encouraged issuers looking to raise equity capital resulting in an increase in their issued capital of 20% or more to consider using the simplified prospectus regime permitted under the EUs Prospectus Regulation. Where an issuer has been admitted to listing on an EU-regulated market for at least 18 months, the new regime allows it to prepare a shorter prospectus without an operating and financial review or the corporate governance disclosure that would ordinarily be required in a full prospectus. In theory, the shorter document should be quicker for an issuer and its advisers to prepare and for the FCA to review, while not disadvantaging investors who otherwise have access to such information through the issuers annual report and accounts and other public disclosure and filings. The FCA noted that the regime may not be suitable for offerings that target investors outside the UK or the EU, where lengthier customary market disclosure will still be required. Flexibility in approach to working capital statements The FCAs statement of policy released on April 8 set out a modified approach to reviewing working capital statements in prospectuses and circulars. The accompanying technical guidance from the FCA states that additional disclosure in a working capital statement may include key coronavirus modelling assumptions in the reasonable worst-case scenario (i.e., how long the issuer expects business disruption or the speed of the recovery) and details of the main sensitivities that have been applied (i.e., the impact on its revenue). This is a move away from Esmas Recommendations on Prospectuses, which state that it is not normally acceptable to disclose assumptions underpinning a working capital statement. The FCA justifies its position on the basis that there is significant uncertainty as to the size and duration of the current disruption, which makes the construction of a reasonable worst-case scenario uniquely challenging. Further, notwithstanding this flexibility, working capital statements must otherwise comply with Esmas recommendations, and include a statement to that effect. The FCA also reminded issuers that disclosure elsewhere in the document must not be inconsistent with the working capital statement, and noted that any assumptions underpinning a working capital statement will need to be monitored in case they change, resulting in an obligation for the issuer to publish a supplementary prospectus or circular. Dispensation from holding a general meeting to approve a significant or related party transaction The final measure included in the FCAs April 8 statement of policy is the ability for a listed company to apply for a dispensation from the requirement to hold a general meeting to approve a Class 1 transaction under Listing Rule 10 or a related party transaction under Listing Rule 11. In order to grant a dispensation, the FCA will have to be satisfied that: the issuer has a sufficient number of written undertakings from those shareholders eligible to vote on the matter under the Listing Rules that they approve the transaction and would vote in favour of the resolution, to meet the required threshold of shareholder support; and

the issuer has updated the market that it has obtained such support and will not proceed with the general meeting. All other provisions of Listing Rules 10 and 11 continue to apply, including the need for a shareholder circular to be prepared and approved by the FCA. The written undertakings may be sought before or after the circular has been published and, if there is a material change to the transaction following shareholder approval, an issuer will have to circle back with shareholders to rerun the process. What happens next? UK regulators and industry bodies have acted quickly and decisively to help premium-listed commercial companies cope with the impact of the coronavirus pandemic, both regarding meeting their reporting obligations and restructuring their businesses. It remains to be seen whether these measures will suffice or if further temporary modifications will be required. While both regulators and investors are clearly sympathetic to the issues faced by listed companies, one point remains clear: perhaps more than ever, companies need to be transparent and timely in their public disclosure (including complying with MAR) to enable investors to assess the risks and uncertainties that companies now need to address. By Davis Polk & Wardwell partner Will Pearce and counsel Jamie Corner in London

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The world of Formula 1 has lost an "incredible man", according to Kevin Magnussen.

The Haas driver is referring to F1 legend Sir Stirling Moss, who died on Easter Sunday at the age of 90, following a long illness.

"He was an incredible man in every way," Magnussen told the Danish newspaper BT.

In 2016, the 27-year-old met Moss at his home in London. The meeting was arranged by former McLaren communications boss Matt Bishop, who is a big admirer of both drivers.

"I knew that Matt knew Sir Stirling, so I asked if he could get me an autograph," Magnussen said.

"But Matt said 'Let's visit him'. So we were invited to lunch with Sir Stirling and Lady Susie at their house in Mayfair. It was overwhelming to meet him. He was such a legend."

After the meeting, Moss described Magnussen as being "refreshingly different to most other young drivers in Formula 1. It seems that Kevin really understands how important the history of the sport is".

Magnussen continued: "In my eyes, Sir Stirling Moss is the epitome of a true racer and an amazing person who I was fortunate to have the honour to get to know.

"He will forever be one of motorsport's greatest legends," he said.

(GMM)
A spokesperson for Madrid's regional government told CNN that more than 300,000 nonessential workers are estimated to have gone back to their jobs in Spain's Madrid region on April 13. This is after the country began a partial lifting of lockdown restrictions that are aimed at curbing the spread of COVID-19.

Some restrictions were eased as the country enters its second month of lockdown, allowing those who can't work from home to return to work, such as those in manufacturing industries and construction. However, bars, shops and restaurants, and other businesses considered nonessential will remain closed until further notice.

Thousands of people return to work in Spain

Spain has been one of the countries worst affected by the coronavirus pandemic, with 172,541 confirmed cases so far. Spain is also the country with the highest number of COVID-19 cases in Europe, and second to the U.S worldwide. The country has now recorded more than 18,056 deaths.

On April 13, the country recorded the second-lowest daily rise in deaths for three weeks, with 517 fatalities in 24 hours. However, Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez has cautioned that the nation's return to normal life will be progressive, and he stressed that the resumption of normal activity will happen in phases and with hygiene measures and efforts to monitor new cases and prevent further contagion.

Also Read: Brazil's Christ the Redeemer Dons Doctor Uniform as Tribute to Health Care Workers Around the World

Slowly but surely

The government announced that the police would hand out 10 million protective masks at metro stations and other transport hubs while reiterating guidance on social distancing and regular hand-washing. The central government of Spain has distributed 1 million coronavirus testing kits around the country, and five million more will be sent out in the coming days.

Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez stated that the climb has been difficult and the descent will also be, as the country's state of emergency was extended to April 26. He also warned that the restrictions may need to be further extended.

However, the easing restrictions have raised some concerns. Spain's General Workers Union or GTU has raised concerns over the safety of those returning to work. The union called on employers to be responsible for providing personal protective equipment for their staff, the statement is published on their website.

Regional governments and opposition politicians have also criticized the decision to ease the restriction. The president of Catalonia, Qium Torra, said that returning people to work was irresponsible and reckless in a video statement posted on his Twitter account.

A study published last week in the medical journal The Lancet warned that coronavirus lockdowns around the world should not be lifted completely until a vaccine for the virus is found. The study is based on China's outbreak, and it used mathematical modeling to show how lifting such measures prematurely could result in a sweeping second wave of infection.

Meanwhile, Spain's neighboring country Austria, stated that it would gradually be to reopen shops after Easter, and in Germany, economists, lawyers, and medical experts are recommending a revival that would allow specific industries and workers to resume their activities while careful steps are taken to prevent another wave of coronavirus.

In Denmark, kindergartens and schools will reopen this week if the country's coronavirus cases remain stable, and In Norway, children will return to kindergarten a week later.



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Twenty years ago, if someone had asked me if a Fringe festival in Hamilton would fly Id have said no. Well, obviously I was wrong. Over the years, the Fringe has grown from attracting a few devotees to a sold-out event.

But, sadly its cancelled for 2020, another casualty of COVID-19.

Letting it go is devastating, says Heather Kanabe, the festivals executive director. But there was no choice. Its all about responsibility to performers as well as the audience. We had shows coming from as far away as Nigeria and as close as around the corner. A decision needed to be made. Its on or off.

Its tough for the performers, Kanabe says. In many ways, The Fringe is their bread and butter and the cancellation of Fringes all over will ultimately have a global impact.

Hamilton Fringe Festival director Christopher Stanton agrees. Hes been Fringing since 2014.

The hardest part of the cancellation is not being able to bring people together. Thats what a Fringe Festival does. It creates experiences that are all about sharing. And with social distancing thats just what we cant do this year.

Stanton believes people will miss the contact and the fun. Fringing is an addiction, he says. Once you check it out, you return every year. Cancelling is a kick in the teeth. A Fringe is all about community, theatre folks and audiences sharing the shows. Well, well just have to wait until next time.

Stephanie Hope Lawlor is a Hamilton-based actress who has celebrated the Fringe from both sides of the footlights.

Its a unique experience. It gives artists the opportunity to create work with the support of the wider theatre community. The Fringe comes as a built-in infrastructure. It allows you to try new things. Its an accessible theatregoing experience. It provides a massive pool of performances that range in style, discipline and length. You create a schedule of shows you want to see, she says. After, you make a pit-stop in the Fringe tent to socialize with the artists and the rest of the audience. Ill miss that camaraderie. But well make it through this time. And I hope well be stronger, wiser and more supportive of the arts.

Playwright-director-actor Brian Morton is an important Hamilton Fringe fixture. Hes been involved, off and on, since 2005. His latest Fringe play was last seasons Equity Rules. Over the years, his productions of Krapps Last Tape, New Talent and Under the Apple Tree have been festival hits.

The most important thing about The Fringe is the complete and utter absence of artistic direction, Morton says. Its your project. You dont have to convince people to get behind what youre doing. You do your own thing. But theres a wonderful team of volunteer staff and board members supporting you. Last year, there were 50 productions in nine venues and the audiences have continuously grown.

It wasnt always that way.

Morton says, The loss of this years Fringe is devastating for theatre people. Those that normally tour the Fringe circuit, from city to city, will be seriously out of pocket.

The first Hamilton Fringe opened in 2003 and attendance was slight. Sometimes there were more people on stage than in the audience. Fringe organizers persisted and in 2019 many shows were sold out.

It was the increase in quality, however, that encouraged Ron Weihs and Judith Sandiford, Hamilton theatre icons, to bring Fringe shows to their tiny ArtWord-ArtBar theatre on Colborne Street.

We saw The Fringe as a way to promote area playwrights, such as Sky Gilbert, Learie McNicolls and Tiny Bill Cody. We feel The Fringe is important, Weihs says. It brings performers, playwrights and audiences together in a celebration of theatre that is greater than the sum of its parts.

Franny McCabe-Bennett, the Fringes associate producer agrees.

Its such an emotional loss, but we needed to be upfront and open with everyone. Cancelling 2020 was the right thing to do. We know that. Now, lets hope were all back healthy and happy and ready for The Fringe in July 2021. Theatre people are pretty tough.
Dear Annie: My best friend had planned a vacation to visit friends in Florida for several weeks. Despite being asked to stay home by our nation's health care advisers, to stop the spread of coronavirus, she and her husband went on their vacation. When I told her, I couldn't believe they were still going, she said, "Well, at least we'll be in warm weather."

I consider it extremely irresponsible and dangerous that my friend and her husband disregarded the directive to cancel all nonessential travel to keep everyone safe. People throughout the country are stepping up, making the necessary sacrifices and staying home as we've been asked to do -- and is often mandated now. I have four of the preexisting conditions that could make getting the virus very deadly. I am so furious at my friend and her husband for their reckless choice. How do I deal with my anger toward my friend and save this friendship? -- Angry in New England

Dear Angry in New England: You have every right to be angry with your friend. According to the experts, to slow the spread of the virus and not overwhelm our hospitals and medical staff, who are working 'round the clock, we must all do our part and stay home. Everyone wants a warm-weather vacation. In normal times, I would say, yes, go take that well-earned holiday. But these are unprecedented times, and we all must stay home.

Now you seem to be a very responsible citizen and already know that. I'm guessing that your friend is running scared. She doesn't want to deal with the anxiety of what is going on in the world and thinks she can escape to Florida. It was a poor decision. That said, she is your friend and she made a mistake. We all make mistakes. But let it go. If you hold a grudge, then it will hurt you more than her.

However, once she returns from Florida, make sure she self-quarantines for 14 days before you get together.

Please be safe and well.

Dear health care workers, doctors, nurses, hospital cleaning crews, police officers, firefights and everyone on the front lines fighting this pandemic:

Thank you, thank you, thank you!

You go into the danger when most people run away from it. You put your own life on the line day after day and night after night, to protect those who are sick and need you.

You are soldiers in a different kind of war. A war against an invisible enemy. You exemplify courage and bravery. You might be scared, as is natural, but you go in despite your fear, for a greater good -- to save lives.

I'd like to extend another huge thank-you to the grocery store workers, pharmacists, big-box store workers, mail carriers, teachers and so many others that are supporting society during these uncertain times.

The rest of us are being called upon to stay on the couch. The experts have said that the most important thing the average person can do is to keep your distance from other people, wash your hands and don't touch your face. These seemingly small measures will make a world of difference.

Please stay home and do your part to stop the spread of this virus. And if you have access to medical protective gear, please give it to those who are on the front lines of this battle. We are all in this together and need to help each other. It is the only way things will get better.

Send your questions for Annie Lane to dearannie@creators.com.

COPYRIGHT 2020 CREATORS.COM
MIDDLETOWN  Efforts to protect the elderly, first responders and other vulnerable populations at risk of contracting the coronavirus are continuing locally as many are stepping up to assist others during the pandemic.

Some of these projects, which depend upon assistance from the community, involve new and creative ways of making personal protective equipment for those who need it.

Boy Scout Troop 41 Middletown and the Knights of Valhalla car club members are teaming up to collect empty soda bottles in a unique face-shield project. The Republican Town Committee also has jumped on board.

The process involves 2-liter Pepsi-style bottles  only those are being accepted because Coke products have a curved shape that wont work, according to Boy Scouts Troop 41 leader Tami Kapacziewski.

Volunteers remove the label, cut off the bottles top and bottom, smooth the edges so theyre not sharp, and use Velcro, childs suspenders, window insulation tape and zip ties so the shields can be adjusted to any size face, said Kapacziewski, also a member of the car club.

The finished products are being given to area first responders and convalescent homes.

Kapacziewski traveled to Harte Nissan in Hartford Wednesday to drop off the bottles. She was assisted by her twin sons Kyle and Kurt McAuliffe, Jack Hoover and others. The boys contributed about 75 2-liter bottles and RTC members supplied another 25, she said.

The last update, posted April 11 on the GoFundMe drive, Jarrods Face Shield for Frontliners Fund, organized by Jarrod Novak, said more than 250 shields have been distributed and 40 others were delivered to Massachusetts locations Monday.

The effort already has raised $1,445 of its $2,500 goal.

Scouting law requires many hours of community service, Kapacziewski said.

They know, as Scouts, one of the main things is to help their community. By doing something as simple as collecting a bunch of 2-liter bottles is helping. Theyre giving back the same way the community has given to them, she said.

The kids are great about it. They usually jump right on board. These kids are selfless. Right now, the community needs it more than we do for protection, Kapacziewski said.

Im willing to jump in if somebody wants it, and its easy to get them to me and collect a bunch and hightail it up, Im fine with that, she added. To take advantage of the offer, people can email her at tkmbubbles@yahoo.com, and write bottles in the subject line. She can also be reached by text and phone at 860-712-6825.

Three young members of Middlefields Jafaria Association of Connecticut mosque began crowdfunding efforts Friday night to support its efforts to help the community affected by the pandemic. They are asking family and friends around the world to consider donating, according to #CARErelief coordinator Syed Naqvi.

Both Rumla Rizvi and Sophia Imam are part of the effort.

The original goal was to distribute 100 packages to provide temporary assistance to those in need, in light of the pandemic and upcoming month of Ramadan, Naqvi said. What began as a three-person effort now includes more than 40 sponsors.

The drive elicited $4,500 in a few days, which will allow them to purchase items for about 120 people/families. Naqvis His offered to help, saying, if were going to do it, were going to do it properly and big, Naqvi said. I knew wed get something, but the amount and sheer volume surprised him.

The initiative is open to the entire community, regardless of race or religion. Just because its being held at a mosque doesnt mean its just for people of Islamic faith and Muslims, he said.

The event will be held in a drive-through manner to observe social distancing recommendations, Naqvi said. Each carload will be given a list from which they request nonperishables, including rice, flour, lentils, pasta and pancake mix, as well as fruits and vegetables. Each box contains enough food for two weeks.

Individuals can collect packages from 2 to 3 p.m. April 26 at 1 Meriden Road.

Other local efforts are underway by agencies such as Middlesex United Way, which is looking for volunteer quilters, stitchers and sewing machine operators to make protective masks for nonprofit agencies throughout Middlesex County providing services to those in need of such PPE.

People can sign up to help at middlesexunitedway.org/masks.

Coleman Bros. Carnival, which last year celebrated 103 years, planned to kick off its seven-month season in its hometown of Middletown April 2 for a nine-day run.

The amusement park-style event usually launches in late April or early March. The family-run business makes its round of the fair and festival scene in areas including Willimantic, Hartford, Milford, Stratford, Shelton, New Haven, Waterbury, upstate New York and Massachusetts, according to secretary/treasurer Mary Oakes, daughter of the founder Dick Coleman.

The Rainmaker, as the carnival is known because it always seems to bring wet weather, is set up in the lot off Washington Street/Route 66. The carnival began four generations ago under the Portland Bridge by Coleman, who was 27 at the time.

Oakes, who lives in Florida during the off-season, said everything is up in the air due to the coronavirus. Were in limbo like other people.

Meanwhile, the number of COVID-19 cases in Middletown is growing. Mayor Ben Florsheim announced late Tuesday there were 151 confirmed infections and eight deaths.

The state Department of Mental Health and Addiction Services announced Wednesday that 45 individuals  16 patients and 29 staff  at its facilities have the coronavirus.

For information on coronavirus, visit MiddletownCT.gov and portal.ct.gov/coronavirus.
Ninete Rachelle said she was scrolling through Instagram when she came across posts about people and medical professionals in need of face masks. As a fashion designer herself, following in the footsteps of her mother Nina Lourdes, Rachelle and her mother decided to use their talents and take matters into their own hands.

They would only have one (mask) per day and they need more than one to really socialize with their patients, she said. My mom called me and was like, Do you want to make these face masks with me and just donate them to people like kids, elderly people and people with special needs? Im like, of course.

ON HOUSTONCHRONICLE.COM: Coronavirus live updates: Houston approves airlines deal, Texas businesses fight to be 'essential'

Rachelle and Lourdes, who owns Charlene Bridal Alterations, are creating handmade face masks from fabric to donate to children, seniors, people with special needs, and communities in need of face masks as hospitals and stores across the country experience a shortage of the vital product during the COVID-19 pandemic.

As of Monday, 2,200 of their masks had been donated within the Greater Houston area and across the country.

HIGH DEMAND: Cypress Assistance Ministries adjusts hours due to 450% increase in food pantry clients during COVID-19

Rachelle, a senior at Klein Collins High School, said she and her mother posted a video to Facebook about how the face masks work, which almost immediately resulted in requests for masks.

People started messaging me and ordering some and we started donating them to families in need and families all over the country, she said. Every day we make about 300 and we just keep working all day from sunup to sundown because there are a lot of people to donate to. We just keep working. Fire departments have also contacted me. Families across the United States. Its crazy how many people have contacted me.

MORE FROM CHEVALL PRYCE: Avanti Senior Living at Towne Lake hosts family parade for residents during COVID-19 pandemic

Rachelle said the masks are donated to families and organizations for free, though recipients are asked to cover shipping costs.

As far as how people can help the cause, Rachelle said donations are welcome in the form of unneeded fabric.

We ask people if they have material at home that they dont need if they could please donate that to us so we can keep making the masks and donating them, she said. There are only five of us in the shop and were all keeping our own distance with our own face masks and everything is sanitized. We would really love people to come help us, but we want to keep it safe.

Learn more about the handmade face masks on Ninetes Facebook page at www.facebook.com/nineterachellefashion.

chevall.pryce@chron.com
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Expats in Hanoi have found a heartfelt way, via photos, to express their love and gratitude toward medical workers on the frontline of Vietnams fight against novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19), who have kept them safe during the global health crisis.

The photos were assembled into a larger collage that was uploaded on Monday to Hanoi Massive Community  a Facebook group of over 135,000 expats and locals in the capital city  by one of its members.

In the collage of 25 photos, the foreigners, who come from Portugal, the United States, Ireland, the UK, Egypt, Latvia, India, South Africa, Romania, Fiji and Germany, sent touching messages of gratitude to those on Vietnams frontline of battling COVID-19.

Thank you for your: bravery, self sacrifice, kindness. Thank you is not enough. Viet Nam co len!!! 29-year-old Daina from Latvia wrote in her message, which includes a Vietnamese phrase that translates as Keep trying, Vietnam!

Because of your strength... I was fearless... Humbly thankful and grateful... Viet Nam co len!! Klaartjies from South Africa wrote in another message.

Thank you! Thank you! Thank you! to all VN [Vietnamese] medical, military personnel, grocery store clerks, transportation drivers, government workers for all you do! Viet Nam co len, reads a message by Connor, 27, from the U.S.

American expats Joe and Becca Phillips and their son, Scotty, pose for a photo with a thank-you message to Vietnams frontline forces in the COVID-19 battle in this picture uploaded to the Hanoi Massive Community Facebook group on April 13, 2020.

Ireland's Odette O'Reilly (left) and American veteran Patrick Furman pose for photos with their thank-you messages to Vietnams frontline forces in the COVID-19 battle in these supplied pictures.

According to sources, these messages are parts of the Viet Nam Co Len (Keep Trying, Vietnam) mini project initated by Wayne Worrell, a British teacher living in Hanoi.

Participants in the project come from all walks of life in the capital city: a teacher of English, an insurance manager, and a war veteran, to name a few.

Through the heartwarming photos, they would like to send a message of gratitude to the doctors, nurses, military personnel, police officers and volunteers for their ultimate sacrifice to keep everybody safe regardless of nationality.

South Africa's Gianluigi Squeege Nicolosi (left) and British teacher Jason Bonne-Gray pose for photos with their thank-you messages to Vietnams frontline forces in the COVID-19 battle in these supplied pictures.

From left: South Africas Julia Meyer, Courtney Jordaan and Molly McMiles pose for a photo with their thank-you messages to Vietnams frontline forces in the COVID-19 battle in this supplied picture.

Vietnam has reported 267 cases of coronavirus infections, of whom 47 are foreigners.

As of Wednesday morning, 169 patients have recovered and been discharged from the hospital.

No death related to COVID-19 has been recorded in the country.

Latvia's Daina Raiskuma (left) and Mohamed Mostafa Shaaban from Egypt pose for photos with their grateful messages to Vietnams frontline forces in the COVID-19 battle in these supplied pictures.

Like us on Facebook or follow us on Twitter to get the latest news about Vietnam!
1. Room (2015)

2. It (2017)

3. The Good Liar (2019)

4. Little Women (2019)

5. Emma (2020)



Directed by Autumn de Wilde, this comedy is based on Jane Austen's 1815 novel of the same name. Starring Anya Taylor-Joy, Johnny Flynn, Josh O'Connor, Callum Turner, Mia Goth, Miranda Hart, and Bill Nighy, it follows the misadventures of Emma Woodhouse, a young woman who likes to interfere in the love lives of her friends. Jane Austen wrote Emma as an enthusiastic but incompetent match-maker. Emma thinks she knows whats best for everyone when in reality her plans end up creating more peril than before. The escapist nature of the book has been caught expertly by the director. The set designs, costumes and the cinematography, as well as attention to period detail, came in for a lot of praise by the critics. The ensemble cast was praised as well.



Directed by Autumn de Wilde,. Starring Anya Taylor-Joy, Johnny Flynn, Josh O'Connor, Callum Turner, Mia Goth, Miranda Hart, and Bill Nighy, it follows the misadventures of Emma Woodhouse, a young woman who likes to interfere in the love lives of her friends. Jane Austen wrote Emma as an enthusiastic but incompetent match-maker. Emma thinks she knows whats best for everyone when in reality her plans end up creating more peril than before. The escapist nature of the book has been caught expertly by the director. The set designs, costumes and the cinematography, as well as attention to period detail, came in for a lot of praise by the critics. The ensemble cast was praised as well.

Aside from a dog, they say, a book is mans best friend. They seem to be the best buddies certainly of the Hollywood filmmakers who more often than not turn towards them for inspiration. Books have been adapted right from the beginning of filmmaking. Nowadays, in particular, studios like to involve the original author in adapting their book to film. Thrillers, murder mysteries, memoirs -- everything is fair game when it comes to adaptations. Presenting the top book adaptations from Hollywood in recent times to help you ease the boredom of quarantine.Directed by Lenny Abrahamson and written by Emma Donoghue, Room is based on her 2010 novel of the same name. It stars Brie Larson -- who won an Oscar for her role, as well as Joan Allen, Sean Bridgers, and William H. Macy. The film is a powerful homage to motherhood and stars Larson as Joy, a 24-year-old who was captured by a man seven years ago and held captive in a shack. He has been raping her regularly ever since. Her only solace is the 5-year-old son born out of this union. She tells the son that only the room is real and the rest of the world exists only on television. She helps her son escape and police soon rescue her as well. They both find it hard to adjust to the outside world. The toll on her is much harder as she cant reconcile with her parents and attempts suicide. Later, she resolves to clean up her act for the sake of her child. They both find closure in the end when they revisit Room and find it to be an insignificant feature of the surrounding landscape.The film, directed by Andy Muschietti,. It stars Jaeden Lieberher and Bill Skarsgard. Critics hailed the present film as being better than the 1990 adaptation by director Tommy Lee Wallace. Its a coming-of-age saga where a group of children are stalked by a dancing clown which is really a malevolent spirit which haunts their town every 27 years, preying on children. The clown makes them confront their worst fears and ironically helps them come to terms with the actual horrors they face in real life. He lives somewhere in the sewers and the youngsters band up against It and almost kill It. As it escapes deeper into the tunnels, it warns that itll come back and haunt them as adults. They all take a vow to come together once more if that happens. The clown was used rather sparingly, what with the director creating an atmosphere where your own brain compels you to seek danger in dark places. Bill Skarsgard was much praised for essaying the clown., The Good Liar, directed by Bill Condon and starring Helen Mirren, Ian McKellen, Russell Tovey, Jim Carter, The Good Liar is a con drama with a dark twist. Betty McLeish (Mirren) is a widow worth two million pounds and Roy Courtnay (McKellen) a professional con man looking for soft targets. She seems all ready to fall into his trap, despite the reservations of her grandson Steven (Russell Tovey). A trip to Berlin brings back a clutch of memories about Courtnays past in the city. Ian McKellen and Helen Mirren are two of the finest British actors of today. Its something of a coup to have them acting opposite each other on the big screen. Watch the film for the acting masterclass provided by Mirren and McKellen, who effortlessly slide into their roles and spar with each other like master fencers, making it look all so easy.Directed by Greta Gerwig,. The film stars Saoirse Ronan, Emma Watson, Florence Pugh, Eliza Scanlen, Laura Dern, Timothee Chalamet, Meryl Streep, Tracy Letts, Bob Odenkirk, James Norton, Louis Garrel, and Chris Cooper. Critics hailed it as the best adaptation of this great American novel to date. Gerwig was praised for being true to the spirit of the book while bringing in contemporary themes in the film. Set in Massachusetts, and having the American Civil War as its backdrop, the period drama about four sisters and their mother, living in a house without men -- their father is serving in the Civil War -- is a tribute to sisterhood, kindness and generosity. Critics were wholesome in the praise of the entire ensemble cast, who all fitted seamlessly together in this modern classic.
NEW YORK, April 14, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- Concrete Floor Coatings Market Research Report by Product (Acrylic, Epoxy, Methacrylic, Methyl, and Polyaspartics), by End Use (Commercial, Industrial, and Residential) - Global Forecast to 2025 (Cumulative Impact of COVID-19)







Read the full report: https://www.reportlinker.com/p05881723/?utm_source=PRN







The Global Concrete Floor Coatings Market is expected to grow from USD 1,312.89 Million in 2019 to USD 2,059.57 Million by the end of 2025 at a Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 7.79%.



Market Segmentation & Coverage:

This research report categorizes the Concrete Floor Coatings to forecast the revenues and analyze the trends in each of the following sub-markets:



On the basis of Product, the Concrete Floor Coatings Market is studied across Acrylic, Epoxy, Methacrylic, Methyl, Polyaspartics, Polyurethane, and Vinyl Ester.



On the basis of End Use, the Concrete Floor Coatings Market is studied across Commercial, Industrial, and Residential. The Commercial further studied across Parking Lot, Retail Outlet, and Warehouse. The Industrial further studied across Chemical Industry and Food & Beverage Industry. The Residential further studied across Exterior and Interior.



On the basis of Geography, the Concrete Floor Coatings Market is studied across Americas, Asia-Pacific, and Europe, Middle East & Africa. The Americas region is studied across Argentina, Brazil, Canada, Mexico, and United States. The Asia-Pacific region is studied across Australia, China, India, Indonesia, Japan, Malaysia, Philippines, South Korea, and Thailand. The Europe, Middle East & Africa region is studied across France, Germany, Italy, Netherlands, Qatar, Russia, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, Spain, United Arab Emirates, and United Kingdom.



Company Usability Profiles:

The report deeply explores the recent significant developments by the leading vendors and innovation profiles in the Global Concrete Floor Coatings Market including Armor Rock Concrete Floor Coatings Inc., BASF SE, Behr Process Corporation, DAW SE, Henkel Corporation, Liquid Floor Inc., Nippon Paint Co. Ltd., PPG Industries Inc., Royal DSM N.V., RPM International Inc., Sherwin-Williams Company, Sika AG, Stonhard Inc., Teknos Group, The Valspar Corporation, and Zeraus Products Inc..



FPNV Positioning Matrix:

The FPNV Positioning Matrix evaluates and categorizes the vendors in the Concrete Floor Coatings Market on the basis of Business Strategy (Business Growth, Industry Coverage, Financial Viability, and Channel Support) and Product Satisfaction (Value for Money, Ease of Use, Product Features, and Customer Support) that aids businesses in better decision making and understanding the competitive landscape.



Competitive Strategic Window:

The Competitive Strategic Window analyses the competitive landscape in terms of markets, applications, and geographies. The Competitive Strategic Window helps the vendor define an alignment or fit between their capabilities and opportunities for future growth prospects. During a forecast period, it defines the optimal or favorable fit for the vendors to adopt successive merger and acquisition strategies, geography expansion, research & development, and new product introduction strategies to execute further business expansion and growth.



The report provides insights on the following pointers:

1. Market Penetration: Provides comprehensive information on sulfuric acid offered by the key players

2. Market Development: Provides in-depth information about lucrative emerging markets and analyzes the markets

3. Market Diversification: Provides detailed information about new product launches, untapped geographies, recent developments, and investments

4. Competitive Assessment & Intelligence: Provides an exhaustive assessment of market shares, strategies, products, and manufacturing capabilities of the leading players

5. Product Development & Innovation: Provides intelligent insights on future technologies, R&D activities, and new product developments



The report answers questions such as:

1. What is the market size and forecast of the Global Concrete Floor Coatings Market?

2. What are the inhibiting factors and their impact analysis shaping the Global Concrete Floor Coatings Market during the forecast period?

3. What is the competitive position if vendors in the Global Concrete Floor Coatings Market?

4. How Porters Five Forces define the Global Concrete Floor Coatings Market landscape?

5. What are the technology trends and regulatory frameworks in the Global Concrete Floor Coatings Market?

6. Which are the products/segments/applications/areas to invest in over the forecast period in the Global Concrete Floor Coatings Market?

7. What is the competitive strategic window for opportunities in the Global Concrete Floor Coatings Market?

8. What are the modes and strategic moves considered suitable for entering the Global Concrete Floor Coatings Market?



Read the full report: https://www.reportlinker.com/p05881723/?utm_source=PRN



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Contributed Photo / New Haven Police Department / Contributed Photo

NEW HAVEN  Detectives continue to investigate the untimely death of a city resident in lock-up early Wednesday morning, according to police.

Just before 2 a.m. Wednesday, 31-year-old Desohn Wilson was brought in to the detention center at police headquarters, 1 Union Avenue.
China Sends Survey Vessel into Vietnamese Waters

2020-04-14 -- China has sent a survey vessel involved in a standoff with Vietnam last year back into that nation's exclusive economic zone this month, vessel-tracking data shows, in a move likely to fuel tensions between the two countries over their rival claims in the South China Sea.

Vietnamese vessels are closely trailing the survey vessel, which is accompanied by a host of China Coast Guard (CCG) ships. The deployment comes less than two weeks after a Vietnamese fishing boat sank in a confrontation with a CCG ship near the disputed Paracel Islands, which prompted international criticism of Beijing.

"What is pretty obvious is China's not going to stop," Gregory Poling, director of the Asia Maritime Transparency Initiative in Washington, said of China's recent expansionist activities despite the worldwide coronavirus outbreak. "If a global pandemic doesn't cause China to calm things down in the South China Sea, there's not much that will."

The Hai Yang Di Zhi 8 survey vessel left port at Sanya on China's Hainan Island last Thursday, and was joined by six CCG ships on Monday  numbered 1105, 1006, 2103, 5901, 4201 and 4203  before they together sailed south into the South China Sea, according to ship-tracking data analyzed by RFA.

As of Tuesday morning local time, the fleet was about 92 nautical miles off the coast of Vietnam's Binh Dinh province, well within that nation's 200 nautical mile exclusive economic zone. They were also accompanied by two Chinese maritime militia ships, the Dongtongxiao00235 and the Min Xia Yu 00013.

It is unclear if this is the fleet's final destination. But Vietnam appears to be taking no chances. The group was being trailed closely by at least three vessels from Vietnam's Fisheries Resource Surveillance agency. One ship, the Kiem Ngu 314363, was sailing right alongside the Hai Yang Di Zhi 8 as of Monday.

Vietnam's government has yet to comment publicly on China's action, but the situation and composition of China's fleet is reminiscent of past confrontations between Vietnam and China in the South China Sea.

The Hai Yang Di Zhi 8 was at the heart of the tense standoff over Vanguard Bank in July 2019. Vanguard Bank is a feature occupied by Vietnam in the South China Sea  but China sent the Hai Yang along with coast guard escorts to put pressure on a Russian-owned oil exploration activity within Vietnam's exclusive economic zone. This prompted Vietnam to send its own coast guard and maritime militia vessels to the area.

The standoff didn't end until November 2019, and was called the worst flare-up in Vietnam-China relations since the 2014 standoff over the Hai Yang Shi You 981 oil rig. In that incident, China dropped an oil rig into disputed waters and subsequently protected it using a combination of coastguard and maritime militia vessels.

This pattern of using survey vessels to intimidate Vietnam explains the large escort China has deployed alongside the Hai Yang Di Zhi 8.

'Go out, assert rights, harass neighbors'

The current deployment comes after China's Foreign Ministry asserted China's claim to the Paracel and Spratly Islands, calling a March 30 submission by Vietnam to the U.N. over its own territorial rights "illegal and invalid."

The Hai Yang Di Zhi 8 was previously conducting surveys southeast of Hainan and northwest of the Paracels between April 6 and April 8.

Beijing claims most of the mineral-rich South China Sea, including areas that reach the shores of its smaller neighbors. Brunei, Malaysia, the Philippines, Vietnam and Taiwan also have overlapping claims in the sea region.

In addition to Vietnam, China has also been exerting pressure recently on Malaysia and the Philippines in the South China Sea. As RFA reported last week, China Coast Guard ships have been patrolling nearly all the hotspots disputed between Beijing and Manila, despite President Rodrigo Duterte's attempts to foster closer ties with China.

The U.S. military has been carrying out freedom of navigation flights and sailing missions throughout the disputed sea region since last year, as part of a deterrent force. Washington has also assured the Philippines and other regional allies that it was prepared to back them up in the case of Chinese aggression.

But Poling, the U.S.-based maritime analyst, said tougher action was needed. "The number one thing that we should think to look into is international economic sanctions," he told the Foreign Correspondents Association of the Philippines in an online news conference.

"We have never had a discussion about sanctioning the actors behind the Chinese maritime militia. China admits it has a maritime militia, and it's a clear violation of international law," he said.

Last week, the Philippines last week joined Vietnam and the U.S. in criticizing China over the April 2 sinking of the Vietnamese fishing boat. Manila's foreign office said it stood in solidarity with Hanoi over the incident that occurred in waters near the Paracel Islands  which both Beijing and Hanoi claim.

Poling said that incident followed the same pattern as the sinking last year of a Filipino boat that was rammed by a Chinese fishing vessel. That left 22 Filipino fishermen stranded at sea for hours. A Vietnamese boat that was passing by later picked them up.

"They (China) are operating on the same policy framework which is go out, assert rights, harass neighbors, do whatever you want," he said.

By Drake Long in Washington for RFA, and Jeoffrey Maitem in Manila and Dennis Jay Santos in Davao, Philippines, for BenarNews, an RFA-affiliated online news service.

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 April 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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TDT | Manama

The governments efforts to bring Bahraini students home from abroad are an excellent step in making their families happy. This was affirmed yesterday by the Shura Councils Foreign Affairs, Defence and National Security Committee member and Youth Affairs Committee member Nancy Khedouri.

Khedouri expressed her heartfelt gratitude to His Majesty the King in taking all preventive measures to combat the coronavirus (COVID- 19). She also lauded the tireless efforts of HRH the Prime Minister and HRH the Crown Prince in their follow-up on the implementation of many government initiatives in regards to the return of Bahraini students from abroad.

We have witnessed how the Government was keen on developing a plan to evacuate Bahraini students since the virus began spreading globally and the great coordination of the return of Bahraini students from China, where the virus began, Khedouri said.

Endeavours have not stopped since January until now, as there are great efforts made by the Embassies of the Kingdom of Bahrain in the countries where students reside, which reflect the great care that the Kingdom gives to its citizens abroad and is keen to provide the best services to them and ensure their return to the Kingdom, in accordance with all health procedures, Khedouri added that this solidarity and mutual support between the various institutions and ministries, as well as the cohesion between the various groups of society, has distinguished Bahrain in its management of the COVID-19 fight.

We feel proud of our national team spirit as Team Bahrain witnessed in all the institutions, and, by Gods grace, we will overcome this crisis and experience much from it, she said.

Khedouri also extended her heartfelt thanks and appreciation to Bahrain TV, which continues to raise awareness and televise educational programmes for citizens and residents in highlighting the Kingdoms efforts in combatting the coronavirus.
People Weve Lost Ying Kao Lee

87 years old

Lived in Cherry Hill

He invented the substance in car paint that prevents fading More Memorials

Car buffs may not know the name Ying Kao Lee, but it was he who kept many of their cars shiny.

During 35 years with the DuPont Co., Dr. Lee invented Lucite dispersion lacquer, the substance in car paint that prevents fading. By doing so, he reduced emissions in the painting process by 70% and set the pattern for automotive top-coat finishing for two decades, ending in the 1990s.

DuPont had a very big business in car-paint science at its Marshall Laboratory in South Philadelphia, said his son-in-law Jason Duckworth. He was able to create the technology for cars to look good years later.

Dr. Lee, 87, of the Quadrangle in Haverford and formerly of Cherry Hill, died Monday, April 13, at Bryn Mawr Hospital of COVID-19, the family said.

Born in Shanghai, China, Dr. Lee came from a high-profile family. His father was D.T. Lee, a textile magnate. As a teenager, Dr. Lee studied English in Hong Kong and then, as he would later tell his grandchildren, left for England.

Planning to return to China, Dr. Lee, called Y.K., earned a bachelors degree in chemistry from the University of Leeds in 1957. During this period, he was a self-described mediocre student, respectable dancer, and outstanding ping-pong player, his family said in a statement.

But tensions were growing between China and Taiwan, where most of the Lee family had moved. His father directed by telegram that Dr. Lee not return to China because the communist rulers were seizing the familys businesses.

Y.K. should by now be ready to stand on his own two feet and would therefore no longer be receiving financial support, his father said. Overnight, Mr. Lee went from being the carefree son of a wealthy silk merchant to being alone and jobless on the other side of the globe.

He immigrated in his 20s to the United States and became a doctoral student at the University of Cincinnati. In 1961, after three years, he earned a Ph.D. in physical organic chemistry.

That April, Mr. Lee met Theresa Tai, a young artist who also had immigrated from China to the United States. They married in September 1961.

In 1965, Dr. Lee joined DuPont. In addition to the car-coating invention, he was a pioneer in creating coatings for microelectronics and was effective in forging business ties for DuPont with China.

Before retiring from DuPont in 2000, he was named a Distinguished Scientist, the highest nonmanagement rank in the company, and was awarded the firms Lavoisier Medal for achievement in technology.

In 1994, Dr. Lee was awarded an honorary professorship by the Institute of Chemistry in Beijing for connecting American and Chinese researchers in macromolecular science.

That year, he received the Achievement Award from the Chinese Institute of Engineers, U.S.A.

His family remembered his dinnertime lectures on what to do about the American economy. He loved to quote business leaders Lee Iacocca and Jack Welch.

He was an honest man, both when returning lost wallets to their proper owners and bluntly sharing his opinion about what youd gotten him for Christmas, his family said in a statement.

Besides his wife, he is survived by children Arthur, Annette, and Angela Duckworth, and nine grandchildren.

A memorial service will be held later.
Vice President M Venkaiah Naidu on Tuesday had a meeting with Union Human Resource Development Minister Ramesh Pokhriyal Nishank and discussed the academic calendar of educational institutes in the backdrop of COVID-19 crisis.

The Vice President, Shri M. Venkaiah Naidu had a meeting with Union HRD Minister, Shri Ramesh Pokhriyal Nishank at Upa-Rashtrapati Bhawan today and discussed the steps being taken to ensure the completion of academic calendar in educational institutions, the official Twitter handle of Vice President tweeted.

They also discussed the way forward for educational institutes so that the students can be provided with unhindered learning opportunities during the lockdown period.
China did not give Americans access when it was needed the most in the beginning, US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has said, demanding answers and transparency from Beijing over its handling of the coronavirus pandemic.

Pompeo also criticised the World Health Organization (WHO) for taking an awfully long time in declaring COVID-19 a global pandemic.

"The Chinese Communist Party didn't give Americans access when we needed it in that most timely point at the very beginning. The President talked about that today. And then we know they have this lab. We know about the wet markets. We know that the virus itself did originate in Wuhan. So all those things come together," Pompeo told Fox on Tuesday.

There's still a lot that the US does not know, he said.

"We need to know answers to these things. We still have this virus out there. You talked about trying to get the economy going not only here in the United States but around the world," he said.

"We need answers to these questions, we need transparency, and we need the World Health Organization (WHO) to do its job, to perform its primary function, which is to make sure that the world has accurate, timely, effective, real information about what's going on in the global health space. And they didn't get that done here," Pompeo said.

Noting that the WHO declined to declare COVID-19 a pandemic for an awfully long time, Pompeo alleged that it was because the Chinese Communist Party did not want that to happen.

"We need a health organization that's going to deliver good outcomes for the world and not do the bidding of any single country. We need accurate information and transparent information. We didn't get it. The world did't get that," he said.

In another interview to WNTW Richmond, Pompeo said that as of now, the US will focus on the things it needs to keep America safe.

"But there'll come a day when we go back and look and see how we can prevent something like this from ever happening again, to make sure that the institutions that were designed to raise the global alert, the World Health Organization how it failed to execute on that mission," he said.

"We need to go take a look at how the WHO performed during this time. There are some things they've gotten right throughout time. They've done great work against AIDS all across the world. We just need to simply make sure that we have it right. We don't want to spend a single dollar from the American taxpayer for an organization that's not keeping Americans safe," Pompeo said.

Pompeo told Chris Salcedo of The Chris Salcedo Show, KSEV Houston & Newsmax TV that it was known where this virus originated.

"It originated in Wuhan, China. These are just the facts. And we need every government to do two things. One, they've got to be honest about what's going on," he said.

"They've got to talk about where the disease is in their country, how many fatalities they've had, what kind of cases they have, what kind of testing they're engaged in. And then for the Chinese Government, as the President said when they were talking about the fact that this might have come from an American soldier or an American weapons lab, that's really risky. That creates risk when you put disinformation out there in that way," Pompeo said.

A known critic of China, Pompeo last month said China's ruling Communist Party posed a "substantial threat" to Americans' health and their way of life, blasting Beijing for engaging in the intentional "disinformation campaign" and trying to deflect from its handling of the coronavirus crisis.

The coronavirus death toll in the United States crossed 25,000 on Tuesday with the country witnessing the highest single-day tally of 2,129.

As of Tuesday, more than 6,05,000 Americans had tested positive for the novel coronavirus -- more than the other top three countries taken together -- according to Johns Hopkins University data.

Globally, 126,722 people have died and nearly two million people have been infected by the novel coronavirus, the data showed.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Health Minister Robin Swann pictured at the Agri-Food and Biosciences Institute on Tuesday. Photo by Kelvin Boyes / Press Eye.

Health Minister Robin Swann has said that Northern Ireland will be dealing with the coronavirus outbreak "well into 2021".

He said that now was not the time for the easing of lockdown restrictions, but acknowledged "difficult conversations" would have to take place about returning to normal life.

Mr Swann made the comments while addressing the Northern Ireland Assembly's Covid-19 Committee on Wednesday afternoon.

The Health Minister also said that the modelling indicated that the peak of the first wave of the pandemic, expected between April 6 and 20, would be "less severe than first feared".

As of Wednesday, 140 people have died in hospital as a result of Covid-19 in Northern Ireland, with 2,088 confirmed cases.

Mr Swann said that social distancing was having an impact and praised the public for sticking to the guidelines during the Easter holidays.

Expand Close A police officer cycles down a deserted Royal Avenue in Belfast on Easter Monday Photo by Kelvin Boyes / Press E / Facebook

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The Health Minister also confirmed that he had approved two decisions to activate Military Aid to Civil Authority (MACA).

He gave the go-ahead for the British Army to become involved in redistributing medical equipment between hospitals in Northern Ireland and to take part in planning for a temporary secondary Nightingale facility.

Mr Swann again acknowledged issues with the supply of PPE and said he was "rigorously pursuing every supply line both locally and elsewhere".

He said that the UK was working closely as part of the 4 Nations PPE Plan and admitted sending 250,000 gowns to England over the past two weeks as part of the sharing of PPE. Mr Swann said he was also exploring supply lines in the Irish Republic.

He promised a "thorough examination" of the flow of PPE to ensure staff get it when they need it.

Addressing testing, the Health Minister moved to clear up confusion around why testing appears lower than the 1,000 plus testing capacity currently in place.

He said this was because "it often takes more than one test to confirm a positive or negative diagnosis".

Mr Swann said he was committed to increasing the number of tests carried out daily in Northern Ireland and said a second test centre would open in Londonderry "imminently".

He said a working group had been set up to explore ways to increase testing with the ultimate aim of moving towards "surveillance of COVID-19 in the population to inform planning of services including surge capacity, and to estimate population immunity".

Expand Close DAERA Minister Edwin Poots and Health Minister Robin Swann pictured with Principal Scientific Officer Ken Lennon at the Agri-Food and Biosciences Institute. DAERA plans to test up to 1,000 samples a day in fight against COVID-19 Photo by Kelvin Boyes / Press E / Facebook

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Whatsapp DAERA Minister Edwin Poots and Health Minister Robin Swann pictured with Principal Scientific Officer Ken Lennon at the Agri-Food and Biosciences Institute. DAERA plans to test up to 1,000 samples a day in fight against COVID-19

Turning to Covid-19 outbreaks in care homes the Health Minister promised that care home residents and staff are being tested when they display symptoms.

"Let me be clear. Every single one of our residents in nursing and care homes matter just as much as every other citizen in our society," Mr Swann told the committee.

He said the number of Covid-19 deaths in Northern Ireland, in both hospital and community settings, would now be published once a week by the Northern Ireland Statistical and Research Agency.

Mr Swann said that many care home residents who die of the virus were already being included in the Public Health Agency's daily bulletins as they were transferred to hospital before passing away.

The Health Minister also expressed confidence in the Northern Ireland health service's ability to deal with the pandemic, outlining the current hospital provision.

This is no time for final verdicts to be delivered, favourable or critical. We are in this for the long haul Robin Swann

He revealed there are 143 adult Intensive Care Unit (ICU) beds available, with a further 12 paediatric beds.

As of Wednesday there are 49 Covid patients in ICU, with a further 38 non-Covid, leaving 56 spare ICU beds.

There are 197 ventilators, 3,820 geriatric and acute beds, with currently 603 Covid-19 related inpatients, including both confirmed and or suspected cases, and 1,345 non-covid patients in hospitals across Northern Ireland, meaning that, as it stands, there are almost 1,900 empty beds.

"If our modelling is accurate, this should be more than sufficient capacity to meet this surge," Mr Swann said.

He reiterated that, without a vaccine, Northern Ireland would have to prepare for a second wave of Covid-19 cases later in 2020.

Mr Swann said the Executive had reviewed the current lockdown measures and said it was not yet safe for them to be relaxed.

"The restrictions continue to be necessary if we are to continue to flatten the epidemic curve, manage the capacity of the health service and keep Covid-19 deaths to a minimum," the Health Minister said.

"There will be a further review which will inform how we progress and the position will be closely monitored, however now, as before, the message remains the same  please keep safe, stay home, and protect our NHS, as they are working to protect us."

Mr Swann also criticised those spreading false information around the coronavirus pandemic on social media.

"I would urge everyone to avoid speculation or rushing to judgement. Comparing our statistics and our actions  favourably or otherwise  with other countries is premature at best," he said.

"It is highly likely that this planet is going to be battling the coronavirus well into 2021 at least. The prospect of a second surge later this year must weigh heavily on all our minds.

"This is no time for final verdicts to be delivered, favourable or critical. We are in this for the long haul."
A fundraising committee for President Trumps re-election is using his renewed attacks on the Chinese governments handling of the coronavirus pandemic to mobilise donors, urging supporters in an email Tuesday to hold China accountable by contributing to his campaign.

The appeal reflects an increased effort by the Trump campaign and the Republican National Committee to use US-China relations as a campaign issue against presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden.

Mr Trumps intensifying criticism is a shift from his warmer approach following a late March phone call with Chinese President Xi Jinping, during which the two leaders pledged cooperation over the global outbreak. Mr Trump tweeted at the time that he had a very good conversation with Xi and that the two countries are working closely together. Much respect!.

But in recent days, Mr Trump has revived his criticisms of the Chinese government and global health leaders over the coronavirus outbreak, saying he will withhold US funding for the World Health Organisation, which he said was very, very China-centric, and re-upping the term Wuhan virus.

The Centres for Disease Control and Prevention, the World Health Organisation and civil rights organisations have discouraged the use of terms tying the novel coronavirus with a geographic location or ethnic group, saying the rhetoric could contribute to the rise in discrimination and violence against Asian Americans.

In a fundraising email on Tuesday, the Trump Make America Great Again Committee echoed the presidents heightened rhetoric against the Chinese government.

China has been lying and doing everything they can to cover up the spread of Covid-19 in their country. Its absolutely disgraceful and we cant stand by and do nothing, read the appeal.

Trump is reportedly taking issue with Joe Bidens good relationship with China (EPA)

President Trump has always been tough on China, but he cant hold them accountable on his own, it read. Thats why he is calling on YOU to stand with him and hold China accountable for their lies and deceptions during the Coronavirus pandemic.

Tuesdays email appeared to be the first instance of his campaign using an anti-China message to raise money.

Campaign officials said they are drawing attention to the US-China trade relations as an important issue in the general election, and intend to focus their attacks on Mr Bidens response to China over the coronavirus outbreak.

Joe Bidens cosiness with China will be an issue in the campaign, said Tim Murtaugh, spokesman for the Trump campaign. He has refused to call China an economic threat and said that President Trumps move to restrict travel from China over the coronavirus was xenophobic and reactionary. He also has refused to explain why his son Hunter got an enormous business deal from a Chinese state-owned bank while Biden was vice president. These will all be issues.

Couples are seen dancing in Wuhan as China continues to lift its strict lockdown lid (AFP) (AFP via Getty Images)

Hunter Bidens lawyer has disputed the assertion that the former vice presidents son financially benefited from the investment.

The Trump Make America Great Again Committee raises money for the Republican National Committee and the presidents re-election campaign, and primarily focuses on raising online low-dollar donations.

RNC spokeswoman Mandi Merritt said Tuesday that the presidents actions record on China poses a clear contrast between Mr Trump and Mr Biden to general-election voters.

President Trump has spent three years standing up to China in ways previous administrations never did, and that includes when Joe Biden was Vice President, Ms Merritt said. From enacting travel restrictions to highlighting the Chinese governments dishonesty on the origins of coronavirus, voters see President Trump is holding China accountable, and they are responding with their resources and support.

Previously, a Trump campaign email in mid-March criticised Beijing for pushing online conspiracy theories specifically intended to undermine the fact that the Wuhan coronavirus originated in China, such as alleging that the virus was genetically engineered by US military personnel.

In that March email, which did not ask for donations, the Trump campaign defended the presidents use of rhetoric linking the virus to the Chinese government and also attacked Mr Biden for not criticising China enough.

Mr Trump has raised more money for his re-election than any of his predecessors had at this point in their campaigns.

Recommended Trump suspends WHO funding as leaked UK report shows PPE shortages

Mr Trumps campaign, the RNC and their joint fundraising committees have so far raised more than $1bn, and entered April with more than $240m in their accounts, officials said.

Mr Trumps fundraising success has benefited from his avid base of online donors, who have consistently driven large sums to his re-election committees in response to email, text and other online appeals.

Mr Trumps re-election committees said they have raised more than $212 million in the first three months of the year, a massive sum that boosts the presidents cash lead as Mr Biden begins shifting his focus to the general election. Mr Biden has raised at least $121m so far.

The Washington Post
The Real Estate Institute of Western Australia (REIWA) is urging the state government to adopt policies that will provide rental assistance to landlords affected by the COVID-19 outbreak.

Damian Collins, president of REIWA, said while the guidelines provided by the Western Australia government are a big step to help the industry weather the economic shocks brought about by the outbreak, further help is needed to assist property owners who are struggling financially.

"Most other states have a rent assistance package in place  New South Wales announced a $440m package for residential and commercial tenants and owners. Western Australian tenants and property owners deserve a helping hand from the state government during this difficult time," Collins said.

The state governments of New South Wales and Queensland recently unveiled their respective relief package catered to both commercial and residential landlords and tenants. These packages are in the form of land tax deferrals for property owners and crisis payment for tenants.

For its part, the Western Australian government announced new laws, implementing a range of measures to minimise financial impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on tenants and landlords. The state's Residential Tenancies Bill 2020 will introduce a moratorium on eviction for six months and a prohibition on rent increases.

Collins said despite these initiatives, the policies provide no form of rental assistance that will help landlords whose finances are affected due to tenants not being able to pay rent.

"The government is expecting property owners to carry the burden, and while the debt is still payable by the tenant, in some cases, the property owner will never be able to recover the debt," he said.
Six new positive cases of COVID-



19 were reported in Telangana on Wednesday, taking the number of active cases to 514 in the state, the government said.

The number of total positive cases in the state mounted to 650, a media bulletin on COVID-19said.

Eight people were cured/discharged from hospitals on Wednesday, taking the number cumulatively to 118.

No fresh death occurred due to the virus and the number of people who succumbed to the infectious disease stood at 18.

According to the bulletin, virus containment activity is being carried out in 22 districts and 259 clustersin the state.

It said 94,514 households have been surveyed, covering a population of 1,13,192.

Chief Minister K Chandrasekhar Rao, who held a meeting with Health Minister E Rajender and officials, said the government was ready to conduct tests on any number of people and to offer treatment.

An official release quoted Rao as saying that the lockdown was being implemented 'well' in the state with people extending their cooperation.

He said lockdown in the present form would continue in the state till April 20 as per the guidelines given by the Centre.

Later, changes would be made as per the circumstances prevailing then, he said.

"People should continue their support in the days to come. As per the guidelines given by the Centre, lockdown in the state would continue till April 20, as it is. Later, based on the circumstances prevailing then, changes would be done," he said.

Before Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced extension of the lockdown till May 3, Rao had said it would continue till April 30.

He also said 259 containment centres have been identified in the state based on spread of infection and that stringent measures have been taken so that the virus does not spread.

Observing that there was no scarcity for personal protective equipment for medical personnel, he said the state was having a stock of 2.25 lakh kits.

In all, the state will have 10 lakh PPE kits, according to the release which also said adequate supply of N-95 masks, ventilators, other medical equipment woud be available.

Noting that 20,000 beds had already been kept ready for treatment of COVID-19 cases, Rao said the the government has made all arrangements even if the number rose to one lakh.

Asserting that the government has taken several measures so that no one in the state remains hungry, he said Rs 1,500 has been deposited in the bank accounts of the poor.

The programme to distribute 12 kg rice has almost been completed, he said.

The cash incentives announced by the state government for the sanitary workers, municipal and Gram Panchayat staff and the 10 per cent additional pay for the medical staff had reached them, Rao said.

Meanwhile, a report from Karimnagar said police registered a case against five people for alleged violation of lockdown regulations in the town on Wednesday.

According to Police Commissioner V.B.Kamalasan Reddy, the five had conducted a meeting of 70 people in violation of COVID-19 lockdown rules and distributed essential commodities pasting the stickers of Popular Front of India on them.

Congress and other opposition parties, at a meeting here, demanded that the Chief Minister convene an all-party meeting to discuss the coronavirus and lockdown situation in the state.

Besides Congress, the meeting was attended by leaders of TDP, CPI and Telangana Jana Samiti (TJS).

State Congress president N Uttam Kumar Reddy claimed that the free rice and Rs. 1,500 cash assistance had not reached all the beneficiaries even after 24 days.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Ontario Superior Court of Justice has given approval for Australian distributors Beyond International Limited (Beyond), to proceed with its $2.6m acquisition of non-scripted specialists TCB Media Rights from FTI Consulting Canada Inc.

The deal was struck via Kew Media Group administrators, FTI Consulting Canada.

UK-based TCBs portfolio includes Abandoned Engineering, Combat Ships, Egypts Unexplained Mysteries, and the recently announced Extreme Ice Machines and Hitlers Supercars.

Beyond Managing Director Mikael Borglund said: This acquisition further strengthens Beyonds business both domestically and internationally.

TCB Media Rights extensive catalogue of non-scripted factual programming is extremely complementary to ours, with many of the same customers worldwide and ongoing relationships with producers in the UK, USA, Canada and Australia.

Beyond Distribution and TCB Media Rights will continue to operate as full-service distribution companies for the foreseeable future, and I am looking forward to welcoming the TCB Media Rights team to the Beyond Group.

Kew Media was placed in receivership on Feb. 28.
(Newser)  A Florida inmate released from jail due to the coronavirus pandemic is accused of murdering somebody the next day. The Hillsborough County Sheriff's Office says 26-year-old Joseph Edward Williams, who was being held on drug charges including possession of heroin, was released under an emergency order freeing certain pretrial detainees who were believed to pose no threat to public safety, USA Today reports. Williams was allegedly involved in the shooting death of a man on March 20, the day after his release. He was arrested Monday and is now being held on $280,500 bond on charges including second-degree murder, possession of a firearm, and resisting an officer with violence.

story continues below

Authorities say Williams is the only inmate in the county known to have committed a crime after being freed under the emergency order. The sheriff's office says that at the time of Williams' release, he needed only to pay $250 in order to be freed on bond, the Tampa Bay Times reports. Hillsborough County Sheriff Chad Chronister says authorities around the country are struggling to balance public safety concerns with the need to protect inmates and deputies from COVID-19. "There is no question Joseph Williams took advantage of this health emergency to commit crimes while he was out of jail awaiting resolution of a low-level, non-violent offense," he says. (Read more Florida stories.)
On April 14, 2020, the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York entered final judgments by consent against a White Plains, New York penny stock financier and two associated companies. The defendants, Joseph Fiore, Berkshire Capital Management Company, Inc., and Eat at Joe's, Ltd. (n/k/a SPYR, Inc.), agreed to pay $3.5 million to settle the SEC's fraud and market manipulation charges.

The SEC's complaint, filed on June 18, 2018, alleged that between March 2013 and March 2014, Fiore manipulated the market for, and scalped, the stock of microcap issuer Plandai Biotechnology, Inc. According to the complaint, Fiore financed and directed a promotional campaign aimed at public investors that included recommendations to buy Plandai stock without disclosing that Fiore beneficially owned Plandai stock, and that he intended to sell and was selling into the public market millions of shares. The complaint further alleged that Fiore engaged in manipulative trading of Plandai stock through two companies he controlled, Berkshire and SPYR, made false and misleading statements to brokerage firms through which he traded Plandai stock, and failed to disclose his beneficial ownership of more than five percent of the outstanding shares of Plandai stock. In addition, the complaint alleged that SPYR failed to register as an investment company with the SEC.

Without admitting or denying the allegations in the complaint, defendants consented to the entry of final judgments that require Fiore, Berkshire, and SPYR jointly and severally to pay $2 million of disgorgement and prejudgment interest, with each defendant separately paying a $500,000 civil penalty. Additionally, Fiore, Berkshire, and SPYR agreed to be permanently enjoined from violating the antifraud, market manipulation, beneficial ownership reporting, and other provisions of the federal securities laws charged in the complaint. Fiore and Berkshire further agreed to be barred for five years from participating in any penny stock offering, and Fiore consented to a five-year bar from acting as an officer or director of any issuer that has a class of securities registered pursuant to Section 12 of the Exchange Act or that is required to file reports pursuant to Section 15(d) of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934.

The litigation was conducted by John Bowers, Paul Kisslinger, and Christian Schultz, with supervision from Stephan Schlegelmilch. The SEC's investigation was conducted by Drew Dorman, Jason Litow, and Kevin Gershfeld and was supervised by Yuri Zelinsky. The Division of Economic and Risk Analysis, the Division of Corporation Finance, the Division of Trading and Markets, and the Division of Investment Management assisted with the investigation. The SEC also appreciates the assistance of William Park of the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority.
One of the Democratic partys most revered progressives has said that allegations of sexual assault against her partys presidential nominee deserve to be discussed seriously.

Speaking during an online forum hosted by The Wing, which describes itself as a global community for the professional, civic, social, and economic advancement of women, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was asked about allegations of sexual assault made against Mr Biden by former staffer Tara Reade.

As reported by CBS, one of the questioners on The Wing raised her resentment that the Democratic candidate against Mr Trump had ended up being Mr Biden, whom she said has a really long history of being creepy to women.

Ms Ocasio-Cortez responded: What youre voicing is so legitimate and real. Thats why I find this kind of silencing of all dissent to be a form of gaslighting.

I think its legitimate to talk about these things. And if we want, if we again want to have integrity, you cant say, you know  both believe women, support all of this, until it inconveniences you, until it inconveniences us.

Speaking to CBS, Ms Reade said she was humbled and honoured that Ms Ocasio-Cortez had spoken up for her.

In the summer of 2019, Ms Reade was one of several women to accuse Mr Biden of a history of inappropriate touching and invasion of personal space. At the time, he said that while he apologised if he made anyone feel uncomfortable, he was not sorry for any of his intentions.

It was in the midst of the primary contest this spring that Ms Reade made a more serious and more specific allegation against Mr Biden, accusing him of pinning her against a wall and seriously assaulting her in the spring of 1993.

While the vice president has not addressed Ms Reades allegations himself, they have been vociferously denied by many in the Biden orbit, including both current and former staffers. Deputy campaign manager Kate Bedingfield told The New York Times that while Mr Biden supports womens right to have their allegations heard and taken seriously, Ms Reades claim did not stand up to that scrutiny.

Such claims should also be diligently reviewed by an independent press. What is clear about this claim: It is untrue. This absolutely did not happen, she said.

The Independent has requested a comment from Mr Biden.

Ms Ocasio-Cortez served as one of Bernie Sanderss highest-profile surrogates during the long Democratic primary, appearing at his rallies well into the contests competitive phase. She has yet to endorse Mr Biden, whom some of Mr Sanderss more ardent supporters are hardly keen on.

Indeed, the New York congresswomans stated priorities and principles do not make her an immediate match with the former vice president, who has been an establishment figure since the 1970s and served in an administration that many progressives regard as a disappointing centrist compromise.

In another interview, this one with The New York Times, Ms Ocasio-Cortez pointed out problems Mr Biden had to address to unify the party, and explained that as far as the partys left is concerned, coming together around a single nominee will demand hard work on all sides.

The whole process of coming together should be uncomfortable for everyone involved  thats how you know its working. And if Biden is only doing things hes comfortable with, then its not enough.

She also said she and Mr Biden have in fact never spoken  Never. Not that I know of, no.

However, she made plain in the same discussion that she will support the Democratic nominee to defeat Donald Trump in November.
Rajesh Asnani By

Express News Service

In Rajasthan, the Corona crisis has now spread to 25 of 33 districts in total and by Wednesday morning the total number of cases rose to 1046. The biggest worry is the state capital Jaipur which is now in the high-risk Red zone with 476 Covid-19 patients.

Over 400 of the cases are from the Ramganj area in Jaipurs Walled City. With the number of cases rising rapidly, many say Ramganj area is now a border-line case for Community Transmission.

While the number of patients increased by 23 on Wednesday, Jaipur has by now also seen a total of 6 deaths of Covid-19 patients. A 65-year old woman who suffered from Diabetes besides becoming Corona-positive, died in Ramganj on Wednesday.

Despite the super-success of the Bhilwara Model, in Jaipur, Ramganj area remains a huge headache for the Gehlot government. The administration is virtually tackling the hot-spot in Ramganj as a War Zone with several senior officials of the police, Health Department, Energy, SDRF and other agencies deputed in the area. Regular monitoring through Drone Cameras continues and barbed wires were used to seal off some areas on Tuesday. Two Companies of RAC and over 200 Home Guards are giving constant duty in the Curfew-bound Walled City area.

CM Ashok Gehlot has instructed all officials to treat the Corona crisis in Jaipur as a top priority and put in their best efforts to ensure that the Rajasthan capital becomes Corona-free at the earliest. Speaking to officials, CM Gehlot remarked, we must identify the maximum possible areas that can be used for Quarantine purposes and develop all basic facilities there. The JDA and Housing Board must ensure that Water -Electricity, Food and all basic needs of people in such areas are well taken care of. The 13 areas in the Walled City where most cases have emerged from should be a special focus of our efforts.

The Jaipur youngster from Ramganj area who had returned from Oman did not isolate himself between March 17 to 24 and ultimately his negligence led to the spread of the Corona-virus cases in the entire area. So far, 95 people who were family members, relatives or came in contact with this youth have been found to be amongst the Corona positive cases. About 2.6 lakh people of the walled city under tight scanner and as more people get tested, the number of Covid-19 cases in Jaipurs Walled City area could continue to rise.

A 4-point formula has now been evolved to tackle the Jaipur crisis which includes :
Globally, forests act as a large carbon sink, absorbing a substantial portion of the anthropogenic CO2 emissions. Whether mature forests will remain carbon sinks into the future is of critical importance for aspirations to limit climate warming to no more than 1.5 C above pre-industrial levels? Researchers at Western Sydney University's EucFACE (Eucalyptus Free Air CO2 Enrichment, see the photo) experiment have found new evidence of limitations in the capacity of mature forests to translate rising atmospheric CO2 concentrations into additional plant growth and carbon storage. The unique experiment was carried out in collaboration with many scientist over the world. The Head of the Centre of Excellence EcolChange Professor Ulo Niinemets and senior researcher Astrid Kannaste from the Estonian University of Life Sciences have contributed to data collection and data analysis of this study.

Carbon dioxide (CO2) is sometimes described as "food for plants" as it is the key ingredient in plant photosynthesis. Experiments in which single trees and young, rapidly growing forests have been exposed to elevated CO2 concentrations have shown that plants use the extra carbon acquired through photosynthesis to grow faster.

However, scientists have long wondered whether mature native forests would be able to take advantage of the extra photosynthesis, given that the trees also need nutrients from the soil to grow. This question is particularly relevant for Australia. In the first experiment of its kind applied to a mature native forest, Western Sydney University researchers exposed a 90-year old eucalypt woodland to elevated CO2-levels. "Just as we expected, the trees took in about 12% more carbon under the enriched CO2 conditions," said Distinguished Professor Belinda Medlyn. "However, the trees did not grow any faster, prompting the question 'where did the carbon go?'".

The researchers combined their measurements into a carbon budget that accounts for all the pathways of carbon into and out of the EucFACE forest ecosystem, through the trees, grasses, insects, soils and leaf litter. This carbon-tracking analysis showed that the extra carbon absorbed by the trees was quickly cycled through the soil and returned to the atmosphere, with around half the carbon being returned by the trees themselves, and half by fungi and bacteria in the soil. "The trees convert the absorbed carbon into sugars, but they can't use those sugars to grow more, because they don't have access to additional nutrients from the soil. Instead, they send the sugars below-ground where they 'feed' soil microbes", explained Professor Medlyn.

These findings have global implications: models used to project future climate change, and impacts of climate change on plants and ecosystems, currently assume that mature forests will continue to absorb carbon over and above their current levels, acting as carbon sinks. Professor Niinemets said: "What did we find? Increased uptake by the forest in elevated CO2, but not increased retention of this extra C. Instead, the extra C that was taken up was released back to the atmosphere. The future emissions could mean worse outcomes than we thought in terms of future climate, given this lack of response by nutrient-limited mature forests."

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The research is published in Nature: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2128-9
Furious families have today accused the Government of 'sacrificing' Britain's elderly in the fight against coronavirus by discharging COVID-19 patients into care homes and signing the 'death warrant' of the most vulnerable in society.

NHS hospitals have been ordered to drastically free up beds, meaning thousands of patients have been released, with scores of elderly Britons meeting the criteria sent to care homes dotted across the UK.

In a revolt against the 'dangerous' drive, some care homes have already refused to accept patients over coronavirus fears - not everyone is swabbed for the killer virus before they are discharged from hospital.

But one home in Essex was allegedly forced to accept an elderly COVID-19 patient 'against their wishes' before they were re-admitted to hospital the next day. The daughter of a 96-year-old resident accused Number 10 of 'recklessly exposing' others to the infection.

In Herefordshire, a dementia-stricken 78-year-old was discharged from hospital to a care home, without her family being told. She also had a Do Not Resuscitate (DNR) notice along with the orders not to send back to hospital if she caught coronavirus.

Demanding action from Downing Street, her daughter said: 'My mother has worked all her life and paid into the NHS they do not have the right to sign her death warrant because she's old and has dementia.'

Despite hospitals being told to free up space, it was revealed last night that London's Nightingale Hospital at the ExCel Centre sat almost empty with just 19 coronavirus patients treated over the Easter weekend.

It comes after care industry bosses yesterday suggested that two thirds of all homes across Britain have recorded coronavirus cases. Around 500,000 people are in care homes in the UK.

The Birchwood Residential Care Home, in Essex, was allegedly forced to accept an elderly COVID-19 patient 'against their wishes' before they were re-admitted to hospital the next day

Workers help prepare the ExCel London centre, which has been made into the temporary NHS Nightingale Hospital

Cyril Lawrence, 99,is now in hospital after falling ill at a care home

Carole Foster, 77, passed away last Wednesday at the Medway Maritime Hospital in Gillingham, Kent, just one day after being admitted

HIDDEN EPIDEMIC OF CORONAVIRUS IN CARE HOMES MAY HAVE COST 4,000 LIVES, EXPERTS WARN A 'hidden epidemic' of coronavirus in care homes may have cost 4,000 lives, experts warned last night. They believe deaths are being hugely under-reported because of a lack of testing. GPs are also sometimes reluctant to write COVID-19 on death certificates and figures from care homes are not included in the official daily toll. The latest report from the Office for National Statistics says the virus killed 217 care home residents in England and Wales up to April 3. But industry figures say the true count is much higher  potentially 4,000 since the outbreak started. Campaigners and MPs warned yesterday of an 'unfolding horror' that could end up with tens of thousands of forgotten victims. Ministers face urgent calls to get a grip and get virus tests for all staff and residents with symptoms, more protection gear and a Cabinet minister to deal with the crisis. Health Secretary Matt Hancock last night pledged action on testing and is also expected to outline a plan to address the crisis in a social care strategy. Care home operators complain they are being overlooked, with desperate short - ages of testing and staff safety equipment making it extremely hard to stop the disease ravaging their sites. Advertisement

Grim statistics released yesterday also showed the number of coronavirus deaths in care homes rose ten-fold by the start of April, up from just 20 for the week ending March 27.

But the true scale of the coronavirus catastrophe in Britain's care homes is a mystery because the figures released by the Office for National Statistics are almost two weeks out-of-date.

Number 10 is under mounting pressure to start recording all coronavirus deaths, wherever they happen, amid the accusations the true toll is being swept under the carpet.

The UK's care home regulator, the Care Quality Commission, announced it would step in to collect daily numbers of coronavirus deaths.

Helen Buniak revealed her 96-year-old mother's home was 'ordered' to admit a coronavirus patient from hospital 'against their wishes' on April 8.

She alleged that the Birchwood Residential Care Home, in Ilford, was told it was 'Government policy'.

The discharged patient only stayed in the facility for one day before they were re-admitted to hospital, Ms Buniak claimed.

She told MailOnline: 'How shocking and completely reckless to allow the virus to enter into a care home that was clear of the virus.

'However much the staff did their best to isolate the patient, there is still a serious risk that the virus could spread and cause multiple deaths.'

Ms Buniak said it seemed like the lives of older people in care homes are 'invisible' and argued: 'The Government is willing to sacrifice them.'

'The Government's so called policy to shield those most vulnerable clearly does not apply to the elderly in care homes.'

The Birchwood care home, which looks after around 40 elderly patients, is one of dozens to have limited routine visits from family members.

Another MailOnline reader revealed her elderly dementia-stricken mother was discharged to a care home, without checking with her.

Her mother, of Ross-on-Wye in Herefordshire, was stuck in hospital because health officials had yet to find a care package for her.

She told MailOnline: 'Due to the COVID-19 outbreak most care homes in Hereford with places refused to take her so she was there a while.

'The hospital were getting really annoyed because they wanted her out as soon as possible and the bed freed up.

'On Sunday (April 12) they discharged her to a care home in Worcestershire without consulting me or checking the home could meet her complex needs.'

The woman - who wanted to remain anonymous - added: 'She arrived with a DNR, which said do not transfer back to hospital if she contracts COVID-19.

'My mother has worked all her life and paid into the NHS they do not have the right to sign her death warrant because she's old and has dementia.

debbie Cholwill said her mother, who had dementia and was living in a care home, passed away on April 10 after testing positive for coronavirus

Chris Schmid told MailOnline his great aunt Isabel Francis, 94, passed away in Fieldway care home in Mitcham, South London on Friday, April 10

TRUE DEATH TOLL COULD BE 12,000 There are no official figures on the number of care home deaths so far, but some estimates put the toll as high as 12,000. The London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine says evidence from France, Belgium, Spain, Italy and Ire - land suggests between 4 2 per cent and 57 per cent of all Covid-19 deaths happen in care homes. There have been 1 2,000 deaths officially in the UK so far, according to Government figures which only cover hospitals. It could mean there have been another 1 2,000 in care homes. The Office for National Statistics puts the number at only 217 but its figures are 11 days out of date at a time when the death rate has risen dramatically. Care England, which represents independent care providers, and Work and Pensions Secretary Therese Coffey both estimate the toll to be at least 1,000. The Mail's own audit has found 951 deaths, but many care homes have declined to give figures. The Alzheimer's Society estimates there have been 2,500 deaths Advertisement

'If my mum gets sick with COVID-19 she will be left to die and the hospital will refuse to admit her because the DNR will be in her notes.'

NHS trusts are trying to discharge patients who do not need round-the-clock care to free up capacity for the expected surge in COVID-19 cases.

But care home managers are refusing to accept elderly people over fears they might bring the virus into the homes.

Under guidance issued by the government last week, testing is not mandatory for discharged patients.

David Steedman, the manager of Arlington House care home in Sussex, admitted he had five empty rooms but refused to take in people discharged from hospitals.

He said it would be 'madness' to expose residents and staff to the risk of infection, the Guardian reports.

Last week the Government promised every social care provider in the country would receive deliveries of personal protective equipment (PPE) including masks.

Mr Steedman told the paper: 'The personal protective equipment issued for staff is laughable.

'These masks, as well as having an expiry date of 2016, are the sort of flimsy, paper thing that dentists wear with gaps all round the edges.

'The instructions say they should be used if a resident has symptoms of the virus or actually has it. But these masks are completely useless in those situations.'

It comes after it was warned last night that a 'hidden epidemic' of coronavirus in care homes may have cost 4,000 lives.

Experts believe deaths are being hugely under-reported because of a lack of testing.

GPs are also sometimes reluctant to write COVID-19 on death certificates and figures from care homes are not included in the official daily toll.

The latest report from the Office for National Statistics says the virus killed 217 care home residents in England and Wales up to April 3.

But industry figures say the true count is much higher  potentially 4,000 since the outbreak started.

One leading statistician the numbers were being underestimated because GPs were unwilling to record covid on death certificates if they hadnt seen the patient.

Professor Sir David Spiegelhalter, who is based at the Faculty of Mathematics at Cambridge University, highlighted emergency laws which came into force last month which enable doctors to certify deaths without being in physical attendance.

Stanley Park care home in Stanley after thirteen residents died after displaying coronavirus (COVID-19) symptoms

Mark Gordon fears his mother Susan (above), a 76-year-old terminally-ill cancer patient, is too weak to fight off coronavirus after contracting the infection while at a Tayside care home. He claims staff did not use PPE when dealing with patients

George Hillhouse's 74-year-old mother, Helen Smith, died at Almond Court care home in Drumchapel, Glasgow, on Saturday

LONDON'S NEW MAKE-SHIFT HOSPITAL HAD JUST 19 PATIENTS OVER EASTER A hospital bed and respirator at ExCel London London's Nightingale Hospital sat almost empty with just 19 coronavirus patients treated over the Easter weekend. The 4,000 capacity flagship hospital was opened by Prince Charles via video link almost two weeks ago and is designed to handle a large surge in coronavirus cases. However data circulated to health chiefs and seen by the Health Service Journal (HSJ) shows some hospitals have been able to double their ICU capacity, to 1,555 beds, despite rising levels of infections. It also showed only 19 patients were receiving treatment over the Easter weekend at the facility located in the Docklands. Advertisement

Under the Governments Coronavirus Act, which was passed on March 25, doctors are allowed to carry out the process of death registration over-the-phone.

The new powers were intended to reduce the likelihood of GPs contracting the infection but Sir David said the upshot was that they were less inclined to record the virus as the cause of death.

Other organisations including the Alzheimers Society and Care England, the main representative body for social care organisations, said the death toll was being hugely underplayed by the lack of tests.

Currently only hospital patients and some frontline staff are being tested for the virus, although the Government hopes to roll this out to other key workers and the wider public if the capacity increases

Sir David said: Less than 10 per cent of deaths are being coded for covid deaths outside hospitals. Thats at home, or in care homes.

Under a new regulation, doctors do not actually have to see a patient to register their deaths now. They can do it over the phone with a description of their symptoms.

I could understand many doctors or GPs not being willing to put covid on a death certificate when theyve neither had a test, nor seen the patient.

Unfortunately, we dont seem to know yet how many of these extra deaths are being registered without even seeing the patient. That seems to me very important to have that piece of information.

Speaking to the BBCs World At One, he added: There are suggestions going around that doctors are kind of being encouraged not to put covid on the death certificate.

He did not explain who was pressuring doctors not to report the virus on the death certificates or why.

But medical professionals are urged not to record an illness as cause of death unless they are very sure.

Nick Stripe, head of the health analysis and life events division at the Office for National Statistics said: It could be that the doctor certifying the death, to the best of their knowledge, is not sure enough that there is possibly covid involved to put it on the death certificate.

CARE HOMES REFUSING TO ACCEPT DISCHARGED PATIENTS OVER FEARS THEY'LL BRING VIRUS WITH THEM NHS trusts are trying to discharge patients who do not need round-the-clock care to free up capacity for the expected surge in COVID-19 cases. But care home managers are refusing to accept elderly people over fears they might bring the virus into the homes. Under guidance issued by the government last week, testing is not mandatory for discharged patients. David Steedman, the manager of Arlington House care home in Sussex, admitted he had five empty rooms but refused to take in people discharged from hospitals. He said it would be 'madness' to expose residents and staff to the risk of infection, the Guardian reports. Last week the Government promised every social care provider in the country would receive deliveries of personal protective equipment (PPE) including masks. Mr Steedman told the paper: 'The personal protective equipment issued for staff is laughable. 'These masks, as well as having an expiry date of 2016, are the sort of flimsy, paper thing that dentists wear with gaps all round the edges. 'The instructions say they should be used if a resident has symptoms of the virus or actually has it. But these masks are completely useless in those situations.' Advertisement

Its dependent of the doctor, understanding the patients background and recent symptoms in terms of what in their medical opinion they put on the death certificate.

Research by the London School of Economics over the weekend suggested that about half of coronavirus deaths in Europe were occurring in care homes.

In Belgium the figure was estimated to be 42 per cent, rising to 53 per cent in Italy and 57 per cent in Spain.

Caroline Abrahams, charity director at Age UK, said the official figures were airbrushing older people out like they didnt matter.

She added: Any suggestion that these spiralling care home deaths are somehow inevitable would be utterly wrong, sounding suspiciously like an excuse for failings of national policy and practice.

Christina McAnea, assistant general secretary of Unison which represents many care home staff said: These figures are just the tip of the iceberg.

A comprehensive programme of testing of staff and the people they look after should start at once.

Without daily updates on the number of people dying in residential care and their own homes, its impossible to track the spread of the virus. Hospital deaths are only part of the picture.

Campaigners and MPs warned yesterday of an 'unfolding horror' that could end up with tens of thousands of forgotten victims.

Ministers face urgent calls to get a grip and get virus tests for all staff and residents with symptoms, more protection gear and a Cabinet minister to deal with the crisis.

Health Secretary Matt Hancock last night pledged action on testing and is also expected to outline a plan to address the crisis in a social care strategy.

Care home operators complain they are being overlooked, with desperate short - ages of testing and staff safety equipment making it extremely hard to stop the disease ravaging their sites.

Care minister Helen Whately was blasted today for sniggering in a car crash TV interview about the 'hidden epidemic' of coronavirus in care homes.

She was taken to task by Piers Morgan on Good Morning Britain as he grilled her over a Mail exclusive that deaths in care facilities are being hugely under-reported.

Piers (left) slammed the minister (right) for laughing during the interview as he asked about care home deaths

She said her laughter was a reaction to him showing her the front page of the newspaper, when she was unable to see him due to not having a screen visible showing the GMB host.

Avice Howarth's mother, who was living in a care home. passed away on April 10

Jane Rudge's mother is a resident at Hopwood Court care home in Alvechurch, Worcestershire. The 94-year-old is now ill, with suspected COVID-19

NHS ORDERED TO FREE UP 30,000 BEDS BY CANCELLING OPERATIONS AND REMOVING THOUSANDS OF INPATIENTS The NHS has been ordered to free up 30,000 beds to make room for an expected surge in coronavirus cases. A letter sent to trusts by NHS chief executive Sir Simon Stevens has called on hospitals to postpone all non-urgent planned operations from today until at least three months. This will free up between 12-15,000 beds, according to the letter seen by the Health Service Journal (HSJ). It will mean thousands of patients will miss out on knee and hip replacements. Organ donors will not be able to donate until at least summer. Trusts are also being asked to discharge all inpatients who are 'medically fit to leave', which could free up another 15,000 beds. Bulk-buying beds from independent providers and using community hospital beds could see up to 10,000 additional beds for COVID-19 patients, the letter claims. NHS bosses also told trusts to free up their private patient unit beds to create extra capacity. The move could see hospitals lose millions of pounds of income. More than 1,000 beds within the NHS are available for private patients, according to think tank the Centre for Health and the Public Interest, with income of around 600m a year. Advertisement

Mrs Whately, 43, MP for Faversham and Mid Kent, insisted that the Government has been working hard to tackle the crisis.

But Piers insisted she answer questions about deaths in care homes, telling her he expected her to be working hard.

He asked: 'Is it true that 4,000 people have died in care home? Yes or no?'

The Social Care Minister then thanked him for acknowledging what the government is doing and said the work was 'really important'.

Piers interrupted to say tell her that it was more important that 4,000 people have died, only for the Minister to start laughing.

The host said: 'Why are you laughing? What do you find funny about this?'

She said: 'I don't think it's funny in the slightest.'

He responded: 'Well why do you keep laughing then?'

'I'm not laughing at all,' she said.

Piers replied: 'I literally just asked you is it true that 4,000 elderly people have died in hosp and all you can do is laugh what's the matter with you?'

As she continued to insist she wasn't laughing and asked Piers not to suggest she had been, he said: 'We literally just saw you.'

But she said her laughter was a reaction to him showing her the front page of the newspaper, when she was unable to see him due to not having a screen visible showing the GMB host.

Meanwhile, the NHS has been ordered to free up 30,000 beds to make room for an expected surge in coronavirus cases.

A letter sent to trusts by NHS chief executive Sir Simon Stevens has called on hospitals to postpone all non-urgent planned operations from today until at least three months.

This will free up between 12-15,000 beds, according to the letter seen by the Health Service Journal (HSJ).

Trusts are also being asked to discharge all inpatients, many of whom are elderly, if they are 'medically fit to leave'.

This could free up another 15,000 beds, NHSE says.

Bulk-buying beds from independent providers and using community hospital beds could see up to 10,000 additional beds for COVID-19 patients, the letter claims.

But despite the scramble to free up hospital beds, it was revealed last night that thousands lay unused at London's Nightingale Hospital at the ExCel Centre.

The 4,000-capacity flagship hospital sat almost empty with just 19 coronavirus patients treated over the Easter weekend.

Data circulated to health chiefs and seen by the HSJ shows some hospitals have been able to double their ICU capacity, to 1,555 beds, despite rising levels of infections.

It also showed only 19 patients were receiving treatment over the Easter weekend at the facility located in the Docklands.

It emerged yesterday that GPs voted to stop visiting care homes just two months before the coronavirus pandemic hit the UK, amid claims the elderly are being left to die.

Debbie Cholwill said her mother (pictured) passed away on April 10. On Facebook, she wrote: 'It is with deep sadness that I am putting this message on sadly after six years of my mum being in a care home with dementia she sadly passed away last night, after testing positive for Coronavirus'

Something funny, Care Minister? Moment grinning MP Helen Whately LAUGHS as Piers Morgan confronts her over 4,000 coronavirus care home deaths Care minister Helen Whately was blasted today for sniggering in a car crash TV interview as it was revealed a 'hidden epidemic' of coronavirus in nursing and old-people's homes may have cost 4,000 lives. She was taken to task by Piers Morgan on Good Morning Britain as he grilled her over an exclusive report in the Daily Mail that deaths in care facilities are being hugely under-reported because of a lack of testing. Mrs Whately, 43, the MP for Faversham and Mid Kent, was sent out to face the media this morning as anger and questions increased over the vulnerability of care home residents amid a lack of testing and personal protective equipment (PPE) for staff. Appearing on GMB she insisted that the Government has been working hard to tackle the crisis, but Piers insisted she answer questions about deaths in care homes, telling her he expected her to be working hard. He asked: 'Is it true that 4,000 people have died in care home? Yes or no?' Advertisement

Home visits have been a cornerstone of general practice for decades  and 10,000 are carried out across England each day.

But in November regional health bosses voted 54 per cent in favour of scrapping a rule in GP contracts which say they must take call-outs when a patient is too ill to make it to hospital.

The controversial move was proposed because visiting the elderly took used valuable time - but campaigners said the decision would be disastrous for the housebound, vulnerable, elderly and dying.

Now, as the coronavirus sweeps across residential care homes, GPs have been labelled 'ageist' for reducing their visits.

Despite the vote to scrap home visits, NHS England guidance due to come in September 2020 will require GPs to visit care homes at least every fortnight.

Professor Martin Marshall, chair of the Royal College of GPs, said that family doctors would keep face-to-face visits to a 'minimum' - including to care homes, saying it would keep residents and staff safe.

The British Medical Association - the UK's largest union for doctors - argued that healthcare workers remain 'absolutely committed to their patients'.

But Liz Kendall, Labour's Shadow Minister for Social Care, argued there should be no changes to how the elderly are treated despite the pandemic.

She said: 'It's vital that people in care homes continue to receive the same standard of medical attention and care that they would before this pandemic, and that includes being transferred to hospital if they need to be there.'

Sir David Behan, non-executive chairman of HC-One, revealed 311 residents and one member of staff have died in its homes as a result of suspected COVID-19.

Elaine Shirt had to put her 'lovely' father Cyril Lawrence, 99, into respite in a care home after her mother was taken ill recently and went into hospital. Pictured, Mr Lawrence (front row, third from left) with Stan Mortensen (front row, sixth from left) at Blackpool in 1939

BOSS OF UK'S LARGEST CARE HOME CLAIMS TWO-THIRDS OF HOMES HAVE HAD CORONAVIRUS Sir David Behan, non-executive chairman of HC-One, revealed 311 residents and one member of staff have died in its homes as a result of suspected COVID-19. And he told BBC Radio 4's Today programme that 2,400 cases of either suspected or confirmed coronavirus have been recorded in 232 of its 330 homes. He also agreed the two-thirds figure was a more 'realistic picture' for the true size of the crisis across the UK. Speaking on Radio 4 this morning, Sir David - a former chair of the Care Quality Commission (CQC) - said: 'This terrible virus does target older people and people with underlying conditions. 'What that means is some of the frailest elderly people we've got in our society are in care homes and therefore those people are at increased risk.' He added that HC-One, which operates 330 care homes in Britain, had 2,407 cases of suspected or confirmed coronavirus. Sir David said: 'There have been 311 residents who have died as a result of suspected COVID-19. Over the weekend we've lost one member of staff. 'COVID-19 deaths are representative of just about a third of all deaths we've had over the last three weeks.' Britain's known care home death toll is now at least 275, but industry experts warned the true figure is likely to already be in the thousands. Advertisement

And he told BBC Radio 4's Today programme that 2,400 cases of either suspected or confirmed coronavirus have been recorded in 232 of its 330 homes.

He also agreed the two-thirds figure was a more 'realistic picture' for the true size of the crisis across the UK.

Speaking on Radio 4 this morning, Sir David - a former chair of the Care Quality Commission (CQC) - said: 'This terrible virus does target older people and people with underlying conditions.

'What that means is some of the frailest elderly people we've got in our society are in care homes and therefore those people are at increased risk.'

He added that HC-One, which operates 330 care homes in Britain, had 2,407 cases of suspected or confirmed coronavirus.

Older people are known to be more likely to die if they catch COVID-19 - more than half of the UK's 10,261 deaths recorded by the NHS have been among people over 80. Almost all victims (92 per cent) have been older than 60.

Sir David said: 'There have been 311 residents who have died as a result of suspected COVID-19. Over the weekend we've lost one member of staff.

'COVID-19 deaths are representative of just about a third of all deaths we've had over the last three weeks.'

Britain's known care home death toll is now at least 275, but industry experts warned the true figure is likely to already be in the thousands.

Data from Italy, Spain and France shows between 42 and 57 per cent of all coronavirus deaths have been in care homes - combined, those countries have had more than 53,000 fatalities.

London School of Economics researchers found the most robust evidence was from Ireland, where 54 per cent of fatalities have occurred in homes.

One expert said the findings 'clearly show the lack of focus on the elderly' and said that Britain's most vulnerable deserve better than to be 'ignored and forgotten'.

Last week Professor Whitty said that just over nine per cent of care homes had cases of COVID-19.

At the Downing Street briefing last night, he revealed the figure had jumped to around 13.5 per cent - statistically a jump of 50 per cent in a week.

Revealing the scale of Britain's crisis, he added there have been COVID-19 outbreaks in 92 care homes in the last 24 hours. There are 17,000 homes in England.

Heartbreaking reports from the front line: Amid fears the number of coronavirus deaths in care homes is much higher than official statistics suggest, relatives of four victims reveal the agony of their loss

by Daniel Martin, Policy Editor for the Daily Mail

Care home nurse Elsie Sazuze 'lost her life doing the job she loved', a friend said yesterday.

The 44-year-old self-isolated after showing symptoms of coronavirus but had to be taken to hospital and put on a ventilator as her condition deteriorated.

The married mother-of-two, pictured, died earlier this month at the Good Hope Hospital in Sutton Coldfield, Birmingham.

Her husband Kenneth, 45, said she had understood the risks of continuing her job after the coronavirus outbreak began but had wanted to carry on working.

Mrs Sazuze, who was originally from Malawi in Africa, trained and worked at New Cross Hospital in Wolverhampton before starting work at a care home in Cannock, Staffordshire.

Care home nurse Elsie Sazuze 'lost her life doing the job she loved', a friend said yesterday

Mr Sazuze, who is training to be a nurse, said he was not allowed to see his wife of 24 years after she was admitted to hospital.

But she called him just before she was put on the ventilator. 'She started telling me, 'Ken, if I don't come back, be strong, I love you, be strong for the kids',' he told the BBC.

'I was like, 'no, no, no, don't tell me that. I don't want you to start telling me that in a negative way... we will be all right.'

'She said, 'I'm just telling you in case'.'

She understood the risks of working on the front line but was happy to help people, he added.

Family friend William Fungatira said: 'Elsie was a naturally quiet person but very caring, friendly, cheerful and resilient.

'She had a passion to always help others. She was dedicated to helping people. It's a great loss to all of us who knew her and, indeed, to the wider community because she lost her life doing the job she loved.'

It's been a harrowing and lonely battle with no help

The manager of three care homes where 11 residents have died from Covid-19 has said she is fighting a 'harrowing and lonely' battle against the virus.

Nicola Richards, 46, pictured right, who runs Palms Row Healthcare, said she has been 'pulled apart' by the illness, which is tearing through her facilities.

A quarter of the Sheffield homes' 200 residents are infected, 30 staff have also tested positive and one nurse is in intensive care.

'It's another one and another one and another one', she said. 'I'm not getting to sleep. I've not switched off. I can't describe the stress.'

Nicola Richards, 46, who runs Palms Row Healthcare, said she has been 'pulled apart' by the illness, which is tearing through her facilities

Mrs Richards said the mental health of her residents is deteriorating because they have to be kept in their rooms and can't receive visitors.

'How do you explain to elderly residents that their wife or daughter isn't coming to see them today? I have residents crying because they can't see their loved ones.

'If we've got residents who are dying we've been told people can't come and see them  only one visitor is allowed. It is soul-destroying.

'They're at the end of life and seeing workers in masks  it's just so clinical.'

The mother-of-two added: 'I'm trying to keep staff morale but it's really tough ...a lonely journey. I feel like I've had no support from the authorities. We have only had one PPE delivery. The lack of awareness has been something else.

'Our elderly have been forgotten. It's like we're the bottom of the pecking order. I've got to hope lessons are learnt. It's just been so dark.'

Staff had begged the public to give masks

An 86-year-old great-grandfather died at a care home where managers had reported a shortage of face masks.

Reg Amison passed away at the Bradwell Hall nursing home last month, after testing positive for the coronavirus.

Days earlier the home in Newcastle-under-Lyme, Staffordshire, had appealed for donations of face masks from the public because its stocks were low and suppliers were unable to confirm delivery dates.

At least one member of staff has tested positive for the coronavirus and several others have gone into self-isolation.

Reg Amison passed away at the Bradwell Hall nursing home last month, after testing positive for the coronavirus

Mr Amison's son Robert, 58, called on the Government to improve access to protective equipment and virus testing for care home workers.

He told the Daily Mail: 'The staff had almost no equipment to stop the disease spreading.

'I'm not blaming the home, they looked after my dad really, really well. But the Government should be ramping up testing, and frontline nurses and carers should get tested first.'

Mr Amison said it was 'heart-breaking' that he and his mother Dorothy, 83, (pictured with Reg) had not been able to visit his father before his death.

He said: 'It's one of the hardest things, to be told your dad is dying but you can't go and sit with him and hold his hand. It broke our hearts not to be there.'

Bradwell Hall confirmed that one staff member had tested positive for the illness and was recovering at home, and others are self-isolating.

Residents who showed symptoms of Covid-19 were being kept isolated in their rooms and 'barrier-nursed' in line with national guidance, meaning staff must wear protective equipment, the home said.

Therapist died in hospital where she used to work

Retired NHS carer Dianne Harvey died in the hospital where she used to work, her family said.

Mrs Harvey, 77, lived in the same care home as Reg Amison, and her family suspect that both of the pensioners caught coronavirus there.

Mrs Harvey, pictured with her late husband Peter, was a retired NHS occupational therapist and had lived in Bradwell Hall for four years after she developed dementia.

Mrs Harvey, pictured with her late husband Peter, was a retired NHS occupational therapist and had lived in Bradwell Hall for four years after she developed dementia

The former Sunday School teacher and Scout leader was taken to the Royal Stoke University Hospital in Staffordshire after she became seriously ill with coronavirus. She failed to recover and died there.

Mrs Harvey had two sons, Paul and Roger, with her husband who was an ambulance driver.

Paul, 51, said: 'She loved to help out in the local community every way she could.'

He added: 'She was so selfless  always putting others above herself.'
ANN ARBOR, MI  Once Hans Masing got the green light from his employer, the decision to shift his focus away from work to deliver personal protection equipment to health care workers with his personal airplane was a no-brainer.

Spring is normally an ideal time for pilots to get out and fly, Masing said. So, when the Ann Arbor resident heard about a local need to deliver equipment to more distant locales, Masing enlisted his services with Operation Face Shield. The group gathers locally made equipment for delivery to those on the front lines of the fight against COVID-19.

Yeah, I have an airplane thats kind of fancy - it's shiny, it's interesting, Masing said. But to me, the real benefit is just in bringing folks together for a common purpose. And that's something that I think we could do more of.

I think it's a really beautiful thing to see people come together, especially considering the division we have right now nationally, with politics the way they are. I hate all the metaphors of this being warfare, but they're not completely incorrect. We need to do what we can when we're trying to solve a problem as a society and if everyone just contributes a little bit, we can get a lot done.

Masings 1968 Mooney M20F aircraft can normally seat three adults and some luggage, he said. Flying solo, the extra space allows him to fit up to 1,000 face shields for delivery.

Masings role in flying for Operation Face Shield has resulted in the delivery of 1,200 face shields over the past couple of weeks.

Almost immediately after learning about the grassroots effort, Masing was en route to Philadelphia to deliver 350 face shields to health care workers at Temple Universitys Health Center.

A couple of days later, he flew around 500 additional face shields to Warsaw and Fort Wayne, Indiana. Over the weekend, he made his latest flight to Marquette to deliver another 350 face shields.

While Masing normally uses the plane to fly to his place of employment at Veterans United Home Loans headquarters in Missouri, the company gave him its blessing to deliver the face shields amid the spread of the coronavirus.

Masing sees himself as one of the many people doing their small part to help out locally during a global pandemic.

I'm lucky and privileged to have this resource available, so I'm more than happy to offer it to help, he said. Using something that we do for fun and to keep ourselves busy to contribute to a greater good makes me feel pretty good about people in general.

During his drop-offs, Masing has encountered doctors and nurses who have gone above and beyond their job duties in combating COVID-19 to pick up the personal protection equipment.

Interactions are kept at a minimum to maintain proper social distancing, Masing said, but health care workers have expressed unanimous gratitude for the communitys efforts to manufacture equipment.

Ann Arbor group gathers hundreds of 3D-printed face shields for health care workers

Theres very minimal contact, with just an elbow bump or a distant high-five, he said. Theyve all said theyre incredibly grateful for the equipment because theyre doing what they can to stay safe and protect themselves and the other patient.

Kevin Leeser, who began organizing Operation Face Shield three weeks ago, said the community effort has resulted in the delivery of more than 10,000 3D-printed face shields.

I think as important as the volunteers have been, the donations that we have been receiving from all sorts of generous donors, Leeser said.

For more information on receiving protective shields from the group, or if you are interested in participating in printing the shields, visit the groups website or Facebook page.

READ MORE:

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$505K donated to Bronson Healthcare for supplies, meals and childcare
He's claimed to be staying safe at home during the coronavirus pandemic.

But it appeared that Love Island star Jack Fincham wasn't adhering to social distancing guidelines, as he enjoyed a bike ride with his pals on Wednesday.

The reality star, 28, appeared in snaps posted by a friend as they rode through the streets of London, with one user even commenting that they were not following the government advice.

What's going on? Jack Fincham, 28, appeared to flout social distancing guidelines on Wednesday as he enjoyed a bike ride during the coronavirus lockdown

In a brief respite from his bike ride, Jack was joined by his male pals as they posed in front of The Shard which one of them posted to Instagram.

His pal - under the handle @bill_london - captioned the post: 'London Town, Cant Beat It.'

One user noted that the group didn't seem to be social distancing, leading his pal to respond: 'we are wend, just one for a smudge quick x.'

However it seemed that at some points the group were not keeping to the government advised distance of two metres, as they appeared in videos posted to Instagram Stories.

MailOnline has contacted representatives for Jack Fincham for comment.

Out and about: The reality star enjoyed the ride with some of his male friends in London, and they appeared noticeably close together in a snap posted by his pal on Instagram

Surprised: One user noted that they appeared to be flouting social distancing, leading one of Jack's pals to claim they only posed for a brief snap

Just a day earlier Jack insisted he'd been staying at home in accordance with government advice, writing: 'Another day safe and healthy at home. A big thank you to our healthcare heroes. @dralexgeorge My boy you're smashing it mate!'

Last month Prime Minister Boris Johnson introduced strict social distancing guidelines, advising members of the public to keep at least two metres away from those outside of their household.

The nation is currently in its fourth week of lockdown to try and beat the coronavirus pandemic, with all non-essentials businesses, including pubs. clubs, theatres and schools, forced to close.

Very close: At some points the group of friends seemed to be riding extremely close together in a video posted to Jack's pal's Instagram Stories

Keep safe: Just a day earlier Jack had been urging his followers to stay indoors during the coronavirus pandemic

Earlier this year, Jack announced the surprise birth of his daughter, Blossom, with long-term friend Casey Ranger.

The reality star admitted their relationship is strictly platonic as they 'figure out' co-parenting their little girl, adding that he plans to focus all his time on being the best father he possibly can.

Since welcoming his daughter last month, Jack said he's embraced fatherhood and he's sworn off women so he can focus on dating Blossom.

The single star - who split from Dani Dyer 10 months ago - ruled out any possibility of a romance with his pal Casey Ranger in their first joint interview since welcoming their baby daughter.
Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, April 15) Southeast Asian leaders and their East Asian partners have backed the setting up of a COVID-19 response fund and a regional reserve of essential medical supplies to bolster their battle against the coronavirus pandemic.

In a joint statement issued after their virtual summit on Tuesday, leaders of the 10-member Association of Southeast Asian Nations together with counterparts from China, Japan and South Korea vowed to enhance cooperation in containing the spread of the pandemic and addressing its adverse impact.

"(We resolve to) endeavour to ensure adequate financing to contain the pandemic and protect our peoples, including through the proposed establishment of the COVID-19 ASEAN Response Fund for public health emergencies," the ASEAN Plus Three leaders said.

The proposed fund will be sourced from existing cooperation funds, the group said, together with possible "additional support" from ASEAN's external partners.

The leaders likewise said they will consider setting up a regional reserve of essential medical supplies for citizens to respond faster in times of health emergencies.

"(We) encourage tapping on existing regional emergency reserve facilities including the warehouses managed by the ASEAN Coordinating Centre for Humanitarian Assistance on disaster management, among others, further consider the utilisation of the ASEAN Plus Three Emergency Rice Reserve," the group added.

The ASEAN Plus Three leaders also encouraged the rollout of effective public communication, including the release of timely and accurate health and safety information.

They also urged a crackdown on "fake news" and misinformation, and also pushed for intensified efforts to reduce discrimination across the countries.

RELATED: ASEAN members strengthen cooperation amid COVID-19 pandemic

The running COVID-19 tally of John Hopkins University shows that the Philippines now has the highest number of confirmed infections in the region, with 5,453 cases as of publishing.

Globally, the viral disease has infected nearly two million individuals in 185 different countries including China, the ground zero of the outbreak.
As the war in Yemen enters its fifth year, faint hope for an end to the continuing carnage can be felt in large part because of the threat posed by the coronavirus pandemic.

On April 12, United Nations envoys to Syria, Iraq and Yemen, among others, called on warring parties in the region to end hostilities and allow access to medical facilities where needed.

We call on all parties to engage, in good faith and without preconditions, in negotiating immediate halts to ongoing hostilities, sustaining existing cease-fires, putting in place more durable and comprehensive cease-fires, and achieving longer-term resolutions to the persistent conflicts across the region, the envoys said in a joint statement.

Yemen recorded its first COVID-19 case April 10. The prospect of the coronavirus spreading is horrifying in a country where the health care system is already in horrific shape.

Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE), which have been battling the Houthi rebels in Yemen, reacted positively to the call. They announced a cease-fire to help prevent an outbreak, Col. Turki al-Malki, spokesman for the Saudi-UAE coalition, told the Saudi national news agency. The agency noted that the cease-fire gives the Houthis an opportunity to join UN-sponsored talks to end the conflict.

As Amberin Zaman reported, "Since September, the Saudis have been holding secret back-channel talks brokered by Oman after the Houthis said they would stop drone and missile attacks against Saudi Arabia."

The Houthis, officially known as Ansar Allah and backed by Iran, seek an end to the war, but on their terms  including an expanded regional profile that puts them on the bigger map of the Middle East and on the same level with the likes of Lebanons Hezbollah in the Iran-led Shiite Axis of Resistance.

In past months, Ansar has been pushing the boundaries of their activities toward the peripheries of their conventional role. Only two weeks after it claimed responsibility for the major Sept. 14 attack on the Aramco oil facilities in Saudi Arabia, the groups military spokesman openly threatened to attack Israeli posts in Eritrea.

On Nov. 9, the groups leader, Abdul-Malik al-Houthi, made his first blatant threat against Israel, warning, Our people will not hesitate to declare jihad against the Israeli enemy and strike the harshest strikes against sensitive targets in the enemy entity if they are involved in any folly against our people.

Al-Houthi has reiterated his position on several occasions since then, while Israeli officials warned before and after that Iran was seeking a means to hit their country from Yemen. Israel deals with the Houthis as part of the Axis of Resistance. Though there has been no direct Israeli-Houthi confrontation, the latter could strangle passage to the Red Sea through the Bab al-Mandeb strait or by launching missiles, placing Yemen in the middle of the regional equation.

Ansar Allahs regional role is clear, as they are one of the pillars of the resistance axis, Hussain Albukhaiti, a Sanaa-based journalist, told Al-Monitor. Albukhaiti believes the Aramco attack heralded a new status for the Houthis and their affiliated Yemeni military establishment.

And as crises around the region intertwine, the Houthis have offered a rare prisoner exchange in which they would set free a Saudi pilot and some soldiers in return for Riyadh releasing a group of Hamas prisoners it has in custody. Al-Houthi made the offer March 26 in a televised speech.

The initiative wasnt coordinated with Hamas, Gaza-based political analyst Hamza Abu Shanab told Al-Monitor, though Hamas has tried unsuccessfully to secure the prisoners release.

Journalist Albukhaiti also stressed that the move was not coordinated, yet he elaborated on the pretexts behind the initiative. The Hamas prisoners in Saudi Arabia have been in custody for at least a year, so why broach a deal now and not before?

Ansar Allah wanted to give some time for other Arab countries to intervene, he said, adding that the offer also came a few months after the Houthis gained leverage when they downed a Saudi fighter jet and recovered two Saudi pilots without confirming whether they were alive. This is uncovering a big secret. The pilots were a precious catch. The group said its going to release one of them, and that means at least one Saudi pilot is still alive.

According to a report by Palestinian human rights group Shahed, there are around 50 Palestinians detained for security reasons by Saudi authorities. The report, issued in September, provides names, professions and testimonies of family members who mostly link the detentions to charity work aimed at raising funds for families of Palestinians killed by Israel. The oldest among the prisoners is Mohammad al-Khodari, 82, who had been the liaison between Hamas and Saudi Arabia for two decades.

Khodari was Hamas representative in Saudi Arabia. Hes well known to the authorities there, and he was for years the contact point between the two sides, explained Abu Shanab.

The swap wont be the first between Riyadh and Ansar Allah. Still, this initiative might prompt other parties to intervene to spare the Saudis the embarrassment [of appearing to succumb to pressure], though its possible that the Saudis might ignore the initiative and keep these people in their prisons.

Albukhaiti noted that the Saudis dont often inquire about prisoners of war and rarely do they act to get them back home.
Source: Xinhua| 2020-04-15 04:42:27|Editor: huaxia

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U.S. President Barack Obama and Vice President Joe Biden arrive for a press conference at the White House in Washington, the United States, July 1, 2015. (Xinhua/Yin Bogu)

Barack Obama's endorsement gives Joe Biden a boost for the upcoming matchup with sitting President Donald Trump. "Joe has all the qualities we need in a president right now," Obama said.

WASHINGTON, April 14 (Xinhua) -- Former U.S. President Barack Obama said on Tuesday that he's endorsing Joe Biden, his former deputy, for the White House, giving the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee a boost for an upcoming matchup with sitting President Donald Trump.

In a 12-minute video posted on Twitter, Obama stressed Biden's leadership and capability, as the United States is combating a coronavirus outbreak that has infected more than 590,000 people and killed over 25,000 in the nation.

"If there's one thing we've learned as a country from moments of great crisis, it's that the spirit of looking out for one another can't be restricted to our homes or our work places or our neighborhoods or houses of worship, it also has to be reflected in our national government," Obama said.

"The kind of leadership that's guided by knowledge and experience, honesty and humility, empathy and grace. That kind of leadership doesn't just belong in our state capitols and legislatures, it belongs in the White House," he said. "That's why I'm so proud to endorse Joe Biden for president of the United States."

Former U.S. Vice President Joe Biden takes selfie with supporters during a rally in Philadelphia May 18, 2019. (Xinhua/Liu Jie)

Biden became the Democratic Party's presumptive presidential nominee last week after his only rival, U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders, suspended his own bid. Sanders, who had campaigned on progressive policies, endorsed Biden, a moderate political veteran, on Monday.

Obama served as U.S. president from 2009 until 2017, with Biden as his deputy. The two have maintained a close friendship that has gone beyond their time in the White House, and the endorsement was not a surprise to many, though Obama stayed on the sidelines during the primary, which at one point featured over 20 Democratic hopefuls.

"Choosing Joe to be my vice president was one of the best decisions I ever made, and he became a close friend," Obama added. "And I believe Joe has all the qualities we need in a president right now."

Biden, retweeting the video, said that Obama's endorsement "means the world" to him.

"We're going to build on the progress we made together, and there's no one I'd rather have standing by my side," said the former U.S. vice president.

In Tuesday's video, Obama did not mention Trump, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, by name but took a shot at the administration's handling of the coronavirus pandemic.

"Pandemics have a way of cutting through a lot of noise and spin to remind us what is real and what matters," he said. "It's reminded us that good government matters, that facts and science matter, that the rule of law matters, that having leaders that are informed and honest, and seek to bring people together, rather than drive them apart, those kinds of leaders matter."

Brad Parscale, manager of Trump's re-election campaign, fired back with a statement, saying that "Biden is the only candidate left in the Democrat field, Obama has no other choice but to support him."

"Barack Obama spent much of the last five years urging Joe Biden not to run for president out of fear that he would embarrass himself," Parscale said. "Even Bernie Sanders beat him to it. Obama was right in the first place: Biden is a bad candidate who will embarrass himself and his party. President Trump will destroy him."

In this year's primary, Sanders finished strong in the early-voting states of Iowa, New Hampshire and Nevada, once elevating him as the field's prohibitive front-runner.

But the momentum stalled in South Carolina, where Biden revived his campaign with a resounding victory that kicked off his consecutive Super Tuesday wins, amassing an almost-insurmountable lead.

In his remarks on Tuesday, Obama spoke highly of Sanders and his campaign in attempt to appeal to the Democratic Party's progressive wing for a greater unity.

"Bernie is an American original, a man who has devoted his life to giving voice to people's hopes, dreams and frustration," Obama said. "He and I haven't always agreed on everything, but we've always shared the conviction that we have to make America a fairer, more just and equitable society."

"The energy and enthusiasm he's inspired, especially in young people, will be critical in moving America in a direction of progress and hope, because for the second time in 12 years, we'll have the incredible task of rebuilding our economy, and to meet the moment the Democratic Party will have to be bold," he added.

Primaries of the 2020 U.S. presidential race have not finished, as many states have delayed their voting due to the coronavirus pandemic, despite a Biden-Trump matchup is poised to take place.

The Democratic National Committee has postponed the party's presidential nominating convention in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, to Aug. 17, the week before the Republican Party's convention, scheduled for Aug. 24 to 27 in Charlotte, North Carolina. The 2020 U.S. presidential election is scheduled for Tuesday, Nov. 3. 
The corona virus pandemic has sickened nearly 2 million people, killed over 100,000 and wrought economic ruin around the world within the space of a few months. It is a global calamity such as humankind has not witnessed since the Second World War. It is also an opportunity and an imperative for the United Nations to bring countries and peoples together, not only to beat back this scourge, but also to build a better world in the process.

This may sound delusional at a time when the world seems to be going down the path of every nation for itself, with countries turning their backs on one another and even competing for scarce medical supplies. The leader of the most powerful of them all, the United States, is openly blaming China for the pandemic and has suspended funding to the World Health Organization (WHO) when it is most needed.

Authoritarian leaders around the world are also taking advantage of the pandemic to restrict citizens rights and freedoms and concentrate power in their own hands.

The pandemic has laid bare the gross inequalities and injustices of a world in which nearly one in two people lives on less than $5.50 a day and half have no access to essential health services, while the richest 1% monopolizes twice as much wealth as 6.9 billion people.

the virus that supposedly does not discriminate

In New York, the city with the greatest number of billionaires in the world, the virus that supposedly does not discriminate has been killing black and Hispanic people at a disproportionately high rate. Many of them work in jobs that will not allow them to stay home and do not have health insurance. Those who are undocumented immigrants are often reluctant to seek health services for fear of being deported.

In the poor neighborhoods of the city of Guayaquil in Ecuador, people die on the streets and the bodies of those who have died in their homes go uncollected, with underfunded public hospitals and funeral services overwhelmed. It is a tragedy heartbreaking for me to witness, having learned to love this country and its warm-hearted people while working there for UNICEF many years ago.

Many African countries are facing the pandemic with even more disastrously inadequate health systems, while also struggling with widespread poverty.

The poor and marginalized of the world are and will continue to be the hardest hit by the pandemic. The virus may not discriminate  but we human beings do.

humanity is facing a common challenge that must be taken on together

Yet this calamity has also led to some signs of hope that this injustice can be corrected. One is a shared awareness  if not among all, hopefully many  that all of humanity is facing a common challenge that must be taken on together. And unlike climate change, when you see daily images of hospitals overflowing, health workers imploring for help, families being robbed of loved ones by the disease in different parts of the world, deniers cannot easily wave this one away.

With this awareness have also arisen empathy and solidarity, both within and across national borders. As a Japanese citizen, it has been gratifying to see how the crisis appears to have brought China and Japan closer together as the two countries, both the governments and ordinary citizens, have sought to support one another in fighting the pandemic. Local communities around the world have also come together to help the elderly and other vulnerable groups with their daily necessities. Messages of gratitude abound in social media, not only to health workers but to supermarket workers, garbage collectors, bus drivers, postal workers and other members of society we had hitherto not bothered to recognize.

The pandemic is also helping us to realize how central to our lives are the bonds we form with one another and to be part of a community. At the same time, it has opened the possibility for expanding that community beyond our immediate families and friends, even our countries, by showing us how people all around the world are battling the same enemy. The pandemic is letting us know that we all have the same capacity for pain and grief, for courage and generosity.

But our feelings of sympathy and good will toward others  both near and far  need to be translated into a recognition of shared rights and freedoms, as well as a shared responsibility to protect those rights and freedoms. And that recognition must be formalized in legal and policy instruments that will outlast our sentiments.

The United Nations must assume the leadership to make this happen. The UN has recently issued a report on the devastating social and economic impact of the Covid-19 pandemic. It calls for countries to work together toward a coordinated health response, as well as concrete measures aimed at building more inclusive and sustainable economies. The Secretary-General has also called for a global cease fire.

It is often pointed out that without the support of its members states, and particularly of the great powers that hold veto rights in the Security Council, the Secretary-General and the staff of the UN have no decision-making power. But they do have a unique moral authority  the legitimacy that comes from representing an organization made up of 193 member states, and hence speaking for the world.

I worked in the UN System for 35 years. Over those years, I saw how the UN, when it exercised this legitimacy with intelligence, determination and perseverance, succeeded in swaying nations toward greater caring for their citizens, particularly the most vulnerable, greater recognition of universal rights and freedoms, and greater accountability for their actions

But the leaders of the UN must fully assume and exercise their moral authority in order to make a difference. Otherwise, this idea that the UN has no power becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. That too has happened, when the UN has chosen to stay passive in the face of injustices and atrocities.

A recent article in The Guardian about the role of the WHO in pandemics, in explaining its success with the SARS epidemic, points out that under the then Director-General, Gro Harlem Brundtland, WHO had been willing to wield authority that it had, in a sense, created simply by speaking it into existence.

The UN must do the same today. And in doing so, it must reach out not only to the worlds political leaders but also to us, the ordinary citizens of the world. It needs to urge us to go beyond merely surviving this calamity, to aspire to more. The UN needs to call on us to exercise responsible and caring citizenship toward building more just and inclusive societies and a more peaceful and collaborative international community, including demanding that our leaders take action toward that goal.

The UN showed that it was capable of this kind of outreach when it mobilized citizen participation in the formulation of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development  a process in which over 5 million people around the world participated. The UN made a special effort to hear from people normally excluded from decision making  the poor, the ethnic and cultural minorities, migrants, women, LGBT people and others. The resulting agenda, approved by all UN member states in 2015, was far from perfect. But it did signify a real shift toward a more just, more sustainable and more caring vision of development.

 the UN will have to build and mobilize partnerships with those that share this vision to push for real change

Only now, the United Nations will have to do more and better, and call on all of us to do the same  to build and mobilize partnerships with those that share this vision to push for real change, to coax and badger those who are reluctant or indifferent, including the powerful who do not like to be questioned, to stand up and speak out for the excluded and invisible.

I think the UN will find that there is a longing for such a collective effort among people around the world at this moment. A longing to do more than just hunker down to wait for the storm to pass. A longing for purpose.
The US government will allow applicants for H-1B visas to continue in the country, helping thousands of Indian professionals stranded due to the coronavirus pandemic.

The H-1B visa is a non-immigrant document that allows US companies to employ foreign workers in specialty occupations that require theoretical or technical expertise. The technology companies depend on it to hire tens of thousands of employees each year from countries like India and China.

Indians are the biggest beneficiaries of the H-1B visa programme, according to the US Citizen and Immigration Services (USCIS).

The US Department of Homeland Security (DHS), in a new notification, has said it recognises that there are immigration-related challenges as a direct result of the coronavirus pandemic.

The announcement comes at a time when countries around the world have closed their borders and all international passenger flights have been suspended globally.

The travel restrictions have left a number of H-1B visa holders stranded in the US with their visa permits soon to expire. However, the DHS will shortly start accepting applications for the extension of expiring visas.

"We recognise that non-immigrants may unexpectedly remain in the United States beyond their authorised period of stay due to COVID-19," the DHS said.

"We continue to carefully analyse these issues and to leverage our resources to effectively address these challenges within our existing authorities. The DHS also continues to take action to protect the American people and our communities, and is considering a number of policies and procedures to improve the employment opportunities of US workers during this pandemic," it said.

Non-immigrants are usually required to the United States before their authorised period of admission expires, it said.

Non-immigrants could apply for an extension of stay (EOS) or change of status (COS) permit. Without a visa extension, thousands of students and professionals in the US would have suffered.

If applicants put in their forms within the specified time frame, their presence will not be taken as "unlawful" and where applicable, "employment authorization with the same employer, subject to the same terms and conditions of the prior approval, is automatically extended for up to 240 days when an extension of stay request is filed on time," the notification said.

The USCIS added that it "reminds petitioners and applicants that it can consider delays caused by the COVID-19 pandemic when deciding whether to excuse delays in filing documents based on extraordinary circumstances."

According to rules, if an employer terminates the contract of an H-1B holder, the employee needs to find new employment within 60 days, in order to retain the visa status. Indian IT workers have been seeking an extension of this 60 day grace period to 180 days.

Also read: Trump halts funding to WHO over handling of coronavirus crisis

Also read: Coronavirus impact: H-1B workers seek 4-month extension in post-job loss period
(Reuters) - Carnival Corp-owned <CCL.N> Princess Cruises, whose three ships had become hotbeds for coronavirus infections, said on Tuesday it would cancel all voyages until June-end, after a "no sail order" from U.S. health officials.

Princess Cruises had previously said it would suspend the voyages of all its 18 ships till May 10, but the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention last week extended its "no sail order" for all cruise ships for up to 100 days.

Carnival's Chief Executive Officer, Arnold Donald, said the company is "working very hard" at seeking more liquidity options, as the cruise industry gets upended by travel bans and thousands of cancellations driven by the virus crisis.

However, the company can get through till the end of 2020 with its current cash reserves, even with no revenues coming in, Donald said in a CNBC interview, adding that bookings for 2021 are strong.

Princess Cruises' Ruby Princess ocean liner is currently part of a homicide investigation in Australia as the country's deadliest virus infection source.

Two other cruise ships operated by Princess, in California and Japan, have also been in the spotlight as major concentration centers of the virus.

(Reporting by Uday Sampath in Bengaluru; Editing by Devika Syamnath)
President Donald Trump has stopped all United States funding to the World Health Organization (WHO) over allegations of the organization siding with China to cover up the spread of coronavirus.

During a White House press conferenceon Tuesday, Trump said he is halting U.S. funding of the WHO for severely mismanaging and covering up the coronavirus pandemic.

According to him, Americas $400 million to $500 million annual contribution to the WHO will be put on hold while a review is conducted.

Today I am instructing my organization to halt funding of the world health organization while a review is conducted to assess the WHOs role in severely mismanaging and covering up the spread of the coronavirus. (The WHO) failed to investigate credible reports from sources in (the Chinese city of) Wuhan that conflicted government accounts and credible reports of human to human transmission in December. From the middle of January it parroted and publicly endorsed the idea that there was not human to human transmission despite reports to the contrary and cost valuable time. The world received all sorts of false information on transmissability and mortality. Trump said.

Trump accused the WHO of directly contributing to a 20-fold increase in coronavirus cases across the world, accused it of many mistakes and said it was unfair for the US to contribute by-far the largest amount of its funding, while China gives less than $40million a year.

He said US cash to the WHO would be redirected while American diplomats launch a probe into the health bodys alleged failings, with the probe set to last 60 to 90 days.

WHO executive director, Dr Michael Ryan, hailed China for its transparency with the coronavirus outbreak in January. But US intelligence officials now believe the countrys communist government told multiple lies about their outbreak, and think the official death toll of 3,400 is way under the true figure of around 40,000 people killed.

Trump had earlier threatened to stop US funding to WHO on April before making good his threats on Tuesday.

The W.H.O. really blew it. For some reason, funded largely by the United States, yet very China centric. We will be giving that a good look. Fortunately I rejected their advice on keeping our borders open to China early on. Why did they give us such a faulty recommendation?  Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) April 7, 2020

It, indeed, seems that the WHO hid the pandemic and only declared a pandemic three months later on March 11, although it was fully informed by Taiwan about the threat of the coronavirus in mid-December and by China, itself, on December 31.

WHO is accused of deliberately declaring the pandemic late in order to help China diffuse the international reactions about its responsibilities.

The infections in Wuhan were reportedly noticed by the Chinese authorities as early as last September and if the WHO had informed the world community on time, the human catastrophe that followed would have been avoided, the US claims.

The US blames Dr Tedros Ghebreyesus, who was elected Director-General of the organisation with the support of China.
SPRINGFIELD  U.S. Rep Richard E. Neals re-election campaign said Wednesday it has submitted to the secretary of the commonwealths office 2,171 certified signatures from the more than 4,000 it collected to get him on the Sept. 1 Democratic primary ballot.

His challenger in the primary, Holyoke Mayor Alex B. Morse, already also has in hand more than the 2,000 signatures required at minimum to get on the ballot, said Max Clermont, Morse campaign manager.

"Alex will be on the ballot," Clermont said.

The deadline for congressional candidates to get signatures certified by city and town clerks is not until May. The deadline to get those certified signatures to Secretary of the Commonwealth William Galvins office is not until June.

Complications surrounding the collection of signatures for political candidates during the statewide shutdown imposed to fight coronavirus with candidates for state office and the re-election campaign for U.S. Sen. Ed Markey experiencing trouble getting enough signatures, according to published reports

The issue is now before the states Supreme Judicial Court, which could take it up Thursday.

Both the Morse and Neal campaigns said they had volunteers out collecting signatures soon after petitions became available in February.

We hit the ground running, said Neal campaign spokeswoman Kate Norton.

Clermont said the Morse campaign collected signatures often through the mail one household at a time because traditional door-to-door canvasing or setting up a table in a busy public place is impossible now.

One Morse campaign volunteer put the signature form out on the front porch with a box of pens and some sanitizer and invited neighbors to stop by and sign, Clermont said.

But the campaign didnt suggest that and doesn't want anyone doing anything that would be thought of as unsafe

But both campaigns have run into the complication of dealing with individual town and city clerk's offices.

Clermont said the campaigns need to have their signatures certified by those offices and what is normally a straightforward process is complicated by COVID-19. City and town halls are closed to walk-in business and each city or town clerk has a different procedure now for handling what were once mundane tasks. Some only work by mail. Some would accept documents that were dropped off. Some would meet a campaign staffer or volunteer by appointment.

Norton acknowledged the complexity but said there has been a lot of cooperation.

"Every city and town has been fantastic about working with us and with candidates across the board," she said.

Wednesday was also a deadline for campaigns to file first-quarter financial reports with the Federal Elections Commission. It's unclear if numbers provided Wednesday by a balky FEC website reflect new reports

But the site reported that for 2019-2020 Neal has campaign receipts of $2.6 million, disbursements, or spending, of $1.4 million and ended his most recent filing period with $4.48 million on hand.

Morse had $340,000 in receipts and $219,000 in disbursements and had $120,434 cash on hand.

Both campaigns said their candidates havent been actively campaigning during the pandemic and have had their days filled with their official duties.

Neal is chairman of the powerful House Ways and Means Committee and an author of the most recent coronavirus stimulus package working on the next round of stimulus.

Morse Holyoke city government has been involved in coronavirus response, such as canceling the St. Patricks Parade and Road Rac. He has said he was the person who took concerns about deaths at the Holyoke Soldiers Home to state officials.

Both men have been hosting online and telephone town halls focused on coronavirus issues.

Clermont said Morse campaign volunteers have shifted to working as community wellness phone banks making sure folks know about the resources available to them and bridging language barriers by working in English and Spanish.
Japan News-Yomiuri

TOYAMA, Japan - The Tateyama Kurobe Alpine Route, a popular and scenic mountain pass that runs through the Northern Japanese Alps in Toyama and Nagano prefectures, opened its entire stretch on Wednesday, ending the winter closure period.

Snow walls stand high on both sides of the stretch toward Murodo in Tateyama, Toyama Prefecture, which is 2,450 meters above sea level. The snow walls, called Yuki no Otani, are up to 15 meters high this year, which is on par with the level of an average year.
One of the good things about studying history is that no matter how bad things get, you can almost always find something from the past that was worse. This is also true about the coronavirus disease (Covid-19), which has now engulfed the world.

Perhaps the most comparable pandemic is the Spanish Flu, which lasted from January 1918 to December 1920. It infected some 500 million people and killed 50 million. To put this into perspective, the entire population of India, as per Census 1921, was about 250 million.

The Spanish Flu took place almost exactly a century ago but it had several similarities with Covid-19. But this was not the only pandemic to have similarities with Covid-19.

The three cholera pandemics of 1817-1824, 1826-1837 and 1846-1860 claimed more lives than any other disease outbreak in the 19th century. Originally starting in India and Central and Southeast Asia, cholera spread to China, from where it reached Europe through trade routes and Russian soldiers. It spread to Poland through Russian troops, who were brought in from various parts of the Tsars empire to suppress uprisings. It then spread from Poland to East Prussia, forcing the Prussian authorities to close their borders to Russian transport. By 1831, the situation was so severe that the British government issued quarantine orders for any Russian ships sailing to British ports. But it was too late. The pandemic had already spread to Britain, France and most of Europe and Asia. Hundreds of thousands died. More than a million died in the Russian Empire during the third pandemic alone, and at least a 100,000 in most affected nations with each successive wave. Thus, we can safely say that the death toll went into millions.

The cholera pandemics of the 19th century had the most similarities with the coronavirus pandemic today. They both started in Asia, and spread to other parts of the world, deeply affecting specific nations (Russia for cholera, Italy and the United States for the coronavirus so far). They both also spread to other parts of the world through these specific nations and the affected populations were, unlike the global population that got Spanish influenza, not weakened by any major war  at least not on the industrial scale of World War I.

The cholera pandemics, just like Covid-19, also called for ship quarantine measures and spread primarily through the people who had gone abroad and brought it back to their nations. These pandemics required social distancing to prevent the spread of the infection. Like Covid-19, the cholera pandemics brought with them large economic losses  not only could ships not enter many ports, bringing maritime trade to a standstill, overland trade was also greatly affected. The Silk Route and other Central Asian trade routes, which counted for the majority of overland trade, could not be used due to both the threat of getting the disease and the anti-cholera steps taken by the Russian Empire, which controlled most of Central Asia at that time. Large financial losses were incurred, especially by the British and the Russians, the two most affected parties in terms of trade. Both relied on their far-flung empires for resources and wealth.

India can learn from the cholera pandemic, as it started here, and within months, hundreds of thousands were either infected or dead. At least 100,000 Indians and 10,000 British troops died in the first pandemic (1817-1824). This was partly because of not practising proper social distancing, which requires active participation from the people. Both an active government push, and deep citizen engagement and support, is clearly needed for social distancing and other public health measures.

In Russia, the incompetence of Tsar Nicholas Is regime in handling the pandemic across the massive rural expanses and the population of his vast empire led to more than a million deaths. While he ordered anti-cholera measures eventually, the damage had already been done. The delay in responding, and the vulnerability of large countries, with a substantial rural and floating population, must be factored into any response.

To end on a positive note, no matter how bad they were, how many millions they killed, or how much they disrupted the economy, all of these pandemics were beaten, with the human race coming out stronger than ever. There was once a time when smallpox terrorised the world, but now it is all but eradicated. The Black Death was beaten. The Spanish Flu was beaten. The cholera epidemic was beaten. We have recovered and come out stronger than ever from all these diseases. I am sure that we will be able to defeat the coronavirus too.

Shiv Malik is a student of Class 9, Vasant Valley School, New Delhi

The views expressed are personal

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A teenage girl has been taken into foster care after the coronavirus killed her NHS nurse mother and left her father, who is also a health worker, fighting for his life.

Devastated Carmina Medel, 14, lost her mother Leilani, 41, on Good Friday.

She died at the Princess of Wales Hospital, Bridgend, South Wales, where she worked.

Carmina's father Johnny, 39, who is a medical technician, is being treated for coronavirus in the hospital's intensive care unit, where his condition is described as 'critical.'

Social services were forced to find a temporary home for the youngster after being unable to place her with an aunt who was already in self-isolation with coronavirus symptoms.

A local authority source told MailOnline that Carmina was 'doing as well as can be expected'.

Carmina Medel (centre) has been taken into foster care after the coronavirus killed her NHS nurse mother (right) and left her father, (left) who is also a health worker, fighting for his life

Leilani, 41, died at the Princess of Wales Hospital, Bridgend, South Wales, on Good Friday. She worked at the hospital where she died

Speaking from the Philippines, Ms Medel's brother Noel Osoteo told MailOnline: 'We haven't been able to speak to Carmina and can't imagine what she must going through.

'She's just a child who has lost her mother, now could now lose her father and is dealing with this by herself. That really hurts because all we want to do is comfort her and give her love.

'At a time like this you need family around you but sadly, Carmina doesn't have this. We are all devastated and want to be with her but that's impossible. I just pray that she is OK.'

A spokeswoman from Bridgend Children's Social Care department confirmed that Carmina was in their care.

'We have made the necessary arrangements to look after and support Carmina,' she said. 'We cannot discuss details of any individual cases.'

Ms Medel's aunt, Maris Allinebem, 64 lives in Bristol but was unable to take Carmina in because she herself is in self-isolation.

Ms Allinebem said: 'Officially I'm not the next of kin but would have loved to have Carmina live with me until her father gets better, which I'm praying he does.

'She's with a foster family and we've heard that she's very upset and worried but is coping as best she can.

'I've been ringing the hospital about Johnny, but they won't give me any information, and this is just adding to my worry.'

She added: 'I last spoke to Leilani on March 26 and she told me that she was worried about getting coronavirus and that she and Johnny were both showing symptoms. I told her to take care because nursing is a very risky profession at a time like this.

Social services found a temporary home for Carmina (pictured with her mother) after being unable to place her with an aunt who was in self-isolation with coronavirus symptoms. A local authority source told MailOnline that Carmina was 'doing as well as can be expected'

Speaking from the Philippines, Ms Medel's brother Noel Osoteo told MailOnline: 'We haven't been able to speak to Carmina and can't imagine what she is going through. She's just a child who has lost her mother, now could now lose her father and is dealing with this by herself'

'I tried contacting her after that but never heard from her. Then the next thing I hear is that she had died, and that Johnny is also in intensive care.'

News of Ms Medel's death was reported on Good Friday, making her the fourth Filipino NHS worker to die after contracting coronavirus.

Just three weeks before, she posted a heart-warming picture of herself and Carmina on Facebook declaring: 'I can't stay at home. I'm a Nurse!'

In another demonstration of her dedication to her profession, she posted a picture of herself with Johnny and Carmina while on holiday with the words: 'Proud to be a Nurse.'

Johnny also worked as a health care professional in Bridgend.

Mr Osoteo, 39 said: 'Leilani loved her work and was very proud of being a nurse in England.

'She died trying to save people in the country and put her own life at risk. Johnny was also very proud of what he did. They both loved looking after people.

'Both of them were very special, kind and caring. I will really miss my sister, she was a wonderful soul.'

Ms Medel was born and raised in Santiago, Philippines and studied nursing at a local university where she also met her future husband Johnny.

They married in 2003 and moved to Britain a year later, settling in Bridgend, where their daughter was born.

Ms Medel was born and raised in Santiago, Philippines and studied nursing at a local university where she also met her future husband Johnny. They married in 2003 and moved to Britain a year later, settling in Bridgend, where their daughter was born.

Mr Osoteo (above) revealed that he last saw his sister in 2018, when she visited the Philippines for a family holiday. Mr Osoteo said that the family are hoping to bring Ms Medel's ashes back to the Philippines and scatter them at her favourite places in Santiago

Mr Osoteo revealed that he last saw his sister in 2018, when she visited the Philippines for a family holiday.

In recent years, the family has been beset by tragedy with Mr Osoteo losing a brother, his mother and now his last surviving sibling, which he reveals, has left his father, Eduardo, 69, a 'broken man.'

Mr Osoteo said that the family are hoping to bring Ms Medel's ashes back to the Philippines and scatter them at her favourite places in Santiago.

He cried: 'We have suffered a lot as a family and my father does not understand why all this is happening to us.

'Leilani would have wanted to have been brought back home but at this stage, we don't even know when her funeral will be taking place.

'But our thoughts at this moment are with Johnny and Carmina. We are just praying that he will recover and that she can have her father back in her life.'

A spokesman for Bridgend County Borough Council said: 'Our sympathies are with the family at this sad time.

'We are making all necessary arrangements to provide those who have been affected by this tragic death with our full support.'

:: The family has set up a GoFundMe page for the Medel family: https://www.gofundme.com/f/leilanis-fund-raising?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=p_cp+share-sheet
A mother-of-three has spoken about the risks involved with being a anaesthesiologist during the coronavirus pandemic.

Dr Tanya Selak works at a hospital in Wollongong, on the New South Wales South Coast, preparing patients for surgery.

However since the spread of coronavirus her job - which typically involves close contact with people - has become incredibly high risk.

Her role now involves intubating some of the most critically ill COVID-19 patients, which forces a breathing tube into their lungs.

Dr Tanya Selak works at a hospital in Wollongong, on the New South Wales South Coast, preparing patients for surgery

However since the development of coronavirus her job - which typically involves close contact with people - has become incredibly high risk. Some patients unable to breathe on their own need to be intubated

This causes coronavirus to become airborne.

Dr Selak said her job is incredibly physical, and while she has a face mask and shield for personal protective equipment, she can become quite close with those she is caring for.

'We've had to take their mask off for the procedure and we are very physically close to them, putting our fingers and instruments into their mouths, with our faces close to theirs. It goes against the notion of social distancing,' she told the Illawarra Mercury.

She said throughout your medical career you learn you come second to helping the patient.

'You miss weddings, funerals, Easter and Christmas celebrations - you miss most of your 20s! But you also know you must protect yourself and your colleagues - if you are sick, you can't look after other people,' she said.

Dr Selak said she is taking precautionary measures in addition to the mandated personal protective equipment.

She now keeps her phone in a sealed zip lock bag and no longer uses her typical handbag when going to work.

She now only brings in essential items.

Intubating forces a tube into the patient's lungs, which can prompt the virus to become airborne

Her children are no longer allowed to give her a hug when she arrives home from work.

Instead, Dr Selak must first take off her scrubs to be cleaned - away from the rest of the family's clothes - and bag her shoes for her next shift before having a shower.

'I assume everyone has it. I assume I have it, that staff have it and all the patients have it. I am just mindful of the simple things that the public health doctors tell us to do - such as social distancing, washing hands and not touching my face,' she told ABC Illawarra.

She said it was terrifying to watch the initial spread of the disease.

'It's been really awful, genuinely awful. As you know I am on Twitter a lot and have international connections,' she said.

'Watching it hit China, and then Italy, and really seeing the video image of the health system being completely overwhelmed, not being able to care for patients as they die in their hundreds of this infection disease.'

She said she watched health care staff become exhausted and distressed as they tried to cope with coronavirus as it spread across Europe.

She said in recent weeks she has started to feel more positive about the area's prospects when it came to coronavirus.

Dr Selak said measures such as closing the borders and people taking social distancing seriously made a large impact.
Einstein Healthcare Network is on track to lose $70 million from March through June as it contends with the extra costs from caring for COVID-19 patients, and the loss of revenue from canceled elective procedures, chief executive Barry Freedman said Wednesday.

A surge in federal funding for health-care providers will help, but it wont be enough, he said during a conference call with U.S. Sen. Bob Casey and U.S. Rep. Mary Gay Scanlon, two Democrats who criticized the Trump administration for distributing $30 billion in grants to hospitals without regard to how hard theyve been hit by the coronavirus pandemic.

Einsteins slice of the $30 billion in grants was $16.8 million. Plus, Einstein received $73.9 million in Medicare advances that must be repaid, a spokesperson said. Even if Einstein gets a bigger allotment in the next round of funding, Freeman said, it will not be enough to cover the nonprofit systems losses.

Thats one of the reasons institutions like Einstein and others have to look at policies like furlough, Freedman said. I do expect it. Its one of the last things we want to do. It is not obviously the front-line people, but it will impact those areas that have closed or partially reduced in volume.

He said more details would be available in the next couple days. Einstein, which is anchored by Einstein Medical Center Philadelphia in North Philadelphia and Einstein Medical Center Montgomery in East Norriton, has about 1,000 inpatient beds and employs more than 8,000. In Southeastern Pennsylvania, Einstein ranks behind the University of Pennsylvania Health System, Jefferson Health, Main Line Health, and Temple in revenue. The Federal Trade Commission and Pennsylvanias attorney general are trying to block its long-pending merger with Jefferson.

WHYY reported the furlough plan Tuesday.

Troubles like those at Einstein are roiling the entire health-care industry, as hospital beds sit unused because care that doesnt need to happen right away is being postponed. Expenses for treating COVID-19 patients also have soared. Pennsylvania Secretary of Health Rachel Levine said recently that statewide, 60% of intensive care unit beds and 55% of all hospital beds were empty.

Kevin Holloran, a senior director at Fitch Ratings and an expert in municipal bonds issued by health systems, said he is most concerned about financial deterioration at smaller, single-site health systems that lack solid cash reserves, naming Holy Redeemer Health System as an example in the Philadelphia region.

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Generally, larger systems with multiple hospitals are better equipped to deal with the pandemic, he said. If you get hit, it might take a lot of cash out of your balance sheet. It might impact your operations, but you have a huge cushion to deal with it.

Holloran said hes hearing that health systems are contending with 25% to 40% declines in revenue, compared with what would be happening without the extraordinary shelter-in-place measures designed to contain the spread of the disease. The percentage loss depends on the mix of businesses a system has, he said.

The Inquirer on Wednesday asked 16 Philadelphia-area health systems how much revenue they were losing because of COVID-19, and eight provided at least some detail, though not always on a comparable basis. For example, its not always clear whether providers are netting out reduced expenses for care not being provided.

Einstein said it is losing about $1 million a day in revenue and projects total revenue loss through June of $105 million, a roughly 30% reduction compared with last year. That will be partially offset by about $35 million in reduced expenses attributable to the forgone care. Einstein had $1.2 billion in patient revenue last year.

Jefferson Health is projecting a revenue impact as high as $120 million a month, before accounting for relief packages that have been approved or are pending. That is a monthly drop of roughly 33% compared with last year, when the system had $4.4 billion in revenue.

Main Line Health estimated that in the last two weeks of March, its revenue was $25 million less than it would have been without steps taken to control COVID-19. That works out to a 38% loss compared with those two weeks a year ago, based on 2019 revenue of $1.7 billion.

At Trinity Health Mid-Atlantic, which already announced an unspecified number of furloughs, executives said the COVID-19 crisis would reduce revenue by $32 million a month at the Mercy Fitzgerald and Mercy Philadelphia Campuses of Mercy Catholic Medical Center, Nazareth Hospital, St. Mary Medical Center, and Saint Francis Healthcare. That works out to a 22% drop based on last years revenue of $1.7 billion for the group.

Temple University Health System did not provide a figure for its revenue decline but said its monthly operating income was taking a $40 million hit, which is huge, considering that the North Philadelphia health system had just $37.7 million in operating income in the 12 months ended June 30 Temple had $1.9 billion in net patient revenue that year.

Doylestown Health said it had $6.4 million in revenue losses in the last two weeks of March, compared with 2019, and executives expect the losses to continue until it is able to resume normal operations.

In New Jersey, AtlantiCare, which has two hospital campuses in Atlantic County, experienced roughly a $13 million drop in revenue over the last two weeks of March. It was not possible to compare that to last year because AtlantiCares revenue is consolidated with its parent. AtlantiCare said operating room cases plummeted 74 percent.

Virtua, the largest health system by revenue in Philadelphias South Jersey suburbs, did not say how much revenue it lost, but said it received $28.5 million of the $30 billion in CARES Act grants awarded last week.

The financial pain for health systems is brutal right now, but its too soon to know the long-term financial impact of the coronavirus, said Dan Grauman, chief executive of Veralon, a Philadelphia health-care consulting firm.

Theres going to be a lot of pent-up demand here, he said. Those patients that are just not seeing their doctors, not going to the hospitals, not having surgeries that they need to have, whether its a joint replacement or a valve replacement or any number of things that you can put off a bit. Its not like they are going away.
Travelers wearing face masks to protect from them the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) while travelling through Abu Dhabi International Airport in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates on February 16, 2020.

The International Monetary Fund forecasts a dramatic contraction for Middle Eastern and North African economies this year, predicting a worse outlook for the region than for the global economy as a whole in its latest regional economic report.

The IMF expects the MENA region to contract by 3.3% in 2020, compared to last year's projected growth of 0.3%. That's worse than the Fund's forecast for the world economy, which is expected to contract by 3% this year.

"Vulnerabilities are high in certain countries, especially those with high levels of unemployment and low growth," the IMF's Middle East and Central Asia Director Jihad Azour told CNBC on Tuesday.

He acknowledged the possibility of civil unrest as the region's economies face strains caused by the "dual shock" of coronavirus and low oil prices.

The IMF expects growth in Lebanon to decline by 12% in 2020. The small Mediterranean country has the third-highest debt-to-GDP ratio in the world and was facing an economic crisis long before the coronavirus pandemic set in. Egypt is the only country in the MENA region the IMF expects to grow in 2020, by 2%.

Lebanon's ailing economy  forecast to have contracted by 6.5% in 2019  with governance issues and rampant corruption resulted in mass demonstrations last year, and ultimately forced former Prime Minister Saad Hariri's government to resign. The structural reforms required of an IMF bailout could have deeper social and economic repercussions, however, and push the government to look elsewhere for funds.
SAN LUIS OBISPO, Calif., April 15, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, ESChat today confirmed it is providing mission critical broadband Push-to-Talk (PTT) communication for law enforcement and Emergency Medical Service (EMS) crews across multiple states including Washington, New York, New Jersey and the District of Columbia. This expanded service is a direct result of the COVID-19 emergency, and incremental to the standard level of PTT communication service ESChat provides throughout the year to public safety agencies.

Used by the US Military, as well as federal, state, local and commercial first responder agencies, ESChat is a cellular based broadband PTT communication service that provides a traditional Land Mobile Radio (LMR) 'like' experience without the geographical restrictions of LMR networks. ESChat is often integrated with LMR networks providing a hybrid communication environment where users on LMR radios and ESChat enabled smartphones can communicate with each other. ESChat is a FirstNet Certified solution and is also approved for U.S. military operational use by the Defense Information Systems Agency ("DISA").

ESChat supplies PTT service to seven Executive Departments within the federal government, and numerous agencies operating within these Departments. As a provider of PTT service to federal first responders and their contractors, ESChat typically sees expanded use during declarations of disaster. In recent years, ESChat has been used during hurricane responses in Texas, Louisiana, Florida and other gulf states.

"We are humbled to be the provider of communication services to a team of professionals who risk their own safety supporting those in need." said Josh Lober, President/CEO for ESChat. "Our customers are true professionals, and we provide one piece as part of a complex operation that involves constant planning and training. This is a high level of responsibility not lost on our team, as reliable communication is a critical component to mission success."

ESChat offers a sixty (60) day free trial to public safety agencies, including functionality to interconnect ESChat with their LMR radio network. Government agencies can purchase ESChat's subscription service at the GSA price of $4.57 per user per month.

About ESChat:

ESChat (www.eschat.com) is the leading solution for carrier independent Secure Push to Talk (PTT) over LTE communications. ESChat includes AES-256 encrypted PTT voice and multimedia (text and image) messaging. ESChat also provides live and historical (bread crumb) tracking and mapping. ESChat is approved for U.S. military operational use by the Defense Information Systems Agency ("DISA"). ESChat is a FirstNet Certified solution, and enhanced by Quality of Service, Priority and Preemption ("QPP") available to FirstNet subscribers. ESChat also supports Quality of Service ("QoS") and RAN priority enhancements on the Verizon Wireless and AT&T commercial networks.

Used by all branches of the U.S. Military, as well as federal, state and local public safety agencies, ESChat is able to operate over and across any wireless network, including all commercial carriers, private 3G/4G/5G networks and WiFi. ESChat supports standards-based interoperability with LMR radio networks, including P25 via the native Inter RF Subsystem Interface ("ISSI") protocol and DMR via the native Inter Application Interface Specification ("AIS") protocol. ESChat also supports interoperability via RoIP to all LMR radio networks, regardless of radio technology or operating frequency band.

For more information, please visit www.eschat.com .

SOURCE ESChat

Related Links

http://www.eschat.com


There was a sharp fall in Irish exports in February, according to data from the Central Statistics Office, although it appears that this was a result of sharp drops in chemicals and pharmaceuticals sales that account for nearly half of all exports rather than the coronavirus.

Seasonally adjusted exports fell by 2.2bn or 16pc 11.6bn.

Irish exports to China, which are tiny proportion of the overall number, actually rose from a year ago 1.7bn in January and February of this year from 1.15bn in the same period of 2019.

Chinese factories closed at the start of February for the Lunar New Year and many did not reopen as the coronavirus roiled the country.

But the biggest hits to exports illustrate Irelands dependence on a small number of product lines that are largely sold in the US.

Exports to the United States took a 700mn hit from February last year.

Exports of organic chemicals decreased by 560mn to 2.3bn,319 million in February 2020 compared with February 2019, accounting for 20pc of total exports while exports of Medical and pharmaceutical products, 29pc of the total, also decreased by 578 million to 3.4bn.
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Zooms paying customers will be able to choose the region they want to use for their virtual meetings, the company announced Monday.

Starting Saturday, paying customers can opt in or out of a specific data center region, although they wont be able to change their default region, which for most customers is the United States.

Zoom has data centers in the U.S., Canada, Europe, India, Australia, China, Latin America, and Japan/Hong Kong.

The move comes after the University of Torontos Citizen Lab earlier this month released a report that found Zoom generated encryption keys on servers in China, even though all the people on a call were located outside of the country.

Although free service users wont have the opt-in or -out options of paying customers, Zoom said it would not route data of any users located outside of China through the country.

Avoiding Unsafe Servers

The data routing changes are a positive, observed Colin Bastable, CEO of Lucy Security, a security awareness and training company located in Zug, Switzerland.

All those free users should be happy that no data is routed through China, and paid users will be happy with the choices being offered, he told TechNewsWorld.

Allowing customized routing will appeal to some companies that must meet compliance requirements for their industries.

There are certain government and cybersecurity standards that require traffic remain within the U.S., explained James McQuiggan, security awareness advocate at KnowBe4, a security awareness training provider located in Clearwater, Florida.

For organizations who do not wish to accept the risk of traffic leaving the U.S., this will mitigate and resolve that risk, he told TechNewsWorld.

Managing a call path lets a meeting planner avoid potentially unsafe servers, said Justin Kezer, managing consultant at nVisium, a Falls Church, Virginia.-based application security provider.

A D V E R T I S E M E N T

That limits the risk of someone listening to an active call through a missing application security feature, like a lack of password and access controls, or siphoning the data directly from a vulnerable server, he told TechNewsWorld.

However, customized routing doesnt address another flaw Citizen Lab found with Zoom, noted Charles Ragland, security engineer at San Francisco-based Digital Shadows, a provider of digital risk protection solutions.

This does not mitigate the risk posed by the lack of true end-to-end encryption or weak encryption that was discovered by Citizen Lab, he told TechNewsWorld.

Passwords for Sale

Zooms popularity skyrocketed with the spread of the COVID-19 virus and resulting increase of home workers. It appears its newfound popularity attracted more attention from hackers.

Information on more than 500,000 Zoom accounts has shown up for sale on the Dark Web and in hacker forums, priced at a penny for each, or less, Bleeping Computer reported Monday.

The data was compiled through credential stuffing attacks. Logins from prior data breaches were tried on Zoom, and the ones that worked were bundled together and sold to other hackers, BC explained.

Criminals will always seize an opportunity to raise their profile or stay relevant. This would be more of the same, Digital Shadows Ragland observed.

Zoom is the current focus of the security industry, and plenty of in-depth discussions have been done around it, making it a prime target for criminals, he explained.

There are billions of credentials being hawked on the Dark Web  500,000 makes no difference, said Lucy Securitys Bastable. Of course, the danger is that users are using the same passwords for other logins, which we know they do.

The sale of the Zoom accounts on the Dark Web demonstrates how bad password hygiene is, observed Joseph Carson, chief security scientist at Thycotic, a Washington D.C.-based provider of privileged account management solutions.

A D V E R T I S E M E N T

Once someone is of age and able to connect to the Internet, they should be educated on how to use a password manager  or, to be honest, it should be the default settings in our browsers, he told TechNewsWorld.

The sale of the Zoom accounts raises questions for some solutions on whether or not users should even be allowed to choose their own passwords, Carson said.

Security-Minded Management

Although Zoom has found itself under the security magnifying glass, it hasnt dropped the ball, maintained nVisiums Kezer.

Zoom is doing an excellent job reacting to the security issues. However, like most companies, proactive security measures and testing would have prevented these issues, he said.

They are quick to accept the vulnerability and promptly issue a patch  that is the most we can ask of any company, Kezer continued. Frankly, I am impressed that they have put all their development efforts towards security. That is a sign of a solid security-minded management team. They are now being proactive.

Despite those security efforts, there are signs of anxiety in the Zoom community.

Twelve percent of the 4,000 professionals who responded to a recent survey had stopped using Zoom, including 100 percent of Tesla professionals. Blind, an anonymous workplace network of professionals based in San Francisco, released the results last week.

More than a third of the professionals surveyed (35.2 percent) said they were worried their information may have been compromised.

Although Zoom had great intentions, they were attempting to accommodate the workforce during a pandemic quickly, wrote Fiorella Riccobono, author at Blind Workplace Insights. That rapid growth left the platforms vulnerabilities exposed.

Yet some companies are comfortable with Zoom.

As a security company, we use Zoom every day, said Ameesh Divatia, CEO of Baffle, a data protection company in San Francisco.

Were comfortable with it because we make sure that our users are educated about how to set up meetings and make sure they know who is participating, he told TechNewsWorld.

One feature Baffle doesnt use is passwords for meeting participants. It uses the waiting room feature. Meeting participants remain in a virtual waiting room until the meeting organizer clears them. That way the organizer need not worry about a participants password being compromised and an unwanted party crashing the meeting.

That feature has its problems, too.

During our analysis, we also identified a security issue with Zooms Waiting Room feature, states the Citizen Lab report on Zoom. Assessing that the issue presented a risk to users, we have initiated a responsible vulnerability disclosure process with Zoom. We are not currently providing public information about the issue to prevent it from being abused. We intend to publish details of the vulnerability once Zoom has had a chance to address the issue.
Many of this year's Married At First Sight cast rebelled against Channel Nine.

And after becoming one of the first to break her contract, Stacey Hampton has now revealed how she was punished by the network while the show was still airing.

The 26-year-old admitted on Tuesday that was she told she would 'no longer be supported' by Nine, and had all promotional opportunities taken from her.

'I took back control': Married At First Sight's Stacey Hampton (pictured) has revealed how she was punished by Channel Nine for breaking her contract when the show was still airing

This meant Stacey was no longer offered radio interviews, photo shoots with magazines or appearances on Today or Today Extra among other things.

Stacey told radio personality Bryce Ruthven in an Instagram Live interview on Tuesday that she broke her contract to defend herself and her reputation.

'I didn't like the way they talking about my life in the media. And they were allowing other contestants to talk about my personal life, and drag certain people through the mud who didn't sing up to the show,' she admitted.

'They weren't helping me': The 26-year-old admitted on Tuesday that was she told she would 'no longer be supported' by Nine, and had all promotional opportunities taken from her

Telling all: Stacey told radio personality Bryce Ruthven (pictured) in an Instagram Live interview on Tuesday that she broke her contract to defend herself and her reputation

Stacey continued: 'They were meant to support our mental health and have my back, and I felt like they didn't and they weren't helping me. And that they were allowing other contestants to get away with certain things. I thought, "This is the part that I take back control and let you guys (viewers of the show) see me for who I am."'.

Despite this, Stacey clarified that she was still offered 24/7 psychological support from Nine, which all past and present reality stars have available to them.

Stacey breached her contract in several different ways.

Punishment: After breaking her contract, Stacey was no longer offered radio interviews, photo shoots with magazines or appearances on Today or Today Extra among other things

Rebel: Stacey breached her contract by locking Nine out of her Instagram, sharing spoilers with fans and speaking out against the producers. Pictured: Stacey and Michael Goonan

Firstly, she locked Channel Nine and producers Endemol Shine Australia out of her Instagram account, and stopped posting promos for the show.

The mum-of-two also did unauthorised interviews with the media, shared spoilers with fans on social media and exposed behind-the-scenes secrets.

Many of her other co-stars, including Josh Pihlak and Natasha Spencer, did similar.

'I'm proud': Last week, Natasha Spencer (pictured) also discussed the consequences the cast members faced for breaking their contracts during an interview with Daily Mail Australia

Last week, Natasha also discussed the consequences she and the other cast members faced during an interview with Daily Mail Australia.

'I am so proud of my co-stars for going rogue. I'm not going to lie, I'm all for it! When there's a state of anarchy, I think they just give up,' Natasha joked, adding that Nine have no intentions of suing stars for going rogue.

'When I mentioned I left MAFS for my mental health, I was like "what are you going to do, say I breached contract and sue me?"' she recalled asking a female producer.

Natasha went on to say: '[The producer] goes, "No, we're just going to take off our arranged publicity... what can I sue you for? You've all broken contract".'
ProcessMAP Corporation, the industry leader in offering a data intelligence platform for employee Health and Safety, and Environmental Sustainability (HSE) announced that Asian Paints Limited, Indias leading and amongst the top 10 coatings companies in the world, has adopted ProcessMAPs suite of cloud and mobile-first solutions to support its enterprise-wide strategic workplace health and safety initiatives.

Asian Paints has a stated safety performance vision of zero accidents, zero occupational illnesses, and zero incidents. To translate this vision into reality, the company will leverage ProcessMAPs suite of HSE software solutions, internally called as iSafe, to:

Provide enterprise-wide standardization and accountability across key HSE processes

Adopt one single platform to manage all safety activities and digitize various manual processes

Proactively identify and mitigate risks through risk assessments

Track company-wide HSE metrics by leveraging real-time analytics and actionable data intelligence

Improve enterprise-wide user engagement through an intuitive and user-friendly interface

Drive comprehensive stakeholder engagement and accelerate organizational initiatives to build safety as an operational culture



At Asian Paints, we were looking for a global partner with a comprehensive and scalable HSE software platform to complement our highly matured internal processes, said N Jagannadha Rao, Chief Manager - Corporate Quality and Safetyat Asian Paints Limited. ProcessMAPs cloud platform maturity, experience and commitment were key differentiators behind this engagement, he added.

It is an exciting opportunity for ProcessMAP to partner with Asian Paints in such a strategic business and technology transformation initiative, stated Dave Rath, CEO of ProcessMAP Corporation.

We welcome Asian Paints to our family of India-based customers, which now includes more than 2,000+ facilities of local and global organizations representing all key industry verticals, said Ashish Mohanty, Head of India Operations at ProcessMAP.

About Asian Paints Limited

Asian Paints is Indias leading paint company and ranked among the top ten Decorative coatings companies in the world with a consolidated turnover of 192.48 billion Indian Rupees. Asian Paints along with its subsidiaries have operations in 15 countries across the world with 26 paint manufacturing facilities, servicing consumers in over 60 countries through Asian Paints Berger, SCIB Paints  Egypt, Apco Coatings, Taubmans, Kadisco and Causeway. Asian Paints is also present in the Home Improvement and Decor space in India through Sleek (Kitchens) and Ess Ess (Bath Fittings). For more information, visit www.asianpaints.com.

About ProcessMAP Corporation

ProcessMAP is the leading EHSQ data intelligence platform that empowers our customers to minimize risk, assure compliance and ensure safety. With more than 200 India-based technology and HSE professionals, ProcessMAP is the only global HSE software provider with the experience and infrastructure to ensure success for its India-based customers. ProcessMAPs analytics-driven cloud platform and advanced mobile-first solutions enable digital transformation, process consistency and data harmonization to drive actionable intelligence. With our global headquarters in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida, ProcessMAP has multiple innovation centers across the U.S., Canada and India, serving more than 3 million users in 27+ languages in over 140 countries. For more information, visit www.processmap.com.

View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20200414005903/en/
Data from two states with significant Indian Country populations shows how the coronavirus is taking a disproportionate toll on the first Americans, whose health care is promised by the federal government yet often falls far short of the need.

In Arizona, American Indians and Alaska Natives represent 7 percent of confirmed COVID-19 cases, according to data released by the state . Since Native Americans make up about 4.6 percent of the population, the figures confirm a higher rate of infections of the deadly disease.

"It is no joke," President Jonathan Nez of the Navajo Nation said during a town hall to his people on Tuesday. The tribe has been the hardest hit by the coronavirus, with 838 confirmed cases so far.

Mortality rates are even more startling. According to the state, 21 percent of people who have died from the coronavirus have been Native Americans.

And a significant number of coronavirus deaths have been Navajo citizens -- 33 so far. Nez, who is running government operations on the largest reservation in the U.S. from self-quarantine after coming into contact with an emergency medical technician who tested positive for COVID-19, said too many of his people are "leaving us early."

Today weve launched a new online portal from @NMDOH with additional #COVID19 data for New Mexico, including county-by-county breakdowns of positive cases by age, gender & ethnicity, as well as reporting on testing by county.



See it here: https://t.co/uigcauDnnC  Michelle Lujan Grisham (@GovMLG) April 14, 2020

Numbers from neighboring New Mexico paint a similar picture. Though the state overall has a smaller number of cases than others in the region, Native Americans represent a whopping 37 percent of confirmed COVID-19 infections, according to data from the health department

As with Arizona, the coronavirus is having a disproportionate impact on American Indians and Alaska Natives in the state, where they represent 9.6 percent of the population . Hotspots have emerged in Navajo and Pueblo communities, even those in remote and less populated areas.

"Please stay home and comply with the stay at home orders that are in place," the Ramah Chapter of the Navajo Nation, which is separated from the main reservation, said in an update on Tuesday which confirmed 14 positive COVID-19 cases in the community.

Despite the existence of the sobering data, Arizona and New Mexico stand out among those willing to report coronavirus figures along racial and ethnic lines. Besides individual tribes, the District of Columbia appears to be the only other jurisdiction that has actively included Native Americans in their updates -- with 7 confirmed COVID-19 case so far, according to the latest data

"WE ARE HERE. COUNT US": Native American LifeLines of Baltimore, an urban Indian health and services provider, is calling on the state of #Maryland to include American Indians and Alaska Natives in #COVID19 data. #Coronavirus #UrbanIndians https://t.co/JSmgupSkIK  indianz.com (@indianz) April 10, 2020

Some jurisdictions are starting to break out racial and ethnic data. But the state of Maryland is grouping American Indians and Alaska Natives in a category called "other" -- or, worse, not at all -- in a state where about 13,000 Native Americans live, far more than the 1,900 in neighboring D.C.

"It is sadly the norm that our community is statistically 'othered', which means that a review of the data would suggest that American Indians/Alaska Natives aren't impacted by COVID-19," Native American LifeLines of Baltimore , an urban Indian health and services provider in the state, said last week . "And we know that isn't true. Data = dollars. No data, no dollars."

Native American LifeLines isn't the only one in Maryland concerned about the exclusion. Rep. Steny Hoyer (D-Maryland), who serves as the Majority Leader in the U.S. House of Representatives , has called on all states, territories and jurisdictions to report racial and ethnic data

"We cannot wait to begin collecting data that will help us fight the spread of coronavirus in communities that are the most vulnerable," Hoyer wrote in a letter to state governors on April 10. "We must have reliable, public data to help us ensure that federal resources and assistance are being directed where they are most needed and will make the biggest difference."

Even the Trump administration is aware of the disparities. U.S. Surgeon General Jerome Adams , who has participated in events hosted by the National Indian Health Board , said Native Americans suffer from health conditions that put them at a higher risk of diseases like COVID-19.

"Well, its alarming but its not surprising that people of color have a greater burden of chronic health conditions," Adams said at a briefing of the White House Coronavirus Task Force on April 10 . "African Americans and Native Americans develop high blood pressure at much younger ages, and its less likely to be under control, and does greater harm to their organs."

But Adams pointed out that social conditions, many of which have their roots in inadequate federal funding of the government's trust and treaty responsibilities , leave tribes and their citizens at risk in times of crises, just like the coronavirus pandemic. Lack of basic infrastructure, such as water and sanitary facilities, inadequate housing stock and harmful legacies of toxic resource development are among the many causes.

"We tell people to wash their hands, but as studies showed, 30 percent of the homes on Navajo Nation dont have running water," Adams said at the White House. "So how are they going to do that?"

In hopes of bringing sufficient resources to Indian Country, tribes and their advocates are calling on Congress to do more to carry out the government's obligations. Although three coronavirus legislative packages included $10 billion for Indian health, social, education, housing and other programs, they say it's not enough to address more than a century of oversight, omission and policies that were premised on the belief that Native peoples would not be around any longer.

Indian Country had significant wins in the CARES Act, but our systems operate on such limited resources, that the Indian health system needs more support to effectively respond to COVID-19," NIHB Chairperson Victoria Kitcheyan said of the last package, H.R.748 , also known as the Coronavirus Aid, Relief and Economic Security (CARES) Act.

NIHB has been joined by 10 national and regional tribal organizations in seeking another $8 billion for Indian health in the next coronavirus bill, sometime being referred as "phase 4" legislation as it would be the fourth enacted since the start of the crisis. Included in the request is $1 billion for a program at the Indian Health Service known as Purchased/Referred Care (PRC), a pot of money that often runs out before people who need specialty care can benefit.

With more and more positive COVID-19 cases increasing in our tribal communities, the need for specialty care increases too. Purchase and referred care dollars are already scarce even without a pandemic, said Kitcheyan, who serves on the council of the Winnebago Tribe

A lack of sufficient funding for PRC forces IHS and tribal facilities to ration health care at a time when our peoples lives are at stake," Kitcheyan added. "We should never have to pick and choose who gets health care.

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Source: Xinhua| 2020-04-15 20:12:27|Editor: xuxin

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DUBLIN, April 15 (Xinhua) -- Ireland exported a total of 11.6 billion euros (12.6 billion U.S. dollars) worth of goods in February, down 812 million euros or nearly 7 percent compared with the same month last year, according to data released from the country's Central Statistics Office on Wednesday.

In the month, the country imported a total of 6.99 billion euros worth of goods, up 487 million euros or 7.5 percent compared with a year ago.

Ireland's February trade surplus stood at 4.6 billion euros, down nearly 1.3 billion euros year-on-year.

During the January-February period of this year, the total value of the goods exported by Ireland amounted to 26.3 billion euros, up 436 million euros or nearly 1.7 percent compared with the corresponding period of last year, while its total imported goods were valued at 14.1 billion euros, down 42 million euros or 0.3 percent from a year ago.

The country's trade surplus for the first two months of 2020 stood at 12.2 billion euros, up 478 million euros compared with the same period last year. (1 euro = 1.09 U.S. dollars)
Bo Young confessed her feelings to Eun-Seob, thinking that she would get a favorable reply. However, Eun-Seob shared that his feelings will never change and wanted to remain as friends.

In the recent episode of When The Weather is Fine, Bo Young went to the mountain after hearing Eun-Seob's rejection. She called and asked him to meet her at the dark entrance of the forest, going back home. Hye Won heard what Bo Young wanted, so she went to find and meet her instead.

Hye Won was able to find Bo Young at the entrance to the forest. Confused, Bo Young's heart felt a sharp pain. Hye Won told her to stay away from Eun-Seob. Bo Young confessed to Hye Won that she had feelings for Eun-Seob and got threatened until she came into the picture. Hye Won denied allegedly having feelings for Eun-Seob back in high school. She admitted that her feelings for Eun-Seob started when she arrived from Seoul at the start of winter.

Bo Young recalled her memories with Eun-Seob back in their school days and how she continued to love him over time. There was no chance to have their friendship blossom.

Hye Won and Bo Young ended their friendship when one of Bo Young's friends found out about Hye Won's mother's imprisonment. She shared her secret to Bo Young that her mother committed a crime. They transferred to the new village as her auntie decided. But Bo Young told one of her friends and spread the news around the campus. Hye Won got bullied, and the whole town talked about their families' stigma until now. Since then, Hye Won hasn't forgiven Bo Young for what she did.

Yoon Taek tried to get back with Myung Yeo for the lost time since they broke up, but Myung Yeo's cold heart never gives into Yoon Taek's persistence to start again. People around the village believe the rumors that Myung Yeo had a relationship with her brother-in-law, that was why her sister killed him.

Meanwhile, Hye Won gathered all the books needed to record to the website. She opened and saw another link to Eun-Seob's blog diary. She read and discovered Eun-Seob's feelings and thoughts about their first meeting to the latest happiness he feels towards their relationship. Eun-Seob felt so embarrassed as she saw his secrets.

Eun Sil arrived in Hyencehon and met with Jang Woo at the bus station. Jang Woo has had feelings for her since high school, although Jang Woo wasn't able to make things work because Eun Sil went out with another guy.

The special book club members gathered for the week. They invited some guests to join and hear about their poems and stories. Im Hwi asked Young Soo and Jang Woo to invite Eun Sil. Everyone had a great time with their special books and poetry to share with.

Bo Young asked Hye Won to meet and talk about important matters for the last time. They meet while riding the bus that goes around the town. Bo Young asked for forgiveness again from Hae Won. She realized that she was responsible for Hye Won and her family to be bullied and that people talked about them because of the rumors she leaked. She never hated Hye Won, and she cares for her. That's the reason why she keeps on returning to win their friendship back.

Eun-Seob received a call from the town hospital where Jung Gil Bok, Seung Ho's grandfather, was admitted. They care for him as their youngest member in a special book club. Eun-Seob comforted Seung Ho as he didn't have any other family members aside from his grandfather.

Hye Won took care of Seung Ho and let him sleepover in her house while his grandfather is recovering. Their house has more guests, with Eun Sil, another friend back in high school, and Seung Ho. The ladies prepared dinner and asked Hae Won to call her Auntie and join them. Hye Won opened Myung Yeo's room and saw her lying on the floor unconscious. Hye Won was shocked as she tried to shake Myung Yeo's body to wake up.
Thousands of clothing workers demonstrated on Monday in Dhaka, the national capital, and in industrial zones across Bangladesh to demand outstanding wages and protest against terminations and layoffs. An estimated 20,000 garment workers also demonstrated the day before, following protests the previous week.

The Awami League-led government of Prime Minister Sheik Hasina had previously imposed a national lockdownfrom March 26 to April 4. Confronted by widespread action by workers demanding hand sanitisers, face masks, gloves and proper social-distancing practices, it then extended the lockdown until April 25.

Employers have responded to the lockdown, and a drastic fall in international orders, by shuttering the plants, sacking thousands of temporary workers and refusing to pay outstanding wages.

When the lockdown began, thousands of mainly female garment workers, whose monthly wage is only about 8,000 takas ($US95), were forced to return to their remote villages without any pay. According to media reports, less than 300 garment factories have paid salaries, with an estimated 200 factories still operating.

Facing destitution and expecting the plants to be reopened on April 4, workers returned to the industrial zones, where they were confronted by an unprecedented situation. Scores of factories had closure notices on their gates. Thousands of workers had been laid off. Factory managers in some plants attempted to make workers sign resignation letters.

Public transport services were not operating, so workers journeys were perilous. They travelled by ferries, vans, auto-rickshaws, trucks and motorcycles. Others walked long distancessome for up to 30 hoursto reach Dhaka and other industrial zones.

Bangladesh is the worlds second-biggest garment maker after China. Its more than 4,500 officially registered plants account for some 84 percent of the countrys $40 billion annual export earnings. Hasinas government and the garment industry bosses, like their counterparts in Europe and the US, are urging a reopening of the plants.

Mehedi Hassan, a garment worker who had returned from Netrokona village, 150 km from Dhaka, told the Dhaka Tribune: We are just pawns in this risky game [of the factory owners]. It had cost him over 1,000 takas, a large amount for a low-paid worker, to return to his plant.

Another worker, from TSS-Fashion at Mowchak in Gazipur, told the New Age: I risked my life on my way to Gazipur to join my factory tomorrow. It is my livelihood. I dont understand the policy of the government since theyve kept everything else closed, except garment factories.

Garment worker Sajedul Islam, 21, told the AFP: We are afraid of the coronavirus. We heard a lot of people are dying of this disease but we dont have any choice. Were starving. If we stay at home, we may save ourselves from the virus but who will save us from starvation?

Speaking with New Age, Iqbal Arsalan, a Bangabadu Medical University professor, warned: We are increasing the risk factors by allowing them to come to Dhaka and begin work in factories where physical distancing cannot be maintained.

Last week, hundreds of garment workers protested in Mymensingh district over the closure of the Crown Wears plant and non-payment of wages. They were violently attacked by police and more than 20 were injured. Two protesting workers were killed when a truck ran over them.

APS Holdings workers in Gazipur also protested against the management seizure of their identity cards and attempts to force them to sign blank sheets of paper that could be later used to terminate them.

About 150 Risingtex Fashion workers in Savar were confronted with the same demands. According to media reports, over 3,000 workers were laid off from 20 factories in the Gazipur, Ashulia, Savar and Chattogram areas.

Confronted with this rising working-class anger, the government ordered the closure of all garment factories, apart from those producing personal protective equipment. Following discussion with garment industry owners, it announced that shut downs would be extended until April 25.

This meant those workers who had travelled from their villages confronted an impossible situation, unable to return home, while facing police restrictions to prevent them from entering or leaving Dhaka.

Hundreds of thousands of poor people across the country have lost their earnings and are starving because no government food aid is reaching them. This has led to suicides and protests. Among the suicides was Wahidul Islam, 30, a van-puller and father of four children from Dalbhanga village in Maheshpur sub-district.

Last week Narayanganj residents marched toward a district administrative office on Wednesday, demanding aid and defying bans on public gatherings and official social-distancing measures.

The governments claims of providing generous aid were exposed by a survey conducted by BRAC, an NGO. It found that only 4 percent of the population had received any emergency relief support as of April 5 and that at least 14 percent of low-income people had no food at home. It also revealed that the average household income of 14,599 taka before the lockdown had fallen drastically by 75 percent to 3,742 taka this month.

Currently about 30 districts out of 64 in Bangladesh, including areas of Dhaka, are in lockdown. For the majority of people social distancing is virtually impossible, particularly in Dhakas slums, where 4.8 million peoplenearly one-third of the citys populationlive.

On April 13, Health Minister Zahid Maleque for the first time admitted community transmission is taking place widely. About 1,012 persons had tested positive for COVID-19 with 46 deaths by April 14. On April 14, 209 people tested positive, the highest single-day count so far.

These low figures are mainly due to the lack of mass testing, as recommended by the World Health Organisation. As of April 10, only 7,359 peoplein a population of 160 millionhad been tested. Jahidur Rahman, a virologist and assistant professor at Shahid Suhrawardy Medical College, has called for at least 10,000 tests daily.

An April 12 comment in the Daily Star said the governments response to the coronavirus outbreak had been plagued by inappropriate decisions, delayed actions and muddled thinkingright from the beginning.

Even as health authorities warned that COVID-19 could become practically uncontrollable if it spread, Prime Minister Hasina initially downplayed the pandemic, saying it was not that deadly.

Her government announced a massive bailout package of $US8.56 billion for the garment industry, almost three times the $3.02 billion losses from cancelled export orders. The amount that the government recommended for workers wages is about 7 percent of that handed over to the employers.
FINANCE Minister Paschal Donohoe has not ruled out pay cuts for Cabinet members as the coronavirus crisis continues.

It comes after New Zealand's prime minister Jacinda Ardern said she and her ministers will take a 20pc pay cut for six months in solidarity with people who have lost jobs.

When asked if ministers here will take a pay cut, Mr Donohoe said the government will look at what other governments are doing and suggested it will be discussed in the coming weeks.

Taoiseach Leo Varadkar is paid 185,350 a year.

His salary is set at 207,000 but Mr Varadkar and other office holders have not taken pay increases due to ministers under the public sector pay restoration process.

Ministers get 157,000 though they would be paid more than 175,000 if they didn't waive the pay rises of recent years.

Read More

Mr Donohoe said that the government hasn't discussed the issue of pay cuts for ministers so far.

He said: "We will look at what other governments are doing" but also said: "It is the case that the wage increases the recent years have not applied to office holders."

Mr Donohoe added: "I absolutely understand now that many people all over the country are facing a very severe loss of income that they are having to deal with.

"And I'm sure that the government will discuss this and other matters in the coming weeks."

Mr Donohoe said the question of a pay reduction for TDs - who get 96,000 - or Senators - who are paid 68,000 - has not been examined.

"I haven't to date considered whether reductions are merited or needed for TDs or Senators. It is the case that a number of TDs and Senators are handing back to the state increases which they were due. It's also the case that some of us cannot do that," Mr Donohoe said.

He also responded to reports that some TDs are seeking additional expenses for working from home.

Mr Donohoe said that the Houses of the Oireachtas has said they're not planning to bring in any new expenses system and that he supports that position.

"I would make the point that now for many years the Houses of the Oireachtas have been making laptops and mobile phones available to those who are in the Dail or the Seanad to allow them to work in different places.

"That is the way that equipment should be used now," he said.

Meanwhile, Mr Donohoe has warned that the coronavirus wage subsidy scheme can't stay in place "indefinitely" as he announced changes that will see lower paid workers get a higher percentage of their pre-crisis pay.

The scheme is aimed at helping businesses hit by the emergency to retain staff and ensure that workers still get a large proportion of their salary.

Under the measures announced by Mr Donohoe there will be changes to the entitlements of lower paid workers but also bring higher paid people whose salaries have fallen below 76,000 into the scheme.

For those will net pay of less than 412 per week, the subsidy will increase from 70pc to 85pc of their previous weekly pay.

Employees who had a previous average net salary of between 412 and 500 per week will get the subsidy paid up to 350-per week.

The changes mean that more employees will now receive a subsidy of 350 per week - which is equal to the emergency payment for people who have lost their jobs.

For employees with a previous net pay of more than 586 per week or 38,000 per year, a tiered approach will apply.

The maximum subsidy payable for these remains at 350 per week.

The tiered approach takes into account both the amount paid by the employer and the level of reduction in pay borne by that employee as follows.

In instances where up to 60pc of an employee's previous average net weekly wage is paid by the employer, the subsidy available is up to 350-a-week.

Where between 60pc and 80pc of the previous pay is covered by an employer, the subsidy on offer is up to 205-a-week.

If an employer is paying more than 80pc of a workers' wage, no subsidy is payable.

Tapering of the subsidy will apply to all cases where the gross pay paid by the employer and the subsidy exceed the previous average net weekly pay.

This is calculated by subtracting the amount paid by the employer from the previous average net weekly pay.

This is to ensure that no employee would be better off under the scheme.

Mr Donohoe has also announced that the wage subsidy is now available to support employees where the average net pre-Covid salary was greater than 76,000, and their gross post-Covid salary has fallen below 76,000.

The tiered arrangement applicable to gross incomes in excess of 38,000 will apply in such circumstances.

Mr Donohoe said the measures build on the scheme that has already been introduced and is in use by more than 40,000 employers and is designed to help businesses and staff at a time of "unprecedented difficulty".

The aim of the scheme is to protect the income of employees and offer a "fighting chance" of saving the businesses they work for.

Mr Donohoe also cautioned that it is an exceptional scheme with the potential to cost hundreds of millions of euro a week and "We will not be able to continue these kinds of measures indefinitely".









He said the ability is there to sustain it for the full 12-weeks that it is to be implemented for but it is being monitored and assessed.

"It's not possible at this point, to put down a very specific end date, beyond this, because so much of what we'll have to deal with just depends on where we want to be with Covid-19," Mr Donohoe said.

"We can sustain this scheme for now but when we get to a point of seeing our public health improve and seeing as a result of that our economy improve the wage subsidy scheme and the way in which it operates will be reviewed and then tapered."

Mr Dohonoe also referenced on the International Monetary Fund (IMF) warning that the economic fallout from the coronavirus crisis may lead to the worst downturn since the Great Depression.

He said: "This underlines the scale of the challenge facing us. But this is a challenge that here in Ireland with our economy,

with decisions that we can make, that we have the ability to help navigate this country through."

He said it's possible Ireland could see a decline in economic activity that's comparable to and potentially greater than the crash of a decade ago.

"We are in uncharted waters. We're facing a new kind of challenge, facing new economic difficulties.

"So this is why the response of the government must be commensurate with challenge that citizens and which our economy now faces."
Following in the large footsteps of the recently announced contribution by Tata Trusts and Tata group towards the management of COVID-19 pandemic in India, Tata AIA Life Insurance today announced additional benefits for its Policyholders and Agents.

As part of Tata AIA Life's initiative, its individual policyholders will get COVID-19 related additional benefit up to Rs 500,000 at no additional cost.

Further, to extend the Circle of Protection to its own Agents, all 'active' Agents of Tata AIA Life Insurance along with their spouse and children will be reimbursed up to Rs 25,000 in case of hospitalisation due to COVID-19. This is a first of its kind initiative in India. The suddenness of present times has led to a high level of uncertainty and this is Tata AIA's own way of showing solidarity and giving back to society.

All employees and Agents are working completely on a digital platform from the comfort of their homes to ensure a full suite of services to consumers.

Tata AIA has already in place several measures to provide for its employees during these times such as Mediclaim policy for employees and their families and an emergency medical funds trust which can be used for COVID-19 diagnosis hospitalisation as well. With an intent to offer similar support during COVID-19 pandemic to its policyholders and Agents, Tata AIA has launched this initiative.

All policyholders of Tata AIA will get an additional benefit equal to the base sum assured or Rs 500,000 whichever is lower for valid death claims due to COVID-19. This benefit is applicable for all valid death claims with a date of death on or before June 30 2020.

Further, Tata AIA's agents along with their spouse and children are entitled to up to Rs 25,000 hospitalization cover if diagnosed with COVID-19 within this period as well.

Tata AIA Life Insurance, a leader in the Life Insurance Protection space with the highest claims settlement ratio, has offered this unique cover for all of its retail policies, comprehensively covering all categories of retail policies, be it Term, TROP, Endowment or ULIP, as part of its commitment to give back to society.

"We are all collectively facing a situation like never before. This is an opportunity for each one of us to come forward and serve society. For us, Protection is the way to serve society. We have done this by digitally enabling our employees and Agents to stay safe at home while continuing to be available for our consumers 24/7 for all their needs so that we uphold our promise to Policyholders which is especially critical during such times," said Rishi Srivastava, MD and CEO, Tata AIA Life Insurance. "Further, for our employees and their families, we have in place robust medical insurance scheme and an emergency medical funds trust that covers COVID-19. We will take this a step further by going above and beyond the promise made to our Policyholders and by being there for our Agents when it's most needed. Thus, we have come a full circle in extending Protection to all near and dear to Tata AIA Life Insurance," he added. This initiative covers individual policies only and is not applicable for lives covered under any group policy. It would be applicable on a unique customer basis and, therefore, a customer owning multiple policies would be eligible for the additional benefit for one valid claim only. Apart from the COVID-19 cover, Tata AIA also has a pre-existing accidental cover that ranges between Rs 300,000 -Rs10,00,000 for its Agent workforce. For its employees, Tata AIA has group Mediclaim policies covering the individual as well as an immediate family along with an emergency medical funds trust. Tata AIA Life can be reached via its various digitally-enabled mediums - 24/7 WhatsApp services, SMS services, email, and IVR [which has been smoothly transitioned to calling from home].

The Company has also equipped its employees with technology that allows smooth Work from Home facility to ensure utmost safety and minimal disruption. This will help provide seamless customer engagement and redressal of any customer queries.

This story is provided by BusinessWire India. 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.)
[April 15, 2020] Airwallex Closes US$160M in Record Fundraising Round to Date, Announces Worldwide Growth Plans

Airwallex has raised a Series D round of US$160M , its largest to date, with participation from a group of new investors, including ANZi Ventures and Salesforce Ventures, and several existing investors, including DST Global, Tencent , Sequoia Capital China, Hillhouse Capital and Horizons Ventures

The new funds will be used to accelerate worldwide growth in Europe , the US and new markets, expand its product line to include payment acceptance solutions and explore acquisitions to fast track Airwallex's offerings

This round is followed by the company's momentous growth over the last 12 months; enhancing its capabilities to serve both SMBs and enterprises alike SINGAPORE, April 16, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- A global fintech leader Airwallex today announced that it has closed its Series D fundraising round at US$160M, marking its biggest raise to date. The round includes majority participation from a group of new top-tier global strategic investors, including ANZi Ventures (the corporate venture capital arm of ANZ Bank) and Salesforce Ventures (the global investment arm of Salesforce). Existing core investors DST Global, Tencent, Sequoia Capital China, Hillhouse Capital and Horizons Ventures also participated, bringing Airwallex's total equity raise since it was founded in 2015 to US$360M. Airwallex plans to use the new funds to continue its expansion journey by: Accelerating worldwide growth through customer acquisition and licensing, particularly in Europe and the US, and new markets such as the Middle East

through customer acquisition and licensing, particularly in and the US, and new markets such as the Middle East Expanding its product line to include payment acceptance capabilities through a proprietary gateway solution as well as partner integration

to include payment acceptance capabilities through a proprietary gateway solution as well as partner integration Exploring acquisitions in the payments space to fast track offerings The new funding comes on the heels of a momentous year of growth for Airwallex. After a successful Series C round in March 2019, Airwallex's global presence has expanded considerably, with new offices in Tokyo, Bangalore, and most recently a presence in Dubai. Alongside the international expansion, Airwallex has also significantly enhanced its product capabilities, including the launch of Airwallex Borderless Cards in parnership with Visa and a highly-requested integration with Xero .



These new features mark Airwallex's evolution from an international payments platform to a fully integrated end-to-end financial services provider for businesses of all sizes. The expansion of products available via Airwallex business accounts means SMBs now have access to a host of services that enable high-speed, low-cost payments and collections worldwide, alongside instant AUD, USD, EUR, GBP, HKD and CNY global accounts. In addition to supporting the growing SMB market, Airwallex has a suite of enterprise products to help larger businesses with more complex financial needs, such as mass international and domestic payouts. Its recently launched Issuing API will further enable enterprises to generate and issue payment cards to their networks, saving them time and money.

Jack Zhang, CEO and Co-founder of Airwallex, said on the fundraising announcement, "The global shift to digital is imminent. We envision a world in the not-too-distant future where all businesses will operate and conduct their affairs online - including banking - with the help of modern tools." "From the very beginning, our vision has been to lead the transformation of global financial infrastructure. We have stayed true to our vision by building the Airwallex platform with fast and agile technology, continually improving our product and investing in dedicated support teams. More than ever, we are well-positioned to support businesses no matter their size as they adapt to today's changes." "The commitment and confidence from both new and existing investors in this round is a strong validation of our successes and our strategic vision. With their support, we look forward to accelerating our growth and further empowering businesses across the globe." Ron Spector, Managing Director of ANZi Ventures said of the funding, "ANZi Ventures is pleased to make a strategic investment in Airwallex, one of Australia's fintech leaders. We look forward to working further with the team to support their vision of building a next-generation digital payments platform for SMBs and enterprises globally." Rob Keith, Head of Australia, Salesforce Ventures said, "Being able to transact and do business with customers all over the world is a key criteria for companies who are going through a digital transformation. We're excited to partner with Airwallex at this critical time in its growth, expanding both its footprint globally and its product capabilities." About Airwallex Airwallex was founded in Melbourne, Australia in 2015 with a simple goal - to push the boundaries of global financial services capabilities in an increasingly borderless world. Airwallex has since secured over $360 million USD in external funding, supported by top-tier investors including Tencent, Sequoia Capital China, DST Global, Hillhouse Capital, Horizons Ventures, ANZi Ventures, Square Peg Capital, Gobi Partners and Salesforce Ventures. The company's core strength lies in its proprietary tech-driven infrastructure to enable low-cost, high-speed and transparent international collections and payments (accessible via API), its business account and borderless card which helps businesses grow both domestically and internationally. Airwallex has grown to over 420 employees across 10 international offices (Melbourne, Hong Kong, Shanghai, Shenzhen, Beijing, Singapore, London, San Francisco, Tokyo, and Bangalore). www.airwallex.com About Salesforce Ventures Salesforce is the global leader in Customer Relationship Management (CRM), bringing companies closer to their customers in the digital age. Salesforce Ventures, the global investment arm of Salesforce, invests in the next generation of enterprise technology that extends the power of the Salesforce Platform. Salesforce Ventures is building the world's largest ecosystem of enterprise cloud companies and extending that technology to customers. Portfolio companies receive funding, strategic advisory and operating support, and can easily join Pledge 1% to make giving back part of their business model. Salesforce Ventures has invested in more than 375 companies, including DocuSign, GoCardless, Guild Education, nCino, Twilio, Zoom and others across 22 countries since 2009. For more information, please visit www.salesforce.com/ventures. SOURCE Airwallex

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Any discerning and patriotic Ghanaian, who truly loves Mother Ghana, and has ever read President Nkrumah's 28th September, 1963, speech, at the opening of what is today known as the Tema Oil Refinery (TOR), will weep, upon learning that an ex-Goldman Sachs employee, Mr. Asante Berko, a rogue dismissed by his American employers for breaking the US Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA), has been appointed to head the state-owned TOR.

How is that possible in a regime led by the honest and principled President Akufo-Addo, I ask? For those of us who believe in President Akufo-Addo and support him 100 percent this is untenable.

The question we must all ponder over is: Where in the world would this be allowed to happen, without the media demanding that his appointment be immediately rescinded - and swiftly call for a Parliamentary inquiry into how such a dubious character came to be appointed to such a sensitive position, by the executive branch of government?

The Ghanaian media is letting our nation down terribly, in egregiously neglecting to play its societal watchdog role, effectively, to the extend that some of those in power can be so bold as to foist such an amoral, greed-filled and shameless man - who totally lacks a moral compass, and has such criminal-tendencies - to head TOR, in a New Patriotic Party (NPP) regime, which used Mahama-era corruption, as it's central election campaign strategy, to ride to power, in the December 2016 presidential and parliamentary elections.

The appointment of Asante Berko illustrates perfectly, the grain of truth in the bush-telegraph stories that President Akufo-Addo's powers, are being systematically hijacked by the greedy bastards in the NPP, to enable them to use greed-filled individuals sympathetic to their party, to asset-strip the enterprise Ghana.

This disreputable greedy bastard would never have been appointed and approved by President Akufo-Addo, personally, ever. Full stop.

Yet, as we speak, somehow, he is in position heading TOR today. Amazing. Clearly, the NPP's greedy bastards are using greedy-bastard-allies to fulfill their secret agenda of transferring what belongs to all Ghanaians, to a greedy and powerful few, by stealth, in the NPP. Eeiiii, Oman Ghana, eyeasem ooooo - enti yewieye paaa enei? Asem kesie ebeba debi ankasa! Hmmmm. Yooooo...
STATEN ISLAND, N.Y. -- While the pandemic is challenging for many, it is always during the toughest times that people rise up together to support the community.

Despite Staten Islanders being stuck at home, many are still staying involved by donating to various groups of essential workers. Whether its masks to essential workers or dinner for medical professionals, Islanders consistently have each others backs.

Mission completed Staten island university hospital @nyc_emt thanks Josh for reaching out good job pic.twitter.com/u9dajdtZC3  Joseph R. Gannascoli (@JoeRGannascoli) April 13, 2020

Joseph Gannascoli, better known as Vito from The Sopranos," donated a catered lunch to EMTs and paramedics at both Staten Island University Hospital (SIUH) locations. Josh Silver, an EMT for SIUH, explained that he saw on Twitter that Gannascoli had been sending deliveries to hospital workers, and reached out.

I sent him a note thanking him and telling him how important it is to acknowledge the difficult work healthcare workers are dealing with everyday, Silver told the Advance/SILive.com.

After they exchanged numbers, Silver says the two spoke and Gannascoli asked if he could deliver to the SIUH locations. Gannascoli told the Advance/SILive.com that both Staten Island and EMT drivers tend to be overlooked, so he wanted to make sure they were taken care of, too.

Sure enough, he showed up on April 13 with a catered lunch for both locations.

I just appreciate everyones generosity and bravery, Gannascoli said. I wanted to give back to my community. If I thank as many people as I can, and give them a break and something to eat, thats all I want to do.

Gannascoli has also donated to Mercy Medical Center, Mount Sinai South Nassau, USPS, lab workers at St. Francis Hospital, and is feeding FDNY volunteers on Friday. Hes been funding his donations through his GoFundMe, which currently has raised over $11,000. He told the Advance/SILive.com that his donations were motivated by his sister, who works in the delivery room at Mount Sinai South Nassau.

Rosebank Post Office

The U.S. Postal Service (USPS) is full of essential workers that are making sure important packages end up on your front step. Sun S.I. Auto, a repair shop located on Lynhurst Avenue, made sure that these workers are taken care of. Boxes of gloves and masks were delivered to the Rosebank Post Office by the shop, USPS letter carrier Michelle Buchheit told the Advance.

Baldor Specialty Foods donated 100 palettes of Passover food through City Harvest to make sure communities in need were able to celebrate the holiday. (Courtesy Chamah)

Passover essentials

As the city was left to celebrate Passover from home, Baldor Specialty Foods made sure that the Jewish community had everything necessary to celebrate. They donated 100 palettes of traditional food to be distributed through City Harvest.

Several companies collaborated to donate Easter goods to RUMC. (Courtesy RUMC)

Easter at RUMC

Several companies collaborated to make sure that medical professionals would be able to celebrate Easter, despite being busy with coronavirus patients. Neiman Marcus, Joann Stores, SAP, CVS, and Gifted Staten Island donated candy, chocolate, masks, and gowns to the staff working at Richmond University Medical Center on Easter Sunday.

Hundreds of candy-filled eggs, baskets, gift bags and wrapped bunnies were placed in the hospital lobby for staff to choose from. Staff was also provided with spring-colored gowns and masks to celebrate the holiday.

MORE GOOD NEWS STORIES:
COVID-19 Testing Centre to open next week

A Covid-19 testing centre will open on the Island next Monday.

The centre will be operated by the microbiology lab at Noble's Hospital and will able to process 220 test samples per day.

Currently, results are sent away to a testing facility in the UK with results taking around 72 hours to come back.

The Manx Government has confirmed its averaging around 55.5 tests per day currently.
The Pakistani Army shelled forward villages in the sector besides Balakote and Mendhar in nearby Poonch district late Tuesday

Jammu: Two members of a family, including a 10-year-old girl, were injured in overnight shelling by the Pakistan Army along the Line of Control in Rajouri district of Jammu and Kashmir, officials said on Wednesday.

A mortar shell from across the border hit the house of Nazir Hussain at village Lamibari in Rajdhani area of Manjakote sector, resulting in injuries to two persons, the officials said.

They said the injured 70-year-old Rafiq Khan and Sonia Shabir were rescued by a police party headed by station house officer of the local police station Manzoor Kohli amid intense shelling and shifted to district hospital Rajouri.

The Pakistani Army shelled forward villages in the sector besides Balakote and Mendhar in nearby Poonch district late Tuesday.

The Indian Army retaliated and the cross-border shelling between the two sides continued intermittently for several hours, the officials said adding the casualties suffered by Pakistani Army in the retaliatory action was not known immediately.

The officials said a live mortar shell was found lying unexploded near a residential area in Mendhar town this morning. An Army team is at the scene to neutralize the shell, they said.

Pakistani rangers also shelled areas along the IB in Hiranagar sector of Kathua district, causing panic among border residents.

The firing and shelling in Chandwa area of Hiranagar began at around 9.30 pm Tuesday and continued throughout the night, they said, adding Border Security Force (BSF) personnel retaliated effectively. The guns fell silent around 4 am.
Superplus Games, a Helsing, Finland-based mobile gaming studio, raised $4.7m in funding.

The round was led by Makers Fund with participation from Business Finland and existing investor Sisu Game Ventures, among others.

The company intends to use the funds to continue to expand operations (adding programmers, creators, marketing professionals, and a community manager) and its development and commercialization efforts.

Co-founded by Kalle Jyly and Aarni Linnakangas, Superplus Games is studio which makes mobile player-versus-player games for casual gamers. The companys first title was mobile action game Hills of Steel, a physics-based tank battle game with over 39 million downloads. The studio is now working on the sequel Hills of Steel 2, expected to be launched during the summer and Brawls of Steel, a hero-based battler, expected to be launched by the end of the current year.

FinSMEs

15/04/2020
TANZANIA Breweries Limited (TBL) operating profit increased by 5 per cent to 220.07bn/- in the year ended 2019 compared to 210.33bn/-in the corresponding period, driven by the cost saving and decrease in other expenses.

According to Tanzania Securities Limited Commentary on TBL financials 2019 selling and distribution cost decreased by 7 per cent to 118.69bn/- from 128.16bn/-in 2018, the administrative expenses declined 8 per cent to 50.25bn/- compared to 54.70bn/-in the other year.

The report shows further expenses falling by 53 per cent to reach 7.62bn/-from 16.27bn/-in the year 2018.

The profit after tax increased by 13 per cent mainly driven by the increase in finance income by 45 per cent to 2.78bn/-from 1.91bn/-, lower brewing and packaging raw materials prices, efficiencies and lower overhead costs.

Consequently, the Earning per share increased by 13 per cent to 487/-from 428/-.

During the year under review, TBL reported 5 per cent decrease in revenue to 1.02tri/-from 1.07tri/- recorded during the year ended 2018 as the results of the scaling down of Darbrew operations.

The decline in revenue was in tandem with the decline in the gross profit by 3 per cent despite the decrease in the cost of sales by 6 per cent to 628.29bn/-from 669.3bn/-in the year ended 2018.

During the year 2019 the company posted improved performance indicated in the published financial statements; The operation profit increased by 5 percent as the results of increased productivity, lower brewing and packaging material prices, efficiencies in logistics and lower overhead cost.

The Gross and net profit margins both increased to 39 per cent and 15 per cent respectively thank to improved operational efficiency and cost management.

Return on assets (ROA) and return on equity (ROE) also recorded an increase to 19 per cent and 39 per cent respectively compared to prior year.

Despite the Groups discontinuation operations of traditional beers business, the performance remained sound and stable thanks to management effort ensure that TBL deliver what investors expect and maintain its status as the highest dividend payer.

The improved performance was achieved despite a scale down of Darbrew (manufacturer of Chibuku) operations and a reduction of spirits volume, as TBL capitalised on operational efficiencies and its mainstream beer brands coupled with reductions in operating expenses.

Given these results, TSL said the companys on-going strategy of delivering more affordable beer brands and packs to encourage consumers to switch out of the informal alcohol market seems to be working, especially considering the current lull in economic activity across sectors due to impact of Covid-19.

TBL will be affected though we are not sure the extent of the impact in the TBL performance in the year 2020. On the other hand the potential to make further dents to the informal alcohol business remains hugely untapped.

The company had announced plans to start a new brewery plant in Dodoma in 2019, but construction is yet to take off.

Still, TBL incurred 64. 17bn/-as capital expenditure during the year, most likely in expansion or improvement of existing production facilities.

This together with the Dodoma plan is a demonstration of the companys confidence in the business future locally as well as in the region.

At the bourse, TBL is one of the most liquid stocks that dominates the industrial and allied sector with total market capitalisation of 3.3tri/-.

As of 3rd April 2020, TBLs stock price closed at 10,900/-, a 4 per cent decline from the 11,400/-recorded in 3rd April 2019. However, with these promising results, the price is likely to go up in the near future.

Balance sheet remains size decreased by 3 per cent to total assets of 939.32bn/-from 965.84bn/-. Current assets went up by 1 per cent to 337.07bn/-from 335.34bn/-in the year ended 2018 due to improved net cash flow and inventories increase.

On the equity side the company 1 per cent increased in value of equity to 565.72bn/-from 562.82bn/-in 2018.

A total of 64.17bn/-was invested in capital expenditure during the year compared to 111.96bn/-in the prior year. This resulted into decrease in net cash flow from investing activities by 44 per cent to 61.3bn/-from 109.86bn/-.

Net cash flow from operations increased by 2 per cent to 229.87bn/-from 225.53bn/-a year, 65.28bn/- was utilised to pay corporate income tax.

Financing activities net cash flow declined by 30 per cent to 144.6bn/-from 206.67bn/-, out that 137.75bn/-was utilised to pay dividend during the year 2019. Also, during the year, TBL Plc declared and paid 500/-per share as dividend in 2019.
An app billed as the 'world's first robot lawyer' has a new feature that files unemployment benefits for free as millions of out-of-work Americans are currently struggling to do the same on their own because of the coronavirus outbreak.

The Do Not Pay App launched its unemployment feature Tuesday and will waive a $3 monthly subscription fee for any one who cannot afford to pay as they seek to use the app's unemployment benefits.

'Even if you are broke, you can use all our services,' the app's CEO Joshua Browder tells Mailonline.com.

The Do Not Pay App launched its unemployment feature Tuesday and will waive a $3 monthly subscription fee for any one who cannot afford to pay as they seek to use the app's unemployment benefits, the app's CEO Joshua Browder tells Mailonline.com

Once signed up for the app, users are prompted for personal and banking information, which Browder says is passed along to unemployment agencies and never kept by the app.

'We inject it into the form, and then it disappears,' Browder told NBC's Today.

If a call to an agency is warranted, the app will dial once an hour until there's an answer.

Ten million Americans have, so far, filed for unemployment because of the economic impacts of the coronavirus, overwhelming states which have struggled to keep up with requests for benefits and have not been able to answer calls made into call centers.

As the app's new feature was released, the US was bracing for millions more unemployment filings due to layoffs and furloughs resulting from business closures and stay-at-home orders during the pandemic.

There have been more than 633,300 cases in the US of the coronavirus, which has been blamed for more than 27,600 deaths across the country.

There have been more than 633,300 cases in the US of the coronavirus, which has been blamed for more than 27,600 deaths across the country

Do Not Pay, a San Francisco-based startup launched in 2015, typically handles parking tickets, small claims court and will even battle with companies to stop robocalls.

Browder, 23, who is originally from London and who attended Stanford University as a computer science major, started the company because he was regularly getting parking tickets and becoming accustomed to resolving them without an attorney.

In dealing with bureaucracy, and specifically with the process of seeking unemployment benefits, he said 'the government should invest in making it an easier process to access your rights.'

He acknowledged users may have reservations about handing over their personal and financial information.

What Do Not Pay wants to file for your unemployment Social Security ID number Copy of driver's license/ID card DD Form 214 (if you've served in the military) Alien Registration number and expiration cate if non-US citizen Paycheck stub/W-2 Form from your last employer Last employer's supervisor name Reason for working reduced hours or no longer working Name, the period of employment, and the hourly wages earned from all your employers in the last 18 months including the most recent employer Bank account number & routing number Advertisement

A checklist for filing with unemployment on the app requires a user to submit a Social Security ID number, bank account and routing numbers, drivers license details, and even paycheck stubs and W2 forms.

'I know it's a big ask,' he tells mailonline.com, assuring that the app is secured through a third party, verygoodsecurity.com.

'It's not like this is our first rodeo,' Browder says. 'We've been dealing with this for a while.'

The app also accepts payments using a secure app, known as Plaid, which is also used by Venmo for money transfers, Browder tells Mailonline.com.

If a user prefers, Do Not Pay can forgo doing an online application, and instead print the form and send it in the old fashion way, by US mail, Browder says.

The approach, in some cases, has yielded faster results than filing for benefits online.

One user even got her benefits and $1,200 stimulus check, in less than a week, she tells NBC's Today show.

When asked how she felt having the money so soon, Marama D. Nengel, an out-of-work hotel employee in Las Vegas, says. 'It was pretty good, because the bank account was getting pretty empty.'

Marama D. Nengel, an out-of-work hotel employee in Las Vegas got her benefits and $1,200 stimulus check, in less than a week, with the Do Not Pay app's help

Millions of Americans trying to file unemployment claims say its been difficult getting through to their state offices. Now one company says it will do the work for you, for free. @byjacobward has the details. pic.twitter.com/A5XjL8L0vg  TODAY (@TODAYshow) April 15, 2020

Do Not Pay as it appears in an online app store

Some comments online about Do Not Pay were not as favorable.

Many remarks in Apple's App store complained of the app's $3 subscription, which some users said was charged before they could even review the app's services.

An App Store comment by a user who goes by Bob Nope on February 27 claims, Do Not pay 'preys on the innocent that it's suppose to protect,' in a critique of how fast Do Not Pay took the users money.
Kamal Haasan, who is known for voicing opinions on social media, has recently spoken about the ongoing migrant crisis that happened amidst the Novel Coronavirus Lockdown. The actor-politician urged the Indian government to address the issues of migrant workers before it's too late.

The Indian 2 actor tweeted and expressed his concern over the incidents that happened in New Delhi and Mumbai over basic ration. Kamal Haasan wrote, "All the balcony people take a long and hard look at the ground. First it was Delhi, now Mumbai. The migrant crisis is a time bomb that must be defused before it becomes a crisis bigger than Corona. Balcony government must keep their eyes on what's happening on the ground too." (sic)

All the balcony people take a long and hard look at the ground. First it was Delhi, now Mumbai.

The migrant crisis is a time bomb that must be defused before it becomes a crisis bigger than Corona. Balcony government must keep their eyes on what's happening on the ground too.  Kamal Haasan (@ikamalhaasan) April 14, 2020

In a tweet, Kamal Haasan mentioned that migrant crisis is bigger than Corona. He criticised the ruling government over their campaigns. Well, this is not the first time that Kamal Haasan has criticised the government for their campaigns.

A few days ago, Kamal Haasan expressed his disappointment over PM Narendra Modi's activities during Coronavirus lockdown. He had written an open letter to PM Narendra Modi, and shared that things are not happening properly and people are creating a ruckus by coming out on the streets. However, he also confessed that he's with the government and will be giving full support to their decisions.

Also Read : Kamal Haasan Trolled For Criticising PM Narendra Modi's Decision Of 21 Days Lockdown For COVID-19

Sadly, the actor was mercilessly trolled for his opinions. Recently, Kamal Haasan also sent a congratulatory message to Kerala police for their Coronavirus awareness musical video.

On a related note, India has reported 11,555 COVID-19 positive cases in which 396 people have lost their lives. Hence, PM Modi extended the lockdown till May 3 to control the spread of Coronavirus.

Also Read : Kerala Police Thanks Kamal Haasan For Posting A Congratulatory Note
In the last decade, perovskites - a diverse range of materials with a specific crystal structure - have emerged as promising alternatives to silicon solar cells, as they are cheaper and greener to manufacture, while achieving a comparable level of efficiency.

However, perovskites still show significant performance losses and instabilities, particularly in the specific materials that promise the highest ultimate efficiency. Most research to date has focused on ways to remove these losses, but their actual physical causes remain unknown.

Now, in a paper published today in Nature, researchers from Dr. Sam Stranks's group at Cambridge University's Department of Chemical Engineering and Biotechnology and Cavendish Laboratory, and Professor Keshav Dani's Femtosecond Spectroscopy Unit at OIST in Japan, identify the source of the problem. Their discovery could streamline efforts to increase the efficiency of perovskites, bringing them closer to mass-market production.

Perovskite materials are much more tolerant of defects in their structure than silicon solar cells, and previous research carried out by Stranks's group found that to a certain extent, some heterogeneity in their composition actually improves their performance as solar cells and light-emitters.

However, the current limitation of perovskite materials is the presence of a "deep trap" caused by a certain type of defect, or minor blemish, in the material. These are areas in the material where energised charge carriers can get stuck and recombine, losing their energy to heat, rather than converting it into useful electricity or light. This undesirable recombination process can have a significant impact on the efficiency and stability of solar panels and LEDs.

Until now, very little was known about the cause of these traps, in part because they appear to behave rather differently to traps in traditional solar cell materials.

In 2015, Dr Stranks and colleagues published a Science paper looking at the luminescence of perovskites, which reveals how good they are at absorbing or emitting light. "We found that the material was very heterogeneous; you had quite large regions that were bright and luminescent, and other regions that were really dark," says Stranks. "These dark regions correspond to power losses in solar cells or LEDs. But what was causing the power loss was always a mystery, especially because perovskites are otherwise so defect-tolerant."

Due to limitations of standard imaging techniques, the group couldn't tell if the darker areas were caused by one, large trap site, or many smaller traps, making it difficult to establish why they were forming only in certain regions.

Later on in 2017, Professor Keshav Dani's group at OIST published a paper in Nature Nanotechnology, where they made a movie of how electrons behave in semiconductors after absorbing light. "You can learn a lot from being able to see how charges move in a material or device after shining light. For example, you can see where they might be getting trapped," says Dani. "However, these charges are hard to visualize as they move very fast - on the timescale of a millionth of a billionth of a second; and over very short distances - on the length scale of a billionth of a metre."

On hearing of Dani's work, Dr Stranks reached out to see if they could work together to address the problem visualising the dark regions in perovskites.

The team at OIST used a technique called photoemission electron microscopy (PEEM) for the first time on perovskites, where they probed the material with ultraviolet light and built up an image based on how the emitted electrons scattered.

When they looked at the material, they found that the dark regions contained traps, around 10-100 nanometers in length, which were clusters of smaller atomic-sized trap sites. These trap clusters were spread unevenly throughout the perovskite material, explaining the heterogeneous luminescence seen in Stranks's earlier research.

Intriguingly, when the researchers overlaid images of the trap sites onto images that showed the crystal grains of the perovskite material, they found that the trap clusters only formed at specific places, at the boundaries between certain grains.

To understand why this only occurred at certain grain boundaries, the groups worked together with Professor Paul Midgley's team from Cambridge University's Department of Materials Science and Metallurgy using a technique called scanning electron diffraction to create detailed images of the perovskite crystal structure. The project team made use of the electron microscopy setup at the ePSIC facility at the Diamond Light Source Synchrotron, which has specialized equipment for imaging beam-sensitive materials, like perovskites.

"Because these materials are very beam-sensitive, typical techniques that you would use to probe local crystal structure on these length scales will quite quickly change the material as you're looking at it, which can make interpreting the data very difficult" explains Tiarnan Doherty, a PhD student in Stranks's group and co-lead author of the study. "Instead, we were able to use very low exposure doses and therefore prevent damage.

"From the work at OIST, we knew where the trap clusters were located, and at ePSIC, we scanned around those same areas to see the local structure. We were then able to quickly pinpoint unexpected variations in the crystal structure around the trap clusters."

The group discovered that the trap clusters only formed at junctions where an area of the material with slightly distorted structure met an area with pristine structure.

"In perovskites, we have these regular mosaic grains of material and most of the grains are nice and pristine - the structure we would expect," says Stranks. "But every now and again, you get a grain that's slightly distorted and the chemistry of that grain is inhomogeneous. What was really interesting and which initially confused us, was that it's not the distorted grain that's the trap but where that grain meets a pristine grain; it's at that junction that the traps cluster."

With this understanding of the nature of the traps, the team at OIST also used the custom-built PEEM instrumentation to visualize the dynamics of the charge carrier trapping process happening in the perovskite material. "This was possible as one of the unique features of our PEEM setup is that it can image ultrafast processes - as short as femtoseconds," explains Andrew Winchester, a PhD student in Prof. Dani's Unit, and co-lead author of this study. "We found that the trapping process was dominated by charge carriers diffusing to the trap clusters."

These discoveries represent a major breakthrough in the quest to bring perovskites to the solar energy market.

"We still don't know exactly why the traps are clustering there, but we now know that they do form there, and seemingly only there," says Stranks. "That's exciting because it means we now know what to target to bring up the performances of perovskites. We need to target those inhomogeneous phases or get rid of these junctions in some way."

'The fact that charge carriers must first diffuse to the traps could also suggest other strategies to improve these devices," says Dani. "Maybe we could alter or control the arrangement of the trap clusters, without necessarily changing their average number, such that charge carriers are less likely to reach these defect sites."

The teams' research focused on one particular perovskite structure. The scientists will now be investigating whether the cause of these trapping clusters is universal across other perovskite materials.

"Most of the progress in device performance has been trial and error and so far, this has been quite an inefficient process," says Stranks. "To date, it really hasn't been driven by knowing a specific cause and systematically targeting that. This is one of the first breakthroughs that will help us to use the fundamental science to engineer more efficient devices."

###
Reading a book can take you so many places in your imagination while Staying at Home with your Family! Rita Wiltz, Executive Director for Childrens Books On Wheels (CBOW) is hoping to reach her goal of keeping Montgomery County Literate by donating 1,600 books in April to celebrate the 16 years CBOW has served the community.

To date CBOW has distributed books with Community Assistance Center during their weekly food distributions, the local YMCAs, and The Treehouse Center for girls in Conroe totaling over 900 books! Individual families with children in Conroe and the historic community of Tamina. Books are always distributed during every event including the Volunteer Income Tax Assistance and Project Re-Set. CBOW will be donating 200 books at the ARC Church each Wednesday a partnership with Community Assistance Center and on the April 22, 2020 a donation of 300 books.
AUD/USD Current Price: 0.6428

Gold surged to a fresh multi-year high above $1,720.00 a troy ounce.

Australia expected to have lost 40,000 jobs in March amid the coronavirus crisis.

AUD/USD is technically bullish, next directional move depending on employment data.

The Aussie has extended its advance against its American rival, with the pair reaching 0.6442, its highest in five weeks. The pair got boosted at the beginning of the day by better-than-expected Chinese Trade Balance figures, later underpinned by the positive tone of equities. Broad dollars weakness and soaring gold prices, with the commodity at fresh multi-year highs above $1,720.00 a troy ounce added to the bullish case.

This Wednesday, Australia will release March employment data. The country is expected to have lost 40K jobs, on the back of the pandemic that is hitting the world. The unemployment rate is seen up to 5.5% from 5.1%. The impact of such a negative number will be limited, as speculative interest is aware of empowerment distortions as a result of the coronavirus crisis. Nevertheless and given that the pair has been rising for seven consecutive days, a worse-than-expected number could trigger some profit-taking.

AUD/USD Short-Term Technical Outlook

The AUD/USD pair hovers around 0.6430, maintaining its bullish stance. The 4-hour chart shows that the Momentum indicator holds above its mid-line, although with little upward strength, as the advance is persistent but slow. The RSI, on the other hand, heads north despite being in overbought territory. A bullish 20 SMA, advancing beyond the larger ones, provides intraday support.

Support levels: 0.6390 0.6365 0.6300

Resistance levels: 0.6440 0.6475 0.6500

Image sourced from Pixabay

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 2020 Benzinga.com. Benzinga does not provide investment advice. All rights reserved.
FILE PHOTO: The sun is seen behind a crude oil pump jack in the Permian Basin in Loving County

By Laila Kearney

NEW YORK (Reuters) - U.S. crude prices fell to an 18-year low and Brent lost more than 6% on Wednesday after the United States reported its biggest weekly inventory build on record, while global demand is expected to fall to quarter-century lows due to the coronavirus pandemic.

The grim figures undercut the positive feeling from the weekend agreement between global oil producers to phase-in a record output cut, making clear that supply reductions would not be enough to prevent storage from filling and leaving countless barrels stranded.

"We have crude oil backing up in the system in epic fashion," John Kilduff, a partner at Again Capital in New York, said after the U.S. government's weekly oil inventory report. "This is probably one of the most bearish, if not darkest reports I've ever seen."

Brent crude <LCOc1> settled at $27.69 a barrel, dropping $1.91, or 6.45%. U.S. West Texas Intermediate crude <CLc1> settled at $19.87 a barrel, shedding 24 cents, or 1.19%. WTI logged its lowest close since February 2002.

For WTI to move much lower, the United States will likely need to near crude storage capacity, said Gene McGillian, vice president of market research at Tradition Energy in Stamford, Connecticut.

"The market is showing at near two-decade lows that we need to have more evidence that we're going to have a huge glut on our hands that will take some time for it to be whittled away before people get aggressively short below $20," McGillian said.

Crude stocks in the United States, the biggest crude-producing country, surged by 19 million barrels last week, while refiners cut capacity use to their lowest levels since 2008 due to plummeting demand caused by efforts to curb the spread of the novel virus, the U.S. Energy Information Administration said. [EIA/S]

The inventory report came shortly after the International Energy Agency (IEA) forecast oil demand would dive 29 million barrels a day in April to levels unseen in 25 years and said no output cut could fully offset the near-term falls facing the market. [IEA/M]

Story continues

The Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries, along with Russia and other producers - a grouping known as OPEC+ - has partnered with other oil-pumping nations, such as the United States, in the record global supply agreement.

Markets rallied in advance of the pact, under which the OPEC+ group will cut 9.7 million barrels per day, along with a hoped-for additional 10 million bpd from other nations. However, it is unclear if the total cuts, which include purchases into strategic reserves and market-induced reductions, will approach the lofty 20 million bpd figure touted by some, including Saudi officials.

"There is no feasible agreement that could cut supply by enough to offset such near-term demand losses," the IEA said in its monthly report.

Officials and sources from OPEC+ states indicated the IEA, the energy watchdog for the world's most industrialized nations, could announce purchases of oil for storage of up to several million barrels to buoy the deal.

As crude tank farms around the United States and globally fill, oil futures contracts suggest a heavy glut will overhang markets for months. Current contracts are trading at a lower price than contracts expiring several months from now.

But as of Wednesday, no such IEA purchases had materialized. The agency, in its report, said it was "still waiting for more details on some planned production cuts and proposals to use strategic storage." [IEA/M]

The United States, India, China and South Korea have either offered or are considering such purchases, the IEA added.

(Additional reporting by Alex Lawler Yuka Obayashi and Stephanie Kelly; Editing by Marguerita Choy, Paul Simao and Richard Chang)
HOUSTON, April 15, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- Main Street Capital Corporation (NYSE: MAIN) ("Main Street") is providing an update regarding its business and the impacts from COVID-19 ("Coronavirus"), its preliminary operating results and liquidity position for the first quarter of 2020, and its regular monthly dividends and semi-annual supplemental dividends.

Business and Coronavirus Update

Main Street continues to work collectively with its employees and portfolio companies to navigate the significant challenges created by the Coronavirus pandemic. Main Street remains focused on ensuring the safety of its employees and the employees of its portfolio companies, while also managing its ongoing business activities. Main Street remains heavily engaged with its portfolio companies and continues to be pleased with the diligent and proactive actions taken by the portfolio company management teams and their ability to respond effectively to the continuing challenges in the current environment. Main Street's lower middle market portfolio companies have also been actively evaluating the programs and relief under the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act, or CARES Act, stimulus packages that may be available to assist these portfolio companies as they navigate the impact of Coronavirus on their businesses, employees and operations. Main Street continues to believe that it has sufficient levels of liquidity to support its existing portfolio companies and selectively deploy capital in new investment opportunities and a capital structure that provides Main Street the flexibility to navigate the current challenging environment.

Preliminary Estimates of First Quarter 2020 Results and Liquidity Position

Main Street's preliminary estimate of first quarter 2020 net investment income ("NII") is $0.55 to $0.57 per share. Main Street's preliminary estimate of first quarter 2020 distributable net investment income ("DNII"), which is NII before non-cash, share-based compensation expense, is $0.59 to $0.61 per share.(1)

Main Street's preliminary estimate of net asset value ("NAV") per share as of March 31, 2020 is $20.35 to $20.85 per share. The estimate includes unrealized depreciation on investments primarily resulting from the immediate adverse economic effects of the impacts of Coronavirus on market conditions and the overall economy as of March 31, 2020 and the related uncertainty regarding its future impact, including, but not limited to, the related declines in quoted loan prices, increases in underlying market credit spreads and company-specific negative impacts on past and expected future operating performance.

As of March 31, 2020, Main Street had approximately $54.2 million of cash and cash equivalents. Also as of March 31, 2020, Main Street had $277.0 million of outstanding borrowings under its revolving credit facility, thereby providing $463.0 million of available capacity, and maintains availability for an additional $45.2 million of capacity under its Small Business Investment Company ("SBIC") licenses.

Updated Dividend Guidance

As previously announced, Main Street declared its regular monthly cash dividends for the second quarter of 2020 of $0.615 per share in aggregate, or $0.205 per share for each of April, May and June 2020, and such dividends will be paid on the previously announced payment dates of April 15, 2020, May 15, 2020 and June 15, 2020. Based upon its current expectations and projections, Main Street's management expects that at Main Street's next regularly scheduled Board of Directors ("Board") meetings in May 2020 they will recommend that the Board approve regular monthly cash dividends for the third quarter of 2020 of $0.615 per share in aggregate, unchanged from the regular monthly dividends to be paid in the second quarter of 2020, and with such amount payable in $0.205 increments for each of July, August and September 2020.

As discussed above, Main Street's business and operating results, and the businesses and operating results of Main Street's portfolio companies, have been significantly impacted by Coronavirus. As a result, there is uncertainty related to Main Street's expected operating results for the second and third quarters of 2020, and as such, Main Street is not currently able to provide projections for its expected NII, DNII or NAV for these future periods. However, it is reasonable to expect that Main Street's NII and DNII for the second and third quarters of 2020 will be below the regular monthly dividend amounts for these periods. As such, the above expected recommendation by Main Street's management team to declare the regular monthly dividends for the third quarter of 2020 is based upon a combination of Main Street's reasonable expectations for its operating results for the second and third quarters of 2020, its estimated undistributed taxable income as of March 31, 2020 of approximately $0.75 per share and, as discussed below, its expectation that the Board will agree to suspend its semi-annual supplemental cash dividends.

In addition, due to the challenges and uncertainty created by Coronavirus, Main Street's management team has concluded that it expects to recommend to the Board that Main Street suspend its future semi-annual supplemental dividends, specifically including the supplemental dividend that it previously expected to pay in June 2020. Main Street believes that it is in the best long-term interests of its shareholders to not only maintain a conservative approach to its dividend policy during this volatile economic environment, but to also ensure it has the ability to be opportunistic in funding attractive investments that have the potential to provide long-term value to Main Street's shareholders.

ABOUT MAIN STREET CAPITAL CORPORATION

Main Street (www.mainstcapital.com) is a principal investment firm that primarily provides long-term debt and equity capital to lower middle market companies and debt capital to middle market companies. Main Street's portfolio investments are typically made to support management buyouts, recapitalizations, growth financings, refinancings and acquisitions of companies that operate in diverse industry sectors. Main Street seeks to partner with entrepreneurs, business owners and management teams and generally provides "one stop" financing alternatives within its lower middle market portfolio. Main Street's lower middle market companies generally have annual revenues between $10 million and $150 million. Main Street's middle market debt investments are made in businesses that are generally larger in size than its lower middle market portfolio companies.

FORWARD-LOOKING STATEMENTS AND OTHER MATTERS

Main Street cautions that statements in this press release which are forwardlooking and provide other than historical information, including but not limited to having sufficient liquidity and a capital structure necessary to successfully navigate the current economic environment, the preliminary estimates of first quarter 2020 results, NAV, its ability to cover its expected second and third quarter 2020 dividends with current and undistributed net income and estimated spillover taxable income, statements regarding expectations for operating results for the second and third quarters of 2020, and statements regarding the payment and amount of future dividends, are based on current conditions and information available to Main Street as of the date hereof and include statements regarding Main Street's goals, beliefs, strategies and future operating results and cash flows. Although its management believes that the expectations reflected in those forwardlooking statements are reasonable, Main Street can give no assurance that those expectations will prove to be correct. Those forward-looking statements are made based on various underlying assumptions and are subject to numerous uncertainties and risks, including, without limitation: Main Street's continued effectiveness in raising, investing and managing capital; adverse changes in the economy generally or in the industries in which Main Street's portfolio companies operate; the potential impacts of the Coronavirus outbreak on the business and operations of Main Street and its portfolio companies, and on the U.S. and global economies, including public health requirements in response to the outbreak and, with respect to Main Street, impacts on its portfolio investments, liquidity and access to capital; changes in laws and regulations or business, political and/or regulatory conditions that may adversely impact Main Street's operations or the operations of one or more of its portfolio companies; the operating and financial performance of Main Street's portfolio companies and their access to capital; retention of key investment personnel; competitive factors; and such other factors described under the captions "Cautionary Statement Concerning Forward-Looking Statements" and "Risk Factors" included in Main Street's filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission (www.sec.gov). Main Street undertakes no obligation to update the information contained herein to reflect subsequently occurring events or circumstances, except as required by applicable securities laws and regulations.

The preliminary estimates of first quarter 2020 results, NAV and spillover taxable income, and Main Street's expectations for operating results for the second and third quarters of 2020, furnished above are based on Main Street management's preliminary determinations and current expectations, and such information is inherently uncertain. The preliminary estimates are subject to completion of Main Street's customary quarter-end closing and review procedures and third-party review, including the determination of the fair value of Main Street's portfolio investments by the Board, and have not yet been approved by the Board. As a result, actual results could differ materially from the current preliminary estimates based on adjustments made during Main Street's quarter-end closing and review procedures and third-party review, and Main Street's reported information in its Quarterly Report on Form 10-Q for the quarter ended March 31, 2020 may differ from this information, and any such differences may be material. In addition, the information furnished above does not include all the information regarding Main Street's financial condition and results of operations for the quarter ended March 31, 2020 that may be important to readers. As a result, readers are cautioned not to place undue reliance on the information furnished in this press release and should view this information in the context of Main Street's full first quarter 2020 results when such results are disclosed by Main Street in its Quarterly Report on Form 10-Q for the quarter ended March 31, 2020. The information furnished in this press release is based on current Main Street management expectations that involve substantial risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from the results expressed in, or implied by, such information.

(1) Distributable net investment income is net investment income as determined in accordance with U.S. Generally Accepted Accounting Principles, or U.S. GAAP, excluding the impact of share-based compensation expense which is non-cash in nature. Main Street believes presenting distributable net investment income per share is useful and appropriate supplemental disclosure for analyzing its financial performance since share-based compensation does not require settlement in cash. However, distributable net investment income is a non-U.S. GAAP measure and should not be considered as a replacement for net investment income and other earnings measures presented in accordance with U.S. GAAP. Instead, distributable net investment income should be reviewed only in connection with such U.S. GAAP measures in analyzing Main Street's financial performance. In order to reconcile estimated distributable net investment income per share to estimated net investment income per share in accordance with U.S. GAAP, $0.04 to $0.05 per share of estimated share-based compensation expense is added back to calculate estimated distributable net investment income per share.





Contacts:

Main Street Capital Corporation

Dwayne L. Hyzak, CEO, [email protected]

Brent D. Smith, CFO, [email protected]

713-350-6000

Dennard Lascar Investor Relations

Ken Dennard / [email protected]

Zach Vaughan / [email protected]

713-529-6600

SOURCE Main Street Capital Corporation

Related Links

http://www.mainstcapital.com


Hastings Technology Metals (ASX:HAS) said today it received its environmental approvals for mining rare earths at the Yangibana rare earths project.

The company said approvals are in place to construct and operate an open pit rare earths mine, processing facility and associated support infrastructure, approximately 270 km east-northeast of Carnarvon, Western Australia.

The company said the permitting process lasted over four years.

Hastings said the next step is making the economics work.

"The immediate focus of the Company is the continuing improvement of the economics of the Yangibana Project by progressing a number of mining, metallurgical and process design and research initiatives that expand on the studies completed as part of the Definitive Feasibility Study (DFS) released in November 2017. All work streams are geared to ensure the Project is capable of being financed and brought into production within the current rare earth pricing environment," said Hastings in a news release.
He's been a vocal advocate for self-isolating during the coronavirus pandemic.

But Arnold Schwarzenegger isn't letting California's Safer At Home order stop him from getting out and about while maintaining social distancing.

On Tuesday, the former governor and Hollywood star was spotted taking his Indian motorcycle for a spin in Malibu.

Out and about: Arnold Schwarzenegger, 72, who is sporting a full gray beard, took his Indian motorcycle for a spin in Malibu Tuesday wearing a black leather jacket and black biker boots

Schwarzenegger, 72, who is sporting a full gray beard, wore a black leather biker jacket and black biker boots for his expedition.

He added a safety helmet and sunglasses.

The Terminator star was accompanied by a male pal for the trip.

During the COVID-19 lockdown, he has been encouraging his fans to continue to exercise and sharing cute social media videos of his pets.

Took a break from home self-isolation: The Terminator star added a safety helmet and sunglasses and was accompanied by a male pal for the trip

Last week, Schwarzenegger sent 1,000 lunches to medical workers in a bid to help those on the front line battling the coronavirus.

He sent the meals from an Italian restaurant to staff at the Keck USC Medical Center in Los Angeles.

He explained his actions in an Instagram video, telling his fans: 'While we are in quarantine and social distancing, there's a lot of people out there that are really fighting on the front lines of this coronavirus.'

'And this is why I said to myself, we got to do something special for them besides just providing masks,' he said. 'So I said to myself, maybe I should send them some food... Thank you for the great work you are doing, hasta la vista.'

Nice gesture: Last week, Schwarzenegger sent 1,000 lunches to medical workers at a medical center in LA as they continue to deal with the COVID-19 outbreak

Took precautions: In individual bags for safety reasons, the meals from an Italian chain restaurant were delivered by drivers wearing gloves and masks

The actor and former bodybuilder also teamed up with TikTok to help feed hungry families.

The online platform donated $3 million to his After-School All-Stars, which usually funds afterschool programs for children.

Schwarzenegger said in a TikTok video: 'Because of the corona crisis, those kids have been sent home so now instead of providing after school programs we thought it would be cool and great if we could provide food for those families.

'But, of course, you can have the best ideas in the world but if you don't have the money you have nothing ... So TikTok came along and said we are the ones that are going to donate the millions of dollars to help feed those families.'

The foundation's team will deliver food and gift cards for groceries to families in need in 60 cities in the country, including New York, New Jersey, Los Angeles and Miami.

Entertaining: Schwarzenegger has also been sharing cute photos and videos of his pets during the Safer At Home order in California




Manchester United midfielder Paul Pogba revealed while growing up he was an Arsenal fan. French international idolised Thierry Henry and wanted to follow the footsteps of the countryman.

"I will be honest. So, at the start, I was an Arsenal fan - obviously because of all the French players, you know. Me and my brother were but my other brother was a Manchester United fan," Pogba told United's official podcast.

"I couldn't say anything so I used to love Henry and, because of him, I was an Arsenal fan. Then I changed and went on to choose with my other brother. No Arsenal, I went with the other one, the United fan!" he added.

Pogba came through the youth ranks at Old Trafford while Sir Alex Ferguson was in charge but after only making a handful of appearances for the first team in 2011/12 he left for Juventus in the summer.

He re-joined United in 2016 from Juventus when Jose Mourinho was the manager as he saw it as an opportunity to finish what he had started.

Henry, who had left Arsenal for Barcelona by the time Pogba arrived in England, was not the only iconic Frenchman or all-time great that an energetic midfielder looked up to.

"I had Ronaldinho, Ronaldo, [Zinedine] Zidane, Thierry Henry, Djibril Cisse, Kaka," Pogba said.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
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.
Abdi Nur was the first Somali source to speak with me after I wrote about Ilhan Omar in my Her back pages post of August 2016. I have met with him frequently over the past three-and-a-half years and confirmed everything he has told me with other sources (including law enforcement) and other researchers (including, preeminently, Preya Samsundar and David Steinberg). Abdi is a widely followed reporter for the Somali community on Facebook  his page is here  under the name Xerta Shekh. Abdi called me last night to request that I post his most recent Facebook items on Power Line to get the word out to Power Line readers in Minnesotas Somali community. Abdi reports (lightly edited):

April 13  Habso Mohamud is a young woman who is an American citizen who lived in Minnesota. She is an educated young woman who was an author and community activist, very helpful to her community. She was active with the youth community and with refugees both here and in Kenya. She visited many refugee camps to help young refugees and was an education advocate. She gave them her book to inspire poor young and orphan refugees. She was able to bring some of them to Minnesota and inspired several to apply to St. Cloud State University. Some were fortunate to be able to attend.

Habso eventually landed a job at the UN in Kenya. While working there she hired a Somali driver. One day when she left work he drove on a different road and tried to kidnap her! Habso realized what was going on and threw herself out of the moving vehicle and almost died. She is now in the hospital.

I am calling on all American citizens to help her get justice. I am calling on the American Embassy in Kenya to actively support an investigation and help Habso. They can Google her information about the amazing work she does. I want to share the pain of her story and help her seek justice for the suffering she has been through. I am also imploring the Kenyan government to arrest this perpetrator for what he did.

April 14  Breaking news: The criminal who was wanted for trying to assault Habso Mohamud has been arrested. He was arrested just in time as he tried to flee Kenya and is now in jail awaiting a court date. As Minnesota Somalis know, Habso is a valuable young woman leader and I will continue to pursue this case until it is resolved. I hope to help Habso find justice. The perpetrator should be found guilty and punished.

Abdi provides the photo of the alleged perpetrator (left) and Habso (right) below.

UPDATE: One of our friends at St. Cloud State writes: Thank you for posting Abdis news about Habso. She is a delight to work with, as we learned here at SCSU. She was a special studies masters student (a self-selecting major) who went on a UN field trip with a political science faculty member here who studies diplomacy. It just opened her eyes to possibilitiesSpecial studies students typically dont get to be part of a hooding ceremony  they dont have a home college  but that professor insisted Habso get to take part.Shes a joy. I pray for her safety and continued success.
Four persons were injured as a mob tried to stop a medical team from taking a coronavirus-infected man into isolation and hurled stones at their ambulance in Nawabpura area in Moradabad on Wednesday.

Police arrested 17 people including seven women allegedly involved in the incident, a Home department official said.

They have been booked under various sections of the IPC, Criminal Law Amendment Act and Epidemic Act, the official said. The FIR was registered at Nagphani police station.

In Lucknow, Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath said those behind the attack will face action under the tough National Security Act and the cost of damage to public property will be recovered from them.

Officials said a doctor and three paramedics were hurt and an ambulance and a police vehicle damaged in the stone-pelting.

Moradabad Chief Medical Officer Milind Garg said the mob suddenly appeared as the ambulance was driving away with a man who had tested positive for coronavirus, and started pelting stones.

They tried to stop the medical team from taking him away, officials said.

Moradabad District Magistrate Rakesh Kumar Singh said the situation has been brought under control and police deployed in large numbers in the area.

Condemning the attack, Adityanath in a statement said the attack on policemen, health workers and those involved in the sanitisation campaign is an unpardonable and most condemnable crime. He directed the district administration to identify those responsible and deal strictly with them.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Iran has likely suffered twice as many deaths from coronavirus as the country's official death toll states, a parliamentary report has said.

Investigators said the official total only counted those who died in hospital and who tested positive for the virus before they died - meaning the true toll is higher.

Iran has officially reported 4,777 deaths from the virus - a figure which has caused suspicion among experts and the international community.

Iran's true coronavirus death toll is likely twice as high as the official 4,777 figure because it does not include those who died at home or were not tested before they died, a report says

The kingdom also reported 76,389 cases of the virus, making it the Middle East's worst outbreak by far.

The 46-page report by Iran's parliament research center, published online, carries the weight of being written by nonpartisan experts within the country.

Iranian health officials offered no comment on the report, released Tuesday.

It represents the highest-level charge yet from within the Islamic Republic's government of its figures being questionable.

The report comes as Iranian President Hassan Rouhani continues to push for a slow reopening of the country's economy, which remains under crushing U.S. sanctions.

If its own figures offered to the World Health Organization are wrong, it adds to fears by some that encouraging people to return to work will spark a second wave of infections.

'In order to have more compatibility between protocol and estimated statistics, it is necessary to increase laboratory and testing capabilities in the country,' the report said. 'Needless to say that through increasing the capacities, diagnosis of disease will be more possible and spread of the disease will be more limited.'

Already, hard-liners have seized on Rouhani's handling of the pandemic to criticize him and his administration, which is held in poor regard after his 2015 nuclear deal with world powers collapsed due to President Donald Trump's move that unilaterally withdrew the U.S. from the accord.

The explosive charge was merely a footnote on page 6 in what appeared to be an otherwise routine report.

It said Health Ministry death toll figures counted only those who died in hospitals and had gotten positive test results for the virus.

That disregarded all coronavirus victims who died in their homes. The report also said that aggressive testing, something experts have seized upon as necessary in the pandemic, has not been done in Iran - meaning other cases likely have been missed.

Iran also has ten times the number of coronavirus cases that have been officially reported, the same report adds (pictured, a temporary hospital in Tehran)

It suggested the true death toll in Iran is probably 80% higher than figures now given, or nearly double.

As far as the positive cases are involved, and given the undertesting, the number of people infected is probably 'eight to 10 times' higher than the reported figures, the report said.

If correct, the report's worst-case figures would put Iran's death toll potential as high over 8,500, with some 760,000 total cases. That would catapult Iran to the country with the highest number of infections in the world.

The U.S. has over 600,000 confirmed cases, according to figures from Johns Hopkins University, though experts believe that number likely is larger as well.

International experts long have suggested they suspected Iran's numbers as its mortality was higher than other nations.

While other countriess also have seen cases spike, Iran's reported numbers so far have offered a gradual slope.

The report also accused authorities of not providing its authors with 'detailed figures' over the disease. It also warned that more than 30,000 people could die if strict quarantine measures aren't taken.

Last week, lawmaker Reza Shiran from the northeastern holy city of Mashhad, said that there had 'been no correct reporting on the death toll.' He alleged official reports instead labeled deaths as coming from an 'acute respiratory syndrome.'

Deputy Health Minister Ali Reza Raisi on Wednesday acknowledged that the 'limits of testing' faced by Iran means it doesn't have accurate figures of all those infected.

Iran has suffered the Middle East's worst coronavirus outbreak, but experts and observes have been skeptical of its data after it initially downplayed the severity of the outbreak (pictured, workers making face masks in Eshtehard, Iran)

'The real figures are more than the official statistics but it is not correct to multiply official figures by two or three,' he said, without elaborating or directly addressing the parliament report.

Meanwhile, Dubai's long-haul carrier Emirates said Wednesday it has begun administering on-site rapid coronavirus tests for passengers, beginning with a flight to Tunisia.

It described itself as the world's first airline to conduct on-site rapid tests for passengers. Dubai health officials conducted the blood test, offering results in 10 minutes, according to the airline.

In Pakistan, officials said that the United Arab Emirates has released some 400 Pakistani prisoners convicted of minor crimes over the outbreak.

A plane carrying 181 prisoners and eight Pakistani nationals stranded in Dubai landed in the northwestern city of Peshawar on Wednesday, immigration official Mohammad Zahid said.

The 181 were quarantined, Zahid said, adding that the remaining prisoners will also return home soon.
The coronavirus sweeping across the world will likely lead to the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) said Tuesday.The IMF predicted the global economy will shrink by 3% in 2020, a dramatic change from its prediction in January, when the IMF projected global gross domestic product (GDP) would rise 3.4% this year.Gita Gopinath, the IMF's chief economist, said in the latest "World Economic Outlook" report.The latest IMF forecasts projects the U.S. economy will shrink by 5.9% this year, with the Euro Zone contracting by 7.5%. Italy and Spain, where the virus is widespread, are expected to be particularly hard hit, with their economies contracting by by 9.1% and 8%, respectively.Gopinath said.And that's the better-case scenario.The global economy will recover a bit in 2021, but not fully.Gopinath said.Other financial institutes have projections that are just as grim. The World Trade Organization (WTO) said last week that global trade will shrink by between 13% and 32% this year. The Organization for Economic Coordination and Development (OECD) has also said that the effects of the virus on the global economy will resonate forGopinath also said things just may get worse.she said.
HALLELUJAH! After temporarily shutting, our favourite Italian restaurant in South London, Lo Paste Tradizionali, has reopened for collections and deliveries on Friday to Sunday.

The place only launched last July, but we now cant imagine our neighbourhood without it. What better way to show our support than by ordering mountains of homemade bavette al pesto and focaccia every weekend.

The most uplifting stories Ive heard in recent weeks are almost all about small businesses adapting to not only survive but thrive  and to put themselves at the heart of their communities.

There have been many uplifting stories in recent weeks about small businesses adapting to not only survive but thrive  and to put themselves at the heart of their communities

Last week, we reported on a handful of these heart-warming tales, and they continue to pour in.

One friend told me how her familys local pub, The Fleece Inn in Bretforton, Worcestershire, has launched Fleece TV on Facebook to keep spirits up.

The landlord Nigel Smith reads funny messages and keeps everyone informed about online pub quizzes and how many pizza delivery slots are left.

Another friend wouldnt stop raving about the fact that he can have pints of beer brought to his door. (Theres a theme here.)

Others are gleeful their bakery, butcher, greengrocer or farm shop will now deliver. They are proving a lifeline for vulnerable people who are struggling to get a supermarket delivery slot weeks from now.

When normality returns, we must remember what these small businesses did for us up and down the country, and do our best to help them recover.

For while the ingenious steps taken ensure some money is still coming in, it will almost certainly not be enough to make up for all they have lost.

Money Mail reader Val Sprotts email sums up the sentiment perfectly. She says: Id like to give a cheer to the independent shops all over the country who have saved the communities they are based in, in these difficult times.

Ive seen shopkeepers serving at their doors, rather like the old-fashioned days of the corner shop where everything would be behind the counter.

'Others have been organising delivery services, or you can phone or email with your order and pick it up at the door. Some have quickly put together websites which show items you can order.

These shops have had all my custom and will continue to receive it once the emergency is over. If you can, shout out loud and clear for the UKs small shops  heroes the lot of them! Hear, hear.

Hero readers

While on the topic of heroes, I have two special mentions of my own, for Money Mail readers Kirsty and Mike.

Both sent such thoughtful emails offering support for a couple who featured in our letters page last week.

The Beatles fans had suffered a devastating two years following the death of their son, and were struggling to get their money back after being forced to postpone a special birthday trip to Liverpool.

Kirsty wrote: I could not help but be moved and would love to send them a small token such as a voucher or even a bunch of flowers with my best wishes.

Mike said: I was greatly saddened by the events leading to this unfortunate situation. I would like to offer my four-bedroom house in Liverpool to the family involved as free accommodation to be used at a future date when travel is allowed.

'My home is within two miles of Strawberry Fields, as well as John Lennons, Paul McCartneys and George Harrisons houses.

I passed your emails to the couple, who were bowled over by your kindness and thank you warmly.

Travel chaos

Finally, another plea for the Government to offer disappointed holidaymakers some clarity.

It is estimated that 500,000 holidays have been cancelled, at a cost of around 4.5 billion. Under normal circumstances, package holiday providers and airlines would be legally obliged to refund travellers. But many are refusing over fears they may go bust.

If travel firms need more time to be able to fulfil refund requests, ministers must amend the law accordingly so everyone knows where they stand. Right now, its an ugly and desperate free-for-all.

v.bischoff@dailymail.co.uk
By Express News Service

THRISSUR: After a meeting in the presence of ministers in the district, Cochin Devaswom Board authorities along with Thiruvambady and Paramekkavu devaswoms, decided to call off Thrissur Pooram entirely, in the wake of extension of the nationwide lockdown til May 3 amid coronavirus pandemic.

Even though preparations for the event, which was was set to happen on May 2, were stopped when the lockdown was announced, the organisers were hopeful about conducting the rituals. As the lockdown norms restrict gathering of not more than five people in temples, the meeting decided to avoid all rituals including flag hoisting for the pooram.

As there were confusions about pooram in the faction temples, the meeting also discussed it and decided to not conduct the pooram there also.

Drawing a large crowd including foreign tourists, Thrissur Pooram has a history of more than two centuries. Now, pooram fans around the globe have to wait for another year to enjoy Ilanjithara Melam, Madathil Varavu and the much appreciated Kudamattam. Fireworks display as a part of the pooram was another awaited feast, which the pooram lovers will miss this year.
The Cyber wing of the Maharashtra



Police on Wednesday identified more than 30 social media accounts, which allegedly spread rumours about train services that possibly prompted the gathering of migrants in Mumbai's Bandra on Tuesday, a senior official said.

Within a few hours after the incident, the cyber police identified the people responsible for spreading the fake and rumours and informed the Mumbai police about it, the official said on Wednesday.

More than 1,000 migrant workers, most of them from Bihar, Uttar Pradesh and West Bengal, gathered near Bandra railway station here on Tuesday afternoon. They were demanding that the state government make transport arrangements so that they can go back to their native towns and villages.

"We have identified more than 30 accounts on various platforms, including a channel, responsible for spreading the rumour about the train services," Balsing Rajput, Superintendent of Police, Maharashtra Cyber, said.

"All this has been informed to the police units concerned," he said.

Although the lockdown has been extended to contain spread of COVID -19, the cyber criminals and anti-social elements in the society are taking advantage of the situation with the intention of creating panic and disrupting harmony, he said.

"The cyber wing is monitoring fake and rumours spread through the various social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Tik-Tok, Instagram and others platforms round-the-clock," he said.

At least 201 cases have been registered till Tuesday at different police stations in the state, he said, adding that the accused in all these cases were involved in spreading fake news about the COVID-19 pandemic and circulating hate messages to create enmity between two communities.

So far, 35 people have been arrested and over 114 others have been identified and will be held soon, the official said.

In one case at Kopar Khairane in neighbouring Navi Mumbai, an unidentified person uploaded an image n Instagram, which disrespected the Indian flag and the country, Rajput said, adding that a search for the accused is on.

While analysing the offences registered across the state, the cyber wing has noticed that 99 of these cases were related to sending offensive messages on WhatsApp, whereas 66 cases were about offensive posts on Facebook, he said.

At least three cases were registered for offensive videos uploaded on Tik-Tok, he said, adding 37 cases were registered for circulating fake news and videos on other social media, such as YouTube, he said.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Quad bikers in the Dublin/Wicklow Mountains have been branded as reckless amid reports of bikes damaging the landscape in recent days.

The Department of Culture has stated that quad biking remains an illegal activity which is also extremely damaging to the fragile landscapes of the mountains.

Groups of people have been observed biking in the area in recent days, with some reportedly having broken the 2km radius travel limit, with speed of the bikes causing concern for local residents.

Fears have also been raised that the bikes may damage the environment and wildlife of the mountains.

The use of these vehicles within the Wicklow Mountains National Park and Special Area of Conservation is an illegal activity and extremely damaging to the fragile landscapes of the Dublin/Wicklow Mountains, the department of heritage, culture and the Gaeltacht said in a statement.

It added that quad bikes cause scarring of the landscape.

These illegal activities cause the loss of vegetation and erosion which leads to gullying, scarring of the landscape and eventual landslides. The unregulated use of these vehicles is also a concern for wildlife and livestock.

The department also encouraged people to report incidents to relevant authorities.

This activity is a scourge to upland habitats. Reports will be followed up on and perpetrators prosecuted where possible.

Given the current national crisis, we would hope that the precious resources of the State are not required to deal with such avoidable behaviour, the statement added.
During the meeting, they discussed prospects for cooperation and trade.

President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelensky has received credentials from Ambassador of the Republic of Serbia Aca Jovanovic, Ambassador of the Republic of Cuba Natacha Diaz Aguilera, and Ambassador of the Republic of Kazakhstan Darkhan Kaletaev.

During a meeting with Ambassador Jovanovic, Zelensky reaffirmed Ukraine's clear position as regards the sovereignty and territorial integrity of Serbia, and praised the consistent support by the Republic of Serbia for the territorial integrity and sovereignty of Ukraine, the presidential press service said on Wednesday.

Read alsoZelensky's Office chief discusses with G7, EU envoys assistance to Ukraine in its fight against coronavirus

To develop bilateral trade and economic cooperation, the parties agreed to intensify negotiations on the conclusion of the Free Trade Agreement and the resumption of work of the Intergovernmental Ukrainian-Serbian Commission on Trade, Economic, Scientific and Technical Cooperation. They also discussed further steps to strengthen interpersonal contacts between the two countries.

At a meeting with Ambassador of Cuba to Ukraine Natacha Diaz Aguilera, the parties discussed prospects for cooperation between the two countries, joint actions to resume political dialogue between Ukraine and Cuba, as well as interaction within the international organizations. Zelensky stressed the importance of further enhancing bilateral trade and economic cooperation, primarily in the spheres of aviation, pharmacology, medicine, as well as agriculture.

During a meeting with the newly-appointed Ambassador of Kazakhstan, the Ukrainian president congratulated Kaletaev on the beginning of diplomatic work in Ukraine. Zelensky stressed that the fight against the coronavirus pandemic should not interfere with the process of intensifying mutually beneficial relations with Kazakhstan. It is Ukraine's important and time proven partner in Central Asia.

The president praised the organizational work carried out with Kazakhstan, which helped deliver medical supplies from China to Ukraine as soon as possible.
A New Jersey man with Down syndrome died from the coronavirus on his 30th birthday  but not before his friends surprised him with a virtual celebration.

Thomas Martins passed away on April 6, just nine days after COVID-19 claimed the life of his 55-year-old mom, Carolyn Martins-Reitz.

Thomas Martins died from the coronavirus nine days after his mother, Carolyn Martins-Reitz. (Courtesy of the Reitz family)

I think Carolyn knew he wouldnt be able to adjust to life without her. They were always together, Martins godmother, Joni Lewin, told TODAY. I have a feeling that at 11:09, which is when he went, she said, OK, Thomas. Its time to come and be with mom.'

Download the TODAY app for the latest coverage on the coronavirus outbreak.

Lewin noted that while Martins adored his stepfather, Rudy Reitz, and his sister, Sharon Reitz, he depended on Carolyn for everything from the moment he was born.

When Martins-Reitz, a graphic artist, was rushed to the hospital in an ambulance earlier this month, her son stopped talking.

He was starting to feel sick himself, but was too upset to vocalize his symptoms, Lewin revealed. He just shut down.

The following day, Martins developed a cough and was taken to Clara Maass Medical Center in Belleville, New Jersey, where he was diagnosed with COVID-19.

Thomas Martins with his mom, Carolyn Reitz-Martin, stepfather, Rudy Reitz, and sister, Carolyn Reitz. (Courtesy of the Reitz family)

Though it was only temporary, Martins started to feel better and began asking his stepfather questions, inquiring about his mom's condition and the plans for his upcoming birthday.

Lewin, who set up a GoFundMe online fundraiser for the Reitz family, said Martins never learned of his mom's death. Reitz would divert conversation with Martins back to his birthday, which the young man had been looking forward to.

Thomas loved a birthday more than anyone. That was his thing," Lewin recalled.

Martins' friends at The Felician School for adults with developmental disabilities knew that and honored him with a beautiful celebration.

They sent over a big cake and a computer so Thomas hear his classmates singing to him, Lewin told TODAY. That was the last thing he heard. That bugger loved his birthday so much, he waited to hear them sing Happy Birthday.
Misinformation may have been a factor behind a protest by migrant workers near Mumbai's Bandra station on Tuesday.

Maharashtra home minister Anil Deshmukh said on Wednesday that the police has "tracked down the accounts" who were behind the spreading of misinformation regarding commencement of train services. This misinformation may have been a factor behind a protest by migrant workers near Mumbai's Bandra station.

Deshmukh said that "eleven different methods were used" to spread the news.

FIRs are being filed in these incidents and appropriate legal action will follow, he said in a tweet.

Misinformation regarding commencement of trains from April 14, 2020 was spread using 11 different methods. The accounts have been tracked, FIRs are being filed & due legal consequences will follow.#StayAlertStaySafe #ZeroToleranceForRumors  ANIL DESHMUKH (@AnilDeshmukhNCP) April 15, 2020

Deshmukh also asserted that the state government has zero tolerance for rumours.

Defying the lockdown in place to contain the coronavirus, more than 1,000 migrant workers had gathered outside the suburban Bandra railway station on Tuesday afternoon.

They were demanding that the state government make transport arrangements so that they can go back to their native towns and villages.

News18 quoted revenue minister Balasaheb Thorat as saying that 12 persons including a person named Vinay Dubey have been identified for spreading misinformation about trains.

Rumours and false information on social media regarding train services are being cited as one of the reasons for the protest which took authorities by surprise.

The police had resorted to lathicharge to disperse the crowd, and has also filed cases against unknown persons for violating the lockdown.

Deshmukh's remarks came hours after he announced the arrest of a Marathi TV journalist over his report on resumption of special trains.

The journalist, Rahul Kulkarni, was detained in Osmanabad in Marathwada region, where he is based, and brought to Mumbai where he was formally arrested.

Click here for LATEST updates on coronavirus outbreak

In a recent news report, Kulkarni said Jan Sadharan special trains would resume for people stranded due to the lockdown, the police official said.

He has been booked under IPC Sections 188 (disobedience to order duly promulgated by public servant and 269, 270 (negligent, malignant act likely to spread infection of disease dangerous to life), 117 (abetting commission of offence by public), the official said.

With inputs from PTI
The White House is installing Trump campaign veteran Michael Caputo in the health departments top communications position, Caputo confirmed to POLITICO.

The move is designed to assert more White House control over Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar, whom officials believe has been behind recent critical reports about President Donald Trumps handling of the coronavirus pandemic, according to two officials with knowledge of the move.

Caputo, whose title will be assistant secretary of HHS for public affairs, said in a text message, I am honored to serve the President to the best of my abilities in this time of crisis and, in so doing, the American people.

Caputo is an intense Trump loyalist whose recent book The Ukraine Hoax, alleged a conspiracy behind Trumps impeachment.

The high-level move comes after a series of news reports that portrayed Azar as warning Trump about the pending Covid-19 pandemic in January but having the president and his aides dismiss his concerns. Trump on Sunday tweeted that Azar told me nothing until later, appearing to refute those reports.

White House officials believe that Azar has been shaping favorable coverage of his handling of the Covid-19 outbreak and trying to shift blame for the administrations mishandled response, said two officials with knowledge of the situation. White House frustration with Azar also dates back to last year, with officials unhappy about his long-running feud with Medicare chief Seema Verma, Azars nominal deputy who maintains her own strong relationship with Trump.

Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar listens as President Donald Trump speaks about the coronavirus in the James Brady Press Briefing Room of the White House, Friday, April 3, 2020, in Washington. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon)

"Im delighted to have Michael Caputo join our team at [HHS] as our Assistant Secretary for Public Affairs, especially at this critical time in our nations public health history," Azar posted on Twitter after POLITICO's story published, sharing a photo of the two men sitting together at HHS headquarters.

The White House declined to comment.

Brad Traverse, a longtime lobbyist who created the popular BradTraverse.com site for Washington-area job hunters, will be Caputo's deputy, said two individuals with knowledge of the move. Traverse's photo was removed in recent days from his job-hitting website. Traverse did not immediately respond to request for comment.

Story continues

Azar has spent the past year battling with White House officials and his own deputies over policies and personnel, and the White House recently installed a new HHS personnel chief. Meanwhile, Verma has assumed a more prominent role in the White Houses coronavirus response even as Azar, who led the response for January and much of February, has disappeared from national TV.

Verma last week publicly announced an initiative to disburse billions of dollars to hard-hit health care providers that was part of Azars portfolio  a move that rattled Azars allies given that the health secretary was out of the office that day, mourning the death of his father. Two of Vermas supporters said that the Medicare chief was directed to make the announcement at the behest of the White House.

Caputo maintains a colorful Twitter feed where hes battled with political rivals and repeatedly weighed in on the coronavirus outbreak, although the tweets have since been deleted.

For the Democrat 2020 victory strategy to work, 100,000+ Americans have to die, Caputo wrote on March 11 in a now-deleted tweet. For the Democrat 2020 victory strategy to work, you have to believe the media.

This little guy lost so many Iranian mullah friends to the [coronavirus] that hes in mourning. Thoughts and prayers, Caputo wrote on March 12, quoting a tweet by former Obama administration official Ben Rhodes.

Caputo also posted a series of tweets last month mocking Andrew Gillum, the unsuccessful 2018 Democratic candidate for Florida governor, after Gillum was reportedly found by police in a hotel room with two men and drug paraphernalia.

Of course unprotected down low meth sex is totally responsible behavior during a global pandemic, Caputo wrote in a now-deleted tweet.

Caputo is a longtime friend of Trump ally Roger Stone and former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort, both of whom were convicted of crimes in the last two years. Caputo wrote last year in POLITICO magazine about his fears after being wrapped up in Robert Mueller's probe of Trump, which Caputo said had led to threats on his life.

"Ive installed shotgun stations in my home, and I carry a concealed weapon wherever its legal," Caputo wrote.

Caputo once lived in Moscow, where he worked for Boris Yeltsin and also performed public relations work for a subsidiary to Russian state-owned energy conglomerate Gazprom. Caputo told the Buffalo News in 2016 that he wasnt proud of the work today, but at the time, [Russian President Vladimir] Putin wasnt such a bad guy.

While Caputo has decades of expertise in communications, he has not worked in a high-level health care role before.

However, White House officials are looking to shake up HHS communications after growing perturbed by a series of news reports, including a story this week in The Daily Beast that called Azar a rare and unlikely hero inside the Trump administration  an article that was heavily circulated by White House officials.

People who know him say he believes in his mission even if the president doesnt believe in him, Daily Beast columnist Eleanor Clift wrote on Monday. Clift told POLITICO on Wednesday that she wrote the story after reading favorable coverage of Azar in publications like The New York Times and The Washington Post and did not speak with Azar directly.

Installing Caputo allows the White House to further control Azars communications strategy, said two individuals with knowledge of the pending move.

HHS has cycled through four communications chiefs in the past three years, including two who have since left the department. Ryan Murphy has been serving as the acting assistant secretary for public affairs since last October, after previous communications chief Judy Stecker was promoted to serve as Azars deputy chief of staff.

Unlike his counterparts in HHS leadership, Caputo worked as recently as last month as a registered foreign agent.

He lobbied lawmakers including Reps. Tom Emmer (R-Minn.) and Chris Smith (R-N.J.) on behalf of Somalian President Mohamed Abdullahi Mohamed last year, according to a disclosure filing. He helped convince The Buffalo News to run a story on Mohamed during a visit to the U.S. last year and set up meetings for him with lawmakers and administration officials. All meetings and pending meetings were cancelled by President Mohamed per Department of State recommendation, Caputo wrote in the disclosure.

The Somali government paid him $45,000 for his services.

Caputo also set up meetings for a Ukrainian delegation that visited Washington last month, securing sitdowns with Sen. Ben Cardin (D-Md.) and a Wall Street Journal reporter, among others.

Theodoric Meyer contributed to this report.
Coronavirus crisis: Actor and comedian Bharti Singh shared a video requesting to public to help the street dogs and not to abandon their pets, due to rumours. Watch the video here

Coronavirus crisis: After the coronavirus outbreak in India, the nationwide lockdown has been imposed till May 3. However, one part of life has been neglected by all, that is stray animals, who are currently roaming on streets for water and food. Most of the families in Britain, Italy, China, and The United States have dumped their pets due to the rumors of COVID-19 can transmit by animals. Actor and comedian Bharti Singh raised her concern on it, and shared a video where she can be seen requesting people to feed animals.

Bharti further said its heartwrenching that due to no food dogs in the Film City are dying, amid lockdown. Kindly come forward and feed them. These poor animals cannot speak, but they are in need. So, all the animal lovers help them in a difficult time

Even comedian Kapil Sharma made an appeal to the public, to look after animals. He said the virus doesnt spread due to pets, its just rumors. No one should abandon their animals, offer them food as they are in need. Other actorsKarishma Tanna, Gauahar Khan, and Karan Patel also urged their fans to do the same, as many animals are losing their lives.

Check the post here:

Meanwhile, actress Shraddha Kapoor extended her helping hands and donated to feed all the stray animals. She contributed to an NGO that looks after all the animals roaming on the streets. People For Animals India (NGO) thanked her for showing love to PAWSITIVE hearts.

Check the post here:

@ShraddhaKapoor

Please show love to the voiceless

PAWSITIVE HEARTS is an initiative launched by PFA in order to overcome the problem of starvation among animals during lockdown

Link:https://t.co/123KlF41d4

Note-Contributions to the cause will be eligible for Tax ExemptionU/S 80G  People For Animals India (@pfaindia) April 13, 2020

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SPRINGFIELD  Seven Illinois lawmakers want Gov. J.B. Pritzker to reopen state parks and trails closed since his March 20 stay-at-home order.

It does not make sense that state parks and trails are closed, and why activities like hunting and fishing on state property are currently prohibited, said state Rep. Avery Bourne, R-Morrisonville.

Social distancing can be practiced quite easily while engaging in these activities, she said. A one-size-fits-all approach just doesnt work here. Parks in Chicago are not the same as our parks around here.

Bourne and the other Republican lawmakers have sent a formal letter to Pritzker asking that the ban be lifted. Referring to state parks and trails as the original destinations for Illinoisans to social distance, exercise and engage in recreational opportunities that improve their wellbeing, the legislators said they hope the governor recognizes that the sites can be used safely and will agree to lift the ban.

The letter notes that Illinois State Conservation Police are on duty to protect park and trail safety. The letter states that, since Illinois was the nations first state park system to fully close, it should also be the first to re-open with proper social distancing guidelines put in place.

State parks and trails in several states surrounding Illinois have remained open during stay-at-home orders there, the lawmakers note.

The governor has admitted that we are beginning to see evidence that we are slowing the spread of COVID-19 here in Illinois, Bourne said. The ability to get outside, hunt, and fish is vital to the people who live in our part of the state.

But most importantly, the governor needs to recognize that these are activities that can easily be enjoyed while adhering to social distancing rules, she said.
On Tuesday, the Nigeria Centre for Disease Control (NCDC) recommended the use of masks to curb the spread of the coronavirus, but only a...

On Tuesday, the Nigeria Centre for Disease Control (NCDC) recommended the use of masks to curb the spread of the coronavirus, but only as a voluntary measure which it said must be done in addition to other directives such as social distancing and regular handwashing.





While doing so, however, it is important to wear the face coverings the right way, the NCDC said, adding that improper handling and frequently touching masks can increase the risk of infection.





So, to guide you properly on the use of face masks, Here are tips to follow strictly based on the advice of the World Health Organisation and reputable institutions:





WHEN TO WEAR FACE MASKS





Presidential task force on COVID-19 with Sanwo-Olu during a visit to Infectious Disease Centre, Yaba in Lagos





The NCDC says while a general use of face masks is recommended but optional, they should be used when in large gatherings. For instance, at the shopping malls or markets where you cannot secure a two-metre radius to yourself.





WASH YOUR HANDS BEFORE PUTTING ON THE FACE MASK

Buhari washing his hands



It is important to remember that it is risky to put on your face coverings whenever you want to without first washing your hands with soap and water or cleaning them with alcohol-based hand sanitisers. Doing so puts you at even greater risk because your hands might end up contaminating them. It is important to remember that it is risky to put on your face coverings whenever you want to without first washing your hands with soap and water or cleaning them with alcohol-based hand sanitisers. Doing so puts you at even greater risk because your hands might end up contaminating them.





Also, avoid touching the mask while using it; if you do, clean your hands thoroughly immediately.





YOU CANT AFFORD TO WASTE ONE  HERE IS HOW TO WEAR IT PROPERLY

Ahmed, minister of finance, wearing a face mask while addressing the press during her visit to Aso Rock



Health experts believe not wearing the face mask properly is as good as not wearing one at all. So to ensure maximum protection from the virus, ensure you: Take the mask and inspect it for tears or holes, be sure which side is the top side (where the metal strip is), ensure the proper side of the mask faces outwards (the coloured side), cover your mouth and nose with the mask and ensure there is no gap between it and your face, and pull it down so it covers a part of your chin. Health experts believe not wearing the face mask properly is as good as not wearing one at all. So to ensure maximum protection from the virus, ensure you: Take the mask and inspect it for tears or holes, be sure which side is the top side (where the metal strip is), ensure the proper side of the mask faces outwards (the coloured side), cover your mouth and nose with the mask and ensure there is no gap between it and your face, and pull it down so it covers a part of your chin.





HOW TO REMOVE THE FACE COVERING? WITH CARE





While removing your face covering; remove it from behind (do not touch its front), be careful not to touch your eyes, nose, and mouth. Dont also forget to wash your hands immediately with soap and water or use alcohol-based hand sanitisers afterwards.





WHAT IF I DONT HAVE STANDARD FACE MASK? CAN I USE CLOTHES?

A standard face mask





The WHO says it is still working to better understand the effectiveness of non-medical masks made of other materials like cotton fabric. It, however, said while such coverings can be recommended in the interim, some factors must be considered such as: Numbers of layers of fabric/tissue, breathability of material used, water repellence/hydrophobic qualities, shape and fit of the mask.





The NCDC also says these cloth masks are also an option as long as they are properly washed regularly.





You can watch this video from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) on easy steps to make masks.





HOW OFTEN SHOULD THE COVERINGS BE WASHED? HOW ARE THEY EVEN WASHED?





The CDC says face masks should be routinely washed depending on the frequency of use. Other experts tend to be more specific: Masks should be washed after each use . with the use of warm water (which has proven effective at degrading most viruses).





HOW MANY SHOULD I HAVE THEN?





Since you wash or discard each mask after every use, it is only ideal to have more than one mask for your use. If you can, get a small set.





THOSE WHO CANT USE FACE MASKS





The US CDC advises that the face coverings should not be placed on young children under the age of two, anyone who has trouble breathing, or is unconscious, incapacitated or otherwise unable to remove the mask without assistance.





REMEMBER THAT FACE MASKS DONT MAKE YOU INVINCIBLE  CORONAVIRUS CAN STILL SEE YOU





This cannot be overemphasised. Wearing face masks alone cannot protect you against the coronavirus. To be safe from it, the NCDC says you must combine this with measures such as physical distancing, handwashing, respiratory hygiene, cleaning and frequent disinfection of touched surfaces.








The Department of Health has confirmed 38 more deaths and 1,068 new cases, including results returned from a German lab.

It brings to 444 the total number of people who have died in Ireland while the number of confirmed infections has passed the 12,500 mark with a total of 12,547 positive tests recorded in the Republic since the end of February.

Today's number of confirmed cases marks the biggest daily reported increase. However, part of the increase is due to a clearing of a backlog of tests which are due to be processed in full this week.

Nevertheless, the Department of Health did confirm that 657 new confirmed cases of Covid-19 were reported by Irish laboratories today which is a peak for locally tested swabs. The additional 411 were processed in Germany.

Community infection has fallen to just over half of all confirmed cases while four out of every ten cases are due to close contact.

Dr Tony Holohan, Chief Medical Officer, Department of Health, said: We are continuing to monitor the course of this disease across a range of indicators  not only in the number of confirmed cases and deaths reported but also through hospital and ICU admissions, clusters and patterns of transmission.

While a number of these parameters are going in a positive direction, it is clear that we need to keep going in our efforts, on an individual level, to limit the spread of this virus.

Dr. Ronan Glynn, Deputy Chief Medical Officer, Department of Health, said: The World Health Organisation yesterday published its COVID-19 strategy update.

This strategy re-emphasises the need for comprehensive public health measures to slow the spread of the virus, with additional capacity to respond rapidly to sporadic cases and clusters when they occur.

Dr Siobhan Ni Bhriain, Consultant Psychiatrist and HSE Integrated Care Lead, said: There are still concerning reports that attendance to emergency departments is unusually low. This concerns us.

Everyone should continue to seek medical intervention if concerned about their health. Do not ignore symptoms of illness because of fear of contracting COVID-19 or fear of imposition on healthcare staff. The health service is there for everyone and all medical concerns.

The details on today's deaths and confirmed cases are as follows:

 29 deaths located in the east, 6 in the west, 3 in the south of the country

 the people included 22 males and 16 females

 the median age of todays reported deaths is 84

 28 people were reported as having underlying health conditions

As of 1pm Wednesday 15th April, the HPSC has been notified of the following cases;

 An additional 657 new confirmed cases of COVID-19 reported by Irish laboratories

 An additional 411 confirmed cases of COVID-19 reported by a laboratory in Germany

The HSE said it is working to identify any contacts the patients may have had to provide them with information and advice to prevent further spread.

Todays data from the HPSC, as of midnight, Monday 13th April (11,261 cases), reveals:

 55% are female and 45% are male, with 413 clusters involving 2,244 cases

 the median age of confirmed cases is 48 years

 1,968 cases (18%) have been hospitalised

 Of those hospitalised, 280 cases have been admitted to ICU

 2,872 cases are associated with healthcare workers

 Dublin has the highest number of cases at 5,850 (52% of all cases) followed by Cork with 829 cases (7%)

 Of those for whom transmission status is known: community transmission accounts for 52%, close contact accounts for 42%, travel abroad accounts for 6%

Department of Healths COVID-19 Information Dashboard; providing latest case information.
A herd of adult and baby wild elephants stopped traffic when they crossed a major highway in a Thailand province.

The family of more than 50 elephants emerged from the jungle and stomped across the road in Chachoengsao, east of Bangkok.

Spectacular footage shows dozens of locals gathering on either side of the road to watch the placid creatures.

The elephants are led across the Chachoengsao highway by a a large matriarch elephant

A large matriarch elephant leads the herd across the road as she leisurely strolls across to the jungle on the other side.

She is closely followed by the rest of the herd all in touching distance with babies in tow.

One elephant briefly stops before carrying on as the whole heard clear the road in just under 40 seconds.

A young elephant calf can be seen crossing the road with its parents as onlookers take pictures

Several police officers also arrived to ensure the elephants made it safely to the neighbouring area of jungle.

Wildlife rangers had been tracking the elephants through the wilderness during the day then quickly blocked off the road to prevent any accidents.

The filmer, Pratya Chutipat Sakul, said: 'More than 50 wild elephants crossed the highway. They were moving together from one part of the jungle to the other.

'The wildlife officers had been following the elephants for the last few days.

A very young calf can be seen at the tail end of the herd walking under her mother's stomach

'When they saw that their path was moving towards the road, they called the police and urgently closed the road.

'Policemen arrived to ensure that the elephants crossed smoothly and there were no accidents.

'Nobody minds waiting for the elephants, as the most important thing is that they're safe.

'The elephants were all so calm and barely noticed the humans. I feel very lucky to have seen such an amazing sight.'

The herd of 50 elephants cross the road in just under 40 seconds and return safely to the jungle on the other side

While majestic, the wild elephants in Chachoengsao have hit the news for the wrong reasons this year on occasion.

Last Thursday, mango picker Chalermphol Sukthawee, 53, was found dead at a rubber plantation near a forested area at the base of Langka mountain.

He is believed to have been stomped on by a herd of elephants in the district.

A monk was also killed on February 11 when ignoring warnings about a herd in an oil plantation.

Phra Prapop, 35, was in seclusion when he was reportedly dragged out of his tent by an unknown number of the wild animals.
Australian Survivor: All Stars' Moana Hope's younger sister Vinny is a regular feature face on her Instagram feed.

But on Tuesday, the former AFLW player, 32, was forced to hit back at a vile troll and defend her sibling after she posted a wholesome video of Vinny, who has Mobius syndrome, to celebrate her birthday.

After the man said Vinny was not 'looking straight', Moana fired back, 'you seriously need to get off my page. You just took a shot at a disabled girl. Doesnt get much lower than that.'

'Doesn't get much lower than that!' Australian Survivor: All Stars' Moana Hope (right) has hit back at a disgusting troll who teased her disabled sister Vinny (left) about her looks

'Sorry, I can cross my eyes too. I thought she was doing it as a joke,' the man replied, prompting Moana to swiftly respond: 'And she was born that way. She aint nothing but phucking perfect.'

The reality star posted a screenshot of the exchange, explaining that Vinny constantly gets made fun of for her condition.

The full story: On Tuesday, the former AFLW player, 32, posted a wholesome video of Vinny, who has Mobius syndrome, to celebrate her birthday

Standing up for her family: But one man commented that Vinny was not 'looking straight', forcing Moana to hit back at the troll and defend her sister

'Anyone who makes fun of someones disability is a horrible person that clearly needs help. Why did I leave (the comment) and not delete it yet, coz this aint the first time someone has made fun of Vinny for her looks and her disability,' Moana wrote.

'Its not ok and Im calling this (poo emoji) out. Lucky she cant read. People do this s**t for attention, feel free to report his account for bullying.

'And the people who liked his comment are just as bad. She was born a bloody angel and I wouldnt change a thing about her coz she is beautiful.'

Constant struggle: The reality star posted a screenshot of the exchange, explaining that Vinny constantly gets made fun of for her condition

Mobius syndrome is a rare congenital neurological disorder which is characterised by facial paralysis and the inability to move the eyes from side to side.

Moana and Lavinia, who she affectionately calls by her nickname 'Vinny,' are known to be extremely close.

In August last year, Moana married Swedish model Isabella Carlstrom in Melbourne.

The newlywed couple gave Vinny a special ring on their wedding day and 'promised to always take care of her and love her for the rest of their lives'.
Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe addresses the opening ceremony of the online Special ASEAN Plus Three Summit on COVID-19 Response. (Source: VNA)

Abe made the statement after attending the online Special ASEAN Plus Three Summit on COVID-19 Response chaired by Prime Minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc of Vietnam, which holds the ASEAN Chairmanship 2020.

The Japanese PM highlighted the need to keep trade routes open, especially for medical supplies and important goods, despite the global pandemic, saying any measures taken by countries should be in line with the World Trade Organisation (WTO)s regulations.

He also proposed the establishment of an ASEAN centre for infectious diseases, which would be financed by the Japan-ASEAN Integration Fund.

Founded in 1967, ASEAN groups Brunei, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam.

The Special ASEAN Plus Three Summit on Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) via video conference took place on April 14, with the participation of leaders from 10 ASEAN member states and their counterparts from China, the Republic of Korea, and Japan.
Californias governor Gavin Newsom on Tuesday outlined six key indicators to guide how and when the golden state will reopen for business as it begins to recover from the COVID-19 pandemic. However, even as lockdown measures are set to be lifted, Newsom said that life would be anything but normal.

Mass gatherings that involve hundreds of people, such as major sporting events, community events, or concerts, will likely still be banned at least through summer, and people may need to wear face coverings in public for months, he said on Tuesday.

You may have dinner where the waiter is wearing gloves and maybe a face mask, where menus may be disposable, where your temperature is checked as you walk into the restaurant, Newsom told a news conference in Sacramento.

California was one of the first U.S. states to issue mandatory social distancing policies with Newsom announcing a statewide stay-at-home order on March 19. The order is in place until further notice.

Newsoms office said in a statement that there is no precise timeline to modify the stay-at-home order, but the framework for making that decision lies in the six indicators. The six factors must be met before restrictions can be lifted, including on mass gatherings, business activities, and school attendance.

They include the ability of the state to perform widespread testing and carry out contact tracing, which will enable authorities to isolate individuals identified as being most at risk of contracting the virus. The remaining five factors are:

The ability to prevent infection in people who are at risk for more severe COVID-19;

The ability of the hospital and health systems to handle surges;

The ability to develop therapeutics to meet the demand;

The ability for businesses, schools, and child care facilities to support physical distancing; and

The ability to determine when to reinstitute certain measures, such as the stay-at-home orders, if necessary.

As we contemplate reopening parts of our state, we must be guided by science and data, and we must understand that things will look different than before, Newsom said in a statement.

School start times may be staggered, so children are not crowded together, and times for lunch and physical education may also change. Restaurants will likely have fewer tables, and big celebrations such as for Memorial Day and the Fourth of July may have to be postponed or canceled for the year.

Newsoms office said that until the state can build immunity, measures will be in place to ensure that hospitals can care for the sick and that people who are at high risk of severe illness do not become infected.

In the 24 hours before Tuesday morning, 71 people died of the COVID-19 disease in California, Newsom said, a record number that brought the state total to 758. Los Angeles County reported 40 new deaths since Monday, also a record.

The death toll from COVID-19, the respiratory disease caused by the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus, also known as the novel coronavirus, has exceeded 25,900, according to statistics compiled by the Center for Systems Science and Engineering (CSSE) at Johns Hopkins University.

More than 608,000 infections have been reported, and more than 3 million COVID-19 tests have been conducted in the United States as of late Tuesday.

From The Epoch Times with reporting from Reuters.
T he Prime Minister of New Zealand and her Government ministers are taking a 20 per cent pay cut for six months as people across the country struggle financially during the coronavirus pandemic.

Jacinda Ardern said a pay cut was one way ministers and herself could "take action" to close the gap between groups of people across New Zealand.

She said: "Today I can confirm that myself, Government ministers and public service chief executives will take a 20 per cent pay cut for the next six months as we acknowledge New Zealanders who are reliant on wage subsidies, taken pay cuts and are losing their jobs as a result of Covid-19's global pandemic.

"We feel acutely the struggle that many New Zealanders are facing and so do the people that I work with on a daily basis."

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

As the pay cut runs for six months, it will reduce Ms Ardern's salary by about 10 per cent from $471,049 New Zealand dollars (226,000) to $423,945 (203,605).

Cabinet ministers could see a cut of $26,900 (12,919) and the Deputy Prime Minister Winston Peters' salary would be cut from $334,734 (160,761) to $302,261 (145,258), according to the NZ Newshub.

Opposition leader Simon Bridges announced on Twitter that he would also be taking a 20 per cent pay cut to his salary of $296,000 (142,154) for six months.

Ms Ardern's move comes after the leader of one of New Zealand's smaller parties, David Seymour of ACT, had said he would bring forward legislation for all the country's MPs to have their pay cut.

Speaking at a press conference, Ms Ardern added: "Of course many people in our public sector are our frontline essential workers, nurses, police, health care professionals, we are not suggesting pay cuts here and nor would New Zealanders find that appropriate.

"Rather, I am responsible for the executive branch, myself and ministers, this is where we can take action and that is why we have."

The Prime Minister acknowledged that the pay cut wouldn't in itself "shift the Government's overall fiscal position" but said the move was about "leadership".

"I acknowledge my colleagues both in the executive but also the colleagues we work with in the public service for the decision that was taken today," she said.

"If there were ever a time to close the gap between groups of people across New Zealand in different positions it is now."

On Tuesday, the Prime Minister said the country appeared to be over the worst of its coronavirus outbreak but it was not time to let up on strict lockdown measures.

The country recorded just 17 new cases of the virus on Tuesday, bringing the total to 1,366. There were also four new deaths, the worst day yet on that measure, bringing the total number of deaths to nine.
ALTON  Alton native Angela Gray helps to empower young women in the Alton School District and the community through her work as a social worker at Alton High School and her volunteer work that embraces the mission of the YWCA of Alton.

In 2016, Gray and co-workers Rosa Burton, Jane Higgins and Linda Wittman developed the Empowered 2B Me initiative, focusing on helping young women develop more self-esteem. This led to I Am Empowered 2B Me teen leadership conferences, which included guest speakers from the Alton community offering words of empowerment, wisdom and networking opportunities.

Grays work as a social justice warrior also embraces the YWCAs mission, eliminating racism, promoting peace, dignity and justice through its program Pipeline to Success, also developed by Gray and her co-workers.

We saw that African American students, particularly girls, had the highest number of physical and verbal altercations, Gray explained.

We didnt want them to be a part of the school-to-prison pipeline narrative, so we created Pipeline to Success.

The Pipeline to Success leaders took the group on a tour of the Madison County Jail and the courthouse, where they talked to inmates, judges, deputies and attorneys about ways to avoid the legal system. The students learned coping strategies and anger management skills.

In 2006, Gray, Burton and Benjamin Golley formed the A-Town Steppers, a step-dance competition group comprised mainly of African American youth, but is open to all students who meet the criteria to participate. Though it was met with opposition along the way, Gray said their faith and perseverance made it worth the effort. The Steppers have excelled academically and socially, and received numerous awards.

Gray described herself as down-to-earth, an introvert, caring and determined, and an advocate for others, especially youth at risk.

She considers her biggest accomplishments to include her healthy daughter, Amoriah, despite having been born prematurely, having a supportive husband, Chris, writing two books, Girl, Check that Attitude and Help! I Have an Attitude Problem, and helping students to overcome obstacles and graduate from high school.

She earned a bachelors and a masters degree in social work, as well as a specialist degree in education administration, from Southern Illinois University Edwardsville. She is SIUEs 2020 Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Humanitarian Award recipient and the Social Work Alumni Award recipient.

Also while attending SIUE, she was an active member of Delta Sigma Theta Sorority, and a member of the Illinois Association of School Social Workers. Currently, Gray volunteers with St. Louis Childrens Hospitals Guardians of Childhood campaign as a guardian.

I am deeply honored and humbled to be selected as a YWCA Woman of Distinction, Gray said.

It means a lot to me to join these distinguished women who do so much for our community.
Employees called out a Whole Foods in Washington D.C. after six coworkers tested positive for the coronavirus and the public was not alerted.

The cases popped up at a Whole Foods in Washington's Logan Circle neighborhood and stretch back to mid-March, the employees said.

One worker provided emails and text messages from human resources that went out to employees at the store, alerting them co-workers tested positive for COVID-19.

A spokeswoman for the store, which is not under legal requirements to report confirmed cases of COVID-19 while operating as an essential service, said it 'has undergone multiple deep cleanings and disinfections by third parties overnight and after hours.'

Employees called out a Whole Foods in Washington D.C. after six coworkers tested positive for the coronavirus and the public was not alerted The cases popped up at a Whole Foods (pictured) in Washington's Logan Circle neighborhood going back to mid-March

One worker provided emails and text messages from human resources that went to employees at the store, alerting them co-workers tested positive for COVID-19. A shopper wearing a mask is pictured at a checkout counter at the Logan Circle WholeFoods on Wednesday

Another employee said the store's response wasn't enough. 'This is about safety for everyone that comes in that store,' the worker said, WUSA reports.

Washington has had close to 2,200 confirmed cases of the coronavirus, which has been blamed for 72 deaths in the nation's capital.

Across the country there have been more than 615,000 cases and 26,094 deaths.

There have been more than 633,300 cases and 27,613 deaths resulting from the coronavirus

How the number of new coronavirus cases in the US has escalated over time

How the number of new coronavirus infections in the US has escalated over time

A day-to-day look at the number of new coronavirus deaths in the US has escalated over time

As COVID-19 has been spreading, Washington Mayor Muriel Bowser a week ago required that all shoppers at grocery stores 'wear a mask or mouth covering.'

Some constituents, including Washington activist and conservative Candace Owens, were unaware of the mandate and complained it was overkill and about media coverage they said was fueling overreaction.

Owens said she and her British husband George Farmer in fact came to learn of the mandate when they walked into their local WholeFoods on Tuesday.

She took to Twitter to detail how a police officer confronted them for not wearing masks while in the store.

Washington activist and conservative Candace Owens learned of Mayor Muriel Bowser's mandate a week ago that required shoppers at grocery stores 'wear a mask or mouth covering' when she and her British husband George Farmer walked into their local WholeFoods

Owens took to Twitter to complain about the mask requirement, suggesting it was overkill

The 30-year-old, who made a point of declaring her backing for the police, said she could tell that the officer 'disagreed with (the policy) personally' because of how frustrated she was becoming with customers complaining about shopping carts and surfaces not being wiped down.

But despite this, the officer told Owens and her British husband George Farmer, 'You guys have to wear your masks.'

At the same time employees at Whole Foods and at warehouses operated by its owner, online retailer Amazon, have staged protests over concerns for workers on the frontlines providing products to Americans forced to stay-at-home because of the outbreak.

Walkouts have been staged in protest of both brands.

A statement provided by a WholeFoods spokeswoman after being contacted about the concerned employees at the chain's store on P Street near Logan Circle says the company is 'providing an essential service in our communities and we continue to balance that responsibility with our responsibility as an employer to ensure the health, safety and privacy of our Team Members.'

The spokeswoman, speaking of the store and its confirmed cases of the virus , says 'we are meeting any notification of a diagnosis with swift and comprehensive action and communication to our Team Members in the store, and are supporting our diagnosed Team Members as well as those in quarantine.'

'Out of an abundance of caution, the store has undergone multiple deep cleanings and disinfections by third parties overnight and after hours, on top of our current enhanced daily sanitation and cleaning measures,' she explains.

'Additionally, we require daily temperature screenings and face masks for anyone working in our stores, have installed plexiglass barriers at check out, and are operating under social distancing and crowd control measures.'

Workers at the store who spoke to WUSA did not want to be identified for fear of losing their employment.

As for health concerns regarding the virus, the Whole Foods spokeswoman said the chain would was 'committed to taking care of and protecting our Team Members as they work to safely serve our communities during this time.'



Coronavirus unmasks Amazon's stumbles at Whole Foods

Amazon's moves to reduce strain on its grocery businesses by putting new online shoppers on wait lists and switching more Whole Foods resources to filling orders, is unmasking limitations at the company that was expected to upend the supermarket industry.

The coronavirus pandemic should be Amazon's moment to shine. Some 90 per cent of US shoppers are under stay-at-home orders and Amazon offers grocery delivery through its 487 U.S. Whole Foods stores.

Instead, Whole Foods has been overwhelmed.

Amazon Prime subscribers, who pay $119 a year for free delivery, are having difficulty finding Whole Foods delivery windows, according to interviews with a dozen customers and numerous posts on social media. And when their orders do arrive, many desired products are unavailable, they say.

'I'm really surprised that they weren't able to scale for this. I was expecting them to perform better. It seems like more than anything Amazon is a supply-chain company,' said Ellen Sullivan, 37, a Chicago-based office manager.

Sullivan was a regular Amazon food delivery user before COVID-19 spread widely in the US. Her last successful order was March 12, and even then, 10 of the 27 items were sold out and had to be replaced.

'Now I'm sitting on 6 pounds of frozen corn,' Sullivan said.

Amazon told Reuters the setbacks are due to the spike in demand and social distancing constraints in its facilities and stores.

Amazon has said it would hire an additional 75,000 people for jobs ranging from warehouse staff to delivery drivers and switched a California Amazon grocery store and a Manhattan Whole Foods to online-only as demand for orders surges.

Whole Foods said its distribution network is strong and that it is working with suppliers to overcome increased demand and supply chain constraints without compromising quality standards that 'further limit the number of products we can source.'

Disruptor disrupted

The world's biggest online retailer sent a shock through the stodgy US supermarket business in 2017, when it bought Whole Foods for $13.7 billion. Some experts predicted that Amazon would hasten the move to online grocery shopping and doom traditional operators like Walmart Inc and Kroger.

But now Amazon is buckling under unprecedented COVID-19 supply-and-demand disruptions that sent the entire grocery industry scrambling to adapt. After expanding and speeding up Whole Foods delivery, the company is retrenching.

On Sunday Amazon told Reuters it would put new grocery delivery customers on a wait list and curtail shopping hours at some Whole Foods stores to focus on orders from existing online customers.

The company - which also delivers food from its own warehouses through Amazon Fresh - last month suspended its Prime Pantry delivery service for non-perishable groceries.

'They were separating themselves from the pack and that's not happening anymore. This doesn't happen to Amazon ... they don't screw up like this,' said Bill Bishop, co-founder of supermarket consultancy Brick Meets Click.

Amazon inherited - and failed to address - many of the problems that are now plaguing its grocery business, a half dozen experts told Reuters.

In particular, they said the e-commerce giant with $55 billion on its balance sheet did not fortify Whole Foods' foundation, which relies on outdated technology, outside suppliers and real estate unsuited for the unprecedented surge in demand.

As a result, the chain's systems 'creak very badly under the strain,' Bishop said.

Walmart and Kroger are also fighting to keep in-demand products like flour, toilet paper and cleaning supplies on shelves, but their regular technology investments and tight control over supply chains have been a competitive advantage over Amazon and Whole Foods, experts said.

Those companies - the top two US grocery sellers - operate fleets of trucks and own dozens of large warehouses, while Amazon is more apt to outsource.

Whole Foods depends on United Natural Foods (UNFI), a debt-laden grocery distributor, to supply dry grocery items like canned goods and toilet paper.

UNFI told Reuters it has 'greatly increased' routes and hired over 1,000 employees to support clients.

Real estate risks

Whole Foods has 10 small regional warehouses for perishables like fruit, vegetables and meats. UNFI has a network of 59 distribution centers, which average about 500,000 square feet.

Walmart and Kroger, which have significantly more stores, have bigger distribution centers designed to swiftly move pallets of goods.

While a Walmart distribution center can deliver two full truckloads of goods to a store from a single driver, Whole Foods has difficulty digesting even one truckload, Strategic Resource Group managing director Burt Flickinger said.

Whole Foods' 'center store was never the big money generator for them,' supermarket analyst David Livingston said, referring to the area where dry groceries are sold.

Indeed, many stores have wine bars, hot food stations and cafes that made them popular gathering places but are of little use right now.

'They're (Whole Foods) a restaurant alternative. It's really tough,' Livingston said.
Oasis and Warehouse are both on the brink of collapse, as they reportedly prepare to appoint a third party to manage the insolvency process.

Sky News reported on Tuesday that the fashion brands known collectively as the Oasis and Warehouse group, are the latest victims of the coronavirus downturn on the high street after being forced to shut shops last month.

If the fashion chains do appoint Deloitte, as is reported, it could risk 2,000 jobs at the brands, which are owned by Icelandic lender Kaupthing.

At least two prospective buyers are thought to have come forward with a deal for the group, but it is now unlikely to be finalised before the imminent administration.

The uncertainty around the Covid-19 outbreak has reportedly made the sale impossible to conclude quickly.

The group employs 2,300 people and has over 90 standalone stores and a further 437 concessions in department stores around the UK, including Selfridges and Debenhams.

Debenhams itself has been facing problems in recent weeks: last Monday it confirmed it would be calling in the administrators due to continued poor trading.

Welcome to lockdown Britain Show all 20 1 /20 Welcome to lockdown Britain Welcome to lockdown Britain Westminster Bridge stands deserted on the morning after Boris Johnson announced the UK was in lockdonw PA Welcome to lockdown Britain The clock tower in Leicester on the day after the prime minister put the UK in lockdown PA Welcome to lockdown Britain The A23 north of Brighton is relatively empty on the morning after the prime minister put the UK in lockdown AFP/Getty Welcome to lockdown Britain The Bullring in Birmingham on the day after the prime minister put the UK in lockdown PA Welcome to lockdown Britain A sign informing residents that bingo is cancelled for the forseeable future in Eyam, Derbyshire AFP/Getty Welcome to lockdown Britain Empty streets in Skegness the day after the prime minister put the UK in lockdown PA Welcome to lockdown Britain Reverend Paul Unsworth prepares food parcels for the homeless in London Getty Welcome to lockdown Britain Streets of Windsor are deserted on the morning after the prime minister put the UK in lockdown AP Welcome to lockdown Britain The Greyfriars Bobby statue in Edinburgh after Boris Johnson urged the public to stay indoors Getty Welcome to lockdown Britain Gallowtree Gate in Leicester on the day after the prime minister put the UK in lockdown PA Welcome to lockdown Britain An isolated couple watch the prime minister's announcement that the UK is to be put in lockdown in Weybridge, Surrey Reuters Welcome to lockdown Britain People jog in Battersea Park in London the morning after the prime minister announced the UK is going into lockdown with people only allowed outside for essentials and daily exercise Reuters Welcome to lockdown Britain McDonald's on High Wycombe High Street High Street displays a sign for takeaway only shortly before closing indefinitely as the prime minister announced that the UK is tto be put in lockdown Getty Welcome to lockdown Britain Deserted streets of Bristol after Boris Johnson urged people to stay indoors Tom Wren/SWNS Welcome to lockdown Britain Kathryn Hadley and her husband David who are in self-isolation in their home in Clutton, Somerset. David has terminal cancer and Kathryn is in a wheelchair Tom Wren/SWNS Welcome to lockdown Britain Residents of Marsden, West Yorkshire head home from the shops on the day Boris Johnson urged the public to stay indoors AFP/Getty Welcome to lockdown Britain Dennis's kebab van remains open for business in a deserted High Wycombe High Street as the prime minister announces that the UK is to enter lockdown Getty Welcome to lockdown Britain Drawings of rainbows stuck on a tree in Davenham, Cheshire Reuters Welcome to lockdown Britain Terminal 5 at Heathrow Airport in London after the prime minister announced the UK is to enter lockdown PA Welcome to lockdown Britain Deserted streets of Bristol after Boris Johnson urged people to stay indoors SWNS

The department store chain appointed administrators from the FRP Advisory to oversee the process.
A mathematics student has been charged with causing the death of a 'beloved' grandmother who died in a crash involving two cars and a bus.

Yvonne Copland died after the collision near Newport, Isle of Wight, sparking a major incident on April 14, 2019.

Yaashmi Ravikumar, who also tutors children, has been charged with death by dangerous driving and four counts of causing serious injury by dangerous driving.

The 19-year-old from Laindon, Essex, who studies mathematics at university in London and also works as a financial assistant part time, is set to appear at Isle of Wight Crown Court on May 15.

Tragic: Yvonne Coopland died in the collision in Newport, Isle of Wight on April 14 last year

The driver of the bus (bus pictured above) suffered a serious injury and 10 passengers on the bus were taken to hospital as a precaution

Ms Copland, 64, from Newport, was travelling in a red Fiat Bravo when the accident happened at the junction of Forest Road and Betty Haunt Lane.

Three other people in the car were taken to hospital in a serious condition.

The driver of the bus, a man in his 50s, suffered a serious injury and 10 passengers on the bus were taken to hospital as a precaution.

Four people travelling in a silver Mini Cooper were also taken to hospital as a precaution.

The Isle of Wight NHS Trust declared a 'major incident' after the accident as four of the casualties had to be airlifted to mainland hospitals.

Four people travelling in a silver Mini Cooper (pictured above) were also taken to hospital after the incident

Ms Copland's family said in a statement: 'Much loved wife, 'ma' of four children and four grandchildren who was loved by all who knew her. She will be greatly missed by all her family and friends.'

At least three air ambulances and 15 emergency service workers attended the scene, with detectives investigating the cause.

At the time bus operator Southern Vectis have said that it believed the double-decker ended up in the Fiat's path after a crash moments earlier.

General manager Richard Tyldsley had said: 'Early indications suggest a car pulled out in front of a route 7 bus and our driver was unable to avoid it. The bus was forced into the path of another car.'
Ahmedabad: Gujarat Chief Minister Vijay Rupani has decided to run the state administration without meeting anyone for next one week after a Congress MLA whom he met on Tuesday tested positive for coronavirus.

Rupani's health is fine and he will run the state administration through technological facilities like video conference, video-calling and tele-calling, Chief Minister's Office (CMO) secretary Ashwani Kumar said on Wednesday.

"No visitor will be allowed at the chief minister's residence for the next one week," Kumar said.

Reputed doctors R K Patel and Atul Patel checked Rupani, he said in a statement.

"The chief minister is fine and all his parameters are normal, Kumar said.

Congress MLA Imran Khedawala, who met Rupani along with other party legislators at the chief minister's official residence in Gandhinagar on Tuesday morning, tested positive for coronavirus in the evening.

After the meeting with Rupani, Khedawala also addressed mediapersons in Gandhinagar.

The MLA was admitted to Sardar Vallabhbhai Hospital, which is a designated COVID-19 medical facility, Ahmedabad Deputy Municipal Commissioner Om Prakash Machra said.

Kumar said Khedawala, who represents Khadia-Jamalpur Assembly segment in Ahmedabad, committed a big mistake by not staying at home and coming out to meet Rupani when he had given his samples for coronavirus testing. He said Khedawala was sitting 15 to 20 feet away from the chief minister during the meeting.

Besides Khedawala, two other Congress MLAs from the city - Gyasuddin Shaikh and Shailesh Parmar - were also present in the meeting.

Deputy Chief Minister Nitin Patel and Minister of State for Home Pradeepsinh Jadeja also attended the meeting, after which Rupani had announced imposition of curfew in some Ahmedabad areas falling under the Assembly constituencies of these Congress MLAs, to curb the spread of coronavirus.
Australia will endure its largest economic hit since the onset of the Great Depression, the International Monetary Fund has warned, with unemployment to remain high for at least two more years in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic.

Releasing forecasts for the global economy overnight, the IMF predicts the Australian economy will contract by 6.7 per cent this year, or almost $130 billion. It would be the single largest hit since 1930 when the economy is estimated to have contracted by 9.5 per cent as the Great Depression set in.

While the fund believes the economy will grow by 6.1 per cent in 2021, it would still leave Australian GDP smaller than it was at the end of 2019.

Of the world's 20 largest economies, Australia's performance is forecast to be among the bottom third with countries such as the United States (minus 5.9 per cent), Britain (minus 6.5 per cent) and South Korea (minus 1.2 per cent) all tipped to do better.
SAN FRANCISCO  Apple Inc. on Wednesday released a smaller iPhone priced at $399, cutting the starting price for the companys smartphone line in a move to broaden its appeal to budget-conscious customers as the coronavirus hobbles the global economy.

The lower-cost model could also attract more consumers to Apple services, a growing driver of revenue. Shares of Apple fell 1.1%, less than the 2.8% decline of the S&P 500 index.

The iPhone SE, available April 24, is the second generation of a previous value model. It will start at $50 less than what was previously the cheapest iPhone available, the $449 iPhone 8, which will be retired. The SE comes with a 4.7-inch display and the same processor chip as Apples most advanced phone, the 11 Pro. The SE lacks 5G capability and Apples facial recognition system to unlock the device, instead relying on a fingerprint sensor similar to older models.

The announcement comes as the United States and much of the world is reeling from the novel coronavirus, although U.S. political leaders have begun to talk about ending stay-at-home orders and restarting the economy, hoping record deaths and falling hospitalizations represent a peak.
Puducherry: Confusion prevails over fishing ban during lockdown in Puducherry

April 15,2020 | Source: The Hindu

While the Chief Minister had announced that fishermen could carry on with fishing during the lockdown, the Department of Fisheries has said the annual fishing ban will come into force from April 14. Is there a ban on fishing during the lockdown period? This question has cropped up among fishermen communities in Puducherry because of the confusion caused by two different announcements -- one by the Chief Minister V Narayanasamy and another by the Department of Fisheries in Puducherry. While the Chief Minister had announced that while extending the lockdown on Monday evening that fishermen could carry on with their vocations and they would not be governed by the lockdown, the Department of Fisheries has come out with a clear circular that the annual ban will come into force from April 14 and no fishermen should venture into the sea for the next 61 days.



These two announcements on fishing have now led to confusion among the fishermen communities in Puducherry. According to M. Ilango, former MLA and chairperson of National Fishers Forum ( NFF), the Union Home Ministry has exempted fishing activities including harvesting, sale and marketing activities from the purview of the lockdown. While NFF has welcomed this announcement, the Department has come out with another announcement on the annual fishing ban.



The government should make it clear whether fishing is permitted during the lockdown. It is also the duty of the concerned State Governments and Department of Fisheries to facilitate Personal Protection Equipments (PPE) and ensure strict enforcement of norms pertaining to social hygiene and distancing practices. Even though the government has permitted fishing, very few fishermen are ready to venture out in the sea as selling fish would become a big problem. The sale of fish has to be regulated as a massive crowd will gather on the shores while fishermen return with the days catch. This will result in a major problem and the police will further curtail our activities, he said.



Puducherry has over 80,000 fishermen families and lakhs are dependent on them. In the wake of the lockdown, fishermen have abstained from venturing out into the sea, losing their livelihood. We want the government to provide compensation of ?6,000 to each family during the lockdown as had been announced for farmers and other sections, as the fishermen are dependent only on their daily catch. However, this should not be clubbed with the relief amount the government would give during the annual fishing ban Mr. Ilango added.
By Arthur I. Cyr





Huawei, China's giant telecommunications corp., faces growing, extremely serious legal trouble in the United States. The U.S. Department of Justice has issued a superseding indictment of the Chinese firm in federal court in Brooklyn, charging the entity and two subsidiaries with violation of the RICO (Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations) Act.



The Feds are charging the Chinese company with conspiracy to steal proprietary information  trade secrets  from six U.S. technology companies. The firm is also accused of aiding the government of Iran through providing sophisticated surveillance equipment used to identify, monitor and seize individuals involved in protests against the fundamentalist regime.



RICO was originally passed to target members of organized crime families. However, the government has for some years also applied the law to prosecute white-collar crimes. RICO can involve seizing the personal assets of those targeted. There is continuing controversy regarding both the fairness and effectiveness of this law, especially outside organized crime cases.



In early 2019, Justice Department officials charged the corporation with bank and wire fraud, violating sanctions against Iran and obstruction of justice. Huawei pleaded not guilty. The new indictment replaces this earlier one, presumably because the government feels a stronger case has now been assembled.



The federal pursuit of this controversial company reflects the wider competition and conflict between China and the U.S., which encompasses politics and national security concerns along with commerce, investment and trade. President Donald Trump has directed harsh accusations and complaints against Huawei, though on this subject he has not been consistent. Last year, he declared the company has significant strengths and might be part of a new trade deal with the government of China.



Huawei is currently the world leader in cutting-edge 5G technology. This term is shorthand for fifth generation wireless capability, which greatly increases the speed and capacity of wireless transmission. 5G is especially important for data transmission. The enormous volumes of data that today can be sent via telecom networks are significant for not only the development of markets by companies, but for governments concerned with national security  and citizens worried about violations of their privacy.



Unifying these varied anxieties and pressures  corporate, governmental and individual  is the understandable fear that Huawei  and therefore China  is accumulating monopoly power. China allegedly could take control over not only international commerce but also literally worldwide communications. That at least is the fear.



Last month, a half dozen China engineers gave a dramatic PowerPoint presentation in Geneva to the International Telecommunications Union, the organization that supervises communications worldwide. The visitors filled the screen with futuristic imagery. They argued that the current Internet is thoroughly outdated and therefore must be replaced with new cutting-edge technology. The main message was that China should lead this effort. Media reaction, including by the non-tabloid "Financial Times," reflected alarm.



Reality, however, is considerably more complex. Three decades ago, Japan seemed to be establishing dominance. A possible monopoly of computer chips became an obsessive focus, after Japan's remarkable success in other sectors.



Arguments for an American "industrial policy" to mimic Japan's close business-government cooperation grew popular. However, Japan's dominance proved temporary as others learned to compete effectively.



Resolving current conflicts with China will involve the law, the marketplace and political negotiation. Nations beyond the U.S. must participate.





Arthur I. Cyr (acyr@carthage.edu) is Clausen distinguished professor at Carthage College and author of "After the Cold War."


Dozens of USNS Mercy Personnel Quarantined Following COVID-19 Outbreak

Sputnik News

19:00 GMT 14.04.2020(updated 19:33 GMT 14.04.2020)

The US Naval Ship Mercy (USNS Mercy) is continuing to accept patients without the COVID-19 novel coronavirus on the West Coast, despite the fact that seven medical personnel had to be removed from the ship after testing positive for the contagious disease.

A spokesperson for the Navy's 3rd Fleet told Business Insider on Tuesday that operations on the USNS Mercy have not been hindered due to the growing outbreak of COVID-19 within the ranks of the hospital ship's crew.

According to the outlet, a total of seven medical personnel have tested positive for the novel coronavirus in the past week while the service has been accepting patients at the Port of Los Angeles in California. These individuals, along with some 120 other personnel they came in contact with, have been removed from the ship and are quarantining back on shore.

"Seven Medical Treatment Facility crewmembers on board USNS Mercy have tested positive for COVID-19 and are currently isolated off the ship," 3rd Fleet spokesman Cmdr. John Fage said in an email to the San Diego Union-Tribune. "The ship is following protocols and taking every precaution to ensure the health and safety of all crewmembers and patients on board."

The outlet noted that the first case within the crew was reported on Wednesday, and then two more were confirmed by the Navy on Friday before jumping to a total of seven by Monday.

The Mercy docked in Los Angeles on March 27 after departing from San Diego, California, with a mission to ease the burden on area hospitals by treating local patients who did not have the novel coronavirus.

Despite nearly 130 of the crew being quarantined, the Mercy is staffed with over 1,000 medical personnel and is only treating 20 patients who do not have COVID-19 - one of whom is an intensive care unit (ICU) patient, Business Insider reported.

Across the country, the New York City-docked USNS Comfort has been accepting those with and without the novel coronavirus, following pleas from medical officials and an order by US President Donald Trump on April 6.

The Pentagon told Business Insider the 1,000-bed emergency hospital ship is presently treating around 70 individuals, and 34 of them are ICU patients. Overall, the Comfort has seen 120 patients since arriving in NYC on March 30.

The crew of the Comfort has also had its share of COVID-19 cases, with a total of four infections reported. However, three of those personnel have recovered and since returned to work. The fourth crew member remains in quarantine.

"The Comfort was set up to provide assistance and care for patients, and that is exactly what we are doing," a Navy spokeswoman said in a statement to Business Insider.

 Sputnik

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Humse Hai Liife actor Himansh Kohli happened to shoot for his music video Tenu Vekhi Jaavan in Italy. The recently released single has been received well by the audiences and boasts of some picturesque locations. However, no one could have imagined the devastation caused by the COVID-19 pandemic on the beautiful country and its citizens.

Himansh recently opened up about shooting in Italy just before the outbreak of novel coronavirus on the Italian soil that happens to be one of the most affected countries by COVID19. The actor said, My music video 'Tenu Vekhi Jaavan' was shot in Italy. I cant believe how things have changed in just three months. Italy was like heaven on earth. I have a lot of friends and fans in Italy and they are constantly in touch with me through social media. They are all scared. The roads are all empty like the lockdown here.

On being quizzed about his upcoming big-screen outing Boondi Raita being delayed due to lockdown, Himansh replied Technically, the film was supposed to be on floors by now. But, thats okay because the safety of the crew is more important. This decision was taken even before everybody had announced that they wont be operating till 31st. (sic)

He went on to add, "My career plans have been delayed as the film won't roll till the situation becomes normal. I am watching videos from Italy and reading the forwards circulating is painful, and if this continues it will affect mental health too.

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The voting for South Korea parliamentary election started on Wednesday (April 15) despite the coronavirus COVID-19 pandemic but with all necessary precautions, including hand masks and sanitizers.

Voters have been asked to come out to vote wearing masks and stand at least 1m apart at the polling booths across the country. The health workers are noting the temperature of each voters and disinfecting their hands before allowing them to enter the polling stations.

The voting is scheduled to take place for three hundred seats at the South Korean National Assembly being contested and the candidates from thirty-five parties are in the fray. The main contest, however, is between the ruling Minjoo (Democratic) Party and the main opposition, the conservative United Future Party.

It is learnt that over 11 million people, nearly 26% of the population of South Korea, have cast their votes in advance, including some by post. The early turnout has touched a record high this year and this is the first time that 18-year-olds have been allowed to exercise their voting rights.

It is to be noted that election has never been postponed in South Korea and the presidential election was held even during the Korean War in 1952.

The biggest challenge for officials to hold the election amid coronavirus pandemic was to avoid the risk of infection. After much discussion, it was decided that anyone with a temperature above 37.5C would be taken to a separate voting area and will not be allowed to mingle with other voters. The patients who had tested positive for coronavirus were given the option of mailing their ballot.
A chief magistrate court in Port Harcourt has granted bail to the two Caverton Helicopters pilots who were arrested and detained over ...





A chief magistrate court in Port Harcourt has granted bail to the two Caverton Helicopters pilots who were arrested and detained over alleged illegal flight operations in Rivers state.





Samuel Ugorji and Samuel Buhari, the pilots were arrested and charged to court on April 7 on the orders of Nyesom Wike, governor of the state.





At the resumed court hearing, Ihua-Maduenyi, the chief magistrate, granted bail to the pilots after hearing the bail application moved by Nwokedi Ibe, counsel to the defendants.





In the bail application dated April 8, 2020, but filed on April 9, 2020, Ibe prayed the court to grant bail to his clients.

Zaccheus Adangor, the attorney general of Rivers state who represented the prosecution, did not oppose the bail application.





However, he urged the court to impose stringent conditions that would ensure the defendants attend their trial.





The chief magistrate granted bail to the pilots and ordered them to produce a surety who must be a management staff of Caverton Helicopters.





The surety must sign a bail bond of N1 million each for the two pilots and must own a landed property in Port Harcourt.





The court also granted bail to 10 passengers flown into the state by the two pilots.





As part of their bail conditions, the court ordered that they should present two sureties who must also be management staff of Caverton Helicopters.





The sureties must sign a bail bond of N500,000 for each of the passengers and undertake to produce the persons in court on every date fixed for trial.





Hadi Sirika, minister of aviation, had faulted the arrest of the pilots, stating that aviation matters are on the exclusive list of the federal government.




PNC customers have experienced intermittent mobile and care center access today. This is the result of an unprecedented volume of customers using these channels to check their accounts for Economic Impact Payments and other forms of financial hardship relief. Our technical teams are engaged and we appreciate our customers patience as we work as quickly as we can to address the issue, Marcey Zwiebel, a spokesperson for PNC, said in an emailed statement.
Italy and Spain have begun allowing partial returns to work amid a fall in new coronavirus cases and signs that the pandemic is easing.

Spanish workers have returned to some factory jobs while in Italy, where the death toll is nearing 20,500, bookshops, laundries and childrens clothes stores have reopened on a trial basis, although it officially has a nationwide lockdown until May 4.

Spain was flattening the curve on the graph representing the rate of growth of the outbreak, the country's Health Minister Salvador Illa said.

The overnight death toll from the coronavirus rose to 567 on Tuesday from 517 a day earlier, but the country reported its lowest increase in new cases since March 18. Total deaths climbed to 18,056.

Shops, bars and public spaces in Spain are scheduled to stay closed until at least April 26.

Italy's Civil Protection Agency said there were 3,186 people in intensive care on Tuesday against 3,260 on Monday  an 11th consecutive daily decline.



Of those originally infected, 37,130 were declared recovered against 35,435 a day earlier.
As many as 69 pregnant women in



Shirur tehsil of Maharashtra's Pune district were placed under home quarantine, after a radiologist who had attended to them tested positive for coronavirus, an official said on Wednesday.

At least 69 women from 31 villages of the tehsil had visited the radiologist for sonography, a senior official from the Pune Zilla Parishad said.

"The radiologist had some symptoms of coronavirus so he voluntarily approached the health officials, following which his swab samples were sent for testing and he tested positive a couple of days ago," he said.

The radiologist, who lives in Pune, visited clinics in and around Shirur tehsil and had performed sonographies on 69 pregnant women at a clinic in Shikrapur on April 6, 7 and 8.

"All 69 women are placed under home quarantine, as it is not advisable to send them for institutional quarantine," he said, adding that a team of 31 doctors and Asha workers was formed to collect swab samples of these women.

"We have also declared these 31 villages as containment zones and a swab collection centre has been set up in Shikrapur and a technical team from the district hospital is stationed there," he said.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
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Linkedin Wahyoe Boediwardhana (The Jakarta Post) Surabaya, East Java  Wed, April 15, 2020 13:38 636 fc6853813033f564188675f8bd20740a 1 Business Indonesia,Oil-and-gas-production,Gundih-gas-well,Blora,fire,operation,SKKMigas,Pertamina-EP Free

The Gundih gas processing facility in Blora, Central Java is expected to resume operations by Sunday after being shut down last week following a fire cut gas supplies to thousands of homes and a power plant in the province.

The Upstream Oil and Gas Special Regulatory Task Force (SKK Migas) dispatched on Tuesday a team to investigate the cause of the fire. At the same time, the plants operator, oil and gas producer Pertamina EP, is working to repair the facilitys burned thermal oxidizer that functions as a gas emissions reduction device.

Hopefully, we can resume normal operations by this week, said SKK Migas regional head Nur Wahidi in a statement on April 14, A recovery would allow us to restore the fulfillment of energy needs.

The shutdown of the Gundih facility, which produces 50 million metric standard cubic feet per day (mmscfd), has cut the gas supply to 5,800 homes within the region and to the 450 megawatt (MW) Tambak Lorok combined-cycle power plant (PLTGU).

The gas well was shut down on April 9 shortly after the thermal oxidizer burst into a column of fire at around 9:30 a.m. that day. Pertamina EP, a subsidiary of state-owned energy company Pertamina, extinguished the fire by 10:45 a.m. with no reported casualties.

Pertamina EPs general manager for the facility, Agus Amperianto, said on April 10 that the Central Java Police had already investigated the incident but SKK Migas and the Energy and Mineral Resources Ministry would conduct a more technical investigation into how the fire started.

Once the official investigation results from the Energy Ministry and SKK Migas are out, we will inform stakeholders, he said.

Despite the cut-off gas supply, state-owned gas company PGN said the 5,800 households have not been affected yet as the company had mobilized its compressed natural gas (CNG) reserves from neighboring East Java to power homes in the meantime.

PGN said it channeled gas from the Gundih plant to 4,000 homes in Blora and 1,800 homes in Semarang, Central Java. Each customer in the former category consumed, on average, 1,300 cubic meters of gas per day, while those in the latter category used an average of 300 cu m daily. The gas is mostly used for cooking.

Stoves are still on as there is still piped gas supply, said PGN corporate secretary Rachmat Hutama on Thursday.

Meanwhile, the Tambak Lorok power plants operator, state-owned electricity company PLN, said the regions electricity supply was very safe because regional peak electricity consumption had fallen 11.2 percent over the past two weeks due to COVID-19 restrictions.

So even if Tambak Lorok is non-operational, the system is safe because our supplies are very safe, said PLN Java, Madura and Bali business director Haryanto.

The electricity company also has a CNG reserve supply on standby that will only be used, if needed, until Pertaminas supply returns, he added.

The Tambak Lorok plant has a power production capacity of 450MW from two blocks that can collectively consume up to 50 billion British thermal unit (BBtu) of gas per day. The third block, slated to begin operations in April, will have a capacity of 780MW and consume 90 BBtu of gas each day.
Chennai, Apr 14 (PTI) Residents of a city locality opposed the cremation of a doctor from Andhra Pradesh who died of COVID-19 here, forcing authorities to carry it out in another place overnight with a top official blaming 'coordination gap' for the unsavoury turn of events.

As the body of the 56-year old doctor, who died on Monday at a corporate hospital, was taken to the cremation ground in Ambattur area, the locals protested against it, saying it might lead to spread of coronavirus in their locality, police said on Tuesday.

Following the resistance, the body of the man from Nellore was taken back to the hospital mortuary, they said.

Top government sources said the man was cremated late on Monday in another locality in the city.

A top official from Chennai Corporation told PTI that the cremation was done with the full protocol for COVID-19 victims.

When asked about locals objecting to the cremation, state Health secretary Beela Rajesh said such an incident was rare and said "coordination gap" could have been the reason behind it, but did not elaborate. "It is a very sensitive issue. Everybody in the government is aware of the guidelines that needs to be followed to dispose (a body). We have also issued guidelines to private hospitals. These kind of issues have not occurred in the past. A small coordination gap has occurred", she said. The government has already informed the district collectors about the procedures to be followed, Rajesh said, adding, "we will reinforce them again". The doctor who contracted coronavirus from a Tablighi Jamaat attendee was first admitted to a government hospital in Nellore, about 175 km from here, and later shifted to the corporate hospital on April 6.

He was a diabetic and also suffered from hypertension. Tamil Nadu has so far reported 11 fatalities due to the virus while the cumulative total of those infected as on Monday stood at 1,173.

Of these, 31 of were children below the age of 10, the government said. Meanwhile, 40 police personnel in Coimbatore are undergoing tests for coronavirus after a person who served food to a few of them tested positive for COVID19 on Monday. According to police, a 61-year old man who had volunteered to provide food to these police personnel on duty at various locations was in the latest list of COVID19 cases. He had visited Delhi for personal reasons and returned to the city on March 23 by flight.

He had initially tested negative twice for the virus and visited the police stations and district collectorate and served food to the police personnel. However, after he developed cough and cold two days ago, the swab samples were sent for testing, and later it emerged he was infected with the virus. He has now been admitted to a local hospital, police said. Subsequently, health authorities approached senior police officials to send the 40 police personnel, including an Inspector, to Primary Health Centre for testing, which was under progress, they said. Officials are tracking the travel contacts and family members of the man. Meanwhile, the blood samples of nearly 100 people, residents of an apartment complex in RS Puram area in the city where four people tested positive for COVID19 a couple of days ago, have been taken for tests. These include those who attended a funeral at the apartment, officials said.

(This is an unedited and auto-generated story from Syndicated News feed, LatestLY Staff may not have modified or edited the content body)
Even before Texas first case of the novel coronavirus landed in March in Fort Bend County, Mrudula Rakhade was preparing how her clinical laboratory in a northwest Houston business park could accommodate the testing to come.

Anticipating the need in February to test for the rapidly-spreading virus  back when international travel was the leading source  Rakhade took the lead in ordering COVID-19 supplies for Altru Diagnostics, where she works as the chief scientific officer. She also made the lab one of the few statewide to be registered with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to identify positive traces of the virus.

By the time her boss of two years, Dr. Jesse Howard, suggested the lab take on COVID-19 testing in March  she had news for him.

I told him, Youre going to get COVID testing in a week because I had already been working on it, Rakhade proudly said.

As Howard, who opened the lab with his late father in 2016, walked by her office Monday afternoon, he said I trust her blindly.

CORONAVIRUS UPDATES: Stay informed with accurate reporting you can trust

Now, the 25-employee operation off the Katy Freeway is analyzing more than 1,000 specimens a day, mostly for local medical providers, including four United Memorial Medical Center drive thru-testing sites. Increases in testing have doubled the number of specimens they started with on March 19. Since then, they have analyzed an estimated 20,000 tests or more, Howard said.

Rakhade and her team of molecular technologists are pulling 12-hour shifts in cramped rooms to meet the growing demand. Social distancing is not an option. Some workers wear N-95 masks, while others, like Rakhade, choose at times not to.

I havent gotten anything yet, she said, adding that employees are tested every week for the novel coronavirus out of precaution. We dont go and touch anything without gloves on.

A meticulous assembly line starts the moment a courier arrives  and couriers with coolers packed with tests routinely pop into the lab.

Specimens are packed into one-time use plastic plates  designed to hold 96 biological samples  which are then injected with a magnetic solution to isolate any trace of the coronavirus ribonucleic acid, also known as RNA.

Another machine identifies how much novel coronavirus  if any  is in a sample, using a predetermined range for a positive result. A lower range of a positive could mean the nasal swab was not administered properly.

Some people dont go that deep, she said.

Undetermined values mean the sample is negative.

For each batch, the process can take up to four hours. As of Monday, the turnaround time, which includes contacting patients with their results, can be anywhere from 24 to 48 hours.

It is difficult to fulfill everyones expectations at this point, she continued.

And then the patients themselves start calling.

We just have to be patient with them, Rakhade said. Sometimes they get frustrated wondering why their results are not yet in. What can I do, they ask. Im quarantined.

CORONAVIRUS IN HOUSTON: All of the latest news, numbers and analysis to keep you up-to-date, only on HoustonChronicle.com

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On Sunday, for the first time in a month, Rakhade took the day off.

Up until then, she had spent several sleepless nights at the lab. She worked exhaustively in mid-March to finalize their COVID-19 certification with a positive patient sample supplied by the Centers for Disease Control to base their review.

I stayed up two nights continuously getting that done, Rakhade said. The night before I finished, we went home around 2 a.m. and I came back at 6 a.m. to finish.

During their research for certification, the lab stumbled across what appeared to be Laredos first case, she said. Without federal registration, which she finalized on March 18, the lab was unable to consider it official and recommended the patient  an elementary school teacher  be retested. According to Laredo officials, the San Antonio Metro Laboratory handled her test and her case was confirmed on March 17. Two days later, Altru Diagnostics first official positive arrived amid an estimated batch of 500 samples. That lone specimen was followed by about three more positives.

It was very rare to see a positive. It had just started, Rakhade said. After that it became routine because we had been testing so many samples.

Despite all her preparation, the lab ran into a similar problem plaguing hospitals and the Houston and Harris County-operated drive-thru testing sites: supply shortages.

On Friday, the lab used up all its plastic plates designed to hold COVID-19 samples. The plates can only be used once and the manufacturer was also out.

Rakhade resorted to old-school bartering to get what they needed. Another lab in Houston, which does not do COVID-19 testing, had a stash of unused plates. And she had what they needed  micro fluiditcs chips for genetic testing.

All the manufacturers are focusing on COVID-19 supplies, she said. They needed something they couldnt get because its not COVID-19.

nicole.hensley@chron.com
China has decided to take advantage of the USS Theodore Roosevelt being crippled by the growing coronavirus by sending fighter gets and an aircraft carrier close to the much disputed territory of Taiwan.

The Defense Ministry of Taiwan said that the Liaoning (China's very first aircraft carrier) and five other accompanying warships have just passed through the Miyako Strait which is located between Japan's islands Miyako as well as Okinawa, to the stretches of northeastern Taiwan on Saturday.

The growing danger of the situation

The USS Roosevelt along with the USS Roland Reagan are the only two existing US carriers located in the Pacific but have recently been forced to dock due to the coronavirus. While the US vessel ports, the Liaoning is currently the only active aircraft carrier in the western Pacific carrying 24 j-15 fighter jets!

On Sunday, the Liaoning's carrier group (which included an arsenal of two missile destroyers and two missile frigates along with a supply ship) sailed to Taiwan's east coast then into the south of Taiwan itself!

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On Monday, the US Air Force and Navy have put on a show of strength in response to China with a runway formation of a dozen B-52 bombers along with other aircrafts.

Taiwan has said that they are monitoring the carrier group's progress and have completed necessary actions to ensure national security as well as protecting regional peace and stability. China's Defense Minister has not yet given a response.

The existing tension

Taiwan and China have an existing dispute over Taiwan's legal status as the Chinese government still consider Taiwan as part of its territory while Taiwan claims themselves a separate nation. The USS Roosevelt is currently docked in Guam and has already reported its first death of the coronavirus.

About 600 other sailors have tested positive for COVID-19 as 92% of the crew have been tested. Officials have said that the USS Raegan is now currently docked in Yokosuka, Japan, for maintenance.

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UDD Carl Vinson is currently docked at the Puget Sound naval base in Washington for maintenance as well while a sailor was also diagnosed with the bug.

USS Nimitz has recently become the fourth US aircraft carrier to report another coronavirus case.

Aside from the Liaoning, China also has its recently built Shandong which is rumored to have cost $9 billion and is stationed at the Hainan Island.

The United States' arsenal

The United States currently has 11 aircraft carriers but two of them are currently in the Middle East while five of them are in US ports undergoing long-term services as well as overhauls.

Taiwan has been complaining about the increase of Chinese military around their area in the past few weeks and have even told China to focus more on the coronavirus instead of menacing the island. The US military has also been active around Taiwanese waters recently.

On Friday, a US Navy guided missile destroyer sailed right through the Taiwan Strait. This is the exact same day that the Chinese fighter jets drilled in water close to the island.
African Americans represent 42% of COVID-19 deaths in Marion County, which translates to a death rate of 18 per 100,000 African Americans.

Dr. Virginia Caine, director of the Marion County Public Health Department, released the initial numbers during a virtual town hall co-hosted by the Recorder and New America Indianapolis.

The death rate for African Americans is currently more than twice that of whites, who have made up 40% of deaths in Marion County. The death rate is based on relative population size.

Caine said the county health department will release more data sometime this week.

Africans Americans are 28.9% of the population in Marion County, according to census data.

Statewide, African Americans make up 17.6% of COVID-19 cases and 20.9% of deaths, adding Indiana to the growing list of places where African Americans are taking on a disproportionate amount of harm from the new coronavirus.

African Americans are 9.8% of the population in Indiana.

The state numbers are current as of April 15.

 CHART: Tracking COVID-19 in Indiana

The Indiana State Department of Health released the initial numbers April 10 and now displays daily updates on its website, but that is only statewide data.

Caine said there are a number of reasons for the disparity, including poverty and chronic medical illnesses such as asthma and kidney disease.

Because of our poverty level we have in Marion County in the African American community, I may not have a primary care provider, she said during the town hall. I may get my medical care through the emergency rooms or urgent care, so its intermittent.

Caine also noted doctors have implicit biases  contributing to medical racism  and said they need training to recognize those biases and how that impacts the health of their patients.

We need to hold them accountable, she said.  They dont mean any harm, some of them, they just really dont know. Theyve never been educated. They dont even realize they may be insulting a patient.

The county and state health departments were under increasing pressure to release data about race, especially after other cities and states showed the general health disparities that have plagued African Americans were also showing up with COVID-19.

African Americans make up about a third of the populations in Chicago and Louisiana, but when they released race data earlier in April, it showed about 70% of those who had died from the virus were African American in both places.

In Wisconsins Milwaukee County, where about 27% of people are African American, 44 of the 67 people who had died from the virus as of April 9 were African American.

Dr. Kristina Box, the states top health official, said before Indianas numbers were released she expected the state to mirror those disparities found in other parts of the country.

Its important to note that race is unknown for about 19% of cases and 6% of deaths at the state level. Box said the health department will continue to work with hospitals to fill in the missing data.

The reason some data is missing is because doctors who order tests fill out a form that includes race and ethnicity, and sometimes they check unknown. The state can go through other records to confirm that information.

Contact staff writer Tyler Fenwick at 317-762-7853. Follow him on Twitter @Ty_Fenwick.

A woman wears a face mask in public to help slow the spread of COVID-19. (Photo/Curtis Guynn)
(CNN)  President Donald Trump took a victory lap over the weekend for helping convince Russia and Saudi Arabia to make record-shattering production cuts  but there was no celebration in financial markets.

"This will save hundreds of thousands of energy jobs in the United States," Trump tweeted Sunday. "I would like to thank and congratulate President Putin of Russia and King Salman of Saudi Arabia."

Yet oil prices barely budged Monday, remaining near 18-year lows. And the S&P 500 energy sector lost further ground, leaving it down a stunning 43 percent on the year.

The muted reaction on Wall Street reflects a realization that despite the historic nature of the OPEC+ cuts, they aren't nearly deep enough to erase the epic supply glut facing the oil market.

"This will stabilize things a bit. It will slow the bloodletting," said Matt Smith, director of commodity research at ClipperData. "But it's absolutely not enough to rebalance the market."

US oil prices finished 1 percent lower on Monday to $22.41 a barrel. That's a far cry from the record 32 percent spike during the first week of April, when Trump first touted major OPEC production cuts.

'Demand implosion'

The central problem remains the collapse in the world's thirst for oil. The coronavirus pandemic has grounded countless flights. Highways remain empty. Many factories are still dark.

Bank of America is now projecting that demand will plunge by an average of 9.2 million barrels per day in 2020, more than double the 4.4 million drop initially projected.

"The demand implosion is immediate and deep, while the supply decline will likely happen in stages," Bank of America wrote in a report Monday.

The good news is that the OPEC+ supply cuts lower the immediate risk of a disaster in the oil market. Demand was collapsing at such a staggering pace -- and supply was increasing -- that the world was rapidly running out of room to store oil. And reaching "tank tops," as it's called in the industry, could have sent oil plunging to single-digits or even negative territory in some places.

"This prevents the impending car crash that was happening in slow motion," said Michael Tran, director of global energy strategy at RBC Capital Markets. "Dodging that iceberg is extremely constructive. But in the near-term, we continue to be plagued by the coronavirus."

Storage space is still being pushed to the limit

Others fear that storage iceberg hasn't been avoided altogether.

Even after the OPEC+ deal, Bank of America warned it still anticipates inventories will surge by 12 million barrels per day during the second quarter and another 1.5 million barrels in the third quarter.

That will push "global storage capacity to the limit...Plenty of downside risks remain," Bank of America strategists wrote.

Part of the problem is that the production cuts may not be as big as advertised. Goldman Sachs says OPEC production is dropping by only 7.2 million barrels per day from average levels of the first quarter. And OPEC and its allies are notorious for "cheating" by producing more than they say they will.

Even if there is full compliance from OPEC members and 50% compliance from other nations, this agreement will reduce actual production by only 4.3 million barrels per day from first-quarter levels, Goldman Sachs said.

"Today's agreement leaves the voluntary cuts as still too little and too late to avoid breaching storage capacity," Goldman Sachs wrote in a report Sunday night. In fact, the bank said that "no voluntary cuts could be large enough" to offset the drops in demand.

In other words, market forces will be needed to cause deep output drops in the United States and elsewhere.

Oil bankruptcies loom

Goldman Sachs said that although oil prices will rebound in the long run, for now there will be further "weakness" in oil prices, perhaps even below the bank's short-term forecast of $20.

That's good news for American consumers dealing with deep economic uncertainty.

The average price of a gallon of gas has tumbled to just $1.87 a gallon, according to AAA. That's down from $2.30 a month ago and well below the year-ago levels of $2.82.

However, few drivers can take advantage of cheap gas because of the health crisis. The vast majority of the country has been forced to work from home. And road trips aren't an option either.

Yet cheap crude will continue to pose a serious threat to US oil companies, especially independent frackers that piled on too much debt.

Rystad Energy recently estimated that 140 US oil producers could file for bankruptcy this year if oil stays at $20 a barrel, followed by another 400 in 2021. That would cause countless jobs to disappear.

Trump: OPEC+ wants to cut 20 million barrels per day

Perhaps this explains why Trump suggested the production cuts are deeper than people realize.

"Having been involved in the negotiations, to put it mildly, the number that OPEC+ is looking to cut is 20 million barrels a day, not the 10 million that is generally being reported," Trump said in a tweet.

However, analysts expressed doubt about that claim, saying it likely includes reductions in supply in non-OPEC nations like the United States. But those cuts are market-driven, not voluntary. That is not what moves the needle for the oil market.

All of this means that a speedy return to healthy oil prices is likely not in the cards -- despite the strong action taken by OPEC and Russia.

"The $50 scenario is extremely far-fetched in the near-term because coronavirus continues to take the oil market hostage," said RBC's Tran.

This story was first published on CNN.com, "Cheap oil isn't going away, even after record production cuts."
Local actor Cynthia M. Putman and her husband Wayne are area thespians who have been cast as extras in such productions as HBOs The Righteous Gemstones featuring actors Danny McBride, John Goodman, Edi Patterson, and Adam Devine.

The show is shot in the Charleston area and focuses on a dysfunctional second generation family of megachurch televangelists, headed up by Eli Gemstone played by Goodman.

Live Arts Scene ART On the Square gallery, 420 Nexton Squre Dr., Summerville, 843-871-0297. Closed until fur

Since the show is filmed in Charleston, many locals such as musician Fleming Moore, my boyfriend, and I have all periodically been cast as extras for various scenes.

Hollywood actor Walton Goggins, who has previously starred with McBride in HBOs Vice Principals, has frequently been on the show as well but is now starring in CBS new hit show The Unicorn.

Cynthia and Wayne have been extras on Gemstones and some other area television productions. Aside from theater, Cynthia is also known as C.M. Putman, author of some childrens books based on their dog white Pomeranian Snowball.

Find more at http://snowballthedog.com/, the first book came out a couple of years ago. Shes visited local schools to promote her books. She is a former educator in various school districts in Florida and South Carolina and at CSU. Wayne was in the Air Force for several years and had previously taught science and math at Summerville High School. He teaches concealed weapons permit courses.

The Putmans were also extras in Mr. Mercedes starring Irish actor Brendan Gleeson, Mr Mercedes was it its third season on the Audience Channel. The show is a (detective) crime thriller based on a novel by best-selling (horror) author Stephen King of my home state of Maine. Its also part of the Edgar-award winning trilogy of Mr. Mercedes, Finders Keepers, and End of Watch. Both shows are on hiatus due to the coronavirus pandemic.

For more Information, go to: https://www.facebook.com/cmputman

Regan: Cynthia and Wayne, how did you two get involved in acting? Was it difficult to become an extra?

Cynthia: Theater and drama interested me from childhood. I used to write stories and act them out with toys. I progressed to church plays and appeared in a few shows at the Flowertown Theater years ago. It is easy to sign up to be an extra. You just have to wait and see if they need someone who has your look.

Wayne: Ive always been in school and church plays. Never been a shy person so any opportunity, I jumped on it.

R: Did you two meet through creative arts endeavors?

C: No, we did not.

R: Are either of you trained in acting at all? How many years have you been acting?

C: I was in a few workshops years ago and have been in plays with different directors. All that has helped me be a better actress. I suppose I have acted sporadically since 1960 when I was in my kindergarten program in California. As a retired educator and a public speaker, I still speak to community, school, and church groups.

W: I started in the fourth grade and only had teachers and local friends who thought they were training me.

R: Have you both been in scenes together and, if so, was that challenging to do with a straight face? What was the most memorable scene that you were in that you enjoyed?

C: Weve had scenes in The Lowcountry Singing Christmas Tree production together at Summerville Baptist Church. Some of the scenes were funny but we made it through without breaking character.

W: Ive always liked the comedy scenes and, of course, we are totally professional  wink, wink.

R: Cynthia, I see you are also an author. Which do you prefer, writing or acting?

C: Either one is a treat for me. With writing, it is a solitary process and you must wait until publication to get a reaction. In the acting arena, you sometimes practice for weeks prior to being in front of an audience. With a television series, you sometimes wait months to see the finished project. Acting seems to give me more of an adrenaline rush.

R: What advice do either of you have to others who want to try acting (or writing)?

C: Go for it! Take advantage of local acting workshops, modeling classes, or any available training. All that helps you prepare.

W: You have to decide how serious you want to go after it (acting). You always hear about the struggling actor who, when you ask, What do you do for a living? the reply is a waiter or a waitress. It can be a fun hobby until you get discovered. Of course, were waiting.

R: What is next for you both with acting endeavors?

C: When filming begins again after the current COVID 19 crisis, we both hope to continue to work as background artists for HBO and any new local filming. However, there are others gigs out there if you want to travel to North Carolina or Georgia. We have friends that do.

Mary E. Regan, columnist, is a publicist with her ProPublicist consultancy and is seeking more clients. Story ideas? Email: Mary@ProPublicist.com.
A government watchdog agency said Wednesday the Pentagon's process for awarding a highly lucrative cloud computing contract to Microsoft was in line with legal and government purchasing standards.

The Defense Department inspector general found no evidence of White House interference in the contract award process. But the report said investigators could not fully review that aspect of the matter because the White House would not allow unfettered access to witnesses.

The contract, potentially worth $10 billion, was awarded to Microsoft last October, prompting tech rival Amazon to cry foul.

Amazon Web Services, a market leader in providing cloud computing services, had long been considered a leading candidate to run the Pentagon's Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure project, known as JEDI. The project will store and process vast amounts of classified data, allowing the U.S. military to improve communications with soldiers on the battlefield and use artificial intelligence to speed up its war planning and fighting capabilities.

Amazon sued the Pentagon after Microsoft won the contract. Work on the project has been halted as the lawsuit proceeds. The judge presiding over the bid protest in the U.S. Court of Federal Claims said in March that Amazon's challenge likely had merit on some technical grounds involving pricing.

The review released Wednesday by the Defense Department's inspector general did not draw a conclusion about whether Microsoft was appropriately declared the winner. Rather, it looked at whether the decision-making process was proper and legal. It also examined allegations of unethical behavior by Pentagon officials involved in the matter and generally determined that any ethical lapses did not influence the outcome.

The review also sought to determine whether the White House influenced the Pentagon's decision, as Amazon has alleged. The report said that although it appears there was no such White House pressure, the reviewers could not definitely determine the full extent of White House interactions with the Pentagon's decision makers.

We could not review this matter fully because of the assertion of a 'presidential communications privilege,' which resulted in several DOD witnesses being instructed by the DOD Office of General Counsel not to answer our questions about potential communications between White House and DOD officials about JEDI, the report said.

As a result, we could not be certain whether there were any White House communications with some DOD officials which may have affected the JEDI procurement, it said. However, we believe the evidence we received showed that the DOD personnel who evaluated the contract proposals and awarded Microsoft the JEDI cloud contract were not pressured ... by any DOD leaders more senior to them, who may have communicated with the White House, the report said.

Amazon has asserted that the bidding was improperly influenced by President Donald Trump's dislike of Amazon and its CEO, Jeff Bezos. Bezos owns The Washington Post, a outlet often criticized by Trump.

The Project on Government Oversight, a private watchdog group, said it was alarmed by the White House's use of presidential privilege to limit the inspector general's access to witness information. Executive privilege is designed to protect national security and the president's candid conversations with close advisers, not to block agency officials from discussing a large government contract that does not call for direct presidential decision-making, the group's top lawyer, Scott Amey, said in a statement.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Four U.S. sailors that were assigned to a French aircraft carrier that has been hit by a coronavirus outbreak have been placed in quarantine in France, it has emerged.

Two of them have tested positive for the virus, according to the U.S. Navy.

French flagship carrier, the Charles De Gaulle, has around 2,100 sailors on board that are being evacuated and isolated. It comes after 'at least 40' cases of the coronavirus were detected following NATO training exercises in Denmark alongside British armed forces.

'Two of four U.S. Sailors assigned to the French nuclear-powered aircraft carrier FS Charles de Gaulle (R91) tested positive for COVID19 and are receiving excellent host nation medical care at French facilities,' a Navy spokesman told CNN in a statement.

It was not previously public knowledge that U.S. military personnel were on board the ship, but it is common for them to serve on allied ships in order to bolster relationships between allied forces.

Four U.S. sailors on France's Charles De Gaulle aircraft carrier have been put into quarantine following an outbreak of the coronavirus on the ship

The ship had 2,100 personnel on it and is one of the largest in the world. There are said to be 50 cases of people with the coronavirus on board

The four sailors are taking part in the US Navy's Personnel Exchange program in which U.S. sailors and personnel are integrated with French and other foreign crews' daily operations, including medical care if required, according to CNN.

The exchange program is designed to 'foster strong relationships and enhanced communication with partners and allies.'

The Charles De Gaulle often works along-side the U.S. and other nation's armed forces. It played a significant part in the bombing campaign against ISIS in the Middle East.

The battleship, one of the largest in the world, reportedly arrived at its home port of Toulon in Southern France on Sunday at around 3pm local time after undertaking exercises in Denmark.

The vessel cut short its current mission in the Mediterranean and the Atlantic by 10 days because of the outbreak.

Coronavirus cases were detected on board, and the nuclear powered ship made an urgent dash for the Mediterranean to get home, where it is now docked. The evacuation of sailors and staff on board infected with COVID-19 began on Sunday evening.

Sailors from the Charles de Gaulle aircraft carrier are evacuated after 'at least 40 cases' were confirmed on board, including two U.S. Navy sailors

According to French news channel BFMTV, 'at least 40 cases', of COVID-19 had been reported on board by Sunday as it made its way to port. CNN says the figure is now more likely to be 50.

Around 50 sailors are being taken to the former site of the Saint-Anne army training hospital, which moved to new buildings in 2008. The premises have been fitted out to receive patients from the Charles de Gaulle.

Local authorities said it was a painstaking operation to remove the personnel to ensure there was no risk of any further infection, and three sailors had already been evacuated to hospital Toulon as a 'precaution' before the ship docked.

All the personnel will be tested and they will then be put into isolation for two weeks, with no physical contact allowed with their families, said the spokeswoman for the regional authorities, Christine Ribbe.

'Our aim is to protect all our sailors and also their families with an unprecedented deployment,' she added. Only once the isolation period is over will the sailors be allowed home.

From Tuesday, the ship itself has been subject of a major disinfection operation.

The vessel is equipped with a medical platform on board complete with a resuscitation unit, and everything was being done to keep those who were thought to be infected away from their comrades.

Beyond sailors and commandos, the Charles de Gaulle has an air wing of 600 pilots and support crew. It carries aircraft including Rafale M fighters and AS532 Cougar helicopters and was launched in 1994.

It was the only nuclear-powered aircraft carrier built outside of the United States Navy.

After the cases of the coronavirus were discovered while the ship was undertaking NATO training exercises in Denmark with British forces, the ship raced back to the Mediterranean

The U.S. Navy has also struggled to contain the virus once it comes aboard a ship. About 12 percent of the ship's 4,800 strong crew aboard the USS Theodore Roosevelt, an aircraft carrier with a crew that has largely been moved ashore in Guam, are infected with the virus.

On Monday, the Roosevelt reported its first death, a sailor who had tested positive for the coronavirus on March 30. A second sailor from the aircraft carrier has since been taken into intensive care.

Nearly 600 crew members (around 12 percent) from the USS Theodore Roosevelt have tested positive to COVID-19 since initial cases were confirmed on March 24.

The ship was thrust into the international spotlight when its captain, Brett Crozier, was relieved of his command by the Navy on April 2 after he sounded the alarm over the outbreak on board his ship.

Crozier had sent a letter to Navy bosses pleading to let his sailors off the carrier, fearing that up to 50 of his crew could die from the virus.

Despite firing Crozier for breaking the chain of command, the Navy conceded to his demands for mass testing and a wide scale evacuation of the ship.

The USS Theodore Roosevelt, a U.S. Navy aircraft carrier, has roughly 600 cases on board out of its 4,800 personnel

Another ship, the USNS Mercy medical ship, docked in Los Angeles, has had to remove 116 workers from the ship after seven people tested positive for the virus

Medical ships docked in both Los Angeles and New York City have seen staff infected with the coronavirus.

The U.S. Navy removed 116 medical staff members from its USNS Mercy docked in Los Angeles today, while four staff on the USNS Comfort hospital ship that is docked in New York City have tested positive.

According to the latest figures from the Johns Hopkins University, France ranks fourth in the world for the highest number of COVID-19 cases, with 131,362 infected. So far, France has suffered 15,750 deaths from the disease.

The US ranks first in both cases and deaths, with 604,270 and 25,289 respectively.

The U.S. has now seen 615,183 cases of the coronavirus, more than any other country in the world
Back to the 1840s

Gordon Hall's internal overhaul begins.

by Cynthia Furlong Reynolds

Published in April, 2020

"Gordon Hall is a house we all love. Many, many generous donors are helping to restore it properly," says Bev Hill, president of the Dexter Area Historical Society, as she shares blueprints of the interior renovations planned for the stately home of judge Samuel Dexter on Island Lake Rd. "The outside is done for now. We're excited to move our efforts indoors."



Purchased from the University of Michigan for $1.5 million in 2004, Gordon Hall was built as the home of Dexter's founder and namesake, Samuel William Dexter (although he always maintained he named the village for his father, who shared all three of his names). After ambitious fundraising efforts paid off its loan in 2014, grants and matching funds provided the $125,000 necessary to begin work with HopkinsBurns Design Studio of Webster Township. A recent fundraiser brought in nearly $50,000, enabling the society to launch Phase I of the hall's long-anticipated interior renovations.



One of the oldest surviving properties in Dexter, Gordon Hall was built between 1841 and 1843 on a prominent knoll overlooking the Huron River and the village. Designed by local resident Calvin Fillmore, brother of future president Millard Fillmore, it is considered one of the finest examples of Greek Revival architecture in the Midwest and played host to two (or possibly three) U.S. presidents.



The home is also believed to have hosted escaped slaves fleeing to Canada--according to a county historic district report, and there is substantial evidence that Gordon Hall was used as a stop, or 'station,' on the Underground Railroad.



Dexter's father was a U.S. senator who served as secretary of war under John Adams and secretary of the treasury under Adams and Thomas Jefferson. The younger Samuel, a Harvard graduate and abolitionist, earned his law degree in 1815 then left Boston for New York State in search of adventure. But after his first wife and son died, he decided to push farther west.



Dexter arrived in Michigan in the 1820s with

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$80,000 in his pockets. In addition to Dexter, he is credited with founding Saginaw, Ionia, and the village of Byron (which he named for the poet).Maternal and infant mortality was still rampant then, and his second wife and son also died in 1827. The following year, Dexter married sixteen-year-old Millisent Bond. He platted the village in 1830, the same year Millisent gave birth to the first of their nine children, all but one of whom survived into adulthood.The couple's home doubled as the village's first post office and church. Dexter donated land for the railroad, a Baptist church, and what is now Forest Lawn Cemetery, and served as the first chief justice of the Washtenaw County Court and as one of the first regents of the University of Michigan.The judge died at the age of seventy-one, in 1863. A decade later, his widow attached a massive four-story Victorian tower to the rear of their home. She sold off all but seventy acres of the property before her death in 1899."Reconstructing this tower is not part of our plans. Gordon Hall will be restored to the way it looked during Judge Dexter's lifetime," Hill says.After Mrs. Dexter's death, the house passed through many hands, eventually becoming a boarding house. "It's a miracle the property wasn't subdivided for housing developments," Hill says.Gordon Hall was derelict and abandoned when Katharine Dexter McCormick, one of the judge's last surviving descendants, bought it in 1938.McCormick was only the second woman to graduate from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the first to earn a degree in biology. Throughout her lifetime, she conducted research in biochemistry and schizophrenia--her husband, Stanley McCormick, son of the mechanical reaper inventor, was institutionalized for most of his life with the disorder. She was instrumental in lobbying for the Nineteenth Amendment, cofounded the League of Women Voters, and almost single-handedly funded development of the birth control pill.McCormick hired a U-M professor of architecture to help her restore Gordon Hall, demolishing the tower and returning the home to its original configuration. However, before the restoration was finished, she donated Gordon Hall and its remaining acres to U-M in 1950, with the understanding that the estate would be preserved as a landmark. The university immediately divided Gordon Hall into apartments for university faculty, gutting all the historic interior details and fixtures.When the U-M decided to sell it, Dexter's historical society leaped into action. Everyone from schoolchildren to natives, newcomers, and businesspeople contributed time, efforts, and funds. And the United Methodist Retirement Community, bought several acres to build a retirement community next door. After the society paid off its mortgage in 2014, it began work on restoring Gordon Hall's exterior and grounds.In mid-February, the society contracted with A. R. Brouwer for Phase I of the interior work: installing three bathrooms (two of them handicapped-accessible) on the first floor and an office/sitting room above them on the second floor. As soon as the weather looks promising, carpenters will demolish the cement back porch and build an exact replica of its 1843 predecessor.Meanwhile, society members are feverishly raising money and writing grants for Phase II. By 2024, the historical society hopes to begin mechanical upgrades; install a small elevator; rip out all twentieth-century changes; create historically accurate millwork, ceilings, and doors, and hang historic fixtures. "Unfortunately, the university destroyed or carted away all the original woodwork, trim, and mantels, so we have to start from scratch," Hill says."Once again Gordon Hall will be gutted," says Jessica Quijano, a preservation architect with HopkinsBurns. "But this time we'll return the interior to the way it looked in Judge Dexter's day." [Originally published in April, 2020.]
In a column published earlier this week in USA Today, the presidents of the American Federation of Teachers (Randi Weingarten), the Communications Workers of America (Chris Shelton), the Service Employees International Union (Mary Kay Henry) and the Teamsters (James P. Hoffa) offer their services to the corporations in defending the capitalist system.

Titled, Coronavirus is a stress test for capitalism, and we see encouraging signs, the editorial is an appeal to the American ruling class to use the services of the union bureaucracy to suppress the resistance of the working class.

American businesses will certainly emerge from the coronavirus crisis transformed by the trials of human loss, steep recession and Wall Street collapse, the leaders of the AFT, CWA, SEIU and Teamsters proclaim. The social fabric of capitalism is undergoing a once-in-a-lifetime stress test.

The fact that the unions identify capitalism as the central issue is significant. The highly paid union executives are well aware of the growth of anti-capitalist sentiment and interest in socialism among workers. They are particularly conscious of the growing influence and readership of the World Socialist Web Site.

The political radicalization of workers is being enormously intensified by the coronavirus pandemic. While workers are dying as a result of the absence of protective equipment and overloaded health care systems, the ruling elite has handed itself trillions of dollars to drive up share values on Wall Street. Now, the political establishment, both Democrat and Republican, is campaigning for a rapid return to work, insisting that workers risk their lives and the lives of their loved ones to pump out profits.

The union executives see as their job to save capitalism and suppress opposition to the plans of the financial oligarchs.

In an effort to conceal the class character of society, they claim the pandemic has led to a sharp division in corporate America. On the one side are those companies evading responsibility, protecting top management and share prices, and continuing practices that put harmful economic distance between Americans. On the other are supposedly those well-managed companies with established relationships with workers [read unions] that recognize that short-term focus, financial shenanigans and corrosive labor-management relationships are not suited to the uncertain future we face.

The supposed enlightened capitalist enterprises they citeincluding Verizon, AT&T, UPS, Kroger, Safeway, General Motors, Ford, Fiat Chrysler and othershave all squandered billions on stock buybacks and other financial shenanigans over the last decade, while destroying the jobs, wages and conditions of workers.

But what makes them important to the authors is that they accomplished these aims while securing the financial and institutional interests of the union executives. The rise in the stock market also meant the rising wealth of these union executives, all of whom are in the top five percent of the population by income.

The four officials praise these companies for signing new deals that throw out small hazard pay raises for grocery and other workers, along with empty promises to provide protective equipment and safe working conditions to health care and other essential workers. All these measures amount to nothing. They are aimed at forcing workers to stay on the job despite the threat to their lives and to facilitate the ruling classs push to reopen the economy.

The union executives then get to the heart of the matter: We look forward, they write, to sitting down with the nations business leaders, as well as the leaders of governments, universities, hospitals and school systems, to hammer out agreements that will restore profits and economic growth as we emerge from this crisis, and protect as many jobs as possible as we battle it.

In other words, these executives want to use the pandemic as an opportunity to further cement their corporatist relationship with management. They see it as their task to restore profits once production resumesthat is, to suppress the opposition of workers.

In the aftermath of the 2008-09 global financial crash, the AFL-CIO and Change to Win labor federations collaborated with the Obama administration to all but end strikes and facilitate the ruling classs restructuring of class relations.

The ruling class intends to use the pandemic to accomplish another and far more sweeping change in social relations. If they get away with it, millions of the workers who have been laid off will not be rehired, and those who have taken pay and benefit cuts will never retrieve them. The transfer of trillions in public assets to the corporations will be used to accelerate the plans to use new technologies to slash jobs and ramp up exploitation.

But these efforts, along with the efforts to force workers back to work to die for corporate profit, will produce, and are already producing, working-class opposition. Over the past month, there has been a wave of protests, walkouts and other job actions by workers throughout the US and internationally, all independently of the unions, which have done absolutely nothing.

One of their more blatant lies in the USA Today comment is the claim that the United Auto Workers worked with General Motors, Ford and Fiat Chrysler to implement social-distancing measures and minimize the risk of exposure to COVID-19.

In reality, the only reason the auto industry was closed was because Fiat Chrysler workers in Michigan, Ohio and Indiana walked out and carried out other job actions in opposition to the UAW. The UAW, whose top officials have been indicted or are under investigation for stealing workers dues money, collaborated with the auto bosses to keep the factories open as the disease spread. This led to the deaths of at least 19 autoworkers.

Workers in health care, the auto industry, public transit and sanitation, and meatpacking, along with workers at Amazon, Whole Foods and Instacart, have taken matters into their own hands, prompting Bloomberg News to publish an article Tuesday, titled, Covid-19 Has Workers Striking. Where Are the Unions?

The unions are where they have been and will continue to be: on the side of corporate management. They long ago abandoned any of the functions historically associated with trade unions. They have spent decades colluding with the ruling class and the state to destroy the jobs, wages and conditions of workers in the name of making American capitalism more competitive and profitable.

The Socialist Equality Party urges workers to move now to form rank-and-file factory and workplace committees. These committees must be independent of the corrupt unions and democratically controlled by workers themselves. They will fight for what workers need and not accept the lies that there is no money, when trillions are being handed out to the super-rich.

In opposition to the demands of the corporations, rank-and-file committees should demand the shutdown of all nonessential production until the virus is contained. No worker should be forced to place his or her life in danger. All production must be redirected to urgent necessities to stop the pandemic, including health care equipment.

The jobs of workers unable to work because of the pandemic must be guaranteed and their wages and benefits paid in full during the shutdown. Rent and mortage payments and interest on loans must be waived. The financial cost of the crisis must be borne by the capitalists, not the workers.

The multi-trillion-dollar bailout of the corporations and banks must be cancelled and the funds used to protect the health and living standards of the working population. Instead of bailing out the corporations, they should be nationalized and turned into public utilities under the democratic control of the working class.

All workers who continue to work must be provided with the necessary protective gear and a safe working environment, overseen by rank-and-file committees working in tandem with health care professionals.

Whether the union bureaucrats like it or not, millions of workers are coming to the realization that they are the essential force in society. The chief obstacle to a rational and humane response to the pandemic is the capitalist system and the insatiable demand for profit by the financial and corporate elite.

The growing opposition of the working class must be guided by a genuine socialist perspective aimed at establishing workers power and the collective ownership and direction of societys productive capacity and resources.
By AFP

BRASILIA: A 99-year-old World War II veteran in Brazil was released from hospital with military honours Tuesday after recovering from COVID-19.

Second Lieutenant Ermando Piveta, who served in the Brazilian artillery in Africa during World War II, was brought out of the Armed Forces Hospital in Brasilia to a burst of trumpet music and applause.

Wearing an army-green side cap, he raised his arms in the air as he left the hospital after eight days as a patient.

"He won another battle, this time against the new coronavirus. He was released from hospital the same day Brazil is commemorating the 75th anniversary of its troops' successful campaign in the Battle of Montese in Italy during World War II," the army said in a statement.

Piveta served in the army's fourth artillery regiment, which trained in Dakar in 1942, soon after Brazil entered the war on the side of the Allies, the army said.

He then returned to Brazil with his regiment to defend the country from an Axis invasion that never came to be.

Brazil is the hardest-hit country in Latin America in the coronavirus pandemic, with 1,532 deaths so far.
India on Wednesday rejected criticism by a US panel on religious freedom of the reported segregation of Covid-19 patients in a hospital in Gujarat, saying it shouldnt add religious colour to efforts to fight the pandemic.

The US Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF), a bipartisan government entity that monitors and reports on threats to religious freedom abroad, had criticised reports that patients at a hospital in Ahmedabad had been separated on the basis of their faith.

External affairs ministry spokesperson Anurag Srivastava said in a statement: As if its peremptory commentary on religious freedom in India is not enough, the USCIRF is now spreading misguided reports on the professional medical protocols followed to deal with [the] spread of Covid-19 in India.

It must stop adding religious colour to our national goal of fighting the pandemic and distract from larger efforts. No segregation is being done in civil hospitals on the basis of religion, as clarified by the Gujarat government.

The USCIRF had tweeted that it was concerned with reports of Hindu & Muslim patients separated into separate hospital wards in #Gujarat. Such actions only help to further increase ongoing stigmatization of Muslims in #India and exacerbate false rumors of Muslims spreading #Covid19.

On Tuesday, the USCIRF had welcomed the Indian Supreme Courts decision to relax conditions for release of people detained as foreigners in Assams detention centres because of Covid-19-related concerns.

The Supreme Court ordered the release of people held for at least two years and lowered the personal bond necessary to secure release from Rs 100,000 to Rs 5,000.

In its 2019 report, the USCIRF had highlighted concerns that the implementation of the National Register of Citizens (NRC) in Assam is an intentional effort to discriminate and/or has the effect of discriminating against Muslims.

The Indian government has reacted angrily to the USCIRFs criticism in the past as interference in the countrys internal affairs.
Member of Parliament for Klottey Korle constituency, Dr Zanetor Agyeman-Rawlings has chided the ruling government together with its officials in charge of the distribution of food meant for the less privileged and vulnerable in society on a partisan basis.



According to her, its wrong for them to tow that line, therefore asking the government to account for GHC2m funding for food.



It is time to account for who is receiving the money and who is the food going to? We need greater transparency, she angrily said.



Dr Rawlings alleged that, she has equally been sidelined on these humanitarian projects as she has not been informed by any member of the ruling NPP on how they plan on distributing food in her municipality.



She lamented, as a member of parliament, I am an ex-officio member of the municipality which means I should be informed on what is going on. I do not know what is going on with regards to the disbursement of funds, or the distribution of food. All I know is there are women here with their children who are sleeping outside because they have no chance to work, because theyve not been allowed to go back home and they are not getting fed.



Zanetor's comments came when she took it upon herself to feed the over 100 Kayayei's who were not privileged to receive some of the food from the government because they don't belong or are not affiliated to the ruling NPP.







Source: ghanaweb









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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A boy waits in dance class in 2009 at a primary school in Lhasa, the capital of the Tibet Autonomous Region in China. (Greg Baker / Los Angeles Times)

A year ago February, authorities in the highly restrictive Tibet Autonomous Region of China picked up Tsering Dorje, who lived in a village near Mt. Everest. They held him for a month in what they told him was a reeducation facility, where he says he was interrogated and beaten.

Dorjes crime? A phone call with his brother, who lives outside China, in which they discussed the importance of Tibetan language instruction for their children. The local police who had intercepted the call told his family that such a conversation was a political crime.

Since the 1960s, Chinese has been the language of instruction in nearly all middle and high schools in the region, where nearly half of Tibetans live. But new Human Rights Watch research shows that practices introduced over the last decade by the regional government are leading more primary schools and even kindergartens to use Chinese as the teaching language for Tibetan students. This appears to have become the norm for primary schools in Tibetan urban areas and the practice is spreading to the countryside.

Chinese authorities hostility toward ethnic and religious minorities is well-documented. One key feature of Beijings notorious political education camps in the western region of Xinjiang  where about 1 million Uighurs and other Turkic Muslims are arbitrarily detained  is mandatory Chinese language study. The government of Chinas president, Xi Jinping, has provided ample evidence of its intent to hollow out distinct cultures through repression and persecution and remake the residents into loyal servants of the Chinese Communist Party.

China formally introduced a policy of bilingual education in 2010 for schools in all minority areas in China, an approach to minority education considered appropriate internationally when it promotes competency in both the local and the national language. The official position of the regional authorities is that both the Tibetan and Chinese languages should be promoted, leaving individual schools to decide which language to make a priority as the teaching medium.

Story continues

But those schools are increasingly staffed by non-Tibetan-speaking teachers, have virtually no Tibetan textbooks and have isolated the use of Tibetan to Tibetan-language classes. As a former part-time teacher from Lhasa, the capital of the Tibetan Autonomous Region, told Human Rights Watch: In primary school, the Tibetan teachers  have a strong urgency to teach Tibetan, but the biggest problem is that they lack methods and materials.

Other policies have contributed to the demise of education in the Tibetan language. In mixed classes non-Tibetan pupils are instructed along with Tibetan students. Concentrated schooling, which involves consolidating local schools into a boarding school, brings educational benefits in terms of diversity, facilities and standards. But the boarding schools also reduce childrens contact with their families and with a Tibetan-speaking environment.

Authorities insist that Tibets stability rests on the success of ethnic mingling and identification policies that place a far higher premium on political loyalty to the Chinese Communist Party than they do education or cultural rights.

Ordinary Tibetans have expressed widespread concern about the increasing loss of fluency in Tibetan among the younger generation as a result of changing school policies. While many favor Tibetan children learning both languages, there is considerable opposition to Chinese authorities approach, which erodes the Tibetan language skills of children and forces them to consume political ideology and ideas largely contrary to those of their parents and community.

These policies are not carried out in a vacuum. Tibetans already endure pervasive restrictions on their rights to free speech and religious belief, political participation and cultural expression. Since Chinas bilingual education policies were formally introduced in 2010, Tibetans have repeatedly protested against them, mostly in Qinghai province in northwestern China. They have also demonstrated virtually by publishing online letters and petitions.

Twice in 2015, Tibetan language-rights campaigner Tashi Wangchuk tried to file formal complaints in Beijing concerning the absence of Tibetan-language teaching in his area. He was detained in early 2016 after the New York Times interviewed him about his advocacy efforts. When he was sentenced to five years in prison, the court said he was guilty of inciting separatism.

In early 2018, regional police in China issued a public notice that declared organizations campaigning on mother tongue issues illegal and a form of underworld gang crime.

Since 1996, three United Nations human rights expert committees have repeatedly expressed concern over Chinas disingenuous claims that the country is providing truly bilingual education. The committees have also repeatedly urged Chinas government to make sure that Tibetan children are able to learn in their own language  and to protect those who advocate for mother-tongue education. But during this same period, Chinese authorities have steadily eroded that right and criminalized efforts to realize it.

Unless concerned governments step in and successfully pressure Beijing to reverse these policies, more Tibetans will pay an extremely high price for trying to keep their language  their identity  alive.

Sophie Richardson is the China director at Human Rights Watch. @SophieHRW




Guatemalan Health Minister Hugo Monroy on Tuesday said more than 50 percent of all deportees flown to his country from the United States have tested positive for the COVID-19 coronavirus.

Monroy did not share any specific numbers on how many deportees are sick or when they returned to Guatemala, the Los Angeles Times reports, but he did say that deportees are stepping off airplanes with fevers and coughs and receiving immediate COVID-19 testing. Guatemala has 150 active COVID-19 cases in the country, and at least five Guatemalans have died from the virus. A spokesman for the Guatemalan foreign ministry told the Times the "official" number of deportees diagnosed with COVID-19 is four, with one arriving on Monday.

Since January, more than 11,758 Guatemalans have been deported from the United States, including 100 unaccompanied minors who were flown to the country during the first week of April. On Monday, 182 deportees arrived in Guatemala on two flights from Texas.

There are 33,000 migrants now in U.S. custody, and immigration officials said that 77 detainees have tested positive for COVID-19, although some may have been released. Since the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic, Guatemalan authorities have asked the United States to halt deportations to the country, over fears of spreading the virus.

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Alistair Greig (pictured above) has been jailed for 14 years

A financial services director who preyed on more than 140 people has been jailed for 14 years after he obtained over 13 million from his unsuspecting clients.

Alistair Greig told investors he would put their hard earned cash into a short-term deposit scheme, but instead splashed their money on lavish trips and classic cars for himself.

The 66-year-old told clients of Midas Financial Solutions in Aberdeen that he had exclusive access to high interest accounts with the Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS).

Some people invested their life savings and pensions with Greig, who was convicted in March following a trial at the High Court in Edinburgh.

According the The Crown Office, Greig, from Boston, Lincolnshire, conned more than 140 people and used their money to invest in property, and other personal expenditures.

Sentencing him at the court on Wednesday, Judge Lord Tyre said it was fraud 'on an enormous scale' and described it as an offence 'at the top end of the scale'.

In a statement published online, the judge said: 'I have read the victim impact statements provided by a number but by no means all of the people who lost pensions and life savings because they believed what you told them about where their precious money was to be invested, and your false guarantees as to its safety.

Greig old clients of Midas Financial Solutions in Aberdeen (pictured above) that he had exclusive access to high interest accounts with the Royal Bank of Scotland. Midas Financial Solutions is now closed

'The statements reflect the tone of the evidence we heard from people who had been left to face retirement without the cushion of savings that they had expected to enjoy.

'It may be that some of these people will recover some of their losses through the Financial Services Compensation Scheme but that does not of itself reflect any credit on you.'

Lord Tyre said the court also heard the evidence of the financial advisers engaged by the finance company Midas, who 'were themselves duped into encouraging their clients - many of whom were personal friends - to entrust their savings to you'.

He said many of these people have had their lives ruined by the fallout from the failure of the scheme.

Lord Tyre added: 'Most of all, I take account of the devastating impact that this fraud has had on a very large number of people, whose trust you deliberately and cruelly betrayed for your own personal benefit.

'You knew that the money you obtained from these people was earning nothing. You helped yourself to it whenever you felt like it.

'Right until the end you encouraged friends to deposit funds to maintain the pretence, even when you must have known that they would probably lose everything.'

Jennifer Harrower, procurator fiscal for specialist casework, said: 'The scale of Alistair Greig's fraud was vast - he spent years lying to many people in order to defraud them out of millions of pounds.

'In some cases, he took the life savings of people who had worked to save for retirement. All this to fund his own lifestyle.

'This sentence is the end of a lengthy and complex investigation that required the dedication of a skilled and knowledgeable team to bring it to prosecution.'
RICHMOND, Va.  Liberty University has profited from the COVID-19 pandemic by refusing to refund thousands of dollars in room and board and other fees owed to students after the school moved classes online last month, a federal lawsuit filed Tuesday alleges.

The lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court in Lynchburg accuses the university  one of the nation's largest and most prominent evangelical institutions  of purporting to remain open so it could refuse to return fees paid by students and their parents for the remainder of the spring semester.

The lawsuit also accuses Liberty and its president, Jerry Falwell Jr., of putting students at risk by telling students they were welcome to return to campus following spring break in March.

The suit cites comments and tweets made by Falwell in which he downplayed the seriousness of the pandemic and implied that the government shutdowns were an attempt to hurt President Donald Trump politically.

The lawsuit said that despite efforts to downplay the pandemic, the university stopped providing services and activities by moving classes online, closing its campus to visitors, prohibiting gatherings of 10 or more people and closing indoor recreation and fitness centers.

"In other words, the University's statement that it is 'open' is an illusion being put forth to try to keep money that should be returned to students and their families," the lawsuit said.

In a statement, Liberty said it has "tirelessly attempted to balance the needs of students, employees, and the community as it has navigated through the unprecedented health challenges presented by COVID-19."

"Each of Liberty's changes in operations and modes of delivery has been required by governmental officials, a fact the complaint omits. That fact legally excuses Liberty's adjustments and leaves the plaintiffs without a legal case," the statement said.

The lawsuit focuses on the week of March 16, when students were on spring break. While many colleges around the country were announcing campus closures, Liberty initially planned to continue on-campus instruction. But after Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam restricted gatherings of more than 100, Liberty announced it would transition most classes to online beginning on March 23.

Liberty officials told residential students in a March 20 email that they were "welcome" to either stay in place or return to campus, where it said various safety measures had been put in place to avoid concentrations of people. That message contradicted actions by many other colleges and universities urging students to stay home.

Officials in Lynchburg, where Liberty's campus is located, said they fielded complaints about hundreds of students who returned to the campus after spring break.

The lawsuit filed Tuesday has just one plaintiff  identified only as Student A  but seeks certification as a class-action suit on behalf of other students who want the university to refund the unused portion of fees they paid for room and board and other on-campus services, said attorney Adam Levitt.

"We filed this lawsuit because we believe that Liberty's effort to profit from the COVID-19 pandemic is wrong. It's particularly hypocritical in light of the values upon which the university says that it's based," Levitt said.

Levitt said he hasnt yet calculated how much money each student is owed, but he said it would be in the thousands for each student. Liberty said it has offered a $1,000 credit to students who opted to move out of residence halls.

"Liberty's less populated and more frequently sanitized campus living environment will be maintained for those students who chose it as their safest option," the statement said.

As colleges and universities around the country have moved classes online because of the coronavirus, they've had varied responses to requests for fee refunds. Some announced prorated room and board refunds quickly, including Harvard and Smith College.

Levitts firm filed a lawsuit last month against the Arizona Board of Regents for refusing to refund fees paid by students at the University of Arizona, Arizona State University and Northern Arizona University.

Denise Lavoie of The Associated Press wrote this story.
Inmate Freed From Jail to Curb CCP Virus Spread Arrested Next Day for Murder

A Florida man has been arrested on suspicion of committing a second-degree murder, just one day after he was released from jail over fears the CCP virus could spread in correctional facilities, authorities said on April 14.

Tampa-based Joseph Edwards Williams, 26, was arrested on Monday on charges of second-degree murder in connection with a homicide last month, the Hillsborough County Sheriffs Office said in a news release. He also faces charges of violently resisting an officer, gun possession, drug possession, and paraphernalia possession.

He remained in jail on Tuesday night with no bond, records show.

Williams was first arrested on March 13 for possession of drug paraphernalia, a misdemeanor, and heroin, a third-degree felony, court records show.

The facility on March 19 released more than 100 of its inmates from custody until trial, including Williams, as part of efforts to curb transmission of the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus, commonly known as the novel coronavirus, within the detention facilities, and to protect the inmates and staff.

A Florida judge had instructed the local sheriff to release any pretrial detainee arrested for a municipal or county ordinance violation, a misdemeanor offense, a criminal traffic offense, or a third-degree felony offense.

However, Williams became the suspect of a murder case a day after his release, the sheriffs office said.

There is no question Joseph Williams took advantage of this health emergency to commit crimes while he was out of jail awaiting resolution of a low-level, non-violent offense, Sheriff Chad Chronister said in a statement.

His arrest came after a man was fatally shot on March 20 in Tampas Progress Village neighborhood.

Every murder, every violent crime, especially those involving a gun, is a sickening example of the worst in our community, especially at a time when our community is working relentlessly to fight against the spread of this deadly COVID-19, Chronister added.

Judges, prosecutors, and sheriffs around the country are facing difficult decisions during this health crisis with respect to balancing public health and public safety.

Sheriffs in Florida and throughout our country have released non-violent, low-level offenders to protect our deputies and the jail population from an outbreak.

Our commitment as an agency is to keep this community safe and enforce the law.

According to the sheriffs office, Williamss criminal record includes arrests for 35 charges.
In this article USEG

The historic deal reached by OPEC and its oil-producing allies to cut production has worked to "stem the tide, stem the damage that was being done to the market," since the onset of the coronavirus pandemic and the Saudi Arabia-Russia oil price war, U.S. Energy Secretary Dan Brouillette told CNBC. Oil prices are down more than 55% year-to-date, having experienced the worst price plunges in nearly two decades in the face of record supply, disappearing storage space and global demand eviscerated by coronavirus lockdowns around the world. But they would be even lower if no agreement had been reached, Brouillette told CNBC's Hadley Gamble via phone interview Tuesday. "Think about what would have happened in the alternative had there been instead of a cut of 10 million on the part of OPEC and OPEC+, what if that number had been zero, what would we be looking at today suggests that it's probably something much lower than where we are," he said. "And I think we may be at a floor. I think the intent of this conversation with OPEC and the rest of the G-20 countries is simply to do exactly that, to mitigate."

U.S. shale hit hard

An early victim of the oil price crash has been the U.S. shale industry, which is now hemorrhaging jobs as highly-indebted oil producers in the U.S. begin filing for bankruptcy. Up to 240,000 oil-related jobs in the U.S. will be lost this year, according to consultancy firm Rystad Energy. Saudi Arabia slashed its oil selling prices and increased production after Russia refused to join its plan to further cut output and boost prices in early March. With the two countries reversing course on oil policy in order to pursue greater market share, many suspected the moves were targeting U.S. shale, whose production would largely cease to be economically viable once prices fell below around $50 per barrel. U.S. benchmark West Texas Intermediate is now trading at less than $20 per barrel.

Despite Sunday's production cut agreement, the largest in history, oil prices still fell by 10% on Tuesday as investors remained unconvinced that the cuts will counter the demand destruction wrought by the virus. But a price bounce was not the aim, Brouillette told CNBC. Rather, he argued, it prevented an even deeper hit to the markets. "I don't think that that was the intent of the conversation, at least with regard to the United States," he said, referring to hopes for a price jump. "I think it was more important for us to stem the losses that were occurring all throughout the marketplace as a result of some of the activities and that loss of demand as a result of the pandemic  (It) is very important that we not allow the market to continue down to what could have been single-digit numbers for the price of a barrel of oil." Brouillette nonetheless expressed optimism for the longer-term future of shale, saying that "once we get on the other side of this event, they're going to come back stronger than ever." He added that for now, however, "there are certainly players in the shale industry who are heavily leveraged and perhaps some of those folks will not survive this extraordinary event, this pandemic event."

Trump can act 'even more aggressively'

The March production and pricing moves by OPEC kingpin Saudi Arabia angered many in Washington, with U.S. lawmakers writing to President Donald Trump to urge the kingdom to halt its activity they described as destabilizing to the oil markets. "The effect was pretty alarming to many here in the United States," Brouillette said. The secretary credited Trump with acting "aggressively" to pressure the Saudis and Russians to change course, adding that he can act even more aggressively if the situation calls for it. "The president has said very, very clearly that he will not allow any type of predatory activity on U.S. markets," he said. "So, you know, there are some in Congress who some felt that the actions (by Saudi Arabia and Russia), while maybe not intended to be affecting the shale industry in the United States, the practical effect is that it was and to the extent that it was, the president was going to react to that."

"Now, I can suggest that, you know, it wasn't intentional," Brouillette added. "If it was intentional then the president can act even more aggressively. And as I said, he will leave every option on the table and is unafraid to use it." The secretary did not elaborate as to what the president could do in terms of more aggressive measures, but lawmakers had previously suggested anti-dumping legislation and even sanctions. Some energy industry experts, however, cast doubt on the U.S.'s ability to affect Saudi Arabia or Russia's actions on its own. IHS Markit vice chairman and longtime industry veteran Dan Yergin told CNBC in a March interview that aside from diplomacy, Washington "doesn't have a lot of tools to address this."
Many of us are hurting right now due to the spread of COVID-19. We are anxious about the unknown, confused about the changes to our lives and worried about the health of our loved ones. Many are also feeling the economic impact of this pandemic, as 1.1 million Texans have applied for unemployment (as of this writing). Thats roughly 8 percent of Texas workforce.

I know many of you are frustrated by long wait times for unemployment claims. I want to share with you why the system has been overwhelmed and all that Texas is doing to ensure you are able to file your claim. As chairman of the House Committee on Business and Industry, my committee oversees all unemployment compensation provided by the Texas Workforce Commission. This matter is of the utmost importance to me and fellow committee members, and we have been in regular contact with the Workforce Commission to address your concerns.

As hundreds of thousands of Texans sought to file for unemployment in a matter of weeks, our system, quite frankly, has been overwhelmed. The Workforce Commission has experienced unprecedented claims volume  up 1,800 percent in March  with computer systems that were created in the 1980s. This surge in unemployment claims and the resulting long wait times are, unfortunately, a product of a record number of people losing their jobs at the same time due to COVID-19.

Our state has never failed to pay an unemployment claim due to insufficient funds. Even if our $2 billion unemployment benefit fund runs low in the coming months, there are contingencies to ensure payments are not missed as this crisis continues. Specifically, Texas is able to receive unlimited interest-free loans from the federal government, and beneficiaries will receive an additional $600 a week as part of the CARES Act. Under this legislation, even independent contractors and the self-employed will qualify for relief.

The next concern I have heard is the difficulty getting through to the Workforce Commission. The Workforce Commission is aware of the mounting frustration and is taking steps to ease the burden on recently unemployed Texans.

First, the Workforce Commission has committed to doubling its call center capacity from 700 to 1,400 employees. To that end, 450 Workforce Commission staff members have been retrained to work in the call center, and 350 third-party customer service representatives have been hired.

Second, the Workforce Commission is moving much of its online infrastructure to the cloud to expand capacity and free up server space for its unemployment benefits system. Given the age of the system, it is nearly impossible to move it to the cloud. To compensate, the commission has expanded the capacity of the system from five to 10 servers, increasing the number of users it can handle at one time. The commission has assured lawmakers it will continue to add servers to meet the growth in demand.

The Workforce Commission is doing its part, and heres how you can help: The commission has asked Texans to stagger their calls by area code to reduce wait times. This model has worked in other states, and we hope to duplicate its success in Texas. If you have a 210 area code, this means calling on Tuesday, Thursday or Saturday from 1 p.m. to 5 p.m. For San Antonians with a 726 area code, this means calling on Tuesday, Thursday or Saturday from 8 a.m. to 12 p.m.

In addition, the Workforce Commission recently launched a virtual assistant on its website to help answer frequently asked unemployment questions. Since its launch last week, the assistant has helped more than 175,000 people, answered more than 455,000 messages, and created a library of the 50 most asked questions, reducing call volume and allowing call centers to focus on more complex questions and claims.

We are all adjusting to the new normal of life during COVID-19  your state government included. State leaders understand your frustration and are working to rapidly scale up the unemployment benefits system. My colleagues and I will continue to work closely with the Texas Workforce Commission to ensure you get relief when you need it, without substantial delay.

Trey Martinez Fischer, a Democrat, is serving his ninth term in the Texas House of Representatives, where he serves as the chairman of the House Committee on Business and Industry.
Coronavirus India Lockdown News update: The number of COVID-19 positive cases stands at 11,439 as on date, while 1,306 people have recovered. A total of 377 people in the country have died because of the COVID-2019 infection; In the last 24 hours, 1,076 new cases have been reported. Thus, based on the available data as on date, 11.41% patients have recovered and this figure is on the rise. This was informed by the Joint Secretary, Ministry of Health & Family Welfare, Shri Luv Aggarwal, at the daily media briefing on Wednesday. He also informed that the government has identified 170 districts as hotspots of COVID-19 and 207 districts as non-hotspots while the rest have been categorised as green zones, says health ministry on Wednesday. Addressing his daily presser, Lav Agrawal, Joint Secretary Ministry of Health told media that all districts of the country have been classified into these three categories. Hotspot districts are those where the number of cases is high, while non-hotspots are those region that have reported cases of Covid-19 but the figure is limited. The green zone refers to regions where there are no cases of novel coronavirus. The Joint Secretary informed that besides the hot spots identified by the Centre, states who are fighting the battle at field level may declare additional districts as hot spot districts and take required action accordingly. Maharashtra remains the worst affected state with 2,687 confirmed cases with 178 deaths. Delhi has pipped Tamil Nadu to become second-worst affected state with 1,561 confirmed COVID-19 cases and death toll at 30. Whereas, Tamil Nadu's tally is at 1,204 and death toll at 12, according the Health Ministry.

The Home Ministry in its guidelines issued on Wednesday following the announcement of lockdown 2.0 by PM Modi said that all public services such inter-state, inter-district movement of people, bus, metro services continue to remain barred till May 3. Domestic, international air travel, train services, educational institutions, coaching centres will continue to be shut. The ministry added that public places such as cinema halls, malls, bars, shopping complexes, swimming pools, gyms, sports complexes will also be closed till May 3. All social, religious, sports, political functions, religious places and places of worship will be shut for public till May 3, the ministry said.

Also Read: Coronavirus lockdown 2.0: All agricultural activities to remain fully functional, says govt

Also Read: Coronavirus lockdown: What economic activities will be allowed after April 20?

Also Read:Coronavirus lockdown 2.0 guidelines issued: Check full list of relaxations, restrictions by MHA

Also Read: Coronavirus lockdown 2.0 guidelines issued: Check full list of relaxations, restrictions by MHA

Also Read: Coronavirus in India: State-wise COVID-19 cases, deaths, list of testing facilities

Follow BusinessToday.in for live updates on coronavirus in India and world:

10.57 pm: B Block of Safdarjung Enclave has been notified as a containment zone after four members of a family tested positive for coronavirus.

10.53 pm: Coronavirus updates: 30% police personnel on standby as crime rate goes down in Bengaluru

To ensure that police personnel get sufficient rest, we have kept 30 per cent of our staff on standby as crime rates have gone down in Bengaluru, Karnataka. However, they have not been allowed to go to their native places: Bengaluru Police Commissioner Bhaskar Rao pic.twitter.com/FxzlyyW0Y7  ANI (@ANI) April 15, 2020

10.41 pm: Govt denies allegations of segregation among coronavirus patients

PIB Fact Check has refuted claims that patients are being segrgated on basis of religion at Civil Hospital in Ahmedabad, Gujarat.

9.49 pm: 50,000 PPE kits from China land in Guwahati

A Blue Dart Air Cargo plane landed in Guwahati with medical supplies, including 50,000 PPEs, from Guangzhou, China. The cargo flight will go to Kolkata now and then to Delhi, Assam Health Department told news agency ANI.

9:40 pm: Rajasthan govt plans to implement modified lockdown from April 21

Ashok Gehlot - led Rajasthan Government has announced that there will be modified lockdown in the state from April 21. As per the government decision, industrial and rural sectors will start operating in the state from April 21.

9:35 pm: Goa's sixth coronavirus patient recovers, says CM Pramod Sawant

The sixth COVID-19 patient in Goa has recovered, says CM Pramod Sawant. Only one active case remained in Goa and no new cases reported after April 3, 2020, he added.

I am pleased to inform that the sixth corona patient from Goa has recovered. Only one active case remains in Goa and no new cases reported after 3rd April 2020.  Dr. Pramod Sawant (@DrPramodPSawant) April 15, 2020

9:30 pm: Coronavirus update: Andhra Pradesh reports 23 new cases, 3 deaths

As many as 23 new COVID-19 positive cases (Kurnool 13, Guntur 4, Kadapa 3, Nellore 2, Anantapuram 1) and 3 deaths reported in Andhra Pradesh, since 9AM till 7PM today. Now total number of cases in state increased to 525, while death toll rose to 14.

9:25 pm: India provided 50 lakh tablets of hydroxychloroquine to Mauritius

Indian government has provided half a million tablets of hydroxychloroquine to Mauritius on Wednesday, as per their request. Consignment is part of 13 tons of essential lifesaving medicines that have been sent for Mauritius, says High Commission of India in Port Louis.

9:20 pm: 2 new COVID-19 cases reported in Himachal Pradesh

Two new positive COVID-19 cases reported in Himachal Pradesh today, taking the total tally to 35, says RD Dhiman, Addition Chief Secretary Health and Family Welfare, Government of Himachal Pradesh.

9:15 pm: WHO lauds PM Modi's 'timely and tough' decision on coronavirus lockdown

The World Health Organisation (WHO) on Wednesday hailed the Narendra Modi government's "timely and tough" decision to extend the coronavirus lockdown across India till May 3.

9:10 pm: Ensuring delivery of essentials to help people stay indoors, says Srinagar administration

Essentials being made available at home, amid coronavirus lockdown. A fleet of cargo autos is ready to deliver vegetables/essentials across Srinagar. Priority is red zone areas, says Shahid Choudhary, District Magistrate/Development Commissioner, Srinagar, J&K.

Essentials being made available at home, amid #CoronavirusLockdown. A fleet of cargo autos is ready to deliver vegetables/essentials across Srinagar. Priority is red zone areas: Shahid Choudhary, District Magistrate/Development Commissioner, Srinagar, J&K pic.twitter.com/HL6pMWlfm9  ANI (@ANI) April 15, 2020

9:00 pm: IMF chief Gita Gopinath calls for measures to support MSMEs, low income households

As the coronavirus rampage continues, International Monetary Fund's Chief Economist Gita Gopinath said that MSMEs and low income households must be supported. Talking at India Today E-Conclave Corona Series, Gopinath said the biggest concern is that the impact of coronavirus pandemic could spill into the second hald of 2020. She also said that IMF strongly supports the steps taken by India.

8:50 pm: Indian govt to facilitate return of 180 stranded Pakistanis

The Indian government is facilitating the return of 180 Pakistanis stranded in the country because of the coronavirus lockdown, with 41 of them set to return via the Wagah-Attari border crossing on Thursday.

8:40 pm: Delhi govt evacuates migrant workers from Kudesiya Ghat near Kashmere Gate

Delhi Dy CM Manish Sisodia on Wednesday said that migrant workers, who have been evacuated from Kudesiya Ghat near Kashmere Gate, were given fruits and shifted to shelter homes set up at government schools in different parts of Delhi amid coronavirus lockdown.

"On orders of Delhi CM, all of these workers have been taken to the night shelters set up across Delhi. They'll be kept there now and food will be provided to all of them. If any worker anywhere in Delhi faces any problem, our government will take care of them," said Manish Sisodia.

blockquote class="twitter-tweet">

Delhi: Migrant workers evacuated from Kudesiya Ghat near Kashmere Gate, given fruits & shifted to shelter homes set up at govt schools in different parts of Delhi amid #CoronavirusLockdown. pic.twitter.com/SNmasH92ZP

 ANI (@ANI) April 15, 2020

8:15 pm: Number of COVID-19 cases reach 591 in Indore

The total number of COVID-19 cases reach 591 in Indore, Madhya Pradesh, says Indore Chief Medical & Health Officer Dr. Praveen Jadia.

8:05 pm: 49-year-old COVID-19 patient died in Pune

A 49 years old COVID-19 male patient has died in Pune. He was suffering from comorbidity and pneumonia. This is fifth death reported in Pune today taking total tally to 43, according to Pune health officials.

8:00 pm: 32 more tests positive for coronavirus in Gurugram district today

As many as 32 new COVID-19 cases have been reported in Gurugram district today, says Haryana District Health Department.

7:55 pm: 22 districts of Tamil Nadu identified as hotspots

A total of 22 districts of Tamil Nadu have been identified as hotspots. These include, Chennai, Tiruchirappalli, Coimbatore, Tirunelveli, Erode, Vellore, Dindigul, Villupuram, Tiruppur, Theni, Namakkal, Chengalpattu, Madurai, Tuticorin, Karur, Virudhunagar, Kanniyakumari, Cuddalore, Thiruvallur, Thiruvarur, Salem and Nagapattinam.

7:50 pm: Women in Punjab's Hoshiarpur prepare homemade masks for villagers

In Gugwaal Haarvillage situated in Hajipur Block of District Hoshiarpur, Punjab, a group of young women, are working tirelessly to safeguard their residents of their village and those in the vicinity, vulnerable migrant workers and ration and food supply distributors from COVID 19 infections by making and distributing face masks free of cost. The group is led by the village Sarpanch Narinder Singh.

The initiative started on 6 April 2020 as the women participated stitching and making homemade cloth masks as per the instructions issued in the manual released by the office of Principal Scientific Adviser to the Government of India. PSCST supported this group by providing necessary raw material for this noble initiative.Within ten days, the group of women supplied more than 2000 good quality masks in four villages near GugwaalHaar to migrant labour, villagers, small-time shopkeepers.

7:40 pm: 10 out of 11 Districts of Delhi identified as hotspots

A total of10 out of 11 districts of Delhi have been identified as hotspots. These include, These include, South Delhi, South East Delhi, Shahdara, West Delhi, North Delhi, Central Delhi, New Delhi, East Delhi, South West Delhi.

7:35 pm: Coronavirus in Chandigarh: Total number of COVID-19 positive stands at 21

The total number of COVID-19 cases in Chandigarh stands at 21, says Chandigarh Administration.

7:30 pm: Coronavirus: Social distancing necessary until 2022, claims new study

According to a new study from Harvard University, prolonged or intermittent social distancing may be necessary until 2022 to contain future COVID-19 seasonal outbreaks.

7:25pm: No new case of COVID-19 reported in Uttarakhand on Wednesday

Uttarakhand Health Department on Wednesday said that no new case of coronavirus has been reported today. Total cases in the state stand at 37.

7:20 pm: 38 more test positive for COVID-19 in Tamil Nadu today

As many as 38 more people tested positive for COVID-19 in Tamil Nadu on Wednesday, of these 34 are those who attended "single source event in Delhi" and their contacts. Total coronavirus cases in the state now at 1242, including 1113 who attended "single source event in Delhi" and their contacts, says state government.

7:10 pm: Coronavirus effect: India's exports decline 34.6% in March

India's merchandise exports fell 34.6% to $21.41 billion in March while imports declined 28.7% due to the ongoing global slowdown in wake of COVID-19 crisis. India's exports dropped by 4.78 per cent to $314.31 billion for 2019-20.

Trade deficit narrowed to $9.76 billion in March this year compared to $11 billion in the same month last year.

"The decline in exports has been mainly due to the ongoing global slowdown, which got aggravated due to the current Covid-19 crisis. The latter resulted in large scale disruptions in supply chains and demand resulting in cancellation of orders," the commerce ministry said.

7:00 pm: 11,439 active cases in India; 11.41% patients recovered: Health Ministry

The number of COVID-19 positive cases stands at 11,439 as on date, while 1,306 people have recovered. A total of 377 people in the country have died because of the COVID-2019 infection; In the last 24 hours, 1,076 new cases have been reported. Thus, based on the available data as on date, 11.41% patients have recovered and this figure is on the rise, says Joint Secretary, Ministry of Health & Family Welfare, Luv Aggarwal, at the daily media briefing on Wednesday.

6:50 pm: Maharashtra, Karnataka in a bit of trouble, says Dr Harsh Vardhan

Bihar isn't in so much trouble right now,but definitely,Maharashtra is in a bit of trouble,particularly Mumbai and also Karnataka. But I was happy to see confidence of 3 Secys&more particularly when Maharashtra Secy said with confidence 'we'll take care of it': Health Minister.

6:45 pm: Check BusinessToday.In tracker to check the latest number of state-wise coronavirus cases

INDIA CORONAVIRUS TRACKER: BusinessToday.In brings you a daily tracker as coronavirus cases continue to spread. Here is the state-wise data on total cases, fatalities and recoveries in one comprehensive graphic.

6:40 pm: Jammu and Kashmir reports 22 new COVID-19 cases

Jammu and Kashmir has reported 22 new cases of COVID-19 on Wednesday, eighteen of them in Kashmir and four in Jammu. The total number of coronavirus patients in the J&K now inches close to 300-mark.

6:35 pm: 2 more tests positive for coronavirus in Punjab today

2 more COVID-19 cases reported in Punjab today, one each from Patiala and Sangrur. Total coronavirus positive cases in the state now at 186, including 146 active cases, 27 cured, and 13 deaths, according to a statement issued by the Punjab Government.

6:30 pm: Kerala reported only 1 new COVID-19 case on Wednesday

Kerala Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan on Wednesday said that the state reported only 1 new COVID-19 case today; taking the total number of positive cases in the state to 387, of which 167 are active.

6:25 pm: Delhi to start clinical trial of plasma therapy for COVID-19 treatment

Delhi to use plasma technique for treatment on a trial basis to save lives of critical COVID-19 patients, says Lt Governor Anil Baijal. He advised all to strictly adhere to SOPs/guidelines and protocols issued by Union Health Ministry while dealing with COVID-19 patients.

6:20 pm: Govt identifies 170 districts in India as hotspots, 207 as potential hostspots

The Union Health Ministry has identified 170 districts as COVID-19 hotspots and 207 districts as potential hotspots, officials said on Wednesday, reiterating that there has been no community transmission of the disease in the country so far.

6.08 pm: Coronavirus updates India: Booze shops to remain closed in Assam

Assam government has orderd all IMFL shops, wholesale warehouses, bottling plants, distilleries and breweries in the state to remain closed with immediate effect in view of Consolidated Revised Guidelines and National Directives by Central Government for COVID-19 management.

5.51 pm: Next 2-3 weeks crucial for India: Harsh Vardhan

Glad to share that first #COVID19 positive patient of Tripura has been discharged today, as she has recovered & found negative in consecutive tests



She has been sent for quarantine under medical supervision.



I Pray to Mata Tripurasundari so that State turns Corona free soon. pic.twitter.com/xsyQEPEsD7  Biplab Kumar Deb (@BjpBiplab) April 15, 2020

5.46 pm: No coronavirus cases in 400 districts: Union Health Minister

Union Health Minister Harsh Vardhan stated that no cases of coronavirus have been found in around 400 districts of India. We have been able to pinpoint where the virus is, he added.

5.36 pm: Coronavirus in India: Number of cases rise to 11,933; death toll at 392

According to Ministry of Health and Family Welfare, by 5PM on April 15, India's total number of coronavirus positive cases has risen to 11,933. This includes 10,197 active cases, 1,344 patients who have been cured or discharged or migrated, and 392 deaths.

5.26 pm: First coronavirus patient cured in Tripura

First COVID-19 patient of Tripura has been discharged today after she was tested negative in consecutive tests. She has been sent for quarantine under medical supervision, informed Chief Minister Biplab Kumar Deb.

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5.13 pm: India lockdown: Doctor, medical team pelted with stones in UP's Moradabad

Some people pelted stones at a team of doctors, medics and policemen who had gone to pick the family of a novel coronavirus positive patient, who had passed away recently, to take them to a quarantine facility. 3 people were injured in the attack including a doctor and pharmacist.

4.58 pm: Coronavirus cases live: COVID-19 impacted IT services revenues for March quarter negatively

Wipro said on Wednesday that the novel coronavirus has impacted the IT services revenues for March quarter negatively by $14-16 million.

4.48 pm: Lockdown news India: No community transmission in the country so far: Health Ministry

Health Ministry confirmed on Wednesday that there is no community transmission in India so far, however, there have been some local virus outbreaks.

4.35 pm: India lockdown news: 1,076 new novel coronavirus cases in 24 hours

The Health Ministry in its daily press briefing said on Wednesday that India reported 1,076 new COVID-19 cases in past 24 hours. The ministry added that the total number of positive cases in the country stand at 11,439 including 9,756 active cases, 377 deaths, 1,305 cured/discharged and 1 migrated.

4.28 pm: India lockdown: Coronavirus spread due to mutations

Addressing a daily presser on Wednesday, Health Ministry said that novel coronavirus has been spread due to mutations and finally spread to humans. Chinese studies suggest that the virus also spreads through pangolin.

4.23 pm: Coronavirus found in two Indian bat species; not harmful to humans

A study by Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) showed that coronavirus has been discovered in two bat species found in Kerala, Himachal Pradesh, Puducherry and Tamil Nadu. The strain of coronavirus-bat coronavirus or BtCoV is different from the kind found in humans but doesn't cause any harm to humans.

Read more here: Coronavirus found in two Indian bat species; researchers recommend proactive surveillance

4.18 pm: Lockdown live updates: Districts asked to make a crisis plan: Health Ministry

The Health Ministry in its daily briefing on Wednesday said that every district has been asked to make a crisis plan to make sure that the areas which do not have novel coronavirus cases remain corona-free and the one that have the virus don't report any new cases.

4.16 pm: Nationwide lockdown

Will issue guidelines for all permitted movement across India: Health Ministry

4.14 pm: India lockdown news

States have been briefed on containment strategy: Health Ministry

4.11 pm: Coronavirus cases in India

Strict restrictions across India till April 20, curbs to be eased in green zones post the period, says Home Ministry

4.10 pm: Coronavirus cases India

Focus on extensive contact racing of the infected people: Health Ministry

4.09 pm: Coronavirus cases live updates

Door-to-door survey being conductes in hotspots, says Health Ministry

4.07 pm: Coronavirus cases live

New COVID-19 dedicated hospitals will be set up by the government: Health Ministry

4.05 pm: Lockdown news India

Exit and exit strategy are being mapped out, says Health Ministry

4.03 pm India lockdown news: Health Ministry begins daily briefing on COVID-19

Lav Agarwal, Joint Secretary, Health Ministry said on Wednesday that the ministry has identified hotspots and green zones and has issued guidelines for hotbeds across India.

4.00 pm: Coronavirus in India: Vistara announces compulsory leave without pay for senior employees

Vistara chief Leslie Thng announced on Wednesday that the senior employees will be sent on mandatory leave without pay for up to 3 days between April 15 and 30 as a step to conserve the airline's cash flow in the wake of lockdown to fight COVID-19 outbreak.

3.45pm: Coronavirus lockdown India: COVID-19 positive cases past 11,000-mark; Maharashtra, Delhi worst-affected

India's total number of confirmed COVID-19 cases stand at 11,439 as of date, according to Union Ministry of Health and Family Welfare. The confirmed cases comprise 9,756 active cases, 377 deaths, 1,305 cured/discharged and 1 migrated. Meanwhile, Maharashtra remains the worst affected state with 2,687 confirmed cases with 178 deaths. Delhi has pipped Tamil Nadu to become second-worst affected state with 1,561 confirmed COVID-19 cases and death toll at 30. Whereas, Tamil Nadu's tally is at 1,204 and death toll at 12, according the Health Ministry.

3.30: Lockdown in Maharashtra: 117 fresh COVID-19 cases reported

Over 117 fresh novel coronavirus cases have been reported from Maharashtra on Wednesday, taking the total tally in the state to 2,801. Out of these, 66 cases are from Mumbai and 44 from Pune.

3.15 PM: Union Health Minister Harsh Vardhan holds a high-level meeting through video conferencing with the World Health Organisation officials on measures to combat COVID-19.

3.10 PM: While situation remains fluid, we are planning to resume flights in phased manner whenever authorities allow us to do so, says Vistara CEO.

3.05 PM: The Centre asks all deputy secretaries and above level officers to join offices, three weeks after they began working from home due to lockdown imposed to check spread of coronavirus. - PTI

3.00 PM: Recognising the need to conserve financial resources at national level, Chairman & Members of UPSC have decided to voluntarily forego 30 per cent of basic pay received by them from the commission for 1 year, with effect from April 2020. - ANI

2.50 PM: To provide protection to healthcare professionals in the fight against COVID-19, Indian Railways plans to produce over 30,000 coveralls (Personal Protective Equipment) in April 2020. Railways plans to manufacture 1,00,000 of the same in May.

2.45 PM: Delhi High Court has ordered that the functioning of Courts subordinate to Delhi High Court shall continue to remain suspended till 3rd May.

2.35 PM: 117 new cases recorded today in the state, of which 66 are from Mumbai and 44 from Pune. The total number of positive cases in the state stands at 2801 now.

2.28 pm: Coronavirus impact: Share market falls amid negative global cues

BSE Sensex fell 350 points, and Nifty dipped by 37 points erasing their early gains and turning bearish in the afternoon trade session on Wednesday.

Read more here: Share Market LIVE: Sensex falls 350 points, Nifty at 8,800 amid negative global cues

2.23 pm: Maharashtra coronavirus news: Ola partners with BMC to provide essential medical trips

Cab-aggregator Ola has partnered with Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) to provide essential medical trips in Mumbai. BMC has been facilitated dedicated cars for every ward in the city to ferry health workers and paramedical staff across wards and their houses, Ola said in a statement as cited by ANI.

2.14 pm: Lockdown in Madhya Pradesh: Stranded migrant workers to get Rs, 1000: CM Shivraj Singh Chauhan

Madhya Pradesh Shivraj Singh Chouhan said announced on Wednesday that the government has talked to other states to make sure that their migrant labourers get food and shelter. The MP CM also said that the state government will transfer Rs, 1000 in the accounts of such stranded labourers.

Don't worry we'll send you more money if needed. We're standing with you. I request people's representatives to make a list of all such people&send it to Chief Minister's Office or Dist collector's office. We will send money as and when the list is sent to us: MP CM SS Chouhan https://t.co/yVuEJzeM1e - ANI (@ANI) April 15, 2020

2.00 pm: Lockdown guidelines India: Govt bans liquor sale

The Home Ministry in its guidelines for lockdown issued on Wednesday imposed an outright ban on the sale of tobacco, gutka and liquor during the curfew duration. The ministry has also made spitting a punishable offence and has asked the state governments and union territories to strictly follow the guidelines.

1.49 pm: Karnataka coronavirus news

Karnataka recorded 17 new COVID-19 cases on Wednesday, taking the state's tally to 277. Out of these 17 cases, at least 9 are linked to the workers of a pharma company in Mysuru, the state government confirmed.

1.38 pm: Guidelines for lockdown: Home Ministry issues guidelines for containment zones and hotspots

The Home Ministry has announced a set of guidelines to be followed during the lockdown 2.0 for containment zones and hotspots across India. PM Modi in his address to the nation on Wednesday had said that the curbs will be eased for certain areas after April 20. The ministry however, said that there will be no relaxation of any guideline in the containment zones.

Read more here: Coronavirus in India: Home Ministry releases guidelines for containment zones and hotspots

1.26 pm: Gujarat CM corona test: Chief Minister Vijay Rupani goes into self-quarantine

Gujarat Chief Minister Vijay Rupani has gone self-isolation after he underwent testing for COVID-19 on Wednesday. The test results however are normal but CM Rupani has gone into self-quarantine as a precautionary measure. The chief minister underwent the COVID-19 test after he met Congress MLA Imran Khedawala who tested positive for the virus. Khedawala along with other Congress MLAs had gone to meet CM Rupani and other government members to discuss the issue of spike in novel coronavirus cases in certain parts of Ahmedabad.

1.16 pm: Lockdown guidelines: CII on PM Modi's lockdown extension announcement

Welcoming the Prime Minister's announcement of extension of lockdown till 3 May 2020, Mr Chandrajit Banerjee, Director General, CII, said, "The Covid-19 curve trajectory as of now required a fitting containment response and Prime Minister's decision for continuation of the lockdown is necessary to avert a larger humanitarian crisis. His attention to ensuring that harvesting of the rabi crop continues and to taking care of distressed persons is very appropriate." He further added, "Prime Minister has also provided a guidance on exit from the lockdown after 20 April which helps industry plan better. The extension gives the Government adequate preparation time to organise an orderly and safe restart of the economy as and when health conditions permit. Industry too can devise its strategies for commencing operations accordingly during this extension period".

1.06 pm: Bengaluru coronavirus news

A 69-year-old man from Chikkaballapura in Bengaluru died after testing positive for COVID-19 on Wednesday, PTI reported. With this, the total number of coronavirus deaths has risen to 110 in Karnataka.

12.58 pm: Meghalaya coronavirus news

Meghalaya Chief Minister Conrad Sangma said on Wednesday that out of the 68 tests conducted so far, 6 have come out as positive. All those who are tested COVID-19 positive are family members and helpers of the first virus case.

Of the 68 tested so far, 6 have come out positive who are all family members & helpers of the first #COVID19 positive case. 6 other cases are being retested. All the rest of the cases are negative: Meghalaya CM Conrad Sangma pic.twitter.com/Ss1Wro9BFI - ANI (@ANI) April 15, 2020

12.47 pm: Guidelines for lockdown: Commerce ministry issues guidelines for industrial workers

Following the lockdown 2.0 guidelines issued by Home Ministry on Wednesday, the Commerce Ministry issued detailed standard operating procedures (SOP) for industrial workers. The small factories and industrial units under the SOP are allowed to operate in single shifts with single entry point for workers ensuring strict social distancing and avoid crowding. The ministry has also directed the employers to arrange separate stay or transport arrangement for workers while they go back home from the factories.

12.35 pm: Lockdown guidelines

Home Ministry allows industries operating in rural areas to run from April 30 but with strict social distancing rules.

12.25 pm: Lockdown guidelines India: Banks to stay open till direct benefit cash transfers conclude

The Ministry of Home Affairs in its new guidelines for COVID-19 lockdown issued on Wednesday said that bank branches well be permitted to function, as per the normal working hours till the direct benefit cash transfers are complete. The ministry added that banks, ATMs, IT vendors and cash management agencies would be permitted to function according to the list of select allowed activities from April 20. The guideline document further stated that the local administration would provide adequate security at bank branches and banking correspondents (BCs), law and order, maintain social distancing as well staggering of bank customers.

12.12 pm: Lockdown in Delhi: Gautam Gambhir sends 1,000 PPE kits to RML hospital

BJP MP from East Delhi, Gautam Gambhir said on Wednesday that he sent 1,000 PPE kits to RML hospital after hearing about 2 doctors testing positive for novel coronavirus. Taking to Twitter, Kejriwal said, "Heard about 2 doctors testing +ve at RML. I have sent 1000 PPE Kits there today! Delhi Health Min stated 1.40 Lakh kits have been ordered. I request @ArvindKejriwal to expedite their delivery. Our Corona warriors need us! Situation demands being proactive not reactive."

Heard about 2 doctors testing +ve at RML. I have sent 1000 PPE Kits there today! Delhi Health Min stated 1.40 Lakh kits have been ordered. I request @ArvindKejriwal to expedite their delivery. Our Corona warriors need us! Situation demands being proactive not reactive@BJP4Delhipic.twitter.com/kC9s9r6RU8 - Gautam Gambhir (@GautamGambhir) April 15, 2020

12.02 pm: Lockdown in Delhi: Police books Markaz chief for culpable homicide not amounting to murder

Delhi Police on Wednesday booked Markaz Chief Maulana Saad and 17 others under culpable homicide not amounting to murder. The police has also issued look out circular (LOC) against 1,900 jamaat participants for flouting visa norms. Saad and 17 others have been issued notices to join the police investigation, with 11 of them not coming onboard for being in quarantine.

11.56 am: Lockdown in Maharashtra: Kamal Hassan on Mumbai protests

Actor Kamal Hassan took to Twitter on Wednesday to say that "All the balcony people take a long and hard look at the ground. First it was Delhi, now Mumbai. The migrant crisis is a time bomb that must be defused before it becomes a crisis bigger than Corona. Balcony government must keep their eyes on what's happening on the ground too."

All the balcony people take a long and hard look at the ground. First it was Delhi, now Mumbai. The migrant crisis is a time bomb that must be defused before it becomes a crisis bigger than Corona. Balcony government must keep their eyes on what's happening on the ground too. - Kamal Haasan (@ikamalhaasan) April 14, 2020

11.53 am: India lockdown news: Max Healthcare to check its entire 18000 workforce for COVID-19

Max Healthcare said on Wednesday that it will test its entire workforce of 18,000 people for novel coronavirus infection and admit patients at its facilities. "Max Healthcare intends to proactively test its entire Healthcare workforce of 18000 people and admitted patients at its facilities. In addition, going forward, Max healthcare intends to test all patients at admission itself. This process has now been made possible since relaxation of testing norms by ICMR to cover such individuals," the hospital said in a press release.

11.42 am: Coronavirus live updates: South Korea holds elections amid COVID-19 pandemic

South Korea's parliamentary election began on Friday. Voters wearing masks and gloves came out to vote. Separate polling stations were arranged for coronavirus patients, reports Reuters.

Early voting in South Korea's parliamentary election began on Friday with voters wearing masks and gloves, while separate polling stations were arranged for coronavirus patients https://t.co/CoxhXNi64Epic.twitter.com/y7Mo3oQovV - Reuters (@Reuters) April 10, 2020

11.37 am: Lockdown in Mumbai: Migrant crisis! Bandra police registers 3 FIRs

The first FIR registered by the police is against 800-1000 people who gathered at Bandra. Second FIR was against Vinay Dubey who allegedly incited migrant workers to start walking towards their native places. The third FIR was registered against ABP Mazha Correspondent for running fake news that trains would be up and running. He was arrested from Osmanabad, and is being brought to Mumbai.

11.26 am: Lockdown guidelines India: Govt allows MGNREGA works from April 20

The Home Ministry in its guidelines for lockdown issued on Wednesday said that although MGNREGA works will be permitted from April 20, but only under the condition that there is a strict enforcement of social distancing and people wear face masks.

11.17 am: Home Ministry guidelines: Congress leader Rahul Gandhi asks govt to bring back Indian workers stranded in Middle East

Congress leader Rahul Gandhi asked the government to facilitate flights to bring back Indian workers stranded in the Middle East. Taking to Twitter, Gandhi said, "The Covid19 crisis and shutting of businesses in the Middle East have left thousands of Indian workers in deep distress and desperate to return home."

The #Covid19 crisis & shutting of businesses in the Middle East have left thousands of Indian workers in deep distress & desperate to return home. The Govt must organise flights to bring home our brothers & sisters most in need of assistance, with quarantine plans in place. - Rahul Gandhi (@RahulGandhi) April 15, 2020

11.06 am: MHA guidelines: All public activities prohibited

The Home Ministry in its guidelines issued on Wednesday following the announcement of lockdown 2.0 by PM Modi said that all public services such inter-state, inter-district movement of people, bus, metro services continue to remain barred till May 3. Domestic, international air travel, train services, educational institutions, coaching centres will continue to be shut. The ministry added that public places such as cinema halls, malls, bars, shopping complexes, swimming pools, gyms, sports complexes will also be closed till May 3. All social, religious, sports, political functions, religious places and places of worship will be shut for public till May 3, the ministry said.

10.57 am: Lockdown guidelines: People facing emergency permitted to move: MHA

The Ministry of Home Affairs in its guidelines for lockdown issued on Wednesday said that those facing emergency will be permitted to step out of their homes. The emergency situation can be medical, veterinary care and for buying essential items.

10.49 am: Lockdown guidelines India: What's open

Essential goods supply

courier services

IT and IT-enabled services

Print and electronic media

E-commerce companies

construction activities

Government offices

Hospitals, nursing homes, clinics

Pharmacies, dispenseries, medicine shops

Veterinary hospitals, pathology labs, sale and supply of vaccine, medicine

Manufacturing units of drugs, pharmaceuticals, medical devices, medical oxygen

Agricultural and related activities

Fisheries

plantations

Animal husbandry

financial sector including bank branches and ATMs

Social sector

MNREGA activities

Movement of goods/cargo- inter and intra state

10.35 am: Guidelines for lockdown: What's shut

Agricultural activities Health services Domestic air and rail travel Public transport Metro rail services Taxis and serives of cab agregators Interstate, inter-district travel by individuals Educaitonand training institutes Hospitality services Cinena hall, malls gym nshopping complesex Religious places not more than 20 people allowed for funerals

10.20 am: Lockdown guidelines: Check BusinessToday.In tracker to check the latest number of state-wise coronavirus cases

INDIA CORONAVIRUS TRACKER: BusinessToday.In brings you a daily tracker as coronavirus cases continue to spread. Here is the state-wise data on total cases, fatalities and recoveries in one comprehensive graphic

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10.14 am: Lockdown in Mumbai: 5 fresh coronavirus cases in Dharavi

5 more people tested positive for COVID-19 infection in Dharavi on Wednesday, taking the total number of virus cases in Mumbai's slum to 60. The new cases include 3 males and 2 females all from the Mukund locality of Dharavi. Meanwhile, the contract tracing of high-risk contacts of these news patients is underway, the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation official said.

10.00 am: Rajasthan coronavirus news

Around 29 people tested positive for COVID-19 in Rajasthan on Wednesday including 15 in Jaipur, 7 in Jodhpur and 7 in Kota.

29 #Coronavirus positive cases have been reported in Rajasthan today so far - 15 in Jaipur, 7 in Jodhpur and 7 in Kota. Total number of positive cases in the state now stands at 1034: State Health Department pic.twitter.com/DZq2kkbqIu - ANI (@ANI) April 15, 2020

9.47 am: India lockdown: Home Ministry released guidelines for lockdown 2.0

The Home Ministry on Wednesday issued guidelines for lockdown 2.0 allowing certain sectors to function from April 20 in order to ease public hardship in the wake of COVID-19 outbreak. While, the air, rail and inter-state travel remains suspended, the government has allowed agricultural activties, health services and industries operating in rural area are also permitted. Meanwhile, limited consutrction actigtives are allowed. lomited activites sot be opened from April 20. The ministry added that the states shall not dilute Centre's guidelines.

Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) issues National Directives for #COVID19 management. Wearing of face cover is compulsory in all public places, workplaces. Spitting in public places shall be punishable with fine. pic.twitter.com/14Y7zq9vqp - ANI (@ANI) April 15, 2020

9.39 am: Lockdown 2.0 in Mumbai: Police registers FIR against 1,000 workers for violating lockdown rules

Mumbai Police has registered FIR against around 1,000 migrant labourers who gathered near Bandra railway station on Tuesday defying the coronavirus lockdown rules and causing public health scare.

Read more here: Mumbai migrant crisis: Police register FIR against 1,000 workers over lockdown violation

9.28 am: Coronavirus global news: China reports decline in new confirmed COVID-19 cases

China recorded fewer novel coronavirus cases on Tuesday with 46 fresh COVID-19 positive cases as against 89 a day earlier. Out of these new virus cases, 36 include travellers arriving in China from abroad, as compared to 86 a day earlier. Meanwhile, the 10 remaining new cases are locally contracted infections.

9.15 am: Lockdown 2.0 in Maharashtra: 10 staffers at a Mumbai hospital test COVID-19 positive

10 staffers at a Mumbai hospital tested positive for novel coronavirus on Tuesday and were all quarantined after 3 patients admitted to the hospital were confirmed for the infection. Total 35 staff members of the hospital have tested positive for COVID-19 till now.

9.09 am: Madhya Pradesh coronavirus news

121 fresh COVID-19 cases surfaced in Indore, Madhya Pradesh on Tuesday, taking the total tally in the city to 548.

9.00 am: Coronavirus updates: US reports over 2,000 deaths in 24 hours

The United States reported a record 2,228 deaths on Tuesday, a single-day record, to jump to the total toll of 28,200, according to a Reuters tally. The country also touched a second-milestone on Tuesday with around 6,00,000 reported COVID-19 cases. This is 3 times more than any other nation. The previous single-day record in the US was last set on Friday at 2,069.

8.45 am: Coronavirus cases in India: Confirmed COVID-19 cases past 11,000-mark: Health Ministry

The total number of confirmed coronavirus cases in India stand at 11,439 including active COVID-19 cases at 9,756, and death toll climbing to 377, according to latest data by the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare.

8.30 am: Lockdown in Maharashtra: Migrant-crisis hits India; chaos in Bandra, Surat

Following Prime Minister Narendra Modi's announcement on Tuesday to extend the lockdown by 19 days till May 3, a large number of migrant workers poured out on roads across states hoping to get back home. Thousands of migrant labourers came out in scores to bus stops and train stations wanting to get back to their hometowns and villages. Huge crowds gathered in Mumbai's Bandra, Thane's Mumbra, Hyderabad in Telangana and Gujarat's Surat and Ahmedabad as daily wager tried to leave for their homes. As per the sources, a social media rumour misled the migrant workers in Mumbai that trains were available to cress state borders. Meanwhile, others in Ahmedabad and Hyderabad had poured out, wanting to walk back home even if it meant covering a distance of around 1,500 kilometres on foot.

8.15 am: Coronavirus news: Donald Trump halts WHO funding

US President Donald Trump said on Tuesday night that he is stopping funding of the World Health organisation (WHO) criticising its response to coronavirus pandemic. He said that the organisation failed to do enough to stem the virus from spreading when it first surfaced in China. "With the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic, we have deep concerns whether America's generosity has been put to the best use possible," he said at the briefing adding that the "WHO failed in its basic duty and must be held accountable". He further said that he US would assess the WHO's actions to stop the coronavirus spread before taking any decision on resuming aid to it.

8.00 am: India lockdown: Check BusinessToday.In COVID-19 tracker for state-wise numbers

INDIA CORONAVIRUS TRACKER: BusinessToday.In brings you a daily tracker as coronavirus cases continue to spread. Here is the state-wise data on total cases, fatalities and recoveries in one comprehensive graphic

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Erin Malloy, Principal of Medical Consulting Group We look forward to Erins partnership and her continued efforts toward high quality service...

In January, Medical Consulting Group (MCG) expanded its ownership team, taking on longtime Ambulatory Surgery Center (ASC) and Practice Business Consultant Erin Malloy.

MCG Managing Principals Bill Rabourn and Robert McCarville note that Erins contributions to the company go back more than 10 years. She has done a wonderful job leading infrastructure and support for our ASC development projects and management clients, says Bill. She also monitors the financial health and efficiency of our client ASCs and practices to enhance their profitability.

She has been an integral consultant on our team, says Robert. We look forward to Erins partnership and her continued efforts toward high quality service and MCG growth.

For more information about Erin and her team at Medical Consulting Group, visit MedCGroup.com or contact their main office at (417) 889-2040.

Medical Consulting Group, LLC

For more than 30 years, Medical Consulting Group has served practices, ASCs, and medical device manufacturers across the U.S. and Canada that are looking for customized business solutions and strategies. MCGs services include practice and ASC consulting and development, as well as management of operations, revenue cycle, and clinical and regulatory compliance. They also specialize in multi-media marketing, digital and website services, and e-learning programs to help physicians and facilities learn to use and integrate technology. Learn more at MedCGroup.com.
The Karnataka government on



Wednesday opened a critical care support unit to monitor the progress of Coronavirus patients in Intensive Care Units (ICUs) of various designated COVID hospitals across the State.

Karnataka is the first state in the country to establish a dedicated unit for critical care support, by linking ICUs of COVID hospitals onto a single platform, Medical Education Minister Sudhakar K, who inaugurated it, was quoted as saying in a statement.

Its objective is to monitor COVID-19 patients in ICUs across Karnataka state so that the hospitals are prepared for the potential onslaught of the virus and thereby to achieve zero COVID mortality in Karnataka, he said, adding, it would enable capturing details of ICU COVID-19 patients in real time.

Jawaid Akhtar, Additional Chief Secretary, Health and Family Welfare Department said the unit is monitored by a centralised team of doctors from the department, Medical colleges and Interns from KIMS, M S Ramaiah Hospital and Dr BR Ambedkar Medical College.

This team will work around the clock in three shifts to monitor patients admitted to ICUs.

At the end of each day, the unit will review the progress and implementation of the action plan and share it with higher authorities for further action.

It also serves as a handholding facility for doctors in interior parts of the state who may not have access to new technologies and will be of immense value in saving a life at this critical moment, the statement said.

Pankaj Kumar Pandey, Commissioner, Health and Family Welfare Department, said as and when the ICU preparedness of a designated hospital is uploaded in the e-health platform, a medical officer will certify the same.

Details of ICU patients are then uploaded, including their treatment methodology.

Data is then monitored and analysed by experts and the nodal officer is intimated on deviation so that the data can be compiled and reported to the Taskforce on a daily basis.

This data is of immense help as it allows us to take precautionary measures to avoid escalations , Pandey said.

The government is mulling the formation of a team of experts, from corporate hospitals in Bengaluru, consisting of Cardiologists, Pulmonologists, Nephrologists and Physicians, the statement said.

The idea is to connect this team of experts with a set of patients in one or more districts so that they can monitor and advise a suitable line of treatment for these patients, it was stated.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
SIOUX CITY -- A disturbance inside a Sioux City apartment Tuesday evening resulted in the stabbing death of a Sioux City woman by her son. The man is also accused of injuring his sister.

Paul Belk, 30, of Beaufort, South Carolina, is being held in the Woodbury County Jail on a $500,000 bond on charges of first-degree murder and willful injury.

A Sioux City Police Department news release said that Paul Belk fatally stabbed his mother, Lisa Belk, 55, at approximately 6 p.m. in an apartment at 3811 Peters Ave. in Sioux City's Morningside neighborhood. Also stabbed was Belk's 28-year-old sister, whose name police have yet to release. The sister was treated for her injuries at MercyOne Medical Center and released.

According to a complaint and affidavit filed by police in Woodbury County District Court, Paul Belk became upset with his sister and mother during a family gathering, retrieved a knife from the kitchen and told his sister "if she went toward the door she would be the first to die" and told them both "you are going to find out what is going to happen."

After pacing back and forth with the knife in his hand, the complaint said, Paul Belk lunged at his mother three times with the knife, then slashed his sister in the right upper shoulder.

Another sister in the room told police she saw Paul Belk swing the knife at Lisa Belk, and she went to the ground. When officers arrived on the scene, they found Lisa Belk with a pair of scissors impaled in her head, according to the complaint.

Lisa Belk was taken to MercyOne Medical Center and died of her injuries.

A search of Iowa court records shows Paul Belk has no violent criminal record in the state. According to online court records, he has five convictions in Woodbury County, all more than 10 years ago. He was convicted of operating while intoxicated in 2007 and had misdemeanor theft convictions in 2007 and 2008. His other offenses were for driving while his license was barred.

Belk was convicted in 2018 in Beaufort County, South Carolina, of possession of cocaine and served two days in jail, according to online court records in South Carolina. Belk also was convicted of traffic violations in 2017 and 2019, South Carolina court records show.

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German zoos struggle with a major loss of income due to coronavirus, as running costs remain high

Zoos that should have been crowded in the sunny Easter holidays are now hard-up and asking for donations, as the coronavirus lockdown bites.

A zoo director in northern Germany has even admitted that some animals might soon have to be fed to others, if the zoo is to survive.

"We've listed the animals we'll have to slaughter first," Neumunster Zoo's Verena Kaspari told Die Welt.

Berlin Zoo has infant panda twins, but their fans can only watch them online.

The zoo's spokeswoman Philine Hachmeister told DPA news agency "the panda twins are adorably sweet".

"Constantly we're thinking 'the visitors should be watching them live'. We don't want the little pandas to be grown up by the time we finally reopen."

Big appetites

Ms Kaspari at Neumunster Zoo said killing some animals so that others could live would be a last resort, and "unpleasant", but even that would not solve the financial problem.

The seals and penguins needed big quantities of fresh fish daily, she pointed out.

"If it comes to it, I'll have to euthanise animals, rather than let them starve," she said.

"At the worst, we would have to feed some of the animals to others."

Ms Kaspari's zoo belongs to an association, which is not covered by the state emergency fund for small businesses.

She estimates the zoo's loss of income this spring will be about 175,000 (152,400).

Besides direct appeals for public donations, Germany's zoos are jointly requesting government aid worth 100m, DPA reports.

Germany's national zoo association (VdZ) argues that zoos, unlike many other businesses, cannot go into hibernation and run down costs. Animals still have to be fed daily and looked after, while a tropical enclosure has to be heated above 20C.

VdZ chief Jorg Junhold said the lockdown was costing a typical German zoo about 500,000 weekly in lost turnover.

Schonbrunn Zoo, one of Vienna's top attractions, says it can manage for the time-being by drawing on existing savings.

But on 1 April it sent 70% of its 230 staff on three months' furlough - sent home with their jobs safeguarded. Austria has a "Kurzarbeit" (subsidised short-time work) system like Germany's, so that most workers do not lose their jobs when their employer hits hard times.

Animals 'missing humans'

Some zookeepers have also warned that the crisis has an emotional cost for certain animals, because they miss the attention they would usually get from the public.

Ms Hachmeister at Berlin Zoo said "the apes especially love to watch people".

She said seals and parrots were also fascinated by their visitors, and "for them now it's really pretty boring".

Last week Moscow Zoo also said its two giant pandas were "missing something now".

"They've started to much more actively approach every single person who walks past their enclosure," it said. BBC
President of Armenia Armen Sarkissian today held a remote conversation with President of Georgia Salome Zourabichvili, as reported the news service of the President of Armenia.

The Presidents of Armenia and Georgia talked about the measures that the countries are taking against the coronavirus pandemic, the preventive actions and the actions aimed at overcoming the consequences of the pandemic.

The interlocutors particularly emphasized the establishment of close cooperation between the two neighboring and friendly countries at all levels in the difficult situation and the constant contacts, stressing that the implementation of coordinated actions and combined efforts are becoming important more than ever during a crisis.

The Presidents of Armenia and Georgia expressed confidence that they will definitely overcome the coronavirus situation and its consequences through combined efforts and will be able to gear the whole potential of cooperation to help the countries economies recover and ensure the nations welfare. President Sarkissian said the issue of food safety remains a current issue in this situation. In this context, the interlocutors touched upon food safety in the currently interconnected world and region and several other issues, the press release reads.
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.

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A loophole in a federal student privacy law gives outsiders access to the personal information of K-12 students that is listed in school directories, yearbooks, and other publications, according to a new report.

The informationavailable to data brokers and other private companiescan include student names, birthdates, photos, and home addresses.

The Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA)designed to give parents and students the right to access and amend educational recordsallows schools to designate certain student data as directory information, according to the 181-page report compiled by the World Privacy Forum.

The provision permits the creation of publications such as PTA directories, yearbooks, and programs for graduations, theater productions, and sporting events. But it also allows the information to be provided to outsiders, who can use it in ways few parents would anticipate.

Data brokers can simply request the information from schools, which are required to provide it, according to WPF executive director Pam Dixon. That allows these companies to build profiles of children that could end up informing marketing campaigns or being used for other purposes.

In Vermont, which requires data brokers to disclose info about their collection practices, for example, Clearview AIa firm under fire for scraping billions of online photos to build a facial recognition databasehas acknowledged that it collects publicly available images of minors, according to the report.



Consumer Reports asked Clearview AI for comment but did not receive a response before publication.

Its an extraordinary problem, Dixon says. When schools designate sensitive student information as directory information, it becomes public information that can be shared with anyone. Schools have a lot of discretion about what to release.

Directory data may include a students name and home address, along with a birthdate, social media handles, and even height and weight. Many districts also make public a students place of birth and primary language.

Story continues

Families fleeing domestic violence can be endangered when a students address becomes public. In addition, such data could be valuable for criminals involved with identity theft. Security experts say personal information about kids is highly valuable because it can be used to open accounts and apply for government benefits with little chance of detection. Parents rarely request credit reports on their children.

The World Privacy Forum says the report, titled Without Consent, was compiled over a five-year period using research from 5,000 schools nationwide.

This troubling revelation makes it more clear than ever that privacy protections for children should be strengthened, says Consumer Reports policy counsel Katie McInnis. Data brokers ability to access and collect personal information about children, including photos of the kids, demonstrates the need to ensure that childrens data is protected.

The Backpack Opt-Out

Parents can opt out of the collection and distribution of directory data, but thats not always easy, the report says.

Most K-12 schools send home a paper form in a students backpack at the beginning of the school year, along with emergency contact forms and other paperwork. The average deadline to sign and return the opt-out form is 45 days, but in some districts the window is as short as 10 days. And many parents may be reluctant to opt out if it means their children wont be included in classroom directories or yearbooks.

According to the report, only 39 percent of K-12 schools allow parents to opt out online. And in rural school districts, that figure dips to 13 percent. (By comparison, 60 percent of colleges and universities let people go online to opt out of data sharing.)

Thats a particular problem with so many schools closed during the coronavirus pandemic, Dixon says. As COVID-19 is exacerbating existing school privacy problems, students and parents need to be able to exercise their rights to place a restriction on disclosure of student information, she adds. But schools that dont have their privacy opt-out systems online are making it nearly impossible.

The organization is calling for a variety of corrective steps, beginning with a requirement for schools to post FERPA notices and opt-outs online.

Were asking the U.S. Department of Education to update their FERPA guidance, to bring it into the modern era, Dixon says.





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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.
THE government has approved three prototype designs for permanent structures of ministerial offices at Mtumba suburb in the capital city, Dodoma.

The construction process, which is scheduled to begin anytime this month, will be completed between two and three years, depending on the availability of funds.

Tanzania Building Agency is the project executing outfit. Its Director of Consultancy, Arch. Wenslaus, Kizaba, told the Daily News exclusively that the cabinet and the Inter- Ministerial Technical Committee (IMTC) under Chief Secretary (PS), John Kijazi, have given the agency the green light to advance to the second phase of the project.

The structures will be distinguished in three designs chiefly to accommodate largeto- medium-to-small ministries.

Large ministries like Regional Administration and Local Governments and Health, Community Development, Gender, Elderly and children would have the tallest structures.

Details revealed by the public landlord indicated that they would have a minimum of seven floors. Construction is scheduled to kick off during the 2020/21financial year.

Five out of 20 ministries have confirmed to have sufficient funds to begin construction work as early as September this year, Arch. Kizaba said.

In February, we received a report from five ministries who want to embark on the project during the third quarter of this year, he said.

He further explained that the Permanent Secretary in the Ministry of Works formed a task force to review the total cost of each structure.

The task force also submitted the report at the end of March this year; This means we will start the process within this month.

The process includes inviting contractors who would be building the permanent structures adjacent to the existing buildings of each ministry at Mtumba.

Other activities such as the construction of a tarmac road network had begun.

TBA Chief Executive Officer (CEO), Daudi Kondoro told Daily News that three prototypes which had been approved by the state considered a standardisation of some major offices like those of the permanent secretaries and their deputies as well as ministers and their deputies.

We understand these positions are usually not permanent and the president can make reshuffles at any time... we needed to agree on the fact that an option of each minister or PS cannot be met as we may keep the construction work anytime there is a reshuffle, he said, further explaining: We agreed that the size and furniture of a given office should be the same to ensure that if one minister is transferred to a different ministry, he or she find a similar office size.

TBA had spent at least 1bn/-to build the current structure of each ministry. It says the structures were temporary to only accommodate ministers, deputy ministers, permanent secretaries, deputy permanent secretaries, heads of department and senior government officials.

The new structures will accommodate all officials in each ministry, the TBA boss elaborated. He assured that the designs of the structures were attractive and had considered all public requirements for the modern age society.

The structures will be distinguished by colours from one ministry to other and have been grouped into two zones, one accommodating ten ministries and the other, 12 ministries.
Two days after allowing manufacture and sale of liquor in the state, the Assam government on Wednesday withdrew the order following guidelines issued by the Centre on the extended lockdown due to coronavirus.

In the consolidated guidelines issued by the Union Ministry of Home Affairs, no relaxation has been given to liquor manufacturing or retail sales, which was allowed in Assam from Monday by the state Excise Department.

The department issued an order this evening asking all deputy commissioners to close liquor shops, wholesale warehouses, bottling plants, distilleries and breweries indefinitely in the state.

It had on April 12 allowed liquor shops, wholesale warehouses, bottling plants, distilleries and breweries across Assam to open from Monday for seven hours daily.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
"Patient 235" (R), a 25-year-old British man, holds a health certificate upon his discharge from the Cu Chi field hospital in Saigon, April 15, 2020. Photo courtesy of the hospital.

Two men were discharged from hospitals on Wednesday after recovering from Covid-19, bringing the national tally of active cases down to 96.

"Patient 145" is a 34-year-old man from Saigon's Tan Phu District, who flew from the U.K. to Can Tho City in the Mekong Delta on March 22.

He tested positive on March 26 and was treated at the Can Tho Tuberculosis and Lung Diseases Hospital. The city has no more active Covid-19 cases.

"Patient 235" is a 25-year-old British man who visited the Buddha Bar & Grill in Saigon, a major outbreak site, on March 14.

He was confirmed positive on April 3 and treated at Saigon's Cu Chi field hospital.

With him discharged, the city has eight patients still under treatment.

Vietnam has had confirmed 267 Covid-19 cases so far but no deaths.

The pandemic has claimed close to 127,500 lives and spread to 210 countries and territories.
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.
Yesterday, Josh Rogin, of the Washington Post, published a column that appeared in the papers Global Opinions section, but contained bombshell new reporting. Per Rogin, in early 2018, officials from the US Embassy in Beijing repeatedly visited a laboratory in Wuhan where researchers were studying coronaviruses in bats, and their possible transmissibility to humans. Embassy staff were so concerned about safety issues they said theyd observed on their visits that they sent two warnings back to the State Department, urging the US government to give the lab support. In the first of the cables, which Rogin obtained, officials warned that the labs work on coronaviruses represented a risk of a new SARS-like pandemic.

Two years later, with a new SARS-like pandemic sweeping the earth, the warning cables have fueled discussions inside the US government about whether this or another Wuhan lab was the source of the virus, Rogin reports. Theres no evidence that the new coronavirus was manufactured; most scientists agree that it came from animals. But as Xiao Qiang, a scientist at the University of California, Berkeley, told Rogin, that is not the same as saying it didnt come from the lab, which spent years testing bat coronaviruses in animals.

ICYMI: How right-wing media is covering the COVID-19 epidemic

Rogins story was shared widely on social media, including by prominent mainstream journalists. Yikes, MSNBCs Chris Hayes tweeted; WOW, Charles M. Blow, a columnist at the New York Times, added, I didnt see this coming. Conservative pundits and politicians seized on it, too; Sen. Ted Cruz, Republican of Texas, called the article a DAMN big deal. This was not surprising: earlier this year, a web of narratives took hold on the right alleging that the new coronavirus originated in a Chinese labby accident or by design. In mid-February, Sen. Tom Cotton, a hawkish Republican from Arkansas, mentioned the Wuhan lab in an interview on Fox News. We dont have evidence that this disease originated there, he said, but because of Chinas duplicity and dishonesty from the beginning, we need to at least ask the question to see what the evidence says. Cotton clarified, on Twitter, that he thought the outbreak was most likely naturaland not deliberate, if it did come from the labbut was pilloried by major news organizations for spreading a fringe conspiracy theory that was already debunked. In the weeks following Cottons Fox hit, versions of the lab theory continued to swirl online, and continued to be cast as baselessand even dangerousby more credible sources. At its nefarious end, the theory is wild, and easy to dismiss. Since early April, however, the accidental end of the theory has, as Vanity Fairs Joe Pompeo put it last week, begun to rear its head once again, this time entertained by credible journalists, including David Ignatius, of the Post, and Glen Owen, of Britains Mail on Sunday. Then came Rogins storyand, with it, further mainstreaming.

Theres a lot to parse here. Theres no question that right-wing China hawks, from the internet to the White House, have weaponized information about the origins of the virusbe it fact, rumor, or outright lunacyto advance a political agenda. President Trump has referred to the virus as the Chinese virus and the Wuhan virus, part of a broader effort to dodge blame for its spread in the US. Such language, Asian Americans say, has fueled rising bigotry. The World Health Organizationwhich has been accused, by many on the right, of being soft on Chinahas also been caught in Trumps crossfire. Yesterday, Trump said he would suspend US funding to the organization. Had the WHO done its job and call[ed] out Chinas lack of transparency, he said, the outbreak could have been contained at its source with very little death.

There are, however, many legitimate questions to ask about Chinas lack of transparency. The US intelligence community reportedly believes that the Chinese government has grossly understated the full extent of the coronavirus outbreak in the country, and its far from alone in that assessment. According to the Times, officials in Wuhan have, in recent weeks, broken up virtual groups set up by victims relatives, censored photos of relatives collecting victims ashes, and even assigned minders to supervise burials. In the early days of the virus, Chinese authorities silenced Li Wenliang, a doctor who tried to raise an early alarm, and who later died after contracting the virus. Journalists who tried to blow the whistle disappeared. Last month, Beijing expelled American reporters working for the Times, the Post, and the Wall Street Journalan escalation of a long-running diplomatic spat with the USand forced Chinese staff serving the same outlets to resign. Two weeks ago, the pro-Beijing government of Hong Kong reprimanded the territorys state broadcaster for asking a WHO official a question about Taiwan.

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Last week, China imposed tight restrictions on the publication of academic research linked to the origins of the coronavirus. As Rogin notes, its government wont answer even basic questions on the topic, and has tried to suppress investigations into the possible involvement of the two labs in Wuhan. Beijing has yet to provide US experts with samples of the novel coronavirus collected from the earliest cases, Rogin writes. A Shanghai lab that published the virus genome in January was quickly shut down by authorities for rectification.

Journalists have rightly been keen to refute Trumps blame-shifting and point-scoring exercises, as well as claims from other actors with an anti-China ax to grind. Still, what we know about the virus is dwarfed by what we dont. Often, uncertainty has stemmed from legitimate scientific disagreement, but it has stemmed, too, from attempts to deny and deflectand on that score, China has been a serious, if not a lone, offender. Just because a conspiracy theory is later proven to have merit doesnt make it not a conspiracy theory; their defining trait is belief in the absence of evidence. The most useful response, here, is not to get sucked into the right-wing fever swamps, but to isolate legitimate questions, and try and report out the answers. As Rogin writes, the coronavirus origin story is not just about blame. Its crucial to understanding how the novel coronavirus pandemic started because that informs how to prevent the next one.

Below, more on the coronavirus:



Other notable stories:

ICYMI: Why did Matt Drudge turn on Donald Trump?

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Jon Allsop is a freelance journalist whose work has appeared in the New York Review of Books, Foreign Policy, and The Nation, among other outlets. He writes CJRs newsletter The Media Today. Find him on Twitter @Jon_Allsop.
WASHINGTON, April 15, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- The Brand Safety Institute (BSI), a nonprofit advertising industry initiative to strengthen the brand safety profession, today announced the appointment of Christine Desrosiers as the organization's first Brand Safety Officer in Residence. Desrosiers, the former BabyCenter programmatic chief, brings 17 years of experience in working with the digital ad industry to understand and address brand safety challenges. This new role is meant to provide industrywide leadership on these topics, as Desrosiers will help BSI design and implement its new digital resource library, advance the Brand Safety Officer certification curriculum, and drive engagement and collaboration with other stakeholders.

Brand Safety Institute

"The Brand Safety Institute's core work involves the exchange of knowledge. BSI shares best practices across the industry through research, education and certification, and we connect members of the brand safety community, so they can share their knowledge with one another," said Neal Thurman, co-founder of BSI. "Christine will be an invaluable asset in that effort, as she brings an extraordinary depth of experience, knowledge, and relationships around the complicated challenges of brand safety."

Desrosiers served as the Director of Revenue Systems and Programmatic for BabyCenter, where she spent the past 12 years developing and implementing programs to improve consumer experiences, advance marketers' measurement and transparency, and protect against malvertising attacks on the platform. She was as responsible for driving strong programmatic revenue growth for the world's number one digital parenting resource. Desrosiers is also the founder of Double Bagel Consulting, a firm that helps digital media companies design and evolve efficient, effective revenue operations.

"In these tumultuous times, brand safety becomes even more critical for marketers, as the public expects every company to live its values and help their customers through the crisis," said Desrosiers. "I am delighted to join the Brand Safety Institute in its efforts to professionalize the field of brand safety, so every company has the executive expertise in-house to address these critical issues."

"It is time that our $300+ billion industry have a bright, guiding light on brand safety solutions, and Christine will serve as the centralized coordinator for these efforts. Her strategic vision and practical know-how will be an invaluable service to the thousands of companies that face these challenges every day," said Mike Zaneis, co-founder of BSI.

About the Brand Safety Institute

The Brand Safety Institute is a digital advertising industry initiative to professionalize the work of brand protection. Through its research, education, and certification programs, the Brand Safety Institute gives ad industry executives the expertise and skills they need to minimize brand risks and capitalize on brand opportunities in the digital advertising supply chain. Through its Brand Safety Officer certification program, the Brand Safety Institute helps leaders set the highest standards for brand protection, learn new and emerging best practices, and build an industry-wide community of brand safety peers. More information about the Brand Safety Institute can be found at brandsafetyinstitute.com.

Media Contact

Andrew Weinstein

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SOURCE Brand Safety Institute
A McDonald's employee wearing a face mask looks out as a Glovo food delivery courier picks up an order.

Valentyn Ogirenko/Reuters

At least a dozen people caught COVID-19 from a localized outbreak linked to two McDonald's locations in Hawaii.

According to Hawaii's Department of Health, 12 people who have tested positive are in isolation. Exposed McDonald's employees without symptoms are self-quarantining at home.

Patrick Lim, the owner-operator of the McDonald's locations, said all workers at the McDonald's locations are being offered COVID-19 testing.

"Our people are the heart and soul of our McDonald's family, and we are keeping those impacted in our thoughts for a fast and full recovery," Lim said.

Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

An outbreak of COVID-19 cases in Hawaii has been linked to two McDonald's locations, sickening at least a dozen people.

On Tuesday, Hawaii's Department of Health announced it was investigating a "limited, localized community spread" of COVID-19 among workers at a McDonald's location in Kona, Hawaii.

According to the DOH, 12 people who have tested positive are in isolation. Exposed McDonald's employees without symptoms are self-quarantining at home.

"Fortunately, the restaurant, like many food establishments, had previously implemented social distancing measures to protect customers and prevent exposure prior to an employee testing positive," the Department of Health said in a statement. "The establishment has closed its operation and performed enhanced cleaning."

The DOH said that it did not believe the outbreak posed a risk to the public, as only workers were involved and the restaurant was taking social distancing measures to protect customers.

Local news reported that the people who tested positive for COVID-19 are a mix of employees and family members at two McDonald's  located in Kona Commons and the Kailua-Kona Walmart  on Hawaii's Big Island.

Story continues

Patrick Lim, the owner-operator of the McDonald's locations, said in a statement to Business Insider that the "highest priority is to protect the health and well-being of our people."

"We recently learned that some employees from our Kona Commons and McDonald's of Walmart Kona locations have tested positive for the coronavirus," Lim said. "As soon as we were notified of the confirmed cases, we immediately closed the restaurant and have conducted a thorough sanitization procedure as well as notify local public health authorities. Additionally, we have also added protective barriers to limit contact in our restaurants."

The location identified and reached out to all workers who had been in close contact with employees who contracted the virus and advised they self-quarantine for 14 days. Lim also said that the location is offering universal testing to all workers at each location.

"Our people are the heart and soul of our McDonald's family, and we are keeping those impacted in our thoughts for a fast and full recovery," Lim said.

McDonald's workers in stores in California, Illinois, and Connecticut have also tested positive for COVID-19, according to Fight for 15, a group that organizes fast-food worker activism. On Tuesday, a McDonald's worker in Chicago filed an OSHA complaint saying that conditions in his location pose "an imminent danger to our health" after a coworker tested positive for COVID-19.

Fast-food workers plan to strike on Tuesday in Chicago, in response to McDonald's and other companies' response to the coronavirus pandemic.

Read the original article on Business Insider
Thousands of homeless "net cafe refugees" in Japan risk being turfed out onto the streets as the coronavirus pandemic forces the sudden closure of their uniquely Japanese 24/7 comic book havens. The ubiquitous all-night internet and "manga" comic cafes offer couches, computers, comics, soft drinks and shower facilities for an overnight stay typically priced around 2,000 yen ($18). An estimated 4,000 people down on their luck make their home in such cafes in Tokyo alone, and activists worry that shutting them down could lead to suicides and a spike in rough sleepers. Some local authorities are now opening shelters to accommodate "net cafe refugees" and keep them from sleeping out in the open. One 58-year-old occasional construction-site worker told AFP his main aim was "avoiding getting wet", as he found a roof over his head at a shelter converted from a martial arts centre in Yokohama near Tokyo. "I thought of sleeping on a bench at a train station... or subway stairs going underground," said the grey-haired man, who declined to give his name. His net cafe informed him at the weekend it would be closing due to state of emergency measures in Japan to stem the spread of the coronavirus. "I used to go to work from net cafes... now I sometimes have a job, sometimes not, due to the coronavirus," he said, adding that it was nearly impossible to find a permanent job at his age. Renting an apartment in Japan requires a very expensive deposit and presents tricky administrative hurdles, leaving net cafes a convenient option for many of the country's hidden poor. "I have nowhere to go to, few acquaintances," said the man. - 'Discreet and quiet' - The temporary shelters at the judo hall in Yokohama, operated by the local Kanagawa authorities, have been designed by a team led by award-winning Japanese architect Shigeru Ban to offer privacy and prevent infections. Residents sleep on camp-style cots or cardboard beds partitioned off by a frame of sturdy paper tubes with cloth hanging from the top of the cubicle to the floor. Ban is famed for other emergency shelters and buildings, including the Cardboard Cathedral for Christchurch in New Zealand after the 2011 earthquake. The aim is to provide a safe place to those driven out by the coronavirus crisis, said Yuji Miyakoshi, an official at the municipal government. The free shelter has hosted nearly 40 people since opening on April 11 and one resident said it had been proved invaluable after his "capsule hotel" accommodation closed two days ago. "I went to work, slept at the hotel and went back to work. I moved to this place but nothing has changed so much," said the man in his 30s who works in construction. Miyakoshi said the people in the shelter were "quite discreet and quiet... My feeling is that many of them are obviously not good at asserting themselves." - 'Unsafe housing conditions' - On the surface, Japan appears a wealthy and prosperous society and visitors to Tokyo and other major cities are often struck by the relative lack of homeless people seen in other world capitals. The Japanese economy bounced back from a recession in the 1990s, creating millions of new jobs, but critics said many of them were temporary and created a new class of urban poverty. The manga cafes were initially a haven for late-working -- or late-drinking -- business people from far-flung suburbs who missed the last train home, but eventually became a shelter for Japan's working poor. Coronavirus has driven these people into a corner, said Tsuyoshi Inaba, who has long been involved in helping homeless people. Inaba estimates there are already 2,000 homeless in Tokyo -- double the official figure -- as public surveys conducted during the day often miss people sleeping rough at night after a day's work. Combined with 4,000 net cafe refugees, "some 6,000 people are in unstable, unsafe housing situations" in Tokyo alone, Inaba told AFP. The Tokyo Metropolitan Government, which ordered establishments such as net cafes closed amid a spike of coronavirus cases in the capital, is trying to find a solution for the hundreds abruptly made homeless. But activists say not enough accommodation is being provided and that the conditions are too onerous -- such as requiring applicants to prove they have been in Tokyo for six months or longer. Many kicked out of net cafes have no option but to sleep on the street if they can't find a proper shelter, Inaba said, adding: "This could cause social confusion and suicides are feared to increase." If official aid remains inadequate, Inaba foresees a "big problem" that could even contribute to a further spreading of coronavirus. "Some people could move to provincial cities despite the possibility that they may have the virus," he warned.
EDEN, NORTH CAROLINA  Six years ago, a stormwater pipe failed and tens of thousands of tons of coal ash spilled into North Carolinas Dan River at a Duke Energy power plant steam station near a town called Eden.

The environmental disaster paints a stark portrait of what happens to a watershed and the people who live there when coal ash escapes the ponds and dumps where its stored.

In Michigan, power companies store toxic coal ash from their generating plants alongside the Great Lakes and their connecting waters. As the coal-powered plants close in favor of clean-energy options, those coal ash sites are supposed to be monitored for at least 30 years.

There hasnt been a major coal ash spill in Michigan, but in North Carolina, the spill by some accounts was called an environmental catastrophe.

Demise of coal-burning power means toxic ash landfills forever on Great Lakes State shores

This is how Consumers and DTE energy companies plan to manage coal ash

Anybody who drove over that river every day, you could take one look at it and know something was wrong, said Amy Adams the North Carolina program manager for Appalachian Voices, a group advocating clean energy.

The river had turned, for lack of a better term, ashy gray. It looked like chocolate milk, but not quite as brown as chocolate milk, she said. It just looked like sort of gunk floating on the top.

She said her group was among the first taking water samples and documenting the spill on the Dan River. She recalls seeing dead turtles and crayfish.

After the Dan River spill, ash, or ash-like material, mixed with native sediment in North Carolina and Virginia as far as 70 river miles downstream, according to the North Carolina Department of Environmental Quality.

Eden, population 15,000, is 128 miles west of Charlotte, North Carolina, and lists among its attractions tourism and activities in the rivers that run through it.

Three Rivers Outfitters, which offers canoeing and kayaking trips throughout the year on the Dan River and others, noticed an immediate effect on business.

We saw a temporary impact that was dramatic, said co-manager Mark Bishopric. Theres no way to know whether theres continuing to be impact because you do not know who doesnt call you or email you or book a trip.

Of the 25 trips Three Rivers Outfitters offers, only three were on sections of the Dan River that were impacted by the spill while the others were upstream of the spill site or on different rivers, Bishopric said. Still, the business took a hit in the short run because people just werent calling for any of our trips.

Now, he cant say whether the business has fully recovered, whether things would be different had the spill never happened.

You dont know what potential customers are not calling you because of what they perceive to be a coal ash problem or any other kind of problem, he said.

Since the spill, state regulators have held Duke Energy accountable and a company spokesman said Duke Energy has become an industry leader in safe coal ash management.

Duke Energy has completed excavation of its Dan River coal ash basins and installed ash handling technology upgrades and is closing all coal ash basins systemwide, the spokesman said.

Adams said in communities affected by coal ash spills, or even simply located near coal ash ponds, people have become ill, homeowners have struggled to sell their homes, residents have resorted to drinking bottled water, sometimes for years, and water recreation and tourism have suffered.

Duke Energy officials, however, dispute those claims.

The North Carolina Department of Environmental Quality found Duke Energy violated the federal Clean Water Act. In 2016, it fined the company $6.8 million, the second-largest fine for environmental violations in state history. The company challenged the fine but ultimately agreed to pay $6 million for the spill.

In addition, the company agreed to a $102 million settlement for nine federal misdemeanor violations related to the Dan River incident and coal ash operations, said Duke Energy spokesman Bill Norton.

State regulators ordered Duke Energy to excavate all remaining coal ash impoundments in the state and dispose of the coal ash in a lined landfill to satisfy the requirements of the Coal Ash Management Act and to protect public health. Norton said the companys Dan River cleanup work was completed years ago and studies by NC State University, the state of North Carolina and others demonstrate that the environment and ecosystem in and around the Dan River is thriving and there is no known impact from the 2014 incident.

North Carolinas coal ash spill in February 2014 was one of a few that have occurred over the last dozen years across the country including a 2008 spill at Tennessee Valley Authoritys Kingston Fossil Plant and a 2011 spill in Wisconsin into Lake Michigan.

Coal ash contains mercury, cadmium and arsenic. Without proper management, these contaminants can pollute waterways, groundwater, drinking water and the air, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

Environmentalists say coal ash has affected human health, property values, river recreation and tourism in North Carolina, but Duke Energy officials say thats not the case.

There is a lot of misinformation in this discussion, spread by a small group of paid activists, said Duke Energy spokeswoman Paige Sheehan. She did not specifically say who is allegedly being paid or by whom. Utilities like Duke Energy are highly regulated and held accountable for what we say and how we operate.

Duke Energys Norton said the 2014 coal ash spill happened when a stormwater pipe under an ash basin at the retired Dan River coal plant failed. The company immediately accepted responsibility and conducted a comprehensive review of its ash basin systems. Water quality in the Dan River returned to normal within days of the spill and drinking water was always safe, he said.

Today, our company is an industry leader in the safe management of coal ash and the permanent closure of ash basins, using science and engineering to guide plans that ensure people and the environment remain well protected, Norton said.

Now, six years later, the river looks like it did before the spill, but We know that all that coal ash is still moving its way along the bottom of the river, said Adams of Appalachian Voices.

Once it escapes into the environmentonce its in there, its damned near impossible to get up, she said. So a spill prevention plan or a clean-up plan is moot if you cant enact it.

Duke Energy was only able to recapture a fraction of the ash, the 39,000 tons, added her colleague Xavier Boatright, environmental justice organizer and researcher with Clean Water for North Carolina. Scientists are still finding ongoing concerns that linger after these events.

Boatright said it changes the way people think about their communities.

In many ways, folks have gained a new sense of awareness about environmental justice and environmental conservation, especially when it comes to coal ash and water and air protections, he said.

Theres the social stress, too, of feeling as though one must pick a side.

Theyve been, in a way, torn apart by coal ash, he said.

Adams said the key to preventing future coal ash spills is storing the stuff dry in lined landfills. Without that, waters going to go where it wants to go, she said.

One of the things weve just got to stop doing is using wet storage of coal ash. There are smarter ways to store coal ash, she said.

Terry Shelton is Eden, North Carolinas public utilities director. He said, despite public concern to the contrary, Edens drinking water was never in any peril as a result of the spill.

Our water intake was upstream and above a dam...and people still did not understand that their water supply was safe, he said.

Shelton said the spills greatest effect on Eden was the damage it did to water recreation and tourism in the short term. In the months immediately following the spill, people didnt want to come in contact with coal ash-contaminated water, which hurt the companies that offered canoe and kayak tours, restaurants, motels and other businesses, he said.

That probably had a greater impact on Eden than the spill itself, Shelton said. Everybody downstream of where it came in, farming operations and stuff, were worried that the coal ash was going to just lay in the river. The Dan River is subject to floods when you have heavy rains...and it can flood some farmland on adjacent areas to the river itself.

I would guess that some of the things theyve done in North Carolina will become a model for other utility companies and the regulatory agencies in other states to set up monitoring operations and decide how to deal with this issue in the long term, Shelton said.

Sheehan said Duke Energys cleanup effort on the Dan River was performed under strict EPA supervision.

"The river has a long history of being impacted by industrial operations (not ours) and the EPA determined that dredging more ash from the river bottom would cause more harm than good by stirring up the historic contamination (not caused by Duke), she said. Independent studies continue to demonstrate that the ecosystem is thriving and there is no measurable impact from the incident in 2014.

Bishopric said would-be kayaking and canoeing customers still ask about coal ash from time to time, particularly after the topic appears in the news.

From our perspective, the coal ash spill itself didnt cause as much damage to our canoe and kayak business as did the stories about the coal ash spill, he said.

Bishopric said the river is constantly changing, as rivers do. So it cant be said that it looks just as it did before the spill, but theres no longer any obvious sign of the spill.

Visually on the river you cannot, and this has been for a long, long time, you would not see any visual reference to the spill. That was through within, certainly, months of the event.

Neville Hall is mayor of Eden. He said the spills effect on the environment was fairly limited and the tourism industry rebounded, in part, because of the funding Duke Energy provided the city for its marketing and media campaigns to promote the rivers.

Theyve done everything they could to help us get beyond it, Hall said. Our rivers are being used more than ever now.

Hes sure the EPA is keeping a good close eye on coal ash facilities throughout the country.

Its been a while and were trying to move past it and move on, Hall said. Were fortunate that it had as little impact as it ultimately did.

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Irvine, Calif., April 15, 2020 - On Tuesday, California Gov. Gavin Newsom suggested that reopening the state's economy will require six steps, the first of which involves "tracing and tracking individuals" in order to identify those who need to remain in isolation.

Researchers at the University of California, Irvine have developed a tool that could be instrumental in this effort. TrackCOVID is a free, open-source smartphone application that permits contact tracing for potential coronavirus infections while preserving privacy.

The team's project is detailed in a paper published recently in JMIR mHealth and uHealth.

"Contact tracing is the process of tracking down and isolating people who may have been exposed to an infectious disease after someone has tested positive," said lead author Tyler Yasaka, a software engineer and junior specialist in otolaryngology at the UCI School of Medicine. "This process has traditionally been slow and inefficient, and current technology-based solutions have privacy concerns because they require continuous tracking of everyone's location."

TrackCOVID works in a different way, he said, by creating an anonymous graph of interactions. Every time a person gathers with others or goes to a public place, he or she can use the app to log contacts by either hosting or joining a checkpoint, which allows possible paths of virus transmission to be discovered. The first person to register as a checkpoint host is given a Quick Response code; others subsequently join the checkpoint by scanning this QR code.

As people congregate with others over time, their interactions are linked to each other anonymously. Anyone who tests positive for COVID-19 can report it through the app without revealing his or her identity. Using the graph of interactions, the app will notify users who may be at elevated risk of exposure.

"We built a simplified simulation model that showed the app is more effective - that it flattens the curve of infections - when more people use it," said co-author Dr. Ronald Sahyouni, a biomedical engineer in UCI's joint M.D./Ph.D. Medical Scientist Training Program and an incoming neurosurgery resident at UC San Diego.

How could this be encouraged? Co-author Brandon Lehrich, who earned a B.S. in biomedical engineering at UCI in 2018, suggested that endorsement by local, state and national government entities would be beneficial - as would enlisting the help of grocery stores and other "essential" gathering places.

The establishments could post signs displaying their QR code, which visitors could scan with their smartphones. TrackCOVID would open automatically in their device browsers, and they'd be anonymously checked into that specific location.

"If the customer happens to be at an elevated risk level, they'll see an alert on their screen," Lehrich said. "If enough public places are doing this, then a lot of contact tracing will happen without any users making a conscious effort other than scanning a QR code when they go shopping. From there, I think people will start to see the value of the app and begin using it to create checkpoints for their private interactions as well."

Yasaka added, "We hope our app goes viral before too many more people come in contact with the more dangerous virus."

###

About the University of California, Irvine: Founded in 1965, UCI is the youngest member of the prestigious Association of American Universities. The campus has produced three Nobel laureates and is known for its academic achievement, premier research, innovation and anteater mascot. Led by Chancellor Howard Gillman, UCI has more than 36,000 students and offers 222 degree programs. It's located in one of the world's safest and most economically vibrant communities and is Orange County's second-largest employer, contributing $5 billion annually to the local economy. For more on UCI, visit http://www.uci.edu.

Media access: Radio programs/stations may, for a fee, use an on-campus ISDN line to interview UCI faculty and experts, subject to availability and university approval. For more UCI news, visit news.uci.edu. Additional resources for journalists may be found at communications.uci.edu/for-journalists.
Seattle, Washington--(Newsfile Corp. - April 15, 2020) - CFN Media (OTCQB: CNFN), the leading agency and financial media network dedicated to the North American cannabis industry announces the publication of an article discussing CannaTrac's innovative alternative to cash handling in the cannabis space.

Image: CannaTrac

To view an enhanced version of this image, please visit:

https://orders.newsfilecorp.com/files/5503/54461_c21bd3d9843e6870_001full.jpg

The COVID-19 outbreak has majorly disrupted nearly every business - including the nascent cannabis industry. While cannabis sales have spiked due to greater demand, businesses face unique risks as they adapt to rapidly changing consumer behaviors. More consumers are shopping online and ordering for delivery, while brick-and-mortar locations are looking for ways to reduce risk to their cashiers and enforce social distancing rules.





Graph: Change in total cannabis orders tracked by Weedmaps vs. first week of Jan. 2020

To view an enhanced version of this graph, please visit:

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In this article, we will take a look at some unique risks facing the cannabis industry and how CannaTrac is helping to address them with CannaCard, online and retail merchant accounts, and its mobile solution for cannabis delivery workers.

Are you an accredited investor? Click here to receive investor information and corporate updates.

Dispensaries Remain Open

California became the first state to implement "shelter-in-place" orders designed to keep citizens at home and slow the spread of COVID-19. After briefly classifying cannabis businesses as non-essential, the state quickly reversed course after a widespread public outcry. Governors and public health officials throughout the country have since deemed cannabis businesses as "essential" operations that can remain open.

"Most of the American public and an increasing number of government leaders stopped buying into the demonization of cannabis years ago," Karen O'Keefe, state policies director for the Marijuana Policy Project, said to Forbes. "Now, not only have two-thirds of states recognized that medical cannabis should be legal-with 11 legalizing adult-use-many are recognizing that safe access to cannabis is essential."

Medical cannabis patients are the biggest concern since they rely on the plant in the same way that they rely on traditional pharmaceuticals. Since many medical cannabis users don't jump through the hoops to become officially certified medical users, recreational businesses have become crucial access points that must remain open. Cannabis delivery providers have also seen a sharp increase in business as the crisis has unfolded.

Cash Handling is Risky

Public health experts, including the World Health Organization (WHO), believe that SARS-COV-2, the virus that causes the COVID-19 disease, is transmittable through "fomites" - or surfaces, including paper money, or "dirty money", that have been handled by an infected person. Many recommend using credit cards or other contactless forms of payment where possible to protect both buyers and cashiers that must handle cash from hundreds of customers throughout any given day.

"The belief is that these viruses can stay on surfaces in their fully active states for at least 10 days. That includes cash and all kinds of other surfaces that people normally touch," Dr. Sanjay Maggirwar, chair of the George Washington University School of Medicine's department of microbiology, immunology and tropical medicine, told CBS MoneyWatch. "So certainly with the coronavirus, cash handling is a concern."

The problem is that about 6.5% of Americans lack any bank accounts and 18.7% are underbanked, according to the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. In addition, many cannabis businesses have struggled to secure merchant accounts that are necessary to accept any form of electronic payments. Many customers visiting dispensaries are forced to pay in cash, which is risky for both consumers, merchants, and the community. ATM's recirculate "Dirty Money".

Are you an accredited investor? Click here to receive investor information and corporate updates.

In addition to the United States, emerging markets have turned to mobile payments as a way to curb COVID-19 by reducing in-person cash transactions. Africa is using digital finance as a means to stem the spread of COVID-19. 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.

CannaTrac Mitigates Risk

The robust demand for cannabis products, the risks associated with cash payments, and the underbanked nature of dispensaries have created a perfect storm for COVID-19 risk.

CannaTrac's handheld payment device for deliveries

To view an enhanced version of this image, please visit:

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The CannaCard is a turnkey, cashless payment solution that works as a standalone payment platform or integrates with an existing point of sale (POS) system. By eliminating cash handling, the technology can help cannabis retailers mitigate the risk of COVID-19 to their customers, employees, and the surrounding community.

CannaTrac is also helping online merchants and delivery services as consumers shift away from brick-and-mortar locations. Delivery services can utilize the cashless payment system through CannaTrac's next-generation mobile handheld device that's PCI compliant and FCC approved. Features include NFC (Near Field Communication), EMV Level 1 & 2, Signature Capture, 4G Cellular with optional WiFi, 5MP Camera, and an Integrated Thermal Printer.

Are you an accredited investor? Click here to receive investor information and corporate updates.

Looking Ahead

The COVID-19 outbreak is having a profound impact on the cannabis industry. The heightened risk of cash handling and lack of banking solutions has put the cannabis industry at risk, while brick-and-mortar retailers have shifted to online sales and deliveries. CannaTrac's CannaCard and other services provide a compelling solution to these problems, helping to eliminate the need to handle cash and empowering online purchases and delivery.

CannaTrac is currently raising up to $20 million in an open round, which it intends to use to expand its IP, for operations, and for working capital. For more information, visit the company's website at www.cannatrac.com or signup to download their investor presentation and receive corporate updates.

Click here to read the full article:

https://www.cannabisfn.com/cannatracs-contactless-payments-provide-a-safer-way-for-consumers-dispensaries-and-delivery-services-to-operate-in-a-covid-19-environment/

CannaTrac Company Contact:

Tom Gavin CEO

tgavin@cannatrac.com

CFN Media Contact:

Frank Lane President

flane@cannabisfn.com

About CFN Media

CFN Enterprises Inc. (OTCQB: CNFN) is the owner and operator of CFN Media, the leading agency and digital financial media network dedicated to the legal cannabis industry.

For Visitors and Viewers

CFN Media's Cannabis Financial Network (CannabisFN.com) is the destination for savvy investors and business people profiting from the worldwide cannabis industry. Viewers will see breaking news, exclusive content and original programming involving the people, companies and investments shaping the industry.

For Cannabis Businesses & Companies

CFN Media is a leading agency and financial media network dedicated to the cannabis industry. We help private, pre-public and public cannabis companies in the US and Canada attract capital, investors and media attention.

Our powerful digital media and distribution platform conveys a company's message and value proposition directly to accredited and retail investors and national media active in the North American cannabis markets.

Since 2013, CFN Media has enabled the world's preeminent cannabis companies to thrive in the capital and public markets.

Learn how to become a CFN Media client company, brand or entrepreneur: https://www.cannabisfn.com/become-featured-company/

Disclaimer

The above article is sponsored content. CannabisFN.com and CFN Media, have been hired to create awareness. Please follow the link below to view our full disclosure outlining our compensation: http://www.cannabisfn.com/legal-disclaimer/

To view the source version of this press release, please visit https://www.newsfilecorp.com/release/54461
Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker on Wednesday provided a glimpse of the havoc the new coronavirus is unleashing on the states already precarious finances, starting with a projected shortfall of $2.7 billion for the current budget year.

The update on the state budget came as Pritzkers administration announced 1,346 new known cases and 80 additional deaths, bringing the statewide known case count to 24,593 and the number of deaths to 948.

Earlier on Wednesday, Mayor Lori Lightfoot announced that Chicago is beginning to flatten the curve on COVID-19 cases but warned that residents health could be jeopardized if strict stay-at-home measures are removed too soon. Heres a look at the data released by the city.

Heres a recap of what happened on April 15 with COVID-19 in the Chicago area and Illinois:

7:34 p.m.: Lawsuit filed after smokestack demolition sent dust cloud into Little Village

A lawsuit was filed in Cook County Circuit Court against Hilco Redevelopment and other groups for the criticized demolition of a Little Village coal-fired power plant Saturday morning.

The demolition at the Crawford Power Generating Station sent a cloud of dust into the Little Village neighborhood. The site, on the citys Southwest Side near the Latino neighborhoods of Little Village and Pilsen, had been shuttered since 2012 after a push by activists.

The complaints seek damages for personal injury including building a system to monitor the medical conditions of residents who could be affected, said Sean Driscoll, a partner at Clifford Law. At a virtual news conference Wednesday, Driscoll said the complaints are filed on behalf of Katherine Ramirez-Mercado, a resident of Little Village who lives near the former power plant.

The demolition happened as officials are trying to contain COVID-19, a respiratory illness. Read more here. Jessica Villagomez

6:50 p.m.: Tribune pages from 1918 show eerie similarities between coronavirus and Spanish Influenza

Colleges canceled classes, bars were shut down, movies werent released and public gatherings were banned. It sounds a lot like the 2020 coronavirus outbreak, but this was 1918 and the Spanish Influenza was spreading across the country.

A look back through the Tribunes archives show some striking similarities between the responses to stop the spread. See here.

6:29 p.m.: GOP candidates fundraising email plagiarizes Tribune story on mail-in voting amid pandemic

A fundraising email sent this week from suburban congressional candidate Jeanne Ives plagiarized a Chicago Tribune article about mail-in voting.

The Ives email sent late Monday afternoon lifted two sentences nearly verbatim from the Tribune article, which first published online Friday and in print Monday morning.

The article focused on how Gov. J.B. Pritzker and other top Democrats are in favor of increased mail-in voting for the November election amid the coronavirus pandemic, but laid out complications in achieving that goal. Ives emphasized Democrats support of vote-by-mail in an appeal to supporters for campaign contributions and volunteers. Read more here. Bill Ruthhart

5:56 p.m.: New saliva test for COVID-19 could be easier on patients, safer for health care providers

Medical experts are encouraged by news that federal authorities have authorized the first saliva-based COVID-19 test  a potentially safer and easier way to diagnose the highly contagious virus  as Illinois and the nation struggle to perform mass testing.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration recently granted Rutgers University researchers emergency-use authorization for the new testing method, which involves collecting a saliva sample as opposed to taking a swab from the nose or throat of a patient.

The new test will be available first through medical providers affiliated with the New Jersey school, according to a statement on the universitys website.

Saliva-based testing limits the exposure of health care workers performing the test and also tends to be easier on the patient, said Dr. Elizabeth McNally, director of the Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine Center for Genetic Medicine. Read more here. Angie Leventis Lourgos

5:47 p.m.: 2 inmates, 7 staff members at federal high-rise jail in downtown Chicago test positive for coronavirus

At least two inmates and seven staff members at the federal high-rise jail in downtown Chicago have now tested positive for coronavirus, and that number may soon rise, prosecutors revealed in a court filing Wednesday.

The new numbers were revealed after Jose Flores, an alleged gang member being held at the Metropolitan Correctional Center on weapons charges, requested to be released on bond due to his history of asthma. Lawyers for Flores had argued in a filing earlier this week that he was at elevated risk of infection at the jail. Defense attorneys in another case, meanwhile, claimed that six inmates had already tested positive for COVID-19.

In response, prosecutors said Wednesday that based on the most recent information from jail administrators, at least two inmates and seven staff members had tested positive for the disease. The motion also stated the government has received preliminary information that other inmates at the MCC may have tested positive for COVID-19, but is awaiting further confirmation from the U.S. Bureau of Prisons.

The BOP has so far confirmed only one positive inmate on its web site. Those numbers had yet to update Wednesday, however. Read more here. Jason Meisner

5:45 p.m.: Skokie mayor orders face coverings be worn in many public places

Skokie is requiring that starting Thursday evening, residents and visitors in the north suburb wear face masks while in specified public situations.

The order, which was issued by Mayor George Van Dusen, goes into affect 5 p.m. Thursday. It stipulates that a mask should be worn in public in situations that would bring individuals into close proximity with others.

The emergency directive also requires that face coverings be worn while working or patronizing a business open to the public or when using public transportation and ride shares.

The directive lists grocery stores, restaurants, hardware and building supply stores, financial institutions, laundry services, pharmacies, group homes and assisted living facilities as examples of public spaces where a mask would be required.

Face coverings are not required for outdoor activities like running or biking, as long as proper social distancing of six feet or more is kept, according to a news release.

Masks are also not required when riding in your own car, at home with family or housemates or in situations when doing so poses great health, safety or security risk.

We want everybody to be safe, Van Dusen said. Were concerned that people might be thinking that were over the peak, were on the downward trajectory, so we can ease up. And that is not true. Read more here. Genevieve Bookwalter

5:39 p.m.: Sunset Foods employee in Northbrook tests positive for COVID-19

An employee at Sunset Foods grocery store location has tested positive for COVID-19, the illness caused by the novel coronavirus, according to a statement from the CEO and president of the family-owned parent company posted on Facebook Wednesday.

Sunset Foods has learned that one of our team members at our Northbrook store has been diagnosed with COVID-19, read the letter from John Cortesi, president and CEO of Sunset Foo Mart.

The store was closed Wednesday for a cleaning and will re-open at 7 a.m. Thursday.

The employee was last in the store Friday, and owners learned about the positive test results Wednesday, Cortesi said in the statement on Facebook. Cortesi and store representatives could not be immediately be reached for additional comments. Read more here. Anna Kim

5:02 p.m.: Checking your account for that stimulus check? Youre not alone. Some online banking platforms are overwhelmed.

Several banks reported issues with online banking services as millions of Americans check their accounts for federal stimulus checks.

Banks said they are experiencing high volumes of clients using their websites, mobile phone applications and call centers. Customers trying to log in to their accounts with SunTrust Banks, BB&T, PNC Bank, TCF Bank and Fifth Third Bank all had trouble Wednesday morning.

The federal government is sending payments of up to $1,200 per adult and $500 per dependent child to certain taxpayers under the CARES Act, the $2.2 trillion stimulus package Congress passed to aid the economy during the coronavirus pandemic. Americans who filed taxes in 2018 and 2019 could see checks dispersed this week through direct deposit or by mail, depending on how they filed their returns.

The U.S. Department of Treasury estimated about 80 million Americans would receive payments starting Wednesday. Read more here. Abdel Jimenez

4:09 p.m.: 23 deaths reported at Joliet nursing home, spokeswoman says

Twenty-two residents and one staff member at Symphony of Joliet nursing home have died of COVID-19, a spokeswoman for the facility said.

Nursing homes nationwide have become epicenters and accelerators of the spread of the coronavirus that causes COVID-19, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The sudden increase in fatalities from early this month, when there was only one death at the home, would appear to be the most at any nursing home in the Chicago area, according to available information. Read more here. Robert McCoppin

3:48 p.m.: Can a drug that kills head lice cure COVID-19 patients?

Add a head lice-killing drug called ivermectin to the list of medicines that researchers are testing as a possible treatment for COVID-19 patients.

In a petri dish, the medication eradicates SARS-CoV-2  the virus that causes the disease  in two days, an Australian virologist recently found. But whether it can work safely and effectively in infected humans is not yet known and will take further studies to determine.

Theres a lot of steps that have to occur before this pans out, said Dr. Nirav Shah, an infectious disease specialist at NorthShore University HealthCare. This is investigational, if anything.

Nevertheless, moving swiftly to research the anti-parasitic drug is worthwhile, he said, in light of the urgency of finding an effective treatment.

I think anything that shows any activity, given were in a pandemic, should be aggressively evaluated, Shah said. Theres currently no approved drug for this right now, so we need something."

But another local physician, Dr. Mark Ratain of University of Chicago Medicine, was dismissive of the drugs potential in treating COVID-19.

I would never dream of using it," said Ratain, an oncologist and clinical pharmacologist. When you look at the concentrations required to get an anti-viral effect, theyre not achievable safely in humans. The drugs a very toxic drug. Read more here. Hal Dardick

3:04 p.m.: Lightfoot still not in a position to talk about summer festival plans

Mayor Lori Lightfoot punted on Wednesday when asked whether summer festivals and large events should be canceled in Chicago, saying the city isnt yet ready to announce any decisions. Lightfoot made the comment after being asked about the mayor of New Orleans recommending that all large events be canceled through 2020.

Were looking at the long-term but Im not in a position as I sit here today to talk really about the summer, Lightfoot said. Were trying to focus on where we are in the short-term but obviously we have an eye towards whats going to be happening in the summer and the fall and thinking already about what things we need to do for example to make sure the November election is done in a way thats consistent with public health guidance so that we avoid some of the challenges that we saw with the March 17 primary.

Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker last week cast serious doubt on the summer festival season, cautioning that organizers should think carefully about canceling large summer events.

Lightfoot responded that its too soon for us to talk about events that are happening in July and August, a point she reiterated on Wednesday.

The widespread coronavirus pandemic has upended most plans for the foreseeable future  with a statewide stay-at-home order in place through the end of April, bars and restaurants closed to dine-in patrons and a large number of events either canceled or delayed. Lightfoot has said the order will extend into May, though its up to Pritzker to make that decision.

Social distancing requirements brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic have led officials across the world to cancel or delay all sorts of public events from athletics to the arts.

Trying to limit the outbreak, Lightfoot has closed the citys lakefront, The 606 elevated trail and the Riverwalk after widespread flouting of Pritzkers stay-at-home order. The mayor also has set a curfew order on all liquor sales across Chicago, banning sales after 9 p.m. Gregory Pratt

2:59 p.m.: Projected $2.7 billion shortfall in revenues for the states current budget year

Gov. J.B. Pritzker on Wednesday projected a $2.7 billion shortfall in revenues for the states current budget year, and a $4.6 billion shortfall in the states next budget year from the revenues in the budget proposal he presented in February, which would widen to $7.4 billion with short term borrowing and if voters dont approve his proposal for a graduated-rate income tax in November, Pritzker said.

We will not go without a state budget, Pritzker said. We will need to make extraordinarily difficult decisions on top of the difficult decisions that weve already made. But together with the state legislature, we will make them.

The governor is authorizing up to $1.2 billion in short-term borrowing and directing state agency directors to take the necessary steps to manage existing resources for the current budget year, with a goal of reserving 4% of unspent dollars by putting non-essential purchases and operational spending on old, freezing non-essential travel and limiting hiring, he said.

The update on the state budget came as Pritzkers administration announced 1,346 new known cases including 80 additional deaths, bringing the statewide known case count to 24,593 and a total of 948 deaths.

Pritzker in February presented two options in his annual budget address: one that would have linked a funding increase for public schools and a pension payment boost to voters approving his graduated-rate income tax plan in November, and a Plan B that would have limited new spending.

The public health crisis will take us off course for a little while, Pritzker said Wednesday.

Pritzker has acknowledged that the states spending effort on personal protective equipment and other supplies in response to the new coronavirus, along with anticipated lower revenues for the state, would mean his proposal would need to change significantly, but Wednesdays briefing provided more details on specifics.

Pritzkers preferred option that he presented in February was a $42 billion spending plan for the states next budget year. Under his earlier proposal, he would have eliminated $1.4 billion in spending  the projected amount of revenue his income tax plan would raise in the next budget year  from that spending plan if voters in November reject one of his top campaign priorities, the graduated-rate income tax.

Pritzker last month announced he would delay the states income tax filing deadline until July 15, to match a change at the federal level, which will delay state revenue. With the statewide stay-at-home order taking effect March 21, it hasnt yet been clear how much of a hit the states sales tax and other revenues will take.

A University of Illinois study from last week concluded that the fiscal gap thats likely to be created by revenue losses and spending increases will almost certainly cost billions of dollars and possibly cost tens of billions of dollars.

The states spending on supplies and other costs in response to the new coronavirus came into clearer focus Tuesday, when Illinois Comptroller Susana Mendozas office launched an online portal that tracks coronavirus-related spending and contracts. As of Wednesday, the state had made nearly $170 million worth of purchases related to the pandemic, according to the comptrollers office. Jamie Munks

2:36 p.m.: 1,346 additional COVID-19 cases, 80 more deaths

The state announced on Wednesday 1,346 additional cases of COVID-19, bringing the total to 24,593. Officials announced another 80 deaths for a total of 948.

2:35 p.m.: Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot says the citys beginning to flatten its coronavirus curve, but preaches caution

Mayor Lori Lightfoot announced that Chicago is beginning to flatten the curve on COVID-19 cases but warned that residents health could be jeopardized if strict stay-at-home measures are removed too soon.

"We must, and you must, continue to stay home to save lives, Lightfoot said. In this moment, when we are all being tested, I think a lot about the people who, every single day, do heroic things all in the service of others. Our health care workers, our valiant first responders, grocery store workers and people who are attending to and feeding the sick, our seniors, our homeless, our vulnerable population and, of course, our children.

Lightfoot made the comments alongside public health commissioner Dr. Allison Arwady. In their presentation, the officials said the citys strict measures  such as shutting down the Lakefront Trail  helped save thousands of lives.

The city will be watching the data for a sustained and substantial drop in new cases, but the city is not there yet.

We are not out of the woods, Lightfoot said. Read the story here on the data. Gregory Pratt

2:31 p.m.: Cook County has lined up about 400 hotel rooms to help coronavirus patients with temporary housing

Cook County Board President Toni Preckwinkle announced on Wednesday an alternative housing plan that will provide temporary accommodations for populations most vulnerable during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Preckwinkle said the alternative housing plan will be rolled out in phases, beginning with support for patients who have tested positive for COVID-19 and require temporary housing to properly self-isolate. The county already has secured roughly 400 hotel rooms and is prepared to acquire more, she said.

Qualifying participants in the program may include the homeless, the housing insecure, or those who do not have a separate room and bathroom to safely isolate at home, Preckwinkle said. Additionally, were finalizing details to help ensure that essential health workers, first responders, and those who are confirmed with exposure to the virus have an alternate place to stay if they need it  in order to protect their family at home, while also decreasing the rate of community spread.

Beginning Wednesday, hospitals in Chicago and suburban Cook County will be notified that the program can accommodate medically stable patients recovering from COVID-19. If an individual being discharged from a hospital identifies as someone who cannot safely self-isolate at home, the hospital may call a Cook County Department of Public Health hotline, which will assist in connecting patients to housing support.

Bill Barnes, the executive director of the countys Department of Emergency Management and Regional Security, said Cook County officials will work in coming weeks to finalize a plan to expand alternative housing to accommodate healthcare workers and first responders as well.

Kiran Joshi, a co-leader of the Cook County Department of Public Health, cited recent statistics indicating that African American communities in suburban Cook County and Illinois have suffered disproportionately high fatalities from COVID-19. The countys new alternative housing plan will help address such disparities, he said.

We suspect that additional contributing factors here are higher rates of poverty and multi-generational housing. No one can effectively self-isolate at home if they dont have the space to do so, Joshi said. Therefore we expect this intervention to be particularly beneficial to residents from the south and west suburbs, where weve seen the highest rates of illness, hospitalizations, and deaths from COVID-19. Antonia Ayres-Brown

1 p.m.: Chicago officials say city is bending the curve. How do we know? What does it mean?

In a conference call with reporters this week, Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot and the city health commissioner, Dr. Allison Arwady, released new data that they say shows the city is winning the fight against COVID-19, though the endgame remains unclear.

Lightfoots administration rolled out their numbers around the same time that Gov. J.B. Pritzker was offering a similar perspective on the states battle. Both messages were delivered as the governor and mayor, both Democrats, could face pressure to scale back restrictions that were instituted to limit the viruss spread.

The states stay-at-home directive is scheduled to expire April 30, and Republicans both in Illinois and Washington, D.C., are asking when the economy will be reopened.

Heres how Chicago officials described the so-called pandemic curve and the citys place on it. Joe Mahr and Cecilia Reyes

12:55 p.m.: Second Chicago firefighter, 55, dies after suffering from COVID-19

A second veteran Chicago Fire Department member has lost his battle with the COVID-19 virus.

Firefighter Edward Singleton, who is survived by his wife and two children, was 55, Fire Commissioner Richard Ford said in a statement.

Singletons most recent assignment was at Midway Airport on the citys Southwest Side. He joined the department in August of 1987.

It is with a heavy heart that I announce the loss of a second dedicated member, Ford said in the statement.

Firefighter Singletons contributions and his spirit will live on forever, Ford said. We ask that the entire city add Firefighter Edward Singleton, his wife Nicol, and his two adult children, Breonna and Edward II, to their prayers.

Earlier this month, firefighter Mario Araujo, 49, who worked in the Rogers Park neighborhood for more than 16 years, became the first Chicago firefighter to die the coronavirus. Read more here. Rosemary Sobol

12:38 p.m.: Five new COVID-19 deaths between Lake, Porter, LaPorte, Newton counties, officials say

Lake Countys COVID-19 death toll rose by two to 33 Wednesday, while Porter, LaPorte and Newton counties each reported another death, officials said.

Lake Countys caseload increased by 57 to 876, according to the Indiana State Department of Healths daily update. The Porter County Health Department reported its first death in Center Township, which includes Valparaiso, with three deaths total and 135 confirmed county cases, according to its website.

Of those 135 cases, 10 are hospitalized and 52 have recovered, it said. Portage Township leads with 61 cases, followed by Center Township (Valparaiso) with 25 and Westchester Township (Burns Harbor, Chesterton) with 12.

LaPorte County reported 42 total cases with four total deaths, its first new death in 10 days. Newton County also reported its second COVID-19 death, state records show.

Statewide, Indianas death toll from the coronavirus outbreak has nearly quadrupled since the beginning of April as state health officials on Wednesday reported 49 additional deaths.

The new COVID-19 death reports occurred between March 28 and Tuesday, increasing the states total to 436 deaths, according to the Indiana State Department of Health. Agency statistics show that 111 coronavirus deaths had occurred through March 31. Read more here. Meredith Colias-Pete

11:55 a.m.: Shuttered MetroSouth Medical Center in Blue Island being prepped to take COVID-19 patients

Just about seven months after it closed, work is progressing at a rapid pace to convert the shuttered MetroSouth Medical Center in Blue Island to accept COVID-19 patients.

The facility is among a number of alternate care sites in Chicago and the suburbs being retrofitted during the coronavirus pandemic to ease the burden on hospitals.

MetroSouth, 12935 Gregory St., closed at the end of September and work began March 30 on preparing it to handle up to 550 patients, according to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.

As of Tuesday, the project was 70% complete and completion is scheduled for April 24, according to W. Patrick Bray, spokesman for the Corps Chicago District.

Work is taking place simultaneously on all six floors of the property and includes extending oxygen and vacuum line and equipment to create negative pressure in rooms where required, Bray said.

The Illinois Health and Hospital Association had set a Tuesday deadline for firms to staff the alternate care sites, including MetroSouth.

That facility would have 269 beds earmarked for the most serious cases and another 237 for patients requiring more generalized care, according to the association. It said it expected the hospital could require a staff of just under 300. Read more here.

11:08 a.m.: Federal stimulus checks have started to arrive. Heres who gets what and how.

The stimulus checks coming to taxpayers, starting with direct deposits this week, are expected to help people for a little while. Here are answers to some questions people are raising. McClatchy Washington Bureau and Associated Press

11:06 a.m.: Blackhawks convention  originally scheduled for July 26-28 at the Hilton Chicago  is canceled

The Blackhawks on Wednesday canceled their annual fan convention that was scheduled for July 26-28, making it the latest sports gathering to be called off because of the coronavirus pandemic.

As the National Hockey League continues to evaluate the future of the 2019-20 season with guidance from public health officials, the Chicago Blackhawks have decided to cancel the 2020 Blackhawks Convention, the team said in a statement.

Full refunds for hotel room deposits and/or convention passes will be processed automatically by the fans point of purchase, either through the Hilton Chicago, Ticketmaster or Blackhawks ticketing. The Hawks advise fans to visit Blackhawks.com/convention for more information.

The Hawks convention, first held in 2008, was scheduled for the last weekend in July at the Hilton Chicago. But public health and elected officials have talked recently about the possibility that social distancing will extend into the fall. So the prospect of packing a convention space with thousands of guests seemed unlikely. Read more here. Phil Thompson

10:37 a.m.: Best Buy to furlough 51,000 store employees amid coronavirus sales slump

Best Buy will furlough about 51,000 store employees in the U.S. on Sunday, adding to the thousands of retail workers thrown out of work when efforts to contain the coronavirus pandemic forced many companies to close stores.

Most Best Buy stores have remained open as essential businesses since they sell items families working from home or teaching kids at home may need. Still, stores have switched to a curbside-only model, with no customers allowed inside, and the company stopped doing in-home deliveries and repairs.

Nearly all part-time employees will be furloughed, while about 82% of full-time workers will remain on the payroll, Best Buy said Wednesday. Furloughed workers will receive health benefits for at least three months. Read more here. Lauren Zumbach

10:25 a.m.: How to get a refund for coronavirus-canceled travel, from hotline help to the nuclear option

As the new coronavirus continues to cripple the travel industry, consumers are clamoring to get their money back for the unused airline tickets, lodging, tours, car rentals and cruises booked before their plans were hijacked by a pandemic.

For some, recouping what they spent has been straightforward and simple, or theyre content to accept credits for future travel in lieu of cash.

Others have found that in a world without sports, getting refunds is the new national pastime. Theyve spent countless hours on hold, ping-ponged between travel providers passing the buck and struggled to make sense of companies shape-shifting refund policies.

Every stakeholder in travel is frustrated, said Kurt Ebenhoch, executive director of Travel Fairness Now, a consumer advocacy group based in suburban Lake Villa. Theres never been this kind of volume of refund activity. Its a confusing, difficult time for consumers, especially when the rules arent being adhered to.

Theres no one-size-fits-all solution for getting cash back on travel plans derailed by the health crisis. Some people, try as they might, will simply be out of luck depending on the fine print of their contracts, among other variables. But for many consumers, there are ways to bolster the chances of a refund. Here are some tips and advice on how to do that. Lori Rackl

10:04 a.m.: FDA approves first saliva test for coronavirus

Researchers at Rutgers University now have a new tool to diagnose cases of COVID-19. With the authorization of the FDA, the school said on Monday, they now have clearance to use a new saliva test for coronavirus, which both expands the current testing options available and potentially signals a safer path forward for health care workers. Read more here. New York Daily News

9:59 a.m.: Chicago City Council meeting virtually amid worldwide coronavirus pandemic

Chicagos aldermen were joining the ranks of the stay-at-home workforce during the ongoing coronavirus pandemic Wednesday, logging in remotely for the citys first-ever online City Council meeting.

The Wednesday meeting via Zoom is slated to simply involve creating new rules to allow the council and Mayor Lori Lightfoot to hold a more substantive remote meeting next week.

Still, the scene of dozens of elected officials trying to conduct business from their homes promises to be one of the lasting images of a city brought to heel by the coronavirus. Read more here. John Byrne

8:50 a.m.: Unprecedented number of people turning to GoFundMe as a last resort during pandemic. Its like youre putting your heart out there

Darryl Henry was running out of time.

For years, his fiancee Kimberly Hemphill dreamed of visiting every famous attraction in Chicago. Hemphill, 50, couldnt leave the house for more than two hours before her oxygen tank ran out, yet she still clung to the hope that the two of them would go adventuring across the city.

In March, Henry said, she broke down crying. The widening coronavirus outbreak meant Hemphill, who has chronic emphysema, was indefinitely stuck at home. The wedding in June was postponed. And Henry was laid off and furloughed from his jobs as a chef at the restaurants Kaathis in Lincoln Park and Ambers Food Cafe in Englewood, leaving the couple without an income.

Henry waited until Hemphill was asleep and created an online fundraiser on the crowdfunding website GoFundMe. In five succinct sentences, he explained the need for $2,500 to buy a portable oxygen concentrator so Hemphill could be outside longer.

Henry is among thousands of people who have created GoFundMe pages in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic. Amid record unemployment, the shuttering of small businesses and the intensifying pressures on the health care system, coronavirus-related GoFundMe appeals have made up one-third of recent U.S. campaigns and have raked in more than $120 million globally, according to a company source. Read more here. Alice Yin

8:31 a.m.: Bleak IMF forecast: 2020 will be economys worst year since Great Depression. This is a crisis like no other.

Beaten down by the coronavirus outbreak, the world economy in 2020 will suffer its worst year since the Great Depression of the 1930s, the International Monetary Fund says in its latest forecast.

The IMF said Tuesday that it expects the global economy to shrink 3% this year  far worse than its 0.1% dip in the Great Recession year of 2009  before rebounding in 2021 with 5.8% growth. It acknowledges, though, that prospects for a rebound next year are clouded by uncertainty.

The grim assessment represents a breathtaking downgrade by the IMF. In its previous forecast in January, before COVID-19 emerged as a grave threat to public health and economic growth worldwide, the international lending organization had forecast moderate global growth of 3.3% this year. But far-reaching measures to contain the pandemic  lockdowns, business shutdowns, social distancing and travel restrictions  have suddenly brought economic activity to a near-standstill across much of the world.

The world has been put in a great lockdown, the IMFs chief economist, Gita Gopinath, told reporters. This is a crisis like no other. Read more here. Associated Press

8:30 a.m.: Chicago police setting up checkpoints to remind people of stay-at-home order and provide a presence in areas of violence

Chicago police are setting up checkpoints throughout the city both to remind people about the statewide stay-at-home order during the coronavirus outbeak and to show a strong police presence in areas hit by violence.

A department memo obtained by the Tribune calls them seatbelt safety and informational checkpoints, and adds that the goal of this mission is to engage the community in a positive and informative manner while providing a visible police presence in areas affected by violence." Read more here. Pete Nickeas

7:59 a.m.: Getting an economic stimulus check? Trumps signature will be on it, a break in protocol

President Donald Trumps name will appear on the economic stimulus checks that will be mailed to millions of Americans beginning next month, the Treasury Department confirmed on Tuesday.

The decision to have Trumps name on the checks, a break in protocol, was made by the Treasury Department after Trump suggested the idea to Steven Mnuchin, the Treasury secretary, according to a department official.

The presidents name will appear in the memo section of the check because Trump is not legally authorized to sign such disbursements. Read more here. The New York Times

6:40 a.m.: Wondering when we can go back to school? Concerts? Movies? These Chicago ecologists are helping decide

Sarah Cobey, like you, isnt sleeping.

She is working from home, and by now the routine has become fairly predictable: She wakes up and does a little yoga, she showers and pours a cup of tea, she logs into work and then she stays there, for a long, long while. Her makeshift office is in the guest bedroom of her South Loop apartment, overlooking the lake. She conducts about eight Zoom meetings, every day, and her days, these days, have been running from early morning until midnight.

Because Sarah Cobey is working to get you back to work, school, concerts, brunch, theater, church, birthday parties, book signings and binge shopping  you remember socializing?

So, she is creating something youve heard about. Read more here. Christopher Borrelli

6:30 a.m.: 37 immigrant children in three Chicago-area shelters test positive for COVID-19

More than half of 69 immigrant children living at three Chicago-area shelters have tested positive for the coronavirus, but the organization running the facilities said the prognosis for the minors is very good.

As of Tuesday, 37 children had tested positive, but the Heartland Alliance said the number could increase in the coming days because it is waiting for results of other tests. Heartland did not give the ages of those who tested positive, but minors in the organizations care range up to 17 years old. Read more here. Elvia Malagon

6:15 a.m.: Trump campaign sues Wisconsin TV station over ad, saying it makes it appear the president said coronavirus was a hoax

President Donald Trumps reelection campaign is suing a Wisconsin TV station for running an anti-Trump commercial that pieces together audio clips of the president talking about the coronavirus outbreak in a way they argue is misleading and false.

The ad by the Democratic super PAC Priorities USA features a series of soundbites in which Trump downplayed the threat posed by the virus, while a chart that is splashed across the screen gradually begins to shoot upward as cases of the virus skyrocketed across the U.S. Read more here. Associated Press

Tuesday, April 14

Here are five things that happened Monday that you need to know:

Monday, April 13

Here are five things that happened Monday that you need to know:

Saturday, April 11 and Sunday, April 12
For your at-home enjoyment

Originally produced by Londons National Theatre of Great Britain back in 2012 and later brought to Broadways Music Box Theatre the same year, this side-splitting farce was available, free of charge, on the small screen via YouTube.

As if from a front-row seat, youd be seeing a live performance of this major hit, filmed before a London audience.

Adapted by playwright Richard Bean from the 1746 commedia dellarte classic The Servant of Two Masters by Carlo Goldoni, this hilarious version is set in 1963, in the rather tacky seaside town of Brighton. A dowdy assortment of characters follow their dreams, democratically divided between love and money, under Nicholas Hytners fervent yet disciplined direction.

Francis Henshall (James Corden) falls for Dolly (Suzie Toase) in the hilarious One Man, Two Guvnors. (Johan Persson)

Hytner is aided and abetted by a top-drawer cast, headed by young scalawag farceur James Corden. Corden, who starred in Hytners Broadway and film productions of The History Boys a few years back, wraps the audience around his pudgy finger.

Cordens character Francis Henshall is a gofer serving wealthy patrons: govnors (governors). At first, he has only one client, Rachel Crabbe (Jemima Rooper), impersonating her recently murdered twin brother, Roscoe Crabbe (never seen).

The tough-strutting Rachel is here to collect money owed her brother by Brighton-fringe-underworld-type Charlie the Duck Clench (Fred Ridgeway), a rather good-natured, gentle soul. Charlie had promised his vapid daughter Pauline (Claire Lams) to Roscoe, not realizing hes deceased. But Pauline insists shes in love with aspiring thespian Alan Dangle (Daniel Rigby), who emotes and poses spontaneously whenever he gets the chance.

Never mind the convoluted plot. Henshall, in his slightly loud plaid suit (courtesy of terrific set-and-costume designer Mark Thompson) is the true center of attention. He muses about his inner conflict between the need for food and love. Now he craves food and addresses the audience, pleading for a sandwich. When someone offers an unappetizing humus sandwich, Henshall alternates between being repelled and droolingly grabbing for it.

Suddenly, hes interrupted by the arrival of Stanley Stubbers (Oliver Chris), a phoney snob who has fled to Brighton to lie low after murdering, either on purpose or by chance, the aforementioned Roscoe. Stubbers immediately hires Henshall to take charge of his oversized trunk. Now Henshall has two masters. Things are looking up.

The superbly slapstick trunk sequence features Henshall persuading two stalwart audience members to carry the weighty item into a nearby pub. Stubbers has just registered at the pub, where, unbeknownst to him, Rachel has also registered. She is in love with him despite his having murdered her brother. After all, love conquers all, right?

The dinner scene closing the first act is arguably the set piece of the entire show. Henshall engineers the proceedings, remarkably managing to have both Rachel and Stubbers served their meal without knowing of the others presence.

And with outrageous aplomb, Alfie (Tom Edden)an 87-year-old, stooped-over waiter, with tremors and a malfunctioning artificial heartperforms such physical shtick as would have had Charlie Chaplin look to his laurels. (Credited with choreographing the brilliant physical comedy scenes is Cal McCrystal.)

Tom Edden gives a brillant performance as the elderly waiter. (Johan Persson)

Act 2 gives Henshall the opportunity to pursue his romantic desires, in the person of Dolly (Suzie Toase), Charlie Clenchs impossibly curvaceous bookkeeper. Smitten, Henshall impulsively invites Dolly to spend a week with him in Majorca. But Dolly insists on a date first. When Henshall inquires of the audience as to what would constitute a good first date, several women simultaneously shout out an answer, which I wont divulge here. It would spoil your fun.

Of course, all is sorted out at the end.

Music happily envelops the entire production, with original songs by Grant Olding. A four-piece skiffle combo called The Craze ushers the audience to their seats and plays brief, zippy interludes during scene changes. Corden himself contributes a snappy xylophone segment.

The production has the feel of British music hall or old vaudeville; the audience here seems a part of the action, with Cordens consummate skills making it all work neatly.

The National Theatre of Great Britain offered a statement preceding the performance, to the effect that the present pandemic has temporarily closed their theaters, making inroads on their profits. Thus, anyone who wishes can make a contribution to their organization, details being offered onscreen.

It is without doubt a worthy cause. This screening, which was available in early April, resulted in tens of thousands of viewer hits.

The company will stream a different performance for free from 7 p.m. UK time (2 p.m. EST) every week, and then it will be available on demand until the following Thursday. Visit the National Theatre of Great Britain website for future showings.

Diana Barth writes for several theater publications, including New Millennium. She may be contacted at diabarth99@gmail.com
American rocker, Bruce Springsteen is unknowingly helping to protect the people of New Jersey from coronavirus during these trying times.

New Jersey residents are being asked to keep "one Springsteen" apart as part of an effort to help citizens adhere social distancing guidelines. The state wrote on Twitter, "REMINDER: Keep AT LEAST one Springsteen of space between yourself and others."

They also shared a picture guideline to show what "one Springsteen apart" is.
California will partner with philanthropists to provide $125 million to undocumented immigrants facing financial hardships during the coronavirus outbreak, Gov. Gavin Newsom announced Wednesday.

The state will contribute $75 million in disaster-relief assistance, Newsom said, while several nonprofit foundations committed to raising $50 million through the new California Immigrant Resilience Fund.

An estimated 150,000 undocumented adults in California will receive a one-time cash payment of $500 with a cap of $1,000 per household to deal with the financial impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The fund  believed to be the first of its kind in the nation  will address a critical need for families who were left out of the federal stimulus package. Undocumented immigrants are ineligible for unemployment insurance benefits and disaster relief under the CARES Act due to their immigration status.

This is a state that steps up always to support those in need, regardless of status, Newsom said during a news conference Wednesday.

An estimated 2.5 million undocumented immigrants live in California, according to the Public Policy Institute. They paid more than $2.5 billion in state and local taxes last year and account for about 10% of the states workforce, Newsom said.

Many of these jobs can be found in the service industry, which has been disrupted by mass closures because of the states shelter-in-place policy, leaving countless families with no income.

An overrepresentation of that workforce is undocumented in the areas that are so essential to meeting the needs of tens of millions of Californians today, Newsom said. In the health care sector, in the agriculture and food sector, in the manufacturing and logistics sector, and in the construction sector.

Erika Garcia, 44, of Windsor, is an undocumented immigrant from Mexico who cleans houses in Sonoma County. With the state under a stay-at-home order, Garcia, a mother of two teenage children, has been left without work.

Im glad that the governor addressed this openly, despite knowing hed have critics and people against this, Garcia said. He said it openly and acknowledged the large amount of immigrant families in our state and the contributions they make to the states economy.

Philanthropists will direct their donations to Grantmakers Concerned with Immigrants and Refugees, a network of foundations focused on immigration issues. The network established the California Immigrant Resilience Fund and received about $6 million in initial investments from Emerson Collective, Blue Shield of California Foundation, The California Endowment, The James Irvine Foundation, The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative and an anonymous donor, among others, according to Newsoms office.

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.

The Resilience Fund will provide immediate relief to some of our most vulnerable neighbors right now, while building long-term support for Californias families and communities in the future, Daranee Petsod, president of Grantmakers Concerned with Immigrants and Refugees, said in a statement Wednesday.

Individuals can apply starting next month.

Other donors include: the California Wellness Foundation; Sunlight Giving; the Evelyn and Walter Haas, Jr. Fund; the Marin Community Foundation; the Silicon Valley Community Foundation; and the Akonadi Foundation.

The social and economic vitality of California owes in large measure to the steady flow of immigration into our state, Dr. Thomas Peters, president and CEO of the Marin Community Foundation, said in a statement. Now in this hour of extreme need, surely it is time to reciprocate the level of support, care, and contribution these new residents have always brought.

Tatiana Sanchez and Alexei Koseff are San Francisco Chronicle staff writers. Email: tatiana.sanchez@sfchronicle.com, alexei.koseff@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @TatianaYSanchez @akoseff
COLLINSVILLE  During the COVID-19 pandemic, the Collinsville Food Pantry (CFP) has had to adapt to stay open, but its mission is more important than ever.

The pantry, located at 201 E. Church St., has seen a huge increase in the number of clients since Governor J.B. Pritzkers stay-at-home executive order, which went into effect on March 17 and has been extended until at least April 30.

The pantry normally serves about 100 people per week, but during March, it served more than 770 people.

Typical operating hours for the pantry are 9-11 a.m. on Tuesday and Friday and 4-6 p.m. on Tuesday, but it is also providing emergency food throughout the week, by appointment only Tuesday through Friday.

We have a doorbell and if somebody rings it, we go and serve food, said Judy Grantham, fund development coordinator for the pantry. We will be here until the last person leaves.

We stay in close communication with the Madison County Health Department, which is how we are allowed to stay open. We are doing everything that they suggest and the minute they come up with something new, they contact our director (Angelica Lipham) and we implement it immediately.

The pantry is typically only to Collinsville residents but is currently providing food to anyone in need.

With unemployment surging due to layoffs and business closings related to the pandemic, many of the pantrys current clients have never visited a food pantry before.

Several pantries have closed, and we are still open, Grantham said. Weve had people from East St. Louis, Cahokia, OFallon, Granite City, Troy, Maryville and many other places. We will not deny anyone food but if the pantry in their area is still open, we will refer them to those pantries.

Previously, clients would sign into the pantry when they arrived and then they would enter the building and do their own food shopping.

Due to the coronavirus, pantry staff and volunteers now bag the groceries themselves, including dry goods, produce, bread, frozen meat, deli and milk.

The staff and volunteers take the food bags to the front door, where clients put them in a cart and take them to their car. Once the bags are unloaded in their trunk, they bring back the carts, which are disinfected.

Due to safety recommendations from the Madison Health Department, Collinsville Food Pantry is not accepting food donations from outside sources during the pandemic because of the potential risk of the virus living on the surface of donated goods.

Instead, it is getting all its food directly from suppliers or from local grocery stores, which follow stricter guidelines.

We have gone onto Facebook and several other ways that we communicate with folks, and we are asking for monetary donations instead of food, said Grantham, who picked up 50 gallons of milk from one local store on Tuesday.

The Society of St. Vincent de Paul in Collinsville previously delivered food orders from Collinsville Food Pantry to clients with disabilities or no transportation. This service has stopped during the pandemic, leaving numerous clients without a way to get food.

That means that other people have had to step up to provide delivery, and much of that task has fallen to pantry employees, including Grantham.

We had an 85-year-old woman crying on the other end of the phone because she wasnt getting her food delivered, so Im delivering to her, Grantham said. We had a single mother of nine and Im delivering to her.

When someone calls and says they are hungry, I feel like I have to go.

Grantham said the number of volunteers for the pantry has decreased during the pandemic due to the practice of social distancing and to prevent the spread of the virus. The number of potential volunteers has increased due to people having more time on their hands.

The pantry is running with no more than 10 people at any time.

We have our core volunteers, basically a skeleton crew, but that has been enough for us to serve the families that come for food, Grantham said. The director (Lipham), manager (Micaela Rodgriguez) and pantry coordinator (Tony Viviano) are the pantry every day making sure everything runs smoothly.

CFP is allowing patrons to visit the pantry only once a month instead of twice.

We want to make sure to prevent the spread of the virus and also make sure we have enough to help as many families as we can during these times, Grantham said.

To donate to CFP by PayPal, go to www.collinsvillefoodpantry.org or text Collinsville Cares to 44321.

More information is also available by visiting Collinsville Food Pantry on Facebook.
For a politician who claims to be a friend of small business, Manitoba Premier Brian Pallister isnt doing much to help the hundreds  perhaps thousands  of companies that may not make it through the COVID-19 crisis.

Hey there, time traveller!

This article was published 14/4/2020 (637 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

For a politician who claims to be a friend of small business, Manitoba Premier Brian Pallister isnt doing much to help the hundreds  perhaps thousands  of companies that may not make it through the COVID-19 crisis.

The premier appears to be doing everything he can to avoid providing small business with any meaningful financial assistance, even though thousands have been ordered by the province to close their doors.

Pallister continued to give lip service Monday to the importance of small business in Manitoba, describing the sector as "the backbone" of the economy.

During normal economic times, small business pays a large portion of the taxes governments use to fund front-line services, such as health care and education. Now, that sector is hurting. Government needs to step up and help small businesses remain solvent so they can bounce back once social-distancing measures are lifted, Pallister said.

So far, Premier Brian Pallister has only announced Manitoba plans to set up an information network to help businesses access federal government dollars. (Mikaela MacKenzie / Winnipeg Free Press)

It sounded like he was about to unveil a significant provincial aid package; instead, Pallister announced Manitoba plans to set up an information network to help businesses access federal government dollars.

What a disappointment  and a major fail for a premier who doesnt appear to understand the ramifications of allowing scores of small businesses to go bankrupt due to the novel coronavirus pandemic. Trying to take credit for a federal program will not help this sector avoid insolvency.

This isnt a normal economic downturn, where survival of the fittest rules the day. In many cases, businesses  including restaurants, bars, shoe stores and musical instrument stores  are forbidden, under provincial law, from opening their doors. The best many can do is sell products online, or through curbside pickup.

The province has issued a schedule that identifies which categories of companies can stay open. Its an arbitrary list to some degree. It allows, for example, travel agencies and car rental companies to open (hardly "critical" services), but not clothing or flower shops.

Deciding which businesses can operate during a pandemic is no easy feat (especially when government has to make hundreds of critical decisions every week). We can cut policy makers some slack when assessing the quality of their decisions during this extraordinary period.

Many businesses are forbidden, under provincial law, from opening their doors. (Jesse Boily / Winnipeg Free Press files)

Pallisters failure to provide small business with any meaningful financial assistance, however, is a gargantuan public policy error.

Governments have no choice but to enforce social-distancing measures. Its a matter of life and death. We cant have people congregating in bars and restaurants, or hanging out in large numbers anywhere. Only the most essential services should be open to the public.

Those measures are paying off: Manitobas infection levels are relatively low and the number of COVID-19 patients requiring hospitalization has remained below 12 most days. There has been tremendous buy-in from Manitobans.

Meanwhile, small businesses, particularly those forced by law to close, are paying a disproportionate price.

There is financial aid for most individuals who lose their jobs, including the Canada Emergency Response Benefit (which provides $2,000 a month to people who can no longer work), but government help for small business is spotty.

Stay informed The latest updates on the novel coronavirus and COVID-19 delivered to your inbox every weeknight. Sign Up I agree to the Terms and Conditions, Cookie and Privacy Policies, and CASL agreement.

Signs like this one at Corydon Avenue shop Riley Grae are a regular sight throughout the province. (Jesse Boily / Winnipeg Free Press files)

The federal wage subsidy will help some companies; however, its been documented a large percentage either dont qualify or wont benefit because they have almost no revenue.

A Canadian Federation of Independent Business member survey shows 32 per cent of small businesses in Manitoba say they wont benefit from the wage subsidy. Another 24 per cent said they dont know if the subsidy will help. Many dont qualify because they dont meet the revenue-drop criteria. Others have already shut their doors.

When a company has zero revenue, a wage subsidy doesnt help. Businesses still have to pay rent, utilities, insurance and other fixed costs. Many wont survive an extended, government-mandated shutdown.

If government is going to force companies to close, it has a moral obligation to compensate them. Provinces such as Saskatchewan are providing at least some cash support.

The Manitoba premiers failure to do so is negligent and shows extremely poor judgement.

tom.brodbeck@freepress.mb.ca
BAKU, Azerbaijan, Apr.15

By Nargiz Sadikhova - Trend:

Kazakhstans Agriculture Ministry lifted restrictions on the export of onions, cabbage and carrots, Trend reports with reference to Kazakhstans Atameken Chamber of Entrepreneurship.

Earlier this year, the ministry introduced restrictions on the export of some agricultural goods in the form of complete prohibition or export on quotas (quantitative restrictions). Thus, the export of onions was prohibited completely, whereas the export of cabbage and carrots was allowed on quotas.

However, due to the numerous inquiries of the countrys business and negotiations held, the ministry made the decision to lift the restrictions on the export of these vegetables.

The corresponding decree enters into force since the day of its registration (Apr. 15) and is relevant till Sept. 1, 2020.

On March 15, 2020, Kazakhstans President Kassym Jomart Tokayev signed a decree introducing an emergency state in Kazakhstan due to the coronavirus outbreak, which came in force from 08:00 (GMT +6) on March 16 and was to last till 08:00 April 15, 2020.

On Apr. 14, 2020 by a decree of Kazakhstan's president the emergency state period in Kazakhstan was extended till May 1, 2020.

The total number of confirmed coronavirus cases in Kazakhstan has reached 1,290. The first two cases of coronavirus infection were detected in Kazakhstan among those who arrived in Almaty city from Germany on March 13, 2020.

---

Follow the author on twitter: @nargiz_sadikh
David Thomson, working and watching his way through quarantine. (Lucy Gray )

The Times asked authors to track what they do in isolation. David Thomson, the renowned film critic and author, binge-watches "Ozark," recommends "the surefire bliss of Jacques Demy" and laments that"Paris, Texas" just doesn't hold up.





Tuesday, March 31





Ozark

You can say Ozark is a modern noir about a financial advisor, Marty Byrde, who gets caught up in Mexican cartel slaughter and who, with his wife, Wendy, packs the walls of their Missouri house with the immense insulation of cash money. So it is suspenseful and lethal. But its also a portrait of a model family (they have two teenage kids) methodically ruined by the compromises in what they are doing.

I recommend the show via email to my grandson, who is doing Media at the University of Bristol in England. He says, OK, granddad, but he has trouble swallowing Jason Bateman as Marty just because as a child he grew up on Bateman in Arrested Development. I tell him dont forget that Bateman is a producer on Ozark as well as the director of several episodes. Plus, doesnt calling his character Marty Byrde invoke a stalwart figure in a lighter genre, as if to say imagine the man in the sitcom plunged into a darker ordeal? OK, granddad.

Laura Linney, Felix Solis, and Jason Bateman in season 3 of "Ozark" on Netflix. (Netflix)

Today we do episodes 9 and 10 of season 3. The finale is breathtaking, magnificent. I have to say that the praise heaped on the lugubrious Irishman is the more bewildering when one realizes how close Ozark has come to being the great American novel of this moment.

Cant wait for season 4, even if one memorable character has been eliminated (no spoiler). But between now and 4 the larger ordeal could take over. OK, granddad.

Wednesday







We watch Godards Pierrot le Fou in the evening (after the soup; it was good). This has always been one of my favorite films (I saw it four times in a week back in 1965). Lucy has been wary of it until now, but she finds she likes it; shell include it in her film clubs. They used to meet in person, but now theyll have a chat room.

Story continues

Jean-Paul Belmondo and Anna Karina in Jean-Luc Godard's "Pierrot Le Fou." (Canal Plus)

Pierrot is another marriage coming apart (Godard and Anna Karina) and maybe the most emotional film ever made by that chilly guy. He was never the same after he and Anna split, and Pierrot is their rueful parting. Its the story of an outlaw couple who quit Paris (and his family) and plunge into summer and the south of France. In color by Raoul Coutard, with music by Antoine Duhamel. Its on the Criterion channel, the Gideon Bible of this survivalist season.

Thursday







Friday





,

Stanley Kubrick's "The Shining," a fun movie about social distancing. (Warner Bros. / LACMA)

The obituary has Dinnys cool touch and includes the observation that just before he went into his last coma John was asking the doctors in Paris about his blood oxygen levels. Grace under pressure. That evening by rights we should have seen The Shining (which Dinny scripted for Kubrick), but Lucy tells me no, because I watch that film too often. She has a point: Jack Torrance at the Overlook Hotel is a warning on social distancing. Some people have been alone most of their lives. No one had to teach Donald Trump about getting self-isolated.

Saturday







But sometimes the films you loved once are not quite the way you remember them. In the evening we watch Paris, Texas from 1984. I loved it so much then: with its desert America; with Harry Dean Stanton as the unexplained vagrant, trudging on without a destination; and with Nastassja Kinski as the young wife he abandoned years ago.

Harry Dean Stanton in "Paris, Texas." (Criterion)

Alas, it seems stranded now, rather becalmed in its pretty photography, yet so neglecting its family situation that the picture feels like a complacent dream. Kinski is still very good and needy. Hunter Carson is the heart of the story as their 8-year-old son. But Harry Dean is not quite good enough. He was a kind man and often unique in supporting roles. He said he had waited all his life for a central part like Paris, Texas, but I think an evasive script left him overawed or uneasy. I cant believe that he and Kinski were married.

Anxiety builds: is the edifice of opinion unsound? OK, grandson. A few weeks ago I watched Antonionis LAvventura, a landmark we said in 1960, but dismayingly prim now, with the inescapable discovery that the radiant Monica Vitti could not act very well.

So in alarm Im going straight to the surefire bliss of Jacques Demy  Lola, Bay of Angels, Umbrellas of Cherbourg. God help us if they dont stand up. Theres only white bean soup after that  or starting Ozark again.




Barclays, HSBC, Lloyds Banking Group and Royal Bank of Scotland are all working on the government's coronavirus business interruption loan scheme. (STAFF/AFP via Getty Images)

Banks are likely to suffer losses as a result of the COVID-19 economic slump and will not profit from a government-backed loan scheme, according to the head of an industry group.

Stephen Jones, chief executive of UK Finance, told MPs on Wednesday: I find it very hard to believe that the banks will profit from this crisis. I think its a question of how significant the losses will be.

Jones, who was appearing remotely in front of parliaments Treasury Select Committee, made the comment in response to a question about whether High Street bankss central role in the government response to the crisis would allow them to profit from the disaster.

High Street banks have been called upon by the government to extend coronavirus business interruption loans (CBILs), state-backed loans to support small and medium-sized businesses. The government has agreed to cover 80% of any losses made on these loans.

READ MORE: Coronavirus: Just 1bn of promised government loans reach small businesses

Even given the government protection, Jones said banks were unlikely to make a net profit on the programme given the outlook for the UK economy. He pointed to the Office for Budget Responsibilitys modelling this week which suggested UK GDP could collapse by 35% by June and 2m more people could be out of work.

Not all businesses will survive this crisis, Jones said. There were businesses that went into this crisis that were not strong. In a normal year over the last 5 years around 12% of all businesses fail and are wound up.

Jones also said banks wouldnt take advantage of distressed businesses in this crisis, as RBS was accused of doing during the 2008 financial crisis.

I do think that the banking sector recognises that it needs to be part of the transmission mechanism for the solution in this crisis, Jones said, adding that there was an opportunity to really make good some of the ills of the past.

Bank of America logo seen in Midtown Manhattan. (Alex Tai/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images)

Jones comments came as a string of US lenders warned of pain ahead. Bank of America (BAC) said in quarterly results on Wednesday its provision for credit losses had jumped to $4.76bn, the largest amount since 2010. Goldman Sachs (GS) also more than quadrupled provisions for credit losses to $937m as it posted a fall in quarterly profits. And Citigroups (C) first quarter profit slumped by 46% as it set aside $4.9bn to cover likely loan losses. Stock in all three banks was trading lower on Wednesday.

Story continues

Earlier in the day, figures from UK Finance showed that UK banks have now extended 1.1bn worth of government-backed loans to over 6,000 small and medium sized companies. Business groups said more needs to be done to get money to firms faster to prevent a cash crunch at the end of the month.

That number is a number we would like to see bigger, Jones told MPs, referencing the lending numbers. Its a number we are working extremely hard to increase.

Jones said the industry was working 7 days a week, 24/7 to respond to the crisis, with thousands working over the Easter weekend. However, banks are facing an average absentee rate of 30% due to COVID-19 and have been overwhelmed by applications for support.

Jones added that banks still had to do credit assessments on businesses and not all would qualify for support.

Ultimately banks are lending depositors money, he said. They cant lend to businesses they perceive to be likely to fail through the crisis.
President Trump said during the coronavirus briefing on Tuesday that individual governors would decide when to reopen their respective state economies.

What he's saying: "I will be speaking to all 50 governors very shortly," Trump said. "And I will then be authorizing each individual governor of each individual state to implement a reopening, a very powerful reopening plan of their state at a time and in a manner as most appropriate."

"The governors will be very, very respectful of the presidency. ... You can talk about constitution. You can talk about federalism. You can talk about whatever you want. But the best way, I am talking now from a managerial standpoint, to let individual governors run individual states and come to us if they have difficulty and we will help them."

Our thought bubble, per Axios' Margaret Talev: Trump appears to be walking back his Monday statement, when said he would force governors to reopen quickly during the coronavirus crisis because, as president, his "authority is total"  sparking backlash from several governors.

Of note: The state governors are independent of the president. The 10th Amendment to the Constitution gives states "police powers" to regulate behavior during a public health crisis.

Editor's note: This article has been updated with new details throughout.
Democrats In Congress Question Trump's 'Heavy-Handed' Approach To Kosovo

By RFE/RL's Balkan Service April 14, 2020

Two Democratic U.S. lawmakers have expressed concern to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo about what they say is a "heavy-handed approach" by the Trump administration toward Kosovo's government.

At the same time, the lawmakers say, "U.S. public pressure on Serbia appears to have been dropped."

The lawmakers called on President Donald Trump's administration to continue U.S. diplomatic efforts to help "resolve the Kosovo-Serbia conflict in a way that's fair to both countries and consistent with U.S. law and long-standing policy."

The concerns were sent in a letter to Pompeo on April 13 by Representative Eliot Engel, a Democrat who chairs the House Foreign Affairs Committee, and Senator Bob Menendez, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

"The Trump administration's lack of balance between Belgrade and Pristina is taking place in the context of Serbia expanding ties with Moscow and increasing imports of Russian armaments," the letter says.

The Democratic lawmakers said Belgrade's weapons purchases from Russia "require the administration to impose sanctions on Serbia" under legislation "passed by Congress in the aftermath of Russia's interference in the 2016 [U.S.] elections."

"Please inform us why the administration has neither imposed those sanctions nor actively pressured Serbia to end its global" efforts against the recognition of Kosovo's independence, the letter says.

Kosovo was an autonomous province of Serbia when war broke out there in the late 1990s between ethnic Albanian separatists and Belgrade's security forces.

NATO launched air strikes against Serbia in 1999 in response to Belgrade's widespread crackdown against ethnic Albanian Kosovars and a United Nations' administration was set up in Pristina after the NATO campaign.

Since 2008, when Pristina unilaterally declared independence from Serbia, Kosovo has received recognition from more than 100 countries.

But Belgrade, which does not recognize Kosovo's independence, has launched counterefforts to try to convince countries to drop their recognition.

Source: https://www.rferl.org/a/democrats-in- congress-question-trump-s-heavy-handed- approach-to-kosovo/30552100.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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FAIRFIELD  After complaints that his tweet was racially insensitive, the vice chairman of the Fairfield Republican Town Committee said his comment about Elisabeth Warren, a U.S. senator and former presidential candidate, was meant to be tongue in cheek.

On Wednesday morning, Alex Plitsas retweeted a tweet from CNBC Now about Warren endorsing Democratic presidential candidate and former Vice President Joe Biden, commenting The Last of the Mohicans.

The comment, according to Plitsas, would be racist if she actually was Native American. He said the tweet was making fun of her false claims that she was part of that demographic.

Im sorry if (people) were offended, Plitsas said. Theres no harm meant by it.

Warren is the most recent major democratic candidate to back Biden. Once a front runner, she dropped out of the race after Super Tuesday, when she came in third place in her home state on Massachusetts.

Questions about the senators heritage first came into public view in 2012, during her campaign for the Senate seat, when it was revealed she claimed to be part Cherokee.

Since then, President Donald Trump has nicknamed her Pocahontas, a racial slur meant to poke fun at the confusion surrounding her heritage.

Democratic Town Committee Chairman Steve Sheinberg said the DTC was extremely disappointed and saddened that the RTC vice chair, and a member of Fairfields Emergency Management Team, would post a racist, culturally insensitive comment such as that.

While President Trump has long mocked Elizabeth Warren with racist slurs, we expect better from our Republican counterparts here in Fairfield, Sheinberg said. Civil political discourse has no room for name-calling that mocks Native American identity.

Sheinberg said he hoped Plitsas would delete the post and apologize for it.

Plitsas, however, said he would not be deleting the tweet.
Bexar County Sheriff's Office

A 23-year-old man was arrested after authorities said he sexually assaulted a woman at gunpoint, according to an arrest affidavit said.

The 29-year-old woman was walking her dog on April 11, when Paul Lawrence Campbell III approached her, the affidavit said. The two knew each other from a social media website, according to police.
The number of coronavirus cases in the country breached the 11,000-mark on Wednesday. The Ministry of Health updated Indias Covid-19 tally to 11,439. The figure includes 9,756 active cases, 1,306 cured or discharged patients and 377 fatalities.

Maharashtra accounts for a massive chunk of the countrys coronavirus cases with over 3,000 cases followed by Delhi which has close 1,600 coronavirus cases.

When it comes to Covid-19 fatalities, nearly half of the total 377 deaths in the country come from Maharashtra which has reported 178 Covid-19 deaths as per health ministrys data.

Of Maharashtras 178 deaths, 112 come from Mumbai alone and 35 from Pune, as mentioned on state Covid-19 monitoring dashboard.

Madhya Pradesh has the second-highest coronavirus death toll in the country with 50 fatalities. As per the state health department bulletin released on Tuesday night, Indore has witnessed the maximum Covid-19 fatalities in the state with 37 people who have succumbed to death.

With as many as 30 coronavirus fatalities, the national capital has the third-highest number of Covid-19 deaths in the country.

Together these four Indian cities, Mumbai (112), Pune (35), Delhi (30) and Indore (37), account for more than 50% - 57% to be precise - of the countrys coronavirus death toll with nearly 214 Covid-19 fatalities.

The 21-day nationwide coronavirus lockdown was further extended on Tuesday by Prime Minister Narendra Modi. The lockdown will now come to an end of May 3.

The government on Wednesday issued revised guidelines that are to be followed in the extended phase of the lockdown.
An 11-week-old boy is in hospital battling coronavirus, the baby's mother has revealed.

Ares Banister has tested positive for the deadly virus and is currently in hospital at Leicester Royal Infirmary.

He was admitted to the hospital on Monday with a high temperature and diagnosed with coronavirus the following day, the BBC reports.

His mother Jodie Banister, 30, from Leicester, said Ares's condition 'seems to have settled', but told the BBC she felt 'fear and panic' after he was diagnosed with Covid-19.

Ares Banister (pictured) has tested positive for the deadly virus and is currently in hospital at Leicester Royal Infirmary, his mother Jodie Banister said in a post on Facebook

Ares (pictured) was admitted to the hospital on Monday with a high temperature and diagnosed with coronavirus the following day, the BBC reports

His mother Jodie Banister (pictured left), 30, from Leicester, said Ares's condition 'seems to have settled', but told the BBC she felt 'fear and panic' after he was diagnosed with Covid-19

Ms Banister, who has three other children, told the BBC: 'We just thought, no way on earth it would be Covid.

'(We felt) fear and panic. I just sat there and cried. It was horrendous.

'The first thing you automatically think it that he's going to die. I was so scared.'

In a post on Facebook, Ms Banister urged non-key workers to stay at home.

She said in the post: 'So while your all still going out and about without a care in the world, going to the supermarket every day for those absolute essentials you just had to have and going out for your three hour long walks that you've never done before in your lives our 11-week-old baby has just tested positive for COVID19.

In a post on Facebook, Ms Banister urged non-key workers to stay at home to protect those, like her husband, who still need to go to work. Pictured: Leicester Royal Infirmary, where baby Ares is currently in hospital

'We haven't been out for weeks but unfortunately Christian still has to go to work to make sure Tesco has food on the shelves ready for you all to ransack and hoard.

'If you aren't a key worker please stay at home!!!!!

'Please please start listening because our entire world has just been tipped upside down!!!'

Today, Department of Health officials announced 761 new coronavirus deaths, taking the UK total to 12,868.

Among those confirmed deaths today was a 20-year-old with no known underlying conditions.

England's Chief Medical Officer Professor Chris Whitty tonight said believed the infection rate was beginning to flatten

A five-year-old child is believed to be Britain's youngest coronavirus victim.

Hilda Churchill, 108, who survived two world wars and the Spanish flu, is believed to be the oldest Briton to die from the virus.

The total number of confirmed cases of coronavirus in the UK moved up to 98,476 today.

But England's Chief Medical Officer Professor Chris Whitty tonight sparked hope for millions of Britons that there was light at the end of the tunnel, saying: 'We do all think this has flattened out.' But he added: 'We can't be sure we're past the peak.'

In Downing Street's press conference, Professor Whitty said deaths will spike for a 'short while' and he expects the daily fatality count to go up tomorrow after a four-day Easter weekend.
The benefits of moving your IT workload into the cloud are evident.

Cloud integration can make day-to-day processes more efficient and reduce operational costs, in addition to enhancing organisational mobility, improving collaboration, and bolstering data security and prospects for data recovery.

The best approach

Many companies eagerly adopt the cloud, but a lack of proper planning can land them in trouble.

Additionally, while some may opt to do the integration themselves, this process could take months and carries great risk.

If a team lacks the required experience they could make mistakes which lead to security breaches, poor workload performance and broader negative impacts.

Using an expert consultant may be a better route. However, due consideration should be given to the costs and time frame of such an endeavour.

The smartest and quickest route to the cloud is through a production- ready cloud platform.

As an Azure Expert MSP Partner, Logicalis has vast experience and all the resources needed to deploy your business into the cloud quickly and effectively.

The Logicalis PRCP sits within Microsoft Azure and offers a pre-configured environment with all con figuration, risk and security issues addressed.

Microsoft Azure Expert MSP status

Logicalis was recently awarded Microsoft Azure Expert Managed Services Provider (MSP) Status, one of only 65 companies in the world to be certified.

Chief Technology Officer for Logicalis South Africa Morne Laubscher explained how achieving this certification came to be.

In the last year we went through a very serious audit with an external auditing firm, that looks at your people, processes and technology and then signs off on your ability to provide managed services in the Microsoft Azure space, Laubscher said.

Laubscher noted that in South Africa there is only a handful of Expert MSPs, with Logicalis being the first systems integrator in the region that has feet on the ground.

Underestimating costs

Laubscher said that where many companies often missed the target in their digitalisation journey is in underestimating the complete cost of acquiring and maintaining cloud capability.

After having accurately established data centre and service infrastructure requirements, companies neglect the costs of governance and security controls and what is required from a network construct perspective.

This could run up bills with workloads that arent adequately managed or properly designed.

What we are seeing in the industry is that in many cases organisations move back out of the cloud as a result, Laubscher said.

Guardrail into the cloud

The Logicalis Production Ready Cloud Platform (PRCP) was built by a centre of excellence in Australia and is now being deployed around the globe.

Weve built a methodology, a piece of IP that we call our Production Ready Cloud Platforming engagement  our guardrail into the cloud, Laubscher said.

Laubscher explained that Logicalis uses a thorough consultative process to establish not only the infrastructure requirements of the customer, but also their business, security and governance requirements.

We then are able to give them a finite cost within a 3% level of accuracy, he stated.

We automate the deployment and streamline your ability to move into the cloud quickly and efficiently, Laubscher said.

We round it off with a very comprehensive managed services offering, which has us not only monitor and support the environment, but also look at things like cost and capacity management.

The Logicalis South Africa PRCP delivers these five key benefits:

Design framework

Security and compliance

Governance

Ongoing maintenance

Availability

Why choose Logicalis

As a global solutions integrator with a local presence, Logicalis possesses one key differentiating attribute to regional competitors: Experience from abroad.

Weve got strategic relationships with key vendors across the globe. For instance, we are a Cisco Global Gold Partner, which will make us one of only two in South Africa, Laubscher said.

Its 140 local service staff members also work with international customers, bringing a wealth of experience into the South African landscape.

Click here to visit the Logicalis website and get your business started on its journey into the cloud.
WILMETTE, IL  A North Shore lingerie shop has provided hundreds of nurses with personalized gifts of comfortable sleepwear to thank them for their work on the front lines of the coronavirus pandemic.

Larisa Olson, owner of Chantilly Lace, 1515 Sheridan Road in Wilmette, responded to the developing COVID-19 crisis by delivering items from the inventory of nightwear at her Plaza del Lago shop to nurses she knew.

Once her customers got wind of the effort, dubbed the "Chantilly Lace Comfort Project," they wanted to help out.

"Though this is a very trying time for me as a business owner, I am most definitely enjoying the Comfort Project," Olson said. "It's a time when Ive been able to source my energy to help others [and] get the customers involved [and] supporting the business in a way that's meaningful to them."

As of Tuesday, the community had provided nearly $16,000 to sponsor 315 gift bags, with 290 already delivered to nurses and nursing assistants at Swedish Hospital, Evanston Hospital, Glenbrook Hospital and Saint Francis. Olson said the focus of the project would be on Swedish, Glenbrook and Saint Francis hospitals due to how hard they have been hit by the virus.

Don't miss updates about precautions in the Wilmette area as they are announced. Sign up for Wilmette-Kenilworth Patch news alerts and newsletters. [RECIRC]

Larisa Olson, owner of Chantilly Lace in Wilmette, has delivered gift bags to 290 nurses and certified nursing assistants at Chicago and North Shore hospitals as of April 14 as part of the Chantilly Lace Comfort Project. (Courtesy Larisa Olson)

The recipient nurses are selected by their respective department supervisors, who have allowed the nurses to come down one at a time to pick up their gifts, she said. Each bag contains a personalized note, along with gifts provided at cost by Chantilly Lace or at a workable rate by the Canadian company Montelle Intimates.



A trio of other lingerie shops around North America have subsequently joined as a way to give back to their communities and keep their businesses afloat at the same time, Olson told Patch. They include A La Mode Intimates in Annapolis, Maryland, Lace & Day in Buffalo, New York, and Bliss Beneath in Barrie, Ontario, she said.

Story continues

The cost is $50 per gift bag to sponsor a nurse gift. Upgraded donations and gift certificates are also available.

"Our revenue is much lower than it would normally be, I'm grateful to scrape by till we can get back to normal," Olson told Patch. "For now, the nurses and CNAs absolutely love the gifts. Brings smiles to their faces. And that's the point. So it's awesome."



This article originally appeared on the Wilmette-Kenilworth Patch
Prime Minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc grants an interview on the outcomes of the Special ASEAN and ASEAN 3 Summits on Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) (Photo: VNA)

Prime Minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc, as the Chairman of ASEAN in 2020, chaired the Special ASEAN and ASEAN 3 Summits on Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) in the form of video conference on April 14.

On this occasion, the PM has granted an interview on the outcomes of these two important events.

Asked about the challenges that the COVID-19 pandemic has posed to ASEAN in general and the Vietnam ASEAN Chairmanship Year 2020 in particular, PM Phuc stressed that the COVID-19 pandemic is the greatest challenge to humankind and an unprecedented global crisis since after the Second World War, and also the biggest challenge to the ASEAN during its more than half a century history of formation and development. After only over three months, the COVID-19 pandemic has caused devastating losses of human health and life as well as social and economic aspects, which are predicted to far surpass the impact of the 1997 financial crisis in Asia or the global crisis in 2008-2009, he said.

He noted that at this moment, all countries in the ASEAN region have had COVID-19 infections with more than 18,000 cases and over 740 deaths.

Not only causing great human loss, the pandemic also seriously affected all aspects of socio-economic life in ASEAN countries and cooperation and exchange activities among ASEAN members as well as between ASEAN and its partners. All ASEAN countries are forecast to suffer from strong decrease in growth, and some will even have negative growth. Regarding ASEAN cooperation, statistics of the ASEAN Secretariat showed more than 200 meetings of the bloc had to be postponed or cancelled, PM Phuc said.

He went on to say that right from the beginning of this year, as Chair of ASEAN, Vietnam, together with other member countries, has actively and urgently made preparations for and got ready to organize activities during the ASEAN Chairmanship Year 2020. However, with the sudden outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic and its unprecedented impacts on all fields, we had to make necessary adjustments to the plans for those activities.

According to the PM, with the motto of putting peoples health first, maintaining connectivity and close coordination in preventing and fighting the epidemic, ASEAN member countries have organised many important ministerial-level meetings in the form of video conference, as well as meetings with partners such as China, the EU, the US and important international organisations like the WHO to share experience and help for the effective response to the epidemic. He added that at the same time, we continue to consider holding important ASEAN events when the epidemic is put under control.

PM Phuc highlighted the quickly response of ASEAN member nations to the COVID-19 pandemic since its outbreak, saying that they have enhanced cohesion in policy and action coordination to effectively contain the spread of the disease.

Vietnam early issued an ASEAN Chair's Statement on the bloc's collective response to COVID-19 (on February 14) and held many important meetings among ASEAN member states and between the group with its partners to ensure concerted coordination in epidemic prevention, and to share experience and support to effectively cope with the pandemic, he said.

The PM called for closer cooperation and solidarity among ASEAN countries to fight the pandemic, saying that if we unite, no danger can subdue us.

I think that individual efforts need to be reunited, becoming a joint action of the ASEAN Community, he stressed.

Timely response and close coordination in policy and action among the 10 ASEAN member countries will be the decisive factor in containing the epidemic, he said.

Apart from controlling the disease, ASEAN also needs to pay special attention to minimizing socio-economic impacts caused by the pandemic, PM Phuc said.

It is necessary to take people as the centre and ensure social security in the region, leaving no one behind, he noted.

In the immediate future, what needs to be done is to provide timely support to disadvantaged groups and financial and economic support packages for businesses to help them stabilise their production and business, and maintain trade activities, he went on.

In the long run, each ASEAN member nation and the whole Community need to enhance their resilience and preparedness for future shocks, PM Phuc said, adding that promoting connection and intertwined interests, and reducing development gap among member would be the long-term solutions to challenges similar to COVID-19.

PM Phuc expressed his belief that ASEAN will soon overcome the pandemic which he said will create a motivation for member nations to grow stronger together.

PM Phuc underlined that the COVID-19 pandemic has proven that the theme Cohesive and Responsive that Vietnam has chosen for its ASEAN Chairmanship Year 2020 is timely and completely right. Efforts by Vietnam as ASEAN Chair over the past time have reflected the spirit of the theme and that Vietnam has really turned words into specific actions.

Joining hands in stamping out COVID-19 is the top priority of ASEAN. The way we are working together to tackle the pandemic will affirm the mettle and strength of the grouping, he said.

Assuming the ASEAN Chairmanship in this especially hard time, Vietnam is deeply aware of its responsibility and resolved to stand side by side with other member countries to sail over the crisis. Right after the pandemic broke out, Vietnam has proactively taken swift actions, led and coordinated joint efforts of ASEAN, while cooperating with partners in containing and stemming the spread of the disease and mitigating its socio-economic impacts.

The PM mentioned some specific actions, first of all the early issue of the Statement of the ASEAN Chair on the groupings collective response to COVID-19 in a timely manner, warning about the pandemic threat at an early date, calling for regional and international cooperation, emphasizing the spirit of intra-bloc solidarity and committing to joining hands in containing and preventing the spread of the disease, thus ensuring a safe life for the public.

Secondly, Vietnam has flexibly pushed for the organisation of ASEAN meetings in the videoconferencing format. The solution helps the group maintain connectivity, close and comprehensive coordination, and prompt response to COVID-19. The meetings focused on three action orientations  information and experience sharing, policy and action coordination.

Thirdly, as ASEAN Chair, Vietnam have made efforts to enhance cooperation with other countries and international organisations in order to raise the efficiency of the fight against the pandemic, coordinated and joined many important meetings with such partners as China, the EU, the US, the WHO and the online G20 Summit to discuss cooperation for the early control of the epidemic.

Such tireless efforts of Vietnam as Chair of ASEAN have brought about initial results in pandemic prevention and control, PM Phuc said, expressing his belief that together with countries and partners in and outside ASEAN, Vietnams efforts will contribute to duplicating good experience and lessons so that the region and the world soon stamp out the pandemic.
Three political parties and three politicians have issued a statement stating that they dont recognize the elections held in Artsakh (Nagorno-Karabakh).

The statement reads as follows:

Artsakh held elections in two rounds amid the coronavirus pandemic, putting the lives and health of citizens and the efficiency of the army at risk.

We dont recognize the elections since they contradict national unity and the global efforts against the pandemic.

At the same time, the elections were held with massive and systemic violations.

The so-called elections helped regenerate the mafia authorities of Stepanakert which will continue to make the people suffer, exploit natural resources and plunder the economy.

With the permission of Yerevan, the mafia of Stepanakert will continue its plan to alienate Artsakh from Armenia and make it become a country like Abkhazia, and when the time comes, it will be instructed to become a foothold that will be used against Armenia.

Thus, overthrowing the mafia in Stepanakert and eliminating the obstacles for de jure unification of Artsakh with Armenia will become the imperative of the nation after the pandemic.

Democratic Homeland Party

European Party of Armenia

Sasna Tsrer Pan-Armenian Movement

Ara Papyan

Albert Baghdasaryan

Arkady Vardanyan
15 April 2020

Keller Group plc

Annual Report and Financial Statements for the year ended 31 December 2019 and Notice of 2020 Annual General Meeting

Keller Group plc, the world's largest geotechnical specialist contractor, announces that its Annual General Meeting will be held at 11.00am on Thursday21 May 2020 at the offices of DLA Piper UK LLP, 160 Aldersgate Street, London EC1A 4HT.

In connection with this, the following documents have been posted or made available to shareholders:

 Annual Report and Accounts for the year ended 31 December 2019 ("Annual Report")

 Notice of Annual General Meeting

 Proxy Form (in the case of shareholders on the register of members)

Copies of these documents have been submitted to the Financial Conduct Authority's Electronic Submission System.

Copies of the Annual Report and Notice of Annual General Meeting are now available to view on the Company's corporate website at www.keller.com.

In accordance with DTR 6.3.5, this announcement contains information in the attached Appendix of the principal risk factors, the directors' responsibility statement and a note to the accounts on related party transactions. This information has been extracted in full unedited text from the Annual Report 2019. References to page numbers and notes in the Appendix refer to those in the Annual Report 2019. A condensed set of financial statements was appended to Keller Group plc's preliminary results announcement issued on 3 March 2020.

For further information, please contact:

Keller Group plc www.keller.com

Kerry Porritt, Group Company Secretary and Legal Advisor 020 7616 7575

Notes to editors:

Keller is the world's largest geotechnical specialist contractor providing a wide portfolio of advanced foundation and ground improvement techniques used across the entire construction sector. With around 10,000 staff and operations across six continents, Keller tackles an unrivalled 7,000 projects every year, generating annual revenue of more than 2bn.

LEI number: 549300QO4MBL43UHSN10

Classification: 1.1

Appendix

Unedited extract from Annual Report 2019

Principal risks and uncertainties

The table below lists the principal risks and uncertainties as determined by the Board that may affect the group and highlights the mitigating actions that are being taken. The content of the table, however, is not intended to be an exhaustive list of all the risks and uncertainties that may arise.

Key: Strategy lever

1 Balanced portfolio

2 Engineered solutions

3 Operational excellence

4 Expertise and scale

Key: Movement in risk

Increased risk

Reduced risk

Constant risk

Link to viability

Financial risk Risk Potential impact Demonstrable mitigation Explanation of risk movement (since 2018) Inability to finance our business

Insufficient levels of funding, whether from operating cash flow or external financing facilities, that are necessary to support the business.

Link to strategic lever: 3, 4 A lack of available funds restricts investment in growth opportunities, whether through acquisition or innovation.

In an extreme circumstance, the lack of available funds could lead to a failure of the group to continue as a going concern. Mixture of long-term committed debt with varying maturity dates which comprise a 375m revolving credit facility with a maturity of November 2024 and a US private placement debt of $125m ($50m note maturing in 2021 and $75m note maturing in 2024).

Active and open communication with the revolving credit facility banking group ensures that it understands the group's financial performance and is supportive of funding requirements.

Strong free cash flow profile with the ability to turn off capital expenditure and reduce dividends.

Embedded procedures to monitor the effective management of cash and debt, including weekly cash reports and regular cash flow forecasting to ensure compliance with borrowing limits and lender covenants.

Culture focused on actively managing our working capital; the annual bonus plan is linked to executive remuneration through an operating cash flow metric.

Monitoring of and response to external factors that may affect funding availability; in anticipation of a less stable global economic environment, the Board announced in March 2018 reduced leverage guidance from 1.5x-2.0x to 1.0x-1.5x. Constant risk

Link to viability

Market risk Risk Potential impact Demonstrable mitigation Explanation of risk movement (since 2018) A rapid downturn in our markets

Inability to maintain a sustainable level of financial performance throughout the construction industry market cycle which grows more than many other industries during periods of economic expansion and falls more harder than many other industries when the economy contracts.

Link to strategic lever: 1, 2 Reduction in the demand for our products and services may lead to a significant deterioration in financial performance, including cash flow generation.

In an extreme circumstance, reduced cash flow generation could lead to a failure of the group to continue as a going concern. The diverse markets in which the group operates, both in terms of geography and market segment, provide protection to individual geographic or segment slowdowns.

Having strong local businesses with in-depth knowledge of the local markets enables early detection and response to market trends.

Leveraging the global scale of the group, talent and resources can be redeployed to other parts of the company during individual market slowdowns.

The diverse customer base, with no single customer more than 5% of group revenue, reduces the potential impact of individual customer failure caused by an economic downturn. Constant risk

Link to viability

Strategic risk Risk Potential impact Demonstrable mitigation Explanation of risk movement (since 2018) Failure to procure new contracts on satisfactory terms

Increasing competition, changing customer requirements or a loss of technological advantage results in a failure to continue to win and retain contracts on satisfactory terms and conditions in our existing and new target markets.

Link to strategic lever: 1, 2,3, 4 Failure to negotiate satisfactory and appropriate contractual terms may result in delays and disputes during project delivery, negatively impacting our relationships with our customers and the group's reputation for delivering quality products and solutions.

Inability to enter into commercially viable contracts may have a negative effect on the profitability of our projects and prevent the group from achieving its targets. A focus on understanding customers' requirements and competitors' capabilities.

Structured bid review processes in operation throughout the group with well-defined selection criteria that are designed to ensure we take on contracts only where we understand and can manage the risks involved.

The Project Lifecycle Management (PLM) Standard has introduced more rigour into how risks are considered during the opportunity, contract approval and project execution phases.

Sales training, which includes a focus on contractual and commercial terms. Constant risk Losing our market share

Inability to achieve sustainable growth, whether through acquisition, new products, new geographies or industry-specific solutions may jeopardise our position as the preferred international geotechnical specialist contractor.

Link to strategic lever: 1, 2 Delivering sustainable growth is a key component of our strategy. Failure to deliver on our key strategic objective may result in the loss of confidence and trust of our key stakeholders including investors, financial institutions and customers. A clear business strategy with defined short-, medium- and long-term objectives, which is monitored at local, divisional and group level.

Continued analysis of existing and target markets to ensure opportunities that they offer are understood.

An opportunities pipeline covering all sectors of the construction market.

A wide-ranging local branch network which facilitates customer relationships and helps secure repeat work.

Continually seeking to differentiate our offering through service quality, value for money and innovation.

Minimising the risk of acquisitions, including getting to know a target company in advance, often working in joint venture, to understand the operational and cultural differences and potential synergies. As well as undertaking these through due diligence and structured and carefully managed integration plans. Constant risk

Link to viability Ethical misconduct and non-compliance with regulations

Keller operates in many different jurisdictions and is subject to various rules, regulations and other legal requirements including those related to anti-bribery and anti-corruption. There is a risk that the group fails to maintain the required level of compliance.

Link to strategic lever: 3, 4 Non-compliance with relevant laws and regulations could lead to substantial damage to Keller's reputation and/or large financial penalties.

Losing the trust of our customers, suppliers and other stakeholders would have an adverse effect on our ability to deliver against our strategy and business objectives. A Code of Business Conduct that sets out minimum expectations for all colleagues in respect of ethics, integrity and regulatory requirements and is backed by a training programme to ensure that it is fully embedded across the group.

A clear and confidential externally run 'whistleblowing' facility encouraging employees to report any suspected misconduct.

An Ethics and Compliance Officer at every business unit who supports the ethics and compliance culture and ensures best practice developed by the group is communicated and embedded into local business practices.

Regular workshops across the group to ensure compliance risks are identified and addressed.

See page 37 for detailed mitigations of health and safety risks. Reduced risk

Link to viability



Strengthened communication of Keller's tone at the top and a renewed focus on risk management and internal control have decreased the exposure of this risk. Inability to maintain our technological advantage

Keller has a history of innovation that has given us a technological advantage which is recognised by our clients and competitors. Inability to maintain this advantage through the continued technological advancements in our equipment, products and solutions may impact our position in the market.

Link to strategic lever: 1, 2 Without a structured innovation approach, including sufficient investment, Keller may lose its completive advantage. The Keller Innovation Board works closely with business units, divisions and global product teams to ensure a structured approach to innovation is in place across the group.

The Keller Innovation Conference was an important milestone to help make existing innovation activities not only more transparent, but also more focused, coordinated and quicker to implement in the future.

KDAQ, a group-wide innovation project, will bring information together and make it accessible in one simple and concise platform. It will include all technical information from Keller and third-party sources at each stage of delivery, including data analysis and visualisations where possible, and it will also be BIM-compatible. New risk

Keller's ability to innovate is essential to its operating model. Changing environmental factors

Changes in environmental legislation and relevant standards that impact our product and service offerings and an increasingly active public response to environmental concerns in the sectors in which we operate.

Link to strategic lever: 3 Inability to achieve Keller's commitment to deliver solutions in an environmentally conscious manner may have a negative impact on our reputation, affect employee morale and lead to loss of confidence from our customers, suppliers and investors.

Product offerings become obsolete because they are no longer compliant with environmental standards. We may be required to remediate at our own cost to attain compliance. The group collaborates with the University of Surrey's Centre for Environment and Sustainability to apply sustainability best practice to all business functions.

A Sustainability Steering Group is responsible for integrating sustainability targets and measures into the group business plan to successfully drive changes important to the company.

Further details can be found in the sustainability report on pages 39 to 46. New risk

An increasingly active public response to environmental concerns in the sectors in which we operate.

Operational risk Risk Potential impact Demonstrable mitigation Explanation of risk movement (since 2018) Service or solutions failure

In designing a product or a solution for customers many factors need to be considered including client requirements, site and loading conditions and local constraints (eg neighbouring buildings, other underground structures). Inadequate design of a customer product and/or solution may lead to an inability to achieve the required standard.

Misinterpretation of client requirements or miscommunication of requirements by the client may lead to a poorly designed solution and consequently failure.

Link to strategic lever: 2, 4 Failure to meet quality standards could damage our reputation, result in regulatory action and legal liability, and impact financial performance.

The liability limitation period of our products is generally 12 years; consequently, a poorly designed product/solution could have an impact on our long-term profitability. Continuing to enhance our technological and operational capabilities through investment in our product teams, project managers and our engineering capabilities.

Employing geotechnical engineers that are focused purely on design.

The global product teams set standards, provide guidance and disseminates best practice across the organisation for our 10 key products.

We seek to agree liability limits in our contracts with customers.

Insurance solutions are in place to limit financial exposure of a potential customer claim. Constant risk

Link to viability Ineffective execution of our projects

Failure to manage our projects to ensure that they are delivered on time and to budget due to unforeseen ground and site conditions, weather-related delays, unavailability of key materials, workforce shortages or equipment breakdowns.

Link to strategic lever: 3, 4 Inability to successfully deliver projects in line with the agreed customer requirements may result in cost overruns, contractual disputes and reputational damage.

Ineffective project delivery may also expose the company to long-term obligations including legal action and additional costs to remedy solution failure. Ensuring we understand all of our risks through the bid appraisal process and applying rigorous policies and processes to manage and monitor contract performance.

Ensuring we have high-quality people delivering projects. Keller's Project Management Academy is designed to create project managers with a consistent skill set across the entire organisation. The Academy covers a broad range of topics including contract management, planning, risk assessment, change management, decision-making and finance.

The new KDAQ system will collect, process and visualise data from any equipment; enabling comparison of performance across sites using similar products, identification of areas of best practice and quickly raising awareness of where improvement is needed.

The PLM Standard introduces a consistent approach to project delivery with robust controls at every project phase.

A formal, structured approach to LEAN across the organisation is being embedded, which is improving processes and strengthening Keller's working culture. Constant risk

Link to viability Causing a serious injury or fatality to an employee or a member of the public

Failure to maintain high standards of health and safety, and an increase in serious injuries or fatalities leading to an erosion of trust of employees and potential clients.

Link to strategic lever: 3 Inability to maintain a positive health and safety culture may lead to damage to morale, an increase in employee turnover rates and a decrease in productivity.

Deterioration in health and safety performance may lead to loss of customer, supplier and partner confidence and damage to our reputation in an area that we regard as a top priority. A Board-led commitment to drive health and safety programmes and performance with a vision of zero harm.

An emphasis on safety leadership to ensure both HSEQ professionals and operational leaders drive implementation and sustainment of our safety standards through ongoing site presence, using safety tours, safety audits, safety action groups and mandatory employee training.

Ongoing improvement of existing HSEQ systems to identify and control known and emerging HSEQ risks, which conform to internal standards.

The new Incident Management Standard and incident management software will drive a robust and consistent management process across the organisation that ensures the cause of the incident is identified and actions are put in place to prevent recurrence. Constant risk

Link to viability Not having the right skills to deliver

Inability to attract and develop excellent people to create a high-quality, vibrant, diverse and flexible workforce.

Link to strategic lever: 2, 3, 4 Failure to maintain satisfactory performance in respect of our current projects and failure to deliver our strategy and business targets for growth. Continuing to invest in our people and organisation in line with the four pillars of the Keller People agenda as noted below.

Ensuring that the 'Right Organisation' is in place with people having clear accountabilities; each organisational unit is properly configured with a matrix of line management, functional support, and product expertise.

As industry leader, that Keller is made up of 'Great People' that are well trained, motivated and have opportunities to develop to their full potential. Project Managers and field employees receive comprehensive training programmes which cover a broad range of topics including contract management, planning, risk assessment, change management, decision?making and finance.

A strong focus on the 'Exceptional Performance' of employees in delivering commercial outcomes safely for Keller based upon project successes for our customers. Business leaders are incentivised to deliver their annual financial and safety commitments to the group.

The 'Keller Way' provides guidance to the company's employees and leaders to comply with local laws and work within Keller's values and Code of Business Conduct. Increased risk

We are seeing increased competition for skilled construction and engineering resources, in particular in our North American market. Loss of security of our data and systems

Information security and cyber threats are a concern across industries worldwide. The introduction of digital solutions such as InSite and KDAQ increases the group's reliance on IT and its inherent cyber risk exposure.

Link to strategic lever: 3, 4 A cyber security breach could result in leakage of proprietary information, operational disruptions, and loss of employee and customer data. A dedicated cyber security team has been established to monitor and respond to potential incidents.

Multi-factor authentication for all users prevents unauthorised access to Keller's networks and applications.

Advanced threat protection on all IT equipment delivers comprehensive, ongoing and real-time protection against viruses, malware and spyware.

A data protection framework ensures compliance with the General Data Protection Regulation. New risk

The introduction of digital solutions such as InSite and KDAQ increases the group's reliance on IT and its inherent cyber risk exposure.

Responsibility statement of the Directors in respect of the Annual Report and the financial statements

We confirm that to the best of our knowledge:

The financial statements, prepared in accordance with the applicable set of accounting standards, give a true and fair view of the assets, liabilities, financial position and profit or loss of the Company and the undertakings included in the consolidation as a whole; and

The Strategic report and Directors' report, including content contained by reference, includes a fair review of the development and performance of the business and the position and performance of the company and the undertakings included in the consolidation taken as a whole, together with a description of the principal risks and uncertainties that they face.

The Board confirms that the Annual Report and Accounts, taken as a whole, is fair, balanced and understandable and provides the information necessary for shareholders to assess the group's position and performance, business model and strategy.

27 Related party transactions

Transactions between the parent, its subsidiaries and joint operations, which are related parties, have been eliminated on consolidation. Other related party transactions are disclosed below:



Compensation of key management personnel

The remuneration of the Board and Executive Committee, who are the key management personnel, comprised:

2019

m 2018

m Short-term employee benefits 5.4 5.1 Post-employment benefits 0.4 0.4 Termination payments 0.2 1.4 6.0 6.9

Other related party transactions

As at the year end there was a net balance of 0.2m owed to (2018: 1.1m owed by) the joint venture. These amounts are unsecured, have no fixed date of repayment and are repayable on demand. There were no sales by the group to joint ventures during the year (2018: none).

During the year two members of management acquired the right to purchase the Cyntech Anchors business at a fixed price over the next five years at their option.
FILE PHOTO: The logo of Amazon is seen at the company logistics centre in Boves

By Aakriti Bhalla and Jeffrey Dastin

(Reuters) - Amazon.com Inc said on Tuesday it had fired three critics of the company's pandemic response for workplace violations, dismissals that drew sharp words from U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders and a labor coalition.

The company on Friday fired two user experience designers, Maren Costa and Emily Cunningham, for what it called repeated violations of internal policies, without specifying which ones.

The two workers, who gained prominence for pushing the company to do more on climate change, had recently made public statements questioning Amazon's pandemic safety measures and pledging to match donations of up to $500 to support staff at risk of getting the virus.

The e-commerce giant also said it dismissed Bashir Mohamed, a warehouse worker in Minnesota, for inappropriate language and behavior. Mohamed told Reuters he had been warning colleagues about the virus and calling on management to increase cleaning; Amazon has been "tripling down on deep cleaning," it has said in recent statements.

Their dismissals follow Amazon's termination on March 30 of warehouse protest leader Christian Smalls on the grounds that he put others at risk by violating his paid quarantine when he joined a demonstration at Amazon's Staten Island, New York, fulfillment center.

In statements shared with Reuters, Cunningham said she believed Amazon could play a powerful role during the crisis, but to do so, "we have to really listen to the workers who are on the front line, who don't feel adequately protected."

Costa said in her statement, "No company should punish their employees for showing concern for one another, especially during a pandemic!"

The world's largest online retailer is facing intensifying scrutiny by lawmakers and unions over whether it is doing enough to protect staff from the novel coronavirus, which has infected more than 1.9 million people, including workers at more than 50 of Amazon's U.S. warehouses, according to the New York Times.

Story continues

The company has been racing to update safety protocols, distribute protective gear and keep warehouses functional as it works to ship essentials to shoppers under widespread government stay-at-home orders. Small groups of employees have staged high-profile protests at several Amazon warehouses.

Mohamed, a 28-year-old Somali-American, said his boss told him not to organize other workers at the Minneapolis-area warehouse. Once he began informing colleagues of the risks they faced from the virus, he said, Amazon started targeting him.

"They didn't like the way I was talking," he said.

In a statement, Amazon said, "We respect the rights of employees to protest and recognize their legal right to do so; however, these rights do not provide blanket immunity against bad actions, particularly those that endanger the health, well-being or safety of their colleagues."

Amazon said Mohamed had also violated social distancing guidelines.

A dismissal letter Mohamed shared with Reuters did not specify social distancing but focused on his declining to talk to certain team leaders starting in early March; Mohamed alleged that before that period his manager had discriminated against him.

Public pressure on Amazon mounted on Tuesday, following five Democratic U.S. Senators who wrote to Amazon's Chief Executive Jeff Bezos last week to request an explanation about what happened with the other fired warehouse worker, Smalls.

Sanders tweeted: "Instead of firing employees who want justice, maybe Jeff Bezos - the richest man in the world - can focus on providing his workers with paid sick leave, a safe workplace, and a livable planet."

Athena, a labor and activist coalition, called the latest dismissals "outrageous."

(Reporting by Aakriti Bhalla in Bengaluru and Jeffrey Dastin in San Francisco; Editing by Sherry Jacob-Phillips and Sonya Hepinstall)
Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, April 15)  Marikina Mayor Marcelino Teodoro said Wednesday he is ready to face charges for opening a testing facility for the coronavirus disease even without accreditation from the Department of Health (DOH).

Teodoro admitted to CNN Philippines that he will be breaking the law when the COVID-19 testing center at Barangay Concepcion Uno opens on Friday, but he said he can no longer put off mass testing for Marikina residents.

I will be violating the law on the operation of a clinical laboratory when, come Friday, the testing lab in Marikina [opens]. And I will do it. Handa akong harapin, sagutin ang batas, managot ako sa batas, he said in a phone interview.

Republic Act 4688 requires any person, firm or corporation to obtain a permit from the DOH for operating clinical laboratories. Government-run hospital laboratories are exempted from the law provided their services are extensions of regional or central laboratories.

DOH spokesperson Undersecretary Maria Rosario Vergeire cautioned the local government of Marikina against operating the COVID-19 testing facility without the necessary permits, saying it might cause undue harm.

She said Marikinas laboratory is only 80 percent to 90 percent completed, as its personnel have yet to undergo the safety training organized by the DOH scheduled for Monday next week.

Teodoro, however, insisted that the personnel hired by the local government are qualified, as they are trained by their partner, the University of the Philippines-National Institutes of Health (UP-NIH).

Wag niyong isipin sana na hindi qualified at trained itong personnel namin. All the trainings they are requiring are only confirmatory trainings, he said.

Teodoro expressed frustration at the bureacratic red tape at the DOH, which he said has been hampering the city governments efforts to test residents for COVID-19.

We have the expertise. Nagiging bureaucratic lang ang approach nila eh. Nagiging mahirap, highly regulated. And I think there should be some flexibility and urgency sa license to operate, the mayor said.

Marikinas COVID-19 testing laboratory is capable of processing up to 400 samples daily. Two dedicated ambulance units will be picking up samples from hospitals and testing centers for delivery to the laboratory. A molecular pathologist will always on duty to run the tests.

Teodoro said social distancing and contact tracing were not enough to reduce the number of COVID-19 cases in Marikina, which have reached 73 as of Wednesday.

We would like to take the offensive strategy of testing, treating at the earlier stage and do the isolation for all those affected, he said.
The coronavirus has imposed widespread isolation  an experience that is deeply familiar to incarcerated people, who confront unique challenges in jail and prison. As part of their art and advocacy work with formerly incarcerated women, the Peoples Paper Co-op (PPC) recently asked eight people in its program to give advice on how to cope. They share tips for getting through, including how to deal with loneliness, what to do when you lack control over your daily schedule, and the importance of eating well even without regular grocery access.

Their stories of resilience and hope show the strength of the human spirit, when tested by extreme circumstances.

Being socially isolated has many of us struggling with our feelings. How can we cope with those complicated emotions?

Ive been home from prison for 3 years and I can tell you, being in quarantine, isolated from my family, my friends, my job, and my community, feels like I am in jail all over again.

After spending 40 years in prison, I know what isolation feels like  to be separated from your life, from your loved ones. It can take your passion, self esteem, dignity, and self-worth  but only if you let it. Serving a life-without-parole sentence felt inhumane, cruel, and heartless. Im not sure if youre a religious person, but praying constantly to my higher power helped me then and is helping me now.

We have the ability to fight against obstacles, but we need the courage for change.

Be determined, hopeful, confident. Find the humor in things; do not prolong a state of stress. Stress can cause long-term damage to your health: You cant sleep, overeat because theres nothing else to do, lash out, take your frustrations out on others  Ive seen this 1,000 times plus one while I was incarcerated and since Ive been home. Stress can make you less effective at maintaining your sanity, at simply functioning. Right now people dont know how theyre going to pay their bills or rent; were afraid of losing our place or our jobs. This is a whole new norm. Most people arent equipped to cope with this. Ive been forced to live a version of this, but not while free.

Helping others has been my truth and made me become a better human being. I am currently working with the PPC on a film about the need to abolish long-term sentences for prisoners (who experience this kind of isolation for decades). I want to try and raise hope for the parole eligibility of many deserving folks. Now is a hard time for all of us, but we need to stay determined  there are so many ways to connect virtually with individuals and organizations.

I have a heavy heart for those lost to this virus. We are at war with the coronavirus, but we must not let this stop our fight for justice. The folks I knew in prison are my family, and Im trying to stay in touch with them however I can.

Paulette Carrington, PPC Fellow

What about missing hugs, high-fives, and other human contact?

In prison, I was not allowed to hug, kiss, give handshakes, or high-fives. This was very difficult because those are the things that make me feel human, and not like an animal locked in a cage where no one touches me.

I had never realized how much human contact meant to me. Faith Bartley

While incarcerated, I developed my own language to express my humanness. When I would see friends in the yard, at the chow hall, or church services, I would draw or trace an air heart with my arms and fingers; really big and wide, letting them know I love them.

I had never realized how much human contact meant to me or the adjustment I had to make because of the prison protocol. Prisons dehumanize people, point blank. Not being allowed to touch or have any human contact other than by speaking may seem small, but it was huge to me, and something that I know many of us are going through now. To help you in this crisis, maybe you too could create a non-contact language similar to what I have, which helped me cope. When you see friends or neighbors from across the street, what can you do to let them know you see and love them?

Faith Bartley, Lead PPC Fellow

How can I eat well without many ingredients or grocery access?

When I was incarcerated, I did not have any family to put money on my books [a bank account that family and friends can add money to for you while youre in jail or prison]. This meant I often had to eat the meals served by the jail; three meals that were always skimpy, lacking in nutrition, not appetizing, and made me sick. They were served at weird times (sometimes dinner was at 3!). I was always hungry.

 READ MORE: Racing against a coronavirus clock, Philly courts release 200+ jail inmates in the first week of fast-track emergency hearings

To get through my own struggles with hunger and lack of access to healthy food, I would try and make the most of whatever I could find and put together a creative meal. Which, when I was incarcerated, meant making what we called chichi  ramen wed cook with cheese twists, sausage, peas, corn, whatever ingredients we had lying around. Everyone would cook together and then come to the table to eat as a family.

Making a delicious meal that seemed to come out of nothing filled our stomachs and our souls. It helped me fight the deep loneliness I felt while incarcerated.

Lisa Shorter, PPC Fellow

Any tips for rationing toilet paper and personal hygiene items?

When youre locked up, toilet paper is one of the hardest things to get. We only have one roll to split between two people, and that has to last one week. You depend on the Correctional Officers to get more, and if they were in a bad mood, you might not get any TP that day or week. It was also really hard to get feminine hygiene products. Youd only get one or two pads and have to make it last a whole day. If theyre not giving you pads, and you dont have toilet paper to use instead, what do you do then? It made you feel degraded, helpless, and less than human.

 READ MORE: Defuse the ticking time bomb of coronavirus in jails and prisons | Editorial

Items in the prison commissary (where we have to buy many items) were out of stock often. Some people would order so many of the same items that they werent available to others, or items would simply be out of stock from the distributor. Sound familiar to what were going through now?

My suggestions are to try switching brands from whatever you usually buy, to a cheaper or more available version. You could also contact a friend, neighbor, or family member and ask if they have any items youre looking for  or vice versa  and offer to pay, trade, or gift. When I see people now hoarding toilet paper, hand sanitizer, food, and other things we all need, I think about my time in jail. I hope that instead of hoarding and taking advantage of others, people reach out, come together, and help each other.

Kerri DeLeo, PPC Fellow

How do I adjust to not having control over everyday life?

I, like everyone who has spent time in jail or prison, struggled with this. I was kept in solitary confinement for almost a year. Some things that helped were keeping my faith in my God; I read the word, prayed, and believed things would turn out good. I stayed busy working and signed up for all the programs I could. I called my family 3 times a day even though the calls were only 10 minutes. I calculated my commissary orders to stretch my money. Also, I read books and took naps, played cards, and took showers at a certain time every day to keep a routine.

Know that when things get better, you will be able to go as you please. Latyra Blake

Try to do what makes you happy. Im finding happiness in relaxing, eating something I enjoy, listening to music, or watching a good movie. While we cant do many things the way were used to, you can still see your friends, go for a walk, share a meal, cook for each other  just make sure all are done from a safe distance or virtually. Know that when things get better, you will be able to go as you please. All I ever wanted to do was travel, and probation kept me from that (since you usually cant leave your city without a verbal or written agreement). Now that I finally have permission from my probation officer to leave Philadelphia whenever I want, the world is shut down. Although I still struggle all the time, I believe my life  and yours!  will go back to how I like it to be. Stay safe and remain strong.

Latyra Blake, PPC Peer Mentor

How do I handle missing my older relatives, friends, and neighbors?

When I was incarcerated, I didnt have money on my books to call my loved ones, which was devastating and fed my loneliness. When I first arrived, I didnt know anyone and had no money, which meant I went a whole month without talking to someone on the outside who I loved and missed. Can you imagine that?

Later, talking to people on the outside gave me hope, grounded me, reminded me of what was to come, and that what I was going through was not forever. I also would do favors, like washing clothes for other women, so I could get stamps to write those I love and try to make them feel extra special. What youre experiencing in this moment is not so different. To get through this and stay connected to your loved ones, find as many ways as you can to reach out.

When this is all over, I hope you never have to experience this again. I also hope you think of those that are locked up and how hard it is for them, and us, not to see, hug, or talk to those you love on a daily basis.

Aesha Barnett, PPC Fellow

How can I survive being stuck inside, unable to travel?

The jail where I was incarcerated only allowed us to come out of our cell every other day. We used our in days to connect with our cellmates. We discussed common likes and future plans. On days we were let out, we utilized things we had access to, such as the TV, card games, getting our hair done, phone time.

 READ MORE: Isolation is linked to decline for seniors. That makes social distancing a frightening prospect

On days I was in complete isolation, I listened to music and used my creativity to draw, write, read, learn, set goals. The result was a published book, The Year We Didnt Vote, that, sadly, probably would never have existed if I wasnt forced to sit there. So use this time to try things: crocheting, meditating, house painting, clearing out old stuff, as just a few suggestions. Do things you never had time to do before and know that this too shall pass.

Jamila W. Harris, PPC Fellow

What about not seeing my friends?

If the situation is out of your control, you have to truly accept it. You really cant do anything about it at the moment, so stop stressing. You have to be patient. In my experience, having tremendous faith helps a lot. One thing Ive done that helped is remembering the moments youve already shared. Tell your loved ones what you dream of doing when you are reunited. More importantly, have faith this wont last forever.

Kitty Marrero, PPC Fellow

A program of the Village of Arts and Humanities in North Philadelphia, the Peoples Paper Co-op works with formerly incarcerated women to challenge stereotypes and fight for policies and programs to keep women free.
The world has always been fascinated with tea. It has literally kickstarted revolutions. Now, it's bottled and sold in every form and price imaginable. The old stand-by being Arizona Iced Tea -- always available at gas stations, for 99 cents, for when you need something to pair with the finest of Flamin' Hot Cheetos. It's the ol' reliable, and we wouldn't have it any other way.

Any other way that is, except boozy.

Yep, that's Arizona "Hard" Green Tea, with ginseng, honey, and now vodka (You supply the sad life choices). It would have been fine if they'd followed the White Claw strategy and put in some nondescript gluten-free alcohol. Too bougie. Twisted Tea, the Kia of alcoholic tea beverages, uses malted barley. Too strong. But vodka? That's 100% perfect for Arizona Green Tea.

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It's the unifying alcoholic tea that's going to bring together everyone. From college students in shitty mid-size frats and sororities, to the sad businessman that needs a drink from the 7/11 by his hotel, to dumb teenagers who don't know what they want to ask their older brothers to buy them at a 200% markup. It's even fuel for the bozos that will later rob the convenience stores that they bought it from. It's the trash tea of the people.

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Sadly, the first release of Arizona Hard Tea seems to be up alone in Canada. If it performs well enough (and we have to imagine it will), it'll probably get rolled out everywhere else just in time to be a part of summer and tragic firework accidents.

Top Image: Kirsi/Flickr
The Mooresville Police Department is requesting the publics help in identifying individuals suspected in a larceny at the Power Outlet.

The suspects are men in their late 20s to early 30s, both with facial hair. They were captured on video at the business located at 752 N. Broad St., on April 11, a news release from the Mooresville Police Department indicated.

A blue Dodge crew cab truck, witah a broken back window and towing a trailer was last seen traveling west on River Highway.

Anyone with information as to the identity or location of these individuals is asked to call the Mooresville Police Department at 704-664-3311 or the Mooresville-South Iredell Crime Stoppers at 704-658-9056. The call is confidential and callers do not have to reveal their identities.
Hanoi on Wednesday announced that social distancing measures in 12 cities and provinces will be extended to at least April 22 and possibly April 30.

Vietnamese Prime Minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc said after an online meeting with local authorities that the cities of Hanoi, Ho Chi Minh and Da Nang, and provinces of Lao Cai, Quang Ninh, Bac Ninh, Ninh Binh, Quang Nam, Binh Thuan, Khanh Hoa, Tay Ninh and Ha Tinh will continue to be locked down.

"The social distancing measures will continue at these locations at until April 22 or April 30, depending on the real situation of each locality. An extension could be added if infection spreads," Phuc was cited by a Vietnamese news agency as saying.

Social-distancing measures will be loosened elsewhere in the country, allowing some important sectors of industry and business to resume operation from April 16, if they followed strict hygiene and epidemiological safety rules.



Residents across the country are expected to wear face masks and to keep at least 2 meters away from each other. Nonessential services will remain closed and activities such as festivals, meetings and religious gatherings of more than 20 people will still be banned until April 22. Schools are likely to remain closed until June, as requested by the education ministry.

Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh have the highest numbers of people quarantined and are the worst affected areas as of April 15. Hanoi has reported a total of 129 cases, while Ho Chi Minh has 54 cases, among a total of 267 in the whole country although no fatality has been recorded.

The Vietnamese government is under pressure to keep the economy afloat ahead of general elections scheduled for first quarter of next year. The country had gradually wound down business and social activities from Jan. 23 when Hanoi declared an epidemic in the three provinces of Vinh Phuc, Thanh Hoa and Khanh Hoa.

That initial assessment was then upgraded to a national epidemic on April 1, along with social distancing measures implemented across the country and the closure of borders.

However, some businessmen are calling for Vietnam to relax social-distancing rules and just learn to live with the disease. Vu Tien Loc, chairman of the Vietnam Chamber of Commerce and Industry, said social distancing should be adjusted depending on location and sectors, paving the way for all production and business activities to gradually recover.

"It is important to set different conditions and scenarios for each part, living with COVID-19 is a way of doing business in an epidemic era," Loc told local media.

Huynh The Du, a senior lecturer at the Fulbright School of Public Policy and Management in Vietnam, agreed that strict measures should only be imposed at high-risk locations. "The government needs to have plans to live with the disease if the epidemic lasts longer," Du said.
Source: Xinhua| 2020-04-15 20:31:06|Editor: mingmei

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BEIJING, April 15 (Xinhua) -- U.S. President Donald Trump said Tuesday that his administration is halting funding to the World Health Organization (WHO), sparking worldwide criticism of undermining global efforts against the coronavirus pandemic at its most critical period.

Experts and U.S. media said scapegoating of the WHO cannot mask the White House's failings in the COVID-19 fight, which has so far claimed the lives of over 126,000 people.

DEFLECTING BLAMES

The White House's decision to halt funding to the WHO "follows weeks of Trump's escalating attacks on the U.N. health organization as he has sought to deflect scrutiny of his own administration's slow response to the outbreak," said a report published by Politico on Tuesday.

Over the past few weeks, criticism has been mounting from U.S. politicians and scholars of the U.S. administration's late pandemic response and missing critical turning points.

On March 12, Dr. Anthony Fauci, the current administration's top infectious diseases expert, admitted the U.S. system is "not really geared to what we need right now," though the WHO has declared a Public Health Emergency of International Concern on Jan. 30.

According to a report published by the Brookings Center on Regulation and Markets (BCRM) late last month, the WHO had sent hundreds of thousands of tests to different countries by early February, but the United States insisted on developing its own test kits, delaying testing throughout nearly all of February - "a lost month during a critical period."

Nevertheless, the Inspector General's office of the Health and Human Services Department on April 6 issued a report, revealing that U.S. hospitals still faced severe shortages of coronavirus test supplies, with Trump calling the report "Another Fake Dossier!" on Twitter.

Over the month of March, confirmed cases in the United States increased rapidly, from over 100 on March 5, to 10,000 on March 18, reaching 100,000 by the end of the month, according to the BCRM report.

A tally by Johns Hopkins University showed that the United States has reported more than 609,000 confirmed cases of COVID-19 and over 26,000 deaths so far, both the highest on record.

"The White House knows that it grossly mishandled this crisis from the beginning, ignoring multiple warnings and squandering valuable time, dismissing medical science, comparing COVID-19 to the common cold," Patrick Leahy, ranking member of the U.S. Senate Appropriations Committee, said in a statement.

"Not wanting to take responsibility as the deaths continue to mount, he blames others," Leahy said.

Stephanie Segal, a fellow with the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said in an online conference entitled "The Coronavirus Response" in mid-March that there was a gap for both the U.S. economic and medical response to the pandemic "on the global coordination side."

"I think ... the health side of this is clearly a global problem and requires global coordination. The global economy is also under stress and ultimately will require enhanced measures of global coordination," he said.

However, Washington's decision is undermining global efforts against COVID-19. "Trump's move to defund (the) WHO goes against the pandemic preparedness plan his administration drafted in 2017, which advocates for 'expanded international coordination on pandemic preparedness and response' and specifically calls for 'continued support' for (the) WHO," the Politico report added.

MUCH NEEDED SUPPORT

Shortly after Trump's announcement, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said in a statement, "It is my belief that the World Health Organization must be supported, as it is absolutely critical to the world's efforts to win the war against COVID-19."

It is "not the time to reduce the resources for the operations of the World Health Organization or any other humanitarian organization in the fight against the virus," he said.

The President of American Medical Association (AMA) Patrice Harris called the U.S.' decision "a dangerous step in the wrong direction that will not make defeating COVID-19 easier."

In a statement issued on Tuesday, Harris said, "Fighting a global pandemic requires international cooperation and reliance on science and data. Cutting funding to the WHO -- rather than focusing on solutions -- is a dangerous move at a precarious moment for the world."

"The AMA is deeply concerned by this decision and its wide-ranging ramifications, and we strongly urge the president to reconsider," Harris said.

The United States was the biggest contributor to the Geneva-based UN agency, with a yearly fund of more than 400 million U.S. dollars.

Thomas Bollyky, director of the global health program and senior fellow for global health, economics, and development at the Council on Foreign Relations, a U.S. think tank, said Tuesday that the WHO "has largely served its purpose well" in the COVID-19 crisis.

Bollyky, in his tweets, urged Washington to strengthen and enhance the agency's independence and effectiveness, not "degrade it amid a crisis."
The Salvation Army and other local organizations have serving the vulnerable homeless population during the coronavirus pandemic, and efforts are expanding this week with daily deliveries of food and essentials.

Since the local onset of the virus in mid-March, and the issue of the states safer-at-home order a week later, the Salvation Army, Catholic Charities, the Coulee Collaborative to End Homelessness, the city of La Crosse and other community partners have enacted plans to provide adequate shelter and fulfill the basic needs of people without a permanent residence.

While some of the areas homeless people have found shelter at the Salvation Army or Warming Center (Cathedral School is no longer serving as a temporary housing facility), others are still living in streets and parks.

To ensure those people dont go unfed  and without crucial hygiene items  the Salvation Army Emergency Disaster Services vehicle will make daily stops at seven locations to deliver food and supplies.

Offered at each location will be a prepackaged meal, coffee, canned foods, toiletries, hand warmers, bandages, coats, hats, blankets, gloves, socks, shoes, disinfecting wipes, toilet paper and rain ponchos.

Area businesses have stepped up with donations, and volunteers are tackling the assembling and packaging of items. All volunteers and staff are following strict CDC guidelines to ensure the health and safety of all members of the collaborative effort and those being served.

We are blown away by the amount of support provided by our community so we can help however we can, said Salvation Army volunteer coordinator Alex Riley. When there is a need in our area, there is never a shortage of hands willing to step up to help.

Individuals in need may obtain supplies at the following times and locations, Monday through Sunday:

11 to 11:30 a.m., Salvation Army, 223 N. Eighth St.

11:40 a.m. to noon, Green Island Park, 2312 S. Seventh St.

12:05 to 12:15 p.m., Salvation Army Thrift Store, 728 Copeland Ave.

12:20 to 12:40 p.m. Copeland Park, North Side La Crosse

12:45 to 1:20 p.m., Cameron Park, downtown La Crosse

1:25 to 1:45 p.m., Houska Park, Joseph Houska Drive

1:50 to 2 p.m., Riverside Park, downtown La Crosse

For more information, or to donate items, call the Salvation Army at 608-782-6126. High-demand items include disinfectant wipes, blankets, gloves, coats and sweatshirts.

We are blown away by the amount of support provided by our community so we can help however we can. When there is a need in our area, there is never a shortage of hands willing to step up to help. Alex Riley, Salvation Army volunteer coordinator

Emily Pyrek can be reached at emily.pyrek@lee.net.

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A quarter of restaurants, along with some pubs and hotels, may never be able to reopen after the coronavirus lockdown, it has been warned.

Colin Neill, of Hospitality Ulster, said the sector was in dire straits, with money promised from the Government not arriving quickly enough.

Venues were ordered to close as Prime Minister Boris Johnson ordered a nationwide lockdown to attempt to slow the spread of coronavirus.

Chancellor Rishi Sunak announced a scheme to allow businesses that cannot operate to furlough staff, while locally Economy Minister Diane Dodds is launching a grants programme for hospitality businesses.

However, Mr Neill said it was taking too long for the money to come through.

He added that 10 to 15% of pubs, 15% of hotels and 25% of restaurants were at risk of never opening again.

"The immediate part is the lack of any money because it is 24 days today since Boris Johnson closed us," he told this newspaper.

"The average restaurant or small pub will have probably about two to three weeks cash flow in reserve. That ran out and we have staff not getting money as businesses have no money to give them.

"Even if you lock up, there are fixed costs such as the alarms, security and insurance. All of that goes on. People are at their wits' ends."

Mr Neill said he had received assurances from Mrs Dodds that grants would be paid as soon as they are verified, which he described as helpful.

"But the two schemes don't open until the 20th. That's another week and people just can't eat," he added.

Mr Neill also warned that the sector would need support after the lockdown was lifted and pointed to the costs of restocking and adapting to any new social distancing measures.

Belfast has experienced a surge in the hospitality sector in recent years, with an increased number of tourists supporting more hotels, restaurants and pubs.

"We were going to be one of the biggest drivers in the economy and we have had the rug pulled from below us," Mr Neill said.

"We don't talk about reopening, we talk about rebuilding. It's so hard to know where this is going to end up, or if there is going to be a second lockdown.

"How does this industry survive? Without the Government's life support, it won't."
Coronavirus has become a global pandemic, upending daily life in every corner of the world. On every continent, governments are enforcing lockdowns and quarantines in an effort to slow the spread of COVID-19. Unprecedented numbers of people are out of work, or simply staying home as businesses shutter and events are called off. In a grim, backhanded upside, there is some unity in this: Across the world, we are all facing similar challenges.

People the world over are having to find new routines as we work from home, homeschool our kids, and try to make our grocery budgets stretch further; we are missing our family members and friends but staying home to protect them. We are losing some. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), since China reported its first case of COVID-19 in December 2019, authorities in 213 countries and territories have reported more than 1,848,439 cases and 117,217 deaths worldwide. Currently, the United States is the hardest hit with more than 553,822 confirmed cases and 21,972 deaths so far. Italy follows with 159,516 reported cases which have led to 20,465 deaths.

It can be difficult not to feel overwhelmed in the midst of a crisis on this scale, but that doesnt mean we cant handle it. COVID-19 has brought a global opportunity for solidarity in what is now a shared struggle. According to New York based psychologist Dr. Sarton Weinraub, Maintaining a self-created routine or schedule is the most important self-care approach that we can enact at this time. This routine might be unique to you and your lifestyle, but whatever it is it needs to be maintained. In other words: Whatever self-care looks like to you, try to fit it in.

Here, 11 women around the world share what self-care practices they are putting in to place and how they are facing each day.

VIDEO: Women Around the World Discuss Life During the Coronavirus Pandemic

Asia

The first case of coronavirus was reported in Wuhan, China on December 31, 2019. The government enacted a widespread lockdown in the weeks following, and similar procedures were then put in place across Singapore, Taiwan, and Hong Kong. After nearly three months, the number of newly reported cases across Asia have decreased and, in China, places of work are reopening as life begins returning to normal.

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Guangzhou, China

Chloe Ho, Restaurant Owner, Age 30

I was quarantined for around three weeks, as I had to reopen my restaurant. I got through the day by doing things I enjoyed. I read a lot more and tried out some new recipes. I also used the time to focus on my skincare routine. I wear a mask to cover my mouth whenever I go outside, so I spend a lot less time on my makeup. Theres a new makeup trend here called makeup with the mask, basically, you only put makeup on the upper part of your face that is not covered by the mask. I concentrate on my eye makeup and eyebrows. Im a makeupaholic so this is a real pain to me, but now I make sure that I give extra attention to my skincare. I love using Charlotte Tilburys Magic Eye Rescue Cream, Erno Laszlo Active Phelityl Intensive Cream, and Youth To The People Superfood Antioxidant Cleanser.

My advice for others around the world in isolation:

This virus outbreak has taught me that life is more fragile than we think. I think it is important to use this opportunity to spend more time with our families and our pets. My dogs were so excited that I was home and had more time to play with them.

North America

The United States is currently the worst hit country with 553,822 confirmed cases of COVID-19, which have led to 21,972 deaths, so far. Now, 48 States have declared a national state of emergency, as the virus continues to spread. Roughly 95% of all Americans are under lockdown, the directives to keep people at home, which began in California in mid-March, and have quickly swept the nation. Masks are now recommended in public, and only essential workers should be on duty.

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New York City, New York

Kylee Kaetzel, PR Manager, Age 25

I have started doing puzzles and recently picked up cross-stitching and knitting. We are all spending hours and hours with screen time and its important to give your eyes and brain a break. This is a very unique opportunity, one that we probably wont get again in our lifetime. Im trying to relax, reflect, and take this time to come out better on the other side.

My advice for others around the world in isolation:

Let this time of isolation and solidarity bring to light what is truly most important to you. We are inundated in our day-to-day lives with pressure and stress from the world. Grow closer to your family and friends, spend time with people you truly care about and reflect inwardly on ways you can be a part of the positive change from this virus.

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Los Angeles, California

Maria DiDomenico, Actress, Age 37

Every day I take the top of the morning to pray and meditate. I give thanks for the health in my body and the privilege to live out another day. Another thing I recently started doing is putting on a bit of lipstick and some mascara at least once or twice a week; I love CoverGirl Lash Blast Volume Mascara. I have found that getting up, doing my hair and putting on my makeup helps me not to feel down, it changes my mood.

My advice for others around the world in isolation:

Life should be experienced with gratitude in our hearts and a thirst to live out each day being present in the moment. It can be overwhelming to try and forecast what will transpire in the coming months. At best, the advice I can offer others and myself is to take all of this day by day, moment by moment and minute by minute. I encourage us all, to the best of our ability, to focus on what we do have and shift our perspective towards gratitude. Gratitude can set a powerful tone in our lives that can lead towards helping others who are in greater need.

Europe

At the end of January 2020, France became the first European country to confirm a coronavirus case. In mid-February, Italy identified its first case, and the illness swept the continent as Fashion Week bounced from city to city (editors returning to New York marked some of the first Americans under quarantine orders). Now, Europe is the most affected continent, with 943,272 confirmed cases, and lockdown orders across several countries.

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Napoli, Italy

Angela Filippi, Designer, Age 30

I wake up in the morning and the first thing I do is a prayer of gratitude for my dad, family, and friends who are fine and free from COVID-19. It helps me start the day off on a positive step. Then, I have a nice warm shower and finish off with a mask; my favorites are Dr Jart and Garnier Skin Active Moisture Bomb.

I also like to put a natural mask on my hair as I dont know when Ill be seeing my hairdresser again! I love to take care of my hair; I do a massage and mask with olive oil and aloe vera, once every two weeks. My hair always comes out feeling soft and shiny once I rinse it. I find this relaxing; it helps me to look good, and that extra me time ensures that I dont go mad whilst in quarantine.

My advice for others around the world in isolation:

Remember that there are many less fortunate, be grateful [if] you and your loved ones are healthy. If you feel sad or miserable, my best advice is to press pause and think about the situation; people are in the hospital fighting for their lives.

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London, England

MaameYaa Kwafo-Akoto, Senior Associate Lawyer, Age 37

My faith is key to my daily routine. Uncertainty can be scary, and reading my Bible has kept me sane these past few weeks. I have also set myself a few goals. I have a treadmill at home which I run on at least once a day; this helps me break up my routine, so I am not constantly working. When you are working from home, its easy for the line between work and home life to become blurred so its good to break up the day and strike a balance.

My advice for others around the world in isolation:

Take every day as it comes and cling on to what matters most. Prioritize yourself and your family and make sure you take time for you, even if its once a week.

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Vienna, Austria

Sanja Bauer, Policy Officer, Age 31

I wake up more or less around the same time as when I went to work. Although I am not going to the office, I like to keep that routine. Im really enjoying not wearing makeup and using this time to try out all my beauty products. I like to try products from around the world as I think there are beauty secrets that different women have in every country. I love this oil I found in Finland called, Lumene Arctic Valo Light Arctic Berry Cocktail Hydra Oil, it has wild arctic cloudberry and cranberry seed oils, it helps my skin feel rejuvenated.

Before lunch, I do my daily workout routine in a nearby park which includes running and different exercises. I love to get outside even if its just for a walk. This is one of the moments when I feel like life is back to normal again. Oh, and lipstick is a must! I like to put on my lipstick if I am going for a walk, I love Sensai lipstick. I put a bit on even if were going to the grocery store.

RELATED: The Best Workouts to Try While You're Cooped Up at Home

My advice for others around the world in isolation:

If you are in quarantine, my best piece of advice is to think about how you want to look and feel after the quarantine ends. Following that, make a plan which includes activities and doing things you enjoy. Then, set yourself daily goals. Also, try and stay physically active, even if you are indoors. Treat your body well, your outer beauty and general well-being will thank you!

South America

The first coronavirus patient in South America was reported on February 26, 2020, in Sao Paulo, Brazil. The number of confirmed cases in Brazil has since surged to 22,169 and 1,124 deaths. The virus has now spread through all 12 countries on the continent, as many impose shelter-in-place measures, close schools, restrict travel, and prohibit large public gatherings.

Courtesy

Sao Paulo, Brazil

Jessica Pauletto, Model, Age 29

I know this is a very hard time, but I think its important not to constantly watch the news; it will only make you anxious. I do things that make me feel good, like cooking a good healthy meal and yoga. I used to work out in a boulder gym as I love climbing, but as we are quarantined, I use the Nike Training Club and Asana Rebel apps to work out at home.

My advice for others around the world in isolation:

Do things that you love. Cook, work out, do your skincare routine, read a book, watch that show you love, or just take this time to rest, because thats really important too. Try to keep positive; this will pass. And of course, if you can, stay home.

Australia

Australia, with a population of 25 million, has had approximately 6,322 coronavirus infections, and 61 deaths. The first case to be recorded was on January 25, 2020. March 20, the government closed its borders to all non-citizens and limited domestic travel. Currently, it is unlawful to be outside without a reasonable excuse of essential shopping, medical care, exercise, or compassionate grounds.

Courtesy

Brisbane, Australia

Sharon Robson, Business Manager, Age 33

I have been dancing in the privacy of my apartment; its me, and a whole lot of space on the dance floor. This helps me to zone out and burn calories at the same time. I love going to the gym but now that the gyms are closed, Im getting my 45 minutes of cardio done in other ways. I want to make sure that I still keep a fitness routine.

My skincare routine is another thing that I am religious about. How I wash my face will never change  a good scrub in the morning and at night. I love my Tatcha Deep Cleanse Exfoliating Cleanser followed by my Drunk Elephant eye cream.

My advice for others around the world in isolation:

Take one day at a time, this is only temporary. It is going to pass and when it does it will only make you realize how strong of a person you really are.

Middle East

There are over 100,000 reported cases of the virus across the Middle East, with the vast majority in the hard-hit nation of Iran. The United Arab Emirates (UAE) was the first country in the region to register a case on January 29. The virus quickly spread to other neighboring countries. Restrictions on religious practices have been put in place; shutting down prayers, pilgrimages, and travel. Schools have been closed since March 5, with most educating being done online. Restaurants, beaches and bars are all closed.

Courtesy

Dubai, United Arab Emirates

Rima Zahran, Entrepreneur, Age 36

In the morning I wake up, pray and meditate, then I take a shower and get dressed before my children wake up. I feel like I can take on the day when Ive taken care of myself. I dont need hours, I just need one hour alone in the morning, then, Im ready for everything. Ive tried to keep my beauty routine pretty much the same. I still put on makeup and take care of my skin. The only thing that has changed is that I have more time to do DIY face masks and scrubs. This week, I mixed honey, olive oil and Himalayan salt; its an amazing cleansing scrub. I love homemade masks. When Im on my regular schedule I never have time to make them; now, I have all the time in the world.

RELATED: Two DIY Face Masks You Can Make Using Ingredients in Your Fridge

My advice for others around the world in isolation:

What we see and who we choose to listen to is so important, as energy is contagious. Ive chosen to only watch one news channel and not 15. Dont watch too much news; watch funny things. Ive also unfollowed people on social media who constantly complain or post negative messages, as I want positive energy in my life. One thing I know for sure is that we are going to look back and say, It wasnt so bad, we were able to do so much with that free time.

Africa

The first coronavirus patient was detected in Africa on February 27, in Nigeria. There are now 10,787 reported cases across the continent. South Africa recently confirmed 2,272 cases, which have led to 27 deaths. Algeria has more than 1,983 cases that have led to 313 deaths, the most within the nation. Different countries are putting prevention methods in place; Ghana and Nigeria both closed their borders and are enforcing a partial lockdown.

Courtesy

Accra, Ghana

Afua Rida, Influencer and Style Consultant, Age 32

I realized that I have to be intentional about everything I do. Being slowed down by the need to social distance and stay at home allows time for self-reflection and to plan for the future. A lot of great things can come out of this quiet time. I plan out the day: workouts, work, leisure time, meals and naps. I stick to my skincare routine and still repeat it twice a day. I use Kiehls Ultra Facial Cleanse, Biossance Squalane + Omega Repair Cream, Biossance Squalane + Vitamin C Rose Oil, and Supergoop Unseen Sunscreen.

RELATED: Social Distancing Has Become Too Social

My advice for others around the world in isolation:

The first thing is to allow yourself to feel whatever it is that you are feeling; whether you are scared or panicked or just enjoying being home all day: No emotion is irrelevant. Acknowledge how you feel, discuss it with others, read about ways to manage the anxiety, or share your good mood with others who might need a dose of positivity.

Courtesy

Lagos, Nigeria

Omoyemi Akerele, Fashion Consultant (Founder of Lagos Fashion Week and Style House Files), Age 41

I think an important part of my self-care is family time. Whilst weve been stuck at home, Ive been enjoying doing more activities with my daughters [10, 14 and 15 years old] I have become their Tik Tok producer and videographer! Last Sunday, I suggested that we all get dressed up for Sunday lunch. I wore the brightest colored boubou (caftan) I could find and although it was just at home, it was a great mood lifter, I definitely recommend it.

RELATED: Why You Should Still Layer on Your Jewelry, Even if You're Home Alone

My advice for others around the world in isolation:

I recently remembered something Reverend Will Van Der Hart said, "We are isolating but we don't need to be isolated." It's become very important to me to be the light, to reach out to people I know, stay connected and stay grateful with an understanding that no matter what happens, we have to be hopeful.

I saw a quote by [psychologist and happiness expert] Dr. Rebecca Ray on @lipstickafricatv and it resonates, "She decided to rename uncertainty as possibility and the world opened up." It might be a bit difficult, but I think it's important to take each day as it comes and hold onto the possibilities that tomorrow can bring.
Temperatures are expected to fall off rapidly across West Michigan tonight, and the tender spring buds of fruit trees could take a hit, meteorologists warn.

The National Weather Service in Grand Rapids has issued a Freeze Warning for Muskegon, Ottawa, Kent, Allegan and Van Buren counties. This includes the fruit-farming area known as The Ridge which straddles the border of Kent and Ottawa counties.

The warning is in effect from 11 p.m. tonight until 8 a.m. Thursday.

Temperatures are forecast to fall into the mid-20s, with even some low 20s this evening into tonight. Some fruit trees will start to experience damage after several hours of temperatures 25 degrees or colder, NWS meteorologists said. An unseasonably cold and dry airmass is in place. As the clouds scatter out and winds diminish this evening, the temperatures will fall off rapidly.
Evangelist Alveda King: A 'Woke' Word for COVID-19

NEWS PROVIDED BY

Alveda King Ministries

April 14, 2020



ATLANTA, April 14, 2020 /Standard Newswire/ -- Evangelist Alveda King submits the following and is available for comment:

With all too many of the news and daily reports filled with fear and terror regarding COVID-19, I don't know about you, but I believe that it's time to exercise faith over fear. We must join President Trump; we must pray rather than panic.



"We must learn to live together as brothers [and sisters], or perish together as fools."  Prophet Martin Luther King, Jr.



As to conspiracy theories? Some of them we can take with a grain of salt. Others? There is some truth out there. When I prayed and asked God: "Is this you causing Covid-19?" surprisingly the answer was in Psalm 2.



"Why are the nations so angry? Why do they waste their time with futile plans? The kings of the earth prepare for battle; the rulers plot together against the Lord and against his anointed one. 'Let us break their chains,' they cry, 'and free ourselves from slavery to God.' But the one who rules in heaven laughs. The Lord scoffs at them. For the Lord declares, 'I have placed my chosen king on the throne in Jerusalem, on my holy mountain.'"  Psalms 2:1-4, 6 NLT



Wow! God did not dump COVID-19 on us? So why does God allow this? GOD wants us to seek Heaven for answers.



"Then if my people who are called by my name will humble themselves and pray and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways, I will hear from heaven and will forgive their sins and restore their land." 2 Chronicles 7:14



"We don't worship government, we worship God."  President Donald J. Trump.



Yes! Catastrophes are as old as sin. The solutions come from God, not humans. It is very important during these troublesome days to have physical, soulful and spiritual balance.



For example, my uncle Prophet MLK said that science gives us facts, religion gives us morals; the two are not rivals. I agree; which is why I emphasize that medicine, safety and nourishment of the physical body and nourishment of the soul and spirit are all essential services.



On Easter Sunday, my pastor Theo McNair, spiritual leader of Believers Bible Christian Church taught us that Jesus is the answer to all of humanity's problems. I worshipped God on Facebook last Sunday.



However, I am also grateful for the intervention strategies that are available at www.whitehouse.gov. We must continue to seek God for strategies to overcome this enemy COVID-19.



While we are participating in the 30 days to slow the virus from home or wherever we are, we must pray, assist others, support life, and avoid fear and panic. We must seek facts, and apply faith rather than fear.



I have included five links below for your consideration. As you review and/or study, please pray and use discernment.

"But when Moses delivered this message to the Israelites, they didn't even hear himthey were that beaten down in spirit by the harsh slave conditions."  Exodus 6:9 MSG



Finally as you consider these five links and information therein, please remember to pray. Issues of separate races and separate classes are socially engineered by humans.



"Have I now become your enemy because I am telling you the truth?"  Galatians 4:16 NLT



There aren't separate human races. We are not colorblind.



We can see God's beauty in every culture. As human beings, we are of various ethnic nations, tongues and tribes, we are the human family. We are one human race, one blood. (Acts 17:26-28)



"We all bleed the same."  President Donald J. Trump



My friends, we need God's help. We need each other.



Remember, do not need to panic. God loves us. We need to pray; we need to avoid fear and instead we need to exercise faith. Remember, above all things, God is agape love and His wisdom is with us.



See images HERE.

SOURCE Alveda King Ministries



CONTACT: Leslie Palma, 917-697-7039


Maharashtra tourism minister Aaditya Thackeray had led the charge on Twitter after nearly 1000 migrant workers gathered in Mumbais Bandra, demanding trains back home after the nationwide Covid-19 lockdown was extended.

Aaditya Thackeray, son of chief minister Uddhav Thackeray, continued tweeting throughout the latter half of the day and night on the Bandra incident as his posts led to a political blame game.

The state unit of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) called the incident a failure of the state after Aaditya Thackerays outburst.

Then there was a phone call from Union home minister Amit Shah to his father. The Union minister said the incidents like that in Bandra could weaken Indias fight against Covid-19 and that the administration needs to stay vigilant to avoid such incidents.

He also offered his full support to the Maharashtra government and Uddhav Thackeray called for peace and assured all help to migrant workers in the state.

But before logging out for the day, the young Shiv Sena leader had a word of caution and praise.

I appeal to all twitter armies who tweeted, and to those who responded to bandra incident in a polarised, political or communal way, lets not do that. This is a time for focus. Join hands, were all in this together (sic), he wrote.

Also read: Coronavirus cases in India climb to 11,439, death toll at 377

While I was pointing out certain gaps in the process, I see 2 clear political divides as a response. That isnt what I stand for. We need unity over division, faith over fear, resolve over panic and purity of intent over politics, he said.

This stand was different from what he had to say earlier in the day.

Aaditya Thackeray had taken to Twitter soon after the police were able to disperse the crowds from the Bandra railway station.

Also read: What happened in Mumbais Bandra

The Shiv Sena leader had blamed Centre responsible for the situation and said the railways should have run special trains to take the migrant workers to their hometown as demanded by Uddhav Thackeray.

The current situation in Bandra, now dispersed or even the rioting in Surat is a result of the union government not being able to take a call on arranging a way back home migrant labour. They dont want food or shelter, they want to go back home, Thackeray had tweeted in one of his first reactions.

Also read: What you need to know today

Maharashtra, he said, had raised the issue of enabling the workers to return home.

A mutual road map set by Union Govt will largely help migrant labour to reach home from one state to another safely and efficiently. Time and again this issue has been raised with the centre, he said in another tweet.

Later, he toned down the tweets and said the Centre and states are facing a Catch-22 situation.

The centre has taken immediate cognizance of the issue and is assisting the State actively. We understand the catch 22 situation centre and states face. Im thankful to PM & HM for understanding the situation, while trying to ensure the safety of home states of migrants, he tweeted.

The migrant labour issue persists everywhere. Even as we house more than 6 lakh migrant labour, with breakfast lunch and dinner, the Union and State Govts are coordinating on further relief for the same. We will continue to ensure the comfort of all migrant labour in our camps, he said in another tweet.
A small study by Chinese scientists suggests that the COVID-19 virus can travel more than 13 feet in the the air.

The research, published Friday in the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's Emerging Infectious Diseases journal, examined samples of aerosol from indoor air and air outlets in an intensive care unit and hospital ward in Wuhan, China. The areas studied held 37 virus patients.

The scientists also took swab samples from surfaces such as floors, handrails, computer mice, patient masks and shoes.

The aerosol distribution characteristics  indicate that the transmission distance of [COVID-19] might be 4 m (meters), the report says. Furthermore, half of the samples from the soles of the ICU medical staff shoes tested positive. Therefore, the soles of medical staff shoes might function as carriers.

Whether SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, can be spread by aerosols remains controversial. On April 2, Dr. Harvey Fineberg told the White House studies are consistent with aerosolization of virus from normal breathing. But other scientists say aerosolized SARS-CoV-2 is relatively rare.

The researchers surmised the relatively high rate of positivity of the hospital's floors might be caused by gravity and air flow causing most virus droplets to float to the ground, accounting for the contamination of the shoes of the staff.

Special Investigation 147 NY dams are 'unsound,' potentially dangerous Thousands of dams have not been inspected in over 20 years.

As medical staff walk around the ward, the virus can be tracked all over the floor, as indicated by the 100% rate of positivity from the floor in the pharmacy, where there were no patients, the researchers wrote.

The CDC says to ensure effective physical distancing, people should stay at least 6 feet apart. The World Health Organization says 3 feet should be enough.

MORE CORONAVIRUS COVERAGE:

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Mike Moffitt is an SFGATE Digital Reporter. Email: moffitt@sfgate.com. Twitter: @Mike_at_SFGate
A second San Antonio firefighter tested positive for the novel coronavirus Tuesday, officials said.

SAFD Chief Charles Hood said in a statement that the firefighter was assigned to the same fire station as the first firefighter who tested positive Monday, noting that the two worked different shifts.

Officials did not immediately identify the fire station where the firefighters are stationed.

Hood said the firefighter in this second case began to feel ill while working a shift on April 11. The firefighter was immediately sent home to isolate and was scheduled for COVID-19 testing.

COVID-19 Tracker: Interactive maps track coronavirus cases in San Antonio, Texas counties and the U.S.

On Monday, officials said that the first firefighter who tested positive last worked on April 7 and became symptomatic on April 10. Details on the condition of the firefighters were not released Tuesday.

The department is now trying to determine with whom the second firefighter came into contact. The crew that was working with the second firefighter has been sent home to isolate until the contact tracing process is complete, Hood said.

As we learn the results of the contact tracing initiated by Metro Health and the SAFD for both firefighters, those identified as close contacts will be immediately quarantined as necessary following the recommendations of Metro Health, Hood said. Taking these measures will help to ensure no impact to the community we serve and will provide us the best odds of minimizing the spread of this illness within our department.

Jacob Beltran is a reporter covering San Antonio and Bexar County. To read more from Jacob, become a subscriber. jbeltran@express-news.net | Twitter: @JBfromSA
Source: Xinhua| 2020-04-15 18:51:59|Editor: huaxia

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The UN-backed Libyan government said Tuesday that Tripoli was shelled on Monday by its rival east-based army. The shelling caused damage to Tripoli's Arada district and wounded one. In April 2019, the east-based army, led by Khalifa Haftar, launched an offensive to seize Tripoli. Since then, the UN has documented at least 356 civilian deaths and 329 injuries.
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

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The Calgary Zoo needs half a million dollars each month to care for its animals  and so it's asking for donations to make it through a financial crisis brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic.

If the zoo stays closed for three months, it's poised to lose up to $27 million, chief development officer Steven Ross said.

At issue, though, is the cost of caring for its nearly 1,000 creatures in particular  which costs roughly $550,000 a month.

Ross said he worries they will have to cut back conservation efforts to make up the difference.

"We are a wildlife conservation charity," Ross told CBC News.

"We deliver programming all around the globe where ... we're working in communities to release wildlife back into the wild, to research and understand these wildlife better."

Monty Kruger/CBC

The conservation programs include protecting whooping cranes, burrowing owls, greater sage-grouses, and black-tailed prairie dogs. Calgary scientists work with agencies around the world, including in Madagascar with lemurs, Kenya with mountain bongos, and Ghana with hippos.

The zoo has been asking its members and supporters through email and social media to consider donating.

Andrew Brown/CBC

The doors closed on March 16 to comply with Alberta Health orders barring large gatherings, and so lost significant revenue from visitors.

To deal with the crunch, the zoo temporarily laid off 60 per cent of its staff, affecting about 250 people.

The zoo was founded in 1929 and is now home to nearly 1,000 creatures from 119 species.
SLCI is an office-based laboratory performing intervention and peripheral vascular procedures. SLSSC is an ambulatory surgery center specializing in defibrillator, event recorder, pacemaker, catheterization, ERCP (endoscopic retrograde cholangiopancreatography), colonoscopy, and EGD (esophagogastroduodenoscopy) procedures. The two facilities are located under a shared roof in Kirkwood, Missouri, a Western suburb of St. Louis.

Legal counsel for the transaction included Polsinelli PC as representation for both SLCI and SLSSC, and McGuire Woods representing SCA.

SCA is a leader in the outpatient surgery industry, partnering with health plans, medical groups, and health systems across the country to develop and optimize surgical facilities. SCA operates more than 200 surgical facilities, including ambulatory surgery centers and surgical hospitals, in partnership with approximately 3,000 physicians. Optum, part of UnitedHealth Group (NYSE:UNH), is a leading information and technology-enabled health services business with more than 100,000 people worldwide.

About Brown Gibbons Lang & Company

Brown Gibbons Lang & Company is a leading independent investment bank and financial advisory firm focused on the global middle market. The firm advises private and public corporations and private equity groups on mergers and acquisitions, divestitures, capital markets, financial restructurings, valuations and opinions, and other strategic matters. BGL has investment banking offices in Chicago, Cleveland, and Philadelphia, and real estate offices in Chicago, Cleveland, Denver, and San Antonio. The firm is also a founding member of Global M&A Partners, enabling BGL to service clients in more than 30 countries around the world. Securities transactions are conducted through Brown, Gibbons, Lang & Company Securities, Inc., an affiliate of Brown Gibbons Lang & Company LLC and a registered broker-dealer and member of FINRA and SIPC. For more information, please visit www.bglco.com.

SOURCE Brown Gibbons Lang & Company

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Since the outbreak of the health crisis in Europe and Africa, Morocco has been cited as an example by several international media for its anticipation, its reactivity and its mobilization, both civic and professional.

In this vein, the French satirical weekly Le Canard Enchaine praised the Moroccan management of the coronavirus crisis, saying that the North African country stands as a model and that France has lessons to learn from the other shore of the Mediterranean.

There is a country at less than a two-hour flight from Paris where the wearing of a mask is compulsory, and where the masks are on sale on the shelves of all supermarkets for the modest sum of eight cents of a euro, writes the French weekly in its Wednesday edition, adding that the masks price was set by the state.

The satirical weekly notes that Morocco, after having succeeded in meeting its own needs for health masks, is even preparing to export them to other countries.

The publication also recalls how Morocco, by mobilizing several specialized companies, succeeds in producing 5 million facemasks per day.

Do we need to specify that all the agents of the Ministries of Health, Defense and the Interior are equipped with masks? A feat that makes you dream, in France, adds the author of the article.

After recalling the decision, taken by the French government, to destroy stocks of masks in 2013, the weekly considers that there is no way to compare the mobilization in France and in Morocco.

Regarding industrial mobilization, there are lessons to be drawn on the other side of the Mediterranean, concludes Le Canard Enchaine.

Several international media have praised the Moroccan Kings swift response and comprehensive socioeconomic relief measures taken to mitigate the fallout of covid-19 and the way in which Morocco, a country with limited financial resources, is managing the coronavirus pandemic.

Many French media commented that Morocco can stand as a model for many European countries.

A special focus was laid on how Moroccan authorities have made facemasks available at an affordable price, with many Moroccan factories shifting their production chains to manufacture facemasks and thus meet the countrys needs.

Hundreds of French nationals also took to social media to express their admiration for Moroccos response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Many said they have been impressed by the Moroccan governments efforts to boost domestic production of face masks and enforce their use in public space, making comparisons with the moves made in France and highlighting the superiority of Moroccos measures.
The United States Food and Drug Administration has issued an emergency use authorization for imported non-NIOSH approved respirators manufactured in China, as the supply gap for respirators continued to rise in the country.

The NIOSH, or the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, is a subsidiary under the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. It offers suggestions on epidemic prevention and work-related injuries.

Under the FDA directive, 46 manufacturers in China, including 3M and Creative Concepts' factories in China, and local Chinese companies, will be able to produce and export their respirators to the US. Out of these, 26 companies are producing respirators according to China's KN95 mask standard.

The KN95 mask standard, issued by the Ministry of Emergency Management of China, is a national class 1 standard for particulate filtering masks. The CDC said previously that the efficiency of KN95 masks was similar to that of the N95 masks, and served as a proper substitute for the latter.

"We need to do everything we can to increase the availability of critical medical devices  so that healthcare workers on the front lines are better protected and provide the best care to COVID-19 patients," said Stephen M Hahn, FDA commissioner, in a press announcement released by the FDA.

As reported by the Cable News Network (CNN), according to a federal draft, US enterprises are barred from exporting essential medical supplies related to COVID-19. On April 2, the White House issued a presidential memorandum to stop manufacturer 3M from sending medical-grade face masks to Canada and Latin America.

To tackle the shortage in medical supplies, at the end of March, the FDA issued a EUA on imported masks from the European Union, Australia, Brazil, Japan, South Korea and Mexico, excluding China from the list.

Chen Qiaoshan, a medical analyst at Beijing-based market consultancy Analysys, said: "Currently, the US is facing a severe shortage of respirators, and China is one of the few countries to produce qualified products. Therefore, the US issued the EUA for respirators manufactured in China."

She said that the US government started to encourage the public wearing of face masks only recently, and its production capacity for masks is far from enough to meet domestic demand. Importing respirators from other countries is a measure to address social panic.

Many Chinese companies, including Yichang, Hubei province-based Allmed Medical, Shenzhen, Guangdong province-based Selen Technology, and Hangzhou-based Great Star, said that their masks were currently approved by the FDA and the companies were preparing to ship the products to the US.

Starting April 1, exporters of medical products, including COVID-19 testing kits, medical face masks and ventilators, need to provide extra documentation when they go through customs clearance, according to the Ministry of Commerce.

Jin Hai, head of the General Administration of Customs' Department of General Operation, said earlier at a news conference that during the epidemic prevention and control period, the Chinese government will ramp up supervision to ensure the orderly and top quality export of medical supplies.

Data from the GAC showed that from April 1 to Sunday, it had 16.6 billion yuan ($2.4 billion) worth of inspected medical supplies. It had also intercepted over 33 million pieces of medical materials produced by unqualified medical enterprises at the port, including 31.65 million face masks, 509,000 protective clothing, 1.19 million COVID-19 detection kits, 6.77 million ventilators and 46,000 infrared thermometers.
A Chicago case study, highlighted in the Centers for Disease Control and Preventions weekly mortality report, explains how gatherings  large or small  can lead to a proliferation of coronavirus cases between households in a community. Before shelter-in-place orders and social distancing measures had been implemented in Illinois to curtail the spread of the coronavirus, a man with a mild respiratory illness shared a takeout meal with a couple of close friends mourning the death of a relative in Chicago. The next day, the man attended the funeral. A few days later, he joined another family for a birthday party. The man later tested positive for the coronavirus. Within a matter of days, he had close contact with several people at these family gatherings and apparently infected 10 people, according to an investigation by the Chicago Department of Public Health. Three died after catching the virus, according to the report.
India is going into the longest lockdown in the world, with the least amount of notice given to its people and the least preparation by its government. Many states want the lockdown to be extended to the end of April, and it is possible that much if not most of India will continue the freeze.

What was the point of the lockdown? We were not told this explicitly by the Prime Minister; but globally it is understood to serve two purposes. The first is that it is time that is used for the state to build its capacity, especially for adding ventilators and intensive care units (ICUs). The second reason is that a lockdown slows the spread of the virus. The virus incubates in those it has infected and they can be identified and isolated. Has Indias lockdown been useful from these two points of view?

The answer to the first is that we have not used this time to build capacity. A report in the Hindu on Saturday, April 11, said that: A countrywide shortage of medicines and medical devices is likely in the coming weeks, the department of pharmaceuticals has warned the home ministry, urging it to take immediate steps to help drug makers resume production under the current lockdown. Drug and medical device makers are functioning on an average, at only 20-30 per cent capacity during the lockdown, as per feedback from various industry formations. Department of pharmaceuticals secretary P.D. Vaghela pointed out in an April 9 communique to home secretary Ajay Bhalla, It was not clear why the government did not put special effort into ensuring that this production continued to at least function if not increase in scale.

Another report said that at a meeting of government officials it was revealed that possibly half of Indias existing 40,000 ventilators were not working because of a lack of spare parts. A third report in the Economic Times on March 24 said that ventilator manufacturers were crippled by the lockdown and unable to produce the machines. All in all, we can assume that the government has not been able to use this time of the lockdown to build capacity.

The second reason for the shutdown is to slow the spread of the virus. Have we been successful in this? The lockdown was announced when we had about 500 cases, today we have over 7,000. We added 1,000 cases in the last 24 hours alone and the escalation of the spread is constant except in one state (Kerala), where the spread is slower. That could be interpreted as success or failure, but the real position is that we do not know if the spread has slowed or become faster and that is because we are not testing many people. India has among the lowest testing rates of any country. We finished testing a little over a lakh people on Friday. Germany, which has a population that is 15 times smaller than Indias, had tested over 13 lakh people in the same period. Another indicator that our testing is off is the fatality rate, which is 10 times higher in Madhya Pradesh than in Kerala, according to a Times of India report on Saturday. This means that its likely there are people dying untested, having spread the infection before passing away.

I am aware that there are several reasons for the lack of widespread testing in India including the fact that we are a poor nation that has not given much attention to healthcare and doesnt have the sort of money to spend on testing as Germany. But that is not the point here. We are trying to ascertain whether or not the lockdown has been used in the way that logic demanded that it be used.

There should have been a purpose and a goal in putting crores of India through the sort of trauma that they are going through in these days. There should have been a reason to deliberately cripple the economy as we have done and to my mind the two reasons have not been fulfilled.

What other purpose has the lockdown served? We are not sure. Rioting happened in Surat this week by migrant labourers stuck there and demanding to go home, and reports of the deaths of migrants stuck with no options and no assistance are common. All of it points to a lack of planning, strategy and execution. This is bad governance by definition.

But that hasnt stopped the politics as usual from continuing. Writing in Business Standard on Saturday, T.N. Ninan said: The Covid-19 epidemic has come just in time to save the first year of Narendra Modis second term growth of the non-government part of the economy had been reduced to just over three per cent in two quarters till December. Politically, Mr Modi had walked into a cul-de-sac with his amended citizenship law, which sparked extended protest sit-ins by citizens, provoked firm push-backs from state governments and state assemblies, and risked the decennial Census. How the narrative has changed in a few weeks!

The protesters against the citizenship law have dispersed, state governments are queuing up for desperately-needed financial support, and all economic problems can be laid safely at the door of Covid-19. The Prime Minister, not seen in Parliament during some key debates, is now on national television every few days with avuncular homilies while imposing a lockdown without notice, demonetisation style. He concludes, meanwhile, the further marginalising of Muslims has also developed into a Jan Andolan.
We recently issued an updated report on Delta Air Lines, Inc. DAL. Crippling air travel demand and eventually dwindling passenger revenues are currently a major headwind. Due to the current unrest caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, the carrier has reduced its capacity by at least 80% in April with 115,000 flight cancellations.

Delta Air Lines, Inc. Price

Delta Air Lines, Inc. Price

Delta Air Lines, Inc. price | Delta Air Lines, Inc. Quote

With the company losing approximately $60 million in cash each day, its first-quarter 2020 performance has been significantly affected. The same is expected to hurt the carriers second-quarter results (April-June) further. The company expects its second-quarter revenues to shrink as much as 90% in the face of plummeting passenger revenues.

With revenues being dented due to extremely low passenger traffic, Delta is looking to cut costs to drive the bottom line. Evidently, the carrier deferred all plans pertaining to capital spending. Moreover, the carrier has put a pause on hiring and is offering voluntary leave options to employees. Apart from accelerating retirement plans of the older planes in its fleet, Delta aims to downsize its active fleet.

Negative Earnings & Downward Revision

The pessimism surrounding the stock is evident from the fact that the Zacks Consensus Estimate for current year earnings has been revised downward by 90% to 11 cents in the past 60 days.

Notably, earnings are anticipated to decline 77.3% for 2020.

Zacks Rank and Stocks to Consider

Currently, Delta Air Lines carries a Zacks Rank #5 (Strong Sell).

Some better-ranked stocks in the Zacks Transportation sector are GATX Corporation GATX, Teekay Tankers Ltd. TNK and Hoegh LNG Partners LP HMLP. All the stocks carry a Zacks Rank #2 (Buy). You can see the complete list of todays Zacks #1 (Strong Buy) Rank stocks here.

Long-term (three to five years) expected earnings per share growth rate for GATX, Teekay Tankers and Hoegh LNG is pegged at 15%, 3% and 8.5%, respectively.

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Last year, it generated $24 billion in global revenues. By 2020, it's predicted to blast through the roof to $77.6 billion. Famed investor Mark Cuban says it will produce "the world's first trillionaires," but that should still leave plenty of money for regular investors who make the right trades early.



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[April 15, 2020] Bank of America Reports First-Quarter 2020 Financial Results

Bank of America reported its first-quarter 2020 financial results today. The news release, supplemental filing and investor presentation can be accessed in the following ways: This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20200415005331/en/ Bank of America newsroom at https://newsroom.bankofamerica.com

Bank of America Investor Relations website at http://investor.bankofamerica.com

Business Wire's news webpage at http://www.businesswire.com/portal/site/home/news Investor Conference Call information:

Chief Executive Officer Brian Moynihan and Chief Financial Officer Paul Donofrio will discuss the fiancial results in a conference call at 8:30 a.m. ET today. For a listen-only connection to the conference call, dial 1.877.200.4456 (U.S.) or 1.785.424.1732 (international). The conference ID is 79795.



Please dial in 10 minutes prior to the start of the call. Investors can also listen to a live audio webcast of the conference call and view the presentation slides by visiting the "Events and Presentations" section of the company's Investor Relations website. Replay information for Investor Conference Call:

Investors can access replays of the conference call by visiting the Investor Relations website or by calling 1.800.934.4850 (U.S.) or 1.402.220.1178 (international) from noon on April 15, through 11:59 p.m. ET on April 24.

Bank of America

Bank of America is one of the world's leading financial institutions, serving individual consumers, small and middle-market businesses and large corporations with a full range of banking, investing, asset management and other financial and risk management products and services. The company provides unmatched convenience in the United States, serving approximately 66 million consumer and small business clients with approximately 4,300 retail financial centers, including approximately 3,000 lending centers, 2,700 financial centers with a Consumer Investment Financial Solutions Advisor and approximately 2,100 business centers; approximately 16,900 ATMs; and award-winning digital banking with approximately 39 million active users, including approximately 30 million mobile users. Bank of America is a global leader in wealth management, corporate and investment banking and trading across a broad range of asset classes, serving corporations, governments, institutions and individuals around the world. Bank of America offers industry-leading support to approximately 3 million small business owners through a suite of innovative, easy-to-use online products and services. The company serves clients through operations across the United States, its territories and approximately 35 countries. Bank of America Corporation stock (NYSE: BAC) is listed on the New York Stock Exchange. For more Bank of America news, including dividend announcements and other important information, visit the Bank of America newsroom and register for news email alerts. www.bankofamerica.com View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20200415005331/en/

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Nations around the world reacted with alarm Wednesday after President Donald Trump announced a halt to the sizable funding the United States sends to the World Health Organization. Health experts warned the move could jeopardize global efforts to stop the coronavirus pandemic.

At a briefing in Washington, Trump said he was instructing his administration to halt funding for WHO pending a review of its role in severely mismanaging and covering up the spread of the coronavirus. The United States is WHO's largest single donor, contributing between $400 million and $500 million annually to the Geneva-based agency in recent years.

Trump has repeatedly labelled COVID-19 the Chinese virus and criticized the U.N. health agency for being too lenient on China, where the novel virus first emerged late last year.

Outside experts have questioned China's reported infections and deaths from the virus, calling them way too low and unreliable. And an investigation by The Associated Press has found that s ix days of delays between when Chinese officials k new about the virus and when they warned the public allowed the pandemic to bloom into an enormous public health disaster.

The European Union on Wednesday said Trump has no reason to freeze WHO funding at this critical stage and called for measures to promote unity instead of division. EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell said the 27-nation bloc deeply regrets the suspension of funds and added that the U.N. health agency is now needed more than ever to combat the pandemic.

Borrell said only by joining forces can we overcome this crisis that knows no borders. Even though they have been traditional allies for decades, the EU has increasingly been critical of the Trump administration over the past years.

Worldwide, the pandemic has infected nearly 2 million people and killed over 127,000, according to a tally by Johns Hopkins University. The virus is spread by microscopic droplets expelled into the air or left on surfaces when people sneeze or cough.

Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison said he sympathized with some of Trump's criticisms of WHO and China but that Australia would continue to fund the U.N. health agency.

"We work closely with them so that we're not going to throw the baby out with the bathwater here, Morrison told Perth Radio 6PR. But they're also not immune from criticism. Germany's foreign minister, Heiko Maas, pushed back at Trump's announcement.

Placing blame doesn't help, he wrote on Twitter. The virus knows no borders. We must work closely against COVID-19. Strengthening the U.N., in particular the underfunded WHO, is a better investment, for example, to develop and distribute tests and vaccines. Devi Sridhar, chair of global public health at the University of Edinburgh, called Trump's decision extremely problematic, noting that the chronically-underfunded WHO is leading efforts to help developing countries fight the spread of COVID-19.

This is the agency that's looking out for other countries and leading efforts to stop the pandemic, Sridhar said. This is exactly the time when they need more funding, not less. Sridhar said Trump's move was a short-sighted political decision that would likely have lasting consequences.

Trump is angry, but his anger is being directed in a way that is going to ultimately hurt U.S. interests, she said.

In Beijing, Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian says the country is "seriously concerned about the U.S. government's decision to suspend funding. As the most authoritative and professional international institution in the field of global public health security, the WHO plays an irreplaceable role in responding to the global public health crisis, he told reporters Wednesday.

The WHO did not respond to repeated requests from The Associated Press for comment, but its Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus and other top WHO officials were expected to attend a conference on the pandemic later Wednesday.

Many analysts have praised the initial response to the pandemic by WHO, which is being challenged as national interests collide with the international cooperation that U.N. agencies must rely on.

But recently, many governments have split with its advice on issues of public health policy, notably on travel restrictions and whether the public should wear masks.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
(PHOTO: Getty Images)

As the number of coronavirus cases continues to rise around the world, designers and labels have responded to the pandemic by offering their factories and manpower to produce essential goods such as hand sanitisers and protective clothing for frontline workers.

The Malaysian Official Designers Association (Moda) has rallied its designers and seamstresses to help make personal protective equipment (PPE) like hospital gowns. Designers Khoon Hooi, Melinda Looi, Key Ng, Celest Thoi and Alia Bastamam, who are Moda members, have put their sewing machines to good use, and made and delivered close to 2,000 hospital gowns so far.

Fashion designer Khoon Hooi told Yahoo Lifestyle SEA, Having free time is indeed a privilege to us in the fashion industry. Since we have the available manpower plus the equipment, and production has come to a halt, there is no excuse for us to not step up and help combat the shortages for PPE gowns. It also keeps us busy and productive. I see it as a call of duty.

Another fashion designer who was involved with the effort, Celest Thoi, shared: We need our frontliners to be protected, strong and have high morale! We are all in this together... for if they fall, we fall.

Story continues

Interested volunteers in Malaysia can email modamalaysia2019@gmail.com or WhatsApp +6012-8580899.

In Singapore, Meiko Tailor has teamed up with stay-at-home sewers to fulfil the demand for handmade fabric masks. As of 8 April, Meiko Tailor has distributed about 150 masks, with some donated to Grab and Deliveroo riders. If you would like to order your own batch of cotton fabric masks, email Meiko Tailor at enquiry@meikotailor.com.

Meanwhile, designers in the Philippines have also contributed to the production of hazmat suits and masks. Celebrity fashion designer Michael Leyva has created head covers and hazmat suits as well as reusable face masks, while Project Runway Philippines alumnus Santi Obcena has sewn face masks for donation.

Related stories:
PRAGUE (Reuters) - The Czech government on Tuesday announced a plan to reopen stores and restaurants gradually over seven weeks to reawaken an economy brought to a standstill by a coronavirus lockdown. Small shops will reopen on April 20, larger stores on May 11, and restaurants and shopping malls on June 8, according to a government presentation.

PRAGUE (Reuters) - The Czech government on Tuesday announced a plan to reopen stores and restaurants gradually over seven weeks to reawaken an economy brought to a standstill by a coronavirus lockdown.

Small shops will reopen on April 20, larger stores on May 11, and restaurants and shopping malls on June 8, according to a government presentation.

But Health Minister Adam Vojtech said the plan would be conditional on adherence to hygiene rules, and subject to evaluations of the spread of the new coronavirus.

The nation of 10.7 million was among the first in Europe to declare a state of emergency in March, and imposed some of the strictest curbs on public life to prevent the spread of the virus when the proven number of cases was still below 200.

By Tuesday, the Czechs had reported 6,101 cases with 161 deaths. The restrictions have reduced the number of new cases to below 300 per day in the past 10 days, and the number of hospital admissions to below the maximum capacity of the health system.

The plan foresees a partial reopening of schools, not least for exams; normal schooling will not restart before the new academic year in September.

(Reporting by Robert Muller and Jan Lopatka, Editing by Michael Kahn and Kevin Liffey)

This story has not been edited by Firstpost staff and is generated by auto-feed.
Gandhinagar, April 15 : Following Congress MLA Imran Khedawala testing positive for coronavirus a few hours after their meeting on Tuesday, Gujarat Chief Minister Vijay Rupani, Deputy Chief Minister Nitin Patel, Minister of State for Home Pradeepsinh Jadeja and two other Congress MLAs have self-isolated themselves as a precautionary measure.

Looking at the rising number of positive cases of coronavirus infection in the walled city of Ahmedabad and Danilimda and intending to curb the menace that has killed over 1 lakh people globally, Rupani had called the three Congress MLAs, who represent a majority portion of the hotspot areas, for a discussion on the proposed curfew in these areas.

On Tuesday afternoon, Jamalpur Khadia MLA Khedawala, Dariyapur MLA Gyasuddin Shaikh and Danilimda MLA Shailesh Parmar met Rupani, Patel and Jadeja and expressed their support to the curfew decision, suggesting relaxation for women to buy for essential commodities.

The three Congress MLAs also met Chief Secretary Anil Mukim and Director General of Police Shivanand Jha. Later in the day on Tuesday, it turned out that the swab samples of Khedawala, taken during the surveillance of Jamalpur Khadia area, turned out to be positive, sending a shivers down the spine to all of those who met him in the afternoon.

On Tuesday evening itself, as Khedawala was rushed to the SVP hospital,Sheikh and Parmar got themselves home quarantined.

According to the information from the CM Office, it is learnt that the Gujarat CM, Deputy CM and the Minister have cancelled all their Wednesday meetings and have opted to isolate themselves at their residences in Gandhinagar.

Leading medical officials of the state, Dr R.K. Patel and Dr Atul Patel inspected the CM on Wednesday morning and expressed satisfaction on his health saying that all his parameters were normal.

"The CM will be functioning from his residence and the administration will run as usual," said Ashwani Kumar from the Chief Minister's Office. The CM is overseeing the administration through technological aids like video conferencing, video calling and telephone. An official order has also been released that nobody will be allowed to meet the CM a week from Wednesday.

Later on Wednesday, Rupani rang up all the 3 Congress MLAs and inquired about their health. He inquired on Khedawala's health and asked him to call if he needs anything. He also inquired about the health of both the other Congress MLAs from Dariyapur and Danilimda and asked them to take care of their health while in their isolation.

Rupani expressed hope that all the three Congress MLAs will get well soon and once again resume their public works.
Jacinda Ardern has been asked to consider easing the strict coronavirus restrictions and follow a similar approach to Australia.

New Zealand is about to head into their fourth week of strict level four restrictions which only allows people to leave their homes for essential services and exercise.

The decision to keep the country under level four restrictions will be decided on Monday, but opposition National Party leader Simon Bridges is calling on the government to follow Australia's approach.

National Party leader Simon Bridges (pictured) is calling on the government to follow Australia's approach

'We should get out of lockdown next week and we should let business and workers get back to it,' he told The AM Show, Newshub reported.

'[Australia] has had very similar health outcomes, but they have had better economic ones.'

Mr Bridges said the government should be looking at which business could 'get up running safely' as the nation continues to tackle the health and economic outcomes.

He stressed that if New Zealand kept their borders closed, fast testing in place and protective equipment readily available should allow people to get back to work.

'I am certainly urging [the Government] as loudly and clearly as I can let's come out of lockdown, we can do what Australia fundamentally has done.'

The Nationals leader explained that Australia will come out with lower employment due to allowing some businesses to continue running.

The unemployment rate has soared to 26 per cent in New Zealand and has been deemed 'unacceptable' by finance minister Grant Robertson.

Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern (pictured) has been asked to ease restrictions and allow people to go back to work

Mr Robertson has also asked the government to 'emerge from level four restrictions' as soon as possible while sticking to the rules.

The decision to ease restrictions or increase them will be decided on Monday based on the latest data and modelling in case of another outbreak.

New Zealand currently has 1,072 positive cases of coronavirus with 628 recoveries. A total of nine people have died from the deadly disease.
Sharon Stone has opened up about struggling with body image when she reached her forties.

Speaking to Vogue Germany, the American actor recalled one moment when she locked herself in the bathroom and refused to leave until she accepted the way she looked.

Sometimes you feel strong and optimistic, and in other phases it may take more strength to deal with the past and the future, Stone said of her changing relationship with body image.

There was a point in my forties when I went into the bathroom with a bottle of wine, locked the door, and said: I wont get out until I can fully accept my body.

I started to cry at the sight of my slightly aging body and face in the magnifying mirror.

Recommended Model Iskra Lawrence opens up about body image in pregnancy video

Stone continued: But you are not completely powerless and can slow down the process enormously if you pull yourself together, eat disciplined and exercise a lot.

Elsewhere in the interview, Stone revealed she finds that dancing restores her confidence in moments of insecurity.

I feel most alive when I dance, she told the publication.

Not just a little bit now and then. No, I dance at least three or four nights a week!

Stone said that she finds dancing regularly keeps her in shape and gives her energy.

The 62-year-old actor also opened up about her dating life, having made headlines last year when Bumble blocked and then reinstated her profile because the app thought it was a fake.

I am currently writing to someone who works for the aerospace program, Stone revealed.

I would never get to know someone like that.
Finance ministry on Monday held a review meeting with the heads of public sector banks, and instructed them to extend all possible help to all sectors of the economy within prudential guidelines to tide over the crisis following COVID-19 outbreak and consequent lockdown.

The review meeting - held via video conference - reviewed banks functioning during the lockdown and also took stock of liquidity situation, sources said.

The ministry asked the banks to devise strategy for the post lockdown period and readiness for meeting the future challenges.

The two-hour long meeting took stock of disbursement of financial assistance through direct benefit transfer (DBT) under the Pradhan Mantri Garib Kalyan Yojana to help poor and daily wagers to sustain during the lockdown triggered by outbreak of COVID-19 pandemic.

As part of the Rs 1.70 lakh crore relief package, the government announced cash doles to women, poor senior citizens and farmers to mitigate the hardships faced due to the lockdown.

According to the sources, it was reiterated that banks should ensure cash availability to meet the demands of customers.

The meeting also deliberated on the deterioration of asset quality due to extended lockdown, the sources said, adding bankers were of the view that there were risks of rising defaults but difficult to make assessment till the system stabilises.

Currently, the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) has allowed a three months mortarium for all kinds of term loan, including retail and crop loans as well as working capital payments.

After the moratorium is over, banks will be in position to assess the stress in the system due to coronavirus outbreak.

Indian Banks' Association (IBA) plans to request the Reserve Bank for extension of moratorium period beyond three months.

Last week, SBI chairman Rajnish Kumar had said banks through IBA will request for raising the loan moratorium period from the existing three months to may be 5-6 months depending on evolving situation.

For revival of the economy, sources said, banks have been asked to prepare a roadmap.

Banks pitched for government guarantees against their loans to certain risk prone sectors in order to revive flow of credit in the economy post lockdown.

"In the current circumstances, this (government guarantee) would be the best way and this is what we have been telling the government. The risk capital comes from the government, liquidity comes from the RBI and the intermediation is done by the public sector banks. So that is a workable model because the risk appetite of banks is limited.

"I believe there are various suggestions and the government has appointed empowered groups. All this information will be gathered, analysed and then we can expect some package and an exit plan from the lockdown," Kumar had said.

Last month, the Prime Minister's office (PMO) constituted 11 empowered groups including on economy and welfare.

The group headed by economic affairs secretary Atanu Chakraborty is not only looking at the pain points of the economy but also the distress and misery being faced by a large section of the society who have been rendered jobless due to the outbreak.

Besides Chakraborty, the other members of the panel are expenditure secretary T V Somnathan, labour secretary Hiralal Samariya, rural development secretary Rajesh Bhushan, department of financial services additional secretary Pankaj Jain, joint secretary in Prime Minister's Office Arvind Shrivastava and deputy secretary in the Cabinet Secretariat Amrapali Kata. The panel is also looking at the rural distress.

Also Read: Coronavirus India Lockdown Live Updates: COVID-19 Guidelines to be issued today as migrant crisis hit nation

Also Read: Coronavirus found in two Indian bat species; researchers recommend proactive surveillance
Many Bollywood celebrities may have become a global phenomenon in the last decade, but their fame doesnt just stop there. Bollywood star kids are also increasingly becoming more and more popular as the next generation of Bollywood stars in the making.

However, unlike the years gone by, star kids no longer take the plunge with making a Bollywood debut right out of school. The latest trend is that of attending expensive (for the middle-class, aam aadmi), top colleges abroad and pursuing their higher studies, despite the possibility that most of them will probably end up in Bollywood anyway after graduating.

Just like these 11 star kids who are attending top colleges overseas but will probably end up in Bollywood anyway.

1. Khushi Kapoor

 Instagram

There was a time when it was reported that Khushi might give Bollywood a miss to pursue a career in international modelling, but as per latest inputs, Khushi seems to have changed her mind and is currently attending the New York Film Academy to pursue an acting course from the famed institute.

2. Aaryan Khan

 Instagram

Shah Rukh and Gauri Khans first born is reportedly enrolled at University of Southern California in the Cinematic Arts faculty where he is learning the craft of filmmaking. If reports are to be believed, Aaryan is not interested in pursuing an acting career and would rather make films instead.

3. Navya Naveli

 Instagram

Amitabh Bachchans granddaughter and Shweta Nandas daughter Navya is currently attending Fordham University in New York City after graduating from the Sevenoaks School in the United Kingdom.

4. Alaviaa Jaffrey

 Instagram

Javed Jafferys daughter, Alaviaa is quite the social media star and is known for her dope fashion game. She is currently studying at the Fashion Institute Of Technology in New York and reportedly wishes to follow in her brother Mizaans footstep to join Bollywood.

5. Ibrahim Ali Khan

 Instagram

Ibrahim has been quite elusive from the media glare of late, and has somehow managed to keep his personal life very private. Much like the fact that people only know that he is currently pursuing his higher studies in London, but no information is available on which college he is attending. Still, there is no guessing that Ibrahim will most likely end up in Bollywood right after this.

6. Suhana Khan

 Instagram

SRK has never shied away from expressing that Suhana is more than interested in making her acting debut, and to further that desire, she is currently pursuing a degree in acting from the New York University.

7. Nysa Devgn

 Instagram

Kajol and Ajay Devgns daughter is currently in Singapore pursuing her higher education from the prestigious United World College of South East Asia. But if leading tabloid reports are to be believed, Nysa's heart is in acting.

8. Yashvardhan Ahuja

 Instagram

Yesteryear entertainer Govindas son yashvardhan is reportedly attending the Met Film School in London presently, and is allegedly looking forward to making a Bollywood debut upon completing his course.

9. Aaliyah Kashyap

 Instagram

Anurag Kashyaps daughter Aaliyah is currently enrolled in Chapman University in Southern California, US and if rumours are to be believed, the social media celeb is all set to turn into a Bollywood celebrity after graduation.

10. Dishani Chakraborty

 Instagram

Mithun Chakrabortys daughter Dishani is quite a beauty to behold and reportedly attends the New York Film Academy. We reckon that suggests that she is interested in following her fathers footsteps and making a career out of acting.

11. Ahan Shetty

 Instagram

Suneil Shettys son Ahan reportedly is a United States University graduate with a degree in filmmaking and acting. If gossip mills are to be believed, Ahan has already started working on his debut film.
She has been keeping her 3.2million Instagram followers entertained with her family's antics during lockdown.

And Stacey Solomon gave boyfriend Joe Swash a very glamorous makeover in a video shared to her Instagram story on Tuesday.

The Loose Women star, 30, showed off her make-up skills as she applied foundation, fluttery false lashes and highlighter to her unimpressed beau, 38, completely transforming his look.

Oh my: Stacey Solomon gave boyfriend Joe Swash a very glamorous makeover in a video shared to her Instagram story on Tuesday

Beginning the video by saying: 'I am so bored, tempted to give him a makeover' Stacey lay on Joe as the unimpressed star looked on.

The next clip showed Stacey applying eyeshadow and foundation to the former EastEnders star, with the caption: 'I love you so much Joe Swash, this was so much fun, he even let me do lashes.'

Adding highlighter and pale pink lipstick, Joe showed off his smouldering look for the camera, with Stacey typing: 'I wish I did my make-up this good, I know he loves it too, I can tell.'

Stacey said: 'You love it!' to which Joe responded: 'I had no choice! I think I've got glue in my eyes Stace!'

Wow: The Loose Women star, 30, showed off her make-up skills as she applied foundation, fluttery false lashes and highlighter to her unimpressed beau, 38, completely transforming his look

Hmm: Beginning the video by saying: 'I am so bored, tempted to give him a makeover' Stacey lay on Joe as the unimpressed star looked on

The star also posted a photo of Joe's new look, joking: 'It wasn't easy finding a colour match to go with the fake tan but I smashed it.'

Stacey revealed that boyfriend Joe had shaved off his beard into a handlebar moustache earlier this week.

The Loose Women panellist took to Instagram to share a video of her presenter beau as she jokingly likened his facial hair to Tiger King's Joe Exotic.

Stacey revealed that Joe decided to shave his beard after letting it grow during isolation.

Admitting she was relieved over the decision as it 'hurt' to kiss, the former X Factor star was soon left shocked as her beau unveiled a new handlebar moustache.

Made up: The next clip showed Stacey applying eyeshadow and foundation to the former EastEnders star

Fluttery: A dutiful Joe let Stacey apply some volumising mascara to his peepers

Wow: Stacey said: 'You love it!' to which Joe responded: 'I had no choice! I think I've got glue in my eyes Stace!'

Stacey said: 'What the hell is that? You can't keep that. Is it a joke or is that what you're actually having? It's not what you're having. Is it real?'

To which Joe admitted: 'Well it took me so long to grow my beard, I didn't want to get rid of all of it.'

With Stacey jokingly adding a GIF of Tiger King's Joe Exotic, she penned: 'I really thought it was a joke but I think this is what he actually wants to have. I don't understand it but I'll stand by him through this.

'Why have I never noticed how much of a bum chin he has until now?'

Netflix's Tiger King follows former Oklahoma zoo owner, Joe Exotic, who is currently serving 22 years for 17 counts of animal abuse and a murder-for-hire plot of his arch-nemesis Carole Baskin, a big-cat campaigner from Tampa, Florida.

Close-up: Stacey shared a beauty shot of her partner rocking his new look
FarEye, a New Delhi, India-based SaaS logistics platform, raised $25m in Series D funding.

The round was led by M12 (Microsofts venture fund) with participation from Eight Roads Ventures and Honeywell Ventures and existing investor SAIF Partners.

The company intends to use the funds to continue to expand operations and its business reach.

Founded in 2013 by Kushal Nahata, Gaurav Srivastava and Gautam Kumar, FarEye provides a SaaS based, machine-learning powered predictive logistics platform that enables enterprises to orchestrate, track, and optimize their logistics operations. Today, the company is present across 20 countries and has traction with more than 150 global Retailers, CPG companies and Logistics & Transportation providers including DHL, Amway, Dominos, Walmart, Johnson & Johnson and Hilti.

FinSMEs

15/04/2020
WASHINGTON - A team of government officials - led by the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention - has created a public health strategy to combat the coronavirus and reopen parts of the country.

Their strategy, obtained by The Washington Post, is part of a larger White House effort to draft a national plan to get Americans out of their homes and back to work. It gives guidance to state and local governments on how they can ease mitigation efforts, moving from drastic restrictions such as stay-at-home orders in a phased way to support a safe reopening.

CDC and FEMA officials have worked on the public health response for at least the past week, and the resulting document by the two agencies has been discussed at the White House including by members of the coronavirus task force, according to two administration officials speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations.

President Donald Trump wants a final detailed plan on reopening the country ready within days so he can issue suggestions for some states to reopen May 1, officials said.

"The plans to reopen the country are close to being finalized," Trump said at a White House briefing Tuesday.

Trump said he planned to speak with all 50 governors "very shortly" and would then begin authorizing individual governors to implement "a very powerful reopening plan" at a specific time and date for each state.

He said about 20 states have avoided the outbreaks that have affected others, and he hinted that some could begin restarting their economies even before May 1.

"We think we're going to be able to get them open very quickly," Trump said.

He added: "We will hold the governors accountable. But again, we're going to be working with them to make sure it works very well."

Other agencies and White House officials have drafted similar planning documents, a White House aide said. The version obtained by The Post appears to be an early draft by FEMA and contains granular instructions for a phased reopening of institutions such as schools, child-care facilities, summer camps, parks, faith-based organizations and restaurants.

Within the White House, one senior administration official said, Trump has been so insistent on the reopening that some officials worry only a narrow window exists to provide information to change the president's mind or to ensure that the effort to reopen does not significantly add to the country's still rising number of infections and deaths. The president has not committed to following the guidelines delineated in the draft.

"Beneath the bluster of the president saying May 1, and he's in charge, and all the other things, there are real efforts to figure out how we could safely and actually do this," that official said.

A federal official who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss evolving plans said the overall planning document has eight parts; the public health response obtained by The Post represents only two of those parts.

The public health response portion of "A Framework for Re-Opening America" is dated April 10. It runs 36 pages. An 11-page executive summary called "Focus on the Future - Going to Work for America" was the subject of discussions last week by FEMA and CDC officials, among others.

"It's a road map for if they want to do it gradually," said one participant in the planning who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the plan has not been made official.

The plan lays out three-phases: Preparing the nation to reopen with a national communication campaign and community readiness assessment until May 1. Then, the effort, through May 15, would involve ramping up manufacturing of testing kits and personal protective equipment and increasing emergency funding. Then staged reopenings would begin, depending on local conditions. The plan does not give specific dates for reopenings but specified "not before May 1."

The first priority, according to the CDC response document, is to "reopen community settings where children are cared for, including K-12 schools, day cares, and locally attended summer camps, to allow the workforce to return to work. Other community settings will follow with careful monitoring for increased transmission that exceeds the public health and health care systems."

The document also says that during phased reopenings, it is critical to strictly follow recommendations on hand-washing and wearing face coverings in group settings.

The plan also carries this warning: "Models indicate 30-day shelter in place followed by 180 day lifting of all mitigation results in large rebound curve - some level of mitigation will be needed until vaccines or broad community immunity is achieved for recovering communities."

The document says re-opening communities in this phased approach "will entail a significant risk of resurgence of the virus."

Any reopening must meet four conditions:

- Incidence of infection is "genuinely low."

- A "well functioning" monitoring system capable of "promptly detecting any increase in incidence" of infection.

- A public health system that is "reacting robustly" to all cases of covid-19 and has surge capacity to react to an increase in cases.

- A health system that has enough inpatient beds and staffing to rapidly scale up and deal with a surge in cases.

The plan describes the conditions under which it is reasonable to lift some community mitigation measures, the phased steps to reduce those measures and indicators to monitor the impact of transmission on public health and health system capacities.

Communities where it is necessary to maintain only "low mitigation" are places where the virus never spread significantly, and those locations can reopen soon, according to the document. Moderate mitigation is called for in former hot spots entering "controlled recovery." Significant mitigation is recommended in current or emerging hot spots, or moderate mitigation communities showing signs of strained capacity.

In a community following the moderate mitigation track, the report says, schools could remain open with enhanced distancing measures, such as no assemblies, no sporting events and staggered scheduling.

The document calls for the CDC to establish a Covid-19 Response Corps to help state and local health departments with key public health functions, including contact tracing, which involves locating people who may have had contact with someone infected with the coronavirus.

Health experts in recent days have called for federal and state officials to help expand capacity throughout the country for the labor-intensive work of tracing people who have come into contacted with infected patients, because local health departments lack the necessary staff, money and training. The plan also says that solutions for "app-based case and contact investigations will be necessary for augmenting the actions of public health workers and for greatly increasing the important role of slowing covid-19 transmission in the community."

Tech experts and companies such as Google and Apple are developing software that uses cellphones and apps to track people's movements. Once someone is confirmed as infected with the coronavirus, public health workers could go back and trace people the infected person has come into contact with. But the invasive nature of cellphone tracking and apps have raised sharp concerns about civil liberties.

The document calls for a workforce of 670 to support communities to do contact tracing as part of a surge staff, not nearly large enough based on plans from other groups.
The DSU team has received multiple orders and is hoping to collaborate with companies to mass-produce the personal protective equipment

The design of the 3D printed face shields was finalised after healthcare workers gave feedback and adjustments were made to improve the product.

Bengaluru: The Autodesk Design and Innovation Centre and Innovation Labs at Dayanand Sagar University have designed a face shield to protect healthcare professionals coming into contact with possible carriers of the virus.

The face shield, which can become a part of the Personal Protective Equipment used by healthcare professionals, has two parts (a) support structure with quick attach-detach points to rest on the forehead of the user, and (b) a transparent film which protects the face of the user from infection carrying droplets.

Based on the design, several units were 3D printed by the DSU team and distributed to doctors for evaluation. After some iterations based on their feedback, a final design was arrived at.

The DSU team hopes to transfer the technology for mass-production to make it affordable.

The face shield was manufactured using FDM (Fused Deposition Modelling), a 3D printing process that uses a filament of a thermoplastic material, Polylactic Acid (PLA), commonly used in 3D printing.

New films can be swapped into the place of old films after a period of use.

The product was developed by Vinayaka K, manager of the Autodesk Design and Innovation Centre at DSU; Dr. Suryanarayana, professor of aerospace engineering and Ajay P, a student of automobile engineering, of the Dayanand Sagar College of Engineering.

We already have multiple orders for the product and are looking for ways to enable mass production amidst limited access to resources and technology. Vinayaka said. We will be seeking approval for the face shield from Indian Council of Medical Research.
BRUSSELS -- The European Parliament will call for the creation of a "common economic space" between the EU and the six former Soviet republics of its Eastern Partnership program as part of a process of "gradual integration" into the bloc, according to a draft report seen by RFE/RL on April 15.

The parliamentary draft report also denounces Russia's "illegal" actions in Eastern Partnership countries -- Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Georgia, Moldova, and Ukraine -- including what it calls destabilization, invasion, and annexation.

The document is to be debated by the European Parliament's Foreign Affairs Committee in the coming weeks and could potentially be endorsed by the full chamber in May.

A Brussels summit bringing together the leaders of the 27 EU member states with those of the six Eastern Partnership members is scheduled for June 18. But several EU diplomats told RFE/RL the gathering might be postponed to the second half of the year due to the coronavirus pandemic.

In a veiled reference to Russia, which has vehemently opposed efforts by countries of the ex-Soviet bloc to get closer to the EU and NATO, the European Parliament will "confirm the sovereign right of the Eastern partner countries to freely choose their individual level of cooperation or integration with the EU," according to the draft report.

The document also "strongly condemns the continued violations of fundamental principles and norms of international law in the Eastern Partnership region," citing "illegal use of force, invasion, destabilization, annexation, borderization, and occupation of territories of several Eastern Partnership countries by the Russian Federation."

In Georgia, Moscow has stationed troops in the breakaway regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia since it recognized their independence following the five-day Russian-Georgian war in 2008. The majority of the world's countries consider Abkhazia and South Ossetia to be Georgian territory.

Meanwhile, Russia seized Ukraine's Crimea region in 2014 after sending in troops and staging a referendum deemed illegitimate by at least 100 countries. Moscow is also supporting armed separatists in the deadly conflict in eastern Ukraine.

The Eastern Partnership program was launched in 2009 and is meant to bring the six former Soviet republics closer to the EU without clearly offering future membership.

Georgia, Moldova, and Ukraine have since inked association agreements with the EU, including free-trade deals, but several member states have been reluctant to discuss the issue of these countries' eventual membership.

The European Parliament, which has in the past called for further enlargement to the east, states in the draft report that "while accession is not foreseen under the framework of the Eastern Partnership, the Eastern Partnership policy can facilitate a process of gradual integration to the EU."

The document adds that the European lawmakers want to "embark on a process to create a common economic space, including services, that facilitates deeper economic integration and convergence with the EU policies and deeper economic cooperation among the Eastern Partnership countries themselves."

The lawmakers will express support for a gradual integration of the six countries into the EU's energy union, transport community, and digital single market, according to the draft report.

Among other things, in the telecommunications field the document suggests creating "a roaming-free regime between the EU and Eastern Partnership countries and an intra-Eastern Partnership one as soon as possible." Other suggestions include the establishment of an Eastern Partnership University in Kyiv.

The draft document also proposes setting up "an extended international peacekeeping force along the Ukraine-Russia border," in which an EU-led mission "should be offered for deployment to the parties in the conflict, to assist in tasks such as de-mining, assisting with preparations for local elections and securing free access for humanitarian aid organizations."

A group of international observers is currently tracking the fighting in eastern Ukraine as part of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe's Special Monitoring Mission.
New Delhi, April 15 : The army has directed its personnel not to use Aarogya Sethu mobile app, designed to help control spread of coronavirus, in office premises, operation areas and sensitive locations.

Also, the personnel using this app should not to disclose service identity, including rank and appointment. The force has been issued directions to adhere to the cyber security policies on the usage of mobile phones.

However, it has allowed all defence force personnel, veterans and their families and dependents to install Aarogya Sethu app.

The army has stressed all the services people using this app will have to switch off location services and bluetooth while visiting public places and engaged in managing 'isolation centres'.

The force has also asked the personnel, called for Covid-19 related assistance to civil authorities, to switch off location services and bluetooth if they use the app.

"Contact list of user should not contain any reference to rank appointment or service," it said. The personnel using this app must install antivirus and update their mobile operating system, it added.

"Serving personnel, veterans & families of IndianArmy advised to use "Aarogya Setu" App for duration of #COVID19 with due precautions," the army tweeted.

Aarogya Setu app, launched by the Ministry of Human Resource Development is association with Digital India, is for contact tracing and dissemination of advisories to contain Covid-19 It also helps find coronavirus infected people present nearby. After downloading, the app asks if you have cough, fever or trouble breathing. If you don't have any such problem, you will be in the 'green zone'.

It asks users to keep the phone's Bluetooth and location devices on. Whenever the user visits a crowded place, this app keeps sending messages from nearby mobile phones through the Bluetooth.

When the user stands near a Covi-19 free person it shows green zone. If that person becomes coronavirus positive after 10 days, the app will alert you immediately. In such a situation, the user can get himself or herself checked too. This app also tells about hotspots, so that the user can change the route.

Since the launch, the app has been downloaded by over 1,00,00,000 people on both Android and iPhone smartphones. Available in 11 languages, the app is designed for use on an all-India basis and can also take a huge workload.
Two civilians were injured in shelling by Pakistan on the line of control (LoC) in Jammu and Kashmir's Rajouri district on Wednesday.

Both people who are injured belong to the same family and are receiving treatment at the Government Medical College (GMC), Rajouri.

"Two people came to the hospital in the morning. One of them is 60 years of age while the girl is only 13 years. The man was gravely injured. The shells hit his chest and arms. We are providing them proper treatment," said Dr Shikha, Medical Officer, GMC Rajouri.

The patients are said to be in stable condition.

On Tuesday, Pakistani Rangers had shelled a couple of villages in the sector besides Balakote and Mendhar in nearby Poonch district.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
San Francisco firefighters battled three separate blazes that sparked in just a 10-minute period Tuesday night, sending three adult victims to the burn center, officials said.

The fires are all under investigation and its unclear if they are related, said Jonathan Baxter, a San Francisco Fire Department spokesman.
MANCHESTER, England, April 15, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- Global employment law consultancy, Peninsula Group today promised to double its 1 million charity pledge to Royal Manchester Children's Hospital Charity, now committing to raise 2 million for the charity.

Peninsula announced its original commitment of 1 million [twelve months ago] but in the light of recent events around Covid-19, which has made the work of the hospital more challenging than ever as well as impacting on charitable donations, Peninsula has decided to double its pledge to 2 million.

Peter Done, founder and Group Managing Director of Peninsula said, "We speak regularly with the representatives of the Children's Hospital and know they have been working incredibly hard throughout this period to keep the NHS staff going and keep the children safe.

"We have now pledged to increase our commitment to 2 million to assist them at this difficult time.

"Royal Manchester Children's Hospital is an incredible organisation and needs help more than ever at the moment. We are glad to assist and it is a privilege to do what we can to help."

Sarah Naismith, Director of Royal Manchester Children's Hospital Charity, said:

"This is incredible news and we are so grateful Peter and the whole Peninsula team felt moved to support us even further.

"The money will make an amazing difference to the children's hospital. I'd like to thank everyone involved at Peninsula for such a wonderful pledge."

About Peninsula Group

Peninsula is one of the UK's premier companies, started in 1983. The company offers HR, employment law and health & safety support services to small and fast-growing businesses across the country, as well as tax and payroll advice, employee assistance programmes, and HR and health & safety training. Since its beginnings in Greater Manchester, Peninsula has now expanded into the furthest corners of the globe, operating in Ireland, Australia, New Zealand and Canada.

www.peninsulagrouplimited.com

About RMCH

Royal Manchester Children's Hospital treats more than 276,000 patients every year. They come from all over the North West of England and from other parts of the country for some highly specialist treatments.

Royal Manchester Children's Hospital Charity provides resources to make a difficult time easier for children and their families who use the hospital.

Royal Manchester Children's Hospital Charity is part of Manchester Foundation Trust Charity which is registered with the Charity Commission as Manchester University NHS Foundation Trust.

www.rmchcharity.org.uk

Contact:

+44 (0)161-830-2405

+44 (0)784-275-6471

Jane.Pearson@Peninsula-uk.com
The Society of St Vincent de Paul (SVP) has called on telecommunication companies providing telephone and internet services to introduce clear guidelines and a consistent approach for dealing with customers in difficulty during the Covid-19 crisis.

SVP says that these guidelines should include a ban on disconnections which would ensure that no households are left without access to vital communication services while we all need to remain at home.

They are also asking that suppliers engage proactively and compassionately with customers that may be faced with large bills in the coming weeks.

The charity says extending limits and caps on usage is the right thing to do in these unprecedented times.



Kieran Stafford, SVP National President said: "Our members have heard from isolated older people and lone parents who have recently been issued with a disconnection notice from their communications provider.

"As we are asked to practice physical distancing, it is more important than ever that vulnerable and marginalised groups can stay connected with loved ones and access up-to-date health advice.

"We are also concerned that children in low income families will fall behind on their schoolwork if they do not have access to internet services.



The Society has contacted the Communications Regulator, Telecommunication Industry Ireland and the Minister for Communications, Climate Action and Environment on the issue.



The Communication Regulator has told SVP that it is actively monitoring the disconnection policies of suppliers and that the industry has processes in place to deal with these exceptional circumstances.

It also said that suppliers will engage sympathetically with their customers if they are in difficulty.



The Minister for Communications has indicated that a Charter of Fair Practice is being developed for the telecommunications industry during the Covid-19 crisis.

Kieran Stafford said: "While this is welcome, we are concerned that without clear messaging and a consistent approach from all suppliers, there is a real danger that vulnerable customer will fall through the cracks.

"Publicly communicating a moratorium on all telecommunication disconnections will provide reassurance to customers and protect the most vulnerable in our communities from experiencing further distress at this very difficult time.



Since the crisis began SVP has worked closely with Utility Suppliers and Commission for the Regulation of Utilities, who have put in place measures for customers on pre-paid electricity and gas meters who may be unable to top up their meters, either due to illness or self-isolation or a sudden drop in income.

The measures put in place include: a moratorium on all energy disconnections; an increase in emergency credit on meters; and workable solutions for bill customers experiencing payment difficulties.



"These interventions make a real difference to those that are struggling in energy poverty. We now need a similar response from the telecommunications industry," said Kieran Stafford.
The leader of German Chancellor Angela Merkel's party suggested yesterday that her successor, who will probably also run for the country's top job in an election next year, probably won't be chosen before December.

Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer succeeded Ms Merkel as leader of the centre-right Christian Democratic Union (CDU) in late 2018. She struggled to impose her authority before announcing in February that she wouldn't run for chancellor in the 2021 election and would relinquish the party leadership.

A special convention was meant to be held later this month for about 1,000 delegates to choose the new CDU leader. But that was cancelled as Germany banned large gatherings because of the coronavirus crisis, and no new date was named.

The CDU was already due to hold a regular convention in early December. Ms Kramp-Karrenbauer told news agency dpa that the further a special meeting gets pushed back, "the smaller the demand is for a convention that would happen only a few weeks before the regular one".

Gatherings of more than two people in public are currently banned in Germany. But Ms Kramp-Karrenbauer said the party hopes developments will allow it to hold the regular convention in Stuttgart in December as planned.

There are three main contenders for the CDU leadership: Friedrich Merz, a conservative former leader of its parliamentary group; Armin Laschet, the more liberal governor of North Rhine-Westphalia state; and Norbert Roettgen, who chairs parliament's foreign affairs committee.

The CDU's poll ratings have been bolstered by the government's management of the epidemic. But Ms Merkel has vowed not to seek a fifth term.
Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates has reacted to President Donald Trump decision to suspend funding to the World Health Organization.

Gates on his twitter handle on Wednesday described the move as dangerous, saying the payments should continue particularly during the global coronavirus pandemic.

He said, Halting funding for the World Health Organization during a world health crisis is as dangerous as it sounds. Their work is slowing the spread of COVID-19 and if that work is stopped no other organization can replace them. The world needs @WHO now more than ever.

Halting funding for the World Health Organization during a world health crisis is as dangerous as it sounds. Their work is slowing the spread of COVID-19 and if that work is stopped no other organization can replace them. The world needs @WHO now more than ever.

The United States has been WHOs largest donor, as it has committed to providing $893 million to the course during its current two-year funding period.

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the familys giant philanthropy, is the next biggest donor to WHO after the U.S., accounting for close to 10% of the United Nations agencys funding.

Trump had announced the temporary suspension of funding for the WHO over the alleged cover-up and mismanagement of the coronavirus outbreak in China before spreading around the globe.

This was announced by the US President, during a press briefing at the White House, on Tuesday. April 14, 2020.

Donald Trump, while making the announcement said that the United States is halting funding of the WHO while a review is conducted to assess the health organizations role in mismanaging the coronavirus outbreak.

PV: 0
Some 842 coronavirus patients have recovered across Turkey in the last 24 hours, Health Minister Fahrettin Koca announced Tuesday. The figure marks a single-day record for recoveries.

Koca said 4,062 people tested positive for COVID-19 in the past day as the total caseload reached 65,111.

Meanwhile, the death toll hit 1,403, with a record daily increase of 107. More than 443,000 people have been tested for the coronavirus so far, including 33,070 in the past 24 hours.

Turkey is the seventh worst-hit country in the world in terms of the number of active COVID-19 cases, with 58,909 patients as of Tuesday.

READ: Turkeys COVID-19 recoveries surge as cases top 65,000

Coronavirus Turkey  daily table





Source: https://covid19.saglik.gov.tr/

We Will Beat COVID-19 Together  Fethiye Governor, Muzaffer Sahiner

Fethiye Governor, Muzzafer Sahiner

Fethiye Governor, Muzaffer Sahiner talked on SED Media about the work being done by help groups and the precautions being taken for Covid-19 in Fethiye on Tuesday.

The VEFA Social Support Group is working under the management of the Governors office to provide help for over 65s and groups under curfew.

Sahiner said, Vefa social support groups are working day and night helping people over 65 years old and people who are in need. We are solving the problems in our area together during these difficult times. The Governors office, Vefa, civil society groups together with Jandarma are taking extra measures to deliver supplies to those in need and avoid public suffering. Everyone should stay where they are as precautions continue to increase.

The Governor then went on to evaluate the results of the work carried out and the measures taken, saying, What we have done in the town of Fethiye since the start of the battle against Coronavirus in our country, is applied all the measures that have been taken for the safety of our citizens. In relation to this Jandarma, Police Department and our establishments are continuing the fight. As you know, with help from Vefa social support group we are providing supplies to the people over 65 years of age. Last weekend there was a curfew also covering Mugla province. Our citizens have shown great understanding towards the curfew. There have been no serious issues as a result of the curfew and, with the help of the Police Department and Jandarma, we kept four petrol stations, bakeries and pharmacies open. We thank our citizens for their understanding. We also thank all our establishments and Vefa social support group for all their efforts during this difficult time.

Of course, we know the difficulties our citizens have by shutting their shops. In relation to this, Social Help Foundation, Police Department, Jandarma and PTT personnel have delivered one thousand lira to 1,633 people. Again we are expecting the help, which is also known as second phase, to arrive this week for 2,500 citizens. Our colleagues have made preparations region by region for this. We will get it to them with these teams.

Together, we are trying to help to our citizens through Vefa social support group channel. Last week there were more than 300 new requests and we are getting to these people for the first time. Our colleagues made deliveries yesterday and continue to do so. Lokman Hekim Esnaf Hospital have also sent out 150 supply packages and Musiad Fethiye, 50 food packages, as have many other civil organisations. We are getting these to our citizens through the social support group. We thank all the civil society organisations for their help. We are expecting help from other civil society organisations.

Governor Sahiner also stated that they had to fine those who didnt obey the curfew applied last weekend and said We had to fine 140 citizens. This is something we dont desire. We have evaluated this with our colleagues. This afternoon Police department, Chamber of Commerce and chamber of trade will get together. Next week again 4 petrol stations, 1 gas bottle supplier will be on duty. We have about 30 bakeries and we are very prepared this week with their phone number distribution. Also we know our citizens will be more prepared by knowing the curfew will take place. We are also expecting understanding from our citizens for the curfew.

118 travel permissions

The Governor said that we are going through extraordinary days and stated We are experiencing trouble neither we, nor even the 70-80 year old people, have seen before, therefore we need to fight this together. We have to help each other and to have understanding towards one another. As you know over 65s and under 20s cannot go out, therefore we are sorting their problems out when they contact us. We also give permission in case of medical emergency at the hospitals or funeral situations. We allow our citizens in our town to travel for doctor appointments, doctor report and funerals. When something like this happens we try to help them. For example, we have given 118 travel permissions to people. These were people who were working here and wanted to go back to their hometowns. But we strictly advise this, everyone should stay where they are.

Necessary checks are being made

Governor Sahiner stated that they are continuing their support to the citizens under quarantine at the student accommodations and said As you know, 9 sailor friends have arrived. We are greeting them as our guests because they came from a ship. We are delivering their food. Apart from these, there are others under quarantine. Our town health management are doing necessary checks. We have people like these in our town. They are isolated in their homes. They are being followed by our colleagues. If there is any application for homeless people our Social Help Department has its doors open. Currently we are accommodating approximately 10 citizens at our hotel like this. We also want to thank the press for their understanding. We thank to people of Fethiye. We will beat this illness with a little more understanding towards each other.

Thank you to Umit Kasm for the translation.

Source: Sahiner; COVID-19u Hep Birlikte Yenecegiz

Police check whether the drivers comply with the coronavirus measures

Some of us may be waiting for masks weve ordered online or struggled to find them at the local chemists but, in Fethiye, traffic police have been handing them out for free to drivers  along with gloves and a little advice about social distancing and the importance of staying at home

Source: https://gercekfethiye.com/fethiye-de-trafik-polisleri-maske-ve-eldiven-dagitti/26713/

New coronavirus quarantines in 58 provinces

As part of the fight against the coronavirus outbreak, Turkey is imposing quarantines on 227 residential areas in 58 provinces, said the Interior Ministry on Wednesday.

The areas are home to some 250,00 people, said a ministry statement, but did not supply further details.

The ministry also said it is lifting quarantine measures on 41 residential areas in 14 provinces of the country.

Source: https://www.aa.com.tr/en/latest-on-coronavirus-outbreak/turkey-new-coronavirus-quarantines-in-58-provinces/1806057

Turkish Red Crescent to provide aid to 10 million in Ramadan

The head of the Turkish Red Crescent, Kerem Knk, shows the content of aid boxes in a live video stream, Ankara, April 15, 2020. (DHA Photo)

The Turkish Red Crescent (Turk Kzlay) aims to reach 10 million people both in Turkey and across the globe during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan as the coronavirus continues to tighten its grip worldwide.

Speaking about the aid to be distributed during Ramadan, the head of the Turkish Red Crescent, Kerem Knk, told reporters via teleconference that the majority of the aid would be distributed domestically due to the pandemic.

This year, we allocated a large part of our operations for the needy in Turkey, Knk said.

READ: https://www.dailysabah.com/turkey/turkish-red-crescent-to-provide-aid-to-10-million-in-ramadan/news

According to a report in Hurriyet Daily News, Turkeys top religious body called for social distancing during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan to stem the spread of coronavirus.

In a statement, the Directorate of Religious Affairs said: Iftar [fast-breaking] gatherings should be avoided with relatives, neighbors, and friends.

The religious body said fasting during the month of Ramadan is a religious duty that cannot be deferred due to the pandemic.

Citing experts, the statement added, fasting carried no risks for healthy people.

Source: https://www.hurriyetdailynews.com/top-religious-body-calls-for-social-distancing-during-ramadan-153863

Important Flight Announcement

Source: UKinTurkey

Global statistics  number of global coronavirus cases surpasses 2 million

The number of global coronavirus cases surpassed 2 million on Wednesday.

There are now 2,026,051 confirmed cases of COVID-19 globally, of which 492,892 have recovered. The number of fatalities stands at 129,077.

Source: Worldometer.

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Todays featured image: Sunrise over Fethiye Boatyard by Lyn Ward
Conservative allies of the president have begun focusing on the WHO as complicit in a Chinese coverup of the outbreak in late 2019 and early 2020, before Trump moved to respond. The finger-pointing allows Trump to deflect blame from his own initial reaction to the outbreak as of no consequence to the United States. Trump also resents the WHO for opposing his decision, in late January, to block most air travel from China.
Lucknow, April 15 : A sudden surge in the number of Corona patients has been witnessed in Uttar Pradesh, taking the tally of Corona positive cases to 657 in the state.

Sixty-four new cases of Corona patients testing positive were registered on Tuesday while the death toll by Tuesday night, went up to ten.

Among the new total Corona cases in the state 40 are linked to the Tablighi Jamaat, officials said.

Deaths were reported from Kanpur (one), two in Agra, one each in Moradabad and Sambhal.

Five deaths that had earlier taken place had been reported from Basti, Meerut, Agra, Varanasi and Bulandshahr.

UP Principal Health Secretary, Amit Mohan Prasad, confirmed that the state has reported 657 coronavirus positive cases so far.

He said, "There are 657 coronavirus positive cases in Uttar Pradesh, including 49 cured or discharged. Most of those who died were also suffering from other diseases as well and most of them were elderly persons. I appeal everyone to take special care of those who are already suffering from other diseases. Do not panic but follow all the precautionary measures such as social distancing, use of sanitizers and masks." A senior health official said that the impact of the lockdown and sealing of hotspots would be visible only after a week or so when the Corona impact begins to slow down.

"The new cases that are emerging are those who have been in contact with Corona positive cases since the past ten days. The virus takes time to show up," he said.

-- The story has been published from a wire feed without any modifications to the text
D ozens of London pharmacies have signed up to a new app allowing them to send vital products to vulnerable people.

The bgX app uses riders and cyclists who normally work for food delivery services to despatch orders for products such as paracetamol, protective gloves and facemasks, and hand sanitisers to customers.

Deliveries are made within an hour from a pharmacy within a five-mile radius. A flat 5 fee is charged, on top of the normal in-store cost of the items sent out.

The app can be used to order deliveries to elderly relatives or friends who are not comfortable with technology. It is hoped the service will be extended to prescriptions and coronavirus antibody tests when they become available.

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

The app was originally set up to deliver beauty products from parlours around London.

Chief executive and co-founder Ali Rafi said: We want to help the elderly and those with underlying health issues to get their pharmacy products safely and quickly without having to go to their local chemist and potentially mixing with other people.

This way we can help pharmacies do their amazing job keeping the UK public healthy, and also take away some of the pressure on local pharmacy staff who currently do not have adequate PPE equipment.
Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, April 15)  Google has released a series of doodles to show appreciation for frontliners and essential workers as the world continues to battle the COVID-19 pandemic.

Google Doodle has paid tribute to different "coronavirus helpers" the past days.

Since April 6, the doodles featured medical personnel, scientists, grocery workers, farmers, sanitation workers, and public transportation workers.

Google's doodle series features medical personnel, scientists, grocery workers, farmers, sanitation workers, and public transportation workers serving amid the virus outbreak.

For each doodle, a heart comes from the letter G and goes towards the last E in the word Google.

On Wednesday, Google shared a doodle thanking packaging, shipping, and delivery workers.

Hovering the mouse over the doodle will show a message "To all packaging, shipping, and delivery workers, thank you."

In a separate post, Google expressed gratitude to frontline workers all over the world.

"We thank them for every late night, every extra shift. Every missed dinner at home. We thank them not only for the sacrifice they continue to make for us all, but the sacrifices their families and loves ones are making in kind," Google wrote. "We thank them for showing up every day and night, all in service of saving lives and helping others."
Thousands of consumers are being targeted by newly established websites offering closing-down sales, as shoppers look for good deals from businesses hit by the coronavirus fallout.

The PA news agency has found almost identical adverts on Facebook from two different websites, claiming they are being forced to shut down, and offering discounts of up to 70%.

After being alerted by PA, the social media giant booted the companies off its site.

Fraudulent activity is not tolerated on our platforms and we have removed both pages for violation of our fraud and deception policies, a spokesman said.

In a paid-for advert on Facebook which had been running since March 1, Coat London said: We are very sad to announce that we are SHUTTING DOWN our website.

In a separate advert, Age Of Rock, a rock-themed clothing site, said: Even after lots of struggle and lots of effort, we are very sad to announce that we are CLOSING DOWN our store.

The ads have racked up thousands of interactions from social media users, many complaining about the items they have been sent in the post.

Consumers should always exercise caution when buying from unfamiliar online retailers, particularly if you spot the use of time-pressure tactics such as closing-down sales to reel in customers, or if it looks like they are operating multiple near-identical sites Adam French, Which?

One user posted on the Coat London ad: Got a coat delivered on Thursday, its a pile of crap, looks like it work (sic) about 3  got a feeling I will never get a refund  speaking with my bank at the moment to dispute the transaction.

Another customer, who asked to remain anonymous, told PA that his bank had blocked what it thought was a suspicious transaction.

He later received three emails from Coat London asking him to complete his transaction. One offered a further 10% discount, he added.

Despite claims that the sites are having to shut down, a WhoIs Lookup, which reveals details of a websites ownership and history, shows that both sites were only set up 58 days ago. Both companies Facebook pages contain no information that is more than a few weeks old.

Experts have warned that customers might be targeted by unscrupulous companies using the coronavirus pandemic for their own benefit.

Which? consumer rights expert Adam French told PA: Consumers should always exercise caution when buying from unfamiliar online retailers, particularly if you spot the use of time-pressure tactics such as closing-down sales to reel in customers, or if it looks like they are operating multiple near-identical sites.

If you are considering shopping from an online retailer found on a social media site, make sure you do your research to ensure the company can be trusted and scrutinise the returns policy before making a purchase.

Both Coat London and Age Of Rock are registered at different addresses in the same street  Wilshire Boulevard in Los Angeles. The Our Story sections of their websites are nearly identical.

Both businesses say they started with our customers in mind.

Our mission is to provide an unparalleled shopping experience by delivering exceptional customer service and great merchandise at affordable prices!

A Google search for that paragraph returns hundreds of other companies with the same description.

Alex Nicoll, from Staffordshire, told PA he is still waiting for his delivery from Coat London, after buying a jacket from the site.

According to a parcel tracking service, the package is being handled by Chinese delivery company Yanwen.

When PA emailed the contact address for Coat London, the news agency was sent a reply with the time listed in Japan Standard Time, which is used in Japan, Korea, parts of Russia and Indonesia.

We continue to invest in people and technology to identify and remove this content, and we urge people to report any suspicious content to us Facebook

Another company whose website lists the same Los Angeles address as Coat London is technology firm The Blank Labs.

One UK-based Blank Labs customer told PA he had spent 300 on five CCTV cameras from the company, three of which have since stopped working.

His neighbour also bought a camera, which has also broken, the customer told PA, asking not to be named.

Facebook said: We continue to invest in people and technology to identify and remove this content, and we urge people to report any suspicious content to us.

As part of this work, we have donated 3 million to Citizens Advice to deliver a new UK Scam Action Programme and set up a dedicated reporting tool, supported by a specialist internal operations team.
KYODO NEWS - Apr 14, 2020 - 17:41 | All, World, Coronavirus

A tuberculosis vaccine is drawing global attention as it may be effective in preventing infection with the new coronavirus, but a lack of evidence so far has prompted medical communities and the World Health Organization to advise against its administration.

Two clinical trials are being conducted to gauge the effectiveness of the Bacille Calmette-Guerin vaccine, which is usually administered to infants, the WHO said, adding it will evaluate the evidence when available.

In a scientific brief released Sunday, the WHO expressed concern that "diversion of local supplies may result in neonates not being vaccinated, resulting in an increase of disease and deaths from tuberculosis."

(Undated supplied photo shows a BCG vaccine vaccinator)[Photo courtesy of Japan BCG Laboratory]

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Medical groups in Japan, where infants undergo BCG vaccination, have also warned against using the vaccine to prevent adults from contracting the pneumonia-causing virus, with the case of one person who developed side effects reported in the country.

"At this point we can neither deny nor affirm (the effectiveness of the BCG vaccine in preventing coronavirus infection), and naturally cannot recommend it," the Japanese Society for Vaccinology said in a statement on April 3, citing the lack of scientific evidence.

The Japanese Society for Turberculosis and Nontuberculous Mycobacteriosis has also warned there can be "serious side effects" when the BCG live attenuated vaccine is administered to the elderly and people with weak immune systems.

Meanwhile, a study by a team of Japanese researchers has shown an inverse correlation between the number of vaccinated people and the number of COVID-19 cases.

The team led by neuroscientist Tsuyoshi Miyakawa at Fujita Health University in Aichi Prefecture, central Japan, looked at COVID-19 infection and death rates in 136 countries and regions after dividing them into those where childhood BCG vaccination is required, was required in the past and was never required.

The research found that the number of coronavirus cases and deaths per million people was significantly associated with national BCG vaccination policies.

The prevalence and mortality rate of COVID-19 was highest in countries that never administered the BCG vaccine such as the United States and Italy, followed by countries that used to vaccinate in the past, including Germany and Australia.

Countries such as Japan and Russia that currently administer the vaccine had the lowest rates.

"The BCG vaccine is believed to strengthen part of the immune system," Miyakawa said. "Our study supports the theory that the vaccine may be effective against the novel coronavirus."

A medical research institute in Australia announced in late March a plan to start a clinical study of the BCG vaccine's effectiveness with the approval of the WHO, enrolling approximately 4,000 health care workers. The Netherlands and Germany also have similar plans.

In Japan, where infant BCG vaccination is almost universal, some adults are increasingly demanding it for themselves.

Japan BCG Laboratory, which produces and sells the BCG vaccine, said shipments have almost tripled since late March compared with past years. The company has expressed concern, saying in a statement last week that "if the situation continues, it will impact the supply for infants."

Its concern was shared by the Japan Pediatric Society, which said on April 3 that infants have priority with regard to the vaccine and demand should be evidence-based.

The health ministry has also said an adult developed serious side effects earlier this month including fever, hives and blood in the urine after the BCG vaccine was administered incorrectly.

The vaccine is usually administered as a "stamp" injection with multiple needles pricking the skin, but there have been cases in which it was injected subcutaneously.

The ministry said it is possible that the doctor "did not fully understand" how to administer the vaccine.
Both Ms. Pelosi and Mr. McConnell have scrapped plans for their chambers to reconvene next week, announcing that they would push the date until May 4 at the earliest, amid a raging debate over when it is safe for the country to begin pulling back on the social distancing practices that have slowed the spread of the coronavirus. And lawmakers in both parties say the strategy House leaders employed to pass coronavirus relief legislation in recent weeks  scheduling consensus action without a recorded vote and hoping that nobody will object  is not sustainable.

Deprived of the ability to meet in person, the House last month passed a $2 trillion stimulus package by voice vote  an unusual maneuver that almost fell apart when one lawmaker, Representative Thomas Massie, Republican of Kentucky, objected and demanded a quorum. Some members drove or flew all night to get to the Capitol to ensure the bill could pass.

Now, lawmakers are debating yet another emergency infusion of cash into the battered economy, and it has become painfully clear that the bipartisan cooperation that smoothed the way for the last bill to pass has evaporated, with Democrats and Republicans at odds over what should be included in a next round of government assistance.

Rank-and-file members in both parties and both chambers say it is too dangerous for them to return, and they want to avoid a repeat of the Massie episode. Moreover, they do not want legislation hashed out in private by their leaders. They want a chance, they say, to do what Congress is meant to do: debate legislation, offer amendments and vote.

Its time for Congress to come into the 21st century in terms of this issue, said Senator Rob Portman, Republican of Ohio, who is sponsoring a bipartisan bill that would allow Senate leaders to authorize remote voting for 30 days in an emergency. Probably half my constituents are working remotely right now, in full or in part, and Congress hasnt yet figured it out. I think were a little behind the times.
A nurse has launched an appeal for volunteers to create matching fabric hearts for patients and their relatives during the coronavirus pandemic.

Amid the outbreak, visiting has been severely restricted at hospitals across the UK, leaving many people feeling alone and detached from their loved ones.

With this in mind, Kat Lamb, an intensive care nurse at the Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother Hospital in Margate, launched an initiative to help bring patients and their families closer together.

The 23-year-old nurse has called on volunteers to send in matching fabric hearts with the hope that it will bring comfort to relatives who are unable to visit.

While we are always there with our patients, caring for them, it's not the same as having the hand of a loved one to hold, Lamb said.

But by giving the patient a heart, and sending a matching one to their family, it can help them feel like they have an emotional link, and a small token to focus on.

The hearts are quarantined for seven days before they are given to patients to ensure any risk of infection is minimised.

Normally relatives are with their loved ones in our critical care units all the time but that just isn't possible at the moment, Lamb added.

It's heart-breaking for them, and it's difficult for us as nurses too, so I hope this is one way of making the situation a tiny bit more bearable.

Kat Lamb, an intensive care nurse at QEQM Margate, says she hopes people appreciate the thought behind the appeal (PA)

Our patients are never alone but anything we can do to help families feel more connected is a bonus at this particularly difficult time.

Not everyone will want a heart but I hope some people find it comforting and appreciate the gesture and the thought behind it.

The NHS trust has said that hearts can be knitted, crocheted, embroidered, or made of fabric or felt, and that each one should have at least one matching pair. The team will then send up to three to relatives.

Fabric hearts can be sent to the palliative care teams at the William Harvey Hospital in Ashford, Kent, and Canterbury Hospital or the Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother Hospital in Margate.

Lambs appeal is one of many heartwarming examples of people coming together to support one another amid the Covid-19 outbreak.

Last month Becky Wass, a freelance copywriter from Falmouth, Cornwall, came up with a novel idea to help combat loneliness: a postcard scheme that allows vulnerable members of society to request that others carry out certain errands for them.

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Elsewhere, children across the country have been sharing drawings of rainbows on social media using the hashtag #RainbowsForNightingale to show solidarity with NHS workers on the front line.

The trend was reportedly started by a nurse who wanted to create a sign of hope for patients and staff in hospitals across the country.
LANSING, MI -- Gov. Gretchen Whitmer says she understood why people were protesting outside the Michigan Capitol Wednesday, but expressed concern about the people who ignored social distancing guidelines while protesting.

I was really disappointed to see people congregating and not wearing masks," Whitmer said during a press conference Wednesday. We know that this rally endangered people. This kind of activity will put more people at risk and sadly, it could prolong the amount of time that we have to be in this posture.

Whitmer said she saw people handing out candy to children barehanded at the rally and generally gathering close to one another.

We know that this demonstration is going to come at a cost to peoples health, Whitmer said. The sad irony here is that the protest was they dont like this stay-at-home order and they may have just created a need to lengthen it.

She was quick to say that theres no plan right now to extend the order based off the protest, but the data shows that as people gather in groups, cases spread. And as cases spread, the need to restrict services and to keep people in their homes continues.

Thousands of people protested outside the Capitol Wednesday to express their displeasure and outright anger toward Gov. Whitmers stay-at-home order.

This is a statement to show peoples frustration, said Meshawn Maddock, a member of the Michigan Conservative Coalition, ahead of the protest.

Whitmer said she understands why people are frustrated and they want to express that. Whitmer said shes frustrated too, but only asks that people take the proper steps to ensure they arent exposing others to the virus.

I know that people are angry and want to take it out and send it my way, thats fine. I support your right to free speech and to express your opinions," Whitmer said.

Michigan State Police estimated somewhere between 3,000-4,000 people involved in the protest with traffic backed up for miles in all directions leading away from the Capitol.

If their goal was to create gridlock, they succeeded in that, said Michigan State Police First Lt. Darren Green.

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

Complete coverage at mlive.com/coronavirus

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Amaravati, April 15 : The death toll due to COVID-19 climbed to 14, even as the overall tally of cases in Andhra Pradesh touched 525 on Wednesday evening. Following a brief lull, Kurnool witnessed a surge in positive cases with 13 cases reported from the district.

While 13 cases were reported from Kurnool, Kadapa, Nellore, and Anantapur districts reported 4,3, and 2 cases, respectively.

Guntur district continues to lead with 122 cases, the highest number of cases in the state. Kurnool follows with 110 cases and Nellore has reported 58 cases till date.

Giving out the details of tests conducted between 9 am and 7 pm, the state nodal officer reported on Wednesday evening that four more persons have been cured and discharged from hospital. All the four persons, ranging in ages from 21 to 70 years, are males who had returned from Delhi.

With 20 people discharged so far, the effective tally of coronavirus patients in Andhra Pradesh stands at 491.

Meanwhile, the death toll in AP increased to 14 from 11, with three deaths reported from different parts of the state. The deceased include a 55-year-old male from Delhi, who had reached Nellore on January 3. He was admitted to hospital on April 11 and died on April 13.

The others who died include a 76-year-old male, allopathic medicine practitioner in Kurnool, and a 74-year old female patient in Vijayawada. Both of them had died on April 14.
The European Union foreign policy chief sharply criticized the decision, saying it would undermine the global response to the pandemic. Deeply regret US decision to suspend funding to @WHO, Josep Borrell wrote on Twitter. There is no reason justifying this move at a moment when their efforts are needed more than ever to help contain & mitigate the #coronavirus pandemic. Only by joining forces we can overcome this crisis that knows no borders.
YEREVAN, APRIL 15, ARMENPRESS. Prime Minister of Armenia Nikol Pashinyan congratulated the people of Artsakh on completing elections, stating that Armenia continues close cooperation with Artsakh for reaching common goals.

I congratulate the people of independent and democratic Artsakh on completing elections. They mandated authorities to further strengthen the security of Artsakh and represent it in the peace process. We continue our close cooperation with Artsakh to reach our common goals, Pashinyan wrote on Twitter.

The voting in the second round of the presidential election was held in Artsakh on April 14. According to the preliminary results, Arayik Harutyunyan was elected President of Artsakh with 88% of votes. The other candidate, current foreign minister Masis Mayilyan received 12% of votes.

Reported by Norayr Shoghikyan

Edited and translated by Aneta Harutyunyan
Miami, Florida  April 13: Lay Guzman stands behind a partial protective plastic screen and wears a mask and gloves as she works as a cashier at the Presidente Supermarket on April 13, 2020, in Miami, Florida. The employees at Presidente Supermarket, like the rest of Americas grocery-store workers, are on the front lines of the coronavirus pandemic, helping to keep the nations residents fed. Photo: Joe Raedle/Getty Images

Ninety-nine percent of Michelle Lees customers are polite. But since the start of the pandemic, a small but consistent portion of the shoppers inside her Virginia Safeway store have become angry, even violent, amid the highly charged atmosphere. Everything is final sale now, so a customer got upset because she couldnt get a refund, Lee told Intelligencer. She threw light bulbs at a lady in customer service.

Customers fought each other, she said, after someone went the wrong direction in a one-way aisle. One shopper almost got into a fight with a store manager. Sometimes it gets worse. A customer pepper-sprayed one of my co-workers the other day, she added. For Lee, a cashier and a member of the United Food and Commercial Workers International Union, the pandemic creates threats on all sides. Not only does she risk infection by going to work, she also bears the brunt of public fear and rage.

Lees experiences and worries arent unusual. The possibility that she will contract the coronavirus at work is significant, and the consequences of unsafe behavior, on the part of customers and managers alike, could lead to tragedy. Other members of her union told members of the press on Monday that consumer behavior put them in real danger. Its members have reported at least 30 deaths since the pandemic began, and more than 3,000 are out of work due to illnesses that could be COVID-19. In a survey of more than 5,000 grocery-store workers, the union  which represents 1.3 million food, retail, and distillery workers in the U.S. and Canada  found that 96 percent of workers fear theyll contract the coronavirus during a shift.

Customers like Lees may deserve some of the blame. A troubling 85 percent of workers said that customers arent practicing social distancing in stores, another 81 percent said customers are hoarding groceries, and 62 percent said theyve been blamed by customers for product shortages they cant prevent. Twenty-nine percent said that customers treated them poorly or very poorly on the job. Workers told members of the press that theyve seen customers discard used gloves in carts, which they then have to clean, and complained that people routinely show up to shop with their entire families in tow, which makes social distancing impossible. I work in one of the hardest-hit areas, and while I maintain my composure, the fear we feel is absolutely real, said Gregg Finch, an employee of Stop & Shop in New York.

In response, UFCW has launched the consumer-focused #ShopSmart campaign, which will air digital and TV ads urging people to practice social distancing in stores and to wear masks while shopping. Though theres no question that consumer behavior needs to change, #ShopSmart also highlights a key tension of the pandemic. Individual choices can help flatten or accelerate the overall rate of infection. But they cant make up for systemic failures, and are often only as meaningful as policy decisions allow them to be. If grocery chains wont enforce reasonable limits on the number of people in stores, if state governors cant enforce evidence-based social-distancing policies, a customer who wears a mask to Kroger only accomplishes so much.

Although Lees Safeway provides gloves and some masks to workers, she doesnt think it moved quickly enough to get protective gear in stores. At first, they didnt want us to wear a mask because they didnt want their customers to think that we were sick, she said. Even now, there arent enough masks for everyone who needs one. If a mask gets dirty or broken or someone forgets theirs, theyll give them one, she said. But theyre not giving us a fresh mask every day. We have to reuse them over and over. The hand-sanitizer supply is running low, she added, and the plexiglass partitions put up to protect cashiers from customers dont effectively block contact that could potentially get workers sick.

I believe that at some point Im probably going to get the virus, she said. I just hope and pray that if I get it, that its not deadly.

Marc Perrone, the president of UFCW, told Intelligencer that he believes theres more that stores could do to protect workers from negligent consumers. They could have more supervisors available to address the customers, and security in the stores to address the customers, he said. Workers also dont always feel like they have the authority to intervene when customers engage in risky behavior, he added. If there was a store manager or a floor supervisor to address the issue, I think it would be more productive, he concluded.

But in order for that tactic to work on a national level, grocery-store chains need uniform policies that are enforced to the same standard by individual stores. That isnt happening, Perrone said. At the top of a company chain, its pretty clear what they want to have happen, he explained. Ive had this conversation with Kroger and Safeway. The further you get from the top, individual people have their own view of how things ought to work. The top of the company might say, we dont have a problem with people wearing their own masks. But when it gets down to the bottom, some store manager can say, No, I dont want you doing that. That creates a dilemma for workers, who can feel as though theyre under threat from customers and supervisors alike.

Perrone also blamed inconsistent federal guidance for compounding the risks his members face. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention guidelines, especially on the effectiveness of wearing personal protective gear, has changed as the pandemic has progressed and led to confusion. Because of that, and because the federal government did not have the personal protection equipment necessary, it put everybody in a worse position than if the federal government had made a uniform response, he said.

The solutions workers say they prefer also require cooperation from employers, along with a more cogent pandemic response from the federal government. Lee thinks there should be no more than 50 customers in Safeway at a time  far fewer than the stores current limit of 200 customers. She also wants Safeway to hire extra security to protect workers from violent customers. Those views appear to be common among UFCW members. Seventy-two percent of members surveyed want a limit on the number of customers allowed in a store at once, 49 percent wanted stores to ban belligerent customers, and 41 percent said that stores should hire more security. Protecting workers from the dangers of pandemic infection requires buy-in from everyone, not just consumers.

But without a stronger response from the government, or a more uniform response from grocery chains, unions like the UFCW may find it increasingly necessary to take on a heavy task. If public officials wont educate consumers, that job falls to unions.
A New York pediatrician said she thought a staggering 80 per cent of children in the city are infected with the coronavirus as she explained that most kids have not been tested as they are not the priority in hospitals.

Dr Dyan Hes, a pediatrician with New York City's Gramercy Pediatrics, offered the statistic when explaining that there were 'zero tests for children' to see whether they had COVID-19.

'We have zero tests for children. We have zero swabs,' she explained to CBS. 'I've had patients whose parents have COVID, child has a 102.5 fever. At the beginning when we were doing this, we were sending them to the ER. They got turned away. They were not tested because we do not have enough tests and the kids are doing well.'

Dr Dyan Hes, a pediatrician with New York City's Gramercy Pediatrics, offered the grim statistic when explaining that there were 'zero tests for children'

Dr Hes believes that the real numbers of children with the disease are much worse, blaming the lack of testing for why more accurate figures aren't available

"I don't mean to be rude, but the numbers are totally wrong



Dr. Dyan Hes, founder of Gramercy Pediatrics, says she thinks 80% of children have coronavirus  but they are not being tested.https://t.co/qRpCuGpuS6 pic.twitter.com/l63jqYmEJQ  CBS News (@CBSNews) April 14, 2020

A CDC report published last week that focused on the disease's impact on children found that while 'most cases reported among children to date have not been severe, clinicians should maintain a high index of suspicion for COVID-19 infection in children and monitor for progression of illness, particularly among infants and children with underlying conditions.'

Roughly 1.7 per cent of the coronavirus cases reported as of April 2 were patients under the age of 18. Some 147 children have been hospitalized, including 59 that are under the age of 1. Three children have died from the virus.

But Dr Hes believes that the real numbers of children with the disease are much worse, blaming the lack of testing for why more accurate figures aren't available.

'I don't mean to be rude, but the numbers are totally wrong,' Hes said. 'I think that probably 80% of the children have coronavirus. We are not testing children. I'm in New York City. I can't get my patients tested. And we have to assume, if they are sick, they have coronavirus.

'Most of them, probably 80 to 90% of them, are asymptomatic. So, these numbers are so skewed. I think that the mortality rate is way, way less than 0.5% for children who have it because it is so prevalent. You have to remember thousands of kids die from flu a year. This is much, much less virulent in children.'

The pediatrician said families should just assume their child probably has the coronavirus if they start showing symptoms.

The pediatrician's statements come as New York City announced 3,778 additional 'probable' deaths attributed to coronavirus, which were never confirmed because no test was administered

'You won't know,' she said. 'If your child does have a low-grade fever right now and a cold, you have to assume that it's COVID because you're really not going to get tested in New York City. In other states, maybe you'll get tested. But in most places, we're saving the tests for the sickest.'

Dr Hes said that the large number of children with asymptomatic symptoms could spell disaster for others who could still get infected.

'The problem with children is that they are so asymptomatic that they are spreading it. And our biggest mistake was that we didn't close the public schools when we should have,' said Hes.

'So the children were the vectors to the teachers, who might be elderly or immunocompromised. They might have diabetes or cancer, but they still had to come to work every day. They still had to take the subway every day.'

Doctors are offering video consultations for those who need to have their children's health monitored.

'The really only reason your child should be going to a physician at this point, aside from a vaccine visit, is if they're short of breath,' she said.

'If you're social distanced and your child has a fever, then somehow that child probably brought it into the house by playing with a neighbor or maybe when you went grocery shopping, you brought it in. But you just have to keep that child at home for 14 days. Socially distance. When they go back out, if they're above age 2, they should be wearing masks.'

Children under two struggle tolerating the masks, the doctor added.

Some 21 teachers in the city have died as a result of the coronavirus, according to the New York City of Education on Monday. The report from the CDC does state that children with mild or no symptoms did contribute to the spread of the virus.

Earlier this week, health department officials shared that they were headed towards not having enough swabs to conduct tests for the virus.

As the swab supply continues to decline, there is a real possibility hospitals will completely run out,' the April 11 health alert said.

'At this time, providers are reminded to only test hospitalized patients in order to preserve resources that are needed to diagnose and appropriately manage patients with more severe illness.'

The warning came amid repeated pleas from New York City and state officials for the federal government to provide widespread testing in order to move to a containment phase in the coronavirus outbreak.

Since early February, when the number of coronavirus cases confirmed in the United States was just a handful, city officials have been begging the government for test kits.

At least three letters were sent to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention beginning in early February asking the federal agency to expedite the delivery of coronavirus test kits to the city.

The pediatrician's statements come as New York City announced 3,778 additional 'probable' deaths attributed to coronavirus, which were never confirmed because no test was administered.

There are more than 6,500 confirmed deaths

The probable deaths, announced on Tuesday, occurred between March 11 and April 13, and when combined with confirmed deaths take the city's coronavirus death toll higher than 10,000.

The probable cases would put New York City's per capita death rate much higher than Italy's, and increase the national U.S. death toll by roughly 17 percent.

Due to a shortage of test kits, particularly in the early days of the outbreak, not everyone hospitalized in critical condition or found dead at home was able to be tested for the virus. Postmortem tests were often not conducted in order to conserve test resources.

City officials said that the newly announced deaths were ruled probable based on the known symptoms and health histories of the patients who died.

Roughly 60 percent of the probable deaths occurred in hospitals, versus 90 percent for confirmed cases, according to city data.

Eighteen percent of the probable deaths occurred in nursing homes, and 22 percent occurred in private residences, officials said.
Irelands Covid-19 testing regime is an omnishambles and an unmitigated disaster, a frontline nurse has stated.

Mary (not her real name), who works at a midlands community hospital, previously described to the Irish Examiner the chronic issues her own institution faced due to a lack of personal protective equipment (PPE).

She said that while issues with PPE have eased to an extent since the acquisition of supply from China by the HSE, huge issues remain due to the backlog of people awaiting test results.

The next four weeks will be hell, she said.

The official numbers are hilarious, she said, adding that in her and her colleagues opinion, the number of people with Covid-19 in their hospital is almost three times what the official figures say.

Particular ire is reserved for the manner with which communication as to Irelands positive numbers has been handled.

The fact that the numbers from Germany are only coming through now is ridiculous, when we knew beyond doubt that the numbers were higher, she said.

The numbers are still being fudged, its as simple as that.

She was speaking with regard to news, which emerged last Friday, that figures received regarding historic tests were not being included in Irelands official statistics as it was believed they would give a false impression of how the disease is spreading.

She said: So the 1,500 people announced as new cases last week, with those tests having happened in March, we were dealing with those people in hospital two weeks ago. And still we were told that the numbers are low. Its really bad. What the public is being told isnt true.

Mary suggested that until the health authorities start giving out real data and telling the public what the numbers are and what is actually going on, the people on the street wont be able to make the right choices regarding their own wellbeing.

She said: At present, the testing simply isnt there. Until those centres are up and running, and until there is turnaround testing in 24 hours, particularly for healthcare workers, we cannot get on top of this thing.

Something serious needs to be done about nursing homes, and there needs to be a really clear plan in place.

The thought of the lockdown being removed on May 5, it simply cannot be until the testing is sorted, because if theres a second wave, its going to be a lot worse than the first. People are starting to suffer on lockdown. If its taken away and then reimposed, people are going to go crazy.

And if this years flu season comes early, as it did last year, then you can forget it.
WASHINGTON - Leading Republicans say the coronavirus shutdown cannot go on. Car-honking activists swarmed a statehouse Wednesday to protest stay-home restrictions. Capitol Hill staff are quietly drafting bills to undo the just-passed rescue aid and push Americans back to work.

Behind President Donald Trumps effort to accelerate re-opening the U.S. economy during the pandemic is a contingent of GOP allies eager to have his back.

Its very much time to start having that conversation and start figuring that out, said Sen. Pat Toomey, R-Pa., who has shared his views with Trump.

The push to revive the economy is being influenced and amplified by a potent alliance of big money business interests, religious freedom conservatives and small-government activists, some with direct dial to Trump. They are gaining currency as a counter-point to the health professionals who warn of potentially deadly consequences from easing coronavirus stay-home restrictions too soon.

The mobilization is reminiscent of the tea party rebellion a decade ago, when conservatives roared against federal intervention in recession recovery. Its drawing a similar band of deficit hawks alarmed by the $2.2 trillion rescue package, religious congregants who say their right to worship is being violated and conservative lawmakers warning of a slide toward big government socialism with expanded safety net programs.

How do you rein in some of the tyrannical enforcement? said Rep. Andy Biggs, R-Ariz., the chairman of the House Freedom Caucus, in a radio interview.

Economist Stephen Moore is leading a new coalition to fire up activists nationwide. The conservative Heritage Foundation put forward a five-point re-opening plan. Republicans discuss options almost weekly on the House GOPs private conference calls.

Its about promoting liberty and freedom, Moore said. Its about stopping spending that will bankrupt the country and getting the $20 trillion engine that is the American economy started again as soon as possible  as in tomorrow.

Early on in the crisis, Trumps instinct to re-open was kept in check by two unlikely forces  the health professionals on the White Houses coronavirus task force and the Trump campaign, which warned that widespread fatalities would be more damaging to the presidents reelection than the economic fallout, according to a Republican granted anonymity to discuss the private assessment.

But as the national stay-home guidelines appear to have limited the virus spread, and the mounting death toll, now beyond 27,000, is less than first envisioned, those political calculations seem to be shifting toward the economic concerns, the person said.

We have to learn to live with this, said Adam Brandon, president of FreedomWorks, which is holding weekly virtual town halls with members of Congress, igniting an activist base of thousands of supporters across the nation to back up the effort.

Advocates say they are focusing on parts of the economy and regions of the country where virus spread is low or workers can do their jobs while maintaining social distancing. They point to construction, landscaping and factory floors. They envision new rules  everyone wears face masks  and other safety precautions.

These Republicans warn that the public health emphasis has failed to take into account the broader societal toll of a prolonged shutdown and potential for a Great Depression. The government cannot keep throwing around money to prop up the economy, they say.

Toomey worries that diseases of despair, including substance abuse, will deepen with unemployment and rising poverty, and supply chain disruptions could lead to civil unrest. He said there are segments of the economy, particularly in rural Pennsylvania, that could be open today.

One early shutdown opponent was the Koch-backed Americans for Prosperity, which argued businesses should be allowed to adapt and innovate.

With one in 10 American workers suddenly unemployed and dismal corporate quarterly earning reports expected, key Republicans on Capitol Hill say its time to shift strategies now.

Were really trying to get this thing going quicker than a lot of people may expect, said Sen. David Perdue, R-Ga., in a radio interview. He spoke to the president over the weekend, he said, and Trump was already thinking about the transition.

What we see right now is the free market, free-enterprise system is under threat, Perdue said. Dont come in and tell us how to run our lives.

Democrats warn that jumping ahead of public health guidelines could have disastrous effects if Americans retreat from social distancing and spark new hot spots that overrun hospitals with more patients than available beds.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi issued a stark warning for Americans to ignore the lies and listen to scientists and other respected professionals to protect themselves and loved ones.

All of us want to resume the precious and beautiful lives that Americas unique freedoms provide, Pelosi wrote in a letter to Democratic colleagues. But if we are not working from the truth, more lives will be lost, economic hardship and suffering will be extended unnecessarily.

Some leading Republicans are pushing health care solutions. Tennessee Sen. Lamar Alexander, the chairman of the health committee, wants a Manhattan Project for testing, referring to the wartime effort to develop nuclear weapons, to give Americans confidence that children can return to school in the fall.

Across the nation, though, end-the-shutdown protests are flaring up.

In Texas, conservative state legislators said in a letter to Gov. Greg Abbott its ultimately the individual Texans responsibility to keep themselves safe. Many are backed by Texas oilman Tim Dunn, who co-authored a similar letter to Trump.

On Wednesday, drivers staged Operation Gridlock at the Michigan state capitol after Gov. Gretchen Whitmers decision to toughen rather than relax what already was one of the nations strictest stay-home orders.

Among the groups promoting the effort on Facebook was one with ties to the politically connected DeVos family, even though Education Secretary Besty DeVos stopped her political spending when she joined Trumps Cabinet.

__

Associated Press writers David Eggert in Michigan and Paul Weber in Texas contributed to this story.
The U.S. securities regulator on Monday charged a former banker at Goldman Sachs Group Inc (GS.N) for arranging at least $2.5 million in bribes to be paid to Ghana government officials to gain approval for a clients power plant project.



The Securities and Exchange Commission said here Asante Berko, a former employee at a subsidiary of the U.S. lender, arranged the bribes for a Turkish energy company to funnel the money to a Ghana-based intermediary, which then paid the local officials.



Goldman Sachs fully cooperated with the SECs investigation and as stated by the SEC in its press release, the firms compliance personnel took appropriate steps to prevent the firm from participating in the transaction, company spokeswoman Nicole Sharp said.



Berko helped the Ghana-based intermediary pay more than $200,000 in bribes to various other government officials, and personally paid more than $60,000 to members of the Ghanaian parliament and other government officials, the SEC statement said, adding that Berko took deliberate measures to prevent his employer from detecting the bribery scheme.



The regulator filed the complaint in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of New York and is seeking monetary penalties, among other remedies, against Berko.



The Wall Street Journal had reported the news earlier in the day.

Source: Reuters









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A tradesman who 'selfishly' broke mandatory hotel quarantine rules to visit his girlfriend has become the first Australian to be jailed for the offence.

Jonathan David, 35, pleaded guilty in Perth Magistrates Court to two counts of failing to comply with a direction after he left the Travelodge Hotel in Perth's CBD and used public transport to visit his partner.

The 35-year-old concreter was housed in the hotel from March 27 to complete his 14 day coronavirus quarantine after he returned from an interstate trip to Victoria.

He was sentenced on Wednesday to six months and two weeks in prison but the majority of the term was suspended.

The first month of his sentence must be served immediately, but he will be able to carry out the remainder of the time in the community, the West Australian reported.

Jonathan David was jailed for six months and two weeks for leaving the Travelodge hotel in Perth CBD and using public transport to visit his partner

Pictured: Returned travellers arriving at their Perth hotel to complete their mandatory isolation

But if he commits another crime over the next 12 months, he could be forced to serve the rest of the prison sentence.

He was also fined $2000.

Magistrate Elaine Campione described David's actions as 'selfish to the extreme' during sentencing.

'You chose to roll the dice with other people's lives and that was breathtakingly arrogant,' she said.

'We must protect the community from those who do not care.'

WA Police said David wedged open a fire door, allowing him to come and go without being seen by police.

David was originally granted permission to stay at his girlfriend's property in Armadale for the two-week quarantine, The West Australian previously reported.

But the couple fell out after just two days and authorities put him in a hotel room to stay until April 9.

Hotel staff said they saw him outside of his room on five occasions.

When police checked on him at 7.30am on April 4, David was nowhere to be seen. He returned 45 minutes later and told officers he left for 'personal reasons'.

In order to slow the spread of the deadly coronavirus, WA effectively made itself an 'island state', Premier Mark McGowan said on April 2.
A farmer in Oklahoma has shared adorable photos of his animals dressed up in costumes, with cockerels donning denim overalls and goats posing in tutus.

The American farmer, who has not been named, shares the playful snaps on the Facebook page for their farm, Twisted B Minis, where they breed miniature horses.

It is thought the farmer might make the costumes specially for his animals. Social media users rushed to praise the 'cute' idea.

One set of photographs showed a sassy rooster dressed in denim overalls, with the caption: 'This is Mr Fluffy Buns! He is my favorite chicken. He loves to be fed treats and told how handsome he is. Hope he brightens your day.'

A farmer in Oklahoma has created adorable clothing for his farm animals. Pictured: One of his hens strutting his stuff in denim overalls

The American farmer has made overalls for cockerels (pictured right) and tutus for goats (pictured left)

Photographs of the chicken were posted with the caption (above): 'This is Mr Fluffy Buns! He is my favorite chicken. He loves to be fed treats and told how handsome he is. Hope he brightens your day.'

'Definitely made me smile and laugh! These are the cutest photos! Can't wait to see who gets dressed up next,' one person wrote on the post.

Another said: 'Those are cute photos. He sure poses so cute. Don't know how he stayed so still for the dress-up. So adorable.'

A third confessed: 'We have chickens and there's no way we can get close enough to dress any like that, lol. So cute!'

The post, shared on March 30, racked up 5,700 likes and more than 6,600 comments.

Adorable snaps of the 'cute' designs (pictured) were posted on Facebook , with social media users rushing to praise the idea

The post (above), shared on March 30, racked up 5,700 likes and more than 6,600 comments

Fans of the designs (pictured) commented on the many posts and described the idea as the 'cutest' and 'adorable'

Another series of images, shared this weekend, captured a goat playing dress up and sporting a vibrant, pink tutu and silver crown.

The caption read: 'Miss Lucy loves to play dress up. Shes always happy to be the center of attention. We hope you all have a wonderful weekend!'

Social media users were keen to express their delight over the pictures, with one individual admitting: 'I love how she has her chin so high, like "I am a princess. Now, feed me, peasant".'

Another series of images, shared this weekend, captured a goat playing dress up and sporting a vibrant, pink tutu and silver crown (pictured)

The caption read: 'Miss Lucy (pictured) loves to play dress up. Shes always happy to be the center of attention. We hope you all have a wonderful weekend!'

Reaction Social media users were keen to express their delight over the cute snaps (above)

However not everyone was impressed with the designs, with the recent posts receiving a few negative comments (above)

While another said: 'So cute. Wish mine would let me, if I can get a Halloween outfit on them, I'm lucky.'

A third impressed fan wrote: 'She is a little princess. Keep the photographs coming, Love them.'

However not everyone was impressed with the designs, with the recent posts receiving a few negative comments.

'I've known there are people who dress their pets, but this? Sometimes you just need to walk away, people', one disgruntled person said.
(TNS)  More than a month after the first confirmed coronavirus case here, Maine is the only New England state that is unable to provide daily reports on the number of people who have been tested for it.The other five New England states have provided such information for weeks, even though at least three of them rely on outside laboratories for part of their testing, as is the case in Maine. Massachusetts even publicly posts a table of results for each of more than 26 labs that test its patients.The Maine Center for Disease Control and Prevention has also lagged in gathering or disclosing other types of data relating to the pandemic. The agency was unable to say how many COVID-19 patients were hospitalized on a given day  a key metric of the burden on hospitals  until last Friday, three days after thepublished a story on the shortcoming. The agency had not even asked hospitals for the information until March 31.Although Maine has the highest proportion of vacation homes in the country  19 percent of the housing stock  and there have been scattered incidents of people threatening visitors from out of state, the agency has disclosed the number of non-resident cases confirmed here only once, on April 9, the morning after thehad asked for the information.Two other states with large numbers of seasonal residents  Hawaii and Florida  post information on non-resident cases on a daily basis, and Florida provides the numbers by county on its website.The Maine CDC was unable to provide an accurate count of intensive care unit beds and ventilators until the week of April 5, and said that shortcoming was due to the fact that some hospitals  including one large hospital it didnt identify  had not been providing it. Such capacity numbers are essential for preparing for various surge scenarios for the disease, public health experts said. The CDC still doesnt include this information on its website, only providing it verbally at its daily press briefings.The fact the other states in the region are able to do this shows that states dont have to be learning these processes in a vacuum, says Jeremy Youde, who studies the intersection of government and public health at the University of Minnesota Duluth. It seems imperative to try to do some outreach and see how the other states are able to make it work.It is not clear why Maine lags its peers, all of which have statewide public health agencies similar to the Maine CDC. New Hampshire has a similar population, Vermont and Rhode Island are smaller, and as of Monday afternoon Maine had the lowest number of confirmed cases per capita in the region.The question of why Maine isnt sharing complete test results is particularly perplexing. Maine CDC Director Dr. Nirav Shah has repeatedly said the problem arose once outside laboratories began testing patients, but it is not clear why other states have not had a problem collecting the same information from such labs. Asked about this, agency spokesman Robert Long said via email that due to the varying frequency and formats that outside labs use in submitting negative test results, the agency had decided that weekly reporting ensures the reliability and accuracy of these data.Long also said the underlying problem was that reporting from labs became inconsistent due to the high volume of tests conducted. He said the CDC then asked the outside labs to prioritize reporting the most important information, the confirmed tests, so the state could begin tracing each patients contacts, and to follow up later with the negative results. In some cases, those labs are conducting tests on samples from multiple states, so following up with negative results for all of those states, including Maine, is secondary, he added.He added that the department was finalizing a contract with an outside vendor to enhance the presentation of our data and to include additional data sets on our website moving forward.Theasked the CDCs counterparts in the other five New England states if they had encountered any challenges in gathering negative testing information. Only Rhode Island and Vermont responded with direct answers.Vermont health department spokesman Ben Truman said there had been no difficulties cooperating with three outside labs. It has been an exceptional cooperative effort among our health care and other partners during this unprecedented public health crisis, he said.Rhode Island, however, said it had experienced challenges. This is because, while laboratories have systems for reporting positive test results to the state, negative test results are not reported to the state for other diseases, Department of Health spokesman Joseph Wendelken said via email.Long said the CDC would gather and report the information on a weekly basis for the time being. On April 9 there were 11,608 negative cases, he said, but he did not provide a county-level breakdown, which would allow residents of counties with few cases to know whether this is due to few people being tested.Long said the agency was working with outside labs to develop a more consistent system for reporting negative test results. But he cautioned that the expected introduction of rapid result tests like those produced in Scarborough by Chicago-based Abbott Laboratories will need to also be taken into consideration in the future.Jennifer Horney, founding director of the epidemiology program at the University of Delawares College of Health Sciences, says having and tracking this information is essential. Knowing the number of negative cases is important because to know the rate of disease among the tested, we need to know the total number of positives divided by the total number of people tested, she said via email.Maine, Massachusetts, Vermont and Rhode Island only report confirmed cases by county of residence, a practice public health experts say can protect patient privacy. New Hampshire and Connecticut, however, provide the information by municipality of residence on their public websites, regardless of the size of the community.Asked about how they decided which information to share, Kate Spiner, a spokesperson for New Hampshires COVID-19 joint information center, said via email that all decisions were based upon whether the release of such information further ensures the health and safety of the public.
Avigan, a flu drug now being tested against COVID-19, on Oct. 22, 2014. (Kazuhiro Nogi/AFP via Getty Images)

Japans Fujifilm Boosts Production of Avigan Amid Testing Against COVID-19

Japans Fujifilm said Wednesday its begun to boost production of Avigan, a flu drug being studied for use in COVID-19 patients.

The company announced a target of producing enough of the drug to treat 100,000 patients in July, or 2.5 times the current production, before ramping up efforts further in the hopes of distributing enough of the drug to treat 300,000 patients in September, equal to seven times its production.

The current treatment course of the tablets from the Japanese Association for Infectious Diseases recommends a 14-day regimen starting with two doses of 1,800 milligrams on day one, followed by 1,000 milligram doses taken twice daily through day 14.

Fujifilm, best known for its camera business, has a healthcare arm. The company will expand its own facilities while partnering with companies inside and outside of Japan.

Avigan, also known as favipiravir, is traditionally used against flu. Its been touted as effective against COVID-19 by Chinese researchers and is being studied in trials in Japan and elsewhere.

Avigan, approved in Japan for manufacture and sale as an influenza antiviral drug, selectively inhibits viral RNA polymerase necessary for influenza virus replication. Due to this mechanism of action, Avigan may have an antiviral effect on the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus, because like influenza viruses, coronaviruses are single-stranded RNA viruses that also depend on viral RNA polymerase, Fujifilm said in a statement.

Fujifilms company logo at its exhibition hall nearby the headquarters of Fujifilm Holdings Corp in Tokyo on June 12, 2017. (Kim Kyung-Hoon/Reuters)

COVID-19, a disease, is caused by the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus, commonly known as the novel coronavirus or SARS-CoV-2.

The CCP virus has spread around the world since emerging in China last year. It causes symptoms similar to the flu and serious illness in 15 to 20 percent of patients, according to international data. A small percentage of those requiring hospital care die from COVID-19, primarily among the elderly and otherwise infirm.

Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe announced plans last month to approve Avigan against COVID-19 and a stimulus package he unveiled in April included funds to boost production of the drug in the hopes of using it to treat 2 million people. The government is planning to stockpile 2 million courses of the drug, according to Fujifilm.

Researchers in a recent report published in the Virus Eradication Journal said favipiravir costs $1.45 a day to make.

Should repurposed drugs demonstrate efficacy against COVID-19, they could be manufactured profitably at very low costs, the authors wrote in the report, estimating that treatments currently being tested against COVID-19 could run as much as $29 per treatment course.

Favorable results from trials of the drugs could lead to companies needing to rapidly boost production of the most promising drugs.

Avigan is being studied in a number of countries, including Egypt, the United States, and the Philippines, as researchers try to build on positive outcomes found in China and Japan.
The market is likely to remain overwhelmed for months to come by the catastrophic collapse in demand caused by the lockdowns designed to slow the spread of the coronavirus through some of the world's biggest economies. "The OPEC+ agreement will not prevent sharp inventory builds in coming months, and near-term oil prices in the physical market will likely remain under pressure," said Martijn Rats, oil analyst at Morgan Stanley. The deal between the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries and its allies will remove nearly 10 million barrels a day from the market through deliberate cuts. In addition, the group is counting involuntary declines in the production of the US, Canada, Brazil and several other countries, as companies reduce drilling activity due to low prices and weak demand. OPEC+ officials, using some creative accounting that also includes output drops in Venezuela, Iran and Libya, which are exempt from making cuts, said that as much as 20 million barrels a day will over time leave the market - 20 per cent of global production. For the time being, the world will need to be content with the 10 million barrels a day from OPEC+. Yet demand is down by about twice that amount, meaning the world's oil tanks will keep filling day after day as long as planes stay grounded, businesses shuttered and billions of people remain at home.

The biggest winner appears to be Trump, who refused to deliberately cut American oil production but was still able to broker the final deal. His phone call with Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, followed by a three-way conference call with Russian President Vladimir Putin and King Salman of Saudi Arabia, came up with the proposal that resolved the Latin American nation's objections to the agreement. Trump, who has been a critic of OPEC for years, is the one who put it together. Of all the deals he's done in his life, this has to be the biggest. Oil historian Daniel Yergin Trump has taken time away from grappling with the world's largest coronavirus outbreak and waded into oil politics with a surprising goal. He's gone from welcoming the crude price collapse to worrying about losing the American energy industry. Fearing that job losses in Texas and other oil-rich states could hurt his reelection prospects, he convinced Putin and the Saudi monarch to end hostilities and make a compromise. "Trump views himself as a dealmaker," said Joe McMonigle, an energy consultant and former US government oil official. So "Trump went to the oil market's red phone." The president sealed the historic deal by offering the Saudis something that exists only on paper. When Mexico refused a big output reduction, putting the whole agreement in danger, Trump assured OPEC+ that the US would cut its own production on its neighbour's behalf.

Mexico would remove 100,000 barrels a day, and the US would contribute an additional 300,000 barrels a day, Trump said at the White House. OPEC+ officials and others involved in the talks said those extra barrels simply didn't exist. The decline in American production would be driven by prices, demand, and capacity in pipelines or tanks, not presidential news conferences. But ultimately his offer was enough. Sunday's agreement ended a period in which the OPEC+ alliance appeared to be dead, with former partners engaged in oil-trade warfare. The deal, for the time being, brings to an end the price war between Russia and Saudi Arabia Credit:AP It all started on March 6, when Russian Energy Minister Alexander Novak walked out of OPEC's headquarters in Vienna and told reporters that his country was ready to increase oil production in April. He had just rebuffed Saudi Arabia's push for his country to cut output by a few hundred thousand barrels a day, to help counter what most saw as a modest demand slowdown due to the coronavirus. In return, the kingdom had rejected his proposal to continue the group's existing curbs at their current level.

Angered by Russia's refusal to cut and Novak's talk of higher production, Saudi Arabia embarked on a shock-and-awe price war. Riyadh offered oil refiners unprecedented discounts for its crude, cutting its official selling prices by the most in more than 30 years. The kingdom also announced it was boosting production to an all-time high above 12 million barrels a day for April, up 25 per cent from February. When the market opened a few hours later, even the most bearish traders were shocked. The Sunday evening session is typically a sedate affair, mostly covered by traders in Asia, where it's already Monday morning. But that night, every trader from Geneva to London and Houston was glued to their screens. When the selling started, benchmark Brent crude plunged more than 30 per cent in seconds - the biggest one-day drop since the 1990 to 1991 Gulf War. What followed was the most chaotic month in the oil market's history, threatening the stability of the petroleum-dependent nations from Nigeria to Iraq and upending the business plans of industry giants like Exxon Mobil and Royal Dutch Shell. Without fully realising it, the Saudis had started a price war at the worst possible time. By early March, the coronavirus outbreak had spread well beyond Wuhan, infecting thousands of people from Iran to the US Around the world, governments copied the lockdowns that China had already tried and tested. Country after country put their economies into deep freeze. With demand for jet fuel, gasoline and diesel sharply down, refineries cut production and reduced their crude purchases. The physical oil market started to resemble a closing-down sale. In one obscure corner of the US, oil even traded at negative prices, with producers paying consumers to take away their barrels.

"I never thought I'd be saying that maybe we have to have an oil increase, because we do. The price is so low," Trump said in a Fox News interview. The president, who had made a political career bashing OPEC and advocating for low gasoline prices, was worried the US industry would be "wiped out." Saudi Arabia and Russian blamed each other for the crash. Putin accused Saudi Arabia of trying to destroy shale; the Saudis said Moscow had kicked the whole thing off. None of it cut any ice in Washington. "We see a huge oversupply in the oil market," said Fatih Birol, the head of the International Energy Agency. Trump spoke to both Putin and Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, commonly known as MBS, proposing a global deal to cut production. He couldn't help boasting about the talks before the deal was in place, announcing in a tweet on April 2 that he hoped Riyadh and Moscow would cut output by 10 million barrels a day, if not more.

Brent crude jumped more than 45 per cent in just a few seconds, crushing many bearish investors. Even when the market closed hours later, the benchmark was still up 21 per cent - the largest one-day increase ever. Unsurprisingly for a deal that includes dozens of countries in the OPEC+ coalition and the G-20, the final deal is a fudge. Saudi Arabia's production will only be 1.2 million barrels a day lower than its average level before the price war. Mexico won special treatment and America's cuts are just an estimate based on forecasts for drilling. Loading The trajectory of oil prices will be more dependent on how fast the world leaves lockdown and the pace of the economic rebound. Yet the deal's significance goes beyond numbers. There has been a tectonic shift in global oil politics. Putin, MBS and Trump, the leaders of the world's three largest producers, are dictating global petroleum supply. And America now accepts that low prices aren't in its interest.
China has approved the trial of two Coronavirus vaccines on humans, as the government aims to prevent a re-occurence of the disease in the country.



According to state owned news agency Xinhua, the Chinese Government approved the two experimental vaccines created by a Beijing-based unit of Sinovac Biotech and by the Wuhan Institute of Biological Products that is affiliated to state-owned China National Pharmaceutical Group, and wants to start testing the vaccines on humans as it has successfully carried out tests on animals.



"We can confirm now that three particular vaccines are being tested in China, and the National Health Commission has said it will have to clear a number of conditions before they can enable mass production of the vaccines globally," Hong Kong based Sarah Clarke said to AlJazeera on Tuesday.



This isn't the first time China is giving authorization for the production of experimental vaccines, as in March, Beijing gave the green light to another clinical trial for a coronavirus vaccine candidate developed by the military-backed Academy of Military Medical Sciences and biotech firm CanSino Bio.



China's decision to give authorization came shortly after US drug developer Moderna said it had begun human tests for their vaccine with the US National Institutes of Health.



John Nicholls, clinical professor of Pathology at the University of Hong Kong, urged scientists and nations working on a vaccine not to rush it's production because of global demand.



"Vaccines can't be rushed"; Nicholls said to Al Jazeera.



"Normally with vaccines you start off with small animals and then move to primates and then to the humans," "It seems that with this one they have gone straight to the humans, which is a very bold decision.



"Most of the mortality in this disease is in the elderly, so the best thing would be to actually see what the anti-body response is in the elderly rather than the young,"













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One expert reminds consumers that airlines are required to offer refunds for canceled flights

Southwest Airlines may have escaped major cancellations from New Years weekend, but its in the hot seat now. The discount carrier pulled 658 flights off the board on Thursday, according to FlightAware. Another 519 were canceled on Friday, and there are another 230 cancellations predicted for Saturday and 19 for Sunday.

In an email to ConsumerAffairs, a Southwest spokesperson explained that ongoing staff challenges  most likely coronavirus-related sick calls from wor...
WASHINGTON  When President Donald Trump spoke with Xi Jinping, the Chinese leader, late last month to reach a truce to the sniping over the coronavirus pandemic, he did so partly to pave the way for steady shipments of much-needed medical supplies from China.

But as the death toll in the United States has surpassed 25,000 and hospitals still struggle with equipment shortages, American officials and executives point to new problems in buying equipment or taking donations from China.

Shipments have run into unexpected delays as Chinese officials impose new regulations in response to complaints of low-quality products. And some American officials remain reluctant to accept gifts of gear because they fear giving the Chinese Communist Party a propaganda win.

The two superpowers are vying to project global leadership roles during the crisis, despite deep failures in how senior officials in both nations responded to outbreaks. At the moment, Chinese officials have the power to make it easy or difficult for vital supplies to flow to the United States and other nations. The two sides must work closely to orchestrate the shipments, even as American officials harbor deep suspicions over Chinas donation diplomacy, a global effort by Beijing involving planeloads of medical gear and delegations of health experts.

The complications could bolster the arguments of some Trump administration officials that U.S. companies should move their supply chains out of China.

On Monday, Trump signaled in a news conference he may be ending the detente with China when he used the term Wuhan virus, a label despised by Beijing that emphasizes the city where the virus was first detected.

Chinese regulators, embarrassed by reports of shoddy medical equipment sent to Europe, imposed a new rule Friday mandating that customs officers inspect every shipment of masks, ventilators and other medical gear before they leave the country. That was the latest in a series of regulatory actions that had begun to hinder shipments. One American businessman said a new list of items to be inspected was so broad that it even included cotton balls. American officials said that after hearing complaints from U.S. companies, they have had to scramble to deal with the delays on a case-by-case basis.

In some cases, Chinese authorities eventually helped untangle the snarls. But the bureaucratic bungling has exasperated American officials, who say the red tape has held up equipment at a desperate moment.

American executives are increasingly complaining of delays. Charter planes from the United States have sat empty in China for days. Millions of masks and thousands of ventilators have sat on factory and warehouse floors, sometimes for weeks.

Jacob Parker, senior vice president at the U.S.-China Business Council, said the restrictions were the top issue for some of the biggest companies in the world.

It is a good intentioned policy that has a variety of unintended consequences across a variety of areas, he said. It remains a big issue for our members.

Zhao Lijian, a Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman, said Friday that Beijing would work with other nations to safeguard international public health security. The country exported more than $1.4 billion of pandemic supplies from March 1 to April 4, he said, and scores of countries had signed contracts.

However, many of the shipments are part of regular, long-term commercial arrangements between non-Chinese companies such as 3M and factories or contractors in China.

The State Department appears determined to compete with China on publicity over aid. Its website says it has given nearly $500 million in foreign aid to help with the pandemic. Last week, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said in a call with reporters in Europe that there is no country in the world that will provide as much aid and assistance through multiple forms as the United States of America will.

One new rule in China dictates that supplies heading to the United States must have approval not just from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration but now also from Chinas National Medical Products Administration, which many importers do not have.

The regulations have threatened to disrupt ventilator supply chains for companies like General Electric and have impeded shipments of masks managed by the Federal Emergency Management Agency, according to people familiar with the matter. Earlier this week, a plane bound for Massachusetts took off with less than half of the 10 million masks it was supposed to carry. Several major makers of virus tests have struggled, too. One, PerkinElmer, has had a large shipment delayed for days, the people said.

But it is American officials who are responsible for the stalling of one batch of gear. For weeks, officials in Washington have debated whether to accept a donation of masks from the Chinese Foreign Ministry, American officials said. Though medical workers are desperate for the masks, some officials argue that taking the donation would aid Chinas propaganda campaign.

That debate is a sign of the growing fury and frustration in Washington over that campaign. American officials who see the Chinese Communist Party as malevolent are irate at what they view as the partys efforts to reshape the narrative of the pandemic, which spread quickly beyond central China in part because of cover-ups by officials. (The State Department did not reply to questions on the offer or its position on donations from China.)

The American officials say China is trying to turn the spotlight away from the pandemics roots through the shipments of purchased supplies and some donations. Often, Chinese officials tell counterparts abroad that they must publicly thank China in return for the shipments, say Western officials, executives and analysts with knowledge of the exchanges.

What is most striking to me is the extent to which the Chinese government appears to be demanding public displays of gratitude from other countries; this is certainly not in the tradition of the best humanitarian relief efforts, said Elizabeth C. Economy, director for Asia studies at the Council on Foreign Relations. It seems strange to expect signed declarations of thanks from other countries in the midst of the crisis.

The equipment has helped save lives, and officials around the world  among them, Gov. Andrew Cuomo of New York  have thanked the Chinese government or private citizens.

Chinese state-run news organizations have highlighted the exports in stories and social media posts.

Some Chinese officials abroad have been surprisingly aggressive in pushing Beijings narrative.

Twice since late February, a Chinese diplomat in the consulate in Chicago has emailed state Sen. Roger Roth, president of the Wisconsin Senate, to ask that the Wisconsin Senate pass a resolution recognizing that China has taken heroic steps to fight the virus, according to reviews of the emails by The New York Times.

The emails had proposed drafts of the resolution that included lines saying China has adopted unprecedented and rigorous measures and that the actions have been effective in curbing the virus from spreading to other parts of China and the world. One sentence said China had been transparent and quick with sharing information.

I was really taken back at the brazenness of their government to try and influence what were doing here, said Roth, a Republican.

Roth sent back a one-word reply  Nuts  and March 26 introduced a resolution in the state Senate that said the Communist Party of China deliberately and intentionally misled the world on the Wuhan coronavirus and that Wisconsin stood in solidarity with the Chinese people to condemn the actions of the party. The Wisconsin Examiner first reported on the resolution.

The diplomat, Wu Ting, did not reply to a request for comment.

Beijing may come to regret its rapid pivot from domestic crisis to international triumphalism, for there is already a rising tide of nationalist anger coming its way as citizens from countries around the world face prolonged economic hardship and are in search of culpable parties, said Jude Blanchette, a China scholar at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

Chinas new regulations on exports could also hamper its own propaganda efforts, even if the purpose of the rules  to ensure that only functional medical equipment leaves China  is a valid one.

And the start-and-stop nature of the shipments is adding momentum to a yearslong push by some American officials to enact policies intended to compel U.S. companies to move their supply chains.

Some U.S. companies have already relocated their supply chains out of China in response to the tariffs Trump imposed as part of the trade war he started in 2018. Now, both the economic shutdown in China during the pandemic and the global shortage of Chinese-made medical products are increasing the calls for more decoupling.

Peter Navarro, a White House trade adviser and China hawk, has drafted an executive order to prod American pharmaceutical companies to move manufacturing to the United States, though some administration officials and lawmakers oppose the effort.

One of the things that this crisis has taught us, sir, is that we are dangerously overdependent on a global supply chain, Navarro said last week during a news conference with Trump. Never again should we rely on the rest of the world for our essential medicines and countermeasures.

Some American officials point to the potential for local governments in China to seize vital personal protective equipment produced there as part of the supply chains. Earlier this year, when the pandemic was still largely centered in China, some U.S. manufacturers found themselves being forced to sell masks and other supplies made in China to local governments and hospitals, effectively leaving none for export.

American manufacturer 3M could find itself in a similar situation, some officials said, with the company struggling to hit a target it brokered with the Trump administration to supply 166.5 million masks over the next three months if Chinese authorities chose to seize masks produced in the country for their own needs.

A recent article in Chinese state media signaled that possibility. Pointing out that a local Chinese manufacturer in Shanghai can produce more than 1 million masks per day, the article mentioned an often-cited unofficial policy: Masks can be exported abroad, provided that the domestic needs are secured.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
[April 15, 2020] Leading Australian Institution Deploys Nintex Promapp to Score Top Marks for Ongoing Transformation

BELLEVUE, Wash., April 15, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- Nintex, the global standard for process management and automation, announced that Western Sydney University has deployed Nintex Promapp, the visual process mapping and management capability of the Nintex Process Platform, to improve and manage business processes, underpin business continuity and provide for a first-class student experience from initial entry enquiry through to alumni. Western Sydney University is a world-class institution, globally recognized for its research strengths and innovations in teaching. Ranked in the top two per cent of universities in the word, Western Sydney University is an Australian multi-campus university, located in the Greater Western region of Sydney.



The decision to select Nintex Promapp follows the university's need for greater visibility and ownership of processes, and to encourage university-wide collaboration between teams. "We recognized a need for change and improvement as our approach to process management was fragmented; tacit knowledge was stored in people's heads, and information and processes were housed locally in Microsoft Visio, Excel and Word files," says Steve Marsh, Business Improvement Manager, Project Management Office - Division of Finance and Resources, Western Sydney University.

"There was a lack of clear ownership of processes, a lack of visibility and collaboration, and often insufficient clarity about who did what, when and how. We recognized a need for a solution which could standardize our approach to documenting processes and lay the foundation for ongoing continuous improvement." Western Sydney University selected Nintex Promapp based on its ease of use, feature-rich functionality, and the capability for individual groups to independently capture and manage their own end-to-end processes, with the aim to ultimately automate workflows within a robust governance framework. An important value add is the ability to easily share processes across the entire organization, and to use Nintex Promapp's feedback functionality to identify opportunities for ongoing improvement. "We want to create a culture of continuous improvement across Western Sydney University. Nintex Promapp provides that opportunity by enabling teams to consistently map their processes, facilitating increased visibility, ownership, and collaboration. Simplicity - and a platform which is highly intuitive - were key factors in choosing Nintex Promapp," says Marsh. Nintex Promapp has been rolled out across 17 business units at Western Sydney University and has been adopted to support the rollout of a new student management system. "Our aim with Nintex Promapp is to continually improve the staff and student experience by having processes that are accessible, clear and well-understood," concludes Marsh. Media Contact

Laetitia Smith

Nintex

[email protected]

mobile: +64 21 154 7114

About Nintex

Nintex is the global standard for process management and automation. Today more than 8,000 public and private sector clients across 90 countries turn to the Nintex Platform to accelerate their digital transformation journeys by enabling them to quickly and easily manage, automate and optimize business processes. Learn more by visiting www.nintex.com and experience how Nintex and its global partner network are shaping the future of Intelligent Process Automation (IPA). Product or service names mentioned herein may be the trademarks of their respective owners. View original content to download multimedia:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/leading-australian-institution-deploys-nintex-promapp-to-score-top-marks-for-ongoing-transformation-301040709.html SOURCE Nintex

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Saudia Arabia has carried out 800 executions since King Salman bin Abdulaziz took power in 2015, according to a British-based human rights organisation.

Reprieve, which fights for victims of human rights abuses, says that the rate of executions in the Kingdom has almost doubled under his reign, which started on 13 January 2015.

This comes despite crown prince Mohammed Bin Salman saying that the Kingdom intends to minimise the number of executions.

Between 2009 and 2014, there were 423 executions in Saudi Arabia.

Last year, Saudi Arabia is thought to have executed 185 people, including 37 in a mass execution in April. This is the highest annual number of deaths since Reprieve and the European Saudi Organisation for Human Rights (ESOHR) started to monitor executions in the country.

Maya Foa, director of Reprieve, said: For all the rhetoric of reform and modernisation, Saudi Arabia is still a country where speaking out against the King can get you killed.

She urged the Kingdoms western partners to call for an end to the execution of children and political opponents before the G20 summit in Riyadh in November.

Ms Foa added that if they failed to do so, these countries would risk tacitly endorsing Saudi Arabias actions.

Reprieve alleges that six young men, who had been children at the time of their alleged offences, were among those killed in last years mass execution.

At least 13 juvenile defendants are thought to currently be on death row in the Kingdom, including Ali al-Nimr, Dawood al-Marhoon and Abdullah al-Zaher.

Ali al-Dubisi, director of ESOHR, said: The high implementation of death sentences, despite assurances from Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, exposes the falsehood of these promises.

The Independent has contacted the Saudi Arabian consulate in the UK for comment.
Strictly adhering to precautions to prevent any further spread of COVID-19 while handling cargo at India's ports, the government has not issued shore passes to more than 50,000 crew and passengers, an official said on Wednesday.

Maintaining smooth operations across its ports and initiating several steps, including waiving rentals, ports have done thermal scanning of over 50,000 crew and passengers post January 27.

"A total of 50,902 passengers have been scanned between January 27 and April 12 using thermal scanners at Indian ports, including 43,925 people scanned at major ports," a Shipping Ministry official told PTI.

The official said these crew and passengers were on board 1,558 ships including 1,990 vessels which arrived at ports post January 27.

The government has asked each major port to ensure that no penalties, demurrage, charges, fee, rentals are levied on any port user (traders, shipping lines, concessionaires, licensees etc) for any delay in berthing or loading/unloading operations or evacuation of cargo caused by the reasons attributable to lockdown measures from March 22.

The government has said each major port shall exempt or remit demurrage, ground rent over and above the free period, penal anchorage/berth hire charges and any other performance-related penalties that may be levied on port-related activities including minimum performance guarantee, wherever applicable.

Besides for existing and operational PPP projects, major ports can permit waiver of all penal consequences on a case-to-case basis along with deferment of certain performance obligations.

The official said that hospitals across the major port trusts have been supplied with personal protective equipment (PPEs) and the arrangement of sufficient staff round the clock has been made.

Ports and PSUs under the Ministry of Shipping have contributed more than Rs 52 crore from the CSR funds towards PM CARES Fund.

Besides, employees of ports, PSUs and other offices of the Ministry of Shipping have contributed over Rs 7 crore from their salaries towards PM CARES Fund.

The number of vessels handled by ports during 2019-20 was around 20,837 against 20,853 vessels in 2018-19.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Queensland's school lessons on television will be beamed into Queensland homes for the first time by Channel Seven from Wednesday, April 29.

Television staff are now assembling school classes for three days' programming each week on Seven.

The two-hour programs are being assembled by the television networks from video classes submitted by teachers chosen by Education Queensland.

Queensland Education Minister Grace Grace. Credit:AAP

The televised school classrooms will probably run from 9am to 11am three days a week, two sources have told Brisbane Times.
 Flash

United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said Tuesday that the World Health Organization (WHO) must be supported, shortly after U.S. President Donald Trump' announcement of halting his country's funding to the organization.

"It is my belief that the World Health Organization must be supported, as it is absolutely critical to the world's efforts to win the war against COVID-19," the secretary-general said in a statement issued by his spokesman.

It is "not the time to reduce the resources for the operations of the World Health Organization or any other humanitarian organization in the fight against the virus," the secretary-general said.

"Once we have finally turned the page on this epidemic, there must be a time to look back fully to understand how such a disease emerged and spread its devastation so quickly across the globe, and how all those involved reacted to the crisis," he said. "The lessons learned will be essential to effectively address similar challenges, as they may arise in the future."

The UN chief noted that "now is the time for unity and for the international community to work together in solidarity to stop this virus and its shattering consequences."

Guterres also recalled his statement made on April 8 that said "the COVID-19 pandemic is one of the most dangerous challenges this world has faced in our lifetime. It is above all a human crisis with severe health and socio-economic consequences" and the WHO is supporting member states and their societies, especially the most vulnerable among them, "with guidance, training, equipment and concrete life-saving services" as they fight the virus.

U.S. President Donald Trump announced on Tuesday that his administration is halting the nation's funding to WHO, a move experts have warned against.
Coronavirus. Credit: European Centers for Disease Control

Denmark began reopening schools for younger children on Wednesday after a month-long closure to combat the novel coronavirus, becoming the first country in Europe to do so.

Nurseries, kindergartens and primary schools were restarting after they were officially closed on March 17 in an effort to curb the COVID-19 epidemic, though many had shut before then.

However classes are only resuming in about half of Denmark's municipalities and in about 35 percent of Copenhagen's schools, as others have requested more time to adjust to health protocols. All are expected to reopen by April 20.

In the centre of the capital Copenhagen, some 220 pupils up to the second grade arrived at the Norrebro Park Skole, welcomed by their teachers who waved Danish flags. Children in the third and fourth grade will follow on Thursday.

The children quickly settled into the reorganised classrooms designed to comply with strict new sanitary guidelines.

"I feel great, really good about the kids going back to school," Caroline, a 38-year-old and mother of two, told AFP.

In early April the country's centre-left government announced that schools would be reopened "on the condition that everyone keeps their distance and washes their hands."

But while schools are gradually reopening, bars, restaurants, hairdressing and massage parlours, shopping centres and discos remain closed, and gatherings of more than 10 people are banned.

Schools are required to ensure that a distance of two metres (about six feet) is maintained between desks in classrooms and recesses must be organised for small groups.

A headache for teachers is that they must ensure that pupils are never in groups of more than two while inside and five outside.

Socially distanced teaching

To adhere to guidelines, the school in Norrebro has divided the classes into two or three groups, limiting the number of students in a classroom to 12.

Bottles with hand sanitiser are never far away to encourage students to clean their hands regularly.

"We have the space because we're using the classrooms usually used by the older grades who are working from home now," said headmaster Henrik Wilhelmsen, adding that it would present an issue when older students also return.

Some parents have opposed the reopening of schools, citing health concerns. A petition dubbed "My child is not a guinea pig" has garnered some 18,000 signatures.

According to the petition's organisers, "children can easily carry the disease without getting sick."

Wilhelmsen told AFP that around 15 parents had informed the school that they would not bring their children back.

Others however trust their government's judgement.

"I think we're all going to be sick at one point and they told us the children are going to be less sick and affected by this virus," said Caroline, the mother.

"I think it's good that they're going back to school... We need to go back to daily life," she added.

Middle and high school students will however continue remote classes and are only expected to return to classrooms on May 10.

According to the latest figures on Wednesday morning, Denmark had 6,876 confirmed cases of the new coronavirus and 299 deaths.

Before Denmark, Austria was the first European country to unveil its roadmap for a return to a "new normal".

On Tuesday, it allowed small non-food shops to open up, while maintaining social distancing rules and requiring masks to be worn in shops and on public transport.

Austria plans to keep schools, cafes and restaurants closed until at least mid-May.

Explore further Follow the latest news on the coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak

 2020 AFP
From a CAT-exposed standpoint, were getting significant rate pretty much across the board  in California, Gulf states  and I think thats now bleeding into other lines, said Tom Clark, president of Nationwide E&S/Specialty, during a panel at the Kaufman Leadership Meeting in Detroit, MI. Were a large writer in California and a large writer in Florida, so we want to make sure that when it comes down to zip codes or counties, that were not over-indexed in any one of those locations. Were really taking this opportunity to manage our concentrations.

Clark noted that the Nationwide team was watching these exposures closely  literally every day  but so far, he thinks that the company has been responsible in how its managed that portfolio.

Read more: Its time to ditch fatalistic views about wildfire

In fact, natural catastrophes remain top of mind and losses stemming from these disasters have a significant role to play in rates. Wayne Bates, president of Atain Insurance Companies, explained that managing exposures will be very much about aggregate management and spreading risk.

This is going to be on the forefront of everyones mind, he said, pointing to California wildfires specifically. I dont know that this phenomenon is going away, so were going to have to work out how to manage it.

One of the other key areas of the market that was seeing some dislocation in 2019 was excess umbrella, where a lot of carriers were pulling back on capacity.

We have not written a lot of CAT-exposed property over the years. The rates were not where our risk appetite was, explained Chris Lewis, group president and CEO of IFG Companies. Were writing more property now, but what we are doing is were growing quite a bit in that excess where that capacity has really shrunk back, and were writing a lot more in the five X five layer for excess and umbrella.

Within this hardening environment, the leaders highlighted that theres a distinction to be made between small, middle market business and larger accounts.

What weve seen through this year is that small middle market business, either on the binding side or on the small brokerage side, has seen low, single-digit rate increases, explained Lewis, though he added that as loss severity trends for the industry overall continue to go up, that small middle market business is also going to see some firming.

Read more: Insureds in niche industries struggle in challenging hard market

Nonetheless, some lines of business have been seeing a rebalancing, with rates finally coming back to a reasonable place, including excess auto in the trucking business, according to Richard Schmitzer, president and CEO of James Rivers insurance. However, Bates pointed out that there was still some soft market mentality, even as the market on the whole was correcting.

We can definitely tell that the market is moving in the right direction, but I think I need a couple more months of what we see now in our figures to know that the market is absolutely moving up for sure, he said.
Monday night at their regular meeting, conducted via teleconference, the Chadron Public Schools Board of Education heard from Chadron High School Principal Jerry Mack regarding the upcoming graduation of Chadrons 58 seniors.

The board approved the list of graduating students, contingent upon completion of their requirements. Superintendent Dr. Caroline Winchester is optimistic all of the students will finish on time, but noted that, even with the limitations due to the COVID-19 pandemic, there are still credit recovery options available beyond the regular school year. Graduation is scheduled for May 9.

Mack said he met with the seniors, and they are really pushing for a formal graduation ceremony. The probability of such a ceremony is fairly small, even in summer months, though one is tentatively scheduled for July 18.

Since we cant control a ceremony date, Mack said, the one thing we can control is to celebrate the Class of 2020. Were leaving the graduation date of May 9 on the calendar. Everyone is encouraged to celebrate the seniors on May 9 through signage. Additionally on the same day, the school will release a video at 1 p.m. recognizing them.

Students will receive their diplomas when they do their checkouts. Were not going to hold a diploma hostage, Mack said. There will also be a mock backdrop of the graduation stage set up at the high school track with short video clips of the seniors celebrating. The video is expected to be done by May 6 and ready to present on graduation weekend.

Were just going to celebrate in all kind of creative ways we can on the scheduled graduation date, Mack said, noting theres a lot of creativity among the boosters and school staff, as shown by the options provided for distance learning. He is also working with students to make sure they are doing everything they can to meet graduation requirements.

In other action, the board approved the beginning of a Family, Career and Community Leaders of America (FCCLA) chapter at Chadron High School for the 2020-21 school year. The formation of the chapter was proposed by Brenda Budler, who would advise the chapter.

Currently a co-advisor of Future Business Leaders of America (FBLA) with Renae Noble, Budler stated in her proposal that Noble feels confident she can handle the FBLA chapter on her own.

Dr. Winchester noted this would mean there would be one sponsor each for FBLA and FCCLA, and provide additional opportunity for student extracurricular activities. She doesnt foresee a significant increase in finances with the chapter formation.

Budler, who was also attending the meeting, said she advised FCCLA for four years in Wyoming and 11 years in Idaho. She said FCCLA is more directed with youth concerns such as traffic safety, parenting, family relationships, nutrition and child care.

The para/secretary wage scale for the 2020-21 school year was approved. Board President Tom Menke said the Personnel Committee met Monday and had several conversations about the wage scale. What was brought forth from the committee is a 2.5% increase. He further noted this would be an increase of $43,605 for salaries or $64,735 with salaries and benefits.

It was pointed out that Level II Special Education paraeducators would remain at the 2019-20. That decision is based largely on input from staff members themselves regarding fairness across the board.

Policy 3530 regarding insurance, was approved on third reading. This policy states the board is responsible for carrying liability, property and workers compensation insurance on all property, vehicles and employees. Further, insurance coverage will meet state requirements. Building content inventories will be updated yearly and turned into the building principals. Injuries received while on school property shall be reported to the superintendent.

Board member Gary Hoffman said the Policy Committee has discussed the policy and wanted to update the language from the previous policy, which was written in 1983. A second policy, Policy 3531, was deleted as it is very repetitious and covers only liability insurance.

Action was tabled on Policy 3540.1 regarding mileage in lieu of transportation of students, which was up for second reading. Hoffman said the policy was originally drafted in 2006 and amended in 2013. He explained it could allow for a cost savings to the district if a group of rural patrons collaborated and agreed one person would drive students from a pick up point.

Hoffman noted parents who are not driving students to school would only receive mileage up to the pickup point, and parents that would drive students into town would receive 100% of the regular mileage and up to 5% more per person up to a maximum of 25% above the 100%.

Hoffman suggested action on the policy be held off for a third reading until the Policy Committee has a chance to meet. Action is expected on the policy at the May board meeting.

The Rapid City Journal and Scottsbluff Star-Herald were added to the list of Official School Press. Dr. Winchester explained sometimes special board meetings come up that are less than a week out. This doesnt allow for publishing notices of these meeting in a weekly paper like The Chadron Record. Previously the school board has been allowed to simply post them. However, changes in Legislature require posting of these meetings, which could only be done in a daily such as the papers in Scottsbluff and Rapid City.

Also at the meeting, Dr. Winchester noted Chadron Intermediate School was awarded the continuing 21st Century grant for the after school program, and commended staff on the writing of the grant.

Dr. Winchester and other administrative staff also expressed great appreciation to the district administrators, staff, teachers and parents for the extra work they have done during the COVID-19 pandemic. These efforts have made distance learning and the meal delivery systems at Chadron Middle School and Chadron Intermediate possible.

Chadron Primary Principal Libby Uhing noted staff at her school are also painting murals and bathrooms. Shes excited to get students back in the building because its going to look like a totally different place.

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The Mangaluru police arrested two persons for spreading objectionable messages against Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Home Minister Amit Shah, a police officer said on Tuesday.

"Two persons spreading inciting messages against the highest functionaries of government of India including the Prime Minister and Home Minister have been arrested," tweeted Mangaluru Police Commissioner T.S. Harsha.



Police arrested Muhammad Ilyas and Abdul Basheer for their posts on Facebook page Mikalto Bisya, a Kannada page engaging 5,000 people.





"On preliminary investigation, the accused have confessed to their affiliation with Popular Front of India (PFI) and Social Democratic Party of India (SDPI) and have given details of a broader network," said Harsha.



The two were booked under Epidemic Diseases Act 1897, Section 67 of Information Technology, Section 54 of Disaster Management Act and IPC Sections 188, 153, 505.
BAR HARBOR, MAINE  A program to teach data literacy to Maine and New Hampshire students by analyzing data on arsenic in well water collected from their homes has found that 25 percent of samples exceed the New Hampshire maximum safety level of 5 parts per billion (ppb) and 15 percent exceed the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) maximum safety level of 10 ppb.

The program also found that 62 percent of homeowners in the two states hadnt had their well water tested or didnt know if it had been tested despite the fact that the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends testing at least once a year.

The results were recently presented to a committee of the Maine State Legislature by Jane E. Disney, Ph.D., who is the principal investigator for the program and director of research training at the MDI Biological Laboratory in Bar Harbor. Her testimony was delivered in support of a bill (LD 1943) to improve well water quality in Maine.

Residents of Maine and New Hampshire rely heavily on private wells for drinking water, but few have their wells tested regularly for arsenic, which leaches out of the bedrock. Arsenic has been designated by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) as the environmental contaminant with the biggest impact on human health.

According to the EPA, long-term exposure, even at low levels, can lead to numerous severe health problems, including cancer, diabetes, heart disease and reproductive, developmental and cognitive problems, including lower IQs. Arsenic is a particular problem in New Englands coastal arsenic belt, where many wells exceed EPA limits.

The five-year, $1.2 million data literacy program, entitled Data to Action: A Secondary School-based Citizen Science Project to Address Arsenic Contamination of Well Water, is funded through a SEPA (Science Education Partnership Award) to the MDI Biological Laboratory from the National Institute of General Medical Sciences.

Since the inception of the program, teachers and students from 12 Maine and six New Hampshire schools have analyzed more than 1,200 well water samples in collaboration with Dartmouth College, which conducted the tests.

The facts that this program has uncovered are staggering, Disney testified in support of the bill, entitled An Act to Protect Drinking Water for Low-income Maine Residents.

The bill calls for revising the maximum contaminant level for arsenic to be consistent with recent research on toxicity and suitable consumption levels, and for establishing a free testing program for low-income residents. The current maximum contaminant level in Maine is 10 ppb, which follows the standard set by the EPA.

Disney also encouraged members of the Health and Human Services Committee to expand the scope of the bill to include support for outreach, education and mitigation.

Students are learning that their communities are at risk and are trying to address this problem in many ways, from public outreach to the filming of videos, she said. But they cannot solve this problem on their own. They will need the help of legislators to assure that residents whose wells have elevated arsenic can get the help they need.

Disney also noted that the bill makes economic sense because the costs of treating arsenic-related disease and of providing special education services to affected children are far greater than those of testing and mitigation. The committee has since approved the bill, which will now come before the state legislature.

The SEPA program is the most recent example of our long-standing commitment to environmental health, said Hermann Haller, M.D., MDI Biological Laboratory president. We are gratified that this program is helping to protect our most vulnerable populations from the adverse health consequences of arsenic exposure.

The test results are being provided to the Maine Center for Disease Control and Prevention and the New Hampshire Department of Environmental Services in order to help them monitor the extent of arsenic exposure and implement mitigation strategies.

The SEPA grant was awarded to the MDI Biological Laboratory in 2018 to establish a national learning model for secondary school education in data literacy while also increasing awareness about the importance of well water testing and mobilizing communities to address issues related to well water safety.

The Data to Action project is supported by Science Education Partnership Award (SEPA) grant 1R25GM129796-01 from the National Institute of General Medical Sciences, an institute of the National Institutes of Health.

About the MDI Biological Laboratory

We aim to improve human health and healthspan by uncovering basic mechanisms of tissue repair, aging and regeneration, translating our discoveries for the benefit of society and developing the next generation of scientific leaders. For more information, please visit mdibl.org.
President Donald Trump speaks about the coronavirus in the Rose Garden (Alex Brandon/AP)

President Donald Trump says he has directed a halt to US payments to the World Health Organisation pending a review of its warnings about coronavirus and China.

President Trump says the outbreak could have been contained at its source and spared lives had the UN health agency done a better job investigating reports coming out of China.

The United States contributed nearly $900 million (711 million) to the WHOs budget for 2018-19, according to information on the agencys website.

The president says the world depends on the World Health Organisation to work with countries to make sure accurate information about health threats are shared in a timely manner.

He said the organisation failed to carry out its basic duty and must be held accountable.

But Mr Trump says the US will continue to engage with the organisation in pursuit of what he calls meaningful reforms.

There was no immediate comment from the Geneva-based organisation on Mr Trumps announcement.

President @realDonaldTrump is halting funding of the World Health Organization while a review is conducted to assess WHO's role in mismanaging the Coronavirus outbreak. pic.twitter.com/jTrEf4WWj0  The White House 45 Archived (@WhiteHouse45) April 14, 2020

But when asked about possible US funding cuts during a regular UN briefing earlier on Tuesday, WHO spokeswoman Margaret Harris responded, Regardless of any issues, our work will go on.

UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres responded to the presidents announcement by saying now is not the time to end support for the World Health Organisation, calling the WHO absolutely critical to the global effort to combat Covid-19.

Mr Guterres said that it is possible that different entities read the facts differently but that the appropriate time for a review is once we have finally turned the page on this pandemic.

That represents one-fifth of its total budget for those years.

More than 125,000 deaths worldwide, including more than 25,000 in the US, have been blamed on the coronavirus, according to Johns Hopkins University.

Asked on Tuesday about the appropriateness of seeking to cut the WHOs funding in the middle of a worldwide viral outbreak, Mr Trump said the review would last 60 to 90 days.

This is an evaluation period, but in the meantime, were putting a hold on all funds going to World Health, the president said.

He has also complained that other countries give substantially less than the US, singling out China.

The American Medical Association (AMA) immediately called on Mr Trump to reconsider his decision.

During the worst public health crisis in a century, halting funding to the World Health Organisation is a dangerous step in the wrong direction that will not make defeating Covid-19 easier, AMA President Patrice Harris said in a statement.

Ms Harris said international cooperation is needed to fight the virus, along with science and data.

Cutting funding to the WHO, rather than focusing on solutions, is a dangerous move at a precarious moment for the world, she said.
Source: Xinhua| 2020-04-15 09:29:32|Editor: zyl

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TRIPOLI, April 15 (Xinhua) -- The Interior Ministry of Libya's UN-backed government on Tuesday accused the rival east-based army of killing the police in Jadu, a city some 180 km southwest of the capital Tripoli.

On Monday, the air force of the east-based army "bombed checkpoints at the entrances to the city of Jadu, killing a number of policemen, security personnel and supporting forces stationed at these checkpoints," the ministry said in a statement.

"The ministry confirms that these crimes were committed by the illegal criminal militias, which targeted security elements who work to protect and secure citizens," the statement said.

Since the outbreak of the conflict in April 2019 between the rival army and the government in and around Tripoli, the UN Support Mission in Libya (UNSMIL) has documented at least 356 civilian deaths and 329 injuries.

Nearly 150,000 people in and around Tripoli have been forced to flee their homes and 345,000 civilians remain in frontline areas, while an estimated 749,000 others live in areas affected by the conflict, according to the UNSMIL.
CLEVELAND HEIGHTS, Ohio  Cleveland Heights police citied a 23-year-old man twice in three days accusing him of violating Ohio Gov. Mike DeWines stay-at-home order by throwing large, raucous house parties.

Mark Anthony, 23, faces two charges each of violating the governors order that bans large gatherings and disorderly conduct. All four charges are misdemeanors. His arraignment date is scheduled for May 19.

Anthony is accused of throwing house parties with dozens in attendance on Saturday and Monday at his home on Oxford Road, south of Monticello Boulevard, according to police and court records. Court records do not list an attorney for Anthony.

The governors orders bans gatherings of 10 or more people to help curb the spread of the coronavirus.

Cleveland Heights police broke up Saturdays party about 11:30 p.m. after a fight between attendees, a police report says. Partygoers lined the streets surrounding the home with cars for the party attended by some 50 people that officers observed around the home, the report says.

The officers broke up the party and cited Adams for violating the governors order.

Officers returned the home about 3 a.m. Monday after another fight, Cleveland Heights Police Chief Annette Mecklenburg said. Officers estimated about 30 people were outside the home. Some were fighting and others yelling and running from the officers.

Another eight people, including a juvenile, were inside the home at the time, Mecklenburg said. Police also cited Christopher James, 23, of East Cleveland, and Tommy Pinkston, 23, of Elyria, with violating the governors order and disorderly conduct, according to Mecklenburg and court records.

Read more from cleveland.com:

Three cited in Cleveland Heights for violating Gov. Mike DeWines stay-at-home order after three dozen found house party, police say

Elyria man lied about positive coronavirus test in attempt to avoid jail, police say

10 arrested, gunshots fired at large party at AirBnb rental in Willoughby Hills, police say
Images and video of Spirits humanitarian flights can be found HERE

MIRAMAR, Fla., April 15, 2020 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- More than 1,300 people who were struggling to return to the United States from Colombia, Panama, Haiti, Aruba, the Dominican Republic, and Honduras are finally coming home, Spirit Airlines (SAVE) announced Wednesday. Over the past 13 days, the airline has organized flights to all six countries to pick up U.S. citizens, residents and family members who have been in limbo since flight restrictions went into effect in mid-March.



The announcement comes after weeks of careful coordination with U.S. embassies and local governments to obtain an exemption to those restrictions on international flights. Based in South Florida, Spirit is proud serve its Guests as a gateway to Latin America and the Caribbean, and the airline has already flown a total of eight flights bringing people back to the United States. The airline plans to operate additional flights based on embassy requests.

Flight Details Route: Date: Bogota (BOG)  Fort Lauderdale (FLL) Thur. April 2 Bogota (BOG)  Fort Lauderdale (FLL) Mon. April 6 Medellin (MDE)  Cartagena (CTG)  Fort Lauderdale (FLL) Mon. April 6 Cali (CLO)  Bogota (BOG)  Fort Lauderdale (FLL) Thur. April 9 Panama City (PTY)  Fort Lauderdale (FLL) Sat. April 11 Port-au-Prince (PAP)  Fort Lauderdale (FLL) Sat. April 11 Aruba (AUA)  Cartagena (CTG)  Fort Lauderdale (FLL) Wed. April 15 Bogota (BOG)  Fort Lauderdale (FLL) Wed. April 15 Cali (CLO)  Medellin (MDE)  Fort Lauderdale (FLL) Thur. April 16 Santo Domingo (SDQ)  Fort Lauderdale (FLL) Thur. April 16 Fort Lauderdale (FLL) - San Pedro Sula (SAP) - Fort Lauderdale (FLL) Sat. April 18 Medellin (MDE)  Fort Lauderdale (FLL) Tue. April 21 Bogota (BOG)  Fort Lauderdale (FLL) Wed. April 22 Cali (CLO)  Cartagena (CTG)  Fort Lauderdale (FLL) Thur. April 23

We have been looking for ways to bring our Guests home ever since international travel restrictions started being implemented, said Ted Christie, President and CEO at Spirit Airlines. Our company is made up of Team Members who care deeply about doing whatever we can to help. I sincerely thank our Spirit Family, our airport partners and our government officials for working with us to reunite people around the Americas with their families.

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Guests make these trips on board one of Spirits signature bright yellow planes with every middle seat blocked off to improve social distancing. As these humanitarian flights continue, Spirit will be following health and safety guidelines from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) while remaining in close contact with authorities to ensure the safety of its Guests and Team Members.

Spirits repatriation efforts have been made possible by U.S. embassies in Colombia, Panama, Haiti, Aruba, the Dominican Republic, and Honduras. Guests needing to return home from an international destination should contact their countrys embassy in that location.

About Spirit Airlines:

Spirit Airlines (SAVE) is committed to delivering the best value in the sky. We are the leader in providing customizable travel options starting with an unbundled fare. This allows our Guests to pay only for the options they choose  like bags, seat assignments and refreshments  something we call A La Smarte. We make it possible for our Guests to venture further and discover more than ever before. Our Fit Fleet is one of the youngest and most fuel-efficient in the U.S. We operate more than 650 daily flights to 77 destinations in the U.S., Latin America and the Caribbean, and are dedicated to giving back and improving the communities we serve. Come save with us at spirit.com . At Spirit Airlines, we go. We go for you.
A vacant hospital in Lincoln Park could serve as a converted 80-bed overflow hospital facility amid the COVID-19 pandemic thanks to the approval of a $500,000 grant.

The Wayne County Commission approved Executive Warren Evans recommendation Tuesday to provide the money in Community Development Block Grant funds.

The approval allows Insight Surgical Hospital the opportunity to overhaul Vibra Hospital, with the capacity to grow from 80 to 440 beds as needed to deal with the crisis.

The 128,000 square-foot hospital is located on a 14-acre site on West Outer Drive in the city.

Insight Surgical Hospital will convert the vacant hospital in Lincoln Park and use its existing Certificate of Need to quickly open with an 80-bed capacity as soon as April 17.

Evans said many hospitals are at capacity and the county must continue to act quickly amid the crisis to support the health care system.

Insight Surgical Hospital can provide immediate relief in Wayne County through increased beds and help decrease the chance of COVID-19 exceeding overall capacity, Evans said. Over the long-term, there is also great potential here as a state-of-the-art neuroscience center in Lincoln Park.

Insight Surgical Hospital has plans to invest $1.5 million in short-term renovations and $20 million over the long-term. It expects to create more than 300 jobs at the facility.

Lincoln Park Mayor Thomas Karnes said the facility has been underutilized for years and said it is ideally positioned to create hospital space for patients from the Downriver area and Detroit as virus cases surge.

Beyond serving an important role in the regional response to COVID-19, we are excited for the long-term prospects at this site, the mayor said. Having a functioning hospital there again would spur other investment and also provide a boost to some of the important development underway in that area of Lincoln Park.

Wayne County Commissioner Ilona Varga (D-Lincoln Park) said the grant shows county officials are unified in their desire to help patients and health care providers.

If this pandemic has shown us anything, its that we must all join together to find ways to meet the needs of those affected by COVID-19 and those who care for them, she said. The community is so deserving to have this hospital functioning again and that is why we moved so quickly on this issue. I am grateful to those who have come together to make this happen.

Fisherman finds missing Rockwood fathers body near mouth of Lake Erie, calls Brownstown police

Taylor courts amnesty program offers window of opportunity to address various infractions

Construction coming to Allen Road in Woodhaven that will stretch into summer months

Downriver leaders adjust to virtual city meetings, closed municipal buildings due to governors order
ANN ARBOR, MI -- Local businesses impacted by the coronavirus outbreak have received nearly $500,000 in aid from a relief fund.

Ann Arbor SPARK, an economic development group that administers local funding from the Michigan Small Business Relief program, dispersed $327,00 in grants to Washtenaw County businesses and another $168,000 in Livingston County, according to a news release.

More than 1,500 companies in both counties have applied for funding since the relief fund was announced in March.

This is an unprecedented time that we are all facing and navigating together, said Paul Krutko, president and CEO of Ann Arbor SPARK, in a statement. Ann Arbor SPARK is ready and able to quickly work with our partners to deploy assistance to companies through programs like the Michigan Small Business Relief Program. We recognize there is an immense need for support and are working diligently to connect businesses to as many resources as possible.

Ann Arbor SPARK is regularly updating its business resources page for anyone needing assistance.

Review panels chose businesses based on criteria that included: longevity of a businesss operations, number of employees impacted, coronavirus-related business losses where available resources could make an impact and providing resources across the region.

Panels included representatives from Ann Arbor SPARK, Washtenaw Community College, Washtenaw Countys Racial Equity Office, and the Washtenaw Office of Community and Economic Development for Washtenaw County; and in Livingston County, representatives from the Economic Development Council for Livingston County, Ann Arbor SPARK and the Livingston County Convention and Visitors Bureau.

Two virtual events next week will provide information and resources to businesses. A discussion led by Ted Dacko, chief executive officer of Arbor Dakota Strategies, will offer advice on decision-making during a crisis. Ann Arbor SPARK will also host an event with Rehmann to touch on what business owners need to know about various funding options.

The Washtenaw Small Business Resiliency Fund also provides funding for local businesses impacted by COVID-19. Duo Security founder Dug Song and his wife Linh Song donated $1 million from The Song Foundation, which the two founded in 2019 to invest in innovative people and organizations in Southeast Michigan.

Duo Security founder donates $1M to Washtenaw County small business fund

Brighton church open for public services amid coronavirus pandemic

Ann Arbor moves forward with three sidewalks gap projects

Full Michigan coronavirus coverage here.

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.
Melissa Studdard and Chelsea Dingman are the winners of the 17th annual Tom Howard/Margaret Reid Poetry Contest sponsored by Winning Writers and co-sponsored by Duotrope "Migration Patterns" is a magical-realist poem in which natural wonders ally with the speaker to overcome the cramped, killing logic of border guards and colonizers.

Winning Writers is pleased to announce the results from its 17th annual Tom Howard/Margaret Reid Poetry Contest, judged by Soma Mei Sheng Frazier with assistance from Jim DuBois. Melissa Studdard of Cypress, Texas won the Tom Howard Prize of $2,000 for a poem in any style or genre, for "Migration Patterns". Chelsea Dingman of Edmonton, Alberta (Canada) won the Margaret Reid Prize of $2,000 for a poem that rhymes or has a traditional style, for "Psychogeography". 5,516 entries were received from around the world.

"Migration Patterns" is a magical-realist poem in which natural wonders ally with the speaker to overcome the cramped, killing logic of border guards and colonizers. Frazier commented, "Things that will make or break a poem: rebellion. Unbending optimism. Prescriptions of song as panacea...This is a poet who pulls off, with grace, what so many of us ache to writeto manifestbut don't quite dare."

"Psychogeography" is a measured elegy that employs repetition to convey an intergenerational pattern of bereavement, exile, and gaps in the historical record. Frazier called it "a poem that renders the heavy constraints of a line unit palindrome as weightless as a prima ballerina executing inimitable turns and techniques."

Ten Honorable Mentions of $100 went to Allison Adair, Jamie Morewood Anderson, F.J. Bergmann, Madeline Cole, Lupita Eyde-Tucker, Monique Ferrell, Margaux Griffith, Kathryn Merwin, M.V. Montgomery, and Tamara Sellman. The top 12 poems and judge's comments are published on the Winning Writers website.

The 2020 contest is now open through September 30, 2020. Top prizes have increased to $3,000 apiece and $200 for Honorable Mentions. See guidelines and enter online.

In addition to the Tom Howard/Margaret Reid Poetry Contest, Winning Writers sponsors the Tom Howard/John H. Reid Fiction & Essay Contest, the North Street Book Prize for Self-Published Books, and the Wergle Flomp Humor Poetry Contest (no fee). Writer's Digest has named it one of the "101 Best Websites for Writers" (2015-2019). For daily contest news and tips for writers, join our 129,000 followers on Twitter.
The government of Wuhan, China, last week ended a citywide lockdown that had brought the city to a standstill for 76 days.

Wuhan was the city where the first known case of the coronavirus was reported in December 2019.

Roads, train stations, and the city's airport have now resumed operations for cautious travelers.

Locals and transplants alike expressed mixed emotions at the end of the lockdown.

View more episodes of Business Insider Today on Facebook.

Getting back to normal is possibly in sight for the residents of Wuhan, China, the epicenter for the coronavirus outbreak.

Lockdown of the city officially ended just after midnight on April 8  76 days after the government ordered the restrictions to curb the spread of the coronavirus on January 23.

When speaking with people around the city, various news outlets found the population experiencing mixed emotions from their newfound freedom.

According to Reuters, one resident told China Central Television that "even if I'm not doing anything, I feel happy, just being able to hang out a bit, having a look at the sky and stepping on the ground."

Another local man who hadn't been out of his house since January 21 said he felt "much better and refreshed."

A meat vendor identified as Zheng told Reuters she thought the epidemic went on too long, saying, "no one is making money when they're stuck at home." And despite the reopening, her shop still has difficulties attracting customers.

"As you can see, we're open and there isn't any business. In the past, we had a few customers that could prop up our business. Now if we're selling as normal then there is still no business. We can't sell anything," she said.

As the city's transportation hubs have resumed operations, travelers are wearing protective gear including face masks, goggles, and even some full-body coveralls while buying tickets and going through security.

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Liu Jia, a passenger departing from the city's Hankou railway station, said the epidemic had delayed her plans to go home during the Chinese New Year holiday in January. She said her family asks her every day: "When are you coming home?"

In Wuhan, roads, train stations, and the city's airport have now resumed operations for cautious travelers.

Reuters

At Wuhan's Tianhe Airport, Wang Wenshu was leaving Wuhan to go back home to see her parents.

"I haven't been out since January 21. This is the first time I left the house today," she said. "Because it happened so suddenly, I didn't know I'll be stuck here for so long."

Another plane passenger, Xu Yuanyuan, was traveling with her young son. Concerns over the length of the flight and tight quarters onboard the plane did not make the choice to leave Wuhan easy for her.

"I feel both excited and nervous," she said. "My kid hasn't had vaccine injections for months. And there are all sorts of insurance that we need to deal with. So we have to go back."

Through the worries, the city's population of 11 million is experiencing grief on a grand scale. People gather at public memorials to mourn loved ones, friends, and healthcare workers.

Gui Yihong was a volunteer who helped deliver supplies to medical staff. He laid flowers at one memorial to remember a colleague lost to the virus.

"For the last 80 days we have fought between life and death, and have finally gained victory. This was not easy at all to come by," Gui said. "If you weren't at the front line, you would not be able to experience this."

Officials are still cautious about the reopening and have introduced regulations to keep the coronavirus from returning in force. One such measure is requiring health QR codes on popular apps WeChat or Alipay for individuals leaving their residences.

One optimistic resident, Hu Haiyan, a kindergarten teacher, expressed hope through a single tear.

"I really feel like we've gone through the four seasons," she said. "I really feel the willpower of the Wuhan people. I am sure Wuhan will regain its past vitality and vigor."

Read the original article on Business Insider
Source: Xinhua| 2020-04-15 17:20:01|Editor: Xiaoxia

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Police officers check transit during mandatory self-isolation amid the COVID-19 pandemic at Sokolniki metro station in Moscow, Russia, April 15, 2020. Russia has registered a new daily record of 3,388 new COVID-19 cases over the last 24 hours, raising the total number to 24,490 as of Wednesday, official data showed. (Sputnik/Handout via Xinhua)

MOSCOW, April 15 (Xinhua) -- Russia has registered a new daily record of 3,388 new COVID-19 cases over the last 24 hours, raising the total number to 24,490 as of Wednesday, official data showed.

The death toll climbed to 198 from 170 the previous day, while 1,986 people have recovered, including 292 in the last 24 hours, Russia's coronavirus response center said in a statement.

Moscow, the worst-hit part of the country, has confirmed 1,774 new cases in the last 24 hours, totaling 14,776.

Russia announced its first two COVID-19 cases on Jan. 31, with cases increasing significantly since the end of March. The total number topped 10,000 on April 9, 15,000 on April 12 and 20,000 on Tuesday.

A Chinese medical team has been working in Russia since April 11 to assist in the fight against COVID-19.

All Russians, except those working for essential institutions and establishments, are on paid leave from March 30 till April 30 as part of the country's efforts to contain the spread of the coronavirus.

Retail sales in Russia have dropped by more than 35 percent in April from the same period last year, President Vladimir Putin said Tuesday at a meeting with senior government officials.

This indicates a sharp contraction of the market because of falling demand, which is a great shock for many businesses, he said.

In the first 12 days of April, electricity consumption in Russia declined by 5 percent year on year, showing that enterprises used less of their capacities, Putin said.

The stagnation of lending to the real economy means that many companies have shelved their investment plans amid the pandemic, he said.
The World Travel & Tourism Council (WTTC) have praised millions of people around the world in the Travel & Tourism sector for going the extra mile to lend crucial help to combat the global coronavirus pandemic. The huge thank you from World Travel & Tourism Council President & CEO Gloria Guevara was made on behalf of travel companies throughout the globes private sector.

The World Travel & Tourism Council (WTTC) have praised millions of people around the world in the Travel & Tourism sector for going the extra mile to lend crucial help to combat the global coronavirus pandemic.

The huge thank you from World Travel & Tourism Council President & CEO Gloria Guevara was made on behalf of travel companies throughout the globes private sector.

Millions of people employed by WTTC member companies large and small have volunteered their time and expertise, many putting their own lives on the line, to provide essential help to their beleaguered communities with relief efforts.

This has ranged from furloughed airline cabin crew being deployed to help in hospitals, to operating additional flights for medical cargo, luxury hotels opening their doors to provide free rooms to healthcare workers or helping with grocery shopping and running errands for the elderly self-isolating.

Gloria Guevara, President & CEO, said: WTTC wants to pay tribute to the millions of amazing coronavirus heroes throughout the global Travel & Tourism sector for selflessly going the extra mile to help their communities to overcome and combat the Covid-19 pandemic threat.

We recognise their quiet heroism and phenomenal dedication through using their incredible people skills developed during their normal working lives and wealth of experience to step up and offer essential help and assistance to those on the front line fighting this terrible virus.

Whether its tending to the sick, opening hotels for health workers or manning foodbanks, they, like countless others have risen to the challenge and shown with their hearts and actions that we are stronger together and we will win this battle.

Examples abound of Travel & Tourism sector workers going the extra mile to provide essential aid to their communities.

Hotel giants like Hilton have teamed up with American Express to launch their Rooms for Responders initiative, offering free accommodation to more than a million healthcare professionals across 10 medical associations fighting the Covid-19 pandemic.

Meanwhile, employees working for Carnival, the world's largest cruise operators have offered a number of its ships to act as floating hospitals to treat patients suffering from less-critical, non-coronavirus related conditions.

In the US and Spain, Room Mate have also offered up hotels in New York, Madrid and Barcelona, to be transformed into temporary hospitals to help in the Covid-19 fight.

United Airlines, the fourth largest carrier in the world, has offered free flights to New York and California to medical personnel.

Spanish flag carrier Iberia is working with the Spanish Federation of Healthcare Technology Companies (Fenin) and the Oesia Group to bring medical supplies from China to fight COVID-19.

Furloughed airline cabin crew have responded in numerous ways. In the UK, those working for TUI Airways have provided essential support to the health systems, in order to help relieve pressure on health workers.

In China, Trip.com has donated more than three million surgical masks to more than 25 countries around the world.

WTTC praises all of its Members, across all sectors and regions for their dedication, and those of their selfless employees for going above and beyond to help.

Like many other industries, the Travel & Tourism sector has faced near collapse and a battle for survival due to the extensive travel restrictions and lockdowns ordered by governments across the world to stop the spread of the pandemic.

Latest WTTC research reveals up to 75 million Travel & Tourism sector jobs are at risk globally.

According to WTTCS 2020 Economic Impact Report, during 2019, Travel & Tourism sector supported one in 10 jobs (330 million), making a 10.3% contribution to global GDP and generating one in four of all new jobs.

Daily News Delivery Join your colleagues and stay up to date on the latest Travel industry news and trends. Subscribe

 2022 Travel Industry Wire
The Azerbaijani side has approved the interstate agreement that envisages the laying of fiber-optic backbone cable between Azerbaijan and Turkmenistan through the bottom of the Caspian sea.

The interstate agreement On the organization of activities by communication operators of Azerbaijan and Turkmenistan in relation to the joint construction of fiber optic transmission lines along the bottom of the Caspian Sea on Azerbaijan-Turkmenistan route, their ownership, and use, signed on November 28, 2019, in Ashgabat, Turkmenistan, was ratified by the Azerbaijani parliament and was approved by President Ilham Aliyev.

According to the interstate agreement, the project on laying the backbone fiber-optic cable line (Trans-Caspian Fiber Optic cable line) will be carried out by AzerTelecom, backbone internet provider connecting Azerbaijan to the global internet network, from the Azerbaijani side, and from Turkmenistan side by Turkmentelecom, telecommunication operator of this country. The cable will run from Siyazan to Turkmenbashi.

The backbone cable line with the total length of 300 km will allow the transmission of data with a capacity of at least 2-4 terabit/s and form Digital Silk Road from Frankfurt, Internet hub of Europe to Mumbai city of India through Azerbaijan. The cable line will allow the transmission of Internet traffic from the European Internet centers through Azerbaijan to Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and India.

The project, implemented within the Azerbaijan Digital Hub program of AzerTelecom, envisages the construction of fiber-optic cable lines between Azerbaijan and Central Asia countries through the Caspian Sea, and the creation of a digital silk road between Europe and Asia through Azerbaijan. The project consists of Azerbaijan-Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan-Turkmenistan routes. There is already an agreement between the operators and an interstate agreement between the two countries on the construction of a 400 km long Trans-Caspian Fiber Optic (TCFO) cable line between Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan.

AzerTelecom is a telecommunication operator of Azerbaijan and the subsidiary of Bakcell, the first mobile operator and the fastest mobile internet provider in Azerbaijan. AzerTelecom connects Azerbaijan to the global Internet network through the diversified network. The company provides a range of advanced telecommunication services to local and foreign companies.
U.S. Envoy Meets Taliban In Doha After Start Of Prisoner Swaps

By RFE/RL's Radio Free Afghanistan April 14, 2020

U.S. envoy to Afghanistan Zalmay Khalilzad has met in Qatar with senior Taliban representatives to discuss what the U.S. State Department described as "current challenges" in implementing a peace deal signed in February by the United States and the Taliban.

The talks in Doha on April 13 were announced by Washington after an initial prisoner exchange between the Taliban and the Afghan government.

Suhail Shaheen, a spokesman for the Taliban office in Doha, said on Twitter that Khalilzad and U.S. Army General Scott Miller met with Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, a co-founder of Afghanistan's Taliban and its chief negotiator.

Shaheen said the two sides discussed the "complete implementation" of the February 29 U.S.-Taliban deal for a phased U.S. troop withdrawal. Shaheen said they also discussed a "delay in the release of prisoners."

Khalilzad said the start of prisoner swaps by Kabul and the Taliban was "an important step" toward Afghan talks on a permanent Afghan peace deal.

According to the International Committee of the Red Cross, the Taliban on April 12 released 20 Afghan government prisoners in the southern province of Kandahar.

A Taliban spokesman told AFP that its decision to release a first group of prisoners was "a goodwill step... to accelerate the prisoner exchange process."

Earlier, the Afghan government had released 100 Taliban prisoners -- bringing to 300 the total number of Taliban inmates freed by Kabul since April 8.

Khalilzad on April 13 called for accelerated efforts "to meet targets specified in the U.S.-Taliban agreement as soon as possible."

He said the prisoner exchange was more important than ever because prison populations are threatened by the coronavirus pandemic.

The pact signed by the United States and the Taliban in Doha calls for the Afghan government to release a total of 5,000 Taliban fighters as a confidence-building measure ahead of formal peace talks aimed at ending the 18-year conflict in Afghanistan.

In return, the Taliban has vowed to release some 1,000 Afghan government troops and civilian workers it is holding.

But the Taliban last week recalled a three-member team it had sent to Kabul to try to finalize the swap, originally set to happen by March 10.

The militants blamed Afghan President Ashraf Ghani's administration for delaying the exchange "under one pretext or another," while Kabul called on the Taliban not to "sabotage the process by making excuses."

Under the U.S.-Taliban accord, talks between Kabul and the Taliban and a series of security commitments from the militants are to be met by the withdrawal from Afghanistan of all U.S. troops and other foreign coalition forces within 14 months.

With reporting by Reuters, AP, and AFP

Source: https://www.rferl.org/a/ afghan-taliban-kalilzad- peace-process-prisoner -swap/30552048.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 Alamo Colleges District will hold all its summer classes remotely in response to the coronavirus pandemic.

The five community colleges have been operating remotely since students returned from an extended Spring Break on March 23.

If the situation changes, then well need to take a look at that again. We wanted to give people the opportunity to prepare, district spokeswoman Kristi Wyatt said. We wanted to give students and faculty and staff as much information as we can now.

On ExpressNews.com: Get the latest updates on coronavirus and a tracking map of U.S. cases

Faculty members at the colleges now are preparing to hold finals remotely for the first time in district history, said Luke Dowden, the districts chief online learning officer.

The district also implemented an optional credit/no credit grading policy for the spring semester. Students receiving a C or higher in their courses can petition for credit, while those receiving a D or F can opt for no credit. Credit or no credit wont be calculated in a students grade point average.

The coronavirus outbreak has caused K-12 and higher education institutions to adjust their services and policies, from moving to remote learning to introducing new grading scales and waiving some admissions requirements.

On ExpressNews.com: Alamo Colleges coronavirus plan: Train teacher and staff to operate 100% remotely

All San Antonio-area colleges and universities plan to hold classes online for the rest of the spring semester, while most K-12 school districts are keeping their buildings closed until May 4 at the earliest.

Two charter networks, IDEA Public Schools and KIPP Texas, have announced that in-person classes wonnt resume for the remainder of the school year.

The Alamo Colleges District also postponed its board election  originally scheduled for May 2  to a future unspecified date.

Ashley McBride covers several school districts and the Alamo Colleges District in the San Antonio and Bexar County area. Read her on our free site, mySA.com, and on our subscriber site, ExpressNews.com. | Ashley.McBride@express-news.net | Twitter: @Ashleynmcb
Washington: US President Donald Trump has taken aim at the World Health Organisation, announcing his administration will halt funding to the global body over its handling of the coronavirus pandemic.

The US is the biggest funder of the WHO, contributing an estimated $US445 million ($691 million) a year to the organisation according to the State Department.

US President Donald Trump speaks about the coronavirus in the Rose Garden of the White House. Credit:AP

Trump said countries around the world, including the US, were suffering "tremendous death and economic devastation" because of the WHO's failures.

He said the agency had promoted China's "disinformation" about the virus that likely led to a wider outbreak of the virus than otherwise would have occurred.
The Ghana National Association of Farmers and Fishermen has donated some items to farming communities in the Eastern Region to aid the fight against COVID-19.

The items included, 50 Veronica buckets, 15 boxes of hand sanitizers, and liquid soap.

The items were donated to the Bepoasa, Asoukoo, Kwamoso and Tweapease communities in the Eastern Region.

The group was led by Dr. Nene Terkpertey Agblezey I, President of farmers and fishermen of Ghana who hinted that the donation was to support the government in the small way they can to help fight the novel coronavirus in the country and help the Farmers to cope with the challenges that come with the partial lockdown directive of President Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo.

Dr. Nene Terkpertey Agblezey I, urged farmers not to panic but rather keep calm and continue their daily farming activities.

The Association also educated and urged the farmers to properly wash their hands, practice personal, respiratory hygiene and observe social distancing.

He also thanked the Ministry of Agriculture for the support given to farmers during these hard times and appealed to the government to see to inaccessible farms road for farmers.

The team used the occasion to conscientise the public on the need to strictly observe all the precautionary measures and respect the directives of the President in order to help combat the spread of the novel COVID-19 pandemic.
The President of the United States, Donald Trump has said he has instructed his administration to stop funding to the World Health Organization (WHO).

According to the President, the WHO had failed in its basic duty in its response to the coronavirus outbreak.

Also Read: Donald Trump Takes Second Coronavirus Test

He also accused the UN body of not telling the truth about what was happening at the centre of the Chinese outbreak in the city of Wuhan.

Trump has previously accused the WHO of being biased towards China.

This decision came a day, after the US surpassed Italy with the most deaths from COVID-19.
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New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy is holding his daily press conference on the Covid-19 outbreak, which has infected more than 68,800 people in the state as of Wednesday, according to data from Johns Hopkins University.

New Jersey has been the second hardest-hit state by the coronavirus, following New York. On Monday, Murphy said the pace of new coronavirus infections in New Jersey is slowing even as the total number of cases rises, indicating that the state's efforts to contain the pandemic are "clearly working." Although the rate of new infections seems to be flattening, Murphy said the state is "right in the thick of it" and can't take its foot off the gas.

"If we stop doing what we're doing, even one bit, Covid-19 can boomerang on us and bring about the worst-case scenario," Murphy said on Monday. "So let's stick together, and let's keep working together. It is clearly working."

The coronavirus has infected more than 609,000 people in the U.S. and has killed at least 26,059, according to data from JHU. Globally, the virus has infected more than 2 million people and has killed at least 127,590.

Read CNBC's live updates to see the latest news on the Covid-19 outbreak.
The 13-lakh strong Indian Army and public service broadcaster Prasar Bharati on Wednesday joined a growing list of government entities in recommending their staff to use coronavirus tracking mobile application 'Aarogya Setu' which recorded around five crore downloads within 13 days of its launch.

The Home Ministry, in its fresh lockdown-related guidelines, said use of 'Aarogya Setu' will be encouraged for all employees in both private and public sectors.

The app, available on both Android and iOS mobile platforms, has been developed by the government-run National Informatics Centre, and was launched by the Union Health Ministry on April 2.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi, in his address to the nation on Tuesday, appealed to people to download the app which helps users to know if they have come in contact with any coronavirus patient and ways to avoid the infection.

In his video conference with chief ministers last week, Modi mentioned that the app will be an essential tool in India's fight against the pandemic and even referred to the possibility of its use as an 'e-pass' to facilitate travel from one place to another.

Niti Aayog CEO Amitabh Kant said 'Aarogya Setu' has become the world's fastest to reach five crore downloads in just 13 days.

Last week, the Indian Railways had asked its 13 lakh employees and requested their family members to download the app.

The HRD Ministry also directed schools and colleges to advise students and teaching staff to download the app developed to fight COVID-19.

Public service broadcaster Prasar Bharati has made it mandatory for its staff reporting to duty in office or in the field to download and activate the app.

In an advisory, the Indian Army asked its personnel, ex-servicemen and their families to download and activate the app.

The Army, however, asked its personnel not to use the app in office premises, operational areas and sensitive locations.

It also directed them to follow existing cyber security policies. The three services have put in place strict measures to prevent leaking of sensitive information through social media platforms



The app was developed under a committee set up by the Prime Minister's Office with active involvement of Niti Aayog and Ministry of Electronics and IT.

Sources said Tata Consultancy Services is working on testing and some of other aspects of the platform.

Tech Mahindra and the Mahindra group are coordinating with the committee on the next version of the application and leveraging next generation technologies like artificial intelligence, machine learning and data science.

Tech Mahindra is also working on expanding the reach of Aarogya Setu on all types of phones. The current version of Aarogya Setu app is fit for use on smartphones only.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
A serviceman of Ukraine's Armed Forces deceased during the live-fire accident that occurred at a firing range in Donbas. Eight of his comrades were wounded in the same accident. The Joint Forces Operation HQ reported that on April 14.

The tragedy took place during the regular combat exercise. The military trained in firing the 82 mm mortar.

"The operative investigation team works on site, the circumstances are being sorted out. The command of Joint Forces offers deep condolences to the family and close ones of the deceased military serviceman", reads the message.

One of the wounded men refused from hospitalization.

Since the beginning of the day, Russian armed gangs landed four attacks on positions of Ukrainian military in Donbas. They did not use the weapons of Minsk-banned calibers. Ukrainian forces took no causalties in combat.

As we reported earlier, Ukraines Commissioner for Human Rights Lyudmyla Denisova claimed that the prisoners exchange between Ukraine, Russia and militants would take place by the end of the week.

The state and the president are going to return all citizens of Ukraine, staying in occupied territories and in Russia, Denisova noted.

According to Denisova, the observation will take place in the order established by the Healthcare Ministry of Ukraine and chief sanitary inspector.
A man and woman have been charged after they allegedly spat in the faces of two paramedics and a doctor in two separate incidents on Monday.

The alleged incidents come days after the New South Wales government introduced $5000 on-the-spot fines for anyone who spits on frontline workers during the coronavirus pandemic.

A woman, 35, allegedly spat in the face of a doctor while being treated at Hornsby Ku-ring-gai Hospital on Sydney's upper north shore on Monday.

Police allege the emergency department doctor was treating the woman for a large laceration to her arm when she allegedly spat in his face and became aggressive.

A woman was charged after she allegedly spat at a doctor at Hornsby Ku-ring-gai Hospital

The doctor called for assistance and the woman was treated before being discharged.

The alleged incident was reported to police, who arrested a woman at a Hornsby home on Tuesday night.

The woman was charged with common assault and bailed to appear in Hornsby Local Court on July 1.

Meanwhile a man, 53, allegedly spat on two paramedics on the way to hospital the NSW Mid North Coast earlier this week.

Police allege the two male paramedics attended a home in Forster where they were met by a man who appeared well affected by alcohol and complaining of pain to his ribs.

The man required further treatment and was placed in the ambulance to be transported to hospital, where it's alleged he twice spat on the two male paramedics.

The man was treated in hospital and later released, with the incident reported to police.

The man was arrested on Tuesday and charged with two counts of common assault.

He was refused bail to appear via videolink in Port Macquarie Local Court on Wednesday.

New $5,000 on-the-spot fines apply to anyone coughing, spitting on or intimidating frontline workers in NSW.

They include doctors, nurses, cleaners, midwifes, police, border force and retail workers.

'Unfortunately, we have had a series of incidences now where some of the most incredible frontline workers, keeping us safe, have actually had people spitting on them, and people coughing on them,' health minister Brad Hazzard said.

'These frontline workers are caring for us and the simple fact is, we need to care for them so this on the spot $5,000 fine will send a clear message that we are all as one.'
Lyft has announced a new pilot program that will make its drivers available to pick up and deliver essential goods to a range of local government agencies, healthcare companies, and businesses.

Called Essential Deliveries, the program is currently being tested in Atlanta, Austin, Dallas, Houston, Indianapolis, Orlando, Phoenix, San Francisco, San Diego, San Antonio, and Seattle.

So far the program has been used for a variety of tasks, including bringing supplies to food banks, and delivering meals to health care providers at hospitals.

Essential Deliveries is a new program from Lyft that will make its drivers available to help bring bulk essential goods to food banks, health care facilities, and communities in need

Through a partnership with Dole Packaging, the Essential Deliveries program has been used to bring canned goods from the company's warehouses to assisted living facilities.

Lyft is also working with the Georgia-based non-profit Army of Angels to help deliver lunches to low income families with school age children.

'While schools are closed, many students go without school breakfast, lunch and dinner,' Greg Valla, an Advisor with Army of Angels, said in a prepared statement.

'For a variety of reasons, some are unable to access the school meals being distributed at select schools, and Army of Angels helps bridge the gap,' said

'Were fortunate that Lyft stepped in to deliver food to students and their families who otherwise would simply not be able to eat during this time.'

Lyft says it expects to continue expanding the number of cities Essential Deliveries operates in over the coming weeks.

The Essential Deliveries program is currently operating in 11 US cities, including San Francisco, Atlanta, Austin, and Indianapolis, with plans for further expansion in the coming weeks

The company is planning a number of other projects for the Essential Deliveries program, including working with non-profits like Loaves & Fishes in Charlotte, North Carolina and Urban Recipes in Atlanta to bring donations to local food banks.

In Los Angeles, the company is working with the City Council on several projects, including a plan to deliver care packages to health care workers assembled by local Girl Scouts.

The company is also planning to work with local restaurants to deliver takeout meals from restaurants to communities in need, which could help keep local businesses from going out of business.

'Surviving this crisis will require innovation on every level,' said LA City Council member Marqueece Harris-Dawson said.

'Partnering with Lyft allows us to expand our emergency senior meals program to provide free, healthy meals directly to seniors at their homes, while keeping afloat the small businesses that contribute so much to the financial and culturally vitality of our communities.'

According to Lyft, the Essential Deliveries program is both a way to serve local communities during the COVID-19 pandemic and support its drivers with steady income despite the fact that none of them are considered employees by the company.
Photo: BC gov. Flickr Provincial Health Officer Dr. Bonnie Henry and Health Minister Adrian Dix.

For those concerned about Alberta licence plates in the Interior this past long weekend, Provincial Health Officer Dr. Bonnie Henry says it's important not to assume other's circumstances.

Peachland Mayor Cindy Fortin was just one of the many people who expressed frustration with visitors to the region over the long weekend, despite recommendations from health officials to stay home to slow the spread of COVID-19.

We welcome you at any other time, this is NOT that time, Fortin wrote on Facebook.

During her daily press conference Tuesday, Dr. Bonnie Henry said not everyone with an Alberta licence plate in B.C. is here for recreational purposes.

We need to be thoughtful about people, and not just assume because you see a licence plate or you see somebody you don't recognize that they don't have a valid reason for doing what they're doing, Dr. Henry said.

There's no benefit, and we've seen that around the world, from trying to block people from coming into an area. It's not going to prevent the transmission of this virus, necessarily. Having said that, what we want is everybody to lay low and stay home.

Canada did close the U.S. border for non-essential travellers last month though.

As an example of valid reasons for travelling, Dr. Henry said many university students were travelling home after classes ended last week.

There are legitimate reasons why people may need to check up on family and friends, she said. So I would just say be patient, don't assume that people don't have a legitimate reason to be somewhere.

Health Minister Adrian Dix added that people are overwhelmingly following the provinces' multiple orders and advice to stay home.

I absolutely agree that people in the Shuswap would have seen Alberta plates, but it's very hard to be comparative about these things, he said.

Understand that we sometimes don't know other people's circumstances and we have to be, in these times, extra vigilant about being generous in times that are difficult for everybody.

As of Tuesday, 1,517 British Columbians have tested positive for COVID-19. With 72 deaths and 942 full recoveries, there are 503 active virus cases in the province.
Sudhir Suryawanshi By

Express News Service

MUMBAI: The number of coronavirus patients and deaths in Asia's largest slum Dharavi is rising by the day.

The fight here is being keenly followed. Spread across 613 hectares, the slum in the heart of India's 'Maximum City' houses more than 15 lakh people, with as many as five to eight people sharing a 100 sq ft room.

Social distancing is nearly unthinkable. Lakhs of people are literarily crammed here. There is no proper ventilation, light and other basic facilities like water... We lack basic things, social activist Rajendra Korade had told The New Indian Express recently.

The Mumbai slum saw a total of 60 positive patients being detected till Wednesday morning. Seven patients have died.

Dr Baliga Nagar of Dharavi saw five positive cases and two deaths.

Apart from this, two cases were reported in the Vaibhav housing society, 14 in Mukund Nagar, two in Madina Nagar and one in Dhanwada Chawl.

There were a further seven cases and one death in Muslim Nagar, six cases and one death in Social Nagar, seven cases in Janata Society, four cases and two deaths in Kaylanwadi, and one case each in PMGP Colony and Murugan Chawl.

There were also two cases in Rajiv Gandhi Chawl, four cases Shashtri Nagar, one case in Indira Chawl and one in Gulmohar Chawl. Nehru Chawl registered one death.

The Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) has identified nine contaminated locations in Dharavi and all of them are sealed.

Rahul Shewale, Shiv Sena MP from Dharavi said they have decided to check each and every area.

"We want to do this rather than wait for people to come to BMC hospitals. The BMC is going to their doorsteps and checking them. We are taking a proactive approach while dealing with this pandemic. In the next 10 days, we will complete these door-to-door health checks," he added.

Vijay Khabale, the BMC PRO, said that they have started an area clinic in every contaminated zone.

"A large number of people are voluntarily coming here and BMC is also going to each house and checking all residents of Dharavi. Therefore, we are seeing a spike in the numbers of coronavirus patients in Dharavi and other parts of Mumbai," said Khabale.

Talking of Mumbai, a total of 1351 coronavirus positive cases have been detected and 112 deaths reported till Wednesday. Those who tested positive include 100 health workers.

Worli, Prabhadevi, Byculla, Peddar road, Bandra, Andheri East and West, and Kurla are among the regions seeing more number of coronavirus positive cases.

The Maharashtra government has formed an expert doctors committee that is monitoring the hotspots.

"These health experts from various private and government hospitals are holding regular reviews and planning the strategy," a BMC official said.

PRO Khabale said that apart from health checks, they have started disinfecting all suspected areas.

"The police has been deployed in the sealed areas, so no one can go out and come inside. We have also told residents to make the list of essentials and are only allowing a few people from every building to go shopping. As per the Maharashtra government's demarcation of coronavirus-infected areas, Mumbai comes in the red zone. However, BMC has been working on a war footing to contain the spread of the coronavirus. We are expecting to see a dip in the numbers in the coming days. The curve will soon start flattening particularly in Mumbai," Khabale added.

Maharashtra Chief Minister Uddhav Thackeray is himself closely monitoring the Mumbai situation.
FILE PHOTO: Workers are seen at Citibank offices in the Canary Wharf financial district in London

By Imani Moise and David Henry

(Reuters) - Citigroup Inc <C.N> reported a 46% plunge in quarterly profit on Wednesday as it prepared for losses driven primarily by its credit card business, and analysts raised worries that there is more pain to come as the economic outlook darkens.

Wall Street banks are bracing for a flood of defaults by cash-strapped customers after the novel coronavirus outbreak shuttered businesses, put millions out of work and has put the United States on course for a deep recession.

But Citi's high exposure to unsecured credit card loans makes the bank more susceptible to hefty writedowns, since credit card delinquencies have historically risen in lockstep with unemployment. At the same time, Citi has fewer other businesses to make up for the revenue hit, analysts said.

"They don't have the same kind of profitability or profit buffers that could absorb the hit as much as, say, JPMorgan has," UBS analyst Saul Martinez said in an interview.

Citi's shares shortly before the closing bell on Wall Street were down 5.8% at $42.81.

Citi said its U.S. card businesses, which accounted for 16% of its net income in 2019, were responsible for half of the additional $4.9 billion in reserves the company set aside at the end of March for expected loan losses.

The increase in provisions caused the bank's U.S. business to report a loss of $837 million in the first quarter. The company said its loss expectations were based on factors including rising unemployment and falling gross domestic product, the outlook for both of which is worsening. Chief Financial Officer Mark Mason told analysts it was "reasonable to expect" further loss provisioning in the quarter, depending in part on whether government programs to help struggling Americans are successful.

He was reluctant to give an indication of how much pain the bank expects to face in coming quarters, despite analysts' pushing for more details on how Citi factored economic contraction and unemployment into its first-quarter loss provisions.

Story continues

Card spending was down 30% overall during the last week of March and that trend has continued as people have stayed at home. Mason said he expects revenue from spending and borrowing with Citigroup cards to fall in the second quarter.

The third largest card issuer in the United States, according to the Nilson Report, Citi has been leaning on its self-branded cards for U.S. growth, with net income in that business increasing 10% in 2019. The retail services card business, which issues credit cards for stores like Home Depot, Macy's and L.L. Bean, grew profit by 8%.The new loss reserves are equal to 9.5% of outstanding U.S. card loans. The rate of actual losses in the first quarter was 3.46% of Citi-branded card loans and 5.53% of store-brand loans. The bank said the transition to a new credit loss accounting standard also caused it to hold more loss reserves compared with the previous rules.

On Tuesday, JPMorgan Chase & Co <JPM.N>, the biggest U.S. credit card issuer, reported its quarterly profit plunged by more than two-thirds, largely due to $3.8 billion of additional credit card loss reserves, while Bank of America<BAC.N> set aside roughly $800 million to cover credit losses related to the coronavirus outbreak.[nL3N2C32UV][nL3N2C22TW]

Analysts have said Bank of America's credit risk positioning will likely lead to smaller losses.

TRADING BOUNCE

The blow to Citi's earnings was partly cushioned by a surge in trading fees as trading desks cashed in on the turbulent markets in February and March. Both Citi's equities and fixed-income trading businesses reported a 39% jump from the year earlier quarter.

Total revenue rose to $20.73 billion, topping Wall Street's estimate of $19 billion, according to Refinitiv data.

Total net income fell to $2.52 billion, or $1.05 per share, in the three months ended March 31, from $4.71 billion, or $1.87 per share, a year earlier. Earnings per share reflect a 10% reduction in shares outstanding.

Analysts on average had expected Citigroup to earn $1.04 per share.

Total end-of-period loans grew 8%, excluding foreign-exchange fluctuations, while deposits jumped 17%.

(Reporting by Imani Moise and David Henry in New York; Additional reporting by Sweta Singh in Bengaluru; Editing by Leslie Adler)
On a typical working day, Kuala Lumpur represents the epicentre of business activity in Malaysia, home to thousands of local and overseas workers spanning a variety of sectors. Yet a city known for hustle and bustle is now a ghost town, following the issue of government-mandated movement control orders in mid-March.

The implementation of such restrictions resulted in the closure of non-essential businesses and activities nationwide, resulting in the majority of workers being sent home effective immediately. Initially spanning March 18-31, the order has since been extended to April 28 in a bid to reduce the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Similar to other cities across the world, such as Manila in the Philippines, the government measures triggered a sharp rise in remote working, placing new operational strains on organisations from a business continuity perspective. Here is how two Malaysian IT organisations adapted to the coronavirus closure.

Following surprise restricted movement order, Star Media responds within 24 hours

As group chief technology officer of Star Media, Kang Yew Jin acknowledged that the media house was taken by surprise following news that a restricted movement order was soon to be in place across the country. Announced by Prime Minister Muhyiddin Yassin on March 16, organisations had approximately 24 hours to initiate business continuity and remote working plans before measures officially kicked in on 18 March. Based in Kuala Lumpur, Yew Jin oversees the digital transformation efforts of Star Medias group of businesses, which include traditional print, events and property, alongside radio.

Star Media Kang Yew Jin, group chief technology officer, Star Media

We were prepared for business continuity but didnt anticipate the need to scale up so fast, he recalled. Within the space of one day we literally had to scramble. We had our normal plan and most of the requirements and scenarios to cater for were fairly simple. In this scenario however, we had to plan further, with headquarters inaccessible and the entire business, from printing to digital to advertising, required to predominantly work from home, Yew Jin said.

You can imagine the chaos. What made the situation worse was that our own IT staff had to also plan to work from home, while ensuring they had enough food and supplies which meant that March 17 became a bit of a nightmare.

With users queuing up on the office floor, and the IT department taking turns to stock up on core supplies, Yew Jin said the business was servicing increased demand with reduced capacity, culminating in the eventual shortage of staff devices. We had to literally beg, borrow or find ways to get laptops to configure for remote access, he recalled. We also had to quickly instruct users with their own PCs or own laptops to bring them in and get them configured for remote access. It was utter chaos.

But despite the short notice, and subsequent chaos, Star Media displayed a sense of creative calm to ensure the organisation was equipped to overcome such challenges, by first assessing the state of the business from an operational perspective. We needed to take stock of the facts, explained Yew Jin, recently honoured as part of the inaugural CIO50 ASEAN Awards. What was our current capacity? What could we scale up to? Then we compared this with what the business was asking so we could assess the gaps.

Yew Jin accepted that the business held larger expectations than what the IT department could accommodate, resulting in a negotiating process to outline key priorities. We had to make some sacrifices, he said. Because we didnt have enough laptops or remote access to go around, we needed the business to prioritise. For example, business units running operations took priority and then business units that are maybe back-office, such as HR, took a lower priority. Everyone wants to be at 100 percent capacity during business continuity, but our role is to explain that during this type of scenario, we need to find ways to scale back.

For Yew Jin, the biggest challenge centred around reduced capacity when supporting the business from a technology standpoint. This was not a lack of bandwidth, lack of VPN or lack of software licences, he qualified. The most fundamental need to address was the insufficient number of laptops to go around. Most of the workforce operates on work desktops. And a lot of these staff, surprising as it may be, lack PCs or personal laptops. Therefore, those with office laptops were configured one way and staff with home PCs were asked to self-configure and schedule tests with us during outside office hours. That was the biggest challenge.

Currently, in response to COVID-19 developments, the industry executive is chiefly tasked with ensuring the business runs smoothly during the restricted movement period, with a focus on protecting core operations. We also have to ensure our journalists can still be out writing and documenting the news, uploading stories and getting them into print, online and social media channels, he added.

Malaysian Aviation Commission relies on cloud to drive productivity

As a government agency, the Malaysian Aviation Commission (Mavcom) is continually tasked with responding to the ever-changing and expanding needs of the public. In response to the restricted movement order however, the immediate focus switched to meeting increased internal user demands.

Malaysian Aviation Commission Saiful Bakhtiar Osman, head of ICT, Malaysian Aviation Commission

We have seen increased demand for network and remote working systems, observed Saiful Bakhtiar Osman, head of ICT at Mavcom. Fortunately, we were already running at 90 percent on cloud, such as Office 365 suites for email, file sharing and productivity tools. These features have contributed a lot to our business continuity readiness and the integration of information. Productivity has also increased as all documents and materials are available online in real-time for faster and more efficient decision making.

According to Osman, Mavcoms network had previous experience in managing large-scale online deployments, running at approximately 75 percent capacity when having a full workforce in the office. The demand then increased with video conference meetings with staff who arrived back from overseas from high risks countries and started working from home as part of the self-isolation procedure, added Osman, also recently honoured as part of the inaugural CIO50 ASEAN Awards.

This further escalated because we preferred to also hold online meetings with external stakeholders, as a safety precaution to avoid our staff being exposed to COVID-19. We were working at around 95 percent network capacity before the restriction movement order was issued, with all staff then required to work from home.

In addition to spearheading ICT response efforts, Osman is also the business continuity planning controller, tasked with ensuring staff are aware of the procedures and responses in place during the crisis.

Under his direction, the agency has issued business continuity guidelines and work from home handbooks to ensure communication is informative and transparent, backed by remote training exercises. The business is placing high demands on IT to provide smooth, reliable and practical collaboration tools during this time of need, Osman added. Meetings still need to convene for decisions to be made and interactions between departments are still required as per usual daily operations. Skype for Business has been essential for the team to communicate, conducts meetings and interact with each other. This is as well as OneDrive and SharePoint features which we have utilised for file sharing and storage.

At this stage, Osman said Mavcoms main priorities centre around staff wellbeing and the availably of service to the public and aviation players. Therefore, the overall system and infrastructure has been configured to ensure the continuity of daily operations. For consumer complaints, the public can file complaints regarding airlines and airport services via our consumer hotline number, our FlySmart mobile app and also via our website, Osman explained.

The consumer hotline number is running on a private PBX [private branch exchange] cloud with staff able to support calls via VoIP from anywhere providing there is Internet connectivity. All three channels are linked to our FlySmart CMS (complaint management system) which is built on Salesforce Cloud.

For airlines seeking to obtain overflight and landing permits, the agency is operating an AeroFile system, a system built on Salesforce Cloud combining approval processes from Mavcom, National Slot Coordination Malaysia (NSCM) and Civil Aviation Authority of Malaysia (CAAM). This ensures stability, availability and accessibility for all airlines to apply for landing permits, he added. The AeroFile system is available 247 and case officers are equipped with efficient approval features via mobile phone. As an economic regulator, our key challenge isnt the implementation of a business continuity plan, rather the duration in which the strategy will have to be in place. The prolonged crisis may have a huge impact on the aviation industry as a whole.
Gujarat Police have started



recruiting cyber volunteers in Ahmedabad and Surat to help in curbing the spread of hate content and rumours over coronavirus and lockdown on social media.

Over 5,000 people, including nearly 800 experts in IT, computer and forensic science, have responded in less than two weeks to applications sought by the Gujarat Police for recruiting them as "cyber volunteers, warriors and gurus", Additional Director General of Police, CID Crime, Shamsher Singh toldPTI.

"In the current situation, these volunteers are all the more important for us because of the fake and hate messages being circulated on social media. These volunteers can flag such cases, and help us to take action against the offenders," Singh said.

The volunteers will help the police in prevention and detection of all kind of cyber crimes, he said.

Other districts of the state are also in the process of building their own teams of such volunteers.

Since the lockdown was enforced in the country to tackle the coronavirus pandemic, police in different parts of the state have registered more than 250 FIRs related to cyber crimes and arrested over 500 people for spreading rumours and hate messages on social media platforms, Singh said.

Five social media accounts have also been blocked, he informed.

The official said a large number of people responded to police applications for working as cyber volunteers, warriors and gurus and their credentials are being verified.

A 'cyber volunteer' is required to have knowledge about smartphone use, cyber crimes, social media and internet services, and will help police by raising issues related to cyber bullying, online financial fraud and pornography.

A 'cyber warrior' is required to be qualified in knowledge of computers, IT and forensics, andwill assist the police in the investigation of offences under the Gujarat Cyber Crime Coordination Centre.

A 'cyber guru' also must have higher qualification in computers, IT and forensic science, and will be required to impart training to police and in schools, colleges, universities on various aspects of cyber crimes, and create public awareness.

"A lot of people have responded to our call to volunteer for us and help in tackling cyber crimes. The Union Ministry of Home Affairs had also advised the police to involve citizens, experts and educational institutions to tackle cyber crime," Singh said.

This is a specialised crime and a lot of people are not even aware of it. Thereofore, experts are required to create a publicity campaign through the joint effort of citizens, academicians and NGOs, he said.

"These volunteers are cyber literate, and have their own social media accounts. They will be sharing advisories issued by the police to help increase their reach. They will also help us in detection of cyber crimes so that others do not dare do such a thing," the official said.

A cyber guru will teach police officers and help them in research on new crimes, because the nature of online offences changes every other day, he added.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Noble metals (e.g., platinum) are often used as catalysts in the oxygen reduction reaction (ORR) of fuel cell cathodes. However, the drawbacks, such as the high cost, easy to be poisoned by CO, and poor stability, obviously limit their industrialization and application. Therefore, it is urgent to develop a new type of oxygen reduction catalysts to replace platinum.

Nitrogen-doped porous carbon supported single atom catalysts (SACs) have become one of the most promising alternatives to precious metal catalysts in ORR due to their unique geometric/electronic structures and outstanding performances, especially the Fe/Co SACs. However, most of them involve tedious pre- and/or post-treatments, especially derived from porphyrin-based materials, which would increase the operation difficulty, even mislead the relationship between structures and activities of the catalysts.

Therefore, the rational design of synthesis route, the achievement of the high efficiency in electrocatalytic reactions and the exploration of the catalytic mechanism and active sites, have become one of the research focus of SACs in fuel cells.

Very recently, the group of Professor Hongbing Ji and Dr. Xiaohui He in Fine Chemical Industry Research Institute of Sun Yat-sen University demonstrated a facile precursor-dilution strategy to prepare nitrogen-doped porous carbon supported Fe SACs through the Schiff-based reaction via co-polycondensation of amino-porphyrin materials, followed by pyrolysis at high temperature.

According to the aberration corrected high-angle annular dark-field scanning transmission electron microscopy and synchrotron radiation, which determined that the Fe atom was atomically dispersed in the support and forming a FeN4O-like structure. It is superior to commercial 20 wt% Pt/C in terms of ORR activities, stability, and methanol resistance in alkaline condition, and moderate ORR activities under the acidic condition.

The structure-activity relationship and catalytic mechanism of the catalyst was further verified by KSCN poisoning, CO poisoning and catalytic activity comparison with reference sample (pure carbon supports without metal loadings, iron nanoclusters, and iron nanoparticles), which confirmed that the active centers of electrocatalytic oxygen reduction were atomically dispersed Fe species.

###

This research was funded by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Nos. 21938001, 21606260, 21576302, 21376278, 21425627, 21701199), the National Natural Science Foundation of China-SINOPEC Joint Fund (No. U1663220), the Local Innovative and Research Teams Project of Guangdong Pearl River Talents Program (2017BT01C102), the NSF of Guang-dong Province (2015A030313104), the Fundamental Re-search Funds for the Central Universities of Sun Yat-sen University (15lgjc33, 19lgpy129).

See the article: He Q, Meng Y, Zhang H, Zhang Y, Sun Q, Gan T, Xiao H, He X, Ji H. Amino-metalloporphyrin polymer derived Fe single atom catalysts for highly efficient oxygen reduction reaction. Sci. China Chem., 2019, DOI: 10.1007/s11426-019-9703-7. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11426-019-9703-7 http://engine.scichina.com/publisher/scp/journal/SCC/doi/10.1007/s11426-019-9703-7?slug=fulltext
Kyiv Court of Appeal has upheld a ruling of Kyiv's Pechersky District Court that obliged PrivatBank to pay more than $250 million to the offshore companies of the Surkis family.

PrivatBank confirmed the report to Ukrinform.

"On April 15, Kyiv Court of Appeal dismissed the appeal and upheld the ruling of the Pechersky District Court that obliged PrivatBank to pay more than $250 million to the offshore companies of the Surkis brothers," the bank said.

As was reported earlier, the court repeatedly adjourned the hearing of the case. PrivatBank's lawyers were not invited to a preliminary court hearing of the appeal filed by the state bailiff against the decision to pay $250 million to the offshore companies of the Surkis family.

At the same time, the Grand Chamber of the Supreme Court of Ukraine set for April 27 the hearing of the case on a lawsuit filed by the Surkis brothers against the National Bank of Ukraine to recognize them as persons related to PrivatBank and to exchange their PrivatBank deposits for shares.

On December 18, 2016, the Cabinet of Ministers adopted a decision on the state's entry into PrivatBank's capital. Within the nationalization of the bank, its obligations to related parties were subject to the bail-in procedure and were exchanged for shares of the bank's additional issue.

On May 17, 2017, Kyiv's District Administrative Court found it illegal and overturned the NBU commission's decision to recognize the Surkis family as persons related to PrivatBank, and revoked the orders of the provisional administrator of PrivatBank concerning individuals' accounts. The Surkis family and persons related to them filed 42 claims against the National Bank of Ukraine.

op
West Texas Intermediate crude oil fell to an 18-year low as U.S. inventories grew at a historic pace last week.

The U.S. benchmark plunged by as much as 4.52 percent on Wednesday to $19.20 a barrel, the lowest since February 2002. WTI was trading at around $20 before the report.

"This was a report unlike anything the oil industry has seen before: It really shows the total shutdown of the U.S. economy expressed in barrels of oil," Phil Flynn, senior market analyst at the Price Futures Group, told FOX Business.

HISTORIC OIL DEAL CUTS OUTPUT 20M BARRELS PER DAY: SAUDI ENERGY MINISTER

"Gasoline demand is almost half of what it was, and U.S. refiners have slowed runs to almost historic lows,Flynn added. "They had better open up the SPR quickly or we may soon run out of storage."

The SPR, or Strategic Petroleum Reserve, is an emergency stockpile of crude oil maintained by the U.S. government.

Crude stockpiles rose by a record 19.2 million barrels in the week ended April 10 to 503.6 million barrels, according to the Energy Information Administration, 6 percent above their five-year average. The build was far greater than the 11.7 million-barrel increase that economists surveyed by Refinitiv were anticipating.

Gasoline inventories rose by 4.9 million barrels and are 12 percent above their five-year average.

Earlier this week, the world's largest oil producers reached a historic agreement aimed at reducing a global glut that has pushed prices down by 60 percent this year.

Crude supplies had ballooned since 2019 as the price war between Saudi Arabia and Russia flooded the market with inventory at the same time government "stay-at-home" orders in response to the COVID-19 pandemic zapped demand by 9.3 million barrels per day, removing a decade's worth of growth, according to a report released earlier on Wednesday by the EIA.

CLICK HERE TO READ MORE ON FOX BUSINESS

Saudi Arabian Energy Minister Prince Abdulaziz Bin Salman told FOX Business' Maria Bartiromo in an interview aired on Wednesday morning that the agreement will reduce global output by 20 million barrels per day, confirming comments made by President Trump earlier in the week.

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Andrew Reese, the director of D.C.s Department on Disability Services, says he and other officials have weekly phone calls with community members and service providers. He also points to other measures the department has taken. He says a quality resource specialist checks in with providers weekly to gather information about their supplies. The department has also put in a request with the appropriate federal agency to get approval for measures that would help staffing needs, including retroactively covering additional pay for staff members who work overtime or with people who test positive for the virus.
The functioning of the Delhi High Court and the district courts will continue to remain suspended till May 3 with only urgent matters being heard through videoconferencing, a communication from the High Court said. However, it said the number of benches of the judges, hearing matters through videoconferencing, would be increased.

The communication said the Administrative and General Supervision Committee of Delhi High Court ordered that all matters listed between April 16 and May 2 in the district courts be adjourned and information about this be uploaded on the website.

The District and Sessions judges concerned, as already directed, may permit the judges and other staff officials to work from home, wherever possible. All hearings be done preferably through videoconferencing which would automatically result in decongestion in court complexes, the communication said.

After receiving several complaints of unavailability of the infrastructure for the video conferencing (VC) of cases, the court also resolved that all judges should be given online training to hear the matters through VC.

All the district and sessions judges shall ensure that videoconferencing is done through Cisco WebEx. Online training about the manner of use of said software be given to all the Judicial officers and court staff through a Centralized Computer Committee.

Such Centralized Computer Committee would, from time to time, seek necessary instructions from IT Committee of this Court on the aspect of VC hearing and would also ensure that there is complete uniformity amongst all districts in this regard, it added.

The High Court also said that each district and sessions judge (DJ) would be at liberty to take appropriate steps to personally ensure that the mechanism of mentioning of urgent matters in each of the district courts is quick and efficient. It also said that the DJ could depute judicial officers for hearing the matters related to bail and urgent civil/injunction cases, corresponding to the need and requirement of the district court concerned.

Reacting to this, KC Mittal, chairman, Bar Council of Delhi (BCD), said that more benches would bring improvement in the functioning and more cases will be heard.

In terms of the district courts, we will observe the situation for a couple of days and if there is any problem, then we can again make some changes, Mittal said.
DALLAS, April 15, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- Norwex today announced it will provide one million face masks to healthcare professionals fighting the spread of coronavirus on the frontlines around the world. Their "A Million Masks. A Million Thank Yous." initiative was created to help alleviate the shortage of personal protective equipment (PPE) by distributing masks to hospitals in some of the hardest-hit areas.

Norwex, through its global supply network and manufacturing partners, quickly secured one million face masks to help increase the protection of frontline healthcare professionals.

"Whether donating time, money or goods, charitable efforts are part of who we are, and this is our way of offering support and saying 'thank you' to our frontline medical professionals in a practical and tangible way," said Judy Letain, Global Chief Executive Officer.

This initiative will take place in North America in partnership with organizations including DonatePPE.org in the US and through Provincial Health Departments in Canada. Shipments of the donated masks will be sent directly to distribution centers, where they will be passed on to areas identified as the most in-need.

"Generous donations like the Million Masks initiative are invaluable to our cause to help healthcare heroes fight coronavirus on the ground," said Deyu Kong, Founder, DonatePPE. "Without proper protective equipment like face masks, our doctors are at high-risk and are unable to fully protect themselves from COVID-19. Thanks to companies like Norwex, we can operate on a much larger scale and have a significantly greater impact."

To learn more about the "A Million Masks. A Million Thank Yous." initiative, visit https://norwex.biz/en_US/blog/million-masks.

About Norwex

Founded in Norway in 1994 by Bjrn Nicolaisen and expanded to North America by Debbie Bolton, Norwex is a Direct Sales company that has been creating healthy homes for 26 years. From its flagship Norwex Microfiber with BacLock, its exclusive silver antimicrobial agent, to superior cleaning and personal care products, Norwex's innovative solutions help families lead cleaner, healthier lives. Learn more at https://norwex.biz/.

For media inquiries:

Marianne Ortiz

TruePoint Communications

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On March 29, a 26-year-old undergraduate student of Rutgers University launched an initiative to feed those in need throughout and beyond New Jersey communities during the coronavirus pandemic.

Six days later, the virus claimed the life of a family member.

I havent been sleeping a lot just because its a turmoil of emotions," Karenn Hapuck Alves said. "With losing someone ... and I have my parents in South America calling me like, Stop what youre doing. With the virus, youre going to get yourself killed. So its been quite a rollercoaster ride.

Noe Hernandez, the stepson of Alves grandmother, lived in New York and was 32 years old when he died April 4. His father, Alves step-grandfather, Lalo, has dually tested positive for the coronavirus and continues to practice self-isolation while remaining at home in New York.

Alves, who also works full time as a personal assistant for a small company in Union, has been coping with her grief while thousands of miles away from her parents and brother, who are based in Brazil. As of Tuesday, she had yet to secure a service for her cousin at a New York funeral home.

I called 10 funeral homes and was not successful. I found one and sent in the forms for cremation and I still havent had any contact yet," Alves said. Its going to be two weeks that he has passed, and we dont have any news.

I dont even know how Im doing this. Its as if Im in shock or living in a movie."

While reflecting upon his death, Alves took a breath. There was another thought that she wanted to express.

"And I would not change this experience for anything in the world, she said.

Following the outbreak of the coronavirus, Alves and other friends from her community partnered with Mantena Global Care in Newark to launch Amigos Por Newark, or Friends For Newark, a project committed to providing food for those in need throughout the global crisis regardless of their nationality.

In the past two weeks, Alves and other volunteers have delivered thousands of boxes of food and meals to feed over 12,600 people, including the elderly, children and homeless individuals who have directly contacted the initiative or Mantena Global Care to request their services.

Following the outbreak of the coronavirus, Karenn Hapuck Alves and other friends from her community partnered with Mantena Global Care in Newark to launch Amigos Por Newark" or Friends For Newark," a project committed to providing food for those in need regardless of their nationality.Courtesy  Karenn Hapuck Alve

One (volunteer) puts a post on a social media and theyre like, If you need help and youre in need, please reach out to to this person. And theyll put my number and theyll reach out," Alves said. "We dont look at the nationality, but we do look at the situation ... and theyre very honest about their situations.

Alves said that she was personally drawn to launch the initiative by her own childhood experiences.

When my mom was pregnant, we didnt have sufficient funds to even buy milk for my brother," Alves said. So I grew up with that in my mind always knowing that I had to provide for my family. So its something that touches me a lot when I see mothers and families not having enough funds to provide and thats one of the things that motivates me. This is what I lived, this is what happened to me and its my time to give back to the community.

Beyond New Jersey cities and towns, including Newark, Belleville, Hillside, Kearny, East Orange and Long Branch, Amigos Por Newark has also partnered with other organizations to make deliveries to New York, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts and Florida.

Ruy Almeida, 44, who helped Alves found the project, said Brazilian and Spanish communities and other organizations from across the country have reached out to Amigos Por Newark to discuss ways to provide services to their own areas.

The love is spreading," Almeida said.

Despite the projects far-reaching success, Alves emphasized that she and the other volunteers are in tremendous need of nonperishable food donations to accommodate the growing number of individuals reaching out to Amigos Por Newark for donations.

We started off on March 29 with one box, and now its growing to the point where  I mean, its scary, Alves said. Theres so many people out there that are needing it. There are seniors calling us and theyre like, I cant leave the house or Ive had an accident.

(Ruy and I) have personally delivered a couple of these boxes and meals and weve seen how devastating the situation is," she added. People are jumping over a bag of rice ... and hugging it with such intense emotion that I know theyre going through hardship.

Echoing Alves, Almeida said that he does not believe the surrounding community has yet reached the peak of hunger.

People stopped working a month ago and then they had a little something to keep going, but now theyre in desperation mode, he said.

Following the outbreak of the coronavirus, Karenn Hapuck Alves and other friends from her community partnered with Mantena Global Care in Newark to launch Amigos Por Newark" or Friends For Newark," a project committed to providing food for those in need regardless of their nationality.Courtesy  Karenn Hapuck Alve

While not yet successful in gathering resources from the area food banks that she has contacted, Alves expressed her determination to continue feeding those in need for as long as the coronavirus continues to upend their lives.

Our goal is to keep on helping people until this ends, and I dont know how. Im probably losing the hair on top of my head," she said.

Recognizing Alves commitment to Amigos Por Newark, Almeida described her as an example of how human beings should be.

She is an amazing young woman," Almeida said. She makes about $600 or $700 a week and at the same time is a student in Rutgers. And she donated $300 in the first week to make hot meals ... and thats when you see the real power of love ... and love is stronger than that virus."

As she reflected upon the mental and physical exhaustion of not only volunteering seven days a week to feed the needy while balancing a job and the workload of a college student, Alves took only a moment or two to pinpoint what motivates her to keep going  even if it means she ends up entirely bald.

And it goes back to the third and heaviest part of her emotional toll  the loss and burden created by the same illness affecting the lives of the individuals that she helps day in and day out.

It was in my Lalos eyes, Alves said. Its the same look that I saw when I would deliver the boxes, and the sense of hope that they received when they received the assistance. And I thought, If I stop because of this, theres going to be a lot of people out there, a lot of kids out there, that wont have what they need to eat.'

And I dont want that to happen; because Ive been in their shoes, and I know what its like. So if it depends on me, I will deliver boxes, meals, every single day.

Individuals can contact or learn more about Amigos Por Newark by visiting their website.

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.

Caroline Fassett may be reached at cfassett@njadvancemedia.com. Find NJ.com on Facebook.
When Boston University announced it was making contingencies for reopening campus in January of 2021, students and educators elsewhere most likely shuddered.

The BU statement was not a commitment, only a recognition that reopening campus for the fall semester was by no means certain. Other educators have made similar references, mostly in terms of improving online education to become a more viable, reliable teaching alternative than has been true this spring, when courses were altered in a matter of days and weeks.

Many universities have privately begun to examine fall term contingencies, a process delayed mostly by the ongoing demands of cobbling together a credible spring term of remote education. BU was the first to openly declare it was preparing for a longer absence of campus life.

More will follow, said Christopher Rim, the founder and chairman of Command Education, which advises high school students on college application strategies and helps them with preparation.

He says more students will likely consider a gap year between high school graduation and their entrance to college - the better to ensure that the college experience they expected will be in place, once their four-year cycle begins.

"College is more than just sitting in front of a computer. Its making good friends, its dorm life, its time in the dining commons,'' Rim said.

Just as students believe their acceptance to a school meant a full experience, families paying huge college costs expect more than remote learning, even if that curriculum is being done well. Whether schools will be able to offer the gap-year option to all who seek it is an unanswered question.

Rim thinks many schools may only accept gap-year requests from students who asked before the coronavirus pandemic changed the nature of college education.

"A student has to apply for a gap year. Usually, the student will have to tell the school what he or she will be doing during that year,'' he said.

Right now, thats difficult because we dont know what will be open.

Timing an entrance to college, based on whether or not campus will be open, might be even more difficult. Some schools, notably highly-rated private institutions, dont accept mid-year transfers at all. They would seem unlikely to allow incoming first-year students to enter in the second semester, if thats when campus becomes open.

Some schools do accept mid-year transfers. Boston University is among them. Theres also the chance that schools will show more flexibility with these rules, given the extraordinary circumstances.

If a student who is accepted to a college is granted a gap year, that students spot is guaranteed for the following year. There is no danger of losing ones place by delaying a year, as long as the college agrees to the gap year.

Rim said that increased interest by graduating seniors in delaying their college cycle, however, will have a ripple effect on this years high school junior class. The more gap-year students shift their 2020 entry plans into 2021, the fewer openings will exist for the high school class of 2021, especially at elite colleges and universities.

"If more (current high school seniors) take gap years, it would open up spots for waiting-list students to be accepted (this fall),'' Rim said. That would affect openings for this years high school junior class in 2021.

Gap years are nothing new, and many institutions accept their value. Rim said Harvard University endorses the strategy, and other high-end institutions support it, though not as publicly.

But gap years have traditionally been sought and granted because of students personal goals or circumstances. For the first time, the lure of delaying is due to circumstances at the colleges end. Students and families want to know the college experience will begin with the campus life, in-person classes and everything else associated with it.

Rim said that BUs willingness to show transparency, months before the fall opening, showed awareness of the universitys high percentage of international students. These students cant be sure travel restrictions will be lifted in time for them to return in the fall.

Like so much about the pandemic, there are no definite answers to what the landscape will look like when America emerges from the other end of the COVID-19 tunnel. If more students delay college to be sure theyre getting what they expected, will waiting-list students be willing to take an open spot to elite, first-choice schools that turned them away, or will they wait, too?

Its almost certain that different schools will have different responses, based not just on their traditional rules but their current enrollment and finances. Whats also likely is that schools will not be able to wait until mid-summer to announce what form their education will take in the fall.

"Youll see schools being creative. Some might look at an October opening. Some might eliminate the two-week break between semesters, and so on,'' Rim said.

Boston University was the first, but I think in the next month or so, well be hearing from many more.
(Natural News) So far, more than 2,200 deaths from COVID-19 have been reported in nursing homes. Thats an unacceptable  but sadly, not surprising  number, but the truth is that it may only represent a fraction of the real number of deaths in these settings.

NBC News gathered data from state agencies showing that nearly 2,500 long-term care facilities across 36 states are currently fighting coronavirus cases, which marks a rise of 522 percent over the nationwide count 20 days before.

However, its worth noting that states like Florida, which has a huge elderly population, didnt even provide data. Some of the states that have seen the biggest coronavirus outbreaks, such as Pennsylvania, Michigan and California, dont share long-term care facility death tallies, either. Other states that didnt provide data include Arizona, New Mexico, South Carolina, Kansas, Ohio, and New Hampshire. Some states dont even track this sort of data in the first place. Theres also the fact that many nursing homes in the country are still trying to get access to testing for their residents.

Just how many coronavirus cases and deaths could be missing from official counts? We have every reason to believe the number could be very high. After all, nursing home residents tend to be elderly, which places them into several high-risk categories, including advanced age, having pre-existing conditions, and living in close quarters.

And while safe to assume that there are quite a few cases in these settings, experts have said that more thorough data is needed to understand why this virus seems to be spreading faster in certain nursing homes compared to others.

We do know that in New York, more than 1,300 nursing home and assisted living facility residents have died from the virus, while Washington state has seen 221 deaths linked to these facilities. More than 100 such deaths have been reported in New Jersey, Connecticut, Illinois and Louisiana.

States like Massachusetts, Colorado, and Virginia say theyre actively working on making this information available to the public. In other states, however, we cant expect to see this data as they claim they dont have the resources and technology needed to collect information on infections and deaths in nursing homes.

Even in states where we are seeing data from state health departments, its reasonable to assume that the numbers being reported are significantly lower than the actual number of cases because of limited testing. In Nevada, where 20 long-term care facilities were reported as having coronavirus infections, the state said their data only included those facilities that were proactive about reporting and whose residents have had lab-confirmed cases. They said that staff and residents there do not have access to universal COVID-19 testing.

Care homes being warned to proceed with extreme caution

In the meantime, the American Health Care Association, a group representing nursing homes, has urged these facilities to proceed as though they already have coronavirus on their grounds.

The CEO of ArchCare, which runs five nursing homes in New York, has told family members that they should bring their loved ones home if at all possible. He said that will provide them with better isolation and less contact with others than theyd experience in a nursing home, although he said only a few families have actually done so. Many of the residents needs are simply too complex for people to take on in a home setting.

With many nursing homes reporting insufficient protective gear for staff and residents often lacking the physical ability to cover their mouth when they cough  and in some cases, even remember or understand that they need to do so  the numbers of deaths in these facilities is only likely to continue to climb, whether we hear about it or not.

Sources for this article include:

NBCNews.com

NBCNews.com
Franklin County and its insurance company spent more than $280,000 to resolve a sexual harassment claim filed against the countys former top building official, newly available insurance records show.

County taxpayers and an insurance pool funded by local governments picked up the tab last year. Part of the money went to former building inspector Jennifer Owen, who accused Robert Andy Morris of pursuing her sexually while on the job. A portion also went to attorneys hired to represent Morris and the county, according to the records.

The Roanoke Times obtained a claim report from the countys insurance company, VACORP, after county officials refused to discuss the settlement and said they didnt have any public records to explain it.

Owen received $200,000, and attorneys hired to defend Morris and the county received $86,028, according to the insurers report.

The report does not address pay for Owens legal representatives. The settlement agreement, which might address that issue, has not been made public.

Owen, 43, said in a recent statement that the harassment I experienced at the Franklin County Building Code Office was a nightmare. Then to be fired for coming forward and reporting the harassment was wrong. But if one person finds the courage to come forward because of my story, it will have been worth it.

Members of the Franklin County Board of Supervisors did not responded to a request for comment, except one official who referred a reporter to the county attorney. The county attorney did not immediately respond to a request for comment last week. Leland Mitchell, chairman of the board, did not respond to phone messages left at his home last week seeking comment.

Owen worked as a building inspector from 2014 to 2016. In a 2017 lawsuit, she claimed that she had been subjected to assault and battery by Morris. She testified in a deposition that Morris made numerous sexual comments and grabbed her breasts in one instance.

Her suit included legal claims that said she endured a sexually hostile work environment and was fired for complaining about the harassment and work environment. In 2019, she, Morris and county representatives reached an out-of-court settlement and the trial was called off.

Throughout the case, the county denied all allegations of wrongdoing. In addition, Morris denied the allegations against him, both in his deposition testimony and in legal filings.

Following the settlement in spring 2019, Morris, then 55, retired from his county post, a decision that his attorney said was based on a desire to spend more time with his family.

VACORP released the claim report Feb. 25 in response to a request under the Virginia Freedom of Information Act. It did not respond to a request for clarification of the reports technical language. The newspaper then reviewed the report earlier this month with a Roanoke insurance broker not involved in the case.

Last week, the county released records showing that it paid $20,000 of the total expense of $286,028 out of its general fund.

The countys coverage with VACORP includes protection for public official liability arising from allegations of sexual harassment or other misconduct. VACORP is a municipal risk pool funded by premiums paid by Virginia government agencies.

Franklin Countys annual insurance premium did not increase in 2019 for any reason related to the settlement, officials have said.
YEREVAN, APRIL 15, ARMENPRESS. Armenias government will direct the 280 million USD aid provided by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) for mitigating the consequences of the novel coronavirus (COVID-19), deputy minister of economy Avag Avanesyan said at a press conference.

The IMF provides aid to Armenia worth 280 million USD. These funds are available to our government because we have constantly improved the business climate and ensured the protection of investments, as well as carried out reforms. As a result, a trust has been formed in the international community that Armenia will spend these funds for mitigating the consequences of the coronavirus, Avanesyan said.

He assured that the main purpose of spending these sums is going to be the major strengthening of the healthcare system, as well as mitigation of social and economic shocks. This is a loan without terms, in other words the government will choose on what to spend these sums, he said.

On April 10 the International Monetary Fund (IMF) team reached a staff level agreement with the Armenian authorities for the completion of the second review of Armenias reform program, which is supported by the IMF, the IMF said in a statement. The statement says the authorities have requested an increase in financial support provided by the IMF for Armenia and, pending Executive Board approval, around $280 million will be available immediately after the Board meeting.

According to the latest data, the number of confirmed cases of coronavirus in Armenia has reached 1,111. The total number of recovered patients is 297. The active cases are 797.

Reported by Lilit Demuryan

Edited and translated by Aneta Harutyunyan
Source: Xinhua| 2020-04-15 01:34:08|Editor: huaxia

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"This is a time for science and solidarity," said the secretary-general.



UNITED NATIONS, April 14 (Xinhua) -- United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres on Tuesday warned against "a dangerous epidemic of misinformation" regarding COVID-19, noting that trust in science is vital.

In his video message, Guterres said that "as the world fights the deadly COVID-19 pandemic - the most challenging crisis we have faced since the Second World War - we are also seeing another epidemic, a dangerous epidemic of misinformation."

"Around the world, people are scared. They want to know what to do and where to turn for advice," he said.

"This is a time for science and solidarity," said the secretary-general. "Yet the global 'misinfo-demic' is spreading."

He said the international community should guard against "harmful health advice and snake-oil solutions," noting they are "proliferating."

"Falsehoods are filling the airwaves," the UN chief noted.

"Wild conspiracy theories are infecting the Internet. Hatred is going viral, stigmatizing and vilifying people and groups," he said, urging the world to unite against this disease.

"The vaccine is trust," he said.

Photo taken on Sept. 22, 2015, shows the north facade of the Secretariat building, and west facade of the General Assembly building at the United Nations headquarters in New York, the United States. (Xinhua/Li Muzi)

The secretary-general called on the global community to trust in science, noting that he solutes the journalists and others fact-checking "the mountain of misleading stories and social media posts."

"Social media companies must do more to root out hate and harmful assertions about COVID-19," he said.

He also urged the international community to trust in institutions, which are "grounded in responsive, responsible, evidence-based governance and leadership."

Photo taken on Jan. 30, 2020 shows the headquarters of the World Health Organization (WHO) in Geneva, Switzerland. (Xinhua/Chen Junxia)

Asking all people to trust in each other, he said that "mutual respect and upholding human rights must be our compass in navigating this crisis."

"Together, let's reject the lies and nonsense out there," said the UN chief.

"Today, I am announcing a new United Nations communications response initiative to flood the Internet with facts and science while countering the growing scourge of misinformation, a poison that is putting even more lives at risk," he said.

"With common cause for common sense and facts, we can defeat COVID-19 - and build a healthier, more equitable, just and resilient world," Guterres said.

(Article by Xinhua Reporter Wang Jiangang; Video by Xinhua Reporter Xie E) 
In a humanitarian gesture, India on Wednesday gifted life-saving drugs, including Hydroxychloroquine tablets, to Mauritius and Seychelles to help them deal with the coronavirus pandemic that has infected 2 million people worldwide.

Mauritius Vice Prime Minister Leela Devi Luchoomun Dookun received the consignment of half a million Hydroxychloroquine tablets that arrived here on Wednesday evening through a special Air India cargo flight from Delhi, the Indian High Commission in Port Louis said in a statement.

"The shipment was made possible as a special gesture although a restriction on its export from India continues to be in force in view of the unprecedented prevailing difficult situation because of COVID-19 global pandemic," it said.

Mauritius is one of the first countries to receive supplies of this medicine after a special exemption was granted for a few countries. "This demonstrates the unique ties between our two countries," the statement said.

It said the consignment was part of the 13 tonnes of essential lifesaving medicines that have been sent for Mauritius. This is the first such consignment of essential medicines and a second consignment will follow in coming weeks.

"India is a proud partner of Mauritius and remains committed to contributing to the public health and welfare of all people of Mauritius," it said, adding that India will continue to work closely with Mauritius in these difficult times.

India also gifted the first consignment of four tonnes of essential lifesaving medicines to Seychelles, in view of the ongoing COVID-19 crisis.

"These medicines were procured basis the request from the Government of Seychelles. The consignment was brought to Seychelles by an Air India Special Charter Boeing 787 flight from New Delhi," said a statement issued by the High Commission of India in Seychelles.

This is a special arrangement made in view of the special relations with Seychelles in order to enable the supply of these medicines despite the restrictions in place due to the lockdown, it said.

"Despite its own domestic challenges and constraints, India has always believed in sharing its resources and expertise with its friends and partners," the statement said.

This airlift also strengthens the spirit of cooperation between the two sides based on India's Neighbourhood First Policy and Seychelles' India First Policy, it added.

As part of this consignment, India swiftly decided to send the supplies of Hydroxychloroquine to Seychelles. The anti-malarial drug is now used to treat COVID-19 patients with effective outcomes.

Health authorities worldwide have recommended Hydroxychloroquine for COVID-19 patients with positive outcomes.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Queensland residents are being urged to work together to stamp out racism during the COVID-19 pandemic, with police laying 22 "racially motivated" charges since March 1.

Police Commissioner Katarina Carroll revealed the figures during a press conference in Brisbane's south with government ministers, throwing their support behind the Chinese Australian community in particular.

Police Commissioner Katarina Carroll has urged members of the community to come forward with details of racist incidents to ensure police could act on the 'abhorrent behaviour'. Credit:Michelle Smith

A total of 16 complaints had led to the charges, spanning assaults, robberies and abusive graffiti, with three cases remaining unsolved.

"These are racially motivated offences," Ms Carroll said, while urging members of the community to come forward to ensure police could act on the "abhorrent behaviour".
That plea, sent to 20 Navy personnel, became public and angered Mr. Modly, which led to his decision to remove the captain from his post.

Admiral Gilday indicated last week that he was open to reinstating Captain Crozier once the preliminary investigation was completed. I am taking no options off the table as I review that investigation, he told reporters. I think that is my responsibility.

Any decision to reinstate Captain Crozier would come with its own problems. Navy officials remain unhappy that the captain sent an unclassified letter seeking help to so many people, instead of relying on his chain of command. For the Navy to reinstate him, Admiral Gilday would have to determine that Captain Croziers superiors were not adequately responsive to requests for help before the letter had been sent, Navy officials said.

Admiral Gilday already has the findings of an initial investigation into the Roosevelt case. But that investigation was conducted by Adm. Robert P. Burke, the Navys second-highest admiral, who was involved in the situation aboard the Roosevelt. As part of the investigation, Admiral Burke called the senior medical officer aboard the ship and criticized the doctor, saying he had failed as a leader, according to crew members.

In the run-up to Captain Croziers letter, the ships medical staff and the captain advocated swift, decisive action, while Captain Croziers immediate boss, Rear Adm. Stuart P. Baker, countered that less drastic measures would still protect the crew and leave the Roosevelt in operation.

Admiral Gilday told reporters this month that the investigation would focus in part on why Captain Crozier, a Naval Academy graduate with nearly 30 years of service, felt compelled to send his four-page letter outside normal communications channels and whether that illustrated a breakdown in communications with his chain of command, particularly with Admiral Baker. The Navy has said Captain Crozier did not copy Admiral Baker on his letter.

Before the results are made public, Admiral Gilday will consult with the new acting Navy secretary, James E. McPherson, as well as with Defense Secretary Mark T. Esper and General Milley.
March was shaping up to be a good month for Brian Bowen Smith, a photographer in Los Angeles who has worked for Vogue and GQ. He had five big jobs lined up, including shoots for two movie posters. All five were canceled because of the coronavirus pandemic.

There is no work whatsoever, he said. Its kind of scary, actually.

To fill his newly free hours, Mr. Bowen Smith drove to Joshua Tree National Park and trained his camera on the barren landscape. It was a long way from the work that usually pays his bills. In recent years, when he is not photographing Christian Bale, Miley Cyrus and Issa Rae for major magazines, Mr. Bowen Smith has shot ad campaigns for Marc Jacobs and other fashion companies.

Now he is telling himself that everything will be OK. A lot of stuff can be done remotely, he said. And maybe thats going to be our future. Everyone wears masks.

As practitioners of a craft that requires long hours of getting up close and personal with their subjects, photographers have been affected by social distancing restrictions perhaps more than other media workers.
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Pharma majors Sanofi and GSK on Tuesday said they have joined hands to develop a vaccine for COVID-19. The companies in a joint statement said they have signed a letter of intent to develop an adjuvanted vaccine for COVID-19, using innovative technology from both firms, to help address the ongoing pandemic.

As per the partnership, France-based Sanofi will contribute its S-protein COVID-19 antigen, which is based on recombinant DNA technology.

The technology has produced an exact genetic match to proteins found on the surface of the virus and is the basis of Sanofi's licensed recombinant influenza product in the US.

COVID-19 pandemic LIVE updates

London-headquartered GSK, on the other hand, will contribute its proven pandemic adjuvant technology.

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 use of an adjuvant can be of particular importance in a pandemic situation since it may reduce the amount of vaccine protein required per dose, allowing more vaccine doses to be produced and therefore contributing to protect more people.

"As the world faces this unprecedented global health crisis, it is clear that no one company can go it alone," Sanofi CEO Paul Hudson said.

That is why Sanofi is continuing to complement its expertise and resources with peers, such as GSK, with the goal to create and supply sufficient quantities of vaccines that will help stop this virus, he added.

"By combining our scientific expertise, technologies and capabilities, we believe that we can help accelerate the global effort to develop a vaccine to protect as many people as possible from COVID-19," GSK CEO Emma Walmsley said.

The companies plan to initiate phase one clinical trials in the second half of 2020 and, if successful, subject to regulatory considerations, aim to complete the development required for availability by the second half of 2021.

The entities have set up a joint task force, co-chaired by David Loew, Global Head of Vaccines, Sanofi and Roger Connor, President Vaccines, GSK.

The task force will seek to mobilise resources from both companies to look for every opportunity to accelerate the development of the candidate vaccine.

Follow our full coverage of the coronavirus pandemic here
Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, April 15)  Negotiations between China and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations for the Code of Conduct in the South China Sea are a "failed process," a maritime expert said, even as the Philippines hails progress in the talks.

"The current process is a joke," Gregory Poling said in an online forum hosted by the Foreign Correspondents Association of the Philippines on Tuesday. He is director of Asia Maritime Transparency Initiative, a Washington-based think tank which has been monitoring the South China Sea dispute.

Poling explained Wednesday in response to questions emailed by CNN Philippines that there was "very little 'agreed' upon" in September 2019, when Foreign Affairs Secretary Teodoro "Teddy Boy" Locsin, Jr. announced that a draft has been reached as Beijing "softened its insistence on controversial provisions"  which earlier delayed the passage of the accord.

Poling said, "The first reading process, which took up all of 2019, involved taking the 11 separate drafts that each country had submitted, deleting any redundant language, and then copying them all into one document. They did very little to actually bring those drafts into agreement."

'Exactly as China wants it'

He added that most of the salient provisions were left unresolved, including whether or not the document  which would establish the behavior countries should take in contested waters  should be legally-binding. Other sore points remain, including the geographic scope, dispute settlement procedures, and fishing and seabed management, Poling said.

"This is exactly as China wants it. Beijing is not prepared to compromise on most if any of these points and so is simply refusing to discuss them," he said.

While China may have dropped its demand requiring Chinese permission before ASEAN countries can engage in joint military exercises in the South China Sea, Poling stressed that it was an argument already settled two decades ago, during the first attempt to come up with a code.

PH, China hail progress

In an April 8 statement expressing concern over the ramming and sinking of a Vietnamese fishing boat off Paracel Islands -- an area both China and Vietnam claim in the South China Sea -- the Philippines' Department of Foreign Affairs said these incidents should be avoided "given the positive momentum on the discussions on a Code of Conduct."

READ: COVID-19 not stopping 'steady increase of Chinese harassment' in South China Sea

In an August 2019 press briefing, Chinese Foreign Ministry Spokesperson Geng Shuang said Beijing and ASEAN countries "have vigorously advanced and made important progress in the consultations on a code of conduct."

"We, the regional countries, have the will, wisdom and capability to properly resolve the South China Sea issue and achieve long-term stability, development and prosperity in this region," he said, adding that the situation "remains stable and is improving."

But Poling said China has been "steadily increasing" its presence and the "frequency of harassment" in the South China Sea, and the coronavirus pandemic has not stopped them from doing so. China has so far managed to put up two research stations and sink a Vietnamese fishing boat in disputed waters while the worlds attention is focused on the pandemic.

"It's pretty obvious now that China's not gonna stop. If a global pandemic does not cause China to calm things down in the South China Sea, there's not much that will," Poling said.

More delays amid COVID-19 pandemic

ASEAN has been pushing for a legally binding code for decades but progress has been slow because of resistance from China.

READ: Duterte 'disappointed' with slow pace of negotiations for a Code of Conduct

There was renewed hope for the code in August 2017 when the ASEAN and China adopted the framework or outline which would be used as basis for the negotiations for the code. A year later, an initial draft was agreed upon by the ASEAN and China.

During the ASEAN-China summit in November 2019, the regional bloc adopted the three-year timeline proposed by Beijing, eyeing completion of the Code of Conduct by 2022. Prior to that, the "first reading" was done in September, resulting in an initial draft.

There have been a number of working-group meetings since then, Poling said, but talks could take a backseat amid the coronavirus crisis.

"I expect forthcoming rounds will be delayed amid the pandemic, since the foreign ministers and leaders level ASEAN meetings are all being delayed. That will result in stalling the process further," he said.

He said negotiations for the code should be done "outside the ASEAN," widely seen to be influenced by Beijing, and should be led by the claimant countries.

The Philippines is country coordinator for the ASEAN-China Dialogue Relations until 2021. Aside from the Philippines and China, Taiwan, Vietnam, Malaysia, and Brunei also have competing claims in the resource-rich South China Sea.
There was a xenophobic joke going around in Moscow, as residents were forced into an increasingly strict coronavirus lockdown, that the continued sight of migrant workers on the streets revealed who really ran the Russian capital.



But while images of seasonal workers seemingly going about their business as usual fed the notion that they were somehow being spared the strict stay-at-home measures being implemented to control the deadly pandemic, it's not like they had much choice.



For many, there was no returning home even if they wanted to, leaving them in a similar predicament to their 200 million fellow migrant workers across the globe who face economic ruin, risks to their health and safety, and overt discrimination as they try to ride out the crisis.



Can't Leave Russia, Keep Working



Russia's mid-March ban on international passenger flights and rail service, combined with similar steps taken by workers' home countries, left hundreds of thousands of the up to 7 million documented and undocumented migrants stranded.

And comments by Russian officials certainly indicated that it was safer for the economy and the laborers themselves to keep working than to be holed up in self-isolation.



We believe that somewhere from 1 to 2 million migrants, according to various estimates, work in the regions," Deputy Prime Minister Marat Khusnullin told the government in early April, before Russia was hit with the full force of the outbreak, in advising them why it was essential that the construction sites that employ many laborers keep working. "They cannot leave -- many because the borders and possibilities of moving are already closed...and it would be better if they are at work and not in the dormitory."



On April 14, as authorities grappled with the detection of 35 coronavirus infections at a dorm housing more than 470 migrant workers in Leningrad Oblast, a proposal was floated in parliament to automatically extend laborers' work permits, sparing them from having to line up outside immigration offices to ensure they remain in legal good standing.



Reversal Of Fortunes



The vast majority of the migrant workers in Russia are from the countries of Central Asia, and reportedly sent more than $8 billion home in the form of remittances in 2019. But the money transfers that migrants' families and native countries heavily depend on have reportedly been halved due to the COVID-19 crisis.



"I used to send $400-$500 every month. But for the past two months, we were not able to send anything back to Uzbekistan," 23-year-old Kasim Rakhimov told RFE/RL's Uzbek Service. "Due to the coronavirus, our restaurant eventually stopped working and 50 people were left without any salaries. They are all from Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, and Kyrgyzstan. Now we are all looking for some other jobs. Hopefully, we will find something."

The situation among the roughly 1 million Tajiks who perform seasonal work in Russia, sending $2.6 billion home and accounting for more than 30 percent of the impoverished country's economy, is so dire that family members at home are looking for ways to send money back to Russia to support them. Farrukh Zardakov, 33, is among those stuck in Russia. He told RFE/RL's Tajik Service by phone that "there are no jobs, and no money."



"They called from home and told me to send money, but I couldn't," he said of his family. "They bought a sack of flour, but maybe they will borrow from someone, here I am unemployed and we have 18 people living in one house."



No Place At Home For Ukrainians



Ukrainian migrant laborers contributed $12 billion -- more than 10 percent of GDP -- to their home country's troubled economy in 2019. More than 3 million were working abroad, the majority in EU states such as Poland, the Czech Republic, and Italy, when the coronavirus outbreak struck, prompting tens of thousands to return home at a time when Ukraine was already grappling with skyrocketing unemployment as COVID-19 took hold there, too.

More than 155,000 Ukrainians -- including tourists, migrant workers, and others -- returned in the month of March alone. Large numbers of them formed long lines at checkpoints on the Polish and Hungarian borders as they tried to reenter their country after strict border restrictions were imposed.



"The COVID-19 outbreak, consequent business closures and economic slowdown in the EU and near abroad caused a surge in returning migrant workers to Ukraine, posing a number of protection concerns and placing further weight on the far-reaching socioeconomic impact of the pandemic," Anh Nguyen, chief of mission of the UN-affiliated International Organization for Migration's (IOM) Ukraine office said early this month.



Online Trolls And Human Trafficking



Migrant workers abroad, organizations like the IOM warn, are at greater risk of exploitation, including human trafficking, at times of crisis. And those contemplating a return home risk being accused of bringing the coronavirus disease with them.



The IOM said that the quarantining in early March of Ukrainians evacuated from China's Wuhan Province, where the coronavirus outbreak originated, "showed how a perceived threat to public health could rapidly escalate into [an outbreak of violence] in the community."
WASHINGTON  President Donald J. Trump announced Tuesday night he will place a hold on hundreds of millions of dollars in financial support for the World Health Organization until a review of its coronavirus response is complete.

Trump's decision amid the coronavirus pandemic faced an outpouring of criticism Wednesday, including from House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., who blasted it as illegal.

"The Presidents misguided decision to halt funding to the World Health Organization ignores science, hinders vital global collaboration and endangers countless lives," said Rep. Paul Tonko, D-Amsterdam. "I urge the administration to swiftly reconsider this decision, which puts additional and unnecessary strain on our health care system and front-line workers. All of us in elected office must acknowledge and support science, wherever it may lead us."

Rep. Elise Stefanik, R-Schuylerville, defended Trump's decision, saying the WHO had failed to adequately respond to the 2014 Ebola outbreak and repeated Chinese Community party "propaganda" about the coronavirus.

We should not be funding an organization that is putting out misinformation that's having an impact not just on lives in the United States, but lots of lives and economic wreckage across the globe," Stefanik said.

Meanwhile, a bipartisan group of lawmakers is pushing Congress to move in the opposite direction by including measures to increase global health infrastructure as part of the next major piece of legislation to respond to coronavirus.

Ive been in conversations with my colleagues about what programs we could include in a fourth coronavirus package, said U.S. Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn.

Murphy, U.S. Sen. Mitt Romney, R-Utah, and Reps. Gerald E. Connolly, D-Va., and Steve Chabot, R-Ohio, are backing legislation to create a new U.S. government council and coordinator to implement the Global Health Security Agenda, a 2014 initiative by 30 countries to collaboratively fight infectious disease threats.

Early international intervention, these lawmakers believe, can stop a virus before Americans get sick. The bill passed the House Foreign Affairs Committee unanimously in early March.

Our experience with coronavirus has exposed some glaring gaps in our nations capacity to respond to a pandemic, and it is critical that we are better prepared to coordinate global responses and exert leadership to address future health threats, Romney said.

According to the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities, the U.S. government spends about a quarter (roughly $1.1 trillion) of its budget on domestic health insurance subsidies and spending, and another 16 percent ($697 billion) on international defense and security measures.

The U.S. is the largest donor to global public health efforts in the world, the Kaiser Family Foundation reports. In the current fiscal year, U.S. global health funding totaled $11.2 billion  less than one-sixth of spending on defense. That level of health spending has remained constant for more than a decade.

Nearly $500 million a year goes to the WHO, which leads the international health responses of United Nations member countries. The Trump administration said that this funding would be placed on hold until WHO mismanagement of the coronavirus pandemic is investigated.

House Democrats contend that the move violates the same spending laws that an independent government watchdog said the administration broke when it placed a freeze on aid to Ukraine  the action that prompted Trumps impeachment.

Trump has repeatedly said that the WHO was soft on China and China-centric by allowing the country to delay information sharing about the virus until it had spread to other counties.

The Republican-led Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee is planning an investigation into the origins and response to the coronavirus, including the responses of the WHO and China.

Was this transferred animal to human? Was this from a lab in China? committee Chair Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wisc., told Politico Monday. We need to know what role WHO might have had in trying to cover this thing up."

Special Investigation 147 NY dams are 'unsound,' potentially dangerous Thousands of dams have not been inspected in over 20 years.

Lawmakers of both parties, including Stefanik, have backed resolutions to investigate Chinas reaction to the virus and possibly hold the nation accountable.

"I do think as we do a look back on this, it will continue to raise concerns about the Chinese government's failure to be honest with the international community and their failure to be honest with their own people  and also it highlights our over-reliance on China in general," Stefanik said Wednesday.

The coronavirus has undeniably spotlighted how an infectious disease can quickly spread across the globe and cripple U.S. domestic health infrastructure, derail U.S. military activities and force the economy into recession.

The COVID-19 pandemic is not the first time the U.S. government has reckoned with its lack of preparedness to fight infectious diseases. In 2014, the federal government watched the Ebola virus leap from Africa to the U.S., carried by travelers.

While cases of Ebola in the U.S. remained few, a frightening realization struck President Barack Obamas administration: The nation was largely unprepared for a pandemic.

We were actually lucky that Ebola was not far, far more contagious than it actually was, Amy Pope, Obamas Deputy Homeland Security adviser, said Tuesday. We still, I think, had an over-inflated sense of what the U.S. could do in managing the problem. ... We quickly realized that we were over-confident.

The administration responded by setting up an office within the National Security Council focusing on contagious diseases without cures and creating a 69-page pandemic playbook, which included detailed protocols for tackling pandemics inside and outside U.S. borders.

In 2018, the Global Health Security and Biodefense unit was disbanded by Trump; some members were moved to other branches of the NSC, a move that has been widely criticized during the coronavirus pandemic. The legislation from Murphy, Romney, Connolly and Chabot would re-establish a similar unit within the NSC.

Stefanik said she support the unit's return, as well as the creation of a new independent bipartisan commission to review the administration's coronavirus response, similar to one Congress created after the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks.

In September 2019, the administration cut funding to the U.S. Agency for International Developments PREDICT program, which connected U.S. scientists with foreign laboratories to monitor thousands of viruses that could explode into pandemic.

The program worked with the laboratory in Wuhan, China, that first identified COVID-19, the illness caused by the novel coronavirus. But when funding for the $200 million program ran out, it was never replenished and U.S. scientists were laid off. Since the COVID-19 outbreak intensified, the administration gave the program $2.26 million in emergency funding, the L.A. Times reported.
As expected, Prime Minister Narendra Modi has extended the nationwide lockdown till May 3. Even before he did so, at least 10 states and union territories had extended it until April 30. The decision is in line with what other countries have done. Italy and France, two of the worst-affected European countries, have also extended the lockdown. While there are indications of the growth of COVID-19 plateauing there, it is difficult to read such a trend at least in some states of India. For this reason, perhaps, policymakers thought it fit to extend the lockdown.

While no doubt saving lives is important, livelihood also needs due attention. To state the economy, already reeling under a slowdown, has been dealt a huge blow would be an understatement. Industries and factories have ground to a halt, with MSMEs, the mainstay of Indias economy, the worst-affected. Rabi harvesting is underway, with expectations of bumper crops across many regions, but farmers are in distress due to the lockdown.

Migrant workers, who make up 80% of Indias workforce, have either returned to their villages or are stranded, with many becoming unemployed. Struggling companies have announced pay cuts for their employees, and many have laid off their staff. Given the dire consequences, the Centre should announce a stimulus package for industries and other sectors. Various industry bodies have come up with their own estimates of the package. The Centre need not be influenced by them but it also shouldnt be too worried of the fiscal deficit as these are not normal times.

While it mulls the stimulus package, the commerce ministrys request to reopen some industries by giving some relaxations needs serious consideration. Limited industrial activity with adequate safeguards of social distancing and regular health check-ups for employees is necessary to not only reopen the monetary tap but also to put money in the hands of the common man. By now health experts know the trajectory of the virus to an extent. Even they will argue that a prolonged and complete shutdown will only be counterproductive.
Charles Ingram, the former army major who was accused of cheating on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?, has fiercely criticised the shows original host Chris Tarrant on Twitter.

Ingram has been posting many tweets about the scandal this week, in time with the arrival of Quiz, a new ITV drama that chronicles the event and subsequent court case.

In 2003, Ingram, his wife Diana and their alleged accomplice Tecwen Whittock were found guilty of conspiring to cheat on the show, after producers noticed suspicious coughs from Whittock when correct answers were read out.

In response to Tarrants recent assertion that the Ingrams are guilty as sin, the former game show contestant wrote on Twitter: Tarrant wants to protect his legacy, his team, and the integrity of the UK production. I get that, but there is the more important issue of justice.

Ingram went on to say that, because Tarrant didnt hear any suspicious coughs during filming, the host should have been a defence witness. He also accused him of feeling no responsibility towards the people who apply and appear on the show.

When asked by a Twitter user how he doesnt blow up in response to Tarrants constant jibes, Ingram replied: Because he lied to & cheated on his wife who likes rabbits. Tarrant is not the person people think he is. TV does that.

"He suffers from delusions of grandeur and despite no proof I cheated he keeps harping on to protect his mates. Im sad for him. p.s., Im still calm.

Tarrant hasnt always argued that the Ingrams were guilty. During the trial, it emerged that Tarrant went to the Ingramss dressing room to congratulate the couple and drink champagne even after the production team warned him of their suspicions.

At the time, Tarrant had said: They seemed as normal as people who have just won 1 million would be in that situation. They did seem fine.

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While Ingram has been criticising Tarrant, he has had nothing but praise for Quiz, calling it terrifyingly accurate and excruciatingly enjoyable".
Connecticut is expected to receive about $28 million of the $3 billion in Emergency Education Block Grants announced Tuesday by U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos.

The grant will go to governors to make sure education continues for students during the coronavirus pandemic.

Separately, Connecticut is in line for about $111 million from the U.S. Department of Education through the Coronavirus Aid, Relief and Economic Security, or CARES, Act.

We expect U.S. DOE to make the applications available within 30 days, said Peter Yazbak, a state Department of Education spokesman.

The Governors Emergency Education Relief Fund, meanwhile, is designed to be flexible to allow governors to decide how best to meet the needs of students at public and non-public schools, and post-secondary institutions.

Governors have the opportunity to truly rethink and transform the approach to education during this national emergency and ensure learning continues, DeVos said in a statement that accompanied the announcement.

The application process for that fund has reportedly been streamlined to get the funds to states as quickly as possible. Once states have submitted the signed PDF, the Department expects to designate the funds within three business days.

The larger Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief Fund, expected to give Connecticut $111 million, promises school districts at least 90 percent of the funds for any activities related to the federal education accountability act, special education and activities to help with the response to COVID-19, including response efforts, cleaning, professional development and distance learning.

An application for those funds is being prepared but is not finalized. Distribution is based in part on Title 1 distribution.

A separate part of the CARES Act will distribute more than $6 billion to colleges and universities for emergency relief due to the coronavirus outbreak. Of that, nearly $134 million will come to Connecticut.

lclambeck@ctpost.com; twitter/lclambeck
Betonsa Ghana Limited, a premix concrete manufacturing company has presented a cheque for GH100, 000 to the National COVID -19 Trust Fund to support the fight against the pandemic in the country.



The donation is in line with the national call for private sector support to mobilise resources to fight the pandemic.



The company, located in Adenta in Accra, says the donation is to enable the government to support people in Adenta and its environs.



Presenting the cheque at the Flagstaff House on Wednesday, Mr Kennedy Amoako, Finance Manager of Betonsa Ghana Limited, a Turkish firm, said the objective of the donation is to enable the government to adequately fight the spread of the virus in communities.



He said although the pandemic has adversely affected businesses, the management of Betonsa believes that there is the need for firms to advance support for community protection against the pandemic.



With our little donation, we are optimistic that the government can be able to assist people in areas such as the Adenta community where we operate, he stressed.



For his part, Zafer Elbatir, General Manager of Betonsa, gave the assurance that the company would continue to partner the government in the fight against the pandemic as well other future development projects.

Receiving the cheque, former Chief Justice Sophia Akufo, Chairperson of the National COVID -19 Trust Fund, expressed appreciation for the gesture and commended the company for assisting the national effort to rid the country of the virus.



She also commended Betonsa for its contribution to the growth of Ghanas construction industry, and urged other firms to emulate the gesture.



In addition, she acknowledged the companys interest in helping the people of Adenta, its host community, and gave the assurance that all donations received would be properly used and accounted for appropriately.



The company has been operating in Ghana since 2012 in supplying quality premix concrete and other products for construction projects across the country.

END







Source: Peacefmonline.com









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Featured Video
While restaurants and pubs across Australia are closed on account of COVID-19, many outlets are experiencing a boom in takeaway and home delivery orders.

But how can you know which wine to match to your Thai takeaway or your Friday dumpling night?

Speaking to FEMAIL, the cellar director from Cellarmasters, Christine Ricketts, revealed the perfect wine for every type of dish - whether you're eating pizza or dining in on sushi.

So what do you need to drink?

Speaking to FEMAIL, the cellar director from Cellarmasters, Christine Ricketts (pictured), revealed the perfect wine for every type of dish

For all the pizza lovers, a Nero d'Avola is a great choice, as the red wine will beautifully balance the flavours of the pizza (pictured)

Drink rose with Thai

If you're a fan of a Pad Thai or a Pad See Ew, Christine said she hopes you also like rose wine.

'Because of the heat and variety of spices traditionally found in Thai food, a fruit-forward rose from a warm climate wine region like the McLaren Vale is the perfect pairing,' she told Daily Mail Australia.

The reason for this is the fact that the slightly sweet fruit flavours from the wine will balance the spice of your meal.

She recommends Joelle Mclaren Vale Grenache Rose as your wine of choice.

exican food has a lot of spice and heat, but a Pinot Noir is the best choice for this cuisine as its soft tannins will go well with spices and beans (pictured)

Enjoy Pinot with Mexican

Like Thai, Mexican food has a lot of spice and heat, but a Pinot Noir is the best choice for this cuisine as its soft tannins will go well with spices and beans.

'Go for a lighter style Pinot Noir from the Yarra Valley instead of the traditionally more medium-bodied Pinots from Tasmania,' Christine said.

'A rose made from Cabernet grapes is another great option as these tend to have the red wine-like flavours of cherry, blackcurrant and peppers, alongside the heightened acidity of a traditional rose to balance the heat.'

The expert recommends Dovetail Yarra Valley Pinot Noir.

'The best wine to enjoy with dumplings is one that doesn't dominate,' Christine said; therefore a crisp Australian Riesling is your best bet (pictured)

Dine on dumplings and Riesling

If dumplings are your choice of takeaway, then Riesling is the wine to go for.

'The best wine to enjoy with dumplings is one that doesn't dominate,' Christine said.

'A crisp Australian Riesling will pair beautifully with these plump pillows of delight, as the dry wine with the lovely citrus-y flavours will not overpower the delicate flavours of the food.'

A Mockingbird Hill Clare Valley Riesling is the best choice here, the sommelier advised.

'Pinot Grigio is a lighter style white, with mouth-filling flavours of pear or apple with tangy acidity, which is why it is the ideal wine match for sushi,' Christine said (pictured)

Sip on Pinot Grigio with sushi

Sushi is a very popular choice across Australia, with countless outlets offering delicious and fresh nigiri and california rolls on demand.

'Pinot Grigio is a lighter style white, with mouth-filling flavours of pear or apple with tangy acidity, which is why it is the ideal wine match for sushi,' Christine said.

The green fruit in the wine is a refreshing choice for with sushi, while the acidity in the wine will help to cut through any heavy flavours like oily fish, soy sauce or tempura batter.

'I recommend Zonte's Footstep Doctoressa Di Lago Adelaide Hills Pinot Grigio,' Christine said.

Kick back with Vietnamese and Sangiovese

The Italian wine Sangiovese is a popular choice with Vietnamese food, and for good reason.

'Vietnamese is spicy, and the key ingredients used in the cooking tend to be fish sauce, sugar and rice,' Christine said.

'These flavours go perfectly with Sangiovese, a medium-bodied red wine with lovely plump, cherry and herb flavours.'

This wine will work wonders at 'off-setting' your spicy Vietnamese food, and Christine's choice is Altero Sangiovese.

Feast on fish and chips with Chardonnay

The great British classic of fish and chips is best enjoyed with a crisp cool glass of Chardonnay, according to Christine, who explained their flavours go well together because of the 'power' of the Chardonnay.

'A bright fruit, unoaked or lightly oaked Chardonnay has enough power and texture to complement the flavours of the fish and the batter, while the acidity of the wine will break down the fat in the chips,' she explained.

Her recommendation is David Lowe Wines Chardonnay.

Christine said Cabernet Sauvignon will work wonderfully well with a delicious dark chocolate mousse as it will balance the chocolate's bitter flavours (pictured)

Enjoy dark chocolate mousse with Cabernet Sauvignon

It's a truth universally acknowledged that chocolate and red wine are a classic combination.

And Christine said her pick for dark chocolate mousse is a glass of Cabernet Sauvignon.

'Cabernet Sauvignon has rich blackcurrant and blackberry flavours, which add a lovely sweetness to dark chocolate's bitterness,' she said.

The richness of the mousse, meanwhile, will also help to get rid of all of the taste of tannins in your mouth.

'Burgers have a lot of flavours, but a big bold Barossa Valley Shiraz is probably the best pick as it has enough power to take on all the flavours of a burger,' Christine said (pictured)

Enjoy burgers with Shiraz

Like chocolate, red meat goes well with red wine, especially Shirasz.

'Burgers have a lot of flavours - including the cheese, beef patty, bread and condiments, but a big bold Barossa Valley Shiraz is probably the best pick as it has enough power to take on all the flavours of a burger,' Christine said.

She loves Krondorf Symmetry Barossa Shiraz with her burger.

Try tiramisu and sparkling Shiraz

If tiramisu to takeaway is on your weekend agenda, look no further than a festive sparkling Shiraz, which will perfectly match the sweetness and weight of the dessert.

'It's light enough, but the acidity will cut through the creaminess of the dessert,' Christine said.

She recommends Riddoch Coonawarra Sparkling Shiraz as your first port of call.

Pick pizza and Nero d'Avola

For all the pizza lovers, a Nero d'Avola is a great choice, as while the ideal wine you should drink depends slightly on what topping you choose, most pizzas have a tomato and cheese base that works wonderfully with an Italian-style, medium-bodied red wine.

'Try Nero D'Avola, a red wine made of a Sicilian grape, with soft tannins and strong fruit flavours,' Christine said.

'The wine will beautifully balance the acidity of the tomatoes while complementing the cheese.'

Colpasso's Nero D'Avola Appassimento is her top pick here.
In a shocking turn of events, a fire has just recently broke out in the Amazon Fulfillment Center and has taken everyone by surprise! The Fresno Fire Department has just confirmed this fire happening at the very Amazon Fulfillment Center itself located in southwest Fresno

Authorities have just responded a little after 3pm on Tuesday heading straight to the facility on South Orange Avenue which is located very near to the East Central Avenue.

The breaking fire

According to Action News in their conversation to a Fresno Fire battalion chief, when the crew finally arrived, they were able to find about 20 solar panels of fire and also about 600 employees inside the building itself who were then rapidly evacuated and sustained no injuries.

The violent fire was a sight to see for everyone around the area and a certain video was uploaded on Twitter showing glimpses of the fire's smoke captured on camera. Things could have ended badly for the 600 employees had they not been properly evacuated by the Fresno Fire Department.

Read Also: China's Aircraft Carrier and Warship Strike Threaten Taiwan While The USS Roosevelt Stays Crippled Due to the Coronavirus

The Fresno Fire Department arrived at the sight just in time to save the employees. One could only imagine the gravity of damage that could have happened should the 600 employees not have been evacuated on time.

The Fresno Fire Department are trained professionals and although for some firefighters, this specific fire was the biggest they have handled so far, almost 50 firefighters were able to properly work towards putting out the fire going on in the Amazon Fulfillment Center.

#UPDATE : Fresno Fire officials say the fire started from at least 20 solar panels that caught fire. Smoke is not as thick anymore. 600 employees were in the building , but no injuries. https://t.co/PWP5Yy496M April 14, 2020

The Amazon Fulfillment Center

The building is known to be quite tall and can be visible from quite a distance. It is also one of the popular buildings around the neighborhood sometimes used by locals as landmarks for direction when trying to get somewhere.

The total area of the building is nearly 850 square feet taking up a massive area not even including the parking lot. The Fresno Fire Department says that because of the size of this building, the firefighters find that factor to be a unique challenge to their crews.

The bigger the area, the harder the fire could be put out since the firefighters would have to travel straight to the fire in hopes that the fire does not spread before they get there. Another challenge for the firefighters would be locating the source of the fire or the heart of the fire and exhausting their efforts in putting it out.

Read Also: Storms Cause Flood in Texas Shortly After Tornado Hits Mississippi: 39,000 Without Power While Damage Is Being Assessed

The firefighters are currently working on two things, the first to work to put the fire out and the second to stop the spread of the fire to other parts of the building or even from breaking out of the building and into the neighborhood.



The citizens gathered around the Amazon Fulfillment Center are shocked by the sight of the building burning but are also relieved that the Fresno Fire Department was able to respond to the situation ASAP.
Brown joins Ting after executing in high-profile roles, most recently as Vice President, Project Management & Product Development at Sirius XM Pandora. There, she set the strategy for integration and alignment of technology systems, planning, leading and managing development programs.

In prior roles, Brown held leadership positions within several Fortune 100 companies, including AT&T, Cox Communications, T-Mobile, Comcast NBCUniversal.

"We are thrilled to have Monica join Ting as an energetic leader and mentor who's adept in thinking and acting at scale" said Justin Reilly, Chief Product Officer at Ting. "Her ability to deliver both high-quality solutions to business partners and high-quality service to customers makes her an ideal fit for our team as we strive to take Ting's product ecosystem to the next level."

Brown has received multiple awards for her contributions to the IT Industry, including the Women of Color STEM Special Recognition Award in 2016, and a feature in the 2017 and 2018 Edition of Who's Who in Black Atlanta publication. Brown will release her first book this summer entitled "Only One" which chronicles her experiences as an African American executive in corporate America.

Brown is based in Atlanta where she will work with colleagues at Ting's offices in Toronto, across the U.S. and around the world.

About Ting

Ting (https://www.ting.com) offers mobile that makes sense. Ting has no contracts, no overage penalties and no hidden fees. Minutes, megabytes and mobile data are treated separately and customers only pay for the usage levels they actually hit. Businesses and families can have unlimited devices on one account and share usage for even greater savings. Active devices on an account cost just $6 per month. Built on customer service, Ting offers a clear, usable website and smart, accessible people that are empowered to solve problems. Follow Ting on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter.

About Tucows

Tucows is a provider of network access, domain names and other Internet services. Ting (https://ting.com) delivers mobile phone service and fixed Internet access with outstanding customer support. OpenSRS (http://opensrs.com) and Enom (http://www.enom.com) manage a combined 24 million domain names and millions of value-added services through a global reseller network of over 36,000 web hosts and ISPs. Hover (http://hover.com) makes it easy for individuals and small businesses to manage their domain names and email addresses.

Press contact:

Kristen Joerger, LKPR

603-494-3295

[email protected]

SOURCE Ting

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The Management of the Volta River Authority (VRA) on Tuesday advised the public to disregard unscrupulous person posing as the Head of Laboratory Unit at the VRA Hospital at Akosombo, issuing fake letters to potential employment seekers.



"We want to state that VRA has not requested any such person to undertake any recruitment exercise on its behalf and that this individual is defrauding unsuspecting job seekers and the general public by this act", it said.



A statement from the office of the VRA and copied to the Ghana News Agency in Accra, said VRA had a recruitment process, and at no stage in the process was payment of any sort required from the candidate.



It cautioned the public to be wary of information from such fraudulent persons and further advised that under no circumstance should they part with money for appointment into VRA because that was not part of VRA's recruitment process.



The statement advised the public to contact the Authority at [email protected] for verification of any employment offers.

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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Presumptive Democratic U.S. presidential nominee Joe Biden, who has vowed to pick a woman to join his ticket, said he would appoint a committee this month to help him vet possible running mates.

The former vice president to Barack Obama has said he would consider six to around a dozen candidates, including several of his former rivals for the party's nomination to face Republican President Donald Trump in the Nov. 3 election. His plan is to select one well before the Democratic convention in August.

Biden, 77, has said the candidate should be someone who could step into the presidency if needed. He also has sought advice from Obama, who formally endorsed Biden on Tuesday.

'He said: 'Look, one of the things that worked for you and me, Joe, was that I tried to find someone who had experiences or capacity that I didn't have,'' Biden said of Obama at a fundraising event last week. 'And so I'm gonna need a woman vice president who has capacities, has strengths, where I have weaknesses.'

No woman has ever served as vice president, although two - Democrat Geraldine Ferraro in 1984 and Republican Sarah Palin in 2008 - were major-party nominees for the office.

Here are some women who are likely to be considered, according to people familiar with the process.

Senator Kamala Harris

Biden said he would consider Harris, 55, for the vice presidential position a day after the senator from California ended her own presidential bid in December.

Harris, who was friendly with Biden's late son, Beau, is aligned with Biden ideologically and is among the country's most well-known black politicians.

A number of advisers have pressed Biden and the campaign to consider Harris seriously because the daughter of Jamaican and Indian immigrants could help bring out the key Democratic constituency of black voters in a close election.

Yet several Biden confidants have expressed skepticism about Harris' loyalty, particularly after her cutting criticism of Biden's record on race during an early Democratic presidential debate.

Senator Amy Klobuchar

The 59-year-old senator from Minnesota defied expectations in the Democratic race with her strong showing in New Hampshire, and her endorsement on the eve of the pivotal Super Tuesday contests on March 3 helped Biden win her home state.

Klobuchar pitched voters on pragmatism and her appeal to independents and moderate Republicans, and some Democratic advisers see her adding to Biden's potential appeal to the white working-class voters who voted for Trump in 2016.

Picking her as a running mate would be a play to help win important Northern states, including Minnesota, where Democrat Hillary Clinton won by only 1 percentage point in 2016 and which Trump is hoping to flip this year.

Still, some Biden advisers view Minnesota as a state that is less critical to their path to victory than some other Midwestern states, including Wisconsin and Michigan.

Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer

Biden said his short list includes Whitmer, 48, who raised her profile as one of the governors confronting a growing coronavirus threat in her home state. But she has also come under fire for a stay-at-home order that some in the state viewed as too restrictive and inconsistently applied.

His advisers see Michigan as a critical state and Whitmer as a rising star. She was also one of the first guests on his new podcast, where Biden called her 'one of the most talented people in the country.'

Senator Elizabeth Warren

Warren, 70, who dropped out of the presidential race in March, was the last woman among the top tier of candidates in a Democratic field that began as the most diverse in history.

Warren endorsed her former rival Biden for president on Arpil 15, following his endorsements by Obama and Senator Bernie Sanders.

'In this moment of crisis, it's more important than ever that the next president restores Americans' faith in good, effective government - and I've seen Joe Biden help our nation rebuild,' she wrote in a tweet.

Yet Biden has said repeatedly he wants a running mate who is 'simpatico' on policy and strategy. Some Biden allies see that as disqualifying for Warren, given their vast differences on the U.S. military's role in the world and how to revamp the U.S. healthcare system.

New Mexico Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham

Lujan Grisham, 60, became the first Latina Democratic governor of a state in 2018, after serving three two-year terms in Congress. She was also the chair of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus and a vocal opponent of Trump's immigration policies.

Biden has been encouraged to consider a running mate who could boost his support among Latino voters, potentially the largest minority voting bloc in the election.

Senator Catherine Cortez Masto

Cortez Masto, 56, a senator from Nevada, succeeded Democratic Senator Harry Reid, an influential party power broker and Biden supporter.

She served two terms as attorney general of Nevada before becoming the first Latina elected to the U.S. Senate.

A presidential ticket with Cortez Masto could improve Biden's support among Latino voters, who chose Senator Bernie Sanders in the Nevada caucus.

Representative Val Demings

Biden is also likely to consider Demings, 63, an African-American congresswoman from Florida, a key election battleground, campaign advisers said.

Yet while Demings was tapped as one of the managers of the House of Representatives impeachment proceedings against Trump, Democratic advisers said her lower profile may hurt her chances.

Former Georgia House Minority Leader Stacey Abrams

In her failed bid to become Georgia's governor in 2018, Abrams, 46, gained a national profile. The African American from the Deep South would likely bring enthusiasm to a ticket with Biden, especially among black voters, but she has minimal executive government experience.

Biden has suggested he would consider her as his running mate, but several allies note his stance that the vice president must be ready on 'Day One' to be president.

- Reuters
FY20 was a year that every fund manager and investor would like to forget, as the Nifty tanked more than 22 percent. Most fund managers closed the financial year with double-digit losses. Of the 141 schemes tracked by PMSBazaar.com, an online portal for comparing portfolio management services (PMSes), 59 outperformed the Nifty50 in FY 20.Only two PMSes gave positive returns in the same period. Marcellus Consistent Compounders, a multicap scheme, was one of them. Consistent compounders identifies firms with high pricing power that helps sustain a large gap between returns on the cost of equity and capital employed. The other scheme that bucked the trend was Ambit Capitals Coffee Can portfolio, a largecap portfolio. Ambits Coffee Can invests in equities by focusing on the ability of a business to deliver healthy growth consistently and RoCE over a long time. Close Related stories Trade setup for Wednesday: Top 15 things to know before Opening Bell

Daily Voice | Any change in FY22-FY23 earnings estimates will be minimal after Q3 numbers: Unmesh Sh...

Delta Corp, Indiabulls Housing among 3 stocks in NSEs F&O ban list At Ambit AMC we always believe in buying quality businesses. It is these steep corrections that provide long-term investors with an opportunity to build a quality portfolio, Manish Jain, Fund Manager, Coffee Can PMS at Ambit AMC, told Moneycontrol. The approach remains largely unchanged except that many businesses which were otherwise proving to be expensive are now much more affordable, he said.

PMSes cater to wealthy investors with portfolio sizes exceeding Rs 50 lakh. The professional fee structure is also different from a regular mutual fund (MFs). We have collated a list of top stocks fund managers trusted for their portfolios that outperformed Nifty50 in the last 12 months. However, their benchmarks could be different. There are top 18 stocks based on the weightage they have across five PMS schemes filtered based on returns given in the last 12 months. Stocks that most portfolio managers trusted the most include HDFC Bank, Page Industries, Asian Paints, Pidilite Industries, Berger Paints, HUL and ICICI Bank, according to data compiled from PMSBazaar.com.

Note: The above table is for reference and not buy or sell recommendations.
California governor Gavin Newsom just announced his plan for how the state will gradually relax social distancing measures -- when the time comes. He did not say when restrictions might be lifted or whether the stay-at-home order will remain in place through May as he's previously suggested it might.

But before it lifts, the state said in a press release, businesses and schools will have to demonstrate their ability to support social distancing. In the real world, that might mean that restaurants operate with fewer tables, with diners having their temperatures checked as they enter, Newsom explained. California schools are closed for the remainder of this academic year, and when they reopen in the fall, it might mean staggered class times allowing students to keep a greater distance from each other.

Similar measures are already being implemented in parts of Asia where coronavirus infections have been brought under control. Chances are, wherever you are, you'll see some version of these measures as well whenever current restrictions begin to lift.

On Sunday the National Institutes of Health infectious diseases head Anthony Fauci said that a "rolling" reentry to the economy might be possible in May, but only in parts of the country where the spread of the coronavirus appears to be under control, and only with widespread antibody testing to monitor who's been infected already. Both he and Centers for Disease Control chief Robert Redfield have warned that reopening the economy will inevitably lead to more coronavirus infections, with Redfield predicting a second wave of Covid-19 in fall or winter.

Six indicators.

With that in mind, Newsom laid out six "indicators" the state will look for before modifying the current stay-at-home order. In addition to schools and businesses being ready for social distancing, they include having both the hospital and health care systems able to provide needed care without getting overwhelmed, the ability to protect the most vulnerable from infection, and ability to use antibody testing, contact tracing, and isolation of the infected to safeguard the community at large. And, he said, California would retain the ability to reinstitute social distancing measures as needed if infections start to spread.

Sonia Angell, California's public health officer, clarified that what the state has planned is an incremental modification of the stay-at-home order over time rather than lifting it altogether, which might lead to a spike in infections. Such measures as the widespread use of face masks might remain in place until a vaccine is widely available, she added.
The mandate given to Israeli parliament speaker Benny Gantz to form a government expired on Thursday, but talks were reportedly ongoing on an emergency alliance with his rival, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Gantz, a centrist and Israel's former army chief, had been given a deadline of midnight by President Reuven Rivlin to reach a deal with Netanyahu.

Rivlin had said that if the sides failed to strike an accord, he would mandate Israel's parliament to select a candidate to form a government, a move that would likely prolong the country's unprecedented political deadlock.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Delhi chief secretary Vijay Dev on Wednesday appointed 10 bureaucrats as nodal officers for coordination with resident commissioners of states to address the concerns of migrants in the city amid the ongoing lockdown.

The move comes a day after a large number of migrant workers gathered in Mumbai and Surat despite the nationwide lockdown to contain the spread of COVID-19.

According to an official, the 10 IAS officers will coordinate with resident commissioners of states and union territories to address issues being faced by migrants in Delhi, be it food, shelter, essential supplies, payment of wages or other livelihood issues.

Dev has asked the nodal officers to submit a report twice a week on the efforts and measures taken by them.

Among the selected bureaucrats are IAS officers D N Singh (nodal officer for Uttar Pradesh), Azimul Haque (Jharkhand), S B Shashank (Bihar) and Arun Mishra (West Bengal and Odisha).

Coronavirus cases in Delhi rose to 1,578 on Wednesday while the death toll reached 32.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
The group was hiding in al-Amiriyah, a district in eastern Cairo. During the gun battle, which lasted several hours, one policeman and seven suspects were killed. Reports indicate that the cell was linked to the Islamic State group. For Egyptian priest, there are no particular fears or concerns since churches and mosques are closed due to the coronavirus.

Cairo (AsiaNews)  Egyptian security forces yesterday neutralised a jihadi cell with alleged ties to the Islamic State group in a district in eastern Cairo. The group was preparing to attack the Christian community during the upcoming Coptic Easter celebrations.

The police turned into a gun battle that lasted at least four hours. At the end of the shootout, one policeman and seven suspected terrorists were dead.

Speaking to AsiaNews Fr Rafic Greiche, head of media committee of the Council of Churches of Egypt, said that the incident wont frighten or concern Christians since most places of worship," including churches and mosques are closed" and worshippers are not allowed in because of the COVID-19 virus.

"I don't think, and this is my personal opinion, that the churches could have been a real target, said the clergyman. The terrorist group perhaps intended to strike elsewhere.

The incident unfolded in al-Amiriyah, a residential district in eastern Cairo where the terrorists had their base.

After receiving a tip-off, police moved in, preventing a series of attacks against police forces and Coptic churches in connection with Orthodox Easter scheduled next Sunday.

Inside the flat, police found several weapons and a huge cache of ammunition to be used in the attacks.

Sources in Egypts Interior Ministry report that three officers were also injured in the shooting, with one needing hospitalisation.

The cell was reportedly linked to the Islamic State group, which is still active in Egypt, especially in northern Sinai and the capital.

In the days prior to the police operation, the cell allegedly collected information about Christian places of worship in the district, which had been closed because of a government order.

Analysts and experts note that al-Amiriyah is among the most densely populated districts in Cairo, with narrow streets, an ideal hiding place for a group that "wants to prepare an attack".

At present, the novel coronavirus has captured public attention; for terrorists, this provided an opportunity to strike, but the security services received information that enabled them to stop the terrorists plans.

In recent weeks, social media linked to the Islamic State group have been calling for attacks during the ongoing health emergency.

Egypt has almost 95 million people with a large Muslim majority. Christians, especially Orthodox Copts, are a substantial minority, about 10 per cent of the population.

Between 2016 and 2017, the latter were the target of a series of brutal attacks.

In 2018 a military court sentenced 17 people to death in connection with these attacks; however, the governments iron fist has not stop the violence. Last year for example, an attack against Christians on Christmas Eve was foiled only by the prompt intervention of an imam.
New Delhi: Motivational speaker, educationist and disability rights activist Priya Bhargava has been intermittently using hydroxychloroquine for the past fifteen years. A long-time patient of lupus with transverse myelitis, Bhargava needs the anti-malarial drug to keep the symptoms of lupus, an auto-immune disease that causes the immune system to attack healthy blood cells in the body, in check.

However, since the recent celebrity status of hydroxychloroquine after China lauded it as a possible cure for coronavirus, the drug seems to have become harder to find in stores. Bhargava, a resident of Noida who uses a wheelchair due to her condition, enquired from local chemists last week when her supply of HCQ ran out, only to be told it was out of stock. She also searched for the medicine online on sites like Pharmeasy but was unable to procure any.

"Last week when I was down to my last strip of HCQ, my doctor warned me to acquire some more as he suspected there could be a shortage. Sure enough, all three pharmacies in Sector 37, Noida, told me it wasn't available," Bhargava told News18.

A former beauty queen, Bhargava, who is the winner of "Miss Wheelchair India 2015", called 112, the emergency helpline number provided by the UP government for residents in need of essential supplies and medicines. The woman who responded to the call told Bhargava that the drug was available in certain pharmacies but that she would have to personally carry her prescription to the store to get it.

"I told her I was a wheelchair user. She asked me to go in a car. That was rather insensitive," Bhargava said, adding, "You are delivering food and vegetables to people's doorsteps but not delivering essential medicines to someone with special needs".

Bhargava finally managed to the prescribed dose of medicine after contacting some senior doctors. "But it was only because of my personal contacts that I could get the drug".

Such instances have been widely reported in the media in the past two weeks. With all eyes currently trained on novel coronavirus, the demand for HCQ - which allegedly has anti-viral properties - has shot up around the globe and many non-coronaviral users of HCQ have reported a shortage. The situation became even tenser after the Indian government gave in to pressure from the United States and agreed to export the drug last week.

Despite the government and Ministry of Health assuring citizens that HCQ was in enough supply, many like Bhargava have been unable to directly procure the drug - used to tame overactive immune systems - from pharmacies.

A similar problem was faced by 39-year-old math teacher and social activist Vikas Kumar from North East Delhi's Burari. Kumar suffers from rheumatoid arthritis which causes severe joint pain and he takes the prescribed dose of HCQ to keep the pain in check. "From March 20th onwards, I was told by chemists that the drug is unavailable," Kumar told News18. He visited a number of shops in Burari and nearby Sant Nagar areas but in vain.

"The problem is not the unavailability of HCQ but the fact that some chemists have now started to hoard the drug and only giving it out to long term customers," Kumar alleged. He said that he himself saw this happen at a chemist's in Sant Nagar. "The shop got a consignment of the tablets in front of me but the chemist told me they are out of stock," Kumar said.

HCQ is currently being produced by two companies, Zydus Cadila and Ipca Labs.

Ipca officials maintained that there is no shortage of the drug. IPCA has even started a helpline to help connect patients and customers to pharmacies that have supplies of the drug. Chemists, however, have confirmed that there indeed has been a spike in demand.

"When the news of HCQ being used to treat coronavirus broke, those who regularly use it went into panic mode and ordered several strips from multiple pharmacies," Abhay Puri, who runs a pharmacy in Sant Nagar, told News18. "So now, we refuse to give the drug to customers who don't have their doctor's prescription and reference," he added.

Abhay further said that since the drug was classified as a Schedule H1 drug by the government of India in March, pharmacies now needed to maintain detailed records of customers getting HCQ along with their prescription details along with details about the doctor treating the patient. Those coming with older prescriptions or prescriptions from doctors who aren't personally treating them are being denied the drug.

Rahul Shrivastava, a Noida resident who has been volunteering with a group called "Project Delhi", has been providing aid to people with disabilities who are facing problems during the lockdown. He confirmed that in the past week, he has received several calls from panicked patients who were unable to leave the house to get medicines.

While the Indian government and health ministry assured Indians that there was no shortage, Shrivastava maintains that availability was not the only problem.

"Even if the drug is available, not everyone can search for it in local pharmacies amid lockdown. This is especially true for people with disabilities and no transport," he said. The banking sector employee felt that the government at both central and state level needed to ensure that essential services like medicines were delivered to the doorsteps of those in need.

HCQ has been repeatedly endorsed not just by China but by US President Donald Trump as well who on March 21 referred to the combination of hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin as one of the biggest game-changers in the history of medicine.

HCQ manufacturers Ipca and Cadilla, as well as other manufacturers of the drug such as Cipla, Lupin along with API suppliers of HCQ, will be ramping up production scale for the drug by the end of this month. India has already reserved 10 crore tablets as personal stock.

With over five lakh positive coronavirus cases and over 24,000 deaths in the US alone, however, demand for the medicine is only likely to rise. Both US, as well as China, do not produce HCQ and their arm-twisting techniques to acquire supplies of the drug may end up costing Indian consumers dearly.
Pan-African genomics startup 54gene has closed a Series A round of $15 million, bringing the companys total venture investment to $19.5 million after it secured $4.5 million seed funding in July. The latest round was led by Adjuvant Capital , a New York and San Francisco-based life sciences fund backed by the International Finance Corporation, Novartis, and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

The investment will allow the company to scale operations in support of generating novel insights from human genetics research, which results in high-impact discoveries for improving human health through therapeutic development, 54gene said in a press release Tuesday.

There is enormous potential in expanding the reach of global drug and vaccine discovery by including more diverse populations in research efforts, said Jenny Yip, Adjuvant Managing Partner.

The startup will also work towards accelerating discovery capabilities by improving operations in genetics, bioinformatics, preclinical, clinical and commercial programs, it added. This funding comes at a historically meaningful time, allowing us to deliver global impact through continued investment in research and strategic partnerships with leaders in the biomedical industry, Founder and CEO Dr. Abasi Ene-Obong said.

54gene was launched in January 2019 with the goal of addressing the huge gap the genomics market currently poses for Africa. As of 2018, less than three percent of the data used in Genome-wide Association Studies were of African ancestry and currently, less than one percent of global drug discovery occurs on the continent.

Located in Africas most populous country, Nigeria, and in the United States, 54gene aims to improve the development and availability of medical products that will prove beneficial to Africans and the wider global population. It currently works with over 300 researchers, clinicians, and geneticists across the continent and has built an African Biobank, a biorepository that stores biological samples to provide data for academic and development research.

The company has said it will further explore partnerships and opportunities for the co-development of drug targets and therapeutics as part of its next stage of growth. It expects to partner with pharmaceutical, medical device, and diagnostic companies for clinical programs in Africa, led by the newly-appointed Vice President of Clinical & Regulatory Affairs, Kemi Williams.

In addition to the Series A raise, 54gene has formed a Scientific Advisory Board, composed of global leaders in clinical genetics, bioinformatics, and data science. The new partnership marks a significant evolution in the growth of our company, said Ene-Obong. In the coming months, we will be focusing on building a genomic resource that we hope will add significantly to global health, while also translating to the health benefits of patients in Africa.

The investment round also included participation from Raba Capital , V8 Capital , Ingressive Capital , and follow-on investment from Y Combinator , Better Ventures , Fifty Years , KdT Ventures , Aera VC and Pioneer Fund .

Source: Ventures Africa
Ghana Education Service (GES) in partnership with Zoomlion Ghana Limited, is set to embark on a nationwide fumigation of all Senior High Schools as well as Technical and Vocational Education and Training institutions as part of efforts to limit the spread of the Coronavirus (Covid-19) pandemic.

The exercise will see Zoomlion fumigate all the 546 boarding schools, 176 day schools, 28 special schools in the country.

The company as part of its corporate social responsibility has also decided to fumigate all the 380 private second cycle schools in the country.

Launch

Speaking at the launch, Director General of GES, Prof. Kwasi Opoku-Amankwa said the exercise which would end in three weeks has been planned to get rid of bedbugs and other rodents which have been a source of worry for the education sector.

He was optimistic the exercise will be successful as shown by recent results of Zoomlion's similar exercise in markets across the country.

Minister of Education, Dr. Mathew Opoku Prempeh reiterated the need for the exercise to be done at this time when the schools have been closed as a result of the Covid-19 outbreak.

This, he said will ensure that the school environments are safe by the time schools reopen.

He urged Ghanaians to stay home unless it is very necessary for them to go out, saying the virus is real and should not be taken for granted.

National President of Conference of Heads of Private Second Cycle Schools, I.K Mensah applauded the initiative to include private schools in the exercise, saying this is the beginning of a new chapter which must be maintained.

He urged government to extend other benefits the public institutions are enjoying to private schools which are major players in the education sector.

Zoomlion in a statement indicated that as part of our corporate social responsibility, Zoomlion Ghana Limited and Vectorpes has disinfected some vulnerable institutions and some major public institutions including the Dworwulu Special School, Akuapem Akropong School for the Blind, Mampong School for the Deaf, the Judicial Service and the Ghana School of Law among others.

It said similar activities have been undertaken at the University of Ghana (UG), University of Professional Studies Accra (UPSA), the Accra Technical University, the National Health Insurance Authority (NHIA), some banks and oil companies among others on highly subsidized business levels.

Corporate institutions are therefore being encouraged to take advantage of the opportunity during this lockdown to disinfect their premises against bacteria, germs and influenza viruses, by contacting numbers provided for immediate inspection, disinfection and fumigation at a 50% discount rate, the statement added.

Meanwhile, Zoomlion Ghana Limited has outdoored new equipment for their disinfection and fumigation exercise including an automised boom spraying machine which can spray up to 50 metres.

---Daily Guide
Our Rapid Deployment Kit blankets surge capacity areas with a reliable, easy-to-deploy wireless nurse call system, with connectivity to mobile devices and robust reporting capabilities which are critical in these temporary hospital settings.

Critical Alert announced today it has partnered with TekTone to offer Rapid Deployment Kits to help hospitals contend with COVID-19 surge capacity. Designed to be utilized in any environment, this portable, software-based, wireless patient call system can be easily implemented with minimal system maintenance, bringing reliable, connected care to any setting.

Driving the system is Critical Alerts CommonPath Canopy software which integrates multiple nurse call and caregiver communication systems into a single, cohesive platform. For wireless Tone/Visual infrastructure, Critical Alert is utilizing TekTones easy-to-use, easy-to-deploy nurse call hardware.

The Rapid Deployment Kit provides wireless, waterproof pendants that patients wear around the neck, on the wrist or can be attached to the bed. When help is needed, the patient simply presses the pendant button which emits a notification to the nurse console as well as to mobile devices (even BYOD). Wireless patient stations with call cords, emergency notification buttons, and auxiliary jacks for medical devices can also be integrated if the setting allows for it.

In this time of crisis, hospitals are expanding to accommodate the tremendous influx of patients and need a dependable communication system, said John Elms, CEO of Critical Alert. Our Rapid Deployment Kit blankets surge capacity areas with a reliable, easy-to-deploy wireless nurse call system, with connectivity to mobile devices and robust reporting capabilities which are critical in these temporary hospital settings, continued Elms.

Features/Benefits:



Deploys quickly and expands easily  An entire system can be set-up and running in a matter of hours

No construction needed  plug-&-play hardware, repeaters use standard AC outlet(s)

Reusable  Box up and re-use anytime

Independent wireless network  900 MHz proprietary network provides maximum coverage and does not burden existing Wi-Fi network(s)

Multi-Unit display  Access and view each temporary unit or location separately or centralized on nurse console displays

Integration  Use with existing wireless devices such as smartphones and pagers

Pre-programmed wireless pendants - pendants are programmed into the system before arrival

TekTone is here to support the Army Corps of Engineers with stand-up hospitals and existing facilities with a diverse platform of durable nurse call solutions. We are prepared to provide sites with the technologies they need in a time crunch. This Critical Alert partnership allows sites the ability to achieve quick, rapid results in a time when life safety is of the essence, said John Mira-Knippel, president of TekTone.

About TekTone

For over 45 years, TekTone has designed and manufactured UL Listed Tek-CARE nurse call, wireless nurse/emergency call, wander management, Tek-SAFE area of rescue assistance systems, and Tek-ALERT integration systems. TekTone products are designed and built in our FDA-registered, state-of-the-art manufacturing facility located in North Carolina - plus a network of distributors and representatives that stretches worldwide.

For more information, visit http://www.tektone.com

Follow TekTone on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter

About Critical Alert

Critical Alert offers a cost-effective solution set of enterprise, software-based products, services and strategies that enable hospitals and healthcare enterprises to give patients a voice, empower clinical staff with actionable intelligence, and unburden their support and IT teams. CommonPath Enterprise, our software-driven patient communications platform, includes UL-1069 nurse call, overlay software to modernize legacy nurse call systems, alarm management & event notification, patient experience monitoring, advanced clinical analytics, and a portfolio of integrated partner offerings.

For more information, visit: http://www.criticalalert.com.

Follow Critical Alert on LinkedIn and Twitter.

Critical Alert is a trademark of Critical Alert. All other product or service names are the property of their respective owners


Green Heys Care Home in Waterloo, Merseyside. (Google Maps)

Eight residents of a care home in Merseyside have died of suspected coronavirus.

A boss at Green Heys Care Home in Waterloo, Merseyside, praised his staff as he confirmed the deaths of eight people, who had symptoms of COVID-19.

Mark Adams, chief executive officer for Community Integrated Care, which runs the home, said: As soon as an outbreak developed at Green Heys Care Home, we were able to respond swiftly and robustly.

I have been astounded by the incredible efforts and professionalism of the staff team, who have done their utmost to support residents, families and each other through this incredibly challenging time.

Read more: London's NHS Nightingale 'largely empty' and only had 19 patients over Easter

The government is facing criticism of its handling of the coronavirus crisis in care homes. (PA Images)

Adams added: It is with great sadness that we have lost eight people supported at the home to suspected coronavirus.

Whilst this is a devastating number, it may have been higher had it not been for the dedicated and selfless response of our team, who have exemplified the commitment, bravery and skill that exists within the social care workforce.

Latest coronavirus news, updates and advice

Live: Follow all the latest updates from the UK and around the world

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The news comes after it was announced on Monday that 13 residents at Stanley Park care home in County Durham had died after displaying coronavirus symptoms.

The government is now facing a growing backlash over its handling of COVID-19 cases in care homes.

Ministers are facing under intense scrutiny after social care providers said official figures on deaths do not match what they are seeing on the ground.

Industry bosses have said daily death tolls are airbrushing out hundreds of older people who have died in the care system.

Professor Martin Green, chief executive of Care England, which represents independent social care services, said there have been thousands of cases and deaths in care homes.

Story continues

HC-One, Britains biggest care home operator, said two-thirds of its homes are affected and that it has seen more than 300 deaths.

Caroline Abrahams, charity director of Age UK, said the lack of personal protective equipment and testing in care homes was leading to coronavirus running wild.

She joined leaders from Marie Curie, Care England, Independent Age and the Alzheimers Society in writing a letter to health secretary Matt Hancock demanding a care package to support social care through the pandemic.

Professor Chris Whitty, the chief medical officer, confirmed on Monday that COVID-19 outbreaks had been recorded at 92 care homes in the UK in a single day.

Speaking at the daily press briefing, he said around 13.5% of care homes had registered an outbreak.

If an outbreak is suspected, public health authorities will go in to do testing to assess if an outbreak has taken place, he added.

On Wednesday morning it was announced that all care home residents and staff with symptoms of COVID-19 are to be tested.

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Ramayan is being re-run on Doordarshan and people are enjoying the mythological show like never before. A few days ago, netizens made hilarious memes on Laxman. They were quite impressed with his angry young man look and compared him to Amitabh Bachchan. Sunil Lahri, who played the character of Laxman on the show, has now reacted to his memes. He said that he is liking and enjoying his memes.

Sunil Lahri was quoted by Koimoi as saying, "I have seen many memes that a lot of people have sent. Even my brother's children in the house send me the memes. I am liking it. I am enjoying it. It's said that you are popular and that's why they make these memes. I am honoured. I feel honoured to be a part of the memes."



Apparently, Sunil was supposed to play another character (Shatrughna) in Ramayan, but since the actor (Shashi Puri), who was supposed to play the role of Laxman, backed out, Sunil got to play the role.

It has to be recalled that Ramayan received record-breaking TRPs and Doordarshan became the most watched channel. Regarding the TRPs, Sunil told the portal, "It was expected. I was sure about it because I have been getting the response on social media. There was a demand for that the programme should be re-telecast. Also, I think people who have seen the show earlier, they have spoken so much about it to their family members and the younger generation. There was a lot of curiosity among the youngsters and the audience who have not seen it earlier. So they wanted to see what was the craze and was so great about this programme. Ultimately, it's the content, the sentiments of the show and the feeling is so strong, that has worked. It's a really good sign that good content always work among the audience."

Also Read: Mukesh Khanna: If Shatruji Feels That Taking Sonakshi's Name Was A Mistake, Then Yes, It Is
Trump blasted for airing propaganda video at coronavirus briefing

Iran Press TV

Tuesday, 14 April 2020 7:04 AM

US President Donald Trump shocked reporters at the White House by broadcasting a video with misleading information at his daily coronavirus press briefing that resembled a re-election campaign advertisement.

During his COVID-19 briefing on Monday, Trump insisted his administration had significantly mitigated the pandemic, despite a US death toll of over 23,200, the highest in the world.

At one point, he even claimed that his actions had saved "tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of lives."

To the shock of reporters gathered for his press briefing, Trump aired a self-promoting, deceptive video that sounded like a campaign re-election ad.

The video featured clips that included Democratic Governors Andrew Cuomo of New York and Gavin Newsom of California praising the Republican president's response to the pandemic.

Several news outlets, which have been live broadcasting most or all of the lengthy briefings, quickly cut away.

Asked by a journalist why he aired the video, Trump was disrespectful: "because we're getting fake news."

Trump has frequently used the term "fake news" to cast doubt on critical media reports about his administration, often without providing any evidence to support his case.

"To play a propaganda video at taxpayer expense in the White House briefing room is a new - you can insert your favorite word here," CNN anchor John King, who spent years covering the White House, said when the network cut away.

Afterwards, Trump repeatedly insisted he took the right step in mitigating the coronavirus outbreak, and expressed anger at reporters who asked him difficult questions.

"We really have done this right," Trump said. "The problem is the press doesn't cover it the way it should be."

The United States, with the world's third-largest population, has recorded more fatalities and confirmed cases from COVID-19 than any other country. There were over 23,600 deaths and nearly 582,000 cases as of Tuesday.

Trump's response to the coronavirus pandemic, which has been sharply condemned by US experts as severely inadequate, is ruining America's reputation as a competent country, according to The Guardian newspaper.

Trump's incompetence and dishonesty in managing the COVID-19 pandemic has left foreign observers as well as Americans in disbelief and may permanently tarnish US standing around the world, the newspaper reported on Sunday.

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A woman doctor was allegedly assaulted by patients at Lok Nayak Hospital in New Delhi on Tuesday. The hospital has been treating COVID-19 patients.

The incident occurred last evening at 5:20 pm inside a surgical ward of the hospital. The woman doctor, along with a male doctor who came to rescue her, was manhandled by the patients. The doctors had to hide inside the duty room and call the security.

As per the letter by the Resident Doctors Association (RWA) to the Medical officer, "One patient started hurling abuses and passed vulgar comments on a female resident doctor on duty. And when the doctor accompanying her objected, the patient gathered other patients of the ward and started threatening the doctors and the staff on duty,"

The letter also states that the marshalls and the guards did not have Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) supplied to them and entered the ward only after they were provided with the PPE by the doctors.

It has alleged lapses in the security management and has demanded the deployment of armed policemen at all COVID-19 wards. It also has demanded the registration of institutional FIR against the concerned patients.

The RWA has demanded action against the floor in-charge and the Chief Medical Officer on duty for allegedly not reaching the ward despite being aware of the situation and ignoring the crisis.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Downtowns notorious truck trap, the Finesilver Curve, a quick right-leaning turn that links Interstate 35 South with Interstate 10 West, will be closed today from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. so crews can proactively improve the troublesome ramp.

Named for the historic factory building beneath it, the devilishly-tight curve has more than a dozen warning signs and pavement markings alerting drivers to its 25-mph speed limit but continues to topple big trucks about once a month.

It happened again Friday morning when an 18-wheeler loaded with 45,000 pounds of grapes crashed there. Police said the driver, who was not injured, was not going the speed limit. As usual, the wreck closed the ramp for hours.

The Texas Department of Transportation said it has received some federal funds to help remedy the ramp, which engineers say cant feasibly be made longer and wider without demolishing houses in the neighborhood below.

On ExpressNews.com: San Antonios notorious Finesilver Curve bedevils trucks, defies easy solution

Among those safety improvements are: refreshed pavement markings, closely spaced reflective pavement markers, additional signage and LED chevrons to reinforce visibility.

The detours for the repair, which began Tuesday, are for southbound drivers on I-10 to use exit 155A to South Alamo Street, then turn around to access I-35 northbound. Those heading west can use exit 156 to access I-10.

State engineers, truckers and personal injury lawyers agree the ramp design primarily is to blame, but they also say trucks often are overloaded and top-heavy, some of their drivers poorly trained and virtually every motorist more distracted than they used to be.

In the most spectacular of the many mishaps, in December 1999, the driver of a tanker truck survived a crash on the Finesilver Curve that spilled some 4,500 gallons of hydrochloric acid, causing the evacuation of thousands from a 3-square-mile area and sending 11 people to hospitals with burning eyes and lungs.

Personal injury lawyer Jamie Shaw of the Carabin & Shaw firm said last year of the dreaded curve: If the state knows theyre having one truck rollover a month on that curve, they are playing a form of Russian roulette, hoping this wont kill someone. They must assemble engineers and begin the process of redesigning it.

TxDOT said its doing just that, embarking upon a long-term feasibility study for downtown roads that will address the Finesilver Curve and a host of other exits, entrances and road configurations.

bselcraig@express-news.net
Shahla Mohieddine stands in front of her courtyard in the Assyria district of Qamishli, wearing gloves and a mask she hopes will keep her safe from the coronavirus. She shows signs of bewilderment and concern as she utters a few words on her mobile phone with her husband.

As soon as she hangs up, she tells Al-Monitors correspondent, who is standing at a safe distance, My children are in their room waiting for their father to bring home some vegetables and fruits. But the prices are so high that we can barely buy what we need. My husbands income is not enough. He works at a mobile phone shop, which was shut down in compliance with the lockdown. We have no other source of income.

The Kurdish autonomous administration in Syria has extended the coronavirus lockdown period until at least April 21. It had announced the first 15-day lockdown period March 23 in the broad swath of territory under its control. It also strictly ordered owners of shops, cafeterias, internet cafes and gyms to shut down and adhere to the directives issued by the crisis team formed to address the spread of the coronavirus in the Jazira region.

In a related move, the autonomous administration also exempted residents from paying water, electricity and sanitation bills for May and June. But some of the residents with limited income viewed this step as insignificant, given these bills trivial amount. Also, the General Administration for Supply and Consumer Protection  which is a department of the autonomous administration  approved a list of fixed prices for goods, in light of a recent price surge after the curfew was implemented.

Yet the price list stirred confusion and anger among some retail merchants and traders. Wholesale trader Ali Awad, a pseudonym, told Al-Monitor, Most imported goods from any region are sold at high prices from the source suppliers, not to mention the customs duties we pay for the autonomous administration and the Syrian government checkpoints, in addition to the loading, unloading and shipping commissions that we also bear.

He explained that the prices set by the General Administration for Supply and Consumer Protection are lower than the prices charged at the country of origin. Do they want us to bear the difference ourselves? he asked.

A source from the General Administration for Supply and Consumer Protection told Al-Monitor, We set prices after studying the price of the food items at the source markets.

On March 29, the Executive Council of the autonomous administration announced food baskets would be distributed to needy families in the area during the lockdown to curb the spread of the coronavirus. However, the council didn't say how much aid would be available or when it would be distributed. Some baskets were handed out April 9 to low-income people by the administration's Office of Humanitarian Organizations Affairs in Al-Malikiyah (Derek).

Al-Monitor contacted some activists, journalists and low-income residents by phone. Gandhi Saadu, a resident of Qamishli  which is about 60 miles from Al-Malikiyah  said he was unaware of any measure to help the poor. Are there really practical steps being taken by the autonomous administration? I only heard some rumors about food items being distributed to all those in need, he told Al-Monitor.

The exemption from paying water, electricity and service taxes is a bit confusing. Such a measure doesn't rise to the level of procedures that protect or help the poor. This is all the more true since a family needs $400 a month to live decently amid exorbitant prices and soaring unemployment and poverty rates in our areas. These decisions cannot protect the poor," said Saadu.

He lamented the autonomous administrations decision-making process regarding the coronavirus pandemic. It seems that decisions and measures are taken arbitrarily and without any prior study or any strategic planning. There is no awareness of the difficult economic situation and living conditions of the population amid a lack of medical, health and economic planning," he said.

Saadu added, "The decisions taken so far have caused complete paralysis of various aspects of life without any coordination or networking between the different autonomous administration bodies, security institutions, medical and services agencies, and civil organizations. All measures taken to this date are mere security actions by the Kurdish security police (Asayish). Most of the procedures are implemented by the Asayish and then the municipalities, and this is a fatal mistake."

Journalist Sulafa Younes from Amuda also criticized what she sees as the administrations lack of seriousness in controlling purchase and sales operations, which causes societal problems.

She told Al-Monitor, The autonomous administrations services and preventive measures are good, but shop owners do not adhere to the fixed prices set by the General Administration for Supply and Consumer Protection. Prices vary from one place to another.

She pointed to a surge in meat prices. For example, the cost of veal and lamb recently rose by about 20%.

The majority of the population, earning a low income or daily salary, can't buy meat at such a high price, she said, adding, Merchants always claim [they must buy] at a high price from their suppliers, who in turn blame the source supplier for setting high prices. Meanwhile, the General Administration for Supply and Consumer Protection insists on its fixed prices lists. The consumer ends up being the victim.

Younes called on the administration to reconsider any decision that does not serve the poor. Most breadwinners have lost their source of livelihood. We urge you to provide them with maximum aid so they can withstand the current difficult circumstances," she said.

Amer Ali from the city of al-Qahtaniyah (Tirbespi) is a construction worker living on a daily salary. He told Al-Monitor, I haven't worked for almost 20 days now. I need at least $300 a month for household expenses." In addition, he has monthly bills for various utilities, a landline, and cell phone and internet service.

The autonomous administration says it exempted citizens from paying for some services, which do not exceed $3 for two months. I say this exemption is meaningless. Also, the distribution of food baskets is not enough. The administration ought to give out checks to cover our fixed expenses, Ali said. He further pointed to the additional financial burden borne by families with sick members.

Between adhering to safety measures and meeting the needs of families with limited incomes, the Kurdish region  which has had no development plans in recent years  seems to be heading toward even more hardship.
A Delhi government school teacher is ensuring that students do not miss out on blackboard teaching during the lockdown.

Meet Rashmi Jha, a teacher at Rajkiya Pratibha Vikas Vidyalaya on Raj Niwas Marg, who is giving Mathematics classes through her YouTube channel ''Ganit Pathshala''.

Jha started her YouTube channel three-four days ago to help class X students study Mathematics at their own time and convenience during this time when schools are closed.

"We had received an advisory from Delhi government to teach students online using Zoom app or WhatsApp. "I teach a section of students who do not have access to 24*7 internet and also Mathematics is a subject in which you just can''t send PDFs and students can study them," she said.

To ensure that students can study at their own convenience, she decided to start a YouTube channel. "Using a blackboard teaching, I explain various concepts in short videos and send the link to students. Whenever they have internet access they can study," she said.

She said she has been getting a good feedback from her students and their parents who have appreciated the idea. She said the videos have also been viewed by others apart from her students.

"I have uploaded seven videos till now and next up, I also plan to upload videos to help class 9 students in Mathematics," she said.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
I therefore once again appeal to the business community and the generality of the Bulawayo community and the Zimbabwean community as a whole, at home and away to once again come to the rescue of our fellow countrymen. All the acts of partnering Government efforts so far are all appreciated and we once again extend our hand and appeal for assistance. Most of these people have been taking care of many of us through sending money and groceries home. It is now our turn to reciprocate and help in taking care of them while they are on quarantine before coming home to families, said the Minister. Chronicle
The Boris Johnson government on Wednesday refused to comment or criticise US President Donald Trumps decision to stop funding to the World Health Organisation (WHO), insisting that London would continue to support the UN body.

The UK and US have what is called a special relationship, at times prompting criticism that London closely follows Washingtons foreign policy moves uncritically. Alleging failures in handling the coronavirus pandemic, Trump on Tuesday announced withdrawing funding to WHO.

A Downing Street spokesman said: Our position is that the UK has no plans to stop funding the WHO which has an important role to play in leading the global health response. Coronavirus is a global challenge and its essential that countries work together to tackle this shared threat.

Asked if the Johnson government is disappointed by Trumps decision, he added: I can only set out the UKs position, and that is that we have no plans to stop funding the World Health Organisation. The UK contributes over USD 10 million annually to WHO.

However, Labour leader Keir Starmer criticised Trumps decision in a radio interview.

That is completely the wrong thing to do. There needs to be a global response to this, we should be supporting our global institutions, he told LBC.

Were about to go on and try and get a vaccine, there should be a global effort to get that vaccine and a global plan as to how we roll that out across the world. This is not the time to be retreating and pulling away from global organisations that help roll that out.

The UK is one of the worst affected countries in Europe, with over 12,000 deaths and over 93,000 cases in hospitals. The figures do not include those passing away or infected in private homes, retirement villages and care homes.

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A Chinese NHS worker taunted by a colleague who made repeated Kung Fu noises from martial arts films has won almost 30,000 in a race claim.

Sandy Sheun said Stephen Baldwin impersonated Bruce Lee in his presence while they worked together in the IT department at Sheffield Teaching Hospitals NHS trust.

Baldwin also put on an accent when talking about traditional Tsing Tao beer, an employment tribunal heard, as part of a 'misguided' attempt at humour.

Senior engineer Mr Sheun sued the health service where he has worked for 10 years for racial discrimination and now won around 28,500 in damages.

The tribunal heard that Mr Sheun's fellow IT workers at the hospital would repeatedly talk about martial arts films while at work.

Sandy Sheun, a keen bodybuilder, has won nearly 30,000 after a race claim against a colleague who made 'kung fu' noises in his presence at Sheffield Teaching Hospitals NHS trust

Colleagues - in particular Baldwin - would make the 'Kung Fu' noise, using 'stereotypical martial arts noises in a humorous way', the hearing was told.

In one incident in December 2018, Mr Sheun was in the office and could hear his colleagues talking.

'As part of the discussion, Mr Baldwin used a stereotypical vocalisation, typical of early Chinese martial arts films and used most often by the actor Bruce Lee,' the tribunal found.

'This is supposed to have been a regular occurrence between November 2016 and December 2018.'

Mr Sheun, a keen bodybuilder from Sheffield, filed a complaint against Baldwin, who denied that he was trying to be offensive but was given a formal warning.

Sheun said fellow IT worker Stephen Baldwin also put on accents and impersonated Bruce Lee

The computer engineer then took the NHS trust to tribunal, claiming race discrimination. Lawyers for the NHS claimed he was 'over sensitive'.

Although it dismissed other claims by Mr Sheun that his colleagues had referred to Chinese as 'communist bastards' and had harassed him with impersonations from the Indiana Jones and Police Academy films, the panel concluded that he had been the victim of racial discrimination.

The tribunal heard that Mr Sheun had suffered abuse while growing up in the west of England close to the Welsh borders.

'He had suffered regular and distressing discriminatory treatment at the hands of other people in the town and of his school mates.

'Some of that discriminatory treatment included the use of the Bruce Lee Kung Fu noise. The films of Bruce Lee were common currency at the time that Mr Sheun was growing up.

He said sued the health service where he worked for ten years due to the discrimination

'The mimicking of the accents of people China when speaking English of course refers to their Chinese ethnicity.

'Further, Chinese martial arts and the films that feature them are so closely associated with Chinese ethnicity and culture that any reference to those is likely to relate to the Chinese race.'

Mr Baldwin was not making comments or noises with the aim of distressing Mr Sheun, the tribunal found.

'They appear to be efforts at misguided humour and appear to be without malice,' the judgment concludes.

The panel awarded Mr Sheun 22,500 for injury to feelings including interest, and around 6,000 including interest for lost earnings.

'There is ample evidence to suggest that Mr Sheun did feel his dignity to be undermined. (He) has suffered harassment in his earlier life and, moreover, harassment of a very similar nature to that which he is complaining of in this case.

'We reject any submission that the claimant is "over sensitive".'
An online newspaper has published telephone contacts of all the state and federal legislators, including senators, from Cross River State, South-South Nigeria, with advice to their constituents to call and request for support to cushion the effect of the lockdown.

Cross River, like most other states in Nigeria, has been on lockdown to halt the spread of the coronavirus, although the state has no confirmed case of the virus.

Paradise News said it published the legislators phone contacts because of public interest.

Most people in Cross River are not government workers, some depend on menial work (to survive). This lockdown has really affected them, the editor of Paradise News, Frankie Ifop, told PREMIUM TIMES, Monday.

The nearest people to this class of people are their representatives. So far, we have not heard that these lawmakers have gone to their constituencies to show love or concern for the people.

Mr Ifop said the lawmakers response to the peoples plight during the fight against COVID-19 would certainly become a campaign issue in the next election in the state.

The legislators phone contacts, he said, were already available on the internet, in such places like the National Assemblys website.

People who spoke with PREMIUM TIMES on this commended the newspaper but said the legislators are, however, not likely to pick calls from unknown numbers.

A lot of them will not pick their call, and that is a barrier to the very good thing the Paradise News has done, a Calabar-based journalist, Anthony Bassey said. If you are representing me I should be able to access you, especially at a time like this.

A lawyer in Cross River state, James Ibor, who applauded the newspaper publication, said a lawmakers phone contact as a matter of law and morality ought to be of public knowledge. A public officer has no private life, so cannot be talking about a breach of privacy, he said.

PREMIUM TIMES called a few of the over 30 telephone numbers published by the Paradise News, only two of the lawmakers picked the call.

The lawmaker representing Odukpani State Constituency, Francis Asuquo, said he did not have a problem with the publication, since almost all my constituents have my phone number.

Mr Asuquo said the palliative measures taken by the Ben Ayade administration was done on behalf of government as a whole and that the House of Assembly has made its own contribution to it.

The other lawmaker, Francis Ovat, who represents Obubra 2 State Constituency, said he was not in the mood to talk when PREMIUM TIMES asked him how his constituency was faring with the lockdown in Cross River state.

Other lawmakers did not respond to the phone calls.

Cross River has about 3 million population. Its people, especially in the northern part of the state, are mainly into farming. The state government is the biggest employer of labour in the state.

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The living standard (in Cross River state) is very low, very poor, said the journalist, Mr Bassey. A lot of civil servants are complaining, the economy is very harsh.

The journalist said retired government workers were yet to get their gratuities and also a lot of the civil servants who have been promoted were yet to receive a salary upgrade.

We dont have many companies. We dont have factories. The ones (factories) we have heard of, we are yet to see their products. Tourism is no longer what it used to be in Cross River, he said.

Mr Bassey said the state and the federal lawmakers were not doing enough for their constituents. The reason, he said, is probably because they were foist on the people during elections.

The lawyer, Mr Ibor, said the lawmakers are not close to their constituents, otherwise, they would have promoted and protected the interest of street children in their areas, who dont have homes and doors to lock during this lockdown.
A married mother miraculously came back to life as funeral parlor workers were set to prepare her body for a service hours after a doctor at a private clinic in east-central Paraguay had informed her family she had died.

Gladys Rodriguez Duarte, who is an ovarian cancer patient, was rushed to San Fernando Clinic in the city of Coronel Oviedo on Saturday morning after her high blood pressure increased.

According to a Paraguay National Police report, the 50-year-old woman was admitted to the hospital at 9:30am local time and was checked by Dr. Heriberto Vera.



Dr. Vera declared Rodriguez Duarte dead at 11:20am before relaying the tragic news to her husband Maximino Duarte Ferreira and daughter Sandra Duarte.

The physician confirmed her cause of death as cervical cancer.

Sandra Duarte slammed Dr. Veras judgement and said he just wrote her mother off instead of attempting to bring her back to life.

He assumed she was dead and handed her naked to me like an animal with her death certificate. He didnt even revive her, Duarte said, according to Paraguayan television network TV Aire.

We trusted him, thats why we went there. But they disconnected her and passed her off to the funeral home.

The hospital subsequently handed over a body bag containing Rodriguez Duartes cadaver to the personnel of Duarte and Sons Funeral, who made the shocking discovery.

The owner told investigators that Rodriguez Duarte was moving inside the bag when they unloaded her at the funeral parlor.

Rodriguez Duarte immediately taken to one of Paraguays Social Welfare Institute medical facilities and placed under observation.

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FARMINGTON HILLS, MI - Luke Schreibers parents didnt think their thermometer could possibly be right. There was no way their toddler could be registering a 107.1 temperature. And he couldnt possibly have COVID-19 at his age, could he?

The Farmington Hills couple is sharing their emotional story with MLive readers, saying they want other people to understand that if coronavirus can unexpectedly impact the smallest members of their family, it can happen to anyone.

What began as a normal day on March 31 turned into a medical nightmare that the family is still living through. Amanda May and Ryan Schreiber say they had been checking the temperatures of their kids, 4-month-old Alistair and 22-month-old Luke, everyday since the family began staying home after Gov. Gretchen Whitmer issued her order restricting non-essential travel.

They were around 98 degrees. I wasnt concerned until Luke woke up crying that Tuesday morning. He never wakes up crying, Amanda May Schreiber told MLive.

She said her sons temperature was at 103 degrees that morning. She gave him something for the fever, which brought it down a couple degrees. But a few hours later after his nap, she couldnt believe what his temperature read.

He got up and he looked flush. My husband sat down with him and I took Lukes temperature and he was 107.1," she said. "I took the blankets off and waited a couple minutes and he registered 106.5. I took it about 10 more times to make sure it was registering correctly. I also checked my temperature and my husbands and we were normal. I even got another thermometer out and he was at 106.4.

Rushed to the hospital

Amanda May Schreiber said she took Luke to Beaumont Hospital, where his fever registered 105.1. The toddler was admitted to the hospital. Schreiber says they first tested him for everything else before finally testing him for COVID-19. The results came back positive.

Six hours after we got to the hospital, his fever was still at 104.5. He stayed the night. It took just 12 hours to get the results back that he was positive for COVID-19 because they do in-house testing.

22-month old Luke Schreiber of Farmington Hills, MI laying in a hospital bed two weeks ago. He's been battling COVID-19 ever since. (Photo by Amanda May Schreiber)

Never-ending fever

After his fever became manageable, Schreiber took Luke home where she says hes been dealing with an on-and-off fever ever since. While we were talking to her this week, she said Lukes fever was at 101 degrees, a full two weeks after returning home from the hospital.

"Its just the lingering fever. Its unbelievable. It goes away and comes right back. We have yet to see a day without a fever at some point. He gets exhausted way faster and just needs to sleep more.

Moms symptoms

Not only is Schreiber trying to take care of Luke, but she says shes been sick for 10 days. She describes having breathing issues and just feeling exhausted.

I am a triathlete and I just ran a half-Ironman last August while 6 months pregnant after being medically cleared for it. I was running before this. I was running two miles, four to five times a week while wearing a mask and staying away from everyone. Now, just sitting and laying around, I feel like Im huffing and puffing like Im going up and down the stairs, but Im not. The fact that my lungs feel like this to me is just crazy.

She says her doctor told her theres no point getting tested because shes told its almost certain she and the rest of her family has COVID-19 because they were all exposed to it.

My pulse oximetry has been as low as 82. Its terrifying. The only thing that has helped me are breathing exercises my physical therapist gave me to do over a virtual appointment. I was also given an Qvar inhaler and Zithromax. But Ive seen little to no difference with those. This virus is horrible and lasts for what seems like forever.

Schreiber says shes also frustrated at the response shes received from some people who still dont believe young kids can get the virus. She says no, Luke does not have a compromised immune system.

Luke has had colds and viruses regularly like any kid. It usually takes him a few days to get over things. Hes never had any issues. And hes never had a temperature like that. He is a healthy boy full of energy. This virus has knocked him on his butt."

Advice for others

Schreiber says her husband, Ryan, has felt OK so far. He had chest tightness for a few days, but thats it. She say her 4-month old has had fevers for about a week of around 100.5 to 101.5, but overall has been doing well. She hopes her familys story will convince everyone to stay home and stay away from people.

Healthy kids and healthy young adults can get this and be very sick from it. I am baffled why people still refuse to stay home and are going out for non-essentials. I would encourage parents to just keep their kids home.

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KENOSHA  An investigation is still incomplete into the cause of a fatal house explosion that occurred in Kenosha in March.

One person was killed and two people seriously injured when the house at 7851 30th Ave. exploded in the early morning hours of March 22.

Kenosha County Medical Examiner Patrice Hall said the person who died, an adult male who was found in the basement area, has still not been officially identified. She said her office is waiting for DNA results before being able to release the mans identity.

The couple who owned the home were rescued with the help of neighbors who worked to pull the man and woman from a window in the burning home. The man who died was a friend who was staying with them.

Guy Santelli, fire inspector for the Kenosha Fire Department, said the official cause of the explosion is still under investigation.

We had a scene examination there on Monday with all of the insurance company investigators and attorneys, they decided there were a few people that were missing that should be there, Santelli said.

He said in cases like that of the explosion, representatives of the manufacturers of any of the equipment that could have been involved in the incident are on hand for the investigation.

The (manufacturers of) the dryer, the stove, the furnace, the water heater, the smoke detectorsall of those people have to be invited to come and take a look at the scene at the same time, Santelli said. It looks like were going to be back there in a couple weeks. We will take it apart piece by piece to determine a cause and origin.

Santelli said he did not know the condition of the couple who were injured in the explosion. A member of the family created an online fundraiser at https://www.gofundme.com/f/tammy-and-dave-hall

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Oregons rickety, outdated system for processing jobless claims is failing thousands of workers when they most need help, delaying unemployment cash they could use to help pay rent and other bills during the states coronavirus shutdown.

The state processes unemployment filings with obsolete computers running systems that date back to the Reagan administration. The technology is rigid and difficult to adapt, frequently requiring manual changes to fix individual errors.

Oregon has known for years that the systems needed to be replaced and received $86 million in federal money to modernize its technology back in 2009. The overhaul didnt get off the ground until the past few years, though, and wont be complete until 2025.

The aging computers are causing enormous frustration for Oregon workers laid off during the coronavirus pandemic, spitting out erroneous information about their claim status and resisting the states efforts to adapt the technology to changes in the jobless benefits program.

The ancient technology also stands to cost Oregon a fortune in federal money earmarked for workers laid off by the coronavirus pandemic  workers who, in some cases, are younger than the computer systems themselves.

Laid-off workers typically have to wait a week before claiming benefits. The rescue package Congress passed last month waived the penalties for states that dont have a waiting week, however, clearing the way for laid-off workers to start getting their money immediately.

Those funds now include $600 in additional weekly payments newly authorized by Congress but set to run out at the end of July.

Oregon, though, said it will not waive the waiting week because its aged computer system is not up to it. And since the $600 bonus payments have a limited life, thats a week of payments Oregon workers will never get.

With 270,000 Oregonians having lost their jobs in the past few weeks, that means a week of lost $600 checks could cost Oregonians well over $100 million in aggregate  and possibly a great deal more.

Pressed on the issue by The Oregonian/OregonLive, the Oregon Employment Department indicated Tuesday it may reverse course and waive the waiting week after all.

However, the department said the waiver is among its last priorities and it gave no indication of whether the hundreds of thousands of workers who already filed claims might receive retroactive payments.

Pretty random

Oregons employment department, like those in other states, has been overwhelmed by the record volume of jobless claims sparked by the pandemic. Oregon claims have surged twentyfold in the past few weeks.

Some claims can be handled automatically online and go through smoothly. The employment department says it processed 134,000 new claims in just the past three weeks, more than in the previous six months combined. Oregon paid nearly $94 million in benefits in the week beginning April 4 and says it has quadrupled the number of workers taking calls.

Still, more than 130,000 other claims hadnt been processed by the end of last week.

The employment department has apologized for repeated problems with its computer systems, acknowledging that laid-off workers are frequently told their claims have been denied even though they are legally entitled to benefits.

The department is receiving more than 2,400 calls a day but fewer than half of those get through, according to state data. The average hold time is nearly two hours long.

After weeks of trying to file her claim, laid-off Portland bartender Charlotte Wannagat said she has no faith at all in a system that doesnt seem to make any sense. She lost her job March 17, when Oregon shut down bars and restaurants to contain the coronavirus outbreak. Wannagat said she immediately filed for benefits but still hasnt received a check.

A letter from the department indicated theres a problem with her availability to seek new work, though the departments website says workers like Wannagat dont need to seek a new job if theyre on temporary layoff.

Its a busy signal every time. There are so many people trying to get on at the same time that you literally cant even get to the phone recording, said Wannagat, 27. I have no way to fix what I know is a problem because the system is so overloaded.

Because she lives with her boyfriend, Wannagat said he can help cover the rent. But she said shes running out of savings to pay her own health insurance and many other bills.

It all seems to be pretty random who gets their money and who doesnt, Wannagat said. Im feeling anxious and concerned for my almost immediate future.

Oregons obsolete computers are at the heart of these problems.

Gig workers and the self-employed, who previously couldnt claim jobless benefits, are now eligible because of changes in the CARES Act rescue package Congress passed last month. Oregons computer systems couldnt accept that change, however. The department said it is working to adapt its computer systems and that self-employed workers will eventually get their money.

It may be a different story with the waiting week.

The CARES Act suspended penalties for states that waive that standard waiting period. Many states moved quickly to eliminate it and speed benefits to their unemployed workers.

Last week, though, Oregon Employment Department spokeswoman Gail Krumenauer said the state had opted not to do that. She said the states computer systems are too old to cope with the change.

For the Oregon Employment Department to waive the waiting week, we would need to interrupt processing the record number of claims coming into our system to spend thousands of hours reprogramming it, Krumenauer wrote in an email. Interrupting claims processing would cause further delays in getting benefits to Oregonians in this great time of need than waiving the waiting week.

Its impossible to know just how much Oregons workers could lose if the state is unable to waive the waiting week. Simple math, though, suggests it would be an enormous sum.

The state fielded nearly 270,000 jobless claims in the first few weeks of the pandemic as layoffs hit 1 in every 8 Oregon workers. All laid-off workers are eligible for the new, $600 weekly federal bonus, on top of their regular jobless benefits.

But since Oregon is leaving the waiting period in place, its unemployed workers will miss a weeks $600 bonus payment. Multiply that $600 by 270,000 workers and the total comes to $162 million.

That is more than the state expects to spend on replacing the computer system: In January, the employment department estimated the upgrade cost between $80 million to $123 million.

Its likely, though, the total lost benefits are a great deal higher. Jobless claims have run at record levels in each of the past three weeks  and probably understate the crisis, since many Oregon workers have been unable to reach the overwhelmed employment department to file claims. A surge of new claims is expected again this week and all those workers will also have to endure a waiting week, too.

Further, while workers now are eligible for 39 weeks of regular jobless benefits, many of them presumably will find new jobs before theyve exhausted those benefits. Leaving the waiting period means they would miss a week of benefits they would never get back.

That would add up to tens of millions in additional dollars Oregon workers would have been entitled to but wont receive.

Top leaders avoid questions

Employment department director Kay Erickson declined a request for an interview. Instead, Deputy Director Jeannine Beatrice defended the departments performance.

Because of this surge in staffing, Oregonians are already getting enhanced unemployment benefits under the CARES Act, which Congress passed two weeks ago, Beatrice wrote in an email. Where provisions of the CARES Act call for additional coding or computer work, the department is working to implement those changes in its system.

Those changes now include the coding necessary to eliminate the waiting week, Beatrice wrote, apparently reversing the departments earlier position it would not make an effort to waive the waiting period.

Pressed for further detail, the department said it will look into the feasibility of waiving the waiting week but wont pursue that immediately because there is a real risk of accidentally stopping or delaying benefits to people as we remove the waiting week. The department gave no indication whether Oregon might retroactively pay workers for that missed week.

The governors office did not respond to repeated questions about whether she was involved in the decision to leave the waiting week in place or whether the state had estimated how much the decision would cost Oregon workers.

On Tuesday evening, though, her office said Gov. Kate Brown was aware of the original decision and is now open to waiving the week  provided the employment department can pull it off.

Now that theres potential federal money available to provide additional benefits to Oregonians who qualify, the governor is looking to the Oregon Employment Department to find a path forward, interim press secretary Liz Merah wrote in an email. The governor is committed to ensuring Oregonians receive the benefits to which theyre owed and entitled.

Old tech plagues multiple states

Oregon is one of a number of states weathering the coronavirus outbreak with technology that is decades old. Oregons systems were built in the 1990s, with some components dating as far back as 1985.

As in other states, Oregons claims system is built on an antique programming language called COBOL, developed in the 1950s. In New Jersey, the state put out a call for volunteer COBOL programmers to help adapt its own unemployment claims system.

Oregon has been planning updates since 2009, when the state received $85.6 million in one-time modernization funds from the U.S. Department of Labor. The state still had nearly $82 million on hand this past October, according to a letter Erickson sent to the Legislature in January.

Planning for an upgrade has spanned three administrations of three Oregon governors.

For a variety of reasons, including leadership changes within the agency, work on the initial phase of the modernization initiative did not begin until February 2016 and did not begin to pick up pace until the last quarter of 2016, according to a legislative update issued in 2019.

The update did not explain which leadership changes interfered with the project, but a 2013 investigation by The Oregonian detailed management failures under former Gov. John Kitzhaber that delayed the mainframe computer replacement project and wasted tens of millions of dollars.

Three of the agencys top leaders either left or were fired that year after the problems surfaced.

Inside state government the issues had been well-documented, as audit after audit exposed leadership problems that festered as the agency wasted as much as $30 million on computer software programs that didnt work, The Oregonian reported.

Bill Fink, a former agency deputy director, said in 2013 that hed been highly concerned about problems replacing the mainframe system during his 2006-2012 tenure. He hired a consultant who reported in March 2012 that the initiative was veering off track.

Another consultant delivered similar findings in early 2013, although his credibility was undermined when he was accused of drugging and assaulting several women in Portland. He ultimately pleaded no contest to sexually abusing one woman and unlawful possession of the drugs ecstasy and ketamine.

The departments technology section also faced allegations of nepotism in 2013, when it emerged that the Legislatures technology project analyst, Bob Cummings, came to the defense of his wifes work managing employment department technology projects amid lawmakers questions. Bob Cummings still works for the Legislature and Leslie Cummings went on to be deputy secretary of state.

State auditors worked to keep the languishing computer project on leaders radars. Their 2015 audit found that the departments staff had to identify and manually collect claims errors. In the wake of that audit, Brown made another change in leadership at the agency, replacing the director with Erickson.

These computer programs are inflexible, poorly documented, and difficult to maintain, the audit found. Considering these factors, Employment should take steps to replace them with more robust and maintainable computer code.

The report noted that prior audits by the Secretary of States office, in 2003 and 2012, identified problems introducing changes to the systems. Auditors found the systems were largely unchanged in 2015.

With seeming foresight about the current glitches, they warned that although the department came up with a workaround, it may be difficult to execute in the event of an economic downturn, since (the department) may not have the additional staffing required to handle the increased volume and complexity of errors.

The departments technology is not flexible enough to efficiently handle additional requirements, such as those that occurred during the latest economic downturn during the Great Recession, the audit found.

Now, history is repeating itself with the coronavirus recession.

Sen. Betsy Johnson, a Scappoose Democrat who sits on the Legislatures technology oversight committee, said the states approach to replacing huge technology systems can be opaque, but in this case, I think we should have pushed more for information.

Sen. Chuck Riley, a Hillsboro Democrat who co-chairs the technology committee, blamed some of the project delays on federal requirements tied to that funding. He said he did not know how long the project had been underway and also said state leaders are taking their time in order to get it right.

My whole philosophy is that people will not remember that it took long if it works, Riley said on Monday. But theyll remember that it didnt work if we did it too fast.

When asked if the enormous human impacts of this projects delay had changed his mind about this, Riley did not directly answer.

Its really difficult to know whats going to come down the pike, he said.

Correction: This article has been corrected to indicate the state paid $94 million in benefits in the week beginning April 4, not the week ending April 4.

-- Mike Rogoway | mrogoway@oregonian.com | twitter: @rogoway |

-- Hillary Borrud; hborrud@oregonian.com; @hborrud

Subscribe to Oregonian/OregonLive newsletters and podcasts for the latest news and top stories.
Storyful

An affable deer created somewhat of a buzz in a neighborhood near Salt Lake City, Utah, he regularly visited over the holiday period.The deer, nicknamed Cooper by local residents, has been playing with children in the neighborhood of Herriman and was even spotted posing for photos, reports said.Herriman resident Angelica Lujan recorded footage of the tame deer interacting with her children outside of her home on South Rowell Drive.Speaking to KSTU, a Utah Division of Wildlife Resources representative said despite the deers friendly attitude, the best thing for the animal is for people to leave him alone.People dont realize these beautiful, cute deer can be aggressive as they get older. Weve had times in the past where these friendly deer, they do get aggressive, said Scott Root, Conservation Outreach Manager, Utah Division of Wildlife Resources.Weve had kids hurt at bus stops. Bad things happen when we feed deer in a residential area, Root added. Credit: Angelica Lujan via Storyful
A shooting Tuesday night in Paterson left one man dead and another wounded, authorities said.

Officers were called to gunfire shortly after 8 p.m. on East 25th Street, near 14th Avenue, where they discovered the two city men shot, according to the Passaic County Prosecutors Office.

Both men were rushed to St. Josephs University Medical Center, where 27-year-old Tamir Blackwood died from his wounds, the prosecutors office said. The second man, a 26-year-old, was listed in stable condition.

Officials did not disclose a possible motive for the shooting or identify any suspects as the investigation continued.

Anyone with information was asked to call 1-877-370-PCPO, email tips@passaiccountynj.org or contact city police at 973-321-1120.

Noah Cohen may be reached at ncohen@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter @noahyc. Find NJ.com on Facebook.
BOSTON, April 15, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- National Geographic Learning, a Cengage company, is offering free COVID-19 lesson plans and resources for teachers to help learners understand the pandemic and its impact.

"Knowledge is power, and during this unprecedented time, we need to ensure our students are armed with an understanding of the illness and what is happening around them," said Alexander Broich, President of Cengage Global Businesses. "We created these free resources and lesson plans to ensure that teachers across the globe have materials available quickly to engage students on the virus and help add context when it comes to the science and history, as well as the social impact."

National Geographic Learning is offering four lessons, intended for primary to middle school English language learners, that provide essential information for students about COVID-19, what they can do to protect themselves, and how they can make a difference. These lessons also provide language support to help students communicate about the virus in English.

Additionally, science, social studies and reading lessons are included as part of the COVID-19 free resources to help teachers provide context, and educate students on the impact of the pandemic. For middle and high school students, these will include a focus on the science of COVID-19 and coronaviruses, a look at how vaccines are developed, and comparisons to the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic. Social studies lessons explore the impact of the virus on students' neighborhoods and the medical community, the economic fallout of the pandemic, and the geographic context for mapping its spread.

For more information on these COVID-19 lessons, and to access the resources, visit: https://exploreinside.ngl.cengage.com/index.php/interdisciplinary-k12-resources/

Beyond these COVID-19 course materials, National Geographic Learning is providing all U.S. K-12 teachers with free access to its learning platforms for the rest of the school year to support them during this unprecedented period. It is also extending access where it is needed for current customers and providing training and support for teachers transitioning to online teaching around the globe. National Geographic Learning English Language Teaching has already provided webinar training to more than 20,000 teachers globally to help them make the transition to online learning.

About National Geographic Learning

National Geographic Learning, a Cengage company, is a leading educational publisher for the K-12 and English Language Teaching markets. At National Geographic Learning, we believe that an engaged and motivated learner will be a successful one, and we design our materials with a highly interactive storytelling approach which is a great way to invoke these connections. To learn more, visit: NGL.Cengage.com and eltngl.com.

About Cengage

Cengage is the education and technology company built for learners. The company serves the higher education, K-12, professional, library and workforce training markets worldwide. Learn more at: www.cengage.com.

Media Contacts:

Emily Featherston, Cengage

617.757.8035, [email protected]

SOURCE Cengage

Related Links

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A young Australian woman with Tourette's who defied school bullies to fulfil her dream of becoming a professional dancer on a cruise ship is pleading for help after the coronavirus pandemic left her stranded at sea.

Cassidy Richardson, 22, is confined to her room on the Mariner of the Seas floating off the coast of Florida - unable to make her way home to Australia after finishing her last job as a dancer on the ship in late March.

Thousands of cruise ship passengers and crew are stranded around the globe, with luxury vessels emerging as hotbeds for coronavirus immediately after the outbreak began and governments banning them from docking at their ports.

The Ruby Princess, anchored at Port Kembla south of Sydney, is Australia's biggest single source of infection with 600 passengers diagnosed, 19 who have died.

Seven month before her own ordeal began, Ms Richardson was celebrating starting her dream career when she boarded the $650million Mariner of the Seas to begin training for her role on-board.

Cruise ship dancer Cassidy Richardson, 22, has been confined to her room on a ship off the coast of Florida because of restrictions on the travel of cruise ship workers

Cassidy pictured in happier times on the Mariner of the Seas in a post shared on March 21

Pictured: The Mariner of the Seas, which has been forced to drift of the coast of the US during the coronavirus lockdown - only docking to refuel and restock

The young dancer, from Kiama on New South Wales' South Coast, had defied the taunts of bullies to become a performer

The performer, from Kiama on New South Wales' south coast, set sail from Miami after years of training at a dance school in Melbourne.

In doing so, she proved wrong the nay-saying teachers and bullies at school who said the verbal and physical tics she suffers because of her Tourette's Syndrome would prevent her from dancing professionally.

But when the global shutdown of borders began last month - coupled with strict rules about the movement of cruise ship workers in the US, the 22-year-old found herself unable to get home.

The US government has banned cruise ship workers from boarding domestic commercial flights.

That means if the cruise ship docked in Orlando, Cassidy would be unable to make a connecting flight to San Francisco or Los Angeles to get another flight to Sydney.

Because of her visa restrictions as a cruise ship worker, a road trip to the west coast would need to be accompanied as part of 'safeguarding' regulations to stop her from staying in the US.

The performer's dream job with Royal Carribean turned into a nightmare after the coronavirus pandemic began while she was finishing up her time on-board

Cassidy's mother said it seemed a cruel twist of irony her daughter had done humanitarian work on the ship to supply food to the victims of Hurricane Dorian (pictured) - only to not receive help in her own time of need

Cassidy pictured with her mother Janelye on the $650million cruise liner before the pandemic stopped the 22-year-old from getting home

'The last month they've just been docking in Florida to take on supplies and refuel and then go out and anchor somewhere out at sea - she's currently off the coast of Cuba,' her mother Janelye Richardson told Daily Mail Australia.

'Cassidy is now in day 16 of isolation - the only time she sees anyone is to do the daily temperature check and to be given her meals.'

Janelye said those on the ship, which is still carrying about 600 crew, were put into isolation after a suspected case of the coronavirus was detected on-board.

Cassidy is pictured in her room on-board the Mariner of the Seas - where she has been confined to after a case of the coronavirus was identified onboard

Janelye has been trying desperately to get the Australian government's Department of Foreign Affairs to charter a flight home for Cassidy and the other Australians onboard, but to no avail.

'When I called DFAT they were useless and the person on the other end of the phone did not know about the US government's new travel rule for cruise workers,' she said.

Janelye said the issue appeared to be there were not enough Australians left on the Mariner of the Seas to make a charter flight worth the cost.

The performer, from Kiama on New South Wales' South Coast, had set sail from Miami after years of training at a dance school in Melbourne

Cassidy pictured in her state room onboard the ship - where she has had to isolate for the past 16 days

'I'm working with the Australian consulate in the US, and our local member here so we are hopeful we'll get Cassidy home,' she said.

'I'm in a Facebook group with other families who have relatives stuck over there, and one of the group members has had more success with DFAT - so I'll try again in the morning.'

WHAT IS TOURETTE'S SYNDROME? Tourette's syndrome is a neurological condition characterised by a combination of involuntary noises and movements called tics. It usually starts during childhood and continues into adulthood. Tics can be either be vocal or physical. In many cases Tourette's syndrome runs in families and it's often associated with obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD) or attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). Tourette's syndrome is named after the French doctor, Georges Gilles de la Tourette, who first described the syndrome and its symptoms in the 19th century. There's no cure for Tourette's syndrome, but treatment can help to control the symptoms. Source: NHS Choices Advertisement

Adding to her frustration, Cassidy's mother said it seemed a cruel twist of irony her daughter had done humanitarian work on the ship to supply food to the victims of Hurricane Dorian.

But now in her own time of need, her mother claimed Cassidy's needs had been neglected by her own government.

'The workers provided water and supplies and generators when the hurricane hit back in August,' Janelye said.

'Now it's like "they're in need of help now" and there's no one coming to their aid - it's hurtful they provided all this aid and not too many months later they're hitting walls.'

Cassidy's mother refused to criticise Royal Carribean though, saying they had taken all steps to avoid the spread of coronavirus on the ship - including rigorous cleaning procedures.

Cassidy told ABC News she felt 'lonely' being isolated on the 'other side of the world'.

'I'm on the other side of the world and it makes isolation more lonely,' she said.

'The rules keep changing every day and the US is going through their worst case of coronavirus, so we're just taking it day by day and will see where it takes us.'

Cassidy would be unable to make a connecting flight to San Francisco or Los Angeles to get another connection to Sydney because of the strict travel rules

Her mother meanwhile said the past 16 days had left her with a range of emotions - from sadness to frustration and even a cause to smile.

'We've had a few times where we've cried over it,' she said.

'I have smiled at some points because at least on the ship she's safe. There's a range of emotions.

'She's by herself though and at times like these with all that's happening in the world you need to have your family by your side.'

Daily Mail Australia has contacted the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade and Royal Carribean for comment.
A worker sprays disinfectant as a precaution to curb the spread of the new coronavirus ahead of the early voting at a local polling station in Seoul, Thursday, April 9, 2020. AP



South Korea recorded fewer than 30 new cases of the novel coronavirus for the third day in a row Wednesday, as the nation is facing the fourth week of strict social-distancing restrictions to slow the spread of the highly contagious virus.

The 27 new cases, which were detected Tuesday and compared with 27 on Monday and 25 on Sunday, brought the nation's total infections to 10,591, according to the Korea Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (KCDC).

South Korea recorded around 50 or fewer daily new cases over the past week, a sharp drop from the Feb. 29 peak of 909 new cases. But health authorities remain on high alert over cluster infections at churches and hospitals, as well as new cases coming from overseas.

The nation's death toll from the coronavirus, which emerged in China late last year, rose by three to 225, according to the KCDC. In total, 7,616 people in South Korea have recovered from the virus.

The total number of cases reported in Daegu and the surrounding North Gyeongsang Province reached 6,823 and 1,348, respectively.

Other major provinces and cities also reported infections, with Seoul and the surrounding Gyeonggi Province adding five and six new cases, respectively.

The country also detected four new cases coming from overseas at border checkpoints, raising the country's total number of imported cases to 955.

Seeking to reduce the daily number of new infections to below 50, South Korea has extended strict guidelines on social distancing by another two weeks to April 19.

South Korea, which has tested 534,552 people so far, is the first major country to hold elections amid the coronavirus pandemic.

Voters wearing face masks and disposable gloves cast their ballots Wednesday, with precautionary measures being put in place at polling stations.

Apparently having slowed the spread of coronavirus infections recently, South Korea went ahead with the quadrennial elections to fill the 300-seat unicameral National Assembly. (Yonhap)
NEW YORK, April 15, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- Pomerantz LLP is investigating claims on behalf of investors Mesabi Trust ("Mesabi" or the "Company") (NYSE: MSB). Such investors are advised to contact Robert S. Willoughby at rswilloughby@pomlaw.com or 888-476-6529, ext. 7980.

The investigation concerns whether Mesabi 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]

On April 13, 2020, Mesabi issued a press release declaring a $0.56 per share quarterly dividend, representing a significant decrease from its prior dividend of $0.70 per share. Mesabi advised investors that the decrease was "primarily attributable to a lower volume of iron ore shipments, at lower prices, during the three month period ended December 31, 2019 compared to the same period of 2018, and to the Trust's receipt of total royalty payments of $9,410,394 on January 30, 2020 from Northshore Mining Company ('Northshore'), which was lower than the total royalty payments of $12,388,664 received by the Trust from Northshore in January 2019." On this news, Mesabi's stock price fell $1.74 per share, or 11.8%, to close at $13.01 per share on April 14, 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

rswilloughby@pomlaw.com
LANSING (AP) -- Gov. Gretchen Whitmer on Thursday extended Michigan's stay-at-home order through April, saying it must continue longer to combat the coronavirus pandemic that has sickened more than 21,000 people and contributed to nearly 1,100 deaths.

Meanwhile, a Detroit-area health care system with hundreds of COVID-19 patients is seeing "glimmers of hope" as the number of people sent home exceeds the number appearing in emergency rooms.

Whitmer's stay-home order took effect March 24 and would have expired next week. It prohibits many employers from requiring workers to leave their homes unless necessary to protect life or conduct minimum basic operations. It also bars all gatherings outside a single household, except to care for a family member. Places of worship are exempt.

The expanded measure puts new restrictions on stores to reduce crowds. Large stores must limit the number of customers to no more than four at a time for every 1,000 square feet of space.

Smaller stores have to cap capacity at 25% of occupancy limits.

Big-box stores cannot sell non-essential items such as paint, carpet and plants.

Starting Saturday, people with multiple homes cannot travel between them. Travel to vacation rentals is barred. Funerals are allowed, as long as no more than 10 mourners attend.

Whitmer cautioned that the extension does not mean everything will return to normal on May 1.

"It's going to take us some time to get through this crisis," she said. "While we hope to re-engage parts of our economy, we must always do so driven by what the best science, the best practices for our health dictate."

Republicans who control the Legislature criticized the the extension, arguing the restrictions should be loosened in places with little growth in infections as unemployment skyrockets. They said businesses that adopt strict safety measures should reopen.

"After an initial three weeks of extraordinary restrictions on their freedoms and their livelihoods, our citizens have earned our trust and our faith in their ability to be an active part of keeping Michigan healthy and safe," said Senate Majority Leader Mike Shirkey.

But Whitmer said the mitigation policy is working and will not succeed with more exceptions.

"We have to double down right now to save lives," she said. She allowed auto dealerships to conduct remote sales, but showrooms must remain closed.
New Delhi/Mumbai, April 15 : Addressing a press meet via video conferencing, two Maharashtra ministers Ashok Chavan and Balasahab Thoraton Wednesday blamed the railways for the assembling of the migrants and said that action will be taken against those responsible for this fiasco. They alleged there is a political conspiracy going in in the state to destabilize the government.

Ashok Chavan said, "A railway circular issued by Secundrabad Railway from Deputy Chief Commercial Manager, said that Jansadharan Express will run. This led to confusion in the migrants and they assembled at Bandra station. Action will be taken against those responsible for this confusion as it could have led to a major accident." "The incident has been used to destabilize the Maharashtra government and people are writing to impose President's rule in the state. Who is patronizing this type of theory," questioned Chavan.

While Balasahab Thorat said that the railways was booking tickets till 2 p.m. on Wednesday. At whose behest it was done, asked Thorat adding that "in the crowd people of all sects and regions were present and its incorrect that only people from one community were there and everybody wanted to go home even as the state has imposed restrictions on the movement." The ministers alleged that the state is coordinating with the Centre but the union government is not cooperating with the state in taking any crucial decision.

The Congress leaders seemed upset with the series of events in the state and said that only when the party local MLA Zeeshan Siddiqui pacified the crowd the people dispersed. However, Chavan said that the government will investigate the whole issue including the laxity of police that how people came to the place and why the police used force against them.

The Mumbai Police on Wednesday arrested a man from Navi Mumbai for allegedly posting messages on social media which triggered a huge rush of migrants to Bandra on Tuesday evening, officials said.

The prime accused, Vinay Dube, was detained by Navi Mumbai Police early on Wednesday, and after the preliminary questioning was handed over to the Bandra Police.

Besides, several other persons have also been booked, including a channel reporter, for alleged fake messages that resulted in the massive gathering.
As the number of COVID-19 cases in Montgomery County increased by 23 Wednesday, officials with the Montgomery County Public Health District are responding to questions regarding the lack of free testing sites explaining the test have been ordered but remain backlogged.

Health officials confirmed the new cases bringing the total in the county to 331. The MCPHD site was down and the ZIP codes of the new cases were not available.

There are 231 active cases with 43 people hospitalized and 188 in self-isolation. Recoveries are now at 94 with six deaths.

Misti Willingham, spokeswoman for the Montgomery County Hospital District, MCPHD requested 1,000 test kits during the week of March 8. After some delay, she added, the public health district received just six COVID-19 test kits. The Montgomery County Office of Emergency Management also requested test kits and was learned state officials would consider sending the kits in August.

Both MCPHD and MCOHSEM have reached out to all the major health care suppliers since March 16 and have been told the test kits are on backorder, Willingham said.

To date, neither MCPHD nor MCOHSEM have received any of the kits they ordered.

The major hospital systems in the greater Houston area decided they would combine their resources and set up free testing sites in Houston and the surrounding counties, Willingham said. Unfortunately, they too never received enough test kit resources to be able to provide free test sites in the areas outside the greater Houston area.

Willingham said the Southeast Texas Regional Advisory Council was able to get some test kit resources from the state stockpile and, along with the larger Houston-area hospital systems, set up a free testing center located at Butler Stadium in southwest Houston.

This is the primary free testing area for all interested residents of southeast Texas, she said. You can go to this site if you wish to be tested for free.

Testing kits sourced internationally are being purchased at a price of $30 to $60 per kit, Willingham said.

Individual health care agencies who are charging for COVID-19 screening, must cover the cost of the test, the cost of the laboratory procedure that determines the test results, and the cost of the health care provider who screens the patient, she said.

If you would like to be tested, call the MCHD/MCPHD COVID-19 hotline at 936-523-5040.

MCPHD officials said the ZIP codes and counts as of Tuesday are: Conroe 83, The Woodlands 61, Spring 62, Montgomery 34, Porter 25, Magnolia 15, New Caney 11, Willis 8, Splendora 2, Kingwood 5, Hockley 1 and Pinehurst 1.

Details on Montgomery County cases can be found at https://mcphd-tx.org/coronavirus-covid-19/confirmed-cases/.

cdominguez@hcnonline.com
President Donald Trumps name will be printed on the economic stimulus checks that will be distributed by the Internal Revenue Service to individuals to help mitigate losses caused by the coronavirus pandemic, The Washington Post reported Tuesday.

The addition, which was ordered by the Treasury Department, is expected to delay the delivery of paper checks by several days, according to the Post, which cited unnamed senior agency officials. The phrase President Donald J. Trump will be printed in a memo line on the left side of the checks (most will total $1,200 for individuals), below a line that says Economic Impact Payment.



After the IRS adjusts its printing technology for this addition, tens of millions of Americans are expected to receive these checks in the mail in the coming weeks.

NBC News also confirmed the report Tuesday night.

President Donald Trump speaks during a bill signing ceremony March 27 for the CARES Act, an economic stimulus package meant to deal with the effects of the coronavirus pandemic.

The decision to add Trumps name to the checks was reportedly finalized late Monday and announced to the IRSs information technology team on Tuesday, the Post reported, citing a Treasury Department official.

This is the first time a presidents name will appear on a payment from the IRS.

The White House did not immediately return HuffPosts request for comment.

The checks are a part of the governments $2 trillion effort to stimulate the tanking economy as the coronavirus pandemic shuts down much of the country. The IRS will need to add computer coding to include Trumps name in the checks printing process, then test the system before sending out the checks, according to the Post.

The newspaper also reported that Trump privately suggested to Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin that the president should sign the stimulus checks. However, the U.S. president is not an authorized signer for payments made by the Treasury.

Sen. Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii) said in a tweet that Trump was directly causing the delay of these checks to Americans who need them to continue paying bills.

You are getting your...

Continue reading on HuffPost


Denmark eased its coronavirus restrictions on Wednesday by reopening schools and day care centers. But thousands of parents kept their children at home because of concerns about a second wave of coronavirus infections.

As the rate of new cases falls, the governments decision to reopen schools has led to a debate over balancing the economy and the safety of children.

I wont be sending my children off no matter what, said Sandra Andersen. She is the founder of a Facebook group called My kid is not going to be a Guinea Pig. It has more than 40,000 followers.

Anderson is the mother of two girls, aged five and nine.

I think a lot of parents are thinking, Why should my little child go outside first, she said.

The coronavirus has infected more than 6,600 people across the country. Three hundred of them have died as a result of COVID-19, the disease caused by the virus.

Denmark has told citizens to stay safe at home for the past month. The government also ordered stores, restaurants and movie theaters to close.

On Wednesday, Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen defended the decision to reopen schools. Frederiksen said she had acted on the advice of health officials. She also said reopening the schools would let parents return to work and get the economy going again.

Christian Wejse is a scientist at the department of infectious diseases at Aarhus University. Wejse said he understood peoples worries because weve spent a month trying to avoid contact. But he added that new infections would not be a problem for children because few fall ill, and those who do wont get very sick.

He told Danes to look at neighboring Sweden, which has kept schools open without a big rise in infections. Children, he added, do not seem to be much of a carrier of the infection.

Teachers have been told to keep social distancing in place between children. Social or physical distancing means keeping space between yourself and other people.

Thousands of Danish mothers have joined an online group called Momster. Its founder, Esme Emma Sutcu, said most mothers do not believe government officials have things under control.

She said, Suddenly, these moms feel like they just have to throw their kids to the frontline and I think their reaction is: Dont mess with our kids.

Nonne Behrsin Hansen is a mother of two children, aged two and four. She will not send her children back to school, she said, adding the conditions officials are setting up now are even worse.

Im Jonathan Evans.

The Reuters News Agency reported this story. Susan Shand adapted it for VOA Learning English. George Grow was the editor.

________________________________________________________________

Words in This Story

kid  n. a child

guinea pig  n. a small mammal often used in medical experiments

ill  adj. sick

mess  n. interfere with
(@ChaudhryMAli88)

MOSCOW (UrduPoint News / Sputnik - 14th April, 2020) The first death from the novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19) has been registered in the Republic of Burundi in east Africa, the country's Health Ministry said.

A ministry spokesman said that a person in intensive care who had tested positive for COVID-19 died from complications related to other pathology April 12.

Overall, five coronavirus cases have been recorded in the country so far.

The World Health Organization (WHO) on March 11 declared the outbreak of the new coronavirus a pandemic. According to the latest WHO data, more than 1.7 million cases of COVID-19 have been registered in the world, and over 111,000 people have died from the disease.

According to Johns Hopkins University, over 1,900,000 coronavirus cases have been confirmed worldwide, with more than 118,000 deaths.
Portugals energy giant Energias de Portugal (EDP) fell victim to a ransomware attack this week, with hackers threatening to leak more than 10 terabytes of sensitive company information unless the firm pays the equivalent of US$11 million in bitcoin.

We had downloaded more than 10TB of private information from EDP group servers, said the attackers who are using the Ragnar Locker ransomware to extort the Portuguese energy giant for money, BleepingComputer reports.

The cyber attackers have posted a note for EDP saying they had stolen information about clients, transactions, and contracts, among others, and had encrypted the systems of the company, BleepingComputer has found.

EDP operates in 19 countries on four continents and employs more than 11,500 people. The company is the worlds fourth-largest wind energy producer, and nearly 66 percent of its energy is produced from renewable sources, it says on its website.

This is not the first time an energy company has been held to ransom by cyber attackers.

At the end of last year, Mexicos state oil firm Pemex was hit by a ransomware attack, which caused administrative operations at the company to grind to a halt, but work was restored soon after.

The incident highlighted once again the growing importance of cybersecurity in the oil and gas industry and all its critical infrastructure across the globe.

Pemex has no intention of paying the ransom that cyber attackers have requested, Mexicos Energy Minister and Pemex board chair Rocio Nahle said a day later after the ransomware attack. The attackers had demanded they be paid US$5 million in ransom in bitcoin, according to various media reports at the time.

At the beginning of this year, industrial cybersecurity firm Dragos said in a new report that threats of cyber attacks on North Americas electric network systems are growing. Dragos said it had identified two groups, Magnallium and Xenotime, which are increasingly probing to compromise electric assets in North America, expanding their targeting from the oil and gas sector to include electric assets.

By Tsvetana Paraskova for Oilprice.com

More Top Reads From Oilprice.com:
Amid the coronavirus pandemic even the simple things, aspects paramedics never thought twice about, have changed.

Normally, theres a passthrough between the driver and the paramedic in the back of the ambulance. The passage is now closed. Instead, partners use radios to communicate.

Overnight shifts live on coffee and takeout. Each has become difficult to find at 2 a.m.

Every call doesnt involve a fever and a cough, but over the last month, it feels that way.

It seems like at this point three-quarters of what we go to is a fever, a cough or trouble breathing, said Bryan Urato, the president of IAEP Local 95 in Worcester and a lieutenant with UMass Memorial/Worcester EMS.

Those calls require paramedics to don full personal protective equipment, including a gown, mask, goggles and gloves. In extreme situations, paramedics also wear PAPR or powered air purified respirators.

Theyre fairly cumbersome hooded breathing apparatus, Urato said.

They look like movie props out of a futuristic sci-fi movie where humans are navigating through space. Paramedics wear them in Worcester whenever they need to intubate a patient or provide air-based treatments like a nebulizer.

The list of responsibilities has increased for Worcesters paramedics. Last week, they began testing the public for COVID-19. A few days prior paramedics were tasked with the responsibility of transporting the homeless population between shelters depending on whether they tested positive for the coronavirus.

When the DCU Center opened as a field hospital, a Worcester paramedic was placed on site to perform intubations and critical care medicine.

Our role for EMS is no longer just going to 911 calls, which were still doing Urato said. We have actually expanded our roles and capabilities pretty much to the Nth degree.

When they do take 911 calls, theyve requested the police and fire departments to wait until they clear the situation for the possibility of the coronavirus. Its a precaution to prevent the spread of the virus in the police and fire departments.

Normally, a pair of paramedics would enter a facility together. In a possible coronavirus situation, only one enters the building to avoid putting multiple paramedics in a situation where the virus could be present.

Were in these peoples homes where a lot of times, were far closer than 6 feet, Urato said. A lot of times were 6 inches from these people.

The measure also is a way to save PPE. Fortunately, Urato said, UMass Memorial Medical Center has a sufficient amount of PPE, but theres an effort to be as efficient as possible when using the equipment.

We dont have to chase the PPE shortages like some of the other ambulances and service providers have to do because were owned and operated by UMass, Urato said. Our PPE is a lot better than even some of the local fire departments that run their ambulances. But thats not to say were swimming in luxury PPE.

Theres a feeling within EMS, Urato said, that theyre on their own in many ways. He pointed to the situation in New York City where paramedics are on the frontlines of the pandemic, but are compensated much less than doctors, police officers or firefighters.

Its not different for us, Urato said.

Unlike some communities, Urato said, Worcesters working relationship between all its first responders is a strong one. The public has also shown strong support for paramedics.

Restaurants like Regatta Deli in Worcester and Tavern in the Square in Shrewsbury have brought meals to the paramedics to help with those late-night cravings.

Through it all, Urato said the 80 or so paramedics, including 42 people working full time, morale among them has never been stronger.

We pull ourselves together, Urato said. Because we truly feel like were in this together.

Related Content:
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Source: Xinhua| 2020-04-15 16:41:00|Editor: huaxia

Video Player Close

CHANGCHUN, April 15 (Xinhua) -- Hongqi, a brand under China's leading automaker FAW Group, starts building a new factory for new energy vehicles (NEVs) on Wednesday in Changchun, capital of northeast China's Jilin Province.

With a total investment of 7.8 billion yuan (about 1.1 billion U.S. dollars), the new plant will produce cars, including NEVs and intelligent connected vehicles, with a capacity of 200,000 cars per year.

The construction of the plant is expected to complete in 2022.

In the first quarter this year, Hongqi sold more than 25,000 cars, up 88 percent year on year.

Hongqi, meaning "red flag," is China's iconic sedan brand. The brand was established in 1958 and has been used as the vehicle for parades at national celebrations.
NEW YORK - Former New York state Senate leader Dean Skelos was expected to be released soon from prison to home confinement after testing positive for the coronavirus, prosecutors told a judge Wednesday.

The government notified a Manhattan federal judge Wednesday that it was informed earlier in the day that Dean Skelos, 72, was in quarantine after testing positive at the federal prison at Otisville, New York. It said he has been symptom-free since April 8.

Prosecutors say the U.S. Bureau of Prisons said Skelos will be approved for furlough and home confinement once his proposed residence has been approved by U.S. Probation Department authorities. Medical authorities at the prison have already cleared his release.

Judge Kimba Wood said in an order Tuesday that Skelos was scheduled for release on June 4, 2021, but that he might be eligible for release to a halfway house as early as June 4.

His lawyers had requested compassionate release for Skelos. In a March 27 letter recently made public, they told the judge that guards had just told Skelos and other inmates that another inmate had tested positive for the coronavirus.

The lawyers cited his age and his medical condition, saying he needs the chance to quarantine at home and escape the glaring risk this virus presents.

Skelos has been serving a four-year and three-month prison term after he was convicted of extortion, wire fraud and bribery.

Evidence at a trial of Skelos and his son in 2018 convinced a jury that he pressured wealthy businessmen to give his son roughly $300,000 for no-show jobs. His son Adam is serving a four-year prison sentence.

Prosecutors said the payments from the businessmen were bribes designed to win support from the powerful Republican for legislation favoured by the businesses.
Shortened program confirms basement offsets and related uranium halos; video presentation of uranium projects with online link

Vancouver, British Columbia--(Newsfile Corp. - April 15, 2020) - CanAlaska Uranium Ltd. (TSXV: CVV) (OTCQB: CVVUF) (FSE: DH7N) ("CanAlaska" or the "Company") is pleased to report that crews were able to complete four drill holes from a planned six hole winter program at the West McArthur uranium project. Drilling was stopped mid-March to ensure an orderly shut down, given the current COVID-19 situation. Assays and data from the drill holes continue to show abundant structures in the sandstone above the unconformity near a large, yet to be tested, target. The last hole of the program WMA060, together with holes WMA054 and WMA058, confirms the model of a proximal mineralizing feeder zone oriented in a north to north-west direction.





Figure 1

To view an enhanced version of Figure 1, please visit:

https://orders.newsfilecorp.com/files/2864/54466_45f0229864e3eb10_001full.jpg

The 2020 drill program was planned to span winter and summer seasons, and to extend the discovery footprint of mineralization containing high-grade uranium near the C10 conductor target. The program was terminated before there was sufficient time to drill the interpreted cross structures, or to test the area north and north-west of the discovery zone (Figure 1).

Section54 (Figure 2) which includes the three drill holes mentioned above is distinctly different from section L6000W (Figure 1). Anomalous uranium occurs discontinuously starting near surface and is accompanied by sulphur, and/or arsenic and/or copper. This suggests a difference in geochemical enrichment and alteration relative to its nearby structures.





Figure 2

To view an enhanced version of Figure 2, please visit:

https://orders.newsfilecorp.com/files/2864/54466_45f0229864e3eb10_002full.jpg

The offsets at unconformity elevations and the boundary of the MFa-MFb sandstone unit shows the offsets are the result of structural activity following Athabasca sedimentation. The resulting structural model ties itself to the extensive alteration of the sandstone, and uranium, base metals and boron halos observed in the 2016 to 2020 drilling in this part of the Grid 5 area. These unconformity structural offsets are shown in shaded relief plan view in Figure 3.

Our data from drill core indicates there is an abundance of structures in the vicinity of the Grid 5 discovery that are providing the focus for the associated uranium-bearing fluids. In addition, geochemical enrichment of copper, zinc and boron, within the uranium halo of the last drill hole (WMA060) indicates that the nearby cross structure may be a significant part of the mineralizing event.

Cross structures are commonly associated with high-grade uranium mineralization in the Athabasca model and have historically been important pathways to discovery of some of the Athabasca Basin's largest deposits. Recognition of their presence, influence on mineralization focus, and connection to the alteration in sandstone are critical steps toward focussing exploration programs. The winter program was terminated before there was sufficient time to drill the interpreted cross structures, or to test the area west, north, and east of the high-grade discovery zone.

Drilling completed to date is along the C10 corridor which is also host to Cameco and Orano's Fox Lake uranium deposit. The interpreted controlling basement structure of the high-grade mineralization at Grid 5 has yet to be intersected, however, the combination of a 75 metre wide zone of high-grade uranium mineralization, typical Athabasca deposit multi-element geochemical enrichment, strong faulting, core loss and intense clay alteration above the unconformity, suggest the presence of additional uranium-bearing zones.





Figure 3

To view an enhanced version of Figure 3, please visit:

https://orders.newsfilecorp.com/files/2864/54466_45f0229864e3eb10_003full.jpg

CanAlaska President Peter Dasler comments: "I am very pleased with the new information from the drill program, especially from WMA060. It provided solutions and ideas for the offsets surrounding our high-grade uranium discoveries. Intersection of these structures at or near the unconformity will be the focus of the next drilling program. Now that the uranium price is starting to respond to newly announced mine shutdowns it is expected that further uranium shortages will provide impetus to resume exploration on the West McArthur and other projects in mid- to late-2020."

New Website Video

A video fly through of the West McArthur and nearby Cree East uranium projects is now available at www.canalaska.com and shows the current targets on these two large projects. Click here to view video.





Cannot view this video? Visit:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0FCtWM7AWaw

About CanAlaska Uranium

CanAlaska Uranium Ltd. (TSXV: CVV) (OTCQB: CVVUF) (FSE: DH7N) holds interests in approximately 152,000 hectares (375,000 acres), in Canada's Athabasca Basin - the "Saudi Arabia of Uranium." CanAlaska's strategic holdings have attracted major international mining companies. CanAlaska is currently working with Cameco and Denison at two of the Company's properties in the Eastern Athabasca Basin. CanAlaska is a project generator positioned for discovery success in the world's richest uranium district. The Company also holds properties prospective for nickel, copper, gold and diamonds. For further information visit www.canalaska.com.

The qualified technical person for this news release is Dr Karl Schimann, P. Geo, CanAlaska director and VP Exploration.

On behalf of the Board of Directors

"Peter Dasler"

Peter Dasler, M.Sc., P.Geo.

President & CEO

CanAlaska Uranium Ltd.

Contacts:

Peter Dasler, President

Tel: +1.604.688.3211 x 138

Email: info@canalaska.com

Cory Belyk, COO

Tel: +1.604.688.3211 x 138

Email: cbelyk@canalaska.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 information

All statements included in this press release that address activities, events or developments that the Company expects, believes or anticipates will or may occur in the future are forward-looking statements. These forward-looking statements involve numerous assumptions made by the Company based on its experience, perception of historical trends, current conditions, expected future developments and other factors it believes are appropriate in the circumstances. In addition, these statements involve substantial known and unknown risks and uncertainties that contribute to the possibility that the predictions, forecasts, projections and other forward-looking statements will prove inaccurate, certain of which are beyond the Company's control. Readers should not place undue reliance on forward-looking statements. Except as required by law, the Company does not intend to revise or update these forward-looking statements after the date hereof or revise them to reflect the occurrence of future unanticipated events.

To view the source version of this press release, please visit https://www.newsfilecorp.com/release/54466
The WHO had promoted Chinas 'disinformation' about the virus that likely led to a wider outbreak than otherwise would have occurred, Trump said.

Washington/Sydney: US President Donald Trump on Tuesday halted funding to the World Health Organization over its handling of the coronavirus pandemic, prompting criticism from other countries and medical experts as the global death toll mounted.

Trump, who has reacted angrily to attacks on his administrations response to the worst epidemic in a century, has become increasingly hostile towards the WHO.

The Geneva-based organisation had promoted Chinas disinformation about the virus that likely led to a wider outbreak than otherwise would have occurred, Trump said.

WHO had failed to investigate credible reports from sources in Chinas Wuhan province, where the virus was first identified, that conflicted with Beijings accounts about the spread and parroted and publicly endorsed the idea that human to human transmission was not happening, Trump said.

The WHO failed in this basic duty and must be held accountable, Trump told a White House news conference on Tuesday.

There was no immediate reaction from the WHO.

Nearly 2 million people globally have been infected and more than 124,000 have died since the disease emerged in China late last year, according to a Reuters tally.

UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said it was not the time to reduce resources for the WHO.

Now is the time for unity and for the international community to work together in solidarity to stop this virus and its shattering consequences, he said in a statement.

The United States is the biggest overall donor to the WHO, contributing more than $400 million in 2019, roughly 15% of its budget.

New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern said the WHO was essential to tackling the pandemic.

At a time like this when we need to be sharing information and we need to have advice we can rely on, the WHO has provided that, she said. We will continue to support it and continue to make our contributions.

China urged the United States on Wednesday to fulfil its obligations to WHO. Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian said the pandemic was at a critical stage and that Washingtons decision would affect the whole world.

Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison said he sympathised with Trumps criticisms of the WHO, especially its unfathomable support of re-opening Chinas wet markets, where freshly slaughtered, and live, animals are sold.

Follow LIVE updates on coronavirus outbreak here

But that said, the WHO also as an organisation does a lot of important work including here in our region in the Pacific and we work closely with them, Morrison told an Australian radio station.

We are not going to throw the baby out of with the bathwater here, but they are also not immune from criticism.

John Sawers, the former head of Britains MI6 foreign intelligence service, said China concealed crucial information about the outbreak from the rest of the world and that it would be better to hold China responsible rather than the WHO.

'Beyond irresponsible'

More than 2,200 people died in the United States on Tuesday, a record toll according to a Reuters tally, even as it debated how to reopen its economy.

New York City, hardest hit by the outbreak, revised its death toll sharply up to more than 10,000, to include victims presumed to have died of the lung disease but never tested.

U.S. health advocacy group Protect Our Care said Trumps WHO funding withdrawal was a transparent attempt ... to distract from his history downplaying the severity of the coronavirus crisis and his administrations failure to prepare our nation.

To be sure, the World Health Organization is not without fault but it is beyond irresponsible to cut its funding at the height of a global pandemic, said Leslie Dach, the groups chair.

The WHO said the number of new cases was tailing off in some places, such as Italy and Spain, but outbreaks were growing in Britain and Turkey and the pandemic had not reached a peak.

Dozens of cases have been recorded among oil and gas workers in Brazil, the industry regulator told Reuters, exposing an outbreak far worse than thought.

India extended a lockdown on its 1.3 billion people until May 3 as its tally of cases exceeded 10,000. Prime Minister Narendra Modi said economic sacrifices were needed to save lives.

New cases in China dropped to 46, compared with 89 the previous day, with one more death. Most cases were people returning from Russia.

Global shares dipped into the red on Wednesday as warnings of the worst global recession since the 1930s underlined the economic damage done during the pandemic.
You only turn four once, and Chrissy Teigen and John Legend made it count for their daughter Luna.

The celebrity couple documented her big day from breakfast in bed up to an opulent cake cutting with three different options.

John, 41, posted a sweet photo of Luna in a yellow princess dress, a white shawl and matching gloves to commemorate the occasion.

Big day: Chrissy Teigen, 34, and John Legend, 41, helped celebrate their daughter Luna's fourth birthday in style with breakfast in bed and three different cakes

'Luna's living her best birthday life,' he joked in the caption.

'Mommy decorated. No preschool friends were able to come, but they sent video messages and she was thrilled. Good memories for her during this strange time.'

Chrissy, 34, made one of her daughter's birthday cakes herself with an elegant design covered in pink roses and in the shape of the number four.

The cake appeared to have two edible layers supported by dollops of meringue, and gold-painted strawberries and raspberries were strewn among the flowers, along with pale pink French macarons.

Stunning: Chrissy, 34, made one of her daughter's birthday cakes herself with an elegant design covered in pink roses and in the shape of the number four

Yum! The cake appeared to have two edible layers supported by dollops of meringue, and gold-painted strawberries and raspberries were strewn among the flowers, along with pale pink French macarons

Make a wish: Luna climbed on the table to blow out the candle on the flower cake, but John reminded her to make a wish before extinguishing it

Luna climbed on the table to blow out the candle on the flower cake, but John reminded her to make a wish before extinguishing it.

When it came time to cut the first slice, she could choose between a pie covered with an impenetrable layer of multicolored sprinkles and a playful white cake decorated with frosted nail polish bottles, one of which was knocked over and oozed sugary goodness.

The birthday girl had her pick of the sweets and chose a slice of the nail polish cake featuring the red bottle.

Candy colored: When it came time to cut the first slice, she also had the option of a pie covered with an impenetrable layer of multicolored sprinkles

Life like: The other item was a playful white cake decorated with faux nail polish bottles, one of which was knocked over and oozed sugary goodness

Sugar rush: The birthday girl had her pick of the sweets and chose a slice of the nail polish cake featuring the red bottle

Earlier in the day, Chrissy awakened Luna with her first ever breakfast in bed, featuring a Belgian waffle with blueberries and raspberries.

'Thank you [unintelligible], you've been good to me!' she shouted in a sing-song voice before digging in.

Both the Chrissy's Court star and the EGOT winner loving tributes to their oldest child earlier on Instagram.

John posted an adorable slideshow featuring photos going back to when Luna was just a baby.

'Happy 4th birthday to our beautiful Luna! I'm so happy I get to be your father, teacher, friend,' he wrote.

Like royalty: Earlier in the day, Chrissy awakened Luna with her first ever breakfast in bed, featuring a Belgian waffle with blueberries and raspberries. 'Thank you [unintelligible], you've been good to me!' she shouted in a sing-song voice

Sweet: 'Happy 4th birthday to our beautiful Luna! I'm so happy I get to be your father, teacher, friend,' read Legend's sweet Instagram tribute

Her girl: Chrissy later posted her own touching tribute to Luna on Instagram

His wife posted a more recent photo of Luna in a two-piece bathing suit with a tall crown on her head.

'Happy 4th birthday to the queen of our household. I could have never prayed for a better little being,' she captioned it.

The couple also shared a younger son, Miles, one.
[April 15, 2020] Ingram Micro Commerce & Lifecycle Services Recognized as Netherlands' Top Fulfillment Provider by Emerce 100

Ingram Micro (News - Alert) Commerce & Lifecycle Services, a strategic business unit of Ingram Micro Inc., today announced that it has been recognized by Emerce, the leading multi-channel media platform about online business and marketing in the Netherlands, as the top ecommerce fulfillment provider in the country. The achievement was published in the annual Emerce 100 report, which relies on a 7-point scale to survey 868 Dutch companies across several verticals, including e-business services. Within the category, Ingram Micro Commerce & Lifecycle Services was recognized as the top provider of e-fulfillment warehousing, earning 6.5 out of 7 possible points. Knowledge, price-quality ratio, reliability and flexibility are among the factors considered in the ranking. Michiel Alting von Geusau, executive vice president, Ingram Micro Commerce & Lifecycle Services EMEA & APAC, said, "We are honored to be ranked as the top e-fulfillment warehousing provider in the Netherlands. In addition to implementing cutting-edge technology and efficient processes within our facilities, our operations teams work in ver close collaboration with our clients to ensure that all their needs are met, if not exceeded, and we are pleased to see our commitment to excellence recognized by the Emerce 100."



Ingram Micro is proud to serve several of Europe's household brands from its warehouses in the Netherlands. The company's vast network includes over 150 locations worldwide, including many facilities in Europe and the UK, and across the Americas. About Ingram Micro Commerce & Lifecycle Services

Ingram Micro Commerce & Lifecycle Services provides supply chain solutions that connect supply and demand. From cross-border fulfillment to dropship and returns management, IT asset disposition, re-marketing, distribution and more, our solutions drive growth across the commerce, technology and mobility markets. We proudly serve customers ranging from fast-growing brands to Global 2000 enterprises, and are dedicated to facilitating their success through our global warehousing network, world-class technology, strategic partnerships and decades of expertise in the logistics, mobility and ITAD industries. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20200414005932/en/

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As the world battles the deadly novel coronavirus, nations will benefit from a strong, united voice from the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) to deal with such a crisis, a spokesman for UN chief Antonio Guterres said days after the powerful UN arm met for the first time to discuss the pandemic.

The UN secretary-general's spokesman Stephane Dujarric replied to a query at the daily press briefing on Tuesday when asked whether Guterres was disappointed about the bare press elements issued by the 15-nation Council last week and if he wanted to see a resolution on the lines that were issued on HIV and Ebola outbreaks.

The UNSC met for the first time last week to discuss the pandemic and underlined the need for unity and solidarity with those affected by the COVID-19 and expressed support for the efforts of Guterres on the potential impact of the pandemic.

The Council, meeting under the Presidency of the Dominican Republic, held a closed video-conference session in connection with the impact of COVID-19 on the issues that fall under the Security Council's mandate. Guterres had also briefed the Council.

All I would say on the Security Council is that we would obviously all benefit in any situation from a strong, united voice from the Security Council, Dujarric said.

In Press Elements issued following the meeting, the UNSC said Members expressed their support for all efforts of the secretary-general concerning the potential impact of COVID-19 pandemic to conflict-affected countries and recalled the need for unity and solidarity with all those affected.

Briefing the Council, Guterres had said that the world faces its gravest test since the founding of the United Nations 75 years ago and there is fear that the worst is yet to come especially in the developing world and countries already battered by armed conflict.

Guterres stressed that the engagement of the Security Council will be critical to mitigate the peace and security implications of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Indeed, a signal of unity and resolve from the Council would count for a lot at this anxious time, he said.

The Council was seen as missing in action as the coronavirus pandemic wreaked havoc across the world.

According to the Johns Hopkins University data, the pandemic, which originated in Wuhan City of central China's Hubei province in November, has so far infected 1.97 million people and killed at least 126,500 people globally.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Uttar Pradesh Director General of Police (DGP) HC Awasthy handed over a cheque of Rs 20 crore to Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath for the Chief Minister's Relief Fund to fight the COVID-19 pandemic on Wednesday, the state police said in a statement here.

The amount was collected by cutting a day's salary of the employees of the police department, following an appeal made by the state police chief, the statement said.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
North Korea fired a barrage of cruise missiles presumed to be surface-to-ship missiles and conducted an air combat drill on Tuesday, a day before the general election in South Korea.

The North ritually stages military provocations to coincide with South Korean elections for reasons that are lost in the mist of time.

"The North fired what we presume were short-range cruise missiles from Munchon, Kangwon Province into the East Sea," the Joint Chiefs of Staff here said Tuesday. "We understand that they flew some 150 km."

It was the first cruise missile test in about three years. Around the same time, the North also staged a live-fire drill scrambling Sukhoi SU-25 and MiG fighter jets in Wonsan in the same province.

The spectacle lasted some three to four hours.

Military authorities are trying to figure out why the North launched the provocation. Neither the South Korean military nor the government protested.


The Delhi government is looking at ways to scale up services at hospitals and clinics across the city after April 20, when the Central government is likely to relax certain norms in areas that fall outside the containment zones and hotspots.

A countrywide lockdown till April 14 was put in place by Prime Minister Narendra Modi last month to contain the spread of Covid-19. The lockdown was on Tuesday extended till May 3. Till Wednesday, Delhi had witnessed 1578 Covid-19 positive cases with 32 deaths.

A set of guidelines released by the Union home ministry on Wednesday states that all hospitals, nursing homes, and clinics, even those providing AYUSH services, will keep running during the extended lockdown period.

The health ministry on March 20 had advised all hospitals  both government and private  to postpone their non-emergency planned surgeries and to maintain social distancing norms in the out-patient clinics. The guidelines had also said that patients with flu-like symptoms should be treated in a separate section.

Big hospitals like All India Institute of Medical Sciences and Lok Nayak, which are treating several suspected and positive Covid-19 cases, have completely shut down their out-patient clinics. Others, have maintained a curtailed service, like Safdarjung hospital that allows patient registration for only two hours instead of four.

A number of private clinics and nursing homes in the city have shut their services completely.

Healthcare is an essential service and nobody was asked to shut OPDs, only elective surgeries were to be postponed. Healthcare services other than Covid-19 are also very important and we cannot keep the patients waiting for eternity, said a senior official from Delhi governments health department.

Authorised private institutions providing home care services, diagnostics, or those involved in the supply chains of hospitals will be allowed to function even inside containment areas, the guidelines said.

The Delhi-specific guidelines will have to be framed by the government on what services to start when and in which areas. This is likely to come by April 20 after the government has assessed all the hotspots in the city, said Dr Girish Tyagi, president elect of Delhi Medical Association.

Many hospitals in Delhi have had to shut their services because healthcare workers are not coming in. The government has directed that their salaries be paid anyway. Just like Rajasthan and Chattisgarh, the Delhi government should give out orders to mandatorily keep OPD services running and scale up other services at least outside the containment areas, said Dr Girdhar Gyani, director-general of Association of Healthcare Providers (India) or AHPI.

The All India Institute of Medical Sciences, however, says it might not be able to open up OPDs immediately.

What would be the use of opening up OPDs if we are not able to provide any other services. And, we cannot start surgeries at the moment because we have moved patients from the AIIMS trauma centre, which has been converted into a dedicated Covid-19 treatment facility. We do not really have space to do much else, said Dr DK Sharma, medical superintendent of the hospital.

For the time being, the Delhi government also launched an app for teleconsultation. The CallDoc app can be used for 24x7 online medical consultations with general physicians and specialists for free by residents. A user can connect to a doctor on Video /Audio/Chat and can even upload their test reports for review. The doctors can upload prescriptions after consultation. Around 100 doctors have been empanelled for the service.

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A truck bearing the Amazon Prime logo arrives at the Amazon logistics center in Lauwin-Planque, northern France, on March 19, 2020. (Pascal Rossignol/File Photo/Reuters)

Amazon to Close French Warehouses Until Next Week After Court Order

Amazon will close its warehouses in France until at least early next week after a court ordered it to limit deliveries to essential goods such as food and medical supplies.

In an internal document sent to French unions ahead of a meeting on Wednesday afternoon, Amazon said it planned to close the countrys six warehouses, which employ 10,000 permanent and interim workers, from April 16 until April 20 at least.

The company is forced to suspend all production activities in all of its distribution centers in order to assess the inherent risks in the COVID-19 epidemic and take the necessary measures to ensure the safety of its employees (during that period), Amazon said in the document seen by Reuters.

A truck is seen outside the Amazon warehouse in Staten Island in New York on March 30, 2020. (Angela Weiss/AFP via Getty Images)

During the suspension, Amazon will tap a state partial unemployment scheme to pay its employees, the group said in the internal document.

Amazons French subsidiary did not return calls seeking comments.

The worlds largest online retailer is facing mounting scrutiny on both sides of the Atlantic of the health measures it has put in place to protect employees from the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus while it deals with a surge in online orders.

With most shops in France shuttered as the government tries to contain the pandemic, the closure of the warehouses will likely disrupt deliveries across the country.

In a ruling on Tuesday, a French court said Amazon had to carry out a more thorough assessment of the risk of CCP virus contagion at its warehouses and should restrict its deliveries in the meantime, or face a fine.

A woman works at a packing station at the 855,000-square-foot Amazon fulfillment center in Staten Island, one of the five boroughs of New York City, on Feb. 5, 2019. (Joahannes Eisele/AFP via Getty Images)

Were puzzled by the court ruling given the hard evidence brought forward regarding security measures put in place to protect our employees, Amazon said in a statement.

Our interpretation suggests that we may be forced to suspend the activity of our distribution centres in France, the group said, adding it would appeal the decision.

The case followed a complaint filed by Union Syndicale Solidaires, a French group of trade unions.

Some of them had called for the complete closure of Amazons activities in France, or at the very least a clampdown, after raising concerns over health standards at its shipping sites, arguing they were too crowded.

Amazon currently employs close to 10,000 people at its six French warehouses, 6,500 of whom are on permanent contracts, according to the court decision.

Cases of COVID-19, the flu-like infection caused by the CCP virus, have been reported among staff from at least 19 Amazon warehouses in the United States and the company has been hit by high-profile protests at several warehouses there.

By Mathieu Rosemain and Gwenaelle Barzic

Epoch Times staff contributed to this report.
South Korea's ruling party may have won an outright majority in parliament in elections held Wednesday, in a show of confidence for President Moon Jae-in's handling of the pandemic that gives him fresh momentum to reshape the economy.

Moon's Democratic Party of Korea, which had 120 seats before the vote, and its satellite party could win at least 155 places in the 300-seat National Assembly, exit polling from national public broadcaster KBS showed. Voter turnout was at about 66%, the highest in 24 years and the projected outcome may indicate a show of support for Moon's handling of the crisis.

If confirmed, it would mark the first time in 12 years that the progressive party will have an outright majority in the country's National Assembly. Final results may not be known until Thursday morning.

South Korea was holding the biggest election since the coronavirus pandemic spread around the globe -- and the apparent win for Moon might spur other world leaders with good poll numbers to follow suit.

The popularity for Moon's government's increased following its handling of the virus in what was initially one of the world's hardest-hit countries. New infection rates have fallen this month to their lowest levels since February.

"I went out to vote because I believe it's important to take part in shaping our country, especially with the hit from the coronavirus crisis," said Kyung-eun Lee, 29, who works at a startup and voted just outside Seoul.

The decision to hold the election contrasts with some U.S. states that have delayed presidential primaries and France, which suspended some local elections after cases began to multiply. Poland plans to conduct its May 10 presidential election by mail-in ballot.

South Korea took precautions to keep voters safe: They were required to stand at least 3 feet (one meter) apart, cover their faces, wear disposable gloves and be ready to submit to temperature checks, while voting booths were frequently disinfected.

More than 1,100 candidates from 21 political parties signed up for 253 constituencies with direct elections. Another 300 candidates are fighting for 47 seats decided by support for the parties.

Still, for any leaders weighing whether to call an election -- such as those in Singapore and Japan -- the win for Moon's party could show the political benefits of moving ahead with a vote despite the risks. The virus provided an opportunity for Moon to rebuild support battered by an economic slowdown, corruption scandals involving presidential aides and resurgent tensions with North Korea.

"Voters are likely to forgive previous transgressions and reward a decisive crisis response," said Miha Hribernik, head of Asia risk analysis at consultancy Verisk Maplecroft. "Unfortunately, we believe South Korea is currently one of the rare exceptions to the rule. Most countries have mishandled their initial response to the pandemic, and many world leaders face a reckoning at the polls over the coming years."

Postponing the election would have been a worrisome precedent in South Korea's three decade-old democracy, with many Moon supporters being among those who took to the streets in the 1980s to end autocratic rule.

"South Koreans have been traumatized by living under the authoritarian regimes of the past and see elections as essential," said Duyeon Kim, a senior adviser for Northeast Asia at the International Crisis Group. "Not even the Korean War stopped them from voting in the 1952 presidential race or the H1N1 influenza outbreak in 2009 by-elections."
Defense company is ready to launch production of the upgraded R-330UV1 and G-330UV2 systems as early as this year.

Ukrainian R-330UM Mandat-B1E jamming systems manufactured by Iskra Design Bureau could be deeply upgraded.

Director of Iskra Design Bureau Yuriy Pashchenko told Defense Express as part of the enhancement engineers intend to equip individual elements in one vehicle and expand operating frequency range of the e-warfare equipment.

Read alsoUkrainian kamikaze drone passes another testing stage (Video)

The company is ready to launch production of the upgraded R-330UV1 and G-330UV2 systems this year.

G-330UM Mandate-B1E is designed to detect and jam short waves and ultrashort waves of communication lines with fixed operating frequencies and lines with software tuning of the operating frequency, aiming in frequency and time.
Last week, the Missouri University (MU) Faculty Council met -- one presumes via Internet -- and showed how little its race-obsessed members had learned in the five years since the campuss 2015 multicultural meltdown.

MU Faculty Council puts out letter about COVID-19 and racism, reads the headline in the Missourian, a daily put out by MUs hugely overrated J-School.

According to the Missourian, some members of the Chinese, Korean, and other Asian communities at MU have experienced racial discrimination tied to the pandemic. This discrimination inspired the Inclusion, Diversity & Equity Committee of the

Faculty Council to send an open letter asking the MU community to do the following:

Refer to the virus as COVID-19 rather than by a name stigmatizing Asian people.

Reject xenophobia related to the virus.

In that no one has been on campus in the last month, and that the Asian faculty members have been housebound, it is hard to divine exactly which members of the MU community did the discriminating and how they managed to pull it off. One suspects that these discriminatory acts are as apocryphal as those that famously agitated the MU snow globe in 2015

The letter goes on to say, Any individuals who have experienced discrimination or bias are strongly urged to consider submitting a report to the MU Office for Civil Rights and Title IX.

Do these clowns have no idea what awaits them in the fall? Do they have no sense of how hard budget shortfalls will hit their campus? Do they not know how little patience Missouris Republican-dominated legislature has for Inclusion, Diversity & Equity administrators making north of $200,000 a year?

Heres hoping they find out.
Queensland is pledging to crack down even harder on its strict closed border policy after the majority of new coronavirus cases were contracted in New South Wales.

The state recorded just five new COVID-19 cases on Tuesday - its lowest daily rise in more than a month - with the state's premier Annastacia Palaszcuk describing the improvement as 'extraordinary'.

Queensland has now had 999 people with coronavirus, 442 of who have recovered.

Road blocks were put in place at major roads on the Queensland border on March 23 meaning only those with an approved pass can enter the state.

While the number of cases are dropping, health officials now have serious concerns over interstate infections with 17 people contracting the virus in New South Wales.

Queensland is pledging to crack down even harder on its strict closed border policy after the majority of new coronavirus cases were contracted in New South Wales

There have been more than 6,400 confirmed COVID-19 cases in Australia, the majority of who have now recovered

The state's health minister Dr Steven Miles said it was 'concerning' how many COVID-19 cases had originated interstate.

'A concerning number of the positive tests coming through are from those people who have travelled interstate,' Dr Miles said.

'We would reinforce the importance of those domestic border travel restrictions.

'Nobody is above those travel restrictions and if it is not essential you should not be going to other states.'

More than 85,000 people have been stopped at the road borders and 15,000 at the state's domestic airports, since the restrictions were put in place.

Queenslanders who are returning home from overseas or interstate must quarantine for 14 days, however some exceptions are being made for travellers who have done similar self-isolation in other states.

The state's health minister Dr Steven Miles said it was 'concerning' that 17 people who have recently contracted the virus likely did so interstate

Queensland Premier Annastacia Palaszcuk said that despite concern over interstate infections, the small number of new cases was a clear sign the curve was flattening

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

Local transmissions in the state have not increased, while more tests are being carried out daily.

Queensland Premier Annastacia Palaszcuk said that despite concern over interstate infections, the small number of new cases was a clear sign the curve was flattening.

'This is an extraordinary result, it's great news and come on Queensland, let's keep it up - let's keep flattening the curve,' Premier Palaszcuk said.

'I want to really congratulate Queenslanders for their efforts but like I said, we're not out of the woods yet so we have to keep it up.'

Queensland Police have issued 884 penalty infringement notices to people caught ignoring social distancing rules or refusing to quarantine.
The Union Minister of Health & Family Welfare Dr Harsh Vardhan on Wednesday asserted that India was first to respond to coronavirus COVID -19 and stands on a better footing than the rest of the world because of the valuable and sincere services of India's warriors. During an interactive session through video conferencing with senior officials and field officers of the World Health Organization (WHO) as well as key central and state government health functionaries, he spoke on the measures being taken for containment of COVID-19 in India.

Vardhan also exhorted the Coronavirus Warriors for their never say die attitude and serving mankind. He wished them luck for a tough fight put up by them against the dreaded virus.

He said that the spread of COVID-19 is being checked via community surveillance, issuance of various advisories, cluster containment and dynamic strategy. "India was first to respond to COVID -19 and stands on a better footing than the rest of the world because of the valuable and sincere services of our Corona warriors. We know the enemy and its whereabouts. We are able to check this enemy through community surveillance, issuance of various advisories, cluster containment and dynamic strategy," he said.

While appreciating the leadership of Prime Minister Narendra Modi he said, We have a great leader in our PM as he is very receptive and accommodating to the suggestions given by experts from time to time, which in turn has led to India handling the bull of COVID-19 by its horns.

Exhorting the WHO officials he said, We are meeting in troubled times and we have to work together to eradicate this virus as we eradicated polio and smallpox earlier. We can and we will defeat this virus," he said.

The meeting deliberated on further strengthening the partnership and the measures that can be taken at the field level to further ramp up the response. Vardhan said, WHO is an important partner in our fight against the COVID-19. I really value guidance and contributions made by the WHO in containing the spread of COVID-19 across the country.

Praising Indias response to COVID-19 the Regional Director, WHO South-East Asia Region Dr Poonam Khetrapal Singh said, Despite huge and multiple challenges, India has been demonstrating unwavering commitment in its fight against the pandemic. The WHO Representative to India, Dr Henk Bekedam said, Our field personnel have been redirected to support the fight against COVID-19. The same team worked tirelessly along with the government and other partner organizations to help India become polio-free. I am confident that the WHO team can once again join hands with the government to help win this fight against COVID-19.

The key discussion points of the interaction included:

* Technical Coordination with WHO officers working at district level for helping in development of Micro Plan for hot spots and clusters containment.

* Helping in analysis of existing cases to identify the possible route of transmission.

* Helping in devising strategy for continued surveillance of districts till such time there is reliable evidence that there is no scope for further infection in the district.

* The experiences and strategies from three states  Bihar, Karnataka and Maharashtra  were also presented during the meeting.

Those who attended include Minister of State for Health and Family Welfare Ashwini Kumar Choubey, Health Secretaries and National Health Mission Directors from State Governments/Union Territories and senior officials from the Ministry of Health & Family Welfare (MoHFW), Directorate General of Health Services, National Centre for Disease Control (NCDC) and the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) as well as Regional Director of the World Health Organization (WHO), South-East Asia region and other key officials from the WHO South-East Asia Region Office and experts and field personnel of WHO deployed across the country.
Drug dealers are disguising themselves as key workers to avoid police during the UKs coronavirus lockdown, officials have revealed.

Lynne Owens, the director-general of the National Crime Agency (NCA), said gangs were also dealing from supermarket car parks in an attempt to mix in with crowds.

We know that some groups are finding it harder to transport their commodities and are adapting their methods, she told a press conference on Wednesday.

Intelligence indicates that they are seeking to deal drugs in supermarket car parks, and to portray themselves as key workers to prevent being stopped by police.

Ms Owens said some dealers were wearing hi-vis amid concerns about closer police scrutiny as fewer people are on the streets.

The global coronavirus pandemic has also made it more difficult for international organised crime groups to smuggle drugs into the UK.

On Tuesday night, a Polish van driver was stopped near Calais carrying a shipment of face masks  which concealed 14kg of cocaine.

The Border Force said the drugs, which had a street value of around 1m, were to be smuggled into the UK via the Channel Tunnel.

It is evidence of how groups are changing their behaviour, Ms Owens said. There are fewer drugs in the UK and prices are rising.

She said the NCA was continuing to battle county lines gangs, who use children to transport drugs from urban to rural areas, to ensure they cannot successfully adapt to the coronavirus outbreak.

The NCA is also monitoring the potential impact on gang rivalries, amid concerns the lack of drug availability and rising prices will drive up violence.

Packages of cocaine found in a shipment of face masks being driven towards the Channel Tunnel on 14 April 2020 (Border Force)

Provisional data from the 43 regional police forces in England and Wales show a 28 per cent fall in overall crime in the four weeks to 12 April, compared with the same period last year.

Serious assault and robbery have both fallen by 27 per cent, with rape and residential burglary down 37 per cent and shoplifting halved.

But Deputy Chief Constable Sara Glen, the national lead for charging, said the last week of data had seen an increase in serious violence and we are concerned about it.

She added: There are concerns that there is a correlation between people coming off the gear, going cold turkey and violence increasing in the home environment.

Martin Hewitt, the head of the National Police Chiefs Council (NPCC) appealed for people to continue reporting crime and asking for help during the coronavirus outbreak.

Despite the impact on our staffing levels, police officers are still out there in their communities fighting crime and protecting victims, he added.

Our message for the public is to continue reporting crime and incidents to us, particularly those who are at risk. My message is that we will come when you call for help.

Across the UK, 10 per cent of police officers and staff are currently absent through sickness, self-isolation or caring responsibilities.

But Mr Hewitt said policing remained in a strong position because of the drop in normal demand and ranks being bolstered by voluntary special constables and retired officers returning to duty.

A small number of crime types, including domestic abuse, are expected to increase during the lockdown.

The NCA is working to prevent a rise in online child sex offences, as paedophiles seek to take advantage of school closures causing more children to be at home.

Ms Owens said fraudsters were also seizing on the pandemic by selling fake protective equipment, testing kits that do not work or using coronavirus for phishing, ransomware and malware scams.

Six websites linked to scams have already been taken down and 60 more are being monitored by the NCA.

Fraudsters are exploiting coronavirus for gain, Ms Owens said. The losses to victims exceed 1.8m.
Tripura has requested the Border Security Force (BSF) to install a full body sanitiser machine at the state-run Agartala Government Medical College (AGMC) and Gobinda Ballabh Pant (GBP) Hospital, which is a dedicated Covid-19 care facility.

Dr Debasish Basu, Tripuras health secretary, in his letter to BSFs Tripura Frontier inspector general Solomon Kumar Minz said the machine will be useful to sanitise people, who visit the hospital.

 ....RUMSHA Hydro-Pneumatic Surface Disinfectant Machine & RUMSHA 2 Sec-360 Full Body Sanitizer maybe quite useful for sanitizing persons accessing hospital complexes, vulnerable areas/ zones of hospitals & for sanitizing ambulances transporting suspected COVID-19 patients as well, Basu wrote on April 13.

It was fabricated by BSF, Udaipur headquarters, in Gomati district of the state.

Also read: Status report highlights logistical issues faced by N-E region related to Covid-19

 ...the BSF may kindly take the initiative for installation of the disinfectant machines initially at the AGMC & GBP Hospital, Agt, the leading Covid-19 Care facility in the State as would immensely help the hospital administration to cope up with the challenges confronting it for keeping its premises & facilities sanitized, Basu said.

The state has two Covid-19 patients and one of whom has recovered.

Also read: A rickshaw cart driver used his savings to feed poor in lockdown-hit Tripura

A senior state police officer had devised a 360-degree full-body sanitisation unit with the help of YouTube to prevent the spread of Covid-19. The unit has one motor, few pipings and agricultural sprayers, a solution of diluted sodium hypochlorite.

Kiran Kumar, superintendent of police of Khowai district, said a similar unit was installed at AIIMS and other states including Tamil Nadus Tirupur, Chandigarh and Rajasthan.

Kumar said it took only 11 hours to prepare the unit with the help of some plumbers at a cost of Rs 15,000.
Copyright  2020 Albuquerque Journal

A handful of shutdowns and slowdowns at meat-processing plants across the country have sent shockwaves through the national food supply industry.

However, experts say New Mexico consumers dont have much to fear at the moment, other than possible short-term price increases on meat products at the grocery store.

Theres plenty of meat to be had, said Breck Stewart, president of the New Mexico Grocers Association, a collection of about 200 New Mexico companies that ranges from local grocery stores to dairies.

On Monday, Smithfield Foods, one of the largest pork producers in the nation, shuttered a production plant in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, after some employees tested positive for COVID-19.

In a prepared statement, Smithfield president and CEO Kenneth Sullivan said the closure pushes the nation perilously close to the edge in terms of our meat supply.

It is impossible to keep our grocery stores stocked if our plants are not running, he said.

Smithfield is one of several large meat producers to close plants or scale back production due to the COVID-19 pandemic, joining companies like Tyson Foods and National Beef Packing.

David Livingston, a Hawaii-based supermarket research analyst, told the Journal many meat processing plants require workers to operate in close proximity, making social distancing a significant challenge.

This could take a long time to straighten out, Livingston said.

However, he said, Smithfield and other large meat processors export the vast majority of the food they produce outside the United States, and U.S. grocery stores and restaurants shouldnt be unduly impacted by a few individual closures for the time being.

In the meantime, Livingston said shoppers could see slightly higher prices on meat products over the next several weeks.

Stewart said many New Mexico grocery stores in his association source heavily from Affiliated Foods, a grocery wholesale company based in Amarillo, Texas, and which has not experienced any plant closures.

He said if Affiliated Foods were to experience a shutdown on the scale of Smithfields, the impacts in New Mexico could cause more significant problems.

A representative for the Texas company was not available for comment.

On the restaurant side, a couple of local chains are in regular contact with suppliers to ensure they wont be unduly impacted by supply chain slowdowns. Miia Hebert, catering and marketing director for Garcias Kitchen, said suppliers the restaurant works with havent reported any significant problems at this point.

Were just taking it day by day and making the changes as we need, she said.

Deena Crawley, marketing director for Dions, said none of the approximately 50 vendors the company works with have experienced significant slowdowns at this point. If the supply chain for an essential ingredient were disrupted, Crawley said the company has other suppliers in its queue it can work with if need be.

That was the case pre-COVID, and its certainly the case now, she said.
British drug firms have put themselves at the centre of the battle against the coronavirus with plans for new treatments and vaccines.

Glaxosmithkline yesterday agreed a tie-up with French rival Sanofi to develop a Covid-19 vaccine.

It came as Astrazeneca, Glaxo's rival, announced it was investigating whether one of its cancer drugs could be adapted to treat virus victims.

Virus battle: Glaxosmithkline yesterday agreed a tie-up with French rival Sanofi to develop a Covid-19 vaccine

And shares in Anglo-French biotech firm Novacyt rocketed after its involvement in the UK's testing regime grew, taking its gains this year to 3,300 per cent.

Glaxo's shares rose 1.7 per cent after its announcement with Sanofi.

The partners, which are among the biggest vaccine producers in the world, said they could start working together 'immediately' and share technologies.

This includes Glaxo's adjuvant technology, which allows smaller doses of vaccines to be more effective, and Sanofi's DNA recombinant technology, which speeds up vaccine production.

Emma Walmsley, Glaxo's boss, said: 'By combining our science and our technologies, we believe we can help accelerate the global effort to develop a vaccine.'

Sanofi boss Paul Hudson added: 'It is clear that no one company can go it alone.'

The tie-up was unveiled just days after Glaxo said it would set up a joint testing laboratory in Cambridge with Astra.

Astra yesterday said it was beginning clinical trials of blood cancer drug Calquence to assess its potential to help the most severely ill Covid-19 patients.

The virus is believed to trigger an over-reaction of the immune system in some patients, known as cytokine storm.

But Astra believes that Calquence could potentially help control this.

Amid the developments, shares in Novacyt rose by 30.1 per cent, or 113.5p, to 491p yesterday. They were just 13p at the start of 2020.

It came days after the firm announced it was working with Glaxo and Astra at the Cambridge testing lab.
Tasmania Tracing Source of Hospital CCP Virus Outbreak

Rumours about a dinner attended by health workers were addressed

In Tasmania, concerns have intensified about a CCP virus cluster in the northwest region centered around two hospitals.

The premier reported 47 new cases over the 4 days of the Easter long weekend. Half of the new cases came from two hospitals which were closed on April 13 when the outbreak was first reportedNorth West Regional Hospital (NWRH) and North West Private Hospital (NWPH).

Authorities are still tracing the origins of the outbreak, meanwhile, rumours have spreadstoked by the chief medical officerthat an illegal dinner party was at fault.

The controversy erupted when Chief Medical Officer Brendan Murphy commented on the rumour during a conversation that he thought was private.

Most of them went to an illegal dinner party of medical workers, he said in a video that was released by the ABC. He has since retracted his statement.

Deputy Chief Medical Officer Paul Kelly addressed the incident at a press conference on April 14.

He referred to the suggestion that a dinner party may have been the source of some of the transmission in north-west Tasmania, related to healthcare workers and the two hospitals in Burnie.

Whilst this possibility had previously been mentioned to him following initial investigations, he was informed that the contact tracing was not yet confirmed and that such a dinner party had occurred, he said.

Concerns have also been raised that the source of the outbreak was linked to the Ruby Princess cruise ship, which accounts for one-third of Australias 6,447 confirmed cases (as of April 15) of the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus, commonly known as novel coronavirus.

Veitch said that the process they are taking to investigate the origin is like tracing steps backward.

Veitch addressed rumours that a number of cases were traced to passengers of the Ruby Princess cruise ship, sparking theories the cruise ship was the ultimate source. Veitch said that they cannot be certain at this stage.

We are keeping our mind open. We will try and join the dots between the cases who were Ruby Princess cases and staff who came unwell [at the hospitals], he said.

Tasmanian Premier Peter Gutwein has asked Tasmania police to investigate.

CCP Virus Updates for Tasmania

As of last night (April 14) thered been just over 4,500 tests for coronavirus conducted in Tasmania, and over the last several days weve been having regularly 80 to 100 tests done in the northwest, Veitch said on April 14.

As of 6 p.m. April 13, the total number of cases in Tasmania now stands at 165, including 57 people who have recovered. There have been 6 deaths.

Speaking at a press conference on April 14, Gutwein pointed out that most people have been doing the right thing over Easter, however, some did not.

Police made 36 arrests and 174 people were either warned or asked to go back home over the holiday. Stay-at-home orders and non-essential travel restrictions will continue to stay in force.

Tasmanians need to understand that we are in the fight of our lives, and we need to ensure we do everything we possibly can, said Gutwein.
A pharmacist and a surveyor have been arrested on suspicion of illegally selling coronavirus testing kits.

It comes amid warnings that individuals and businesses need to be "fully prepared for criminals trying to turn the pandemic to their advantage by scamming them out of money".

On Saturday, National Crime Agency (NCA) officers arrested a 46-year-old pharmacist from Croydon, south London, and seized around 20,000.

He was arrested under the Fraud Act 2006 after making false and misleading claims about the tests capability.

Two properties and a car linked to the suspect were searched.

On Sunday, in a separate investigation, a 39-year-old surveyor from Uxbridge, west London, was stopped while driving his car.

Officers found 250 Covid-19 testing kits in the vehicle.

Like the first suspect, he was arrested under the Fraud Act 2006 after making false and misleading claims about the capability of the tests.

Europe takes it's first steps out of Coronavirus lockdown 1 /25 Europe takes it's first steps out of Coronavirus lockdown People queue at a hardware store during a partial reopening after the Austrian government eased lockdown restrictions Reuters A worker checks the temperature of a customer at the entrance of a supermarket in Itay Reuters Customers hold flowers in front of a DIY store in Graz, Austria, after it re-opened on April 14, 2020, following a "shutdown" in a measure to limit the spread of the new coronavirus APA/AFP via Getty Images People wearing protective face masks and gloves walk in the streets as the Italian government allows the reopening of some shops while a nationwide lockdown continues following the outbreak of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19), in Venice, Italy, Reuters People queue to enter a hardware store during a partial reopening after the Austrian government eased restrictions following the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) outbreak in Eisenstadt, Austria Reuters Camilla Cocchi wears a face mask and gloves as she sorts out clothing in her children's clothes shop after it was allowed to reopen following lockdown measures to contain the spread of Covid-19, in Rome AP A man wearing a face mask shops in a hardware store during a partial reopening after the Austrian government eased restrictions following the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) outbreak in Eisenstadt, Austria Reuters "Respect the 2 meters distance" banner is seen at a fish stand as the Italian government allows the reopening of some shops while a nationwide lockdown continues following the outbreak of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) in Venice, Italy, Reuters Customers wearing face masks push shopping carts in front of a DIY store in Vienna, Austria, after it re-opened on April 14, 2020, following a "shutdown" in a measure to limit the spread of the new coronavirus APA/AFP via Getty Images A worker checks the temperature of a customer at the entrance of a supermarket, as the spread of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) continues, in Turin, Italy Reuters Customers line up in front of a DIY store in Graz, Austria APA/AFP via Getty Images Gianfranco Mandas wears a face mask as he sorts out clothing in his children's clothes shop after it was allowed to opens following restriction measures to contain the spread of Covid-19, in Rome AP Customers wearing face masks push shopping carts in front of a DIY store in Vienna, Austria, after it re-opened on April 14, 2020, following a "shutdown" in a measure to limit the spread of the new coronavirus APA/AFP via Getty Images Customers queue at the Trastevere market, as new restrictions for open-air markets are implemented to prevent the spread of coronavirus disease (COVID-19) in Rome, Italy, Reuters Customers wearing face masks push shopping carts in front of a DIY store in Vienna, Austria, after it re-opened on April 14, 2020, following a "shutdown" in a measure to limit the spread of the new coronavirus APA/AFP via Getty Images A man wears a protective face mask and gloves at the newsstand as the Italian government allows the reopening of some shops while a nationwide lockdown continues following the outbreak of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19), in Venice, Italy Reuters People wearing face masks work in a hardware store during a partial reopening after the Austrian government eased restrictions following the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) outbreak in Eisenstadt, Austria Reuters Customers queue at the Trastevere market, as new restrictions for open-air markets are implemented to prevent the spread of coronavirus disease (COVID-19) in Rome, Italy Reuters A general view of the parking area of a hardware store during the partial reopening of shops after the Austrian government loosens its lockdown restrictions during the global coronavirus disease (COVID-19) outbreak in Vienna Reuters

He told investigators he was planning on selling the kits to construction workers.

Both suspects have been released on conditional bail.

The NCA also took down a website trying to fool victims into buying suspected non-existent personal protective equipment (PPE) through phishing emails.

Nikki Holland, NCA Director of Investigations, said: Criminals capitalise on fear and anxiety and they will exploit any opportunity, no matter how awful, to line their pockets.

Illegally selling testing kits completely undermines the nations collective response to the pandemic and actually endangers lives.

Anyone thinking of trying to profit in this way should take note of these arrests and that bringing these offenders to justice and ceasing their activities is a key priority across law enforcement.

Graeme Biggar, Director General of the National Economic Crime Centre, said Covid-19 is increasingly being used as a hook to commit fraud and believes these offences will increase during the pandemic.

He said: Individuals and businesses need to be fully prepared for criminals trying to turn the pandemic to their advantage by scamming them out of money.

Law enforcement, government and the private sector are working together to protect the public and combat these offenders."

Offenders have been targeting people trying to buy medical supplies online and have been sending emails offering fake medical support and scamming people who may be vulnerable or isolated at home.

Frauds have been attempted by trying to lure victims with offers that look too good to be true such as high return investments, "healthcare opportunities" or appeals to support bogus charities.

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

Tariq Sarwar, Head of Operations for Enforcement at the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA), said: We are committed to working together with law enforcement to protect public health and prevent unsafe medicines and medical devices getting to the public.

The use of products for the diagnosis of coronavirus infection in community settings, such as pharmacies, for home use, is not at present advised by Public Health England.

There are no CE marked tests for home use, and it is illegal to supply such products.

The safety, performance or quality of the products cannot be guaranteed and this poses a health risk."
The memo stipulates that Ukraine and the victims' families shall not pursue criminal and judicial action against Iran in return for monetary compensation and publication of black box data.

Radio Farda has learned that Iran is pushing Ukraine to sign a memorandum of understanding obliging Ukraine and the families of victims of flight PS 725, shot down over Tehran, to waive their right to pursue the matter any further through courts.

Iran's Revolutionary Guard fired two missiles at Ukraine's flight PS 725 on January 8 in the wake of Iran's missile attacks on Iraqi military bases hosting U.S forces. Iranian authorities took responsibility for downing the flight and killing 176 passengers and crew members onboard the plane after three days of denials and later claiming that "human error" was responsible for shooting the plane, Radio Farda recalls.

Radio Farda has learned that Iran has sent the draft of a memorandum of understanding (MoU) to the Ukrainian Foreign Ministry according to which Ukraine and the families of the victims are to accept "human error" as the cause of the crash. The said document also stipulates that Ukraine and the families of the victims shall not pursue criminal and judicial action against Iran in return for the payment of compensation by Iran and release of the plane's flight recorder's data after they are analyzed.

To clarify issues related to a possible MoU proposed by Iran, Radio Farda asked Andriy Guck, an international aviation law expert to comment on MoU possible text. He pointed out that Iran may be seeking to create disunity among the countries whose nationals were killed in the crash by seeking to reach such a separate agreement with Ukraine.

Read alsoPS752 downing: Ukraine releases intercepted tower communications proving Iran was aware of missile launch all along

Guck also said the fact that Iranian authorities claim human error caused the crash of the Ukrainian airliner does not mean that Iran has taken responsibility for the tragedy. "The question remains whether Iran is prepared to be accountable, explain why the airspace was not closed and the reasons for the human error, compensate it or not," he said and added that the MoU draft submitted to the Ukrainian Foreign Ministry by Iran does not make any mention of Iran's accountability and sets few conditions to start compensation negotiations.

The question of whether Iran is prepared to compensate the families of the victims and the Ukraine International Airlines that owned the passenger jet will remain unanswered if Ukraine accepts Iran's position, Guck says. In other words, Iran considers the probe into the "human error" and all respective court procedures an internal matter.

"First of all, the reason for the crash must not be attributed to human error before the conclusion of an independent and proper investigation. Secondly, the government of Ukraine cannot be made responsible for forcing the families of the victims to forego their right of seeking an independent investigation as a precondition for payment of compensation by Iran; and thirdly, Ukraine should not have an obligation to provide Iran with the technical data of the Ukrainian airline -- which is a private company  particularly because Iran is not undertaking to provide its own data until Iran is not taking proper measures to provide access to its data and at least preliminary investigation results to Ukraine and other countries involved in the matter," Guck said.

Read alsoIran military "did well": MP claims no arrests made in PS752 downing case

Moreover, the draft MoU says Iran may allow international experts' participation in the flight recorders analysis but only if Iran recognizes that it cannot do it. But so far it has been clear that Iran has not cooperated in this regard and is not capable or willing to decode flight recorders, so it's just delaying clauses that do not foresee Iran's obligations. The document prepared by Iran does not indicate who the responsible party for the payment of compensation is and lacks clear clauses for the identification of Iran's obligations and the time frame for their realization, as well as any arbitral procedure if states do not reach understanding, the Ukrainian international aviation laws expert pointed out.
Google said Wednesday it will launch an emergency fund to help local outlets struggling to maintain operations in the face of the coronavirus pandemic.

The internet giant gave no specific figure for its fund, but said it would offer grants ranging from the "low thousands of dollars" for the smallest operations to "low tens of thousands for larger newsrooms."



The move comes with the media sector facing deep cutbacks resulting from the global consumer lockdown, an intense economic slump and a retrenchment in advertising revenues that many outlets depend on.

"Local is a vital resource for keeping people and communities connected in the best of times," Google News vice president Richard Gingras said in a statement.

"Today, it plays an even greater function in reporting on local lockdowns or shelter at home orders, school and park closures, and data about how COVID-19 is affecting daily life." Gingras said the fund will open to outlets "producing original news for local communities during this time of crisis," with applications due by April 29.

"At the end of the process, we'll announce who has received funding and how publishers are spending the money," he said.

"We believe it is important to do what we can to alleviate the financial pressures on newsrooms, and will continue to look at other ways to help with more to announce soon." The New York Times has estimated that news outlets have cut 28,000 jobs as a result of the health crisis and subsequent economic impact.

Other outlets have furloughed journalists or announced pay cuts. Facebook on March 30 said it was donating $100 million to support news organizations globally hurting from the coronavirus pandemic. This includes $25 million in grants and ramped up ad spending by the social media giant.

In recent months Facebook and Google have stepped up efforts to help news organisations, following criticism that their dominance of online advertising has made it difficult for media to profit from digital operations.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Lawyers at the seven district courts in the city are struggling with the video conferencing system in place for hearing urgent matters amid the coronavirus outbreak and want the system to be upgraded on a war footing.

From sending a PDF file of their applications to convincing the judge of the urgency of the matter and address their arguments through video - lawyers are facing facing a plethora of problems, advocate Manish Bhadauria said.

The seven district courts in the national capital are only hearing urgent matters as per the directions of the Supreme Court.

Senior advocate Vikas Pahwa,who represents Congress leaders Shashi Tharoor and Ahmad Patel and Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal, said the use of technology in the day-to-day functioning of the courts should be enhanced but the upgrade should be done at a war footing.

Although the continuous lockdown is imperative, it has paralysed the entire criminal justice system of the country.We have to enhance the use of technology in the day-to-day functioning of the courts. Efforts towards this are being made but they are not enough. The upgrade should be done at a war-footing level. More judges must hear the cases by video-conferencing. We must start hearing cases which are urgent (and not only extremely urgent). We have to liberalise the process of listing so that more cases are cleared for hearing, he said.

He welcomed the decision of the Delhi High Court to cancel the summer vacation saying, Our endeavour must be to achieve hearing via video-conferencing by all the judges at the earliest.

Pahwa also said the state government should allocate more funds to upgrade the e-courts in Delhi.

Recently,Bhadauria approached the Karkardooma District Court for urgent hearing of a bail plea in a murder case as the accused had delivered a baby. He told the court that the mother had a surgery and she and her baby had the risk of contracting coronavirus in the congested prisons and the hospital.

He was able to get her out on an interim bail for 45 days but had to go through a tedious process.

I went to the filing counter in the morning and submitted three sets of hard copies to the clerk. The clerk then called up the administrative officer and sent the PDF files to him, who forwarded it to the Judge. I had to wait in the courts complex till 3.30 pm when the court staff told me that the judge had agreed to hear the matter. But I was given a date which was five days after that. I then had to go to court on that day for arguments on the bail plea, he said.

Bhadauria also said he waited for more than an hour for the judge and all the parties to get connected through video during the hearing.

In the middle of the arguments, there was a point when I could not hear anything from the other side. Many lawyers don't know how to send a PDF file or how to log in to the video-conferencing application, he said.

Senior advocate Mohit Mathur, who represents senior Congress leader P Chidambaram and others, said the video-conferencing options are being tested and tried.

It is going to take sometime to evolve the facility into a smooth functioning system. Though the system seems a good one because without going to court, you are able to see the judge and other parties and you can argue on cases without leaving the confines of your homes, there is a time constraint. The time given to hear the matters is less than usual days.

Also, right now, we don't have access to our books from where to cite judgements or anything while addressing the arguments. You can't cite anything more than what is already put on the PDF file sent to the judge. The reply by the state does come on the record as a pre-hearing filing. But if the complainant or the opposite party wants to see something, then the judges allow it to be read it out to them, he said.

Mathur, president of the Delhi High Court Bar Association, added that one can cite an order during arguments but the judge won't have immediate access to it.

Bhadauria said lawyers should have been given a mock drill about the system.

Mathur expressed anguish over the vagueness of the term extremely urgent and said it is subjective.

Judges are only picking up cases which according to their understanding and their belief are extremely urgent. That is a term which may suit someone and may not suit the other person. This extremely urgent' is a vague phenomenon and a subjective thing. The justice system is definitely undergoing tremendous pressure and citizens are finding it difficult to get relief, he noted.

The senior lawyer said there is a growing sense of paranoia among those who are in custody as if the infection is contracted by someone in the congested prisons, the spread would be like a wildfire.

Liberty of an individual needs to be prioritise. Undertrials are not brought to court complexes. There is no meeting with lawyers or with family members. Their frustration is increasing.There are people who have lost 10 kgs in jail. As usual the jail authorities would be sending the reports on which the judge may or may not accept the medical condition of the person. That wider relief giving power which was there earlier is being curtailed.

There are people who filed their cases in February and got dates of late March and early April. Now they are getting dates in July and much later than that. They burned six months of the calendar only waiting for their turn to be heard, he added.

Mathur added that the number of benches should be increased.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
15.04.2020 LISTEN

A member of the legal team of the National Democratic Congress (NDC), Abraham Amaliba has blamed President Akufo-Addo for the spread of the deadly Coronavirus in Ghana.

According to the lawyer cum politician, the spread of coronavirus in Ghana could have been averted if not for the bad management of the President.

Speaking on GHONE TV Wednesday, Mr Amaliba told host Serwaa Amihere that Ghana failed to record a single case of the Ebola epidemic in 2014 because of the good management of then president, John Dramani Mahama.

Asked by the host if Akufo-Addo is the cause of the spread of the virus in Ghana, Mr Amaliba said Yes, Akufo-Addo himself brought it when he went to Norway.

The Ghana Health Service has reported that, as of 13th April 2020, at 23:00HRS, a total of 44,421 persons have been tested with 636 being positive for COVID-19.

---starrfmonline
He said the exchange would be "tomorrow or the day after tomorrow."

Minister for Reintegration of Temporarily Occupied Territories Oleksiy Reznikov says that "dozens" of Ukrainian citizens should return home as a result of a prisoner swap with the two self-proclaimed republics in Donbas, the so-called "Donetsk People's Republic" ("DPR") and the so-called "Luhansk People's Republic" ("LPR").

"We are talking about dozens of people, it's more than ten for sure, this list includes men and women, both civilians and military men. All of them are citizens of Ukraine," he said, according to hromadske.ua.

Read alsoDonbas prisoner swap: Media outlet reports date and venue

The minister refused to disclose their exact number or names, "so as not to disrupt the exchange."

When asked who Ukraine would hand over to the "DPR" and the "LPR," Reznikov replied: "Those who were discussed as per request during the negotiations, those whom the Russian Federation has requested, who have been cleared for the exchange."

He said that there are citizens of Russia among those who will be handed over to Russia. However, he also refused to disclose the exact number of people on that list or their names.

He said the exchange would be "tomorrow or the day after tomorrow."
Technavio has been monitoring the semiconductor chemical vapor deposition (cvd) equipment market and it is poised to grow by USD 2.88 bn during 2019-2023, progressing at a CAGR of almost 8% 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.

This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20200414005783/en/

Technavio has announced its latest market research report titled Global Semiconductor Chemical Vapor Deposition (CVD) Equipment Market 2019-2023 (Graphic: Business Wire)

Technavio suggests three forecast scenarios (optimistic, probable, and pessimistic) considering the impact of COVID-19. Please Request Latest Free Sample Report on COVID-19 Impact

The market is concentrated, and the degree of concentration will accelerate during the forecast period. AIXTRON, Applied Materials, Inc., ASM International, LAM RESEARCH CORPORATION, and Tokyo Electron Limited, are some of the major market participants. Although the rising demand for semiconductor lasers will offer immense growth opportunities, growing demand for ALD equipment will challenge the growth of the market participants. 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.

Rising demand for semiconductor lasers has been instrumental in driving the growth of the market. However, growing demand for ALD equipment might hamper market growth.

Semiconductor Chemical Vapor Deposition (CVD) Equipment Market 2019-2023: Segmentation

Semiconductor chemical vapor deposition (CVD) equipment market is segmented as below:

End-user Memory Foundry IDM

Geographic Landscape Americas APAC EMEA.



To learn more about the global trends impacting the future of market research, download a free sample: https://www.technavio.com/talk-to-us?report=IRTNTR30872

Semiconductor Chemical Vapor Deposition (CVD) Equipment 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 semiconductor chemical vapor deposition (CVD) equipment market report covers the following areas:

Semiconductor Chemical Vapor Deposition (CVD) Equipment Market Size

Semiconductor Chemical Vapor Deposition (CVD) Equipment Market Trends

Semiconductor Chemical Vapor Deposition (CVD) Equipment Market Industry Analysis

This study identifies growing market for carbon nanotubes as one of the prime reasons driving the semiconductor chemical vapor deposition (CVD) equipment market growth during the next few years.

Semiconductor Chemical Vapor Deposition (CVD) Equipment Market 2019-2023: Vendor Analysis

We provide a detailed analysis of around 25 vendors operating in the semiconductor chemical vapor deposition (CVD) equipment market, including some of the vendors such as AIXTRON, Applied Materials, Inc., ASM International, LAM RESEARCH CORPORATION, and Tokyo Electron Limited. Backed with competitive intelligence and benchmarking, our research reports on the semiconductor chemical vapor deposition (CVD) equipment market are designed to provide entry support, customer profile and M&As as well as go-to-market strategy support.

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Semiconductor Chemical Vapor Deposition (CVD) Equipment Market 2019-2023: Key Highlights

CAGR of the market during the forecast period 2019-2023

Detailed information on factors that will assist semiconductor chemical vapor deposition (cvd) equipment market growth during the next five years

Estimation of the semiconductor chemical vapor deposition (cvd) equipment market size and its contribution to the parent market

Predictions on upcoming trends and changes in consumer behavior

The growth of the semiconductor chemical vapor deposition (cvd) equipment market

Analysis of the market's competitive landscape and detailed information on vendors

Comprehensive details of factors that will challenge the growth of semiconductor chemical vapor deposition (cvd) equipment market vendors

Table Of Contents :

PART 01: EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

PART 02: SCOPE OF THE REPORT

2.1 Preface

2.2 Preface

2.3 Currency conversion rates for US$

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 END-USER

Market segmentation by end-user

Comparison by end-user

Memory Market size and forecast 2018-2023

Foundry Market size and forecast 2018-2023

IDM Market size and forecast 2018-2023

Market opportunity by end-user

PART 07: CUSTOMER LANDSCAPE

PART 08: GEOGRAPHIC LANDSCAPE

Geographic segmentation

Geographic comparison

APAC Market size and forecast 2018-2023

Americas Market size and forecast 2018-2023

EMEA Market size and forecast 2018-2023

Key leading countries

Market opportunity

PART 09: DRIVERS AND CHALLENGES

Market drivers

Market challenges

PART 10: TRENDS

Increasing investments in fabs

Growing market for carbon nanotubes

Rising investments in thin-film solar photovoltaics

PART 11: VENDOR LANDSCAPE

Overview

Landscape disruption

PART 12: VENDOR ANALYSIS

Vendors covered

Vendor classification

Market positioning of vendors

AIXTRON

Applied Materials, Inc.

ASM International

LAM RESEARCH CORPORATION

Tokyo Electron Limited

PART 13: APPENDIX

Research methodology

List of abbreviations

About Us

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His guitar solo of God Save The Queen from the roof of Buckingham Palace was an unforgettable part of the Golden Jubilee celebrations.

Now Brian May has hit the heights again with a song to help people get through the isolation of lockdown.

The Queen guitarist joined forces with female group Kings Daughters to record Get Up, which they hope will spread positivity during the crisis.

Main man: Brian May has joined forces with female group Kings Daughters to record Get Up, a song to help people get through the isolation of lockdown

For the video, produced during lockdown, May, 72, filmed himself playing guitar on his rooftop in Kensington, west London.

He said it was evocative of 2002, when he played from the roof to start the Party at the Palace concert.

Of the lockdown, May said: Its tough and I think we deal with it, most of the time.

Here we go: For the video, produced during lockdown, May, 72, filmed himself playing guitar on his rooftop in Kensington, west London

Fun: Brian with King's Daughters - Talia Dean, Isabel Lysell, session bassist Rosetta Carr and Vicky O'Neon

Getting together: It also features videos from people across the world who have recorded themselves doing the special Get Up dance move - which sees them punching the air

'Then we get odd moments when we really start to feel like caged animals and feel like theres no hope.

And thats when you need a bit of music to pick you up.

May, who has spoken openly about his mental health struggles, added: Music is a great healer.

Old times: He said it was evocative of 2002, when he played from the roof to start the Party at the Palace concert

Doing something good: Get Up by Kings Daughters, produced by Brian May, is released today. Ten per cent of each purchase will go to mental health charity Mind

Pop: The girls have added some serious fun to the music video

'So Im hoping that this song will be such a thing, you know itll actually pick people up when theyre on the brink.

Get Up by Kings Daughters, produced by Brian May, is released today. Ten per cent of each purchase will go to mental health charity Mind.

The video also includes the Kings Daughters band members and lead singer Talia Dean, 22, who co-wrote the song with May and who was a contestant on the X Factor in 2017, showcase a day in their lives under isolation.

It also features videos from people across the world who have recorded themselves doing the special Get Up dance move - which sees them punching the air.

May was previously seen showing his appreciation for NHS staff by joining in the weekly clap for carers initiative with partner Anita Dobson from their west London doorstep.

Something for everyone: NHS workers have also got involved with the dance routine
El presidente @MartinVizcarraC, acompanado del Consejo de Ministros en pleno, informa sobre la situacion del Estado de Emergencia en el #Dia30 y las acciones que realiza el Gobierno para contener la propagacion del COVID-19. En vivo: https://t.co/qvqAfF1O4e https://t.co/2JVCq2T3I0
The UK has "no plans" to stop its funding of the World Health Organisation in the wake of President Donald Trump's suspension of US financial support, Downing Street has said.

Prime minister Boris Johnsons official spokesman refused to comment on Trumps decision.

But he said the WHO had an important role in the global response to coronavirus and it was essential for countries to work together to deal with the outbreak.

The UK is one of the biggest donors to the WHO, with an annual fee of around 17m and much larger sums in voluntary contributions to its projects. Already, Britain has given 75m to help it respond to the spread of coronavirus.

But the multilateral body has come under fire for failing to hold China to account for withholding vital information about Covid-19 in the months after it first emerged in the city of Wuhan at the end of last year.

High noon in a coronavirus-stricken world Show all 18 1 /18 High noon in a coronavirus-stricken world High noon in a coronavirus-stricken world Najaf, Iraq A man holds a pocket watch at noon, at an almost empty market near the Imam Ali shrine Reuters High noon in a coronavirus-stricken world Bangkok, Thailand Wat Phra Si Rattana Satsadaram (The Temple of the Emerald Buddha, part of The Grand Palace) Reuters High noon in a coronavirus-stricken world Prague, Czech Republic An empty street leading to the historic Old Town Square Reuters High noon in a coronavirus-stricken world Washington DC, US Lawn stretching towards the Capitol, home of Congress Reuters High noon in a coronavirus-stricken world Jerusalem's Old City A watch showing the time in front of Damascus Gate Reuters High noon in a coronavirus-stricken world London, UK The Houses of Parliament seen from Westminster Bridge Reuters High noon in a coronavirus-stricken world Wuhan, China Empty lanes in the city that saw the first outbreak of disease Reuters High noon in a coronavirus-stricken world Havana, Cuba The Malecon road and esplanade winds along the city's seafront Reuters High noon in a coronavirus-stricken world Cairo, Egypt A little busier than elsewhere: midday traffic in Tahrir Square Reuters High noon in a coronavirus-stricken world Berlin, Germany The Brandenburg Gate, the only surviving city gate in the capital Reuters High noon in a coronavirus-stricken world Caracas, Venezuela Bolivar Avenue, opened in 1949 and the site of many demonstrations and rallies Reuters High noon in a coronavirus-stricken world Moscow, Russia Spasskaya Tower (left) on the eastern wall of the Kremlin, and St Basil's Cathedral Reuters High noon in a coronavirus-stricken world Istanbul,Turkey The harbourside Eminonu district is usually buzzing with activity Reuters High noon in a coronavirus-stricken world New Delhi, India Rajpath, a ceremonial boulevard that runs through the capital Reuters High noon in a coronavirus-stricken world Amman, Jordan The Roman amphitheatre that dates back to the 2nd century AD Reuters High noon in a coronavirus-stricken world New York City, US The main concourse of Grand Central station in Manhattan Reuters High noon in a coronavirus-stricken world Kiev, Ukraine Maidan Nezalezhnosti, the site of many political protests since the end of the Soviet era Reuters High noon in a coronavirus-stricken world Accra, Ghana The odd walker out in the midday sun on Ring Road Central Reuters

Mr Johnson's spokesman said that Britain wanted the WHO to "learn lessons" from its handling of the crisis.

Our position is that the UK has no plans to stop funding the WHO, which has an important role to play in leading the global health response," said the PM's spokesman.

Coronavirus is a global challenge and its essential that countries work together to tackle this shared threat.

Asked if the Government was disappointed by Donald Trumps move, the spokesman said: I can only set out the UKs position and that is we have no plans to stop funding the WHO.

The spokesman played down suggestions that the UK could step in to make up the loss to the WHO of Trump's move, saying that contributions were based on the UK's assessment of the organisation's needs and were "not something that is affected by other countries' decisions on funding".

Mr Trump justified the suspension of US payments by saying the WHO had "failed in its basic duty" to obtain, vet and share information in a timely fashion and accused it of spreading Chinese "propaganda.

While stopping short of any direct criticism of the organisation, Mr Johnson's spokesman used diplomatic language to indicate that London believes it can up its game.

"We want to see the WHO continue to learn lessons on how to improve its response to global health emergencies," he said.

And he was equally diplomatic over allegations that China failed to share information on the deadly virus as quickly and openly as it should.

"We have always stressed that transparent and accurate information about the virus is essential for an effective global response," said the PM's spokesman.

"And we have also been clear that we want to work with all parts of the international community, including China, to ensure a joined-up response to the epidemic."

Former prime minister Gordon Brown described Trump's move as "an act of self-harm on the part of America".

Mr Brown told the BBC's HardTalk that the US president had signed up to a G20 commitment to support the WHO as recently as 26 March and should be held to it by other world leaders.

"Its our duty to persuade the Americans solidarity is in their self-interest," said the ex-PM.

The former head of the secret intelligence service MI6, John Sawers, said it would be better to hold China responsible rather than the WHO.

There is deep anger in America at what they see as having been inflicted on us all by China and China is evading a good deal of responsibility for the origin of the virus, for failing to deal with it initially, Sawers told the BBC.

Intelligence is about acquiring information which has been concealed from you by other states and other actors, there was a brief period in December and January when the Chinese were indeed concealing this from the West.

And former chancellor Sajid Javid said Trump was wrong to cut funding to the WHO at a time of global health emergency.

Mr Javid told BBC Radio 4s Today programme: Whilst there are legitimate questions to ask about the WHO, I think that now its not the time and thats the wrong thing to do.

He added: I think one of the lessons to learn from this when we are past the worst of the crisis is that we are going to have to look carefully into was China providing the right information to the WHO and to the others.

China didnt even admit to human-to-human transmission until some time in January, which was very late in the day and I think its a legitimate question to ask what they knew, when and how that could have made a difference.

Liberal Democrat foreign affairs spokesperson Alistair Carmichael said: "Trump's decision to halt funding for the World Health Organisation at this moment is a dereliction of duty and puts lives at risk around the world.

"The UK has a duty to lead and the foreign secretary must do everything in his power to bring the US president back on board in supporting the efforts of the World Health Organisation. The government must do everything possible to ensure this vital institution is not undermined at the moment we need it most."
The Spanish government is currently working at at least three different speeds to combat the coronavirus crisis. One is the here and now, and which involves practically the entire executive, with the four key ministries  Health, Interior, Transportation and Defense  in charge, taking decisions every day to try to control the health emergency and palliate the effects it is having on the economy.

The other, the long term, which includes economic and social reconstruction, is being worked on by the Finance Ministry. Their remit includes getting the 2021 budget passed by Congress, something that will require the support of other parties given that the Socialist Party-Unidas Podemos coalition government does not have a working majority. And a third group, working away from the spotlight, is focused on the medium term, and how the deescalation of confinement measures will be carried out.

The group includes a wide range of technical experts of all kinds, not just epidemiologists and economists

This group is being coordinated by Teresa Ribera, one of Spains deputy prime ministers and also the minister for environmental transition. Health Minister Salvador Illa is participating in the group, given his constant contact with scientific experts and the regional health chiefs.

The task force is meeting on a very discreet basis, with some ministers who are outside of the central core of those managing the crisis, such as Foreign Minister Arancha Gonzalez Laya, who is in permanent contact with her counterparts in the other countries affected by the coronavirus pandemic, and who provides information about the measures being taken elsewhere. It also includes Jose Luis Escriva, the social security minister and a renowned economist, who is providing a technical vision.

As well as politicians, the group includes a wide range of technical experts of all kinds, not just epidemiologists and economists. This committee will be making proposals to Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez as to the measures that should be taken when the deescalation of the confinement begins. Sources from the executive explain that this will be a particularly complex phase, and extreme care is being taken.

They are working on the assumption that it is essential to begin thinking about these measures so that they can be adopted from April 26, which is when the current state of alarm is due to expire. Before that date, there is the possibility that children could be allowed to leave their homes. Currently in Spain, the confinement measures are almost total, with citizens only allowed to leave their homes under very strict circumstances, such as to buy food or to get to their jobs if they cannot work from home.

The task force is basing its decisions on all kinds of documents from both Spanish and international experts. Ribera is working discreetly, and is unwilling at this point to reveal who these experts are nor the approaches that they are preparing, and has also expanded the group with new incorporations.

Another 17 people appointed by each Spanish region will be joining the task force

According to Interior Minister Fernando Grande-Marlaska, speaking on Tuesday, another 17 people will be joining this group, as appointed by each of Spains regional governments. The 17 regional premiers have been insisting that they want to participate in the decision-making ahead of the deescalation, and as such Sanchez has offered each region the chance to incorporate the technical expert of their choosing into the task force.

One of the issues that the regions are insisting on is the chance to deescalate in different ways according to each region, given that not all of them are in the same situation. The Canary Islands, for example, is one of the areas of Spain that has the situation most under control, given its insular nature.

Sources from the executive insist that the decision has not yet been taken, but the government does not appear keen to take different measures in different areas, given that it believes that this could generate more problems than it will solve.

English version by Simon Hunter.
WASHINGTON - The U.S. military is bracing for a months-long struggle against the coronavirus, looking for novel ways to maintain a defensive crouch that sustains troops health without breaking their morale  while still protecting the nation.

Unlike talk in the Trump administration of possibly reopening the country as early as May, military leaders are suggesting that this summer may be the best-case scenario of tiptoeing toward a return to normal activities. Even that is uncertain, and for now the focus is on adjusting as the pandemics threat evolves.

We are going to need to change and adapt, because even over the coming months the virus isnt going to go away. Were going to have to be able to operate in a COVID environment, Deputy Defence Secretary David Norquist said recently, referring to the disease caused by the novel coronavirus.

Officials have frozen most forces in place overseas, stopped troops and their families from moving to new assignments, and cut back access to the Pentagon. The military services have halted or restricted recruit training, cancelled major exercises, and isolated troops in the most sensitive units. The new Space Force has delayed a satellite launch, and the Navy this week postponed the return of the USS Harry S. Truman, keeping the aircraft carrier at sea to shield its crew from virus exposure at home.

These steps to protect the force have parallels in civilian society, but a far-flung military cant function by staying at home.

This will be a new way of doing business that we have to focus in on, says Air Force Gen. John Hyten, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Were adjusting to that new world as we speak today.

The notion of normal in the military may never be the same.

Weve all deployed and fought enemies abroad, however, todays enemy is here in our communities, said Lt. Gen. Brad Webb, commander of the Air Forces training and education command. We dont know what new normal will look like until we get to the other side.

Defence Secretary Mark Esper has been consistent in saying it will take time to determine when to begin lifting restrictions on the military, and he has faced little public pressure  from military families or the White House  to rush things. In civilian society, there is an open split between those like President Donald Trump who want the country reopened soon to mitigate economic damage and those, including many state governors, who fear reopening prematurely will undermine progress against the virus.

Gen. Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said the the pandemic has spread so far and wide, potentially creating instability in some countries, that the U.S. military cannot return to business as usual.

We have got to take a hard look at how we as a military, we as a Department of Defence, conduct operations in the future, he said.

In a further sign of uncertainty, Esper said Tuesday that he will extend a stop movement order halting what are called permanent change-of-station moves by troops and their families. He did not say how long he will extend the order, aimed at protecting troops and originally set to expire May 11. If it continues into the summer, military members with children could face serious hardship, since they need time to settle and enrol their children in new schools.

Coronavirus has been less deadly in the military than in the rest of American society, but the number of confirmed cases is still rising. As of Tuesday the total exceeded 2,600, up from 1,521 a week earlier. Two troops have died of the disease  a National Guard member in March and a Navy sailor on Monday.

Even after the number of the militarys coronavirus cases crests, a degree of uncertainty about restoring normalcy will linger. The Navys top doctor, Rear Adm. Bruce Gillingham, says the virus wields a secret power that the military must take into account as it adjusts in the weeks and months ahead.

What weve learned, certainly in the Navy with regard to COVID-19, (is) that stealth, in the form of asymptomatic transmission, is this adversarys secret power, he told reporters. And so we recognize that despite really our best efforts, were going to have to learn how to operate with the virus.

Webb, the Air Force training commander, said his service is doing about 99% of its recruiting online rather than with traditional in-person pitches. And while the way ahead isnt clear, he said, I think we have the opportunity now to never go back to old ways.

For the Army, a major priority is keeping combat brigades healthy but also ready for war. Prior to the coronavirus crisis, more than half of the brigades were at high readiness levels, but in the past month training has significantly slowed down.

Were in good shape but youve got to be able to turn it back on, said Army Secretary Ryan McCarthy. He says that increased coronavirus testing capabilities will allow the Army to test units and then send them out for large battalion and company-sized exercises where they can remain in a bubble.

Were going to have to do that, and thats where youre going to have to manage the risk until theres a vaccine, he said. Were preparing ourselves to do just that.

Even as they take precautions, defence officials are eager to bat down any idea that they are so focused on protecting troops health that the force has been weakened or is unable to fight if needed.

I dont want anyone out there in the world to think that somehow the U.S. militarys readiness is significantly degraded. It is not, Milley said last week.

___

Associated Press writer Lolita C. Baldor contributed to this report.
There is already a look out circular issued for 1900 people to ensure they don't leave the country

While the country is still trying to trace the missing/hiding attendees of the Tablighi Jamaat which was held at the Nizamuddin Markaz in New Delhi, a news report by a TV channel which claims to have accessed the list of attendees say that there were some 2041 foreign nationals who took park in the religious congregation.

Now, the fear is that these people who came from across the continents could have been the carriers of the covid19 infection.As per the report, the foreign national list includes nine Chinese nationals as also Indonesians. China is where it all begun, so the fact that there were nine attendees from the infected nation is something to worry about.

As per the news report aired by a leading English channel, some 9000 people attended this huge religious congregation at Nizamuddin Markaz.So far around 1100 of these attendees have tested positive for coronavirus and being treated at various hospitals in Delhi.

There is already a look out circular issued for 1900 people to ensure they don't leave the country. It is worth mentioning here that all the missing Jamaat attendees also flouted visa rules.

While the country is still trying to trace the missing/hiding attendees of the Tablighi Jamaat which was held at the Nizamuddin Markaz in New Delhi, a news report by a TV channel which claims to have accessed the list of attendees say that there were some 2041 foreign nationals who took park in the religious congregation.

Now, the fear is that these people who came from across the continents could have been the carriers of the covid19 infection.As per the report, the foreign national list includes nine Chinese nationals as also Indonesians. China is where it all begun, so the fact that there were nine attendees from the infected nation is something to worry about.

As per the news report aired by a leading English channel, some 9000 people attended this huge religious congregation at Nizamuddin Markaz.So far around 1100 of these attendees have tested positive for coronavirus and being treated at various hospitals in Delhi.

There is already a look out circular issued for 1900 people to ensure they don't leave the country. It is worth mentioning here that all the missing Jamaat attendees also flouted visa rules.
Hotel and guesthouse owners in Leitrim and across the country are calling on Paschal Donohue TD, Minister for Finance, and the Government to introduce a series of urgent measures that are required to mitigate the impact of Covid-19 on the economy, including the tourism and hospitality industry.

Over the past few weeks, the industry has been decimated with over 85% of hotels closed nationally and the majority of the 260,000 employees laid off or on short-time.

Michael Yates, Chair of the Leitrim, Sligo and Roscommon branch of the Irish Hotels Federation stated that hoteliers appreciated that the country is experiencing the greatest health crisis in living memory and that significant resources are being committed to address the overriding issue of public health. However, he warned: every days delay in implementing the measures, results in greater risks to our tourism and hospitality industry."

Mr Yates noted the willingness of hotels to play their part in providing assistance to essential services where required by the HSE and other Government departments.

He said that mitigating the impact of Covid-19 must go hand in hand with ensuring that Irish people have a viable economy to return to in the coming months. The health and wellbeing of all citizens is intertwined with the economy, and people will need livelihoods after the crisis is over. Tourism supports 11% of total employment nationally.

"It is important to note that 70% of these jobs are outside of Dublin which highlights its vital role in spreading employment opportunities and prosperity across the entire country. Here in Leitrim tourism supported 1,100 jobs and generated 36m in local revenues before this crisis, he said.

Irish tourism has been a key driver of job growth over the last decade, and it is essential that our industry remains to the fore of the national economic agenda, including in negotiations on the Framework for Government.

"Whilst discussions are ongoing, further measures are now urgently required to protect tourism livelihoods and address the enormous challenges we face. These challenges are existential for many tourism businesses and of a significantly greater scale than anything experienced during the last financial crisis.

Leitrim hoteliers are calling for a range of measures that will allow businesses to plan now for their recovery. These include:

1. Local Authority rates and water charges: to be waived for a minimum period of 12 months.

2. Cash flow & finance: measures to assist with cash flow for businesses facing short term problems, including interest free loans and a minimum 12-month deferment on Senior debt (both Capital and Interest).

3. Taxation: tourism VAT rates to be reduced to zero for a minimum of 12 months and until the industry has recovered, then restored to 9% on a permanent basis. Employers PRSI to be reduced to 0.5% for a minimum of 12 months and until the industry has recovered.

4. Government grants: business interruption grants to help businesses survive and reopen.

5. Seasonal employees: Supports for seasonal workers in tourism who do not currently qualify for Covid-19 related payments.

Mr Yates added: At present most of our industry nationally is closed. We are seeking an urgent response to ensure that hotel and guesthouse properties are preserved and ready to scale up when the Covid-19 related restrictions are lifted. Tourism and hospitality businesses are now working to secure the necessary funds to survive and restart.

"That process involves making predictions around the period of closure and the length of time it will take for various categories of revenue to recover. Government controlled costs such as local authority rates, VAT and employers PRSI are having an enormously negative impact on viability scenarios during the recovery period.

"We recognise that the Government is being forced to increase the level of national debt to fund the health crisis and must protect the exchequer to fund ongoing services. However, these urgent measures are required now to help our industry recover and play its part in ensuring that the Irish economy will be strong enough to service post Covid-19 national debt.
Five persons from Assam's



Hailakandi district, who attended the Athgaon Kabarastan Masjid congregation in Guwahati, have tested negative for COVID--19, said Joint Director of Health Services Dr Ramesh Chandra Dwivedy on Wednesday.

Of the 10 swab samples of Athgaon Kabarastan Masjid congregation attendees sent to Silchar Medical College and Hospital, Dr Dwivedy said results of five turned out to be negative while the result of other five are awaited.

A congregation of around 100 people was held in the Athgaon Kabarsthan Masjid on March 12 and was attended by the first person to test positive on March 31 and two others from Dhubri district.

On April 10 the Masjid was sealed by the government.

The joint director said that all the six members of Assam's first COVID-19 victim, including his married daughter, have tested negative.

"It's a great relief for everyone," said Dr Dwivedy.

All the family members of the COVID-19 victim are being kept at an institutional quarantine centre, he said.

The health authorities here after holding discussions with the district administration and the state health department would decide whether to release the 493 persons who have already completed the 28 days home quarantine period, he added.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Many rice exporters were left surprised because the export quota of 400,000 tonnes of rice in April ended quickly in just three hours.

Rice loaded for export.

Earlier, the Ministry of Industry and Trade (MoIT) issued a decision announcing the rice export quota for April after the Prime Minister gave the green light to resume exporting the product.

Rice exporters therefore required their staff to wait for the opening of the online customs portal to submit declaration forms. However, they were unable to access the system. Notably, the portal was opened at midnight on April 11 and by April 12 the quota was fully registered.

On April 13, Trung An Hi-tech Farming JSC in Mekong Delta Province of Can Tho sent a petition to the PM, the Government Office and the MoIT, saying that the opening of e-customs declaration software system has not been transparent.

The company said their staff waited to access the portal on Saturday, but it did not open. They did not receive prior notice at the website of the General Department of Customs on the opening for the rice export quota. The office suddenly opened the system and closed it only three hours later saying the 400,000-tonne export quota had been filled.

Pham Thai Binh, the companys general director said the General Department of Customs should give priorities to rice lots which are currently stuck at ports, then give new declarations for other exporters.

Binh wondered whether the declaration follows the PMs instruction to ensure transparency and openness in implementing rice export quota.

Sharing the idea, Nguyen Van Don, Director of Viet Hung Company Limited in the southern province of Tien Giang said the opening of customs declarations in the middle of the night was extremely unfair. His company has one lot of 625 tonnes of rice packed in containers and two barges carrying over 1,500 tonnes of rice stuck in Nhon Trach Port.

Nguyen Trung Kien, vice chairman of Viet Nam Food Association (VFA) said many businesses had not been able to access the portal. They are collecting opinions to submit to the MoIT and General Department of Customs.

Responding to the issue, the General Director of Viet Nam Customs Nguyen Van Can said the customs declaration system was completely automated, without the impact of customs officers and having no sign of profiteering.

He said the declaration is fully automatic, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, regardless of working hours.

According to Can, the Ministry of Finance (MoF) had also proposed MoIT and the Government to consider balancing the quantity as the amount of national reserve rice at the request of the Government has been facing a significant shortage.

The General Department of Customs also proposed that the Government should stipulate export quota for an enterprise to ensure fairness for all businesses.

He added that that the customs declaration system worked on a first come first serve basis. Those registering late would not be able to access the system.

There were around 40 exporters who successfully registered for the quota in April.

Enterprises will have to wait for a new evaluation from MoIT, which will be submitted to the PM to determine the new quota for May.

National rice reserves face shortage

The MoFs General Department of State Reserve on Tuesday said it only bought 7,700 tonnes of rice in reserve, out of a total of 190,000 tonnes of national rice reserves in 2020 at the request of the PM.

Do Viet Duc, general director of State Reserve said they also decided to cancel bidding of 17,000 tonnes as the bidders refused to sign and secure the performance of contracts.

For businesses cancelling bids, they must be handled under the Bidding Law and will have to re-bid to buy the required amount of rice.

He also said that the upcoming rice auction will be implemented in the shortest time within 10 days to buy enough rice according to regulations.

Earlier, the General Department of State Reserve said they had bid to buy 178,000 out of 190,000 tonnes of rice for reserves in 2020. However, there was a phenomenon that winning enterprises extended the contract period.

The rice buying was scheduled to complete before June 15.  VNS

Who is allowed to export rice during the COVID-19 crisis? The total amount of rice that Vietnamese exporters have to deliver to partners under contracts from now to the end of May is 1.385 million tons.
(Bloomberg) --

Republicans are ratcheting up efforts to paint China as the villain in the coronavirus pandemic, seeking to shift blame as President Donald Trump faces increased criticism of his handling of a crisis that has shuttered the U.S. economy.

The Trump campaign on Tuesday sent out a fundraising email that accused China of lying about the outbreak and saying the country must be held accountable, language that is harsher than the president has used himself.

Senator Josh Hawley, a Missouri Republican, introduced a bill that would make the Chinese government liable for civil claims in U.S. courts if its found to have withheld information related to the virus. And House Republicans election committee issued a statement calling a freshman Democrat who flipped a Republican-held seat in 2018 a Chinese asset.

The president announced Tuesday he would halt U.S. funding for the World Health Organization, accusing the United Nations agency of taking Chinese claims about the disease at face value. Trump repeatedly complimented the Chinese governments handling of the outbreak in January and February.

China has serious concerns about Trumps decision and called on the U.S. to fulfill its responsibilities, foreign ministry spokesperson Zhao Lijian said at a briefing in Beijing on Wednesday. Zhao said the U.S. move will weaken the WHOs capabilities and undermine international cooperation.

The Associated Press reported that Chinese officials waited six days before warning the public of the outbreak in Wuhan after they determined they likely were facing a pandemic from a new coronavirus. The Chinese government has repeatedly said it reported the outbreak to the WHO and has denied suppressing information about the virus initially.

The U.S. coronavirus outbreak, at nearly 600,000 cases and more than 25,000 dead, stands to dominate the 2020 election. The pandemic has collapsed the economy, which less than two months ago was the centerpiece of Trumps re-election effort. Democrats have sought to portray his handling of the crisis as inept, and he has responded in part by blaming his White House predecessors, U.S. governors -- and China.

Story continues

China has been lying and doing everything they can to cover up the spread of Covid-19 in their country. Its absolutely disgraceful and we cant stand by and do nothing, Trumps campaign said in the fundraising email sent Tuesday. President Trump has always been tough on China, but he cant hold them accountable on his own.

Lisa Burns, a Quinnipiac University professor who specializes in political messaging, called the effort playing to the base of the Republican Party.

The default was to go back to the China excuse and deflecting to China, she said in an interview. When youre playing to a base, looking for that red meat, scapegoating is one of your best strategies.

Congressional Democrats called Trumps move to halt WHO funding a desperate attempt to absolve himself, and said it was illegal.

The president does not have the unilateral authority to withhold the United States assessed contribution to the World Health Organization. Moreover, refusing to fund the WHO is a foolish step that only weakens international tools to fight this pandemic and future global health emergencies, House Appropriations Committee spokesman Evan Hollander said in a statement.

Not wanting to take responsibility as the deaths continue to mount, he blames others, Senator Patrick Leahy of Vermont said of the president in a statement. WHO could have been stricter with China and called for travel restrictions sooner, but it is performing an essential function and needs our strong support.

China Critic

Trump entered the White House as a China critic who has blamed the country for declines in U.S. manufacturing jobs. In 2018, he began imposing tariffs on Chinese imports, leading to what his administration called a phase one trade deal in December with the Beijing government. That history gives him a lot of credibility as he seeks to pin blame on China for the coronavirus outbreak, said Scott Jennings, a Republican strategist whos worked on four presidential campaigns.

The Trump administration, the president, his allies need to -- and are going to be -- all-in on the idea that China is a bad actor with their lies and the coverup that unleashed this on the world and made it exponentially worse, Jennings said in an interview.

That point of view has been buttressed by Republican lawmakers who have said the Chinese government or its allies should be held to account for the outbreak, which began in the city of Wuhan in Hubei province.

Hawleys bill would create a State Department task force to investigate the Chinese governments handling of the coronavirus and allow Americans to sue the countrys government for actions including silencing whistle-blowers and withholding information about the spread of the disease. U.S. courts would be able to freeze Chinese government assets.

There is overwhelming evidence that the Chinese Communist Partys lies, deceit and incompetence caused Covid-19 to transform from a local disease outbreak into a global pandemic, Hawley said in a statement.

One of his Republican colleagues, Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas, has said that unsubstantiated allegations the virus originated in Chinese laboratories near Wuhan should be investigated and that the country should be held accountable for the global outbreak.

Chinese Asset

Down the ballot, Republican strategists in congressional races have targeted Democrats who have publicly defended the Chinese people or their leadership.

During a recent tele-town hall hosted by AARP, Democratic Representative Sean Casten of Illinois fielded questions about the role of Chinese wet markets in spreading the virus and its zoonotic origins. We need to be careful about laying the blame on a particular cultural practice in a country that we dont live in, he said.

The National Republican Congressional Committee responded Tuesday in a statement that alleged the congressman had either been duped by the Chinese Communist Party or is a Chinese asset.

Sean Castens bizarre commentary around coronavirus is raising serious questions about the Chinese Communist Partys hold over him, the NRCC spokeswoman, Carly Atchison, said.

Separately, the NRCC assailed a Democratic congressional candidate on Long Island, Perry Gershon, in an April 8 release for saying in a virtual town hall four days earlier that theres a misconception around that the Chinese were not sufficient in disseminating information -- that they tried to keep things for themselves.

Atchison said in the release that it is disgusting that while Long Islanders are dying from a pandemic made worse by Chinese government lies, Perry Gershon chooses to defend the Chinese Communist Party and spew their propaganda.

Gershon is challenging Republican Representative Lee Zeldin in a rematch. Zeldin won by 4.1 percentage points in 2018.

Our response to the ridiculous and misleading NRCC attack is the only one it merited, Kim Devlin, a senior adviser to Gershons campaign, said in a statement. We raised money off of it.

Casten defeated six-term Republican Peter Roskam in 2018 to represent a district that includes parts of the west and northwest suburbs of Chicago. Jeanne Ives, a Republican former state legislator, is challenging Casten this year.

Chloe Hunt, the campaign manager for Castens re-election campaign, said in a statement, These nonsense political attacks are distracting from the real crisis at hand. If these bogus claims are what the NRCC and Jeanne Ives are focused on, its clear they dont have their priorities straight.

(Updates with Chinese response starting in fifth paragraph.)

For more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.com

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Employees of the main directorate for combating corruption and organized crime of the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) have liquidated a cocaine distribution network in Kyiv and the Kyiv region, the SBU's press center has reported.

"Operatives of the special service have established that the drug business had been organized by a resident of Kyiv who sold cocaine wholesale and retail to reliable clients. On average, he sold one gram of drugs for $150. SBU employees detained the drug dealer according to Article 208 of the Criminal Procedure Code of Ukraine at the entrance of his own house with a package of cocaine prepared for another client," the report said.

It notes that during searches conducted in the premises of the culprit law enforcement officers seized more than 700 grams of cocaine, as well as tools for its packaging, including electronic scales.

In the black market, the value of the drugs seized exceeds $100,000.

The issue of serving the detainee with a suspicion notice is being resolved.

Investigative acts are underway to identify all persons involved in the illegal activity and to bring them to account.

op
That perhaps is the only similarity that India shares with the US on Covid-19, thankfully. But why not have a war room thats the core of all decision-making to not only contain the spread of the virus but also address all issues central to the crisis? Or are there multiple war rooms in the government dealing with the dynamic scenario? Many senior officials across ministries didnt want to respond to that question while pointing out that international models ...

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Efforts to reduce the prison population at jails in Portlaoise and elsewhere must be ramped up in order to uphold minimum human rights standards of those in custody and protect the prison community from Covid-19, the Irish Penal Reform Trust (IPRT)

The organisation, which campaigns for the rights of everyone in prison, says this should be achieved through the presumption of bail and increased use of non-custodial sanctions, alongside the continued safe early release of sentenced prisoners.

IPRT called on the Minister for Justice & Equality Charlie Flanagan to accelerate such actions. It also called on him to ensure monitoring bodies including the Office of the Inspector of Prisons are resourced to ensure human rights are respected and to protect against potential ill-treatment and torture during this period.

IPRT was responding to a judgment in a case taken by a remand prisoner who is being kept in his cell for 24 hours a day, with no access to exercise. The Trust said the Court found that the temporary nature of the mans situation and the logistical challenges faced by the Irish Prison Service in having so many prisoners cocooning or in quarantine justified the limitation of his entitlements under the Prison Rules.

There were 3,843 prisoners in Irish jails as of April 14. This compares to 4,209 on February 29 which was the day before the first case of Covid-19 was confirmed in Ireland. Jails are now 89% full as compared to 97% on February 28.

Temporary releases were sanctioned as part of the national restrictions to stem the spread of the virus. Visiting prisons has also been suspended.

Fiona Ni Chinneide is the Executive Director of the Irish Penal Reform Trust. She said more must be done.

If the minimum entitlements outlined by the prison rules cannot be met due to staffing and logistical pressures during this time, then a further reduction in prison numbers is needed. While much remains unknown about COVID-19, we do know that the virus will remain in the community for quite some time. Responses that rely on lock-up for extended periods will exacerbate fears and tensions and increase the risk of violent incidents in prison. This is in addition to the serious risk to health that an outbreak of COVID-19 in crowded prisons would present.

With limitations being placed on the rights of people in custody, including those on remand, stringent oversight and accountability mechanisms are more crucial now than ever. Independent monitoring bodies such as the Office of the Inspector of Prisons must be guaranteed access to prisons and prisons data in order to protect against potential human rights violations during this period. It is essential that the Office of the Inspector of Prisons receives additional resources to meet the significant demand that this unprecedented situation presents, she said.

IPRT said it notes the preventative measures taken by the Department of Justice & Equality and the Irish Prison Service to protect against an outbreak of COVID-19 in the prison system, including the temporary release of certain prisoners. However, it added that with increasing pressure on staffing levels and challenges to meeting minimum rights in prisons, accelerated action on further steps, as outlined in the Department of Justice & Equality Justice Sector COVID-19 plan, is now required.

It said this includes increased access to enhanced remission of up to 33% for lower-risk prisoners and temporary release for prisoners with less than six months remaining to serve on a sentence.

Speaking about the risk COVID-19 poses in the prison system, Ms. Ni Chinneide continued:

In the context of COVID-19, prisons represent a high-risk environment, with social distancing almost impossible to achieve within normal operating capacity of prisons. The number of prisoners in the prison population (3,843 as 14 April 2020) is still far above the number of operational cells (3,149 as of 16 April 2019), meaning that many prisoners do not have access to single cells. A further reduction in the prison population is essential in order to achieve a safe level of occupancy and protect both the health of the prison community and the communities that prisoners and staff return to.

Ms Ni Chinneide said there is a continued over-reliance on imprisonment.

In order to reduce the risk of infection, the churn of people processed through the prison system must be reduced. In particular, there should be a presumption against committing people to prison for offences that attract custodial sentences of less than 12 months, in line with the principles of the Criminal Justice (Community Service) (Amendment) Act 2011.

"Short-term custodial sentences are widely ineffective at any time, but in the context of COVID 19 could result in grave consequences. The 2014 cross-agency Strategic Review of Penal Policy recommended that imprisonment be regarded as a sanction of last resort in Ireland. While this should always be the case, in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, it is urgent that this recommendation is the cornerstone of all sentencing decisions, she said.

She said accompanying these measures, the number of remand committals must be reduced immediately to limit the flow of entries to the prison system.

Remanding people to custody places further pressure on a system that is already under strain, with all new committals placed in quarantine for up to 14 days. The period after committal to prison is a time of heightened vulnerability, marked by feelings of hopelessness and higher incidences of self-harm. IPRT is concerned that this will be compounded due to reduced access to psychological supports in prisons as a result of COVID-19. Pre-trial detention should be used as an exceptional measure, with bail only denied in the most serious of cases.

The Trust said numerous international bodies, guided by public health evidence, have called for an immediate reduction in prison populations in order to respect public health advice on COVID-19 and save lives. This includes the World Health Organisation (WHO), the United Nations, the Council of Europe Committee for the Prevention of Torture and Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment (CPT), and the Council of Europe Commissioner for Human Rights, among others.

In order to effectively manage the rapidly developing crisis without infringing on the rights of those in custody, IPRT called on the Department of Justice & Equality, the Irish Prison Service, the Probation Service and the judiciary to work together to continue the safe reduction of the prison population.

Proposed measures are:

 Activate the additional early release measures available to further reduce the prison population to ensure access to single-cell accommodation across the prison estate;

 Presumption against custodial sentences for offences that attract sentences of <12 months in prison, in line with the principles underpinning the Community Justice (Community Service) (Amendment) Act 2011;

 Adherence to the constitutional presumption of bail, in particular for non-violent offences;

 Guaranteed access to prisons for the Office of the Inspector of Prisons in order to protect against potential human rights violations during this period.
NEW YORK, April 14, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- B2B Travel Market Research Report by Product (Conferences, Events, Groups, and Meetings), by Application (Hotel Accommodation Booking, Itinerary plan & Activities, and Transportation) - Global Forecast to 2025 (Cumulative Impact of COVID-19)



Read the full report: https://www.reportlinker.com/p05881703/?utm_source=PRN



The Global B2B Travel Market is expected to grow from USD 19,250.20 Million in 2019 to USD 39,758.57 Million by the end of 2025 at a Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 12.84%.

Market Segmentation & Coverage:

This research report categorizes the B2B Travel to forecast the revenues and analyze the trends in each of the following sub-markets:

"The Events is projected to witness the highest growth during the forecast period"

On the basis of Product, the B2B Travel Market is studied across Conferences, Events, Groups, and Meetings. The Groups commanded the largest size in the B2B Travel Market in 2019. On the other hand, the Events is expected to grow at the fastest CAGR during the forecast period.

"The Hotel Accommodation Booking is projected to witness the highest growth during the forecast period"



On the basis of Application, the B2B Travel Market is studied across Hotel Accommodation Booking, Itinerary plan & Activities, and Transportation. The Transportation commanded the largest size in the B2B Travel Market in 2019. On the other hand, the Hotel Accommodation Booking is expected to grow at the fastest CAGR during the forecast period.

"The Asia-Pacific is projected to witness the highest growth during the forecast period"

On the basis of Geography, the B2B Travel Market is studied across Americas, Asia-Pacific, and Europe, Middle East & Africa. The Americas region is studied across Argentina, Brazil, Canada, Mexico, and United States. The Asia-Pacific region is studied across Australia, China, India, Indonesia, Japan, Malaysia, Philippines, South Korea, and Thailand. The Europe, Middle East & Africa region is studied across France, Germany, Italy, Netherlands, Qatar, Russia, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, Spain, United Arab Emirates, and United Kingdom. The Europe, Middle East & Africa commanded the largest size in the B2B Travel Market in 2019. On the other hand, the Asia-Pacific is expected to grow at the fastest CAGR during the forecast period.

Company Usability Profiles:

The report deeply explores the recent significant developments by the leading vendors and innovation profiles in the Global B2B Travel Market including Alternative Airlines Ltd, B2B Travel Agency India Pvt ltd, Bedsonline, Bookingee.com, BookRes Company, Emerging Travel Group, Expedia Group Inc., GRNconnect, Hotelbeds, Lemax Ltd, Mystifly, Oravel Stays Private Limited, Sabre Corporation, TBO Group, Tour Partner Group, TourConnect, Travala.com, Travelstart Kenya, Trip.com Group Limited, Via.com, Webbeds, and Xinxin Tourism.

FPNV Positioning Matrix:

The FPNV Positioning Matrix evaluates and categorizes the vendors in the B2B Travel Market on the basis of Business Strategy (Business Growth, Industry Coverage, Financial Viability, and Channel Support) and Product Satisfaction (Value for Money, Ease of Use, Product Features, and Customer Support) that aids businesses in better decision making and understanding the competitive landscape.



Competitive Strategic Window:

The Competitive Strategic Window analyses the competitive landscape in terms of markets, applications, and geographies. The Competitive Strategic Window helps the vendor define an alignment or fit between their capabilities and opportunities for future growth prospects. During a forecast period, it defines the optimal or favorable fit for the vendors to adopt successive merger and acquisition strategies, geography expansion, research & development, and new product introduction strategies to execute further business expansion and growth.

The report provides insights on the following pointers:

1. Market Penetration: Provides comprehensive information on sulfuric acid offered by the key players

2. Market Development: Provides in-depth information about lucrative emerging markets and analyzes the markets

3. Market Diversification: Provides detailed information about new product launches, untapped geographies, recent developments, and investments

4. Competitive Assessment & Intelligence: Provides an exhaustive assessment of market shares, strategies, products, and manufacturing capabilities of the leading players

5. Product Development & Innovation: Provides intelligent insights on future technologies, R&D activities, and new product developments

The report answers questions such as:

1. What is the market size and forecast of the Global B2B Travel Market?

2. What are the inhibiting factors and their impact analysis shaping the Global B2B Travel Market during the forecast period?

3. What is the competitive position if vendors in the Global B2B Travel Market?

4. How Porters Five Forces define the Global B2B Travel Market landscape?

5. What are the technology trends and regulatory frameworks in the Global B2B Travel Market?

6. Which are the products/segments/applications/areas to invest in over the forecast period in the Global B2B Travel Market?

7. What is the competitive strategic window for opportunities in the Global B2B Travel Market?

8. What are the modes and strategic moves considered suitable for entering the Global B2B Travel Market?

Read the full report: https://www.reportlinker.com/p05881703/?utm_source=PRN \

About Reportlinker

ReportLinker is an award-winning market research solution. Reportlinker finds and organizes the latest industry data so you get all the market research you need - instantly, in one place.

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Petrol and diesel consumption, which saw its biggest-ever decline in the aftermath of a nationwide lockdown, is likely to pick up in the second half of the month as the government has allowed trucks to ply as well as farmers and industries in rural areas to resume operations after 20 April

New Delhi: Petrol and diesel consumption, which saw its biggest-ever decline in the aftermath of a nationwide lockdown, is likely to pick up in the second half of the month as the government has allowed trucks to ply as well as farmers and industries in rural areas to resume operations after 20 April.

Petrol and diesel sales had fallen by over 66 percent and aviation turbine fuel (ATF) consumption collapsed by 90 percent as the unprecedented nationwide lockdown shut factories, stopped road and rail transportation and suspended flights.

"The government has allowed inter and intra-state movement of goods traffic by road as well as rail. Also, farming operations, as well as industries outside municipal limits, have also been allowed to operate from 20 April. All these will involve fuel consumption," a top industry official said.

Trucks are the biggest user of diesel. Diesel is also used as fuel in the harvester and other agri equipment. Some goods train also run on diesel.

All these activities, the official said, will allow diesel demand to pick up in the latter part of the month.

Click here to follow LIVE updates on coronavirus outbreak

Also, vehicles used by e-commerce operators will be allowed to ply. These vehicles would largely use petrol.

"There isn't much hope for ATF but petrol and diesel demand certainly will look up if all the industries and activities permitted by the government resume operations from 20 April," the official said.

The government hasn't yet allowed resumption of domestic and international flights.

Also, road construction and resuming on work on projects in industrial clusters has been allowed, which too would consume fuel, he said.

As part of a plan to exit the world's biggest lockdown and revive stalled economic activity, the government on Wednesday allowed makers of information technology hardware, farmers and industries in rural areas to resume operations after 20 April.

This came a day after Prime Minister Narendra Modi extended a nationwide lockdown to 3 May to prevent the spread of coronavirus. The lockdown was first imposed on 25 March for 21 days.

From 20 April, the government will lift restrictions on e-commerce companies, goods movement by roads and restart port and air cargo operations.

Factories beyond municipal limits including those in the food processing industry, mining, packaging material, oil and gas exploration and refineries will be allowed to operate. Road construction, irrigation projects, construction work and projects in industrial areas such as SEZ and EoUs will be allowed to operate.

The official said both public and private sector oil refineries had cut down their run-rate following the drop in demand.

Petrochemical plants too had shutdown as products like polymers they produced were not being lifted by user industries such as plastics and packaging unit. Now with packaging industry allowed to operate, some of the products from packed godowns will move, allowing resumption of petrochemical units, he said.

The collapse of demand in the world's third-biggest consuming nation during April came on the back of worst fuel sales in more than a decade recorded in March 2020.

The country's petroleum product consumption fell 17.79 percent to 16.08 million tonnes in March.

Diesel, the most consumed fuel in the country, saw demand contract by 24.23 percent to 5.65 million tonnes. This is the biggest fall in diesel consumption the country has recorded as most trucks went off-road and railways stopped plying trains.

Petrol sales dropped 16.37 percent to 2.15 million tonnes in March as the 21-day nationwide lockdown enforced to prevent the spread of COVID-19 took most cars and two-wheelers off the road.

With flights grounded since mid-March, ATF consumption fell 32.4 percent to 4,84,000 tonnes.

The only fuel that showed growth was LPG as households rushed to book refills for stocking during the three-week lockdown period. LPG sales rose 1.9 per cent to 2.3 million tonnes in March.
The information below has been supplied by dairy marketers and other industry organizations. It has not been edited, verified or endorsed by Hoards Dairyman.



PanTheryx , the biotechnology company committed to realizing the potential of bovine colostrum to address a wide range of health conditions, announced today that it has appointed Holger Liepmann and Peter Erickson to join its board of directors. Both Liepmann and Erickson bring robust experience in nutrition and food science innovation and commercialization and will help develop and oversee the companys growth strategies.

Adding great talent to our Board builds a strong foundation for the momentum of PanTheryx

As we continue to advance our colostrum-based offerings and educate consumers about the wide array of colostrum benefits, bringing talented individuals who can help us achieve this mission is essential, said David Abramson, executive chairman of PanTheryx. Both Holger and Peter come with compelling industry backgrounds and track records of unparalleled commercial success and scientific advancement in nutrition and food science, and we could not be happier that they have agreed to join our Board.

Mr. Liepmann has been consistently recognized for his leadership skills and business results throughout a more than 35-year career in the health care environment, including experience in pharmaceutical, nutritional and hospital products and roles in R&D, manufacturing, supply chain and commercial operations. Liepmann had an extensive and successful career with Abbott Laboratories, most recently serving as executive vice president for Abbotts $5.0+ billion Global Nutrition business. Prior to Abbott, Liepmann worked for Bayer AG in a variety of capacities, in both the US and Germany. He has been advising boards since 2002, continuing to serve on the board of Altan Pharmaceuticals and the board of trustees of the DRI Foundation. He earned his Bachelor's degree from Dartmouth College and a Masters degree in business administration from Stanford University.

Mr. Erickson brings more than 30 years of food science expertise to the PanTheryx Board, most recently serving as executive vice president for innovation, technology and quality at General Mills Inc. He is credited with building a culture focused on industry-leading innovation, technical excellence, product quality, and food safety; resulting in the invention and commercialization of advanced food and technologies that benefit the lives of consumers globally. Erickson has remained committed to driving innovation and delivering safer, more effective products to consumers through his active board service with Noblegen Inc. and Wenger Corporation. Erickson received a Bachelor of Science and Master of Science in food science from University of Massachusetts.

Adding great talent to our Board builds a strong foundation for the momentum of PanTheryx, said Wes Parris, president, CEO and director of PanTheryx. We are poised to provide an exciting portfolio of colostrum-based solutions for a wide range of health benefits for consumers and are thrilled to have these two exceptional leaders join an impressive group of individuals on our Board. Their combination of business knowledge, global leadership and industry contacts will be instrumental in meeting our goals.

Liepmann and Erickson join the existing Board members, including David Abramson, executive chairman of PanTheryx; Craig Cogut, founder and co-managing partner of Pegasus Capital Advisors; David Cogut, principal at Pegasus Capital Advisors; Dr. Mehmet Oz, M.D, surgeon and host of The Dr. Oz Show; Wes Parris, president, CEO and director of PanTheryx; Dr. Rajiv Shah, M.D., president of the Rockefeller Foundation and Tom Washing, founding partner of Sequel Venture Partners.

About PanTheryx:

PanTheryx is a biotechnology company committed to realizing the potential of bovine colostrum to address a wide range of health conditions. As the worlds largest producer of bovine colostrum, PanTheryx utilizes the cellular and biomolecular processes of bovine colostrum to produce a wide range of therapeutics, spanning the range of nutritional interventions to biologics. PanTheryxs proprietary colostrum, ColostrumOne is natures superfood; designed to be comprehensive as nature intended with the important nutritional components for health and vitality throughout all stages of life. Founded in 2007, PanTheryx is headquartered in Boulder, Colorado and has production facilities in Phoenix, AZ and Ripon, CA. For more information, please visit PanTheryx.com
Jermaine Harris, 18, of Northwest, was arrested Tuesday and charged in the death of Lamar Walters, 38, of Northeast, police said. Walters was found fatally shot about 1:30 p.m. on Jan. 6 in the 2400 block of Franklin Street NE, police said.
The Palo Verde College (PVC) Pirates' Chest free foods program will continue to serve enrolled students next week, to be hosted at the Blythe Emergency Food Pantry (181 S. Main St.) on April 21, from 10 a.m. to 12 p.m., for students whose last names begin with A-J; and on April 24, from 10 a.m. to 12 p.m., for students whose last names begin with K-Z. (Archived file photo by Uriel Avendano/Palo Verde Valley Times)
Bob Dole has compared coronavirus to the Second World War, when he nearly died and was left partially paralyzed during fighting in Italy.

The 96-year-old Republican said he has not seen anything like the current crisis that has gripped the world after first emerging in China last December.

But the former senator, who represented Kansas during the 1980s an 1990s, vowed the US would get through the pandemic due to the same dedication of doctors and nurses who saved his life 75 years earlier.

The former Senate majority leader and the 1996 Republican candidate for president who lost out to incumbent Bill Clinton, nearly died after being seriously wounded by German machine gun fire.

Former Senator Bob Dole being held up so he can salute the casket of his friend, the late former President George H.W. Bush, as he lay in state at the Capitol in December 2018

Bob Dole recovering from his wounds in after being seriously injured in Italy in April 1945

He was serving as a young US Army lieutenant in the 10th Mountain Division when he was struck in the upper back and right arm near Castel d'Aiano in the Italian Alps in April 1945.

Dole was hospitalized for three years and left with limited mobility in his right arm and numbness in his left arm.

He suffered spinal cord bruising, lost a kidney and his recovery was compounded by blood clots and infection.

Robert Dole served as a young US Army lieutenant in Italy when he was injured in 1945

But the war veteran said neither the horrors of WWII, the Vietnam conflict, the Cold War nor 911 were like the current global crisis.

Yesterday Dole took to Twitter to mark the 75th anniversary of the day he suffered his near fatal wounds.

He posted a message of hope to his followers amid the coronavirus lockdown, saying that with 'love and support' the country will 'come out stronger and more united than ever'.

The veteran senator wrote: 'Seventy-five years ago today, I was wounded in the hills of Italy and I thought my life was over.

'Thanks to the skills of great doctors and nurses, the love of my family, and support of my friends, I learned that my life was just beginning.

'I've seen a lot of history in the past 75 years - and have been fortunate to play a small role in writing some of it - but I've never seen anything like what out country is going though today.'

Dole also said he was 'the most optimistic man in America' and believed the US would triumph in the face of the pandemic.

So far, the US has had more coronavirus cases and fatalities than any other country, with 615,183 cases and 26,094 deaths.

He added: 'A few years back, I said I was ''the most optimistic man in America''. I still am. I am confident that - thanks to the skills of great doctors and nurses, the love of our families, and the support of our friends, our nation will persevere, and we will come out stronger and more united than ever.'

Since his devastating injuries, Dole minimizes the effect of numbness in his arm by keeping a pen in his right hand.

Republican presidential candidate Bob Dole and former President George H.W. Bush receiving a standing ovation after Bush introduced Dole at a rally Tampa in 1996

Former Sen. Bob Dole, with former First Lady Barbara Bush (left) holding hands with her husband, former President George H.W. Bush, during the playing of 'Taps' at a Pearl Harbor remembrance ceremony in Texas in 2016

He was decorated three times with two Purple Hearts for his injuries and the Bronze Star with 'V' Device for valor for his attempt to assist a downed radioman.

After working as an attorney, Dole went into politics and a member of the House of Representatives from 1961 to 1969 and in the Senate from 1969 to 1996, serving as the Senate Majority Leader from 1985 until 1996.

Dole ran against George H.W. Bush in the 1988 Republican presidential primary in a bitter battle, but Bush ultimately won the nomination and Dole stayed in the Senate.

However, the two men forged a working relationship and began great friends.

Dole was pictured paying an emotional tribute to the former president when he was helped out of his wheelchair to stand and salute the casket of his friend at the Capitol in December 2018.
1Q20 Adjusted EPS* expected to increase approximately 29% year-over-year



1Q20 Adjusted EBIT* expected to exceed guidance and grow approximately 17% year-over-year

1Q20 Adjusted EBIT Margin* expected to expand to approximately 6.5% from 5.3% in 1Q19

Specialty Construction Chemicals profitability expected to improve for fifth consecutive quarter

Growth initiatives continue to gain traction; North America sales up 5% year-over-year in 1Q20

Expects to release first quarter 2020 results on May 6, 2020

CAMBRIDGE, Mass., April 15, 2020 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- GCP Applied Technologies Inc. (GCP), a leading global provider of construction products technologies, today provided an update regarding its expected financial results for the first quarter of 2020 and its response to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Randy Dearth, GCPs President and Chief Executive Officer, said, I want to thank our employees for their outstanding focus and dedication in the first several months of 2020. Due to their commitment, we expect to report our best first quarter earnings performance since 2016. Highlights of the impressive performance we expect to report include strong year-over-year growth in Adjusted EBIT and Adjusted EPS, solid sales growth in North America, and continued improvement in profitability for Specialty Construction Chemicals. Our preliminary results demonstrate that we sustained the improved performance and business momentum we had entering 2020 despite the significant challenges caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. As always, we will prioritize the health and safety of our employees as we support our customers, suppliers and other stakeholders during this unprecedented time.

Dearth continued, As our preliminary results indicate, we are continuing to manage expenses and expect solid year-over-year improvement in our margins in the first quarter. We will also continue to evaluate the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on our business globally and act proactively to manage the effects of the crisis. Our strong balance sheet, coupled with our significant liquidity and no near-term debt maturities, leave us well-positioned to successfully navigate ongoing economic challenges and uncertainty. We believe these factors, as well as our ongoing focus on improved performance, comprise the right strategy to create value for shareholders.

Story continues

The Company today provided its expectation regarding results for the first quarter of 2020, as follows:



Net sales of approximately $217 million;

Adjusted EBITDA* of approximately $25 million;

Adjusted EBIT* of approximately $14 million; and

Adjusted EPS* of approximately $0.09

Net sales in the first quarter of 2020 are expected to exceed the Companys expectations, benefitting from stronger performance in North America due to growth by both Specialty Construction Chemicals and Specialty Building Materials in this region. Sales performance in North America was offset by the impact on sales in the Asia Pacific region resulting from the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic in China. GCP continued to advance its restructuring programs and manage discretionary costs during the first quarter of 2020 and expects to report a reduction in total operating expenses. As a result, the Company anticipates significant outperformance in Adjusted EBIT* for the first quarter of 2020 compared to the outlook provided on its most recent earnings call. The Company expects Adjusted EBIT* to increase approximately 17% year-over-year to approximately $14 million, with preliminary Adjusted EBIT Margin* expected to expand to approximately 6.5% in the first quarter of 2020 compared to 5.3% in the first quarter of 2019. Additionally, GCP expects Adjusted EPS* of $0.09 for the first quarter of 2020, which would represent approximately 29% year-over-year growth.

GCP expects its cash balance at the end of the first quarter of 2020 to be approximately $320 million and has reduced planned capital expenditures by approximately $25 million compared to its original plan to further support its cash position.

Withdrawing 2020 Outlook

As a result of the global disruption and uncertainty caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, GCP is withdrawing its fiscal 2020 outlook provided on February 26, 2020 and is not providing an updated outlook at this time.

*Non-GAAP financial measures. See below for important information regarding such non-GAAP measures.

First Quarter 2020 Investor Call

GCP expects to release results for the first quarter on Wednesday, May 6, 2020 at 6:00 a.m. ET. President and Chief Executive Officer Randy Dearth and Interim Chief Financial Officer Craig Merrill will host a conference call to discuss the results later that day at 10:00 a.m. ET.

The live webcast may be accessed by visiting the Events and Presentations section of the Companys website at investor.gcpat.com. The call also may be accessed by dialing +1 (888) 254-3590 in the U.S. or +1 (720) 543-0214 internationally. Participants should ask to join the GCP Applied Technologies earnings call.

For those unable to listen to the live conference call, a playback will be available until May 13, 2020. To listen to the playback, please dial +1 (888) 203-1112 in the U.S. or +1 (719) 457-0820 internationally; the access code is 8265227. A webcast replay will also be available in the Events and Presentations section of the Companys website for approximately three months.

Non-GAAP Financial Measures

In this communication, the Company refers to non-GAAP financial measures including: Adjusted EBIT, Adjusted EBIT Margin, Adjusted EBITDA, and Adjusted EPS. These non-GAAP measures do not purport to represent income or liquidity measures as defined under United States Generally Accepted Accounting Principles ("GAAP"), and should not be considered as alternatives to such measures as an indicator of GCP's performance. These measures are provided to investors and others to improve the period-to-period and peer-to-peer comparability of GCP's financial results and to ensure that investors understand the information GCP uses to evaluate the performance of its businesses. The following are the non-GAAP financial measures presented in this communication:

The Company defines Adjusted EBIT (a non-GAAP financial measure) to be net income (loss) from continuing operations attributable to GCP shareholders adjusted for: (i) gains and losses on sales of businesses, product lines and certain other investments; (ii) currency and other financial losses in Venezuela; (iii) costs related to legacy product, environmental and other claims; (iv) restructuring and repositioning expenses, and asset impairments; (v) defined benefit plan costs other than service and interest costs, expected returns on plan assets and amortization of prior service costs/credits; (vi) third-party and other acquisition-related costs; (vii) other financing costs associated with the modification or extinguishment of debt; (viii) amortization of acquired inventory fair value adjustments; (ix) tax indemnification adjustments; (x) interest income, interest expense and related financing costs; (xi) income taxes; (xii) shareholder activism and other related costs; and (xiii) certain other items that are not representative of underlying trends. Adjusted EBIT Margin is defined as Adjusted EBIT divided by net sales. The Company uses Adjusted EBIT to assess and measure its operating performance and determine performance-based employee compensation. The Company uses Adjusted EBIT as a performance measure because it provides improved quarter-to-quarter and year-over-year comparability for decision-making and compensation purposes and allows management to measure the ongoing earnings results of our strategic and operating decisions.

The Company defines Adjusted EBITDA (a non-GAAP financial measure) as Adjusted EBIT adjusted for depreciation and amortization. Adjusted EBITDA Margin is defined as Adjusted EBITDA divided by net sales. GCP uses Adjusted EBITDA as a performance measure in making significant business decisions.

The Company defines Adjusted Earnings Per Share (a non-GAAP financial measure) to be earnings per share ("EPS") from continuing operations on a diluted basis adjusted for: (i) gains and losses on sales of businesses, product lines and certain other investments; (ii) currency and other financial losses in Venezuela; (iii) costs related to legacy product, environmental and other claims; (iv) restructuring and repositioning expenses and asset impairments; (v) defined benefit plan costs other than service and interest costs, expected returns on plan assets and amortization of prior service costs/credits; (vi) third-party and other acquisition-related costs; (vii) other financing costs associated with the modification or extinguishment of debt; (viii) amortization of acquired inventory fair value adjustments; (ix) tax indemnification adjustments; (x) shareholder activism and other related costs; (xi) certain discrete tax items; and (xii) certain other items that are not representative of underlying trends. GCP uses Adjusted EPS as a performance measure to review its diluted earnings per share results on a consistent basis and in determining certain performance-based employee compensation.



Adjusted EBIT, Adjusted EBIT Margin, Adjusted EBITDA and Adjusted EPS do not purport to represent income measures as defined in accordance with U.S. GAAP. These measures are provided to investors and others to improve the period-to-period comparability and peer-to-peer comparability of GCP's financial results and to ensure that investors understand the information GCP uses to evaluate the performance of its businesses.



Adjusted EBIT has material limitations as an operating performance measure because it excludes costs related to income and expenses from restructuring and repositioning activities which historically have been a material component of net income (loss) from continuing operations attributable to GCP shareholders. Adjusted EBITDA also has material limitations as an operating performance measure because it excludes the impact of depreciation and amortization expense. GCP's business is substantially dependent on the successful deployment of capital, and depreciation and amortization expense is a necessary element of its costs. GCP compensates for the limitations of these measurements by using these indicators together with net income (loss) measured in accordance with U.S. GAAP to present a complete analysis of its results of operations. Adjusted EBIT and Adjusted EBITDA should be evaluated together with net income (loss) from continuing operations attributable to GCP shareholders measured in accordance with U.S. GAAP for a complete understanding of GCP's results of operations.



The Company has not provided comparable GAAP financial information on a forward-looking basis because the Company is unable to estimate with reasonable certainty unusual or unanticipated charges, expenses or gains without unreasonable effort. These items are uncertain, depend on various factors, and could be material to the Companys results computed in accordance with U.S. GAAP. As a result, the Company has not provided a reconciliation to such measures because it is not practicable at the time of this communication to determine or estimate each of the items that the Company excludes to calculate the comparable non-GAAP financial measure, which items and amounts could be material.

About GCP Applied Technologies

GCP is a leading global provider of construction products technologies that include additives for cement and concrete, the VERIFI in-transit concrete management system, high-performance waterproofing products, and specialty systems. GCP products have been used to build some of the worlds most renowned structures. More information is available at www.gcpat.com.

Investor Relations

Joseph DeCristofaro

T +1 617.498.2616

investors@gcpat.com

Cautionary Statements Regarding Forward-Looking Information

This communication contains forward-looking statements, within the meaning of Section 27A of the Securities Act of 1933, Section 21E of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 and the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Forward-looking statements may be identified by the context of the statement and generally arise when GCP or its management is discussing its beliefs, estimates or expectations. Such statements generally include the words believes, plans, intends, targets, will, expects, estimates, suggests, anticipates, outlook, continues, or similar expressions. These statements are not historical facts or guarantees of future performance but instead represent only the beliefs of GCP and its management at the time the statements were made regarding future events which are subject to certain risks, uncertainties and other factors, many of which are outside GCPs control. Actual results and outcomes may differ materially from what is expressed or forecast in such forward-looking statements. Forward-looking statements include, without limitation, statements about expected financial positions; results of operations; cash flows; financing plans; business strategy; operating plans; strategic alternatives; capital and other expenditures; competitive positions; growth opportunities for existing products; benefits from new technology and cost reduction initiatives, plans and objectives; and markets for securities. Like other businesses, we are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause our actual results to differ materially from our projections or that could cause other forward-looking statements to prove incorrect. Factors that could cause actual results to materially differ from those contained in the forward-looking statements, or that could cause other forward-looking statements to prove incorrect, include, without limitation, risks related to: the cyclical and seasonal nature of the industries that GCP serves; foreign operations, especially in emerging regions; changes in currency exchange rates; the cost and availability of raw materials and energy; the effectiveness of GCPs research and development, new product introductions and growth investments; acquisitions and divestitures of assets and gains and losses from dispositions; developments affecting GCPs outstanding liquidity and indebtedness, including debt covenants and interest rate exposure; developments affecting GCPs funded and unfunded pension obligations; warranty and product liability claims; legal proceedings; the inability to establish or maintain certain business relationships and relationships with customers and suppliers or the inability to retain key personnel; the handling of hazardous materials and the costs of compliance with environmental regulations; extreme weather events, natural disasters and the COVID-19 pandemic. These and other factors are identified and described in more detail in GCP's Annual Report on Form 10-K, which has been filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission and is available online at www.sec.gov, and subsequent quarterly reports. Readers are cautioned not to place undue reliance on GCPs projections and other forward-looking statements, which speak only as of the date thereof. GCP undertakes no obligation to publicly release any revision to its projections and other forward-looking statements contained in this communication, or to update them to reflect events or circumstances occurring after the date of this communication.
ALTON  Local leaders on Wednesday praised the regions response to the coronavirus pandemic.

State Rep. Monica Bristow, D-Alton, led off a 60-member teleconference hosted by the RiverBend Growth Association by noting the continuing need to follow recommendations on limiting the spread of the virus.

There are still those people who dont believe this is real. Im telling you, it is, she said. My husband was out yesterday getting groceries, and about half the people have masks and half dont.

Ajay Pathak, president of OSF HealthCare Saint Anthonys Health Center in Alton, said wearing a mask should not be the exception, but the rule. He added local efforts to limit COVID-19 risks are making a difference.

So I would urge you to continue to feel comfortable avoiding public gatherings, he said.

Bristow said work is underway to set up COVID-19 testing sites in Alton, Granite City and East St. Louis.

We have the facilities available, she said. We have the staff available. But we dont have the tests available.

We have the machines for analysis at those sites, Bristow said. But we dont have the testing kits.

She also discussed the uncertainty of when the General Assembly will again meet in Springfield.

We have not been in Springfield since some time in March; dont know when were going back, she said. We do not have the ability to vote by phone remotely.

We do need to pass a budget, she said. The budget is going to be a mess; its going to be bad. But Illinois is not going to be alone in that.

She also said many lawmakers have asked Gov. J.B. Pritzker to put off the minimum wage increase slated for July 1.

The legislators, almost en masse, almost unanimously, have asked the governor to please delay that, she said. Its just a burden we believe businesses should have to deal with right now.

Bristow said she is concerned if businesses will be able to come back from the COVID-19 crisis.

I hate it; I feel the weight of it, she said. When is this going to end? We dont know. Are schools going to be done for the year? We dont know.

Also during Wednesdays program:

 Pathak told how the hospital is partnering with the state on a digital pandemic health workforce program that allows people to talk with medical professionals and screen symptoms for COVID-19.

The PHW program will allow us to better serve our community, utilizing digital technology and trained compassionate and trusted pandemic health workers to offer support to individuals where they are most comfortable, in their own homes, Pathak said in a media release Wednesday.

 Brett Stawar, president/CEO of the Great Rivers & Routes Tourism Bureau, said a number of area restaurants and hotels were among the 700 announced this week that will receive Illinois Department of Commerce and Economic Opportunity grants. More than 12,000 applied; the grants were awarded by lottery.

He also said the Hampton Hotel and Comfort Inn are currently closed in Alton. The rest are open with minimal occupancy and theyre all struggling, he said.

It is going to be a process to relaunch tourism, he said. Were kind of waiting to see what guidance we get from the governor and the administration on where we can actually go for the rest of this calendar year. Its going to be a rough year.

 John Keller, president of the RiverBend Growth Association, urged local residents to safely shop local.

Its going to be a rough go on the other side of this, he said. I encourage you to get out. Everybodys got a special right now going on; some of them are pretty darn good.

Bristow also noted there remains an extreme shortage of personal protection equipment and encouraged people to donate any PPE they had for health care workers and first-responders.

She also noted the challenges currently faced by the Illinois Department of Employment Security.

They are overwhelmed both with phone calls and online, she said. We are aware there are problems. They are trying to fix them. But with the number of people applying (for unemployment) its just crazy.

Tony Fuhrmann, administrator of Madison County Employment and Training, said his office is closed to the public but is still working and can help people who might be having problems applying for unemployment.

We are hearing from employers that they are still hiring, he said.
Two relatives of Tablighi Jamaat chief Maulana Saad Kandhalvi tested positive for coronavirus in Uttar Pradesh's Saharanpur district, an official said on Wednesday.

After the two relatives of Kandhalvi tested positive for COVID-19, the district administration sealed Mufti locality in Mandi area here, Saharanpur DM Akhilesh Singh told PTI.

He said eight other people from the area were placed under quarantine.

The two persons who tested positive are Kandhalvi's in-laws and they had stayed at the Tablighi Jamaat's Markaz in Delhi's Nizamuddin before the COVID-19 lockdown was imposed, the district magistrate said.

They had recently returned from South Africa and quarantined along with two other persons, Singh said.

The authorities are now trying to find those people who came in contact with the two relatives of the Tablighi Jamaat's leader.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
After surging over 25 per cent in less than a month, entering a technical bull market in the process, gravity reasserted itself over the Australian share market on Wednesday with early gains quickly evaporating as the session progressed.

The benchmark S&P/ASX 200 fell 21.4 points, or 0.4 per cent, to 5466.7.

Our market opened with glimmers of hope, but this was quickly erased early doors after the consumer confidence numbers were the worst in the 47-year history of the survey, said Karen Jorritsma, head of equities at RBC Capital Markets. Volumes are sloppy and big tickets are few and far between.

While Wall Street managed to brush aside weak earnings results from JP Morgan and Wells Fargo, posting huge gains on renewed hopes for an early rollback of coronavirus containment measures, Ms Jorritsma described the reports as an ominous signal.

Both posted their highest loan loss provisions in a decade, setting aside more than $US12 billion to cover defaults across the economy. This is four to six times the amounts they have done in the last few quarters, she said. Quite simply, banks are bracing themselves for pain and in a significant way.

Along with energy, materials and communications, the financial sector was among the worst performers during the session with a decline of 0.5 per cent.

The Commonwealth Bank eased 1.1 per cent to $62.07, offsetting modest gains in the other three majors.

The energy sector was also weighed down by a sharp decline in crude oil prices on Tuesday, sliding 3.1 per cent.

Oil Search slumped 4 per cent to $2.64, Santos 3.7 per cent to $4.39 while Woodside Petroleum skidded 3.6 per cent to $21.22.

Among the other major names, Qantas fell 3.5 per cent to $3.55 following a bearish broker note from UBS.

The big miners were also pressured with BHP Billiton falling 0.7 per cent to $31.43 while Rio Tinto slipped 1.2 per cent to $89.78. Despite stronger iron ore prices, Fortescue Metals slumped 1.5 per cent to $11.40.

CSL  the largest company on the benchmark by market capitalisation - ensured a down day for the broader index, closing with a fall of 0.6 per cent to $324.15.
Even when the Strokes were a brand-new band, nostalgia was a big part of their appeal. "In many ways, they'll miss the good old days/Someday," Julian Casablancas sang on "Someday" from the Strokes' 2001 debut album, "Is This It." At the time, the Strokes were already being hailed as a second  maybe third or fourth  coming of a terse, hardheaded, jaded but hopped-up New York City rock lineage running from the Velvet Underground through the New York Dolls and the Ramones.

Now, 19 years after the Strokes released their first recordings and seven years after their previous full-length album, "Comedown Machine," the band has released "The New Abnormal." (They announced the album title in early February, weeks before "the new abnormal" became a familiar description of life during the COVID-19 pandemic.)

It's the sixth album by the Strokes, always a supremely self-conscious band. And as the band completes its second decade, its invocations of nostalgia have folded in on themselves: on the music the Strokes chose as their foundation, on two decades of the Strokes' own catalog and on the conflicting pressures of enjoying flexing their strongest instincts and moving ahead. "I want new friends but they don't want me," Casablancas complains, resignedly, in "Brooklyn Bridge to Chorus."

The Strokes have the boon and burden of making three indelible albums: "Is This It" (2001), "Room on Fire" (2003) and  though it was less appreciated at the time  "First Impressions on Earth" (2005), which bristles equally with guitar hooks and misanthropic barbs. The next two albums, and the 2016 EP "Future Present Past" (note the title), turned inward and grew opaque; band members also took time for solo projects. But the early Strokes albums built lasting loyalty, particularly in New York; the Strokes were headliners at Governors Ball in 2014 and 2016, and on New Year's Eve 2019 at the Barclays Center in Brooklyn.

"The New Abnormal" was produced by Rick Rubin, who in recent decades has become known as someone that established acts  Metallica, the Dixie Chicks, Red Hot Chili Peppers  go to for a midcareer reckoning, a reconsideration of a band's essence as it grows up. "The New Abnormal" clarifies what had already become increasingly obvious: that the Strokes never intended to reincarnate punk, garage rock or proto-punk.

Brevity was fine, but the primitivist blare and blur of punk were by no means what the Strokes were after. The band's true commitment is to counterpoint: to putting interlocking melody at every level of a song. The guitars of Nick Valensi and Albert Hammond Jr. are in constant dialogue, separated in stereo with contrasting tones, while Nikolai Fraiture's bass offers as much countermelody as impact; Fabrizio Moretti's drums goad and answer them all but leave space. The instruments lean toward brief, staccato parts, simultaneously pacing and pulling against sustained melodies from Casablancas. Even on lesser Strokes albums, the musical ideas always snap neatly into place.

On "The New Abnormal," tempos are often slower than they were on early Strokes songs, which only exposes more of the songs' intricacies. At any speed, Strokes tracks are clockworks, not tantrums or squalls. And they haven't gotten lazy; the album opens with "The Adults Are Talking" in perky, vintage Strokes style, with guitars picking steady eighth-notes, bouncing back and forth, stacking up little lines that mesh crisply or tease with dissonance.

"The '80s bands, where did they go?," Casablancas sings in "Brooklyn Bridge to Chorus," simultaneously acknowledging influences and musing on the half-lives of pop careers. Throughout "The New Abnormal," the band summons the full-bodied sounds of the 1980s, with spacious guitar tones and what may or may not be blippy electropop synthesizers (Valensi has ways of drawing synthesizer-like tones from his guitars). One song, "Bad Decisions," harks back to Billy Idol's "Dancing With Myself," sharing the songwriting credits with Idol and his collaborator Tony James. It's the Strokes admitting that they, too, had some not-so-hip formative years.

"The New Abnormal" has the Strokes thinking in the long term not only about pop careers but about relationships, even the state of the environment. Casablancas remains skeptical of just about everyone, definitely including himself. In "Why Are Sundays So Depressing" he warns, "Don't ask me questions/that you don't want/the answers to." But he's no longer petulant or dismissive. In a few songs he's even apologetic, particularly in "Selfless," which could easily be a marriage proposal. There's a broader view in "Eternal Summer," a majestic march that warns bitterly about climate change. "Summer is coming, won't go away," Casablancas croons in falsetto; later, he brings a punky rasp to snarl, "They got the remedy/But they won't let it happen."

"At the Door" is the album's most radical departure from the typical Strokes sound. There are no drums; the music gets its pulse from rhythmic synthesizer tones and rippling guitar chords, and near the end the parts multiply into an overarching neo-Baroque polyphony of computer-tuned vocals and countermelodies. It's not the early, edgy Strokes, but what they've grown up into. Maybe the Strokes won't make new friends with this album, but old friends can get closer.
Chennai, April 15 : DMK President M.K.Stalin has announced that an all party meeting will be held through video conferencing on Thursday morning.

Despite the assurance given that the meeting would be held complying with various regulations and by maintaining social distane, the police has denied permission, Stalin said late on Tuesday in a statement.

The Leader of the Opposition in the Tamil Nadu Assembly Stalin said the party had called for an all party meeting at its head quarters on April 15, but the city police refused permission for the same.

Stalin said Chief Minister K.Palaniswami has held meetings with ministers, officials, medical experts and even with religious leaders in the state secretariat.

On those lines, an all party meeting was called by the DMK to discuss issues relating to Covid-19.
India has decided to send 5 lakh tablets of hydroxychloroquine to Afghanistan from the Saarc Covid-19 Emergency Fund set up at Prime Minister Narendra Modis suggestion last month. The fund was created with an initial corpus of $10 million from India; other Saarc members had also pitched in.

A top government official told Hindustan Times that the decision to send the tablets had been taken but New Delhi is yet to work out the logistics in view of relations with neighbouring Pakistan. We are looking at various possibilities to reach the medicine to the people of Afghanistan at the earliest, the official said.

One of the options being explored is use of third-party planes, may be international cargo planes.

A second official said India had already made deliveries of hydroxychloroquine to other Saarc countries such as Maldives, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Bangladesh and Bhutan. There has been no proposal to send the medicine to Pakistan in the absence of a request from Islamabad.

I think there have been public statements by leaders in Pakistan that they have sufficient supply of the medicine, the official said.

Global demand for the anti-malarial drug hydroxychloroquine had boosted over the last few weeks after some studies showed that it helped to reduce the viral load in Covid-19 patients.

India initially had banned exports of the drug to ensure that there were sufficient supplies to cater to domestic requirements. These restrictions were later eased, mostly to enable pharmaceutical companies to honour their contractual obligations on a case-to-case basis.

Otherwise too, pharma companies have been permitted exports to friendly countries such as the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia.

The decision taken to supply the medicine and other medical assistance under the Saarc Covid-19 Emergency Fund demonstrates the utility of the fund that was created last month.

PM Modi, speaking at the virtual conference of Saarc leaders, had underscored that the fund would be financed by voluntary contributions from all members. Pakistan was the last member state to pledge its share of the contribution, $ 3 million, but had demanded that the fund should be placed at the disposal of the secretary general of the South Asian grouping.

The current secretary general of Saarc is veteran Sri Lankan diplomat Esala Ruwan Weerakoon, who recently succeeded Pakistans Amjad Hussain Sial.

Pakistan Prime Minister Imran Khan was the only Saarc head of government who opted out of the conference and instead, sent Pakistans de facto health minister for the meeting.

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LOS ANGELESLorena Borjas, a longtime activist and advocate for transgender and undocumented sex workers in the New York City borough of Queens, died late last month, a victim of the coronavirus pandemic, according to an obituary published by The New York Times. She was 59 years old.

She pushed us to shine authentically, to become an unstoppable insubordination, a scream of subversion that says, I am here, and I deserve happiness, too, wrote Cecilia Gentili, a New York trans activist who was mentored by Borjas.

According to a BuzzFeed News report, Borjas died on March 30. She had run away from her Veracruz, Mexico, home in at the age of 17, finally crossing into the United States in 1981 after four harrowing years on the Mexico City streets.

She received a green card in 1986, when then-President Ronald Reagan granted a broad amnesty to about 3 million undocumented immigrants.

But she lived under the threat of deportation due to a series of sex-work arrests in the 1990s that made her unable to renew her green card. But three years ago, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo granted her a pardon. She obtained full United States citizenship in 2019.

She was very interested in breaking the cycle that is arrest, jail time, immigration detention, deportation procedures, Gentili told BuzzFeed News. She knew if she was able to pay the bail, the girls wouldnt go to jail.

In 2011, she founded the Lorena Borjas Community Fund with the stated intention of helping transgender sex workers break out of the arrest-jail-deportation cycle. Her fund posted bail for at least 50 transgender individuals, according to Chase Strangio, a friend and colleague who spoke to The New York Times.

But this is just a fraction of what Lorena herself did, Strangio told The Times. She probably helped over 100 trans people obtain immigration status or other legal support.

With Gentili, who worked at a Queens health clinic, she also handed out condoms to sex workers in Roosevelt Avenue in Queens, always making sure they never carried more than two at a time  because holding more than two condoms often led to an arrest.

This was lifesaving work, Gentile wrote. For many sex workers, particularly transgender women, arrest meant facing degrading treatment and abuse at the hands of the police.

The Jackson Heights neighborhood in central queens, which served as home base for Borjas, has been hit especially hard by the citys coronavirus outbreak. With a densely-packed populatiom if about 600,000 largely by working class and immigrant residents, central Queens had suffered 7,260 cases of the virus by April 10. Manhattan, with a population of more than 1.6 million, recorded 10,860 cases in the same time frame.

According to Gentile, Borjas is survived by a partner, as well as family members still living in Mexico.

Photo Via Lorena Borejas Facebook
Mauritius, which is one the largest sources of foreign portfolio investments (FPI) into the country, has welcomed the recent government decision to upgrade the island nation as an eligible country for Category-I FPIs.

On April 13, the government notified Mauritius as an "eligible country", enabling its investment entities to register as Category-I foreign portfolio investors, relaxing their KYC requirements.

Considering the large size of investments by entities from Mauritius into the capital markets, this is a welcome move and goes in line with protection of FPIs from such adverse tax regimes.

Category-I FPIs include government and government-related investors such as central banks, sovereign wealth funds, international or multilateral organisations or agencies, including entities controlled or at least 75 per cent directly or indirectly owned by such governments and government-related investors, pension and university funds.

The new regulation also specifies that the category-I FPIs shall include entities from the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) member-countries or from any country specified by the government by way of an agreement or treaty with other governments.

It can be noted that so far Mauritius was not eligible for Category-I status as it is not a member of the Financial Action Task Force.

Welcoming the new categorization, the Economic Development Board of Mauritius on Wednesday said the move will enhance the engagement levels of governments of Mauritius and India for trade and economic ties.

Following the government move, the markets watchdog Sebi has revised its regulation under Regulations 5 (a)(iv) of Sebi FPI regulations 2019 on Tuesday making the regulated funds from Mauritius eligible for registration as Category 1 FPIs in India.

The revised Sebi circular and the accruing benefits will bring in regulated funds from Mauritius, making them eligible for registration as Category 1 FPIs in India, the Economic Development Board of Mauritius said in a statement, adding the provision will enhance the engagement levels between the two governments.

It also opens the gateways for interactions between the Financial Services Commission of Mauritius and the Sebi as a result of which the government of Mauritius has reaffirmed its interest in creating a conducive business environment and a hub of choice for international investments, the board said.

This recognition follows fruitful engagements, at the highest level, between the two governments on further enhancing our trade and economic ties. It also follows interactions amongst the various authorities, including high-level discussions between the Financial Services Commission of Mauritius and the Sebi since October 2019, as well as the relevant ministries, the statement said.

The statement further said Mauritius has been providing a conducive business environment to the investor community, and this amendment is a key development in reaffirming Mauritius as the hub of choice for international investments. It also bears testimony to the strong relationship that exists between the two countries.

The Monday notification from the finance ministry said, the government hereby specifies Mauritius as an eligible country for the purposes of Regulation 5 (a)(iv) of the Sebi (Foreign Portfolio Investors) Regulation 2019".

Under the new regulation, even the unregulated funds whose investment manager is appropriately regulated and registered as a Category-I FPIs can operate from India if their investment managers take the responsibility for all commissions or omissions of such unregulated funds.

According to Amit Maheshwari of AKM Global, the changes are part of the budget proposal to exempt FPI Category-1 investors from indirect transfers. Through this order funds from Mauritius have been allowed to be registered as Category-1 and hence would get the benefit from indirect transfer provisions under the Income Tax Act.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Clear skies and warm temperatures in 2019 are responsible for the worst year on record for Greenland's vast ice sheet, a study reveals.

It also found that atmospheric factors, such as clear skies and high pressure, are currently not included in climate predictions for the future.

Therefore, the researchers from Columbia University state, models may be underestimating future melt of the world's second largest ice sheet by around half.

Last year, Greenland ice sheet's mass balance  which accounts for melting and snowfall  increased by only 50 billion tons, 320 billion tons less than the average for 1981-2010.

However, when researchers also accounted for ice that calves away and drifts into the ocean, it revealed Greenland's ice sheet lost 600 billion tons in mass.

According to the researchers, this is equivalent to a global sea level rise of around 1.5mm.

Unusually persistent bouts of high pressure over the country prevented the formation of ice, which led to a decrease in snowfall and an increase in ice melt.

The Greenland ice sheet contains enough frozen water to raise sea levels by as much as 23 feet (7m) if it was to disappear entirely.

Scroll down for video

Pictured, how 2019 was different to the average for 1981-2010 Red indicates something is happening at an above average rate while blue indicates it is occurring at a below average rate. (a) number of total melting days (b) amount of snowfall (c) amount of reflected light from the sun (d) cloudiness (e) temperature two meters above the ice. The data reveals more melting, less snowfall and less cloud cover than normal in 2019

The study used satellite data, ground measurements and climate models to analyse changes in the ice sheet during the summer of 2019.

The scientists compared the data to the average annual surface mass difference between 1981 and 2010, which was a 375 billion ton gain.

Previously, the worst year on record was 2012, which experienced a 310 billion ton drop compared to the pre-2010 average.

The principle issue last year was the fact Greenland's skies were often clear, and not cloudy, due to persistent area of high pressure.

As a result of these so-called anticyclonic conditions, approximately 50billion ton of snow did not fall, the scientists say.

The lack of snowfall also left dark, bare ice exposed in some places, and because ice doesn't reflect as much sunlight as fresh snow, it absorbed more heat and exacerbated melting and runoff.

'Imagine this vortex rotating in the southern part of Greenland,' Professor Tedesco explained

'It is literally sucking in like a vacuum cleaner the moisture and heat of New York City, for example, and dumping it in the Arctic - in this case, along the west coast of Greenland.

'When that happened, because you have more moisture and more energy, it promoted the formation of clouds in the northern part.'

Average pressure over Greenland in summer 2019, with arrows showing wind direction. The high pressure led to less cloud cover and this, in turn, increased ice loss. The red circles reveal the country was experiencing far higher pressure, and less cloud, than normal

Last year, Greenland ice sheet's mass balance  which accounts for melting and snowfall  increased by only 50 billion tons, 320 billion tons less than the average for 1981-2010. Pictured, blue icebergs Saqqaq village, west coast of Greenland

Surface mass balance takes into account gains in the ice sheet's mass, such as through snowfall, as well as losses from surface meltwater runoff.

Professor Tedesco said: 'You can see the mass balance in Greenland as your bank account. In some periods you spend more, and in some periods you earn more.

'If you spend too much you go negative. This is what happened to Greenland recently.'

The study, published in the journal The Cryosphere, shows climate models may be vastly underestimating how much ice will melt in Greenland in the future.

According to Dr Tedesco, current global climate models are not able to capture the effects of a 'wavier jet stream' - a phenomenon that can lead to extreme weather.

As a result, he believes simulations of future impacts are significantly underestimating the mass loss due to climate change.

He says: 'Because climate models that project the future melting of the Greenland ice sheet do not currently account for these atmospheric patterns, they may be underestimating future melting by about half.'

The researchers believe these conditions will become more common in Greenland.

Dr Tedesco said: 'These atmospheric conditions are becoming more and more frequent over the past few decades.

'It is very likely that this is due to the waviness to the jet stream, which we think is related to, among other things, the disappearance of snow cover in Siberia, the disappearance of sea ice, and the difference in the rate at which temperature is increasing in the Arctic versus the mid-latitudes.'
"I've been thinking of trash for so long," said Naomi Shihab Nye when asked about the inspiration for her new book of poems, "Cast Away."

Clearly for Nye, the trash of others has become her poetic treasure. These 81 short verses explore what she's picked up over the years as she walks: the rim of a pizza box, plastic tops, three soggy, old report cards.

The objects have their own odd beauty, she told KidsPost by phone from her home in San Antonio. She tries to pay attention to this even as she places the litter in her sack to be discarded later in a garbage can.

One bit of trash - a child's blue mitten - became a gift to her editor. The mitten cleaned up nicely, as shown in the illustration on the book's back cover.

As she began to write the poems, Nye drew from notebooks she's kept for decades. In them, she has jotted ideas, snippets of dialogue and descriptions of things around her, from the birds and pecan trees in her yard to the straws and chip bags on the sidewalk.

Her poems include lines that make the reader stop and think. "Pine Cones" mentions how comforting it is to "hold a little beauty during difficult times." "Not My Problem" ends by suggesting that trash reveals: "who you are,/how you spend your days."

Nye became aware of trash and poetry at about the same time and from the same person, her mother. Good-natured, intelligent and untidy, Nye's mother never paid much attention to stacks of catalogues, junk mail and crumbs, said Nye.

So, as the oldest of two children, "I tried to create order," she explained.

Nye also has early memories of her mother reading aloud poems by Emily Dickinson. Favorite lines were "I'm Nobody! Who are you?/Are you - Nobody - too?"

"Poetry language was more delicious than conversation language," said Nye, about her childhood love of poems by Christina Rossetti and Langston Hughes.

This love was kindled into passion in second grade. Her teacher, Harriet B. Lane, had each child find and bring in a published poem every Monday. Favorite lines were written on the board, and the students read and talked about the poems during the week. Ms. Lane encouraged the kids to write their own poems.

"There was such a buzz of excitement about poetry in that class," said Nye, with a laugh. "We became aware of the beauty and power of words."

As a grown-up, Nye is much like her second-grade teacher. She loves to share poetry with others. Nye has written many books of poems for children and adults, and she has traveled to numerous places around the world to teach poetry.

Last year, Nye was named the nation's Young People's Poet Laureate by the Poetry Foundation. As part of her duties for the two-year position, she has visited and shared poetry in remote places that rarely had literary events. Now she is staying at home during the coronavirus outbreak. But she has continued to do events virtually, she said in a recent email.

Poetry seems especially important during challenging times. It has a unique power, Nye said. Poems can express feelings. They can explore our families and identity, as do those that reflect Nye's Palestinian American heritage. Poems can encourage us to notice what's around us, both indoors and outside. You might look closely at that tassel on the lampshade or listen to the sound of your own breath. Many of the poems in "Cast Away" focus on small, seemingly ordinary details.

Like her teacher Ms. Lane, Nye encourages everyone to write about what interests them. Whether that's bikes or moss (her young grandson's current passion) or a piece of trash, surely there's a poem in there.

- - -

WRITE A POEM

Want to write a poem for National Poetry Month in April or for the 50th anniversary of Earth Day on April 22? Naomi Shihab Nye shares a few tips:

1. Look out a window or walk out a door and write about the first five things you notice. They don't have to be big or important. "Blue car with crushed bumper parked by curb." "Mountain laurel tree with bunches of purple blossoms smelling like grapes."

Make a little list, then pick two to three that are more interesting to you and write more about them. You can add other things, too - what these details remind you of, make you feel like, etc.

2. Ask questions. Writing doesn't have to start with a big or even a small idea. Sometimes a question is a good place to begin. "Where did my energy go?" "Why is my friend looking sad today?" "Who lost that red ribbon?"

Then make up some answers.

3. Find something in the room and follow it back to something in your past: a picture, a book, a chair. Connect it to something else in your life from a different time.

4. Think of something that changed in your world recently. Write about the before and after. But mostly focus on the pivot, the moment or way it changed. What is different? What is the same?
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Wednesday Governor Bill Lee announced the appointment of Butch Eley to serve as the Commissioner for the Tennessee Department of Finance and Administration. Mr. Eley currently serves as chief operating officer in the Governors Office and will continue to coordinate efforts between departments in the interim.



The Department of Finance and Administration will play a crucial role in the reboot of our states economy and Butch brings significant expertise to the role as our state faces economic changes, said Governor Lee. His knowledge of the private sector and service as our chief operating officer will ensure we keep Tennessee in a fiscally sound position by prudent management of state services.



Prior to joining Governor Lee's Administration, Mr. Eley was a founder and CEO of Infrastructure Corporation of America. Headquartered in Nashville, ICA was one of the nations leading infrastructure asset maintenance management companies with comprehensive asset management contracts throughout the country.



Mr. Eley was also a partner and eventually president at the Ingram Group, a premier public affairs and advisory firm in Tennessee. At the Ingram Group, he specialized in helping companies interact with multiple levels of government.



Mr. Eley earned his bachelors degree and MBA at Belmont University. He and his wife, Ginger, reside in Nashville.
Many realtors have slashed retail premises rent by 20-40 percent to help tenants survive Covid-19, which is damaging the economy.

The Da Nang-based Dai Thang Holdings has announced 20-40 percent decreases in rent of the offices the company is managing.





Doan Thien Viet, CEO of Dai Thang, said the company cut the office rent to share difficulties with clients. Both clients signed contracts prior to March 1.



Hung Thinh Group has also announced the reduction of retail premises rent until April to two shopping centers in HCM City  Moonlight Plaza in Thu Duc district and Saigon Mia in Binh Chanh, and one in Vung Tau City  Vung Tau Melody.



Hung Thinhs president Nguyen Dinh Trung said the company lowered rent to help partners stabilize their business. Because of the epidemic, the number of visitors to shopping centers, supermarkets, restaurants and convenience stores has decreased dramatically.

Many realtors have slashed retail premises rent by 20-40 percent to help tenants survive Covid-19, which is damaging the economy.

Tenants have also asked landlords to slash rents.

Hoa, who has been working as a broker for half a decade in districts 1, 2 and Binh Thanh, said some large food and beverage chains have asked landlords to slash rent by 40 percent, equal to their 40 percent revenue reduction.



The chains said if the landlords dont lower the rents, they will leave, Hoa said.



Some small and medium businesses which are leasing offices at $25 per square meter per month and street-front houses have also asked to lower the rents by 20-25 percent as their business has become stagnant.



New rent levels have been set up in the Covid-19 period. Itll be okay if landlords lower the rents by 50 percent of the proposed levels, he commented.



The owners of street-front houses have already begun slashing rents. According to Hoa, the rent of the houses in Binh Thanh district has decreased by 7-8 percent, while the rents in district 2 have decreased most sharply by 15 percent.



The negotiations appear to last longer for premises in central district 1 because of their advantageous positions. Some landlords have promised to raise the rent only once every two years and lower the fees of some kinds of services.



The rent decreases are more common in the localities neighboring HCM City because of their less advantageous positions.



Huynh Phuoc Nghia from the HCM City Economics University commented that rent reductions were inevitable, saying that the domino effect may continue for many more months until the epidemic ends.

Kim Chi

HCM City: Retail premises rent declines as beer shops shut down Businesses now have bigger choices for retail premises as the rent has decreased significantly.
You've talked about it. You've wondered about it. You've considered it. But you haven't been able to work up the nerve to try Rick Simpson oil (RSO)the black tar in a syringe they keep at the far end of the dispensary counter.

You've asked about it a few times. It looks viscous and gummy, refusing to shift as you roll the syringe in your hand. They say you'll have to eat some of ita dose the size of a grain of rice. You asked how it tastes and the 'tender made a face. You hemmed and hawwed and eventually lost courage. It just seemed too hard to make the commitment.

And who the heck is Rick Simpson, anyway?

According to High Times, back in 1997, Simpson was working at a Canadian hospital as an engineer. While treating the hospital's pipes with a potent aerosol glue for asbestos, toxic fumes from the glue caused him to fall off a ladder and hit his head. After the injury, Simpson developed post-concussion syndrome, causing him to suffer from an incessant ringing in his ears. According to Simpson, he was unable to successfully address the problem with traditional pharmaceuticals and decided to try a different tack after seeing a television program called Reefer Madness 2. The special highlighted people who were using cannabis for medical reasonsa novel idea at the time.

Simpson began growing his own plants and developed a method for extracting THC and other cannabinoids from them. He claims that he used the extract to help treat his head injury and cure the ringing in his ears. He also says he began giving the oil to sick Canadians for free.

Doctors later diagnosed Simpson with basal cell carcinomaa type of skin cancer. Simpson says he decided to treat the associated tumors himself by putting the oil onto bandages and applying them to his arms. He claims that after only four days the tumors disappeared.

Simpson continued to give out free samples of the oil to friends and even published the recipe for his oil for free online. But in 2009, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police raided his home in Nova Scotia and shut his operation down. Simpson was in Amsterdam at the time and decided not to return to Canada to avoid incarceration. In 2013, he moved to Europe. According to a statement, he can return to Canada but has decided against it.

Simpson has made some pretty big claims about his oilnone of which have been corroborated. This harmless non addictive natural medication can be used with great success, he writes, to cure or control cancer, MS, pain, diabetes, arthritis, asthma, infections, inflammations, blood pressure, depression, sleeping problems and just about any other medical issues that one can imagine.

If you've ever heard someone claim that THC cures or kills cancer, then you were probably speaking to a Simpsonite. They can have very compelling arguments, but the veracity of their claims has yet to be tested properly.

And while no self-respecting doctor would say that cannabis cures cancer without enough evidence, one study published in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute back in 1975 found that tumors in mice seemed to shrink in relation to THC and CBN dosage. The same study found that ingesting CBD had no effect on tumor size. So there could be something worth looking into there, but much more testing would be required to prove anything.

What we do know is that RSO can be some potent stuff. This extract option can produce an oil with a THC content of over 90 percent. It can easily be produced at home with a good amount of discarded cannabis stems, a solvent like isopropyl alcohol or Everclear and a small rice cooker. Simpson recommends making your own to ensure its potency and purity, but Weekly Alibi says: Leave it to the professionals. The solvents involved are highly flammable, and handling them in the kitchen can be extremely dangerous.

The process is quite simple, though. Professional extractors will steep plant matter in solvent until the trichomes have separated. Then they burn the solvent off slowly over low heat to activate the THC. The resultant substance is a dark, sticky oil that can be mixed into foods, vaped or eaten directly (although it tastes horribly bitter).

And while it might not cure cancer, it certainly will give you a psychotropic kick in the pants. And that's plenty valuable on its own.
By Easton Sanders Apr. 15, 2020 | 01:54 PM | COVINGTON





Three Kentuckians filed the lawsuit against Beshear on Tuesday, alleging that Beshear's prohibition on in-person church services has violated their constitutional rights.





They attended an in-person church service near Louisville on Easter. State police placed notices on the cars at Maryville Baptist Church during the service, ordering the churchgoers to self-quarantine for 14 days. The plaintiffs also argue in the suit that they don't show any symptoms of the virus, so they should not have to quarantine.







The lawsuit says, "In his evening briefings, the Governor made clear that he was going to target religious services for these notices, apart from other gatherings. Based on the activity of the Kentucky State Police on April 12, 2020, the Governor carried out his threat."



TJ Roberts, one of the plaintiffs in the case, provided the following statement to West Kentucky Star.







"Our right to worship in accordance with our cautions is a fundamental right. Our nation was founded by descendants of people seeking to escape religious persecution. I filed this lawsuit because I know that our fundamental rights still matter even during an emergency." Roberts continued, "It is my hope that this lawsuit vindicates my belief in the Freedoms outlined in the Bill of Rights and declares these infringements on liberty unconstitutional."







During a previous press conference, Beshear reiterated his support for the plan, saying he was just doing his best to save lives.







"There are no easy answers. I'm willing to make unpopular decisions regardless of what it means for me in the future," Beshear continued, "I would give up being politically popular in a nanosecond to save lives."







U.S. Senator Rand Paul and Representative Thomas Massie both spoke out against Beshear's prohibition on the in-person services on Twitter.







"Taking license plates at church? Quarantining someone for being Christian on Easter Sunday? Someone needs to take a step back here," Paul said.







Massie had similar feelings.







He said, "The same week Jews celebrate freedom from bondage and Christians celebrate freedom from death, Governor Beshear is going to be in your church parking lot scanning your license plate."





You can read the lawsuit in its entirety at the link below.



A federal lawsuit has been filed against Governor Andy Beshear over his COVID-19 response.

On the Net:
If Mikey Steinmetz and Snoop Dogg arent the oddest couple in the cannabis sphere, theyre awfully close to it. But sharing a stage at the inaugural Cannabis as a Catalyst for Change symposium last fall, the two seemed well matched for their impromptu chat in front of the hundreds of guests.

The usually low-key Steinmetz  CEO and co-founder of the host company, Flow Kana, which he started in 2015 with his wife, Flavia Cassani  was clearly excited to be with the rapper-personality-cannabis entrepreneur, who was even more chill and gracious than his well-known laconic persona would suggest.

While their cannabis orbits obviously intersect, theyre coming from different directions. Snoop drops in, lending his influence from the mountaintop of celebrity. Steinmetz, 35, has built Flow Kana from the ground up.

The symposium, on the Flow Kana Cannabis Institute grounds in the Redwood Valley just north of Ukiah (Mendocino County), is one of the ambitious CEOs many initiatives to move cannabis culture and commerce into the mainstream. Hes been strikingly successful, but the continuing challenges of Californias shifting regulations and a stubborn black market are threatening his vision.

I believe this region is going to be known for its quality and for its heritage, Steinmetz said later, after a dinner with local farmers at a hillside ranch house overlooking the scenic property. He and Cassani often entertain guests and the press here. Steinmetz, through a mixture of charisma and prominence, has become a significant voice in cannabis business and culture.

In February 2019, Flow Kana announced a $125 million infusion of capital, which it said was the largest private funding round for a privately owned cannabis company in the United States. The company has raised a total of $175 million since 2014.

Were really invested in the infrastructure in California. We believe California is what matters in the long term, and we make decisions for the long term, Steinmetz said.

Just over a year ago, Flow Kana opened the worlds largest cannabis processing center on the site of the former Fetzer Winery in southern Mendocino County, where Catalyst for Change was held. In the mornings, soft wisps of fog drift over the green hills and vineyard-covered land surrounding the Flow Kana campus. Steinmetz and his family have a home on the grounds.

The sprawling 80-acre campus includes grading, processing, lab testing, manufacturing and distribution, essentially bringing together the entire sun-grown cannabis supply chain. They market their own brand of cannabis products, flower, pre-rolls, etc. Flow Kana products are carried in 470 licensed California dispensaries and it will soon produce a variety of cannabis products including vapes, concentrates, and tinctures.

Though Flow Kana doesnt release employee data, the company believes it is the second-largest employer in Mendocino County. Its modeled after Sunkist Growers Inc., the most diversified citrus processing and marketing company in the world, and the largest shipper of fresh produce in the United States, which doesnt grow anything.

Similarly, Flow Kana doesnt grow cannabis. It does, however, give more than 200 independent farmers throughout the Emerald Triangle (Mendocino, Humboldt, Trinity counties) a centralized place to come to market with their crops. Thats the result of an epiphany Steinmetz had after a couple of road trips through Northern Californias cannabis-growing region.

I came up here to the Emerald Triangle, and I was just blown away by the ecosystem of the community and of the farmers and seeing cannabis in its rightful place under the sun, Steinmetz said. To see these farmers growing cannabis totally off grid, off the beaten track, fully sustainable, solar panels, rain catchment, fully diversified. Having cabbage and carrots and tomatoes and celery and cucumbers and strawberries and sunflowers. Growing your own soil and practicing regenerative agriculture.

Simon Evers, one of the young farmers at the ranch house dinner, runs the nearby Elysian Fields Farm with his wife, Jenn Gray. They have been working with Flow Kana since the company first came to the region.

Initially what struck me was just the fact that they were all about sun-grown, Evers said. In general, it seems the conventional thought is that indoor is top shelf and sun-grown is just like mid-level quality. I dont think thats true.

Flow Kana has been consistent in presenting its mission, stating it is creating the first sustainable, sungrown cannabis brand that embraces California values and the small independent farm ecosystem. Flow Kana partners with and gives scale to craft farmers in Northern California, who focus on beyond organic farming practices.

Also important for Evers was that Flow Kana did what Steinmetz said it would do.

They followed through, they were professional, they paid us on time, and that was important, Evers said. They gave us the documentation that we needed, just simple stuff. They were doing it by the book, and thats what we wanted to do.

Steinmetz was born and raised in Caracas, Venezuela. He came to the United States after high school to study engineering and finance at Carnegie Mellon University. After graduating, he soon realized he had little passion or interest in either engineering or banking. He eventually started a food distribution company in Venezuela, but visits to California had seduced him. He wanted to build a life here. He thought hed live in Silicon Valley and develop social media apps, but volunteering at a fledgling cannabis dispensary followed by two trips to the Emerald Triangle changed all that.

The first trip opened Steinmetzs eyes to a culture that had hidden from the world for decades because of its illegality.

I started to realize that, Wow, in this region, in this Emerald Triangle that is the geographic size of Ireland, between Mendocino, Humboldt and Trinity County, there are 53,000 cannabis farmers that collectively produce 80% of the cannabis consumed nationwide.

Even more astonishing was that this huge production was coming from a fragmented, unorganized amalgamation of small farmers using holistic, sustainable practices not thought conducive to commercial viability. Thinking perhaps hed stumbled into a unique cadre of high-minded growers, he took a longer, more extensive trip to the area with his soon-to-be wife, Cassani. They came away even more impressed with the lifestyle and cultivation culture they encountered.

Cassani, also from Venezuela, told me, Theyre genuinely in a relationship of love with the land. Its like being attuned to not only the land but the natural elements, the planet Earth, connecting to the animals, respecting them and seeing life, especially human beings, as just one part of the ecosystem, not just that element that controls the planet.

From that three-week immersion in the culture of the Golden Triangle, Steinmetz came away with three foundational concepts on which he has built Flow Kana.

One was this area and this region and this heritage and this legacy is one of a kind, Steinmetz said. It cant be replicated. His business sense told him he could build a brand telling the honest story of the farmers.

Second, he realized, If I bring these farmers together, we would have enough volume to compete with the bigger guys.

Last, his banking and food distribution experience allowed him to dissect the business models in place and see their weaknesses. The farmers knew how to grow their crops and be conscious stewards of their land, but what was really expensive for them was everything post-harvest, Steinmetz said. Those elements included drying, curing, trimming, processing, packaging, distribution, sale and marketing. If only there were a place that did all that and allowed the farmers to focus on cultivating crops. Steinmetz saw where he could fit in and flourish.

In April 2018, Flow Kanas processing center came online, manifesting Steinmetzs vision of a centralized facility providing packing, labeling and distribution services to partners across the industry, including dispensaries, brands, manufacturers, and other distributors.

Along with running his business, Steinmetz has also become a forceful advocate pushing the government to help the industry rather than handicap it.

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.

Lets put it this way: The system is broken, but unintentionally broken, Steinmetz said. I do believe that the legislators and Gov. Newsom and his administration have every intention to make this work.

The most significant problems compound each other. Regulations are inconsistent as incorporated cities can have policies for regulating commercial cannabis activities that are different from county regulations. There are also state and federal laws that often overlap but dont necessarily complement each other. Taxation occurs at almost every step along the supply chain, choking off growth.

Theres about a 45% to 50% tax discrepancy between legal shops and illicit shops, Steinmetz said.

Last year an audit by the United Cannabis Business Association estimated that $8.7 billion would be spent on unregulated cannabis products in California in 2019, compared with just $3.1 billion spent on cannabis sold by legal businesses. The audit found approximately 2,835 unlicensed dispensaries and delivery services operating in California, while the Bureau of Cannabis Control says there are only 873 cannabis sellers licensed in the state.

The majority of the demand is still in the hands of the illicit operators, and thats a problem, Steinmetz said.

The black market doesnt deal with the regulatory tax layers, so it can offer products for less than suppliers who are trying to be compliant. Thats the No. 1 goal of legalization: to eliminate the illicit market, Steinmetz.

Another issue is local controls of the retail permitting process. You first have to get licensed by the city and the locality or the county, and then you get licensed by the state. Right now, we have very few retailers because most of the localities of the state have not come online. Weve had three years for cities and counties to get their act together. Still, almost 80% of the state doesnt have a regulatory system, Steinmetz said.

The states slow-motion response last year forced the contraction of a number of midsize cannabis companies, including Flow Kana, which reportedly laid off up one-fifth of its workforce. Steinmetz wrote a statement for the Sacramento Bee about the situation that accompanied a news story about the industrys troubles.

In response to COVID-19, the company has significantly reduced the number of people in its workplaces to decrease risks of exposure. The production facility has undergone a deep industrial sanitation cleanse. Anyone working there is required to observe CDC recommended precautions. There are strict rules about personal space and contact. Any employee who can work from home is working from home.

Even though clouds were rolling in, Steinmetz was optimistic enough to push forward the Cannabis as a Catalyst for Change symposium in September. Part industry conference, part influencer meet-up and part party, the event drew major players from across the cannabis spectrum. While Snoop Doggs surprise appearance lit up the crowd, thought leaders such as green architect Jason McLennan and civil rights activist Winona LaDuke were also on hand. So were author Steven Kotler and Black Lives Matter co-founder Opal Tometi. Research scientists mingled with venture capitalist investors. There was cannabis sampling in the Old Dog Saloon, once the Fetzer tasting room. Ideas around cannabis and conscious capitalism were in the forefront, just as Steinmetz had wanted.

This industry is going to be fully mainstream, Steinmetz said. He predicts that soon, like alcohol, signature brands and products will retail in pharmacies and supermarkets. He believes California will always be the important market and producer of cannabis products but that it is impossible to have a five-year plan for an industry so much in flux.

I try to think about our business as working with a compass, not a roadmap. A compass points in a general direction, general mission, general vision and kind of moving forward and being opportunistic along the way.

He also knows larger companies are looking to make quick profits by buying up existing businesses or land and turning them over.

Were not in it for a quick flip. A business that has a long, infinite horizon will make fundamentally different decisions, Steinmetz said.

At Flow Kana, we like to say that we play for the infinite game.

Marcus Crowder is a Sacramento freelance writer.
A succession of international appeals has urged the need to see the universal challenge posed by the Covid-19 pandemic as an invitation to allow reason to prevail in order to bring to a halt the futile warfare in Libya, Syria, Yemen and other conflict zones in the Middle East. If asolidarity is what ordinary societies need now more than ever to fight the lethal virus and then struggle to resume normal life, war torn societies will require even greater collective resolve and more determined steps to achieve peace before it is too late.

Most recently, the UN secretary general and his Middle East envoys called on all concerned parties to engage, in good faith and without preconditions, on negotiating immediate halts to ongoing hostilities, sustaining existing ceasefires, putting in place more durable and comprehensive ceasefires, and achieving longer-term resolutions to the persistent conflicts across the region. The appeal needs to be followed through immediately with practical steps undertaken by the UN in coordination with major powers in order staunch the bloodshed and halt the squandering of vast sums of money and resources on conflicts in the Middle East. In this regard, the Arab Coalitions recent ceasefire initiative in Yemen is a step in the right direction.

Channels for dialogue, negotiation, mediation and other peaceful means to reduce tensions and resolve disputes may not always be immediately within reach, but the perpetuation of the pandemic and the spectre of the total collapse of health and security systems in societies already afflicted by conflict do offer a platform for international groups and mechanisms to set to work to reach peaceful settlements on new foundations that prioritise humanitarian concerns in the available options.

Without effective communication across the divides of conflict, no effective challenge can be mounted to halt the spread of the mysterious virus and it will be impossible to share already scarce resources in societies torn by civil war and strife. There are urgent priorities that need to be observed in conflict zones. These include enabling medical and relief teams to reach internally displaced persons, refugees, civilian communities under siege and other intended beneficiaries among the victims of the destruction and deprivation caused by war. Another urgent priority is the need to facilitate the safe, voluntary and dignified return of refugees and internally displaced persons to their homes through urgent, effective and meaningful measures, as the UN envoys to the Middle East called for in their recent message.

The need to rise above narrow disputes and conflicts may be a difficult goal to attain in a short time, but the key players in the conflicts in this region have the power to bring conflicting parties to the negotiating table and to encourage them to reach out to each other in order to work together in what has been described the real battle for humankind. The longer international powers continue to ignore ongoing conflicts in the Middle East on the grounds that they are too preoccupied with the fight against Covid-19 at home, the greater the risks that this failure will rebound against them. This applies, in particular, to Europe in the event of a massive health crisis in the Middle East which could trigger higher rates of refugees fleeing the claws of death due to the lack of effective health barriers against the lethal virus in their already crisis-gripped societies.

Today, the world has the best available opportunity to put an end to the decade of bloodshed that has ravaged Yemen, Libya and Syria, even if some remain blinded by the pursuit of partisanship and narrow interests, preventing them from rising to the responsibility of the real battle against a relentless enemy that threatens all humankind.

*A version of this article appears in print in the 16 April, 2020 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly

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Technavio has been monitoring the social media management software market and it is poised to grow by USD 789.43 million during 2019-2023, progressing at a CAGR of almost 14% 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.

This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20200415005383/en/

Technavio has announced the latest market research report titled Global Social Media Management Software Market 2019-2023 (Graphic: Business Wire)

Technavio suggests three forecast scenarios (optimistic, probable, and pessimistic) considering the impact of COVID-19. Please Request Latest Free Sample Report on COVID-19 Impact

The market is fragmented, and the degree of fragmentation will accelerate during the forecast period. AgoraPulse, Buffer, Hootsuite Inc., Sprout Social, Inc., and Twitter, Inc. (TweetDeck) are some of the major market participants. The increased social media advertising 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.

Increased social media advertising has been instrumental in driving the growth of the market.

Social Media Management Software Market 2019-2023: Segmentation

Social Media Management Software Market is segmented as below:

Deployment Cloud-based On-premises

Geographic Landscape APAC Europe MEA North America South America



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=IRTNTR31030

Social Media Management Software 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 social media management software market report covers the following areas:

Social Media Management Software Market Size

Social Media Management Software Market Trends

Social Media Management Software Market Industry Analysis

This study identifies use of analytics in social media management software as one of the prime reasons driving the social media management software market growth during the next few years.

Social Media Management Software Market 2019-2023: Vendor Analysis

We provide a detailed analysis of vendors operating in the social media management software market, including some of the vendors such as AgoraPulse, Buffer, Hootsuite Inc., Sprout Social, Inc., and Twitter, Inc. (TweetDeck). Backed with competitive intelligence and benchmarking, our research reports on the social media management software market are designed to provide entry support, customer profile and M&As as well as go-to-market strategy support.

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Social Media Management Software Market 2019-2023: Key Highlights

CAGR of the market during the forecast period 2019-2023

Detailed information on factors that will assist social media management software market growth during the next five years

Estimation of the social media management software market size and its contribution to the parent market

Predictions on upcoming trends and changes in consumer behavior

The growth of the social media management software market

Analysis of the market's competitive landscape and detailed information on vendors

Comprehensive details of factors that will challenge the growth of social media management software market vendors

Table Of Contents:

PART 01: EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

PART 02: SCOPE OF THE REPORT

2.1 Preface

2.2 Preface

2.3 Currency conversion rates for US$

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 DEPLOYMENT

Market segmentation by deployment

Comparison by deployment

Cloud-based Market size and forecast 2018-2023

On-premises Market size and forecast 2018-2023

Market opportunity by deployment

PART 07: CUSTOMER LANDSCAPE

PART 08: GEOGRAPHIC LANDSCAPE

Geographic segmentation

Geographic comparison

North America Market size and forecast 2018-2023

Europe Market size and forecast 2018-2023

APAC Market size and forecast 2018-2023

South America Market size and forecast 2018-2023

MEA 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

PART 12: VENDOR LANDSCAPE

Overview

Landscape disruption

Competitive scenario

PART 13: VENDOR ANALYSIS

Vendors covered

Vendor classification

Market positioning of vendors

AgoraPulse

Buffer

Hootsuite Inc.

Sprout Social, Inc.

Twitter, Inc. (TweetDeck)

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/20200415005383/en/

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Technavio Research

Jesse Maida

Media Marketing Executive

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UK: +44 203 893 3200

Email: media@technavio.com

Website: www.technavio.com/
NEW YORK, April 15, 2020 /PRNewswire/ --



KEY FINDINGS

The global artificial intelligence in healthcare market is set to register growth, projecting a CAGR of 38.05% during the forecast period, 2020-2028. The prominent drivers of market growth are estimated to be the rising big data in the healthcare industry, the growing use of AI in genetics, the emergence of personalized medicine in tests for clinical decision making, along with the creation of a real-time monitoring system due to AI.







Read the full report: https://www.reportlinker.com/p05242360/?utm_source=PRN







MARKET INSIGHTS

The utilization of AI in healthcare entails the use of software and algorithms for estimating the human perception for analyzing complex medical data, along with the relationship between treatments or prevention techniques and patient outcomes.The growing demand for real-time monitoring system is one of the key aspects propelling the growth of the global artificial intelligence in healthcare market.



The real-time monitoring devices like health monitoring devices or indicators track real-time health data of patients, which is increasing the demand for AI in healthcare.The devices also drive the relevancy of data interpretation and aid in reducing the time the patients spend in piecing data output.



In healthcare, the devices help in detecting and preventing undesirable patient outputs. The growing number of mobile devices integrated with artificial intelligence assists in the prediction of future outcomes with regard to health, which further benefits market growth.

Medical practitioners are reluctant to adopt AI-based technologies, and this is restraining the growth of the market.The reluctance is because of the lack of data that identifies healthcare decisions.



Also, from a diagnostics point of view, AI systems fare less in terms of efficiency in comparison to conventional methods.The companies in the market are competing against each other by providing the same characteristics and similar prices.



The competitive rivalry is projected to be high during the forecast period.



REGIONAL INSIGHTS

The geographical segmentation of the global artificial intelligence in healthcare market includes the analysis of Europe, North America, Asia Pacific, and the rest of the world.Inkwood Research estimates the Asia Pacific region to be the fastest-growing region by the end of the forecast period.



The invention of new technologies, the presence of countries like China, Japan, Australia, and India, and the thriving artificial intelligence market, are the factors propelling the growth of the market.



COMPETITIVE INSIGHTS

Some of the prominent companies operating in the market are Enlitic Inc, Next IT Corporation, Recursion, Welltok, GE Healthcare, Microsoft Corporation, etc.



Our report offerings include:

 Explore key findings of the overall market

 Strategic breakdown of market dynamics (Drivers, Restraints, Opportunities, Challenges)

 Market forecasts for a minimum of 9 years, along with 3 years of historical data for all segments, sub-segments, and regions

 Market Segmentation cater to a thorough assessment of key segments with their market estimations

 Geographical Analysis: Assessments of the mentioned regions and country-level segments with their market share

 Key analytics: Porter's Five Forces Analysis, Vendor Landscape, Opportunity Matrix, Key Buying Criteria, etc.

 Competitive landscape is the theoretical explanation of the key companies based on factors, market share, etc.

 Company profiling: A detailed company overview, product/services offered, SCOT analysis, and recent strategic developments



Companies mentioned

1. DEEP GENOMICS INC

2. ENLITIC INC

3. GE HEALTHCARE

4. GENERAL VISION INC

5. GOOGLE

6. IBM CORPORATION

7. ICARBONX

8. INTEL CORPORATION

9. MICROSOFT CORPORATION

10. NEXT IT CORPORATION

11. NVIDIA CORPORATION

12. ONCORA MEDICAL

13. RECURSION PHARMACEUTICALS INC

14. STRYKER CORPORATION

15. WELLTOK INC



Read the full report: https://www.reportlinker.com/p05242360/?utm_source=PRN



About Reportlinker

ReportLinker is an award-winning market research solution. Reportlinker finds and organizes the latest industry data so you get all the market research you need - instantly, in one place.



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The Coast Guard is searching for a kayaker missing in Dickinson Bay after his vessel overturned early Wednesday morning.

Two men were in the kayak when it overturned shortly before 4:30 a.m., according to the Coast Guard. One of the men managed to swim to an island in the bay and called for help.
Denmark's children are back in the classroom as the country eases its month-long coronavirus restrictions - becoming the first in Europe to reopen schools.

Nurseries, kindergartens and primary schools welcomed returning students today who were pictured lining up outside, six feet apart, to maintain social distance rules.

Schools had been closed since March 12 in an effort to curb the the country's rising number of coronavirus cases.

Parents with their children stand in a queue waiting to get inside Stengaard School, north of Copenhagen

Around half of Denmark's municipalities and 35 percent of Copenhagen's schools are now reopening following an easing of measures from Mette Frederiksen, Denmarks centre-left prime minister.

Others have requested more time to adjust to health protocols still in place, though all are expected to reopen by April 20.

In early April the country's government announced that schools would be reopened 'on the condition that everyone keeps their distance and washes their hands.'

Special rules mean schools must ensure a distance of around six feet is maintained between desks in classrooms and breaks for students must only be organised for small groups at a time.

Many schools are opting to teach outdoor classes in order to maintain the guidelines, which could pose a challenge for those in urban areas.

Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen speaks with pupils as she attends the reopening of Lykkebo School in Valby. Special rules mean desks must be kept at least six feet apart

Middle and high school students are expected to return to school from May 10

In a press conference at the time, Frederiksen said: 'We are presenting a first, careful phase in the reopening of Denmark. It assumes that we are responsible and that the number of [of sick] are stable, not just for this week but for a long time to come.'

Some parents have opposed the reopening of schools, citing health concerns. A petition dubbed 'My child is not a guinea pig' has had around 18,000 signatures.

Henrik Wilhelmsen, principal of a school in the Norrebro district said they 'expect quite a lot of children to be kept at home'.

Pupils wash their hands during a break at Korshoej school in Randers, Denmark

It is expected that Germany's chancellor Angela Merkel will soon allow shops and schools to reopen

Denmark's middle and high school-age students will continue to learn remotely. They are only expected to return to classrooms on May 10.

Elisa Rimpler of the BUPL, the Danish Union of Early Childhood and Youth Educators, told the BBC: 'We're all a bit nervous and we'll have to ensure that we stick to hygiene rules.

'We have a lot of washing hands during the day. We don't have masks and we have to keep a good distance from each other so that's a very difficult task.'

The next stage of Denmark's return to normality will be to consider allowing businesses like restaurants and hairdressers to reopen, though a ban on large public gatherings is likely to remain in place until August.

New cases of coronavirus in Denmark have generally been falling, although a slight climb was recorded between April 12 and 14

A total of 299 deaths have been recorded in Denmark

Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen speaks with a pupil as she participates in the reopening of Lykkebo School in Valby in Copenhagen

Frederiksen said: 'I do not believe we will return to the Denmark we knew before coronavirus', adding that 'it is also important that we do not keep Denmark closed for longer than we need to'.

The country has so far had nearly 6,700 confirmed cases of coronavirus and 299 deaths.

And today Angela Merkel will follow Denmark's lead and discuss easing restrictions on shops and schools - despite a record spike in Covid-19 deaths.

She will speak to leaders of Germany's 16 states today to discuss a possible easing in lockdown measures from April 20.

Before Denmark, Austria was the first European country to unveil its roadmap for a return to a 'new normal'.

On Tuesday, it allowed small non-food shops to open up, while maintaining social distancing rules and requiring masks to be worn in shops and on public transport.

Austria plans to keep schools, cafes and restaurants closed until at least mid-May.
Deer hunters killed more than 224,000 white-tailed deer this past fall, the state Department of Environmental Conservation recently reported.

According to the DECs 2019 White-Tailed Deer Harvest Summary, the buck take statewide was up about 6.2 percent, while the overall number of deer taken was down slightly.

The 2019 estimated deer take includes 103,787 antlerless deer and 120,403 antlered bucks. Statewide, this represents a 9 percent decrease in antlerless deer taken. An antlerless deer is defined as a doe or young buck that doesnt have at least one antler thats three inches long.

Regionally, hunters took 30,236 deer in the Northern Zone and 193,954 deer in the Southern Zone.

Across the state, hunters this past season continued to voluntarily pass up on young bucks, responding to the DECs Let Young Bucks Go and Watch Them Grow campaign.

Tara Schaefer shot this 10-point buck while out hunting in Ionia, N.Y. in Ontario County. It weighed 175 pounds after being field dressed. It's antlers had a 19-inch spread. "I took the shot at 210 yards with a Browning X-bolt 280 rem," she said.

The portion of yearlings (1.5 years old) killed dropped to 37 percent, the lowest level ever. And for the first time, the harvest of 2.5-year-old bucks (41 percent) exceeded that of yearling bucks, DEC said.

This fall proved favorable for bowhunters, DEC said, as the take during the bowhunting season increased 18 percent from 2018. Deer take during the regular and muzzleloader seasons, however, both dropped about 6 percent.

Meanwhile, slightly less deer were killed with a crossbow this fall compared to the 2018 season (10,569 down from 10,829). Also, there was a few more more deer were taken during the annual Youth Firearms Hunt over the Columbus Day weekend (1,148 up from 1,025).

As far as wildlife management units (WMUs), a total of 14.4 deer were killed per square mile in WMU 8R  the highest number in the state. The WMU intersects parts of Yates, Schuyler and Steuben counties in Western New York.

The DECs Deer harvest data are gathered from two main sources: harvest reports required of all successful hunters and DECs examination of more than 15,000 harvested deer at check stations and meat processors across the state.

Harvest estimates are then made by cross-referencing these two data sources and calculating the total harvest from the reporting rate for each zone and tag type.

Finally, DEC tested 2,658 deer that were killed across the state and found no evidence of Chronic Wasting Disease (CWD) in the herd. DEC partners with cooperating meat processors and taxidermists in obtaining samples for testing each year.

See the DEC website for a complete breakdown of numbers and types of deer taken in each WMU, county and town. One can also find reports from 2018 and past seasons on the DEC website as well.

MORE:

NY Deer hunting season safest on record:' See complete summary of accidents

Big buck bonanza: Upstate NY gun hunters share eye-opening photos

Bowhunting for deer: Upstate NY hunters share photos

Crossbow season: Upstate NY hunters share photos of big bucks

Have a question or suggested story concerning the Upstate NY outdoors scene? Outdoors writer David Figura can be reached by email at dfigura@NYup.com, on Facebook or by calling 315-470-6066.
###





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Detectives are appealing for witnesses following an incident in Maplebrook Hill in Coalisland PACEMAKER BELFAST 15/04/2020

Two men have been arrested after a man was shot with a crossbow bolt in Co Tyrone.

Police are appealing for witnesses after the incident in the Maplebrook Hill area of Coalisland around midnight on Tuesday, April 12.

It was reported that a man had been shot with a crossbow bolt after windows of a house in the area had been smashed.

Officers responded to the scene and a 34-year-old man was discovered in the street with an injury to his back.

He was arrested on suspicion of criminal damage and possession of an offensive weapon and was taken to hospital for treatment to his injuries.

A 29-year-old man was arrested on suspicion of grievous bodily harm with intent and possession of an offensive weapon with intent to commit an indictable offence. He remains in police custody at this time.

Local SDLP councillor Malachy Quinn said he was "shocked" by the incident.

"The man has been wounded and could have been more seriously injured or killed," he said.

This kind of brutal attack does not represent the people of Coalisland, who are pulling together to make it through a very difficult time. It is hard to understand why anyone would want to add any extra service to our health and emergency service workers, who are already operating under extreme pressure.

I condemn this senseless attack and urge anyone with any information to go to the PSNI or Crimestoppers.

Detectives are appealing for anyone who was in the area of Maplebrook Hill last night and who witnessed the incident or anyone who has any information that can assist with the investigation to contact them in Cookstown on 101 quoting reference 19 15/04/20.

Alternatively, information can also be provided to the independent charity Crimestoppers on 0800 555 111, which is 100% anonymous and gives people the power to speak up and stop crime.
A woman in Western New York has been arrested for allegedly threatening a mail carrier with coronavirus.

The Buffalo News reports Melissa C. Daniels-Johnson, 39, of Buffalo, is accused of verbally assaulting and spitting on a letter carrier outside the U.S. Post Office in Cheektowaga.

The USPS worker told investigators that Daniels-Johnson entered the post office parking lot through the exit, not the entrance, on March 19. When he mentioned it to her, she allegedly got upset, screamed profanities, threatened to cough on him to give him coronavirus, took his picture with her phone, and threatened to send her husband to (expletive) him up.

WKBW reports a USPS manager tried to de-escalate the situation. As she left, she allegedly spit on the postal employee, according to recently filed court papers; he was able to shield his face, but fluid landed on his shorts and right leg.

Any individual who threatens or attempts to use the COVID-19 virus as a weapon as alleged here deserves  and should expect  a strong dose of justice, U.S. Attorney James P. Kennedy Jr. said in a statement Tuesday.

According to WKBW, Daniels-Johnson has been charged with assault of a federal employee and threatening to assault a federal employee. She faces up to eight years in prison.

Shes next scheduled to appear in federal court on April 27.

MORE ON CORONAVIRUS

Coronavirus in NY: Cases, maps, charts and resources

Onondaga Co. coronavirus: Recoveries outpace known infections; deathly ill at 21; 537 total cases

Wegmans limiting shoppers in stores, starting employee temperature checks

Dying in coronavirus pandemic cant mute outpouring of love for CNY teen cancer victim

Complete coronavirus coverage on syracuse.com
New Delhi, April 15 : Delhi Police officers and personnel deployed on 'ground zero to prevent and control the spread of coronavirus will now be housed in 57 hotels spread across 15 police districts in the national capital.

The step has been taken to prevent any possibility of the family members of these officials or others getting the infection in case anyone tests positive.

An order to this effect was issued by Special Commissioner (Armed Police) on Tuesday in the wake of three Delhi Police officials testing positive for coronavirus.

It is pertinent to mention here that many personnel of Delhi Police reside in adjoining states of Uttar Pradesh and Haryana, apart from Rajasthan.

Police in these states had raised objections over the movement of Delhi Police personnel across the inter-state borders to reach their respective homes on the ground that policemen infected with the virus could spread it in these states.

Since there was no adequate space to house all personnel in police barracks while adhering to the physical distancing norms, authorities made arrangements to lodge them in city hotels.

Deputy Commissioners of all police districts have been directed to report to the headquarters within 24 hours about the number of police personnel along with dates and duration they were lodged in the designated hotels. A pro forma has been issued in this regard.
South African Airways has been denied any further funding by its government owner as the national carrier looks for ways to recover from the coronavirus crisis and a local form of bankruptcy protection.

The airlines administrators, who were put in charge in December, were told by the state to instead source cash from available resources, according to a letter they sent to affected parties and to Bloomberg News dated April 14.

We are currently assessing the impact of this development on the business-rescue process and will communicate any decisions to be made, they said in the letter.

South African Airways, which began operations in 1934, has racked up 26 billion rand ($1.4 billion U.S.) in losses over the last six years and has depended on a series of state bailouts to keep operating. The grounding of all of its passenger flights, aside from charters to repatriate stranded citizens, due to the coronavirus lockdown have further decimated its revenue stream.

Finance Minister Tito Mboweni has long advocated shutting off funding for the airline, and earlier Tuesday cited the carriers closure as a way to save funds as the country deals with the fallout of the coronavirus pandemic. Even before the COVID-19 outbreak ground global travel to a halt, the administrators had cut routes and started consultations with more than 4,700 employees about job losses.

All options are now blocked to any form of real continuation of the airline, said Peter Attard Montalto, head of capital markets research at Intellidex. Basically the only option now is liquidation.

The development is a blow to the ambitions of Public Enterprises Minister Pravin Gordhan, who has been keen to keep the airline running to both preserve jobs and act as a flagship carrier for the country. However, he told the business-rescue practitioners that the virus had strained the governments finances and he couldnt agree to their request to extend foreign borrowing limits by 10 billion rand, according to a second letter seen by Bloomberg News.

SAAs external debt is guaranteed by the state in the event of the carriers collapse.

We are of the firm conviction that South Africa needs a viable and sustainable set of airlines, the Department of Public Enterprises, which falls under Gordhan, said in a statement late Tuesday. We must urgently determine the operating and business model for a rescued airline, with a sustainable financial model.
NORWALK  The Common Council has approved a new fee system to obtain passes for the citys transfer station and public beaches.

Under the new system, only people who pay vehicle taxes to the city will receive free passes to the transfer station and beaches. The vehicle pass will be for the non-commercial vehicles, which is registered in the city.

Under the previous ordinance, anyone who was a Norwalk resident could receive passes and free parking/entrance to the transfer station and public beaches. However, Recreation and Parks Director Nick Roberts said the city received numerous complaints about cars with out-of-state plates parked in resident parking at the beach last summer.

I know its challenging and I know theres been some questions about beach passes, but we also had situations where people were not pleased with people who had passes almost to the exclusion of Norwalk residents, Mayor Harry Rilling said at the meeting, which was conducted via Zoom and livestreamed on the citys Youtube channel.

Under the new ordinance, Norwalk residents with a vehicle registered in the city and who are up-to-date on motor vehicle taxes will receive free parking at local beaches. The license plate readers will store this information so those whose vehicles are registered in Norwalk will not be flagged for parking violations when at the beach.

The exception is for those who registered their car after Oct. 1, which is when the city receives its grand list from the Department of Motor Vehicles. Anyone whose car was registered in Norwalk after this date needs to bring the vehicles registration and proof of the owners Norwalk address to the citys tax office to be added to the system.

Norwalk residents whose vehicles are not registered in the city will be required to buy a seasonal pass for $250. There will also be an increase in pricing for passes only available to residents in the landlocked towns of New Canaan, Redding, Ridgefield, Weston and Wilton. These residents would now pay $325 instead of the previous $225.

The weekday non-resident daily parking rate would increase from $35 to $40, and the weekend/holiday non-resident daily rate would increase from $40 to $65.

The ordinance requires separate passes for the beach and the transfer station as opposed to the previous system with only one pass for both. An additional permit is needed for vehicles with trailers.

A public hearing on the issue was conducted prior to the Common Council meeting when Assistant Corporation Counsel Brian Candela read public comments sent in about the proposal. Only one comment was sent from a former Norwalk resident who now lives in Wilton, but continues to own property in the city. Carol Silvato called for people who pay Norwalk property taxes to receive free vehicle access to the beach.

I am well into my senior years and am saddened to see the town Ive longtime supported gives little regard for my support, Silvato said in her emailed comment.

erin.kayata@hearstmediact.com
Greece transferred a dozen unaccompanied children from overcrowded migrant camps to Luxembourg on Wednesday, the first of more than 1,000 relocations that are being expedited amid concerns over the impact of coronavirus on vulnerable groups.

Another group of 50 children is expected to fly from Athens to Germany on Saturday, and 20 more will head to Switzerland at a later date. Greece hopes to relocate some 1,600 unaccompanied minors in the coming months.

At least 5,200 migrant children from Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq and African countries currently live in Greece, many of them under harsh conditions in camps on islands in the Aegean.

Deputy migration minister Giorgos Koumoutsakos said that although the number of children was small, it sent a strong message for others to follow the example set by Luxembourg.

Greece, he said, is having to bear a disproportionate share of the refugee burden.

Greece faces a crisis within a crisis; migration and the pandemic together, he told state broadcaster ERT. The combination makes an already difficult situation even more so, and more complex.

Having imposed a lockdown early on, Greece has weathered the coronavirus pandemic relatively well compared to many other European countries, with 2,170 confirmed cases and 101 deaths to date.

But its economy, which had been emerging from a decade-long recession following a debt crisis, is expected to suffer badly from a collapse in tourism bookings.

Human Rights Watch, an advocacy group, called on Greece this week to release all unaccompanied minors, saying their detention in overcrowded camps or in police cells heightened the risk of them contracting Covid-19.

Hundreds of thousands of migrants and refugees fleeing conflicts and poverty in their countries used Greece as a springboard towards other European countries in 2015 and 2016, when an EU-brokered accord with Turkey all but halted the flow.

Recommended How Greece managed to flatten the curve

Turkey now hosts about 3.4 million refugees and migrants, while Greece has about 120,000 who are waiting for asylum applications to be processed. Many of them are in overcrowded camps on five islands in the Aegean Sea, where aid groups say living conditions are dire.

About a dozen European nations have expressed a willingness to take in a number of them on a voluntary basis, including Italy, Finland, Serbia, Ireland and Portugal, Greek officials say.

Reuters
MATTOON  Lake Land College reported that it is working with industry professionals to assess the extent of damage caused by a fire that broke out on an isolated section of the roof of Neal Hall mid-afternoon Tuesday.

A Lake Land press release provided by spokeswoman Kelly Allee reported that the initial assessment reveals Neal Hall is structurally safe, but there is smoke damage throughout this building and water damage to the roof and the commons area of the north wing near the art and music classrooms.

Crews and specialists reportedly have begun the cleanup process and continue to assess damage to classroom materials and electronics, in addition to the structural elements.

"The colleges goal is to restore the classrooms and building to a safe and healthy learning environment when classes resume on campus," the release reported.

Lake Land reported that the roof of Neal Hall was being replaced and the contractors who were working on the roofing project escaped from the building without injury. The Mattoon Fire Department has reported that there were no injuries among the emergency responders or anyone else at the scene.

Due to the ongoing campus closure due to the COVID-19 pandemic, there were no students or staff in the building when the fire occurred. Lake Land reported that the campus remains on Level 3 Restricted Access to all students and staff, with the exception of a few authorized employees.

The college thanks all the emergency response organization that joined Lake Land police officers in responding to the fire, including Mattoon and Charleston fire departments, Lincoln and Wabash fire protection districts, Mitchell-Jerdan Ambulance Service, Mattoon Police Department and Coles County Sheriffs Office.

Neal Hall is located at the central entrance to campus and has a large Lake Land College marquee on its exterior to welcome those arriving on campus. This building houses staff offices, a nursing lab, 2-D and 3-D art labs, a music classroom, a biology lab and greenhouse, an earth science lab, and general education classrooms.

Lake Land reported that the Neal Hall roofing project is one of several facilities projects approved to continue as an essential operation by the governors executive order on regarding construction work. The Lake Land Board of Trustees approved the roofing project during a special meeting on March 27.

The college reported that all construction employees are required to submit a campus visitor approval form and take measures to practice social distancing of 6 feet, to use personal protective equipment when appropriate, and to use hand sanitizer and wash hands frequently while on campus.

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The Dene Nation again called on the N.W.T. government to consider its 27 chiefs request to ration alcohol across the territory in a bid to combat bootlegging in communities during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Dene National Chief Norman Yakeleya said on Tuesday he and other Dene leaders were perplexed by what he considered to be the inaction of the territorial government.

The N.W.T. government did not seem to be listening to the reality of whats happening in our small communities, Yakeleya said on Tuesday.

We know that the Government of the Northwest Territories is a roadblock in our well-being in our communities. And so we want to look at this roadblock. And so we have a plan as to how we deal with the roadblock.

Yakeleya said the Dene Nation had contacted Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and other federal ministers in the hope of receiving additional, direct funding. Some money has already been released by Ottawa to help Indigenous governments in the N.W.T.

There is a plan ahead of us and we are working on that plan, he said.

Late last week, finance minister Caroline Wawzonek said communities without any form of prohibition in place could utilize temporary prohibitions during the COVID-19 pandemic. Her department would not implement any territory-wide restrictions on the purchase of alcohol, she said.

We recognize that decisions about how to manage alcohol within a community are those that we would like to encourage be made by community leadership, Wawzonek said.

The Liquor Act provides a variety of tools to municipal and band governments to allow them to make their own decision and best respond to the specific needs of their residents.

At least four N.W.T. communities have so far applied for a temporary prohibition.

Every community is doing what it needs to do in their own unique way to protect their people, Yakeleya said.

Read more about:
A team of researchers from MIT has developed a novel method of tracking COVID-19 transmission among the population, using Bluetooth chirps that could automatically trace COVID-positive contacts and warn those who have potentially become infected, without violating their privacy.

The system is called PACT, or Private Automated Contact Tracing. It works by sending random strings of numbers via low-power Bluetooth from a users smartphone to other nearby devices using the system, creating a coded list of smartphones that a given user has been close to in the past 14 days.

If the user subsequently tests positive for COVID, he or she can upload that list of chirps to the database, so that other users can run a check to determine whether they might have exposed.

MIT said that the system uses advanced privacy protection methods to ensure the privacy of both COVID sufferers and those checking to see whether theyve been exposed. People would need to opt in, and researchers specifically highlighted that PACT does not use any GPS, wireless location or phone ID information.

For these broadcasts, were using cryptographic techniques to generate random, rotating numbers that are not just anonymous, but pseudonymous, constantly changing their ID, and that cant be traced back to an individual, said MIT institute professor Ron Rivest, who led the project. (Rivest knows a thing or two about cryptography: hes the R in RSA, the first publicly available public-key cryptosystem.)

The idea behind PACT is to make sure that the system isnt tracking any individuals specifically. Rather, its meant to be a yes/no resource for those wondering whether they may have been in proximity to someone with COVID. Its currently at the proof-of-concept stage  the team recently overcame the hurdle of getting Androids and iPhones to speak to each other  and overtures have been made to smartphone makers, Apple, Google and Microsoft to try and get the system into the publics hands as quickly as possible.

The aim of the prototype is to prove to these developers that this is feasible for them to implement, said Rivest.

The team hopes that if PACT comes into widespread use it would enable a much more selective approach to quarantine and give communities the ability to return to normalcy more quickly. Tracking the spread of a disease like COVID with more speed and precision could let public health authorities suggest testing to specific groups of people if they notice a pattern emerging.

MIT also said that the team has demonstrated PACT to various government agencies, and coordinating similar efforts elsewhere in the U.S., as well as in Europe.
The requests come at a time when Nebraska has recorded more than 950 coronavirus cases and 23 deaths. Close to 500 of those cases are in the Omaha and Grand Island areas. And the peak of cases is not expected until early May, according to some models.

Lincoln officials have said that with community transmission of the coronavirus accounting for about 70% of confirmed cases, Lancaster County residents should assume they are at risk of contracting it while they are out in public.

So state workers want the governor to allow all state employees who can to work from home, to close offices to the public while continuing to provide services by phone, and to immediately pay a $2 shift differential as hazard pay to workers who must report to work in person.

In just five days, our members responded overwhelmingly by signing these petitions, said Deb Strudl, Department of Health and Human Services specialist for Children and Family Services and union chairwoman.
It was a good day Tuesday on Wall Street, with big gains for all three major indexes on optimistic coronavirus news.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average gained 559 points and closed up at 2 percent. The S&P 500 was 3 percent higher, and the NASDAQ rose a hefty 4 percent.

European markets were mixed. London was off a fraction, while Frankfurt and Paris were both 1 percent higher. Asia also had a good day Tuesday. Japan's Nikkei index was up 3 percent, and South Korea, Australia and Shanghai were all 2 percent higher. Hong Kong was up a fraction.


The global lockdown has spawned some seriously wild looks, with people at home getting crafty using things like pillows and other household items lying around. Others like Shea Coulee, however, are showing the girlies how it's really done thanks to some impressive construction techniques and elevated design chops. (They studied costume design for years.)

The RuPaul's Drag Race star shared a recent photo of themself clad in a full head-to-toe printed look complete with a colorful head wrap and matching face mask. They designed the look at home with the help of Coulee's boyfriend and graphic artist Dan Polyak, who created the custom print.

"I'm definitely one of those people that if I'm not on the go traveling and I'm [at] home... I like to make things with my hands like cooking or sewing or working on hair," Coulee tells PAPER, describing themself as a "textile person." So after reflecting on how social distancing measures have affected things like fashion, they came up with the idea for this fully concealed look, which was inspired by the rising British designer Richard Quinn.

"They have definitely become one of my favorites to look out for every season," they explain. (They also cite Christopher John Rogers, Moschino and Iris van Herpen as constant fashion inspirations.) "I kind of got bored and made a cast of my head, patterned it out, and made a little quarantine couture outfit to keep my creativity flowing."

Quinn, who gained prominence after receiving an award from Queen Elizabeth a few years ago, is known for their maximalist floral prints and feminine shapes with a subversive edge. Coulee's look captures the designer's signature eccentricity that's become something of a draw for celebrities going incognito. (Remember Cardi B's head-to-toe disguise at Paris Fashion Week?)

Coulee has plenty more quarantine fashion looks in the pipeline while they isolate at home in Chicago. But they're also excited to continue performing once the lockdown eventually lifts. "There's been this shift to respond to COVID-19 where drag has gone into this digital frontier, so I've been in this process of figuring this out and creating spaces in my house so it doesn't look like I'm just in my living room."

They continue, "I feel like it will provide a new form of craftiness and how to create performance spaces anywhere. I feel like now it will be a little bit different for drag queens where we won't just walk on the stage and press play on the track. I feel like people are going to be so much more creative now after this and I'm really excited to bring that creativity to the stage."
The cost of paying out universal credit could surge by around 9.6bn a year following more than 1.4 million additional claims from people hit by the coronavirus crisis, a senior official has said.

Neil Couling, the director general of universal credit at the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP), said the benefits bill would rise by billions in the coming months as the impact of the coronavirus lockdown hits the economy.

In a briefing to journalists, he warned that some people may be confused by their entitlement and could receive less money than they expect when the first tranche of new claims are paid from 22 April.

Mr Couling also said it would be just impossible to cut the five-week wait for payments for first-time claimants and tinkering with the system at this stage could cause problems.

Some 1.4 million applications have been made for universal credit  which rolls several working-age benefits into a single payment  since 16 March, after 18 per cent of the workforce saw their hours cut or were made redundant due to the outbreak.

Asked about the cost of the extra claimants, Mr Couling would not give an exact forecast but added: It will be billions because of the nature of the expenditure on universal credit.

The average universal credit payment is 800 a month. So say if you did 800 times 12, times the million or so people who will be entitled, you can roughly approximate that just from that kind of calculation.

His suggested calculation amounts to 9.6bn a year. He added: But well do proper forecasts when were clear what the people who have come onto universal credit are entitled to and project some of that forward.

The spike represents a major increase compared with a typical period, where around 55,000 new claims would be made per week, he said.

But Mr Couling insisted that the welfare system would take the strain of new claimants, adding: That is what it was designed to do.

Some families may receive less than they are expecting if they have received redundancy payments or a final pay packet in the month they applied for universal credit, leading to confusion among new claimants.

Mr Couling said: I think therell be a few confused people out there for the first couple of weeks here because they havent had experience of how universal credit works before, so we are going to try to explain all of that to them.

Around 87 per cent of claims will be paid in full after five weeks, he said, but added that he was confident that the DWP can do better than that.

Asked if the assessment time could be reduced, he said it was just impossible, adding: You cant change the monthly assessment period, its integral to how universal credit will work.

Some 10,000 staff have been seconded to help from other parts of the DWP, as around 20 per cent of the workforce has been forced to self isolate due to Covid-19 symptoms in their household.

High noon in a coronavirus-stricken world Show all 18 1 /18 High noon in a coronavirus-stricken world High noon in a coronavirus-stricken world Najaf, Iraq A man holds a pocket watch at noon, at an almost empty market near the Imam Ali shrine Reuters High noon in a coronavirus-stricken world Bangkok, Thailand Wat Phra Si Rattana Satsadaram (The Temple of the Emerald Buddha, part of The Grand Palace) Reuters High noon in a coronavirus-stricken world Prague, Czech Republic An empty street leading to the historic Old Town Square Reuters High noon in a coronavirus-stricken world Washington DC, US Lawn stretching towards the Capitol, home of Congress Reuters High noon in a coronavirus-stricken world Jerusalem's Old City A watch showing the time in front of Damascus Gate Reuters High noon in a coronavirus-stricken world London, UK The Houses of Parliament seen from Westminster Bridge Reuters High noon in a coronavirus-stricken world Wuhan, China Empty lanes in the city that saw the first outbreak of disease Reuters High noon in a coronavirus-stricken world Havana, Cuba The Malecon road and esplanade winds along the city's seafront Reuters High noon in a coronavirus-stricken world Cairo, Egypt A little busier than elsewhere: midday traffic in Tahrir Square Reuters High noon in a coronavirus-stricken world Berlin, Germany The Brandenburg Gate, the only surviving city gate in the capital Reuters High noon in a coronavirus-stricken world Caracas, Venezuela Bolivar Avenue, opened in 1949 and the site of many demonstrations and rallies Reuters High noon in a coronavirus-stricken world Moscow, Russia Spasskaya Tower (left) on the eastern wall of the Kremlin, and St Basil's Cathedral Reuters High noon in a coronavirus-stricken world Istanbul,Turkey The harbourside Eminonu district is usually buzzing with activity Reuters High noon in a coronavirus-stricken world New Delhi, India Rajpath, a ceremonial boulevard that runs through the capital Reuters High noon in a coronavirus-stricken world Amman, Jordan The Roman amphitheatre that dates back to the 2nd century AD Reuters High noon in a coronavirus-stricken world New York City, US The main concourse of Grand Central station in Manhattan Reuters High noon in a coronavirus-stricken world Kiev, Ukraine Maidan Nezalezhnosti, the site of many political protests since the end of the Soviet era Reuters High noon in a coronavirus-stricken world Accra, Ghana The odd walker out in the midday sun on Ring Road Central Reuters

Around 5,000 are being recruited, with some coming from across Whitehall, such as the Passport Office.

Thousands of call handlers will be working from home once they get the right IT equipment, he said, as all jobcentres have been closed to prevent the spread of the virus.

It comes as a new report by the Institute of Employment Rights think tank warned that millions of workers could face destitution due to gaps in the income protection plans.

Labour peer Lord Hendy, who wrote the report, said reassurances offered by ministers to millions of low-income people may be misguided as up to 9 million people could be missing out on sick pay and 7 million are not eligible for the furlough scheme.

Elsewhere, Citizens Advice reported a 39 per cent rise in enquiries during the coronavirus outbreak, with 9 million page views for its website in the past month.
New York Lawmakers Call for Federal Aid for Burials

By VOA News April 14, 2020

New York Senator Charles Schumer and Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Tuesday called on the federal government to provide funding for funeral and burial assistance across New York state.

At a news conference in Ocasio-Cortez's district, in the Queens borough of New York City, the two lawmakers said the use of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) Disaster Funeral Assistance program would help low-income communities and communities of color afford to bury loved ones who have died during the COVID-19 pandemic.

They argued that New York and especially Ocasio-Cortez's district in Queens and the Bronx have been the hardest hit by COVID-19.

Schumer, who is the U.S. Senate minority leader, noted FEMA helped pay for funerals in the wake of 2012's Hurricane Sandy, which struck parts of New York.

President Donald Trump approved a Major Disaster Declaration on March 20, but FEMA must approve special funeral assistance, which is currently under review.

Schumer and Ocasio-Cortez called for swift approval to help struggling families hit by the pandemic crisis.

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Linkedin Dian Septiari (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Wed, April 15, 2020 20:17 636 fc6853813033f564188675f8bd21f161 1 SE Asia #migrant-workers,migrant-workers,COVID-19,#COVID19,ASEAN,#ASEAN,refugee,#refugees,pengungsi,#pengungsi,buruh-migran,#buruh-migran,Retno-Marsudi Free

Having held a special meeting on Tuesday to discuss steps that could be taken at the regional level to overcome the COVID-19 pandemic, ASEAN leaders are now facing pressure not to neglect migrant workers and refugees after the two vulnerable groups were not mentioned at all in the meetings main outcome document.

The meeting, held online and chaired by Vietnamese Prime Minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc, resulted in a joint declaration that included the widely applauded plan to establish a regional COVID-19 response fund to deal with the scarcity of medical supplies caused by the pandemic.

However, labor rights advocacy group Migrant Care criticized the declaration for not tackling the issue of human mobility, especially in regard to migration and refugees.

From a careful reading of this declaration, the substance is still within the framework of normative ASEAN cooperation, emphasizing more the medical governance approach, Migrant Cares Wahyu Susilo said on Tuesday.

While the approach was certainly important and useful, ASEAN should also find a way to help migrants and refugees, which has become an even more pressing matter during the pandemic, he said.

Read also: Leaders support establishment of ASEAN COVID-19 response fund

They are part of a group that is vulnerable to COVID-19. It is unfortunate that ASEAN has neglected this, he added.

In the declaration, leaders expressed an intention to prioritize the well-being of peoples in ASEANs collective fight against COVID-19 and to provide appropriate assistance and support to the nationals of ASEAN member states affected by the pandemic in each others country or in third countries.

As one of the biggest migrant-sending countries in the region, Indonesia in particular raised the issue at Tuesdays meeting, with President Joko Jokowi Widodo acknowledging the roles migrant workers played in their host countries economies.

The President emphasized that migrant workers have in fact contributed to the economies of ASEAN member countries, Foreign Minister Retno LP Marsudi said after the meeting on Tuesday.

Singapore and Malaysia, among the wealthiest countries in the region, depend on millions of migrant workers to fill low-wage jobs in the agriculture, construction, domestic help and restaurant sectors.

In Singapore, migrant workers are the most vulnerable members of the community, with around a third of the city-states 2,918 cases having been linked to clusters at migrant worker dormitories, where workers from Bangladesh, Indonesia, Myanmar, Nepal and elsewhere often sleep 10 to 20 to a room.

Read also: Singapore migrant workers live in fear as virus hits dorms

In Malaysia, migrants make up around 30 percent of the Malaysian workforce, according to the International Labor Organization (ILO).

According to the Indonesian Foreign Ministry, there are 1.1 million documented Indonesian workers in Malaysia, with the number of undocumented workers estimated to be double.

These workers have been greatly impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic, especially following Malaysias decision to enforce a movement control order (MCO) policy, which began on March 18 and has been extended until April 28.

Many Indonesian workers are day laborers, such as construction workers, and are affected by not being able to work because of the MCO, which is basically a semi lockdown, Retno said in a livestream discussion on Wednesday.

Indonesian missions in Malaysia have distributed nearly 70,000 food packages to the most vulnerable Indonesian workers, with priority given to day laborers, the elderly and the disabled.

Retno said each ASEAN country had adopted a different approach to contain the pandemic, but that they must not lose sight of the commitment to assisting and protecting their vulnerable citizens in other ASEAN countries.

Nearly 7 million workers migrate within the ASEAN region. I believe they are at the heart of our community building process, Retno said in an op-ed published by The Jakarta Post on Tuesday. With more than 1 million Indonesians working in Singapore and Malaysia, I have been in close contact with my counterparts to ensure the protection of our migrant workers in their respective countries.

Wahyu said ASEAN must acknowledge the vulnerability of migrant workers as well as Rohingya refugees, who live in appalling conditions near the Myanmar-Bangladesh border.

We urge ASEAN to develop and implement a health protocol for the protection of migrant workers and refugees in the region to ensure they are also an integral part of the efforts to prevent COVID-19 transmission, he said. This protocol requires a human rights-based, gender-sensitive and non-discriminatory approach.
Recently, to spread awareness about online presence, RuBic Group launched information on its online platform that described why business owners must have a website.

DONG NAI, VIETNAM / ACCESSWIRE / April 15, 2020 / In the modern world, when the majority of the population has turned into an online community, it is needless to describe why having a website for a business is so important. But still, some business owners fail to realize the importance of a website. Keeping this into consideration, Rubic Group launched information about why a business owner must own a website.

According to rubicmarketing.com, promoting one's business through leaflets, documents, and catalogs is a thing of the past. These days, having a website is enough to connect with the target audience and provide them with complete information about the business - its products, service, and other related info. As everyone has a smartphone and a computer these days, therefore, a website link does all the work of promoting business in the market segment.

The company further explains necessary information related to a website for business owners who are entirely unaware of a website. To enhance the awareness of business owners, the company stated that a website acts like an information page that introduces individuals, businesses, and organizations. The information posted on a website includes contact information, partners and customers, services, and products so that the targeted customers can self-understand what the company deals with.

When talking about the reasons to have a website or the benefits associated with it, the company representative mentioned that a website with an alluring website design provides unlimited advertising opportunities. Business owners can advertise their products without any restrictions on the number of posts. A website makes it super easy to reach out to the customers and sell the products quickly.

The representative added that though a website is an essential platform for business promotion, one should not neglect the power of excellent catalog design and profile design. A catalog and profile explain your business info to the customers. Therefore, to make a lasting impression on the customers, one should both use a website and a perfectly designed catalog for the business.

Story continues

Lastly, the representative suggested that before choosing a service provider for profile design capacity or logo design, one must check the expertise and experience beforehand.

About The Company

RuBic Group is one of the most reputed companies in Vietnam that is involved in offering a range of services, like Google SEO services; Google Adwords; SEO standard website design; Zalo advertising; Facebook; catalog, profile, banner, logo design; and writing content for websites, magazines, newspapers, and PR articles to attract customers and increase brand value. The company works with a diverse team of experts who help business owners (clients) design a website, boost its ranking, and generate more leads through AdWords services.

Contact Details:

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/rubicgroup/

Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCyywekMHUhYzoDogiyV03fQ/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/marketingrubic

Contact Info:

Name: Tracy Ford

Email: Send Email

Organization: RuBic Group

Address: No.F10, town 5A, Tan Bien urban area, Tan Bien ward, Bien Hoa, Dong Nai

Phone: +84 937 667 886

Website: https://rubicmarketing.com/

SOURCE: RuBic Group





View source version on accesswire.com:

https://www.accesswire.com/585191/RuBic-Group-Explains-Why-Businesses-Need-a-Professional-Website




The UAE has launched its first national fraud awareness campaign in light of the increased use of digital banking services during the new coronavirus (Covid-19) pandemic.



A joint initiative of UAE Banks Federation (UBF), the Central Bank of the UAE, CBUAE, Abu Dhabi Police, and Dubai Police, the campaign aims to educate and protect consumers from financial cybercrime and fraud, reported state news agency Wam, citing a press release issued by UBF.

As digital solutions disrupt the banking industry, fraudsters have become increasingly sophisticated resulting in a surge in the number of cases of fraud worldwide.



In 2018, there was a year-on-year increase of 18.2 percent in fraud cases in the UAE. These numbers increased again in 2019, the press release said.



Globally, fraud and cybercrime are expected to rise further. And with hundreds of millions of people mandated to stay at home to curb the spread of the coronavirus, related fraud is also expected to climb as fraudsters exploit peoples fear and anxiety during these difficult times.



Common scams are targeting victims via email, SMS, phone and social media, with fraudsters posing as genuine organisations including government entities, banks, and healthcare providers to trick victims into disclosing personal or financial information.



In the UAE, the Central Bank has urged the public to be wary of potential fraudulent activities using its name, and warns that there will be a rise in these types of scams during the coronavirus outbreak.



To counter this, and encourage people to remain vigilant while they stay at home, the national fraud awareness campaign will be rolled out across social and traditional media channels with the support of the UBF Fraud Prevention Committee and UBFs 53 member banks.



Under the theme #TogetherAgainstFraud, content will include educational videos and articles that will raise awareness on how to identify scams and avoid them.



And as part of the campaigns efforts to help banks and authorities spot trends and further combat fraud, UBF has launched a micro-website where customers can report fraudulent activity.



Abdulhamid Saeed, Governor of the Central Bank of the UAE, said, "As digital banking transactions are witnessing a significant spike during this time, we at Central Bank of the UAE have been quick to deploy robust fraud prevention measures to protect consumers. Todays announcement further validates this commitment," he said.



Commenting on the campaign, Abdul Aziz Al Ghurair, chairman of UAE Banks Federation, said: "The banking sectors digital transformation and widespread implementation of online solutions has increased both the complexity and magnitude of financial fraud and cybercrime across the globe.



"With the launch of this joint campaign we not only aim to equip the public with the knowledge and resources they need to protect themselves from fraud, but also disrupt the criminal networks that are targeting UAE residents.



The national fraud awareness campaign will run until the end of the year, focusing on different topics every month. These include SIM swap fraud, phishing, vishing, lottery scams, vanishing ink scams, card skimming, email redirection fraud, and data privacy.



Lieutenant General Abdullah Khalifa Al Marri, Lieutenant General of Dubai Police, said, "We encourage all UAE residents to remain vigilant during these uncertain times, and exercise extra caution when sharing any confidential information."



Major General Maktoum Ali Al Sharifi, Director-General of Abu Dhabi Police, said that during 2019 to February this year, Abu Dhabi Police arrested 13 criminal gangs made up of 142 fraudsters involved in vishing attacks.



The fraudsters were posing as bank employees and asking customers to disclose their bank details and personal information to steal their money, he revealed.




Ten U.S. airlines, including the 'Big Four,' have agreed to terms to accept a $25 billion in federal aid to meet payrolls during the coronavirus crisis in exchange for granting the Treasury Department the option to exercise small ownership stakes.

American, Delta, United and Southwest Airlines were among the carriers that agreed to the massive bailout deal, Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin said in a statement on Tuesday evening.

News of the deal sent airline stocks soaring in after-hours trading, with Delta shares rising 9.5 percent and American up 10.7 percent.

Also accepting federal aid were: Alaska Airlines, Allegiant Air, Frontier Airlines, Hawaiian Airlines, JetBlue Airways, and SkyWest Airlines.

merican, Delta, United and Southwest Airlines were among the carriers that agreed to the massive bailout deal, Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin (left) said on Tuesday evening

A one-day view of American Airlines stock shows shares rising in after-hours trading Tuesday

A one-day view of United Airlines stock shows shares rising in after-hours trading Tuesday

The deal includes 10 of the top 12 U.S. carriers. The other two, Spirit Airlines and Republic Airlines, said on Tuesday that they were still in discussions with the Treasury.

The assistance will include a mix of cash and loans, with the government getting warrants that can be converted into small ownership stakes in the leading airlines.

Major carriers will receive 70 percent of the funds for payroll in cash assistance that will not need to be paid back, while smaller carriers receiving $100 million or less will not need to repay any funds.

The airlines did not want to give up equity, but Treasury demanded compensation for taxpayers.

The airlines have little leverage - their business has collapsed as the coronavirus pandemic reduces air travel to a trickle and they face mass layoffs without the federal aid.

According to the statute, companies receiving funds cannot lay off employees before September 30 or change collective bargaining agreements and must agree to restrictions on buybacks, executive compensation and dividends.

Buybacks and dividends are banned through September 2021, and executives must accept salary restrictions until late March 2022.

The statute gave Treasury the authority to demand compensation for the grants, but did not require it.

American Airlines passenger planes are parked last month due to flight reductions made to slow the spread of coronavirus disease (COVID-19), at Tulsa International Airport in Oklahoma

This chart shows the number of daily air travelers in the US (blue) as well as that number's change from a year ago (red), based on data released by the TSA

Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said the department would work with the airlines to finalize deals 'and disburse funds as quickly as possible.

Airline workers hailed the deal as a way to preserve their jobs in the crisis.

'We are closer than ever to almost a million airline workers knowing they will receive their paycheck and keep their healthcare and other benefits, at least through September,' said Association of Flight Attendants President Sara Nelson, who is widely credited for the idea of aid specifically for payroll.

'At the same time, we were able to rein in the worst corporate practices by tying this aid to restrictions on stock buybacks, executive compensation and dividends.'

Airlines are hopeful that U.S. demand, which has dropped by 95 percent due to the coronavirus, will begin to recover by October but have warned that the slowdown in air travel could extend into next year and even longer. It is possible they will need another round of government bailouts to survive.

President Donald Trump - perhaps mindful of criticism that the government was bailing out a previously profitable industry - said the deals will support airline workers and protect taxpayers.

'Our airlines are now in good shape, and they will get over a very tough period of time that was not caused by them,' Trump said.

The payroll aid is roughly based on each airline's spending on wages and benefits from April through September 2019,

American Airlines said Treasury approved $5.8 billion for the airline, a $4.1 billion grant and a $1.7 billion low-interest loan. CEO Doug Parker called it 'fantastic news,' and 'we now believe we have the financial resources necessary to help us withstand this crisis.'

Southwest Airlines said it had agreed in principle and expects to receive $3.2 billion in grants and will need to repay nearly $1 billion over 10 years.

Southwest will issue 2.6 million warrants to the Treasury, or less than 1 percent of its outstanding stock. Others gave no details about the warrants.

An airline check-in area is empty at Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport on Tuesday in Phoenix. The new coronavirus has caused a significant decrease in air travel

CEOs of 'Big Four' airlines all take pay cuts under deals Airlines who accept the Treasury bailout will have executive compensation caps in place tied to 2019 salary levels through March 2022. Officers and employees whose total compensation (including stock-based) exceeded $425,000 in 2019 may not receive total annual compensation during the two-year period that exceeds the total compensation received in 2019. Officers and employees whose total compensation exceeded $3 million in 2019 may not receive total annual compensation that exceeds $3 million plus 50 percent of the excess over $3 million of total compensation received in 2019. Prior to the bailouts, the CEOs of the 'Big Four' US airlines had already agreed to salary cuts prior to Tuesday. American CEO Doug Parker American Airlines American CEO Doug Parker does not get paid a base salary or a cash bonus. 'He made a change to his compensation in 2015 to be paid only in stock. So hes already at zero and has been for several years,' a spokesperson told DailyMail.com. Parker's stock-based compensation totaled $11,999,517 in 2018; data for 2019 is not yet available. Delta CEO Ed Bastian Delta Airlines Delta CEO Ed Bastian said last month that he will forgo 100 percent of his salary for the next six months. 'Our Board of Directors elected to forego their compensation over the next six months as well,' he said in a statement last month. Bastian made $14,982,448 in total compensation in 2018, with $7.7 million in the form of stock awards. 2019 data is not yet available. United Airlines CEO Oscar Munoz United Airlines United Airlines CEO Oscar Munoz and President Scott Kirby both said that they will forsake 100 percent of their salaries through the end of June. Kirby had been scheduled to take over as CEO of the airline in May. In 2018, Munoz earned a total compensation of over $10 million and Kirby took home roughly $5.5 million. Southwest Airlines CEO Gary Kelly Southwest Airlines Southwest Airlines CEO Gary Kelly announced last month that he will take a 10 percent pay cut In 2018, Kellys base salary was $750,000, but his total compensation neared $8 million. Advertisement

JetBlue Airways said it will receive $935.8 million in payroll grants.

United was eligible for about $6 billion, Delta about $5.6 billion and Alaska $1.2 billion, but they did not disclose on Tuesday how much they would receive.

The airlines had expected to begin receiving the aid - entirely in cash that didn't have to be repaid - from the government to cover their payrolls by April 6, the deadline set by Congress. Instead, they found themselves locked in several days of tense negotiations with the Treasury Department, which insisted that only 70% of the aid should be in cash, with the rest in loans that airlines must repay.

In addition, Treasury demanded that to compensate taxpayers, the largest airlines must turn over warrants that, if exercised, could give the government ownership stakes ranging between 1 percent and 3 percent, according to calculations by a Raymond James analyst.

The warrants total 10 percent of the loan amount, and Mnuchin can exercise them at each airline's closing stock price on April 9, according to airline officials.

The nation's airlines entered 2020 riding a decade-long hot streak in which together they earned tens of billions of dollars due to strong travel demand.

That success came crashing down in just a few weeks, as governments restricted travel to slow the spread of the new coronavirus, and people feared contracting the illness on a plane.

A Treasury official working on the program, Brent McIntosh, told Reuters on Monday that the government had done a 'substantial analysis ... we believe approximately 70% of those payments becomes a direct benefit to taxpayers.' He cited 'avoided unemployment benefits, taxes that come back to the federal government, and the benefits of continued air service.'

U.S. passenger airlines can also apply for a separate $25 billion loan scheme under the government's $2.3 trillion stimulus package, known as the CARES Act, and had lobbied for the payroll relief portion to be free cash.

American is seeking funds from that $25 billion loan program, but interest in loans may not be universal as airlines can also seek credit in the private markets.

'I strongly believe what Congress laid out in this provision of the CARES Act - to put workers first - should be the model for any industry-specific relief going forward,' U.S. Representative Peter DeFazio, chair of the House Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure, said in a statement.

Estimated global airline losses from the coronavirus pandemic have climbed to $314 billion, 25 percent more than previously forecast, the International Air Transport Association (IATA) said on Tuesday, owing to the severity of the economic downturn and a slower than previously expected reopening of international routes.

Alexandre de Juniac, the Geneva-based organization's CEO, said leaving the middle seat vacant was among likely conditions for a resumption of air travel to be discussed with governments in a series of coordinated meetings around the world.
The roar of the new F-35 fighter aircraft will not be heard around Selfridge Air National Guard Base in Harrison Township anytime soon.

Macomb County Executive Mark Hackels office was informed that reconsideration of a previous decision to award the planes to locations in Alabama and a site in Madison, Wisconsin, where local residents had protested the planes being based there, did not result in a change of venue.

Michigan Senator Gary Peters confirmed that fact in a statement to The Macomb Daily Wednesday.

I spoke with Air Force Secretary Barbara Barrett. While I am disappointed Selfridge was not selected for conversion this round, I appreciate her commitment to the A-10 mission at Selfridge, he said. I will continue working with the Air Force, local officials including county Executive Hackel, and the Michigan Congressional delegation to highlight why the 127th Wing at Selfridge is an ideal choice to host future F-35 missions.

Hackel remained upbeat as what has been an exhaustive process headed up by his office in association with the Selfridge Base Council and local and state officials appeared to be at a conclusion.

That being said, boy, what an incredible plan we put together for people to understand the importance of Selfridge Air Base here in Michigan for our nations defense, he said, adding the plan demonstrated the base was superior to the others based on strategic deployment, economic advantages and community support.

His sentiments were shared by Macomb County Public Works Commissioner Candice Miller, a former longtime member of Congress whose district included the base.

We are disappointed at the news that Selfridge Air National Guard Base was not selected as an F-35 base. For those of us who personally know the airmen, the base and the leadership team in place at Selfridge, we are confident that the base is well positioned to be selected for the next round of F-35 basing or other critical future missions, she said.

Hackel also predicted the base, located on the shores of Lake St. Clair directly across from Ontario, will be in the running for future F-35 expansions.

People now know Selfridge, without question, is an incredible asset to our nations defense, he said.

The F35s, which are built at a price tag estimated at $90 million each, are expected to be rolled out in 2023.

The news comes after President Donald Trump told a gathering at a Warren manufacturing facility in late January the planes could be coming to the base in Harrison Township.

We are giving strong consideration to deploying some of our mighty F-35s to Selfridge, and many of you know what that means. So Selfridge is going to see a lot of fast planes, but actually, they are stealth, so maybe you wont see them, Trump told a crowd gathered at Dana Manufacturing Jan. 30.
In less than two weeks, Montana small businesses have received nearly $1.3 billion in federal aid to keep employees on payroll and out of unemployment.

The U.S. Small Business Administration issued state-level numbers Tuesday, revealing that 10,372 Montana business had been approved for loans totaling $1.293 billion though Monday.

All told, the SBA has spent $247.5 billion since the Paycheck Protection Program launched April 3. Congress had approved $349 billion at the end of March. It is now seeking to add another $200 billion.

This program is critical to keep Montana small businesses open and their workers employed, Sen. Steve Daines, R-Montana, tweeted Tuesday. "We must work together to boost funding for PPP now.

The Paycheck Protection Program offers Businesses federally backed loans to cover up to eight weeks of payroll and related overhead. The money doesn't have to be repaid if at least 75% of the money borrowed goes to payroll and the remaining 25% is used for expenses like utility costs, and lease and mortgage payments. The rate on money that has to be repaid is .5%.
US President Donald Trump on Tuesday announced halting America's funding of the World Health Organization while a review is being conducted to assess its role in "severely mismanaging and covering up" the spread of the deadly coronavirus.

The novel coronavirus, which originated from Wuhan City of central China's Hubei province in November, has so far killed at least 1,19,000 people globally, including more than 25,000 in the United States, according to Johns Hopkins University.

"Today I am instructing my administration to halt funding of the World Health Organization while a review is conducted to assess the World Health Organization's role in severely mismanaging and covering up the spread of the coronavirus. Everybody knows what has gone on there," Trump told reporters at his daily White House conference on the pandemic.

The Trump administration has accused WHO of taking side with China in the coronavirus outbreak that has brought America's economy to a standstill.

American taxpayers provide between USD400 million and USD500 million per year to the WHO, in contrast, China contributes roughly USD40 million a year and even less, he said.

"As the organization's leading sponsor, the United States has a duty to insist on full accountability, one of the most dangerous and costly decisions from the WHO was its disastrous decision to oppose travel restrictions from China and other nations, Trump alleged.

"They were very much opposed to what we did, fortunately, I was not convinced and suspended travel from China saving untold numbers of lives...thousands and thousands of people would have died, he said.

The world, he asserted, depends on the WHO to work with countries to ensure that accurate information about international health threats is shared in a timely manner. The WHO failed in this basic duty and must be held accountable, he said.

The president alleged that WHO failed to investigate credible reports from sources in Wuhan that conflicted directly with the Chinese government's official accounts. There was credible information to suspect human-to-human transmission in December 2019, which should have spurred the WHO to investigate and investigate immediately, he observed.

Through middle of January it parroted and publicly endorsed the idea that there was not human-to-human transmission happening despite reports and clear evidence to the contrary, he said.

According to Trump, the delays the WHO experienced in declaring a public health emergency cost valuable time. "More time was lost in the delay it took to get a team of international experts and to examine the outbreak...," he added.

The inability of the WHO to obtain virus samples to this date has deprived the scientific community of essential data. New data that emerges across the world on a daily basis points to the unreliability of the initial reports and the world received all sorts of false information about transmission and mortality, he said.

Trump alleged that the silence of the WHO on the disappearance of scientific researchers and doctors and new restrictions on the sharing of research into the origins of COVID-19 in the country of origin is deeply concerning, especially when the US gives by far the largest amount of money to the global health body.

"Had the WHO done its job to get medical experts into China to objectively assess the situation on the ground and to call out China's lack of transparency, the outbreak could have been contained...with very little death..., he said.

Instead the WHO willingly took China's assurances at face value...and defended the actions of the Chinese government, even praising China for its so-called transparency.... The WHO pushed China's misinformation about the virus, saying it was not communicable, and there was no need for travel bans.... The WHO's reliance on China's disclosures likely caused a 20-fold increase in cases worldwide, and it may be much more than that, Trump said.

The president alleged that the WHO has not addressed a single one of these concerns nor provided a serious explanation that acknowledges its own mistakes, of which there were many.

Trump said for the WHO, it would have been so easy to be truthful, and so much death has been caused by their mistakes. We will continue to engage with the WHO to see if it can make meaningful reforms. For the time being, we will redirect global health and directly work with others, he said.

According to Trump, had other nations like US suspended travel from China, countless more lives would have been saved. Instead look at the rest of the world, look at parts of Europe other nations and regions who followed WHO guidelines, and kept their borders open to China accelerated the pandemic all around the world, he said.

The WHO's attack on travel restrictions put political correctness above life-saving measures, he alleged.

Since its establishment in 1948, the American people have generously supported the World Health Organization to provide better health outcomes for the world and, most importantly, to help prevent global health crises, he said.

"With the outbreak of the COVID-19, we have deep concerns whether America's generosity has been put to the best use possible. The reality is that the WHO failed to adequately obtain, vet and share information in a timely and transparent fashion," Trump added.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
When Jayne Pinto ordered groceries through Instacart at the end of March, some of the items she requested were sold out.

As concerns about COVID-19 grew, so did the food reserves in peoples pantries. Stores were quickly selling out of canned goods and cleaning supplies, including hand sanitizer, paper towels and toilet paper. So, it wasnt a surprise when her groceries had to be delivered without a few of the products.

The problem, however, was getting the money back for items she never received.

In these times when money is so tight and our financial picture is so bleak, who can afford to pay for things that they do not get? Pinto said.

Pinto emailed Instacart multiple times, using both the Contact Us on the app and report a problem on her specific order. She also attempted to call but was told the company is currently not accepting calls and then redirects customers to the contact us section of their website.

The only response I have received from Instacart was the automatic responses, she said in early April.

Others are posting on social media that they are seeing the same or worse delays in getting their money back.

@Instacart

it's been 22 days since I reported that I never got an item in my order. Why hasn't ur support responded to multiple follow up emails and tweets? Why haven't I received a refund? I understand delays r expected but u've been keeping my money for 3 WEEKS! That's fraud!  Svetlana (@SvetlanaSF) April 12, 2020

@Instacart I've tried emails, support chat messages, direct messages on Twitter and I still haven't received a refund for groceries that were never delivered almost a week ago. What's going on?  Robert Hernandez (@SaulGoode91) April 10, 2020

@Instacart #instacart what a mess. I ordered groceries 2 weeks ago, never delivered, never answered my customer service questions and you charge me twice on deposit. Finally was able to cancel order after 10 days of waiting...please refund my $200 for nothing!  csrlamom (@csrlamom) April 7, 2020

Instacart did not respond to MassLives request for comment.

On April 9th, Pinto finally received a response from the company informing her they gave her credits to use at a later date. Pinto said she doesnt trust using the company again but even if she did, using those credit are not a viable option right now.

They have no delivery dates available anyway," she said. So, how would they expect me to even use the credit?

The lack of delivery services is another problem residents in Massachusetts and elsewhere are reporting.

Danielle Lightner said shes used Instacart for groceries in the past but during the pandemic, shes had to be more careful about planning out grocery deliveries.

While you used to be able to get same-day delivery with Instacart, the delivery dates are now 3-4 days out, she said.

KSNV reported that Instacart has more shoppers on its platform than ever before and will be hiring an additional 300,000 to keep up with demand. It also started providing workers with health and safety kits after they went on strike, CNBC reported.

Stop & Shop announced in March it was suspending online pickup service until further notice and warned of delays with its Peapod home delivery service. Amazon Fresh, FreshDirect, Target, and Walmart are also all experiencing delays, Money reported.

Other places are seeing a complete lack of delivery time options.

Lightners mother is homebound due to an orthopedic disability. She uses a wheelchair and doesnt drive, Lightner said. She said shes typically able to help her mom - who lives across the country - order groceries and the food she needs, even from a far distance.

But when Instacart stopped delivering to her moms area, Lightner was left scrambling.

She said she turned to Amazon Pantry, VONS and Postmates  but like Instacart, many had stopped delivering, and she couldnt find the delivery services she needed. She even turned to her mothers local community.

Community members on our town Facebook page are asking for food assistance or cleaning products and people from the town are doing porch drop donations, she said. That sort of thing doesnt happen in San Diego. That sense of community doesnt exist there.

Instead, Lightner said they sometimes used Doordash and Grubhub to get through some of the meals. And Lightners sister brought her left-over food from Starbucks where she works. But thats not ideal for Lightners diabetic mother.

Getting food delivered through Instacart allows her to exercise some choice in a life that otherwise doesnt provide much choice, she said. Being able to get healthy food is so important for her.

Instacart is now back up and running in San Diego, Lightner said. But uncertainties still remain.

Thats why many are turning to local grocery stores.

Simos Produce in Springfield typically supplies produce to schools, restaurants and prisons but with so many closed many of their usual customers werent in need  but the community is.

Normally were wholesale distributors, said Jeremy Durrin, account manager at Simos, told MassLive. But weve got the infrastructure here to kind of turn things around  get deliveries to peoples houses. So, thats what we started doing.

The box includes a number of items, including a bag of potatoes, a dozen eggs, half gallon of milk, apples, bananas, grapes, carrots, lettuce and more.

Alltown Fresh also started offering three crate options, meat, produce and pantry, for families trying to avoid grocery shopping.

Customers, like Desirae Nicodemus, are having better luck using more local options. Shes been using Fruit Fair in Chicopee.

She said shes used the delivery service and shopped in store during the pandemic, and both options have been wonderful.

Even with this pandemic, I havent had to change any of my shopping habits when I shop there, she said.

Kelly Robidoux, a personal shopper in Fall River known as The Errand Lady, works through the grocery delivery app Dumpling.

Shes had to change a few of her habits, like wearing a mask and particularly planning when she shops for various communities. But she makes sure the quality of her service hasnt taken a hit.

Customers use the Dumpling app to request Robidoux for their shopping. That way they always know theyll get match with not only a shopper but a shopper they know and trust.

But like everyone else, Robidoux has run into not being able to find every product on her customers lists. For example, Lysol wipes are in high demand and arent easy to find.

Unfortunately, Im not a cleaning fairy and I cannot make those appear, she said.

Instead, she keeps an eye on all her orders for the week, and keeps an eye out for these high demand products while she shopping for other orders.

So, if they ordered Lysol wipes and [the store] happens to have it, I can buy it on Monday, she said.

Then she can shop for the rest of their order on the day its scheduled for delivery. Robidoux knows how important it is for people to not only get their groceries but get the high quality products they want.

I shop for everyone like their family, she said.

Related Content:
Israeli political impasse: Gantz-Netanyahu miss coalition govt. deadline

Iran Press TV

Tuesday, 14 April 2020 7:03 AM

Israeli President Reuven Rivlin has extended the mandate of centrist Blue and White party leader Benny Gantz to form a unity government as coalition talks with rightist rival, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, remain deadlocked.

Gantz had been given 28 days to clinch a power-sharing deal with Netanyahu, who heads the right-wing Likud party, after Israel's March 2 polls, Israel's third elections in a year.

The rival leaders, however, were unable to reach an agreement before a deadline passed at midnight Monday.

They asked the Israeli president early on Tuesday to extend the deadline to form a joint coalition to midnight Wednesday.

Rivlin acceded to the 48-hour extension request "on the understanding that they are very close to reaching an agreement," according to a statement from his office.

Gantz and Netanyahu met overnight in a last-ditch effort to resolve differences and later issued a joint statement claiming that they had made "significant progress" in forming an emergency administration to end Israel's unprecedented political deadlock amid the coronavirus pandemic.

If the pair fails to clinch a deal, the Israeli parliament (Knesset) will have 21 days to come up with a candidate for prime minister endorsed by 61 members of the 120-seat legislature.

If that also fails, Israel could be headed for an extraordinary fourth straight election, sending people back to the ballot box in just over a year.

Just hours before the original deadline, both Netanyahu and Gantz delivered separate televised statements on Monday night and expressed their desire for a coalition administration, citing the emergency created by the coronavirus outbreak.

"We will keep making every effort to achieve the unity," Netanyahu said in a speech that began with his explanation of the latest restrictions imposed over the pandemic, which has so far infected 11,586 Israelis and killed 116.

"Benny, I'm waiting for you in the prime minister's residence in Jerusalem" al-Quds, he tweeted later. "Let's meet and sign even tonight on forming a national emergency government that will save lives and work for the citizens of Israel."

Gantz, an ex-military chief, urged Netanyahu to come to an agreement or risk dragging Israel into an unwanted election.

"Netanyahu, we have arrived at the moment of truth. The citizens of Israel expect us  both of us  to make difficult decisions," he said.

Coalition talks reached an impasse last week over a demand by Netanyahu, who faces an impending corruption trial, to have more influence over judicial appointments.

On Monday, Gantz reportedly agreed to the plea, drawing criticisms from his former political allies.

"I am not prepared to believe that Blue and White would give Bibi (Netanyahu) an immunity law," Yesh Atid party leader Yair Lapid wrote on social media. "Even the Right would not give Bibi the personal immunity law that he wanted."

Similarly, Telem party leader Moshe Ya'alon stressed that although Gantz may have good intentions, he has been tricked by a cynical criminal trying to evade justice.

Gantz said in response that "no one can preach to me about politics, and no one will take me away from my deep belief that Israel must come first."

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A woman is to work on the coronavirus frontline in the London hospital that successfully treated her brain tumour.

Kate Baker, 38, has left her sales job temporarily and will next week become a healthcare assistant at Queens hospital in Romford.

She was inspired by the care she received at Queens for a benign brain tumour in December 2016. She had already become a hospital volunteer but wanted to go further and help deliver care to patients on wards.

Ms Baker, from Colchester, who has a five-year-old son, Max, responded to a recruitment campaign by Barking, Havering and Redbridge University Hospitals NHS Trust seeking temporary staff to help care for patients during the pandemic.

The trust, which runs Queens and sister hospital King George in Ilford, has declared 135 Covid-19 deaths so far.
Health officials in Taiwan were seen sporting the pink protective masks at a press conference defying the gender stereotypes and appropriation during the coronavirus pandemic. They wore the masks in response to an issue raised by a reporter in a press conference held on Sunday saying that the boys were mocked and teased for wearing pink coloured face masks at schools by the classmates. As a result of which, they refused to take precautions, thereby, many were exposed to the disease, the reporter said.

Led by Health Minister Chen Shih-chung, Taiwan's Epidemic Command Centre dismantled the gender norms and urged men to wear their masks irrespective of the colour. "It's fine for a man to wear pink," Chen was quoted as saying in the press conference. Pink is for everyone and no colour is exclusive to girls or boys, Gender Equality lies at the heart of Taiwan values, Ministry of foreign affairs, ROC, Taiwan quoted Chen on Twitter.

Read: Taiwan Announces $35 Bn COVID-19 Stimulus Package, Says Will Donate 10 Mn Masks

Read: Coronavirus Relief Checks Wont Have To Be Repaid, Feds Say

Taiwan recorded six deaths

Meanwhile, MP Wang Ting-yu wrote on his official handle on twitter, In response to parents' concern that their sons are afraid to wear pink face masks to school, officials from Taiwan's Epidemic Command Centre led by Health Minister Chen Shih-chung today showed up at daily presser wearing pink face masks to challenge gender norms. Releasing a caricature to shatter gender roles, the ministry wrote, It is your mask when it protects you. No matter the colour, as translated from Mandarin Chinese language on Twitter.

Having limited the COVID-19 spread, Taiwan has recorded six deaths despite the island's proximity and ties with China. The country has 393 confirmed cases, as it successfully planked the curve and in recent weeks lifted the movement restrictions, according to media reports. Taiwan had earlier accused the United Nations health agency of neglecting its suggestions in the preliminary stage of COVID-19 outbreak. WHO chief Tedros, however, accused Taiwan of racial slurs against him in an unusual Taiwan-China spat.

Read: COVID-19: Taiwan Makes Masks Mandatory On Rail, Inter-city Buses Amid Tomb Festival

Read: Taiwan Blames Trolls From China For Issuing Fake Apology To WHO Chief
USS Roosevelt Arrives in 6th Fleet

Navy News Service

Story Number: NNS200414-02

Release Date: 4/14/2020 8:20:00 AM

From U.S. Naval Forces Europe-Africa/U.S. 6th Fleet Public Affairs

NAPLES, Italy (NNS) -- Arleigh Burke-class guided-missile destroyer USS Roosevelt (DDG 80) is conducting operations in U.S. 6th Fleet in support of maritime security operations.

Roosevelt, named after the 32nd President Franklin D. Roosevelt and his wife Eleanor, is the first Flight IIA Forward Deployed Naval Forces-Europe (FDNF-E) destroyer and, following a regional patrol, will complete her homeport shift to Rota, Spain.

"Roosevelt is trained and ready to execute the FDNF-E mission set and shift homeports to Rota," said Cmdr. Matthew Molmer, Roosevelt's commanding officer. "Our professional crew will continue the legacy of ships assigned to 6th Fleet."

Helicopter Maritime Strike Squadron (HSM 48) Det 7 'Mayport Mules' embarked on Roosevelt, which is the first FDNF-E destroyer capable of deploying with organic Lamps MK III MH-60 helicopters.

Roosevelt will replace USS Carney (DDG 64) in the first of several scheduled homeport shifts to occur in support of the U.S. Navy's long-range plan to gradually rotate the four Rota-based destroyers.

"The arrival of Roosevelt is a tangible demonstration of our continued commitment to operate forward in support of our national security interests," said Vice Adm. Lisa Franchetti, commander, U.S. 6th Fleet. "Our forward deployed destroyers out of Rota, Spain conduct the full range of maritime operations and provide unwavering support to our allies and partners across the region."

Prior to transiting the Atlantic, Roosevelt took a variety of coronavirus-related precautions to ensure the crew arrived in the European theater safe and healthy.

With a newly configured baseline 9 Aegis weapon system, Roosevelt brings the U.S. Navy's top-of-the-line capabilities to the U.S. European Phased Adaptive Approach and NATO's robust integrated air missile defense (IAMD) architecture. Roosevelt will support these missions, while patrolling the waters surrounding Europe and Africa, ensuring freedom of navigation in critical waterways.

Roosevelt will seamlessly integrate into the U.S. 6th Fleet mission, as the ship and crew are already familiar with our regional partners and allies. In 2019, Roosevelt participated in Exercise Formidable Shield, conducting an SM-3 engagement with a simulated ballistic missile target, while concurrently engaging 'Firejet' test targets with SM-2 missiles.

Last June, the ship also visited Chebourg, France to commemorate the 75th Anniversary of the D-Day landings in Normandy. The success of D-Day demonstrated the impact a strong unified alliance can have; Roosevelt is forward deployed to reinforce that strong alliance, supporting maritime security and stability.

CTF 65 and DESRON 60, headquartered in Rota, Spain, oversee the forward-deployed ships in U.S. 6th Fleet's area of operation in support of regional allies and partners, as well as U.S. national security interests in Europe and Africa.



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T he Duke and Duchess of Sussex have arranged for money generated from their royal wedding broadcast to be used to help feed children during the coronavirus pandemic.

Harry and Meghan asked for 90,000  the excess profits from the BBCs broadcast  to be given to the charity Feeding Britain.

A spokesman for the couple said they had been moved to hear of the organisations work during the coronavirus crisis.

Harry and Meghan, who have now quit as working royals and are living in the US, phoned the Archbishop of Canterbury, who conducted their marriage ceremony in 2018 and who is president of Feeding Britain, to discuss the donation to the charitys countrywide projects.

Harry and Meghan are now living in the US / REUTERS

They became aware of Feeding Britain after paying a royal visit to the Feeding Birkenhead community supermarket in Merseyside in January last year, when Meghan was pregnant.

The duke and duchess were able to speak to the archbishop recently, and were moved to hear all about the work Feeding Britain was doing to support people during Covid-19, a spokesman for the Sussexes said.

They have particularly fond memories of their visit to the citizens supermarket in Birkenhead, especially the generosity and compassion of everyone working there to help others.

They are delighted to be able to ensure this money is donated to such a great cause.

The couple felt it was particularly fitting to be able to support the archbishops charity after he played such an important part in their lives and their wedding day.

The charity works to eliminate hunger in the UK / Getty Images

Andrew Forsey, national director of Feeding Britain, said: We are incredibly grateful for such generous support which, thank God, will sustain our emergency response to coronavirus until the schools return.

During that time, there are many tens of thousands of children who we are helping to supply with breakfast, lunch and dinner every day.

Were just so grateful that the duke and duchess have contributed to that programme.

The BBC covered most of the costs of the broadcast / AFP via Getty Images

The BBC covered most of the costs of the wedding broadcast, and used money raised from transmission rights and subsequent sales.

It was agreed at the time of the wedding that if there was any excess, a percentage of the profits would go to a charity nominated by Harry and Meghan.

The independent charity Feeding Britain works to eliminate hunger and its root causes from the UK.
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Linkedin Apriadi Gunawan (The Jakarta Post) Medan, North Sumatra  Wed, April 15, 2020 16:56 636 fc6853813033f564188675f8bd213fb1 1 National rape,Indonesia,crime,North-Sumatra,perkosaan,Sumatra-Utara Free

The Dairi Police in North Sumatra have granted a 75-year-old man who allegedly raped and impregnated a junior high school student bail.

The alleged rapist, identified only as MM, was removed from his detention cell at the Dairi Police headquarters and picked up by his family on Monday.

Dairi Police spokesperson First Insp. Donni Saleh stated that MM was granted the temporary release following a request from his family. According to Donni, the family's reasoning for the bail request was because of his deteriorating health and effort to make peace with the victim and her family.

We had to grant their request because the suspect will be a burden to the investigators considering his decreasing health condition, Donni said, adding that police investigators initially attempted admitting him to a hospital and a detention center in Dairi regency.

Read also: North Sumatra prepares 1,000 isolation rooms to handle COVID-19 patients

However, the detention center did not accept the man for indefinite detention due to COVID-19 concerns, while the hospital rejected him due to overcrowded conditions.

Donni gave assurances that the police would proceed with his case despite the release.

We will send the suspects file to the prosecutors soon, Donni said.

The chairman of Indonesian Women Care in Dairi, Delphi Masdiana, deplored the polices decision to grant MM bail since his case was categorized as an extraordinary crime.

We have objections with this decision since its an extraordinary crime. The police granted the suspension request too easily, Delphi said. (dpk)
The Justice Department on Tuesday intervened in a federal lawsuit brought by a Greenville, Mississippi, church over the city's efforts to shut down drive-in religious services, telling a judge that local officials had possibly violated the constitution in their bid to stem the spread of coronavirus.

In a hedged, 14-page legal statement of interest, the Justice Department asserted that the circumstances described by Temple Baptist Church "suggest that the city singled out churches for distinctive treatment," and that officials should allow Temple Baptist to proceed with drive-in services.

The department's filing stressed that state officials were within their rights to impose temporary restrictions - including on constitutional rights - on residents during an emergency, and that the "best path to swiftly ending COVID-19's profound disruptions to our national life and resuming the normal economic life of our country" was to follow state and federal guidance.

But the Justice Department also asserted there was no blanket "pandemic exception" to the Constitution, and seemed to take Temple Baptist's side as it urged the judge to carefully consider whether the city's actions were legal.

"The facts alleged in the complaint strongly suggest that the city's actions target religious conduct," the Justice Department wrote. "If proven, these facts establish a free exercise violation unless the city demonstrates that its actions are neutral and apply generally to nonreligious and religious institutions or satisfies the demanding strict scrutiny standard."

The filing offers a window into how the Justice Department is thinking about the thorny legal considerations surrounding coronavirus-related restrictions on constitutional rights - though it provides no clear-cut answer.

"Courts reviewing a challenge to a measure responding to the 'society-threatening epidemic' of COVID-19 should be vigilant to protect against clear invasions of constitutional rights while ensuring they do 'not second-guess the wisdom or efficacy of the measures' enacted by the democratic branches of government, on the advice of public health experts," the Justice Department wrote.

As the department filed its statement of interest in the Temple Baptist case, Attorney General William Barr issued a lengthy statement both urging people to follow state and local social distancing orders, while also noting there are limits to such directives.

"For example, if a government allows movie theaters, restaurants, concert halls, and other comparable places of assembly to remain open and unrestricted, it may not order houses of worship to close, limit their congregation size, or otherwise impede religious gatherings," Barr said. "Religious institutions must not be singled out for special burdens."

Temple Baptist and its pastor, Arthur Scott, had filed the suit last week with the help of the Alliance Defending Freedom advocacy organization. They alleged that Greenville had sent police officers to issue $500 tickets to those who had come to the church's parking lot in their cars earlier this month to listen to a service broadcast on FM radio, with their windows up.

"This was both unnecessary and unconstitutional," the church wrote in its request for a federal judge to issue a restraining order blocking the city from enforcing the restrictions.

Alliance Defending Freedom Senior Counsel Ryan Tucker said Tuesday he appreciated the Justice Department's support.

"In Greenville, you can be in your car with the windows rolled down at a drive-in restaurant, but you can't be in your car with the windows rolled up at a drive-in church service," he said.

At a news conference Monday, before the Justice Department's statement, Greenville Mayor Erick Simmons called allegations that he was unlawfully targeting churches "ridiculous." He said when the city issued tickets at Temple Baptist earlier this month, it did so only to those people who refused to leave voluntarily, and it would not require anyone to pay the fines.

"People are dying," Simmons said.

Barr had previously expressed some wariness with restrictions states have imposed to stem the spread of coronavirus. In an interview with Fox News last week, he called some of the measures "draconian," and said they should be revisited when federal guidance on the topic expires at the end of the month.

Barr said in the interview that the Justice Department already had "jawboned" some local governments that had imposed restrictions that applied to churches but not others, and he was watching the matter closely.

"I think religious liberty is the first liberty," Barr said. "It is the foundation of our republic, and a free society depends upon a vibrant religious life among the people. So any time that's encroached upon by the government I'm very, very concerned."

Temple Baptist argued in the lawsuit that Greenville aimed restrictions directly at churches - even though they were specifically exempted from the state's stay-at-home order as an essential businesses. The church said it assiduously followed CDC guidelines in organizing the drive-in services - requiring all attendees to stay in their vehicles and limited its production team to less than 10 people. It noted that Greenville residents were still allowed to use drive-in restaurants.

While many Christians hunkered down at home for Easter Sunday - watching virtual services - there were some signs of frustration with states' stay-at-home orders and their effect on churches. A pastor in Louisiana, for example, defied the state's ban on gatherings larger than 50 people, holding a service that a local police chief said drew more than 300.

There is some precedent for courts rejecting government-imposed coronavirus related restrictions on a church. A federal judge in Louisville recently blocked that city's mayor from forbidding drive-in church services, writing that the decision to do so was "stunning" and "unconstitutional."

The Kansas Supreme Court, however, struck down a Republican-led effort to allow the continuation of in-person services, despite the governor's ban on them.
Technavio has been monitoring the two-wheeler tire market and it is poised to grow by USD 4.53 billion during 2019-2023, progressing at a CAGR of almost 10% 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.

This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20200415005365/en/

Technavio has announced the latest market research report titled Global Two-wheeler Tire Market 2019-2023 (Graphic: Business Wire)

Technavio suggests three forecast scenarios (optimistic, probable, and pessimistic) considering the impact of COVID-19. Please Request Latest Free Sample Report on COVID-19 Impact

The market is fragmented, and the degree of fragmentation will accelerate during the forecast period. Bridgestone Corporation,Continental AG, JK TYRE INDUSTRIES LTD, MRF, TVS SRICHAKRA LIMITED, and ZC-RUBBER are some of the major market participants. The demand for quality tires 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 quality tires has been instrumental in driving the growth of the market.

Two-wheeler Tire Market 2019-2023: Segmentation

Two-wheeler Tire Market is segmented as below:

Application Motorcycles Scooters

Geographic Landscape APAC Europe The Middle East and Africa North America South America



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=IRTNTR31139

Two-wheeler Tire 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 two-wheeler tire market report covers the following areas:

Two-wheeler Tire Market Size

Two-wheeler Tire Market Trends

Two-wheeler Tire Market Industry Analysis

This study identifies growing demand for high-performance tires as one of the prime reasons driving the two-wheeler tire market growth during the next few years.

Two-wheeler Tire Market 2019-2023: Vendor Analysis

We provide a detailed analysis of vendors operating in the two-wheeler tire market, including some of the vendors such as Bridgestone Corporation, Continental AG, JK TYRE INDUSTRIES LTD, MRF, TVS SRICHAKRA LIMITED, and ZC-RUBBER. Backed with competitive intelligence and benchmarking, our research reports on the two-wheeler tire market are designed to provide entry support, customer profile and M&As as well as go-to-market strategy support.

Register for a free trial today and gain instant access to 17,000+ market research reports.

Technavio's SUBSCRIPTION platform

Two-wheeler Tire Market 2019-2023: Key Highlights

CAGR of the market during the forecast period 2019-2023

Detailed information on factors that will assist two-wheeler tire market growth during the next five years

Estimation of the two-wheeler tire market size and its contribution to the parent market

Predictions on upcoming trends and changes in consumer behavior

The growth of the two-wheeler tire market

Analysis of the market's competitive landscape and detailed information on vendors

Comprehensive details of factors that will challenge the growth of two-wheeler tire market vendors

Table Of Contents:

PART 01: EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

PART 02: SCOPE OF THE REPORT

2.1 Preface

2.2 Preface

2.3 Currency conversion rates for US$

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

Motorcycles Market size and forecast 2018-2023

Scooters Market size and forecast 2018-2023

Market opportunity by application

PART 07: CUSTOMER LANDSCAPE

PART 08: GEOGRAPHIC LANDSCAPE

Geographic segmentation

Geographic comparison

APAC Market size and forecast 2018-2023

South America Market size and forecast 2018-2023

North America Market size and forecast 2018-2023

Europe Market size and forecast 2018-2023

Middle East and Africa 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

Use of RFID technology in two-wheeler tires

Growing demand for high-performance tires

Adoption of environment-friendly tire manufacturing processes

PART 12: VENDOR LANDSCAPE

Overview

Landscape disruption

Competitive scenario

PART 13: VENDOR ANALYSIS

Vendors covered

Vendor classification

Market positioning of vendors

Bridgestone Corporation

Continental AG

JK TYRE INDUSTRIES LTD

MRF

TVS SRICHAKRA LIMITED

ZC-RUBBER

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/20200415005365/en/

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Technavio Research

Jesse Maida

Media Marketing Executive

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Email: media@technavio.com

Website: www.technavio.com/
PHOENIX, April 15, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- Prevalent, Inc., the company that transforms how you manage third-party risk, today announced Prevalent TPRM Jump Start, a new solution to help risk teams of any size accelerate their third-party risk management programs with a focus on providing insights and value in 30 days or less. As supply chain security and business resilience have become more important amid COVID-19, companies must ensure that their vendors are secure and can withstand the pressures of today's economic environment.

Prevalent TPRM Jump Start includes two solutions offered as a SaaS service  Discover and Assess  with fixed-price packages of specific capabilities to help organizations quickly automate the processes necessary to assess supply chain resilience.

Prevalent TPRM Jump Start Discover enables organizations to centrally manage vendors and quickly determine inherent risk to optimize planning, resource allocation and remediation decision-making. With unlimited vendors, unlimited users, and unlimited profiling and tiering, Jump Start Discover provides enterprise flexibility at scale and is the ideal solution for organizations looking to plan, grow, or optimize their third-party risk management programs.





enables organizations to centrally manage vendors and quickly determine inherent risk to optimize planning, resource allocation and remediation decision-making. With unlimited vendors, unlimited users, and unlimited profiling and tiering, Jump Start Discover provides enterprise flexibility at scale and is the ideal solution for organizations looking to plan, grow, or optimize their third-party risk management programs. Prevalent TPRM Jump Start Assess enables organizations to embrace a centralized, automated platform to discover and quantify the residual risk of their top vendors in 30 days or less. Organizations can automate and optimize their third-party risk activities using a single, dynamic questionnaire that is mapped to multiple security and compliance frameworks such as ISO, NIST, CMMC, PCI, HIPAA, GDPR, CCPA, NYDFS, CAIQ and more or leverage a custom survey creation wizard to meet unique requirements. With unlimited users and powerful assessment capabilities, Jump Start Assess gives organizations the ability to eliminate spreadsheets and manual processes. This solution is ideal for gaining quick results and for those who have to adhere to multiple security, compliance and privacy requirements.

"Today's unprecedented economic landscape has brought broken supply chains to the forefront. Companies can no longer endanger their own business by not having the right processes in place to manage risk," said Brenda Ferraro, vice president of third-party risk at Prevalent, Inc. "We developed this solution to enable companies  regardless of size or maturity  to accelerate time to value."

Prevalent TPRM Jump Start delivers:

Automated onboarding and central management of an unlimited number of vendors

Inherent risk scoring for an unlimited number of vendors

Unlimited number of users to access the SaaS service for management, reporting or auditing

Standardized assessments, risk scoring and remediation guidance to reduce residual risk

Built-in reporting against common compliance and security frameworks

Programmatic best practices processes to build a foundation for a more mature TPRM program

To learn more about the Prevalent TPRM Jump Start Program, or watch a brief demo video, please visit https://www.prevalent.net/products/tprm-jump-start/

About Prevalent

Prevalent helps enterprises manage risk in third-party business relationships. The company delivers the industry's only purpose-built, unified platform that integrates a powerful combination of automated assessments, continuous monitoring, and evidence sharing for collaboration between enterprises and vendors. No other product on the market combines all three components, providing the best solution for a highly functioning, effective third-party risk program. To learn more, please visit www.prevalent.net.

Media Contact

Angelique Faul, 513-633-0897, [email protected]

SOURCE Prevalent, Inc.

Related Links

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Chinese Doctor Says She is Safe And Well Amid Concern She Was Detained

2020-04-14 -- Whistleblowing doctor Ai Fen has confirmed she is still at work at her hospital in the central Chinese city of Wuhan after concerns over her whereabouts and personal safety.

The Paris-based press freedom group Reporters Without Borders (RSF) on Monday called on the ruling Chinese Communist Party to "urgently clarify" Ai's status, saying she had been unreachable for the past two weeks.

It said it hoped that a video on her Weibo account suggesting she was at liberty wasn't "staged by the Chinese regime."

Ai told RFA on Tuesday that it was she who had been sending out the posts from her Weibo account, and that she hadn't been detained, just working.

"It was I who sent out the posts on Weibo," she said. "I never used to use it in the past because I thought it was useless, and I only started using it after this thing happened because there were a lot of people concerned about me."

"Some of the employees of Weibo behind the scenes kept saying I should post a bit more, but I told them I'd only be able to do it from time to time," Ai said.

"I'd like to thank everyone for their concern," she said. "I'm doing pretty well, just going to work every day. Everything is fine."

"I'd like to say ... that all I ever wanted was to just get on with being a doctor in peace: thank you for your understanding," Ai said.

'Under pressure'

However, a source familiar with the situation said that Ai had come under considerable political pressure behind the scenes, and wasn't in a position to talk about it.

"She probably is under pressure but you shouldn't call her; call someone else,OK?" the source said. "Sorry about that -- really sorry."

An employee who answered the phone at the Wuhan Central Hospital ER, of which Ai is director, declined to comment when contacted by RFA on Tuesday.

"I don't think she's here right now, but I don't know. Maybe you should just call her directly?" the employee said.

Another hospital employee also declined to comment.

"It's not convenient for me to answer your questions," the employee said, using a phrase often used to indicate pressure from the authorities. "You should ask somebody else."

"Either that or contact our propaganda department ... I'm busy now, OK, so would you mind hanging up now?"

Repeated calls to the Wuhan municipal health commission rang unanswered during office hours on Tuesday.

RSF earlier had cast doubt on the authenticity of Ai's Weibo posts, saying that Chinese police have often forced detainees to reveal their social media passwords, then made posts in their name.

Ai was among a group of fellow doctors who first sounded the alarm on Dec. 30 about the emergence of a mystery virus in Wuhan that seemed similar to SARS.

The authorities detained and questioned eight of the doctors on Jan. 3, including Li Wenliang, who later died of the virus, accusing them of "rumor-mongering."

Allowing independent voices 'would be suicide for them'

Ai was earlier given a stern reprimand after sending information about the early stages of the outbreak to a group of doctors, she wrote in a now-deleted essay published in China's People (Renwu) magazine.

Titled "The one who supplied the whistle," the article described how Ai had been silenced by her bosses after she took a photo of a patient's test results and circled the words "SARS coronavirus" in red. She then alerted colleagues to several cases of the virus.

Dissident artist Ai Weiwei told an international human rights conference on Tuesday that allowing any kind of dissent was anathema to the ruling Chinese Communist Party.

"It would be suicide for them to allow independent thought or critical voices in China," he said.

"A lot of people in the international community say that we need China, but China also needs the rest of the world," he said. "[China's leaders] are hoping that things will go back to the way they were before [the pandemic]."

"I think that is pure propaganda, because if that were to happen, then another crisis would just occur very soon," Ai Weiwei said.

China ranked 177th out of 180 countries in RSF's 2019 World Press Freedom Index.

Reported by Wong Siu-san and Sing Man for RFA's Cantonese Service, and by Zheng Chongsheng for the Mandarin Service. Translated and edited by Luisetta Mudie.

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 April 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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Human health and saving lives are priorities for governments around the world as they put in measures to combat the coronavirus. These are demanding times for medical staff on the front line, and for leading researchers as they look for short and long term measures of fighting infection in populations.

The issue of antibiotic resistance has emerged as an important issue when it comes to the possibility of treating diseases associated to coronavirus and it is important that this debate is being raised at an international level, says Genos CEO Kristin Malons.

There is a global awareness that we need to reduce the reliance on antibiotics in human health. This, as we know, has implications for livestock production  for meat and milk produced for the human food chain.

Unique among cattle breeding programs, the Norwegian Red scheme run by Geno has focused on high health status traits since the mid-1970s. We have deliberately chosen bulls and cows within our breeding program that provide the healthiest offspring and daughters with good fertility, adds Ms Malons.

While the Norwegian Red, that is widely used in cross breeding dairy programs across the world, has kept pace with production improvements, our emphasis on a wider range of traits compared with many other dairy breeding programs, means that health traits are well ahead of others and make a valuable contribution to health and welfare of many dairy herds in commercial milk and meat production.

High health status cattle have far less reliance on medications including antibiotic use. Genos emphasis on health and fertility in breeding has been the right strategic move.

Among international scientists, the Norwegian Red breeding program is considered a welfare and environmentally friendly system. This green recognition reflects our four or so decades of breeding. We have always considered that the combination of healthy, fertile and productive livestock is important for farmers and their business, and for the production of safe and high quality food for consumers.

Healthy animals that do not need the degree of veterinary care and medication required by those more pre-disposed to, for example, fertility issues or udder infections.

Norways low antibiotic use

Norways drive to adopt responsible use of antibiotics in livestock and humans has been long term. The Norwegian Government's national strategy on antibiotic resistance stated that antibiotic use in food-producing animals should be further reduced by 10% from 2013 to 2020.

In 2000 the countrys Veterinary Institute set up the NORM-VET monitoring program for antimicrobial resistance in the veterinary and food production sectors in 2000. Its 2018 report showed a 17% decline in antibiotic consumption in livestock production from 2013 to 2018.

The goal of reducing antibiotic use in agriculture has led to a change in treatment strategies, better preventive health work and increased emphasis on health in breeding, adds Ms Malons.

The progress we have seen in breeding for improved health traits is an important driver in this positive development. Udder health has been included in the Norwegian Red breeding goals since 1978, which has contributed to a considerable decline in veterinary treatments and antibiotic use for more than three decades.
$583M to help transit agencies

SEATTLE  The Puget Sound Regional Council's board on Thursday will hold an emergency meeting to distribute $538 million in CARES Act funding to the region's transit agencies. This funding will help mitigate impacts from the COVID-19 crisis.

The funds are intended for operating costs, not for capital improvements.

Here is where some of the larger chunks of money are expected to go:

 $243.7 million to King County.

 $166.3 million to Sound Transit.

 $39.2 million to Washington State Ferries.

 $33 million to Community Transit.

 $20.7 million to Pierce Transit.




If the Trump administration must go forward with bailouts, extracting ownership stakes so taxpayers might benefit from the economic recovery would make these unsavory transactions fairer. But wouldnt you know it, Boeing and the airlines hate that idea. Theyd much rather receive the money as a blank check, thank you very much.

Boeing, a government defense contractor and one of two global airplane manufacturers, is the countrys largest exporter. Air travel is critical to the economy. No question, the aviation industry is important. But if high status is an argument for government intervention, it is also a reason why these companies should be able to manage COVID-19 headwinds with their own bank loans and other sources of capital. Were remembering back to the dark days of the 2008 financial crisis, when Warren Buffett stepped in to protect Goldman Sachs by investing $5 billion. Both sides benefited. That type of private transaction is available to Boeing, United and the others, assuming they are healthy enough to survive. If they arent, why should taxpayers save them?
Six youths between 12 and 17 years old were arrested Tuesday after a Gateway Transit Center security guard was attacked in Northeast Portland, police say.

Portland police said the private security officer asked two of the youths to stop smoking on the TriMet platform. An altercation ensued, and the security officer was pushed to the ground, punched and spat on several times by various youths, according to police.

A bystander stepped in and was also spat on, police said. Police officers arrived and apprehended the primary aggressors, authorities said. Several of the involved youths fled.

The security officer wasnt seriously hurt.

Five boys between 12 and 17 were booked into a juvenile detention center on various charges. A 14-year-old girl was booked on a previous warrant, according to police.

Records indicate two of the boys booked into the detention center had been reported missing prior to their arrests, police said.

A seventh child was detained and released to his parents. He had been missing, as well.

The Oregonian/OregonLive generally doesnt identify juveniles accused of crimes unless theyre tried as adults or face Measure 11 charges.

Police urge anyone who has information to contact Sgt. Jessy Brown at 503-962-7566 or jessy.brown@portlandoregon.gov.

-- Jim Ryan; jryan@oregonian.com; 503-221-8005; @Jimryan015

Subscribe to Oregonian/OregonLive newsletters and podcasts for the latest news and top stories.
Banks are set to make more than 600 million in extra interest paid by cash-strapped homeowners taking mortgage holidays, Money Mail can reveal.

Campaigners say the vast profit lenders will make from the crisis is 'disgraceful' and are demanding they scrap additional interest charges.

The breaks are seen as a lifeline for borrowers facing financial ruin due to the coronavirus crisis and 1.24 million have been approved, according to UK Finance. But most homeowners will end up facing heftier interest payments as a result  around 500 on a typical mortgage.

Holiday rush: Campaigners say the vast profit lenders will make from the coronavirus crisis is 'disgraceful' and are demanding they scrap additional interest charges

That is despite banks being able to borrow at record low rates and the billions of taxpayer cash that was used to bail them out in the last financial crisis.

Baroness Altmann, former pensions minister, says: 'It's an outrage that people are being led to believe that banks are somehow being kind to them when actually what they're doing is making more money from them. What we need is an interest holiday that doesn't rack up extra costs in the long run and actually gives something back.'

Homeowners can ask their bank to freeze their mortgage payments for three months, but face paying out more overall because interest accrues.

When the break ends, borrowers can choose to pay back the interest or add it to their loan balance. The latter option will cause monthly repayments to rise for the rest of the term.

On an average 132,128 mortgage at 2.37 per cent over 17 years, the total repayment is 160,656. A three-month mortgage holiday will push the total up to 161,164, an increase of 508, says AJ Bell.

Yesterday, UK Finance confirmed 1.24 million mortgage holidays have already been approved by lenders, meaning one in nine mortgages in the UK is now subject to a payment holiday.

It means lenders currently stand to make at least 630 million in extra interest, but given the number of approvals more than tripled in the two weeks between March 25 and April 8, with around 61,000 being granted each day, that total is likely to rise further.

Outraged: Former pensions minister Baroness Altmann

The majority of approved holidays are thought to be for the full three months.

The Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) has encouraged banks to be flexible when offering mortgage holidays and has said lenders can reduce or waive extra interest charges for those in need.

But banks face pressure to do more to help those affected by the pandemic after receiving billions in taxpayer cash during the financial crisis in 2008.

Dominik Lipnicki, of Your Mortgage Decisions, says: 'It's disgraceful that banks would want to profit from the pandemic. People will remember how we all had to suffer as a result of having to bail them out.

'It's only fair that they do something for the public when we need them.

'We are talking to clients all the time who have lost their income and this is a real lifeline, but to saddle them with more interest at the end of all this is not in the spirit of the payment holiday.

'Normally interest is paid back later and that's fine because it's a client choice, but right now it is not a choice. This is a real kick in the teeth for borrowers.'

The FCA has already said it expects banks to introduce 500 interest-free overdrafts and credit payment breaks for three months.

Laura Suter, personal finance analyst at AJ Bell, says that while banks could waive the additional interest on mortgage holidays in the same way they have done on overdrafts, the size of mortgage borrowing means it would be a larger sum to waive.

She warns borrowers not to 'rush into taking a mortgage holiday without working out the real cost'.

Struggling homeowners could extend the term of their mortgage, which would reduce monthly repayments.

Other options include switching to an interest-only loan, which would cut your monthly costs but help you to keep on top of interest repayments.

Sarah Coles, of Hargreaves Lansdown, says banks could be reluctant to waive extra interest on mortgage holidays because they are having to borrow to finance the breaks.

She adds that homeowners can avoid paying back more on mortgage holidays by switching to cheaper rates.

Most homeowners who take out a mortgage holiday will end up facing heftier interest payments as a result  around 500 on a typical mortgage

Mark Harris, chief executive of mortgage broker SPF Private Clients, says: 'Lenders should be applauded for enacting government policy within a relatively short period of time, particularly as it has been a big draw on their resources.'

UK Finance chief executive Stephen Jones says: 'Mortgage lenders have been working tirelessly to help homeowners get through this challenging period.

'The industry has pulled out all the stops in recent weeks to give an unprecedented number of customers a payment holiday, and we stand ready to help more over the coming months.'

A spokesman adds: 'Customers will continue to be charged interest during the payment holiday unless their lender has told them otherwise.

'Before their payment holiday period comes to an end, customers will be given information on the cost of the deferred payments and interest accrued, which will then typically be spread across the remaining term of their mortgage.

'Lenders will also offer alternative arrangements for customers where necessary to ensure repayments are affordable, including tailored support for any borrowers in arrears.'

An FCA spokesman says its guidance on mortgage holidays 'does not prevent firms from providing more favourable forms of assistance to the customer, such as reducing or waiving interest, depending on the circumstances'.

m.dilworth@dailymail.co.uk
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Linkedin Adrian Wail Akhlas (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Wed, April 15, 2020 14:36 636 fc6853813033f564188675f8bd20b026 1 Business Trade,exports,imports,BPS,data,march,trade-surplus,COVID-19,coronavirus Free

Indonesia booked a US$743 million trade surplus in March as export and import activities contracted slightly amid the COVID-19 pandemic, Statistics Indonesia (BPS) has announced.

Southeast Asias largest economy recorded $14.09 billion in exports in March, a 0.2 percent decrease year-on-year (yoy), while total imports fell 0.75 percent yoy to $13.35 billion driven by decreased imports of capital goods.

This figure is encouraging amid the uncertain global situation, BPS chairman Suhariyanto said at a media briefing on Wednesday.

Indonesia's manufacturing exports grew by 7.41 percent yoy to $11.12 billion, driven by a significant increase in the exports of machines and electric appliances, as well as of iron and steel. Agricultural exports rose 17.82 percent yoy to $320 million.

However, the countrys oil and gas exports declined by 40.91 percent yoy to $670 million as a result of falling oil prices, while exports of products of mining also fell by 16 percent yoy to $1.98 billion.

Imports of consumption goods rose 10.66 percent to $1.27 billion as a result of Indonesias recent, huge purchase of guns and ammunition. Imports of raw materials increased by 1.72 percent to $10.28 billion, while imports of capital goods shrank by 18 percent to $1.8 billion.

We must, however, be aware of the decline in capital goods and raw materials, which may have a huge impact on trade and investment, Suhariyanto added.

In the first quarter of the year, the country booked a total of $41.79 billion in exports, a 2.91 percent increase from last years figure, while imports were $39.17 billion from January to March, a 2.69 percent decrease from the same period last year.

Indonesia recorded a trade surplus of $2.62 billion during the first three months of the year, compared to a deficit of 62.8 million in the same period last year.

BPS recorded $2.98 billion in imports from China in March, an increase of $1 billion from Februarys figure, as Indonesias largest trading partner had started to recover from the COVID-19 pandemic.

Exports to China, meanwhile, were $1.98 billion, up by $7 million compared to the same period last year. This made for a trade deficit of $1 billion with China in March, lower than the $1.24 billion deficit in March of last year.

The World Trade Organization (WTO) projected that global trade would shrink by between 13 and 32 percent as the economic impact of the health crisis remained uncertain.

The WTO forecasted a rebound in the 2021 global goods trade of between 21 and 24 percent, depending largely on the duration of the outbreak and the effectiveness of policy responses.
Joe Kaeser, president and CEO Siemens AG

Under the auspices of the community-serving nonprofit organisation Siemens Caring Hands e.V. (Caring Hands), this aid fund is to provide support, without red tape, to relief organisations and medical facilities as well as to individuals impacted by the COVID-19 crisis worldwide.

All Siemens AG employees worldwide can now make monetary donations to Caring Hands by specifying COVID-19 as the purpose of the gift. Siemens AG will match every euro donated, meaning the company will donate the same amount to Caring Hands. In accordance with its articles of association, the charity itself will then channel the funds to those who need them most.

Siemens is fundamentally committed to making a significant effort to serve society.

Joe Kaeser, president and CEO of Siemens AG, said: Both medically and socially, COVID-19 is a challenge of a kind that the world as a whole has never seen before in peacetime. Now, acting responsibly is more important than ever  for our companys future, for the health and economic security of our workforce and business partners, but also for the cohesion of societies around the world.

Many people have helped make us the strong, successful company we are today. And now we want to help those who are doing excellent work, day in and day out, in serving the sick and needy during this time of crisis. Thats why Im calling on our management and employees worldwide to donate generously."

Every euro counts. I want to start things off by personally contributing 1 million ($1.1 million), Kaeser noted.

As an alternative or as a supplement, the Managing Board and senior management will also have the option of voluntarily waiving vacation time. Siemens will then donate a corresponding amount to Caring Hands by reversing accruals for this purpose.

As a nonprofit organisation, Caring Hands will use the donations to support co-ordinated projects and aid programmes and to buy urgently needed products. The goal is to deliver aid rapidly to people affected by the coronavirus pandemic worldwide. The Board of Caring Hands will manage the distribution of the aid fund.

Siemens Caring Hands e.V. was founded at the initiative of Siemens AG in 2001. At the time, Siemens AG management and employees wanted to provide direct, uncomplicated assistance to victims of the September 11 attacks. Caring Hands also reacted in 2004 to the large-scale tsunami in Asia and in 2013 to the historic flood of the Elbe River in Germany.

The charity has also provided assistance in response to several other natural disasters. Siemens is fundamentally committed to making a significant effort to serve society. The company spends some 80 million ($87.5 million) for donations and charitable sponsoring each year.
President Trump has falsely claimed that "when somebody is the president of the United States" their "authority is total."

Reuters

President Trump claimed on Monday that "when somebody is the president of the United States" their "authority is total."

He made the statement when a reporter asked how he would compel governors to reopen their states' economies during the coronavirus pandemic.

"The federal government has absolute power," Trump added. "As to whether I'll use that power, we'll see."

The president's claims are untrue. The 10th Amendment of the Constitution delegates "police powers" to states to regulate behavior during public-health crises.

This isn't the first time Trump has claimed the presidency gives him unilateral authority. He previously said he has the "absolute right" to pardon whomever he wants and that he has "absolute immunity" from being investigated while in office.

Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

President Donald Trump claimed on Monday that "when somebody is the president of the United States" their "authority is total."

Fact check: That is untrue, according to the US Constitution.

Trump made the statement during Monday's daily coronavirus task-force briefing.

When a reporter asked him how he would compel governors to reopen their states' economies during the outbreak, Trump responded: "When somebody is the president of the United States, the authority is total. And that's the way it's got to be."

Earlier Monday, the governors of California, Washington, and Oregon said they were working together on a West Coast plan to safely reopen those states, and New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo unveiled a multistate coalition to coordinate on ways to reopen the region's economy as the spread of the virus becomes more manageable.

The move came as Trump and many of his top administration officials have been adamant about rolling back social-distancing measures to fire up the economy as the nation faces mounting unemployment and economic distress.

Story continues

Cuomo also made the announcement after Trump falsely suggested on Twitter that reopening the country "is the decision of the President."

Fact check: The decision is up to individual states.

CNN's Kaitlan Collins pressed Trump during Monday's briefing on his baseless claim that his "authority is total" as president, saying: "That is not true. Who told you that?"

"Yeah, so you know what we're going to do?" Trump replied. "We are going to write up papers on this. It's not going to be necessary because the governors need us one way or the other, because ultimately it comes with the federal government."

Fact check: The 10th Amendment delegates "police powers" to the states to regulate behavior during public-health crises.

Still, Trump pressed on, saying: "The federal government has absolute power. As to whether I'll use that power, we'll see."

He added: "I'd rather have [the states] make decisions, but I have absolute right to make the decisions if I want to. The relationships we have with the states and governors is very good."

This isn't the first time Trump has claimed that he has unilateral authority as president. He has previously claimed he has the "absolute right" to pardon anyone he wants.

Trump's lawyers have also argued in legal proceedings that as president he has "absolute immunity" from criminal prosecution and any investigation, including probes initiated by Congress.

Read the original article on Business Insider
Two young Cork men on opposing sides of a feud who are accused of making Facebook death threats were both remanded in continuing custody today.

James McCarthy, 33, of bay 8, halting site, Spring Lane, Cork, and of 25 Liffey Park, Mayfield, Cork, was remanded in custody until April 29 by video link from prison at Cork District Court.

McCarthy was represented by solicitor, Thomas Coughlan. Prosecuting the case, Sergeant Gearoid Davis said they needed to seek directions from the Director of Public Prosecutions.

Cross-accused, Michael Stokes, 24, with an address at St. Anthonys Park, Knocknaheeny, Cork, consented through solicitor, Frank Buttimer, to a remand in custody for three weeks while directions were sought from the DPP.

Mr Buttimer added that Stokes had a bail application pending at the High Court.

Both defendants were refused bail when they were arrested last week and brought before Judge Olann Kelleher at Cork District Court.

It was alleged at that hearing that McCarthy made a video on his Facebook page in which he made a threat directed at Michael Stokes.

Stokes and McCarthy were both charged with making threats to kill or seriously injure each other on April 6.

Detective Garda John Gleeson said it was alleged that McCarthy said on the video:

I will get you. I will cut you from head to toe. I will cut you in pieces. I will cut you in bits.

Detective Garda Pat Barry said it was alleged that Michael Stokes, 24, posted videos on his Facebook page specifically targeting James McCarthy, in which he allegedly said: Ye got bate seven days a week and youll get bate seven days again.

Next time I see you, you are going underground.

Det. Garda Barry said there was an escalating feud between the families that had in recent weeks seen a pipe bomb thrown at a house and a gunshot fired at a house.
Few farmers brought their crop to mandis on the first day of mustard procurement in Bhiwani, Jind, Dadri and Mahendergarh districts on Wednesday.

Farmers union leader Balbir Singh Takhan, who visited Bhiwanis Behal Mandi, said, Many farmers failed to turn up as they did not receive the governments message asking them to bring their produce to the mandis.

A farmer, Ram Chander of Dadris Ranila village, said he had brought 40 quintals of mustard to the grain market but was still waiting to sell it. He, however, appreciated the government and arhtiyas efforts to procure grain amid the Covid-19 outbreak.

Hafed and marketing officials have assured us that they will start procurement process by tomorrow, Takhan said.

Sushil Kumar, a commission agent from Bhiwanis Behal, said, We refused to buy mustard as the government is not making us handling agent on paper.

Village heads purchase mustard at rural centres

After arthtiyas refused to purchase mustard at few rural purchase centres, Bhiwani administration authorised four village heads to buy the farmers produce.

When this HT correspondent visited Mitthi, Sidhanwa, Paju and Kurl villages, he found that the centres there lacked basic amenities. However, farmers and village heads had put their best efforts and initiated procurement process. The sarpanches claimed that they were facing issue of weak internet connection, but farmers were cooperating with them.

Amit Sangwan, a farmer from Bhiwanis Mitthi village, said he had brought 40 quintals of mustard to the mandi and local sarpanch procured his produce at 4,425.

Hariyawas sarpanch and Sidhanwa procurement centre in-charge Sunil Sheoran said, We bought mustard from 10 farmers in two shifts. We will put all our efforts to purchase farmers produce even with limited resources. The farmers covered their faces and maintained social distancing at mandi, he added.

Bhiwani DC Ajay Kumar said they had started the procurement process at 24 out of 32 centres.

50 farmers will be allowed to sell their crop at the bigger grain markets and 10 at the rural centres. There were few concerns of commission agents in Behal, Digawa and Loharu grain markets, which were later resolved. Four village panchayats initiated procurement process in the district today for the first time in the history of Haryana after arhitiyas refused to purchase from these centres. We will start procurement at the remaining eight centres in a couple of days, he added.

Tosham MLA Kiran Choudhry said farmers at few centres in her constituency were not issued gate passes.

If there werent any arrangements at purchasing centres, why were the farmers even called there? I want to ask agriculture minister why did he reduce the number of mandis in the district during the last stage? she asked.
A number of the smaller parties have poured cold water on the Fianna Fail-Fine Gael joint framework document published on Wednesday.

The document outlines how the next government will navigate the post-Covid-19 emergency and contains 10 key pillars it says will improve Irish society.

Hours after the blueprint for government was circulated, Labour leader Alan Kelly described it an uncosted and purely aspirational document that will require detailed scrutiny.

It fails to mention any concrete timelines or when any of the mooted ideas would be delivered, he added.

Fianna Fail and Fine Gaels document promises to set up a unit to work towards a consenus on a united island.



It includes a pledge to build a high speed cross border rail service. pic.twitter.com/TxM9EJ0AcV  Aine McMahon (@AineMcMahon) April 15, 2020

I welcome that in both parties coming together to draft this document, that they have come around to a different way of thinking on a new social contract and other social democratic policies.

The Labour Parliamentary Party will appraise this document over the coming days.

Micheal Martin and Leo Varadkar plan to meet the smaller parties including Labour, Social Democrats and the Greens over the coming days to discuss a programme for government.

Both Fine Gael and Fianna Fail have ruled out going into government with Sinn Fein.

In reaction to the historic document, a spokeswoman for the Social Democrats said: The document is portrayed as some kind of radical change of direction but on first reading it appears disappointing.

It is vague and for the most part simply repeats existing government policy and commitments previously made and not delivered upon.

It lacks timelines, costings and clear targets.

With that said, it is welcome that both Fianna Fail and Fine Gael are acknowledging that there is a need for a change in direction.

The current crisis has highlighted the need for far greater investment in public services, healthcare, housing and action on climate change.

But actions must speak louder than words.

We will take a detailed look at the document and give a further reaction in the coming days.

A spokesman for the Greens said they will consider the contents of the document and will reply in due course.

I would be surprised if any of the parties who stood on a platform of change if they found anything in this document that is worthwhile Louise O'Reilly

Sinn Fein TD Louise OReilly said the document is a construct designed to keep Sinn Fein out of government.

It allows them to continue the politics of exclusion and to nod in the direction of policies they have put absolutely no substance into.

I would be surprised if any of the parties who stood on a platform of change if they found anything in this document that is worthwhile.

The document is very light on detail and very heavy on vague aspirations so what people want to see in terms of a programme for Government, they want to see those details.

People were very focused on policy in the last election but there is no detailed policy in this document.

The intention is to nod in the direction of issues.

In the absence of any details, what we have to do then is look at past performance.

Fianna Fail and Fine Gael had four years and four budgets they have agreed together in which they could have agreed on some of the items that are here, but they didnt.

This document is deliberately vague so for anyone to come out the other side of this pandemic in debt or overcrowded or insecure accommodation or on a waiting list for an elective procedurethere is nothing in this document for them.
ASAP! in Washington is extending its deadline for submissions to the Celebration of Young Writers until April 30.

Students in grades K-12 from across the state are invited to participate in the literary experience that recognizes the work of talented young writers across the state.
Source: Xinhua| 2020-04-14 07:31:20|Editor: xuxin

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Staff from the the Chinese Consulate General in Houston disinfect the protective supplies in Houston, the United States, April 9, 2020. The Chinese Consulate General in Houston on Monday started to distribute health kits to Chinese students studying in the southern United States as COVID-19 cases continue to grow in the region. According to the consulate general, about 16,000 health kits containing face masks and other supplies arrived in Houston from China a few days ago. The consulate general has disinfected and repacked the supplies. The first batch of health kits will be distributed to six universities that have confirmed COVID-19 cases. (The Chinese Consulate General in Houston/Handout via Xinhua)

HOUSTON, April 13 (Xinhua) -- The Chinese Consulate General in Houston on Monday started to distribute health kits to Chinese students studying in the southern United States as COVID-19 cases continue to grow in the region.

According to the consulate general, about 16,000 health kits containing face masks and other supplies arrived in Houston from China a few days ago. The consulate general has disinfected and repacked the supplies. The first batch of health kits will be distributed to six universities that have confirmed COVID-19 cases.

The rest of the supplies will be distributed to Chinese students in more than 50 universities in the region as soon as possible.

In a letter attached to the health kits, Chinese Consul General in Houston Cai Wei said, "Though far away, the motherland is always concerned about the health of overseas students."

He also thanked the students for their prompt action and generous donations to support their country in the fight against the coronavirus.

In the past weeks, confirmed COVID-19 cases have risen sharply in the southern United States. In order to protect the health of Chinese students, the consulate general has sent around 10,000 face masks from its reserve supplies to Chinese students in more than 20 universities in the region.
President Donald Trump exits the Oval Office before announcing a national emergency with regard to the coronavirus in the White House Rose Garden in Washington on March 13, 2020. (Charlotte Cuthbertson/The Epoch Times)

China Using Facebook Ads to Attack America, Spread Virus Disinformation

The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is using its state-run social media accounts, which boast tens of millions of followers, to spread disinformation via Facebook and Instagram advertisements in an attempt to criticize President Donald Trump and alter the narratives on the CCP virus pandemic.

The ads, many of which ran with no political disclaimer, were spread to English-speaking audiences across the world through Chinas major state-controlled media companies, including the Global Times, Xinhua News Agency, China Central Television (CCTV), and China Global Television Network (CGTN).

The political ads, which have drawn roughly 45 million views since Feb. 15, represent another escalation of Beijings already brazen disinformation campaign. As Renee DiRestathe technical research manager at Stanfords Internet Observatorynoted, state-run media advertisements in 2019 mostly included friendly images of pandas and kittens  and amplified feel-good political stories.

That changed when February hit.

The ads began boosting state media coverage of the coronavirus, with dozens of ads praising [Chinese leader Xi Jinping] for his leadership and emphasizing Chinas ability to contain the disease, DiResta, whose team studied hundreds of state-run media ads, wrote in The Atlantic. By March 2020, angry ads appeared in the mix, promoting outraged coverage of President Donald Trumps use of the term Chinese virus.

Undisclosed political ads on Facebook dont show information such as who was being targeted or who had financed the spots; however, Facebook later began flagging the items. Some of the Facebook and Instagram ads can be found in their ad library, which is searchable online.

President Trump  seems impatient when it comes to epidemic controls. He and his team are still misleading American society, one ad in the Global Times as recent as April 13 stated. Racism in ink, a March 20 ad in China Xinhua News read, referring to the story of Trump crossing out corona and replacing it with Chinese in his notes.

Chinas efforts to fight #COVID19 were met with incessant defamation and stigmatization from the beginning  #WesternFallaciesDebunked, one ad that ran from March 27 to April 2 in the Global Times stated. That ad ran without a disclaimer.

A screenshot of a state-run media ad. (Screenshot)

U.S. President Donald Trump and his opponents have shamelessly politicized one of the most naturally occurring things evera global pandemic, another ad, posted by CCTV, stated on April 13. Meanwhile, numerous ads have portrayed Xis response to the outbreak in a positive light.

The racism narrative pushed by Beijing is one of many gaining traction in U.S. media and asserts that calling the pathogen the Wuhan virus is racist, despite the fact that Chinese state-run media have used the term themselves, as seen in Xinhua, the Global Times, and elsewhere. Previous diseases such as Ebola, Zika, the West Nile virus, Lyme disease, and the Spanish flu are all named after the places where the viruses emerged.

Emerson Brooking, resident fellow at the Digital Forensic Research Lab of the Atlantic Council, told The Epoch Times that the barrage of political advertisements are a natural next step for Beijings digital influence operations. For example, Global Times has more than 52 million followers on its official Facebook account, while The New York Times, by comparison, has just over 17 million followers.

The CCP seeks to draw attention to the failures of other nations as they grapple with COVID-19 and deflect scrutiny from their own bungled response, Brooking said.

Walter Lohman, director of The Heritage Foundations Asian Studies Center, called the pivot to attack ads another front for the CCP to use, adding that from Chinas perspective, this is a matter of an existential threat.

While outlets like the Washington Post have been condemned for running advertisements from China Daily, those had been marked as advertisement,' Lohman told The Epoch Times. This is different, in that the ads are not labeled as advertisements (nor is the source always made explicit).

Social media platforms have been major tools utilized by the CCP to push its propaganda. State-run media such as Xinhua News last month began including the hashtags #Trumpandemic and #TrumpVirus on its news posts on Facebook and Twitter.

In a phone call at the end of March, meanwhile, Trump and Chinese leader Xi Jinping agreed to tamp down their war of words over the novel coronavirus.

But Brooking, like other China experts, says the truce is temporary, if at all.

Just because the information war is less visible, this does not mean that it has stopped, he said. The rhetoric between Trump and Xi has indeed softened, but conspiracy theories about coronavirus continue to spread at an alarming rate.

This perceptual battle is too important to both the United States and China for either side to abandon it entirely, Brooking added.

Internal government documents obtained by The Epoch Times have highlighted how the Chinese regime purposefully underreported cases of the CCP virus, commonly known as the novel coronavirus and which causes the disease COVID-19, and censored discussions of the outbreak, helping to fuel its spread.

Lohman said Beijing will do whatever it takes to preserve its own rule and that this will always involve a sort of public-opinion warfare aimed at the U.S.

Facebook officials didnt immediately respond to a request by The Epoch Times for comment. A spokesperson told VICE News that some of the ads werent caught by their systems even though they should have been, while others ran in countries in which Facebook does not require disclosure.

We are progressing on our plans to label state-controlled media pages on Facebook, including from China, and will have more to share on this soon, the spokesperson said. We are continuing to work with publishers and third-party experts on this issue to ensure that we get this right.

Facebook said the ads not labeled as political by state-run media would simply have disappeared once they expired, making it virtually impossible to assess the full scale of Chinas propaganda effort, according to VICE.

Last month, almost 15,000 contractors who moderate Facebooks content were placed on paid leave due to the pandemic; the company is increasingly relying on AI and algorithms in lieu of human moderators.

Soft Power

The CCP is attempting to use its soft power to influence public opinion around the world, which is now turning decisively against Beijing, says Steven Mosher, president of the Population Research Institute and a founding member of the Committee on the Present Danger: China.

In 2007, Hu Jintao (former general secretary of the CCP) told the Seventeenth Party Congress that it was time to fight back against the West and launch its own soft-power initiative, Mosher told The Epoch Times. Since then, the CCP has spent billions to extend its media outreach around the world.

China has deliberately masked the total number of COVID-19 cases in China in a bid to safeguard its image both nationally and internationally, as a growing list of countries express anger and frustration over Beijings handling of the CCP virus.

Beijing officials have previously accused the United States of being the origin of the CCP virus as part of a wider propaganda initiative that draws upon every weapon in its arsenal, including online, print, and broadcast media that it has purchased or fostered over the past 12 years, Mosher said.

The extent or effect of these ads on Americans is unclear.

The less they know about China, the more they will be swayed by disinformation, Mosher said. Due to the CCP virus, however, more people are paying attention to the dangers of the regime in Beijing, he added.

A few Facebook ads are probably not sufficient to counter the fear and anxiety they are feeling for themselves and their families that the CCPs evil and incompetence have stoked, he said, referring to the American public.

The political ads may muddy the waters, but Lohman said the reaction is far more likely to center on peoples confirmation bias.

Those who already feel favorable toward China will feel that they are not alone, that there are others who feel the same way, he said. And of course, it will be unwittingly picked up by some who are motivated principally by their political opposition to Trump.

Attila Tomaschek, digital privacy expert at ProPrivacy.com, told The Epoch Times that the CCP propaganda machine is working at full tilt and that should come as no surprise because its exactly how the regime operates. Despite some political advertisements gaining a large number of views, he said most Americans know to take anything from Chinas state-run media with a giant grain of salt.

An April 8 survey from Harris Poll found that 77 percent of Americans nationally blame the CCP for the spread of the virus. That belief was echoed across the political spectrum, with 67 percent of Democrats, 75 percent of independents, and 90 percent of Republicans attributing the virus to the communist regime.

At the same time, the CCP wants to exploit the pandemic to hold itself up as a model on how to deal with the epidemic, Mosher said, noting that China is worried that other nations will unite against it.

The ultimate reason is that [China] is at war with the United States across all domains except the kinetic, and is desperately and belatedly trying to turn defeat into victory where the CCP virus is concerned, he said.

Some China experts told The Epoch Times that U.S. tech companies shouldnt ban Chinese officials and state-run media from their platforms, while others said they should.

Chinese officials and state-run media are trying to reach a global audience. That is why they have access to social media, Lohman noted. The U.S. government, and Americans more generally, business and media, should miss no opportunity to point out this contradiction.

I have long thought that we should demand absolute parity with China in all things, Mosher added.

Some experts suggest that the United States is increasingly closing its doors to engagement with China. Bipartisan opposition to the CCP may also be at an all-time high because of the pandemic.

In addition, U.S. lawmakers have called for the Chinese regime to be punished for its role in covering up and lying about the pandemic, which allowed the virus to spread to more than 200 countries.

In the United Kingdom, ministers and senior Downing Street officials said China now faces a reckoning over its handling of the outbreak and risks becoming a pariah state, according to a report in The Mail on March 28. That report detailed how scientific advisers warned Prime Minister Boris Johnson that Chinas official statistics on the virus might be being downplayed by a factor of 15 to 40 times and that Beijing is attempting to exploit the pandemic for economic gain.
By Lawrence Hurley and Andrew Chung

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. Supreme Court on Wednesday announced it will hear a dispute over whether President Donald Trump's tax and financial records should be disclosed on May 12 as part of its first ever round of oral arguments by teleconference.

The court, forced to adapt to the coronavirus outbreak, is hearing 10 cases over a two week period starting on May 4.

Other cases of note include two on the complex U.S. presidential election system and whether Electoral College electors are free to break their pledges to back the candidate who wins their state's popular vote, which will be heard on May 13.

The nine justices will hear a Trump administration bid to let employers obtain religious exemptions from having any health insurance offered to employees to help pay for women's birth control on May 6 and a religious rights dispute involving Catholic schools in California on May 11.

The justices and lawyers for the litigants will all participate remotely.

In another break with tradition, the court will provide a live audio feed of the arguments to the news media.

Trump's appeals in three separate cases to prevent his financial records from being handed over to Democratic-led U.S. House of Representatives committees and a New York prosecutor were due to have been heard on March 31 but were postponed on March 16 when the court delayed a series of cases over coronavirus concerns.

(Reporting by Lawrence Hurley and Andrew Chung; Editing by Tom Brown)
(Natural News) As the coronavirus pandemic continues to wreak havoc across the world, were seeing more and more civil unrest cropping up. In one particularly frightening example late last week, a group of inmates took over a Kansas prison cell block in a dramatic incident that went on for several hours.

Around 50 inmates in the C cell house of the Lansing Correctional Facility were involved in a disturbance that began at around 3:00 in the afternoon. At least 20 inmates somehow got out of their cells by evening and started tearing up anything they could find.

Staff managed to get out of the unit safely and monitor the situation over video, deciding that the best approach was to not get involved in the melee unless violence or fires broke out.

The entire disturbance took place inside the medium-security housing unit, and now the cause of the incident is under investigation. Several inmates and staff have been diagnosed with COVID-19 recently, with 12 inmates testing positive and being placed in a medical isolation unit and 14 staff members testing positive and isolating at home as of Thursday morning.

The whole facility was placed under restricted movement orders on Saturday. It has an overall capacity of 1,906 inmates, and the cell house where the incident took place houses between 120 and 160 inmates.

Under the movement restrictions that were put in place because of coronavirus, prisoners were not confined to their cells. However, they did have to eat their meals within their housing units, and changes were also put in place for recreation procedures in order to keep the number of people interacting in groups down.

An inmate told the media that coronavirus concerns relating to masks were part of the reason for the incident, and that frustration about being unable to shower only added to the dissatisfaction.

The inmates were able to get into some staff offices, where they threw papers and other items around. They also broke into fire extinguisher containers and discharged them, causing massive amounts of property damage.

The unidentified inmate said: Theyve broken everything that could be broken, except the bars because you cant break the bars.

Other prison disturbances taking place around the world

Earlier this month, a destructive disturbance took place at a Washington state prison following the coronavirus diagnosis of six men who are behind bars at the Monroe Correctional Complex facility.

On that occasion, authorities made use of sting balls that release noise, light and rubber pellets, along with pepper spray, to try to keep the situation under control at the minimum-security unit. The incident, which involved more than 100 inmates, took place at around 6:00 in the evening in a recreation yard and saw fire extinguishers discharged within two housing units there. No one was injured in the disturbance.

The corrections department released a statement outlining their belief that the incident was caused by the positive test results of the six inmates, who were then moved to isolation. Five staff members there are also believed to have tested positive, but the corrections department has stated their number is based on self-reporting.

In March, prison riots in response to coronavirus measures were seen across Italy, with prisoners rising up in places like Naples and Salerno, setting papers on fire and throwing them out of windows and groups of prisoners making their way to the roof. These incidents came after the Italian government put face-to-face meetings between prisoners and their families on hold for 15 days to help stop the spread of the disease.

The coronavirus outbreak is a serious problem for prisoners, and the type of social unrest were seeing in these settings could soon be something we see outside of prison walls as well if the pandemic isnt managed properly.

Sources for this article include:

NBCNews.com

NBCNews.com

DW.com
SAN FRANCISCO, April 15, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- The global IV tubing sets and accessories market size is expected to reach USD 1.5 billion by 2027, registering a CAGR of 4.0% over the forecast period, according to a new report by Grand View Research, Inc. Rising incidence of cancer, favorable government initiatives related to IV tubing sets and accessories, and increasing risk of malnutrition across the globe are the key driving factors for the market.

Key suggestions from the report:

In terms of revenue, the primary IV tubing sets segment held the largest share in 2019 owing to its increasing use and continuous product launches by key market players

The central venous catheter placement segment is anticipated to witness fastest growth over the forecast period owing to its wide applicability

The hospitals segment dominated the market in 2019 owing to increasing number of hospitals across the globe

Asia Pacific market is expected to witness the fastest growth over the forecast period owing to increasing healthcare expenditure, rising patient awareness, and growing need for technologically advanced and cost-efficient healthcare solutions

Prominent players present in the IV tubing sets and accessories market include B. Braun Medical, Inc.; Fresenius Kabi AG; Baxter ; and ICU Medical, Inc.

Key players are involved in adopting strategies such as merger, acquisitions, agreement, product launch, and partnerships to strengthen their position in the market.

Read 105 page research report with ToC on "IV Tubing Sets & Accessories Market Size, Share & Trends Analysis Report By Product, By Application, By End Use (Hospitals, Clinics, Ambulatory Surgery Centers), By Region, And Segment Forecasts, 2020 - 2027' at: https://www.grandviewresearch.com/industry-analysis/iv-tubing-sets-accessories-market

Increasing prevalence of chronic conditions, such as cancer, is positively impacting the use of parenteral nutrition across the globe. Parenteral nutrition helps in the administration of vital nutrients, which help in maintaining strength, energy, and hydration level in patients suffering from a disease. According to statistics published by WHO, around 8.2 million deaths occur every year due to cancer, accounting for 13.0% of the deaths worldwide. Moreover, cancer cases are estimated to increase by 70.0% over the next couple of decades. Increasing prevalence of cancer is one of the major drivers of IV tubing sets and accessories.

Cancer generally leads to a rise in the incidence of stomach ulcers, disturbance in the normal functioning of the GI tract, and development of physical obstructions, thereby resulting in an increased requirement for parenteral nutrition. In addition, a common symptom associated with cancer is anorexia or unintentional weight loss, requiring replenishment through the parenteral route of administration. Since IV tubing sets and accessories is one of the essential requirements for the parenteral nutrition, the demand is anticipated to surge in the coming years. These factors are anticipated to propel the IV tubing sets and accessories market growth over the forecast period.

Ambulatory surgery centers (ASC), also known as outpatient surgery centers, segment is anticipated to be the fastest growing segment over the forecast period. ASC are generally opted by patients undergoing less complicated procedures as minimally invasive interventional procedures allow rapid healing and require shorter hospital stay.

Grand View Research has segmented the global IV tubing sets and accessories market based on product, application, end use and region:

IV Tubing Sets & Accessories Product Outlook (Revenue, USD Million, 2016 - 2027)

Primary IV Tubing Sets



Secondary IV Tubing Sets



Extension IV Tubing Sets



IV Tubing Accessories



Others

IV Tubing Sets & Accessories Application Outlook (Revenue, USD Million, 2016 - 2027)

Peripheral Intravenous Catheter Insertion



Central Venous Catheter Placement



PICC Line Insertion

IV Tubing Sets & Accessories End-use Outlook (Revenue, USD Million, 2016 - 2027)

Hospitals



Clinics



Ambulatory Surgery Centers



Others

IV Tubing Sets & Accessories Regional Outlook (Revenue, USD Million, 2016 - 2027)

North America



U.S.





Canada



Europe



Germany





U.K.



Asia Pacific



China





Japan



Latin America



Brazil





Mexico



Middle East & Africa

&

South Africa





Saudi Arabia

Find more research reports on Medical Devices Industry, by Grand View Research:

3D Bioprinting Market - The global 3D bioprinting market size was valued at USD 965.0 million in 2018 and is expected to witness a CAGR of 19.5% over the forecast period.

in 2018 and is expected to witness a CAGR of 19.5% over the forecast period. 3D Printed Surgical Models Market - The global 3D printed surgical models market size was valued at USD 500.0 million in 2018 and is expected to exhibit a CAGR of 10.3% over the forecast period.

in 2018 and is expected to exhibit a CAGR of 10.3% over the forecast period. Hospital Microbiology Testing Market - Global hospital microbiology testing market is expected to witness lucrative growth over the forecast period owing to increase in awareness levels of people related to onset of respiratory infection.

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PEMBROKE, Bermuda, April 15, 2020 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Sompo International Holdings Ltd., a Bermuda-based specialty provider of property and casualty insurance and reinsurance, announced today that as part of the ongoing transformation of Sompo International, the insurer will be consolidating its London presence into one company market platform. This will mean that, from January 2021, it will no longer write business from Endurance at Lloyd's (EAL) or Syndicate 5151. All renewals and new business will be written from Endurance Worldwide Insurance Limited.



Mr. John Charman, Executive Chairman of the Board of Directors, Sompo International Holdings Ltd. and CEO Overseas Insurance and Reinsurance Business, Sompo Holdings, Inc. said "Our decision to focus our activities in London on a single company platform reflects the unique strength of Sompo's global reach, brand, ratings and financial stability. Having one single platform will allow us to continue to profitably grow our business and deliver superior value and solutions to our clients and distribution partners. With Sompo International's rating equivalent to Lloyd's, we can utilize that rating and our existing operation to be an even more streamlined and efficient provider of risk solutions whilst maintaining a meaningful and diversified trading relationship with Lloyd's in the years to come."

Julian James, CEO International Insurance said; "Our ambition is to grow our London Market and European business significantly in the near term. Sompo International is now recognized by our brokers and clients as a global leader with significant capability and excellent talent. With one platform, we will be able to provide them with efficient access to the very best products and services, underpinned by highly rated security."

About Sompo International

Sompo International Holdings Ltd..

Contacts

Sompo International

Cara Gallagher

SVP, Marketing & Communications

Phone: + 1 917 421 4973

Email: cagallagher@sompo-intl.com

Luther Pendragon

Caroline Wagstaff

Phone: 0207 618 9158

Email: CarolineWagstaff@luther.co.uk
BENZIE COUNTY -- Benzie County food pantries are working hard to keep food coming and volunteers safe as more and more people need food assistance while unable to work while non-essential businesses are closed.

Fresh Wind Christian Community

Fresh Wind Christian Community offers food assistance from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. every Tuesday and Thursday at its ministry center on U.S. 31, just outside Honor, next to the Cherry Bowl Drive-In Theater.

Katie Osborn, ministry coordinator, said Fresh Wind is working with food rescue programs and are getting deliveries every Monday and Wednesday containing of fresh produce, bread and other items from local stores.

They also have a supply of non-perishable items donated by congregation members and members of the community.

Fresh Wind takes donations from 9-10 a.m. on Mondays and Wednesdays at the ministry center. Currently they're taking non-perishable items, cash donations, diapers and wipes.

How people get their food has changed, due to the coronavirus, COVID-19 pandemic and the governor's social distancing orders.

"We're doing a drive-through," Osborn said. "They enter through the Cherry Bowl and drive through to the ministry center. We have people put food in the back of their vehicles. With this, packing the items and putting it in the vehicle, there is little exposure and touching."

Food packages contain some type of fruit or vegetable, a protein source, bread, cereal and sometimes dairy along with some non-perishable items.

"The numbers of people we're serving is definitely up," Osborn said. "Every Tuesday and Thursday we have about 100 boxes made up, and we've gone through all of them. We've seen a jump since the stay at home order and the COVID-19 pandemic. We're blessed to be able to offer them free food twice a week."

The pantry is run by volunteers.

"We're trying to stay under the 10 person limit set by the state," Osborn said. "We have them spread out in the drive-in for security services and traffic flow. We also have people working with Benzie Bus for food deliveries."

Volunteers unload food and pack boxes.

"We're blessed with amazing volunteers at the church," Osborn said. "They give and give. They're awesome. They're selfless in helping keep the community together."

Benzie Area Christian Neighbors

Benzie Area Christian Neighbors is also changing how it helps neighbors feed themselves and their families.

"Instead of coming in and shopping for themselves, we're doing pick-up now," said Gerri Van Antwerp, executive director of BACN. "People call in, make an order and they're given a number. They drive up and pick up the numbered package from a designated area or we place the order in the trunk of the car."

The food packages have a variety of foods in them such as produce, bakery items, perishable items and non-perishable items. Packages are based on family size.

The food pantry is active from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. on Monday through Thursday in Benzonia.

BACN also is still offering financial assistance for utilities, but over the phone. There are no classroom services, they are not accepting donations nor are they opening BACN for people to pick up clothing or household items.

"We're staggering volunteers so we can follow guidelines," Van Antwerp said. "We have five volunteers a day and they only come in a couple of times each week. We really only have about 10 or 15 volunteers active right now."

Volunteers all have personal protection gear, and volunteer groups are crossing over. They're also working in groups of less than two. There is also a lot of extra sanitizing.

Staff at BACN also is reaching out to volunteers to see how they are feeling. Van Antwerp said BACN didn't see more people requesting food early in, now they were seeing more new faces.

"I think a lot of people were eating what they had left in their own pantries and using household money and savings, but now they're running out," she said. "SNAP benefits could also be running low."

Van Antwerp said volunteers were critical to BACN's operation.

"We have about a quarter of a million dollars worth of labor most years done by volunteers," she said. "We still want to find some way to celebrate our volunteers for volunteer appreciation week, but we're not sure yet what we're going to do."

Benzie Food Partners

The Benzie Food Partners also has pivoted to curbside pickup.

Hours are from 8:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. on the first and third Thursday of the month, at their downtown Honor location.

"We are still open, but switched to curbside distribution," said Jeffie Lynch-Jones, secretary for the Benzie Food Partners. "We have also switched to a prepared box of food for our consumers. We will also provide a pre-packed bag of personal care items like bath soap, toothpaste, toilet paper and a pre-packed bag of extra food items for families with school age children. In addition, fresh produce from Food Rescue and loaves of bread if people want them as long as available on a distribution day."

Jones said the Food Partners has great volunteers, all wearing gloves and observing social distancing guidelines.

Area food pantry contact information

Benzie Area Christian Neighbors: (231) 882-9544

Benzie Food Partners: (231) 325-2936

Community Spirit Food Source: (231) 383-2606

Fresh Wind Christian Community: (231) 325-0344

Lake Ann United Methodist Church: (231) 231-275-7236.
DERBY  First responders, as a way to say thanks to others working on the coronavirus front lines, led a parade of vehicles to Griffin Hospital.

The fire, police, and EMS vehicles gathered at Nolan Field in Ansonia and rode in a parade along Wakelee Ave. on Tuesday. They then stopped briefly at the hospital to greet health care workers.
TEHRAN,Iran, April 15

Trend:

Iran's Airport Company is reconsidering its future projects and plans to compensate for the economic losses resulting from the coronavirus disease spread, a member of the board of directors at Iran Airports Company (IAC) Ali Rostami told Trend.

"The priority of airport's projects should change, the IAC has initiated necessary measures and has plans," he said.

Rostami said that new instructions are for the airports and their work during the times of the coronavirus, which should help reduce costs.

"The coronavirus spread started in February in Iran, and created many problems for the aviation industry. We are currently facing the outbreak and passengers and airport workers' safety is the priority," he said.

"The IAC has reconsidered the economic predictions for airports in the new Iranian year (started March 20,2020) to reduce the effects of coronavirus. In this regard, there have been various meetings to change the priorities based on new developments," he said.

"The development of airports should not be stopped, meanwhile due to airports' income cuts, the priorities should be reviewed to focus on important projects in the current Iranian year (started March 20,2020) ," he added.

"The coronavirus has crated many limitations and threats for the aviation industry and airports in the country, but by proper management and using successful experiences and scientific models, we can limit the crisis damages," Rostami said.

"Today all the countries in the world are being challenged by the crisis and experts have provided solutions to resolve the current situation. So, we can localize these methods," he added.

"The virus spread is an opportunity to identify the weak points an airport's operational services that can be fixed," he said.

The World Health Organization (WHO) declared COVID-19 a pandemic on March 11. Some sources claim the coronavirus outbreak started as early as November 2019.

Iran is one of the countries heavily affected by the rapidly-spreading coronavirus.

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.
Now there is even less. Landlords are becoming more flexible with lease terms or going month to month, he said, to hang onto the renters they have or to encourage a quick turnover.

In mid-March, there were 15 rentals available; as of early April, there were 12. The least expensive was a one-bedroom, one-bathroom apartment at 302 Mott Street, with a live-in super, a virtual doorman and laundry in the building, for $2,595; the most expensive was a duplex penthouse in a 2010 condo building at 41 Bond Street, with two bedrooms, two full and two half bathrooms, three terraces, one balcony and a private elevator, for $40,000.

The Vibe

With its historical ties to artists like Andy Warhol, Jean-Michel Basquiat and Robert Mapplethorpe, as well as theatrical and fashion icons, NoHo is a hub for culture  all of it, of course, currently on pause because of the coronavirus.

The traffic circle at Astor Place is home to a rotating sculpture by Tony Rosenthal commonly known as The Cube. It stands just north of the Public Theater, which is across the street from Colonnade Row, a landmark building that once housed the Astor and Vanderbilt families and is now home to the Astor Place Theater. Other theaters in the area include the Gene Frankel Theatre on Bond Street and the Sheen Center for Thought and Culture on Bleecker Street.
uschools/iStock(WASHINGTON) -- Republican senators on Tuesday sent a wide-ranging demand for information, records and documents to the World Health Organization regarding the origins of the novel coronavirus, part of a larger investigation into the global response to the pandemic.



In a letter to Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, director-general of the WHO, Homeland Security Committee Chairman Ron Johnson, along with Sen. Rick Scott of Florida and a handful of GOP colleagues, requested a sweeping list of materials regarding what they called WHOs failed and delayed response to the Coronavirus.



American taxpayers fund the WHO, and it is up to us to make sure those taxpayer dollars are being spent wisely, they said.



Johnson, who launched the investigation this week, indicated in a Politico interview Monday that although he wanted to mount a sweeping look at the response, including the U.S. governments, the focus of the probe was particularly on the China/WHO component of the crisis.



Where did this all start from? Was this transferred animal to human? Was this from a lab in China? Might have been the best of intentions trying to come up with the different cures, with the different therapies for the coronavirus in general, he told Politico.



Comments from WHOs Tedros and other officials in the organization praising Chinas response late into January when the virus was spreading outside that countries borders, angered members on both sides of the aisle, but others have faulted President Donald Trump as well.



On Jan. 22, just days after the first positive COVID-19 case surfaced in the U.S., Trump said he was not worried at all, telling CNBC, No. Not at all. And we have it totally under control.



Critics warn that while it is important to understand the origin of the current coronavirus pandemic, its important that it not be used as an effort by President Trumps allies to find a convenient scapegoat to distract from his administration's failure to act quickly enough to mitigate against the spread of the virus.



I just wonder about their motives, said Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., referring to his GOP colleagues several of whom have touted conservative theories that the virus was conceived in a Chinese lab. While he said the WHO made mistakes. China made egregious mistakes, he added, It was the president and his team that made a series of blunders, too.



I will support any good faith public health effort, but Im not going to support any efforts to find current scapegoats, Murphy said.



Theres not going to be a simple answer to this question, he said.



A Democratic aide on the Homeland Security Committee told ABC News that "any investigation into the coronavirus response must be comprehensive and follow the facts."



"We need to ensure that our nation is better prepared to address possible pandemics or public health emergencies in the future, and that will require a comprehensive investigation that looks not only at our response, but also our preparedness and how we got here," the Democratic aide said. "Any review also needs to provide concrete steps that can be taken to improve our long-term readiness."



The Johnson letter to WHO -- signed by Sens. Kevin Cramer of North Dakota, Martha McSally of Arizona, Steve Daines of Montana, Todd Young of Indiana, and Joni Ernst of Iowa -- sought detailed information on protocols and procedures in place at the end of 2019, as a patient in Wuhan, China, tested positive for COVID-19; when the WHO knew of Chinas first case and when it got boots on the ground there to investigate; who coordinated a response with the ruling Chinese Communist Party; and if the world agency received any financial compensation outside of their WHO salaries.



The newly-launched Senate inquiry sought agency property, including electronic records, hard drives, emails, and text messages from from Oct. 1, 2019, to March 12, 2020.



Scott, a noted China hawk and Homeland Security Committee member, is expected to lead the WHO/China portion of the panels probe. In a recent Fox News op-ed, the senator made clear his disdain for the WHO which he called a puppet and shill of Beijing, writing, American taxpayers are the largest contributor to the WHO budget. There needs to be accountability for their failures and their willingness to help China hide the coronavirus from the world.



Whether we cut funding or tie future funding to certain changes in the organization, we have to take action, Scott wrote.



Trump recently said his administration is considering pulling funding from the WHO, a view supported by a number of GOP senators.



A spokesman for the Senate Homeland Security Committee was not able to say when the first hearing might take place. The letter requests WHO answers by April 21, and the Senate is not expected to return for business before May 4.



Congressional action could extend beyond the Johnson-Scott probe, with a number of GOP senators calling for retaliatory action against China.



A bill by Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, introduced Tuesday, would impose sanctions on Chinese officials who engage in censorship through activities that prohibit, limit, or penalize the exercise of freedom of expression or assembly by citizens of the Peoples Republic of China, including prohibitions, limitations, or penalties related to the use of social media.



The sanctions are also designed to penalize those Chinese citizens who disseminate inaccurate epidemiological information.



GOP Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri introduced legislation Tuesday that would hold the Chinese Communist Party responsible for causing the COVID-19 global pandemic.



The bill would strip the communist country of its sovereign immunity to allow lawsuits and would create a Justice for Victims of COVID-19 Task Force at the State Department to lead an international probe of Beijings handling of the pandemic.



There is overwhelming evidence that the Chinese Communist Partys lies, deceit, and incompetence caused COVID-19 to transform from a local disease outbreak into a global pandemic. We need an international investigation to learn the full extent of the damage, said Hawley. The CCP unleashed this pandemic. They must be held accountable to their victims.



Copyright  2020, ABC Audio. All rights reserved.
YEREVAN, APRIL 15, ARMENPRESS. An appellate court has denied former President Serzh Sargsyans motion on lifting his exit ban amid the ongoing court proceedings.

A court banned Sargsyan from leaving the country pending the trial.

At the decision of the court of appeals, the measure of restraint against Serzh Sargsyan  the signature bond on not leaving the country  will not be lifted, the prosecution told ARMENPRESS.

The former president was charged with embezzlement in December 2019 and a court imposed a signature bond as bail. Former agriculture minister Sergo Karapetyan, businessman Barsegh Beglaryan and several others are also charged in the same case. Sargsyan is suspected in abuse of power and organizing the embezzlement of nearly half a billion drams during his tenure as president through the businessman. Sargsyan denies wrongdoing.

Reporting and writing by Karen Khachatryan

Edited and translated by Stepan Kocharyan
Help India!

Auqib Javeed, TwoCircles.net

Kupwara: Watching the debris of his house that he had made over years of hard work along with his three sons, Mohammad Shaban* wails inconsolably. Shaban has just returned to his village where the cross border shelling has recently claimed over three innocent lives (including a minor), and rendered over 6 families homeless.

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On April 12, residents of Chowkibal and Timuna of north Kashmirs Kupwara district were locked inside their homes due to ongoing nationwide lockdown in the wake of pandemic coronavirus when around 4 PM, they witnessed an intense shelling between Indo-Pak forces.

Suddenly a shell landed and panic gripped the whole area, told Shaban to Twocircles.net. He said that people started to run to safer places as soon as the loud shelling was heard and many even abandoned their homes immediately as the firing continued blasting the two villages located along the Line of Control (LoC) forming the de facto border that divides Kashmir between India and Pakistan.

I thought everything is going to end now, recalls Shaban, who along with his family, left behind everything and fled from the area to save their lives. Owing to social distancing norms and the coronavirus scare in place, he added, not many doors were thrown open for them and it was like running towards death and darkness. His family spent the whole night in a load carrying vehicle in a nearby village. The next day when he returned, a mountain of rubbles was waiting in place of his house.

One of the shells, probably from Pakistan, had hit his house and everything shattered. But even before the shells would drive them out, a sudden fright had overtaken the villagers as Indian Army moved artillery weapons in an open field surrounded by over 200 houses in Panzgam and Rawatpora villages, a few kilometres away from Chokibal. Just around the time, a video of locals including women and kids having heated arguments with the troops had went viral on social media. In the video, villagers can be seen shouting at soldiers, Kill our kids instead of escalating the situation amid novel coronavirus scare.

According to reports, the army had surrounded Jahaz Ground, the local playground for children, gathering a strong protest from residents as soon as it deployed artillery.It may be noted heavy exchange of gunfire and shelling occurred at LoC in Kupwaras Keran on April 10. The shelling took place after a deadly gunfight in Karen sector in which 5 militant and 5 paratroopers were killed.

Another local from Panzgam reported that the Army is using civilians as human shields and doesnt bother about safety and security of villagers. By placing the artillery weapons in the civilian area they are using humans as shield as they know Pak wont attack on civilians.

The village has now been declared as Red Zone by the authorities due to increasing number of COVID positive cases, leading many to flee the villages. But not everyone has the option. We requested both the governments of India and Pakistan to hold shelling in this time as the world is fighting against pandemic Coronavirus, said a relative of a deceased woman who died in the shelling.

One of the deceased women was a mother of four. Another one among the dead is an 8-year-old boy who succumbed after being hit by shrapnel during cross LoC shelling in village Tumina. The picture of his mother wailing while holding her sons body has gone viral on social media. Another viral video shows a girl appealing the governments of India and Pakistan to halt the shelling in wake of the coronavirus. The girl says it is unfortunate that people are being left homeless and are being terrorized even at a time when the whole world is battling a deadly virus.

Shaban is thankful that his family is safe and is hopeful that the house can be rebuilt but the question which he along with many others living along the LoC have is, For two long we will live in fear?

*Names of the characters in the story has been changed to protect the identity of the people
YouTube CPAC

UPDATE 9:45 a.m.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau says the partial shutdown of Canada has to last weeks more to get COVID-19 under control, using his strongest warning yet against loosening economic restrictions too soon as he unveiled expanded help for hard-hit workers.

In the last month, the national economy has contracted sharply as businesses have been ordered closed and Canadians told to stay home.

Preliminary data from Statistics Canada on Wednesday showed economic activity collapsed in March, suggesting the drop could be a record nine per cent.

In a fierce warning from in front of his residence in Ottawa, Trudeau says the country is still contending with the first wave of the novel coronavirus pandemic.

Loosening controls too quickly could mean the country gives up the ground gained, he says.

That could cause even greater economic damage than the pandemic has already inflicted.

"With spring coming, people are looking outside, wanting to get out, wanting to this to be over  I understand that. It will be weeks more before we can seriously consider loosening the restrictions," he said.

"As impatient as people are getting all across the country, we need to continue to hold on if what we're doing as sacrifices are going to be worth it."

To help, the federal government is loosening the eligibility criteria for emergency federal pandemic aid to cover seasonal workers without jobs and workers whose hours have been drastically cut but who still have some income.

The details announced this morning will allow people who are making up to $1,000 a month to qualify for the Canada Emergency Response Benefit for COVID-19.

And those whose employment insurance benefits have recently run out will also qualify for the $2,000-a-month benefit.

Some six million people have applied for the help since the middle of March when businesses were ordered closed and workers to stay at home as a public health precaution.

For those doing jobs deemed essential, Trudeau says the federal government will top up their pay to encourage them to keep going into work during the health and economic crisis.

The Bank of Canada is warning that the downturn tied to COVID-19 will be the worst on record and that the economic recovery will depend on the effectiveness of current measures to bring the pandemic under control.

The bank announced that it is keeping its key interest rate target on hold at 0.25 per cent, saying that it is effectively as low as it can go to combat the economic impacts of COVID-19.

If conditions improve quickly, the economic shock is likely to be "abrupt and deep, but relatively short-lived" and followed by a strong rebound for most, but not all, sectors of the economy.

A more severe scenario would likely see a "significant number" of businesses closing for good and longer spells of unemployment as workers look for new jobs.

A longer downturn would also mean households, businesses and governments could have higher debt by the time the recovery takes hold.

No matter the scenario, all the possibilities suggest "the near-term downturn will be the sharpest on record," the report reads.

"The outlook is highly conditional on how long the containment measures remain in place, and how households and firms adapt," governor Stephen Poloz said in his opening remarks during a morning teleconference.

He added that "substantial monetary stimulus needed to be in place to lay the foundation for the post-containment economic recovery."

The monetary policy report is the last one that Poloz is to be a part of, with his tenure at the head of the central bank scheduled to come to a close on June 2.

He was involved in the first monetary policy report published 25 years ago. Poloz said that he wished the circumstances for his last were "more favourable."

ORIGINAL 7:59 a.m.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is set to address the nation as he has been doing over the last several weeks.

Trudeau is expected to add details to the government's expansion of eligibility requirements for the Canada Emergency Response Benefit.

The update is expected to add part-time workers who have lost one or more of their jobs as a result of COVID-19 and earn less than $1,000 a month.

The CERB is also expected to be extended to seasonal workers.

-with files from CTV News and the Canadian Press
British fashion brand Barbour has turned over its production line to making protective gowns for frontline healthcare workers battling the coronavirus outbreak, reviving memories of its patriotic efforts in both world wars.

Many of Britains healthcare workers have complained there is not enough protective equipment, including gowns, masks and hoods.

The 126-year old Barbour, famous for its wax jackets and country fashion, is targeting the manufacture of 23,000 gowns over three weeks, chairman Margaret Barbour told BBC radio on Wednesday. It hopes to have made at least 7,000 by the end of the week.

Its extremely worthwhile to know that were playing our part, she said.

Barbour, 80, said the project stemmed from her close relationship with the Royal Victoria Infirmary in Newcastle, northeast England, which was the first hospital in Britain to treat novel coronavirus patients in January.

She offered to help by recalling machinists at Barbours South Shields factory who in line with the national lockdown were not working, reorganising the plants layout to comply with the governments social distancing regulations.

They are so enthusiastic to help, I think we all are in this desperate time, she said, noting that Barbour is no stranger to adaptation.

During both world wars the factory was turned over to make military garments to assist the war effort.

We even made trench sleeping bags in World War One, which really upsets me a bit, said Barbour.

(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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Sri Lankan police on Wednesday claimed to have made two high-profile arrests in the 2019 Easter Sunday attacks by arresting a prominent lawyer and a Muslim political party leader's brother who allegedly had links with one of the suicide bombers who killed 279 people and wounded nearly 600 others in one of the deadliest attacks in the island nation's history.

Nine suicide bombers carried out a series of devastating blasts that tore through three churches and three luxury hotels, killing 279 people and injuring 593 others on the Easter Sunday on April 21, 2019.

The ISIS terror group claimed the attacks, but the government blamed the local Islamist extremist group National Thawheed Jammath for the bombings.

Police spokesman Jaliya Senaratne said they have made two high-profile arrests in the ongoing investigations into the last year's Easter Sunday suicide bomb attacks.

He said they the brother of a Muslim political party leader and a prominent lawyer have been arrested.

"They both have been found to have had links with one of the suicide bombers, Senaratne said.

Commenting on the lawyer's arrest, the police spokesman said he has had connection with two of the bombers. "He had been part of an organisation of which the two bombers were members, Senaratne said.

The Easter Sunday bombing was a major election issue at the presidential election held in November.

The previous government headed by Maithripala Sirisena and Ranil Wickremesinghe was blamed for ignoring prior intelligence on the attacks.

There have been at least three separate probes on the attacks in addition to the police investigations.

The police said over 200 people Sri Lanka makes two high-profile arrests in Easter Sunday attacks



Sri Lanka's Cardinal Malcolm Ranjith on Sunday said that the Roman Catholic Church had forgiven the suicide bombers.

"We offered love to the enemies who tried to destroy us. We forgave them," Cardinal Ranjith told an Easter mass which was broadcast from a TV studio due to the coronavirus outbreak in the country.

The blasts targeted St Anthony's Church in Colombo, St Sebastian's Church in the western coastal town of Negombo and a church in the eastern town of Batticaloa when the Easter Sunday mass were in progress.

Three explosions were reported from three five-star hotels - the Shangri-La, the Cinnamon Grand and the Kingsbury in Colombo.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
1 of 2

Coronavirus update: Global cases rise to 2,012,069; death toll at 127,493



The United States recorded 2,228 deaths related to the coronavirus pandemic over the past 24 hours, according to a tally by Johns Hopkins University. Globally, there have been over 2,012,069 confirmed cases of COVID-19. At least 127,493 people have died so far according to worldometers. The United States has the highest number of confirmed cases, followed by Spain, Italy, France and Germany. The number of people dying from coronavirus in the US rose by at least 2,228 - the highest in a single day - on Tuesday to exceed 28,300. The country also has more than 600,000 reported cases, three times more than any other country. US President Donald Trump is cutting funding to the World Health Organization (WHO) over its handling of the pandemic. The US is the biggest contributor to the WHO budget.



Russia on Wednesday reported 3,388 new cases of the coronavirus, a record daily rise, bringing its overall nationwide tally to 24,490, the country's coronavirus response centre said. It said 198 people in Russia diagnosed with the virus had now died, an overnight rise of 28. Read More...


A Dublin farmer gave himself a quick lockdown haircut using sheep shears to snip at his unruly grey hair.

With all the barbers shut during the coronavirus pandemic, Donie Anderson decided to do a much-needed DIY job on his hair.

He steadies his camera to record himself and says 'I think this needs to be done,' before taking the large metal sheers to the side of his head seemingly unfazed.

Donie Anderson, a sheep farmer based in Glenasmole Valley in Dublin, decided to cut his own hair after the barbers closed due to lockdown

The farmer, based in Glenasmole Valley near Bohernabreen and close to the Wicklow Mountains, begins randomly hacking away at sections of his hair and jokes: 'Tell me if I missed a bit.'

As he continues to lop off large chunks of hair, the haircut starts to take shape and he says he hopes the haircut will 'lighten the load a bit' while he is on the farm.

The cut hair falls onto his shoulders before blowing away into the field as Mr Anderson reassures himself: 'It will grow back in a couple of days so nobody will notice.'

The video, which has 4 million views on Facebook, showcases Mr Anderson's impressive shearing skills.

The farmer takes shears, usually reserved for his sheep, to his grey unruly locks hacking away large chunks at a time

Seemingly unfazed, Mr Anderson starts cutting the side of his head above his ears before moving around his whole head, joking 'tell me if I missed a bit'

By the end of the four-minute video, captioned 'It's a great day for it!', he has a near-perfect short haircut.

Mr Anderson, a well-known figure in the local farming community, told Storyful that since he posted the footage he had 'received a tremendous amount of messages regarding the video.'

'Now and again if my hair is long I'll do it myself with the shears. I really needed a haircut. I was thinking if I didnt cut it I wouldnt be able to get my head in the door,' he told The Echo.

The DIY haircutting video in which the farmer reassures himself 'it will grow back in a couple of days' has four million views on Facebook

The haphazard cutting technique proves a success in the end with Mr Anderson showing off his near-perfect short hair-do

The birds near his farm also enjoyed the cut, using his sheared hair to make their nests.

He has worked on his family farm most his life and, according to Farming Independent, farms sheep which have access to 4,900 acres with help from his wife Angela.

His sheepdogs, Jess, Bob and Thos, became well-known in the farming community for their ability to herd not just sheep but duck and geese.

Some other at-home lockdown haircuts didn't work quite as well as Mr Anderson's.

Piers Morgan's reluctantly let his wife, Celia Walden, cut his hair after she watched a Youtube tutorial.

Piers Morgan reluctantly trusted his wife Celia Walden to give him a lockdown haircut on Monday evening

He looked less than impressed in a selfie he posted on Instagram but appeared happy with the results the next day presenting Good Morning Britain.

Other Britons have also been using their spare time at home to pick up the hairdressing scissors and trimmers with some disastrous results.

Images shared on social media saw people giving themselves wonky cuts, harsh bowl cuts and extreme-shaved hairlines.

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
TransferWise has announced the launch of its low cost, fast money transfers in the United Arab Emirates.

TransferWise Nuqud LTD is regulated under the Abu Dhabi Global Market (ADGM) Financial Services Regulatory Authority, enabling people to send money from AED at the real mid-market exchange rate, using its platform.

TransferWise is a global technology company thats building a new way to move money around the world, entirely online. This includes online account set-up and verification.

TransferWises approach makes sending money abroad faster, cheaper and more convenient as customers are able to compare prices and set-up payments without leaving their homes. Today the company offers over 1600 currency routes and 49 currencies, with from-AED money transfers found to be up to 2 times cheaper than the major banks and exchange houses by independent firm Viva Consulting.

According to World Bank data, outward remittance flows from the UAE reached $44 billion in 2017, making it one of the biggest outward remitters in the world. After TransferWise announced its UAE licence to operate in 2019, 15,000 people signed up to be notified about the launch of the currency route.

TransferWise has opened an office in the ADGM, operating as a hub for its expansion into the Middle East. TransferWise is licenced as a Money Services Provider.

Kristo Kaarmann, CEO and co-founder of TransferWise said: The UAE is one of the most important remittance markets in the world, and were delighted to be bringing the first fully online money transfers to the country. Its testament to the forward thinking nature of the FSRA that weve been able to bring our product to market so quickly - more competition means more choice for those living and working in the UAE.

Sending money abroad should be as easy as sending an email, yet many people are still reliant on expensive, slow legacy services. People can now send money to over 80 countries without leaving their homes, and all at the real, mid-market exchange rate.

Steve Barnett, Executive Director of Business Development at Abu Dhabi Global Market, said: We are pleased to welcome TransferWise to our portfolio of financial services entities. We are confident that coupled with ADGMs thriving and holistic ecosystem, TransferWise will continue to reinforce its position as a leading financial services provider. As an international financial centre located in the capital of the UAE, ADGM is committed to leveraging Abu Dhabis robust business environment to attract the worlds foremost enterprises, in an effort to facilitate further growth and development in the UAE and across the region.

Simon Penney, Her Majestys Trade Commissioner for the Middle East, said: The launch of TransferWise in the UAE is great news for the financial services offering in the Gulf. This launch is the largest UK FinTech market entry in the region to date, and will pave the way for other UK fintech companies to offer their services in this exciting and dynamic market. FinTech is a priority sector for the Department for International Trade in the UAE and wider region, and builds on the UKs strong partnership with the Gulf across multiple industries. -- Tradearabia News Service
UPPER THUMB  Although there are orders to shelter in place, against public gatherings, and close offices to the public because of the COVID-19 virus, municipalities need to conduct some business.

The village of Cass City will host its first virtual meeting 7 p.m., April 16. The March meeting was canceled.

The following is the procedure to virtually attend the meeting: Go to the village of Cass City website at www.casscity.org.

Joining by phone at by dialing 1-312-626-6799 or 1-646-558-8656 and following the prompts. The meeting ID is 834-5208-3050 and the password is 745595. You may also join by computer at https://us02web.zoom.us/j/83452083050?pwd=YzJOL3d5cW1OZUprd2tFS3FoZ2pQQT09.

Public comments will be heard during the public comment period at the beginning and end of the meeting by using the raise hand method. Participants may use this feature by dialing *9 on their phone or clicking the "raise hand" button on the bottom right corner of the Zoom screen. A written public comment can be submitted to village Clerk Nanette Walsh at cctreasurer@casscity.org by noon Thursday.

The agenda for the meeting has five items:

 Approve purchase of Abadata Computer Corporation 100 Hour Service Package

 Approve Community Economic Development Association of Michigan (CEDAM) Fellowship Agreement and grant match of $6,000.

The CEDAM funding comes from a partnership with the Michigan Economic Development Corporation (MEDC).

The fellowship was created to help address a common challenge Michigans diverse communities face: A lack of sufficient capacity to achieve their economic development potential. Fellow projects will expand organizational capacity, increase local collaboration, and remove barriers to development.

The village of Cass City is honored and excited to be chosen to participate in the CEDAM Fellowship Program. There is so much to do with limited staffing, said village Manager Debbie Powell. The CEDAM Fellowship Program will allow us to make a significant impact in both community and economic development in the village.

 Approve 2020 street hot mix asphalt resurfacing bid award. Hot mix asphalt is a combination of approximately 95% stone, sand or gravel bound together by asphalt cement, and a product of crude oil to resurfaced roadways.

 Adopt a resolution for Transportation Economic Development Fund (TEDF) funding for Third Street improvements.

 Approve the purchase free standing playground equipment for the municipal park.

Just as there would be for an in-person meeting, there will be time for public comment at the beginning of the meeting and at the end of the meeting.

Per Gov. Gretchen Whitmers Executive Orders, public bodies can hold virtual meetings to conduct business.

The council, staff and public are encouraged to log into the computer access point for the virtual meeting 10 minutes prior to the designated meeting time.

If the technology causes the meeting to crash," council shall consider this interruption as a recess and attempt to re-convene within 15 minutes from the time of disruption. The village president shall announce that the meeting has re-convened. If the reconnection is not successful, the meeting is immediately adjourned by the chair.
At a time, the when virtual world has become the norm, people are harnessing the power of digital to stimulate their interest areas and hone their skills. Lumix by Panasonic is organizing virtual photography workshops titled #PassionNeverRests. These free of cost sessions invite all photography enthusiasts to join in for an inspiring journey in the world of photography. Offering a wide range of tutorials from basic to advanced techniques, the classes are designed to extend essential tips and tricks by experts. Panasonic will be organizing these workshops thrice a week till 31st May 2020 on social media platforms of Instagram and Facebook.

With photography becoming an essential part of our lifestyle, there is a huge interest from users to master this applied art. To bring these workshops alive, Panasonic has collaborated with celebrated photography influencers and Lumix luminaries such as Shoot Guru  Kshitih Shritak, Abhishek Singh  i.am.abhishek, PK Suri, Head of World Wide Studio, Niklesh Malkani, CupCake Productions, Vivek Gowda  Blink Films and Jassi Oberai  Xploring Light, who will share their insights and experiences across diverse genres and disciplines in photography, including wedding, travel, cinematography, vlogging, aviation, fashion and landscape, to connect and fuel the passion points of the participants. Along with the live sessions, Lumix will also be conducting detailed webinar workshops on Zoom for professionals on photography content, case studies and much more. The virtual workshops will be moderated by Hitesh Vig  National product trainer of the Panasonic Lumix range.

Speaking on the initiative, Mr. Sandeep Sehgal, Business Chief, Imaging Business Group, Panasonic India & SAARC, said, At Panasonic, we look for a silver lining amidst every dark cloud. Given the current scenario, we would like to connect with our consumers and help them hone their skills. We are happy to have the support of some of the experts in the field to share their knowledge and expertise with others and help them grow in this journey. We hope to synergize the energies and our passion to make each day a new learning experience.

Schedule of the planned sessions

S.no Dates Trainer Platform Duration Topic 1 16-04-2020 Abhishek Singh Instagram 1 Hour Aviation Photography: how to create niche photography 2 18-04-2020 Jassi oberoi Instagram 1 Hour Landscape Photography 3 21-04-2020 CupCake Productions Zoom 2 Hours Tips & trick on pre-wedding shoots 4 23-04-2020 Niklesh Malkani Zoom 2 Hours Mastering creative wedding photography 5 25-04-2020 Blink Films : Vivek Gowda Instagram 1 Hours Shooting award winning wedding photographs and cinema 6 26-04-2020 Shootguru : Kshitij Sheetak Zoom 2 Hours Setting your camera for cinema 7 28-04-2020 P.K Suri Zoom 2 Hours Shooting destination weddings 8 30-04-2020 Neeraj Vishwakarma Zoom 1 Hour Macro photography shooting with available lights 9 02-05-2020 Abhishek Singh Zoom 1 Hour How to identify your niche in photography

Panasonics vast array of Lumix range has expertise in different photography practices like Lumix S1, Lumix GH5 & GH5s for still photography which includes wedding and fashion and Lumix G95 & G85 for motion photography which includes shooting Youtube videos a nd vlogging. For cinematography and especially in the content shooting for OTT platforms like Netflix /Amazon/Hotstar, Lumix S1H is certified as the most affordable power-packed camera with full feature upload. The previous sessions of #passionneverresets received over 1100 entries.
A group of soldiers were fined by police after they went to an illegal party over the Easter weekend.

The soldiers were attending a party on Bonnett Road in Mount Low, 18km west of Townsville, Queensland on Easter Sunday when police received a number of complaints.

A Queensland Police spokesman told Daily Mail Australia officers arrived at the home at 9pm and gave advice to the occupants about COVID-19 safety.

'Several people left the residence to comply,' the spokesman said.

A group of soldiers were fined by police after they went to an illegal party over the Easter weekend (unrelated stock image of Australian soldiers)

However police continued to receive complaints about the party and returned a short time later to find the soldiers and others still there.

As a result police issued a total of eight $1,334 on-the-spot fines for failing to comply with COVID-19 public health directions.

An ADF spokesman confirmed the soldiers had been fined but didn't reveal any further details.

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

'Chief of Army has issued a directive to all personnel that they are to comply with all state and federal government directions on social distancing and COVID-19 transmission reduction,' the spokesman told Nine News.

However the ADF spokesman said the behaviour of the soldiers was unacceptable.

'Defence takes any reports of personnel not complying with COVID-19 guidelines seriously,' the spokesman said.

'Defence personnel involved will be subject to disciplinary investigation under the Defence Force Discipline Act, which may include administrative or disciplinary action.'

Daily Mail Australia has contacted the Australian Defence Force for further comment.
Afghan authorities have arrested a suspected pro-Islamic State Bangladeshi militant who is wanted in Dhaka for his alleged involvement in a foiled plot to bomb an event attended by Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina in 2017, police here confirmed on Wednesday.

Mohammad Tanvir, whom Afghan authorities have identified as a senior leader of the Islamic State terror group, was arrested recently with another suspected IS leader in northwestern Afghanistan, according to Khaama Press, which cited a statement from the Afghan National Directorate of Security (NDS). The outlet describes itself as Afghanistans largest English news service.

Yes, we have received confirmation that Tanvir has been arrested in Afghanistan, Saiful Islam, a deputy commissioner of the Bangladeshi polices counter-terrorism and transnational crimes unit, told BenarNews.

Islam told BenarNews that a foreign intelligence agency called Bangladeshi police seven days ago seeking information about Tanvir, whose name is spelled as Tanweer (alias Omran, Ahmad or Nasir) in Afghanistan.

We provided them the information, Islam said, without elaborating. Later, the agency confirmed to us that Tanvir was genuinely arrested in Afghanistan.

In a separate report published online, Republic TV, an English news channel in India, said that NDS, Afghanistans intelligence agency, had released a video of Tanvir and accused him of having links with a militant attack that killed 25 people in Kabul last month.

About 150 worshipers were inside the Gurdwara Har Rai Sahib shrine, a Sikh temple in the Afghan capital, when a gunman opened fire inside the complex early in the morning on March 25. The gunman was killed in an exchange of gunfire with security forces, authorities said.

The Islamic State group claimed it carried out the attack, according to BBC News.

The reports from Khaama Press and Republic TV did not mention when the Bangladeshi mans arrest took place, but the Afghani news service posted what it claimed to be Tanvirs picture during his interrogation by Kabuls intelligence agents. The video-grab included a subtitle in which the photographed man allegedly said that his house was in Bangladesh.

Islam told BenarNews that Tanvir, an engineering graduate of Bangladesh University, fled to Afghanistan while trying to complete his masters degree in business administration at Dhaka University.

He had links with the militants who operate in Bangladesh under the banner of IS, Islam said.

Islam said Tanvir had communications with a 21-year-old man also named Saiful Islam, who blew himself up in a Dhaka hotel room in August 2017, when officers confronted him as he was about to set off a bomb at the Hotel Olio International.

The hotel was in the Panthapath neighborhood, about 300 meters (984 feet) from a house in the adjacent Dhanmondi neighborhood where the countrys founding president, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, and several members of his family were assassinated on Aug. 15, 1975.

Saiful, who was a madrassa student and a suspected member of militant group Jamaat-ul Mujahideen Bangladesh (JMB), had checked into the hotel armed with explosives, police told reporters.

August 15 is observed in Bangladesh as a national day of mourning to mark the anniversary of the assassination of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, the father of Sheikh Hasina, who is now the prime minister. She was out of the country when the assassination took place.

The Hotel Olio explosion occurred about three hours after Hasina and President Abdul Hamid placed floral wreaths at the house, which is now a museum. The blast ripped an outside wall from the hotel and injured a security guard and a police officer.

On Dec. 9 last year, Bangladeshs anti-terrorism tribunal filed charges against 14 Neo-JMB members including Tanvir, for taking part in the August 2017 terror plot, according to court documents.

Bangladesh has no extradition treaty with Afghanistan. As a result, Islam said, Dhaka would send a letter to the Afghan government through Interpol to get more information about Tanvirs arrest.

Bangladeshi Foreign Minister A.K. Abdul Momen told BenarNews on Wednesday that he was aware that Tanvir had been arrested, although Afghan authorities have yet to formally inform Dhaka.

Yes, we have come know to about the arrest of the Bangladeshi IS leader in Afghanistan from media reports, he said. The Afghan government has not officially informed us about his capture.

The Afghan embassy in Dhaka was closed. BenarNews did not receive a response to an email sent to the spokesman of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Afghanistan.

Sakhawat Hossain, a security analyst and retired brigadier general, said it was difficult to determine the actual numbers of Bangladeshis who had joined the IS forces in Afghanistan.

There is no official figure about them. But certainly there are Bangladeshis fighting for the IS in Afghanistan, Hossain said. This is because we saw in the past that Bangladeshis were captured in Afghanistan.

Police have blamed a faction of JMB for carrying out a terrorist attack that killed 29 people at a local cafe, the Holey Artisan Bakery, in July 2016.

Since that overnight siege at the Dhaka cafe, Bangladeshi authorities have announced several arrests of suspected members of Neo-JMB, a local militant group aligned with Islamic State (IS). A couple of days after the cafe attack, the Islamic State released a video from Syria, praising the act.

Bangladeshi officials have long denied an IS presence in Bangladesh but acknowledged that a propaganda video that was released on Sept. 24 in 2016 was filmed in Bangladesh. The video included footage of the men who carried out the attack.
Washington  Former President Barack Obama endorsed Joe Biden in a video on Tuesday, giving the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee a boost from the partys biggest fundraiser and one of its most popular figures.

I believe Joe has all the qualities we need in a president right now, Obama said in a nearly 12-minute video, touting him as a close friend and lauding him for his perseverance and compassion.

Obama and Biden are close friends from their two terms in the White House, when Biden served as vice president. Biden leaned heavily on his affiliation with the former president throughout the Democratic primary, framing his pitch as an extension of Obamas presidency. In recent weeks, he has told donors he's been in touch with Obama about his vice-presidential pick.

The endorsement marks Obama's return to presidential politics more than three years after leaving the White House. He rarely talks directly about his successor, President Donald Trump, and avoided intervening in the Democratic primary. The field at one point spanned nearly two dozen candidates and Obama offered private counsel to anyone who asked it, but but made no efforts to bolster an individual campaign  including Bidens.

But Obama has been following the Democratic race closely from the sidelines and is eager to take a more active public role in the campaign. Hes expected to headline fundraisers for Biden and public events in key swing states, if those events can still be held given social distancing guidelines during the pandemic. An Obama adviser said the former president is taking his cues from Bidens campaign on how he can be most useful as he eases back into a more overtly political role.

The endorsement comes a day after Bernie Sanders also backed Biden. The former vice president now has the support of all of his former Democratic primary rivals except for Elizabeth Warren. The Massachusetts senator is expected to formally throw her support behind Biden soon, according to a person familiar with her plans.

Two other prominent Democrats who have yet to formally endorse Biden are former President Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton, the partys 2016 nominee. Hillary Clinton has been in regular touch with Biden, including several times since Sanders dropped out of the race, according to an aide.

Obama has been an obvious shadow throughout the 2020 Democratic primary. Biden coined the Obama-Biden administration moniker when hed talk about various accomplishments.

But he also tried to insist he was running as his own man, telling anyone who asked that he urged Obama not to endorse him out of the gate or even in the thick of the primary.

Obamas tenure became a sort of punching bag for some presidential hopefuls in a primary fight that early on was defined by a debate over the need for generational and systemic change versus a return to normalcy after the Trump era.

Julian Castro, 45, pushed Biden repeatedly on whether he argued with Obama privately over deportations overseen by that administration. Pete Buttigieg, 38, and Beto ORourke, 47, subtly jabbed Biden  and by extension Obama  by suggesting the party shouldnt return to the past. Sanders and Warren suggested that the 2010 Affordable Care Act hadnt gone far enough.

But Biden was a staunch defender of the Affordable Care Act and on the trail, often referred to himself as an Obama-Biden Democrat." The former vice president called it bizarre for Democrats, even faintly, to attack Obamas record.

The conversation around Obama's presidency shifted as the primary wore on. By the time voting began, Buttigieg was almost explicitly comparing his youthful bid to Obamas 2008 campaign and the progressives were framing their health-care proposals as a way to build on Obamas legacy. Billionaire candidate Mike Bloomberg, meanwhile, featured Obama in his ubiquitous advertising effort, much to Bidens chagrin.

Youd think Mike was Baracks vice president, Biden once quipped to donors.

For his part, Biden leaned even more heavily into Obama as primary voting began. Aiming at Sanders, the self-described democratic socialist, and billionaire Bloomberg, whod been elected New York City mayor as a Republican, Biden said in a Feb. 21 interview with The Associated Press that theyre not bad folks. Theyre just not Democrats.

Campaigning before increasingly diverse audiences in Nevada and South Carolina, Biden ramped up his recollections of when Obama tapped him for the ticket in 2008. Biden recalled Inauguration Day 2009, waiting for the train in his hometown of Wilmington, Delaware, for a black man to pick me up  for the two of us to be sworn in as president and vice president of the United States.

Often drawing nods and vocal affirmation from his audiences, Biden said he had thought of that day as a national victory over institutional racism. Now, in the Trump era, Biden calls that conclusion a mistake.

I thought we could defeat hate, he said, but, it never goes away.

On Feb. 29, Biden took the stage in South Carolina to celebrate a nearly 30-point victory that would propel him past Sanders and everyone.

He dusted off a line hed used many times before: Im a proud Obama-Biden Democrat, Biden said.

Obama was watching. His sideline approach nearing its end, he called his former vice president that night to congratulate him on his victory.
The largest inland city in New South Wales has officially dumped its sister city in China over the Communist regime's 'cover up' of its deadly coronavirus outbreak.

Best known for producing a string of national sporting heroes, the City of Wagga Wagga, population 64,000, voted to cut ties with Kunming - a provincial city in southern China with 6.3million people - at Tuesday night's council meeting.

Sporting greats from Wagga Wagga in the NSW Riverina district include Australian cricketers Geoff Lawson, Michael Slater and former captain Mark Taylor, AFL stars Paul Kelly and Wayne Carey - as well as rugby league legend Peter Sterling.

The motion to ditch the 22-year sister city relationship was put by councillor Paul Funnell who said Kunming was part of a regime that 'lied to the world' about the coronavirus outbreak, according to the Daily Advertiser.

There is growing criticism across the globe over China's failure to properly disclose the severity of COVID-19 when it first emerged in Wuhan in December.

Since then, 1.9 million people worldwide have become infected with 129,000 deaths.

The City of Wagga Wagga voted to cut ties with its sister city of Kunming, southern China on Tuesday

The main street of Wagga Wagga (pictured) in the New South Wales Riverina region

The vote to dump Kunming was tied with three councillors supporting the motion and three against, before a deciding vote was cast by Cr Tim Koschel who led the meeting because Mayor Greg Conkey was absent.

Cr Funnell said the vote was not about racism but an attempt to set an example that Wagga Wagga does not 'tolerate lies and subterfuge'.

'This action is in no way stopping international trade, communication or the opportunity to deal with China in a fair, transparent and beneficial manner,' he said.

'This is not about the people, obviously everyone's coming out calling it racist... You are not dealing with the people themselves. You're dealing with the ruling authority which is a communist regime.'

Some councillors argued the scheme was important to promote understanding between different cultures rather than political statements.

'I don't think this is the time to stir up a hornets nest when we should be focused on other things at hand rather than Wagga supposedly dabbling in international relations,' Cr Vanessa Keenan said.

Since the signing of the relationship in 1998, there have been several exchange events between Wagga Wagga and Kunming.

People wearing face masks scan a QR code to submit their personal information while security volunteers check their temperatures at a grocery market, as the country is hit by an outbreak of the novel coronavirus, in Kunming, Yunnan province, China February 24, 2020

Wagga Wagga is the largest inland city in New South Wales with farming a big industry

NSW Nationals MLC Wes Fang said the last few months had been hard for Chinese-Australians who are proudly Australian but have been abused because of their name and appearance.

'We are better than this as a city, a state, and as Australians. No one is going to defend the Communist Chinese Government, but the people of Kunming have been a sister city with Wagga for more than three decades,' Mr Fang told the ABC.

'To throw that away because of a dog whistling act about who we're going to punish for COVID-19 is really dangerous,' he said.

Crs Funnell, Yvonne Braid and Tim Koschel voted to discontinue ties with the Chinese city while Crs Hayes, Keenan and Kendall voted against the idea.

Two councillors excused themselves from the vote because of a conflict of interest.

The coronavirus outbreak is understood to have originated in the Chinese city of Wuhan in the country's east.

China's response to the outbreak has been widely criticised with reports of doctors who sought to alert the public being detained.

Travel out of China was also allowed to continue after the outbreak was discovered, even after travel from Wuhan to other Chinese cities was banned by the Chinese government.

Mayor Greg Conkey who was absent because of illness said he was 'appalled' by the decision and there will be a rescission vote in two weeks.
Another two batches of personal protective equipment will arrive in Ireland from China this week.

The HSE ordered more than 200m worth of the masks, gowns and other gear from China recently.

The first batch arrived in Ireland earlier this month, but about 20% of it was not suitable for general healthcare use.

But HSE chief executive Paul Reid says more will arrive in the coming days.

We are currently in discussion with China to have the delivery of the second batch and to try aim to accelerate the third batch from later in this week, he said.

We do still face very significant issues all across the healthcare system, and particularly this week in terms of gowns.

Our Chief Clinical Officer will be communicating out to ensure that we use the gowns properly and effectively until we get the further delivery later this week.

The health chief has also been defending the HSE's record for coronavirus testing and tracing.

Weve built this up hugely over the last number of weeks but now we need to put in a full end to end process oversight, said Mr Reid.

Ive recently appointed Ms Niamh OByrne who will come and work for me on a secondment from EY for the net six months.

Very positively, weve had support and weve strengthened our overall capacity.

And during this week we will now be in a position where we dont have a back log and we will be returning these tests in a more timely manner.

The current restrictions started on Friday, March 27. They mandate that everyone should stay at home, only leaving to: Shop for essential food and household goods;

Attend medical appointments, collect medicine or other health products;

Care for children, older people or other vulnerable people - this excludes social family visits;

Exercise outdoors - within 2kms of your home and only with members of your own household, keeping 2 metres distance between you and other people

Travel to work if you provide an essential service - be sure to practice physical distancing

Last week,

Read More:

The U2 frontman has asked for personal protective equipment and said he will pay for them himself.

The Asian country was initially one of the worst affected by the global outbreak, but its strong medical response has limited the number of deaths and confirmed cases.
COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo.  Prosecutors are no longer pursuing the death penalty for a 23-year-old man accused of being one of two gunmen in the March 2017 killings of two Coronado High School students.

Fourth Judicial District Attorney Dan May said his office decided to abandon the death penalty as a sentencing option against Marco Garcia-Bravo of Colorado Springs, The Gazette reported Monday.

Garcia-Bravo is scheduled for trial beginning July 17 in the fatal shootings of 16-year-old Natalie Cano-Partida and 15-year-old Derek Greer.

Mays office said the students families no longer support pursing capital punishment as a penalty option.

In March, Gov. Jared Polis signed a death penalty repeal bill into law and commuted the sentences of all three men on Colorados death row. The repeal law applies to offenses charged starting July 1.

The families believe that continuing to pursue a death sentence in this case is meaningless and will unnecessarily prolong the proceedings, May said in a court filing obtained by The Gazette. It is clear to them that the governor has stated he has no intention of accepting a jurys decision if a death sentence is imposed.

Cano-Partida and Greer were abducted from a party in Colorado Springs at gunpoint and driven to a road outside the nearby city of Fountain, where they were shot at point-blank range, authorities said.

The two teenagers were targeted over suspicions that Cano-Partida had been helping a rival street gang, investigators said, adding that Greer was killed to eliminate a witness.

Garcia-Bravo was among 10 people arrested in the case.

Diego Chacon was identified as a shooter and pleaded guilty in December 2018 to two counts of second-degree murder. He was sentenced to 65 years imprisonment under terms of his plea agreement.
Source: Xinhua| 2020-04-15 18:51:37|Editor: xuxin

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A medical staff member takes sample from a woman at a COVID-19 testing point in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, April 15, 2020. The number of COVID-19 cases in Malaysia totaled at 5,072 after 85 new cases were recorded, the Health Ministry said on Wednesday. The newly confirmed cases of 85 is the first time the number dropped to a double-digit for over a month. (Photo by Chong Voon Chung/Xinhua)

KUALA LUMPUR, April 15 (Xinhua) -- The number of COVID-19 cases in Malaysia totaled at 5,072 after 85 new cases were recorded, the Health Ministry said on Wednesday.

The newly confirmed cases of 85 is the first time the number dropped to a double-digit for over a month.

Health Ministry Director-General Noor Hisham Abdullah said at a press briefing that 169 had been cured and discharged in the past day, twice more than new cases, making the total cured 2,647 or 52.2 percent of all cases.

Meanwhile, 56 are currently being held in intensive care and 32 of those are in need of assisted breathing.

One more fatality had been recorded, a 69-year-old man who had suffered from other health problems prior to being infected, pushing the total to 83 deaths, he said.

Meanwhile, Education Minister Mohd Radzi Md Jidin said all major government examinations for primary and secondary school students had been either cancelled or postponed.

In a televised speech, Mohd Radzi said this would include the Certificate of Education, the national examination taken by all fifth grade secondary school students in Malaysia which would be pushed to 2021. It is one of the most important exams for students who want further studies in universities.

Schools in the country have been closed since March 14. The government has said schools will not immediately reopen even after the movement control order expires.
Pennsylvania corrections officials signed a notice of execution Tuesday for a man sentenced to die for the killings of two Vietnamese brothers whose bodies were found bound, tortured, and tossed in the Schuylkill in 2014.

But that doesnt necessarily mean Tam Minh Le, 49, will be put to death any time soon.

Gov. Tom Wolf, who has the authority to block executions, declared a moratorium on capital punishment shortly after taking office in 2015 and has vowed to block all executions pending legislative action to address shortcomings of the states death-penalty law.

 READ MORE: Six charged in 2014 kidnap, torture of Vietnamese brothers dumped in Schuylkill

The last person executed in Pennsylvania was Gary Heidnik, who was put to death in 1999 for torturing and murdering two women in his Philadelphia basement.

The execution notice for Le, signed Tuesday by Department of Corrections Secretary John Wetzel, was issued under a provision of the law that requires him to issue such orders when the governor fails to sign a warrant of execution during a given time period.

Wetzels notice scheduled Les execution for June 2.

A jury sentenced Le, a reputed Vietnamese gang member, to death after a trial in Philadelphia in which prosecutors alleged he and others had killed brothers Vu Kevin Huynh, 31, and Viet Huynh, 28, over a $300,000 drug debt they owed their marijuana supplier in California.

Since then, federal authorities have alleged that Le lured the brothers to his home under orders from a onetime ranking member of the New York City-based Vietnamese gang known as Born to Kill, after a slogan painted on helmets of some U.S. soldiers during the Vietnam War.

According to a third man who survived the attack, the Huynhs were stripped to their underwear and tortured for hours before being stabbed multiple times and dumped in the river.

Federal prosecutors have charged six other suspects who they say either enlisted Le or assisted him in carrying out the slayings and eluding capture.

Le is being held at a state prison in Greene County near the states border with West Virginia.
The Equestrian Canada (EC) Health & Welfare Award recognizes an individual or organization that has contributed directly to the improvement of horse health and welfare in Canada through years of hard work and dedication, and Equine Guelph is the deserving recipient for 2019.

Equine Guelph, based at the University of Guelph in Ontario, is recognized as an international leader in promoting the health, welfare and safety of horses and their caretakers. Acting as a vital link between industry, research, and horse owners and caretakers, Equine Guelph has been a pioneer in the development of evidence-based, award winning online education since 2002.

From nutrition to disease prevention to stable management, Equine Guelph offers over 20 courses through its Equine Certificate and Diploma programs, which attract 900 students per year from more than 40 countries. Their programs are senate-reviewed and have received both provincial and national academic awards.

Applauded for their collaborative approach to equine education, Equine Guelph has partnered with the Campbell Centre for the Study of Animal Welfare since 2012 in developing the Equine Welfare Certificate. The program focuses solely on the welfare of horses from a practical, evidence-based approach and has garnered global recognition. In fact, as a result of this program, Equine Guelph Director Gayle Ecker has been invited to attend the World Horse Welfare Conference in London, ENG, annually since 2015.

Equine Guelph has also built lasting partnerships with national and provincial equestrian organizations that have resulted in the creation of vital tools for equestrians, including TheHorsePortal.ca. The flexible, online health and welfare courses offered through TheHorsePortal.ca feature short, practical courses accessible from all web-based devices for busy equestrians, and provide continuing education credits, as well as opportunities to engage in peer-to-peer discussion and engagement.

Other innovative programs Equine Guelph has pioneered in recent years include EquiMania!  a unique travelling exhibit that has won two international awards for educating youth on horse health, welfare and safety. They have also developed a hands-on training course specifically for SPCA agents and inspectors responsible for equine welfare assessment. In addition, Equine Guelph created the Ontario Technical Large Animal Emergency Rescue Program to help first responders in the safe handling of large animals that require emergency rescue, while their Fire Prevention program trains horse and facility owners in fire risk reduction within barns.

These initiatives just scratch the surface of the education, support and tools Equine Guelph provides to the Canadian and global equestrian industry. Their countless resources also include everything from a vaccination equi-planner to a colic risk rater to free access to current research materials.

EC applauds Equine Guelphs invaluable work to drive positive change and continuous learning in the equine industry, and is honoured to recognize this Canadian-based, globally-respected organization with the 2019 EC Health & Welfare Award.

(Equine Guelph)
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New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo is holding his daily press conference on the Covid-19 outbreak, which has infected more than 203,300 people across the state as of Wednesday, according to data compiled by Johns Hopkins University.

On Tuesday, Cuomo said coronavirus deaths have started to level off at "a devastating level of pain and grief." The state has reported nearly 800 coronavirus deaths per day with the total surging past 10,800 people. Cuomo also said he would not engage in a fight with President Donald Trump as tensions escalated over who has the authority to reopen the U.S. economy.

"This is not time for politics, and it is no time to fight. I put my hand out in total partnership and cooperation with the president. If he wants a fight he's not going to get it from me. Period," Cuomo said at a press conference in Albany.

The coronavirus has infected more than 609,900 people in the U.S. and has killed at least 26,000, the highest death toll of any country. Globally, the coronavirus has infected more than 2 million people and has killed at least 128,800, according to JHU data.

Read CNBC's live updates to see the latest news on the Covid-19 outbreak.
Joaquin Phoenix calls for NY to release some prisoners amid COVID-19 spread

American actor Joaquin Phoenix called for New York to release some prison inmates, in light of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The 45-year-old on Tuesday (local time) shared his thoughts in a tweet released by the Release Aging People in Prison Campaign. Phoenix called on Gov. Andrew Cuomo, a Democrat, to take action immediately.

A message from Oscar award winning actor Joaquin Phoenix: Im calling on @NYGovCuomo to take action in New York by granting clemency to New Yorkers in prison. The lives of so many people depend on his action. No one deserves to die in prison from COVID-19. #ClemencyNow pic.twitter.com/CEFEkwVTBV  Release Aging People in Prison Campaign (@RAPPcampaign) April 14, 2020

The tweet began, "A message from Oscar award-winning actor Joaquin Phoenix : I'm calling on @NYGovCuomo to take action in New York by granting clemency to New Yorkers in prison. The lives of so many people depend on his action. No one deserves to die in prison from COVID-19."

Earlier in the video, he said, "The spread of coronavirus in prisons threatens the health and safety of all of us."

"When you're incarcerated there's no such thing as social distancing and ensuring good hygiene is not an option. Leaders must do everything possible to prevent incarcerated people and those who work in prisons from becoming ill and spreading the virus," the actor added.

According to Fox News, as of Tuesday, there have been nearly 600,000 cases of the coronavirus in the United States and just over 25,000 deaths.
Source: Xinhua| 2020-04-15 14:11:56|Editor: Wang Yamei

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BELGRADE, April 15 (Xinhua) -- Entering its fourth working week, the team of Chinese medical experts dispatched here to help Serbia tackle its COVID-19 crisis has visited seven cities and over 20 medical institutions, covering most of the COVID-19 hotspots in the country.

"We have a busy schedule. We get up at 6 every morning and return to where we stay around 7 or 8 p.m. With a report to finish, we usually get to rest late at night." Long Qisui, an epidemiologist from the team, told Xinhua on Saturday.

The team, which came from the southern Chinese province of Guangdong, comprises epidemiologists, respiratory disease and emergency medicine specialists, as well as a clinical psychologist.

They came to help "out of international humanitarianism and the 'steel-like' friendship between China and Serbia. I think it is a very meaningful thing," said Guo Yubiao, a respiratory disease expert on the team.

PRACTICAL SUGGESTIONS

Since their arrival on March 21, the experts have held several seminars with local officials and doctors, sharing their experience in efficiently tracing the source of infection, early treatment of patients, and strengthening triage at outpatient clinics.

More than five weeks have passed since Serbia reported its first case on March 6, and "generally speaking, the fifth and sixth weeks are the most critical time," said Lin Bingliang, an epidemiologist on the team.

During this period of time, the number of cases will slowly increase and the death toll will also climb, mounting pressure on the health care system, Lin said, repeatedly stressing the importance of expanding tests.

"We have seen very big progress in this respect," said Lin, adding that Serbia's testing ability has reached more than 2,000 a day, a rapid increase from a dozen a few weeks ago.

The number of newly confirmed cases in Serbia has not risen as fast as the number of people tested every day, which is a good sign, said Lin.

As of Tuesday afternoon, Serbia reported 4,465 cases, with 94 deaths.

Serbia's rapid response, including expanding tests and building temporary hospitals, showed that the country attached importance to their suggestions and learned from China's experience to optimize its own epidemic prevention and control, said Peng Zhiqiang, head of the team.

Considering that makeshift hospitals are helpful to address the shortage of beds in hospitals, Serbian army on March 24 started to transform Belgrade Fair in the Serbian capital into a temporary hospital with 3,000 beds.

The dusk-to-dawn curfew currently imposed across Serbia has achieved good results in reducing the mobility and gathering of people, said Pen, who also praised the country's decision to shut down borders.

The experts suggested closely monitoring Serbian nationals who returned home before the closure of borders.

Around 400,000 Serbians from abroad will finish their self-quarantine at home.

"At first we find the enemy and dig the trenches. Now it's time to re-examine the previous work and fix the loopholes. After that we may be able to take the initiative to destroy the enemy," said Long.

WARM WELCOME

Facing a tight schedule and the challenges ahead, the Chinese experts said they were deeply moved by the Serbian people's trust in them.

On the night of their arrival, they received a warm welcome from Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic and local doctors.

Together with the team, the first batch of 16 tons of medical supplies donated by China, including ventilators, masks and protective gear, also arrived at Belgrade.

Vucic said in a welcome address that the Chinese experts' coming to help is of "immense importance to our country," and the medical aid is "life-saving."

"Thank you" is what they heard most during their stay in Serbia, the experts said, adding that patients often gave them a thumbs-up when they walked into the wards.

"Local people now can recognize our vehicle. One day in a traffic jam, they all gave way to our vehicle and smiled and waved to us in their cars." Long said.

Chinese Ambassador to Serbia Chen Bo said in an earlier interview with Xinhua that the Serbian government sent emergency medical supplies to China when the coronavirus broke out, and organized concerts at home to show solidarity.

"The two countries are brothers through thick and thin, and have a friendship like iron and steel," she said.

China is a country that showed its best organization ability in the fight against the coronavirus crisis, said Marko Djuric, vice president of the ruling Serbian Progressive Party, adding that "we should always learn from the best."
The health department on Wednesday ordered closure of a hospital in Daliganj area after it was found that a person who tested positive for coronavirus was admitted there a few days back.

Notice was issued for closure of hospital and all clinical and para-medical staff will remain under home quarantine and a list of the same has been demanded from the owners of the Daliganj Hospital, said Lucknows chief medical officer (CMO) Dr Narendra Agrawal, in a press statement.

Different medical associations have, however, opposed the decision.

Dr Anoop Agrawal, secretary of the UP Orthopaedic Association, who owns a hospital in Faijullaganj said, This is discrimination between the government and private hospitals. When a corona positive patient had visited the KGMU, its sanitization was done and functioning of the casualty ward was resumed within 36 hours but the same is not being done in a private hospital.

Dr Rama Srivastava, president IMA, Lucknow said, Even if a positive patient visited a private hospital sanitization can be done and the staff in direct contact should be put under quarantine but the hospitals should not be sealed.

The decision to run or keep the hospital closed should be with the owner, he said.

Dr PK Gupta, former IMA president, Lucknow, on Wednesday announced to close his pathology for a few days.

I was running services for four hours a day but if the health department will take such actions it is better to keep establishment closed till the situation is better and health department turns supportive instead of discriminatory.

Doctors said that if such types of actions are taken services such as ultrasound, x-ray and pathology may get affected.

Private sector is supporting the government that has asked us to run emergency services. But if we have to face action for supporting the administration what choice do we have but to shut shops till better times, said Dr Agrawal.
Many Australian landlords are offering a month's free rent to lure in tenants after the coronavirus pandemic sparked an economic downturn.

Landlords in Sydney - known for its sky-high rents - are being taking the drastic action after many renters left the market; either moving back in with parents to save money or expats going back overseas.

With hundreds of thousands of Australians and foreign workers stood down by businesses across the country, many were unable to pay their rent and left major cities.

The exodus has sparked a 300 per cent rise in vacant rental listings in the past month in some areas of Sydney, according to date from realestate.com.au.

Landlords are offering massively reduced rent across Sydney due to the coronavirus crisis. Pictured: Listing for Paddington

One property in Olympic Park, home to the Opal Tower debacle, is being offered rent free for the first four weeks

The same situation is also causing price drops in Brisbane, with apartments in the city's Sky Tower lowering their rent.

'Price drop! Fully furnished one bedroom apartments in Sky Tower at just $400 a week,' an advertisement read.

A two-bedroom apartment on Adelaide Street, in Brisbane City, is charging $550 per week with free rent available until April 30.

On Queen Street in Brisbane's CBD, Spire is offering six weeks free rent and three months free internet for a two-bedroom unit which costs $750 per week.

Other landlords are offering massively reduced rent across Sydney, with one four-bedroom house in the northern beaches offering a whopping $445-a-week discount for the first six months.

Offering ocean views in Fairlight, it now costs $950-a-week rather than $1,395.

Similarly in Bondi Junction in the city's east, a three-bed house was reduced from $1,300 to $1,000-a-week - a $7,800 saving over the six month period.

Pictured: Sydney Olympic Park is located 15 kilometres west of the Sydney CBD. Both suburbs have dozens of listings offering free and reduced rent incentives

A two-bedroom apartment in Chatswood has dropped rent to $580 per week after charging $750 for the past four years

'No one wants to [reduce rents], but it's better to get something coming in,' Rebecca Kleiner of LJ Hooker Bondi Junction told domain.com.au.

Ms Kleiner said vacancy was the 'biggest expense' during the pandemic.

Homes across Sydney were being offered with the first two weeks' rent for free to entice willing lodgers.

One property in Olympic Park, home to the Opal Tower debacle, is being offered rent free for the first four weeks.

Other landlords are reducing their asking price altogether, realising renters are unlikely to be able to pay higher costs in just a few weeks' time.

A two-bedroom apartment in Chatswood was being offered at $580 per week after charging $750 for the previous four years.

On Queen Street in Brisbane's CBD, Spire is offering six weeks free rent and three months free internet for a two-bedroom unit which costs $750 per week

The same situation is also causing price drops in Brisbane, with apartments in the city's Sky Tower lowering their rent

'Rather than see the unit remain vacant over the next 6 months (or more) the owners have instructed us to reduce the rent significantly, right now, in order to secure tenants,' the listing reads.

'So if you're searching for a bargain. This is it'

The coronavirus pandemic has also led to discounted rent in Melbourne.

'A lot of them [landlords] have the initiative to actually offer such discounts, given the current times,' Greg Hocking Holdsworth's Carlo Russo told Domain.

'Just to help people out and, as well, be a bit more competitive.'

Mr Russo said the price on any rental property can be discussed during the health crisis, even if it's not listed with a discount.

He has advertised a one-bedroom terrace in Albert Park for $590 per week, with the first three months discounted to $500.

One CBD apartment listed at $1,695 per calendar month has been discounted to $1,477 per month for tenants who have lost income due to the health crisis for the first three months.

Greg Hocking Holdsworth's Carlo Russo has advertised a one-bedroom terrace in Albert Park (pictured) for $590 per week, with the first three months discounted to $500

Consumer researcher Graham Cooke, from Finder.com.au, said the pandemic is creating a 'tenant's market' in major cities.

Mr Cooke said the outlook is improving for lease-hunters, with rents expected to drop by up to 10 to 20 per cent.

Fewer international students, a slow housing market and a ban on Airbnb rental properties in NSW is expected to place downward pressure on rents.

He explained: 'There's been three drivers behind it - student accommodation, there's not a lot of students coming in from overseas.

'We're already seeing a lot of short term rental properties coming onto the long-term rental market after Airbnbs were declared illegal.

'(And) because of the difficulty of selling a house right now, we're probably going to have a lot of people who were trying to sell postponing.

'That will lead to an increase in stock on the market, which will probably, in turn, push rents down'.
Billings, MT, April 15, 2020 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) --

rmb lOGO

Billings, MT  Rocky Mountain Bank announced today it will commit $100,000 to support four local community initiatives related to Montanas COVID-19 crisis. The Billings-based bank will make significant contributions to the Billings Food Bank, HRDC, Flathead Food Bank, and Family Promise of Gallatin Valley. This latest community outreach follows earlier announcements about the banks comprehensive COVID-19 response measures centered around financial relief for clients and employee safety.

This is an unprecedented time for families and businesses across Montana, expressed Tod Petersen, President and CEO of Rocky Mountain Bank. Our employees, clients, and community continue to come together to help one another during this crisis. It has reinforced how fortunate we are to live and work in Montana. On behalf of our amazing team at Rocky Mountain Bank, I am proud to support these important community relief efforts.

As the COVID-19 crisis persists, the demand for emergency meal services, shelter services, and related hardship services continues to surge. Rocky Mountain Bank has focused its contribution to support these growing needs.

Contribution funds will be allocated to the following causes:

$40,000 for Billings Food Bank

Rocky Mountain Bank will contribute $40,000 to the Billings Food Bank. The organization provides more than 14 million pounds of food to local residents needing assistance every year. It also helps distribute blankets, quilts, hygiene kits, student lunches, and other essentials across the region. The nonprofit also operates the Fortin Cafe & Gift Shop and the Fortin Culinary Training Center. More information is at https://billingsfoodbank.com/ .

$30,000 for HRDC

HRDC will receive $30,000 from Rocky Mountain Bank. The nonprofit operates the Gallatin Valley Food Bank, Big Sky Community Food Bank, and Headwaters Area Food Bank. It also runs Bozemans Fork and Spoon, an innovative pay-what-you-can cafe, and the Warming Center for the Homeless. Additionally, the group leads a series of other initiatives centered on housing, community transportation, senior empowerment, youth development, and more. More information is at http://www.thehrdc.org/ .

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"While HRDC's mission has not changed, how we meet that mission is constantly evolving in this challenging time, explained Heather Grenier, president/CEO of HRDC. This support will enable us to ensure nobody goes to bed hungry, everyone has a safe, warm place to shelter in place and our elderly have the essential items they need to remain safe at home. We continue to be humbled by the generosity of this community and the support for our neighbors in need."





$20,000 for Flathead Food Bank

Rocky Mountain Bank will provide $20,000 to the Flathead Food Bank. The organization provides food services to disadvantaged individuals and families across the Kalispell region. The organizations key programs include its main Kalispell pantry, mobile pantry service, student backpack lunch program, and its commodity supplemental food program. More information is at http://flatheadfoodbank.org/ .

Thank you Rocky Mountain Bank for this amazing blessing so we can feed not only Flathead County but Northwest Montana and all of those struggling during our global crisis, expressed Jamie Quinn, executive director for Flathead Food Bank. Your support will help us to get food to children out of school, senior citizens sheltering in place, people laid off during a difficult period in their lives, and so many others.

$10,000 for Family Promise of Gallatin Valley

Rocky Mountain Bank will contribute $10,000 to Family Promise of Gallatin Valley. The nonprofit works with a large base of local volunteers to provide shelter, meals, job training, and other necessities to bring lasting solutions to families in need. More information is at http://www.familypromisegv.org/ .

"Imagine being told to shelter in place and homeschool your children, when you don't have a home to go to, asked Christel Chvilicek, executive director of Family Promise of Gallatin Valley. The support from Rocky Mountain Bank during this pandemic will ensure we can continue to support our most at risk population in Gallatin Valley. We can't thank them enough for the support."

CONTACT:

Tod Petersen

President & CEO

Rocky Mountain Bank

406-556-7607

tpetersen@rmbank.com



Steve Ebner

Regional Marketing Officer

Rocky Mountain Bank

303-880-3405

sebner@htlf.com

About

About Rocky Mountain Bank Rocky Mountain Bank, a subsidiary of Heartland Financial USA, Inc., (HTLF), is a state-chartered, community-invested bank with more than $532 million in assets. Headquartered in Billings, Montana, the bank also has offices in Bigfork, Bozeman, Kalispell, Plains, Plentywood, Stevensville and Whitehall. With a focus on business and personal lending, and deposit services, they are dedicated to making Great Things Happen! for their customers. For more information, visit www.rmbank.com or call 406.655.5112. Rocky Mountain Bank is a member of the FDIC and an Equal Housing Lender. About Heartland Financial USA, Inc. Heartland Financial USA, Inc. is a diversified financial services company with assets of $13.2 billion. The company provides banking, mortgage, private client, investment and insurance services to individuals and businesses. Heartland currently has 114 banking locations serving 83 communities in Iowa, Illinois, Wisconsin, New Mexico, Arizona, Montana, Colorado, Minnesota, Kansas, Missouri, Texas and California. Additional information about Heartland Financial USA, Inc. is available at www.htlf.com. Safe Harbor Statement This release, and future oral and written statements of Heartland and its management, may contain forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995 about Heartlands financial condition, results of operations, plans, objectives, future performance and business. Although these forward-looking statements are based upon the beliefs, expectations and assumptions of Heartlands management, there are a number of factors, many of which are beyond the ability of management to control or predict, that could cause actual results to differ materially from those in its forward-looking statements. These factors, which are detailed in the risk factors included in Heartlands Annual Report on Form 10-K filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission, include, among others: (i) the strength of the local and national economy; (ii) the economic impact of past and any future terrorist threats and attacks and any acts of war, (iii) changes in state and federal laws, regulations and governmental policies concerning the Companys general business; (iv) changes in interest rates and prepayment rates of the Companys assets; (v) increased competition in the financial services sector and the inability to attract new customers; (vi) changes in technology and the ability to develop and maintain secure and reliable electronic systems; (vii) the loss of key executives or employees; (viii) changes in consumer spending; (ix) unexpected results of acquisitions; (x) unexpected outcomes of existing or new litigation involving the Company; and (xi) changes in accounting policies and practices. All statements in this release, including forward-looking statements, speak only as of the date they are made, and Heartland undertakes no obligation to update any statement in light of new information or future events.
Andrew Scheer says he has 'serious concerns' about WHO, Trudeau vows to stick with global health agency

Conservative Leader Andrew Scheer said Wednesday he has serious concerns about the World Health Organization (WHO) and its relationship with the communist regime in China.

Scheer also said he has reservations about the agency's track record during the pandemic, citing its initial claim that the virus did not spread easily between people, and its warning against closing borders to member states like China, as questionable advice given what we know now about the virus.

"We've got serious concerns about the accuracy of the information coming out of the WHO and it's incumbent upon this government to explain why they have based so many of their decisions on the WHO," Scheer said.

The WHO also advised against the use of non-medical masks by the general population, guidance that Canadian public health officials repeated for weeks  until they changed their position last week.

Watch: Andrew Scheer says he has 'serious concerns' about the WHO

Dr. Theresa Tam, the federal chief public health officer, now says wearing a mask could help slow the spread of COVID-19 by pre-symptomatic and asymptomatic people. She has said she'll wear a mask in public when social distancing isn't possible. Tam has served as an international expert on a number of WHO committees.

Based in part on WHO guidelines, the Canadian government also avoided closing its border to inbound foreign nationals for weeks  until an abrupt about-face in mid-March when it became clear such an action was crucial to stopping the influx of cases from abroad.

While caseloads spiked worldwide, the WHO waited until March 11 to declare COVID-19 a global pandemic.

"We've seen examples of how the communist, autocratic, human rights-abusing government of China has had an inordinate effect on the WHO. There's evidence of suppressing information, not being open and transparent about the number of cases. Those are very concerning," Scheer said.

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The Associated Press reported Wednesday that the Chinese regime suppressed evidence of the virus's transmissibility for six days in early January before going to the WHO to brief the agency on the extent of the COVID-19 outbreak.

The current director-general of the WHO, Tedros Adhanom, visited China in January and praised the country's leadership for "setting a new standard for outbreak response."

The AP report comes a day after U.S. President Donald Trump announced his government would suspend its contributions to the WHO's budget. The U.S. is responsible for 15 per cent of the organization's funding, or some $400 million a year.

Trump said the WHO is complicit in the death of thousands because of its questionable response to the virus to this point.

Salvatore Di Nolfi/AP

Health Minister Patty Hajdu said Wednesday that the federal government still has confidence in the WHO.

"Canada values the work of the World Health Organization and we continue to commit to contribute towards the work of the organization. It is a very valuable tool," she said.

Scheer said he was troubled when Bruce Aylward, a Canadian epidemiologist who headed a WHO mission in China earlier this year, was dropped from the witness list for a House of Commons health committee meeting on Tuesday.

Aylward abruptly cancelled his appearance and did not reschedule.

Watch: Health Minister Patty Hajdu on the WHO

Matt Jeneroux, the Conservative health critic, said Aylward's actions were "unacceptable" and asked "who's really making the decisions" at the Switzerland-based organization.

The health committee voted Wednesday to summon Aylward to appear before that body before May 1.

"The WHO has backtracked on every position they have taken, meaning the Canadian government has backtracked as well," Jeneroux said in a media statement.

"There are many important questions Canadians have for the WHO about its advice in the past three months and what it has planned for the future. While it avoids questions, cases are growing and Canadians are more uneasy than ever."

When asked about the WHO's record during a pandemic that has now infected some two million people worldwide, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said Canada would continue to work with the United Nations-affiliated agency because this virus demands a global, coordinated response.

Watch: Prime Minister Justin Trudeau on the WHO's pandemic role

"I think there are, obviously, reflections that we have to have going forward. We have to make sure that we are doing everything we can to keep Canadians safe. That is our focus right now. What can we do now? What do we need to do in the coming weeks?" Trudeau said.

"How do we lean on experts in international institutions and in partner countries around the world who are making recommendations alongside our domestic experts on what we need to do now?"

Trudeau said there will be "plenty of time to reflect on challenges" in the future.

Watch: Scheer reiterates concerns about Canada's 'reliance' on China and the WHO on Thursday
Samaritans Purse has treated 130 patients in the 68-bed Central Park hospital since it opened on April 1, the group said on Tuesday. But its role in the response to the virus in New York has been criticized because of its position on L.G.B.T. issues and the past statements and political activities of Mr. Graham, a vocal supporter of President Trump.

On Sunday, Mr. Graham delivered an Easter message on Fox News while standing in front of his groups medical tents in Central Park. In the message, which included footage of virus patients with their faces obscured, he described the pandemic in terms similar to those used by the president: a storm that none of us anticipated and nobody expected.

On Tuesday, Mr. Graham said that critics had been harassing Samaritans Purse with information requests while it was busy trying to save lives. He specifically mentioned the New York City Commission on Human Rights; the Reclaim Pride Coalition, a progressive L.G.B.T. group; and Democratic members of Congress.

If any of these groups had funded and erected their own emergency field hospitals to serve Covid-19 patients in Central Park, we would join what we believe would be most New Yorkers  and Americans  in applauding and praying for them, not harassing them, he wrote on Facebook.

Last week, four Democratic members of New Yorks congressional delegation sent a letter to Kenneth L. Davis, the president of Mount Sinai Health System, Mayor Bill de Blasio and Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo asking how the Samaritans Purse field hospital would operate. The lawmakers also asked how the group came to be involved in the virus response in New York.
The lockdown imposed to control



the spread of COVID-19 pandemic has hit the sixth edition of 'Boi Utsab' (mini book fair) in which over 300 new Bengali titles by big-time and small publications were slated to hit the shelf on 'Bangla Nabo Barsho' (Bengali new year).

The 'Boi Utsab' organised by Publishers and Booksellers' Guild was not held on April 14, the Bengali new year due to the lockdown in force.

President of the apex body of publishers in state, Tridib Chatterjee told PTI on Wednesday that publishers would look at this occasion for bringing out new titles, covering different fictional/non-fictional subjects and there was great enthusiasm among Bengali readers.

"While we were going ahead with the plan and publishers like Dey's Publishing, Mitra O Ghosh and others were all set to bring out several new titles, there were the quick, swift developments from mid-March triggered by the pandemic and before we could firm up an alternative plan, the lockdown started. All of us are now staring at a big loss," he said.

Apu Dey from Dey's Publishing said three of their important titles for Nabo Barsho release - which included a compilation of all literary works of late Bengali poet-writer Buddhadeb Guha, with the first volume slated to be published in this Poila Boisakh, the collection of all novels, including unpublished ones, by writer Buddhadeb Guha - were ready for binding when the lockdown began.

"Thousands of such printed contents are now lying at the binding units in central Kolkata which are locked as the employees havie left for home in villages or are stuck in different parts of locked down city," he said.

Over 20 new Bengali titles were scheduled to be published by Dey's Publishing at the mini book fair during Nabo Barsho at College Square area, adjacent to the hub of booksellers and publications - College Street.

Chatterjee said his Patrabharati publications would have come up with several new titles and three of these titles were at the binding unit when the pandemic alert set in and all the units suddenly shut down.

"Around four lakh people - small time book sellers, workers and owners of printing units and binding units, small time publishers, not to mention about bigger publishers and their staff - are in serious crisis in the emerging situation and we are desperately looking for a solution," he said.

Dey said since non-text and reference books don't fall in the category of essential services, "we are not able to deliver online orders and make up the loss."



Chatterjee claimed Kerala government has included online delivery of non-text books in the essential category during COVID-19 lockdown.

"We would soon approach West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee with a similar plea. Books help to shape our views, knowledge, and curiosity about life and enrich us mentally. Can't books be considered an essential part in our lives," he wondered.

Asked when the unpublished books can hit the stands, Chatterjee said, "we have plans to release our five titles during foundation day celebration of our publication in August. Dont know what others will do. But we are looking forward to improve the situation first."



A spokesman of Mitra o Ghosh Publishers said, "we had plans to bring out several new titles during this time. Nababarsho used to be an important occasion for years for our old publication. And this new book event at College Street had given new thrust in the Bengali book publishing business for past six years to counter the threat from e-books. But corona has suddenly changed everything."



Guild sources did not give a specific figure about last year's book sales during week long Naba Barsho event but said there were decent sales in 80 stalls.

Publishers said the tradition of authors, publishers and booklovers assembling at College Street on the first day of the Bengali New Year to have a debate on literature over food and music at the offices of different publishers had started in the 60s, which witnessed a declining trend since 2000 but still continued.

As part of the effort to revive the tradition, Guild started the Nabobarsho Boi Utsav on 2014 and this was the first time that the Boipara wore a desolate forlorn look.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
A series of blue and silver pinwheels are placed along the garden outside Paducah midtowns Coke Plant as part of the national Pinwheels for Prevention campaign. Locally, Child Watch Childrens Advocacy Center and Lotus are encouraging placement of pinwheels throughout the city to promote awareness for National Child Abuse Prevention Month.
President Donald Trumps announced intention to halt U.S. funding to the World Health Organization is shining a new spotlight on the U.N. agencys role in combating the coronavirus pandemic and whether it has been too deferential to China, where the virus first erupted.

WHO was one of numerous international organizations created as part of the U.N. in the years after World War II and for seven decades has played a key role in shaping the response to global health crises. Over the years, WHO has helped eradicate smallpox, reduced polio cases by 99% and been on the front lines of the battle against such outbreaks as Ebola.

But the controversy over Trumps bid to halt the estimated $445 million the U.S. contributes annually to WHOs $4.8 billion budget  the most of any country  comes at a crucial time. There is no cure or vaccine  and may not be for months or a year  for the disease that as of Wednesday afternoon EDT had killed more than 133,000 people around the globe.

Trump, who has blamed U.S. state governors for not stockpiling medical equipment needed to treat coronavirus patients, himself downplayed the threat the coronavirus posed to the United States for weeks earlier this year before declaring a national emergency in mid-March.

In halting U.S. support for WHO, Trump blamed its deference to China, one of the agencys key funding countries, for keeping the world from reacting faster to the pandemic.

First report

After China first reported a mysterious but small number of pneumonia cases December 31, WHO said in early January that it had asked for more information from Beijing but advised against the application of any travel or trade restrictions on China based on the current information available on this event.

In late January, WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus sat alongside Chinese President Xi Jinping in Beijing's Great Hall of the People and praised Chinas response to the coronavirus crisis.

We appreciate the seriousness with which China is taking this outbreak, especially the commitment from top leadership, and the transparency they have demonstrated," Tedros said. Chinese state media quoted the comments for weeks.

Trump, at Tuesday nights coronavirus briefing, said, "With the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, we have deep concerns whether Americas generosity [to WHO] has been put to the best use possible."

Here is a primer on WHO:

The agency was founded in 1948 and now is run by 194 member states. It was created to coordinate international health policy for the United Nations, particularly on infectious diseases.

Each country sends health experts to represent it in the World Health Assembly, WHOs decision- and policymaking body. The assembly meets annually in Geneva.

WHO has regional headquarters in Africa, North and South America, Southeast Asia, Europe, the Eastern Mediterranean and the Western Pacific. It has 7,000 employees spread across 150 field offices throughout the world.

Structure, funding criticized

Despite WHOs success in helping eradicate smallpox and all but eliminating polio, the agency has drawn criticism over the years as too bureaucratic, badly structured and too dependent on major donors.

WHO acknowledged its poor response to the 2013-16 Ebola outbreak in West Africa. The agency took five months to declare a public health emergency of international concern over Ebola. One academic assessment said the delay "undoubtedly contributed to the unprecedented scale of the outbreak."

In 2014, former WHO consultant Charles Clift wrote that the agency "is too politicized, too bureaucratic, too dominated by medical staff seeking medical solutions to what are often social and economic problems, too timid in approaching controversial issues, too overstretched and too slow to adapt to change."

WHO gets its funding from throughout the world, but only partly from individual countries. International organizations, private donors and its parent organization, the U.N., also fund WHO.

Each member state in WHO pays dues based on the countrys wealth and population. But these dues constitute only about a quarter of WHOs funding. The remainder comes from voluntary contributions, effectively donations from countries around the world or individual donors.

US tops donor list

The U.S. is the biggest donor, giving $893 million in the two-year, 2018-19 funding cycle. Of that figure, $237 million came from required membership dues and $656 million from donations.

The second-biggest national donor, the United Kingdom, paid $434.8 million in dues and donations during that same time span. China contributed nearly $86 million.

The U.S. voluntary donations amounted to nearly 15% of the world total. The second-biggest donor was the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, buttressed by Bill Gates wealth as co-founder of Microsoft Corp.


Restaurateurs on Tuesday walked away from more than $900,000 that federal law enforcement had alleged was part of a drug money laundering scheme linking Wyoming and Colorado fast-food restaurants to Mexican drug cartels.

The news came via a federal court filing in which lawyers for Monicas Taco Shop in Colorado Springs  as well as four people associated with the restaurant  announced they would withdraw their claim to two safe deposit boxes and a bank account. Court documents filed in the case indicate that the safe deposit boxes held $805,000 cash and the bank account was worth another $101,000.

When reached by phone late Tuesday afternoon, a DEA spokesman declined to talk in detail about the civil forfeiture proceedings or a parallel criminal case that has been conducted largely behind sealed court filings. David Tyree, who leads the agencys Wyoming office, confirmed, though, the amounts of money forfeited in the cases most recent public filing.

The latest forfeitures are in addition to another $200,000 that has been turned over to the government since the case became public in early 2019.

According to court documents filed by prosecutors last year, the bank account forfeited Tuesday was registered in the names of Raul Rodriguez, Guillermina Lopez and Adriana E. Rodriguez, all of Colorado Springs, as well as in the name of Monicas Taco Shop, a restaurant on the east side of the southern Colorado city.

One of the safe-deposit boxes was entirely full with cash in held grocery bags when federal agents seized it in June 2018, according to the documents. Records kept of access to the safe deposit box indicated that all of the 16 times Monica Rodriguez-Lopez accessed the box over the course of nine years she appeared to be pregnant, which prosecutors insinuated was actually the outline of a false belly filled with cash.

Both safe deposit boxes were  according to the prosecutors filing  registered in the name of Rodriguez-Lopez. One was also registered in Adriana Rodriguezs name.

The documents state that invoices sent by El Potosino Foods  the Colorado food supplier alleged to be at the center of the scheme  indicate that the restaurant and food distributor laundered money by inflating the price of food items in order to make drug money look like payment for ingredients. A package of tortillas, the documents state by way of example, increased in cost from about $3 to nearly $15 in shipments sent a week apart from one another.

El Potosino was run by Jose Aguilar-Martinez, whom Tyree has previously referred to as the investigations target. The governments filings indicate that at least $13,000 of the money already forfeited was taken from accounts belonging to Aguilar-Martinez.

Authorities say that Aguilar-Martinez has connections with a Mexican drug cartel: his phone number turned up in previous investigations of Ismael El Mayo Zambada and Joaquin El Chapo Guzman.

Zambada and Guzman run the Sinaloa Cartel, which is thought to be among the largest drug trafficking organizations in the world. A federal jury in New York last year convicted Guzman of crimes including operating a continuing criminal enterprise and murder. He was sentenced to life in prison. Zambada still evades law enforcement.

According to prosecutors filings, Aguilar-Martinez would provide money from drug sales to the restaurants, which would then deposit the money into restaurant bank accounts disguised as food sales. El Potosino would then issue falsified invoices for ingredients and supplies to the restaurants. The restaurateurs would then pay El Potosino for items that the restaurants never actually received, according to the government. When El Potosino deposited those checks in its accounts, the money would then appear legitimate.

Among restaurants named in the civil case are Rodolfos Mexican Grill in Cheyenne, Rolandos Mexican Grill in Cheyenne and Almanzas Mexican Food in Laramie. Although the Laramie restaurant is named in the civil filings, which began in November, the government has not publicly sought the forfeiture of any of its money, save for an account opened in Aguilar-Martinezs name but that authorities said was associated with the restaurant. An attorney for the restaurants owners has said his clients strongly denied wrongdoing.

The civil filings also indicate an account associated with Rolandos Mexican Grill closed before law enforcement began investigating the case.

Many named restaurants denied the governments claims and asked for return of the money. A judge in April of last year denied a request to dismiss the case. The same month, prosecutors asked that the case be put on hold, saying they needed first to focus on a related criminal investigation. That six-month hold was renewed in October. The government has twice since filed sealed updates to the court.

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A doctor examines a COVID-19 patient in Hanoi (Photo: VNA)

The patient is a 46-year-old man residing in Ha Loi commune, Me Linh district, Hanoi.

He is father of the 257th patient and husband of the 258th patient. He had close contact with the 243rd patient on March 20.

He was taken to a quarantine centre on April 8 and started to develop a fever, sore throat and tiredness five days later.

He tested positive for the novel coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 on April 14.

The man is being treated at the National Hospital for Tropical Diseases No.2 in Hanois Dong Anh district.

So far, 169 people who contracted the disease have been treated and made full recovery.
A Boeing 737 Max aircraft is seen parked outside the company's production facility in Renton

By David Shepardson and Rachit Vats

(Reuters) - Boeing Co on Tuesday reported another 75 cancellations for its 737 MAX jetliner in March, as the coronavirus crisis worsened disruptions from the grounding of its best-selling jet.

The U.S. planemaker posted a total of 150 MAX cancellations in March, including 75 previously reported from Irish leasing company Avolon. New cancellations came from buyers including 34 of 135 aircraft ordered by Brazil's GOL.

The cancellations come as Boeing seeks to untangle delivery commitments after halting output of the MAX in January, following delays in returning it to service.

Boeing, facing a 13-month-old freeze on deliveries of the MAX and now disruption to deliveries of larger planes due to the coronavirus epidemic, said it had delivered 50 planes in the first quarter, barely a third of the 149 seen a year earlier.

That was the lowest since 1984 for the first quarter.

The company posted orders in March for 12 787 Dreamliners, one 767 freighter and 18 pre-MAX versions of the 737 for the P-8 maritime patrol program. For the first quarter, it posted 49 new orders, or a negative total of 147 after cancellations.

After further accounting adjustments representing jets ordered in previous years but now unlikely to be delivered, Boeing's adjusted net orders sank to a negative 307 airplanes.

The pandemic has forced Boeing and European rival Airbus to cut production in the face of plunging demand, cash problems at airlines and logistical difficulties in delivering aircraft.

Boeing halted production of the MAX in January and remains in talks with regulators seeking approval to return the plane to service. Last week, Boeing said it was addressing two new software issues with the MAX flight control computer.

U.S. airlines, suffering an unprecedented downturn in demand due to the coronavirus, are close to accepting the terms of a $25 billion offer for government payroll aid.

(Reporting by Rachit Vats, David Shepardson and Tim Hepher; Editing by Maju Samuel)
DETROIT, MI -- Fiat Chrysler Automobiles, Ford Motor Company and General Motors Company have come together to endorse a Michigan ballot campaign to ban discrimination against lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender individuals.

The companies announced Wednesday, April 15, their first joint endorsement to back the Fair and Equal Michigan campaign.

The state ballot initiative aims to amend the Elliot Larsen Civil Rights Act, which already protects individuals against discrimination in employment, public accommodation and housing based on 10 factors, including age, race, sex, and religion. The ballot initiative would amend the current law by defining sex as including gender, sexual orientation, and gender identity or expression.

Endorsement from the Big 3 came two days after the Fair and Equal Michigan campaign became the first ballot initiative in the state to collect electronic signatures in light of COVID-19.

The initiative launched Jan. 7 and has about 150,000 signatures. It needs 340,047 resident signatures to get the citizen-initiated bill to the legislature.

Fair and Equal Michigan is contracting with DocuSign to gather signatures. Voters can access the petition from the groups website, where two-factor authentication is used to cross-reference peoples drivers license or state ID number with their voter file.

Trevor Thomas, co-chair for Fair and Equal Michigan, said the auto companies endorsement is a significant milestone for the campaign.

The Big Three auto companies understand that every Michigander deserves a fair and equal chance to succeed," Thomas said. FCA, Ford and GM know first-hand this is about attracting and retaining the best talent to Michigan in support of economy.

Mark Stewart, chief operating officer for Fiat Chrysler Automobiles in North America said FCA is committed to creating a diverse and inclusive working environment that enables the company to exceed the expectations of its diverse customer base.

In that spirit, we believe that amending the Elliott-Larsen Civil Rights Act to include protections for LGBTQ individuals is an important step towards achieving full equality and respect for all people," Stewart said.

Lori Costew, chief diversity officer at Ford Motor Company, said Fords team welcomes and values everyones unique contributions by fostering a safe and inclusive work environment.

"In order to continue to compete and win globally, we must be able to recruit and retain the talented people from all backgrounds, Costew said. In supporting these efforts to expand the Elliott-Larsen Civil Rights Act, Ford Motor Company affirms our belief that inclusion of everyone makes us stronger, drives more innovation and, in turn, is best for customers and other stakeholders.

Ken Barrett, chief diversity officer for General Motors Company, said the automaker stands with its LGBTQ employees and their families as proud members of the Human Rights Campaigns Business Coalition.

At GM, promoting a culture that is inclusive and free of discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity, affords all our employees to proudly be who they are at work an environment that is open, supportive, and empowering where everyone is valued and belongs, Barrett said.

Other companies that have issued support for Fair and Equal Michigan include DTE Energy, Consumers Energy, Apple, Dow, Rock Holdings, and Herman Miller. It has been endorsed by the Ann Arbor-Ypsilanti Chamber, Michigan Dental Association, League of Women Voters, American Association of University Women and State Employees Retiree Association.

While the group behind Fair and Equal Michigan has informed the state of its plan to collect electronic signatures, they did not ask for permission to do so, per a statement from Michigan Department of State spokesperson Jake Rollow.

We have not yet determined if we can accept signatures collected as they propose as we have not yet conducted a full legal analysis, Rollow said in the statement. "No signatures collected in this way have yet been provided to us.

A recent executive order from Gov. Gretchen Whitmer reinforced using electronic signatures, saying theyre OK unless law specifically mandates a physical signature.

The campaign began sending out petitions by mail once the coronavirus pandemic hit Michigan. The group behind it has until May 27 to collect the necessary signatures.

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:

How to track when your coronavirus stimulus check will arrive

Whitmer sees reasons to believe stay-at-home is working against coronavirus

Michigan prioritizing coronavirus insurance appeals

Michigan health care system launches study testing for coronavirus antibodies
The World Heath Organisation has found itself with serious questions to answer after President Trump accused the UN agency of 'severely mismanaging' its response to the coronavirus pandemic and withheld $500million in funding.

The WHO has been spearheading global efforts to fight the virus, but has come under attack for playing along with China as the country sought to minimise its initial outbreak and the threat the disease posed.

Critics point to its uncritical parroting of Chinese government data, early claims that the disease was not spreading person-to-person, and praise for the country's leaders as evidence that it was not fulfilling its role.

Trump - who is facing heavy criticism for his own response - has blasted the WHO for advising against travel bans, which he claims 'accelerated the pandemic all around the world', and called for an investigation.

Here, the Mail Online has tracked key WHO statements about coronavirus - from the first cases, through China's outbreak, and beyond - to reveal what the world's largest health body said and when as the disease spread...

Donald Trump gives a briefing at the White House on Tuesday announcing that he will suspend all US funding to the World Health Organisation

December 31  China first reports a cluster of unusual pneumonia cases in Wuhan to the WHO

January 4  WHO tweets about a cluster of pneumonia cases in Wuhan with no deaths, saying investigations into the cause are underway

January 5  The WHO issues its first guidance on pneumonia of unknown cause, saying there are a total of 44 patients and 11 in severe condition. The main symptom is listed as fever, with a few patients having difficulty breathing

The WHO says there is no evidence of human-to-human transmission and that no health care worker infections have been reported

January 7  China says it has identified the cause of the pneumonia as a novel coronavirus, initially named 2019-nCoV by the WHO

China first reported cases of 'pneumonia of unknown cause' to the WHO on December 31, and the agency put out its first tweet on January 4 saying the cause was being investigated

January 9  The WHO praises China for identifying the new virus in a short space of time and repeats its assessment that the virus does not transmit readily between people. It also advises against travel or trade restrictions on China

January 13  The WHO says it is now working with authorities in Thailand after reports of a case there, and may call a meeting of the Emergency Committee

January 14  The WHO tweets saying there is no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission in China, though later clarifies and says there may have been limited transmission via family members

Jan 20-21 - WHO's field team in China conducts a brief field visit to epicentre Wuhan

Jan 21  The first case is confirmed on US soil in Washington, in a person who had travelled from China a week before

Jan 22  A report from the WHO team sent to Wuhan notes human-to-human transmission is taking place, but says more research is needed to assess the full extent. The report notes confirmed infections in 16 medics, a clear sign of transmission from patients

The team recommends avoiding large gatherings, isolating infected people, and a focus on washing hands as the best way to combat the viruss spread

The same day, that WHO Emergency Committee convenes for the first time. Afterwards, Dr Tedros says he has spoken with the Chinese Minister for Health, and praises the government for its invaluable efforts to halt the virus. He calls a second meeting for the following day

Jan 23  With the Emergency Committee split, Dr Tedros says he has decided not to declare the virus a public health emergency of international concern. Referencing the lockdown of Wuhan, which was announced the same day, he says he hopes it will be effective and short in duration. He praises Chinas cooperation and transparency in tackling the virus

Dr Tedros says there is limited evidence of human-to-human transmission, mostly among families or doctors treating the virus. At this point, there are 584 confirmed cases and 17 deaths globally, including in Vietnam, South Korea, Japan, Thailand and the US

On January 14, more than a month after the first infections at this seafood market are thought to have taken place, the WHO tweeted saying China had found no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission

He recommends screening at airports and tells countries to put testing facilities in place, but stops short of recommending a travel ban

Jan 28  Dr Tedros and other senior WHO officials meet Xi Jinping in China, agreeing that a panel of experts should be sent to monitor the outbreak. He praises the seriousness with which China is taking this outbreak, especially the commitment from top leadership and the transparency they have demonstrated

Jan 29  Dr Tedros gives a speech praising Chinas efforts to contain the virus, saying the country deserves our gratitude and respect for locking down swathes of the country to prevent the spread.

He notes a few cases of human-to-human spread outside China, which he says is of grave concern and will be monitored closely

Jan 30  The WHO Emergency Committee reconvenes early and declares a public health emergency of international concern. It comes after confirmed cases of human-to-human transmission in Germany, Japan, Vietnam and the US

Dr Tedros again praises China for setting a new standard for outbreak response with its lockdowns, and says the small number of cases outside the country  98  is thanks to their efforts

Despite noting that a majority of cases outside China have a history of travel to or from Wuhan, he again recommends no measures to curb international travel or trade

Jan 31  Donald Trump announces travel restrictions on people coming from China

Feb 3  Dr Tedros gives a speech to the WHO updating on coronavirus, saying there are 17,238 cases in China and 361 deaths  now thought to be an under-estimate

He praises Xi Jinping for his individual leadership, and insists that cases outside China can be managed if world authorities work together and follow recommendations which include  no ban on travel or trade, supporting countries with weak health systems, investment in vaccines and diagnosis, combating disinformation and urgent reviews of emergency preparedness

Feb 7  Dr Li Wenliang, a doctor who first reported the existence of coronavirus and was initially silenced by China, dies from the virus

Feb 10  The WHOs team of experts arrives in China to assist with the outbreak

Feb 11  The WHO names the disease caused by the virus COVID-19, saying it avoided including a geographical name because it risks stigmatizing people. It says it will not be using the name SARS-CoV-2 because it risks causing unnecessary fear by linking it to the 2003 SARS outbreak

Tedros Ghebreyesus, WHO Secretary-General, pleaded for world leaders to refrain from politicising the virus 'unless you want more body bags'

Feb 12  Dr Tedros says the number of new cases being reported in China has stabilised but adds that it must be interpreted with extreme caution and the outbreak could still go in any direction

Feb 16-24  WHO team of experts convenes in China, visiting affected sites and sharing information on the best ways to tackle the crisis

Feb 17  Dr Tedros begins chairing daily updates on the coronavirus response, with each briefing beginning with an update on the number of infections including from China, which are repeated without caveats

He give an analysis of Chinese data on some 44,000 confirmed cases. He says the data shows that 80 per cent of cases are mild, 14 per cent lead to severe disease, and 2 per cent are fatal. The disease is more severe in older people, with the young largely spared.

He urges world leaders not to squander a window of opportunity to get ahead of the virus and prevent it from spreading

Feb 26  Donald Trump announces a dedicated coronavirus response team, which Mike Pence will lead

Feb 28  The team of WHO experts delivers its first report on the coronavirus. Among its major findings are that the disease likely came from bats, that it is spread through close contact with infected people and not through the air, and that most common symptoms include fever, dry cough and fatigue

The report praises Chinas response as perhaps the most ambitious, agile and aggressive disease containment effort in history saying lockdowns were achieved due to the deep commitment of the Chinese people to collective action and had achieved a rapid decline in cases

Mar 9 - The whole of Italy is placed on lockdown as the virus spreads, the first European nation to enter total lockdown

Mar 11 - The WHO declares coronavirus a pandemic, meaning it is spreading out of control in multiple locations around the world. At this point, cases have been reported in more than 100 countries

Mar 13 - WHO says Europe is now the new epicentre of the virus after cases increase steeply, with Dr Tedros noting more cases are now being reported every day than were reported in China at the height of its epidemic

Mar 19 - China reports no new domestic infections from coronavirus since the pandemic began

The pandemic has now infected some 2million people worldwide, with 128,000 confirmed deaths (pictured, a hospital in Italy)

Mar 20 - Dr Tedros issues a warning that 'young people are not invincible' to the virus after data from outside showed large numbers of people under the age of 50 ending up in intensive care

Mar 25 - As Donald Trump begins touting hydroxychloroquine as a potential coronavirus treatment, WHO warns that no drugs have so far been approved for treating the virus

The same day the organization calls for an extra $2billion in funding to help tackle the virus

Apr 3 - As millions of US citizens sign on for unemployment benefit, Dr Tedros and the IMF call for debt relief and social welfare to help people through the pandemic

Apr 6 - The WHO updates its guidance on masks to say they are effective at stopping spread of the virus, but must be used in conjunction with other methods.

It comes after the CDC updated its guidance to advise people to wear masks in public

Apr 8 - Following Trump's first barrage of criticism for the WHO, Dr Tedros urges world leaders to 'stop politicising the pandemic' unless they want 'more body bags'

Apr 13 - A group of scientists convened by WHO to research a vaccine for coronavirus issue a joint statement urging world leaders to keep listening to the scientific community when responding to the virus
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Chinese freelance journalist Li Zehua went missing on February 26, 2020, after live-streaming security agents entering his temporary apartment in the city of Wuhan, according to news reports.

Li traveled to Wuhan from Beijing to report on the COVID-19 outbreak after journalist Chen Qiushi went missing in the city in early February, according to a post Li made to his YouTube channel on February 11, where he uploads his reporting. More than 2 million people have viewed his videos.

On February 17, Li posted a video saying that a local neighborhood committee had not carried out the basic countermeasures promised by authorities, and had tried to cover up information about infected cases in the community.

On February 21, he visited a local crematorium and spoke to a porter who claimed that the crematorium was hiring more workers with higher wages to transport bodies. On February 24, Li interviewed a Chinese worker who traveled to Wuhan for work but got stranded due to the lockdown of the city.

On February 26, Li posted two live-stream videos claiming that state security agents were pursuing him. The stream ended abruptly with two unidentified individuals entering the apartment. He has not posted any videos since then, or made any other posts on his Weibo or Twitter accounts.

CPJ called the Wuhan Public Security Bureau for comment, but no one answered.
Fishing communities in the Philippines bear brunt of coronavirus lockdown

by Karl R. Ocampo

April 15,2020 | Source: Philippine Daily Inquirer

A sinking feeling has enveloped fishing communities across the Philippines as the uncertainty of an extended lockdown continues to bite.



As the government scrambles to control the spread of the new coronavirus disease (COVID-19), thousands of Filipinos whose lives depended on the sea have seen prices of seafood slashed by more than half because of restrictions on the movement of goods and people.



Bureau of Fisheries and Aquatic Resources director Ed Gongona said much of the fish being brought in were piled up in cold storages while movement of fish exports are hampered by port congestion.



Despite the ongoing drop in sales, however, the countrys fishermen have no choice but to continue sailing.



Since the quarantine, orders from processing companies have slowed down and prices have gone down too. But we cannot stop fishing. This is the only livelihood we know, Imuk Montebon, a 62-year-old fisherman based in Gigantes Island, said.



Montebon used to sell a kilo of squid for P340. The price has now plummeted to P250. A 40-kilo tub of fish used to be sold for P6,000, but this has also significantly gone down to P1,000 since the lockdown.



We can make do with the limited fishing schedule, but its hard to deal with the prices. People here have nothing to do but sacrifice if they want to buy rice, he added.



Since the Philippines reported its first confirmed case of COVID-19, it has implemented a string of measures to curb the spread of the disease, including travel restrictions and curfew schedules.



Operations related to food were exempted from these restrictions, but demand has gone stale with the temporary closures of restaurants and hotels, and with food processing companies operating with only a skeleton force.



Small-scale fishing was also limited to municipal waters, making local fisherfolk compete with one another for their catch.



These fishermen in Cavite go as far as Bataan to fish, but they cannot do that anymore with the current regulations. They cannot even go to Manila Bay. The government is saying that they are exempted from these restrictions, but these people dont have cars to move around. They dont have any mode of transportation, Fernando Hicap, National chair of Pambansang Lakas ng Kilusang Mamamalakaya, said.



These are fishing communities. The people here cannot plant. Most of them have been really reliant on relief because there is not much to go around, he added.



Even with fish catch already being sold at a loss, prices in public markets have not been reflective of the fisherfolks plight. In Palawan, a kilo of roundscad (galunggong) are being sold to traders between P30 and P50 a kilo. In public markets in Metro Manila, however, the same variant is being sold for P130 a kilo.



Agriculture Secretary William Dar said the agency was doing its best to prop up the production of the entire sector, including crops, livestock, poultry and fisheries, but fisherfolk are demanding relief.



Under the Department of Agricultures P31-billion Plant, Plant, Plant program, only P1 billion was directly committed to the fisheries industry. Half of that would be used for urban aquaponics, while the other half would be used to improve aquaculture operations as well as capture fisheries in inland waters.





Even with fish catch already being sold at a loss, prices in public markets have not been reflective of the fisherfolks plight. In Palawan, a kilo of roundscad (galunggong) are being sold to traders between P30 and P50 a kilo. In public markets in Metro Manila, however, the same variant is being sold for P130 a kilo.



Agriculture Secretary William Dar said the agency was doing its best to prop up the production of the entire sector, including crops, livestock, poultry and fisheries, but fisherfolk are demanding relief.



Under the Department of Agricultures P31-billion Plant, Plant, Plant program, only P1 billion was directly committed to the fisheries industry. Half of that would be used for urban aquaponics, while the other half would be used to improve aquaculture operations as well as capture fisheries in inland waters.

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The number of confirmed coronavirus cases in Iowa grew to 1,995 Wednesday, an increase of 96 cases.

Pottawattamie County saw its cases jump by four to a total of 18. All four are residents of Council Bluffs. Their ages range from 41 to 80, and all have preexisting conditions. None had contact with a known infected person. Two are hospitalized, and two are self-isolating at home.

Statewide, four more deaths were reported, all people older than 60, in Allamakee, Clayton, Johnson and Polk Counties, Gov. Kim Reynolds said. A total of 53 people in Iowa have died because of the coronavirus or complications from it, all of whom were older Iowans or people with underlying health conditions, Reynolds said.

Outbreaks have been reported at seven long-term-care facilities in the state, and 10% of known cases in Iowa and 49% of deaths are tied to those nursing facilities, Reynolds said.

As of Wednesday, 171 people ill with COVID-19, the disease caused by the virus, were hospitalized, and 43 were on ventilators. Hospitals are not at capacity, Reynolds said.

Just more than 900 Iowans have recovered from COVID-19. Almost 20,000 have been tested, almost twice the number in Nebraska.
Tuscaloosa has made enough progress in flattening the curve of COVID-19 cases that a plan to reopen the city is set to be announced April 28, Mayor Walt Maddox said Tuesday.

Your work has generated tangible hope on the horizon, Maddox tweeted.

Thanks to your extraordinary efforts, @tuscaloosacity has made real progress to #flattenthecurve. Your hard work has generated tangible hope on the horizon. On April 28, I will be presenting a responsible plan to reopen our community. (1/4)  Walt Maddox (@WaltMaddox) April 14, 2020

The mayor said the plan, which is expected to be revealed in two weeks, will be healthcare driven and reviewed/approved by our medical team, abide by the states health order and be flexible to the healthcare trends and needs of Tuscaloosa.

My first responsibility is to protect you and your family. My commitment has never been stronger even as we see hope on the horizon," Maddox said. Lets continue this fight and finish this race to reclaim our lives.
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Linkedin Benoit Pelegrin (Agence France-Presse) London, United Kingdom  Wed, April 15, 2020 09:35 636 fc6853813033f564188675f8bd1f2328 2 Business OPEC,OilPrices,Oil-and-gas-production,oil-and-gas,oil-and-gas-industry Free

Global oil traders have shrugged off Sunday's historic output-cutting deal by OPEC and its allies, with prices languishing not far from recent two-decade lows.

The market failed to win traction from the deal, which fell short of expectations and resulted from Easter weekend video-conference talks led by the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries.

Where are oil prices now?

In late afternoon European deals, international benchmark London Brent North Sea oil stood at $31.04 per barrel, compared with $34.36 last Thursday before talks began.

US benchmark West Texas Intermediate crude meanwhile traded at $21.81 a barrel on Tuesday, down from $26.80.

Both contracts had crashed late last month on virus-linked demand fears and a Saudi-Russia crude price war.

WTI had slumped as low as just $19.27 per barrel on March 30, when Brent had also nosedived to $21.65 per barrel. Those levels were last witnessed in 2002.

The collapse prompted top producers to tighten the taps to stop hemorrhaging precious oil revenues.

Are the cuts enough?

OPEC producers dominated by Riyadh, and their allies led by Moscow, thrashed out a compromise deal on Sunday to cut production by 9.7 million barrels per day from May.

Yet traders remain doubtful over the impact because the cuts nevertheless fell short of expectations, amid fears over plunging demand on COVID-19 fallout.

"The OPEC+ deal has received the underwhelming reception it deserves, frankly, with producers delivering right at the bottom end of expectations after days of talks," said OANDA analyst Craig Erlam.

"This may be the largest ever cut but we are living through an unprecedented event and demand has fallen off a cliff."

Futures briefly bounced Tuesday after US President Donald Trump tweeted producers were considering cutting 20 million barrels per day.

Influential Saudi energy minister Prince Abdulaziz bin Salman also indicated cutbacks by OPEC and its allies, together with pledges from other G20 nations and purchases by strategic reserves, could remove 19.5 mbpd from the market.

"There is still a lot uncertainty over whether the reduction in output will be enough," said Markets.com analyst Neil Wilson.

"Most think OPEC and allies have not done enough to prop up prices in the near term, albeit they do seem to have shown a willingness to prevent a complete collapse."

What is market outlook ?

Global oil supplies are currently outstripping global demand by as much as 30 million barrels per day, according to Alfa Energy chairman John Hall.

"What we have to remember is that the supply-demand imbalance could be as high as 30 mbpd," Hall told AFP.

"A recent figure from OPEC has warned of a figure of 14.7 mbpd, so this cut -- although the largest ever -- is probably not even half way to what is actually needed to supposedly re-balance the market."

Rystad Energy predicts oil demand will hit 28 million barrels per day (mbpd) in April and 21 mbpd in May.

That is far below "normal" demand of 100 mbpd, according to Rystad.

The IMF meanwhile forecast Tuesday that oil prices will likely remain below $43 throughout 2023 due to "persistently weak demand" in a deep global recession sparked by coronavirus.

However, the IMF did also admit that the rapidly falling cost of oil -- which greases the wheels of the global economy -- should nevertheless give a big boost to consumer nations.

Will OPEC deal be respected?

Compliance among OPEC member nations over the cartel's production quotas has long been a controversial topic, analysts agree.

"We should not forget how difficult OPEC found it to comply with the production quotas in the past three years," said Commerzbank analyst Eugen Weinberg.

"In fact, compliance was achieved mainly thanks to involuntary production outages and over-compliance on the part of Saudi Arabia."

ING analyst Warren Patterson added: "The group has agreed on historic cuts, and now we have to see whether they will stick to them.

"Unlike previous deals, it is hard to see the likes of Saudi Arabia cutting output by more than their quota, in order to make up for shortfalls from others, given the scale that they have already agreed to cut."

What next?

Many industry experts expect the global oil market will remain caught between plentiful crude and virus-ravaged demand for the foreseeable future.

"With the coronavirus-led slowdown taking a toll on the global oil demand, the supply side news could be rapidly forgotten," said Swissquote Bank analyst Ipek Ozkardeskaya.

"The historic cut did not spark the market reaction that oil producers were hoping for.

"Wide controversies among oil producer nations hinted that a further action is probably unlikely."
The Bachelor's Laura Byrne has previously spoken about having a miscarriage with fiance Matthew 'Matty J' Johnson before welcoming daughter Marlie Mae last June.

But on Tuesday, the 32-year-old revealed on her Life Uncut Podcast that she'd suffered another devastating loss this year.

'Just two months ago, Matt and I went through our second miscarriage and that still feels raw and very bizarre to even say out loud,' she told co-host Brittany Hockley.

Devastating: The Bachelor's Laura Byrne (pictured right) revealed on her Life Uncut podcast on Tuesday that she suffered a second miscarriage just two months ago with with fiance Matthew Johnson (pictured left)

Laura went on to explain that she was speaking out to help end the stigma surrounding miscarriage, after feeling 'incredibly alone' following her first one in 2018.

Laura revealed it wasn't until she started to talk openly about her miscarriage- she found out she already knew women who had been through the same thing.

'Then I found out that friends, family members and people I had never knew had a miscarriage, would talk to me about it,' she said.

Doting mother: Following her first miscarriage in 2018, Laura welcomed daughter Marlie Mae in June (both pictured) Laura explained that as her first miscarriage was due to an unplanned pregnancy, she felt she 'didn't have the right to be upset' and was all 'alone'

'It's not something I've really spoken about, not something that I've talked to many people about, but I feel very very passionately that miscarriage is a conversation that needs to be had in an open forum,' she later added.

Speaking of her most recent miscarriage, Laura said she and Matt had been over the moon to be welcoming a child so soon after Marlie.

'I found out I was pregnant. We had gotten really excited about it and we'd had our scans and everything. A week later, I felt different and I knew something was wrong and I knew it was happening again,' she shared.

'It is painful and it is lonely, but it doesn't need to be quite so lonely': Laura is speaking out to help combat the stigma surrounding miscarriage

'It is painful and it is lonely, but it doesn't need to be quite so lonely, and the more that we talk about it, and the more that we de-stigmatise it, then I feel other women who are going through the same thing may feel more supported,' she concluded.

Laura and Matt fell in love on the 2017 season of the Bachelor.

The pair became engaged while on vacation in Fiji in April 2018, two months before they welcomed their daughter.
An haute-cuisine restaurant that normally charges more than 500 a head is going to start feeding the homeless during the coronavirus outbreak.

Two-Michelin-starred outfit The Alchemist in Denmark is moving away from expensive and inaccessible dining to cater for Copenhagens 1,400 homeless people during lockdown.

The restaurant has swapped 60 covers a night for 600 as it delivers meals around the city.

Normally known for his extravagant 45-course, six-hour long tasting menus, comprised of dishes like strawberry gazpacho served on a silicone tongue and costing around 560 per person, head chef Rasmus Munk also founded a charity, JunkFood, last year.

We would make food for homeless people on days when the restaurant was closed, Munk told CN Traveler.

Now that the restaurant has had to close full-time for regular diners, Munk and his team have stepped up to make meals for the homeless every day.

Chefs used to producing the most elaborate of dishes have had to swap tweezers and pipettes for baking trays, cooking hearty favourites like lasagne and shepherds pie instead.

However, there are still some unexpected touches, such as the kefir shots and cherry juice theyre distributing to help boost the immune system.

The team starts at 8am and finishes as 6pm, when service would normally just be beginning, after delivering meals to around 10 shelters across Copenhagen.

Other restaurants are getting involved too, with three-Michelin-starred Geranium offering to help, while a local bakery is providing 700 sourdough buns. Another company has also lent a van and a driver to help with deliveries.

The Alchemists dishes are normally politically charged; this one is called blood diamond (Clare Vooght)

Its been amazing to see so many people supporting it, said Munk.

Plans are even afoot to roll out the programme across other Danish cities, such as Aarhus and Aalborg.

We also want to see if we can help the amazing nurses, doctors, and medical staff, said Munk.

Coronavirus: London on lockdown Show all 29 1 /29 Coronavirus: London on lockdown Coronavirus: London on lockdown A man walks down a deserted Camden High Street Photos Angela Christofilou Coronavirus: London on lockdown Goodge Street Station is one of the many stations closed to help reduce the spread Angela Christofilou Coronavirus: London on lockdown An empty street in the heart of Chinatown Angela Christofilou Coronavirus: London on lockdown People in masks in Chinatown a day after the lockdown Angela Christofilou Coronavirus: London on lockdown A near-empty Piccadilly Circus during the first week of lockdown Angela Christofilou Coronavirus: London on lockdown Sonja, my neighbour, who I photographed while taking a short walk. It was nice to briefly chat even from a distance Angela Christofilou Coronavirus: London on lockdown A couple sit on the empty steps of the statue Eros in Piccadilly Circus Angela Christofilou Coronavirus: London on lockdown Making sure I stay two-meters apart  DArblay Street, Soho Angela Christofilou Coronavirus: London on lockdown A mannequin behind a shop window. UK stores have closed until further notice Angela Christofilou Coronavirus: London on lockdown A notice displayed on a shop window in Camden Angela Christofilou Coronavirus: London on lockdown As part of the lockdown, all non-essential shops have been ordered to close.Image from Camden High Street Angela Christofilou Coronavirus: London on lockdown A skateboarder wearing a mask utilises his exercise allowance in the Camden area Angela Christofilou Coronavirus: London on lockdown Communities have been coming together in a time of need Angela Christofilou Coronavirus: London on lockdown A woman stands alone in a deserted Oxford Street. Up until a few weeks ago, on average, half a million people visited the street per day Angela Christofilou Coronavirus: London on lockdown A couple walk hand in hand down a street in Soho, a day before the stricter lockdown was announced Angela Christofilou Coronavirus: London on lockdown During the first week of March, shoppers focused on stockpiling necessities ahead of a countrywide lockdown Angela Christofilou Coronavirus: London on lockdown Many supermarkers are operating a queuing system to make sure only a limited amount of customers are allowed in at anyone time Angela Christofilou Coronavirus: London on lockdown Stay Safe  Curzon cinemas are temporarily closed under the new measures Angela Christofilou Coronavirus: London on lockdown Pubs, restaurants and bars were ordered to shut as part of the lockdown Angela Christofilou Coronavirus: London on lockdown Camden High Street There are fears that coronavirus could lead to permanent closure of struggling shops Angela Christofilou Coronavirus: London on lockdown Camden Town is eerily silent on a normal working day Angela Christofilou Coronavirus: London on lockdown Shops and supermarkets ran out of hand sanitisers in the first week of the lockdown. As we approach the end of the second week most shops now have started to stock up Angela Christofilou Coronavirus: London on lockdown Empty streets around Soho Angela Christofilou Coronavirus: London on lockdown A noticeboard on Camden High Street urges the public to stay at home Angela Christofilou Coronavirus: London on lockdown Camden High Street, one of Londons busiest tourist streets turns quiet Angela Christofilou Coronavirus: London on lockdown Thriller Live confirmed its West End run ended in the wake of the coronavirus outbreak Angela Christofilou Coronavirus: London on lockdown Empty and eerie Soho streets after stricter rules on social distancing announced Angela Christofilou Coronavirus: London on lockdown A woman pauses for a cigarette on Hanway Street, behind Tottenham Court Road Angela Christofilou Coronavirus: London on lockdown A man steps outside onto Hanway Street, that sits behind what is usually a bustling retail hub Angela Christofilou

The Independent has launched its own appeal to help those going hungry because of the coronavirus crisis. Help The Hungry aims to highlight how you can help in your area, with money, food donations or volunteering.

The campaign has been backed by politicians including Sadiq Khan, the mayor of London, and Jess Phillips, the Labour MP who recently ran for party leader.
(Kingston, Jamaica)  10 new cases; 10 more recoveries

In the last 24 hours, 10 samples have tested positive for COVID-19 bringing the total number of confirmed COVID-19 cases in Jamaica to 544. The 10 new cases consist of six (6) males and four (4) females with ages ranging from 4 to 61 years. In the meantime, 10 more patients have recovered and have been released from isolation, bringing that total to 191 (35.1% recovery rate). There are now 344 (63%) active cases, with no moderately or critically ill patients.

Five (5) of the new cases are from the repatriated Jamaicans, who arrived on the cruise ship in Falmouth, Trelawny. Of these imported cases, there are four males and one female. Two have local addresses in St James; one in Manchester; one in St Catherine, and one in Hanover.

The remaining five cases consist of one (1) male and four (4) females. Three are from Kingston & St Andrew and two from St Catherine. Among these are three cases, which are contacts of confirmed cases and two that are under investigation.

Jamaica now has 57 imported cases; 210 cases which are contacts of confirmed cases (25 cases are import-related, 71 are related to local transmission cases (not epidemiologically linked), 99 are contacts of employees in the workplace cluster in St. Catherine, 15 are contacts of confirmed cases under investigation); 26 are local transmission cases not epidemiologically-linked, and 251 are under investigation (234 of those under investigation are linked to the workplace cluster in St. Catherine and 17 others).

Some 324 (60%) of all confirmed cases are females and there are 220 (40%) males, with ages ranging from 2 months to 87 years. Of the 544 confirmed cases, 9 (1.7%) persons have died.

Some 376 new samples were tested in the last 24 hours, bringing the total number of samples tested in Jamaica to 9,554, with 8,934 negatives and 76 pending.

Clinical Management Summary as at 5:00 p.m. on Friday, May 22, 2020
Yasmine Chacon worked as a radiologist back in El Salvador, but her medical degree has not yet been certified in Spain, so now she cleans houses in a village in Spains eastern region of Valencia. Jose Alejandro Pinto was a doctor in Venezuela, but without a work permit, he is watching the coronavirus pandemic from the sidelines in his apartment in Madrid. Lucas Ferraz, from Uruguay, treated dozens of malaria cases in the Democratic Republic of Congo as a nursing assistant, but he doesnt have residency papers and makes a living doing repairs.

They are not the only ones. Hundreds of foreign health workers living in Spain are eager to help, but the hurdles placed by immigration services and the bureaucracy involved with certifying their degrees mean they can do nothing but watch the crisis unfold from their sofa.

Yasmine Chacon, 31, and Juan Jose Hernandez, 32, met at medicine school in San Salvador, the capital of El Salvador. They completed their studies in radiography in 2014, found jobs at a hospital and had two children together. But the couple were forced to leave everything behind to flee the violent local gangs in the country. In September 2018, they requested asylum in Spain and now are legal residents with work permits, but their medical degrees have not been certified. Chacon cleans houses and helps an elderly woman. Hernandez still has not found work. I have applied for jobs as a cleaner, at supermarkets  I even offered to collect oranges, but no one has called me back, says Hernandez. I need to find a job, but my goal is to work in my field of expertise.

I am trained to work in intensive cardiology centers, I can handle infusion pumps and respirators, but I have worked more in construction than as a nurse Lucas Ferraz, nursing aide from Uruguay

Its difficult to accept that we have the ability to practice medicine, but cant. Its hard realizing that there [in El Salvador] we were someone, but once we arrived here, youre not worth anything because youre just the woman who cleans homes, says Chacon.

Confined to his home in Madrid, the Venezuelan doctor Jose Alejandro Pinto, 30, feels as though a war has been declared and hes not allowed to go out and help mend injuries. By his side on the living room sofa is his girlfriend, Yessica Moy, who also cant do anything to help even though she is a nurse who specializes in cardiopulmonary disease  a much-needed area of expertise in the current crisis.

Both Moy and Pinto want to help in the fight against the coronavirus outbreak. But because they do not have work permits, their only option is to stay at home. The couple even avoid watching television because it makes them even more frustrated with the situation. We are staring up at the ceiling with our arms crossed, complains Pinto. He says this ironically. In reality, the doctor is doing everything he can to find work and help fill the huge demand for health workers. It would be the first job he has had since he arrived in Spain on November 4 to request asylum.

Pinto certified his degree before arriving in Spain and he is a chartered physician in Madrid. He even attended a training workshop on how to treat coronavirus patients, but he requested asylum less than six months ago, and does not have permission to work. Lacking the proper papers, Pinto was rejected twice in the past two weeks  once from a medical center in Madrid, and another time from a senior residence. The response was: Please send us your social security number when you have it. Its as simple as they want it to be, says Pinto. I am just asking them to look at my record and give me a work permit.

Faced with the shortage of health workers and the fact that more than 26,000 have been infected with the coronavirus, the Spanish government has tried to recruit medical students, retired health workers, as well as foreign doctors and nurses. The Health Ministry has promised to relax the process for recognizing specialties studied outside of Spain, and the University Ministry has prioritized the certification of degrees of doctors and nurses. More than 400 degrees have been certified during the state of alarm, which came into effect on March 15. In the meantime, the state migration office has fast-tracked work permits for 390 professionals. The Education Ministry has also certified 223 professional degrees in the last 15 days, most of them for nursing aides. This has provided some relief and allowed trained professionals to leave their unskilled jobs in call centers and as delivery riders. But hundreds of health workers are still on the sidelines.

The Health Ministry has promised to relax the process for recognizing specialties studied outside of Spain

Several ministries are considering a proposal for a new process that would allow qualified migrants, residents in their last year of training and doctors who have passed their specialization exam (known as MIR in Spanish) but missed out on a spot, to request accreditation for their degrees as well as a work permit. This process would apply to asylum seekers like Pinto, but its approval is still under discussion.

According to sources familiar with the process, the Interior Ministry wants to make it clear that the process will not regularize foreigners who are in an irregular situation, and there are doubts about just how quickly degrees will be certified, a process that usually takes six months. The Interior Ministry is not opposed to including asylum seekers, but does not want them to be specifically mentioned in the text. According to the Interior Ministry, The objective is to give a work and residency permit for extraordinary reasons to nationals of third countries who are legally in Spain. Whether they are asylum seekers or not, it is not important.

Many health professionals are in an irregular situation, which makes it difficult for them to join the workforce. Lucas Ferraz, a 40-year-old nursing aide from Uruguay, lives in Valencia and has been without legal papers for a year. He works doing repairs because the process to regularize his immigration status has come up against many obstacles. Although Ferraz lived in Spain between 2004 and 2012, he was never granted legal status. I was always missing some piece of paper, he says.

I am just asking them to look at my record and give me a work permit. Jose Alejandro Pinto, doctor from Venezuela

These days, with the coronavirus crisis, he is more frustrated than usual. I am trained to work in intensive cardiology centers, I can handle infusion pumps and respirators, but I have worked more in construction than as a nurse, he says. Ferraz says he has worked on a military ship in Antarctica, taken part in a peace mission in the Democratic Republic of Congo, where he treated malaria cases, and has been trained to treat Ebola patients.

I understand that politically it could be difficult, but how is it possible that they dont give us the possibility of helping when they are doubling shifts and infected health professionals are working? he asks. Here I am with degree and knowledge, confined to my home without being able to do anything.

The Spanish Association of Venezuelan Doctors (Amevesp) estimates that there are hundreds of health professionals in Spain without work permits, many of them in Madrid, which is the main destination for Venezuelan migrants. Associations of Argentinean, Colombian and Cuban doctors have also offered to join in the fight against the virus. A few days ago, Ferraz, who does not belong to any association, expressed his frustration with the situation in a message on Facebook. He received dozens of messages from people in similar situations and created a Facebook group that now has more than 200 members. They are all qualified, says Ferraz, but most do not have work permits.

English version by Melissa Kitson.
REDDING, Calif.  The city of Redding will join the nationwide #LightItBlue campaign by lighting the Sundial Bridge blue, starting Tuesday night, city officials announced in a press release Tuesday.

The #LightItBlue campaign is to a show of support for all frontline and essential workers during the coronavirus pandemic.

The city is inviting local businesses, venues and the community at large to stand in solidarity with the broader national #LightItBlue movement to acknowledge the hard work of front line and essential workers in the medical, grocery, restaurant, utility, transportation and public service industries. In addition to any other essential workers who are supporting their communities during this pandemic, city officials said.

The Sundial Bridge will be illuminated in blue until further notice, Click Here for more information on the #LightItBlue campaign.
Four persons were injured as a mob tried to stop a medical team from taking a coronavirus-infected man into isolation and hurled stones at their ambulance in Nawabpura area in Moradabad on Wednesday.

IMAGE: A team of medical personnel and police along with the family members of a person who died of COVID-19 sit inside a vandalised ambulance after a mob attacked their vehicle with stones in Moradabad. Photograph: PTI Photo

Police arrested 17 people including seven women allegedly involved in the incident, a Home department official said.

They have been booked under various sections of the IPC, Criminal Law Amendment Act and Epidemic Act, the official said.

The FIR was registered at Nagphani police station.

In Lucknow, Uttar Pradesh chief minister Yogi Adityanath said those behind the attack will face action under the tough National Security Act and the cost of damage to public property will be recovered from them.

IMAGE: A police vehicle vandalised after a violent mob pelted stones at health workers, doctors and police officials. Photograph: PTI Photo

Officials said a doctor and three paramedics were hurt and an ambulance and a police vehicle damaged in the stone-pelting.

Moradabad chief medical officer Milind Garg said the mob suddenly appeared as the ambulance was driving away with a man who had tested positive for coronavirus, and started pelting stones.

They tried to stop the medical team from taking him away, officials said.

IMAGE: Rapid Action Force personnel deployed after the attack. Photograph: PTI Photo

Moradabad District Magistrate Rakesh Kumar Singh said the situation has been brought under control and police deployed in large numbers in the area.

Condemning the attack, Adityanath in a statement said the attack on policemen, health workers and those involved in the sanitisation campaign is an unpardonable and most condemnable crime.

He directed the district administration to identify those responsible and deal strictly with them.
The ECAs African Trade Policy Centre is conducting a short COVID-19 Africa Impact Survey to provide insights into the economic effects of COVID-19 on economic activity and trade for African businesses. The survey can be accessed here.

In a report to be released later this week, the UNECA outlines different scenarios and outcomes as well as the impact the Covid-19 pandemic has had across the continent. The ECA also notes that the economic impact of COVID-19 on African cities is likely to be acute.

African Unions Labour Migration Advisory Committee: statement on COVID-19 and the condition of African migrant workers

The Labour Migration Advisory Committee is extremely concerned about the welfare of African migrant workers, refugees and Internally Displaced Persons caught in the cross-fire of this current global health crisis. As countries increasingly adopt sweeping measures, thousands of vulnerable African labour migrants have become stranded in their different countries of work. Some are likely to fall victim to hardship, exploitation, and extortion in their desperate effort to return to their homes and families before the intensification of the on-going global containment measures.

The AU LMAC, therefore, calls upon the AUC, RECs, member states, social partners organizations and the international community to strategically consider and implement measures to mitigate against businesses collapse, jobs and income losses. In the near future, Member States are encouraged to put in place unemployment insurance plans and to extend social security to workers in the informal economy and rural sectors.

Further, we call on African governments in the post-COVID-19 era to carefully look at and renegotiate the different Labour Migration Agreements that they may have signed with the view of ensuring the enjoyment by migrant workers of adequate health and safety, social protection and portability, and other human and labour rights protections.

Todays 18th extraordinary summit of the EAC Heads of State on COVID-19 has been postponed, due to a request by South Sudan. The East African Business Council had prepared two inputs for the summit:

pdf Private sector recommendations on mitigating the impact of covid-19 in the EAC region (1.00 MB) . In a bid to safeguard current and future jobs, exports and businesses as well as offer quick economic recovery for the EAC Bloc, the Board on behalf of the EAC Private sector recommends to the Council of Ministers and to the Summit of the EAC Heads of State as follows: Adopt a common regional approach in the preparedness and response measures towards mitigating the impact of COVID-19 outbreak in the EAC

Implement an Open Skies Policy for cargo carriers into the EAC market to fully liberalise free movement of goods across the EAC without restrictions in line with the Yamoussoukro Decision on freedom rights and the draft EAC regulations on liberalisation of air transport services, during the COVID-19 pandemic

Provide an environment for private sector collaboration with bovernments to enhance efforts towards mitigation and response measures against COVID-19

The EAC Partner States to collaborate closely for increased production of essential goods and ensure their free flow across the EAC Partner States

Allow free movement of essential services and service suppliers such as doctors, nurses, scientists, researchers, truck drivers, etc across the EAC region

Urge the EAC Partner States to provide fiscal incentives to businesses already involved in manufacturing of essential products such as health equipment, sanitizers, masks, soaps

Enhance collaboration in information sharing, best practices and any other support initiatives in fighting COVID-19

EAC Partner States to develop a harmonized economic stimulus package to cushion businesses against the impact of COVID-19 and save jobs. pdf A position paper on facilitating air cargo operations in the EAC region during the COVID-19 outbreak (188 KB) . The current COVID-19 crisis on air cargo operations requires extraordinary measures to address the challenges in the region. Like the EU, it demands greater cooperation between East African airlines and the international aviation community, including air cargo and express service providers to ensure the supply and fair distribution of scarce and essential goods. To achieve this cooperation, EABC recommends that the EAC Heads of State Summit considers the following; Immediate/short term: EAC Partner States to facilitate the use of passenger aircraft for cargo-only operations, including the re-positioning of air cargo flight crews EAC adopts and directs the implementation of IATA operational guidelines for ground handling during COVID-19 crisis EAC temporarily grants the Yamoussoukro Decision (YD) 5th to 9th Freedom rights, effectively increasing capacity, reducing inefficiencies and costs. EAC promotes consolidation of air freight and cooperation between EAC airlines and allows for flexibility in scheduling EAC encourages coordination and equitable share for EAC airlines for both south and northbound freight To reduce operating costs, that the EAC Partner States waive landing fees, excise duty on aviation fuel, navigation, landing, parking and COVID-19 related fees. To encourage imports by air, that the EAC Partner States waive all import duties and VAT by air during the COVID crisis EAC Partner States provide subsidies for the Aviation industry in the form of direct financial support; loan guarantees, corporate bonds and tax reliefs.

Post COVID-19 crisis: EAC Partner States fully adopt and implement draft regulations on the liberalisation of air transport services and expand Freedom rights beyond the fourth to foster the growth of both passenger and cargo traffic EAC Partner States to harmonise landing fees, excise duty on aviation fuel, navigation, landing, parking and other related fees across the EAC region EAC Partner States to improve air transport logistics and infrastructure, security and interconnectivity to attract high capacity carriers.

Expected long term benefits: Increase inter-regional air transport traffic/frequencies by 41% and reduce flight time Reduce air transport cost (passenger and cargo) by 10% An additional 46,320 jobs and $202.1m per annum in GDP for the EAC partner states



Related:

The IMF posts its Regional Economic Outlook for Sub-Saharan Africa

As with growth, considerable uncertainty remains around budget forecasts for 2020 as more countries put together emergency fiscal measures and commodity exporters adjust to recent price drops. On average, current projections suggest that for oil-importing countries, fiscal deficits in 2020 could be about 2.5% of GDP higher than in 2019, driven mainly by an increase in expenditures reflecting greater health spending and discretionary stimulus in some cases. For oil exporters, the deficits could be 3% of GDP higher, driven by a decline in revenues. The increase in expenditures in oil-exporting countries is expected to be less than for oil importers, given limited fiscal space, and mainly targeted at the health sector.

The evolution of debt levels will depend on a number of factors that are difficult to predict. Additional fiscal stimulus, realization of contingent liabilities, lower than expected growth, and currency depreciation caused by external pressures can all affect debt dynamics significantly. Current baseline projection suggests that, on (simple) average, debt levels will rise temporarily from 58% in 2019 to 64% in 2020 (compared with a projected decline to 56% in the October 2019 Regional Economic Outlook for Sub-Saharan Africa) but decline thereafter as fiscal adjustment plans are implemented (Figure 1.13). This picture masks considerable heterogeneity because several countries are expected to see increases in debt levels ranging from 10% of GDP to 25% of GDP, reflecting lower output, larger fiscal deficits, and exchange rate depreciations.

Once the health crisis abates, ensuring that fiscal policy reverts to its medium-term path will reduce debt vulnerabilities. The size and pace of the adjustment should be guided primarily by long-term objectives for fiscal sustainability and stabilization and the availability of adequate financing. [Download: pdf Regional Economic Outlook - Sub-Saharan Africa: COVID-19: An Unprecedented Threat to Development (4.43 MB) ]

The locust plague: Fighting a crisis within a crisis (World Bank)

If [East African] countries dont act now, the locust population will swell exponentially - hey are projected to grow by up to 400 times their current numbers by June - and potentially spread to new areas, including West Africa, just as crops are ready to be harvested. Without broad-scale control measures to control the locusts, damages and losses could reach $8.5bn by the end of 2020. Locust plagues can be difficult to control in normal circumstances, requiring cooperation across borders to destroy swarms before they multiply and equipment like airplanes that arent always readily available. The COVID-19 pandemic will make things even more challenging. Already, disrupted supply chains are delaying the delivery of locust control equipment and inhibiting access to critical materials and services. Lockdowns and travel restrictions are preventing response teams from reaching areas that desperately need their advice and expertise.

In response to urgent need, the World Bank Group is moving to provide flexible support to countries affected by the outbreak. The Bank Group is coordinating closely with partners, including the UN-FAO, which is leading control efforts. To support the short-term response, the Bank Group is mobilizing emergency financing, combined with policy advice and technical assistance, to support countries in their immediate response to the infestation. In Kenya, US$ 13.7 million in emergency funding supports the Government in setting up six control bases across the affected counties for coordination of the control operations, deploying surveillance aircrafts, and providing ground control equipment and other materials needed for control. Dijbouti will also receive emergency funding. [FAO: In East Africa, a race to outsmart locusts with drones and data]

Todays Quick Links:
All five Covid-19 patients who have died of the disease in Bhopal so far were also victims of the Bhopal Gas Tragedy, certain organisations representing the gas tragedy survivors have claimed. The city currently, has 158 coronavirus positive patients.

One of the organisations has moved the high court for a direction to the state government to denotify the Bhopal Memorial Hospital and Research Centre (BMHRC) as a non-Covid-19 hospital so that it can treat the Bhopal Gas Tragedy victims. The hospital was notified as a Covid-19 hospital by an order of the district administration in the third week of March.

The Covid-19 patients who have died are between 49 years to 80 years and lived in different localities affected by the gas tragedy. The first Covid-19 patient among the Bhopal Gas Tragedy victims died on April 6, second and third on April 12, fourth on April 13 and the fifth Covid-19 patient died on April 14. One of them was suffering from oral cancer. Another was suffering from tuberculosis but he had recovered from the disease. The three others too were suffering from ailments. One of the five happened to be a journalist, as per associations and officials from the district administration.

Bhopal Group for Information and Action convener Rachna Dhingra accused the government of neglecting the victims and said, Bhopal Gas Tragedy victims are dying of Covid-19 as they are more vulnerable to the virus and they have been deprived of treatment at BMHRC which is meant for them as the hospital has been notified as a Covid-19 hospital.

Rachna Dhingra said, The Bhopal Group for Information and Action filed an application in the high court on Tuesday for an urgent hearing through video conferencing on the organisations petition already filed after the state government notified the hospital for Covid-19 patients. This is regarding denial of all medical facilities at BMHRC to gas tragedy victims.

Member of the Supreme Courts monitoring committee for gas victims, Purnendu Shukla said, After BMHRC was notified as a Covid-19 hospital the OPD service was discontinued at the hospital for gas victims. As many as 65 patients were discharged from the hospital. Only a few patients were allowed to remain at the hospital as they could not be shifted from there given their serious condition. As many as 31 patients on dialysis were shifted to another hospital, where there was only one technician for dialysis.

The governments decision to not allow the gas victims to be treated at BMHRC was beyond comprehension as the gas victims are more prone to contracting the virus given their co-morbidity. And now the results are there for all to see. All the five Covid-19 patients who have died are gas tragedy victims, Shukla said.

District collector, Bhopal Tarun Kumar Pithode could not be reached for comments. He didnt respond to phone calls and text messages.
Orange County firefighters and other first responders from Laguna Beach, Santa Ana and Irvine thank healthcare workers for their efforts to combat COVID-19 at Mission Hospital on Tuesday. (Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times)

Orange County health officials on Wednesday reported three additional coronavirus-linked deaths, bringing the toll to 22 and ending what had been a string of days with relatively low numbers of new confirmed infections.

The county also announced an additional 87 COVID-19 cases, with the total now at 1,376. The number of new cases announced Wednesday was more than the previous three days combined, according to the Orange County Health Care Agency.

The county had seen a slowing in the number of infections this week  with only seven new cases reported Monday and 21 Tuesday  although health officials emphasized that an overall downward trend is far more important than a few select data points.

"The goal of our stay-at-home order and social distancing is to flatten the curve, so its to spread the cases out over time and, ideally, to reduce the size of the surge," David Souleles, director of public health services for the county Health Care Agency, said Tuesday.

Of those who have died, 12 were at least 65 years old and seven were 45 to 64. Two others were age 25 to 34, and the other was 35 to 44. Ten of the victims have been women and 12 men.

County officials also released a breakdown of the victims by race and ethnicity, which showed that nine of those who have died were Asian, five were white, another five were Hispanic or Latino and one was black or African American. That information was unavailable for the remaining two victims.

As of Wednesday, 104 people were hospitalized, 45 of them in intensive care.

Countywide, 15,305 people have been tested for coronavirus infection  up 328 from Tuesday. Approximately 58% of those who have tested positive are at least 45 years old.
The terrifying reality of the COVID-19 comes crashing down to the patients. Aside from the health complications, patients also have to deal with the overwhelming costs of the hospital bills. This is also the concern of this dying patient, who asked his nurse this question: "Who's going to pay for it?"

Hospitals in New York are overwhelmed with the surge of COVID-19 patients. And since the virus targets the lungs, most of them require ventilators.

When they do not get better from the ventilator, they become another dead body chucked off to the mortuary. Since COVID-19 fatalities are infectious, they never see their families anymore, and their final resting place is Hart Island.

The bodies are then laid to rest in a mass grave in Potter's Field. Most of them died alone in quarantine, with no loved ones to comfort them during their harrowing battle.

Nurses bear the brunt of this human tragedy

Derrick Smith is a Certified registered nurse anesthetist, who has lost patients in the ICU. He is also the attending nurse who heard the elderly man's dying words.

For Smith, the dying man is just one of many who died while intubated, as the virus blocked out the air with so much mucus. The virus will continue denying air until the victim dies because their airways are already blocked.

The man who uttered those last words will not be the last because there will be more deaths. This is the terrifying reality unless the COVID-19 pandemic is over soon.

According to the attending nurse, the patient cannot breathe well and had difficulty even when speaking. But above all, he was concerned about the costs of his treatment. Looking at the patient, he was not expected to survive even if given the proper treatment.

His wife was contacted and he got intubated. It did not take long before they realize it was a losing battle, and final goodbyes with his spouse were arranged.

When placed on a ventilator, most patients will expire soon, and the death rate is 80% with a slim 20% chance of beating the odds. It will be mostly a one-way trip for many critical patients.

Smith will be one of the last people to see the patient alive, and he has to summon loved ones for the last goodbye, then it's off to the freezer truck and a mass grave.

Despite keeping a professional distance, the incident overwhelmed him in his 12 years of critical care and anesthesia. He blames the flawed health care system that is not good enough.

Coronavirus reveals flawed health care system

Smith added that when patients feel like they will expire soon, he will start thinking of his finances. The last concern for his final moments on Earth is who will shoulder the costs of the treatment.

He was not able to answer the dying man's question because it cannot be answered. Smith added, "The pandemic has highlighted a lot of structural inadequacies in our country, not only the response to the pandemic itself but our approach to health care coverage."

Since the US does not have universal health care system, getting sick is really a gamble. Especially when you're sick with the COVID-19 disease, as it will cost money before and after the treatment.

Related article: Body Bags With Dead Coronavirus Patients Line Up Brooklyn Hospital Hallway

@ 2022 HNGN, All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission.
The Office of the President of Ukraine notes that the next stage of the mutual release of detainees in Donbas is indeed being prepared, the latest approvals are underway on the list and on the transportation.

"The release itself will take place in the near future. The date is constantly being updated," the President's Office said on Facebook on Wednesday.
Baptist Hospitals of Southeast Texas is calling on community members previously infected with COVID-19 for blood donations after its initial treatment of two critical patients with an experimental therapy using antibody-rich plasma.

So far, the health system reported its first two patients treated with the convalescent plasma therapy are recovering well and three other patients on ventilators have already been treated as of Tuesday, but future use of the therapy could be stalled if more plasma doesnt become available.

Todd Senters, associate vice president of operations for Baptist, said three more patients have already been registered on the waiting list for the research pilot program Baptist has been allowed to participate in, but its previous plasma connections have run dry.

Houston just doesnt have the plasma to help us at this point, Senters said. Our blood center doesnt have any more, as well. Thats why we are putting out a call for help.

Through its usual blood supplier, the Louisiana-based LifeShare Blood Center, Baptist is asking people that have recovered after receiving a positive COVID-19 diagnosis to reach out for appointments to donate their much needed blood.

The treatment uses blood from patients that have recovered from the virus that is spun into plasma before being transfused into critically ill patients, most of which have been put on ventilators. The plasma contains antibodies created by the immune systems of the donors that has been shown to help boost the immune system of patients in clinical studies.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration previously authorized an emergency provision that gave research hospitals approved to conduct the therapy the ability to include other facilities under their permissions, expanding access to the possible life-saving treatment and collecting more data to prove its effectiveness. Baptist was able to gain approval under Minnesotas Mayo Clinic.

Since the treatment requires donations from people who contracted the virus at least 28 to 30 days before the blood draw and match the blood type of the patient, hospitals will need large volumes of plasma to treat more patients.

Senters said the almost universal lack of sufficient testing resources affecting Southeast Texas and other regions means there probably wont be a push to test people in the community that dont have immediate COVID-19 symptoms to see if they are one of the expected 25% of the overall population that may have been asymptomatic after their infection, but there are other options for reaching out to donors.

Baptist is working with health authorities in the region that have been tracking positive cases to see if some of those patients would be willing to contribute their blood to the cause.

Christus Health System has started the process to try to have all of its hospital facilities joining the same Mayo Clinic-led program Baptist is a part of so it can also conduct the treatment.

In the meantime, the system has rolled out a new testing technology that analyzes the antibodies in a patient's blood to see if they are currently infected or ever have been.

It has been important to us that we are able to work closely with community partners to offer convalescent plasma, Christus spokeswoman Katy Kiser said in an email. We could possibly use the (antibody) test as a screen for possible candidates but now can also refer people who have a (positive result) and who have clinically recovered.

The American Red Cross has also created a specific form for COVID-19 plasma donations at its website where donors can send in their information and be contacted later with a donation time and location once their eligibility has been determined.

Donors must be at least 17 years old, at least 28 days out from the first symptoms of COVID-19 or 14 days out from the last, and test positive for antibodies capable of fighting the novel coronavirus.

If Baptists call for blood donation is successful, even if every donor doesnt have a sufficient amount of antibodies in their blood, Senters said it could hopefully generate a positive impact for blood-starved centers like LifeShare.

LifeShare, which has a location in Beaumont, says it it has missed about 6,000 planned donations due to the cancellation of nearly 300 blood drive events.

The need for blood is continuous and must be replenished on a regular basis, LifeShare spokeswoman Suzanne Upchurch said.

She said LifeShare expects difficulties in collecting blood throughout the next several months as lifestyle changes related to the pandemic continue.

For people to donate convalescent plasma, the donor must have a previous diagnosis confirmed by a lab and have been symptom free for 14 days along with a negative test result. Without a negative test results, the donor must be symptom free for 28 days.

Those wishing to donate should contact their doctor. The donating process takes about 45 minutes while blood is drawn from the donors arm and separated into plasma and red cells. The blood center keeps the plasma for the transfusion and returns the red cells to the donor.

jacob.dick@beaumontenterprise.com

chris.moore@beaumontenterprise.com
Thomas Imbach didnt have to go far for the inspiration and execution of his latest feature documentary Nemesis, which premiered in the International Competition section of the digital version of Switzerlands Visions du Reel documentary film festival and now plays in IDFAs main competition section.

Shot over seven years from his own window, a trick Imbach previously used in 2011s Day is Done, the film tracks the demolition of Zurichs historic freight railway station and the subsequent construction of a massive, industrial prison where three quarters of the inmate population is likely to be immigrants, if it matches national averages.

As the train station crumbles beneath the metal jaws of an excavator, Imbach tells stories from his past and the impact the station has had on his own life. Once construction begins on the towering penitentiary, the stories shift to those of immigrants awaiting deportation, collected by Imbachs assistant Lisa Gerig. The heartbreaking tales of confused and scared prisoners, not convicted of any crime yet serving sometimes years-long sentences, accompany construction until the city is no longer visible behind the stories-tall behemoth.

Imbach discussed the film and its execution with Variety ahead of the April 25 digital premiere.

At times this film feels almost stop-motion animated. Can you talk about how you used sped-up footage and sound to create that effect?

I did all the speed up and slow-motion effects in the 35mm camera. I shot a lot at three frames per second. It looks quite different than if Id have done it in post. Basically, my intention was to use the sound to make the pictures palpable. My sound designer Peter and I are both long-standing Jacques Tati fans, so he was really inspired and created sound effects like a musical score.

Where did the idea come from to include anecdotes from your own life in this story about immigration, incarceration and how they are intertwined in Switzerland?

Story continues

I started the film seven years ago because it broke my heart when they started to demolish the old station. I think it will soon be recognized as a major act of architectural vandalism in Switzerland. The slow death of my long-time neighbor made me think about time passing; sensations which stretch from early memories of the death of my grandfather, to the more recent experiences of when a filmmaker friend succumbed to cancer.

You start the film with the demolition of the train station but end it before the completion of the new police/prison complex. Why did you end the film before the building was finished?

I already had enough footage to make two films! More important was the fact that I was never interested in the new building as an architectural event. I explored what it represented. Once the shell of the building was finished this was apparent; so I left it standing as a ruin.

They take their work seriously you say at one point of the construction workers, before praising them as peasant workers. Do you see yourself as a peasant filmmaker? What you saw and admired in the workers in your film, is that something you strive for in your own work?

They are more old-fashioned, less domesticated. They made me think of Pasolinis non-actors in The Gospel According to St. Matthew. Ironically, they are a contrast to the trend the film depicts towards a total security apparatus.

And of course, Im a peasant filmmaker. One of my theses is that we dont have any great-grandfathers and mothers in cinema because we were a peasant country until WWII.

The stories used to narrate the film are heartbreaking, and now likely to occur day in and day out across the street from your home. How does it affect your living situation knowing so specifically how the people across the street are suffering?

The testimonies of the refugees come from my assistant Lisa, who has been visiting prisoners awaiting deportation for years. As for the new prison and police center, I ask myself many questions about what right we have as a society to deprive people of their freedom who have not been convicted of anything.

You caught some amazing candid moments, bordering on voyeurism, but you also referenced moments of vandalism that only appear in the film as narration. How dedicated were you to this shoot? That is, were you spending months on end like Jimmy Stewart in Rear Window, or was most of what you caught on film a matter of being home when interesting moments passed by outside?

I previously shot another film out of my window over 15 years (Day Is Done, 2011). So, I am used to filming by instinct. I never shot with a plan, it all happened in between my life and other work. Of course, I missed a lot, but that was part of the game. With the demolition of the old station it was not possible to foresee exactly when one of the roofs would collapse. So, there I had to make an exception, and waited behind the camera for hours with my finger on the trigger.

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GCMI is a comprehensive innovation center utilizing 3D printing to help alleviate medical device shortages  especially when it comes to ventilators and protective masks. A release mentioned that GCMI works in collaboration with Childrens Healthcare of Atlanta Pediatric Technology Center.

Direct Relief is a humanitarian aid organization providing personal protective equipment (PPE) and essential medical items to healthcare workers. The organization is active in all 50 states.

Whether you have been directly impacted or are witnessing the global pandemic through the media, one thing is very clear: Americans are coming together to address this problem in ways we have not seen in a very long time, said Aflac chairman and CEO Dan Amos.

Amos added that Aflacs mission is to be there for its policyholders in their time of need, and to provide value for its shareholders  the company believes the best way to accomplish these things is to help fill significant needs in a crisis and by delivering for our customers with more urgency than ever before.
Lori Van Buren

ALBANY  The Pioneer Bank Foundation this week committed a minimum of $100,000 to Capital Region charities serving those affected by the coronavirus pandemic.

The funds will be disbursed to organizations that provide services to children and families, said Schuyler D. Bull, Pioneer's vice president of marketing. The Capital District YMCA, Hope 7 Community Center and a coalition of 60 different Capital Region food pantries have been identified as initial recipients, as has CAPTAIN Community Health Services, which provides free school meals to local children. Bull said that list will grow as Pioneer identifies more organizations that will benefit from the donations.
U.S. cruise line stocks popped on Tuesday after Carnival CEO Arnold Donald said in an interview that customers are already booking trips for 2021.

Flashback: The comments mirrored what Donald told me in an interview last month for "Axios on HBO" that the company had interest from potential customers until it shut down operations.

"All the way up until the day we paused people wanted to cruise."

The intrigue: Carnival's stock has risen 30% so far this month.

The stock rose 8% on Tuesday (a week after a 20% gain) and has seen a gain or loss of less than 5% on just one trading day this month.

Other cruise companies also saw major surges in their stock prices Tuesday, with Royal Caribbean rising 13.4% and Norwegian Cruise Line gaining 8.7%.

But, but, but: Carnival's stock price is still down 75% since the beginning of the year.
Examining how Molina Healthcare, Inc. (NYSE:MOH) is performing as a company requires looking at more than just a years' earnings. Below, I will run you through a simple sense check to build perspective on how Molina Healthcare is doing by comparing its most recent earnings with its historical trend, in addition to the performance of its healthcare industry peers.

View our latest analysis for Molina Healthcare

Could MOH beat the long-term trend and outperform its industry?

MOH's trailing twelve-month earnings (from 31 December 2019) of US$737m has increased by 4.2% compared to the previous year.

However, this one-year growth rate has been lower than its average earnings growth rate over the past 5 years of 37%, indicating the rate at which MOH is growing has slowed down. Why could this be happening? Well, let's look at what's occurring with margins and if the entire industry is feeling the heat.

NYSE:MOH Income Statement April 15th 2020

In terms of returns from investment, Molina Healthcare has invested its equity funds well leading to a 38% return on equity (ROE), above the sensible minimum of 20%. Furthermore, its return on assets (ROA) of 12% exceeds the US Healthcare industry of 5.3%, indicating Molina Healthcare has used its assets more efficiently. And finally, its return on capital (ROC), which also accounts for Molina Healthcares debt level, has increased over the past 3 years from 11% to 30%. This correlates with a decrease in debt holding, with debt-to-equity ratio declining from 68% to 64% over the past 5 years.

What does this mean?

While past data is useful, it doesnt tell the whole story. Positive growth and profitability are what investors like to see in a companys track record, but how do we properly assess sustainability? I recommend you continue to research Molina Healthcare to get a better picture of the stock by looking at:

Future Outlook: What are well-informed industry analysts predicting for MOHs future growth? Take a look at our free research report of analyst consensus for MOHs outlook. Financial Health: Are MOHs operations financially sustainable? Balance sheets can be hard to analyze, which is why weve done it for you. Check out our financial health checks here. Other High-Performing Stocks: Are there other stocks that provide better prospects with proven track records? Explore our free list of these great stocks here.

NB: Figures in this article are calculated using data from the trailing twelve months from 31 December 2019. This may not be consistent with full year annual report figures.

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.
Apple has released data it says could help inform public health authorities on whether people are travelling less during lockdown orders to slow the spread of the new coronavirus.

The data is gathered by counting the number of routing requests from Apple Maps, which is installed on all iPhones, and comparing it with past usage to detect changes in the volume of people driving, walking or taking public transit around the world, the company says.

Apple has aggregated all Maps requests to measure the effectiveness of lockdown measures.

The information is being updated daily and compared with a date in mid-January, before most lockdown measures were in place. Various lockdowns are now underway in countries around the globe.

According to Apple the data is aggregated so that requests from individual users can not be shown, and it does not track individual users or their locations.
Russian embassy in Manilla thanks Philippine Government for accepting sick seafarer

The Russian Embassy in the Philippines made a Facebook post thanking the Philippine Government for accepting a sick seafarer.
Tolleyseminars.com scored 40 Social Media Impact. Social Media Impact score is a measure of how much a site is popular on social networks. 2/5.0 Stars by Social Team

This CoolSocial report was updated on 3 Jul 2014, you can refresh this analysis whenever you want.

The total number of people who shared the tolleyseminars homepage on Google Plus by a google +1 button. The total number of people who shared the tolleyseminars homepage on StumbleUpon. The total number of people who shared the tolleyseminars homepage on Delicious. This is the sum of two values: the total number of people who shared, liked or recommended the tolleyseminars homepage on Facebook + the total number of page likes (if tolleyseminars has a Facebook fan page). This is the sum of two values: the total number of people who shared the tolleyseminars homepage on Twitter + the total number of tolleyseminars followers (if tolleyseminars has a Twitter account).

Basic Information

PAGE TITLE Welcome | Tolley Seminars Online DESCRIPTION KEYWORDS OTHER KEYWORDS seminars, online, service, tolley seminars online, tolley seminars, seminars online, tolley



CoolSocial advanced keyword analysis tool is able to detect and analyze every keyword on each page of a site. The title found in the head section of the homepage. The description meta-tag found in the head section of the homepage. The URL (Uniform Resource Locator) is the address of the site. The keywords meta-tag found in the head section of the homepage.

Domain and Server

DOCTYPE XHTML 1.0 Transitional CHARSET AND LANGUAGE English UTF-8English DETECTED LANGUAGE English English SERVER Microsoft-IIS/6.0 (ASP.NET,PHP/5.2.14) OPERATIVE SYSTEM Windows Server 2003 Windows Server 2003

The language of tolleyseminars.com as detected by CoolSocial algorithms. Character set and language of the site. Type of server and offered services. Represents HTML declared type (e.g.: XHTML 1.1, HTML 4.0, the new HTML 5.0) Operative System running on the server.

Site Traffic trend during the last year. Only available for sites ranked <= 100000 in the world.

Referring domains for tolleyseminars.com by MajesticSeo. High values are a sign of site importance over the web and on web engines.

Facebook link

FACEBOOK PAGE LINK NOT FOUND

Facebook Timeline is the new layout of Facebook pages. The URL of the found Facebook page. The total number of people who like website Facebook page. The description of the Facebook page describes website and its services to the social media users. The total number of people who tagged or talked about website Facebook page in the last 7-10 days. The type of Facebook page. A Facebook page link can be found in the homepage or in the robots.txt file.

Twitter account link

TWITTER PAGE LINK NOT FOUND
CHICAGO, April 15, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- CNA today announced that its 2020 Annual Meeting of stockholders will be held virtually, moving away from an in-person event due to the evolving nature of COVID-19 Coronavirus. Stockholders will not be able to attend in person.

Virtual meeting date: Wednesday, April 29, 2020

Virtual meeting time: 7:30 a.m. CT

Virtual meeting link: www.virtualshareholdermeeting.com/CNA2020

As described in the proxy materials for the 2020 Annual Meeting distributed on March 20, 2020, persons who were stockholders as of the close of business on March 6, 2020, the record date, or hold a legal proxy for the meeting provided by their bank, broker, or nominee are entitled to attend and participate in the 2020 Annual Meeting. To attend, stockholders must use the virtual meeting link and enter the control number provided on the proxy card, voting instruction forms or other notices received.

Stockholders may vote during the 2020 Annual Meeting by following the instructions available on the meeting website. Whether or not stockholders plan to attend the 2020 Annual Meeting, stockholders should vote and submit their proxies in advance of the meeting by one of the methods described in the proxy materials. The proxy card included with the proxy materials previously distributed will not be updated to reflect the change to a virtual-only meeting and may continue to be used to vote in connection with the 2020 Annual Meeting. If stockholders have already voted, no additional action is required.

About CNA

CNA is one of the largest U.S. commercial property and casualty insurance companies. CNA provides a broad range of standard and specialized property and casualty insurance products and services for businesses and professionals in the U.S., Canada and Europe, backed by 120 years of experience and more than $45 billion of assets. For more information about CNA, visit our website at www.cna.com.

Follow CNA (NYSE: CNA) on: Facebook | Twitter | LinkedIn | YouTube

Press Contacts:

Brandon Davis

CNA

[email protected]

312-822-5885

CNA Newsroom

[email protected]

312-822-5167

SOURCE CNA Financial Corporation

Related Links

http://www.cna.com


The 66 Artillery Regiment (Volta Barracks) in Ho, has commenced investigations into acts of assault by Warrant Officer class 2 (WO2), Daniel Agbenyegah on a taxi driver.



The soldier was said to have assaulted the taxi driver physically for allegedly interrupting the work of a taskforce deployed for a clean-up exercise at the Ho Main Market on Monday, in an effort to stop the spread of COVID-19.



Lieutenant Colonel Bernard Pantoah, Commanding Officer of the Regiment told the GNA that the soldier, who was seen in a video whipping the taxi driver in the streets, acted unprofessionally and had been withdrawn from the operation to the Barracks for investigations.



He said the Regiment had a very good relationship with the public and would not trade that for any unprofessional conduct.



Lt. Col. Pantoah said investigations were already ongoing and that the soldier would be given "appropriate sanctions" if found culpable.

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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German Chancellor Angela Merkel and the heads of Germanys 16 states have decided to allow some stores to open as early as next week even as social distancing guidelines remain in effect.

In an address Wednesday evening, Merkel announced that the current restrictions on social distancing will stay in place until May 4. Currently, large groups are forbidden and residents are required to maintain a distance of five feet from each other.

Starting on Monday, shops with a sales area up to 800 square meters are allowed to reopen if they comply with relevant hygiene and distancing standards. When it comes to face masks, the chancellor said her government strongly recommends wearing them while using public transportation or shopping for groceries.

What we have achieved is an interim success, Merkel said. We dont want to wrongly hurry ahead."

PHOTO: Copenhagen Airport's Terminal 3 hall is seen almost empty following the outbreak of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) after the country lockdown in Copenhagen, Denmark, March 24, 2020. (Ritzau Scanpix via Reuters, FILE)

Some schools will gradually reopen on May 4 with priority given to graduating classes. These, too, will also be subject to contact and hygiene regulations and classes will be limited to smaller sizes.

"We need to understand that we will need to live with the virus as long as there is no medication or vaccine," she said.

Events that draw crowds will be strictly prohibited until Aug. 31 and will be subject to crowd-size restrictions.

Germany has been praised for its handling of the coronavirus and low number of infections. As of Wednesday, Germanys Robert Koch Institute reported 132,000 confirmed infections since the outbreak.

PHOTO: A general view shows the Duomo Cathedral and an almost empty Duomo Square, amidst the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) spread, on Easter Sunday, in Milan, Italy, April 12, 2020. (Flavio Lo Scalzo/Reuters)





MORE: US surpasses 20,000 coronavirus deaths, the highest national death toll

Strategies to cope with the pandemic have varied greatly in Europe and Scandinavia.

Denmark, for example, has already let children go back to school. On Tuesday, Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen said the country could open much faster than expected as the rate of infections slowed. He added that it should not go too fast because should there be a setback, it will not be too severe.

Story continues

In recent days, Hokkaido, Japan, has been cited as a cautionary tale -- a worst-case scenario for what can happen when the economy is prioritized over the health of the population. The city lifted restrictions on March 19 but was forced to call a new state of emergency on Monday as the second wave of the contagion swept through the city and the number of people infected grew rapidly.

On Wednesday, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said the imposed restrictions were necessary but came at an "enormous price." The commission laid out a plan for coping with COVID-19 until a vaccine is found and said member states should take small, strictly controlled steps when rolling back lockdown measures.

PHOTO: German Chancellor Angela Merkel holds a news conference in Berlin, Germany, April 15, 2020, as the spread of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) continues in Munich. (Bernd von Jutrczenka/Pool via Reuters)





MORE: No evidence yet for effective COVID-19 treatments, review shows

Other European countries have also been gradually relaxing restrictions in the last days. On Monday, Austria opened some small businesses, including flower shops and DIY shops, citing a successful fight against the virus. Citizens are still told to wear face masks in public and maintain social distancing rules. As of Tuesday, Austria reported about 14,000 cases and 368 deaths.

Even hard-hit countries in Europe have begun to gradually relax measures. Spain, which has the second-highest number of COVID-19 cases after the U.S., began allowing some non-essential workers to return to their jobs on Monday amidst a strict lockdown. Construction workers as well as those working at businesses which sell hygiene products and pet food, dry cleaners and hairdressers have been given the green light to go back to work. The move was met with criticism from political opponents who feel the government is putting economic interests above the health of its citizens.

In Italy, where 20,000 people have died from the virus, an easing of restrictions is already taking place in certain parts of the country. Some shops, including childrens clothing stores and bookshops, are allowed to cautiously open in certain regions as the Italian government has deemed them essential goods. Premiere Giuseppe Conte told the public last week, We obviously dont want to delude ourselves that everything will change."

Italians have been on strict orders to stay at home and fines have been issued to those who disobey orders. On Easter Monday, a national holiday in Italy, 16,543 fines were given out, AFP reported. Yet some hard-hit regions, such as Lombardy, and its capital of Milan, are keeping shops closed a bit longer.

French President Emmanuel Macron, meanwhile, extended his countrys lockdown until May 11.

Some businesses to open in Germany as other EU states find ways to cope with COVID-19 originally appeared on abcnews.go.com
Theres a lot we need to know about this disease, so finding the prevalence in the population will be a big deal to (help people) know where you are more or less at risk, more or less likely to bump into someone who is infected," she said. The testing, she added, also will be part of a larger strategy for how people will go back to work and so forth.
The Nokia 9 PureView is considered to be Nokias flagship and for 2020, nearly all flagships that have been released till now, feature high refresh rate displays. The Nokia 9.3, slated for release in Q4 2020, will apparently also follow the same trend and will likely feature a 120Hz screen, along with a 108MP camera.

Flagship smartphones that use include high refresh rate screens include the OnePlus 8 series, Samsung Galaxy S20 series, a bunch of gaming phones, realmes X50 Pro and more. The upcoming Nokia 9.3 apparently will come with a high refresh rate screen too, touted to refresh at a higher 120Hz, instead of 90Hz. Talking about the display tech itself, it is unclear at the moment on whether it will have an OLED panel or LCD panel, although the OLED panel is more likely.

The Nokia 9.3 PureView is also rumoured to have a traditional camera setup, instead of the insane 9-lens, simultaneous firing rear camera setup that was found on the original Nokia 9 PureView. The rumours point to a 108MP Samsung sensor for its primary shooter, which was selected after trying other lower spec-ed 24MP, 20MP and 48MP sensors. The Nokia 9 PureViews camera was quite disappointing except dynamic range considering its hardware, and we hope that this year, Nokia can do a much better job with the Nokia 9.3, especially in the video segment.

Source
While Congress has focused much of its coronavirus relief legislation on helping struggling airlines, state highway officials are worried about another crisis on the horizon: plummeting gas tax revenues as most Americans stay at home.

The federal government largely pays for its roads, bridges and transit through the Highway Trust Fund, supported by federal gas and diesel tax revenue. In January, the Congressional Budget Office projected that the fund, which already relies on regular infusions from general Treasury accounts to stay afloat, would run out of money in 2021. But the coronavirus  and the stay-at-home orders keeping people off the roads  may speed that timeline, analysts say.

This will absolutely accelerate the insolvency of both the highway and mass transit accounts, said Adie Tomer, head of the Metropolitan Infrastructure Initiative at the moderate Brookings Institution. He predicts the federal government will have to once again bail out the trust fund. Its going to be dramatic and that infusion is going to need to come sooner rather than later.

And state and local governments, which rely on a combination of state gas taxes and revenue streams such as sales taxes to pay for their road projects, are also feeling the impact of the pandemic.

We know that states in general are going to have fiscal problems, said Douglas Holtz-Eakin, president of the conservative American Action Forum and the chief economist for the Council of Economic Advisers under President George W. Bush. Theres no way around this.

Among the first state and local transportation agencies to acutely feel the impact of the pandemic were transit systems, which receive dollars from the highway trust fund as well. They were hit hard by a steep decline in ridership and received $25 billion in the last coronavirus spending bill (PL 116-136), largely to triage the immediate impact of the pandemic on ridership.

The concerns about transportation systems spurred the National Governors Association on April 11 to request $500 billion in aid from Congress.

And they arent the only one asking for help: So worried is the American Association of State Highway Transportation Officials that they wrote congressional leadership on April 6 to request $50 billion in any forthcoming coronavirus-related spending bills to make up for what they anticipate will be a precipitous drop in revenue.

The reductions in travel, said Jim Tymon, executive director of AASHTO, is really going to take cash out of the hands of state DOTs. The pandemic, analysts say, compounds funding problems that have existed for years.

The trust fund was broken already  there wasnt enough revenue going in for all the spending, said Kyle Pomerleau, a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. Now, theres going to be an even further decline in revenue driven by a huge reduction in economic activity.

Congress was already due to extend the law (PL 114-94) authorizing the fund at the end of September. The pandemic has injected additional uncertainty and urgency into how and when they act.

Tomer said the practicalities of passing major legislation  the House and the Senate are tentatively scheduled to come back to town May 4  as well as competing priorities may make it easier just to inject money into the trust fund and extend the current law.

All the signs are pointing toward an extension and an infusion of money, he said.

But that uncertainty does little for states, which frequently use their gas taxes for general revenue.

In the short term, the problem hardly looks as dire as it does for airports, and some states have actually continued or even sped up already-funded projects.

Virginia has deemed its highway construction essential, and in Florida, Gov. Ron DeSantis ordered the state DOT to accelerate some $2.1 billion in transportation projects.

But other states have felt the impact pretty quickly. Pennsylvania in early April announced it would furlough some 9,000 state workers, including some 5,700 PennDOT employees.

As the crisis stretches on, what youre going to see start to happen is state DOTs start to triage and throw things overboard, said Kevin DeGood, director of infrastructure policy for the left-leaning Center for American Progress.

Many states, he said, will revisit their long-term plans as they realize how big the hole is.

Theyre holding off canceling or delaying projects because theyre waiting to see if Washington will help. And the longer theres no direct aid to states from Washington, the more youll see those announcements roll out.

Data on the scope of the crisis is still coming into focus.

The Treasury Department has not yet put out its April report on gas tax receipts. But its March report  which covered the final two weeks of February and the first two weeks of March, just before the country went into a near-total lockdown  found that gas and diesel payments were down 11% from last year, according to Marc Scribner, a senior fellow at the conservative Competitive Enterprise Institute.

Scribner said he believes that drop could be more than 40% over last year in the April report.

Tymon said states are using traffic volume statistics to calculate what the crisis will cost. He said the group is anticipating a 30 percent reduction over the next 18 months to revenue at the state level alone. The $50 billion request, he said, is about stopping the bleeding.

This is real, said Tomer. And its coming quick.

Jessica Wehrman of CQ-Roll Call wrote this story.

2020 CQ-Roll Call, Inc., All Rights Reserved

Visit CQ Roll Call at www.rollcall.com

Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
The High Court has found a warrant used by the Australian Federal Police to raid a journalist's home was invalid and ordered that it be quashed.

News Corp reporter Annika Smethurst had her Canberra apartment raided in 2019 over stories she wrote revealing secret plans to expand the government's spying powers.

The full bench of the High Court on Wednesday unanimously found there was not enough precision in the drafting of the warrant.

However, only two judges ordered that material seized during the search be destroyed, meaning it could still be used by police.

News Corp reporter Annika Smethurst (pictured) had her Canberra apartment raided in 2019 over stories she wrote revealing secret plans to expand the government's spying powers

Officers searched Ms Smethurst's home and mobile phone over the 2018 publication of a leaked plan to allow the Australian Signals Directorate to spy on Australians

The court did not consider whether the AFP raid infringed on implied freedom of political communication.

The AFP has been ordered to pay court costs.

Officers searched Ms Smethurst's home and mobile phone over the 2018 publication of a leaked plan to allow the Australian Signals Directorate to spy on Australians.

The story in question, published by the Sunday Telegraph, included images of letters between the heads of the Home Affairs and Defence departments.

Australia's press freedom was under intense security when the AFP searched another media outlet just days later.

The ABC's Sydney headquarters was raided over stories published in 2017 containing allegations Australian soldiers may have carried out unlawful killings in Afghanistan, based on leaked Defence papers.

The raids prompted the 'Australia's Right To Know' campaign late last year, which called for freedom of information reform, whistleblower protections and public interest exemptions from national security laws.

Under the nation's tightening national security laws it's illegal for Commonwealth Government officers to leak documents or publish the information.

Australian Federal Police investigators leave the main entrance to the ABC building located at Ultimo in Sydney on June 5 2019
On the 20th anniversary of Christian Bale-starrer movie "American Psycho", filmmaker Mary Harron has revealed how she initially lost the project due to her objection towards Leonardo DiCaprio playing the central character Patrick Bateman.

The film, based on Bret Easton Ellis' 1991 novel of the same name, was released in April 2000. It featured Bale as Bateman, the wealthy New York investment banker and a serial killer.

Though Bale was always the first choice of Marron for the lead, things changed when DiCaprio expressed interest in the project.

"I didn't agree with that partly because he was such a big star but also because he had a teenage girl fanbase. I just didn't think he was right for it so I was fired from the movie for a while," the filmmaker told Little White Lies in an interview.

After she was removed from the project, the studio, Lionsgate, roped in Oliver Stone to direct the movie. However, the film couldn't take off.

"They couldn't agree on the script, so they brought me back and I was able to cast Christian,' Marron said.

The filmmaker was particularly impressed by the dedication of Bale, who has often gone to extreme lengths to pull off his characters in films.

His physical preparation was beyond what I expected. I thought he might have to visit the gym, because Bateman works out, but he went through a complete physical transformation. He only ate grilled chicken," Harron said.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
A senior consultant doctor weeks from retirement and a housekeeper described as the linchpin of her hospitals geriatric ward are among the latest London NHS workers to die while suffering coronavirus symptoms.

Cheryl Williams, who worked as housekeeper at North Middlesex University Hospital, died at the weekend after two weeks in intensive care battling Covid-19.

Her death followed that of consultant Eric Labeja-Acellam, 68, who was about to retire from his role at University Hospital Lewisham. He was described today by his wife Jennifer Lawala as the greatest of men, while hospital colleagues praised Mrs Williams as irreplaceable, compassionate and caring.

The two NHS deaths came as Londons coronavirus death toll continues to rise, with 3,071 fatalities declared in hospitals in the capital so far.

Hundreds of other deaths have occurred outside hospitals with concerns mounting about the number of care home residents, in particular, who have died.

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Mr Labeja-Accellams wife spoke of her devastation at his loss, saying: Eric was the greatest of men. He worked at hospitals all over London. He was coming up to retirement but he loved his work in the NHS so much.

Eric would try to laugh through illness but this time it was different. We had to call for help. The ambulance took a long time to come then he went and we never saw him again.

Ms Lawala a well-known musician in her native Uganda, does not believe her husband contracted the virus at work, with both she and her son also developing symptoms.

She said: I became ill and had to go to hospital where I was put on life support. I thought I was going to die.

My son was alone at home and then he developed symptoms. We have both pulled through and are recovering slowly but Im still in pain. We dont know what we are going to do, our family has been torn apart.

Meanwhile, Omodele Olowokere, the manager of Charles Coward geriatric ward at North Middlesex Hospital, paid tribute to her colleague Mrs Williams, whose job as housekeeper involved cleaning rooms, making beds and replenishing linens on the ward.

It is with great sadness and heavy heart to share the news that our colleague Cheryl passed away, Ms Olowokere wrote on social media.

Eric was the greatest of men. He was coming up to retirement but loved his work in the NHS so much

The entire Charles Coward team are devastated about the loss. You have left a vacuum for us. Our heartfelt condolences to your family and friends.

Her cousin Ethel Nubla Ogan last week posted a link to a BBC report filmed inside the intensive care unit at University College Hospital where Mrs Williams was being treated. She wrote: Prayers for my cousin who was tested positive for Covid-19. This is hitting really close to home and extremely hard. Five days later, on Sunday, she added: Rest in peace now and know that you passed this world and gave comfort & joy to those lives you touched.

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The North Middlesex University Hospital NHS Trust also paid tribute, saying: As a ward housekeeper on one of our elderly wards, Cheryl was a linchpin of the care, comfort, and compassion that our patients and local people value so highly. Her contribution to patient care is irreplaceable.

Dozens of NHS staff are reported to have died with Covid-19 amid calls for more personal protective equipment. Heath Secretary Matt Hancock has said an investigation will be carried out into the extent to which health workers have caught the virus while doing their jobs.
Mexico is a vast country and is the third-largest country in Latin America. Mexico has a beautiful coastline with some of the best beaches in the world, so it's not hard to see why people descend here year on year.

With over 10,000km of breathtaking beaches on the Pacific ocean, the California Sea, the Gulf of Mexico, and the Caribbean sea, choosing the perfect location for a beach break in Mexico could be quite a challenge.

With this in mind, you are sure to be able to make use of our guide below to the best beaches in the fantabulous country of Mexico.

A Breathtaking Trip To Playa Mazunte Beach - Mexico

One of the most common coastlines in Mexico is that of southern Oaxaca state. It boasts serene, sandy beaches facing the Pacific Ocean, and gentle turquoise waves. One of the best beaches in Oaxaca can be found in Mazunte's quirky beachside town and is formally named Playa Mazunte. With parasols available all day long to rent from the beach vendors along with cold beers and food on hand, you'll never want to leave.

A Breathtaking Beach Break To Playa Paraiso - Mexico

Playa Paraiso in Tulum is known by many as 'Paradise Beach.' It is one of Mexico's best beaches and is almost unrivalled in elegance and ecological diversity.

Hemmed in by swaying palms and rugged cliffs, this ideal beach is postcard-perfect and sits beneath a beautiful, classic archaeological ruin.

The turquoise waters and the white sands reach as far as the eye can see, and while it is relatively well known, travellers never overwhelm it.

Enjoy The Beautiful Beach At Playa Las Gatas

Playa Las Gatas is a relatively overlooked beach in Zihuatanejo. It was allegedly named after the abundance of cat-whiskered nurse sharks which used to dwell in this area.

This beach boasts smooth, calm waters nowadays, despite the presence of rocky coves and coral. It is an excellent location to snorkel and discover the ocean through a snorkel. Be wary of sea urchins on the seabed though!

Isla Holbox - An Island With Amazing Beaches In Mexico

Isla Holbox is a newly discovered island in the state of Quintana Roo in Mexico. While it has many beaches (the beach literally surrounds it) its small size makes it easy to explore many beaches.

It was long associated with having an overwhelming presence of whale sharks and was a trendy place for divers. It is now gaining prominence in the travel and tourism industry for its soothing environment, shallow waters and pristine beaches that are pretty much deserted.

Playa Norte Beach On Isla Mujeres Mexico

The long and easily accessible Isla Mujeres is another excellent Quintana Roo island that has some spectacular beaches. Notably more touristy than Isla Holbox, this charming island has a wide variety of beach bars, lodgings, and restaurants.

Playa Norte's breathtaking beach has crystal clear waters and soft powdery sand that could easily make this one of Mexico's most beautiful beaches.

Bahia Balandra Is A Beautiful Beach In La Paz Mexico

La Paz is popular with holidaymakers from all around the world. It's a number one go-to holiday brochure resort. After a quick look at the beach, it's not hard to understand why it's so popular. Bahia Balandra is one of the world's most famous and most visited beaches. The waters here are shallow, and the views are serene. It's an ideal resort for children as there are plenty of activities and attractions to keep them amused and entertained.

The snorkelling and diving conditions here are perfect and are teeming with tropical fishes. It's best to head to this beach earlier in the day, especially if you want a sunbed or a good spot close to the water's edge.

The Tourist Paradise Of Playa Del Amor

Playa del Amor beach resort is located in the tourist paradise known as Cabo San Lucas. In English, Playa Del Amor means Lover's beach. Funnily enough, it backs on to a beach known as divorce beach! If you're happily married, make sure you're on the right beach at the beginning of the day!

This beautiful beach is one of the best beaches you can visit in Mexico and is the most popular beach in the resort of Cabo San Lucas. It is a beautiful and romantic location, and its name is incredibly apt. The beach is situated in a bay, and there are fantastic rock formations, jagged cliffs and blue waters all around the soft, sumptuous sands.

Punta Negra Secluded Beach Break Puerto Vallarta

Punta Negra is a well-hidden less frequented beach but is exceptionally beautiful. It's quite hot and humid in this region but a dip in the cooling waters will make the trip here worthwhile.

The beach is somewhat hidden, is situated in the south of the country and is just past the historic town that it is associated with. You'll need to take your own beach supplies as there is no beach service here, but if you're looking for privacy, relaxation and peacefulness, then you'll find it at this beach.

Mexico really does have some of the most breathtaking beaches in the world, and it's a great place to holiday if you're looking for some time out in the sun.




As a corporate communications professional and a former journalist, I understand the co-dependent relationship that exists between the media and big business. That the public is reliant on this mutual professional (and ethical) affiliation to get a view of the inner-workings of these organisations as a means of policing their behaviours and actions, as well as their impact on broader society.

Photo by Markus Winkler on Unsplash.com

A driver for future reputation

Tell the organisations relevant stories of hope

Being accessible, transparent and open in communicating

This insight, which most citizens only has access to via media, is one very powerful channel of emotionally binding society with that which big business has to offer. Business owners or leadership, believe this, among their other strategic and practical efforts, will yield an uptick in the bottom line through an increase in brand awareness and loyalty, and the purchasing of goods and services.On the other hand, their communications teams work tirelessly to develop these relationships with the understanding that more awareness of an organisations positive behaviours and actions through media activities will have positive outcomes on overall reputation among members of society and shareholders. Above all else, the hope is that this more favourable reputation will result in a ripple effect of more brand loyalty, potential investment, and possibly a pliable stakeholders ear required for further business growth.The South African media, as we know, is inundated every day with communication from corporate South Africa. One after the other peddling their wares. Some of it relevant, others, arguably blatant fluffing of the feathers (yeah, we try and sometimes theres just no avoiding it).Nevertheless, it is in times of real crisis, as we as a nation are faced with currently, that the true nature and character of big business emerges  their accessibility, their transparency, their loyalty and commitment to society. Their visibility, actions and behaviour now more than ever before become a driver for future reputation, and whether the individual on the street resonate with them, believe in them, importantly TRUST in them.Right now, the greatest focus of South Africas media is on governments response to the crisis health-wise and economically; what the fallout of this all means for business and society; and the reaction of the countrys citizens to some of the revocation of rights in the interest of mitigating and minimising the long-term negative impact. However, medias gaze will certainly wander back to the actions of big business, asking pertinent questions, particularly because most of them are better positioned than small- and medium-sized enterprises to weather the economic storm currently raging and unlikely to abate in the months to come. Further, President Ramaphosa has called for them to play their part in fighting the pandemic.Despite this, now is no time for big business to retreat from the public eye. Yes, they too are focused on salvaging what may be left of their operations once the lockdown comes to an end and to contemplating and planning (as best as possible) for an uncertain future, but the work of the media practitioner does not end now.This is their time to stand up and tell the organisations relevant stories of hope and even those of despair because admittedly, there will be those. The public need to know how big business is stepping up to the plate and supporting the state of affairs and society that it so often claims to care about at other times without being prompted.In addition, its important to demonstrate the human character of business to ensure the brand maintains an emotional connection with stakeholders - think Edcon CEO Grant Pattisons raw emotional conversation with SMME suppliers recently and the resulting communication on the businesss future probability of continuing operations post-Covid-19. Media and other stakeholders, including the public, have given them an empathetic ear and all companies need this understanding and support in a time of crisis. A brand can only build this level of understanding during crisis by being accessible, transparent and open in communicating consistently through thick and thin.Society and business are linked  the one supports the other. And so, it is during this time, when the consumers of services and products who face one of the greatest mass uncertainly of their times, that big business should step forward and communicate how they are helping buffer the fallout as much as possible, as well as how they may be struggling.A careful balance of communication should be developed so that media and the public are not overwhelmed or that communication does not border on the irrelevant or simply communicating for the sake of it.We need to work with media and help them in this critical time to tell well-balanced and comprehensive stories that are of interest to the nation. Critically, communication and visibility during this time will indeed help build reputation and long-term trust in brands. This is such a moment and one that will indeed come back to companies in months and years from now.
The Chicago Tribune reported in 2018 that many of the countys 36,960 tax-delinquent properties set to go to auction that year were in the south suburbs. Harvey had the most, at 4,352. Calumet City and Chicago Heights each had more than 1,000 tax-delinquent parcels headed to the auction block.
Storm clouds cover the Cape May, New Jersey on Monday. Read more

Hurricane-force winds were roaring at 100-plus mph, 2,000 to 3,000 feet above the ground.

And it is all but certain that a gravity wave yanked some of that ferocious energy to the surface, setting off gusts as high as 82 mph on Monday, ripping down power lines; shearing a chunk of roof off the historic Congress Hall hotel in Cape May; and damaging Wildwoods boardwalk.

Were pretty confident it was a gravity wave, said Robert Deal, a lead meteorologist at the National Weather Service Office in Mount Holly.

 READ MORE: Power outages, roof and boardwalk damage accompany storms throughout Philadelphia region

The damaging gusts were fitting exclamation points to a remarkable five-day wind siege across the region. Jim Eberwine, a longtime weather service marine forecaster and now emergency services director in Absecon, N.J., said he expected a post-storm analysis would show that the peak of Mondays mayhem was the work of a gravity wave.

So just what is a gravity wave?

In the atmosphere, a gas that behaves like a fluid, waves can move sideways or vertically. A gravity wave is an example of the latter.

Although the appreciation of their impacts on weather is a relatively recent development, they actually occur quite frequently and are visible in certain cloud formations. Under the right (or wrong) circumstances, however, as was the case Monday, they can conspire to cause destruction.

Warm air rises over cold air, and it can climb rapidly during strong thunderstorm outbreaks or other disturbances. A gravity wave results when a parcel of air encounters the resistance of a cooler layer, ultimately forcing the air to descend, bringing strong winds down with it.

On Monday, said the weather services Deal, "we saw that the winds were strong aloft, and it was just a matter of how much would reach the surface.

The answers were evident at Island Beach State Park, where a gust of 82 mph was recorded around noon. And around Atlantic City, a peak wind of 72 mph was measured at the airport, and gusts ripped sheet metal from the side of the former Trump Plaza.

Gravity waves can be both the cause and result of thunderstorms, said Louis W. Uccellini, director of the National Weather Service, who has conducted pioneering research on the phenomenon.

They also can be associated with winter storms, he said, creating corridors of profoundly heavy snows and strong winds.

One example is the East Coast blizzard of 1983. In Northeastern Snowstorms, Vol. I, which Uccellini coauthored with Paul Kocin, the authors noted that a gravity wave on Feb. 11 generated snowfalls at the rates of two to five inches an hour from Washington to New York. Commuters were stranded in the Lincoln Tunnel for several hours by the rapidly falling snow.

Are they a new phenomena?

No. They probably have been around as long as the atmosphere has been making mischief.

However, serious research on how gravity waves might affect weather is a modern development. Uccellini recalled that he discussed them in his first published paper, in 1975.

He found that they could propagate for 1,000 miles, along perhaps a 100-mile-wide alley, and last from two to four hours.

His conclusions were met with skepticism by some of the brightest minds in atmospheric research, who argued that the waves couldnt last for more than about 20 minutes. They included Theodore Fujita of the Fujita tornado scale.

Uccellini said he became part of a gravity wave underground. He added, We didnt want to tell anybody we were studying gravity waves.

The skeptics eventually relented, and the significance of gravity waves to weather events became widely accepted in the 1980s.

Are they predictable?

As with almost everything else in weather, not entirely, although meteorologists have made progress.

In its morning discussion Monday, the Mount Holly weather office said, Weve seen all the signatures of a gravity wave propagating through the mid-Atlantic," and thus issued a special weather statement.

Its a challenging forecast, said Deal.

It would have been nice to know at what point would those strong winds descend, said Eberwine. You know its coming, but when?

The gravity wave wasnt the only force behind a seemingly relentless spell of wind that began Thursday. Atlantic City International Airport, 10 miles northwest of the city and well away from the water, recorded gale-force gusts or better on all five days.

Not that Philadelphia and the surrounding counties enjoyed gentle breezes; 50 mph-plus gusts were common.

No encores are in the forecast, but more rain is due Tuesday night into Wednesday, and just for a dash of icing, parts of the region are under a frost advisory Wednesday morning.

Staff writer Amy S. Rosenberg contributed to this article.
Yesterday, on April 14, during the scheduled combat exercise, a Ukrainian military from the 3rd detached special task regiment named after Grand Prince Svyatoslav the Brave died, as the press service of the Command of the Special Forces of the Armed Forces of Ukraine reported.

It was noted that the deceased is 24-year-old senior soldier Ihor V. Vivcharenko.

The Command of the Special Forces of the Armed Forces of Ukraine expresses its profound condolences to the family and relative of Ihor Vivcharenko.

As we reported, a serviceman of Ukraine's Armed Forces deceased during the live-fire accident that occurred at a firing range in Donbas. Eight of his comrades were wounded in the same accident.

Earlier, Ukraines Commissioner for Human Rights Lyudmyla Denisova claimed that the prisoners exchange between Ukraine, Russia, and militants would take place by the end of the week.
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Linkedin News Desk (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Wed, April 15, 2020 12:34 636 fc6853813033f564188675f8bd204689 1 Lifestyle skincare,quarantine,self-quarantine,COVID-19,coronavirus,health,beauty,beauty-treatment Free

With the increasing amount of time spent at home amid the coronavirus pandemic, your body is now adjusting to a new routine.

Your skin, the largest organ in your body, might also have a hard time figuring out what is happening and freak out in one way or another.

There are chances you are exposed to less harsh sun and use less makeup--or even no makeup at all, which is good for your skin. However, you might also expose yourself to more air conditioning, eat less healthy food and consume more alcoholic beverages to cope with the quarantine blues.

Heather D. Rogers, owner of Modern Dermatology in Seattle, in the United States, said that you need to take care of your whole self to keep your skin healthy and glowing in quarantine. Your skin is a reflection of your overall health, she said to huffingtonpost.co.uk.

Take a look at the list below of ways to take care of your skin amid the pandemic.

Get enough sleep

Sleeping is imperative for your overall healthy life. According to Sleepfoundation.org, healthy sleeping behavior includes falling asleep easily within 15-20 minutes of lying down to sleep; regularly sleeping for a total of seven to nine hours in a 24-hour period; having continuous sleep and not having long periods of lying awake when you wish to be sleeping; and waking up feeling fresh and alert.

If you dont get enough sleep, your body will release more cortisol, the stress hormone that can cause acne or psoriasis.

Work out routinely

Working out will help your body to burn cortisone, which is a good way to reduce stress and help keep your skin clear.

However, remember to immediately take a shower after exercising.

Please dont sit around in your sweat, and wash your face, dermatologist Nazanin Saedi told Huffingtonpost.

Read also: Indonesian beauty trends to look out for in 2020

Wear moisturizer

Saedi predicted that people would sit around in air-conditioned rooms more often than in pre-coronavirus times. This can cause your skin to be exposed to dry air for a longer time. She suggested using a humidifier in the room where you sit most often in the house.

Also, try not to take too many long, hot showers as hot water sucks the moisture out of your skin, she said.

Dont go too far with skincare

You should brace yourself with an experimental skin care routine now that you have so much time on your hands. Use skin masks, peels and exfoliators only with caution.

All of that exfoliating and peeling affects your skins acid mantle. You have good bacteria and bad bacteria. You dont want to get rid of all your good stuff. If you overtreat, your pH levels go up and that can lead to skin problems, Rogers said.

Also, Saedi said you should wash your face but not too much.

If you over-wash, you are stripping the natural oils, so your skin will start producing more, she said. According to Saedi, it is enough to wash your face only once or twice a day, and use benzoyl peroxide once a week.

Moisturize your hands

The number-one COVID-19 preventive measure is to wash your hands, so naturally by now you will be washing your hands more often than you used to. However, always remember to moisturize your hands after washing.

All that washing and hand sanitizer dries out the skin, Saedi said. She suggested hand lotions or petroleum jelly to avoid cracked and chapped hands.

With the lockdown being in effect, it might be harder to purchase your skincare supplies. However, you still can make your own skincare with things you may find in your kitchen.

Rogers suggested using coconut oil to help with eczema and blocked pores. She also recommended castor oil, which is a source of triglycerides, ricinoleic, and other fatty acids. Triglycerides help retain moisture in the skin while ricinoleic works as an anti-inflammatory agent.

Olive oil also helps with dry scalp and hair. Sleep with some olive oil massaged into your scalp and it should help, Rogers said. (gis/wng)
Activist Le Dinh Luong stands to hear his sentence in court in Nghe An province, Vietnam, Aug. 16, 2018.

The relatives of more than 30 political prisoners in Vietnam have penned an open letter to the countrys leaders pleading for the release of their loved ones, who they say are at serious risk of contracting the coronavirus due to poor conditions in jail.

Amid fears over COVID-19 [the disease caused by the coronavirus], wethe relatives of political prisonerscall on Vietnams leaders to release the detainees so that they can avoid infection, said the letter, dated April 14.

Due to the outbreak over the last several months, the family members of political prisoners have been unable to visit with them. We are worried that the bad conditions in prison can affect the health of prisoners, leaving them more susceptible to the virus.

In the letter, the relatives warned that the reputation of Vietnams governmentand particularly Prime Minister Nguyen Xuan Phucwould be tarnished in the eyes of the international community if any political prisoners die as a result of becoming infected in detention.

The petition follows similar calls from groups including New York-based media watchdog Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), Californias Vietnam Human Rights Network (VNHRN), Vietnam-based blogger organization Defend the Defenders, and the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) for Hanoi to release prisoners deemed not to be a risk to society from Vietnams jails.

Nguyen Thi Lanh, the wife of Nguyen Trung Tona pastor serving a 12-year prison sentence in Gia Lai provinces Gia Trung Prison for his involvement with the Brotherhood for Democracytold RFAs Vietnamese Service Wednesday that she has been extremely concerned for her husbands well-being since prison visits were suspended in early March.

I am worried because the conditions in jail are not safe for the health of the prisoners and sick prisoners arent being examined, she said.

My husband is very sick, but I cant send him anything or visit him.

In August last year, Lanh told RFA that her husband's health condition had deteriorated because he was beaten before his arrest and the detention center did not allow him to seek a medical examination and treatment.

Ton was arrested in July 2017 on charges of "attempting to overthrow the people's government" and was sentenced to 12 years in prison and three years of probation in April 2018.

Estimates of the number of prisoners of conscience now held in Vietnams jails vary widely. New York-based Human Rights Watch said that authorities held 138 political prisoners as of October 2019, while Defend the Defenders has suggested that at least 240 are in detention, with 36 convicted last year alone.

Prime Minister Phuc said Wednesday that he was extending a March 31 directive aimed at slowing the spread of the coronavirus by requiring people to stay home except for emergencies and to buy food at least until April 22, and possibly longer.

As of April 15, Vietnam had confirmed 267 cases of COVID-19 infection.

Reported by RFAs Vietnamese Service. Translated by Huy Le. Written in English by Joshua Lipes.
More than 10,600 out-of-state health care workers now have temporary licenses to help New Jersey battle the coronavirus, officials announced Tuesday.

More than 400 retired doctors, nurses and others within New Jersey also reactivated licenses this month, officials said.

This is an all hands on deck moment, Gov. Phil Murphy said Tuesday at his daily briefing in Trenton. We thank everyone who is stepping forward.

Every new license makes New Jersey better equipped to fight back against COVID-19, state Attorney General Gurbir Grewal said in a statement.

Officials previously made it easier for both out-of-state and retired health care workers to provide care in New Jersey.

CORONAVIRUS RESOURCES: Live map tracker | Businesses that are open | Homepage

Out-of-state licenses were granted to soldiers deployed with the National Guard and people offering telehealth from other parts of the country, Grewals office said. A total of 3,350 are doctors or physician assistants. A little less than 3,000 are nurses, more than 2,270 are mental health professionals, and 117 are respiratory specialists.

In addition, 270 recently retired nurses and more than 130 doctors or physician assistants signed up to return to work.

The experienced recruits will help ease an unprecedented workload in overstretched health facilities, Paul Rodriguez, acting Director of the Division of Consumer Affairs, said in a statement.

New Jersey will soon launch a program to allow some doctors licensed in other countries to work domestically, Grewals office said. The state is also giving physician assistants and advanced practice nurses more leeway to work with less supervision, and relaxing limits on out-of-state medication prescriptions.

Recent retirees who apply to reactivate their licenses online should have an answer within one day, officials said.

The new and reactivated licenses will expire at the end of New Jerseys state of emergency.

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.

Blake Nelson can be reached at bnelson@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter at @BCunninghamN.
BSNL chairman and managing director P K Purwar has taken over additional charge of Mahanagar Telephone Nigam Limited, a regulatory filing said on Wednesday.

This is the third time Purwar has been given charge of MTNL CMD in the last six years.

"P K Purwar, CMD,BSNL has been entrusted the additional charge of CMD MTNL with effect from April 13, 2020 by the government of India, Department of Telecom," MTNL said in a regulatory filing.

The appointment of Purwar comes at a time when both the PSU are reeling under heavy debt despite the government offering them a relief package.

Accordingly, Purwar has taken over charge of CMD MTNL from April 15, 2020.

While MTNL has been able to resolve salary related issues and has only debt of around Rs 20,000 crore, BSNL is yet to clear dues of employees and vendors.

Purwar took charge as BSNL chairman in July 2019.

State-owned telecom firm BSNL's loss swelled by over 2.5 times to Rs 39,089 crore during the April-December 2019 period. The public sector telecom firm had recorded a loss of Rs 14,904 crore in the previous financial year 2018-19.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
With the nationwide lockdown extended till 3 May, domestic airlines have again decided not to refund customers in cash for their cancelled flights and instead have offered them rescheduling of tickets for a later date without any additional fee

Mumbai: With the nationwide lockdown extended till 3 May, domestic airlines have again decided not to refund customers in cash for their cancelled flights and instead have offered them rescheduling of tickets for a later date without any additional fee.

India had imposed a 21-day lockdown from 25 March to curb the spread of the coronavirus pandemic. Consequently, all domestic and international commercial passenger flights were suspended for this time period.

However, most of the airlines had been taking bookings except national carrier Air India for domestic flights for the period beyond 14 April.

Aviation consultancy Centre for Asia Pacific Aviation (CAPA) India said the civil aviation ministry should instruct airlines to "halt unfair practice of taking advance bookings until resumption is certain and an interim transition schedule has been established".

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After Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced the extension of lockdown till 3 May, aviation regulator DGCA issued a circular stating all international, as well as domestic flights, will remain suspended during the lockdown.

"Following orders from the Ministry of Civil Aviation issued to all airlines, we have extended the suspension of our operations until 3 May, 2020.

"We are in the process of cancelling the affected bookings and we will offer customers free of charge rescheduling to another date until 31 December, 2020," a Vistara spokesperson said in a statement.

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The customer, however, will have to pay the fare difference, if any, at the time of rebooking, the airline said.

A GoAir spokesperson said that it has already "factored in" these type of scenario and that the airline will review its earlier scheme of providing rescheduling free of cost at a later date while protecting their existing bookings for one year.

"In accordance with the Prime Ministers instructions and the DGCAs circular, GoAir has suspended all its flights till 3 May," GoAir said in a statement on Tuesday.

The airline also said it is extending its "Protect Your PNR" scheme till 3 May, 2020 wherein customers are eligible to reschedule their flight by 3 May, 2021.

The airline had on Monday announced that it was extending the Protect Your PNR scheme till 30 April, 2020.

The civil aviation ministry should instruct airlines to "halt unfair practice of taking advance bookings until resumption is certain and an interim transition schedule has been established", the CAPA said in a series of tweets.

With the lockdown extended till May 3, passengers who have purchased tickets for the 15 April to 3 May would "once again only be offered credit for future travel, rather than a refund," it said.

In case of train travel, the railway ministry has said there will be no advance bookings on trains until further notice.

According to the consultancy, this continues to be unfair on consumers who have purchased a service that the airlines cannot deliver, albeit through no fault of their own.

Some passengers may not have a need to travel in future during the validity of the credit and will lose their money, it noted.

"Some carriers have opened full schedule for sale from 04-May. Even if flights resume from that date, which is not certain, it is highly unlikely that full operations will resume from day 1.

"Further flight cancellations almost inevitable, resulting in more pax funds in credit," it said in another tweet said.

It may be mentioned here that the then customers of the erstwhile Kingfisher Airlines and Jet Airways could not recover their money which the two airlines had amassed on account of advance bookings only after their going belly up.

CAPA in its March 18 report had stated that amid COVID-19 and in the absence of government support "several Indian airlines may shut down operations by May or June due to a lack of cash.

Within hours of the government extending lockdown to 3 May, budget carrier IndiGo announced the resumption of flight services though in a phased manner from 4 May.

Announcing that all its flights are cancelled till 3 May, IndiGo said, it is in the process of cancelling the reservations."Your ticket amount is protected in the form of credit shell in the PNR, which can be utilised within one year of the issued date."

"In its endeavour to reconnect critical air corridors post the lockdown, IndiGo, India's leading airline, will resume flight operations from 4 May, 2020," IndiGo said in the statement.

Gurugram-based spiceJet also said the amount from the cancelled ticket will be maintained in a credit shell.

"We are cancelling the reservation of those who booked tickets for travel till 3 May, 2020. Upon cancellation your entire amount will be maintained in credit shell and the same may be used for fresh bookings and travel till 28 February, 2021, for the same passenger," it said.
ALREADY impacted by COVID-19 (coronavirus) pandemic members of Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) are asking the government for tax relief and exemption.

Fish mongers, and other traders in markets and shops in different parts of the Zanzibar city say there has been drastic reduction of customers since the government imposed partial business lockdown in efforts to control the spread of the virus.

We are really desperate. It is a global problem, but let the government allow tax exemption at least for three months as the world battles COVID-19, Mr Omar Ibrahim a trader in Darajani market said.

While the authorities from the Zanzibar Revenue Board (ZRB), digest the request, the management of the Kinyasini Market in north Unguja has swiftly reacted by promising tax relief as soon as possible.

Traders pay different amount of tax on daily basis, monthly and yearly depending on the size of the business and Ms Mwaka Hassan running a retail shop said tax relief or exemption at this time is crucial.

We will definitely consider traders request for tax relief so that we have revenue to collect as they also sale at this time of challenges caused by coronavirus, Mr Mbarouk Maalim Mohamed assistant manager of Kinyasini Market said.

He said Hotels are closed and local customers have decreased due to the virus, Therefore we have to find ways of copying with the situation and we increase awareness campaign so that more do not contract the disease.

Everyone should promote observing health precautions which include self isolations, social distancing, and frequent hand washing.
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Market Research Future Published a Research Study on Specialty Metallic Pigments Market Research Report, Size, Share and Industry Analysis - Forecast to 2023

Specialty Metallic Pigments are colors/dyes made from metal flakes and are designed to give a shimmering, seamless effect to a specific final product. Finding applications in diverse industries like automotive, construction, furniture, personal care & cosmetic and printing Specialty Metallic Pigment perceive an augmented demand worldwide. For instance: -

In personal care & cosmetic, these Metallic colors are used in various products ranging from powders, nail paints, to hair care to give these products a fascinatingly shimmering effect and a unique tangible dimension, thus presenting them as a complete speciality product and indispensable.

Metallic Pigments used in construction/ residential interiors & furniture, give a seamless, sparkling and a unique, three-dimensional appearance & finish (walls, floors, tiles etc.) perfecting them with an unparalleled blend of beauty and durability.

Metallic colors used in automotive coatings and paints, offer vehicles an elegant and exotic finish. Similarly, in printing inks developed with Metallic Pigments are used for a shiny/ glossy printing need.

According to the Market Research Future, The global Specialty Metallic Pigments Market of Organic Matting Agent is booming and expected to gain further prominence over the forecast period. The market is forecasted to demonstrate a voluminous growth by 2023, registering a striking CAGR during the estimated period (2017  2023).

Augmented demand from the burgeoning industries defines the growth landscape of the Specialty Metallic Pigments Market globally escorting it to the ascended heights.

Paints & Coating industries predominantly drive the market growth. Automotive industry accounts for a larger contribution witnessing the increasing demand and production of automobiles worldwide. Other burgeoning industries contributing the market growth include construction, architecture, electronics & electrical and furniture.

Specialty Metallic Pigments are widely utilized for printing and to add aesthetic elements to the packaging material. Furthermore, rising demand for attractive packaging coupled with the continuous growth of packaging sector is expected to fuel the growth of the market during the review period.

Worldwide Specialty Metallic Pigments Market  Competitive Analysis

The market appears to be highly competitive and fragmented with the presence of several well-established players having regional and global presence. Innovation, mergers & acquisitions, and brand reinforcement remain the key trends for leading players. They strive to develop Specialty Metallic Pigments designed to reduce the downtime and maintenance with longer life and lower total costs. The market will witness a fierce competition due to the expected extensions in product & service and product innovations.

Worldwide Specialty Metallic Pigments Market  Segments

The Specialty Metallic Pigments Market can be segmented in to 3 key dynamics for the convenience of the report and enhanced understanding;

By Type : Comprises Copper, Aluminium, Bronze, Stainless Steel, Zinc, and others

By Application : Paints & Coatings, Printing Inks, Cosmetics & Personal Care, Plastics, and other.

By Region : North America, Europe, APAC and Rest of the World.

Segment Aluminium by type has accounted for the largest market share due to growing acceptance in automotive paints & coatings.

Worldwide Specialty Metallic Pigments Market  Regional Analysis

Asia Pacific is predicted to grow at the fastest CAGR during the review period, driven by increasing demand from end use industries such as automobiles, packaging, and construction.

North America is expected to witness a significant growth owing to strict regulatory framework along with high technology adoption rate. North American countries such as U.S. and Canada are among the major contributors in the regional market growth and are expected to witness regional market growth during the review period.

European countries such as Russia, Spain, Germany, and UK have emerged as the regional consumer market due to growing end use industries and increasing consumer spending on personal care products.

Browse Key Industry insights spread across 134 pages with 35 market data tables & 11 figures & charts from the Report, Specialty Metallic Pigments Market Information- by Type (Copper, Aluminum, Bronze, Stainless Steel, Zinc, and Others), by Application (Paints & Coatings, Printing Inks, Cosmetics & Personal Care, Plastics, and Others), and By Region- Forecast till 2023 in detail along with the table of contents@ https://www.marketresearchfuture.com/reports/specialty-metallic-pigments-market-4279

Related Chemicals And Materials Market Research Report@ https://www.marketresearchfuture.com/categories/chemicals-market-report

NOTE: Our team of researchers are studying Covid19 and its impact on various industry verticals and wherever required we will be considering covid19 footprints for a better analysis of markets and industries. Cordially get in touch for more details.
Australia's powerful teachers unions are holding children's education to ransom, insisting schools should remain closed contrary to medical experts.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison, keen for Australian children to have the best possible education, is desperate for schools to re-open - but belligerent unions are standing in his way.

The fate of millions of schoolchildren is at stake.

The National Cabinet is due to meet on Thursday to discuss the future of schooling amid the coronavirus pandemic after all states and territories, except the Northern Territory, either told parents to keep children at home or made school optional.

Scott Morrison, keen for Australian children to have the best possible education, is desperate for schools to re-open but belligerent unions stand in his way

The President of the Queensland Teachers Union (pictured) told Mr Morrison to 'butt out' and insisted that teachers should not have to attend school

On Tuesday night Mr Morrison released a video asking teachers to agree to go back to work, saying: 'Your students and their families are relying on you more than ever.'

The President of the Queensland Teachers Union, which has 47,000 members giving it more than $20million per year, told Mr Morrison to 'butt out' and insisted that teachers should not have to attend school.

President Kevin Bates claimed that 'young people will not suffer' from learning online - despite strong evidence that children learn far better in a classroom environment.

Mr Bates, who has shared articles on Twitter advocating the overthrow of capitalism, said it was not safe for teachers to go to work.

Australia has made significant progress in the fight against coronavirus, with a clear flattening of the curve on the graph that measures the daily infection rate

The Victorian branch of the Australian Education Union and the NSW Teachers Federation have also demanded school closures.

But health experts have repeatedly said schools are safe and on Wednesday afternoon Deputy Chief Medical Officer Dr Nick Coatsworth again re-iterated it was fine for schools to be open because children do not tend to spread the virus.

Children make up only two per cent of coronavirus cases in Australia, he said.

'It's the view of the Australian Health Protection Principal Committee that schools are safe places because of the low rates of transmission.'

He described teachers as 'essential' and said the AHPPC will advise the National Cabinet how to make schools even safer so they can re-open.

Federal Education Minister Dan Tehan told education representatives in a meeting on Tuesday he wants schools back up and running in four to six weeks.

On the same day, Chief Medical Officer Brendan Murphy said the powerful unions were responsible for shutting down schools against the wishes of state premiers.

'Most of the state governments actually didn't want to close the schools, it was the parents and the teachers who closed the schools,' he told a New Zealand parliamentary hearing.

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 unions are major financial contributors to state Labor parties, making it difficult for Labor premiers such as Victoria's Daniel Andrews and Queensland's Annastacia Palaszczuk to stand up to them.

Moreover, the teachers unions can afford to drive a hard bargain because they know their members' jobs are secure, unlike jobs in the private sector which have taken a hammering due to the coronavirus shut down.

With salaries starting at around $70,000 and heading up towards $160,000, teachers in Australia are among the highest paid in the world.

Paypackets for primary school teachers are 36 per cent higher than the OECD average and salaries for high school teachers are 22 per cent higher, a report in September showed.

Meanwhile, battling parents are being told to keep their children at home, causing them to fall behind.

Commentators have compared concerned teachers to our unflappable nurses who put their health at risk every day on the front lines without a fuss.

Dr Bella d'Abrera from the Institute of Public Affairs told Daily Mail Australia Scott Morrison is right to ask teachers to 'do their jobs'.

Classrooms across the nation were virtually empty toward the end of term one as parents stopped sending their children to school

'School teachers should be in classrooms, doing the jobs that they are being paid to do,' she said.

'They are behaving as if they are being asked by government to risk their lives at the front line of infection.

'The teachers unions should be putting children first by providing them with an education.

'Australian schoolchildren are already behind in literacy and numeracy. They simply cannot afford to fall back even further,' Dr d'Abera said after NAPLAN results showed Australia had fallen behind comparable countries in science, maths and reading.

Experts also strongly refute the insistence of the unions that learning from home is an adequate replacement for going to school.

The Victorian government's own website says: 'Going to school every day is the single most important part of your child's education.

'There is no safe number of days for missing school. Each day a student misses puts them behind.'

A major study of online schools in the US found that children were far less well educated than in normal schools.

'Attending an online charter school leads to lessened academic growth for the average student,' the study said.

In an article for The Conversation, Grattan Institute Fellow Julie Sonnemann said poor students and those already behind are being hit the hardest.

'Children from poorer households do worse at online learning for a host of reasons; they have less internet access, fewer technological devices, poorer home learning environments and less help from their parents when they get stuck,' she wrote.

Ms Sonnermann said intense after-school tuition classes and even holiday classes should be considered to help these children get back on track once the schools re-open.

In the meantime, Scott Morrison has a major fight on his hands to get us to that point.
14.04.2020 LISTEN

Gospel musician and actor Atta Patrick has asked Ghanaian gospel musicians to practice what they preach in their songs.

Speaking from Holland, he said people often get disappointed with the lifestyle of gospel musicians due to credibility crisis most artistes have suffered by their public actions.

He said considering the hard time Ghanaians and the world are going through, gospel musicians would have been the best mentor to others, but because they don't practice what they preach they have lost it.

"Arrogance, Adultery and other social vices have been like a curse on most Gospel musicians which has messed up their influence, Mr Patrick emphasised.
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Business Insider

President Donald Trump at one of the daily coronavirus press briefings at the White House.

Reuters

The US traditionally sets a model for other countries during global crises and uses its resources to assist them, but that has not been the case during the coronavirus pandemic under President Donald Trump.

Not only is the US struggling to contain its own outbreak, but close allies like the UK and South Korea that traditionally look to the US for help are fighting the pandemic on their own.

"Trump's ineptitude is exposed, but more than that, the US is not there to help others. We are not a global power in this pandemic, and people will remember that," Cynthia Schneider, who was the US ambassador to the Netherlands from 1998 to 2001, told Insider.

Governors in the US have had to handle acquiring crucial medical supplies on their own. After Trump rejected New York's request for more ventilators, the state received 1,000 ventilators from China  a massive influx of critical aid that's more typical of the US response to disasters.

"The lack of a global health defense network that could have been empowered by American medical expertise meant that the virus blossomed wherever underpreparation and slow-footedness prevailed," said Jack Chow, who was a US ambassador for global HIV/AIDS during the George W. Bush administration.

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As Ebola ravaged West Africa in September 2014, President Barack Obama stood in front of the United Nations and implored the leaders of the world to do more. Though Ebola never posed a significant threat to the US domestically, Obama presented it as a problem the globe had to face together.

"This is also more than a health crisis. This is a growing threat to regional and global security," Obama said at the time. "In an era where regional crises can quickly become global threats, stopping Ebola is in the interest of all of us."

Later that same week, Obama hosted health ministers from more than 40 nations at the White House for a global health security summit, where he renewed calls for a coordinated, international response to Ebola.

Story continues

President Donald Trump has taken the polar-opposite approach to the coronavirus pandemic. He's blamed other countries for the virus, announced funding cuts for the World Health Organization, moved to restrict exports of medical supplies to Canada and Latin America, and been accused by at least five countries of blocking or seizing shipments of vital supplies.

"What the Trump administration has never really understood, and you see it again here, is that global leadership is not about telling other countries what to do  it's about being willing to be the first in line to do it," Jeremy Konyndyk, a senior fellow at the Center for Global Development who oversaw the Obama administration's response to the Ebola outbreak in West Africa as director for foreign disaster assistance at USAID, told Insider. He added: "The world follows the signals we send with our own actions."

Trump's disastrous coronavirus response has not only caused embarrassment for the US  which is still struggling to provide widespread tests for Americans as its 612,000 confirmed COVID-19 cases outstrip every other nation's  but has also created a gaping hole in global leadership that China has rushed to fill, say former US officials who served under three different administrations.

"Trump's ineptitude is exposed, but more than that, the US is not there to help others. We are not a global power in this pandemic, and people will remember that," Cynthia Schneider, who was the US ambassador to the Netherlands from 1998 to 2001, told Insider. "When there's a void, there's always something to fill the void. China is filling the void."

If the US is not "robustly engaging and showing leadership" in global institutions, then it creates a vacuum for others to do so, Konyndyk said.

He added: "By the US pulling back and getting into fights with these institutions, we're just leaving more space for others to occupy. I don't think the Trump administration has ever really understood that."

Trump with Chinese President Xi Jinping during a meeting on the sidelines of the G20 summit in Osaka, Japan, on June 29.

AP Photo/Susan Walsh

Trump set the US up for disaster and has failed to bring the world together to fight the coronavirus

After years of taking steps that weakened America's ability to thwart pandemics, including scrapping the National Security Council's global health unit, Trump ignored myriad warning signs of an impending global-health catastrophe.

Even after he'd been briefed by the intelligence community and senior advisers on the devastating impact the virus might have on both public health and the economy, Trump downplayed the threat for weeks. As a result, the US was left largely unprepared for a public-health crisis of this magnitude and too preoccupied to help mobilize the world to defeat the virus at a time when global cooperation could not be more important.

It also did not help matters that Trump had spent the past three years attacking global institutions the US played a vital role in founding and building up.

"Fighting the epidemic globally requires nations to unionize and act in synchrony and coordination, and the Trump administration has failed to have America activate any conventional international consortium to confront the epidemic: UN Security Council, G7, G20, NATO, central banks  all have not coalesced around any grand strategy due to Trump's abdication of leadership in those US-anchored alliances," Jack Chow, who was a US ambassador for global HIV/AIDS during the George W. Bush administration and is a former World Health Organization assistant director-general, told Insider.

'The US is not helping anyone. The US isn't even helping itself.'

The US is now the epicenter of the coronavirus pandemic, with the most confirmed cases and fatalities in the world. It's been far outpaced by other countries in terms of testing for and containing the virus  including South Korea, which had its first reported case of the virus on the same day as the US in January. Meanwhile, states across the US are struggling to obtain lifesaving medical supplies as hospitals nationwide are overwhelmed.

With minimal help from the Trump administration, governors have rallied together to help one another and in some cases have also received assistance from other countries. New York, the hardest-hit state, recently accepted 1,000 ventilators from China after Trump rejected calls from Gov. Andrew Cuomo for more.

"We are not only not providing leadership in terms of how people should be behaving at a time like this, but we are ourselves requiring and relying on aid from other countries. Our states are receiving aid from China," Schneider said.

She added that, previously, "even countries that might have had criticism for the US" knew they could "depend on it to be there as the strong global power to help them as they needed it."

"That is completely absent," she said. "The US is not helping anyone. The US isn't even helping itself, much less other countries. And, thanks to 24/7 global communication, that is visible for all the world to see."

She added: "The world does not have red states and blind Trump followers. The world can see the absolute terrifying and fatal ineptitude of the Trump administration. There's no global Fox News that's going to tell a different, false story."

Many Americans also appear to have caught on to the ways in which the US is racing to keep up with the world, rather than setting the pace, in terms of its response to the pandemic. As of this week, 55% of Americans now say the federal government was not prepared to handle the coronavirus pandemic, and just 27% say the US is doing a better job at containing the virus than other developed countries, according to Insider polling.

But Trump has explicitly refused to take any responsibility for his administration's failures and routinely berates reporters who question his handling of the pandemic.

"The US has never been a perfect world power, and one of our strengths has been our capacity for self-criticism, recognizing our faults, and trying to correct them," Schneider said. "That is of course completely absent in the Trump administration."

'It is striking that we look so far behind the curve'

Though the US has hardly been a wholly benevolent actor in foreign affairs since World War II, it's traditionally set a model for the world during global crises and looked to international institutions as crucial tools in solving them. That's not happening under Trump.

"The US is just not taking the kind of role it would normally take, neither in terms of engaged moral leadership, basic coordination, getting joint statements at the G7. It's not doing any of that. It's jaw-dropping," Daniel Nexon, an associate professor of government at Georgetown University who was the coauthor of "Exit from Hegemony: The Unraveling of the American Global Order," told Insider, adding: "It is striking that we look so far behind the curve, are so absent, and are not doing so great ourselves on the crisis. I can't think of anything like this, honestly."

Nexon added that while the US was "no longer a sole, global hegemon," it nevertheless was "perfectly capable of exercising more leadership" and "particularly under an administration that is more conventional  Republican or Democratic  you would not see the US quite so AWOL in a fight against a pandemic."

Since he entered the White House, Trump has operated on a theory that weakening or sidelining global institutions means the US will have more bargaining power. In doing so, the president repeatedly attacked organizations like NATO and the United Nations, contending they'd been unfair to the US and had taken advantage of its generosity. Nexon said this had made the US appear as a less reliable partner and opened the door for countries like China and Russia to push their agendas more effectively.

"It's ironically made the old-style institutions much more attractive to powers who disagree with the US because the US is less influential there and they can get more of what they want," Nexon said. "It's left the US much more isolated and flailing."

With the US viewed as a less credible and consistent partner as a consequence of Trump's leadership, key countries that would normally look to an American president for guidance  South Korea, Italy, Spain, and the UK  have largely sought to fight this pandemic on their own. This has resulted in a "checkboard pattern of gaps and vulnerabilities that failed to stem the virus's exponential progression," Chow said.

"The lack of a global health defense network that could have been empowered by American medical expertise meant that the virus blossomed wherever underpreparation and slow-footedness prevailed," Chow added. "The crisis has laid bare the need for localities, countries, and alliances to work as one organism to break the chains of transmission."

Read the original article on Business Insider
Following the announcement of the inaugural IAB SA Front Row winners, announced online during this year's Bookmarks, we interviewed them on what the initiative means to them and what they hope to get out of it.

Front Row winner Kamogelo Makhale

Congratulations on being announced a Front Row winner! What does this recognition and opportunity mean to you?

What are you currently studying and/or where do you work?

What course are you thinking of studying at the Red & Yellow Creative School of Business and why?

Tell us a bit about your experience. Why the creative industry and your field of interest?

Comment on the challenges facing the industry.

Comment on the current state of the industry/the impact of the pandemic and current lockdown on the industry.

Comment on the power of access, mentorship and collaboration in transforming the industry?

What does the future of the industry look like to you?

What are you most looking forward to?

The aim of the initiative is to create access in terms of events and mentors, as well as career-building opportunities for South Africas creative youth.Veli Ngubane, IAB Transformation Council Head explains the initiative: "We have taken a pragmatic approach to support transformation in the industry this year, concentrating on access as the key focus to this end. Front Row forms part of this approach, in giving free access and support to the front row for IAB events and workshops to black students, entrepreneurs and agency interns between the ages of 18-24, and going forward 18-28."The IAB South Africa serves to empower the media and marketing industry to thrive in a digital economy. We do this through our connected culture and access to experts and expertise. It is vital that we are always increasing our engagement with the future leaders of our industry while bringing in a fresh, and different, perspective to the IAB SA as a whole, adds Paula Hulley, CEO of the IAB SA. Platforms like the IAB SA Front Row and IAB SA Youth Action Council, aim to provide easier access to information and platforms of engagement while creating valuable collaborative spaces and the opportunity to sit at the table with seasoned industry leaders at the highest level.In addition to being given access to some of our countrys most brilliant digital media and marketing minds, each of the five winners received a R15,000, non-transferable, online-course voucher from The Red & Yellow Creative School of Business to further their digital creative and business studies, as well as a R3,000 voucher from Bookmarks 2020 event partner, G-Star and access to the front row at the IAB SA Insight events Here, our interview with Makhale:I am so grateful for this recognition and opportunity because it will enable me to get access to platforms of engagement. Not only that, through this opportunity, I will be able to also share my knowledge about the digital economy within our industry and to possibly be able to come up with digital strategies that will help other industries/sectors that are still struggling to adapt to this digital era that we are in.I am currently an intern at Avon Justine in the Credit Control Department.I was thinking of studying Digital Content and Copywriting mainly because I have realised the importance of content creation and copywriting, but mostly I would like to get more insight about writing and I am positive that when I finish the course my content creation skills would be better than before.Well, I have always been intrigued by the ads and billboards that I have always seen, although I was not certain about the industry because of how broad it is. However, in my first year of varsity, that's when I managed to explore my interest in brand communication. I got a chance to work for Locrate Market mainly on their social media. It exposed me to a lot of creatives who are in the marketing and film industry and such opportunities have helped me broaden my knowledge about the creative industry.Challenges that the industry is facing is that we see most brands jumping on every trend. I mean it's great to see our favourite brands being part of the trends that are part of our lives but there is no need to jump on every trend in order to try stay relevant to your audience,understand your audience and have a creative way that they will see it as out of the ordinary communication.Another challenge could possibly be reaching potential clients and engaging them, because emotional and meaningful engagements are important yet so challenging, hence it's important to have creative approaches that will solve these challenges.The Covid-19 outbreak has disturbed the way businesses operate. This hits hard on our industry because we have seen campaigns and events being cancelled or postponed. However, the current lockdown somehow forces brands to do things differently. This includes changes in their strategies, but not forgetting their goal as a brand. For some businesses, it can be an opportunity to attract new audiences.Well, for me, access on its own gives an individual a platform to choose what to do with what they have. However, access is not as accessible as one would think. That's why it's important to do your utmost best when given access to an opportunity.Mentorship is very important because it builds a relationship between the one with experience and the one with less experience. It may lead to a collaboration as both individuals may learn from one another.The power of collaboration in transforming the industry is an essential tool that many may not realise because most brands are aiming to be at the top and working against each other. Collaboration will transform the industry in a form of enhancing productivity and innovation, and mainly will be the digital transformation in terms of adapting to the new technology, which will change the way people work but also reinventing the business for the benefit of the brand and its audiences.To me the future of the industry looks pretty exciting and more especially what happens in the digital space, I see groundbreaking strategies, and more brands finally getting the hang of the use of digital spaces. I see more collaboration between brands or even collaboration between brands and their consumers.I am most looking forward to meeting the four other winners and engaging with them. Besides that, I am looking forward to making the most from this opportunity through engaging with industry leaders and possibly having the platform to share my ideas and collaborating withthem. I am looking forward to more opportunities that are coming my way, opportunities that are going to challenge my creativity, but most importantly that will groom my creativity.
JOHNSTON  An outbreak among workers at a food processing plant in southeast Iowa helped create the largest one-day total of newly confirmed cases of the novel coronavirus in Iowa, state officials said Tuesday.

Gov. Kim Reynolds at her daily briefing said 189 new cases of the coronavirus were confirmed by the state  86 of which were tied to an outbreak at Tyson Foods processing plant in Columbus Junction in Louisa County.

Reynolds said the state public health department has been working with local public health officials and leaders at the Tyson plant in an effort to slow the virus spread there. She said the state on Monday sent 200 testing swabs to the plant to test workers, and continued to assist in testing on Tuesday. And she said state and local public health officials are working to determine the geographic impact of the outbreak, given that many of the plants workers do not live in Columbus Junction.

Reynolds said leaders at the plant, which is temporarily closed, are taking their own mitigation steps.

They have really been, I think, very proactive and making sure that when they stand the plant back up, theyre doing everything that they can to not only protect the employees but to continue a really critical piece of our food supply chain, Reynolds said Tuesday at the State Emergency Operations Center at Camp Dodge during her daily briefing on the states coronavirus response efforts.

Reynolds said her administration also has reached out to other, similar facilities to urge them to take precautions.

Earlier this week, the Iowa Premium beef plant in Tama closed after several of its employees tested positive for the coronavirus.

Its incredibly important because that is a part of the food supply chain. So we have to make sure that were not only protecting employees, but were doing the recommendations that have been put in place by the (state) Department of Public Health, Reynolds said.

Reynolds also said new outbreaks have been detected at three long-term care facilities: two in Polk County and one in Bremer County.

The outbreaks in food processing plants and long-term care facilities matches with what experts have learned about how the novel coronavirus spreads rapidly through people gathered in close proximity, said state epidemiologist Caitlin Pedati.

(The virus) does seem to move efficiently among people who are in close contact and who live together, Pedati said. Unfortunately what were seeing is a reflection of the spread of the illness that we knew about sort of moving in the community.

The previous one-day high for newly confirmed cases of the virus was 125 on Thursday. There have been nearly 1,900 total confirmed cases in Iowa.

Six more Iowans died as a result of the virus, officials said Tuesday, pushing the states total virus-related deaths to 49.
Wally, a 26-foot fiberglass Stegosaurus, is spending the summer at his birthplace for restoration work. PreviousNext

Wally the Stegosaurus Departs for Restoration Summer

PITTSFIELD, Mass.  Wally was hoisted from his Berkshire Museum home and onto a flatbed Friday morning to take a trip to his birthplace in New York for some freshening up.

The 1,200-pound Stegosaurus sculpture is a favorite feature of the local museum and has stood guard near its entrance since 1997. Created by Louis Paul Jonas Studios in Hudson, N.Y., Wally spent his first 30 years at the Cleveland Museum of Natural History. Cleveland commissioned a twin, "Steggie II," to take his place from the original casts.

Wearing a mask just in case, the fiberglass Wally was carefully lifted by Berkshire Crane and Logistics onto a trailer for the 40-mile trek back to the Hudson studio for some much-needed repairs of his 50-year-old body. He's expected to stay in quarantine for most of the summer before returning to the museum in the fall.

A number of people  keeping careful social distancing  took pictures or watched from their cars on the cold, rainy morning.

The museum posted Wally's journey on its Facebook page so people could catch a glimpse of him driving by. Banners that read "Thank you for doing your part to make COVID-19 extinct" were attached to both sides of his 26-foot-long body.

"We hope that catching a glimpse of Wally in the wild provides a brief respite for everyone who comes out to see him. Its not every day that a Stegosaurus roams the Berkshires," Executive Director Jeff Rodgers wrote in announcing the trip. "Wally will be missed, but we are happy he will be receiving a much-needed restoration so that our community can enjoy him for many years to come."

Wally is only the second sculpture made from the mold created for the Sinclair Dinoland pavilion at the New York World's Fair in 1964-1965. Dinoland was sponsored by the Sinclair Oil Corp., known for its green brontosaurus logo. Jonas is known for his work on natural history exhibits and worked with paleontologists to craft the Dinoland sculptures that later ended up in museums around the country. Another of Wally's brothers is at the Quarry Visitor Center in Dinosaur National Monument in Utah.

When he arrived in Pittsfield in 1997, a contest was held to name him. The museum chose Levi Bissell's suggestion of Wally because of the Stegosaurus' walnut-sized brain.

This is Wally's second return to the Jonas studio, where he was reconditioned in 1997 before being placed on the museum's front lawn on South Street. The museum is currently closed to the public during the novel coronavirus pandemic but hopes to reopen in May.
There was compelling evidence by late December that the new coronavirus in Wuhan, China, was spreading from person to person, but Chinese officials didn't take the threat of a significant outbreak seriously until the coronavirus was detected in Thailand on Jan. 13, The Associated Press reports, citing internal documents and interviews with Chinese officials. Top officials in Beijing started preparing for a pandemic on Jan. 14, but secretly, keeping the public in the dark as the virus spread for six days. President Xi Jinping issued a televised warning on Jan. 20, at which point more than 3,000 people had been infected.

Chinese officials spent the six days distributing test kits to trace the virus nationwide, ordering wider screening of patients, preparing hospitals for an infectious virus, and easing the stringent rules for confirming coronavirus infections, AP reports. During that week, Wuhan "hosted a mass banquet for tens of thousands of people" and "millions began traveling through for Lunar New Year celebrations."

"If they took action six days earlier, there would have been much fewer patients and medical facilities would have been sufficient," Zuo-Feng Zhang, an epidemiologist at the University of California, Los Angeles, told AP. "We might have avoided the collapse of Wuhan's medical system," and lives would have been saved. Researchers later estimated that if the public had been warned a week earlier and told to wear masks, forego travel, and social-distance, cases could have been cut by up to two-thirds.

China denies that it hid the outbreak early on, and some outside experts argue that Beijing's actions were defensible given its private actions and the risk of provoking unnecessary hysteria. "But the early story of the pandemic in China shows missed opportunities at every step," AP reports. "Under Xi, China's most authoritarian leader in decades, increasing political repression has made officials more hesitant to report cases without a clear green light from the top." Read more at The Associated Press.

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Ms. Cooley said that when the company realized the extent of the misunderstanding, its employees were very upset. After all, their intentions were good. Two hundred fifty teachers were made very happy.

But while it is true that the company is small, Ms. Witherspoon herself is big, maybe even one of the most powerful people in Hollywood. In good times, that perception benefits her brand. It probably is part of what convinced her to enter the fashion arena in the first place, monetizing her image and following in the footsteps of Gwyneth Paltrow at Goop, Jessica Alba at the Honest Company and Kate Hudson at Fabletics. It also created a disjunction between perception and reality that contributed to misconceptions.

It would not have seemed out of the realm of possibility to many teachers, who as of May 2019 had a median annual income of $59,670 (per the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics), with the lowest 10 percent making only $39,020, that Ms. Witherspoon, whose most recent pay rate was reported to be $2 million an episode for The Morning Show on Apple TV, was giving everyone who applied a dress.

Assuming she was giving away her cheapest dress, which sells for $78, and if the cost of that dress to her company is, say, $40, which takes into account the average wholesale margin, that would have meant spending something like $40 million on the giveaway.

This is a time when  thanks in part to social media  the cult of personality that attaches to a founder is often conflated with the company they run. Giving away $40 million in dresses may even have seemed in character, at least as far as this public character went. Ms. Witherspoon is a very plausible dream benefactor, swooping in to do something entirely unexpected and joy-giving.

She always seemed like such a down-to-earth celebrity, said Laura Deckman, Mr. Carrolls sister and a teacher in the Rochester, N.Y., public school system, who said she followed Ms. Witherspoon on Instagram. She has a really strong brand that is about being a mom and regular person.
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Vilnius, Lithuania, April 15, 2020  Russian authorities should condemn Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrovs threats to journalist Elena Milashina and ensure her safety, the Committee to Protect Journalists said today.

In an April 13 speech, Kadyrov accused Milashina, a correspondent for independent newspaper Novaya Gazeta, of writing nonsense and blamed the Federal Security Service for not silencing her, according to a transcript of his remarks published by Novaya Gazeta.

He said, if you [the security services] want us to commit a crime and become criminals, then say so. Someone will take the burden of responsibility and will be punished under the law.

The speech was in response to Milashinas April 12 report that quarantined Chechens had stopped reporting coronavirus symptoms for fear of being labeled terrorists.

Journalists are already facing immense danger in covering the COVID-19 pandemic, and should not also have to endure threats against their lives by political leaders, said Gulnoza Said, CPJs Europe and Central Asia program coordinator, in New York. Russian federal authorities should ensure the safety of Elena Milashina and her colleagues at Novaya Gazeta. Condemning Ramzan Kadyrovs verbal attacks and opening an investigation would be the first steps for authorities to show they are taking this situation seriously.

Speaking to CPJ via phone from Moscow, Milashina said she is really afraid, as Kadyrovs threats are really serious and he is a dangerous man. I know that if he really decides to kill me, he will do it.

Of the 38 journalists that CPJ has determined were murdered in Russia in retaliation for their reporting since 1992, at least six had covered Chechnya, CPJ research shows.

Milashina said she had appealed to the Investigative Committee of Russia and to the prosecutor generals office, but got no answer. The state does not want to defend me, said Milashina, who is a former correspondent for CPJ.

CPJ called and emailed both institutions and the investigative department of the Investigative Committee of the Russian Federation for the Chechen Republic, but no one picked up the phone or replied to those messages.

Yesterday, Kadyrov said his threats were actually meant for liberal radio station Ekho Moskvy, not Novaya Gazeta, according to news reports.

In early March, Milashina and human rights lawyer Marina Dubrovina were beaten in the Chechen capital, Grozny, as CPJ documented at the time. In his channel on the Telegram messaging app, Kadyrov said Chechen authorities investigated the beating but found no evidence the incident occurred, according to reports.
A 22-year-old woman has been jailed for spitting at a police officer while claiming to have coronavirus after first racially abusing an emergency call handler.

Emily Whittall, of Milton Keynes, pleaded guilty at Oxford Magistrates' Court to assaulting an emergency worker and one count of a racially-aggravated public order offence.

She was jailed for eight weeks and fined 200.

A Thames Valley Police spokesman said: This follows an incident on Friday in which Whittall made racist remarks to a call handler after calling 999.

Then, as she was being arrested, Whittall claimed to have coronavirus and spat at an officer.

Coronavirus in numbers: UK passes 12,000 deaths

PC Antony Hurd said: This sentence is a strong message that assaults against emergency workers are not tolerated by Thames Valley Police or the courts.

These are unprecedented times during a global health pandemic, and Whittall showed nothing but disregard for this or the officers personal safety.

Coronavirus spreads primarily through droplets of saliva or discharge from the nose when an infected person coughs or sneezes.

Listen to The Leader: Coronavirus Daily podcast
When Ashley Haydens husband, Jimmie, was struggling to breathe, she thought their emergency visit to the hospital would be brief. She expected he would receive some oxygen and emerge from Methodist Hospital | Stone Oak with some new prescriptions.

Instead, on April 2, Jimmie, 47, was diagnosed with COVID-19. Within hours, he was taken into the intensive care unit, where he would have to rely on the support of a ventilator to breathe.

Hes been there ever since.

Ashley and their four children know firsthand the fear, uncertainty, isolation and helplessness that accompanies a coronavirus diagnosis.

More Information Have you recovered from COVID-19? Here's how to donate your plasma. The South Texas Blood and Tissue Center is collecting plasma from people who have tested positive for the coronavirus and recovered from it. Interested donors can be screened for eligibility by emailing COVID19@southtexasblood.org. See More Collapse

On ExpressNews.com: A fever that comes and goes, or almost no symptoms at all: San Antonians troubled by milder forms of COVID-19

Now, theyve also been given reason for encouragement.

On Thursday, Jimmie was the first COVID-19 patient in San Antonio to receive blood plasma from a person who had recovered from the virus. While the therapy is still experimental, doctors, researchers and health officials are optimistic that antibodies in convalescent plasma could help some of the sickest coronavirus patients recover, at least until a vaccine and other treatments are developed.

His family hopes it was enough to save his life.

I may never seen him again

In mid-March, the San Antonio area and, soon, the rest of Texas, was poised to go on lockdown to slow the spread of the novel virus.

At the time, the Haydens were still taking a casual approach to the situation. On March 19, the couple decided to go out one last time, for drinks with a friend near their Spring Branch-area home.

They would later learn the friend had just returned from visiting her mother in Philadelphia. Both would test positive for the virus.

A few days later, Ashley developed a hacking cough that couldnt be soothed, along with headaches and body aches. Their three children who still live at home had similarly mild ailments: aches, low-grade fever, temporary loss of taste and smell.

But Jimmie, a construction manager, was clearly hit the hardest. He coughed, spiked a high fever, couldnt taste or smell and complained of fatigue. His breathing became labored even while sitting, and he would have to stop talking mid-sentence to catch his breath.

On ExpressNews.com: Planning for the worst, hoping for the best: San Antonio hospitals brace for surge of coronavirus patients

His primary care physician prescribed cough medicine, an inhaler and antibiotics, but eventually it became clear that he couldnt kick the illness on his own.

Ashley drove him to the Stone Oak hospital, and after sitting in her car for a couple hours, her husband called from inside. On speaker phone, a nurse said they couldnt release him. His oxygen levels were low, and he was breathing twice as fast as a healthy person would.

After she drove home, Jimmie texted her his diagnosis: COVID-19.

Hours later, she got another call, this one even more alarming. The doctors wanted to put him on a ventilator, an idea that terrified her. Shed thought he would be going home that day and hadnt even had a chance to say a proper goodbye.

A stream of frantic thoughts flashed across her mind.

Im not with him, I cant be with him, she said. I just dropped him off and I may never see him again.

On the phone, the couple  married for almost 26 years and sweethearts since their time at Churchill High School  cried and said they loved each other. It was the last time they could speak before a tube was inserted down Jimmies throat.

Praying for good news

The following days were agony.

At home, the rest of the family quarantined themselves. They were not tested, but they figured theyd had the virus, too, to some degree. They relied on others to drop off groceries and other necessities.

The days began to blur together. To his wife, the distance felt like torture.

In a normal illness, if your loved one is put on a ventilator, you can still be there. You can still be there to hold his hand, she said. At this point, I cant do anything. I cant do any of that.

Ashleys calls with Jimmies doctors and nurses served as a substitute, albeit a poor one, for sitting by his bedside.

Those discussions, which took place several times a day, were both a lifeline and a source of tension.

Every time the phone rings, its, Oh God, please let it not be bad news. Youre on pins and needles the whole time, Ashley said. I dont think there are words to describe the feelings that Ive felt over the last two weeks.

On a few occasions, Jimmies family talked with him over video calls. The second time, Jimmie responded to their voices, but his eyes remained closed the entire time.

A treatment, and hope

A week into Jimmies hospital stay, the Haydens were finally given good news.

During a call on Thursday, Ashley learned her husbands medical team had tested his blood type and was seeking federal approval to treat him with convalescent plasma  an experimental therapy that aims to introduce the antibodies from recovered people into critically ill patients who are struggling to fight off the viral infection.

Such transfusions have longstanding use in medicine, and they tend to be one of the first options the field turns to when novel pathogens emerge. Without approved treatments or an effective vaccine, hospitals are otherwise limited to treatments that are still being studied or supportive care, such as oxygen, fluids and, in severe cases, ventilators.

After Houston Methodist Hospital treated a COVID-19 patient with plasma in late March, hospitals across the country began following suit. Federal regulators approved a national clinical trial, which includes University Hospital, and allowed blood centers to more easily collect plasma from suitable donors.

With regulatory hurdles removed, the South Texas Blood and Tissue Center collected its first unit of plasma from a recovered donor. David Herrmann, a San Antonio man in his 50s, who contracted the virus after a ski trip in Colorado but had experienced very few symptoms. After testing negative twice for the virus, he donated his plasma on April 7, the first person in the area to do so.

On ExpressNews.com: Its the best that weve got: San Antonio COVID-19 patients to receive plasma from donors who recovered from the virus

Two days later, on Thursday afternoon, the blood center delivered Herrmanns plasma to Stone Oak, where it was transfused into Jimmie overnight.

That weekend, on Easter Sunday, Jimmie seemed more engaged during a video call with his family. He shook his head as if he wanted to talk and gave the camera a thumbs up.

In Ashleys eyes, the transfusion helped her husband turn the corner toward recovery. On Facebook, where she has chronicled Jimmies illness, she has encouraged people who have had COVID-19 to donate their plasma, in the hopes that it could benefit other patients. Over the past week, the blood center has recruited a handful of donors and delivered eight plasma units to hospitals in San Antonio and South Texas.

Jimmies doctors have lowered the settings on his ventilator, gauging his ability to start breathing again on his own. Ashley is looking forward to the moment he is disconnected from it.

Ill breathe easier when he is off that machine, Ashley said. To me, that machine means hes very, very serious, if not close to death. Once hes off that machine, Ill be a hundred thousand times better.

Update: On Wednesday, Jimmie was taken off of the ventilator  or, more accurately, he removed it himself. He had a coughing spell and coughed so hard that he coughed the tube out, his wife wrote on Facebook.

They are letting him rest now, we probably wont be able to talk to him until tomorrow, she added. We can hardly wait for this to happen.

Researcher Misty Harris contributed to this report. | Lauren Caruba covers health care and medicine in the San Antonio and Bexar County area. To read more from Lauren, become a subscriber. lcaruba@express-news.net | Twitter: @LaurenCaruba
Information Minister, Kojo Oppong Nkrumah has asked Ghanaians not to panic even as Ghanas COVID-19 cases have gone up.



Ghana as at last count upadate on Tuesday has 636 cases with 17 recoveries and 8 deaths.



It is estimated by some health experts that the numbers will continue going up because of the continuous enhanced testing.



The Ofoase-Ayirebi MP who was speaking in an interview on Peace FM's morning show said indeed the numbers will go up because more tests are being conducted.



However, "dont panic, be concerned," he says.



Lockdown extension or lifting



President Akufo-Addo in his recent address to the nation extended the partial lockdown by one more week and on day 16 with 636 cases, the question is whether the restrictions will be lifted or extended.



Speaking to this, Kojo Oppong Nkrumah said lifting or extending the partial lockdown will be determined by data since the aim of the lockdown is to control the spread and go ahead of the virus.



Social distancing in food distribution



There are concerns over how food is distributed to the vulnerable in the wake of the coronavirus lockdown.



Videos on social media have shown crowds gather in queues for food and other items; a situation that can cause community spread.



According to the Information Minister, the local government and Gender Ministries have come out with a guideline to guide the distribution of the food.



He further urged that the vulnerable abide by the guidelines to avoid the spread of the virus; adding, "if that is not done, government can decide to stop distributing the food."





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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China said Wednesday it was "seriously concerned" about the US decision to suspend funding for the World Health Organization, and urged Washington to fulfill its obligations during the coronavirus crisis.

"This US decision will weaken WHO's capacities and undermine the international cooperation against the epidemic," Chinese official Zhao Lijian told a regular press briefing, a day after US President Donald Trump accused the Geneva-based body of putting political correctness above life-saving measures.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Popular Nollywood actor and comedian, Uche Maduagwu, has pointed out that he is ready to tie the knot with reality TV star, Mercy Eke.

Mr Maduagwu who is a well-known fan of Mercy has several times pointed out that he will always be loyal to Mercy.

In his post on Instagram, the actor pointed out that he will get married to Mercy only if she is ready to be a housewife.

READ ALSO  Mercy Stands Out From Other BBNaija Housemates  Uche Maduagwu

The actor also pointed out that a lot of people have been begging him to get married to Mercy.

See His Post Here:
President Donald Trump speaks about the coronavirus in the James Brady Press Briefing Room at the White House, Monday. Photo: AP

President Donald Trump stepped to the lectern on a day when the virus death toll in the United States ticked up past 23,000. He addressed the nation during a period where unemployment claims have shot past 15 million, and lines for food banks stretch on toward the horizon.

Yet in the middle of this deadly pandemic, the US president made clear that the paramount concern for Trump is Trump.

"Everything we did was right," Trump said, in a sometimes hostile news conference in which he offered a live version of an enemies list, brooking no criticism and repeatedly snapping at reporters who dared to challenge his version of events.

Trump has always had a me-me-me ethos, an uncanny ability to insert himself into the centre of just about any situation. But the coronavirus briefing offered a particularly stark portrait of a president seemingly unable to grasp the magnitude of the crisis.

Read More

At one point - after praising himself for implementing travel restrictions on China at the end of January and griping about the press - Trump paused to boast with a half-smirk: "But I guess I'm doing OK because, to the best of my knowledge, I'm the president of the United States, despite the things that are said."

The news conference began when Trump turned to Anthony Fauci, the nation's top infectious-disease specialist, and asked him to "say a few words before we go any further". With that, Fauci stood and offered a not-quite-apology for comments he made over the weekend to CNN's Jake Tapper, in which he confirmed that he and other health experts had made mitigation recommendations to Trump as early as the third weekend of February and said earlier mitigation "could have saved lives".

Fauci tried to walk back his comments, saying he had been responding to a "hypothetical" and had not intended to criticise the president, who he praised for implementing the recommendations of public health officials like himself.

"That was the wrong choice of words," said Fauci.

One reporter asked him whether he was speaking "voluntarily" or at the behest of the president. "Everything I do is voluntarily," Fauci said. "Please don't even imply that."

Next, Trump played a propaganda-style video he said had been pulled together by White House aides earlier in the day. In a short hagiography more in line with a political event, clips critical of the media were interspersed with footage of loyalists praising the president.

"The president has been outstanding through all this," Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, a Republican, says in the video. "The vice-president has been outstanding. Members of the coronavirus task-force very responsive."

Since the pandemic began, Trump's almost daily news conferences have increasingly taken on the feel of campaign rallies - a simulacrum for the raucous, Keep-America-Great-fests he has had to forgo amid the global contagion.

"You know, I don't mind controversy," Trump said, offering something of a guiding life principle. "I think controversy is a good thing, not a bad thing." He also criticised "sleepy Joe Biden", the presumptive Democratic nominee, as Biden, he said, had previously criticised him, and jousted with the "fake news".

Shortly after Trump played the video, CBS's Paula Reid pressed him on how his administration failed to use the month of February to ready itself for the coming virus, after sharply limiting travel from China.

"You didn't use it to prepare hospitals, you didn't use it to ramp up testing," Reid said, before Trump cut her off, calling her "disgraceful".

Reid forged ahead. "What did you do with the time that you bought, the month of February?" she asked, as Trump talked over her. "That video has a gap - the entire month of February... What did your administration do in February with the time that your travel ban bought you?"

"A lot. A lot," said Trump, before turning his frustration back on Reid. "You know you're a fake," he said.

At another moment, seemingly eager to assert his dominance over the nation's governors, Trump declared incorrectly: "When somebody is the president of the United States, the authority is total."

Later, CNN's Kaitlan Collins followed up: "You said when someone is president of the United States, their authority is total. That is not true. Who told you that?" The president declined to answer, saying "the governors need us" before abruptly silencing Collins with a sharp, "Enough."

About halfway through, Trump finally departed, leaving the remainder of the briefing to Vice President Mike Pence and the public health professionals. But the first hour of the news conference was a paean to the president and his ego, orchestrated by Trump himself. For one fleeting instance, the president seemed poised to reveal a flicker of self-awareness.

Asked why he shared a tweet from a supporter with the hashtag #FireFauci, the president said while he personally thinks Fauci is "terrific", not everybody is happy with him.

"Not everybody is happy with..." Trump said, before pausing briefly. He seemed about to say himself; not everybody is happy with Fauci, and not everybody is happy with Trump.
Citywide, Polk, Tenderloin

TLC aims to keep tenants housed and businesses in place. | Photo: Carrie Sisto/Hoodline

The ongoing pandemic and shelter-in-place order have been difficult for both residential and commercial tenants, as they struggle to pay rent with little to no income coming in.

As a result, calls to the Lower Polk Tenant Landlord Clinic (TLC) have gone through the roof in recent days, according to Chris Schulman, board president of the Lower Polk Community Benefit District, which administers the clinic.

The clinic was established in 2017 through a grant from the Mayors Office of Housing and Community Development (MOHCD), with the mission of preventing the displacement of people and businesses in and around lower Polk Street. (Given the scale of the current crisis, however, it's also opened its doors to those in other neighborhoods as well.)

The Bar Association of San Francisco, UC Hastings College of Law and the San Francisco Apartment Association all pitch in to help tenants and landlords resolve disputes, with resources available in multiple languages. Since its founding, the TLC has helped around 200 clients to remain housed, according to director Kevin Thomason.

While TLC staff dont provide any legal guidance, they offer information and independent mediation during calls or other communication efforts, provided by the Bar Associations Conflict Intervention Service (CIS).

The city has provided resources attempting to explain tenant protections during these challenging times, Schulman said. But the details are hard to interpret, and even landlords need assistance understanding them fully.

The goal of mediation is to prevent any legal action and limit the costs associated with any disputes, said Carole Conn, director of public service programs for the Bar Association.

And it usually works  even when a resolution isnt reached, the situation fundamentally changes because the conversation is happening openly.

In the wake of the COVID-19 crisis, Lower Polk CBD partnered with the TLC to send out postcards to alert tenants of the free resources available.

Story continues

Everyone, for the most part, benefits when people stay where they are, Schulman said, and most landlords want to help tenants figure out a solution.

A recent postcard alerts neighbors to TLC services available during the current pandemic. | Photo: Lower Polk CBD/Facebook

One person who received a postcard was Lower Polk resident Obay Kahala, who found himself struggling to pay April rent due to a COVID-19-related loss of income. He reached out to TLC, and Thomason responded within 24 hours, connecting him with a mediator at CIS.

Kahala said the mediator took time to fully understand his situation, outlining his options in laymans terms and explaining the citys COVID-19 eviction protections and the terms he should seek in any rent deferment agreement with his landlord.

Once he understood his rights, the conversation between the tenant, landlord, and property managers unfolded relatively organically, Kahala said. There are no outstanding issues, and all parties have agreed on next steps.

The lack of legal action on either side is a huge relief, Kahala said.

Kahala added that the mediator from CIS followed up multiple times to make sure everything was moving forward and appropriately documented.

Its important to remember that the tenant-landlord connection is a relationship," Conn said. "Sometimes, like all relationships, it needs maintenance.

Starting today, the TLC and its partners are hosting a series of webinarsfocused on small business commercial leasing, COVID-19 financial relief, and tenant/landlord dispute mediation.

Tenants and landlords can learn more about the free services offered by calling 415-782-8940 or emailing kevin@lptlc.org.
All 16 South Texas counties served by the San Antonio Food Bank are expected to receive badly needed help after Gov. Greg Abbott asked for federal assistance for the entire state.

I dont have any reason to believe it wont be approved by the Federal Emergency Management Agency, said Celia Cole, CEO of Feeding Texas, a 21-member statewide network of food banks. To me, every indication points to it being approved.

Earlier, the San Antonio Food Bank had trimmed its request for emergency state aid from $12 million to $9.6 million just for Bexar County. The request was rendered moot when Abbott sought help from FEMA for all Texas 254 counties  not just for the major food banks serving South Texas, West Texas, North Texas and Houston.

Its thumbs up. Its happening, said an elated Eric Cooper, president and CEO of the San Antonio Food Bank. Its a victory. It really is like manna from heaven in a lot of ways.

FEMA all but committed to procuring 44 million pounds of food for Texas. Feeding Texas worked with the Texas Division of Emergency Management and Abbotts office to secure the aid. FEMA would pay 75 percent of the cost; the state would pick up the rest.

We are really grateful to the governor for recognizing the need and expediting the request, Cole said.

The federal assistance means that the struggling San Antonio Food Bank could soon receive more than 5 million pounds of food as it prepares to feed more households through massive drive-thru giveaways.

The 5 million pounds is worth roughly $9.3 million, Cooper said.

On ExpressNews.com: San Antonio Food Bank makes first-ever appeal for state emergency aid

Nearly overwhelmed by desperate families who have lost jobs and suffered other hardships amid the coronavirus pandemic, the Food Bank feared that without funding from the state or federal government, its warehouse could be emptied out within weeks.

This buys us some time, Cooper said. But it does not solve the problem.

The San Antonio Food Bank  along with the North Texas Food Bank in Dallas, the West Texas Food Bank serving Midland/Odessa and the Houston Food Bank  had filed State of Texas Assistance Requests before Abbott sought federal aid for the entire state.

The San Antonio Food Bank received more than $750,000 in donations over the weekend after the Express-News published photographs of long lines of cars at last Thursdays drive-through distribution on the South Side, which fed a record 10,000 households.

Donations continued to flow in this week, including $50,000 from the SWBC Foundation on Wednesday.

On ExpressNews.com: Serrano tweet, Nirenberg post, others raise $500,000 for Food Bank

As San Antonio remains in a Stay Home, Work Safe period, more and more of its citizens are being impacted by unemployment, said Spurs investor Charlie Amato, Chairman of SWBC, a San Antonio-based financial services company. This is just one of the enormous challenges putting a strain on the food bank, as its working to serve more than double its normal clients.

Truckloads of donated food have also poured in from H-E-B, Labatt Foods, Ben E. Keith Foods, Sysco and NatureSweet.

Its amazing to see, Cooper said. It gives you hope. The fact we were able to double our normal supply last week and not really lose ground in the warehouse at all was a miracle.

Help is also on the way in the form of federal assistance beyond FEMA. Last week, Congress passed the Families First Coronavirus Response ACT, which allocated an additional $400 million for the Emergency Food Assistance Program (TEFAP), which provides food for distribution to food-insecure households through food pantries and soup kitchens.

We expect to receive about 8.5 percent of whatever Texas will get from TEFAP, but that funding likely wont arrive until mid- to late-summer, Cooper said.

To mitigate the demand on the Food Bank, Cooper is encouraging needy families to apply for assistance from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP).

Texas Health and Human Services is providing more than $168 million in emergency SNAP food benefits to help Texans during the COVID-19 pandemic. Last week, Abbott announced that Texans enrolled in SNAP will receive the maximum amount possible in April and May, after the U.S. Department of Agriculture authorized the increase.

For a single person, the maximum SNAP benefit is $194 per month. The maximum amount for a family of four is $646. More information about SNAP can be found at yourtexasbenefits.hhsc.texas.gov.

Ive either got to increase our supply or decrease our demand, Cooper said. I can do the decreasing of the demand if I can get more families accessing SNAP. But if I cant decrease the demand, Ive got to keep my supply moving.

Hoping to aid Cooper in his quest to increase the supply of food, Mayor Ron Nirenberg said at his daily coronavirus briefing with Bexar County Judge Nelson Wolff that its imperative San Antonians stop hoarding food, especially items needed by SNAP participants such as milk and eggs.

We need to change some behaviors that we can avoid, Nirenberg said. Part of this is being created by hoarding at our supermarkets. The fact that people are over-buying certain products.... You have to stop doing that. Make sure that the folks who need to get those products have it there for them, and that will relieve some of the pressure on the Food Bank.

Cooper is also hopeful Texas will become one of the states involved in the Pandemic Electronic Benefit Transfer Program. Under the Families First Coronavirus Response Act, states can give families EBT cards with the monetary value of school meals not accessible because of school closures.

It could give a mom with two kids $240, technically, a month for food if Texas does it like other states, Cooper said. That will offset some of the demand on the Food Bank. Every bit of food, every dollar helps.

On ExpressNews.com: Businessman Hartman leads working groups to get San Antonio back on its feet
Millionaires are being invited to move to New Zealand to escape the global coronavirus pandemic and help rebuild the economy after COVID-19.

Around 2,000 high net worth individuals and their families could be granted a resident visa if they bring $50million dollars to invest in job creation.

The concept is being developed by a number of high profile financial players to solve growing concerns around the country's rising unemployment and national debt.

Caniwi Capital Executive Chairman, Troy Bowker told Daily Mail Australia the country is going to suffer much more than others unless a radical approach is taken.

Wealthy individuals are being invited to move to New Zealand and escape the global coronavirus pandemic (pictured: lone cyclists relax at Marine Paradise Beach in Napier on April 11 during coroanvirus lockdown)

The economy has taken a massive hit,' he said.

'The economic cost is going to be in the $50billion plus range, with potentially significant unemployment.

'New Zealand has gone quite hard and were going to pay a big price for that.'

The proposal would hinge on the country first eradicating COVID-19 then operating as a kind of virus-free sanctuary where only those with the means to help could hide out.

If we manage to quash the virus then we have effectively created intellectual property in that the country will be free of the virus,' Mr Bowker said.

'We are already seen as a safe haven anyway and this will be even more so in terms of health and wellbeing.'

All new arrivals would be quarantined before being allowed to establish a home for their families in New Zealand (pictured: empty runways at Wellington Airport, New Zealand after flights were heavily reduced because of COVID-19 restrictions)

If youre a very high wealthy high net worth individual and youre sitting in New York or London and youre facing a situation where youve got death occurring in the hundreds and thousands on a daily basis your situation is pretty dire.

'If we get the right mix and the right dollar amount that's one way to help pay for the massive hole in our GDP.'

Mr Bower speculated the technology sector or value-adding to the food and agriculture through processing and infrastructure could be some of the best industries to translate to the New Zealand economy.

Mr Bowker is an investment banker who spent long stints in financial hubs London and New York where he rose to prominence as a the head of asset finance for HSBC.

He then returned to New Zealand in 2008 where he launched venture capital firm Caniwi Capital.

Investment banker Troy Bowker (Pictured) returned to New Zealand in 2008 where he launched venture capital firm Caniwi Capital

Mr Bowker believes the financial implications of COVID-19 could otherwise result in residents being slugged with higher taxes for years following the coronavirus crisis.

Jacinda Ardern comes from the Labor party so the ideology is tax, borrow and spend. The go-to position is to tax the hell out of the country and borrow and pay for the next 30-40 years. It depends on your political persuasion but I think this situation calls for some thinking thats not necessarily driven by political ideology, he said.

All new arrivals would be quarantined before being allowed to establish a home for their families in New Zealand.

The concept would then rely on the investors to spend their $50million of capital in the first 12 months.

All new arrivals would be quarantined before being allowed to establish a home for their families in New Zealand (pictured: a quiet approach to Auckland's Harbour Bridge during the COVID-19 lockown in New Zealand)

Money would need to be spent on boosting productivity in New Zealand and creating opportunities for employment.

After a five year window during which they prove they have helped boost the country's economic position they would be granted a New Zealand passport.

Meanwhile Economist Cameron Bagrie told the New Zealand Herald that the government would have to act fast to get on top of economic recovery.

'This is not like the Great Depression, or the Asia Crisis, or the GFC ... it is more like 1987-1992 where we didn't get an upfront hit,' Mr Bagrie said.

'It took a lot of time for the cracks to come to the surface and then to find we had run out of band-aids.'
MUSKEGON COUNTY, MI  The spread of coronavirus throughout Muskegon County continues as the number of cases grows, according to new data released by the health department.

The analysis was based on 75 coronavirus COVID-19 cases in the county reported on Monday, April 13. That number has grown to 90, the health department reported the evening of Tuesday, April 14.

Five Muskegon County residents have died from COVID-19.

Of the 75 cases, most  more than 75 percent  are in the cities of Muskegon, Muskegon Heights and Norton Shores, the data shows.

The number of cases has grown among people of all ages other than those under age 20, in which there has been one case in a 19-month old that was reported several weeks ago.

African Americans continue to suffer at disproportionate rates, making up 56 percent  or 42 -- of COVID cases, according to the data posted on the health departments website. An earlier analysis by the health department reported on April 6, when there were 41 cases, that 44 percent of the cases were among African Americans.

In comparison, African Americans make up about 14 percent of the countys population.

White residents account for 27  or 36 percent  of the cases, while there has been one case in an Asian citizen and five in those of unknown race, according to the health department data.

A third of the countys cases  25 -- are among residents of the city of Muskegon. Nearly a quarter  18  have been diagnosed in Muskegon Heights residents and 15 cases, or 20 percent, are among Norton Shores residents.

Townships that did not have any cases when the health department last released location analysis are Dalton, with three cases, and Egelston, with one.

Fruitland Township has three cases, Fruitport and Laketon townships each have two cases and Ravenna and Whitehall townships and Roosevelt Park each have one.

Three cases are of an unknown municipal location, according to the health department.

Women account for 57 percent of the cases, but men account for all but one of the five deaths.

The average age of COVID-19 patients in Muskegon County is 51. The highest number of cases  18 -- are among those in their 50s. There were 17 cases among those in their 60s, 10 among those in their 40s, 10 among those in their 20s, eight in 30-somethings, five among people in their 70s and six in patients age 80 and older. The oldest patient is 93, the health department reported.

There have been 612 specimens sent for COVID-19 testing, with 509 of the results coming back as negative as of April 13, according to the health department.

Those who died from COVID-19 were an 83-year-old man and a 78-year-old man on March 27, a 64-year-old woman on April 3, a 57-year-old man on April 4 and a 58-year-old man on April 12.

The jump in cases  from 53 cases to 90 in the past week  is the result of an increase in testing capabilities, health department spokeswoman Jamie Hekker told MLive.

Mercy Health officials have indicated no change in the number of patients admitted during the past two weeks, Hekker said. That, she said, suggests that the number of truly ill in the community is not changing.

Mercy Health has declined to provide MLive with statistics regarding the number of people admitted to its two Muskegon hospitals for treatment of COVID-19. The health system cited privacy issues, though MLive asked only for numbers and no other identifying information.

MLive has complete coverage on coronavirus COVID-19, including maps of known cases, at mlive.com/coronavirus.

PREVENTION TIPS

Michigans State Emergency Operations Center is coordinating state-government resources and the response to the coronavirus spread. It has shared the following tips:

What you can do to prevent the spread of COVID-19 and other respiratory diseases:

 Always cover coughs or sneezes with a tissue or sleeve.

 Stay home if you are sick and advise others to do the same.

 Avoid close contact with people who are sick.

 Avoid touching your eyes, nose and mouth with unwashed hands.

 Wash your hands often with soap and warm water for at least 20 seconds.

 Use an alcohol-based hand sanitizer with at least 60% alcohol, if soap and warm water are not available.

 Clean and disinfect frequently touched objects and surfaces (computers, keyboards, desks, etc.).

 Its not too late to get your flu shot! While the influenza vaccine does not protect against COVID-19 infection, it can help keep you healthy during the flu season.

For statewide and national information on the virus, visit Michigan.gov/Coronavirus or CDC.gov/Coronavirus.

More on MLive:

Coronavirus cases spread throughout Muskegon County, but hit black residents especially hard

Timeline of coronavirus in Muskegon County: How we got here

Muskegon County reports fifth death from coronavirus
As the coronavirus crisis has forced millions of children out of school cafeterias and millions of their parents into unemployment, the social safety net of free school meals has begun to fray.

More districts are turning to food banks and nonprofits for help, reconfiguring meal distribution plans, and authorizing hazard pay for front-line employees to keep them safeand on the job.

But even their best efforts to confront child hunger may just be scratching the surface of growing and unprecedented need.

In the last month, more than a third of parents reported skipping entire meals for their children or cutting the size of servings because they did not have enough money for food, according to a nationally representative survey of 1,025 families from Hunger Free America.

Schools are making heroic efforts to get children food, but theyre not able to do it alone, said Joel Berg, the chief executive officer of the New York City-based nonprofit. How long can families survive with this level of hunger? Theyre hanging on now, but every week its going to get worse.

Jenny Arredondo, the executive director of child nutrition services for the San Antonio Independent schools, in Texas, has seen the desperation and fallout from economic collapse first-hand.

While 10,000-plus families lined up for a pre-Easter San Antonio Food Bank giveaway last week, the school district prepared and distributed close to 40,000 meals the following Monday.

While many other districts around the country have reduced the number of food distribution sites since the coronavirus crisis began, the San Antonio schools expanded. When schools shuttered on March 16, the district handed out meals at eight high schools. Now, a month later, the district uses 29 school campuses for drive-up and walk-in distribution and 65 bus routes to get food to families in need.

Under the old setup, families would walk miles to and from schools to secure food.

Its just been so sobering, Arredondo said. The food was always needed, but its needed now more so than ever and you see it. You can truly see it.

Hazardous Conditions

A survey conducted for the School Nutrition Association last month just as many schools began to close, found that more than 90 percent of food service directors were at least moderately worried that students would miss mealsa fear that has come to fruition.

Now, as nearly every school meal program in the nation transitioned from cafeterias to the curbside, their needs have shifted as well, said Diane Pratt-Heavner, a spokeswoman for the organization.

Demand for personal protective equipment has emerged as a new and urgent concern. Many school districts were already well-stocked with gloves, a staple of the food service industry, but are now facing a severe shortage of masks and aprons.

See Also: New Rule Lets Parents Pick Up Free Meals for Children During Coronavirus Closures

Food service directors are keenly aware that a single employee contracting COVID-19 could bring entire operations to a screeching halt and that their employees face on-the-job hazards much like their grocery store brethren.

I dont ever want to promise a meal program or a location for our community and not be able to sustain it, said Arredondo. Were in the business of feeding kids. But its a different game now. The world has changed.

An Education Week review of news reports found that school food employees have died in at least four statesMissouri, Nevada, New York, and Texasbut it is unclear if the employees contracted COVID-19 on the job or elsewhere.

The San Diego Unified school board approved hazard pay for food service, delivery workers, and custodial staff. Hundreds of employees in the 103,000-student district will receive time-and-a-half pay, retroactive to mid-March when the shutdown began.

What If Something Happens?

Last week, a school employee in Jefferson County, Ala., was rushed to the hospital last week after experiencing COVID-19 symptoms. The test eventually came back negative, but the scare caused enough concern for the 36,000-student district to shut down food sites for two days.

At least a half-dozen districts in north central Alabama have halted food distribution, reports the news site al.com, as they are forced to choose between feeding hungry children and curbing the spread of coronavirus.

Jefferson County schools Superintendent Walter Gonsoulin had long feared that one of the districts food service employees, who are predominately older women, could contract the virus.

I was always thinking, Oh my god, what if something happens? Gonsoulin said. But our kids need to eat.

After the two-day shutdown, the district restarted service with help from Kikstart Inc., a nonprofit that has served close to 25,000 meals in school districts around Birmingham and Selma.

In response to increased need in the region, the Community Foodbank of Central Alabama has delivered more food more often to school campuses, even though schools are closed.

Helpline calls for food assistance have surged, increasing 700 percent in the last month, said Emily Wix, the director of partnerships at the food bank.

Food Bank of Central and Eastern North Carolina, which works with 900 partner agencies across 34 counties, is facing similar demand.

The region includes Durham County, where school officials shut down their school meal program for close to two weeks after an employee tested positive for COVID-19. After the positive test, the rush of staff applying for paid leave left the district unable to effectively operate the program.

The 33,000-student district, in partnership with local government and nonprofits, is now scheduled to resume service Thursday, providing breakfast and lunches for children prepared by local restaurants along with food supplies and casseroles for families.

The food bank has also set up 14 grab-and-go meal sites across the region to help feed children up to the age of 18 and provided emergency food boxes for families in the Wake County, N.C., school district.

When one person is hungry in a house, theyre likely not the only one, said Jennifer Caslin, marketing and project manager for the Food Bank of Central and Eastern North Carolina.

Combating Hunger

Michigan is one of nine states the United States Department of Agriculture has approved, as of Wednesday, for the Pandemic Electronic Benefit Transfer Program, which gives extra money for food to low-income families with children in closed schools. The funds are available on debit-like cards that can be used in food stores.

In Michigan alone, families of 895,000 students enrolled in free and reduced lunch programs are eligible. That number may mask the scope of need in the state: More than 1 million state residents in the state have filed for federal unemployment benefits.

The Hunger Free America survey found that adult hunger is also on the rise and that 38 percent of households nationwide reported a loss in income over the past month.

Approved by Congress as part of the COVID-19 relief efforts, the pandemic food benefits of at least $5.25 per child per day, are meant to supplement, not supplant, efforts by local school districts to feed children.

In Muskegon Heights, a city in the western half of the state, school workers are delivering meals along bus routes with door-to-door service for medically fragile children and other students with disabilities.

The school district has been forced to adjust its meal delivery methods four times in the past four weeks. The motivation to keep food service going is two-fold: feed the school districts 650 students and keep residents employed, Superintendent Rane Garcia said.

The need for food has long been dire in Muskegon Heights, one of the states most economically depressed communities. Before the statewide school shutdown, which will now continue for the rest of the school year, the district was already serving free lunch and breakfast and packaging a take-home meal for every student daily.

On some days during the shutdown, the school system has served more meals per day than it has students because many children who live there attend schools in nearby districts.

If they can show up to one of our buses, were not asking what school they go to, Garcia said. If we dont provide this, families will struggle. The trauma and insecurity that people are seeing across the country has been a part of our community for a long time.

Garcia is unsure how much the pandemic benefit will help families in her community. There are no full-service grocery stores within the district borders; the lone food shopping option for families without transportation is a Dollar General that sells snacks, drinks, and canned food and vegetables but no fresh produce.

Last summer, in a push to quell violence and hunger, the city hosted a Guns for Groceries swap, where people could exchange their guns for a $100 grocery gift card to use at a big-box store in a neighboring community.

We had a major hunger crisis when things were going great, said Berg, the Hungry Free America CEO. Were acculturated to expect happy endings, but thats not what always happens. Poor people suffer more and they always have.
A total of Rs 205 crore have been paid to over 8 lakh investors of PACL Ltd, with claims of up to Rs 7,000, markets regulator Sebi said on Wednesday.

PACL, which had raised money from the public in the name of agriculture and real estate businesses, was found by Sebi to have collected more than Rs 60,000 crore through illegal collective investment schemes (CISs) over a period of 18 years.

A panel headed by retired Justice R M Lodha initiated the process of refunds in two phases -- during the period January 2, 2018, to March 31, 2018, and February 8, 2019 to July 31, 2019, -- for investors, who invested money in PACL.

"As on date, payment aggregating to Rs 204.85 crore has been effected to 8,31,018 investors, with claims up to Rs 7,000," Sebi said in a statement.

In December last year, the regulator said 2,77,544 investors having a claim amount up to Rs 5,000 have been paid under the second refund process.

In the first phase, refunds were effected in respect of 1,89,103 investors having claim amount up to Rs 2,500.

In December 2015, Sebi had ordered attachment of all assets of PACL and its nine promoters and directors for their failure to refund the money which is due to investors.

Sebi had asked PACL as also its promoters and directors to refund the money in an order dated August 22, 2014. The defaulters were directed to wind up the schemes and refund money to the investors within three months from the date of the order.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
The Saigon Central Post Office in Ho Chi Minh City pictured on April 3, 2020 amid the coronavirus pandemic. Photo by VnExpress.

90 percent of tourist firms in Ho Chi Minh City have suspended operations due to the new coronavirus pandemic slashing revenues.

An estimated 20,000 tourism employees, or 70 percent of the total, will remain off work without pay until the disease is contained.

Foreign tourist arrivals in the first quarter fell 42 percent year-on-year to 1.3 million, while related revenues fell 26 percent to VND25.6 trillion ($1.1 billion), the lowest since 2016.

Revenues started falling in February and became severe in March when it fell 71 percent year-on-year to VND2.2 trillion ($94.83 million).

Hospitality businesses also suffer. A survey of 25 premium hotels and resorts show first quarter revenues fell 58 percent year-on-year.

The drop came as Vietnam limits travel to curb the spreading new coronavirus. All restaurants and tourist destinations in HCMC have been shut since the end of last month.

HCMC Tourism Department has proposed tax breaks and a delayed tax payment deadline to support businesses.

Deputy Director Vo Thi Ngoc Thuy said the department would deploy a new promotion strategy as soon as the pandemic is controlled to revive the industry.

HCMC welcomed 8.6 million international tourists last year, up 13.5 percent. Tourism revenues rose 10 percent to over VND140 trillion ($6 billion).
New Delhi: Bengaluru-based IT major Wipro Ltd on Wednesday (April 15) posted nearly 6 per cent decline in consolidated net profit to Rs 2,345.2 crore for January-March 2020 quarter, according to its regulatory filing with the BSE. The company also suspended revenue growth guidance due to uncertainty in the external environment amid coronavirus pandemic.

The company said, "We estimate that the IT services revenues for the quarter ended March 31, 2020, were negatively impacted by COVID-19 by approximately USD 14-16 million (0.7-0.8 per cent of revenues)," adding "Due to the uncertainty around the course of the COVID-19 pandemic, it does not have visibility into the extent to which it will disrupt the company's operations."

On the company's performance for the quarter and year ended March 31, 2020, Abidali Z Neemuchwala, CEO and Managing Director, said, In these unprecedented times, I am extremely proud of how the Wipro team has come together and worked 24/7 to ensure the safety and well-being of each other while continuing to serve our clients. We hope that all of us stay safe and strong during these tough times. We are confident that our broad portfolio of services and our ability to execute to our commitments makes us well-positioned to gain market share.

Highlights of the Results

Results for the Year ended March 31, 2020:

1. Gross Revenue was Rs 610.2 billion ($8.1 billion), an increase of 4.2% YoY

2. IT Services Segment Revenue was at $8,256.2 million, grew at 1.7% YoY

3. Non-GAAP constant currency IT Services Segment Revenue increased by 3.9% YoY

4. IT Services Operating Margin4 for the year was at 18.1%, an expansion of 0.2% YoY

5. Net Income for the year was Rs 97.2 billion ($1.3 billion), an increase of 8.0% YoY

6. EPS for the year was Rs 16.67 ($0.221) per share and grew 11.2% YoY

Results for the Quarter ended March 31, 2020:

1. Gross Revenue was Rs 157.1 billion ($2.1 billion), an increase of 4.7% YoY

2. IT Services Segment Revenue was at $2,073.7 million, a decrease of 1.0% QoQ

3. Non-GAAP3 constant currency IT Services Segment Revenue increased by 0.4%QoQ

4. IT Services Operating Margin for the quarter was at 17.6%, a decrease of 0.8% QoQ

5. Net Income for the quarter was Rs 23.3 billion ($308.5 million), a decrease of 6.3% YoY

6. EPS for the quarter was Rs 4.09 ($0.051) per share, a decrease of 1.1% YoY

7. The Board has not recommended any final dividend. The interim dividend of Rs 1 declared by the board at its meeting held on January 14, 2020 shall be considered as the final dividend for the financial year 2019-20. Thus, the total dividend for the financial year 2019-20 remains Rs 1 per equity share.

Jatin Dalal, Chief Financial Officer said, The quarters ahead seem challenging and require a tremendous response on costs. We also anticipate our working capital to increase, but our strong balance sheet provides us the confidence that we will emerge stronger and better. Further, due to the volatility in the external environment, we have decided not to provide quarterly guidance on revenues.

1. For the convenience of the readers, the amounts in Indian Rupees in this release have been translated into United States Dollars at the certified foreign exchange rate of US$1 = Rs 75.39, as published by the Federal Reserve Board of Governors on March 31, 2020. However, the realized exchange rate in our IT Services business segment for the quarter ended March 31, 2020 was US$1= Rs 73.95.

2. YoY growth rates for the year ended March 31, 2020 have been computed by adjusting revenues for the year ended March 31,

2019 for the impact of divestments.

3. Constant currency revenue for a period is the product of volumes in that period times the average actual exchange rate of the corresponding comparative period.

4. IT Services Operating Margin refers to Segment Results Total as reflected in IFRS financials.

5. The estimated impact of COVID-19 on our business is due to service discontinuity caused by the inability of our employees to work from home or contract cancellations/ ramp down attributed to the COVID-19 pandemic.

"We estimate that the IT Services Revenues for the quarter ended March 31, 2020, were negatively impacted by COVID-19 by approximately $14 -$16 million (0.7%-0.8% of revenues). Due to the uncertainty around the course of the COVID-19 pandemic, we do not have visibility into the extent to which it will disrupt our operations, and we have decided to not provide revenue guidance for the quarter ending June 30, 2020. We anticipate that we will resume providing revenue guidance when we have increased certainty of both demand and supply-side factors," the Chief Financial Officer is quoted as saying in the regulatory filing.
A plane with more or less 150 Mexican farmers had landed at the Vancouver Internation Airport. Others arrive at Okanagan after a 14-day mandatory isolation period, says an article.

The arrival of the foreign workers from Mexico came two days after the federal and provincial authorities announced the programs to provide funds for temporary foreign workers.

The province agreed to give remuneration to the 14-day isolation period. The farmers will be staying in hotels in Vancouver.

According to the B.C. Fruit Growers Association's general manager Glen Lucas, he believes that the measure will allow the standard care for their foreign workers.

Paying Foreign Workers During the 14-Day Isolation Period

The federal government will be giving $1,500 for every foreign worker who will undergo the 14-day isolation period.

Every foreign worker is required to be given a pay equivalent to not less than 30 hours per week while on isolation. This amount equates to $900. The other $600 will be used to offset the expenses for hiring charter flights compared to the traditional commercial flights. Also, it will be used to pay for the transportation of the workers to Okanagan.

Growers will still be having high expenses for this year due to the increased need for sanitation facilities, cleaning, and more space to allow workers to work two meters apart.

Check these out:

Not All Will Be Bound to Okanagan

Not all of the 150 Mexican workers will be sent to Okanagan. Some of them will be sent to work in Fraser Valley Farms. The foreign farmers will be arriving on their worksites based on their primary schedule of arrival. However, due to the 14-day isolation period, their arrival at the worksites will be delayed by six weeks.

The workers are needed starting the middle of June. Lucas hopes that the foreign workers will be there before that date. A lot of charter flights will also be making its way to the country shortly.

Provincial Protocol for Foreign Workers amid the COVID-19 Pandemic

The Provincial protocol governing which COVID-19 policies should be applied to foreign workers was arranged last week. It mandates that workers in the orchards should stay there. They are also required not to visit the town since all of their groceries will be delivered to them.

It is a recommendation and not an order, says Lucas. Due to the risks of the transmission of COVID-19, these foreign workers will be refraining from going outside the farm, Lucas added.

Some worker rights activists have spoked against the isolation of foreign workers on farms. There are risks that these foreign workers will be under poor housing and working conditions.

The Mexican farmworkers were already fully oriented on the protocols before they arrived in the country, says Lucas.

According to Lucas, the farmers are coming to the farm to work for many years.
Michigan [USA], April 15 (ANI): Indian automaker Mahindra is joining the "Arsenal of Health" efforts spearheaded by General Motors Co. and Ford Motor Co. in Michigan to make medical Personal Protection Equipment (PPE) for healthcare workers fighting COVID-19.

More than 20 Mahindra employees of the Michigan plant are making medical shields from windshields. This innovative ease-of-use box-shaped design will be used by doctors, nurses, local frontline healthcare workers and first responders.

"MANA's Michigan employees have taken an all-hands-on-deck approach to the COVID-19 fight," said Rick Haas, President and CEO, Mahindra Automotive North America (MANA).

"We have a company full of people who love to design and make things and they are not people who like to stand on the sidelines. We have ideas coming in from across the company and we are looking hard at all of them." Haas added.

MANA is working with the state, Michigan's congressional delegation, trade organisations, Oakland County and local businesses to get the products frontline workers need during the crisis.

Additionally, the company is also announcing several actions it is planning and executing from its Auburn Hills Michigan headquarters and manufacturing facility. The Indian automaker is distributing free meals to those workers in Oakland County after an employee who owns food trucks offered his assistance.

Meanwhile, the number of coronavirus cases in the United States has topped 600,000, according to data from Johns Hopkins University. The death toll has surpassed 25,000.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
BEIJING, April 14 (Xinhua) -- Chinese authorities on Tuesday made public several criminal cases of producing or spreading harmful content including pornography.

The cases that have been cracked cover the illegal activities of organizing porn livestreaming, setting up porn websites or apps, selling porn videos online and publishing unauthorized online games, according to the National Office Against Pornography and Illegal Publications.

In one case cracked by police in the city of Tianjin in April 2019, 29 suspects were arrested for organizing obscene online shows. Over 500 performers were recruited by the group.

In another case in Jiangsu Province, a group was busted for selling porn videos to tens of thousands of WeChat users and earning over 2 million yuan (about 284,000 U.S. dollars). Three in the group were sentenced to over 10 years in prison.

The office said it will maintain the crackdown on pornography and illegal publications.
OTTAWA, Ontario, April 14, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- British Columbia based social activist, freedom of speech advocate, blogger, and international businessman, Satinder Dhillon, has filed a historic and landmark application to the Supreme Court of Canada.

In the filing, Dhillon's attorney asks the Supreme Court of Canada to intervene, to allow the truth to be used as a defence in Canadian courtrooms.

To view the court filing please visit: www.thetruthmustbeallowed.com

Dhillon, who has been compared to Malcolm X and Gandhi by Canadian authorities, has fought this battle for nearly two decades.

Dhillon was named in the list of top 100 Punjabi personalities in the world by the Jewels of Punjab alongside many other notable individuals from around the world.

He was the 3rd youngest entrant on the list that included the CEO of Mastercard, former Prime Minister of India, a top ten Forbes list earning actor, American Ambassador to the United Nations and former Governor of South Carolina, and the President of the World Punjabi Organization.

Dhillon was one of the twelve Canadians named to the list that included Canada's Minister of Defence, the first Sikh B.C. Court of Appeal judge and Canada's first Sikh Billionaire.

The Times of Canada has hailed him a 'Modern Day Revolutionary' and he's received the Emerging Leader Award from them as well. His work in Canadian courts has been cited internationally.

Currently, there is a movie being written about Dhillon's life, largely based on the historic case he has fought in Canada for many years now.

For more information about the movie and the Jewels of Punjab list please visit:

https://www.prweb.com/releases/2017/10/prweb14758274.htm

"It's obvious for everyone to see that the decisions by the lower courts in British Columbia were egregious errors in law and they defy the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms," stated Dhillon.

"This is why we have all these levels of court in this country. If this decision by the B.C courts is left to stand, then it will damage the whole of our society in a major way. Who's going to trust our court system if people in the country can't even use the truth to defend themselves? It makes absolutely no sense."

Dhillon's lead lawyer in Canada, Nicolas Rouleau - a highly regarded constitutional law expert, said the following about the national importance of the case - "This case is critical because it gives the Supreme Court of Canada the opportunity to determine whether a Canadian can be imprisoned for criminal contempt of court, simply because he spoke the truth. We want to live in a society where we are allowed to speak the truth, even when this truth is uncomfortable."

Emmet Pierce, who assisted Dhillon during his trial added, "He shouldn't have had to go to jail for writing the truth. This case is clearly of national importance now, which is the exact mandate of the Supreme Court of Canada."

When asked why he continued fighting, instead of simply taking down the blogs and writing the apology that the government wanted in order to drop the case, Dhillon stated, "The blogs were true and still they wanted me to remove them. I'd rather have died than taken them down and I told them that. That was my stance then and I stand by it today."

"Just because there were powerful corporations and well connected people involved at the highest levels that have a lot of power, that doesn't mean the blogs weren't true."

"I shouldn't have had to go to jail just because they were scared of the truth coming out and had all that power which they abused. To this day not one person has ever directly challenged the veracity of what I wrote and that's because all those involved know it is all true," added Dhillon.

"I've waited a very long time for this moment and envisioned this all happening over 10 years ago when I decided to write the blogs. A lot of people never thought we'd make it this far but I always believed that we'd find a way no matter how hard it got. The pain and stress that was caused to us by culpable and guilty parties was immense but it made us stronger in the end. Even in the darkest of times when it seemed impossible - we kept moving forward. Hope is an amazing thing. It can keep you alive against all odds."

"I love my country and we want it to do right by us. This application we filed gives the system one more chance to do the right thing in Canada. No person or corporation, no matter how powerful they are, should be above the law, period!" added Dhillon.

"Taxpayers money was abused here to muzzle the truth. It's clear to see what really happened. We've done our part by continuing to fight and bring it this far. If this court now also refuses to do the right thing, like the others, then it's going to be an international embarrassment for the Canadian judicial system if we have to go to the International Court of Justice in the Hague (Netherlands)," stated Emmet Pierce.

"My parents came to Canada because of the equality in our society. I hope we are allowed to have our voices heard. We are proud to be Canadians and think we live in the most amazing place in the world and are trying to help strengthen our society by continuing to fight the good fight."

"Our application has been reviewed by some of the best legal minds in the world and they all agree that this situation needs to be fixed. What message are we sending our citizens if the courts keep failing us like this - while the real guilty parties suffer no consequences."

Mr. Rouleau added that the case has a second element of national importance, "The case will also determine whether a Canadian who could be affected by a public order of the Court, should pay for legal advice to understand its terms, given that some of these terms might contain obscure legal nuances. Orders directed to the public should use clear and simple language. It's not fair to expect the many Canadians potentially affected by these orders to understand complicated legal nuances."

Along his journey Dhillon has been in contact with many famous lawyers from around the world that advised him. Among them is Wikileaks and Julian Assaange's former lawyer Mr. Mark Stephens, Mr. Jamshed Mistry - a high profile human rights and celebrity lawyer from Mumbai and member of the Canadian Bar Association, and Mr. Martin Garbus who has represented Nelson Mandela, Al Pacino, Robert Redford, and many others.

In addition, two former judges from British Columbia who now practice law again - Peter Leask and William Sundhu, also helped Dhillon along the way, as well as current judge (Canada's first turban wearing Sikh judge), Palbinder Shergill. Justice Shergill worked with Dhillon on his file when she was a lawyer practicing in Surrey, B.C.

For the complete story please visit:

https://thetruthmustbeallowed.blogspot.com/

For more information about Mr. Dhillon please visit:

https://www.satinderdhillon.com/

https://www.huffpost.com/author/satinder-dhillon

To read about Canada's newest political party that Mr. Dhillon has formed please visit the links below.

Satinder Dhillon Launches Campaign to Run for Prime Minister of Canada - Forms the New 'Justice and Equality' Party

https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/satinder-dhillon-launches-campaign-to-run-for-prime-minister-of-canada---forms-the-new-justice-and-equality-party-300925751.html

https://justiceandequalityparty.blogspot.com/

For more information about Nicolas Rouleau please visit:

https://www.nicolasrouleau.com/

For more information about Emmet Pierce please visit:

http://www.emmetpierce.ca/

For more information about the initial arrest please visit:

https://satinderdhillonkpmg.wordpress.com/

Other Media:

https://www.prweb.com/releases/2017/10/prweb14758274.htm

https://www.prweb.com/releases/2018/06/prweb15579559.htm

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2008/mar/09/blogs

Emerging Leader Award given to Satinder Dhillon by the Times of Canada.

http://timesofcanadapresents.blogspot.com/

https://thetimesofcanada.com/satinder-dhillon-modern-day-revolutionary/

https://thetimesofcanada.com/modern-day-revolutionary-satinder-dhillon-continues-to-fight-corruption/

Contact:

Jamshed Mistry

604-614-8281

[email protected]

SOURCE Satinder Dhillon

Related Links

http://www.thetruthmustbeallowed.com


Priti Patel's pledge to crack down on migrants crossing the Channel in small boats is in tatters after a record number reached Britain this month.

The Home Secretary vowed in the autumn that the illegal journeys would be virtually eliminated by now.

But Home Office figures show that so far this month at least 336 men, women and children have made the treacherous trip from northern France  the highest monthly total logged.

This includes 72 caught on Easter Sunday after a number of small-boat crossings. More are expected as the weather improves.

Priti Patel's pledge to crack down on migrants crossing the Channel in small boats is in tatters after a record number reached Britain this month

There is mounting frustration in Whitehall that despite being given millions of pounds, the French authorities are not doing enough to stop the crossings.

Miss Patel insists that tackling the crisis is a 'top priority' but MPs and ex-border chiefs warned last night she has failed to 'get a grip'.

Since the start of the year, 802 migrants have arrived on the beaches of Kent and Sussex in flimsy vessels. Another 246 reached the UK in December, including 60 on Christmas Day.

But in October, when Mrs Patel launched the crackdown with her French counterpart, just 58 made it to Britain.

She said at the time the crossings would be an 'infrequent phenomenon' by spring.

Under the plan, patrols along the French coast were doubled and drones deployed as part of a 6million Home Office investment so the authorities in France could intercept boats before they even set sail.

People smugglers are now targeting new routes across the Channel.

Small boats are increasingly landing at Hastings, East Sussex  a crossing of 40 miles, twice the distance from Calais to Dover.

Migrants pay up to 13,000 for a place in a rickety dinghy, spurred on by the belief that if rescued by UK cutters they will be brought here.

Home Office figures show that so far this month at least 336 men, women and children have made the treacherous trip from northern France  the highest monthly total logged. Pictured: British patrol boat with migrants

Last year, more than 1,850 succeeded.

The Home Office said 111 traffickers have been convicted and imprisoned since January 2019, including ten this year.

Over the same period, 155 migrants have been returned to France. Ministers said the coronavirus outbreak has not depleted staff and resources.

Natalie Elphicke, Tory MP for Dover and Deal, said: 'We really need to see the Home Office make the French honour their promise to stop people crossing the Channel in this way.

'Anyone found breaking into Britain should be immediately returned to France.'

Tony Smith, ex-head of the Border Force, said: 'The Government has not got a grip. For the migrants and people-smugglers, success breeds success. They see people getting into the UK and it fuels the supply chain.

'We have got to say we will no longer tolerate this.'

Miss Patel said last night: 'I will not stand by whilst malicious criminals prey on the vulnerable. We will enforce the law and seek justice. Protecting our border is one of my top priorities.

'That is why I am working with my French counterpart and have reaffirmed our commitment and dedication to tackling this exploitative crime.'
New York airports are receiving more than $440 million in federal funding as part of CARES Act relief.

The Federal Aviation Administration allocated the funds, awarding nearly $13 million to Syracuse Hancock International Airport, and $69,000 to Griffiss International Airport in Rome.

This federal funding will offset the devastating financial impacts of COVID-19 on travel hubs throughout the state and allow New York airports to continue to work on essential services, like airport safety, and most importantly, will help New York airports have the tools they need to properly rebuild after the crisis is over, said Sen. Chuck Schumer, who fought for airport funding to be included in the CARES Act.

The CARES Act provides funds to increase the federal share to 100% for the Airport Improvement Program and other grants already planned for 2020.

The additional funding and elimination of the local share will allow for projects to continue as planned, despite the current financial impact of coronavirus on airports.

New Yorkers are already feeling the devastating economic impact of COVID-19, and this funding from the CARES Act is a promising step toward restoring business, tourism, and mobility. I will always fight for resources that help our communities grow and thrive, said Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, who also supported the bill.

The FAA plans to begin releasing funding this month.
An additional coronavirus testing location in Laredo will be open on Monday, according to City of Laredo officials.

The City of Laredo Health Department has obtained 1,000 COVID-19 test kits, which will be put into use as the city opens a testing clinic at the health department offices at 2600 Cedar Ave.

The location will be open on Monday, though hours of operation are still pending. Citizens that want to be tested must have a referral from their physician or have a screening preformed via telephone prior to having a test conducted.

The measure is enacted in order to ensure the city's limited supply of tests are used to their greatest effect. An average of 100-150 tests are expected to be conducted daily.

Tests being administered at the clinic are confirmatory and performed via a nasal swab. While the confirmatory tests can take up to 3 days to return, city officials expect results to return in 24 hours, due to new medical equipment received and set to be operational at the city health department.

The health department has yet to create the phone number for citizens without physicians who believe they might have coronavirus-related symptoms. However, it is expected to be announced as early as tomorrow.

The news follows the announcement of a drive-thru clinic that's set to open Thursday morning at the El Metro Park and Ride at 1819 E Hillside Rd.

300 testing kits will be available at the drive-thru clinic through the city's partnership with CPL Laboratories.

For both the drive-thru clinic and the one at the health department, residents with and without health insurance will be accepted. Those with health insurance will have the test billed to their insurer. Tests performed for those without insurance will be billed to FEMA.

Citizens without a doctor who believe they might be exhibiting coronavirus-related symptoms can call 956-795-4932 for an over-the-phone screening prior to visiting the drive-thru clinic. The line is now open for calls in advance of the drive-thru clinic's expected opening date of Thursday.

The drive-thru clinic will be open on Thursday and Friday from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m., but will close over the weekend due to predicted inclement weather expected to hit the Gateway City. It will reopen Monday.
While the United States continues to see a spike in confirmed cases of coronavirus, US President Donald Trump has said on April 15 that the plans of re-opening the country are close to being final. Trump has said that the final details regarding the future plans of the country to ease the lockdown, imposed to curb the spread of COVID-19, will be shared with all 50 states. In the press briefing, the US President informed that he will be meeting with governors of all states and provide individual state leader with the authority to implement the powerful re-opening plan in their own discretion. However, Trump said that the day will be very very close, maybe even before the date of May 1.

Plans to re-open America for business are close to being finalized. pic.twitter.com/Z9d2dTySV0  The White House (@WhiteHouse) April 14, 2020

However, the statements by Trump have sparked criticism because as of April 15, the United States has recorded at least 614,246 confirmed cases of coronavirus with 26,064 casualties. Before making such comments, amid harsh scrutiny of his administration, Trump had even made the media sit through the video of the clips of US governors praising the White House for its swift response since the pandemic originated in China. The unprecedented move by Trump came as White House faced backlash over its response to the deadly coronavirus outbreak. Just a day before, one of the leading members of US task force for COVID-19, Dr Anthony Fauci had reportedly said that the country could have saved lives with early mitigation processes.

Read - Trump Names Six Indian-Americans To Great American Economic Revival Industry Groups

Read - Hollywood Celebrities Take A Swipe At Donald Trump After Stopping US Funding To WHO

All 50 states under the Presidential disaster declaration

Meanwhile, US President Donald Trump issued a disaster declaration for Wyoming on April 12 which implies that all 50 states will be under such declaration for the first time in history. According to White House Press Secretary, Judd Deere, a US President has never before declared a major disaster in all its states at once. Donald Trump not only tweeted about the move himself but also said that the country is "winning" against the "war with the invisible enemy". The declaration came on the same day the US surpassed the COVID-19 death toll of Italy which is also one of the hardest-hit countries of the pandemic outside China, where it originated. The nationwide number of casualties in the US hiked from 10,000 to more than 20,000 in reportedly just five days.

Read - COVID-19: Pak-origin Actor Kumail Nanjiani Takes Dig At Trump Over 'reopening Of Economy'

Read - Pandemic Power Play Between Trump And States
Source: Xinhua| 2020-04-15 13:44:11|Editor: zyl

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CANBERRA, April 15 (Xinhua) -- Australia's Treasurer Josh Frydenberg has reaffirmed the government's commitment to globalization despite a global economic downturn as a result of COVID-19.

Frydenberg told reporters in Canberra on Wednesday that the coronavirus crisis is not a "cause for protectionism."

It comes after the International Monetary Fund (IMF) forecast a 3 percent contraction in the global economy because of the pandemic.

Frydenberg said he would join a video conference call with his peers from the Group of 20 (G20) economies on Wednesday evening to discuss the IMF projections.

"We must continue to see the trade-in essential items like health supplies at this time. And the current crisis should not be seen as a cause for protectionism.

"We will also continue to support emerging economies and many of those developing economies who do not have the established health systems that we see in Australia and in other nations."

As of Wednesday morning, there have been 6,416 confirmed cases of COVID-19 in Australia, an increase of 0.78 percent from 6,366 on Tuesday.

U.S. President Donald Trump announced that his administration will halt funding to the World Health Organisation (WHO) but Frydenberg said the Australian government would not follow suit.

"Some of the work they do in developing countries is important. And we play our role in supporting global organizations through the United Nations (UN)," he said.
A gold standard when it comes to bespoke watches, Golay Spierer aims for excellence, creativity and exclusivity, all with great forethought. Anyone can ask for a custom-made watch, for example one with their grandfathers signature, says Christophe Golay, co-founder of the brand. Taking ones time to create exceptional, handcrafted pieces is the only way of working for the Swiss maison, which is why the company has produced a limited number of timepieces (just over 130) since its creation in Geneva in 2001.

Christophe Golay  Golay Spierer

This year, Golay Spierer is expanding with the creation of a capsule collection, Heroica Tempus. Dedicated to historical figures, this collection will begin with a unique timepiece paying homage to Napoleon Bonaparte. Initially approached by Gael Bonnel Sanchez, a French creative talent who specializes in creating new and unique objects (and who imagined this first model), Christophe Golay was immediately taken by the idea of associating a moment in history with watchmaking. As the opening salvo for this collection, the first piece honours the 250th anniversary of the famous emperors birth by bearing the signature he affixed to his letter dated on 4 March 1807, addressed to General Clarke during the Polish Campaign.

 Golay Spierer

The signature and imperial bee were cut out of the letter by Marianne Dubuis, a Swiss craftswoman who specialises in paper cutting, then encased in a pink gold case 46 mm in diameter and 9 mm thick. The choice of this precious metal gives the watch an antique look, in keeping with its historical spirit. Moreover, gold was (and still is) a precious material very widely used in the upper echelons of society of past eras, especially by emperors such as Napoleon. Christophe Golay said that finding a signature adapted to the size of a watch was a real challenge, which in part explains the generous size of the case. On the caseback, a 20-franc gold Napoleon coin (minted the same year as the signature) completes the creation. The strap is made of black alligator leather with gold trim and red calf leather lining. This combination of colours is reminiscent of the uniform of the mounted soldiers of the time, known as hussars.

 Golay Spierer

The box this watch is offered in is just as breath taking as the timepiece itself, and for good reason: it contains the rest of the letter from which the signature on the watchs dial comes from. The watch case is in the shape of a book, with the rest of the letter placed on the back cover, while the watch is placed on the right side of the book, inside a cut out that was made in the pages to make room for it.

Napoleon Bonaparte watch  Golay Spierer

It takes about a years work to create a piece with so much history. For the Napoleon Bonaparte watch, whose assembly was completed in mid-March of this year, the first discussions on its creation had begun on 2 January, 2019, Christophe Golay told us. Designing such a piece takes time due to the number of people involved in the process: some twenty craftsmen worked on the piece, including an expert in signature authentication and the paper cutter, Marianne Dubuis.

Napoleon Bonaparte watch (back)  Golay Spierer

Each year two historical figures will be honoured to expand the Heroica Tempus collection and each figure will only be interpreted oncein other words, Golay Spierer will not create a second timepiece dedicated to Napoleon. So, if you are interested in this one, be present at the auction in autumn where it will go under the hammer. As for the rest of the collection, Christophe Golay has revealed the figures that will be featured in the next two pieces: the second will be dedicated to Albert Einstein and the third to Empress Elisabeth of Austria. The watch honouring the theoretical physicist will be revealed this year, while the one for the empress will be presented next year. Dedicating a piece to the Empress Sissi is of particular interest to Christophe Golay, as one of his ancestors attempted to come to her aid during her assassination in Geneva in 1898.

Always fond of new ideas and inspirations, Christophe Golay asked me which historical figure I would personally choose for a watch. I told him that my choice, influenced by my studies of Hispanic literature, would be Spanish novelist, poet and playwright Miguel de Cervantes, a name Golay did not fail to note. Will he bring this man from the past back into the present as he does with his other creations from the Heroica Tempus collection? Only time will tell.

Heroica Tempus
Deaths linked to coronavirus in Northern Ireland could be up to 65% higher than was thought.

An additional 31 deaths here that were associated with Covid-19 occurred in a 16-day period that were not initially included in official figures.

By April 3, there were 79 deaths here, well above the tally of 48 announced at the time.

The discrepancy emerged after the official figures were compared with more complete data held by Northern Ireland's official statistics agency.

It comes amid growing concerns of a significant underestimate in the number of fatalities.

On Tuesday, a further 10 deaths were announced, bringing the death toll here to 134.

The official tally across the UK passed 12,000, with another 778 patients with coronavirus dying in hospitals.

Experts have called for care home deaths to be included with daily updates, amid fears they are going "under the radar".

On Tuesday, the Northern Ireland Statistics and Research Agency (NISRA) pledged to publishing weekly data on deaths in non-hospital settings.

SDLP MLA Colin McGrath, who sits on Stormont's health committee, said it was clear the figures to date have not been accurate.

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In Northern Ireland, the Public Health Agency (PHA) publishes an official daily bulletin of new cases and deaths linked to the virus.

Figures collated by NISRA, based on the formal process of death registration, offer a more complete picture.

These will include cases where a doctor completing the death certificate diagnosed suspected cases of Covid-19, for example, where this was based on relevant symptoms, but no test for the virus was conducted.

The PHA figures include only those testing positive for the virus within the previous 28 days.

The NISRA figures also include deaths outside hospitals.

An analysis by NISRA covers the 16-day period from Northern Ireland's first known virus death on March 18.

It states that 79 deaths occurred here between March 18 and April 3, which mentioned Covid-19 on the death certificate.

On April 3, a PHA bulletin reported 48 deaths - a difference of 31, with NISRA's figures 65% higher. A similar issue has arisen in England and Wales, when official death figures have been compared to data from the Office for National Statistics (ONS).

The ONS has said its data showed that coronavirus-related deaths in England and Wales were 50% higher than government figures.

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It is possible not all deaths from the 16-day period in Northern Ireland, recorded in NISRA's bulletin published last Friday, had been formally reported to the PHA immediately.

While that will partly account for some of the additional deaths, it has been acknowledged,  including by Deputy First Minister Michelle O'Neill, that the true toll is greater.

Mr McGrath said: "For several weeks, I have been questioning whether we are getting the true and proper accurate figure. I think it is obvious now that we are not, and the question has to be why?"

A PHA spokesperson said: "The Covid-19 Daily Surveillance Bulletin records deaths reported to the PHA by Health and Social Care Trusts. Deaths are recorded of patients who have died within 28 days of a positive test result, whether or not Covid-19 was the cause of death. By definition therefore, deaths where tests were not taken will not be included.

"The deaths may have taken place in a hospital setting, or in the community or a care home, but must have been reported to PHA by the Health and Social Care Trust to be included in the report.

"This reporting process allows a 'real time' daily update of trends in Covid-19 deaths within each trust area. In this pandemic, public health professionals, policy makers and the public value an up to date, daily record of the number of deaths associated with Covid-19."
"Montana workers need relief immediately. I fought to secure an additional $600 a week for folks on unemployment insurance on top of what they already would take home. We must get this important relief into the hands of Montana workers as soon as possible," Sen. Steve Daines, a Montana Republican, said in an email.

Congress also extended the number of weeks a person can draw unemployment by 13 weeks. Previously, the number of weeks a person could receive unemployment was capped at 28 weeks.

We understand the difficulties of many Montanans who are out of work due to the COVID-19 outbreak, and we know that these benefits are providing relief, said Brenda Nordlund, DLI acting director. We are working as hard as we can to make sure that everyone receives their benefits as quickly as possible. This is an important step in employing the assistance provided as part of the CARES Act. We continue to urge patience as the department works to implement all the components of this vital legislation.

The state is still adding new federal terms to its claims processing system so it can handle claims from self-employed people. Similar issues are being worked for people on unemployment who have previously exhausted their normal benefits.
David Hockney has suggested smoking helps protect people from Covid-19.

The artist, 82, a keen smoker, has previously described smoking bans in enclosed public spaces as the most grotesque piece of social engineering.

Now, in a letter to The Daily Mail, he wrote: Could it not be that smokers have developed an immune system to this virus?

With all these figures coming out (in) research in China its beginning to look like that to me.

Im serious and remember cigars and cigarettes are vegan.

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The newspaper said he was referring to research in China on the numbers of smokers being treated with Covid-19 in hospitals.

Deborah Arnott, chief executive of the charity Action On Smoking And Health (Ash) rejected his comments.

David Hockney is a very heavy smoker but this is risky advice for others to take, she said.

Quitting smoking has immediate benefits.

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If you quit, endothelial function in the linings of small arteries in the blood system improves rapidly.

She said endothelial dysfunction was implicated in Covid-19 and smokers therefore were at higher risk of complications.

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Advice published by the National Institute For Health And Care Excellence (Nice) strongly encourages smokers with severe respiratory disease to quit because of coronavirus.

Dr Sanjay Agrawal, consultant in respiratory and intensive care medicine, previously said: Doctors should be strongly encouraging smokers with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) to quit.

In fact they should be encouraging all smokers to quit, as early evidence from China shows that smokers who contract Covid-19 are more likely to develop severe disease, to end up in intensive care and to die.

Smokers should try to quit without delay.

The benefits from quitting are immediate, including increased oxygen supply to the lungs, reduced risk of respiratory infections, and improvements in blood pressure.

Longer-term benefits include significant reductions in the risk of developing cancer, heart disease and COPD.

Hockney is currently painting in Normandy, France, which he has said is a lot more smoker-friendly than England.
I f youve been on Instagram lately, you would have done well to miss someone taking on the Run for Heroes challenge.

Thousands across the country are posting on their Story, urging friends to 'run 5, donate 5'.

As well as raising money for NHS workers, the challenge is also providing welcome release from lockdown for many Brits.

So, what exactly is Run for Heroes all about and how can you play your part? Here's everything you need to know...

Thousands are fundraising for NHS staff on the front line of the pandemic / PA

What is the Run For Heroes challenge on Instagram?

Set up by Olivia Strong, a 27-year-old from Edinburgh, the Run For Heroes challenge is an active fundraiser for NHS workers during the Covid-19 crisis.

The money raised is funding wellbeing packs for staff and the NHS volunteer army, travel, parking and volunteering expenses, and other items requested by NHS charities to improve the wellbeing of workers.

It works in three stages: first you run 5km, then you donate 5 on the Virgin Money Giving crowdfunding page, before choosing five friends on social media to follow suit and tagging @Run.For.Heroes on Instagram.

Most are using their Instagram story for the nomination stage, by taking a selfie with their hand palm held up and tagging people on each finger.

It is taking place in line with Britains lockdown rules, which permit local exercise once per day.

Can I do the challenge if I've not been nominated?

Yes, of course. The nomination is just designed to encourage others to join in, especially those who do not normally run.

If no one has nominated you, there is no harm in spreading some good by running it anyway, donating and then nominating five of your friends.

This way, youre ultimately helping to raise more money for our NHS workers.

The donation page for Run For Heroes has topped 2 million

How much of the money raised goes to NHS staff fighting coronavirus?

The initial goal was to raise 5,000 but this has been smashed by more than 100 per cent, with the current total exceeding 2 million.

Virgin Money Giving said every penny is going to NHS Charities Together, formerly known as The Association of NHS Charities, which champions and supports the 250 NHS charities in the UK.

These groups help improve morale for staff and patients by decorating wards with bright and colourful art, they fund research and medical equipment for hospitals, and support mental health trusts, community workers and paramedics.

How else can I donate and help?

There are various other crowdfunders that have been set up. A separate NHS Charities Covid-19 Appeal on Virgin Money Giving has raised more than 26 million.

Fire fighters applaud on Westminster Bridge in London to salute local heroes / PA

Actor Damian Lewis fundraising page with restaurant LEON to provide 6,000 hot meals a day for critical care staff in London hospitals has raised more than 1 million.

Masks for NHS Heroes is another crowdfunder, which actor James McAvoy gave 275,000 towards, to get crucial PPE supplies to the front line amid ongoing shortages.

Another way to show your appreciation for NHS workers is to engage in the weekly Clap For Carers at 8pm on Thursday night, or by signing up to the NHS Volunteer Army when applications reopen.
Copyright  2020 Albuquerque Journal

For health care workers and families battling coronavirus on the Navajo Nation, masks and gowns are essential but often in short supply. Environmental health researchers with the Southwest Research and Information Center in Albuquerque created the Tribal Clinical Relief Support GoFundMe account to collect money and supplies for Navajo hospitals and communities.

Molly Rennie, the director of outdoor education and an English teacher at Sandia Preparatory School in Albuquerque, organized a donation drive at the school to help the cause. The school sent an email to all past and present Sandia Prep students and teachers asking for money, diapers, homemade gowns and masks for the Navajo Nation.

I work at a very community-oriented school, so I wasnt surprised to see this huge outpouring of support, Rennie said. We had one person donate an entire bag of homemade gowns. Ever since we sent out the email, people started sewing gowns and masks like crazy.

Rennie said monetary donations for Tuesdays event at the school totaled $2,000. Donations of homemade masks, gowns and other supplies were enough to pack the schools Ford Expedition SUV to the brim. The money will pay for more supplies, such as hand sanitizer made by local breweries.

The Navajo and Tribal Clinical Relief Support effort has raised more than $3,000.

The Navajo Nation has been hit hard by the coronavirus, with more than 830 COVID-19 cases and 33 deaths.

Data released Tuesday by the New Mexico Department of Health shows that Native Americans make up 36.7% of the states COVID-19 cases.

Rennie heard about the fundraising efforts through her husband, who works for the Center for Development and Disability at the University of New Mexico and is connected with the Navajo Nation through the Navajo Birth Cohort project. The Sandia Prep teacher said that in addition to the in-person donations, former students and teachers mailed money and supplies from out of state to help the cause.

This social distancing process is lonely, but I was struck today by how rejuvenating it was to do a project like this, Rennie said. It was good to be a part of something bigger and get out of my worried head. I think that was true for everyone involved, even if they just quickly dropped off supplies.
MySA.com is compiling the latest headlines on the COVID-19 pandemic and its affects in the San Antonio area.

Local dies under the age of 40: A Hispanic man in his 30s died of the virus at Northeast Baptist Hospital, officials said Wednesday. Before, no local resident under the age of 40 had been killed by the disease.

Surge in coronavirus cases: San Antonio reported 75 new cases of COVID-19, pushing the total to 890 as of Wednesday and four more deaths were reported, officials said Wednesday. The total death toll in Bexar County now stands at 37.

Baptist Health System furloughing workers: With nonessential surgeries barred during the coronavirus pandemic, Baptist Health System  one of the San Antonio areas largest hospital operators  announced Wednesday that its furloughing workers. Baptists owner, Dallas-based Tenet Health Corp., said less than 3 percent of the systems 6,600 workers would be affected.

Baptist owns five hospitals in San Antonio and one hospital in New Braunfels, and operates eight smaller facilities  micro hospitals  with Emerus, based in the Houston area.

Casting ballots by mail: Voters cannot cast ballots by mail if they are afraid of getting the coronavirus at polling places, Republican Attorney General Ken Paxton said on Wednesday.

His declaration came as a state district judge said he was inclined to grant a request by the Texas Democratic Party and a slew of civil rights and voter advocacy groups to declare that voters can mail-in ballots if they believe voting in person puts their health at risk.

More deputies test positive: Six more deputies at the Bexar County Jail have tested positive for COVID-19, officials said Wednesday.

The detention deputies were initially placed on leave, then tested for the coronavirus.

Officials are conducting contact tracing on all positive tests within the Bexar County Sheriff's Office.

Another S.A. nursing home resident dies: Another resident of the Southeast Nursing and Rehabilitation Center has died from the novel coronavirus, officials said Wednesday.

Additional details about the individual were not immediately available.

The San Antonio nursing home now has had 17 deaths. In total, 74 residents and 28 staff members have tested positive for the virus.

Another firefighter tests positive: A second San Antonio firefighter tested positive for the novel coronavirus Tuesday, officials said.

SAFD Chief Charles Hood said in a statement that the firefighter was assigned to the same fire station as the first firefighter who tested positive Monday, noting that the two worked different shifts.

Officials did not immediately identify the fire station where the firefighters are stationed.

Hood said the firefighter in this second case began to feel ill while working a shift on April 11. The firefighter was immediately sent home to isolate and was scheduled for COVID-19 testing.

Bexar County jail reports 8th case: Officials at the Bexar County jail reported Tuesday that an eighth inmate has tested positive for COVID-19.

The inmate was relocated to the infirmary after developing a fever and remained there while awaiting coronavirus test results.

All inmates have been provided surgical masks that must be worn inside the living units and all inmates have their temperatures checked daily by University Health Systems staff.

Coronavirus cases rise above 800: The confirmed number of COVID-19 cases jumped to 815 on Tuesday. The number of deaths related to COVID-19 stands at 33, with no new deaths reported.

Computer models predict when pandemic will peak in San Antonio: Computer modeling data that the city will begin posting on its website Wednesday predicts Bexar County could hit the peak of positive COVID-19 cases in late April to mid-May.

COVID-19 Tracker: Interactive maps track coronavirus cases in San Antonio, Texas counties and the U.S.

CURBSIDE: An updated list of San Antonio restaurants offering takeout and delivery

MORE CORONAVIRUS COVERAGE:
Registration Now Open for the OCP Virtual Summit May 12-15

AUSTIN, Texas, April 15, 2020, a collaborative community focused on redesigning hardware technology to efficiently support the growing demands on compute infrastructure, announces today the complete schedule for its 2020 Virtual Summit and Future Technologies Symposium taking place online May 12-15. The Summit and Symposium moved online due to the COVID-19 crisis. Registration for the virtual event is free and open to executives, engineers, technology architects, adopters and more from all over the world to practice social distancing while engaging in valuable networking and educational opportunities.



The OCP Virtual Summit will be an interactive format that incorporates all of the key components of the Global Summit, including Keynotes, Expo Hall Talks, Executive Tracks and Engineering workshops. In addition, the online event will offer virtual Q&A, panel discussions, one-on-one connections with attendees, exhibitors and sponsors. Unique to the Virtual Summit, the Expo Hall will remain open 24/7 providing the ability for attendees to visit exhibitors anytime.

"OCP has worked tirelessly to shift our major event from live to virtual in a matter of weeks, which is no easy task," states Bill Carter , Chief Technology Officer at the Open Compute Project Foundation. "We are thrilled our virtual 3D interactive event will be able to reach an even larger global audience while providing the high-caliber networking, education and collaboration opportunities our valued attendees, exhibitors and sponsors are accustomed to."

To register for the 2020 OCP Virtual Summit and Symposium, click here . Registration is free of charge and can be experienced on a laptop or desktop computer with no additional equipment or software required.

About Open Compute Project Foundation

OCP Contact:

Dirk Van Slyke

Open Compute Project Foundation

303-999-7398

dirkv@opencompute.org

Media Contact:

Jaymie Scotto & Associates
Here's the most recent top news you may have missed in San Antonio.

With its doors shut down amid the coronavirus pandemic, the San Antonio Zoo is facing the biggest crisis in its 106-year history.

Read the full story on San Antonio Zoo.

Family says county waited too long to stop transfer of inmates to treatment facility

The family of a San Antonio man who has spent the past few months at a county treatment facility sharply criticized the decision of officials to only recently suspend transferring inmates there from the county jail, where the number of COVID-19 cases has risen dramatically in recent days.

Read the full story on Graham Media: KSAT 12 .

Man robbed of backpack outside NW Side hotel, police say

San Antonio police are searching for five people who robbed a man outside a hotel early Tuesday morning.

Read the full story on Graham Media: KSAT 12 .

San Antonio has 840 COVID-19 quarantine rooms ready for occupancy

The city of San Antonio has 840 hotel rooms available for people who test positive for COVID-19 and have nowhere to quarantine themselves, said Chief Charles Hood of the San Antonio Fire Department.

Read the full story on Graham Media: KSAT 12 .

'I couldn't believe it': San Antonio business gifts local nurse new motorcycle after hers was stolen

When local nurse Mercedes Suarez found out her 2004 Kawasaki 250 Ninja was stolen, she was "devastated." During the past three years, she spent hundreds of dollars restoring the motorcycle.

Read the full story on MySanAntonio.

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.
WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. (WLFI)  A Purdue student is suing the university for "unfair reimbursement" after classes were moved online.

Senior Zachary Church is studying Aerospace Engineering. According to the class-action lawsuit document, he claims he paid $2,050 for his spring semester classes. However, the school is only offering a $750 credit back to student accounts.

Church argues online school is nowhere near the value of getting an in-class education. And, since students were forced to do remote learning, he believes they deserve more money back.

We reached out to Purdue for comment and the university's Director of Public Information, Tim Doty and he gave us this statement.

"It was sadly predictable that some plaintiff's lawyer would attempt to profit from this unprecedented public health crisis that's affected us all. The suit is baseless and has no chance of ultimate success. In the meantime, it will be one more minor difficulty among all those we're currently wrestling with."

We also reached out to Church's lawyers, who disagree and say his actions are "heroic" because he's fighting for every student's rights.
The International Criminal Police Organisation (Interpol) says it has uncovered a fraudulent scheme to the tune of 1.5 million run ac...





The International Criminal Police Organisation (Interpol) says it has uncovered a fraudulent scheme to the tune of 1.5 million run across three countries, with part of the money headed to Nigeria.





The organisation said the scheme, coordinated across Spain, Netherlands and United Kingdom, kicked off when German health authorities ordered face masks to curb the spread of the coronavirus.





The order, which originally targeted masks worth 15 million, was placed in March through two sales companies in in Zurich and Hamburg, according to Interpol.





The police organisation said the buyers placed an initial order of 1.5 million with a company liked to Spain, not knowing their legitimate email addresses had been compromised.





Through email correspondence, the company initially claimed to have 10 million masks, only for the delivery to fall through, Interpol said.





As consolation, they then referred the buyers to a trusted dealer in Ireland. The Irish middleman promised to put them in touch with a different supplier, this time in the Netherlands.





Claiming to have a strong commercial relationship with the company, the man provided assurances that the alleged Dutch company would be able to supply the 10 million face masks.





An agreement for an initial delivery of 1.5 million masks was made, in exchange for an up-front payment of EUR 1.5 million.





It said the buyers initiated a bank transfer to Ireland and prepared for delivery but just before the delivery date, they got to know that they had been duped.





The organisation said the buyers were informed that the funds had not been received and that an emergency transfer of EUR 880,000 straight to the Dutch supplier was required to secure the merchandise.





The Dutch Fiscal Information and Investigation Service quickly tracked down the EUR 880,000 which had been transferred from the German company, it said, adding that nearly EUR 500,000 of those funds had already been sent to the United Kingdom, all of which was destined for an account in Nigeria.





The money was eventually recalled and frozen after the European police organisation followed through with key contacts in the banking sector, with some of the suspects arrested.





Jurgen Stock, Interpol secretary general, was quoted as saying the suspects had no connections to the medical equipment industry but were experienced fraudsters who saw an opportunity with the outbreak of COVID-19.





They adapted their sales pitches to take advantage of strained supply chains and generate huge profits, he said.








President Moon Jae-in attends ASEAN Plus Three virtual summit at the presidential Blue House in Seoul, Tuesday, April 14, 2020. Courtesy of Cheong Wa Dae



The following is a full text of a joint statement adopted at the special ASEAN Plus Three summit on COVID-19. It was provided by Cheong Wa Dae.



WE, the Heads of State/Government of the Member States of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), the People's Republic of China, Japan, and the Republic of Korea, held the Special ASEAN Plus Three (APT) Summit on Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) via videoconference on 14 April 2020. The Summit was chaired by H.E. Nguyen Xuan Phuc, Prime Minister of Viet Nam, in his capacity as the Chair of ASEAN.



DEEPLY CONCERNED about the unprecedented and severe challenges posed by the COVID-19 pandemic to the well-being, livelihood and safety of our peoples and its adverse impact on the socio-economic development of our respective countries and the world at large.



EXPRESSING deepest condolences and sympathies for the loss of life and suffering caused by the pandemic.



RECOGNISING the exponential spread and severity of COVID-19, which the World Health Organisation (WHO) declared as a pandemic on 11 March 2020.



EMPHASIZING our gratitude and support to all medical professionals, healthcare workers and other frontline personnel who have been working with all their hearts and minds to fight the pandemic, saving people's lives.



ACKNOWLEDGING the importance of people's participation in preventing and controlling COVID-19.



WELCOMING steps taken by International Financial Institutions (IFIs) to support countries in need by using and enhancing their instruments in response to their members' urgent needs.



SUPPORTING the call by the United Nations Secretary-General for all nations to respond decisively, innovatively and collectively to suppress the spread of the virus and address the socio-economic impact of COVID-19.



NOTING the commitment expressed by the G20 Leaders in their Extraordinary Summit statement of 26 March 2020 to present a united front against the common threat of COVID-19.



STRESSING the important role of the World Health Organization (WHO) in the global campaign to control and contain the spread of COVID-19, recognising the importance of implementing the health measures under the International Health Regulations (2005) and underscoring the necessity for Universal Health Coverage (UHC) in addressing public health challenges such as COVID-19;



COGNISANT of the important role of APT cooperation for peace, security and prosperity in the East Asian region. Emphasising the significance of health cooperation and its existing mechanisms in addressing public health challenges, including our successful partnership in fighting the SARS pandemic in 2003.



COMMENDING the timely and active efforts by the APT Health cooperation platforms and among the Plus Three partners in jointly responding to COVID-19 from its early outbreak.



NOTING with satisfaction the encouraging outcomes of the Special Video Conference of the APT Senior Officials Meeting on Health Development on 3 February 2020, the China-Japan-ROK Foreign Ministers' Special Video Conference on COVID-19 on 20 March 2020; the Special Video Conference of the APT Health Ministers in enhancing cooperation on COVID-19 on 7 April 2020.



RECOGNISING the decisions to re-organize a number of major events including the Olympic and Paralympic Games.



WELCOMING the ASEAN Chairman's Statement of 14 February 2020 and the Declaration of the Special ASEAN Summit on COVID-19 of 14 April 2020 that demonstrated ASEAN's highest-level commitment on collective response to the outbreak of COVID-19, in the spirit of a Cohesive and Responsive ASEAN. Supporting ASEAN's multi-sectoral, multi-stakeholder, whole-of-community approach to address the multi-faceted challenges posed by COVID-19.






Two men were killed Tuesday in separate shootings in the city, Philadelphia police said.

In the first incident, a 32-year-old man in North Philadelphia died after being shot numerous times throughout his body. Police responding to the 2400 block of North 24th Street took the victim to Temple University Hospital, where he was pronounced dead at 4:26 p.m. His name was not released.

About four hours later, a 19-year-old man was fatally wounded in a street shooting in Kensington. Police said the victim, whose identity also was withheld, died after he was shot once in the back while on the 200 block of Westmoreland Street at 8:53 p.m. Police also took him to Temple, where he was pronounced dead at 9:05.

Authorities did not release any other details except that no arrests had been made in either case.

There were 107 homicides in Philadelphia as of Monday night, a 13% increase compared with the same day in 2018.
New York, April 14, 2020 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Reportlinker.com announces the release of the report "Mexico Dental Procedures Outlook to 2025 - Dental Bone Graft Substitutes & Regenerative Materials Procedures, Dental Implants & Abutments Procedures, Dental Membrane Procedures and Others." - https://www.reportlinker.com/p05879530/?utm_source=GNW





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- Dental Bone Graft Substitutes & Regenerative Materials Procedures

- Dental Cosmetic Procedures

- Dental Implants & Abutments Procedures

- Dental Membrane Procedures

- Prefabricated Crown and Bridge Materials Procedures



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Read the full report: https://www.reportlinker.com/p05879530/?utm_source=GNW



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__________________________
Far From Home unveils the first gameplay teaser for their sci-fi, action-survival game coming to Steam Early Access in 2022 and later to consoles.
The Ogun State Government has pledged to ensure complainace with the lockdown directive of the federal government.

This was announced by Governor Dapo Abiodun in a press statement issued by his chief press secretary, Kunle Somorin, and made available to journalists late Monday.

It declared that effective from Saturday, it was going to be total lockdown in the state.

The governor commended President Muhammadu Buhari for providing the necessary leadership especially for the federal governments efforts to combat the deadly coronavirus in the country.

Mr Abiodun enjoined the citizens and residents of the state to endure the 14-day extension of the lockdown in the state and consider it a necessary sacrifice to defeat an invisible and deadly enemy that requires its victims as unwitting vectors of its deadly venom.

We must deny the virus the vital supply chain required to decimate humanity by complying with all the social distancing measures and maintaining personal hygiene., the governor said, adding that his administration, remains committed in its twin-responsibility of protecting lives and properties in the state and ensuring the welfare of the citizens.

The COVID-19 pandemic has created an unusual challenge to strike a delicate balance of need for public safety and welfare of the citizenry. Therefore, the current window of relaxation of the lockdown in the state from 7.00am to 2.00pm, which follows the same pattern of last week, will still be available for this Wednesday (15th April) and Friday (17th April, 2020) only.

This is to allow the residents prepare for the extension of the lockdown and restock on food and other essential items. However, Ogun State borders remain closed. It should be emphasised that people should only go out if they need to and are required at all times when outside their homes to wear a face mask, including locally made face masks, even as they observe other social distancing measures.

The state will soon commence strict enforcement of wearing of face mask in the public as it has been shown to help flatten the spread of the virus, the governor said.

He also announced that the distribution mechanism of the states relief materials has been fine-tuned to make it more effective and efficient in the delivery to the target population of the elderly, the poor and vulnerable.

The statement added that the new mechanism, has incorporated the learning from the experience of the first phase and it reassured the citizens that the materials would get to the deserving households.

The statement said the relief items have so far been distributed to over 60,000 households of the elderly, the poor and vulnerable in the state, covering about 300,000 individuals and the next phase of distribution to additional 80,000 households of estimated 400,000 people across the 236 wards will commence soon.

The governor thanked the security agencies for moving swiftly to curtail the nefarious activities around the border communities with Lagos and promptly arresting over 150 suspects.

The law enforcement agents have been directed to deal ruthlessly with anyone taking advantage of the pandemic to engage in any form of criminal activity, he stated.

Ogun, as well as Lagos and the FCT, are the three states President Buhari ordered a lockdown in to check the spread of coronavirus. Lagos and the FCT account for about 70 per cent of Nigerias coronavirus cases while Ogun was selected due to its proximity to Lagos.
Source: Xinhua| 2020-04-15 15:10:58|Editor: huaxia

Video Player Close

BEIJING, April 15 (Xinhua) -- A 20-day themed online quiz, focusing on national security education, has been launched as an important online campaign of China's fifth National Security Education Day.

Falling on April 15, this year's National Security Education Day will be highlighted by a series of online and offline activities which are arranged by the Ministry of Justice and a national office overseeing public legal education work.

The public can join the online quiz via an official WeChat account of the ministry, which releases one national security education-related question every day.

Educational lectures, posters and public-interest advertisements will also be used across the country to raise the awareness of national security and create a better environment for safeguarding national security.
OTTAWA, April 14, 2020 /PRNewswire/ - The Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA) today announced the temporary reduction of service hours at certain low-traffic ports of entry (POE) along the Canada-United States land border. These COVID-19 related measures are temporary and in effect as of April 15, 2020 at 11:59 p.m. EDT. They will remain in effect until further notice.

The Government of Canada continues to introduce border measures to limit the spread of Coronavirus disease (COVID-19) in Canada. All non-essential travel into Canada continues to be prohibited.

The CBSA will proceed with the temporary reduction of service hours at a total of 27 locations.

Economic supply chains and trade will remain open and we will work to ensure that access to goods and services is not interrupted. As such, these changes should not affect commercial traffic.

The CBSA remains committed to ensuring that Indigenous people continue to be able to move within and between their communities, and are able to provide and access essential goods and services.

Quick Facts

This temporary reduction of service hours will be reviewed on an ongoing basis as the public health situation evolves.



As of March 21 , there is a temporary 30-day restriction on all non-essential travel at the Canada -U.S. border, including but not limited to tourism and recreation.

, there is a temporary 30-day restriction on all non-essential travel at the -U.S. border, including but not limited to tourism and recreation. Travellers who are granted entry into Canada will be informed of Public Health Agency of Canada (PHAC)'s mandatory 14-day self-isolation requirement. This is mandatory for all coming into Canada even if they do not have any symptoms, as they are at risk of developing symptoms and infecting others. If they do have symptoms, they will be provided a mask and referred to a health professional.

will be informed of Public Health Agency of (PHAC)'s mandatory 14-day self-isolation requirement. This is mandatory for all coming into even if they do not have any symptoms, as they are at risk of developing symptoms and infecting others. If they do have symptoms, they will be provided a mask and referred to a health professional. Travellers will also be required to provide their contact information and place of isolation to help PHAC monitor and enforce compliance with the 14-day quarantine/isolation requirement.

Associated Links

Follow us on Twitter ( @CanBorder ), join us on Facebook or visit our YouTube channel .

Fact Sheet

COVID-19  Temporary reduction of service at Canadian land border crossings

In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, the CBSA is temporarily reducing service hours at a total of 27 Canadian land border locations. The temporary hour adjustments are in effect as of April 15, 2020 at 11:59 p.m. (EDT) and will remain in effect until the expiration date of the Order in Council made under the Quarantine Act prohibiting entry into Canada from the United States. The CBSA regularly reviews its operations and adjustments are made when necessary.

Pacific Region: 3 ports



CBSA Port CBSA Current Hours of Service New CBSA Temporary Hours of Service Cascade, British Columbia 8:00 am to midnight, 7 days a week

(first Saturday in November to second Saturday in March)



7:00 am to 11:00 pm, 7 days a week

(second Sunday in March to first Sunday in November) 8:00 am to 8:00 pm, 7 days a week Nelway, British Columbia 8:00 am to 8:00 pm, 7 days a week 8:00 am to 4:00 pm, 7 days a week Rykerts, British Columbia 8:00 am to midnight, 7 days a week

(first Saturday in November to second Saturday in March)



7:00 am to 11:00 pm, 7 days a week

(second Sunday in March to first Sunday in November) 7:00 am to 5:00 pm, 7 days a week

Prairie Region: 16 ports



CBSA Port CBSA Current Hours of Service New CBSA Temporary Hours of Service Carievale, Saskatchewan 8:00 am to 9:00 pm (second Sunday in March to first Saturday in November) 9:00 to 10:00 pm, 7 days a week (remainder of the year) 9:00 am to 5:00 pm, 7 days a week Carway, Alberta 7:00 am to 11:00 pm, 7 days a week 8:00 am to 6:00 pm, 7 days a week Climax, Saskatchewan 9:00 am to 6:00 pm

(second Sunday in March to May 31)



8:00 am to 9:00 pm

(June 1 to September 15)



9:00 am to 6:00 pm

(September 16 to first Saturday in November)



10:00 am to 7:00 pm

(first Sunday in November to second Saturday in March) 7 days a week 9:00 am to 5:00 pm, Monday to Friday Coulter, Manitoba 8:00 am to 9:00 pm, 7 days a week 8:00 am to 4:00 pm, 7 days a week Del Bonita, Alberta 8:00 am to 9:00 pm

(June 1 to September 15)

7 days a week



9:00 am to 6:00 pm

(September 16 to May 31)

7 days a week 9:00 am to 5:00 pm, Monday to Friday Estevan, Saskatchewan 8:00 am to 9:00 pm (second Sunday in March to first Saturday in November)



9:00 am to 10:00 pm (remainder of the year), Monday to Friday (except holidays) 9:00 am to 5:00 pm, 7 days a week Goodlands, Manitoba 9:00 am to 10:00 pm, 7 days a week 9:00 am to 5:00 pm, 7 days a week Gretna, Manitoba 8:00 am to 10:00 pm, 7 days a week 8:00 am to 4:00 pm, 7 days a week Lena, Manitoba 8:00 am to 9:00 pm, 7 days a week 8:00 am to 4:00 pm, 7 days a week Monchy, Saskatchewan 9:00 am to 6:00 pm

(second Sunday in March to May 31)



8:00 am to 9:00 pm

(June 1 to September 15)



9:00 am to 7:00 pm

(September 16 to first Saturday in November)



10:00 am to 7:00 pm

(first Sunday in November to second Saturday in March)



7 days a week 9:00 am to 5:00 pm, Monday to Friday Northgate, Saskatchewan 8:00 am to 9:00 pm (second Sunday in March to first Saturday in November)



9:00 am to 10:00 pm (remainder of the year) 7 days a week 9:00 am to 5:00 pm, 7 days a week Oungre, Saskatchewan 8:00 am to 9:00 pm (second Sunday in March to first Saturday in November)



9:00 am to 10:00 pm (remainder of the year) 7 days a week 9:00 am to 5:00 pm, 7 days a week Regway, Saskatchewan 24/7 6:00 am to 10:00 pm, 7 days a week West Poplar River, Saskatchewan 9:00 am to 6:00 pm

(second Sunday in March to May 31)



8:00 am to 9:00 pm

(June 1 to September 15)



9:00 am to 6:00 pm

(September 16 to first Saturday in November)



10:00 am to 7:00 pm

(first Sunday in November to second Saturday in March)



7 days a week 9:00 am to 5:00 pm, Monday to Friday Windygates, MB 9:00 am to 10:00 pm, 7 days a week 9:00 am to 5:00 pm, 7 days a week Winkler, Manitoba 8:00 am to 10:00 pm, 7 days a week 8:00 am to 6:00 pm, 7 days a week

Quebec Region: 8 ports



CBSA Port CBSA Current Hours of Service New CBSA Temporary Hours of Service Chartierville, Quebec 8:00 am to midnight, 7 days a week 8:00 am to 8:00 pm, 7 days a week Frelighsburg, Quebec 24/7 8:00 am to 8:00 pm, 7 days a week Hemmingford, Quebec 24/7 8:00 am to 8:00 pm, 7 days a week Highwater, Quebec 24/7 8:00 am to 8:00 pm, 7 days a week Lacolle Route 221, Quebec 24/7 8:00 am to 8:00 pm, 7 days a week Morses Line, Quebec 8:00 am to 4:00 pm (all travellers)

4:00 pm to 8:00 am

Remote traveller processing

(only available to citizens of Canada, the United States,

and permanent residents of either country) 8:00 am to 4:00 pm, 7 days a week



Remote traveller processing

(only available to citizens of Canada,

the United States, and permanent residents of either country) NOTE: This location will be available to travellers only.

Commercial traffic must use Frelighsburg or St-Armand. Trout River,Quebec 24/7 8:00 am to 8:00 pm, 7 days a week Lacolle 223, Quebec 24/7 8:00 am to 8:00 pm, 7 days a week

SOURCE Canada Border Services Agency

Related Links

www.cbsa-asfc.gc.ca


Rights advocate urges U.S. Ambassador to assist in bringing schoolchildren back to Russia

 RAPSI, Vladimir Burnov

13:43 15/04/2020

MOSCOW, April 15 (RAPSI)  Chair of the Presidential Human Rights Council's standing commission on international cooperation in the sphere of human rights Alexander Brod has turned to U.S. Ambassador in Russia John Sullivan on behalf of NGO Lawyers for Human Rights and Dignified Life seeking his assistance in returning back home Russian schoolchildren.

As it became known earlier, several dozens of Russian school children, who since last autumn had stayed in the U.S. for taking student courses, were stranded in the country because their educational residence programs had been cancelled because of the pandemic. Now, according to Brod, Russian Embassy in the U.S. receives petitions for return of Russian minors.

The rights advocate states that Russias Foreign Ministry has not been informed about either the existence of such programs, or the fact that schoolchildren from Russia have travelled to the U.S. to take the respective courses; Brod is concerned that the host party is in no way responsible for the children, whereas U.S. authorities have failed to make a list of the schoolchildren seeking repatriation.

The Councils commission Chair asks the Ambassador to ensure that Russian children have adequate living conditions and are protected from the coronavirus pandemic, as well as to inform the relevant U.S. authorities about rights activists concerns and urge such authorities to assist in returning children back to their homeland, according to Brods address.
New Delhi: The Enforcement Directorate (ED) on Wednesday (April 15) moved the Bombay High Court seeking cancellation of bail of DHFL promoters Kapil Wadhawan and Dheeraj Wadhawan, accused in a money laundering case. The DHFL promoters recently violated bail conditions and traveled to their farmhouse at Mahabaleshwar hill station in Maharashtra's Satara district during the lockdown imposed due to coronavirus.

Advocate Purnima Kantharia of the ED mentioned the application before high court Justice P D Naik. The court then issued a notice to Wadhawan and posted the matter for further hearing on April 23.

The woes of the Wadhwan brothers do not end here as the ED also submitted before the HC to cancel their bails in the Iqbal Mirchi money laundering case. Notices have been issued to the Wadhawan brothers, and the case will be heard on April 23.

In January this year, the ED arrested the Wadhawan brothers for their dubious dealings with gangster Iqbal Mirchi, who died in 2013, and was booked under provisions of the Prevention of Money Laundering Act.

The ED last week issued orders for the seizure of five luxury vehicles in which Kapil Wadhawan, his brother Dheeraj Wadhawan and their other family members traveled to their farmhouse at Mahabaleshwar hill station amid lockdown.

On April 10, Maharashtra Home Minister Anil Deshmukh appointed Additional Chief Secretary to probe against Principal Secretary Amitabh Gupta, who issued "picnic" passes to DHFL promoters. The state government has sent Amitabh Gupta on a compulsory leave till further notice and his charge has been given to Srikant Singh.

On that day, Wadhavan brothers were booked under IPC Section 188 at Mahabaleshwar Police station for flouting Section 144 imposed due to the nationwide lockdown amid coronavirus COVID-19 pandemic.

Notably, Gupta gave permission to the Wadhwan brothers against whom CBI had issued a lookout notice in the Yes Bank fraud case.

Earlier in March, the CBI had registered a case (RC 219 2020 E0004, EO-I, CBI, New Delhi) on 07.03.2020, in which Kapil Wadhawan, Dheeraj Wadhawan, Rana Kapoor (the then MD & CEO of Yes Bank) and others were made accused.
CLEVELAND, Ohio  While doctors have found different strains of the novel coronavirus, until now doctors have believed they arent that different.

It seems like good news, if the coronavirus in Italy is pretty similar to the one you could catch in China, or the United States, or Australia. Doctors theorized that once youre immune to one, youre likely immune to them all.

But new research in Australia and Taiwan has found one strain that has changed the mechanism the virus uses to bind the virus to human cells, according to news reports. And that could render all current vaccine research futile.

The research looked at an outlier strain from a medical student in Wuhan, China, according to the Science Times. In the research released Saturday, researchers wrote, the observation of this study raised the alarm that Sars-CoV-2 mutation with varied epitope [something an antibody attaches itself to] profile could arise at any time. This means current vaccine development against Sars-CoV-2 is at great risk of becoming futile.

The findings still need verification, since outside factors may have influenced the mutation of the strain. Researchers said a technical error could have happened. The study has not been peer-reviewed.

On Wednesday morning Dr. Frank Esper, a pediatric infectious disease specialist at Cleveland Clinic Childrens Hospital, said in an email that random, small coronavirus mutations are to be expected. He said researchers can factor these mutations in when formulating vaccines. Moreover, he does not expect the coronavirus to mutate as wildly as other viruses, such as the flu. Influenza changes so quickly, scientists must reformulate the vaccine annually. The coronavirus appears to be much more stable than other viruses like the flu or HIV.

I have not reviewed that study although from the article it has not been peer-reviewed," Esper said. Again, we expect random mutations to happen. We definitely take new mutations into account when we develop vaccines and watch out for any that would impair the vaccine effectiveness. It is like a game of tennis sometimes, especially for high mutation viruses like influenza. The virus changes, we change the vaccine, the virus changes again, we change the vaccine again, etc. We do not expect nearly as much changes from this coronavirus.

On Tuesday, Esper spoke about the majority of the coronavirus strains studied so far. Doctors believe there are three main strains.

There really isnt a substantial variation between the different viruses that are causing this pandemic across the world, compared to when youre talking about different strains of lets say influenza, Esper said.

Because the coronavirus hasnt seemed to mutate much, at least for now, doctors theorize that a coronavirus vaccine could be good for two or three years, as opposed to the flu vaccine, which is reformulated annually due to mutations in the virus. It also means that the virus could be less likely to become resistant to future drugs developed to treat it. Researchers continue to study the issue.

The coronavirus doesnt change that much as it spreads because it has a so-called proofreader on an enzyme that checks its work as it replicates, to make sure there arent any mistakes. If it did make a mistake it can fix it.

In contrast, the flu and HIV dont double check their work as they make copies of themselves. These slacker viruses make lots of mistakes, mutating widely. They create headaches for doctors, because they change so much. HIV may become resistant to one drug as the virus mutates. The flu changes so much the vaccine has to be changed every year.

Esper relates the differences in the viruses to his two teenage sons at home; one of them writes their report a week ahead of time, and then make sure that everything is right, the other one just does it the night before and doesnt even read it through before he hands it in.

The coronavirus, for now, has no serious reason to mutate, doctors say. Its spreading easily between person to person. But when if a vaccine or drug is developed and as more people develop an immunity, that immunity will likely put more pressure on the virus to change.

The changes the virus has made allows doctors to pinpoint where each strain came from and understand the spread better.

About 3,000 of viruses genomes have been analyzed around the world. The Cleveland Clinic will soon be analyzing samples in Ohio to understand answer questions like: Are healthcare workers contracting the coronavirus from hospitals or their communities? How much of the spread is being caused by asymptomatic carriers of the disease? Are children spreading the disease to their families, or is it the other way around? Studies like these are going on around the world.

At the Clinic, Esper and his colleagues are looking to answer the question, Whos giving it to who, so that we can better understand how this thing is spreading throughout a community."

They will be able to look to see where most Ohio cases came from. And though doctors have yet to find any evidence that one strain is more severe, or benign than another, the Clinic will also examine this question in its study.
In a massive development, YSRCP MLA Madhu Sudan Yadav broke lockdown rules as he was seen on the Karnataka-Andhra border check-post in Madanapalle in Chittoor district. Despite strict guidelines to follow the lockdown amid rising coronavirus cases across India, the Kanigiri MLA was returning from Bengaluru in five cars escorting 39 people.

Andhra Pradesh police stated that the people might the relatives of the MLA, and further stated that the police is questioning how he went to Bengaluru. Madhusudan Yadav represents the Kanigiri constituency of Prakasam district.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi addressed the nation on Tuesday as the pan-India lockdown that he imposed as a measure to tackle the Coronavirus outbreak entered Day 21. In his address, the PM said that India is fighting against COVID-19 and it has been successful so far. He then announced the extension of lockdown till May 3.

READ: As Modi govt announces Covid lockdown 2.0 guidelines, here's what's allowed and what isn't

READ: Coronavirus LIVE Updates: MHA issues guidelines for lockdown 2.0, total cases reach 10,000R

Karnataka BJP minister shares pool party photo amid COVID threat

Earlier, a controversy had erupted in Karnataka where a BJP MLA and Minister for Medical Education, Dr. Sudhakar K, took to Twitter to post a picture of him along with his kids in a swimming pool amid the novel Coronavirus outbreak. After the matter heated up on social media, the Minister deleted the post.

Sudhakar K wrote, "After a long time joined my children for swimming hope maintaining social distance here also.. haha".

EAD: Delhi Markaz's Maulana Saad booked for culpable homicide; LoC for 2000 foreign Tablighis

READ: Stones pelted at ambulance in UP's Moradabad; driver says shocking attack was pre-planned
Giovanni Battista Piranesi, Carceri dInvenzione, 1749, etching, 25 1/16 x 19 7/16 inches

Contributed by Armin Kunz / Giovanni Battista Piranesi (17201778) created innumerable views of ancient and modern (that is, Baroque) Rome that together formed his monumental print cycles Antichita Romane and Vedute di Roma. They established his fame and lured generations of travelers to the Eternal City. Today, however, he is best known for the series of merely fourteen etchings that was first published in 174950 as Invenzioni Carpric[ci] di Carceri. Shown here is the title-page in its first (of nine) states, with the name of the Roman publisher Giovanni Bouchard misspelled as Buzard.

Piranesi spent the years 1743 to 1747 in Venice and his Carceri, created soon after his return to Rome, still betray the influence of La Serenissima as well as of Baroque stage design. More immediate antecedents were the prints of Giambattista Tiepolo (16961770) who had etched a set of Vari Capricci in the 1740s and whom Piranesi met during his Venetian sojourn.

In 1761 a second edition of theCarceri was published. Apart from adding two plates, Piranesi had extensively reworked each of the compositions. Throughout, the diaphanous luminosity of the earlier states had been transformed into a densely etched darkness that is ultimately more appropriate to the gloomy subject matter of the scenes. The architectural elements show an even more pronounced structural imponderability and the small figures that the artist added throughout help in projecting the vastness and monumentality of the settings.

Giovanni Battista Piranesi, The Drawbridge, from Carceri dinvenzione, 174950, etching, 24 15/16 x 19 7/16 inches

Giovanni Battista Piranesi, Invenzioni capric di carceri allacqua forte, 1749-50, etching, 24 15/16 x 19 7/16 inches

Piranesis Carceri have since become a universal screen upon which to project the anxieties of modernity. This reception probably started with Horace Walpole, who encouraged artists as early as 1765 to study the sublime dreams of Piranesi, who seems to have conceived visions of Rome beyond what it boasted even in the meridian of its splendour. Savage as Salvator Rosa, fierce as Michelangelo, and exuberant as Rubens, he has imagined scenes that would startle geometry, and exhaust the Indies to realize. William Beckford, the founder of Englands Dark Romanticism, also found inspiration here for his own subterranean fantasies.

It is fascinating to observe how the Carceri gradually became part of the wider image of Rome that was forming over time in the minds of the grand tourists as well as of those who stayed home and experienced the Eternal City through books, prints, and paintings. A rare early example of this diffusion are two mezzotints by the architect-graveur George-Francois Blondel (1730ca. 1792).



George-Francois Blondel, A view of the inside of the New Prison at Rome, 1765, mezzotint, 20.5 x 15.7 inches

The son of the more famous French architect Jacques-Francois, the younger Blondel had studied in Paris, made the obligatory trip to Italy, and ultimately ended up in London in 1764. It must have been the English predilection for a technique that made him decide to embark on a series of eight prints that were, as the title page said, curiously engraved in Mezzotinto at London and published as a set in 1766. The first one, seen here, is titled A View of the Inside of the New Prison at Rome. The Carceri served clearly as Blondels model. The title to the second plate of the set reads A View of a Prison of the Composition of Mr. Blondel done at Rome. The Frenchman in London therefore knows that Piranesis prints do not have the same topographical value as the Vedute. He understands them correctly as Invenzioni and sets out to compete with the Italian master by creating his own imaginative and equally capricious prisons. They stand out through their technique: for the first time mezzotinto is used here to depict architectural themes on such a grand scale.

About the Author: Armin Kunz is the owner and director of CG Boerner, a Chelsea gallery that has specialized in prints and drawings since it was founded in Leipzig in 1826.

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Bill Gates has condemned Donald Trump for the decision to suspend World Health Organisation (WHO) funding during a worldwide pandemic, saying the move is as dangerous as it sounds.

The Microsoft founder used Twitter to warn against the sudden withdrawal of millions of dollars in US support per year.

Mr Gates said on Wednesday: Halting funding for the World Health Organization during a world health crisis is as dangerous as it sounds. Their work is slowing the spread of COVID-19 and if that work is stopped no other organisation can replace them. The world needs the WHO now more than ever.

President Trump announced on Tuesday that his administration would not continue to support the WHO, pending a White House investigation into the bodys management of the coronavirus pandemic.

That comes as Mr Trump has defended his management of the health crisis, which has now seen over 615,000 Americans infected with the coronavirus and 26,061 deaths.

The reality is the WHO failed to obtain, vet and share information in a timely fashion, said Mr Trump. The WHO failed in its basic duty and must be held accountable.

The US president added that the WHO did not declare a world health emergency in time, whilst aiding a Chinese government cover up.

Through the middle of January, it parroted and publicly endorsed the idea that there was not human to human transmission happening, despite reports and clear evidence to the contrary,

The Trump administrations account appeared to contradict the WHO timeline of events. According to Jeremy Konyndyk, the former head of the US Office of Foreign Disaster Assistance (OFDA), WHO officials reported on January 23rd that human-to-human transmission was happening in China.

Mr Konyndyk added on Twitter that it was lunacy to blame the WHO for White House mistakes. This is not about WHO's culpability or need for reform; it's about creating a scapegoat for the United States governments own ineptness.

On Wednesday, the former OFDA and USAid head warned that there was no real replacement for the WHO, of which the US is the largest financial contributor.

WHO has technical capacity, credibility with health ministries, research expertise, legal authorities that dont exist elsewhere. USG cant just fund an NGO to pick up the slack instead.

President Trump suggested that WHO would be redirected to work with other countries on health issues in other ways.
Police are hunting a boyfriend after the house of his partner and their two young children was set ablaze.

David White, 34, was named as a prime suspect after the semi-detached house in Birmingham, West Midlands, was gutted by flames on Easter Monday.

He is alleged to have forced his way into the house and set light to a living room before fleeing the scene.

Hazel Henderson, White's girlfriend, was said to have escaped the fire holding her toddler son and clasping the hand of an older girl.

Firefighters and police surrounded the gutted family home in Birmingham earlier this week

David White, 34, was named as a prime suspect after the semi-detached house in Birmingham, West Mids, was gutted by flames on Easter Monday

Around 20 firefighters worked to bring the blaze under control but the house in Farren Road, Northfield, was severely damaged.

One neighbour told how White and Ms Henderson moved in with their two children, Brooke and Vinnie, around 12 months ago.

They said: 'We just can't believe what's happened. They seemed like a normal family.

'All the immediate houses were evacuated. We were given blankets and made to stand at the top of the road for about three hours.

'We've heard all kinds of stories about what went on. It's just frightening. I'm just glad the children are all okay.

'It's scary that no-one knows where he is.'

Burnt-out debris was left on the drive of the three-bed home, including the remnants of a sofa and charred kids' toys.

One neighbour told how White and his girlfriend Hazel Henderson moved in with their two children around 12 months ago

Ms Henderson managed to escape the fire holding her toddler son and clasping the hand of an older girl

Dozens of bin bags of destroyed personal possessions lay in an alley at the side of the house.

A friend of White, a former builder, said that the couple had been in a relationship 'for years'.

He said: 'They've been together for years and years. He dotes on the kids - I refuse to accept he would have deliberately put them at risk of harm.'

Neighbours told how a man was seen running from the house shortly before smoke was seen billowing from the property.

A witness, who asked not to be named, said: 'It was domestic violence. There was lots of shouting and then we saw a man run out of the front of the house.

'Apparently he set fire to a cushion, which then ignited the sofa. Before you knew it, the place was engulfed with smoke.

'Thankfully, the mum and her kids got out of the house. They were checked over by paramedics. I think they were all okay - just in shock.'

West Midlands Police say White was known to the family that lived inside the home

West Midlands Police said White was known to those inside the house.

Inspector Dave Sproson said: 'We believe this was a deliberate act and those inside the property were known to White. It's just fortunate nobody was seriously injured and they have since been safeguarded.

'We urgently need to trace and speak to him and I would urge anyone with information to get in touch as soon as possible.'

A spokesman said: 'A woman and two children had escaped the fire before our crews arrived on scene.

One neighbour said the fire was started on a cushion and 'before you knew it, the place was engulfed in smoke,' on Monday

'Four crews were initially sent and at the height of the fire we had approximately 20 firefighters.

'We suspect the fire was started deliberately.'

Ambulance chiefs said a woman and her two young children were checked for smoke inhalation and discharged at the scene.

Domestic violence cases have surged since the government's stay-at-home orders three weeks ago.

The UK's largest domestic abuse charity, Refuge, reported a 700% increase in calls to its helpline in a single day.

Anyone with information can call police on 101.
Soaring numbers of workers at the Columbus Junction, Iowa, pork-processing plant who have been sickened by COVID-19 have sparked fears not only for the employees health but also for the vitality of this small town and the continuity of the nations meat supply.

Officials from Tyson Foods have closed the plant amid one of the state's largest outbreaks of COVID-19: 186 employees have tested positive for the illness. The facility is one of the nation's major pork processing plants and the rural community's largest employer.

We are taking on water fast, National Pork Producers Council President Howard A.V. Roth said, adding that thousands of hog farms could close this year without government intervention. Immediate action is imperative, or a lot of hog farms will go under.

The Columbus Junction plant is one of several meatpacking facilities across the state and the nation where business has been suspended after they were hard-hit by the highly contagious coronavirus.

Essential employees: COVID-19 claims lives of 30 grocery store workers, thousands more may have it, union says

Pandemic repercussions: 3 in 10 Americans have lost income due to coronavirus

In Tama County, where 108 positive COVID tests and three deaths have been reported, National Beef suspended production at Iowa Premium beef plant after an outbreak. Smithfield Foods, the worlds biggest pork processor, shut its Sioux Falls, South Dakota, plant over the weekend as the coronavirus spread among workers.

Meat processing plants from Colorado to Canada have similarly suspended production after the virus spread.

The whole system is gummed up, Iowa State University agricultural economist Dermot Hayes said. Its not just the farm and the packer. Its all along the chain.

Tyson Foods officials said Tuesday that the company would keep its Columbus Junction plant, which has about 1,400 employees in normal times, shuttered. The plant  said to be responsible for 2% of the countrys total slaughtering capacity  has been closed since April 6. The company is diverting livestock originally scheduled for delivery at Columbus Junction to its other plants, when possible.

Story continues

Tyson was taking precautions to protect its employees from the spread before the closure. Staff was checking the temperature of workers at all locations before they entered facilities. But checking temperatures only ensures that symptomatic people do not engage with others; those who are not feverish can still spread the virus.

Protecting our team members continues to be top priority for us, the company said in a statement to the Des Moines Register. The plant will continue to pay employees and keep its doors closed while assessing the situation, officials said.

Gov. Kim Reynolds said Tuesday that nearly half of the day's newly confirmed cases  86 of the 189  were tied to the Tyson Food plant outbreak.

A Tyson Foods processing plant is seen, Tuesday, April 14, 2020, in Columbus Junction, Iowa.

Testing increases, and with it positive tests

Reynolds said earlier in the week that 200 testing swabs were sent to the Columbus Junction, Iowa, plant and indicated a quick-test machine was provided. She said she hopes more testing will be the first step to getting the plant back in operation.

The extra tests will help the state "understand who was positive, who was negative, which was part of the scenario in opening the plant back up," Reynolds said. "The plant is also putting in a lot of measures to protect the employees."

Meanwhile, the Louisa County Sheriff's Office announced Tuesday that nearby community health centers in southeast Iowa will be offering COVID-19 testing in the afternoons, Tuesday through Friday. The office has a limited number of tests available, so appointments are required.

Columbus Junction Mayor Mark Huston said not all of Tysons employees are from the town or even a part of the county. But the suspension of the plant's work will likely have a major economic effect on his community of fewer than 2,000 people.

Lets say there was an employer (in Des Moines) that employed 200,000 people  one employer  and then they shut down, Huston said to the Des Moines Register. What do you think that would do to Des Moines and the surrounding area?

Huston, who said he's spoken with the plant manager, expects testing to be done on nearly all of the facility's employees.

Well all make it through this, the mayor told the Quad-City Times. "Its just what is the damage going to look like when it gets done. Its kind of like high-water time. When the water goes down, you have to take a look and see what youve got, roll up your sleeves and figure out how to fix it. Hopefully, we will be able to fix most of it, but we wont be able to fix all of it.

Other Iowa plants also have cases

Tyson Foods delivered face masks to its 2,000 employees at its Waterloo, Iowa, pork processing plant Tuesday, said Bob Waters, president of United Food and Commercial Workers Local 431, which represents the employees.

Waters said a couple of workers have tested positive for coronavirus at the plant over the past couple of weeks, though the operation has continued.

According to state data, at least 78 people have tested positive for the disease in Black Hawk County, home to Waterloo.

Tyson Foods did not respond to a request for comment about the situation in Waterloo.

Guards at the Waterloo plant are also taking employees temperatures when they arrive, and Waters said the company suspended its attendance policy. Workers who skip work will not receive payment, but they will not get fired, either.

Like at other meat processors, Tyson officials have added plexiglass on the line to separate workers. Waters said the plant also slowed down how fast the pork moves down the line so that fewer workers have to cram into a given area. But, as is the nature of the work, Waters believes the company can separate workers only so much.

Youre working side by side, he said. In order to be able to effectively (keep employees safe), you have to space them out at least 6 feet. On the lines, its kind of hard.

Waters said UFCW Local 431 purchased 5,000 bottles of sprayable hand sanitizer for workers at Tyson Foods and other plants it represents. They are ordering another 5,000 shipments from a source in Wisconsin.

As dangerous as the work is, he said it must continue.

We cant stop the plants, he said. If we stop the plants from running, we stop feeding the country. We want to do everything we can to make sure the employees are safe to keep the plant running.

Follow Tyler Jett and Tommy Birch on Twitter @LetsJett & @TommyBirch.

This article originally appeared on Des Moines Register: Coronavirus cases soar at Tyson Foods plant in Iowa; 186 test positive
While lockdown may be testing many people's patience, Jessica Rowe is eager to see the 'silver lining' in what is an otherwise trying situation.

In a post on Instagram on Wednesday, the 49-year-old media personality celebrated taking a walk with her teenage daughter, Allegra.

'Silver lining... my eldest daughter actually coming on a walk with me & me not having to pretend the entire time I didn't know her!! Hooray!!' she captioned the hilarious photo.

Getting some fresh air: In a post on Instagram on Wednesday, Jessica Rowe celebrated taking a walk with her reluctant teenage daughter, Allegra. Both pictured

An excited Jessica snapped a selfie during their apparently rare walk on an otherwise isolated path, with her 13-year-old daughter appearing moody as she trails behind her mum in the distance.

Along with Allegra, Jessica also shares an 11-year-old daughter, Giselle, with her husband of 16 years, Channel Nine newsreader Peter Overton.

With the country put into lockdown amid the coronavirus pandemic, Jessica has been finding 'silver linings' in what can only be described as a difficult situation.

Happy family: Along with Allegra, Jessica also shares an 11-year-old daughter, Giselle, with her husband of 16 years, Channel Nine newsreader Peter Overton. All pictured

The former Studio 10 host has been keeping her fans updated on her home life, celebrating little every day moments.

Last week, she revealed she was happy to be starting Pilates again, working out in her living room.

She also said she was enjoying having her daughters at home, gaining unusual insight into their schooling.

Working it: Last week, she revealed she was happy to be starting Pilates again, working out in her living room

'Silver lining time... hearing my youngest play French horn with the rest of her "orchestra" via Zoom!!' Jessica wrote on April 1.

Jessica revealed the family had also used their time at home as an opportunity to adopt a puppy.

'Let my introduce to you "Daphne Luna Overton"! Despite being & always remaining a crazy cat lady our persistent daughters have convinced us to get a puppy!' she wrote last week, sharing photos of the new addition.
Armenian News - NEWS.am presents a daily digest of Armenian-related top news as of 15.04.2020:

 The number of confirmed COVID-19 cases has reached 1,111 in Armenia, one more death has been reported.

According to the latest data, 297 COVID-19 patients have recovered so far, whereas 17 others have died in Armenia from the disease.

The latest COVID-19 casualty in Armenia is a 66-year-old-man.

 The Artsakh health ministry said that another 16 citizens have been tested for coronavirus, Artsakh information headquarters reported.

As of today, six COVID-19 cases have been reported in Artsakh so far.

 Ex-PM Arayik Harutyunyan received 39,860 votes (84.5%), and serving FM Masis Mayilian received 5,728 votes (12.1%), according to preliminary results of the Artsakh presidential runoff election on Tuesday.

According to Srbuhi Arzumanyan, chair of the Artsakh Central Electoral Commission, the voter turnout was 47,165.

In the meantime, likely president-elect Arayik Harutyunyan held a press conference on Wednesday.

According to him, his opponents calls to postpone the elections amid the pandemic are not dictated by concerns, but by the realization of what the result of the vote will be. All statements by political opponents about the postponement were political, he noted.

He also said that he intends to appeal to Armenia's authorities for financial aid.

I think it will be necessary to discuss with the Armenia's authorities the issue of attracting additional funds, he told reporters on Wednesday referring to the direct funds to stimulate the economy.

 Third President Serzh Sargsyans current pretrial measure of a signature bond not to leave the country will not be abolished, Gor Abrahamyan, Adviser to the Prosecutor General told Armenian News-NEWS.am.

Sargsyan's lawyers had appealed to the Armenian Criminal Court of Appeal the decision by the Court of General Jurisdiction of Yerevan, which had denied their appeal.

Sargsyan is charged with organizing the theft of half a billion drams from the state budget.

 Zvarnots International Airport of Yerevan canceled 202 flights in March amid the COVID-19 pandemic, while Gyumris Shirak Airport canceled 13 flights, Armenia International Airports CJSC told Armenian News-NEWS.am.

According to the company, in the mentioned period, none of the employees of the airport has been fired, and 780 employees are in forced idleness.
Chancellor Rishi Sunak ruled out a universal basic income. (PA)

UK chancellor Rishi Sunak has ruled out introducing a universal basic income (UBI) in Britain, dashing the hopes of some campaigners.

The finance minister said it was not the right response to the COVID-19 pandemic and defended the existing welfare system when asked about UBI on Tuesday.

UBI involves unconditional cash payments to all citizens whatever their income, either replacing or complimenting other targeted welfare benefits or tax allowances.

Calls for UBI in Britain have grown in recent weeks, as millions of households have taken an economic hit from the coronavirus lockdown. Fans of UBI argue the policy is the most effective way to keep every household above the breadline. Some like the RSA also see it as a public health measure  those who need income to survive wont need to go to work when sick and risk spreading COVID-19 further.

READ MORE: Businesses plead for urgent support as two-thirds plan to furlough staff

Responding to a question on UBI at the Downing Street press conference on Tuesday, Sunak said: "I don't think universal basic income is the right response to this."

Universal credit is working well, obviously DWP [Department for Work and Pensions] staff are under strain like many other organisations across the country and they're dealing with people being sick and away as well but I think, given the circumstances, they are processing claims efficiently and effectively.

We've also injected extra resources to deal with the particular nature of this crisis into the welfare system... interventions which will total several billions of pounds.

Campaigners argue UBI is more effective and less bureaucratic than most targeted support schemes, which often fail to reach all their intended recipients.

UBI has typically received most support on the radical left, but recently more mainstream voices have given it their blessing.

READ MORE: Spike in tenants not paying rent as COVID-19 hits jobs and pay

Last week, Scotlands first minister Nicola Sturgeon said the coronavirus had strengthened immeasurably the case for UBI. She welcomed a report by the Reform Scotland think tank that proposed giving every adult 5,200 a year and under-16s 2,600 a year. Sturgeon said she hoped to discuss UBI with the UK government.

Story continues

Similar ideas are also gaining traction around the world. The US government is already making $1,200 direct payment to citizens for those earning up to $75,000 a year, which has been seen as a form of temporary and limited UBI.

A petition for UBI in Britain has gained more than 20,000 signatures in recent weeks.

But critics are wary of the vast costs of such proposals. Reform Scotlands proposed basic income guarantee would cost 20.4bn in Scotland alone.

The UK government has already introduced a furloughing scheme subsidising pay for workers who otherwise faced redundancy. An income support scheme also exists for the self-employed.

Millions of workers are expected to benefit from such schemes, though some warn they are too bureaucratic, slow and leave too many ineligible workers falling through the cracks.

Watch the latest videos from Yahoo UK
By Imani Moise and Elizabeth Dilts Marshall

(Reuters) - The top U.S. retail banks said on Wednesday they would provide relief to customers who had overdrawn checking accounts, so that they could reap the full benefits of the federal government's cash stimulus program.

Americans stand to receive payments of up to $1,200 each as part of Congress' $2.2 trillion aid package meant to stem the fallout from the novel coronavirus outbreak that has shuttered businesses and left more than 10 million people unemployed.

The first wave of the payments began to hit bank accounts through direct deposits this week.

JPMorgan Chase & Co, Bank of America Corp and Wells Fargo & Co are pausing collection on negative balances or offering temporary credits to customers who have overdrawn their accounts. Without the relief, the payments would be reduced by the amount of the negative balance, which can include hefty overdraft fees.

The number of checking-account customers with negative balances varies widely each day and often peaks at the end of months, when people face bills, and falls on common paydays, like the 15th.

"We hope this gives them a chance to catch their breath," JPMorgan spokeswoman Anne Pace said.

Chase and Wells Fargo are also waiving fees for non-customers who come in to cash their checks.

"We encourage customers who receive a stimulus payment check to use mobile deposits or ATMs to deposit the checks if possible," Wells Fargo said in a statement.

(Reporting by Imani Moise; Editing by Peter Cooney)
International Monetary Fund (IMF) has warned that the global economy was heading towards deep recession due to the unprecedented crisis triggered by Covid-19 pandemic and only predicted a partial recovery in 2021.

To help countries steer through the depth of the recession and support their recovery, we are prepared to use our full toolbox and $1 trillion firepower, mindful of the need to use programmes wisely and strengthen good governance, stated IMF Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva during the G20 Finance Ministers and Central Bank Governors Meeting today (April 15).

Georgieva pointed out that inorder to assist the low income countries, IMF plans to triple its concessional lending.

"We are therefore urgently seeking $18 billion in new loan resources for the Poverty Reduction and Growth Trust, and will also likely need at least $1.8 billion in subsidy resources. We will also explore whether the use of SDRs could be helpful in this context," she added.

In her opening address, she thanked the Saudi Presidency for steering the G20 in this unprecedented crisis, and also the group's members for the remarkable efforts to protect people and the economy.

Georgieva said $8 trillion of fiscal measures and ample liquidity by central banks had helped build a bridge to recovery for companies and households. "And you stepped up with an initiative on a time-bound suspension of debt service payments for the poorest countries. I wholeheartedly welcome this timely action," she added.

We are today discussing a new short-term liquidity line for countries with strong policies.

"And we will need to step up even more. As you know, we project a deep recession in 2020 and only a partial recovery in 2021," he stated.

You called on the Fund to ramp up our crisis response for emerging markets and developing countries. And we acted on this call.

The top IMF official said it had doubled annual access limits for emergency financing.

"Over 100 countries have already approached us and by the end of this month half of the requests will have been approved by our board. Ten countries have already received emergency assistance," she stated.

"This Monday our board had granted immediate relief for debt service to the IMF to 25 countries. We thank members who have made generous pledges to this effort and call on others to contribute," she added.

According to Georgieva, IMF is concentrating both lending and policy support to reduce the scarring of the economy caused by bankruptcies and unemployment, in order to support a speedy recovery.

"And, with many economies continuing to face capital outflows and high debt, we are ready to work closely with other international institutions and fora, as well as private stakeholders, to help our members steer through this crisis and come out of it more resilient," she added.-TradeArabia News Service
North Korean state broadcaster KRT on Wednesday showed citizens marking the 108th anniversary of the birth of the country's founder Kim Il-Sung.

Virus fears meant many, but not all, were seen wearing face masks.

North Korea has repeatedly said there has been no coronavirus outbreak on its soil. But many foreign experts are skeptical of that claim and have warned that an outbreak in the North could become a humanitarian disaster because of the countrys chronic lack of medical supplies and fragile health care infrastructure.
Hot qubits break one of the biggest constraints to practical quantum computers

Most quantum computers being developed around the world will only work at fractions of a degree above absolute zero. That requires multi-million-dollar refrigeration and as soon as you plug them into conventional electronic circuits they'll instantly overheat.

But now researchers led by Professor Andrew Dzurak at UNSW Sydney have addressed this problem.

"Our new results open a path from experimental devices to affordable quantum computers for real world business and government applications," says Professor Dzurak.

The researchers' proof-of-concept quantum processor unit cell, on a silicon chip, works at 1.5 Kelvin - 15 times warmer than the main competing chip-based technology being developed by Google, IBM, and others, which uses superconducting qubits.

"This is still very cold, but is a temperature that can be achieved using just a few thousand dollars' worth of refrigeration, rather than the millions of dollars needed to cool chips to 0.1 Kelvin," explains Dzurak.

"While difficult to appreciate using our everyday concepts of temperature, this increase is extreme in the quantum world."

Quantum computers are expected to outperform conventional ones for a range of important problems, from precision drug-making to search algorithms. Designing one that can be manufactured and operated in a real-world setting, however, represents a major technical challenge.

The UNSW researchers believe that they have overcome one of the hardest obstacles standing in the way of quantum computers becoming a reality.

In a paper published in the journal Nature today, Dzurak's team, together with collaborators in Canada, Finland and Japan, report a proof-of-concept quantum processor unit cell that, unlike most designs being explored worldwide, doesn't need to operate at temperatures below one-tenth of one Kelvin.

Dzurak's team first announced their experimental results via the academic pre-print archive in February last year. Then, in October 2019, a group in the Netherlands led by a former post-doctoral researcher in Dzurak's group, Menno Veldhorst, announced a similar result using the same silicon technology developed at UNSW in 2014. The confirmation of this 'hot qubit' behaviour by two groups on opposite sides of the world has led to the two papers being published 'back-to-back' in the same issue of Nature today.

Qubit pairs are the fundamental units of quantum computing. Like its classical computing analogue - the bit - each qubit characterises two states, a 0 or a 1, to create a binary code. Unlike a bit, however, it can manifest both states simultaneously, in what is known as a "superposition".

The unit cell developed by Dzurak's team comprises two qubits confined in a pair of quantum dots embedded in silicon. The result, scaled up, can be manufactured using existing silicon chip factories, and would operate without the need for multi-million-dollar cooling. It would also be easier to integrate with conventional silicon chips, which will be needed to control the quantum processor.

A quantum computer that is able to perform the complex calculations needed to design new medicines, for example, will require millions of qubit pairs, and is generally accepted to be at least a decade away. This need for millions of qubits presents a big challenge for designers.

"Every qubit pair added to the system increases the total heat generated," explains Dzurak, "and added heat leads to errors. That's primarily why current designs need to be kept so close to absolute zero."

The prospect of maintaining quantum computers with enough qubits to be useful at temperatures much colder than deep space is daunting, expensive and pushes refrigeration technology to the limit.

The UNSW team, however, have created an elegant solution to the problem, by initialising and "reading" the qubit pairs using electrons tunnelling between the two quantum dots.

The proof-of-principle experiments were performed by Dr Henry Yang from the UNSW team, who Dzurak describes as a "brilliant experimentalist".

###

Other authors on the paper include Ross Leon, Jason Hwang (now at the University of Sydney), Andre Saraiva, Tuomo Tanttu, Wister Huang, Kok-Wai Chan and Fay Hudson, all from Professor Dzurak's group, as well as long-time collaborators Dr Arne Laucht and Professor Andrea Morello from UNSW.

Dr Kuan-Yen from Aalto University in Finland assisted the device fabrication team, while Professor Kohei Itoh from Keio University in Japan provided enriched silicon-28 wafers from which the devices were made. The qubit devices incorporated nano-scale magnets to help enable qubit operation, and these were designed with support from a team led by Professor Michel Pioro-Ladriere at Universite de Sherbrooke in Canada, including his PhD student Julien Camirand Lemyre.

This story has been published on: 2020-04-15. To contact the author, please use the contact details within the article.
Dr. Rahmat Mazaheri Seif is a surgical oncologist, retired captain of the US Navy, former Assistant Professor of Surgery at the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences, former Clinical Associate Professor of Surgery at the University of Virginia, and New Testament scholar currently residing in the Dallas, Texas area. He has published his latest book The Tongue of the Unseen Hafez and His Poetry: a collection of selected poetic fragments with original translations and detailed commentary.

Since the middle ages, Persia has produced more great poets than any other country in the world. Sir William Jones about two hundred fifty years ago, in his introduction on Hafez, wrote, "...At Oxford there is a manuscript containing the lives of a hundred and twenty-eight of the finest Persian poets," of these, according to Iranians, the fourteenth century poet, Hafez, is their last, greatest, and the most beloved of all; even though, Persia has had poets like Sa'di, Khayyam, Ferdosi, Nezami, and Rumi to boast about! (Iranians take Rumi as a Persian.) They also consider Hafez as their most difficult poet to understand.

One may ask, how could such a difficult poet be so popular among people of all walks of life? No Hafez scholar, heretofore, has directly addressed, or adequately answered this question! In this book, the author, for the first time, raises and answers this question by bringing convincing examples from different parts of the divan.

Another unique aspect of this book is in the fact that the author has interpreted some couplets entirely different than what other commentators have done, and sometimes, the opposite of theirs!

Still another difference that we find in this book is the sequence of the couplets in some ghazals. The author, in order to find the natural unity of the poems, he has arranged a new sequence for the couplets. Something that is lacking in all available divans.

The translations are accurately and charmingly done in the form of uni-rhymed ghazal, and each one is preceded by the original, and followed by a commentary, something that has never been done before.

This book is written for English-speaking people who wish to know Hafez, especially, the siblings of the Iranians in diaspora, whose children have heard the praise of Hafez from their parents but are unable to read him in Farsi. It is for them to read him in English and put to test the judgment of their parents.

Published by Page Publishing, Dr. Rahmat Mazaheri Seifs engrossing book is a thorough analysis of the fourteenth-century Persian poet Hafez.

Readers who wish to experience this engaging work can purchase The Tongue of the Unseen Hafez and His Poetry 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.
Was the interstellar asteroid `Oumuamua torn from another planet by a star? (Getty)

A visitor to our solar system became the subject of headlines around the world in 2017 when the cigar-shaped rock now named `Oumuamua flew past our sun.

It was the first known interstellar object to visit our solar system, and some scientists initially suggested it might be an alien probe.

But now a new theory could explain where it really came from.

Read more: Comet or asteroid? Cigar asteroid shows we may need a new classification

Researchers from the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the University of California now believe the object may have been torn from a rocky object that travelled too close to a star.

The stars gravity then hurled the elongated object into space, the researchers believe.

The researchers ran high-resolution computer simulations to model the structural dynamics of an object flying close by a star.

Professor Douglas Lin of UC Santa Cruz said: We showed that Oumuamua-like interstellar objects can be produced through extensive tidal fragmentation during close encounters of their parent bodies with their host stars, and then ejected into interstellar space.

Read more: Asteroid that wiped out dinosaurs exploded with force of 10bn atomic bombs

Co-author Yun Zhang at the National Astronomical Observatories of the Chinese Academy of Sciences said, It is really a mysterious object, but some signs, like its colours and the absence of radio emission, point to Oumuamua being a natural object.

The find suggests there must be an extremely large population of interstellar objects like Oumuamua.

The discovery of Oumuamua implies that the population of rocky interstellar objects is much larger than we previously thought, Zhang said. On average, each planetary system should eject in total about a hundred trillion objects like Oumuamua. We need to construct a very common scenario to produce this kind of object.

When a smaller body passes very close to a much bigger one, tidal forces of the larger body can tear the smaller one apart, as happened to comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 when it came close to Jupiter.
The Twelllium foundation has cautioned that businesses withhold their support to the vulnerable in the hard times of the COVID-19 fight, at their own future loss.

Project leads with the Foundation made the call when the mother company Twellium Industrial Company Ghana drove a forty feet full of Verna Natural Mineral Water and McBerry biscuits for distribution to some designated institutions in Kumasi.

The donations went to support front line workers at the Komfo Anokye Teaching Hospital and the Kumasi South Hospital; the Ashanti region police command and the Manhyia Palaces feed the vulnerable outreaches.

The company also donated 40 thousand pieces of Personal Protective Equipment and hand sanitizers to the frontline health workers to secure themselves from contracting the virus while they risk their lives to treat patients.

Speaking to this reporter, the Kumasi Brands Manager for Verna Steven Dwomo pointed out that companies will need to sacrifice to save the populace who form the core of their consumers even if it hurts their already frustrated bottom lines.

He told reporter Ivan Heathcote  Fumador, To save lives today, is to have business tomorrow. But to have business today and to lose lives tomorrow, business ends. So yes we have been impacted financially but these are not normal times and we need to tighten up to help in whatever way we can.

Receiving the donations, Otumffuos Apagyahene, Oheneba Owusu Affrieyie the forth relayed how the donations would support the vulnerable hard hit by the lockdown.

Government continues to call on the business community to help in providing in cash and kind to support the COVID 19 Alleviation Program especially for vulnerable persons who are caught up in the lock down in Greater Kumasi, Greater Accra and Tema.
(@ChaudhryMAli88)

Slovakia has flown back 29 troops, part of NATO's non-combat contingent in Afghanistan, as a precaution against the spread of the coronavirus, Defense Minister Jaroslav Nad said Wednesday

PRAGUE (UrduPoint News / Sputnik - 15th April, 2020) Slovakia has flown back 29 troops, part of NATO's non-combat contingent in Afghanistan, as a precaution against the spread of the coronavirus, Defense Minister Jaroslav Nad said Wednesday.

"We have withdrawn 29 of our troops from Afghanistan, whose presence was not essential to the operation's goals ...

This is related to efforts to limit the spread of the coronavirus," Nad was quoted as saying in a press release.

The special flight landed at Sliac International Airport on Tuesday. It also brought back a Slovakian civilian who had been working in Afghanistan. All passengers were put in quarantine at a military facility.

The defense ministry said 20 more troops stayed in Afghanistan to provide assistance and guidance to Afghan security forces. A total of 464 Slovak service members remain abroad.
Source: Xinhua| 2020-04-15 22:52:01|Editor: huaxia

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BEIJING, April 15 (Xinhua) -- The following are the updates on the global fight against the COVID-19 pandemic.

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NEW YORK -- Global confirmed COVID-19 cases topped 2 million on Wednesday morning, according to the Center for Systems Science and Engineering (CSSE) at Johns Hopkins University.

The figure has reached 2,000,984 with 128,071 deaths as of 10 a.m. local time (1400 GMT), the CSSE said.

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TEHRAN -- The novel coronavirus outbreak in Iran has inflicted 187 million U.S. dollars of loss on the hotel industry in the country, according to a Financial Tribune daily report on Wednesday.

After the outbreak of novel coronavirus in Iran in February, hotels, lodgings and guesthouses were among the first to shut down.

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LONDON -- The death toll of those hospitalized in Britain who tested positive for the novel coronavirus hit 12,868 as of Tuesday afternoon, a daily increase of 761, the Department of Health and Social Care said Wednesday.

As of Wednesday morning, the number of confirmed cases of COVID-19 in Britain reached 98,476, said the department, adding that 398,916 tests have concluded, with 15,994 tests on Tuesday.

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DAR ES SALAAM -- Authorities in Tanzania's business capital Dar es Salaam on Wednesday announced measures aimed at containing the COVID-19 pandemic, including selection of 24 health centers for collection of samples from infected suspects.

Paul Makonda, Dar es Salaam regional commissioner, said in a statement that the 24 centers will collect samples of people suspected to have been infected with the virus and send them to the national health laboratory for testing.

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LISBON -- A total of 931,000 Portuguese workers have temporarily lost their jobs under the country's simplified temporary "lay-off" measure prompted by the coronavirus outbreak, Portuguese Minister of Labor, Solidarity and Social Security Ana Mendes Godinho said on Wednesday.

The government's "lay-off regime" enables companies that lose at least 40 percent of their turnover due to the COVID-19 pandemic to suspend employment contracts.

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CAIRO -- Egypt's Prime Minister Mostafa Madbouly ordered on Wednesday the full closure of all public parks, beaches and other gathering places during the coming holidays to curb the spread of the novel coronavirus.

April 19 and 20 mark respectively the Coptic Easter and the traditional Egyptian spring holiday of Sham El-Nessim, which are often celebrated with family outings to parks or other outdoor excursions.

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ADDIS ABABA -- The death toll from the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic on the African continent reached 874 as the number of confirmed cases hit 16,285 as of Wednesday, the Africa Center for Disease Control and Prevention (Africa CDC) said.

The Africa CDC, a specialized agency of the 55-member African Union (AU) Commission, in its latest situation update issued on Wednesday also revealed that the number of confirmed positive cases across the continent rose from 15,249 on Tuesday to 16,285 as of Wednesday afternoon.

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BANGKOK -- Thailand's Centre for COVID-19 Situation Administration (CCSA) said on Wednesday it will conduct an assessment on the enforcement of measures imposed under the state of emergency decree amid the COVID-19, including the night curfew, to determine whether they should be extended or whether some of the measures can be eased.

Speaking after a cabinet meeting on Wednesday, Thai Prime Minister Prayut Chan-o-cha expressed his satisfaction, saying that Thailand's COVID-19 infection rates have shown signs of slowing down.

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MADRID -- Spain saw a rise in new COVID-19 cases recorded in a 24-hour period and a slight fall in new deaths, according to the data collected by the Ministry for Health, Consumer Affairs and Social Welfare by 21:00 hours on Tuesday and made public on Wednesday.

There were 523 new fatalities, down from the 567 reported on Tuesday and 517 on Monday, bringing the tally to 18,579.


CHICAGO (dpa-AFX) - In March, customers of Boeing Co. cancelled 150 orders for 737 Max aircraft, amid the worsening crisis due to coronavirus or Covid-19 pandemic, multiple reports said.



The cancellations for Boeing's best-selling aircraft, which has been grounded since last year after fatal crashes, follow weak demand for air travel as majority of airlines across the world have halted their operations to stop the spread of the virus.



Boeing reportedly said, 'We are working closely with our customers, many of whom are facing significant financial pressures, to review their fleet plans and make adjustments where appropriate. At the same time, Boeing continues to adjust its order book to adapt to lower-than-planned 737 MAX production in the near term.'



Irish aircraft leasing firm Avolon cancelled orders for 75 additional 737 Max jets, and Brazilian carrier GOL scrapped its order for 34. Further, Lufthansa subsidiary SmartWings cancelled orders for five jets, while the details of the other 36 jet orders were not known.



In the month of February, Boeing had reported 41 order cancellations. In the first three months till March 31, Boeing has removed 314 737 jets from its order list.



Meanwhile, the company received 31 orders for jets in March, including 18 for military aircraft.



Boeing still has a backlog of 5,049 orders, including 4,079 orders for the Max jets.



The 737 Max were grounded by airlines worldwide in March 2019 following two deadly crashes within a short span of five months that killed a total of 346 people.



Since then, the company has been trying to fix its software and safety issues to put its hugely popular aircraft back to service. In mid-January, Boeing had stopped 737 MAX production after it failed to get regulatory approvals and due to a backlog of 400 undelivered jets. In late March, there were reports that Boeing plans to restart the production of 737 Max by May.



Boeing on Tuesday said it delivered 50 commercial aircraft in the first quarter, including five 737 jets.



Boeing had said last week that it would temporarily suspend all 787 operations at its South Carolina factory until further notice, due to the Covid-19 pandemic.



Earlier this month, Boeing had offered buyouts to its employees in an effort to lower workforce.



Last week, rival Airbus also said it is cutting commercial aircraft production by a third citing lower demand due to Covid-19. The European aerospace giant said it would cut production of its A320 narrowbody aircraft to 40 per month.



Copyright RTT News/dpa-AFX

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Samples of a 45-year-old man, who



died at the Government Medical College and Hospital in Maharashtra's Akola city a day back, came out positive for coronavirus on Wednesday, an official said.

The patient, suffering from diabetes, high blood pressure and cough, was admitted to the GMCH on Monday, and as a precautionary measure, his throat swabs were sent for testing, deputy dean of the college Dr Kusumakar Ghorpade said.

However, the patient died during treatment on the same day, he said, adding that when the test results came in on Wednesday, the man was found to be positive.

The authorities were now examining all high-risk contacts of the deceased, the official said.

As many as 14 persons have tested positive for coronavirus in Akola district, of which one COVID-19 patient committed suicide last week.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
The following editorial appeared in the April 8 edition of The Des Moines Register:

When we get through this, it wont be due to the sacrifices of the rich, but to the dedication of working stiffs who showed up and clocked in day after day

Iowans able to work from home right now should feel fortunate. That includes most of us at The Des Moines Register. Sheltering in place is doable when you can continue to earn a living with a computer and cell phone from your living room or kitchen. Life is different, but disruptions are fairly minimal.

Our trash is picked up. Our mail is delivered. We may venture out in our cars to pick up hamburgers at a drive-thru restaurant. With a few clicks of the mouse, pizza and groceries will be delivered to our front porches.

All that is made possible by the thousands of Iowans who continue to report to work in person each day.

Our cupboards would be bare by now if it werent for workers who risk exposure to Covid-19 to keep the grocery shelves stocked. The same goes for the truck drivers who deliver food to stores, the factory workers who process it and the farm workers and growers who supply it.

Then there are the power plant operators who keep the electricity flowing, the waterworks employees who keep clean drinking water coming, the postal workers who bring the mail like clockwork every day, the UPS workers delivering goods ordered online, the pharmacists filling our prescriptions, the technicians fixing internet problems.

Not to mention the front-line health care cadres. On Tuesday, a state public health official said more than 20% of the Iowans who have tested positive for COVID-19 have been health care workers.

These and millions of working people like them are the heroes of the great plague of 2020.

If we get though this, it wont be due to the sacrifices of the rich and the favored. It will be thanks to lots of working stiffs, many of them underappreciated and toiling for low wages.

This country has treated its working people shabbily in recent decades, denying them a fair share of the wealth their labor creates. Too many do not earn living wages or have health insurance, sick leave or retirement savings.

Yet in this time of crisis, they have stepped up to rescue the country. Their work in the face of the virus enables the semblance of a functioning economy to be maintained. They provide not only goods and services that allow many of us to remain safer, but also comfort, which is critical in trying to keep stress and panic at bay.

For now, we should tip them generously. We should tell them  through the glass of a front door or car window  that we are grateful. We should recognize they may fear not only for their own health but also for those they go home to each day. That may include a parent with diabetes or a daughter with asthma or a wife with cancer.

Each of us is only as quarantined as the people we live with.

Working people have always been the bedrock of this countrys economy. Now they are literally keeping the country running.

When the crisis is over, they will be owed a great debt of thanks. It can best be paid by finally making their well-being the focus of national policies and attention.
WASHINGTON  President Donald Trump says he has directed a halt to U.S. payments to the World Health Organization pending a review of its warnings about the coronavirus and China.

Trump says the outbreak could have been contained at its source and spared lives had the U.N. health agency done a better job investigating reports coming out of China.

Coronavirus in Oregon: Latest news | Live map tracker |Text alerts | Newsletter

The president says the world depends on the World Health Organization to work with countries to make sure accurate information about health threats are shared in a timely manner.

Trump claims the organization failed to carry out its basic duty and must be held accountable.

But Trump says the U.S. will continue to engage with the organization in pursuit of what he calls meaningful reforms.

President Trump: "Today I'm instructing my administration to halt funding of the World Health Organization."



Full video here: https://t.co/4ar96UGcFV pic.twitter.com/KRZPKRGvhj  CSPAN (@cspan) April 14, 2020

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Children are assisted by their mother as they navigate online learning resources during the CCP virus lockdown in Huddersfield, England, on March 23, 2020. (Oli Scarff/AFP via Getty Images)

CCP Virus Puts Strange Spotlight on Homeschooling

Commentary

Since the CCP virus has forced millions of children to stay home from school, its forced Americans to place an unusual spotlight on educationin particular, home school.

With stay-at-home or quarantine measures in place, what other choice do parents have but to try to educate their children from home, typically with some kind of e-learning in place? Ideologues have started to participate in supporting or criticizing educating kids at home during this pandemic.

A Salon piece bemoans the fact that people who had always been homeschooling saw this pandemic as a silver lining, a chance to convince others to do the same.

While the public experiences a health calamity, the homeschooling movement sees a big opportunity, the article subtitle reads.

After including quotes from supporters of homeschooling, the author writes about how bad it would be if this lifestyle choice were to continue:

[E]xperts warn that any growing popularity of homeschooling as a result of the pandemic will likely worsen education for students and pose serious problems to the economy and the nations social well-being.

The author concludes with the many downsides: homeschooling isnt feasible for most parents, the benefits are few, that parents lack knowledge of how to teach, and that its expensive.

Before the CCP virus, homeschooling had been growing slowly in the United States. I homeschooled my four kids for six years; we all enjoyed it and my kids learned plenty. Still, approximately 90 percent of parents sent their kids to public or private school before this current crisis. Its a bit strange even for Salon to sound the alarm on something parents are having to do by default or due to mandates from local officials to close schools.

Theyre not the only ones concerned though. In June, Harvard Law School is officially hosting a Homeschooling Summit to advocate against homeschooling. An education expert at the Cato Institute, Corey DeAngelis, flagged the event, and I wouldnt have believed it if I hadnt read about it for myself.

According to the information online, The focus will be on problems of educational deprivation and child maltreatment that too often occur under the guise of homeschooling. The education experts will have a panel on Reform Proposals, such as regulatory oversight and even a possible ban.

Reading both the Salon article and about the Harvard homeschooling summit raises the question: Why is arguably the best university in the United States so worried about something Salon thinks backward, impossible, and expensive?

For starters, its a bit silly to overreact about the potential for a huge spike in homeschooling following the CCP virus pandemic. I predict there will be a slight increase in homeschooling because some families will want to continue that lifestyle, but generally speaking, its true that its just not tenable for most families and they will put their kids back in school when they can.

To sound an alarm about homeschooling right now when families are forced to embrace it just doesnt make sense. Regardless of whether or not homeschooling deserves all the sudden bad press, an attempt to advocate against it to the point of banning it is completely asinine.

Ive not been particularly overjoyed with the online schooling my children are doing via their public school district, but when we homeschooled consistently for years, that was an entirely different experience. Homeschooling when one has a prepared curriculum, experience, co-ops, support, and other essentials is hugely different to how parents are educating their kids now in the midst of this health crisis.

Of course, homeschooling is a luxury, but its a choice many families make, and make work by cutting out other niceties. Either way, just because its a luxury, doesnt mean it should be looked at with disdain. Even all the other claims Salon made, that its expensive, or untenable, or not beneficial are either bunk or irrelevant.

It wasnt my experience that homeschooling was all that costly, its certainly feasible if your family plans their life around it, and its incredibly beneficial to children who learn at a different pace, who have learning disabilities, or just want to embrace a certain lifestyle or curriculum. To rail against it because only a few choose the lifestyle is like lambasting the existence of Lamborghinis because youll never be able to afford one: Who cares?

Homeschooling has its pros and cons just like any education system, but to see the way the CCP virus has highlighted it now among the progressive left is as fascinating as it is absurd.

Most of their concerns are short-sighted, illogical, and will never come to fruition, because the reason people are homeschooling now is due to a health crisis that hopefully will never occur again in our lifetimes. Even then, the hearty criticism seems biased, unwarranted, and often plain wrong.

Homeschooling has always been a right and that should continue, CCP virus or not.

Nicole Russell is a freelance writer and mother of four. Her work has appeared in The Atlantic, The New York Times, Politico, The Daily Beast, and The Federalist. Follow her on Twitter @russell_nm.

Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
The Reliance Industries (RIL) and Reliance Foundation have donated a sum of Rs 5 crore to the Andhra Pradesh Chief Ministers' Relief Fund (CMRF) to combat coronavirus.

Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister YS Jagan Mohan Reddy thanked RIL Chairman Mukesh Ambani for his contribution to the state.

According to the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare, Andhra Pradesh has reported 483 positive cases for coronavirus, as of April 15 afternoon. The southern state has reported 9 deaths and 16 people have been cured or discharged, so far.

Also read: Coronavirus India Lockdown guidelines Live Updates: No liquor sale; air, rail shut; country's tally at 11,439

A few days back, the Reliance Foundation and RIL contributed Rs 5 crore to the Telangana Chief Minister Relief Fund to support COVID-19 relief efforts of the state.

Reliance Industries also donated Rs 500 crore each to PM CARES Fund and Rs 5 crore to Gujarat and Maharashtra's Chief Minister Fund.

Mukesh Ambani-led RIL has, further, set up a 100-bed centre at Seven Hills Hospital in Mumbai for coronavirus patients. Reliance Foundation is also providing free meals to people in partnership with NGOs.

Also read: Lockdown 2.0: Restaurants, bars shut but dhabas on highways to remain open

Also read: Coronavirus lockdown: Airlines deny refund to customers on cancelled flights
HAMBURG, Germany, April 15, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- Indivumed GmbH ("Indivumed") announced today the launch of the Oncology Alliance for Individualized Medicine ("Onco AI-Med"), an international collaborative alliance to advance personalized medicine in cancer through Indivumed's true multi-omics database, IndivuType.

The Onco AI-Med network is composed of a large number of leading cancer clinics and research institutions from around the world. Current participants are located in Brazil, Germany, Italy, Ireland, Japan, Korea, Singapore, Spain, Sweden, United Kingdom and the United States, with new countries and hospitals being added continuously. Sites are selected based on their research activity, number of cancer cases and expertise of the faculty in advanced molecular oncology.

IndivuType is a unique discovery and knowledge platform developed by Indivumed to create and accelerate new insights into cancer biology, leading to better and more affordable drug development for precision medicine and the personalized treatment of cancer.

The platform leverages Indivumed's standard operating procedures for tissue and clinical data collection, gathering highly reliable and comprehensive genomics, transcriptomics, proteomics, phosphoproteomics, morphology and clinical information which is then integrated through advanced AI / ML based analytical tools, constituting the most comprehensive oncology multi-omics asset available today.

Onco AI-Med activity is organized around tumor entities, with specific working groups for each one. These groups will explore the best use of the unprecedented data sets available in IndivuType and link them to real world clinical care through specific research projects, coordinated by an Advisory Board that includes some of the brightest thought leaders in oncology today. Dr. John Marshall, Chief of the Hematology/Oncology Division at Medstar Georgetown University Hospital and Director at the Otto J. Ruesch Center for the Cure of Gastrointestinal Cancer has been appointed Chairman of the Advisory Board.

"The work we are doing is without precedent," said Dr. Marshall. "No group in history has combined gold standard tissue collection techniques with the most extensive multi-omics analysis, with long term clinical outcomes all analyzed using industry leading AI technologies with a global reach. It is only by connecting each of these elements that the next layer of cancer's secrets will be revealed," he added.

Onco AI-Med members are also supporting the creation of POWER (Precision Oncology Web Education Resource), an educational program in collaboration with Georgetown University and Oxford University addressing the widening knowledge gap between oncology researchers and clinicians caused by the speed of discoveries and innovation in precision medicine technologies.

"It is fantastic to see how 18 years of standardized tissue and clinical data collection to obtain reliable and comparable biological research data has turned into this global initiative to understand the complexity of cancer," said Dr. Hartmut Juhl, CEO and Founder of Indivumed. "Indivumed has evolved from providing high-quality tissue and data collection services to becoming a leading cancer database with innovative bioinformatic and AI-capacity. Together with our clinical partners in the Onco AI-Med alliance we hope to decipher cancer complexity in each individual patient with the ultimate goal of curing cancer."

The Onco AI-Med Advisory Board expects to have the first results published in the coming months.

About Indivumed

Indivumed is a physician-led, integrated global oncology company committed to unveiling complex mechanisms of cancer, in order to support precision oncology. Only a multi-omics approach can achieve this goal  and reliable multi-omics require especially high-quality biospecimens and data. Through its three divisions, IndivuServ, IndivuType, and IndivuTest, Indivumed offers specialized products and services that support customers in biomarker and target discovery, drug development, clinical trials, individualized therapy and more.

Media Contact:

Patrick Renegar

W: 703-519-1600 Ext. 104

[email protected]

SOURCE Indivumed
After a lifetime of service within the British royal family, Prince Harry has decided to leave The Firm and find his own path. Though many royal fans and experts knew that the prince and his wife, Meghan, Duchess of Sussex were struggling with their fishbowl existence as senior royals, no one saw Megxit coming.

Now the Sussexes have resigned from their positions and have moved halfway across the world to the duchess hometown, Los Angeles, California. In LA, the duo hopes to launch their Archewell foundation in an effort to continue helping others while becoming totally financially independent of the royal family.

Though the dukes decision has left many scratching their heads, one royal expert believes hes following in the same footsteps of his father, Prince Charles.

Prince Harry will finally be able to stick up for himself

Its well known that the British royal family doesnt respond to rumors, tabloids, or accusations. Unfortunately, that means that when terrible things are said, the royal family has no way of defending themselves. Also, because they are to remain neutral, they cant give any real opinions on politics or policies. As someone with his own mind and passions, that has been incredibly frustrating for Prince Harry over the years.

Now, hes looking forward to speaking his own mind with Buckingham Palace holding him back. Certainly being in a different position now gives us the ability to say things and do things that we might not have been able to do, he said during a leaked phone call. And seeing as everyone under the age of 35 or 36 seems to be carrying out an activists role, gives us the opportunity to try and make more of a difference without being criticized. Oh no, I think its much better.

Prince Harry wants to define himself outside of his royal linage

With the Sussexes Archewell foundation, they are seeking to To do something of meaning, to do something that matters. Archewell is a name that combines an ancient word for strength and action, and another that evokes the deep resources we each must draw upon.

Since the British royal family has so many traditions, the prince knew hed be unable to do this within the royal family, especially within the shadow of his older brother, Prince William and the Cambridge legacy.

The couples future isnt certain, The Atlantics Caitlin Flanagan explained. They are hugely appealing and glamorous. Everyone in Hollywood is eager to host them. The first few years of this plan are going to be heady. But  as Harry has often said  as soon as Williams three children become old enough to emerge as individual figures, the klieg lights will immediately turn to them. He is in a rush to make his mark and seems to treat life as a race, too.

Prince Harry is following in Prince Charles footsteps

Though Prince Harrys resignation from royal life is unprecedented in modern times, his father, Prince Charles attempted to do something similar. In a 1978 speech, the Prince of Wales said, My great problem in life is that I do not know what my role in life is. But somehow, I must find one.

When he retired from the Royal Navy, the prince also felt the same sentiments. After six years in the Navy, Charles decided to move on, and for the remainder of the decade would be in search of both a meaningful role as a modern Prince of Wales and a wife, writer Bob Colacello explained to Vanity Fair in 2005. There was some talk between the Palace and the Government of appointing Charles Governor-General of Australia or ambassador to France. However, those plans were rejected since senior royals are not civil servants.

In the end, the Prince of Wales focused on his new life with Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall and finding his footing as the future Crowned King. However, for Prince Harry, who will never sit on the throne, the opportunities to define himself have become limitless.
54 Cars Involved in Chicago Crash, 14 People Injured

At least 50 vehicles were involved in an accident on Chicagos Kennedy Expressway on Wednesday morning, said local officials.

The Chicago Fire Department said that approximately 54 vehicles are involved in the pileup, reported CBS Chicago.

At least 14 people were taken to local hospitals, and 32 other people have been evaluated and will NOT be transported, according to the Chicago Fire Department.

It noted that slick, low traction conditions are still occurring on roadways in the area. In a previous post, the agency said that low traction on the expressway triggered multiple collisions.

EMS plan 2 on Kennedy now secure. We have 14 transports and 32 other patients who have been evaluated and will NOT be transported. Low traction conditions still in place. pic.twitter.com/PlfqG9rb4i  Chicago Fire Media (@CFDMedia) April 15, 2020

The crash came amid poor driving conditions caused by a spring snowstorm. According to the National Weather Service (NWS), snow has been falling rather heavily at times and will end from the west this morning.

Accumulating snow should end over most of the Chicago metro area by 9 am, but continuing until 10 or 11 am across the far southern suburbs and northwest Indiana. While snowfall totals will not be particularly heavy, the snow is creating very hazardous travel conditions, the agency said.

Kennedy near North Ave pic.twitter.com/6xH18nWSl2  Chicago Fire Media (@CFDMedia) April 15, 2020

A winter weather advisory was also issued in Chicago. Meanwhile, a fraction of an inch of snow has fallen in the city, according to the local NWS website.

The Illinois Department of Transportation told the CBS station that areas on the expressway might be closed for two hours.

CFD final count. 14 transported of which 13 were green or minor. 1 was  yellowgood condition. And 45 others were evaluated and refused transport. CFD mobile medical unit 8812 was on scene with EMS plan 2 and 12 ambulances.  Chicago Fire Media (@CFDMedia) April 15, 2020

Overnight conditions deteriorated and we got some snow and icy conditions on the expressway, vehicles driving at high rates of speed caused the accident, explained John Giordano of the Chicago Fire Department, according to a local ABC station. We are not sure the vehicles that caused it but it did cause an effect where vehicles couldnt stop behind them because of the high speeds that they were traveling and thus the amount of vehicles we have at this time.

Chicago, like the rest of Illinois, is currently under a stay-at-home order in a bid to curb the spread of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) virus, also known as the novel coronavirus, which cause COVID-19.
On May 17, 1943, the men and women of the Bradley Mining Company in Stibnite, Idaho, received an unexpected telegram. It came from Dwight D. Eisenhower, the Commander and Chief of Allied Forces in Africa. Following allied victory, he wrote to express his appreciation for the work done on the home front that kept his troops equipped, saying, there is glory for us all in the achievement.

The men and women of Bradley Mining produced the tungsten and antimony used to harden Allied armor and munitions. So important was the discovery of tungsten at Stibnite in 1942, and the mining effort that followed, that the U.S. Munitions Board estimated it shortened World War II by at least one year and saved the lives of a million American soldiers.

The U.S. once again finds itself in an all-out-battle. The enemy is different, but the mining industry is ready to do its part to make sure we not only win but come out stronger.

As an essential U.S. industry, mining continues to produce the materials that are the building blocks of American life  and that the American people rely on, including the nations medical and healthcare sectors.

Antimicrobial metals, like copper, silver, gold and zinc, are found in every hospital room and in much of the equipment and medicines that help the nations doctors and nurses save lives. As a recent study from researchers at the National Institutes of Health concluded, while the coronavirus can live for days on hard surfaces like plastic or glass, coppers passive antimicrobial properties begin killing the virus almost immediately. Within four hours of contact, virus levels are undetectable.

Mining and mined materials are playing a vital role in helping the nation weather this storm, but it will be after the crisis that the nations miners can provide the foundation for our recovery.

With the unprecedented economic toll already wrought by the virus, and the measures taken to combat it, policymakers are exploring additional rounds of policy changes to jumpstart the economy. An infrastructure package appears to be on the horizon  and is the perfect place for mining to contribute.

Rebuilding and modernizing our critical infrastructure  everything from our roads and bridges to our water treatment systems and airports  will require an immense amount of material and the industrial base to provide it.

If we are to make the most of an infrastructure package, it should include efforts to re-shore our industrial supply chains and to make sure we are rebuilding and modernizing when possible with American-made materials, equipment, and jobs. If done correctly, rebuilding our infrastructure can happen in parallel to reenergizing our industrial base  in the face of troubling vulnerabilities.

Now is the moment to commit to increasing the competitiveness of existing industries and reestablishing pieces of our supply chains that have disappeared altogether. The mining industry  the front end of our industrial base  exemplifies this opportunity and the need for action.

The U.S. possesses vast domestic mineral reserves, but mineral import reliance has grown to alarming levels. In 1990, 20 percent of all global mining investment flowed into the U.S. Today, its only 8 percent. The U.S. is now 50 percent or more import-reliant for nearly 50 vital minerals and metals, and 100 percent import-reliant for 18 of them. We shouldnt wait a moment longer to reverse this trend.

Americas industrial base, led by American mining, was once the envy of the world. It built our cities and infrastructure, and helped see us through the greatest conflicts of the 20th century. With foresight and smart policy, it can help see us through this challenge and be the foundation upon which we launch our recovery.

Rich Nolan is president and chief executive officer of the National Mining Association.

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Exercise equipment company, PRx Performance, ranks in the Inc. 5000 Series: Midwest. Their Profile Folding Squat Rack helps convert any garage, home, or small space into a multi-functioning gym

FARGO, ND / ACCESSWIRE / April 15, 2020 / Inc. magazine recently revealed that PRx Performance, home gym equipment company and inventor of the folding squat rack, has been selected for its inaugural Inc. 5000 Series: Midwest list. The list ranks the fastest-growing private companies in Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, North Dakota, Ohio, South Dakota, and Wisconsin. With two-year revenue growth of 416 percent, PRx Performance ranked 45th overall and 4th in the retail industry.

Persons interested in learning more about PRx Performance and the Inc. 5000 Series: Midwest can visit: https://prxperformance.com/blogs/news/prx-performance-ranks-on-2020-inc-5000-series-midwest

PRx Performance was founded in 2013 by Brian Brasch and Erik Hopperstad who set out to revolutionize the fitness industry by creating unique, space-saving exercise equipment. Their flagship product, the Profile Folding Squat Rack, easily folds up and out of the way when not in use, giving customers the ability to transform their garage, home, or small commercial space into a multi-functioning gym. Located in Fargo, North Dakota, PRx Performance continues to set the bar for creating premium exercise equipment to help people fit fitness into life.

"The PRx Team is proud to be another example of what happens when our Midwest work ethic meets the capstone of ingenuity," says Brian Brasch, Founder and CEO of PRx Performance. "I've never come across a more dedicated team of individuals. People have even brought their families on the weekend to work as a team to meet our customers' needs."

Due to the recent surge in demand for home gym equipment, PRx Performance has been operating at full capacity. They have even implemented a temporary daily sales limit to manage inventory shortages and to protect the health of their employees. While the company has plans to further accommodate the influx of orders, they encourage fans to download their free workout app PRx Fit in the meantime. Free daily exercises include high-intensity workouts, bodyweight workouts, and more.

Story continues

To learn more about PRx Fit, visit: https://prxperformance.com/pages/prx-fit

The PRx Fit app includes so that they can stay fit from home - whether it's bodyweight workouts or with their equipment.

Born of the annual Inc. 5000 franchise, this regional list represents a unique look at the most successful companies within the Midwest economy's most dynamic segment-its independent small businesses.

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: https://www.inc.com/inc5000-series-midwest-2020.html

Contact Info:

Name: Rachel Rice

Email: Send Email

Organization: PRx Performance

Address: 2402 8th Ave N, Fargo, North Dakota 58102, United States

Phone: +1-701-566-0452

Website: https://prxperformance.com

SOURCE: PRx Performance





View source version on accesswire.com:

https://www.accesswire.com/585194/Home-Gym-Squat-Rack-Company-Ranks-4th-in-Retail-on-the-Inc-5000-Series-Midwest




It's a disaster, school says they'll be teaching for about 2 hours per day. Parents of primary school kids can't work at home and supervise kids learning at the same time. Need one teacher and 1 assistant teacher online seven hours per day per class, this will allow 1:1 teacher discussions while the other staffer supervises the rest of the class online. - James Congratulations to the NBN who have chosen this morning to conduct three hours of planned maintenance in our area between 9am and 5pm. Excellent for all the distance learners. - Ellie It would help if they gave us more info other than we're back at school and log in online to empty portals. They've had weeks to get sorted! - Anonymous

I'm sure it would be fine if I didn't have to work. But it seems the government position is to make me choose between keeping my job vs education for my 5-year-old. - Anonymous It's a nightmare having a 15-year-old turning 16 "studying from home". I cannot micromanage him whilst I am working from home. - John Evie Macheda, 5, starts remote learning at home on the first day of term two. Credit:Tanya Macheda

I have three younger brothers (two in year 9 and one in year 11) who are unable to get onto their schools online portal to complete activities/schoolwork. Im just glad that I finished year 12 last year! - Matthew Kanizay Dreadful. Clearly our government thinks working from home is a joke, and we all have plenty of spare time to supervise children. Grade preps don't learn without supervision, and parents who are working hard (which is the case for most of us who still do have jobs) don't have the ability to provide this supervision. - Anonymous

Poorly organised by school and even with a laptop and three ipads a lot of the tech and applications pretty hit and miss. Stressed kids x 2 and frustrated parent, impossible to work from home while home schooling concurrently. Nil productivity for ANYONE. All because teachers don't see their role as essential and just do their job, like all the others doing their jobs and keeping the community and society moving. - Walter Loading Lots of information etc. for schools, but no information, direction or support for kindergartens! - Anonymous

After 30 minutes both my kids are crying and my wife is angry at me. I now have a greater respect for teachers. Let's pay them more. - Anonymous As a teacher, this has been worse than any day at school. It has been a constant barrage of questions from almost every corner including kids who for some reason now can't read instructions, we still have to contact students we haven't heard from (over half of our cohort) whilst reviewing work etc. It's been a nightmare! Give me face-to-face teaching anytime... - Peter I'm hiding in the staff room. - Natalie Bailey

Not so good. I have a grade 1 and grade 2. We just finished today's tasks (11.40am), so we have been busy for 3 hours. I took the day off work to get them started, but I can't do this everyday. I'm about to go to the school to see if they will be able to attend tomorrow. If both parents are working during the day then this isn't going to work for very long. ScoMo is right. - Anonymous It is an absolute nightmare. You are given a few tasks and then are expected to sit next to the child to help them do it. The teacher meets the class for 15 minutes each morning. That is it. It's impossible to hold down a full-time job. Am concerned that I will now have performance issues at work. I am a single parent. - Lissie

WebEx failed. Fifteen minutes with the teacher daily online is apparently all we are getting (state primary school). Feeling a lack of leadership from the school and very unclear what I am supposed to be doing! - Richard Very frustrating! Lots of connection issues and no face-to-face teaching. Just multiple tasks set for completion. - Anonymous

Aaaaaargh! - Tim Chaos, this is home schooling, not remote learning, not sure how two parents working from home are supposed to undertake this. 1. We are only just receiving instructions late last night and this morning. 2. Online services are outdated and do not work on Android devices (they rely on Adobe Flash, which is at end of life and being discontinued). 3. School of the Air has been running since 1951 with more success than this. - Ian As a year 12 VCE student who has never been able to study at home, today has been really stressful and distracting. - Anonymous

Loading Today has been a disaster. I am a healthcare worker and have just got home from work. My wife is crying and has just stormed off in frustration at trying to keep our grade 1 child focussed, whilst having a 4-year-old daughter running around the house too. Weve managed to complete about half the tasks allocated to us for the day (we get an email from the school telling us what to do) but the Grade 1 boy needs constant supervision and this is something thats impossible whilst trying to work from home also. He really needs a classroom environment to stay focused. The 4-year-old is supposed to be at kinder also but unfortunately I suspect our attention will be on trying to keep the older one focused. I understand there will be teething problems, but this is not sustainable and adds significant strain to what is already a stressful environment at home. I really hope the schools will reopen in the coming month or so if coronavirus cases remain low (if it is safe to do so), otherwise it will be months of misery in this house. - Anonymous Im a stay at home parent so I have the time to devote to schooling without having to worry about work, and even I feel overwhelmed by the sheer volume of work we need to fit into the week. I cant imagine how working parents will manage. My kids are young (year 3 and 1) so they need quite a lot of guidance and support. Its hard for me to deliver two curriculums simultaneously. Its hard enough just to sift through the daily and weekly tasks to figure out a functional schedule. Day one in the bag and weve all been in tears today. My kids love school usually. This isnt anything I can call school, and I cant even begin to list the ways it is an inadequate substitute. What price are we paying for this decision to close schools to most kids? - Anonymous

Lauren, from Bayside Secondary school, takes part in her online school class as her mother Gayle, a teacher from Flinders Christian College, takes students for online schooling in Melbourne. Credit:AAP Miss 14 has level 5 funding. No extra assistance at home though. Pass some of her aide funding over to us so we can pay someone who is willing to work with her at home. Today included kicking her walls screaming that school is stupid and refusing to do anything productive. The system is way too complicated - a Google classroom for every subject. The refusal of the education department to allow zoom....she woke to 66 new messages, she only read her check-in one then closed her computer for the day. Where are the supports for our funded students? - Cheri I am a parent of three children with learning difficulties (dyslexia and dysgraphia etc). Dyslexic kids often struggle to understand what is expected of them and need a lot of support to get started and complete tasks. My husband took the day off work to help me get through the day and we barely managed. I will have to put my own career firmly to one side to try and make this work. Why is Bunnings still open but mothers (mostly) are expected to carry the load of educating our children? This reeks of patriarchy in my opinion! Surely schools are an essential service? - Claerwen

After the first day, I'm now listening to very loud music to avoid drinking an entire bottle of wine. Maybe the kids (year 1 and 3) don't need so much supervision at school but it seems at home they need to check the answer for everything and have no capacity to think for themselves. The school clearly has no idea what it's doing and just sent home glorified homework tasks. My heart goes out to those trying to hold down jobs. Open the schools, this is ridiculous. - Anonymous My grandson's school has no face to face time on line with their teacher not even a recorded video message. Parents don't get the timetable for the next day until 4 pm the day before. This is an international baccalaureate school. Pathetic when you consider school broke up early so teachers could have prepared for this. - Helen Gilhome

Disaster. 3, 6 and 9 year old kids at home. 9 year old was happy enough although Im sceptical of the learning outcomes achieved. The other 2 chaos. Crying, screaming, hiding under tables. And no, I didnt manage to get to even half of my own work. Its going be a late night answering emails. I appreciate its the first day, but I honestly cannot see how I can manage work from home and 3 kids for an entire term. - Anonymous Nightmare. Poor instruction from school, no face to face instruction/interaction for Year 8 student. A weeks worth of poorly explained work dumped into Compass. My daughter with dyslexia struggled with knowing what to do and how to prioritise the work. Luckily I had the day off so could be there to help her through, but what about tomorrow when I have my own work to do? - T Telstra internet outages affecting a lot of households in outer east (Belgrave, Tecoma, Upwey) since last Monday, so theres been lots of frustration and inconvenience for many out here. Our son did alright hot spotting but with parents also working from home were chewing through phone data fast. Telstra say outage could last until Monday. Im about to go all Peter Finch if it isnt sorted soon. Aaaarrrggghhhh!!! - DC

Absolutely horrendous. Its a joke expecting us to work from home. I have a preppie who cant read and a year 2. Its constant supervision, reading the assignment and in the case of the Prep 1-1 teaching. We see the teacher once a week. Its a joke. I cant believe Im saying this but I am with ScoMo on this one. I am going to lose my job if I keep having days like this with 1 hour of work done between 2 kids homeschooling. Why do teachers get to decide they are too precious to work as essential workers? My doctor husband, nurse friends and tradie friends are still working, they should be too. Im so angry. This term is going to be disaster. If COVID-19 rates keep going down then Schools need to open earlier and the health experts agree. ScoMo- you have a very committed labor voters support here. Keep schools open. - Anonymous Terrible. The school has given some very broad advice but no structure and it relies on parents being the teacher. This is not what the premier promised. this is very hard when both parents are working full time and on zoom conferences all day. Surly the education department could have developed some online material and activities over the past 3 weeks. On line Cubs was great. - Anonymous

A disaster...My eldest is doing VCE and must be back at school for face to face learning. Here is an idea.... why not bring back year 11 & 12 students first and the rest can follow later ... Mr Andrews you are out of touch with reality. - Jimbo Disaster. Not sure which genius thinks kids can get the same level of education at home. Who's going to look after them and assist them? What if parents are working from home? They need to be working part time teachers. Would've been better off extending school holidays for another 2 weeks and then go back to school. - Anonymous Not too bad, actually

I'm a teacher and so far, so good! A very large volume of emails at the moment but we've been able to work through most issues. - Callum Better than expected! My two eldest daughters are plugged into their iPads, and will be until 3.15pm following their grade 1 and grade 4 curriculum with their whole class through Zoom. My 1-year-old is plugged into The Wiggles! I'm worried about so much screen time, but it is better than the alternative- which would be me! Tricky with a 1-year-old. Aside from hearing about some very sad staffing issues through The Age, the girls school has been super organised and I have every confidence they will have a great virtual term. - Olivia Timetables all sorted-kids made it up yesterday so we'd know who had what and when - Donna Lancaster

Donna Lancaster's four children made this timetable to help them negotiate home school a little easier. Credit:Donna Lancaster Pretty easy to be quite honest. (Even though I'm in year 12 and still confused on what the VCAA are doing) Considering it will be a half day of school with only having three classes. - Nick It's going as well as can be expected: by which I mean we have agreed to a plan, a 'timetable' that includes some breaks - for all of us - and we'll see how it works today, and work together to improve tomorrow. It's a team effort. - Anonymous

Considering the circumstances, I would say pretty good! Difficult to motivate my children as they still feel like they're in holiday mode but we're getting through it. This isn't an ordinary turn of events and you can't put the blame on the teachers nor the government. Keep your patience and try a bit harder as everyone is in the same boat! - Anonymous Pretty good. Joined a call this morning at 9.30 am. The call ended at 10.20 am and I have been doing the assigned work since then! - Sebastiano Byrne As a teacher in a state school, my kids don't fully return until Friday but I have sent work out for them to complete. Almost all of my kids have completed it this morning because 'they are bored and want to return to school'. I think this will be much more successful than originally thought! - Anonymous

Beautiful. Kids self-motivated and happy. Internet working for all. No complaints here. - Sophie Surprisingly smoothly. I have three teenage sons (years 9, 11 and 12) and they seem to have adapted very well. My main concern was the capacity of the NBN, touch wood, no issues so far. I am fairly tech savvy but I am nowhere near my sons who are all 'digital natives' and seem to have embraced the new learning environment. As a parent I was really pleased to hear all three of my sons actively participating in classroom discussions. Finally, I would like to thank all teachers and support staff who have been working incredibly hard to make this work. We would agree that it isn't ideal but under the circumstances it seems the best option. - Peter Redden

I have a year 12 and year 10 - all went perfectly. Our school went online two weeks before the end of term - all issues ironed out. Microsoft teams worked well. Teachers teaching for the whole class. Kudos to the school and the teachers. - Anonymous Given I'm in year 12, it went really well. Teachers are working so hard to adapt to unforeseen circumstances and we should all be more grateful for it. Being able to learn from home is a privilege - there are no alternatives, and we just have to accept that this is our reality for now. It could be a lot worse. - Bridget My two teenage kids in year 11 and year 8 seemed happy to back with their peers. I could hear my daughter's singing lesson from the other room where I was working. They came out for breaks smiling. I think they feel more connected to the outer world through the structure of the school classroom. My hope is that this continues! - Fleur Summers

Its been a massive learning curve here for grade 1 - but weve also had some fun, completed reading, writing, art and maths tasks and sworn at the systems as we attempt to learn them quickly. Our teacher is doing an amazing job under the circumstances. - Kelly E I'm a secondary teacher and I've been at my PC since 8am. Haven't had time for breaks or lunch, it's been really hectic trying to provide offsite learning to my students. Having said that I am really proud of the kids I teach. They've all logged in and we've gone over work expectations, tried troubleshooting a few issues and sorted out how we're going to get through this as a class. I'm sure there's a lot behind the scenes that I can't see, such as parents organising these guys to get online and talk with me and manage their learning. It's a massive collaborative effort and so far I am (like many others I'm sure) exhausted but ready for more. - Anonymous

Wasnt the disaster I thought it could be. My grade 3 boy and I worked side by side at the dining table, my grace 6 daughter was at her desk following the excellent guidance given by her teacher on her own. My work did suffer today, so some juggling will be required- the 1.5 hours of making school lunches and travelling to the office will now likely become 1.5hrs of early morning work time for me, before the school day starts at 9. Some work in the evenings may also be needed. We just have to remember, that despite everything, we really are in the lucky country right now- good times will return. I wouldnt want to be anywhere else during COVID-19. Huge thanks to all our teachers and healthcare workers, youre all champions. - Stephanie From the standpoint of an IT professional; it went surprisingly well. I think our primary school was reasonably prepared. At least the online systems were performing well with access all sorted. The communications were good. Online lessons have not gone into full swing yet but they had tasks prepared and took the results via email. My time is another story. A few hours lost to school so now I'm just taking a break from my long WFH day. I figure this is likely the new norm, but I do realise I'm in a relatively lucky position. - SPB We are amazed at how well it goes. Miss 8 completely engaged in her zoom classroom from 845 to 3pm. Both parents working from home and find she can mostly be left to them. Amazing effort and attitude and communication from teachers and school leadership at Haileybury College. Cant praise them enough. - Matthew

As a public high school teacher, I think our school did well. High attendance and participation today. All classes and subjects organised at least a week in advance by our staff. There were some internet issues today but they seemed to be sorted out. It must be frustrating for parents having multiple kids (especially primary kids) at home with internet issues and I am not sure how other schools went. I think the governments, state and federal have done a good job keeping Australia from the catastrophic scenes weve witnessed in other countries. The advice may be that shutting schools may not have made a difference. I dont know. Were making the best of the situation at my work. So are the kids. They are for the most part resilient and cheerful. It was great to see them today. - Matthew I am incredibly grateful for our teachers and school staff that they have all put in so much effort over a very short space of time to put together the best home learning curriculum that they can. It is a challenge for sure. My partner and I are both working from home and we are home learning with our son, Year 1. From one day to the next, some things will work really well, whilst others will not work very well. Everyone is doing the best they can with what they have got. And when our children head back into our classroom, our wonderful teachers, who are so skilled at what they do, will have a way to bring our kids back to where they need to be. #thankyouteachers - Anonymous

We prepped our Year 7 and Year 9 kids that today was going to be a learning experience for them, us, teachers, etc. We explained it isnt going to be exactly like school. We are also both working from home. Our state secondary school has done an amazing job preparing us and the kids for the term ahead, with many weekend and late night emails from the staff. It was a really positive experience for both of our kids and I am so thankful we have this option. Everyday will bring challenges and so we will just roll with it. Teachers - you are awesome! - Susan Carter My kids (years 6 & 8) had a wonderful start to term 2, online classes were well run, my son even had an online PE class. I work full time and met by kids at 1pm for a family lunch. Long may this continue! - Anonymous I am a recently out of work father of three helping three kids at home. I am really only helping one child as the two older ones seem to be able to sort themselves out. I found the online learning really smooth and easy to navigate, and had a rewarding day helping my grade 6 child. I realise that there are plenty of people with more challenging home situations, but i think once kids and parents get the hang of it, kids will be able to work more autonomously. Two thumbs up for me. - Matthew Broadbent

My two year 8 students managed really well, and the lessons sounded productive and engaging. I was really impressed with the preparation and calm manner of the staff at Auburn High School. My kids are doing the French binational program and was even more impressed to hear all of the students manage online learning of the majority of the curriculum entirely in French. - Fiona It was breezy. Year 9 daughter is self motivated and appeared to be engaged all day. She took her recess and lunch breaks, had a music lesson and asked me some advice on a geography question. I worked as usual from home. No issues so far. I expect some days will be better than others but we're not worrying about academic progression. Just staying healthy, mentally and physically. - Zoe

So far so good. Two primary children. We are going rogue and focussing on reading, writing, spelling, multiplication stuff that interests them and anything we think they might be missing - like telling the time. We are both working from home so we are aiming to do two half hour sessions each a day- playing to our strengths. They do Joe Wicks PE and if we need extra time or to keep them occupied we will let them watch a documentary. We are hoping by the end of this they will be able to make their own lunch. Being home won't last forever, so we are trying to make the most of it. - Anonymous I had a year eight and Year five start online today and it went really well (despite a couple of glitches). secondary kid had at least 3 zoom lessons but got left out of another. Did homework. Younger one self sufficient all day once we had watched the welcome videos. Both kids found it well planned and easy to self start work. Well done to Princes Hill Secondary and Primary. Maths Teacher partner also went very smoothly with near full attendance at their school. - Anonymous As a Year 11 (completing a Year 12 subject this year) remote learning is, of course, not exactly what I'd hoped for in terms of my VCE years. However, I know that teachers and IT are trying the best they can- I could've said that any school day but it's even more poignant now. My younger siblings and I are all trying to make it through (past various tech issues and the like) and it's gone pretty smoothly thus far. We're trying to keep ourselves, our families and the wider community safe and frankly, it is disheartening to see so many people taking their frustrations out on teachers. No one, let alone teachers would have wished this on us. Thank you to our teachers and essential workers for sticking with us in such a crisis. Good luck fellow students and stay positive all!

Gosh people, we could be extremely sick, or dying in a country with no ICU BEDS left... This is an extreme time.. I feel privileged to live in Australia where we have schooling, a health system and mostly a chance at survival. I am a nurse who is also remote schooling my 11 year old... Sure, there are glitches, yes it is different, yes it is strange... But we have so much to be grateful for. As for the teachers, who haven't stopped working in weeks, and have never been payed their worth ( nor the nurses) hats off to you angels. You are doing an amazing job! Just remember, this too shall pass. - Bron Fantastic. I believe the parents that are complaining need to understand the bigger picture. We are going through a global pandemic and safety is key for our children. Alongside this, we need to step up in our role as parents. We are meant to provide for them, and we see the efforts of educators more clearly throughout this. I understand the pressures of working from home alongside this, but perhaps its time to take a proper look at parenting and structures at home. - Anonymous

Time will tell... Eight-year-old Zack Wong sent this drawing of his Easter in isolation. Credit:Zack Wong It started very positively. The kids were ready by 8.30am, and we flew into the basics, literacy and numeracy, and all done by 11.20am. I am hiding my anxiety. There is no way I can produce high quality strategic plans and reports whilst overseeing my children in their learning. My employer (state government) is flexible in every respect, and clear in their communications, that they are here for us to find the "balance". But in this scenario, there is no balance to be found. The way I could find balance would be to take leave without pay, or at half pay. But that's not a financially viable option for my family. I feel our essential services like supermarkets and triage have been able to put effective hygiene protocols in place that are working. Please, we need to install these protocols at our school gates and get our kids back in. Social distancing can continue in the home and authorities regulate accordingly. But our kids are the losers in all this. No school, no social contacts, no playgrounds..... it's gone, overnight. Living their young lives via a virtual reality should not be our go to option, until we're in a position where school hygiene is insufficient protection. - Kate Hill The screaming and shouting has subsided a little now, but it's going to be a very long term! - Anonymous

First day back at school is going okay but a poor substitute for kids interacting directly with teacher and classmates. I can only comment on primary school age kids but the more kids you have in different years - particularly below grade 4, the trickier it is for the parent to co-ordinate. It's not remote learning - there's no chance the parent can get on with their own work - it's constant supervision. - Anonymous As a teacher I dealt with the usual silly behaviours and sometimes reticent attitudes towards working. Occasionally I would have a visit from a student from another class who would come into the chat line and say very inappropriate things. In many ways, it's just a digital environment and the same issues of teaching teens are present - that is, some kids want to learn, others don't. The good thing is that we can outline all the work that needs to be covered. The bad, and this is the same in the classroom, is behaviour. The triumph of the 'no phones' policy has now got to contend with the difficult screen time behaviours that were present prior to this year. Is it a step backwards - time will tell. - Anonymous

Single working parent, one grade 4 and two grade 1s. We more or less worked through the materials for today except the Physical Activity stuff, as they are much happier just running around the backyard doing their own games; and with an added Art class by popular request. No online classes at all, which I thought was really surprising - definitely not getting much work-from-home done! Have asked my employer to stand me down as soon as they figure out whether they qualify for JobKeeper, since I only have so much leave to use up on home-schooling. - Anonymous I'm a primary school teacher and I've been on call with families and students regarding learning at home since 9am. Yes it is hectic. Parents are going to be overwhelmed. Teachers are overwhelmed. Think about the teachers who have children of their own who also need to support their own child. Everyone is learning. But it is only temporary. As much as I would love to be in a classroom with 30 of my students, I'd rather everyone is safe and healthy for the time being. In the grand scheme of things, this is a time period we can learn and adapt to challenge our persistence! Good luck to all families, parents, students and teachers on term 2. - Anonymous I'm a primary school teacher and I do not know a single teacher that insisted schools be closed, like some have suggested. It has been a steep learning curve over a short amount of time for teaching staff, and like some parents and students, quite stressful. Yes the internet is unreliable, and video meetings drop out or have poor audio. Today a big section of the remote learning platform was unable to be accessed due to high demand and poor internet capabilities. We are all doing the best we can given the circumstances. It wasn't our decision to close schools, but while it has been difficult, I would rather keep the community safe from potential infection than take the risk and keep schools open. - Anonymous

I teach in a private co-ed school, and had a really sore head (and neck) after four hours of solid remote teaching. We are talking about constant replying to questions, checking online work, giving feedback, giving reminders/ additional instructions, on top of all the planning that used up most the school holidays. While not all schools are alike, it is very demoralising to read parents disparaging remarks about teachers. I will say that most teachers would love for the students to be back at school, although the fear of an outbreak is real. School grounds are notorious for spreading viruses. (Think gastro, flu, chicken pox, what more Covid-19). For those parents whose kids seem to have had a good start, just remember that there has been lots of work that has gone behind it, and there continues to be an enormous amount of work to sustain it. I have my own kids at home too, and they have certainly been neglected today. All my attention was on my own classes. Having said all of that, I am grateful for technology, and I am grateful for my students, and I am grateful that we are keeping safe and well. - Anonymous I need to say that losing one term of school learning is not the end of the world. The dux of one of my schools came to Australia after living in a refugee camp with very little schooling for five years. He didnt know the English language when he began schooling in Australia in Year 9. He got an ATAR of 99.8. When life goes back to normal, teachers will make sure kids know the essentials in their learning. A parent's job is to make sure the kids are safe and happy. If they dont get all their work done.... so be it. Im a principal that has children. Dont stress if they cant do all the work. Dont stress if you cant help them. It will be OK. Keeping a healthy, happy environment is the role of a parent. The online glitches will be fixed and it will all work. Remember.... if it doesnt the impact on students will be minimal. - Anonymous

Not easy for the PS daughter whose instructions could have been clearer but it went well with the older HS daughter whose school is engaged and she is learning, and as a HS teacher today went well, albeit not easy to have discussions but we tried. The state gov't is doing the right thing. I feel sorry for stressed parents and students and hope it will get easier with perseverance, But this is something we simply have to do. - Darren Great day to take a step back and lower expectations. Poor teachers are struggling with completely foreign ways of teaching. Students being made accountable before they are ready. Parents wanting the best but failing at everything. Time to care less about everything. - AP By 5pm my kids, my partner and my partner's Mum who lives with us are all still healthy and alive. Sucking it up and feeling grateful. - Luke
- Well-known Ghanian musician, Shatta Wale, has said what he thinks about former BBNaija housemate, Tacha

- The musician in a manner that professes affection for her said he wishes she were his bestie

- In the message, he called her a pretty queen as he inserted many love emojis in his Instagram post

Popular Ghanaian rapper Shatta Wale has professed his deep affection for former BBNaija housemate, Tacha.

In an Instagram post he made on Sunday, April 12, the musician said he wished the lady were his bestie.

Gosh I wish this pretty queen was my bestie lol," he wrote on his gram as he inserted love emojis in the message.

See the Instagram post below:

Meanwhile, Legit.ng earlier reported that Don Jazzy, whose real name is Michael Collins Ajereh, has spoken on the economic hardship the present lockdown caused by coronavirus outbreak.

Well known for his giveaways on Twitter, the music producer on Saturday, April 11, confirmed that the present time is really hard for everyone.

In a very short tweet that has a lot of engagements, the Marvin Record boss said: "These are hard times guys".

The music boss in a separate tweet also agreed with a follower who wondered how daily earners are surviving the harsh realities of the period.

In other news, Pastor Chris Oyakhilome reacted to the move by some state governors to temporarily relax the lockdown law so that some churches can celebrate Easter.

During his preaching on Friday, April 10th, the cleric said that church is not a place of infection but where people come to get blessed.

He, therefore, prayed against anything that makes people come into the church and get infected with diseases.

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Churches are not a place of infections, they are a place of blessings I decree and declare that every church is a place of blessing in that might name of Jesus, he prayed.

Pastor Oyakhilome also said that any government with wisdom will know not to trouble the church, but leave them alone.

You know the best thing in any government is to always leave the church alone Its always the best thing, the wisest leaders understand that, they leave the church alone. But when you trouble the church, there is a scripture, he said.

NAIJ.com (naija.ng) -> Legit.ng We have upgraded to serve you better

Zlatan Ibile speaks on collabo with Obesere, relationship with Tacha | Legit TV

Source: Legit.ng
Fire in Chernobyl Exclusion Zone Put Out, Several Days Needed to Douse Afterburn - Emergency Service

Sputnik News

11:16 GMT 14.04.2020(updated 11:42 GMT 14.04.2020)

Hundreds of Ukrainian firefighters and local volunteers have been involved in extinguishing forest fires in the abandoned regions surrounding the site of the infamous nuclear disaster.

The fire in the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone has been extinguished, the Ukrainian Emergencies Agency reported.

"Ukraine's State Service on Emergency Situations needs several more days to extinguish the afterburn that remains following the fire in the exclusion zone of the Chernobyl Nuclear Plant", the president's press service said.

The emergency services also stated that radiation levels in surrounding areas and the region around the capital Kiev are within normal limits and do not exceed natural background levels.

On 4 April, a forest fire began near the site of the nuclear catastrophe and the State Emergency Service mobilised early the next day. By 7 April, the fires covered 86 acres of territory. Police said they have apprehended the suspected arsonist behind the blaze and have launched a criminal case.

About 1,000 square miles were completely depopulated and left for nature to reclaim following the 1986 disaster at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant (NPP). Sprawling forests and the build up of shrubbery have rendered the area prone to more intense wildfires.



A Sputnik

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With liquor stores and bars



downing their shutters amid the COVID-19 lockdown, a man in Maharashtra's Nagpur city resorted to selling beer at a pharmacy, police said on Wednesday.

The police on Tuesday arrested Nishant alias Bunty Pramod Gupta (36) for allegedly selling beer at a pharmacy in the Ganeshpeth area, an official said.

Acting on a tip-off, the police raided the pharmacy at around 8 pm on Tuesday and found beer bottles stored in boxes of mineral water, he said.

The police seized 80 bottles of beer and arrested Gupta, a resident of Dosar Bhavan Chowk, he said, adding that another accused managed to flee during the raid.

A case has been registered against the accused under relevant provisions of the Indian Penal Code and Maharashtra Prohibition Act, the official said.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
[April 14, 2020] Financial Services: Adapting to the Coronavirus (COVID-19) Outbreak - ResearchAndMarkets.com

The "Financial Services: Adapting to the Coronavirus (COVID-19) Outbreak" report has been added to ResearchAndMarkets.com's offering. In the short term, the impact of COVID-19 on consumer financial services will be analogous to the global financial crisis of 2008-09, creating a period of economic paralysis and leaving a massive hole in banks' balance sheets. This report provides an early assessment of the impact of the COVID-19 outbreak on the retail banking, payments, wealth management, and the insurance sectors. Scope Banks are preparing for mass channel changes as customers are expected to shun branches

Coronavirus offers unique opportunities for digital teams to ramp up, refine, and prove digital across a much wider range of wealth brackets, age groups, geographies, and use cases.

Increased digital activity brought about by COVID-19 could spur greater adoption of fintech and personal financial management tools.

Consumers will shift from in-store paymnts to online payments in order to avoid exposing themselves to the virus.

Coronavirus highlights the intricacies of insurance policy wording and the gap in cyber insurance coverage.



Reasons to Buy This report identifies which retail banking markets will be hit hardest by the outbreak of COVID-19.

Details how banks are reacting to the outbreak across different markets.

Identifies which payment companies have the most exposure to POS terminals vs e-commerce.

Explores how consumer payment methods will change and the impact upon the industry.

Identifies which markets and investor types are most exposed to equities and funds.

Discusses strategic options for wealth managers, drawing lessons from the previous global financial crisis.

Highlights the impact of COVID-19 on insurance providers. Key Topics Covered:

Retail Banking

Payments

Wealth Management

Insurance Companies Mentioned Ingenico

Deutsche Bank

Visa

Mastercard

American Express

PayPal

Afterpay

Global Payments

Fiserv

FIS

JP Morgan (News - Alert) Chase

DBS

Santander

ICICI

Bank of China

Bank of East Asia

Commerzbank

HVB

Nationwide

AN For more information about this report visit https://www.researchandmarkets.com/r/j2tox6 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. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20200414006062/en/

[ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ]
In this handout released by the U.S. Navy, the aircraft carrier USS Theodore Roosevelt leaves its San Diego homeport on Jan. 17, 2020. (U.S. Navy via Getty Images)

Preparing for a Future Biological Disaster

No one in our intelligence system appears to have systematically studied what China was doing

Commentary

There are two keys to preparing for a future biological disaster: a strategy that keeps the military and critical industries operating, and far better intelligence on bad actors, especially Russia and China.

Both need massive improvement.

While many experts are focused on the coronavirus lockdown and its eventual lifting, less attention is given to the degradation of the U.S. military and weakening of Americas strategic deterrence, especially in East Asia.

Concomitant with a loss of deterrence is a rise in the risk of general war.

Neither the Navy nor the Pentagon were prepared for a pandemic, and their decisions resulted in the withdrawal of the aircraft carrier USS Theodore Roosevelt from the region.

In early March, the Navy persisted in normal port calls to areas with rising coronavirus infection ratesthe Theodore Roosevelt went to Vietnam, and the crew was on the ground for five days. Ships were then quarantined at sea for 14 days.

The Navy had to know by then that the quarantine of cruise ship passengers and crew together at sea meant the virus spread widely among those on board. At the same time, while the Pentagon canceled all travel, military exercises, and deployments, it did not countermand the Navy decision to quarantine 5,000 people together.

China has taken advantage of the absence of the Theodore Roosevelt by stepping up operations in the South China Sea, and theres a risk that Chinese military leaders may push for action against more significant targets.

The Pentagon and military services must find a better way to secure effective fighting forces under pandemic conditions. Part of the answer would seem to be in prepositioning testing kits, protective masks, and decontamination equipment in safe zones located on or near important U.S. military bases.

Clearly the Pentagon has been scrambling for answers, including having many of its personnel telework (although DOD has come nowhere near solving the security issues). The situation for troops, including sailors, abroad should be a top priority.

Civil Strategy

A similar strategy is needed for critical industries. If specialized plants reduce output, or cease working altogether, the damage to our capabilities could be enormous. A civil strategy to keep businesses, including small businesses, operating could significantly reduce the need for lockdown or quarantine measures.

During the Gulf War and Iraq War, Israel set an important civil defense example by providing kits to all its citizens that included gas masks and antibiotics to be used in case of a biological attack. The distribution of kits ended in 2014, but Israel kit distribution stands as an excellent example of what the United States and other nations could do to protect against pandemics caused by viruses.

A properly designed kit for every citizen (Israel had baby kits and kits adjusting for long beards) would go a long way to protect lives and keep the country working, meaning that lockdowns and other measures could be confined to hot spot locations and only when absolutely needed.

Kits might include high-quality face masks, synthetic rubber gloves, and, most important, general purpose antiviral compounds. The last is not yet available, but investing in their development would reduce fear in the public, stop hoarding practices that tend to harm social trust, and keep transportation systems operating. It also would reduce pressure on doctors, nurses, and hospitals.

What China Is Doing

A critical need is vastly improved intelligence so that dangers can be avoided or mitigated. A great deal is known about Chinas biological research operations because of extensive contacts and cooperation between Chinese and foreign scientists, and projects shared between Chinese, American, French, and other laboratories.

For a brief three years (201417) the United States recognized the risk in certain types of viral research and urged scientists to stop doing it, going so far as to halt funding from the National Institute of Health and other organizations. But in 2017 the ban was dropped.

Our scientific establishment returned to business as usual with no real strategic assessment of the risks involved, although there were warnings. The FBI was concerned about biological agents, including SARs viruses, being moved in and out of the United States, and U.S. Customs seized some of this material.

Likewise, the CIA evidenced serious concern about certain biological warfare dangers, particularly from terrorists. But no one in our intelligence system appears to have systematically dug into what China was doing.

There are hundreds, if not thousands, of American scientists working with Chinese experts. They know a great deal about what China is doing, and how well. Some of the work is done at American labs and universities, some with private companies, and there is some exchange with China (although presumably carefully controlled on the Chinese end).

This is an intelligence gold mine. Our agencies need to be building networks among U.S. scientists to get a grip on the big picture. In this way, not only can we anticipate developing threats but also start working on countermeasures.

Our intelligence agencies should also be systematically exploiting information in the public domain. Chinese scientists have published a great deal of their research in scientific journals, often boasting about their achievements.

Recently, the Chinese government has started censoring some of this output, but there still is a great deal out there that has not been thoroughly exploited. An open source exploitation effort is sorely needed.

There are companies, such as Palantir, that specialize in what they call big data analytics. Putting them to work now on Chinese scientific writings and the writings of Western scientists and physicians associated with China could produce a wealth of important information.

We were caught short and the United States is paying the price. It shouldnt happen again.

Stephen Bryen is regarded as a thought leader on technology security policy, twice awarded the Defense Departments highest civilian honor: the Distinguished Public Service Medal. His most recent book is Technology Security and National Power: Winners and Losers.

Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
By Express News Service

PATNA: A fortnight after searches and their quarantine, 46 foreign nationals in Bihar including 20 from Malaysia were sent to jails for violating visa norms.

The police had traced 18 foreigners in Araria, 10 in Buxar district and the rest in Patna.



All of them had sought and were granted tourists visas. But they involved in religious activities violating the Foreigners Act 1946. The nationals from Malaysia, Kyrgyzstan, Bangladesh and Indonesia went to Delhi to attend the Tablighi Jamaat Congregation after landing in Bihar last month.

Police have seized the passports and other documents of all the 46 foreign nationals before sending them to jails at Buxar, Patna and Araria.
As the nationwide lockdown paralyses the operations of Indian corporates, Harsh Goenka, chairman, RPG Enterprises, has sought the support of the government for a fast recovery when the market reopens. "The immediate need is a significant relief to all businesses in the form of tax deferments and relaxation of loan servicing norms," he told Business Today.

"Cash is the lifeline that is required now. All measures that will enable conservation of cash within the businesses will be critical for the survival. We will have to focus entirely on tiding over the crisis before we can start looking at the rebound," said Goenka, who is hopeful that the economy will rebound.

The whole business cycle, which consists of sourcing, value addition and its eventual conversion to cashflows has presently gone into a total freeze for most sectors. The World Bank expects the Indian economy to grow at 1.5-2.8 per cent in FY21, the slowest growth rate recorded since the economic reforms of 1991. Asian Development Bank (ADB) sees India's economic growth slipping to 4 per cent in FY21 from 6.5 per cent projected earlier. S&P Global Ratings has further slashed its FY21 GDP growth forecast to 3.5 per cent from a previous downgrade of 5.2 per cent.

Fitch Ratings puts its estimate for India growth at 2 per cent in FY21 from 5.1 per cent estimated just 18 days ago. Moody's Investors Service has slashed India's 2020 GDP growth estimate to 2.5 per cent from 5.3 per cent earlier.

In terms of losses, the fact that lot of fixed costs are still continuing, there could be under-recovery, he pointed out. "Sales revenues for the first quarter are going to be negligible for most manufacturing operations. Besides the airline and hospitality industry, which are the most affected, consumer durables, textiles, auto and many others into discretionary demand would face hardships," Goenka added.

The cash-strapped aviation sector in India is expected to post losses of $3-3.6 billion in the June quarter because of coronavirus pandemic. The lockdown to contain virus spread in the country has had disastrous impact on the hospitality sector, especially on hotels. "The impact is disastrous. The hotels are businesses which are very capital intensive and also have high fixed costs," Lemon Tree Hotels Chairman and MD Patanjali G Keswani told media.

Niranjan Hiranandani, founder and MD of real estate giant Hiranandani group, said that the real estate off-take will fall 20 per cent in three weeks.

Going forward, the companies need to manage the liquidity aspect quite astutely, said Goenka. "Commodity prices have fallen which can be helpful for a brief period during the recovery phase. But overall, businesses have to focus on cash," he added.

Also Read: Coronavirus India Lockdown Live Updates: COVID-19 Guidelines to be issued today as migrant crisis hit nation

Also Read: Coronavirus lockdown 2.0 guidelines issued: Check full list of relaxations, restrictions by MHA
The UK Government should offer a 1billion prize to any laboratory that can process 10million coronavirus tests a day, according to a Nobel Prize-winning economist.

Paul Romer, a professor at New York University, said the huge sum would light a fire under university and private labs to rapidly scale up their swabbing capacity.

Britain is still carrying out fewer than 15,000 coronavirus tests every day - despite promises to swab 100,000 people daily by the end of the month.

Hopes were raised last Friday the Government could be on track to hit the ambitious target when a record 19,116 people were tested in 24 hours.

But that number fell by more than a thousand to 18,091 the following day and then plummeted to 14,982 daily tests by Tuesday. It is unclear why.

If the UK was to continue testing around 15,000 people a day it would take around 12 years for every Briton to be swabbed.

Shortages of trained staff, swabs and chemicals are thought to be to blame for the UK's meagre testing programme - as well as the Government's slow response to the crisis.

Several private labs - which have the capacity to conduct thousands of tests a day - have said their offers to help the Government have fallen on deaf ears, including one today that claimed it has been ignored for a month.

But Professor Romer said the 1bn prize would be so enticing it would result in the production of millions of daily tests 'within a month'.

The UK is still carrying out fewer than 15,000 coronavirus tests every day despite promises to swab 100,000 people daily by the end of the month

Swab tests - currently the only tests validated in the UK - work by collecting a sample from the nose or throat and running it through a machine which builds up and scans the patient's DNA - thousands of the machines are available all over the UK, experts say (Pictured: A patient has a swab test at a hospital in Idlib, Syria)

PRIVATE TESTING LAB SAYS IT HAS BEEN IGNORED FOR A MONTH - DESPITE OFFERING TO HELP GOVERNMENT SCALE UP Several private labs - which have the capacity to conduct thousands of tests a day - have said their offers to help the Government have fallen on deaf ears. Alan Thornhill, the UK head of Igenomix, a private IVF firm that is headquartered in Surrey, said he had approached every branch of Government to offer to carry out coronavirus tests. He told BBC Radio 4's Today Programme this morning: 'We have a highly trained team and accredited medical diagnostics lab ready to be repurposed for coronavirus testing. 'Ive made many calls many and emails to various people within the NHS, PHE, Department of Health, and so far no useful feedback or response. 'Weve been making these calls for about a month. We are ready to help. 'I understand youve got to offer a good test and a bad test is worse than no test at all, but the test we were planning to offer is the same one as what NHS and Public Health England is using.' Advertisement

Professor Romer told BBC Radio 4's Today programme: 'I would recommend for the UK and US Government to do this right out of the gate.

'They should pass legislation that says were going to give a prize of a billion dollars, or a billion pounds, to the first university laboratory which shows it can process 10million tests a day.

'Ive been talking to these people in the university labs, theyre chomping at the bit ready to go. They just dont have the resources to higher up the staff and get going on this.

'But if they were competing for a billion pound prize. Youd have 10million tests a day, I think within a month. And then we would just stop this hand-wringing of, "Oh we dont know if we can do this."

'In the US, we produce and distribute 300million soft drinks a day. An economy that can do that can produce 30million tests a day if its important for us to do it.'

The UK's sluggish testing progress means it is unlikely it will be able to scale up capacity within a fortnight to meet its ambitious 100,000 target.

For comparison, in the last two weeks the country has went from testing little over 10,000 people a day to almost 15,000.

In total, the UK has tested 302,599 people, which means just four out of every 1,000 Britons have been checked for the killer disease.

Germany has been able to stifle its outbreak by swabbing more than half a million people a week - 19 out of every 1,000 people.

CHIEF SCIENTIFIC ADVISER FINALLY ADMITS TESTING HAS BEEN TOO SLOW Sir Patrick Vallance conceded that while Public Health England got off to a 'good start' during the containment phase, checks had not 'scaled up' quickly since then. The UK effectively abandoned efforts to screen everyone with symptoms last month when the response moved from 'containment' to the 'delay' phase. Instead tests were largely restricted to those in hospital, while those who suspected they were mildly infected were urged to self-isolate. However, ministers have been stung by comparisons with countries like Germany and South Korea, which are doing huge scale testing and appear to have much lower death rates. In an interview on ITV News last night, Sir Patrick said: 'I think the testing at the beginning was at the right level. 'At the beginning, Public Health England got off to a good start in terms of testing to try and make sure they caught people coming in to the country with it. 'I then think it's not scaled as fast as it needs to scale  and that's being done now. 'But I do think testing is an incredibly important bit of this. It needs to be done at scale, and it needs to be able to be done rapidly enough to look at outbreaks and isolate.' Advertisement

Several private labs - which have the capacity to conduct thousands of tests a day - have said their offers to help the Government have fallen on deaf ears.

Alan Thornhill, the UK head of Igenomix, a private IVF firm, said he had approached every branch of Government to offer to carry out coronavirus tests.

He told BBC Radio 4's Today Programme this morning: 'We have a highly trained team and accredited medical diagnostics lab ready to be repurposed for coronavirus testing.

'Ive made many calls many and emails to various people within the NHS, PHE, Department of Health, and so far no useful feedback or response.

'Weve been making these calls for about a month. We are ready to help.

'I understand youve got to offer a good test and a bad test is worse than no test at all, but the test we were planning to offer is the same one as what NHS and Public Health England is using.'

Health Secretary Matt Hancock last week launched a drive to get private laboratories to help conducting tests amid complaints about shortages of swabs and chemicals.

But Public Health England, a government body separate from the Department of Health, is facing the burden of blame for insisting on developing its own tests and analysing results in its own eight laboratories along with around 40 NHS sites before health chiefs U-turned on the centralised approach.

Academics and private sector scientists say they have the machines capable of interpreting swab tests if they were given the right information.

There are believed to be thousands of the machines - PCR machines - ready and waiting in laboratories around the country and many owners are willing to help test NHS staff to help them keep working.

Some have already taken matters into their own hands and begun testing medical workers in their local areas.

MORE TESTS PROMISED FOR CARE HOMES AFTER JUST 500 WORKERS WERE SWABBED Matt Hancock has promised to dramatically ramp up testing in care homes as it emerged barely 500 care workers have been tested so far. The Health Secretary pledged that all care home residents who show symptoms of the disease would receive a test. And for the first time, everyone released from hospitals into care homes will be tested, even if they show no signs of coronavirus. Mr Hancock said all social care staff who need a test will now have access to one with the Care Quality Commission contacting all 30,000 care providers in the coming days. 'I am deeply conscious that people in residential care are among the most vulnerable to coronavirus,' he said. 'We are doing everything we can to keep workers, residents and their families safe, and I am determined to ensure that everyone who needs a coronavirus test should be able to have access to one.' Advertisement

The scientists are capable of doing PCR tests, which look for evidence of the coronavirus inside people's DNA and are different to antigen tests, which also test for current infection but do so by trying to trigger a reaction from viruses in a sample.

One man running a fully-equipped lab in Leicester told The Times his firm had offered to help the Government but was now testing private clients on its own.

He said: 'We approached the NHS on March 17 to offer our assistance and said we were happy to use all our capacity for NHS work and we've been trying to get a response since then.'

Mr Dunn said the lack of smaller labs being involved in the testing effort was 'a bit of a travesty'.

He thinks his lab alone could work up to completing 1,500 tests per day. The tests in question are called polymerase chain reaction (PCR) tests and sample people's DNA to look for traces of the coronavirus's genetic material which have got mixed in, showing whether they are currently infected with the virus.

They rely on PCR machines which are widely used in biological sciences for their ability to examine DNA.

A former regional director of Public Health England (PHE), John Ashton, said the body's handling of the testing programme had been a 'fiasco'.

Scientists at the University of Oxford, one of the world's top institutions, previously said they also had not had their offers of help taken up by British authorities.

Matthew Freeman, a biologist at the Sir William Dunn School of Pathology at Oxford University said in a tweet: 'We have many people experienced in PCR.

'We'd love to help and have been trying to volunteer for weeks. Must be many university departments and institutes in similar position.'

Another lab at Oxford - the Butt Group, which studies genetics - added on Twitter: 'I echo this sense of frustration: we volunteered on day 1 and beyond being asked 3 times to list our expertise, have heard nothing.'

Marc Dionne, a researcher at Imperial College London, replied: 'Many from Imperial in the same position.'

Amid the backlash, some institutions are forging their own relationships with local NHS workers.

Last night, the government's chief scientific adviser finally admitted that the UK failed to ramp up coronavirus testing fast enough.

Health Secretary Matt Hancock k has launched a drive to get private laboratories to help conducting tests amid complaints about shortages of swabs and chemicals. But several labs - which have the capacity to conduct thousands of tests a day - have said their offers to help have fallen on deaf ears

Sir Patrick Vallance conceded that while Public Health England got off to a 'good start' during the containment phase, checks had not 'scaled up' quickly since then.

The UK effectively abandoned efforts to screen everyone with symptoms last month when the response moved from 'containment' to the 'delay' phase.

Instead tests were largely restricted to those in hospital, while those who suspected they were mildly infected were urged to self-isolate.

However, ministers have been stung by comparisons with countries like Germany and South Korea, which are doing huge scale testing and appear to have much lower death rates.

Health Secretary Matt Hancock has launched a drive to get private laboratories to help conducting tests, amid complaints about shortages of swabs and chemicals.

He has pledged that the UK will be carrying out 100,000 tests a day by the end of the month.

In an interview on ITV News last night, Sir Patrick said: 'I think the testing at the beginning was at the right level.

'At the beginning, Public Health England got off to a good start in terms of testing to try and make sure they caught people coming in to the country with it.

'I then think it's not scaled as fast as it needs to scale  and that's being done now.

'But I do think testing is an incredibly important bit of this. It needs to be done at scale, and it needs to be able to be done rapidly enough to look at outbreaks and isolate.'

A Downing Street spokesman said: 'The government has been very clear on the need to rapidly scale up our testing capacity and that is what we are doing.'

The spokesman said it was on course to meet the 100,000 daily target, with the new 'mega-lab' near Manchester now in operation - carrying out 500 tests - to join the Milton Keynes facility.

A Glasgow laboratory is due to begin work at the end of this week.

The Prime Minister's spokesman said a new lab, being set up by AstraZeneca, GSK and the University of Cambridge 'aims to carry out 30,000 tests a day'.

Matt Hancock has promised to dramatically ramp up testing in care homes as it emerged barely 500 care workers have been tested so far.

The Health Secretary pledged that all care home residents who show symptoms of the disease would receive a test.

And for the first time, everyone released from hospitals into care homes will be tested, even if they show no signs of coronavirus.

Mr Hancock said all social care staff who need a test will now have access to one with the Care Quality Commission contacting all 30,000 care providers in the coming days.

'I am deeply conscious that people in residential care are among the most vulnerable to coronavirus,' he said.

'We are doing everything we can to keep workers, residents and their families safe, and I am determined to ensure that everyone who needs a coronavirus test should be able to have access to one.'

Chancellor Rishi Sunak assured carers that they had not been forgotten amid mounting questions over why coronavirus deaths in care homes had not been included in the official daily statistics.

Lack of coronavirus testing in care homes is an 'unfolding horror' that could lead to tens of thousands of forgotten victims, experts warn - amid claims 'hidden epidemic' has already cost 4,000 lives

A 'hidden epidemic' of coronavirus in care homes may have cost 4,000 lives, experts warned last night.

They believe deaths are being hugely under-reported because of a lack of testing.

GPs are also sometimes reluctant to write Covid-19 on death certificates and figures from care homes are not included in the official daily toll.

The latest report from the Office for National Statistics says the virus killed 217 care home residents in England and Wales in the two weeks up to April 3.

But industry figures say the true count is much higher  potentially 4,000 since the outbreak started.

Retired NHS carer Dianne Harvey, pictured with late husband Peter, died in the hospital where she used to work, her family said. Mrs Harvey, 77, lived in the same care home as Reg Amison, and her family suspect that both of the pensioners caught coronavirus there

Campaigners and MPs warned yesterday of an 'unfolding horror' that could end up with tens of thousands of forgotten victims.

Ministers face urgent calls to get a grip and get virus tests for all staff and residents with symptoms, more protection gear and a Cabinet minister to deal with the crisis.

Nicola Richards, 46, who runs Palms Row Healthcare, said she has been 'pulled apart' by the illness, which is tearing through her facilities

Care home operators complain they are being overlooked, with desperate short - ages of testing and staff safety equipment making it extremely hard to stop the dis - ease ravaging their sites.

It came as one care home lost a fifth of it's residents and the manager says she is fighting a losing battle against the deadly pandemic.

Anita Peet, who is in charge of Wren Hall Nursing Home has criticised health chiefs for their lack of help in fighting the virus.

Ten residents died at the weekend from the virus, and a further 15 are currently in isolation.

She told The Sun: 'We are just having deaths all the time.

'Are people dispensable? It feels as if people are not worth saving. But that is certainly not how we feel.'

'It's getting harder and harder every day. We're fighting a losing battle.

'It is awful that people are not being able to prepare for this, to spend quality time with loved ones. It is making the whole situation more challenging.'

The care home has already paid out 9,000 for protective equipment, and getting a steady supply of PPE equipment was difficult.

She added: ''The first delivery (from the government) was 160 masks. I told them we were using 312 a day. I waited four days and got 400. The supply chain is completely useless.'

Ministers are coming under pressure to include care home deaths in the daily figures.

Mr Sunak and public health officials faced a string of questions over the issue at a press briefing last night.

Organisations including the Alzheimer's Society and Care England, which represents social care organisations, believe the care home death toll is being hugely under-played by a lack of tests.

Sir David Spiegelhalter, a Cambridge University professor, highlighted emergency laws that enable doctors to certify deaths without being present and risking infection.

Reg Amison passed away at the Bradwell Hall nursing home last month, after testing positive for the coronavirus

Official data showed the week ending April 3 was the deadliest since records began in 2005, with 16,387 fatalities recorded. A graph shows how the week compares to others since the start of 2020

TRUE DEATH TOLL COULD BE 12,000 There are no official figures on the number of care home deaths so far, but some estimates put the toll as high as 1 2,000. The London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine says evidence from France, Belgium, Spain, Italy and Ire - land suggests between 4 2 per cent and 57 per cent of all Covid-19 deaths happen in care homes. There have been 1 2,000 deaths officially in the UK so far, according to Government figures which only cover hospitals. It could mean there have been another 1 2,000 in care homes. The Office for National Statistics puts the number at only 217 but its figures are 11 days out of date at a time when the death rate has risen dramatically. Care England, which represents independent care providers, and Work and Pensions Secretary Therese Coffey both estimate the toll to be at least 1,000. The Mail's own audit has found 951 deaths, but many care homes have declined to give figures. The Alzheimer's Society estimates there have been 2,500 deaths Advertisement

Sir David said this meant they were less inclined to record the virus as the cause of death.

Mike Padgham, of the Independent Care Group, which represents care homes and home care providers, said he believed the virus could already have claimed the lives of at least 4,000 residents.

He based the figure on estimates that suggest the care home death toll is equal to about a third of the total deaths in hospitals as well as on care home deaths from other countries which he said would be no different to the UK.

'These people are in a very vulnerable group, they may have underlying condi - tions and they're in close proximity so it's being spread quicker,' he said.

'We don't think the Government are doing enough and now they've been caught out. They didn't fix the roof on social care when the sun was shining and now it's too late.'

The Alzheimer's Society estimates there have been at least 2,500 deaths from care homes based on the latest ONS figures from yesterday.

But this data is 11 days behind. The charity's Sally Copley said: 'It strikes us that these deaths from coronavirus are the iceberg, and the hospital figures just the tip.

'The evidence from Europe shows more than 40 per cent of all deaths relating to coronavirus occur in care homes.'

The Mail has compiled a figure of at least 951 care home deaths from officially confirmed fatalities by care home operators and local authorities or local media reports since the start of the outbreak.

Martin Green of Care England said up to three quarters of care homes 'had some element' of coronavirus.

Labour MP Peter Kyle MP said: 'We need a dedicated minister of Cabinet level who will bang their fist on the table and shout from the rafters about the horrors unfolding in our care system.'
Women in Northern Ireland will be able to have early abortions due to an emergency response brought in to tackle the coronavirus crisis.

The new scheme, launched by sexual and reproductive health charity Informing Choices NI, will cover the first nine weeks and six days of pregnancy.

It comes after frontline service providers voiced fears women in Northern Ireland who are seeking abortions could be left with nowhere to go because of restrictions on travel during the coronavirus outbreak.

While abortion is now legal in the country, there are not yet any services that provide terminations  meaning women must travel to the mainland UK or the Republic of Ireland. This has become a far more difficult and dangerous journey in the wake of the Covid-19 emergency.

Dr Audrey Simpson, chair of Informing Choices NI, said: We are delighted to provide this interim central access point to enable access to early medical abortion services in our local health trusts.

Celebrations as abortion is decriminalised in Northern Ireland Show all 11 1 /11 Celebrations as abortion is decriminalised in Northern Ireland Celebrations as abortion is decriminalised in Northern Ireland Pro-choice campaigners stood outside the Stormont Estate on Monday 21 October with the word "decriminalised" spelt out in front of them as some of Stormonts assembly members returned to the chamber for the first time in nearly three years. A group of Northern Irish lawmakers returned to parliament in a failed last-minute protest at the decriminalisation of abortion in the region. AFP via Getty Images Celebrations as abortion is decriminalised in Northern Ireland Attendees at a pro-choice press conference embraced one another ahead of the meeting of the Stormont Assembly on abortion rights and same-sex marriage in Belfast. Getty Images Celebrations as abortion is decriminalised in Northern Ireland A member of pro-choice group Alliance for Choice smiled as she and others marched in support of abortion rights in Belfast, Northern Ireland, following a pro-choice press conference. Getty Images Celebrations as abortion is decriminalised in Northern Ireland Members of pro-choice groups Alliance for Choice and Pro Life held demonstrations outside Stormont on Monday 21 October as a last-minute attempt to stop the decriminalisation of abortion in Northern Ireland was made by the Democratic Unionist party. Getty Images Celebrations as abortion is decriminalised in Northern Ireland A rally was held in Dublin City centre on Monday 21 October in celebration of the eminent decriminalisation of abortion and same-sex marriage. PA Celebrations as abortion is decriminalised in Northern Ireland Equal marriage campaigners Martha Brown and Louise McCullough celebrated at Maverick Bar in Belfast as same-sex marriage and abortion were legalised in Northern Ireland. PA Celebrations as abortion is decriminalised in Northern Ireland Members of pro-choice group Alliance for Choice made their way to Stormont carrying abortion rights signs. Getty Celebrations as abortion is decriminalised in Northern Ireland Kellie Turtle and Emma Campbell embraced as members of pro-choice group Alliance for Choice held a press conference in Belfast, Northern Ireland. Getty Images Celebrations as abortion is decriminalised in Northern Ireland Activist Ashleigh Topley wiped away her tears during the Alliance for Choice press conference on Monday 21 October. Getty Images Celebrations as abortion is decriminalised in Northern Ireland Members of Alliance for Group embraced one another after their pro-choice press conference. Getty Images Celebrations as abortion is decriminalised in Northern Ireland Abortion rights campaigners marched through the streets of Belfast ahead of the meeting of the Stormont Assembly on abortion rights and same-sex marriage. Getty

Accessing terminations will involve attending a local clinic to take the first abortion pill, while the second set of pills can be taken at home, Dr Simpson added.

We stand by women and girls and all pregnancy choices. Anyone can contact our helpline and be assured they will be offered non-directive information and, where necessary, referred on to services.

The service will be rolled out via existing sexual and reproductive health services in the Belfast, Northern and Western health and social care trusts.

The termination of pregnancies became legal in Northern Ireland in October after MPs in Westminster voted by a landslide in July to give women the right to abortion  marking an end to the procedure being banned in almost all circumstances, even rape and incest, and women seeking a termination facing life imprisonment.

A long-awaited new legal framework around abortions took effect in Northern Ireland from the end of March but its rules on terminations have come under criticism from campaigners who recently told The Independent they are not fit for purpose and will put vulnerable women and girls at grave risk.

Amnesty International welcomed the new measures around early abortion but warned the government that this does eradicate the need for measures that allow both abortion pills to be consumed in the home.

Grainne Teggart, Amnesty Internationals Northern Ireland campaign manager, said: We welcome this extremely important step forward which will provide a much needed local pathway to early medical abortion services. It is vital during the current pandemic that everyone who needs this service has access to it.

Recommended Women in England can now get abortion pills by post

This does not remove the pressing need for measures that enable both abortion pills to be taken at home, which will ensure that people in vulnerable situations and those unable to travel have access to this healthcare. We repeat our call on the government for this to be delivered urgently.

Recommended Abortion services at risk of collapse with women denied procedures

Women have to take the first of two abortion pills inside a health and social care service under current regulations in Northern Ireland  forcing them to travel to access the service.

Abortion providers across the UK argue the Covid-19 crisis means travelling for an abortion is no longer a safe or feasible option due to risks of women contracting the virus while travelling to have a termination.

Such journeys, which directly contravene government guidelines to stay at home, could lead to women potentially exposing themselves to coronavirus in crowded NHS waiting rooms where it is impossible to obey social-distancing rules.

This has meant measures to allow women to take both abortion pills at home are already in place in the rest of the UK where clinic closures have forced women to make longer trips than usual.

Additional reporting from wires
ELLSWORTH, KS (AP) - Inmates at a state prison in central Kansas threw trash from their cells and damaged security cameras during a weekend disturbance that was the second outbreak of prison unrest in less than a week. The state Department of Corrections reported Tuesday that between 125 and 150 inmates were involved in the incident Sunday at the Ellsworth Correctional Facility.
New Delhi, April 16 : After extending the nationwide lockdown, the Union government on Wednesday released a list of 170 hotspot districts, which includes all six metros and various other large cities. The list includes all nine districts of national capital.

All the major metros including Delhi, Mumbai, Bengalauru, Chennai, Kolkata, and Hyderabad are part of the list of hotspots notified by the Health Ministry. Tamil Nadu tops the list with 22 districts in the hot spots while Rajasthan and Maharashtra are second on the list with 11 each.

Among the list of hotspot districts with large outbreaks are the nine districts of Delhi - South, South West, Shahdara, South East, West, North, Central, East and New Delhi.

Andhra Pradesh has 11 hot spots including Vishakhapatnam, Bihar has one hot spot in Siwan, entire Chandigarh is included, Chhatisgarh has Korba, Gujarat has five including Ahmedabad, Surat, Vadodara, and Rajkot, Haryana has four including Gurugram, Jammu and Kashmir has five including Srinagar, Jammu, and Baramulla, Karnataka has three including Bengaluru urban, Mysore, Belagavi, Kerala has six including Kasaragod and Kannur, Madhya Pradesh has five including Bhopal, Indore, and Ujjain, Maharashtra has 11 including Mumbai, Pune, Sangli, Nashik, Thane, Nagpur, Aurangabad, Odisha has only Khordha, Punjab has four including SAS Nagar, Jalandhar, and Pathankot, Rajasthan has 11 including Jaipur, Jodhpur, Tonk, Jaisalmer, Bhilwara, Bikaner, Bharatpur, and Kota, Tamil Nadu has 22 including Madurai, Tuticorin, Chennai, Salem, Cuddalore, Coimbatore, Erode, and Vellore, Telangana has eight including Hyderabad, Nizamabad, and Warangal, Uttar Pradesh has nine in Noida, Lucknow, Shamli, Firozabad, Moradabad, Saharanpur, Ghaziabad, Meerut, and Agra, Uttarakhand has Dehradun, West Bengal has four including Kolkata and Howrah.

According to the government a hotspot which will be called a red zone would be a district or city that contributes to more than 80 per cent of the cases in the country or the state. Apart from these places that show a high rate of infection, that is doubling rate less than 4 days - will also be in this category.

According to the list there are 207 other districts marked as potential hotspots and the government has now tasked the states to ensure containment of outbreak in these regions. The only way that a district or region can be brought out of the red zone is when there is no new case of Covid-19 for at least 28 continuous days, once this is achieved the district would be called green zone, that is Covid-19 free area.

Union Health Secretary Preeti Sudan also wrote to Chief Secretaries of states and Union Territories, asking them to divide their states and UTs into two sections -- hotspot and non-hotspot areas.

States also need to identify hotspots based on doubling rate of confirmed cases. The exercise of identification of hotspots, she says, has to be done on a weekly basis, every Monday. She has advised strict containment plans for such clusters.

Segregating areas into three zones, she said: "Containment operation would be deemed over when there is no case reported in 28 days from an area after the last case tests negative. Hotspots (designated red zones) will be assumed to be undertaking effective containment activities, if no case is reported in the next 14 days (designated orange zones) and will be deemed successful in containment, if no case is repofted for 28 days (designated green zones).
A local BJP leader, also a school



teacher, was arrested on Wednesday on the charge of sexually abusing a 10-year-old student nearly a month ago, police said.

Kuniyil Padmarajan (45), a BJP panchayat president and district leader of National Teachers' Union (NTU), the teachers' wing of the BJP, was arrested from a Poyilur area near here when he tried to escape after seeing the police," an investigating officer told PTI.

The parents of the fourth standard student of Palathayi school, where Padmarajan was also working as a teacher, had on March 17 approached the police with the complaint.

"As per the complaint, Padmarajan had abused the child a few days before January 15, and on February 2. The parents approached the police with a complaint and we arrested him," Thalassery Deputy Superintendent of Police Venugopal told PTI.

The child's statement was earlier recorded before the magistrateand the child had narrated her ordeal to the doctor who examined her.The medical examination of the child had also revealed that she was abused.

"We had gathered all the scientific evidences against Padmarajan. The complaint says he had taken her to the school bathroom and abusedher," police said.

Even as the complaint was filed on March 16, police had not arrested him saying he was absconding.

The police came under strong criticism for not arresting the BJP leader accused in a Protection of Children from Sexual Offences (POCSO) case even after a monthwith all political parties protesting against the law enforcers for their attitude which they termed as shoddy.

The Congress party and the Indian Union Muslim League had protested against not arresting Padmarajan despite having strong evidence and child's statement.

The CPI(M) district committee had approached the Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan, who is also the home minister, againstthe alleged careless attitude of the police in a POCSO case.

The police have registered a case under necessary provisions of the POCSO Act and recorded the arrest. The BJP leader would be produced before the Magistrate soon.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
wdstock/iStock(NEW YORK) -- A class action lawsuit filed Tuesday on behalf of over a thousand Celebrity Cruises employees alleges the company failed to protect its crew members working aboard ships amid the novel coronavirus outbreak.



The suit comes less than two weeks after a crew member working on the Celebrity Infinity died after being medically evacuated by the U.S. Coast Guard. The USCG confirmed the employee had coronavirus-like symptoms.



"Celebrity egregiously failed to take even the most basic steps to protect its crew members from the rampant spread of coronavirus," Michael Winkleman, a Miami-based maritime attorney, said in an interview with ABC News.



The lawsuit claims that the cruise industry received an "early warning of how easily COVID-19 could spread on massive ocean liners" when the first cases were reported on Princess Cruises' Diamond Princess.



From Feb. 7 to Feb. 23, the largest cluster of COVID-19 cases outside mainland China were on the Diamond Princess cruise ship, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The ship was placed under quarantine for more than two weeks in Yokohama, Japan.



"Despite having notice that COVID-19 was and/or likely was present aboard the vessels," the complaint alleges the company allowed its employees to attend crew parties aboard the ships, eat in buffet settings and mandated their participation in shipboard drills.



Alexandra Nedeltcheva, 54, the plaintiff representing the class in the suit, has worked for Celebrity Cruises in the food and beverage department for the past 11 years. She joined the Celebrity Apex on March 2 -- one of the 14 ships listed in the complaint.



"With all of the information around the world about COVID and how dangerous it is and how people are dying around the world, I was a little surprised that no one was taking precautions," Nedeltcheva told ABC News. "No masks, no screenings."



Nedeltcheva said her supervisor denied employees' requests to wear masks until crew members from the ship were taken to the hospital.



The crew was eventually placed under quarantine on March 25, Nedeltcheva said. Less than a week later that she tested positive for COVID-19.



"We were wrongly put on the front lines to fight for our health and our well-being," Nedeltcheva said. "The majority of the food and beverage department is sick because we were the ones that are in constant contact with all other people on board."



Nedeltcheva said during the quarantine no one from Celebrity called to check on her well-being for 10 days.



"It wasn't easy to be quarantined on the ship," Nedeltcheva said. "You have no information, no help. It wasn't easy to think on a daily basis if you're going to be able to go home or if you are just going to die on a ship. Never in my life have I had such a long 30 days -- it felt like years."



According to the CDC, over the last two months outbreaks on three cruise ships have caused more than 800 confirmed cases of coronavirus in the United States among passengers and crew, including 10 deaths.



"COVID-19 on cruise ships poses a risk for rapid spread of disease, causing outbreaks in a vulnerable population, and aggressive efforts are required to contain spread," the agency said.



The CDC recommends that everyone should defer all cruise travel worldwide during the COVID-19 pandemic.



While guests have disembarked, and all major cruise lines have temporarily suspended passenger cruises in the U.S., many employees are still stuck at sea.



Nedeltcheva has since disembarked from the Celebrity Apex and is staying at a rental apartment in Sofia, Bulgaria. She said many of her co-workers are still on board.



"I pray to God that everybody's safe," Nedeltcheva said. "The guests are very important, but we're also human at the end of the day,"



On Monday, the USCG told ABC News it is monitoring 25 cruise ships anchored in U.S. waters with 18,900 crew members on board, and 26 cruise ships moored in U.S. ports with 20,900 crew members on board.



When asked for comment, Celebrity Cruises said it does not comment on pending litigation.



Copyright  2020, ABC Audio. All rights reserved.
The GM logo is seen at the General Motors Assembly Plant in Ramos Arizpe

By David Shepardson

(Reuters) - General Motors Co said on Tuesday it had started producing ventilators in the volume needed to treat severely ill coronavirus patients and would deliver the first batch of the medical equipment to the U.S. government this month.

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) has awarded nine contracts totaling nearly $2.6 billion to produce 137,000 ventilators by the end of 2020 for the U.S. Strategic National Stockpile, including a contract to GM worth $489.4 million for 30,000 ventilators by the end of August after President Donald Trump invoked the Defense Production Act.

Other contracts announced by HHS in recent days include a $646.7 million contract to Dutch health technology company Philips and others to General Electric Co, Hill-Rom Holdings Inc, Medtronic Plc , ResMed Inc, Vyaire Medical Inc, Hamilton Medical AG and Zoll Medical Corp.

Hamilton is receiving a $552 million contract for 14,115 ventilators, while Vyaire is receiving a $407.9 million contract for 22,000 ventilators produced by June 29 and Zoll is receiving a $350.1 million contract for 18,900 ventilators, HHS said on Monday.

HHS Secretary Alex Azar said in a statement the contracts "will mean we have more capacity to respond to the pandemic as it evolves."

GM, which is working with ventilator firm Ventec Life Systems to produce the medical equipment, said it would ship more than 600 ventilators in April.

It added that it expected to fill nearly half the order by the end of June and the full order by the end of August. The ventilators will be produced at a plant in Kokomo, Indiana.

White House adviser Peter Navarro said that "as these lifesaving ventilators roll off GMs assembly line as fast as tanks once did in an earlier World War, they will be rapidly deployed."

GM's shares closed flat. The stock has fallen more than 37% this year, as coronavirus-related lockdowns weigh on automobile sales.

(Reporting by David Shepardson in Washington and Ankit Ajmera in Bengaluru; Editing by Aditya Soni and Peter Cooney)
Boris Johnson announces the coronavirus lockdown on 23 March. A former UK chief scientific adviser has said the 'delay' imposing this has cost lives. (PA)

The UKs former chief scientific adviser has said Boris Johnsons delay in enforcing the coronavirus lockdown has cost lives.

In a scathing assessment of the governments response to the COVID-19 outbreak, Sir David King said every days delay has resulted in further deaths.

The latest official death toll stands at 12,107, while the number of people infected is set to pass 100,000 in the next couple of days.

Johnson imposed a full lockdown on 23 March, having initially requested people to work from home and avoid social venues on 16 March.

Sir David King is a former chief scientific adviser to the UK government. (Matthew Lloyd/Getty Images for ReSource 2012)

Sir David was the chief scientific adviser to Tony Blair and Gordon Brown between 2000 and 2007.

Its the job currently held by Sir Patrick Vallance, one of the key figures in driving the prime ministers coronavirus response.

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

6 charts and maps that explain how COVID-19 is spreading

Sir David told LBC: I'm very saddened by the predicament we're in. Why we didn't respond so much sooner once this epidemic broke out in China, I simply don't know.

I say this because in 2006, we published a report on actions needed to deal with a pandemic and in that report, we showed that if an outbreak occurred of any new virus of this kind anywhere in the world, within three months, due to air travel, it would be everywhere in the world.

"That of course is what has happened and it seems like we were unprepared and we didn't take action.

Sir David pointed to the Cheltenham Festival horse racing event on 16 March as he went on: We didn't manage this until too late and every day's delay has resulted in further deaths in the United Kingdom.

Asked if the government was negligent and asleep at the wheel, Sir David claimed the austerity measures of the David Cameron and George Osborne government led to the cutting back of risk management programmes.

Story continues

He said: It goes right back to 2010 when the government came in with a very clear policy to reduce public spending across the board, including the National Health Service.

Coronavirus: what happened today

What is herd immunity?
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Estimated global airline losses from the coronavirus pandemic have climbed to $US314 billion ($487 billion), 25 per cent more than previously forecast, owing to the severity of the economic downturn and a slower than previously expected reopening of international routes.

The latest forecast from the International Air Transport Association (IATA) is up from the $US252 billion figure given on March 24 and represents a 55 per cent drop in 2020 passenger revenue compared with last year.

Airlines have been battered by the coronavirus pandemic. Credit:Robert Rough

Traffic measured in revenue passenger kilometres is forecast to be 48 per cent down this year, compared with the previously forecast 38 per cent decline, industry body IATA said at a weekly online news conference on Tuesday.

"The recovery should be slower and the crisis deeper than we expected even one month ago," Director General Alexandre de Juniac told Reuters TV in an online interview.
One of Airbnbs competitors, Vrbo, has taken a lot of heat over the way its handled refunds during the coronavirus crisis. The company has essentially left it up to guests and hosts to hash it out. That meant Aurora resident Drew Nicholson was on the hook for about $2,500 for a couple of homes he rented in Brownsburg, Indiana, to house 36 people in late March, when both states were under stay-at-home orders. Nicholson wants his money back but the host refuses, offering a credit instead.
The hot buzz in the media circle is that Vijay's son Sanjay is not in India.

Yes, various media reports suggest that Sanjay is stuck in Canada where he has been pursuing his higher studies in filmmaking. Reports also added that Vijay is worried about Sanjay as the country has come to a standstill due to the coronavirus pandemic.
With the pandemic situation unfolding every hour, we, as a Virginia-based company, would like to do our part to help local SMBs in the DMV area to combat this coronavirus outbreak by offering our full-service HRIS, benefits & payroll solution, free of charge for all of 2020.

This isnt business as usual. We all are operating in unprecedented times, and in a fluid and unique global situation. The current health and economic crisis due to the COVID-19 outbreak in the US has left serious consequences for businesses, especially the small- and mid-sized ones.

The package of measures such as low-interest loans and the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP), from the U.S. Government to support small businesses through this crisis reflects the decisive action the country needs right now.

It's in times of great stress and uncertainty that our sense of purpose really matters. With the pandemic situation unfolding every hour, we, as a Virginia-based company, would like to do our part to help local SMBs in the DMV area to combat this coronavirus outbreak by offering our full-service HRIS, benefits & payroll solution, free of charge for all of 2020. Wed charge no fees and allow full access of UZIO platform to all DMV small- and mid-sized businesses.

We are all in this together as a global community. The best way to get through these anxious times is to focus on doing something each day that makes a small difference. All of us at UZIO are completely focused on enabling SMBs to be productive during this crisis.

Please visit us at http://www.uzio.com or write to us at info@uzio.com to get your account set-up with UZIO at Zero Cost. We are prepared at every level to be responsive and proactive across our services.

About UZIO

With over 150+ broker partners, 1700+ Employers relying on UZIO and 70+ carrier serving plans, UZIO offers an Integrated HR, Benefit Administration and Payroll platform for brokers, employers, and employees. UZIO enables business to manage HR and compliance with its user-friendly platform and advanced features.

Media Inquiry

Sunny Arora

Sr. Director - Head of Marketing & Inside Sales at UZIO, Inc

sunny.arora@uzio.com
ROSLAN RAHMAN, Contributor / AFP via Getty Images

Oil fell below $20 a barrel after the International Energy Agency said demand would slump by a record this year despite a historic production cut deal.

Futures fell as much as 4.5% in New York to the lowest since 2002. Oil demand will drop by over 9 million barrels a day this year, wiping out a decade of consumption growth, the IEA said, exhausting storage by mid-year. While Saudi Arabia and other Gulf producers have pledged to cut supply starting next month, they continue to flood the market in April.
COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo., April 15, 2020 /PRNewswire/ --

Dear Colleagues & Customers,

R9B owes much of its roots to the military and intelligence communities, where mission success is imperative. Overnight, we have seen COVID-19 upend all aspects of cybersecurity operations and introduce new vulnerabilities across the enterprise. Staying true to our history, R9B remains mission-focused in helping clients navigate these current and future challenges. As always, when it comes to protecting our customers' global networks, information and systems, failure is not an option.

First and foremost, we want you to know that our level of service and business continuity remains unchanged.

The fact that over 80% of employees have shifted to remote network access due to COVID-19 is not lost on cyber adversaries who eye this period of rapid transformation as an opportunity to exploit an expanded attack surface. They know IT and cybersecurity teams had little to no time to prepare for the dangers this crisis presented and will not hesitate to act if organizations fail to remain vigilant.

Times like these require a renewed commitment to the fundamentals of cybersecurity. It's not just about having the right tools, but also the right knowledge and experience to protect your organization and employees from new tactics and entry points. With that in mind, our team has assembled 8 Key Security Threats and Insights to consider with today's expanded remote workforce:

VPN Is Not Absolute Security for Remote Work. Having a "VPN solution in place" does not address the security requirements of operating on untrusted or unknown networks. Tip: Require employees to apply security updates, update anti-malware applications, protect system credentials and be vigilant against COVID-19 social engineering activities.

Having a "VPN solution in place" does not address the security requirements of operating on untrusted or unknown networks. Require employees to apply security updates, update anti-malware applications, protect system credentials and be vigilant against COVID-19 social engineering activities. Spear Phishing. Malicious actors use email campaigns to exploit fear and uncertainty. Tip #1: Train your teams to be extra vigilant regarding suspicious emails about COVID-19 cures, telehealth, medical supplies, or stimulus money and to avoid clicking on suspicious links or attachments -- just to name a few! Tip #2: Utilize trusted resources, anti-virus software, and secure DNS servers that automatically drop phishing domains.

Malicious actors use email campaigns to exploit fear and uncertainty. Train your teams to be extra vigilant regarding suspicious emails about COVID-19 cures, telehealth, medical supplies, or stimulus money and to avoid clicking on suspicious links or attachments -- just to name a few! Utilize trusted resources, anti-virus software, and secure DNS servers that automatically drop phishing domains. Watering Holes are a Threat. Adversaries use fake websites to steal Personally Identifiable Information (PII) or introduce malware. Tip: Proceed with caution and utilize free browser extensions for Adblock software and website security inspection tools.

Adversaries use fake websites to steal Personally Identifiable Information (PII) or introduce malware. Proceed with caution and utilize free browser extensions for Adblock software and website security inspection tools. Credential and Access Management. The WFH paradigm has scaled credential and access management, introducing major security issues and possible unauthorized access to networks. Tip: R9B's ORKOS product evaluates these accesses and mitigates threats. We have a new limited 3-month license to help bridge the gap and take back control.

The WFH paradigm has scaled credential and access management, introducing major security issues and possible unauthorized access to networks. R9B's ORKOS product evaluates these accesses and mitigates threats. We have a new to help bridge the gap and take back control. Telework Security Processes. IT teams must make firewall and Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) decisions to ensure business continuity, which might weaken network security. Tip: Require passwords that are strong and secure, use Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) when possible and conduct security assessments against newly configured services.

IT teams must make firewall and Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) decisions to ensure business continuity, which might weaken network security. Require passwords that are strong and secure, use Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) when possible and conduct security assessments against newly configured services. Database Security. As with Network Hygiene, IT teams may be forced to ensure business continuity by weakening database access control security. This may result in misconfigurations as teams rush to make corporate resources available. Tip: Understand methods of implementing proper security, especially if you are forcing deployment to cloud services, such as AWS, Google, or Azure.

As with Network Hygiene, IT teams may be forced to ensure business continuity by weakening database access control security. This may result in misconfigurations as teams rush to make corporate resources available. Understand methods of implementing proper security, especially if you are forcing deployment to cloud services, such as AWS, Google, or Azure. Supply chain vulnerabilities. "Shelter-in-place" mandates have created a massive demand on the supply chain where normal supply lines could be adversely affected. Deviations from typical procedures to maintain productivity and business continuity may unintentionally provide an attacker access to the network. Tip: IT teams must be mindful of potential attack vectors used to modify normal network software or hardware (i.e., firmware modifications to routers, firewalls, computers) with backdoors or malicious capabilities.

"Shelter-in-place" mandates have created a massive demand on the supply chain where normal supply lines could be adversely affected. Deviations from typical procedures to maintain productivity and business continuity may unintentionally provide an attacker access to the network. IT teams must be mindful of potential attack vectors used to modify normal network software or hardware (i.e., firmware modifications to routers, firewalls, computers) with backdoors or malicious capabilities. Teleconference and other software vulnerabilities. As WFH demands increase, reliance on teleconferencing software has increased and exposed vulnerabilities in some of these tools. Tip: Stay up-to-date on the security posture of the software you are using and avoid making meetings, teleconferencing links, and screen sharing public. Also ensure software is up-to-date.

Our Response to Work from Home Risks: Take Back Control

Time is a luxury organizations can ill-afford when it comes to adapting cybersecurity for the WFH paradigm. R9B recognizes this urgency, and we want to help bridge the security gap and take back control of network security with a 90-day license of R9B's ORKOS. To learn more, click HERE or contact us at [email protected].

R9B has a unique status as the Mission Qualification Training provider for multiple U.S. Government cyber units, state governments, and the private sector where cyber qualifications are paramount. Part of our efforts to give back during this time is to provide two advanced training courses at a discounted rate .

We are recognized as the best-of-breed for our custom-designed training programs, approach to education, expert instructors, and live interactive, distance learning options. Our cadre of professional educators are dedicated to the art of educating operators and analysts from foundation-level skills to technical mastery of the most challenging operational environments.

Beginning May 4, 2020 through June 6, 2020, R9B is offering Certified Threat Intelligence Analyst (CTIA) and HUNT Operations and Windows End-Point Data Collection & Analysis online courses with 20% off for the first 50 registrants. These courses are critical to staying a step ahead of increasingly sophisticated adversaries. Class participants who successfully complete the courses are given an official certification.

Certified Threat Intelligence Analyst (CTIA)

This five (5)-day Instructor-Led Training course teaches network defenders to collect, analyze, and apply targeted cyber intelligence to defensive operations in order to proactively act on and adapt to sophisticated and dedicated attacks by cyber adversaries. Original Cost: $4,600. Discounted Rate: $3680. Click HERE to register!

HUNT Operations and Windows End-Point Data Collection & Analysis

The first of three courses in R9B's HUNT Certification program is designed to train cybersecurity professionals to actively defend critical Windows systems. The course exposes students to a "Think like the Adversary" mindset in order to actively detect sophisticated and tailored adversary attacks. Original Cost: $4,600. Discounted Rate: $3680. Click HERE to register!

At R9B, we stand with our community and the critical mission to safeguard networks and the newly expanded attack surface from cyberattack. From our executive leadership, security operators to our sales and marketing professionals, we recognize the value of brand assurance for you and your customers during this unprecedented time. There are many reasons why these men and women chose to join R9B, but I have found that in the most trying times, the vast majority demonstrate their character by putting others before themselves. The current crisis is no different. R9B and our employees are standing up now to continue our mission.

Email us at [email protected] or visit root9B.com for more information. We stand by ready to help.

Stay safe and stay secure,

Eric Hipkins CEO, R9B

About R9B

Based in Colorado Springs, Colo., R9B is a leading provider of advanced cybersecurity products, services and training for commercial and government clients. Combining cutting-edge technology, tactics development, specialty tools, and deep mission experience, R9B personnel leverage their extensive backgrounds in the U.S. Intelligence Community to conduct advanced vulnerability analysis, penetration testing, digital forensics, incident response, industrial control system (ICS) security, and active adversary pursuit (HUNT) engagements on networks worldwide. R9B is a portfolio company of Tracker Capital Management, an early-stage investor focused principally on emerging technologies and companies with the potential to advance U.S. national security interests. For more information, visit www.root9b.com.

Media Contact:

Erika Hipkins

[email protected]

719-534-3994

SOURCE R9B

Related Links

https://www.root9b.com


Psychiatrists with Texas Tech University have created a free support group for local health care workers on the frontlines of the coronavirus pandemic.

The group meets daily over Zoom to follow social distancing guidelines, said Dr. Bobby Jain with Texas Tech, who leads the group. He said the attendees are mostly made up of staff from Midland Memorial Hospital, but the group is open to workers at Medical Center Hospital, Odessa Regional Medical Center and other health care providers, as well.

We know that frontline health care workers are struggling with unique stressors the general public might not understand or appreciate as much, Jain said.

He said some of those stressors include the intensity of working in COVID-19 wards, anxiety that they might become infected or infect family members, the emotional stress from losing patients and the stress of knowing some patients wont survive the illness.

The long-term effects of working on the frontlines during a pandemic can include depression, burn-out and post-traumatic stress disorder, Jain said.

Fatima Motiwala, a second-year resident at Texas Tech, said the group offers an outlet and teaches workers techniques to decrease anxiety, including breathing techniques. She said focusing on the positives, such as the patients who have recovered, can also help workers alleviate stress.

Unfortunately, a lot of media is focusing on the negative aspects of this pandemic, but there are also cases who have recovered, she said. So, I think its best to look at the positive aspects.

Motiwala said employees can learn to change their perspectives in the morning to set a more positive outlook for the rest of the day.

Do what you can do to protect yourself and your family. Take all the precautions, she said. But at the end of the day, you have to remember that a lot of anxiety is not going to benefit anyone.

Jain said he worries a stigma against seeking psychiatric help, even among those in the health care community, may prevent some from receiving the treatment they need. He said workers likely will experience more stress as the wave of patients slows down, when the adrenaline wears off and is replaced with fatigue.

A concern I have is that many of our health care professionals may not realize the stress they are going through, he said.

Meeting over Zoom can help combat this stigma, Jain said, because it offers meeting attendees some level of anonymity. Users can disable their cameras and choose any name as their username.

Those who have sought the help of the support group have complained of insomnia, nightmares and a fear of all that is still unknown about the virus, Jain said.

When you see other countries struggling to keep up with patients coming in, there is an uncertainty about it, he said. Being on the edge  will we be the next hotspot?

Employees have also expressed concerns over personal safety issues and not knowing if they could be exposed by a colleague who might be infected, he said.

Jain said he expects the group will continue past the initial crisis as more health care workers seek help to process their experiences.

Well continue as long as it takes, he said.

The group meets 7:30 to 8:30 p.m. daily. The Zoom link is available to workers through their employers.
Jussie Smollett had a sexual relationship with one of the Nigerian brothers who allegedly orchestrated his 'hoax' attack, a new source claims.

The anonymous insider told Page Six Wednesday that the Empire star, 37, and his purported 'attacker' Abel Osundairo also visited an upscale Chicago bathhouse together on multiple occasions.

'They used to party together and he [Smollet] had a sexual relationship with [Osundairo]. They went to this affluent Chicago bathhouse multiple times and they had to show ID. It's known as a bathhouse where a lot of affluent black gay men hang out,' the source stated.

The insider further claimed that there is likely to be records of the pair's visits to the establishment, and says they could be seized as part of Smollet's upcoming trial on felony disorder conduct charges.

Smollet says he was attacked by two masked men in Chicago back in January 2019. He claims they poured bleach on him, tied a noose around his neck and shouted racist and homophobic slurs.

An investigation later led police to Abel Osundairo and his brother, Ola, who allege that Smollet paid them $3,500 to stage the attack in a bid to boost his public profile.

Ola Osundairo is a personal trainer who appeared in an episode of Empire. Smollet and Ola reportedly became friendly and traded 'workout tips' via text message.

Smollet was subsequently charged with lying to police before the case was later dropped. However, Smollet was indicted again in February of this year following an investigation by a special prosecutor.

Empire star Jussie Smollet (left) and his alleged 'attacker' Abel Osundairo (right) had a sexual relationship and visited a Chicago bathhouse for gay men on multiple occasions, a source has told Page Six. Osundairo has previously denied insinuations he is gay; Smollet has not commented on the claims

Abel (left) and Ola (right) Osundairo - who originally hail from Nigeria - have dismissed insinuations that they are gay. Ola met Smollet on the set of the Empire , and the pair later texted each other workout tips. It is still unclear how well Smollet knew Abel before the alleged 'attack' in January 2019

Abel and Ola Osundairo - who originally hail from Nigeria - have dismissed insinuations that they are gay.

Smollet's lawyers, Tina Glandian and Mark Geragos, last year insinuated that there may have been a sexual relationship between Smollett and Abel whilst giving an interview on Good Morning America.

The Osundairo brothers sued the lawyers for defamation, claiming the comments put them at risk as their home country's laws state that homosexuality is punishable by up to 14 years in jail.

A judge later dismissed the defamation suit.

Abel (left) and Ola (right) Osundairo arrive at court in February of this year after Smollet was indicted again following an investigation by a special prosecutor

Smollett arrives at court in February of this year, after he was indicted on six felony counts of lying to police

The saga began on January 29 last year when it emerged that Smollett told police he had been the victim of a racist, anti-gay attack while he was walking home in the early hours of that morning.

He told police afterwards his attackers identified him from the show he was on, Empire, and called him both the N-word and 'f****t'. He said they beat him, poured bleach on him then put a noose around his neck.

Smollett went back to his apartment where his friend, Frank Gaston, was. It was Gaston who insisted they call police.

When officers arrived, the actor refused to hand over his phone.

He went to the hospital to be checked over but had no major injuries.

The Chicago Police Department vowed to investigate the incident with all its might, and celebrities around the world rushed to share their support of Smollett. He became a household name almost overnight.

But as the police investigation progressed, leaks began from within the police department that all may not have been as it seemed.

Smollet pictured suffering injuries to his face in the hospital after the alleged attack

The Chicago Police Department released videos of Jussie Smollett from the night of his alleged 'attack'. Pictured here is body camera footage of Smollett still wearing a noose around his neck as police arrive and begin to question him

Smollett poses for a booking photo in February 2019 after he was initially charged by police over what they claimed was a ''hoax attack'. The charges were later dropped. Smollet has now been indicted again following an investigation by a special prosecutor

As the controversy grew, Smollett - determined to make his case - went on Good Morning America where he cried and insisted he was telling the truth.

By then, Chicago PD had released grainy surveillance camera footage of two men walking near the scene of the incident itself which was among the only part of his journey not captured on Chicago's vast network of security cameras that night.

JUSSIE SMOLLETT TIMELINE January 29: The 'hoax' attack outside Smollett's apartment in Chicago occurs. January 30: A wave of public sympathy rushes over Smollett, until then a relatively unknown actor February 14: After a series of unfavorable leaks from the Chicago PD, Smollett goes on Good Morning America to plead his case. Unbeknownst to him, brothers Abel and Ola Osundairo are being interviewed by police after returning from Nigeria. February 20: Smollett is arrested and accused of lying to police. He is bailed out on a $10,000 cash bond. March 7: Grand jury indicted Smollett March 26: Charges dropped April 11: Chicago sues Smollett for $130,000 - the cost of the investigation August: Dan Webb is appointed special prosecutor November: Smollett counter-sues, alleging malicious prosecution February 11, 2020: Reports emerge that Dan Webb has charged Smollett Advertisement

Smollett unequivocally identified the two men in the grainy footage as his attackers.

Neither their faces nor skin color could be made out in it.

Unbeknownst to him while he was conducting his GMA interview, the Chicago PD was building a case against him.

They had identified the people in the video as the Osundairo brothers and had backed-up their belief by tracking the pair's movements in the days and hours both before and after the incident.

Smollett was eventually arrested and charged with suspicion of lying to police.

The brothers flew to Nigeria within hours of the January 29 incident and missed the media storm which followed

When they landed back in the US, police investigators were waiting to question them.

After hours of secret interviews, they told cops that Smollett had paid them $3,500 to carry out the attack as part of an elaborate hoax.

Smollett was then arrested.

In an extraordinary press conference afterwards, then police chief Eddie Johnson accused him of inflaming race relations in Chicago and of wasting police time.

He bellowed that Smollett had tried to leverage the 'attack' to get his bosses at Empire to pay him more.

Despite police outrage, prosecutor Kim Foxx was quiet.

The case then went to a grand jury which returned a stunning, 16-felony indictment that would have put Smollett behind bars for more than 50 years if he had been convicted.

By then, Foxx had informally recused herself from the case.

Her conflict of interest was that in the early days of the police investigation, she intervened at the request of Smollett's family and their friend - Time's Up CEO Tina Tchen - who wanted the FBI to take over the police investigation.

They said they were worried by the number of leaks that had come from the Chicago PD and asked Foxx to help. She said she would try.

After the grand jury indictment, the case stalled for a few weeks.

Smollet is pictured speaking about the alleged 'attack' on him in March 2019

Then, in March, Foxx's deputy Joseph Magats - who had taken over - announced the decision that the charges against Smollett had been dropped.

Foxx had intervened again, it emerged, and pointed to what they called 'alternative prosecution' whereby Smollett, a first-time offender, was let off with a $10,000 bail forfeiture and community service.

There was outrage and calls for Foxx to be investigated herself for prosecutorial misconduct.

As judges and special prosecutors for that task were tossed around, the city came out swinging in civil court. They sued Smollett, asking him to reimburse them for all the money they said they'd wasted investigating what they believed were bogus claims.

Smollett counter-sued, accusing the city and Eddie Johnson of malicious prosecution. He lost his job on Empire and became a pariah in the showbiz world he was allegedly trying to ascend through.

Special Prosecutor Dan Webb was appointed last August to examine what occurred in the case.

After the investigation, Smollett was indicted in February on six counts pertaining to making four false police reports.

Abel Osundairo is pictured following his arrest for his alleged role in 'staging' Smollet's 'attack'

Ola Osundairo is pictured following his arrest for his alleged role in 'staging' Smollet's 'attack'

He returned to court on February 24 and pleaded not guilty.

Smollet's attorney Tina Glandian issued a statement at the time saying: 'The attempt to re-prosecute Mr. Smollett one year later on the eve of the Cook County State's Attorney election is clearly all about politics not justice.'

However, Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot issued a damning indictment of Smollet saying: 'He committed a crime, and he needs to be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law, and we are going to continue to aggressively make him accountable for the wasted police resources that went into investigating what turned out to be a total hoax.'

The case is ongoing.
You can leave your umbrella at home for today, but light snowfall is in the forecast for Denver starting on Thursday, according to the seven-day forecast from drone-powered weather service Saildrone. The greatest chance of snow is predicted on Thursday at 58 percent, with the potential for light snowfall of 0.37 inches.

The immediate forecast also has mild temperatures in store for today. Temperatures will turn colder from Thursday to Friday, getting up to just 35 degrees on Thursday.

Winds are forecast to rise as high as 19 mph on Sunday, while today will be quieter with a top speed of just 14 mph. Skies will be cloudy today.

This story was created automatically using Saildrone's local weather forecast data, then reviewed by an editor. We also incorporate historic weather data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). Click here for more about what we're doing. Got thoughts? Go here to share your feedback.
Health ministry joint secretary Lav Agarwal said that 1,076 new coronavirus cases have been reported in the last 24 hours, taking the country's tally to 11,439 cases so far.

The Union health ministry on Wednesday said that all districts across the country will be classified into three categories based on the occurrence of novel coronavirus cases in each of them.

Health ministry bulletin:

Health ministry joint secretary Lav Agarwal, during the daily media briefing on coronavirus, said that 1,076 new coronavirus cases have been reported in the last 24 hours, taking the country's tally to 11,439 cases so far. While 377 deaths have been reported in total, 270 people have recovered from the infection, he added.

"The percentage of patients who are recovering is 11.41 percent. This rate has been increasing in the past few days," he was quoted as saying.

Agarwal said that the aim of the exercise of classifying the districts is to "efficiently manage the fight against coronavirus pandemic".

"The districts of the country will be classified into three categories, which are hotspot districts, non-hotspot districts with cases being reported from there and the green zone districts," he said.

Follow LIVE updates on coronavirus outbreak here

"The Union cabinet secretary held a video conference today with all chief secretaries, DGPs, health secretaries, collectors, SPs, municipal commissioners and CMOs in the hotspots and orientation on field level implementation of containment strategy was given," he added.

Agarwal defined the term 'hotspot district' as those where there are a high number of COVID-19 cases, "or rate of growth of cases is more", reports said.

Agarwal further said that around 170 districts have been categorised as hotspots as of Tuesday, whereas 207 have been categorised under as 'non-hotspot areas with some cases'.

He also reiterated that there is no instance of community transmission in the country yet. "We are seeing local outbreaks or clusters. We have implemented containment measures," he was quoted as saying by The News Minute.

Meanwhile, Dr R Gangakhedkar of the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) said that 73 private labs had been approved, and 22 private labs were currently conducting tests for coronavirus.

On being asked whether research had confirmed whether the COVID-19 strain had infected humans from bats, he said, "As per research in China, it was found that coronavirus might have originated due to mutation in bats. Bats might have transmitted it to pangolins, from pangolins it got transmitted to humans."

He added, "We also conducted surveillance, in which we found that there are two types of bats, and they carried coronavirus which was not capable of affecting humans. It's rare, maybe once in 1,000 years that it gets transmitted from bats to humans."

MHA bulletin:

In light of protests from migrant workers in Surat and Mumbai on Tuesday, the MHA was on Wednesday asked about the Centre's measures to make the workers aware about the extension of the lockdown.

In reply, an MHA official said that guidelines and advisories had been issued, The News Minute reported.

Additionally, the MHA said that revised guidelines for the extended lockdown included relaxations of the restrictions "in areas that are not sensitive or aren't hotposts, on two conditions: Lockdown measures and social distancing should be followed, and national COVID-19 guidelines should be followed," the report said.

With inputs from agencies
(TNS)  The HIPAA patient privacy law does not apply to law enforcement and first responders during the coronavirus pandemic, permitting public safety agencies to access protected health information in order to better prepare emergency response.That is if states allow them to.The town of Kittery was the first community in Maine to request to Gov. Janet Mills and the state's Center for Disease Control and Prevention that law enforcement and first responders be able to obtain addresses of confirmed COVID-19 cases , in order to properly prepare for emergency calls amid ongoing personal protective equipment shortages.Many rang the alarm about the town's request being a Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) violation, but it's not. "I wouldn't have access to it, the Town Council wouldn't," said Kittery Town Manager Kendra Amaral. "It would just be police, fire and dispatch."A HIPAA-covered entity may disclose personal health information to law enforcement without the individual's signed HIPAA authorization in certain circumstances, including when a law enforcement official is reasonably able to prevent or lessen a serious and imminent threat to the health or safety of an individual or the public.In the context of the coronavirus crisis, "The (Privacy Rule) recognizes that various agencies and public officials will need protected health information to deal effectively with a bioterrorism threat or (public health) emergency," according to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. "To facilitate the communications that are essential to a quick and effective response to such events, the Privacy Rule permits covered entities to disclose needed information to public officials in a variety of ways."Emergency services in New Hampshire and Massachusetts are already getting these addresses as a result of authorization by their respective state agencies.In Portsmouth, officials get addresses daily through the state's E-911 headquarters, Police Chief Robert Merner said last week. For example, he explained, if a first responder is dispatched to a specific address where someone has tested positive for COVID-19, an E-911 dispatcher will send that information to the officer's mobile data terminal.At present, that's not happening in Maine. Per state law, the state's CDC releases publicly only the gender, age range and county of residence of the positive individual, which is in line with federal policy."Every fire chief in southern York County is saying the same thing," said Kittery Fire Chief David O'Brien. "It's simple, if you don't have enough PPE to go around, you try to ration your PPE for the calls that you need it for."As of Monday, there were 633 confirmed coronavirus cases in Maine and 19 related deaths. York County has the second highest number of cases behind Cumberland County.Amaral penned a letter to the state on April 6 outlining the "devastating impacts" an undetected COVID-19 exposure could have on the town's lean-staffed emergency departments.She said obtaining these addresses are "vital" to protecting her first responders.In response to Amaral's letter, Robert Long, communications director for the Maine CDC, said in a statement to Seacoast Media Group, "As is the practice in most states, the Maine Center for Disease Control and Prevention lists confirmed cases by gender, age range, and county of residence. This system protects patient privacy as we continue to work with the Department of Public Safety to ensure that first responders have the equipment and guidance they need to do their jobs safely."On Monday, Amaral said the town had not received a formal response from the state, but it was her impression "the state is not receptive to that.""We are now trying to work every possible angle to make sure we have as much PPE as possible to protect the staff," she said. "We're talking to the state seeking additional PPE, the Kittery Together volunteer group is making masks for public safety, and we're working with (Portsmouth Naval Shipyard) and their 3D printers. We're also trying to buy it on the private market."She added, "if (addresses) are not going to be a tool, we need to get all of the others tools in the tool box."Amaral said she'd been watching commenters weigh in on social media about the town's request, many of whom suggested first responders should simply treat every emergency call like a positive coronavirus case."The idea of going into every site as if every person is infected is all well and good if we have sufficient PPE," she said.Last week, Merner said first responders in Portsmouth are wearing different kinds of PPE based on whether the person they're responding to is confirmed positive or not  an N95 mask with other protective gear if they are, and a surgical mask if they aren't.City dispatchers, Merner said, are asking everyone seeking a response from police or fire if there is anyone at the address exhibiting symptoms. If the answer is yes, they'll also wear an N95 mask to those calls.Amaral said Kittery has such a limited supply of PPE that "if we know we're going into an address where someone has tested positive, we'll feel a lot better using that Tyvek suit (than if they weren't).""We're trying to do everything there is to protect our first responders, police fire and EMS, everything possible,"' said O'Brien. "And this is just one more piece of the puzzle to do that and they've denied it."Last month, officials in Massachusetts issued an order allowing the addresses of positive COVID-19 cases be given to local boards of health and first responders. After the state of emergency is over, the order states, the addresses will no longer be attainable.
Chinese Premier Li Keqiang attends a special summit of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, China, Japan and the Republic of Korea (ASEAN Plus Three countries or 10+3) on COVID-19 via video link in Beijing, capital of China, April 14, 2020. (Xinhua/Wang Ye)

BEIJING, April 14 (Xinhua) -- Chinese Premier Li Keqiang on Tuesday proposed opening a "fast-track lane" for essential personnel on urgent visits in the fields of commerce, logistics, production and technological services among the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) countries, China, Japan and the Republic of Korea.

Li made the remarks in Beijing while attending a special summit of ASEAN, China, Japan and the Republic of Korea (ASEAN Plus Three or APT) on COVID-19 via video link.

The fast-track lane should be opened with all the necessary control measures in place, said Li, noting that this will be conducive to maintaining the necessary flow of people and goods and stabilizing the industrial and supply chains.

Li pointed out that the APT countries need to leverage their strengths in economic complementarity and strong business ties to further ease tariffs, eliminate barriers, boost the flow of trade and investment, and keep markets open to each other, in an effort to restore growth in East Asia as quickly as possible.
The West Bengal government has



decided to step up surveillance in slum areas in and around the metropolis to ensure implementation of lockdown norms, an official said on Wednesday.

The identification process of such areas is now complete, he said.

"These slums have quite a good number of people living there. They use common facilities such as toilets and washing areas. Also, these places have very narrow lanes and chances of the spread of COVID-19 are high. Therefore, adhering to the lockdown is critical," the health department official said, without giving details of the slums identified.

The state government has also opened 'fever clinics' in several hospitals across the city.

As a part of measures of the Kolkata Municipal Corporation (KMC), officials will be visiting these slum areas to find out if people exhibited symptoms of COVID-19.

As many as 17 people have tested positive for coronavirus in West Bengal over the last 24 hours, taking the number of active cases to 132, the state government said earlier in the day. Seven people have so far died due to the contagion.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
The Oregonian Media Group said Wednesday it will cut most employees pay for the rest of the year and require them to take additional, unpaid furloughs as the coronavirus outbreak takes a heavy toll on journalism in the state.

The company, which publishes The Oregonian newspaper and OregonLive website, said it will cut employee pay by 2% to 20% from May through December. The amount of the pay cut will depend on how much employees earn.

The media group will also require employees outside newsroom and production to take two weeks of furlough. Newsroom employees will take one week of furlough. The company is also suspending matching payments to employees 401(k) retirement programs from May through the end of the year.

Our commitment to this community is unwavering. I fully expect that we will continue with the coverage levels we have demonstrated in the past couple of weeks against the backdrop of this crisis, said John Maher, the news organizations president.

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Advance Local, parent company of Oregonian Media Group, is implementing similar cuts across the company. It also owns newspapers and websites in Ohio, Michigan, New Jersey, Alabama, Pennsylvania and New York.

Most news organizations are heavily reliant on local advertising revenue, which has all but vanished during the pandemic as restaurants and stores have closed, and as concerts and other public events have shut down.

The Oregonian Media Group is especially vulnerable to the downturn in ad revenue because it is among the few, large regional papers in the country that does not charge for unlimited access to its website. The publication began voluntary digital subscriptions last week and has attracted more than 2,700 subscribers thus far.

We understand the importance of a strong news report and were doing everything we can to make sure were able to devote resources to that, Maher said. But this is a business after all. It is.

The news industry is just one piece of the broad economic calamity that has accompanied the coronavirus outbreak. One in every 8 Oregon workers has been laid off in just the past few weeks, nearly 270,000 altogether.

News organizations across Oregon  from Astoria to Eugene to Bend to Baker City  cut jobs, furloughed workers or reduced their print run during the early days of the coronavirus outbreak.

More recently, KGW (Channel 8) said last week that its parent company is requiring most employees to take one week of furlough by the end of June. Willamette Week cut its print run in half in March, to 25,000 copies, and said earlier this month that it has laid off five employees.

Clarification: This article has been updated to clarify that KGW staff is required to take a week for furlough over three months, not three weeks of furlough.

-- Mike Rogoway | mrogoway@oregonian.com | twitter: @rogoway | 503-294-7699

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Consumption in China is showing strong signs of revitalisation against the backdrop of the epidemic, with the potential for catering businesses, retail and e-commerce industry being further tapped.

A woman selects commodities in a market in Zhengding county in Hebei province. (People's Daily/Shi Zhiqiang)

Car-hailing services have become increasingly popular, now that many business districts have resumed operation.

Data from Didi Chuxing, an online car-hailing platform, suggests that on weekends in March, the number of car-hailing orders to and from the Sanlitun business area in Beijings Chaoyang District increased by 258 percent compared with that in February.

Customer volumes in clothing stores, milk tea shops and appliance stores have basically returned to normal in the area.

Catering businesses have also received a boost, as Beijing is now allowing its citizens to eat at restaurants with certain protective measures, including checking customers health codes, taking their temperatures and disinfection.

There has also been growth in the e-commerce industry. During a promotion on March 8 of online marketplace Tmall, over 20,000 brands saw a year-on-year increase of over 100 percent in their sales.

The catering business, retail and e-commerce industry are believed to be the first to rebound against the impact of the pneumonia outbreak, according to Zhao Ping, director of the international trade research department at the Academy of China Council for the Promotion of International Trade.

Zhao explained that with companies resuming work and production, previously restrained demand for food will be stimulated, giving a boost to the catering industry. The retail business will be given new energy as shopping malls reopen, while the e-commerce industry has shown potential amid the epidemic and still has room for growth, Zhao noted.
Today we'll evaluate Cairo Communication S.p.A. (BIT:CAI) to determine whether it could have potential as an investment idea. 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.

First up, we'll look at what ROCE is and how we calculate it. Then we'll compare its ROCE to similar companies. Last but not least, we'll look at what impact its current liabilities have on its ROCE.

Understanding Return On Capital Employed (ROCE)

ROCE measures the amount of pre-tax profits a company can generate from the capital employed in its business. In general, businesses with a higher ROCE are usually better quality. Overall, it is a valuable metric that has its flaws. Author Edwin Whiting says to be careful when comparing the ROCE of different businesses, since 'No two businesses are exactly alike.

So, How Do We Calculate ROCE?

The formula for calculating the return on capital employed is:

Return on Capital Employed = Earnings Before Interest and Tax (EBIT)  (Total Assets - Current Liabilities)

Or for Cairo Communication:

0.077 = 104m  (1.5b - 125m) (Based on the trailing twelve months to December 2019.)

Therefore, Cairo Communication has an ROCE of 7.7%.

Check out our latest analysis for Cairo Communication

Is Cairo Communication's ROCE Good?

One way to assess ROCE is to compare similar companies. We can see Cairo Communication's ROCE is around the 9.4% average reported by the Media industry. Aside from the industry comparison, Cairo Communication's ROCE is mediocre in absolute terms, considering the risk of investing in stocks versus the safety of a bank account. It is possible that there are more rewarding investments out there.

In our analysis, Cairo Communication's ROCE appears to be 7.7%, compared to 3 years ago, when its ROCE was 4.4%. This makes us think the business might be improving. You can see in the image below how Cairo Communication's ROCE compares to its industry. Click to see more on past growth.

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BIT:CAI Past Revenue and Net Income April 15th 2020

When considering this metric, keep in mind that it is backwards looking, and 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. ROCE is only a point-in-time measure. What happens in the future is pretty important for investors, so we have prepared a free report on analyst forecasts for Cairo Communication.

Do Cairo Communication's Current Liabilities Skew Its ROCE?

Liabilities, such as supplier bills and bank overdrafts, are referred to as current liabilities if they 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.

Cairo Communication has current liabilities of 125m and total assets of 1.5b. Therefore its current liabilities are equivalent to approximately 8.5% of its total assets. Cairo Communication has a low level of current liabilities, which have a minimal impact on its uninspiring ROCE.

What We Can Learn From Cairo Communication's ROCE

Based on this information, Cairo Communication appears to be a mediocre business. But note: make sure you look for a great company, not just the first idea you come across. So take a peek at this free list of interesting companies with strong recent earnings growth (and a P/E ratio below 20).

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.
Challenge 1: Overbearing leadership

Challenge 2: Blind spots and biases

Challenge 3: Micropolitics

Challenge 4: Tunnel vision and mental fatigue

Responses to crises are to a large extent shaped by the shared sense-making, deliberation and decision-making that occurs in teams for policymaking, coordination and tactical response. Emergency plans position all manner of teams as crucial nodes in crisis response networks. For example, the U.S. National Incident Management System (NIMS) identifies emergency support functions and provides a template for a project organization that can be adapted to the context and demands of a particular emergency, disaster or crisis. Similar systems exist in Australia and New Zealand, from ministers down to the tactical response level.The key question is how to compose, manage and work in such groups so that they perform productively and remain fit for purpose in a crisis. While emergency plans often provide generic guidance for their composition, they do not provide guidance on how to manage and navigate the crucial interpersonal and inter-professional processes that support  or inhibit  problem-solving during a crisis.In crises, there is always a temptation for leaders to adopt a heroic and command-and-control posture. This may look and feel good externally and "get things done" speedily. But research is clear: It is a liability rather than an asset to team performance. These kind of command-and-control leaders end up dominating deliberations, constricting the information flow, promoting conformity and undermining the authority, expertise and critical thinking of team members.The best crisis leaders provide direction but remain aware that crisis success is generally co-produced. First, they should adapt deliberative and decision-making processes to the timeframes available, and encourage purposeful, focused dialog and inclusive engagement by all team members. They should ensure that the appropriate mix of professions, expertise and backgrounds is at the table and periodically recalibrate team composition in view of the evolving character and challenges of the crisis at hand. Second, rather than getting locked into a role conception as "the decider," they should provide broad direction regarding the mission and mandate of the group, without telegraphing personal policy preferences or likely decisions early in the process. Third, they should ensure that each team member feels empowered to contribute authentically, including voicing doubt, dissenting, and being given a fair hearing.Many crises have been mismanaged in good faith by top teams making fatal judgment calls based on false premises and misperceptions, rather than by willful pursuit of questionable policies. Crises are tough information environments. High uncertainty (including "unknown unknowns"), high fluidity, high stakes and high emotions may all cloud policymakers ability to make sense of rapidly unfolding situations. In the heat of the moment and under pressure to act quickly, our instinctive, emotional "System One" brains may thrive while our systematic, deliberative "System Two" mode of information processing is momentarily suppressed. This cognitive shift can compromise our ability to assess situations and purposefully consider potentially vital issues that do not fit our emotionally driven frames of reference. Group dynamics  for example the premature and excessive concurrence-seeking behavior associated with "groupthink"  can exacerbate such blinkered thinking. The challenge when deliberating and taking crucial decisions is to avoid such pitfalls.Each team member should be authorized up front to pull the "emergency brake through vigorous opposition at any time the group or key members slide into a questionable (incomplete, self-serving, catastrophized or outdated) definition of the situation or are leaning toward unworkable or unethical policies. Members with certain professional roles in the team (the lawyer, the virologist, the engineer, the emergency manager, the military or law enforcement officer, the communicator) have a particular responsibility to make sure that the group acts in ways that are legitimate and consistent with good professional practice relevant to the circumstances at hand.When crisis teams kick into action, "microclimates" develop within them and determine the quality of their performance. Importantly, these climates are partly shaped by the quality of the pre-existing relations between the political, bureaucratic and professional constituencies that team members represent. It may also be shaped by gender divides. Although the prevailing norm is to suspend politicking and unify in order to fight the crisis together, the reality is that under the pressure of a crisis, pre-existing fault lines and protective, competitive instincts may be amplified rather than attenuated. Just because circumstances dictate that individuals join a leadership or coordination "team" does not mean that members cast aside their set identities, situated interests ("where you stand depends on where you sit") and relational baggage.Do not ignore, or try to wish away, this type of micropolitics and let it fester in the shadows. Name it at the outset. Dont suppress it but find ways to normalize and even harness it in ways that allow the team to make balanced, well-scrutinized decisions that will be understood and accepted by other groups and agencies  from stakeholders who are dependent on group decisions to others who will implement decisions. Adopt a practice of "multiple advocacies" where representatives of different viewpoints on issues of strategic importance are given license to argue their cases during team meetings in a structured process  buffeted by their collective commitment to "fall into line" with decisions once taken. Team leaders act as "magistrates" ensuring the integrity of the process and setting (temporal or other) boundaries for arriving at a decision.High performance can operate on the edge of failure. Adrenaline and stress can enhance the ability of individuals to perform and even thrive, but they can also create a false sense of being able to cope if only we keep pushing ourselves. Separation from friends, loved ones and indeed many colleagues can be necessary in order to function, but prolonged insulation demonstrably leads to alienation and clouded judgment. Well-meaning commitments to the groups work and its key decisions may escalate and succumb to blinkered thinking that any decisions it has taken must have been the right ones. Particularly, in long-running crises (such as COVID-19), sheer fatigue and "bunker syndrome" can be the enemy of good team performance.First, teams should build in regular and short (20 minutes at a time will do) but purposeful "stop, reflect and reconsider" moments into their proceedings. During such "balcony time," members are encouraged to give voice to what they notice about their own and the teams mindsets and behaviors, and what might be questioned and improved. Second, all team members should have fallbacks/deputies who regularly attend team meetings. This enables the pacing of each individuals workload and pre-empts any illusion of irreplaceability and misguided sense of duty to gain hold of team members. Third, efforts should be made to ensure team members do not remain locked in bunkers or on executive floors. Force them to see "real people" (frontline staff, citizens, loved ones) regularly to hear and feel different voices and maintain a sense of perspective. Fourth, periodically bring in a respected outsider (senior peers, independent experts, experienced facilitators) to purposefully challenge the shared beliefs, norms and practices that have developed within the team. Such "critical friend" scrutiny may feel like a luxury when in fact it is a necessity.
One more person tested positive for COVID-19 in the state capital, taking the total number of coronavirus cases in Jharkhand to 28, a health official said.

RIIMS Superintendent V Kashyap said the person who tested positive hails from Ranchi's Hindpiri locality.

Till date, the total positive cases in Ranchi has gone up to 14 (all from Hindpiri), nine cases have been recorded in Bokaro, two in Hazaribag and one each in Simdega, Koderma, and Giridih districts.

The tally includes two deaths - one in Ranchi and another in Bokaro district.

The first case of COVID-19 positive in Jharkhand was detected at Hindpiri locality when a 22-year-old Malaysian woman tested positive for coronavirus on March 31.

Meanwhile, Chief Minister Hemant Soren told reporters that he had spoken to Union Health Minister Harsh Vardhan and urged him for more kits and labs to speed up COVID-19 testing.

Soren also lauded various organisations across the state for providing food to the needy people during the lockdown as he inspected a place where such people were being served food on Wednesday.

The chief minister said the government is keeping a vigil on mischief-makers and they would be dealt with strictly.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Bengaluru, April 15 : Karnataka Health and Family Welfare Department has launched a state-wide Critical Care Support Unit, linking all Covid-19-19 hospitals' ICUs to aim for zero mortality, Medical Education Minister K. Sudhakar said on Wednesday.

"The objective of the Critical Care Support Unit is to monitor Covid-19-19 patients in ICUs across Karnataka so that the hospitals are prepared for the potential onslaught of the virus and to achieve zero Covid-19-19 mortality in Karnataka," Sudhakar said in a statement.

Purported to be India's first such state-wide Covid-19 ICU monitoring support unit, the single platform will monitor the progress of each Covid-19 patient across the designated hospitals.

"We are able to capture the details of Covid-19 patients in ICUs in real time. This bottoms-up approach provides the necessary data for analysis by experts of the taskforce," said Sudhakar.

Jawaid Akhtar, Additional Chief Secretary, health department, said a centralised team of doctors from the department and medical colleges, interns from KIMS, MS Ramaiah Hospital and B.R. Ambedkar Medical College will monitor the platform.

"This team will work round the clock in three shifts to monitor patients admitted to the ICUs. At the end of each day, the Critical Care Support Unit will review the progress and implementation of the action plan and share it with higher authorities for further action," Akhtar said.

According to Akhtar, the support unit will also serve as a handholding facility for doctors in interior parts of the state, who are deprived of new technologies.

Pankaj Kumar Pandey, Commissioner, Health and Family Welfare Department, said, "As and when the ICU preparedness of a designated hospital is uploaded in the e-health platform, a medical officer will certify the same. Details of ICU patients will be then uploaded, including their treatment methodology." Later, the data will be monitored and analysed by the experts and then the nodal officer will be apprised of any deviation.

Further, data can be compiled and reported to the taskforce on a daily basis.

"This data will be of immense help as it will allow us to take precautionary measures to avoid escalations," added Pandey.

Similarly, the Karnataka government is also forming a team of experts from corporate hospitals in the city, consisting of cardiologists, pulmonologists, nephrologists and physicians to connect them to the patients in the districts for suitable treatment.
When Smithfield Foods closed its massive South Dakota pork processing plant on Sunday following an outbreak of COVID-19 illness, the company's CEO warned of the impact this and other recent plant closings might have on the nation's food supply chain.

At least 10 meat processing plants, including three over the border in Canada, have closed because of the virus, according to Reuters.

'The closure of this facility, combined with a growing list of other protein plants that have shuttered across our industry, is pushing our country perilously close to the edge in terms of our meat supply," said Kenneth M. Sullivan, Smithfield's president and CEO. "It is impossible to keep our grocery stores stocked if our plants are not running."

Despite some high-demand edible items that still can run low, such as fresh meat and bread, supermarkets say the food supply chain continues to function.

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"The food supply chain in the United States is healthy and resilient," said Hannaford spokesman Eric Blom. "We continue to work as quickly as possible to replenish specific high-demand items when a low inventory occurs; and were working closely with our suppliers to provide our customers with the products they need.

"Were also searching widely for new sources of supplies to bring product in even more quickly" Blom added.

"The food supply is not in jeopardy," said Mona Golub of Schenectady-based Price Chopper/Market 32. "We're not always getting 100% of what we order, but product continues to flow" into the stores, she added.

Grocers and their suppliers also had to switch gears as consumers suddenly started buying things that previously had seen limited appeal.

Take yeast, for example.

The Food Institute, an industry trade group, reported that yeast sales for the week ending March 28 were up 457 percent over the same period a year earlier, citing data from Bloomberg and Nielsen.

In the first two to three weeks after the pandemic, "packaged bakery companies ... were having great difficulty keeping up with production," said Golub. "People started baking. That continued into the Easter holiday."

Flour sales were up 155 percent, while butter sales climbed 73 percent and eggs 48 percent, the Food Institute reported.

Special Investigation 147 NY dams are 'unsound,' potentially dangerous Thousands of dams have not been inspected in over 20 years.

Meanwhile, FMI - The Food Industry Association - and the International Foodservice Distributors Association last month teamed up to redirect excess products, transportation resources and warehouse space to retail supply chains, now that institutional demand from schools, workplaces, restaurants and other large customers had dried up.

These are unprecedented times with unprecedented needs, but if we can think in terms of partnerships and problem solving, we can get through this together, FMI President and CEO Leslie Sarasin said in a press release. We are committed to replenishing supplies, but we know it will take cooperation, patience and consistency to deliver results.

FMI didn't respond to a request for additional comment.

There were some early hiccups between institutional suppliers and retail grocers. News reports last weekend described farmers who supply institutional customers plowing under their unharvested crops and dumping milk, even as supplies at the retail level were running short.

But Golub said such items as dairy, which were slow to be replenished after an initial surge in demand, are once again available. For example, Price Chopper/Market 32 was running a special on its PICS private brand ice cream at 99 cents.

And shoppers might recognize grocers' efforts to enlist new suppliers as they push to keep their stores stocked.

"In some cases, you'll see different brands or different sizes," she said. Selection might also be different, as manufacturers focus on the most popular products. "You might not see whole wheat bowties" in pasta, Golub said.

Blom of Hannaford, meanwhile, cautioned against hoarding as supplies are replenished.

"We would encourage customers to purchase only what they need," he said. "We anticipate a return to more regular buying habits and patterns in the coming days."
Gov. J.B. Pritzker says he has had some preliminary discussions with industry leaders on how to go about re-opening the state when it is time to lift the existing stay-at-home order, which has shuttered large swathes of the states economy.

The governor said the priority would be the health of employees.

I have been talking to industry leaders because the most important thing is safety and health, Pritzker said. People are going back to work and, if we are going to open up opportunity for people, will they feel safe?

Pritzker said it is possible employees would be asked to wear a mask when they return to work.

Pritzker said that adjustments could be made to the states stay-at-home order after May 1, depending on a number of factors.

I think its likely that there will be adjustments to the orders that weve put in place, the governor said in response to a question about whether schools would reopen next month.

Pritzker said a return to normalcy would require a treatment for COVID-19, widespread testing, herd immunity, and improved contract tracing. With none of those things likely to be in place by the end of the month, re-opening Illinois could take time.

I think nothing that happens next month or the month after that is going to be exactly the way it was four months ago or five months ago, so the question is really not could you do this or that, the question is how would you do it practically speaking so that you dont have many more people getting infected? he said.

Pritzker also said no decision had been made on whether to reopen schools.

Statewide, health officials have confirmed a total of 23,247 cases, including 868 deaths, as of Tuesday.
Ashley Amon and her daughters, Alysha, 2, and Alexandria, 4, who are currently homeless, attend an Easter service with fellow worshipers in their cars in a parking lot in Santa Ana. (Christina House / Los Angeles Times)

On Easter Sunday at a church in Fontana, a pastor delivered a fiery sermon to worshipers who crowded the pews in defiance of government orders prohibiting in-person services even on this holiest of days.

The next day, the pastor, Patrick Scales of the Shield of Faith Family Church, filed a lawsuit contesting the stay-at-home orders as a violation of 1st Amendment religious freedom.

Were not going to stay home. We went to the house of God anyway, Scales thunders in a video of the Easter service posted on Facebook. We were threatened by jail. We were threatened by a fine. I chose to come worship.

People in the pews cheered and applauded, many wearing masks and gloves but appearing to be closer to each other than the six-foot distance mandated by officials to stop the spread of the coronavirus that has killed more than 126,000 worldwide.

Much about the COVID-19 pandemic is unprecedented, from the mass closure of schools and restaurants to the social distancing rules requiring that religious services be held online only.

The U.S. Constitution is also being tested in unprecedented ways, with religious leaders from Mississippi to Kentucky to San Diego County suing their governments, asserting that they are being treated differently from businesses that can remain open, such as supermarkets and liquor stores.

Other plaintiffs in the lawsuit include one of Scales parishioners, Wendy Gish, and two Riverside County pastors, James Moffatt of Church Unlimited in Indio and Brenda Wood of Word of Life Ministries International Inc. in Riverside.

Moffatt was fined $1,000 for conducting a church service on Palm Sunday, according to the complaint.

MaryAnn Lawson collects prayer requests from people gathering in their cars for a drive-in service in Santa Ana. (Christina House / Los Angeles Times)

On Easter Sunday, his church held a drive-in service, which was permitted by Riverside County only for that weekend.

Photos on the churchs Facebook page show cars lined up in the parking lot, where a live band performed. Some worshipers emerged into the sunshine, standing on the curbs or in the narrow gaps between cars.

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It doesnt work for the government to tell you or me that its good enough to load up Zoom and your high-speed internet and do your service remotely, said the plaintiffs lead attorney, Harmeet Dhillon. Thats incredibly arrogant and out of touch.

Dhillon noted that in rural areas, many people do not have internet access. On Tuesday, she filed for a temporary restraining order to obtain a ruling on whether the defendants, who include Gov. Gavin Newsom and officials from Riverside and San Bernardino counties, should allow the churches to resume in-person services.

A hearing before U.S. District Judge Jesus G. Bernal is scheduled for June 1.

Newsoms office did not respond to a request for comment.

A spokeswoman for Riverside County said the county is reviewing the lawsuit but could not comment because of the ongoing litigation.

San Bernardino County officials were also reviewing the complaint and will continue to act in the best interests of the publics health and safety, a spokesman said.

Constitutional law scholars interviewed by The Times were divided on the strength of Scales case.

During an infectious disease pandemic, government officials have a public health interest in restricting peoples movements, which can clash with constitutional rights such as freedom of religion, speech and assembly.

Barry McDonald, a professor at Pepperdines Caruso School of Law, said the plaintiffs have a decent claim.

The government must have a compelling reason to treat churches differently from other organizations it has deemed essential, he said.

If churches agree to maintain safe social distancing, according to McDonald, they could argue for a carve-out like supermarkets and pharmacies.

These are important material needs that must be fulfilled, important social needs  courts, day care, child care, he said. You could say spiritual needs are essential and necessary as well.

Aaron Caplan, a professor at Loyola Law School and a former attorney at the American Civil Liberties Union of Washington, questioned why the plaintiffs sued so quickly instead of waiting to see how much law enforcement would crack down on them.

But he agreed with McDonald that the government must have a really good reason for not putting churches on the list of businesses that can still operate.

Maybe the best thing to do would be to design religious exceptions, because religion is important to people, he said. Do we want the government to say we think the grocery store and the drugstore are more important than your religion?

In Kentucky, a federal judge granted the On Fire Christian Centers request for a temporary restraining order against the city of Louisville so it could hold drive-in services.

Because Louisville allows drive-through liquor services, it must allow church services, U.S. District Judge Justin R. Walker ruled.

But if beer is essential, so is Easter, Walker wrote.

In San Diego, a judge came out on the other side, rejecting a churchs request for a temporary restraining order so it could hold Easter services.

The right to freedom of religion doesnt include the right to expose the community to communicable disease, U.S. District Judge Cynthia A. Bashant said.

In Mississippi, U.S. Atty. Gen. William Barr went to bat for a church whose members were fined $500 each for attending parking lot services while drive-in restaurants could continue to operate.

The city appears to have thereby singled churches out as the only essential service ... that may not operate despite following all  recommendations regarding social distancing, he wrote in a news release announcing that the Department of Justice had filed a brief in support of the church.

Lawrence Sager, a professor at the University of Texas at Austin School of Law and visiting professor at UCLA School of Law, said the Riverside and San Bernardino county churches did not provide strong evidence of unconstitutional religious discrimination.

Whereas people cannot rely exclusively on online deliveries of food and medicine, churches can deliver their messages online, he said.

They can behave virtually and do what needs to be done virtually. You cant give someone food virtually or medicine virtually, he said. I think that makes the case that churches arent being treated fairly a weak case  a very weak case.

But on Easter in Fontana, Scales recited the 1st Amendment and said the church was facing the enemy as best it could by taking legal action.

We cant roll over and play dead. The devils playing for keeps, he said. Were living in the last days. Its time to stand up  hallelujah  not to run and hide.

The applause from the pews intensified. People rose to their feet, waving hands in rubber gloves.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.
Nigerias minister of foreign affairs, Geoffrey Onyeama, has said the country does not have the capacity and resources to absorb Nigerians abroad who want to come home immediately due to the crisis caused globally by the coronavirus pamdemic.

The minister disclosed this on Tuesday during Channels TV Politics Today show while speaking on the alleged ill-treatment of Nigerian citizens in China.

The minister said the country currently does not have the capacity and resources to absorb Nigerians abroad who want to come home at once, as it would be necessary for returnees to be subjected to a 14-day quarantine treatment before integrating them into the country.

This is a necessary prerequisite adopted by nations to curb the rapid spread of the coronavirus pandemic.

We just dont have the capacity and resources to absorb all of them immediately, so we would have to probably do it in stages. Some people are of the opinion that tests should be carried out before they leave. We know in some countries it is difficult to get testing done, but hopefully, we would be in a position to start sending out planes in a matter of days, he said.

He also said It is not as simple as people think it is. We have to make provision for isolation centres for them in Nigeria here, where they would be isolated for 14 days.

We have about 2,000 Nigerians who want to come back. Theyre those in the U.S., UK, United Arab Emirate, China and (we have) 200 in Sudan, as well as students, he said.

Mr Onyeama also said the authorities are currently liaising with some airlines as well as the Nigerian Emergency Management Agency, to ensure the safe arrival of Nigerian citizens abroad.

Earlier, the Nigerian government had pledged to assist citizens who want to return home but said such returnees would bear the cost of the trip.

PREMIUM TIMES also reported how Nigerians and other Africans were harassed in China.

However, Mr Onyeama blamed the tension on poor communication between the Chinese government and Nigerians.
Over 17,000 people have now died in France from COVID-19, a top health official said on Wednesday, but the the total number currently hospitalised has fallen for the first time since the epidemic began.

A total of 17,167 people are now confirmed to have died in France in hospitals and nursing homes, Jerome Salomon told reporters, compared with a total toll of 15,729 the day earlier. But he said the difference did not represent a daily toll due to the delayed collation of data from the Easter weekend.

In better news, he said there were currently 513 fewer coronavirus patients in hospital since the day before. "It remains very high but... the total shows for the first time a fall thanks to people who have been discharged.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
A third of the nearly 2,000 sailors who were aboard France's aircraft carrier and support craft when a coronavirus outbreak occurred at sea have tested positive for the virus, the defence ministry said Wednesday.

With two-thirds of test results in, 668 sailors from the Charles-de-Gaulle and escort vessels in its battle group are confirmed to have the virus, it said.

Thirty-one were being treated in hospital, and one was in intensive care, a ministry statement said.

Last week, it was decided to bring the Charles-de-Gaulle home 10 days early from a deployment in the Atlantic after some crew members showed coronavirus symptoms. The carrier which had helicopters and fighter jets on board, was accompanied by two frigates -- one for aerial defence and the other an anti-submarine vessel.

Sailors from the Charles-de-Gaulle, one of the frigates and the pilots who returned the aircraft to their respective bases, are all placed in isolation for 14 days, the ministry said.

There had been no virus outbreak on the other frigate. So far, 1,767 sailors from the battle group have been tested for the virus, the vast majority from the aircraft carrier itself, said the ministry statement.

Some thirty percent of results are still outstanding, meaning more than half of those tested so far have come back positive. The Charles-de-Gaulle, which can transport about 2,000 sailors, had been deployed in the Atlantic as part of a NATO exercise after taking part in Operation Chammal that seeks to contain the Islamic State group in Iraq and Syria.

The vessels in the battle group are being disinfected, the ministry said.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
The selfishness shown by Ashraf Ghani government is being demonstrated by the Modi sarkar also in the Occupied Kashmir and Kashmir region.





by Ali Sukhanver writing from Islamabad





Corona pandemic must be an eye-opener to all those who are misguided by the notion that there would be no decline to their authority and influence. Epidemics never spare anyone on the basis of status and rank. This horrible calamity is as dangerous for Pakistan, US, UK as it is for Ashraf Ghani, Narendra Modi and for the distressed people of Jammu and Kashmir and even for those who are behind the bars in Afghan jails. This is the time we all must express kindness and compassion for everyone around us. The death toll from Corona Virus is rapidly increasing. Experts on the matter are of the opinion that this disaster could wipe-off millions of people from the planet. Muslims or Christians, Hindus or the Jews; this pandemic is going to spare no one. The only way to defeat this horrible epidemic is to stay united and face it with all possible courage and determination keeping away all differences on the basis of religion, region and political divide. Iran is also a country which needs international sympathy at this critical time. Under the instruction and pressure of the western countries, so many sanctions and restrictions have been imposed on Iran. In the larger interest of the world peace and prosperity, all these sanctions must be lifted up as soon as possible so that the Iranis could do something to save their country from the hazards of Corona.













Recently different Taliban groups have called on international health and rights organizations to seriously consider the condition of prisons and the prisoners in Afghanistan with particular reference to the spreading Corona pandemic. They have warned that the corona virus is threatening at least 40,000 prisoners across Afghanistan. Luckily Afghanistan is still among the few countries which are facing a comparatively low rate of corona virus cases but there are chances of getting the situation serious as the country doesnt have the required resources to counter this brutal pandemic. Najmusama Shefajo, an obstetrician-gynecologist said in a recent statement, A doctor or a nurse may be able to buy some hand sanitizer and gloves for their homes, but we have hospitals in Kabul that don't even have clean water for doctors to wash their hands. Shefajo further said that if doctors lack the supplies to guarantee their own hygiene, it will be impossible for patients to place their trust in them. In short the situation in the war-torn Afghanistan would certainly become a serious threat if precautionary measures are not taken in time. Afghanistan being a mountainous area mostly comprises of scattered population. Moreover, the women in that society usually remain confined to their houses. There are very less probabilities of spreading this contagious disease as the Afghan society is already a social distance observing society but the prisons and the prisoners are, however, a serious threat.





Unfortunately the Ashraf Ghani government is not trying to understand the situation. It seems adamant on not releasing the prisoners in spite of the peace-deal signed with the United States late last month. Experts on regional affairs are of the opinion that the stubborn attitude of the Ashraf Ghani government would simply push this already troubled region into another hell; the hell of corona. It is an old saying that forces of nature are always hostile to man. Man could never defeat these hostile forces but with wisdom, unity and determination. Unfortunate are those who get no lesson from such type of calamities and disasters. In civilized world such indifference to the rage and wrath of hostile forces of nature is called selfishness.





The selfishness shown by Ashraf Ghani government is being demonstrated by the Modi sarkar also in the Occupied Kashmir and Kashmir region. According to various newspapers and TV channels, the Modi sarkar has recently approved a new Jammu and Kashmir Reorganization Order 2020, no doubt an Order which would make the lives of the local people more painful and agonizing. Commonly this new order is known as the New Domicile Order also. According to this Order all Indians, who have resided for a period of 15 years in the occupied region or have studied for a period of seven years and appeared in Class 10/12 examinations there, would be eligible for domicile of the valley. In other words those who fulfill the new criteria will become permanent residents of Jammu and Kashmir. The logic behind implementation of this new law is simply to benefit the children of Indian officials, who have served in the valley for a total period of 10 years. Most of them would be certainly from the Indian Army and other security forces. Here the timing chosen for the implementation of this law is also noticeable; because of the Corona disaster, the helpless people of Kashmir are already in a serious trouble. In short Modi and Ashraf Ghani, both are treating their own people with the same cruel selfish behaviour. Such cruelties add to the wrath and rage of the natural calamities like Corona. Our ruthlessness would bring the end of this world closer.
KaviAR Gate is an educational and enlightening new tool that harnesses the power of augmented reality, allowing the consumer to travel through a virtual doorway to their choice of incredible destinations.

KaviAR Tech, an augmented reality-focused startup headquartered in Paris, announced its new app KaviAR Gate, the worlds first augmented reality teleportation application tool allowing one to visit exotic destinations right from their smartphone.

The KaviAR Gate demonstration may be viewed at https://gate.kaviar.app and downloaded at the Apple Store (iPhone here: https://apps.apple.com/fr/app/kaviar-gate-ar-portal-360/id1502873747 and Android here: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.kaviar.gate&hl=en_US).

KaviAR Gate is an educational and enlightening new tool that harnesses the power of augmented reality, allowing the consumer to travel through a virtual doorway to their choice of incredible destinationsfrom an idyllic French beach to the legendary Grand Canyon, stated Michel Ruiz, co-founder of KaviAR Gate. During todays global health crisis, the temptation to step outside has never been stronger as the beautiful spring weather arrives and upcoming vacations have been cancelled. KaviAR Gate allows you the chance to discover new places, have fun with AR and take a vacationat a time when most people could truly use onefrom wherever you are, allowing your mind to relax, wander and explore.

The newly-available KaviAR Gate app is free to download and gives one the ability to travel through a virtual doorway in their living room to breathtaking locations across the world, from stunning beaches in Madagascar, Tobago Cay and South Carolina to a casino in Las Vegas, a cathedral in Italy and the Angkor temple in Thailand, to the Andean Lagoons in Peru, the Lions Head and Table Mountain Peaks in South Africa, and the incredible Eiffel Tower and Seine River in Parisand many others.

In addition to helping consumers discover new virtual destinations, the KaviAR Gate app presents a valuable marketing opportunity for tourism professionals and operators, where they can promote and highlight key tourist attractions, cities, and destinations. It is also a beneficial way for travel-industry businesses to showcase their services and offerings, harnessing the power of augmented reality to feature any travel environment.

An immersive, 360-degree experience, possible thanks to augmented reality technology, KaviAR Gate allows the consumer to become immersed in a real photo or video setting wherever they are.

KaviAR Gate aims to introduce people not just to incredible destinations, but to the power of augmented reality, Mr. Ruiz stated. KaviAR envisions a future where consumers smartphones become an interface, a filter between the real world and the virtual world, and a source of better-quality experiences that lead to richer experiences and greater success. Since 2018, KaviAR has pioneered augmented reality technology to bring its benefits to as many people as possible.

About KaviAR Gate

KaviAR Gate is a new augmented reality application, allowing consumers to virtually visit global destinations through a virtual doorway, right on their smartphones. Simply download the app, select your destination, position your doorway, and walk through the gateand you have arrived. KaviAR Gate is a product of KaviAR Tech, an augmented reality software startup. For more information, please visit https://gate.kaviar.app.

About KaviAR Tech

Founded by Michel Ruiz, Anthony Merzouki and Wajdi Ben Rabah, KaviAR Tech is an augmented reality market software startup focusing on augmented reality content. With the use of the KaviAR application, anyone can place content in augmented reality though the screen of their smartphone. While the majority of North American and European consumers use a smartphone, augmented reality solutions have not lived up to their potential. KaviAR helps companies and brands to place the content of their choice, including images, video, a web link or 3D objects, in augmented realityon any medium. KaviAR Techs technology is able to recognize any image that has been augmented using the software; there is no need for a QR code or to modify existing images. From street signs to company logos to billboards and business cards, companies can create the augmented reality experience of their choice. KaviAR envisions a future where consumers smartphones become an interface, a filter between the real world and the virtual world, where augmented reality both educates and inspires, transforming the world for the better. For more information, please visit https://www.kaviar.app.
The Alabama Media Group today announced it will cut most employees pay for the rest of the year and require them to take additional, unpaid furloughs as a result of the coronavirus pandemic effects on the news industry.

The company, which owns Al.com and publishes The Birmingham News, The Huntsville Times and the Press Register in Mobile, announced it will require employees outside newsrooms and production to take two weeks of furlough. Newsroom employees will take one week of furlough.

The company also announced it will cut employee pay between 2 percent and 20 percent from May through December. The percentage is higher for employees who earn more.

Advance Local, parent company of the Alabama Media Group, is implementing similar cuts across the company. It also owns media companies and websites in Oregon, Ohio, Michigan, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and New York.

The pandemic effect has been felt across every sector of life, affecting advertising revenue from retail stores to restaurants to public events. This happened at the same time that more than 200,000 Alabamians have filed for unemployment over the last month.
Michigan prisoners are muffling coughs and riding out fevers cocooned in bunks. And there are accounts of inmates quietly hoarding newly available cleaning supplies and disinfectant.

They dont want administrators to know theyre sick, that they may have the coronavirus, but they want to feel safe.

Joe L. Kearney, an inmate at Parnall Correctional Facility in Jackson, hid his illness from prison staff until his last breaths. On April 1, he became Michigans first inmate to die of COVID-19.

He did not tell health care he was having any symptoms and did not tell any staff he was having issues, said Chris Gautz, a state prison spokesman. Kearney was found unconscious in his cell, was quickly taken to the hospital and reported dead later that day.

A postmortem test revealed he was positive for the virus.

The Michigan Department of Corrections is engaged in a seemingly futile battle with a virus that lingers in the air and thrives in close quarters.

As of April 14, eleven inmates and two employees who tested positive for COVID-19 had died; 454 inmates and 175 prison staff had tested positive.

Note: Some plots overlap nearby locations. Use the + button to zoom into locations to reveal all prisons.

Its not just a problem in Michigan.

Prisons and jails across the country have become COVID-19 hotspots, prompting a $2 billion federal program to fund coronavirus testing and early-release efforts in state prisons and county or local jails.

This is a public health emergency and we must protect everyone, including preventing a potential crisis in our correctional facilities," said U.S. Sen. Diane Feinstein, D-California, a co-sponsor.

Michigans efforts to curb the spread in prisons are thwarted by limited testing, an inability to enforce social distancing, tight-lipped inmates and a lack of trust.

Many fear what will happen if theyre suspected of having the virus and quarantined. Theyre not willing to tell guards on others they believe are ill.

Its a big problem," Gautz said. The no-snitching street code applies even to coronavirus behind bars.

If a guy dont want to go ... you know what Im saying, it aint my job to make them go, said Antonio D. Hall, 47, whos serving three years for drug crimes and is expected to be paroled in January 2021.

Since MLive spoke with Hall, the MDOC has confirmed the deaths of three more inmates at Parnall Correctional Facility due to the coronavirus.

In total, 182 Parnall prisoners have confirmed cases and 89% of the 182 tests administered there have returned positive results. The prison has a nearly 1,700 inmate capacity.

We know some guys in here are sick, Hall said. Youre hearing them coughing all through the night. Theres guys walking around here sweating. You can look at a person and know theyre sick.

Hall wears a prison-issued face mask to sleep. He doesnt think it does much good.

A sign at the Parnall Correctional Facility near Jackson on Tuesday, April 14, 2020. J. Scott Park | MLive.com

Quarantine

Its not a matter of if theyll catch the virus, but when, said Michael Curtiss, a 52-year-old whos serving a four-year sentence for second-degree home invasion at Parnall Correctional Facilitys Vocational Village in Jackson, where the largest COVID-19 outbreak is occurring.

From his eight-man cube in his low-security prison dormitory, he peers out unbarred windows and watches ambulances enter and exit the front gates.

While Curtiss doesnt know for sure, he has a pretty strong hunch why theyre there. The prison is being overrun by the coronavirus.

The MDOC has made efforts to separate sick prisoners from the healthy. Its created coronavirus segregation areas, sometimes gymnasiums or visitation rooms, in each of the states 29 prisons, Gautz said. Theyre used to separate and monitor prisoners awaiting test results or those suspected of being ill.

If an inmate tests positive, theyre transferred to one of two prison hospital units, Robert Cotton Correctional Facility in Jackson or Carson City Correctional Facility in Montcalm County, Gautz said.

But continuity is important behind bars, Curtiss said. Inmates like routine. Theyre sensitive to change, separation from their few personal possessions or an inability to maintain communication with loved ones outside.

If they are moved to a prison hospital or seen by medical staff, they doubt treatment will extend beyond being handed a couple Tylenols, Curtiss said.

People are feeling like theyre going to go into some closed cell and be alone and really sick, he said. Because thats what I picture. I picture going into a room where I have nothing and Im just staring at walls and Im sick.

The curve where Elm Road turns into Parnall Road near the prison complex near Jackson on Tuesday, April 14, 2020. J. Scott Park | MLive.com

Testing

Only a small portion of the states prisoners, 707 of nearly 38,000 inmates, have received COVID-19 tests, and an overwhelming majority, nearly 64% of them, have tested positive.

Gautz said the disproportionately high number indicates medical staff are correctly identifying COVID-19 symptoms. The positive test rate among the general public is about 33%.

Gautz said the MDOC currently has about 750 tests available and each prison has coronavirus test kits on site. Prison staff determine which inmates are tested and the criteria for testing is that they are showing any possible symptoms.

At Parnall Correctional Facility, three inmates told MLive the process begins when an inmate is identified as having possible symptoms, either because of self-reporting or staff observation.

Theyll take out a group of guys, Curtiss said. Usually if one guy in the cube complains theyre sick, theyll have them all pack up their stuff, leave it where it sits, theyll take them down to medical ... and they check their temperature.

Curtiss said initially inmates in close contact with a prisoner suspected of having coronavirus were segregated and monitored for 48 hours. However that is no longer happening, he and other inmates said.

If anybody has a high temperature, they quarantine them and test them at that point," Curtiss said. "The rest of them that were in with them, come right back up here.

A "Heroes at Work" sign at the Parnall Correctional Facility near Jackson on Tuesday, April 14, 2020. J. Scott Park | MLive.com

Vulnerable guards

Corrections officers, who make a $37,500 per year starting salary, have no choice but to place themselves in close proximity to sick prisoners.

Theyre worried about getting it just live everybody else, and taking it home to their families, Curtiss said. A lot of them are sick right now.

The MDOC administration began paying correctional officers an additional $750 every two weeks in hazard pay on April 4.

Two MDOC employees, including Damon Burton, who worked at the Detroit Reentry Center and another who worked in a Metro Detroit parole office, have died due to complications related to the coronavirus.

At Parnall Correctional Facility, 63 correctional officers have tested positive.

Theyre half-staffed, so theyre in panic mode, said Barry Carter, a Parnall inmate serving 10 years for assault with intent to murder and first-degree home invasion. I mean, theyre bringing in business office representatives to babysit us because their staff is so low.

Byron Osborn, president of the Michigan Corrections Organization, a union that represents nearly 6,000 MDOC correctional officers, said prison administration and Gov. Gretchen Whitmer arent involving the union in efforts to combat the outbreak.

We can be an asset and a partner in addressing situations like this, Osborn said, "It seems like in most cases theyre reluctant to bring representatives in from line staff to share perspectives and offer input ...

Were living this right now ... Its such an impactful crisis situation and its just, in the prison setting, extremely difficult to control.

Face masks, cleaning supplies

In an effort to curb the spread of germs, MDOC is issuing protective face masks to each prisoner and guard and increasing the availability of soap and cleaning products.

Prison staff passed out two protective masks each to prisoners at Parnall Correctional two weeks ago. Gautz said the goal is to make roughly 150,000 cloth masks, so every employee and inmate can have three masks of their own. He expected masks to be distributed to all prisoners by the early this week.

Theyre made out of the state blues that we wear, Hall said. They just passed out the masks in the past week and a half. It just gave me chills.

Carlos Garcia is serving time in medium security at Muskegon Correctional Facility, where he shares a 6-by-8-foot cell with a bunk-mate.

Garcia said there are more cleaning supplies, but theyre rarely used or vanish quickly.

As you have surely noticed, cleaning efforts have been enhanced, said one MDOC email Garcia forwarded to MLive. "All facilities are using bleach to clean regularly in all areas. We have doubled down on our cleaning efforts of all surfaces, phones, restraints and more. We have also increased our production of soap ... "

And thats just not true, Garcia said, noting there was a deep clean using bleach on March 13 but no major full-facility cleaning effort since.

Garcia said brown paper towels and a generic light-pink cleaning solution is placed in common areas near items, such as phones and microwaves, each morning.

The towels and cleaner are usually used up or stolen by hoarding inmates within a few hours, he said.

Im looking at the chair that its in right now, he said while speaking from the prison phone bank recently. It looks like the disinfectant itself is empty, but theres a little paper towel on the roll.

" ... Im surprised theres actually anything left there now."

Garcia said correctional officers are loosely enforcing social distancing at meal times by sending fewer prisoners at one time and limiting two inmates to each table, but he said theyre just inches from one another as they wait to be served.

This place is just not conducive to social distancing, the way that is required to prevent the spread, he said. I mean, were double-bunked, so even, just in the cells, theres no way you can be six feet apart.

Early release

We think they should remove some guys out, Hall said.  ... Put them on tether ... Guys can even parole, let them go home.

That sentiment is shared by proponents of proposed federal legislation that would entice prison and jail administrators to reduce inmate populations.

In order to be eligible for the grant funds, prison and jails would be required to submit a plan to reduce inmate populations to 80 percent of their certified capacity by May 12.

To minimize the infection risk inside Michigan jails, Gov. Gretchen Whitmer issued an executive order on March 29 allowing counties greater flexibility to release prisoners early. MDOC inmates, however, must still serve their minimum sentences under the 1998-passed Truth in Sentencing law.

The MDOC is reviewing parole-eligible prisoners for possible release due to the coronavirus.

Twenty-eight-thousand of our 38,000 prisoners have yet to serve their minimum sentence, so thats a huge chunk of our population that we couldnt do anything with," Gautz said. And then another 5,000 are lifers, so theres about 5,000 prisoners that are parole eligible, and a majority of those, theres a reason ... they havent paroled yet, because theyre serving for violent crimes or sexual offenses.

Up until this week, Curtiss only kept one picture on his bulletin board inside his prison cube.

It was of Reagan, the black Labrador service dog he trained behind bars. The rest, he stashed away in preparation for his upcoming release date in June.

But Curtiss says the stress of this pandemic, time spent worrying about his 83-year-old mother, his ex-wife with lupus, and her son, changed that.

I put all my pictures back up the other day, he said. The coronavirus has "brought back more of a sense of how fragile life can be.

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 more on MLive:

Michigan stay-at-home order expanded, extended

Not enough body bags

No vacation travel allowed

Friday, April 10, coronavirus updates

Mapping spread of coronavirus in Michigan over past four weeks

Conoravirus upends Michigans Class of 2020: This isnt the senior year that anyone wanted'
Adorable time bombs are a health risk to the elderly I rarely agree with Chris Uhlmann, but he asks all the right questions and posits sensible alternatives to us becoming a police state for little gain ("Majority rules post lockdown", April 15). No doubt he will attract condemnation for suggesting younger people's lives should be given more weight than older ones, and that people should be free to make informed choices regarding risk to themselves  but I fully support his arguments. Alynn Pratt, Killara Chris Uhlmann may be a little naive in suggesting grandparents could decide to choose the hugs of a grandchild. For many grandparents, granny day-care will be back in full swing once the children's parents are back at work. This gives rise to an ethical dilemma: do parents insist that pre-pandemic arrangements resume, or do they feel guilty for asking elderly parents to assume this risk? Do grandparents accept this health risk willingly, or with great trepidation? Do they see their much-loved grandchildren as adorable time-bombs? Shona Kirchen, Kiama

Peter Shmigel I feel for you and your family over the death of your mother from COVID-19 in New York ("My mother's life was greater than the virus", April 15). My own dear mum timed her exit very nicely in mid-February this year, aged just shy of 102 years, before the crisis really took hold. The thought of her getting sick and me not being able to visit her or comfort her in her last days would have broken my heart. Your mother sounds like a grand woman. Hold onto those lovely memories. Deborah Lloyd, New Lambton Thank you Peter Shmigel for your beautiful words celebrating the life of your mother, Nadia, after her death in New York aged 87, and sharing her story as a World War II survivor and a refugee from Ukraine who moved to the US and led a life of achievement, leadership, service and love. In this crisis, there are so many numbers, graphs and statistics and too few tributes to the individuals we have lost. Hopefully when this tragedy is finally over, more people will be moved to tell their stories. Ruth Barwick, Hornsby Aged-care residents are often frail with some level of dementia and many do die in any three-month period. It is cruel that they are denied the comfort of visits by loved ones in order to slow the spread of COVID-19. While staff, GPs and other workers are all allowed in and out as necessary, perhaps each resident could be allowed one visit per week by a carefully screened relative or friend. Ruth Ratner, Northbridge Tracking app comes with risks On the surface it seems sensible to have an app to follow your movements that alerts others if you become infected (''New app to track spread of virus'', April 15). On the other hand, what a field day for the police who will be able to also track your movements and determine whether you have had a reasonable excuse to leave your home. There needs to be a trade-off here to enable a balance between allowing more movement within the community, how the information is shared, and what is the overall good for the community. Michael Blissenden, Dural

A mobile phone app that tracks the users every movement will be embraced by every suspicious spouse and controlling boss. Tom Kelly, Potts Point We have been inundated with ideas on how to deal with the pandemic. Every piece I read assumes everyone has a smart phone and a computer. From the government to the banks thay are all guilty of this assumption. Although I know many elderly people who are competent in their use of technology there are also those who cannot afford the technology or do not feel competent enough to use it. Could all the guilty please stop assuming the ownership of modern technology and offer some solutions to those less fortunate. Robyn Lewis, Raglan Illustration: Matt Golding Credit: Nothing special about Pell How is it so ''extraordinary'' that police and the media should have pursued Cardinal Pell (''No surprise if police keep up case: Pell'', April 15). It is the task of the police, at every level, to address accusations of alleged offences, and of the media to report on the progress of those inquires. The only ''extraordinary'' thing is that, in the past, many of these accusations were not pursued with sufficient vigour. Imagine the outcry if police and the media had neglected to pursue their allotted roles in the community? Derrick Mason, Boorowa

Walkers on wild side As someone who both walks and runs around the Bay Run, I'm curious to know why only joggers are singled out (''Time runners forged a different path'', April 15). Joggers make up only a small percentage of foot traffic, and generally stay to the left. By contrast, walkers are normally in groups of two, three or even four, and even those who are alone often walk on the right or stay in the middle. With all of this going on, it's impossible to observe social distancing, whether you're going in the same or the opposite direction, and regardless of whether you're running or walking. No doubt the joggers aren't perfect, but I think we do pretty well in a difficult situation. Fraser Rew, Summer Hill A walker on the Bay Run requires resilience, a steady straight pace, a focused determination, and most of all a rain hat, sanitiser, goggles and a towel for protection from the joggers spray. Walking is not for sissies. Vicky Marquis, Glebe Airports need scrutiny While the Ruby Princess disaster is the subjects of two different investigations, how about looking at why, at airports, overseas travellers flooding into Sydney were not screened in any way ('''No stone unturned': Premier to launch cruise special commission'', April 15). We saw the same disturbing pictures of this happening night after night with no follow-up. Why? Kate Chivers, Epping

Not so super idea You still dont get it, Tony Shepherd (Letters, April 15). You cant take a 9.5 per cent pay rise for six months if you dont have a job. Its those who no longer have a job who require such assistance  not those who are fortunate enough to have held onto their job. Bill Young, Greenwich Shepherds assertion that compulsory superannuation has reduced the burden on the taxpayer should not be allowed to pass without comment. He overlooks the enormous sums given by government (the taxpayer) over many years in the form of tax concessions to people like me and, more pertinently, to people whose wealth makes it highly unlikely they will ever need to call on the age pension. The money given to me alone over the last few years of my working life could have funded several pensions for those in need. And, in the same breath, he concedes that the vast majority of older Australians still access the pension, which scarcely accords with his claim to be reducing the taxpayer burden. It may well have been launched with good intentions, but far from easing any burden on the taxpayer, the scheme has subsequently been engineered to effect a massive transfer of benefit from the taxpayer to non-taxpayers like myself. As I like to say when people ask if I am a self-funded retiree: No. I am a taxpayer-funded retiree. And thank you very much for your contribution to my fund. Michael Strickland, Mosman What's their game? The NRLs decision to seek a line of credit from a consortium of British banks is, indeed, a strange one (NRL goes offshore to secure $250 million loan, smh.com.au, April 15). Social distancing aside, employing the adage of ''you scratch my back, Ill scratch yours', the betting agency thats a major sponsor of the NRL could have been expected to be first in the queue to back the NRLs future. Surprisingly, the agency hasnt yet framed a futures market about the NRLs survival. What does that say? Col Shephard, Yamba

Naked incompetence As COVID-19 spirals out of control in the US all its President can do is point fingers and play the blame game (''Trump warns states not to steal glory'', April 15). He is a disgrace to his nation and to countries such as ours who call themselves US allies. The images of prisoners digging graves for the unknown and unloved must surely strike a chord with the US people. It was not fake news. How low does this man have to go before Americans wake up to his paucity of policy, his lack of genuine concern and his childish name calling? King Trump? No, he is an emperor who is wearing no clothes. Genevieve Milton, Newtown Can a US President be impeached due to incompetence and stupidity? The citizens of the US need realistic leadership in this crisis. Ric Baxter, Umina Beach Copper stopper Any old drover will tell you that once a week a copper penny was scraped across a farrier's file into their dogs dinner. The small amount of copper kept the dogs well. (Copper-coated doorknobs to kill COVID? It makes sense, say scientists, April 15). David Sayers, Gwandalan

The copper on the doorknob will do more to limit the spread of COVID-19 than the copper on horseback evicting couples taking a breather on a park bench. Doug Walker, Baulkham Hills Home truths Now we're in semi-lockdown we finally know the answer to Whos he, when hes at home? Barry Ffrench, Cronulla Let's get metaphysical Philosophy for these distancing times: "Meditation is a metaphysical hug". Helen Rainger, Gouburn
Press Release

15 April 2020

Phoenix, Arizona - Best Western Hotels & Resorts (BWHR) has launched a support package designed to offer a helping hand to front line workers during the COVID-19 pandemic. The package includes a discounted rate at participating BWHR-branded hotels, a custom loyalty offering for essential workers and expanded donation offerings supporting COVID-19 relief efforts.

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"Each and every day we see essential workers, from healthcare providers and first responders to transportation workers and infrastructure professionals, putting their own health at risk to lead the fight against the COVID-19 pandemic," said David Kong, President and Chief Executive Officer for BWHR. "These front line workers are making tremendous sacrifices for the greater good. While no token of appreciation will ever be enough, we are proud to show our respect and gratitude by keeping our doors open in their time of need, extending a loyalty upgrade and supporting the relief efforts through donations."

Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, front line workers have emerged as heroes, selflessly fighting a daily battle to keep communities around the world safe and healthy. Many of these professionals need a safe place to sleep to help them continue the fight against COVID-19. BWHR has created a special rate plan that extends a discount of at least 10% to essential workers at participating properties across North America. The rate plan is effective immediately and available for stay dates through June 30, 2020. Essential workers can select the rate plan when booking on bestwestern.com and will need to provide their work identification upon check-in.

In addition to keeping its doors open to essential workers in their time of need, BWHR is offering a Best Western Rewards (BWR) Elite status upgrade to those on the front lines. Eligible essential workers can visit bestwestern.com/frontlineheroes for their status upgrade. Elite BWR members can enjoy bonus points for every stay, exclusive promotional offers, and discounted rates at BWHR-branded hotels worldwide.

To round out the relief package for front line workers, BWHR has made it easier than ever for its loyalty members to support essential workers. BWR members who donate their rewards points to BWHR's charitable arm, Best Western for a Better World, or charitable partner, the Red Cross, will see their donations go directly to supporting COVID-19 relief efforts.

This announcement is the latest example of BWHR's commitment to supporting its hoteliers, guests and communities during the COVID-19 health crisis. BWHR was the first hotel company to offer a relief package to its hoteliers to help ease the financial burden during this challenging time. BWHR was also the first in the industry to extend loyalty status to its BWR members whose travel plans have been greatly impacted by travel restrictions and cancellations resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic.

Click here to read about BWHR's hotelier relief efforts.

Click here to learn more about the BWR loyalty extension program.




Recent reports about the protest of doctors and other health personnel in Mexico have been circulating different media outlets. These reports state that a lot of medical staff from various Mexican hospitals are protesting for the lack of PPE and other supplies needed to take care of COVID-19 cases.

The Uncontrollable Spread of COVID-19 Due to the Lack of PPE

Earlier this week, during a protest in the capital of the country, health personnel from the Regional Hospital 1 de Octubre expressed criticisms on the death and spread of the novel coronavirus and blames such results to the insufficiency of PPEs.

Additionally, experts from UNAM affirmed that the deadly SARS-CoV-2 is spreading throughout Mexico. However, the cases are not correctly reported because most of them are being recorded as an acute respiratory infection.

According to the specialist, it is probable that the majority of the cases are of medium to moderate severity. It tends to affect 80 percent of the affected population.

Dismissing Mexican Doctors and Nurses to Reduce Exposure to High-Risk Staff

Victor Hugo Borja Aburto, director of the Mexican Social Security Institute's, also known as IMSS, said that the institute is using strategies to lessen the exposure of high-risk staff. This is why more or less 20,000 employees, including doctors and nurses, were dismissed from duty.

Check these out:

Benefits for Personnel Taking Care of COVID-19 Patients

Aburto also said that staff who takes care of COVID-19 patients are given a bonus of a maximum of 20 percent of their salary.

In Michoacan, Governor Silvano Aureoles Conejo announced that doctors and nurses who are tasked to take care of COVID-19 patients would be given a 60 percent increase in their salaries.

The Lack of PPEs and Other Necessary Supplies

In Yucatan, medical students from various schools have halted their services for the insufficiency of PPEs and other supplies needed to protect them from fighting COVID-19.

According to a statement by Baja California's governor Jaime Bonilla, the IMSS doctors are similar to falling flies because of the lack of PPEs to protect them from COVID-19.

This is an indication of the difficulties that health workers have to go through to fight the spread of the deadly novel coronavirus while still protecting themselves from contracting the deadly virus. Also, there is a need for more coordination between the federal and local authorities to address this concern, says an article.

In the entire Mexican region, Baja California ranks 14 in the country's population. It is shocking news to find out that this Mexican state ranks third among the states of Mexico with the most COVID-19 confirmed cases considering its population.

On Monday, it was reported that there are 335 cases and 25 deaths due to COVID-19. In California, USA, 24,139 people were reported to have contracted the virus, and 727 people lost their battle with the illness as of Monday.

The trade and personal flow between Baja California and California have made the Mexican State of Baja California, one with the highest COVID-19 cases.
(@FahadShabbir)

The Lithuanian government has temporarily closed the Nemencine city located 15 miles northeast to the capital of Vilnius in a bid to abate spillover of the COVID-19 outbreak, the cabinet announced during a video conference on Wednesday

MOSCOW (UrduPoint News / Sputnik - 15th April, 2020) The Lithuanian government has temporarily closed the Nemencine city located 15 miles northeast to the capital of Vilnius in a bid to abate spillover of the COVID-19 outbreak, the cabinet announced during a video conference on Wednesday.

On Monday, the Lithuanian National Public Health Center (NVSC) said an outbreak of COVID-19 occurred at the Vilnika sewing company in Nemencine and at least 84 close contacts of the infected employees had been identified at the time.

Nemencine will go on complete lockdown on Thursday until April 23. The city will be closed for entry and exit except for people working in other cities or people in need of medical assistance who got permits from the National Public Health Center, the cabinet said.

At the same time, the government said it had decided to gradually soften COVID-19 restrictions on businesses.

In particular, the first phase will resume operations of grocery stores and other shops located not in malls. Services which imply direct contact with clients for no longer than 20 minutes can also resume operations, the cabinet said.

Services like gyms and hair salons, as well as food services and recreational sites, will be able to resume operations during phase two, according to the government's COVID-19 website.

Lithuania is on nationwide-quarantine set to expire on April 27. People are required to have medical masks on at all times leaving home. Public gatherings of more than three people are banned. As of Wednesday, there have been 1,091 confirmed COVID-19 cases, including 29 fatalities and 138 recoveries, in Lithuania.
Seoul, South Korea

A barrage of North Korean missiles fired from the ground and fighter jets splashed down on the waters off the country's east coast on Tuesday, South Korea's military said, a show of force on the eve of a key state anniversary in the North and parliamentary elections in the rival South.

The back-to-back launches were the latest in a series of weapons tests that North Korea has conducted in recent weeks amid stalled nuclear talks and outside worries about a possible coronavirus outbreak in the country.

North Korean troops based in the eastern coastal city of Munchon first launched several projectiles  presumed to be cruise missiles  on Tuesday morning, South Korea's joint chiefs of staff said in a statement.

The weapons flew more than 93 miles at a low altitude off the North's east coast, a South Korean defense official said. If confirmed, it would be the North's first cruise missile launch in about three years, said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, citing department rules.

Later Tuesday, North Korea launched several Sukhoi-class fighter jets that fired an unspecified number of air-to-surface missiles toward the North's eastern waters, the defense official said.

The official said North Korea has recently appeared to be resuming its military drills that it had scaled back due to concerns about the coronavirus pandemic. He said other North Korean fighter jets also flew on patrol near the border with China on Tuesday.

All the recently tested missiles were short-range and didn't pose a direct threat to the U.S. mainland.

U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres expressed concern at the latest missile launches by the Democratic People's Republic of Korea or DPRK, the country's official name.

"Once again we call on the DPRK leadership to comply fully with its obligations under relevant Security Council resolutions," Guterres' spokesman Stephane Dujarric said, referring to U.N. bans on ballistic missile launches.
Technavio has been monitoring the global nicotine patch market and it is poised to grow by 229.07 mn during 2019-2023, progressing at a CAGR of almost 7% 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.

This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20200415005244/en/

Technavio has announced the latest market research report titled Global Nicotine Patch Market 2019-2023 (Graphic: Business Wire)

Technavio suggests three forecast scenarios (optimistic, probable, and pessimistic) considering the impact of COVID-19. Please Request Latest Free Sample Report on COVID-19 Impact

The market is concentrated, and the degree of concentration will accelerate during the forecast period. Dr. Reddy's Laboratories Ltd., GlaxoSmithKline plc., Johnson Johnson Services, Inc., Novartis AG, and Perrigo Company plc, are some of the major market participants. 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.

Benefits of using nicotine patches has been instrumental in driving the growth of the market.

Global Nicotine Patch Market 2019-2023: Segmentation

Global Nicotine Patch Market is segmented as below:

Product 24-hour Nicotine Patch 16-hour Nicotine Patch

Geographic Landscape APAC Europe MEA North America South America



To learn more about the global trends impacting the future of market research, download a free sample: https://www.technavio.com/talk-to-us?report=IRTNTR30833

Global Nicotine Patch 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 global nicotine patch market report covers the following areas:

Global Nicotine Patch Market Size

Global Nicotine Patch Market Trends

Global Nicotine Patch Market Industry Analysis

This study identifies technological innovations in transdermal drug delivery process as one of the prime reasons driving the global nicotine patch market growth during the next few years.

Global Nicotine Patch Market 2019-2023: Vendor Analysis

We provide a detailed analysis of around 25 vendors operating in the global nicotine patch market, including some of the vendors such as Dr. Reddy's Laboratories Ltd., GlaxoSmithKline plc., Johnson Johnson Services, Inc., Novartis AG, and Perrigo Company plc. Backed with competitive intelligence and benchmarking, our research reports on the global nicotine patch market are designed to provide entry support, customer profile and M&As as well as go-to-market strategy support.

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Global Nicotine Patch Market 2019-2023: Key Highlights

CAGR of the market during the forecast period 2019-2023

Detailed information on factors that will assist global nicotine patch market growth during the next five years

Estimation of the global nicotine patch market size and its contribution to the parent market

Predictions on upcoming trends and changes in consumer behavior

The growth of the global nicotine patch market

Analysis of the market's competitive landscape and detailed information on vendors

Comprehensive details of factors that will challenge the growth of global nicotine patch market vendors

Table Of Contents :

PART 01: EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

PART 02: SCOPE OF THE REPORT

2.1 Preface

2.2 Preface

2.3 Currency conversion rates for US$

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 PRODUCT

Market segmentation by product

Comparison by product

24-hour nicotine patch Market size and forecast 2018-2023

16-hour nicotine patch Market size and forecast 2018-2023

Market opportunity by product

PART 07: CUSTOMER LANDSCAPE

PART 08: GEOGRAPHIC LANDSCAPE

Geographic segmentation

Geographic comparison

North America Market size and forecast 2018-2023

Europe Market size and forecast 2018-2023

APAC Market size and forecast 2018-2023

South America Market size and forecast 2018-2023

MEA 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

Online retailing

Rising number of promotional campaigns and activities for smoking cessation aids

Technological innovations in transdermal drug delivery process

PART 12: VENDOR LANDSCAPE

Overview

Landscape disruption

Competitive scenario

PART 13: VENDOR ANALYSIS

Vendors covered

Vendor classification

Market positioning of vendors

Dr. Reddy's Laboratories Ltd.

GlaxoSmithKline plc.

Johnson Johnson Services, Inc.

Novartis AG

Perrigo Company plc

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.

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15.04.2020 LISTEN

Former President John Mahama has urged President Akufo-Addo to cut down the size of his government in order to ease the burden on the economy occasioned by covid-19.

Our economy has revealed from this Covid stress test that it is still fragile and we need to be prudent in how we manage going forward. We must also be diligent in how we apply the $1 billion facility as the various tranches are released.

We face significant pressure on our local currency, declining domestic revenues, a slowdown in GDP growth, increase in deficit to GDP of between 8% to 9%, ballooning debt which is projected to hit almost 70% by end year. This scenario requires that we exercise strict prioritization in our borrowing and expenditures and this might be the right time for the President to consider trimming down the bloated size of his government, Mr Mahama said while donated food Items to some vulnerable households in Ghana.

He also appealed to the government to make judicious use of the money given it by the IMF.

It is predicted that this pandemic and the disruption of global trade and economic activity will adversely affect the economies of developing countries. Ghana is no exception. The fast track approval by the IMF of the highly concessional Rapid Credit Facility is therefore timely and very welcome. This will help cushion the economy from the dangers of recession.
Despite disruption and uncertainty in the public markets, investors at Rockies Venture Club continue to make seed stage investments to support a thriving startup community in Colorado. RVCs syndicates invested in three companies in March.

Despite disruption and uncertainty in the public markets, investors at Rockies Venture Club (RVC) continue to make seed stage investments to support a thriving startup community in Colorado. RVCs syndicates invested in three companies in March, bringing the total number of investment deals to seven for 2020. RVC Director of Operations, Dave Harris, says that the club expects to make twenty-five investments by the end of the year.

Investors are turning to startups and venture capital investments that dont have the volatility of the public markets in recent times. Because the timeline for angel investments can be three to five years or more, the economy should be going strong by the time the club receives returns on todays investments. Peter Adams, RVCs Executive Director, says angel investments are a lot less risky than people think. Angels who invest in groups typically see portfolio returns of 25% or more each year - and most of that is tax-free due to angel tax incentives.

RVC is excited for the prospects of the three companies that closed deals in the month of March.

Wander + Ivy offers a single-serve wine experience that combines the exquisite taste and terroir of organic wines from sustainable producers with convenient, premium packaging. The company purchases premium bulk wine from award-winning, family-owned vineyards around the world at a discount, ships the wine via flexitanks to a co-packer to bottle, private label, and package, then sells their single-serve wine bottles or varietals gift sets to distributors and consumers at a premium. Wander + Ivy is targeting the $69M single-serve wine market with a focus on female millennials, semi-regular wine drinkers and active, health-conscious + environmentally friendly consumers prone to buying organic. Wander + Ivy first began selling their product in October 2018 and has sold over 28K bottles, generating $100K in revenue with distribution across 4 states.

PageDip allows knowledge workers to easily bring depth to documents, enabling the reader to read (text), watch (video) and explore (interact) all in the same place. The technology turns a linear reading experience into a multidimensional exploration with the added benefit that content is kept current in a centralized and secure location. PageDip is a cloud-based content authoring environment for businesses who need an in-house solution to better generate, control and update internal or external facing content. The content creation tool is easy to use and intuitive, requiring simple drag and drop actions to create a page.

ClinOne is a healthcare IT company providing a cloud-based information and document sharing platform that connects pharmaceutical companies to clinical trial sites and patients globally. They are selling directly to Research Sites and Pharma Sponsors, and have been utilized in over 2,500 active clinical trials across 53 countries. The company is now aiming to take advantage of an opportunity in the clinical trial management systems space. Clinical study coordinators are forced to interact with multiple vendors to manage a study. ClinOne is now aiming to be the singular vendor for cost-effective and seamless clinical study administration. They have multiple modules they are building into the platform, aiming to upsell Research Site and Pharma Sponsor clients. They are currently engaged with 14 of the top 20 Pharma companies worldwide, and have Research Site customers, such as Stanford University.

Rockies Venture Club Executive Director, Peter Adams, added, these companies represent the diversity of great quality startups coming out of Colorado. They range from consumer goods to business-to-business SaaS software to a platform for managing medical clinical trials. Rockies Venture Club has leveraged the diverse expertise among its two hundred investors to be able to source, do due diligence and negotiate deals in such a broad spectrum of business types.

Over the last 5 years, RVC has invested in a diverse range of companies from a variety of industries. Although RVCs investment focus is primarily in Colorado, that hasnt stopped the organization from investing in startups around the country; leveraging strong syndicate partners as part of the Angel Capital Association. Also, with funding rounds ranging from $200k-$2M, RVC has helped start-ups of all sizes to reach their financial and operational goals in a quick and efficient manner while providing ongoing support to a portfolio of one hundred twenty investment rounds in about fifty companies. Regardless of the size and industry of the start-up, RVC works to help its investors find transparent investment opportunities that meet their risk and return expectations while simultaneously guiding entrepreneurs to creating easy to understand business plans and investor pitches.

About the Rockies Venture Club: Rockies Venture Club is the oldest and one of the largest Angel Groups in the U.S.A., founded in 1985, whose mission is to advance economic development by actively connecting the most promising entrepreneurial companies with Angel investors, venture capitalists, and other community members. Every year Rockies Venture Club offers over 140 educational programs, mastermind groups, Angel forums, and two major conferences for both investors and entrepreneurs.

300 Angels Project: To keep up with growing demand for capital in the state, the Rockies Venture Club is growing by adding one hundred new angel investors to the group in 2020, bringing it to a total of over three hundred angels. The organization is successful in making profitable investments because of its education programs for both angel investors and entrepreneurs, plus its ability to leverage the skills and wisdom of so many investors to conduct due diligence and make good investment decisions.
COVID-19 impact: Clinician trauma and other lessons from the Ebola epidemic

Nursing professor who treated Ebola patients describes psychological toll

As the coronavirus threatens health and upends daily life throughout the world, UofSC Today is turning to our faculty to help us make sense of it all. While no one can predict exactly what will happen in the coming weeks and months, our faculty can help us ask the right questions and put important context around emerging events.

Cheedy Jaja, a Fulbright Scholar and associate professor at the College of Nursing, in 2014 and 2015 served as a frontline health care provider during the Ebola epidemic in Sierra Leone, his birth country. Jaja is a former tenured philosophy professor and board-certified psychiatry and mental health nurse practitioner. He provides insight about the mental health impact of the pandemic and the implications for Sierra Leone.

What surprised you when you started working on the front lines of the Ebola epidemic?

Before we traveled to Sierra Leone, we had training and simulations in the United States so I formed this picture in my head of what it would be like: Im going to be dressed in personal protective equipment, Im going to be in this hospital, and everything is going to be very clinical and very organized.

The reality was very, very different. My first day in the Ebola hospital, I had to confront dealing with a patient who had died overnight. I thought, My God, what am I doing here? What was I thinking? But then you realize that you are a clinician, that you are there to help and to make a difference. That mindset just clicks. You are aware that you have the clinical training  if not the experience  to help.

As nurses, we are trained to be compassionate and we try to be, but it was hard to be compassionate when you are filled with dread. You have to be alert and hypervigilant all the time to not become infected. Everybody that I worked with at some point thought they had contracted Ebola. I thought I had gotten it maybe 100 times.

The procedures and guidelines were changing constantly and we were learning in real-time, but unfortunately there was very little attention paid to the psycho-social health of the health care workers. Somebody died every day. In order to function, you dont allow that sense of sadness to overcome you. You dont feel that sense of grief or loss. You accept this is reality: some people will die, some will survive. You just stay focused and put all those emotions on hold.

Health care workers like Cheedy Jaja wore face shields, masks, gowns and several layers of gloves to protect themselves from contracting the Ebola virus. "You are sweating under your face mask," he says. "You lose a lot of fluid. Your face shield gets fogged up. You cant see. You soldier on."

What was it like when you started to mentally and emotionally process your experience?

It wasnt until my colleagues and I returned to the states and had to spend 21 days in quarantine that we started to revisit the death and grief that we experienced. For me and for a lot of other people, unpacking in isolation was what prompted the psychological trauma. Psychological trauma for me was like falling down a bottomless pit, just tumbling down a black hole with no end in sight.

You go through emotions of grief, sadness and anger. Youre angry that people are dying out there and youre stuck home. Youre angry, thinking that, Oh gosh, I didnt do enough. Theres a sense of grief because you can recall vividly those who died, both adults and kids. Theres a sadness that you didnt have the wherewithal to help them. Theres sadness, too, because you bonded with a lot of patients. I bonded with kids who are calling me uncle because I brought them treats. The images stay with you. Youre angry that you feel ostracized. Youve gone out to make a difference for humanity, but now youre stuck at home. It was a rollercoaster of contrasting emotions.

What helped was the realization that I wasnt the only one feeling these emotions. My colleagues were equally going through the same thing. Someone came up with the brilliant idea: why dont we have daily Skype meetings? We would spend hours a day just talking about what happened. We felt like we were soldiers coming back from battle. It was that daily Skype talk that helped pull us through our psychological trauma.

Those were the short-term consequences. For some of my colleagues, the trauma came at the cost of their marriage, their relationships. For me, I decided that what I needed to do is to go back and reinforce that experience. I realized that I felt that I didnt do much, and the way I could overcome that sense of guilt was to go a second time. I went back in a leadership role and with a much stronger, more informed perspective.

But with the coronavirus pandemic now, just watching the news triggers memories and emotions I thought Id gotten rid of five years ago.

What similarities do you see between the Ebola epidemic and the coronavirus pandemic?

This is very startling for me. Im beginning to see some striking similarities between the Ebola experience and the coronavirus experience, both from a clinical standpoint and a community standpoint.

In my Ebola experience, when somebody got admitted to the hospital, they would leave their loved ones behind because of the contagious nature of the virus. For those patients who end up dying, thats the last time that they interacted with their family. Im beginning to see that same thing happening here with the coronavirus. When patients die, the trauma of that experience not only impacts the health care workers who have to communicate that information to their loved ones but also to the loved ones who never had the opportunity to say goodbye.

Thats going to create psychosocial trauma. Thats something that we need to address. I think there should be a way to connect those who are admitted here with loved ones outside by phone or internet.

Another thing I notice is very similar with this pandemic is that entire communities go through a very stressful period. You wake up in the morning, and you get bombarded with news. This general sense of being unsafe creates stress for individuals. You wonder, Am I going to get infected? What happens if I get infected? You end up having a whole community that is traumatized.

Psychological trauma for me was like falling down a bottomless pit, just tumbling down a black hole with no end in sight. Cheedy Jaja, associate professor of nursing

What is your outlook for Sierra Leone as coronavirus spreads in Africa?

I am very frightful. Post-Ebola Sierra Leone, like many African countries, has a very fragile health care system. Theres not enough doctors, nurses and other health care workers. There is always a scarcity of medical supplies. They dont have enough facilities for isolating the coronavirus patients if there is an outbreak in the country.

Whats equally worrying is that if the number of infections starts increasing, I dont have any confidence that the cavalry will be coming this time. Last time with Ebola, the entire world mobilized to help out. But almost every country now has to deal with their own outbreak.

If this coronavirus gets a foothold in the country and the government does not take the necessary proactive measures, its going to rage like a wildfire in the country. Ebola will pale in comparison. Thats my biggest fear.

Helping the helpers

Nursing professor Cheedy Jaja says health care workers need mental health support from the community. That support can be as simple as phone calls, texts or emails, which help them feel connected and convey the impression that were all in this together.

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A day after a 44-year-old woman, reportedly not having any travel history, tested positive for Covid-19 in Sector -15, the deputy commissioner (DC) on Wednesday marked the area as a containment cluster.

After the womans diagnosis, Sector-15 was sealed and heavy police force was deployed in the area. Police teams patrolling the area advised residents against stepping out of their homes.

DC Mukesh Kumar Ahuja ordered the creation of containment and buffer zones and asked the municipal corporation to sanitise the sector.

The deputy commissioner of police (DCP) has been asked to restrict entry and exit of people in the containment zone and to set up nakas to check vehicular movement towards the sector.

The health department has been asked to monitor the area and initiate door-to-door screening, to check if any person is exhibiting flu-like symptoms in the containment and buffer zone.

The woman in question is a post office employee. Health department officials say the woman and her husband had only stepped out to get essential commodities. Her husband has also been admitted to the hospital and samples have been sent for testing.

Twelve of their relatives have also been sent to the civil hospital to be screened. An official, on condition of anonymity, said some relatives from Delhi had visited the patient before the lockdown.

Currently, the district count is six. The first two residents to be diagnosed in Panchkula have recovered and were discharged on April 11. At present, there are four active cases in Panchkula.
CLEVELAND, Ohio -- The Ohio Supreme Court on Wednesday rebuked the 8th District Court of Appeals and unanimously ordered a new trial for a woman convicted of assaulting a state trooper in 2016.

Cuyahoga Countys appellate court strayed from 65 years of legal precedent in 2018 when it held that Sharon Fips conviction went against the weight of the evidence at her trial, and found her guilty of a misdemeanor disorderly conduct charge instead.

Fips attorneys asked the panel of three 8th District judges to order a new trial. Still, the judges in a 2-1 vote took it upon themselves to modify Fips conviction instead of ordering a new trial, records show.

Supreme Court Justice Patrick Fischer wrote in the Wednesday slip opinion that the panel ignored longstanding rules that establish that the proper move in the case would have been to send it back to the Common Pleas Court for a new trial.

We also take this opportunity to remind the lower courts in this state that they are required to follow our precedent, Fischer wrote.

Justices Maureen OConnor, Judith French, Michael Donnelly and R. Patrick DeWine signed onto the opinion. Tenth District Court of Appeals Judge Lisa Sadler, who heard the case in place of former 8th District Judge Melody Stewart, also joined the opinion.

Justice Sharon Kennedy concurred in the courts judgment but did not join the majoritys opinion.

It is the second time in as many days that the court has unanimously overturned a decision from the 8th District. The justices on Tuesday reinstated the guilty pleas and convictions of two Parma men accused of arson after finding the appeals court wrongly withdrew their pleas due to a technicality.

Wednesdays opinion stems from Fips 2016 arrest after a trooper said she kneed him in the crouch inside the Brook Park police station.

She and her son showed up at the police station after State Highway Patrol troopers arrested her other son on a drunken-driving charge, according to court records. Troopers at the station noticed that Fips was also drunk, and began to question her. The situation escalated and resulted in patrolmen Patrick Reagan forcing Fips up against the wall to handcuff her from behind, court records say. As Sgt. Christopher Brock came over to help Reagan, Reagan said that Fips kneed him in the crotch.

Fips, Brock and Reagan were the only three to testify at Fips trial in March 2017. Reagan testified that he was standing behind Fips when she lifted up her right knee, and she reached back and hit me in the crotch with her right knee, according to court records.

Brock said he did not see Fips strike Reagan but said he saw Reagan recoil and exclaim, she kneed me in the crotch, records say.

Fips testified that she was drunk at the time, but maintained that she did not strike Reagans crotch, records say.

Common Pleas Court Judge Joseph Russo found Fips guilty after she waived her right to have a jury decide her fate, and he sentenced her to probation.

The Cuyahoga County Public Defenders Office appealed Fips conviction and argued that it was against the manifest weight of the evidence that prosecutors presented in the case.

Assistant Public Defender Francis Cavallo argued in court filings that of the three witnesses called to testify, only one testified to seeing the assault. Of the other two, one person denied it happened altogether, and the other said he was present, but did not see it. Cavallo asked the court to overturn the conviction and give Fips a new trial before Russo.

Judges Eileen A. Gallagher and Anita Laster Mays wrote in their opinion overturning Fips conviction in 2018 that she likely struck Reagan inadvertently while she resisted her arrest. They found that the state did not prove she knowingly tried to hurt Reagan.

The judges based their authority to do so on a 2015 decision in which a different 8th District panel modified the conviction of Eric Dove from a first-degree felony kidnapping with a sexual motivation charge to a second-degree felony kidnapping charge. The judges in that case found there was no evidence presented during the trial to show the victim in the case was harmed.

The prosecutors office did not appeal that decision to the Supreme Court.

Then-Judge Stewart broke from the panel and wrote a dissenting opinion in which she said she would have upheld the conviction, but also that the majority did not have the authority to reduce Fips conviction. She wrote that the panel in Doves case reviewed the evidence and concluded what it showed, while in the Fips case, the panel weighed one witnesses testimony against anothers.

Doves case, Stewart wrote, is not persuasive authority for the 8th District to modify a conviction for the proposition that this court has the authority to reverse on the weight of the evidence and then modify conviction.

Fischers opinion overturning the 8th District did not address the Dove case. He cited Stewarts dissent as correctly pointing out that Fips should have been given a new trial, and listed a host of previous rulings that laid out that was the correct move after overturning a conviction because it went against the manifest weight of the evidence presented at the trial.

Deciding this case is made easy by the fact that at least 65 years of precedent from this court suggests that, contrary to the decision below, a new trial is the appropriate remedy when a reviewing court determines that a criminal conviction is against the manifest weight of the evidence, Fischer wrote.

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El Monte couple Rosalina Nava and Danny Herrera were initially resistant to wearing face masks. (Irfan Khan / Los Angeles Times)

Before she began to spread the gospel of masks, Rosalina Nava was a skeptic.

Even as many of her Asian immigrant neighbors in the San Gabriel Valley increasingly wore them to protect against the growing coronavirus threat, the 42-year-old court reporter resisted wearing a mask, finding them strange and cold. In this regard, that made her typical of Latinos, the largest group in California.

But by the middle of March, even before many places started requiring masks in public, Nava and many other Latinos not only became converts to wearing  they became mask evangelists, pushing their loved ones, their partners and their co-workers to wear them.

Nava persuaded her boyfriend to wear a mask, and he in turn convinced his his aunts, uncles and cousins living in Riverside to put them on even before the county made usage mandatory on April 4.

It was nerve-racking seeing everyone wearing these masks and not really understanding what was going on, Nava said. When I realized how deadly the coronavirus was, I thought it was time to turn that fear into action.

Though incomplete and based on a limited sample, preliminary data released last week by L.A. County showed that Latinos, which make up almost half of the county's population, represent just over a quarter of its coronavirus deaths. Experts said that the lower mortality rate could partly be due to the fact that the Latino community tends to be younger than other demographic groups.

But they also worried that there could be a surge in Latino deaths, pointing to such factors as relatively high poverty rates in the population, larger households and working in fields that often require them to be out of the house.

The county's top public health official, Dr. Barbara Ferrer, cautioned against drawing conclusions based on the figures, given they were based on 57% of reported deaths. But they aligned with information released last week by Gov. Gavin Newsom's administration, which also showed that Latino deaths statewide were smaller than their percentage of California's population.

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A Pew Research poll last month found that about two-thirds of Latino adults considered the coronavirus outbreak a major threat to the health of the U.S. population as a whole, compared with about half of the general public. Whether this has resulted in changes in social behavior  including wearing masks and taking other precautions that could lower the spread of the virus  is unclear.

While experts are split on the effectiveness of cloth masks, Nava has come to believe there is no downside to wearing them  and that they can only help to slow the spread of transmission.

If you and I are in the same room and it helps me or helps you, why not use one? she asked. Why not flatten the curve?

Nava purchased and sent cloth masks back to family in the Central Valley. She also convinced her hesitant boyfriend, Danny Herrera, a 42-year-old advertising agency strategist, to cover his face.

He said he had to push family members in the Inland Empire to shed their skepticism, as he had, and wear the masks.

I have a lot of family there who werent really happy to put the face masks on, Herrera said. But now theyre all doing it and have been doing it way before Riverside County said to.

El Monte couple Rosalina Nava and Danny Herrera. (Irfan Khan/Los Angeles Times)

Carlos Franco, a 29-year-old produce distributor from Boyle Heights, said he realized he had to wear a mask three weeks ago while shopping at a market.

I was in line to buy milk and the guy ahead of me coughed all over the pen that everybody uses to sign credit card slips, said Franco, whos seen his business, Elias Produce, struggle with sales during the lockdown.

From then on it was like, Im using [touchless] Apple Pay and a face mask because I dont want to get anyone sick, he said.



Franco said a lot of Asian co-workers and customers had been wearing the masks for months before his own conversion. But he said he found the changing guidance on them from officials confusing.

One week it was, save the mask for nurses and doctors' and another week the experts and the media were saying that masks arent effective, he said.

For weeks now, Franco said he has been pushing family and friends to use masks to fight the spread of coronavirus.

"Theyre not uncomfortable at all, and now when I wear one it lets my customers know Im serious about their safety," he said.

Julissa Rodriguez, 28, said she has been wearing masks whenever she leaves her home in Van Nuys.

Two months ago the field representative for Assemblyman Adrin Nazarian (D-Van Nuys) would have never considered using a mask.

Rodriguez said she changed her mind when Gov. Gavin Newsom issued his stay-at-home order on March 19 that closed nonessential businesses. From that point, she understood the significance of COVID-19 and saw a change within her neighborhood.

That weekend, all over the Valley, you saw members of the Latinx community, who play a huge role in the informal economy, selling masks for $5 on many street corners," Rodriguez said. "The distribution of masks and their availability led many people to change their minds."

One person who needed additional convincing was Rodriguezs 64-year-old father.

My dad was telling me, Im invincible' and Im fine and Nothing is going to happen to me, Rodriguez said. I told him that this wasnt about him. This was about protecting my mom, me and everyone in the house. He understood after that.
Odisha Joint Entrance Examination (OJEE) 2020 that was scheduled for first week of May has been postponed till further notice. OJEE 2020 has been deferred due to the extension of the coronavirus lockdown.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi had on 14 April extended the countrywide lockdown till 3 May to restrict the spread of coronavirus.

A notice of the extension of OJEE 2020 has been uploaded on the official website ojee.nic.in.

The detailed schedule regarding revised dates of the Examination (OJEE 2020) and related activities like online submission of application forms and downloading of admit cards, etc. will be notified, in due course of time, on the assessment of the prevailing situation, the notice mentioned.

OJEE in its notice has asked students to not be worried, and follow all the preventive measures being laid down, by various government agencies to check the spread of coronavirus. Students are also advised to visit the official website - www.ojee.nic.in / www.odishajee.com regularly for updates.

Several entrance examinations such as JEE Main 2020, NEET UG 2020 have been deferred due to the outbreak of novel coronavirus. The new dates of the tests will be announced by the examination conducting bodies once the situation improves.

Odisha was the first state to extend the lockdown in the state till 30 April. School and colleges in the state will remain closed till 17 June. India has registered over 11,000 cases of COVID-19, with the death toll close to 400. Odisha itself has at least 60 confirmed COVID-19 cases.
Apple has launched a new site, apple.com/covid19/mobility, that uses data pulled from Apple Maps requests to show mobility trends for various regions. The aim is to help public health officials to understand where people are taking heed to shelter-in-place orders or guidelines and where they are not.

Anyone can go to the site and search for info from many major cities along with 63 countries or regions. Some cities or regions may not show up because Apple doesnt have enough data to ensure accurate trends.

What about privacy?

Those who dont read beyond headlines before mouthing off on social media are already complaining about privacy. Doesnt Apple say it dont track its users location history? Isnt Apple Maps supposed to be private? How can they do this?

Apple explains how it all works, and yes, it does protect your privacy.

When you use Apple Maps, your location history is not recorded by Apple (it lives only on your personal device, encrypted), and your requests are not associated with your Apple ID. But when you ask Maps for directions, check traffic data, or search for local businesses, it has to transmit that info over the internet.

To protect your privacy, Apple associates those requests with a unique identifier (a string of letters and numbers). It doesnt know who it belongs toits not associated with a specific Apple ID or personally identifiable data. This lets Apple track things like what kinds of requests are made and how often, but without having any way to associate it with particular users. Because the identifiers change and reset often, they cant even build up a history of your request to infer your identity by looking at things like your travel patterns.

In other words, Apple knows a user requested directions from here to there or a user searched for pizza but it doesnt know which specific user made those requests and doesnt even have enough data to figure it out over the course of many requests.

What the new COVID-19 site shows is the number of requests for directions made in each region, along with the mode of transport (driving, walking, or public transit). The site does not contain info on the start or end points of the directions requests, and as explained above Apple doesnt even have data on who made the requests.
PRIME Minister Kassim Majaliwa has called on Tanzanians to step up vigilance against COVID-19 by taking more precautionary measures against the spread of the deadly disease as the number of confirmed cases escalates.

He said the country had reached a level where cases were now increasing, especially in Dar es Salaam, Arusha and Zanzibar due to the nature of the areas.

"We all know that Dar es Salaam is the commercial hub and most populous city in the country, but we must follow the necessary precautions and measures given by health experts, including avoiding unnecessary gatherings to protect ourselves and others," he said.

Speaking in Dodoma yesterday during an event to receive a 500m/- dummy cheque for the support in the fight against COVID-19, he stressed on regularly and thoroughly washing hands with soap and water or an alcohol-based hand rub.

Most importantly, we should all continue to pray to the Almighty God to relieve us from the disease, he stressed.

Last week, Health Minister Ummy Mwalimu said that Tanzania had moved from imported cases to local transmission and that it will soon reach the community transmission stage.

However, she reiterated that the government would not pursue a standstill option and lockdown but instead sustain the ongoing containment measures.

The premier received the assistance from Export Trading Group (ETG), Country Director Mr Nilladri Chowdhury.

Speaking immediately after receiving the support, Mr Majaliwa thanked the executives of the ETG company for supporting the effort in the fight against COVID-19, whereby to-date 53 cases have been reported since the onset of the disease in the country while seven patients have recovered.

"On behalf of our President, Dr John Magufuli, we thank you for this assistance which will help the government cut costs in serving the community. We need the support of other stakeholders like you," he remarked.

Mr Chowdhury said they deemed it fundamental to support the governments efforts in the war against the disease.

We have decided to join the government in the fight against this disease; on behalf of ETG, Chairperson, Mr Mahesh Patel, we are presenting to you a 500m/- dummy cheque. We have faith and continue to pray for God to save us from this pandemic, he said.

He said ETG was an integrated agricultural supply chain groups responsible for, inter alia, procurement, warehousing, processing and/or manufacturing of finished goods through their company in Kapunga, Mbeya Region, three cashew nut processing industry in Mtwara, Newala and Tunduru and oil processing industries.

They also provide farmers with markets for products such as cashew nuts, peas, corn, chilies and sesame seeds.
[April 15, 2020] Worldwide Services Market Momentum Derailed by COVID-19 Pandemic, According to IDC

Worldwide IT Services and Business Services revenue grew 5% year over year in 2019, according to the International Data Corporation (IDC) Worldwide Semiannual Services Tracker (growth in nominal dollar denominated revenue in today's exchange rate was 2.4%, due to dollar's appreciation in 2019). This represents the second consecutive year the market has accelerated since 2017 (from 4% growth in 2017 to 4.2% in 2018 and 5% in 2019) despite a cooling economy (2019 world GDP slowed to just above 3%). Large services vendors also reported stronger bookings and book-to-bill ratios mostly above 1, portending buyers' overall optimism, as well as their appetite for more digital transformation. However, ravaged by the COVID-19 pandemic and comorbid economic malaise, the outlook has turned. This is the first time since the two world wars that the global economy has been disrupted both by demand and supply at such a scale. Considering the impacts, IDC (News - Alert) forecasts the worldwide services market will decline 1.1% in 2020 and grow just over 1% in 2021. The new forecast is based on the Economist Intelligence Unit's projection that the real 2020 GDP will likely contract by more than 2%, with a sharp decline in Q1 and Q2 offset by recovery in the second half of the year. The impact on the supply side, at least for enterprise services, will be relatively small. Providers are quickly adopting the "new norms" of working remotely and social distancing. The COVID-19 crisis will also tip organizations and consumers over to the online world sooner. As a result, it may improve productivity and open new opportunities. The demand-side shock and uncertainty will have a bigger and deeper impact. Most regions will contract somewhat in 2020 but with different severities: overall, Asia/Pacific will continue to grow, while the Americas will contract slightly in 2020. Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA) will be the most negatively impacted. The Americas services market will contract by 0.2% this year, down from the 5.2% growth experienced in 2019. IDC expects it to bounce back to growth in 2021 and eventually get to 3% or more. But the five-year compound annual growth rate (CAGR) will be considerably lower than previously forecast. This will be driven largely by the US market, which will remain flat in 2020 - tapering slightly from revenues of $485.6 billion in 2019 to $484.7 billion this year, or a 0.18% decline. US government and private sectors are putting off new projects to delay discretionary spending decisions due to market uncertainty. Project-oriented markets, such as consulting, custom application development, systems integration, etc. are expected to suffer short-term revenue downfalls. Growth in this segment is expected to be just 0.4% in 2020, down from last year's 7.4%. Managed services are expected to shrink slightly (-0.7%), and support services will be flat (both were slower growing markets to begin with). Canada's 2020 market size is also expected to shrink in 2020. This is partially offset by slight growth in Latin America, although it represents a sharp deceleration from the region's 7.2% gowth last year, amidst the demand shock of local shutdowns, currency depreciation, and China's weak demand for commodities, among other factors.



The EMEA region is forecast to contract by 4.3% in 2020, down from 2019's 4.4% growth, and will not likely return to positive territory until 2022. However, IDC expects different countries and sub-regions to recover at very different rates. With major Western European countries reporting high numbers of COVID-19 cases and fatalities and bracing themselves for a major recession from a prolonged shutdown, business leaders will focus primarily on preserving cash, which will impact almost all foundation markets in the near term. In Central and Eastern Europe (CEE), most markets are expected to contract similarly, ending two years of fast growth. Russia's market, which accounts for almost one third of the CEE market, however, is being severely impacted by the oil price shock and will decline by 20% this year. The Middle East & Africa market will also shrink moderately largely due to falling oil prices.

Asia/Pacific will decelerate and is expected to grow by only by 1.9% this year, down from 5.5% last year. The biggest impact will be felt in China. IDC expects the China services market to grow 2.4% in 2019, down from 7.6% in 2019, assuming a robust economic rebound in the second half of 2020 and government stimulus will offset the crisis earlier this year. For the rest of the region, the market is forecast to slow to 4.6% growth this year and 4.5% next year, down slightly from 5.9% last year. Compared to other regions, reports of confirmed cases and fatalities suggest that the pandemic has been better contained in the region; therefore, the outlook for the region's growth potential is more optimistic. "The COVID-19 pandemic is a demand shock on the services market worldwide," said Lisa Nagamine, research manager with IDC's Worldwide Semiannual Services Tracker, "but it will present different challenges, as well as opportunities, to different regions, industries, services offerings, as well as services providers." "It will also have a profound long-term impact on our global supply chain," said Xiao-Fei Zhang, program director, Global Services Markets and Trends. "After the dust settles, services vendors may find their client portfolio changed, as well clients' priorities. They will need to re-align their digital capabilities to the 'new norm.'" About IDC Trackers IDC Tracker products provide accurate and timely market size, vendor share, and forecasts for hundreds of technology markets from more than 100 countries around the globe. Using proprietary tools and research processes, IDC's Trackers are updated on a semiannual, quarterly, and monthly basis. Tracker results are delivered to clients in user-friendly excel deliverables and on-line query tools. For more information about IDC's Worldwide Semiannual Services Tracker, please contact Kathy Nagamine at 650-350-6423 or [email protected]. Click here to learn about IDC's full suite of data products and how you can leverage them to grow your business. About IDC International Data Corporation (IDC) is the premier global provider of market intelligence, advisory services, and events for the information technology, telecommunications, and consumer technology markets. With more than 1,100 analysts worldwide, IDC offers global, regional, and local expertise on technology and industry opportunities and trends in over 110 countries. IDC's analysis and insight helps IT professionals, business executives, and the investment community to make fact-based technology decisions and to achieve their key business objectives. Founded in 1964, IDC is a wholly-owned subsidiary of International Data Group (IDG), the world's leading tech media, data and marketing services company. To learn more about IDC, please visit www.idc.com. Follow IDC on Twitter (News - Alert) at @IDC and LinkedIn. Subscribe to the IDC Blog for industry news and insights: http://bit.ly/IDCBlog_Subscribe. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20200415005076/en/

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We know from history the devastation caused by the Great Depression of the 1930s, and most of us know from experience the Great Recession following the 2008 global financial crisis. But we have never seen anything like the covid-19 crisis. The pandemic will leave deep psychological scars, but its most striking feature is the speed and ferocity with which containment efforts have hit the global economy. Call it the Great Whiplash.

In the US, more than 17 million people filed for unemployment benefits last month. The week of 28 March, a record 6.9 million people did, a figure that would have seemed unbelievable just a few weeks prior, when the weekly norm was about a half-million. The Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis estimates that by mid-2020, the US unemployment rate could hit 32.1%, surpassing the previous high of 24.9% reached in 1933.

From the piecemeal statistics coming out of the developing world, it is clear that the situation there is dire. In its recent Africas Pulse report, the World Bank estimates that Sub-Saharan Africas economy could contract by 5.1% in 2020, compared to 2.4% growth last year, with South Africa, Nigeria, and Angola taking particularly big hits. South Africa, which has rightly been praised for its strong early containment measures, has also suffered an outflow of $1.75 billion in portfolio capital in March, which caused a sharp depreciation of the rand. Africas most urgent concern, however, is shortages in essentials, especially food. The World Bank expects agricultural production to decline by at least 2.6% and as much as 7%, with food imports dropping by 13-25%.

Despite these grim projections, there are grounds for hope. Thanks to a global marshaling of scientific resources, reflecting a unity of purpose rarely witnessed in history, our initial confusion is gradually giving way to some understanding of how covid-19 spreadsand how we can contain it without causing widespread hunger and poverty.

Already, governments have shifted considerable resources to combating the pandemic. In the US, a navy hospital ship was brought to New York Harbor to relieve the pressure on the citys hospitals. In China, dedicated covid-19 hospitals were built in record time. India is converting 5,000 railway coaches into isolation wards, and its celebrated Taj Hotels in Mumbai are being used to house frontline medical workers who need to remain in quarantine between shifts.

Meanwhile, government-funded drive-through covid-19 testing has enabled South Korea to achieve the worlds highest testing rate. Applying those lessons, South Africa has become a leader in rapid testing, deploying mobile testing units in densely populated areas. Its government plans to increase its capacity to 30,000 tests per day by the end of April.

Large-scale testing is crucial, as governments attempt to design policies that limit the costs of the crisis, while protecting public health. Here, special attention must be paid to what epidemiologists refer to as the basic reproduction number," or R0.

An infectious diseases R0 is the average number of people to which one infected person is likely to transmit the disease. Covid-19s R0 is currently estimated at around 2.5. If infections are to taper off over time, that figure must be less than one.

While we cannot make it less contagious, we can reduce its R0 through social norms and behaviour, such as physical distancing. Given the pitfalls of blanket lockdowns and quarantines, we should ring-fence areas where infections are concentratedidentified through expanded testingwhile allowing the economy to function elsewhere (with appropriate distancing rules in place).

Food and health services could then be delivered to the doorsteps of those under lockdown. Kerala, which early evidence suggests is managing to hold down its R0, has distributed cooked meals to those in need, while using aggressive testing, contact tracing, and quarantine protocols.

Other countries are finding innovative ways to protect citizens without shutting down the economy. For example, rather than shut Atikilit Tera, a fruit and vegetable market in Addis Ababa, Ethiopias authorities relocated it to a large open space, where social-distancing rules could be followed.

There is still a lot we dont know about covid-19a reality that should inspire both worry and hope. It remains a mystery why the incidence of the disease has remained low in Africa, South Asia, and large parts of Latin America.

Countries with lower infection rates are not more isolated. Bangladesh (which has recorded 1,000 cases) has one of the worlds most peripatetic populations, and Ethiopia (with fewer than 80 confirmed cases) has deep ties with China.

Of course, low numbers of confirmed infections can be explained partly by insufficient testing. But we are counting deaths more accurately than infections; hence the death tolls so far suggest that, if nothing else, covid-19 may have a lower fatality rate in these regions.

A surge in infections may still come, and we must take every precaution to guard against that outcome. But before we become swept up in collective hysteria, we should remember that we were foolish to remain complacent in the initial months after covid emerged. Dizzy with whiplash, we may prove similarly foolish in assuming that only disaster lies ahead. In this sense, our poor record of forecasting might be a source of some comfort. 2020/project syndicate

Kaushik Basu is professor of economics at Cornell University and former chief economist of the World Bank

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MC2 will retire Midwest generated Renewable Energy Certificates (RECs) equal to 100 percent of its customers energy consumption to celebrate the 50 th Anniversary of Earth Day

MC2 supports the development of sustainable renewable generation resources in the Midwest

An equivalent to over 3,000 metric tons of CO 2 will be eliminated from the atmosphere

CHICAGO, April 15, 2020 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- MC Squared Energy Services, LLC (MC2), a leading retail electric supply company located in the heart of Chicago will celebrate and honor the 50th anniversary of Earth Day in a unique way. On Wednesday April 22, MC2 will retire Midwest-based Green-e Wind Renewable Energy Certificates (RECs) equal to 100 percent of the energy consumption during this day. This includes all residential, commercial, educational and governmental customers served by MC2 in Illinois and Ohio, states in which the company is a certified retail electric supplier. These RECs are in addition to existing state mandated Renewable Portfolio Standard (RPS) requirements.

Chuck Sutton, MC2 founder and president, said he was looking for a unique way to celebrate the 50th anniversary of Earth Day, a worldwide event established in 1970 to demonstrate support for environmental protection. On Earth Day 2020 MC2 is projected to retire renewable energy certificates equivalent to over 3,000 metric tons of CO 2 eliminated from the atmosphere. Sutton says the company is excited to do its part to help reduce the worlds carbon footprint. Our efforts to reduce carbon emissions on the 50th anniversary of Earth Day is just one way we as company can demonstrate our commitment to make the planet we live in a better and safer place for all of our customers.

MC Squared Energy Services offers electricity supply products and services that are backed by RECs as a way for customers to support the reduction of harmful emissions and help the environment. A REC represents 1 megawatt-hour (MWh) of electricity that has been generated from a renewable energy source. Each REC retired by MC Squared is backed by Green-e, a trusted global leader in energy certification.

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To bolster its environmental commitment, MC Squared Energy Services proudly offers its EcoGreen Power Supply Program. The program is designed to give customers the opportunity to support renewable energy backed by 100 percent Wind Green-e certified RECs. The MC2 EcoGreen Power Program is Green-e Energy certified and meets the environmental and consumer protection standards established by the nonprofit Center for Resource Solutions. For more information on Green-e, visit https://www.green-e.org/. For more information on MC Squared Energy Services and its EcoGreen Power Program, visit www.mc2energyservices.com.

About MC Squared Energy Services, LLC

Established in 2008 by veteran energy industry experts, MC Squared Energy Services, LLC (MC2) is a certified, retail electric-service provider headquartered in Chicago. MC2 helps municipalities, businesses and individuals with competitive electric supply products to fit their specific needs. The companys customer-focused team has the resources and knowledge to meet its customers electrical supply requirements. MC2 prides itself on being easy to work with and responsive to its customers.

MC Squared Energy Services, LLC is a wholly owned subsidiary of Wolverine Holdings. Founded in 1994, the Wolverine companies comprise a number of diversified financial institutions specializing in proprietary trading, asset management, order execution services and technology solutions. They are recognized as a market leader with focus on innovation, achievement and integrity with clients and colleagues. The Wolverine companies are headquartered in Chicago with satellite offices in New York and San Francisco, and a proprietary trading affiliate office located in London.

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A pharmacist and a building surveyor have been arrested on suspicion of illegally selling coronavirus testing kits.

Police say a 46-year-old pharmacist from Croydon, South London, was arrested for misleading the public on Saturday after police seized 20,000 from his properties.

In a separate incident, detectives also arrested a 39-year-old from Uxbridge, West London, who was caught driving a car carrying 250 Covid-19 testing kits on Sunday.

The surveyor told detectives he was planning to sell the kits to builders. Both suspects were held on suspicion of fraud.

Police search the premises of a pharmacist from Croydon, South London, who was arrested for misleading the public on Saturday after officers seized 20,000 from his properties

The use of coronavirus tests at home is not currently advised by Public Health England. There are no tests for home use that are CE marked, a certification that shows compliance with European safety standards, and it is illegal to sell them.

Officers also shut down a website whose creators were trying to trick victims into buying non-existent personal protective equipment through phishing emails.

Authorities are warning the public against using the diagnosis kits at home because they have not been approved by official bodies and could be dangerous to health.

Tariq Sarwar, head of operations for enforcement at the Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency, said: 'The use of products for the diagnosis of coronavirus infection in community settings, such as pharmacies, for home use, is not at present advised by Public Health England.

Detectives are pictured arresting a 39-year-old surveyor from Uxbridge, West London, who was caught driving a car carrying 250 Covid-19 testing kits on Sunday

'There are no CE marked tests for home use, and it is illegal to supply such products.

How fraudsters are taking advantage of the coronavirus pandemic Police have warned people not to let anyone into their homes who claim to be testing for coronavirus. Opportunist scammers have been knocking on doors in London claiming to be from health authorities. The con artists then say they need to carry out tests for Covid-19 to gain entry to properties of the elderly and vulnerable. Phishing emails have also been circulating to trick people into revealing sensitive personal and financial information, with some fraudsters contacting potential COVID-19 victims pretending to be from Centres for Disease Control and Prevention and World Health Organisation research teams. Some even provide the recipient with a list of coronavirus infected people in their area with a link to a malicious website or Bitcoin payment. Advertisement

'The safety, performance or quality of the products cannot be guaranteed and this poses a health risk.'

Detectives are urging the public to be wary of a surge in email scams targeting vulnerable people.

Examples include fake offers of medical support, high return investments, and appeals to support bogus charities.

Graeme Biggar, director general of the National Economic Crime Centre, said: 'Covid-19 is increasingly being used as a hook to commit fraud - and we think these offences are likely to increase during the pandemic.

'Individuals and businesses need to be fully prepared for criminals trying to turn the pandemic to their advantage by scamming them out of money.

'Law enforcement, government and the private sector are working together to protect the public and combat these offenders.'

The pharmacist and the surveyor arrested this weekend have both been released on conditional bail.

Nikki Holland, director of investigations at the National Crime Agency, Britain's equivalent of the FBI, said: 'Criminals capitalise on fear and anxiety and they will exploit any opportunity, no matter how awful, to line their pockets.

'Illegally selling testing kits completely undermines the nation's collective response to the pandemic and actually endangers lives.

'Anyone thinking of trying to profit in this way should take note of these arrests and that bringing these offenders to justice and ceasing their activities is a key priority across law enforcement.'

Details of the arrests came after Europol said it had foiled a plot to defraud German health authorities of millions of euros as they tried to buy face masks.

The FBI also warned it has seen incidents of conmen targeting government and health industry bodies responsible for buying protective equipment and ventilators.
Nonprofits Insurance Alliance (NIA), a nationwide insurer exclusively serving 501(c)(3) nonprofits, has introduced auto coverage that reimburses California nonprofits for payments made to their employees for auto physical damage caused on personal vehicles during work-related activities. The coverage is effective July 1, 2020.

California requires an employer compensate an employee for all necessary expenses incurred by work-related duties. When an employee is using their own vehicle, the primary coverage for any auto physical damage claim is the employees own personal auto insurance. If the personal auto carrier denies the claim because the driver was working, the expense of auto repair becomes the responsibility of the employer.

The Non-owned Auto Physical Damage Reimbursement (Employee Vehicles) coverage applies to nonprofits that are required to reimburse their employees for losses related to auto physical damage claims. The NONPROFITS OWN coverage will be added to the business auto liability coverage form for NIAs California members.

NIA offers insurance coverages for the operational needs of 501(c)(3) organizations. NIAs NONPROFITS OWN full spectrum of property and casualty coverages are created by nonprofits, for nonprofits.

Founded in 1989 in Santa Cruz, Calif., the NIA group brand is comprised of Alliance Member Services (AMS) and three insurers: Nonprofits Insurance Alliance of California (NIAC), Alliance of Nonprofits for Insurance, RRG (ANI), and National Alliance of Nonprofits for Insurance (NANI). All organizations under the NIA brand are 501(c)(3) nonprofits.

Topics California Auto Claims
BAKU, Azerbaijan, Apr. 15

Trend:

Citizens of Azerbaijan purchased 284 real estate properties in Turkey from January through March 2020, which is 3 properties less compared to the same period of 2019, Turkeys General Directorate of Land Registry and Cadaster told Trend.

In March 2020, Azerbaijani citizens purchased 65 real estate properties in Turkey, which is 15 properties less compared to March 2019.

According to the ministry, 118,753 real estate properties were sold in Turkey in February 2020, which is 51.4 percent more compared to February 2019.

In March 2020, 108,670 real estate properties were sold in Turkey, which is 3.4 percent more compared to March 2019.

In March 2020, 3,036 real estate properties were sold to foreigners in Turkey, which is 3 percent less compared to the same month of 2019.

In 2019, Azerbaijani citizens purchased 1,191 real estate properties in Turkey, which is 59 properties less compared to 2018.

Azerbaijani citizens purchased 146 real estate properties in Turkey in December 2019, which is 20 properties less compared to the same month of 2018.

---

Follow the author on Twitter: @rhafizoglu
An upscale outlet mall near Omaha, Nebraska, is planning to reopen in just nine days despite a statewide order prohibiting gatherings of more than 10 people as the number of coronavirus cases and deaths continues to grow.

Nebraska Crossing Outlets announced that it is aiming for a 'soft reopening' on April 24, which would be roughly the same time officials expect the number of coronavirus cases in the state to peak.

Health experts and others have condemned the plan as reckless because it could draw large crowds into confided spaces where they are at high risk of spreading and contracting COVID-19.

But owner Rod Yates claims that the reopening will serve an important purpose as a case study for other malls preparing to go back in business after the worst of the COVID-19 crisis passes.

'We're looking at the great opportunity to set some best practices and help our retailers open their portfolios across the country,' owner Rod Yates told the Omaha World-Herald.

The Nebraska Crossing outlet mall (pictured) near Omaha is planning to reopen on April 24 - just as the state is projected to hit its peak in coronavirus cases

Nebraska is one of the few states that still allows malls to be open even though many businesses are closed because the state prohibits gatherings of more than 10 people and limits restaurants and bars to take out and delivery services.

It is not immediately clear how many stores will reopen when the mall does and how the facility will comply with state-ordered social distancing protocols.

The outlet sits next to a heavily traveled stretch of Interstate 80 about halfway between Omaha and Lincoln.

Douglas, Sarpy and Lancaster counties, which include Omaha and Lincoln and their suburbs, had seen a total of 354 cases as of Wednesday afternoon.

That's about 40 percent of the statewide total of 901 cases of COVID-19 and 20 deaths linked to the disease.

Douglas County Health Director Dr Adi Pour called the reopening plan 'disappointing'.

'If we open things up too soon, we're going to see outbreaks,' Pour said during the county's monthly COVID-19 meeting on Wednesday.

'That's not what you want to see. There are businesses in town that have been very unresponsive to recommendations.'

Owner Rod Yates (pictured) claims the reopening will serve as a case study for other malls preparing to go back in business after the worst of the COVID-19 crisis passes

Governor Pete Ricketts (pictured at a news conference in Lincoln on Friday) said the stores are free to reopen as long as they follow the state's social-distancing guidelines

Gov Pete Ricketts said Tuesday the stores are free to reopen as long as they follow the state's social-distancing guidelines.

'We didn't ask them to close, and we didn't ask them to open,' he said at his weekday coronavirus news conference.

Ricketts, a Republican, has encouraged residents to shop alone and limit their excursions to one trip per week, but he hasn't ordered any formal restrictions.

He said he discussed the matter with the shopping center's managers, and told them that if they chose to open, they needed to follow the state rules.

Mall officials say they have purchased 100 thermometers for each store to use to check employees at the start of each day, and they plan to install 200 plastic shields at registers to separate customers and employees.

Officials plan to encourage employees and customers to wear masks and gloves and avoid walking around in groups at the outdoor mall.

'Anything we do is going to be very controlled,' Yates said.

'We're not going to do any mass events that attract hundreds of people. We're going to slowly ease ourselves into the process of getting ourselves open.'

Consumer experts have speculated that the mall won't attract many customers when it reopens because people will be reluctant to shop there

It could be difficult for stores to maintain social distancing if crowds of shoppers returned, but Craig Johnson, president of consumer consultancy Customer Growth Partners, said he doesn't think the mall is likely to have that problem.

'My guess is they will be happy and delighted if a store gets crowded enough where people have to worry about their six-foot radius,' Johnson said.

'I just don't think they're going to get a big crowd.'

Retail analyst Jon Reily also said he didn't think the reopening will be successful because consumers will likely be reluctant to shop there.

'People are very cautious,' Reily, senior vice president of global commerce strategy at Isobar, told AP.

'I don't know if old patterns of going to the mall to buy nonessential items are really going to stick.'

But Yates said he's expecting plenty of people to turn out at the mall when it reopens.

'My phone has been ringing off the hook with customers asking us: "When can we get the stores open, we have some shopping needs, we want to get out of the house, we want to do something different,"' he said.

Two general managers at Nebraska Crossing stores told The World-Herald that they worried about the potential ramifications of reopening too soon.

'There's been absolutely no regard to Nebraska Crossing employees. None of us signed up to be guinea pigs,' one manager said.

'We all have family. I'm not willing to bring that to my family. Im not willing to be a test subject for you guys, and neither are my employees.'

'We haven't even hit our peak in Nebraska yet. That's ridiculous. I understand it's going to be a long time, but there has to be a protocol set in place that needs to be tested before we open to the public.'

The other general manager expressed concern about out-of-state visitors from harder-hit areas, which the mall is known to attract.

Ricketts addressed that concern by asking people who come to Nebraska from other states to self-quarantine for 14 days.

'I gotta tell you, I just don't think youre going to see a lot of traveling this time when everybody knows were supposed to stay at home,' the governor said.
PDS has serious doubts about St. Es capacity to follow CDC guidelines about social distancing for our clients and to care for those who might be symptomatic with Covid-19, Clark said in an email. The hospitals lack of transparency both with the public and us leaves us terrified for our clients, many of whom are elderly, are medically vulnerable, or both.
Illinois Air Guard C-130s join the fight against COVID-19

By Tech. Sgt. Lealan Buehrer, 182nd Airlift Wing / Published April 14, 2020

EUGENE, Ore. (AFNS) -- What could have been a three-day trek across 2,150 miles of interstate highway was shortened to overnight delivery by Air National Guard C-130H Hercules joining Illinois' fight against the COVID-19 pandemic.

Two aircrews assigned to the 182nd Airlift Wing departed Peoria Air National Guard Base, Illinois, April 7, to pick up and transport 250 medical isolation pods from the Oregon manufacturer to Chicago Midway International Airport the next day. The negative-pressure tents are for use in an alternate medical facility assembled inside Chicago's McCormick Place convention center. Transporting them fit the C-130's tactical airlift mission set, which allows for a wide variety of oversized cargo and flexible design configurations.

"(The C-130) is the workhorse of the fleet. It's been reliable since the 1950s, and our crews and our maintenance professionals are the best in the business," said Maj. Justin Childers, a 169th Airlift Squadron C-130H mobility pilot. "We got the people there, we got the airplanes ready to go, and we went off and executed it. The Guard motto about 'Always Ready' is absolutely true."

The pods are sealed cubicles with high-efficiency particulate air, or HEPA, filtration systems, said Nathan Neckles, a sales manager with the pod manufacturer. The pods allow medical professionals to work with patients in a contained space using cleaned, recirculated air, helping prevent the coronavirus from spreading.

Childers said while airlift and airdrop is what the 182nd AW does every day, such a high-visibility operation is not as common.

"It felt really good just to know we're helping get those supplies, so that if this thing spikes, (Illinois) can be more prepared for it," he said. "I'm glad we got to go do it. I really am."

While the Air National Guard operates for the war fight and security cooperation with foreign allies, its primary mission is to support homeland operations at the direction of the governor and adjutant general.

"We fight America's war, but as the National Guard, we're also here for our communities," said Brig. Gen. Richard Neely, Illinois National Guard adjutant general, in an April 8 interview with Chicago's WBBM-TV. "So, this is the most rewarding mission we could possibly have, is to help our neighbors when they're in need."



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The administration has demarcated 90 red zones across Jammu and Kashmir as on 14 April, according to the Department of Information and Public Relations.

Authorities in Jammu and Kashmir have issued fresh guidelines on dealing with the novel coronavirus in the Union Territory. The guidelines include stamping coronavirus patients and sealing of zones that report a high number of cases.

The guidelines note that if cases rise, doctors may not have the time to carry out contact tracing. They recommend the creation of separate teams for contact tracing, so that doctors can focus on medical work.

The administration has demarcated 90 red zones across Jammu and Kashmir as on 14 April, according to the Department of Information and Public Relations. These red zones will be under a 100 percent lockdown and will be completely sealed.

At these zones, authorities have erected iron barricades, evoking angry at some places. Several people have accused the police of committing excesses while enforcing the lockdown.

Some of the guidelines that have been a part of the standard operating procedure (SOP) are rather baffling. For instance, movement of patients requiring emergency treatment will only be allowed if permission is issued by the sub-divisional magistrate/tehsildar and the emergency is certified by the block medical officer. Such patients, as well as their attendants, will be red stamped. For "other emergencies", the permission of the executive magistrate will be needed to travel out of a red zone. The SOP does not clarify the meaning of "other emergencies."

The guidelines further state that identification of the red zones would require an intelligent demarcation of boundaries using roads and natural barriers. Entry and exit points of the red zones will be marked by stickers, and police personnel will be present.

The guidelines also note that community participation is necessary to raise awareness about the novel coronavirus. They state that the authorites should create a "database of influencers in the village like religious leaders, government servants, panchayat raj institution (PRI) members and utilise them in spreading awareness and ensuring total lockdown."

The guidelines also say that the deputy commissioner will make arrangements in cases of pregnant women or people needing dialysis. However, it is not clear how these arrangements will be made.

Meanwhile, authorities have suspended routine health care services in public hospitals.

Although authorities have said that health workers will deliver essential commodities to people, locals said "there was no such arrangement in place."

Abdul Rehman Malik, a farmer from Soibugh in Budgam, one of the red zones, said, "The police recently baton-charged people who had gone to a ration store to fetch some rice and flour."

Fayaz Bakshi, activist and businessman, said, "A proper strategy needs to be put in place to tackle the disease. How will we overcome it if frontline staff like healthcare and municipal workers get beaten up? The government has already shut Out Patient Department (OPD) services in hospitals. Arbitrary restrictions on the movement of people will only throw a spanner in our fight against the disease."

Samir Matoo, Director of Health Services, Kashmir said the red zones have been demarcated to ensure that coronavirus cases do not spread. "We will also conduct large-scale testing in affected areas," he said.
Virginia passes law to extend discrimination protections to LGBT community

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Virginia has passed a law that extends anti-discrimination protections to include sexual orientation and gender identity, reportedly the first southern state to do so.

Governor Ralph Northam signed the Virginia Values Act, also known as Senate Bill 868, into law on Saturday after it was passed by a Democrat-controlled legislature.

In a statement released last Saturday, Northam said that the new law sends a strong, clear message that Virginia is a place where all people are welcome to live, work, visit, and raise a family.

We are building an inclusive Commonwealth where there is opportunity for everyone, and everyone is treated fairly, he said. No longer will LGBTQ Virginians have to fear being fired, evicted, or denied service in public places because of who they are.

Democratic Senator Adam Ebbin, who sponsored the bill, said in a statement he believed the new law was necessary during times of crisis like these.

When jobs are scarce and housing unaffordable, the reality of who you are must be an additional hurdle to putting food on the table or providing shelter for your family. This law provides important new protections, stated Ebbin.

Critics of the legislation argued that, if enacted, the Values Act might threaten the religious liberty of those who are morally opposed to homosexuality and transgenderism.

Victoria Cobb of the Family Foundation, a socially conservative group, previously denounced the passage of the bill earlier this year in a statement.

In his dissent to the Supreme Court's Obergefell decision inventing a right to marriage, Justice Alito warned that some would use that decision to 'stamp out every vestige of dissent, stated Cobb, as reported by WTVR.

The Virginia General Assembly today passed legislation that empowers the Attorney General to do just that. The Family Foundation is already preparing to defend religious Virginians who are attacked for their faith.

In addition to the Values Act, the state government also recently passed a law banning sexual orientation change efforts therapy for LGBT minors.

The measure, also known as House Bill 386, was signed into law by Northam in March. In previous General Assembly sessions, when Republicans held a majority, the proposed legislation had failed.
Source: Xinhua| 2020-04-15 17:58:10|Editor: xuxin

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MUMBAI, April 15 (Xinhua) -- India's Mumbai civic authorities has facilitated direct supply of fresh farm produce to consumers in the city to counter the erratic supply of vegetables and fruits amid COVID-19 pandemic, local media reported on Wednesday.

The nationwide lockdown that has been extended till May 3, after it was planned to end on April 14, disrupted supply, resulting in spiraling prices of essential items.

BrihanMumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) that governs the city provided contact details of the suppliers of fresh farm produce on its twitter page to enable citizens place orders for door-step delivery.

"We have come up with this initiative to ensure minimal human contact. This initiative will help keep the prices of these goods in check," said a local media quoting a civic official.

The farm produce market place that supplies to Mumbai normally receives 525-550 truck load of vegetables every day. The three-week disruption due to nationwide lockdown had seen vegetable prices rising between 50 percent to 100 percent.

The direct supply now has brought down the prices by 12 percent to 35 percent, while also maintaining social distancing in this hour of health crisis, according to local media.
COVID-19 has become a very real and serious problem in our nation, as well as the rest of the world, for quite some time now. Lockdown measures have been placed in several states to help minimize the amount of those that would be infected by this. Conveniently, in relation to this topic, there was a spike in COVID-19 patients in Iowa just under a week ago (or as much that has been reported), where it has been reported by some news outlets, that the jump has gone up by 57%.

When I see statements from Kim Reynolds, our state governor, such as, It's important to understand that sheltering in place for two or three weeks will not cause the coronavirus to go away, or that health care officials, people who are certified medical officials, might not have all the information, one would only become more skeptical.
The Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) on Wednesday issued detailed guidelines on activities that will be allowed during the second phase of lockdown till May 3. As per these guidelines, the e-commerce companies, which were only supplying basic essentials during the nationwide lockdown, will now be permitted to resume its operations.

Officials in top e-commerce companies who did not want to identified informed that they have reached out to the ministry seeking more clarity on the operations that are exempted to be resumed.

"The guidelines mentioned that e-commerce companies will be allowed to function. While we have started preparing for staggered resumption, we just want to make sure whether we can go full scale with non-essentials as well," he said.

The companies have also reached out to lobby groups like Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry (FICCI) and the National Association of Software and Service Companies (NASSCOM).

Under new guidelines, the MHA said that some commercial and private establishments will be allowed to operate from April 20. However, all of these relaxations are for areas which have not been declared as hotspots or containment zones of deadly coronavirus.

Call centres for government activities, all courier services, e-commerce companies, will be allowed to function, the ministry said in its revised guidelines. Vehicles of e-commerce companies will require the necessary permit.

The Centre had assured e-commerce companies that their operations would not be disrupted amid a nationwide lockdown to curb the spread of coronavirus, but most had filtered their services to delivery of only essentials like groceries and food grains.

Local issues such as differing state and district level regulations had hindered operations.

Most of Amazon.com Inc's 60 plus fulfilment centres in India were shut, while Wallmart-owned Flipkart had cut down in most of its services.

The guidelines, issued by the MHA has also allowed exceptions for construction activities and rural works under MNREGA.

Adding to the list of exceptions, the government said all farming operations, including procurement of agricultural products and agriculture marketing through notified mandis, will be permitted. The supply chain of milk and its products, poultry and live-stock farming and tea, coffee and rubber plantations will also resume.
There have been calls for increased testing in care homes. (Yui Mok/PA)

Nurses are being trained to verify the deaths of care home residents across Northern Ireland in a bid to ease pressure on overstretched GP services during the coronavirus pandemic, it can be revealed.

The changes to the way deaths of care home residents are dealt with has raised fears that staff may be able to cover up neglect and abuse of residents at a time when visitors to care homes have been banned in order to slow the spread of Covid-19.

SDLP MLA Colin McGrath said: "It seems to me that important safeguards to ensure independent scrutiny of deaths have been removed. These are safeguards and checks that are in place to stop the likes of Harold Shipman from operating with impunity.

"What's to stop another Harold Shipman from seeing an opportunity and say that a resident had coronavirus symptoms before their death and have that recorded as the cause of death when in fact that isn't what happened?"

The death certification process in Northern Ireland has been changed due to the Coronavirus Act 2020, which makes a provision to change who is permitted to complete a medical certificate cause of death (MCCD).

It means that nursing staff at a care home can now verify a death and pass information about the resident's medical condition to a GP before they then sign the death certificate.

This can be done by the original treating doctor or a colleague from the same GP surgery.

Alternatively, if a care home resident has not been treated within 28 days and dies of a natural illness, any doctor is allowed to sign the MCCD.

The changes to the way deaths in care homes are verified comes as it emerged that coronavirus deaths are not being reported to the coroner.

The Coroners Service, which is responsible for holding inquests into deaths when notified by the authorities, has said it will not be investigating Covid-19 cases.

A spokesperson said deaths due to the virus are "natural" and do not need to be reported.

Nurses working in the community are already permitted to verify the death of a patient - a process also known as pronouncing life extinct.

However, nurses working in care homes are now receiving specific training from the Clinical Education Centre to confirm a death in order to relieve pressure on GPs.

If no appropriately trained nurse is available, GPs will still carry out the task.

Mr McGrath continued: "Prior to this there was a robust process in place so that everyone could have confidence in the system.

"It appears that that has now been taken away and there is less of an independent oversight, where the coroner isn't involved and a death can be certified by a doctor without them having any involvement in the care of a care home resident.

"This is a very anxious time for the families of care home residents as it is, they haven't been able to see their loved ones for a number of weeks now and there are cases where they will already have had concerns about the standard of care their loved one is receiving.

"It is vital that families are provided with as much reassurance at what is already a very stressful and difficult time."

The chief nursing officer Charlotte McArdle said: We recognise that death of a loved one due Covid-19 is very difficult, especially as social distancing prevents a bereaved familys involvement in the normal processes.



Verification of Death is not a new role for Registered Nurses, however training in this procedure has been increased in recent weeks to ensure that sufficient numbers of nurses are trained in the Verification of Death procedure.

"This will also ensure that any delay between the actual time of death and the verification of the death is minimal. In every situation when a death occurs, the dignity, religious and cultural needs of the deceased person and family members will be respected.

The Department of Health (NI), issued guidance on verification and recording of the fact of death in March 2008. The circular states that verification of death can be carried out by any doctor, nurse, or ambulance clinician who has had appropriate training.

"This guidance was updated in January 2019 and has been further updated in response to the current Covid-19 pandemic.

Whilst Verification of Death can be undertaken by nurses, the process of Certification of Death is the responsibility of a medical practitioner only."
We all know that when cheating is involved, shit can get messy. But this. This is something else.

Nick Lutz is a college student who broke up with his girlfriend after she cheated on him. When she ended up sending him an apology letter, Nick wasn't having a bar of it.

Instead of keeping the letter or throwing it out, he did something so much better. He took out a red pen and started marking it, pointing out errors and critiquing her statements.

He begins by pointing out her poor letter format, that her "introduction" is too long and that there's "lots of repitition".
(HealthDay)Considerable severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus-2 (SARS-CoV-2) contamination of air and object surfaces is reported in intensive care units (ICUs) and general coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) wards (GW), according to a study published online April 10 in Emerging Infectious Diseases, a publication of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Zhen-Dong Guo, from the Academy of Military Medical Sciences in Beijing, and colleagues tested air and surface samples to examine the distribution of SARS-CoV-2 in two hospital wards in Wuhan, China, from Feb. 19 through March 2, 2020. Swab samples were collected from potentially contaminated objects in the ICU and GW.

The researchers found that the rate of positivity was higher in the ICU than the GW (43.5 versus 7.9 percent). The rate of positivity was relatively high for floor swab samples (70 and 15.4 percent in the ICU and GW, respectively). Half of the samples from the soles of ICU medical staff shoes were positive. The rates of positivity were also relatively high for the surface of objects frequently touched by medical staff or patients, with the highest rates for computer mice (75 and 20 percent in the ICU and GW, respectively). In samples from sleeve cuffs and gloves of medical staff, sporadic positive results were obtained. Positive results were obtained for 35 and 12.5 percent of air samples collected from the ICU and GW, respectively. Rates of positivity for SARS-CoV-2 aerosol transmission were 35.7, 44.4, and 12.5 percent near air outlets, in patients' rooms, and in the doctors' office area.

"These findings indicate that virus-laden aerosols were mainly concentrated near and downstream from the patients," the authors write. "However, exposure risk was also present in the upstream area; on the basis of the positive detection result from site 3 (doctors' office area), the maximum transmission distance of SARS-CoV-2 aerosol might be 4 m."

Explore further Follow the latest news on the coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak

Copyright  2020 HealthDay. All rights reserved.
The coverage on this live blog has ended  but for up-to-the-minute coverage on the coronavirus outbreak, visit the live blog from CNBC's Asia-Pacific team. Global cases: More than 2,047,700

Global deaths: At least 133,354

US cases: More than 632,800

US deaths: At least 27,850 The data above was compiled by Johns Hopkins University. All times below are in Eastern time.

8:15 pm: San Francisco launches its own contract tracing program

The city of San Francisco is creating a new contract tracing program  currently in the testing phase  which is designed to track and monitor people who are potentially infected with Covid-19. The city is working on it with UCS faculty and over 50 people including San Francisco librarians, city attorney staff and UCSF medical students. Those workers, who are being trained for responding, will follow up remotely with any individuals who may have been in contact with the Covid-positive patient. It's on a voluntary basis, which means people need to be able to trust the process, city officials said. "There have been instances in San Francisco when people have been unwilling to work with contact investigators, either because they do not trust them, do not understand the purpose, or do not have all the information they need to feel comfortable," city officials said. Jennifer Elias

7:50 pm: San Francisco city workers take 'emergency' roles in pandemic

Hundreds of San Francisco city government workers have been drafted as "disaster service workers," the San Francisco Examiner reported Wednesday. The city requires its employees to help out where needed if a disaster occurs. The city has mobilized employees from librarians to election staffers to take on roles they may not normally in their day jobs. Since early April, approximately 75 librarians have been in charge of making sure seniors and low-income families have food on their plates, according to the report. Park and Recreation staffers are providing childcare to hospital and frontline workers, San Francisco mayor London Breed tweeted Wednesday. tweet

7:30 pm: LA mayor says large gatherings likely banned for the rest of the year

Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti said Wednesday large gathering such as concerts and sporting events likely won't resume until 2021. "It's difficult to imagine us getting together in the thousands anytime soon, so I think we should be prepared for that this year," Garcetti said in an interview with CNN's Wolf Blitzer. "Until there's either a vaccine, some sort of pharmaceutical intervention, or herd immunity, the science is the science. He added that public health officials made clear it has "miles and miles to walk before we can be back in those environments." Jennifer Elias

7:02 pm: Apple and Google have an ambitious plan to help officials track the virus

Rival tech giants Google and Apple have teamed up to create technology to help health officials trace who's been infected by Covid-19, and are building it directly into iOS and Android, the two operating systems that power almost 100% of the world's smartphones. It's a big announcement  not only is it an unusual example of two tech giants working together, but digital contact tracing is a technology that is being closely watched to see if it can help schools and businesses re-open when the Covid-19 epidemic slows down. It's a digital version of traditional contact tracing, a labor-intensive process in which public health officials contact everyone who might have been exposed to someone infected with Covid-19 to tell them to self-isolate or get tested. Contact tracing is a big part of mitigation efforts in Hong Kong and Taiwan, for example. Kif Leswing

6:51 pm: Another 5 million unemployment claims could be tallied, but the job-loss trend may be peaking

The number of workers filing for unemployment claims could again top 5 million for the week ended April 11, but the filings may also be peaking. Economists expect a fourth week of claims in the multi-millions, the result of the abrupt shutdown of the economy that started in the second half of March to stop the spread of coronavirus. In the prior three weeks, the number of claims totaled 16.8 million. According to Dow Jones, economists' consensus forecast is 5 million for the week ended last Saturday, down from 6.6 million the week earlier. The stay-at-home orders and unprecedented shutdown of business activity hit the leisure and entertainment industry and retail workers hard, as restaurants, stores and other venues where crowds gather were closed to prevent the spread of the virus. Patti Domm

6:44 pm: Alphabet CEO tells employees the company will slow hiring and other investments

Alphabet, the parent company of Google, is pulling back on some of its investments for the rest of the year amid the Covid-19 crisis and it's starting with hiring. "We believe now is the time to significantly slow down the pace of hiring, while maintaining momentum in a small number of strategic areas where users and businesses rely on Google for ongoing support, and where our growth is critical to their success," CEO Sundar Pichai told workers this week in a memo first reported by Bloomberg. A spokesperson confirmed the slowdown in a statement to CNBC. "We'll be slowing down the pace of hiring, while maintaining momentum in a small number of strategic areas, and onboarding the many people who've been hired but haven't started yet." Jennifer Elias

6:37 pm: Trump says US has 'passed the peak' of outbreak

President Donald Trump said the U.S. has "passed the peak" of the coronavirus outbreak, which has infected more than 632,000 people in America. "While we must remain vigilant, it is clear that our aggressive strategy is working," Trump said at a news briefing with the White House coronavirus task force. "The battle continues, but the data suggests that nationwide we have passed the peak on new cases." Trump said new cases are "declining" in New York, which has more confirmed cases than any country outside the U.S. He added that cases are "flat" in Denver and Detroit, while other cities including Baltimore and Philadelphia "are showing great signs of success." Will Feuer

6:27 pm: WHO says changing climates and crowded cities drive disease outbreaks

Chinese workers and health officials wear protective white suits as travelers from Wuhan gather to take buses as they are processed and taken to do 14 days of quarantine, after arriving on the first trains to Beijing on April 8, 2020 in Beijing, China. Kevin Frayer | Getty Images

There is "no question" that changes in temperature, rainfall and humidity are driving infectious disease outbreaks around the world, but the impact of rapidly changing weather systems on the coronavirus are not yet known, World Health Organization officials said. Even though scientists are still learning about Covid-19, the virus has shown the capability to "accelerate in a number of different climates," Dr. Maria Van Kerkhove, head of WHO's emerging diseases and zoonosis unit, told reporters during a press conference at the agency's headquarters in Geneva. "If you remember, this began in very cold temperatures, very dry temperatures, very low-level humidity," she said. "We don't know how this virus is impacted completely yet." China reported its first known cases of the coronavirus to the international health agency on Dec. 31 when parts of the country were in the middle of the winter season. Since then, the virus has spread to nearly to every country across the globe and infected more than 2 million people in a range of different environments.Berkeley Lovelace Jr.

6:15 pm: Stock futures flat after Dow's 445-point slide, investors await jobless claims data

6:05 pm: United expects $5 billion in government aid to weather coronavirus

United Airlines expects to receive $5 billion in government coronavirus relief  $3.5 billion as grants and $1.5 billion as a low-interest loan  help it through a sharp drop in demand because of the disease. Chicago-based United joins American, Delta, JetBlue and others that have reached agreements in principle with the U.S. government over the conditions for their share of $25 billion in payroll grants, which require airlines not to furlough or cut the pay rates of their employees through Sept. 30, even as demand drops to the lowest level in decades. United said it also expects to issue warrants to the U.S. government to purchase around 4.6 million of United's common stock, a stake that would allow the government to acquire close to 1.9% of the airline, based on FactSet data. The funds will "cover a portion" of the company's pay and benefits costs until Oct 1, United spokesman Frank Benenati said in a release. "This financial support is critical to our people, who are ensuring air service to communities throughout the country and supporting the shipment of much-needed medical supplies and travel of health care professionals around the globe," he said Leslie Josephs

5:50 Map shows US topping 630,000 cases

5:30 pm: Gov. Newsom announces more benefits for unemployed Californians amid coronavirus pandemic

People wear their face masks waiting in line for an emergency food distribution at the 88th Street Temple Church of God in Christ on April 14, 2020 in Los Angeles, California, during the coronavirus pandemic. Frederic J. Brown | AFP | Getty Images

California Gov. Gavin Newsom announced additional unemployment benefits for the state on Wednesday as well as new measures to handle a record volume of unemployment inquiries. "People are not where they were just a few weeks ago," Newsom said at a press briefing Wednesday. "Just in the last four weeks, 2.7 million Californians have formally filed for unemployment insurance." Newsom said California is now setting up the federal government's Pandemic Unemployment Assistance program, which will provide benefits for certain unemployed individuals, including those who are self-employed, gig workers and independent contractors. There are 1.5 million self-employed California residents "also deserving of direct assistance," according to Newsom. Hannah Miller

5:24 pm: Drinking alcohol can make the coronavirus worse, the WHO says

Drinking alcohol can increase the risk of catching Covid-19 and make it worse if you do get it, the World Health Organization said, recommending that government leaders around the world limit its access during coronavirus lockdowns. "Alcohol compromises the body's immune system and increases the risk of adverse health outcomes," the WHO's regional office for Europe said on its site late Tuesday, citing heavy alcohol use throughout the continent. Alcohol consumption is associated with a number of communicable and noncommunicable diseases, which can make a person more vulnerable to contracting Covid-19. It can also exacerbate mental health issues, risk-taking behavior and stoke violence, especially in countries that have implemented social distancing measures that largely keep the population quarantined in their homes. William Feuer

5:20 pm: New Orleans extends stay-at-home order

New Orleans Mayor LaToya Cantrell issued an order extending the city's stay-at-home policy until May 16.



The order continues the closure of nonessential businesses and limits restaurant operations to take-out and delivery. Louisiana Gov. John Bel Edwards issued a stay-at-home order for the state on April 2 that is only in place through April 30. Hannah Miller

5:15 pm: Applying for small business loans has been tough. But not for these people

A forgivable loan program meant to help ailing small businesses has met with much criticism amid delays, confusion and frustration. But some small-business owners have successfully applied for the loans, made through the new Paycheck Protection Program, with hardly a hiccup. These entrepreneurs appear to have something in common: relationships with representatives inside their bank who helped guide them through the process. Lawrence Sprung, a certified financial planner and financial advisor, was one such owner. Sprung, the president of Mitlin Financial, based in Hauppauge, New York, applied for a $50,000 loan on April 3, the day banks began taking applications. Others weren't as fortunate. Many were locked out due to heavy volume or the absence of a relationship with a bank credentialed to be part of the loan program. Darla Mercado, Greg Iacurci

5:09 pm: Goldman says fewer 'loss of smell' Google queries suggest better COVID outlook

Goldman Sachs is optimistic that recent public safety measures to contain the spread of the coronavirus are working based on an unusual data source: Google searches for "loss of smell." Queries for "loss of smell" on the internet search giant spiked in the week that began March 22 to an intensity reading of 100. That means that U.S.-based searches for the phrase "loss of smell" peaked relative to any other period in the last 12 months during the last full week of March. Since then, however, Google searches for "loss of smell" have more than halved, a sign Goldman Chief Economist Jan Hatzius says could suggest a fall in official case counts over the next few weeks. "The latest data on the pace of virus spread are encouraging, suggesting that lockdowns have paid large dividends," Hatzius wrote Wednesday. "Measures of virus spread based on big data are even more encouraging and suggest that the true number of new cases actually peaked a while ago." "Google searches for 'loss of smell'  a symptom that has proven an effective way to track the virus spread  have fallen to roughly one-seventh of their peak US level," he added. "These measures appear to lead the official count of cases confirmed by testing by 2-3 weeks." The latest Google search data as cited by Goldman Sachs suggests that U.S. queries for "loss of smell" have fallen to about 15% of their peak level. Thomas Franck

4:50 pm: IRS stimulus check tracking tool is not working for some people

A tool launched Wednesday by the Internal Revenue Service to track Americans' stimulus relief checks is not working for many, according to individuals who reached out to CNBC Make It. The Get My Payment tool is meant to give those eligible for a coronavirus stimulus check information on when they will receive their payment. Instead, many are receiving messages that their payment status is not available. In most cases, this happened because the system was overloaded, Luis Garcia, an IRS spokesperson, told CNBC Make It. "What happened is instead of having an error message or a message saying the system is very busy, it just says your information isn't in here, that was the default," says Garcia. But that should be fixed now. "Just be patient, check back later," he says. "If you filed last year's or this year's taxes we have your information." Alicia Adamczyk

4:38 pm: Trump's WHO funding threat echoes action that got him impeached, Democrats say

4:30 pm: JC Penney says it skipped a $12 million interest payment as outbreak shutters stores

J.C. Penney said Wednesday that it has chosen not to make a roughly $12 million interest payment due on April 15, as the coronavirus pandemic takes a toll on its business. It is entering into a 30-day grace period "in order to evaluate certain strategic alternatives, none of which have been implemented at this time," Penney said in a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. If the company does not make the payment within the 30-day period, it would result in an "event of default," with respect to its 2036 Senior Notes, the department store chain said. Among Penney's options is filing for bankruptcy protection, a person familiar with the matter told CNBC. Even before the coronavirus pandemic forced the retailer to close all of its stores, Penney was already facing slumping sales and looming debt payments that include significant annual interest expenses. "The Coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic has created unprecedented challenges for department store retailers across the industry and has resulted in extensive store closings," a spokeswoman told CNBC in an emailed statement. Lauren Thomas

4:26 pm: Elizabeth Holmes' criminal trial delayed

Elizabeth Holmes, the once heralded visionary who claimed to revolutionize blood testing in America, got her fate delayed when a judge set a new trial date of Oct. 27 due to the coronavirus pandemic.



As the economy is screeching to a halt and millions are scrambling to get tested for whether they have the virus, a judge said it's impossible to keep Holmes' original trial date in July. "We're in unchartered waters and unchartered territories," U.S. District Judge Edward Davila said. "We need to make sure the environment is safe for all parties, including the jury that's called to hear the matter." The judge said he would consider moving the trial to early 2021 if the coronavirus remains a threat in the fall.



In a status memo filed this week, attorneys for Holmes pointed to the dangers of conducting such a high-profile trial amid a health pandemic. Yasmin Khorram

4:07 pm: Dow drops more than 400 points as the coronavirus fuels deeper worries over the economy

Stocks fell sharply as dismal economic data and weak bank earnings fueled concerns over the coronavirus's impact on the U.S. economy. The Dow Jones Industrial Average dropped 442 points, or 1.9%. The S&P 500 slid 2.2% while the Nasdaq Composite closed 1.4% lower. Bank of America closed more than 6% lower on the back of disappointing earnings. Citigroup fell more than 5%. Energy, materials and financials were the worst-performing sectors in the S&P 500, dropping more than 4% each. Retail sales during the month of March plunged a record 8.7%, according to a report from the Commerce Department published Wednesday. That was the largest one-month decline since the department began tracking the series in 1992. "If this is a precursor to what we can expect throughout the U.S. ... there's no word for it," said Quincy Krosby, chief market strategist at Prudential Financial. "The reflects the complete shutdown of the economy." Fred Imbert

3:34 pm: Executives warn Trump that Americans need more testing before returning to work, shopping, eating out

A group of business executives warned President Donald Trump on Wednesday that the federal government "needed to dramatically increase" the availability of coranavirus testing before Americans would feel comfortable returning to their normal lives, according to a new report. The Wall Street Journal, citing people familiar with the situation, said Trump held a conference call with about three dozen financial, food and beverage, hospitality and retail industry executives who are part of a new task force that will advise him on reopening the country. It was the first of four planned calls involving task force members. "The people involved in the first call ... described current testing levels in the U.S. as inadequate to effectively reopen the economy," the Journal reported. Dan Mangan

3:07 pm: Maryland governor orders residents to wear masks in retail stores

Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan signed an executive order requiring masks or face coverings to be worn in retail locations, including grocery shops, pharmacies and convenience stores.The order goes into effect Saturday. "This is really another important step in our immediate efforts to protect public health and safety," Hogan said. "The wearing of masks is also something that we may have to become more accustomed to in order to safely reopen our state." Essential retailers will also have to require employees to wear face coverings. Masks will also be required on public transportation. Hannah Miller

2:28 pm: French death toll rises, intensive care numbers down

The number of people who died in France from the coronavirus infection in hospitals and nursing homes reached 17,167, the head of the public health authority said. The total death toll stood at 15,529 on Tuesday. The number of people in intensive care units fell to 6,457, a drop of 273, director general of health Jerome Salomon said. It was the seventh consecutive day of declines, suggesting the national lockdown, extended to May 11 on Monday, is having positive effects in containing the disease. Reuters

2:21 pm: Fed Beige Book says economy contracted 'sharply and abruptly' due to coronavirus

Economic activity has showed a deep decline due to measures taken during the coronavirus scare, with leisure and hospitality as well as retail the hardest-hit so far, according to the Federal Reserve's latest Beige Book report. The report also said most areas saw manufacturing declines that varied among industries. Food and medical product producers saw strong demand but faced obstacles in production and supply chains. "Economic activity contracted sharply and abruptly across all regions in the United States as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic," the report said. "All Districts reported highly uncertain outlooks among business contacts, with most expecting conditions to worsen in the next several months." Released periodically through the year, the Beige Book surveys the Fed's 12 districts for activity across sectors. Jeff Cox

2:13 pm: Small business loans top $296 billion and could reach the program's limit by the end of Wednesday

Much-needed small business aid is beginning to trickle out and more is expected in the weeks to come as banks start to disburse the rescue funds to Main Street. But the first-come, first-serve Payroll Protection Program of $349 billion in aid may be nearing a ceiling for loan commitments, with more than 1.3 million loans given approval at a value of more than $296 billion through Wednesday afternoon, according to the Small Business Administration. The program could reach its funding limit by the end of the day, according to a source familiar with the matter. The SBA and Treasury Department have yet to release any formal statistics on total loan disbursements from banks to small business owners, with one senior administration official telling CNBC the information is not yet available, despite multiple requests. The SBA did release data showing the average loan size is just under $240,000. Kate Rogers, Betsy Spring

2:03 pm: 'We need to start saving individual people,' not just stockholders, says pension fund CIO

The chief investment officer of one of the country's biggest public pension funds said the government response to the coronavirus should be focused on supporting unemployed workers, not stocks owned by pensioners. "I don't buy in to just [saving] the pensioners. Yes, they're important, but they're a small percentage. I think we have to start saving individual people," Christopher Ailman of CalSTRS said on "Squawk Box." The $2.2 trillion CARES Act passed by Congress and other actions by the Federal Reserve have created an unprecedented economic support from the U.S. government as the coronavirus pandemic shut down large parts of the economy. On Tuesday, the major airlines and the Treasury Department struck a deal on how the companies could receive payroll support to stay afloat and keep workers employed. Ailman said it is "such a tough call" as to which companies should be helped, but he said the total amount would likely have negative economic effects long-term. Jesse Pound

1:52 pm: New government app shows you the status of your stimulus payment

Millions of Americans are slated to get payments of up to $1,200 per person from the government this week, and now there's a way to track your money. On Wednesday, the Treasury Department and IRS launched a new free web app called "Get My Payment" that allows taxpayers to find the status of their payment. It also enables taxpayers to add their direct deposit information if they did not include that in their tax returns for 2018 or 2019. In the first hours after launch, many users complained on social media that they were having a difficult time getting through. Others who accessed the site still were not able to get their payment status. Lorie Konish

1:45 pm: Oracle's Larry Ellison says Zoom is an 'essential service' as virus forces remote work

Oracle founder and chairman Larry Ellison gave Zoom high praise this week, calling it an "essential service" for his business and others around the world. Zoom has seen enormous growth as more and more workers have been instructed to stay at home during the coronavirus pandemic. Zoom said its daily users spiked to 200 million in March compared with 10 million in December. The service's growth has been credited in part to its availability across many different platforms and it's free use for calls up to 40 minutes. Ellison said in the video posted Monday he believes Zoom will continue to be an important to businesses once workers return to the office. Lauren Feiner

1:37 pm: New York Gov. Cuomo orders all people to wear masks or face coverings in public

Rules for wearing of face coverings in New York State stated by Gov. Andrew Cuomo, April 15, 2020. Source: New York State

New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo plans to issue an executive order requiring all people to wear a mask or face covering while in public as the state works to combat the worst coronavirus outbreak in the U.S. "If you are going to be in a situation, in public, where you come into contact with other people in a situation that is not socially distanced you must have a mask or a cloth covering nose and mouth," Cuomo said during a press conference in Albany. Cuomo said the state is moving to a "new normal" as he outlined a gradual reopening of businesses, saying the crisis won't be over until a vaccine is made available. "Where we're going, it's not a reopening in that we're going to reopen what was. We're going to a different place," Cuomo said. Noah Higgins-Dunn

1:31 pm: CEO of mortgage giant Quicken Loans explains how struggling homeowners can 'skip the payment'

One of the biggest questions for homeowners facing a coronavirus-related financial hardship is whether to try to pause their mortgage payments. Quicken Loans CEO Jay Farner told CNBC the company wants to educate people that if they "skip the payment," they'll still have to pay it eventually. "Our tool right now is something called 'forbearance,'" Farner said on "Squawk Box." "It gives you the opportunity to pause on making your mortgage payments [with] no impact on your credit. But at some time in the future, you have to catch those back up." Many of the nation's top mortgage issuers, of which Quicken Loans is the largest, are working with clients to help them get through the coronavirus-driven economic halt. Requests to delay mortgage payments grew by 1,270% between the week of March 2 and the week of March 16, and another 1,896% between the week of March 16 and the week of March 30, according to numbers released Tuesday by the Mortgage Bankers Association. Matthew J. Belvedere

1:24 pm: A majority of publishers say advertisers have canceled or paused campaigns, says new IAB survey

The vast majority of online publishers in the U.S. say they've had advertisers cancel or pause ad campaigns with them as the coronavirus pandemic and lockdown hurts advertisers, according to results of a new Internet Advertising Bureau survey. The advertising cutback is resulting in widespread layoffs and cost cuts even as media consumption is skyrocketing. The effects are being felt across ad-supported websites, as well as companies that provide technical infrastructure to support selling ads. The IAB said it surveyed more than 200 U.S. ad-supported publishers, programmatic providers and media platforms who are both members and non-members of the organization. The survey examined both publishers covering hard news as well as other ad-supported media, like cooking or financial advice sites. Of those, 98% of respondents said they're expecting a decrease in revenue in 2020. Meg Graham

1:12 pm: Half of the world has asked the IMF for a bailout, chief says

The global economic downturn has been so severe that already half of the world has asked the International Monetary Fund for a bailout, the organization's chief said. "This is an emergency like no other. It is not because of bad governors or mistakes," Kristalina Georgieva told CNBC's Sara Eisen on CNBC's "Squawk Alley." "For that reason, we are providing funding very quickly." "We are asking for one thing only: Please pay your doctors and nurses, make sure that your health [care] systems are functioning, and that vulnerable people and first responders are protected," Georgieva said. Georgieva comments came after the IMF said Tuesday it expects the global economy to contract by 3% this year, adding the world could see a 1930's style recession. The fund had forecast a 3.3% economic expansion for 2020 in January. Fred Imbert

1:01 pm: How Germany plans to gradually reopen its economy after a weeks-long coronavirus shutdown

Chancellor Angela Merkel Wednesday laid out Germany's plan to gradually resume public life while maintaining social distancing, a month after Europe's largest economy effectively shut down in an effort to slow the coronavirus outbreak. Some small businesses will reopen on April 20 while schools will begin to gradually reopen on May 4. Most businesses have been closed in Germany since a March 16 government order limited economic life to grocery stories, pharmacies, banks, gas stations and other essential services while people were urged to remain at home. The German government extended social distancing measures until May 3, which require people to maintain a distance of 1.5 meters (5 feet) and limit public gatherings to just two people with the exception of family members. Large gatherings will remain banned at least until August 31, and religious gatherings remain prohibited until further notice. Germans are also being encouraged to wear masks in public and avoid travel. Businesses that don't exceed 800 square meters are allowed to reopen, as well as car dealerships, bike shops and bookstores regardless of their size. Hair salons can reopen on May 4 but workers must wear personal protective equipment. All shops that reopen must adhere to regulations on hygiene and must prevent lines from forming.



Restaurants will remain closed to dine-in service, but can offer delivery and takeout. Bars, clubs, theaters and concert venues will remain closed. Companies are encouraged to continue working for home whenever possible. Spencer Kimball

12:48 pm: Schumer, Pelosi staff to discuss next coronavirus relief bill with Treasury

Staffers for Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi will meet with the Treasury Department on Wednesday to discuss the Democrats' push to pass additional coronavirus relief legislation. The new round of working-level negotiations between Democrats and members of the Trump administration indicates a potential thaw in the ongoing stalemate over emergency funding. It also reflects a desire on both sides to keep the government's fiscal spigot open and pouring money into the economy, which has been devastated by the disease and the strict policies imposed to slow its spread. Schumer, D-N.Y., spoke with Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin on Wednesday morning about the "interim" relief package, a spokesman for the Senate leader's office told CNBC. Kevin Breuninger

12:31 pm: American Airlines CEO: 'It certainly feels like we're at bottom' as revenue tumbles 90%

The record drop in air travel demand because of the coronavirus pandemic appears to be as bad as it's going to get, American Airlines CEO Doug Parker said. "It certainly feels like we're at the bottom," Parker told CNBC in an interview. "Our revenues are down 90% on a year-over-year basis and they've been that way now for a few weeks. The real question is how long you stay at the bottom and when do we begin to recover. I don't think I know that better than anybody else." American and other large U.S. airlines, including Delta, Southwest and JetBlue on Tuesday announced agreements with the Treasury Department on the terms for their share of $25 billion in government grants and low-interest loans. American said the Treasury Department approved $5.8 billion in assistance  a $4.1 billion grant and a $1.7 billion low-interest loan. The Fort Worth, Texas-based carrier said it plans to apply for another government loan of around $4.75 billion. Leslie Josephs

12:19 pm: The economic data is even worse than Wall Street feared: 'The economy is clearly in ruins here'

Consumer and manufacturing reports for March showed the hit to the economy from the coronavirus was even swifter and deeper in the early weeks of the shutdown than expected. March retail sales fell 8.7%, the most ever in government data, and New York regional manufacturing activity hit an all-time low, declining a shocking 78.2%. Industrial production slipped 5.4% and manufacturing was down 6.3%, a record reflecting in part the 28% decline in auto production as plants shut down. The economic reports showed the double whammy of state shutdowns in mid-March on two pillars of the economy  the consumer and business. Both reports were even more dire than expected, and foreshadow even worse declines in April's activity, with state shutdowns affecting areas responsible for more than 90% of the economy. Patti Domm

12:10 pm: Insurance companies offering drivers relief during the coronavirus pandemic

A car moves along an empty highway during the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) outbreak in Seattle, Washington, March 30, 2020. David Ryder | Reuters

With millions under stay-at-home orders and working remotely, American roadways are seeing a lot less congestion and accidents. That means less risk of insurance claims  and auto insurers are taking note. Just over 80% of American auto insurance companies have announced that they will refund or credit drivers more than $6.5 billion over the next two months, according to a new report from the Consumer Federation of America. But those refund programs vary widely from insurer to insurer. Initiatives from State Farm and American Family received high marks from the consumer advocacy group for the amount of relief offered and the speed at which it's promised to be delivered. However, others fell short. CNBC Make It rounded up a list of insurance companies that have announced initiatives for drivers during the current coronavirus health crisis. Keep in mind that some insurers are providing relief on a case-by-case basis and you may not qualify for all of the programs. Megan Leonhardt

12:02 pm: McDonald's relationship with US franchisees is fraying over coronavirus relief

The coronavirus pandemic is straining McDonald's relationship with its U.S. franchisees once again. The fast-food giant is pushing for franchisees to do more to protect their workers, while franchisees are asking for more financial relief to keep them afloat. Franchisees operate 95% of McDonald's 14,000 U.S. restaurants. McDonald's is deferring rent for three months for franchisees to lessen the financial blow of social-distancing measures. Only about one-third of its U.S. franchisees will be asked to pay March rent. Operators who have seen the sharpest sales drops are also receiving deferrals on service fees. Tensions between the National Owners Association and McDonald's management have flared up in the past month, based on correspondence between the two viewed by the Wall Street Journal. McDonald's U.S. franchisees formed the independent group in 2018 to push back against the Chicago-based company's discounts and renovation plans. The NOA told McDonald's management in a letter last week that its members and most of the company's franchisees are "increasingly losing faith in the partnership and company leadership," according to the Journal. Amelia Lucas

11:53 am: WHO 'regrets' Trump's decision to withhold funding, says focus is on saving lives in coronavirus pandemic

President Donald Trump addresses the daily coronavirus task force briefing in the Rose Garden at the White House in Washington, April 14, 2020. Leah Millis | Reuters

The World Health Organization is turning to other countries to help fill any gaps in financing its Covid-19 response work after U.S. President Donald Trump said the United States would withhold contributions. "The United States of America has been a long-standing and generous friend to the WHO and we hope it will continue to be so," WHO Director-General Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said at a press conference. "We regret the decision of the President of the United States to order a hold in funding to the World Health Organization." Trump announced Tuesday that the U.S. will suspend funding to WHO while it reviews the agency's response to the Covid-19 pandemic. He said the administration will conduct a "thorough" investigation that should last 60 to 90 days. In the fiscal year 2019, the U.S. provided about $237 million as well as an additional $656 million in voluntary contributions to the agency, according to a WHO spokesperson, representing about 14.67% of its total budget. Berkeley Lovelace Jr.

11:45 am: New York City struggles to get accurate coronavirus fatality count as more people die at home

New container morgues are being prepared for the new type of coronavirus (COVID-19) victims to be delivered to hospitals in New York City, United States on April 14, 2020. Tayfun Coskun | Anadolu Agency | Getty Images

New York City is struggling to get an accurate count of the number of Covid-19 fatalities as more people die at home and some likely coronavirus deaths are attributed to heart attacks and other causes, Mayor Bill de Blasio said. On Tuesday, New York City officials said they would begin counting "probable" Covid-19 deaths, which are people "who had no known positive laboratory test," but are believed to have died due to Covid-19. The New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene estimates that there have been 3,778 probable Covid-19 deaths since March 11 that weren't previously counted in the city's official tally. There have been 6,589 confirmed Covid-19 deaths in New York City so far. Will Feuer

11:33 am: How to stay safe when people are breathing heavily while running, walking outside

@katiekhromova | Twenty20

Taking a walk or going for a run outdoors during the Covid-19 pandemic can be a saving grace for your mental and physical health. But in a time when we're all supposed to stay inside, it might seem ironic that there are more people gathering in outdoor spaces to jog. Running and walking outside are some of the safest activities people can do right now, "assuming they follow the actual social distancing guidelines," Dr. Aaron E. Glatt, chairman of the department of medicine and hospital epidemiologist at Mount Sinai South Nassau tells CNBC Make It. You'll probably have to temporarily change where and when you run amid the pandemic, Dr. Ravina Kullar, infectious disease researcher and expert with the Infectious Diseases Society of America, who is also an avid runner, tells CNBC Make It. But "If you're running by yourself and you're running in an area where you're not encountering other people, it's very healthy," Glatt says. Here's all you need to know about running, walking and exercising outdoors during Covid-19. Cory Stieg

11:12 am: Alphabet's health company defends decision to require a Google account to use its screening site

In a letter to five Democratic senators, Alphabet's Verily explained how it would protect data collected by its coronavirus screening website and defended its decision to require users to sign in with a Google account to gain full access. The Baseline Covid-19 website made a big splash in mid-March when President Donald Trump announced project at a press briefing that reportedly caught the Google sibling company off-guard. The idea for the site was to screen people for symptoms of the virus and direct them to nearby testing locations if they appeared to be a candidate. So far, the site has rolled out at a smaller scale initially than Trump originally suggested, having launched only in California. Verily is Alphabet's life sciences company, which is run separately from Google. Lauren Feiner

11:09 am: El-Erian: Banks take drastic steps to avoid being seen as making money off the crisis

U.S. banks are not hesitating to set aside billions of dollars in case of coronavirus-driven loan losses because it allows them to mask substantial increases in quarterly trading revenue, Mohamed El-Erian said. The chief economic advisor at Allianz acknowledged on CNBC that banks are certainly adding to their credit reserves in an anticipation of a wave of defaults related to the pandemic. "They expect, the IMF expects, everybody expects, the worst economic hit since the Great Depression." "But I also think, if you've made a ton of money on trading, you really don't want to show massive profits right here," El-Erian said on "Squawk Box." "You don't want to say, 'Hey look I'm doing OK,'" while millions and millions of Americans have lost their jobs in recent weeks. Kevin Stankiewicz

11:04 am: Online lending platform SoLo Funds opens spigot on interest-free peer-to-peer microloans

Online lending platform SoLo Funds relaunched and opens money spigot on interest-free peer-to-peer microloans for cash-strapped Americans. It uses a new model for peer-to-peer lending. It will provide microloans of between $50 and $1,000, with terms set by the borrower. There is no interest charged for the loans on the platform. Borrowers set their own terms, select the repayment date, how much they need, the reason they need it and what they would like to tip the individual lender. Tips are capped at 10%. Lori Ioannou

10:54 am: 60% of employers have reduced hiring in the last month, according to new data

New York state Department of Labor office in Brooklyn, New York on April 14, 2020. John Nacion | NurPhoto | Getty Images

In the last month, amid the spread of the Covid-19 pandemic in the U.S., 60% of employers have reduced job openings, with almost 25% of employers closing all of their postings, according to job searching platform Glassdoor. When looking at its data, Glassdoor found that job openings on its site had decreased by 20.5% between March 9 and April 6, bringing its number of employment opportunities to 4.8 million. That number, according to Glassdoor, marks the lowest number of openings on its platform since February 2017. "For perspective, the U.S. is on track to lose as many job openings on a percentage basis in the first four weeks of the crisis as we did in the first nine months of the Great Recession," Glassdoor economist Daniel Zhao wrote in a blog post. Courtney Connley

10:32 am: Bill Gates calls Trump's decision to halt funding for WHO 'as dangerous as it sounds'

Bill Gates said the White House should not withhold funding for the World Health Organization during a global pandemic, a day after the president announced his intent to do so. President Donald Trump announced that the U.S. is suspending funding from WHO while it reviews the agency's response to the coronavirus pandemic. "Halting funding for the World Health Organization during a world health crisis is as dangerous as it sounds," Gates said on Twitter early Wednesday morning. Jessica Bursztynsky, Christina Wilkie

10:21 am: Homebuilder confidence index takes the biggest one-month dive in its history

A contractor carries boards through a house under construction at the Lennar Corp. Tree Tops community development in Lancaster, South Carolina, U.S., on Monday, Jan. 8, 2018. Travis Dove | Bloomberg | Getty Images

A crucial indicator of homebuilder sentiment suffered its biggest monthly drop in the index's 35-year history this month, as the coronavirus pandemic hammered the American economy. Builder confidence in the market for single-family homes plunged 42 points to a reading of 30 in April, the lowest point since June 2012, according to the latest National Association of Homebuilders/Wells Fargo Housing Market Index, or HMI. The survey dates back to January 1985. The reading was expected to drop to 55. Anything above 50 is considered positive. The last negative reading was in June 2014. Diana Olick

10:17 am: Abbott's new antibody test could handle up to 20 million screenings in June

Abbott Laboratories launched its third test for the coronavirus and said it could be screening up to 20 million people for antibodies for Covid-19 by June. Abbott said it plans to distribute 4 million of the new antibody tests by the end of this month, after an initial shipment of 1 million tests this week to US customers, beginning Thursday. "Antibody testing is an important next step to tell if someone has been previously infected," Abbott said in a press release. "It will provide more understanding of the virus, including how long antibodies stay in the body and if they provide immunity," the company said. Abbott's two other coronavirus tests, which only recently were introduced, determine whether a person has Covid-19 now. One of those tests can tell in 13 minutes or less if a person at a testing site is currently infected, while the other test is performed in labs. The new antibody test announced Wednesday will reveal if a person also had been infected in the past, even if they were no longer sick. Dan Mangan, Meg Tirrell

9:48 am: China didn't warn public of likely pandemic for 6 key days

President Xi Jinping warned the public they likely were facing a pandemic from a new coronavirus on Jan. 20. But by that time, more than 3,000 people had been infected during almost a week of public silence, according to internal documents obtained by The Associated Press and expert estimates based on retrospective infection data. That delay from Jan. 14 to Jan. 20 was neither the first mistake made by Chinese officials at all levels in confronting the outbreak, nor the longest lag, as governments around the world have dragged their feet for weeks and even months in addressing the virus. "This is tremendous," said Zuo-Feng Zhang, an epidemiologist at the University of California, Los Angeles. "If they took action six days earlier, there would have been much fewer patients and medical facilities would have been sufficient. We might have avoided the collapse of Wuhan's medical system." Other experts noted that the Chinese government may have waited on warning the public to stave off hysteria, and that it did act quickly in private during that time. Associated Press

9:34 am: Dow tumbles more than 500 points as coronavirus shutdown slams economy, bank earnings

Stocks fell sharply Wednesday as dismal economic data and weak bank earnings fueled concerns over the coronavirus's impact on the U.S. economy. The Dow Jones Industrial Average dropped 530 points at the open, or 2.2%. The S&P 500 slid 2.3% while the Nasdaq Composite traded 1.9% lower. Fred Imbert, Maggie Fitzgerald

9:30 am: New York, New Jersey continue to have highest number of confirmed cases

9:24 am: Best Buy to furlough about 51,000 employees as its stores remain closed

Best Buy will furlough about 51,000 employees starting Sunday. The retailer's stores have been closed across the country since March 22, but it has continued to pay its employees and offer curbside pickup. It also suspended all in-home delivery, installation and repairs. Starting Sunday, Best Buy said it will furlough nearly all of its part-time store employees and some of its full-time store employees in the U.S. About 82% of its full-time store employees will continue to be paid. Melissa Repko

9:15 am: US clinical trials of hydroxychloroquine could show in weeks whether it works

Researchers are working as quickly as science will allow to determine whether hydroxychloroquine, a decades-old malaria drug touted by President Donald Trump as a potential "game changer" in curtailing the Covid-19 pandemic, is effective in fighting the coronavirus. One study at NYU Langone and the University of Washington s a randomized controlled trial designed to determine whether hydroxychloroquine is any better than a placebo in preventing Covid-19. The New York State Department of Health, in partnership with the University of Albany, is also conducting a so-called observational study that researchers hope can shed some insight into the drug's potential effectiveness in a matter of weeks, possibly before May. Berkeley Lovelace, Jr.

9:13 am: New York manufacturing hits record low reading of -78.2 amid coronavirus collapse

The Empire State Manufacturing Index for April hit minus 78.2, worse even than the -32.5 expected by economists surveyed by Dow Jones. The worst reading the index had seen was -34.3 during the financial crisis. The index measures companies reporting better versus worse conditions over the past month. Just 7% reported stronger conditions, while 85% said things had weakened. As businesses shut down due to coronavirus restrictions, it was no surprise that firms in New York, which has been the U.S. epicenter of cases, would experience a downturn or near total stoppage. However, the outlook ahead wasn't much better, with the future expectations index registering a 7% reading. Jeff Cox

9:05 am: South Africa extends lockdown but offers a road map for reopening

South Africa has extended its nationwide lockdown for two weeks but outlined criteria for lifting restrictions, with coronavirus cases in the country so far avoiding the sharp trajectory seen in Europe and the U.S. South Africa remains the most affected country in Africa by the pandemic, with 2,415 confirmed cases as of Wednesday morning, according to Johns Hopkins University. However, the spread of Covid-19 has been far less severe than expected. Elliot Smith

8:59 am: US retail sales in March saw the biggest decline since 1992

U.S. retail sales suffered a record drop in March as mandatory business closures to control the spread of the coronavirus outbreak depressed demand for a range of goods, setting up consumer spending for its worst decline in decades. The Commerce Department said retail sales plunged 8.7% in March, the biggest decline since the government started tracking the series in 1992, after falling by a revised 0.4% in February. According to a Reuters survey of economists, retail sales were forecast to have fallen 8% last month. Reuters

8:54 am: Harvard researchers warn social-distancing measures may need to remain in place into 2022

Researchers from the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health have warned that in the absence of a vaccine or an effective treatment of the coronavirus, social-distancing measures may be required through to 2022. In a study published Tuesday in the journal Science, epidemiologists at Harvard assessed what is known about Covid-19 and other coronaviruses to anticipate possible scenarios for the current global health crisis. It said social-distancing measures, such as school closures, bans on public gatherings and stay-at-home orders, may have to remain in place for at least the next couple of years. "Absent other interventions, a key metric for the success of social distancing is whether critical care capacities are exceeded," they said. "To avoid this, prolonged or intermittent social distancing may be necessary into 2022." Sam Meredith

8:45 am: Americans are spending their coronavirus stimulus checks on food, gas, and paying back friends

Data compiled by digital bank Current found members who received stimulus payments over the past five days spent 16% of the money on food, including takeout and delivery. An additional 9% of spending was on groceries and 10% went toward gas. "Clearly food is an issue, people are struggling," Current CEO Stuart Sopp told CNBC. "They're just trying to survive, and I think that's what the stimulus was all about." The figures give an early glimpse at how Americans will use cash transfers from the government as the coronavirus pandemic has shut down businesses and left millions unemployed. The CARES Act, which was passed by Congress at the end of March, provided one-time cash transfers of up to $1,200 to individuals to assist with the economic fallout of the pandemic. The Treasury Department said this week that tens of millions of Americans will receive payments via direct deposit by Wednesday. Elizabeth Schulze

8:05 am: Trump's decision to withdraw WHO funding prompts international criticism

President Donald Trump's announcement that he is going to withdraw U.S. funding for the World Health Organization has provoked criticism from around the world. Among those voicing opposition was philanthropist Bill Gates, who called the decision "as dangerous as it sounds." Germany's Foreign Minister Heiko Maas tweeted that "blaming does not help," adding, "the virus knows no borders." He said the WHO was already underfunded. The European Union's foreign policy chief, Josep Borrell, said he "deeply regretted" the decision. United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said earlier that now is "not the time" to cut WHO funding, as the world grapples with the coronavirus pandemic.The WHO is the United Nations' health agency. Trump said Tuesday the U.S. will suspend funding to the WHO while it reviews the agency's response to the Covid-19 pandemic. He has accused the agency of making mistakes in its approach to the virus. However, some have criticized the White House for what they see as an inadequate response to the crisis. Holly Ellyatt

7:29 am: CDC director says the agency has a productive relationship with WHO

Center for Disease and Control (CDC) Director Robert Redfield testifies before the House Appropriations Committee on the CDC's budget request for fiscal year 2021 on Capitol Hill on March 10, 2020 in Washington, DC. Samuel Corum | Getty Images

The director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said the agency has a very productive relationship with the World Health Organization, whose funding was cut by President Donald Trump over the coronavirus crisis. "The CDC and WHO have had a long history of working together in multiple outbreaks around the world as we continue to do in this one," CDC chief Robert Redfield said in an interview with ABC's "Good Morning America." "We've had a very productive public health relationship. We continue to have that." Reuters

7:14 am: WHO recommends governments restrict alcohol access

A customer wearing a glove grabs the wine "No Curfew" at the Total Wine & More liquor store in South Beach, Miami, on March 19, 2020. Leila Macor | AFP | Getty Images

The World Health Organization's regional office for Europe recommended governments restrict access to alcohol and "any relaxation of regulations or their enforcement should be avoided." More than 3 million people die every year from alcohol, the WHO said, adding that alcohol consumption during an emergency can "exacerbate health vulnerability, risk-taking behaviors, mental health issues, and violence." Alcohol sales in the U.S. were up 22% at the end of March, compared with a year earlier, according to Nielsen. "During the COVID-19 pandemic, we should really ask ourselves what risks we are taking in leaving people under lockdown in their homes with a substance that is harmful both in terms of their health and the effects of their behavior on others, including violence," said Carina Ferreira-Borges, program manager for WHO Europe's alcohol and illicit drugs program. Will Feuer

6:15 am: Russia rejects criticism of its handling of the crisis

A mural reading "Fight!" by the construction site of a new building of the Novomoskovsky multipurpose medical center for patients suspected of the COVID-19 coronavirus infection and passengers with acute respiratory viral infection (ARVI) symptoms arriving from countries with unfavorable epidemiological situation. Sergei Savostyanov | TASS | Getty Images

The Kremlin rejected criticism of its handling of the coronavirus crisis after China said its largest source of new, imported cases, had come from the far northeastern part of the country that borders Russia. "We hear that there is now an exchange of criticism over coronavirus between different countries, which is played like pingpong. We consider this to be a thankless exercise," Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said, Reuters reported. Holly Ellyatt

5:40 am: Race for vaccine 'is a global effort' for mankind  not just one country, Germany says

As the coronavirus spreads around the world, experts are scrambling to develop a vaccine to protect millions of people from infection. Finding a vaccine is a collaborative effort, experts say, and is expected to take around 12-18 months. The World Health Organization said over the weekend that there are currently 70 vaccine candidates in development. But who, or which country, gets priority when a vaccine is finally found is yet to be seen and could prove controversial. The president of Germany's Federal Institute of Vaccines and Biomedicines, an agency of the German Ministry of Health, told CNBC that the race to develop a vaccine is a collaborative and cooperative effort. Holly Ellyatt

5:05 am: Spain's daily death toll from the virus falls

Coffins containing the bodies of people who have died of coronavirus (COVID-19) are lined up in the long-term parking of the Collserola morgue before they either buried or incinerated, on April 02, 2020 in Barcelona, Spain. David Ramos | Getty Images

Spain's death toll rose to 18,579, up from 18,056 the day before, Spain's health ministry said. That's a daily increase of 523 deaths, down from 567 deaths reported the previous day. On Monday, 517 new deaths had been reported. The total number of confirmed cases in Spain has now reached 177, 633.Holly Ellyatt

4:20 am: Crisis will erase nearly a decade of oil demand growth this year, IEA says

The International Energy Agency said it expects the coronavirus crisis to erase almost a decade of oil demand growth in 2020, with countries around the world effectively having to shut down in response to the pandemic. A public health crisis has prompted governments to impose draconian measures on the lives of billions of people. It has created an unprecedented demand shock in energy markets, with mobility brought close to a standstill. Sam Meredith

4:11 am: Germany to extend restrictions to May 3, media reports
Denmark began reopening schools for younger children on Wednesday after a month-long closure to combat the novel coronavirus, becoming the first country in Europe to do so. Nurseries, kindergartens and primary schools were restarting after they were officially closed on March 17 in an effort to curb the COVID-19 epidemic, though many had shut before then. However classes are only resuming in about half of Denmark's municipalities and in about 35 percent of Copenhagen's schools, as others have requested more time to adjust to health protocols. All are expected to reopen by April 20. In the centre of the capital Copenhagen, some 220 pupils up to the second grade arrived at the Norrebro Park Skole, welcomed by their teachers who waved Danish flags. Children in the third and fourth grade will follow on Thursday. The children quickly settled into the reorganised classrooms designed to comply with strict new sanitary guidelines. "I feel great, really good about the kids going back to school," Caroline, a 38-year-old and mother of two, told AFP. In early April the country's centre-left government announced that schools would be reopened "on the condition that everyone keeps their distance and washes their hands." But while schools are gradually reopening, bars, restaurants, hairdressing and massage parlours, shopping centres and discos remain closed, and gatherings of more than 10 people are banned. Schools are required to ensure that a distance of two metres (about six feet) is maintained between desks in classrooms and recesses must be organised for small groups. A headache for teachers is that they must ensure that pupils are never in groups of more than two while inside and five outside. - Socially distanced teaching - To adhere to guidelines, the school in Norrebro has divided the classes into two or three groups, limiting the number of students in a classroom to 12. Bottles with hand sanitiser are never far away to encourage students to clean their hands regularly. "We have the space because we're using the classrooms usually used by the older grades who are working from home now," said headmaster Henrik Wilhelmsen, adding that it would present an issue when older students also return. Some parents have opposed the reopening of schools, citing health concerns. A petition dubbed "My child is not a guinea pig" has garnered some 18,000 signatures. According to the petition's organisers, "children can easily carry the disease without getting sick." Wilhelmsen told AFP that around 15 parents had informed the school that they would not bring their children back. Others however trust their government's judgement. "I think we're all going to be sick at one point and they told us the children are going to be less sick and affected by this virus," said Caroline, the mother. "I think it's good that they're going back to school... We need to go back to daily life," she added. Middle and high school students will however continue remote classes and are only expected to return to classrooms on May 10. According to the latest figures on Wednesday morning, Denmark had 6,876 confirmed cases of the new coronavirus and 299 deaths. Before Denmark, Austria was the first European country to unveil its roadmap for a return to a "new normal". On Tuesday, it allowed small non-food shops to open up, while maintaining social distancing rules and requiring masks to be worn in shops and on public transport. Austria plans to keep schools, cafes and restaurants closed until at least mid-May. Schools in Denmark were closed on March 17 in an effort to curb the COVID-19 epidemic, though many had shut before then Bottles with hand sanitiser are never far away to encourage students to clean their hands regularly
The officials said the security forces sealed off main roads in most places in the Valley and erected barriers at several other places to check the unwanted movement of the people and to enforce the lockdown

Srinagar: Authorities in Kashmir have sealed off the containment zones to ensure strict adherence to the standard operating procedure to contain the spread of coronavirus even as the lockdown in the Valley entered the 28th day on Wednesday, officials said.

The restrictions on the movement and assembly of people in Kashmir continued on Wednesday, they said.

The officials said the security forces sealed off main roads in most places in the Valley and erected barriers at several other places to check the unwanted movement of the people and to enforce the lockdown.

Only persons with valid passes are allowed to move, they added.

In the declared containment or red zones across the Valley, the restrictions have been intensified as authorities have sealed those zones to ensure strict adherence to the standard operating procedure and warned of strict action against anyone who violated the prohibitory orders, the officials said.

"While all entry-exit points of areas declared as containment zones have been sealed, at least half of these points in each one of these areas have been sealed with removable barriers, enabling access into and out of them as and when required," they said.

The local mohalla committees of all such areas have been reached out to and are onboard the administration's efforts to contain the spread of COVID-19, the officials said.

The administration has put in place an elaborate and a comprehensive mechanism to ensure all requirements and needs of the residents are covered for as long as these areas remain under restrictions, they said.

Markets across the valley were shut and public transport was off the roads with only pharmacies and groceries allowed to open, the officials said.

Click here to follow LIVE updates on coronavirus outbreak

The total number of COVID-19 cases in Jammu and Kashmir has risen to 278. Four patients have died of the disease while 20 have recovered in the union territory

More than 55,000 people have been kept under surveillance including those who are either in government established quarantine facilities or in home isolation.

"Till date 55,498 travellers and persons in contact with suspected cases have been put under surveillance which include 7,760 persons in home quarantine including facilities operated by government, 365 in hospital quarantine, 244 in hospital isolation and 30,952 under home surveillance. Besides, 16,173 persons have completed their 28-day surveillance period," the officials said.
Katie Centola was supposed to be putting the final touches on her upcoming trip to Las Vegas, a celebration vacation now that shes cancer-free. After a mastectomy, chemo-therapy and radiation, the 44-year-old Westborough native living in North Attleborough has certainly earned it.

This was supposed to be an easier time. Its only been three months since a scan showed that the breast cancer that spread to Centolas lymph nodes was gone.

Centola, 44, has hair again. Not as much or as thick as before, but its coming. Her strength and energy are back as she returned to her job as a nurse practitioner at Boston Medical Center. She was hoping for a little time to enjoy a little normalcy.

After a rough 2019, 2020 was poised to be a good year. But the coronavirus had different plans.

Instead of a casino, Centola is spending most days in the surgical intensive care unit at BMC, which is ground zero for the citys battle to contain COVID-19. Centola arrives at 6 a.m. and many nights doesnt leave until 7 p.m.

Im exhausted, she said. I had been looking forward to a little stress-free time.

Stress-free is a relative term. The surgical ICU is hardly a calm place in normal times. Usually, thats a unit that sees a steady wave of victims of violence - stabbings, gunshot, wounds, etc.

Some of the stuff you see - the suicide attempts, the gunshots and the violence people inflict on each other - its a lot, she said. Its hard to get invested because the outcomes frequently arent ideal. But some of the resiliency I have seen is amazing.

During the pandemic, its the overflow area for COVID-19 patients once the medical ICU is full. Elective surgeries were halted weeks ago. When the surgical ICU is full, a recovery room has been converted into another overflow ICU area for COVID-19 patients. When thats full patients are sent elsewhere. Thats happened for one short period already, but its expected to happen again.

Some colleagues were surprised shes coming to work at all. Cancer can diminish a persons immune system. According to Cancer.net, a website connected to the American Society of Clinical Oncology, patients with cancer and survivors of cancer may be at higher risk of health complications from COVID-19. This is not surprising given that this group of individuals is often immune-compromised.

A lot of people at work are like, Why are you here? You should be at home, Centola said. I dont think Im at more risk. My blood counts are up.

Her father, Thomas McGinn, died of cancer at 45 when she was 10, an experience that put her on this career path. Now 44, her calling to help is still stronger than the instinct to run during this scary time.

I wanted to go into medicine since my father passed away, she said. I love it. I like to be busy. Im here. This is what I want to do.

Centola thinks of current cancer patients a lot. If she had been diagnosed this year instead of 2019, shed be facing an awful choice. Go through treatment, which makes someone more vulnerable to diseases, with COVID-19 lurking or hold off treatment and surgery risking the disease spreading further.

I cannot tell you how many times Ive thought 'thank God things for me happened last year not this year. I cant imagine people getting that diagnosis and not knowing, she said. "Some centers are doing mastectomies. Some are pushing it off. Youre being put on a floor with people who have a disease that could also kill you. I cant imagine being scared for your own life anyway and then theres this pandemic going on.

On the April 1 anniversary of her mastectomy she posted on Facebook:

1 year ago today, I was getting major surgery for cancer. It was an awful year but I fought my a** off and beat it. This year... its a different fight. Im working in an ICU and fighting hard for these very sick patients and were getting more and more busy. Please Stay Home. Please wash your hands. Please think of me....I dont want to be sick again. We will beat this too!!!

To be safe, Centola doesnt go into the rooms of infected patients. Protocol already limits how many people enter a room to limit exposure and save PPE. Shes making decisions from a distance while another member of her team does the examination.

Still, its scary. Around the country, doctors, nurses, paramedics and staff have all been infected.

Its very stressful. The patients are scared. They cant have visitors," Centola said. "The nurses are stressed. The housekeeping staff is stressed. You walk into the hospital and its palpable. Its hard.

Every morning she leaves clothes in the garage. She changes out of her work attire when she gets home and leaves it in her garage for a few days. If theres anything infectious on her clothes, those days outside should kill it. She goes inside and showers right away.

At home, she tries to get away from thinking about it for at least a little while with her 11-year-old daughter Mia (her son Thomas is riding out the pandemic with her ex-husband). There are only so many New York hospital scenes she can see on the news before the escape of DVRd reality TV beckons.

New York is scary. I hope and pray to God it doesnt get to that point here, she said. I dont know what the future is going to hold. Its very scary. We have a large homeless population, and they arent ideal at social distancing. For our hospital, those are our people. That will overwhelm us if the homeless population starts spreading it around.

Shes trying not to think about that either. One shift at a time. Itll end when it ends, and Katie Centola will celebrate when it does. It doesnt have to be as fancy as Vegas either.

I miss a nice restaurant Margherita, she said. When its safe to get one, Ill definitely get one. I hope its sooner than later.

Follow MassLive columnist Matt Vautour on Twitter at @MattVautour424.

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All of the U.S. is impacted by this  97% has some sort of shelter-in-place  so everybodys having to deal with this in some form or fashion. But only those that are infected that are fortunate enough to come out of it on the back end, now we have the opportunity to do something to help the country overcome this.

Dr. Anuj Malik, director of infection control at Ascension St. John, is overseeing the patients care. Malik cautioned that infusions of convalescent plasma  antibody-rich blood  while encouraging, are unproven and not a panacea.

There isnt a way to know whether the treatment helped her until more extensive information is available as part of the Mayo Clinics nationwide clinical trials, Malik said, but there is a reasonable probability that it will improve patient outcomes because of past experience using the treatment for Ebola and severe influenza.

I think theres at least moderate potential for this treatment, Malik said. It remains to be established, but my hopes are cautiously optimistic.

Everything was heightened and maybe more acute
Hut 8 Mining Group, a publicly traded cryptocurrency mining firm, is concerned about coronavirus-related delays of new machine deliveries from potential suppliers such as Bitmain and MicroBT.

During an earnings call last week, CEO Andrew Kiguel said his firm was grappling with a vague timeline for the delivery of crypto mining machines to support its farms, saying that while in February, you thought machines could be delivered between March and April, these timelines have since shifted due to the ongoing pandemic. He did not have a revised timeline either.

His remarks follow guidance from competitor Riot Blockchain, which also warned the novel coronavirus outbreak would impact its business operations.

Related: What the Economy Will Look Like 6 Months From Now, Feat. Ryan Selkis

Three or four weeks ago, nobody thought these things would be an issue, and the world is grappling right now with different supply chain issues like getting ventilators and masks around the world as opposed to bitcoin mining machines, Kiguel said.

Bitmain was one of several Chinese miner manufacturers that warned as far back as January  close to eight weeks ago  it would be forced to delay deliveries due to the coronavirus outbreak.

Bitmain has since resumed operations, though its delivery timetable is still unclear.

Halving concerns

Hut 8 Mining Group, one of the few publicly traded mining firms in the U.S., is also closely watching the upcoming bitcoin halving in hopes of appropriately scaling the size of its mining farm.

Related: Andrew Yang Says Current Stimulus Payments to Americans Arent Enough

The Canadian firm is set to have a higher stake in the bitcoin market after launching its core operation in the middle of 2018 and acquiring facilities to boost its mining power last year. According to its year-end report for 2019, released on Monday, Hut 8 saw $58.6 million in revenue, up by 66 percent from the prior year, thanks to larger capacity and higher bitcoin price.

Story continues

This places it as one of the productive miners in North America among its competition, including the Colorado-based Riot Blockchain.

Hut8s coronavirus concerns come as the firm prepares for bitcoins hotly anticipated halving, tentatively set to occur in mid-May.

Theres a lot of different scenario planning that weve done, Kiguel said.

Related Stories
Mixed reactions have trailed the Abia Governments directive on compulsory wearing of face masks by residents and visitors to the state to prevent the spread of COVID-19.

Governor Okezie Ikpeazu on Tuesday announced the compulsory wearing of face masks, among other precautionary measures against the spread of the virus in the state.

While some commended the state government for the initiative which took effect on Wednesday, others dismissed it, saying that it would be counter-productive.

Nkem Uche of the Grace Methodist Church, World Bank Housing Estate, Umuahia, lauded the governor over the order while describing it as a step in the right direction.

Wearing of face mask by residents is very important. It is for personal protection and prevents the spread of the coronavirus and other related ailments. It is for our own safety.

As you can see, I wear mine as I talk to you, just as you wear yours too. That way, it wont let my spit touch you as I talk to you or yours touch me.

What I dont like is the total reopening of markets and other public places that I heard the government is planning to do after this lockdown.

I suggest that those places should be opened partially, maybe by weekend, after which the lockdown is continued for the rest of the week, he said.

Tochi Igbokwe, a nurse at a private clinic in Umuahia, urged the residents to comply with the order, saying that government was only making efforts to curb the spread of the pandemic.

Many people still dont believe that the COVID-19 is real. I have heard many argue that it is a scam, but as a health professional, I advise people to take any issue concerning their health seriously.

We thank God we have not recorded any case in Abia, but that should not mean that we should ignore some confirmed preventive tips, she said.

Ifeanyi Okoro, a fashion designer on Warri Street, Umuahia, dismissed the order and expressed disappointment over the ongoing lockdown in the state.

The disease is not in Abia yet, so why are they forcing us to wear face masks.

We have been on lockdown for more than two weeks without food and now they have come up with the compulsory wearing of face masks.

READ ALSO:

I cant wear it until I confirm that it has killed somebody in Abia. Lagos has confirmed cases, so they can make it compulsory for the residents over there, he said.

Also, Michael Igwe, a youth, said he would never wear the face mask no matter the enforcement.

I heard that face mask is worn by patients and those attending to them, especially the health workers. Besides, it is a serious inconvenience to me, he said. (NAN)
Union Mutual Fund is utilising its cash pile to buy equities given the current valuations of the market where many good businesses are available at a discount.

The fund house did not disclose the cash levels, but given the immense volatility and uncertainty in the market, most fund houses had increased their cash levels to 8-10 from normal 4-5 percent.

The cash in the portfolio is now being used by Union Mutual Fund to buy equities.

In an interaction with Moneycontrol, Vinay Paharia, Chief Investment Officer, Union Mutual Fund said, Market has fallen significantly since February 2020 and has now moved to a substantial discount to its fair value, making valuations very attractive.

The fund house is bullish on medium to long term return potential from equity markets.

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

Union Mutual Fund is betting on telecom, healthcare, and industrial sectors.

However, the fund house is underweight on sectors like consumer discretionary and consumer staples. But Paharia was quick to add that fund houses exposures may change faster than normal due to market volatility and the resultant change in risk-reward ratio for stocks and sectors.

Follow the latest updates on our Coronavirus LIVE blog

When asked about the impact on the FMCG sector, Paharia said companies in the FMCG sector sell consumer staples, which are used on a daily basis. The demand is least volatile and relatively less elastic. Hence, the sector is relatively immune to the current economic turmoil and is likely to report a lower impact on business compared to other sectors.

Impact of economy on companies

Indian economy, like the world economy, has been severely impacted by the ongoing spread of COVID-19 and the severity, longevity, and spread of the disease will decide the economic impact on India.

Paharia pointed out that the impact on the countrys economy is "likely to be very severe in FY21 which is likely to recover substantially from FY22 onwards.

Paharia believes the impact will largely depend on the business of the respective company.

If the products or services sold by the company are essential or non-postponable (like consumer staples, healthcare, telecom, energy, utilities sector), COVID-19 may have a limited impact on their business, Paharia said.

However he feels, companies selling products or services, the consumption of which can be postponed like consumer discretionary, real estate, maybe most impacted.

He also pointed out that impact on leveraged sectors like banks and NBFCs (Non-Banking Finance Companies) may depend on respective companies underwriting policies, customer profile and funding mix.
U.S. aircraft spotted near Taiwan as Chinese navy conducts training

ROC Central News Agency

04/14/2020 06:18 PM

Taipei, April 14 (CNA) An American anti-submarine and maritime surveillance aircraft was spotted south of Taiwan Tuesday morning, close to where a Chinese aircraft carrier battle group is engaged in a training exercise, according to Aircraft Spots, a military air movement tracker.

A U.S. Lockheed P-3 Orion flew over the Bashi Channel between Taiwan and the Philippines in a northeast to southwest direction, a chart posted at Aircraft Spots' Twitter at 10:01 a.m. showed.

Taiwan's Ministry of National Defense (MND) spokesman Shih Shun-wen () told reporters that Taiwan's armed forces are closely monitoring the country's surrounding waters and airspace, without directly confirming the aircraft sighting.

Based on a compilation of the MND and Aircraft Spots' open records, this was the sixth appearance of U.S. military aircraft in the same area over the past five days, and the 11th since March 25, including a B-52 strategic bomber, EP-3E electronic warfare and reconnaissance aircraft, RC-135U Combat Sent and P-3 Orion.

The frequent appearance of U.S. military aircrafts in the region comes as China steps up military maneuvers around Taiwan and in the South China Sea, at a time when all four U.S. aircraft carriers assigned in the Indo-Pacific region are quarantined at different ports due to coronavirus concerns.

On Monday, Chinese Navy spokesman Gao Xiucheng () confirmed media reports that the Chinese aircraft carrier, Liaoning, and several escort ships passed through the Miyako Strait and waters east of Taiwan Saturday, heading to the South China Sea for an annual training mission.

Last week, Lin Ying-yu (), an assistant professor at National Chung Cheng University's Institute of Strategic and International Affairs, told CNA that the presence of U.S. and Chinese military assets in the area is an indication of increased messaging efforts by both countries through more frequent muscle-flexing to boost morale at home, as both have been hit hard by the COVID-19 pandemic.

(By Matt Yu and Emerson Lim)

Enditem/AW

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'Clearly, the next few months will be very challenging for industry.'

'We are clearly in a phase where recovery is a dream.'

IMAGE: Prime Minister Narendra Damodardas Modi addresses the nation on April 21, 2020. Photograph: PTI Photo

Prime Minister Narendra Damodardas Modi's address to the nation on Tuesday, April 21, the fourth in a month, has left India Inc captains wondering when the issue of an economic stimulus package will be broached.

"While extension of the lockdown was imperative, given the rise in cases, I don't think the issue of an economic package can be overlooked. It is key to recovery," Harsh Mariwala, below, chairman, Marico, tells Viveat Susan Pinto.

Would you have liked the PM to have touched upon relief measures in his address?

Economic relief measures are normally announced by the finance minister.

Having said that, I would have really appreciated it had the PM given some indication of an economic package during his address. He was completely silent on the issue. That to me is worrying.

There is urgent need to look into the challenges faced by industry.

Demand for discretionary products has come to a standstill.

Movement of essential goods and services remains restricted.

These issues have to be addressed quickly.

But the PM has said a comprehensive set of guidelines will be released. Won't that help?

The guidelines have more to do with helping sectors come out of the lockdown, it does not address the broader issue of economic relief required to help industry get back on its feet.

The coronavirus outbreak has disrupted businesses significantly and many have been set back in terms of financial performance. They require support to get going.

While extension of the lockdown was imperative, given the rise in cases, I don't think the issue of an economic package can be overlooked. It is key to recovery.

What will be the impact on manufacturing because of the extension to the lockdown?

A lot will depend on what happens between now and April 20.

The PM has said there will be strict monitoring of districts, regions and zones for COVID-19 cases.

Selective relaxation will be given in only those areas where the impact of the outbreak is low. This basically means that manufacturing will not normalise quickly.

Clearly, the next few months will be very challenging for industry.

But the (coronavirus) curve has to be flattened. There is simply no choice there.

The 21-day lockdown has helped slow down the curve slightly, but it hasn't flattened the curve altogether.

There is greater discipline needed (from people) when it comes to following lockdown rules.

When do you anticipate recovery of the fast moving consumer goods market and Marico in particular?

If we can maintain even last year's volume growth, it would be enough.

We are clearly in a phase where recovery is a dream. I would be happy if we can simply maintain what we achieved last year in terms of sales growth. That's all.

What are the shifts in consumption you are seeing right now?

Anything to do with the online medium will be significant in the post COVID-19 world. Whether it is e-learning or online shopping or digital payments or even virtual events and launches.

As the lockdown gets extended, this behaviour will get pronounced and companies will have to pay greater attention to this trend.

At Marico, we will accelerate the work we are doing in the digital space and encash opportunities that come up in the area.
The enemy opened fire, employing grenade launchers of various types, heavy machine guns, and small arms.

Russia's hybrid military forces on April 14 mounted nine attacks on Ukrainian Army positions in Donbas, eastern Ukraine, with three Ukrainian soldiers reported as wounded in action.

"The Russian Federation's armed forces violated the ceasefire nine times on April 14. Three Ukrainian soldiers were wounded as a result of enemy shelling," the press center of Ukraine's Joint Forces Operation Headquarters said in an update posted on Facebook as of 07:00 Kyiv time on April 15.

The enemy opened fire, employing grenade launchers of various types, heavy machine guns, and small arms.

Read alsoOne serviceman killed, another eight injured in mortar blast at firing range in Donetsk region

Under attack came Ukrainian positions near the towns of Avdiyivka and Krasnohorivka, and the villages of Pisky, Pavlopil, NovoMykhailivka, Starohnativka, Taramchuk, and Kamianka.

Joint Forces returned fire to each enemy shelling. Losses among enemy forces are being verified.

The enemy did not attack Ukrainian positions from 00:00 to 07:00 Kyiv time on April 15.
The Congress on Wednesday sought the return of the Uttarakhand residents stuck in other states due to the nationwide lockdown imposed to check the coronavirus spread.

Demanding immediate steps for their return, party leaders in a joint statement condemned the state government for its indifference over the matter.

"Are you waiting for Uttarakhandis to pour into the streets as the crowds did in Mumbai to take notice, the leaders asked.

"If you can send Gujaratis in 15 luxury buses from Haridwar to Gujarat during the lockdown, why can't you arrange 15 government buses for Uttarakhandis stranded in other states," a joint statement signed by Pradesh Congress vice-president Dhirendra Pratap read.

"If anything goes wrong with them, the chief minister should be held responsible," the statement said.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
President Donald Trump leveled a new threat at Congress Wednesday, threatening to try to force Congress into adjournment in order to install additional conservative judges and other nominees  just days after clashing with governors of his 'absolute' power to force them the country to reopen.

The president made his case in a speech at the start of Wednesday's White House press conference, which came just a day after he retreated on his claim of having 'absolute power' to compel governors to rescind their stay-home orders amid the coronavirus outbreak.

He blasted senators for holding up judicial and administrative nominees, saying the Senate must 'fulfill its duty.' He even went after Voice of America, calling some of its programming 'disgusting.'

President Trump on Wednesday threatened to try to force Congress into adjournment in order to install additional conservative judges and other nominees

'If the House will not agree to that adjournment I will exercise my constitutional authority to adjourn both chambers of Congress,' Trump said.

The Senate is not due back until May 4th, and has been meeting in 'pro forma' sessions every three days, which has the effect of preventing the president from making 'recess' appointments.

Both houses must agree to a resolution to adjourn. The Senate is narrowly controlled by Republicans, and the House is in Democratic control.

The Constitution, in Article II Section 3, gives the president the power to call Congress into session, which has happened numerous times in the nation's history. It also states that 'in Case of Disagreement between them, with Respect to the Time of Adjournment, he may adjourn them to such Time as he shall think proper.'

However at present each chamber has chosen to stay open and in 'pro-forma' session amid the coronavirus outbreak.

A White House official told DailyMail.com the conditions are already there for presidential action. 'They havent agreed on an adjournment resolution, so by definition they are in disagreement,' the official said.

A spokesman for McConnell did not exactly endorse the idea.

'Leader McConnell had a conversation today with the president to discuss Senate Democrats unprecedented obstruction of the presidents well-qualified nominees and shared his continued frustration with the process. The Leader pledged to find ways to confirm nominees considered mission-critical to the COVID-19 pandemic, but under Senate rules that will take consent from Leader Schumer'  a reference to Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer of New York.

Congressional leaders made the decisions on going home in part to protect the health of members and staff, while still being able to quickly pass bailout legislation. When the chambers meet, members typically fly back and forth from their districts, coming in contact with numerous Americans en route.

Trump made the threat as he demanded action on nominations, even though Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has had great success installing his judicial appointments in particular, with no filibuster in place and Democrats limited in their ability to delay.

Congressional scholar Norman Ornstein of the American Enterprise Institution told DailyMail.com: 'He could only do it if the two houses disagree on adjournment. I wish I could count on McConnell to act in the interests of Congress and the country. But he cannot adjourn Congress without that disagreement.'

The Senate has gone home for recess amid the coronavirus outbreak. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell controls the schedule

The president only has the authority to adjourn Congress if the chambers cannot agree on whether to go out of session

'It is absolutely essential that the key positions at relevant federal agencies are fully staffed and we're not allowing that to take place through our Congress, they're just not giving it to us. We have many, many positions that are unstaffed,' Trump complained.

'We have judges because we go through the process,' he said, complaining of a 'very unfair system.'

'They'll take the maximum number of hours and days, we're talking about days, to get one judge approved. Many of these people have been waiting for two and a half years,' he said, mentioning 129 nominees 'stuck in the Senate.

'We have a tremendous number of people that have to come into government. And now more so than ever before because of the virus and the problem,' he said.

He vented: 'The current practice of leaving town while conducting phony pro forma sessions is a dereliction of duty that the American people can not afford during this crisis.'

He called it a 'scam ... And everybody knows it and its been that way for a long time.'

It is not clear how Trump would respond to the coronavirus crisis without Congress. The administration is seeking $250 billion in new funding for small businesses, with Trump's treasury secretary negotiating with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

'We can't get them approved by the Democrats, they won't release them,' Trump said.

Trump repeatedly complained about not being able to install a nominee to run Voice of America, which broadcasts overseas to try to benefit the U.S.

'One of them is the head of Voce of America. If you look at what theyre doing and what theyre saying, about our country its a disgrace, the people that are running that. We have somebody thats really good, really talented, and that loves our country,' Trump said.

Trump advisor Dan Scavino blasted Voice of America in a tweet last week after the broadcast entity tweeted about the end of a lockdown in Wuhan, China.

'American taxpayerspaying for Chinas very own propaganda, via the U.S. Government funded Voice of America! DISGRACE!!' Scavino wrote.

The House and Senate have gone home for recess amid the coronavirus outbreak, but Democrats force it to meet in pro-forma sessions to keep Trump from making recess appointments without them. That is in keeping with practice going back years amid partisan clashes over recess appointments.

In 2014, the Supreme Court sided with Republicans on setting its own pro forma sessions.
Joseph Williams, 26, was arrested for possession of heroin and drug paraphernalia March 13 but on Monday he was locked up on no bond on suspicion of murder

A Florida man has been arrested on suspicion of a murder committed just one day after he was freed from jail to help prevent the spread of coronavirus.

Joseph Williams, 26, was initially booked into Orient Road Jail on March 13 for possession of heroin (less than four grams), a third-degree felony, and possession drug paraphernalia, a first-degree misdemeanor.

But on March 19 Williams was one of 164 inmates deemed low-risk who was allowed to leave custody following the issuance of Administrative Order 2020-018 which allows people to go free early to decrease the risk of contracting COVID-19 in crowded facilities.

He left the Hillsborough County jail at 8.02am but by 10.40pm the next day, police were called to the scene of 8000 block of Ash Avenue in Tampa where a man had been shot dead.

Williams is believed to be responsible for the second-degree murder.

'There is no question Joseph Williams took advantage of this health emergency to commit crimes while he was out of jail awaiting resolution of a low-level, non-violent offense,' Sheriff Chad Chronister said in a statement. 'As a result, I call on the State Attorney to prosecute this defendant to the fullest extent of the law.'

Just days after Williams entered jail, Chronister had said at a media briefing they were releasing more than 100 inmates for the safety of fellow jailers and staff.

Early release is a move that jails around the country have opted for to slow the spread of the virus.

By Wednesday morning there were 21, 628 confirmed cases in Florida and 571 deaths. Florida is deemed one of the hotspots in the United States where there were 615,302 cases and 26,114 deaths.

Hillsborough County released 164 inmates on March 19 to help prevent the spread of coronavirus among jailers and staff

But on March 20 police were called to the scene of 8000 block of Ash Avenue in Tampa where a man had been shot dead

'Every murder, every violent crime, especially those involving a gun, is a sickening example of the worst in our community, especially at a time when our community is working relentlessly to fight against the spread of this deadly COVID-19,' Chronister said.

'Judges, prosecutors, and Sheriffs around the country are facing difficult decisions during this health crisis with respect to balancing public health and public safety.

'Sheriffs in Florida and throughout our country have released non-violent, low-level offenders to protect our deputies and the jail population from an outbreak. Our commitment as an agency is to keep this community safe and enforce the law.'

Records show that Williams has an extensive rap sheet. He has been arrested for a total of 35 charges in the past.

He was previously convicted of two felony offenses including burglary of an unoccupied conveyance in 2012 and felon in possession of a firearm in 2018, in addition to five misdemeanor convictions.

While on last month's drug charges Williams was issued a bond of $2,500 and was eligible for release, now he's back in jail on a no bond status.
The Finnish government on Wednesday pledged to increase its funding for the World Health Organization (WHO) by restoring it to the 2015 level -- 5.5 million euros (6 million U.S. dollars), Trend reports citing Xinhua.

In 2019, Finland's basic contribution to the WHO was 1.9 million euros and it provided 0.75 million euros in program support. Finland also made other membership-based contributions to WHO bodies totaling 0.9 million euros in 2019, the government said in a statement.

The Finnish Ministry of Social Affairs and Health is responsible for Finland's contributions to the WHO.

The WHO is leading the global effort to prepare for and respond to the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic. Finland is one of the vice-chairs of the WHO Executive Board and supports a strong WHO, the government noted in the statement.

Finnish Foreign Minister Pekka Haavisto said on Wednesday that the decision by the United States to suspend its funding to the WHO is "a major setback."

Talking to the Finnish news agency STT, Haavisto said that "the work of the WHO is needed especially these days for overcoming the coronavirus."

Earlier this year, the Finnish Foreign Ministry has already granted one million euros in funding to the WHO's COVID-19 Strategic Preparedness and Response Plan.

Global problems can best be solved by working together, and therefore Finland advocates consistently on behalf of a more effective and stronger multilateral order, the government said, adding that this is also a key objective of its own program.

U.S. President Donald Trump announced late Tuesday that he had instructed his administration to suspend funding for the WHO, which he accused of "severely mismanaging and covering up the spread of the coronavirus."
TDT | Manama

Interior Minister General Shaikh Rashid bin Abdullah Al Khalifa launched yesterday a series of comprehensive e-services from the ID and Population Registry.

The services, made available by the Information and e-Government Authority (iGA) through its portal Bahrain.bh, aim to reinforce precautionary measures as part of the national efforts against the coronavirus (COVID-19).

The Interior Minister hailed the directives of His Majesty King Hamad bin Isa Al Khalifa to invest in technology in all fields to serve the nation and citizens.

He also valued the support and follow-up of the government, led by His Royal Highness the Prime Minister Prince Khalifa bin Salman Al Khalifa, of these initiatives that are part of the directives of His Royal Highness Prince Salman bin Hamad Al Khalifa, Crown Prince, Deputy Supreme Commander and First Deputy Prime Minister.

The Interior Minister launched eight e-services, while four others were updated, bringing the total number of e-services to 23 comprehensive offered by iGA through its national portal, smart devices and other e-channels. These services are with great importance in the current situation.

The Interior Minister asserted that the e-services would contribute to achieving performance excellence and better services for citizens. He highlighted the importance of continuing the development and adoption of technology in various initiatives and services, as well as the importance of limiting the need of making personal appearances at services-providing centres.

The Interior Minister hailed the national expertise that contributed to the fast processing of the services
[April 15, 2020] Uber Executive and Technology Veteran Birju Shah Joins Narrative Advisory Board

NEW YORK, April 15, 2020 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Narrative , the enterprise data streaming company today announced the appointment of Birju Shah, head of product for AI and Cities at Uber Technologies, LLC , to its advisory board. Shahs broad business and technical expertise further strengthens Narratives bench as the company continues to evolve and support growing demand for its data monetization and acquisition platform.

Birju brings a wealth of technology and data experience and insight to Narrative, said Nick Jordan, founder and CEO of Narrative. Throughout his career, he has consistently demonstrated a proven ability to take early products and scale them for a global marketplace. We expect him to be an invaluable asset to Narrative, as we create innovative global solutions that simplify the buying and selling of data. With more than 15 years of experience with hardware, software, technology services, and products, Shah has successfully launched and scaled 10+ products worth over $3 billion that still serve two billion people across the globe. He has led teams aslarge as 1800 people and managed budgets as large as $1B globally.



Most recently he has scaled and operated products across life sciences, agriculture, and transportation that involve complex data-sharing agreements with partners to land his moonshots for mass adoption. Since 2017, Shah has directed multiple product groups and innovation development at Uber. Previously, he held executive technology and product roles within Google, Climate Corp., and Arrowstream. Shah holds a BS in Industrial Engineering and Management Sciences from Northwestern University, and an MBA from the Massachusetts Institute of Technologys Sloan School of Management.

Enterprises have fallen in love with all the ways they can leverage data, but executing a data strategy is complicated, said Shah. With the data monetization market ripe for innovation, Narrative has developed an operating system for data monetization and acquisition that simplifies the entire process and delivers transparency between buyers and sellers. The potential to streamline data acquisition from a multi-year negotiation to a click is game-changing, said Shah. I am excited to be working with Nick and the entire team, and look forward to providing guidance on their continued innovation and contribution to the marketplace. About Narrative

Narrative operates a technology platform that centralizes and simplifies the buying and selling of data with both software and a raw data marketplace. Innovative brands, data platforms, and direct-to-consumer companies leverage Narrative's technology to fuel powerful data strategies, build data monetization businesses, power growth marketing and inform product development. Narrative's raw data marketplace gives companies access to unprecedented scale, transparency, precision, and optionality to transform their business. Founded in 2016, Narrative is a private company operating in New York City and San Francisco. PR Contact: Ilona Mohacsi

PenVine for Narrative

[email protected]

+1 631 764 3729 A photo accompanying this announcement is available at https://www.globenewswire.com/NewsRoom/AttachmentNg/aa69f963-cc3e-435e-ba60-c48a150f887e

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"Clients come first and advisors should keep their focus on their clients needs during this market upheaval."

In his April 10, 2020 ThinkAdvisor article, 10 Red Flags to Watch When Switching BDs Jon Henschen discusses when not to change broker dealer and identifies the 10 red flags broker dealers should track.

According to Henschen, when economies go into decline, we see the shift from want to need, as the stock markets increasingly focus on companies with products that fill needs rather than wants. Examples include companies such as General Mills for food, Target for staples, and in the case of my wife (and others), Hershey for much-needed chocolate.

But many broker dealer recruiting situations are more want than need, and recruiting can take a backseat to more pressing matters. Henschen then shares an email he recently received that illustrates this point:

While I appreciate you touching base with me and providing information/reasons/opportunities for changing broker-dealer, that is the last thing on my mind right now. My time and energy are being spent servicing and communicating with our clients. That client focus appears to be for the foreseeable future, given the state of the world economy.

Henschen agrees that clients come first and that advisors should keep their focus on their clients needs during this market upheaval. To pressure advisors to make a change during this turbulent time is simply self-serving and inappropriate.

Market conditions aside, Henschens firm has seen a number of situations where pursuing a BD change is inappropriate and advise that the best guide to determine this is the Financial Industry Regulatory Authoritys Registered Representative Composition Report.

The report includes 10 categories that BDs should track. If an advisor meets any of these criteria, theres the potential that a change of broker-dealer could be problematic. Henschen then addresses the 10 categories, or red flags, that may make a broker dealer change prohibitive:

1. Representative new to the industry: A newer advisor will be under more scrutiny due to lack of experience; for example, their trades will be looked over in more detail. Otherwise, theres no issue changing broker-dealers.

2. Transferred from another firm: As long as leaving the other firm was voluntary and there is no open-ended compliance issue, this is not problematic.

3. Registered with three or more firms in the last two years: This has been increasingly problematic, as some advisors have a history of repeatedly switching firms every year or two.

Fewer firms are willing to bring on advisors with job-hopping histories, except for perhaps lower-quality BDs.

More difficult, still, is when an advisor expects to receive transition note money from a new firm when in reality, they may be lucky to simply have a firm make them an offer.

4. Termination: Many larger firms have blanket policies to not hire an advisor with an Employment Separation after Allegations within the last 10 years, while others will look at the context of the separation. Forging client signatures or unfilled forms that are signed by the client can make you a toxic consideration.

5. Multiple disclosures: One or two customer complaints isnt much of an issue. When you get up to three marks within the last five years you become problematic to a broker-dealer because you are problematic to FINRA.

The hiring broker-dealer may be required to perform heightened supervision on you, which is more liability and work for the compliance department.

Weve seen advisors wanting to change BDs when they have as many as 17 disclosures on their record. In these cases, weve informed them that they should appreciate that they have a broker-dealer to call home.

Even for advisors with high production, or fees and commissions, over $1 million in a year, being able to place an advisor with numerous disclosures on their Form U-4 is burdensome.

In cases such as this, if you are able to join a new firm, it may be one that is already a melting pot for troublesome representatives. In terms of multiple disclosures, those where there is no action taken, dismissed or denied are not included.

Also, if the disclosures are due to tax liens and other credit issues, finding a new broker-dealer may be workable, depending on the extent and reason for credit problems.

6. Customer complaint disclosures: This can work against you if the customer complaint is topically egregious, such as borrowing money from a client, stealing money from a client account or making unauthorized trades.

Claims such as market loss during a bear market may result in a fine, but will not hamper an advisors ability to change BDs unless there is a repeating pattern.

7. Criminal disclosures: Sometimes these disclosures occur in an advisors life before becoming an advisor, such as in college when wild oats are sown. These transgressions are usually not a problem.

On the flip side, weve seen advisors terminated over drunk driving convictions in recent history or having their homes raided by FBI agents who find child porn on a computer, which ended their career and resulted in prison time.

8. Financial disclosures: This was a large problem in 2008-2011, when some advisors had upside-down mortgages that they walked away from or had financial hardship due to loss of production with the market drop.

With the current market upheaval and future stagflation, we anticipate a resurgence in financial disclosures as well as customer complaints over market loss.

Over the last five years, broker-dealers have become much less tolerant of financial problems unless they were the result of divorce or health issues. If you have a recent tax lien, make sure you have a payment plan in place with the IRS or state before looking for a broker-dealer.

9. Previously with a severely disciplined firm: This was more of an issue back in the 80s and 90s when there were lots of penny stock firms in business, but thats not on BDs radar often today.

10. Arbitration/civil litigation disclosures: Showing a pattern of arbitrations being paid is the litmus test for broker-dealers as is the amount of fines being paid.

One or two disclosures are typically not a problem. Three or more disclosures over the last five years can make finding a new firm difficult.

When fines are $25,000 or less, it is perceived as a payoff by the broker-dealer to make the case go away and avoid costly arbitration. If this is the case with your disclosures, it will hold less weight.

Also, BDs that focus on established advisors will frequently have arbitration levels above industry averages because established advisors have more disclosures than newer advisors.

The same is true for firms that specialize in illiquid investments (sought out by securities attorneys), such as alternative investments and REITs.

Civil litigation is rare and frequently is tied to legal conflicts with outside business activities, like real estate. Weve never seen civil litigation become an obstacle to being considered by a broker-dealer.

Beyond the red flags listed above, Henschen notes there are also other considerations. During an audit of a broker-dealer, FINRA staff uses the Representative Composition Report as a guide to see if the firm is above the industry average in any of these 10 categories.

BDs have reported that FINRA expressed concerns about their having averages higher than that of the overall industry, and if they brought on any more advisors that increased that average, more FINRA visits and scrutiny could take place.

For example, if a BD ranks above the industry average in terms of customer complaint disclosures, an advisor who has three customer complaint disclosures on their record could be rejected from consideration.

An advisors production volume also comes into play on a risk vs. reward basis. A BD may reject an advisor with $100,000 of yearly fees and commissions and with three disclosures, but accept an advisor producing $500,000 and the same number of disclosures.

Henschen states that his firm sees many situations in which an advisor wants to change broker-dealer but its in their best interest to stay where they are due to the fact that they fall into one or more of the 10 categories in the Representative Composition Report.

If an advisors motive to move is a need and they fall into one of the 10 categories, realize that its getting increasingly difficult to maneuver through the marketplace with successful results as FINRA and BDs continuously tighten standards. Numerous compliance issues that were not a big deal five years ago are now heinous.

Jon Henschen is founder of Henschen & Associates, a Twin Cities-based firm that matches financial advisors to independent broker dealers. He has more than 25 years of experience in the financial services industry and has worked as a registered financial advisor in both the independent and wirehouse channels. Jon has been featured in numerous financial publications, including the Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg News, Reuters, and the New York Post.
In an online appearance on Monday with Mr. Biden, Senator Sanders made a bid for Democratic solidarity and declared President Trump the most dangerous president in the modern history of this country.

Senator Sanders, who suspended his campaign last week, told Mr. Biden: We need you in the White House. I will do all that I can to see that that happens, Joe.

Mr. Biden vowed that the United States would take a back seat to no one when it comes to fighting climate change.

But winning over Senator Sanderss most ardent supporters might still be a challenge for Mr. Biden.

Just a few hours before Senator Sanderss announcement, for instance, I spoke with the leaders of The Climate Mobilization, an advocacy group that has worked closely with Mr. Sanders. The groups director of research, Laura Berry, said Mr. Biden needed to offer more details.

What the climate movement is looking for is for him to back up the rhetoric of saying things like We need to get off fossil fuels with specific plans, Ms. Berry said. We dont have any time left. We are in a climate emergency.
The City of San Antonio has issued more than 3,900 warnings and 351 citations for violating the emergency declarations, according to an enforcement report.

Officials had received over 21,100 calls reporting violations as of Thursday.

READ ALSO: Here's how to get an emergency mail-in ballot if you contract COVID-19 after the deadline

The social distancing orders, intending to slow the spread of COVID-19, first went into place on March 18. The most recent, a third addendum to the eighth emergency health declaration, went into effect on June 26.

Multiple city departments  Code Enforcement, Parking Enforcement, Metro Health and the San Antonio Police Department  are enforcing the order.

Here are the citations issued so far:

January 9

- At Dollar General, located at 3350 S.W. Military, the manager told inspectors that health and safety signs had been removed "per corporate." A citation was issued.

- At Dollar General, located at 8718 S Zarzamora, the health and safety signs were not posted. A citation was issued.

- A caller reported that people were not wearing masks at QuikTrip, located at 4710 Fredericksburg. Inspectors found that health and safety signs were not posted and two customers were not wearing masks. Two citations were issued.

- At Dreamers, located at 2376 Austin Hwy., the health and safety signs were not posted. A citation was issued.

- At Streetfare SA, located at 1916 Austin Hwy., the health and safety signs were not posted. A citation was issued.

- At Big Bang and One Pocha Live Lounge, located at 4408 Walzem, the health and safety signs were not posted and the tables were too close to each other. A citation was issued.

January 8

- A caller reported that people were not wearing masks at the EZ Wash laundromat, located at 6101 S. Flores. Inspectors saw individuals not wearing masks and issued a citation.

- At Little Sam's convenience store, located at 3215 Roosevelt, the health and safety signs were not posted. A citation was issued.

- An email reported that masks were not being worn at Planet Fitness, located at 207 N. General McMullen. Inspectors found the business was allowing customers to walk around without masks or social distancing. Employees were wearing masks, but members were not. A citation was issued.

- At Sir Winston's Pub, located at 2522 Nacogdoches, customers were not wearing masks or social distancing. A citation was issued.

January 7

- At My Bar, located at 6402 Callaghan, employees were wearing masks but social distancing features were not enforced. A citation was issued.

January 6

- A caller reported that employees at C.D. Division Tire-Muffler Shop, located at 730 Division, were not wearing masks. Inspectors saw employees not wearing masks or social distancing. A citation was issued.

January 5

- A caller reported that people at Lowe's, located at 1200 N. Loop 1604 W., were not wearing masks. Inspectors saw people inside the store without masks. A citation was issued.

- At Guzman's Barber Shop, located at 414 N. General McMullen, employees and customers were not wearing masks. Social distancing was not being enforced. A citation was issued.

January 4

- At Roy's Taco Hut, located at 246 Enrique Barrera, there were no social distancing features in place and social distancing was not being enforced. A citation was issued.

- At Koo Kutz Barbershop, located at 10029 San Pedro, customers and staff were wearing masks but health and safety signs were not posted at the entrance. A citation was issued.

December 29

- Inspectors provided security support at the Alamodome for the Alamo Bowl between Texas and Colorado.

Ten people were cited for repeatedly refusing to wear masks or wear masks correctly after receiving warnings. Seven more people were issued warnings or were escorted out of the stadium for violating the mask rules.

December 28

- A caller reported that My Bar, located at 6402 Callaghan Road, was not following the guidelines. Inspectors saw employees and customers not wearing masks or social distancing. A citation was issued.

- A caller reported that LA Fitness, located at 5803 Babcock Road, was over capacity. Inspectors found the gym was within the 75 percent capacity limit but employees were not wearing masks. A citation was issued.

December 23

- A caller reported that Taqueria Nuevo Vallarte, located at 3451 Roosevelt, was over capacity. Inspectors found there was no social distancing between groups of customers. A citation was issued.

- A caller reported that A's Up Sports Lounge, located at 5520 W. Military, was not following guidelines. Inspectors saw multiple people consuming alcohol at the bar. They spoke to the owner, who confirmed he had not reclassified as a "blue tag" restaurant with the Texas Alcoholic Beverage Commission. A citation was issued.

December 21

- At Easy Stop, located at 423 N.W. 24th, inspectors found that employees were wearing masks but customers were not. Social distancing features were in place but not enforced. A citation was issued.

December 18

- A caller reported that employees at H&H Insurance Agency, located at 70 N.E. Loop 410, employees were not wearing masks. Inspectors saw employees not wearing masks where required. A citation was issued to the owner.

- At Quick Stop Food Mart, located at 311 N. Hamilton, one employee and two customers were not wearing masks. Social distancing features were in place but were not being enforced. A citation was issued.

- At the N.W. Food Center, located at 1213 N.W. 24th, an employee and vendor were not wearing masks. Social distancing features were in place but were not being enforced. A citation was issued.

- At Black Clover, located at 3030 Thousand Oaks, employees and customers were wearing masks and social distancing. However, the pub should not be offering on-premises service per the Texas Alcoholic Beverage Commission.

December 17

- At Big Frog Custom Shirts, located at 15058 U.S. Hwy 281 North, employees were not wearing masks when required. A citation was issued.

- At Circle K, located at 1203 Roosevelt, customers were not wearing masks or social distancing. A citation was issued.

December 16

- At Delicious Tamales Factory, located at 3500 S. Presa, employees were not wearing masks when required. There were no safety signs or social distancing features present. A citation was issued.

December 15

- A caller reported that employees at Circle K, located at 1503 S.W. Military, were not wearing masks. Inspectors saw an employee not wearing a mask when required. A citation was issued.

December 12

- At Basement Bar and Lounge, located at 244 Losoya, some customers were not wearing masks or social distancing. A citation was issued.

December 11

- At Zarzamora Street Gym, located at 1402 N. Zarzamora, employees did not identify themselves and refused to allow inspectors inside. Staff gave inspectors a printout to contact the gym's attorney.

The building's permit did not reflect some work that had been done to the building, including the installation of security doors. Inspectors posted a notice of violation on the front door and issued a citation for refusing to allow inspectors inside.

- At Purgatory, located at 1010 N. Main, customers sitting at the bar were not practicing social distancing. A citation was issued.

- At Burnhouse Cigar & Martini, located at 4553 N. Loop 1604 W., customers were seen not wearing masks or social distancing. A citation was issued.

December 10

- Oak Hill Lanes, located at 7330 Callaghan, was having a bowling league night. Several barriers had been placed between the seating areas, but they did not meet the guidelines. Bowlers were not wearing masks as they walked throughout the building. A citation was issued.

- At Frida Mexican Restaurant, located at 18740 Stone Oak Pkwy., a plexiglass divider was under 6-feet tall. A citation was issued.

- A caller reported that Little Em's Oyster Bar, located at 1001 S. Alamo, was over capacity. The restaurant was following the occupancy guidelines but the safety signs were not posted. A citation was issued.

December 8

- A caller reported that Crunch Fitness, located at 8715 Marbach Road, was over capacity and not enforcing the mask requirements. Employees and customers were seen not wearing masks or social distancing. A citation was issued.

December 7

- A caller reported that people were not wearing masks properly at 7-Eleven, located at 14702 Blanco. Customers were wearing masks but an employee was not wearing a mask properly.

The employee did not correct the issue when officials explained the protocols. The owner arrived and a citation was issued.

December 5

- A caller reported violations at The Block San Antonio food truck park, located at 14530 Roadrunner Way. Employees and some customers were not wearing masks. A citation was issued.

- At Attagirl, located at 726 East Mistletoe, employees and customers were not wearing masks or social distancing. The establishment did not have a Texas Alcoholic Beverage Commission license. A citation was issued.

- At Pegasus, located at 1402 North Main, employees and customers were not wearing masks or social distancing. A citation was issued.

- At Knockout, located at 1420 North Main, the safety signs were not posted. Employees and customers were not wearing masks or social distancing. A citation was issued.

December 4

- A caller reported that staff at Las Pinchanchas Cafe, located at 450 Fredericksburg, were not wearing masks. Inspectors saw staff not wearing masks and tables not properly distanced. The issues were addressed. A citation was issued.

- At Regia's Cocina, located at 1701 West Martin, employees were not wearing masks. A citation was issued.

- At Speedy's Taco, located at 1823 West Martin, employees were not wearing masks. A citation was issued.

- At Taquitos West Avenue, located at 2818 West Ave., the safety signs were not posted. A citation was issued.

December 3

- At Stanley's Ice House, located at 2442 West Southcross, an employee and vendor were not wearing masks or social distancing. A citation was issued.

- At El Azteca Mexican Restaurant, located at 2800 Guadalupe, customers were eating at tables that were not 6 feet apart. A citation was issued.

- At The Nail Spa, located at 555 East Basse, the safety signs were not posted. A citation was issued.

December 2

- At Botanica Miracle Hands, located at 2600 South Flores, employees and customers were not wearing masks or social distancing. A citation was issued.

- At Subway, located at 8002 Callaghan, the safety signs were not posted. A citation was issued.

- A caller reported that South Texas Guns, located at 15120 U.S. 281 North, was not enforcing mask requirements. The safety signs were not posted and employees were not wearing masks or social distancing. Two citations were issued.

December 1

- At Total Wine, located at 125 N.W. Loop 410, people were wearing masks and the establishment was following occupancy requirements. However, the health and safety signs were not posted. A citation was issued.

- At Valle's Flowers, located at 1315 Cupples, people were wearing masks but the safety signs were not posted at the entrance. A citation was issued.

- At Kaotric Barber Shop, located at 1414 Cupples, the safety signs were not posted and employees were not wearing masks. A customer entered the shop with no mask and said he forgot it. He went to his vehicle to retrieve his car. A citation was issued.

November 27

- At Ojos Locos Sports Cantina, located at 5809 N.W. Loop 410, inspectors saw that the restaurant was closing and no customers were inside. However, the required signs were not posted. A citation was issued.

November 22

- An attendee at an Alamodome event received numerous warnings from on-site security about wearing a mask. After San Antonio police helped identify the individual, officials with the Development Services Department issued the person a citation.

Other attendees who were not wearing masks properly were told to correct the issue.

November 21

- A proactive inspection at XTC Cabaret, located at 2023 Sable Lane, found that people in the dance area and in the women's locker area were not social distancing or wearing masks. A citation was issued.

November 19

- A caller reported that people were not wearing masks at the Mission Event Center bingo hall, located at 5614 S. Flores. Inspectors found that employees and customers not seated were wearing masks, but the health and safety signs were not posted. A citation was issued.

November 18

- A caller reported that employees at Burger King, located at 4520 W. Commerce, were not wearing masks properly and coughing on customer's orders. Inspectors saw the general manager not wearing a mask properly. A citation was issued.

November 14

- At The Good Kind, located at 1127 S. St Mary's, inspectors saw employees and customers not wearing masks or practicing social distancing. A citation was issued.

- At Elsewhere Garden Bar & Kitchen, located at 103 E. Jones Ave., inspectors saw customers and employees not wearing masks. There were groups larger than 10 people not social distancing. A citation was issued.

- At The Aquaduck Beer Garden, located at 9214 Espada Road, inspectors saw customers and employees not wearing masks. Tables were too close to the stage for social distancing. A citation was issued.

November 7

- At XTC Cabaret, located at 2023 Sable Lane, inspectors found customers in the locker room not wearing masks or social distancing. A citation was issued.

November 6

- At XTC Cabaret, located at 2023 Sable Lane, inspectors saw customers and employees not wearing masks on the stage, in the dressing room, and in the VIP area. Tables were not spaced enough to allow social distancing. A citation was issued.

November 2

- A caller reported that Stanley's Ice House, located at 2403 East Commerce, was not enforcing the mask requirements. Inspectors observed an employee with a mask hanging from his ear and staff not enforcing the mask mandate. A citation was issued.

October 31

- A caller reported people were not wearing masks at Overstock Furniture Store, located at 8327 Texas 151. Inspectors saw employees, customers and a manager not wearing masks. A citation was issued.

- At The Social Spot, located at 930 Broadway, inspectors saw mask and social distancing violations. A citation was issued.

October 30

- A caller reported excessive noise coming from Deco Pizza, located at 1815 Fredericksburg Road. Inspectors saw violations of the mask and social distancing requirements. A citation was issued.

- At Hidden Tavern, located at 11407 West Ave., inspectors saw mask and social distancing violations. A citation was issued.

- At Ricky Bobby Bar, located at 2335 N.W. Military Hwy., inspectors saw mask and social distancing violations. A citation was issued.

October 28

- A caller reported that employees were not wearing masks at Wok Inn, located at 2230 S.E. Military Dr. Inspectors saw two employees not wearing masks properly or social distancing. A citation was issued.

October 24

- A proactive inspection at Texas Roadhouse, located at 6616 West Loop 1604 North, found patrons sitting back-to-back in booths without a partition. A citation was issued.

October 21

- A caller reported that people were not wearing masks or social distancing at Crunch Gym, located at 8725 Marbach Road. Inspectors saw multiple employees, guests and a manager who were not wearing masks. A citation was issued.

- A caller reported people not wearing masks at Midas, located at 11000 Interstate 10 West. Inspectors saw two people, one without a mask, interacting within 6 feet. A citation was issued.

October 17

- At Anchor Bar, located at 4553 N. Loop 1604 W., inspectors saw tables not adequately spaced out to maintain a 6-foot distance. A citation was issued.

- At The Lost Bar & Grill, located at 12730 N.W. Loop 410, inspectors saw tables not adequately spaced out to maintain a 6-foot distance. A citation was issued.

- At Elsewhere Garden Bar, located at 103 E. Jones Ave., inspectors saw violations of the mask and social distancing requirements. A citation was issued.

- At Social Spot, located at 930 Broadway, the business was operating over the maximum allowable capacity. There were also violations of the mask and social distancing requirements. Citations were issued.

- A Boneheadz Sports Bar, located at 9503 Console Drive, patrons were close to one another, violating the social distancing requirement. A citation was issued.

October 16

- A caller reported employees were not wearing masks at Hernandez Tire and Muffler Shop, located at 1514 Bandera Road. Inspectors saw employees in the bay area not wearing masks or social distancing. Two citations will be filed in municipal court.

- A caller reported social distancing violations at Circus Bingo SA, located at 3307 Wurzbach Road. Inspectors saw several players sitting back-to-back with no masks on. A citation will be filed in municipal court.

- At Pueblo Hall, located at 3315 Northwestern, inspectors saw the establishment hosting a mixed quinceanera. The tables were not adequately spaced out. A citation was issued.

October 10

- After an email complaint regarding Weathered Souls Brewing, located at 606 Embassy Oaks, inspectors found two employees not wearing masks or social distancing. A citation was issued.

- A caller reported people not wearing masks at El Canelo Mexican Grill, located at 1003 Culebra Road. Inspectors found six employees talking at the counter without masks on. Customers were not socially distanced. A citation was issued.

- At Thirsty's SA, located at 8902 S. Presa St., people were not social distancing or wearing masks. A citation was issued.

- At The Aquaduck Beer Garden, located at 9214 Espada Road, customers were not social distancing. A citation was issued.

October 9

- At Chili's, located at 5790 W. Loop 1604 N., inspectors found the restaurant was under the 75 percent capacity limit but violating the social distancing requirement. A citation was issued.

- At Cowboys Dance Hall, located at 3030 N.E. Loop 410, inspectors found people not wearing masks or social distancing. There were groups larger than 10 people. Two citations were issued.

October 8

- Paperwork from the Texas Alcoholic Beverage Commission indicated that Mainland Sports Complex, located at 8002 Sand Pebble, was considered a bar and should remain closed. A citation was issued.

- At Boneheadz Sports Pub, located at 9503 Console Drive, inspectors saw the bar was in violation of the social distancing requirement. A citation was issued.

October 6

- A caller reported Rising Phoenix Vape Shop, at 8015 Bandera, for employees not wearing masks. Inspectors saw the owner not wearing a mask while speaking to another person. A citation was issued.

October 3

- A caller reported Taqueria La Perla La Jalisco, at 2255 S.E. Military, was over capacity and customers were not socially distanced at tables. Inspectors found customers were sitting back-to-back in booths with no partition.

They counted 86 patrons, over the 75 percent maximum of 75 patrons. Two citations will be filed in municipal court.

- At Texan Icehouse, located at 4518 West Ave., inspectors found signs were not posted and the bar remained open despite a red tag classification with the TABC. Two citations were issued.

- At The Republic of Texas, located at 526 Riverwalk, inspectors found signs were not posted and proper social distancing was not maintained. Two citations were issued.

- At XTC Cabaret Center, located at 2023 Sable Lane, inspectors saw one violation of social distancing. A citation was issued.

October 2

- A caller reported El Tequila Mexican Restaurant, at 7628 Marbach Road, was not enforcing the mask rules.

While an inspector was speaking with the owner, an employee walked by several customers with her mask around her chin. Then four customers entered with no masks and no one enforced the policy. A citation was issued.

- A caller reported an employee was suspected of testing positive at Manheim San Antonio Transportation, located at 2042 Ackerman Road. The general manager said the cleaning crew constantly sanitize the building and employees who test positive quarantine for 14 days and test negative before returning to work.

While inspectors were speaking with the manager, they saw four employees less than six feet apart talking without face masks. A citation was issued.

- A caller reported employees at Big O Tires, located at 13080 N. US Hwy 281, were not wearing masks. Inspectors saw employees inspecting a vehicle with no masks on and other employees enter without masks. A citation was issued.

- At El Bocanero, at 8300 Marbach Road, inspectors found tables were not spaced enough to maintain social distancing. A citation was issued.

- At E&E Entertainment, at 7616 Culebra Road, inspectors found no signs posted, people not wearing masks, and people not practicing social distancing. Two citations were issued.

October 1

- A caller reported Damasco Mediterranean Buffet, at 4841 Fredericksburg, for unsanitary food and serving from the buffet. Inspectors found the restaurant was allowing customer to serve themselves from the buffet. A citation was issued.

September 30

- At Jiffy Lube, located at 7862 Callaghan, inspectors found employees were not wearing masks or social distancing. A citation was issued.

September 26

- A caller reported employees were not wearing masks at Reyna's Cafe, located at 227 Aransas Ave. Inspectors found the cafe did not have safety signs posted and an employee was speaking with a seated customer while not wearing a mask.

They explained the violations to the owner, who put on her mask after learning of the violations. A citation was issued.

September 25

- A caller reported a mask violation at The Magnolia Pancake Haus, located at 606 Embassy Oaks. Inspectors met with the general manager and saw three employees not wearing masks. The general manager became upset over the violation.

A citation will be filed with the municipal court.

September 24

- At Landry's, located at 517 N. Presa St., inspectors found customers seated less than six feet apart and not wearing masks. A citation was issued.

- At Mad Dogs, located at 123 Losoya St., inspectors found tables less than six feet apart and customers not wearing masks. A citation was issued.

September 18

- Inspectors found Bentley's Beer Garden, located at 802 N. Alamo St., to be in violation of guidance on masks and social distancing. A citation was issued.

- At Cowboys Dancehall, located at 3030 N.E. Loop 410, inspectors saw large groups of customers clustered around the railing of the dance area. There was only one small sign for social distancing and a person was sitting in front of it.

The manager said he had posted many signs along the railing but people removed them. The staff were not enforcing social distancing between the large groups and some people did not have masks. A citation was issued.

- At Lucy Cooper's Texas Ice House, located at 16080 San Pedro Ave., inspectors saw customers at the bar not wearing masks or social distancing. A citation was issued.

- At Half Moon Saloon, located at 308 N. Presa St., the required signs were not posted. A citation was issued.

September 17

- At Elsewhere Garden Bar & Kitchen, located at 103 E. Jones Ave., inspectors saw employees in the kitchen not wearing masks. The employees said they were all family members who lived together.

Two customers ordering food and a man taking out trash were not wearing masks. A citation was issued.

- Southtown 101, located at 101 Pereida St., was operating as a bar/restaurant without changing its status to restaurant. The owner said he had not finished the application. A citation was issued.

September 16

- A caller reported people were not wearing masks at Bobby's Cafe, located at 6728 S. Flores St. Inspectors found staff, including cooks in the kitchen, not wearing masks or social distancing. A citation was issued.

September 12

- At Ojos Locos, located at 5809 N.W. Loop 1604, inspectors found social distancing violations in the bar area. A citation was issued.

READ MORE: The latest news and features about coronavirus in San Antonio

September 11

- At XTC Cabaret, located at 2023 Sable Lane, inspectors found people without masks and no social distancing. Tables were overcrowded. Two citations were issued.

- At Thirsty's Spot SA, located at 8902 S. Presa St., inspectors found social distancing violations. A citation was issued to the owner.

- At The Rustic, located at 17619 La Cantera Pkwy., inspectors found tables too close to each other. A citation was issued.

- At Bob's Steak and Chop House, located at 5815 Rim Pass, inspectors found booths seated back-to-back without the required partitions. A citation was issued.

September 7

- A caller reported kids swimming in the San Pedro Park pool while others sat in closed areas of the park. An officer saw three people swimming in the closed pool area and issued three citations.

September 6

- Six people were cited for skating while Pearsall Park was closed. One person was given a warning.

September 5

- At Ojos Locos, located at 5809 N.W. Loop 1604, a citation was issued for customers at the bar sitting within six feet of each other.

- At Pockets, located at 5819 N.W. Loop 410, a citation was issued for people playing pool and congregating within six feet of each other while not wearing masks.

- Las Islas Marias, located at 522 S.W. Military, was cited for booths filled with customers eating back-to-back with no partitions.

- Stray Grape Urban Winery, located at 16630 U.S. Hwy 281 North, was cited for employees not wearing face masks. The manager refused to comply.

- The San Antonio Event Center, located at 8111 Meadow Leaf, was cited for customers and vendors not wearing face masks and the line not socially distancing.

- At the Mission Del Lago Golf Course, located at 1250 Mission Grande, two customers in the pro shop were not wearing face masks. A manager with no mask approached an officer and stood less than six feet away. A citation was issued.

September 4

- At Vallarta Grill & Bar, located at 6810 N.W. Loop 410, a mariachi band walked table-to-table singing and not practicing social distancing. Booths were side-by-side. A citation was issued.

- At Chicken N Pickle, located at 5215 UTSA Blvd., people were walking around without masks and not maintaining six feet from other groups. A citation was issued.

- At 210 Sports Bar, located at 1946 S.W. Military Dr., officials counted 58 people. The maximum allowed was 52. A citation was issued.

- A caller reported that Wing Daddy's, located at 10730 Potranco Road, was not social distancing. A citation was issued because no health and safety policy was posted.

- A caller reported that Ojos Locos, located at 5809 N.W. Loop 410, was over capacity. The property was not over capacity but a citation was issued for multiple people walking around without face masks.

- A caller reported no face masks at Alex Tire Shop, located at 2150 Basse Road. The owner and two employees were not wearing face masks while speaking with customers outside. A citation was issued.

September 3

- At Amore Bistro, located at 4553 N.W. Loop 1604, employees were not enforcing social distancing of tables. A red placard was given to the employee in charge because the managers and owners were out of town.

- At El Canelo Restaurant, located at 1003 Culebra Road, people were not practicing social distancing or wearing face masks. A citation was issued.

- At Smashing Crab, located at 8910 Bandera Road, tables were less than six feet apart. A citation was issued.

- A caller reported that Discount Tire employees, located at 12850 Interstate 10 West, were not wearing masks while assisting customers. Officials saw employees not practicing social distancing or wearing masks. A citation was issued.

September 2

- Park police patrolling San Pedro Park saw 10 to 15 people swimming in the pool. All but two of them got out of the pool when officers told them it was closed. Citations were issued to the two that stayed.

September 1

- A caller reported that employees at Mega Food Mart, located at 9385 Marbach, were not wearing masks. Officials saw an employee assisting a customer without a mask or practicing social distancing. The business was cited.

- A caller reported that employees at Paul's Pizza Romo, located at 5137 Fredericksburg, were not wearing masks. Officials saw employees not wearing masks or practicing social distancing. The business was cited. Employees did put their masks on when told to.

August 31

- Three people were seen swimming in the pool at San Pedro Park. An officer told them the pool was closed and issued each of them a citation.

August 29

- A proactive inspection at Cowboys Dancehall, located at 3030 N.E. Loop 410, found that mask and social distancing requirements were not being met. Two citations were issued.

August 28

- At Perfect Score Sports Bar and Grill, located at 6420 N.W. Loop 410, inspectors found that all customers and employees were wearing masks and the bar was below the occupancy limit. However, a citation was issued because the bar did not have COVID-19 signs posted.

- At Ojos Locos, located at 5809 N.W. Loop 410, inspectors found that the establishment was practicing social distancing and under the occupancy limit. However, customers were walking around without masks. A citation was issued.

- At Pockets, located at 5819 N.W. Loop 410, inspectors found that the establishment was practicing social distancing and under the occupancy limit. However, customers were walking around without masks. A citation was issued.

- At Vallarta Grill and Bar, located at 6810 N.W. Loop 410, inspectors found that while the bar maintaining social distancing, it was over the occupancy limit and customers were walking around without masks. Two citations were issued.

- At 54th Street Grill and Bar located at 7735 N.W. Loop 410, inspectors found that while the bar was under the occupancy limit, the COVID-19 guidelines were not posted on the door. A citation was issued.

- At Charlie Brown's Neighborhood Bar and Grill, located at 11888 Starcrest Dr., inspectors saw employees in the kitchen not wearing masks. Customers at the bar were not social distancing. Two citations were issued.

- At Grand Tequila, located at 8723 Texas Hwy. 151, inspectors found that while employees and customers were wearing masks, the restaurant was violating the social distancing requirements. A citation was issued.

- At Willie's, located at 8739 Texas Hwy. 151, inspectors found that while employees and customers were wearing masks, tables were not spaced out. A citation was issued.

- At Tejanitas, located at 10704 Perrin Beitel Road, inspectors found the restaurant in violation of the social distancing requirements. A citation was issued.

- At Chili's, located at 131 S.W. Loop 410, inspectors saw employees not wearing masks. Two citations were issued.

- At Buffalo Wild Wings, located at 115 S.W. Loop 410, inspectors did not see social distancing. A citation was issued.

- At Twin Peaks, located at 103 S.W. Loop 410, inspectors saw that tables were not spaced out. A citation was issued.

- An officer saw three people skating in a fenced-off area of Old Pearsall Park. Citations were issued to each of them.

August 27

- At Amore Cafe, located at 4553 N.W. Loop 1604, the COVID-19 guidelines were not posted at the entrance. A citation was issued.

- At Midnight Swim, located at 2403 N. St Mary's St., the COVID-19 signs were not posted and social distancing was not maintained. Two citations were issued.

- At The Yard House, located at 15900 La Cantera, cooks and line servers were not wearing masks. A citation was issued.

- At Kona Grill, located at 15900 La Cantera, servers and bartenders were not wearing masks. A group of 14 adults were sitting together at a table. Two citations were issued.

August 26

- An officer saw 20 people skating in a fenced-off area of Rosedale Park. All but two complied when told to leave. Those two returned and started skating again. Citations were issued to each of them.

August 24

- An officer saw a person swimming in the closed pool at San Pedro Park. The person left the pool. A citation was issued.

August 22

- A proactive inspection at The Sandbox, located at 7280 UTSA Blvd., found that the bar was operating under 50 percent capacity but did not have proper social distancing. A citation was issued.

- A proactive inspection at Hills and Dales Ice House, located at 15403 White Fawn, found that the bar was operating at 50 percent capacity and the required signs were posted.

However, the bar did not have proper social distancing and was allowing customers to order drinks at the bar. A citation was issued.

- A proactive inspection at Pick's Bar, located at 4553 Loop 1604 West, found that the bar was operating under 50 percent capacity and everyone was wearing masks. A citation was issued for individuals not practicing social distancing.

- A caller reported that people at Brown Coffee Company, located at 1800 Broadway, were not wearing masks. Officials saw an employee serve customers without wearing a mask. A citation was issued.

- A caller reported that people at the leasing office of Charleston Apartment Homes, located at 14555 Blanco Road, were not wearing masks.

Officers did not see any signs posted on the front door of the office. The community manager told officers that her company does not allow the signs to be posted. A citation was issued.

- A caller reported that Taqueria La Tapatia, located at 538 Fair Ave., was not social distancing. Officials saw customers eating in booths seated back-to-back. The manager said once people started to leave the restaurant would close every other booth. A citation was issued.

August 21

- A proactive inspection at Chicken N Pickle, located at 5215 UTSA Blvd., found kitchen staff and guests not wearing masks. Tables were too close together and customers were allowed to order at the bar. Four citations were issued.

- A proactive inspection at Lucy Cooper's Texas Ice House, located at 16080 San Pedro Ave., found inadequate distancing between tables. Customers at the pool table were not wearing masks. Two citations were issued.

- A caller reported that Texas Roadhouse, located at 2893 Cinema Ridge, was not social distancing. Officials counted 181 customers, over the 50 percent limit of 150. Customers seated at a table were not wearing masks. Three citations were issued.

- A caller reported a mask violation at Precious Angels Early Learning, located at 13134 Independence. Officials saw two employees and two individuals congregating in a small area without masks. Two citations were issued.

August 20

- A proactive inspection at The Hanger, located at 8203 Broadway St., found the proper signs and everyone wearing masks. However, tables were less than 6 feet apart. A citation was issued.

- A proactive inspection at Luther's Cafe, located at 1503 N. Main, found the proper signs and everyone wearing masks. However, tables were less than 6 feet apart. A citation was issued.

- A proactive inspection at Tucker's Kosy Korner, located at 1338 E. Houston St., found the bar was in compliance with social distancing and mask requirements but had failed to post the proper signs. A citation was issued.

- A caller reported that people were not wearing masks at El Canelo Mexican Restaurant, located at 1003 Culebra. Officials found that the tables were not spaced out and customers were sitting too close together. A citation was issued.

August 19

- A proactive inspection at H-E-B, located at 108 N. Rosillo St., found employees interacting with other employees within a 6-feet distance without wearing masks. A citation was issued.

August 17

- Two citations were issued to the owner of The Well, located at 5539 UTSA Blvd., after videos showed customers not social distancing or wearing masks. The owner admitted the videos were true. Two citations were also filed against the promoter.

August 14

- A proactive inspection at Discount Tire, located at 14822 Blanco Road, found employees in the bay area not wearing masks. One employee had the mask sitting on his chin after receiving a warning. The business and employee were cited.

August 13

- An officer on patrol saw six people skating in an area of Martinez Park that has been closed for many months. The Parks Police has issued numerous warnings that the area remains closed. Each individual was issued a citation.

- A caller reported that Asian Star Buffet, located at 9919 Colonial Square, was allowing customers to serve themselves. The location had previously been warned to not allow self-service at the buffet. A citation was issued.

- An officer on patrol saw five people skating in a fenced-off area of Old Pearsall Park. Each person was issued a citation.

- A proactive inspection at Flores Tire and Muffler Shop, located at 586 Enrique M. Barrera, found five employees not wearing masks. An official spoke with the manager.

Two citations were issued, one to the the business for employees not wearing masks and one to the owner for not wearing a mask after a warning.

August 10

- A proactive inspection at San Pedro Springs Park around 7:50 a.m. found an individual swimming in the closed pool. The officer told the person the pool was closed due to COVID-19 and issued a citation.

- Officials conducting a proactive inspection at San Pedro Springs Park around 2:20 p.m. saw an individual swimming in the closed pool. The person told an officer that he was homeless and rinsing off his clothes. The officer told him such services can be received at Haven for Hope and issued a citation.

August 8

- Officials conducting a proactive inspection at CD Front Tire Shop, located at 5104 W. Military Drive, saw two employees interacting without masks on. They also saw five customers without masks. The business was cited.

August 7

- Officials conducting a proactive inspections at Rent-A-Tire, located at 827 S.E. Military Drive, found that several employees were not wearing masks  even though few were able to practice social distancing. The manager was also not wearing a mask. A citation was issued.

- A caller reported that an employee at Satex Plumbing, Inc., located at 313 N. Park Road, was suspected of testing positive for the virus.

Officials found no health and safety policy posted. They spoke with an employee, who did not wear a mask, and other employees were not wearing them either. Citations were issued for not wearing masks and not having the policy posted.

August 6

- A caller reported that employees at Camila's Mexican Restaurant, located at 15311 Lookout Road, were not wearing masks. Kitchen staff were not wearing masks at the time of inspection. A citation was issued.

August 4

- A caller reported that employees at Undefeated Barber & Beauty Shop, located at 12726 Nacogdoches Road, were not wearing masks.

Officials found employees cutting hair with no masks on. They spoke with the owner, explained the orders, and cited the business.

August 2

- An officer saw seven people skating in area of Old Pearsall Park that was clearly fenced off. A citation was issued to each individual.

August 1

- Officials conducting a proactive inspection at Party Planet, located at 6450 N.W. Loop 410, found several adults walking around or playing games without masks. Some did not even have their masks with them.

There were over 40 guests in the facility. Two citations were issued for not wearing masks and allowing a party with more than 10 people.

July 28

- A caller reported that Hernandez Tire Shop, at 1514 Bandera, was not practicing social distancing or following COVID-19 guidelines.

The owner told an officer they were unaware of the mask requirements. Customers were wearing masks but the owner and staff were not. A citation was issued to the owner.

July 25

- A caller reported that an employee was not wearing a mask at the Pollo Loco drive-thru at 11820 Bandera Road. A manager, working alone and not wearing a mask, went to talk to another employee within six feet. A citation was issued.

- Officials conducting a proactive inspection at Cambridge Auto Center, located at 9823 Fredericksburg Road, saw two mechanics standing less than six feet apart while not wearing masks. The owner stated that he doesn't believe in the facemask policy. A citation was issued.

July 24

- Officials conducting a proactive inspection at QuikTrip, located at 2707 NE Loop 410, saw an employee walk into the store without a mask on. The store's manager said he also walks into the store at the beginning of his shift without a mask. A citation was issued.

July 23

- A caller reported that people were not wearing masks at Ken's Tire Shop, located at 1346 Fair Ave. Officials found that the manager and employees were not wearing masks. A citation was issued.

July 22

- A caller reported that people were not wearing masks at North Star Dodge, located at 7242 San Pedro Ave. None of the customers and few employees were wearing masks or practicing social distancing.

Customers put their masks on upon the officers' request. Police spoke with the manager about the staff violation and issued a citation.

July 20

- Inspectors found that staff at Life Time Recover, located at 10290 Southton, were not wearing masks. A citation was issued.

July 18

- Officials conducting a proactive inspection at Brake Check, located at 8650 Marbach Road, found seven employees congregating in the bay area without masks. One employee was within two feet of a customer without a mask.

Officials spoke with the manager about the violation and issued a citation.

- Officials were called to Brake Check, located at 13495 Interstate 10 West, for people not wearing masks. They found that the proper signs were posted but two mechanics were not wearing masks. A citation was issued.

- Employees in the kitchen at Las Palapas, located at 23725 Interstate 10 West, were not wearing masks and crossing one another. A citation was issued.

- Officials were called to North Star Mall for people not wearing masks. They saw six employees from three different stores  Daniels Jewelry, Aman's Jewelry, and American Cookie Factory  not wearing them.

All of the employees corrected the issue immediately, except for an American Cookie Factory employee who was not willing to wear a mask correctly. The employee was cited along with the three store owners.

July 17

- Officials conducting a follow-up inspection at Sushiholic, located at 11619 Bandera Road, found that the proper signs were posted but the owner was preparing food without a mask. He put his mask on when asked to do so. A citation was issued to the owner.

- Officials were called to La Perla Del Pacifico, located at 7911 Culebra Road, for a violation of CDC guidelines. They found that signs were not posted as required and tables were not separated by six feet for social distancing.

The restaurant was allowed to have 44 people inside. There were 33 patrons eating and no one was taking count when more patrons walked in. A citation was issued.

July 11

- Police conducted a follow-up inspection of Highlanders Bar and Grill at 5562 Fredericksburg Road to verify compliance with the guidelines. Officers saw two people drinking on the premises.

They told the owner that the bar could only serve to-go and curbside with food. The owner was asked to wear a mask when interacting with the officers but refused to do so. He also refused to provide his identification. Two citations were issued to the owner.

July 10

- Police received a call reporting that people were not wearing masks or social distancing at Taqueria La Tapatia at 4731 Rigsby Ave. Officers saw one employee not wearing a mask and two others with masks around their necks. A citation was issued.

- Police received a call reporting that people were not wearing masks at an MG Building Materials Millwork Division construction site at 4825 Rittiman Road. Officers saw two employees congregating without masks and spoke with the manager who was not wearing one.

A citation was issued to the business.

July 8

- Police received a call reporting that the Smitty Motorcycle Clubhouse bar at 1850 E. Houston St. was open for business with loud music. An officer found the bar operating in violation of the declaration and a citation was issued.

- Police received a call reporting that people were not wearing masks at the O'Hanna Academy gym at 15062 US 281 North. Employees adjusted their masks once they saw the officers and a warning was issued.

However, the employees were not wearing the masks despite the warning, police said, and citations were issued to both employees.

- Police received a call reporting that people were not wearing masks or practicing social distancing at Alamo Distilling Company at 2030 E. Houston St. Officers made contact with the person in charge over the phone and were denied entry to the building. The individual refused to provide his identification.

Officers saw that a health and safety plan was not posted and a citation was issued to the property owner.

- Police received a call reporting that employees were not wearing masks at Anderson Garage at 7560 Bandera Road. An officer found that the proper signage was posted but there was no screen between customers and the person at the counter.

The owner at the counter was not wearing a mask and refused to do so upon request. A citation was issued.

July 7

- Police received a call reporting that no face masks were being worn at Brown Coffee Shop at 812 S. Alamo St. An officer found no signs displaying the instructions for social-distancing and face masks. A stop work order was posted and a citation issued.

July 4

- Police received a call reporting The Drink bar at 200 Navarro St. was open for business. An officer had warned the owner that he was violating the emergency declaration orders but the owner refused to close.

The SAPD Vice Unit found 10 to 15 people drinking inside the bar. A citation was issued to the owner.

July 2

- Police received a call that Web House Cafe and Bar at 320 Blanco Road was allowing customers to drink inside. The manager said the establishment was making most receipts from food, not alcohol, so they could be open. He said they had applied to TABC for an exemption and had not heard back.

Officers advised that the bar must shut down the dining room but could do take out and delivery of alcohol with food orders. A stop work order was posted and a citation was issued.

July 1

- At Wetmore Family Dentist, officers found customers and staff not wearing masks and no signs posted. A citation was issued to the dentist's office, located at 13499 Wetmore Road.

June 30

- Officials checking for proper signs at a Northside gym called The Pit, located at 8506 Speedway, found that the signs had not changed. They posted a placard to file a case and issued a citation.

June 27

- Police were called for a Brown Coffee Company employee allegedly not wearing a mask. Officers saw the server without a mask and a municipal court case will be filed. The coffee shop is located at 812 S. Alamo St. in Southtown.

- Police were called to 809 Riverwalk for a river barge company allegedly not requiring passengers to wear masks. Based on an officer observing employees and customers not wearing masks, an official warning was given and a municipal court case will be filed.

- Police were called to 2711 Treble Creek for people at Gold's Gym allegedly not wearing masks. An officer explained the mask ordinance to a manager as they observed some members not wearing their mask in the gym. A municipal court case will be filed.

- Police were called to 4319 S. New Braunfels for employees at Sonic allegedly not wearing masks while serving food. An officer watched a server approach vehicles and deliver orders with no mask on. The manager was told to have servers put on masks within 6 feet of customers. A municipal court case will be filed.

- Police were called to 6059 La Cima for employees at La Michoacana allegedly not wearing masks. An officer saw one cashier with a mask around her neck and another worker with no mask. A patron also had no mask. Everyone complied when the officer enforced the mask rule.

The manager said he had several incidents of patrons cussing him out over a facemask. The officer suggested he contact SAPD to escort belligerent non-compliant customers off the premises. A municipal court case will be filed.

- Police were called to 1560 Bandera for an employee at Walgreens allegedly testing positive for COVID-19 and not sanitizing store. Officers observed all employees wearing masks but not wearing them properly. Social distancing practices were in place. A municipal court case will be filed.

- Police were called to 1003 Culebra for Quintanilla's Restaurant allegedly operating over capacity and staff not wearing masks. An officer found that the location was maintaining capacity just under 75 percent.

Several employees were not wearing masks. The manager said masks are provided to them but they take them off as soon as he steps out. A municipal court case will be filed.

- Police were called to 2838 N. Loop 1604 E. for people at El Chaparral allegedly not wearing masks. An officer saw two employees in the kitchen not wearing masks. A municipal court case will be filed.

- Police were called to 5138 Blanco for employees at Los Angeles allegedly not wearing masks. An officer saw all employees wearing masks.

The restaurant's mask rules said they were "preferred." The officer told the manager it should say "required" and the manager said she would have the signed changed by the end of the day. A municipal court case will be filed.

May 5

- Police found the Cantina Sports Bar, located at 6565 Babcock Road on the Northwest Side, open for business. Approximately 50 people were inside the crowded bar, none of whom were social distancing or wearing a mask  including the owner.

The bar was selling alcohol and police did not observe anyone eating food. The owner told police he could no longer afford to remain closed. He would rather fight a citation in court than close the bar. A citation was issued to the owner.

- Police received a call reporting that Porta Rosa Bar at 1221 Broadway St. was hosting an opening night party. The caller said a large number of people were inside the bar and on the patio, failing to social distance or wear masks. Officers found the location open for business.

Advised to close the bar, the manager said he would comply. Police received two more calls and an officer responded for the second time in an hour. The bar was still operating with a large number of people inside. A citation was issued.

May 2

- Police officers, responding to a call for a shooting, found a large group of people conducting an illegal 8-liner gambling operation at a South Side home. They found that no one was shot or injured at the residence, located on the 700 block of Grosvenor St.

The officers cited 34 individuals for violating the emergency declaration.

April 27

- Police received a call reporting that the Planet K at 1015 E Mulberry was open. Officers saw customers inside the store and posted a stop work order.

April 26

- Police received a call reporting that the Planet K at 1015 E Mulberry was open for business. Officers observed customers inside the store. An employee told police the store would not comply with the curbside-only requirement. A stop work order was posted.

April 22

- Police received a call reporting that Firme Copias Tattoo Shop was open. At the business, located at 10520 Culebra Road, officers observed a customer in a tattoo chair with an artist next to him. The artist was not wearing a mask.

Officers told the artist that the business was not allowed to be open.

The artist admitted he was allowing private sessions and did not indicate whether he would stop work. He told police he would fight the citation in court.

April 18

- Police received a call reporting 10 people inside the Smoke Shadowz store at 1429 W. Hildebrand Ave. Officers watched two individuals enter the store separately. The owner said the customers were picking up wholesale orders. Officers told the owner no customers were permitted the enter for any reason. A stop work order was posted at the entrance. The owner secured the entry door and gate.

April 15

- Police received a call reporting an open barber shop at 10223 Ironside Dr. The owner told officers that he was only cutting employee's hair. The owner had been previously informed that the business must be closed. A stop work order was posted on the door.

April 10

- Officers received a call reporting a vendor selling Easter baskets and pinatas in a parking lot at Nacogdoches and O'Connor roads. The man had been given a warning the previous day for the same violation. Officers cited the man and advised him he had to close down. He packed the items and left the location.

April 9

- Police received a call reporting an open barber shop at 114 N. Ellison Dr. An officer observed an employee cutting hair and asked the owner for identification. The owner refused, became irate, and removed a stop work order from the door.

April 7

- A fourth citation was issued to the Mega Vape on S.E. Military Drive. The owner refused to close, so the city revoked its certificate of occupancy.

April 6

- The Michaels store at 415 W. Loop 1604 South was open. Police cited the store and issued a stop work order.

- The Mega Vape on S.E. Military Dr. was cited for being open with customers.

April 5

- The Michaels arts and crafts store at 17700 U.S. 281 North was cited for operating. The store was told they could only be curbside and issued a stop work order.

- The city revoked the certificate of occupancy for the Planet K on Austin Hwy.

April 4

- The Planet K on West Ave. was cited for being open. The manager told police the store was restocking items while closed and turning away customers.

- The Planet K on Evers Road was cited for being open. A sign said "curbside only" but police advised employees the store should be closed.

- The Planet K on Austin Hwy. was cited for being open for business. Police met with the manager and a stop work order was posted.

- The Mega Vape on S.E. Military Dr. was open with employees present. The store was cited and a stop work order was posted.

- Police cited the Planet K on Goliad for being open and posted a stop work order.

April 3

- The Planet K on Evers Road was cited for being open and refusing to close.

- Officers spoke to an employee at the Planet K on Goliad. The employee called the manager, who refused to allow the employee to close the store. The owner arrived and also refused to close.

- Mega Vape at 2603 S.E. Military Dr. was cited for operating.

April 2

- Officers cited a Planet K store at 11202 West Ave. for defying the emergency declaration and operating on April 1 and April 2.

- A caller reported the Planet K at 2803 Goliad was open. When police responded, employees said the owner was forcing them to work and called the owner. The owner refused to close, saying he was within his rights to be open, and a citation was issued.

- After a seventh notification to the Planet K at 5619 Evers Road, a citation and closure was issued.

- A Planet K at 2130 Austin Hwy. was cited for being open with customers inside.

April 1

- Officers responded to a reported shooting-in-progress at Towering Oaks Apartments (7710 Oakdell Way). Police discovered a BB gun and issued citations to three men for public intoxication and violating the public health order.

- Police visited the Texas Vape Stores location at 1518 Austin Hwy to see if the store was complying with the order. The "open" light was on and officers took that as evidence of a violation.

Mark Dunphy is a breaking news and general assignment reporter for MySA.com | mark.dunphy@express-news.net | @m_b_dunphy

MORE CORONAVIRUS COVERAGE:
The speaker of the house of representatives, Femi Gbajabiamila says the issue of maltreatment of Nigerians living in China has been sorted out between the two countries.

Speaking via his official Twitter handle, he further hailed Nigerias consul general to China, Razak Lawal for his robust defence of the rights of Nigerians in China.

Im glad the matter of maltreatment of Nigerians in China  has been sorted out between both countries. The Ambassador has communicated his findings and we hope that moving forward communication will be swift and clear and due process will be observed even where there are allegations of wrongdoing by citizens of other countries. It is important that we follow up on this and Nigerians can legitimately go about their business in the Peoples Republic of China.

Read Also: COVID-19: SERAP Asks Lawan, Gbajabiamila To Give N37bn NASS Renovation Fund To States, FCT

I spoke with the Acting Consul General, Mr Razak Lawal whose robust defence of the rights of Nigerians in China went viral and I salute the gentleman diplomat for his dedication to duty and his patriotism. https://t.co/a12D9B5by8

https://twitter.com/femigbaja/status/1250383003748106240?s=19

https://twitter.com/femigbaja/status/1250383006818328579?s=19
President Donald Trump on Tuesday backed down from his claim that he was the ultimate authority in deciding when states should reopen following the coronavirus outbreak, saying it would leave it to Phil Murphy and the other governors.

Trump said he would talk to the governors Thursday and discuss when the states could relax their COVID-19-related lockdowns. He said the states will have the responsibility of obtaining testing equipment to monitor the spread of the coronavirus within their borders.

We will hold the governors accountable. But again, were going to be working with them to make sure it works really well, Trump said at his daily press conference at the White House. Im not putting any pressure on the governors.

He said some states could be ready to open before the end of April, while it will take longer for others.

We think that some of the governors will be in really good shape to open up, Trump said. Others are going to have to take a longer period of time until theyre in a position to say, Were ready to go.' And thats okay. We understand that. Some of the governors have a very tough situation.

CORONAVIRUS RESOURCES: Live map tracker | Businesses that are open | Homepage

Trump drew the ire of some governors and constitutional experts when he declared Monday that he had the power to decide when the states should reopen.

When somebodys president of the United States, the authority is total," Trump said at the time. And thats the way its got to be. Its total. Its total. And the governors know that.

New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo on Tuesday said thats not true because America has a president and not a king.

Later in the day, Trump said he expected to work closely with the governors.

I think were going to have a good relationship, Trump said. "he governors will be very, very respectful of the presidency.

Murphy said Tuesday that New Jersey would work with both the federal government and neighboring states.

We need the administration, we need the federal government and the full force of it," he said. And I can say with the same passion: We need a similar reality with our regional partners. Both of those statements can stand. Theyre not at odds with each other. Nor are the actions that underpin them.

New Jersey Republicans also werent sure Trump would try to exert his will on states.

Assembly Minority Leader Jon Bramnick said Trumps comments were not productive.

He has to work with governors, said Bramnick, R-Union. "I think the pushback from different governors would be seriously problematic. I wouldnt expect all 50 governors would cooperate with the president.

Murphys predecessor, Chris Christie, said the governors and the president would find a way to work together.

There would be a real battle in court over this because the president does, under a national emergency, have much broader authority than he normally does, Christie said Tuesday on ABCs The View." They have to they have to figure out a way to work together. My guess is there will be compromises.

Rep. Chris Smith, R-4th Dist., said there has been an extraordinary degree of successful bipartisan cooperation at all levels of government and "its imperative to bring multiple layers of expert opinion, due diligence and insight to bear on when its safe enough to reopen the economy in whole or in part.

And former state Assemblyman Jack Ciattarelli, R-Somerset, who is seeking the Republican nomination to challenge Murphy next year, also declined to choose sides.

State governments and the federal government need to work in partnership in managing the crisis," he said. "And they need to do that in all respects.

If you would like updates on New Jersey-specific coronavirus news, subscribe to our Coronavirus in N.J. newsletter.

Jonathan D. Salant may be reached at jsalant@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter @JDSalant or on Facebook.

Brent Johnson may be reached at bjohnson@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter @johnsb01.

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Linkedin News Desk (Reuters) Berlin, Germany  Wed, April 15, 2020 15:30 636 fc6853813033f564188675f8bd20f0cb 2 World Germany,TerroristSuspect,terror-plot,Islamic-State Free

German police arrested on Wednesday four suspected members of Islamic State, all from Tajikistan, believed to have been planning deadly attacks in Germany, prosecutors said.

Special forces in the western state of North Rhine-Westphalia made the arrests near the cities of Essen and Duesseldorf and raided properties in the area.

Prosecutors suspect the four men, with a fifth who has been in detention for the last year, of being in contact with leading members of Islamic State in Afghanistan and Syria and of receiving instructions from them.

"Targets for the attacks were supposed to be institutions of US forces in Germany or even individual people," said prosecutors in their statement.

"In particular, they planned a murder attack on one person who had made public comments that they viewed as being critical of Islam," the prosecutors added.

The prosecutors said they believed the suspects had already carried out surveillance of the targeted individual and were procuring weapons, ammunition and components for a bomb.

Prosecutors identified the suspects as Azizjon B., Muhammadali G., Farhodshoh K. and Sunatullokh K., in line with German privacy rules. The fifth man who is already in detention was identified as Ravsan B.
The annual Thrissur Pooram, billed as the mother of all temple festivals in Kerala, will not be held this year in the wake of the nationwide lockdown, the Kerala government said on Wednesday.

Photograph: Jagadeesh / Rediff.com IMAGE: A file photograph of Thrissur Pooram.

The iconic festival, known for the parade of richly caparisoned jumbos, performance of traditional music ensembles and a sea of cheering people, was to be held at the sprawling Thekkinkadu Maidan in Thrissur city on May 2 this year.

Agriculture Minister and a legislator from the district VS Sunil Kumar told the media that the state government and members of the two devaswom boards, which organise the festival, held discussions and consulted with the priests and "unanimously decided" to cancel the Pooram.

"After considering the unusual situation of pandemic we are facing, the state government and the devaswom boards have unanimously decided to cancel the famous Thrissur Pooram (festival) and will conduct only the necessary rituals," the minister said.

The rituals will be conducted inside the Vadakkunnathan Lord Shiva temple with the participation of five people and devotees will not be allowed inside the temple.

"All other events related to the Thrissur pooram, including the exhibition, mini-poorams also standcancelled," he said, adding that all the religious institutions are supposed to follow the lockdown protocol.

The pooram had been cancelled earlier as well, including in 1948 when Mahatma Gandhi was assassinated and then during the 1962 Chinese war.

"Earlier also it was cancelled or held with minimum rituals when there was a difference of opinion over conducting the fireworks and handling of the usual exhibition," the minister said.

This year's festival was scheduled to be held on May 3.

The Pooram exhibition, which usually begins on April 1 and ends in the last week of May, has already been cancelled.

The two-century-old Thrissur Poorams origin goes back to 1798, to a royal edict of the then Raja Rama Varma, popularly known as Shakthan Thampuran, a powerful ruler of the erstwhile princely state of Cochin.

The edict entrusted two local temples -- Paramekkavu and Thiruvambady -- as the main sponsors of the festivities to be conducted in a competitive spirit.

Besides the main poorams by the two devaswoms, small poorams from nearby temples also participate in the festivities, which ends with a fireworks display.
On Friday, Mr. Ramamurti said he had yet to receive a response to his letter.

Our mission is to determine how this $500 billion affects the financial well being of American families, he said in an interview. The only way we can figure out what the effect is on American families is if we figure out which American companies are getting money and what theyre doing with it.

There have been growing concerns that Mr. Trump will not comply with oversight efforts, particularly after his selection of a White House lawyer, Brian D. Miller, to serve as the special inspector general at Treasury and his firing of the Pentagons inspector general, Glenn A. Fine, who had been tapped by the Council of the Inspectors General on Integrity to lead the new Pandemic Response Accountability Committee.

The economic stimulus legislation requires the Fed and Treasury to turn over an array of information after disbursing loans. However, Mr. Ramamurti is concerned that the information could be provided in aggregate, making it difficult for watchdogs or taxpayers to know how the money is being spent and which specific companies or sectors are benefiting.

The Fed is still determining how much information it will release on its new programs, but is expected to be more transparent with the efforts that use taxpayer funds than it has historically been with its emergency lending.

The Dodd Frank Act placed new reporting requirements on the central banks programs: it has to both update relevant Congressional committees on its plans shortly after announcing them, and then follow up with transaction details. The central bank plans to publish information on program use to its website, but it is still unclear if officials will name individual companies that benefit.

Daleep Singh, the recently-appointed head of the markets group at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, discussed transparency in the text of prepared remarks on Friday.
Scott Morrison believes tracking Australians' movements and locations through a mobile phone app may be crucial in stopping the spread of coronavirus.

But the prime minister insists the federal government will carefully work through privacy issues before an opt-in app is launched.

The TraceTogether app uses Bluetooth to track people who had spent 15 minutes or more in close proximity to a person with coronavirus.

They then share the records with authorities when asked to be part of a tracing investigation.

Mr Morrison said using location informatiocoon may be necessary to save lives and livelihoods.

'If that tool is going to help them do that, then this may be one of the sacrifices we have to make,' he told 6PR radio on Wednesday.

Scott Morrison said using location information may be necessary to save lives and livelihoods in the coronavirus pandemic

Singapore is using the TraceTogether application to help track the spread of the disease. Australia has been given the code to develop the surveillance software

The prime minister said the app would be a more efficient way of contact tracing coronavirus cases.

'What would happen then is the health authorities, who are the only ones who'd have access to that data, would contact those people just like they do now,' he said.

He said the digital information would prevent a reliance on people's memories.

'At the end of the day (that) would mean we'd save lives and save more livelihoods,' Mr Morrison said.

Singapore, where about 20 per cent of people have signed up to the app, has provided coding information to Australia for development.

The TraceTogether app uses Bluetooth to track people who had spent 15 minutes or more in close proximity to a person with coronavirus, and is being used in Singapore

Australian health authorities estimate a 40 per cent take-up rate would been needed for the scheme to be efficient.

Attorney-General Christian Porter has been tasked with investigating privacy issues surrounding TraceTogether.

But Digital Rights Watch chair Lizzie O'Shea said people should be concerned about a location-tracking app with no guarantees about how data would be used.

'No public trust means people will hesitate to install the app, and not-very-subtly coercing people by saying restrictions could ease if surveillance increases is an appalling way to start,' she said.

Ms O'Shea said assurances the attorney-general would look at privacy issues were not enough.

'Everything about this needs to be transparent. The code must be independently audited,' she said.

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

'There needs to be a clear benchmark for when data will no longer be collected and the app deactivated.'

Communications Minister Paul Fletcher said the app would only proceed if the government was satisfied with privacy safeguards.

'That's a matter that the attorney-general is very focused on,' he said.

Chief Medical Officer Brendan Murphy told a New Zealand parliamentary hearing that Australia is 'very keen to use it perhaps even more extensively than Singapore'.

But Professor Murphy acknowledged there were privacy concerns.

'Obviously there's a conversation to have with the community about the acceptability of it but we think that idea, the TraceTogether app, is a really excellent one,' he said.

Australia's latest death is a woman from Canberra aged in her 60s who reportedly caught the virus on the ill-fated Ruby Princess cruise ship




Digitalising the agricultural sector is an essential requirement in the context of disease and climate change.

Minister of Agricultural and Rural Development Nguyen Xuan Cuong

Minister of Agricultural and Rural Development Nguyen Xuan Cuong sat down with Phuong Hao to discuss the issue.

The Vietnamese government and the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development (MARD) have called on businesses and farmers to apply more technology in agricultural production. How will this impact a field depending a lot on the weather like agriculture?

After more than 30 years of development since doi moi, Vietnamese agriculture has attained very basic achievements. We have moved from importing two million tonnes of food every year to producing enough food for nearly 100 million people, exporting up to $41.3 billion worth of agro-forestry-fishery products in 2019. This is the highest result ever in a very difficult global picture of agricultural trade, and proves that Vietnams agricultural production capacity has developed well. Vietnams agricultural products are exported to 185 markets around the world, but are mostly raw products with very low added value. We are determined to restructure the agricultural industry by developing value chains for the long term, building a clean agricultural industry with global integration.

The current virus pandemic, along with other issues such as African swine fever and H1N1 avian flu, with devastating effects on the whole economy in general and agriculture in particular, has shown the urgency of technology application in agricultural production. In addition, drought and climate change here are also factors that compel businesses and workers to apply technology to reduce the negative impacts of natural factors, ensure productivity and quality of agricultural products, and turn into deep processing to lengthen the expiry date of products.

Vietnam has been actively participating in major free trade agreements which require very high standards regarding quality and origin of goods. To take advantage of these agreements, digitalisation is a core element for businesses and farmers.

Last September, the Vietnam Digital Agriculture Association was launched. What is the associations role in promoting the application of high technology in agriculture in Vietnam?

The Vietnam Digital Agriculture Association has 500 members, all of which are economic organisations and enterprises of all sizes as well as typical households, operating in agriculture, fisheries, and livestock farming. Even logistic businesses have joined this digital association.

This is a requirement of businesses when they want to reach international integration. Enterprises realise that it is necessary to take the management platform of digital economy and digital industry, approaching the latest achievements in science and technology to apply in production in order to renew themselves and grow together.

It can be said that the association is a common playground for resources to perform practical tasks such as perfecting the technological infrastructure for agriculture, international connection, and market expansion. The association is expected to support the development of large-scale projects to modernise Vietnams agriculture, introduce high-quality agricultural centres in the world, build online agricultural product exchanges serving the global market, and create centres for processing and preserving agricultural products in the regions, deploying the system of digital agricultural vocational training for Vietnam and the region.

The association will be the link between the enterprise community and the state. It will criticise and determine how to improve mechanisms and institutions towards intelligent agriculture, integration, and bridging between large enterprises, co-operatives, and farmers in the development process.

Digitalisation will bring a more sustainable future to Vietnams agriculture. How do you assess the current conditions for this?

In the last three years, the number of enterprises focusing on the agricultural sector has nearly quadrupled, from 3,000 to 11,800 so far. Besides this, 49,000 businesses are indirectly supporting the sector. We have also witnessed that many large enterprises operating in other fields have turned to investing in agriculture.

This is a very happy signal, and a good condition for Vietnamese agriculture to be digitalised.

In addition, although the number of businesses investing in agriculture is not too big, most of the major industries have private enterprises as the pillars. We can proudly say that catfish production in Vietnam is currently the most modern in the world with the core businesses being private ones. In addition, quick development of dairy and vegetables has also allowed us to believe that the room for development in the major agricultural sector is still large, and that our agriculture can integrate globally.

How will the MARD accompany businesses and farmers in digitalising the agricultural sector?

Production in the sector is most difficult for those with low profits, so it requires great determination from the business community. We appreciate the involvement of businesses in agricultural production and in processing chains. The business community is a companion of the MARD to realise the goal of agricultural restructuring and new rural development. The ministry is willing to engage in matters under its responsibility to address business barriers.

The prime minister requires further administrative reforms, creating an ecosystem for businesses to participate in the most favourable market, so the MARD is trying its best to solve difficulties for them. VIR

Phuong Hao

Which investors are pouring money into agriculture? Tran Ba Duong, a member of top 10 stock billionaire, president of Thaco, an automobile manufacturer, has joined hands with the King of Catfish Duong Ngoc Minh, president of Hung Vuong Group (HVG).
DUBLIN, April 15, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- The "Refrigerated Trucking Market in the US and Canada - Industry Outlook and Forecast 2020-2025" report has been added to ResearchAndMarkets.com's offering.

Get an in-depth analysis of COVID-19 impact on refrigerated trucking market in the US and Canada.



The refrigerated trucking market in the US and Canada is expected to grow at a CAGR of over 4% during the period 2019-2025.



This study considers the present scenario of the refrigerated trucking market in the US and Canada and its market dynamics for the period 2019-2025. It covers a detailed overview of several market growth enablers, restraints, and trends. The study offers both the demand and supply aspects of the market. It profiles and examines leading companies and other prominent companies operating in the market.



The challenge of perishability and the need to preserve food and non-food categories at optimal temperatures to prevent spoilage are the major growth enablers for the refrigerated trucking market in the US and Canada. The growth in refrigerated warehouse capacities in the US and Canada has a positive impact on the refrigerated logistics market. Being geographically vast countries, the US and Canada need to have refrigerated truck transport and trailers for long haul transportation to avoid food spoilage, thereby influencing the market. The demand for temperature-controlled logistics continues to grow upward trajectory as perishable food items and medicines need to be maintained at optimal temperatures throughout the cold chain until they reach end-consumers. This demand pushes more opportunities for vendors to increase their investments that could benefit both refrigerated trucking companies and perishable food manufacturers as well.



Pharmaceutical products need to be maintained at a precise temperature to maintain their efficiency. Time and temperature are two vital factors to be taken into consideration when transporting medicines. Transporting biological materials such as blood, tissue samples, reproductive material, etc. must be carriage at a cryogenic temperature less than -150C. Therefore, it is critical to transport clinical products under temperature-controlled trailers over a long distance. The pharmaceutical market in the US and Canada continues to grow at a steady rate of YOY. Hence, refrigerated trucking companies are exploring to deliver advanced solutions for biological researches, needing transportation of specimens, or even entire research labs at times. Therefore, pharmaceutical products are mandatory to be transported in temperature-controlled trucks becomes a driving force for the refrigerated trucking market.



Market Dynamics



Opportunities & Trends



Growing Organic Food Market

Increasing Multi-Temperature Trucking

Solar Powered Refrigeration Units

Usage of Freight Optimization Software

Growth Enablers

Growing Consumption of Perishable Goods

Growing Need for Pharmaceutical Shipping

Growth in Frozen Foods

Restraints

Fuel Cost Fluctuation

Competitive Market Place

Shortage of Drivers

Refrigerated Trucking Market in US and Canada: Segmentation



This research report includes a detailed segmentation by service, temperature compartment, end-users, vehicle, and geography.



The refrigerated trucking market by less than truckload (LTL) is growing at a steady pace driven by end-users such as F&B and pharmaceuticals. The (LTL) industry in North America is composed of numerous vendors. The industry has high entry barriers across the region on account of the complexity of operating thousands of depots, driver shortage, and intricacy with respect to the spoke hub system used for pickup and deliveries. The growth of e-commerce has a high positive impact on the overall LTL industry. However, dry freight has a higher share compared to refrigerated freight. LTL carriers commonly employ covered or enclosed van trailers. The usage of LTL refrigerated trailers is less compared to dry freight LTL carriers. The majority of temperature-controlled transporting through LTL is limited to regional levels compared to inter-regional or national levels. Online retail is a major driver for the LTL segment. Also, several start-up companies are trying to disrupt the LTL, consolidate the market with new technology-based solutions to address the complexity associated with the LTL segment.



The single temperature and multi-temperature logistics segments supplement each other's growth. Currently, single temperature refrigerated trucking services dominate the industry. However, the growth of multi-temperature refrigerated trucking services has been higher. Reduced weight and improved fuel economy are the characteristics of single-temperature refrigerated truck trailers. Local manufacturers meet a large part of the demand for transportation refrigeration units in the US. However, low-cost imports from China and Mexico are also available in the market.



The food & beverage industry dominates the reefer truck market. The logistics cost in the food industry accounts for 710% of the total product cost. The increasing number of quick-service restaurants and retail outlets has fueled food consumption, which has increased the demand for chilled and frozen food and beverages. Foods that are expected to see high demand for packaging include organic foods, dairy, and meat. Scaling up of tier 2 brands in the US food industry is expected to bring high volumes, while larger food corporations will drive the steady need for refrigerated transportation. Canada is one of the most potential markets for launching new and innovative products due to its multi-ethnic society. Food consumption differs significantly across the country. Also, a vast majority of people are health-conscious, and hence, the market has observed an increased demand for organic food products that require refrigeration in their supply chain.



While refrigerated trailers reduce operating expenses by reducing fuel and/or power consumption, they are complex to manage. Vendors boost the trailer revenue by charging for loading and unloading, detention of tractors and trailers, fuel surcharges, and other services. The market for trailers is also dependent on inventory levels, customer needs, trucking capacity, and availability of the driver. The availability of long-haul drivers is a major concern both in the US and Canada. The FTL and LTL segment use trailers for delivering cargo. However, the utilization of vans is limited to the LTL segment. Since the FTL demand is currently high, and also the regional LTL demand is growing, the usage of the trailer is growing.



Market Segmentation by Service

FTL

LTL

Market Segmentation by Temperature Compartment

Single

Multiple

Market Segmentation by End-users

Food

Poultry, Meat, and Seafood

Dairy and Beverages

Bakery, Confectionery, and Others

Pharmaceutical

Others

Insights by Geography



Chilled or perishable food items have multiple challenges in transportation; therefore, cold chain management is increasing its complexity significantly. Due to technical advancements, refrigerated trucks that can hold goods with multiple segments at different temperatures are gaining popularity in recent years in North America. Multi segmented refrigerated trucks can maintain different optimum temperature levels. Multiple temperature trucks are more particularly used for the retail application, where temperature-controlled models are required to replenish store stock with relatively small quantities from regional distribution centers.



Canada stands out to be on top as the largest country both in the production and consumption of food and beverages. Canadian organic food products are at the highest demand being exported across all major countries of the world. The agriculture and food and beverage processing industries in Canada contributes around 6.8% toward GDP annually. Quebec and Ontario hold leading two positions in agriculture and food and beverage processing industries.



Key Profiled Countries

US

Canada

Insights by Vendors



The US and Canada refrigerated trucking industry is large, fragmented, and highly competitive with thousands of FTL and LTL carriers. No single vendor dominates the market. The three major factors on which the competition is dependent include - tariff, capacity, and customer service. The competitive factors change as and when the market conditions change. For instance, in the low demand market scenario, the tariff for hire refrigerated trucking company becomes significant, while in the times of high customer demand, the capacity and service quality make become more vital. The pricing of a truckload refrigerated carrier is in North America depends mainly on supply and demand factors.



Vendors

H. Robinson Worldwide

Americold Logistics

B Hunt

Knight-Swift Transportation

FedEx

DB Schenker

U.S Xpress

DHL

Lineage Logistics

ABF Freight

Marten

KLLM Logistics

Prime Inc.

Covenant Transportation Services

Stevens Transport

Burris Logistics

Total Quality Logistics

Henningsen Cold Storage

Expeditors

XPO Logistics

Trenton Cold Storage

RLS Logistics

Matson Logistics

Conestoga Cold Storage

Agro Merchants Group

Congebec Logistics

Hanson Logistics

Confederation Freezers

Ruan Transport

Penske

Atlanta Bonded Warehouse Corporation

Alliance Shippers

Midwest Refrigerated Services

Estes

For more information about this report visit https://www.researchandmarkets.com/r/59vjqr

Research and Markets also offers Custom Research services providing focused, comprehensive and tailored research.



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THE Zanzibar Health Minister, Mr Hamad Rashid Mohamed, has called on the general public to refrain from stigma and discrimination on COVID-19 pandemic, because it can lead to fear and discourage people from testing and seeking treatment on time.

He said stigma and discrimination on people who have tested positive for COVID-19 or those who are under quarantine might deter more people from going for check up, which might be catastrophic.

Presenting an update on the spread of the virus in Zanzibar, Mr Mohamed warned that if stigma and discrimination over COVID-19 pandemic continues, it might contribute to having more cases in the society, which may pose as a threat to the country.

"As we join forces against coronavirus, we also need to stop stigmatising and marginalising people with the virus. We are all human beings, and anybody can contract the virus, he said.

The minister also appealed to members of the public to help convince (or report) returnees from outside the country and people with symptoms to visit hospitals for checking, because self -isolation or quarantine and seeking treatment early would save lives and prevent further spread.

As of April 13, 2020, Zanzibar had recorded 12 cases of COVID-19, with two cured and more than 50 released from mandatory quarantine in both Unguja and Pemba.
For the first time ever, investment firm RBC Capital released its Small-Cap Growth Idea list, made up of stocks with market caps below $5 billion at the time of publishing, and average daily trading volumes of $10 million. Each name scored one of the coveted spots on the list because the firms analysts believe it has either an attractive normalized growth story or strong durable growth characteristics.

After using TipRanks database to get the lowdown on RBCs top picks, we were able to pinpoint two stocks that have earned support from other analysts as well, enough so to be given a Strong Buy consensus rating. Not to mention both names could see substantial gains in the twelve months ahead. Heres the full scoop.

Agios Pharmaceuticals (AGIO)

Leveraging its expertise in cellular metabolism and precision medicine, Agios has developed an impressive product pipeline that includes therapies to target cancer and other rare genetic diseases. So far, April has been kind to this healthcare name, with it up 18% since the first of the month. RBCs take? More gains are on the horizon.

Weighing in on AGIO for RBC, 5-star analyst Kennen MacKay argues that while somewhat controversial," the companys pyruvate kinase deficiency (PKD) program could be the key to its success. Currently, there arent any available treatment options for PKD, which is a rare and severe hemolytic anemia. MacKay doesnt dispute that AGIOs mitapivat (AG-348) therapy is a known aromatase inhibitor, which could cause hormonal imbalances, but he points out that during the Phase 2 study, hormones stayed at relatively normal levels.

MacKay added, We view completion of enrollment for two Phase 3 trials (ACTIVATE and ACTIVATE-T) positively with topline expected by YE:20 and see a high 70% probability of success given limited alternatives for these patients. The Phase 3 responses to mitapivat could be superior to Phase 2 response rates as the Phase 3 study excludes patients with 2 non-missense mutations in PKD. We see the potential for de-risking of mitapivat in other hemolytic anemias such as sickle cell disease and thalassemia with mid-2020 updates at the EHA conference. As a result, peak global PKD sales could reach $880 million in 2020.

Story continues

If that wasnt enough, MacKay believes its Tibsovo drug represents a key point of strength for the company. While Tibsovo's IDH1mut acute myeloid leukemia (AML) market is smaller than its Idhifa drugs IDH2mut market, the analyst thinks AGIOs full ownership of Tibsovo makes it the more valuable asset as Idhifa was developed with Celgene.

We view Tibsovo's approval in 1L AML ineligible for intensive therapy as positive and combination with Aza in 1L AML as practice-changing. We see use in cholangiocarcinoma helping drive Tibsovo value beyond AML, MacKay commented.

With several other possible catalysts fast approaching, its no wonder MacKay stayed with the bulls. Along with an Outperform rating, the top analyst kept a $69 price target on the stock, implying 73% upside potential. (To watch MacKays track record, click here)

In general, the rest of the Street is on the same page. 6 Buys and 2 Hold ratings received in the last three months add up to a Strong Buy consensus rating. At $63.71, the average price target suggests 52% upside potential. (See Agios stock analysis on TipRanks)

eHealth, Inc. (EHTH)

Switching gears now, eHealth is the largest private health insurance marketplace in the U.S. According to RBC, the stock, which is already up 26% year-to-date, could see its share price grow even more as its the only name in the firms coverage universe that should escape COVID-19's impact.

5-star analyst Frank Morgan believes that because people will continue to reach age 65, EHTHs addressable market stands to grow. He added, As these newly-Medicare eligible continue to choose Medicare Advantage over traditional FFS Medicare, eHealths growth potential should accelerate. And importantly, as a multi-carrier Medicare Advantage broker, eHealth has no medical underwriting risk.

Every day, almost 10,000 senior citizens age into the Medicare program, with Medicare Advantage penetration slated to increase from 33% currently to about 50% at some point. As a result, Morgan thinks the opportunity for EHTH will expand and rapid changes in plan design and increasing complexity will make its tools more valuable to customers. Additionally, the companys product enables complete transparency, which could help it compete with other insurance carriers, healthcare.gov and third-party aggregators/call centers.

In addition to opportunities for further membership growth, we believe eHealth is positioned to drive further improvement in per-member economics, including increased lifetime value through better retention, reduced marketing costs through increased use of direct marketing channels vs. third-party lead generation, and lower customer care costs through increased usage of online enrollment vs. its traditional call center approach, Morgan stated.

Even though EHTH has to predict the life time value (LTV) of its commission revenue streams earned from Medicare Advantage and other carriers, Morgan calls its expectations conservative. To this end, the analyst tells investors he remains optimistic, maintaining an Outperform call and $166 price target. This target brings the upside potential to 44%. (To watch Morgans track record, click here)

Similarly, other analysts have high hopes when it comes to EHTHs long-term growth prospects. With 100% Street support, or 8 Buy ratings to be exact, the message is clear: EHTH is a Strong Buy. Should the $177.13 average price target be met, shares could be in for a 47% twelve-month gain. (See eHealth stock analysis on TipRanks)

To find good ideas for stocks trading at attractive valuations, visit TipRanks Best Stocks to Buy, a newly launched tool that unites all of TipRanks equity insights.
04/15/2020

Photo (c) RichLegg - Getty Images Due to the impact of the novel coronavirus, some U.S. education institutions may not re-open for in-person classes until 2021.

In an online statement, Boston University (BU) said its already cancelled all in-person summer activities on its main campus and is considering the possibility of extending its remote learning strategies.

"The Recovery Plan recognizes that if, in the unlikely event that public health officials deem it unsafe to open in the fall of 2020, then the University's contingency plan envisions the need to consider a later in-person return, perhaps in January 2021," the school said.

However, Jean Morrison, the provost and chief academic officer at BU, told NBC10 Boston said the university is focusing our planning on a fall return to campus.

Facing uncertainty

Harvards President, Lawrence S. Bacow, said in an interview last week that the school is considering "lots of different scenarios" for the fall semester. Decisions are currently up in the air due to the unknowns of the coronavirus.

Universities including Oregon State and the University of Arizona are also hoping to welcome students back for in-person classes in the fall, but uncertainty remains.

"Only the novel coronavirus will determine what happens, Oregon State University spokesman Steve Clark told The Oregonian. We can hope for a full return in fall 2020, but hope is not a strategy. So that is why we are going to prepare as best we can for every possible contingency."

A University of Arizona spokesperson said recently that the school is cautiously optimistic that it will be able to resume business as usual in the fall.

"We are cautiously optimistic that the fall semester will be able to launch with the normal face-to-face campus experience, but of course we will prioritize the health and well-being of our community in making that decision," the spokesperson told the Arizona Daily Star.
FMCG major Procter & Gamble (P&G) on Wednesday said it will donate face masks and hand sanitisers to the government and relief organisations to support the fight against the coronavirus pandemic in India.

The company is planning to donate 1.5 million masks to the government and relief organisations, it said in a statement.

P&G has already started production of hand sanitisers at its Roorkee facility and will soon start manufacturing 3-ply face masks in Hyderabad, the firm said in the statement.

The company added that these initiatives are part of its response programme 'P&G Suraksha India'.

P&G Indian Subcontinent MD & CEO Madhusudan Gopalan said, "Under the programme, we are stepping up to support the government and those who are on the front line in India's fight against COVID-19."



Gopalan said that the company has started production of hand sanitisers and will begin the production of masks soon, using it to ensure people can continue operating safely and will share it with those who are on the front line.

"To start with, we will donate 1.5 million masks to the government and relief organisations to combat the spread of this pandemic," he added.

Under P&G Suraksha India, the company is extending its support to the broader community through in-kind, product and critical supplies to aid frontline and essential workers who are working to combat the spread of coronavirus.

It is also leveraging its advertising and brand voice on traditional and social media to increase awareness on safety and hygiene measures among consumers.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Get ready for multiplatinum country superstar Luke Bryan like youve never seen him before. The six-time CMT Artist of the Year, 2019 ACM Album of the Decade Award winner and American Idol judge performed an intimate show, direct from his home, on Thursday, April 16. His performance will be archived and available on demand here for one week.

Luke Bryan is the latest headliner for Pay It Forward Live, Verizons weekly streaming concert series to support small businesses affected by COVID-19. The exclusive shows kicked off last month with Dave Matthews, and have continued in recent weeks with Alicia Keys and OneRepublic frontman Ryan Tedder.

Over the course of Pay It Forward Live, viewers are encouraged to tag their favorite local businesses and do what they can to support them  shop online, make a purchase in advance for when the crisis is over and the businesses reopen, or order a meal. Verizon will also donate $10 to support small businesses, up to $2.5 million, each time the hashtag #PayItForwardLive is used.

More information can be found at Verizon.com/PayItForwardLive.

Verizon is the parent company of Yahoo.

For the latest coronavirus news and updates, follow along at https://news.yahoo.com/coronavirus. 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.
The Kintampo Campus of the Martin Luther King Nursing Training College has donated quantities of Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) to the Kintampo North Municipal Assembly to support the fight against the COVID-19.



These include 1,000 pieces of nose masks, packs of tissue paper and theatre gowns meant for distribution to frontline health workers, police personnel and journalists in the Municipality and the Kintampo South District.



Mr Ishaq Alhassan, the Principal of the School, pledged to place its equipment and facilities at the disposal of the frontline healthcare providers as well as offer voluntary services to the public by its staff and student nurses.



He called on all to heed to the advice by the experts to prevent contracting the disease, for instance through frequent handwashing with soap under running water, social distancing and observing respiratory hygiene.



He urged the public to avoid behaviours likely to spread the disease to ensure the country won the battle sooner than later.



Mr Michael Sarkodie, the Kintampo North Municipal Chief Executive, thanked the School for the support and asked the people to cooperate with the Government in its efforts at stopping the spread of the virus.

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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As the coronavirus wreaks havoc on economies and populations around the globe, the chaos also presents a unique opportunity for disinformation efforts.

According to a new report from social analytics company Graphika, which tracks online disinformation, Iran's propaganda operations have turned to promote the country's causes through the lens of the coronavirus in recent weeks. Since February, a group known as the International Union of Virtual Media (IUVM) has seeded memes, articles and videos promoting Iranian and Chinese interests and accusing the U.S. of creating the virus as a biological weapon. The IUVM efforts also blamed U.S. sanctions for worsening Iran's situation and praised Iranian leaders for their response to the pandemic.

Image via Graphika

Through mid-February, accounts linked to the IUVM were preoccupied with the U.S. assassination of Qasem Soleimani, but they turned their attention to the coronavirus around the time that Iran reported its first COVID-19 deaths. An article in late February with the headline "Is coronavirus an American creation?" accused the U.S. of bioterrorism and claimed that "America is the biggest beneficiary to creating a virus that will paralyze China and pose internal challenges to a power that poses a threat to the White House in the economic sphere."

A series of editorial cartoons also pushed the message that the U.S. was to blame for the pandemic, depicting President Trump as a the virus itself. As Iran began to recover from its worse wave of coronavirus cases, the message shifted to praising the country's response to the virus and highlighting the failures of the Trump administration as the virus spread quickly through the U.S.

Image via Graphika

While the IUVM generally focuses its efforts on creating website content, it also promotes pro-Iran propaganda through social platforms. The propaganda group has struggled to keep a foothold on social media as platforms grow more savvy to disinformation threats, but the IUVM renewed its efforts with a handful of new accounts across Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and Twitter promoting pro-Iran coronavirus content. Those accounts, which had fewer than 5,000 combined followers, were taken down by April.

Story continues

The IUVM can be expected to continue this kind of operation in the future, but Graphika notes that "its amplification network has been significantly disrupted by a series of takedowns over the years," particularly on Facebook and Twitter.

"The IUVM operation is significant and manned by a well-resourced and persistent actor, but its effectiveness should not be overstated," Graphika's researchers said in the new report.
Dubai, April 15 : The Indian Consulate in Dubai has warned expats against fake circulars regarding repatriation.

The circular asks stranded expats - visit visa holders, elders and jobless - to send their personal details to the missions, reports Khaleej Times.

"It has come to our notice that a message is being circulated on social media asking Indians stranded in the UAE to send their personal particulars to various email IDs of the Indian Embassy. Please note no such message has been sent by the embassy," the mission clarified on Tuesday.

India on Tuesday extended the lockdown due to the Covid-19 pandemic till May 3. On Monday, the Supreme Court of India had ruled that stranded expats cannot be flown back home till travel restrictions are in place.

The Covid-19 impact leading to job losses and salary cuts has put pressure on expats. And the embassy is now offering a tele-counselling service, which has already been availed of by 500 expats.

Indian Ambassador to the UAE Pavan Kapoor said distressed expats who wish to seek the service can write to ca.abudhabi@mea.gov.in There is a team of doctors who are helping the mission in this regard.

"Expats who need medical and psychological counselling service can email to the embassy. Once we have the mobile number of the person, our team of doctors call them and address their issue," an official from the embassy said.
Finance Ministry on Monday held a review meeting with the heads of public sector banks, and instructed them to extend all possible help to all sectors of the economy within prudential guidelines to tide over the crisis following Covid-19 outbreak and consequent lockdown.

The review meeting - held via video conference - reviewed banks functioning during the lockdown and also took stock of liquidity situation, sources said.

The ministry asked the banks to devise strategy for the post lockdown period and readiness for meeting the future challenges.

The two-hour long meeting took stock of disbursement of financial assistance through direct benefit transfer (DBT) under the Pradhan Mantri Garib Kalyan Yojana to help poor and daily wagers to sustain during the lockdown triggered by outbreak of Covid-19 pandemic.

As part of the 1.70 lakh crore relief package, the government announced cash doles to women, poor senior citizens and farmers to mitigate the hardships faced due to the lockdown.

According to the sources, it was reiterated that banks should ensure cash availability to meet the demands of customers.

The meeting also deliberated on the deterioration of asset quality due to extended lockdown, the sources said, adding bankers were of the view that there were risks of rising defaults but difficult to make assessment till the system stabilises.

Currently, the Reserve Bank of India has allowed a three months mortarium for all kinds of term loan, including retail and crop loans as well as working capital payments.

After the moratorium is over, banks will be in position to assess the stress in the system due to coronavirus outbreak.

Indian Banks Association (IBA) plans to request the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) for extension of moratorium period beyond three months.

Last week, SBI Chairman Rajnish Kumar had said banks through IBA will request for raising the loan moratorium period from the existing three months to may be 5-6 months depending on evolving situation.

For revival of the economy, sources said, banks have been asked to prepare a roadmap.

Banks pitched for government guarantees against their loans to certain risk prone sectors in order to revive flow of credit in the economy post lockdown.

In the current circumstances, this (government guarantee) would be the best way and this is what we have been telling the government. The risk capital comes from the government, liquidity comes from the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) and the intermediation is done by the public sector banks. So that is a workable model because the risk appetite of banks is limited.

I believe there are various suggestions and the government has appointed empowered groups. All this information will be gathered, analysed and then we can expect some package and an exit plan from the lockdown, Kumar had said.

Last month, the Prime Ministers office (PMO) constituted 11 empowered groups including on economy and welfare.

The group headed by Economic Affairs Secretary Atanu Chakraborty is not only looking at the pain points of the economy but also the distress and misery being faced by a large section of the society who have been rendered jobless due to the outbreak.

Besides Chakraborty, the other members of the panel are Expenditure Secretary T V Somnathan, Labour Secretary Hiralal Samariya, Rural Development Secretary Rajesh Bhushan, Department of Financial Services Additional Secretary Pankaj Jain, Joint Secretary in Prime Ministers Office Arvind Shrivastava and Deputy Secretary in the Cabinet Secretariat Amrapali Kata. The panel is also looking at the rural distress. PTI DP BAL
KAMPALA  President Yoweri Museveni is set to hold discussions with top officials from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs on the possibility of Ugandans trapped in China, who are said to be facing Xenophobic.

The Ministry of Foreign Affairs, through its Twitter handle noted that, President Kaguta Museveni is open to the possibility of airlifting some of the Ugandans who are stuck abroad affected by the lock down put in place in some countries to fight this #COVID19 pandemic. He will have a discussion with Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

The move by government is preemptive of Kyadondo East MP, Robert Kyagulanyis plan to team up with the co-founder of Atlanta Black Star, Neil Nelson, to help airlift Africans and African Americans being subjected to inhumane treatment in China, a plan that was announced through a joint statement on Monday.

According to the statement, the duo is currently working together to facilitate a humanitarian mission to airlift those Africans and African-Americans who are affected by these attacks to a country in Africa that is willing to receive them, read the press release. We are also prepared to evacuate them to the United States for those holding U.S. citizenship or permanent resident status.

Kyagulanyi and Nelson also appealed to the Chinese government and other global African leaders to take urgent action to protect Africans abroad.

After Kyagulanyi unveiled his plan, Sam K. Kutesa, Minister of Foreign Affairs moved swiftly on Tuesday,held a press briefing at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and informed the Press about the efforts Government of Uganda has been making in conjunction with the Government of the Peoples Republic of Chinas to address the plight of Ugandans caught up in China following the drastic measures taken to mitigate the COVID -19 scourge.

Kutesa said that in response, there were plans to provide accommodation for Ugandans and other Africans who have overstayed their visas and have no place of residence; provide assistance to any of the Ugandans who have been quarantined in hotel facilities and cannot afford the cost; as well as ensure that there are no more targeted evictions and revocations on legal rental contracts by landlords.

Government also vowed to ensure that there is no discrimination in access to services such as hospitals, markets, public transport, restaurants etc. Where this has happened, it will be condemned.

Kutesa however earlier refuted possibility of evacuating the Ugandans trapped in China arguing that owing to the on going lockdown in almost the entire world, closure of borders and suspension of regional and international air travel, it is not possible for these Ugandans to return home at the moment.

The position of Government, therefore, is that these Ugandans should stay put in their respective locations and strictly adhere to the health and administrative measures instituted by the Government there. The Government of Uganda is in discussions with various Foreign Governments in order to find ways to assist these Ugandan nationals in their respective locations until such a time that travel restrictions shall be lifted and the Ugandans can return home, said Kutesa.

last week, Kampala Central MP, Muhammad Nsereko asked Government to urgently evacuate Ugandans stranded in China after reports emerged that theyre suffering xenophobic attacks in China and other Arab countries such as United Arab Emirates (UAE) after local residents in those countries descended on Africans, demanding they return to their mother countries, blaming them for the spread of COVID-19 pandemic.

Reports from China indicate that blacks are being evicted and forced to sleep on the streets and denied use of public transport after the host countries got overwhelmed with feeding and accommodating them yet they are no longer working due to the global shut down.

Related
As the number of COVID-19 recoveries rises, hospitals are calling on survivors to donate blood plasma. The Philippine General Hospital earlier said blood of people who have recovered from the disease is rich in antibodies that could fight the infection. Senator Sonny Angara who is already cleared of the virus donated his blood to a patient in Quezon City.
In a welcome move, French IT major Capgemini has announced that it has given single-digit salary hike to 70 percent of its employees in India, effective April 1, 2020. The tech firm has 1.2 lakh employees in India, of which 84,000 employees will be benefitted by this decision.

The rest of the employees of Capgemini India will get their increments in July, reported the Times of India. The decision has been praised widely, especially since several companies have cut the salaries of their employees or sacked their staff to deal with the COVID-19 crisis that has brought economic activity to a standstill.

For live updates on coronavirus, click here

Notably, the IT company will also be providing cash allowance of up to Rs 10,000 to employees who have got stranded due to the nationwide lockdown to curb the spread of the novel coronavirus and do not have a paying-guest accommodation either. These decisions were taken by the company at a meeting held in mid-March before the lockdown had been announced.

Coronavirus pandemic | Mental illness cases rise in India after COVID-19 outbreak: Study

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

Besides, employees are being retained on the bench (employees who are currently not working on any project) and their salaries are being paid without setting any timeline either. Moreover, the company has extended its shift allowance to those working from home also, which includes 95 percent of its workforce. The promotions due in April would be announced in June and be effective from July 1.

Coronavirus impact | Lockdown to hit state govt's finances worse than Centre

Ashwin Yardi, CEO of Capgemini India, has also assured that all employees will receive their full salaries regardless of their bench time.

He added: This is a black swan event and at this point, its not a question of timeline, but how our business will evolve. And we have a clear view as to what our economic model is going to look like and we dont see any reason to discontinue this approach.

Yardi further assured that there has been no discussion within the Capgemini India leadership to introduce pay cuts either.
And with a newborn, when you may be on parental leave and earning a reduced income (or no income at all), keeping a hawks eye on your spending in the weeks and months youre away from your job will help you avoid credit card debt or depleting your savings.

We needed a plan. The immediate goal was to get a handle on our expenses when our brains were especially sleep-deprived. Beyond that, though, I wanted us to become more conscious of the million places our paychecks were going, and to see if, through some slight nudges, we could put those dollars toward a goal we actually cared about.

Establishing a financial baseline

Given my chosen profession (i.e., writing about money all day), my ever-practical wife told me to give her a concrete number: How many dollars can we spend and how many can we save in a month without going into debt?

She was onto something. When figuring out which spouse does what with the family finances, it turns out that youre better off sticking to a role that actually brings you satisfaction rather than splitting the tasks evenly, according to Kristy Archuleta, a University of Georgia associate professor of financial planning, housing and consumer economics. One of you is probably more naturally fiscally oriented than the other.

But assigning roles is just the beginning. You still need to be on the same page. The caveat to this is that both partners need to know what is going on financially, Archuleta said.
Saudi Arabia has doubled its use of the death penalty since King Salman bin Abdulaziz came to the throne five years ago, according to human rights organisation Reprieve.

800 people have been executed in the kingdom since Salman ascended to the throne in January 23, 2015, following the death of King Abdullah.

The most recent execution was that of Abdulmohsin Humood Abdullah al-Ghamdi, who was beheaded yesterday for murder, a report by Reprieve said.

From 2009-14, there were 423 executions in Saudi Arabia.

Saudi Arabia has doubled its use of the death penalty since King Salman came to the throne five years ago

That figure has doubled in just over five years under King Salman. In 2019, Saudi Arabia executed 186 people, 37 of whom were killed in one mass execution on April 23. Six of them were men who were juveniles at the time of their alleged offenses.

Two of those killed were teenagers Abdulkareem al-Hawaj and Mujtaba al-Sweikat, who were just 16 and 17 at the time of their arrests.

Al-Hawaj was arrested for attending an anti-government protest when he was 16 and was convicted of being a 'terrorist'.

Al-Sweikat was also arrested for attending an anti-government protest and was tortured into confessing to 'crimes against the state', according to human rights charities.

The report claimed that al-Sweikat was held in pre-trial detention without charge for three years, and was subjected to torture by al-Mabahith officers including beatings, foot whipping, and cigarette burns.

Two of those killed were teenagers Abdulkareem al-Hawaj (left) and Mujtaba al-Sweikat (right), who were just 16 and 17 at the time of their arrests

At least 58 of those killed in 2019 were foreign nationals that were accused of spreading Shia Islam - which is a crime in the Sunni arab state.

Others were killed last year for participating in or inciting political demonstrations.

According to Reprieve, which advocates against the death penalty across the globe, the rise in executions is partly due to the number of people accused of politically motivated crimes under King Salman.

13 juvenile defendants remain on death row in the Kingdom. Ali al-Nimr, Dawood al-Marhoon and Abdullah al-Zaher are at imminent risk of execution, according to Reprieve.

Director of Reprieve, Maya Foa, said: 'For all the rhetoric of reform and modernisation, Saudi Arabia is still a country where speaking out against the King can get you killed.

'In the run-up to the G20 summit in Riyadh in November, the Kingdom's western partners must demand an end to the execution of children and political opponents, otherwise they risk tacitly endorsing these flagrant violations of international law.'
Trains for HCM Citys first metro line, which runs between Ben Thanh Market in District 1 and Suoi Tien Theme Park in District 9, are undergoing final technical inspection in Japan, according to the HCM City Management Authority for Urban Railways.

HCM Citys first metro line trains are undergoing final technical inspection in Japan before being brought to Vietnam.  Photo courtesy of HCM City Management Authority for Urban Railways

The testing phase is expected to be completed in the next few months, and the first trains will be delivered to Vietnam by the second quarter of the year, according to Hitachi, the maker of the trains.

Each train features three cars, with a total length of 61.5 metres. They can travel at a maximum speed of 110km per hour above ground and 80km per hour underground.

Each train can carry up to 930 passengers with room for 147 seats and 783 people standing.

The train will be extended to carry six cars in the future when demand increases.

The underground infrastructure is now in place in District 1, and work is being done to complete installation of the rail systems, electrical and mechanical equipment, and signals.

When the metro trains arrive in Vietnam, the HCM City Management Authority for Urban Railways will run technical inspections in the upper metro section from Binh Thai to Long Binh depot until the end of this year.

As of February, the completion rate of the entire first metro line had reached 71 per cent. The line is expected to reach 85 per cent of its workload by the end of this year.

Speaking at a recent meeting, Nguyen Thanh Phong, chairman of the city Peoples Committee, said that construction on the line would be sped up this year so it could open by the end of 2021.

HCM City Urban Railway Company Ltd No 1, the operator of the line, is making preparations, and its staff have been sent to Japan to take part in training courses on management and operation.

The operator said that it was offering training for 58 drivers of trains.

Nearly 700 people for management, operation and maintenance positions are needed for the line.

The line is the first of the citys eight proposed routes. It comprises four main packages and is funded in part through an official development assistance loan from the Japan International Cooperation Agency.

Since construction began in 2012, it has faced many problems, including slow fund disbursement and a personnel crisis.

The line, which is nearly 19.7km long with total investment of VND46.3 trillion (US$1.97 billion), has 14 stations (11 elevated stations and three underground stations) through districts 1, 2, 9, Binh Thanh and Thu Duc and neighbouring Binh Duong Province.

Construction on the second metro line between Ben Thanh Market in District 1 and Tham Luong in District 12 is expected to start soon next year and have a trial run and then open in 2026.

The second metro lines adjusted total capital is about VND47.9 trillion ($2 billion).  VNS

HCMC: First metro line will have trial run in third quarter HCM City plans to launch a trial run of the first metro line section between Binh Thai intersection and Long Binh Depot in District 9 in the third quarter.
A 34-year-old assistant police inspector posted with the special branch of Mumbai Police and another officer residing at Byculla police quarters was tested positive for Covid-19 on Tuesday.

The officer who stayed at the RAK Marg police officers quarters along with two police sub-inspectors has been admitted to Seven Hills hospitals.

After the officer tested positive both the sub-inspectors have been sent to quarantine and one floor of the officers quarters at RAK Marg was sealed. All necessary precautions are being taken to check persons who enter or leave the building, said a police officer.

Contact tracing has been done to find out who all were in touch with the officer and precautionary actions have been initiated, added the officer. Saurabh Tripathi, deputy commissioner of police, Zone 4 said, The police station is working and we have taken all safety measures.

Special branch officers are responsible for gathering intelligence.

Any policemen coming from the job or any common man approaching the police station is first checked for temperature, then sanitised. However, families residing in the quarters are not allowed to move and we have requested them to stay in, said a police officer, requesting anonymity.

Meanwhile, Byculla police quarters was declared as containment zone after a police officer was tested positive.

All the police officers who reside in the building are informed to stay at home, said a police officer.
I TVs Quiz has returned one of the biggest scandals in the history of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? to the publics memory - but a much more expensive saga came many years later.

The three-part drama covers all the twists and turns which took place after Charles Ingram was accused of cheating his way to the 1 million jackpot, with the help of his wife Diana and an accomplice.

The bizarre true-life tale unfolded in September 2001, putting the much-loved show in the spotlight. And nine years later, it hit headlines again.

In 2010, a legal battle that had started in 2004 culminated in Disney being ordered to pay $269 million (the equivalent of 178m at the time) in damages to the show's creators, British production company Celador.

ITV's Quiz featuring Michael Sheen (2020) - In pictures 1 /26 ITV's Quiz featuring Michael Sheen (2020) - In pictures ITV / Left Bank Pictures Michael Sheen as Christ Tarrant ITV/Left Bank Pictures ITV/Left Bank Pictures ITV/Left Bank Pictures James Graham as Major Charles Ingram celebrating winning the million pounds ITV/Left Bank Pictures ITV/Left Bank Pictures ITV/Left Bank Pictures ITV/Left Bank Pictures ITV/Left Bank Pictures  LEFT BANK PICTURES (Television) Ltd All rights reserved

Celador claimed Disneys ABC network had cheated them out of the 50 percent share of profits it was entitled to from the American version of the quiz show, the Guardian reported.

Disney appealed the ruling but lost, and in 2012, the US conglomerate was ordered to pay the damages plus interest - with the new total hitting a whopping US$319 million (198m at the time).

The jury had ruled Disney had breached its license agreement with Celador, which was forged in 1998, as per The Hollywood Reporter.

We are extremely disappointed with the decision, as ABC and Buena Vista Television continue to believe that they fully adhered to the Millionaire agreement," a Disney representative told THR at the time.

After the initial ruling and before Disneys appeal, Celador's founder, producer Paul Smith, told The Guardian that the lawsuit was a David against Goliath story.

"This is money to which we're entitled and Disney endeavoured to avoid paying it. I'm delighted we're going to get it," Smith said. "It's been debilitating and it's been very, very difficult at times.

The American version of Who Wants to be a Millionaire? premiered in 1999, and went on to become a huge hit for ABC. Various new versions of the show have been developed, with a new celebrity edition hosted by Jimmy Kimmel premiering this month.

Smith developed the Millionaire format with radio station director David Briggs and Celador writers Steven Knight (who went on to create Peaky Blinders) and Mike Whitehill. The UK show began in 1998 and became a huge success for ITV.

Celador also produced Danny Boyles Slumdog Millionaire, a fictional story about a winning contestant of Who Wants to be a Millionaire, along with Film4.
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Lee Hae-chan, chairman of the ruling Democratic Party of Korea, right, and Lee Nak-yon, who runs in Seoul's key constituency of Jongno, shake hands after exit polls predicted the party's victory. Yonhap



The ruling Democratic Party (DP) and its affiliated party are expected to secure more than a majority of parliamentary seats in Wednesday's general elections, exit polls showed.

The DP and the Platform Party, a satellite sister party that only targets proportional representation (PR) seats, are expected to win 155-178 seats in the 300-member National Assembly, according to the poll by South Korea's public broadcaster KBS.

The main opposition United Future Party (UFP) and its affiliated Future Korea Party are likely to win 107-130 seats.

Another poll by MBC showed the ruling bloc winning 153-170 seats against the UFP and its sister party's 116-133 slots. An SBS poll forecast the DP and the Platform Party winning 154-177 seats and their main rivals holding 107-131 seats.

South Korea held the quadrennial parliamentary elections earlier in the day to fill the 300-seat unicameral National Assembly -- with 253 directly contested seats and 47 PR slots.

The elections, widely viewed as a referendum on liberal President Moon Jae-in, were conducted amid an unprecedented coronavirus pandemic.

The ruling party was widely expected to win the polls on the back of positive assessment of the government's handling of the COVID-19 crisis.

Former Prime Minister Lee Nak-yon of the DP is forecast to win 53 percent of the vote against Hwang Kyo-ahn, chief of the UFP, with 44.8 percent in the Jongno district in central Seoul, according to the exit polls.

A high-profile race has unfolded between Lee and Hwang in Jongno, a symbolic constituency in Korean politics, as they are viewed as potential presidential candidates. (Yonhap)
Poila Boishakh, the Bengali New Year is one such festival which is celebrated with much gusto by Bengalis all over the world. The festival has its own essence and significance, and Bengalis celebrate the beginning of the New Year with lot of fanfare.

The ongoing lock down may have hampered the Nobo borsho plans but not the celebratory spirits. Taking a cue from this, Star Jalsha has created a special campaign to celebrate this auspicious day. The viewers are in for a delightful treat as their favourite Jalsha stars share their most cherished memories and other heartwarming anecdotes around Poila Boisakh with the viewers, throughout the day. The campaign will witness a plethora of special video messages by Sreemoyee, Diti, Mohor, Arjo, Dinka, Chuni, Nirbhik, Amon, Iraboti and Kadambini.

Come celebrate the true essence of Bangaliana with the Star Jalsha family on 14th April.
Summer classes at Connecticuts community colleges will be offered online only until at least Aug. 1 as COVID-19 cases continue to increase daily in the state.

Connecticut State Colleges and Universities President Mark Ojakian announced the news Wednesday, adding that there will be some exceptions.

Exceptions will be made for some on-ground courses for students about to enter to workforce and in need of critical programs  such as CNA, paramedics, nursing, medical assisting, phlebotomy, respiratory care, radiology technologists, advanced manufacturing and electro-mechanical courses.

These courses are set to begin as early as July 20.

All other on-ground or skills-based courses should be scheduled for the hands-on or lab components after Aug. 1, including hands-on lab courses not completed in the spring.

The lecture portion of the course can be scheduled online before Aug. 1 as long as the hands-on piece doesnt happen until after Aug. 1.

Ojakian said if the pandemic prevents the colleges from opening by Aug. 1, we are exploring options for the hands-on portion to be offered in condensed sessions at the start of the fall semester.

The number of students in those lab classrooms might be limited by social distancing guidelines, Ojakian said, adding that it might require the colleges to offer multiple lab sections with a small number of students.

This was a difficult decision, and please know that it was not taken lightly, Ojakian said.
SAGINAW, MI  Prosecutors have issued murder charges against a man in the case of a mother and her daughter found slain in their Saginaw home a month ago.

The Saginaw County Prosecutors Office on Tuesday, April 14, issued the following 12 charges against a 55-year-old man:

 Two counts of open murder

 Two counts of assault with intent to murder

 Six counts of felony firearm

 One count of carrying a dangerous weapon with unlawful intent

 One count of felon in possession of a firearm

Prosecutors said Wednesday morning that the suspect is in jail in Chicago and police were headed there to bring him back to Saginaw County.

Police learned on March 19 that the suspect was in custody in Chicago on an outstanding Saginaw County drug-charge warrant and prosecutors thereafter worked on the extradition process.

The mans name is being withheld pending his arraignment in Saginaw County District Court.

The murder charges stem from the March 14 fatal shootings of Hortense Williams, 72, and her 48-year-old daughter Teresa Allen.

Shortly before 9 p.m. on March 14, police responded to the shooting in the 4100 block of Gallagher Street on the citys East Side. In addition to Williams and Allen, a third woman and a man also suffered gunshot wounds.

First responders pronounced Williams and Allen deceased at the scene. The other two wounded individuals were taken to an area hospital for treatment.

Williams, nicknamed Aunt Sister, hailed from Brooklyn, where she met her husband. The couple later moved to Saginaw and had four children.

She loved when her family and friends would gather and fellowship with one another, Williams obituary reads. She enjoyed cooking and watching everyone enjoy her meals. Sister liked to double dutch and was one of the best to ever do it.

Allen graduated from Saginaw High School in 1990, after which she attended Michigan State University.

Teresa loved spending time with all her family and friends, especially her grandkids, her obituary states. Playing softball, cooking, and helping others was what she did to enjoy life. She always had a smile and was a joy to be around. Teresas beautiful smile and sweet spirit will truly be missed.

Both women are survived by their husbands, several children, grandchildren, and extended family members.

Police and prosecutors declined to provide their theory on what prompted the killings or what the suspects connection is to the victims. Prosecutors did say, however, that the suspect is not related to Williams or Allen.

Related:

No arrests yet in Saginaw quadruple shooting that left 2 dead

2 women killed in Saginaw shooting, 2 other people injured
Trump said on Tuesday, "The WHO pushed China's misinformation about the virus, saying it was not communicable and there was no need for travel bans" and its "reliance on China's disclosures likely caused a 20-fold increase in cases worldwide."

He did not say that the US would pull out of the organisation but only that funding would be on temporary hold "while a review is conducted to assess the World Health Organization's role in severely mismanaging and covering up the spread of the coronavirus."

"Our countries are now experiencing -- you look all over the world -- tremendous death and economic devastation because those tasked with protecting us by being truthful and transparent failed to do so," he said.

The US pays 22 per cent of WHO's annual assessments of $2.47 billion from members.

Its dues for the current year is $580 million and it has arrears of $413 million from previous years, according to WHO.

Even before Trump announced the halt to funding, United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said it is "not the time to reduce the resources for the operations of the World Health Organisation or any other humanitarian organization in the fight against the virus."

Support for WHO "is absolutely critical to the world's efforts to win the war against COVID-19," he said.

The Senate Homeland Security Committee is also planning an investigation of the WHO's role in the coronavirus pandemic and the origins of the virus, according to the panel's Chairman Ron Johnson. He told Politico that the probe would also look into the lack of preparation for the crisis and the dependence on foreign manufacturers for essential medical equipment.

Trump, who has made his January 31 decision to bar visitors from China as an important plank of his defence against allegations that he did not act soon enough, said that WHO had "fought" the travel ban.

He was also attacked by Democrat leader Joe Biden, who is the party's likely presidential candidate, for imposing travel restrictions.

Trump also criticised WHO's inaction on the silencing and punishment of Chinese doctors and scientists who first set off alarm bells about the virus.

WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus has been crticised for his role in handling the pandemic.

Asked at his briefing if he would resume support for the organisation if Tedros was replaced, Trump said, "I don't know the gentleman, but I know there have been problems."

China has an outsize influence over international organisations because it has been able to mobilise support among developing countries, especially the smaller ones, through aid programmes that lack transparency and have implicit or direct conditions.

Trump, who has made his decision to bar visitors from China on January 31 an important plank of his defence against allegations that he did not take preventive measures soon enough, again criticised WHO saying it had "fought" the travel ban.

The travel ban was also attacked by Democrat leader Joe Biden, the likely party candidate for president.

Trump also criticised the WHO for not defending the Chinese doctors and researchers who first set off alarms about the virus but were silenced or punished by the government.

The pandemic has increased Beijing's influence because it has a stranglehold on medical equipment and supplies needed by countries around the world and is profiting from the consequences of a virus that originated there.

The US has been running an "airbridge" of jets ferrying essential medical supplies and this, along with donations by Chinese philanthropists, obfuscates China's role in the pandemic.

New York has received donations of ventilators from Chinese e-commerce entrepreneurs Jack Ma and Joe Tsa and Democratic governors Andrew Cuomo of New York and Phil Murphy of New Jersey have publicly thanked China for its help.

Trump has also had to be diplomatic in dealing with China because of the dependence on it to face the pandemic.

He has often praised China's President Xi Jinping and even initially said that China was cooperating in stemming the pandemic before it blew up into a global problem.

Trump has questioned the US dependence on China, built over decades of Democratic and Republican administrations and has faced criticism for trying to reverse it through trade wars and "Buy American" campaign but the pandemic has brought home the dangers.

His trade adviser, Peter Navarro, recently said, "We are dangerously over-dependent on a global supply chain. Never again should we rely on the rest of the world for our essential medicines and countermeasures."

(Arul Louis can be contacted at arul.l@ians.in and followed on Twitter @arulouis)

--IANS

al/prs
All deputy secretaries and above level officers were on Wednesday asked to join offices by the central government, nearly three weeks after they began working from home due to the lockdown imposed to check the spread of coronavirus, according to an official communique.

All joint secretaries and above level officers had joined respective central government departments from Monday.

"Remaining officers and staff to attend up to 33 per cent as per requirement," according to the guidelines for the lockdown issued by the Home Ministry.

All the ministries and departments, and offices under their control are to function with 100 per cent attendance of Deputy Secretary and levels above that, it said.

Besides, defence, central armed police forces, health and family welfare, disaster management and early warning agencies, national informatics centre, food corporation of India, NCC, Nehru yuva kendras and customs to function without any restrictions, the guidelines said.

With respect to offices of the state and union territories, the Home Ministry said district administrations and treasury (including field offices of the accountant general) will function with restricted staff.

"However, delivery of public services shall be ensured, and necessary staff will be deployed for such states," it said.

All other departments of state and UT governments will work with restricted staff, it added.

"Group A and B officers may attend as required. Group C and levels below that may attend up to 33 per cent of strength, as per requirement to ensure social distancing," the guidelines issued by the ministry said.

Police, home guards, civil defence, fire and emergency services, disaster management, prisons and municipal services will function without any restrictions, it said.

"Resident Commissioner of states/UTs, in New Delhi, (will remain open) only to the extent of coordinating COVID-19 related activities and internal kitchen operations," the ministry said.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
ALBUQUERQUE, N.M., April 14, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- PNM Resources, Inc. (NYSE:PNM) (the "Company") today announced that the Company's Annual Meeting of Shareholders (the "Annual Meeting") will be held in a virtual meeting format only, on the previously announced date and time of Tuesday, May 12, 2020 at 9:00 a.m. Mountain Daylight Time.

In response to the public health impact of the ongoing coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic, and in accordance with the Order 2020 - 024 issued by the Governor of the State of New Mexico (the "Order") and to limit public gatherings and support the health and well-being of the Company's shareholders, the Annual Meeting will now be held solely by remote communication in a virtual meeting format only, and will not be held at a physical location. Specifically, the Order permits New Mexico corporations the ability to conduct annual meetings of shareholders solely by means of a remote communication. Shareholders may not attend the Annual Meeting in person.

As described in the proxy materials for the Annual Meeting previously distributed, only shareholders of record at the close of business on March 23, 2020 are entitled to participate in the Annual Meeting. Shareholders will be admitted to the virtual Annual Meeting at https://www.virtualshareholdermeeting.com/PNM2020 by entering the 16-digit control number found on their proxy card, voting instruction form or notice. Shareholders will have the opportunity to vote their shares during the Annual Meeting by following the instructions available on the meeting website during the meeting. Shareholders will also be provided an opportunity to ask questions of the Board of Directors and management at the Annual Meeting. Shareholders encountering any difficulties accessing the virtual meeting during the check-in or meeting time should call the technical support number that will be posted on the Virtual Shareholder Meeting log in page.

The Company encourages eligible shareholders to vote on the proposals prior to the Annual Meeting using the instructions provided in the Proxy Statement previously distributed. The proxy card included with the proxy materials previously distributed may continue to be used to vote shares in connection with the Annual Meeting.

The Company has also filed additional proxy materials with the Securities and Exchange Commission for a Notice to Change the Location of the meeting.

Background:

PNM Resources (NYSE: PNM) is an energy holding company based in Albuquerque, N.M., with 2019 consolidated operating revenues of $1.5 billion. Through its regulated utilities, PNM and TNMP, PNM Resources has approximately 2,761 megawatts of generation capacity and provides electricity to approximately 789,000 homes and businesses in New Mexico and Texas. For more information, visit the company's website at www.PNMResources.com.

CONTACTS:

Analysts Media

Lisa Goodman Ray Sandoval

(505) 241-2160 (505) 241-2782

SOURCE PNM Resources, Inc.

Related Links

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The Minister of Humanitarian Affairs, Disaster Management and Social Development, Sadiya Farouq, says the relief items being given by the federal governments as palliative over the coronavirus-induced lockdown would reach only 25 per cent of Nigerians.

The minister said this while addressing State House correspondents in Abuja on Wednesday.

She also said state governments would now handle the distribution of the items to beneficiaries in their domains.

It cannot go round everywhere but we are starting from somewhere. 25 percent of, lets say the location of Lagos State, for example, is what is going to benefit from this intervention that we are doing. Going forward, we might expand it but this is what is obtainable for now, she explained.

President Muhammadu Buhari in his second national address on Easter Monday said he was aware of the impact of the lockdown especially on those living on daily wages.

No country can afford the full impact of a sustained restriction of movement on its economy. I am fully aware of the great difficulties experienced especially by those who earn a daily wage such as traders, day workers, artisans and manual workers, he said.

He also announced that National Social Register (NSR), which the World Bank had assisted in compiling, would be expanded by one million households to 3.6 million, to accommodate more Nigerians considered to be the most affected in the ongoing lockdown in three states.

The NSR is a World Bank assisted project that helps in selecting and identifying vulnerable persons in a given community.

Many Nigerians have since taken to social media to demand accountability and transparency in the distribution of the palliative items.

The leadership of the National Assembly had also called for a total review of the process.

Similarly, state governors also urged the president to reform the process of the distribution of the palliatives.

Palliatives over to Governors

The minister said her ministry had begun the digitisation of the cash transfers and other programmes under the NSIP.

Ms Farouq said her ministry intends to hand over the distribution of food relief items to state governments, so as to address the challenges associated with the exercise in the past.

On the issue of palliatives in terms of food relief, going forward, we are going to hand over the food items to the states because issues have come up, as at yesterday (Monday),

Our people were mobbed, some of them were attacked in the course of carrying out this assignment so the general conclusion is that we give this food relief directly to the state governments for them to distribute to the beneficiaries, she added.

Urban Areas To Benefit More

Ms Farouq also said going forward, distribution of food items would majorly target poor persons living in urban communities.

According to her, the decision followed a presidential order.

You are aware that the President in his broadcast of Monday 13th April, directed that we expand the beneficiaries of the conditional cash transfer by one million and in this regard, we are going to focus more now on the urban poor.

These are people who depend on the informal sector to earn their livelihood; they are daily wage earners and these are the people that we are really going to focus more on as well as people living with disabilities.

More Resolutions

Ms Farouq also spoke on the efforts of the government to digitalise the channel of disbursing cash transfers palliatives.

According to her, the Ministry has adopted three options in selecting and distributing funds to the beneficiaries under the scheme.

READ ALSO:

Well, we have three options; one, we are going to use the national social register that we already have, two, we are also going to focus on the urban poor as I mentioned, by using their verified BVN accounts to get them, that is, people that have an account balance of N5, 000 and below.

We are also using the mobile networks, to know people that top up the credit units for their phones with maybe N100 or less. Those are also people that we consider to be poor and vulnerable.

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So, these are the three options that we are exploring and I am sure that by the time we get this data we will be able to give this intervention. Ms Farouq said.

EU Donation

Shedding more light on the N21 billion support given to Nigeria by the European Union to fight COVID-19, the minister said the donation is tied to medical equipment and provision of structures that will help Nigeria fight the deadly disease.

This donation is coming in kind, basically by way of medical equipment and also some structure to be put in place as a response to this COVID-19 pandemic.

In that intervention, there are also humanitarian issues that would be addressed. As you are aware, this is a health emergency but at the same time it is also a humanitarian emergency. So the Ministry is going to come in here because we are to coordinate all humanitarian interventions coming into the country by way of making sure that such interventions get to the poor and vulnerable in our society, she said.
NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian has urged more people to get tested for coronavirus as 16 new cases were reported.

"It's with a degree of caution that we welcome that low number of new cases," Ms Berejiklian said on Wednesday, noting only 1300 tests were conducted on Tuesday.

The Premier urged anyone with symptoms in areas where NSW Health had identified cluster outbreaks to get tested. Those areas include Penrith, the inner west, Liverpool, Randwick, Waverley, Woollahra, Blacktown, Cumberland, Westmead, Ryde, Manning and Lake Macquarie.

"Last week we peaked on a day at around 4500 tests in a day," Ms Berejiklian said.
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The Treasury Department on Tuesday announced that several airlines have agreed in principle to participate in a $25 billion payroll support program.

Alaska Airlines, Allegiant Air, American Airlines, Delta Air Lines, Frontier Airlines, Hawaiian Airlines, JetBlue Airways, United Airlines, SkyWest Airlines, and Southwest Airlines are all on board, The New York Times reports.

The program is part of the coronavirus relief package Congress passed in March, with the money used to pay employees. Under the agreement, the airlines will not be allowed to make pay cuts or any major staffing changes through September. The industry lobbying group Airlines for America said that as of April 9, U.S. airlines have grounded 2,200 planes and passenger volume is down 95 percent from this time in 2019.

It took several weeks for the airlines and Trump administration officials to agree to the bailout's terms, and last week, the Treasury Department announced airlines that receive up to $100 million in funds will not have to give the government equity stakes or other compensation, the Times reports.

In a statement, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said the agreement would "support American workers and help preserve the strategic importance of the airline industry while allowing for appropriate compensation to the taxpayers."

More stories from theweek.com

Why can't you go fishing during the pandemic?

Legal scholar who defended Trump during impeachment objects to his idea of adjourning Congress

China secretly prepared for a pandemic as tens of thousands of people dined together in Wuhan, AP reports


[April 15, 2020] CaliforniaChoice Adds Full-Network PPO Plans from Anthem Blue Cross

CaliforniaChoice announced today the addition of three new full-network PPO plans from Anthem Blue Cross. These plans offer access to the Anthem Blue Cross Prudent Buyer network of hospitals, doctors, and specialists. This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20200415005004/en/ Beginning with the July 1, 2020, effective date, CaliforniaChoice members have access to the new PPO plans in addition to plan options from Health Net, Kaiser Permanente, Oscar Health, Sharp (News - Alert) Health Plan, Sutter Health Plus, UnitedHealthcare, and Western Health Advantage. "At CaliforniaChoice, we celebrate the differences of each of our members," said Michael Payton, Senior Vice President of Sales, at CHOICE Administrators, the parent organization for CaliforniaChoice. "The new Anthem Blue Cross PPO plans - and access to the Prudent Buyer Network - are great additions to our portfolio. They help us provide membes with even more access to the health insurance they want and need, especially during these difficult times."



"We value our ongoing partnership with CaliforniaChoice," said Colin Havert, Vice President and General Manager of California small group business at Anthem Blue Cross. "By adding our full-network PPO to their program, we are able to offer Californians more options and access to other services through the Prudent Buyer full PPO." CaliforniaChoice offers employee benefits to small businesses with up to 100 employees. Employers determine how much they can contribute to employee health care and each employee uses those dollars toward the insurance they like best. Employees have the flexibility to make their decision on their individual or family needs from a selection of eight health plan options and dozens of HMO, PPO, HSA, and EPO plan options. Small business health insurance rates are fixed for one year.

About CHOICE Administrators CHOICE Administrators is the parent organization of the nation's largest multi-carrier, small group private health exchange, CaliforniaChoice, and America's first ancillary benefits exchange, ChoiceBuilder. Together, the two exchanges currently serve more than 450,000 members across the state. The CaliforniaChoice provider network includes more than 85,000 unique individual health care providers and 390+ unique hospitals. Small businesses looking for more information can visit www.mycalchoice.com. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20200415005004/en/

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WASHINGTON  Elizabeth Warren endorsed Joe Biden on Wednesday, the latest of the former vice presidents onetime White House rivals to back him as the Democratic Party moves to project unity against President Donald Trump going into the November election.

Joe Biden has spent nearly his entire life in public service. He knows that a government run with integrity, competence, and heart will save lives and save livelihoods, Warren said in a nearly four-minute video announcing her decision. And we cant afford to let Donald Trump continue to endanger the lives and livelihoods of every American.

The Massachusetts senator rose to brief front-runner status in the Democratic race last fall but suspended her campaign last month after a disappointing Super Tuesday that included a third-place finish her home state. Warren left the race without endorsing Biden or her fellow progressive Bernie Sanders  but the dynamics changed substantially in subsequent weeks, with campaigning forced into a hiatus amid the coronavirus outbreak.

Sanders dropped out last week and endorsed Biden within days, hoping to persuade his fervent progressive supporters to warm to the more centrist Biden. Former President Barack Obama followed suit on Tuesday. Warren's formal backing doesn't carry the political heft it might have if she had endorsed Biden over Sanders weeks ago. Nonetheless, her announcement now could fuel speculation that Biden may choose her as a running mate. Biden has said he soon will announce a committee to oversee his vice presidential search.

Warren made no mention of that possibility in announcing her endorsement video, instead saying Biden "grew up on the ragged edge of the middle class. That phrase that was a centerpiece of Warren's own campaign and referred to her own upbringing in Oklahoma.

Warren also referred to the pandemic more directly in a tweet. "In this moment of crisis, its more important than ever that the next president restores Americans faith in good, effective government  and Ive seen Joe Biden help our nation rebuild. Today, Im proud to endorse @JoeBiden as President of the United States, she said.

Some of Warren's allies note that, in the days before her endorsement, Biden embraced some of the senators plans to combat the coronavirus, including calls to cancel student debt and expand Social Security benefits during the crisis. He also has adopted a plan she promoted as a candidate to overhaul the nation's bankruptcy system.

In her video, Warren also referenced the pair's sometimes rocky relationship. They clashed in 2005, when Biden was a Delaware senator and Warren was a Harvard Law School professor and bankruptcy expert, during a congressional hearing over a bankruptcy bill. It was a scene that Biden, as vice president, recalled when he swore Warren into office eight years later.

Joe Biden was there at the very moment I became a Senator," Warren said. "And when he did, he said you gave me hell! And youre gonna do a great job.
Auckland Council has drawn up a list of 73 key infrastructure projects that it hopes will attract Government funding to stimulate the economy post Covid-19.

Two north Rodney transport projects are on the list, but have been relatively low priority. They are the Matakana link road and a regional seal extension programme.

Council submitted the projects to the Governments Infrastructure Industry Reference Group this week. The group is looking for shovel-ready infrastructure projects that can start quickly and reduce the economic impact of Covid-19.

The list is made up of two parts  30 key projects ranked in order of priority and a further 43 projects that are not ranked, but that also meet the Government criteria. Neither the Matakana link road nor the seal extension programme made the top 30.

Councils top three priority projects were the City Rail Link (CRL), a downtown infrastructure development programme and a Marae upgrade programme (see list attached).

The Government will now decide which projects it will fund.

Rodney Councillor Greg Sayers says it is disappointing Rodney projects did not figure more prominently.

I find this particularly disappointing for our local families. Government funding would have helped employment to a wide range of local front-line project delivery people, as well as to many other local businesses involved in the supply chain, he says.

Among the projects advocated for by Cr Sayers was an upgrade to the Hill Street intersection. Meanwhile the Rodney Local Board pressed for a Warkworth park and ride. Neither projects made the final lists.

However, this doesnt mean the projects wont happen. They will remain Council-funded projects rather than getting the emergency Government aid, Cr Sayers says.

He says the total cost of the top 30 projects being presented to the Government is $392 million. Funding sought for the CRL alone is $105 million.

Board deputy chair Beth Houlbrooke was not surprised by Councils announcement. She says all Government infrastructure funding in the Auckland region is helpful.

She says even if Government funding is not applied to Rodney projects, it will free up Auckland Council money that could then be applied in Rodney.

At the same time, she was delighted to see one project in west Rodney, an upgrade of roads in Kumeu and Huapai to serve a housing area, had made the priority list at number 22.

Council gave priority to projects that were over $10 million, created significant numbers of jobs, and could be physically started within six months.

The full project list
Its the iPhone SE. Thats the name first used in Spring 2016 when the chassis of an earlier iPhone, the iPhone 5s, was packed with the then-latest processor. It was also cheaper than any of the other phones in Apples range. Apple has followed the same route here.

The new phone looks very similar to the iPhone 8, with a 4.7in display, Touch ID, glass back for wireless charging. The iPhone 8 and iPhone 8 Plus will be retired, so this will become the most affordable iPhone in the range. Theres no Plus version of the iPhone SE, because the iPhone SE is deemed to be such a perfect size for the hand.

We may earn commission from some of the links in this article, but we never allow this to influence our content.

Latest processor

Where the iPhone 8 has the A11 Bionic chip, first seen in September 2017, this new phone has the very latest chip, A13 Bionic, which powers the latest flagship iPhone 11 and iPhone 11 Pro handsets and which is up to 40 per cent faster than the iPhone 8. As such, its near-certain this is the most powerful small-screen phone you can buy.

Camera

Like the iPhone 8 and iPhone XR, this is a single-camera iPhone. But advances made possible with the much more powerful A13 Bionic chip mean that this is the most advanced single-camera system on an iPhone yet.

Recommended Apple releases maps data to track whether people are obeying lockdown

The advances include more accurate auto white balance than the original iPhone SE, much faster autofocus and zero shutter lag.

Better even than the iPhone XR, then, which is a pricier phone. There are even improvements in the front-facing camera, again thanks to the significantly improved processing power, so that there are more advanced portrait mode features including all of Apples advanced lighting techniques for portrait mode.

There have been a lot of advances since the original iPhone SE, or the iPhone 8 which this phone replaces, such as better HDR, more sophisticated computational photography and more.

This is the first time in an iPhone with 4.7in display that theres video stabilisation in the front-facing camera, too.

Battery life

This is expected to be the same as on the original iPhone 8. It has wireless charging, and can be fast-charged.

Gadget and tech news: In pictures Show all 25 1 /25 Gadget and tech news: In pictures Gadget and tech news: In pictures Gun-toting humanoid robot sent into space Russia has launched a humanoid robot into space on a rocket bound for the International Space Station (ISS). The robot Fedor will spend 10 days aboard the ISS practising skills such as using tools to fix issues onboard. Russia's deputy prime minister Dmitry Rogozin has previously shared videos of Fedor handling and shooting guns at a firing range with deadly accuracy. Dmitry Rogozin/Twitter Gadget and tech news: In pictures Google turns 21 Google celebrates its 21st birthday on September 27. The The search engine was founded in September 1998 by two PhD students, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, in their dormitories at Californias Stanford University. Page and Brin chose the name google as it recalled the mathematic term 'googol', meaning 10 raised to the power of 100 Google Gadget and tech news: In pictures Hexa drone lifts off Chief engineer of LIFT aircraft Balazs Kerulo demonstrates the company's "Hexa" personal drone craft in Lago Vista, Texas on June 3 2019 Reuters Gadget and tech news: In pictures Project Scarlett to succeed Xbox One Microsoft announced Project Scarlett, the successor to the Xbox One, at E3 2019. The company said that the new console will be 4 times as powerful as the Xbox One and is slated for a release date of Christmas 2020 Getty Gadget and tech news: In pictures First new iPod in four years Apple has announced the new iPod Touch, the first new iPod in four years. The device will have the option of adding more storage, up to 256GB Apple Gadget and tech news: In pictures Folding phone may flop Samsung will cancel orders of its Galaxy Fold phone at the end of May if the phone is not then ready for sale. The $2000 folding phone has been found to break easily with review copies being recalled after backlash PA Gadget and tech news: In pictures Charging mat non-starter Apple has cancelled its AirPower wireless charging mat, which was slated as a way to charge numerous apple products at once AFP/Getty Gadget and tech news: In pictures "Super league" India shoots down satellite India has claimed status as part of a "super league" of nations after shooting down a live satellite in a test of new missile technology EPA Gadget and tech news: In pictures 5G incoming 5G wireless internet is expected to launch in 2019, with the potential to reach speeds of 50mb/s Getty Gadget and tech news: In pictures Uber halts driverless testing after death Uber has halted testing of driverless vehicles after a woman was killed by one of their cars in Tempe, Arizona. March 19 2018 Getty Gadget and tech news: In pictures A humanoid robot gestures during a demo at a stall in the Indian Machine Tools Expo, IMTEX/Tooltech 2017 held in Bangalore Getty Gadget and tech news: In pictures A humanoid robot gestures during a demo at a stall in the Indian Machine Tools Expo, IMTEX/Tooltech 2017 held in Bangalore Getty Gadget and tech news: In pictures Engineers test a four-metre-tall humanoid manned robot dubbed Method-2 in a lab of the Hankook Mirae Technology in Gunpo, south of Seoul, South Korea Jung Yeon-Je/AFP/Getty Gadget and tech news: In pictures Engineers test a four-metre-tall humanoid manned robot dubbed Method-2 in a lab of the Hankook Mirae Technology in Gunpo, south of Seoul, South Korea Jung Yeon-Je/AFP/Getty Gadget and tech news: In pictures The giant human-like robot bears a striking resemblance to the military robots starring in the movie 'Avatar' and is claimed as a world first by its creators from a South Korean robotic company Jung Yeon-Je/AFP/Getty Gadget and tech news: In pictures Engineers test a four-metre-tall humanoid manned robot dubbed Method-2 in a lab of the Hankook Mirae Technology in Gunpo, south of Seoul, South Korea Jung Yeon-Je/AFP/Getty Gadget and tech news: In pictures Waseda University's saxophonist robot WAS-5, developed by professor Atsuo Takanishi Rex Gadget and tech news: In pictures Waseda University's saxophonist robot WAS-5, developed by professor Atsuo Takanishi and Kaptain Rock playing one string light saber guitar perform jam session Rex Gadget and tech news: In pictures A test line of a new energy suspension railway resembling the giant panda is seen in Chengdu, Sichuan Province, China Reuters Gadget and tech news: In pictures A test line of a new energy suspension railway, resembling a giant panda, is seen in Chengdu, Sichuan Province, China Reuters Gadget and tech news: In pictures A concept car by Trumpchi from GAC Group is shown at the International Automobile Exhibition in Guangzhou, China Rex Gadget and tech news: In pictures A Mirai fuel cell vehicle by Toyota is displayed at the International Automobile Exhibition in Guangzhou, China Reuters Gadget and tech news: In pictures A visitor tries a Nissan VR experience at the International Automobile Exhibition in Guangzhou, China Reuters Gadget and tech news: In pictures A man looks at an exhibit entitled 'Mimus' a giant industrial robot which has been reprogrammed to interact with humans during a photocall at the new Design Museum in South Kensington, London Getty Gadget and tech news: In pictures A new Israeli Da-Vinci unmanned aerial vehicle manufactured by Elbit Systems is displayed during the 4th International conference on Home Land Security and Cyber in the Israeli coastal city of Tel Aviv Getty

Other features

The new iPhone SE has Wi-fi 6, for speedy connections, which wasnt on the original iPhone SE, as is Apple Pay Express Transit.

Price

The original iPhone SE cost 379 or $399 in the US and has just 16GB of storage. This one, considerably more advanced and with 64GB of storage, costs 419. Available for pre-order from Friday, its on sale from next Friday, 24 April.
Benn, Haro & Isaacs, PLLC- The Workers Compensation Firm is proud to serve the Tampa area Your employer and their insurance company have attorneys working for them, and so should you, says partner, David Benn. We are proud to add Tampa to our geographic coverage, and are excited to assist many more Florida injured workers.

With numerous offices across the state of Florida, Benn, Haro & Isaacs, PLLC- The Workers Compensation Firm is now serving Tampa. The firm offers free consultations to injured workers to determine how their rights can be protected after a work accident.

The firm represents clients seeking compensation with regard to work accidents. Benn, Haro & Isaacs, PLLCs lawyers work on a contingency basis, which means clients pay nothing unless the attorneys secure a settlement.

Benn, Haro & Isaacs, PLLC handles all work accidents, from the slip and fall, to death cases. The firm even represents clients with regard to chronic issues caused by overexertion or repetitive motion.

Your employer and their insurance company have attorneys working for them, and so should you, says partner, David Benn. We are proud to add Tampa to our geographic coverage, and are excited to assist many more Florida injured workers.

Each of the firms three founders is proficient in Spanish, and partner, William Haro, is fluent. All partners are board members of the Workers Compensation Section of the Broward County Bar Association, as well as members of Florida Workers Advocate, and organization that advocates for the fair treatment of Floridas workers. Partner, Stacey Isaacs, is Vice Chairwoman of the 17th Judicial Grievance Committee, which reviews bar complaints made against other attorneys.

Those in Tampa, FL who have been injured at work can receive a free consultation by calling 954-716-8287. Learn more about the firm at https://accidentlawyerfl.com/ where you can find helpful workers compensation tips, industry trends, and attorney information. Also follow them on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.

About Benn, Haro & Isaacs, PLLC - The Workers' Compensation Firm

With over 45 years of combined legal experience, the Florida attorneys and staff at Benn, Haro & Isaacs, PLLC offer personalized representation for workers injured on the job. The firm represents clients across the state in Boca Raton, Coral Gables, Coral Springs, Fort Lauderdale, Ft. Myers, Orlando, and Sunrise. Both in and out of the courtroom, Benn, Haro & Isaacs, PLLC is dedicated to providing the highest quality legal counsel to Florida workers.


Volvo has become to first car maker to start fitting all of its new models with speed limiters, This is Money can reveal - two years ahead of the market-wide requirement for the safety systems.

The Swedish auto brand announced in March 2019 that it would be fitting limiters to all new models in 2020 which would mean none of its new cars would be able to be driven at speeds over 112mph.

And it has confirmed this has already started to take place, with vehicles that have come off assembly lines as part of customer orders this year have the technology installed.

New limit: New cars built by Volvo already in 2020 have speed limiter installed, it has said

All new cars built from 2022 will legally be required to have speed limiters - known as Intelligent Speed Assistance systems - fitted.

However, Volvo has taken the decision to introduce the technology ahead of the curve as part of efforts to eliminate all road deaths and serious injuries in its vehicles - part of a project it has dubbed 'Vision 2020'.

And models already set to be delivered have them installed.

A spokesman for the brand told This is Money: 'Everything we do at Volvo starts with safety.

'Above certain speeds, in-car technologies and infrastructure are no longer sufficient to prevent serious injury or fatality if an accident occurs.

'By tackling the issue of speeding in this way, we are addressing what is still a major cause of traffic fatalities.'

While the car maker confirms new vehicles built already this year have the limiters installed, it hasn't clarified from what date they were being implemented in its factories.

There is also no information on the brand's website to inform potential customers that new cars ordered will have speed limiters.

The Scandinavian brand - now owned by Chinese firm Geely - hopes the move to install speed-limiting technology will help to cement its reputation as a worldwide leader in safety with one of the 'most ambitious safety visions in automotive history'.

Volvo has confirmed that cars already coming off assembly lines have the limiters, restricting top speeds of all new models to 112mph

The Swedish brand is fitting cars with limiters two years earlier than similar speed-restricting technology is being made mandatory for all auto brands

It means vehicles already built to order have the limiters fitted to them, however there is no clear indication of this technology being in place in new cars on the Volvo website

It said speeding is one of the most prominent reasons for road accidents, and the introduction of a built-in speed limiters will help curb the number of deaths caused by drivers travelling excessively fast.

It added that a top speed of 112mph was chosen as it balances safety against buyer attitudes, fearing that limiting drivers strictly to national limits would hinder sales volumes.

German outfits including BMW and Audi already have speed limiters of 155mph for their mainstream models only - likely a move to handicap motorists using their cars on the unrestricted Autobahns - but not in their high-performance cars.

Volvo is the first to have the electronic restrictors across an entire range.

It means a car like the flagship XC90 SUV - priced from just under 55,000 has had its top speed trimmed by around 20mph.

Limiters are being installed across the entire Volvo range - the first brand to do so. It means an XC90 SUV will have its previous top speed trimmed by around 20mph

Volvo says it is putting limiters into all its cars because above certain speeds, in-car technologies and infrastructure are 'no longer sufficient to prevent serious injury or fatality if an accident occurs'

Intelligent Speed Assistance (ISA) technology mandatory from 2022 will allow drivers to override the set limit by pushing harder on the throttle pedal. Volvo's system will not allow for this

Speed limiters will be mandatory across the market from 2022 under proposals from the European Transport Safety Council that received approval by MEPs.

These systems - also known as Intelligent Speed Assistance (ISA) technology - use GPS data and traffic sign recognition cameras to determine what the speed limit is on the the road the car is travelling on.

Hakan Samuelsson, Volvo chief executive

The ISA identifies the speed limit and automatically limits the top speed to match it.

However, drivers will be able to override the system by pushing hard on the throttle - just in case they're overtaking another motorist who has decided to put their foot down.

Volvo's system is different.

It will electronically limit the top speed to 112mph at all times - which is 42mph faster than motorway restrictions in the UK.

The only time this will not be the case is if the vehicle is being used by the police, when the limiter will be deactivated, a spokesman confirmed to This is Money last year.

Hakan Samuelsson, president and chief executive at the car maker said: 'Volvo is a leader in safety: we always have been and we always will be.

'Because of our research we know where the problem areas are when it comes to ending serious injuries and fatalities in our cars.

'And while a speed limitation is not a cure-all, its worth doing if we can even save one life.'

Only Volvo cars produced for police forces will have the speed limiters deactivated, the brand confirmed to This is Money last year

If you order a new Volvo today, it will almost certainly have a speed limiter installed

As well as limiting top speeds, the company is investigating how a combination of smart speed control and geofencing technology could automatically limit speeds around schools and hospitals in the future.

New cars sold from 2021 will also have a new 'Care Key' with additional speed limits.

This is an extra spare key for the vehicle that can have a pre-loaded lower top speed of less than 112mph activated for the car when this specific fob is in use.

That means owners of Volvos will be able to lend their vehicles to their teenage children who might have only recently passed their test in the knowledge that they can go no faster than a top speed determined by the parent.

'We want to start a conversation about whether car makers have the right or maybe even an obligation to install technology in cars that changes their drivers behaviour, to tackle things like speeding, intoxication or distraction,' Mr Samuelsson added.

'We dont have a firm answer to this question, but believe we should take leadership in the discussion and be a pioneer.'

The new 'Care Key' - available from 2021 - will have a pre-loaded lower top speed activated for the car when this specific fob is in use. It means owners can lend their vehicles to their children who have recently passed their test without the fear of them speeding excessively

Volvo is also planning to install cameras and sensors in its cars to reduce the number of crashes caused by drivers being intoxicated, distracted or falling asleep at the wheel

The cameras and sensors will monitor the driver's behaviour to determine if they are intoxicated or not and then take the relevant steps to prevent a crash

On top of limiters, the other facet of the Vision 2020 project is the introduction of new technology to defeat two other major causes of accidents - intoxication and distraction.

To do so, Volvo also plans to fit new models with in-car cameras and sensors to monitor driving behaviour.

If the technology measures that a user is unfit to be at the wheel or driving erratically it will alert them and prompt the motorist to pull over.

And in the most extreme cases the technology built into Volvo cars will be able to safely bring the vehicle to a halt automatically to prevent the user causing an accident.

Volvo is also pushing motorists to consider alternative fuel models in its range by first introducing customers in showrooms and online to plug-in variants of its car before petrol and diesel-powered examples.
OTTAWA, April 15, 2020 /CNW/ - Statistics released today by the Canadian Real Estate Association (CREA) show national home sales and listings were down sharply between February and March 2020.

Highlights:

Monthly home sales (CNW Group/Canadian Real Estate Association)

National home sales fell 14.3% on a month-over-month (m-o-m) basis in March.

Actual (not seasonally adjusted) activity was up 7.8% year-over-year (y-o-y).

The number of newly listed properties dropped 12.5% m-o-m.

The MLS  Home Price Index (HPI) advanced by 0.8% m-o-m and 6.9% y-o-y.

Home Price Index (HPI) advanced by 0.8% m-o-m and 6.9% y-o-y. The actual (not seasonally adjusted) national average sale price climbed 12.5% y-o-y.

Home sales recorded over Canadian MLS Systems dropped by 14.3% in March 2020 compared to February, as the economic turmoil and physical distancing rules surrounding the COVID-19 pandemic caused both buyers and sellers to increasingly retreat to the sidelines over the second half of the month.

Transactions were down on a m-o-m basis in the vast majority of local markets in March. Among Canada's largest markets, sales declined in the Greater Toronto Area (GTA) (20.8%), Montreal (-13.3%), Greater Vancouver (-2.9%), The Fraser Valley (-13.6%), Calgary (-26.3%), Edmonton (-13.2%), Winnipeg (-7.3%), Hamilton-Burlington (-24.9%) and Ottawa (-7.9%).

Actual (not seasonally adjusted) sales activity was still running 7.8% above a quiet March in 2019, although that was a considerable slowdown compared to the y-o-y gain of close to 30% recorded in February.

"March 2020 will be remembered around the planet for a long time. Canadian home sales and listings were increasing heading into what was expected to be a busy spring for Canadian REALTORS," said Jason Stephen, president of CREA. "After Friday the 13th, everything went sideways. REALTORS are complying with government directives and advice, all the while adopting virtual technologies allowing them to continue showing properties to clients already in the market, and completing all necessary documents. They remain your best source for information and guidance when negotiating the sale or purchase of a home in these unprecedented times," continued Stephen.

"Numbers for March 2020 are a reflection of two very different realities, with most of the stronger sales and price growth recorded during the pre-COVID-19 reality which we are no longer in," said Shaun Cathcart, CREA's Senior Economist. "The numbers that matter most for understanding what follows are those from mid-March on, and things didn't really start to ratchet down until week four. Preliminary data from the first week of April suggest both sales and new listings were only about half of what would be normal for that time of year."

The number of newly listed homes declined by 12.5% in March compared to February. As with sales activity, declines were recorded pretty much across the country.

With sales and new listings each falling by similar magnitudes in March, the national sales-to-new listings ratio edged back to 64% compared to 65.4% in February. While this is down slightly, the bigger picture is that this measure of market balance was remarkably little changed considering the extent to which current economic and social conditions are impacting both buyers and sellers.

Considering the degree and duration to which market balance readings are above or below their long-term averages is the best way of gauging whether local housing market conditions favour buyers or sellers. Market balance measures that are within one standard deviation of their long-term average are generally consistent with balanced market conditions.

Based on a comparison of the sales-to-new listings ratio with the long-term average, two-thirds of all local markets were in balanced market territory in March 2020. Virtually all of the remainder continued to favour sellers.

The number of months of inventory is another important measure of the balance between sales and the supply of listings. It represents how long it would take to liquidate current inventories at the current rate of sales activity.

There were 4.3 months of inventory on a national basis at the end of March 2020. While this is up from the almost 15-year low of 3.8 months recorded in February, it remains almost a full month below the long-term average of 5.2 months. With the overall number of listings on the market continuing to fall in March, the m-o-m decline in the months of inventory measure was entirely the result of the outsized drop in sales activity.

National measures of market balance continue to mask significant regional variations. The number of months of inventory is well above long-term averages in the Prairie provinces and Newfoundland & Labrador. By contrast, the measure is running well below long-term averages in Ontario, Quebec and the Maritime provinces. The measure remains in balanced territory in British Columbia.

With measures of market balance at this point little changed from recent history, and most of the impact on sales and listings from the COVID-19 situation only showing up towards the end of March, the impact on housing prices will likely take a little longer to become apparent. Price measures for March 2020 were strongly influenced by very tight markets and a very strong start to the spring market in many parts of Canada before physical distancing measures were implemented.

The Aggregate Composite MLS Home Price Index (MLS HPI) rose 0.8% in March 2020 compared to February, marking its 10th consecutive monthly gain.

The MLS HPI was up in March 2020 compared to the previous month in 16 of the 19 markets tracked by the index.

Looking at the major Prairie markets, home price trends have ticked downwards in Calgary and Edmonton to start 2020 but have generally been stable since the beginning of last year. Prices in Saskatoon have also been stable over the last year, while those in Regina have continued to trend lower. Prices in Winnipeg have been on a slow upward trend since the beginning of 2019.

Meanwhile, the recovery in home prices has been in full swing throughout British Columbia and in Ontario's Greater Golden Horseshoe (GGH) region. Further east, price growth in Ottawa, Montreal and Moncton continues as it has for some time now, with Ottawa and Montreal prices accelerating to start 2020.

Comparing home prices to year-ago levels yields considerable variations across the country, although for the most part trends are still regionally split along east/west lines, with gains ranging near the low double-digits from Ontario east, more modest gains in B.C., and a mixed bag of even smaller gains and some declines across the Prairies.

The actual (not seasonally adjusted) Aggregate Composite MLS HPI rose 6.9% y-o-y in March, the biggest year-over-year gain since January 2018.

Prices are in positive y-o-y territory in Greater Vancouver (+2.1%) and the Fraser Valley (+2%). Elsewhere in British Columbia, home prices logged y-o-y increases about twice as large in the Okanagan Valley (+5.1%), Victoria (+5%) and elsewhere on Vancouver Island (+4.3%).

Calgary and Edmonton continued to post small y-o-y price declines (-0.8% and -1.3%, respectively), while the y-o-y gap was -5.1% in Regina. Prices in Saskatoon (+0.4%) and Winnipeg (+1.2%) both posted small y-o-y increases in March.

In Ontario, home price growth has re-accelerated across the GGH, with a number of markets posting double-digit y-o-y growth in the 11% range. Meanwhile, price gains in recent years have continued uninterrupted in Ottawa (+15.8%), Montreal (+11.3%) and Moncton (+8.1%).

All benchmark home categories tracked by the index accelerated further into positive territory on a y-o-y basis. Apartment units posted the biggest y-o-y increase (+7.4%) followed closely by prices for two-storey single family homes (+7.3%). One-storey single-family home prices were up 6.2% y-o-y in March, while prices for townhouse/row units climbed 5.6%.

The MLS HPI provides the best way to gauge price trends because averages are strongly distorted by changes in the mix of sales activity from one month to the next.

The actual (not seasonally adjusted) national average price for homes sold in March 2020 was just over $540,000, up 12.5% from the same month the previous year.

The national average price is heavily influenced by sales in the GVA and GTA, two of Canada's most active and expensive housing markets. Excluding these two markets from calculations cuts more than $130,000 from the national average price, trimming it to around $410,000.

PLEASE NOTE: The information contained in this news release combines both major market and national sales information from MLS Systems from the previous month.

CREA cautions that average price information can be useful in establishing trends over time, but does not indicate actual prices in centres comprised of widely divergent neighbourhoods or account for price differential between geographic areas. Statistical information contained in this report includes all housing types.

MLS Systems are co-operative marketing systems used only by Canada's real estate Boards to ensure maximum exposure of properties listed for sale.

The Canadian Real Estate Association (CREA) is one of Canada's largest single-industry associations, representing more than 130,000 REALTORS working through 90 real estate boards and associations.

Further information can be found at http://crea.ca/statistics.

SOURCE Canadian Real Estate Association

For further information: Pierre Leduc, Media Relations, The Canadian Real Estate Association, Tel.: 613-237-7111 or 613-884-1460, E-mail: [email protected]

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Some of Asia's biggest economies are likely to narrowly avoid recession this year and are poised to bounce back strongly in 2021 if the coronavirus is contained, the IMF forecast Tuesday, with China leading the recovery. The pandemic has hammered the world economy, with millions of jobs lost and businesses shut because of unprecedented lockdown measures to slow the spread of the disease. But unlike the United States and major Western nations, China -- the world's second-largest economy -- will scrape through 2020 without going into recession, the IMF said in its latest World Economic Outlook. It predicted growth of 1.2 percent growth for China this year, the slowest expansion in more than four decades. "Emerging Asia is projected to be the only region with a positive growth rate in 2020 (1.0 percent), albeit more than 5 percentage points below its average in the previous decade," the IMF said. "Other regions are projected to experience severe slowdowns or outright contracts in economic activity." The Fund forecast China to bounce back next year with 9.2 percent. India, Asia's third-biggest economy, is also expected to grow at 1.9 percent in 2020 before surging 7.4 percent next year. Indonesia too is expected to just stay above water, gaining 0.5 percent this year before an 8.2 percent bounce in 2021. However, more advanced economies in the region -- Japan, South Korea, Australia, Singapore and Hong Kong -- will dip into recession, according to the forecast. Thailand and Malaysia are also expected to be in negative territory, but the Philippines and Vietnam are expected to still see modest growth this year. China is expected to lead the economic recovery in Asia, and Beijing has unveiled a number of massive stimulus measures. But economists have warned that China, where the virus first emerged late last year, will depend on recovery in other parts of the world. And the Chinese government's domestic measures like increased credit will have a limited effect as long as the rest of the world is in turmoil, analysts said. "Beyond China's own domestic challenges, the global recession poses additional threat to the economy," Chang Shu and David Qu of Bloomberg Economics said in a note. The global economy is projected to contract by three percent this year, much worse than during the 2008-09 financial crisis, according to the grim IMF forecast -- which added that there was "extreme uncertainty", and the situation could get much worse. The scale of the challenge, especially for exports, was highlighted last week when the World Trade Organization warned that global trade could fall by as much as a third. Like the IMF, it too had warned that many variables were at play during a recovery -- and pointed to threat of a second wave of infections.
Royal Mail employees have courageously kept letter and parcel services operating in the midst of a crisis. Bank statements, magazines and greetings cards arrive in a timely manner.

In some sorting offices, social distancing has proved tricky and posties carefully have to navigate their way through a thicket of self-isolation when making deliveries.

During this period a letter or small parcel on a birthday, anniversary or bereavement is particularly poignant. So it is surprising chief executive Rico Back has chosen, since the shutdown began on March 23, to hunker down with his family in his main residence in Switzerland.

Under scrutiny: Royal Mail boss Rico Back has chosen to hunker down with his family in his main residence in Switzerland

Many of us have learned over the last several weeks how to work from home using apps such as Zoom and Whatsapp. Those running vital services in these trying times do not have the same luxury.

As the head of the Royal Mail one might have expected Back to visit staff in their workplaces (with the right protective gear) to show solidarity.

The boss also should be at hand in case a crisis such as disputes over conditions in sorting offices or a breakdown of services arises. There might be more sympathy for Back were he making personal sacrifices.

Royal Mail investors (who include most employees) have suffered a dividend cut. But Back, who earns an estimated 2.3m a year, has so far failed to volunteer a pay cut or bonus deferral, leaving decisions to the pay committee.

He is displaying a sad derogation of leadership.

Sky scrap

British airlines could not be blamed for being envious of the unconditional rescue for US carriers. Indeed, BA and Virgin Atlantic might well complain that when the worst of the pandemic has passed, they will be facing unfair competition on profitable transAtlantic routes.

Under the rescue, the six largest US carriers including American, United and Delta (minority owners of Virgin Atlantic) will be provided with cash grants covering 70 percent of payroll costs.

The sums advanced are based on salary and benefits bills in the second and third quarters of 2019. These are two of the busiest travel periods and the cash due to American Airlines turns out to be higher than its market valuation.

The formidable founder and largest shareholder Stelios Haji-Ioannou is expected to continue his campaign to persuade the carrier to cancel an Airbus order.

He has complained to the Financial Conduct Authority about alleged breaches by Easyjet of disclosure rules as to its plans, and is seeking the removal, one by one, of non-executives.

There is something distasteful about his hostile approach during a crisis when the focus should be on the well-being of staff and underlying balance sheet.

Easyjet boss Johan Lundgren will announce today that the carrier has deferred the purchase of 24 of the 103 aircraft on order and pledged not to add any planes to its fleet in 2021.

By taking on a loan of 600m, via the Bank of England's coronavirus facility, the airline has strengthened its resources and has a war chest of 2.3 billion to see it through the pandemic.

It would have had even more resources had investors, including Stelios, bought into a deferral of dividend payout in February as Covid was starting to wreak havoc across the Continent. Survival and recovery are priorities in current conditions.

The last thing needed is an outbreak of hostilities against a board trying its best.

Staying home

Plumbing distributor Ferguson has joined Unilever and Smith & Nephew in abandoning plans to shift a primary stock market listing from London because of resistance from long UK investors.

Chairman Geoff Drabble has not given up telling investors 'ultimately a US primary listing is the right outcome.'

Ferguson may want to leave but that didn't stop it from accessing the taxpayer-funded loan scheme to keep afloat.

It needs to recognise its real friends are in the City, as they were when it refinanced after the banking crisis.
SHELTON  The death toll from coronavirus-related complications continues to mount in Shelton, with five more residents reported dead Tuesday, bringing the number of city deaths to 48.

Naugatuck Valley Health District stated Tuesday that four were residents of a city nursing home or assisted living facility. The fifth Shelton resident was inpatient at an area hospital, where she died.

"The health district staff offers our sincerest condolences to the families and friends of those who have lost their loved ones, said NVHD Director Jessica Stelmaszek.

Overall, there are 263 positive cases in the city, by far the most in the Valley, according to NVHD data released Tuesday. In all, there are 54 Valley deaths from complications related to COVID-19, and 48 of those deaths were residents of nursing homes or assisted living facilities.

For public health surveillance, laboratory-confirmed COVID-19-associated deaths are defined as patients who tested positive for COVID-19 around the time of death, said Stelmaszek, adding that this is not a determination of the cause of death.

The Valley now has 620 positive cases, according to Stelmaszek, adding that the increase in local cases is largely related to catch up of data entry by the state Department of Public Health into the shared secure online disease surveillance system as well as the recent implementation of a new method for reporting cases to the DPH by the labs and providers.

Stelmaszek said the health district is continuing to urge residents to stay home as much as possible and practice social distancing by keeping 6 feet between you and others if you must go out.

It is evident that we remain in the acceleration phase of the COVID-19 pandemic, meaning we are consistently receiving an increasing number of cases, Stelmaszek said. With an increasing number of cases, we can expect that we will continue to see an increased number of COVID-19-related deaths. We expect the Valley cases to continue to rise over the next few days.

To minimize the amount of people who can be exposed, Stelmaszek said families should designate one person per household to do grocery shopping or other necessary errands. Those going out in public should wear a cloth face covering, she added.

Of the Valley deaths, 40 were people 80 and older, 13 were between 70 and 79, and one was between 60 and 69 years of age.

Beside Sheltons 249 positive cases, there are 97 in Naugatuck, 96 in Ansonia, 86 in Seymour including five deaths, 56 in Derby, with one death reported Monday, and 22 in Beacon Falls.

Data show that 171, or 28 percent, of the 620 confirmed cases among Valley residents are individuals who currently reside in a nursing home, assisted living facility, group home or similar setting. Overall, 122 of Sheltons 263 confirmed COVID-19 cases are residents of nursing or assisting living facilities.

Positive cases cover a wide range of ages, with Valley data showing that 128 people are 80 and older; 61 are between 70 and 79; 101 are between 60 and 69; 92 are between 50 and 59; 98 are between 40 and 49; 82 are between 30 and 39; 53 are between 20 and 29; and five between 10 and 19 years of age.

Gov. Ned Lamonts executive orders have shuttered all schools until at least May 20 and directed employees at nonessential businesses to stay home until further notice. Gatherings of more than five people are prohibited. The governor has stated that schools may remain closed until the fall.

Residents should continue to heed the advice of their chief elected officials and stay home as much as possible and continue to practice social distancing to avoid exposure and further spread of the virus, Stelmaszek said.

The state Department of Public Health now publishes a report at ct.gov/coronavirus that breaks down positive COVID-19 cases by town.

brian.gioiele@hearstmediact.com
General Motors says it has started mass production of ventilators at its Kokomo, Ind., plant and plans to ship 600 units by the end of this month.

GM announced progress in a news release Tuesday, April 14. The automaker is fulfilling a contract with the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services in response to the COVID-19 emergency.

Thousands of men and women at GM, Ventec (Life Systems), our suppliers and the Kokomo community have rallied to support their neighbors and the medical professionals on the front lines of this pandemic, GM Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Mary Barra said in a statement issued by the company. Everyone wants to help turn the tide and save lives. It is inspiring and humbling to see the passion and commitment people have put into this work.

GM announced March 27 that it would build critical care ventilators with Ventecs help, just hours before President Donald Trump ordered the company to start ventilator production under the Defense Production Act.

Since that time, the company said its been able to build the capacity to deliver on the federal governments 30,000-unit order by the end of August.

In GMs announcement Tuesday, White House Assistant to the President Peter Navarro said in a statement, GM has moved swiftly in Trump time to manufacture one of the most critical lifesaving devices in Americas war against the coronavirus.

GMs rapid mobilization of Americas manufacturing might in defense of our country is a proud salute to the ingenuity of its engineers, the true grit of its UAW workers on the line, and Americas doctors, nurses, and other healthcare professionals fighting for our lives at the front lines, Navarros statement says. "As these lifesaving ventilators roll off GMs assembly line as fast as tanks once did in an earlier World War, they will be rapidly deployed to the hospitals of Gary, Chicago, and far beyond.

GM said almost half of the federal government order will be filled by the end of June and the full order will be completed by the end of August.

GM is working around-the-clock to build ventilators at Kokomo, Indiana plant

Trump bashes General Motors and its CEO, tells Ford to get going on ventilators fast
New York: The official death toll from the coronavirus soared in New York City on Tuesday after health authorities began including people who probably had COVID-19, but died without ever being tested.

Officials reported 3,778 probable deaths, where doctors were certain enough of the cause of death to list it on the death certificate, and 6,589 confirmed by a lab test. Combined, that would put the total fatalities in the city over 10,000.

The change in the city's accounting of deaths came after officials acknowledged that statistics based only on laboratory-confirmed tests were failing to account for many people dying at home before they reached a hospital or even sought treatment.

Behind every death is a friend, a family member, a loved one. We are focused on ensuring that every New Yorker who died because of COVID-19 gets counted," said Health Commissioner Dr. Oxiris Barbot.

"While these data reflect the tragic impact that the virus has had on our city, they will also help us to determine the scale and scope of the epidemic and guide us in our decisions. New Yorkers continue to die at an unnerving pace even as the number of patients in hospitals has leveled off.

Earlier Tuesday, officials said 778 deaths were recorded statewide Monday, bringing New York's total to more than 10,800. That figure, though, did not factor in the probable deaths now being counted in New York City.

New York Governor Andrew Cuomo criticised President Donald Trump's claim of total authority to reopen the nation's virus-stalled economy, saying Tuesday he was talking more like a king than a president.

The Democratic governor criticized Trump's assertion Monday that when somebody is president of the United States, the authority is total. His proclamation is that he would be king, that's what a king is, Cuomo said at his daily briefing. A king has total authority. That statement cannot stand.

The Republican president made his comments after Cuomo and governors on both coasts announced multi-state compacts to coordinate reopening society amid the global pandemic.

Cuomo said restarting the economy must be done cautiously, or the hard-won gains of the past month could be quickly lost.
South Chickamauga Creek, which runs from Brainerd to East Ridge, was almost eight feet above flood stage on Tuesday morning.

The stage at 10 a.m. was 25.9 feet. Flood stage is 18 feet.

The creek was expected to rise to near 26 feet on Tuesday afternoon, then begin falling.

Officials said moderate flooding was occurring.

At 27 feet, homes on Arlena Circle off Shallowford Road are evacuated.

Evacuations also take place at the Fountainbleau Apartments on Spring Creek Road in East Ridge.

With flood waters reaching between moderate and major flood stages, low lying areas in the eastern half of East Ridge may be affected, City Manager Chris Dorsey said.

He stated, "East Ridge Fire and Police are continuously monitoring this hazardous event. Please be aware of your surroundings and use extreme caution when driving in this area."

David Pond, a TVA retiree, questioned the effect of the Bass Pro development and Camp Jordan on the water levels.

He said, "Based on the National Weather Service water level gauge at Eastgate, this flood level today far surpasses the recorded 26 foot depth of Dec. 27, 2015.

"However, today's National Weather Service gauge is now only showing 21 foot.

"Could the raised areas by Bass Pro and Camp Jordan be contributing to higher flooding upstream of the Eastgate gauge?
by Kamel Abderrahmani

Handing out copies of the holy book and using loudspeakers to read passages from it are supposed to help fight the coronavirus. In reality, by giving the current health crisis an apocalyptic character, those in power are using religion to stay in power.

Paris (AsiaNews)  A young Muslim intellectual slams the use of religion, specifically Quranic chapters (Surah), to fight the coronavirus. Recited and broadcast with loudspeakers, this keeps people in ignorance. His criticism underscores the tragic situation of Algerias civilian hospitals, which lack everything compared to military hospitals, reserved for the elite, which are well stocked. (Translation by AsiaNews).

Ridicule may not kill but ignorant people can do by themselves what their enemy dare not do. This is what is happening in Algeria right now. Whilst our Mediterranean neighbours are using all medical resources at their disposal to stop and defeat the COVID-19, in Algeria, to achieve this goal, the Religious Affairs Ministry has undertaken two completely outlandish, abject, inconceivable, dishonest, and even laughable initiatives.

Rest assured that the first initiative is not about handing out masks to poor people or providing some of its budget money to help our underequipped hospitals. No, it involves handing out copies of the Quran across the country. This is a way to push people towards irrational and religious arguments, which are useless vis-a-vis the pandemic.

In order to carry out this "important project", the state has mobilised Islamic associations, local Salafist militants who ensure that neighbourhoods and villages tow the line, and is providing residents with copies of the Quran, inviting them to "deal with" the health crisis through religion. Meanwhile, public hospitals endure severe shortages of the most basic means of protection against the coronavirus, except for the right to a copy of the Quran; whilst military hospitals, which are reserved for the powerful, have proper equipment that cannot be found in regular hospitals. In short, the Qur'an is for the poor and medicine is for VIPs and their families.

I have the impression that the Algerian state and Islamists would like us to reserve our place "up there". Put another way, Algerian authorities seem more concerned with the faith of ordinary Algerians in the present and in their fate in the afterlife than in their health and their need for hospital beds in the here and now.

The second initiative is more controversial and trickier than the first. The Algerian state, faithful to its old modus operandi, uses the sacred to silence people and manipulate the masses, through Religious Affairs Ministry. The latter issued instructions to imams to broadcast Quranic readings via mosque loudspeakers even if mosques themselves are still closed. Thus, Surah are recited for about 30 minutes before noon prayers. According to the Ministry, this stems from popular demand! I wonder who asked for this? How did they ask for it? The demand came from social media, petitions and Islamist associations, Minister.

This argument is entirely disingenuous. The request came from Islamist associations which try every which way to keep up religious appearances as a way of holding the ground and attach an apocalyptic character to this health crisis. This suits the authorities too as they try to paralyse the population. In other words, the use of the sacred is far from being a healthy practice. The authorities seek to distract the people from the real issues and the major problem; in this case, the health emergency that threatens people and the dismal, if not catastrophic state of Algerian hospitals. This goes to show that Islamism has always been the friend of dictatorship and social deprivation.

What is the use of this? Will it save us from the tragedy that COVID-19 can cause? Wouldn't it have been better to inform people and teach them how to protect themselves, how to manage confinement? Instead of reciting the Holy Quran with loudspeakers, which can upset the sick, the elderly, children, or focus on invocations, mosques should try instead to influence people by appealing for civility since the personnel of these religious establishments are supposed to be role models.

For their part, instead of providing needed care and basic products to help people avoid endangering themselves as they rush to buy bags semolina, as we see every day, the authorities and their institutions have chosen to leave people in ignorance and obscurantism, feeding them an archaic notion of religion.
WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange's planned escape from the Ecuadorian Embassy in London in December 2017 was derailed by Undercover Global, the Spanish company that was in charge of the embassy's security but was actually spying on the cyberactivist for the United States, court case materials obtained by Sputnik showed

LONDON (UrduPoint News / Sputnik - 15th April, 2020) WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange's planned escape from the Ecuadorian Embassy in London in December 2017 was derailed by Undercover Global, the Spanish company that was in charge of the embassy's security but was actually spying on the cyberactivist for the United States, court case materials obtained by Sputnik showed.

David Morales, the head of Undercover Global, is currently the lead defendant in the case opened in Spain over illegal wiretapping of Assange in the embassy. According to the judicial investigation, the company's employees were collecting information about the whistleblower, his lawyers, assistants and visitors and passing it to the US and Ecuadorian intelligence services. Morales is charged with crimes against privacy, violating attorney-client confidentiality, money laundering, and bribery.

Case files showed that a database made by Undercover Global employees, which contained information on all activities of a "Hotel" (the embassy) and a "guest" (Assange), also included data on a visit of Rommy Vallejo, the head of the Ecuadorian National Intelligence Secretariat (SENAIN). Morales shared this data with his "American client."

Vallejo visited the cyberactivist in the embassy on December 21, 2017. According to Assange's lawyer in Spain, Aitor Martinez, this meeting was linked to the possibility of leaving the UK for another country with an Ecuadorean diplomatic passport.

"Six or seven people, at most, participated in developing the operation. Julian was acting paranoid because he suspected that UC Global was spying on him. He took me to the bathroom, turned the water on, and so we were talking. No one believed him, but he was absolutely right," Martinez says.

The lawyer said that Bolivia, Venezuela, Greece, Serbia, Belgium and China were on the list of possible countries where Assange could flee to.

Meanwhile, Martinez noted that the WikiLeaks head refused to seek asylum in Russia fearing that this could become an additional argument for supporters of a conspiracy theory seeing him as a "Russian agent."

According to Martinez, Vallejo's visit was a key stage of the planned escape, as they were set to discuss details of the operation, including the way Assange was supposed to get out of the embassy, where a car would be waiting for him.

E-mail correspondence attached to case files shows that Morales received a detailed report on Vallejo's visit, including audio and videotapes, the same night on December 21. The very next day, the United States sent an international arrest warrant for Assange to London.

"The plan was thwarted because of the alleged notification, which the UC Global chief sent to his contacts in Las Vegas Sands, the casino corporation owned by Sheldon Adelson, a sponsor of [US President] Donald Trump presidential campaign, who is also in [US State Secretary] Mike Pompeo's close circle," the article said.

However, during hearings in a Spanish court, Morales refuted allegations and said that he had not passed any tapes to the US intelligence services.

Assange is currently being sought by the United States for extradition to face multiple charges of espionage following the 2010 leak of classified materials relating to military operations in Afghanistan and Iraq.

If convicted in the United States, Assange could face a prison term of up to 170 years. The ongoing initial court hearing will likely continue for the rest of the week, with a second hearing set for May.
The Massachusetts Gaming Commission has approved Springfield Technical Community Colleges request to shift funds from a workforce program, which was developed through commission funding, for adjustments necessitated by the coronavirus pandemic.

The transfer is designed for the STCC Hampden Prep to reallocate its budget so that the program can run through Zoom Pro Meeting. Purchase of Zoom Pro accounts, Chromebooks and hotspots are part of the digital transition.

In 2017, the Gaming Commission approved $200,000 for a Hampden Prep program at STCC in collaboration with Holyoke Community College. The program is intended to develop and implement an innovative High School Equivalency (HSE) and workforce readiness program, a commission statement said at the time.

Workforce development programs are a critical component of job creation, economic opportunity and the Commonwealths ability to meet gamings burgeoning hiring demand, Gaming Commission Chairman Steve Crosby said in a press release.

The growth of job opportunities within the gaming industry gave impetus for the program, which is aimed specifically for students who need at least a couple of more semesters of learning before tackling exams.

The estimated rollover cost will be $6,200. Hampden Prep intends to use funding that was originally allocated toward additional in-person classes, as well as remaining bus token funding that was approved in the original budget.

No new additional funding will be needed. The Gaming Commission approved the transfer on April 9. Digital programming for the students was to begin this week.

Purchases will be made of two Zoom Pro accounts, 15 Chromebooks for students and 15 internet hot spots.

The format will allow for at least 20 to 25 or students, possibly more and all without high school diplomas, to continue learning within the program. Chromebooks and hot spots will give students necessary access, regardless of whether they otherwise have available Internet or technology.

Hampden Prep plans to run this session until the campus can reopen. Since the admissions process can only be done in-person, no new students can be registered at this time.

Zoom Pro allows for all-day access, giving students more flexibility if they cannot attend a morning session. They can attend during the evening, or attend the morning instruction and meet with an advisor during the evening.
HANOVER, Md., April 15, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- One of the largest and most influential construction unions, the International Union of Painters and Allied Trades (IUPAT), is calling on Congress to protect the nation's 11 million US construction workers both on and off the job site.

"While many construction workers have been deemed "essential" for building and maintaining critical infrastructure, we are an incredibly vulnerable workforce and we are being treated like we are expendable," says IUPAT General Vice President Jimmy Williams. "Our ability to work varies greatly from state to state. If we can work, we risk exposure to the virus. If we can't work, many of us can't access unemployment insurance because of overloaded state systems. Now our healthcare is expiring. The Speaker can safely quarantine thanks to the outstanding salaries and healthcare they've allotted themselves. But the 11 million workers who were ignored during the CARE Act recovery bill won't soon forget how they were almost out on the street and couldn't afford to go to the hospital during a global pandemic."

The IUPAT has recommended fully subsidized health plans for those who have lost or may lose their jobs as COVID-19 spreads and wipes out America's 6th largest employment sector. Several cities and states have issued major U.S. construction stoppages, including San Francisco, Boston, and Pennsylvania. The IUPAT estimates that at least 50% of construction sites across the country have already been shut down and has cited that the lack of safety standards at open sites risks more shutdowns and places workers at risk of contracting COVID-19 perpetuating the cycle of lost income and benefits.

The Union has also demanded OSHA provide stronger regulatory oversight of sanitation and safety protocols for ongoing construction to protect workers and public health.

"Construction workers are unseen heroes in the fight to keep America going during COVID-19, and they're proud to keep communities safe each and every day. They build field hospitals and finalize expansions that support patient overflow, and they maintain the power plants, roadways, and bridges that keep the lights on and goods coming to our homes. Without them, America cannot shelter in place," says Ken Rigmaiden, General President of the IUPAT. "They are essential, but not immune to this virus or its financial impact. Now it's our duty to protect them by holding our nation's leaders accountable for their well-being both on and off the job site."

IUPAT members have reported that many job sites lack access to proper protection gear or sanitation supplies, in addition to blatant failures to isolate sick individuals. They also anticipate pressure for workers to complete jobs without supplies that are in shortage, such as protective safety gear and masks.

"While we commend the contractors who have voluntarily gone above and beyond to keep work sites safe, as long as there is a profit motive, there are some who will do anything to keep a site open without even the most basic controls. Workers fighting to keep America going are reasonably scared and deserve enforced protection," says Rigmaiden. "The lack of standardized safety measures is a ticking time bomb without them, people will inevitably get sick. As a result, their site might shut down or they're sent home. Then they lose income and healthcare. Throughout these unstable conditions, COBRA benefits need to be fully subsidized so people can maintain critical care without the fear of financial ruin."

58% of the American population is covered by employer-based health insurance. For the nation's 11 million construction workers, every hour worked is an hour contributed to their health coverage.

In Anchorage, Mike McGuire is an IUPAT District Council 5, Local 1959 Painter and former volunteer with the National Guard. He's the sole provider for his wife and three school-age daughters but was recently forced to take six months off work for cancer treatment. Now immunocompromised, he's worried about being able to return to work safely but will have to work after his final treatment so he doesn't lose his family health insurance.

"The medication I have to take is upwards of $2,200 a month," he says. "Going back to work is a health risk but I can't afford a lapse in coverage after cancer, and my three daughters and my wife are also on my plan. Paying out of pocket for COBRA is not an option for me, so I have to go to work in order to keep our coverage, even if it puts me at risk."

In addition to the temporary subsidization of health plans, the IUPAT's Bold Action Platform for Working Families urges Congress to secure retirement plans affected by the crisis and invest in American infrastructure to quickly put construction workers back to work.

THE INTERNATIONAL UNION OF PAINTERS AND ALLIED TRADES (IUPAT)

Represents a growing community of over 110,000 active and retired craftspeople in the United States and Canada. The IUPAT membership extends far beyond the workplace. Recognized as one of the most active unions in the labor movement, IUPAT members help shape their communities in many ways: through an abiding commitment to service, by fighting passionately for workers' rights that benefit all working families, and through effective worker education and mobilization. Visit www.IUPAT.org to learn more.

SOURCE International Union of Painters and Allied Trades

Related Links

http://www.iupat.org


With India under lockdown to stem the spread of coronavirus, drones are proving to be a crucial tool in the functioning of law enforcement authorities and other government agencies which are deploying these Unmanned Aerial Vehicles for carrying out surveillance, sanitisation and to reach out to people, minimising the risk of infection for their personnel. While Gujarat Police is using 200 drones across the state to monitor people's movements, Delhi Police has deployed them to ensure people follow social distancing in Asia's largest fruit and vegetable wholesale market Azadpur Mandi. Municipal authorities in Madurai are utilising them to disinfect areas near the coronavirus wing of a city hospital.

These are only a few examples of UAVs being used in the fight against coronavirus. However, government agencies aren't the only ones to tap into technology in these tough times, media organisations are also using drones to show people confined indoors the impact of the world's biggest lockdown. "It is fair to assume that out of 20,000 drones registered with the government, about 450-500 drones are already being used all across India to assist different states and law enforcement agencies," Smit Shah, Director - Partnerships, Drone Federation of India (DFI) told PTI. The DFI is an industry body that has companies like Asteria Aerospace, Quidich Innovation Labs, AutoMicroUAS, Aarav Unmanned Systems and Indrones as its members.

"Drone startups have come out and extended their support to the government on a no-cost basis. Most of the drone service providers are not charging for the services they are providing," Shah noted. India has remained under lockdown since March 25 to contain the spread of COVID-19, the disease caused by coronavirus, which has so far infected 10,815 people and claimed 353 lives in the country. On Tuesday, Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced that the lockdown, which was originally for 21 days, will be extended by 19 days to May 3 as the measure has produced a significant outcome in containing the infection.

Shah said drones are being used for carrying out a host of tasks like surveillance to ensure that people are maintaining social distancing, spreading awareness about COVID-19 in densely populated areas, spraying disinfectants and checking people's temperature. During the initial days of the lockdown, drones were used by the Jammu and Kashmir administration to announce restrictions on movement of people in Srinagar's busy Lal Chowk. Delhi Police is also using drones to monitor people's movements in Ghazipur Mandi, which witnesses a steady stream of buyers throughout the day. The municipal corporation of Warangal in Telangana has collaborated with a private company, Binford Robotics, to deploy its UAVs for surveillance and spraying disinfectants in the city.

According to experts, as the number of coronavirus cases in the country mounts, the use of the UAVs is also expected to rise. Ankit Mehta, co-chair of a FICCI committee on drones, told PTI, "Right now, the need of the hour is that the Ministry of Home or state police departments should take a call on whether they need drones with megaphones as a reinforcement tool, otherwise their containment strategies won't work. This is the time to go for mass procurement and leverage the entire drone production capability of the country. It will take us two-three weeks to start delivering," said Mehta, who is also the CEO of ideaForge, a drone manufacturing company.

He called for stepping-up the use of drones. "Containment zones are going to be around for a while, and they are going to extend because it is a contagious virus. What is required is 24x7 deployment of drones for surveillance to enforce containment and not sporadic usage. "My estimate is that we have 640 districts. If about 2,000 drones are inducted, assuming that each district needs around 3 drones, we can enable a broad level of persistent surveillance in the major containment zones," he said. Mehta said several state police departments are already customers of ideaForge and they had procured surveillance drones well before the lockdown.

"Some of these departments, which were planning to place orders with us, have asked us to deliver drones quickly since the beginning of lockdown," he said. DFI's Shah, however, recommended incentivising the approximately 20,000 drone operators who are registered with the Ministry of Civil Aviation. "This would be much more cost-effective for the governments as against procuring new drones at this time as that would involve management of equipment, training programmes and capacity building, which might not be feasible as of now," he said. For media organisations too drones are proving to be a boon at a time when many parts of the country have been sealed and are out of bounds for outsiders.

Remote-controlled UAVs allow media organisations to shoot videos or click photographs and cover various aspects of the lockdown. For instance, The Times of India's Chennai supplement on Sunday posted online a 5-minute video, which was shot using drones, showing how the once-bustling city has come to a standstill during the lockdown. A senior executive of a news organisation said the media companies in India generally use "micro drones", which weigh between one to two kgs.

"The drones are registered with the central government. Before deploying them, a news organisation generally takes permission from the local police department," the executive said. News organisations also make sure that while recording a video, the drone does not enter any restricted areas like an airport's airspace, etc, the executive noted.
WASHINGTON - The U.S. Postal Service needs a bailout, or at least some vision for its future after the coronavirus pandemic.

The agency is burdened by hundreds of billions of dollars in debt and falling revenue, and Congress and the White House have signaled an unwillingness to grant more funding without major restructuring, lawmakers say. Conservatives see a chance to remake the Postal Service in the image of a private corporation. Liberals want to modernize what they view as a conduit essential to connecting and unifying the nation.

Stuck in the middle are the Postal Service's 630,000 workers, who were assured prepaid health and retirement benefits by the 2006 Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act, known in postal circles as "PAEA" (pronounced like the Spanish rice dish). The law envisioned the Postal Service as a self-sustaining agency whose revenue could cover the expenses associated with an aging workforce involved in a physical occupation: delivering packages and parcels to every address in the country.

Not even two decades later, it can't. The Postal Service has racked up $160.9 billion in debt from what's owed prepaying retiree benefits. On top of that, it has many years' worth of operating deficits, as its top revenue generators no longer covered the costs of delivering the mail.

Instead, Apple's revolutionary iPhone was released a year after then-President George W. Bush signed the bill into law. Mobile phones hastened consumer behavior changes that were already driving away the kinds of business the Postal Service had relied upon for decades. People could send texts or emails from handheld devices rather than through written correspondence. Bill payment moved online. For a generation of Americans, the Postal Service was nearly obsolete.

Then came the Great Recession, which ravaged the Postal Service by slicing the volume of first-class mail it handled - the items on which it makes the highest margin - by 13 billion items over two years. After the recession, much of that demand never returned.

By 2009, the Government Accountability Office, Congress's nonpartisan watchdog agency, determined that the Postal Service's business model was no longer sustainable. The debt it carried jumped from $7 billion in 2008 to $10 billion in 2009.

At the end of 2019, the GAO calculated that the Postal Service had $160.9 billion in debt, $119.3 billion of which came from retiree benefits.

The mandate to prepay employees' retirement and health-care benefits is an obligation held by few other government agencies, let alone private companies. The Postal Service missed its first payment on those expenses, worth $5.5 billion, in 2011. By 2012, it exceeded its borrowing limit. And then the debt kept piling up.

"That prepayment responsibility that they've been unable to meet has exacerbated over the years," said Cary Brick, a member of the Citizen Stamp Advisory Committee, and former chief of staff for Rep. John McHugh, R-N.Y., a co-sponsor of the 2006 law. "It was bad, and it got more bad and it got worse. But now it's desperate."

How desperate? Without a $10 billion loan included in the Cares Act, the Postal Service would have had to miss a payroll or disrupt service in September. The loan, which has yet to be approved by the Treasury Department, gives the Postal Service enough cash to fund operations and make payroll until March or April 2021. But it is more debt the agency has to carry.

"For now, the pandemic is an immediate threat to the survival of the people's post office," said Fredric Rolando, president of the National Association of Letter Carriers, the labor union that represents 280,000 active and retired postal workers.

But back in 2006, PAEA seemed like a responsible decision to the officials in charge of analyzing the Postal Service budget, GAO officials said. From 2004 through 2006, the Postal Service made $6 billion in profits, according to financials filed with Congress. It paid out retiree and worker benefits on a "pay as you go" structure, meaning the agency only paid out retiree benefits when people actually retired, just like most other government agencies. The money to pay those claims came out of the Treasury Department.

Congress and the White House still wanted some reform at the time. First-class mail volume was healthy but steadily decreasing after an all-time high in 2001 - 103.7 billion items - and profits had started to fall as well.

"Congress had realized for some time that the post office was dealing with an outdated business model," said Tom Davis, the rector of George Mason University and a former GOP congressman from Virginia who introduced the bill. "And it still is. That hasn't changed."

Parts of that 2006 law included provisions to allow the Postal Service to raise rates on certain products and gave more power to the Postal Regulatory Commission, the board of governors that oversees the Postal Service, to review the agency's use of resources. It even granted the commission subpoena power.

It eliminated the Postal Service's existing retirement escrow fund, and the agency's requirement to pay out the military pensions of veterans who worked there, which saved $61 billion over 10 years. The legislation passed with broad bipartisan support.

But the 2006 law also shifted the burden of paying for worker and retiree benefits entirely to the Postal Service. That came at the insistence of the Bush administration, Davis said. The White House no longer wanted the Treasury Department on the hook for those expenses if the Postal Service was making billions of dollars in profits.

"Predating PAEA there was increased desire on the part of the [Bush] administration to push the Postal Service toward increased efficiency and competitiveness," said Lori Rectanus, director of physical infrastructure at the GAO. "In general, PAEA really sought to make the Postal Service a high-performing, self-sufficient, efficiency-based business."

Of course, the relatively stable financial footing that enabled that perspective didn't last. First-class mail volume between 2010 and 2019 plummeted and the Postal Service ran up larger and larger operating deficits. Package volume doubled in that time frame - one of the agency's lone bright spots - but the Postal Service doesn't make enough money on package delivery for that to make much of a dent in the deficit. Postal leaders have pitched other products to generate revenue, including banking services and prepaid debit cards, but none of those ideas ever made it to the market.

"They ought to take it up with the administration and the Congress, if they need to have it changed," said former congressman Henry Waxman of California, one of the law's Democratic co-sponsors. "It's a charge we're not going to avoid and we're not going to leave these workers in the lurch."

Now postal leaders forecast another drop in mail and revenue because of the pandemic. Volume in the first week of March declined 30%, postal agency officials told lawmakers last week. At the end of June, the agency projects volume to be down 50%, and it could lose $23 billion over the next 18 months.

It gives the Postal Service two crises to contend with: running out of cash to finance operations and paying down debt while running a perpetual deficit. Both of those, experts said, point to a need for a bailout and some restructuring.
[April 15, 2020] Therap Becomes First Technology Partner of the Charting the LifeCourse Nexus

KANSAS CITY, Mo., April 15, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- Therap Services, national leader in web-based documentation, reporting and communication solutions for Medicaid-funded Home and Community Based Services (HCBS), and Long Term Services and Supports (LTSS), is happy to announce Therap as the first official technology partner of the Charting the LifeCourse Nexus. The Charting the LifeCourse (CtLC) framework and tools were developed at the UMKC Institute of Human Development (UMKC IHD), a University Center for Excellence in Developmental Disabilities (UCEDD), to help individuals and families of all abilities and ages develop visions for a good life, identify how to find and access supports, and discover how to live the lives they want to live. Through the partnership, Therap and UMKC IHD are combining the strengths of the person-centered CtLC tools with Therap's secure, electronic platform to allow documentation and data exchange. The combined tools will enhance collaboration, transparency and access to needed supports for individuals with disabilities and their families. Therap supports this vision and sees the partnership with UMKC IHD as an opportunity for continued innovation in providing individuals and families tools to assist them in developing good lives. "Therap is excited to reach this agreement to become the first official technology partner of the Charting the LifeCourse Nexus center," said Jeff Case, Therap's National Director of Business Development. "Therap's platform offers individuals and families a digital solution. Our technology partnership with CtLC will allow our customers to securely share their visions for a good life with the professionals who serve them, using the LifeCourse Tools. We are prou to integrate these tools into our digital platform for increased access and collaboration between individuals, families, and professionals."



UMKC IHD sees the partnership as a natural fit that will help advance understanding of the CtLC core principles and improve the quality of life for many more individuals and families. "The Therap team has demonstrated great commitment to the core CtLC principles, which prioritize the person, family, and individual choice," said Dr. Sheli Reynolds, Director of the CtLC Nexus. "They incorporated the framework into their culture as a company, sending a large group of leadership and staff through our full CtLC Ambassador training series. We welcome them as our first official Technology Partners and are confident that this collaboration will be a great asset to their national and international network of service providers and the people they serve."

Therap is now able to offer CtLC tools on its platform with options to utilize the Life Trajectory, Integrated Supports Star, and Tools for Developing a Vision. Therap providers already using Therap's platform can additionally benefit from CtLC resources available on the software to strengthen their person-centered approach. About Charting the LifeCourse Nexus :

The Charting the LifeCourse (CtLC) framework and tools were created to help individuals and families of all abilities and ages develop visions for good lives, think about what they need to know and do, identify how to find or develop supports, and discover what it takes to live the lives they want to live. The CtLC Nexus supports a community of learning that champions transformational change through knowledge exchange, capacity building and collaborative engagement. CtLC is housed within the University of Missouri-Kansas City Institute for Human Development (UMKC IHD), Missouri's University Center for Excellence in Developmental Disabilities (UCEDD). Learn more at www.therapservices.net View original content:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/therap-becomes-first-technology-partner-of-the-charting-the-lifecourse-nexus-301041198.html SOURCE Therap Services

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USPS mail carrier

Joe Raedle/Getty Images

Tens of thousands of military veterans employed by the United States Postal Service are on the front lines of a bureaucratic conflict amid the ongoing coronavirus pandemic.

The USPS is one of the largest employers of veterans nationwide: nearly 100,000 military veterans are employed by the agency, or roughly 15% of its entire workforce.

The USPS estimated that at least 60% of veterans employed had a disability rating.

"The post office wants its mail is delivered every day," one Marine Corps veteran and a current letter carrier said. "If you're a veteran, you know about a mission and you know about completeness; and they want it done every day. So, a lot of them take pride in that."

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Tens of thousands of military veterans employed by the United States Postal Service are once again on the front lines of a bureaucratic conflict amid the ongoing coronavirus pandemic.

The Postal Service's future has become uncertain as its history of financial troubles looked bleaker during the nationwide crisis. The USPS estimated it will continue to lose $2 billion every month as it remains operational during the pandemic, according to The Washington Post; after it had already lost nearly $4 billion in 2018 and over $8 billion in 2019.

But the lack of mail volume and the increase in operating costs are not the only problem fueling the USPS's predicament.

Current and former officials have voiced their frustrations at a 2006 congressional law that requires the agency to pre-fund its own cost of future benefits for retirees. The USPS is required to pay the estimated $5 billion annual fee for the next 75 years, which no other private corporation or government agency in the US is required to pay.

A direct cash infusion for the USPS appeared to be the only solution as the agency's leaders last week requested $50 billion from Congress, half of which was supposed to address the losses from mail volume and the other half for modernization projects. An additional $25 billion loan from the Treasury Department was also supposed to pay for an existing debts.

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"At a time when America needs the Postal Service more than ever, the reason we are so needed is having a devastating effect on our business," Postmaster General Megan Brennan said in a statement. "The sudden drop in mail volumes, our most profitable revenue stream, is steep and may never fully recover."

US Army soldiers stationed in Camp Lemonnier, Djibouti, attend a career fair on base, July 26, 2019.

US Navy Mass Communication Specialist 1st Class Shannon Barnwell

A second uniform

The tenuous situation for the Postal Service puts its employees, many of them military veterans, in a uncertain position.

The USPS is one of the largest employers of veterans nationwide and dwarfs its competitors in hiring numbers: nearly 100,000 military veterans are employed by the agency, or roughly 15% of its entire workforce of 600,000 employees, according to a spokesperson.

One former enlisted Marine who deployed during the Gulf War said there was not a lot of job opportunities coming out of the military. He attended a military career fair in the early 1990s, where because of his occupation in the Marines, "there really wasn't a lot besides working for McDonalds."

US Marines march on the Memorial Bridge across the Potomac River towards the pentagon during National Victory Celebration Parade, June 8, 1991 in Washington.

AP Photo/Doug Mills

Nearly 30 years after applying for the Postal Service, he still works as a letter carrier in Michigan.

"One thing I'll tell you is that the post office wants its mail is delivered every day," the letter carrier said. "If you're a veteran, you know about a mission and you know about completeness; and they want it done every day. So, a lot of them take pride in that."

"In the military, it's all about getting that mission accomplished," he added. "And that's the same with the post office. You know, whether it's hot or cold, Michigan deals with all four seasons. Just the other day, it was hailing, snowing, raining, and sun, all in one day. It's something you need to deal with for a job like this."

One internal statistic reveals how a subset of veterans could be disproportionately affected by potential cuts. Although the exact numbers were not immediately available, the USPS estimated that at least 60% of veterans employed had some sort of disability rating.

Paul Barner, the assistant secretary-treasurer to the National Association of Letter Carriers union; a retired mail carrier; and a US Army veteran, explained that veterans, particularly disabled veterans, who applied to work for a federal agency like the Postal Service would have points added to their civil service profile  making them a more competitive candidate for employment.

"I think that the biggest part of the impact to veterans, should something happen to the postal service, is that by being a large civilian employer, that opportunity would be gone," Barner said. "And not only does it affect veterans, but particularly disabled veterans  veterans that have preferential eligibility."

President Donald Trump and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin.

Alex Wong/Getty Images

Care package for the Postal Service

In order to help stimulate the economy during the coronavirus pandemic, the unprecedented $2.2 trillion Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act was passed by Congress and signed by President Donald Trump on March 27.

Democrats lobbied to include $13 billion in the form a grant for the USPS, arguing that the agency has been negatively affected by the pandemic. The lawmakers, however, were met with opposition from the Trump administration.

Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, the White House's chief negotiator of the bill, reportedly warned congressional leaders that Trump would veto the bill if it included additional funding for the USPS.

One Democratic committee aide told The Post that Mnuchin balked at the potential $13 billion grant, and only approved of a $10 billion loan advocated by a bipartisan pair of lawmakers, Sens. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin and Gary Peters of Michigan.

Donald Trump stands at the Old Post Office building in Washington, D.C., where he eventually developed the building into the Trump International Hotel, in a picture from September 25, 2015.

@realdonaldtrump/Twitter

"You can have a loan, or you can have nothing at all," Mnuchin said during the negotiations, according to the aide in The Post.

The loan is expected to keep the USPS afloat until the spring, just a few months before the agency is expected to run out of funding in September.

"We told them very clearly that the president was not going to sign the bill if [money for the Postal Service] was in it," a Trump administration official told The Post. "I don't know if we used the v-bomb, but the president was not going to sign it, and we told them that."

Trump has criticized the Postal Service throughout his tenure as president, claiming that they have been taken advantage of by tech companies like Amazon. While some Republicans have expressed interest privatizing the Postal Service, it is not entirely clear why the Trump administration has been apathetic towards the agency's circumstance.

"Why is the United States Post Office, which is losing many billions of dollars a year, while charging Amazon and others so little to deliver their packages, making Amazon richer and the Post Office dumber and poorer," Trump said in a tweet in December 2017. "Should be charging MUCH MORE!"

"Only fools, or worse, are saying that our money losing Post Office makes money with Amazon," Trump tweeted in April 2018. "THEY LOSE A FORTUNE, and this will be changed."

With the stimulus bill signed, the Treasury Department is now responsible for the $10 billion loan to the Postal Service.

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The Delhi High Court on Wednesday granted bail to an interior designer who was arrested by the city police for allegedly assaulting two women resident doctors of Safdarjung Hospital after accusing them of spreading Covid-19 in Gautam Nagar area on April 8.

Justice Rajnish Bhatnagar granted bail to the man on a personal bond of 20,000. In its order, the court said that since the accused was an educated man he should have been respectful of the doctors and not threatened them, but stated that no useful purpose would be served by keeping him in judicial custody and crowding Tihar Jail.

Police had arrested him on a complaint filed by a 29-year-old junior resident doctor at Safdarjung Hospital who had alleged that the man started speaking about social distancing and remarked that doctors like them were spreading infection in residential areas. The incident had taken place on April 8.

The man was granted bail by the Metropolitan Magistrate on April 9, but, it was cancelled on the same day by the Additional Sessions Judge looking into the seriousness of the allegations. The aggrieved then moved the Delhi High Court seeking release from jail.

Appearing for him, his counsel contended that his client has been falsely implicated and he had only protested against the complainant and her sister for not adhering to social distancing norms. He said that both the women became aggressive and told that they were doctors and knew the meaning of social distancing.

However, the court said that the accused, being an educated person, should have been respectful to the doctors rather than abusing and threatening them.

The country is passing through a very difficult phase and the doctors are rendering yeomen service to the nation. The petitioner being an educated man, as stated by the counsel for the petitioner that he is an interior designer by profession, should have been respectful to the doctors rather than abusing and threatening them, the court said.
Some personal protective equipment (PPE) could be reused by NHS staff under last resort plans to cope with shortages, according to a leaked Public Health England document.

A Public Health England spokeswoman confirmed that the safe reuse of items was currently under consideration, but no decisions had yet been made.

The document states that protective masks and gowns could need to be washed and reused when stocks run low and admits there is currently a reduced ability to re-supply PPE, the BBC reported.

Some hospitals have already begun cleaning single-use gowns to preserve stocks, according to emails seen by the broadcaster.

The plans are also said to include buying building or sportswear eye protection with extensions to cover the side of the eyes if there are no available goggles or face shields.

Health workers could also be forced to wear washable laboratory coats and patient gowns where there are no available disposable gowns or coveralls.

It is understood that the chief medical officers and chief nurses of the four UK nations recently discussed the issue. Following the meeting, a draft document written by Public Health England and dated 13 April suggested solutions for acute supply shortages of PPE.

These are last-resort alternatives, but, given the current in-country stock and the reduced ability to re-supply, we are suggesting that these are implemented until confirmation of adequate re-supply is in place, it reportedly stated.

It is also believed to have suggested face masks could be re-purposed using various disinfection or sterilisation methods, including steam and UV disinfection.

Medical staff wear PPE of gloves, eye protection, face masks and aprons, as they wait to test NHS workers at a drive-in facility run by Wolverhampton (AFP via Getty Images) (AFP/Getty)

In the United States, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has approved the use of vaporised hydrogen peroxide to decontaminate certain masks and respirators for use by staff.

The leaked document said some of the last-resort measures would need to be reviewed and approved by the Health and Safety Executive (HSE).

In a statement, Dr Susan Hopkins, from Public Health England, said: PPE is a precious resource and it is crucial that everyone in health and social care has access to the right protective equipment.

Recommended Hancock declines to apologise to nurses working without PPE

All options are being considered to ensure this, including the safe reuse of items, but no decisions have been made.

An HSE spokesman said: In line with the governments PPE strategy, it is right that, where possible, strategies for optimising the supply of PPE should be explored.

We are discussing with Public Health England ways in which pressure can be eased on the supply chain. This includes potentially reusing certain equipment where it is safe to do so.

At the weekend health secretary Matt Hancock declined to apologise to nurses forced to choose between treating patients or protecting themselves due to shortages of protective kit.

 Priti Patel says she's "sorry if people feel there have been failings" over PPE

Cabinet colleague Priti Patel was criticised for saying she is sorry if people feel there have been failings in the governments supply of PPE.

Dr Chaand Nagpaul, chairman of the British Medical Association (BMA), told the BBC the latest leaked last-resort plans underlined the urgency with which this situation had to be sorted.

The government must be honest about PPE supplies, he said. If [Public Health England] is proposing the reuse of equipment, it needs to be demonstrably driven by science and the best evidence in keeping with international standards, rather than by availability, and with absolutely no compromise to the protection of healthcare workers.
Caught by surprise with the detection of the first Covid-19 positive case in the state on Monday, Meghalaya has launched an intensive drive to locate the silent carrier who infected the patient.

Nearly 2,000 primary and secondary contacts of the patient, a senior doctor with Bethany Hospital, a private hospital in Shillong, have been traced and samples have been collected from 90 of them for testing, almost half of the primary contacts. Results are expected later.

Initial investigations suggest the doctor, who doesnt have travel history outside the state, could have got infected from one of his relatives, more specifically, his son-in-law, who is a pilot with Air India and had returned from New York last month. The son-in-law was asymptomatic for Covid-19.

Preliminary investigation suggest that one of the relatives of the concerned person had a travel history to one of the infected countries and he was back in Shillong before the 14-day quarantine period was over, Meghalaya Chief Minister Conrad Sangma said on Tuesday in a video shared on Facebook by his office.

According to a letter written by the Meghalaya health department to the Union health ministry, the patients son-in-law travelled from New York to Delhi on March 16. He travelled from Delhi to Imphal on March 17 and returned to Delhi on March 20.

On March 24 he travelled from Delhi to Shillong and was placed under home quarantine from March 24 to April 7 after registering with the state government. The letter adds that a surveillance team of the health department had visited him during the quarantine period.

Though the person took all precautions, sometimes we see asymptomatic cases as well, who dont show any signs but could be a carrier. Therefore there is a high chance that it could have been passed on from there. We are looking at all possibilities of how this could have happened, Sangma said.

Meghalaya government has asked its Assam counterpart to support with the testing of the 2,000 contacts. The Shillong-based North Eastern Indira Gandhi Regional Institute of Health and Medical Sciences (NEIGRIHMS) is the lone Covid-19 testing lab in Meghalaya.

Our basic strategy would be to identify, isolate and test all contacts for the first few days till we are able to zero down and close the loop of transmission, Sangma said in Shillong after a cabinet meeting.

Both branches of the private hospital where the doctor worked have been shut and the staff placed under quarantine. The government has asked everyone who may have visited Bethany Hospital on or after March 22 to register themselves by calling 108 or getting in touch with the health department.

Meghalayas capital Shillong has been placed under curfew for 48 hours beginning 6:00 am on Tuesday.

Patient commits suicide at Bethany Hospital

Meanwhile, a patient who was admitted to Bethany Hospital, the hospital where Meghalayas first Covid-19 patient works, committed suicide by jumping out of his room early on Tuesdaya day after the institution was sealed.

This case has nothing to do with coronavirus. This individual who committed suicide was a substance user (drug addict) and he was admitted for rehabilitation. He also had some psychiatric problems and in all likelihood, the suicide may be the result of withdrawal symptoms and psychiatric problems, Meghalaya Chief Minister Conrad Sangma told journalists in Shillong.

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Jaipur MP Ramcharan Bohra has sought the intervention of Union Home Minister Amit Shah for tacking the situation in the city's Ramganj area where the number of COVID-19 patients are constantly rising.

The BJP leader alleged that lockdown and curfew norms were being violated in the affected area and the state government has failed to contain the virus' spread in Ramganj.

Targeting the BJP over the issue, Chief Minister Ashok Gehlot, without naming anyone, said some leaders were trying to disturb the atmosphere.

The MP wrote a letter to Shah on Wednesday seeking his intervention in controlling the situation in Jaipur's Ramganj area where the number of patients is increasing.

He said 428 out of the 476 patients in Jaipur are from Ramganj and alleged that the state government was doing of appeasement.

Gehlot said, Some leaders of the opposition party are trying to disturb atmosphere for the last two three days".

"Rajasthan is a model where all political parties, bureaucracy, social workers and the common people are collectively fighting against the coronavirus and despite this, if such situation is made then it is unfortunate, he told reporters through video conferencing.

Meanwhile, health minister Raghu Sharma, transport minister Pratap Singh, government chief whip Mahesh Joshi and MLAs Rafeek Khan and Amin Kagzi visited the affected areas and quarantine centres.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Source: Xinhua| 2020-04-15 08:00:43|Editor: Liu

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WASHINGTON, April 14 (Xinhua) -- U.S. President Donald Trump announced on Tuesday that his administration is halting the nation's funding to the World Health Organization (WHO), a move experts have warned against, as COVID-19 continues to take a toll globally.

Speaking to reporters at the White House, Trump also said a review is being conducted to assess the WHO's role in addressing the spread of the coronavirus.

The announcement came as Trump is aggressively defending his own handling of the outbreak in the United States after the administration has been scrutinized for downplaying the threat from the coronavirus early on and faulted for delays in testing.

The tone also differed from one of his tweets on Feb. 24, several days before the United States reported the first death from COVID-19.

"The Coronavirus is very much under control in the USA," Trump wrote at that time. "We are in contact with everyone and all relevant countries. CDC & World Health have been working hard and very smart."

Lawrence Gostin, director of the O'Neill Institute for National and Global Health Law at Georgetown University, called cutting funding to the WHO during a global health crisis "disgraceful," warning that it would cause death and even blow back on the United States.

"How shortsighted when global coop needed more now than ever," Gostin said in a series of tweets on Tuesday.

In remarks delivered from Geneva last week, WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said, "We must quarantine politicizing this virus at national and global levels."

"We have to work together, and we have no time to waste," he added.

According to a tally from Johns Hopkins University on Tuesday, the United States has reported more than 600,000 confirmed cases of COVID-19 and 25,575 deaths, both the highest on record.

Globally, the number of cases is approaching 2 million, as the death toll has surpassed 125,000, the tally showed.
The government is changing the Covid-19 wage subsidy scheme for employers in a bid to keep part-time workers in their jobs.

The move comes following concern that some part-time workers were not turning up to work as the Covid-19 emergency payment scheme paid out more.

Minister for Finance Paschal Donohoe told RTE radios News at One that under the change the state subsidy for employers will increase from 70% to 85% for workers who earn less than 24,400 per year.

"We're putting in place a set of changes in relation to the wage subsidy scheme today for incomes that are less than 24,400 per year we will increase the subsidy that the state makes available to employers from 70% to 85%."

Mr Donohoe said that the emergency Covid payments would last for 12 weeks, but he warned that while the State can afford such payments for now, it could not continue indefinitely.

The Minister said that it will be possible for the economy to grow again, but the main challenge now is to get people back to work.

The change in the wage subsidy scheme is a bid to keep people at work and to provide a bridge between employers and employees.

It does pose an additional cost, he acknowledged, depending on how many avail of the scheme, but he said he is hoping that there will be a saving on the numbers accessing the pandemic payment which will balance it out.

At present, there are 533,000 on the Covid-19 payment while there are 42,000 employers availing of the wage subsidy scheme.

I hope these changes will play an important part.

Earlier today, the chief executive of the Convenience Stores and Newsagents Association, Vincent Jennings has claimed that it is difficult to get part-time staff because

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The Ministry of Home Affairs has announced a set of new rules and regulations and issued a letter to the states on implementation of the new advisory.

The new advisory has allowed select activities to operate from April 20. The central government has also advised the states and union territories to not dilute these rules, but to make them stricter based on local needs.

The government has also allowed farmers to go back to work on the fields. All other agriculture-related functions have been allowed too. Mandis that are operated by the Agriculture Produce Market Committee or controlled by a government body can function at the village level.

Along with that, fisheries, plantations (with 50 per cent of workers) and animal husbandry farms will be allowed to function.

RBI and financial organisations regulated by it, like NPCI and CCIL, along with banks will open from April 20. "Local administration to provide adequate security personnel at bank branches and BCs to maintain social distancing, law and order and staggering of account holders," the advisory directed.

Care home and anganwadis will be functional too. MNREGA workers can go back to work given they maintain social distancing and wear face masks.

These activities will not be allowed in any of the contamination zones or hotspots and there shall be strict perimeter to ensure no one goes in or out without being checked. If a new area is demarcated as a hotspot, these activities will be suspended there too.

The rest of the advisory is similar to the last one. All public places, gatherings, places of worship, theatres, etc are still closed. All means of passenger transport is still not allowed.

Public utilities like power, gas and oil operations are still allowed. All public services like fire police and health service providers will still be allowed to ply. All cargo and goods traffic will go as usual.

Centre also wrote a letter to the chief secretaries of states and administrators of union territories to ensure that the new guidelines are followed strictly. "The activities allowed under the consolidated revised guidelines will be withdrawn immediately if any of the local measures are violated, risking the spread of COVID-19," Union Home Secretary Ajay Bhalla said in the letter. "All entities in the government and private sectors and members of public should follow the guidelines strictly."

Also Read: Coronavirus Lockdown Live Updates: Govt identifies 170 districts as hotspots; total cases in India reach 11,933

Also Read: Coronavirus lockdown 2.0: All agricultural activities to remain fully functional, says govt
The global pandemic has devalued our present and definitely our future. The idea of freedom, touch, work, leisure, sharing, caring and mattering has changed across the globe and how. Every piece of information is causing anxiety and everyday has become a fight to finish. Take each day at a time, is the most worthwhile piece of advice that many of us are getting from peers and workspaces but how does one do that?

The everyday jargon of chores and making the day count is tough as it is as you are not supposed to take a peek out of the futuristic window to give yourself hope and acquire inspiration of any kind. The extroverts are suffering and the introverts are suffering wondering about the change of roles and lifestyle. The fear of living in a Utopian space is not acceptable to many but it is not a choice anymore. All the issues that we were already battling at many fronts like mental health, physical health, productivity, poor sleep, lack of interest, in general, have hit us in full capacity and there is nothing one can do about it. The idea of boredom has also changed. From the cracked walls of a super busy lifestyle, boredom came in like light and began rewiring the lives we live or we think we are living. Back in the day which is like a couple of months ago, people prayed for it, pined for it. They wanted to afford the luxury of getting bored but now the wish has somewhat come true but its come for a price.

Danish writer, Sren Aabye Kierkegaard once wrote, Since boredom advances and boredom is the root of all evil, no wonder, then, that the world goes backwards, that evil spreads. This can be traced back to the very beginning of the world. The gods were bored; therefore they created human beings. Many writers and philosophers like Albert Camus, Friedrich Nietzsche, Arthur Schopenhauer, Saul Bellow and Emile Zola among others in the past shared their ideas of boredom and talked about how it means different things to different people. Hasnt boredom always challenged the idea of a perfect life and a perfect world that we are living in without even knowing what actually bores us? This not the first pandemic that has hit the world in so many ways.

The hyper bored generation has been created successfully and this mental transit has been anything but easy. The virtual, life of the future is not fascinating anymore. The constant scrolling on smartphones and tablets is not fun anymore. Living a multi-purpose active life within four walls is new life but not that bad as it is made out to be. Yes, taking a stroll our seems like a distant dream right now but it is not that bad. What is bad is the constant state of fear that is brewing on the outside as well as the inside. The conversations virtual or vocal is shifting to what we were rather than what is going to be.

The dependence on memory is the call of the hour. The happier times where simplicity even though not valued much was a cherishable experience. To make our lives easier, arent we all going down memory lane to gather those simpler skills that our previous generations crafted and lived? While one can, rather than jumping into the pool of hashtagged challenges, why not reflect upon the past, open those memory boxes and see what could have been done differently? Not to change the future or even reshaping the present, but just to relive some simpler times, noticing those little gestures that changed your life without one even realising it and to also reckon ways to live in a certain livable way.

While we rejoiced the nuclear family set-ups, arent we missing the joys of living in a joint family household? The aspect of loneliness, the sense of desire, the presence of absence, the certainty of the uncertain change is stolen and returned to us at the same time. The idea of touch will never be the same. Witnessing ourselves as to what we were and what we are turning into can only be bridged by those many memory boxes that will remind us of the journey that hasnt ended. Not as of now. This shall too pass but do wonder about what you want to keep for the future.

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The Ministry of Home Affairs on Wednesday issued detailed guidelines for the extended lockdown and introduced new points like wearing a face mask in public places will be compulsory, spitting in public spaces shall be punishable with fine and selected activities to be allowed from April 20 in non-hotspot places.

The government has also included that it will also encourage online or e-learning classes for students.

According to the guidelines, MNREGA work will be allowed with labourers practicing social distancing and wearing masks, and the movement of goods and empty trucks will be allowed for the delivery and pick-ups.

The Central government, in the guidelines, has also given permission for the movement of vehicles of e-commerce companies and services provided by self-employed persons, like electrician, IT repairs, plumber, motor mechanics and carpenters are allowed to operate.

Some industries including hardware manufacturing, unit of packaging material, and other industries in the special economic zone (SEZ) with access control, etc will also be allowed to operate during the extended lockdown.

"Hotspot areas of large COVID-19 doubt breaks or cluster with a significant spread of COVID-19 will be determined as per the guidelines issued by the Ministry of Health and Welfare, Government of India. These hotspots determinant zones will be demarcated by State, UT and district administration as per the guideline of MoHFW," Home Ministry said in the guidelines.

The government said that IT and IT-enabled services with up to 50 percent strength courier services data and call centre for government activities only will be allowed to operate.

Similarly, food processing industries and brick kilns operating in rural areas outside the limits of municipal corporations and municipalities are allowed. Manufacturing and other industrial establishments with access control in SEZs and export-oriented units industries, estates and industrial townships are also allowed to operate.

These establishments shall make arrangements for their workers within their premises as far as possible and or adjacent buildings along with the implementation of standard operating protocol given by the government, the guidelines said. The industries will also have to arrange transport by ensuring social distancing for the employee.

The Centre has also given permission to operate construction projects within the limit of municipal corporations, where workers are available on site and no workers are required to being brought from outside.

Notably, all workplaces have been directed to have adequate arrangements for temperature screening and provide sanitiser at convenient places on the premises.

Government offices, ministries, departments, and offices under their control, are to function with 100 percent attendance of officers of deputy secretary level and above while 33 percent of the remaining officers and staff can attend as per requirement.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
THE ISSUE:

Gov. Andrew Cuomo has used the coronavirus pandemic to temporarily halt pay raises for about 80,000 state workers.

THE STAKES:

Given the financial emergency the state is facing, the governor's move is reasonable.

---

The societal shutdown forced by the coronavirus pandemic has put roughly 800,000 New Yorkers out of work and has forced many more to cope with pay cuts.

The pain, in other words, is being widely shared during what can only be described as a collapse of the economy as we knew it. Some economists liken it to an economic depression.

Given the seriousness of the crisis, it makes sense that state workers also sacrifice, as Gov. Andrew Cuomo has ordered. The governor, using executive emergency powers, has postponed 2 percent pay raises for about 80,000 state employees for 90 days.

While we suspect many state employees understand and accept the move, their unions have reacted with outrage. The president of the state Civil Service Employees Association called Mr. Cuomo's move "inexcusable," while the head of the New York Correctional Officers & Police Benevolent Association called the deferment "a slap in the face."

With all due respect, it is the unions that are being unreasonable, and we urge them to join in the spirit of shared sacrifice that should be guiding New York and the country through this national emergency.

After all, millions of Americans have it far worse. They're out of work, potentially losing their health insurance and the ability to feed and house their families. They are frightened for their financial futures.

The governor has required only a modest sacrifice from state workers. Confronted by cratering revenue, Mr. Cuomo has not sought to freeze public pay, nor asked for pay cuts or furloughs, nor threatened layoffs. He has chosen only to delay raises.

That is hardly too much to ask.

The postponement is expected to save the state about $50 million over 90 days, money that might maintain the cash flow needed to respond to the pandemic. Flattening payroll costs now might also allow the state to avoid layoffs in the uncertain days ahead.

It is true, as the unions note, that the delayed raises affect some workers who are on the front lines of the COVID-19 crisis, putting their own health at risk for the common good. Those workers deserve our respect and our gratitude.

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Yet millions of Americans are already on the front lines of the economic crisis, and nobody should underestimate the difficult road ahead.

New York officials believe the pandemic could deliver a $15 billion revenue hit, forcing painfully deep cuts to the state's $177 billion annual budget. So there is more pain to come, certainly.

Not fighting this is also in the unions' and their members' interest: There are plenty of anti-union forces out there that would be all too happy to exploit this issue to stoke animosity toward public employees. This is not a battle worth having.

One last thing: In the spirit of shared sacrifice, we urge Mr. Cuomo to give up the pay hike he and other top state officials received this year.

That, also, is hardly too much to ask.
Harris County stopped accepting applications for its $10 million small business loan program 28 hours after its website launched, after requests far exceeded the available aid.

By 5:45 p.m. Friday, the site had received requests from 7,135 business owners seeking more than $152 million, a sign of how hard-hit small firms have been hit by the novel coronavirus and Harris County restrictions on commerce intended to slow the spread of the disease.

Precinct 2 Commissioner Adrian Garcia, who proposed the program, said the county decided to suspend applications to avoid giving business owners false hope.

Theres obviously not going to be enough to go around for everybody, so why leave the site up, have people frustrated that they applied to something that already effectively ran out? Garcia said.

The first-term commissioner said he hopes to expand the program by committing additional county funds or through a partnership with the state.

The loans are particularly attractive to struggling small firms because Garcia said the county hopes to pay out more quickly than similar federal government programs. Unlike funds from private lenders, Harris County is offering no-interest loans that can be forgiven after five years.

More than 1,100 businesses in each of four commissioner precincts submitted applications, including 2,324 in Precinct 3. The average loan request was $21,410.

The maximum businesses can seek is $25,000.

Lake Houston Chamber of Commerce President Jenna Armstrong said she expected applications to flow in quickly, so she urged member businesses to file when the site launched at 2 p.m. Thursday. Still, she was surprised at the volume of requests.

I think that underscores the great need thats out there, Armstrong said. Its limited funding, and everyone is trying to grasp on to whatever they can.

J. Goodwille Pierre said he successfully submitted an application for his law firm and consulting business a few hours after the site launched. He said many of his clients are restaurants who have been struggling since Harris County restricted food service to takeout and delivery almost a month ago.

Pierre said the application process was surprisingly easy compared to federal programs.

My experience with the SBA program hasnt been positive, so its a godsend, Pierre said. It will help me with short-term cash flow.

To be eligible, firms must be up to date on taxes, in business for at least a year and be able to demonstrate harm caused by the pandemic and meet other criteria. Armstrong said she has heard from firms in business less than 12 months whose owners have nowhere to turn for aid.

Ingrid Robinson, president of the Houston Minority Supplier Development Council, said the program could help some of the groups member businesses survive the pandemic. She said some business owners were puzzled by a requirement to post collateral for a relatively small loan principal.

If Im already struggling with my business, do I really want to put up my car? Robinson said.

The loans will be disbursed on a first-come, first-served basis. Garcia said business owners must promptly respond to communications from loan servicers, such as requests for additional documents, to avoid losing their places in line.

Harris County contributed the $10 million from its $300 million rainy day fund, which usually is reserved for hurricanes and economic downturns. The Houston-Galveston Area Council is administering the loan program.

Garcia said he wants to analyze which businesses receive loans through the program. He may consider asking his Commissioners Court colleagues to again dip into the rainy day account for another tranche of funding, this time with stricter rules to ensure the neediest businesses receive the limited aid.

At last Tuesdays session, Precinct 1 Commissioner Rodney Ellis suggested reserving funds for women and minority-owned businesses.

The three Democratic members voted for the loan program. Republican Precinct 3 Commissioner Steve Radack criticized the idea as an inappropriate use of taxpayer money; the courts other Republican member, Precinct 4s Jack Cagle, expressed support for the idea but voted against it saying he needed more time to study the proposal.

The proponents acknowledged the damage to businesses caused by the stay-at-home order is greater than the aid county government can provide.

We cant bail out our entire countys economy, County Judge Lina Hidalgo said.

Garcia said last week that he hoped the city of Houston would contribute to the loan fund. The city has yet to do so, but it has contributed $25,000 to a relief fund for artists.

zach.despart@chron.com
The ASEAN+3 Special Summit on COVID-19 Response on April 14 will bring in great opportunities for regional cooperation in dealing with an unprecedented" dual crisis, said Thai experts.

Dr. Robin Ramcharan

According to Dr. Robin Ramcharan, lecturer at the Webster University of Thailand and Executive Director of the Bangkok-based Asia Centre, COVID-19 has revealed itself to be not only a health crisis but also a crisis for development as supply chains are disrupted and international trade are disrupted.

This health and developmental crisis poses a challenge to ASEANs purported goal of achieving the SDGs. In light of this, there have been calls for ASEAN to step up its response to this situation, he said.

He said ASEAN has recognised these challenges and in early April announced several initiatives, including establishing a regional COVID-19 response fund, sharing information, and coordinating strategies to ease the impact of the crisis on the economy and the people. The need for peace and stability in the East Sea was discussed in discussions with China, Japan and the Republic of Korea.

Individual ASEAN members, especially Singapore, have taken decisive action that has led to flattening the curve of infection. However, for future crises the speed of the reaction must be reviewed. An assessment must be made to whether faster action could have dramatically reduced the spread of the virus, he noted.

According to Robin, the Summit must consider addressing a number of challenges within ASEAN and between it and its dialogue partners. These include the need for accurate information on the infection rate, for transparency, better functional cooperation, rapid reaction capacity, and preventing any outside interference in any decisive actions taken to contain the crisis.

Other measures for better future coordination include the possibility of a regional stockpile of medical supplies and equipment and engaging the defence sector in humanitarian responses, he said, adding this crisis brings an opportunity for ASEAN to improve its coordination through technological means, notably video-conferencing.

The Summit is vital not only for ASEAN centrality to regional politics and economics, but also for fostering better appreciation for each others approach to the Indo-Pacific concept.

This dialogue process has proven useful in managing affairs with external actors, especially big powers in order to preserve some balance of power in the region. The ASEAN Plus Three encourages intra-Asian multilateral cooperation, which has historically been absent. At this particular junction, medical cooperation through this forum should be of utmost priority.

Meanwhile, Dr. Thitinan Pongsudhirak, Director of the Institute of Security and International Studies (ISIS), said the Summit is expected to draw much attention, as China, the Republic of Korea and Japan have implemented effective measures to contain the COVID-19 pandemic.

He said, in the first outbreak in January, Southeast Asian countries seemed to have curbed the spread of the disease. Vietnam seemed to prepare to announce the end of the epidemic by the end of February. However, new infections have been rapidly increasing, with potential factors that can turn the disease into a crisis beyond the control of the region.

He said that this ASEAN 3 Special Summit is a very important event for ASEAN, in the context that the partner countries have many conditions to support this bloc.

In addition, Dr. Thitian stated that ASEAN's central role in the region is also under pressure, if the bloc cannot stabilize the situation and solve the crisis effectively.

If that happens, the COVID-19 pandemic will take away many of the achievements ASEAN has made over the past years. Therefore, this is a very important time that Vietnam in particular and ASEAN in general need to give priority to the fight against COVID-19, the ISIS leader said.

According to Robin, one can not ignore the fact that the health crisis has led to a grinding halt to ASEAN activities. Vietnam has guided ASEAN well during this crisis, including taking the responsible step of postponing the ASEAN summit until June 2020.

Vietnam has engaged in all channels of communication that are possible. It has guided a cohesive response by ASEAN through the ASEAN Chairmans Statement on ASEAN Collective Response to the Outbreak of COVID-19. At the request of Vietnam, the ASEAN Coordination Council coordinated in Laos on February 20. It also proposed the creation of an ACC Working Group on Public Health Emergencies, which was adopted. Vietnam has also called for better sharing of information, improving relations between relevant national and regional agencies and strengthening international collaboration to address the crisis. It has kept its word in pursuing during its Chairmanship theme Cohesive and Responsive ASEAN.

Vietnam has been hailed for its exemplary handling of the crisis, given the much lower infection rate and no deaths. It announced strict measures much earlier than other parts of the region. Among the good measures are strict contact tracing to identify and isolate infected persons and their second and third-hand contacts, and a strict monitoring of suspected infections. As the second wave of the virus seems to be coming, Vietnam would do well to implement nation-wide testing, to the extent that it has the means to do so.

Meanwhile, Dr. Thitinan recommends that in the coming time, Vietnam needs to keep a close watch on the situation and effectively address the immediate challenges. At the same time, it should play the role of coordinating epidemic prevention and control in ASEAN and between the bloc and its partner countries, first of all in sharing information on best practices in disease prevention and treatment.

Vietnam has certain resources such as test kits that can be shared with or transferred to other countries in the region, he said, adding that the country also needs to rearrange all agendas of ASEAN, as well as other ASEAN-led frameworks such as the East Asia Summit, in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic./. VNA
MOSCOW, April 15 (Reuters) - The Kremlin on Wednesday rejected criticism of Russia's handling of the coronavirus outbreak after China said its largest source of new, imported cases, had come from transmissions in its far northeast, bordering Russia.

China's northeastern province of Heilongjiang has become a front line in the fight to keep out imported cases as infected Chinese nationals return overland from Russia.

"We hear that there is now an exchange of criticism over coronavirus between different countries, which is played like ping pong. We consider this to be a thankless exercise," said Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov. (Reporting by Anastasia Teterevleva, Writing by Alexander Marrow; Editing by Toby Chopra)
Australian PM Douses Virus Tracking Privacy Concerns

Prime Minister Scott Morrison says AirDrop-like bluetooth-based contact tracing through mobile phones may be a sacrifice Australians need to make to stop the CCP virus, commonly known as the novel coronavirus.

Scott Morrison believes that mobile apps, like those being used overseas based on bluetooth data sharing, can be made acceptable to privacy concerns and help authorities with contact tracing that will prove crucial to saving lives during pandemic caused by the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus, commonly known as the coronavirus, if social distancing measures are to be slowly made less restrictive.

The prime minister insists that the federal government is carefully working through privacy issues before an opt-in tracing program is launched.

Were not doing it in haste, he said.

One app released by the Singaporean government, TraceTogether, uses Bluetooth data sharing to register mobile phone users who had spent 15 minutes or more in close proximity to a person with the CCP virus.

The authorities would then have to request individuals who are part of a tracing investigation to share their apps proximity records, as all records are stored locally on the phone, according to the Singaporean governments website about the app.

Keeping logs decentralised on users phones rather than on a centralised internet-accessible database means that the information will not be compromised even if the server is breached, it said.

The app relies on users having a mobile number and a Bluetooth-enabled smartphone where the Bluetooth function remains on.

Morrison said using the proximity data could help save lives and livelihoods.

If that tool is going to help them do that, then this may be one of the sacrifices we have to make, he told 6PR radio on April 15.

There are different apps being done by other companies, he added.

The prime minister said the app would be a more efficient way of contact tracing CCP virus cases than the current manual investigations.

What would happen then is the health authorities, who are the only ones whod have access to that data, would contact those people just like they do now, he said.

He said the digital information would prevent a reliance on peoples memories.

At the end of the day (that) would mean wed save lives and save more livelihoods, Morrison said.

Singapore, where about 20 percent of people have signed up to the app, has provided the open-source coding information to Australia for its own development, as well as other countries like New Zealand.

Australian health authorities estimate a 40 percent take-up rate would been needed for the scheme to be efficient.

Attorney-General Christian Porter has been tasked with investigating privacy issues surrounding TraceTogether.

Digital Rights Watch chair Lizzie OShea said people should be concerned about apps where there are no guarantees about how data would be used.

No public trust means people will hesitate to install the app, and not-very-subtly coercing people by saying restrictions could ease if surveillance increases is an appalling way to start, she said.

OShea said assurances the attorney-general would look at privacy issues were not enough.

Everything about this needs to be transparent. The code must be independently audited, she said.

There needs to be a clear benchmark for when data will no longer be collected and the app deactivated.

Communications Minister Paul Fletcher said the app would only proceed after a thorough review and implementation of privacy safeguards.

Deputy chief medical officer Nick Coatsworth said such a tool would enhance case detection and interrupt transmission chains.

With any sort of infectious disease, thats our fundamental weapon at the moment in the absence of a vaccine, he told reporters in Canberra.

He said privacy needed to be carefully considered, but labelled it a potentially important tool in the fight against the CCP virus.

By Matt Coughlan
Health secretary Matt Hancock has announced a new right to say goodbye as he admitted he wept at the death of a 13-year-old boy whose family were not allowed to be with him in his final moments.

As a father of a young teenager himself he said he wanted, wherever possible, for people to be able to see their loved ones one last time.

Mr Hancock set out out the plans as part of moves to respond to a rising death toll in care homes.

A new badge for social care workers would also allow the public to express their gratitude to them in the same way they do towards NHS workers, he said.

Ministers have been accused of not acting swiftly enough amid a growing crisis in the UKs care homes.

Mr Hancock said that wherever possible people will be given the chance to say goodbye to loved ones dying with coronavirus, following reports of older people in care homes dying without anyone by their side and hospitals banning visitors.

Mr Hancock was emotional as he spoke of 13-year-old Ismail Mohamed Abdulwahab, from Brixton, south London, dying without a parent at his bedside.

As the father of a 13-year-old himself, he said he had wept at the news and that wanting to be with someone you love at the end of their life is one of the deepest human instincts.

New procedures would be introduced to limit the risk of infection and, wherever possible, give families the chance to say goodbye, he said.

Mr Hancock also said a badge for care workers would help them access similar benefits to NHS staff.

Supermarkets have been asked to give care staff the same priority access as health service staff, he added.

This badge will be a badge of honour in a very real sense, allowing social care staff proudly and publicly to identify themselves, just like NHS staff do with that famous blue and white logo, he said.

I know that many businesses will want to offer the same recognition and benefits as they do wonderfully to the NHS.

Unions almost immediately poured cold water on the badge plan, however.

Rehana Azam, national officer of the GMB union, said: Our care workers need more than a badge and a pat on their head to define their precious role in society.

They need the protective equipment and testing on the front line now to protect their lives.

Mr Hancock also said ministers were making crystal clear that advanced care plans, including do not resuscitate orders, could not be applied to an entire group of people.

The health secretary had previously announced that all care home staff and residents who need one would receive a test.

The government has scrapped a rule that meant only the first five people in a care home to develop symptoms would be tested, to confirm an outbreak.

All those discharged from hospital to a care home will also be tested.

Mr Hancock made the announcement after it emerged a pregnant nurse has died at Luton and Dunstable University Hospital after testing positive for coronavirus.

Mary Agyeiwaa Agyapong, who worked as a nurse at the hospital, died on Sunday.

Her baby was successfully delivered and is doing well, the hospital said.
Tata Consultancy Services announced that Israel's first fully digital bank, has partnered with TCS as the first customer of its Banking Service Bureau, powered by TCS BaNCS.

TCS was selected by Israel's Ministry of Finance to transform its banking sector by building a banking service bureau that would serve as a shared, plug-and-play, digital banking operations platform - powered by the TCS BaNCS Global Banking Platform - to help start-up banks launch their operations very quickly. This initiative is seen as a bid to boost competition in the financial services sector, spark greater innovation and enhance customer experience by democratizing access to banking in Israel by making financial services accessible to the consumer.

It will serve as an online financial superstore through which an ecosystem of providers of services and products, such as insurance and credit cards, can reach out to the new generation of digital natives.

The digital bank, which is yet to be named, is the first to receive a banking license in the country, in over 40 years and is set to launch in 2021. It will have no physical branches and will provide Israeli citizens with all the services that regular brick and mortar banks offer, including credit, deposits, loans, account management, securities trading and processing. The new bank will have access to all of Bank of Israel's liquidity tools and various payment systems.

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A Virgin Australia fleet engineer fears he will be forced to either uproot his young family to move overseas or leave the industry if the struggling airline collapses.

Brisbane father Tony Hill, 35, believes he'll struggle to find another job in Australia's embattled aviation industry if his employer can't survive the coronavirus crisis as the airline waits for a potential federal government bailout.

The airline, which is now considering voluntary administration, is one of Queensland's biggest employers with 4000 jobs now under threat.

Almost half of Virgin's 10,000-strong workforce across Australia are skilled workers such as Mr Hill, who racked up ten years of experience to get the position he now has at Brisbane Airport.

Virgin Australia fleet engineer Tony Hill (pictured with wife Hannah) is one of 4,000 Queenslanders who will lose their jobs if the airline collapses due to the pandemic

With 13 years of experience in the industry, Mr Hill could be forced to decide whether to change careers or move his family overseas if he loses his job.

His wife Hannah is currently pregnant with their second child.

'There more or less is nowhere else to go,' Mr Hill told the Courier-Mail.

'There's almost nothing you can do about it because it's not a Virgin problem, it's an industry problem  you can't walk down the road and work at Qantas

'If Virgin collapses  we would be leaving the industry and a very highly-skilled workforce would disappear.'

With 13 years of experience under his belt, Tony Hill (pictured) may have to decide between a career change or moving his family overseas if he loses his job at Virgin Australia

Virgin Australia halted trading on Tuesday as it anxiously waits to find out whether it to keep flying domestically.

Most of the airline's fleet is grounded with all international flights suspended and just one Sydney-Melbourne domestic service in operation each day.

The airline has renewed calls for a $1.4 billion federal government loan in a desperate battle to survive the pandemic.

'Virgin Australia has requested a trading halt as it continues to consider ongoing issues with respect to financial assistance and restructuring alternatives,' a Virgin Australia statement read on Tuesday morning.

'This has arisen due to the unprecedented COVID-19 crisis which has particularly impacted the aviation sector.

'Virgin Australia has been keeping the air fair in Australia for 20 years and we want to continue to provide a valuable service to all Australians, the 16,000 people employed directly and indirectly, and enable the broader economy to restart quickly once we emerge from this crisis.'
New alliance unites seminaries, Christian colleges and schools amid ongoing struggles

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Dozens of Christian colleges, high schools, seminaries and Bible colleges have banded together to form an alliance uniting all sectors of Christian education to address the mutual challenges they face in an increasingly secular culture.



Over the last several years, I think a variety of people have been recognizing that various sectors of Christian education have been facing similar challenges, David Dockery, the chancellor of Trinity International University in Illinois and president of the new International Alliance for Christian Education, told The Christian Post.

We realized that K through 12 schools are addressing these challenges and so are Bible colleges and Christian colleges and seminaries. We'd never worked together because we thought we had our own issues and our own demographic context in which to serve. And we thought that perhaps we could link arms and address some of the challenges better in a synergistic way.

Dockery said that no organization or network in the past has tried to bridge Christian primary schools, secondary schools, gap-year programs, seminaries and colleges.

We've always kind of worked in our own silos, Dockery admitted. So this is an attempt to link Christian education as a whole.

IACE held its inaugural meeting in Orlando, Florida, attended by 100 people on Feb. 12-14.

According to the IACE website, the network seeks to help its members and partners focus on the distinctive mission of Christian education by strengthening confessional commitments, and sharing efforts to reclaim and advance the best of the Christian intellectual tradition.

There was a lot of interest and a great deal of hopefulness about pulling people together with shared commitments and working together collaboratively to advance a distinctive form of Christian education, Dockery said of the February gathering.

The alliance, which spans denominational lines, includes member schools from across the globe in places like Asia, Africa and Latin America.

At least 55 colleges and seminaries are members of the alliance. Through the alliance's seven partner organizations, it's connected with another 175 Bible colleges and 750 Christian primary and secondary schools.

The associations members have a shared commitment to the Nicene Creed and the Lausanne Covenant.

Partner organizations include the Alliance Defending Freedom, The Southern Baptist Conventions Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission, the Colson Center for a Christian worldview and the international mission organization TeachBeyond.

Considering partner organizations also include the Association for Biblical Higher Education and the Association of Christian Schools International, Dockery assured that the goal of the new network is not to replace other Christian educational associations that have existed for years.

Initially, some people were nervous that we were recreating the wheel and duplicating some of their efforts, Dockery said. But I think as everyone's taking a closer look, they realize that there is a way they can relate to at least an aspect of what we're doing.

Dockery told CP that IACE has a warm relationship with the Council for Christian Colleges and Universities, which has over 150 member colleges in the U.S., including Dockers own Trinity International.

He said the CCCU has been very generous in offering to partner with the IACE with student programs.

Among the similar challenges that Christian schools and colleges are facing is the fact that there seems to be fewer connections today between churches and educational institutions, Dockery said.

Additionally, Christian schools that uphold traditional orthodoxy on sex and marriage could face issues presented by LGBT nondiscrimination ordinances.

The reality that we find ourselves in a secular age calls for us to respond not by yielding to secularization but by finding ways to ensure that Christian faith will be passed to the next generation, Dockery explained. And we believe that schools at all levels play an important part in that.

We do that by recognizing that we're not trying to do something new, but we're trying to do something that's been consistent with the church's history, Dockery added. So we've put a strong emphasis on reclaiming the Christian intellectual tradition, as a way of addressing that.

When it comes to issues of human sexuality in the culture and the challenges being felt from a legal and governmental standpoint, IACE seeks to help schools navigate those challenges.

Much like secular private institutions, several Christian schools across the nation are also struggling financially due to low enrollment.

Really since 2008, Christian Schools have been feeling more and more stretched, Dockery said. We realized we need to look for ways not to duplicate effort but to share the effort to create partnerships, collaborations and look for creative ways that would help us be better stewards of the resources we have been given.

Dockery said a section of IACEs inaugural meeting in February was dedicated to the need for innovation and to think of fresh ways to approach the issues of low enrollment.

Dockery said the stay-at-home orders that have come in response to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has caused Christian education institutions to move into an innovative mindset.

Its been an amazing transition to watch everyone move to different delivery modes of doing education. Were all homeschoolers and online educators now because the meeting in the brick-and-mortar classrooms is not a reality right now and will be for the rest of the semester. I think we have to be planning for the possibility that it won't be in the fall.

The last several entries on IACEs online blog have focused on the delivery of online education.

We want to make sure institutions can be sustained in the midst of these challenges and fortify new ways of doing educational delivery that we now all share, Dockery said. I think everyone had some piece of online education, but I don't think anyone realized it would be front and center in this way right now.
Patna, April 15 : The Bihar government seems to tighten the grip over those who attended the congregation in Delhi's Nizamuddin Markaz, as 57 foreigners of different countries were arrested in Patna, Buxar, Kishanganj and Araria for violating visa rules.

According to the police, all the arrested were associated with Tablighi Jamaat.

18 have been arrested from Araria while 17 from Patna and 11 each from Kishanganj and Buxar. All of them were tested of coronavirus but they tested negative.

Kishanganj Superintendent of Police Kumar Ashish said 10 Indonesia and one Malaysian were arrested from near the Khanka Mosque a few days ago. They were tested of coronavirus however, they tested negative but still we kept then in quarantine in the Mosque itself. FIR has been lodged against them and all of them were arrested on Tuesday, after their quarantine period was over, for violating visa rules.

Similarly, seven Indonesian and four Malaysian from Naya Bhojpur in Buxar district.

Buxar Superintendent of Police Upendranath Verma said these foreign tourists had come to India on tourist visas and were preaching religion. They also participated in the congregation organised by Tablighi Jammat.

After being caught from a Mosque in Bhojpur area in March, all of them were sent to a quarantine centre. After the quarantine period got over, a FIR was lodged against them and they were sent to jail after being produced in the court.

18 foreigners, nine Malayasian and nine Bangladeshi, were arrested from Araria also for violating visa rules. Of 18, nine were staying at Jama Masjid in Araraia while nine were at Revahi Mosque in Narpatganj.

Earlier, on March 23 a FIR was registered against 17 foreigners for violating visa rules.

Among the foreigners sent to jail, nine are from Kyrgyzstan, seven from Malaysia and one from Kazakhstan.

Senior Superintendent of Patna Police Upendra Kumar Sharma, said, "FIRs against seven have been registed in Fulwari Shareef and against 10 in Digha for violating visa rules. All the accused came on tourist visa but were promoting religious congregation." Police sources said, all of them were associated with the Tablighi Jammat and the police is investigating the case.
Now is "not the time" to reduce resources for the World Health Organization (WHO) as it fights the COVID-19 pandemic,



UN chief Antonio Guterres said after US President Donald Trump announced to halt America's funding of the world body and blamed it for severely mismanaging and covering up the spread of the coronavirus.

The Trump administration has accused WHO of taking side with China in the coronavirus outbreak that has brought America's economy to a standstill.

"Today I am instructing my administration to halt funding of the World Health Organization while a review is conducted to assess the World Health Organization's role in severely mismanaging and covering up the spread of the coronavirus. Everybody knows what has gone on there," Trump told reporters on Tuesday.

The UN secretary-general expressed support for the WHO after it came under attack from Trump over the pandemic, saying that now is not the time to look back and assess how all those involved reacted to the crisis.

As it is not that time, it is also not the time to reduce the resources for the operations of the World Health Organization or any other humanitarian organization in the fight against the virus, Guterres said on Tuesday.

He said that now is the time for unity and for the international community to work together in solidarity to stop this virus and its shattering consequences.

The novel coronavirus, which originated in Wuhan City of central China's Hubei province in November, has so far infected 1.97 million people and killed at least 126,500 people globally, including more than 25,000 in the US, according to Johns Hopkins University data.

American taxpayers provide between USD 400 million and USD 500 million per year to the WHO, while China contributes roughly USD 40 million a year and even less, Trump said.

"As the organization''s leading sponsor, the US has a duty to insist on full accountability, one of the most dangerous and costly decisions from the WHO was its disastrous decision to oppose travel restrictions from China and other nations, Trump said.

As Trump lashed out at the WHO, Guterres had last week said that the COVID-19 pandemic is one of the most dangerous challenges this world has faced in our lifetime. It is above all a human crisis with severe health and socio-economic consequences.

Guterres reiterated his message from last week when he had said that WHO with thousands of its staff, is on the front lines, supporting Member States and their societies, especially the most vulnerable among them, with guidance, training, equipment and concrete life-saving services as they fight the virus.

It is my belief that the World Health Organization must be supported, as it is absolutely critical to the world's efforts to win the war against COVID-19, Guterres had said.

The UN Chief stressed that the virus is unprecedented in our lifetime and requires an unprecedented response.

Voicing support for WHO's handling of the crisis, Guterres said obviously, in such conditions, it is possible that the same facts have had different readings by different entities.

Once we have finally turned the page on this epidemic, there must be a time to look back fully to understand how such a disease emerged and spread its devastation so quickly across the globe, and how all those involved reacted to the crisis. The lessons learned will be essential to effectively address similar challenges, as they may arise in the future. But now is not that time, Guterres said.

Responding to Trump's decision, Oxfam America President and CEO Abby Maxman said picking a fight with the World Health Organization during a pandemic is shortsighted to say the least. Instead of bringing us together through this global crisis, President Trump has attacked leaders and agencies around the world, seeking to deflect blame for his own administration's failings.

The organization said with the latest move to hold back funding for the WHO, Trump is crippling any hopes for the responsible international cooperation and solidarity that is critical to save lives and restore the global economy.

Withholding funding and blame-shifting means wasted time and needless death, misery, and poverty. And it gets the US and the world no closer to an end to this disaster, Maxman said, adding that Trump must immediately reverse course and act like the global leader the world expects.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
A blog post suggests that the Finance Minister says the federal government lost 700billion naira covid-19 relief fund to the fire outbreak at the Accountant Generals office.

The Finance minister never made such a comment; with her agency issuing a tweet that rebuffs the falsehood. Moreover, the donations so far are not up to 700 billion naira.

UPDATE

While we thought we had put this claim to rest, like the walkingdead, it keeps coming back up. This iteration featured a viral WhatsApp picture-text preaching the same message:

The image in the background whose appearance is similar to a news frame shows the burning treasury house LIVE on the top left corner. It presents its message in the form of breaking news a tactic not obscure to trained eyes.

Meanwhile, after speaking with the Minister of State, Premium Times identified the cause of the fire as an electric spark earlier on April 8.

So, back to the image; on first glance, a straightforward verdict is evident- FALSE. Because the picture carries the watermark of a meme making website, its foundation is baseless at best. Further, the site also has an app which provides users with a template of a news frame; thereby, making it easier for anyone to break the news at their leisure.

It was falsely reported that Billions of Naira got burnt in the fire incident at the Accountant-Generals office

Also, it seems this is not this sites first rodeo; as it has further contributed to the wave of misinformation surrounding the pandemic on several occasions in the past.

Moreover, Prince Clem Ikanade Agba  the Minister of State for Budget and National Planning  already said that the agency did not lose any data to the fire. The minister made this comment while addressing the discussions on social media concerning possible funds lost. He further revealed that the ministrys operations are digital and that all data are intact.

Full text

The nation was awash with several conspiracy theories in respect of the fire outbreak Wednesday, April 8, 2020. Several unsubstantiated claims have ensued. Some of these conjectures claimed that the inferno was a pretext for the pilferage from the COVID-19 donation funds.

Amongst these falsehoods, comes this page which quotes Nigerias Finance Minister, Ms Zainab Shamsuna Ahmed. According to the page, she exclaimed that the government lost in a fire accident, 700 billion naira in donations from individuals.

Another false claim

This big reveal came after a section of the office of the Accountant- General of the federation was gutted by fire on April 8.

The page in question further states that the minister made the proclamation at a press interview the next day, Thursday, April 9.

The quote attributed to Ms Ahmed on the page reads:

We are sorry about the incident last occurred on Wednesday been 8th of April 2020, the government lost 700billion naira Covid-19 relief funds due to the fire outbreak, its caused a lot of damages in the office and were yet to investigate on what caused the outbreak.

Verification

While it is factual that fire engulfed a section of the office of Accountant-General of the federation; the minister of finance did not exclaim that the government lost donations as a result of the fire.

Furthermore, we checked the total donations, so far, and it corresponds to about 43billion naira; not 700billion naira as the post asserts. So far, no credible platform has reported the claim either, calling its integrity into account.

Secondly, in a Twitter response to the claim, the Ministry of Finance debunked this news.

The general public should take note. @zshamsuna did not grant a press conference or any interviews. No funds were lost in the fire at the Accountant Generals Office which was contained to two rooms. Donations are under N30b to date. This is pure mischief & should be disregarded pic.twitter.com/vknWNWHOHS  Ministry of Finance, Budget and National Planning (@FinMinNigeria) April 9, 2020

The public should take note. @zshamsuna did not grant a press conference or any interviews. No funds were lost in the fire at the Accountant Generals Office which was contained to two rooms. Donations are under N30b to date. This is pure mischief & should be disregarded.

Meanwhile, the fire razed the fourth floor and fifth floors, which are reportedly cash processing floors off the office. The fourth-floor hosts processing of allocations to the federal, state, and local governments; the fifth-floor houses the office of the Accountant General.
China has pledged to ease health measures on Africans in the southern city of Guangzhou, as the country seeks to resolve a dispute that could set back Beijing's diplomatic outreach during the coronavirus pandemic.

African leaders alleged discrimination against their citizens by city authorities in measures to stem the spread of imported coronavirus cases, saying Africans have been mistreated, evicted from hotels, and forcefully tested for the virus.

China's pledge comes as McDonald's China apologised after one of its restaurants refused to allow black customers to enter.

The company's Chinese operation said it had closed a restaurant in Guangzhou for a half day of diversity and inclusion training after an investigation confirmed social media reports and images of signs showing it was barring "black people". One sign said, in part, "We've been informed that from now on black people are not allowed to enter the restaurant".
A young man with a history of addiction has been given a six month suspended sentence after he pleaded guilty to masturbating in public on a train.

A young man with a history of addiction has been given a six month suspended sentence after he pleaded guilty to masturbating in public on a train.

Naas District Court heard evidence last Wednesday, April 11 that Andrew Roche whose address is listed as Santa Maria Hostel, Charlemount Street, Dublin was on the Dublin to Waterford train on February 16.

Garda Alan Murphy told Judge Michael Coughlan that the defendant sat down beside a woman and began masturbating, eventually ejaculating.

As well as being charged with the lewd act, he was also charged with threatening, abusive or insulting behaviour, and with soiling the seat and carpet of the train.

Representing him, Tony Hanahoe explained that the defendant is 24 years of age, and has been homeless for a number of years.

His addresses are usually always hostels. He has a long history of drug abuse.

Needless to say he is very ashamed of what he did and would like me to apologise to the court for it.

He is endeavouring to deal with his drug problem.

The judge gave him a six months suspended sentence.
The next stage of mutual release of citizens is being prepared, Ukrainian Parliament Commissioner for Human Rights Liudmyla Denisova announced.

The exchange will take place this week. The talks are currently ongoing. In particular, the date and lists of citizens are being negotiated," she said in a video address.

According to Denisova, the mutual exchange is complicated by quarantine. The citizens, who will return to Ukraine, will be required to undergo mandatory observation.

As reported, the Office of the President of Ukraine stated after the meeting of the Trilateral Contact Group held in the format of video conference on April 8 that the principled agreement on the lists for mutual exchange of detainees and the date of exchange  not later than on Easter  had been reached.

On April 10, Vice Prime Minister  Minister for Reintegration of Temporarily Occupied Territories Oleksiy Reznikov said that the residents of Crimea had not been included in the lists of prisoners who would be exchanged.

On April 13, Ukrainian Parliament Commissioner for Human Rights Liudmyla Denisova informed that a new phase of all for all detainee exchange would be held this week and everyone who returns would undergo a mandatory two-week observation.

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More than 700,000 Australians are expected to lose their jobs before mid-2020

Consumers have turned to online shopping as shops close and people stay home

Most employees will be based in the US HQ, but some Australians will be hired

An additional 75,000 workers will be hired by the US-owned online retailer

The retail giant will go on a hiring blitz to keep up with a surge in online shopping

Hundreds of jobs will be up for grabs at Amazon as demand for online shopping surges amid the coronavirus pandemic.

An additional 75,000 workers will be hired as the online retail giant battles to keep up with demand in Australia.

The lion's share of new employees will work out of the company's headquarters in Washington, but a number of Aussies will also be hired.

Consumers are now turning to online shopping as stores close and people are ordered to stay home to stop the spread of the virus.

An additional 75,000 workers will be hired as the online retail giant battles to keep up with demand in Australia

The lion's share of new employees will work out of the company's headquarters in Seattle, in Washington, but a number of Australians will also be hired

More than 700,000 Australians are expected to lose their jobs before the middle of this year because of the coronavirus pandemic.

Amazon said it expects to spend more than $500 million globally to increase wages for workers during the pandemic, up from a previous estimate of $350 million.

'We know many people have been economically impacted as jobs in areas like hospitality, restaurants and travel are lost or furloughed as part of this crisis and we welcome anyone out of work to join us at Amazon until things return to normal and their past employer is able to bring them back,' the company said in a blog post.

More than 700,000 Australians are expected to lose their jobs before the middle of this year because of the coronavirus pandemic

The federal treasury expects the unemployment rate to hit 10 per cent in the June quarter, leaving 1.4 million people out of work.

Before the coronavirus led to major economic shutdowns and mass standdowns of workers, the jobless rate was 5.1 per cent.

Treasury estimates the rate could have tripled to 15 per cent were it not for the government's $130 billion wage subsidy scheme.

Treasurer Josh Frydenberg said the expected unemployment rise is very concerning.

'But it's also a reflection of the economic challenges that we face,' he told reporters in Canberra on Tuesday.

Mr Frydenberg says the debt for the $130 billion package will be felt for years to come, but that the government isn't considering a rise to the GST.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison described the projected figures as a tragedy.

'Unemployment at that rate - hundreds of thousands of people losing their jobs - it is just absolutely heartbreaking,' he told Nine.

'The JobKeeper program means we'll be able to limit that devastation.

'We've also got the doubling of the JobSeeker program, which means that those who do find themselves unemployed will be able to gain access to support that we've never seen in this country before.'

Money under the JobKeeper program will begin flowing to eligible businesses in early May, who will then pass the $1500 fortnightly payments onto their employees.
Discount airline Wizz Air announced a decision to fire 1,000 of its employees, a workforce reduction of 19%, and cut salaries in the wake of the financial impact of the coronavirus pandemic, according to a press release sent to the Budapest Business Journal.

"First and foremost, I would like to thank our people for their tremendous support to passengers and communities across all countries during these unprecedented times, Wizz Air CEO Jozsef Varadi says.



"They have risen to the challenges facing Wizz Air and the industry with grace and determination, especially when it comes to performing repatriation flights for citizens stranded by COVID-19 across the world and delivering key medical supplies to help our countries, communities of caregivers and their patients."



Varadi says that the Wizz Air has taken various initiatives to protect the company during the COVID-19 pandemic and are reviewing the competitiveness and allocation of assets.



"We are also working to further improve our strategic, cost and cash position in the aftermath of this crisis to ensure we can deliver our long-term growth target. Wizz Air undoubtedly remains best placed for long-term value creation in the European aviation industry due to its low fare - lowcost business model and unique positioning as the market leader in the growing CEE market.



The company is expecting to deliver significant shareholder value, environmental benefits and employment opportunities in the years to come," Varadi adds.



According to the press release, additional employee furlough measures have also been and will be taken in the short term as necessitated by the travel restrictions.



Additionally, Wizz Air has been working with suppliers to reduce contracted rates and improve payment terms. The airline will gradually return 32 older leased aircraft by the end of the 2023 financial year (F23) as existing lease contracts expire.



The company also announced that for the whole financial year (F21, which ends on March 31 2021) the remuneration of the CEO, the Board of Directors and all senior officers will be reduced by 22%, while salaries of pilots, cabin crew and office staff will be reduced by 14% on average.



For the last financial year (F20), which has ended on March 31, Wizz AIR expects to report an underlying net profit in line with the companys latest guidance range of EUR 350-355 million.



In March 2020, the airlines traffic was down 34% year-on-year. Wizz Air is currently operating only 3% of its pre-coronavirus capacity.



As a consequence of COVID-19 and in line with IFRS standards, Wizz Air says will recognize exceptional losses in Q4 of F20 of EUR 7080 mln, specifically related to hedging losses for the months of March to May 2020.



As a result, Wizz Air expects to report a statutory net profit of EUR 270-280 mln for F20. At the end of March, the company had a liquidity of EUR 1.5 billion in cash.



The airline says that it is not in a position to provide guidance for the year ending 31st March 2021.



The airline expects to maintain its plans to grow capacity by an average of 15% annually as markets normalize. The launch of operations of Wizz Air Abu Dhabi is also progressing in line with the initial timeline.



Since the coronavirus outbreak, Wizz Air has worked with multiple governments to offer repatriation flights for their citizens in Europe, Central Asia, North Africa, and North America.



The company also operates flights between China and Hungary, transporting medical supplies, with most orders coming from the Hungarian government.
Denmark began reopening schools for younger children on Wednesday after a month-long closure to combat the novel coronavirus, becoming the first country in Europe to do so.

Nurseries, kindergartens and primary schools were restarting after they were officially closed on March 17 in an effort to curb the COVID-19 epidemic, though many had shut before then.

However classes are only resuming in about half of Denmarks municipalities and in about 35 percent of Copenhagens schools, as others have requested more time to adjust to health protocols. All are expected to reopen by April 20.

In the centre of the capital Copenhagen, some 220 pupils up to the second grade arrived at the Norrebro Park Skole, welcomed by their teachers who waved Danish flags. Children in the third and fourth grade will follow on Thursday.

The children quickly settled into the reorganised classrooms designed to comply with strict new sanitary guidelines.

I feel great, really good about the kids going back to school, Caroline, a 38-year-old and mother of two, told AFP.

In early April the countrys centre-left government announced that schools would be reopened on the condition that everyone keeps their distance and washes their hands.

But while schools are gradually reopening, bars, restaurants, hairdressing and massage parlours, shopping centres and discos remain closed, and gatherings of more than 10 people are banned.

Schools are required to ensure that a distance of two metres (about six feet) is maintained between desks in classrooms and recesses must be organised for small groups.

A headache for teachers is that they must ensure that pupils are never in groups of more than two while inside and five outside.

- Socially distanced teaching -

To adhere to guidelines, the school in Norrebro has divided the classes into two or three groups, limiting the number of students in a classroom to 12.

Bottles with hand sanitiser are never far away to encourage students to clean their hands regularly.

We have the space because were using the classrooms usually used by the older grades who are working from home now, said headmaster Henrik Wilhelmsen, adding that it would present an issue when older students also return.

Some parents have opposed the reopening of schools, citing health concerns. A petition dubbed My child is not a guinea pig has garnered some 18,000 signatures.

According to the petitions organisers, children can easily carry the disease without getting sick.

Wilhelmsen told AFP that around 15 parents had informed the school that they would not bring their children back.

Others however trust their governments judgement.

I think were all going to be sick at one point and they told us the children are going to be less sick and affected by this virus, said Caroline, the mother.

I think its good that theyre going back to school... We need to go back to daily life, she added.

Middle and high school students will however continue remote classes and are only expected to return to classrooms on May 10.

According to the latest figures on Wednesday morning, Denmark had 6,876 confirmed cases of the new coronavirus and 299 deaths.

Before Denmark, Austria was the first European country to unveil its roadmap for a return to a new normal.

On Tuesday, it allowed small non-food shops to open up, while maintaining social distancing rules and requiring masks to be worn in shops and on public transport.

Austria plans to keep schools, cafes and restaurants closed until at least mid-May.
Every psychiatrist and psychologist Rediff.com spoke to said one thing: Avoid news channels and social media.

Ramesh Menon reports.

IMAGE: A health worker checks a woman's temperature amid coronavirus fears. Photograph: Akhtar Soomro/Reuters

"Is the world coming to an end?"

"There is no cure for COVID-19. Many of us will die."

"I just cannot sleep well at night. If I do, I suddenly wake up shaking in fear."

"Our lives are never going to be normal anymore."

"Working at home is driving me mad as my office is not happy with my performance."

"My company has cut my salary. I might soon lose this job."

"Age is not on my side. People like me are certain to die."

IMAGE: Khushbu Mehta, 22, an architecture student, works on her project as her father Hitesh Mehta, 47, a businessman, speaks on his mobile phone inside their three-room apartment in Mumbai. Photograph: Hemanshi Kamani/Reuters

These are some of the questions and statements that psychiatrists and psychologists are grappling with as their patients battle their fears and apprehensions.

Most of them are ghosts of their imagination.

The mental disorders that are cropping up due to the spread of COVID-19 are going to haunt many of us. It is going to hang around much after the virus has disappeared.

It will radiate different kinds of symptoms and emotions that health professionals will have to handle for months to come.

Like panic attacks.

Anxiety.

Depression.

Obsessive-compulsive disorder.

Financial worries.

Fear of losing jobs or losses in business.

Fear of contracting the infection while stepping out.

Fear that the elderly who are infected will not be taken care of as priority will be to save youngsters.

Fear that the lockdown will happen again and again.

Fear of another wave of infections after the current one dies down.

Fear that some loved ones may die in the coming months.

Recurring worries about how a poor country like India can battle the virus and win when the richest countries are losing the war.

The list goes on.

Where are all these fears and complexes coming from?

Answer: News shows on television that borders on paranoia and social media are the triggers.

Every psychiatrist and psychologist that Rediff.com spoke to said one thing: Avoid news channels and social media.

The plethora of fake news on social media and the fear psychosis created by screaming anchors on television triggered anxiety and fear in normal people who were perfectly navigating their lives earlier.

The constant bombardment of information about the virus and its scathing effects worldwide was causing panic as it mainly painted a picture of an uncertain future.

One Noida student had self-quarantined though she had no symptoms. She had become paranoid watching television and WhatsApp forwards.

A recent Pew Research Centre Survey in the United States showed that 18 per cent of those surveyed reported nervousness or anxiety when they thought of the virus outbreak.

Thirty per cent said their financial situation was threatened.

A study by the Christian Medical College, Vellore, indicated that existential questions of survival and death rose out of the fear of uncertainty.

Those who had an earlier history of anxiety and depression are rushing for therapy again as their phobias have returned.

Those who have suffered financial losses in business or in the stock market are worried and anxious.

IMAGE: In Ghaziabad, on the outskirts of New Delhi, migrant workers and their families run behind a bus as they try to return to their villages. Photograph: Adnan Abidi/Reuters

Pune-based psychiatrist Dr Dayal Mirchandani warns that a huge wave of mental health cases is going to swamp India.

He is already seeing it.

Patients talk to him about their worries about their relationships, finances, jobs, salary cuts, insomnia and other issues related to mental illness.

"We have never seen something so lethal. People are naturally worried. Patients with absolutely no symptoms or history of travel are gripped by the fear of falling victim to the disease," Dr Mirchandani tells Rediff.com,/strong>.

Patients, the psychiatrist adds, shared their anxiety about going back to their crowded offices. They feared the virus would be lurking around for months as just one infected person in a building is enough for the virus to spread it to dozens within a day.

"The offices of the future will have to be remodelled as working spaces will go through a change all over the world," Dr Mirchandani says.

Employees may want to sit away from each other and not cramped together.

Delhi-based psychologist Dr Bhawna Chaudhary found that those who have to go back to hostels were suddenly fearful of consuming food there and had issues with cleanliness.

Just a few weeks ago, they were living there without any apprehensions and it was seen as a place to bond, enjoy and sculpt their careers.

This virus changed that perception.

Initially, Dr Chaudhary asked patients to look inward during the lockdown as they had lots of free time. But she found that it did not work with many youngsters.

"When they looked inward, they got into a spiral of negativity," Dr Chaudhary says. "So, I changed tack and asked them to be physically active, exercise at home, dance and listen to music."

Many patients who had recovered from mental health issues regressed, experiencing panic attacks, anxiety and depression.

The spread of the disease all over India has worsened it for them.

IMAGE: A man performs a song during a programme organised by the Ahmedabad police to entertain housebound citizens. Photograph: Amit Dave/Reuters

The Indian Psychiatry Society says there has been a 20 per cent rise in mental illness after the outbreak.

At least one in five Indians are suffering.

Gurugram-based psychologist and hypnotherapist Dr Deepika Chamoli says this is mainly due to the negative reinforcement that television channels and social media were whipping up.

Many, Dr Chamoli says, felt working from home had led to more stress as they were not able to perform well.

They could not concentrate on work with their wife and children around.

They feared losing their jobs as their bosses were unhappy with their output.

She found many housewives could not handle their husbands and children as they had done before and were getting irritated and angry for even simple, sundry things.

It had shattered domestic peace.

Many were not able to handle obsessive parents and in-laws who would keep on talking of how they would soon die.

Psychologists noticed adjustment problems with both men and women.

They were suddenly spending 24 hours together.

Dr Chamoli says some patients who were positively disposed were responding faster to suggestions of meditation, focusing on one activity, enjoying quality time with their families and exploiting this once in a lifetime opportunity to be with them.

Some patients asked Dehradun-based psychologist Dr Mnayitre Ghoshal if the world was going to end.

Many previous patients started bringing up earlier illnesses or fears, saying they were once again sick and needed therapy.

"When we are confused or apprehensive about the future, our minds naturally gravitate towards anxiety-related issues. Many of us live normal goal-oriented lives. Suddenly, there is a shock forcing us to look away from our jobs or goals to uncomfortable truths," says Dr Ghoshal.

IMAGE: Doctors too worry about contracting the coronavirus. Photograph: PTI Photo

March and April usually see a plethora of parties on every campus as placements get finalised and students get wings to fly out and build exciting careers.

Not this year.

Students who were earlier placed are now unsure.

Organisations are reconsidering their offers and many are not offering the promised salaries.

Result: Anxiety and pessimism.

Dr Rita Kumar, who teaches at the Amity Institute of Psychology and Allied Sciences at Noida, answers numerous calls every day from students who are worried about their careers, job opportunities and have anxiety-related issues.

Many complain of insomnia.

Dr Kumar says the trick is to maintain a regular routine even during the lockdown and continue to either work out of home or engage in some activity like enrolling in an online course and completing it.

"Remaining positive during these troubled times is very important not only for each of us to become resilient but also to help others to cope," she says.

She was happy when students told her that they were using their time doing household work, helping their parents cope and spending quality time with their family.

Dr Debanjan Banerjee, a geriatric psychiatrist at the National Institute of Mental Health and Neurological Sciences in Bengaluru, told Rediff.com: "India also needs to get ready to integrate mental health into the public health system to meet the challenges of pandemics like the one we are witnessing. It is going to be a long haul.

"We need to convert this tragedy into an opportunity by introducing family bonding to get rid of other illnesses caused by loneliness and lack of moral support," he adds.

One fallout that has not been talked about is the domestic violence that women are witnessing during the lockdown. Closed in the confines of their house, they are helpless.

The National Commission for Women said in the first 10 days of the lockdown, 257 women contacted it to complain about abuse like rape, attempt to rape, domestic violence and even online harassment.

Women are hesitant to call helplines as they fear more abuse if the police release their abusers and they then have to live with them locked in their houses.

Medical professionals have their own worries.

Dr Divya Manchanda from Delhi says she lives in constant fear of being infected. Like many other doctors, she feels certain that it will happen sooner or later.

"There is a fear that there will not be enough beds in any hospital someday. I am more afraid about my mother's plight as she lives alone and I cannot even go and meet her. She also lives in fear, not about herself but about me. She wants me to return home, but I cannot do that," Dr Manchanda says.

In the months ahead, we are going to see mental tremors shake our lives as never before.

In some form or another, each one of us will experience it.

Ramesh Menon is an author, journalist, documentary film-maker and corporate trainer.
'As a doctor, I always knew I would get it, but I was always sure I would get cured too.'

IMAGE: Kindly note the image has been posted only for representational purposes. Photograph: Manvender Vashist/PTI Photo

Dr Tauseef H Khan, a resident doctor in the infectious disease department at the King George's Medical University, Lucknow, was diagnosed as a COVID-19 patient in mid-March.

After contracting the virus from a patient, he has been in isolation and will be discharged from hospital on April 21.

Dr Khan, below, ever so positive about his condition, tells Syed Firdaus Ashraf/Rediff.com that he felt guilty about passing on the infection to his family and is confident that India will win this battle against coronavirus.

Continuing our series on Indian heroes at the frontline of the war against coronavirus:

A lady doctor settled in Canada had come to my hospital -- the King George's Medical University, Lucknow -- on March 11 to be treated for coronavirus.

As I was the doctor on duty, I had to treat her. When she came in, I noticed she was showing signs of the virus and immediately put her in isolation.

Later, it was found that she had tested positive.

Five days after she was tested positive, I started suffering from a running nose and myalgia (pain in the muscles). However, I didn't run a fever.

I was tested and the results were positive for coronavirus.

My advice to every Indian is that as soon as you get any symptoms of coronavirus, please see a doctor or try to reach a government centre which is treating COVID-19 patients.

The sooner you go to a doctor, the more chances that it will save your life.

If you are late, then you are in trouble.

If you diagnose early, then you are more in the safe zone because you will be put on immediate treatment.

The first initial symptom of COVID-19 is mild fever, myalgia, running nose, sore throat or fever.

If you delay your treatment, then you will have respiratory problems or pneumonia, which can be very dangerous. Therefore, it is better that you go to a doctor at the earliest and get treated.

There is no cure as of now for COVID-19. Under a doctor's observation and prescription, I took Oseltamivir and chloroquine.

Now I am feeling better. I am ready to go back to work from April 22.

When I first read about COVID-19 I immediately knew that this is a highly communicable disease and doctors are the first category of people who will get infected.

I always knew we were in a high-risk category of getting infected and therefore, I was not scared or worried when I got infected.

The worst part of being a COVID-19 patient is to inform your loved ones that you are infected.

Another aspect of the disease which is hard is that you know immediately that you have spread the virus to the loved ones with whom you stay at home or at the work place.

You do feel guilt, but what can one do, after all a doctor has to go home too.

Since I was staying with five of my relatives, three of them got infected due to me. Now they too are out of the danger zone and will be out of quarantine.

As soon as I developed symptoms, I immediately quarantined those relatives. Therefore, the transmission chain broke and did not spread beyond my home.

This is very important for every COVID-19 patient to do because they have to break the chain so that the virus does not spread.

My parents, two brothers and sisters who are not staying with me in Lucknow got very worried when they came to know that I was a COVID-19 patient.

I call them regularly and update them about my health. Since I sound perfectly fine on the phone, the thought of having the virus was not too worrying for them.

IMAGE: Dr Tauseef H Khan contracted coronavirus from an Indian-Canadian patient he was treating for the same at the King George's Medical University in Lucknow. Photograph: Kind courtesy Dr Tauseef H Khan

I feel that once you contract the virus, the chances of getting it again are less. In China, though, there are some cases where people have got the disease again to which I will say precaution is always good.

I sincerely believe every Indian has to follow the lockdown orders issued by the government. This is the only way right now to avoid coronavirus from spreading.

And if you have to go out due to an emergency, then go out with safety equipment, like wearing a mask and gloves. Everyone must practise social distancing.

In the medical fraternity, too, new guidelines have been issued for doctors treating coronavirus patients.

One medical team, which works like a unit, works for seven days with coronavirus patients and then that medical team self-quarantines for 14 days. If they test negative, they can resume work.

India will win the battle against coronavirus, Inshallah.

We have four per cent positive patients out of 100 tested patients. And now we are testing more and still 4 per cent is the result. Therefore, I am very sure that coronavirus has not spread to the community level.

COVID-19 is a highly communicable disease, but recovery rates are also good. The mortality rate is not more than two per cent.

As a doctor, I always knew I would get it, but I was always sure I would get cured too.

Actually, if you observe closely, coronavirus is just fever and cough. You do not need to worry.

You must not fear death, but must report to the authorities as soon as possible when you develop symptoms of COVID-19.
Microsofts Your Phone app was originally designed for both iOS and Android, then narrowed to an Android-only feature. Now Microsoft seems to be focusing the app further, limiting Your Phones advanced functionality to just Samsung devices.

As part of a new Windows 10 Insider build for the Fast Ring, Build 19608, Microsoft is improving the Windows 10 Your Phone app by adding drag-and-drop capabilities for files. But if you dont own a supported Samsung phone, youre out of luckit wont work. Microsoft is adding copy and paste features to more Samsung devices, too, which is similarit simply requires you to use the actual copy and paste commands instead. In the Build 19582 update in March, Microsoft also added support to turn off your phones screen remotelybut again, just for some Samsung phones.

Users who dont own a Samsung phone receive a few improvements, too. But theyre far more minor: a general UI overhaul to the Your Phone app will sync the apps background with your phones wallpaper, and the typography of the headers was made more prominent. The Messages portion will also receive an interface with more rounded message bubbles, something everyones undoubtedly waited for with bated breath.

Otherwise, theres little in the new build to get excited about. The company changed the way in which the Windows 10 Settings menu handles the default app experiences, and thats about it. Microsoft also fixed some general bugs, including a crash that would occur if Sticky Notes were moved about the screen.

Remember, the current state of Windows 10 Fast builds is that Microsoft is simply testing code. Theyre not tied to any any specific upcoming release to the general public.

Microsoft The new build makes a small change to the Settings menu.

Lets hope, however, that Microsoft doesnt continue to pursue Your Phone hand-in-hand with Samsung, excluding other phone manufacturers. One of the dichotomies we noted in our recent Windows 10 20H1 / 2004 review is that Your Phone feels nearly complete in its basic functionality, but the quality and cohesion of the experience still depends too much on the hardware. It looks like that will still hold true for the near future.
MIAMIIn a 2-1 decision, a federal appeals court has ruled against victims of sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein, who were seeking to overturn the late multi-millionaires secret 2008 federal plea deal in an effort to go after co-conspirators who received immunity under the agreement.

Despite calling the case a national disgrace, two judges with the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said victim Courtney Wild was not entitled to confer with the government about the case, appear at Epsteins sentencing nor to have been even informed that he had received a non-prosecution agreement.

The lawsuit arose in 2008 after federal prosecutors and Epsteins lawyers reached a deal to allow Epstein to plead guilty to two prostitution charges in state court, rather than face a 53-page federal indictment on sex-trafficking charges. As part of the agreement, Epstein and an untold number of alleged co-conspirators were also given immunity, despite allegations that they had sexually abused some three dozen girls at his mansion in Palm Beach.

Wild, who was 14 when she was first sexually abused by Epstein, petitioned the federal court in 2008 to throw out the deal, arguing that it violated the federal Crime Victims Rights Act, which gives victims certain rights, including the right to be informed by prosecutors how the case is being disposed of. In Epsteins case, then-U.S. attorney Alexander Acosta agreed to keep the deal secret  and allowed it to be sealed  so that none of Epsteins victims would be able to raise objections to it and possibly sway the judge until after Epstein had already been sentenced and sent to jail.

Epstein was re-arrested in New York in July 2019, and was found dead a month later in his Manhattan jail cell, where he was awaiting trial on sex-trafficking charges brought by the U.S. attorney in the Southern District of New York. His death was ruled a suicide. The arrest came after the Miami Herald published an investigative series, Perversion of Justice, dissecting the case.

Epsteins victims had hoped that federal prosecutors would prosecute Epsteins alleged accomplices, identified in the agreement as Sarah Kellen Vickers, Nadia Marcinkova, Lesley Groff and Adriana Ross. The women were accused of helping Epstein recruit and schedule underage girls for sex. The deal, however, also mentions that it covers unnamed co-conspirators who have never been identified.

Tuesdays court decision could impact whether its possible to charge the co-conspirators with crimes that they were given immunity for in Florida.

A lower-court decision, in February 2019, concluded that prosecutors had violated the CVRA by intentionally misleading Epsteins victims, and telling them that the criminal case was still moving ahead, when in fact, a deal had been signed months earlier. But the judge stopped short of voiding the agreement, which led to Tuesdays ruling.

Despite our sympathy for Ms. Wild and others like her, who suffered unspeakable horror at Epsteins hands, only to be left in the dark  and so it seems, affirmatively misled  by government lawyers, we find ourselves constrained to deny her petition, Judges Kevin Newsom and Gerald Bard Tjoflat said in writing for the majority.

They explained: Because the government never filed charges or commenced criminal proceedings against Epstein, the CVRA was never triggered.

In dissenting, Judge Frank M. Hull pointed out that not only were criminal proceedings already well underway, but the government had assured Epsteins lawyers they had proof beyond a reasonable doubt of his crimes  as evidenced by the 53-page draft federal indictment. Prosecutors inexplicably shelved the case upon reaching an agreement with Epsteins lawyers. The only female on the panel, Hull chastised the majority for making a decision that essentially will allow prosecutors in the future to continue to make secret plea deals with wealthy criminals.

The majoritys new blanket restriction eviscerates crime victims CVRA rights and makes the Epstein case a poster child for an entirely different justice system for crime victims of wealthy defendants, Hull said.

Wild was stunned, saying Tuesday that she had hoped the panel would recognize the significance of the case and use it to set a precedent that sends a message to prosecutors that they cannot make backroom deals with wealthy and powerful sex predators and child molesters.

Justice has never been served in this case, and its a sad day because this is just another victory for Jeffrey Epstein, and other people committing crimes against women and children, Wild said.

Every time we get to the point that we are going toward the greater good, that maybe we will get justice, we get shut down.

One of her lawyers, Paul Cassell, said he would appeal the decision en-banc to the entire 11th Circuit.

For all the reasons given in the 60-page dissenting opinion, we strongly disagree with todays ruling, which leaves victims like Ms. Wild without any remedy, even for victims like her who have been affirmatively misled by federal prosecutors. We will be seeking a rehearing en banc before the full 11th Circuit.

The 120-page decision is rife with criticism from both sides on how federal prosecutors  and even the news media  handled the case.

We are doubtlessly omitting many of the sad details of this shameful story. For our purposes, we neednt discuss the particulars of Epsteins crimes, or the fact that the national media essentially ignored for nearly a decade the jailing of a prominent financier for sex crimes against young girls, the majority wrote.

Today, the public facts of the case are well-known  Epstein was eventually indicted on federal sex trafficking charges in the Southern District of New York, and in August 2019, while awaiting trial, he was found dead in his jail cell of an apparent suicide.

Hull disagreed with their assessment, writing: While the majority laments how the national media fell short on the Jeffrey Epstein story, this case is about how the U.S. prosecutors fell short on Epsteins evil crimes. Our criminal justice system should safeguard children from sexual exploitation by criminal predators, not revictimize them.
The cuts target Head Start, a national early-childhood program aimed at educating children from low-income families. Chancellor Lewis D. Ferebee said Wednesday that the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, which runs the program, planned to withhold federal funding after flagging safety issues in the school systems operation of the program. Rather than lose the funding, he pulled the application, he said, adding that he plans to address the systemic issues and consider reapplying in future years.
Downing Street insisted today its threat to walk away from Brexit talks in June if not enough progress on a deal with the EU had been made remains in place despite the coronavirus pandemic.

UK negotiator David Frost and Brussels counterpart Michel Barnier held remote talks today and unveiled three week-long virtual summits are planned, later this month, in May and early June.

In a joint statement they said that a meeting of high-level figures earmarked for June would 'take stock of the progress made', and suggested the two sides remain some way apart.

Before the coronavirus pandemic struck, Boris Johnson's government had said it would walk away from the talks and leave the transition period on December 31 on World Trade Organisation terms.

With the economy in freefall there have been calls for the negotiations to be put on the backburner until the worst has passed.

The Office for Budget Responsibility yesterday saying the virus could be the worst hit on the economy in at least a century.

But asked about the threat to walk away from talks in June and go it alone, the Prime Minister's official spokesman told reporters today: 'What we said was June was the period in which we can take stock in relation to how negotiations have progressed.

'That remains the case.'

UK negotiator David Frost and Brussels counterpart Michel Barnier (pictured above at a previous round of talks) held remote talks today (top) and unveiled three week-long virtual summits are planned, later this month, in May and early June.

Downing Street is believed to have reiterated to Mr Barnier that it will not extend the transition period, despite the new economic problems affecting both the UK and EU nations.

At the end of February Mr Johnson put Britain on a collision course with the EU, warning Brussels that the Government would pull the plug on trade talks if it did not get its way.

The Prime Minister's administration wants to see the 'broad outlines' of a 'Canada-style' deal with Brussels before the planned June summit, according to its confrontational official negotiating mandate.

In today's joint statement, the two sides said there would be further weekly summits held remotely, starting April 20, May 11 and June 1.

Discussing today's talks, they said: 'The two sides took stock of the technical work that has taken place since the first negotiating round on the basis of the legal texts exchanged by both sides.

'While this work has been useful to identify all major areas of divergence and convergence, the two sides agreed on the need to organise further negotiating rounds in order to make real, tangible progress in the negotiations by June.

'Given the ongoing coronavirus crisis, these negotiating rounds  the structure of which is set out in the Terms of Reference  will take place via videoconference.'
Thiruvananthapuram, April 15 : A special British Airways flight took off from here on Wednesday with 110 foreign nationals and picked up another 158 from Kochi to London.

A majority of the passengers were British nationals and also included nationals from Austria, Canada, Portugal, Ireland and Lithuania.

All of them were stranded here after the normal airline services were suspended following the nationwide lockdown which came into effect last month.

The passengers who boarded from Kochi included seven who had tested positive for Covid-19 and were treated successfully in Kochi.

Jeremy Pilmore-Bedford, Deputy High Commissioner in Bengaluru, was at the Kochi airport, supervising the repatriation operations.

This is the third aircraft to repatriate stranded passengers in Kerala from Europe since the lockdown. An Air India aircraft with 232 passengers left for Germany on March 31. Four days later, a second aircraft flew 112 people to France.
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Linkedin Moch. Fiqih Prawira Adjie (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Wed, April 15, 2020 10:21 636 fc6853813033f564188675f8bd1f6a18 1 National KPK,National-Police,law-enforcement,anti-graft-body,Firli-Bahuri,Corruption-Eradication-Comission,corruption,police-generals,wealth-reports Free

Corruption Eradication Commission (KPK) chairman Firli Bahuri inaugurated Brig. Gen Karyoto on Tuesday as the agencys deputy for law enforcement amid criticism from antigraft activists over a lack of transparency in the selection process.

Karyoto, who previously served as Yogyakarta Police deputy chief, passed the selection process for the vital position in the antigraft body.

A key position in the agency, the deputy for law enforcement oversees all legal matters, from questioning and investigations to issuing charges against graft suspects. The post has been left vacant by Firli, who in June 2019 returned to the National Police before returning to the KPK after passing the screening process at the House of Representatives in September 2019.

Karyoto was among the final three candidates, all police generals, vying for the position. The names of the candidates were finally revealed by the KPK following backlash from a coalition of antigraft watchdogs, who lambasted the lack of transparency. The coalition, comprising the Indonesia Corruption Watch (ICW), West Sumatras Andalas Universitys Constitution Study Center (PUSaKO), the Indonesia Legal Aid Institute (YLBHI) and the Indonesian Legal Aid and Human Rights Association (PBHI), also raised concerns that KPK leaders were motivated by a hidden agenda in the selection process.

Read also: KPK limits detention center visitors amid COVID-19 pandemic

The agency brushed off the concerns, saying the KPK was committed to ensuring transparency through an open recruitment process.

According to the KPK State Organizers Assets Reports (LHKPN) database elhkpn.kpk.go.id., Karyoto was found to not have filed a wealth report since 2013.

He last reported his wealth and assets on Dec. 18, 2013, when he was still serving as the general crime director for the Yogyakarta Police.

His last entry in the database reported he had Rp 5.45 billion (US$346,747) to his name, which consisted of Rp 5.72 billion in land and properties, Rp 400 million in vehicles, Rp 800 million in business ventures and 1.27 billion in bank accounts and cash, minus 2.84 billion in debt.

The LHKPN is used to record state organizers assets and wealth to help with public monitoring and accountability. Routinely reporting ones wealth and assets is a consideration for assignments and promotions.

Read also: 100 days of blunders: Watchdog slams new KPK chairman's performance

Karyoto was appointed as the Yogyakarta Police deputy chief in 2019 after serving as the deputy chief for the North Sulawesi Police. Karyoto graduated from the police academy in 1990 with a specialization in detective work.

In addition to Karyoto, Firli also inaugurated the National Polices Criminal Investigation Department (Bareskrim) corruption crime director Sr. Comr. Endar Priantoro as deputy director for investigations on Tuesday.

The agency also appointed Communications and Information Ministry official Mochamad Hadiyana as information and data deputy head and prosecutor Ahmad Burhanudin as its legal bureau head. All of the newly appointed officials have reported their wealth since at least 2018.
Los Angeles, April 15 : "Pirates Of The Caribbean" actor Lee Arenberg says a sixth movie is "definitely" being discussed by the makers.

The 57-year-old star, who essayed the role of pirate Pintel in the original trilogy, has not been involved in the franchise since 2007's "At World's End". He suggested that a new film is on the horizon, reports dailymail.co.uk.

"They're definitely talking about it, as far as I know," Arenberg said when he appeared on "Kendall Talks TV".

It is unclear whether the new installment will be another sequel or a reboot of the original franchise, which featured Johnny Depp as Captain Jack Sparrow. Last year, Disney brought Ted Elliot and Craig Mazin on board to work on the film franchise.

While details are being kept under wraps, Arenberg says he would be up for a comeback.

"I mean yeah, of course, obviously. But they've already done two without us. I love it, though, I love that part. But it's not up to me," he added.

The highly anticipated sixth film follows 2015's "Dead Men Tell No Tales". Stuart Beattie, who was attached with "Curse of the Black Pearl" as a screenwriter, previously suggested the studio was looking to the future.

He said: "I think (Depp's) had a great run. Obviously he's made that character his own and it's become the thing that he's most famous for now. It's been great for him and it's been great for us... There's that saying, 'Don't frown because it's over, smile because it happened. The fact that they're rebooting something that you did means that you did something that was worth rebooting. It's an honour." The sixth part will be directed by Joachim Ronning, who had also helmed the previous part of the franchise. The release date of "Pirates of the Caribbean 6" is still not announced but there are reports that the next sequel is slated to release in 2021.

-- The story has been published from a wire feed without any modifications to the text
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Fuel cells are devices which convert the fuels chemical energy into electricity via a chemical reaction in the presence of an oxidizing agent. They can be of different types, but they all consist of an anode, cathode, as well as an electrolyte. They use hydrogen or other hydrocarbon fuels which are available in abundance, along with an oxidant (usually oxygen), to carry out an electrochemical reaction. This makes them one of the fastest growing alternate backup power options. Additionally, they are eco-friendly as their by-product only comprises nitrous oxide. They generate lower noise levels as compared to other incumbent technologies due to lack of moving parts and an efficient combustion process.

There are various types of such cells, the major ones being PEMFC (Proton Exchange Membrane), SOFC (Solid Oxide), PAFC (Phosphoric Acid) and MCFC (Molten Carbonate). Portable applications include consumer products such as laptops and mobile phones, personal electronics, Accelerated Processing Units, portable products and consumer products such as laptops and mobile phones. Stationary applications include Uninterrupted Power Supply (UPS), residential power and Combined Heat Power (CHP). Transportation applications include auxiliary power units and electric vehicles. Fuel cell vehicles, generally hydrogen fuel cell vehicles, have gained a lot of support and visibility in the past few years. With this in mind, fueling stations have seen a healthy growth in the past few years.

The global fuel cell market is an attractive one, owing to the following factors:

Governments of various countries have been pushing for their development and technological advancement due to their eco-friendly nature, which is expected to significantly drive the market.

The increasing need for reduced emissions and better fuel economy has resulted in development of fuel cell enabled commercial vehiclesthat utilize hydrogen fuel.

Various countries and participants are trying to successfully implement this technology at lower costs, which increases their market attractiveness.

However, their implementation and use also comes with a set of restraints. Most significant among them being cost, as even though technological advancements are being made in the field, they have still not been able to compete economically with traditional energy technologies, which includes gasoline internal combustion engines. Another issue with is that hydrogen storage and distribution is difficult, which provides hindrance to market growth. Vehicles based on this technology have their set of detractors, with the production, storage and cost of the technology being the most common point of argument. This is expected to hinder the future market.

North America dominates the market in terms of installed capacity and unit shipment owing to favorable regulatory scenario and technological advancement in this region. The U.S. Department of Energy has over 300 patents on fuel cell technology and is extensively involved in its research. Asia Pacific is the second largest market due to high demand from Japan and South Korea. The market in other countries such as China and India is also expected to increase due to an increase in the technological capabilities and government support. Europe is expected to witness fast growth in terms of their installed capacity primarily due to growing hydrogen fuel infrastructure in Germany, Norway, Denmark and Sweden.

Key manufacturers include:

Dominion Resources Inc.

Ballard

ClearEdge

Plug Power Inc.

Nedstack

SFC Energy AG

Toshiba

Panasonic, among others.

The major developments that have taken place in the market in the past few years include:

In May 2019, Nedstack, based in Netherlands, has tied up with OSD-IMT, another Dutch organization specializing in ship designing, to manufacture the worlds first hydrogen fuel cell powered tugboat. Through this, the focus is on reducing the environmental footprint of economic activity, along with testing of new technologies. The design involves a 65-ton bollard pull harbor tug, which will be completely electric-driven. Electric power for the propulsion motors will be generated onboard by hydrogen fuel cells. The design is expected to be implemented further in smaller and larger tugs as well.

In July 2019, Ballard Power Systems announced an agreement with Wrightbus, an OEM for buses headquartered in Northern Ireland, which detailed a purchase of 15 FCveloCity-HD 85-kilowatt fuel cell modules for powering buses in Aberdeen, Scotland. This development is under the JIVE (Joint Initiative For Hydrogen Vehicles) program. The program targets a deployment of 291 fuel cell buses in more than 20 cities in Europe.

In May 2019, SFC Energy AG, headquartered in Germany, received an order for tempered defense fuel cell products worth 1.4 Million Euros, from an Asian defense organization. The companys JENNY 600S AND EMILY 3000 cells, along with the SFC Power Manager 3G are used to power off-grid border protection equipment, electrical equipment, as well as communication and radio systems, which may be located on high altitudes as well as at remote outposts.

In September 2019, Plug Power, which provides hydrogen engines and fueling solutions, reached an agreement with ENGIE, which provides energy transition services, to expand the use of renewable hydrogen and fuel cells. Plug Power will be working with ENGIE to identify potential markets and customers. The agreement will allow adoption of hydrogen as an efficient and clean energy source that enhances productivity.

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.
[April 15, 2020] IOWN GF Unveils Vision 2030 White Paper, Launches Working Groups and Steering Committees to Define Next Generation Communications Infrastructure and Welcomes New Members

The Innovative Optical and Wireless Network Global Forum (IOWN GF) unveiled today its Innovative Optical and Wireless Network Global Forum Vision 2030 and Technical Directions White Paper and the IOWN GF steering committees and working groups. The steering committees and working groups will begin work in late April. IOWN GF also announced that Chunghwa Telecom, Ciena, Fujitsu, Microsoft (News - Alert) and NEC joined as sponsor members. Mitsubishi (News - Alert) Chemical Holdings joined as a general member. Founded by Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corporation (NTT), Intel Corporation (Intel) and Sony Corporation (Sony), IOWN GF was established to define the next generation communications infrastructure ad help create a smarter world for billions of people.



"The coronavirus (COVID-19) has spread quickly causing infection and transforming the lives and economies of people around the world. We couldn't have foreseen this outcome," said Katsuhiko Kawazoe, Ph.D., president and chairperson of the board, IOWN Global Forum, Inc. "For the moment, even with some of the most dedicated and intelligent people in the world focused on treatment and prevention, answers still elude us. Although the focus in this case is healthcare, IT is more involved than ever before in the daily lives of people and in many industries. For example, in the current pandemic, telecommunications and teleconferences have significantly increased the traffic on communication networks. My sincere hope is that as society changes, IT research and development will similarly evolve to meet the new challenges. It is my belief that IOWN GF and its activities will be instrumental in aiding humanity both today and in the future." The global forum's objective is to accelerate the adoption of a new communications infrastructure that will bring together an all photonics network infrastructure including silicon photonics, edge computing, dynamic computing scaling and wireless distributed computing to meet global future data and computing requirements.

IOWN GF Vision 2030 - A Smarter World With artificial intelligence, virtual and augmented realities, 5G, dynamic computing scaling, blockchain and other advanced technologies on the verge of becoming part of the daily lives for billions of people, IOWN GF's Vision 2030 is to define and build a global communications infrastructure over the next decade capable of sustainably maximizing the benefits these new technologies offer society and businesses. The hope is to create a smarter world where technology is used more naturally and becomes more pervasive for all. Download the Innovative Optical and Wireless Network Global Forum Vision 2030 and Technical Directions White Paper (News - Alert) here. IOWN GF's Steering Committees And Working Groups IOWN GF's goals include securing 100 members, publishing 75 technical specifications and releasing 50 proof-of-concepts by 2030. This work will be driven by IOWN GF's steering committees and working groups. The steering committees will be responsible for facilitating collaborations and interactions between working groups, leading working groups' scope arrangement and increasing awareness of IOWN GF. The working groups will be responsible for producing specifications, use cases and reference architecture, deciding technical scope and content. Steering committees and working groups include: Vision Steering Committee; Technology Steering Committee; Marketing Steering Committee; Use Case Working Group and Technology Working Group. About IOWN GF IOWN GF's objective is to accelerate innovation and adoption of a new communication infrastructure to meet our future data and computing requirements through the development of new technologies, frameworks, specifications and reference design in areas such as Photonics R&D, Distributed Connected Computing and Use Cases and Best Practices. Technology, telecommunications and other industry organizations are invited to join the forum. Based in the United States, IOWN GF membership opportunities are available. More details on IOWN GF and membership information can be found at: http://www.iowngf.org. # # # View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20200415005487/en/

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The first positive case in Jharkhand was recorded on March 31, a week after the national lockdown was announced. It was of a Malaysian woman in her early twenties, a member of Tablighi Jamaat group that was picked from different mosques in the state capital. She is still under treatment at Rajendra Institute of Medical Sciences (RIMS).

As per the latest official data, the number of positive cases stand at 24, of which two persons have died  one each in Ranchi and Bokaro. Both were senior citizens. These cases have been reported from across five districts including Ranchi, Bokaro, Hazaribag, Koderma and Giridih.

Eleven of the 24 positive cases have been reported from one area, Hindpiri, in Ranchi. The entire area, the biggest hotspot in the state with a dense population of around 60,000, has been under curfew for about a week. Six of the 11 cases in Hindpiri are from one single family, including a 60-year-old man who died on Sunday morning.

The other two hotspots are in Bokaro. The districts first case was reported from Tello village under Chandrapura block. A woman of this village, who had been to Bangladesh and then to New Delhi to attend religious congregation Tablighi Jamaat, was detected positive for Covid-19 on April 5. Later, four members of her family were also found infected with novel coronavirus infection.

The districts second hotspot is Saram village under Gomia block from where three confirmed cases have so far been reported. The village came in light after the death of the 75-year-old man who was tested positive few hours before he breathed his last.

The deceased, reportedly, had no travel history or contact history with any positive case. The district administration is still tracing the links as to how the man got infected with coronavirus infection.

Of the 24 positive cases in the state, the authorities have been able to trace connection of five to Tablighi Jamaat.

While Jharkhand figures lower in terms of number of positive cases as compared to other states, it is also due to slow pace of testing. As on Monday, 2,523 tests were conducted from across the state.

First, this is one state which would not have many people who might have come from abroad. As far as migrant workers are concerned, most could not return. One advantage of the state has also been that the population is sparsely habited across the state. Even the urban centres are not very densely populated, said a health department official.

The officials, however, rue the fact that the tests are not adequate for a state with a population estimated to be over three crore.

Obviously, it is due to the lack of number of testing kits, besides the lack of testing centres. We have two centres which are fully operational. The third started on Monday, but it is still to get into the groove. Testing has gathered pace only since April 10 when over 200 samples were picked. Monday saw the highest to date with 406 sample collection. The chief minister and the health minister have been highlighting it during all of their interactions with the Centre, said an official.

One of other aspects of the lockdown has been providing ration and food to the needy. The state government has started over a 1,000 daal-bhaat centre across the state besides the Didi kitchens in all panchayats in the state, providing free meal to the needy. The state government is now also planning to transfer 2,000 to a migrant worker from one family, stuck outside the state, on recommendation of the local MLA. As per estimates, over seven lakh migrant workers from Jharkhand are expected to be stuck in different states.

Taking lessons, the state government has also constituted a subcommittee of three ministers for overseeing the related issues during the lockdown. We focused on providing food to the needy, besides seeing that agriculture produce and other things like milk production is not affected during the first leg of lockdown. We are going to implement all such measures even more effectively now, said Rameshwar Oraon, states finance and civil supplies minister. Oraon is also a member of the ministers subcommittee constituted on Tuesday.

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But machine learning algorithms are playing a bigger role because theres so much more and different information available. Asset managers are forecast to spend $1.7 billion this year on alternative data  facts and figures compiled by sources other than companies, government agencies and the like  compared with $232 million in 2016, according to AlternativeData.org, an association of analysts and engineers. Thats just on data, not the hardware and software that analyze it.

A report from the investment management firm Neuberger Berman detailed how the company uses such nontraditional data. It included scouring credit card receipts to see if men are shopping at Lululemon, a clothing chain viewed as a destination almost exclusively for women, and collating social media posts to get a clue whether Procter & Gambles employees approved of a major revamping effort. The fund provider also cited a program that evaluates natural speech for phrases that have correlations with future share price performance.

Causeway Capital Management, in a report of its own, said it used big data to help forecast the outcome of the 2019 parliamentary elections in India by hiring local people to classify 10,000 Twitter messages. That effort trained a machine-learning model that then did the same with many more tweets. Causeway said the exercise allowed it to anticipate a better-than-expected showing for the ruling coalition. Indian stocks shot up after the election, far outperforming emerging markets generally.

Causeway has also predicted stock price movements through so-called nowcasting: generating real-time statistics of one sort or another. By buying data from a vendor that tracked the use of apps on 1.3 billion Chinese phones, for instance, Causeway said it was able to gauge how popular the companies behind each app were and how their stocks were likely to perform.

The sheer diversity of data is much larger than before, said Jeff Shen, co-head of systematic active equity at BlackRock, which uses big data to analyze earnings reports and analyst calls, and study online search patterns relevant to certain businesses.

Using new data sources allows us to predict macrotrends or future cash flows of companies better than conventional research methods, Mr. Shen said. It allows us to ask better questions we had not thought about asking.

They are questions that continue to be asked under the current extraordinary market conditions. Throughout the stock market plunge, the alternative data that BlackRock uses is providing valuable high-frequency information that is a timely reflection of whats going on in the economy, Mr. Shen said. The additive nature of the data allows investors to dynamically navigate through the current market volatility.
A mob trying to stop a medical team from taking a coronavirus-infected man into isolation hurled stones at an ambulance in Moradabad on Wednesday, injuring four people.

Twenty-three people, including a woman, were detained by police after the violence in Moradabad's Nawabpura area and an FIR registered, officials said.

In Lucknow, Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath said those behind the attack will face action under the tough National Security Act and the cost of damages to public property will be recovered from them.

Officials said a doctor and three paramedics were hurt, and an ambulance and a police vehicle damaged in the stone-pelting.

Moradabad Chief Medical Officer Milind Garg said the mob suddenly appeared as the ambulance was driving away with a man who had tested positive for coronavirus, and started pelting stones.

They tried to stop the medical team from taking him away, officials said.

An FIR was registered at Nagphani police station.

Moradabad District Magistrate Rakesh Kumar Singh said the situation has been brought under control and a large police force deployed in the area.

Yogi Adityanath condemned the attack.

Attack on policemen, health workers and those involved in the sanitisation campaign is an unpardonable crime, which is most condemnable, he said in a statement.

He directed the district administration to identify those responsible and deal strictly with them.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
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Federal Committee on Geomatics and Earth Observations (FCGEO) This group is a collection of federal departments participating in the international Group on Earth Observations (GEO).Footnote 1 Name of lead department: Environment Canada (EC) is the lead department by virtue of the identification of the Assistant Deputy Minister (ADM) of the Meteorological Service of Canada as GEO Principal. Lead department PAA program: Weather and Environmental Services for Canadians Start date: July 2003 End date: Ongoing Total federal funding allocation (from start date to end date): Provided through the existing resource envelope and in-kind contributions from federal departments Description of the horizontal initiative (including funding agreement): The GEO is implementing the Global Earth Observation System of Systems (GEOSS), which seeks to create free and open access to Earth observations for decision- and policy-makers in all countries. As a result, users such as Environment Canada and other participating departments will be able to better understand the present state and more accurately predict the future state of planet Earth and better inform and warn citizens of the onset of hazardous conditions affecting their lives and livelihoods. See the GEO website for more details. Shared outcomes: Enhancing access to global Earth observation data and science to meet Canadian environmental and socio-economic monitoring requirements.

Maximizing the effectiveness of Canadian investments in Earth observation networks, both domestic and international.

Improving evidence-based decision making in operational and policy domains based on coordinated, comprehensive and sustainable Earth observations. Governance structures: Coordination is achieved through the ADM-level Federal Committee on Geomatics and Earth Observations (FCGEO); a Director-General-level shadow committee; and ad hoc working-level committees and task groups. Performance highlights: Environment Canada and Other Government Departments In January 2014 at the GEO Plenary and Ministerial Summit in Geneva, the international community reaffirmed member countries commitment to the GEOSS by endorsing the extension of GEOs mandate for another 10 years (2016-25). During 2013-14, Canada was one of three Americas Caucus representatives on the GEO Executive Committee, and continued to serve as GEO Americas Caucus Chair until early 2014. In 2013, Canada (through the Canadian Space Agency, or CSA) served as Chair of the Committee on Earth Observation Satellites (CEOS), and was pleased to host the 2013 CEOS Plenary in Montreal, where a new mission statement was approved, and governance was reviewed. For the first time, biodiversity issues were on the CEOS agenda; other discussions related to disasters, climate, forestry, agriculture, oceans and global carbon and water cycle monitoring. Through the Canada Centre for Mapping and Earth Observation (CCMEO), NRCan also participates in CEOS as an associate member. NRCan supports the Working Group on Information Systems and Services, which promotes collaboration in the development of systems and services that manage and supply observatory data. Interdepartmental international activities related to GEO, geomatics and related domains are being better coordinated through the efforts of the Federal Committee on Geomatics and Earth Observations (FCGEO). Co-chaired by Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada (AAFC) and NRCan, this ADM-level committee is focused on ensuring coherent Canadian positions and representation at related international fora as well as the establishment of the Federal Geospatial Platform to increase the interoperability, availability and usefulness of geospatial data for decision- and policy-makers. During 2013-14, Canada (NRCan, CSA and AAFC) actively contributed to global efforts in forest carbon tracking. NRCans forestry experts provided support to other nations under GEOs Global Observation of Forest Cover GOFC/Land Cover Dynamics (GOFC/GOLD) in the area of Global Early Warning Fire Systems. Canada also contributed to forest observation and land cover research into integrating remote sensing and ground-based observations in support of forest carbon tracking. AAFC and the CSA continued to play lead roles in the GEO Global Agricultural Monitoring initiative (GEO-GLAM), and AAFC led the GEO Joint Experiment for Crop Assessment and Monitoring (JECAM) supported by the CSA. As Canadian lead in the North American Drought Monitor, AAFC is also responsible for a trilateral operational monitoring effort between Canada, the United States and Mexico. DFO is contributing to GEO Blue Planet efforts to coordinate the collection and dissemination (with a goal in real-time) of marine observations. During 2013-14, DFO was a lead editor of the report from the inaugural Blue Planet Symposium. Recognizing the importance of capacity building, Canada (NRCan) is leading the development of a national geomatics plan in Senegal, and will also be the lead in a new geoscience project in Africa that will be heavily influenced by a new spatial data infrastructure (SDI) platform to be housed in the proposed created African Mineral Development Centre. In support of enhanced polar monitoring, Canada participated in WMOs Polar Space Task Group, leading the development and implementation of a multi-year strategy for the observation of ice sheets using space-based Earth Observation platforms. The satellite assets of the Polar Space Task Group member agencies will continue to monitor ice sheets and contribute to the legacy of archived Earth Observation satellite products of the Arctic and Antarctica. Canada continued to collaborate with the United States Group on Earth Observations (US GEO) on joint projects, such as the bi-national group for the Great Lakes Observing System (GLOS), which is working to improve monitoring and data sharing in the Great Lakes Basin. Canada also played a key role in GEO Monitoring and Evaluation activities, with EC taking part as a member of the fifth evaluation team, focused on the Strategic Targets for Weather, Water and Climate.

Horizontal Initiatives Federal

partners PAA program Contributing activities / programs Total allocation (from start date to end date)

($ thousands) 2013-14

Planned

spending 2013-14

Actual

spending 2013-14

Expected

results 2013-14

Contributing activity / program results Environment Canada Weather and Environmental Services for Canadians (2.1) Meteorological Service of Canada Canadian Wildlife Service Not applicable In-kind contributions: $75,000 in salary $50,000 in O&M from existing A-Base In-kind estimated: $75,000 in salary $50,000 in O&M $100,000 in G&C Coordination of Canadian inputs and position for 2012 GEO Plenary and GEO Executive Committee meetings FCGEO departments are engaged in Earth Observation data issues and policy development See above Canadian Space Agency Earth Observations In-kind contributions: $25,000 in salary and $20,000 in O&M from existing resources (A-Base) As planned Benefits of space-borne Earth observations are optimized through co-operation of CEOS agencies in mission planning and in the development of compatible data products, formats, services, applications and policies in support of GEO The CSA provided data dissemination, coordination and planning support to GEO activities related to global monitoring via satellites in forestry (Global Forest Observing Initiative),

agriculture (GEO-GLAM),

oceans (Blue Planet), and

disaster risk management projects either directly (RADARSAT data provided to disaster response pilots in Caribbean and Namibia) or through its membership and chairmanship in CEOS. The CSA is also chairing the CEOS Working Group on Calibration and Validation, which contributes directly to enabling data and information interoperability and harmonization, strategic objectives of the architecture section of GEO. Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada Science & Technology N/A N/A Enhancing international sharing of data and science towards the development of national and global agriculture monitoring capacities AAFC leads the R&D component of the GEO-GLAM initiative and leads the JECAM initiative. Agreements were negotiated with the Committee on Earth Observation Satellites (CEOS) for free and open space data access for JECAM sites. AAFC has developed national crop monitoring operations to address national and global needs. Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada Science & Technology N/A N/A Risks of reduced water availability and agricultural productivity are identified on a continental scale through assessment and monitoring of drought conditions in Canada, the United States and Mexico The United States has considered the North American Drought Monitor (NADM) to be a model of international collaboration and has, through GEO, initiated the development of the Global Drought Information System. Department of National Defence Ongoing Defence Intelligence Operations (1.3.2) Chief of Defence Intelligence N/A N/A Enhancing international sharing of data related to disaster response and for global weather forecasting in support of deployed operations Natural Resources Canada a) Canadian Forest Service, and; b) CCRS / CCMEO $8,000 in O&M .05 person-years (PYs) a) 0.2 full-time equivalent (FTE) b) 0.1 FTE a) 0.2 PY - $20,000 in salary - $3,500 in O&M b) 0.1 FTE a) Fire: - Development of fire extraction algorithm for any TIR satellite sensor - Ongoing collaboration on Cal-Val of Sentinel-3 satellite - Lead science team for the CSAs CWFMS microsat See above Prototype in place. Fire emissivity; fire extraction algorithm ongoing. Contributions to GFOI methods and guidance document to support international Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD) efforts. Contributions towards EO federation of catalogues and various interoperability initiatives (CWIC - OPENSEARCH). Maintenance of the Global Fire Early Warning System; presented system status at GOFC and international fire meetings. Fisheries and Oceans Canada Ocean Forecasting DFO Science Sector 0.2 PY (in kind) $5,000 travel As planned Editing Blue Planet Proceedings book

DFO input into Canadas position at GEO Plenary

DFO input into FCGEO committee See above Total 100K G&C 150K Salary 78.5K O&M As planned

Comments on variances (if applicable): Not applicable. Results achieved by non-federal partners: See the GEO website for more details. Contact information: Michael Crowe

Executive Director

Policy and Partnerships Division

Meteorological Service of Canada

Environment Canada

351 Saint-Joseph Blvd.

Gatineau QC K1A 0H3

The Federal Contaminated Sites Action Plan (FCSAP) The Federal Contaminated Sites Action Plan, approved March 2005 (followed from the two-year Federal Contaminated Sites Accelerated Action Plan (FCSAAP). Name of lead department: Environment Canada (EC), with support from the Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat (TBS) Lead department PAA program: Substances and Waste Management (Environment Canada); Financial Management (Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat) Start date of the horizontal initiative: FCSAP was approved in 2005, with funding of $3.5 billion over 15 years. The first phase of the program ended March 31, 2011. The second phase of the program will run through to March 31, 2016. End date of the horizontal initiative: FCSAP is expected to continue for 15 years to March 31, 2020. However, the current policy approval for Phase II ends March 31, 2016. Total federal funding allocation (start date to end date): $3,159.0 million (including PWGSC accommodations charges) to March 31, 2016. Description of the horizontal initiative (including funding agreement): The Federal Contaminated Sites Action Plan (FCSAP) provides a long-term mechanism to address federal contaminated sites posing the highest risks to human health and the environment. Although responsibility for the actual management and remediation of federal contaminated sites rests with responsible custodial departments, the overall program is administered by Environment Canada with support from the Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat. Shared outcomes: Reduce federal financial liability and risks to human health and the environment, including fish habitat. Increase public confidence in the overall management of federal real property through the effective risk management or remediation of individual federal contaminated sites. Governance structures: The Federal Contaminated Sites Assistant Deputy Ministers Steering Committee is supported by a director generals committee, the Contaminated Sites Management Working Group (CSMWG) and the FCSAP Secretariat (Environment Canada), which provides overall program coordination. Performance highlights: In 2013-14, custodians undertook environmental site assessments at 344 sites. Assessment was completed at 163 sites and the remaining 181 sites are ongoing. Remediation activities were undertaken at 368 sites. Remediation activities were completed at 22 sites and the remaining 346 sites require ongoing remediation work. The assessment and remediation of contaminated sites often require multiple years to complete.

Planned spending and actual spending in 2013-14 Federal partners Federal partner program activity Names of programs for federal partners Total allocation (from start date to end date)

($ thousands) 2013-14

Planned spending

($ thousands) 2013-14

Actual spending

($ thousands) Aboriginal Affairs and Northern Development Canada Responsible Federal Stewardship Contaminated Sites Management Program 205,034.1 13,289.4 19,049.4 Aboriginal Affairs and Northern Development Canada Northern Land and Resources Northern Contaminated Sites Program 1,346,053.3 178,566.9 143,953.0 Aboriginal Affairs and Northern Development Canada Total 1,551,087.4 191,856.3 163,002.4 Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada Internal Services Contaminated Sites 7,862.6 682.0 385.2 Canada Border Services Agency Corporate Management and Direction Infrastructure and Environment 3,490.2 1,870.0 0.0 Canadian Food Inspection Agency N/A N/A 183.8 0.0 0.0 Correctional Service Canada Internal Services Facilities/Asset Management Services 16,116.8 1,154.0 788.8 Environment Canada Substances and Waste Management Asset Remediation and Disposal 65,711.7 3,063.6 2,234.2 Environment Canada Substances and Waste Management Contaminated Sites 74,670.7 6,087.5 5,466.9 Environment Canada Total 140,382.4 9,151.1 7,701.1 Fisheries and Oceans Canada Internal Services Contaminated Sites - FCSAP Projects 102,990.9 4,794.4 4,920.2 Fisheries and Oceans Canada Fisheries Protection FCSAP Expert Support 31,121.9 1,955.4 1,897.5 Fisheries and Oceans Canada Total 134,112.8 6,749.8 6,817.7 Health Canada First Nations and Inuit Health First Nations and Inuit Health Protection 7,445.2 0.0 0.0 Health Canada Environmental Risks to Health Healthy Environments Consumer Safety Branch 62,749.1 3,886.5 3,521.2 Health Canada Total 70,194.3 3,886.5 3,521.2 Industry Canada Communications Research Centre Canada Contaminated Site Management Program 162.0 54.0 37.4 Jacques Cartier and Champlain Bridges Incorporated Management of federal bridge, highway and tunnel infrastructure, and properties in the Montreal area N/A 27,033.7 22,641.0 0.0 Marine Atlantic Inc. Corporate Management FCSAP (Projects) 120.0 0.0 0.0 National Capital Commission Real Asset Management Land and Real Asset Management 34,518.0 12,634.0 3,121.0 National Defence Environmental Protection and Stewardship Contaminated Sites Program 692,424.2 100,055.4 47,668.0 National Research Council of Canada Internal Services Environmental Operations 5,257.0 102.0 127.0 Natural Resources Canada Internal Services Asset Management Services - Real Property 28,858.8 93.0 87.8 Parks Canada Conserve Heritage Resources Active Management and Restoration 58,506.2 7,792.4 3,184.8 Public Works and Government Services Canada Federal Accommodation and Holdings FCSAP (Projects) 119,012.1 49,923.5 46,262.7 Public Works and Government Services Canada Federal Accommodation and Holdings FCSAP (Expert Services) 8,850.0 700.0 693.8 Public Works and Government Services Canada Total 127,862.1 50,623.5 46,956.5 Royal Canadian Mounted Police Internal Services FCSAP (Projects) 25,605.2 521.7 371.6 Transport Canada Sustainable Transportation Development and the Environment Environmental Programs 213,307.0 13,055.0 12,152.3 Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat Financial Management Assets and Acquired Services 5,385.6 527.9 526.7 Total

(excluding PWGSC accommodations charges; totals may not add due to rounding) 3,142,470.1 423,449.6 296,449.5

Expected results and results achieved for 2013-14 Federal Partner Expected results for 2013-14 Results achieved for 2013-14 Aboriginal Affairs and Northern Development Canada - Southern Program AANDCs Southern Program plans to complete the assessment of 10 sites and the remediation of 5 sites in 2013-14. Other targets are 1) activities on 15 Class 1 sites where risk reduction is occurring; and 2) an $8 million reduction in total contaminated sites financial liabilities for known sites in remediation / risk management. AANDCs Southern Program completed the assessment of 43 sites. One additional site had ongoing assessment activities and 70 (closed 8) sites had ongoing remediation activities. Aboriginal Affairs and Northern Development Canada - Northern Program The expected results for AANDCs Northern Program for 2013-14 include the assessment of 2 sites and the remediation of 1 site. An additional 2 sites will have ongoing assessment activities, 64 sites will have ongoing remediation activities, and 1 site will have long-term monitoring activities. AANDCs Northern Program completed the assessment of 4 sites. An additional 4 sites had ongoing assessment activities and 54 sites had ongoing remediation activities. Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada Agriculture and Agri-Food Canadas expected results for 2013-14 include assessment activities at 21 sites, and 1 site will have ongoing remediation activities. AAFC completed the assessment of 13 sites and 1 site had ongoing remediation activities. Fewer sites than expected were assessed, as fewer sites were eligible than originally anticipated. Canada Border Services Agency The Canada Border Services Agencys expected results for 2013-14 include the remediation of one site. No remediation activity was conducted. Canadian Food Inspection Agency No planned activities for 2013-14. N/A Correctional Service Canada Correctional Service Canadas expected results for 2013-14 include the assessment of 8 sites and the remediation of 2 sites. An additional 5 sites will have ongoing assessment activities, 2 sites will have ongoing remediation activities, and 1 site will have long-term monitoring activities. CSC completed the assessment of 4 sites. An additional 13 sites had ongoing assessment activities and 7 sites had ongoing remediation activities. Environment Canada - Custodian Environment Canadas expected results for 2013-14 include the assessment of 36 sites and the remediation of 1 site. An additional 3 sites will have ongoing assessment activities, 8 sites will have ongoing remediation activities, and 1 site will have long-term monitoring activities. Of the 39 sites Environment Canada planned to have assessed (36 expected sites and 3 sites with ongoing assessment activities), 3 sites completed assessment activities. Ongoing assessment activities continued or were initiated on an additional 38 sites. Twenty-eight of those sites were consolidated into 1 site on the Federal Contaminated Sites Inventory in the 2012-13 fiscal year. Of the 10 sites Environment Canada planned for remediation (8 sites with ongoing remediation, 1 site with ongoing long-term remediation and 1 site with delayed remediation activities), 2 sites completed remediation activities. Ongoing remediation activities continued or were initiated on an additional 7 sites, including 1 site with long-term monitoring activities. Environment Canada -FCSAP Secretariat In cooperation with the Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat, the FCSAP Secretariat supports the Director Generals and Assistant Deputy Ministers steering committees and the Contaminated Sites Management Working Group (CSMWG); oversees the project selection process; coordinates funding and reporting processes; manages program communications; and evaluates program performance. In 2013-14, the FCSAP Secretariat will lead the development of a Treasury Board submission for renewed remediation and assessment funding in 2014-15 and 2015-16, review the performance measurement targets for the program, implement a new information management system as well as a new performance measurement tracking system, and respond to the recommendations stemming from the FCSAP program evaluation led by Environment Canadas Audit and Evaluation Branch. In its role of managing the FCSAP program, Environment Canada in its capacity as program Secretariat, with support from the Treasury Board Secretariat, continued to provide overall program oversight, support and administration (including reviewing project submissions for eligibility, maintaining the priority list of eligible projects and tracking program expenditures at mid-year and year-end). One of the key accomplishments was the preparation of a funding proposal for the remediation and assessment activities by 16 federal custodians in 2014-15 and 2015-16. The following were also achieved: A review of the performance measurement targets for the program;

Implementation of a new information management system;

Implementation of a new performance measurement tracking system; and

Response to the recommendations stemming from the FCSAP program evaluation. Environment Canada - FCSAP Expert Support In 2013-14, Environment Canada - FCSAP Expert Support will conduct the following activities: Continued provision of scientific and technical advice to custodial departments regarding ecological risks and other environmental matters at their contaminated sites, and the remediation / risk management strategies that will mitigate or reduce these risks; and

Provision of guidance, training and tools to federal custodians to assist them in addressing their contaminated sites. In its role as an expert support department for the FCSAP program, Environment Canada provided technical advice to custodial departments for the management of their contaminated sites so that risks to the environment are reduced or minimized and provided support to the Secretariat on site eligibility and issues resolution. Some specific accomplishments include the following. The Department Coordinated and reviewed site classifications to ensure that sites with the highest priority were eligible for FCSAP funding;

Published the Database of Guidelines (DoG), which was featured in Environment Canadas Data Catalogue, and the Canadian Open Data Experience (CODE) Appathon;

Made publicly available several guidance documents on the FCSAP webportal (e.g., Ecological Risk Assessment, Decision Making Framework and Site Closure Tool); and

Developed and delivered several training courses on various topics including sustainability, climate change, and the decision-making framework. Fisheries and Oceans Canada - Custodian Fisheries and Oceans Canadas (DFOs) expected results for 2013-14 include the assessment of 119 sites and the remediation of 16 sites. An additional 84 sites will have ongoing assessment activities, and 39 sites will have ongoing remediation activities. DFO completed the assessment of 58 sites and the remediation activities at 11 sites. An additional 77 sites had ongoing assessment activities and 37 sites had ongoing remediation activities. Five remediation sites and 41 assessment sites were closed in 2013-14. Fisheries and Oceans Canada - FCSAP Expert Support In 2013-14, DFO FCSAP Expert Support will conduct the following activities: Provision of scientific and technical advice to custodial departments with respect to the management of federal contaminated sites that may be impacting, or have the potential to impact, fish or fish habitat;

Development of guidance material and provision of training to custodial organizations on the management of FCSAP aquatic sites (e.g., long-term monitoring and site closure of aquatic sites, remediation technologies identified in aquatic site remediation / risk management plans and the Aquatic Sites Framework);

Review of project submissions to ensure that the potential impacts to fish and fish habitat have been appropriately considered; and

Review and evaluation of FCSAP projects to ascertain if, and to what level, the risk to fish and fish habitat has been reduced as a result of custodial actions. DFO FCSAP Expert Support achieved the following in 2013-14: Provided scientific and technical advice to 9 different custodial departments with respect to the management of 277 federal contaminated sites that impacted or had the potential to impact fish and fish habitat; Developed guidance material and provided training on the management of FCSAP aquatic sites to custodial organizations in the following 5 areas: a) developed a long-term monitoring guidance training course and delivered 3 pilot sessions, b) updated the Aquatic Sites Classification System (ASCS) and User Guide, c) delivered training on the Aquatic Sites Management Framework and ASCS, d) developed and delivered ERA causality module WebEx training sessions, and e) initiated development of the Active Harbour Management Strategy Guidance document; Reviewed 214 project submissions (i.e., technical documents in support of site classification and remediation) to ensure that the potential impacts to fish and fish habitat were appropriately considered; and Reviewed and evaluated FCSAP projects to determine whether the risk to fish and fish habitat had been reduced as a result of custodial actions (e.g., Esquimalt Harbour assessment of fish habitat compensation/restoration works). Health Canada - Custodian No planned activities for 2013-14. No planned activities using FCSAP funds in 2013-14. Health Canada - FCSAP Expert Support In 2013-14, the Healthy Environments Consumer Safety Branch (Health Canada FCSAP Expert Support) will conduct the following activities: Provision of guidance, training and advice on human health risk assessment and risk management;

Public involvement and risk communication;

Review of National Classification System (NCS) scoring, human health risk assessments and remediation plans for projects;

Participation in interdepartmental national and regional working groups; and

Development of the human health component of Canadian Council of Ministers of the Environment (CCME) soil quality guidelines. Health Canadas Healthy Environments Consumer Safety Branch and Regions and Programs Bureau provided technical reviews of human health risk assessments and related documents for approximately 120 FCSAP sites across Canada and performed National Classification System (NCS) scoring reviews for 64 of the above sites. In addition, Health Canada completed 58 FCSAP site visits across Canada and provided advice for 24 non-FCSAP sites and environmental assessment projects.

Health Canada conducted two training sessions for federal custodians: Human Health Risk Assessment Considerations for Risk Management (in-class); and Considerations for Short-term Exposure to Chemicals (webinar).

Health Canada prepared or published soil quality guidelines (SQGs) on nickel, beryllium and barium. The barium SQG document was published by CCME.

Health Canada continued work on the development of the following guidance documents: (i) bioaccessibility guidance, (ii) indoor dust guidance, (iii) human health-based sediment guidance, and (iv) an air quality guidance update.

Fact sheets were prepared on topics such as bioavailability in human health risk assessments, conceptual site model development for sediments, arsenic contaminated sites, and short-term exposure to non-carcinogens. Health Canada also developed a vapour intrustion calculator tool.

Health Canada participated in Contaminated Sites Management Working Group meetings (quarterly), Inter-Regional Working Group meetings (semiannually) and FCSAP Expert Support meetings (quarterly). Industry Canada Industry Canada expects to complete the assessment of 1 site in 2013-14. Industry Canada completed the assessment of 1 site. Jacques Cartier and Champlain Bridges Incorporated Jacques Cartier and Champlain Bridges Incorporated will have ongoing remediation activities at 2 sites. No remediation activities were undertaken using FCSAP funding. Marine Atlantic Inc. No planned activities for 2013-14. N/A National Capital Commission The National Capital Commission will pursue ongoing assessment activities on 40 sites and ongoing remediation activities on 7 sites. The National Capital Commission completed the assessment of 7 sites. An additional 35 sites had ongoing assessment activities and 6 sites had ongoing remediation activities. National Defence National Defences expected results for 2013-14 include the assessment of 5 sites and the remediation of 16 sites. An additional 17 sites will have ongoing assessment activities, 57 sites will have ongoing remediation activities, and 16 sites will have long-term monitoring activities. National Defence completed the assessment of 14 sites and the remediation activities at 5 sites. An additional 17 sites had ongoing assessment activities and 74 sites had ongoing remediation activities. One remediation site was closed in 2013-14. National Research Council of Canada National Research Council of Canadas expected results for 2013-14 include the assessment of 7 sites. An additional 6 sites will have ongoing assessment activities, and 3 sites will have ongoing remediation activities. National Research Council of Canada completed the assessment of 1 site. An additional 4 sites had ongoing assessment activities and 3 sites had ongoing remediation activities. One remediation site was closed in 2013-14. Natural Resources Canada Natural Resources Canadas expected results for 2013-14 include the assessment of 1 site and ongoing assessment activities on 1 site. Natural Resources Canada completed the assessment of 3 sites. One additional site had ongoing assessment activities. Parks Canada Parks Canadas expected results for 2013-14 include the assessment of 8 sites and the remediation of 14 sites. An additional 19 sites will have ongoing assessment activities, 14 sites will have ongoing remediation activities, and 6 sites will have long-term monitoring. Parks Canada completed the assessment of 6 sites and the remediation activities at 1 site. An additional 17 sites had ongoing assessment activities and 25 sites had ongoing remediation activities. Two remediation sites were closed in 2013-14. Public Works and Government Services Canada - Custodian PWGSCs expected results for 2013-14 include the assessment of 1 site. An additional site will have ongoing assessment activities, and 14 sites will have ongoing remediation activities. PWGSC completed the assessment of 2 sites, and 19 sites had ongoing remediation activities, while 1 remediation site was closed in 2013-14. Public Works and Government Services Canada - FCSAP Expert Support In 2013-14, PWGSC - FCSAPExpert Support will conduct the following activities: Development of contaminated site management tools;

Collection and sharing of innovative and sustainable/green approaches; and

Notification of the private sector of likely federal demand for services. In 2013-14, PWGSC - FCSAP Expert Support conducted the following activities: Development of contaminated site management tools (e.g., GOST, SD Tool);

Collection and sharing of innovative and sustainable/green approaches (e.g., sharing information at the RPIC Halifax Workshop and RemTech); and

Informing the private sector of likely federal demand for services (e.g., sharing information at the RPIC Halifax Workshop and RemTech). Royal Canadian Mounted Police The Royal Canadian Mounted Police plans to complete assessment work on 14 sites and remediation work on 4 sites in 2013-14. Another 2 sites will be assessed during the 2013-14 fiscal year and are expected to require ongoing assessment activities in future years. Activities and expenditures planned for the 2013-14 fiscal year will increase if certain projects are confirmed to be eligible for FCSAP funding. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police completed the assessment of 4 sites. One additional site had ongoing assessment activities. Five sites had ongoing remediation activities and 2 remediation sites were closed. Transport Canada Transport Canadas expected results for 2013-14 include the remediation of 4 sites. An additional 24 sites will have ongoing remediation activities, 1 site will have ongoing assessment activities, and 4 sites will have long-term monitoring activities. Transport Canada undertook remediation activities at 30 sites in 2013-14. Transport Canada completed the remediation activities at 3 sites. An additional 27 sites had ongoing remediation activities, including the 4 expected long-term monitoring sites. No assessment activities proceeded using FCSAP funds. Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat TBS supports Environment Canada in the management of the FCSAP program through the provision of strategic advice and policy guidance to ensure that ongoing implementation of FCSAP is undertaken in a manner that is consistent with Treasury Board policies on management of federal real property, including federal contaminated sites. In this role, TBS will advise Environment Canada on the monitoring of government-wide progress, administer the Federal Contaminated Sites Inventory, and coordinate planning for the biennial Federal Contaminated Sites National Workshop to be held in 2014. The Treasury Board Secretariat (TBS) supported Environment Canada in the management of the Federal Contaminated Sites Action Plan (FCSAP) through the provision of policy advice and guidance. In this role, TBS: Supported Environment Canada in the development of a Treasury Board submission for remediation and assessment funding in 2014-15 and 2015-16; Contributed to the completion of the FCSAP evaluation; Maintained and enhanced the Federal Contaminated Sites Inventory; Supported the work of the Parliamentary Budget Office for the April 2014 report Federal Contaminated Sites Cost; and Coordinated planning for the Federal Contaminated Sites National Workshop, held in Ottawa, Ontario, April 12-14, 2014.

Comments on variance: In 2013-14, the FCSAP federal partners spent 72% ($296 million) of the available funding; reprofiled, carried forward, or cash-managed 25% ($103 million) to future years; and lapsed 3% ($10.3 million). Note that the amount of available funding was $410 million, while the amount of planned spending was $423 million. This difference is due to the fact that the approval of funding transferred forward from 2012-13 to 2013-14 occurred after the planned spending amount was calculated in the 2013-14 Report on Plans and Priorities. Aboriginal Affairs and Northern Development Canada - Southern Program: $19.049 million in funding was available in 2013-14, of which $5 million was carried forward from 2012-13, and $760 thousand in funding was received from other custodians ($335 thousand from CSC and $425 thousand from Natural Resources Canada). Aboriginal Affairs and Northern Development Canada - Northern Program: $187.845 million in funding was available in 2013-14. $43.8 million in funding was reprofiled from 2013-14 to future years and $92 thousand in funding was lapsed in 2013-14. Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada: $943 thousand in funding was available in 2013-14, of which $261 thousand was internally cash-managed from 2012-13. $350 thousand in funding was internally cash-managed from 2013-14 to 2014-15 and $208 thousand in funding was lapsed. The variances are primarily due to a change in departmental priorities. Canada Border Services Agency: $1.870 million in funding was available in 2013-14. This funding was carried forward from 2013-14 to 2014-15. Correctional Service Canada: $1.152 million in funding was available in 2013-14, of which $513 thousand was internally cash-managed from 2012-13. $500 thousand in funding was transferred to other custodians ($165 thousand to Fisheries and Oceans Canada and $335 thousand to Aboriginal Affairs and Northern Development Canada - Southern Program). $364 thousand in funding was internally cash-managed from 2013-14 to 2014-15. Environment Canada - Custodian: $3.064 million in funding was available in 2013-14. $600 thousand in funding was reprofiled and $229.4 thousand in funding was lapsed in 2013-14. Environment Canada - FCSAPExpert Support and Secretariat: $6.087 million in funding was available in 2013-14. $621 thousand in funding was lapsed in 2013-14 due to delays in staffing some vacant positions, reduced travel, and delays in contracts for some projects. Fisheries and Oceans Canada - Custodian: $5.760 million in funding was available in 2013-14, of which $498 thousand was carried forward from 2012-13, and $215 thousand was received from other custodians ($165 thousand from CSC and $50 thousand from DFO Expert Support). $820 thousand in funding was carried forward and $20 thousand in funding was lapsed in 2013-14. Fisheries and Oceans Canada -FCSAP Expert Support: $1.955 million in funding was available in 2013-14. $57.9 thousand in funds lapsed due to procurement/contract issues/delays and one regional full-time equivalent staffing delay. Health Canada - FCSAPExpert Support: $3.886 million in funding was available in 2013-14. Variance was based primarily on a Regions and Programs Bureau salary surplus as a result of vacant positions, sick leave, part-time positions, and staff turnover. The O&M surplus was as a result of not all travel being possible, and one uncompleted contract. Industry Canada: $54 thousand in funding was available in 2013-14. $17 thousand in funding was lapsed in 2013-14. The lapse was due to a reduction in project scope. Jacques Cartier and Champlain Bridges Incorporated: $22.641 million in funding was available in 2013-14, of which $13.780 million was reprofiled from 2012-13. $21.641 million in funding was reprofiled from 2013-14 to future years and $1 million is pending late reprofiling. National Capital Commission: $14.615 million in funding was available in 2013-14, of which $10.650 million was reprofiled from previous years and $1.981 million was internally cash-managed from 2013-14. $2.5 million in funding was internally cash-managed from 2013-14 to 2014-15, $5.037 million in funding was lapsed and $4 million was reprofiled for the LeBreton Flats project. National Defence: $63.723 million in funding was available in 2013-14, of which $10 million was reprofiled from 2011-12. The amount of $25 thousand in remediation funding was transferred to National Research Council Canada. The amount of $14.3 million in funding was internally cash-managed from 2013-14 to 2015-16 and $1.755 million in funding was lapsed. National Research Council Canada: $127 thousand in funding was available in 2013-14, of which $25 thousand was received from National Defence. All funding was spent in 2013-14. Natural Resources Canada: $93 thousand in funding was available in 2013-14. $425 thousand in funding was transferred to AANDC - South. $5,211 in funding was lapsed in 2013-14. Parks Canada: $8.258 million in funding was available in 2013-14, of which $5.244 million was carried forward from 2012-13. $5.074 million in funding was carried forward from 2013-14 to 2014-15. Public Works and Government Services Canada - Custodian: $49.923 million in funding was available in 2013-14, of which $36.815 million was reprofiled from previous years. $2.010 million in funding was reprofiled from 2013-14 to 2014-15 and $1.650 million in funding was lapsed. Public Works and Government Services Canada -FCSAP Expert Support: Of the available $700,000, approximately $6,200 in funding was lapsed. Royal Canadian Mounted Police: Planned FCSAP funding reported in the report on plans and priorities was $522 thousand for 2013-14. Actual funding available to the RCMP in 2013-14 was $1,031 thousand, which included $495 thousand carried forward from 2012-13 to 2013-14. RCMP spent $372 thousand from FCSAP funds and lapsed $239 thousand in 2013-14. The RCMP will carry forward $420 thousand into 2014-15. Transport Canada: $16.795 million in funding was available in 2013-14. $3.432 million in funding was reprofiled from 2013-14 to 2014-15 and $1.210 million in funding was carried forward. Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat: $527.9 thousand in funding was available in 2013-14. $1,154 in funding was lapsed in 2013-14. Results achieved by non-federal partners (if applicable): N/A Contact information: FCSAP Secretariat, Compliance Promotion and Contaminated Sites Division, 17th floor, Place Vincent Massey, 351 St. Joseph Blvd., Gatineau QC K1A 0H3; FCSAP.PASCF@ec.gc.ca

Great Lakes Ecosystem Initiative Name of lead department: Environment Canada Lead department PAA program: Canada-Ontario Agreement (COA) Respecting the Great Lakes Delivery Start date: April 1, 2008 - Clean Water Action Plan (CWAP) - Great Lakes sediment remediation implementation

April 1, 2010 - Great Lakes Action Plan V (GLAPV) (Note: resources were A-Based as of Budget 2010)

April 1, 2012 - Great Lakes Nutrient Initiative (GLNI) Resources End date: March 31, 2022 - CWAP - Great Lakes sediment remediation implementation

March 31, 2016 - GLNI Resources Total federal funding allocation (from start date to end date): $193.065 million plus contributions from other departments (Natural Resources Canada, Parks Canada, Infrastructure Canada, and Health Canada) through their existing resource envelopes. Description of the horizontal initiative (including funding agreement): The Great Lakes Ecosystem Initiative (GLEI) is Environment Canadas mechanism for coordinating efforts to restore and maintain the chemical, physical and biological integrity of the Great Lakes Basin Ecosystem, and ensure delivery of federal commitments as expressed in the Canada-United States Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement (GLWQA). Environment Canada (EC) uses the Canada-Ontario Agreement (COA) Respecting the Great Lakes to engage other federal departments and Ontario in delivering Canadas Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement (GLWQA) commitments. ECs GLEI reflects Budget 2007 funding of $48.9 million over 8 years (subsequently spread over 14 years) from the Clean Water Action Plan to implement remediation plans for contaminated sediment in 8 Canadian Areas of Concern (AOC) in the Great Lakes. As well, Budget 2010 investments targeted continuing the work under the Great Lakes Action Plan to improve the ecological integrity of the Great Lakes Basin Ecosystem. Under GLAPV, $8 million per year is allocated to continue the environmental restoration of key aquatic Great Lakes AOC. These resources were A-Based by Budget 2010, after two years, in 2012-13. Additionally, in 2012, the Government of Canada committed $16 million over 4 years to the GLNI to determine phosphorus targets and take action to reduce levels that contribute to harmful algae in the Great Lakes. Federal departments also use A-Base resources to support their efforts towards achieving COA results. Shared outcomes: The GLWQA establishes broad, long-term objectives for Canada and the United States in restoring and protecting the Great Lakes. The COA provides a short-term, 5-year plan for achieving Canadas GLWQA commitments. Through the COA, federal and provincial agencies are guided by a shared vision of a healthy, prosperous and sustainable Great Lakes region for present and future generations. The COA also establishes a common purpose and shared goals, results and commitment in four priority areas: restoration of AOC; reduction of harmful pollutants; achievement of lake and basin sustainability; and coordination of monitoring, research and information. Governance structure: Eight federal departments are engaged in delivering GLEI results under the COA: EC, Fisheries and Oceans Canada, Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada, Natural Resources Canada, Parks Canada, Transport Canada, Infrastructure Canada and Health Canada. The COA Management Committee is the senior federal-provincial management body responsible for setting priorities, establishing strategies to ensure the delivery of the COA, and developing common positions and joint action plans for representing Canadian interests and engaging in co-operative initiatives with United States agencies and the International Joint Commission. Planning, prioritization and allocation of GLAPV monies is managed through the EC - Ontario Regions Regional Director Generals office, with the advice of the GLAPV Workplan Review Team. Members of the GLAPV Workplan Review Team consist of representatives from EC and Fisheries and Oceans Canada that receive GLAPV funds. The GLAPV Workplan Review Team reviews proposed projects and activities, and develops and regularly updates a coordinated federal workplan based on priorities required to support Great Lakes Action Plan implementation. Management of CWAP-Great Lakes sediment remediation implementation funding is also managed through the EC - Ontario Regions Regional Director Generals office with the development, implementation and monitoring of project plans specific to this work in each of the eight Canadian Great Lakes AOC. GLNI funding is managed by EC - Ontario Regions Regional Director Generals office through a GLNI workplan. The workplan is developed by directorates within Environment Canada receiving GLNI funds: the Regional Director General - Ontario Directorate and the Water, Science and Technology Directorate, and sets out projects and activities that are regularly reviewed and updated. Performance highlights: *During 2013-14, the Government of Canada was in negotiations with the province of Ontario to negotiate a new Canada-Ontario Agreement (COA) Respecting the Great Lakes to implement the 2012 GLWQA.

Horizontal Initiatives Federal partners PAA Program Contributing activities / programs Total allocation

(from start date to end date)

($ thousands) 2013-14

Planned spending*

($ thousands) 2013-14

Actual

spending

($ thousands) 2013-14

Expected

results

($ thousands) 2013-14

Contributing activity / programs results

($ thousands) Environment Canada Sustainable Ecosystems COA $8 million/year - GLAPV; $48.9 million - CWAP-GL Sediment; $16 million - GLNI; Departmental A-Base See note (*) above table $7.5 million - GLAPV $808.7 thousand - CWAP-GL Sediment $694.3 thousand - GLNI $3.1 million - A-Base All COA results except Ann. 2-3.2 See below Fisheries and Oceans Canada Sustainable Aquatic Ecosystems COA Fisheries Protection and Science Sea Lamprey Control Program $4.6 million - GLAPV $14.5 million - Departmental A-Base $40.1 million A-Base - Sea Lamprey Control Program $6.1 million - Asian Carp Program GLAP V = $860 thousand Fisheries protection and science = $3.0 million Nearshore bathymetry survey = $1.5 million Sea Lamprey Control Program = $8.1 million Asian Carp Program = $4.5 million GLAP V = $860 thousand Fisheries protection and science = $3.0 million Nearshore bathymetry survey = $1.5 million Sea Lamprey Control Program = $8.1 million Asian Carp Program = $4.5 million Ann. 1-2.4 Ann. 1-2.6 Ann. 3-1.2 Ann. 3-1.3 Ann. 3-1.4 Ann. 3-3.1 Ann. 3-3.2 Ann. 3-4.1 Ann. 3-4.2 Ann. 3-5.1 Ann. 4-1.1 Ann. 4-2.2 See below Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada 1.2.3 Cost-shared Environmental Risk Assessment and Implementation Growing Forward $54.8 million - Environment and Climate Change Adaptation Designated Program for Ontario from April 1, 2013 to March 31, 2018 $10.9 million See Comments on Variance section below Ann. 1-1.2 Ann. 1-2.2

Ann. 2-2.3 Ann. 3-1.2 Ann. 3-1.4 Ann. 3-2.2 Ann. 4-1.1 Ann. 4-2.2 See below Natural Resources Canada Natural Resource Sectors Consumers are Environmentally Responsible Risks to natural resource sectors, infrastructure and human health are safely managed Port Hope Long-term Low-level Radioactive Waste Management Project Canadian Forestry Service (CFS) - Forest harvesting in riparian zones CFS - Understanding and mitigating risks to aquatic biodiversity Departmental A-Base and C-Base See note (*) above table $162.0 thousand Ann. 1-2.3 Ann. 3-1.4 Ann. 3-2.4 See below Parks Canada Heritage Places Establishment Heritage Resources Conservation COA Departmental A-Base See note (*) above table No COA allocation Ann. 3-1.1 Ann. 3-1.2 Ann. 3-1.3 Ann. 3-2.2 Ann. 3-3.2 Ann. 3-3.3 Ann. 4-1.1 Ann. 4-2.2 See below Transport Canada Environmental Protection Canadian Ballast Water Program COA $65.0 thousand - Departmental A-Base $550.0 thousand - Funding from Ballast Water portion of World Class Initiative $615.0 thousand Ann. 3-1.3 Ann. 3-2.1 Ann. 3-4.1 Ann. 3-4.2 See below Infrastructure Canada Infrastructure funding program Building Canada Plan (Building Canada Fund; Provincial-Territorial Base Fund; Gas Tax Fund) Green Infrastructure Fund Sunsetting programs (Infrastructure Stimulus Fund; Canada Strategic Infrastructure Fund; Municipal Rural Infrastructure Fund) No COA allocation See note (*) above table No COA allocation INFC supports the objectives of the COA with particular emphasis on these Annex items: Ann. 1-1.1 Ann. 1-2.1 See below Health Canada Environmental Risks to Health COA Departmental A-Base See note (*) above table No COA allocation Ann. 2-3.2 See below Total GLAPV, CWAP-GL Sediment, GLNI, plus Departmental funding $193.065 million plus contributions from other departments (Natural Resources Canada, Parks Canada, Infrastructure Canada, and Health Canada) through their existing resource envelopes. See note (*) above table $8.4 million - GLAPV $808.7 thousand - CWAP-GL Sediment $694.3 thousand GLNI $21.0 million - Deptl funding

Results achieved in 2013-14: Specific results by department Environment Canada Work continued to achieve progress in the restoration of Great Lakes Areas of Concern: Formal agreement was reached on funding and implementation of the Randle Reef clean-up project. Partners are working together on the $138.9 million sediment-capping project to protect water quality and improve fish habitat in the harbour. Public Works and Government Services Canada initiated the procurement process to contract construction of the Engineered Containment Facility as Stage 1 of this three-stage project. Environment Canadas efforts to assess and manage the risks posed by commercial chemicals under Canadas Chemicals Management Plan (CMP) supported continued work to reduce the release of harmful substances to the Great Lakes: Since it was launched in 2006, the CMP has made significant progress. Of the 4,300 substances identified as priorities for assessment by 2020, approximately 1,100 have been addressed and risk management actions initiated (when necessary) through such initiatives as the Challenge to Industry, the Petroleum Sector Stream Approach and the rapid screening of substances of low concern.

In addition, approximately 1,500 additional substances are on track to be addressed, with risk management to be initiated by 2016. Work continued to achieve a better understanding of, and to report on the Great Lakes Ecosystem status and trends. Environment Canada worked collaboratively with universities and other government and non-governmental agencies on many projects: The State of the Great Lakes 2011 technical and highlights reports were released and are available online.

Key findings were that water quality is in fair condition but is deteriorating; aquatic-dependent life is in fair condition but is deteriorating; and the landscapes (and landscape-related natural processes) that influence the Great Lakes are in fair condition and are improving. Work continued to determine phosphorus targets and take action to reduce levels that contribute to harmful algae in the Great Lakes: Progress was made on both the science (including monitoring of phosphorus loading, research and modelling) and policy analysis components of the Great Lakes Nutrient Initiative to inform the establishment of revised phosphorus reduction targets for Lake Erie.

Nutrients work under the Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement focused on developing inventories and baseline program information; defining metrics to evaluate effectiveness; and identifying opportunities to optimize programs. Progress was made through binational discussions on an approach to developing new phosphorus objectives and targets. Fisheries and Oceans Canada Work continued to safeguard fisheries by protecting commercial, recreational and Aboriginal fisheries through the conservation of the habitat that supports those fisheries; to conduct science to support fish habitat protection; to control the established invasive Sea Lampreys to reduce their effects on fisheries and the ecosystem; to protect the Great Lakes from the invasion of Asian Carp; and to prevent new invading species from becoming established. Results included the following: Provided monitoring and science to support the delisting of Areas of Concern, including the Bay of Quinte, Toronto Harbour, Hamilton Harbour, the Detroit River and the St. Clair River. Results included developed indices of biotic integrity and habitat productivity for nearshore fish populations; developed fish habitat classification and supply models to measure the success of habitat restorations; continued long-term assessment of lower-trophic levels and food web status; and developed ecosystem models.

Delivered an integrated program of Sea Lamprey management in the Great Lakes in collaboration with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Services, under the direction of the Great Lakes Fishery Commission. Results included successful lampricide treatments in tributaries and connection channels in lakes Ontario, Erie, Huron and Superior to suppress invasive Sea Lampreys and to protect and restore native fishes. Achieved suppression targets for abundances of adult Sea Lampreys in Lakes Ontario and Superior. Continued research and development of new alternative Sea Lamprey control methods, including field trials of Sea Lamprey pheromones.

Carried out risk assessments of potential aquatic invasive species; evaluated the impact of aquatic invasive species on Great Lakes ecosystems; and monitored ballast water management, establishing its effectiveness in eliminating importation of new species through this vector.

Carried out a program in response to the threat of Asian Carp to the Great Lakes, including monitoring for early detection; regulation at the border; assessment of risk of other species (Grass Carp); research into potential pathways and containment; and outreach.

Delivered a program of fisheries protection to ensure fish habitat supports commercial, recreational and Aboriginal fisheries.

Delivered a new one-time LiDAR survey of nearshore bathymetry to support the inventory and assessment of aquatic habitats in the nearshore of Lake Huron. Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada Work continued to improve beneficial agriculture management practices with involvement of the Great Lakes farming community in numerous projects, including the following: Implemented beneficial management practices under Growing Forward 2 programming, which is directed by the province of Ontario. In 2013-14, work involved food processors, collaborations/organizations, as well as individual farmers, all of whom received funding for Environment and Climate Change Adaptation. Natural Resources Canada Work continued towards the achievement of the sustainable development of Canadas energy, forestry and mineral metals resources within the Great Lakes Basin, including the following: Developed bioacoustic methods for monitoring change in amphibian and wetland associate bird communities.

Assessed stream water chemistry and benthic macroinvertebrates communities as potential indicators.

Monitored Wood Turtle movement patterns and habitat preferences in relation to potential cumulative risks. Parks Canada Delivers the National Parks and National Marine Conservation Areas programs and works to develop and maintain a viable protected areas network in the Great Lakes Basin that is relevant to Canadians. Projects included the following: Worked with Ontario towards the formal establishment of the Lake Superior National Marine Conservation Area, including development on interim management plan and zoning.

Operated the Fathom Five Marine Park (Lake Huron), including protection and monitoring of coastal heritage resources and delivery of Great Lake focused interpretation and outreach programs.

Operated five coastal national parks in Ontario on three Great Lakes and in the St. Lawrence River. This included the monitoring of heritage resources; the active management of invasive species and restoration of habitats through an Action on the Ground project on the Lake Erie Sand Spit Savannah in Point Pelee National Park; and the delivery of interpretation, outreach, stewardship and visitor experience programs related to the Great Lakes. Transport Canada Work continued to ensure compliance with Canada Shipping Act regulations related to the ecosystem health of the Great Lakes. Transport Canada undertook a wide variety of inspection, monitoring and training programs, including following projects: Updated/input to the Port State Control/Canadian National Ballast Water Database.

In conjunction with Fisheries and Oceans Canada, carried out shipboard testing of exchange plus treatment to decrease the risk of discharge of alien invasive species into the Great Lakes under the Ballast Water Management Program; conducted Phase 4 of Freshwater Ballast Water Treatment Technologies Testing; conducted Phase 8 of Ballast Water Management Assessment - Compliance and Enforcement Tools; and supported the Great Lakes Seaway Joint Ballast Water enforcement program to protect the Great Lakes. Infrastructure Canada Work continued toward providing funding to eligible infrastructure projects in support of federal objectives such as a cleaner environment, which includes improved wastewater treatment. Since 2006, the Government of Canada has committed over $2.08 billion in direct federal funding under several infrastructure funding programs for wastewater infrastructure projects across Canada, including more than $628 million for wastewater infrastructure in the Great Lakes watershed.

In 2013-14, Infrastructure Canada continued to support the implementation of wastewater infrastructure projects, including projects to improve the quality of municipal wastewater effluent in the St. Lawrence River and Hamilton Harbour AOC. Health Canada Work continued to enhance, within the Great Lakes Basin, environmental health knowledge that can be integrated into policies to address risks to human health by all levels of government. Projects included the following: Since it was launched in 2006, the Chemicals Management Plan has made significant progress. Of the 4,300 substances identified as priorities for assessment by 2020, approximately 1,100 have been addressed and risk management actions initiated (when necessary) through such initiatives as the Challenge to Industry, the Petroleum Sector Stream Approach and the rapid screening of substances of low concern.

For example, of the 188 substances assessed to date under the Challenge, 42 have been found to be harmful to human health and/or the environment. Risk management instruments have been finalized for 32 of these 42 substances, with proposed instruments published for an additional six and instruments are in development for the remaining four.

In addition, approximately 1,500 additional substances are on track to be addressed, with risk management to be initiated by 2016. Comments on variances (if applicable): Environment Canada: in 2013-14, the Government of Canada was in negotiations with the province of Ontario to negotiate a new Canada-Ontario Agreement respecting the Great Lakes to implement the 2012 GLWQA. Therefore, no planned spending was forecasted for the program. Dedicated Great Lakes funding (CWAP, GLNI) is received by Environment Canada and Fisheries and Oceans Canada only; each department also contributes departmental A-Base funding towards achieving results under the COA. All other partners to the COA (federal and provincial) achieve COA results via departmental funding. Agriculture Canada: Figures for planned spending are taken from the Growing Forward 2 bilateral agreement with Ontario for the designated Program 1.2, Environment and Climate Change Adaptation. Actual spending by the province will not be reported until August 31, 2014, following the fiscal year. Great Lakes specific activities are not separated, but are assumed to include the entire province. Parks Canada: Figures for planned and actual spending are not available as Parks Canadas financial coding systems are not designed to separate out Great Lakes-specific activities. Health Canada: Health Canada supports work for the GLEI through the joint Environment Canada/Health Canada Chemicals Management Plan. Specific resource figures are not available, as this spending is not tracked separately in Health Canada's financial system. Infrastructure Canada: Federal infrastructure funding programs do not include an allocation specific to the COA. The projects to be funded may be determined through a competitive, merit-based process or through joint federal-provincial discussions. In addition, the Minister of Infrastructure, Communities, and Intergovernmental Affairs may accept project proposals from municipalities and other non-governmental stakeholders. Results achieved by non-federal partners (if applicable): Not applicable. Contact information: Jennifer McKay

Great Lakes Environment Office

Environment Canada

416-739-5712
The old-fashioned butcher shop is having a moment.

Across the nation, butchers report a spike in sales linked to the coronavirus pandemic. The uptick has likely been fueled by shoppers frustrations with supermarkets running low on some items.

Our business has been brisk and it has been surprising," said Brad Wenger, owner of Wenger Meats & Ice in Carlisle.

Regular clientele are patronizing Wengers, known for its full-service butcher shop and deli. But Wenger said theyve also noticed an influx of new customers, likely a reaction from people who havent been satisfied with grocery store inventory.

Butchers, much like grocery stores, are deemed essential by Pennsylvania and allowed to remain open.

At Shaffers Quality Meats at the West Shore Farmers Market in Lemoyne, co-owner Kymn Shaffer said the number of customers patronizing the stand has climbed in recent weeks. Shaffers has serviced shoppers at the market for 81 years.

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Particularly, she said chicken, ground meats and roasts are in high demand. With everyone at home, many families are looking for cuts they can stretch into leftovers and soups, Shaffer said.

In the meantime, Shaffer said they havent had any issues sourcing meat from local purveyors and plan to continue filling their meat cases.

Heres a list of some central Pa. butcher and meat shops open for business:

Country Butcher Shop

The Country Butcher Shop has been in business in Carlisle since 1965 when Robert and Mary Finkenbinder took over. Today, their son Charles Finkenbinder operates the market, while their eldest son Glenn Finkenbinder owns North Mountain Butcher Shop, the only USDA inspected facility in Cumberland County. Most of the fresh meats including beef and pork are provided from local farmers. The shop also sells baked goods, snacks, milk, eggs, cheese and more.

Its open 9 a.m.-6 p.m. Tuesday-Friday, 8 a.m.-2 p.m. Saturday and closed Sunday-Monday.

286 McAllister Church Road, Carlisle, 717-249-4691

Gene Wengers Meats and Fine Foods

Located in Elizabethtown, Gene Wengers features fresh meats, homemade frozen dishes and casseroles, barbecue and a full deli. Specialities include signature ham loaf and steak burgers.

The meat case includes beef, pork and sausage, but shoppers also can pick up baked goods and prepared foods such as chicken pot pie.

To maintain distancing, Wengers permits two people in the store at once. It has installed safety shields and closes from 1:15 to 2 p.m. daily so employees can restock and sanitize. Otherwise, store hours are 8 a.m.- 5 p.m. Tuesday-Friday and 8 a.m.-noon Saturday. It is closed Sunday-Monday.

935 Groff Ave., Elizabethtown, 717-367-8864

Laudermilch Meats

Laudermilch Meats in Palmyra boasts a 200-square foot display of beef, pork, poultry, veal and lamb. The butcher shop carries hard-to-find items such as double smoked hams, scrapple, filled pig stomachs, pork crown roasts, prime rib and over 15 varieties of home made sausages along with steaks, burgers, hot dogs and chicken. Laudermilchs also sells baked goods, deli items and ready-to-eat foods. Look for weekly specials and meat bundle deals. Shoppers are urged to call ahead and pick up orders.

Its open 9-6 p.m. Tuesday-Friday and 9 a.m.-4 p.m. Saturday. Closed Sunday-Monday.

724 W. Main St., Palmyra, 717-867-1251

Pugliese Brothers Authentic Italian Gourmet Sausage opened in September 2016 at the Brandywine Plaza in Susquehanna Township. It is owned by brothers, John, Richard and Robert Pugliese. HARHAR

Pugliese Brothers Italian Sausage

Three brothers - Richard, John and Robert Pugliese - opened the shop in 2016 in Susquehanna Township. Along with the handmade sausages sold in sweet, hot and mild hot, the shop carries imported Italian products such as frozen and dried pastas, cheeses, olives, olive oils/balsamics, tomato and spinach pies and bread and rolls.

Its open 9 a.m.-2 p.m. Wednesday- Thursday, 9 a.m.-5 p.m. Friday and 9 a.m.-2 p.m. Saturday.

2241 Paxton Church Road, Susquehanna Township, 717-727-7191

RG Hummer Meats & Cheese

Hummers fifth generation meat cutter Ryan Hummer oversees the stand at the Broad Street Market in Harrisburg. His family opened it in 1957. Shoppers stop for pork chops, roasts, chicken and more along with deli meats and cheeses. Hummers custom cuts its meat to suit your requests. Deli selections run the gamut from Lebanon bologna to Cuban pork. Its open 7 a.m.-5 p.m. Thursday-Friday and 7 a.m.-4 p.m. Saturday.

1233 N. Third St., Harrisburg, 717-232-4150

Schmidts Sausage

Schmidts sausage recipes arrived in this country when Henry Schmidt emigrated from Hungary at age 13 in 1913 on the RMS Carpathia, the ship that one year earlier had rescued survivors of the Titanic.

Living in the ethnic neighborhood of Steelton, he made sausage in the basement of his home for friends and family. His style of German/Hungarian smoked sausage is known for being garlicky and robust.

Today, owners and brothers Doug and Don Jorich continue the tradition at their Swatara Township shop where they are offering curbside pickup and delivery. Also, look for weekend sandwich specials such as smoked brisket, foot long sausage and pulled pork.

Its open 9 a.m.-6 p.m. Tuesday-Friday and 9 a.m.-2 .m. Saturday. Closed Sunday-Monday.

1035 Eisenhower Blvd., Swatara Township, 717-939-0501

Shaffers Quality Meats

A staple at the West Shore Farmers Market in Lemoyne for 81 years, Shaffers carries a variety of meats including poultry, pork and beef. Co-owner Kymn Shaffer said inventory has not been a problem and purveyors ensure there is enough product to meet demand.

Shaffers accepts orders by phone, which shoppers can pick inside the market or curbside. The stand is open 8 a.m.-3 p.m. Tuesday, 8 a.m.-4 p.m. Friday and 8 a.m.-2 p.m. Saturday.

900 Market St., Lemoyne, 717-737-5713

David T. Mills III, owner of Smoke & Pickles. Smoke & Pickles Artisan Butcher Shop is located at 30 S. Market St. in Mechanicsburg. It combines a full-service butcher shop with an American barbecue restaurant. April 12, 2019. Dan Gleiter | dgleiter@pennlive.comPENNLIVE.COM

Smoke & Pickles Artisan Butcher Shop

David T. Mills III and his wife, Kelli, opened Smoke & Pickles last year. It combines a full-service butcher shop with 35-seat American barbecue restaurant.

The Mills source whole animals that are humanely raised including guinea fowl and chickens as well as different breeds of cows and pigs from local farms such as North Mountain Pastures in Newport and Pecan Meadows Farm in Newburg. They also sell charcuterie.

Smoke & Pickles is open for curbside pickup for butchered meats and its restaurant menu. Customers can order ahead by calling 717-795-4852or emailing ChefMills@SmokeandPicklesltd.com.

Its open 11 a.m.-7 p.m. Wednesday-Friday, 10 a.m.-6 p.m. Saturday and 9 a.m.-3 p.m. Sunday.

Wenger Meats & Ice

The family-owned company operates in Carlisle with a full-service delicatessen and butcher counter. Buy poultry, pork and beef as well as seafood including meat bundles. They also sell smoked meats and local products such as Apple Valley Creamery Milk, Utz chips, Harners Bakery and Kutztown Soda.

511 E. Louther St. Carlisle, 717-249-3223

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JUNCTION CITY, Ore.  Police are searching for a man who stole a truck and was reportedly acting strangely, offering to buy clothing that nearby children were wearing.

Police said a witness reported Mark Kloppel, 50, on Sunday afternoon after he was seen in the area of 2nd and Greenwood street.

Officers responded to the area and approached Kloppel, but he got away and wasn't found, police said.

The witness told police Kloppel was barefoot and acting very strange. Kloppel reportedly asked them to help get the ignition key and a cell phone from his semi-truck that was parked nearby.

Police found that the truck had been stolen from Seattle, Washington, on April 10 while the driver was getting fuel.

This prompted Junction City police to begin working with agencies in both Oregon and Washington.

Kloppel is described as white, 5 feet 10 inches tall, 200 pounds, with short brown hair and blue eyes. He has a neatly-trimmed mustache and goatee.

Police also describe him as wearing light-colored metal-framed glasses and said he was last seen wearing a neutral-toned jacket or a long-sleeve shirt with a hood. Police also said he is known to wear orange-colored traffic safety vests.

Anyone with information on Kloppel or who knows of his whereabouts should contact the Junction City Police Department at 541-998-1245.
Potomac Mills Rd., 14700 block, 6:27 p.m. April 7. A man at a public transportation terminal got into an argument with a security guard that escalated. The man pushed the guard to the ground and struck him several times. A male accomplice intervened and kicked the guard, then held a knife to the guards throat. A second security guard was able to separate the attackers from the other guard and called police. Two men, 24 and 36, both of no fixed address, were arrested nearby and charged with attempted malicious wounding and assault and battery.
Outbreaks of COVID-19 have flared up at two crowded California prisons, confirming the worst fears of prisoner families and advocates  and adding fuel to a growing federal court fight over the state prison systems response to the pandemic.

Forty-four prisoners and 21 staffers have tested positive for the coronavirus at the California Institution for Men in Chino, while 15 prisoners and 11 employees have been infected at the state prison in Los Angeles County, according to figures from the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation.

The number of confirmed prisoner cases nearly doubled in Los Angeles and increased more than fivefold at Chino since last week, when prison officials on April 7 reported eight confirmed cases at each facility. Chino has more than 3,431 prisoners and Los Angeles houses 3,187.

Five other prisons in California house a single prisoner who has tested positive: Centinela State Prison in Imperial; California Institution for Women in Corona; the California Mens Colony in San Luis Obispo; North Kern State Prison in Delano; and the Substance Abuse Treatment Facility in Corcoran.

As of Tuesday, 64 prisoners throughout the system had tested positive and 581 had been tested. Approximately 120,000 prisoners are housed at the states 35 institutions.

Staffers at three Bay Area prisons have also tested positive: six at San Quentin State Prison, four at the California Health Care Facility in Stockton and two at a Stockton juvenile facility.

Systemwide, there are 78 confirmed cases among prison staff and health care employees.

Jane Dorotik, a 73-year-old prisoner at the California Institution for Women, said in an email that everyone is squeezed tight in the housing unit, making it physically impossible to maintain 6 feet of physical distance as health officials recommend.

Women at the facility in Corona have become so worried theyre fashioning their own face masks out of scrap material, Dorotik said. In the last few days, though, state prison officials began handing out masks to prisoners, so Dorotik and others now have two.

We all feel like we are sitting ducks, fearful of becoming dead ducks, she wrote. The only real solution to save lives behind bars is to release.

Vanessa Nelson-Sloane, whose organization Life Support Alliance advocates for prisoners with life sentences, said she has been talking with prisoners, family members and state corrections officials to get a better handle on the outbreaks and response. Prisoners seem to be dealing with the crisis better than their loved ones on the outside, she said.

Theyre worried, theyre panicked, Nelson-Sloane said of the family members. Theyre really mistrustful of CDCR, which I totally understand.

But in this case, she added, state prison officials are being as proactive and transparent as I have ever seen them be.

During the pandemic, the state has taken some actions to reduce populations in the prison system, suspending intake from county jails and expediting the release of 3,500 prisoners who were within two months of completing their sentences.

Dana Simas, a state corrections spokeswoman, said the total prisoner population has decreased by 6,758 people since March 25. The state has also moved more than 600 prisoners from dormitories to vacant spaces.

We have taken unprecedented steps to address COVID-19, Simas said in a statement.

Courtesy of the Prison Law Office 2019

Seven housing units are on quarantine status and two are on isolation status at the Chino facility, Simas said. One unit is on quarantine status at the prison in Los Angeles.

However, attorneys and advocates for prisoners say these measures arent nearly enough to achieve physical distancing in crowded facilities, and they are pushing for the release or relocation of thousands more prisoners. Plaintiffs attorneys have focused attention on the plight of those who are especially vulnerable to dying of COVID-19 due to age or existing illnesses.

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.

In late March, attorneys with Rosen Bien Galvan & Grunfeld and the Prison Law Office filed a federal motion calling for emergency steps to protect prisoners. The motion called attention to state prison dormitories where men and women live, sleep, and bathe within feet  sometimes inches  of each other.

The outbreak at Chino has grown and spread in the facilitys dorms, according to a federal court filing Tuesday by the Prison Law Office. Of the 600-plus people moved, none were at Chino.

Even before this outbreak, it was a bad place to live, said Rita Lomio, a staff attorney with the office who toured Chinos dorms twice last year. She said she observed blind men being led down cramped hallways, poor ventilation and walkers stashed next to crammed bunks.

The state still has a window of time to prevent wider outbreaks by emptying crowded areas and moving vulnerable prisoners, said Bien, who is representing prisoners in multiple lawsuits against the state.

The legal battles are being fought this week before federal judges in California.

State officials have so far resisted the type of sweeping releases sought by Bien and other advocates.

During an April 2 court hearing, two federal judges asked an attorney for the state if California prisons could achieve 6 feet of physical distancing without releasing a large number of prisoners. The attorney answered that he did not know.

Attorney General Xavier Becerras office, which is representing the Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, said in its latest court filing that California has taken far more steps to address the COVID-19 pandemic than any other state.

The attorneys argued that California prisons should be allowed to address these important issues without judicial interference.

Jason Fagone and Megan Cassidy are San Francisco Chronicle staff writers. Email: jason.fagone@sfchronicle.com, megan.cassidy@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @jfagone, @meganrcassidy
Ryan Kellogg, a former oil company engineer and now an economist at the University of Chicago, says now is an especially bad time for this deal. Increases in oil prices hurt consumers, many of whom now have reduced or even zero income but still need to drive to the store or run errands, he told me. The gains go to oil company shareholders and debtholders, and to royalty owners  folks that tend to be higher income.
Microsoft on Tuesday made clear it remains committed to ending support for Office 2010 in October, even though the company recently extended deadlines for other products, including some versions of Windows 10.

"Office 2016 for Mac and Office 2010 will reach their end of support on October 13, 2020," Microsoft's Office 365 team wrote on a company blog, referring to a date that had been set long ago. The post's title, "Reminder of changes coming to Office support in October," offers an unsubtle hint that a different date is unlikely.

Microsoft will deliver the final security updates for Office 2010 and Office 2016 for Mac on Oct. 13, though the suites' applications will continue to work after that. Microsoft does not cripple the applications post-retirement.

Nor will the company go out of its way to block the suites' applications from connecting to Office 365 services, such as Exchange Online, even though announcements in 2017 and 2018 stated that only Office 365 ProPlus, Office 2019 and as an after-thought addition, Office 2016, could do so. "Microsoft will not take any active measures to block legacy versions of the Office client from connecting to Office 365 services, but these older clients may encounter performance and/or reliability issues over time," Microsoft asserted Tuesday.

Although Computerworld had argued as recently as this week that Microsoft should offer customers more time to move off Office 2010, the Redmond, Wash. firm was, well, fairly firm. It did leave the door open just a crack, however.

"We recognize customers are at different points in their journey to the cloud, and we will continue to listen to and support our customers," Microsoft said, using phrasing that has accompanied past reversals.

Over the last month, Microsoft has extended support for several products, citing the business disruptions caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, notably employers asking some workers to toil from home. Among the software receiving six-month support extensions: Windows 10 1709 and Windows 10 1809, and SharePoint Server.

At least one customer pleaded for an extension to Office 2010. "Due to [the] coronavirus, deploying new applications to remote workers is not [an] easy task and requires additional planning and testing. Therefore, I am wondering, is it possible to extend [the] end of support date for these products to next year?" asked Reza Ameri, a Microsoft Most Valued Professional (MVP) in a comment appended Wednesday to the blog post.

Ameri had yet to receive a reply.
Calif. bill aims to hide kids' abortions, transgender procedures from parents

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A California state lawmaker has introduced a bill that would hold health insurance companies criminally liable if they disclose medical information to parents or guardians about their dependents, including details about procedures that have been performed without their knowledge.

Services and procedures mentioned in SB 1004, the "Confidentiality of Medical Information Act" include drug abuse and mental health treatments, abortions, and experimental gender transition hormones and related surgical procedures.

In a fact-sheet released by Democratic state Sen. Hannah-Beth Jackson of Santa Barbara, the claim is that the legislation is necessary to protect young adults who remain on their parents' health insurance until age 26 from being shamed or hurt by the policyholder who disagrees with their healthcare choices.

The religious advocacy group Catholic Citizens of Illinois raised concerns, saying, "This bill not only hides the medical service used by young adults from their parents, but it also hides services for 'a minor who can consent to a health care service without the consent of a parent or legal guardian "

California Family Council President Jonathan Keller said in a statement to The Christian Post that government bureaucrats should not be helping Planned Parenthood undermine parents rights to guide and oversee the healthcare of their children."

Transparency matters. The owner of an insurance policy deserves to know what medical procedures they are paying for. If an adult under 26 wants insurance privacy, they can and should purchase their own insurance, he added.

California state law currently allows minors to give consent to the following medical procedures and treatments in cases of: abortion; drug and alcohol related problems; HIV/AIDS; certain infectious, contagious, or communicable diseases, including sexually transmitted diseases; mental health drugs and counseling; pregnancy and birth control; and sexual assault, according to the California Healthcare Foundation.

Under the new bill, insurers would be held criminally liable if they informed parents or guardians that their insurance policies were paying for any of these procedures for their children.

Planned Parenthood currently says on its website that minors who identify as transgender and want to take puberty-blocking drugs and cross-sex hormones  which cause sterility  must first obtain parental approval.

Some groups believe that a 1997 California state Supreme Court ruling might be used as the legal basis to justify permitting minors to obtain experimental drugs for transgender procedures without their parents' consent.

In a press release sent to CP, Pacific Justice Institute Senior Attorney Kevin Snider highlighted the case of American Academy of Pediatrics v. Lundgren, which, he said, "emasculated" parental rights, as it overturned a law requiring parents to be notified before a minor could undergo an abortion.

The California state Supreme Court held that minors have informational and autonomy privacy in terms of intimate personal decisions which trumps the rights of parents. It is doubtful that the ruling would not extend to minors ingesting cross-sex hormones, Snider said.

Another factor that points toward this as a likely development is a recent policy from the California Teachers Association, the state teachers' union.

The new CTA policy states that it believes "comprehensive school-based healthcare clinics are needed to bring caring and responsive services to young people. The clinics shall provide cisgender, transgender and non-binary youth equal and confidential access to decision-making rights for students and their families.

The group's stated rationale for the policy is that "[c]urrent interpretation of California state law does not allow trans students to begin gender identity confirming hormone therapy without the consent of both legal guardians, however, it does allow for cis minors to receive hormones (e.g. birth control) without the barrier of parental permission."

This inequity of decision-making forces some children to go through the wrong puberty and can negatively impact the childs mental health, the teachers' union claims.

In December, Planned Parenthood announced its plans to establish health centers within 50 high schools in the Los Angeles Unified School District to offer their services to students.

SB 1004 hasn't yet been assigned to a Senate committee for a hearing, and won't be assigned to a hearing until the Senate returns to session in May.

California is among the states whose lawmakers have pushed for transgender medicalization of children. In 2018, lawmakers passed AB 2119, legislation that guaranteed state resources would go toward "gender-affirmative" treatments for children in the state foster care system who identify as transgender or nonbinary. Democratic Gov. Jerry Brown signed the bill in September of the same year.
Reducing the workload of the constraint resource by studying the work and eliminating unnecessary tasks. If the time it takes a worker to complete a DMV transaction can be reduced from 15 minutes to 10, we have 33 percent more capacity. Again, this is why this concept is so critical. Saving five minutes of labor elsewhere in the system is a mirage. But saving it at the point of the constraint is game-changing. The constraint focuses our attention.

Looking at the work that comes to the constraint point and ensuring that it is actually necessary and ready to be worked. For example, many DMV and public-assistance offices now deploy a "navigator" in their lobbies. Navigators determine why people have come in and whether they have the right paperwork, completed the right way, before they ever get in line to see a worker. While this appears to be a customer-service innovation, its true function is to prevent any waste at the constraint. You don't want a precious window resource spending 10 minutes with a customer only to find that the transaction can't be completed. Other "ventilator" strategies consist of moving customers to online transactions, double-manning counters during peak times, and moving complex or difficult transactions to specialists to minimize delays for the whole queue. The key principle is to keep work flowing, and to do that we must improve and manage our bottlenecks.

The global pandemic is offering countless examples of public leadership and management in action. Many are truly heroic and inspiring, while some are just downright bizarre. But despite the best efforts of government leaders, epidemiologists, doctors and nurses, the success of the coronavirus response system for those seriously ill with COVID-19 has turned out to be critically dependent on one thing: the availability of ventilators.Through the ventilator shortage, we are all learning a lot about a key management concept first made popular by Eliyahu M. Goldratt in his 1984 book,The book was where Eli introduced the world to his Theory of Constraints. Essentially, any system will be limited in achieving its goals by a few key constraints. Said simply, you are only as good as your weakest link.Take, for example, a simple four-step process in which each step has the following capacity to produce a service such as building permits: A (125) > B (150) > C (75) > D (150). The system will only produce 75 permits; step C is the system constraint. The outputs from A and B that exceed 75 will only pile up in front of C.The power of Eli's theory is that to dramatically increase capacity, you don't have to do a lot of things. Rather, you have to focus on one thing  your point of constraint. You have to find it, study it and figure out a way around it. That is, when you increase the capacity of the constraint, you increase the capacity of the whole system. Conversely, if you don't fix the constraint, nothing else you do will have much impact on the system.So, as we've learned, our system for treating people seriously ill with COVID-19 is governed by a constraint: the number and availability of ventilators. Like most systems, the demand on this treatment system is predictable. We are able to estimate how many people are likely to get sick in a given location, how many will be hospitalized and how many will need ventilation. Doing the math identifies the constraint. In New York state, for example, in late March the math showed that roughly 18,000 ventilators a week would be needed during the peak of illnesses. As of March 26, the state had less than 3,000.Your agency or jurisdiction almost certainly has its own version of a ventilator shortage. That is, your organization has a few key work systems, and each of those has a constraint that prevents it from producing more. A DMV office is constrained by the number of windows it has working to serve the line of customers. A permitting process may be constrained by the availability and workload of a senior review engineer. Child-welfare investigations are often constrained by the limited availability of supervisors to review key decisions. You can do your own epidemiological math to figure out the predictable demand on your system and isolate the constraint. Or you can just walk around and observe. The constraint is usually where the work is piling up, the staff is tense, and the lack of progress chasing phone calls is the highest.The ventilator shortage can teach us the key principles for eliminating constraints:In the case of the pandemic, this means procuring and producing more ventilators. I know this sounds obvious, but there is actually a key insight for us. So many of our agencies beg elected officials for more resources. And yes, we do often need more resources. But usually what we really need are moreresources. That is, rather than needing a few more of a lot of resources, we need a lot more of a few resources. Child welfare needs more case workers to monitor foster care. Environmental agencies need more senior permit engineers. DMV offices need more window workers during peak times.Because the capacity of the entire system is dependent on the capacity of the constraint, we also have to ensure the constraint is working at maximum efficiency. In the case of ventilators, this has meant first and foremost that ventilators not sit idle. Every possible ventilator needs to be deployed and needs to be properly working. The ventilator shortage has also forced another brilliant innovation: sharing ventilators. That is, medical teams have found a way to use one ventilator to pump air to two patients, effectively doubling the capacity of the constraint.The key insight for agencies is to recognize the constraint resource and focus attention on helping staffers be as productive as possible. We do this in two ways:As you watch the nightly-news pandemic updates, listen for the ventilator-shortage strategies. Watch how data is being used to predict demand. Watch how ventilators are being deployed and redeployed. And then think about your own agency and its constraints. How well do you know them? Is there a crisis coming? Can we manage our constraints as vigorously as the ventilators are now being managed? Does our staff know this story? The steps you take now will better prepare you for when you don't have a choice.GoverningGoverning
ISTANBUL - Turkey on Wednesday begun releasing thousands of detainees after a large-scale amnesty was approved to counter the risks of COVID-19 spreading in jails. Buses began the transfers in the morning from penitentiaries, starting with those over age 65.



Some 90,000 prisoners are expected to be released after the reform, equal to almost a third of the total. Half will be able to use the parole system at least until May 31, with a possible further extension for another 4 months. The rest will be released completely, though some will be under house arrest, to reduce overcrowding in prisons. There are currently some 123 prisoners per 100 places available in Turkish jails. The measure was criticised by opposition parties and NGOs since it excluded political opponents of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, many of whom were sentenced on controversial terrorism charges, one of the crimes not included in the amnesty.


This is a shameful abuse of power, said Nancy Northup, president of the Center for Reproductive Rights, in announcing the Louisiana suit. We are already fighting a separate Louisiana law at the Supreme Court that would shut down nearly every clinic in the state. If the states latest actions are not blocked, that will become a reality before the Supreme Court even rules.
Todd McFarlane talks about his first Spawn team book and the culmination of the 'Year of Spawn'

The comic book icon looks back at the 'Year of Spawn' and forward to his first-ever team book The Scorched
OSLO, Norway, April 15, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- The Annual General Meeting of Akastor ASA was held on Wednesday 15 April 2020 at the company's premises at Oksenyveien 10, Lysaker, Norway.

All proposals on the agenda were adopted, cf. Notice of Annual General Meeting attached to the stock exchange release dated 25 March 2020.

The complete minutes are attached to this release and are also available at www.akastor.com.

For further information, please contact:

yvind Paaske

Chief Financial Officer

Mob: +47-917-59-705

E-mail: [email protected]

This information is subject to the disclosure requirements pursuant to section 5 -12 of the Norwegian Securities Trading Act.

This information was brought to you by Cision http://news.cision.com

https://news.cision.com/akastor-asa/r/akastor-asa--minutes-of-annual-general-meeting-2020,c3087989

The following files are available for download:

https://mb.cision.com/Main/18618/3087989/1229764.pdf Akastor ASA AGM 2020 Minutes of Meeting.pdf

SOURCE Akastor ASA
(Alliance News) - Kavango Resources PLC on Wednesday said it has raised GBP358,500 by issuing shares and convertible loan notes.

The stock was trading 5.9% lower at 0.80 pence each at Wednesday midday in London.

The mining exploration firm said it raised GBP218,000 through the placing of 27.3 million shares at 0.8p each and the issue of GBP102,500 of 10% convertible loan notes. Power Metal Resources PLC also subscribed for GBP38,000 of zero coupon convertible loan notes.

Following admission of the placing shares, Kavango will have 188.2 million shares in issue.

Kavango also said it has sold a 51% stake in the Ditau project in Botswana to Power Metal Resources PLC for GBP150,000. Power Metal said the amount will be paid through the issue of 35.7 million shares at 0.42 each.

In September, Kavango said it found evidence of possible rare earth elements at Ditau. On Wednesday, Power Metal stated that ten geophysical "ring structures" were identified at Ditau, including one 7 kilometere by 5 kilometre magnetic anomaly, potentially related to carbonatite magmatism.

Carbonatite magmatism is the primary source of niobium and rare earth elements

Under the agreement, Power Metal will become operator of Ditau and will confirm a new project work programme after completion of the acquisition.

"Power Metal is building a portfolio of potentially exciting opportunities, with the conditional acquisition of the Ditau Project offering a great deal of promise. The team has a strong connection with research leaders in the area of carbonatite geology, and we believe that know-how, when applied to the extensive information gathered by Kavango to date, will make a significant difference. Not only can we help augment the forward direction for the Ditau project, but also open up new commercial avenues for a more rapid project advancement," said Power Metal Chief Executive Paul Johnson.

Power Metal noted that since Johnson holds 5.1 million shares in Kavango Resources - representing a 2.7% stake in Kavango post acquisition completion - he did not submit a vote on the acquisition.

Power Metal stock was trading 31% higher at 0.28p each at Wednesday midday in London.

By Ife Taiwo; ifetaiwo@alliancenews.com

Copyright 2020 Alliance News Limited. All Rights Reserved.
2 1 of 2 Josie Norris /Staff Photographer Show More Show Less 2 of 2 William Luther /Associated Press Show More Show Less



In an effort to help alleviate hunger in the Alamo City during the COVID-19 pandemic, the SWBC Foundation announced on Wednesday a big monetary donation to the San Antonio Food Bank.

The SWBC  a San Antonio-based financial services company  gave $50,000 to the food bank as a way to help "feed our neighbors in need during the COVID-19 pandemic," the organization said in a news release.
NEW YORK, April 15, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- Kustomer, the SaaS platform reimagining enterprise customer service, announced the broad rollout of KustomerIQ, its artificial intelligence engine embedded across the Kustomer CRM platform. Kustomer IQ is empowering companies to do more with less, and operate as efficiently as possible in the face of a reduction of resources. The solution leverages the power of machine learning to get to the root of customer needs, helping achieve effective customer experiences by eliminating manual guesswork and arming agents with the tools and insights that drive results across responses, routing, and analytics. Kustomer IQ also offers customer deflection tools across web, chat, and email channels, which automate the communication of initial and routine customer inquiries.

"KustomerIQ delivers quicker and more accurate results to customer service inquiries by leveraging sophisticated machine learning models. Our intelligence tools help companies efficiently automate and scale communication without compromising accuracy, whether it's routing inbound requests to the right team or measuring a customer's sentiment," said Brad Birnbaum, CEO and Co-Founder of Kustomer. "This increase in speed and overall quality experiences translates into more satisfied and loyal customers, which every business needs right now."

With Kustomer IQ, companies can access AI-powered tools to contextualize every conversation and leverage that data to save valuable agent time for more meaningful and essential customer service. Its highly accurate machine learning models are easily trained with a few simple clicks allowing any company to harness the power of modern AI.

"Kustomer IQ has had a tremendous impact on my team's efficiency. Machine learning instantly identifies the purpose of every inbound conversation, then intelligently routes each customer to a specific team based on their contact reason, such as orders, returns, or clean out. Rather than spend time manually routing conversations, my team can focus on delivering personalized service and resolving issues quickly to decrease customer effort," says Emily Marcogliese, Head of Customer Service at ThredUp.

Kustomer IQ includes new features such as:

Automated Self-Service: Native omnichannel deflection capabilities provide relevant and accurate content to customers from an organization's Knowledge Base prior to agent intervention.

Native omnichannel deflection capabilities provide relevant and accurate content to customers from an organization's Knowledge Base prior to agent intervention. Intent Identification: Machine learning analyzes and classifies inbound conversations, triggering smarter processes that expedite customer experiences.

Machine learning analyzes and classifies inbound conversations, triggering smarter processes that expedite customer experiences. Agent Recommendations : Machine learning analyzes customer messages and suggests relevant help articles and policy content to resolve issues faster.

: Machine learning analyzes customer messages and suggests relevant help articles and policy content to resolve issues faster. Global Language Detection : Featuring natural language processing and powered by Amazon Comprehend, language detection helps companies deliver consistent experiences to all customers.

: Featuring natural language processing and powered by Amazon Comprehend, language detection helps companies deliver consistent experiences to all customers. Sentiment Analysis: Machine learning analyzes messages and recognizes exactly how customers are feeling, assigning a sentiment score to help agents mirror emotions, and calm frustrations.

Machine learning analyzes messages and recognizes exactly how customers are feeling, assigning a sentiment score to help agents mirror emotions, and calm frustrations. NLP (Natural Language Processing) Chatbot (coming soon): By leveraging NLP and the advanced CRM data model in the Kustomer platform, its chatbot will be able to offer automated information gathering and human-like levels of customer service to company conversations

Kustomer IQ is being offered in three tiers: Kustomer IQ Lite, Kustomer IQ and Kustomer IQ+. Kustomer IQ includes all of the features above, enabling companies to provide more efficient experiences through sophisticated automation and accurate predictive insights. Kustomer IQ+, coming soon, will provide end-customers a new way to interact with brands, featuring an AI-powered chatbot functionality. The chatbot will be capable of conducting two-way dialogue via live chat and be able to recognize customers based on custom object data, helping brands accurately deflect inquiries around orders, shipping and tracking.

To provide all customers with powerful AI capabilities, Kustomer has included a complimentary Lite version of Kustomer IQ as part of their existing pricing plans. Kustomer IQ Lite includes global language detection and sentiment analysis, so all customers can provide empathetic service and support around the world.

"We're proud to announce Kustomer IQ Lite includes automated self-service, so all companies can take advantage of deflection and conversational assistant support capabilities," adds Birnbaum. "Now, more than ever, when companies are struggling to do more with less, we believe that deflection will serve as an added leg up in delivering an exceptional support experience. We are committed to our client's success and are proud to offer the enhanced AI capabilities that we believe are crucial."

For more information about Kustomer, visit www.kustomer.com

About Kustomer

Kustomer is the omnichannel SaaS platform reimagining enterprise customer service to deliver standout experiences - not resolve tickets. Built with intelligent automation, Kustomer scales to meet the needs of any contact center and business by unifying data from multiple sources and enabling companies to deliver effortless, consistent and personalized service and support through a single timeline view. Today, Kustomer is the core platform of some of the leading customer service brands like Ring, Glossier, Away, Glovo, Slice and UNTUCKit. Headquartered in NYC, Kustomer was founded in 2015 by serial entrepreneurs Brad Birnbaum and Jeremy Suriel, has raised over $173M in venture funding, and is backed by leading VCs including: Coatue, Tiger Global Management, Battery Ventures, Redpoint Ventures, Cisco Investments, Canaan Partners, Boldstart Ventures and Social Leverage.

Media Contact:

Cari Sommer

Raise Communications

cari @raisecg.com

SOURCE Kustomer

Related Links

https://www.kustomer.com


Bill Gates and the United Nations (UN) have described the decision of the president of the United States, Donald Trump, to halt the countrys contribution to the World Health Organisation (WHO) as dangerous and unnecessary at a time the world is wrestling to defeat the spread of COVID-19.

Mr Trump, in his address to White House correspondents on Tuesday, revealed his decision to withhold the countrys funding over his suspicion of the agencys dereliction of duty.

He also alleged that the WHO was complicit in mismanaging and covering up of the spread of the coronavirus after its emergence in China.

I am directing my administration to halt funding while a review is conducted to assess the World Health Organizations role in severely mismanaging and covering up the spread of the coronavirus, Mr Trump had told journalists at a news conference on Tuesday.

On a yearly basis, the US contributes roughly $400 to $500 million to the coffers of the WHO. This makes the country the leading sponsor of the organisation.

Mr Trump has also been facing criticism from Americans on his management of the pandemic in the country. As at Wednesdays morning, the US has recorded over 614,246 confirmed cases of COVID-19 and 18,255 total death cases.

Currently, the country accounts for a little above 25 per cent of the worlds COVID-19 cases while the world total cases is a little above two million.

Dangerous Decision

In reaction to Mr Trumps decision, Bill Gates, who is the second-largest funder of WHO, in his tweet posted at 6:17 a.m. on Wednesday, described such a decision as dangerous, going by the current stretch of the pandemic across the world and the efforts of the organisation so far.

Halting funding for the World Health Organization during a world health crisis is as dangerous as it sounds. Their work is slowing the spread of COVID-19 and if that work is stopped no other organization can replace them. The world needs @WHO now more than ever, Mr Gates cautioned.

According to information on WHO official website, Mr Gates provided 9.76 per cent of the agencys funds in the year 2018-2019 while the US contributed 14.67 per cent ($400m) of the entire funds.

Chinas contribution in the same year was almost $76m in assessed contributions and about $10m in voluntary funding. This is about 0.21 per cent of the entire contribution.

In its official statement in reaction to Mr Trumps directive, the United Nations Secretary-General, Antonio Guterres, said now is not the time to reduce resources in the combat against the pandemic disease but a time to stay unity to ascertain victory.

This virus is unprecedented in our lifetime and requires an unprecedented response. Obviously, in such conditions, it is possible that the same facts have had different readings by different entities. Once we have finally turned the page on this epidemic, there must be a time to look back fully to understand how such a disease emerged and spread its devastation so quickly across the globe, and how all those involved reacted to the crisis.

But now is not that time.

As it is not that time, it is also not the time to reduce the resources for the operations of the World Health Organization or any other humanitarian organization in the fight against the virus, he appealed.

This reaction was also retweeted by the WHO Twitter handle even though the agency is yet to respond to Mr Trumps allegations.
BAKU, Azerbaijan, Apr. 15

By Rufiz Hafizoglu - Trend:

Turkeys export of leather goods to Uzbekistan dropped by 34.2 percent from January through March 2020, compared to the same period of 2019, amounting to $1.7 million, Turkeys Ministry of Trade told Trend on April 15.

In March 2020, Turkeys export of leather goods to Uzbekistan dropped by 41.3 percent compared to March of last year and amounted to $758,000.

From January through March 2020, export of leather goods from Turkey to world markets dropped by 5.4 percent compared to the same period of 2019, amounting to $415.2 million.

Turkeys export of leather goods amounted to 1 percent of the countrys total export for the reporting period.

In March 2020, Turkey exported leather goods worth $130.2 million to world markets, which is 26 percent less compared to the same month of 2019.

Turkeys export of leather goods in the reporting month made up 1 percent of the countrys total export.

During the last twelve months (from January through March 2020), Turkeys export of leather goods amounted to $1.6 billion.

---

Follow the author on Twitter: @rhafizoglu
Five years ago, Desiree Harmon, then 40, was treated for breast cancer at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania. Now, to avoid possible coronavirus exposure, she gets a monthly anti-cancer injection at home instead of in the hospital. Read more

For almost five years after her treatment for breast cancer, Desiree Harmon made an inconvenient, monthly trek to the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania for an injection that helps keep the disease from coming back.

I called it my calendar-killer, the 45-year-old middle school director at Friends Select said of her West Philadelphia appointments. I had to work my life around this shot."

The pandemic changed that. Because hospitals are hot zones of coronavirus transmission, Penn is ramping up home cancer care. A nurse now gives the estrogen-suppressing shot to Harmon at her home in Mount Airy, where she, her husband, and their two children are hunkered down.

I kind of freaked out a little bit [about coronavirus] because of having a compromised immune system," Harmon said. As much as I love Penn, not having to go there gives me peace of mind.

COVID-19, which has so far killed more than 28,000 in the U.S., is particularly dangerous for older adults and those with weakened immune systems; cancer patients are often both.

Thats why hospitals, oncologists, and insurers are beginning to look for ways to shift cancer treatment out of medical facilities, including the infusion centers" where outpatients sit for hours getting intravenous chemotherapy.

 FAQ: Your coronavirus questions, answered

Just earlier this week, the National Comprehensive Cancer Network, an alliance of 30 leading cancer centers, issued these recommendations in response to the pandemic: Try to convert in-person oncology visits to telemedicine. Use oral chemotherapy whenever possible. Move outpatient care, such as disconnecting infusion pumps and giving injections, into the home. Do scans less often, or switch to blood tests for monitoring response to therapy. The guidance also has advice for ensuring the safety of oncology care workers.

 READ MORE: How people with compromised immune systems are staying safe amid coronavirus

At Thomas Jefferson University Hospital, the strong telemedicine program has been expanded to reduce oncology patient visits to the Center City institution.

Yesterday, I saw only four patients in person. I saw 10 online, said Jefferson oncologist Adam Binder. Even patients who come to the infusion center for chemotherapy are seeing the providers the same day via telehealth to reduce time and touches in the center.

 ASK US: Do you have a question about the coronavirus and how it affects your health, work and life? Ask our reporters.

For their part, patients are justifiably afraid that coronavirus exposure may be more dangerous than postponing cancer treatment.

We get a lot of calls every day asking if its necessary to come in, Binder said. Patients are canceling on their own or their families are canceling, even if we think it is medically necessary.

 READ MORE: Fighting for survival inside Philadelphia's busiest COVID-19 hospital

Cancer care has traditionally been provided in medical facilities for good reasons. Infusion centers can efficiently give chemotherapy, including complicated drug regimens, to large numbers of patients while monitoring them for bad reactions that require quick intervention. Hospitals are primed for emergencies such as severe nausea, dehydration, blood clots, difficulty breathing.

The problem is that Medicare  which pays $30 billion to treat beneficiaries with cancer in their first year after diagnosis  and private insurers often wont reimburse for treatment outside those proven settings, even when it seems sensible.

The pandemic is accelerating revisions in reimbursement policies, said Justin Bekelman, director of Penns Center for Cancer Care Innovation.

Some reimbursement mechanisms already exist for [home] services or are in process," he and a colleague wrote in a journal article. For example, billing codes for home infusion of intravenous fluids or medications, including chemotherapy, are present, and the home infusion market is growing rapidly. Forty-nine states and Washington, D.C., have legislation related to payment for some telemedicine services.

Late last year, the cancer care innovators planned a home treatment program in partnership with Penns pharmacists and home infusion therapists.

Launched in February, the pilot program soon signed up several dozen patients with breast cancer, prostate cancer and lymphoma. Six cancer drugs not previously given in the home, as well as a complicated five-drug regimen called EPOCH, were successfully administered.

Then, in mid-March, state officials began issuing stay-at-home orders, while the surge in coronavirus patients overwhelmed many hospitals. The number of Penn cancer patients getting home infusions jumped from 670 in mid-February to 845 now, Bekelman said, adding that 15 additional cancer drugs are being considered for home delivery.

Given that Penn performs hundreds of cancer infusions a day at its West Philadelphia complex, home care is still tiny, said Penn oncologist Lynn Schuchter.

But this is one of the silver linings of the pandemic, she said. Things we wanted to innovate in cancer care, weve been able to do much more rapidly.
New Delhi, April 15 : Slamming the government over plight of labourers and workers of the unorganised sector due to lockdown, the Congress, here on Wednesday, said it should focus on the economic crisis.

"The government has failed to share an economic blueprint for the 48 crore labourers, for 6 crore MSME workers, and salaried class, who were facing job layoffs due to closing of businesses," said Congress spokesperson Jaiveer Shergill.

Along with the event management, the government should also focus on the economic crisis to ensure that people survived the 'Income down, business down, jobs down' virus along with the coronavirus, he added.

The Congress leader said the government should have introduced fiscal vaccine to combat the economic recession virus along with the administrative lockdown guidelines.

"Where is the blueprint to help migrant labourers, to help those losing jobs, to help those unable to pay bank EMI/loan interests," he tweeted.

The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) seemed to have turned a blind eye to the economic recession storm dismantling the fiscal structure and fiscal balance of every household, he said.
The people wanted to know: Did self-described psychic Sylvia Browne predict the 2020 coronavirus pandemic in her 2008 book? So they turned to the place one goes to find the answers to such questions: Snopes.com.

The internet's original myth-busters tackled this query on March 4, and the resulting post became one of the site's most-read pieces that month, along with a look into whether the Trump administration actually fired the U.S. pandemic response team in 2018 and the one about whether Costco truly issued a toilet paper recall.

They deemed the Browne matter a "mixture" of truth and fiction. Yes, Browne had written more than a decade ago that "in around 2020 a severe pneumonia-like illness will spread throughout the globe, attacking the lungs and the bronchial tubes and resisting all known treatments." But the Snopes team determined that "it's unclear whether Browne's 'prediction' was more of a lucky guess, considering the book was written after the SARS outbreak." (Browne also predicted the disease "will suddenly vanish" and then come back in 10 years. Jury is still out on that.)

But since then, Snopes, which delves into everything from bizarre urban legends to intricate government policies, has been overwhelmed with so many COVID-19-related questions that the website can't keep up. The company has done something that seems counterintuitive: It has scaled back operations by publishing fewer stories. There have been no furloughs or layoffs; but Snopes is encouraging employees, whose lives have been turned upside down by the pandemic, to take time off if needed.

It's a predicament other fact-checkers and journalists are facing: As the novel coronavirus has swept the globe, so has misinformation about the virus. The World Health Organization has referred to the abundance of articles, commentary and social media postings about this one topic  some accurate, some not  as an "infodemic" which "makes it hard for people to find trustworthy sources and reliable guidance when they need it."

Compared with other big news stories, this pandemic presents a particularly difficult challenge for professional fact-checkers. The multi-headed crisis has its roots in what is essentially a science and medical story, requiring many journalists, not just health reporters, to quickly get up to speed. COVID-19 remains a mystery even to many of the professional scientists who could explain it to a reporter. And the stakes are high: The consequences of promoting a bogus diagnostic technique or false cure  such as the church that tried to sell its members on ingesting a common swimming pool cleaner  could be deadly.

"I wish we could do more, but we just can't, and that's because when demand increases, there is no economics that support an increase in production at a fact-checking organization," said Vinny Green, general manager of Snopes.com. "The only way for us to do more is to pass that burden on to our staff and try to make them rise to the occasion, even though they've been working their a  es off day in and day out."

Since the pandemic began, Snopes has looked into questions about whether Pat Robertson blamed oral sex for COVID-19 (not really, but it seems some readers misinterpreted a satirical piece as news); explored a rumor about thieves distributing masks laden with toxic chemicals (false, it turns out); and investigated claims that Ivanka Trump stands to profit from the pandemic because of a trademark on coffins in China (yes, she holds the trademark, but no, there's no evidence she's selling coffins).

And Snopes has seen a record amount of traffic to its site since the dawn of the crisis. Green, citing Google Analytics, said the website had 37 million visitors from late February to late March, a jump of 43% from the previous 30-day period. But more eyeballs on a website doesn't always translate to more revenue: Many news outlets are breaking readership records these days but experiencing declines in ad sales. Some are pleading with readers to become paid subscribers; Snopes is selling premium memberships.

Snopes managing editor Doreen Marchionni said she became concerned with the morale in her small, remote newsroom. "Trying to keep up with the rumors and misinformation on COVID was going to drown us and hurt our staff."

Readers submitted roughly 10,000 COVID-related queries to Snopes during the last two weeks of March. Rather than trying to answer the avalanche of questions, Snopes said it will pick its targets and amplify credible sources, highlighting the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and WHO in particular. (They're also still posting some timely non-coronavirus fact checks, like one about Florida residents allegedly finding porn-filled Easter eggs in their mailboxes.)

The avalanche at Snopes is mirrored in what's happening globally, especially as information is being spread not just on social media outlets but also platforms like WhatsApp. "So many organizations are overwhelmed by the number of requests they are receiving from their audiences," said Baybars Orsek, director of the International Fact-Checking Network at the Poynter Institute.

The network, which includes more than 70 members, started a database of more than 3,000 fact-checks from around the world. It's "the largest collaboration among fact-checkers ever, and that by itself is a pretty strong indicator that the amount of misinformation around COVID-19 is unprecedented," said Orsek, who estimates fact-checking organizations worldwide are seeing 10 times the number of requests than they usually do.

Sharing the work that's gone into debunking false claims is one approach in the battle against misinformation. Myths about the virus move from country to country as the pandemic does; fact-checkers in Spain, for instance, started seeing the same myths that their Italian counterparts had already debunked, Orsek said. Among the most prevalent conspiracy theories: that COVID-19 is a biological weapon developed in a lab.

"Readers around the world are asking us about possible cures, and possible behaviors we might take to keep from getting the virus," Marchionni said. "We're also debunking a fair number of comments from the president," such as whether hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin are "game changers" in the fight against COVID-19.

Snopes got its start in 1994 as the "Urban Legends Reference Pages," an early internet forum that mostly concerned itself with folklore and hoaxes such as whether Charlie Chaplin's stolen remains were truly held for ransom, or whether "The Wizard of Oz" includes footage of a munchkin committing suicide.

The site never stopped tackling these kinds of questions, but over the years the rebranded "Snopes" turned into a trusted arbiter in sorting through fact and fiction on the internet. "Well, Snopes says this is false" can be a debate-ender online.

Under normal circumstances, Snopes debunks a variety of weird things, such as whether the quokka is a real animal (yes and it's very cute) and if House Speaker Nancy Pelosi actually used $15,000 worth of pens to sign the articles of impeachment against President Donald Trump (false).

"When we have a whole bunch of people asking us a question about it, regardless of what it is, we don't judge the question," Marchionni said. "We take a look at it and try to provide answers about that thing."

These days, Snopes is consumed with a litany of COVID-19 questions. For example:

"Was Charles Lieber arrested for selling the COVID-19 coronavirus to China?" Mostly false: The Harvard chemist was arrested but it had nothing to do with COVID-19, nor was the virus "developed" or "manufactured" by anyone, anywhere.

"Did millions of canceled cellphones reveal unreported coronavirus deaths in China?" This one Snopes could only call "unproven."

"Did President Trump refer to the coronavirus as a 'hoax?'" True and false: Snopes ruled he did not call the virus itself a hoax and was referring to the Democrats' response to it, but that he "muddied the waters" by downplaying the scale of the virus in the United States.

In many ways, the pandemic is an unprecedented news event. The closest equivalent for many American journalists was the 9/11 terrorist attacks, which, "for all its intricacies and profundities, didn't necessarily involve the kind of scientific and health information that is peculiar to COVID," Marchionni said.

"It has very specific scientific angles to it that make debunking it just that much more difficult, and the sheer volume of it as a global crisis is different than 9/11," she added. "In my lifetime, I don't think there's been anything like this."

And Sept. 11, 2001, predated social media  now the most prevalent medium for the spread of misinformation. "The focus [in 2001] was on email listservs and Yahoo groups, and it was still a problem to handle urban legends and conspiracy theories," Orsek said. "But given the flow of information now, it's absolutely a different challenge for everyone in this field right now."

 FAQ: Your coronavirus questions, answered

It's especially difficult now for fact-checkers to determine the origin of misinformation to see whether something is an innocuous rumor or part of a coordinated campaign by bad actors with an agenda. That's especially the case with myths that first pop up on Chinese social media platforms, which don't share data, Orsek said.

But even Western platforms can be a challenge. A new study this week from Oxford University researchers found more than half of the debunked misinformation about COVID-19 remains on Twitter without a warning label.

Green also said platforms such as Google and Facebook need to invest more money into paying fact-checkers.

The fact-checking industry is so undervalued and underinvested, he said, that even with this traffic boom and the rise in prominence and responsibility at this moment when people are relying so heavily on fact-checkers for credible information, we have no hopes for scaling up our businesses.
Representative Image

Wholesalers and large retailers are pushing ahead with their digitisation plans to service customers who are increasingly ordering daily essentials online in the wake of the lockdown, which has been extended to May 3.

Offline retail giants such as Big Bazaar are building omnichannel models to deliver essential goods and groceries during the coronavirus lockdown, the Economic Times reported.

For example, Future Group, which provided online orders for groceries only at its Easy Day stores in Delhi-NCR, has now extended this facility to 250 Big Bazaar outlets across India via BigBazaar.com, Bharati Balakrishnan, senior VP, digital commerce, Future Group told the paper.

We are running online wherever we are allowed to operate stores. We were able to launch BigBazaar.com within 10 days and since then weve scaled it to about 10,000 orders a day, Balakrishnan added.

Their website and phone ordering services, which account for 30 percent of the sales currently, are also clearing Amazon orders and are working with local delivery platforms such as Dunzo and Shadowfax to boost delivery strength, the report 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

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Kolkata-based Spencers Retail has partnered with Swiggy, Uber and Rapido to deliver orders placed on its website. It has also partnered with Flipkart to broaden ts reach and service out of store (OOS) orders.

Our OOS business has gone from low single-digit to double digits, thanks to e-commerce and phone orders, Devendra Chawla, CEO of Spencers Retail, told the newspaper.

Metro Cash and Carry India, which recently entered the Indian market, has rolled out its mobile app facilities across the country, despite the original plan being for only a pilot in Bengaluru. MD Arvind Mediratta told ET they had already get over 100 online orders from traders per store across India.

The government has been pushing for e-commerce companies to work with local stores and kiranas to ensure doorstep supply of essentials.

E-commerce platforms have been asked to collaborate with local stores and the home ministry in its guidelines for lockdown 2.0 has included the sector in the essential services list.

Find other stories related to MHA guidelines on Lockdown 2.0 here
DANBURY  A large company of clinical volunteers and medical reservists who have signed up to help active duty health care workers fight the coronavirus are yet to be deployed at hospitals here and across the state.

The reason: Hospitals have enough beds and staff to handle the onslaught, even as the number of COVID-19 patients needing hospitalization continues to climb daily across the state.

Were holding our own, says Andrea Rynn, a spokeswoman for the seven-hospital network Nuvance Health, which runs Danbury, New Milford and Norwalk hospitals. We still have capacity in Connecticut.

The fact that Danbury has not used its 25-bed field hospital that was built three weeks ago, or the 220-bed medical space at Western Connecticut State University that was built two weeks ago doesnt mean the state has seen the worst of an unprecedented health crisis.

But it does mean that six weeks since the first case of coronavirus was confirmed in Danbury on March 8, hospitals have been able to suspend elective procedures, convert surplus beds for COVID-19 care, re-purpose excess hospital space to treat the pandemic, and reassign staff to new coronavirus duty.

Were extremely proud and grateful for the willingness of our employees to be reassigned from areas that we werent using so that we can add new beds within the four walls of our hospitals, Rynn said Wednesday.

As a result, several hundred volunteers with clinical backgrounds, such as retired doctors, former nurses and EMTs, are on standby while Nuvance hospitals in Connecticut and New York manage the coronavirus crisis.

The same thing is happening at hospitals in New Haven and Hartford counties, where the virus continues to spread.

The Nuvance experience is not unique  all the hospitals in Connecticut are moving their clinical staff around and expanding their critical care capacity, said Paul Kidwell, senior vice president of policy for the Connecticut Hospital Association. What we are seeing, especially in Fairfield County, is an expanded infrastructure that is giving hospitals the ability to manage the cases.

In March, at Gov. Ned Lamonts urging, the heads of Connecticuts big-three health systems submitted a plan to boost the states critical care capacity from 7,000 to 10,000 beds. The surge plan called for the construction of mobile hospitals by Connecticuts National Guard as well as repurposing surplus hospital space.

At the time, a top Lamont official projected that a surge of infections could require 50,000 hospital beds at the same time.

The surge of COVID-19 infections  which has played out dramatically in other areas of the world such as Italy  had been predicted to hit Connecticut as early as last week.

On Wednesday, 1,900 people were hospitalized with COVID-19 in Connecticut.

It doesnt mean that we shouldnt continue to prepare for an uptick, the CHAs Kidwell said. We are continuing to plan for the worst.

Kidwell said while there are still unknowns about how COVID-19 spreads, the states stay-at-home directives were working.

The governor has been fantastic to help us get the social distancing message out, Kidwell said. We are seeing some of the benefits of that now.

rryser@newstimes.com 203-731-3342
ACM, the Association for Computing Machinery, today named Sarit Kraus of Bar-Ilan University the 2020-2021 ACM Athena Lecturer for foundational contributions to artificial intelligence, notably to multiagent systems, human-agent interaction, autonomous agents and nonmonotonic reasoning, and exemplary service and leadership in these fields. Her contributions span theoretical foundations, experimental evaluation, and practical applications. Multi-agent systems are regarded as vital to the increasingly complex challenges within artificial intelligence and have broad applications in a number of areas.

Kraus is recognized as one of the world's leading researchers in multi-agent systems, in which a distributed group of agents (computers, robots, and/or humans) interact and work collaboratively to solve problems. Beyond her work in multi-agent systems, Kraus has made significant contributions to knowledge representation (another area of artificial intelligence research) by incorporating nonmonotonic reasoning, and to randomized policies for security applications by combining methods from game theory, machine learning and optimization. Kraus is also recognized for her service to the field as an outstanding educator and mentor, as well as for her conference, editorial, and leadership roles.

Initiated in 2006, the ACM Athena Lecturer Award celebrates women researchers who have made fundamental contributions to computer science. The award carries a cash prize of $25,000, with financial support provided by Two Sigma. The Athena Lecturer gives an invited talk at a major ACM conference of her choice.

"Each year, it is ACM's honor to put a spotlight on the instrumental role that women play in the computing field by selecting an Athena Lecturer," said ACM President Cherri M. Pancake. "The ability of multi-agent systems to effectively work together is at the core of AI research and will be the lynchpin of many of the technologies that will shape the future. With seminal work in AI stretching back to the early 1990s, it is fair to say that Sarit Kraus has introduced new ways of thinking in multi-agent systems research, while also shepherding research ideas into practical applications. Her colleagues also cite her generosity and sensitivity in mentoring the next generation of researchers, which aligns perfectly with our mission in bestowing this particular award."

Multi-agent Systems

In a multi-agent system (MAS), a distributed network of agents (which could include computers or humans) work together to solve a problem that is beyond the capacity of a single agent. For example, if two autonomous vehicles were approaching an intersection, the software systems (agents) in each vehicle would communicate with each other via sensors, and perhaps a central computer coordinating traffic in the neighborhood in order to ensure the vehicles would not collide. Multi-agent systems are increasingly used in a wide range of areas, from Internet of Things (IoT) applications like smart cities, supply-chain management, smart electric grids, robotics, and online trading to many mobile computing services.

The focus of Kraus's research in multi-agent systems has been to develop intelligent agents that can interact proficiently with each other and with people, in both cooperative and conflicting scenarios. As with other areas of AI, this work requires an understanding of human behavior and decision-making in order to develop models for how the agents will make decisions. Toward this goal, Kraus developed innovative methods combining machine learning techniques for human modeling, formal decision-making and game theory approaches to enable agents to interact well with people. In a series of seminal papers, Kraus developed formal models of agent interaction that have been used in several practical applications including the ARMOR project, which combines game theory and optimization methods to improve robotics security at venues such as the Los Angeles International Airport; the Sheba Project, which deploys machine-learning techniques to facilitated training and rehabilitation (including speech therapy) at hospitals in Israel; developing a virtual suspect, integrating psychological models and machine learning, to enhance law enforcement training; recommendation systems for smart cars; and developing an automated mediator for use in studies on the influence of different mediation types on intra- and inter-country negotiations.

Kraus's work in multi-agent systems also includes the shared plans framework for collaborative planning and acting, models of coalition formation, automated negotiation, and culture-sensitive agents. For example, her 1996 paper, co-authored with Barbara Grosz, "Collaborative plans for complex group action," provided a framework for investigating fundamental questions about how agents collaborate and has been especially influential in the development of MAS research, having been cited nearly 1,400 times.

Automated Negotiation

Kraus is recognized as a world leader in a subfield of multi-agent systems called automated negotiation, in which the goal is to build computers that can reach agreements with other computers, negotiate on behalf of humans, or perhaps do a better job than human negotiators. Automated negotiation systems are designed to operate without any human intervention. Automated negotiation especially comes into play in economic domains and has garnered increasing interest with the rise of e-commerce applications. As with her broader work within multi-agent systems, Kraus designed models and protocols for automated negotiation algorithms that she introduced in dozens of seminal papers stretching back to the early 1990s. Kraus is a co-author (with Michael Wooldridge and Shaheen Fatima) of the book Principles of Automated Negotiation, a state-of-the-art treatment of the subject.

Nonmonotonic Reasoning

In designing artificially intelligent systems, researchers seek to simulate the logic humans use to make assumptions about the world, even in the face of incomplete or new information. In the traditional example, if a human is told that an animal is a bird, the human will logically assume that it can fly. However, when the human is informed that the bird is a penguin, which cannot fly, the human must adjust his/her logic to allow for potential exceptions to the general rule "all birds fly." In artificial intelligence, nonmonotonic reasoning refers to the ability of a system to take back conclusions when initial assumptions were incorrect and/or new information is given. Nonmonotonic systems are also designed to reach new/alternative conclusions in these instances. Kraus was the lead author (with Daniel Lehmann and Menachem Magidor) of the landmark 1990 paper "Non-monotonic Reasoning, Preferential Models and Cumulative Logics," which has been recognized as a highly useful attempt to provide theoretical foundations for nonmonotonic logic that could be used in AI systems. Kraus's subsequent publications in nonmonotonic logic have shaped the development of this important subfield of AI and opened up new lines of research.

Service to the Field and Mentoring

Over the years, Kraus has served the research community by taking on many volunteer roles. She has been a General, Program or Workshop Chair for several leading AI conferences including IJCAI, ICMAS, AAMAS, and ECAI. Currently, she is serving on the editorial boards of the Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research, Journal of Autonomous Agents and Multi-agent Systems, and Annals of Maths & AI. As an educator and mentor, she has supervised 62 Master's students and 34 PhD students. In the spirit of the ACM Athena Lecturer Award, Kraus is also a recognized leader in efforts to increase the participation of women in science.

Biographical Background

Sarit Kraus is a Professor of Computer Science at Bar-Ilan University in Ramat Gan, Israel, where her research is focused on intelligent agents and multi-agent systems. She received her Bachelor's, Master's and PhD degrees from The Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

Kraus has written six books, 122 journal articles, and 176 conference papers, and has received nine patents. Twelve of her publications have won best paper awards and two have won the IFAAMAS Influential Paper Award. She is a Fellow of ACM, the European Association for Artificial Intelligence (EurAI), and the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI). Her honors include receiving the IJCAI Computers and Thought Award in 1995, the ACM SIGART Autonomous Agents Research Award in 2007, and the prestigious Israel EMET Prize in 2010.

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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.
The coronavirus lockdown is turning out to be a boon for all the animals living in the wild and who could not roam freely earlier due to massive human clusters. The lockdown has given them an opportunity to come out from their hidings and reclaim the rights to nature. A pair of snow leopards, that are listed as endangered species on the IUCN Red List, has been sighted in India's Nanda Devi National Park in Uttarakhand.

Read: COVID-19: Canadian Family Recreates 'The Simpsons' Intro, Netizens Ask For All Episodes

The pictures of the rare sightings were shared by Indian Forest Service officer Akash Kumar Verma, who is currently posted in Uttarakhand. Akash Tweeted the pictures along with a caption that informed the snow leopards were captured in the camera traps that have been laid down by authorities all over the National Park.

The viral pictures

Camera traps in Nanda Devi National Park reveal a pair of Snow Leopards. A smile adorns with such revelations. Good news being nurtured, folks! Courtesy: Director, Nanda Devi Biosphere Reserve. @CentralIfs @RandeepHooda @moefcc @uttarakhandpost pic.twitter.com/OTExWStv0l  Akash Kumar Verma. (@verma_akash) April 12, 2020

Read: Good News: London Residents Clap For Medical Workers Fighting COVID-19 On Frontline

The snow leopards are mostly found in Mongolia and China, but they have a small number of population in India as well. The snow leopards are protected by international laws and there is a conservation programme called the Global Snow Leopard and Ecosystem Protection (GSLEP) to save the endangered species.

Read: Amul Pays Tribute To Women Working From Home Amid COVID-19 Lockdown

Ever since the lockdown in India and around the world has begun, animals have started to come out on roads in large numbers, entering the towns and the cities which they usually avoided. Pictures and videos showing civet, deers, elephants, Kashmiri goats and other animals taking the streets in different parts of the globe had been doing rounds on social media for a long time now. India had gone under a complete nationwide lockdown on March 25 for 21 days, which was extended by Prime Minister Narendra Modi on April 14 for another two weeks.

Read: US: Family Makes Mini Pantry For People To Take Away Free Food Amid Crisis

(Image Credit: @verma_akash/Twitter)
A retired Sydney nurse accused of kicking a dog in the face has been spared a criminal conviction after the full details of the case came to light.

Martin Toohey, 64, was knocked to the ground and hit his head on a wall when trying to separate a woman's unleashed two dogs, which had rushed towards his miniature schnauzer at Millers Point in central Sydney in December.

Police originally accused the local man of kicking one of the pups - Sootie the white powderpuff - after the dog was found with two missing teeth.

But that allegation was quickly withdrawn.

Martin Toohey (standing) was spared a conviction after being accused of kicking a Chinese crested powderpuff dog in the face

Police on Wednesday also withdrew a charge of offensive behaviour, having alleged that Toohey was verbally aggressive.

The 64-year-old was on Wednesday sentenced without conviction on the remaining charge of intentionally damaging property.

He admitted stomping on the woman's iPhone X and cracking the screen after it dropped from her pocket as she tried to regain control of Sootie and her border collie.

'It was a situation that spiralled out of control and he admits he let his temper overcome him,' lawyer Chris Kapsis told Downing Centre Local Court on Wednesday.

Agreed facts state Toohey told police he was angry because the 41-year-old woman hadn't taken any responsibility for the incident.

He promised to compensate the owner for the phone, the court heard.

Magistrate Jacqueline Trad placed Toohey on a six-month conditional release order, a type of good behaviour bond for less serious offences.

'There's no evidence this is your usual behaviour .... It seems it was provoked under the circumstances,' Ms Trad said.
Aircraft Technical Publishers and CaseBank Technologies Inc. have rebranded to become known as ATP, a leading provider of information services and software solutions for the aviation industry. The company is also introducing a new logo and tagline which celebrates their nearly 50 years of history within aviation, and their commitment to aircraft safety and reliability.

Aircraft Technical Publishers, the leading provider of maintenance and regulatory information and the cloud-based ATP Aviation Hub and ATP Libraries platforms, will now be marketed as ATP Information Services. CaseBank Technologies Inc., the developers of the ChronicX defect analysis and SpotLight guided troubleshooting platforms, will now be marketed as ATP Software Solutions. Combined, the new ATP has more than 6,700 customers in 137 countries globally, and services four key verticals within the aviation industry  OEMs, General Aviation, Commercial Aviation, as well as Military and Defense.

Effective today, the company will begin using a new logo and tagline. The logo was designed to honor the rich history of the two companies within the aviation industry while also being a bolder and more modern representation of the future opportunities ahead. The new tagline Always Ready represents the commitment of the company to its customers and the broader industry, while also being the mantra of ATPs dedicated employees in delivering services and solutions.

When you undertake a project to rebrand a company with this degree of experience in the aviation industry, the task at hand requires an extreme degree of thought and care, noted James Geneau, Chief Marketing Officer at ATP during todays launch. ATPs solutions and services can be found in every corner of the aviation world. From a single propeller crop-duster in Iowa to the cabin of a passenger jet or supporting the mission of an F-35 Joint-Strike Fighter. We are dedicated to aviation, and this new brand strategy reinforces that we are always ready to make flying safer and more reliable.

In addition to todays launch of a new company website and social media channels, ATP will be launching a campaign over the coming months to reintroduce the industry to the new company. To learn more about the new brand and company vision, a dedicated webpage has been created at http://www.atp.com/alwaysready. For specific requests for information related to the new brand and its roll-out, please feel free to email marketing@atp.com.

About ATP

ATP is a global information services and software solutions company focused on making flying safer and more reliable. ATP Information Services is the general and business aviation industrys source for aircraft technical publications and regulatory information, connecting more than 45,000 maintenance professionals to the latest OEM content and airworthiness directives. ATP Software Solutions is the leading provider of repetitive defect and troubleshooting applications focused on reducing operating costs, improving reliability, and supporting technical knowledge sharing and collaboration for the military, commercial aviation, and OEMs.

The company has deployed solutions worldwide to support multiple Fortune 100 companies. As a global company, ATP has more than 6,700 customers in 137 countries, with almost 50 years of experience in the information services and software industries. For more information, visit http://www.atp.com.

For more information, please contact:

Bridget Lewis

Associate  Social Media and Content Marketing

ATP

+1 (905) 364-3422

blewis@atp.com
Photo credit: Pool/Samir Hussein - Getty Images

From Harper's BAZAAR

Prince Harry and Duchess Meghan have donated 90,000 (more than $100,000) to charity Feeding Britain, according to Town & Country.

The donation stemmed from the proceeds generated from the Sussexes' global wedding broadcast in 2018.

The Sussexes are reportedly "delighted" that the money has gone to a good cause, concerning how many people are currently in need due to the health crisis.

Prince Harry and Duchess Meghan are utilizing the proceeds from their wedding day to support those most affected by the coronavirus crisis.

According to Town & Country, the Duke and Duchess of Sussex have donated 90,000 to Feeding Britain, an organization that aims to provide families in need with food and hot meals across the United Kingdom. The generous donation stems from the excess funds generated from the 2018 BBC broadcast of the Sussexes' wedding. Per T&C, it was reportedly agreed upon at the time that any excess profits would go to a charity chosen by the couple.

The Sussexes were notified of the funds in the midst of the ongoing coronavirus pandemic, which ultimately influenced their decision to donate to a charity that was spearheading efforts to help those most affected by the health crisis.

Photo credit: Pool/Samir Hussein - Getty Images

In addition, the Archbishop of Canterburywho officiated Harry and Meghan's marriageis also the president of Feeding Britain. The royal couple found it "fitting" to support an organization supported by the archbishop who served as a vital component of their wedding day.

A spokesperson for the Sussexes claimed the couple are "delighted" to see the money from their special day go to "such a great cause."

Feeding Britain's national director, Andrew Forsey, described the Sussexes contribution as a "godsend" and will help "keep breakfast, lunch and dinner, so three square meals, on the table of many tens of thousands of children across our network."

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Three Boeing 787 Dreamliners carrying 45 tonnes of lamb meat apiece will leave Melbourne for Abu Dhabi this week in a sign agricultural trade is getting back on the front foot.

The first of the flights containing millions of dollars of meat from Warrnambool's Midfield Meat International will take off on Thursday, with more to follow under the federal government's $110 million push to boost food exports by funding emergency flights.

Millions of dollars of lamb meat will leave Melbourne for the Middle East as government-funded air freight begins. Credit:Jamila Toderas

About 90 per cent of the red meat industry's chilled goods are transported offshore, much of it to China, Japan and the Middle East. Products like seafood and meat are often sent as cargo on passenger planes. But with airlines cancelling commercial flights due to coronavirus travel restrictions, many producers are finding it too expensive to charter flights themselves.

Trade Minister Simon Birmingham said it had been hard for red meat producers to get their products offshore in recent months and these flights were the first of 200 planned to leave for key trading regions, including China.
BAKU, Azerbaijan, Apr.15

By Tamilla Mammadova  Trend:

A total of 128.2 million lari (about $40.65 million) has already been accumulated in Georgian StopCov fund created on March 23, Trend reports on April 15 citing Georgian media.

The funds raised for the StopCoV fund are to be used to help vulnerable groups of the populations during the coronavirus outbreak in Georgia.

Recent companies to donate to the fund include companies, organizations and institutions such as LC Waikiki - 100,000 lari ($31,695), Georgian Beer Company - 50,000 lari ($15,847), Georgian Building Group - 30,000 lari ($9,508), Sonnet Construction - 30,000 lari ($9,508), Company Lagidze Jsc - 7,000 lari ($2,218), Badiauri - 3,000 lari ($950.87), and Flooring Group - 2,000 lari ($633.91).

In addition, private individuals have also donated to the fund, announced the press office of the foundation.

The number of COVID-19 cases in Georgia has reached 306 on April 15.

On March 21, Georgia declared a state of emergency to prevent the spread of coronavirus.

The outbreak in the Chinese city of Wuhan - which is an international transport hub - began at a fish market in late December 2019. Some sources claim the coronavirus outbreak started as early as November 2019.

The World Health Organization (WHO) declared COVID-19 a pandemic on March 11.

---

Follow the author on Twitter: @Mila61979356
First Vice-President of the Republic of Azerbaijan Mehriban Aliyeva has made an Instagram post expressing her gratitude to Turkey for Atakule in Ankara was illuminated in colors of Azerbaijans flag, Trend reports.

In a post on her official Instagram page, Mehriban Aliyeva said: I express my deep gratitude to fraternal Turkey. Our countries always stand by each other - both in joy and on difficult days. This is our unity, our strength. I wish our peoples the best of health, and our countries peace and prosperity. May Almighty God bless our world! 
A man in New Jersey was arrested twice after entering two Wawa convenience stores Saturday and refusing to wear a mask in either, the attorney general said.

Stephen Breza, 70, went into the first Wawa just before 11 a.m., according to a state news release. After being told he needed to wear a mask, officials say he became belligerent, cursing at employees while screaming and flailing his arms.

Stephen Breza, 70, faces a number of charges after New Jersey police say he refused to wear a mask in two Wawa convenience stores.

Breza also allegedly threatened to beat a customer with a pipe, the release said.

When police arrived, Breza screamed at officers while resisting arrest, officials say.

Less than three hours later around 1:30 p.m., Breza went into another Wawa store, again not wearing a mask, according to the release. There, he punched customer in the face, officials say.

The customer left the store, but Breza allegedly went out to his own car where he retrieved a pipe which he wielded menacingly, the news release said.

New Jerseys stay-at-home order requires individuals to wear face coverings when shopping at essential retail businesses, picking up take-out orders and using public transit to help prevent the spread of the coronavirus, according to the states website.

Breza was arrested again. In both cases hes charged with failure to submit to fingerprinting, disorderly conduct and violating the emergency orders, the release said. In the first case, hes also charged with resisting arrest.

In the second case hes charged with second-degree terroristic threats during an emergency and third-degree possession of a weapon for an unlawful purpose, the release said.
Harris County Precinct 4 Commissioner Jack Cagle announced the opening of mobile COVID-19 testing sites this month in Tomball and Humble. The addresses of the two sites will be disclosed to people only after they are successfully registered for testing, according to an April 13 news release.

Harris County Public Health opened the first testing site in Tomball on Tuesday, April 14, and will perform testing April 14-16 and April 27-29. A second site will open in Humble on April 20 and will offer testing April 20-22 and May 7-9.

ON HOUSTONCHRONICLE.COM: Inside the Houston lab tackling thousands of COVID-19 tests  and its familiar problem

Cagle thanked Harris County Public Health officials for their collaboration with Pct. 4 staff to make both sites available.

The figures from various government agencies show that northwest Harris County was among the hardest-hit areas of Harris County in terms of COVID-19 infections, Cagle said. Thats why Im especially grateful that my staff and the staff at Harris County Public Health worked together quickly to stand up a mobile testing site in Tomball to serve our constituents in their time of greatest need.

Economic impacts of COVID-19: Coronavirus pandemic affecting Tomball tourism

Lone Star College-Tomball has teamed up with Harris County Pct. 4 to provide support for the testing site in the Tomball area.

I truly appreciate being able to partner with Lone Star College-Tomball on this project, in which they showed once again what it means to be a good neighbor, Cagle said.

Each site is expected to handle as many as 100 tests per day. Testing is not conducted inside LSC facilities, according to the release.

ON HOUSTONCHRONICLE.COM: Coronavirus live updates: Houston approves airlines deal, Texas businesses fight to be 'essential'

LSC-Kingwood also loaned eight ventilators, five nebulizers and 75 personal protective equipment kits to hospitals in the area to help in the fight against COVID-19, states an April 15 press release from Lone Star College.

Lone Star College-Tomball is grateful to be able to assist the first responders who are working so hard to keep our community safe, said Kyle Scott, LSC vice chancellor of strategic priorities. We are proud to work with Harris County Precinct 4 on this important endeavor.

How to register for testing:

Harris County and the city of Houston have an online self-assessment tool for people to determine whether someone should be tested for COVID-19, which can be found at https://checkforcorona.com/harris-county#/welcome. People that are deemed at risk for COVID-19 by the self-assessment will receive a code and a number to call for a telephone consultation. If the person is still considered at risk after the phone consultation, they will receive another code and information on the location, date and time of their test. People scheduled for testing should bring their photo ID along with information specified during the phone consultation. The release states that visitors who are unregistered will be turned away by security officials and will not get tested.

For more information, contact Harris County Public Health at 832-927-7575.

alvaro.montano@chron.com
A total of 111 Africans in Chinas southern city of Guangzhou had tested positive for the novel coronavirus as of Monday, Xinhua news agency said on Tuesday.

According to Chen Zhiying, executive vice mayor of Guangzhou, 19 cases were imported.

Some 4,553 African people in the city had undergone nucleic acid testing since April 4, Chen said.

Across Africa, Chinese ambassadors are being hauled over by foreign ministries to explain horrid scenes that have gone viral on social media platforms of African migrants being evicted from apartments and refused entry into hotels in China.

The incidents have sparked a diplomatic race row with the African Union, various African governments and even the United States all putting pressure on Beijing over the reported treatment of black migrants.

China on Monday dismissed allegations that foreigners of African appearance in the city of Guangzhou were being subjected to forceful testing for the coronavirus, quarantines and ill treatment.

The focus on African residents comes amid broader restrictions on foreigners in China as officials, having curtailed the coronavirus outbreak that began in the central city of Wuhan in November, grow concerned about a second wave of infections from abroad, the Washington Post reported.

Some 30,000 foreigners live in Guangzhou, including about 4,500 Africans.
News Corp is calling for an investigation into journalist Annika Smethurst to end after the High Court delivered a partial victory for the political editor in her challenge against the police raid on her home last year.

The court unanimously found the warrant executed at Smethurst's home by the Federal Police was unlawful on technical grounds, because it "misstated" relevant criminal laws and was not specific enough about the alleged offences.

News Corp journalist Annika Smethurst, whose home was raided by federal police. Credit:Dominic Lorrimer

"The entry, search and seizure which occurred on 4 June 2019 were therefore unlawful," the court decided, according to the judgment summary.

News Corp said the ruling sent an "indisputable message" that the police raid was illegal. The Labor Party welcomed the verdict and said the government must rule out prosecution of Smethurst and commit to a suite of reforms to protect press freedom.
I think that this is a decision being made in a world like we dont have an international health pandemic, Beshear said Tuesday during a news briefing, noting that the government offices that typically issue identifications are closed. Cant [Republicans] at least wait until the next session when were not facing this? . . . If you want to pass a voter ID bill, thats fine, but lets do it outside the coronavirus.
<! Governor Sanwo-Olu, with his team >

By Kazeem Ugbodaga

The Lagos State Governor, Babajide Sanwo-Olu on Tuesday disclosed that eight more Coronavirus patients have been discharged in the state.

He said they were discharged after testing negative twice for the deadly virus.

The governor disclosed that the eight survivors included two female and six male.

More great news today from our Mainland Infectious Disease Hospital, Yaba. 8 more people; 2 females and 6 males have tested negative and fully recovered from #COVID19. They have been discharged to return to their families, he tweeted on Tuesday.

Sanwo-Olu said the discharge of the eight Coronavirus patients brought to 69, the total number of patients discharged so far in the State.

In his words: This brings the number of patients successfully managed and discharged from our facilities to 69. Please, let us continue to adhere to all the safety advice from our health experts.

On Monday, the Nigerian Centre for Disease Control, NCDC, confirmed 189 confirmed cases of Coronavirus in Lagos, out of which 61 had been discharged.

As at Monday, Lagos has 120 active cases of Coronavirus, but as at 5:21pm on Tuesday, it has decreased to 112 after the State discharged eight patients.

So far, Lagos has recorded six death, two evacuation cases and three transfer cases.
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CANTON, Mass., April 15, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- In the wake of dangerous delays in the provision of desperately needed personal protective equipment (PPE) for nurses and healthcare professionals (HCPs) during the COVID-19 pandemic, and the lack of an adequate state and federal effort to provide needed protections, the Massachusetts Nurses Association (MNA), in conjunction with donors, contractors, and outside organizations, has successfully acquired and is now distributing a significant quantity of PPE and other supplies to its members statewide. Donations include:

20,000 FDA-approved KN95 respirator masks, with another 40,000 on the way

Skyhawk Therapeutics and Dragonfly Therapeutics, based in Waltham, Mass., donated $150,000 for the purchase of one of the most urgently needed PPE: FDA-approved KN95 respirator masks.

"These medical-grade masks are essential to the safety and well-being of our nurses and healthcare professionals," said Donna Kelly-Williams, RN and MNA president. "Without this PPE, our frontline caregivers are just as susceptible to COVID-19 as every visitor and patient they interact with and care for. If most of our frontline caregivers were to become sick, the entire healthcare system would be compromised. But thanks to this donation, our members can care for patients during this pandemic safely and without fear."

"Simply thanking Skyhawk Therapeutics and Dragonfly Therapeutics for these donations really isn't enough," added Kelly-Williams. "Their generosity is beyond words, and it is beyond measure."

The MNA also used a sizeable portion of its own budget to purchase PPE for its members. When the COVID-19 pandemic struck, and both social distancing and the commonwealth's state of emergency got underway, it meant that the MNA had to cancel its spring education curriculum for members. Those funds were entirely redirected to the purchase of PPE, including the KN95s and, next, face shields.

Distribution of the PPE is now underway, with deliveries  of proportional size, and based on need  being made to MNA facilities across the state by MNA staff members and union leaders. These deliveries will continue to roll out during this month's anticipated surge and will continue for as long as the items are available and needed. [For information on the MNA's PPE deliveries within your readership/viewership, email [email protected] and/or [email protected].]

Other groups that also contributed in-kind donations of, or monetary donations for, PPE include IBEW Local 103, which donated 20,000 medical-grade N95s; countless small businesses; and more than 80 individuals who added to the MNA's online fundraising efforts at massnurses.org/PPEdonations.

Additional donations

2,600 face shields, manufactured and donated by Autodesk

500 sets of scrubs, with more on the way, from Barco Uniforms as part of its "Project Gratitude" initiative

200 pairs of sneakers, with an additional 18,000 on the way, from Puma

400 headbands, also from Puma

KIND bars from the KIND company

Bottled of water from Anheuser-Busch

"The toll this virus is taking on our members is profound, and it affects all parts of their daily routines," said Kelly-Williams. "Hospitals have been short on scrubs, and they are hard to come by. Nurses are worried about walking into their homes with sneakers on that they wore at work all day. They have gone hungry and thirsty during their shifts because hospitals have closed their cafeterias, and local convenience stores and delivery services are either closed or overwhelmed."

"Donations of items like scrubs, sneakers, snacks, and water go a long way in making nurses' lives feel a little more manageable," added Kelly-Williams. "We are so grateful that, and for the generosity of these companies, organizations, and individuals."

MassNurses.org  Facebook.com/MassNurses  Twitter.com/MassNurses  Instagram.com/MassNurses

Founded in 1903, the Massachusetts Nurses Association is the largest union of registered nurses in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. Its 23,000 members advance the nursing profession by fostering high standards of nursing practice, promoting the economic and general welfare of nurses in the workplace, projecting a positive and realistic view of nursing, and by lobbying the Legislature and regulatory agencies on health care issues affecting nurses and the public.

SOURCE Massachusetts Nurses Association

Related Links

http://www.massnurses.org


On Jan. 22, Netflix released the six-part docuseries Pandemic: How to Prevent an Outbreak, which prominently featured Dr. Syra Madad, a top public health official with New York City Health + Hospitals. Its just a matter of time where the next pandemic is going to start, Madad, who is responsible for preventing outbreaks in the citys public hospitals, says early on in the first episode. We just dont know where or how, but we know it will.

Madads remark proved eerily prescient. By the beginning of March, the first novel coronavirus case was identified in New York City, which quickly became the epicenter of a growing pandemic in the United States. And while politicians have suggested in recent days that restrictions on social interaction in New York and elsewhere have helped turn a corner in the public health response to COVID-19, Madad and other experts warn that theres still much more to be done  and much more to be learned about how the virus.

In City & States latest webinar on the coronavirus response, Madad, the senior director of the System-wide Special Pathogens Program at Health + Hospitals, was joined by Dr. Saskia Popescu, an infectious disease epidemiologist and infection preventionist. The medical professionals made a presentation on how outbreaks like SARS and MERS have informed current epidemiological efforts, where the United States public health response fell short, and what should be done going forward. Madad and Popescu also took questions from CIty & State and audience members about whether New York has actually reached a peak, the importance of increased testing and contact tracing, and the perennial lack of federal funding for public health. The transcript below has been edited for length and clarity.

Click play on the video below to watch the webinar.

City & State: What are the models showing us right now, both in New York and nationally? Is it possible to tell if weve reached the peak? Is the curve flattening?

Dr. Popescu: I think the hard part with models is you have to take them with a little bit of a grain of salt. Epidemiological models are based on forecasting. They're not predictions, so this is going to change every single day as we get more cases in, as we're learning where that curve is going. I do stress the importance when people who are looking at them, how many variables are the models accounting for? And not to get so set on a date. I've personally seen that where I've had administrators say, Well, the peak in Arizona is going to be at this time. We know that can change, and the truth is that it takes at least a couple of weeks to see if our current efforts are going to work appropriately and help decrease the case counts. When we start to open things back up, you're going to see a rapid spike. It's much faster to see that kind of change when cases increase. We have to be mindful when it comes to cases. A lot of states are plateauing, some are increasing, some are decreasing. It's very challenging right now, when you're looking at preparedness across a nation and if we can relax those kinds of restrictions when we're all in different situations and the models that we are using for forecasting are constantly changing.

City & State: What do we know about people who have already had COVID-19 and recovered? Could they get sick again? Could they still spread germs?

Dr. Popescu: I think we are still learning a lot about the status of immunity and serology testing. The CDC guidance has been quite helpful in terms of seven days following your positive lab results or 72 hours after the resolution of symptoms without a fever. Again, this is still a very novel disease. We're still learning a lot about it. I hate to give any cement answer.

Dr. Madad: I think what she stated is obviously very accurate. Right now, we still do not know a whole lot about this disease in terms of how long the immunity can last for if you do get infected. One of the things I'll mention is there's a difference between reading an article, a report, or, obviously, a scientific study. There are a lot of articles out there that have talked about people getting reinfected with COVID-19 that didn't have immunity. But please again make sure you go to a credible source. These are reports. These are people that have no scientific background, and they're writing these articles based on information they may have received. These are not scientific studies that have a cohort of individuals that are studied over a period of time to look at the reinfection rate and how long immunity can last for. That information is not available yet. Again, this virus is only four months old. We're learning every day. But you know right now that's a question that will hopefully be answered in the very near future.

Dr. Popescu: I'd like to mirror that. I think part of the problem too is we are so inundated with information. People are reading a lot about a single case, or theyre seeing preprints. This is definitely a big issue right now. When you are reading, whether it's the news or things that are coming out of a study that has just been done, really look at the number of people that were studied. If this is a preprint, has this gone through peer review? Because a lot of the research that's being done right now is happening very, very fast and we need to be mindful of the information and the science communication that is coming out to you. I saw this with the concerns for aerosolization in airborne. The truth is many of the nuances of studies aren't necessarily real world or they're very isolated events. So when you're reading this, as Dr. Madad noted, be mindful of what you're reading, who you're reading it from. Is this person an expert on it, was this a study or are you reading it thirdhand? It's easy to get a lot of fear or the sensationalism out of what's being shared right now.

City & State: Just this week, the de Blasio administration said it is taking steps to obtain and manufacture a significant amount of test kits. Does this mean the city can lift restrictions on social distancing, or are there other factors to consider?

Dr. Madad: Testing is certainly one very, very large aspect, and we're certainly moving in the right direction. It's great that we're able to afford the test kits that are needed. But obviously, there are other factors that go into play when we talk about lifting restrictions. Mayor de Blasio has done a wonderful job outlining some of these other factors that we're looking at. He called them indicators or clues. So testing is one of them, but also looking at the number of hospital admissions, people in ICU and things like that. So it's a number of different things that go into lifting these types of restrictions.

City & State: Both on the national level and here in New York, how are we doing in terms of protecting health care workers, from training to supplies?

Dr. Madad: This type of situation that we're in requires coordination, collaboration and communication from the local, state and federal level. We are seeing this play out very much so. This is something that requires an all hands-on deck approach. When we're talking about more equipment and supplies, a lot of different levels of government are working together to get the necessary equipment and supplies thats needed. In a health care delivery environment, our timeline is hours, days and weeks. Right now, certainly, we have the resources that we need, but we know that this epidemic, we're in it for the long run. So we need to continue to have injections of these equipment and supplies to maintain them at a par level. That's why we need to continue to advocate for more.

City & State: I also wanted to go deeper on contact tracing. My understanding is that we were way behind from the get-go, especially compared to other countries. What difference does having enough contact detectives make?

Dr. Popescu: Contract tracing is a cornerstone in epidemiology and I really think our ability to do it is very representative of the public public health system we have and how well we're supporting it. So that means, from the beginning I think a lot of us have been saying we need to do better in terms of public health resources. If you can't do contact tracing in the very beginning, that's a pretty big indicator that your health departments are already struggling. So now when they're inundated, that means that we really can't do it. And the truth is that to kind of start relaxing some of these restrictions, we have to be able to do contact tracing because that allows us to not only identify a case, which is where that rapid diagnostic comes into play, but make sure that they're isolated appropriately and evaluate any close contacts they had within their period of potential infectiousness and get them to quarantine or make sure we're kind of communicating with them: Hey, you might be at an increased risk for acquiring this disease, please stay home. And our ability to do that is huge. That means we can help control the outbreak and help break that chain of transmission. So when we're not able to do it, that really prevents us from getting involved and disrupting the chain of transmission. I think that's hard, because it's very telling of a public health infrastructure and the resources it has.

Dr. Madad: One of the biggest issues we have been facing, not just from a public health standpoint but also from the health care delivery standpoint is the cuts to funding at the federal level. Many of you may be familiar with the Hospital Preparedness Program and the PCP, the Public Health Emergency Preparedness Program, both funded you know at the federal level. Both of these programs have continuously taken very large cuts in terms of funding capacity over the years. In fact, when we talk about HPP, the Hospital Preparedness Program, this is the money that from a hospital standpoint we use to maintain that state of readiness. This is the money that we use to do our drills and exercises, and continuously train our staff. This continues to dwindle down. So if you look at the Hospital Preparedness funding that has been allocated for, you know, this year and future years, it's really at an all-time low. I mean it's extremely unfortunate. And the approach that we've always had here in the United States is a very unfortunate approach from a federal standpoint. What this means is that when we have an epidemic they inject millions of dollars for that specific epidemic and then once it's over that funding is taken away that staff is basically, is let go, if you will, or repurposed, and the expertise that was built for that that particular situation that can be extrapolated for many different situations obviously doesn't exist. Case in point, the Netflix docuseries, one of the things that I highlighted, and even at the end when you see me doing that Ebola exercise at Coney Island hospital and I'm talking about the funding, the funding I'm thinking about is the Regional Ebola Special Pathogen Treatment Network. Millions of dollars were allocated in 2014, but its an entire network of frontline hospitals. We have 6,000 hospitals in the United States. When we talk about the regional Ebola Special Pathogen Treatment Center that was established, you have frontline hospitals, assessment hospitals, Ebola treatment centers, and regional Ebola treatment centers. And Congress has now finally only approved funding for 10 regional centers, so these are only 10 hospitals. Now if you talk about COVID-19, this is again an all-hands-on-deck approach. Every single hospital plays a role in this. And so all those frontline hospitals, those 6,000 frontline hospitals, they're not getting any funding. So that's funding thats unfortunately set to expire this month and there's no indication from Congress that that that work is going to be renewed besides the 10 regional centers. So that shows you a huge problem in our approach to infectious disease preparedness and how we need to continue to prepare and invest in preparedness dollars. And that's not the case right now, and so we really need to have a different approach moving forward.

Dr. Popescu: Coupling in on that too, we also have, as Dr. Madad noted, funding for those 10 regional centers, but for the rest of the thousands of hospitals that exist there's really no incentive for hospitals to invest in these costly prevention efforts and preparedness efforts, unless you have hospital administrators that opt to invest in them. There's no requirement. There are emergency preparedness rules through Medicare, but unfortunately they're not specific to infectious diseases. So I think that's a huge gap and whether we're looking at it from a national level or even your local hospital, unless they decide to put money into this there's no priority for it, there's no federal mandate.

City & State: We talked about the federal aspect here, but what city or state policies need to change?

Dr. Popescu: I think we definitely need to need to put more money into public health, because hospitals work very closely with our state and local health departments to ensure readiness, but if we're all in the process of getting funding whenever an outbreak or a pandemic occurs, it's going to be dwindling. So my concern is there's just not enough resources for local hospital coalitions or the HPP to really be focusing on that and then also bringing in the public health department to collaborate with multiple hospitals in the areas.

City & State: For those of us who are not medical professionals or scientists, what are the reliable sources we can turn to that do accurate reporting?

Dr. Popescu: I always like to encourage people, if you are following someone on social media, look at their background. Look at who shares their information because most of us in the fields all know each other and we share each other's names. We encourage each other. So I think that's always a red flag, if they're kind of on their own, look at their backgrounds. But, you know there's so many great resources. Stat News is really wonderful. Ed Young has been really great with The Atlantic, But, also Scientific American, the CDC, the WHO, those are your steadfast sources that you want to stick to. But, I think it's very easy to see sensationalism. I personally stick to the CDC and the WHO, and then I follow my trusted resources, Dr Madad being one of them, but my biologists, my stats people, all of them, because I know that they're experts in their field and they're going to review the information before they share it.

Dr. Madad: And just to add to that, you know, I think also at the local level, here in New York City, another great resource that we have is your public health department. So for example, New Yorks Department of Health and Mental Hygiene. They are really one of the best in the world. We have one of the best public health departments. And we have an amazing leadership that oversees the Department of Health, and they keep a very robust and up to date website of not only the number of cases we have for COVID, but also additional recommendations and suggestions. One of the things that we know for COVID-19 is that the response at the local level differs from state to state. And so some of the regulations and guidance may be different for New York City versus something that's happening for example in California or Utah. So just make sure that you know who your public health department is and and reach out to them if you have any questions or concerns, but also look at their website and see what type of information that they have, because I know from a city department of health standpoint, we rely on them very heavily on a number of different things and they have been amazing partners throughout this whole thing.

Dr. Popescu: Ithink also the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security has been really wonderful at sharing information, but also their GIS maps.

City & State: Is there any indication that there may have been cases in New York City as early as December? Will we ever know how early a case came to New York?

Dr. Madad: So, we know one of the testing that's going to be up and running hopefully soon as you know is the serology testing to see who's immune. But, we can also do some genetic analysis and look at the footprint of the virus. But it's still very hard to tell when the virus obviously first started here in New York City or New York state. We were essentially, at a national standpoint, blinded to you know, when this epidemic started here and how many cases we had early on and even now, because of the whole testing fiasco. So its something that we'll probably learn more about as this epidemic continues and a lot more people look into this and investigate when a patient zero first arrived here in New York City and in New York state but right now I think that's something that is to be determined.

Dr. Popescu: I also think that's a really great reason to invest in public health because it's your epis that are going to be doing that epigenetics investigation. And so another reason why we want to really increase public health funding and support for this is because they'll ultimately be doing that and helping us identify some of the gaps that were very prevalent in the beginning and how we can fix those for the future.

City & State: With the news that COVID-19 can linger in the air, what are your recommendations for elevators and also for air ducts and apartment built buildings? Should people seal the vents?

Dr. Popescu: The airborne question is one that I think we've all heard so many times. The truth is that we're still learning so much about how long things are lingering on surfaces. But droplet transmission they tend to kind of hover in the air and then they fall, and as long as you have an HVAC system and air circulation that's definitely going to help. Obviously if you're trapped in an elevator with someone who's coughing a lot, that's not ideal, and that's why mask wearing can be helpful, because it really is about containing the microbes that somebody is coughing out. But I wouldn't suggest taping off air ducts because you want air circulation, you want the HVAC system and the heavy filtration to be working, and if you take those off they won't and we need that we want that, so I wouldn't encourage that. Its hard to maintain social distancing in elevators. That's why the community masks wearing is encouraged for that situation especially. Hand hygiene really goes a long way. If somebody is coughing and you're in an elevator, get off the elevator or ask them to maybe cover their cough, but please don't cover your vents. And, most of us, we're very fortunate where we have HVAC systems that constantly are recirculating the air, so I'm not as worried about that. It's more in a closed environment with no air circulation for a prolonged period of time that I would worry about.

Dr. Madad: Obviously, the elevator is a certain situation that you're in, but this is why you know the recommendation is to keep that six feet distance. Many of you may have seen an image of somebody coughing or sneezing and you see those viral particles that people are spewing out. These are respiratory droplets and they don't travel extremely far in that sense. And so this is why we want to make sure that you keep that six feet distance to not inhale those particles or if you're around those surfaces you don't touch those surfaces. And all of this makes sense if you look at the whole epidemiology of transmission of viruses and when I talk about COVID-19 still a lot for us to still learn and new information is still coming out every day. But, we know we can rely on at least the foundation and backbone of what we know based on other viruses and the mode of transmission and just general respiratory viruses in general.

City & State: Dr. Madad, you've talked about watching the 1995 film Outbreak as a turning point for your career. What did it get right? What did it get wrong?

Dr. Madad: You know with these Hollywood movies, this is something that obviously as I was growing up I used to love watching and I used to love reading about these things. Outbreak was one of the movies that got me interested to pursue the career that I'm in. You know, with all of these types of Hollywood blockbusters, there is some truth to it but largely it's sensationalized. But, when we talk about the fear that is generated, and we talk about you know the chaos, and what we know and what we don't know, a lot of that is true and that we're living through right now with COVID-19. You're seeing obviously the effect that it's having not just on individuals, but it's also having a large effect on the economy and society in general. You see, obviously, how many different agencies are playing a part in the epidemic response. It's not just public health departments, it's at the federal level, at the state level, at the local level. And you're also seeing a number of people come together to respond to this incident, so a lot of that is depicted in these movies. But a lot of it's also sensationalized. And it's hard to see what is true and what is not. But, you know, there is some truth to it.

Dr. Popescu: I agree that the chaos that it causes is an important component to this. But every one of these movies does sensationalize, like the whole scene with it going airborne, we know that's not how viruses work. Just take it with a grain of salt and that it is a movie. But, the most important thing again is getting information from the right sources.

Popescu & Madad Hospital Biopreparedness Presentation by City & State NY on Scribd
CHICAGO (AP) - When Bernie Sanders didn't win the Democratic presidential nomination in 2016, Silvia Machado and Patrick Gibbons voted for Green Party candidate Jill Stein in protest.

Four years later, the couple is still passionate about the Vermont senator's progressive agenda. But they're open to voting for the relatively centrist Joe Biden if that's what it takes to defeat President Donald Trump.

"Its like hold your nose and vote," said Gibbons, 59.

A week after Sanders' exit left Biden as the presumptive Democratic nominee, the former vice president is working to win over voters such as Machado and Gibbons. The party is desperate to avoid a repeat of 2016, when ideological divides helped Trump win the White House.

Biden has made a series of proposals intended to appeal to progressives and won endorsements this week from Sanders and Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren, another liberal rival during the Democratic primary.

But the tensions that have weighed on Democrats for years aren't suddenly evaporating. While some voters are making a practical calculation to beat Trump by supporting Biden, other leaders of the movement are urging caution until Biden embraces priorities such as the universal health care plan known as " Medicare for All."

FILE - In this Feb. 10, 2020 file photo, Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., accompanied by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., left, takes the stage at campaign stop at the Whittemore Center Arena at the University of New Hampshire in Durham, N.H. Choosing a presidential candidate based primarily on loathing the alternative is not the strongest of electoral strategies. That's why leaders of the progressive movement say many Americans who were enthralled by Bernie Sanders and his slogan of "Not Me. Us," won't be as likely to settle for Joe Biden. (AP Photo/Andrew Harnik)

"The Biden that exists now will not get a lot of votes from progressives currently inclined to not vote at all or to vote third party," said Norman Solomon, co-founder of the activist organization Roots Action. "The only tool now to defeat Trump is Joe Biden, and the only way to sharpen that tool is to move him in a more progressive direction."

AP VoteCast surveys of the electorate conducted before Sanders dropped out of the race show skepticism among his supporters about Biden. Across 17 states where the survey was conducted, 54% of Sanders backers said they would be dissatisfied if Biden were the nominee. Just 28% of all Democratic primary voters said the same.

In the three states that voted on March 17 - Florida, Arizona and Illinois - some Sanders supporters went further, vowing not to support Biden. Thirteen percent said they would definitely not vote for Biden, and an additional 10% said they probably would not.

A slim majority, 54%, indicated that they definitely would support the Democrat against Trump, while 23% said they probably would.

In Arizona, a state that Democrats are hoping to flip in November, 8% of Democratic primary voters overall said they would not vote for Biden in November. But among Sanders supporters, that figure increased to 17%. In Michigan, which flipped to support Trump in 2016 and is now a key 2020 battleground, 19% of Democratic primary voters said their vote in November depended on which candidate the party nominated. That figure climbed to 26% among Sanders voters.

There are factors working in Biden's favor. For one, he's consolidating support in the party much earlier than nominee Hillary Clinton did in 2016. That year, Sanders waited until just before the party's July convention to endorse Clinton. Warren also waited until the primary was over to back Clinton.

In 2020, they are backing Biden sooner, and more aggressively.

Sanders told The Associated Press on Tuesday that it would be "irresponsible" for his supporters to sit back and see "the most dangerous president in modern American history" reelected.

"My job now is to not only rally my supporters, but to do everything I can to bring the party together to see that (Trump) is not elected president," Sanders said.

The future of the progressive movement may rest with leaders such as Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. The New York Democrat has long said she would back the ultimate Democratic nominee. She told Politico on Wednesday that she supports Biden "in solidarity with the families I represent."

In an earlier interview with the AP, she urged Biden to take seriously both young voters and Latinos, two groups with whom he has struggled.

"I just want to make sure that we have a winning electoral strategy," she said. "And if that strategy is 100% more affluent suburban voters, then fine. Perhaps districts and communities like mine arent as important, but I would like them to be, and I think that they should be, and I think young voters matter."

Prospects for reconciliation between Biden and progressives may not all be bleak, however, especially with the election still more than six months away.

Jorge Trejo-Ibarra, a Las Vegas high school senior who will turn 18 in July, said he flirted with the idea of not backing Biden. But with the economy largely shuttered amid the coronavirus outbreak, he said he doesn't think the U.S. can survive another four years of Trump.

"We cant come back from this unless we have some very strong leadership in the next four years," Trejo-Ibarra said, adding that he's not excited about Biden, but is a realist.

"In democracies, you never have wins, you have compromises," he said. "I guess I must compromise."

Jack Wilsbach, a 21-year-old junior at Ohio State University, said he knows many Sanders supporters who will not support Biden. But he is convinced by his mother, sister and friends who are gay who he thinks will be hurt by a Trump victory.

"I would feel bad if I didnt vote for (Biden) and that affected the outcome," Wilsbach said. "I mean, Im a white guy. I can kind of make the sacrifice to maybe live and be OK under Trump, but other people dont have that luxury."

___

Weissert reported from Washington. Associated Press writers Hannah Fingerhut and Laurie Kellman in Washington, Steve Peoples in Montclair, N.J., Nicholas Riccardi in Las Vegas and Julie Carr Smyth in Columbus, Ohio, contributed to this report.

FILE - In this Feb. 19, 2020 file photo, Democratic presidential candidates, Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., left, and Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., talk during a Democratic presidential primary debate in Las Vegas, hosted by NBC News and MSNBC. Choosing a presidential candidate based primarily on loathing the alternative is not the strongest of electoral strategies. That's why leaders of the progressive movement say many Americans who were enthralled by Bernie Sanders and his slogan of "Not Me. Us," won't be as likely to settle for Joe Biden. (AP Photo/John Locher)
One person died following a shooting Tuesday evening in Vallejo, police said.

Reports were made to police at about 5 p.m. after people heard gunshots in the general vicinity of the 1800 block of Ohio Street, police Lt. Ken Park said.

Officers responded and didn't find any victims. A few minutes later, someone from a hospital called police and told them that a gunshot victim had been dropped off.

Park said the victim died. Police have no motive and no suspects at this time, Park 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.
The world was a very different place a year ago, when Val Chmerkovskiy and Jenna Johnson celebrated their marriage.

And the Dancing With The Stars pros both took to social media on Monday to express their love for each other to mark their first year of married life, albeit during the global coronavirus crisis.

Chmerkovskiy shared a photo of the couple eating wedding cake in bed along with a romantic rhyme, while his bride expressed gratitude for his love during the ongoing pandemic with a series of snaps from their wedding day.

Milestone: Val Chmerkovskiy and Jenna Johnson celebrated their first wedding anniversary on Monday, April 13, by professing their love for each other

'Waking up to our 1-year anniversary like.. I am so grateful that it's you that I get to call my wife, that it's you I get to wake up next to, that it's you I get to love for life, you I get to have and eat my cake too,' the Russian-born dancer, 34, wrote alongside a photo of himself giving his new wife a kiss on the cheek as they eat cake in bed.

'Rhyme aside, I love you dearly, lucky to have you and hold you near me. What a privilege I've been given, you're gods gift that keeps on giving,' he continued about Johnson, who was decked out in her wedding veil for the bedroom snap.

Chmerkovskiy added: 'I love you. More than I love words that rhyme, more than music more than wine, go to the general and save some time. I love you more than humor, you inspire me to do more, to be true more, honestly I can't imagine loving you more. But I will, celebrating you daily, you bring something powerful out of me like dairy. I will love you from now till eternity.'

Poetic: Chmerkovskiy shared a photo of the couple eating wedding cake in bed along with a romantic rhyme on Instagram

Lovely: ' will love you from now till eternity,' the Russian born dancer said of his wife

Sweet sentiments: Johnson expressed gratitude for his love during the ongoing coronavirus pandemic with a series of snaps from their wedding day

Johnson marked the occasion by reminiscing about their gorgeous wedding ceremony and the stability their union has brought her amid the COVID-19 pandemic.

'1 year down, eternity to go. Happy 1st Anniversary my love.. crazy to think that exactly a year ago we were celebrating with all of our closest friends and family!' she wrote in the caption of 10 wedding pictures.

'And although this isn't how we were meant to spend our first anniversary, I'm incredibly grateful to spend it snuggled up next to you safe and sound.'

She concluded: 'Thank you for the greatest year of my life. I love you and I LOVE being your wifey.'

History: The couple had an on-again, off-again relationship before they tied-the-knot in a romantic ceremony overlooking the ocean in Rancho Palo Verdes, California on April 13, 2019

The couple had an on-again, off-again relationship before they tied-the-knot in a romantic ceremony overlooking the ocean in Rancho Palo Verdes, California on April 13, 2019.

They both read their own vows in front of 200 of their closest friends and family, including Chmerkovskiy's brother and best man Maks Chmerkovskiy and fellow DWTS pros Hayley Erbert, Emma Slater, Witney Carson, Sasha Farber, Cheryl Burke, Mark Ballas, Alan Bersten, Artem Chigvintsev, Lindsay Arnold and Brandon Armstrong, among others.
Opinion Article

15 April 2020

In the workplace, we often face problems. They could derive from suppliers, employees, managers or customers. This is particularly evident in the hospitality industry where every day is met with new problems which we often refer to as challenges. Problems can be inclusive, i.e. 'we've got a problem' or accusatory, 'you've got a problem'. Yet they can be dealt with by following SOPs or the rules and regulations the company has set up to deal with the different situations.

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Coronavirus crisis communication: problem, crisis... or more?

Some problems take on a new level and become crises. Crises can derive from humans, i.e., a scandal within the company or a human error in the production line. Or, a crisis can be natural like a tsunami or a hurricane. In both cases, what may begin as 'we've got a problem' quickly escalates to 'we've got a crisis'. A problem becomes a crisis when traditional SOPs and set guidelines cannot be applied. Rather, new solutions must be created. Crises do not have a clock, they are not bound by time. They often come in the middle of the night, on the weekend or during your holiday. They can be resource-intensive and they certainly demand a lot of attention from the stakeholders involved. Crises must be dealt with quickly and efficiently, and communication of these crises is primordial to protect the company's reputation. Handle it well, the crisis disappears as quickly as it appeared; handle it poorly and your stakeholders will throw you under the bus. You could lose customers or shareholders; you would certainly 'lose face' and potentially see your reputation suffer which could, subsequently, result in a dip in profits. Yet, despite the risks and uncertainty, most companies still manage to survive the crisis.

The Coronavirus is not a problem nor a crisis. Coronavirus falls into the category of a 'wicked problem'. The term 'wicked problem' was defined by Rittell and Webber back in 1973. There are ten criteria that can be applied to ascertain if a crisis can be placed in the wicked problem category. Let's apply them to the Coronavirus.

1. There is no definitive formulation of a wicked problem.

While we have been able to give Coronavirus a name, we are no closer to understanding it now than in January. Scientists worldwide are working non-stop on testing and countries are competing to be the first to come up with a cure. This 'healthy' competition could be effective, yet the testing of cures takes time. In the beginning, there was no agreement on how it could be transmitted or what people needed to do to protect themselves. In the early days, most companies continued with 'business as usual', keeping their eyes on the unfolding events, but remaining confident it would be contained.

2. Wicked problems have no stopping rule.

While most problems and crises have a clear starting place, there is also a moment when we consider the problem to be resolved or the crisis to be over. This is not the case with the Coronavirus. We have seen in China that the cases went down in March, but new cases are still arriving. No one is sure that it is over. More companies are closing each day, many town centers are empty; everyone wonders when it will go back to 'normal'. Yet, even when the final cases are cured, the after-effects of this virus will continue to be felt.

3. Solutions to wicked problems are not true or false, but good or bad.

When trying to deal with a wicked problem like Coronavirus, we have seen many countries and companies trying different solutions to beating it. However, none of these solutions can be proven as true or false; rather, they are good or bad. In reality, the solutions are better or worse. If we close our hotel, we protect our employees and potential customers, but we lose profits and put people on unemployment. And depending on the country, unemployment could become personal crises for employees already leading a precarious life, for example, employees that live month to month, struggling to pay their bills at the end of each month.

4. There is no immediate and no ultimate test of a solution to a wicked problem.

With the Coronavirus, there is no immediate and sure test of a solution. We can already compare countries and companies in how they have reacted. Is everyone right? Is everyone wrong? At this point, the question should be 'is everyone doing the best they can do under the circumstances?"

5. Every solution to a wicked problem is a 'one-shot' operation. There is no opportunity to learn by trial and error, every attempt counts significantly.

With no ultimate test and no past examples to compare with, each solution applied to Coronavirus is a 'one-shot' operation. There are no chances to test it and improve; there is only one possibility. Each attempt counts significantly. Working one meter from each other? Going to work if you can't work from home? Washing your hands? Wearing masks? Each solution can be more or less effective. Quarantine and confinement have shown (tentatively) positive results in reducing the number of cases, but we cannot know if more or less would have controlled this uncontrollable virus.

6. Wicked problems do not have an exhaustively describable set of potential solutions, nor is there a well-described set of permissible operations that may be incorporated into the plan.

Wicked problems have infinite solutions which sounds like a positive statement. However, as seen above, each solution is a one-step trial and cannot be immediately tested for its effectiveness. Imagine testing infinite solutions. This would be called a 'mission impossible'.

7. Every wicked problem is essentially unique.

Coronavirus is a unique wicked problem. We have seen other health epidemics, but not one like this that has halted entire economies. On a business level, many experts have compared this to 2008. For the time being, it seems unlikely that it will be another 2008; rather, it seems it will be much worse. Think back to a time in this lifetime where industries (WORLDWIDE) were halted; where airplanes (ACROSS THE GLOBE) were grounded; where town centers were empty. At the present, we are within the wicked problem; all of the after-effects will continue for years to come.

8. Every wicked problem can be considered to be a symptom of another problem.

Coronavirus has shown other underlying problems such as the unpreparedness that countries and companies have to deal with this wicked problem. Companies have crisis plans and these plans evolve over time. When taken seriously, companies test their crisis plans periodically and spend time trying to proactively imagine the types of crises they could face to be better prepared when they come. In this particular case, no preparation could have been imagined. The wicked problem of Coronavirus could not have been imagined.

9. The existence of a discrepancy representing a wicked problem can be explained in numerous ways.

Humans have a tendency to place blame on someone or something when faced with a wicked problem. It is in our DNA to want to have a reason for the crises we face. Yet, with Coronavirus, there are almost as many discrepancies as potential solutions. The rumors and fake news regarding how it is transmitted and who it affects have greatly contributed to these discrepancies. We've all seen students still partying on Spring Break; 'joggers' who have never run a day in their lives out on the streets; people defying the confinement rules. With no clear definition of the wicked problem itself and no proven guidelines to follow, no explanation can be offered.

10. The planner has no right to be wrong.

When dealing with a wicked problem, someone needs to be in charge. In the current situation, that is, first and foremost, the government officials. But in the workplace, that decision falls on the management. Stay open, but how do we protect our employees? Follow the guidelines, but does this ensure that the virus won't spread? Keep customers a meter apart or reduce the amount of clients in a store at the same time?  the list is long. The added pressure links to the previous criteria: If a 'bad' choice is made, people could get sick and further spread the virus.

The Coronavirus is, indeed, the wickedest problem we have ever seen in the global workplace. We have no idea when it will end or what direction it will take. We do not know if we have done the 'right' thing or if we have been completely off base. We won't have a chance for a 'do-over', each decision is our final one. But what we do know in these trying times is that we are doing the best we can!

Coronavirus resources: free online course and consulting services - click here to learn more

Reference: Source: Rittell, H.W.J., & Webber, M.M. (1973). Dilemmas in a general theory of planning. Policy Sciences, 4, 155-169.
April 14 COVID-19 Briefs: Send SMVC Staff Meals; NAPS Registration Online

Meals for front-line staff

Southwestern Vermont Medical Center has deployed an online tool to facilitate community members sending meals to front-line staff during the COVID-19 crisis. Community members can visit here and volunteer to purchase a meal for as few as two staff members or as many as 25.

"This program grew out of a desire to make supporting our staff easier for the community and the need to support our local businesses, too," said Leslie Keefe, vice president for Corporate Development.

The hospital partnered with the Southwestern Vermont Chamber of Commerce to identify restaurants to participate. Visitors to the Meal Train website volunteer to purchase a meal electronically and call the restaurant to order. Once claimed, the department is considered covered. Future visitors to the site are encouraged to volunteer for a different department. This keeps one department from receiving two lunches, for instance, while another department doesn't receive any.

All restaurants will make no-contact deliveries to SVMC in Bennington, the Centers for Living and Rehabilitation in Bennington, and the Center for Nursing and Rehabilitation in Hoosick Falls, NY. A designated staff member will come outside to receive the delivery, so no restaurant personnel need enter the building.

NAPS Opens Online Registration

In response to COVID-19, North Adams Public Schools has moved registration to an online format for all new students looking to enroll. Parents/guardians looking to register their PreK-12 student can fill out the registration form located here or found online under the "Parents" tab.

Preschool children must be 3 or 4 years old by August 31. Kindergarten children must be 5 years old by August 31. Current enrolled preschool students within the district do not need to register. Once registered, North Adams Public Schools personnel will follow up via mail or phone call to finalize the child's enrollment. For questions, concerns or assistance with the form, contact Bobbi Tassone at 413-776-1666 or email her.

Emergency Response Efforts

Berkshire United Way and Berkshire Taconic Community Foundation have awarded more than 60 grants totaling more than $975,000 from the COVID-19 Emergency Response Fund for Berkshire County, their joint effort with Northern Berkshire United Way and Williamstown Community Chest to raise new resources in support of community-based organizations at the frontlines of the coronavirus outbreak.

"This fund is providing a rapid response to the increased challenges our nonprofits face as they provide services to our neighbors in greatest need," said Peter Taylor, president of Berkshire Taconic Community Foundation. "These organizations are deeply rooted in their communities and quick to action. Their work inspires us as we aim to provide ongoing support from our generous friends and partners."

The organizations receiving grants are dispersed across Berkshire County and work to support children and low-income families, communities of color and immigrants, seniors, and people with mental illness and addiction disorders, among others. A collaborative team of staff from Berkshire Taconic, Berkshire United Way, Northern Berkshire United Way and Williamstown Community Chest is reviewing and awarding grants on a rolling basis during the crisis as funding permits.

Grantees from the COVID-19 Emergency Response Fund for Berkshire County include: 18 Degrees, Adams Council on Aging, Al Nelson Friendship Center Food Pantry, Berkshire Bridges Working Cities, Berkshire Community Action Council, Berkshire County Arc, Berkshire County Diaper Project, Berkshire Dream Center, Berkshire Family YMCA, Berkshire Food Project, Berkshire Grown, Berkshire Health Systems, Berkshire Helping Hands, Berkshire Hills Regional School District, Berkshire Housing Development Corporation & Berkshire Housing Services, Berkshire Immigrant Center, Berkshire Nursing Families, Berkshire Tomorrow, Inc. (BRPC) Weekend Restaurant Program, BRIDGE, The Brien Center, the Cancer Center at BMC, Cathedral of the Beloved, Central Berkshire Coordinating Center, Central Berkshire Habitat for Humanity, Central Berkshire Regional School District, Central Berkshire Regional School District Weekend Backpack Program, Chabad of the Berkshires, Cheshire Food Pantry, Christ Trinity Church, Community Food Pantry at South Congregational Church, Community Health Programs, Construct, Dalton Community Recreation Association, Elder Services of Berkshire County, Elizabeth Freeman Center, Gladys Allen Brigham Community Center, Josh Bressette Commit to Save a Life, Louison House, Mass 2-1-1, Mount Carmel Care Center, NAMI Berkshire County, North Adams Farmers Market, North County Emergency Planning Commission, Northern Berkshire Community Coalition Weekend Meal Project, Northern Berkshire EMS, Our Lady of Charity (St. Elizabeth of Hungary Church), Pittsfield Public Schools, Roots Rising, ROOTS Teen Center, Salvation Army, ServiceNet, Soldier On, UCP of Western MA, Volunteers in Medicine Berkshires, Western MA Womens Fund, Williamstown Food Pantry and Youth Center, Inc.

Fundraising for the emergency fund, which launched on March 19, has reached just under $2 million. A list of the fund's generous partners is online here. Donations to the fund can be made here.

Telemedicine Expanded

Southwestern Vermont Medical Center continues to adapt to rapidly changing circumstances related to COVID-19, including innovating new ways to provide primary and specialty care.

"While the SVMC staff is focused on fighting COVID-19, we recognize that patients' needs for other care do not disappear," said Dr. Bob Schwartz, a primary care physician at SVMC Northshire Campus. "We are making it as easy as we can for patients to receive the same care they are used to remotely through telemedicine."

Telemedicine services are available from all of SVMC's primary and specialty care sites and are simple to use. Accessing services requires no special equipment or expertise. There is no app or other software needed. Patients access telemedicine with a device that has video capabilities and an Internet connection, like a smart phone, tablet, or computer. As in the past, patients call their primary care office for an appointment. They receive a special web address. They check in electronically and meet their provider via video. The communication is private and compliant with the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA).

Those without an Internet connection or video-enabled device may be able to meet with their provider over the phone. Some patients, depending on their condition, may need to be seen in person. A link to more telemedicine information, including a get-started guide, is available online.

Nonprofit Virtual Town Hall

The Nonprofit Center of the Berkshires is hosting a virtual Town Hall meeting with Berkshire County legislators on Friday, April 17, at 11:30 a.m. The event is free but registration is required. Attendance is limited to 90 nonprofit leaders; however, the session may be recorded and shared following the event.

We want nonprofits to have the opportunity to check in with their legislators, voice their concerns, and get their questions answered, said Liana Toscanini, NPC executive director. Participating legislators include Sen. Adam G. Hinds, and Representatives Tricia Farley-Bouvier, John Barrett III, Paul Mark and William "Smitty" Pignatelli.

Nonprofits share many concerns related to COVID-19 including short and long-term sustainability, and the desire by those not on the front lines to help in some way. "We think people are taking comfort in connecting right now," Toscanini said.

The Town Hall will be moderated by NPC board member Stephanie Bosley. To register or find additional COVID-19 resources for nonprofits, visit the website

Personal Protective Equipment Donations

Southwestern Vermont Medical Center is requesting the community to assist with donations of Personal Protective Equipment (PPE). The hospital currently needs the following PPE: N95 maskstypically found in industrial businesses and home workshops; nitrile gloves in all sizes; home-sewn cotton masks (as many as 300 have been donated so far, but the hospital needs 1,000 more); and home-sewn cloth surgical caps, known also as scrub caps and skull caps. (Cloth caps, worn low on the forehead, relieve the friction and improve comfort for those wearing face shields. Five-hundred surgical caps are needed at this time.)

PPE donations are accepted through Catherine Hagadorn, program coordinator for the Quality, Safety, and Value Department, by e-mailing her here or calling 802-447-5600.

"PPE is crucial in treating COVID-19 patients safely, and we are in urgent need," said registered nurse Shiela Boni, who oversees the hospital's PPE supply. "SVHC is asking everyone with access to PPE or the ability to make PPE to come to our aid by donating it to the courageous clinicians on the front line of this pandemic."
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Linkedin Amir Havasi (Agence France-Presse) Tehran  Wed, April 15, 2020 23:26 636 fc6853813033f564188675f8bd221dd5 2 World COVID-19,Iran,Iran-US,WHO,Donald-Trump Free

Iran said Wednesday the world is learning that the United States "kills people", after President Donald Trump suspended US funding for the World Health Organization amid the coronavirus pandemic.

Trump has accused the UN body of covering up the seriousness of the COVID-19 outbreak in China before it spread around the world.

The US president on Tuesday ordered that payments amounting to $400 million be halted pending a review of the WHO's role in allegedly "severely mismanaging and covering up the spread of the coronavirus".

The death toll from the COVID-19 pandemic has topped 125,000 around the world, with more than two million people infected by the disease since December.

Iran's Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif likened the funding freeze to the United States' "maximum pressure" campaign against his country.

The United States reimposed crippling sanctions against Iran in 2018 after Trump unilaterally withdrew from a nuclear deal.

"The shameful defunding of WHO amid a pandemic will live in infamy," Zarif wrote on Twitter.

"The world is learning what Iran has known & experienced all along," he said.

"US regime's bullying, threatening & vainglorious blathering isn't just an addiction: it kills people," added Zarif.

Iran itself is battling the Middle East's most deadly coronavirus outbreak and on Wednesday reported that another 1,512 people had tested positive for the COVID-19 illness.

It has repeatedly called on the Trump administration to reverse its sanctions policy, which has been opposed even by some US allies, particularly since the pandemic hit.

Medicines and medical equipment are technically exempt from the US sanctions but purchases are frequently blocked by the unwillingness of banks to process payments for fear of incurring heavy US penalties.

The new infections confirmed by Iran on Wednesday took the total number in the country to 76,389, Jahanpour said, noting that 49,933 of those hospitalised had recovered and been discharged.

The government of President Hassan Rouhani has struggled to contain the outbreak that emerged two months ago.

It shut schools and universities, postponed major events and imposed a range of other restrictions, but it has stopped short of ordering lockdowns.

Iran allowed small businesses outside Tehran to reopen on Saturday and is set to extend the measure to the capital next week.

The move has faced criticism from health experts and even some authorities.

Iran has requested a $5 billion emergency loan from the International Monetary Fund to battle the coronavirus outbreak.

But the United States, which effectively holds a veto at the IMF, has signalled it has no intention of agreeing to give Iran such a credit line, alleging that it would be used to fund "terror abroad".
Billionaire business mogul, Bill Gates has reacted as US President, Donald Trump instructed his administration to halt funding to the ...





Billionaire business mogul, Bill Gates has reacted as US President, Donald Trump instructed his administration to halt funding to the World Health Organization (WHO) for the coronavirus.





Recall that the US President Donald Trump said he has instructed his administration to halt funding to the WHO.





According to the President, the WHO had failed in its basic duty in response to the coronavirus outbreak.





Reacting, Gates via his Twitter account on Wednesday, said putting a stop to the funds given to WHO for the fight against COVID-19 is as dangerous as it sounds.

He said, Halting funding for the World Health Organization during a world health crisis is as dangerous as it sounds.





Their work is slowing the spread of COVID-19 and if that work is stopped no other organization can replace them.





The world needs WHO now more than ever.
The student loan crisis has crescendoed to even worse heights. As universities shut down across the country due to the outbreak of COVID-19 and employment opportunities dim with the rapidly decelerating economy, todays students and post-grads need better tools than ever to navigate their finances.

Unfortunately, student loans in the United States are extraordinarily complicated, with literally hundreds of variations on loan terms, repayment methods and public interest forgiveness options. For borrowers, what are the best ways to minimize their total burden while staying within the rules?

Washington, DC-based Savi wants to make student loan borrowers savvy to the best options available to them, and now it has even more capital to take on this pressing challenge. The company announced today that it has raised a $6 million Series A led by Nyca Partners, one of the most influential investing firms in the fintech space.

Finance startups often have misaligned incentives between users and their own revenue models  a financial health app may make quiet referral revenue by peddling new credit cards and loans, exactly what a user doesnt need.

What makes Savi interesting is that the company was designed from the beginning to make sure that it always placed the interests of its users first. Its organized as a public benefit corporation and founded by two idealistic founders who came together over improving the outcomes of the nations youth.

After graduating from Georgetown Law, Aaron Smith founded and spent four years running Young Invincibles, a youth-focused think tank and advocacy organization that was originally created to bring attention to youth issues during the healthcare reform discussions in the early years of the Obama administration. Meanwhile, Savis other co-founder, Tobin Van Ostern, worked on youth voter engagement for Obamas first presidential campaign as the head of Students for Barack Obama before heading to the liberal Center for American Progress.

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Savi co-founders Tobin Van Ostern and Aaron Smith. Photos courtesy of Savi.

Together, they decided to found Savi to bring their progressive mission orientation to helping young people around student debt. The student loan world is "fairly complicated, and while obviously I think there needs to be continued improvement on the policy side, we needed solutions for student loan borrowers right now," Smith explained. And so that was sort of the impetus behind Savi  to use technology to create those kind of solutions.

Savi ingests student loan data from users and then begins crunching the numbers to calculate the best options for repayment or forgiveness while taking into account the goals of its users.

While student lending is a trillion-dollar-plus market, Savi  owing to its progressive roots  has been particularly focused on offering its platform to users like social workers, teachers and service workers. One of their largest partners is NEA, the largest teachers union in the United States with around 3 million members, and Savi is offered as a benefit to its members.

Organizations offer Savis student loan assessment tool to their employees and members to help them understand their financial picture. That tool is free for users, but from there, Savi charges a subscription to actively manage a users student loans, such as automating the process for filling out paperwork. Users can calculate their savings using Savi before committing to paying a subscription, ensuring that no user pays if Savi cant help them save money. The company says that the average borrower sees $140 in savings per month and pays a $5-a-month subscription fee.

Given the typical employment of its users, Savi has a particular specialty on loan forgiveness, an option that many student loans offer for people in public-interest careers. Such options often have byzantine rules for eligibility though, and so Savi works to ensure that borrowers seeking forgiveness stay within the rules of their loan programs. Currently, the company handles more than 150 forgiveness and repayment options.

Similar to its assessment tools for organizations, Savi launched a new tool around COVID-19 to help people in health professions or who have been laid off as a result of the pandemic to figure out their student loan situations and find new programs for help. We actually happen to have a pretty disproportionately high number of users that actually work on the COVID crisis, Van Ostern explained.

Startups around managing student loans have been a popular area of investment for VCs. Yesterday, my colleague Alex Wilhelm noted that student loan platform Frank received a $5 million interim strategic round of funding, with edtech giant Chegg taking a board seat. I also covered Summers $10 million raise late last year, which, like Savi, is a public benefit corporation focused on minimizing the burden of student loan payments.

In addition to Nyca, Savi received funding from AlleyCorp, Temerity Capital and 9Yards Capital, along with Michelle Kang, Catherine Reynolds and Sheila Lirio Marcelo.
Prabhu Deva married Latha in 1995 but their relationship was on the rocks after a few years of their marriage. Reports of Prabhu Deva being more than friends with Nayanthara started turning up, a few years later, while him being married to Latha already. Soon Nayanthara and Prabhudeva made their love public in 2010 and admitted to being in a relationship with each other. Surprisingly, even after breaking up with Prabhudeva, Darbar actor Nayanthara did not erase the tattoo on her left arm that read-- Prabhu.

Also Read | Nayanthara-Vignesh Shivan Bond With Khushi-Boney Kapoor In New York Ahead Of Special Day

When Nayanthara flaunted her modified tattoo

For the unversed, when Nayanthara was dating Prabhudeva during 2010-12, the actor had inked the name 'Prabhu' on her left hand. (with P in English and rest in Tamil) After being in love for years and announcing marriage, they reportedly broke up. There were rumours, later, that she had removed the tattoo in Hong Kong, but it turned out to be baseless. While Nayanthara time and again refrained from talking about about the breakup as well as the removal of the tattoo, the Naanum Rowdy Dhaan actor, in 2019, took the internet by storm when she flaunted her restyled tattoo, whilst holidaying in Greece with boyfriend Vignesh Shivan. The newly modified tattoo on her hand read- 'Positivity'.

Also Read | Nayanthara Was Shattered After Break-up With Prabhu Deva - Throwback

In the photograph, shared by Nayanthara, fans got a glimpse of how the actor had erased Prabhudeva's name in Tamil, and changed it to 'Positivity', with the same initial- P. Donning a pretty white tee, she made sure that her tattoo is visible. While she flaunted it like a boss, fans did notice the changed tattoo on her hand and praised Nayanthara for her decision.

Also Read | Nayanthara looks ethereal as Goddess Amman in 'Mookuthi Amman's' new poster, see pic

Earlier, in 2017, while talking to a news portal, Nayanthara was questioned about her plans of changing the tattoo, to which the Sye Raa Narasimha Reddy actor had exclaimed that she is planning to keep it. When Nayanthara collaborated with Vignesh Shivan for Naanum Rowdy Dhaan in 2015, rumours sparked that something was brewing between the two actors. And after which, the reports turned to be true and now the duo has been dating for four years.

Also Read | Remo D'Souza on recreating Prabhudeva's song Muqabala: 'I was extremely happy'

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.
Lan Mercado, regional director of Oxfam in Asia

The number of active COVID-19 patients in the ASEAN passed 10,000 at the beginning of last week. As a collective, the ASEAN represents nearly 650 million people, and with more of them being infected with each passing day, the bloc, its people, its economies, and way of life are increasingly at stake.

The ASEAN chairs statement last February rightly called for a cohesive and responsive ASEAN in responding to the pandemic. The statement underlines the need to act together if the bloc is to successfully tackle this crisis.

Time to act

Indonesia is calling for a special summit on a regional COVID-19 strategy. The imperative of the hour is a well-articulated ASEAN response plan enacted immediately, addressing the health, humanitarian, social, and economic needs of the regions people in line with an orchestrated response and collective action of the entire bloc in curbing the spread of the disease, as outlined in the ASEAN chairs statement.

The existing healthcare infrastructure in many member states, epitomised by long waiting queues and low-quality care, will need significant ramp ups to cope with the pandemic. The ratio of doctors is at eight for 10,000 people, and out-of-pocket expenditure for healthcare is at 44 per cent in the regions five most populous nations.

Current conditions paint a grim picture for more than 36 million people in Southeast Asia who live in extreme poverty, earning under $1.90 a day. A 20 per cent loss of income due to the current crisis may push 60 million people in East Asia and the Pacific into extreme poverty and another 160 million into surviving on less than $3.20 a day.

The crisis is likely to further imperil those already struggling with poverty, vulnerabilities, and discrimination disproportionately. Not only because they will struggle to get good quality healthcare but also because they are more likely to be first-line casualties of the ensuing economic crisis. Informal and daily wage workers and women and girls are likely to be hit the hardest.

However, given the unforgiving and undiscriminating nature of a pandemic, none of us  no individual, no community, no nation or region  is safe unless all of us are. Thus, the actions must be cohesive with the ASEAN being the platform. Tackling issues of inequality is critical to containing the outbreak. Prioritising assistance to those most at risk including frontline responders, wage workers, refugees, and migrants is critical to recovery for all of us.

The World Health Organizations figures indicate that countries with stronger public healthcare systems like Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam are more successful at case management. Meanwhile, Indonesia has amped up health spending to the tune of $4.5 billion.

As part of economic stimulus packages totaling $150 billion to date, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, and Vietnam are among the blocs countries that have significant social protection packages.

Swift action, that takes into account the needs of all people, especially those likely to be hit harder, will demonstrate the ASEANs commitment to a peaceful and safe living environment for the people. Not only the recovery from the pandemic but also the future of all member states hinges on the decisive action following the ASEANs commitment to collectively respond to the outbreak of COVID-19.

ASEAN member states have held joint meetings with fighting COVID-19 being one of the top discussions

Things to do

To fulfill the commitments, protect the lives of and ensure the wellbeing of its people, it is necessary for the ASEAN to act in unison and serve as a platform for openly sharing knowledge and co-ordinating cohesive policies. Furthermore, the bloc should set up a well-resourced response where no one is left behind through an ASEAN Emergency COVID Fund, pooling contributions from member states and dialogue partners, and to build up capacities of weaker public health systems to protect the entire region.

Besides these, the ASEAN needs to put in place stronger frameworks and fair and transparent structures to deal with transboundary risks now and to prevent future pandemics in the region. Lastly, there needs to be a strong support for small and medium-sized businesses and their workers by mobilising resources from financial institutions for crisis response and its recovery.

In addition, it is necessary for ASEAN member states to take the following decisive actions:

* Immediately upscale testing and treatment facilities and make them available to all people in need, especially poor and vulnerable communities;

* Provide healthcare workers and others on the frontline with adequate protection, equipment, and support to deliver essential services;

* Ensure all people affected, especially locked down communities, to have enough food and essentials. All workers who lost their income require social protection;

* Enact solutions for the special protection and wellbeing needs of migrant workers, displaced people, and others left marginalised;

* Enact measures to promote womens voices and leadership, and deliver gender-sensitive assistance to prevent gender-based violence; and

* Engage with civil society in impact assessments and response implementation to make the needs of vulnerable groups heard and met.

Cohesive and responsive

In delivering a strong response, the region will benefit from strengthening its mechanisms. The ASEAN chairmans statement tasked a co-ordinating role for its Health Sector mechanism on border crossing, meaning consular services and transportation. However, a cohesive and holistic approach that looks at all aspects of the health and safety of people is the need of the hour. The ASEAN Coordinating Center for Humanitarian Assistance (AHA Center) already has in place the mandate, network, and partnerships to rapidly enable an emergency response.

The ASEANs Health Sector and AHA Center can play a pivotal role in regional co-ordination and co-operation of a united COVID-19 response. The ASEAN Business Advisory Council will prove to be a useful partner in engaging the private sector in delivering essential services and supplies, and to support displaced workers in their value chains.

The ASEAN Coordinating Council (ACC) has been tasked to monitor the collective response, present subsequent recommendations, and report to the 36th ASEAN Summit in June. To put out the immediate fires of the pandemic and to move beyond, the ACC must take into account the views of impacted communities, emergency responders, the civil society and womens rights organisations, as well as other partners in the region.

Meaningfully working together for a cohesive response backed up by an emergency fund, right policies, and open and honest collaboration will go a long way in suppressing the outbreak, especially for the blocs least developed member states as well as its most marginalised communities.

The ASEAN, whose 36th Summit on April 8-9 was rescheduled as a result of the pandemic, holds the power to save millions of lives. Only with bold and decisive actions can we stop a catastrophe and shift towards a sustainable, safer, and more equal Southeast Asia.
On April 13, 2020, a charge was brought against a vicar of one of the dioceses of the Armenian Holy Apostolic Church, through combination of sufficient evidence obtained through investigative and operational intelligence measures taken under the criminal case being investigated by the Investigation Department of the National Security Service of Armenia, as reported the news service of the National Security Service.

The mentioned clergyman is Vicar of the Araratian Patriarchal Diocese, Archbishop Navasard Ktchoyan.

Based on the factual data, in the summer of 2010, Ktchoyan, acting in conspiracy with a person who was his godson, with the made-up excuse of increasing productivity in case of a $12,000,000 investment in diamond mines belonging to him in Africa, processing and selling the extracted diamond raw material in the Republic of Armenia, sparked interest in an Armenian entrepreneur to make the mentioned investment, after which Ktchoyan obtained the right to real estate belonging to the entrepreneur and his close ones, obtained and freely possessed large amounts of money by concealing and distorting the source, movement and pertinence of those funds through several bank and commercial transactions, transfers and conversions. To legalize the incomes received through crime, Ktchoyan used the company established in an offshore zone in the spring of 2010, and 33% of the shares of the company belonged to Ktchoyan.

A signature to not leave the country has been selected as a pre-trial measure against Ktchoyan.

Preliminary investigation continues, and measures are being taken to establish the identities of all those who are involved in the crime and bring them to justice, as well as recover the damage caused.
When an outbreak of Ebola stalked West Africa five years ago, Miata Tubee Johnson, a former refugee from Liberia and now a public health officer with UNHCR, the UN Refugee Agency, played a key role in reducing deaths in the community from the deadly virus that claimed more than 10,000 lives.

Now facing the spread of COVID-19, she is taking her knowledge of virus wars to protect thousands of highly vulnerable refugees living in camps in Tanzania.

"The last thing we want is for there to be an outbreak in the camp," says Miata, who spends her days between her office and three different refugee camps in Tanzania's Kigoma region.

More than three quarters of the world's 25.9 million refugees live in developing countries.

To prevent avoidable deaths and suffering, UNHCR, is prioritizing steps to curb potential COVID-19 outbreaks that would put extraordinary strain on already fragile local health-care services.

"The last thing we want is for there to be an outbreak in the camp."

With 245,000 refugees in Tanzania, Miata is working all hours to implement steps to prevent an outbreak in the camps and host communities that surround them.

First on her agenda is chairing a COVID-19 preparedness meeting with 20 staff from a number of organizations and the government, sitting at least one meter apart under a tree  social distancing in effect.

Next, she will hand over a much-needed digital X-ray machine recently procured with donor funding, to a nearby district hospital serving the host community. The machines are useful diagnostic tools for COVID-19, as they can detect lung damage.

"We are always working to build capacity in the local health facilities when we identify gaps. It is important for coexistence between refugees and host communities," adds Miata.

So far, there are no reported cases in Tanzania of the new coronavirus among refugees, most of whom are from Burundi and the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

Part of Miata's focus is to ensure refugees are included in the national surveillance, preparedness and response activities.

"If there are any cases of COVID-19 in the camp, they will be referred to government designated health facilities," she explains.

Having fled the civil war in Liberia as a child in 1991, Miata returned home with her family eight years later, went through school and graduated with a nursing degree. Two years later, she enrolled for a Master's in Public Health. She then applied for a job as a Public Health Associate with the UNHCR office in Liberia.

In 2014, one year into her new job, Liberia declared a state of emergency following the Ebola outbreak in the region. The small West African country was the hardest hit, recording 4,809 deaths before the outbreak was declared over in 2016.

Miata's job involved making sure refugees were well informed about how to prevent transmission of Ebola. She also worked with a team to convince governments to include refugees in the national Ebola prevention plan.

"My experience in Liberia actually prepared me for where I am today. I feel a sense of deja vu," she says.

While COVID-19 has a different transmission and etiology to Ebola, Miata draws broadly on that experience to provide lifesaving public health messaging and call for the integration of refugees into the national coronavirus response.

"My experience in Liberia actually prepared me for where I am today."

The Tanzania refugee response is one of the least funded in the region, receiving only 25 per cent of the requested funding for 2019-2020. Basic services are severely over-stretched and unable to meet the needs of refugees.

While she works in Tanzania, her family remains at home in Liberia. Her work is demanding but keeping in touch with her eight-year-old daughter keeps her going.

"Living away from home is the nature of our work as humanitarians but sometimes your child just needs your full attention as a mother," she says.

Miata, like many other humanitarian workers around the world is working through the global crisis to make sure refugees receive lifesaving assistance.

"I remember when we were in the refugee camp, I used to be happy when my parents would come from the food distribution point with food in their hands. I am playing that role now. Whether there will be a lock down or not, refugees should get what they need."

Additional reporting by Linda Muriuki in Nairobi, Kenya

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The 27-year-old was denied bail to stay at his grandparents house because of fears over the virus

A 27-year-old awaiting sentence on domestic offences has been refused bail on Wednesday after concerns were raised regarding his grandparents health.

Stephen Jonathan Brown has been housed in Maghaberry since his arrest in March 2019 following an attack on his ex-partner.

He is awaiting sentence on three charges, including assault occasioning actual bodily harm and false imprisonment.

A bail application was made on behalf of Brown at Belfast Crown Court by his barrister Luke Curran.

Mr Curran put forward Browns grandparents home as a bail address, which he said had been confirmed by Browns grandfather.

Saying the family are a unit, Mr Curran said both grandparents had expressed a wish to assist and support their grandson, adding that Brown lived there for quite a period of time before jail.

Mr Curran said it was accepted the domestic incident Brown is awaiting sentence on was terrifying.

He also pointed out his client has been in custody in excess of a year, which is the equivalent of a two-year sentence.

The defence barrister spoke of the current lockdown situation, and said Browns grandfather feels it would be better having him home, where he can assist them.

Mr Curran ended his submission by telling Judge McFarland that Brown would abide by any bail conditions imposed.

Addressing the issue of the Covid-19 crisis, Crown barrister Kate McKay expressed concerns about Brown leaving a prison environment and staying with two vulnerable people living alone together.

Ms McKay said: He has been in contact with other inmates, which would put his grandparents at significant risk.

Police are concerned about this aspect.

Opposing bail, the Crown barrister branded the domestic offences as very serious.

She pointed out that Brown had breached bail in the past. After listening to submissions from the Crown and defence, Judge McFarland said both Browns grandfather and grandmother had serious underlying health issues.

The Belfast Recorder also raised concerns about a previous alleged assault against the grandfather in the past, as well as Browns general history in relation to offending.

Judge McFarland said that under the circumstances the bail address was unsuitable and refused the application.
Leadership is not a concept typically associated with introverts, as most people assume extroverts -- known for being more social, outgoing and outspoken -- are destined to be better organizational leaders and CEOs. This assumption is not entirely correct, however, as introverts can make excellent leaders by leveraging the very traits that define them. They may not always be excellent public speakers or risk-takers, but they can leverage their unique strengths, such as their penchant for listening carefully or being cautious, to become excellent choices for leadership roles.

These seven entrepreneurs share some of the most effective ways introverts can use their innate traits to their advantage in the pursuit of becoming great leaders.

Use your gift of listening.

"My business partner is the extrovert and I am definitely the introvert," says Nicholas Bull, co-founder of Propaganda Premium E-Liquid, explaining how he and his partner are complementing each other by dividing between them the tasks each are good at. "He can do the media interviews, while I'm good at meeting with staff individually, listening to concerns and collaborating on solutions."

Bull underlines that as a former employee himself, he is aware of how important it is to be seen and heard by management. This is why he leverages his innate gift of listening when communicating with his staff. "As a boss, you can do that much more effectively in a quiet one-on-one conversation," he says.

Ensure effective communication.

As opposed to extroverts who tend to think out loud, introverts really take their time to internally craft a very specific and crystal-clear message that will get the job done from the get-go, thinks OneIMS president Solomon Thimothy.

"That's why I think that introverts have tremendous leadership potential," Thimothy explains. In addition to being effective communicators, they can organize the work of the entire team hyper-efficiently and smoothly, which is a great advantage for any business, he says.

Build thoughtful relationships.

This penchant for introspection also plays an important role when it comes to building relationships with the team, says Craft Impact co-founder and CEO Traci Beach. "While outgoing, extroverts may not be as approachable as a thoughtful, introspective leader who is more focused on listening," she says.

Beach explains that introverts are uniquely able to develop deeper relationships with individuals, which gives them the ability to understand the underlying sentiments and morale of a workforce. "A quiet leader can be well-positioned to inspire trust and motivation."

Exercise humility.

"Humility is an underappreciated trait of leaders," says Jordan Conrad, founder and publisher of Writing Explained, underlining how important it is that introverted leaders tend to share their accomplishments with the team, which has a great effect on workplace morale.

This, in turn, can significantly improve team productivity, Conrad explains: "By making others feel a part of the process, your team will be eager to take on new projects and go above and beyond because they are now getting part of the credit."

Leverage your empathy.

Alongside humility, empathy is arguably one of the most prominent traits in introverted people, and this is especially useful for introverts in leading roles as it can help develop better relationships and improve communication, thinks Nicole Munoz Consulting, Inc. founder and CEO Nicole Munoz.

"Making empathy a key component of your leadership style and company culture is a fantastic way to leverage the benefits of being more introverted," Munoz says. "It's a different form of inspiration, one that inspires not only confidence, but also deeper trust, and that ultimately will create real loyalty."

Develop authoritative knowledge.

Introverts tend to be quiet, observant and focused, and these are the very traits that can help them become experts in their fields and give them a competitive advantage, thinks Shaun Conrad, founder and publisher of My Accounting Course.

"Their keen ability to study their surroundings and gain knowledge about their business, product and industry gives them an advantage over their competitors," Conrad explains. "Knowledge is power, and introverts' talent for focusing intensely on understanding issues can give them the upperhand."

Lead by example.

"I tend to think of myself as an introvert," Bell + Ivy co-founder and president Zach Binder says, explaining that he was never the type of leader who could rally the team behind a shared goal or joint project with a big motivational speech.


OAK BROOK (dpa-AFX) - McDonald's in China has apologized and closed a restaurant for issuing a notice banning black people from entering amid the spread of coronavirus or Covid-19 pandemic, multiple reports said. The fast food chain said the ban on black people was not representative of its inclusive values.



The incident happened in the industrial city of Guangzhou, where China's largest African communities reside.



As per a video shared on social media, a notice displayed at the store read, 'We've been informed that from now on black people are not allowed to enter the restaurant.'



The company immediately removed the communication and temporarily closed the restaurant when it found this out. Further, the restaurant reportedly conducted diversity and inclusion training in the branch.



BBC reported that in Guangzhou, a major area for African traders, hundreds of Africans were evicted last week from hotels and apartments following online rumours that the virus was spreading among African people.



The news of restaurant closure comes as the company is experiencing weak sales due to COVID-19, which caused significant restaurant closures and 'shelter-in-place' orders worldwide.



Last week, McDonald's had reported 22.2 percent drop in total comparable sales for the month of March and a 3.4 percent drop in total comparable sales for the first quarter. Globally, sales results began to markedly decline during the second half of March due to COVID-19.



The company recently withdrew its 2020 outlook and its long-term outlook, due to the uncertainty related to COVID-19.



Copyright RTT News/dpa-AFX

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A second city in China has banned the consumption of dogs, cats and some wild animals  a move campaigners hope could signal an end to the trade of all wildlife at wet markets across the country.

The ban in Zhuhai follows a decision made by authorities in Shenzhen earlier this month to prohibit dog and cat meat. The new rules come into force in Zhuhai on 1 May, according to state-run China News.

A spokesperson for the animal charity Humane Society International described it as thrilling news, and said it could be the start of a domino effect of animal protection legislation across China.

It comes as The Independents Stop the Wildlife Trade campaign calls for an international effort to tighten restrictions on wet markets to reduce the risk of future pandemics.

The coronavirus outbreak is believed to have originated at a wet market in Wuhan where exotic animals were sold  making the jump to humans from animals kept in close proximity.

Recommended The Independent calls for tighter restrictions on wildlife trade

Last week Chinas ministry of agriculture and rural affairs stated for the first time that dogs should be treated as pets rather than livestock.

Yet in the absence of a national ban, other cities in mainland China are believed to be considering their own legislation to stop the consumption of dogs and cats.

Zhuhais ban on dog and cat meat eating is thrilling news for all those in China and around the world who have campaigned for so long to end this brutal trade, said Wendy Higgins, Humane Society Internationals director of international media.

Coming so soon after Shenzhens ban and the governments historic statement classifying dogs as pets, we hope this is the start of a domino effect of progressive legislation across China, with other cities following suit.

She added: This isnt just good news for animal protection, its also very good news for public health.

The Zhuhai authorities said the consumption of some wild animals will also be banned, based on the guidance given by the ministry of agriculture and rural affairs. However, animals such as alpaca, ostrich, silver fox, blue fox and raccoon dog  considered special livestock  will still be allowed to be traded as meat.

Dr Teresa Telecky, vice president of wildlife at Humane Society International, said: Listing wild animals, including foxes and raccoon dogs, as special livestock is concerning.

Rebranding wildlife as livestock doesnt alter the fact that there are insurmountable challenges to keeping these species in commercial captive breeding environments, and that their welfare needs simply cant be met.

Vendors cut up dog meat at a market in Yulin, home to an annual dog meat festival (STR/AFP/Getty)

Dr Jane Goodall DBE has backed The Independents campaign calling on governments to work together to impose stricter controls on the trade, sale and consumption of wild animals.

The renowned conservationist said: If we go on treating animals the way we are that is going to hit back on us, as it has.

Writing for The Independent, the United Nations biological diversity chief, Elizabeth Maruma Mrema, said: Global wildlife trade and live animal markets, where live fish, meat and wild animals are sold, are important risk factors for zoonotic disease spillover.

An estimated 10 million dogs a year are killed for Chinas dog meat trade, which is thought to be consumed infrequently by less than 20 per cent of the population, according to Humane Society International.

A nationwide survey in 2016 suggested a majority of Chinese citizens think the dog meat trade should be completely banned.

Ms Higgins said: It would seem that in the absence of a national ban, cities are taking matters into their own hands and reflecting the mood of the people.
Photo: Doug Mills/The New York Times

When Congress enacted an emergency plan to send $1,200 checks to every American adult, Republicans joked that President Trump would want to sign his name on the checks. A few weeks later, after the Wall Street Journal reported that Trump was exploring this outlandish desire, a reporter asked, Is that right? Do you want to sign those checks? Trump denied it: No. Me sign? No.

Last night, the Washington Post reported that Trumps name will be displayed on every check. A measure passed by both parties to alleviate an economic emergency has been expropriated by his reelection campaign. Trumps presidency has largely consisted of outrageously corrupt notions proceeding from fearful accusation to accepted reality. Within a few days, this one will also probably be forgotten.

Trump has never respected any meaningful distinction between the federal government and the Trump Organization. He expects every federal employee, especially its law-enforcement agents, to advance his personal political agenda. He has functionally mixed its budget with his own by having the government pour money into his properties, and he has treated its official powers as if they are his own personal chits. The authority he has gained through the emergency response to the coronavirus has vastly expanded the potential for corruption, and every sign indicates that Trump is already engaging in systemic abuse.

Some of the corruption is lingering just below the surface. Trump is speaking constantly with corporate leaders, who can position themselves at the front of the line for federal contracts or relief payments. He supports bailouts for industries with a shaky claim to the public purse, like cruise lines, and has staunchly opposed any rescue for the United States Postal Service, which handles essential government communication. Trump of course has been trying to force the post office to raise rates on Amazon, in retaliation for Jeff Bezoss ownership of the Washington Post. The economic crisis has put the post office on life support, giving Trump the leverage he wants to make it punish a detested rival.

Trump has treated the distribution of the federal governments supply of emergency medical equipment like he is walking around the neighborhood with a money clip, pulling out bills and patting grateful recipients on the cheek. When New York governor Andrew Cuomo noted that he retains power to reopen public spaces, Trump exploded, I got it all done for him, and everyone else, and now he seems to want Independence! That wont happen! Trump routinely threatens Democratic governors not to complain about his mismanagement if they want help from Washington, conflating the authority of the government with his own authority (When they disrespect me, they are disrespecting our government). He has used the precious supply of ventilators as in-kind contributions, allowing endangered Republican allies like Martha McSally and Cory Gardner to hold them up as proof of their clout.

When Congress handed Trump control of half a trillion dollars in spending authority, it insisted on establishing some loose oversight requirements. Trump has diligently trashed them. When he signed the economic rescue bill, he added a statement that he would refuse to follow its express requirement that the inspector general report if the administration is withholding information from Congress. He quickly fired the inspector general who was tasked with overseeing the bailout fund, and replaced him with a member of his impeachment defense team. There is little mystery about Trumps intention. He blurted it out: Ill be the oversight.

While it is a coincidence that the pandemic broke out as impeachment was winding down, it is not a coincidence that Trump is revisiting the pattern of abuse for which he was impeached. Trump believed he had a perfect right to take spending passed into law by Congress (in that case, military aid for Ukraine) and dangle it for a political benefit. He has correctly interpreted the near-unanimous acquittal vote by Republicans as a green light to repeat the crime.

Congressional Republicans are communicating their open willingness to help Trump cover up his corruption. They have not raised a peep about Trumps subversion of oversight, let alone demanded any measures to hold him accountable. After Democrats announced a House committee to ensure stimulus funding is spent fairly, House Republican leader Tom Cole said it would have unanimous or near-unanimous opposition and thus no legitimacy whatsoever.

Cole explained his rationale in a comically credulous story for the right-wing Washington Free Beacon. Congress doesnt need to oversee the bills funding because it would be redundant. Democrats previously lauded the bills oversight requirements, the story explains, quoting a Democratic member praising its oversight panel. Within the legislation itself, Cole says, theres a five-person committee thats appointed by leadership in both houses of Congress, as well as an inspector general function, that will have oversight over this. The fact that Trump publicly announced his defiance of the laws requirements, and then fired its lead official, is not mentioned anywhere in the story.

There are a handful of categories of behavior by President Trump that have drawn condemnation or even forceful pushback by at least some Republicans: Trumps communication style, trade policy, and accommodation of Russia. Trumps corruption of government and open intent to turn government power into a tool of regime control is not in that category. Republicans have calculated, perhaps correctly, that it is in their interest for Trump to use emergency funds as campaign spending. He is not letting the crisis go to waste.
A barrage of North Korean missiles fired from both the ground and fighter jets splashed down off the country's east coast yesterday, South Korea's military said, a show of force on the eve of a key state anniversary in the North and parliamentary elections in the rival South.

The back-to-back launches were the latest in a series of weapons tests that North Korea has conducted in recent weeks amid stalled nuclear talks and outside worries about a possible coronavirus outbreak in the country.

North Korean troops in the eastern coastal city of Munchon first launched several projectiles - presumed to be cruise missiles - yesterday morning, South Korea's joint chiefs of staff said.

The weapons flew more than 150km at a low altitude off the North's east coast, a South Korean defence official said. If confirmed, it would be the North's first cruise missile launch in about three years, said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

Later yesterday, North Korea launched several Sukhoi-class fighter jets which fired an unspecified number of air-to-surface missiles toward the North's eastern waters, the defence official said.

The official said North Korea has recently appeared to be resuming its military drills which it had scaled back due to concerns about the coronavirus pandemic. He said other North Korean fighter jets also flew on patrol near the border with China yesterday.

Some experts say North Korea probably used the latest weapons launches to bolster its striking capability against South Korea, which has been introducing US-made stealth F-35 jets and other sophisticated conventional weapons systems in recent years. Others say the missile tests were also aimed at shoring up internal unity in the face of US-led sanctions and the coronavirus pandemic.

Go Myong-Hyun, an analyst at the Seoul-based Asan Institute for Policy, said that North Korea also wants to maintain tensions to secure leverage over the US in future negotiations.

Nuclear diplomacy between Pyongyang and Washington has made little headway since the breakdown of a second summit between North Korean leader Kim Jong-un and US President Donald Trump in Vietnam in early 2019.

Most of the weapons North Korea had tested recently were ballistic missiles or artillery shells with a ballistic trajectory. The North's last known cruise missile test occurred in June 2017, when it said it had test-launched a new type of cruise missile capable of striking US and South Korean warships "at will".

Cruise missiles fly at a lower altitude and slower speed than ballistic missiles, making them easier to intercept, but they are still considered more accurate. UN Security Council resolutions ban North Korea from engaging in any ballistic activities, but not cruise missile tests.

The launches came a day before North Korea marks the 108th birthday of the country's late founder, Kim Il-sung, the grandfather of Kim Jong-un. They also came a day ahead of South Korean parliamentary elections.

In the South Korean elections, President Moon Jae-in's liberal ruling party, which espouses greater reconciliation with North Korea, is expected to defeat the main conservative opposition amid a slowdown in the number of new coronavirus infections in South Korea.
Jeffrey Epstein's victims have left the door open to sue Prince Andrew after they receive compensation from the dead paedophiles estate, legal documents reveal.

The women are close to striking a deal with the 513million estate of the Wall Street financier, who was close friends with the Duke of York.

But lawyers representing the victims, who include Andrews accuser Virginia Roberts, say they will not let certain individuals escape liability through the agreement.

In an explosive email, Miss Robertss lawyer David Boies names Prince Andrew or others to whom our clients were trafficked among those individuals.

The lawyers representing Andrews accuser Virginia Roberts (pictured central with the Prince) say they will not let certain individuals escape liability through the agreement.

Miss Roberts claims she had sex with the duke three times aged 17 when she was Epsteins slave  claims Andrew emphatically denies.

US prosecutors and the FBI have been trying to get Andrew to answer questions about his association with Epstein for months  but say he has failed to respond.

The new documents were filed this week to the Superior Court of the US Virgin Islands, which is handling Epsteins will.

Lawyers representing dozens of women are negotiating with the co-executors of Epsteins estate about the terms under which they will receive compensation.

Lawyer David Boies (pictured central) named Prince Andrew or others to whom our clients were trafficked among those individuals who could be sued by the victims

In a BBC interview with Emily Maitlis Prince Andrew denied ever having had sexual relations with Virginia Roberts and said he could not remember the photograph ever being taken

One outstanding issue is a release document to be signed by the victims which would protect a number of Epsteins former associates against legal liability for their actions.

On April 7, Mr Boies wrote to the co-executors that any settlement cannot allow Andrew to be released  but the overall terms of the release were acceptable.

He said victims should have in the release a space to make clear that certain individuals (e.g. Prince Andrew or others to whom our clients were trafficked) are not released.

This means that if the victims receive payments  expected to be in the millions of pounds  they can still try to pursue the duke.

Lawyers for Andrew declined to comment on Wednesday night.
In a humanitarian gesture, India on Wednesday gifted life-saving drugs, including Hydroxychloroquine tablets, to Seychelles to help them deal with the coronavirus pandemic that has infected 2 million people worldwide. India gifted the first consignment of four tonnes of essential life saving medicines to Seychelles.

"These medicines were procured basis the request from the Government of Seychelles. The consignment was brought to Seychelles by an Air India Special Charter Boeing 787 flight from New Delhi," said a statement issued by the High Commission of India in Seychelles.

This is a special arrangement made in view of the special relations with Seychelles in order to enable the supply of these medicines despite the restrictions in place due to the lockdown, it said. "Despite its own domestic challenges and constraints, India has always believed in sharing its resources and expertise with its friends and partners," the statement said.

This airlift also strengthens the spirit of cooperation between the two sides based on India's Neighbourhood First Policy and Seychelles' India First Policy, it added.

As part of this consignment, India swiftly decided to send the supplies of Hydroxychloroquine to Seychelles. The anti-malarial drug is now used to treat COVID-19 patients with effective outcomes. Health authorities worldwide have recommended Hydroxychloroquine for COVID-19 patients with positive outcomes, it said. Other medicines as part of the supplies include various life-saving medicines for COVID-19 complications which shall be a game-changer for the treatment of the pandemic in Seychelles.

India had previously gifted lifesaving state-of-the-art medical equipment worth USD 8.75 million in February 2018 which is now distributed across all the hospitals and health clinics in Mahe, Praslin and La Digue.

"This is the level of commitment and unwavering support that India provides to closest maritime neighbor and best friend, Seychelles, and work untiringly towards capacity building and strengthening its health care infrastructure, especially during the testing times!," further added the statement.
Writer & Director Tayarisha Poe delivers in first feature film Selah and The Spades

Tayarisha Poes first feature film  that she wrote and directedSelah and The Spades will debut on Amazon Prime, April 17th and thats a very big deal.

Why? Havent you heard? Its a Herculean task for a young, African-American woman to get an opportunity to live her bliss. And Poes bliss is being a filmmaker, a writer-director and one that can make a living doing just that.

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Its 2020, and the delightful, upbeat and funny Poe began the process when she was 21. Shes just thirty now a baby really with so much ahead of her and thats exciting for her and us. Why? Well, because Tayarisha Poe is talented period, end of sentence. And shes funny. Wait. I mentioned that and her sense of humor (dark) and her strong sense of character is evident in Selah and The Spades.

Heres the story. In the closed world of an elite Pennsylvania boarding school, Haldwell, the student body is run by five factions. Seventeen-year-old Selah Summers (Lovie Simone) runs the most dominant group, the Spades, with unshakable poise, as they cater to the most classic of vices and supply students with coveted, illegal alcohol and pills. Tensions between the factions escalate, and when Selahs best friend/right hand Maxxie (Jharrel Jerome) becomes distracted by a new love, Selah takes on a protegee, enamored sophomore Paloma (Celeste OConnor), to whom she imparts her wisdom on ruling the school. But with graduation looming and Paloma proving an impressively quick study, Selahs fears turn sinister as she grapples with losing the control by which she defines herself.

My new best friend aka Tayarisha Poe considers herself essentially a storyteller. We both grew up in Philadelphia, a place I hate (with my whole soul) and a place she loves with her whole soul. To be specific shes a West Philly girl and takes all of the lessons she learned there we get things done with her on her journey. Her tenacity works. Poe was chosen as one of the 25 new faces of the independent film by Filmmaker magazine in 2015, and in 2016 she received the Sundance Institutes Knight Foundation Fellowship. In 2017 she was selected for the January Sundance Screenwriters Lab and the June Sundance Directors Lab. She is a 2017 Pew Fellow.

It was her experience at the Sundance writer and then the director lab that helped Poe put everything together. They teach you the value of failing, shared Poe when remembering the experience in shaping Selah and The Spades, You have to give yourself the room grow. Thats an important lesson that I learned.

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Here is what writer/director Tayarisha Poe wants you to know about her first film Selah and the Spades that will debut on Amazon Prime, April 17, 2020.

Los Angeles Sentinel:I am so proud of you, my new best friend. First, how did this project originate?

TAYARISHA POE: I made an overture to Selah and the Spades, called Overture, in 2014, knowing I eventually wanted to make a feature. But I didnt know how to write a feature script, and I didnt know what it would be about, so I wrote short stories about the characters and their world  one every day for the month of November 2014. At the end of the month, I had all these stories. Since I knew how to write and take photos, I turned the stories into separate multimedia works. Its not the most conventional approach to making a movie but it worked for the story because I wound up spending so much time world-building and thinking about the lives of these kids, which in the end made the feature itself so much more complex and rich.

LAS: What was the inspiration for the story?

TP: After graduating from college in 2012 and starting a real job, I kept wanting to write characters that did whatever they wanted, who kept moving forward in life without overthinking things, or even thinking about them at all.

LAS: At what point did you decide to make a gangster movie set in high school?

TP: From the projects inception; the first Selah story I wrote was about Selah watching from afar as Maxxie beats up this kid who owes them money. It was about this girl who doesnt get her hands dirty  she sends other people to do her dirty work. Thats the kind of story Ive always been drawn to.

LAS: Who is Selah and how has she evolved over the years?

TP: Shes a 17-year-old girl whos already well aware that her actions are constantly under review by others, but Im still asking myself where that comes from. Shes been around for a long time, but shes always been the character she is. Shes an amalgamation of the strong women Im friends with, and sometimes see myself as  but its less about who those women are than it is about how others perceive them. Selah was born out of this frustration of me knowing that if were too headstrong or aggressive, I might be stereotyped as an aggressive black woman, so I spent a lot of time being chill and even-tempered. But its exhausting to constantly be thinking about how other people are seeing you, so Selah was born of my frustration with that, combined with the notion of examining what life would be like if you didnt have to lean into the image of what you should be, or how you should act, or what you should be doing with your life, or your body, or your energy. Selah came out of those feelings, and shes evolved over the years into something deeper and more complex.

LAS: This is a movie about power. What did you want to explore about power through this movie, or these characters?

TP: Power is an addictive thing, and Im interested in the things people do to hold onto power, especially if youre a person who lacks power, like a woman for example. What will you do to hold onto power once you have it? Im interested in exploring that, because who doesnt want power? Who doesnt want to be able to do whatever they want and nobody can tell them otherwise  to me, thats a thrilling thing.

LAS: What makes Selah powerful?

TP: People who are good at holding onto power tend to be those who are constantly competing against themselves, and I see that quality in Selah. That sort of constant competition is powerful unto itself  its something I feel like Im examining every day of my life, in everything I write.

LAS: Describe the dynamic between Selah and Paloma.

TP: I wrote Selah and Paloma because I wanted to explore the relationships teenage girls have with one another, which are often more all-consuming than romantic relationships. They can be stronger and more important than the relationships they have with teenage boys, who dont have a lot of substance at that age. I often feel like we dont have a language to talk about the depth of our relationships with our closest friends  it still feels like we put the importance of close friendships on the backburner to romantic relationships. When I wrote these characters, it was so obvious to me that this was a love story between two people, even though its not about sex and romance. These are two people who are so passionate about each other they almost destroy themselves, and each other.

LAS: All high schools are a hotbed of sexual expression but in your movie, its also about organized criminal business. Please describe The Haldwell School in your own words.

TP: This is a heightened, fictional portrayal of what boarding school is. I started attending one beginning in tenth grade, and Haldwell isnt far off from my life there. Youre living in a hermetic environment removed from your parents and family, and you get to make your own rules, you have your own little society.

LAS: What was your inspiration for the five factions at Haldwell?

TP: They come from all the mafia and gangster movies Ive ever seen, theres always someone whos betting on something, and whos responsible for throwing parties, or for getting drugs. And theres always a group like the prefects because somebody has to be responsible for making sure we get away with all this stuff. Imagine a bunch of kids who grew up watching The Godfather getting to a place where they have all this freedom; the first thing theyre going to do is create their own system of order within that free world.

LAS: Why did you want to cast Lovie Simone as Selah?

TP: She first auditioned for Paloma. If she played Selah, I worried that she looked so young that we would have to cast everyone else around her to look similar. But thankfully she was cast as Selah, its the greatest thing that could have happened to this story. You look at her face in any scene and you see her go through all these emotions in a matter of seconds, you see them written across her face, and then you see her cover them up under this perfect smile. She brought this very real teenage girl experience to the invaluable character  shes brilliant.

LAS: Its also an effective ensemble. How did you manage to achieve group chemistry?

TP: Ironically, I took the actors aside and told them what kind of movie they were in  every single character in this movie is living in their own different kind of movie. Paloma is living in a romantic comedy, Selah is in The Godfather, and Maxxie is in a Jane Austen movie like Pride and Prejudice. I also gave everyone complex backstories, they all had reading assignments, short stories that inspired their characters. It also helped that we had the world of Haldwell containing them, this school identity everyone could latch onto and dive deep into. The actors would debate what their characters and factions might do in these hypothetical situations they came up with during downtime  it was like they were writing fan fiction as the story was happening.

LAS: Describe the dynamic between Selah and her mother.

TP: Selah is someone who wants to hold onto the power she has at school, but she doesnt have that power when shes at home with her mother.

LAS: What makes teenagers fascinating to you as subjects?

TP: Im attracted to stories that treat teenagers and the emotional stuff theyre going through seriously, giving them the weight that those things deserve. A lot of the stuff theyre experiencing, like falling in love or hating somebody, or just the dramatic ups and downs of daily life is a first for them. When a teenager falls in love and then out of love, they feel like theyre going to die, they genuinely dont know if they will survive this experience, because its never happened before. Im fascinated by the purity of emotion that exists in teenagers.

LAS: What are you trying to say about humanity with this movie?

TP: I should qualify that in no way do I think that Selah is good or bad  and this applies to the other characters, I view them all as neutral and living in a grey area, which is why I love them because I believe in living in grey areas. But my biggest goal with the film springs out of that phrase sympathy for the devil  but for me, its empathy for the devil. I want audiences to have empathy for people who are doing things in life they may disagree with.

LAS: Any other things you would like your audience to take away from this movie.

TP: This one is specifically for black girls or people of color but I hope audiences will see people who look like them doing what they want to do  or being able to do whatever they want to do, which is important to me, in addition to having empathy for people who are doing what they want to do. Its invigorating to see that on the screen, even if its not something you would personally do. Hopefully, it will inspire others to do what they want to do in life.

LAS: Whats next for you? I hope that you are writing a comedy? Or a horror? Or a horror-comedy? Spill the beans, Tayarisha Poe.

TP: (laughing) I cant but I am writing.

Selah and The Spades on Amazon Prime, April 17th.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity. The article was originally published in the L.A. Watts Times Newspaper print and online edition for the week of 4-9-20.


ATLANTA - A national political fundraising committee endorsed Rep. Doug Collins bid Wednesday to unseat his fellow Georgia Republican, Sen. Kelly Loeffler, in a November special election.

The endorsement from Great America PAC comes after the recently appointed Loeffler faced scrutiny over stock transactions she made just before the coronavirus pandemic sent markets tumbling.

The super PACs chairman, Ed Rollins, made reference to those trades in a statement endorsing Collins.

In a very short time, Kelly Loeffler has proven she puts protecting her personal wealth well before protecting her constituents, Rollins said.

Loeffler took her seat in the Senate in January after being appointed by Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp to fill the seat of Sen. Johnny Isakson, who stepped down due to deteriorating health. A political newcomer, Loeffler soon drew opposition from within her own party from Collins, a four-term congressman who had actively sought the appointment to Isaksons former seat.

The two Republicans are among more that 20 candidates running in a special election on Nov. 3 to fill the remaining two years of Isaksons term.

The race wont be filtered by the normal party primaries, meaning all comers will be together on the November ballot. The crowded field significantly increases the odds that the race will be decided by a Jan. 5 runoff, required by state law if no candidate breaks 50% in November.

Great America PAC calls itself as a leading pro-Trump super PAC, but Loeffler spokesman Stephen Lawson questioned the groups connection to the president.

Doug Collins is actively touting support from a group that President Trump and his representatives have denounced? Lawson said in an email. Thats a typical Washington politician for you.

Trump, after initially lobbying for Collins to get the Senate appointment, has praised both Collins and Loeffler but has not made an endorsement in the race.

GOP Rep. Drew Ferguson, who represents west Georgias 3rd Congressional District, endorsed Collins on Monday, becoming the first member of Georgias congressional delegation to openly break ranks with Loeffler by backing Collins.

Loeffler and her husband, a wealthy businessman who is chairman of the New York Stock Exchange, offloaded parts of their portfolio and purchased new stocks, including shares in a chemical company that manufactures protective equipment, as Congress was receiving briefings on the growing threat of the pandemic.

Loeffler has said she played no part in the trades, that they were managed by third-party advisers and that she has not attempted to profit from her time in the Senate. She also announced that shes selling her holdings in individual stocks to avoid political distraction.

Top Democrats in the race include Raphael Warnock, pastor of the Atlanta church where the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. preached; Ed Tarver, a former federal prosecutor who was U.S. attorney for Georgias Southern District under President Barack Obama; and Matt Lieberman, a former educator and the son of former vice-presidential candidate Joe Lieberman.
The VOAs value became clear to me in Ethiopia as far back as the 1980s, when the Mengistu dictatorship  with Soviet backing  twisted the truth about the famine and civil war plaguing the country. As public affairs officer at the U.S. Embassy, I saw that many Ethiopians faithfully listened to the VOA. It did not distort the news or make it into American propaganda. It provided facts, ideas and varied viewpoints. Its programs no doubt contributed to the popular support needed to rid the country of that terrible regime.
March 31 (Reuters) - U.S. coronavirus-related deaths reached 3,393 on Tuesday, exceeding the total number of deaths reported in China and reaching the third highest in the world behind Italy and Spain, according to a Reuters tally.

Health officials urged Americans to follow stay-at-home orders and other measures to contain the spread of the virus, which originated in China in December. Globally, there are now over 800,000 cases of the highly contagious illness caused by the virus and more than 39,000 deaths reported.

Italy has 11,591 reported deaths followed by Spain at 8,189.

(Graphic: https://tmsnrt.rs/2w7hX9T)

(Reporting by Christine Chan in New York; Writing by Lisa Shumaker; Editing by Bill Berkrot)
Some teachers and parents have appealed to the network providers for free data to facilitate e- teaching and learning in the country during this period of COVID-19.

Most of the schools have set up parent-teacher platforms through which exercises are forwarded to parents or guardians for their children to have access to lesson notes and homework.



In some of the schools, the children send completed assignments back to their teachers for marking, a practice which they said required a lot of data, especially for the teachers.



For instance, the headmaster of Star International School at Teshie in Accra said his school was on the e-learning programme, from Nursery One to JHS Three and the teachers were mandated to set up WhatsApp groups for the various classes.



He said before the lockdown, parents brought the exercises for marking twice a week to the school but since the partial lockdown, parents submitted the work online, adding that the teachers also did audio lessons for the children and all that required data.



The school initially agreed to provide data for the teachers but it wasnt sustainable, he added.



The Proprietress of the Perpetual Help School, Mrs Justine Wordui, said her school started the e-schooling three weeks ago, using the Zoom Cloud meeting app which functioned well.



She said things were moving on well but later, parents started having problems such as cost of data, poor network and also giving children access to their mobile phones when they had to go out.



She said at the moment, she had closed the JHS 2 class because out of the 18 students, only three of them participated because some parents could not afford data and others too complained of poor network.



She said since the government was doing well in providing water and electricity, others should also endeavour to help. She therefore tasked internet providers to either provide free data or give it at a reduced price so parents and teachers would afford, since e-learning was yielding good results.



A teacher at the Elsie Lund School, Tamale, in the Northern Region, Mr Ronald Yeboah, said his region was not on lockdown so the teachers gave the schoolchildren weekly projects and their parents submitted them on Mondays.



He said most parents were very much involved but others did not show any interest at all.



While some parents were fine with the current arrangement, others too did not have any idea what was going on.



I dont have a smartphone so my son has not been able to do the homework their teachers have been sending them online. I know he is missing out but I cant let him go out to his friends house and do the work because of the virus, said Ms Comfort Boama, a trader in Kumasi.



"But even if I get the smartphone, how am I going to get the data to use? He is sad and I am sad. The situation is really serious, she added.



Mr Bernard Tumi in Takoradi, Western Region, said he was an essential worker and had to go to work with his phone, making it difficult for him to give his son the homework his teachers posted online.



He would be asleep by the time I get home so sometimes, it makes the work pile up and I am only able to give them to him during the weekend, he said.



Mr Tumi said the whole concept was good because a lot of parents commented on the platform for more clarifications on questions, which he thought was healthy.



Georgina Amankwa, a JHS 2 student of the Holy Spirit School, in Kumasi, said her mother was home so she was able to access the questions her teachers put online.



This keeps me very busy because I hardly rest as there is always something to do. I still want to study in the classroom where all our friends will be present. We pray Covid-19 goes so we can go back to our classrooms and see our friends.

Source: Daily Graphic









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The Delhi government has taken a strong view against private schools in the city hiking fees without permission and violating provisions of the Disaster Management Act presently enforced in the city in view of the Covid-19 outbreak. The Directorate of Education (DoE) last week issued an order to a south Delhi private school over the matter.

The move came even as the higher education sector regulator the All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE) informed colleges under its purview not to pressure students into paying fees till the lockdown continues.

In an order issued on Wednesday, AICTE Member Rajive Kumar said that it had come to the notice of the regulator that some institutions were insisting that students should pay the fees including admission fees.

Significantly, the Union ministry of human resource development has received a series of requests and demands from different quarters to address the issue of institutions demanding fees both in school and higher education sector.

Parents of students enrolled in private schools across the city have complained of fees being hiked and institutions also quarterly fees instead of monthly, pulling on their already tight purse strings amid the lockdown.

Many parents have asked the DoE to intervene.

In an order issued to the south Delhi school on April 11, the DoE said, It has been brought to our notice that Apeejay School, Saket, a private unaided school has increased the fee illegally without taking cognisance of the prevailing situation in view of the announcement of lockdown by the central government and despite the enforcement of Disaster Management Act, 2005, and Delhi Epidemic Diseases, COVID-19 regulations, 2020, under the Epidemic Diseases Act 1897, for prevention and containment of COVID-19 and also without compliance of the mandatory provisions of Delhi Education Act, 1973.

DoE director Binay Bhushan said the order was issued after the body received multiple complaints against the school.

Parents of students in Apeejay School alleged that the school had hiked the fees by 15-20% in April this year. The school is constantly calling us and pressuring us to submit the hiked fees. Many of us are not in a position to pay even the normal fee amid the lockdown, said a parent who is member of Naya Samaj Parents Association of the School, the schools official parents body.

The DoE also ordered the school to not increase any fee or compel students to pay increased fees or arrears till further orders. The school shall, in no case, deny access to online education to students who are unable to pay the fee due to financial crises out of the closure of business activities in the ongoing lockdown condition, the order stated, adding, that the failure to comply with the instruction can also invite action under the Disaster Management Act, 2005.

School principal Smita Amit refused to comment on the matter. However, in a e-mail statement sent to Hindustan Times, school authorities said Its working in compliance of the order issued by the DoE.

Parents whose children are enrolled in Adarsh Public School in Vikaspuri and Guru Harkrishan Public School in Kailash Colony also alleged that the schools have increased the fee by 10% without taking prior approval from the DoE. The mother of a class 6 student at Adarsh School said, The school has increased the fee by 10%. We have no idea why the fee was revised when the government has ordered against it.

Pooja Sehgal, principal of the school, said they had sent a letter to the DoE for approval for the fee hike We have not revised the fee structure in the last four years, which is why the revision was needed, she said. Officials in the DoE, however, said they have not yet granted permission to the school.

The principal of Guru Harkrishan Public School, Gurpreet Singh, however, said that while the school management had decided to increase the fee by 10%, it is yet to implement the decision. Immediately after the decision was taken, the lockdown was announced. The parents were informed about it but we are not yet charging the revised fee, she said.

Advocate Khagesh Jha of Social Jurist, an NGO, said the Delhi government should issue an order to all schools asking them not to hike fees, and avoid action against students unable to pay the prevailing fees in the current situation.

Instead of waiting for individual complaints, the DoE should immediately direct all schools against harassing the parents in the time of the pandemic. We have also sent multiple complaints of fee hike by schools to the DoE. They should also issue a helpline for such complaint in the time of the lockdown, he said.

The AICTE also said it had been made aware that some institutions had either terminated staff members or had not paid their faculty.

It is clarified that salary and other dues to the faculty/staff members will be released for the duration of lockdown and terminations, if any, made during the lockdown will be withdrawn, the AICTE communique said.
INDIANAPOLIS  Purdue University Global is partnering with Saylor Academy to expand flexible and affordable degree completion opportunities for both current and prospective Purdue Global students. As part of Purdue Globals mission to support student success throughout their university careers, students will be able to earn credit recognition for Saylor Academys online, university-level courses.

Purdue Global and Saylor Academy both recognize that students lead increasingly complex lives and require flexible education options to balance skill development with work and family demands, said Carolyn Nordstrom, vice president, faculty and academic resources, and interim chief academic officer for Purdue Global. This is especially important as more than 36 million adults in the U.S. have some college credit and need flexible options to be able to return to school, complete their degrees and keep up with workforce demands.

Speed to degree and the cost of education are important to Purdue Global and to our busy adult learners, Nordstrom said. As a transfer-friendly institution, students bring an average of 25 credits with them into Purdue Global. We also work closely with employer partners and the military to articulate credit. The Saylor Academy partnership is yet another way for Purdue Global to help students fuel their path to success. We want students to feel all learning is valuable and that it counts toward their education goal.

Saylor Academys self-paced course model and partnerships with leading colleges and universities specifically support students, especially working adult learners as they progress toward completing their degrees. The tuition-free aspect of Saylors program allows students to start, or return to, their degree completion journey with zero financial risk.

We are pleased to work with Purdue University Global, an innovator in serving adult, working learners  particularly those returning students with some credit, but no degree, said Jeff Davidson, executive director of Saylor Academy. We are seeing more universities leveraging our tuition-free courses to dramatically improve their degree completion initiatives. Our tuition-free, always on model is a perfect supplement to any program to help students complete their degrees more quickly with no new debt.

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), most of whom 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.

About Saylor Academy

Saylor Academy is a nonprofit initiative committed to making education accessible and affordable to all who need it. We are doing so by creating free online courses, created by experienced professors with relevant teaching experience, that people can use to learn skills and earn university-level credit. Our courses are available for anyone to take at their own pace, and earn certificates or university credits to help them graduate or gain employment faster, and improve their futures. Saylor partners with a group of universities and colleges, as well as other nonprofits and organizations wishing to open access to education. We do not charge institutions to partner with us, and are always looking for like-minded organizations to expand our mission further. Saylor Academys credit-recommended courses are recognized by the American Council on Education (ACE) for meeting university-level academic rigor. You can view our recommendations and learn more about ACE National Guide to College Credit here.

Media Contact, Purdue: Tom Schott, 765-494-9318, tschott@purdue.edu

Media Contact, Saylor Academy: Jacqueline Arnold, jacqueline.arnold@saylor.org

Sources: Carolyn Nordstrom, cnordstrom@purdueglobal.edu

Jeff Davidson
A Vietnam Airlines flight carrying 93 Vietnamese from the UK touched down at Van Don International Airport in Quang Ninh Province on Wednesday morning.

The passengers included students aged 18 or younger, senior citizens, and those suffering economic harship, the carrier said, noting that the Vietnamese Embassy in the UK arranged the flight.

All the passengers had their health checked and were isolated upon landing, pursuant to Ministry of Health regulations, said Pham Ngoc Sau, director of the airport in the northern Vietnamese province.

Their checked baggage and carry-on were disinfected following their arrival.

This is the sixth flight the national airline has made to bring Vietnamese back home.

On April 13, another Vietnam Airlines plane departed Phnom Penh, Cambodia with British citizens on board and stopped by Hanoi to pick up more Britons.

Those UK citizens boarding the flight in Phnom Penh never left the plane when it was parked in Hanoi.

The Britons getting on the flight bound for London from the Vietnamese capital had their health checked and gathered in a separate area before departure.

Most of these passengers were tourists, with some having recovered from novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19) in Vietnam.

Face masks and other gifts from the Vietnamese government to the UK were also loaded on this plane that carried a total of 100 British citizens stranded in Vietnam and Cambodia to London.

The Van Don airport has welcomed 31 flights carrying almost 4,600 passengers from many epidemic-hit regions since February.

Vietnam has restricted both inbound and outbound flights to contain the coronavirus but the government has still arranged certain planes to take stranded Vietnamese citizens home and to enable foreigners to return to their countries.

The Southeast Asian country has confirmed 267 COVID-19 cases as of Wednesday morning, with 169 having made a full recovery.

No virus-associated fatality has been recorded in Vietnam.

Like us on Facebook or follow us on Twitter to get the latest news about Vietnam!
The Maharashtra government had



demanded special trains from Mumbai to some places in Bihar and Uttar Pradesh to allow migrant workers to return to their natives places, but the Centre did not respond to it, a state minister said on Wednesday.

More than 1,000 migrant workers, most of them from Bihar, Uttar Pradesh and West Bengal, gathered near Bandra railway station here on Tuesday afternoon.

They were demanding that the state government make transport arrangements so that they can go back to their native towns and villages.

The migrants were dispersed after a couple of hours and were assured accommodation and food till the lockdown lasts, a police official earlier said.

"The state government was well aware of the demands of migrant labourers that they wanted to return their home. It is evident that if there is no work, no one will allow them to stay at their current temporary accommodations in Mumbai or other parts of the state, the minister told PTI.

Just before the announcement of lockdown last month, there were reports of how migrant labourers from Uttar Pradesh and Bihar were rushing to board any train heading towards their hometowns, he said.

"That was the first time, we had requested the Centre to run special trains, he said.

On March 29, when Maharashtra Chief Minister Uddhav Thackeray said his government had set up some 163 centres across the state to provide food, water and temporary shelter to the migrant labourers, the state administration was able quantify the approximate figures of migrant labourers.

"The figure was between five to six lakh - of people who had approached the state run centres. Some of them had already started walking towards their hometowns while some tried to hide inside containers or tankers to reach their homes," a Shiv Sena MP from Mumbai said.

A fresh update was shared with the Centre, but "it was turned down" again, he said.

"We informed the Centre that we will provide enough food to these migrants so that they could reach their homes. With most of the rail routes closed, the trains leaving from Mumbai to Uttar Pradesh and Bihar would have reached in much shorter time, he said.

A basic list of stations was also prepared with the help of local contractors of migrant labourers about their current location in Mumbai and at which particular station they would alight in Uttar Pradesh or Bihar, he said.

The plan also included a condition that the state will allow only fit and healthy migrants to travel, while those having any kind of illness will be admitted to state-run hospital for treatment, the Shiv Sena leader said.

It would have certainly restricted spread of any contagious disease, he said.

"I wonder why such an idea was turned down. After all, these are the people who would suffer a lot," he said.

The issue of running dedicated trains for migrant workers had come up during the video conference meeting of Prime Minister Narendra Modi and chief ministers of various states, but received no positive response, another senior Shiv Sena leader said.

"The government has categorically said it would arrange food for these people for next three months, but it is their request that they want to go home. We simply want to facilitate them, he added.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
GULF BREEZE, Fla. - Deputies in Florida said two doctors stole a campaign flag supporting President Donald Trump from their neighbours property.

Geoffrey Michael Fraiche, 41, and Laura Ann Webb-Fraiche, 38, allegedly took the flag on April 7 while their two children were with them, news outlets reported. A Santa Rosa County Sheriffs report said they used a ladder to pull it down.

Both Fraiche and Webb-Fraiche are gynecologists working in different Pensacola hospitals, WKRG-TV reported. They were charged with several crimes, including trespassing and larceny, and released from the county jail.

Fraiche said in a text message on Wednesday that he was preparing a statement for the media, but didnt have an immediate comment.

The districts Republican U.S. Rep. Matt Gaetz tweeted Tuesday that their actions showed despicable parenting. He included a version of a surveillance video with captions added that said their older child asked them to stop. Apparently two medical degrees lack the decency & common sense of a child, Gaetz added.
The scientific community agree that SARS-CoV-2 originated in horseshoe bats but it is unlikely that it was directly passed onto humans.

Pangolins, not snakes, may be the missing link for transmission of the new coronavirus from bats to humans. Since its initial outbreak at Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market in Wuhan, China, in late 2019, COVID-19 has since infected more than a million people across the globe. To understand and control the transmission of COVID-19, scientists are racing to study the coronavirus causing the disease: SARS-CoV-2, previously named 2019-nCoV. SARS-CoV-2 is zoonotic, which means that the virus originated in animals and jumped to humans. A critical challenge is to determine which animal transmitted the virus to humans.

We are a team of bioinformaticians and we feel it is our responsibility to the global community to investigate the origin of this virus.

Based on the research in our lab, we believe that pangolins, as opposed to snakes, may have served as the hosts that transmitted the coronavirus to people and caused the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. The pangolin, also known as a scaly anteater, is the only known mammal with scales and is found in Asia and Africa.

Mystery of zoonotic transmission

Since January 2020, the current consensus among the scientific community is that SARS-CoV-2 originated in horseshoe bats; however, its unlikely that bats directly gave the virus to humans based on whats known about transmission of earlier zoonotic coronaviruses. Instead, scientists suspected that the bat coronavirus infected another animal, an intermediate host, which subsequently transmitted the virus to humans.

For example, SARS-CoV, which is the coronavirus that caused the severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) pandemic in 2003, is a close relative of SARS-CoV-2. It was also found to have been transmitted from bats to an intermediate host  the masked palm civet  which subsequently infected humans. Similarly, MERS-CoV, the coronavirus that caused Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS) in 2012, jumped from bats to another intermediate host, the dromedary camel, before infecting humans.

The identity of the intermediate host of SARS-CoV-2 is therefore a mystery that many researchers hope to solve, as knowing the intermediate host is very helpful for prevention of further spread of epidemic. An early study claimed that snakes such as the Chinese krait and the Chinese cobra were likely to be the intermediate hosts for SARS-CoV-2. Yet, this conclusion quickly drew skepticism, partly because there exists no previous evidence that coronaviruses can jump from a cold-blooded animal, such as snakes, to human beings.

Snakes make unlikely host

The early claim that snakes transmitted SARS-CoV-2 was based on an analysis of the viruss genetic sequence. For both viruses and animal cells to function, genetic sequences (RNA or DNA) must be translated into proteins, which then carry out many tasks of the virus and the cell. These proteins exist as linked chains of single amino acids; each amino acid in a protein is encoded by a group of three nucleotides, also known as a codon, in the genetic sequence.

Since there are 64 possible different codons but only 20 amino acids, several codons can correspond to the same amino acid; different organisms will have different preference for which codon is used for a given amino acid. The early study hypothesized that for the coronavirus to effectively grow inside an animal cell, the codon usage preferences of the coronavirus should match that of the host cell.

The researchers compared the codon usage in the SARS-CoV-2 virus against that of the cells in eight animals at the Wuhan Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market. That study found that the snakes share the most similar codon usage pattern to SARS-CoV-2, thereby declaring that snakes were the most likely intermediate hosts.

However, their central hypothesis that coronaviruses and their animal hosts share similar codon usage was never verified. Our team at the University of Michigan scrutinized this hypothesis, and performed a more systematic analysis that we published in a recent follow-up study. We compared the codon usages of three coronaviruses (SARS-CoV-2, SARS-CoV and MERS-CoV) to those of more than 10,000 different kinds of animals.

To our surprise, we found that the codon usage of a coronavirus is not determined by its hosts. For example, the codon usage of SARS-CoV and MERS-CoV is much closer to frogs and snakes than to their real animal hosts (civets and camels, respectively). This shows that it is not possible to use only codon usage in animals cells to infer the hosts of coronaviruses, suggesting that the early claim of snake-borne transmission of SARS-CoV-2 is likely to be incorrect.

Discovering the pangolin as a likely missing link

Our follow-up study also found that the genetic sequence of a coronavirus, discovered in lung samples of Malayan pangolins, was highly similar to SARS-CoV-2. The two viruses shared 91% of their genetic sequence.

There is a particularly strong similarity between the spike proteins of these two viruses. The spike protein, which is on the surface of a coronavirus, is used by the virus to get into an animal cell. The bat coronavirus, which was the ancestor of SARS-CoV-2, has 19 amino acids on the spike protein that are different from SARS-CoV-2; the pangolin coronavirus only has five amino acids that are different from SARS-CoV-2. Meanwhile, several other research groups have found further experimental evidence of pangolins being infected by coronaviruses highly similar to SARS-CoV-2.

While pangolins are now our top suspect as the intermediate host, our study concludes that other potential intermediate hosts should still be considered. A coronavirus can use more than one kind of animal to infect humans: For example, while civets are best known for transmitting SARS, other animals such as raccoon dogs and ferret badgers are also able to carry SARS. Similarly, cats and ferrets can also be infected by SARS-CoV-2; it is still unknown whether humans can get infected by the coronavirus residing within these animals.



Yang Zhang, Professor of Computational Medicine & Bioinformatics, University of Michigan; Chengxin Zhang, PhD Candidate in Bioinformatics, University of Michigan, and Wei Zheng, Postdoctoral Fellow of Computational Medicine and Bioinformatics, University of Michigan

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Also read: How do viruses mutate and jump species? And why are 'spillovers' becoming more common?
NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian wants students back in classrooms early next term but will not direct parents to send their children to school despite pleas from Prime Minister Scott Morrison.

New social distancing measures to ensure teachers can safely return to classrooms in the coming weeks will be considered at the national cabinet on Thursday, as state and territory leaders attempt to plan the road out of the coronavirus crisis for the nation's students.

NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian wants students back in classrooms early next term. Credit:Peter Rae

Mr Morrison will press his counterparts to switch from large-scale remote learning to more face-to-face lessons by May, while attempting to address the concerns of teachers and parents.

He appeared at odds with premiers on Wednesday over the advice to parents about whether they should send their children back to school despite "clear" advice from medical authorities that it was safe to do so.
On Tuesday afternoon, just hours after Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced the extension of the lockdown for another 19 days, hundreds  some reports indicate thousands  of migrant workers made their way to Mumbais Bandra (West) station. They had been waiting for the lockdown to end  and had assumed that they could return home. Some reports say this assumption was based on an erroneous news report about special trains. With restrictions in place, including on inter-state bus and rail travel, this was not to happen. The same day, in Surat, hundreds of textile workers staged a sit-in, demanding that they be allowed to return home. This yearning is not new. Soon after Mr Modi declared the lockdown on March 24, hundreds of thousands of migrant workers began making their way home, some walking long distances to do so.

These large congregations of workers  at close proximity with each other  are disturbing. They represent a sense of desperation, which is emerging from economic suffering and emotional anxiety. They also undermine the principle of social distancing, for one infected person in any of these gatherings has the potential of infecting hundreds, who may then come in contact with hundreds of others. It requires one incident to begin another chain of transmission, which can set back Indias efforts in the battle against the pandemic.

And that is why a two-pronged approach is necessary to allay the anxieties of migrant workers. The first is recognising that they are economically insecure, without incomes, and often, without food. As Kerala finance minister Thomas Isaac pointed out, without income support, compliance with the restrictions will be low. The government needs to immediately expand its cash transfer measure  and include workers in the unorganised sector, perhaps even incentivising those who stay in camps for migrant workers, at least till May 3. The partial lifting of restrictions in areas less vulnerable to the infection after April 20, as notified by the home ministry, will help a segment of workers. But they need more direct financial and food support. There is a second element. Many workers are anxious to return home because they are frightened  of the disease, of staying alone in the city, of the fate of their families back home. Travel will mean a high degree of risk because social distancing norms cannot be enforced in trains and buses. Travel is also difficult because their home states are not receptive to these workers, given the fear that they may spread the infection in villages. These are all real constraints, but the issue requires more sensitive communication  and the announcement of measures which allay their anxieties and encourages migrant workers to stay where they are.
Toronto Public Health will not release detailed information on COVID-19 infections and deaths of vulnerable senior citizens in long-term care homes, the citys top public health official said Tuesday.

Dr. Eileen de Villa made the remark as the death toll at Eatonville Care Home in Etobicoke reached 27, surpassing Seven Oaks home in Scarborough as the hardest-hit Toronto seniors facility in an epidemic ravaging some homes.

As of Tuesday afternoon 38 Toronto long-term care homes  where residents have significant health needs  and 14 retirement homes had experienced COVID-19 outbreaks. Seniors home outbreaks had claimed the lives of 69 residents.

On April 2 de Villas department reported one COVID-19 case at Eatonville. Asked Monday about the status of the outbreak there, de Villa told reporters she had no specifics and would follow up. Hours later the home itself confirmed 25 virus-related deaths after residents were notified and told reporters.

De Villa defended Toronto Public Healths approach at a daily news briefing when told many people with parents in seniors homes are eager to know details of outbreaks at specific sites.

Im truly concerned about the devastating impacts of COVID-19 we are seeing at our long-term-care homes, she said, but her staff are focused on helping the city-run, private and not-for-profit homes prevent infections and fight outbreaks.

If you want to understand and have the most up-to-date numbers around whats happening in a specific home, the best thing to do is to connect to the home directly, de Villa said.

However, she added: Tracking the numbers that are constantly changing while trying to provide care and maintain strict outbreak control measures is a Herculean task.

I dont think that there is any real effort or intent by long-term care providers, and certainly not by public health, to not be forthcoming with numbers.

Premier Doug Ford on Tuesday said his government will ban seniors home employees from working in more than one facility to help extinguish the wildfire spread of COVID-19 in such sites.

De Villa said Toronto has asked staff at 10 city-run long-term-care homes to declare the city as the primary employer, to help prevent virus spread, and is offering them benefits including extra hours and overtime.

Toronto on Tuesday afternoon had 2,543 confirmed and probable COVID-19 infections with 223 people in hospital  90 in intensive care  and a total 115 deaths. A day earlier the city reported 80 people in intensive care and 92 deaths.

Despite the grim news, amid hopes the virus is peaking outside of seniors homes officials are planning how to bring a huge, mostly shuttered city back to life.

Mayor John Tory said his task force on Torontos recovery from the crisis on Tuesday worked on ways to declare the city open for business after infections diminish to the point that people can safely start mingling again.

Toronto is learning from cities further along in the pandemic and the reawakening will come in stages, he said, mindful of advice from public health officials and the possibility of a second wave of infections.

I think (the reopening plans) are going to be robust, theyre going to be complete in context of looking at every neighbourhood, every kind of business, every kind of organization.., Tory said.

I havent heard anybody talking about flipping a switch and everything going back to the way it was.

David Rider is the Star's City Hall bureau chief and a reporter covering city hall and municipal politics. Follow him on Twitter: @dmrider
VANCOUVER, British Columbia, April 13, 2020 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Champignon Brands Inc. (Champignon or the Company) (CSE: SHRM) (FWB: 496) (OTC: SHRMF), a human optimization sciences company focused on applying novel and natural treatment protocols to address a broad range of disorders and deficiencies with an emphasis on psychedelic medicine, continues to accelerate its advancements within the psychedelic medicine arena via the acquisition of a leading Canadian ketamine clinic operator, psychedelic medicine IP aggregator and novel drug discoverer (the Transaction). To this extent, the Company is pleased to announce that it has entered into a definitive agreement (the Agreement) to acquire 100% of AltMed Capital Corp. (AltMed).



PERSONNEL

AltMeds chief executive officer, Dr. Roger McIntyre, is a professor of psychiatry and pharmacology at the University of Toronto and head of the Mood Disorders Psychopharmacology Unit at the University Health Network, Toronto, Canada. Dr. McIntyre is also executive director of the Brain and Cognition Discovery Foundation in Toronto; director, co-chair of the Scientific Advisory Board of the Depression and Bipolar Support Alliance (DBSA) in Chicago, Illinois; professor and Nanshan Scholar at Guangzhou Medical University; and adjunct professor at the College of Medicine at Korea University. Furthermore, Dr. McIntyre is a clinical professor at the State University of New York (SUNY) Upstate Medical University, Syracuse, New York, and a clinical professor, Department of Psychiatry and Neurosciences, University of California School of Medicine, Riverside, California.

Clarivate Analytics has named Dr. McIntyre one of The Worlds Most Influential Scientific Minds each year from 2014-2019. Dr. McIntyre is widely regarded as the worlds most recognized psychiatrist in relation to mood disorders. He has extensive experience collaborating with private-sector partners, including but not limited to entities within the pharmaceutical industry, the insurance industry and the health care industry in Canada, the United States and globally.

Dr. McIntyre has published over 600 articles on the topic of mood disorders along with an extensive number of books and chapters, and he has delivered thousands of lectures nationally and internationally on the topic of mood disorders.

Dr. McIntyre had the vision to implement and develop Canadas first-ever treatment center providing rapid onset treatments for persons with mood disorders, The Canadian Rapid Treatment Centre of Excellence (the CRTCE). The CRTCE is involved in knowledge application (using existing scientific research to improve outcomes in depression, PTSD and substance and alcohol use disorders [DPS]); knowledge generation (new research and development); as well as knowledge application (educating health care providers throughout North America and the world on new rapid onset treatments for DPS).

The CRTCE is the only center in North America and globally to demonstrate that rapid onset treatments improve health outcomes in one to two weeks and get people back to work, which is of enormous importance to individuals as well as payers in the private space.

AltMeds board of directors is led by Pat McCutcheon, who most recently, as the founder of the highly successful MediPharm Labs Corp. (MediPharm) (TSX: LABS), identified an important, overlooked segment of the burgeoning cannabis market and became the first significant pure-focused play on cannabis extraction and API manufacturing. Mr. McCutcheon was paramount in raising considerable capital to finance MediPharms vision, thus creating a top five revenue-generating company within the Canadian cannabis industry in the span of three years.

Prior to MediPharm, Mr. McCutcheon held top sales roles, successfully launching a wide range of medical products during his tenure as the head of the Hospital Division for Renal and Mental Health Products at Jansen Pharmaceuticals (Johnson & Johnson). Mr. McCutcheon holds an Honors Bachelor of Science degree in biology from the University of Western Ontario.

ALTMED

AltMed is a Canadian ketamine clinic operator, psychedelic medicine IP aggregator and novel drug discoverer. AltMed has a suite of assets that will accelerate Champignons multi-pronged business strategy, enabling Champignon to reach the consumer directly via rapid onset medical treatments, with an anticipated rollout of new clinical entities (NCEs) already identified and to be opened across the United States and Canada. Five new clinics in key markets, including New York, Florida and California, are anticipated to be fully operational by Q4 2020.

AltMeds asset portfolio is comprised of the following:

CRTCE & ASSOCIATED SOPs FOR SIGNIFICANT CLINIC ROLLOUT

AltMed owns 75% of the CRTCE, a fully operational ketamine clinic located in Mississauga, Ontario, with over 18 months of operating history. The CRTCE is licensed (2018) by the College of Physicians and Surgeons Ontario (CPSO) under OHPP (Out of Hospital Premise Program) to administer ketamine treatments for indications including but not limited to depression, bipolar disorder, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD).

CRTCE is the only vertically integrated rapid onset treatment centre operating from proof-of-concept to human clinical trials and publication, with study results in peer-reviewed journals by the worlds leading experts in psychopharmacology. The CRTCE also serves as a rapid onset treatment training and education center for medical professionals and is equipped with a co-located pharmacy.

The clinic has been licensed by Health Canada to dose eligible patients with psilocybin and is the only clinic in Canada to perform psilocybin doses under Health Canada approval.

Champignon and AltMed will begin to roll out a network of subspecialty therapeutic clinics as a complementary, follow-on service for individuals and families who are suffering from the effects of addiction, depression, PTSD and anxiety disorders. Through continued R&D initiatives, the CRTCE plans to expand its clinical footprint via the establishment of NCEs for ketamine, psilocybin and MDMA, as well as pursue partnerships with the broader pharmaceutical industry.

PSYCHEDELIC MEDICINE, NOVEL DRUG DISCOVERY & TRIALS

With this acquisition, Champignon will now have three trials in the Phase I stage and three trials in the preclinical stage during 2020. The Company will also have seven IP patents for its ketamine/psilocybin delivery platforms and formulations.

AltMed maintains a preferred commercial relationship with Canadas largest neuroscience-focused preclinical contract research organization (CRO), InterVivo Solutions. The entities are collaborating to expedite Phase I testing and novel drug development of psychedelic molecules and proprietary delivery systems.

Champignon and AltMed plan to advance psychedelic-derived treatments and establish, via human clinical trials, the most compelling IP portfolio, clinical pipeline and drug development platform in the psychedelic medicine space. In H2 2020, AltMed will commence both comprehensive R&D campaigns as well as clinical trials, to be led and administered by leading M.D.s, clinicians and researchers targeting the following indications:

Treatment-Resistant Depression (Dr. Roger McIntyre)

Addiction (Dr. Peggi Shepherd DeGroote)

PTSD/Traumatic Brian Injury (Dr. David Greenberg and Dr. Michel Rathbone)

Aging/Dementia (Dr. DW Molloy)

Anxiety/Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (Dr. Michael Van Amerigan)

TRANSACTION COMMENTS

Founded and operated by Dr. McIntyre, the CRTCE has the human capital and unmatched R&D capabilities, with respect to rapid onset treatments such as ketamine, to revolutionize the treatment of depression, PTSD and substance use disorders, stated Gareth Birdsall, CEO of Champignon. Champignon and AltMed will leverage Dr. McIntyres expertise, alongside the CRTCEs existing SOPs, data-driven research sets and practitioner education modules, to roll out five unique ketamine clinics across Florida, California and the U.S. Eastern Seaboard. Our additional ketamine clinics are projected to be fully operational by Q4 2020. Furthermore, having previously completed funding rounds, our acquisition of AltMed will further bolster our corporate treasury.

Pat McCutcheon, director of AltMed, stated: Together with Champignons existing novel ketamine delivery platforms, associated patents/IP and now advanced clinical infrastructure, we will look to deliver approved, point-of-care psychedelic treatments in clinics throughout Canada and the United States. Ketamine, psilocybin and MDMA have all been fast-tracked by the FDA and Health Canada with respect to R&D in DPS, and we will look to monetize our capabilities and human capital within this domain. Led by our accomplished operational team, comprised of experienced clinicians, academics and thought leaders within dynamic, blue-sky industries, we will be the global leader with regard to the application of rapid onset treatments and will continue to be a first-in-class, vertically integrated center that champions R&D, clinical research, knowledge translation, vocational rehabilitation and psychotherapeutics, offering patient populations a wholesome and comprehensive treatment ecosystem.

TERMS

Under the terms of the Agreement, Champignon will acquire 100% of the issued and outstanding shares of AltMed for total consideration of 55,124,000 common shares, common shares in the capital of the company (the Consideration Shares), of which 16,522,000 will be subject only to applicable hold periods under securities legislation and 38,602,000 will be subject to voluntary resale restrictions and released in five equal tranches every three months with the first release commencing thirty days following closing. Additionally, 3,391,500 share purchase warrants will be issued in exchange for the cancellation of outstanding exercised AltMed share purchase warrants. The Transaction remains subject to AltMed shareholder approval. A finder's fee is applicable to this transaction.

About Champignon Brands Inc.

Champignon Brands Inc. (CSE: SHRM) is a research-driven company specializing in the formulation of a suite of medicinal mushrooms health products as well as novel ketamine, anaesthetics and adaptogenic delivery platforms for the nutritional, wellness and alternative medicine industries. Via its vertically integrated alternative medicine product range, Champignon is pursuing the development and commercialization of rapid onset treatments capable of improving health outcomes, such as depression and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), as well as substance and alcohol use disorders. Under a collaborative research agreement with the University of Miami's Miller School of Medicine, the Company is conducting preclinical studies and eventual human clinical trials, with the objective of demonstrating safety and efficacy of the combination of psilocybin and cannabidiol in treating mTBI with PTSD or stand-alone PTSD. Champignon continues to be inspired by sustainability, as its medicinal mushroom-infused SKUs are organic, non-GMO and vegan certified. For more information, visit the Companys website at: https://champignonbrands.com/ .

ON BEHALF OF THE BOARD OF DIRECTORS

W. Gareth Birdsall

CEO & Director

T: +1 (778) 549-6714

E: info@champignonbrands.com

FOR INVESTOR INQUIRIES:

Tyler Troup

Circadian Group

E: SHRM@champignonbrands.com

FOR CHAMPIGNON BRANDS FRENCH INQUIRIES:

Remy Scalabrini

Maricom Inc.

E: rs@maricom.ca

T: (888) 585-MARI

The CSE and Information Service Provider have not reviewed and does not accept responsibility for the accuracy or adequacy of this release.

Forward-looking Information Cautionary Statement
Careers in the Trump administration may be secured by craven declarations of loyalty and frantic efforts to subscribe to his ever-changing whims on policy. Emulation works, but as Mr. Modly discovered, not when it comes to President Trumps behavior. For instance, while Mr. Trumps habitual lying is allowed by his followers and beyond the reach of public law, loyalists who shared his contempt for truth  but not his immunity  paid a high price during the Mueller investigation. Among many, one thinks of retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn and Roger Stone.
Lisa Riley shared her heartache on Lorraine on Wednesday as she revealed her beloved great-uncle died aged 104 from coronavirus.

The Emmerdale actress, 43, explained to the host how her Uncle Bert had tested positive for Covid-19 after contracting the virus in hospital following a nasty fall.

Speaking about her loss, Lisa said: 'My beautiful uncle Bert, he was 104. He had a bad fall at home and went into hospital.

Always remembered: Lisa Riley shared her heartache on Lorraine on Wednesday as she revealed her beloved great-uncle died aged 104 from coronavirus

'Unfortunately he is one of the statistics, but what a life to celebrate.

'It's horrible we can't go to the funeral, but I was on the phone to my Auntie Eleanor and I said, "What was one of uncle Bert's favourite things?" It was his family BBQ's.

'When all this is all over we hope to get together, have a BBQ and play all his Frank Sinatra favourites and sing like Uncle Bert would have done.'

Lisa added: 'My dad is 70 in May. He has type two diabetes, he's high risk. I want to stay connected.'

Loss: The Emmerdale actress, 43, explained to the host how her Uncle Bert had tested positive for Covid-19 after contracting the virus in hospital following a nasty fall

In memory: Lisa said: 'It's horrible we can't go to the funeral, but I was on the phone to my Auntie Eleanor and I said, "What was one of uncle Bert's favourite things?" It was his BBQ's'

It comes after the soap star paid tribute to her Uncle Bert on Instagram.

She wrote: 'GOD BLESS YOU UNCLE BERT......you are the last of that generation and what a life???

'You made it to 104 years old, thats something we can share with all the NEXT generations, what a strong, kind, beautiful man you were....Rest In Peace....and keep singing Frank Sinatra with my Poppa up in heaven

'thank you for all you did for me, I will NEVER forget #angel #rip'.

During the interview, Lisa admitted she had moved households during the nationwide lockdown.

The Emmerdale star said she spent the first two weeks in Derry, Northern Ireland, before moving back home to Yorkshire after her fiance Al returned from America.

Viewers of the show soon flooded Twitter as they questioned if Lisa had just confessed to flouting official government guidelines, stating you should remain in your own household for the entire duration of lockdown.
Apple has announced the release of a second generation iPhone SE  a $749 smartphone with the looks of an iPhone 8 but the same powerful chip as the last year's iPhone 11 in a move to broaden its appeal to budget-conscious customers as the coronavirus hobbles the global economy.

Like 2017's iPhone 8 the new phone comes equipped with a 4.7-inch display, which is quite small compared to most modern phones, but it's been updated with technology including True Tone, Dolby Vision and HDR10. Likewise the single camera has been enhanced to allow portrait mode and augmented reality. Other modern features added to the SE include wireless charging and an IP67 water resistance rating.

The new iPhone SE packs a lot of modern iPhone features into a smaller frame.

By lowering the size and cost but keeping up-to-date specs, Apple has produced a sub-$1000 phone that still allows users to fully experience its platform offerings including Apple TV+ and the Apple Arcade games subscription service. In terms of price it goes head to head with the likes of Google's $649 Pixel 3a and Samsung's $749 Galaxy A71, but in power Apple's model has a clear edge.

The iPhone SE also marks the return of the Home button and Touch ID, which could be appealing to users of older iPhones reluctant to upgrade to the all-screen format adopted in 2017 with the iPhone X.
FILE PHOTO: Portugal's Finance Minister and Eurogroup President Mario Centeno gestures during an interview with Reuters in Lisbon

ROME (Reuters) - Joint debt issuance by euro zone countries remains an option for tackling economic fallout from the coronavirus epidemic, the chairman of the bloc's finance ministers, Mario Centeno, said in a newspaper interview.

The bloc has agreed an immediate rescue package worth half a trillion euros, and combined joint and national measures to help businesses and households totalling some 3.2 trillion euros ($3.51 trillion).

But member states are divided on how to finance subsequent economic recovery, with fiscally conservative northern countries including Germany, the Netherlands, Finland and Austria opposing calls by France, Italy, Belgium and others for joint debt issuance.

Asked about joint debt issuance - dubbed 'coronabonds' by some - Centeno said in an interview with Italy's Corriere della Sera that he did not rule it out.

"There is a proposal to use the European budget and one to issue common debt (instruments). And one does not exclude the other," he was quoted as saying.

National leaders of the EU member states will debate the matter by videolink on April 23.

"It will be an important meeting, I expect it to give us some guidance," said Centeno, when asked about decisions regarding a mooted recovery fund worth up to 1.5 trillion euros.

Not reaching a deal on a package would count as a collective failure, said Centeno, who is also Portugal's finance minister.

A deal must be reached within weeks, and part of the funds needed by member states to relaunch their economies had to be made available "as soon as we come out of lockdown", by late spring or early summer, he said.

The European Union's gross domestic product would not return to 2019 levels for at least two years, he added.

($1 = 0.9122 euros)

(Reporting by Giulia Segreti; editing by Valentina Za)
Australians who are struggling with anxiety and depression because of the the coronavirus crisis should be treated with psychedelic drugs, a charity has claimed.

Mind Medicine Australia (MMA) has urged the Government to create a mental health taskforce for COVID-19.

The not-for profit charity works to create safe treatments for people with mental health issues using drugs such as MDMA and psilocybin, which is found in magic mushrooms.

Former Coalition MP Andrew Robb, who is now a board member for the MMA, says the use of psychedelic drugs represented the biggest innovation in the the treatment of mental health issues 'in decades'.

Former Coalition MP Andrew Robb (pictured), who is now a board member of Mind Medicine Australia, has urged the Government to use drugs like MDMA to treat people with mental health issues

Drugs such as MDMA which is used the make the illegal drug and psilocybin - found in magic mushrooms - have had positive effects on those suffering from anxiety and depression.

Mr Robb said he was not advocating for the drug to be used recreationally, but believed psychedelic-assisted therapy should be available in the same way as medicinal cannabis.

He pointed to clinical trials of psychedelic drugs used to treat anxiety which recorded 60 to 80 per cent remission rates for depression and post-traumatic stress disorder.

'We would be derelict in our duty as a country, as governments in this country, if we didn't take this opportunity to grab hold of this technology,' Mr Robb said.

He said the introduction of these drugs could potentially provide a very significant benefit for Australians who have mental health issues.

Maree Teeson, the director of The Matilda Centre for Research in Mental Health and Substance Use, said the clinical results were promising but trials were still in the early stages.

She believes psychedelic drugs currently have limited real-world applications and most trials have been limited to testing in controlled environments.

'We really do need to know the clinical utility at the highest level and we're getting some trials but for the evidence you need replication, you need efficacy and safety requirements,' Ms Teeson said.

Mr Robb said he was not advocating for the drug to be used recreationally, but believed psychedelic-assisted therapy should be available in the same way as medicinal cannabis (stock photo)

The Australian government announced details of a $1.1billion coronavirus relief package in late March which will direct funds towards mental health services, medicare assistance for people at home, domestic violence support and emergency food relief

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 of Wednesday morning, there have been 6,431 cases of coronavirus in Australia and 62 people have died.

The Australian government announced details of a $1.1billion coronavirus relief package designed to help the country's most vulnerable in late March.

The funds will be directed towards mental health services, medicare assistance for people at home, domestic violence support and emergency food relief.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison said the assistance package was 'focused on saving lives and saving livelihoods' as the economy continues to face uncertainty in the wake of the coronavirus crisis.

He said the cash injection is directed at combating the secondary effects of the pandemic on people's health as more Australians shift to working at home or face the prospect of losing their jobs and businesses.

The government's latest boost came in response to warnings from doctors that cases related to elevated anxiety, isolation and loneliness had risen dramatically
The Governor of Illinois said he no longer expects any help from the federal government and has written off President Donald Trump's coronavirus testing efforts as "nearly irrelevant."

JB Pritzker, the state's governor, appeared on CNN's Erin Burnett OutFront, and told the host that he'd given up on waiting for the federal government to help the state with coronavirus testing.

"We have gotten very little help from the federal government. It's fine. I've given up on any promises that have been made," he said. "I hope something will get delivered from the federal government, but I don't expect it anymore."

On Tuesday, Donald Trump said that testing was meant to be carried out by the governors, not by the federal government. However, many states have called on the federal government for assistance, thus far with little success.

The absence of a centralised, federal testing initiative has drawn criticism from health professionals.

The New York Times reported that researchers have found that coronavirus was spreading in New York for weeks before the US moved to stifle travel or enact stay-at-home orders or issue social distancing guidelines. They said that early and aggressive testing could have prevented the level of infection that eventually occurred in New York City.

Mr Pritzker said that when it comes to testing, "the President at this point is near irrelevant when it comes to this question of testing."

Mr Trump's insistence on state self-reliance does not extend to determining when states can lift their stay-at-home orders and social distancing rules.

The president insisted during a press briefing earlier this week that "when somebody is the president of the United States," their "authority is total." The statement came as he was questioned over whether he had the authority to force states to reopen.

The statement drew immediate criticism from both sides of the political spectrum, the majority of which pointed out that the 10th Amendment limits the government's ability to dictate how the states conduct business.

On Tuesday, Mr Trump said he would be "authorising" the governors of all 50 states to make decisions on when to reopen. That authority is a power the governors already possess.

Though Mr Trump said he wants to see the states reopen "very soon," Mr Pritzker is hesitant to send people back out en masse,arguing the "preconditions just aren't there yet."

"I know we all want this to end soon. We really do. But I'm not going to risk having another spike come and having more people hospitalised, having our hospital and health systems overwhelmed and more people dying," he said. "So we're going to do this very gradually. Very carefully. I want people to get back to work just as much as the President does. But we've got to be not expeditious about it, but very careful and rely most importantly on the science.
[April 15, 2020] John Marshall Bank Processes $150 Million in Paycheck Protection Program Loans to Business Clients

Congress recently passed legislation in response to the COVID-19 outbreak. Within the legislation, the Small Business Administration (SBA) was allotted billions of dollars in funding to help mitigate the economic impact of the outbreak. The legislation - which includes the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) - provides economic relief for small to mid-size businesses. The PPP features a loan forgiveness provision that motivates businesses to retain their employees, thus helping to minimize unemployment rates due to the outbreak. As a certified SBA lender, John Marshall (News - Alert) Bank (JMB) was able to help businesses in VA, MD and DC process applications for this lending program. In anticipation of the April 3rd launch of the program, the Bank deployed preliminary measures needed to prepare for the administration of the loans. This included comprehensive and early communication with business customers before the PPP application was live and the development of an integrated online loan application portal designed for this program. Due to the pre-planning efforts, the Bank was able to process and satisfy virtually every application submitted in accordance with the guidelines provided. The Bank received an overwhelming response from both existing and new customers. At this time, the Bank has suspended accepting applications in order to prioritize servicing our impacted customers. Through the diligent and collaborative effort of numerous staff members, John Marshall Bank will have promptly processed and submitted 610 PPP loan applications to the SBA within a very short period.The average loan amount per business client is approximately $244,000 - 80% of the loans are equal to or less than $350,000. In total, the Bank will process $150 million in loans for hundreds of VA, MD and DC businesses that employ an average of 24 people per business or collectively over 15,000 employees throughout the region.



With banks being designated an essential service by the Department of Homeland Security, John Marshall Bank has been operating under normal business hours with nearly 80% of the Bank's employees working fully remote or rotating shifts within their department. Employees are equipped with the latest in remote technology including conferencing tools and cloud-based applications. For employees that are working within the corporate office or local branches, the Bank continues to apply best practices according to federally mandated guidelines and public health recommendations. This includes social distancing and implementation of hygiene protocols. "Our staff is working diligently to provide the resources, lending solutions and banking services needed to support our customers during this unprecedented time," states Chief Lending Officer, Andrew J. Peden. "We're committed to standing together in the fight against the outbreak and contributing to the rebound of both the local and national economy. In the meantime, our team continues to practice recommended precautionary measures in order to limit the spread of the virus."

About John Marshall Bank:

John Marshall Bank (JMB) is the largest community bank headquartered in Reston, Virginia with eight full-service branches located in Alexandria, Arlington, Loudoun, Prince William, Reston, Rockville, Tysons, and Washington, D.C. and one loan production office in Arlington, Virginia. The Bank is dedicated to providing exceptional value, personalized service and convenience to local businesses and professionals in the Washington DC Metro area. JMB offers a comprehensive line of sophisticated banking products and services that rival those of the largest banks along with experienced staff to help achieve customers' financial goals. Dedicated Relationship Managers serve as direct points-of-contact, providing subject matter expertise in a variety of niche industries including Charter and Private Schools, Government Contractors, Health Services, Nonprofits and Associations, Professional Services, Property Management Companies, and Title Companies. Learn more at www.johnmarshallbank.com. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20200415005513/en/

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Cairo: The sudden outbreak of Corona has been taking the form of an epidemic for the whole world today. Keeping this in mind, a lockdown order has been issued in every corner of the world. A recent sensation news has been revealed in Egypt. After which the fear of the people there is increasing.

Things are getting worse in Germany and Russia, many people died due to corona

Egyptian security forces have killed 7 terrorists planning an attack during the Easter celebrations. According to the country's Ministry of Internal Affairs, the seven terrorists were planning an attack at the Easter celebrations, but they could not carry out the incident due to the strict supervision of security forces. According to the ministry, the security forces raided a densely populated apartment in the capital. During this time, a lieutenant officer, Mohammed Foji Al Hofi, died, and another police officer also suffered injuries. At present, this entire matter is being investigated.

Death game due to corona continues, more than 1 lakh 26 thousand died worldwide

At this time the whole world is facing the wrath of Corona. Meanwhile, several lakh people have died in the whole world and more than 16 lakh people are infected. Terrorists are not putting any effort in executing their activities.

Corona did not end even after lockdown, 574 deaths in one day in France
John Paul McDonagh, the teen who died after a street altercation in Enniskillen

A 29-year-old man has been arrested in connection with the murder of John Paul McDonagh in Co Fermanagh.

Police confirmed yesterday that the man was arrested on suspicion of a number of offences including murder.

He remained in custody last night.

Mr McDonagh (18) passed away in hospital on Monday, prompting police to launch a murder inquiry.

He lost his leg after he and another man (24) were stabbed at Coolcullen Meadows in Enniskillen on Saturday night.

It followed a public dispute involving members of the Travelling community, which was filmed on mobile phones.

The PSNI said it received reports of an ongoing street altercation involving a number of men with weapons at around 8.40pm on Saturday.

When officers came to the scene they found two men, including Mr McDonagh and the 24-year-old, who had sustained wounds to their legs.

Both men were taken to hospital.

Mr McDonagh was originally from Dublin but had been living in Enniskillen for some time.

He was predeceased by his father Pat and is survived by his mother Rosie, brothers, sisters and family circle.

Posting on social media, the victim's heartbroken aunt Mary Theresa McDonagh wrote: "RIP to my nephew John. This world is so cruel.

"Just please God give my sister Rosie the strength and heart to get through this hard time.

"John if you're looking down at your family now just please look after your sisters and brothers and nieces and nephews.

"John you were took too soon from us, too young.

"You still had your life to live.

"You were only a single boy of 18 years of age who didn't even get to have children.

"We will miss the way you got on John, the way you laughed.

"Now we won't be able to hear you anymore or have you around," she added.

"Fly high our angel John, you will never be forgotten. You will always be in our hearts."
The Parliament will be able to consider the bill in the second reading by May 5, David Arakhamia says

Ukraine will get a loan from the International Monetary Fund within three weeks after the eventual approval of the law on banking activity. David Arakhamia, the head of the parliamentary faction of Servant of the People party said so on air of Channel 24.

'I'm 200-percent sure: after we vote for the draft law on banks, we'll get the tranche within three weeks", he said.

The MP added that the IMF and the World Bank have no claims against Ukraine.

Arakhamia also said that the Parliament would be able to consider the bill in the second reading by May 5. If it fails to do so, the entire country may "face difficulties".

On March 30, the Ukrainian Parliament approved the law as the basis. The bill foresees that once a bank was nationalized, it cannot be returned to its previous owners anymore. The banks that ran bankrupt are prohibited to return to the financial market, even if their owners managed to get the court decision canceling the National Bank's decree about their bankruptcy. If the bank was eliminated or nationalized in breach of the legal procedure, the former owners can get a compensation of their expenses.

There are currently 16,000 amendments to the current edition of the law. The Parliament wants to change internal regulations so as to speed up its consideration.

The approval of this particular law is one of the key demands of the IMF that Ukraine has to live up to in order to get financial aid from the Fund.
Cupboard volunteer and director Debbie Miller passes a phone out of a window to Charles Smith from inside the Upper Darby Food Bank on Tuesday. Thanks to the coronavirus shutdown of much of the U.S. economy, the food bank now serves double the number of people each day. Read more

One by one, they are finding this place  people without food to eat, people with food to give, all in growing numbers as the coronavirus has dumped hard workers off of U.S. payrolls by the millions.

In just the last month at this place in suburban Philadelphia, morning after morning, more people from both ends of the economic spectrum have been turning up on the sidewalk than has been the case on just about any other day in the 30 years prior.

The hungry arrive with empty bags. Some cry as they poke through a ground-floor window and introduce themselves.

The others come bearing food as gifts. Some leave their name, others dont so much as announce their arrival before depositing a box and leaving. No questions asked.

Here, outside the former Calvary Presbyterian Church in Delaware County, where a view of the Philadelphia skyline is just a block away, tragedy and charity now come together each morning in an act of human compassion. Here, people help people being harmed by fallout from the invisible virus known as COVID-19.

How did you find out about us? Debbie Miller, a mask over her face, asks when folks approach the open window leading to the Upper Darby Food Bank she runs.

The pickup window is only a few weeks old. Fear of spreading the highly contagious and lethal coronavirus forced an alternative to indoor exchanges: Miller ripped out an old window screen and cracked open a pane just wide enough to let food pass through at street level.

Through that window, some people answer Millers question with tears. Theyre the ones new to the food line. They lost income as the pandemic forced much of the U.S. economy to shut down in March. They are men and women, fathers and mothers.

I never thought Id be in this situation, some have told Miller.

Thats what were here for, the retired health-care worker will say, refusing to let the emotions rattle her. Then, the 67-year-old retiree and 30-year volunteer at this cupboard gets down to business: Do you want peas?" she asks. Do you want carrots? Do you want bread?

She refuses to let anyone leave with food they do not already prefer to eat. This is called dignity.

Before COVID-19, it used to be mostly senior citizens came here. Guys like Charles Smith, who came by Tuesday. Elderly folks on fixed incomes. Maybe a handful a day, on any given day. On the donor side, maybe a handful of supplies would come in all week, too.

Since the coronavirus and its crushing blow to workers everywhere, several dozen people show up on each of four days a week. The number of donors finding this tucked-away place is growing, too.

I just opened a box from Target that was delivered here with a box of spaghetti," Miller said Monday night as we talked by phone. I could hear her huffing and puffing as she leaned over the merchandise. A one-pound box of spaghetti!

On Tuesday morning, Elaine Vetre of Havertown was waiting with a box of food as Miller pulled up to the church for 10 a.m.-to-noon handouts. Later in the day, a van loaded with groceries pulled up for the second time in two weeks. It was from a single block in Havertown where neighbors had banded together to do this good deed.

The week before, Id also been a first-time donor after finding the food bank online. Since Upper Darby has long teemed with working-class residents, I figured it would be hard hit by coronavirus cases among families on the margins of the economy.

I discovered in a return trip on Tuesday that I was, sadly, right.

Outside the long-ago-decommissioned Calvary Presbyterian Church where Millers parents launched the food bank in the 1960s, a line of people waited their turn to walk to a folding chair tucked between bushes beneath the open window.

One was 52-year-old Gloria Rocano. A nail salon worker from Ecuador, her workplace was ordered shut down as a non-life-sustaining business. She had come wearing a mask. Everyone in line had a mask on.

I only have faith in God, Rocano told me in her native Spanish as she prepared to load her car with food, because none of us knows exactly when this will end.

 FAQ: Your coronavirus questions, answered

A husband and wife behind her, both 35 years old, were also there for the first time. They had two sons, 12 and 9, at home. Mom was pregnant with their third. Dad has been out of work since the Norristown restaurant where he was a kitchen staffer closed due to the pandemic.

They didnt tell me their names but graciously shared slivers about their struggle.

We have a little money at home, the mother said. Its almost gone.

As shelves thin out after each mornings work, Miller is rejuvenated by donations that keep showing up. Only once before, said the Drexel Hill woman, had she sensed the same kind of community compassion: After the 2001 terrorist attacks.

After 9/11, she said, everybody was so nice and kind and helpful to everybody.

Sadly, not for long. That all went down the toilet, she said.

Still, she hopes this time around it sticks.

Im hoping this will bring out the goodness in people, she said.

To donate, see the food banks Facebook page or call 610-853-2481.
Here are todays top news, analysis and opinion curated for you. Know all about the latest news and other news updates from Hindustan Times.

2 more FIRs over gathering of migrant workers in Bandra, 1 arrested

Mumbai Police registered two more FIRs in a case related to spreading of rumours which led to migrant workers gathering outside Bandra railway station on Tuesday. One person has been arrested in connection with the case. Read more

Lockdown 2.0: E-commerce, plumbers, electricians allowed after April 20

The Union home ministry on Wednesday issued extensive guidelines on permitted commercial and industrial activities as the country entered the first day of the extended nationwide lockdown till May 3. Read more

Covid-19 lockdown guidelines by MHA: These industries can operate

The government on Wednesday issued detailed guidelines for states, Union territories and people to follow during the extended lockdown till May 3. Read more

Coronavirus update: China didnt warn public of likely pandemic for 6 key days

The Chinese government has repeatedly denied suppressing information in the early days, saying it immediately reported the outbreak to the World Health Organization. Read more

Dont win matches by sledging, Clarkes statements were ridiculous: Former India opener

Former Australia captain Michael Clarke had claimed that the Australian players went soft on the Indian team and on captain Virat Kohli during the recent India vs Australia matches as they wanted to bag IPL contracts. Read more

Lockdown 2.0: IT, IT enabled services allowed to operate at 50% of strength

The Ministry of Home Affairs has released revised consolidated guidelines for the lockdown measures. The government has allowed all IT and IT enabled services to operate but with 50% of strength. Read more

This dog and cat friendship is representative of introvert and extrovert mates. Watch

Who hasnt heard that phrase that introverts make friends when an extrovert adopts them. This may or may not be true in most mix-trovert relationships but is definitely true in the case of this doggo and feline. Read more

Triple threat: Models are styling, set designing and photographing their own shoots during Coronavirus lockdown

With most of the world under lockdown on account of the coronavirus pandemic that affected over 180 countries in the world, movement has been limited and people have been advised to only venture out if they work for an essential business or service, to stock up on essential products, medical purposes and so on. Read more

Watch: Man who allegedly incited migrants protest at Bandra station arrested
FILE PHOTO: An illustration, created at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), depicts the 2019 Novel Coronavirus

By Paresh Dave

OAKLAND, Calif. (Reuters) - A global race is on to develop smartphone apps and other types of mobile phone surveillance systems to track and contain the spread of the novel coronavirus.

The process known as "contact tracing," which is used to control the spread of infectious diseases, was boosted last week when the top two smartphone software makers, Alphabet Inc's Google <GOOGL.O> and Apple Inc <AAPL.O>, said they were collaborating on apps that can identify people who have crossed paths with a contagious patient and alert them.

HOW CAN MOBILE PHONES HELP COMBAT THE NEW CORONAVIRUS?

Smartphones and some less-sophisticated mobile phones keep track of their location via cell-tower signals, Wi-Fi signals and the satellite-based global positioning system, known as GPS. Smartphones also use so-called Bluetooth technology to connect with nearby devices.

The location data can be used to monitor whether people, either individually or in aggregate, are obeying orders to stay inside their homes. It can also be used for contact tracing: determining whether people have been in contact with others who have the virus, so they can get tested or quarantined.

Smartphones can also be used to take surveys of people about their health via messaging, record their health histories via various forms of data entry and even produce a health "score" based on a combination of location information and health data.

HOW CAN PHONES HELP WITH CONTACT TRACING?

Using Bluetooth, smartphones can log other phones they have been near. If someone becomes infected, there is a ready list of their prior encounters. Phones on the list would get push notifications urging them to get tested or self-isolate.

In principle, this system is more efficient than traditional contact tracing methods that require large staffs to interview patients about their travels and then call or knock on the doors of contacts.

The Bluetooth solution is far from perfect. Phones can log one another even when 15 feet apart or on separate sides of a wall, even though a cough from an infected person likely would not be problematic in those cases. But developers have been working on ways to better define "contacts" based on the length and strength of so-called handshakes between devices.

Story continues

Bluetooth also remains more accurate than GPS or cell tower location data, which can wrongly associate everyone on a busy city block as contacts.

ARE ANY OF THESE METHODS CURRENTLY IN USE?

Singapore pioneered contact tracing via Bluetooth with an app called "TraceTogether." Israel, which made headlines by employing its powerful government surveillance system to track cases, has also rolled out an app called The Shield. India also has an app.

South Korea is using mobile phone location data for contact tracing, while Taiwan uses it for quarantine enforcement and is also developing an app. China is employing a range of app-based tracking systems.

Meanwhile, dozens of efforts to develop contact tracing apps are underway around the world, many led by government research institutes and health authorities. In Europe, for example, a German-led effort is aiming to rally other European countries behind a technology platform that could support contact tracing apps across the 27-member EU. But several other European countries are pursuing their own apps. An effort is also underway in the United Kingdom.

The United States government has yet to promote an app, but at least two university research groups and one ad-hoc software development team are trying to gain endorsements from state and local bodies.

HOW DO APPLE AND GOOGLE FIT IN?

The two companies said they were concerned about competing approaches and agreed to develop tools, to be released in May, that will enable apps to "handshake" with one other. They also address battery drain and other issues that have limited the utility of some early apps.

Apple and Google also plan to go a step further later this year by integrating logging functionality directly into their phone software nearly worldwide.

People who catch the virus would still need to download an app to initiate contact notifications, but even those without apps could receive notifications.

ARE THERE PRIVACY AND SECURITY CONCERNS?

Yes. The most sensitive issue is who can view a phone's list of devices it has crossed. Nearly everyone agrees on deleting logs after about one month.

The tools coming from Google and Apple keep names off contact lists and leave the lists secret to everyone involved, which has drawn plaudits from privacy experts. Only governments, which must verify that people who say they tested positive for coronavirus actually did so, would know the identity of disease carriers, and even they would not have access to the contact lists.

But some governments and technologists favor collecting a central database of all "handshakes" between phones because it is an easier system to design and manage. Privacy advocates worry that such a database would be a hackers' goldmine and prone to governmental abuse.

Some researchers have suggested apps also track GPS information to better map the spread of the coronavirus. But GPS data could undermine people's privacy and leave places visited by people who test positive ostracized, activists said.

WILL PEOPLE BE REQUIRED TO TURN ON CONTACT TRACING?

No country is known to have required an app, but workplaces or other facilities could end up mandating usage. Apple and Google said that apps seeking to use its tools would need to be voluntary.

But the apps won't achieve their purpose unless they are widely used. Some epidemiologists have said at least 60% of a country needs to activate digital contact tracing for it make an impact.

(Graphic: Tracking global spread of coronavirus - https://tmsnrt.rs/3aIRuz7)

(This story was refiled to to add dropped words paragraphs 13, 16 and 23)

(Reporting by Paresh Dave; Additional reporting by Stephen Nellis, Raphael Satter and Douglas Busvine; Editing by Jonathan Weber and Grant McCool)
Express News Service

BENGALURU: The use of Hydroxychloroquine (HCQ) for treating COVID-19 for children may be risky, warned experts. A doctor from KC General hospital said that they had an eight-year-old child who contracted the virus from his COVID-positive mother. As he was asymptomatic, no medicines were given.

But HCQ cannot be given to children below 15 years of age, as it has toxicity and can affect them adversely. Children should be treated only with symptomatic medicines, he said.

But the use of HCQ is still controversial with contradicting opinions among the medical fraternity.

Dr Kishore Kumar, Founder Chairman and Neonatologist at Cloudnine Group of Hospitals, Bengaluru, said, HCQ is not recommended at all for children below 15 years and so far, the dosage to be given for children is not known. The drug has a prolonged QT interval, where people who take the medicine can sometime experience cardiac arrest.

Dr CN Manjunath, Senior Cardiologist and Director of Jayadeva Institute of Cardiovascular Sciences and Research, who is also a member of the Karnataka COVID-19 Task Force, said, For children suffering from pneumonia, cortical steroids and other anti-viral drugs, including Azithromycin, are given. Right now, HCQ is given to adults for prophylaxis and active treatment of those who have pneumonia or lung infection or depending on their state of health. Azithromycin and HCQ are given together for active treatment, while for prophylaxis it is only HCQ.

However, some experts said it can be used in severe cases.

We have to weigh the risks and benefits. HCQ does surface for moderate to severe COVID-19 cases. It can alter the internal electrocardiogram and the risk is too high. The treating physician takes a decision on a case-to-case basis. It is not used for children with epilepsy, liver diseases, heart diseases and chronic conditions. On other children, it is used on a five-day regimen, said Dr Supraja Chandrashekar, Consultant, Paediatric Intensivist, People Tree Hospitals.

Dr Rakshay Shetty, Head, Paediatric Intensive Care Services, Rainbow Childrens Hospital, explained that HCQ helps in preventing the infection from becoming a severe form of pneumonia where a patient requires ICU or ventilator support.

Both Shetty and Supraja said that so far, cases of coronavirus are not severe among children worldwide.

Shetty pointed out that only if used over a long duration can HCQ lead to toxicity and for short durations, such as COVID treatment, it does not lead to toxicity.
[April 15, 2020] Construction Starts Decline in March

Total construction starts declined 5% from February to March to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of $746.9 billion. Volatility caused by the presence or absence of large projects in healthcare and the utility/gas plant category, however, skewed the analysis. In March, nonresidential building starts fell 9% from February (seasonally adjusted), while residential building dropped 11%. Nonbuilding construction starts, however, rose 14% during the month. This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20200415005124/en/ For the 12 months ending March 2020, total construction starts were 2% higher than they were for the same period ending March 2019. Residential building starts were 3% higher, while nonbuilding starts were up 5% for the 12 months ending March 2020. Nonresidential building starts, however, were down less than one percent. The Dodge Index dropped to 158 (2000=100) in March from the 167 posted in February. "Considering the calamity that occurred towards the end of March as the fallout from the COVID-19 (Coronavirus) hit the economy, construction starts held up rather well," stated Richard Branch Chief Economist for Dodge Data & Analytics. "Construction starts in March were unlikely to be greatly impacted as projects that broke ground during the month likely had materials sourced and in-place and labor booked well ahead of the scheduled groundbreaking. That momentum and planning is difficult to reverse at the last minute. Additionally, most of the stay-at-home orders and construction moratoriums were not instituted until the last week of the month and into April. Therefore, April construction starts are likely to be a very different story with states like New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania among others banning construction activity. April's starts data will be the first true indication of how the crisis will impact the construction industry." Nonbuilding costruction jumped 14% in March to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of $168.9 billion due to the start of several large electric power facilities. When the massive 161% gain in the utility/gas plant category is removed from the total, nonbuilding starts fell 9% during the month. Highway and bridge starts rose 5%, although the environmental public works category dropped 5% and the miscellaneous nonbuilding category fell 44%.



The largest nonbuilding project to break ground in March was the $1.0 billion 1,085 MW Indeck Niles Energy Center power plant in Niles MI. Also starting in March were the $600 million Jordan Creek Wind Farm in Williamsport IN and the $469 million Titan Solar Project in Culberson county TX. For the twelve months ending March 2020, total nonbuilding starts were 5% higher than the twelve months ending March 2019. Starts in the utility/gas plant category were 62% higher, while environmental public works were down slightly. Street and bridge starts were 5% lower for the twelve months ending March, while miscellaneous nonbuilding was down 15%.

Nonresidential building starts fell 9% in from February to March to a seasonally adjusted $259.8 billion. Commercial building starts were 5% lower, with losses in three of the five commercial sub-categories (warehouses and parking structures made gains). Manufacturing buildings dropped 7% during the month, while institutional buildings dropped 12%. Institutional buildings posted a large gain in February due to the start of several large healthcare facilities, which were not present in the March statistics. However, education facilities posted a solid 18% gain in March. The largest nonresidential building project to break ground in March was the $616 million Duncan Neuroscience Research Facility in Saint Louis MO. Also getting started in March was a $415 million Amazon fulfillment warehouse in Wilmington DE and a $369 million Amazon fulfillment center in Colorado Springs CO. On a 12 month total basis, nonresidential building starts were less than one percentage point lower than they were for the 12 months ending March 2019. Commercial starts were up 2%, while institutional building starts were 1% lower and manufacturing starts were down 7%. Residential building starts moved 11% lower in March to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of $318.2 billion. During the month, single family starts dropped 14%, while multifamily starts lost 3%. The largest multifamily structure to break ground during in March was the $420 million Hunter's Point South Mixed-Use building in Long Island City NY. Also starting during the month was the $200 million Piazza Terminal Mixed-Use building in Philadelphia PA and the $125 million Adeline Residences in Phoenix AZ. For the 12 months ending in March, total residential starts were 3% higher than the 12 months ending March 2019. Single family starts were up 5%, while multifamily building starts were less than one percent lower. About Dodge Data & Analytics: Dodge Data & Analytics is North America's leading provider of analytics and software-based workflow integration solutions for the construction industry. Building product manufacturers, architects, engineers, contractors, and service providers leverage Dodge to identify and pursue unseen growth opportunities and execute on those opportunities for enhanced business performance. Whether it's on a local, regional or national level, Dodge makes the hidden obvious, empowering its clients to better understand their markets, uncover key relationships, size growth opportunities, and pursue those opportunities with success. The company's construction project information is the most comprehensive and verified in the industry. Dodge is leveraging its 100-year-old legacy of continuous innovation to help the industry meet the building challenges of the future. To learn more, visit www.construction.com. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20200415005124/en/

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The two Nigeriens, who were arrested in Accra and later tested positive for COVID-19, have refused to submit to treatment.



They have since been returned from the Ga East Municipal Hospital, Ghanas main national COVID-19 treatment center.



The two foreigners are currently being held in a secluded police facility, the Ghana Police Service said on Tuesday.



The two Nigeriens who tested positive to COVID-19 and were transferred from a Police holding facility of the Accra District Police to the National Treatment Center have been returned to the Police facility as a matter of necessity, to enable health officials to manage them, the Ghana Police Service said in a Facebook post.



The development sparked widespread agitations among officers, who appear exposed to the deadly infection.



But the police further clarified that: The two refused to submit to treatment at the national treatment center, making their management difficult, thus their return.



The Police said the government of Ghana is engaging the Nigerien Ambassador to Ghana to decide on the management of the two cases.



The government is, however, yet to decide whether or not the two will be repatriated to their home country.



Meanwhile, the Police says its officers will not be in contact with any of the two foreigners as it engages its medical team to safeguard Police officers and our facility.



Background



The two were arrested in Accra for flouting COVID-19 lockdown on Sunday, April 5, 2020.



They were detained at the Accra District Police Station and later tested positive for the virus on Friday, April 10, 2020.

Source: ghanaweb









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New Delhi: Former Congress president Rahul Gandhi on Wednesday urged the Centre to bring back thousands of Indian workers stranded in the Middle East where they are left out of work due to the coronavirus pandemic.

The Congress MP took to Twitter and said that thousands of Indian workers are in deep distress and desperate to return home and the government should bring them back and put in mandatory quarantine.

"The Covid-19 crisis and shutting of businesses in the Middle East have left thousands of Indian workers in deep distress and desperate to return home. The Govt must organise flights to bring home our brothers and sisters most in need of assistance, with quarantine plans in place," Rahul said in his tweet.

The #Covid19 crisis & shutting of businesses in the Middle East have left thousands of Indian workers in deep distress & desperate to return home. The Govt must organise flights to bring home our brothers & sisters most in need of assistance, with quarantine plans in place.  Rahul Gandhi (@RahulGandhi) April 15, 2020

It may be recalled that the Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) informed the Supreme Court on Monday that there are 13 million Indians - including NRIs and students stranded abroad and the government is seeking to minimise the severe risk posed by their arrival from an increasing number of countries affected by COVID-19.

The government has urged the Indian nationals to stay put where they are to contain the further spread of the virus within India and allow the health machinery to focus on domestic containment effectively.

In the UK, there are about 400,000 Indian nationals, including about 50,000 students. The UK government has now extended visas till May 31 and has issued necessary guidelines.

"However, given the present situation of the coronavirus outbreak in India and the available limited resources, it is not feasible to selectively evacuate Indian citizens from abroad when a large number of them from a number of countries want to return back due to various reasons," said the MEA in its reply to the Supreme Court.

The nation-wide lockdown has been extended till May 3 to contain the spread of the pandemic that has killed over 370 people and infected over 11,000 in the country.
Gov. Kristi Noem announced Wednesday that testing equipment from Abbott Laboratories went to Sioux Falls and several rural populations across the state to help bolster testing during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Abbott rapid ID testing machines went to Prairie Lakes Hospital in Watertown, Community Memorial Hospital in Redfield, Huron Regional Medical Center, Mobridge Hospital, one to the hospital in Martin in Bennett County, one to the Fall River hospital in Hot Springs, one to Monument Health in Spearfish, and two for Sioux Falls.

Kim Malsam-Rysdon, state health secretary, said her department wanted to send those to areas of the state where the hospital system does not have ready access to commercial lab capacity and to make sure communities that have been hard-hit such as Huron have testing equipment.

We also wanted to really look at West River and some of the independent hospitals in our West River locations to ensure that folks across the river have access, she said.

Malsam-Rysdon estimates each machine can run 72 to 96 tests in a day and turn around test results in a matter of minutes.

Malsam-Rysdon also said her department is getting closer to releasing information about a breakdown of negative tests by county in a matter of days.

Noem said shes had conversations with federal officials and the U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Sonny Perdue. Perdue has been working with Noem and Smithfield Foods CEO to safely reopen the meatpacking plant in Sioux Falls, Noem said.

Opening the plant will bring some relief not only to our (agricultural) producers, but to make sure were continuing to secure our nations food supply, Noem said.

This news came after an announcement mid-day Wednesday that cases related to Smithfield had grown. The Department of Health reported that 518 employees had COVID-19, as well as 126 of their contacts.

The Argus Leader reported Wednesday, simultaneous to the governors daily press conference, that a Smithfield worker had died from COVID-19 Tuesday morning. The Department of Health has not yet updated their data to reflect the 64-year-old Sioux Falls mans death.

Noem said the peak date for Sioux Falls is now in mid-May because of the outbreak, which is earlier than health officials estimated for the area. New York Times data estimates that the Smithfield Foods outbreak is the top hotspot in the nation for COVID-19.

Noem also said she expects a surge of 1,200 to 1,300 beds in Sioux Falls alone by the peak infection rate date in May.

We believe that (the capacity for 1,200 to 1,300 beds) is already in those health care systems, although we are not changing how we are planning based on what we gave to you two weeks ago, Noem said. Models are dynamic. They will continue to change. This is a virus, it is fluid, but we have cut our peak.

Noem said the National Guard still plans to add a 100-bed capacity hospital in the Sioux Falls and Rapid City areas and would give out information about those facilities in the coming days.

Dr. Joshua Clayton, epidemiologist for the Department of Health, gave a conservative estimate of four people who have had to go on ventilators so far for COVID-19 treatment.

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Theres reason to be optimistic in this overwhelming crisis. This sensibility springs from an idea my father, Pat Williams, gave me about political leadership:

We must remember there is a genius on every block.

That means we need to have confidence and trust in the people and systems that make America extraordinary. Then well be OK.

I watched this American wisdom borne out in my personal experience in the Congo. A decade.ago, I helped to create an organization  Eastern Congo Initiative  in a part of the world that has experienced war and disease.

Today, we employ nearly 200 professionals who help local leaders build the economy, create jobs, and make clean water and health services available to confront health challenges. The works paying off: Weve opened markets for farmers to sell their cocoa to the chocolate company Theo and coffee to Starbucks. Weve partnered with community groups to reduce maternal and child mortality rates and seen thousands of patients at health clinics. Well-being is rising.

I was in the Congo during the recent Ebola outbreak, a challenge that preceded what we face now. Heres a reason for optimism: The Congo just celebrated a major milestone with the passing of a month without a new Ebola case. The Congolese can beat Ebola, and we can do the same with coronavirus, especially if we pay attention to the biggest lesson from that epidemic.

Africans beat Ebola by beating an attitude of distrust in institutions, science and expertise.

When trust in institutions and science breaks down, real problems begin. I saw it happen. Early in the epidemic, people were so suspicious of health care workers and their advice that they physically attacked them  ugly violence against modern-day heroes trying to help.

What saved millions from that epidemic was turning that attitude around. Citizens were taught to trust and support front-line health care workers and scientists. This change paid off in spectacular fashion and ways that give us hope today.

Ebola was like coronavirus because as the epidemic began, a lot of faith was directed toward magic-bullet solutions that would miraculously make the peril pass. But Congolese front-line health care workers learned by doing: Caring for patients, showing that small steps help, effectively quarantining or attending to hydration, restoring fluids and electrolytes of patients.

The health care workers taught us that small steps from geniuses on every block reduced the death rate and saved lives, a step at a time. Its the same spirit that had a father and son in Billings recently figure out how to make medical masks with 3-D printers.

We depend not only on front-line workers here to beat our current problem but pockets of genius that will overcome our crisis bit by bit: People in local and state government taking care of us with reliable information and communication; neighbors looking out for neighbors; and those in the supply chain working to deliver medical supplies and food. We need to support, trust and give them the tools they need  and listen to them. Were in this together.

After this pandemic Montana will face economic and social challenges that no one thought wed face two months ago. Well need a new generation of leadership to pull us through. Well need someone who will fight for Montanas families, farmers and ranchers, small businesses. Well need someone with broad experience in solving complex problems.

Ive worked alongside small farmers and Fortune 500 companies to solve tough problems. I work with fierce urgency, and believe deeply in Montanas promising future. Its why Im running for governor  and why Im asking for your support.

Whitney Williams is a sixth-generation Montanan, a businesswoman and a Democratic candidate for governor.

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[April 15, 2020] Nationwide clinician-to-hospital matching system launched in response to an overwhelming need for assistance in current and emerging COVID-19 hotspots

NEW YORK, April 15, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- The Clinician Matching Network platform, a national-level clearinghouse designed to match qualified medical staff with hospitals and communities overwhelmed by the coronavirus pandemic, was launched through the joint efforts of the American College of Chest Physicians (CHEST), the American Thoracic Society (ATS), and PA Consulting. In response to the need for additional staffing support for New York City, a call for assistance was issued using the organizations' communication tools. The response was immediate, with more than 350 clinicians signing up using the CHEST Analytics platform to join forces with their colleagues in New York and helping hospital systems being pushed to the limits find qualified health care providers. The additional staffing made a direct impact on patient care by filling shortages and providing respite to fatigued front line workers. The positive response from the members shows the willingness of qualified medical staff to assist on the front lines. The benefits of the Clinician Matching Network platform are the ability to eliminate the lag between a clinician submitting their application and getting word about an assignment and reduction of the strain on other application systems in the face of this pandemic. In addition, information collected through the matching network can be verified quickly, reducing the time between application and assignment. "We felt we had the resources to leverage our CHEST Analytics platform to create a process that would put physicians in hospitals where they could do the most good more efficiently," said Robert Musacchio, CHEST EVP/CEO. "If we can apply this knowledge in a way that saves lives and supports the front line staff, we have to do it." The online platform is a two-way matching system accepting applications from qualified clinicians, as well as health care facilities. Hospitals can specify their needs and their requirements through an online process. Volunteers are then matched accordingly, streamlining the process for the hospitals and sending volunteers to the front lines sooner. "We saw the need for this type of system because of New York City, but we anticipate that additional geographic regions willneed similar support in the days and weeks ahead. This joint effort allows us to hopefully move ahead of the curve in some places. It's also giving us a model for how we can increase crisis capacity for hospitals in the future," said Karen Collishaw, CAE executive director of the ATS.



Qualified clinicians in the position to help alleviate the strain on staffing at hospitals and alternate care facilities can register online by completing a simple form at https://www.chestnet.org/Clinician-Matching. Invitations to apply for volunteer work assignments are already being sent to all members of CHEST and ATS. In addition, communications will be distributed to hospitals and hospital systems to help identify their staffing needs, encourage them to apply for staffing assistance, and begin the clinician-to-hospital matching process. Health care facilities do not need to wait for an invitation to get support but can register online immediately.

"One of the benefits of the Clinician Matching Network for hospitals is the fact that we have already matched their need to the skills and availability of the clinician. There will be no cross-over resulting in double bookings or mismatches that can use up precious time and resources that are already being stretched," says Bret Schroeder, Healthcare Provider Lead at PA Consulting. To learn more about the Clinician Matching Network, go to https://www.chestnet.org/Clinician-Matching or email [email protected]. About the American College of Chest Physicians

CHEST is the global leader in prevention, diagnosis, and treatment of chest diseases. Its mission is to champion advanced clinical practice, education, communication, and research in chest medicine. It serves as an essential connection to clinical knowledge and resources for its 19,000+ members from around the world who provide patient care in pulmonary, critical care, and sleep medicine. For information about the American College of Chest Physicians, and its flagship journal CHEST, visit chestnet.org. About the American Thoracic Society

Founded in 1905, the American Thoracic Society is the world's leading medical association dedicated to advancing pulmonary, critical care and sleep medicine. The Society's more than 16,000 members prevent and fight respiratory disease around the globe through research, education, patient care and advocacy. The ATS publishes four journals, the American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine , the American Journal of Respiratory Cell and Molecular Biology, the Annals of the American Thoracic Society and ATS Scholar . About PA

We believe in the power of ingenuity to build a positive human future in a technology-driven world. As strategies, technologies and innovation collide, we create opportunity from complexity. Our diverse teams of experts combine innovative thinking and breakthrough use of technologies to progress further, faster. Our clients adapt and transform, and together we achieve enduring results. An innovation and transformation consultancy, we are over 3,200 specialists in consumer, defense and security, energy and utilities, financial services, government, health and life sciences, manufacturing, and transport. Our people are strategists, innovators, designers, consultants, digital experts, scientists, engineers and technologists. We operate globally from offices across the UK, US, Europe, and the Nordics. PA. Bringing Ingenuity to Life. www.paconsulting.com Media contact:

Ashley Houk

PA Consulting

[email protected]

+1-212-973-5918 View original content to download multimedia:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/nationwide-clinician-to-hospital-matching-system-launched-in-response-to-an-overwhelming-need-for-assistance-in-current-and-emerging-covid-19-hotspots-301041093.html SOURCE PA Consulting

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15 Three planes and three helicopters were used to drop water on the wildfires. According to the Emergency Situations Service, more than 530 tons of water were dropped on the fires as of April 13.
New Delhi, April 15 : Union Minister of State for Agriculture and Farmers Welfare Kailash Chaudhary said that the farmers will be paid within three days of their crops purchased by the government.

He has also asked the states to make proper arrangements for procurement.

The government procurement of wheat in many states, including Madhya Pradesh and Punjab, has started from Wednesday despite a nationwide lockdown. Haryana has announced to start purchasing mustard first and then wheat from April 20.

Chaudhary told IANS that during the period of coronavirus crisis, the Central government stands with the farmers and many decisions have been taken in their interest.

He said earlier there used to be a delay of a month in making the payment to the farmers from the time of purchase of the crops, but now they will get the price of their produce within just three days and in this regard the state governments have been asked to send reports soon.

Chaudhary said: "The Prime Minister has said that no work of farmers will be stopped and they are allowed to continue with their work." He said that in order to carry out the procurement of Rabi crops smoothly, the government asked the states to make necessary arrangements for the same at the panchayat level and the agency from whom they would like to make the purchase. But they will have to follow the instructions regarding social distancing because it is necessary to stop the transmission of COVID-19.

Relaxing the rules of procurement, the central government has increased the daily limit for the purchase of gram and mustard from 25 quintal to 40 quintal.

He said the government is worried about the farmers, hence, they are being provided with the benefits of schemes made for them.

He said that the amount under Pradhan Mantri Kisan Samman Nidhi scheme is being directly transferred in the accounts of beneficiaries.

The beneficiaries of Modi government's ambitious scheme PM-KISAN get the scheme amount of Rs 6,000 annually in their respected bank accounts equally in every three months. During the lockdown, about Rs 16,621 crore have been transferred to the bank accounts of about 8.31 crore farmers under the PM-KISAN so far.

During the lockdown, the Ministry of Agriculture has continued to do its work and Chaudhary said he is also attending office. regularly.

Latest updates on Howdy Modi Houston
Staff of the Greater Accra Regional Hospital (GARH) who were put under mandatory quarantine after coming into contact with Nana Osei Boansi Kuffuor, father of popular musician Obour, have all tested negative.



Awaiting a test on Coronavirus, Nana Boansi Kuffour, whose travel history is said to have been concealed from management of GARH by his family, died at the facility.



He died on Friday, March 27.



His test results later came out positive, according to officials, prompting an immediate shutdown of the emergency unit of the Hospital while all the staff who came into contact with the deceased were quarantined.



The unit was disinfected before being open again for operation.



In a statement issued on Tuesday, management of the Hospital said the seven nurses, three doctors and an IT officer have tested negative.



The above category of workers were quarantined because they had contact with the deceased when he was accidentally admitted and briefly managed at the emergency ward.



But the former President of the Musicians Union of Ghana (MUSIGA), Bice Osei Kuffour, has demanded the autopsy report on his fathers death.



In a letter written on his behalf by his lawyers, Obour, as he is popularly known, threatened legal action.



Already, he has expressed doubt about his father dying from coronavirus.

Source: 3news









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WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A sailor from the coronavirus-stricken aircraft carrier Theodore Roosevelt was in an intensive care unit (ICU) in Guam, the Navy said on Tuesday, a day after another sailor from the carrier died after contracting the virus. The U.S

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A sailor from the coronavirus-stricken aircraft carrier Theodore Roosevelt was in an intensive care unit (ICU) in Guam, the Navy said on Tuesday, a day after another sailor from the carrier died after contracting the virus.

The U.S. Navy sailor who died from the COVID-19 illness on Monday became infected with the coronavirus while aboard the carrier, whose captain was fired after warning that crew members would die unnecessarily unless strong action was taken.

In a statement on Tuesday, the Navy said the other sailor was moved to the ICU for "increased observation due to shortness of breath." Three other sailors from the carrier are being treated at the U.S. Naval Hospital in Guam for coronavirus symptoms.

So far, 589 crew members of the Theodore Roosevelt have tested positive for the coronavirus.

Late last month the Roosevelt's commander, Captain Brett Crozier, called on Navy leadership to evacuate the vast majority of the crew and to disinfect the ship in a letter that leaked to the public - embarrassing the Navy.

The letter, which was obtained by a number of news outlets, set in motion a series of events that led to Croziers firing and the resignation last week of acting Navy Secretary Thomas Modly.

The Navy this week is expected to release the results of an investigation into the events surrounding the letter. Officials have not ruled out reinstating Crozier, who is seen as a hero by the ship's crew, as captain of the carrier.

No other part of the military has been as widely impacted by the coronavirus as the Navy, in part because of the size of the ships and how sailors aboard work and live in very close proximity.

Seven crewmembers on the U.S. Navy hospital ship Mercy have tested positive for coronavirus, the Navy added on Tuesday.

The Mercy arrived in Los Angeles last month to help reduce the stress on hospitals dealing with the coronavirus outbreak.

(Reporting by Idrees Ali; Editing by Chizu Nomiyama and Bill Berkrot)

This story has not been edited by Firstpost staff and is generated by auto-feed.
YEREVAN, APRIL 15, ARMENPRESS. President of Armenia Armen Sarkissian had a telephone conversation with President-elect of the Republic of Artsakh Arayik Harutyunyan, the Presidential Office told Armenpress.

President Sarkissian congratulated Arayik Harutyunyan on his success in the second round of the presidential election and on being elected President of Artsakh.

The Armenian President said Arayik Harutyunyan is going to assume the position of the President in a very complex and responsible period for Artsakh, conditioned by the developments taking place in the world and in particular the ongoing complex geopolitical processes in the region. The Republic of Artsakh once again proved that it is a well-established country with its state institutions, and most importantly, with its citizens. Today more than ever we need to be united, the Armenian President said during the telephone talk.

President Sarkissian expressed confidence that Arayik Harutyunyan will be able to strengthen the atmosphere of solidarity and tolerance in Artsakh, organize and ensure the security, the economic and political development of Artsakh, unite the people around common goals.
Business records show that Hunter Biden is still listed as a board member of Chinese private equity firm BHR Partners, despite his lawyer saying in November that Biden had resigned from the position.

Biden remains on the board and still has a 10 percent equity stake in BHR, which manages $2.1 billion in assets, according to business records reviewed by the Daily Caller on Tuesday. When the Daily Caller reported in early November that records showed Biden remained on BHRs board, despite a statement saying he would resign on or by October 31, 2019, his lawyer George Mesires responded saying that Hunter has resigned from the board, but did not provide any evidence to confirm the statement.

The statement my son put out today, which I saw when he put it out  I was told it was going to be put out, I did not consult with him about whats being put out  in fact represents the kind of man of integrity he is, Joe Biden said in October when Hunter released his initial statement.

President Trump and allies have targeted Joe Biden for his sons business dealings in China, touting them in a recent attack ad. The New Yorker reported in July that Hunter Biden arraigned a meeting between his father and BHR Capitals founder Jonathan Li during the vice presidents trip to China in 2013  a move which drew concerns from White House officials over the possibility that Bidens son was leveraging access for his benefit, which just wasnt done in that White House.

Hunter Bidens company Skaneateles LLC owns the 10 percent equity stake in BHR, which it purchased in October 2017 with a $420,000 investment. Skaneateless listed address matches that of the $3.8 million home in Los Angeles that Hunter Biden is reportedly renting for $12,000 a month, according to the companys records.

Hunter Biden agreed in January to pay monthly child support to an Arkansas woman who gave birth to his child, two days before a deadline to appear in court to explain the state of his finances, after missing a deadline to hand over five years of records.

Story continues

Senate Republicans are looking at Hunter Bidens financial records as part of a probe into Bidens position on the board of Ukrainian energy company Burisma Holdings. He was appointed to the board during his fathers tenure running point for U.S. relations with Ukraine. Senator Ron Johnson (R., Wisc.) revealed in an interview Monday that the probe should be released sometime this summer.

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Luxembourg Air Rescue is flying a lot of missions at the moment, mostly on request of the French authorities.

Only on Tuesday the first French patient from Ettelbruck was returned to the Grand Est region in France. The cured patient was reunited with his family in Colmar.

However, there was another repatriation on Tuesday. An Air Rescue plane was used to fly a patient from Austria to France.

3 more missions are planned to take place on Wednesday, 2 by jet and 1 by helicopter. The planes are scheduled to take off in Magdeburg with one flying to Metz and the other to Saarbrucken. The helicopter transfer will take place between Mainz and Mulhouse.
Meghan Markle is no longer a senior member of the royal family and is settling into her new life with Prince Harry and Archie Harrison. As happy as the family might be, there are many fans who are still disappointed that they didnt get to see Markle live out her life in the royal spotlight, doing good for charitable organizations and looking fabulous while doing so. While there are likely many reasons why Markle decided to step away from the royal family, there has been some speculation that Markle wasnt properly prepared for what being a member of the royal family might entail.

Meghan Markle | Chris Jackson/Getty Images

What is royal training?

Marrying into any family comes with a learning curve. From difficult in-laws to stressful family gatherings, there is a lot to get used to. When someone is marrying into the royal family, however, things are taken to the next level. The practice of royal training has been around for decades, and in theory, helps to prepare the new family member for the scrutiny that they will be receiving.

Royal training includes learning a strict set of behavior rules, from the proper types of clothing to wear to ways to ensure that the queen always feels properly respected. Courtships within the royal family are typically lengthy (no shotgun weddings for the royals), therefore, the training can often last for years. However, there is no one specific protocol for royal training, and depending on what position the new family member will be occupying, the training might consist of wildly different things. For example, Kate Middleton, Prince Williams wife and the future queen consort had to go through a rigorous training process over a period of many years.

Kate Middleton received extensive royal training

Kate Middleton started dating Prince William when she was just a teenager. Middleton met his family early on and understood from the very beginning the role that Prince Williams wife would have to play. Once everyone at the palace realized that Prince William was serious about Kate Middleton, her royal training began in earnest.

According to reports, she started undergoing her royal training when she was still dating Prince William. Her training was multifaceted and undoubtedly included things like various etiquette rules  however, she also received extensive media training, learning how to deal with the paparazzi. The British press can be notoriously difficult and ran Prince Williams mother, Princess Diana ragged. The media training was a way to ensure that Kate Middleton didnt undergo the same treatment  and helped her to understand exactly what she would be getting into as a high-ranking member of the royal family.

What type of royal training did Meghan Markle receive?

Meghan Markles experience of preparing to join the royal family was vastly different than Kate Middletons. While she did undergo some high-level training scenarios (including reportedly going through kidnap training) the vast majority of her royal training had to do with living as a British citizen  including becoming familiar with British sensibilities. Being born and raised in California, the British lifestyle would have been entirely new to Markle.

Clearly, Markles training was a good deal different from Middletons  except for, likely, the safety training. While her etiquette training might have been helpful for the general American citizen moving to England, it could have left Meghan Markle horribly unprepared for the high level of scrutiny that she would experience as Prince Harrys wife. It certainly seems as though her training lacked a great deal of royal specific courses that could have helped her to better deal with the press and public.

Whatever the real reasons for her exit from royal life, perhaps Meghan Markle will finally be able to enjoy her marriage  without having to worry about constant backlash from the British tabloids.
Sensex, Nifty Updates: Benchmarks Sensex and Nifty erased early gains and closed bearish by the afternoon session on Wednesday, in line with global trend. Extending decline for the second straight session, BSE Sensex closed 310 points lower at 30,379 and NSE Nifty 50 ended 68 points lower to 8,925. Sectorally, gains in realty, FMCG, IT were capped by losses in banking indices.

Where Wall Street indices ended strongly bullish in overnight trade, Asian counterparts as well as European indices were falling over 1%. SGX Nfty also fell 2.2% to 8,995 mark. Meanwhile, PM Modi announced lockdown extension till May 3rd, 2020, over the rising coronavirus cases in the nation.

Traders said investors have already factored in the chances of extension and the domestic market will continue taking cues from worldwide trend. Moreover, concerns over the rise in Covid-19 cases across the nation and worldwide kept domestic investors cautious. Earlier domestic markets rose on hopes of decisionmakers lifting some curbs to help millions hit by coronavirus lockdowns.

On Monday, Sensex closed 469 points lower at 30,690 and Nifty lost 118 points to 8,993. Sensex and Nifty have fallen 9.82% in the last one month and 26% since the start of the year. Contrary to this, the indices have gained over 11% in last week's trade. Financial markets were closed yesterday, on account of Dr Baba Saheb Ambedkar Jayanti.

According to experts, prevailing uncertain market conditions amid the rising cases of the virus and extension of the lockdown period have caused volatility and led to the downfall of broader markets on a global scale. There 19.98 lakh confirmed cases worldwide and almost 1.26 lakh deaths from the coronavirus COVID-19 outbreak. India has recorded a total of 11,487 cases, 384 deaths and 1,359 recoveries.

Here's a look at the updates of the market action on BSE and NSE today:

3.40 PM: Closing bell

Benchmarks Sensex and Nifty erased early gains and closed bearish by the afternoon session on Wednesday, in line with global trend. Extending decline for the second straight session, BSE Sensex closed 310 points lower at 30,379 and NSE Nifty 50 ended 68 points lower to 8,925. Sectorally, gains in realty, FMCG, IT were capped by losses in banking indices.

3.35 PM: Dabur shares climb over 5%

Dabur share price touched an intraday high of Rs 505.7, rising 5.41% on BSE after the company said its plants will continue to remain shut till MAy 3, 2020, except for essential items viz. hand sanitizers, hand wash, disinfectants, ayurvedic medicines, juices, coconut water, honey etc.

3.30 PM: DCB Bank rises over 5%

DCB Bank shares opened with a gain of 5.2% today and later rose 5.74% to an intraday high of Rs 87.45 on BSE after the company reported advances and declines in the Q4 FY 20. Provisionally, Deposits stood at Rs 30373 cr, rising 6.8% yearly and 2.2% quarterly. Company's Advances came to Rs 25677 cr, rising 7.6% yearly, and dropping by 0.2% on a quarterly basis. CASA stood at Rs6492 cr, falling 3.9% yearly & 6% on a quarterly basis. CASA ratio was at 21.4% compared to 23.8% yoy and 23.2% qoq.

3.20 PM: Interglobe Aviation drops over 5%

Shares of Interglobe Aviation fell over 5% in today's trade after the aircraft carrier said it has now suspended the operation of all its scheduled commercial international and domestic flights until May 3, 2020.

3: 15 PM NTPC rises over 6%

NTPC shares climbed 6.15% to an intraday high of Rs 94.1 on BSE after the company said it has decided to raise Rs. 4,374.10 crore on 16 April 2020 through private placement of unsecured non-convertible bonds

3.10 PM Tata Comm shares gain over 16%

Tata Communications share price gained 7.19% at opening bell and later rose 16.2% touched an intraday high of Rs 384.9 (16.21%) as the company board approved raising up to Rs 650 cr via NCDs

3.00 PM: ACC shares climb over 8%

ACC shares opened with a gain of 2.91% today and later touched an intraday high of Rs 1,162.75, rising 8.88% after the government allowed select construction activities

2.55 PM: Titan shares fall flat

Titan shares after rising 2.5% in early trade erased gains and fell to day's low at Rs 951 after eports that ace investor Rakesh Jhunjhunwala has cut more than 1% stake in Titan during Q4.

Rakesh Jhunjhunwala, wife Rekha sold 1 crore Titan Company shares in March quarter

2.45 PM: Rupee ends at day's low

Rupee ended at day's low at 76.45 per dollar as against the previous closing value of 76.27 per US dollar.

2.35 PM: Brent crude drops over 4%

Crude oil benchamrk, Brent crude futures failed to hold minor gains and later fell 4.2% to 28.36 per barrel, as hopes of supply cut helping surge in prices were faded over the lack of demand for the comodity over lockdown times.

2.25 PM: European indices open lower

European markets opened in red, with FTSE, DAX and CAC falling 1.8% each. Where Wall Street indices ended strongly bullish in overnight trade, Asian counterparts as well as European indices were falling over 1%. SGX Nfty also fell 2.2% to 8,995 mark. According to experts, prevailing uncertain market conditions amid the rising cases of the virus and extension of the lockdown period have caused volatility and led to the downfall of broader markets on a global scale.

2.20 PM: Dalmia Bharat Sugar rises almost 5%

Shares of Dalmia Bharat Sugar opened with a gain of 4.54% today and later climbed 4.95% to an intraday high of Rs 64.7 on BSE after the company said it has started manufacturing Hand Sanitizers at its Distillery units in Jawaharpur and Nigohi, Uttar Pradesh and Kolhapur unit in Maharashtra.

2.15 PM: Market erases gains to turn red

Benchmarks Sensex and Nifty erased early gains and turned bearish by the afternoon session on Wednesday, in line with bullish global trend. Meanwhile, PM Modi announced lockdown extension till May 3rd, 2020, over the rising coronavirus cases in the nation. BSE Sensex traded 150 points lower at 30,595 and NSE Nifty 50 fell 37 points lower to 8,956. Sectorally, gains in realty, FMCG, IT were capped by losses in banking indices.

Traders said investors have already factored in the chances of extension and the domestic market will continue taking cues from worldwide trend. Moreover, concerns over the rise in Covid-19 cases across the nation and worldwide kept domestic investors cautious. Earlier domestic amrkets rose on hopes of decisionmakers lifting some curbs to help millions hit by coronavirus lockdowns

2.10 PM: Apollo Tyres rises almost 5%

Apollo Tyres share price opened with a gain of 2.5% today and later climbed 4.54% to an intraday high of Rs 89.85 on BSE after the announced board meet on April 17, 2020, to consider, inter-alia, the issue of non-convertible debentures (ncds) through private placement.

2.00 PM: M&M share price rises almost 10%

Mahindra & Mahindra shares touched an intraday high of Rs 168.45 rising 9.24% on BSE after the company announced that India Ratings and Research (Ind-Ra) has affirmed its long-term issuer rating at 'INDAAA'and kept the outlook stable.

1.50 PM: DCM Foods rises 20%

DFM Foods shares opened with a gain of 9.97% today and later rose almost 20% to an intraday high of Rs 228.05 on BSE after the company announced that it has resumed partial operations at its Greater Noida Plant/Factory (U.P)

1.40 PM: Market Update

Benchmarks Sensex and Nifty erased gains by the afternoon session on Wednesday, in line with bullish global trend. Meanwhile, PM Modi announced lockdown extension till May 3rd, 2020, over the rising coronavirus cases in the nation. BSE Sensex traded 400 points higher at 31,097 and NSE Nifty 50 climbed to 9,135, up 140 points.

Is this the best time to invest in Index Funds?

1.30 PM: Future Retail climbs 5%

Future Retail shares climbed 5% to an intraday high of Rs 73.5 after CNBC reported that company's 900 outlets are operational for the grocery part of the business. Non-essentials are seeing a bigger challenge. The filing added that the company expects e-Commerce operations of non-essential products to begin post April 20, 2020.

1.25 PM: Cipla shares rise to new 52-week high

Cipla shares opened with a gain of 2.58% today and later touched a new 52-week high of Rs 614.05, rising 3.6% on BSE.

Cipla's subsidiary Startup Cipla Health, announced its partnership with Swiggy, Zomato and Dunzo for home deliveries of over-the-counter wellness products in the wake of the nationwide lockdown.

1.15 PM : Metals stocks gaining in trade

In today's bullish session, metal stocks were on a rise. Tata Steel, JSW Steel, Vedanta were among the top gainers today rising almost 4% each, while Nifty metal as rising 3.65%.

1.10 PM: Jindal Steel Power shares rise over 4% on bagging order

JSPL shares rose to an intraday high of Rs 95.7, rising 4.36% as against the previous closing price of Rs 91.70 on BSE. This was on back of company announcing that it has bagged an order worth Rs 50 cr to supply 12,000 tonnes of rail blooms to France.

1.00 PM: Fertilizers stocks surge in trade

Fertiliser stocks were surging on Wedmesday's trade after government issues guidelines allowing agricultural activities during lockdown

FACT was up 17%, while UPL gained 15%, RCF 14%, and 11% gain in Chambal Fertilizers and Deepak Fertilizers.

Coronavirus lockdown 2.0: All agricultural activities to remain fully functional, says govt

12.55 PM: All sectors in green

Sectorally, all indices were trading in green, with FMCG, metal rising over 3.5% each, followed by 2.5% rise in realty, IT and pharma stocks. Banking indices also rose over 1.5% each.

12.45 PM: March inflation numbers

The annual rate of inflation, based on monthly WPI, stood at 1.00% (provisional) for the month of March,2020 (over March,2019) as compared to 2.26% (provisional) for the previous month.

Wholesale price inflation eases to 1% in March

12.30 PM: Rupee pares most gains against dollar

Rupee pared most gains from early morning trade and traded 4 paise higher at 76.23 per US dollar as the American currency rose globally. The dollar index, which gauges the greenback's strength against the basket of six currencies was trading 0.05 per cent higher at 98.93.

Home Ministry issues guidelines on extension

12:10 PM

The Home Ministry on Wednesday issued guidelines for lockdown 2.0 allowing certain sectors to function from April 20 in order to ease public hardship in the wake of COVID-19 outbreak. Meanwhile, the country saw a new bout of migrant crisis following PM Modi's announcement of a 19-day lockdown extension till May 3 in the wake of coronavirus outbreak.

Coronavirus India Lockdown Live Updates: Govt guidelines bar all public activities including bus, metro, malls

Check BusinessToday.In tracker to check the latest number of state-wise coronavirus cases

INDIA CORONAVIRUS TRACKER: BusinessToday.In brings you a daily tracker as coronavirus cases continue to spread. Here is the state-wise data on total cases, fatalities and recoveries in one comprehensive graphic

UPL climbs 15%

11: 45 AM

UPL was the top gainer on Nifty, rising 15% after the company said it continues its operations withits plants running to meet the challenges of providing stable and reliable service to farmers around the world and does not anticipate any significant challenges meeting customer demand.

Rupee rises 25 paise to 76.02 against US dollar

11: 30 AM

Indian Rupee, the currency benchmark opened at 76.07 per dollar at the interbank foreign exchange on Wednesday and later gained further ground, rising 25 paise higher to 76.02 against the US dollar.

Gold outlook

11: 20 AM

MCX gold today rose to another all-time high of 46,730 and later rose 0.88% higher or 405 points higher to 46,675 per 10 gm.

Experssing his views over MCX gold rising to record highs, Anuj Gupta-DVP-Commodities & Currencies Research, Angel Broking said," Today Gold touched the life time high of 46676 on MCX June contract and spot gold is trading around $ 1720 which is 8 year high. Safe heaven demand and weakness in Dollar supports the Gold prices."

He added," Although the lockdown situation also increased the demand of investment in safe heaven assest class product. Low interest rate and global growth forecast cut down by IMF provide extra fuel to Gold prices. We are expecting this rally may continue and Gold may test 49000 to 50000 on MCX and in international market it may test $1780 to $1800 soon."

Gold price seen clocking more gains after yellow metal surges to record high

L&T climbs over 5%

11:00 AM

L&T share price was among the top gainers on Wednesday, rising up to 5.31% to Rs 911 compared to the previous close of Rs 865 on BSE.

Larsen & Toubro (L&T) said its arm L&T Construction has won two contracts to build Regional Rapid Transit System (RRTS) infrastructure from National Capital Region Transport Corporation (NCRTC) in Uttar Pradesh. Value of these projects lies between Rs 1,000 to Rs 2,500 crore, as per the filing.

L&T share price rises over 5% as construction arm bags two infra projects in Uttar Pradesh

Why market is rising today

10: 50 AM

Traders have also already factored in the chances of extension and the domestic market will continue taking cues from worldwide trend.

Wall Street indices closed with major gains over Trump announcing lockdown ease at some states. European markets closed higher after some of the EU countries started looking at exit strategies as new cases and deaths were on a decline.

SGX Nifty also traded 0.50% higher at 9,251.

As per Geojit Financial technical,'Nifty is likely to head into the 9220-9470 region, having survived the day without unsettling the support region. The play from here on would be to capture leaps to 10200 with an eye on 8900. Favored view is that at least a few of such leaps or accompanying corrections could now occur overnight and volatility is likely to step up during the day.'

Markets sentiments were optimistic after the government notified Mauritius as an "eligible country", enabling its investment entities to register as Category-I foreign portfolio investors (FPIs) with lower KYC requirements.

Technical upside: 9500/10000 and downside: 7340/6400

RIL climbs almost 4%

10: 40 AM

Reliance Industries' share price climbed to the intraday high of Rs 1,235.95, rising 3.93% against the last closing price of Rs 1,189.25 on BSE. This comes after the company said it will raise Rs 9,000 crore through an NCD sale this week to refinance the existing high-cost rupee debt.

Market updates

10: 35 AM

Where Wall Street indices ended strongly bullish in overnight trade, Asian counterparts were trading in red. As per traders, stock-specific action pulled the market higher. Moreover, concerns over the rise in Covid-19 cases across the nation and an extension of the lockdown till May 3, 2020 kept domestic investors cautious.

FII/ DII action on Monday

10: 30 AM

On a net basis, FIIs sold Rs 1,243.7 cr worth of equities and DIIs also offloaded Rs 1,096.9 cr in equities on Monday

Sensex pack gainers/losers

10: 20 AM

Sun Pharma, L&T, HUL, Axis Bank, UltraTech Cement, ICICI Bank among the top gainers in the Sensex pack, while ONGC, Maruti, Kotak Bank and Titan were the laggards.

Biocon shares gain over 3%

10: 15 AM

Biocon shares opened with a gain of 3.47% today and later touched an intraday high of Rs 352.65, rising 3.6% on BSE today. This comes after the company in collaboration with Mylan N.V. announced the launch of Fulphila, a biosimilar to Neulasta (pegfilgrastim) in Australia. Fulphila is approved by the Therapeutic Goods Administration for the treatment of cancer patients following chemotherapy, to decrease the duration of severe neutropenia and so reduce the incidence of infections, as manifested by febrile neutropenia.

Global markets

10:00 AM

Asian markets mostly lower ahead of key economic data and corporate earnings that will show the extent to which the coronavirus has hurt the global economy.

US stocks closed sharply higher, lifted by growing expectations that the worst of the human toll of the COVID-19 pandemic may have passed. Trump said he will make some 'important announcements' in the next few days regarding state guidelines on reopening the U.S. economy. However, US Futures (Dow Jones) traded at 23,719, down 161 points or 0.67%.

Hindalco among top gainers

9: 50 AM

Hindalco shares opened with a gain of 4.79% and later touched an intraday high of Rs 123.95, rising 8.92% on BSE after the company announced closure of $2.8 billion ( Rs 21,295 crores) worth deal to acquire Aleris by its wholly owned subsidiary Novelis Inc.

Hindalco share price rises 9% on $2.8 billion deal to acquire US-based Aleris

MCX gold at all time high

9: 30 AM

MCX gold today rose to another all-time high of 46,730 and later rose 0.88% higher or 405 points higher to 46,675 per 10 gm.

The panic sentiment in financial markets due to the pandemic since early 2020 has pushed the price of yellow metal. Since the mid-December lows of $1,350, gold prices have almost risen 30%, when China was slowly becoming a hotspot for coronavirus cases. With the country entering the 22nd day of a nationwide lockdown to curb the spread of the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic, market experts believe that the demand outlook for the precious metal looks quite strong.

Gold price seen clocking more gains after yellow metal surges to record high

Opening Bell

9: 20 AM

Dalal Street opened higher on Wednesday, as investors took positive cues from the extension of lockdown amid the rising coronavirus cases in the country. Sensex opened 590 points higher at 31,268 and Nifty climbed to 9,150 level, up 150 points.

Global cues

9: 10 AM

Stocks in Wall Street jumped over optimism of easing lockdown from the outbreak overshadowing worries of earnings reports. The Dow Jones Industrial Average rose 2.39%, the S&P 500 gained 3.06% and the Nasdaq Composite added 3.95%.

In Asian, warnings of the worst global recession since the 1930s kept investors sentiments checked even as some countries tried to re-open for business.

With investors concerned globally over the mounting Covid-19 cases, key equity indices in Asian counterparts were trading mixed today, with Nikkei, Hang Seng, SGX Nifty and Shanghai trading marginally lower, while Taiwan and Kospi rose 1%.

Coronavirus effect: US stocks jump as hopes of relaxing lockdown offset bad earnings

Pre open session today

9: 05 AM

Benchmarks Sensex and Nifty pre-opened bullish on Wednesday, amid mixed global cues. Sensex was rising 600 points higher to 31, 200 mark and Nifty climbed to 9,200 level, up 200 points in pre-open trade. In the meanwhile SGX Nifty Futures traded flat, up 4 points at 9,206 mark on Singaporean Exchange.

SGX Nifty turns flat

8: 50 AM

SGX Nifty Futures on Singaporean Exchange, that fell marginally in ear/y trade recovered to trade flat with positive bias.

Lockdown extension

8: 45 AM

Domestic sentiments were also negative with PM Narendra Modi announcing the extension of the virus-induced-lockdown till May 3rd, 2020, further damaging economic activity, in a move to curb the spread of the virus. With lockdown extended, DGCA has also announced continued suspension of all domestic and international airlines' operations till 11:59 pm of May 3, 2020. Further, all passenger train services on Indian Railways shall remain cancelled as well.

Barclays revises GDP

8: 40 AM

Barclays has revised their India GDP growth forecast further to 0.0% for CY2020 from 2.5% earlier, and to 0.8% for FY20-21 from 3.5% earlier.

Currency closing on Monday

8: 35 AM

Rupee, the local unit ended almost flat, gaining 2 paise to 76.27 per dollar

Global Cues

8: 30 AM

With investors concerned globally over the mounting Covid-19 cases, key equity indices in Asian counterparts were trading mixed today, with Nikkei, Hang Seng, SGX Nifty and Shanghai trading marginally lower, while Taiwan and Kospi rose 1%

Sensex falls 469 points, Nifty ends below 9K amid weak global cues; pharma stocks shine

SGX Nifty trades marginally lower

8: 15 AM

SGX Nifty traded 14 points lower at 9,188 level, indicating a muted start in domestic grounds today.

Coronavirus toll

8: 20 AM

There 19.98 lakh confirmed cases worldwide and almost 1.26 lakh deaths from the coronavirus COVID-19 outbreak. India has recorded a total of 11,487 cases, 384 deaths and 1,359 recoveries.

Stocks to watch today on April 15

8: 10 AM

NTPC, DCB Bank, Biocon, Apollo Tyres among others are the top stocks to watch out for in Wednesday's trading session

Stocks in news: NTPC, DCB Bank, Biocon, Apollo Tyres and more

MCX to trade in revised hours

8: 05 AM

As the press release by MCX, SEBI has decided to continue with the restricted trading hours (till 5PM) for all commodities until further notice

Last Close

8: 00 AM

On Monday, Sensex closed 469 points lower at 30,690 and Nifty lost 118 points to 8,993. Sensex and Nifty have fallen 9.82% in the last one month and 26% since the start of the year. Contrary to this, the indices have gained over 11% in last week's trade.

Share Market Update: Sensex ends 469 points lower, Nifty at 8,993; Bajaj Finance, Zee Ent, Titan top losers
What can economic history teach us about the lockdown?

The coronavirus pandemic is, of course, first and foremost a social crisis. It is testing the limits of the NHS, bringing out the best in our doctors, nurses and carers, and many others on whom we all rely.

But it is also a huge challenge for policy makers who are trying to protect businesses, jobs and incomes, so that the economy can quickly reboot once the lockdown is lifted.

Long-term benefits: History teaches us that vicious diseases cannot be allowed to run unchecked

And while the saving of lives is rightly the priority, the extent and duration of the economic disruption could also have significant impacts on our health.

Fortunately, history provides a few pointers. Perhaps the least surprising conclusion is that vicious diseases cannot be allowed to run unchecked.

One particularly grim study of the longer-term economic consequences of 15 pandemics, all the way back to the Black Death in the 14th century, found that the fallout persisted for as long as 40 years.

More positively, recent history shows that brief falls in economic activity, even large ones, do not necessarily lead to a deterioration in health outcomes.

US research suggests a temporary downturn is more often associated with a small improvement in overall mortality rates, due to indirect benefits such as a fewer traffic accidents.

Together, these studies suggest that it might be worth taking a large hit to the economy in the short term in order to get on top of coronavirus.

That conclusion is supported by a recent analysis (by economists Sergio Correia, Stephan Luck, and Emil Verner) of how US cities responded to the Spanish flu pandemic of 1918.

As you might expect, the cities that suffered the most deaths also saw a sharp and persistent fall in economic activity.

But, importantly, this study also looked at the impact of the sort of restrictions that the Government is imposing today, such as banning public gatherings, and closing schools, churches, shops and restaurants.

The researchers found US cities where authorities intervened earlier and more aggressively did better in terms of mortality, without doing any worse in terms of the impact on economic activity. If anything, their economies grew faster than others when the pandemic was over.

Obviously, none of these studies are exact matches for the current crisis. Economies may now be more vulnerable to some types of shock, for example, because of fragile 'just-in-time' supply chains and less secure forms of employment.

We are also more aware of some potential costs of social isolation, such as mental health problems or an increase in domestic violence.

Covid-19 itself does not appear to be as severe as the Spanish flu and is certainly less harmful than the Black Death, or the plagues of the 16th and 17th centuries. Mortality rates are also much lower than some more recent coronavirus outbreaks  MERS, in 2012, and SARS, in 2002.

Nonetheless, the evidence is refuting complacent assumptions made by armchair pundits  such as that Covid-19 might not be much worse than 'seasonal flu', or that it would 'only' be a serious risk for older people and those with existing health problems.

The prospect of the NHS being overwhelmed with coronavirus patients is something that should worry us all.

On the other hand, there are growing concerns that the lockdown is discouraging people from seeking care for other conditions. There are, therefore, no easy answers.

Experts, whether in healthcare or economics, have to make a balanced assessment of all the risks and uncertainties, and there are many. But history at least suggests that the lockdown should help save lives and reduce the long-term economic costs.

Julian Jessop is an independent economist
President Donald Trump's inaccurate assertion that he has "total" authority to reopen a nation shuttered by the coronavirus is igniting a fresh challenge from governors scrambling to manage their states and highlighting a Republican Party reluctant to defy a president who has relished pushing the boundaries of executive power.

The president's claim, first conveyed in a tweet Monday morning and underscored at a White House news conference and subsequent social media posts, caught his aides off guard and prompted them to study whether Trump would have such authority in a time of emergency like the ongoing pandemic.

Republicans were largely tepid in their criticism of Trump's expansive views on his power, which he has wielded throughout his presidency as he circumvented the legislative branch on matters of spending and subpoenas, while enjoying decisions in which he maintained universal authority such as issuing pardons. Trump has also issued a multitude of executive orders while relying heavily on myriad acting administration officials rather than subjecting them to the Senate confirmation process.

At a White House briefing late Tuesday, Trump offered conflicting statements about which entity had the authority to reopen, seeming to backtrack from his claim Monday but at the same time insisting the federal government would have the final say.

"The governors are responsible. They have to take charge," said Trump, who added that some states want to reopen now and probably can before May 1, while others aren't there yet. He said that if a state with many cases tries to reopen early, the federal government might step in.

"If we disagree with it, we're not going to let it open," he said, before adding, "We're there to help. But we're also there to be critics."

Earlier in the day, Trump's comments on reopening the nation were challenged by his presumptive Democratic rival this fall, former vice president Joe Biden, and also by prominent governors overseeing the public health crisis in their states such as New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who in his daily news conference Tuesday skewered at length Trump's position as wildly off-base from the Constitution.

Cuomo said the president's claim of total authority is "not an accurate statement," because the basic principle of federalism is enshrined in the Constitution, in which powers not given to the federal government remain with the states.

"The statement that he has total authority over the states and the nation cannot go uncorrected," Cuomo said. "There are many things that you can debate in the Constitution because they're ambiguous. This is not ambiguous."

Later Tuesday in his own remarks, California Gov. Gavin Newsom, a Democrat, was less pointed toward Trump but nonetheless unequivocal, tweeting: "When it comes to reopening, SCIENCE - not politics - must be California's guide." Newsom outlined six factors he will consider in doing so, including protecting communities from the spread of the virus and ensuring that hospitals could handle any surge in cases.

The fresh power struggle between the federal government and state officials came as the toll of the pandemic continued to grow, with more than 25,000 people dead from the virus in the United States and more than 600,000 confirmed to be infected.

The International Monetary Fund said Tuesday that the pandemic is causing the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression of the 1930s. It is also inflicting acute pain in the medical sector, which continues to struggle with supplies and personnel becoming sick, with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention saying Tuesday that 9,000 health care workers have tested positive.

In another assertion of authority, Trump said he would halt funding to World Health Organization while a review was conducted. He has criticized the organization for its slow response in the early days of the outbreak, but by Jan. 30, the organization declared a global health emergency, after which the president continued to play down the outbreak and compared it with seasonal flu.

Governors also began outlining their strategy for reopening their states in the coming weeks and months, while a consortium of seven states on the East Coast continued a plan to explore how and when to lift restrictions in their geographically aligned states.

Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine, a Republican, was among the state leaders who made clear Tuesday that the facts on the ground must dictate when the current restrictions can begin to ease.

"This monster is still going to be with us at least until we get a vaccine," DeWine, who has said his state has had a good working relationship with federal officials so far, said at a Tuesday news conference. "It's not going away, and that's the sad news. . . . We are 12-18 months away from this going away. We're going to have to live with it."

Two White House officials said there was no broader planning for Trump's comments that he had "total" authority and that they were both surprised by his tweets to that effect Monday. There was no legal underpinning for the remarks in advance, said the officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to talk frankly, and "it is widely viewed with skepticism in the building that we should be doing this."

The White House Counsel's Office is studying what authority the president actually does have during a national emergency, according to the officials. But the operating plan in the White House is not to try to force any state to reopen, although one senior White House official said they had been in contact with some states - such as Texas, Mississippi and Tennessee - about reopening sooner rather than later.

"I am almost positive James Madison fell off a cloud somewhere today when Trump said that," said Dan Eberhart, a Republican donor. "The founders of the republic stitched together a complicated game of chess to ensure our president was a very weak king who could be simultaneously slowed down by the legislature, judiciary and federalism. His authority is far from total."

Another prominent GOP donor, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss private deliberations, said there was an effort "to talk him into a better place."

One official said Trump is frustrated that the governors are getting so much credit and no blame while he gets all the blame and none of the credit. He particularly complains about Cuomo, this official said.

"Cuomo's been calling daily, even hourly, begging for everything, most of which should have been the state's responsibility, such as new hospitals, beds, ventilators, etc.," Trump tweeted earlier Tuesday. "I got it all done for him, and everyone else, and now he seems to want Independence! That won't happen!"

Trump has said repeatedly that the federal government is merely a backup to the states and that the onus is on the governors to deal with the pandemic.

Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., said in a recent interview that "at the end of the day, it will be the governors that make these decisions."

One Republican ally close to the president said Trump did not initially want to be associated with decisions to close down the government because "closing is bad news, and opening is good news." And he spoke with governors such as Florida's Ron DeSantis, a Republican, who were skeptical, said this person, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private conversations.

Trump was happy to accept the argument from some advisers that he should invoke federalism, and the president repeatedly emphasized states' rights when questioned by reporters in recent weeks why he was not instituting a national stay-at-home order.

But Trump sees a political triumph in reopening the economy and wants credit for it, this person said.

In a tweet Monday, Biden said that he is "not running for office to be King of America."

"I respect the Constitution," Biden said. "I've read the Constitution. I've sworn an oath to it many times. I respect the great job so many of this country's governors - Democratic and Republican - are doing under these horrific circumstances."

Within the GOP, Trump's biggest challenge to his exertion of executive power came last year, when a dozen GOP senators voted to reject an emergency declaration the president issued to take taxpayer dollars from the military and other accounts for a border wall that Congress had denied.

Of that dozen, two - Sens. Rand Paul of Kentucky and Marco Rubio of Florida - issued comments Tuesday, both stressing that states should retain the power to regulate their own activities. Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, said in a statement: "I respect the authorities of the office of the presidency. I also recognize that it will take all of us - elected leaders and citizens - to effectively stop the spread of this virus."

A spokeswoman for Sen. Rob Portman, R-Ohio, pointed to his remarks from a Fox Business interview earlier Tuesday in which he said the matter was not just up to elected officials "deciding when it's time and coming up with some arbitrary deadline," but the science and whether people feel safe leaving their homes.

Aides to two others - Utah Sens. Mitt Romney and Mike Lee - said the senators would have no response.

None of the other seven responded to requests for comment. They were Sens. Lamar Alexander of Tennessee, Roy Blunt of Missouri, Susan Collins of Maine, Jerry Moran of Kansas, Patrick Toomey of Pennsylvania and Roger Wicker of Mississippi.

At least two other prominent elected GOP officials, past and present - Rep. Liz Cheney, R-Wyo., the third-ranking leader among House Republicans, and Republican-turned independent Rep. Justin Amash of Michigan - challenged Trump's notion.

Cheney, whose father, Richard Cheney, had pushed for broad executive authority as vice president in George W. Bush's administration, cited the text of the 10th Amendment in a tweet: "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people."

But other GOP lawmakers questioned about Trump's bold claim, an assertion refuted by constitutional experts, were reluctant to challenge the president.

Rep. Steve Scalise, R-La., the No. 2 House Republican, argued in a Fox News interview Tuesday that states had largely taken their cue from Trump and the federal government over the past two months, particularly when it comes to social distancing guidelines.

"When the president said that, you saw almost every governor in the country take that cue and say, 'OK, we're going to institute a new set of policies,' " Scalise said. "And so, while the president hasn't said every state has to do this, he's been setting the guidance using the experts from CDC and other agencies, and then you see states following suit."

A spokesman for Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan, a Republican, on Tuesday declined to comment beyond the governor's remarks to CNN on Monday in which he said governors were best positioned to make the ultimate decision on when their states can safely resume everyday activities.

"It's not my understanding of the Constitution," Hogan said in the CNN interview of Trump's interpretation of his own powers.

- - -

The Washington Post's Devlin Barrett, Ovetta Wiggins, Felicia Sonmez, Mike DeBonis, Samantha Pell and Brittany Shammas contributed to this report.
TriMet last month quietly shifted its seven on-the-ground customer service officers to new temporary roles working with the Meals on Wheels People to distribute food, organize volunteers and help prepare food boxes.

The employees finished their training and started making the deliveries in TriMet uniforms and while driving the transit agencys vehicles last week.

Ridership across the tri-county transit system is down 69% from the levels seen in February, when the Portland area had its first known case of the novel coronavirus. With fewer riders on the system, theres less need for customer service staffers to help answer questions and assist riders in person.

Krista Cordova, a labor relations coordinator with the Amalgamated Transit Union Local 757, said those customer service representatives faced potential layoffs without TriMets actions to keep them employed.

This group is an incredible asset to TriMet and our ridership, and I know they are really happy that theyve been able to continue being the face of TriMet to the community during this difficult time, she said in an email. The union is really proud of the work they are doing.

In a news release and video published Friday, TriMet publicized the initiative, saying the employees are helping deliver food to kids, families and seniors in need across the Portland area during the pandemic.

Diverting those employees to new jobs with the charity means those staffers can keep their work hours. In a statement, TriMet acknowledged they could otherwise see reduced hours because of the declining ridership and social distancing requirements.

Our response to COVID-19 requires creativity at every level, TriMet General Manager Doug Kelsey said in a statement. As an agency, we pride ourselves on providing excellent customer service. Helping others is what these members of our team do every day. They are well-suited to make this transition and serve a critical need during these unprecedented times.

Meals on Wheels typically relies on unpaid volunteers to deliver food to its seniors and school kids and their families who qualify for its Meals 4 Kids program.

The requests for meals have skyrocketed in the last month, CEO Suzanne Washington said in a statement. We are very grateful to corporate partners, like TriMet, who have stepped up to provide us with volunteers in both our Central Kitchen and to help deliver meals. Their service has allowed us to continue to meet the need during the novel coronavirus pandemic.

TriMet still has customer service employees working in a call center and on social media issues.

TriMet is covering its employees wages during this period and has said it would reevaluate the arrangement after 30 days.

-- Andrew Theen; atheen@oregonian.com; 503-294-4026; @andrewtheen

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The Chhattisgarh government has



decided to adopt "pool testing" technique to expedite the process of COVID-19 testing and cover more ground, a health official said on Wednesday.

As many as 33 persons have tested positive for coronavirus in Chhattisgarh, of which 13 have recovered from the infection.

Taking to Twitter, state Health Minister T S Singh Deo said, "In order to effectively use the extended lockdown period, I have initiated measures to start pool testing, in at least one of our labs, at the earliest. This would help us in increasing Covid-19 testing by manifolds."



Scientists from the state have sought detailed technical guidelines from Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) to undertake "pool testing" for COVID-19, secretary of the health department Niharika Barik Singh said.

"Under the pool testing method, generally (swab) samples from least affected areas are pooled together and tested. If the result of a collection of samples comes out negative, then all samples in that group are considered negative," she said.

However, if the result of the collection was found to be positive, then each sample from the group is tested individually to confirm which one was positive for the virus, Singh said.

"Our scientists have sought detailed technical guidelines from the ICMR and as soon as it reverts, we will start the process in a day or two," she added.

The method will not only reduce the number of kits used for testing, but it will also help the authorities to cover more ground in a short span of time, she said.

According to health officials, of the 4,821 samples tested in the state so far, only 33 were found to be positive, while 4,319 came out negative and reports of 469 were awaited.

Moreover, of the 33 COVID-19 patients, 13 were cured following treatment, they said.

At present, samples are being tested at AIIMS Raipur, Pt Jawahar Lal Nehru Memorial Medical College in Raipur and Jagdalpur Medical College in Bastar.

As many as 75,837 people, most of them with history of travel abroad or to affected states, were under home quarantine, they said.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
TAMPA, Fla., April 15, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- Today, national nonprofit Wreaths Across America announces it will host the second of its Stem to Stone Race Tour events in Tampa, Florida. The 5K race event will be held VIRTUALLY on Saturday, April 25. The series, which is in partnership with event management and timing company CompetitorME, was announced earlier this year and features eight 5K road races throughout the year. Due to COVID-19, and the CDC's recommendation for large gatherings, this race has been moved to a VIRTUAL event.

Registration for virtual participation will be open until Sunday, April 19 at 11:59 pm EDT. To register, please visit www.competitorme.com/wreaths-across-america or click here .

"The goal of this race series is to build community awareness and understanding of the organization's yearlong mission to Remember, Honor, Teach," said Karen Worcester, executive director, Wreaths Across America. "However, in light of the current health crisis, we feel these races have taken on even more meaning by providing the opportunity for people to safely participate in something healthy and fun, while supporting and giving back in their own community during this uncertain time."

Each individual virtual race registration sponsors a fresh balsam veteran's wreath that will be placed on the headstone of an American hero on December 19, 2020, as part of National Wreaths Across America Day. During check out, registrants can designate the Sponsorship Group or participating Wreaths Across America Location they want their sponsored wreath allocated to. There are nearly 50 participating locations in Florida state, to find a cemetery near you to support click here .

Virtual participants will receive personalized racing bibs and commemorative finisher medallions, with event t-shirts being provided to the first 200 people to register, via the mail before race day!

About Wreaths Across America

Wreaths Across America is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization founded to continue and expand the annual wreath-laying ceremony at Arlington National Cemetery begun by Maine businessman Morrill Worcester in 1992. The organization's mission  Remember, Honor, Teach  is carried out in part each year by coordinating wreath-laying ceremonies in December at Arlington, as well as at thousands of veterans' cemeteries and other locations in all 50 states and beyond.

For more information or to sponsor a wreath please visit www.wreathsacrossamerica.org

About CompetitorME

CompetitorME is a proud, Maine-owned event management and timing company with clients in New England. We are about inspiring athletes and connecting communities. It is our pleasure to work with clients to direct safe, fun, and fair events for all ages, with a focus on creating a memorable participant experience. Our portfolio of events has expanded to include those honoring and remembering our Nation's Active Duty Servicemembers, Veterans, or Nation's Fallen Heroes and their Gold Star Families. The CompetitorME team also serves on a committee for the Maine Gold Star Family Memorial to be built in Augusta, Maine.

For more information please visit www.competitorme.com

Press contact:

Amber Caron

Wreaths Across America

(207) 513-6457

[email protected]

SOURCE Wreaths Across America

Related Links

http://www.WreathsAcrossAmerica.org


LONDON (Reuters) - Britains banks have enough funds to keep lending to the economy even under the deep recession scenario outlined by a government watchdog, Bank of England Deputy Governor Sam Woods said on Wednesday.

The BoE has allowed banks to tap 23 billion pounds ($29 billion) of their capital buffers to support up to 190 billion pounds of lending, well above a net lending to companies of 16 billion pounds last year, Woods said.

We go into this with a well capitalised banking sector, Woods told a meeting of parliaments Treasury Select Committee.

It was not at all obvious that the scenario outlined by the Office for Budget Responsibility on Tuesday was worse overall for banks than last years BoE stress test for lenders, Woods said.

The OBR said Britains economy could shrink 35% during the three months to June due to coronavirus shutdowns, then bounce back sharply afterwards, giving an overall economic hit for the year of about 13% - still the largest in more than 300 years.

Banks have ample capacity from a capital point of view, Woods said.

A huge support package from the state also reduces the hit on the banking system, Woods said.

Sarah Breeden, executive director for bank supervision at the BoE, said Britains biggest companies have drawn tens of billions of pounds on credit lines from their banks, but they have yet to spend it.

In the near term, for largest companies that risk of default does not feel very immediate, Breeden said. The shock hasnt yet hit in scale, she said.

Britains banks are offering loans under a government-backed scheme to help businesses stay afloat during the national lockdown, but it is unclear if all of the companies will survive.

The capital treatment for these loans is strong enough to cover the losses that should arise in the normal way from making loans of this kind, Woods said.

Lawmakers also sought reassurances that banks were not profiting from the crisis.

I find it very hard to believe that the banks will profit from this crisis, I think its a question of how significant will the losses be, Stephen Jones, chief executive of UK Finance, a trade body for banks, told the lawmakers.

INSURANCE HIT

Britains insurers have taken a hit from large falls in financial markets which they have broadly weathered quite well.

The hit has left insurers with a coverage ratio, a measure of ability to service debt and obligations, of 130-160%, down by up to 20 percentage points, Woods said.

The BoE is now checking whether insurers have enough capital to cover policy claims for disrupted travel and interrupted business.

We think we have that covered in capital requirements and provisions, but you never know until a thing flows through completely, Woods said.

The BoE is also checking on the painful impact of downgrades to bonds held by insurers to make sure these are covered, Woods added.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel addresses a press conference on German government's measures to avoid further spread of the novel coronavirus COVID-19, on April 15, 2020

German Chancellor Angela Merkel on Wednesday announced first steps in undoing coronavirus restrictions that have plunged the economy into a recession, with most shops allowed to open although schools must stay closed until May 4.

Shops up to 800 square metres (8,600 feet) are allowed to reopen once they have "plans to maintain hygiene", Merkel told reporters in Berlin, as Germany sees "fragile intermediate success" in slowing the spread of COVID-19.

"We have to proceed with extreme caution," she said following her afternoon meeting with the heads of Germany's 16 states.

Rules will therefore remain in force preventing more than two people from gathering in public, other than family groups who live together.

Schools will gradually be reopened with priority given to pupils about to take leaving examinations.

Meanwhile, a ban on large public events will be upheld until August 31 to prevent possible mass transmissions of the virus.

And the government urged people to wear face masks when out shopping or on public transport, but stopped short of imposing a requirement like neighbouring Austria.

Reviews of the looser measures with an eye on infection rates would follow every two or three weeks, said Merkel.

Questioned on the limitations on which shops can open, she said "we have to be careful that we don't completely re-enable public activity in city centres, because then chains of infection will arise".

"I want to thank citizens who have changed their lives, given up on social contacts, who have limited themselves, very warmly.

"Not because they wanted to do the government a favour, but because they wanted to help their fellow people. That's something very strong and important our country is experiencing."

Grip of recession

Like other countries around the world, Germany has seen a lively debate since coronavirus lockdowns began in mid-March over lifting them again.

People walk past a graffito reading: "Covid(19) knows no borders, be like Covid" in Berlin

Pressure has grown from business to provide a clear plan.

"Companies need to know soon what steps will lead to social and economic life being restarted," the powerful BDI industry federation said ahead of Wednesday's decisions.

Earlier Wednesday, the economy ministry said Europe's powerhouse had plunged into a recession set to last until the middle of the year.

"Falling global demand, interruption of supply chains, changes in consumers' behaviour and uncertainty among investors" had already made themselves felt, the economy ministry said.

The economic blow from the virus fell just as Germany was beginning to recover from a year marked by the impact of trade wars and Brexit fears.

Long road to recovery

"Even if the first protective measures can be loosened somewhat (after April), growth will remain very muted and only revive bit by bit," the economy ministry forecast.

To cushion some of the blow, Berlin has passed a rescue package totalling 1.1 trillion euros ($1.2 trillion), ranging from guarantees for bank lending to businesses, to a state fund that could buy stakes in stricken companies if necessary.

The federal government also eased access to a scheme that tops up workers' wages if their employer slashes hours.

Berlin estimates that 2.1 million workers will have to fall back on the support, far more than the 1.4 million people who did during the 2008-9 financial crisis.

Meanwhile all eyes are on a European Union heads of government videoconference on April 23 to lay the groundwork for recovery across the bloc.

Finance ministers from the eurozone single currency area agreed 500 billion euros of immediate support last week, but economists and politicians warn more will be needed, especially for the hardest-hit nations such as Spain and Italy.

Many German experts have warned Berlin that the country will not be able to recover if its EU and eurozone neighbours are left crippled in the virus' aftermath.

Explore further Follow the latest news on the coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak

 2020 AFP
The coronavirus lockdown which was supposed to end on April 15 has now been extended to May 3. This has garnered a mixed reaction from the people - while a lot of them are grateful that the Central Government made the smart decision to extend it so that the country could beat the deadly virus, others feel that the government also needs to ease some of the restrictions that the lockdown initially brought - like the sale of alcohol.

There have been several cases of people committing suicide due to the unavailability of alcohol while others are resorting to the grey-market to buy liquor at exorbitant rates. States are undergoing a drastic revenue loss as alcohol brings in a lot of money.

Whiskeypedia

In the wake of all this, liquor companies are requesting the Central authorities to let them sell liquor online. Since everyone is at home and under lockdown, the demand for alcohol has also significantly increased. They are requesting the government to take steps, in order to avoid do away with grey-market sales, which are damaging business for both the state and the companies.

According to a Times of India report, International Spirits & Wines Association of India (ISWAI) and Confederation of Indian Alcoholic Beverage Companies (CIABC) wrote in their separate petitions that, 'Home deliveries should be allowed, especially as it will also help in maintaining social distancing and avoiding crowding at retail shops. Customers may place order online or over phone, along with an ID proof establishing age'.

AFP

Vinod Giri, director-general of CIABC told TOI, The shops should be asked to enroll for home delivery through online applications, and the governments may charge a fee for this exceptional facility that they would allow at this time."



In a letter to Kejriwal, Vinod Giri also pointed out that there was a rise in the sale of illicit and bogus liquor in Delhi, which will lead to health hazards for people and also disrupt the law. There have been reports of Delhi Police and the excise department seizing illicit liquor during the lockdown.

AFP

On the other hand, consumers are also not happy with the fact that the Central government has not acted on this yet. People have taken to social media to express their demand for liquor.

It is completely stupid to ban the sale of liquor for five weeks.

People havent stopped drinking;bootleggers & the black market have taken over.

Govts lose revenue;crime gets a boost



Alcohol Online Sale: Liquor companies seek nod for online, on-call sale https://t.co/vBNQjMtXmF  vir sanghvi (@virsanghvi) April 13, 2020

Dear @narendramodi According to the Food Safety and Standards Authority of India, food, and alcohol are essential commodities and you should not deny that to us, unlike some parts of India liquor is not taboo here, rather its a way of life here in south India. #COVID2019india  Adrika Shivangi (@AdrikaShivangi) April 14, 2020

Declare Alcohol as an essential item and remove all bans before people die after consuming spurious liquor . https://t.co/zciXCwyf42  Naveen Sodem (@nisar_naveen) April 15, 2020





All images used are for representational purposes only.
New Delhi, April 15 : Tablighi Jamaat leader Maulana Mohammad Saad Kandhalvi is increasingly coming under fire from within the Muslim community for the Nizamuddin Markaz fiasco, particularly those who have been infected by coronavirus.

One such person, businessman Tabrez Khan, alleged that the Tablighi leader's conduct in the Markaz episode and thereafter was "careless" and brought a bad name to the Muslims in India.

Tabrez was admitted in the Lok Nayak Jai Prakash Narayan (LNJP) Hospital after he tested positive for coronavirus. His mother, sister and two relatives too tested positive, though all of them are now cured.

"Had Maulana Saad directed all Tablighi followers to come forward to get tested for coronavirus and seek help from health and police authorities, they won't have gone into hiding. Then, there was no need for the police and other authorities to visit mosques to look for the missing Jamaatis," Tabrez remarked.

He held the Maulana responsible for the infamy earned by the Muslims amid the coronavirus pandemic, as also for the anger among a section of Indians towards the community.

Tabrez pointed out that Maulana Saad was the community's influential leader on whose call the Muslims would have taken up mass sanitation or fed the poor, but he preferred to not do so.

"The Maulana should have come forward to appeal to his followers to cooperate with the authorities and to quarantine in case of suspected coronavirus symptoms," he said.

Tabrez said that at a time when the government machinery was busy fighting coronavirus, a large number of civil and police officials were busy tracing Tablighi meeting attendees, taking them to hospitals for testing, and quarantining them.

He said the situation became acute as the Maulana did not step forward to take positive action to save the lives of his followers.
Warning: This story contains graphic content and may be upsetting to some readers.

The night before he died, Derek Soberal went up one storey of his downtown apartment building to visit his mom and dad. Theyd lived one floor apart for nearly a decade, which kept the family close, especially once Soberal started one of his own. Hed frequently pop by, his two small boys in tow.

On this night, Soberal was particularly loving, wrapping his mother in one of his legendary hugs.

He kissed me so much, and said to me Mom, you dont realize how much I love you, Judy Soberal said in an interview Wednesday, crying at the memory. I said Yes, I do, and I love you too, and you dont realize either. And we went back and forth.

The next day, just before 9 a.m. on March 17, Soberal, 40, walked down the street to the Esso gas station at Dundas St. East and Church St. where he sometimes bought coffee. There, he began livestreaming a video on Occupy Canadas Facebook page, an online community he helped establish, before suddenly taking a pump in use by a customer, dousing himself in gasoline, and setting himself ablaze.

It was the beginning of an incident called tragic by Ontarios Special Investigations Unit, the civilian watchdog that has been probing Soberals death after Toronto police became involved, summoned by a report of a man on fire. On Tuesday, the SIU concluded Soberals fatal injuries were self-inflicted, and police played no role in the death.

The SIU did not name Soberal, but he was identified as the deceased man by his family.

A video posted to Youtube shorly after Soberals death appears to show part of the incident as seen from a nearby balcony. In it, a man partially on fire can be seen walking in front of the gas station with his arms outstretched. He then walks back toward the gas station. Sirens can be heard in the distance.

According to the SIU, after police arrived at the gas station, Soberal fled towards a Rabba Fine Foods store on Jarvis St. No longer aflame, he went to the stores deli and began repeatedly stabbing himself in the chest with a knife.

Thirty-five seconds later, Soberal then left the store, where he was confronted by Toronto police officers, two of whom deployed their Tasers. Soberal continued to stagger down the street before collapsing, where police then firefighters performed first aid, the SIU said.

Soberal later died in hospital. An autopsy concluded the cause of the death was multiple stab wounds to the chest. According to the SIU, a pathologist found the Taser deployment did not play a role in Soberals death.

I am satisfied there is patently nothing further to investigate as far as the potential criminal liability of any police officer, wrote SIU director Joseph Martino.

The death of the well-known Toronto activist has hit his family, friends and broader community hard. Friend David Clow remembers seeing Soberal for the first time at a rally in downtown Toronto during the 2010 G20 Summit, megaphone in hand. After Clow introduced himself, the two men became fast friends, embarking on trips and projects, including a documentary about helping Torontos homeless, a passion they shared.

In a short 2015 documentary, the two friends pass out Subway sandwiches to people in need on a cold night in downtown Toronto. Soberal often bought homeless people a hotdog, Clow said, and he felt injustice acutely. That drove his activism, which focused on inequality and civil liberties.

But Clow said the activists life can be such a lonely one.

When you spend the lions share of your thoughts and energy on objectives and seeking information that no one wants to hear about, it wears on you in ways few could understand, Clow wrote in a eulogy for Soberal.

Those Soberal left behind are still trying to understand his final act. Judy Soberal said she knew hed been agitated in the days before he died because of the mounting threat of COVID-19. In a wide-ranging video he live-streamed in the moments before his death, Soberal discussed the mounting restrictions on free movement caused by efforts stop the spread of the virus.

Clow said he did not think his friend was being conspiratorial, but wanted people to be aware as to how these measures could be used to restrict our rights and freedoms.

He was trying to tell us that we cant just give up these rights so easily, Clow wrote.

Judy Soberal said she and her family will hold a small funeral for her youngest of three sons when COVID-19 restrictions on gatherings are lifted.

If you are considering suicide, there is help. Find a list of local crisis centres at the Canadian Association for Suicide Prevention. Or call 911 or in Ontario call Telehealth at 1-866-797-0000
Married At First Sight's Stacey Hampton has hit back at the show's former star Jessika Power as the pair continue their legal stoush over Jess's MAFS recap videos for New Idea and Who magazine.

Speaking to Bryce Ruthven for an Instagram Live interview, law graduate Stacey, 26, confirmed she did in fact send a cease and desist letter to the blonde after Jess 'disparaged' her in the clips.

'I sent a cease and desist letter to Jessica,' Stacey said, confirming the existence of the document and its authenticity.

Tit for tat: Married At First Sight's Stacey Hampton (right) has hit back at the show's former star Jessika Power (left) as the pair continue their legal stoush over Jess's MAFS recap videos for New Idea and Who magazine

'She has 28 days from the date that I sent it to apologise and to remove all content that basically defames me in the nature that I outlined in the letter.'

Stacey said she had been 'in contact with my lawyers' and revealed they are 'ready to go' - in a possible court appearance.

Stacey said that was all she could say about the legal matter, but did say she was upset that Jess demeaned her profession and her qualifications.

'They exist': Speaking to Bryce Ruthven for an Instagram Live interview, law graduate Stacey, 26, confirmed she did in fact send a cease and desist letter to the blonde after Jess 'disparaged' her in the clips

'At the end of the day, it's the principle. Don't rubbish someone's qualifications and say that lawyers are pathological liars, and we are paid to lie. That is disgusting,' she said.

Despite referring to her 'lawyers', Stacey did explain that it was her children's godmother, who is a practicing lawyer in Adelaide, who drafted the letter.

Stacey threatened Jess with cease and desist letter after the former MAFS star disparaged her in a paid recap video for New Idea and Who magazine.

Controversial: Stacey threatened Jess with cease and desist letter after the former MAFS star disparaged her in a paid recap video for New Idea and Who magazine. In the recap, which Jess posted to Instagram Stories, she said Stacey was 'pathological' in her denial that she had secretly slept with Mikey Pembroke

In the recap, which Jess posted to Instagram Stories, she said Stacey was 'pathological' in her denial that she had secretly slept with Mikey Pembroke.

While speaking to Daily Mail Australia last week, Stacey confirmed the negative review had an impact on her mental health.

She told Daily Mail Australia that she went to hospital and was on antidepressants due to the online trolling she's received since her alleged affair with Mikey was exposed at the Married At First Sight reunion dinner party.

Legally blonde: Stacey (pictured) spoke numerous times about being a 'lawyer' on the show. Pictured: Stacey holding her legal diploma at the Supreme Court of South Australia

Daily Mail Australia has reached out to Jess for comment

Jess, who herself was trolled over her controversial storylines on Married At First Sight, previously defended her right to make commentary on the show.

After threatening her with legal action, Jess said running commentary was just a normal part of starring on the series.

'How f***ing embarrassing!' After Jess' recap went live, a furious Stacey privately messaged Jessika on Instagram and threatened her with legal action over the recap

'Oh Stacey, get over it babe,' she fired back.

'If I had a lawyer send a cease and desist letter to everyone who said things about me I would have been on the phone to them every day.'

She continued: 'I've been asked (and paid) to do the recaps for Who magazine and New Idea. If you don't like what I said then don't act so shady.'
Sector shows significant growth compared to overall economy

A major new report has revealed Travel & Tourisms crucial contribution to help re-energise the EUs economic recovery once the COVID-19 pandemic has been successfully combatted.

The publication by the World Travel & Tourism Council (WTTC), which represents the global Travel & Tourism private sector, of its annual Economic Impact Report (EIR), shows the vital part the sector played in driving the EU economy last year.

During 2019, Travel & Tourism was responsible for 22.6 million jobs, or 11.2% of the EUs total workforce. It also generated 1,319 billion Euros GDP, or 9.5% to the EU economy. Whilst the EUs overall economy grew by just 1.4%, the Travel & Tourism sector showed significant growth of 2.3% on the previous year.

The comprehensive report also showed the EU is the largest region in the world in terms of international spending at a staggering 427 billion Euros in 2019, representing 6.2% of the EUs total exports.

Leisure spending helped generate jobs throughout the EU with analysis from the report showing across the EU it accounted for an overwhelming 81% of all cash spent, compared to less than a fifth (19%) for business.

The largest EU economies in terms of total Travel & Tourism contribution to GDP were also revealed to be Germany (US$347 billion), Italy (US$260 billion), France (US$229 billion) and Spain (US$198 billion).

Gloria Guevara, WTTC President & CEO, said: WTTCs 2019 Economic Impact Report (EIR) shows how intrinsic the Travel & Tourism sector was last year to the EU economy, responsible for more than 22 million jobs or 11.2% of the total number of people employed.

Our analysis underscores how vital the Travel & Tourism sector will be in powering the recovery of the EU economy, generating new jobs and driving visitors back, having a positive economic domino effect on suppliers large and small throughout the industry on the continent.

Until then it is crucial that all governments throughout the EU help to protect a sector which is the backbone of the European and global economy, which is currently in a fight for survival with up to 75 million jobs globally are at immediate risk, with 6.4 million at risk across the EU alone.

On a global level, the Travel & Tourism sector outperformed the 2.5% rate of global GDP growth for the ninth consecutive year in a row, thanks to an annual GDP growth rate of 3.5%. This made it the global economys third highest sector in terms of GDP growth.

The EIR shows the sector supporting 1 in 10 jobs (330 million), making a 10.3% contribution to global GDP and generating 1 in 4 of all new jobs.

A breakdown by WTTC shows the Asia Pacific to be the top performing region worldwide with an impressive growth rate of 5.5%, followed very closely by the Middle East at 5.3%. The US demonstrated a steady growth rate of 3.4% and the EU 2.4%, while the fastest growing country was Saudi Arabia.

Daily News Delivery Join your colleagues and stay up to date on the latest Travel industry news and trends. Subscribe

 2022 Travel Industry Wire
"I am from UP bordering Bihar. I know these people. I have grown up with them. Let me tell you something, when they get angry they get very angry. They walk hundreds of miles to go home. Right now they are not worried about food. Talk to them. PLEASE!!! Don't lathi charge them," tweeted Sinha.

"Thappad" director Anubhav Sinha is not impressed with the Mumbai Police resorting to lathi charge after around 3,000-plus stranded migrants from different parts of India crowded near Bandra railway station on Tuesday, in a bid to go home.

Earlier on Tuesday, Prime Minister Narendra Modi had announced that the lockdown would need to be extended till May 3 to fight the coronavirus pandemic.

Despite the announcement, many migrants arrived at the Bandra railway station in Mumbai, and demanded transportation facilities to return to their native places.

The Mumbai Police, which attempted to convince them from gathering in such huge numbers, finally resorted to a mild lathi charge when sections of the restive crowd seemed to be going out of control.

Sinha spoke about the issue in a series of tweets.

"We have to understand, these migrant workers uses their houses just to sleep. A lot of them even use toilets at workplaces. Those 'houses' can not be inhabited 24*7 by several for a month without stepping out. That's why they want to go home," he wrote.

"This HAD TO BE addresses before we started to explain Social Distancing to them. There is No distance at their homes. But when was the last time a policy was made keeping them in mind???"

"IMHO this can still get worse in days to come. This needs a bit more handle with care. Ideally by leaders/volunteers from UP and Bihar. Trust me this detail will help a lot."

He said it's not about food or grocery.

"And stop talking about f**king Food and Grocery. SHUT THE F**K UP on that. It is about living conditions. Those are subhuman. That's how they live while they build our penthouses," he tweeted.

"Try imagining a dingy 8ftx8ft room. One small cooking area in a corner. In some cases a 2ftx1ft window looking at nothing. Community toilets minimum 100ft away. Put three migrants in this room. Those three migrants have come to Bandra. Understood?"
WASHINGTON - Sen. Thom Tillis, R-N.C., on Wednesday declined to say whether his North Carolina colleague and fellow Republican, Sen. Richard Burr, should stay on as chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, saying only that the decision is up to GOP leadership.

Tillis, who is up for reelection in November, made the remark in an interview with conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt, who also writes an opinion column for The Washington Post.

Burr has come under intense scrutiny in recent weeks for stock trades he made as the U.S. braced for the coronavirus pandemic. The Justice Department is investigating the trades, and Burr has faced calls from some corners to resign.

In Wednesday's radio interview, Hewitt raised the topic and said that he believes Burr "ought to step down as chairman of the Intel Committee."

"Has there been any conversation with him about that?" he asked Tillis.

Tillis replied that he hadn't discussed the matter with Burr and noted that the Senate Ethics Committee and Department of Justice are investigating.

"We'll have to see where the facts lead," he said.

Hewitt kept pressing and declared of Burr, "I have no confidence in him until this is done."

"Well, regardless of what happens with the investigation, I think Senator Burr owes everybody in North Carolina and the United States an explanation, and we'll see where the investigation goes,' Tillis replied. "With respect to his chairmanship, that's a decision that he and, that would be better left to him and the leadership."

Regardless how the investigation unfolds, Burr is expected to step down as Intelligence Committee chairman at the end of the year due to GOP term limits in the Senate. But some Republicans, including Rep. Matt Gaetz of Florida, have called for Burr to be removed from his position leading the panel immediately because of the controversy.

In mid-February, Burr sold 33 stocks held by him and his wife, estimated to be worth between $628,033 and $1.7 million, Senate financial disclosures show. It was the largest number of stocks he had sold in one day since at least 2016, records show.

While he was receiving daily briefings on the mounting pandemic, Burr publicly played down the threat posed by the novel coronavirus.

Burr was dealt some further bad news Tuesday with the publication of a ProPublica report that delved into the details of the senator's 2017 off-market sale of his home in the District.

According to the report, Burr sold the townhouse for $900,000, an above-market price, to a group led by a longtime donor and a lobbyist who had business before the Senate Intelligence Committee.

A Burr spokesperson told ProPublica that the townhouse was sold for its fair market value, that an independent appraisal had been conducted and that the Senate Ethics Committee was notified before the sale.

- - -

The Washington Post's Devlin Barrett contributed to this report.
Source: Xinhua| 2020-04-15 00:06:37|Editor: huaxia

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Photo taken on Jan. 30, 2020 shows the headquarters of the World Health Organization (WHO) in Geneva, Switzerland. (Xinhua/Chen Junxia)

Trump has criticized the WHO's response to COVID-19 and threatened to freeze U.S. funding for it.



MOSCOW, April 14 (Xinhua) -- Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov on Tuesday urged other countries not to politicize COVID-19 and the activity of the World Health Organization (WHO).

"I would caution against attempts to politicize the coronavirus, regarding not only the role of the WHO but also accusations against one or another country," he said during an online news conference.

"I think that anyone who familiarizes oneself with the chronology of the WHO's actions will surely find out that the organization has acted effectively," he added.

U.S. President Donald Trump has criticized the WHO's response to COVID-19 and threatened to freeze U.S. funding for it.

The recognition of the important coordinating role of the WHO in combating the pandemic was reflected in the UN General Assembly resolution on April 2 and the declaration of the G20 emergency summit on March 26, Lavrov said.

The United States supported both documents and Moscow believes from this fact that this is the official position of Washington, he said.

Those who criticize the WHO should instead concentrate on concrete steps to stop the pandemic and minimize its effects, particularly to people's health, he said. 
ANN ARBOR, MI -- Nurses, healthcare workers and activists plan to protest outside a Michigan Medicine building Wednesday to call for hospitals nationwide to focus on prioritizing workers and patients.

Organizers encourage healthcare workers to join their protest at 7:30 p.m. April 15, outside the Rogel Cancer Center, according to a news release and Facebook event. The group is joining a national network of nurses protesting Wednesday for National Day of Action.

UM nurses ask to use outside masks, but leaders confirm hospital-supplied policy

The nurses say they want safe staffing, adequate supplies of the proper personal protective equipment, a national coordination of resource, housing for exposed healthcare workers, childcare and Medicare for All," according to the events description.

Healthcare workers are encouraged to wear red and protest while six feet apart on the sidewalk. Supporters are encouraged to join a car caravan that will drive around the Michigan Medicine campus on E. Medical Center Drive.

22,000 masks sent to Michigan Medicine from national stockpile deemed unusable

Our government must put patients over profits by directing and coordinating the manufacture and distribution of vital medical resources and guaranteeing that everyone is provided the quality health care they need with Medicare for All, according to the news release. This action will tell the world #TheSystemIsBroken and we demand #PPEoverProfit.

Organizers say the rally will last about 45 minutes.

MORE FROM MLIVE:

Wednesday, April 15: Latest developments on coronavirus in Michigan

Ann Arbor pilot flies face shields to health care workers around Midwest to help fight coronavirus

Letter from the Editor: You can support MLives vital reporting by subscribing today
In 2012, the Hubble Space Telescope caught a glimpse of a faint plume of material at the southern pole of Jupiter's moon, Europa . Since then, the moon has provided faint glimmers of plumes, hinting that material from its icy interior ocean could be jetting into space .

Now, a new study thatcombed images of the moon to hunt for signs of material on the Europanlandscape, only to find no obvious indications of the eruptions.

In 1995, NASA's Galileo mission arrived at the Jupiter system and began a detailed probe of the gas giants and its moons, including Europa. Europa was also visited by NASA's Voyager and New Horizons spacecraft on their way out of the solar system. By using data collected by all three missions, Paul Schenk, a researcher at the Lunar and Planetary Institute in Houston, was able to hunt for signs of changes that could indicate erupting material had fallen back onto the surface. The plumes themselves could help to reveal information about the ocean hidden deep beneath the ice.

Related: The plumes of Europa are missing "hotspot" engines

"Plumes on icy bodies usually produce a range of particle sizes," Schenk told Space.com via email. Gravity pulls the largest and most massive of the particles back to the surface. "These particles are always different from the surface in some way, either by composition and color or by particle size and hence apparent brightness," he said. "So we expected to see some sort of anomalous brightness or color signature near the sources, wherever they may be."

But Schenk found no variations in brightness or composition that might indicate ocean material might have ended up on the surface of the moon.

The surprising lack of variations could mean that plume activity was relatively continuous over the three decades of mapping, the exuded particles blending together over time with no obvious differences. Another option is that the plumes produced "stealth" deposits not visible with the available instruments. Finally, the plumes themselves could be atypical, not really plumes at all but something unseen on other worlds.

"We do not really know why we do not see an obvious sign of plumes on Europa's surface ," Schenk said. "We will have to go there to find out."

"Stealth plumes" and hidden fingerprints

This illustration depicts how water plumes can erupt through the icy surface of Europa from deep within the moon's icy ocean. (Image credit: NASAs Conceptual Image Lab - Michael Lentz (USRA), Walt Feimer (KBRwyle), Bailee DesRocher (USRA) & NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory)

On the surface, Europa appears rather unremarkable, a grey and white world with traces of intriguing red patches . The entire moon is covered with ice, hiding an ocean beneath. The interaction of the ocean with rocky layers beneath could provide a haven for life to evolve, especially if the oceans contain vents that bring heat up from the interior.

Since 2012, Hubble has spotted several indications of explosive activity as the moon has passed between Earth and Jupiter. During some of the passages, light from Jupiter was blocked by vapor venting from the moon's surface.

Europa isn't the first moon known to have explosive plumes. Saturn's moon Enceladus is well known for spewing material from its 'tiger stripe' crevices at its southern pole. NASA's Cassini mission flew through one of the eruptions to obtain a sample of the material, which the spacecraft was not originally designed to collect and examine.

When NASA's Europa Clipper mission arrives at the moon in the 2030s, it will be better prepared for plumes. The spacecraft will carry the Mass Spectrometer for Planetary Exploration/Europa (MASPEX), which will collect gases around the moon and analyze any plume material that may be released into space. To do so, the spacecraft must fly by the regions where material is being expelled. Identifying those regions prior to the spacecraft arrival would make the process easier.

An artist's illustration of water plumes erupting from the icy ocean of Jupiter's moon Europa. (Image credit: NASAs Conceptual Image Lab - Michael Lentz (USRA), Walt Feimer (KBRwyle), Bailee DesRocher (USRA) & NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory)

Using the maps created by the three missions, Schenk created new maps that revealed how the surface evolved over time. Changing features would appear as larger dark or bright features distinct from the static, unchanging landscape on the moon. But the new maps revealed no major changes larger than 30 miles (50 kilometers) on the surface.

Next, Schenk specifically probed the candidate plume sites, regions identified based on where plumes had been spotted over Europa . Image coverage for the south pole sites identified by Hubble was poor, and no obvious features were visible.

"Plumes may not produce observable deposits in existing imaging," Schenk wrote in his paper, which was published March 24 in the Astrophysical Journal Letters . "This is possible if Europa's plumes are vapor-only 'stealth plumes', but the failure of water vapor to crystalize into particulates upon venting into space would be difficult to explain."

The difference in size between vented particles and surface particles should be different enough to be spotted by the spacecraft, even if they lay thin on the ground. However, if stealth plumes are the norm, mid-infrared or ultraviolet mapping spectrometry may be required to detect them. Clipper will carry a digital camera sensitive to ultraviolet wavelengths and may be able to spot the traces.

The chaos of Europa

Puzzling regions known as chaos terrain could potentially produce short-term plumes and may hide their fingerprints. Hundreds of chaos regions are scattered across the moon's surface, with domes and iceburglike blocks. As the bottom layer of surface ice is heated by tidal interactions between Jupiter and Europa, the surface buckles in on itself and creating stress fractures. The ice on top weakens and the crust buckles and sinks, forming larger, glacierlike blocks of ice.

Schenk said that these violent events could expose liquid water on the surface for short periods of times. That water could boil off to produce localized plumes of frozen water vapor crystals. There are faint indications around the terrains that could be fingerprints of the plumes.

"We might be observing this at scales of a few kilometers in the form of dark halos around some chaos [terrain], but we are not sure," Schenk said.

Another possibility is that the extensive chasms stretching over 600 miles (1,000 kilometers) across the surface of Europa could be expelling material. Occasionally the chasms contain double ridges with dark reddish materials coating the surfaces up to 6 miles (10 km) along the sides. Previous research has suggested that the burnished red material along the flanks could come from explosive venting from the chasms, much as water vapor jets from the central fissures along the double ridges of Enceladus.

The Hubble Space Telescope captured images of plumes from Europa in 2014 and 2016 coming from the same part of the moon. (Image credit: NASA/ESA/W. Sparks (STScI)/USGS Astrogeology Science Center)

"If the darker reddish materials flanking double ridges on Europa are due to venting of plume materials like those on Enceladus, they would have been spectacular," Schenk said. During eruptions, the ridges would have released material along most of their length, creating long curtains of gas and particles several kilometers high arcing into space above each ridge, though it is unlikely they all exploded at once.

"It would have been quite a thrill to be standing there, in a spacesuit, watching these events along ridges that disappear over the horizon," Schenk said.

The new results underscore the limited quantity and low quality of images of the moon. Clipper plans to undertake an extensive hunt for plume activity, with hopefully more success. Until then, the plumes may remain a mystery, Schenk said.

"Whatever is going on at Europa, we haven't gotten to the bottom of it yet."

Follow Nola on Facebook and on Twitter at @NolaTRedd . Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom and on Facebook .
East Asia Forum ran an article on April 14 saying that Vietnam has been one of Asias most successful in dealing with the pandemic.

It was among the first countries to impose strict containment measures, the paper noted, even when COVID-19 was still confined to China.

The paper added that despite the negative effects COVID-19 had on its socioeconomic development in the first quarter, Vietnam may get out of the pandemic in better shape than others.

Despite expected growth in 2020 falling to 4.9%, it is among only a few economies in Asia Pacific - and perhaps the world - to still post growth, it wrote.

The Asian Development Bank, while predicting a sharp decline in GDP growth in Vietnam, said its economy remains uniquely robust in the subregion, it went on, adding that Vietnams success in curbing the pandemic may attract more foreign investors, as will its traditional advantages of cheap labour, political stability, and proximity to China.

Physical distancing has also helped accelerate the countrys transition to a digital economy, which is considered by the government to be a pillar of sustainable growth, the paper noted.

A day earlier, German news agency Deutsche Presse-Agentur (DPA) published an article highlighting anti-pandemic activities undertaken in Vietnam.

Despite its border with China, it wrote, Vietnam, thanks to a combination of early decisive action, extensive testing, vigorous quarantining, and social unity, has avoided greater losses and confined the number of confirmed cases to the mere hundreds, with no fatalities.

It emphasised that much of Vietnams success can be ascribed to its social unity.

On April 12, Resident Representative of the UN Development Program (UNDP) Caitlin Wiesen congratulated Vietnam on its success in combating COVID-19, with more than half of all patients having fully recovered.

UNDP donated 20,000 high-quality surgical masks to the Ministry of Health to help protect healthcare workers on the frontlines in fighting the pandemic.

WHO Representative to Vietnam Kidong Park said previously that the country has responded proactively and early to the outbreak. Its first risk assessment exercise was conducted in early January - soon after cases began being reported in China.

Meanwhile, Christoph Dolitzsch - a researcher at the Berlin-based Dalia Research Institute - said Vietnam has the ability to control any increase in infections, in stark contrast to many other countries around the world.

According to its largest survey on COVID-19, some 62% of respondents in Vietnam say their government is doing the right amount in response to the pandemic.
RALEIGH, N.C. - The threat of hand-to-hand contamination from the new coronavirus while voting entered arguments in a lawsuit seeking to stop the use of touch-screen ballot-marking machines in North Carolina.

Lawyers for four North Carolina voters and the state NAACP largely cited constitutional concerns in the lawsuit announced Wednesday in asking that the equipment from the nations largest voting machine manufacturer be barred from future elections. About 20 of North Carolinas 100 counties have the machines, used first in one way of another during last months primary elections.

But the plaintiffs also said using touch-screen machines are inherently hazardous to use during the COVID-19 crisis, because voters and poll workers are smudging screens with fingers and hands that could transmit the virus to unsuspecting people.

Cleaning the ExpressVote machines  created by Election Systems & Software and targeted in the lawsuit  after every vote, would create long lines at voting sites, the lawsuit said. An ES&S memo last month recommended poll workers should use lint-free cloths with isopropyl alcohol or prepared alcohol wipes to clean screens for at least 30 seconds to disinfect them.

COVID-19 can survive on plastic screens, said John Powers, an attorney for the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, which is helping represent the plaintiffs. Theres risk if this (cleaning) doesnt happen right each time. Both poll workers and voters can get infected.

The litigation, which Powers said was being mailed Wednesday to court, rather than filed in person, because of health concerns, also comes as states figure how to conduct high-stakes elections this fall should the new coronavirus persist. A hint of the challenges came last week with Wisconsins primary, marked by long lines at precincts and a massive of influx of mail-in ballots.

Concerns over the use of touch-screen machines have intensified since hackers tried to access U.S. election systems in 2016. A study released last year by the combined National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine urged that elections use human-readable paper ballots that people can inspect and recount.

The safety argument provides critics of these ES&S machines, who focus largely on security and hacking concerns, another line of attack.

People shouldnt have to choose between safety and the right to vote, said Courtney Hostetler with the group Free Speech for People and another plaintiffs lawyer: Our position is that is really not a constitutional trade-off.

Otherwise, the plaintiffs say the public cant be confident that the names of the voters preferred candidates that the machine prints on the ballot will correspond with bar code data thats also printed and tallied by a separate counting machine.

The ExpressVote is an insecure, unreliable, and unverifiable machine that threatens the integrity of North Carolinas elections, the lawsuit reads.

Few if any problems related to actual machine operations were reported last month. In seven counties, including the one surrounding Charlotte, ExpressVote equipment is now the primary voting machine in election day precincts. Other counties use them for early in-person voting or for people with disabilities.

The State Board of Elections, a defendant along with county election boards, didnt immediately provide a comment Wednesday on the lawsuit. ES&S didnt immediately respond to an email.

Voters in other counties that use hand-marked paper ballots can feel confident that their choices will count, the lawsuit says in declaring the machines use violate equal protection and fair-election provisions in the North Carolina Constitution. The plaintiffs want a judge to permanently block state elections from being held with them. They could be next used in a western North Carolina Republican congressional primary runoff in late June.

___

Follow AP coverage of the virus outbreak at https://apnews.com/VirusOutbreak and https://apnews.com/UnderstandingtheOutbreak.
The Centre is concerned about the safety of Indians abroad and is taking all measures in this regard in coordination with respective governments, Minister of State for External Affairs V Muraleedharan said on Wednesday.

Like some political leaders the government of India is also concerned about the safety of the Indian population abroad. They have been provided with quarantine, medical, accommodation, food, water and other facilities in coordination with the respective governments, he told PTI.

He was asked about the statements of former Congress president Rahul Gandhi and IUML leaders from Kerala on the issue of Indians stranded in Middle East and other countries due to the coronavirus pandemic.

"The Indian embassies are also assisting whoever has approached them. Unless the embassies are approached by the individuals concerned, the follow-up action could not be taken," he said to a question on bringing them to India.

"While some of them have gone on visit visas (and could not come back due to cancellation of flights), a few others wanted to return to India for various reasons like losing employment, fear of getting a virus attack etc.," Muraleedharan said.

Earlier Rahul Gandhi, elected to Lok Sabha from Wayanad in Kerala, had tweeted: The COVID-19 crisis and shutting of businesses in the Middle East have left thousands of Indian workers in deep distress and desperate to return home.

"The Government must organise flights to bring home our brothers and sisters most in need of assistance, with quarantine plans in place," he said on Twitter.

A few days back, IUML national general secretary P K Kunhalikutty expressed concern on the plight of stranded Indians in the Gulf region and urged the Centre to bring them back at the earliest.

The Malappuram MP (Kerala) claimed that Indians, particularly unskilled labourers in the Middle East region, were suffering as there is no proper place to stay or availability of food and water to them" and "many of them have already lost jobs".

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
To help Vietnam combat the COVID-19 pandemic, on April 10 in Hanoi, representatives from AIA Life Insurance Co., Ltd., Vietnam, through the Central Committee of the Vietnamese Fatherland Front, provided VND25 billion ($1.1 million) financial support for doctors and medical staff working on the front lines.

Representatives of AIAs Board of Directors during the announcement of the Financial Assistance Package for frontline medical staff fighting against COVID-19

Of the funds donated by AIA Vietnam, VND2 billion ($86,700) was transferred directly to the Central Committee of the Vietnamese Fatherland Front, which will be used for the purchase of essential medical equipment for frontline doctors and medical staff. The remaining VND23 billion ($1 million) will be implemented into a special financial support programme by AIA Vietnam. This package will apply to all doctors, nurses, and other frontline staff who work at hospitals and health facilities designated by the Ministry of Health to diagnose and treat COVID-19 patients.

Wayne Besant, CEO of AIA Vietnam, shared his support for the tremendous efforts the medical staff continue to make to combat the virus. We are extremely grateful to the thousands of heroes in white-shirts who fight on the frontline against the epidemic. The sacrifices you make, day and night, risking your own safety, is truly inspirational. Thank you for your courageous, tireless, and selfless acts in providing such essential services to those in need. With this support, we would like to express our appreciation to all medical staff and hope to do our part in fighting against this pandemic, he said.

Accordingly, the Financial Assistance Program provided by AIA includes:

Financial assistance for frontline workers upon positive diagnosis of SARS-CoV-2 virus: Any frontline staff such as doctors, nurses, technicians, pharmacists, pharmacy staff, administrative staff, emergency drivers, guards, or volunteers who meet the programme requirements and are diagnosed positive for the Sars-CoV-2 virus themselves during the programme period will receive a lump sum allowance of VND10 million ($435).

AIA Vietnam representatives presented the VND25 billion ($1.1 million) check to the Central Committee of the Vietnamese Fatherland Front

Financial support for relatives in the case of death from SARS-CoV-2 virus infection: In the unfortunate event of frontline staff, such as doctors, nurses, technicians, pharmacists, pharmacy staff, administrative staff, emergency drivers, guards, or volunteers who meet the programme requirements pass away due to virus infection, VND100 million ($4,350) will be available as financial aid for their relatives.

Besant also added: AIA's philosophy in Vietnam is what is good for Vietnam, is good for AIA. Therefore, we believe our role to best contribute to the Vietnamese people is through our commitment to helping our community and customers live healthier, longer, and happier lives. As a result, AIA Vietnam always strives to understand and meet the increasingly diverse needs of its customers as well as support the community to improve the quality of life and promote the development of society.

The Financial Assistance Program for the contingent of doctors and medical staff will be implemented until either the end of June 30, 2020 or until AIA Vietnam has fully used the total amount of VND23 billion ($1 million) available for financial support.
The influx of Chinese home buyers in Vancouver has noticeably thinned over the past month, according to a recent RE/MAX analysis.

With the closing of national and international borders as a response to the pandemic, real estate players within the metro Vancouver market have noticed a marked decrease in the number of Chinese travellers and buyers, particularly around Chinese New Year- a hot time for foreign buyers, RE/MAX said.

The restrictions being imposed within China in response to the virus, are having monumental impacts upon their economy, and many of these restrictions have already spread to other countries that are home to other heavy investors in Vancouver Real Estate.
The following is a summary of one of many cases across the country compiled in a Hearst Connecticut Media investigation of sexual abuse connected in some way to local affiliates of Boys & Girls Club of America, their staff, volunteers, members and/or attendees. Boys & Girls Club of America said that it does not keep a public list of sexual abuse incidents connected to clubs. If you have a story to share, or have information related to this or other incidents, contact us here.

A technology aide at Liberty Elementary School in Riverside, California, who also worked for the Boys & Girls Clubs of Greater Redlands-Riverside, has been sent to prison after pleading guilty to sexual abuse charges.

Figueroa pleaded guilty to charges connected to his work at the school. He was not charged with any alleged crimes in connection with his work at the Boys & Girls Club; however, in a press release at the time of his arrest, police said he was around children while working for the club.

Fernando Figueroa, 27, participated in an act of oral copulation or sexual penetration with a girl younger than 10 years old, according to a 25-count indictment filed Oct. 31, 2018, in Superior Court in Riverside County. Figueroa committed a lewd and lascivious act on the girl and three other victims, according to the indictment.

The indictment against Figueroa alleged he abused 11 victims during his time at Liberty Elementary School.

Figueroa pleaded guilty to one count oral copulation or sex with a child under 10 and one count of a lewd act on a child under the age of 14, according to Marita C. Ford, a spokeswoman for the Riverside Superior Court. He was sentenced Dec. 13, 2019, to 20 years to life in prison with credit for time served.

The original indictment charged him with 25 counts of sexual abuse involving minors.

Figueroa originally pleaded not guilty to the charges on Nov. 30, 2018, Ford said.

The abuse came to light after a student told school officials that she had been touched sexually by a technology aide, according to Riverside Police.

In addition to criminal charges, two civil lawsuits have been filed based on Figueroas alleged conduct.

The first suit, filed against the Riverside Unified School District in October 2017, alleged the school was negligent in hiring and supervising Figueroa. Parents of three of his alleged victims settled the claims for $6.2 million in November 2018 and that case is now closed. As part of the settlement, the school district did not admit any liability.

The Riverside Unified School District did not respond to multiple requests seeking comment.

According to a second lawsuit filed by the legal guardians of three other children in 2019, Figueroa abused 14 victims before authorities eventually charged him with sexually assaulting 11 of the girls. The minor victims referred to in the complaints were all abused by Figueroa while they were students at Liberty Elementary School, according to the court documents.

Neither lawsuit names the Boys & Girls Club as a defendant.

The 2019 lawsuit claims there were multiple red flags about his behavior that should have been noticed by school staff.

Figueroa was able to seclude students in classrooms, where he would lock the door, the complaint in the 2019 suit details. He would also favor female students, separating them out from the boys in the class, and sitting close to them in order to touch them, the suit alleges.

The civil complaint filed in the second lawsuit claimed officials at the school should have known Figueroa was sexually abusing girls. That lawsuit is still pending in Superior Court in San Bernardino, court records indicate.

Administrators from Boys & Girls Club of Greater Redlands-Riverside did not respond to requests for comment.

Figueroa did not respond to a mailed letter seeking comment.
The current special times call for special measures, Laszlo Kover, Hungarys parliamentary speaker, wrote in a letter addressed to 60 European politicians and released to MTI.

In his letter, Kover said that Hungarys recent coronavirus law does not curb parliaments powers.



On the contrary, this has been the only special legislation in Europe aimed at increasing parliaments authorisations as against the government. The Hungarian legislation has been subject to sharp criticism since the passage of that law on March 30, Kover said.



Concerned voices have warned that the Hungarian government has obtained full control over the country for an indefinite period of time and democracy is jeopardised.



The speaker, however, dismissed those worries as groundless, and assured recipients of his letter that the legislation was fully in line with the countrys constitution.



The law does not grant unlimited powers to the government, Kover said, adding that even this increased room for manoeuvre for the government is not as large as that of some governments of the EU in a state of emergency.



Kover went on to say that most Hungarians are disappointed that some political factors in Europe even in the current crisis cannot get rid of their personal bias and political fixations and cannot concentrate on fighting a shared hazard.



We thank all those that are ready to help us in good faith and call on all others not to add to the damage if they cannot contribute to efforts against the epidemic, Kover said in his letter.



The letter was sent to the parliamentary speakers of the EU member states, the president of the European Parliament, group leaders of the EP, heads of the EUs institutions, the heads of the parliamentary assemblies of the Council of Europe and OSCE, as well as the house speakers of seven German states.



MTI Photo: Noemi Bruzak
Hyderabad: A post-graduate doctor was slapped on the ear by the son of a suspected Covid-19 patient, who was not willing to stay in Osmania General Hospital and insisted on being discharged.

Junior doctor Nikhil, who was attending on the suspected patient in an isolation ward, had said that it was not possible to discharge the patient and asked the son not to raise a hue and cry.

The first test of the patient was positive and the hospital authorities were waiting for the second test for confirmation, the junior doctor had informed the father.

Furious, the attendant slapped the doctor, who began bleeding from the ear. The doctor has been given treatment and is now stable.

Telangana Junior Doctors Association (T-JUDA) have demanded that special police protection be provided to doctors during the Covid-19 crisis. Doctors are upset as this is the second attack on them, after the first at Gandhi Hospital some days ago.

The Afzalgunj police later booked a case against the attacker. Afzalgunj inspector P. Gyanender Reddy said Dr Nikhil had lodged a complaint against the man for misbehaving with him.
While the world self-isolates to prevent the spread of the coronavirus, Angelina Jolie discussed how important it is to check in on each other.

The 44-year-old actress and Special Envoy of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees spoke with California Surgeon General Dr. Nadine Burke Harris in a video conference for Time, where she is also a contributing editor.

With stay-at-home orders in place in almost every state in the country, both Harris said it was important both to maintain those orders, but also to keep in touch with their friends and loved ones.

Important: While the world self-isolates to prevent the spread of the coronavirus, Angelina Jolie discussed how important it is to check in on each other.

Conference: The 44-year-old actress and Special Envoy of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees spoke with California Surgeon General Dr. Nadine Burke Harris in a video conference for Time , where she is also a contributing editor

'I think it is so important that people hear that,' Jolie said. 'To love each other, check in with each other.'

She added, 'Be there, be a support group, keep your eyes open whether you are a teacher or a friend.'

'I really do hope people hear this, and they do reach out, and they do pay more attention, and they are not sitting in a moment when they think, "Well maybe, but its not my business,"' she continued.

Important: 'I think it is so important that people hear that,' Jolie said. 'To love each other, check in with each other'

The actress added that because kids aren't going to school right now 'teachers cant see the bruises and people arent identifying what is happening within some homes.'

Harris also asked Jolie what motivates the actress to, 'continue to stand as a witness and to not look away,' and also what she does for 'self-care.'

Jolie said there was, 'a time in my life when I became more aware of what was happening around the world,' and she started to 'open up' and hope she was 'being useful.'

No school: The actress added that because kids aren't going to school right now 'teachers cant see the bruises and people arent identifying what is happening within some homes'

She added that she used to write in a journal a lot and that she was crying all the time, but she met a grandmother who saw her crying and told her, 'I don't need you to cry. I need you to help me,' which motivated her to help.

Burke-Harris was named the first ever Surgeon General of the state of California by Governor Gavin Newsom in January 2019.

She revealed that California has been the first state in the country to do, 'broad scale training' for primary care doctors to do 'routine screening for trauma.'

Journal: She added that she used to write in a journal a lot and that she was crying all the time, but she met a grandmother who saw her crying and told her, 'I don't need you to cry. I need you to help me,' which motivated her to help

'All of the research shows that the single most powerful antidote to the impacts of trauma and adversity is nurturing, caring relationships with others  safe, stable and nurturing relationships.

The surgeon general also pointed out it was important to believe victims of domestic violence, saying, All you have to do is be there for a person. All you have to do is believe them when a victim comes forward.

'You dont have to fix it, you dont have to solve it. You dont have to worry about not being enough,;' Burke Harris said. 'You just have to be willing to be there and listen and to be that shoulder and those open arms.'

Believe: The surgeon general also pointed out it was important to believe victims of domestic violence, saying, All you have to do is be there for a person. All you have to do is believe them when a victim comes forward'
Unfortunately, the report said that these claims are unlikely to be approved, due to Hong Kongs previous experience with the severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) outbreak in 2003. During the outbreak 17 years ago, insurers in Hong Kong paid out HK$325 million (US$42 million) compensation.

No-one in Hong Kong would offer business interruption cover due to the outbreak of contagious diseases after SARS in 2003 as some huge claims were paid, Glenn Turner, COO of Altruist Financial Group, was quoted as saying by the report. All insurers and reinsurers withdrew such cover.

Read more: Policy wording key as firms assess coronavirus claims

Daniel Tang, corporate team partner at Withers law firm, said that government-ordered lockdowns and national emergencies are usually excluded from business interruption insurance. During the massive wave of protests in Hong Kong last year, less than 20% of business interruptions claims were granted, Tang told SCMP.

However, some business insurance policies may have extended coverage despite the lack of physical damage resulting from the coronavirus outbreak, according to Tow Lu Lim, partner at law firm Mayer Brown. But in order to have the claims approved, businesses must prove that the losses were a direct result of the shutdown order and not caused by the slowing down of the economy in general.

All hope is not lost for businesses, though. The government has released a HK$137.5 billion relief package which includes an HK$80 billion salary payment plan for jobs affected by the crisis.
Former Counting On star Josh Duggar just suffered another major blow in his ongoing molestation lawsuit. Josh is suing officials in Arkansas for releasing documents related to his molestation investigation that took place in the mid-2000s. While Josh was hoping to score big in the lawsuit, his case fell apart in the Arkansas Court of Appeals.

Josh Duggar | Kris Connor/Getty Images

Inside Josh Duggars molestation lawsuit

Joshs scandal made headlines in 2015 after sources discovered that he had molested five underage girls between 2002 and 2003. Two of Joshs sisters later confirmed that they were among his victims.

After the reports surfaced in the spring of 2015, Josh admitted that the allegations were true. He also stepped down from his position at the Family Research Council, a conservative organization that fights issues like gay marriage and abortion.

Josh Duggars molestation scandal led TLC to cancel 19 Kids and Counting. Jim Bob and Michelle Duggar have since continued their reality series in the form of the shows spin-off, Counting On, which was not canceled.

Josh Duggar files lawsuit against AK officials who released info that he molested 4 of his sisters. What do you think? #EverybodyTalks pic.twitter.com/IIc8WeyUzW  The Talk (@TheTalkCBS) July 10, 2017

Prior to 2015, the Duggars had hoped that Joshs shady past would never come to light. In 2018, Josh filed a lawsuit against officials in Springdale and Washington County, arguing that they should have kept his records sealed to avoid privacy issues.

A circuit court judge threw out the case, prohibiting it from going to trial. In response, Josh filed an appeal with the Arkansas Court of Appeals, a move that did not end well for the former reality star.

Josh suffers a big legal blow

Josh is arguing that state officials invaded his privacy by releasing documents that should have remained sealed. The disgraced reality star believes the public records should have stayed private because he and his sisters were juveniles at the time of the crime.

According to USA Today, the Arkansas Court of Appeals agreed with the circuit court ruling and dismissed the case. The court concluded that the records should not have been sealed because the investigation happened in late 2006 after Josh Duggar had turned 18 years old.

Court of Appeals upholds dismissal of Josh Duggars lawsuit over release of molestation report https://t.co/U5iLZGQpvE via @arktimes  Arkansas Blog (@ArkansasBlog) April 8, 2020

To add more credence to the ruling, Joshs previous lawsuit in 2017 was dismissed because officials released the records after the scandal made headlines. This undermined Joshs argument about how the documents violated his privacy.

Josh Duggar gets sued over real estate fraud

The latest ruling on Joshs molestation case is not the only legal trouble he is dealing with at the moment. Joshs company, ALB Investments, was recently sued by a man who claims they committed real estate fraud.

According to The Sun, Carl Echols says that he bought a five-acre piece of land for $17,500 in 2006. He thought the deal was legitimate until Josh bought the same parcel of land in 2016 for the low sum of $1,000.

Josh Duggar almost got arrested for failing to appear in court for his real estate fraud trial: https://t.co/wFQJTLMUpn  Starcasm (@starcasm) December 18, 2019

Both Josh Duggar and his wife, Anna Duggar, were deposed in the case, which was set to start in April of 2020. In the original filing, Josh was included among the defendants but is no longer listed in the case.

Homeland Security raids Joshs business

As if that is not bad enough, Josh Duggars car business in Arkansas was recently raided by Homeland Security. According to TMZ, agents visited Joshs Springdale business, which is apparently a part of a federal probe.

Homeland Security has not revealed anything about the case and they did not raid Joshs home. It is unclear if Josh is under investigation or if the raid had something to do with one of his employees.

Needless to say, Joshs car dealership has remained closed since the raid. While there has been evidence to back up what happened, a spokesperson for the Duggars claims that Josh is not under investigation and that the reports surrounding the raid are untrue.

Homeland Security Goes to Josh Duggar's Office for Investigation https://t.co/HHoxauPN6f  TMZ (@TMZ) November 20, 2019

Living a life in the publics eye has taught us that it is best not to reply to every rumor and piece of fake news that is circulated online. It would be a full-time job if we attempted to do so, the spokesperson added.

Josh Duggar has not commented on the reports surrounding his failed appeal. Since the cancelation of 19 Kids and Counting, Josh has not stepped foot in front of the cameras, but he does pop up on the familys social media accounts from time to time.
A nasal ventilator is pictured as a patient suffering from COVID-19 is treated in a pulmonology hospital in Vannes, France, March 20, 2020.

Stephane Mahe/Reuters

Many US governors have reported little success in using official FEMA channels to get critical medical supplies for their hospitals from the federal stockpile.

Instead, governors have resorted to making calls directly to Trump, appearances on television, pleas on Twitter, and lavishing praise on the president to secure federal supplies, according to a Politico report.

Because governors haven't been able to rely on federal assistance, they've been involved in bidding wars for supplies with other states.

"This is not something that we should ever be faced with," Kansas Gov. Laura Kelly, told Politico."It really is the federal government's responsibility to build those stockpiles, and distribute those during the time of crisis."

Visit Insider's homepage for more stories.

Desperate to get critical medical supplies from the federal stockpile, US governors have resorted to calling Trump directly, making TV appearances, pleading on Twitter, and lavishing praise on the president.

And they say these frenzied attempts are more effective  and faster  than using official federal channels to get the coronavirus-fighting supplies their hospitals need.

"This is not something that we should ever be faced with," Kansas Gov. Laura Kelly, told Politico. "It really is the federal government's responsibility to build those stockpiles, and distribute those during the time of crisis."

US Governors are making desperate attempts to get federal medical supplies

Healthcare providers across the US say there are dire shortages of critical medical supplies for patients and medical workers, including ventilators, face masks, and medical gowns. Some hospitals have taken donations from nail salons and veterinary clinics and asked workers to reuse their limited stock of masks, which could put them at higher risk of infection.

In trying to equip their hospitals, US governors have attempted to independently secure ventilators and protective supplies. But without a centralized response from the federal government, they've entered bidding wars with other states.

Story continues

The US maintains a national stockpile of the medical gear workers need to fight the coronavirus, though its stock is dwindling. President Donald Trump has previously attempted to downplay governors' fears that shortages will force medical workers to choose which patients will get treatment and which won't.

"[Ventilator] shortages have led to inflated requests," Trump said at a White House news briefing this month. "We have some states and areas that are just asking for far more than they need."

U.S. President Trump leads daily coronavirus response briefing at the White House in Washington

Reuters

But local and state officials in several states told Politico they've had little success using official channels to get the equipment they need from the federal government.

When appeals to the Federal Emergency Management System (FEMA) fail or are too slow, governors have tried calling Trump or Vice President Mike Pence, who is leading the White House's coronavirus task force. They've also tried contacting Jared Kushner, and trade advisor Peter Navarro, both of whom are leading efforts to secure more supplies.

If state officials don't have a direct line to Trump or his inner circle, some officials have resorted to complaining on television or desperate pleas on Twitter. Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker did both and later received supplies from the national stockpile, according to Politico.

Governor JB Pritzker (@GovPritzker) March 22, 2020

California Gov. Gavin Newsom found success in securing supplies by lavishing praise on the president  a change in tone from Newsom, who typically blasts Trump for his policies on immigration, civil rights, and climate change. However, the ventilators Newsom received from the federal stockpile were broken upon arrival in Los Angeles.

Meanwhile, Kelly, the Kansas governor, submitted seven requests through FEMA that were largely ignored until a reporter asked the Vice President about the status of the request at a news briefing, Politico reported.

States reported varying degrees of success in getting supplies through FEMA

The Trump administration put FEMA in charge of distributing supplies from the national stockpile after the strategy was initially handled by the Department of Health and Human Services. Much of the reserve has already been depleted.

Officials with the agency told Politico that they are in the process of distributing 250.6 million gloves, 25.1 million surgical masks, and 3.5 million gowns, and more the federal government they secured from factories abroad. Twenty-six flights have reportedly been completed with 54 more flights scheduled to deliver more.

FEMA officials told Politico that the agency directs 50% of the cargo on each plane to high-risk areas which are determined by FEMA and the CDC. The remaining half is used to fill outstanding orders.

U.S. President Trump leads coronavirus task force daily briefing at the White House in Washington

Reuters

However, states reported varying degrees of success in getting supplies through FEMA.

For Colorado Gov. Jared Polis, the state's request for federal supplies was canceled without notice.

The applications are long and laborious, requiring seven days of data from hospitals before the agency even responds to a request, Brian Moran, Virginia's secretary of public safety and homeland security, told Politico.

And even after completing the tedious process, Virginia received less than 200,000 of the 3.5 million masks it requested and is looking at other avenues to attain medical supplies.

"We hope the supply chain will catch up when our peak is supposed to come," Moran said.

Read the original article on Insider
B ritain will not exit lockdown completely until a coronavirus vaccine is found, health minister Nadine Dorries has said.

The government has come under mounting pressure to outline its plan for how and when stay-at-home orders might be lifted.

But officials have pushed back on these calls, saying it is too soon to discuss such moves while the death toll continues to climb.

And health minister Ms Dorries, who was the first MP to be diagnosed with Covid-19, has now hinted that the measures could remain in place until a vaccine is found.

Europe takes it's first steps out of Coronavirus lockdown 1 /25 Europe takes it's first steps out of Coronavirus lockdown People queue at a hardware store during a partial reopening after the Austrian government eased lockdown restrictions Reuters A worker checks the temperature of a customer at the entrance of a supermarket in Itay Reuters Customers hold flowers in front of a DIY store in Graz, Austria, after it re-opened on April 14, 2020, following a "shutdown" in a measure to limit the spread of the new coronavirus APA/AFP via Getty Images People wearing protective face masks and gloves walk in the streets as the Italian government allows the reopening of some shops while a nationwide lockdown continues following the outbreak of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19), in Venice, Italy, Reuters People queue to enter a hardware store during a partial reopening after the Austrian government eased restrictions following the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) outbreak in Eisenstadt, Austria Reuters Camilla Cocchi wears a face mask and gloves as she sorts out clothing in her children's clothes shop after it was allowed to reopen following lockdown measures to contain the spread of Covid-19, in Rome AP A man wearing a face mask shops in a hardware store during a partial reopening after the Austrian government eased restrictions following the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) outbreak in Eisenstadt, Austria Reuters "Respect the 2 meters distance" banner is seen at a fish stand as the Italian government allows the reopening of some shops while a nationwide lockdown continues following the outbreak of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) in Venice, Italy, Reuters Customers wearing face masks push shopping carts in front of a DIY store in Vienna, Austria, after it re-opened on April 14, 2020, following a "shutdown" in a measure to limit the spread of the new coronavirus APA/AFP via Getty Images A worker checks the temperature of a customer at the entrance of a supermarket, as the spread of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) continues, in Turin, Italy Reuters Customers line up in front of a DIY store in Graz, Austria APA/AFP via Getty Images Gianfranco Mandas wears a face mask as he sorts out clothing in his children's clothes shop after it was allowed to opens following restriction measures to contain the spread of Covid-19, in Rome AP Customers wearing face masks push shopping carts in front of a DIY store in Vienna, Austria, after it re-opened on April 14, 2020, following a "shutdown" in a measure to limit the spread of the new coronavirus APA/AFP via Getty Images Customers queue at the Trastevere market, as new restrictions for open-air markets are implemented to prevent the spread of coronavirus disease (COVID-19) in Rome, Italy, Reuters Customers wearing face masks push shopping carts in front of a DIY store in Vienna, Austria, after it re-opened on April 14, 2020, following a "shutdown" in a measure to limit the spread of the new coronavirus APA/AFP via Getty Images A man wears a protective face mask and gloves at the newsstand as the Italian government allows the reopening of some shops while a nationwide lockdown continues following the outbreak of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19), in Venice, Italy Reuters People wearing face masks work in a hardware store during a partial reopening after the Austrian government eased restrictions following the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) outbreak in Eisenstadt, Austria Reuters Customers queue at the Trastevere market, as new restrictions for open-air markets are implemented to prevent the spread of coronavirus disease (COVID-19) in Rome, Italy Reuters A general view of the parking area of a hardware store during the partial reopening of shops after the Austrian government loosens its lockdown restrictions during the global coronavirus disease (COVID-19) outbreak in Vienna Reuters

She tweeted on Wednesday night: There is only one way we can exit full lockdown and that is when we have a vaccine.

Until then, we need to find ways we can adapt society and strike a balance between the health of the nation and our economy.

It is not clear when a Covid-19 vaccine could arrive, with some experts saying it could take as long as 12 to 18 months.

The government is expected to extend the lockdown measures later this week for at least another three weeks.

Conservative MP: Nadine Dorries

Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer said the opposition would support the extension, but called on ministers to publish their exit strategy.

He said: Overcoming this crisis requires taking the British public with you.

"Ministers have argued that now is not the time to talk about this. I profoundly disagree. Overcoming this crisis requires taking the British public with you.

"Millions of people have played their part and exceeded Government assumptions about their willingness to make sacrifices and to stay at home in the national interest.

"In return, the Government needs to be open and transparent with the public about how it believes the lockdown will ease and eventually end, how this decision will be informed and what measures are being put in place to plan for this eventuality.

Listen to The Leader: Coronavirus Daily podcast:

A Government source said: "Our strategy is focused on saving lives.

"We have been clear that all decisions will be guided by the scientific advice and data.
Rep. Justin Amash, I-Mich., is seen on the House steps of the Capitol before the House passed a $2 trillion coronavirus aid package by voice vote on Friday, March 27, 2020.

Rep. Justin Amash, a former Republican who voted to impeach President Donald Trump, is getting close to making a decision about a third-party bid for the White House, his campaign said Wednesday.

Speculation heated up after the Michigan independent tweeted on Monday that "Americans who believe in limited government deserve another option."

Tweet

His tweet came in response to a quote from Trump stating, "When somebody's president of the United States, the authority is total, and that's the way it's gotta be."

Replying to a tweet urging him to be that other "option," Amash said he is weighing whether to run and will make a decision shortly.

"Thanks. I'm looking at it closely this week," he wrote.

Tweet

In a statement Wednesday, his campaign said: "In mid-February, Justin Amash paused active campaigning for his congressional seat to carefully consider a presidential run. He has been discussing the potential campaign with his family, his friends, his team, and others, and a decision can be expected soon."

Amash made a splash last summer when he came out in support of impeachment and decided to leave the Republican Party, saying he felt "disenchanted with party politics and frightened by what I see from it. The two-party system has evolved into an existential threat to American principles and institutions."

Since then, he has continued to position himself as a Trump critic, receiving heat from top GOP officials and from the president himself.

On Monday, he criticized the president for claiming that he has control over how states respond to the coronavirus pandemic.

Tweet

In an extension of the rivalry between Amash and the president, Donald Trump Jr. said in June that he planned to campaign against him during the primary. There is little evidence that the president's son has done so amid the coronavirus outbreak.

It's unclear whether the 39-year-old Amash would run as an independent, a libertarian, or as another third-party candidate if he decides to go for it.

It's unlikely that a third-party candidate would win the presidency. However, third-party candidates can swing elections in tight contests. Michigan is considered a swing state, with its 16 electoral college votes coveted by Trump and the apparent Democratic nominee Joe Biden.

Amash, the son of Christian Arab immigrants, represents Grand Rapids in Congress.
The distant meeting of the Eurasian Economic Union (EEU) working group on the pricing of natural gas transportation services of the Board of the Eurasian Economic Commission took place Tuesday via videoconference, with the participation of the heads of the relevant departments of the EEU member states.

Minister of Territorial Administration and Infrastructure Suren Papikyan noted that in the envisaged regulations, the Armenian side proposes to be guided by the principles of ensuring the principles of non-discriminatory, transparency, and equal conditions when developing the respective tariff formation policy.

According to Papikyan, the regulations for the formation of a single energy market should stem from mutually agreed approaches and common goals, in order to provide preconditions for economic stability and promising development for the EEU and its member states, especially in the post-crisis conditions.
Boeing has completed the first flight of the F-15QA fighter, the most advanced version of the jet ever manufactured. Developed for the Qatar Emiri Air Force (QEAF), the jet demonstrated its next-generation capabilities during its 90-minute mission.



We are very proud of this accomplishment and looking forward with great excitement to the continued successes of this program, said Col. Ahmed Al Mansoori, commander, QEAF F-15 Wing. This successful first flight is an important milestone that brings our squadrons one step closer to flying this incredible aircraft over the skies of Qatar.



Boeings flight test team, led by Chief Test Pilot Matt Giese, implemented a precise mission checklist to test the multirole aircrafts capabilities. The aircraft demonstrated its manoeuvrability during its vertical Viking takeoff and by pulling nine Gs, or nine times the force of earths gravity, in its subsequent manoeuvring in the test airspace. Checks of systems such as avionics and radar were also successful. A test team monitoring the data in real time confirmed the aircraft performed as planned.



This successful first flight is an important step in providing the QEAF an aircraft with best-in-class range and payload, said Prat Kumar, Boeing vice president and F-15 program manager.



The advanced F-15QA not only offers game changing capabilities but is also built using advanced manufacturing processes which make the jet more efficient to manufacture. In the field, the F-15 costs half the cost per flight hour of similar fighter aircraft and delivers far more payload at far greater ranges. Thats success for the warfighter."



The US Department of Defence awarded Boeing a $6.2 billion contract in 2017 to manufacture 36 F-15 fighter jets for the QEAF. Boeing will begin delivering aircraft to the customer in 2021. In addition, Boeing was awarded a U.S. Air Force foreign military sale contract in 2019 for F-15QA aircrew and maintenance training for the QEAF.



The F-15QA brings to its operators next-generation technologies such as fly-by-wire flight controls, digital cockpit; modernized sensors, radar, and electronic warfare capabilities; and the world's fastest mission computer. Increases in reliability, sustainability and maintainability allow defence operators to affordably remain ahead of current and evolving threats.  TradeArabia News Service
U.S. President Donald Trump said on Tuesday he has instructed his administration to at least temporarily halt funding to the World Health Organization over its handling of the coronavirus pandemic.

Trump, at a White House news conference, said the WHO had "failed in its basic duty and it must be held accountable." He said the group had promoted China's "disinformation" about the virus that likely led to a wider outbreak of the virus than otherwise would have occurred.
Source: Xinhua| 2020-04-15 15:14:52|Editor: huaxia

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A medical worker with Zhongnan Hospital of Wuhan University conducts disinfection at Leishenshan (Thunder God Mountain) Hospital in Wuhan, capital of central China's Hubei Province, April 15, 2020. Wuhan Leishenshan (Thunder God Mountain) Hospital ceased operation in Wuhan on Wednesday as the coronavirus epidemic wanes. (Xinhua/Xiao Yijiu)

WUHAN, April 15 (Xinhua) -- A makeshift hospital ceased operation in Wuhan, capital of central China's Hubei Province, on Wednesday as the coronavirus epidemic wanes.

Wuhan Leishenshan (Thunder God Mountain) Hospital was built in 10 days to treat COVID-19 patients. Construction began in late January. Its last batch of patients was transferred to normal hospitals on Tuesday.

At the closing ceremony, doctors and nurses waved flags and wrote their names on the clothes of their colleagues for memory.

"We hope that the hospital will never restart operations," a local district official told an applauding crowd.

After the closing ceremony, medical workers were seen disinfecting and sealing the remaining wards.

Wang Xinghuan, head of the hospital, said they worked hard to achieve a low mortality rate of 2.3 percent among its patients, 45 percent of whom were in severe or critical conditions.

The hospital is managed by the Wuhan-based Zhongnan Hospital of Wuhan University with over 3,000 medics from nine provincial regions in China. A total of 2,011 patients have been treated there.

"After Leishenshan was built, I can see the efforts to increase beds and the support coming from across the nation," said Fang Yanhong, a nurse with the hospital.

The retirement of the hospital is a landmark development in Wuhan's months-long battle with the epidemic, indicating the city's COVID-19 treatment and medical operations are "back on the normal track," Jiao Yahui, an official with the National Health Commission, told Xinhua.

Jiao said the medical facility was built at a time when "medical resources were in the shortest supply."

It has played a very important role, helping the city add beds to admit more patients in a short period of time, thus helping contain the source of infection, she said.

The official said there is no timetable for dismantling the Leishenshan Hospital, noting it could be reactivated at any time.
More behind the cutNow T45 is cutting funding to WHO because he always blames others for his shortcomings and failures. This guy wouldnt cut it as a shift leader at a fast food restaurant. No character, worst leader ever. Sunny says its unclear if KingTrump has authorization to cut funding, and just because hes being a bully in a snit. Democrats in Congress are looking into legalities. He refuses to accept any responsibility for his failures. WHO offered tests but T45 turned it down, then CDC test failed. Meghan suggests people read articles about WHO, thinks they gave China cover. Sees politics blurring the lines. [Who cares where it started, it came to America in January and that fool has bungled it every step]. Joy thinks of course its political. He only cuts funding if it benefits him politically [eg Ukraine]. Brings up US Postal Service. Everything with him is always about him.[Shes only allowed to appear because ABC covers T45 propaganda campaign rallies disguised as a press conference. Yesterday he ranted the whole time and no questions asked of the medical experts present. So, anyway].Birx talks trends of new cases and fatalities. Proud to see so many embracing social distancing. Shes data driven, doesnt like to average things, prefers to focus on specific communities. You can see states with good surveillance, reopening should be community based and some may be able to proceed soon with decreased restrictions. Birx says they have much better sense of how contagious the virus is, in a way we havent seen with prior viruses. Talks about the silent threat of asymptomatic people. Birx treads carefully on WHO topic. Talks history of what happens in early days of pandemics. Needs to always have early transparency. Good to debrief once this is over. Talks infectious lingo. [R0 to R4-6 means one (=R0) infected patient can infect 4-6 more people (=R4-6), which is quite high in terms of communicable diseases.]Birx moves to testing topic. More discussion on reopening, especially when some states have still refused to put guidelines in place. Birx talks wonky stuff. Traditional flu season is over, so now theyre able to separate surveillance systems matching with testing capacity that doesnt confuse covid with flu. Birx moves to vulnerable populations, pre-existing conditions, thanks millennials who did a good job getting message out and protecting their parents. Talks supply chains of more rural medical facilities.AOC represents one of the hardest hit districts in NY. Talks about the vulnerable communities. NY-14 has 5 of the top 10 impacting communities. Mostly working class black and brown people. Quotes a lot of stats about this and that. Moves to Surgeon General comments from last week. What a clown. Came off like personal responsibility was to blame instead of systemic racial inequalities. AOC expands on this. Pre-existing conditions will be impactful but that applies to everyone and doesnt address the inequities in poc communities. Quotes more stats. Believes it should be addressed more with public policy than public choice. More talk about the progressive agenda. Everyone is resistant against policies until theyre personally affected. Equates to LGBT civil rights evolution. Guaranteeing healthcare isnt giving away charity, it affects everyone in the community. If you think covid testing should be free, then why not diabetes and other chronic conditions.AOC talks about Sanders dropping out, endorsing Biden. AOC says stakes are too high to consider another 4 years of T45. Lists all the horrible things over the last 3 years. Feels its important to rally behind our Democratic nominee. AOC says one of these two candidates is going to be elected T45 or Biden. Maybe it wasnt the outcome they (Sanders supporters) wanted, but between those two, its not close between the them. Important to see that the campaign has a plan for you. AOC talks possible VP pick. A lot of woc who are really qualified. Combination of two things 1-first female VP being a woc is a significant milestone and 2-what does the woman value, what policies does she champion, which is more than being a token of a particular demographic. AOC would like it to be a progressive to bridge the two policies.Source links are below each video or section
CINCINNATI, April 15, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- The Kroger Co. (NYSE: KR) today announced that Rodney McMullen, Kroger's chairman and CEO, will participate in a fireside chat with investors hosted by Evercore ISI at 8:45 a.m. ET on Thursday, April 16.

The presentation will broadcast online at ir.kroger.com. Click on "Events & Presentations" to access the event. The presentation will be available to view in an archived format following the conference until April 23, 2020.

At The Kroger Co. (NYSE: KR), we are Fresh for Everyone and dedicated to our Purpose: To Feed the Human Spirit. We are, across our family of companies, nearly half a million associates who serve over 11 million customers daily through a seamless shopping experience under a variety of banner names. We are committed to creating #ZeroHungerZeroWaste communities by 2025. To learn more about us, visit our newsroom and investor relations site.

SOURCE The Kroger Co.

Related Links

http://www.kroger.com


CHICAGO, April 15, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- According to Arizton's recent research report, Telehealth Market in US - Industry Outlook and Forecast 2020-2025 is expected to grow at a CAGR of approximately 30% during the period 20192025. This market research report includes data-driven and deep market insights on the impact of COVID-19 across geographies, segments, and vendor landscape. Leverage Arizton's market analysis to take real-time strategic business decisions and enhance your product portfolios.

Key Highlights Offered in the Report:

1. The US telehealth market is expected to reach to around $10 billion by 2020 with high double-digit YoY growth of around 80%, due to the recent COVID-19 pandemic.

2. Healthcare service providers are utilizing services such as telehealth that connect doctors and patients remotely to implement social distancing to prevent spreading of coronavirus.

3. Recently, approximately 76% of US hospitals connect with patients and consulting health care professionals remotely using video, audio, chat, email, and related technologies.

4. Favorable private and public reimbursement coverage for telehealth services in almost every state and recent inclusion of remote patient monitoring (RPM) under federal reimbursement coverage are fueling the uptake of telehealth services in the US.

5. Rising number of mobile health (mHealth) adoptions due to the widespread use of smartphones and internet connectivity is one of the key growth factors of the US telehealth market.

6. Post COVID-19, hospitals across the US are planning to invest more on telehealth solutions and associated physician education in order to increase physician familiarity with telehealth.

Key Offerings:

Market Size & Forecast by Revenue | 20192025

Market Dynamics  Leading trends, growth drivers, restraints, and investment opportunities

Market Segmentation  A detailed analysis by modality, component, delivery mode, and end-user

Competitive Landscape  Profile of 8 key vendors and 37 other vendors

Get your sample today! https://www.arizton.com/market-reports/telehealth-market-in-united-states-2025

Telehealth Market in US  Segmentation

The remote patient monitoring (RPM) segment is growing at a healthy rate and is expected to continue during the forecast period. This growth can be attributed to the growing prevalence of chronic diseases such as cardiovascular, diabetes, and respiratory diseases in the elderly population that require regular monitoring and high-quality healthcare.

The telehealth services segment is growing at the fastest CAGR as the demand for these services is increasing across the US. These services require to conduct and process virtual visits, online consultations of patients, interact with other healthcare professionals, and monitor patients on a real-time basis.

The web/app-based telehealth segment accounts for the largest share in the US telehealth market. As the web-based delivery model requires minimal software and hardware components for delivering advanced telehealth solutions, the demand is relatively high since it reduces upfront installation costs. Hence, the market is witnessing the increased adoption of web-based services by healthcare providers.

Market Segmentation by Modality

Real-time Virtual Health

Remote Patient Monitoring

Store and Forward

Market Segmentation by Component

Service

Hardware

Software

Market Segmentation by Delivery Mode

Web/Application-based

Cloud-based

On-premise

Market Segmentation by End-user

Healthcare Providers

Patients & Individuals

Employees & Government Organizations

Payers

Telehealth Market in US  Dynamics

Robotics platforms and robots are being used in healthcare, especially for performing minimally invasive surgeries to treat urological and gynecological disorders. Growing popularity of mHealth, virtual visits, and tele-ICUs, the usage of robotics is being expanded into telehealth services as well. With fewer skilled physicians to meet the growing healthcare needs of the target population, hospitals and healthcare centers are investing in robotic platforms telehealth that increase their patient capacity and geographical reach. Cutting-edge telemedicine and virtual reality (VR) applications have also integrated robotic technology that are presently being incorporated into many clinical applications.

Key Drivers and Trends fueling Market Growth:

Major Expansion of Reimbursement for Telehealth Services

Increasing Demand for Telehealth Due to COVID-19 Pandemic Crisis

Growing Demand for Remote Patient Monitoring Platforms and Connected Medical Devices

Advances in Technology Encouraging Adoption of Telehealth Among End-Users

Get your sample today! https://www.arizton.com/market-reports/telehealth-market-in-united-states-2025

Major Vendors

AMD Global Telemedicine

American Well

BioTelemetry

GlobalMedia Group

Koninklijke Philips

Resideo Life Care Solutions

Medtronic

Teladoc Health

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The US recorded its highest number of coronavirus deaths in a day after several days in which the death toll had fallen or was nearly flat.

The daily death toll was 2,405 on Tuesday, according to Johns Hopkins University's tally of cases, bringing the total number of US deaths to 26,033. At least 609,240 people have been infected with the virus in the US.

Despite the grim numbers, health officials have said they believe US numbers are leveling,

"There's no doubt what we've seen over the last several days is a flattening out," Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said Wednesday on NBC's "Today."

Still, officials are warning that states shouldn't yet ease up on social distancing measures because a resurgence of the virus is highly likely once Americans begin getting out of the house again.

What will be key to preventing another deadly wave in the country are the tools to track and monitor new cases.

"You want your resources to be able to very efficiently in real-time identify, isolate, and contact trace," Fauci said.

In the meantime, finding the right time to reopen the country is still a work in progress.

The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is working to make sure testing, contact tracing and an expanded public health capacity is in place as the country begins talking about opening back up, CDC Director Dr. Robert Redfield said.

"This is going to be fundamental to maintain and contain cases as they occur and then make sure we have the health capacity to deal with this, as we work to regain the confidence of the American public that it's safe to go back to work," Redfield said Wednesday on "CBS This Morning."

A team led by the CDC and the Federal Emergency Management Agency has drafted a strategy to return the country to work that includes guidance for local and state governments on how to reopen safely and in phases, the Washington Post reported.

Meanwhile, governors have begun diving into discussions about the first steps toward reopening their economies, with many of the nation's stay-at-home orders, as well as the federal government's social distancing guidelines, set to expire at the end of the month.

But many state leaders who are still seeing their number of cases climb say it's too soon to begin thinking about lifting any measures.

How will states know when to reopen?

Nearly a dozen states have begun working together to determine what the first steps should be once stay-at-home orders are lifted. But with experts cautioning that each state should be treated as a separate situation and assessed individually, there are still few answers to the questions of when each part of the country will begin reopening and what that will look like.

All that some state leaders have offered so far are indicators of when their state may begin thinking about reopening.

California Gov. Gavin Newsom, who said he'll be working with Washington and Oregon to determine a path forward, announced Tuesday a set of indicators that will help the state pin down the right time to begin lifting measures.

Those include the state's ability to track and monitor infected individuals through testing, contact tracing and isolating procedures, as well as its ability to prevent infection of at-risk groups.

"Science, not politics must be the guide. It cannot be ideological," he said. "We can't get ahead of ourselves. ... I don't want to make a political decision. That puts people's lives at risk."

Massachusetts Gov. Charlie Baker told residents of his state he was expecting "difficult days and weeks ahead." He said officials have begun conversations around reopening the state but there's still a lot of work that needs to be done before a plan is set into motion.

The state will need to have testing, tracing, isolation and quarantine procedures in place to reopen, the governor said.

Baker, who will work together with other governors of the Northeast in a plan toward reopening said that while his priority is doing "what's right for Massachusetts," it will also help staying in sync with other state leaders.

"I think it's going to be really important that we all pay attention to what the others are up to, and to make sure that nobody does anything that puts somebody in a really bad spot, because they just weren't thinking about what that impact was going to be on some other part of the Northeastern part of the US," he said.

In Ohio, Director of the Department of Health Dr. Amy Acton said that the state would first need to see a sustained decrease in the number of new cases -- so low that officials could trace each infected resident -- before considering reopening the state.

But even when that happens, until there's a vaccine, daily life won't look like it did before, the state's governor said, and institutions will need to take precautions to prevent further infections.

"Until there is a vaccine -- this monster is going to be working around us. When we start opening businesses and schools back up, it's going to be different," Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine said.

We might not go back to normal for another 2 years

DeWine's assessment was underscored by researchers from the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health who published findings Tuesday that projected the US may have to endure social distancing measures -- such as stay-at-home orders and school closures -- until 2022, unless a vaccine becomes available.

"Intermittent distancing may be required into 2022 unless critical care capacity is increased substantially or a treatment or vaccine becomes available," they wrote in their report.

Those findings directly contradict research cited by the White House that suggests the pandemic could stop by this summer.

And much like experts have already warned, the Harvard team warned that another round of the virus is possible once social distancing measures are lifted.

"Even in the event of apparent elimination, SARS-CoV-2 surveillance should be maintained since a resurgence in contagion could be possible as late as 2024," they wrote.
TWIN FALLS  As the COVID-19 pandemic forces widespread social distancing and Idaho sits under Gov. Brad Littles stay-home order, people are only supposed to travel for essential services.

Some of the few places people can still consistently go are restaurants where takeout and drive-thru options are available.

But just how much risk is there of catching the coronavirus by grabbing some to-go food and coming home?

According to Idahos South Central Public Health District and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, its not very high, as long as the employees and customers practice proper sanitation and distancing techniques.

Even while the health district is spending much of its time and resources dealing directly with the coronavirus, it is still responsible for regular restaurant inspections. Idaho health codes require at least a yearly inspection.

Jacob Ward, an environmental health specialist in the districts Twin Falls office who oversees restaurant inspections, said the frequency of inspections has not gone down during the pandemic.

The COVID investigations are taking up most of our time, and were doing the food inspections right after that, Ward said.

He said that techniques during inspections have changed a bit to accommodate social distancing rules, but much is still the same. Hand-washing and hygiene practices are critical, especially now.

The CDC said that it is unlikely that the coronavirus is transmitted through food. So Ward said that while its not infected food that is a potential danger at restaurants, coming in contact with other people is much more of a threat. Thats why to-go options are relatively safe.

The thing about drive-thru and carryout is that the restaurants can control the six feet of distance between people, he said. That really helps.

The district also recommends that restaurants check with their employees about their health before their shifts begin in order to make sure no one who may be carrying the virus brings it in.

So while the coronavirus main transmission threat isnt through food, safety regulations that restaurants already much abide by can help to contain the overall threat.

It does still help that there are already protections against something that might be transferred through food, health district spokeswoman Brianna Bodily said. There are people that are very concerned of course about grocery shopping and getting their food in safe ways through safe methods, but social distancing is one of the top ways that they can protect themselves.
File image

India on Wednesday pitched for a global cooperation and coordinated action to safeguard lives and livelihood of people while maintaining macroeconomic stability in a sustainable manner. Participating in a virtual session of G-20 Finance Ministers and Central Bank Governors (FMCBG) hosted by Saudi Arabia, Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman also talked about the measures taken by the Indian government to provide the vulnerable sections with swift, timely and targeted assistance.

The outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic or COVID-19 followed by subsequent lockdowns imposed by various countries to prevent spread of deadly virus has badly hit the global economy. The pandemic has infected more than 20 lakh persons around the world and took lives of more than 1.25 lakh people.

In her intervention, the minister talked about the role the member countries can play in "safeguarding the lives and livelihood of people while maintaining macroeconomic stability in a sustainable manner", said an official release.

She also shared with her G20 counterparts the measures taken by the Government of India to provide the vulnerable sections with swift, timely and targeted assistance.

Sitharaman had earlier at the 2nd Extraordinary Virtual G20 FMCBG on March 31, 2020 talked about the importance of international cooperation and coordinated actions in ensuring that the financial system continues to support and quickly revive the global economy.

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 her address on Wednesday, she said that within a couple of weeks India has disbursed financial assistance amounting to USD 3.9 billion to more than 320 million people, with a special focus on direct benefit transfer through digital technology so that the exposure of beneficiaries to public places is minimised.

Sitharaman also said that the policy measures undertaken by the Government of India, RBI and other regulators have helped in de-freezing the market and catalysing credit flows.

These measures include liquidity support of USD 50 billion, regulatory and supervisory measures for credit easing, relief on debt servicing through moratoriums on installments of term-loans, eased working capital financing and deferred interest payments on such financing.

An action plan has been prepared by G20 members on the directions of G20 leaders to protect lives, safeguard people's jobs and incomes, restore confidence, preserve financial stability, revive growth and recover stronger, provide help to countries needing assistance, coordinate on public health and financial measures and minimise disruption to global supply chain.

Referring to the action plan, Sitharaman said that it was a step in the right direction and would guide individual and collective actions for the G20 members in responding to COVID-19 pandemic in short and medium term.

She expressed hope that the global community would overcome this crisis soon and the lessons learnt would enable countries to develop prudent policy measure to combat any such crisis in the future.
Unions have welcomed the deal struck with the HSE allowing the voluntary redeployment of health workers to private nursing homes to deal with the Covid-19 crisis, but there has also been criticism of delays in getting those who answered the Call for Ireland back into the frontline.

Siptu representatives confirmed that an agreement has been reached with the HSE on the voluntary redeployment of health workers to private nursing homes amid growing fears over the number of coronavirus clusters in those settings.

Inclusion Ireland became the latest organisation to call for immediate Government and HSE action to address the issue, citing figures released on Tuesday which indicated that nearly half of all Covid-19 related deaths here have been people living in care homes.

On the new deal, Siptu health division organiser Paul Bell said: Under this agreement, the redeployment of Siptu members is strictly on a voluntary basis and a volunteers register will be set up in each CHO area. Volunteers will come from across the nursing, healthcare assistant, cleaning, chef, and catering assistant disciplines.

Our members will remain completely under the management of the HSE and will be assigned for agreed periods of time. They will also be provided with an adequate supply of PPE for their tasks.

This development arises because of challenges that have emerged in some private nursing homes in relation to staffing and their ability to manage the Covid-19 crisis. We will engage with the HSE and Department of Health for a critical review and analysis of this work when the crisis abates.

Tony Fitzpatrick, director of industrial relations with the INMO, said the agreement would help in the fight against the spread of the virus but said all the unions were disappointed that only a fraction of the people who responded to the Call for Ireland and returned to serve here have been processed.

Speaking on RTEs Today with Sean ORourke programme, Mr Fitzpatrick said: We are disappointed, and we speak for all the unions in this regard.

As far as I am aware they have only processed about 1,000 people via the Call for Ireland. We havent got the breakdown by grades, we havent got the breakdown of where theyve been allocated so we would like to see that process sped up to ensure that we have adequate staff within the system.

We have to remember that a quarter, one-in-four, of infections are healthcare workers and we are really worried about that.

He said the INMO had written to the chief medical officer, Dr Tony Holohan, and HSE chief clinical officer Colm Henry about this and that more needs to be done to ensure that more healthcare workers are coming on stream to help.

Earlier, consultant geriatrician Dr Emer Ahern said efforts are being made to create a bank of nursing in Cork to support nursing homes if staff are unavailable through illness or self-isolation. This is peoples homes and a lot of them want to remain there to receive their care, she said.

Dr Ahern told RTEs Morning Ireland that the anticipated surge is not being seen in hospitals, but is being felt in nursing homes and residential facilities.

She said that for the first time there is cross-sector movement of nursing staff. Specialist teams are helping nursing homes with consistent public health infection controls, nursing, and palliative medicine advice.
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The Centre has emphasized on having a face cover for everyone in the community -- including children older than three years -- as people with no symptoms can infect others."Those living in close proximity with others should distance themselves as far as possible, ventilate the room with a fan and open window. Always use face covers when in close proximity," said the guidelines.The handbook also emphasised that fruits and vegetables should be thoroughly washed, and milk bags and other packaged food items should also be washed with soap water before use.The document identified common use surfaces such as handles, knobs, doors etc. as a major source of disease spread in a community. "It is recommended that foot operated hand washing stations are installed at all public areas to enable residents to frequently wash their hands... hand washing stations will control the spread of the disease while reducing the amount of water used. To eliminate use of soap, chlorine can be added to the water," said the handbook citing two designs for affordable and self-assembled hand washing stations."Individuals must not defecate in the open and instead must use the toilet. The toilet must be kept clean after every use. Poorly-used or maintained community toilets can serve as a major source of disease. To prevent infection caused by people who do not take proper precautions while using toilets, the following best practices must be observed," said the handbook, insisting on maintaining safe distancing from each other near toilets and in other public areas.--IANSss/vdSource: IANS
United Nations has warned that around 117 million children worldwide face measles risk because countries are using their vaccine resources as they battle the coronavirus pandemic.

Representational Image/ASM

Given the current crisis, dozens of countries are curtailing their vaccine programs and putting all their efforts in tackling the virus that has caused quite a devastation across the globe.



Currently, 24 countries, including several already dealing with large measles outbreaks, have suspended widespread vaccinations, the World Health Organisation and the UN's children's fund UNICEF said.

An additional 13 countries have had their vaccination programmes interrupted due to Covid-19.

Representational Image/Reuters

In a joint statement, the Measles and Rubella Initiative (M&RI) said it was vital that immunisation capacity was retained during and after the current pandemic.



"Together, more than 117 million children...could be impacted by the suspension of scheduled immunization activities," it said.

"The M&RI supports the need to protect communities and health workers from Covid-19 through a pause of mass campaigns, where risks of the disease are high. However, this should not mean that children permanently miss out."

Across the globe, the the total number of coronavirus cases is approaching 20 lakh while the death toll has gone up to 1.26 lakh, according to latest data from Johns Hopkins University.

Reuters

The US is the worst affected country with over 6 lakh cases and about 26,000 fatalities. Spain (1.74 lakh cases), Italy (1.62 lakh cases), Germany (1.32 lakh cases) and France (1.31 lakh cases) are among the other worst affected countries.



Meanwhile, the death toll in Italy has gone up to 21,067 while it has risen to 18,255 in Spain and 15,729 in France.
Samsungs 5nm plans seem to be in jeopardy now because of the coronavirus. A report from South Korea claims that the outbreak will interfere with the companys ability to import the required equipment and get on with the production plans.

Samsung sources extreme ultraviolet (EUV) exposure equipment from ASML. The Netherlands-based manufacturer is the only one to make such equipment.

Due to the pandemic, its facing difficulty exporting the gear. And without it, semiconductor makers like Samsung and TSMC will be severely impacted.

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However, the delay in shipment will apparently deal a bigger blow to Samsungs 5nm process than TSMCs. Thats because Taiwanese companies made up 51 percent of the Dutch companys EUV equipment sales in 2019. TSMC was supposedly the biggest client.

This timely stockpiling will soften the blow for TSMC. It seems like the company is on track to begin production of 5nm semiconductors for AMD, Apple, Huawei and Qualcomm from this quarter.

However, the Taiwanese foundry will likely have to delay the test production of 3-nm semiconductors to Q4 2020. But given that 5nm is said to be the next full node after 7nm, it matters more currently.

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Thats why Samsung seems to be in greater trouble. Korean companies accounted for just 16 percent of ASMLs shipment last year. Thus, we can surmise that the company doesnt have enough to proceed with the mass production of 5nm semiconductors. Whatever equipment it bought last year was supposedly for DRAM production anyway.

Samsungs 5nm plans must go ahead per schedule for it to chase TSMC

Samsung is vying to be the top player in the semiconductor market by 2030. However, TSMC has a comfortable lead right now and the gap is only widening.

If Samsung is unable to stick with its production plans for the year, the situation will only worsen. Although the company was the first one to use EUV in the foundry process, TSMC caught on quickly.

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Right now, the EUV-based foundry industry is something of a duopoly and if Samsung fails to catch up, it may very well become a monopoly down the line.

Previously, it was reported that Samsung has delayed the mass production of 3nm chips until 2022 because of COVID-19. The initial plan was to get to work by next year. However, because of the pandemic, it wasnt able to go ahead with the scheduled installation of equipment needed for production lines.

So, by the looks of it, TSMC will likely beat Samsung to the market by presenting 3nm chips first.

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Other than Samsungs 5nm plans, the companys smartphone sales are also said to be suffering because of the coronavirus. A recent report says that the Galaxy S20 series will end up being the worst-selling S range ever.

But Samsung is said to be a firm that thrives in crises. Thus, we wont be surprised if its at the top of its game again by next year. Thats not to say its performance is sub-par by means. After all, its an industry leader in many segments, including smartphones.

But of course, to maintain that lead, it will have to continue doing better. We will have to wait and see what it does about the 5nm plans and dwindling flagship sales.
Today we will run through one way of estimating the intrinsic value of Zijin Mining Group Company Limited (HKG:2899) by taking the expected future cash flows and discounting them to their present value. I will use the Discounted Cash Flow (DCF) model. Don't get put off by the jargon, the math behind it is actually quite straightforward.

Companies can be valued in a lot of ways, so we would point out that a DCF is not perfect for every situation. Anyone interested in learning a bit more about intrinsic value should have a read of the Simply Wall St analysis model.

Check out our latest analysis for Zijin Mining Group

The method

We're using the 2-stage growth model, which simply means we take in account two stages of company's growth. In the initial period the company may have a higher growth rate and the second stage is usually assumed to have a stable growth rate. To begin with, we have to get estimates of the next ten years of cash flows. Where possible we use analyst estimates, but when these aren't available we extrapolate the previous free cash flow (FCF) from the last estimate or reported value. We assume companies with shrinking free cash flow will slow their rate of shrinkage, and that companies with growing free cash flow will see their growth rate slow, over this period. We do this to reflect that growth tends to slow more in the early years than it does in later years.

A DCF is all about the idea that a dollar in the future is less valuable than a dollar today, so we discount the value of these future cash flows to their estimated value in today's dollars:

10-year free cash flow (FCF) forecast

2020 2021 2022 2023 2024 2025 2026 2027 2028 2029 Levered FCF (CN, Millions) CN5.76b CN6.94b CN7.81b CN8.53b CN9.12b CN9.60b CN10.00b CN10.3b CN10.6b CN10.9b Growth Rate Estimate Source Analyst x2 Analyst x2 Est @ 12.46% Est @ 9.19% Est @ 6.9% Est @ 5.29% Est @ 4.17% Est @ 3.38% Est @ 2.83% Est @ 2.45% Present Value (CN, Millions) Discounted @ 8.3% CN5.3k CN5.9k CN6.2k CN6.2k CN6.1k CN6.0k CN5.7k CN5.5k CN5.2k CN4.9k

("Est" = FCF growth rate estimated by Simply Wall St)

Present Value of 10-year Cash Flow (PVCF) = CN57b

Story continues

After calculating the present value of future cash flows in the intial 10-year period, we need to calculate the Terminal Value, which accounts for all future cash flows beyond the first stage. For a number of reasons a very conservative growth rate is used that cannot exceed that of a country's GDP growth. In this case we have used the 10-year government bond rate (1.6%) to estimate future growth. In the same way as with the 10-year 'growth' period, we discount future cash flows to today's value, using a cost of equity of 8.3%.

Terminal Value (TV)= FCF 2029  (1 + g)  (r  g) = CN11b (1 + 1.6%)  8.3% 1.6%) = CN164b

Present Value of Terminal Value (PVTV)= TV / (1 + r)10= CN164b ( 1 + 8.3%)10= CN74b

The total value, or equity value, is then the sum of the present value of the future cash flows, which in this case is CN131b. The last step is to then divide the equity value by the number of shares outstanding. Compared to the current share price of HK$3.3, the company appears quite undervalued at a 42% discount to where the stock price trades currently. Remember though, that this is just an approximate valuation, and like any complex formula - garbage in, garbage out.

SEHK:2899 Intrinsic value April 14th 2020

The assumptions

We would point out that the most important inputs to a discounted cash flow are the discount rate and of course the actual cash flows. Part of investing is coming up with your own evaluation of a company's future performance, so try the calculation yourself and check your own assumptions. The DCF also does not consider the possible cyclicality of an industry, or a company's future capital requirements, so it does not give a full picture of a company's potential performance. Given that we are looking at Zijin Mining Group as potential shareholders, the cost of equity is used as the discount rate, rather than the cost of capital (or weighted average cost of capital, WACC) which accounts for debt. In this calculation we've used 8.3%, which is based on a levered beta of 1.063. Beta is a measure of a stock's volatility, compared to the market as a whole. We get our beta from the industry average beta of globally comparable companies, with an imposed limit between 0.8 and 2.0, which is a reasonable range for a stable business.

Next Steps:

Whilst important, DCF calculation shouldnt be the only metric you look at when researching a company. The DCF model is not a perfect stock valuation tool. Rather it should be seen as a guide to "what assumptions need to be true for this stock to be under/overvalued?" If a company grows at a different rate, or if its cost of equity or risk free rate changes sharply, the output can look very different. What is the reason for the share price to differ from the intrinsic value? For Zijin Mining Group, We've compiled three fundamental aspects you should further examine:

Risks: For example, we've discovered 3 warning signs for Zijin Mining Group that you should be aware of before investing here. Future Earnings: How does 2899's growth rate compare to its peers and the wider market? Dig deeper into the analyst consensus number for the upcoming years by interacting with our free analyst growth expectation chart. Other Solid Businesses: Low debt, high returns on equity and good past performance are fundamental to a strong business. Why not explore our interactive list of stocks with solid business fundamentals to see if there are other companies you may not have considered!

PS. Simply Wall St updates its DCF calculation for every HK stock every day, so if you want to find the intrinsic value of any other stock just search here.

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.
A telltale signature of a cookstove, commonly used to prepare food or provide heat by burning wood, charcoal, animal dung or crop residue, is the thick, sooty smoke that rises from the flames. Its remnants, black stains left on the walls and clothes and in the lungs of the people -- usually women -- who tend to the stoves, are a striking reminder of the hazards the stoves pose both to human health and to the environment.

But soot is only part of the story when it comes to environmental impact -- about half of it, it turns out.

As the temperatures in a cookstove begin to drop, and the black smoke turns greyish-white, soot (or black carbon) emission is replaced by organic carbon.

Research from the McKelvey School of Engineering at Washington University in St. Louis has revealed that, despite its whitish appearance, organic carbon particles absorb as much -- if not more -- sunlight in the atmosphere as black carbon. And its health effects may be worse for the nearly 2.7 billion households worldwide that use them.

The research was published in the April 14, 2020, issue of Environmental Science & Technology Letters.

To better understand the effects cookstoves are having on the environment and human health, Rajan Chakrabarty, assistant professor of energy, environmental and chemical engineering, took his research to a pollution hotspot: Chhattisgarh, in the heart of rural central India, where cookstoves are one of the biggest emitters of aerosols and greenhouse gases.

"Previous experiments had been carried out in a lab under controlled conditions, which are different from what you'll find in the field," Chakrabarty said.

Yet global mitigation and policy strategies have for 15 years been influenced by a 2005 study based on experiments carried out in a lab. That paper recommended controlling black carbon as a way to mitigate climate change in the South Asian region.

To better understand the effects of cookstove emissions in the field, Chakrabarty's team headed to Chhattisgarh, between New Delhi and Calcutta. For two weeks, they lived with residents in rural homes where people used mud chulhas, or cookstoves, to prepare food. During that time, they ran 30 tests, cooking with different fuels: wood, agricultural residue and cattle dung, all of which were locally sourced.

The success of their field study was greatly facilitated by local researcher and Chakrabarty's longtime collaborator, Professor Shamsh Pervez and his research group at Pt. Ravishankar Shukla University.

"We found the reality of a cooking cycle is a mix of black and white smoke," Chakrabarty said. The color black absorbs light, and white reflects it. "We had thought that the organic carbons counteracted the black carbon, to a degree," he said. "Soot absorbs, organics scatter."

What they found was something different. The particulates in the white smoke were absorbing light very strongly in the near ultraviolet wavelengths. "When we looked under the hood," Chakrabarty said, "they were actually brown carbon." After completing the analysis, the team determined the absorption was equally if not greater than black carbon, making it an equally potent agent of atmospheric warming.

Burning biomass fuel, such as wood or dung, is the dominant source of ambient air pollution particles in the South Asian region, according to Chandra Venkataraman, professor of chemical engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay. Venkataraman was the first author of that influential 2005 Science paper.

"This work makes a novel and crucial finding, using field measurements of particulate emissions from biomass stoves, that radiation absorption from the organic carbon component could equal that from black carbon," she said.

Beyond its effects on the climate, organic carbon also poses significant health risks. Many of the particulates are what are known as high molecular weight polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons -- compounds of carbon and hydrogen that are established carcinogens in animals and generally believed to be so in humans.

Chakrabarty's findings are applicable around the world, as the World Health Organization reports nearly half of the world's population cooks over an open fire. Cookstoves can be found in homes not only in India, but around the globe, from Senegal to Peru to Albania.

"The finding has very significant implications for regional atmospheric warming from pollution particles containing short-lived climate forcers like black and organic carbon in the context of achieving Paris Agreement temperature targets," Venkataraman said.

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Packaging giant Pact Group's chief executive, Sanjay Dayal, says the federal and state governments need to offer more incentives to manufacturers, including relief from high energy prices, to encourage more local investment.

Mr Dayal also told The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald on Wednesday that high energy costs continue to weigh heavily on Australian manufacturers, with Pact's energy costs rising sharply in recent years.

He added that governments, both at a federal and state level, needed to give local manufacturers "active encouragement", pointing to the significant support given by foreign governments to their manufacturing sectors.

Bottles of hand sanitiser made by Pact Group stored at the company's Eastern Creek warehouse ready for dispatch. Credit:

"In most countries there will be a lot of encouragement given, particularly in the ones which we call low cost. And you would find the government plays an active role in encouraging that industry to start up and to work through the manufacturing process," he said.
Albany, N.Y.  Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo on Tuesday said New York is at the apex of its coronavirus battle and, as plans unfold to reopen the economy, he insisted he will not engage President Donald Trump in a fight over who has the power to make that decision.

"I am not going to fight with him. This is no time for any division," Cuomo said.

The debate about whether governors or the president have the authority to restart the economy erupted Monday when Cuomo  a day before Trump said he would announce the creation of a federal task force to provide guidance on how to do that safely  held a news conference with five other governors of northeast states to say they were creating their own task force.

Trump, in a series of tweets on Tuesday morning, implied the move is a mutiny by governors and that the authority to allow U.S. businesses to reopen rests with him.

"The president is clearly spoiling for a fight on this," Cuomo said. "The best thing we have done throughout these past 44 days is we have worked together and we havent raised political flags  even though it's an election year. We said not here, not in this; this is too important for anyone to play politics. It was a no-politics zone."

Cuomo led the effort to form the consortium with the states of Rhode Island, Connecticut, Pennsylvania, Delaware and New Jersey, saying that health and economic leaders from each state, along with each governor's chief of staff, would coordinate their efforts to restart the economy. Late Monday, Massachusetts' officials announced they would also join the task force.

Both Trump and Cuomo have acknowledged that restarting the economy, including reopening schools and businesses, must be done in a way that helps ensure there are no additional waves of COVID-19 outbreaks.

Cuomo said the northeast states have agreed to work together on a regional strategy, in part, "because the virus can get on Amtrak."

The political posturing unfolded as 18,697 people across the state remained hospitalized on Monday from symptoms associated with COVID-19, including 5,225 in intensive care units. More than 202,000 people in New York have tested positive for the infectious disease, although tens of thousands have recovered. There were 7,177 new positive cases on Monday.

Deaths continued to remain high in New York, with 778 fatalities on Monday, up from 671 on Sunday. Statewide there have been 10,834 fatalities attributed to COVID-19, a large majority of those involving individuals who had other underlying diseases or health problems.

Cuomo said the state is continuing to see a troubling surge in the rate of infections and deaths in nursing homes.

"You cannot stop it. Look, we have no visitors going to nursing homes ... talk about a harsh policy," Cuomo said, adding that staff members are checked when they arrive to work but "it just takes one staff member who didn't have a temperature when they walked in. ... You cannot hermetically seal a nursing home."

State Health Department Commissioner Howard Zucker said that most of the nursing home fatalities also involved patients in their 90s who had other underlying health problems.

Cuomo reiterated that he will not engage Trump in a dispute about states' rights but also said he could "not let stand" the president's remarks.

"I am not interested in fighting with the president," Cuomo said. "We dont have a king in this country. We didnt want a king.  We elected a president. ... He is wrong on the law."

On Monday during his daily briefing at the White House, Trump fired back.

"The president of the United States calls the shot," he said. "Its a decision for the president of the United States."

Trump also tweeted earlier in the day that his administration is working closely with the governors, and this will continue. A decision by me, in conjunction with the governors and input from others, will be made shortly!

-- By Brendan J. Lyons, Times Union, Albany

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The Enforcement Directorate on Wednesday moved the Bombay High Court seeking cancellation of bail of DHFL promoter Kapil Wadhawan, who is an accused in a money laundering case, for violating his bail conditions and travelling during the coronavirus lockdown.

Advocate Purnima Kantharia of the Enforcement Directorate (ED) mentioned the application before high court Justice P D Naik.

The court then issued notice to Wadhawan and posted the matter for further hearing on April 23.

Kapil Wadhawan, the 46-year-old chairman and managing director of Dewan Housing Finance Limited (DHFL), was arrested on January 27 this year by the ED for his dubious dealings with gangster Iqbal, who died in 2013, and was booked under provisions of Prevention of Money Laundering Act IPMLA).

He was granted bail on February 21 by a special PMLA court in Mumbai.

Kapil Wadhawan, his brother Dheeraj Wadhawan and other family members travelled to their farmhouse at Mahabaleshwar hill station in Maharashtra's Satara district last week, in alleged breach of the lockdown imposed to check the spread of coronavirus.

Subsequently, the ED on Friday issued orders for seizure of five luxury vehicles in which they travelled to Mahabaleshwar from Khandala.

The Wadhawan brothers and 21 others, including their family members, are at present in quarantine in Mahabaleshwar.

Kantharia said the ED sought an urgent hearing of its application after it came to light that Kapil Wadhawan violated the conditions imposed upon him by the special PMLA court while granting him bail.

"The accused (Kapil Wadhawan) was directed to appear regularly before the ED to ensure he does not leave the city. However, it was recently learnt that he travelled outside the city and thus, violated the bail conditions, Kantharia said.

She said this was an added ground for the prosecution to seek urgent hearing into its application requesting cancellation of bail granted to Wadhawan.

According to the ED, Kapil Wadhawan laundered money from DHFL as part of an illegal property deal with Mirchi.

It alleged that Rs 12,773 crore was siphoned off from DHFL on the pretext of providing loans to one lakh fictitious customers.

A part of this loan was used to make payments to Mirchi, who died in 2013 in London, the agency claimed.

As per the ED's case, Mirchis properties in Mumbai were sold to Sunblink Real Estate Private Limited, a company linked to Kapil Wadhawan and his brother Dheeraj Wadhawan.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
By PTI

HYDERABAD: Predicting that the growth rate in the first quarter of the current fiscal may slip into negative, former RBI governor C Rangarajan on Wednesday expressed the view that Prime Minister Narendra Modi's lockdown extension announcement should have included plans to address the issues of migrant labourers and daily wagers.

Rangarajan said though there may be negative growth in the GDP during the first quarter, if the situation recovers during the next three quarters, the growth rate may be closer to 3.5 percent.

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"The most important thing is that the hardship of the lockdown is being borne very severely by the vulnerable sections."

Because of the closure of the factories, the daily wage earner including the migrant labourer has been severely affected, he said.

"Therefore if lockdown is absolutely essential, then I think something must be done to take care of these people who have been thrown out of employment. And therefore this announcement should have been accompanied by an announcement regarding what and how they will take care of these people.

"Immediately in his (Modi) speech or elsewhere we should have seen (measures for labourers and daily wage earners). Even today in the relaxation norms, along with it perhaps some announcements on how the migrant labourer and others will be helped. It is also necessary," Rangarajan told PTI.

The former RBI Governor said the government has gone by medical advice to impose a lockdown and by the same advice they expanded the lockdown also which is essential to combat the coronavirus spread.

The lockdown has brought the economic activity to "halt", he said.

"Perhaps in the first quarter of the year, the GDP growth may even be negative. But that could be made up by the growth in the next three quarters. Some people have estimated the growth rate to be about 2 percent. But I think probably it will be closer to 3.5 per cent for the year as a whole.

But that all depends on how long this virus will continue, he said when asked about the lockdown impact on the economic growth.

He said Direct Cash Transfer system is one of the mechanisms through which the government can help the migrant labourers and at the same providing food and other relief material to them must be the first priority of the dispensation.

Replying to a query, he said the governments spendis expected to go higher than it originally was planned and finding resources to meet the expenditure will be difficult for it.

According to him, the centre needs to go for extra borrowings for which the Reserve Bank of India will have to step in to support the governments fund raise programmes.

The government itself is placed in a situation that it will have to borrow a lot more than what is planned.

In that also the RBI will have to help in some manner in a mutual agreement with the government to provide liquidity to the government, he said.
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Linkedin Editorial Board (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Wed, April 15, 2020 08:20 637 fc6853813033f564188675f8bd1ea76b 1 Editorial COVID-19,health-ministry,transportation-ministry,ride-hailing-application,ojek-driver,physical-distancing,large-scale-social-restrictions,PSBB,Grab,Gojek Free

The contradictory regulations issued by the Health Ministry and the Transportation Ministry on the operation of app-based motorcycle taxis (ojek) in the capital have confirmed the concerns of many observers: That the government is struggling to formulate a unified response to the worst pandemic to hit Indonesia since the Spanish flu brushed part of the archipelago in 1918.



For months, the news has been dominated by an apparent tug of war between the central government and local administrations over how to handle the crisis  a full lockdown or just a strict policy to restrict mobility. But the latest fiasco involving Health Minister Terawan Agus Putranto and acting transportation minister Luhut Pandjaitan shows that even members of President Joko Jokowi Widodos Cabinet are far from united in their response to the outbreak, which has killed over 450 people in the country.



Terawan, widely criticized for downplaying the threat of the coronavirus outbreak and later bureaucratizing the response to it, has made it clear in his regulation that application-based ojek drivers are prohibited from transporting passengers in areas where a large-scale social restrictions (PSBB) order is in place.



His policy is consistent with the whole purpose of social distancing  an attempt to curb contagion by keeping people apart. That is why the minister refused to grant the request of Jakarta Governor Anies Baswedan to waive the policy.



It boggles the mind that Luhut, the coordinating maritime affairs and investment minister, then issued his own regulation allowing app-based ojek drivers to serve passengers on the conditions that they wear masks and gloves, disinfect the vehicles before and after use and do not drive if they do not feel well. His move could easily be seen as a blatant attempt to upend Terawans policy. It raises the disturbing question of whether the Cabinet members ever actually sat together to discuss ways to effectively address the pandemic before issuing policies.



Indonesia badly needs a unified response to battle this virus, which has wreaked havoc in more developed countries in Europe and America. The contradictory policies issued by members of the Cabinet have created confusion among the public, undermining the whole effort to contain the deadly outbreak.



The Jokowi administration has been criticized for its policy flip-flops, a huge concern for businesses who want nothing but legal certainty. But we are currently facing a highly contagious disease that is killing thousands of people globallyand dozens nationwide  on a daily basis. We have no room for that kind of mistake.



President Jokowi must have a clear strategy to fight the virus and must get his ministers to work together to implement the agreed-upon strategy  not whatever springs to their mind.



The President has shown that he is serious about handling the crisis by declaring the COVID-19 outbreak a health emergency and, recently, a national disaster. But with his ministers saying different things within just a few hours of each other or issuing different policies within just a few days, the optics are not flattering for the President.



This may not be his fault, but it has reflected badly on him.
France 24

Russia said on Sunday it would not make concessions under U.S. pressure and warned that this week's talks on the Ukraine crisis might end early, while Washington said no breakthroughs were expected and progress depended on de-escalation from Moscow. The hard line from Moscow underscored the fragile prospects for negotiations that Washington hopes will avert the danger of a new Russian invasion of Ukraine, at the tensest point in U.S.-Russia relations since the Cold War ended three decades ago.Ta
Could Northrop Grumman Corporation (NYSE:NOC) be an attractive dividend share to own for the long haul? Investors are often drawn to strong companies with the idea of reinvesting the dividends. On the other hand, investors have been known to buy a stock because of its yield, and then lose money if the company's dividend doesn't live up to expectations.

A slim 1.6% yield is hard to get excited about, but the long payment history is respectable. At the right price, or with strong growth opportunities, Northrop Grumman could have potential. The company also bought back stock equivalent to around 1.4% of market capitalisation this year. Some simple analysis can offer a lot of insights when buying a company for its dividend, and we'll go through this below.

Click the interactive chart for our full dividend analysis

NYSE:NOC Historical Dividend Yield April 14th 2020

Payout ratios

Dividends are usually paid out of company earnings. If a company is paying more than it earns, then the dividend might become unsustainable - hardly an ideal situation. So we need to form a view on if a company's dividend is sustainable, relative to its net profit after tax. Looking at the data, we can see that 39% of Northrop Grumman's profits were paid out as dividends in the last 12 months. A medium payout ratio strikes a good balance between paying dividends, and keeping enough back to invest in the business. Besides, if reinvestment opportunities dry up, the company has room to increase the dividend.

Another important check we do is to see if the free cash flow generated is sufficient to pay the dividend. Northrop Grumman paid out a conservative 29% of its free cash flow as dividends last year. It's positive to see that Northrop Grumman'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.

Is Northrop Grumman's Balance Sheet Risky?

Story continues

As Northrop Grumman has a meaningful amount of debt, we need to check its balance sheet to see if the company might have debt risks. A rough way to check this is with these two simple ratios: a) net debt divided by EBITDA (earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortisation), and b) net interest cover. Net debt to EBITDA is a measure of a company's total debt. Net interest cover measures the ability to meet interest payments. Essentially we check that a) the company does not have too much debt, and b) that it can afford to pay the interest. Northrop Grumman has net debt of 2.92 times its EBITDA. Using debt can accelerate business growth, but also increases the risks.

We calculated its interest cover by measuring its earnings before interest and tax (EBIT), and dividing this by the company's net interest expense. Net interest cover of 5.62 times its interest expense appears reasonable for Northrop Grumman, although we're conscious that even high interest cover doesn't make a company bulletproof.

Remember, you can always get a snapshot of Northrop Grumman's latest financial position, by checking our visualisation of its financial health.

Dividend Volatility

Before buying a stock for its income, we want to see if the dividends have been stable in the past, and if the company has a track record of maintaining its dividend. Northrop Grumman has been paying dividends for a long time, but for the purpose of this analysis, we only examine the past 10 years of payments. During this period the dividend has been stable, which could imply the business could have relatively consistent earnings power. During the past ten-year period, the first annual payment was US$1.72 in 2010, compared to US$5.28 last year. Dividends per share have grown at approximately 12% per year over this time.

Dividends have been growing pretty quickly, and even more impressively, they haven't experienced any notable falls during this period.

Dividend Growth Potential

Dividend payments have been consistent over the past few years, but we should always check if earnings per share (EPS) are growing, as this will help maintain the purchasing power of the dividend. Northrop Grumman has grown its earnings per share at 6.0% per annum over the past five years. It's good to see decent earnings growth and a low payout ratio. Companies with these characteristics often display the fastest dividend growth over the long term - assuming earnings can be maintained, of course.

Conclusion

Dividend investors should always want to know if a) a company's dividends are affordable, b) if there is a track record of consistent payments, and c) if the dividend is capable of growing. Firstly, we like that Northrop Grumman has low and conservative payout ratios. Second, earnings growth has been mediocre, but at least the dividends have been relatively stable. Overall we think Northrop Grumman scores well on our analysis. It's not quite perfect, but we'd definitely be keen to take a closer look.

Companies possessing a stable dividend policy will likely enjoy greater investor interest than those suffering from a more inconsistent approach. Meanwhile, despite the importance of dividend payments, they are not the only factors our readers should know when assessing a company. For example, we've picked out 2 warning signs for Northrop Grumman that investors should know about before committing capital to this stock.

Looking for more high-yielding dividend ideas? Try our curated list of dividend stocks with a yield above 3%.

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.
Of course, it helped early on, said Ravshan Maimulov, director of a regional antiplague service in Kyrgyzstan who examined the teenage plague victim when he died in 2013. He used the same quarantine plan that he had instituted after the boys death to respond to the coronavirus in March.

When the 15-year-old had arrived at the village hospital, the body was still damp from sweat and I felt swelling under the armpits and chin, Mr. Maimulov said. But the boy was too far gone to save, and he died within hours.

Mr. Maimulov, 57, trained at a Russian antiplague institute called Microbe. After the boys death, he had the authority to immediately put in motion plans for a lockdown, even though at that point they had only a partial diagnosis.

He relayed the news to a regional governor in code  they would need to implement Formula 100  lest word leak and inhabitants of the village, Ichke-Zhergez, should try to flee before the door slammed shut.

We needed to prevent them all from running away, he said. By the next morning, police checkpoints were in place and the village was sealed.

On his recommendation, the authorities in the surrounding Issyk-Kul region used the same approach in March in introducing coronavirus lockdowns. We worked under the operative plan for the plague, Mr. Maimulov said in a telephone interview. The region of about half a million people has reported three coronavirus cases, he said. Kyrgyzstan has reported five deaths.
Rohan Verma, 21, was looking forward to pursuing a course in 3D animation from Canada. Verma is now in a dilemma as the lockdown has halted his visa processing.

With high commissions dysfunctional and countries imposing restrictions in the wake of the coronavirus outbreak, the study abroad dreams of thousands of students in the region are gripped by uncertainty as the world grapples with the Covid-19 lockdown.

Verma said, I had applied in a Canadian college, but my visa processing was stopped. I am not able to decide what to do next. If I apply here again, I will have to pay the fee again.

Immigration experts say over 1 lakh students from Punjab and Chandigarh land in foreign countries like Australia, Canada, UK and others for pursuing education every year.

Navneet Singh, an immigration consultant, said, Last year we had sent around 1,200 students abroad for studies, but we have experienced a dip this year. Worst affected are those who have already paid their fee and their files are with the high commission offices. Every May and September countries like Canada and Australia take students, but we arent sure whether students will be able to go in the fall either.

Around 50,000 students go abroad from here between July and September, but this year the number will go down, said Jatin Wadhwa, director of a Candigarh-based education abroad consultancy.

Equally hard pressed are those students who are already enrolled in courses abroad, but couldnt fly due to the lockdown.

For 18-year-old Simranjeet Kaur, lockdown has deferred her semester to January 2021. My classes were scheduled to start in May but now they will start in January next year. I do not have any option but to wait.

Managing director of an overseas solution provider said, We receive applications mostly from the students of Punjab, Chandigarh, Haryana and Himachal Pradesh. The intake that was about to happen in May in Canada and few Universities of Australia has been deferred. Students as well as parents are in panic.

For September intake last year we had received over 100 applications, but this year we have not received any. There is much uncertainty because we do not know when board examinations will be conducted. I think we will see a dip of 60% in applications this year, said Rakeshwar Walia of an immigration and education consultancy based in Khanna.
EXECUTIVE ORDER  WEAR MASKS:

- Any situation in public where you cannot maintain social distancing (6ft.): public transit, crowded streets, etc..

- Possibility for a civil penalty, local gov'ts would enforce, but doesn't want to get to a penalty, yet. If people don't follow, there might be a penalty in the future. Looking for self-enforcement from public.

- NY will coordinate as much as possible with local gov'ts and partner states. Local governments can have their own rules, but they can't conflict with the state. If there's a conflict, state laws supersede.

- Question on forceful removal from public transport if mask refused to be worn. Cuomo stated that we're not there yet, and transitioned into compliance with stay at home initiative. "How can you not wear a mask" given the facts?

- NOTE: Presentation slide states "All people in public in NY must have mask or mouth/nose covering." Exec Order will be issued. Must be worn in situation in which social distancing in not maintained. 3-day notice to allow for compliance. Goes into effect on Friday.

NURSING HOMES:

- State will release as much data as possible, but keeping respect and legal rights to privacy will be kept in mind. Gov says err on the side of discretion.

TESTING:

- New York City is looking to acquire swabs and vials, etc. Cuomo is looking to increase testing capacity in labs, all aspects, hoping to reduce competition between purchasers and organize efforts of gov'ts, and companies.

- How do we get the supply chain up - Fed Govt.

STATE PARKS:

- State's goal is to leave parks open.

ADDITIONAL NOTES

- Total hospitalizations are down a bit, still in the 18k.

- Net change in hospitalizations is down & three day average is down.

- Intubations are down.

- 2,253 new COVID hospitalizations, up from yesterday's numbers.

- 752 lives lost yesterday. 45 from nursing homes, remainder of number is from hospital reports.

- State will begin reporting all categories of fatalities pursuant to new CDC guidelines. "Probable deaths" will be included. State contacting facilities to get updated numbers.

- State looking to get reports of COVID deaths outside of hospitals and nursing homes.

- About 800 people have gone through Javits.

- We are not "reopening", we're going to a different place, taking the "New Normal" mentioned during Monday's multistate announcement.

- Gov reiterates need for clarity on the relationship between responsibilities. States can achieve reopening, but not testing.

- Phased reopening based on: How "essential" is business service or product & what is the risk of infection spread of business.

- What is the next "traunch" of essential businesses.

- Priorities, More essential and low risk gradient down to less essential and high risk.

- On producing a vaccine: full partnership w/ Fed Govt. Gov states that this isn't completely over until there is a vaccine.

- Need a place for testing and development, think NY.

- Possibility of medical treatments: convalescent plasma / antibodies / hydroxychloroquine. It's a medical doctor decision, and if Feds sent more hydroxychloroquine, regs on limiting will be lifted. NY is testing, and awaiting results.

- Reiterates phased "reopening" with public health as priority.

- Reiterates large scale testing as best tool to get state to reopening.

- Test, Trace, Isolate: massive undertaking. "We need an army to trace." Need Feds as partner.

- Diagnostic testing / antibody testing / saliva testing / finger prick testing / blood sampling are in development.

- Testing equipment is needed

- Testing sites in hospital are less than ideal, drive-thru better.

- Testing labs?

- We can't do large scale testing yet. We need federal support.

- Testing is basically provided by private sector companies.

- Companies need massive amounts of equipment, they need massive lab capacity, and massive amounts of chemical agents.

- NYS will coordinate statewide testing: 228 labs

- Gov likens testing capacity need to that of ventilators at start of response. Gov states "no one is to blame," effort is now how do we do it.

- DOH developed their own antibody testing; no need for private lab.

- 2,000 per day tested via finger prick.

- Asked FDA to approve test to bring up to 100,000 a day.

- Testing will be prioritized for healthcare workers, first responders, essential workers. Highlights specifically: 1199SEIU, NYPD and NYSNA (Nurses Assoc.).

- Need PPE and testing.

- Cuomo reiterated that states and the Feds are competing for tests, same as they had been for PPE and ventilators.

- In order to meet the needs for testing, etc., state governments need funding.

- NY will be giving ventilators: 100 to Michigan, 50 to Maryland.
The need of the hour is "universal testing" for COVID-19 and providing personal protection equipment along with testing kits, senior Congress leader M Veerappa Moily said on Wednesday, alleging that Prime Minister Narendra Modi has not given assurances on key aspects of the fight against the pandemic.

His attack on the government came a day after Prime Minister Modi on Tuesday announced the extension of the three-week nationwide lockdown for another 19 days till May 3 to control the coronavirus pandemic.

Moily said in the wake of the pandemic and the extended lockdown, the country needs to provide immediate relief to the hungry and those in need shelter and jobs.

"The need of the hour is universal testing for COVID-19, providing PPEs, testing kits, mobilising professionals, biologists, scientists and researchers," the former Union minister said in a statement.

"The prime minister has not given any assurances for these basic necessities to tackle the pandemic -- be it providing shelter to people or on loss of jobs," Moily said, asserting that India should tackle the crisis on a war footing.

"The prime minister, while speaking to the people of his parliamentary constituency of Varanasi via video conferencing, on March 25 said the Mahabharata war was won in 18 days but this war against coronavirus will take 21 days," Moily said, adding that it seems the PM has failed the people of India.

"I think, the prime minister should stop giving false assurances to the people of the country knowing the gravity of the pandemic world over," said Moily, who is a member of the task force formed by the Congress for overseeing the fight against the pandemic in the party-ruled states.

On reports of the US approving the sale of missiles and torpedoes to India, Moily said the two governments should not be talking in terms of war preparedness when the entire humanity is suffering from hunger and lack of shelter and basic necessities.

Moily also attacked Modi over his 'Saptapadi' call, saying he uses the sacred word without understanding the implications of it.

During his 25-minute address on Tuesday, Modi also asked people to follow 'saptapadi' (seven steps) in the coming days to help the government in its fight against coronavirus. The seven steps included taking care of the elderly people, maintaining social distancing and helping the poor.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Face up to eating disorders, and seek help

A new study has found young people are leaving it 'too late' to seek help for eating disorders, citing fear of losing control over their eating or weight, denial, and failure to perceive the severity of the illness as reasons not to get professional advice.

The recent online survey of almost 300 Australian young adults aged 18-25 years found a majority had eating, weight or body shape concerns, and even those with anorexia or bulimia reportedly found reasons to delay getting treatment or expert interventions.

The first author of the study, Kathina Ali, Research Associate in Psychology at Flinders University, explains that concern for others and the belief one should solve their own problems were the two most common barriers towards seeking help for eating concerns.

"Not wanting others to worry about their problems was the highest endorsed barrier - it reflects the wish for autonomy and also the fear of being a burden to others in this group of young adults."

Feeling embarrassed about their problems or fearing that other people do not believe eating disorders are real illnesses even prevented young adults experiencing symptoms of anorexia nervosa or bulimia nervosa from seeking help, says fellow psychology researcher Dr Dan Fassnacht.

"Concerningly, only a minority of people with eating disorder symptoms had sought professional help and few believed they needed help despite the problems they were experiencing," says Dr Fassnacht, Flinders University Psychology Lecturer, co-author of a new paper just published in the International Journal of Eating Disorders.(Wiley).

In the research article, entitled 'What prevents young adults from seeking help? Barriers toward help?seeking for eating disorder symptomatology', the Australian and German researchers recommended clinicians (counsellors, health workers and others) and the public be made aware of these barriers.

More information and education about the severity and the impact of eating disorders - and how symptoms can get worse without interventions or treatment - should be available to young adults, including the importance of seeking help, and self-management strategies.

Helpful and free evidence-based online resources are available at websites such as Australia's Butterfly Foundation and the National Eating Disorders Collaboration.

###

Read the article, entitled 'What prevents young adults from seeking help? Barriers toward help?seeking for eating disorder symptomatology' (April 2020), by K Ali, DB Fassnacht, L Farrer, E Rieger, J Feldhege, M Moessner, KM Griffiths and S Bauer has been published online DOI: 10.1002/eat.23266

The study was conducted within the Australia-Germany Joint Research Cooperation Scheme with colleagues from the University Hospital Heidelberg in Germany, with support from the Young and Well Cooperative Research Centre in Australia.

This story has been published on: 2020-04-15. To contact the author, please use the contact details within the article.
The central banks have no choice but to remain expansionary, which is good for gold, said Dennis Gartman.

Gartman is the retired editor of the Gartman Letter. He spoke to Bloomberg recently. The interview was posted yesterday.

Gartman said he is not a "gold bug"

"I am actually an optimist. But I believe the monetary authorities, led by the Fed, have no choice but to remain expansionary," said Gartman.

Gartman sees the central banks becoming even more expansionary.

As of the recording, Gartman noted that gold broke out above $1,700 and said gold should go a "good deal higher"

"There are times when you should own gold. There are times when you should not. This is a time where you should."

To play gold's rise, Gartman said investors should look at ETFs or gold miners.

"I prefer the ETFs. It is a better way to go," said Gartman.

Gartman said his bet on gold is not a bet on deflation--yet.

"It is a bet on the debasement of major currencies.

Gartman said central bank buying has been a major force in propelling gold higher. Gartman points out that central banks in Russia and China have been big buyers of gold. In 2019 China added 106 tonnes of gold to its official reserves, while Russia acquired an additional 145 tonnes.

"And now it will be the retail investors who will be a big buyer of gold."

Gartman said gold buying has been constrained in India due to the COVID-19 lockdown, but when restrictions are lifted he predicts that the Indian market will bounce back.
LANSING, MI -- Gov. Gretchen Whitmer issued a statement Wednesday publicly thanking California Gov. Grant Newsom for his states assistance in helping Michigan battle the COVID-19 virus. Whitmer specifically pointed out that 50 ventilators are scheduled to arrive in Michigan today that are on loan from California.

From the beginning, Governor Newsom has taken swift and aggressive action to protect California families from the spread of COVID-19, Whitmer said in a press release. He understands that when it comes to fighting this virus, we are all on the same team, and must work together to protect as many people we can. These ventilators will save lives and help our health care system treat more COVID-19 patients here in Michigan. Im proud to work with Governor Newsom and everyone else who can step up to keep families safe.

California was one of the first states in the nation to institute stay-at-home orders restricting businesses from being open and limiting reasons for citizens to travel outside their home in an effort to slow down the spread of the virus. Michigan followed suit, but has been hit harder than California as Michigan has surpassed California in total COVID-19 cases and deaths as a result of the virus.

As California continues to flatten our curve in the fight against COVID-19 we have a moral and ethical imperative to help our fellow Americans. We are pleased to be able to assist Governor Whitmer and the people of Michigan who are rising to meet the moment in their own fight to protect public health and safety, Newsom said in the release.

And while Whitmer applauded more help arriving, the state is still seeking donations of much needed medical supplies and personal protective equipment for hospital workers. Items still being sought by the state include:

Masks: NIOSH N95 or better

Ventilators

Sanitizer (Hand/Wipes)

Gloves

Surgical Masks (Not handmade)

Hospital Gowns

No-Touch Thermometers

Donations can be directed to the Michigan Community Service Commission to 517-335-4295 or you can email: COVID19donations@michigan.gov.

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

Complete coverage at mlive.com/coronavirus

Wednesday, April 15: Latest developments on coronavirus in Michigan

Whitmer sees reasons to believe stay-at-home is working against coronavirus

Michigans coronavirus survivors describe battles to stay alive

Nearly a quarter of Michigan workers have filed for unemployment

As coronavirus scare relaxes Michigan transparency laws, experts question long-term effects

Whitmer sued by residents, landscaping business over stay-at-home order
A Texas woman is suing Princess Cruise Lines for knowingly exposing her and her husband to the coronavirus, saying he was kept on the ship at the Oakland harbor without care for days while his health deteriorated.

The husband, 68, was eventually sent to an Oakland hospital, where he died alone days later.

By allowing thousands of passengers to board the Grand Princess without telling them that others already on board had been exposed to COVID-19, the cruise line chose to place profits over the safety of its passengers, crew, and the general public, lawyers for Susan Dorety and the estate of her husband, Michael Dorety, said in a suit filed Tuesday in a Los Angeles federal court.

The lines lackadaisical approach to the safety of its passengers led to her own illness and her husbands death, the suit said.

The Grand Princess left San Francisco on Feb. 21, with 2,421 passengers and 1,113 crew members, for a scheduled 15-day voyage to the Hawaiian Islands and back. After reaching Hawaii and heading toward California, the ship was forced to anchor off the Bay Area coast on March 4 after one of its passengers, who had been on a previous voyage, died of the coronavirus. He was one of 62 passengers from the earlier voyage who were also on the Feb. 21 cruise.

The ship docked in Oakland on March 9, and passengers and crew were eventually transferred to military bases, where they were quarantined. At least 103 people tested positive for the virus. So far, Michael Dorety, another passenger and a crew member have died.

Susan and Michael Dorety, who was a retired firefighter, took the cruise to celebrate their 40th wedding anniversary.

According to the suit, the cruise line knew that passengers from the earlier voyage had been exposed to the virus, but allowed them to board again after signing papers saying they were not ill. After a few days, the ship started requiring employees to wear gloves, but continued to hold bingo games and other group events for nearly two weeks before imposing a quarantine, the suit said.

When Michael Dorety first experienced symptoms with the ship docked in Oakland, the suit said, his wife called the ships emergency phone number three times, and was told each time that someone would get back to her, but no one did.

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.

The next day, when he was unable to get out of bed, three more phone calls eventually produced a doctor, who found he had a fever and gave his wife some Tylenol for her husband and Tamiflu for herself, the suit said.

He was finally taken to a hospital almost three days later, where he suffered in agony for several days until his death. Susan Dorety, 65, said she and their two children listened over the phone as a doctor counted out Michaels final heartbeats.

The suit accuses Princess Cruise Lines of gross negligence and seeks unspecified damages.

The company, based in Santa Clarita (Los Angeles County), said in a statement Wednesday that it has been sensitive to the difficulties the COVID-19 outbreak has caused to our guests and crew. Our response throughout this process has focused on the well-being of our guests and crew within the parameters dictated to us by the government agencies involved and the evolving medical understanding of this new illness.

Bob Egelko is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: begelko@sfchronicle.com Twitter @BobEgelko
In these difficult days, it is such a relief to report about a warbird adventure with a happy resolution. We thought our readers would enjoy hearing from John Hess about he and his wifes recent acquisition of a long-dormant, prize-winning North American AT-6A Texan, and their valiant efforts to move the WWII trainer from her longtime home in Springfield, Missouri to the Hess familys base near Atlanta, Georgia. Hess is no stranger to warbirds, having already restored a magnificent Beech AT-11 Kansan; 41-9486, the 50th example built and oldest still flying. Given such a pedigree of accomplishment, the Texan should have been a walk in the park. right?

We will let John pick up the Texan story here

The Grand Texan Adventure in Missouri!

by John Hess

I finally have time to post about our latest adventure A few months ago, while volunteering for the The Liberty Foundation, my wife Fran and I were in Springfield, Missouri (SGF) with the B-17 Ye Olde Pub, along with John Shuttleworth, Mike Wilton and David Garrett. We needed a tow bar to move the P-51, so the airport ops guy suggested we use one from Nik Domann. Upon opening his hangar door, there sat a beautiful T-6 (minus engine) covered in dust. A closer look revealed that it was a very early AT-6A, Army Air Corps serial #41-153. Fran and I had always wanted a T-6, but she said she wouldnt sell her Cherokee to make room for one unless it had WASP history. Researching this serial number showed that it was based in Stockton, California and Williams, Arizona during WWII  both WASP bases where they flew T-6s.

Nik and his family had owned this Texan for more than 35 years. It was a former Oshkosh Grand Champion. Nik somewhat fondly remembers all the endless hours of polishing he spent during his youth. Fran and I eventually made the deal, but then had to figure out whether to either make it airworthy, or disassemble it and truck it home. The engine had been overhauled, however that was over 20 years ago. But, the airframe was so nice we decided to build up a firewall forward QEC (quick engine change) at home in Georgia, and then install it on the airplane in Missouri. Rex Vaughan of Tulsa Aircraft Engines did an awesome job with the engine IRAN (inspect and repair as necessary). He shipped it to us where Steve Beck and I built it up for installation.

We spent a week installing all the accessories and as many of the components as possible, but the main work would be in SGF. On Saturday April 4th, 2020, Steve and I drove the 11 hours to Springfield and started the installation. We spent long days and nights installing all of the firewall bellcrank brackets, hanging the engine and propeller, installing and rigging all of the push/pull engine controls, and a hundred other pieces to the puzzle. Then we had to perform an annual for the airframe (technically a 100 hr inspection because the annual could not be signed off without the wing attach AD being complied with, which was not feasible onsite). Nik had to continuously escort us at the airport because SGF is a TSA airport. Thankfully Nik, and sometimes his brother Kyle or friends James and John would pitch in. Of course the CV-19 mess threw a couple of wrenches into our trip. While Steve, Nik and I were good at staying Socially Distant from the rest of the world, many times almost all of the local restaurants would be closed by the time we left the airport. We always worked without stopping for lunch.

Less than a week later, 41-153 was pulled out of the hangar for the first time in over 20 years. We had a couple little squawks, but within a few hours she was ready for a test flight. Like those of you who have flown a Texan, I will never forget pushing that Pratt and Whitney R-1340 up for the first time! Thanks to Christopher Cox and Robert Maximillian Maiden I had some back seat lessons, but this was my first in the front. I circled the airport a few times and then landed to check fluid and oil screen, etc. (incidentally, Im thankful that T-6s are much easier to land from the front!).

Later that day I made Memphis, KNQA (Millington) before dark. Steve, driving the truck, arrived later that night. The next morning we uncowled her again and made it home that afternoon.

There are no words to express how grateful Fran and I are to Big Steve!! There are not many people that would or could do everything we did over these last few weeks. Now I just have to worry about whatever project he needs my help with because I wont be able to say no!

Many thanks to John Hess for allowing us to reproduce his story and photographs here. We look forwards to hearing about more of his adventures with his new prize in the future, and hope you, our readers, have enjoyed following his story!

A video of the first engine start is HERE, and greasing the landing back home HERE.
NEW YORK, April 14, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- Residential Generators market worldwide is projected to grow by US$2.7 Billion, driven by a compounded growth of 3.8%. Residential Generators, one of the segments analyzed and sized in this study, displays the potential to grow at over 3.8%. The shifting dynamics supporting this growth makes it critical for businesses in this space to keep abreast of the changing pulse of the market. Poised to reach over US$11.8 Billion by the year 2025, Residential Generators will bring in healthy gains adding significant momentum to global growth.



Read the full report: https://www.reportlinker.com/p05689842/?utm_source=PRN



- Representing the developed world, the United States will maintain a 3% growth momentum. Within Europe, which continues to remain an important element in the world economy, Germany will add over US$99.1 Million to the region's size and clout in the next 5 to 6 years. Over US$80 Million worth of projected demand in the region will come from Rest of Europe markets. In Japan, Residential Generators will reach a market size of US$723.9 Million by the close of the analysis period. As the world's second largest economy and the new game changer in global markets, China exhibits the potential to grow at 6% over the next couple of years and add approximately US$761.7 Million in terms of addressable opportunity for the picking by aspiring businesses and their astute leaders. Presented in visually rich graphics are these and many more need-to-know quantitative data important in ensuring quality of strategy decisions, be it entry into new markets or allocation of resources within a portfolio. Several macroeconomic factors and internal market forces will shape growth and development of demand patterns in emerging countries in Asia-Pacific, Latin America and the Middle East. All research viewpoints presented are based on validated engagements from influencers in the market, whose opinions supersede all other research methodologies.



- Competitors identified in this market include, among others,

American Honda Motor Co., Inc.

Atlas Copco AB

Briggs and Stratton Corporation

Caterpillar Inc.

Champion Power Equipment, Inc.

Cummins Inc.

Generac Power Systems, Inc.

Pramac S.p.A

Honeywell International Inc.

Kirloskar Electric Company Limited

Kohler Co., Rolls-Royce Power Systems AG

MTU Onsite Energy

Siemens Corporation

Westinghouse Electric Corporation

Wuxi Kipor Power Co. Ltd.

Wacker Neuson Corporation

Yamaha Motor Corporation

Yanmar Co., Ltd.



Read the full report: https://www.reportlinker.com/p05689842/?utm_source=PRN



I. INTRODUCTION, METHODOLOGY & REPORT SCOPE



II. EXECUTIVE SUMMARY



1. MARKET OVERVIEW



Residential Generators: Enabling Accessible, Efficient, and

Affordable Backup Power for the Powerless

Recent Market Activity

Need for Reliable and Continuous Power Supply Drive Widespread

Adoption of Generators

Global Market Outlook

Replacement Demand to Sustain Demand for Residential Generators

in Mature Developed Markets

Asia-Pacific: Fastest Growing Residential Generators Market

Global Competitor Market Shares

Residential Generators Competitor Market Share Scenario

Worldwide (in %): 2020 & 2029





2. FOCUS ON SELECT PLAYERS



American Honda Motor Co., Inc. (USA)

Atlas Copco AB (Sweden)

Briggs and Stratton Corporation (USA)

Caterpillar Inc. (USA)

Champion Power Equipment, Inc. (USA)

Cummins Inc. (USA)

Generac Power Systems, Inc. (USA)

Pramac S.p.A (Italy)

Harbor Freight Tools USA, Inc. (USA)

Harrington Generators International Ltd. (UK)

Honeywell International Inc. (USA)

Kirloskar Electric Company Limited (India)

Kohler Co. (USA)

Mi-T-M Corporation (USA)

Multiquip Inc. (USA)

Rolls-Royce Power Systems AG (Germany)

MTU Onsite Energy (USA)

Scott?s Emergency Lighting and Power Generation, Inc. (USA

Siemens Corporation (USA)

Westinghouse Electric Corporation (USA)

Wuxi Kipor Power Co. Ltd. (China)

Wacker Neuson Corporation (USA)

Yamaha Motor Corporation (USA)

Yanmar Co., Ltd. (Japan)

Himoinsa (Spain)





3. MARKET TRENDS & DRIVERS



Growing Popularity of Automatic, Intelligent, and Smart

Generators Drive Healthy Market Growth

Advanced Technology and Connectivity Make Residential

Generators Smarter

Automatic Generators Integrated with Smart Technologies

Gasoline-Powered, and Solar and Battery Combination Generators

Gain Traction

Frequent Power Outages Due to Aging and Heavily Burdened

Electric Power Infrastructure Benefit Market Expansion

Grid Failures Due to Natural & Man Made Disasters Also Boost

Demand for Residential Generators

List of Major Power Outages That Affected Global Power Supply

for 2015 & 2016

Slow yet Encouraging Rise in Residential Construction Activity

to Sustain Growth in the Market

Growing Investments in Smart Homes that Requires Uninterrupted

Power Supply Drive Strong Business Case for Residential

Generators

Easy Portability, Low Installation & Maintenance Requirements

Drive Surging Demand for Portable Residential Generators

Bi-Fuel Portability Aid Growth

Market for Generators with Output Capacity Upto 20 KVA Gain

Momentum

Lower Prices and Lack of Proper Network for Gas Transportation

Benefit Demand for Diesel Generators

Longer Duration of Power Supply during Outages Spur Demand for

Residential Standby Generators

Select Innovative Residential Standby Generator Models

Impediments in Market Growth

Despite Lowering Prices, Cost of Operations & Maintenance

Continues to Remain High

Sputtering Economic Growth Forcing Cut in Consumer Spending

Stringent Environmental Guidelines Hampering Growth



4. GLOBAL MARKET PERSPECTIVE



Table 1: Residential Generators Global Market Estimates and

Forecasts in US$ Million by Region/Country: 2018-2025

Table 2: Residential Generators Global Retrospective Market

Scenario in US$ Million by Region/Country: 2009-2017

Table 3: Residential Generators Market Share Shift across Key

Geographies Worldwide: 2009 VS 2019 VS 2025





III. MARKET ANALYSIS



GEOGRAPHIC MARKET ANALYSIS

UNITED STATES

Market Facts & Figures

Market Analytics

Table 4: United States Residential Generators Market Estimates

and Projections in US$ Million: 2018 to 2025

Table 5: Residential Generators Market in the United States:

A Historic Review in US$ Million for 2009-2017

CANADA

Table 6: Canadian Residential Generators Market Estimates and

Forecasts in US$ Million: 2018 to 2025

Table 7: Canadian Residential Generators Historic Market Review

in US$ Million: 2009-2017

JAPAN

Table 8: Japanese Market for Residential Generators: Annual

Sales Estimates and Projections in US$ Million for the Period

2018-2025

Table 9: Residential Generators Market in Japan: Historic Sales

Analysis in US$ Million for the Period 2009-2017

CHINA

Table 10: Chinese Residential Generators Market Growth

Prospects in US$ Million for the Period 2018-2025

Table 11: Residential Generators Historic Market Analysis in

China in US$ Million: 2009-2017

EUROPE

Market Facts & Figures

Market Analytics

Table 12: European Residential Generators Market Demand

Scenario in US$ Million by Region/Country: 2018-2025

Table 13: Residential Generators Market in Europe: A Historic

Market Perspective in US$ Million by Region/Country for the

Period 2009-2017

Table 14: European Residential Generators Market Share Shift by

Region/Country: 2009 VS 2019 VS 2025

FRANCE

Table 15: Residential Generators Market in France: Estimates

and Projections in US$ Million for the Period 2018-2025

Table 16: French Residential Generators Historic Market

Scenario in US$ Million: 2009-2017

GERMANY

Table 17: Residential Generators Market in Germany: Recent

Past, Current and Future Analysis in US$ Million for the Period

2018-2025

Table 18: German Residential Generators Historic Market

Analysis in US$ Million: 2009-2017

ITALY

Table 19: Italian Residential Generators Market Growth

Prospects in US$ Million for the Period 2018-2025

Table 20: Residential Generators Historic Market Analysis in

Italy in US$ Million: 2009-2017

UNITED KINGDOM

Table 21: United Kingdom Market for Residential Generators:

Annual Sales Estimates and Projections in US$ Million for the

Period 2018-2025

Table 22: Residential Generators Market in the United Kingdom:

Historic Sales Analysis in US$ Million for the Period 2009-2017

SPAIN

Table 23: Spanish Residential Generators Market Estimates and

Forecasts in US$ Million: 2018 to 2025

Table 24: Spanish Residential Generators Historic Market Review

in US$ Million: 2009-2017

RUSSIA

Table 25: Russian Residential Generators Market Estimates and

Projections in US$ Million: 2018 to 2025

Table 26: Residential Generators Market in Russia: A Historic

Review in US$ Million for 2009-2017

REST OF EUROPE

Table 27: Rest of Europe Residential Generators Market

Estimates and Forecasts in US$ Million: 2018-2025

Table 28: Residential Generators Market in Rest of Europe in

US$ Million: A Historic Review for the Period 2009-2017

ASIA-PACIFIC

Table 29: Asia-Pacific Residential Generators Market Estimates

and Forecasts in US$ Million by Region/Country: 2018-2025

Table 30: Residential Generators Market in Asia-Pacific:

Historic Market Analysis in US$ Million by Region/Country for

the Period 2009-2017

Table 31: Asia-Pacific Residential Generators Market Share

Analysis by Region/Country: 2009 VS 2019 VS 2025

AUSTRALIA

Table 32: Residential Generators Market in Australia: Recent

Past, Current and Future Analysis in US$ Million for the Period

2018-2025

Table 33: Australian Residential Generators Historic Market

Analysis in US$ Million: 2009-2017

INDIA

Table 34: Indian Residential Generators Market Estimates and

Forecasts in US$ Million: 2018 to 2025

Table 35: Indian Residential Generators Historic Market Review

in US$ Million: 2009-2017

SOUTH KOREA

Table 36: Residential Generators Market in South Korea: Recent

Past, Current and Future Analysis in US$ Million for the Period

2018-2025

Table 37: South Korean Residential Generators Historic Market

Analysis in US$ Million: 2009-2017

REST OF ASIA-PACIFIC

Table 38: Rest of Asia-Pacific Market for Residential

Generators: Annual Sales Estimates and Projections in US$

Million for the Period 2018-2025

Table 39: Residential Generators Market in Rest of

Asia-Pacific: Historic Sales Analysis in US$ Million for the

Period 2009-2017

LATIN AMERICA

Table 40: Latin American Residential Generators Market Trends

by Region/Country in US$ Million: 2018-2025

Table 41: Residential Generators Market in Latin America in US$

Million by Region/Country: A Historic Perspective for the

Period 2009-2017

Table 42: Latin American Residential Generators Market

Percentage Breakdown of Sales by Region/Country: 2009, 2019,

and 2025

ARGENTINA

Table 43: Argentinean Residential Generators Market Estimates

and Forecasts in US$ Million: 2018-2025

Table 44: Residential Generators Market in Argentina in US$

Million: A Historic Review for the Period 2009-2017

BRAZIL

Table 45: Residential Generators Market in Brazil: Estimates

and Projections in US$ Million for the Period 2018-2025

Table 46: Brazilian Residential Generators Historic Market

Scenario in US$ Million: 2009-2017

MEXICO

Table 47: Residential Generators Market in Mexico: Recent Past,

Current and Future Analysis in US$ Million for the Period

2018-2025

Table 48: Mexican Residential Generators Historic Market

Analysis in US$ Million: 2009-2017

REST OF LATIN AMERICA

Table 49: Rest of Latin America Residential Generators Market

Estimates and Projections in US$ Million: 2018 to 2025

Table 50: Residential Generators Market in Rest of Latin

America: A Historic Review in US$ Million for 2009-2017

MIDDLE EAST

Table 51: The Middle East Residential Generators Market

Estimates and Forecasts in US$ Million by Region/Country:

2018-2025

Table 52: Residential Generators Market in the Middle East by

Region/Country in US$ Million: 2009-2017

Table 53: The Middle East Residential Generators Market Share

Breakdown by Region/Country: 2009, 2019, and 2025

IRAN

Table 54: Iranian Market for Residential Generators: Annual

Sales Estimates and Projections in US$ Million for the Period

2018-2025

Table 55: Residential Generators Market in Iran: Historic Sales

Analysis in US$ Million for the Period 2009-2017

ISRAEL

Table 56: Israeli Residential Generators Market Estimates and

Forecasts in US$ Million: 2018-2025

Table 57: Residential Generators Market in Israel in US$

Million: A Historic Review for the Period 2009-2017

SAUDI ARABIA

Table 58: Saudi Arabian Residential Generators Market Growth

Prospects in US$ Million for the Period 2018-2025

Table 59: Residential Generators Historic Market Analysis in

Saudi Arabia in US$ Million: 2009-2017

UNITED ARAB EMIRATES

Table 60: Residential Generators Market in the United Arab

Emirates: Recent Past, Current and Future Analysis in US$

Million for the Period 2018-2025

Table 61: United Arab Emirates Residential Generators Historic

Market Analysis in US$ Million: 2009-2017

REST OF MIDDLE EAST

Table 62: Residential Generators Market in Rest of Middle East:

Recent Past, Current and Future Analysis in US$ Million for the

Period 2018-2025

Table 63: Rest of Middle East Residential Generators Historic

Market Analysis in US$ Million: 2009-2017

AFRICA

Table 64: African Residential Generators Market Estimates and

Projections in US$ Million: 2018 to 2025

Table 65: Residential Generators Market in Africa: A Historic

Review in US$ Million for 2009-2017





IV. COMPETITION



Total Companies Profiled: 32

Read the full report: https://www.reportlinker.com/p05689842/?utm_source=PRN



About Reportlinker

ReportLinker is an award-winning market research solution. Reportlinker finds and organizes the latest industry data so you get all the market research you need - instantly, in one place.



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BEIJING/TOKYO/WASHINGTON : China criticized US President Donald Trumps move to temporarily halt funding to the World Health Organization and pledged to support the global health body.

Trump on Tuesday said he ordered the move against the WHO because it took Chinas claims about the coronavirus at face value" and failed to share information about the pandemic as it spread. China has serious concerns" about the decision and called on the US to fulfill its responsibilities, foreign ministry spokesperson Zhao Lijian said at a briefing in Beijing on Wednesday.

This US decision will weaken the WHOs capabilities and undermine international cooperation," Zhao said, adding: China will as always support the WHO in playing an important role in international public health and global anti-epidemic response."

The move to limit support to the WHO in the midst of a global pandemic is unprecedented, and attracted criticism from health policy experts as well as billionaire philanthropist Bill Gates. Yet as domestic criticism of the Trump administrations response has increased and the US became the epicenter of the outbreak, many of the presidents supporters have pointed to the WHO for making early mistakes they say worsened the crisis.

The WHO failed in its basic duty and must be held accountable," Trump said at a White House press conference. The outbreak could have been contained at its source" if the organization had correctly responded early on, he added.

WHO member funding

The AP reported Wednesday that it obtained internal documents showing Chinese officials waited six days in January before President Xi Jinping warned the public of the dangers of the coronavirus outbreak. The delay after China became aware of the dangers of what is now known as Covid-19 allowed millions of people to travel from the epicenter in the city of Wuhan elsewhere in the country and the world, the report said.

While Chinas Zhao said he hadnt seen the report, he added that Beijing updated the WHO in a timely" manner and called accusations the government wasnt transparent unfair."

The WHO has been a conduit for tension between the US and China for months, with WHO Secretary-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus being singled out for blame by allies of the president for being too deferential to Beijing. Representatives for the WHO didnt respond to requests for comment.

Its unclear when any halt in payments would take effect or how much authority Trump has to suspend disbursements, which are authorized by Congress. The US has contributed $893 million to the WHOs operations during its current two-year funding cycle, according to the organization. Administration officials signaled the suspension would be for 60 days.

Responding to Trumps decision on Tuesday, UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres said the chance to investigate how the disease spread around the world would come later.

As it is not that time, it also not the time to reduce the resources for the operations of the World Health Organization or any other humanitarian organization in the fight against the virus," he said. As I have said before, now is the time for unity and for the international community to work together in solidarity to stop this virus and its shattering consequences."

Billionaire philanthropist Bill Gates, the co-founder of Microsoft Corp., warned in a tweet that cutting off funds for the WHO is as dangerous as it sounds."

Halting funding for the World Health Organization during a world health crisis is as dangerous as it sounds. Their work is slowing the spread of COVID-19 and if that work is stopped no other organization can replace them. The world needs @WHO now more than ever.  Bill Gates (@BillGates) April 15, 2020

The US contributes nearly a quarter of all member state dues for the WHO. That pool of funds  although a small proportion of the overall budget  are used as the organizations operating budget to run daily operations, said Adam Kamradt-Scott, an associate professor of international security at the University of Sydney who has written about the politics of pandemic preparedness. The rest of the funding, called voluntary contributions, come from member states and non-profits and are tailored to specific global health programs.

He warned that Trump could bankrupt the organization" if the US pulls both member dues and voluntary contributions, adding that the move would undo decades of working leading the world in fighting diseases. The move could impact global health more broadly beyond the WHO, he added.

We now have a situation in which the U.S. is vacating a leadership role in the middle of the crisis," Kamradt-Scott said. Nature abhors a vacuum. Politics abhors a vacuum even more."

Extraordinarily bad decision

Early on after the news of the virus broke, the U.S. had pushed to have its own experts included in a WHO-led delegation to China. The health group repeatedly praised the Chinese response to the crisis, and later drew questions about whether it acted too slowly in declaring a pandemic.

Trump on Tuesday pointed to a WHO statement in late January opposing travel bans as a response to the coronavirus outbreak. The president instituted travel restrictions on China in late January, later extending it to the European Union and U.K. Around the same time, he also praised Chinas efforts and transparency" in a tweet.

One of the most dangerous and costly decisions from the WHO was its disastrous decision to oppose travel restrictions from China and other nations," Trump said on Tuesday. Had other nations likewise suspended travel from China, countless more lives would have been saved."

Ashish Jha, the director of Harvard Universitys Global Health Institute, called Trumps move an extraordinarily bad decision."

I have a long history of criticizing @WHO when they mess up



I blamed WHO for catastrophic response to Ebola in 2014



I criticized WHO for naming Mugabe a health ambassador



But current scapegoating of WHO is exactly that



Scapegoating



And the losers will be the American people https://t.co/ryYfxSH3T0  Ashish "I'm still focused on testing" Jha (@ashishkjha) April 15, 2020

One person who reached out to Trump ahead of his announcement was the United Nations secretary-general. Guterres, through the US envoy to the UN, acknowledged WHO missteps in the pandemic, but argued that now is not the time to be pointing fingers.

Some aides to the president have argued that cuts to the WHO now could be counterproductive because it is one of the few agencies with access to some of the worlds most vulnerable populations in Yemen, Libya and Syria, which could all be hit hard by the virus, according to one person.

Budget cuts

The president has sought in the past to cut U.S. contributions to the WHO, even before the virus outbreak. In its proposed 2021 budget, the administration called for reducing voluntary contributions to the WHO by more than half, to about $58 million.

While Trump criticized WHO reliance on Chinese information in the early day of the crisis, he repeatedly praised China and its president, Xi Jinping, for its handling of the coronavirus outbreak in January and February. But he said Friday that the WHO is very, very China-centric. China always seems to get the better of the argument, and I dont like that."

House Democrats denounced Trumps decision to withhold congressionally appropriated funds from the WHO in the middle of a pandemic. They said that he lacks the legal authority to do so and, like his withholding of aid to Ukraine, it would be a violation of the law.

Democratic criticism

In a desperate attempt to deflect blame, President Trump is threatening to violate the same spending laws that brought about his impeachment," House Appropriations Committee spokesman Evan Hollander said in a statement. The president does not have the unilateral authority to withhold the United States assessed contribution to the World Health Organization."

Democratic Representative Don Beyer of Virginia called Trumps action so stupid and so dangerous."

The World Health Organization leads and coordinates the fight against pandemics. Its what they do," Beyer wrote on Twitter. You dont stop firefighters from doing their jobs during a five-alarm fire."

Trump is likely to get full support from Republicans in Congress. Several GOP lawmakers, such as Senators Martha McSally of Arizona and Rick Scott of Florida, have accused WHO of participating in alleged efforts by China to cover up or minimize the extent of the outbreak. Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina pledged to cut funding in the next appropriations bill.





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North Korea test-fires multiple cruise missiles: South

Iran Press TV

Tuesday, 14 April 2020 7:12 AM

South Korea says the North has fired multiple short-range cruise missiles into waters between the Korean Peninsula and Japan.

The South's Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) said several air-to-surface missiles were fired from fighter jets on Tuesday.

After flying about 150 kilometers, the projectiles went down into the North's eastern waters.

There was no immediate confirmation from Pyongyang.

The JCS said that it was monitoring for more developments and that US intelligence officials were conducting more analysis of the launch.

This was the latest launch since March, when Pyongyang fired nine short-range ballistic missiles, a record quantity for the country in a month.

The new test-launches come on the eve of the 108th birthday of the North's late founder, Kim Il-sung, the grandfather of current leader Kim Jong-un.

Since December last year, the country has test-fired multiple rockets and missiles. Back then, Kim ended a moratorium on the country's missile tests and said North Korea would soon develop a "new strategic weapon."

The ending of the moratorium came after the United States repeatedly refused to relieve any of the sanctions on the North even though Pyongyang had taken several goodwill steps in the course of now-stalled diplomacy with Washington.

The United Nations Security Council, the US, South Korea, and other bodies have slapped multiple sets of sanctions on Pyongyang over its weapons programs.

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The Central government will be issuing a detailed set of guidelines on the countrywide lockdown on Wednesday.

Prime Minister Modi had announced the extension of the lockdown in a televised address to the nation on Tuesday. And the 21-day lockdown which was slated to end yesterday was extended till May 3.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi had indicated at easing of lockdown restrictions in places where there is no hotspot after April 20 soon after announcing the extension of lockdown till May 3 amid surging COVID-19 cases in the country.

"Till 20th April, all districts, localities, states will be closely monitored, as to how strictly they are implementing norms. States which will not let hotspots increase, they could be allowed to let some important activities resume, but with certain conditions.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
As Philadelphias courts continue to hold emergency hearings to reduce the jail population amid a coronavirus outbreak behind bars, one judge has rejected every request for inmate release  and has even increased the bail for four.

That record over two days prompted the Defender Association to inform the courts Tuesday evening that it intended to withdraw all cases before Common Pleas Court Judge Anne Marie Coyle, saying it no longer believed it was in its clients best interest to argue their cases in front of her.

In an email sent to the leadership of the First Judicial District and obtained by The Inquirer, Chief Defender Keir Bradford-Grey wrote that as Coyle increased some detainees bail during hearings ostensibly designed to expedite their possible release, the judge told attorneys in her virtual courtroom that they should be careful what [they] wish for."

We are compelled reach the unfortunate conclusion that Judge Coyle does not share the understanding reached by all of the stakeholders involved in this extraordinary circumstance," Bradford-Grey wrote.

This is the latest sign of discord among the citys judiciary, defense lawyers, and the District Attorneys Office, who have publicly bickered for weeks about how to best to respond to a virus that is spreading behind bars five times faster than the rest of the city.

The decision also created some uncertainty in a process that, through Tuesday, had led to roughly 380 inmates securing an early release during five days of emergency hearings that began last week.

The judges have agreed to review the cases of scores of potentially releasable inmates from lists compiled by the District Attorneys Office and the Defender Association in an effort to reduce the population of the countys jails, which public health advocates have been warning for weeks could turn into a breeding ground for transmission of the coronavirus.

On Tuesday, city officials announced the first inmate death related to the coronavirus in the jails and said 54 more were infected with the disease.

Under the agreement struck by judges, prosecutors, and public defenders this month, candidates for potential release include nonviolent offenders who had already completed their minimum sentences and those being held on cash bail or low-level charges like drug possession, prostitution, and theft.

The courts leadership acknowledges the Defenders ability to withdraw any petition it chooses," said Gabe Roberts, a spokesperson for the First Judicial District. The courts remain open, ready and willing to decide any motion legally presented for adjudication.

District Attorney Larry Krasner said he understood Bradford-Greys position, given the effort parties have put into finding candidates worthy of possible release from jail.

Theres not much point in doing all that work and then having every single case rejected, he said.

The episode is not the first time Coyle has been embroiled in controversy.

An Inquirer analysis published last year found that Coyle sentenced people who had violated probation to state prison at a higher rate than any other judge in Philadelphia. Coyle said at the time that that could have been the result of overseeing serious cases in a major trials courtroom.

In February, Superior Court overturned a seven-year prison sentence Coyle imposed on a man who had violated probation, saying a reasonable observer could question whether the judge comported herself in an unbiased and impartial manner," and citing in part her animus against the District Attorneys Office.

And two years earlier, Coyle confronted the District Attorneys Office in highly unusual fashion by removing an assistant district attorney from a probation violation hearing, and unilaterally naming a defense lawyer in the room a special prosecutor." That case is waiting to be heard by the Supreme Court.

Ronald Greenblatt, a member of the private defense bar who has been involved in negotiations over the development of the emergency hearing process, said that even given Coyles history, he found her decisions this week shocking.

It really makes you wonder why Judge Coyle was selected for this role, he said.
(Newser)  Most people like a nice chandelier, but Amanda Liberty? She's in love with one. And she just learned that British regulators will not consider her attraction to light fixtures a protected sexual orientation, the Guardian reports. The UK's biggest press regulator, known as Ipso, made the ruling after Liberty complained that a December Sun article was discriminatory. Sun columnist Jane Moore had nominated Liberty for a "Dagenham Award (Two Stops Past Barking)" prize and asked if she was "Dim & Dimmer" because Liberty was in a relationship with the chandelier she calls "Lumiere," per Metro. The paper said it didn't doubt Liberty's attraction to the light fixture, but argued that discrimination rules didn't pertain to attraction between a person and an object.

story continues below

Ipso agreed, saying it "recognized that the complainant found the article to be offensive and upsetting," but regulatory code "does not cover issues of taste and offence." But Liberty insists that her sexual orientation draws her to inanimate objects, which at least one academic paper has dubbed "objectum sexuality" and linked to autism and synesthesia. Liberty had even changed her named from Whittaker when she was in a long-distance relationship with the Statue of Liberty, the Sun noted in 2019. As for Lumiere, Liberty says she bought the German chandelier on eBay for about $500: "Lumiere is too big to take to bed, but she does not mind when I spend time with the others," says Liberty. "This is just a natural orientation for me. I find the beauty in objects." (Read more sexual orientation stories.)
Britain appears to be reaching the peak of the coronavirus outbreak, with signs that the numbers of new cases are flattening off, experts have said.

But chief medical officer Chris Whitty left no doubt that it is too soon to lift lockdown restrictions on social activities without risking a renewed flare-up of the deadly virus.

Ministers are expected to extend the restrictions until 7 May at a virtual meeting of the Cobra emergencies committee on Thursday, when they will be briefed by Prof Whitty and chief scientific adviser Sir Patrick Vallance. Northern Irelands devolved executive has already decided the province will stay in lockdown to 9 May.

Prof Whitty told the daily press conference at 10 Downing Street on Wednesday that the outbreak was probably reaching the peak overall in the UK.

But health secretary Matt Hancock poured cold water on any hopes of an easing in restrictions, telling the conference: The clear message is that it is too early to make changes and therefore the message to the public is that everybody can play their part by staying at home, which protects the NHS and saves lives.

Of course I understand there is a broad discussion about what next, but we are very clear about the things people need to do now.

Angela McLean, deputy scientific adviser, gave the first indication that the lockdown will be lifted simultaneously across the UK, rather than being phased out according to regional variations in the progress of the outbreak.

What we would expect to happen is the peak to be at the same time across the country, because the way we changed our behaviour in the country was largely speaking the same everywhere, said Prof McLean.

While we have said London was two weeks ahead, what we meant was that London was two weeks ahead on the way up. In terms of starting to flatten and go down, we would expect each region to be the same.

Prof McLean pointed to encouraging signs that the daily numbers of new cases of Covid-19 had remained relatively steady for almost two weeks since peaking above 6,000 on 5 April, in marked contrast to swift rises in the weeks before.

Numbers of hospital beds occupied by coronavirus patients fell by 1 per cent across the country and by 5 per cent in Greater London over the past 24 hours, she said.

What I see here is evidence that everybodys efforts to stay home and not have as much contact with other people as would be normal is having the impact we hoped it would have and bringing this epidemic to a much better trajectory where this is currently flat and no longer rising, she said.

Matt Hancock speaks at the Downing Street press conference (PA)

Prof Whitty cautioned that high numbers of deaths would continue for some time after new cases begin to decline. And he warned that the knock-on effect of delays in reporting cases over the four-day Easter weekend could cause an upwards spike in deaths on Thursday.

We do all think that this has flattened out, said the chief medical officer.

But sadly we do think that high numbers of deaths will continue for a short while on from where we are at the moment.

At the moment we are not yet at the point where we can say confidently and safely this is now past the peak and we can start thinking very much about the next phases.

Ministers have been resisting calls from Sir Keir Starmer to set out how they intend to relax restrictions once it is safe to do so.

High noon in a coronavirus-stricken world Show all 18 1 /18 High noon in a coronavirus-stricken world High noon in a coronavirus-stricken world Najaf, Iraq A man holds a pocket watch at noon, at an almost empty market near the Imam Ali shrine Reuters High noon in a coronavirus-stricken world Bangkok, Thailand Wat Phra Si Rattana Satsadaram (The Temple of the Emerald Buddha, part of The Grand Palace) Reuters High noon in a coronavirus-stricken world Prague, Czech Republic An empty street leading to the historic Old Town Square Reuters High noon in a coronavirus-stricken world Washington DC, US Lawn stretching towards the Capitol, home of Congress Reuters High noon in a coronavirus-stricken world Jerusalem's Old City A watch showing the time in front of Damascus Gate Reuters High noon in a coronavirus-stricken world London, UK The Houses of Parliament seen from Westminster Bridge Reuters High noon in a coronavirus-stricken world Wuhan, China Empty lanes in the city that saw the first outbreak of disease Reuters High noon in a coronavirus-stricken world Havana, Cuba The Malecon road and esplanade winds along the city's seafront Reuters High noon in a coronavirus-stricken world Cairo, Egypt A little busier than elsewhere: midday traffic in Tahrir Square Reuters High noon in a coronavirus-stricken world Berlin, Germany The Brandenburg Gate, the only surviving city gate in the capital Reuters High noon in a coronavirus-stricken world Caracas, Venezuela Bolivar Avenue, opened in 1949 and the site of many demonstrations and rallies Reuters High noon in a coronavirus-stricken world Moscow, Russia Spasskaya Tower (left) on the eastern wall of the Kremlin, and St Basil's Cathedral Reuters High noon in a coronavirus-stricken world Istanbul,Turkey The harbourside Eminonu district is usually buzzing with activity Reuters High noon in a coronavirus-stricken world New Delhi, India Rajpath, a ceremonial boulevard that runs through the capital Reuters High noon in a coronavirus-stricken world Amman, Jordan The Roman amphitheatre that dates back to the 2nd century AD Reuters High noon in a coronavirus-stricken world New York City, US The main concourse of Grand Central station in Manhattan Reuters High noon in a coronavirus-stricken world Kiev, Ukraine Maidan Nezalezhnosti, the site of many political protests since the end of the Soviet era Reuters High noon in a coronavirus-stricken world Accra, Ghana The odd walker out in the midday sun on Ring Road Central Reuters

In a letter to foreign secretary Dominic Raab, the Labour leader said that to maintain morale and hope, people need a sense of what comes next.

But Mr Hancock showed concern that any public discussion of relaxed restrictions might encourage people to abandon social-distancing efforts prematurely.

In an apparent acknowledgement that the government sent out mixed signals early in the outbreak  when Boris Johnson was criticised for saying he was continuing to shake peoples hands and planned to visit his mother  Mr Hancock said: One of the things that I think we have learnt during this crisis is that the clarity of the guidance to the public is incredibly important.

With Mr Johnson continuing to recuperate from coronavirus at his country residence of Chequers, Mr Raab will chair the crucial Cobra meeting, which will involve leaders of the devolved administrations as well as senior ministers and advisers.

The meeting will follow a virtual cabinet, also led by the foreign secretary. Mr Raab is expected to announce the decision on the lockdown extension at the daily press conference in No 10 around 5pm.
The European Union (EU) has given Nigeria 50 million (N21 billion) grant in support of the governments current efforts to contain the spread of Coronavirus pandemic in the country.

The Head of EU delegation in Nigeria, Ambassador Ketil Karlsen, announced the grant at a meeting with President Muhammadu Buhari on Tuesday in Abuja.

The Special Adviser to the President on Media and Publicity, Femi Adesina, confirmed the EUs funding support in a tweet.

EU gives Nigeria a grant of 50 million Euro to fight Covid-19. Head of EU delegation, Amb Ketil Karlsen, at the event commended President Buhari for your powerful address to the nation last night, and for the bold and necessary measures youve taken, he wrote.

EU gives Nigeria a grant of 50 million Euro to fight Covid-19. Head of EU delegation, Amb Ketil Karlsen, at the event commended President Buhari for your powerful address to the nation last night, and for the bold and necessary measures youve taken.  Femi Adesina (@FemAdesina) April 14, 2020

While receiving the donation, President Buhari commended the EU commission for its efforts at aiding the country fight against the spread of the deadly disease with its 50 million donation.

Indeed, this brotherly support will save millions of lives. Nigeria, Africa and many beneficiary countries across the world will remain grateful for generations to come, the President was quoted saying.

Buhari told the delegation that his administration had done a lot to date in the fight against COVID-19.

So far, the number of confirmed cases in Nigeria is 343. Our efforts as a Government have focused on controlling and containing the virus to prevent community spread. I want to assure you that in this fight, Nigerians are united and by the grace of God and the continued support from our partners, we shall succeed, he said.

He also used the occasion to express the sincere condolences of the Government and people of Nigeria to EU-member countries and families who lost their loved ones as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Our thoughts and prayers are with the families, friends and communities impacted. We are confident from history that the resilience of Europe and our global collective will enable us to emerge stronger from this tragedy. Although, the EU is facing significant challenges due to this pandemic, I am indeed touched and grateful that the European Union still had the vision and foresight to remember its friends, partners and allies across the world, Buhari said.

This is coming after the International Monetary Fund (IMF) granted $500 million debt relief to 25 countries, mostly African nations excluding Nigeria.
05:05 PM IST

Districts which are not hotspots need to be proactive: Health Ministry
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Today in Pa. Daily Podcast | April 15, 2020

Pennsylvania lawmakers come up with their own plan to reopen businesses. Meanwhile, 900 South Carolina inmates are being transferred to a Pennsylvania prison. The federal government is giving more than $239 million to Pennsylvania airports and we have a story about a groundhog eating pizza.

Those are the stories we cover in the latest episode of Today in Pa, a daily weekday podcast from PennLive.com and hosted by Julia Hatmaker. Today in Pa is dedicated to sharing the most important and interesting stories in the state.

Todays episode refers to the following articles:

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Iran Economic Outlook: IMF forecasts 6 percent drop in GDP in 2020

03/29/20

Source: Press TV

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) has expected that the Iranian economy would do better in the wake of the current coronavirus pandemic compared to the previous fiscal year. The IMF said in a report published Tuesday that the Iranian economy would shrink by 6 percent this year compared to 7.6 percent drop in 2019.

It said the slight growth would come despite the fact that Iran has been hit hard by COVID-19, the disease caused by the new coronavirus, with more than 73,000 people infected with the virus since the pandemic began in the country less than two months ago.



The estimate comes as Iran, an oil-rich country which has relied on crude revenues for years, has been effectively deprived of those finances since the United States imposed its sanctions on the country in November 2018.



However, US sanctions have prompted deep changes in the way the Iranian government finances the country while they have clearly led to increased manufacturing and exports for non-crude products.



Last year was one of the worst on record for Iran's economy, the second largest in the Middle East region, as the decline in gross domestic product (GDP) was almost double the figure seen in 2017.



IMF's prediction for a slight economic rebound in Iran in 2020 comes as many countries around the word are bracing for a deep recession in the year ahead mainly because of the coronavirus pandemic and its impacts on the global economy.





Source: IMF's World Economic Outlook



The IMF said the economy in the Middle East and North Africa region, which is home to some of the richest countries of the world, would slump as a whole by 3.3 percent, the biggest contraction seen since the end of 1970s.
Tesla (TSLA) has now settled a lawsuit with California-based robotics company Zoox, Reuters reports. In March 2019, Tesla lawyers filed a lawsuit against four former employees and Zoox.

The company claimed that these employees stole proprietary information and trade secrets for developing warehousing, logistics and inventory control operations.

Zoox acknowledges that certain of its new hires from Tesla were in possession of Tesla documents pertaining to shipping, receiving, and warehouse procedures when they joined Zooxs logistics team, Zoox said.

According to the settlement, Zoox will now pay Tesla an undisclosed amount and undergo an audit checking that none of its employees have retained or are using Teslas confidential information.

At the same time, Credit Suisse analyst Dan Levy upgraded TSLA from sell to hold while boosting his price target from $415 to $580. Levy believes that Tesla now competitively has more edge in the transition to EV [electric vehicles] as coronavirus disruption will make it more difficult for legacy automakers to balance the long-term shift to EV in the face of near-term cycle disruption.

Meanwhile Goldman Sachs analyst Mark Delaney re-initiated coverage of Tesla with a bullish Buy rating and $864 price target (22% upside potential). We are positive on Tesla because we believe that the company has a signicant product lead in EVs, which is a market where we expect long-term secular growth, Delaney told investors on April 14.

Teslas stock has now rallied 70% year-to-date, and 30% in the last five days alone. Overall, TipRanks reveals that analysts have a Hold consensus on Tesla stock with a $511 average analyst price target. Due to the stocks recent rally, this indicates a 28% drop from current levels. (See Teslas stock analysis on TipRanks)

Related News:

Tesla Scored Record China Sales In March, Says Industry Association

Disney Signs $5 Billion Credit Agreement With Citibank

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More recent articles from Smarter Analyst:
TORONTO - Premier Doug Ford opened the door Wednesday to systemic changes to Ontario's long-term care system, where a significant portion of the province's COVID-19 deaths have been recorded.

Hey there, time traveller!

This article was published 15/4/2020 (636 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Ontario Premier Doug Ford answers questions at the daily briefing at the Queen's Park Legislature in Toronto on Tuesday April 14, 2020. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Frank Gunn

TORONTO - Premier Doug Ford opened the door Wednesday to systemic changes to Ontario's long-term care system, where a significant portion of the province's COVID-19 deaths have been recorded.

"There's cracks," Ford said after announcing additional testing and infection control measures. "We have to raise the standards...This is a wake-up call to the world, not just Ontario."

In the meantime, Ontario has issued an emergency order preventing long-term care staff from working at multiple homes. The province has acknowledged that some outbreaks in those facilities were the result of staff who work in two or three homes inadvertently bringing in the virus.

Though the government described it as a 14-day order, it takes effect April 22 and is only in place for six days. The government said it will likely be extended, as with its other emergency orders.

Long-Term Care Minister Merrillee Fullerton said it is an interim solution, and that Ontario will work with the federal government to address wages for those workers while they are prevented from working at more than one home.

"This is a temporary measure to allow for the reduction of the spread of COVID-19," she said.

Health-care worker unions have long raised the issue, saying staff often work at multiple facilities because they're unable to get full-time positions.

The NDP said the order contained a "giant loophole," which it said would allow temp agency long-term care staff to continue to work at multiple locations.

The president of the Ontario Nurses' Association echoed that concern and said the government has needed to take more decisive action to address the outbreaks for weeks.

"If they don't do something to curtail agency workers going from nursing home to nursing home, what's the point?" Vicki McKenna said. "This has to be top down. This should be all workers."

The ONA and the Registered Nurses' Association of Ontario have long been raising concerns about the continued practice of staff working in multiple homes.

Doris Grinspun, CEO of the RNAO, said she was pleased to see the government ban the practice for now but stressed that workers must be brought up to full-time hours or have their wages augmented.

"These individuals, 45 per cent of PSWs, they work in two or three places," she said. "We cannot just say to them, you can only work in one place. We have to say to the employers, give the full-time hours."

The government said it "encourages long-term care employers to offer full-time hours to their part-time employees during the COVID-19 outbreak."

The Ontario Long-Term Care Association said "while the long-term care action plan will take careful implementation," restricting workers to a single site  in addition to more testing, personal protective equipment and other supports  will be "fundamental to stabilizing homes."

Fullerton said before the pandemic she had been looking at ways to address personal support worker shortages in long-term care homes, and defended the government's actions so far to try to limit the impact of the virus in those facilities.

"This is an unprecedented tragedy and we acted swiftly months ago to make sure that there was proper screening, active screening, barring only essential visitors into the home," she said.

Ontario issued guidance to long-term care homes on active surveillance  meaning staff, volunteers, visitors and residents who may come and go are checked for symptoms and asked about travel history  in early March and non-essential visitors were restricted shortly after.

The province also announced Wednesday that it will test asymptomatic residents and staff in select homes, support long-term care homes with more public health and infection control expertise, provide additional training for staff working amid an outbreak, and redeploy staff from hospitals and home and community care.

"We owe it to our most vulnerable, we owe it to their families and loved ones to fight this terrible virus until the end," Ford said.

"We owe it to them to leave nothing on the table. Today we're throwing everything we've got at our long-term care homes."

Ontario reported 494 new COVID-19 cases Wednesday, including 51 more deaths.

That brings the total cases in the province to 8,447, including 385 deaths and 3,902 cases that have been resolved.

The total number of cases grew by just over six per cent, continuing a relatively low growth trend in recent days. And while there are now 795 people in hospital with COVID-19 in Ontario  26 more than on Tuesday  the number of people in intensive care and on ventilators dropped slightly.

Modelling had predicted that in a best case scenario there would be about 1,100 people with COVID-19 in intensive care now, but that number has hovered around 250 for about a week.

Chief medical officer of health, Dr. David Williams, said he believes physical distancing measures have been effective.

"The way I read it is that we have been doing our duty as Ontarians, collectively, on the physical distancing and we are in fact bending the curve," he said.

Ontario's modellers believe the province's peak will come this week, health officials have said.

Williams said Wednesday that new case numbers suggest that in terms of community spread, Ontario may in fact be past the peak, with a large number of new cases coming from long-term care homes.

The virus continued to spread in those facilities, with 98 homes reporting COVID-19 outbreaks that have killed at least 145 residents.

Some of the hardest-hit facilities include Pinecrest Nursing Home in Bobcaygeon, where 29 residents have died; Eatonville Care Centre in Toronto, where 30 residents have died; Seven Oaks in Toronto, where 22 residents have died; and Almonte Country Haven outside Ottawa, where 18 residents have died.

Testing has been expanded in long-term care homes, which the Ministry of Health says has increased the number of COVID-19 tests under investigation. That number doubled in the past day, to 4,429.

There were just over 6,000 tests completed in the previous day despite a promise from the government to do 8,000 tests a day by Wednesday.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published April 15, 2020.

 with files from Shawn Jeffords
DUSHANBE  A Tajik court has begun the trial of a journalist on extremism charges that international media-freedom watchdogs have called "absurd."

Daler Sharifov, who writes about domestic politics and religious issues, was arrested on January 28 on charges of inciting ethnic, racial, and religious hatred. He could be jailed for up to five years if found guilty.



His lawyer, Abdurahmon Sharifov, said on April 15 that the judge has told him the trial is open to the public but that the number of people allowed into the courtroom would be limited due to warnings by the World Health Organization about large gatherings during the coronavirus pandemic.

Sharipovs trial was initially scheduled to begin on April 13 but the hearing was postponed for two days because the state prosecutor was absent.

The Prosecutor-Generals Office says the case is based on "more than 200 articles and commentaries containing extremist content" aimed at "inciting religious intolerance" that were published on social media between 2013 and 2019.

Sharifov's relatives, human rights organizations, and media-freedom groups have rejected the accusations as unfounded and have demanded his immediate release.

Calling the incitement charges "absurd," Reporters Without Borders (RSF) and the Committee to Protect Journalists have said Sharifov's arrest was aimed at silencing a critical journalist ahead of parliamentary elections in March that were won, as expected, by President Emomali Rahmon's ruling party.

Writing for the independent news website Ozodagon from 2013 until its closure last year following "years of harassment," Sharipov often commented on violations of human rights and religious freedoms, according to RSF.

Eight years ago, the journalist spent several days in a hospital after being beaten in a still unpunished attack.
Tamil Nadu: Fisherfolk could be in imminent danger of contracting COVID-19, say experts

April 15,2020 | Source: The New Indian Express

Fishers could be in imminent danger of contracting COVID-19 if they resume fishing. The Centre recently announced it is exempting fishing from lockdown restrictions. Irrespective of the possibility of extension of the lockdown, many experts states a return to fishing would be very risky, considering the number of surfaces fishers usually come in touch with. "Virus outbreaks are challenging to contain in places such as fishing hamlets. People need to be sensitised about social distancing and hand washing. Since they live in close proximity one another, it becomes more challenging. It is important to keep the virus out of fishing hamlets," said Dr K Gopala Rathinam, a retired public health officer.



A study was conducted by The New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM), a weekly medical journal published by the Massachusetts Medical Society, on the surface lifespan of novel coronavirus, which has been recognised by WHO. The journal states the virus can live on surfaces for a few minutes to four days. Surfaces like paper and tissue paper, copper, cardboard, wood, clothes, stainless steel, polypropylene plastic, class and paper money are used in fishing. "The virus spreads through droplets from sneezing and coughing if an individual comes in contact with surfaces contaminated by another individual in places like boats and harbours in the case of fishers. It becomes dangerous and and makes for circumstances for easy transmission of the virus," said Dr M Shalini, Consultant Epidemiologist, Meenakshi Multi Speciality Hospital, Thanjavur. Retired public health officer Dr S Balasubramanian said, "The virus spreads through contamination in aerosol, surfaces and direct contact. It is a seventh-generation mutated virus. The risk of the virus spreading in places like fishing villages is quite high once there is an outbreak."



The annual fishing ban for states such as West Bengal, Odisha, Andhra Pradesh, Tamil Nadu and Puducherry is in effect from April 15 to June 14. The ban differs for States like Gujarat, Maharashtra, Karnataka and Kerala, who fish in the west in the Arabian Sea. Their ban starts on June 1 and ends on July. 31. This ban applies to mechanised boat fishers, while fibreglass boat fishers are exempted from the ban.



Speaking to TNIE, R Amal Xavier, Joint Director, Fisheries department, said, "We are planning to block mechanised fishers from fishing as the annual ban is only a couple of days away. We have sought opinions from representatives of fibreglass boat fishers. Some of them, particularly in southern parts like Nagapattinam taluk, have said they would refrain from fishing. Representatives in villages in some of the north taluks like Sirkazhi and Tharangambadi have expressed their willingness to go to sea."



Fishers have mixed opinions. S Karthikeyan, a fisher representative from Poompuhar, said, "We cannot maintain social distancing as there would be crowds in the harbour when we land with fish. We cannot focus on work if we have to focus on washing hands every half an hour after touching surfaces." District Collector Praveen P Nair said, "We would conduct a meeting with stakeholders and participants of the Crisis Management Committee and take a call on whether to allow fishers to resume or not."
Development is in progress, with testing planned in conjunction with an accredited laboratory for a prototype device that can detect disease from a distance without the need for close contact.

DIDSBURY, AB, April 15, 2020 /PRNewswire/ - Canada-based Airwave Electronics/Environmental, a long-time innovator in chemical gas sensing technologies, is developing a device to detect the COVID-19 virus immediately and at safe social distancing. Technology that has long been used throughout the world to detect gas leaks and monitor pollution levels is now being developed to screen for public health.

The device leverages the same concept that enables dogs to reliably sniff out gases associated with cancer and other diseases. It uses infrared technology (FTIR) to scan for the unique emission spectrum of people carrying the COVID-19 virus. Results are immediate, without intrusive testing or personal contact.

The device is small enough and light enough to be transported by a single operator. Its versatility enables it to be mounted on a portable stand, such as a tripod, or permanently secured to static structures, enabling a multitude of applications for its use, including area surveillance. A small video camera in the system enables the user to point the instrument at a desired target area.

Airwave Electronics/Environmental has aimed to develop a viable solution that is cost-effective and practical for mass detection of the COVID-19 virus and public health monitoring. The device will significantly help health care workers and others observe safe social distancing guidelines now and well into the future. At this time, COVID-19 tests are in short supply, and the use of current testing methods requires the consumption of a dwindling supply of one-time-use personal protective equipment (PPE).

Airwave Electronics/Environmental

Started in 1984, Airwave Electronics/Environmental is a Canadian company based in Calgary, Alberta specializing in the manufacture and sales of gas detection equipment.

SOURCE Airwave Electronics Ltd.

Related Links

https://gasdetect.com/


As the number of new COVID-19 cases shows promising signs of falling to single digits, a mobile phone app could play a crucial role in opening the economy without risking a second wave of the pandemic.

The Herald revealed on Tuesday that the federal government is considering asking Australians to download an app similar to one developed in Singapore called TraceTogether, which identifies people who have come into contact with someone diagnosed with the disease.

Those people can then be asked to test for the disease and, if need be, self-isolate for 14 days to stop the disease spreading.

The tracking app, one of several now in use across Asia, would provide a back-up for hard-pressed public health officials who now have to do so-called contact tracing in person by interviewing anyone diagnosed with COVID-19 about what they have done in the previous week.

Most infected people are happy to help but since COVID-19 can be contagious for as long as a week before symptoms show, it can be hard to remember all your potential contacts.
Lets not beat around the bush: our federal government has responded to the coronavirus outbreak with rank incompetence. The seriousness of the virus was grossly downplayed through much of January. Any additional time the country gained from Trumps decision to ban some travelers from China (more than 40,000 travelers from China arrived in the U.S. after the ban was in place) was wasted in a feckless February.
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As the economy reels, media companies are reacting to the stunning drop in advertising with layoffs, furloughs, and pay cuts. Magazine giant Conde Nast attempted to sweeten the bad news of its pay cuts with something positive: The company will be sending each of its employees an N95 maskyou know, the masks that help keep doctors and nurses treating coronavirus patients from getting ill themselves.

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Why do journalists need N95s? Heres the email from David Gifford, vice president, real estate and workplace services:

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Offering employees these masks is dangerous. The main, huge, obvious way it is dangerous is because there is a national shortage of N95s. These are hospital-grade masks. Health care workers need these masks to stay healthy so they can continue to go to work helping people with COVID-19 not die. They also need them so they can not die themselves. And there is a national shortage of them.

Where did the masks come from? I reached out to Conde Nast, and a spokesperson clarified why they have them, while also noting that the company did donate a bunch of masks already:

As a tenant of 1 World Trade, we have had a supply of masks on hand for employees since moving into the building in 2014. We donated the vast majority of our stock, a medically-preferred type of mask, to local hospitals in New York City. We offered employees, some of whom are reporting on the front lines of the crisis, the option of having one of the remaining masks, which are not the preferred type of masks for medical facilities. Any unclaimed masks will be donated.

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The spokesperson confirmed that by medically preferred, he meant disposable N95s, which is indeed what hospitals typically use. But given that health care workers are improvising personal protective equipment, it seems like they could still use a slightly different version of an actual N95, rather than a surgical mask or something else.

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There is a more subtle way this is dangerous, which has to do with how people might use the masks. Giving out a single N95 invites reuse. In fact Giffords email encourages reuse, for up to two years. Health care workers are reusing masks because they absolutely need to have them. Methods to clean them include using hydrogen peroxide vapor. Thats a far cry from the soap and water that Gifford advises (the mask manufacturer suggests they are good for just 30 washes). Instead of cleaning them, the World Health Organization advises that after wearing a mask, you put it immediately in a closed bin and then clean your hands. (The next best alternative, as we turn to making our own masks, seems to be to toss it in a laundry bin.) Wearing a mask into the world, touching surfaces, and then touching the mask means that the mask stands to get contaminated on the outside, as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention explains. If youre sick, you will contaminate the inside. It is not good to have a contaminated thing just hanging out in your household.

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Another way it is a little bit dangerous is because N95s are not neutral pieces of equipment. As Robert Amler told me for my Slate guide to masksan N95 has its own side effects. Namely, they can be hard to breathe through; Amler described it as similar to breathing into a paper bag. Folks with breathing issues should consult a doctor before using N95 masks, a San Francisco Chronicle piece explained a few years ago (they should not be used on children).

While theres mixed evidence that members of the public wearing a surgical or cloth mask can help slow the spread of the novel coronavirus, its even less clear that donning an N95 could help on an individual level, and extremely clear that on a public health level, the best use of N95s is for health care workers. Condes masks seem to be the 2020 equivalent of getting a Town Carjust stupider.
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Researchers have been working furiously to identify medications and treatments to combat the novel coronavirus that causes COVID-19.

While there are still no definitive answers, the Food and Drug Administration recently authorized emergency use of whats called convalescent blood plasma, an antibody-rich fluid thats donated by people who have survived a previous COVID-19 infection. This emergency use authorization (EUA) will make it easier for doctors to give donated plasma to COVID-19 patients as part of a standard course of hospital treatment.

But some expertsincluding, according to The New York Times, Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID)recently said that more evidence was still needed on whether plasma is a safe and effective treatment and that the data from the study used to justify the authorization was not strong enough.

While the data to date show some positive signals that convalescent plasma can be helpful in treating individuals with COVID-19, especially if given early in the trajectory of disease, we lack the randomized controlled trial data we need to better understand its utility in COVID-19 treatment, Thomas File, the president of the Infectious Diseases Society of America (IDSA), said in a statement.

This was not the first time the rapidly evolving information on COVID-19 has led to confusion and conflicting advice.

In March, for example, the FDA authorized emergency use of the anti-malarial medications hydroxychloroquine and chloroquine, perhaps out of desperation, says Paul Goepfert, professor of medicine and microbiology and director of the Alabama Vaccine Research Clinic at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. Three months later, as research increasingly pointed toward known harms and no available evidence of benefits, according to the American College of Physicians, that EUA was revoked.

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Researchers around the world are continuing to explore a number of other possible treatments, ranging from dexamethasone (an inexpensive, widely available steroid) to remdesivir (an expensive, experimental antiviral). The IDSA released guidelines outlining which therapies are worth testing as potential treatments for this new disease that many doctors are still trying to understand.

Were learning a lot quicklymore so than we have with any other virus, Goepfert says.

But it will take more rigorous studies before scientists truly understand what will work best. Drugs that initially show promise may turn out to be dangerous or ineffective. Hundreds of trials are still underway, involving thousands of patients in the U.S. and around the world.

Heres a rundown on what we know so far about treating COVID-19.

The Basics of Hospital Care

Most people who contract COVID-19 can be treated at home and start to feel better after a week or so, but about one-fifth of patients experience worsening symptoms, such as difficulty breathing, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Its people with these more severe cases who may need to be treated in the hospital.

Care in the hospital is aimed at supporting patients as their body fights off the virus, Goepfert says. That entails supplemental oxygen to help people breathe, intravenous fluids if they are dehydrated, and antibiotics to treat secondary bacterial infections, such as pneumonia. If patients receiving oxygen still arent able to get enough of it into their bloodstream, doctors may put them on a ventilator to help them breathe while their body fights the infection.

Blood Plasma From Recovered Patients

This experimental therapy, called convalescent plasma, collects blood plasma from people who have recovered from COVID-19 and injects it into people fighting the disease. The idea is that the blood of survivors, which contains antibodies against the virus, may help recipients who are ill recover faster or may prevent the disease in those at high risk, such as frontline medical workers and those living with a COVID-19 patient.

Dating back to the late 19th century, the venerable treatment is a great idea, says Gregory Poland, an infectious disease expert and director of the Mayo Clinics Vaccine Research Group in Rochester, Minn. It has worked in many other infections, and therefore, there is reason to suspect it may be helpful.

Early data from research in China was promising. A national initiative to investigate the therapy is still seeking plasma donors in the U.S. (Read more about how to help.) And in April, the FDA expanded the use of convalescent plasma to make it available to some patients with severe disease outside of clinical trials.

Then, in August, the agency authorized convalescent plasma for emergency use. Some researchers, including Frank Harrell, a professor of biostatistics at Vanderbilt University School of Medicine in Nashville, Tenn., have expressed concern that the benefits of plasma were overstated when the EUA was announced. The authorization was largely based on data collected from 35,322 patients who received plasma through the FDAs expanded access program.

A study from the Mayo Clinic analyzing that data, which has not yet been peer-reviewed, indicated that patients who received plasma with high levels of antibodies were more likely to survive than patients who received plasma with low levels of antibodies. The study also found that patients who received plasma within the first three days after being diagnosed fared better than patients who received plasma on or after day four after diagnosis.

The body of evidence seems to indicate that plasma is safe, but it is not yet sufficient to say that we know that plasma works, says Shmuel Shoham, an associate professor of medicine and associate director of the Transplant and Oncology Infectious Diseases Center at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore.

What we dont have are the randomized controlled trials, which are the gold standard to bring it home, he says. Such trials involve a control group that does not receive the plasma treatment, something the Mayo Clinic study did not include. (Shoham, who is a fellow of the IDSA, is involved with two randomized control trials of plasma that are still trying to recruit patients.)

Even if additional data suggests that convalescent plasma is effective, it still is not a cure or even a scalable treatmentits just a stopgap measure, Poland says. The immunity conferred generally lasts only a few weeks. And because plasma from one patient treats only two or three others, its not practical for widespread use. As a crowdsourced product there could be problems with supply, Shoham says.

The National Institutes of Health is coordinating studies looking at how a more scalable treatment might be manufactured from plasma, but the availability of such a product would still be a long way off.

Other Experimental Drugs

Beyond supportive care such as oxygen, researchers are studying several therapies other than convalescent plasma that could ease symptoms and possibly ward off life-threatening complications. We do not currently have any known treatment that will kill the virus or decrease its growth, Goepfert says.

And with doctors sometimes trying multiple drugs in seriously ill patients, when people recover its hard to know whatif anythinghelped. Or whether a drug caused harm. Thats why clinical trials are so important, Goepfert says.

Here are some of the therapies researchers are currently investigating.

Chloroquine and Hydroxychloroquine

Research shows that, in test tubes, these anti-malarial drugs can block coronaviruses such as the one that causes COVID-19 from invading cells. Scientists at first theorized that the anti-inflammatory effect of the drugs, which makes them useful against arthritis, could reduce the swelling in the lungs that can make it hard for people with COVID-19 to breathe.

Early evidence from experiments in humans with the virus were mixed. Ultimately, larger trials suggested that the potential harms may outweigh any potential benefits. This drug may not be effective to treat COVID-19, the FDA concluded in the June 15 letter (PDF) revoking its emergency use authorization.

Whats important to remember, Goepfert says, is that none of these drugs is innocuous. Hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin can trigger dangerous irregular heart rhythms, and the drugs may be more dangerous when given together.

IL-6 Inhibitors

Clinical trials are underway to study whether drugs such as sarilumab (Kevzara) and tocilizumab (Actemra), used to treat autoimmune disorders such as rheumatoid arthritis, could help prevent severe complications of COVID-19. Because the drugs help prevent the immune system from attacking healthy cells, researchers theorize that they may help quell the overactive immune response in COVID-19 patients (known as a cytokine storm) that leads to dangerous inflammation and damage to the lungs. But because of uncertainty about its efficacy and potentially harmful side effects, the IDSA says that tocilizumab should be used only as part of a clinical trial.

Lopinavir/Ritonavir (Kaletra)

Studies in test tubes and animals suggest that this HIV drug may work against other types of coronaviruses. But in a recent trial of 199 people with severe COVID-19 infections, those who took Kaletra fared no better than those who didnt. Researchers hope the drug will work better if given earlier in the course of the illness. The IDSA advises that this combination should also be used only in the context of a clinical trial.

Remdesivir

Remdesivir, originally developed by drugmaker Gilead Sciences to combat Ebola, is not on the market in the U.S. or elsewhere, though it is being used in some studies.

The intravenous antiviral first appeared to help reduce the severity of COVID-19 in a study, sponsored by Gilead, of 53 hospitalized patients. But the study was small and did not directly compare those who got the drug with those who didnt.

Results from an NIAID trial of 1,063 patients, published May 22 in the New England Journal of Medicine, found that those hospitalized with COVID-19 who received remdesivir recovered enough to be discharged or resume normal activities in 11 days, vs. 15 days in those who received a placebo.

Fauci, discussing the results April 29, said the mortality rate in the study, at 8 percent for those taking remdesivir compared with 11 percent for people on a placebo, trended toward being better but wasnt statistically important. The data need to be further analyzed, he said.

A study published in The Lancet the same day the NIAID results were announced had different findings. It found that of 237 patients with serious COVID-19, those given remdesivir did not recover faster or clear the virus more quickly than those given a placebo. The researchers wrote that they expected other, ongoing trials of remdesivir to confirm or refute their findings.

Gilead is also sponsoring research to see whether a shorter course of remdesivirfive days instead of 10has an effect.

In addition, studies using remdesivir are underway in people with milder symptoms. Like the antiviral drugs used against the flu (such as Tamiflu), remdesivir may work better if given soon after patients first develop symptoms, Goepfert says.

Steroids

Doctors were cautious about using steroids early in the pandemic, according to the IDSA, because they can suppress an immune response and make it more difficult to fight off an infection. But as it became clear that many of the most dangerous symptoms of COVID-19 emerged because of an overactive immune responseknown as a cytokine stormresearch began to suggest that an inexpensive steroid called dexamethasone might help in certain severe cases.

A clinical trial involving thousands of patients, published July 17 in the New England Journal of Medicine, found that a 10-day course of dexamethasone significantly reduced deaths in patients on ventilators or on oxygen. There was no evidence of any benefit in patients who were not ventilated or on oxygen, and the study did not look at patients who were not hospitalized.

Based largely on that trial, the IDSA guidelines recommend steroids such as dexamethasone for hospitalized patients with severe COVID-19 but cautions against their use in patients who do not require supplemental oxygen, warning that they may cause harm.

Compared to other drugs that we have seen data for thus far, [dexamethasone] is the one that seems to have the greatest effect on patients, especially those who are critically ill, says Krutika Kuppalli, an infectious diseases physician in the Bay Area and vice chair of the IDSA Global Health Committee. Still, she adds, doctors need more data to better understand potential side effects and long-term outcomes, especially because previous experiments using other steroids to treat COVID-19 have had variable results.

The Real Hope: A Vaccine

The most promising path for returning to prepandemic life is to immunize people to protect them against the virus that causes COVID-19. And researchers have made unprecedented strides toward quickly developing a vaccine.

As of Aug. 25, more than two dozen vaccines were being tested on humans in clinical trials and more than 135 others were in earlier stages of development, according to an analysis by The New York Times.

Having a variety of approaches is important because this is a completely new pathogen, and we dont yet know what will work, says Ruth Karron, director of the Center for Immunization Research at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

If everything goes right, researchers estimate we could have at least one version of the vaccineif not moreready in spring 2021, according to Karron, or perhaps earlier. To put that in context, she says, historically, vaccine development has taken 10 or 20 years.

However, even after a vaccine goes through all the necessary testing to prove that its safe and effective, it still takes time to ramp up a global supply, she says. Well know more by then about who the at-risk groups are and who we should prioritize to get the vaccine.

Like the flu vaccine, a COVID-19 vaccine is unlikely to provide complete protection against the virus.

The real goal is to protect against severe disease, Karron says, so that even if you do get infected, youll be more likely to have a mild case and avoid serious complications, such as pneumonia.

Additional reporting by Lauren F. Friedman and Kevin Loria.





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The INTERPOL says it has foiled a coordinated multinational face masks supply fraud worth Eur 1.5 million linked to Nigeria.

The International Criminal Police Organisation in a statement on its website on Tuesday said the scheme involved the use of compromised emails, advance payment fraud, and money laundering.

The alleged fraudsters use the global scarcity of medical supplies following the coronavirus pandemic to dupe their victims. According to INTERPOL the suspects used a compromised email address linked to a legitimate company in Spain selling face masks and a fake website.

The company originally claimed to have 10 million masks but could not deliver them. It later referred the buyer to a dealer in Ireland. The Irish dealer also promised to put the buyer in touch with a different supplier in the Netherlands.

Claiming to have a strong commercial relationship with the company, the man provided assurances that the alleged Dutch company would be able to supply the 10 million face masks. An agreement for an initial delivery of 1.5 million masks was made, in exchange for an up-front payment of EUR 1.5 million.

The buyers initiated a bank transfer to Ireland and prepared for delivery, which involved 52 lorries and a police escort to transport the masks from a warehouse in the Netherlands to the final destination in Germany, INTERPOL explained.

But just before the order was to be delivered, the buyers were told that the funds had not been received, the alleged fraudster then asked that an emergency transfer of Eur880,000 be made to the suppliers in the Netherlands to secure the merchandise.

The fund was sent but the buyers soon realised that they have been duped and immediately contacted their bank in Germany, which in turn contacted INTERPOLs financial crimes unit. A frantic chase involving multiple agencies in Europe to retrieve the money began.

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Banks, financial intelligence units and judicial authorities, as well as partner organizations Europol and EUROJUST, joined INTERPOL in the chase.

INTERPOL contacted its National Central Bureau in Dublin as well as the Irish bank. Prompt intervention by the Garda National Economic Crime Bureau allowed them to freeze the 1.5 million in the account and identify the Irish company involved.

The Dutch Fiscal Information and Investigation Service quickly tracked down the EUR 880,000 which had been transferred from the German company. Nearly EUR 500,000 of those funds had already been sent to the United Kingdom, all of which was destined for an account in Nigeria.

Luckily due to an alert raised by investigators, the UK bank successfully recalled the full amount and the funds have been repatriated to the Netherlands where it remained frozen.

They adapted their sales pitches to take advantage of strained supply chains and generate huge profits. I can only salute the quick work of both the private and public authorities involved. INTERPOL will continue its work on the case  and the many others like it  in close cooperation with all of our partners, added the INTERPOL Chief.

INTERPOL said two persons have already been arrested and more arrests are likely as investigations continue across Europe.

When reached for comment about the investigation and what role, if any it played towards the repatriation of the funds, spokesperson Nigerias Economic and Financial Crimes Commission, Tony Orilade, promised to get back to this reporter after confirming. However, several hours later he neither answered nor returned calls made to his mobile number.
Coronavirus Outbreak LIVE Updates: WHO director general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said that the global body was reviewing the impact on its work of any withdrawal of US funding and 'will work with our partners to fill any financial gaps we face and to ensure our work continues uninterrupted.'

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Earlier in the day, Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced the extension of the three-week nationwide lockdown for another 19 days till 3 May. Modi indicated easing some curbs after 20 April in areas which are not hotspots to allow some select necessary activities.

India reported 1,463 fresh cases, a new record in a single-day increase of infections, taking the total number of infections to 10,815. The toll from the virus currently stood at 353, the health ministry said on Tuesday.

Daily wage workers have been rendered jobless ever since the lockdown was announced late last month to stem the spread of COVID-19, making their life a constant struggle.

In Surat, hundreds of migrant workers gathered in the Varachha area, demanding that they be sent to their native places despite the lockdown. In Mumbai, a large number of migrant workers who earn daily wages came out on the road near the Bandra railway station demanding transport arrangements to go back to their native places.

It said the deputy commissioners have been instructed to provide accommodation to the police personnel at these locations.

The details of these locations are available with the deputy commissioners in all the districts of Delhi, the letter said.

According to the letter, the police personnel whose houses are in the COVID-19 hotspots areas of the national capital can also stay at the identified locations.

A letter has been written in this regard by Special Commissioner (Armed Police) Robin Hibu to all the deputy commissioners, special commissioners and joint commissioners.

Delhi Police on Tuesday identified 57 locations to accommodate its personnel who are deputed in sensitive areas due to COVID-19 pandemic, officials said.

Sixteen new cases were reported in Bhopal, which took the tally of COVID-19 patients in the state capital to 158.

Since Monday evening, two COVID-19 patients died in Indore while one person succumbed in Bhopal, officials said. Indore, a commercial hub, has reported the highest 427 cases in the state with 99 new cases being reported on Tuesday.

With 142 persons testing positive on Tuesday, the number of coronavirus cases in Madhya Pradesh climbed to 757, health officials said. With three deaths, the death toll of COVID-19 patients in the state also reached 53.

"A woman from Dhubri has tested positive for COVID-19. She is wife of a COVID-19 positive person who is connected both with Nizamuddin Markaz and Athgaon Kabristan congregation in Guwahati. The number of patients is now 32," the minister said in a tweet.

On Tuesday Sarma tweeted that one more person from Dhubri, who is the wife of an infected person linked to both the Tablighi Jamaat event in Delhi and Athgaon Kabristan congregation in Guwahati, has tested positive for COVID-19.

The total number of COVID-19 positive patients in Assam has reached 32, according to Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma.

Aviation consultancy Centre for Asia Pacific Aviation (CAPA) India said the civil aviation ministry should instruct airlines to "halt unfair practice of taking advance bookings until resumption is certain and an interim transition schedule has been established".

However, most of the airlines had been taking bookings except national carrier Air India for domestic flights for the period beyond 14 April.

India had imposed a 21-day lockdown from March 25 to curb the spread of the coronavirus pandemic. Consequently, all domestic and international commercial passenger flights were suspended for this time period.

With the central government extending the lockdown to May 3 and the subsequent suspension of all commercial passenger services till then, domestic airlines have again decided not to refund customers in cash for their cancelled flights and instead offer them rescheduling of tickets for a later date without any additional fee.

"As per the orders, restrictions on the movements of people have been imposed from 6 am on 15 April to 3 May in these areas," said joint commissioner of police, Ravindra Shisave.

Pune police on Tuesday night issued orders under section 144 of CRPC and restricted movement of people in various slums as well as non-slum pockets under Khadak, Bandgarden, Sinhgad Road, Dattawadi, Warje, Kothrud, Vishrantwadi, Khadaki, Chandannagar, Vimantal, Yerwada and Hadapsar police stations.

Curfew was imposed on Tuesday in some more areas in Pune city after the civic body on Monday issued an order to seal them following a spurt in the cases of COVID-19.

A total of 95 vehicles were also seized during the vigil conducted till 8 pm, he said. Those arrested will be prosecuted under sections dealing with disobedience of order duly promulgated, the officer added.

Over 600 people were arrested from different parts of the city on the Bengali New Years' day on Tuesday for defying the lockdown norms imposed to break the chain of coronavirus transmission, a senior police officer said.

The official also asked media persons to publicise that Northern Railways is not running any train from Delhi or anywhere else.

"The general public is informed that a decision has been taken to not run any trains by Northern Railways till 3 May 2020 in view of COVID-19, hence such fake news in circulation may not be believed," a Northern Railways spokesperson said.

Fearing a repeat of what happened in Mumbai earlier during the day when thousands of migrants gathered at Bandra railway station hoping to catch trains to their native places, the Northern Railway also issued an advisory.

Senior officials of the Railways on Tuesday said the suspension of train services and other public transport is necessary to ensure social distancing which is the only way to prevent the spread of coronavirus.

The hold on funding was expected. Trump has been increasingly critical of the organization as the global health crisis has continued, and he has reacted angrily to criticism of his administrations response.

The United States is the biggest overall donor to the Geneva-based WHO, contributing more than $400 million in 2019, roughly 15% of its budget.

Trump, at a White House news conference, said the WHO had failed in its basic duty and it must be held accountable. He said the group had promoted Chinas disinformation about the virus that likely led to a wider outbreak of the virus than otherwise would have occurred.

President Donald Trump said on Tuesday he would halt funding to the World Health Organization over its handling of the coronavirus pandemic while his administration reviews its response to the global crisis.

"It is my belief that the World Health Organization must be supported, as it is absolutely critical to the world's efforts to win the war against COVID-19," Guterres said, after President Donald Trump announced that the US would cut off funding to the UN health body for mishandling the pandemic.

It is "not the time to reduce the resources for the operations of the World Health Organization or any other humanitarian organization in the fight against the virus," United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres has said.

We acknowledge New Zealanders who are reliant on wage subsides, taking a pay cut, and losing their jobs as a result of the global pandemic, she added.

The government has forecast joblessness to surge because of the global and domestic slowdown. This is where we can take action and that is why we have, Ardern said in a news conference announcing the decision.

New Zealands offices, schools and non-essential services have been closed for the last three weeks, and economic activity is at a standstill as the country undertakes one of the strictest lockdowns globally.

New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, ministers in her government and public service chief executives will take a 20 percent pay cut for the next six months amid the economic impact of the coronavirus pandemic.

38 deaths and 1076 new cases reported in the last 24 hours. India's total number of coronavirus positive cases rises to 11,439, including 9756 active cases, 1306 cured/discharged/migrated and 377 deaths, reported Ministry of Health and Family Welfare.

Total confirmed COVID-19 cases in India have risen to 11,439, according to the latest update by from the Union Health Ministry. This number includes cases involving foreign nationals, patients who have recovered.

Ten staffers of a Mumbai hospital have tested positive for COVID-19 on Wednesday. They were in quarantine after 3 patients admitted there had tested positive. A total of 35 staff of the hospital have tested positive for the coronavirus till now and all are being treated at the hospital itself, reports ANI.

However, the Chief Justice did not preside hearing of any case due to the coronavirus scare. The incident followed a day after Chief Justice Ahmed raised several questions over the size of the federal Cabinet and qualification of Advisor on Health Dr Zafar Mirza.

The Public Relation Officer of Supreme Court said in a statement that tests of Chief Justice Gulzar Ahmed, his family and his secretary were conducted and they all were found to be negative.

Pakistan's chief justice and his family were tested for coronavirus on Tuesday after one of his staffers tested positive for the deadly disease.

Also on Tuesday, 57 new asymptomatic cases were reported taking their total to 1,023, the NHC said.

Health experts said that the Suifenhe city at the China-Russia border might become another Wuhan amid sharp increase of COVID-19 cases following an exodus of Chinese nationals from Russia.

China's National Health Commission (NHC) said on Wednesday that 46 new confirmed cases mostly from Chinese coming from abroad were reported on Tuesday taking the total number of recent cases to 1,500. This included 10 new local infections.

China's has reported 46 new coronavirus cases, including 10 domestic infections, with health experts saying that the increasing number of local transmissions in the country's northeast bordering Russia remained a concern following the return of Chinese nationals from abroad.

Health officials confirmed five new coronavirus cases in Mumbai's Dharavi region, taking the total number of cases in the locality to 60 and 7 deaths due to the spread of the disease, reported ANI.

West Bengal Governor Jagdeep Dhankhar accused Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee's administration of failing to handle the coronavirus crisis. Taking to Twitter, he said the police and administration in Bengal are failing to implement the required social distancing norms and curbing of religious congregations, which according to him, should "be shown (the) door."

A hospital in the city dedicated for the treatment of gas mishap survivors has been turned into a facility for coronavirus patients, causing hardship to these people, Rachna Dhingra, member of the NGO Bhopal Group for Information and Action, told PTI.

"All the five persons who died after contracting COVID-19 here were victims of the Bhopal gas tragedy," the official said.

On 21 March, some organisations working for the survivors of the Bhopal gas tragedy had written to the authorities concerned, saying such people were five times more vulnerable to the coronavirus infection.

All five persons who died due to coronavirus in Bhopal were victims of the 1984 gas tragedy in the Madhya Pradesh capital, an official said on Wednesday.

In pursuance of this announcement, the Government of India has issued directions to all the Ministries/Departments of Government of India, State/Union Territory governments and authorities, that the lockdown measures stipulated in the Consolidated Guidelines of MHA, for containment of COVID-19 pandemic in the country, will continue to remain in force up to May 3, 2020, a statement by the Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) had said earlier.

It also stated that construction activities in rural areas will be allowed during the coronavirus lockdown. Construction activities in municipal (urban) areas will only be allowed if workers are staying on-site.

According to the latest notification by the Ministry of Home Affairs dated 15 April, food processing, manufacturing units, and industries will be allowed in rural areas amid the coronavirus lockdown.

Other key guidelines include that transportation of goods will be permitted without any distinction of essential or non-essential.

The Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) has issued a set of detailed guidelines for the lockdown that will remain in force till 3 May. The revised guidelines permit all health services and the social sector to remain functional. Public utilities to function without any hindrance. The supply chain of essential goods to operate without any hindrance and, important offices of Centre and state governments and local bodies to remain open with the required strength.

Only essential services have been permitted in these zones and strict perimeter control and strict restrictions on movement enforced.

Very strong containment measures will be implemented in the hotspot districts accounting for a large number of COVID-19 cases or with the fast growth of cases, Ministry of Home Affairs revised guidelines for lockdown says.

The Ministry of Home Affairs new guidelines says that states, Union Territories (UTs) and district administrations will demarcate hotspots and containment zones as per the guidelines of the Union Ministry of Health and Family Welfare.

All inter-state and district restrictions on movement of people, including metro, bus services will continue till 3 May according to the MHA guidelines on lockdown.

All personnel travelling to place of work and back in the exempted categories, as per the instructions of the State/ UT local authority.

Private vehicles for emergency services, including medical and veterinary care and for procuring essential commodities. In such cases, one passenger besides the private vehicle driver can be permitted in the backseat, four-wheelers; however, in case of two-wheelers, only the driver of the vehicle is to be permitted.

According to the latest update released by MHA, movement of persons is allowed in the following cases:

Activities prohibited across the country include travel by air, rail and road; operation of educational and training institutions; industrial and commercial activities; hospitality services; all cinema halls, shopping complexes, theatres, etc.; all social, political and other events; and opening of all religious places/places of worship for members of public, including religious congregations.

All social, political, sports, religious functions, religious places, places of worship shall remain closed for public till 3 May, the ministry of home affairs has said in its guidelines on the extended lockdown.

MHA issued guidelines for COVID-19 lockdown on Wednesday. Masks have been made compulsory, however, some industries will be allowed to resume work post 20 April onwards.

Manufacturing of essential items including pharmaceutical products will continue despite lockdown curbs, Ministry of Home Affairs stated. Mahatma Gandhi Employment Guarantee Act (MNREGA) works will also be allowed provided that all these activities in state/Union Territories take adequate social distancing measures. The ministry also advised to priorities irrigation and water conservation amid the lockdown.

The Maharashtra government will be allowing industries to operate in 15 green districts and 14 orange zones, says a report. State industries minister Subhash Desai said the plans will be presented before Chief Minister Uddhav Thackeray soon and twelve municipal corporations have come under the red zone where strict lockdown restrictions are said to be followed, reported CNN-News18.

Highway 'dhabas', truck repairing shops, and call centres for government activities shall remain open post 20 April, according to MHA guidelines issued to Wednesday. Manufacturing units of pharmaceuticals, medical devices, construction of medical infrastructure will also remain open 20 April onwards.

The government extended a lockdown on its 1.3 billion people until at least 3 May on Tuesday, as the number of coronavirus cases exceeded 10,000.

The NSE Nifty 50 index rose 1.7 percent to 9,150.8 while the benchmark S&P BSE Sensex was up 1.77 percent at 31,236.27, Reuters said.

The stock markets resumed trading after it was shut down on 14 April for Ambedkar Jayanti on a positive note. Shares rose on a rally in heavyweight bank and energy stocks, in line with an overnight rise in US markets, even as the country went into an extended lockdown to curb the spread of the coronavirus.

Congress leader Rahul Gandhi called for the Indian government to provide relief to thousands of nationals stranded in the Middle East due to the coronavirus pandemic. "The Government must organise flights to bring home our brothers and sisters most in need of assistance, with quarantine plans in place," he said.

At the interbank foreign exchange the rupee opened at 76.07, and gained further ground and touched a high of 76.02 against the US dollar, registering a rise of 25 paise over its previous close. On Monday, rupee had settled at 76.27 against the US dollar.

Forex traders said a higher opening in domestic equities supported the local unit, while concerns over coronavirus pandemic weighed on the local unit.

The Indian rupee appreciated by 25 paise to 76.02 against the US dollar in early trade on Wednesday tracking positive opening in domestic equities.

More than 1,000 migrant workers, most of them from Bihar, Uttar Pradesh and West Bengal, gathered near Bandra railway station here on Tuesday afternoon.

He has been booked under IPC Sections 188 (disobedience to order duly promulgated by public servant and 269, 270 (negligent, malignant act likely to spread infection of disease dangerous to life), 117 (abetting commission of offence by public), the official said.

In a recent news report, Kulkarni said Jan Sadharan special trains would resume for people stranded due to the lockdown, he said.

The accused, Rahul Kulkarni, based in Osmanabad district of Maharashtra, has been detained and police are in the process of bringing him to Mumbai, he said.

An FIR has been registered against a television journalist over his report that trains would restart, which may have prompted gathering of migrants in suburban Bandra on Tuesday, a police official said.

More than 1,000 migrant workers here gathered outside the station in Bandra on Tuesday and demanded transportation arrangements to go back to their hometowns, hours after Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced the extension of the ongoing nationwide lockdown till 3 May.

A communication related to internal planning of South Central Railways (SCR) to assess demand for train services is being misinterpreted in some sections as decision to run special trains for migrant labourers. Clarifying on the statement, the SCR took to twitter to state that there is "No such proposal and all passenger trains stands cancelled till 3 May."

Two more deaths (one each in Ahmedabad and Surat) and 52 more COVID-19 cases have been reported in Gujarat, reported ANI. The total number of confirmed coronavirus cases in the state has reached 695. The virus-related death toll is at 30.

The police immediately set into action and traced the patient and his family members, including the attendant, and shifted them to Gandhi Hospital.

Furthermore, after their escape, the results showed the patient had tested positive for the disease, following which a police team tracked the two down and shifted them to another hospital on Tuesday.

In a shocking incident, the attendant of a person with symptoms of COVID-19, attacked doctors at Osmania General Hospital and later fled with the patient.

The release added that a total of 2,20,129 kilometers distance has been covered by the flights under the initiative so far.

A release by the MoCA on Tuesday states, "227 flights have been operated under Lifeline Udan by Air India, Alliance Air, Indian Air Force (IAF) and private carriers. 138 of these flights have been operated by Air India and Alliance Air. Cargo transported to date is around 407.40 tons."

India's aviation sector has been operating on war footing transporting critical medical equipment and supplies to various parts of the country during the lockdown. According to the Ministry of Civil Aviation, under the 'Lifeline Udan' initiative, over 407 tonnes of medical air-cargo has been transported within the country using 227 flights till 13 April.

So far, 1,446 people have recovered from the disease and 107 deaths have been reported in the country.

The Ministry of National Health Services said that Punjab reported 2,945 cases, Sindh 1,518, Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa 865, Balochistan 240, Gilgit-Baltistan 236, Islamabad 140 and Pakistan-occupied Kashmir 46.

The number of coronavirus patients in the country rose to 5,988, with 272 new cases and 11 deaths during the last 24 hours.

The number of coronavirus cases in Pakistan approached 6,000 after 272 new infections were reported, the health ministry said on Wednesday as Prime Minister Imran Khan extended the ongoing lockdown until the end of this month to fight the pandemic.

The officials said the security forces sealed off main roads in most places in the valley and erected barriers at several other places to check the unwanted movement of the people and to enforce the lockdown. Only persons with valid passes are allowed to move, they added.

The restrictions on the movement and assembly of people in Kashmir continued on Wednesday, they said.

Authorities in Kashmir have sealed off the containment zones to ensure strict adherence to the standard operating procedure to contain the spread of coronavirus even as the lockdown in the Valley entered the 28th day on Wednesday, officials said.

With this, the total number of coronavirus cases in Ahmedabad has gone up to 404, followed by Vadodara-116, the health department said.

Of the new cases, 42 were reported from Ahmedabad, six from Surat, three each from Vadodara and Panchmahal, and each from Botad and Kheda, it said.

The total number of coronavirus cases in Gujarat rose to 695 as after more patients test positive. 56 fresh cases were reported on Wednesday, the health department said.

A ministry team studying clusters of the disease estimated that serious cases needing ventilator intervention could reach 8.5 lakh. Japan has had more than 8,000 cases and 162 deaths from the virus so far

Japan's death toll from the novel coronavirus could reach 4 lakh without measures to stem the contagion, according to a health ministry projection reported by local media.

An analysis of the data shows that till Wednesday morning, the death rate of COVID-19 patients in the city was around 6.8 percent, higher than the national average.

Of these, 37 patients have so far died during treatment," Chief Medical and Health Officer (CMHO) Praveen Jadia said.

Till late Tuesday night, the state's industrial hub reported 427 COVID-19 cases. "A report from a Delhi-based laboratory has found 117 more people of Indore infected with the coronavirus. Now, the number of COVID-19 cases in the city has gone up to 544.

The total number of coronavirus cases in Indore went up to 544 after 117 new cases were reported from the Madhya Pradesh city on Wednesday, an official said.

However, with the lockdown being extended, the railways not only cancelled all its passenger services till 3 May on Tuesday, but also stopped advance bookings.

With the national transporter allowing tickets to be booked during the 21-day lockdown announced earlier for journeys starting after 14 April, around 39 lakh bookings were made by passengers.

The railways is set to cancel around 39 lakh tickets booked for journeys between 15 April and 3 May due to the extension of the nationwide lockdown and suspension of passenger trains till the extended period in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic, sources told PTI.

The coronavirus pandemic has infected nearly two million people and killed at least 119,000 globally, according to estimates by the Johns Hopkins University.

Medical supplies like surgical masks, gowns, and ventilators are required in massive numbers across the globe because of the coronavirus pandemic that surfaced in central China's Wuhan city last year and spread to at least 185 countries and territories.

The IMF has called on all countries to refrain from putting restrictions on exporting medical supplies in view of their massive requirement across the globe to combat the coronavirus pandemic that has killed at least 119,000 people and infected nearly two million.

Kerala's Alappuzha District Administration has decided to convert houseboats into isolation facilities amid the COVID-19 outbreak. "This would increase our bed strength by 1500 to 2000," M Anjana, Alappuzha District Collector told ANI.

The 63-year-old man, who was said to be a cardiac and diabetes patient, tested positive for COVID-19 during community screening on April 8 and was admitted to the government hospital.

The two deaths, of men aged 63 and 52 years, were reported from Guntur city on 13 April, the bulletin said.

The number of patients recovered and discharged remained at 16 and the active cases 475. In all, 11,613 blood samples were tested across the state till date and 11,111 of them turned negative.

Of the new cases, eight were recorded in West Godavari district, six in Kurnool, four in Guntur and one in Krishna since Tuesday 5 pm, the latest bulletin from the government said.

Coronavirus cases shot past the 500 mark in Andhra Pradesh on Wednesday, reaching 502, as 19 new cases were reported overnight even as two more deaths were added to the tally on account of the pandemic, taking the overall toll to 11.

He added that more money will be sent to the stranded workers, if needed. "I request people's representatives to make a list of all such people and send it to Chief Minister's Office or District Collector's office. We will send money as and when the list is sent to us," Chouhan said.

Acknowledging that many workers from Madhya Pradesh are stuck in other states amid the lockdown imposed in view of the coronavirus, Chief Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan said that Rs 1,000 will be given to each of them. "We talked to other CMs to make arrangements for their foodand shelter. They'll be able to withdraw it (the money) wherever they are," he said.

The total number of deaths in Karnataka is now 11 and the number of confirmed cases is 260.

A 69-year-old person from Chikkaballapura died of coronavirus-related complications in Bengaluru. The deceased was referred to a Bengaluru hospital with complaints of being H1N1 positive,Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease with obstructive sleep apnea and a past history of diabetes and hypertension.

Earlier in the day, a television scribe was arrested for his report that said train services would resume, allegedly prompting the gathering at Bandra.

BJP leader Kirit Somaiya wrote a letter to the Mumbai Police Commissioner Parambir Singh, seeking an investigation into the gathering of thousands of migrant workers outside Bandra railway station on Tuesday. In his letter, he also mentioned photos and videos that he had received regarding the gathering, during which police had to resort to lathicharging in order to disperse the workers.

A 29-year-old woman who tested positive for COVID-19 allegedly committed suicide at Mumbai's Nair Hospital, Indian Express reported. According to police officials, the woman is a resident of Worli and was suffering from asthma.

Maharashtra Minister Jitendra Awhad released a picture of his test report which states that he does not have the coronavirus after some media reports claimed that he tested positive for the disease.

"States/UTs cannot dilute restrictions imposed via aforesaid guidelines", said the Ministry of Home Affairs.

Home Secretary Ajay Bhalla has written to States/UTs to ensure strict compliance with Consolidated Revised Guidelines on lockdown measures to contain the COVID-19 epidemic in the country.

The amount was collected by cutting a day's salary of the employees of the police department, following an appeal made by the state police chief, the statement said.

Uttar Pradesh Director General of Police (DGP) HC Awasthy handed over a cheque of Rs 20 crore to Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath for the Chief Minister's Relief Fund to fight the COVID-19 pandemic on Wednesday, the state police said in a statement.

"No visitor will be allowed at the chief ministers residence for the next one week," he said. Congress MLA Imran Khedawala, who met Rupani along with other party legislators on Tuesday morning, tested positive for coronavirus in the evening.

Rupani's health is fine and he will run the state administration through technological facilities like video conference, video-calling and tele-calling, Chief Minister's Office (CMO) secretary Ashwani Kumar said on Wednesday.

Gujarat Chief Minister Vijay Rupani has decided to run the state administration without meeting anyone for next one week after a Congress MLA whom he met on Tuesday tested positive for coronavirus.

The staff of Cooper Hospital, one of the biggest government hospitals in Mumbai suburbs, protested after one of the nurses was thrashed by the kin of a patient late Tuesday night, reports Times of India . They also protested against the lack of safety equipment, especially PPE or Personal Protective Equipment, required for treating COVID-19 patients.

Solicitor General Tushar Mehta said doctors, healthcare professionals and other "corona warriors" like sanitation workers have been provided requisite protective gears.

The Centre said this before a bench of Justices NV Ramana, SK Kaul and BR Gavai which was hearing, through video-conferencing, a plea seeking directions to the authorities concerned to provide personal protective equipment (PPE) to sanitation workers who are carrying out their work amid coronavirus or COVID-19.

The Centre told the Supreme Court on Wednesday that sanitation workers in the country have been provided with requisite protective kits and the authorities are following the guidelines of the World Health Organization (WHO) on the coronavirus pandemic.

Only Siwan, where 29 people have tested positive for the novel coronavirus, has reported more cases than Munger which shares the second spot with Begusarai with eight cases each.

In addition, a 60-year-old man from Munger has also tested positive, Kumar said, adding that his contact-tracing is on.

Principal Secretary, Health, Sanjay Kumar said three persons from Nalanda district a 60-year-old man and two women aged 25 and 35 years all of whom came in contact with a coronavirus-infected patient with travel history to Dubai, have tested positive.

Four persons tested positive for COVID-19 in Bihar on Wednesday, taking the total number of people afflicted with the disease to 70, an official said.

DM of GB Nagar informed via a tweet that for people inside a hotspot cluster, or for COVID-19 cases, people can dial 18004192211; for non-COVID-19 cases call 108.

Uber, like Ola's initiative in Mumbai, has partnered with Noida authorities to provide its fleet as makeshift ambulances, in wake of the problems faced by people due to the lockdown. The service will also be available to people residing in hotspots and containment zones.

Andhra Pradesh government will double the COVID-19 testing capacity to 4,000 tests per day. This was revealed during a review meeting held here by Chief Minister YS Jagan Mohan Reddy here on Wednesday. As of now more than 2,100 tests are being done per day and that would be scaled up to 4,000 a day by using TrueNat TB testing equipment, the Chief Minister was told.

Assam government has withdrawn an order allowing the sale of liquor in the state following Union Home Ministry guidelines on lockdown.

India's total number of coronavirus positive cases rise to 11,933, of which 10,197 are active cases, 1,344 have been cured, discharged or migrated and 392 have died, as per the latest update from Ministry of Health and Family Welfare.

"There are around 400 districts of India where coronavirus has not entered. We have been able to pin point where the virus is," says Union Minister Harsh Virdhan. The government had earlier identified 170 districts as COVID-19 hotspots and 207 districts as potential hotspots, Hotspots are those districts which are reporting more number of cases or where the rate of growth of COVID-19 cases is high.

"Bihar isn't in so much trouble right now, but definitely, Maharashtra is in a bit of trouble, particularly Mumbai, and also Karnataka. But I was happy to see confidence of three chief secretaries and more particularly when Maharashtra CS said with confidence 'we'll take care of it'."

Union health minister Harsh Vardhan said that Bihar wasn't as badly affected by the coronavirus pandemic as Maharashtra and Karnataka.

Union health minister Harsh Vardhan said that the next 2-3 weeks are going to be the most crucial in handling the COVID-19 pandemic, particularly in India.

Kerala chief minister Pinarayi Vijayan said that only one new COVID-19 case was reported in the state on Wednesday, taking the total number of positive cases in the state to 387, of which 167 are active.

Injured doctor SC Aggarwal was quoted by ANI as saying, "We went to Nawabpura, Moradabad to take four men to a quarantine facility from the family of a COVID-19 victim. As soon as they sat in ambulance, some people gathered and a ruckus ensued. People started attacking us. An elderly man saved me and then police arrived."

Reports said that a team of health workers was "attacked" when they went to Moradabad in Uttar Pradesh to take four people to a quarantine facility.

The BMC on Tuesday said that 183 new coronavirus cases were reported in Mumbai in the last 24 hours, taking the total tally of cases to 1,936. Additionally, two new deaths were also reported. The toll has now risen to 113 in the city.

The Mumbai Police was quoted by ANI as saying that the Crime branch on Tuesday arrested a man in Dharavi for illegally hoarding 81,000 three-ply surgical masks and seized stock worth Rs 12,15,000, approximately.

"Advised all to strictly adhere to SOPs/guidelines and protocols issued by Union health ministry while dealing with COVID-19 patients," he said.

Delhi lieutenant governor Anil Baijal said that the Delhi government will use plasma technique for treatment on a trial basis to save lives of critical COVID-19 patients.

The Punjab government said that two more COVID-19 cases were reported in the state on Wednesday, one each from Patiala and Sangrur. The total coronavirus positive cases in the state rose to 186, including 146 active cases, 27 cured, and 13 deaths.

The Tamil Nadu government said that 38 new COVID-19 cases were reported in the state on today, of which 34 are those who attended "single source event in Delhi" and their contacts. The total coronavirus cases in the state are now at 1,242, including 1,113 who attended "single source event in Delhi".

"All 22 cases are contacts of positive patients. Total number of positive cases now stands at 300, 54 from Jammu and 246 from Kashmir," he said.

Jammu and Kashmir principal secretary Rohit Kansal said that 22 new COVID-19 cases were reported in the union territory on Wednesday, including four from Jammu, and 18 from Kashmir.

Migrant workers evacuated from the Kudesiya Ghat near Kashmere Gate in Delhi were given fruits and were shifted to shelter homes set up at government schools in different parts of National Capital.

ANI reported that Rahul Kulkarni (a journalist with a TV channel) has been arrested in connection with Tuesday's gathering in Bandra. The Mumbai Police said that "he is accused of spreading misinformation about trains being restarted. He'll be produced before court on Thursday."

"The accounts have been tracked, FIRs are being filed and due legal consequences will follow," he said.

Maharashtra home minister Anil Deshmukh said that misinformation regarding the commencement of trains from 14 April at the end of the first phase of the COVID-19 lockdown was spread using 11 different methods.

The toll in the state rose to 187, after nine deaths were reported on Wednesday.

Reports said that 232 new COVID-19 cases were reported in Maharashtra on Wednesday, taking the total number of cases in the state to 2,916. 36 patients were discharged on Wednesday, while a total of 295 patients recovered and have been discharged so far.

Indore chief medical officer Dr Praveen Jadia said that the number of COVID-19 cases on Wednesday rose to 591 in Indore.

The Kangra administration in Himachal Pradesh said that a journalist with a newspaper has been tested positive for COVID-19 in the district.

Three deaths were also reported in the state, on Wednesday. Now total number of cases in state increased to 525, toll 14.

The Andhra Pradesh government said that 23 new COVID-19 cases were reported in the state today, including 13 in Kurnool, 4 in Guntur, 3 in Kadapa, 2 each in Nellore, Anantapuram.

Assam minister Himanta Biswa Sarma said that the state government had imported 50,000 PPE kits from China.

"The highest number of districts that have been designated as hotspots are in Tamil Nadu (22 out of 37 districts) followed by 14 in Maharashtra, 13 in Uttar Pradesh, 12 in Rajasthan, 11 in Andhra Pradesh and 10 in Delhi," News18 reported.

The Centre on Wednesday said that 170 districts have been identified under the 'Red Zone', depending on how many COVID-19 cases have been reported in the area.

Reports said that 12 new coronavirus cases were reported in West Bengal on Wednesday, and the number of active cases in the state are at 132. No deaths were reported in the state on Wednesday.

WHO director general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said that the global body was reviewing the impact on its work of any withdrawal of US funding and "will work with our partners to fill any financial gaps we face and to ensure our work continues uninterrupted."

"I am a driver but since vehicles are not allowed these days, I began selling vegetables to run my household during coroanvirus lockdown," said Brijendra Kumar Mehto who hails from Bihar.

Several migrant workers have started selling vegetables, fruits in Delhi's Janakpuri area to make a living during the coronavirus lockdown. "I used to sell roasted gram in buses but took to selling fruits in residential areas since the lockdown began," ANI quoted Nishant Verma as saying.

The Delhi government said on Tuesday that it aappointed 10 officials to look into the problems being faced by people from other states who are stranded in Delhi due to lockdown. These 10 officials will submit report to the chief secretary twice a week, giving details of measures taken to resolve their issues.

The Rajasthan health department said that the number of coronavirus cases rose to 1,076 in the state, with 71 more people testing positive on Wednesday. Of the fresh cases, 30 have been reported in Jaipur, 27 in Kota, 10 in Jodhpur.

The test helps identify disease-fighting antibodies in people who have been infected but may have had mild symptoms or none at all, making it different from the current diagnostic tests that require nasal swabs to confirm active infection.

Abbott Laboratories Inc said on Wednesday it would begin shipping a new coronavirus blood test that can tell whether a person has ever been infected and plans to ramp up manufacturing to produce 20 million tests per month by June.

The Delhi government said that 17 new COVID-19 cases and two deaths reported in the National Capital in the last 24 hours. The total number of positive cases in Delhi now stands at 1,578 (including 1,080 positive cases). Total toll stands at 32.

The Bihar government said two more coronavirus cases were reported in the state on Wednesday, taking the total number of positive cases to 72.

Chhattisgarh health minister TS Singh Deo said that four more COVID-19 patients have been discharged from AIIMS, Raipur on Wednesday, taking the total number of cured people to 17 in Chhattisgarh. Number of active cases stands at 16.

A statement by Jamia Millia Islamia said, "In view of the extension of the lockdown period and guidelines of the Ministry of Home Affairs dated 15 April, the online filling of admission forms of the Jamia Millia Islamia, including schools has been further extended till 4 May."

The Uttar Pradesh health department on Wednesday said that 69 new coronavirus cases were reported in the state on Wednesday,. Three new deaths were also reported on Tuesday.

The Madurai district collector said that a total of 3,000 cases have been registered so far by Tamil Nadu Police for violating the coronavirus lockdown in Madurai, this includes cases against few people who attended funeral of a bull in a village in Madurai on 12 April.

The Punjab special chief secretary said that three more positive COVID-19 cases were reported on Tuesday in Patiala. According to the statement, these are the high-risk contacts of Tuesday's positive case from Safabadi Gate area. "Area being contained, contact tracing commenced," said KBS Sidhu, Special Chief Secretary, Punjab.

NDRF on Wednesday launched a 24/7 helpline to provide assistance to people during lockdown, The helpline, 9711077372, can be contacted by phone or through WhatsApp

The coronavirus toll crossed 17,000 in France on Wednesday, AFP reported, adding that numbers of patients who were hospitalised were low for first time.

"It must stop adding religious colour to our national goal of fighting the pandemic and distract from larger efforts. No segregation is being done in civil hospitals on the basis of religion, as clarified by the Gujarat government," he added.

MEA spokesperson Anurag Srivastava said, "As if its peremptory commentary on religious freedom in India is not enough, the USCIRF is now spreading misguided reports on the professional medical protocols followed to deal with spread of COVID-19 in India."

The Bihar government said two more coronavirus cases were reported in the state on Wednesday, taking the total number of positive cases to 72.

Chhattisgarh health minister TS Singh Deo said that four more COVID-19 patients have been discharged from AIIMS, Raipur on Wednesday, taking the total number of cured people to 17 in Chhattisgarh. Number of active cases stands at 16.

A statement by Jamia Millia Islamia said, "In view of the extension of the lockdown period and guidelines of the Ministry of Home Affairs dated 15 April, the online filling of admission forms of the Jamia Millia Islamia, including schools has been further extended till 4 May."

The Uttar Pradesh health department on Wednesday said that 69 new coronavirus cases were reported in the state on Wednesday,. Three new deaths were also reported on Tuesday.

The Madurai district collector said that a total of 3,000 cases have been registered so far by Tamil Nadu Police for violating the coronavirus lockdown in Madurai, this includes cases against few people who attended funeral of a bull in a village in Madurai on 12 April.

The Punjab special chief secretary said that three more positive COVID-19 cases were reported on Tuesday in Patiala. According to the statement, these are the high-risk contacts of Tuesday's positive case from Safabadi Gate area. "Area being contained, contact tracing commenced," said KBS Sidhu, Special Chief Secretary, Punjab.

NDRF on Wednesday launched a 24/7 helpline to provide assistance to people during lockdown, The helpline, 9711077372, can be contacted by phone or through WhatsApp

The coronavirus toll crossed 17,000 in France on Wednesday, AFP reported, adding that numbers of patients who were hospitalised were low for first time.

"It must stop adding religious colour to our national goal of fighting the pandemic and distract from larger efforts. No segregation is being done in civil hospitals on the basis of religion, as clarified by the Gujarat government," he added.

MEA spokesperson Anurag Srivastava said, "As if its peremptory commentary on religious freedom in India is not enough, the USCIRF is now spreading misguided reports on the professional medical protocols followed to deal with spread of COVID-19 in India."

Coronavirus Outbreak LATEST Updates: WHO director general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said that the global body was reviewing the impact on its work of any withdrawal of US funding and "will work with our partners to fill any financial gaps we face and to ensure our work continues uninterrupted."

ANI reported that Rahul Kulkarni (a journalist with a TV channel) has been arrested in connection with Tuesday's gathering in Bandra. The Mumbai Police said that "he is accused of spreading misinformation about trains being restarted. He'll be produced before court on Thursday."

Delhi lieutenant governor Anil Baijal said that the Delhi government will use plasma technique for treatment on a trial basis to save lives of critical COVID-19 patients.

"Advised all to strictly adhere to SOPs/guidelines and protocols issued by Union health ministry while dealing with COVID-19 patients," he said.

The BMC on Tuesday said that 183 new coronavirus cases were reported in Mumbai in the last 24 hours, taking the total tally of cases to 1,936. Additionally, two new deaths were also reported. The toll has now risen to 113 in the city.

Meanwhile, 181 patients have been discharged.

Union health minister Harsh Vardhan said that Bihar wasn't as badly affected by the coronavirus pandemic as Maharashtra and Karnataka.

"Bihar isn't in so much trouble right now, but definitely, Maharashtra is in a bit of trouble, particularly Mumbai, and also Karnataka. But I was happy to see confidence of three chief secretaries and more particularly when Maharashtra CS said with confidence 'we'll take care of it'."

"There are around 400 districts of India where coronavirus has not entered. We have been able to pin point where the virus is," says Union Minister Harsh Virdhan.

The death toll due to coronavirus in India rises to 392 and the total number of cases have reached 11,933.

Health Ministry has declared 170 districts as hotspots and has identified 207 districts as non-hotspots.

Heath workers, who had gone to quarantine the family members of a COVID-19 patient, were attacked in Uttar Pradesh's Moradabad on Wednesday. Some vehicles were also vandalised in the incidence while three medics were injured.

Maharashtra, the state with highest COVID-19 tally in India, on Wednesday reported a surge of 117 new cases recorded today, of which 66 are from Mumbai alone, while another 44 are from Pune. The total number of positive cases in the state stands at 2801 now.

Home Secretary Ajay Bhalla has written to States/UTs to ensure strict compliance with Consolidated Revised Guidelines on lockdown measures to contain the COVID-19 epidemic in the country.

Alappuzha district administration in Kerala has converted houseboats, usually used by tourists in backwaters, into isolation wards to admit COVID-19 patients. Out of 387 positive COVID-19 patients, 211 patients have been cured so far in the state.

The total number of coronavirus cases in Indore went up to 544 after 117 new cases were reported from the Madhya Pradesh city on Wednesday, an official said. An analysis of the data shows that till Wednesday morning, the death rate of COVID-19 patients in the city was around 6.8 percent, higher than the national average.

A 69-year-old doctor has died of the coronavirus disease in Meghalaya, the first death in the state, said chief minister Conrad Sangma, according to news agency PTI. He was the first COVID-19 patient in the state.

A man who allegedly incited migrant labourers to protest here amid lockdown was arrested by the police on Wednesday. The man, Vinay Dubey, who was earlier detained for threatening to launch an agitation on 18 April, was booked under Sections 117, 153 A, 188, 269, 270 and 505 (2) of the Indian Penal Code (IPC) and Section 3 of The Epidemic Diseases Act. He will be produced before a local court later today.

MHA issued guidelines for COVID-19 lockdown on Wednesday. Masks have been made compulsory, however, some industries will be allowed to resume work post 20 April onwards.

According to the latest notification by the Ministry of Home Affairs dated 15 April, food processing, manufacturing units, and industries will be allowed in rural areas amid the coronavirus lockdown. It also stated that construction activities in rural areas will be allowed during the coronavirus lockdown.

Health officials confirmed five new coronavirus cases in Mumbai's Dharavi region, taking the total number of cases in the locality to 60 and 7 deaths due to the spread of the disease

Total confirmed COVID-19 cases in India have risen to 11,439, according to the latest update by from the Union Health Ministry on Wednesday.

With 142 persons testing positive on Tuesday, the number of coronavirus cases in Madhya Pradesh climbed to 757, health officials said. With three deaths, the death toll of COVID-19 patients in the state also reached 53.

The country reported 1,463 fresh cases, a new record in a single-day increase of infections, taking the total number of infections to 10,815. The toll from the virus currently stood at 353, it said.

The extension of the nationwide lockdown for another 19 days sparked protests by migrant labourers in Surat and Mumbai on Tuesday.

At both places, migrants gathered in large numbers in public, leading to fears of transmission of the novel coronavirus even as the country registered a record single day increase of 1,463 cases.

In Surat, hundreds of migrant workers gathered in the Varachha area, demanding that they be sent to their native places despite the lockdown. In Mumbai, a large number of migrant workers who earn daily wages came out on the road near the Bandra railway station demanding transport arrangements to go back to their native places.

Earlier in the day, Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced the extension of the three-week nationwide lockdown for another 19 days till 3 May. Modi indicated easing some curbs after 20 April in areas which are not hotspots to allow some select necessary activities.

Migrant labourers gather on streets in Surat, Mumbai

A large group of migrant labourers gathered in Bandra, demanding permission to return to their native states.

According to reports, heavy police deployment was seen in the area and the police resorted to lathicharge in order to disperse the gathering.

The migrants originally hail from states like West Bengal and Uttar Pradesh.

One of the labourers, who did not reveal his name, said that NGOs and local residents are providing food to migrant workers, but they want to go back to their native states during the lockdown which has badly affected their source of livelihood.

"Now, we don't want food, we want to go back to our native place. We are not happy with the announcement (extending the lockdown)," he said, looking dejected.

Asadullah Sheikh, who hails from Malda in West Bengal, said, "We have already spent our savings during the first phase of the lockdown. We have nothing to eat now. We just want to go back to our native place. The government should make arrangements for us."

Daily wage workers have been rendered jobless ever since the lockdown was announced late last month to stem the spread of COVID-19, making their life a constant struggle.

An FIR has been registered in this regard against about 1,000 migrant workers, but no arrests have been made yet and the workers are being identified, a police official said.

Maharashtra chief minister Uddhav Thackeray appealed to migrant workers in the state to stay put and take up the challenge against the coronavirus, while also seeking to assure them that "lockdown" was not a "lock-up".

"Today what happened in Bandra was unfortunate. It might have happened because they thought that trains will start from 14 April, and so they would be able to go back to their villages," he said.

Stating that the highest number of coronavirus tests have probably been carried out in the state, Thackeray said between 20,00-22,000 tests have been carried out in Mumbai alone and between 10,000 to 15,000 tests have been carried out in the rest of the state till Tuesday morning.

Maharashtra home minister Anil Deshmukh said that a probe has been ordered to find out who spread the rumour about train services resuming to take migrants home.

Hundreds of migrant workers gathered in Surat on Tuesday evening, demanding that they be sent to their native places despite lockdown, the Gujarat Police said.

The migrant workers gathered in Varachha area of the city and sat on a road demanding that they be allowed to go to their native places, police said.

Varachha is the diamond polishing hub of Surat, giving employment to lakhs of workers from different parts of Gujarat and the country. Many textile units are also located here.

"These migrant workers want to go to their native places. We have asked them not to be impatient because a lockdown is in force at present.

"Since some of them were complaining about food, we have called an NGO and immediately brought food packets for them. The situation is now under control," a police officer at the spot told reporters.

This was the second incident of migrant workers gathering on the streets in a week.

Migrant workers had staged violent protests in Surat on Friday, demanding that they be sent to native places despite lockdown.

Modi announces extension of lockdown till 3 May

Modi has announced the extension of the three-week nationwide lockdown for another 19 days to battle the coronavirus pandemic.

The prime minister acknowledged that the lockdown has come at a huge economic cost and also inflicted pain on the people, especially the poor, calling them disciplined soldiers.

Modi, however, asserted that India has chosen the correct path, and has managed to avert to a large extent the damage caused by the pandemic in many countries.

The prime minister's announcement on lockdown extension came at a time when India has recorded a sharp spike in COVID-19 cases in the last one week ever since Kerala reported the country's first coronavirus infection on 30 January.

The third and final week of the lockdown saw a jump of 5,574 cases and 215 deaths, an analysis of official data showed.

According to the latest health ministry data, there has been a record single day increase of 1,463 cases in the last 24 hours taking the total number of infections to 10,815. The toll from the virus currently stood at 353, it said.

A PTI tally compiled from states showed there were 11,312 cases with 389 deaths. The tally also showed that 211 of the 386 coronavirus patients in Kerala had recovered. There were two deaths in the state.

In his fourth address to the nation in the last one month on the coronavirus pandemic, Modi also announced that extensive guidelines for the second phase of the lockdown will be issued on Wednesday, declaring that his biggest priority is to save lives and minimise the hardships being faced by daily wagers and farmers.

During his 25-minute address, Modi also asked people to follow saptapadi' (seven steps) in the coming days to help the government in its fight against coronavirus. The seven steps included taking care of the elderly people, maintaining social distancing and helping the poor.

Ten states  Tamil Nadu, Arunachal Pradesh, Odisha, Punjab, Maharashtra, Telangana, West Bengal, Karnataka, Meghalaya and Mizoram  and the Union Territory of Puducherry have already extended the lockdown till 30 April. Union government sources pointed out that the restrictions have been extended till 3 May as 1 May is a public holiday followed by the 2-3 May weekend.

IMF pegs India's growth at 1.9 percent in 2020-21

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) has projected the growth of Indian economy in 2020 at the rate of 1.9 per cent, while the world economy is likely to contract sharply by "minus 3 percent" due to the coronavirus pandemic, which is proving worse than the 2008-09 financial crisis.

The IMF, in its yearly World Economic Outlook, gave a grim picture of the world economy amid global lockdown due to the coronavirus pandemic, which has jolted the world by claiming over one lakh lives globally.

The IMF has, however, given a bullish projection about India's economic growth in 2021, pegging the growth rate at 7.4 percent.

Gita Gopinath, Chief Economist and Director of the research department at IMF said in her opening remarks, "The COVID-19 pandemic is inflicting high and rising human costs worldwide. Protecting lives and allowing health care systems to cope have required isolation, lockdowns, and widespread closures to slow the spread of the virus."

"The health crisis is, therefore, having a severe impact on economic activity. As a result of the pandemic, the global economy is projected to contract sharply by minus 3 percent in 2020, much worse than during the 2008-09 financial crisis," said Gopinath.

As for China, the economy has been projected to grow at 1.2 percent and projected growth of 9.2 per cent in 2021.

With inputs from agencies
Sitting inside a trailer on the set of her latest TV series, Laura Carmichael is giving the most demure up-yours possible.

Frequently glancing away, towards a pair of Doc Marten boots lined up against the wall like toddlers in a time-out, she speaks about her decision to take the role of Agatha  a damaged woman desperate to have a baby in the miniseries The Secrets She Keeps  that flies in the face of the advice given to her by the man who made her a star.

It was Dont try and destroy an image that people have of you, that they enjoy, says Carmichael, of the guidance given to her by Julian Fellowes, creator of Downton Abbey, the TV series that brought Carmichael worldwide acclaim for her six-season role as dowdy middle sister Lady Edith Crowley. He advised her to stick to period pieces. I can understand the logic in it, says Carmichael, slowly, with a voice of the finest sandpaper. But I also think theres something in actors that you want to  flex every muscle and push yourself, and do something different.

Laura Carmichael, Michael Sheasby and Jessica De Gouw in The Secrets She Keeps. Credit:Network Ten

Carmichael looks off, out the window of the trailer, towards Auburn Hospital in western Sydney, where the climax of the domestic noir series was filmed.
By Akbar Mammadov

The Georgian Foreign Ministry has said said it does not recognize the so-called "elections" held in Azerbaijan's occupied Nagorno-Karabakh region on April 14.

"Georgia does not recognize the so called independence of Nagorno Karabakh, and therefore, does not recognize the second round of the so-called "presidential elections" held in this region of Azerbaijan," the Georgian Foreign Ministry stated in its official website on April 15.

"Georgia supports territorial integrity and sovereignty of the Republic of Azerbaijan within its internationally recognized borders and supports the peaceful settlement of conflict based on the principles and norms of international law," the ministry added.

Note that Georgia made a similar statement during the first round of the so-called elections in Nagorno-Karabakh held on March 31.

A number of other countries, including France, Germany, Turkey, UK, Canada, Australia, Norway, Pakistan, Latvia, Ukraine, Estonia, as well as major international organizations such as the EU, NATO, OSCE, OIC, GUAM, Visegrad Group, TURKPA have recently reiterated their support for Azerbaijans territorial integrity and condemned the illegal elections held in in Karabakh on March 31.

Azerbaijan and Armenia are locked in a conflict over Azerbaijans Nagorno-Karabakh breakaway region, which along with seven adjacent regions was occupied by Armenian forces in a war in the early 1990s. More than 20,000 Azerbaijanis were killed and around one million were displaced as a result of the large-scale hostilities.

The OSCE Minsk Group co-chaired by the United States, Russia and France has been mediating the Armenian-Azerbaijani conflict since the signing of the volatile cease-fire agreement in 1994. The Minsk Groups efforts have resulted in no progress and to this date, Armenia has failed to abide by the UN Security Council resolutions (822, 853, 874 and 884) that demand the withdrawal of Armenian military forces from the occupied territories of Azerbaijan.

---

Akbar Mammadov is AzerNews staff journalist, follow him on Twitter: @AkbarMammadov97

Follow us on Twitter @AzerNewsAz
New Delhi: As the deadly coronavirus outbreak continues to bring the world to a standstill, search giant Google is thanking all the COVID-19 fighters for the selfless services with its doodle. Earlier this week, the doodle was dedicated to all medical professionals for their efforts in the fight against coronavirus and today, Google has thanked the delivery workers for their services.

To all packaging, shipping and delivery workers, thank you, reads the Google Doodle. The colourful doodle on Googles homepage beautifully depicts the hardwork of those involved in the job and how they are doing their bit for humanity during these testing times. It also carries a heart emoticon.

The doodle is part of the series in which Google will honour the coronavirus fighters over the next two weeks.

Check out todays Google Doodle here:

Last week, with a tagline Stay Home. Save Lives, Google had dedicated its doodle to the preventive measures that could help to curb the spread of coronavirus.

In India, the number of COVID-19 cases now stands at 10,815 while the death toll is at 353 as of Wednesday morning. The country witnessed the largest single-day spike in coronavirus cases on Tuesday, with as many as 1,463 positive cases and 29 deaths recorded in 24 hours.
Private steel maker JSPL on Wednesday said it has bagged an order worth Rs 50 crore to supply 12,000 tonnes of rail blooms to France.

In a regulatory filing the company said JSPL has bagged a contract to supply the special grade rail blooms to France rail hayange, France.

"With this, JSPL has come to be acknowledged as one of the regular suppliers to France Railways. Similarly, Britain and Australia have expressed interest and they are expected to place orders as well," JSPL MD V R Sharma said.

Sharma further added that "the 12,000-tonnes special grade rail blooms export order to France is valued at around Rs 50 crore".

He further said "JSPL has got a certification from Research Designs & Standards Organisation (RDSO), and started the production of 1,080 head hardened heat-treated grade rails. Rail Vikas Nigam Limited has placed an order of 2308-tonnes rails of this series".

Part of USD 25 billion O P Jindal Group, JSPL's rail mill at its Raigarh plant has capacity to produce over 30,000 tonne of head hardened rail per month.

The company has presence in steel, power, mining and infrastructure sectors.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
The number of people unemployed or receiving some sort of emergency payment amid the Covid-19 economic crisis is in touching distance of one million  just over four weeks after the start of the lockdown.

And the cost of the schemes covering the main 350-a-week pandemic payment and the wage subsidy payment alone has now been budgeted at between 4bn and 5bn over the 12-week period to late June, compared with an original estimate of 3.7bn, the Department of Finance has said.

The huge and rapid increase in unemployment or for people whose wages are subsidised by the Government to the one million level since the middle of March has caught many economists by surprise.

The new numbers include 533,000 people on the main 350-a-week pandemic payment and 210,000 people on the live register claimant count.

In addition, Revenue chairman Niall Cody said that as of yesterday there were 255,000 people availing of the wage subsidy scheme who had received at least one payment since that scheme was launched.

That is an increase of 35,600 people availing of the wage subsidy scheme in the last week.

Finance Minister Paschal Donohoe said he had ordered changes to the wage subsidy scheme to iron out anomalies for earners on less than 500 a week, equivalent to 31,000 a year, and for earners on more than 586 a week, or 38,000.

The subsidy rises to 85% of pay from 70% at some wage bands.

Increasing the wage replacement rate from 70% to 85% on earnings up to 24,400 and the value of the subsidy to 350 on earnings between 24,400 and 31,000 goes a distance in doing what we asked of Government and, importantly, protects jobs and the worker-employer relationship during the emergency to facilitate a rapid recovery, said Patricia King, general secretary at the Irish Congress of Trade Unions.

Danny McCoy, chief executive of business group Ibec, said the wage support scheme will help both firms and employees.

It will continue to play a vital role in enabling the economy to bounce back at the other end of this crisis, helping vulnerable firms to stay afloat and keeping their employees engaged whilst protecting the incomes of individuals, he said.

Meanwhile, the European Commission held out hope for a co-ordinated approach across the EU when the time comes for lifting the health restrictions.

The Commission said its roadmap of guidelines is based on science and on expanding testing for the virus.

At a minimum, member states should notify each other and the Commission in due time before they lift measures and take into account their views, said the Commission.

Saving lives and protecting Europeans from the coronavirus is our number one priority. At the same time, it is time to look ahead and to focus on protecting livelihoods, said European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen.

Dermot OLeary, chief economist at broker Goodbody, said that the guidelines were important to prevent member states going their separate ways.

Opening up travel between bilateral states will depend on the same health conditions, said Mr OLeary.
A television journalist was arrested from Mumbai on Wednesday over his report on resumption of special trains, which might have prompted gathering of migrant workers in suburban Bandra on Tuesday amidst the coronavirus lockdown, a police official said.

IMAGE: Migrant workers gather outside Bandra West Railway Station as they defy lockdown norms and request to leave for their native places after Prime Minister Narendra Modi had announced the extension of nationwide lockdown till May 3 in the wake of coronavirus pandemic, in Mumbai on Tuesday. Photograph: PTI Photo

The accused, Rahul Kulkarni, was detained in Osmanabad in Marathwada region, where he is based, and brought to Mumbai where he was formally arrested.

The arrest of Kulkarni, who works with a Marathi news channel, was announced by state home minister Anil Deshmukh on his Twitter handle.

"Police arrested journalist Rahul Kulkarni for giving news report, due to which rumour was spread," Deshmukh tweeted.

In a recent news report, Kulkarni said Jan Sadharan special trains would resume for people stranded due to the lockdown, the police official said.

He has been booked under IPC Sections 188 (disobedience to order duly promulgated by public servant and 269, 270 (negligent, malignant act likely to spread infection of disease dangerous to life), 117 (abetting commission of offence by public), the official said.

More than 1,000 migrant workers, most of them from Bihar, Uttar Pradesh and West Bengal, gathered near Bandra railway station here on Tuesday afternoon.

They were demanding that the state government make transport arrangements so that they can go back to their native towns and villages
The Delhi government on Wednesday appointed 10 bureaucrats as nodal officers for coordination with resident commissioners of states to address the concerns of migrants in the city amid the ongoing lockdown.

The move comes a day after a large number of migrant workers gathered in Mumbai and Surat despite the nationwide lockdown to contain the spread of COVID-19.

According to an official, the 10 IAS officers will coordinate with resident commissioners of states and union territories to address issues being faced by migrants in Delhi, be it food, shelter, essential supplies, payment of wages or other livelihood issues.

Delhi chief secretary Vijay Dev has asked the nodal officers to submit a report twice a week on the efforts and measures taken by them.

Among the selected bureaucrats are IAS officers D N Singh (nodal officer for Uttar Pradesh), Azimul Haque (Jharkhand), S B Shashank (Bihar) and Arun Mishra (West Bengal and Odisha).

The total number of coronavirus cases in the national capital on Tuesday increased to 1561, with 51 fresh cases and two deaths being reported in a day.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
TWO men who spent a night in custody after Portlaoise gardai stopped them at a Covid-19 checkpoint were released on bail on Wednesday, April 15.

Mateusz Polcinak, 24, and Bartek Zajac, 25, both with an address at 3 Millbrook, Main St, Kilcullen, Co Kildare, had been arrested and brought to Portlaoise Garda Station where they were charged in relation to their failure to appear in court in Dublin on previous occasions.

They appeared in custody at Tullamore District Court and Gda Andrea Byrne said that after Mr Polcinak was cautioned he made no reply.

Gda Byrne said she had been conducting a Covid-19 checkpoint and Mr Polcinak was well outside the 2km limit.

She said she had no objection to bail being granted.

Gda Doreen O'Connor gave evidence of arresting, charging and cautioning Mr Zajac who was travelling with the other man. Mr Zajac also made no reply when he was charged and cautioned.

Mr Polcinak was arrested in connection with his failure to appear in court on February 24 last after being remanded on bail at the Criminal Courts of Justice (CCJ) in Dublin on December 9 last.

Mr Zajac had been before Balbriggan District Court on October 24 last and was remanded to appear there again on November 21 but did not do so.

Patrick Martin, solicitor for Mr Polcinak, said his client was willing to plead guilty to the charge but Judge Bernadette Owens told him the matter would have to return to the CCJ.

She granted applications for legal aid after being told that Mr Polcinak was a chef who had been earning 400 per week and Mr Zajac was a trainee chef on a weekly wage of 200.

Both were remanded on bail to appear at the CCJ on July 22 next.
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Sylvester Miller, a 50-year-old with expressive brown eyes, is an auto technician at a manufacturing plant in Illinois. He was hired at 40 hours a week as a temporary service worker. Now, though, under the COVID-19 shutdown, Miller has been told to shelter in place at homewithout pay until further notice.

Problem is, Miller doesnt have a home in which to seek refuge from the life-threatening virus. He lives in a transitional shelter for homeless men, called the Breakthrough, in Chicagos East Garfield Park neighborhood, in a dormitory that sleeps an average of 30 other testosterone-filled men prone to fighting, he said, in beds uncomfortably close to each other.

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Dont get him wrong, Miller says. Hes supremely grateful for his rent-free bed and for the dining hall where he eats his complimentary meals with the others. But in this pandemic, its far from the luxury of having his own place. For one thing, he cant ever self-isolatethe very thing so many Americans are complaining about having to do. And even though he has his own face mask that he got at work, he is vulnerable to the hygiene standards of the people with whom he must cohabitate.

There was a guy who was dope sick and he threw up on my bed last week, Miller said. I had to take everything off my bed and wash it and then I had to clean up my area.

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Across the country, the working homelessa population that the Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments estimated makes up 22 percent of homeless single adults and 25 percent of adults in homeless familiesfind themselves in versions of the same predicament during the COVID-19 crisis: There is no home from which to work remotely, let alone to seek refuge.

In a series of interviews with Slate that included telephone conversations and photographs shared by the interviewees, working homeless people from New York to Miami to Chicago to Salt Lake City talked at length about how they are attempting to cope with the pandemic. Their generally low-paying jobs put them at prolonged exposure to the coronavirus and their crowded communal living arrangementsaccommodations ranging from tent encampments to the streetsput them at relentless risk for COVID-19 infection, a virus that thrives on human proximity and vulnerability.

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As we know, if you are healthy and have a healthy immune system, you may be exposed to it and you might not develop a serious illness, said Bobby Watts, chief executive officer of the National Health Care for the Homeless Council in Nashville. But because of homelessness, people are much more likely to have poorer nutrition and chronic sleep deprivation and therefore weaker immune systems.

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These factors mean homeless people are also much more likely to already have multiple health conditionswhich puts them at higher risk of serious COVID-19 complications, Watts explains.

In Salt Lake City, Greg Young, general manager of transitional services for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, offers triage services to an impoverished population that includes refugees, immigrants, and people coming out of incarceration. Some 40 to 60 of those people each week are working homeless folks, Young estimates.

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Sequestered inside the safety of his own home after falling ill with what he feared was COVID-19his attempt to get tested for the virus was denied, so he may never know his official diagnosisYoung said he has been talking to his clients via a phone recently installed for them outside his work building, now closed. Recently, Young counseled a woman who works as a gas station cashier and lives in a densely populated tent encampment alongside the Jordan River.

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I told her: Do you realize what is going on? You need to stay in one place. 

He knew the request was at odds with the conditions of the womans daily life, which keep her traversing the city to connect with the people who can give her the resources that she needs. She still needed to get back and forth from the food pantries for which she had been given vouchers for free groceries, to keep appointments with case managers trying to help her attain better paying employment, and to visit apartment houses where she needed to put her name on waiting lists for low-income housing.

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I hear so many people complaining about having to be quarantined in their homes, Young said, and these people are out in the elements being told that they cannot intermingle with others or go into big crowds and yet that is exactly what they need to do to find what they need to survive.

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That same bind is glaringly obvious in Oakland Park, Florida, where 55-year-old John Scammon said the only way he was able to create a job for himself during this pandemic was to step directly into the commotion of a 24-hour gas station.

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Every day, along the stretch of Prospect Road, Scammon, a stocky man with a gray beard and tattooed arms, pumps gas and opens the front door to the stations convenience store for those who dont want to put themselves in possible contact with COVID-19 by touching the handles themselves.

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Scammons voice echoed against the walls of the gas station restroom where hed gone to talk on a friends phone.

The coronavirus thing cant mess with me, maam, he said. I drink a lot of beer and smoke a lot of pot. It will run from my system.

Scammon says the gas station doesnt pay him and I never ask nobody for nothin. But the customers generally tip him between $40 and $50 a day. He loves the dignity of making his own money, 10 percent of which he tithes to his church, the Solid Rock Ministry, down the street from the gas station: Every day, I put the money in the door between the deadbolt and the door frame, maam.

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His spiritual guide, pastor Billy Delaney, attests to Scammons good deeds and commitment.

John is a very sensitive human being and he loves God, Delaney said. He is not lazy and he is not crazy. He is a homeless man who has an addiction problem and is down on his luck. He is excited to work and makes his contributions to the church. What else is there to say? God has got to bless him.

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Meanwhile, the pastor provides Scammon with new shoes, warm meals after Tuesday night Bible study meetings, gloves, and hand sanitizer. Scammon says he is appreciative of the protective measures but points out that, for all the sanitary measures, he often sleeps next to a dumpster.

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In New York City, there are two things that Michael Anatole, a 55-year-old, college-educated homeless man living at the New York City Rescue Mission, wants people to know: First, homelessness can happen to anyone. He graduated from Pace University in 1985 with a bachelors degree in management information systems, he says. Now he makes $45,000 a year working for the city gathering essential data for its computer systems. The average cost of a studio rental in New York City is $1,889 per month, according to a 2019 article from Smart Asset.

Anatole, a serious-looking man with an eloquent way of expressing himself, has been living at the New York City Rescue Mission since November, when he says his landlord locked him out of the room he was renting because Anatole owed approximately $1,000 in back rent. Though he said he doesnt want to go into the personal details about what sparked his homelessness, he did say that he was depressed and that the depression played into a spate of absenteeism from work, causing loss of pay. These days, Anatole pays the Rescue Mission 20 percent of his income to stay at the shelter, allowing him to save money to move into a studio in one of the citys outer boroughs, hopefully by June.

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But that all depends on the infection rates, death tolls, and economic devastation due to the coronavirus, he points out. Like so many other Americans, Anatole is worried about the stability of his job.

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The mayor has gone on record saying city agencies are going to have to make reductions due to the current economic conditions, Anatole said.

Which brings Anatole to his second point.

He feels vulnerable, he saysevery second of every day.

I have COPD [chronic obstructive pulmonary disease]. I feel vulnerable because I have a breathing condition. I feel vulnerable when I walk outside. I feel vulnerable dealing with the homeless community. I feel vulnerableperiod.

In his best attempt to protect himself, Anatole eats alone, purposefully staggering his meal times so that he can stay away from the shelters other men, who dont always cover their mouths when they sneeze and cough, Anatole has noticed. He uses liberal amounts of hand sanitizer and Clorox wipes, which he buys at a local CVS. Every time he uses one of the shared restrooms, he wipes it down with the disinfectant before and after he uses the facilities.

And each day, as an essential worker, he gets on the bus and keeps going to work. He wears gloves during his three-stop commute and doesnt touch his face or stand close to anybody.

I dont even sit down, Anatole says. I just hop on and hop off.

This story was supported by the Economic Hardship Reporting Project.
Two men were sentenced to prison Tuesday for assaulting Covid-19 task force members who asked them to wear face masks.

Tran Van Manh, 24, received a nine-month jail term in the northern province of Thai Binh six days after he beat officers in charge of health control when they asked him to wear a face mask. He was sentenced April 14 by the provinces Hung Ha District court.

Tran Van Manh stands trial in Hung Ha District, Thai Binh Province, for assaulting Covid-19 task force, April 14, 2020. Photo courtesy of People's Court of Hung Ha District.

He is the first person in the province to be sentenced for opposing Covid-19 control and prevention measures. The investigation, prosecution and trial were held in quick order by Hung Ha District authorities.

There were no more than 10 people allowed in the court room and attendees had to sit at least two meters apart from each other, as a national social distancing campaign was still in effect. Everyone was required to wear face masks.

According to Hung Ha District police, on April 8, Manh drove a motorbike without a helmet and a mask near his house to Tien La Village, Doan Hung Commune, to deliver beef. At a Covid-19 checkpoint in Thong Nhat Commune, he was stopped by the task force and asked to wear a mask and submit a medical declaration. Instead of compiling, he cursed and assaulted members of the task force with a stainless steel stool.

Also Tuesday, Nguyen Van Quynh, 34, was sentenced to a year in prison for snatching the phone of medical control staff and throwing it on the ground. He was also charged and found guilty of obstructing officials on duty by the Yen Phong District court in Bac Ninh Province, northern Vietnam.

Nguyen Van Quynh stands trial in Yen Phong District for opposing Covid-19 task force, April 14, 2020. Photo courtesy of Bac Ninh police.

On Apirl 7, Quynh did not wear a mask as he drove a motorbike through the Covid-19 control checkpoint in Yen Phong District. He refused to heed repeated reminders and instead, challenged the checkpoint staff members and abused them.

As Lieutenant Nguyen Van Duc used a cell phone to record Quynhs violation, the latter snatched the phone and threw it to the ground.

Vietnam has toughened up measures against violations that sabotage the country's pandemic fight. Manh and Quynh's trials are the first regarding violations against Covid-19 task force, although thousands have been fined for not wearing face masks in public places, or leaving homes for "non-essential" reasons.

The country has recorded 267 Covid-19 cases, including 98 active ones.
Total SA investors called on the oil major to put broader limits on carbon emissions, increasing pressure on the French company to match commitments made by peers ahead of its annual shareholder meeting.

The request, made by 11 European asset managers, is the latest sign that Big Oils own shareholders are forcing companies to take responsibility for their emissions -- and for those of their customers. But it catches Total at a difficult time, as the coronavirus crisis destroys fuel demand and prompts the industry to make sweeping cost cuts.

While Total has already adopted plans to reduce greenhouse-gas output from its own projects and from the generation of energy that it buys -- known as scope 1 and 2 emissions -- its now being urged to curtail emissions caused by the use of its products, or scope 3.

As long-term shareholders, we have to take into account the climate risk in the management of our portfolios, the 11 investors said Wednesday in a statement. The group, accounting for 1.35% of Totals capital, includes Meeschaert Asset Management, Candriam France SAS and La Banque Postale Asset Management.

Under the investors proposed resolution for Totals May 29 shareholder meeting, the company would set up an action plan with medium and long-term targets to reduce emissions in absolute terms, including scope 3.

Total Chief Executive Officer Patrick Pouyanne has said its more important to set immediate action plans because managers setting long-term goals wont be in charge by the time deadlines come around. Nevertheless, he conceded last month that the company will have to go further in terms of emission cuts.

Total didnt immediately respond to a request for comment on Wednesday.

Current plans

So far, Total has said its seeking to reduce the carbon intensity of products sold to customers by 15% by 2030 as it expands in renewables and increasingly favors natural gas over oil. It also plans to reduce its scope 1 and 2 emissions to less than 40 million tons of carbon dioxide equivalent by 2025 across its operated oil and gas projects, from 46 million tons in 2015.

Competitors BP Plc and Repsol SA have pledged to zero-out carbon emissions by 2050, while other European oil producers such as Royal Dutch Shell Plc and Equinor ASA have also vowed to offset emissions from the fuels they sell to customers.

Totals current commitments dont allow investors to assess its progress toward reaching the goals of the Paris climate agreement, the investors said. In particular, Totals ambition to reduce the carbon intensity of its energy products doesnt guarantee a reduction in greenhouse-gas emissions in absolute terms, including scope 3, they said.

Follow This, a separate group of activist shareholders, said its delighted that institutional investors have now filed a resolution with the exact same request as ours, according to a separate statement. Similar resolutions have been effective with Shell in 2017 and with BP and Equinor in 2019.

2020 Bloomberg L.P.
South Africa has received medical supplies from China to help combat the Covid-19 outbreak in the country.

Picture: @DIRCO_ZA/Twitter

Protecting healthcare workers

Second consignment

A Boeing 777 aircraft, from Guangzhou, China, arrived at OR Tambo International Airport with a consignment of medical supplies and equipment donated by China on 13 April. The cargo is currently going through accelerated clearance, with the assistance of the South African Revenue Service.Items donated include 11,000 N95 masks, 50,000 surgical masks, 3,000 sets of protective suits, 500 portable infrared thermometers, 3,000 goggles, 11,000 pairs of surgical gloves and 11,000 pairs of medical shoe covers.Minister of Health, Zweli Mkhize, together with his deputy Joe Phaahla and International Relations and Cooperation Minister, Naledi Pandor, received the consignment from Charge d'affaires Li Nan at OR Tambo International Airport.Welcoming the donation at a briefing on Tuesday, the health minister said the medical equipment will go a long way to protect healthcare workers at the frontline of the countrys fight against coronavirus.We are sensitive about the protection of our professionals, so this donation is going to contribute quite significantly to ensuring that we are able to get our staff protected against infection.This for us indicates a contribution to a kind of commodity that is highly needed inside the department, particularly as we deal with the issue of Covid-19."We want to express our gratitude to the Peoples Republic of China for their continued support and assistance that they have given us, said Mkhize.Upon clearance, the health department will distribute the medical equipment across the country.The donation comes as the total number of confirmed Covid-19 cases in the country rose to 2 415, as of Tuesday with 87,022 tests conducted to date.Truly, China has exhibited that it is only together that we can stop this virus, said Pandor.Another batch of medical supplies for donation is being assembled in Shanghai, China, for collection by chartered South African aircraft. This next batch of donations is set to arrive in South Africa during the course of this week.Chinas ambassador to South Africa, Li, said the donation of medical supplies demonstrates brotherhood between the two countries.This batch of medical supplies arrived in South Africa just five days after President Xi Jinpings telephone call with President Cyril Ramaphosa, which represents an important concrete step to implement the consensus reached by our two Heads of State.It fully demonstrates the comprehensive strategic partnership and the special brotherhood that exists between China and South Africa, said Li.
The political commentator and Fox Nation talk-show host Tomi Lahren recently purchased a sweet home in Nashville, TN, for $700,000.

The home was built in 2014, but looks as though it is brand-new. Photos show a Pinterest-perfect residence done up in sedate and neutral tones.

According to a recent Instagram post, the outspoken conservative told her fans she was fleeing California. She's already settled into Tennessee lifethe new homeowner has been broadcasting from her kitchen during the pandemic.

The home is located in the trendy 12 South neighborhood, just a 10-minute drive to downtown Nashville, and is within walking distance of 12 Souths burgeoning scene of hip restaurants and designer boutiques.

Situated on a half-acre corner lot, the exterior is a blend of contemporary and rustic. Reclaimed wood accents abound, and the newly added covered front porch makes for an ideal spot for watching the world go by.

Inside, the home gives a vibe of floating among the trees, thanks to the windows everywhere. The cozy three-bedroom home offers just over 2,000 square feet of living space.

On the main floor, there's an oversized gourmet kitchen with beautiful marble countertops, as well as a gas cooktop. The kitchen flows easily into the living room, which is designed for entertaining a bunch of guests.

The 14-foot ceilings in the living room and gas fireplace with large windows create a bright, lively atmosphere, and the hardwood floors reinforce the rustic vibe. All bedrooms are located on the second floor, and the master suite boosts his-and-hers closets.

Out back, an ample fenced courtyard, surrounded by trees, offers privacy. The property also has a storage shed and a two-car garage.

The home Lahren was renting in Redondo Beach, CA, is now looking for a new tenant, at $7,200 a month.

It was listed by agent Andrea Woodard of Village Real Estate. Lahren was represented by Lacey Newman with Compass.

The post Fox Nation Host Tomi Lahren Buys $700K Nashville Home in Trendy Neighborhood appeared first on Real Estate News & Insights | realtor.com.
The coronavirus pandemic has closed schools, shuttered restaurants, emptied office buildings, put Prime Minister Boris Johnson in intensive care and forced much of the U.K. economy into cryogenic suspension. So far, though, it hasn't derailed Brexit.

Fronting the daily U.K. press conference Tuesday, Chancellor of the Exchequer Rishi Sunak affirmed that the government was committed to its current timetable for trade talks with the European Union, which resume Wednesday. In a photo tweeted by the EU's chief negotiator, Michel Barnier, only the empty chairs between his team were a clue that something has changed in the non-Brexit world. Talks on the future trading relationship were paused when the virus hit both negotiating sides. They're restarting in the same way that most of us are conducting our professional lives: remotely.

It all seems like a hazy dream from another life now, but the U.K. officially left the EU at the end of January, and entered a period of transition where it still enjoys full access to the European single market until the end of this year. Under the terms of the divorce deal, Britain can request a one-time extension of the transition period for one or two years, provided it makes the request by the start of July. If there were ever an excuse for triggering that extension, a once-in-a-century public health and economic crisis would seem to be it.

The International Monetary Fund predicts a 6.5% drop in Britain's gross domestic product this year (and a 7% drop in GDP per head). The U.K.'s independent Office of Budget Responsibility is even gloomier, saying that the economy could shrink by 35% in the second quarter and by 13% for 2020. Even if the impact of Brexit is tiny in comparison to the virus shock, adding to this kind of misery seems cruel.

"This is not an argument about leaving the EU. That is done and dusted," Robert Keen, the head of the British International Freight Association, said recently. "This is an argument about managing the transition process when not just the goalposts but the entire playing field has moved."

As well as the impact on business, there's the question of whether a government that's consumed by the coronavirus response really has the capacity to successfully renegotiate Britain's most important trading relationship in the space of a few months. There are thorny questions over fisheries that are a long way from being resolved, and difficult issues around transport, data sharing, the recognition of professional qualifications, technical barriers to trade, financial services and so-called "level playing field" demands from the EU (requiring that British regulations and standards stay aligned with those of Europe). Of five scheduled negotiating rounds before a major meeting between the opposing sides in June, two had to be cancelled because of the virus.

Even if a deal were struck, there would be serious doubts about implementation. Could Britain really be ready in January to roll out enhanced border procedures, a new immigration system and a complex customs and border arrangement to keep the border open between Northern Ireland and Ireland? These would be huge challenges in the best of times. And Britain is among the countries worst hit by Covid-19. That suggests its lockdown will probably be lifted in phases, with some social distancing measures maintained and part of the economy left shackled.

Yet Johnson is likely to stay the Brexit course, as there's nothing particular to stop him. He has an unassailable parliamentary majority, and like incumbents pretty much everywhere dealing with this crisis, his popularity has shot up; more so after his recent hospitalization. If there's ever a time to make a decision that's not universally popular, it's probably now.

Johnson had already moved his Conservative Party in a different direction since becoming prime minister, focusing on his message of "leveling up" left-behind working class communities, rebuilding trust and seeking to move beyond Brexit. With the coronavirus raging, he's now a wartime leader of sorts. He doesn't want bitter and divisive debates about why the U.K. will have to keep paying into the EU budget (as it would during an extension) just as the country is trying to recover.

On cue, Brexit Party leader Nigel Farage sent out a letter to his supporters Tuesday night telling them to keep their antennas on alert: "There are voices now suggesting that the Brexit negotiations should be extended beyond the end of the year. We need to be free completely of the EU so that, as we emerge from this crisis, we are free to make all of our commercial and trade decisions."

Shanker Singham, an influential Brexit-supporting trade lawyer and government adviser, also called on Tories to hold their nerve. Writing on the Conservative Home website this week, he argued that extending the transition would hamper Britain's recovery, tie it to the EU's protectionist policies and impede trade talks with the U.S. and other countries. The two sides, he said, are closer than they look to a deal and Covid-19 will provide extra motivation. "The crisis and the compression of a deadline will lead to the result we all need," Singham wrote.

Johnson has to tread carefully, however, and he's too astute a student of Winston Churchill to test the patience of the public too far. Britons won't want their leaders visibly distracted by the arcana of trade when medical staff are complaining of shortages of personal protective equipment and people are still dying. He'll scrutinize polling on the matter closely and if - as at least one poll suggests - voters overwhelmingly back a delay, this most flexible of politicians won't have trouble changing course.

As Singham alludes at the end of his column, there are ways in which Britain can get an extension in all but name. The EU could decide to allow the status quo to continue in certain aspects of the relationship while they're being negotiated. The two sides could agree the terms of the new deal but allow for additional time for the necessary ratification to go through each others' parliaments.

Politically, it may have gotten a little easier for Johnson to deliver the Brexit he promised. But with lingering questions over his handling of the Covid-19 medical and social crisis, he won't take anything for granted.

- - -

This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of Bloomberg LP and its owners.

Raphael writes editorials on European politics and economics for Bloomberg Opinion.
Consumer Reports has no financial relationship with advertisers on this site.

Sarah Fretwell, who lives in Santa Barbara, Calif., knew the lease on her 2017 Audi A3 e-Tron was ending in June, so she contacted the dealer to ask about her options. The dealer suggested she speak directly with Audis financing company.

After about an hour on hold, Fretwell was connected to a customer service representative, who arranged for a six-month lease extension in about 5 minutes. Once I got through, it was an easy experience," Fretwell says.

If you have a vehicle lease nearing the end of its term, its increasingly likely that you can get an extension. The novel coronavirus, which causes COVID-19, has people like Fretwell concerned about leaving home and spending time in public places. So turning in a leased vehicleor picking out a new onemight not be something you want to do right now.

Want an Extension, Just Ask

Several automakers and leasing companies contacted by Consumer Reports said its important for the companies to make it easy for customers to stay in their cars, if thats what they want or need. For starters, people who lease tend to lease again, company officials told us. And repeat customersalways important to a car companywill be especially crucial as automakers enter damage control mode amid the economic downturn.

Also, with many dealerships and auto auctions around the country closed for businessor operating with skeleton crewsthere may not be many physical places for consumers to turn in off-lease cars. Even so, there are options for lease customers who still want to return a vehicle at the end of its lease term.

Customers having difficulty making payments on a lease or auto loan are also being presented with an array of short-term solutions from financing companies. Again, approach varies by manufacturer, but many are offering payment deferrals and other ways for consumers who have fallen upon financial difficulty to make it through these tough times.

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Most automakers are working with their leasing companies to make sure that customers who wish to return leased vehicles as scheduled can do so without a lot of hassle, with many offering online transactions and home pickup and delivery. Again, it comes down to each leasing companys policy, as well as the nuances of each individual deal, says Eric Lyman, senior vice president of ALG, TrueCars analytics arm.

Communicate

Make sure to communicate with your lender and dealer about any challenges you may have with an existing loan or lease, or an upcoming lease termination, Lyman says. Captive lenders and dealers prize customer loyalty and should be willing to make small concessions in exchange for an ongoing business relationship, especially during these uncertain and volatile times.

Scot Hall, the executive vice president of operations at Swap-a-Leasea company that arranges for lease transfers between individualssays that leasing companies have everything to gain from being flexible, especially now.

Getting those cars back right now doesn't do them any good anyway, he says. Dealerships and auto auctions have to pick those cars up for them to be removed from the balance sheet of the leasing company, but theres no way to do that right now.

Of course, theres no one-size-fits-all approach to automotive leasing. Most manufacturers told CR that they were handling lease extensions on a case-by-case basis. Even so, most had an option for customers to extend their leases by a month or more.

Lease extensions are nothing new, even under normal circumstances, Hall says. They often include an upfront fee or a premium on monthly payments, but in light of the current situation, many leasing companies are extending leases free of charge, as well as increasing mileage caps to accommodate the extensions.

Stuart Schorr, vice president of communications for Jaguar Land Rover of North America, says that the pandemic has turned automakers normal leasing strategy on its ear.

In general, the goal of most companies is to contact lease customers and have them get a new car early, he says. In this case it's more about supporting those who do have to renew, and making it easy for those who prefer to delay the whole process.





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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.
Real estate industry on Wednesday said the government's decision to allow construction on those projects where labourers are already available on sites will solve the problem of migrant daily wage workers but said availability of raw materials may be an issue.

NAREDCO President Niranjan Hiranandani said, "The government has issued an order which allows staggered reopening on the stalled construction work to partially resume from 20 April 2020, subject to terms and conditions. The real estate industry acknowledges the positive impact this will have in handling the migrant crisis."



"The relaxation has come at the right time as the situation was very grim to keep construction workers at the site afloat," he said.

Credai National Chairman Jaxay Shah said the directives issued by the Ministry of Home affairs will boost the country's economic growth in a slow but steady manner.

"We, however, await the directives by the state government," he said.

"The realty sector remains the second largest employer after agriculture and halt in construction activities will have a long term impact on the realty sector. We therefore urge the government to allow construction activity and supply chain in a staggered manner.

"We are already taking care of the workers and construction can begin amidst the present conditions. We are also ready to start construction at those sites where labourers are already present with subject to the supply chain," Shah said.

Anuj Puri, Chairman - ANAROCK Property Consultants said: "Offering some relief to the construction sector, the government has permitted activity to resume in non-Covid-19 hotspots, provided they follow strict social distancing guidelines. However, the guideline clearly mentions that no construction worker will be brought from outside and only those currently available on the site will be able to resume work."



The move to start at least some of the construction activity on project sites, even with limited workforce, is certainly welcome, Puro said.

"That said, since many migrant workers had left for their villages post lockdown 1.0 announcement, we will have to wait and see how many are actually left back to resume work. Migrant workers comprise at least 80% share of the total 44 million workforce in the construction sector currently," Puri said.

CREDAI-NCR President Pankaj Bajaj said, "We are awaiting clarity. It seems that Noida construction may be allowed outside the hotspots, But practically it seems impossible. Labour has to stay in-house. Most projects are at the finishing stage. At such stage, labour does not stay in-house."



"The other problem is supply of raw material. Large restrictions are still in force for the production of those goods. Nearly 200 different items go in the construction," Bajaj said.

Supertech Chairman R K Arora spoke about the challenges for starting construction work.

"We require different types of labour in consultation i.e labour, mason, carpenter, plumbers & bar binders etc & all are not available at site. Work without construction materials will not be possible since industry related to construction are not allowed till May 3," Arora said.

"By allowing in-situ projects, to commence construction work is a step in the right direction. Upon successful experience, construction activities should be allowed across all projects," said Ashish Bhutani MD & CEO Bhutani Infra.

The decision to resume construction activities will help in job creation, said Ankush Kaul, President (Sales & Marketing)- Ambience group said.

Vikas CMD, Saya Homes, said: "Permitting construction activities although with conditions is the right approach and we wholeheartedly welcome it. But the implementation will be subject to guidelines issued by respective states, we will have to wait and watch for clarity to emerge."



Rajat Goel, JMD,G World, said, "Allowing in-site projects, falling within the boundaries of Municipal Corporation to commence construction, while following social distancing norms is a step in the right direction. This will immensely help the daily wage labourers.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
By Stephanie Nebehay and Jeff Mason

GENEVA/WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The head of the World Health Organization (WHO) said on Wednesday he regrets U.S. President Donald Trump's decision to pull funding for the agency, but that now is the time for the world to unite in its fight against the new coronavirus.

Trump's move prompted condemnation from world leaders as global coronavirus infections passed the 2 million mark.

The United States is the world's worst-affected country and its coronavirus death toll topped 30,000 on Wednesday, according to a Reuters tally. The fatalities have doubled in just a week and set a record single-day increase for the second day in a row.

New U.S. cases have been rising by about 25,000 a day, down from a peak of 35,000, according to a Reuters tally.

Trump said the data suggests the nation has passed the peak of new coronavirus infections and that he will announce guidelines for reopening the economy on Thursday.

After gradually becoming more hostile toward the Geneva-based WHO, Trump accused it on Tuesday of promoting Chinese "disinformation" about the virus, saying this had probably worsened the outbreak.

WHO Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus told a news conference that the United States "has been a long-standing and generous friend of the WHO, and we hope it will continue to be so."

"WHO is reviewing the impact on our work of any withdrawal of U.S. funding and we will work with partners to fill any gaps and ensure our work continues uninterrupted," Tedros added.

Global health campaigner and donor Bill Gates tweeted that "Halting funding for the World Health Organization during a world health crisis is as dangerous as it sounds ... The world needs WHO now more than ever."

But Washington showed no sign of softening its stance, as Secretary of State Mike Pompeo pressed China's top diplomat on the need for full transparency and information sharing to fight the pandemic.

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There was a sign of global unity among the Group of 20 major economies, including the United States, which agreed to suspend debt service payments for the world's poorest countries from May 1 until the end of the year. Meeting host Saudi Arabia said this would free up more than $20 billion for them to spend on their health systems.

MONEY GOING ELSEWHERE

The United States contributed more than $400 million to the WHO in 2019, roughly 15% of its budget.

A senior administration official said Washington would stop a $58 million "assessed contribution" that it was due to pay for 2020.

The United States also traditionally provides several hundred million dollars a year in voluntary funding tied to specific WHO programs. "That money will be spent with other partners," said a second senior Trump administration official.

The WHO has appealed for more than $1 billion specifically to fund operations against the pandemic, which reached 2 million confirmed cases on Wednesday, including more than 131,000 deaths, according to a Reuters tally.

New York City, center of the U.S. epidemic, revised its COVID-19 death toll sharply higher to nearly 11,000 - around a third of the overall U.S. total - to include victims presumed to have died of the disease but who were not tested.

But declines in hospitalizations and need for intensive care for coronavirus patients across New York state prompted Governor Andrew Cuomo to say on Wednesday that fears of its healthcare system becoming overwhelmed had not materialized.

Many of the hardest-hit countries have acknowledged that they are failing to register large numbers of coronavirus deaths among elderly people living in nursing homes, where testing is rare.

Data from Belgium indicated that almost half of its coronavirus-related deaths had occurred in nursing homes.

EASING THE LOCKDOWN

Spain and Italy, which have almost 40,000 coronavirus deaths between them, have begun this week to allow some non-essential businesses to reopen in the hope of reawakening locked-down economies nosediving into recession.

The WHO said the world stood at a "pivotal juncture" and countries that eased restrictions should wait at least two weeks to evaluate the impact before easing further.

Chancellor Angela Merkel said on Wednesday some shops in Germany could reopen next week and that schools would be allowed to open gradually from May 4, but that social distancing rules would remain in place for now.

But England's chief medical officer said that although Britain, with almost 13,000 deaths, was probably close to the peak of its epidemic, it was too soon to think about next steps.

Some 94 percent of Americans have been under government stay-at-home orders, but a top U.S. health official said governors of about 20 states spared the worst of the coronavirus outbreak may start reopening their economies by Trump's May 1 target date.

Trump is forming advisory groups on how to open up the country. On Wednesday, Amazon.com Chief Executive Jeff Bezos and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg participated in White House conference calls, their firms said.

In a vivid reminder of the economic damage wrought by efforts to curb the health crisis, data showing the U.S. economy in a deep downturn and reports of persistent crude oil oversupply and collapsing demand sent global shares falling.[MKTS/GLOB]

The MSCI gauge of stocks around the world fell 2.4% after the International Energy Agency forecast a 29 million barrel per day dive in April oil demand to levels not seen in 25 years, and U.S. retail sales plunged 8.7% in March.

On the bright side, 106-year-old Connie Titchen, thought to be the oldest patient in Britain to beat the coronavirus, was discharged from hospital.

"I feel very lucky that Ive fought off this virus," she said. "I cant wait to see my family."

(Open https://tmsnrt.rs/3aIRuz7 in a separate browser for an interactive graphic to track the global spread.)

(Refiles to add missing word "to" in first paragraph)

(Reporting from Reuters bureaux across the world; Writing by Nick Macfie, Kevin Liffey and Lisa Shumaker; Editing by Robert Birsel, Philippa Fletcher and Bill Berkrot)
On Monday morning, the coronavirus death toll in Madhya Pradesh was 43. This was the second highest in the nation, behind Maharashtra. Worse, MP has the highest mortality rate in the country at 7.65 percent (43 deaths out of 562 cases), ahead of Maharashtras mortality rate of 6.70 per cent. And MPs figures are a far cry from Keralas, which suffered the first wave of infections but has managed the spread so well that as of Monday, it had flattened the curve of the rate of growth of new cases  with only two cases registered on Sunday. So, if Kerala is a lesson in what to do, MP might fall in the category of what not to do.

Former chief minister Kamal Nath has squarely blamed the Centre for the infections spread. He went on the record to say that the lockdown was delayed because the Centre was obsessed with toppling his government; it kept Parliament functioning to keep the state Assemblies going, especially MPs, so that he would have to face a floor test (he no longer had majority support following the defection of Jyotiraditya Scindia and 21 MLAs from the Congress party). Kamal Nath resigned and on March 23, Shivraj Singh Chouhan was sworn in. To paraphrase a Central minister, one need only see the chronology of events.

Since then, there has been inadequate political management of the coronavirus spread. The bureaucracy went on with business-as-usual, as Kamal Nath put it, resulting in the large-scale infection among state health officials. Such is babudoms attitude that those whose children returned from abroad did not self-quarantine; and senior officers, rather than stay at designated hospitals for monitoring, care and containment, chose to stay in more luxurious private hospitals.

Perhaps the bureaucracy in MP would have behaved more responsibly had there been a functioning council of ministers, or even a health minister of the calibre of Union minister Harsh Vardhan or Telangana health minister Etela Rajender. Yet three weeks after Chouhan was sworn in, MP does not have a health minister. This is no doubt due to the politics of cabinet formation: not only does the CM have to accommodate those from his earlier ministry and party MLAs who have patiently awaited a ministerial berth, but he is also compelled to reward Congress party defectors with whose help the Kamal Nath government was toppled. The pressure of accommodation has led to policy paralysis. With the cases and death toll rising, there is an argument here that the constitutional machinery in MP has broken down and that Presidents Rule needs to be imposed.

This paper would urge the MP CM to immediately appoint a health minister. He should ideally appoint a full council of ministers so that the state government can come up with a focused economic package for implementation, as demanded by Kamal Nath. Otherwise, Chouhan risks going down in history as a man so desperate for power that he neglected to prevent the coronavirus spread from ravaging his state.
Our states are competing with each other and we dont have a national plan to make sure that supplies are going to where the hot spots are. Thats today, Murray said. If we reopen government and we reopen the country and we want people to go back to small businesses and not have to fill up our hospitals, were going to have to have a plan in place to test wherever it is.
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When Tooning Out the News was prepping to make its originally scheduled March 16 debut on CBS All Access, the creative team was already striving to make a show that was nearly impossible. But then coronavirus hit, pushing pause on production and shifting post processes into artisans homes, and things got even more complicated.

Tooning Out the News is an animated short series that runs four times a week on the streamer. Each under 10 minute segment that airs daily features an anchor named James Smartwood parodying the top news stories of the day and interviewing real-world guests. Those segments are turned around quickly to be as timely as possible, and then at the end of the week they are compiled into one full weekly episode.

Originally, after converting David Lettermans old personal screening room in the Ed Sullivan Theatre into a NASA-like control room where the actors could be captured into animation in real time, the production team had spent an intense five months preparing to the point where they were delivering daily. Post-coronavirus pandemic, they were forced to pivot.

Just the act of doing animation on a daily basis is one of the oldest and hardest challenges in the animators playbook, says executive producer Tim Luecke, who heads up the animation team. So even in-studio is a struggle. When we got the news on the Friday before we were set to premiere that we had to all stay at home for at least two weeks, that became the final obstacle in an already crazy obstacle course that we had run.

In theory, Luecke, executive producer Stephen Colbert and the rest of the team behind the animated satirical political comedy had been unintentionally working towards the goal of a series this ambitious since they discovered Adobe Character Animator in beta five years ago. That technology allows hand-drawn characters to be motion-tracked in real time, and its one on which they cut their teeth on The Late Show for CBS and Our Cartoon President for Showtime. In creating Tooning Out the News, the goal was to respond to current news clips with larger-than-life animation as non-animated figures and pundits guested.

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To get to air by the new April 7 debut date, the team leaned into the efficiencies and crazy pipelines they had already built. They continued working closely with the Adobe Character Animator team, shipped out audio equipment to the cast at home and created 24-hour schedules with rotating shifts while relying on a combination of Slack, Zoom and remote computer access. The interviews with actors and guests now take place over Zoom in the early afternoon, are recorded, and then sent to editing to be completed by about 10 p.m.

Weve had to find a way to break up that edit and, basically, throw as many animators as we can on it at once, Luecke says. Animation is traditionally a very linear process where there are specific handoffs that have to take place; were now faced with the challenge of doing everything as simultaneously as possible. So we basically take the edit that comes out of Zoom, and we split it up. We recreate the motion capture in post as quickly as humanly possible so that we can hit the same turnaround time that we had been doing in the studio where we were getting motion capture directly out of the record.

According to Luecke, that timeline is still an impressive two-to-three hours, but upload speed and having to share large files creates a whole new headache that they didnt have to account for in-studio. And thats just for the panel portion, aka the body of the show. Luecke reveals theres an entirely separate pipeline that also runs every day for the cold open, in which they take real news footage from the past 24 hours and inject an animated element into it. Thus far, this has included a horse speaking out over Bernie Sanders from a framed picture on the wall, and Donald Trumps memo giving him sass.

To make that magic happen, they receive a pitch at 7 p.m. and the team begins sending in ideas and sketches via Slack, and then they have a rough cut of what it will look like by 11 p.m. If things go according to plan, the story board process happens until 3 a.m., and then the artists come in the next morning to build the final animation. In total its a 24-hour turnaround, with a lot of crossover between the body and cold open teams.

I cannot tell you how many schedules weve been through trying to figure this out in the past month. And the team has just been incredibly patient and adaptable so that we could figure out the best way to make sure that we had as many hands as possible at every moment of the day, Luecke says, noting theres no technology that would allow simultaneous animation.

He notes it takes roughly 15 animators to pull together the body, with 25 to 30 animators total working on each episode. Its a slimmer team than would be on a half-hour animated series; Luecke says there are at least 50 to 60 working on Our Cartoon President, for example. However, as the creatives have already learned, having a smaller team actually allows for a more simultaneous process.

At a certain point, there are only so many hands that can be touching a project before it becomes cumbersome to have more hands on it, he notes. Having a team of artists who are all very good at adapting to the needs of the day, and who can all wear a number of different hats has been probably the biggest help to us. When we were hiring for this show we were looking for people who, on a given day might be doing storyboards, and on the next day might be doing drawn animation. We basically built our team with as many of those jacks-of-all-trades as we could find.

For now, the result is a broadcast that rivals the look of any of the at-home newscasts happening across the country  in many cases the sleek animation looks even better than some home offices. Leucke muses that guest availability is probably a bit easier at the moment because everyones at home, and having people Zoom into real cable news shows has allowed them to slide into that ecosystem quite quickly.

One of the most exciting things about the show is that this is the first time animated characters are really interacting with the real world in real time, he says, referring to the shows first week, in which they essentially pranked Rudy Giuliani over the phone about a chair at the Grand Havana Room, a members-only club in New York City.

Those types of ambitious undertakings will only grow as the series finds its footing, especially when the show does eventually transition back into the studio. The ultimate goal is to create a live version at some point, something they did on Late Show with a cartoon Hillary Clinton back in 2016.

We were voicing that and puppet-ing it and motion-capturing it all live-to-air. So its being done, Leucke concludes. Its just scary to think of doing that on an even larger scale.

New episodes of Tooning Out the News stream Tuesdays through Fridays on CBS All Access.

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Victoria's Parliament will be recalled for an emergency sitting to enact crisis measures.

The government will introduce vital legislation when Parliament sits next week, including new protections for renters and urgent budget bills allowing healthcare workers and public sector staff to continue being paid.

Premier Daniel Andrews flanked by Treasurer Tim Pallas and Consumer Affairs Minister Marlene Kairouz yesterday. Credit:Eddie Jim

The total number of COVID-19 cases in Victoria reached 1299 on Wednesday morning  an increase of eight on the day before. There were no additional deaths, leaving the total number for the state at 14. There were 132 cases that may have been acquired through community transmission.

Premier Daniel Andrews said the numbers were stable and the strategy is working. He insisted the appropriate social-distancing measures would be observed when the Parliament sits for one day next week.
Paul McCartney calls for Chinese wet markets to be banned

Sir Paul McCartney is calling for Chinese wet markets to be banned amid the coronavirus pandemic. The Daily Mail reports the Beatles legend and animal rights activist was speaking on Howard Sterns radio show about reports COVID-19 may have originated in Wuhan, China food markets, some of which have reopened as the virus has slowed in the country. They might as well be letting off atomic bombs because its affecting the whole world," McCartney said. Lets face it, it is a little bit medieval eating bats.

Paul McCartney goes after the Chinese wet markets: Lets face it, its a little medieval eating bats. They might as well be letting off atomic bombs, because its affecting the whole world. They dont need all the people dying. And whats it for? All these medieval practices. pic.twitter.com/SBOYs8DAju  Mike Sington (@MikeSington) April 14, 2020

Doctor Strange 2

Evil Dead, Spider-Man director Sam Raimi has finally confirmed hell direct Doctor Strange sequel. SlashFilm reports Raimi talked about a joke in Spider-Man 2 (where The Daily Bugle tries to come up with a name for Doctor Octupus, and one says Doctor Strange but its already taken) during a roundtable call, and he said he had no idea at the time that he might one day direct a Marvel movie. Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, starring Benedict Cumberbatch, is now scheduled to be released in November 2021 after the MCU calendar was shuffled by the coronavirus pandemic.

Huh. Surely, there must be SOME character to challenge the good Doctor... https://t.co/1ZTpfoE3te  Bruce Campbell (@GroovyBruce) April 15, 2020

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Highlights Sony has revealed when the Xperia 1 II will be released.

The Xperia 1 II was launched back in February.

It is by far the most expensive phone from Sony.

Sony launched the Xperia 1 II, its most powerful and expensive flagship, in February this year. The Japanese company said it will release the Xperia 1 II into the eligible markets sometime in Q2. But there were assumptions that the covid-19 pandemic has pushed back it back to an unspecified date. Gladly, we have a specific timeline for the availability of Xperia 1 II if a new piece of information is anything to go by.

The official Twitter account of Sony Spain has divulged the crucial information that Xperia 1 II could hit the shelves as early as later this month. In reply to a user, the Twitter account gave away the availability details of the flagship for the European market at least. Since the information comes from an official source, it is likely credible. However, it is not clear if the Sony Xperia 1 II will debut in the markets outside of Europe at the same stipulated time.

The Sony Xperia 1 II was announced at a price of EUR 1,200 in the European market back in February. This translates to roughly Rs 1 lakh in India, the most exorbitant amount for a Sony phone by far. But, keeping in mind Sony wound up its phone business in India some years back, the Xperia 1 II will not hit the Indian marketplaces. If you are thinking of getting it from abroad for yourself, you may as well go ahead as the Xperia 1 II supports the 3G and 4G LTE bandwidths used in India.

Available in Black and Purple colours, the Sony Xperia 1 II comes with a 6.5-inch QHD+ OLED display with a 21:9 aspect ratio and a resolution of 1644x3840 pixels. It is protected by a Corning Gorilla Glass 6 on top and features HDR. The smartphone runs Android 10 and is powered by an octa-core Qualcomm Snapdragon 865 SoC paired with 8GB of RAM and 256GB of internal storage, with support for a microSD card. It has a side-mounted fingerprint sensor, a USB-C port, Bluetooth v5.1 among other features.

The Sony Xperia 1 II comes with a quadruple-camera setup at the back - a 12-megapixel f/1.7 sensor, a 12-megapixel f/2.4 telephoto sensor, a 12-megapixel f/2.2 ultrawide sensor, and a 0.3-megapixel Time of Flight 3D sensor. For selfies, there is an 8-megapixel camera available with HDR. The smartphone also has stereo speakers and a dynamic vibration system for sound output.
As President Trump stepped onto the White House lawn on Tuesday evening to boast falsely about substantial progress in our war against the virus, the truth of the ongoing devastation caused by COVID-19 was revealed in the staggering numbers of sick and dead now being reported in Americas nursing homes, assisted living and long-term care facilities.

The New York Times identified 2,500 senior and elder care locations nationwide with coronavirus cases. The report says, More than 21,000 residents and staff members at those facilities have contracted the virus, and more than 3,800 have died.

These numbers are without doubt an underestimation of the real toll that the pandemic is having on this most vulnerable section of the population. As the Times explained, Many states, counties and facilities have declined to provide information or provided partial information regarding the scale and scope of the coronavirus on the elderly in nursing homes across the US. In some cases, this information is being kept a secret by government officials for fear of the reaction by the public and the families of those who are living under increasingly deadly circumstances.

One of the 83 patients evacuated from the Magnolia Rehabilitation and Nursing Center in Riverside, Calif. on Wednesday, April 8. (AP Photo/Chris Carlson)

While all age groups remain susceptible to contracting COVID-19 and can become very sick and die from it, the CDC reports that approximately 75 percent of Americans who have contracted the virus and 78 percent of those who have died from it are 65 years old or older.

Over the last several days, there has been a growing number of reports revealing the horrific situation at nursing home facilities across the country:

At least 45 residents of the Canterbury Rehabilitation and Healthcare Center in Richmond, Virginia, have died after contracting the virus, the highest known death toll at a single long-term care facility in the US. According to National Public Radio, more than half of the 102 outbreaks of coronavirus in Virginia are in nursing homes. Although the Virginia Department of Health has declined to release the names of all of the facilities, it has reported that more than 600 residents have been infected.





In New York City, approximately 90 residents have died at two Brooklyn nursing homes. According to a nurse who spoke to the New York Post at the Chateau at Brooklyn Rehabilitation & Nursing Center in Sheepshead Bay, These places dont have morgues. They were putting them downstairs but now a lot of them are being left in their rooms. What else can you do right now? The New York Department of Health released a report on Monday that said a total of 2,722 people had died in nursing homes statewide.





Eighty-three residents of the Magnolia Rehabilitation and Nursing Center in Riverside, California, were evacuated on April 8 when the facility became overrun with five staff and one third of those living there testing positive for the coronavirus. According to the office of California Governor Gavin Newsom last Friday, 400 residential care facilities and 1,266 residents are infected with COVID-19 statewide.





Every single one of the 26 nursing homes located in the city of Detroit has cases of COVID-19 among both their residents and workers, according to recent reports from the Detroit Health Department. On Friday there were 191 cases of the coronavirus reported in Detroit nursing homes and 20 deaths. Eight more nursing home-related deaths occurred in the city over the weekend, according to Detroits Democratic Mayor Mike Duggan.





There have been 44 veteran residents of the Soldiers Home in Holyoke, Massachusetts, who have died from COVID-19, the majority of them over the past two weeks. At least 100 residents and 79 employees at the 247-bed state-run nursing facility have tested positive for coronavirus. Staff have reported that they were not provided with masks while tests results were pending for one resident, and when they came back positive, they were not told immediately.

With dozens of similar reports in urban, suburban and rural communities across the country, the pandemic is revealing a disturbing fact of life in the US: the nursing home and senior care industry is a vast network of privately owned facilities that are understaffed, paying low wages to workers who are not given adequate training or resources.

The nursing care industry in America has an estimated market value of $139 billion. There are approximately 32,000 establishments, and the industry employs an estimated 1.7 million people. According to an industry analysis published by IBISWorld, In the past five years, the industry has benefited from an increasingly aging population, which requires greater health care services. Individuals aged 65 and older make up about 90.0 percent of residents at nursing care facilities, so as the population continues to grow older on average, facilities are expected to serve an increasing number of residents.

Giant corporations have been cashing in on the aging of the US population and, through financial arrangements like government disbursement of Medicaid and Medicare funds for nursing home care, enormous fortunes are being amassed while the quality of life for the largely working class residents steadily declines, as the dire consequences of the pandemic is proving.

Genesis Healthcare is among the largest of the corporations in the short-term post-acute, rehabilitation, skilled nursing and long-term care services business. It has annual revenues of $5.7 billion and operates approximately 500 skilled nursing centers and assisted/senior living residences in 34 states with 61,300 employees. George V. Hager, Jr. is the CEO of Genesis Healthcare, Inc., and his total compensation in 2018 was $2,227,887, with $1.2 million in cash salary and the balance in corporate stocks.
Its a shocking scene: two women square off to fight on the narrow, one-way Hoffman Avenue in Trentons West Ward on Sunday evening, April 5. The state is under a lockdown order due to the coronavirus, but the anticipated fisticuffs draws dozens of spectators, some filming it with their phones.

Then a bearded man enters the scene, approaches a woman on the sidewalk - not one of the combatants - and during a brief confrontation, a gunshot goes off. People run, scream and the cell phone footage gets blurry.

The bearded man is Quasim Hallett, 39, authorities alleged Tuesday, and he shot 24-year-old Quamierah Massey in the head at close-range. She died a day later at a Trenton hospital.

Hallett was apprehended Tuesday morning in Wilmington, Delaware by a U.S. Marshals task force, Mercer County Prosecutor Angelo Onofris office announced.

People in the neighborhood knew it was Hallett by sight, police investigators say, and footage of the fight and gunshot was posted on the website Worldstarhiphop, and has been shared on social media among area residents. As of Tuesday, Worldstarhiphop showed it had over a million views.

The prosecutors office did not publicize a motive for the shooting, or say why Hallett was in Wilmington. Hes charged with murder and related weapons offenses, as well as aggravated assault for pointing a firearm at another victim, and terroristic threats for threatening to kill a third victim.

Hes jailed in Delaware awaiting proceedings to extradite him to New Jersey.

The killing of Massey not only occurred when people are under order to stay in their homes and social distance if they have to leave for food or medicine, but it was the second of three homicides in fours hours in Trenton - one of the bloodiest days in recent memory in the Capital City.

We lost our humanity, Mayor Reed Gusciora told the Trentonian that night, after a total of seven people were killed or wounded.

Hallett is known to police as a felon who is often armed. Among his prior convictions, state records show, is a firearms possession charge. In June 2017, Trenton police charged him with attempted murder along with Omar Davis for the non-fatal shooting of a man on East Hanover Street.

Its unclear how the case against Hallett was resolved; records were inconclusive and the prosecutors office was still researching it. Davis is in the state prison system, serving a six-year term for aggravated assault for the shooting.

The 2017 shooting was caught on a surveillance camera, and longtime city police officer, Sgt. Anthony Manzo, identified Davis and Hallett from previous encounters, saying he knew it was them with 100% certainty, according to documents in that case.

Kevin Shea may be reached at kshea@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter @kevintshea. Find NJ.com on Facebook.
STATEN ISLAND, N.Y. -- Gov. Andrew Cuomo announced on Wednesday that priority will be given to healthcare workers, first responders and essential workers for coronavirus (COVID-19) antibody tests.

We are going to prioritize the antibody testing for first responders and essential workers, Cuomo said at Wednesdays press conference. We have all been saying thank you to the healthcare workers, and thats nice, Cuomo said, but stressed the need for actions more than words  adding that the antibody test could be critical for workers at higher risk of contracting the virus.

The Police Benevolent Association (PBA), which Cuomo referenced during the briefing, applauded the move.

This is a smart move by Governor Cuomo that will ultimately help get our city and state back up and running," said PBA President Patrick J. Lynch.

New York City police officers have been overlooked in this crisis because New Yorkers are used to seeing us everywhere, Lynch said. We are in the grocery stores, the subways, the hospitals and housing complexes, interacting with both the sick and the healthy. But that is precisely the reason we need more testing.

The NYPD has lost at least 24 members of the department as a result of the coronavirus, the Advance/SILive.com reported, though its sick rate has begun to decrease in recent days.

Lynch said that officers live in the five boroughs and surrounding counties and that Priority testing for police officers will provide important intelligence about how this virus has spread and who is still at risk.

Antibody testing could also provide information regarding which officers have already contracted the virus and offer a fuller picture as to how the virus has been spread.

We thank the governor for recognizing the unique and critical job police officers do and helping us protect ourselves and the public, Lynch said.

*** CLICK HERE FOR COMPLETE COVERAGE OF CORONAVIRUS IN NEW YORK ***

At Wednesdays press conference, Cuomo said the states current antibody testing capacity is 2,000 per day, but said that New York has asked the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to expeditiously approve a state test that could get us to 100,000 people per day.

The Advance/SILive.com previously reported that the New York State Department of Health (DOH) is aiming to ramp-up coronavirus antibody testing, which officials have said will be a key element in the effort to reopen the state.

Under the direction of Governor Cuomo, the department is working with many private partners, including large hospitals and private laboratories, to scale up antibody testing availability at sites that do not put individuals at risk of exposure, said state Department of Health (DOH) spokeswoman Erin Silk.

Cuomo said on Wednesday that hospitals are currently responsible for the majority of the tests, but said, frankly, thats not a great place to do testing, citing concerns about infectious conditions in the medical establishments.

While the state DOH did not provide information regarding where these tests would take place, Cuomo did say drive-through locations would be preferred compared to the current hospital testing, but cautioned that it is currently unclear how that operation would be brought to scale.

Additionally, questions concerning which labs could process increased testing capacity also currently remain unanswered, Cuomo said.

There is a whole world of questions no one has ever seen before that stand between reopening the states current status and reopening the economy, he said.

Northwell Health is currently validating a number of lateral flow assay tests for antibody testing" in accordance with the state Health Departments plans, according to Christian Preston, a spokesman for Staten Island University Hospital.

While Richmond University Medical Center (RUMC) has not been contacted regarding antibody tests thus far, the hospital system will be reaching out to the state regarding testing, said Alex Lutz, a RUMC spokesman.

In the effort to make tests more accessible, the state Health Department is working alongside private companies and the FDA on the review and approval of tests that will work with blood drawn from a finger-stick that will transmit results quickly.

Results from the laboratory-based tests will be available in 24 to 36 hours after receipt of a sample, echoing the timeframe of coronavirus testing in early March.
The Arizona Supreme Court on Tuesday upheld the murder conviction and death sentence of a man who suffocated a 10-year-old girl he locked in a plastic storage box as punishment.

The justices rejected John Michael Allen's claim that jurors abused their discretion in sentencing him to death in the 2011 killing of Ame Deal.

Prosecutors said Ame was ordered by Allen to get into the box because she had stolen an ice pop.

Allen and his wife, who was Ame's cousin, fell asleep and discovered the next morning that the child had died.

'Even if Allen did not intend to fall asleep and leave [Ame] inside the box for more than six hours, he should have known that placing her there for any length of time would cause [Ame] physical pain and mental anguish,' the justices wrote.

The Arizona Supreme Court on Tuesday upheld the murder conviction and death sentence of John Michael Allen (left) who suffocated Ame Deal (right), 10, by locking her in a plastic storage box in 2011

The justices concluded there was substantial evidence showing Allen carried out the killing in an especially cruel manner.

The court upheld Allen's death sentence but threw out sentences for three related child abuse convictions, concluding the trial court improperly applied harsher sentencing enhancements than were available for Allen.

He will be re-sentenced on those three convictions.

Colin Stearns, one of Allen's attorneys, didn't immediately respond to a call and email seeking comment on his client's behalf.

Allen's wife, Sammantha Allen, was also convicted of murder and sentenced to death in the killing of Ame. She has appealed her conviction.

The 10-year-old's death was the cruel culmination of a history of abuse that a handful of relatives heaped on her at the home they shared in Phoenix, authorities said.

Evidence showed Ame was forced to eat dog feces, crush aluminum cans barefoot and consume hot sauce.

She was kicked in the face, beaten with a wooden paddle and forcibly dunked after being thrown in a cold swimming pool, investigators said.

Allen's wife, Sammantha Allen (pictured), was also convicted of murder and sentenced to death in the killing of Ame. She has appealed her conviction

Ame had been forced into the plastic box on 10 other occasion for hours at a time.

The box was less than 3 feet long, less than 1 foot wide and a foot deep. Ame stood about 4 feet tall and weighed nearly 60 pounds.

Authorities say Ame was treated more harshly than other children at the home, and her family members characterized her as a liar and thief.

Three other relatives, including an aunt who served as Ame's legal guardian, were sentenced to prison for abusing the girl.

Child welfare authorities in Arizona said they didn't receive any reports of abuse before her death.

Police said child welfare reports from Utah, where the family lived before moving to Phoenix, listed Ame as an abused child.

Ame's mother left the family years earlier after suffering abuse by relatives and moved to Kansas without taking her daughter.

David Deal, who is listed on Ame's birth certificate as her father, is serving a 14-year sentence after pleading guilty to attempted child abuse.

Ame's legal guardian at the time of her death was her aunt, Cynthia Stoltzmann, who is serving a 24-year prison sentence for a child abuse conviction.

The child's grandmother, Judith Deal, was sentenced to a 10-year prison sentence on a child abuse conviction.

Sammantha and John Allen were the only people charged in Ame's death.
The Jammu and Kashmir unit of Congress on Wednesday lashed out at Pakistan for the frequent ceasefire violations along the Line of Control (LoC) and the International Border (IB) while pointing out that the BJP government at the Centre has failed to contain border violence even during the testing time of coronavirus pandemic.

The party expressed sympathies with the families of the victims of cross-border shelling and demanded adequate compensation and necessary measures for the safety and security of the border residents.

Despite the challenging situation in the wake of the deadly coronavirus outbreak, Pakistan is continuously shelling the civilian habitats along the borders which shows its barbarism and total disregard for human values, Jammu and Kashmir Pradesh Congress president G A Mir and several other senior leaders hailing from various border townships said in a joint statement here.

Referring to the killing of three civilians and injuries to scores of others in different sectors over the past couple of weeks, they said Pakistan has intensified the shelling and firing at a time when the world is fighting the novel disease which has brought life to a standstill, which is very unfortunate.

The graph of border violence has increased manifold over the years which show that the BJP led government had failed to give a befitting response to Pakistan. All the claims of Prime Minister Narendra Modi have proved hoax, the leaders said.

Demanding an immediate end to the hostilities in the larger interest of peace, the Congress said the government must reach out to the people and work out a comprehensive plan for their safety and security.

The government should also provide adequate ex-gratia relief to the families who lost their members to the Pakistani shelling besides providing adequate compensation to the injured and those whose property was damaged, they said.

The party lauded the courage of the security forces and their devotion in securing the borders of the country.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
G20 ministers to discuss global response to coronavirus

As the negative impacts of the coronavirus on economies are mounting by day, G2O leaders will continue to work on a roadmap for global response to the pandemic.

The G20 finance ministers and central bank governors will hold meeting on Wednesday to form an action plan to combat the coronavirus crisis.

"GLOBAL ECONOMY WILL EXPERIENCEITS WORST RECESSION"

The G20 is set to gather at a time when the International Monetary Fund (IMF) projected the global economy would shrink by 3 percent in 2020 due to the pandemic.

The IMF's latest report stressed that it is very likely that this year the global economy will experience its worst recession since the Great Depression, surpassing that seen during the global financial crisis a decade ago.

This is why the G20's leadership in finding a sensible, more inclusive, human-centric global response to coronavirus is considered a difficult task today.

Making up some 90 percent of global output, the G20 members' efforts in tackling the crisis is in spotlight now.
In a surreal scene Wednesday at the Manitoba legislature, one-third of the province's 57 MLAs, sitting well apart from one another, debated seven emergency bills to address the COVID-19 crisis, while several support staff and at least one politician donned masks.

Hey there, time traveller!

This article was published 15/4/2020 (636 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

In a surreal scene Wednesday at the Manitoba legislature, one-third of the province's 57 MLAs, sitting well apart from one another, debated seven emergency bills to address the COVID-19 crisis, while several support staff and at least one politician donned masks.

The bills included new measures giving the province greater powers to restrict Manitobans' movements and the ability to punish citizens more severely for breaking public-health orders.

With physical distancing in full force, cabinet ministers occupied spots on the back benches, and the middle row of seats in the chamber remained empty.

"We will face our challenges together, strong and united," Premier Brian Pallister told the house as the session began.

The government's intent was to compress the days and weeks of debate that normally accompany each bill to a single day. Debate was expected to continue into the evening before the bills received royal assent, as Opposition politicians negotiated with the government over amendments.

Legislation was passed Wednesday evening.

A bill amending the Public Health Act allows an order to be issued to prohibit or restrict people from travelling to and from specified areas in Manitoba.

In order to observe proper social-distancing guidelines, not every member of the provincial government attended the special sitting at the Manitoba legislature on Wednesday. (John Woods / The Canadian Press)

Bill 59 also enables authorities to order people travelling into and out of specific locations to take certain precautions to prevent the spread of a communicable disease.

It also gives a medical officer or inspector broad powers to deal with anyone failing to comply with a public-health emergency order. They could take or cause to be taken "any action that the medical officer or inspector considers necessary to carry out the order." The officer or inspector could request the help of a peace officer or any other person to carry out the order, the bill states.

The Emergency Measures Amendment Act (Bill 54) gives the provincial cabinet broad, largely undefined, powers during a state of emergency. Cabinet could make "any order" it considers necessary and essential "to prevent, reduce, or mitigate serious harm or substantial damage to persons or property or the effects of fiscal or economic disruption."

The bill increases penalties under the act to a maximum of $100,000 or one year in prison for individuals and a maximum $1-million fine for corporations. It gives courts the option to increase the fine for a person convicted of price gouging by an amount equal to the financial benefit acquired.

The bill also gives the government the power to build an emergency shelter wherever it's needed regardless of local bylaws.

The amendments authorizing the provincial government to make emergency orders are temporary and automatically rescinded after one year.

Other bills introduced Wednesday provide enabling legislation for recently announced government initiatives, including adding temporary protected leave for employees who can't work due to circumstances related to the pandemic.

The government also tabled documents to provide additional spending authority for up to $1 billion for COVID-19 initiatives, including $500 million to fund health services, $100 million for emergency expenditures and $400 million for new pandemic-related costs throughout government.

Manitoba NDP opposition leader Wab Kinew says his party is concerned about the lack of any direct provincial financial aid for small businesses. (John Woods / The Canadian Press)

The $400 million gives the government the flexibility to create new programs or support services for Manitobans, or cover pandemic-increased costs under existing programs.

Opposition politicians said their main concern was the absence so far of any direct provincial financial aid for individuals and small businesses.

"We're pushing for that. We haven't seen it from the government yet," NDP Leader Wab Kinew said.

He said Manitoba could have used the $4 million it has budgeted to fund a call centre to help Manitobans apply for federal programs to instead finance the costs of providing interest-free loans to small businesses and landlords, the latter benefiting renters.

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Liberal Leader Dougald Lamont said laid-off workers and small businesses that have been forced to close or severely scale back operations need help to cover their basic costs.

"There are times when the private sector melts down and government is the only institution with the tools and the resources to step in and rebuild," he said in the legislature. "This is one of those times. We cannot shy away from it."

At a mid-afternoon press conference, Pallister hinted for the first time that the government was working on some form of direct assistance program that would complement federal programs.

"I'd prefer to tell you next week when the details are ironed out," he told reporters.

carol.sanders@freepress.mb.ca

larry.kusch@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
WASHINGTON  Just as a Texas judged opened the door to more voting by mail amid the coronavirus outbreak, the states attorney general is trying to slam it shut.

Voters cannot cast ballots by mail just because they are afraid of getting the coronavirus at polling places, Republican Attorney General Ken Paxton said on Wednesday, even as a state district judge in Austin said he will rule that voters can vote by mail if they believe doing so in person puts their health at risk.

The judges apparent decision was an early victory for the Texas Democratic Party and a slew of civil rights and voter advocacy groups seeking to expand voting by mail in Texas, but it will almost certainly be appealed and Paxtons pronouncement makes it clear the state has no plans to open up 2020 elections to more voting by mail.

TEXAS TAKE: Get political headlines from across the state sent directly to your inbox

Our voting rights have been under attack for decades, long before the coronavirus pandemic reached the borders of our state, Texas Democratic Party Chair Gilberto Hinojosa said in a statement. We cannot allow this public health crisis to be the death of our democracy when it is taking so many of our loved ones.

Texas is one of the few states that still require voters younger than 65 to have an excuse to cast a ballot by mail. Fewer than 7 percent of Texas voters mailed in ballots in 2018.

The issue has emerged as a major political fight amid the coronavirus outbreak. Democrats and voting rights advocates have pushed for states to expand voting by mail, arguing that forcing people to show up to polling places during the largest public health crisis in a century is tantamount to vote suppression.

They point to the long lines at polling places in Wisconsin, which held its primary last week. Voters had to wait hours in some areas, such as Milwaukee, which had only five polling places open amid a shortage of poll workers.

Republicans, including President Donald Trump, have pushed back, however, arguing mail-in ballots are less secure than those cast in person.

Republicans should fight very hard when it comes to state wide mail-in voting, the president tweeted last week. Democrats are clamoring for it. Tremendous potential for voter fraud, and for whatever reason, doesnt work out well for Republicans.

STAY-HOME DEBATE ESCALATES: Texas conservatives call stay-home orders tyranny. Some lawmakers agree.

State law currently allows voters to claim disability and apply for an absentee ballot if showing up at a polling place risks injuring the voters health.

Mail ballots based on disability are specifically reserved for those who are physically ill and cannot vote in-person as a result, Paxton said on Wednesday. Fear of contracting COVID-19 does not amount to a sickness or physical condition as required by the Legislature  The integrity of our democratic election process must be maintained, and law established by our Legislature must be followed consistently.

The states elections director earlier this month issued guidance to elections officials in all 254 counties pointing to the election codes disability clause, apparently giving the green light to county officials to take a lenient approach in approving requests for mail-in ballots. Voting rights advocates had claimed that guidance was a victory.

Paxtons statement wasnt an official opinion, but it makes clear the state isnt planning to expand voting by mail anytime soon, unless it is forced to do so.

Attorneys for the Democratic Party argued in court on Wednesday that the disability clause plainly provided for circumstances such as this, when public health makes it dangerous to vote in person.

FOR THE LATEST: Interactive maps, charts show spread of coronavirus in Texas

But they said the courts need to make that clear as county officials are currently wrestling with how to conduct the upcoming runoff elections in July, when voters will pick a Democrat to challenge U.S. Sen. John Cornyn.

This is a total muddled mess," said Glen Maxey, the Texas Democratic Party's primary director, who administers elections in dozens of counties, as he testified about state guidance on the matter in court on Wednesday. Were going to have a mishmash of who can vote and who cannot vote by mail in this election.

State district judge Tim Sulak said on Wednesday he was will issue a temporary injunction allowing voters worried about coronavirus to vote by mail through November.

County officials have said they are waiting for either the courts or the state to offer them definitive guidance. For now, many are urging those who clearly can vote by mail  such as people over 65 years of age  to apply for a ballot.

We dont have any clear direction on if were going to open it up for anyone, said Jacquelyn Callanen, Bexar Countys elections director.

Callanen said shes being very cautious, especially as the issue is fought out in court.

I dont want people to rush into this and have a false sense of security that theyll be mailed a ballot and then someone has pulled it back, she said. I dont want to have them get caught in some sort of a crossfire.

Harris County, the states largest, suggested on Monday that any voter could request a mail-in ballot by claiming a disability.

We are not going to question someone's disability, Trautman wrote at the bottom of a notice urging seniors to request mail ballots for the July runoff, as a precaution against contracting the virus.

Trautman on Wednesday declined to elaborate further, and said she was reviewing both the state court ruling and Paxtons advisory.

Health experts, including Cathy Troisi, an epidemiologist at the University of Texas Health Science Center Houston, testified on Wednesday that theres no way to make polling places as safe as someone mailing in a ballot, and said poll workers are especially at risk without personal protective equipment thats currently in short supply.

As were finding in grocery stores  its very difficult to maintain that six feet of distance, Troisi said.

Maxey, meanwhile, said many county elections officials have told him they expect theyll only be able to get as many as 20 percent of their usual poll workers to show up in the midst of the outbreak.

And the chances this all will actually be cleared up by Novembers elections are slim, Troisi said.

The risk of it reappearing in the fall is very, very high, she said. Until we have a vaccine  I hate to say this, its bad news, but the chances of successfully containing this virus are very small.

An appeal, which is likely, would send the case to the states 3rd Court of Appeals in Austin.

Benjamin Wermund reported from Washington; Zach Despart reported from Houston.

ben.wermund@chron.com
While attending a special summit of the ASEAN Plus Three on COVID-19 via video link, Chinese Premier Li Keqiang said:

- The battle against COVID-19 has made people more aware that all humanbeings are in a community with a shared future;

- China will provide another 100 million face masks, 10 million protective suits and other urgently needed medical supplies to ASEAN countries as grant assistance and via commercial channels;

- ASEAN Plus Three countries need to act with greater synergy and common purpose and to send a message of partnership, solidarity and mutual assistance to secure an early victory against COVID-19 in East Asia.

BEIJING, April 14 (Xinhua) -- Chinese Premier Li Keqiang on Tuesday called on the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, China, Japan and the Republic of Korea (ASEAN Plus Three or APT) to pool efforts in clinching an early victory against COVID-19 in East Asia.

Chinese Premier Li Keqiang attends a special summit of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, China, Japan and the Republic of Korea (ASEAN Plus Three countries or 10+3) on COVID-19 via video link in Beijing, capital of China, April 14, 2020. (Xinhua/Wang Ye)

Li made the remarks in Beijing while attending a special summit of the ASEAN Plus Three on COVID-19 via video link.

Noting that with more than 200 countries and regions affected to date, Li said COVID-19 is gravely threatening the health, safety and life of people around the world and is putting the global economy under severe strain.

He called on APT countries to act with greater synergy and common purpose and to send a message of partnership, solidarity and mutual assistance to secure an early victory against COVID-19 in East Asia.

"The battle against COVID-19 has made us more aware that we are in a community with a shared future," Li said.

ENHANCE PUBLIC HEALTH CAPACITY

Li called on APT countries to enhance all-round epidemic cooperation to jointly curb the spread of COVID-19 and build up public health capacity.

China will provide another 100 million face masks, 10 million protective suits and other urgently needed medical supplies to ASEAN countries as grant assistance and via commercial channels, he said.

Customs officers check medical supplies donated to Ja TO GO WITH XINHUA HEADLINES OF APRIL 14, 2020. (Xinhua/Pan Yulong)

China supports ASEAN in setting up a COVID-19 ASEAN response fund, and will provide necessary support through the ASEAN-China Cooperation Fund and APT Cooperation Fund, said Li, noting that China suggests an APT reserve of essential medical supplies be established to make responses faster and emergency supplies more readily available.

The premier said APT countries also need to support the World Health Organization (WHO) in playing a leading role, and work together to safeguard regional and global public health security.

The special summit, chaired by Vietnam in its capacity as ASEAN chair for 2020, is a key get-together for the East Asian region's COVID-19 response taking place after the G20 Extraordinary Virtual Leaders' Summit on COVID-19 on March 26.

Leaders of the ten ASEAN countries, ROK President Moon Jae-in, Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, and ASEAN Secretary General Lim Jock Hoi also attended meeting.

The participating leaders shared the view that in the face of the unprecedented challenge posed by COVID-19, APT countries should carry forward the tradition of cooperation, demonstrate solidarity and join hands in tackling this challenge.

It is important to enhance experience and information sharing, conduct joint research and development of drugs and vaccines, and build up regional mechanisms for epidemic control, they said.

Airport workers unload cargos of Chinese medical supplies at the Yangon International Airport in Myanmar, April 8, 2020. (Xinhua/U Aung)

RESTORE ECONOMIC VITALITY

APT countries, representing the bulk of Asia's economy, have a total trade volume of over 10 trillion U.S. dollars, almost half of which is intra-regional trade.

As close neighbors, the APT countries have developed a full-fledged industrial chain and a mutually complementary specialization structure, said Li.

He called on the APT countries to demonstrate their positive and special role in fighting the epidemic and revitalizing the economy.

APT countries need to further ease tariffs, eliminate barriers, boost the flow of trade and investment, and keep markets open to each other, said Li.

He proposed opening a "fast-track lane" for essential personnel on urgent visits in the fields of commerce, logistics, production and technological services among APT countries.

Philippine Health Secretary Francisco Duque (L) talks to members of a Chinese medical team in Manila, the Philippines, on April 6, 2020. (Xinhua/Rouelle Umali)

APT countries also need to work toward signing the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) agreement within this year as agreed and endeavor to take regional economic integration to a higher level, Li said.

He also suggested making full use of mechanisms such as the Chiang Mai Initiative Multilateralization and leveraging the APT Macroeconomic Research Office to strengthen crisis preparedness.

APT countries should also strive to ensure regional grain supply and market security, he added.

The participating leaders said APT countries need to enhance macro economic policy coordination, ensure the smooth functioning of the industrial and supply chains, gradually restore social and economic order, and anchor market confidence.

They agreed that APT countries should make the best effort toward signing the RCEP agreement within this year.

A joint statement of the summit was released after the meeting.

Hwang Jae-ho, director of the Global Security Cooperation Center at Hankuk University of Foreign Studies, said the COVID-19 response reflects the importance of building a "community with a shared future for humanity."

It is an urgent need for East Asia not only to build "an epidemic prevention community" to contain the outbreak, but also "an economic community" to address the impact on economy, said Hwang.

Geographically close, APT countries have close contacts and a good foundation for cooperation, said Hwang, adding that the outcome of this online summit shows the cohesion of the APT countries in coping with the crisis.

A Lao Health Ministry official (R) says goodbye to a Chinese anti-epidemic medical expert at the Wattay International Airport in Vientiane, Laos, April 12, 2020. (Xinhua/Zhang Jianhua)

The APT cooperation mechanism was set up in response to the Asian financial crisis in the late 1990s and then emerged even stronger from the international financial crisis in 2008.

Wu Jianghao, director-general of the Department of Asian Affairs of the Chinese Foreign Ministry, said Tuesday's meeting strengthened APT countries' will to coordinate, boosted their confidence and identified the direction of cooperation.

"China is encouraged to see the outcomes of the summit," Wu said at a press briefing after the summit, adding that China stands ready to stay in close cooperation with all parties to act on the consensus reached by the leaders, take effective measures and work together to overcome the pandemic and restore economic vitality in the region at an early date.
S cientists exploring the deep waters off Australias western coast have discovered what may be the longest animal ever seen, along with up to 30 new marine species.

The discovery of the siphonophore measuring an estimated 150 feet (46 metres) - twice as long as many blue whales - came as part of an expedition into the Ningaloo Canyons led by the US-based Schmidt Ocean Institute (SOI).

"We think it's the longest animal recorded to date," SOI director of marine communications Carlie Wiener told USA Today.

Siphonophores are deep-sea predators made up of an array of small clones that act together as one.

They appear to spread out like a single string and, similar to jellyfish, feed by dangling stinging tentacles out into surrounding water.

Nerida Wilson, a senior research scientist at the Western Australia Museum, who led the expedition, described the discovery of the extra-long creature as an "amazing sight".

"Like a giant UFO," she said in a post on Twitter last week. "What amazing creatures live in our oceans."

The SOI's research vessel plunged to depths of nearly 4,500 metres, but the siphonophore was only spotted as the vehicle was making its way back to the surface.

"Most scientists had drifted out of the control room," Wilson told The Guardian.

"The word soon spread and people came pouring into the control room to share the excitement.

"We couldnt believe what we were seeing."

Commenting on the finding of several new species, she added the team had been keen to "reveal the incredible biodiversity that is there".
HOUSTON, April 15, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- Kraton Corporation (NYSE: KRA), a leading global producer of specialty polymers and high-value biobased products derived from pine wood pulping co-products, today announced a two year extension of its senior secured asset-based revolving credit facility ("ABL Facility"), with an aggregate commitment of up to $250 million. Availability under the ABL Facility is subject to a borrowing base, supported by inventory and receivables. The ABL Facility has a $100 million uncommitted accordion feature which, subject to satisfaction of specific terms and conditions, would provide for increased availability under the credit facility.

"Kraton continues to have a strong liquidity position, with its available cash on hand and significant borrowing base availability under the $250 million ABL Facility," said Atanas H. Atanasov, Kraton's Senior Vice President and Chief Financial Officer. The extension of the ABL Facility maturity date to January of 2023 further strengthens Kraton's liquidity position and financial flexibility, and was extended with no significant change in terms and a modest price increase of 50 basis points in the borrowing margin for amounts outstanding under the facility while improving borrowing base advance rates. We thank our bank group and appreciate their support and confidence in Kraton."

The ABL Facility is provided by a syndicate of banks with Bank of America, N.A. as Administrative Agent, Collateral Agent and Security Trustee.

FORWARD LOOKING STATEMENTS

This press release contains "forward-looking statements" within the meaning of the U.S. Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Forward-looking statements are often characterized by the use of words such as "believes," "estimates," "expects," "projects," "may," "intends," "plans" or "anticipates," or by discussions of strategy, plans or intentions. The statements in this press release that are not historical statements, including statements regarding the Company's financial flexibility and liquidity position forward-looking statements. All forward-looking statements in this press release are made based on management's current expectations and estimates, which involve known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other important factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from those expressed in forward-looking statements. Additional information concerning factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from those expressed in forward-looking statements is contained in Kraton's most recently filed annual report on Form 10-K, quarterly reports on Form 10-Q and in other filings made by Kraton with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, and include, but are not limited to, risks related to: Kraton's ability to repay or re-finance its indebtedness; Kraton's reliance on third parties for the provision of significant operating and other services; health epidemics or pandemics such as COVID-19 (including governmental and regulatory actions relating thereto); conditions in the global economy and capital markets; fluctuations in raw material costs; limitations in the availability of raw materials; competition in Kraton's end-use markets; and other factors of which we are currently unaware or deem immaterial. Readers are cautioned not to place undue reliance on forward-looking statements. Forward-looking statements contained herein speak only as of the date of this press release, and we assume no obligation to publicly update or revise such forward-looking statements in light of new information or future events.

ABOUT KRATON



Kraton Corporation (NYSE "KRA") is a leading global producer of specialty polymers and high-value performance products derived from renewable resources. Kraton's polymers are used in a wide range of applications, including adhesives, coatings, consumer and personal care products, sealants and lubricants, and medical, packaging, automotive, paving and roofing products. As the largest global provider in the pine chemicals industry, the company's pine-based specialty products are sold into adhesive, road and construction and tire markets, and it produces and sells a broad range of performance chemicals into markets that include fuel additives, oilfield chemicals, coatings, metalworking fluids and lubricants, inks and mining. Kraton offers its products to a diverse customer base in over 70 countries worldwide. Kraton, the Kraton logo and design are all trademarks of Kraton Corporation or its subsidiaries or affiliates.

For Further Information:

H. Gene Shiels 281-504-4886





SOURCE Kraton Corporation

Related Links

http://www.kraton.com


When it comes to COVID-19, there are a few facts that are difficult to massage away, no matter how hard the Chinese government and its shills in the mainstream American media try. Whether the virus started in a lab or a wet market, it first became a serious problem in Wuhan, China. Doctors and scientists in Wuhan became aware of it in December and January, but when they spoke up, they were silenced, sometimes permanently.

In January, as frightening videos emerged showing round-ups and mass sanitation efforts, China insisted that nothing serious was wrong and assured everyone that the disease in Wuhan had not mutated to human-to-human transmission. And at all times, the World Health Organization (WHO) had Chinas back.

Throughout January, WHO insisted that there was no evidence of human-to-human transmission, even as videos showed Wuhan hospitals packed with patients and China speed-building new facilities. On February 3, WHO was still insisting that there was no need to restrict travel from China. WHO also consistently praised China for its transparency and support for other countries. Meanwhile, it sought to silence Taiwan, which credibly claims to be the legitimate Chinese government and which was giving early warnings about the disaster brewing in China.

When Trump started making noises about freezing WHO funds and investigating WHOs carrying water for China, Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus threatened that there would be body bags. Despite that threat, on April 14, during the daily Wuhan virus briefing, Trump announced that his administration would engage in a 60-to-90 day investigation into WHOs handling of the pandemic, during which time America would withhold funds from WHO. As matters stand, we currently give WHO $400 to $500 million per year, compared to Chinas $40 million annual contributions.

Following Trumps announcement, Fox News quoted Trumps statement about WHO and provided information about Americas funding. It then gave a short chronology of WHOs habit of echoing Chinas press releases about the Wuhan virus. Fox finished its report about WHO with the usual Democrat rebuttal that the world will end if WHO doesnt get money and by saying that Trump has insisted for years that international agencies must be held accountable before getting American money.

CNN and MSNBC took a different approach to reporting on the story. Both reports have as their predicate the theory that Trump is scapegoating WHO because he mismanaged the virus. This is CNN:

Trump's announcement comes in the middle of the worst global pandemic in decades and as he angrily defends his own handling of the outbreak in the United States. Amid swirling questions about whether he downplayed the crisis or ignored warnings from members of his administration about its potential severity, Trump has sought to assign blame elsewhere, including at the WHO and in the news media. [snip] His decision to withdraw funding from the WHO follows a pattern of skepticism of world organizations that began well before the coronavirus pandemic. Trump has questioned US funding to the United Nations, withdrew from global climate agreements and lambasted the World Trade Organization -- claiming all were ripping off the United States. Democratic Sen. Chris Murphy of Connecticut, who serves on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said earlier Tuesday that while the WHO and China "made mistakes," Trump is also looking to deflect blame from his own administration. "Right now, there is a very coordinated effort amongst the White House, and their allies to try to find scapegoats for the fatal mistakes that the President made during the early stages of this virus," he said.

Meanwhile, MSNBC produced a video thats almost seven minutes long entitled Failure: Debunking Trumps dangerous new attack on W.H.O. during pandemic. If you want to watch it, you can find it here.

In the video, Ari Melber cites to the New York Times attack on Trump to justify claiming that Trumps attacks on journalists were false. Melber also runs video showing Trump in January saying he thought China was being open and honest. What thrills Melber is when Trump says that WHO is working with China, which is why Trump has faith that Chinas being honest. To Melber, that January statement means Trump is lying now when he attacks WHO.

The contrary is true. The statement supports Trumps current contention that WHO was promulgating Chinas lies. Because WHO turned out to be China's mouthpiece, rather than an honest actor, the world was deceived into believing China's lies.

You dont have to be naive to believe MSNBC; you just have to be stupid.

The thing to understand about CNN and MSNBC is that they are not reporting the news. One doesnt go to them for information. One goes to them for Democrat Party talking points. In other words, they are arguing a position.

No wonder the media is enraged by Trumps press conferences. Finally, Trump gets to argue back.
Former President John Dramani Mahama says the countrys economy has revealed that it is fragile following the stress test it has been subjected to by the coronavirus pandemic.



He, therefore, called for the need for authorities to be prudent in the management of the sector going forward.



Mr Mahama made these remarks on Tuesday, when he made available relief items worth millions of Cedis for distribution to 20,000 households in Ghana.



The gesture is his own way of mitigating the effects of the lockdown on many Ghanaians.



He said Covid-19 management requires that there is strict prioritization in governments borrowing and expenditure.



On Monday, the Executive Board of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) approved $1 billion for disbursement to Ghana under the Rapid Credit Facility (RCF) to cushion the economy.



The former president said the decision by IMF is timely and very welcome.



This will help cushion the economy from the dangers of recession, he noted, strongly indicating: Our economy has revealed from this Covid stress test that it is still fragile and we need to be prudent in how we manage going forward.



He said the government led by President Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo must be diligent in the application of the facility as it is released in tranches.



But he maintained that without strict management, it would cost the country.



Mr Mahama therefore asked President Akufo-Addo as a matter of urgency to downsize his government.



This might be the right time for the president to consider trimming the bloated size of his government.



So far, a National Covid-19 Trust Fund has been set up by the government. The president donated his salaries of April, May and June as seed money for the Fund while his appointees donated 50 per cent of their salaries of the same months.



As of Sunday, April 5, about GH8.75 million has been realised from donations by corporate organisations and other bodies.

Source: 3news









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
by Mathias Hariyadi

Such cases are occurring in other parts of the country. Millions of people express their outrage online at such incidents. So far, 22 doctors and 10 nurses have died in the fight against the COVID-19 virus, from lack of necessary protections and overwork. The social situation is deteriorating.

Sewakul (AsiaNews)  Residents in Sewakul, a village in central Java, prevented the burial of a nurse who died from the coronavirus. The woman, who hailed from the village, contracted the virus working at a hospital in the city of Semarang.

This incident is not unique. In various parts of Indonesia, people are trying to stop the burial of COVID-19 victims in local cemeteries.

Many have reacted negatively to similar incidents in places like Gowa (southern Sulawesi), Bandung (West Java) and Semarang Regency.

Local authorities as well as millions of people on social media have expressed their outrage at such a lack of compassion for the people who sacrificed their lives to help others.

The Sewakul nurse was later buried near the hospital where she worked. The village chief said he was pressured into preventing the burial.

The police are investigating the case, looking for three people who allegedly pushed ten more people to block access to the cemetery.

The Indonesian Nurse Association (PPNI[*]) has asked the government to better protect medical workers in hospitals, who face shortages in protective gear and are forced to work long shifts.

As of this Monday, 22 doctors and 10 nurses have died in the country. Overall, more than 5,000 cases have been reported with 469 deaths, the highest death rate in Asia after China. About 430 people have recovered.

As a result of the pandemic, the social situation is deteriorating. In Jakarta, police are warning that mass looting and vandalism might occur next Saturday, promoted on social media by a self-styled Anarko Gang.

The quarantine imposed by the authorities has left many Indonesians without food, especially low-wage workers.

[*] Persatuan Persatuan Perawat Indonesia
The College Board announced today that it is developing at-home versions of the SAT college admission tests in case school shutdowns continue in the fall. The organization said it was working on digital versions of the tests, and that they could be administered similarly to the at-home versions of the Advanced Placement (AP) tests that its planning to run in May. According to the New York Times, the AP tests will now be 45 minutes instead of three hours and will be open-book.

In a statement, the organization said: In the unlikely event that schools do not reopen this fall, College Board will provide a digital SAT for home use, like how were delivering digital exams to 3 million AP students this spring. The New York Times reports that the ACT is developing an at-home version of its own test as well. Amid the coronavirus pandemic, the College Board had already suspended the SAT college admission tests for this coming June.

The College Board also said that the at-home SAT testing would be simple, secure and fair, accessible to all, and valid for use in college admissions, but did not specify how it would be done, especially for those who lack resources like reliable broadband internet.

If schools do open again, the College Board said it would provide weekend SAT administrations every month beginning in August. It also plans to significantly expand capacity for testing once schools reopen.

However, even this might not be necessary. In light of the situation, many colleges have waived the requirements for standardized testing for 2021 applicants.
For some passengers, this has become a cruise to nowhere.

After enduring a coronavirus outbreak on a Carnival Corp. luxury cruise liner, some passengers say they are still trapped aboard another luxurious ghost ship, isolated and unable to get home  more than a month after they first set sail.

Four passengers from Argentina and one from Uruguay spent Easter confined to their cabins on Holland America Lines Rotterdam, at sea in the Caribbean. Holland America said they were blocked from going home by the Argentine governments COVID-19-related restrictions.

They are among thousands of passengers still aboard ships almost one month after the world's major cruise lines agreed to halt cruises because of the dangers of sailing during the pandemic.

"It's like we are ghosts on a ghost ship," said Claudia Osiani, 74, of Mar del Plata, Argentina, in an phone interview from her cabin in the Rotterdam. "We just want to go home."

Osiani began what she hoped would be a dream cruise for her and husband Juan Henning on the Zaandam on March 7 in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Then it turned into a nightmare, Osiani said.

The Zaandam was stranded at sea for three weeks as a flu-like outbreak sickened roughly 250 passengers and crew. Four people died, including two with COVID-19, according to Holland America. Hundreds of people, including Osiani and Henning, were transferred from the Zaandam to the Rotterdam at sea, near Panama, as passengers and crew were sickened.

Osiani and Henning have been quarantined since March 22, first in a small cabin with a sealed window, and now in a spacious suite on the near-empty Rotterdam. Six medical exams have shown them to be free of COVID-19, Osiani said.

Holland American had evacuated 1,200 passengers from the Rotterdam and Zaandam soon after the ships docked in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., on April 2. But not us, said Osiani.

She and the other Argentines on the Rotterdam were blocked from boarding a charter flight because their government declined to authorize their return, citing restrictions imposed during the pandemic.

 FAQ: Your coronavirus questions, answered.

As of April 7, 53 guests and service staff remain on the Rotterdam, Holland America said. And some crew members may be stuck at sea for awhile as well.

Osiani had a brief break on land. She said they spent April 8 being ferried by bus from the Rotterdam to a nearby airport  twice  and were sent back to the ship after Holland America failed to get authorization from Argentina to fly them home on a charter flight. Two other Argentines and one Uruguayan national with Argentine residency were also blocked from traveling to the country.

"It's a big mystery, what will happen to us," Osiani said. "When will we be able to get home?"

Argentina didnt authorize their return because the government can only process a limited number of people a day returning from COVIID-19 hot spots, like the United States, said a spokesperson for the Argentine foreign ministry who wasnt authorized to be quoted by name. The country banned flights to Argentina on March 12, and there wasnt the capacity to process the passengers on the Rotterdam, the spokesperson said.

On April 10, Argentina extended a nationwide lockdown to April 26 amid signs that shelter-in-place measures imposed to curb the coronavirus outbreak have succeeded in flattening the rate of infections. President Alberto Fernandez said in a TV interview late Sunday that while the restrictions have slowed the pace of contagion, he couldnt say when they would end. The country has more than 2,000 cases of COVID-19 and more than a hundred deaths, according to the health ministry.

Holland America said its trying to find another way to get the Argentines on the Rotterdam home. We are sorry that their travel home is delayed, and we will continue to work on a plan to get them home as soon as possible and when their country permits their entry, Holland Americas spokesperson Erik Elvejord said via email.

The cruise industry is working to get thousands home after the coronavirus pandemic sparked the global shutdown of the cruise industry on March 13. Holland Americas parent company Carnival, the largest cruise line company in the world, has 3,600 passengers on six ships around the world, spokesman Roger Frizzell said earlier this week.

For now, Osiani spent Easter with her husband in her cabin on the Rotterdam fielding calls from their grandchildren. We are comfortable, they are giving us everything we need, she said. But we dont have is what every human being wants: freedom.
As demand for fuel plummeted worldwide and the oil industry faced a devastating drop in oil prices, the U.S. took the rare move of stepping into negotiations involving the member countries of OPEC and non-members such as Russia and Mexico, an alliance called OPEC+.

President Donald Trump and a group of U.S. senators wielded political influence to push OPEC and its allies to agree over the weekend to cut production by nearly 10 million barrels per day  about 10% of current global output.

The unusual action by the U.S.  and the fact that the intervention worked  reflect the desperate conditions the oil industry found itself in due to the economic damage wrought by the coronavirus outbreak.

There have been oil market crises, but nothing like this before, said Dan Yergin, vice chairman of IHS Markit. Even when the price collapsed in 1986 or 1988, demand actually went up. Youve never had a 20 to 25% drop in demand just overnight. Youve never had the world economy shut down overnight.

Trump also knew what was at stake domestically  The U.S. is now the worlds largest oil and gas producer.

This historic action will help nearly 11 million American workers who are supported by the U.S. oil and gas industry, Trump said during a coronavirus press briefing Monday.

How significant is the US involvment?

American officials have gotten involved with OPEC in the past, making phone calls or attempting to sway a deal during international crises and unusual circumstances. The intervention has typically been in response to high prices; instead, in the current situation, oil prices dropped more than 60% since the start of the year.

There is nothing new about a president phoning Riyadh to ask for help dealing with oil market disruptions, but the level of pressure and deep involvement of both sides of Pennsylvania Ave., not to mention the G20, along with the scale of the oil cuts on the table, is something rarely seen in OPEC history, said Jason Bordoff, founding director of Columbia Universitys Center on Global Energy Policy.

What exactly did the US bring to the table?

Mexico stalled the negotiations by refusing to cut more than 100,000 barrels a day of production, when OPEC was asking for double or triple that amount. Trump said the U.S. would help by shouldering the cuts that Mexico was unwilling to make.

While Trumps promise to help Mexico may have seemed hollow  U.S. companies were already cutting production due to the low prices  Trumps intervention on Mexicos behalf sent a message that could have helped push the wary alliance into a deal.

They had to agree to give something like a cover story, a diplomatic cover, so that the other parties in OPEC, who whether they liked it or not were going to have to accept these terms, would be able to do so without a loss of prestige, said Kevin Book, managing director at Clearview Energy Partners.

Trumps statements also signaled that the U.S. views Mexico as an important partner in the integrated North American energy market, said Amy Myers Jaffe, senior fellow at the Council for Foreign Relations, who also saw it as an important policy move. I think it will serve the president well on every count, including border issues, she said.

Even more stark was a call between a dozen U.S. senators and high-ranking energy and defense officials Saturday. Sen. Dan Sullivan, R-Alaska, noted there is legislation drafted that would remove American forces, including Patriot Missile batteries, from Saudi Arabia.

If they lose that group of senators you start to see veto override majorities on legislation that deals negatively with the Saudis, Sullivan told a small group of congressional reporters.

That was a very clear threat, Book said. Its not really a negotiation at all. he added. Its a pretty dangerous neighborhood for the Saudis, and the U.S. plays a vital role in protecting them.

Could force production cuts work in the US?

With state-run oil operations, OPEC nations can easily enact a cut or boost production. But the U.S. has thousands of independent oil producers, so coordinating and enforcing a production cut would be complicated, and experts say its unlikely.

Some oil producers in Texas and Oklahoma are pushing for state-mandated production cuts, but the industry is split on the prospect. Right now, the producers with more costly production are most likely to suffer, and would be the first to file for bankruptcy or shut down existing wells, damaging oil fields. But a state-managed production cut spreads out the pain uniformly, Book said.

Were not suggesting that Oklahoma can balance the market, we cant do that, said Mike Cantrell, owner of Cantrell Investments LLC, an oil and gas investment group based in Oklahoma. But statewide, production has declined about 20% this year, the equivalent of about 100,000 barrels a day  a cut similar to Mexicos. If sustained, that would be a cut that would be a significant cut in the world scheme of things, he said.

In Texas, commissioners will hold a meeting Tuesday on the topic.

Why didn't oil prices recover after the OPEC+ deal?

Despite the deal, U.S. benchmark crude was trading at about $22 a barrel Monday, well below what most producers need to financially survive. But that was still better than what some analysts had predicted  including a drop in the price to the single digits.

A clock was ticking, for all the players, because by the end of April or early May...the world was going to run out of storage, and the price of oil was going to drop like a rock, Yergin said.

What about low fuel prices?

Low oil prices lead to cheap gasoline prices, and consumers in different times would praise discounts at the pump. Gasoline prices are about $1.86 per gallon, about $1 less than a year ago, according to AAA. But most consumers arent able to take advantage, because many are staying home to prevent the spread of the coronavirus. Even when travel restrictions lift, economic turmoil could prompt consumers to save money and stay home.

Follow our full coverage of the coronavirus pandemic here
The U.S. Navy has removed 116 medical staff members from its hospital ship docked off Los Angeles after seven crew members tested positive for the coronavirus, an official said on Tuesday.

The personnel from the USNS Mercy were taken to a nearby base and remain under quarantine. None so far have needed hospitalization, said Lieutenant Rochelle Rieger of the 3rd Fleet, who added that it's unclear where or how the sailors became infected.

Rieger initially said 126 medical crew members were taken off the ship but later corrected the number to 116.

The ship left San Diego on March 23 when all staff were screened before they boarded, the lieutenant said. It arrived at Los Angeles four days later to provide relief to the city amid the pandemic by accepting patients from hospitals who were not infected with the virus.

The number of COVID-19 cases among crewmembers of the USNS Mercy has risen to seven while it is docked in the Port of Los Angeles to help serve the region's patients who have not been stricken by the coronavirus.

The US Navy has removed 116 medical staff working on board the USNS Mercy medical ship (pictured bringing a patient on board) after seven tested positive for Covid-19

None of the more than 1,000 personnel aboard were allowed to leave the ship once it departed San Diego.

'The only people going on and off the ship are the actual patients we've been treating so it's very hard to trace where this came from,' Rieger said.

The first case emerged last week as the ship was preparing to receive elderly patients from a skilled nursing facilities in Los Angeles to protect them from being exposed to the virus.

So far the ship, with 1,000 beds, has taken in only 20 patients from hospitals and none have tested positive for the coronavirus or showed any symptoms of the illness, Rieger said.

Two medical personnel from the ship who tested positive came in close contact with a small number of the patients but they were wearing full protective gear, including gloves, N95 masks and eye goggles.

Rieger said the removal of the 116 crew members will not affect the ship's ability to treat patients.

Pictured: Sailors transport a patient across the brow onto the USNS Mercy in Los Angeles, California. The ship is treating patients without the coronavirus, but it has somehow come aboard and infected seven medical staff

The Navy is also planning to send some of its staff who have been screened and completed a 14-day self-quarantine period to work at Los Angeles medical facilities, but that is yet to happen.

The Navy has strictly followed the guidelines of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for hospitals, Rieger said. It also has done deep cleaning of the ship, including sanitizing spaces where any of the infected staff may have been.

Those on board are practicing social distancing as best as possible, and the Navy has added tables to its flight deck to allow people to go up top to eat when mess decks become too crowded.

Meanwhile, three medical staff members who had tested positive for the virus aboard the USNS Comfort hospital ship that is docked in New York City returned to work. A fourth crew member who also was infected is still recovering.

The USNS Comfort hospital ship, pictured docked in New York City, has also seen medical staff test positive for the coronavirus. Unlike the Mercy, the Comfort is treating patients with the virus to alleviate pressure on NYC hospitals

Unlike the Mercy, the Comfort is treating COVID-19 patients on board as well as patients who do not have the virus.

The ship has treated more than 120 people since it arrived on March 30, and about 50 of those have been discharged, said Lieutenant Mary Catherine Walsh. The ship removed half of its 1,000 beds so it could isolate and treat coronavirus patients.

The Navy has struggled to contain the virus once it comes aboard a ship. About 12 percent of sailors aboard the USS Theodore Roosevelt, an aircraft carrier with a crew that has largely been moved ashore in Guam, are infected with the virus.

On Monday, the Roosevelt reported its first death, a sailor who had tested positive for the coronavirus on March 30. A second sailor from the aircraft carrier has since been taken into intensive care.

The USS Theodore Roosevelt has seen 600 of its crew member test positive for the coronavirus. The ship became infamous when its captain Brett Crozier blew the whistle on an outbreak of the virus on his ship. He has since been relieved of his command

Nearly 600 crew members (around 12 percent) from the USS Theodore Roosevelt have tested positive to COVID-19 since initial cases were confirmed on March 24.

The ship was thrust into the international spotlight when its captain, Brett Crozier, was relieved of his command by the Navy on April 2 after he sounded the alarm over the outbreak on board his ship.

Crozier had sent a letter to Navy bosses pleading to let his sailors off the carrier, fearing that up to 50 of his 4,800 strong crew could die from the virus.

Despite firing Crozier for breaking the chain of command, the Navy conceded to his demands for mass testing and a wide scale evacuation of the ship.

For most people, the virus causes mild or moderate symptoms, such as fever and cough that clear in two to three weeks. For some, especially older adults and people with existing health problems, it can cause severe life-threatening illness, including pneumonia.

Los Angeles County public health authorities have reported more than 9,400 virus cases and 320 deaths, while in total the U.S. has now seen a total of 615,183 confirmed cases of the coronavirus, and 26,094 deaths.

Overall, the U.S. has now seen 615,183 confirmed cases of the coronavirus, more than any other country in the world.

The number of new cases per day has dropped slightly for the last three days
Vistara airlines will be sending its employees on compulsory leave without pay for three days between April 15 and April 30 as a measure to preserve jobs and conserve cash flow, announced its CEO Leslie Thng.

Extending the nationwide lockdown till May 3 to combat the coronavirus disease, Prime Minister Modi urged companies to be sensitive towards people and not sack them during this difficult period.

As part of a number of steps we are taking to conserve cash and save costs, we had to make the difficult decision of further reducing our staff costs with the objective of preserving jobs.

For the period between 15- 30 April 2020, about 30% of Vistaras workforce will take compulsory no-pay leave of one to three days, depending on employment grades (three days for senior-most employees). This decision does not impact the remainder 70% of Vistara staff, said Vistara spokesperson.

The exercise will be carried out at three levels. The first grade will take 3 days leave without pay, the next grade level will take two days leave without pay and then the third grade will have to take a day off with no pay.

On March 27, the airline had also introduced compulsory leave without pay for up to three days between April 1 and April 14 for the same set of senior employees.

The compulsory no pay leave will affect around 1,200 employees in senior grades.

The remaining 2,800 employees of the airline such as members of cabin crew and ground handling services will be unaffected.

With the announcement by the government of India on extending the lockdown, we continue to suspend all our domestic and international operations till 3rd May 2020 and this further impacted significantly on our cash flow with no revenue being generated over an extended period of time, Thng said in an email to employees.
BAKU, Azerbaijan, Apr. 15

By Nargiz Sadikhova - Trend:

Kazakhstans Aviation Administration (AAK) and BusinessOptix, a US & UK based software company, signed a partnership agreement to deliver a framework for digital aviation regulation to Kazakhstan, Trend reports with reference to Kazakhstans Civil Aviation Committee.

BusinessOptix is to support the creation of its Digital Regulator to drive strategies around Enterprise Risk and Compliance and enable AAK to design and deliver its optimal future operational state.

The BusinessOptix platform enables organizations to design and deliver their Digital Twin for a variety of business needs, which, in this case, includes the rollout of a full Enterprise Risk and Performance database that has been specifically designed to support the growing needs of the Aviation Administration of Kazakhstan, the report said.

The Digital Twin is expected to enable AAK to identify a future operational state in which key processes can be benefit from intelligent automation and leverage IOT and big data to provide immediate insight into the operational effectiveness of current processes.

The combination of these disciplines, delivered within a Microsoft Azure environment, will form the foundation for the Digital Regulator.

The task of the AAK is to transform how aviation regulation is delivered in the country in line with the presidential vision. It is a vast task, a three year project, that requires the very best transformation tools. We have teamed up with BusinessOptix who offered a cost effective solution to provide the digital twin approach so that we can document and test transformation scenarios to ensure we apply a right first time approach, CEO of the AAK Peter Griffiths said.

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Follow the author on twitter: @nargiz_sadikh
In an election marked by a significant increase in absentee ballots, Columbia County reported that of its 17,538 total ballots cast, more than 11,000  or 63%  were absentee.

According to the Wisconsin Elections Commission, Columbia County issued 12,579 absentee ballots, but only 11,081 were counted. Statewide, requests had exceeded 1 million by April 1.

Portage City Clerk Marie Moe said the city had 1,660 of its 2,083 ballots cast by absentee voters, or about 80% of votes. In the spring 2016 presidential election, 514 of 2,956 ballots were cast as absentee  about 17% of voters.

In a report to City Administrator Shawn Murphy, Moe relayed that the election went smoothly despite extra steps organizers had to take to ensure a safe polling place in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic.

As elections officials filtered into the county administrative building Monday with ballots and tally sheets to submit to the clerks office, they remarked on the huge increase in absentee ballots, varying from 77% percent of the vote in Columbus to 33% in Springvale.
We all know the fact that agriculture plays a vital role in the economy. To meet the ever-increasing need of food, the traditional methods must be updated with the latest technologies and tools.

Cyber Chasse introduced FARMlytics, a soil moisture sensor that ingests data into Splunk, in India. This device allows farmers to monitor the field conditions from anywhere by analyzing the data on the Splunk dashboard.

The manual methods of data collection can be replaced by advanced techniques of data collection using sensors. As the concept of IoT became popular, companies are applying various information communication technologies (ICT) and big data technologies to increase the efficiency of cultivation.

Anil Kumar, Director of Cyber Chasse said  we can apply low-cost IoT systems and cloud computing to determine the moisture content of soil and control the facilities. In addition to these, the technique to analyze the collected data can greatly improve the efficiency of cultivation.

It is estimated that poor water availability and increase in global temperature correlates to a 15%-20% drop in overall crop production. The solution to this problem lies in useful data analytics. This compelled the team of Cyber Chasse to build a device that reshapes the way the challenges involved in farming are addressed.

We are in a critical stage of agriculture, where there is a significant change in the climate condition. IoT technology can give farmers the ability to leverage data and improve their operation. This is what FARMlytics is about says Ashish Yadav, Chief Technlogy Officer of Cyber Chasse.

Anil added, We have a better approach of determining soil moisture than looking at the thermometer, barometers, and hygrographs. Currently, we are working with Ridge Farmhouse Pvt. Ltd., an India-based agriculture company, to deploy the FARMlytics system on 36 acres of land for productive farming.

IoT has come up as a second wave in the field of agriculture and is helping farmers increase yields by making better decisions using accurate data. It has brought huge benefits like - monitoring field in real-time, efficient use of water, optimization of resources and more. With seamless end-to-end operations, produce is likely to get processed faster than before.

About Cyber Chasse

Cyber Chasse is a leading IT consulting firm in the USA specialized in providing cybersecurity solutions using Splunk, IoT, DevOps, Cloud Solutions and Managed Security. We have huge experience working for Fortune 500 companies in the USA and provide innovative solutions for cloud environments. Our innovative cybersecurity solutions help organizations to prepare, protect and respond to all points of security lifecycle.

For more information, visit http://www.cyberchasse.com

Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/cyberchasse/

LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/company/cyber-chasse-inc/

Twitter - https://twitter.com/cyber_chasse?lang=en

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Community Coalition, Giving Back to Gyms Affected by COVID-19 Im worried about the thousands of gyms that might close permanently around the country. So instead of pulling back, weve pulled together a coalition of like-minded brands committed to donating 50% of their profits from online sales to local gym owners.

Thousands of independently owned and operated gyms have been forced to shut down as a result of COVID-19. But an unexpected force, O2 Recovery Drink, has created a profit share program that could funnel millions of dollars to fitness professionals and gym owners to support them in a challenging time.

Those businesses and their owners now face indefinite closures and uncertainties. This is a scary time, said O2 founder and CEO, Dave Colina. Like many companies, Im concerned about the impact COVID-19 is going to have on our business, but even more so, Im worried about the thousands of gyms that might close permanently around the country. So instead of pulling back, weve pulled together a coalition of like-minded brands committed to donating 50% of their profits from online sales to local gym owners.

I have no other words right now to express my gratitude. This is incredible, said Teri Williamson, owner of Black Bull CrossFit. God bless you.

So far, the coalition has raised well into the six figures. One participating brand, Born Primitive, raised $186,641 alone through sales on their website. Consumer behavior has changed drastically in recent weeks, said Bear Handlon, co-owner of Born Primitive. All brands and businesses are hurting right now. So while offering 50% of our profits might seem drastic, I think it is necessary to send the message to all the gym owners out there that the community has their back. No one is alone and we will get through this.

Gym members from all over the United States have rallied in support of their gym owners and favorite instructors, and the proof is in the voice of the fitness community. So far, the number of people across the United States that have supported their local gym as a result of the initiative is nearing 10,000 and growing exponentially.

"This wasn't a hard decision to make, it came down to doing the right thing for the community, said Colina. We have no plans of stopping and are currently exploring ways to expand O2s impact and reach with other partners and brands. This is about supporting the people who got us to where we are today.

Gym owners that have been forced to close because of COVID19 or Brand Owners who would like to join, may contact: chalkup@drinko2.com.

About O2

Now more than ever, people are working out like elite athletes, but not taking the time to recover like the pros. O2 is making recovery more accessible, enjoyable, and convenient to help solve that problem. Developed by a physician and a CrossFit trainer, O2 is a non-carbonated, keto-friendly recovery drink blending oxygenated water with electrolytes to help athletes accelerate their recovery without compromising their health.

Spend less time recuperating and more time accomplishing. Check out drinko2.com for more info and follow @drinko2recovery on Instagram.


New York Daily News Archive

Big topic. Big writer. In his new nonfiction book, The House of Kennedy, James Patterson takes on the saga of America's most famous political family. Written with Cynthia Fagen, this breathless account speeds through tragedies and triumphs, assassinations and overdoses, not to mention an eye-popping array of sex scandals.

It opens with The Patriarch, about Joe Kennedy Sr., and ends with The Prince  John F. Kennedy Jr., who died, along his wife and her sister, on July 16, 1999, in a plane crash. Says Patterson, 73: If this was a novel that I was submitting to a publisher, they would say, We really can't do this novel because all this could never happen to one family. But it did.

Read an excerpt from The House of Kennedy here. Patterson talks about writing it below.

What inspired him to write The House of Kennedy

The Kennedys are America's royal family. Like The Crown and Queen Elizabeth, the notion of combining these character stories with the events that shaped that period of history from the 20s through the 90s is pretty stunning. It's a great story. There is greed and wealth. There is incredible historical relevance. There is tragedy after tragedy and there are inspirational triumphs. For a lot of people, they think they know everything about the Kennedys, but with this book, they can see that they didn't.

An adaptation in the works

We're looking at a possible five-season television program. We have a very big show runner who is involved. Her response was the same thing: I knew pieces, but I didn't really know it all.

The Kennedy he finds most compelling

Joe Sr. was actually in some ways the most impressive of all of them. He was impressive and depressing. He was crafty and very, very bright ... the patriarch of this family, the one who started it and drove these kids to be as good as they could be and to be daredevils. The story of what happened to Rosemary [President John F. Kennedy's sister] - unbelievable. There had been a problem during her delivery that caused her to be a little slower. She was doing fine, but she didn't live up to the Kennedy be the best you can be. They tried a lobotomy on her [in 1941]. That was the kind of the end of her. [She was institutionalized for the rest of her life.]
A massive COVID-19 outbreak that's sickened all but five residents of an Ontario group home for the disabled has now turned deadly.

Hey there, time traveller!

This article was published 15/4/2020 (636 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

A massive COVID-19 outbreak that's sickened all but five residents of an Ontario group home for the disabled has now turned deadly.

The family of resident Martin Frogley, 58, says he died of COVID-19 in a Markham, Ont., hospital early Wednesday.

Martin Frogley, 58, is seen in this undated family handout photo. A massive COVID-19 outbreak that's sickened all but five residents of an Ontario group home for the disabled has now turned deadly. The family of resident Martin Frogley, 58, says he died of COVID-19 in a Markham, Ont., hospital early Wednesday. A family statement says he passed peacefully listening to music he loved. THE CANADIAN PRESS/HO

A family statement says he "passed peacefully" listening to music he loved.

Frogley was one of 42 people with either a physical or intellectual disability living at Participation House, a facility where a major outbreak of the novel coronavirus has caused chaos in recent days.

The Markham Stouffville Hospital, which is assisting the home, says 37 of the 42 residents have tested positive for COVID-19, and at least 13 staff are also infected.

Last week most of the employees stopped working, a situation the union representing them attributed to a growing number of positive tests and public health guidance that advised them to stay away from the facility.

Frogley's family did not comment on the unfolding situation at Participation House, reflecting only on his memory while requesting privacy as they grieve his death.

"He was a wonderful son, uncle and the best brother anyone could ever ask for," the family said in a statement.

They thanked Participation House employees for what they described as "exceptional care," as well as the hospital staff who tended to him in his final days.

Earlier this week, Participation House Executive Director Shelley Brillinger said a resident had been taken to hospital on the weekend. She said at the time he was "holding his own," but provided no other details.

The staffing shortage, which triggered pleas for help from municipal and provincial politicians and prompted former federal health minister Dr. Jane Philpott to start providing medical care at the home, began last week when the outbreak was first announced.

At that point, at least 10 residents and two staff members were confirmed to have tested positive for COVID-19.

It was widely reported that the ensuing shortage was caused by employees walking off the job, but the union representing Participation House staff says the situation was caused instead by employees following widely recommended public health advice.

Tom Galivan, secretary-treasurer of The Service Employees International Union Local Two, said the home had been experiencing staffing shortages for months prior to the pandemic. On Thursday, he said employees staff learned that positive cases had surfaced among residents and were advised to get tested immediately.

"The current staffing challenges are rooted in the fact that 30 per cent of the workforce has tested positive or is awaiting test results," he said, noting public health officials have advised those with possible COVID-19 exposure to self-isolate at once.

Galivan said another large swath of the staff had previously been working at multiple long-term care facilities in order to make ends meet, but were advised to stay at one workplace in order to curb the spread of the virus. Premier Doug Ford announced a provincial measure to the same effect on Wednesday.

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.

Since last week, the outbreak has spread to 27 more residents and 11 more staff, a development the home described as "very upsetting."

"Our hearts go out to the residents and their families as we face this challenge," Brillinger said in a statement released on Tuesday. "I want to reassure our residents and their families that, with the support of the hospital, we are providing the care that is needed."

The COVID-19 pandemic has taken a particularly heavy toll on long-term care homes across the country, and Ontario is no exception. At least 98 facilities have reported outbreaks, and the 145 deaths in those homes account for nearly 40 per cent of the 385 total deaths in the province to date.

The grim situation prompted Ford to acknowledge shortcomings in the province's long-term care system as he announced emergency measures intended to address the outbreaks in those centres.

"There's cracks," Ford said after announcing additional testing and infection control measures. "We have to raise the standards...This is a wake-up call to the world, not just Ontario."

This report by The Canadian Press was first published April 15, 2020.
PASSAIC, NJ  Inside St. Mary's General Hospital in Passaic, everything has changed.

That sentiment rings extraordinarily true for Kerri Burghardt, a liaison nurse for the geriatric program who has spent her days not in a white lab coat visiting nursing homes  as she usually does  but instead in a triage tent outside of the hospital examining patients with symptoms of the new coronavirus.

That is, she did that until she caught the COVID-19 virus.

Talking to Burghardt, it's almost as if she sees things "before" and "now."

For example: Before the coronavirus crisis, she arrived at work at 9 a.m. every day, donned a white lab coat and did little hands-on nursing. Now, she's working in St. Mary's emergency room after recovering from the virus. "There's not a typical day anymore," she said.

Before, she hugged and kissed her daughters regularly. Now, they ask, "Mommy, when is this going to be over? I really want to kiss you."

But the virus upended more than just her role at the hospital. When she fell ill with COVID-19, her whole life changed.

Burghardt said it started about a month ago, after she finished a weekend shift in the emergency room triage tent. She worked Saturday and Sunday, then was off Monday and Tuesday.

The day before returning to work, Burghardt said, she began to feel "flushed and just kind of off." She took her temperature, but the thermometer said she had no fever  at first.

"Within 30 minutes, I went from not having a fever to having like 99.3," she said. "I checked it not 15 minutes later . It went from like a 99.3 to about 102 within 15 minutes. I've never had a fever spike like that before, ever."



Burghardt said she immediately made arrangements to send her daughters, ages 4 and 10, away.

"Having them leave and not knowing the next time I would see them is the hardest thing I've pretty much ever had to do," she said. "My 10-year-old was very upset. She was scared."

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Kerri Burghardt is seen without personal protective equipment. Photo courtesy of Kerri Burghardt, used with permission.

Burghardt said her symptoms ran the gamut for COVID-19, ranging from fever to fatigue and beyond.

"I had every single thing you could possibly think of as far as being symptomatic," she said. "I went from having fever to coughing a lot to horrible back pain to ... really bad diarrhea."

Burghardt said she was short of breath and had terrible back and muscle pain, leaving her unable to do much other than stay in bed and rest. About nine days after she began feeling ill, she also lost her senses of taste and smell, and she became dehydrated.

Read more: Beloved St. Mary's General Hospital Pediatrician Dies

Burghardt recovered after 16 days, and she has been cleared to return to work. Now, she said, a typical day no longer exists, and she spends time before each shift steeling herself for what the day holds.

"You put on your PPE [personal protective equipment], you say a little prayer before you start working, and you hope for the best," she said. "I know when I leave that I did my best, I took care of who I could, and it's in God's hands at this point."

Going back into the hospital is scary for a litany of reasons. Burghardt doesn't want to infect her daughters or get sick again. Still, she is returning to work with hope and a sense of duty.

"I couldn't have imagined not being able to help my hospital family during the pandemic," she said. "There is no way I would have ever said no to it, ever."

Since the pandemic reached New Jersey, one thing stands out as the most difficult challenge Burghardt has faced.

"I haven't kissed my daughters in over three weeks," she said. "My 4-year-old asked me, 'Mommy, when is this going to be over? I really want to kiss you.' I think my heart broke into like 100 pieces. I can't hug them. I can't kiss them. I barely go near them."

Read more: Wayne Coronavirus Totals For Tuesday: 583 Cases, 29 Deaths

Vanessa Warner, a spokesperson for St. Mary's, told Patch the hospital has enough personal protective equipment for each day, but it's "always on the edge" of running out.

To supplement its current supply, the hospital is accepting donations of plastic isolation gowns, gloves, hand sanitizer and masks.

"We will gratefully accept any of those," Warner said. "I think the plastic gowns are the most important, but they're the most difficult to source."

Anyone wishing to make a donation to the hospital is asked to email Warner at vwarner1@primehealthcare.com.

For now, Burghardt said, she's staying the course with the support of her colleagues and her community.

"We are a family, and I have never been more grateful to be a nurse and to have a job than I am right now," she said.

As of Wednesday morning, 6,438 people had tested positive for COVID-19 in Passaic County, and 156 people had died from the illness.

Passaic County is among the areas hardest hit by the new coronavirus and is led only by Bergen, Hudson, Essex and Union counties.

On Tuesday, the New Jersey Department of Health announced that Bergen County had confirmed more than 10,000 cases of COVID-19. There, the virus has taken the lives of 550 people.

This article originally appeared on the Wayne Patch
New figures released on Tuesday based on death certificates suggest the death toll from coronavirus in the UK is nearly 15 per cent higher than that announced daily on the basis of deaths in hospitals alone, as officials saw a 35% drop in GDP in Q2.

The higher figures relate to those passing away in private homes, care homes and hospices  a sector that campaigners allege has been air-brushed in the daily discourse. The Office for National Statistics (ONS) says the virus was mentioned on 3,475 death certificates in the week ending April 3.

ONS statistician Nick Strike said: When looking at data for England, this is 15% higher than the NHS numbers as they include all mentions of Covid-19 on the death certificate, including suspected Covid-19, as well as deaths in the community.

The cumulative figures from hospitals on Tuesday were 12,107 dead and 93,873 cases. Campaigners called for similar daily release of figures from care homes and retirement villages.

Foreign secretary Dominic Raab chaired another core meeting in Downing Street on Tuesday; he is likely to announce a date on Thursday until when the current restrictions would continue. The Office of Budget responsibility put the impact of current lockdown at a 35% GDP drop in the second quarter.

Groups such as Age UK, Marie Curie, Care England, Independent Age and the Alzheimers Society have written to health secretary Matt Hancock, demanding a care package to support social care through the pandemic, besides a daily update on deaths in the care system.

According to Age UK, coronavirus is running wild in care homes for the elderly, while Care England estimates nearly 1,000 deaths from the virus in care homes. Nearly 4.1 lakh people live in 11,300 care homes in the UK.

Meanwhile. Heathrow airport announced that in March passenger numbers shrunk by 52% compared to the same time last year. The situation is expected to continue as initial forecasts show passenger demand in April is set to decrease by over 90%, with lasting and significant industry-wide effects predicted. It is operating on a single runway.

Heathrow CEO John Holland-Kaye said: Heathrow continues to serve the nation by keeping vital supply lines open, and helping people get home. Now is the time to agree a common international standard for healthcare screening in airports so that when this crisis recedes, people can travel with confidence and we can get the British economy moving again.

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In that cause, the federal government has some vital, enumerated responsibilities: for defense and the regulation of commerce, and for protecting peoples rights and securing their welfare. The states work within that framework to exercise a broader set of authorities. They are closer to the people, and so are entrusted with shaping the kind of polity their residents want, taking responsibility over public health, education and other facets of the common good. Local governments, though not as fully sovereign, can further enforce local preferences and priorities. The resulting system of government is something like a set of concentric rings, each protecting and enabling the next and all ultimately geared to enabling individuals, families and communities to thrive.
MONTREAL, April 15, 2020 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Gildan Activewear Inc. (GIL; TSX and NYSE) will report its 2020 first quarter results on Wednesday, April 29, 2020. A press release will be issued after markets close and a conference call is scheduled on that same day at 5:00 PM ET to discuss the Companys results. The conference call can be accessed by dialing (877) 282-2924 (Canada & U.S.) or (470) 495-9480 (international) and entering passcode 4587007#. A replay will be available for 7 days starting at 8:00 PM ET by dialing (855) 859-2056 (Canada & U.S.) or (404) 537-3406 (international) and entering the same passcode. A live audio webcast of the conference call, as well as a replay, will be available on our corporate site at Gildan Q1 2020 audio webcast .

Annual General Meeting of Shareholders

In light of the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on public health and to mitigate the risks to the health and safety of our shareholders, employees and other stakeholders, we will hold our Annual Meeting of Shareholders in a virtual-only format, which will be conducted via live audio webcast. While shareholders will not be able to attend the meeting in person, shareholders will have an equal opportunity to participate in the meeting online and will be able to vote and submit questions for consideration. Shareholders can also vote by proxy in advance of the meeting as in prior years and online during the meeting. Instructions for Gildans virtual 2020 Annual Meeting of Shareholders can be found in our Notice of 2020 Annual Meeting of Shareholders and in our Virtual AGM User Guide. The 2020 Annual Meeting of Shareholders can be accessed on our corporate site at Gildan 2020 AGM. You may also listen to the live audio webcast or replay, as a guest by completing the online form at the same link. Guests can listen to the Meeting but are not able to vote or ask questions.

About Gildan

Gildan is a leading manufacturer of everyday basic apparel which markets its products in North America, Europe, Asia-Pacific, and Latin America, under a diversified portfolio of Company-owned brands, including Gildan, American Apparel, Comfort Colors, Gildan Hammer, Prim + Preux, Gold Toe, Anvil by Gildan, Alstyle, Secret, Silks, Kushyfoot, Secret Silky, Therapy Plus, Peds and MediPeds, and under the Under Armour brand through a sock licensing agreement providing exclusive distribution rights in the United States and Canada. Our product offering includes activewear, underwear, socks, hosiery, and legwear products sold to a broad range of customers, including wholesale distributors, screenprinters or embellishers, as well as to retailers that sell to consumers through their physical stores and/or e-commerce platforms, and to global lifestyle brand companies.

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Gildan owns and operates vertically-integrated, large-scale manufacturing facilities which are primarily located in Central America, the Caribbean Basin, North America, and Bangladesh. With approximately 51,000 employees worldwide Gildan operates with a strong commitment to industry-leading labour and environmental practices throughout its supply chain in accordance with its comprehensive Genuine Responsibility program embedded in the Company's long-term business strategy. More information about the Company and its corporate citizenship practices and initiatives can be found at www.gildancorp.com and www.genuineresponsibility.com, respectively.





Investor inquiries:

Sophie Argiriou

Vice President, Investor Communications

(514) 343-8815

sargiriou@gildan.com Media inquiries:

Genevieve Gosselin

Director, Corporate Marketing and Communications

(514) 343-8814

ggosselin@gildan.com




New York has developed its own antibody test that could help detect those immune to coronavirus as the state looks to gradually end its shutdown, Governor Andrew Cuomo said Wednesday. He made the announcement as he ordered all residents of the state -- the epicenter of America's coronavirus outbreak -- to cover their faces when in stores or using public transit. Cuomo said 2,000 people would be tested a day, as he works on a plan for a phased reopening of New York, without speeding up the spread of COVID-19 again, following its weeks-long shutdown. "We're going to prioritize the antibody testing for first responders and essential workers," Cuomo told reporters. "It's a finger prick test so it's not terribly invasive." Officials are battling with how to get crippled economies up and running again without increasing the rate of infections as the world awaits a vaccine for the deadly virus. Cuomo said he had a "blueprint" centered on testing residents for the virus, and then tracing and isolating those who have it to control the spread. Health officials believe antibody tests that have just entered the market and look for whether a person has been previously infected are crucial in answering questions about immunity. It isn't yet clear whether people who were previously infected will be immune and if so for how long, experts say. Cuomo announced that another 752 New Yorkers had died from COVID-19 in the past 24 hours. He failed to give un updated toll but that number would take statewide deaths past 11,000. The illness has claimed more than 27,000 lives across the United States, according to a running tally by Johns Hopkins University. Cuomo said he would sign a decree that would come into effect in three days requiring that everyone in the state cover their mouth and nose when unable to maintain social distancing outside. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have been recommending that US citizens wear masks since April 3. Closed store fronts in the Astoria neighborhood of Queens, on April 15, 2020 in New York City
The Association of Gas Producers of Ukraine calls on the government to take a number of measures to support the industry during the global economic crisis caused by the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) spread.

The association said in a statement released on its Facebook page that there are a record decline in global oil and gas prices, including in the oil and gas industry of Ukraine, what creates, in particular, a high risk of decline in investments into oil and gas production, that in the future may cause its significant decrease.

In view of this threat, the association appealed to the president of Ukraine, the parliament and the government with number of proposals aimed at supporting the industry. The association considers it necessary to introduce incentive royalties of 6% and 12% (for wells over five kilometers deep and up to five kilometers deep respectively) for rehabilitated wells where gas and oil have not been mined for the last two years and which have been returned into the production process after workover.

By analogy with the incentive regime of taxation for natural gas production, the association requested to reduce the royalties for oil and gas condensate production to 6% and 12% for new and rehabilitated wells.

The association said about the need to develop a transparent methodology for identifying difficult and nonconventional oil and gas deposits, as well as introduce incentive standards for their mining.

The association also considers it advisable to extend the period of taxation of oil and gas production from new wells from five to ten years, as the government guaranteed.

The statement also contains the need for the appointment of the Head of the Ministry of Energy and Environmental Protection as soon as possible, what is essential for a constructive dialogue on the implementation the package of industry support measures.
Massachusetts will start reporting city and town-by-town data on COVID-19 cases, Health and Human Services Secretary Marylou Sudders said Wednesday.

Since the state started releasing data on COVID-19 data, the cases have been broken down by county, not town. For weeks, lawmakers and health officials have called for more granular details about the cases to help determine if there are hotspots within particular towns and if resources should be re-directed to those communities.

Sudders previously argued against releasing coronavirus cases by town to the public because some of the first people who became infected with COVID-19 were outed.

Theres stigma attached to all sorts of communicable diseases, and there were several individuals very early on who tested positive through social media were identified locally, and they were really cyberbullied, Sudders said last month in response to a MassLive question.

On Wednesday, Sudders said the new town-by-town data will be available in the report released around 4 p.m. Wednesday.

Public health folks are always trying to balance privacy, data," Sudders.

Some cities and towns have been reporting the data on their own, despite being discouraged to do so by the state in a conference call with health officials across the state last month.

Worcester was one of the cities that had continued reporting the data.

Were not giving anybodys name, were not giving anybodys address, City Manager Edward Augustus Jr. said previously. But were trying to show the seriousness of this, and the pace of new cases, so people understand why were taking all of the actions that were taking. If we did that in the absence of any data or any information, Im not sure people who have a sense of the seriousness of this.

The Baker administration approached reporting on cases of vaping-related lung illness and deaths throughout the state in the same way, opting not to identify cases and deaths by town or city. MassLive attempted to request records in October to get a sense of the scope of vaping-related lung illnesses across the state. Health officials initially declined, even after being twice-ordered by the Secretary of States office to do so, citing patient privacy concerns, among other things.

Government accountability advocates were also calling for more detailed reporting. Justin Silverman, executive director of the New England First Amendment Coalition, told MassLive the state ought to be sharing more specific information with municipalities so that residents can better understand how the virus is affecting communities at large.

Transparency during this pandemic is crucial, he said. We need to have timely information about the coronavirus so we can make the best decisions about keeping ourselves and our families safe. Without knowing how many cases of the virus are in our towns, its difficult if not impossible to assess the threat.

As of Tuesday, 28,163 people have tested positive for the coronavirus and 957 people have died, according to the state Department of Public Health. Nearly half of those who died lived in long-term care facilities.

Gov. Charlie Baker said a surge of cases will likely hit Massachusetts between April 10 and April 20, but the worst isnt over. Baker said last week the models suggest new cases will peak closer to April 20 than April 10.

MassLive reporter Tanner Stening contributed to this report.

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Morocco and China cooperate closely in the fight against the COVID-19 pandemic, said Moroccos ambassador to China Aziz Mekouar.

Speaking during a meeting broadcast on Tuesday by China-Arab TV channel, Mekouar said that videoconferences were organized regularly between doctors and health professionals in China and their counterparts in Morocco to share Chinese experience in the fight against Covid-19 and get information about measures taken to counter the spread of the viral epidemic.

The Moroccan diplomat said the two parties are continuing consultations on the evolution of the epidemic situation.

The diplomat also recalled that large shipments of medical equipment and devices have been sent to Morocco via four flights, to help the North African country cope with the pandemic.

Since the outbreak of the epidemic in China, the Moroccan embassy in Beijing has set up a crisis cell to follow up the situation of the Moroccan community established in China, and a series of measures was taken to accelerate the process of evacuation, towards the Kingdom, of Moroccans who lived in Wuhan and in the province of Hubei, in application of King Mohammed VIs instructions, said the diplomat.

The Moroccan diplomat also underlined the relevance of the Chinese experience in the fight against the pandemic, highlighting the actions undertaken by Chinese authorities, in particular in health isolation and social distancing, which have shown their effectiveness. Chinese citizens have complied with these measures to preserve public health, he said.

Aziz Mekouar recalled that two weeks ago, the streets of Beijing, which has no less than 20 million inhabitants, were deserted and shops were closed. The situation is now returning to normal, but health prevention measures are still applied, namely temperature measurement at the entrance to shopping centers and respect of physical distancing.

The good behavior of the inhabitants of the Chinese capital and their strict respect of the preventive measures have proved their worth as the number of infections recorded in Beijing has not exceeded 500 cases, the Moroccan diplomat said.
Bondholders of Denis OBriens Digicel have indicated overwhelming acceptance for a deal that would see $1.7bn (1.5bn) of the companys debt to them written off.

Digicels debt pile currently stands at around $7bn (6.4bn). Creditors had indicated agreement to the write-off enough debt to bring the total down to about $5.4bn (4.8bn) by an early acceptance date of April 14. The consent solicitation process will run until April 28th.





By the early deadline bondholders owed more than $5bn of the total indicated their acceptance to swap their bonds for a smaller amount of new bonds with some beefed up security.

However, a cohort of bondholders owed $925m that is due to be repaid in 2023 did not accept the offer.

Under the terms on offer those 2023 bonds would be swapped for $786m of debt due in 2027. The early deadline for acceptance has been extended until April 28th, but it now seems likely the wider restructuring deal may happen around the 2023 bondholders  leaving their bonds intact.

Acceptance levels among other bondholder groups was overwhelming, ranging between 86pc and 97pc. That is far in excess of the levels of 50pc and 75pc required to carry the various classes of bondholder in a new structure.

The deal will substantially reduce Digicels debt levels at a stroke, though Denis OBrien will need to refinance part of the new debt structure within the next three years, or some bondholders wholl be given a convertible bond under the terms of the current deal will be able to swap it for 49pc of Digicels shares.

Digicel operates across 32 markets in the Caribbean, Central America and Asia Pacific but has struggled under the scale of its debt, in particular because of a mismatch between the local emerging markets currencies customers pay in versus dollar denominated debt servicing costs.

The debt deal marks the second time in two years the telecoms group has had to negotiate with its lenders.

Digicel spent much of the second half of 2018 in talks that eventually saw bondholders owed $3bn agree to swap their paper for debt falling due much later.

This time around the process has been far swifter with agreement from most bondholders secured within a matter of weeks.
The lockdown on movement in Northern Ireland will remain in place for a further three weeks, the First Minister has announced.

Arlene Foster said it was appropriate and proportionate to keep the current regulations in operation.

Ministers in the powersharing executive agreed the move at a meeting on Wednesday.

The number of people with coronavirus who have died in a hospital setting in Northern Ireland is 140, with six further deaths reported on Wednesday.

Another 121 laboratory-confirmed cases were confirmed, bringing the total since the outbreak began to 2,088.

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Deputy First Minister Michelle ONeill said while there were positive signs that social distancing was working, the biggest danger was complacency.

We must keep going for this for as long as we need to, she said.

Keeping these measures in place remains a necessity.

The deputy first minister said lives were being saved due to the measures.

We know its not easy, but this is the time to dig in, she said.

This is the time to stay strong and this is the time to stay at home and to save lives.

Earlier, Stormonts health department said almost 1,000 tests a day for coronavirus are being carried out in Northern Ireland.

Officials have faced calls for greater transparency over the number of people who are dying in care homes after contracting the infection as well as demands for more testing there.

Michelle ONeill said it was time to dig in and keep the restrictions in place (Kelvin Boyes /PA)

Sinn Fein Assembly Member Colm Gildernew called for Covid-19 testing to be carried out in all residential and care homes across Northern Ireland. Around 32 homes are known to be affected.

He said: I have been speaking to many families who have loved ones in residential and care homes and they are becoming increasingly and rightly concerned about the lack of information around testing for Covid-19 in these facilities.

He added: Age should not be a barrier to testing for anyone.

Testing has been rolled out to include temporary facilities at the SSE arena in Belfast and MOT vehicle testing garages.

A Department of Health statement said: The health and social care system is working intensively to significantly increase levels of testing across all our laboratory services, within health and social care facilities, other public sector bodies, and also within the commercial sector.

We have increased capacity in recent weeks and will increase further.

At the start of the outbreak, laboratories were processing around 40 tests per day.

The department said: That has now increased to almost 1,000 tests per day, adding: We expect to increase our testing capacity further once AFBI labs are operational.

AFBI is part of another branch of the devolved government outside the health system.

 Ministers @poots2edwin and @RobinSwannMoH visited @AFBI_NI yday to announce that AFBI labs will test up to 1,000 suspect COVID-19 samples a day, the help with the fight back. Working together, we can get through this #stayhome @healthdpt pic.twitter.com/sCMlctkWIP  DAERA (@daera_ni) April 15, 2020

The department went on: We have been faced with global supply issues with regard to the procurement of reagents to use in test kits; however, the test machines that AFBI use apply Kingfisher extraction methodologies and currently we understand that reagents for Kingfisher are in relatively good supply for Northern Ireland.

This presents a significant advantage for scale-up of testing in Northern Ireland.

Subject to being able to secure the key test kits and reagents, when fully operational in a number of weeks, it is expected that AFBI may test up to 1,000 samples per day.

Meanwhile, two jet skiers have been issued with fines after breaking restrictions designed to limit journeys.

The equipment was tracked down to Millisle in Co Down.

A Coastguard statement said: Please stay at home. Coastguard will continue to assist police with dispersing people using the coast as a recreational area during this pandemic.

The economy is enduring its fastest and deepest decline ever, Ulster Bank chief economist Richard Ramsey said.

The banks monthly survey showed the steepest ever fall in activity.
Quantedge was founded in 2006 and has offices in Singapore and New York. (PHOTO: Quantedge website)

By David Ramli

(Bloomberg) -- In December, Singapores Quantedge Capital Pte was celebrating one of its best-ever years. Now, its just rounded off its worst month in history, showing how quickly the coronavirus has upended hedge funds.

In a commentary sent to clients this month, the fund, which in 2019 grew by 70.5% to hit assets under management of over $2 billion, said early estimates showed it lost 28.8% in March. As global equities, bonds, currencies and commodities markets fell, so too did the funds value.

This is the third time since our inception in 2006 that we have a monthly loss larger than 20%; the other two being October 2008 during the global financial crisis and June 2013 during the taper tantrum, Quantedge wrote. While our long-time investors will not find the loss surprising, many of our newer investors who have not gone through past drawdowns with us may find this months returns disconcerting.

Quantedges pain is symptomatic of its willingness to take risks -- a strategy that helped the 13-year-old fund deliver annualized returns of 22% until February. And its far from alone; many hedge funds around the world struggled last month as financial markets sold off.

In Asia, high-risk, high-return funds that cater more to wealthy individuals who can stomach losses in volatile markets, like Quantedge, were a particular drag on regional performance. The Eurekahedge Asian Hedge Fund Index fell 7.5% in March versus a 4.9% drop in the U.S. and a 6.5% decline in Europe. Only around one-third of Asian funds in Eurekahedges database have provided March returns to date.

Some of these guys have tended to operate with a high-risk appetite compared to your average hedge funds, which means in good times when their convictions win out they win big, Eurekahedge head analyst Mohammad Hassan said. But if youre operating at 25% to 35% volatility targets and the markets go down the way they have, then of course youre going to be in for losses.

Story continues

Worlds Not Ending

Hassan said the relative preference for equities-based strategies among Asian hedge funds meant more suffered when markets tanked.

The crucial thing is how much nerve investors have, said Hassan. If you have to start liquidating to meet investors cash requirements then you cant play out your convictions.

Quantedge told clients it has aggressively cut its position sizes but has still maintained positive exposure across all major asset classes. By doing so, it aims to reduce its ultimate losses and have a foothold for when markets recover.

Fortunately for Quantedge, 82% of its assets under management are committed for three or more years, meaning investors cant withdraw on a whim and the money can continue to be invested. Hassan said funds like these would be the first to bounce back if markets improved.

It is not unexpected to witness the widespread liquidation of assets if investors think that the world as we know it is going to end, Quantedge wrote. However, this is an irrational fear. The world, the financial world in particular, is not ending. Humanity and the world economy have endured many far worse disasters than Covid-19 and have recovered from each one without fail.

Quantedges own staff arent immune either. They collectively represent more than 10% of its assets under management. This month alone, Quantedge employees have lost a total of more than $75 million, the firm said in its March update.

Quantedge, helmed by Suhaimi Zainul-Abidin, has a minimum investment of $1 million. Its website says its investment strategy is only suitable for long-term investors who can tolerate high variability in monthly returns.

 2020 Bloomberg L.P.
U.S. passenger airlines have agreed in principle to a $25 billion rescue package, said the U.S. Treasury Department on Apr 14. This will ensure that airline workers wont lose their jobs until October as the country continues to contain the spread of the deadly coronavirus.

The development finally sent airline stocks rallying. Airlines companies have been bleeding following the coronavirus outbreak, with hundreds of flights getting cancelled every day, as governments continue to implement travel restrictions. Things have become so bad that many carriers are opting layoffs and furloughs, while some are completely grounding their fleet.

Airlines Agree to Terms on $25 Billion Package

Per the deal, major U.S. airlines will receive 70% of the funds for payroll in cash assistance, which they wont be required to pay back. Smaller airline companies receiving $100 million or less wont be required to pay back any amount at all.

Per the terms of the deal laid out by the Treasury last week, large carriers would be required to repay 30% of the funds awarded, while warrants equal to 10% of the loan amount that were priced at last weeks close. The aid comes just at a time when airlines were starting to give up hopes of a turnaround.

Can Airlines Bounce Back?

Major airlines feel that passenger traffic, which has declined 95% due to coronavirus outbreak, will start recovering from October. However, they have also warned that the slowdown in air travel could extend into the next year or even longer.

That said, the $25 billion grant definitely comes as a much-required respite for the airline industry. The Treasury on Apr 14 said that all six major U.S airlines  American Airlines Group, Inc. AAL, United Airlines Holdings, Inc UAL, Delta Air Lines, Inc. DAL, Southwest Airlines Co. LUV, JetBlue Airways Corporation JBLU and Alaska Air Group, Inc. ALK  along with four other airlines have accepted the support.

Story continues

Following the news, shares of American Airlines, United Airlines and Southwest jumped 3.3% 6.9% and 1.5%, respectively, on Tuesday. Also, shares of Delta Air Lines, JetBlue and Alaska Air gained 5.6%, 2.3% and 5.2%, respectively. Each of the above mentioned stocks carries a Zacks Rank #3 (Hold). You can see the complete list of todays Zacks #1 Rank (Strong Buy) stocks here.

Details of Grants

Delta Airlines will be receiving $5.4 billion in grants. Of this, $1.6 billion will be an unsecured 10-year low-interest loan that has to be repaid. Delta will also provide the government with warrants to acquire 1% of its stock at $24.39 per share over five years.

JetBlue will be receiving $935.8 million in payroll grants, while Alaska along with its regional carrier Horizon Air will receive $992 million in funding that includes $267 million in the form of loans. American Airlines and Southwest Airlines will receive $5.8 billion and $3.2 billion in grants, respectively.

American Airlines will be required to repay $1.7 billion over the next 10 years, while Southwest Airlines will repay $1 billion over the same time period. The grant is likely to help the airlines in the near term. Airline companies have been fearing that further cancellation of flights due to coronavirus could completely cripple the industry.

At the same time, the statute states that companies receiving funds cannot lay off employees before Sep 30. Many airlines reduced headcount and grounded fleet over the past few weeks. However, the grants secure jobs of airline staff for now and will help the players to get back on their feet.

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CAIRO  Egyptian security forces over the last few days have arrested political and human rights activists in Cairo and in several Egyptian governorates who called for the release of prisoners and detainees in places of detention, as they fear the spread of the coronavirus and the threat it poses to the lives of prisoners.

The campaign included the arrest April 1 of prominent political activist Noha Kamal, daughter of Kamal Ahmed, a parliament member in the Alexandria governorate.

Noha has become known by her father's name among political activists. She has a long history in political work and provides humanitarian aid to the families of prisoners of conscience and freedom of expression as part of her personal initiatives.

Also among the arrested is prominent human rights lawyer Mohsen Bahnasi, who has been a lawyer for a number of political detainees during the past few years. He has called via his Facebook account for the immediate release of prisoners.

After Bahnasis arrest, case No. 558 of 2020 was opened in late March. The Supreme State Security Prosecution filed charges against both Kamal and Bahnasi, among others, for joining a terrorist group and spreading false news aimed at smearing the reputation of Egypt.

A human rights lawyer who attended the investigation session with Bahnasi and Kamal as part of the defense team before the prosecution told Al-Monitor on condition of anonymity that the case includes more than 20 activists who were arrested for their demands to release prisoners. The source said security forces have thus far refused to allow lawyers to view the papers and names of the accused or their places of detention.

The human rights lawyer said he works at a human rights center that receives daily reports whereby activists are arrested and placed in unknown locations simply because they brought up or asked for the release of detainees amid fears of a coronavirus outbreak.

There is no precise figure when it comes to the number of detainees, but according to the data we were able to gather during the investigations with Kamal and Bahnasi, there are at least 20 detainees in the case [No. 558 of 2020]. Security authorities in Egypt refuse to reveal the details of their detention, but they all face the same charges, he added.

Over the past two weeks, several initiatives saw the light and demanded the release of prisoners and detainees for fear of a COVID-19 outbreak among prisoners, especially considering the fact that prisons are overcrowded. However, Egyptian authorities seem to be responding to such demands with more arrests.

Spokesperson for the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights Rupert Colville condemned in a statement issued April 4 Egyptian authorities continued punishing of human rights activists and their failure to consider demands calling for the release of prisoners.

We are also concerned by reports the government has moved to quash criticism on social media and silence the work of human rights defenders and journalists focused on the COVID-19 pandemic, Colville said.

We advise that, rather than sanctioning critical voices through a punitive approach, the Egyptian authorities address disinformation by providing clear, reliable and fact-based information and seek to engage the population and empower civil society to fight the common threat of the pandemic, he added.

On March 28, the public prosecution issued a statement announcing that it would impose legal sanctions on anyone who publishes false information or data related to the new COVID-19 virus or the threat it poses to citizens. This is the charge the detainees are facing.

Based on said decision, people who spread rumors could be sentenced to at least two years in prison and asked to pay a fine ranging between 100,000 Egyptian pounds (about $6,500) and 300,000 Egyptian pounds (about $20,000).

Medhat al-Zahid, head of the leftist Socialist Popular Alliance Party, condemned the arrest of individuals calling for the release of prisoners.

Differences should be put aside during this crisis that everyone needs to face, he told Al-Monitor.

Zahid said the Socialist Popular Alliance Party launched an initiative April 1 calling for the release of financial wrongdoers, political detainees and convicts who do not pose a threat to society. We reiterate the need to decrease, not increase, the number of detainees.

The Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights, a human rights organization working in Egypt since 2004, also demanded the release of individuals detained on charges of calling for the release of prisoners.

In a statement issued April 6, the group said some individuals were arrested in their own homes on charges of joining a terrorist group, spreading false news and misusing social media, only because they used social media to call for reducing the number of prisoners held in penal institutions in Egypt.

The primary goal is to alleviate overcrowding in Egyptian prisons in an attempt to stem the spread of the coronavirus, the statement added.

We are concerned about the increasing number of prisoners in Egyptian penal institutions, and we call on the public prosecution to release the detainees held in connection with case 558 of 2020 and immediately drop the charges against them all, the statement continued.

There are 68 prisons across Egypt, 26 of which were established under President Abdel Fattah al-Sisis rule from 2014 to 2019. Although there are no local official statistics on the number of prisoners in Egypt, Human Rights Watch estimated in 2019 the presence of about 60,000 political prisoners. Meanwhile, journalists close to the state estimate the number to be at 110,000, including political detainees and criminals.

Meanwhile, the state has yet to take any measures to protect the prisoners from the threat of a coronavirus outbreak inside jails, and prison officers and employees are still allowed to leave the jail, mingle with people and then return to their workplace, further raising the possibility of passing the virus to prisoners.
Takealot CEO Kim Reid expects the national lockdown in South Africa to cost the company around R350 million, due to the restrictions on ecommerce.

Online retailers are prohibited from selling or delivering any non-essential goods during the lockdown.

Takealot, which also owns clothing store Superbalist and food delivery service Mr D Food, was hit hard by these restrictions.

Reid told Reuters their sales have plummeted since the lockdown began, which is leaving the company in distress.

Takealot quickly adapted to allow its customers to buy essential goods like healthcare products, sanitisers, and baby products.

This was not enough to prevent a big sales drop, however, and Reid said they are currently only seeing around 15% of their usual sales volumes.

Takealot also had to cancel many orders for non-essential goods which were placed before the lockdown, which could not be fulfilled due to the restrictions.

Call on the government to relax ecommerce restrictions

Reid hopes that the government will relax its restrictions on ecommerce and deliveries soon.

During the lockdowns in China, the US, and the UK, ecommerce players were allowed to operate without restrictions.

Reid argues that ecommerce helps with social distancing as it allows for the contactless delivery of products.

His views are echoed by other ecommerce companies which are lobbying Trade and Industry Minister Ebrahim Patel to allow online shopping and deliveries to continue.

They argue the ecommerce sector provides a valuable service to society while not adding undue risk to the further spread of COVID-19.

We hereby request that you seriously consider allowing approved courier companies adhering to stringent preventative measures to transport all goods domestically, a letter to Patel stated.

We can play a vital part in not only preventing the spread of the virus, but ensuring the well-being of South Africans  please allow us to do this.
The Minister for Communications, Climate Action and the Environment, Richard Bruton has acknowledged that he has concerns about the risk of Fine Gael forming a government with Fianna Fail.

I have expressed concerns about the risks, that it (a government) wouldnt be durable, that it wouldnt deliver, he told RTE radios Today with Sean ORourke show.

Mr Bruton is chairperson of his partys reference group which was formed to examine the planned coalition to make sure we step back from the cut and thrust of any negotiations.

There are seven key tests which will be applied, and his role is to ensure that any agreement meets the key tests, the primary one being that nothing will distract from the central task of protecting people at this time of crisis, he explained.

Any government that is formed must be durable and able to respond to the challenges of our time.

Members of the Fine Gael parliamentary party will receive the agreement document today and will meet at 5pm to discuss it, he said.

It would be doing no one any favour if a government was formed in haste and did not survive the pace, added Mr Bruton.

Only as the process evolves will we see if it can last the pace.

When asked if he was likely to lose his ministerial position in a new coalition, Mr Bruton said that there had not been any discussion yet on who might make up the government.

He said he recognised that the road ahead is tricky.

We are starting in good faith, we have to work this through and see if agreement can be reached.

Both parliamentary parties will hold separate meetings later today to sign off the details for the joint blueprint for government.

Following the conclusion of the parliamentary parties, Leo Varadkar and Micheal Martin will together approach other party leaders of the Green Party, the Labour Party and the Social Democrats.

The document will be shared with the other parties and the group of Independent TDs.

Fianna Fails negotiator, Michael McGrath, said the document sets out a number of key missions that an incoming government will need to deal with.

Speaking to RTE Morning Ireland, he said: First and foremost being, of course, dealing with the enormous economic fallout from the Covid-19 crisis, the preparation of a national economic recovery plan, but also drawing on the lessons from the general election and dealing with the issues that people demand.

He said the issues include affordable housing and universal access to health care.

Meanwhile, Justice Minister Charlie Flanagan said the deal between Fine Gael and Fianna Fail is a no brainer but that a lot more work needs to be done in order to form a stable coalition.

We need to move on and see if we can form a government. It has been over two months since the election. I believe it is a no brainer. I very much welcome the proposed deal between the two historic foes.

There will be an equality of authority between Fianna Fail and Fine Gael. There will be an equality of ministers because parties will be entering this historic agreement and doing so on the basis of equality.

Speaking to Newstalk FM, he said: There is a lot of work to be done here. All we have is a framework and a handshake. We have to ensure flesh is put on the bones of the deal.

- additional reporting from Press Association
BRIDGEVIEW, IL  In late March when the coronavirus first appeared in Illinois, Tina Meskill received a phone call from the Bridgeview Health Care Center, where her 81-year-old stepfather, James Zbonski, Sr., had been a resident since November 2019. She was told that her stepfather was showing symptoms of the virus.

They called me on March 29, saying he had severe chills and an unproductive cough, Meskill said. He wasnt verbally responsive and would only respond to touch. The doctor there said he wanted my stepfather to go to [Advocate] Christ [Medical Center] for an evaluation.

Meskill met the ambulance transporting her stepfather at the hospital. She was able to visit him in his room for a few minutes and drop off his do-not-resuscitate order with medical staff.

We were both wearing masks, Meskill said. He was talking to me, so I dont know where him not being responsive at the nursing home was coming from. He didnt know who I was, but he was talking to me. That was the last time I physically saw him.

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Zbonski was given a COVID-19 test at the hospital. The next day, doctors told Meskill that her stepfather tested positive for coronavirus. In keeping with his final wishes, Zbonski was not put on a ventilator. Instead, he was placed in hospice and made comfortable.

On April 6, a nurse at Advocate Christ held the phone up to her stepfathers ear so that Meskill and her mother could say their final goodbyes. Zbonski died a few hours later.

I told him it was okay to go, Meskill said.

Between March 29 and April 10, six elderly people whose addresses match the nursing homes address at 8100 S. Harlem Ave., Bridgeview succumbed to coronavirus, according to Cook County Medical Examiner reports. All six died at Advocate Christ Medical Center in Oak Lawn, which is treating a majority of the [South Sides] most critical cases.

Story continues

The Cook County Department of Public Health is aware and in communication with the facility in Bridgeview, spokeswoman Kimberly Conrad Junius said. We have been working with them on an ongoing basis; checking in regularly, daily if possible, to answer questions as they arise.

Like Zbonski, who suffered from dementia, hypertension, coronary artery disease and valvular heart disease, the other coronavirus patients had underlying health conditions that were contributing factors to their deaths.

My stepfather was sick and had a lot of health issues, but he wouldnt have gotten pneumonia or respiratory failure if he didnt get coronavirus, Meskill said. I dont know when he started showing symptoms because the nursing home was on lockdown.

The coronavirus deaths originating from the nursing homes address began on March 29, with the passing of a 74-year-old man. The same day that Zboinski died, a 92-year-old woman also oassed away on April 6. A 99-year-old woman died on April 8, followed by a 100-year-old woman on April 9. A 67-year-old man died on April 10. The cause of their deaths was attributed to COVID-19 infections complicated by other underlying conditions.

Meskill and other families with loved ones at the facility claim the only communication they received was a letter mailed to their homes. The undated later was postmarked March 28, the day before the first patient at Advocate Christ died of coronavirus.

Nursing home administrator Martha Peck confirmed in the letter to families that a resident had tested positive for COVID-19 and was in stable condition at a hospital. The letter explained the facilitys efforts to assess residents vital signs and oxygen levels every eight hours. Residents showing symptoms of coronavirus were placed in isolation and their physician notified. The letter invited families to be placed on an email list to receive real time updates about conditions at the nursing home.

Meskill said that by the time she received the letter her stepfather had already been admitted to the hospital. Other families who contacted Patch said they received the letter and their attempts to get recent updates about conditions at the nursing home have gone unanswered.

At that time I didnt think it would be necessary due to him already being admitted to the hospital, she said. Had I gotten the letter when the first case was reported I would have asked to be put on the list. But one day before I was kind of like, too late now.

A similar statement posted March 26 on the facilitys website around the time Pecks letter was sent to families, confirmed several residents testing positive for COVID-19.

Additionally, we have had a resident who had only been in the facility ten days transfer to the hospital and test positive. In this case, that resident did pass a few days later due pneumonia associated with COVID-19, along with other complicating factors at the hospital. There have been some additional residents who were transferred to the hospital in unstable condition experiencing increased respiratory issue and high fevers. Each of them were tested and found to be positive. Currently, these residents are in the hospital and will return once stable.

The statement went on to say that while testing is a vital part of this process  when we inquired about testing residents and staff, the standard does not advise testing for anyone who is asymptomatic.

Peck did not return repeated calls and emails seeking further comment.

Coming off a 14-day self-quarantine period after Meskill from being exposed to stepfathers coronavirus, said she has yet to hear from the nursing home since his death.

They havent bothered to reach out to offer their condolences, she said. This was one of their residents, Im his power of attorney, and they didnt contact me. Ive received no information about collecting his belongings.

More on Patch:

Illinois Coronavirus Update April 15: 23,247 Cases; 868 Deaths

Pritzker Can't Wash Hands Of Coronavirus Primary Risk To Voters



Coronavirus: No Time For 'Terrified' Chicago Nurses To Break Down





This article originally appeared on the Oak Lawn Patch
Editors note: The post has been updated to correct the description of the Game of Life Conway invented.

A renowned Princeton University mathematician and professor, known for inventing the cellular automaton Game of Life, died last week from complications related to COVID-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus.

John Horton Conway, 82, died on April 11 in New Brunswick, according a release from the university.

"John Conway was an amazing mathematician, game wizard, polymath and storyteller who left an indelible mark on everyone he encountered  colleagues, students and beyond  inspiring the popular imagination just as he unraveled some of the deepest mathematical mysteries, said Igor Rodnianski, a Princeton University professor of mathematics and chair of the universitys Department of Mathematics. His childlike curiosity was perfectly complemented by his scientific originality and the depth of his thinking. It is a great loss for us and for the entire mathematical world.

I am sorry to confirm the passing of my colleague John Conway. An incomparable mathematician, a pleasant neighbor, and an excellent coffee acquaintance.



His passing was sudden (fever started only Wednesday morning). Part of coronavirus's hard toll in New Jersey.  Sam Wang (@SamWangPhD) April 12, 2020

Conway, who was born in Liverpool, England, got his B.A. from Cambridge University in 1959 and his Ph.D. there five years later before coming to Princeton in 1987.

He taught at the university until he retired in 2013 and during his time there he made significant contributions to mathematics in the fields of group theory, number theory, algebra, geometric topology, theoretical physics, combinatorial game theory and geometry, according to universitys release.

CORONAVIRUS RESOURCES: Live map tracker | Businesses that are open | Homepage

Of all of his accomplishments, he was probably most well known for inventing the Game of Life, a concept he came up with in the 1970s to describe how life can evolve from an initial state, the university said.

His enthusiasm for mathematics made him a popular teacher on campus and he was known for carrying props such as ropes, dice, models and even a Slinky, in his pockets to entertain students, university officials said.

Conway met his wife, Diana, at the university bookstore in 1996 before they got married in 2001.

John was the most fascinating human being Ive ever met, Conway said in the university release. He was not only interested in math, he was interested in everything.

He is survived by Diana and son Gareth as well as children from his first and second marriages. He also leaves behind three grandchildren and several great-grandchildren.

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.

Chris Sheldon may be reached at csheldon@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter @chrisrsheldon Find NJ.com on Facebook. Have a tip? Tell us. nj.com/tips.
The virtual visit was created as an escape for those whose plans to visit the Faroe Islands have been temporarily put on hold due to current travel restrictions and for those looking ahead for future inspiration. With a population of just 50,000 across the Faroes' 18 islands, the remote tour offers armchair travellers a chance to visit distant lands and to walk outdoors, discovering pristine landscapes, wild seascapes and the occasional Faroese sheep. Virtual travellers can also explore key landmarks and the capital city of Torshavn.

Located in the North Atlantic, halfway between Iceland and Norway, the Faroe Islands is welcoming virtual travellers from around the globe via mobile devices, tablets and PCs. The new site will allow virtual visitors to explore the Faroes' rugged mountains and see its cascading waterfalls and traditional grass-roofed houses close-up by interacting - live - with a local Faroese, who will act as their eyes, ears and body on a virtual exploratory tour of the destination.

The Faroese locals will be equipped with a live video camera, allowing virtual visitors not only to see the views from an on-the-spot perspective, but also control where and how they explore, by using their computer or phone keypad to turn, walk, run and even jump. Just like a real-life computer game, the main player will control the moves of the Faroese islander/s, who will not only explore locations on foot, but also take to the skies by helicopter giving the virtual visitors a bird's eye perspective on this beautiful island nation's steep grassy slopes, its 80,000 sheep and its unspoilt, wild and natural countryside.

During the virtual tours, which start on Wednesday 15 April and run once or twice daily (9 EST and Noon EST) for about 10 days, (livestreamed on Visit Faroe Islands' Facebook and Instagram pages), the Visit Faroe Islands tourist board team will be online in real time to answer any questions that participants may have, providing both inspiration and expert knowledge about places to visit and things to see once the islands have reopened to visitors.

Guri Hjgaard, Director of Visit Faroe Islands, says that the nation is proud to welcome virtual tourists to its remote North Atlantic location. "When the travel bans began to escalate, we sat and wondered how we could recreate a Faroe Islands' experience for those who had to cancel or postpone their trip to the Faroe Islands, and for everyone else stuck at home. The result is this new platform that enables those in isolation to take a walk across our wild landscapes and to explore beyond their own four walls.

"We believe that our remote islands are the perfect place to inspire people in lockdown  and, naturally, we hope to welcome them in person once everyone is free to travel again."

The launch of the virtual tourism idea is the latest in a series of innovative initiatives by the Faroe Islands' tourist board to share their remote homeland with the world, following the success of Google Sheep View (which saw sheep mapping the islands for Google Street View) and Faroe Islands Translate (which had local people translating, in real time, phrases requested from around the world into Faroese).

The Faroes' Closed for Maintenance, Open for Voluntourism project, which saw the country close to tourists for few days for the first time last year, hosting 100 volunteers who took part in projects to protect the environment and key visitor spots, has been postponed this year due to COVID-19. New dates later in 2020 will be announced as soon as possible.

The Faroe Islands will remain closed to tourists until the end of April at the earliest. Fortunately, the effect of the COVID-19 on the health of locals has been limited. The number of people recovering from the virus currently exceeds the number of people being infected.

To experience the Faroe Islands as a virtual tourist through a local, go to remote-tourism.com. The first public tour will take place on Wednesday 15 April at 9 am EST with a second tour at Noon EST

Editor's Notes:



About the Faroe Islands

Population: 52,199

Number of sheep: 80,000

Number of islands: 18

Total area: 1,399 km2

Estimated number of overseas visitors: 130,000 in 2019

Coronavirus in the Faroe Islands - Click here for the latest information on the Coronavirus situation.

SOURCE Visit Faroe Islands

Related Links

http://www.visitfaroeislands.com/


Simran Ahuja By

Express News Service

BENGALURU: The azaan from a mosque, chirping birds, the regular beeping of a hospital machinery, water from a dripping tap... A new project on Instagram calls for recordings from ones confined environment. Titled Share Your Quiet, the initiative was the brainchild of Pallavi Paul, a multimedia artist and Ph.D student at Jawaharlal Nehru University. Though Delhi-based herself, Pauls project is open to everyone. After taking off on March 26, the project has over 200 audio recordings from places around the world, including Serbia, Portugal, France, Italy, China, and of course, India.

The Janata Curfew showed us this bizarre display of public spirit, that was full of noise. But what about those who chose to withdraw and instead ask pressing questions about the lives of workers?, points out Paul, who was approached by Sunaparanta Goa Centre for the Arts for a surviving self-quarantine project.

The result was Share Your Quiet, which Paul terms as a space that houses gestures like withdrawal from noise and the choice of non-participation. Social media is throwing up lots of content. An archive of the noise being made, snippets of hyper-productivity people indulge in and more. But heres a platform for you to express your quietude, says the 32-year-old.

Heres where the name also plays a part. Silence can sometimes be forced. Choosing to be quiet, however, is an act of agency, explains Paul, who was surprised by the response she received. Among the 200 clips, three stood out for her: The beeping of a hospital machine, the sound of a saw, and that of a child reciting poetry in the background. It helps that people dont need to display an understanding of the situation.

It is just a recording of their senses, she adds. About 50-60 such clips are compiled and uploaded on Sunaparantas Instagram page (@sunaparanta_goa) every Monday, until the lockdown ends. According to Bengaluru-based multimedia artist Amshu Chukki, who also sent a recording, this edit of a soundscape works well. You listen without realising the seamless transition or who sent what. Theres an anchoring of the collective instead of a geographical one, he says, adding that he sent in the birdsong he could hear from his window. Something like this also makes you slow down and gives you a sense of presence and immediacy. It can only be helpful in these times.
URUMQI, April 15 (Xinhua) -- From a herdsman to a salaried man, Polatinur Juandehr has bid farewell to poverty thanks to a string of supportive policies in northwest China's Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region.

The only possessions of the ethnic Kazakh herdsman were two cows given by his parents when he got married about 15 years ago, which were not enough to support a whole family. Juandehr needed to herd for other herdsmen and still found it hard to make both ends meet.

Things began to change in 2016 when Juandehr's family, along with other 851 poverty-stricken households, moved to a township in Qinghe County, Altay Prefecture in Xinjiang for better living conditions with the help of local government.

Each poverty-stricken household could get 0.67 hectares of land according to local policies, and every member of these households could get 3,500 yuan (about 496.48 U.S. dollars) for leasing the land to agriculture-related companies each year.

Local government not only provided residential buildings with complete water and electricity facilities for these poverty-stricken households but built a total of 36 cowsheds that herdsmen could use for free.

Juandehr applied for a 50,000-yuan poverty alleviation loan from the local government and bought five cows. "I can earn more than 1,000 yuan by supplying fresh milk to a dairy plant in the township," he said.

Hearing that local enterprises could offer better pay, Juandehr and other herdsmen were not satisfied with taking care of their livestock. They decided to look after the livestock in turns and find jobs in these enterprises to increase income.

Juandehr found a job in an agricultural equipment company in the township and could earn more than 4,000 yuan each month after several months' training. Now Juandehr has paid off his loan and increased his cows to seven. "My income is much better than before," he said.

More than 10,000 peasants and herdsmen in the county has been lifted out of poverty with better living conditions since 2014.

Xinjiang has implemented a string of supportive measures to boost employment, such as providing loans and subsidies and cutting taxes for those who set up small and micro-enterprises or are engaged in self-employed business.

Creating jobs has been a top priority for Xinjiang to enhance people's wellbeing and fight poverty. Official statistics showed that a total of 645,000 people were estimated to have cast off poverty in the autonomous region in 2019. The region is determined to eradicate absolute poverty by lifting the remaining 165,800 people out of poverty this year.
A fresh rallying call has been made for British agricultural workers and crop pickers as the soft fruit season soon approaches.

Fruit picking in parts of the UK will reach a peak in high summer ahead of the main season for vegetable harvesting in the autumn.

But due to the global nature of the Covid-19 crisis, growers remain concerned that it will be difficult to recruit the 80,000 workers that are required to undertake seasonal work.

This is despite a record demand for UK agricultural jobs, with one recruitment website witnessing a huge 83 percent spike in applications.

It comes as HMRC recently confirmed that individuals who have been furloughed are able to take up alternative employment on a temporary basis during the period of their furlough if contractually enabled to do so by their employer.

Farming groups are now promoting their recruitment services to individuals who may be out of work or on a temporary furlough period to take up paid work in the countryside.

NFU Scotland is one group issuing a rallying call for people to assist on-farm ahead of the Scottish soft fruit season staring in earnest in the next few weeks.

Having launched its employment-matching service on 20 March, the union has seen 'unprecedented levels' of visits and has already matched a number of Scottish growers to available workers.

But NFU Scotlands Horticultural Working Group Chairman, James Porter, who farms in Angus, said growers need 'all hands to the pump' to ensure harvesting and distribution can continue.

The initial feedback from NFU Scotlands employment-matching service, launched three weeks ago, is hugely encouraging," he said.

"I am delighted that it has already proven successful in matching individuals who had found themselves out of work due to the public health crisis with essential employment in our countryside.

With the clarification from HMRC this week that workers furloughed, I hope we might encourage them to view our initiative as an excellent way for furloughed individuals to top up their wages also."

However, Mr Porter said it remains 'extremely unlikely' that growers will be able to recruit the volume of workers that are needed during the fruit and vegetable seasons.

As such, NFU Scotland is calling on the UK government to participate in the EU Commissions guidelines which ensure the exchange of seasonal farm workers between member states so that harvesting, planting and tending can be carried out.

Another industry initiative has seen over 10,000 British people sign up to work at more than 500 farms across the country as part of the ''Feed the Nation' campaign.

In a new update, charity Concordia said roles for April are currently filled  but applications are being accepted from people looking for work from May onwards.
Egyptian security forces have killed seven terrorists who were planning an attack on the country's Coptic Orthodox Christian population during their upcoming Easter celebrations, the country's Ministry of Internal Affairs said.

According to the ministry, security forces raided an apartment in a densely-populated region of the capital. Mohammed Fawzy Al Hofi, a lieutenant officer, was killed during the attack, and one other police officer suffered injuries, the statement read.

Security forces found six machine guns and ammunition in the apartment after the raid, according to the statement.

On Tuesday evening, the national media reported on the security operation, which took place in a multistorey building in the Al Amireya region of the Egyptian capital.

The country's Coptic Orthodox Christians are set to celebrate Easter Sunday on April 19.

In April 2017, Egypt's Coptic Christians were targeted by bomb blasts during services to celebrate Palm Sunday. Two blasts in the cities of Tanta and Alexandria left at least 44 people dead.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Policemen in Madhya Pradesh's



Indore city, which is the worst coronavirus-hit region in the state, have tonsured their heads as a preventive measure against contracting the deadly disease.

Some of these men in khaki, with their shaved heads, were seen manning the streets of Chandan Nagar and other areas of the walled city during the COVID-19 lockdown.

"A head constable and four constables of Chandan Nagar police station have tonsured their heads to reportedly protect themselves from the virus, as they believe that the pathogen can latch on to their hair," town inspector (TI) Yogesh Tomar of Chandan Nagar police station said.

Apart from this, police personnel deployed in the affected areas washed their hands frequently to stave off the infection, he said.

Some policemen also believe that after tonsuring their heads they can apply sanitisers on their scalps as an extra precaution, the official said.

A constable, on condition of anonymity, said he had tonsured his head as a preventive measure since he was deployed in one of the most severely hit areas of the city.

"The shaved head also provides some respite from the summer heat," he added.

Meanwhile, chief medical and health officer Praveen Jadia said 544 people in the city had tested positive for COVID-19 so far, of which 37 had succumbed to the pandemic.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Authorities are investigating the cause of a three-vehicle crash that left a passenger dead in Cumberland County.

Geremias Velasquez-De Leon, 25, of Rosenhayn, was in the backseat of a 1996 Toyota Corolla traveling on Route 77 in Upper Deerfield Township on April 11 when the vehicle was struck by a Hyundai Sonata just after 7 a.m. at milepost 7.4, according to New Jersey State Police.

The Sonata ran off the roadway, while the impact sent the Toyota into a 2011 Toyota Corolla.

Velasquez-De Leon was pronounced dead a short time later, while the drivers of all three vehicles suffered moderate injuries, police said.

The cause of the crash remains under investigation and no charges had been filed as of Wednesday.

Matt Gray may be reached at mgray@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter @MattGraySJT. 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.
Outside daffodils have shot up, waving their crowns; forsythias in their crude and blinding crimps of yellow burst forth, as they did every spring in the yard of my childhood home. Im not ready.

FaceTime: my mother under a white blanket, white thinning hair pulled back, hollowed eyes, sculpted cheekbones, frail hands. Her face reminds me of a painting I cant recall, maybe by Rembrandt. My son, Lucas, and husband, David, briefly join the FaceTime. We reminisce. How she stood over me to make sure I meticulously dried every piece of lettuce for the salad for her elaborate holiday dinners. Never bottled condiments on the table. Kept a suitcase of antique toy cars and trucks she collected at flea markets in her house when my toddler son and nephew came for a visit. Lucas, now grown, remembers Lauras bedroom in our childhood home where she wallpapered in black-and-white posters of Marilyn Monroe, John Kennedy, Hermans Hermits, The Beatles. A last text from Laura a few hours later. Five p.m., March 29. Moms gone.

In Jewish tradition the body must be buried within 24 hours. I fight with myself about whether to travel to Cleveland. Davids judgment is less clouded by emotion. The rabbi calls to express his condolences. In Judaism the period of Nisan is the first month of the Jewish calendar, and since Passover is the spring festival of liberation, it is a special time for our mother to leave us and pass over. Ordinarily, when someone dies, theres a 30-day mourning period following shiva, but Passover cancels it to commemorate the month of rebirth, the rabbi says. He briefly outlines the plan. No funeral service. Only a grave site burial. Only 10 people permitted. Everyone must stand six feet apart. The ritual of Kriah, the tearing of the cloth, a symbol of pain and grief; throwing dirt on the coffin, a mark of closure. Afterward the seven-day shiva candle.

A pearl-gray morning of howling winds. I dress for the virtual graveside burial in a black flowing blouse my mother would love, put on the sapphire earrings she gave me, lipstick  my mother never left the house without it. David changes from his now-that-were-in-lockdown sweats into a crisp blue button-down shirt. A driver in a sedan arrives to pick up Laura. We sisters group-text (and occasionally Laura snaps us a photo) as the car drives through mostly empty roads to Mount Olive Cemetery in the Cleveland suburbs.

We switch from text to FaceTime. Laura shows off her new glasses. We blow kisses. The sedan pulls up the long drive to the cemetery. It is one of the grayest days I remember. At 11 a.m. the service begins. Through the window of my phone a jerky kaleidoscope of cloudy sky, a small blue tent flapping in the wind, underneath a podium where the rabbi presides, a quick flash to the chestnut-colored coffin soon to be lowered into the ground. Hundreds of gravestones like dominoes stand in the background, a few bare trees just beginning to bud. A blue bird skims the weighted sky. I look up from the tiny screen on my phone and out my own window in Long Island at a family of trees in the yard, their crippled, arthritic branches a chorus of joining arms.
Daniel Kwadwo Owusu

15.04.2020 LISTEN

Deloitte Ghana is delighted to announce the appointment of Daniel Kwadwo Owusu as its new Country Managing Partner, effective 1 June 2020.

Daniel takes over the leadership from Charles LarbiOdam, who will retire from Deloitte at the end of our financial year, 31 May 2020.

Charles has served Deloitte with distinction for 20 years and has been instrumental in the transformation of the business in Ghana.

Daniel is a Chartered Accountant with over 22 years of experience in accounting, internal and external audits. He also has extensive experience in advisory services and has built a solid reputation in leading complex assignments across several sectors.

In his role as the Audit & Assurance leader in Ghana, Daniel has overseen the business strategy and transformation of the line of service within the practice.

Daniel worked in the Deloitte UK office as a Manager responsible for large engagements in the Financial Services sector, specialising in banking, insurance, and pension fund companies for three (3) years. In addition to working in the UK, Daniel has worked in South Africa, Mali, Liberia, Sierra Leone, Nigeria, Kenya, and Egypt.

For about four (4) years, Daniel served as the Professional Practice Director (PPD) for the Ghana Office before moving on to become the Lead Audit Partner.

Daniel is a product of the Institute of Professional Studies (IPS) now University of Professional Studies Accra (UPSA). He is a member of the Institute of Chartered Accountants Ghana (ICAG) and serves as a member of the Professional Standards and Ethics Committee (PSEC) of the Institute. He is also a member of the Certified Information Systems Auditor (CISA), USA. Daniel holds Masters in Business Administration (MBA) degree in Finance from the University of Leicester, UK and a Master of Science (MSc) degree in Computer Systems Auditing from the London Metropolitan University, UK.

Daniel is an affable and a solution-focused individual. He believes there is a solution to every situation that confronts humankind. To him, leadership and empowerment is a means to identify, develop and unleash the potential of people. Daniel will continue as the Audit Leader for Ghana.

Charles Larbi-Odam, an outgoing Country Managing Executive described Daniel as an exceptional leader. He said, I can think of no one better to lead Deloitte Ghana at this time. His 22-year career with Deloitte combined with his strong core values makes him the perfect choice to lead Deloitte Ghana. I admire his calmness, commitment to conducting business with high integrity, quality and level of professional behaviour.

...I am personally delighted to be handing over the reins to such an outstanding person. I do not doubt Daniels leadership in further strengthening Deloitte's capabilities in this marketplace by helping clients to address their burning issues, brought about by rapid changes in the business environment."

Reflecting on his appointment, Daniel said, I feel honoured to assume this important position at a time when our firm is aspiring to be the undisputed professional services leader in Ghana. The appointment is not only the highlight of my career but it also represents my fellow partners vote of confidence in me. They share with me the common vision of building a stronger Ghana practice for the future generation.

...I am passionately committed to placing our clients at the absolute centre of everything we do. Filling the shoes of my great mentor and Uncle, Charles will be no easy feat. His support and that of my colleagues, has helped me reach this landmark in my career. I thank them and will work to reward their faith in me.

As the new Leader for Deloitte Ghana, Daniel will take up the responsibilities that focus on enhancing the depth and breadth of the Firm's capabilities in supporting clients in this constantly evolving environment, and also strengthening the Deloitte brand in Ghana.

About Deloitte

Deloitte refers to one or more of Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu Limited, a UK private company limited by guarantee, and its network of member firms, each of which is a legally separate and independent entity. Please see www.deloitte.com/aboutto learn more.

Deloitte is a leading global provider of audit and assurance, consulting, financial advisory, risk advisory, tax, and related services. With 175 years of hard work and commitment to making a real difference, our organization has grown in scale and diversityapproximately 312,000 people in 150 countries and territories, providing these servicesyet our shared culture remains the same. Our organization serves four out of five Fortune Global 500 companies.

About Deloitte Ghana

The Ghanaian firm of Deloitte has a long history in the country, dating back to when it was originally formed by Mr. James Donald Barnes CA Scotland on 1 January 1947, under the name and style of J. D. Barnes & Co. Chartered Accountants. As one of Ghanas leading professional services firms, Deloitte provides audit & assurance, tax & regulatory, consulting, risk advisory and financial advisory services through approximately 250 professionals across the country.
Sweden's softer approach to containing the new coronavirus was already an outlier in Europe and is coming under even more scrutiny as death rates leap ahead of its Nordic neighbours.

As of Wednesday, a total of 1,203 people had died from nearly 12,000 confirmed cases of COVID-19 -- a far higher rate than Finland, Denmark and Norway, which have all instituted more restrictive containment measures.

"The authorities and the government stupidly did not believe that the epidemic would reach Sweden at all," Bo Lundback, professor of epidemiology at the University of Gothenburg, told AFP.

In contrast to Nordic neighbours and most of Europe, Sweden has not imposed extraordinary lockdown orders.

Instead, it has called for citizens to take responsibility and follow social distancing guidelines along with stronger measures such as banning gatherings of more than 50 people and halting visits to retirement homes.

Despite international attention and domestic debate, the government has maintained its course, taking its cue from its expert authority, the Public Health Agency.

Lundback and 21 other researchers urged the government to reconsider and institute "rapid and radical measures" in a joint article in Dagens Nyheter newspaper on Tuesday.

"Sweden was poorly or even not at all prepared," Lundback told AFP.

But officials insist their plan is sustainable in the long-term, rejecting drastic short-term measures as too ineffective to justify their impact on society.

Last week, health officials announced 40 percent of deaths in the Stockholm region -- the epicentre of the epidemic -- could be traced to retirement and care homes.

Even with measures targeting these institutions, half of the retirement homes in the capital have had cases of the virus.

One-third of the country's municipalities had reported cases in retirement homes, public radio reported in early April.

The government has had trouble explaining the outbreaks.

"We still don't quite know the reason, but there aren't too many things to choose from," Health Minister Lena Hallengren said in a Dagens Nyheter column earlier this month.

"Either the ban on visits hasn't been enforced or staff with symptoms, or that didn't think they had symptoms, have gone to work," she wrote.

The status and working conditions of care home staff in Sweden could help to explain the pattern of the spread in Sweden, according to Ingmar Skoog, director of the Centre for Health and Ageing at the University of Gothenburg.

Retirement home staff are often paid low wages and on casual contracts, he said, and they "do not get any salary if they stay home with mild symptoms".

In neighbouring Finland care workers enjoy far greater social protections, meaning they can stay away from work if they get sick.

The virus in Sweden has also disproportionately affected those born abroad -- the Public Health Agency pointing out that this was true whether the people hailed from Africa, Europe or the Middle East.

In contrast, health officials in Norway said there had been "no general over-representation among foreign-born".

According to figures released last week, some of Stockholm's most disadvantaged neighbourhoods, where many immigrants live, were up to three times more affected than the rest of the capital.

Gina Gustavsson, associate professor of political science at Uppsala University, said the government showed "a worrying lack of knowledge" or a lack of interest in people with different social backgrounds.

Sweden's Prime Minister Stefan Lofven, speaking to broadcaster SVT over the weekend, conceded that "preparedness has not been good enough.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Right at Home, a leading international in-home care provider, has been caring for seniors, wherever they call home, for 25 years. Their mission, to improve the quality of life for those they serve, is evident in the 50,000-plus seniors they care for each year. During the COVID-19 pandemic, seniors need everyones help because older adults are some of the most adversely affected by the coronavirus. Right at Home caregivers are working harder than ever to help keep seniors safe and healthy, but they need your assistance.

Right at Home created T-shirts with the slogan, Because Someone I Love Is a Senior. The shirts are a symbol that we can all do the inconvenient things, such as social distancing, hand-washing, and sheltering in place, to help stop the spread of COVID-19.

For each shirt sold through May 31, 2020, Right at Home will donate $5 to the American Red Cross COVID-19 response. We recognize that life-saving blood transfusions dont stop during a crisis, and as we head into severe weather season, the Red Cross disaster relief program is ready to provide assistance to those who will be affected by hurricanes, tornadoes and related events, said Margaret Haynes, Chief Operating Officer. We are committed to helping the Red Cross maintain its blood bank supplies and supporting its disaster relief program so they can serve those in need.

How You Can Help



Purchase T-shirts at http://www.ILoveASenior.com.

Post to social media a picture or video of you wearing the shirt and share how a senior loved one has affected your life. Use #SomeoneILoveIsASenior, #RightatHome #LoveIsRightatHome and/or #RightatHomeCares.

Ask your friends and family to consider supporting the effort by purchasing shirts and postings selfies on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter wearing the shirts. Remind them to include #SomeoneILoveIsASenior.

ABOUT RIGHT AT HOME:

Founded in 1995, Right at Home offers in-home companionship and personal care to seniors and adults with a disability who want to continue to live independently. Most Right at Home offices are independently owned and operated and directly employ and supervise all caregiving staff, each of whom is thoroughly screened, trained, and bonded/insured prior to entering a clients home. Right at Homes global headquarters is based in Omaha, Nebraska, with more than 500 franchise locations in the U.S. and seven other countries. For more information on Right at Home, visit About Right at Home at http://www.rightathome.net/about-us or read the Right at Home franchising blog at http://www.rightathomefranchise.com/blog/. To learn more about franchising opportunities, please visit http://www.rightathomefranchise.com/.

ABOUT THE AMERICAN RED CROSS:

The American Red Cross shelters, feeds and provides emotional support to victims of disasters; supplies about 40 percent of the nation's blood; teaches skills that save lives; provides international humanitarian aid; and supports military members and their families. The Red Cross is a not-for-profit organization that depends on volunteers and the generosity of the American public to perform its mission. For more information, please visit https://www.redcross.org/ or https://www.redcross.org/cruz-roja.html, or visit us on Twitter at @RedCross.
The chief investment officer of one of the country's biggest public pension funds said the government response to the coronavirus should be focused on supporting unemployed workers, not stocks owned by pensioners.

"I don't buy in to just [saving] the pensioners. Yes, they're important, but they're a small percentage. I think we have to start saving individual people," Christopher Ailman of CalSTRS said on "Squawk Box."

The $2.2 trillion CARES Act passed by Congress and other actions by the Federal Reserve have created an unprecedented economic support from the U.S. government as the coronavirus pandemic shut down large parts of the economy.

On Tuesday, the major airlines and the Treasury Department struck a deal on how the companies could receive payroll support to stay afloat and keep workers employed.

Ailman said it is "such a tough call" as to which companies should be helped, but he said the total amount would likely have negative economic effects long-term.

"It's a question of overall cost. All of a sudden, 'too big to fail,' remember that term from '08? Now we're implying that almost everything is too big to fail, and I hate to say it, but in capitalism we should have some destruction, even from events that people can't foresee. It's just different with this being a health crisis," Ailman said.

Government support of airlines has come under criticism, with some, including Social Capital CEO Chamath Palihapitiya, saying it would be better to let them fail.

CalSTRS, which stands for California State Teachers' Retirement System, has more than $225 billion in assets under management, making it the second largest public pension fund in the U.S. The CalSTRS investment team is still positioned defensively, Ailman said, and expects a slow economic recovery.

"We stopped the economy almost on a dime, which is amazing, but I don't think we're going to be able to restart it as efficiently. We're going to end up stumbling out of this slowly," Ailman said.








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DNA strand breaks resulting from wireless radiation can impair cell function, change cell structure and even lead to cell death. It is how humans age, and worse, how cancer develops. This knowledge has been available from as far back as in 1996 when two bioengineering researchers at the University of WashingtonDr. Henry Lai and Narendra Singh at the University of Washington in Seattle conducted a study documenting this breakthrough.

From years back, the electromagnetic radiation utilized by all mobile phone technologies has always led to worry about increased health risks, including developing certain types of cancer. Sadly, there is ample scientific evidence to show that these concerns are valid and that radiation is lethal to human life.

The higher you go up the electromagnetic spectrum, the more dangerous these rays become; clear risks from prolonged exposure have long been established. And recently, scientists have gone well beyond the usual frequencies used by mobile phones, which is the reason behind the public outcry following the rollout of the 5Gtechnology.

5G uses higher frequency waves than earlier mobile networks, allowing more devices to have access to the internet at the same time and at faster speeds and emitting higher energy radiation at unprecedented levels. So whereas, human life was at risk with the use of previous, more basic forms of wireless technology; with 5G networks, those risks are intensified to the most dangerous levels.

Worse still, there are established strict advisory limits for exposure to higher energy radiation levels that can lead to life damage, like medical x-rays and gamma rays. However, there would be no limits to our exposure to 5G and other wireless networks, which means, no limits to the damage it can cause to people who would be involuntarily exposed to the technology.

Response from the Industry

According to a report on 5G crisis.com, after President Bill Clinton signed the 1996 Telecommunications Act into law, scientific evidence of the potential harms of wireless radiation began to emerge. The telecom industry, fearing a public reaction to this evidence, started to lobby for clauses in the Telecommunications Act that would prevent any local interference with the installation of wireless antennas in local communities.

Besides, some scientists and public health who had already established that environmental factors influence our cell biology were still grappling with the idea of how a chronic illness can be caused by non-ionizing RF microwave radiation. However, their refusal to see the dangers does not mean they dont exist. Just like exposure to cigarette smoke and lead, can cause adverse health effects; increased involuntary exposure to wireless radiation is lethal to human life and many renowned scientists agree.

Dr. Robert O. Becker, surgeon and researcher who was twice nominated for the Nobel Prize, once observed, I have no doubt in my mind that, at the present time, the greatest polluting element in the earths environment is the proliferation of electromagnetic fields.

More than human life, research is revealing that EMR exposure causes harm to all living organisms, including plants, trees, insects, animals and bacteria, even at exposure levels below current U.S. safety guidelines.

A 2013 review of113 published, peer-reviewed studies bya group from the Institute of Environmental Sciences in the Netherlands on the ecological effects of RF-EMF found that in 70% of the studies, wireless radiation had a significant effect on birds, insects, other vertebrates, and multiple organisms and plants.

Other studies on wireless radiation and biological effects

In 2007, researchers at the University of Kentucky proved how exposure to RF microwave radiation can damage and sometimes destroy brain cells.

In 2012, Yale University scientists found that pregnant laboratory mice exposed to RF microwave radiation gave birth to offspring that had poorer memory and were more hyperactive than the control group.

More recently, in 2018, a study by the Ramazzini Institute in Italy, part-funded by the U.S. government, found that lab animals exposed to wireless radiation from distant cell towers were more likely to develop heart tumours than the unexposed group of animals. This was the first large-scale study that proved clear evidence of cancer risk from far-field exposures.

If all these technologies which operate at lower frequency levels that 5G have been known to cause this much harm to life, then one must wonder about the 5G network. According to a U.S. senator, quoted on Scientific American, there is no research on the health effects of the 5G technology, so we are flying blind. However, we are not necessarily flying bling considering the overwhelming amount of evidence of harmful effects of 2G and 3G.

Conclusion

Through the years, a growing number of respected scientists have found that the proliferation of wireless devices and computers are causing several significant health impacts. Individuals from all over the world have reportedly experienced all sorts of symptoms ranging from fatigue, headaches, mental confusion and heart palpitations when using wireless devices and when close to cell towers. Wireless radiations are an undeniable risk to our health and can no longer be ignored.

Over 300 scientists and medical doctors have signed the 5G Appeal that calls for an immediate suspension on the deployment of 5G and request that the government fund the research needed to implement biologically-based exposure limits that protect public health and safety, until then, it is best that you remain skeptical about the 5G technology.
From April 20, students who wish to take the Graduate Management Admission Test (GMAT) for pursuing education in Ivy league universities can do it from their homes as GMAC, the body which conducts these tests has introduced this new step in view of the coronavirus lockdown.

According to a Graduate Management Admission Council (GMAC) official, the new GMAT online exam is designed specifically for business schools and candidates exploring an advanced business degree.

As the COVID-19 pandemic has resulted in the closing of testing centers around the world, GMAC quickly moved to offer an alternative solution that is accessible online. The interim GMAT Online exam will help candidates feel safe while meeting upcoming application deadlines, according to GMAC.

GMAC has made the interim solution available on Mac and PC platforms and will prioritize the availability of the alternative assessment as the organization seeks to support test takers and schools in impacted markets, with the exception of markets limited by regulatory restrictions like China, Iran, Cuba, Sudan, Slovenia, and North Korea.

GMAC is also working to provide appropriate online options for candidates with disabilities who meet specific eligibility criteria.

The Quantitative, Verbal and Integrated Reasoning sections (omitting the Analytical Writing Assessment section) will have the same type and number of items and the same time for completion, creating consistency in content and structure with the GMAT exam administered in test centers. It will also use the same scoring algorithm and score scale for the Section Scores and Total Score as the test center-based version. Appointments for around-the-clock test dates begin on April 20, 2020 and run through June 15, 2020, at which time the need for the interim solution will be reevaluated.

Supporting candidates in their pursuit of business school and helping schools evaluate talent is at the core of our mission and has always been our highest priority, said Vineet Chhabra, senior director and head of the GMAT product at GMAC. As COVID-19 evolved, and quickly changed how we have traditionally administered the GMAT exam, our team immediately transitioned focus to developing an online testing solution that empowers business schools and candidates to discover and evaluate each other during this interim period. GMAT Online maintains the GMAC standard of offering a valid and rigorous assessment, with critical security practices and protocols tailored for an online proctored environment.

The GMAT exam is the most widely used graduate business school assessment, recognized by more than 7,000 programs worldwide especially many top US B-schools.
Member of Parliament for the Manhyia South Constituency, Dr. Matthew Opoku Prempeh has donated some foodstuff to the Kumasi Childrens Home.



The gesture is to support the hospital feed inwards during the partial lockdown in the region to help curb the spread of Coronavirus.



Presenting the items, he noted that As you are aware of, governments decision to partially lockdown some communities in our country, has resulted in some difficulties to the section of Ghanaians, and these children are of no exception.



Therefore my donation, which is part of spiritual and social obligation, is also aimed at helping managers of the home to feed the children well so that they will stay home and adhere to the governments lockdown order to help stop the speed of the virus.



I am also using this opportunity to appeal to Ghanaians, especially the well-to-do people in our midst, to constantly donate to the various orphanage homes in order to support the children, who have no parents to turn to look up to for support and care. He added





















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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Fitch Group has said it has pledged $50,000 to Give2Asia to fight coronavirus pandemic

New Delhi: Fitch Group has said it has pledged $50,000 to Give2Asia to fight coronavirus pandemic.

Funds from Fitch and other donors will help towards the purchase of medical supplies, construction of hospitals, and providing frontline staff with food, lodging and subsidies.

Give2Asia is an international non-profit organisation that coordinates funding between global donors with charitable projects and social enterprises across the Asia-Pacific region.

Click here to follow LIVE updates on coronavirus outbreak

It has launched a campaign to support frontline health workers and hospitals responding to the outbreak, including partnerships with several non-governmental organisations in China.

In a statement Fitch Group has said "it has donated $50,000 to Give2Asia in support of the organisation's crisis response to the outbreak of Covid-19".

Click here to follow LIVE news and updates on stock markets

Fitch Group Chief Executive Officer Paul Taylor said the company is deeply saddened by this tragedy. This donation is part of Fitch's ongoing efforts to complement other relief and recovery initiatives across the world.
Pay wages and distribute food and face masks freely to save lives

What's the condition of country's marginal-income group people? What are they eating?







This realisation has to be found in the government that the people are confined in their houses by the orders of the government and the government has taken full responsibility of arranging food and other necessities of life.







That does not mean that all things must be provided by the government. But the government must have the planning for making the necessities available. Issuing orders without preparations for the results is nothing but incompetence and unconscionable.





This is not the time to show pleasure exposing incompetence of the government, which is nothing new. But in life and death crisis why the government cannot show some common sense for preparedness to take care of the people denied the sources of earning livelihood.





What's the condition of several million rickshaw-pullers of Dhaka and other cities? How long they can survive when lockdown has stopped their earnings? We are sure these questions are not seriously taken. Where are the street vendors? Where are millions of small traders of makeshift footpath shops? Does anybody in the government trying to know what the condition of thousands of transport workers is? The answers of these questions are not so simple.







It will be much easier to understand the actual condition of country's majority people, if we cite here a recent data of World Bank. It said only 15% of Bangladesh's population makes more than 500 taka a day. They can meet their daily expenses, send their children to school, and have little ability to face an emergency health crisis.





That means, at present, the rest 85% population is living more miserably.





Most of the villagers depended on remittances from the cities or abroad are now facing extreme situation. People everywhere are out of work, they have no earnings. The rural economy is on the verge of collapse.







The situation has reached to such an extent that the starving workless and poor people looted a truck carrying relief materials (600 bags of 10kg rice and 600 bags of 3kg potatoes) at Jamalpur municipality's Mukundabari on Sunday last. They alleged that they did not get any relief even after going to several places for food aid.







The garment workers have come out to streets for getting their wages despite the fact that the government has already given funds for them through banks.







There are many other lakhs of people, including journalists, who must also get help from the government. Nobody sees the government worried about the problem or has the competence to deal with the crisis.







The government's past experience is that the people are so docile that they will accept deaths quietly. Such explanation is for the sycophants and looters. But sensible people's explosion is coming.







So our advice is pay wages as many owners could not be able to arrange workers' payments for shutting off their businesses, and distribute food and face masks freely among the poor.







The government was happy with incompetent sycophants in the government. Now take advice from some sensible people and make the incompetent ones in the government unemployed.
The number of coronavirus cases in Gujarat rose to 766 as 127 new patients were detected on Wednesday, while five patients died, taking the death toll due to the pandemic to 33, a senior official said.

Eighty-eight new cases were reported in Ahmedabad city alone, which took the number of coronavirus cases in the city to 450.

Vadodara reported eight new cases on Wednesday, while Surat reported nine, taking the total number of cases in these cities to 121 and 51, respectively.

Narmada district reported its first two cases on Wednesday, so did Botad and Kheda districts, with one case each.

Of the two patients in Narmada district, one had returned from Maharashtra, while other worked as a lab technician in Surat, Principal Secretary (Health) Jayanti Ravi said.

Bhavnagar reported two cases, Bharuch two, Rajkot six, Panchmahal three and Anand seven.

The state reported five deaths since Tuesday night.

Three women patients died in Ahmedabad, a 14-year-old girl died in Vadodara, and a 45-year-old woman in Surat.

The girl from Vadodara suffered from a neurological disease, while the woman from Surat suffered from hypertension.

Of the three women who died in Ahmedabad, a 55-year- old woman suffered from heart disease. Another woman, 65 years old, suffered from diabetes.

On the other hand, five patients recovered on Wednesday, which took the number of discharged patients in the state to 64. Of those discharged on Wednesday, four are from Ahmedabad, including an eight-year-old boy. One patient was discharged in Surat.

As many as 3,213 samples were tested since Tuesday night, taking the total number of tests conducted to 19,197.

Out of 669 'active' patients, six are on ventilator.

District-wise, Ahmedabad has reported 450 cases and 16 deaths, Vadodara 121 cases, Surat 51, Bhavnagar 26, Rajkot 24, Gandhinagar 16, Patan 14, Bharuch 13, Anand 17, Panchmahal and Chhota Udepur five each, Kutch and Mehsana four each, Porbandar three, Gir Somnath, Dahod, Narmada and Banaskantha two each, and Jamnagar, Morbi, Sabarkantha, Botad and Kheda one each.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
The graduating class of 2020 will be experiencing senior-year milestones in the shadow of COVID-19.

To help soften the blow, Impressions Design + Marketing in Klamath Falls created yard signs for seniors.

Family and friends can buy a yard sign with a picture of their senior on it to show support throughout neighborhoods in southern Oregon.

For us it's just about celebrating this class they've worked 12 years for this huge accomplishment and we're so proud of them, said Sara Irvine, the owner of Impressions Design + Marketing.

$5 from every sign will be donated to a fund for that schools senior class. On June 30, Impressions Design + Marketing will draw a winner to receive the fund.

To order a sign email info@impressionsdesign.com with your seniors name and high school.

You will receive an email when you sign is ready. Signs in the Klamath Falls area can be picked up at Impressions Design, signs in the Medford area will be available for pick up at Bullet Rental.
WEBSTER GROVES  An employee and a resident of the Laclede Groves assisted living complex here have tested positive for coronavirus, officials said Tuesday.

In an email to employees Tuesday morning, Lutheran Senior Services President Gary Anderson wrote that the employee came to work April 11 and passed the health screening, but "began to show symptoms and was sent home early." LSS was notified Sunday that the employee had tested positive, Anderson wrote. That employee worked in the memory care assisted living portion of the community.

Tuesday afternoon, Anderson notified employees that a resident in memory care was taken to the hospital Monday "for reasons unrelated to COVID-19," and tested positive for coronavirus there. The email continues, "The area has been quarantined and all residents on the neighborhood are being monitored for symptoms."

Both emails say staff have been in contact with the COVID-19 positive employee and resident and are "following up with these individuals."

In a statement, LSS said they are working "closely with local, state, and federal authorities and are following their guidelines."
Peter Kupfer of Mainz University published a history of the Chinese wine culture / 9,000-year-old discoveries from central China are the world's earliest traces of winemaking

The oldest archaeological evidence of the use of wild grapes to make a fermented ritual drink comes from China and dates back some 9,000 years. This "Neolithic cocktail" is currently thought to be the world's oldest alcoholic drink. Viticulture itself began only a little later, about 8,000 years ago in Georgia. "Alcohol and, in particular, wine made using grapes has been a fundamentally important part of cultural life in Eurasia for thousands of years. And China has played a key role in its history," said sinologist Professor Peter Kupfer of Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (JGU). Kupfer has been studying China for four decades and has investigated all aspects of the alcohol culture of the Middle Kingdom, which has shaped the lives of its peoples for thousands of years. In Kupfer's view, the emergence of China as one of the world's leading wine-producing and wine-consuming countries is best seen against this background.

Human evolution has always been linked with winemaking

Recent research suggests that alcohol has played a central role in human evolution and the history of civilization. Wine is humanity's oldest and most widespread cultural and ritual drink, older even than beer. "Without exception, the rise of all advanced Eurasian civilizations was intimately linked to the development of a wine and alcohol culture that was initially linked to magic and later played a role in social and religious rituals," explained Kupfer, describing the key influence alcoholic drinks have had on human history. Wine and, later, beer consumption in the Eurasian continent is as old as the ties and cultural exchange between its peoples. The peoples of Eurasia have been in contact and exchanged ideas and goods over vast geographical distances since prehistoric times, long before the heyday of the Silk Road two thousand years ago. "Barley was exported from Mesopotamia to China, where it was used exclusively for beer brewing," Kupfer cited one example.

Although still unproven, Kupfer believes that there were probably links between the most ancient winemaking sites - between Georgia 8,000 years ago and Jiahu in central China some 9,000 years ago. China's natural history has also been pivotal to its viticulture: For millions of years, the country has been home to the world's richest and most diverse range of species of the Vitis genus. During glacial periods, vines found a refuge in southern China, which is now home to over 40 Vitis species, 30 of which are indigenous.

With very few exceptions, alcohol has never been prohibited in China. Quite the reverse: The Chinese rule "No celebration without alcohol" has been followed throughout all epochs. "The way the Chinese toast each other has remained unchanged for 3,000 years, as evidenced by ancient written precepts on the subject of hospitality," added Peter Kupfer. Given the preeminence accorded to French wines, it is natural to assume that winemaking must have originated in ancient Greece or Rome. In fact, it has developed since the Neolithic Age over thousands of years in the context of continuous exchange between Eurasian regions, with Persia and India playing a particularly important role very early on.

New wines from the Middle Kingdom

Only in the late 19th century Chinese viticulture started to realign itself with its Western counterpart - at approximately the same time as European wine culture was establishing itself in numerous overseas regions, including North and South America, South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, and Japan. Chinese companies imported vines and technologies from Europe, cooperated with European vintners and oenologists, and increasingly adopted French techniques of winemaking, including aging in oak barrels. These techniques remain the basis of Chinese winemaking today. "But since the 1990s, wine production in China has begun to become increasingly self-sufficient. Ever more land is being cultivated for winemaking and the area is now as extensive as that in Germany, while imports and consumption of wine are also rising. In particular young people, naturally receptive to new experiences, are learning to appreciate wine." Kupfer also emphasizes that there are already outstanding wines to be discovered on the Chinese market, in particular red wines, and that Chinese terroir and climate represent an excellent basis for future growth. "In my opinion we will witness the emergence of a very distinct wine culture in China in a few years. Chinese geography - varied and on a scale of thousands of kilometers - offers ideal perspectives for such growth," Kupfer suggested.

Amber Shine and Black Dragon Pearls: The History of Chinese Wine Culture

In 1998 Peter Kupfer was appointed Professor of Chinese Language and Culture at the Faculty of Translation Studies, Linguistics, and Cultural Studies of Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz. Since 2008 he has undertaken several research trips along the Central Asian, Chinese, and Iranian sections of the Silk Road and has made a special study of Chinese wine culture. His book Bernsteinglanz und Perlen des Schwarzen Drachen: Die Geschichte der chinesischen Weinkultur [Amber Shine and Black Dragon Pearls: The History of Chinese Wine Culture] provides a comprehensive interdisciplinary analysis of the role played by wine and alcohol in Chinese culture. It takes into account all the various related aspects - the archaeological, anthropological, historical, ethnographic, sociological, literary, artistic, linguistic, and culinary factors. The book illuminates the history of wine and alcoholic drinks in China through the various epochs down to the present day. Its publication was supported by funding provided by the German Research Foundation (DFG).

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Nearly a quarter of Lone Star Family Health Centers business has turned into an examination for the novel coronavirus. Now the center has launched a new COVID-19 Clinic in Conroe and has started accepting referrals from the countys hotline.

Overnight we have gone from your family doc, which is what we need to be most days, Lone Star Family Health Center CEO Karen Harwell said. Now it has turned more into a pandemic response.

ON HOUSTONCHRONICLE.COM: Coronavirus live updates: Houston approves airlines deal, Texas businesses fight to be 'essential'

The center does not have a drive thru testing site. Any patient who arrives at the entrance of the center that is symptomatic or dealing with an underlying health issue will be directed into the COVID clinic, which opened on March 13.

It includes a physical exam by a primary care doctor who determines if the patient needs testing at this time. While the center has FDA approved swab tests, it has a limited supply. The tests are reserved only for patients who are screened and approved by the doctor.

Priority testing

First responders and the facilitys own health care professionals that are showing symptoms are the top priority for tests followed by elderly patients who are symptomatic, then patients who are displaying all the symptoms that indicate the virus, Harwell said.

MORE FROM MEAGAN ELLSWORTH: Montgomery ISDs Lake Creek principal lifts communitys spirits via tweet while fighting coronavirus

Weve had a real shortage of tests, so we have to be very, very selective on who we have been testing, Harwell said.

There are lanes set up outside the center, which may give the appearance of a public drive thru testing site. That is not the case. Those lanes are designated for patients who were approved to drive up for the test.

Dedicated hotline

Some patients may also be referred by the countys dedicated COVID-19 hotline, which is part of a collaborative effort involving the Montgomery County Hospital District and Montgomery County Office of Emergency Management.

CASE JUMP: Montgomery County sees second-largest COVID-19 case increase in week

The patient will be screened by a physician, which may be through a virtual visit, and then if approved could also drive up to be tested at the center.

Lone Star has really taken the lead when it comes to testing here in Montgomery County, Lone Star Family Health Center Board Chairman and Conroe City Councilman Duke Coon said. I am so proud of our doctors and our staff at the clinic. They are working tirelessly to meet the needs of this community.

I am very proud and would like to thank the Montgomery County Hospital District for all of their support and cooperation through this testing and screening process, Coon added.

MCHDs CEO Randy Johnson stated in a message to The Courier that the countys hospital district and public health district appreciates the Lone Star Family Health Center and looks forward to working with the center on the collaborative effort. The hotline to be referred to Lone Star Family Health Center can be reached at 936-523-5040.

Increase in numbers

As of April 1, the 2020 COVID-19 Clinic saw a total of 303 unique patient visits. There was a total of 77 COVID-19 tests. Of those tests, the majority were negative (47), only about a handful were positive (4), and 26 were still pending results, which sometimes return in waves with as many as 20 results in a day.

This past Thursday, a week later, the numbers showed 5,171 patients screened for COVID at the center, 346 patients examined for COVID, and 121 tested for COVID with 6 positive, 82 negative, 33 pending results.

Harwell said the hotline opened on Monday and drive-up opened on Tuesday. It is off to a slow start with only eight patients for the drive-up testing, but Harwell said the center is prepared for those numbers to grow.

Coon said he and Harwell planned to reach out to state and federal officials this week to obtain more of the limited but preferred FDA approved or emergency use authorization tests. Tests are also being conducted at other facilities across the county including other doctors offices, hospitals, and Americas ER in south Montgomery County.

Adjusting to the influx, LSFHC has rapidly grown virtual visit capabilities. The center continues to work to get doctors set up with the right equipment and trained to make the virtual visits as easy as possible for patients, including those who think they may need a COVID-19 test.

Over the last two weeks we have gone from none of our doctors set up to do telehealth to about eight of them, we are now averaging about 20 visits a day that that are done on a virtual platform, Harwell said. We actually want that to be much greater. We want to shift all of our wellness visits to virtual in the coming months just to keep people at home.

Serving the underserved

Lone Star Family Health Center in Conroe has kicked off a campaign to flatten the curve in Montgomery County while providing options for the uninsured and the underserved.

The fundraiser seeks donations, including cash and personal protective equipment to continue its collaborative battle against the novel coronavirus pandemic that has prompted extra expenses to provide affordable health care.

The clinic currently needs face shields, shoe covers, surgical caps, gowns (universal), N95 masks, gloves (small, medium, and large), and hand sanitizer. Gowns are the greatest need at this time, Harwell said.

Those interested in donating to the #FlattentheCurveMoCo campaign can call 936-539-4004 or email info@lonestarfamily.org to make arrangements for drop off. Used equipment that can be sanitized and used again may be accepted.

mellsworth@hcnonline.com
Kavita Khosas hopes of coming home to Hong Kong from the west Indian city of Pune are growing dim.

The 57-year-old Hong Kong permanent resident, a social enterprise boss and lawyer, went to India in February on a business trip, with a plan to return in a few weeks. But she has been stranded in the South Asian country since its government declared a three-week lockdown in March that was supposed to end at midnight on Tuesday.

But the sky fell on her when Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced on Tuesday that the lockdown would remain in place until May 3, and there could be no alternative to saving human lives.

All that is left in Khosas flat are six eggs, a watermelon, some vegetables and rice, while food supplies at nearby grocery stores have also been scarce.

Im not back home in India now. I am here all alone and my family is in Hong Kong, said Khosa, who moved to Hong Kong from India 33 years ago and considers herself a Hongkonger.

The situation here in India is so unbelievable and dire. Why is the Hong Kong government refusing to evacuate its own people? It begs the question, is it racial profiling? Is it because we are considered the ethnic minority? What are the reasons?

More than 1,000 Hong Kong residents, mostly of Indian origin, have been stranded in India, according to Mohan Chugani, former president of the India Association Hong Kong. Among them are 150 Hong Kong passport holders, he said, accusing the citys government of double standards for dragging its feet on the evacuation.

There were about 30,000 to 40,000 people of Indian origin in Hong Kong, he added.

In response, the Security Bureau told the Post the Immigration Department had received 1,527 requests for help from Hong Kong residents stranded in 62 countries, with a relatively large number of them being stuck in Vietnam, Pakistan and the Philippines. It did not mention India.

When necessary, the government of [Hong Kong] may render assistance in liaising with relevant airlines to reserve seats for the journey to return to Hong Kong, and where the circumstances so warrant, the government would assess the need to exceptionally charter a special flight for the return of stranded Hong Kong residents, a spokesman said.

Story continues

He added that factors to be considered included the ground situation in the countries, the availability of transport facilities, the number of Hong Kong residents involved and their locations, the feasibility for airlines to operate chartered flights in the countries, as well as the readiness and capacity of quarantine facilities in Hong Kong to receive the returning residents.

As of Wednesday, Hong Kong has recorded 1,016 Covid-19 cases, many of the residents returning from overseas, straining the citys medical resources and quarantine facilities.

Khosa and others stranded in India feel they have been abandoned by the citys government. They said the government had arranged chartered flights to bring stranded residents home from the mainland Chinese city of Wuhan, Japan and Peru, but had turned a blind eye to those in the South Asian country.

Khosa considers herself a true Hongkonger, having lived in the city for 33 years, practising law, running a social enterprise and actively engaging in social activities.

How much more of a Hongkonger can I be? I just want to be home, she said. Her husband and two children were all born in Hong Kong.

She knew of some stranded Hongkongers in India who had already been fired by their employers.

Manish Suri, another Hong Kong resident who has worked in the city for seven years, was also stuck in India after going there to visit friends in January. He now stays at his friends house.

No one is helping us, the 41-year-old said.

Hundreds of those stranded in India have signed a petition urging the Hong Kong government to evacuate them as soon as possible, saying some foreign governments have already done so.

The Indian consulate in Hong Kong has said if the citys government requests an evacuation, it would process the application.

As of Wednesday, India had recorded more than 11,500 Covid-19 cases, with at least 394 deaths.

Humayun Umer, who holds a Hong Kong passport, said he and about 20 other residents had been stranded in Pakistan and were unable to leave because of the lockdown that was expected to end on April 28.

Umer, who went to Pakistan to visit his relatives in January, said he had called the Hong Kong Immigration Department and asked for help, to no avail.

More from South China Morning Post:

This article Coronavirus: more than 1,000 Hong Kong residents stranded in India call for evacuation first appeared on South China Morning Post

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A lot of people are talking about Zoom these daysits the name of the videoconferencing software that, thanks to the coronavirus crisis, has quickly gone from semi-obscure tool for working remotely to household name and basic social utility. But for some of us, there was another Zoom, one we encountered way before anyone ever dialed into a videoconference: the goofy public television show, starring a cast of regular, non-actor kids, that originally aired in the 70s and got a millennial reboot in the 90s. Its why some of your colleagues and friends get a faraway look in their eyes when you ask them to Zoomthat word transports some of us back to childhood and gives us the urge to sing a ZIP code: Oh-two-one-three-four  

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And it turns out this isnt just the case for those of us who watched the show. The people who starred on and made Zoom have also, in the age of the Zoom happy hour, found themselves returning to thoughts of Zmail, Cafe Zoom, and dancing around a soundstage in matching striped shirts. I had daydreamed of a very meta Zoom reunion on Zoom, but the team had a better idea: In the spirit of the late-night shows that are going on even as production has moved from professional sets to cast members basements, the Zoomers decided to bring back their show, or at least a lo-fi version of it: This week and next, WGBH, the Boston public television station that produced both iterations of Zoom, will use its social media channels to share video segments where former Zoom cast members guide viewers through the same kind of science experiments and do-it-yourself activities that powered the old series.

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Pablo Velez, who spent a season as a mushroom cutsporting, rapping tween cast member of Zoom 99 and went on to work for WGBH as an adult, first floated the idea of bringing the show back in some form. I followed up with some of my former Zoom castmateswe stay in touch stilland threw out this idea, like, Hey, what if we put out some videos?  Velez, now 34, saidnaturally, over a Zoom call with Slate. Literally at the same time, I got a call from some of my colleagues at GBH saying, Hey, have you thought about maybe doing something Zoom-related?  (Asked about that 99 look, he added, My haircut was dope, I dont know what youre talking about.)

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You too might live the dream of Zooming with Zoom.

Project #ZOOMIntoAction was a go. Also on board was Hillary Wells, the stations executive director of youth media, who had worked on the 1999 shows pilot. Wells and Velez insisted that the word Zoom being in the air wasnt their primary inspiration for bringing back the brand, though it was hard to ignore, and yes, theyd seen the jokes on Twitter. There was one the other day that had my seasons intro. It said something like, Im starting my Zoom meeting like this, and it was all of us singing the theme song, Velez said. But the bigger reason for the revival was Zooms lasting hold over the people who grew up watching it. Of all of our properties, the most nostalgia really comes from Zoom, Wells said. Regardless of who walks in the building, they see an old prop from Zoom and they want to take a picture with it.

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The first order of business was to reach out to the wider cast of the show. I was really touched and overwhelmed by the response that we got, Velez said. Hed gotten to know a lot of the 90s cast over the years, even living with some of them in his Los Angeles days, but he was unsurprisingly less connected to the 70s Zoomers. For that, he enlisted the help of Bernadette Yao, she of the signature Bernadette gestureEmily Nussbaum once described it as a joyous wiggly arm thingfrom the 70s shows introduction. Yao really gathered the troops on that end, Velez said. All in all, they recruited 22 former cast members, a pretty even mix of 70s and 90s kids, for the project.

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Whats putting the segments together been like? Sadly, Velez told me, When we hop on the phone or on a video call, were not just talking in Ubbi Dubbi, although that would be funny, referring to the gibberish-esque language Zoom encouraged audience members to speak. Because no Zoom curriculum would be complete without it, the new videos will include at least one segment schooling kids on that beloved Zoom lingo (call it an intrubbodubbuction). Also on the syllabus: recipes and arts and crafts. Overall, the goal is to produce a series of segments that mix archival footage from the original shows and new material that former Zoomers were able to produce on the fly in their homes. In the first one, released Monday, Velez shows viewers how to make a rainstick, a classic kids sound-making contraption, out of a paper towel roll, re-creating a craft he remembers doing on air back in his original Zoom run. This time, hes standing at the kitchen counter in his grown-up home, and his toddler daughter makes a cameo appearance.

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For a series whose mission was to craft a show by kids, for kids, the producers are conscious of the fact that the presence of adult former cast members rather than, well, actual kids will be much more likely to appeal to parents and grandparents than young viewers. But the producers also figure, at a time when those parents and grandparents may be looking for ways to occupy and entertain kids of their own, why not offer them some tried and trusted Zoom suggestions, served in a comfortingly nostalgic package? The station is also planning to host two live chatson, where else, Zoom, as well as other platformswhere participants will be able to interact with former Zoom cast members, ensuring that you too might live the dream of Zooming with Zoom, and bringing us one step closer to my vision that all Zoom calls from now on include a mandatory group performance of the Zoom theme song. Sing it with me: Cmon and Zoom, Zoom, Zoom-a, Zoom.
BEIJING, April 14 (Xinhua) -- China has reported new progress in the research of COVID-19 drugs and therapies, sharing with the world its clinical experience and achievements and pushing forward international cooperation in the study of the disease.

One of the highlights of the new progress is stem cell treatment, which has been used in more than 200 cases in Wuhan, the hardest-hit city amid the epidemic in China, Sun Yanrong, deputy head of the China National Center for Biotechnology Development under the Ministry of Science and Technology, said at a press conference on Tuesday.

Clinical trials show that the therapy is safe, and can increase the cure rate of severe patients by inhibiting lung inflammation and improve the respiratory function of patients in the rehabilitation period, according to Sun.

China has also made progress in convalescent plasma therapy. So far, more than 700 patients have received such treatment with good effects. The median length of stay in ICU of the patients receiving convalescent plasma therapy was significantly shorter than that in the control group, Sun said.

Since the outbreak of COVID-19, China has launched 27 projects in the research of drugs, therapies and related technologies. More than 3,200 researchers from 152 hospitals, universities and institutions across China, including those on the front line of the fight against COVID-19 in Wuhan, have participated in the research.

At present, clinical trials on four drugs are in progress, and more than 10 research achievements have been included in the diagnosis and treatment guidelines on COVID-19, Sun said.

Currently, the main drugs used in treating COVID-19 cases in China include Chloroquine Phosphate, Favipiravir and traditional Chinese medicines.

Several Chinese research teams are focusing on the utilization of monoclonal antibodies, and have achieved some progress, Sun said.

In addition, Chinese researchers have developed human immunoglobulin from the COVID-19 convalescent plasma, which could be used in the clinical treatment of patients, as well as the passive immune protection of high-risk groups.

China is also promoting research on independently developed drugs, and accelerating the clinical research on a series of drugs including traditional Chinese medicines, Carrimycin, Tetrandrine and Azvudine, Sun said.

China has shared with the world its experience in epidemic prevention and control at the earliest possible date, with the results of Chinese scientists' clinical research on COVID-19 quickly published in international academic journals.

According to incomplete statistics, Chinese research teams have conducted academic exchanges and discussions with over 140 countries and regions on new research progress and clinical application experience involving traditional Chinese medicines, Chloroquine Phosphate, Favipiravir, Tocilizumab, convalescent plasma therapy and stem cell treatment.

A number of Chinese research achievements have been applied in the clinical treatment of COVID-19 in other countries.

The World Health Organization and some countries are also carrying out clinical research on Chloroquine and Hydroxychloroquine. Several drugs and therapies used by China such as convalescent plasma therapy and Tocilizumab have also been approved by many countries in their treatment or clinical research, Sun said.

She said the development of the drugs and therapies requires the wisdom of the whole world. Chloroquine Phosphate was invented by German scientists 80 years ago, Favipiravir was developed by Japanese scientists 20 years ago, and Carrimycin was created by Chinese scientists 30 years ago.

She said China is actively expanding the channels of international scientific and technological cooperation and promoting joint clinical research on the disease.
Its now clear that COVID-19 is disproportionately infecting and killing people of color across the country. Over the coming months, the economic dimension of this crisis will also disproportionately harm business owners and job seekers of color. So far, the federal governments response only exacerbates underlying racial economic gaps. As with so many other aspects of this crisis, its up to state and local leaders in our region to take the lead and create opportunities for business owners and job seekers of color.

The $350 billion small business lending program in the CARES Act will have an exclusionary effect on business owners of color. The criteria for Paycheck Protection Program, or PPP, loans exclude business owners who are on parole, probation or have been convicted of a felony in the past five years. People of color already suffer from racially biased policing and incarceration, so this bar on federal small-business funds will magnify that bias. Additionally, the private sector banks administering the program have begun to make loans prioritizing businesses that already have a line of credit at the bank in question. Given that people of color experience discrimination in accessing credit, this private sector practice will compound their disadvantage.

Furthermore, formerly incarcerated people frequently rely on entrepreneurship because they suffer discrimination as job seekers. For instance, businesses started in programs like Goodwin Colleges ENet Program and the Progressive Prison Ministries P.R.I.D.E. Program, just to name a few, may not be able to access PPP loans and may need to shut down.

Job seekers of color consistently have worse labor market outcomes than white workers, even after accounting for differences in education, age, and other factors. In response to economic downturns, they are first fired, last hired. Our nascent economic crisis will be no different  in fact, it may be worse because people of color are suffering greater physical harms from COVID-19 in addition to economic displacement.

Because the federal government has done nothing to remedy these racial gaps in economic hardship, we urge state and local leaders to promote racial equity in the following four ways:

Local small-business relief  Prioritize businesses that cant access federal stimulus with local loans and grants. States and cities are setting up their own business relief funds, including Connecticuts Emergency Bridge Loan and Business Response Line of Credit programs. State and local policymakers should consider (1) prioritizing historically disadvantaged groups in state/local funds (as Connecticuts Business Response Line of Credit already does), (2) explicitly setting aside funds for businesses owned by formerly incarcerated people, and (3) restricting state and local funds to those who are not already receiving a federal CARES Act loan.

Targeted training  Subsidize job training and transition programs for in-demand sectors. In the short term, local funding could subsidize the transition of recently unemployed workers into the health sector, where demand will be high for at least the coming year or two. In the longer term, training should be offered for workers to transition to jobs that enable a pathway to a greener economy. For instance, one initiative in New York Citys Community Retrofit program should serve as a model for our policymakers. BlocPower, a private company contracting with the city, provides job training for people in low-income communities, who then work on retrofitting buildings across the city to be more energy efficient. Connecticut policymakers should subsidize training programs like this one for our region (retrofitting buildings, building bike or bus lanes, and so on).

Experiential hiring  Incentivize the adoption of experiential, objective hiring rather than credential and interview-based hiring. Traditional hiring, which focuses on resume credentials and personal interviews has been shown to penalize people of color because it locks in prior sources of discrimination. Policymakers should incentivize companies to transition to blind and/or experiential (i.e., skill-based) hiring.

Anti-discrimination  Increase disclosure of racial gaps and ramp up enforcement of anti-discrimination laws. For instance, the state legislature could pass legislation to require affirmative disclosure of racial gaps in hiring rates and wages, as some other countries use for gender pay gaps. The state attorney general can ramp up enforcement of existing anti-discrimination laws.

In the absence of federal leadership, state and local officials have been stepping up to lead our country through this crisis. Governor Lamont and city leaders like Mayor Elicker in New Haven must seize this opportunity to reduce racial gaps.

Paul Healy and Kate Levien are students at Yale Law School, where they are participants in the Jerome N. Frank Legal Services Organization, a law clinic offering assistance to small businesses and non-profit organizations affected by the COVID-19 crisis. For more information, small businesses and non-profit organizations can email covid.ced@ylsclinics.org.
Hyderabad: When the coronavirus finally exhausts itself and the danger is over, lets do something good for our country. Lets spend our holidays in India, eat in local restaurants, buy local meats and veggies, buy clothes and shoes from Indian brands and support local businesses.

These businesses are going to find it very difficult to get back on their feet and survive without our help. Theyre suffering badly right now. Lets do our bit in helping each other stand and grow again. God bless India.

This is a Facebook forward that everyone from industrialist Harsh Goenka to students are endorsing. Why uplift the Turkish economy by celebrating our big fat weddings there, when it is pro-Pakistan? Why holiday in the US which is so tough on us in the matter of visas? Why contribute to the economy of the British who looted us or of Europe which has never done anything for us?

Going on holiday now is anyway not an option for the majority of us, who need to get back to work ASAP after the pandemic ends. But the lucky few who can afford a small break would be well advised to think of spending their money exploring the hills and beaches of our own country.

And when it comes to shopping, groceries included, many feel its our moral responsibility to buy Indian brands and commodities. In fact, there are many forwards doing the rounds, urging us to continue buying from the bandi wala, local kirana shop and neighbourhood stationery and fruit shops because they were the ones who ensured that we got our essentials when online giants who we had patronized earlier shut shop.

Currently, this is the sentiment. But will it continue? Will life get back to normal once the lockdown ends?

Its naive to think that the lure of ordering online from e-giants, indulging in retail therapy from the West, or the thrill of travelling the world will end because of the shock we have got.

But we need to think. How much of an extra effort are we willing to make for our economy from now on? Has this lockdown changed us and our priorities in any way?

Nisha Dhawan, Country Director, India, Empower, explains that What the lockdown has enabled is an increase in consciousness about the resilience of the informal sector and, more importantly, how much of a difference it makes to buy from local, small scale vendors. I think it has (already) resulted in a shift of consciousness that we shouldnt always choose the easy (add to cart) option in our day-to-day lives.

The lockdown has forced Divya Jain, Founder, Safeducate, to slow down and take a look at her life, the people around her and what really matters. There is a new appreciation towards everything that is local and fresh. I definitely want to consume products and brands which I know about, closer to me and mine. Given the economic devastation that I do feel will follow, I see myself buying a lot more for Indian designers versus the West; using my local grocery store as well as deep diving into Indian destinations for our next holiday, says Divya.

Sindhura Indukuri, director The Shri Ram Universal School, wants to promote travel within India. My first international trip was when I was 12 years old. And my son, who is only four, has travelled outside the country more often than within the country. There are so many places within India that my children have never been to, and I would like to take them to these places now, she says. Sindhura is also reviewing her supply chain and giving priority to local sourcing.

There are so many alternatives to my sources outside India, whether it is the toys we buy for our kids, the clothes we wear or the food we eat, she points out.

It may not be possible to completely change our habits post the pandemic, but its great to see how the Spend in India sentiment is being taken seriously.
Its no secret that Princess Diana felt extremely isolated and controlled within the British royal family. She and Prince Charles were vastly different people and though they may have been optimistic about their marriage in the early days, by the late-1980s they had both very much checked out.

Though the princess was terribly unhappy in her marriage and within the confines of the royal family, she was determined to find happiness for herself and for her sons Prince William and Prince Harry. The princess was vivacious and full of life, often playing with her sons and taking them on one adventure or another.

She thought carefully about their birthday and holiday gifts and she had a ton of fun within the confines of the palace. In fact, one of her hidden talents as an impersonator often left people in a fit of giggles.

Diana, Princess of Wales at a private viewing and reception at Christies in aid of the Aid Crisis Trust and The Royal Marsden Hospital Cancer Fund, Diana is with her step-mother Raine, Comtesse De Chambrun (formerly Countess Raine Spencer), Diana is wearing a dress by Catherine Walker | Tim Graham Photo Library via Getty Images

Princess Diana loved telling jokes

While British royal life wasnt exactly what she expected, the princess tried to keep things light with her humor and wit. She had a great sense of humor and was very good at remembering jokes, royal photographer Jayne Fincher told Daily Mail. She always had a joke up her sleeve and she used to tell quite a few dirty ones. She had a really funny laugh too, it came right from her stomach. Once she saw something funny she was off  that was quite incredible at the time, because royals did not do that.

Since the princess often did what royals didnt do she was even more enamored by everyday people, earning her beloved nickname as The Peoples Princess.

Diana Princess Of Wales, Prince William & Prince Harry Visit The Thorpe Park Amusement Park. | Julian Parker/UK Press via Getty Images

Princess Diana was extremely playful

When her dear friend and fourth cousin, Sarah, Duchess of York joined the royal family in 1986, the princess had a kindred spirit by her side for the first time since shed married Prince Charles in 1981. The evening of the Duchess of Yorks bachelorette party, the women dressed up as policewoman and were nearly arrested when officers didnt recognize them.

They were often called out for their carefree attitudes during former royal events. The women were chastised in the media for poking their friend Lulu Blacker in the butt with their umbrellas at Ascot. Prince Charles once scolded them both for playfighting during a photo opp at Klosters

Once, they even went joyriding in the Queen Mothers Daimler while they were visiting the queens Balmoral estate in Scotland.

Diana, Princess Of Wales, Smiling On A Walkabout After Attending Christening Service At Sandringham Church. The Princess Is Wearing A Houndstooth Red And White Jacket Designed By Moschino With A Black Polo Neck Jumper And A Broad-brimmed Red Hat. | Tim Graham Photo Library via Getty Images

Princess Diana was an incredible impersonator

In addition to her love of mischief, fun, and jokes, Princess Diana also had a delightful hidden talent as an impersonator.

Apparently, Diana is a terrific mimic, not unlike the late Jacqueline [Kennedy] Onassis, reporter Cathy Horyn wrote in Vanity Fair in 1997. [Marguerite]Littman says shes been told by friends that Diana does a dead-on imitation of her Louisiana drawl, which is as slow as Karo syrup. I tried to get her to do it for me, but she wouldnt.

Marguerite Littman was a close friend of the princess who founded the AIDS Crisis Trust. She had her own memories of her friends knack for impersonations. [Shes] really funny. I told her she brings oxygen into the room, she explained. Most people take it out. But she brings it out.
The Centre on Wednesday reacted cautiously to US President Donald Trumps decision to cut funding to the World Health Organisation (WHO), with people familiar with developments saying the world communitys focus should remain on the Covid-19 pandemic.

During his daily briefing on the Covid-19 crisis, Trump announced the US would halt funding for the WHO for severely mismanaging and covering up the spread of the Coronavirus.

The move was soon criticised by world leaders, and UN chief Antonio Guterres said this was not the time to reduce the resources for the operations of the WHO.

Coronavirus outbreak: Full coverage

The Indian government was more circumspect in its response, with people familiar with developments insisting that the focus of global efforts should remain on overcoming the Covid-19 pandemic.

At present, our efforts and attention are fully focused on dealing with the Covid-19 pandemic. Once the world has addressed this crisis, we can revisit this question [of funding for the WHO], one of the people cited above said on condition of anonymity.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi, while participating in a virtual summit of G20 leaders last month, Prime Minister Narendra Modi, had called for the reform of the WHO, which was based on the last centurys models and hadnt adapted to deal with new challenges.

At his daily briefing, Trump, who has repeatedly criticised the WHO in recent weeks for its handling of the pandemic and for allegedly toeing Chinas line, said: Today Im instructing my administration to halt funding of the World Health Organisation while a review is conducted to assess the World Health Organisations role in severely mismanaging and covering up the spread of the Coronavirus.

He noted that American taxpayers provide between $400 million and $500 million a year to the WHO, while China contributes roughly $40 million a year and even less. He added, As the organisations leading sponsor, the US has a duty to insist on full accountability.

Trump further said: One of the most dangerous and costly decisions from the WHO was its disastrous decision to oppose travel restrictions from China and other nations. They were very much opposed to what we did. Fortunately, I was not convinced and suspended travel from China, saving untold numbers of lives.

The US president is himself facing criticism for his handling of the Covid-19 crisis in his country, which has recorded more than 614,000 infections and more than 26,000 deaths.

UN chief Antonio Guterres said in a statement that the need of the hour is unity in the global battle against Covid-19 and not cutting the funding for the WHO.

It is my belief that the WHO must be supported, as it is absolutely critical to the worlds efforts to win the war against Covid-19, Guterres said.

While acknowledging the need to review the actions of different entities in responding to the Coronavirus, Guterres said: Once we have finally turned the page on this epidemic, there must be a time to look back fully to understand how such a disease emerged and spread its devastation so quickly across the globe, and how all those involved reacted to the crisis.

He added, The lessons learned will be essential to effectively address similar challenges, as they may arise in the future. But now is not that time.

German foreign minister Heiko Maas tweeted: Blaming does not help. The virus knows no bordersOne of the best investments is the @UN, especially the underfunded @WHO, to strengthenthe development and distribution of tests and vaccines.

Microsoft founder Bill Gates tweeted: Halting funding for the World Health Organization during a world health crisis is as dangerous as it sounds.

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Eighty million Americans are expected to receive their stimulus check this week. Alabamas retail association is pushing for more stores to open back up. And the stock markets saw a small positive bump.

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:

Eighty million Americans are expected to receive their stimulus check by tomorrow, according to Treasury secretary Steven Mnuchin.

The stimulus check will pay up to $1,200 for individuals who made $75,000 or less and up to $2,400 to households made $150,000 or less in the most recent tax filing between 2018 and 2019.

The government sent out the money for many Americans who had direct deposit set up on Friday but for most banks it will take at least a few days to clear thus the confidence that 80 million Americans will have it by Wednesday. If you dont receive your stimulus check by the end of the week, the IRS is launching a Get My Payment tool on April 17 to help citizens track where their stimulus check is.

AL.coms Bill Thornton recently solicited reader feedback on what people will do once they receive their stimulus check money. The answers ranged from paying past due bills to supporting local businesses to buying lottery tickets. You can read about the full gamut of responses here.

State:

The Alabama Retail Association is pushing for the state of Alabama to allow small retailers to open back up under the same restrictions as the big box stores like Walmart.

Patrick Brown, the president of the retail association, called for the small retail stores to open back up under the same social distancing and occupancy restrictions that the large retailers have endured since being deemed an essential business.

This will diffuse consumers to more retailers, thus limiting crowds, Brown said. An added benefit is that this policy change will invigorate our local economies and keep retail employees employed.

Sen. Arthur Orr (R-Decatur) recently called upon Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey to consider letting businesses, like small retailers, open up before April 30th, according to the Alabama Daily News. Last week, Alabama Lt. Governor Will Ainsworth announced a subcommittee to look into when to reopen the states economy and that itd report its findings to Ivey on April 17.

Market update:

Dow Open: 23,690.57

Dow Close: 23,949.76 (Up 2.36%)

In case you missed it:

What were watching

How many Americans actually receive their stimulus check on Wednesday, April 14, after the public proclamations that 80 million will get it.

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

How much will I get from the coronavirus stimulus?

How do you apply for small business funds from the stimulus package?

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.
Coronavirus has boosted the net worth of American billionaire Jeff Bezos by $24bn (19bn) as the demand for online shopping sent Amazons stock price to an all-time high.

The Amazon founder and CEO was already the worlds richest person, but now according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, his fortune is worth $138bn (110bn).

On Tuesday, Amazons share price climbed 5.3 per cent as consumers have moved online during the coronavirus pandemic.

The US economy is expected to contract by almost double that of the global economy, according to the IMF, with a 5.9 per cent drop in GDP forecast for 2020.

Mr Bezos becomes the latest billionaire to benefit from the current economic standstill whilst 22 million Americans claim unemployment.

Tesla founder Elon Musk added $10.4 bn (8.3 bn) to his fortune this year, whilst the demand for teleconferencing has seen the fortune of Zoom founder Eric Yuan more than double to $7.4 bn (5.9bn).

Walmart owners, the Walton family, also saw a 5 per cent increase in their net worth as consumers have come to depend on the retailing giant for goods during the lockdown.

Amazon has been recruiting thousands of new workers to meet current demands.

At the same time, Amazon has been widely criticised for workplace safety during the pandemic. Distribution warehouses across the world have seen mass walkouts since the pandemic began in Europe and the US.

According to The New York Times, 50 of Amazons US warehouses have seen confirmed cases of the coronavirus.

Last month, worker Christian Smalls was dismissed after he had aided a demonstration at a New York distribution centre. Amazon said Mr Smalls had been in violation of quarantine policy.

On Friday, Amazon fired two designers who had made public statements questioning workplace safety measures whilst pledging to match donations of up to $500 to support warehouse staff at risk of getting the virus.

The company said Maren Costa and Emily Cunningham had violated internal policy.

In a statement, Ms Cunningham said that Amazon could use its power to act during the pandemic, but to do so we have to really listen to the workers who are on the front line, who dont feel adequately protected.
What happened

Shares of Boeing (NYSE:BA) fell nearly 5% on Tuesday after the company released first-quarter commercial order and delivery information, including the cancellation of 150 orders for 737 MAX aircraft. It's by now obvious that the COVID-19 pandemic has had a profound effect on Boeing's business, but these numbers are fresh evidence that the impact will be long-lasting.

So what

Boeing on Tuesday said customers had canceled orders for 150 MAX jets in March. Net cancellations spread over all programs for the month totaled 119, thanks to Boeing booking a few new orders for larger aircraft and for military planes.

For the year, Boeing has now recorded net cancellations of 307 planes.

Boeing came into the year with bright hopes, riding high on a near-decadelong commercial aerospace up cycle and expecting to return its grounded 737 MAX to service by midyear. But those hopes have been crushed by the pandemic, which has zapped travel demand and caused airlines once focused on expansion to instead ground planes.

The MAX a few years ago was poised to be a cash cow for Boeing, but it now appears demand for the plane will be muted into 2021 at least. And it is possible Boeing will never hit the full production levels it had hoped to achieve for the plane, which will eat into the long-term profitability of the program.

Now what

Boeing shares recovered some of their initial losses as the day went on, perhaps because the numbers, while stark, were not a surprise.

This is hardly a problem for Boeing alone, as rival Airbus also reported anemic delivery numbers in March. Airbus, unlike Boeing, has already announced production cuts, and that's likely the next shoe to drop at Boeing.

Shares are down 55% year to date. The core business has a healthy long-term outlook, but the next few years could be challenging. Given Boeing's myriad of other questions, I'd advise investors to avoid buying in despite the declines.
The coronavirus crisis has caused a hidden death toll not reflected in the daily statistics, chief medical officer Dr Tony Holohan acknowledges.

People will not just have died from complications, but others, who were not infected, will have been victims of indirect deaths due to failure to go to A&E or receive critical treatment.

Dr Holohan intends to examine the full range of fatalities  known as excess mortality. He also wants the current period of three months allowed for the registration of deaths to be shortened to get an earlier picture of the degree of its impact.

It comes as the number of laboratory-confirmed deaths from the virus reached a record 41 yesterday, including 25 men and 16 women.

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That brings the number who have died from the virus here to 406.

The deceased had a median age of 85 and most deaths occurred in the east, with four in the west and one in the south.

Another 548 new cases were reported by Irish laboratories and 284 older samples tested positive in a German lab, bringing the total number infected here to 11,479.

The extent of the impact on nursing homes is revealed in figures showing that 187 of the deceased were resident in one of these facilities. Another 35 died in residential centres, including disability facilities.

"We remain concerned about the prevalence of Covid-19 in nursing homes and residential care settings," Dr Holohan said.

"The National Public Health Emergency Team is monitoring developments in these facilities and continues to advance supports and actions where needed.

"From the beginning, we have been aware that vulnerable groups, including the elderly, are at greater risk from this virus.

"These groups will continue to be our priority."

He said it was decided yesterday to go into homes where a case of the coronavirus has not yet been reported and to carry out sampling to detect infection which may not have come to light.

The HSE is to ask hospital clinicians to provide more training for nursing homes in end-of-care for residents who may be suffering pneumonia.

However, Nursing Homes Ireland said the promised package of supports remains uneven and some areas of the country are delivering better than others.

Despite the continued daily growth in new coronavirus cases, hospital intensive care units are not experiencing a surge.

"We are not seeing a significant increase in the number of Covid-19 positive cases in our hospitals or our intensive care units over the last number of days," said Dr Colm Henry, chief clinical officer of the HSE.

"That is down to the efforts of every individual who has followed advice to stay apart and slow the spread of the virus.

"To everyone playing their part, the health service is grateful."

So far 77 of the most severely ill patients who were admitted to critical care have been discharged - accounting for 28pc of those who needed this level of treatment.

The latest analysis of figures as of midnight Sunday looked at 10,385 cases of the virus and showed more that half those infected were women, and there were 408 clusters across a range of areas including hospitals and private homes.

The median age of those affected is 48 years, and 1,903 people who have got the infection so far - equivalent to 18pc - have been hospitalised.

Of those hospitalised, 275 cases have been admitted to intensive care.

Some 2,707 cases are associated with healthcare workers.

Around a quarter of these were infected in the workplace.

Dr Holohan said he believes that this may be more of a problem among staff in nursing homes and community settings rather than in hospitals.

Dublin continues to have the highest number of cases at 5,438 - accounting for one in two of everyone infected.

The majority of those who get the infection have no idea how they picked it up.

Dr Holohan said there is no evidence yet that restrictive measures can be eased when the current extension is due to end in early May.

At that point various factors such as the number of new cases of the disease, hospitalisations and admissions to intensive care and deaths will need to be at a level that gives assurance that it would be appropriate to lift the restrictions.

"I would continue to stress that we are not at that point yet where we think we can contemplate lifting restrictions," he said.

"We hope the situation will be different on May 5."

Asked about the decision over plans to hold the Leaving Certificate exams in late July or early August, he said the environment is uncertain.

It would have advised the Department of Education that it would have expected the continued spread of the virus in early summer and that is the reason for extending the date for the exams.

Meanwhile, Inclusion Ireland last night said that it is gravely concerned at the number of Covid-19 outbreaks in disability services across Ireland.

There are 32 outbreaks of the virus in residential settings for people with disabilities.

Chief Executive Enda Egan said that there are around 2,900 people living in institutional settings across Ireland and in total there are 8,000 people in residential centres.

"People with intellectual disabilities living in residential and institutional settings are at much greater risk of contracting the Covid-19 virus, due to the institutional nature of many residential settings.

"The risk of infection within these settings is exacerbated by many factors. This includes the sheer number of residents, staff members and others living and working in close proximity on a daily basis."

Recent evidence in New York city indicates that people with disabilities living in residential settings are 5.34 times more likely to contract the coronavirus and 4.86 times more likely to pass away from the disease than the general population.

Visit our Covid-19 vaccine dashboard for updates on the roll out of the vaccination program and the rate of Coronavirus cases Ireland

"It is vitally important that in the current circumstances people with disabilities are properly supported through this difficult time and have their rights respected, such as by providing people with information in an accessible format.

"Ensuring there is sufficient personal protective equipment (PPE) available for frontline staff members working with people with disabilities in these services must be a key priority for the HSE, to prevent further outbreaks emerging," he warned.

People with intellectual disabilities must also be treated equally in accessing healthcare and given access to life-saving treatment if resources become scarce, he said.
TICKERS: DAC; TTMZF, DFLY; DFLYF, RCRT, TSF, VSBY; VSBGF; 5VS

Source: Streetwise Reports (4/13/20)

Some small caps are finding new opportunities during the Covid-19 pandemic.



While the extreme market volatility over the past weeks creates a lot of uncertainly, some companies have seen business increase amid the Covid-19 epidemic. Here are a handful of small caps expanding in a number of different sectors far from traditional healthcare, from quarantine tracking technology to the use of drones and cameras to monitor temperatures of large numbers of people.

Blockchain Holdings Ltd. (BCX:CSE) announced on March 20 that it had entered into a binding agreement to acquire 100% of the rights and interest in a self-quarantine monitoring program from WiSilica Inc. The program, called IMSafe, is currently being used by the Hong Kong government to keep track of people arriving from overseas, and the company expects its use to expand to other countries. TRACEsafe wristbands pair with a cell phone, and using the phone's GPS a person's location can be known at all times.

"TRACEsafe has been adapted to fit the needs of the pandemic," Blockchain Holdings CEO Wayne Lloyd told Streetwise Reports. "The hospital-style wristband pairs with a person's cell phone so that the government knows if that person is maintaining quarantine at all times. The Hong Kong government is now requiring its use for all people arriving into the area, putting bands on people as they go through customs and pairing it with their phones. Then the government knows that that person is with their phone and hasn't left the self-quarantine location."

Prior to the adoption of TRACEsafe, travelers were required to turn on location services on What's App or other applications. But a person could just leave the phone behind and break quarantine.

Privacy issues are a concern when tracking people, but "the brilliance of this product is that it's disposable, and the battery is not replaceable or rechargeable," Lloyd explained. "That means after four weeks, the battery dies and you're not tracked anymore."

If a person cuts it off, the TRACEsafe wristband is tamper evident and the person could be fined HK$25,000 and jailed for six months, Lloyd stated.

"Wristbands have been in use in Hong Kong since February, and more than 10,000 have been used," Lloyd explained. "Based on the success of the program in Hong Kong, and confirmed orders in excess of 65,000 units, TRACEsafe expects to roll out in multiple countries in the coming weeks and months," the company stated.

"The Coronavirus outbreak is widely expected to change how people shop, travel, and work for years to come and TRACEsafe could play an important part in implementing new policies," Lloyd stated.

Technical analyst Clive Maund wrote on March 23, on Blockchain Holdings shares, we "stay long and it is rated a buy with a close stop if it does as expected and opens up."

Datable Technology Corp. (DAC:TSX.V; TTMZF:USOTC) provides a suite of digital marketing applications, PLATFORM3, sold as Software as a Service, that specializes in online consumer loyalty and reward programs for major brands. It counts Universal Pictures, General Mills, Unilever and Toro among the many brands using its service. A number of the brands are food, beverages and household products, "which are expected to remain in demand during the crisis," the company stated.

"Many of our customers offer rewards and loyalty for in-store and online purchasing. Given that consumers may prefer to shop from home to avoid public spaces, Datable is facilitating the expansion of shop-from-home options," the firm explained.

In February, Datable announced that it expected revenue would grow by over 100% in 2020, with expenses increasing by about 10% compared to 2019 and gross margin to remain at about 70% in 2020. "Datable's progress in March 2020 has increased the company's confidence in this guidance," the company noted.

Draganfly Inc. (DFLY:CSE; DFLYF:OTCQB), a company that specializes in unmanned vehicle technology, announced at the end of March that it has been selected as the exclusive integration partner for the Vital Intelligence Project. Working with Vital Intelligence Inc. and in conjunction with the University of South Australia, the project uses technology developed in collaboration with the Australian Department of Defence Science and Technology Group.

The program monitors health and respiratory function using camera networks as well as unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and remotely piloted aircraft systems. The technology is being commercialized for "health monitoring and detection of infectious and respiratory conditions including monitoring temperatures, heart and respiratory rates, amongst crowds, workforces, airlines, cruise ships, potential at-risk groups, i.e., seniors in care facilities, convention centers, border crossings or critical infrastructure facilities," the company stated.

The agreement with Draganfly calls for an initial budget of up to $1.5 million to "utilize its engineering, integration and distribution expertise as well as its secure supply chain for immediate commercialization and deployment of the technology."

"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.

Recruiter.com Group Inc. (RCRT:OTCQB) aggregates over 20,000 small and independent recruiters under a common platform. It has responded to the pandemic crisis by identifying large pockets of hiring in the quickly changing job market. "To share this knowledge of the job market and hiring opportunities, Recruiter put together informational content on the top companies hiring now and created a webinar series for recruitment professionals on top areas of hiring demand," the company stated.

Rick Roberts, president of Recruiting Solutions, said, "Recruiter.com has been very agile and positive in responding to shifting client needs. Recent events related to COVID-19 have actually caused an uptick in our available open jobs due to our focus on areas of continued strong demand, such as healthcare, logistics, telecom and financial services. Interestingly, during the most recent week, job listings on the platform were up 250%."

The company also made its recruitment training program free, growing the program by 50%; these active learners will become certified recruiters upon completion of the program.

VSBLTY Groupe Technologies Corp. (VSBY:CSE; VSBGF:OTC; 5VS:FSE) announced on March 31 that it in partnership with RadarApp, a Smart Cities Solutions provider, it is testing crowd temperature scanning in Mexico City as a "tool to help identify potential at risk individuals and ultimately reduce the spread of disease."

The company is in the process of installing thousands of security kits that use VSBLTY software as the first phase of the Smart City intelligent camera network program. "In addition to a remarkable impact on crime reduction, VSBLTY is working with RadarApp to test the addition of infrared camera capability that enables temperature scanning of crowds in various locations along with a correlation to face capture," the company noted.

The system uses real-time, non-contact camera technology that connects with a mobile app. "A major objective of the program is to provide an efficient temperature screening tool for monitoring public spaces with the pre-emptive scanning of persons entering facilities such as restaurants, bars, schools, and hospitals. Also being explored is the application of this temperature monitoring capability to Mexico City buses and transit operations," VSBLTY stated.

VSBLTY Co-founder and CEO Jay Hutton said, "It is hoped that the perfection and deployment of this technology will serve as a public screening tool to help identify individuals who may be a potential risk of spreading disease and assist in accelerating the safe return to normality we are all desperately seeking."

[NLINSERT]

Disclosure:

1) Patrice Fusillo compiled this article for Streetwise Reports LLC and provides services to Streetwise Reports as an employee. 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.

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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. As of the date of this article, officers and/or employees of Streetwise Reports LLC (including members of their household) own securities of Blockchain Holdings, Datable Technology, Draganfly, Recruiter.com Group and VSBLTY Groupe Technologies, companies mentioned in this article.
GENEVA - Nations around the world reacted with alarm Wednesday after President Donald Trump announced a halt to the sizable funding the United States sends to the World Health Organization. Health experts warned the move could jeopardize global efforts to stop the coronavirus pandemic.

Hey there, time traveller!

This article was published 15/4/2020 (636 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

President Donald Trump speaks about the coronavirus in the Rose Garden of the White House, Tuesday, April 14, 2020, in Washington. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon)

GENEVA - Nations around the world reacted with alarm Wednesday after President Donald Trump announced a halt to the sizable funding the United States sends to the World Health Organization. Health experts warned the move could jeopardize global efforts to stop the coronavirus pandemic.

At a briefing in Washington, Trump said he was instructing his administration to halt funding for the WHO pending a review of its role in severely mismanaging and covering up the spread of the coronavirus. The United States is WHOs largest single donor, contributing between $400 million and $500 million annually to the Geneva-based agency in recent years.

Trump has repeatedly labelled COVID-19 the Chinese virus and criticized the U.N. health agency for being too lenient on China, where the novel virus first emerged late last year.

Outside experts have questioned China's reported infections and deaths from the virus, calling them way too low and unreliable. And an investigation by The Associated Press has found that six days of delays between when Chinese officials knew about the virus and when they warned the public allowed the pandemic to bloom into an enormous public health disaster.

The WHO has been particularly effusive in its praise for China, calling on other countries to emulate their approach and repeatedly praising their transparency.

But China only agreed to a proposed WHO-led mission to investigate the coronavirus after WHOs chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus personally paid a visit to Chinese President Xi Jinping, a highly unusual move to secure a country visit during an outbreak.

The European Union on Wednesday said Trump has no reason to freeze WHO funding at this critical stage and called for measures to promote unity instead of division.

Trudie Lang, a professor of global health research at Oxford University said attempts to hinder WHO's work could have significant consequences for the pandemic response.

The reason we're making such fast progress on diagnostics, vaccines and drugs is because of WHO's role as a neutral broker, she said. It's their role to bring together the best science.

On Twitter, Bill Gates  whose foundation was the second-largest donor to the WHO for its latest two-year budget, contributing over $530 million in 2018 and 2019  wrote that stopping funding for WHO during a world health crisis is as dangerous as it sounds.

Their work is slowing the spread of COVID-19 and if that work is stopped no other organization can replace them. The world needs WHO now more than ever, Gates wrote.

Worldwide, the pandemic has infected nearly 2 million people and killed over 127,000, according to a tally by Johns Hopkins University.

Germanys foreign minister, Heiko Maas, pushed back at Trumps announcement.

Placing blame doesnt help, he wrote on Twitter. The virus knows no borders. We must work closely against COVID-19.

The Netherlands has also thrown its support behind the WHO. Now is not the time to hold back funding. Once the pandemic is under control, lessons can be learned. For now, focus on overcoming this crisis, Sigrid Kaag, minister for foreign trade and development co-operation, said on Twitter.

Devi Sridhar, chair of global public health at the University of Edinburgh, called Trump's decision extremely problematic, noting that WHO is leading efforts to help developing countries fight the spread of COVID-19.

This is the agency that's looking out for other countries and leading efforts to stop the pandemic, Sridhar said. This is exactly the time when they need more funding, not less.

Sridhar said Trump's move was a short-sighted political decision that would likely have lasting consequences.

Trump is angry, but his anger is being directed in a way that is going to ultimately hurt U.S. interests, she said.

Sridhar and others said it was still unclear what the precise impact of Trump's funding cuts might be, but that other health priorities funded by the U.S., like polio eradication, malaria and HIV, were likely to suffer.

Aid workers in developing countries worried they might be hardest hit by Trump's decision.

President Trumps decision to cut US funding of WHO, while allegedly only temporarily, will have significant and far-reaching impacts that wont be felt by Americans or Europeans, but instead by the worlds most vulnerable populations, said Donald Brooks in Burkina Faso, chief executive officer for Initiative: Eau, an American aid group focused on increasing drinking water safety and quality in developing areas and conflict zones.

In Beijing, Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian says the country is "seriously concerned about the U.S. governments decision to suspend funding.

The WHO did not respond to repeated requests from The Associated Press for comment.

Some experts say WHO dallied in declaring a pandemic; it did so only on March 11, long after the surging outbreaks on multiple continents met the agency's own definition for a global crisis.

They were really behind the curve, said Mark Woolhouse, professor of infectious disease epidemiology at the University of Edinburgh.

The U.N. health agency also insisted for months that the virus could be contained and was not as infectious as influenza. But many outbreak experts, including at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, say COVID-19 is spreading many times faster than flu and that its rate of spread was apparent in January.

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Still, some global health academics said Trump's attacks on WHO might actually strengthen the agency's credibility.

If Trump was making a great success of the pandemic response in the U.S., if there were minimal cases and deaths there, that might be different, said Sophie Harman, a professor of international politics at Queen Mary University of London. But things are getting worse and that reinforces the need for WHO.

___

Cheng reported from London. Associated Press Writers Mike Corder in The Hague, Frank Jordans in Berlin and Sam Mednick in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso, contributed to this report.

Follow AP coverage of the pandemic at http://apnews.com/VirusOutbreak and https://apnews.com/UnderstandingtheOutbreak

.
The debate on an emerging new global economic order had been floating since China announced its Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) seven years ago. With BRI being a global development strategy involving infrastructure development and investments in nearly 70 countries to exploit cheap factor markets and expanding product markets, it was thought to be rocking the status quo of the occident ruling the roost.

The idea of the status quo in the global political and economic order was challenged further with the emergence of strong leaders, the dominance of nationalistic fervour emerging from a xenophobic discernment of some major nations, and the insulating tendencies of economies that were once the major proponents of free-market economies and globalisation. Such tendencies can be witnessed in the US withdrawal from the TPP, the prolonged US-China trade war, Trumpian disregard of the Climate Change crisis and Brexit. On the other hand, Chinas BRI began obtaining momentum with nations from the EU, Asia and Latin America joining in. This marked the ride of China on its BRI horse, which was attempted to be combated by some coalitions like the Quad in the Indo-Pacific  a potential security arrangement among the four large democracies, Australia, India, Japan, and the US.

A game-changer

Then came Covid-19, with the initial cases witnessed in Wuhan, a manufacturing hub in China. In the globalised world, more than 210 nations were affected in varying degrees. The most interesting observation is that the economies with the highest levels of exposure to China either through BRI or otherwise are the ones most affected by the virus. In ongoing research with two colleagues, I have argued that the openness of an economy with respect to China delineated by three variables, namely, tourism, trade and investment, can largely explain the spread of the virus.

It has been observed that the economies with the highest levels of exposure to China - either through BRI or otherwise - are the ones most affected by the coronavirus. (Photo: Reuters)

New status quo

This can be evinced with the case of Italy, one of the highest Covid-affected nations. China was not only Italys largest cooperative trade partner but ever since the nation became a BRI member in 2019 it emerged as one of the major destinations of Chinese FDI. Irans exposure to China was in the form of the latter being its biggest trading partner with massive Chinese investments and labour flown to Iran. Similarly, high export exposure of South Korea to China often occurs through assembly lines before being re-exported to other nations. While the infection is caused by the physical proximity of citizens of affected countries, at a more macro-scale there is substantial evidence about the role of trade, investment, and human capital movement in transmitting the virus. It is obvious that economies will take counteractive measures by closing borders.

This is bound to bring about a major change on plans for regional connectivity. With economies insulated as an immediate response to the crisis, globalisation goals will be severely affected. Trade routes will be seen with suspicion, and investment in foreign destinations to exploit the global value chains (GVCs) in usual destinations will be cast with doubts. Will India win or lose under these changing dynamics? Will the world choose a safer destination like India to exploit GVCs? Though short-run impacts will be negative, there is no doubt that over time growth drivers will change organically. This organic movement will be pronounced in the service sector, with a large part moving to the digital world, creating virtual workspaces. The ambitions of physical connectivity will be replaced by digital connectivity. Hence, there remains the possibility that growth may be spurred from this digital space mostly from services, but this will also witness simultaneous slump and closures of traditional manufacturing. However, the biggest challenge for India will be to place the major component of the services sector that remains unorganised, informal, and has limited reach in the digital space.

From a global perspective, China cannot be a trusted partner anymore. Rather, the India-factor in the QUAD in the Indo-Pacific in the post-Covid world becomes significant and a prime force to combat the China-factor. It needs to be noted that it isnt only with the movement of goods and investment that gates may be closed, but a more severe impact may be witnessed on labour movements. With stricter immigration rules prevailing all across the world, a nation like India that has boasted of providing skilled human capital to the developed world may be a loser.

Advantage for India

However, a changing global economic order will make many focus on India as a preferred destination for investment. From that perspective, Indias eastern states will be critical. They have all four factors of business in abundance: namely, human capital, social capital, natural capital and an improving physical capital. This part is relatively less explored and can be the fulcrum of development of the region in the post-Covid world. While the global economic system is slated to go to a slump, opportunities and challenges for India occur through all avenues. Whether India will be a net winner or loser depends on the sensitivities of the coefficients of the economic variables, the dynamics of the global order, and the soft power that the nation can wield in the international domain.

(Courtesy of Mail Today)

Also read: Lessons to be learnt as India battles the Covid-19 challenge
Rise in prevalence of skin disorders, surge in healthcare expenditure, and increase in focus on skincare products have boosted the growth of the global dermatologicals market

PORTLAND, Oregon, April 15, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- Allied Market Research recently published a report, titled, "Dermatologicals Market by Dermatological Disease (Acne, Dermatitis, Psoriasis, Skin Cancer, Rosacea, and Alopecia), Drug Type (Prescription-Based Drugs and Over-the-Counter Drugs), and Route of Administration (Topical, Oral, and Parenteral Administration), Global Opportunity Analysis and Industry Forecast, 2018-2026". According to the report, the global dermatologicals industry was pegged at $15.56 billion in 2018, and is anticipated to reach $36.20 billion by 2026, growing at a CAGR of 10.9% from 2019 to 2026.

Drivers, restraints, and opportunities

Rise in prevalence of skin disorders, surge in healthcare expenditure, and increase in focus on skincare products have boosted the growth of the global dermatologicals market. However, presence of alternatives for acne treatment hampers the market growth. On the contrary, high growth potential in developing economies is expected to create lucrative opportunities in the near future.

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Dermatitis segment to manifest the highest CAGR through 2026

The dermatitis segment is expected to register the fastest CAGR of 11.8% during the forecast period, due to surge in the awareness related to the use of dermatologicals for the treatment of dermatitis across the globe. However, the psoriasis segment held the largest share in 2018, contributing to nearly two-fifths of the global dermatologicals market, owing to increase in the incidences of psoriasis along with skin disorders associated with it and rise in awareness among people regarding different treatments.

Prescription-based drugs segment dominated the market

The prescription-based drugs segment held the largest share in 2018, accounting for nearly two-thirds of the global dermatologicals market, as these medicines are advantageous as patients get the correct dosage of the drug during the treatment of skin conditions such as acne and psoriasis. However, the over-the-counter drugs segment is expected to portray the highest CAGR of 11.7% during the forecast period, owing to rise in awareness related to early diagnosis and treatment of the medical condition.

North America held the lion's share

The market across North America held the largest share in 2018, contributing to around two-fifths of the total revenue. This is pertaining to surge in prevalence of various skin disorders, easy availability of dermatological products and surge in awareness related to use of dermatologicals in treatment of various skin disorders. However, the global dermatologicals market across Asia-Pacific is anticipated to register the highest CAGR of 12.3% during the forecast period, due to presence of large potential customer base coupled with surge in awareness related to use of dermatologicals for treatment of diseases.

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Major market players

Bayer AG

Pfizer Inc.

Johnson & Johnson

GlaxoSmithKline plc

Novartis AG

Galderma S.A.

AstraZeneca

AbbVie Inc.

Amgen Inc.

Merck KGaA

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About Capstone Mining Corp. Capstone Mining Corp. is a Canadian base metals mining company, focused on copper. Our two producing mines are the Pinto Valley copper mine located in Arizona and the Cozamin copper-silver mine in Zacatecas State, Mexico. In addition, Capstone has the large scale 70% owned copper-iron Santo Domingo development project in Region III, Chile, in partnership with Korea Resources Corporation, as well as a portfolio of exploration properties. Capstone's strategy is to focus on the optimization of operations and assets in politically stable, mining-friendly regions, centred in the Americas. We are committed to the responsible development of our assets and the environments in which we operate. Our headquarters are in Vancouver, Canada and we are listed on the Toronto Stock Exchange (TSX). Further information is available at www.capstonemining.com.

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.
New Delhi, April 16 : GMR-led Delhi International Airport will distribute food to migrant labourers till the end of lockdown period, its CEO said on Wednesday.

The company has come forward to help migrant labourers by distributing freshly cooked food among them.

"Keeping alive the spirit of Social Responsibility in these trying times, DIAL has taken the initiative of distributing freshly cooked food among these workers and will continue till the end of the lockdown," CEO,DIAL Videh Kumar Jaipuriar was quoted as saying in a statement.

In addition, about 342 ration kits have been distributed over the last week with a target of serving to 1,000 migrant workers.

"These kits consists of atta (10 Kg), Oil (1 litre), Pulses (2 kg), Masala Packet (300 gms), Sugar (2 kg), and Salt (1 kg)," the statement said.
The joint effort is aimed at assisting the country in fighting off the coronavirus.

A pair of Il-76 military transport aircraft of the Air Force of Ukraine have delivered from China to Romania a bath of medical supplies.

The joint effort is aimed at assisting the country in fighting off the coronavirus.

"Besides civil sent in framework of NATO SALIS, Ukraine also provides military cargo to deliver medical materials to NATO allies. 2 IL-76s landed in Bucharest bringing medical supplies from China to help fight COVID19. Ukraine will be useful NATO ally," Ukraine's Mission to NATO wrote on Twitter.

Besides civil  sent in framework of @NATO#SALIS,also provides military cargo  to deliver medical materials to NATO allies. 2 IL-76s landed in Bucharest bringing medical supplies from China to help fight #COVID19. Ukraine will be useful NATO ally. #StrongerTogether#DefMinhttps://t.co/lp6GmOyhkI  UKR Mission to NATO (@UKRinNATO) April 15, 2020

The SALIS program provides NATO Allies with a strategic air transport opportunity. It includes nine Allies of the Alliance: Belgium, Czech Republic, France, Germany, Hungary, Norway, Poland, Slovakia, and Slovenia.

As UNIAN reported earlier, the world's largest cargo aircraft An-225 Mriya, made in Ukraine, is involved in transportation from China to the European Union of humanitarian aid  medical supplies to fight the coronavirus.

Huge  cargo planes #AN225#Mriya#AN124 continue to deliver much-needed medical supplies to our #NATO partners. Ukraine is ready to stir up the cooperation in the time of crisis. We have the capabilities to make a significant contribution to Euro-Atlantic security pic.twitter.com/qHFLl1Pm3V  Vadym Prystaiko (@VPrystaiko) April 15, 2020

"Huge cargo planes AN225 Mriya AN124 continue to deliver much-needed medical supplies to our NATO partners. Ukraine is ready to stir up the cooperation in the time of crisis. We have the capabilities to make a significant contribution to Euro-Atlantic security," Vice Prime Minister of Ukraine for European and Euro-Atlantic Integration Vadym Prystaiko wrote on Twitter on April 15, 2020 following AN225 Mriya had delivered medical cargo from China to Poland.
A 48-year-old woman on Tuesday became the first Philadelphia jail inmate to die of complications from the coronavirus, city officials said.

The Department of Prisons did not release the womans identity, say which facility she had been housed in, or describe the charges on which she was being held.

Sources who were not authorized to publicly discuss the womans death identified her as Yvonne Harris, who had been housed at the Riverside Correctional Facility on State Road since September 2018 on charges of robbery, trespassing, and possessing an instrument of a crime.

Harris received an 11-to-23-month jail sentence after pleading guilty to those charges in July 2019. She would have been eligible for release in August, court records show.

The sources said she fell ill as the coronavirus rapidly made its way through the jail, and she was rushed to a hospital last week. In a news release announcing her death, the city noted that the woman had underlying medical conditions but did not specify what they were.

"Any death is tragic, Mayor Jim Kenney said at a news briefing Tuesday. I want to remind everyone that incarcerated men and women are human beings. They are someones family member and friend and we owe them the dignity of acknowledging their life and their passing."

The death comes as city and state officials ramp up efforts to reduce their inmate populations to curb the spread of the disease behind bars and a day after the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections announced the first coronavirus-related death in the state prison system: a 67-year-old man who had been incarcerated at SCI Phoenix in Montgomery County.

Gov. Tom Wolf unveiled a process Friday that could temporarily release up to 1,800 nonviolent offenders from state prison to home confinement starting this week. Meanwhile, judges, prosecutors and public defenders in Philadelphia have been fast-tracking reviews of inmates charged with minor crimes or held on minimal bail for possible release from the citys jails, which unlike prisons house mostly pretrial defendants.

Harris conviction for a violent crime would have made her ineligible for the early release review, prison officials said. Court records also indicate that at the time of her 2019 guilty plea, she had been on probation for a drug-related conviction a year earlier.

This was an approximately 48-year-old woman who clearly had been suffering from addiction for a long time, District Attorney Larry Krasner said. Her "sentence was not death.

Kenney said Tuesday that the citys courts, working in conjunction with lawyers, have managed to decrease the jail systems inmate population by about 13% over the last month. As of Tuesday morning, the population stood at 4,085 inmates, according to Department of Prisons records.

Of those, 54 are infected with the coronavirus, including three who have been hospitalized, city officials said. An additional 13 inmates have recovered from the illness.

The city has refused to release a breakdown of how many inmates are ill at each of its four jail facilities or identify how many corrections officers have tested positive for the virus, citing privacy concerns.
Technavio has been monitoring the poultry eggs market and it is poised to grow by USD 25.21 billion during 2019-2023, progressing at a CAGR of over 4% 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.

This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20200415005291/en/

Technavio has announced the latest market research report titled Global Poultry Eggs Market 2019-2023 (Graphic: Business Wire)

Technavio suggests three forecast scenarios (optimistic, probable, and pessimistic) considering the impact of COVID-19. Please Request Latest Free Sample Report on COVID-19 Impact

The market is fragmented, and the degree of fragmentation will accelerate during the forecast period. Agroholding Avangard, Cal-Maine Foods, ISE FOODS, Proteina Animal, S.A. DE C.V. (PROAN), and Rose Acre Farms are some of the major market participants. The benefits of poultry eggs 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.

Benefits of poultry eggs has been instrumental in driving the growth of the market.

Poultry Eggs Market 2019-2023: Segmentation

Poultry eggs market is segmented as below:

Product Shell Eggs Specialty Eggs Processed Egg Products

Geographic Landscape APAC Europe MEA North America South America



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=IRTNTR31101

Poultry Eggs 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 poultry eggs market report covers the following areas:

Poultry Eggs Market Size

Poultry Eggs Market Trends

Poultry Eggs Market Industry Analysis

This study identifies growing prominence of private label brands as one of the prime reasons driving the poultry eggs market growth during the next few years.

Poultry Eggs Market 2019-2023: Vendor Analysis

We provide a detailed analysis of vendors operating in the poultry eggs market, including some of the vendors such as Agroholding Avangard, Cal-Maine Foods, ISE FOODS, Proteina Animal, S.A. DE C.V. (PROAN), and Rose Acre Farms. Backed with competitive intelligence and benchmarking, our research reports on the poultry eggs market are designed to provide entry support, customer profile and M&As as well as go-to-market strategy support.

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Poultry Eggs Market 2019-2023: Key Highlights

CAGR of the market during the forecast period 2019-2023

Detailed information on factors that will assist poultry eggs market growth during the next five years

Estimation of the poultry eggs market size and its contribution to the parent market

Predictions on upcoming trends and changes in consumer behavior

The growth of the poultry eggs market

Analysis of the market's competitive landscape and detailed information on vendors

Comprehensive details of factors that will challenge the growth of poultry eggs market vendors

Table Of Contents:

PART 01: EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

PART 02: SCOPE OF THE REPORT

2.1 Preface

2.2 Preface

2.3 Currency conversion rates for US$

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 PRODUCT

Market segmentation by product

Comparison by product

Shell eggs Market size and forecast 2018-2023

Specialty eggs Market size and forecast 2018-2023

Processed egg products Market size and forecast 2018-2023

Market opportunity by product

PART 07: CUSTOMER LANDSCAPE

PART 08: GEOGRAPHIC LANDSCAPE

Geographic segmentation

Geographic comparison

APAC Market size and forecast 2018-2023

North America Market size and forecast 2018-2023

Europe Market size and forecast 2018-2023

South America Market size and forecast 2018-2023

MEA 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

New product launches

Growing prominence of private label brands

Increase in strategic alliances

PART 12: VENDOR LANDSCAPE

Overview

Landscape disruption

Competitive scenario

PART 13: VENDOR ANALYSIS

Vendors covered

Vendor classification

Market positioning of vendors

Agroholding Avangard

Cal-Maine Foods, Inc.

ISE FOODS. INC

Proteina Animal, S.A. DE C.V. (PROAN)

Rose Acre Farms

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/20200415005291/en/

Contacts:

Technavio Research

Jesse Maida

Media Marketing Executive

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UK: +44 203 893 3200

Email: media@technavio.com

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The coronavirus pandemic has turned the United States fine dining landscape into the Wild West. Many restaurants have closed their doors while others look for alternative ways to keep serving food.

As Michelin-starred restaurants wade into the world of takeout and delivery, fine dining looks a lot different nowadays.

Many have put their plating tweezers down and moved molecular gastronomy techniques to the back burner in favor of comforting, soul-nourishing meals.

Designing a New Model

Canlis in Seattle, one of the first U.S. cities to be seriously hit by the virus, started brainstorming new models of business in the beginning of March. Upon closing the dining room, it opened in quick succession a drive-thru burger operation, a bagel shed, and their pre-made meals for delivery and takeaway.

The first two ideas proved to be populartoo popular, in fact, causing traffic problems in the neighborhoodso it ceased operations on the burgers and bagels and refocused solely on meal kits.

Called Family Meal, the four-course dinners, which can be ordered on reservation system Tock, serve two to four people and are priced anywhere from $46 to $95 a head.

Menus change daily and feature dishes such as meatballs, rabbit pot pie, and a crab boil.

It doesnt make sense for us to do our more meticulous, manicured, fine dining food, says third generation co-owner Mark Canlis.

Thats not what Seattle needs right nowand you cant package that up and put it in a box anyway.

However, he still stresses the food is fine dining, just reimagined. Were taking our dry-aged steaks and grinding them down into meatball marinara sauce. The ducks we used to do table-side are now used in a duck cassoulet, he explains.

As any restaurateur knows, food is only part of the equation. Ambiance counts toward the overall experience as well. Every evening, Canlis live-streams pianoan iconic part of the dining roomso guests can recreate the Canlis vibe in their homes.

For Chicago gastronomes, no announcement was more enticing than The Alinea Groups pivot to takeout. The group counts award-winning Alinea, Next, and Roister restaurants, as well as cocktail den The Aviary, under its umbrella.

When co-owner Nick Kokonas started seeing reservations at restaurants across the country plummet in the wake of the coronavirus, he knew action was needed.

Citing Canlis as inspirationthey do a lot of creative things like we do, says Kokonasthey prepared to get rid of our restaurant as we used to know it, as a modernist cuisine temple, and figure out how to serve [hundreds of] meals a night as carry out, he says.

(Hundreds is an understatement. Alinea produces 1,250 dinners per day, suggesting the appetite for high-quality takeout is high in Chicago.)

Each restaurant in The Alinea Group now offers a single dish, which changes frequently. One of the things thats really important is to do one thing really well.

Instead of offering a giant carry out menu of 80 items, its much better to come up with something very, very awesome, precise, and simple to execute.

This scalable approach translates into the $39.95-a-head coq a vin from Alinea, a $24.95-per-person lasagna from Roister, or $65 mimosas and ready-to-bake pastries from The Aviary.

Kokonas is keen on takeout not only because it keeps workers employed, but it potentially prevents food scarcity in the city. Between grocery stores and restaurants, youve spread out your food distribution into many, many nodes. More points of opportunity means less chance of failure, he explains.

Not all chefs feel the need to completely throw out their playbook.

At two-Michelin-starred Acadia in Chicagos South Loop, chef-owner Ryan McCaskey offers a la carte items culled from the restaurants bar menu and from his seasonal Maine restaurant, Acadia House Provisions, rather than try to retrofit Acadias tasting menu bites into a delivery format.

As he gains solid footing under him, hes introducing composed dishes, such as the fan-favorite deconstructed lobster pot pie that appeared on Acadias opening menu, into the takeaway repertoire.

A New Kind of Soul Food

Its often been said chefs cook from the heart, but just because the food is now in a bowl or box doesnt mean they cant still tell their story.

Fabian Von Hauske, co-owner of tasting-menu restaurant Contra and natural wine bar Wildair in Manhattan, relaunched with a completely new model that combines the energy and cuisine of both places, right down to the name of the single-serving bowl: Contrair.

We wanted to do something that we havent done before because this is a new thing for everyone; we just need to approach it like that, he says.

The bowls, such as a spicy lamb stew or crab congee, meld Von Hauskes Mexican and his co-owner Jeremiah Stones Chinese heritages. Its food we really enjoy eating and food that really means something to us, Von Hauske explains.

A selection of natural wines, also available for delivery, round out the offerings.

For acclaimed chef Dominique Crenn, My primary thought was: OK, well, is it about us surviving or is it about us being at the service of the community?' she said.

Although Crenn has several restaurants to her name, she notes that all are small operationsthe largest has 38 seatsand she needed to focus her energy in one place to achieve her vision of serving the greater good.

Crenn designed her Crenn Kits, which feed one to six people and are priced at $38 or $55 per person, around the healing properties of food.

As a cancer survivor, Crenn believes nutrition is paramount; food should be good for the soul and good for the immune system, she says, and the kits often contain ingredients cultivated at her organic and biodynamic farm in Sonoma, California.

Soup plays heavily in the menu, as do vegetables.

The emotional impact of being well-fed with low-stress is also important to Crenn; she hopes the kits alleviate the burden of yet another task for parents who now balance working from home with their childrens schooling or the elderly who may be house-bound.

Crenn also recently launched Vitabowl, a new project in which shes a partner.

The vegetarian superfood bowls, as Crenn describes them, were fast-tracked for the COVID-19 pandemic. Priced $12 to $14 and sold at her restaurant and in certain food markets in the San Francisco area, she sees them as another way to provide nourishment to the community.

Option to Elevate

While the takeout trend leans into affordable, comfort-food meals, chef Hiroki Odo of the 14-seat kaiseki speakeasy o.d.o by ODO in New York City recently unveiled a new high-end catering option.

The $250-a-head, five course kaiseki meal is a luxurious counterpoint to the affordable $18 sushi boxes he first released (and still offers) when the restaurant closed.

Odo wanted to use more high-end ingredients, like what he uses in the restaurant, he explained through a translator, and offer guests something more upscale if theyre looking for an elevated experience in their home.

Supporting the Greater Good

Through the new delivery and takeout model, restaurateurs find they can support new endeavors that affect positive change in society.

Crenn partnered with Lexus (shes a culinary master for the company) to ramp up production of her Crenn Kits so she can donate meals to health care workers on the front lines.

In addition to Family Meal, Canlis sells what they call CSA boxes, which contain ingredients from their purveyors.

By opening up a direct-to-consumer channel for its suppliers, Canlis is keeping its vendors afloat. Acadia hosts a farmers market every Saturday where unemployed restaurant workersone of the hardest-hit industriescan pick up donated products and get foodstuffs for the week, free of charge.

Coveted Tables

Takeaway from these fine-dining spots is the hot new reservation: Alinea has a waiting list of 1,000 orders.

Every. Single. Night.

And no wonder; people who normally wouldnt be able to patronize the restaurant get the opportunity to experience Michelin-starred cuisine at a fraction of the price, while regulars can support their favorite establishments.

Jill Adams, a kindergarten teacher in Austin, Texas, saw the James Beard-awarding winning restaurant Uchi was offering takeaway through the venues social media.

We would consider it our favorite restaurant and think its incredible food, she says. It certainly is a high-end restaurant and it would be a special occasion for our family.

Given the circumstances, ordering from Uchi was a way for Adams to engage in some normalcy and celebrate life.

Kokonas sees his regulars picking up from Alinea one night, sister restaurant Next another night, and says the oft-changing menu entices repeat business.

He calls the experience joyful and says, starting at around 6 p.m. every night, my Twitter feed is a bunch of people posting pictures and saying, Hey, how does my plating look?'

Date Night

Mark Canlis favorite moment thus far was on one of his delivery shifts (yes, even the boss works delivery).

I show up and theres a sign taped to the screen door and it says, Welcome to Canlis,' he recalls. And it wasnt for me, it was for [the customers] wife. [The customer] said, Its the one time Ive taken my sweatpants off all week. Im getting dressed up for my wife.'

Thats the response, says Canlis. Thats whats going on. Its not just that youre sharing someone dinner, youre reminding them of a time that seems like a long time ago, and youre giving them an excuse to just celebrate.

The-CNN-Wire and copyright 2020 Cable News Network, Inc., a WarnerMedia Company. All rights reserved.
1. Bollywood Courtroom Drama - Aitraaz (2004)

2. Bollywood Courtroom Drama - Shaurya (2008)

3. Bollywood Courtroom Drama -

4. Bollywood Courtroom Drama -

5. Bollywood Courtroom Drama -

6. Bollywood Courtroom Drama -

7. Bollywood Courtroom Drama -

8. Bollywood Courtroom Drama -

Courtroom dramas hold a special appeal in the sense that it lets the actors give long impassioned speeches and make the masses believe theyre witnessing actual courtroom proceedings. However, the real courtroom happenings are far removed from the glamorised versions that we see on screen. They make for engaging viewing for sure. During these days, when were all locked up and can do with some excitement in our lives, what can be better than binge-watching courtroom dramas. Presenting a list offor your viewing pleasure this quarantine.Director: Abbas-MustanCast: Akshay Kumar, Kareena Kapoor, Priyanka Chopra, Amrish PuriAitraaz was kind of inspired by the Micahel Douglas starrer Disclosure (1994). In that film, Demi Moores character forces herself onto Michael Douglas and later vows to ruin him when he spurned her advances. In Aitraaz, Akshay and Priyanka are shown to have known each other before. They were in a relationship but she chose to break it off and even aborted their child. Now, despite being married to a rich man, who happens to be his boss, shes sexually frustrated. She wants to ignite their relationship again and accuses him of molesting her when she fails to seduce him. A long court case follows, where initially she seems to be winning but later, deft counter-questioning by Akshays wife Kareena, who happens to be a lawyer, makes her admit to the truth. The film was quite bold by Indian standards. Priyanka was a relative newcomer back then and it was brave of her to choose such a provocative role. She was liked by the critics and masses alike in her bad girl avatar and her star ratings soared because of that.Director: Samar KhanCast: Kay Kay Menon, Rahul Bose, Javed Jaffrey, Deepak Dobriyal and Minissha LambaShaurya was said to be inspired by the Hindi play Court Martial written by Swadesh Deepak and carried elements of the Tom Cruise starrer A Few Good Men (1992). Best friends Akash (Javed Jaffrey) and Sid (Rahul Bose) are army lawyers. As luck would have it, Akash is appointed the lawyer for the prosecution while Sid is selected as the lawyer for defence for a high profile case. Captain Javed Khan (Deepak Dobriyal) has been accused of killing a superior officer. Strangely, though he has surrendered after the act, he has chosen to stay mum, thus making Sids job harder than ever. Intrigued by this, Sid starts investigating in the unrest, leading him to believe that the killing was justified and that the army top brass is trying to hush up the incident. He lacks concrete evidence but engages the base commander, Brigadier Rudra Pratap Singh (Kay Kay Menon), in a battle of words when the latter is brought in to testify. An enraged Brigadier slips up and shows his anti-Muslim bias, thus helping Sid win the case. The film was marked by fabulous performances from the entire cast. Deepak Dobriyal doesnt speak much throughout the film but still manages to make his presence felt.Director: Umesh ShuklaCast: Akshay Kumar, Paresh Rawal, Mithun ChakrabortyThehad the strangest of a plotline in the sense that it shows a man suing God. The film is said to be an official remake of the 2001 Australian film The Man Who Sued God. And the storyline is also based on a Gujarati stage-play called Kanji Virudh Kanji. Kanji Lalji Mehta (Paresh Rawal), is a middle-class Hindu who doesnt believe in God despite owning a shop selling Hindu idols. One day, an earthquake hits the city, and Kanji's shop is the only shop that is destroyed. At the insurance office, Kanji learns that the disaster claim does not cover any damage caused by natural calamities classified under "Act of God". Therefore, he decides to sue God and Hanif Qureshi (Om Puri), a Muslim lawyer, helps him file the case after Kanji decides to fight on his own. Initially, things go bad for him. Kanji finds himself facing armed goons sent by fundamentalists. The bank starts mortgage proceedings against him and fed up by constant harassment his wife and kids leave him. But later, hes joined by thousands suffering similar calamities. Various religious heads get dragged into the lawsuit. He proves triumphant in the end, only to witness that the masses have begun to see him as an avatar of God and have constructed a temple in his name.Director: Subhash KapoorCast: Arshad Warsi, Boman Irani, Amrita Rao, Saurabh ShuklaJolly (Arshad Warsi) has never argued a big case before while Tejinder Rajpal (Boman Irani) has never lost one. When he hears that Rajpal is defending a rich mans son accused of killing six people sleeping on pavements through rash driving, he files a PIL in order to earn instant fame. He even takes a bribe to lose the case. However, chided by his girlfriend, he returns the money and begins to fight in earnest. He fumbles at first but goaded by the callousness shown by Rajpal towards the death of poor pavement dwellers, he begins a parallel investigation and learns of the police's involvement in hushing up the case. Even at the risk of his own life, he manages to bring in a crucial witness to the court and helps the underprivileged victims get justice. The film was a satire on our lax judicial process. It also exposed the apathy of the upper classes towards the plight of the downtrodden. Saurabh Shukla was excellent as the judge while Boman Irani andverbal sparring in the court was the highlight of this thought-provoking comedy.Director: Aniruddha Roy ChowdhuryCast: Amitabh Bachchan, Taapsee Pannu, Kirti Kulhari, Andrea Tariang, Angad BediConsent is the most important thing when it comes to any form of sexual congress. No essentially means no. So when a girl is saying that, you better stop. This is basically the essence of the film, so to speak. Three young women  Minal (Taapsee Pannu), Falak (Kirti Kulhari) and Andrea are harassed by three young men Raunak (Raashul Tanden), Vishwajyoti (Tushar Pandey) and Rajveer Singh (Angad Bedi). As a woman has hurt them, their well-connected friend, Ankit (Vijay Varma), vows revenge. Andrea is forever being stalked and Falak loses her job. Minal is kidnapped and molested in a car and warned strictly against filing a case of initiating police proceedings against the three. In the court, the lawyer hired by the men makes a case that the girls were prostitutes -- they were friendly towards strangers, they drank with men, attended a rock concert and were wearing revealing clothes. Their lawyer, played by Amitabh Bachchan, points out that while women are stereotyped as prostitutes if they come home late, move out of their home, want to be independent, drink and so on, none of these conditions applies to men. He states that the girl said no. No means no and doesnt require further explanation. While Bachchan was in fine form, as usual, the three girls, Taapsee Pannu, Kirti Kulhari and Andrea Tariang made the film their own through their realistic performances.Director: Subhash KapoorCast: Akshay Kumar, Huma Qureshi, Annu Kapoor, Saurabh Shuklaplays a small-town lawyer who, ridden by guilt, takes up a case involving false encounters by the police. He has never undertaken a case before, his knowledge of the courtroom proceedings is scratchy and hes up against one of the best defence lawyers in the city. But his persistence does pay off and he not only ends up uncovering the unlawful activities of the police, but he also ends up nabbing the real culprit. Fake encounters by the police are indeed a sad reality of our country. Hats off to director Subhash Kapoor for making a bold, sensitive film on such a hard-hitting subject. While the film is given a comedic treatment, its intentions are anything but. What the film is trying to say is that its become the practice of sorts to give the police a clean chit in sensitive cases. The judiciary tends to take a lenient view of things where extra-judicial killings of terrorists are involved. But care should be taken that no innocent gets harmed while taking action against insurgents. That the police shouldnt overstep their authority nor should it falsify facts. Akshay Kumar does full justice to his role as an inexperienced lawyer who nevertheless isnt short on courage. Annu Kapoors one-liners keep you in splits and Saurabh Shukla too is in fine form as the judge.Director: Anubhav SinhaCast: Rishi Kapoor, Taapsee Pannu, Prateik Babbar, Neena Gupta, Manoj Pahwa, Prachee Shah, Rajat Kapoor, Kumud Mishra and Ashutosh RanaHow does one prove that one loves ones country? And should this love be questioned in the first place? Who are the actual citizens of this country, really? Given the fact that 40 lakh people in Assam find themselves out of the citizen list, these are relevant questions indeed. Such questions have never been pointedly asked in such a fearless manner in our films. For years, we have been divided into them and us and slowly, this divide has reached such a state that now the criteria is that if you hate them, only then you're with us. Shahid Mohammed (Prateik Babbar) is the wayward nephew of advocate Murad Ali Mohammed (Rishi Kapoor). His younger brother, Bilaal Mohammed (Manoj Pahwa), runs a small electronics shop. His elder son is settled in England, along with his Hindu wife, Aarti (), who too is a lawyer. Shahid is accused of being a terrorist. He's killed in an encounter and his father is arrested for having a connection with terrorists. Worse, Murad himself, who is fighting his brother's case, is slapped with a charge of collusion. Now it's up to daughter-in-law Aarti to clear the family name by winning the case in the court.Director: Ajay BahlCast: Akshaye Khanna, Richa Chadda, Rahul Bhat, Meera ChopraThe film revolves aroundof our Constitution, which defines rape as sexual intercourse with a woman against her will, without her consent, by coercion, misrepresentation or fraud or at a time when she has been intoxicated or drugged and in any case if she is under 16 years of age. A lowly costume assistant Anjali (Meera Chopra) accuses a top-notch film director, Rohan Khurana (Rahul Bhat) of rape. A high profile court case ensues, where top defence lawyer Tarun Saluja (Akshaye Khanna) is pitted against an ambitious public prosecutor Hiral Gandhi (Richa Chadda). Both bring various perspectives into play, laying bare the ugliness of rape in the process. The film, in its entirety, bats for women empowerment. It tells you how degrading it is for a woman to narrate her ordeal multiple times in court, as well as while filing an FIR. That she has to undergo a physical examination and subject herself to all kinds of tests, all of which make her experience the dreaded trauma again. It calls not only for a humane approach by the judiciary and the police but also asserts that following a time-bound procedure for collecting evidence and maintaining a thorough record of findings is crucial in such cases.
Regulatory News:

Pershing Square Holdings, Ltd. (LN:PSH) (LN:PSHD) (NA:PSH) today released its regular weekly Net Asset Value ("NAV") and performance returns on its website, https://www.pershingsquareholdings.com/company-reports/weekly-navs/. The NAV and returns were computed as of the close of business on Tuesday, 14 April 2020.

PSH NAV per share as of close of business on 14 April 2020 was 30.21 USD 23.93 GBP and year-to-date performance was 12.5%.

Weekly net asset value ("NAV") is calculated as of the close of business on each Tuesday and posted on the following business day. In the event that Tuesday is not a business day, the Company will calculate the close-of-business NAV as of the business day immediately preceding that Tuesday. The end-of-month NAV is calculated as of the close of business on the last day of the month and posted on the following business day. For weeks that include a month-end NAV report, PSH will provide only the month-end NAV and not report the Tuesday NAV. Monthly NAVs are published in accordance with the Decree on Conduct of Business Supervision of Financial Undertakings under the Wft (Besluit Gedragstoezicht financiele ondernemingen Wft).

Performance is presented on a net-of-fees basis and reflects the deduction of, among other expenses: management fees, brokerage commissions, administrative fees and accrued performance fees, if any. The performance figure includes the reinvestment of all dividends, interest and capital gains. Depending on the timing of a specific investment, net performance for an individual investor may vary from the net performance as stated herein. Net performance is a geometrically linked time weighted calculation.

Past performance is not necessarily indicative of future results. All investments involve risk including the loss of principal.

About Pershing Square Holdings, Ltd.

Pershing Square Holdings, Ltd. (LN:PSH) (LN:PSHD) (NA:PSH) is an investment holding company structured as a closed-ended fund that makes concentrated investments principally in North American companies.

View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20200415005724/en/

Contacts:

Camarco

Ed Gascoigne-Pees Hazel Stevenson +44 020 3757 4989, media-pershingsquareholdings@camarco.co.uk
(Newser)  President Trump says the US is halting payments to the World Health Organization while his administration investigates the UN health agency's failure to carry out its "basic duty." In his Tuesday briefing, Trump accused the WHO of "severely mismanaging and covering up the spread of the coronavirus," the New York Times reports. "The WHO pushed Chinas misinformation about the virus," said Trump. The president called the agency's advice against travel restrictions "disastrous" and said lives could have been saved if the WHO had done a better job of investigating early reports of the outbreak in China, reports the AP. The WHO, Trump said, "defended the actions of the Chinese government, even praising its so-called transparency."

story continues below

Trump also appeared to backtrack on his claim to have "total" authority to order states when to reopen their economies, an assertion that was rejected by constitutional scholars as well as state governors. Instead, he said he would be "authorizing each individual governor of each individual state to implement a reopeningand a very powerful reopeningplan of their state at a time and in a matter as most appropriate." He said he wasn't going to put pressure on any state to reopen before it is ready, NBC reports. Trump said he would soon be speaking to the governors of all 50 states, and there are "over 20 that are in extremely good shape" which could reopen soon. (Earlier Tuesday, Trump accused governors of "mutiny.")
Turkey dispatches another military convoy to Syria's Idlib: Group

Iran Press TV

Tuesday, 14 April 2020 5:39 PM

A monitoring group says Turkey has dispatched a new military convoy to Syria's northwestern province of Idlib, despite a recent ceasefire deal that Ankara has signed with Moscow to halt the escalation of violence there.

The British-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR), citing what it said were activists requesting anonymity, said on Tuesday that a Turkish convoy of some 35 military vehicles entered Syrian territory through the Kafr Lusin border crossing and headed toward Turkish positions.

The group added that the number of Turkish military units that had entered the Idlib de-escalation zone ever since the ceasefire came into effect in the area last month had increased dramatically to more than 5,950.

It said the number of Turkish soldiers deployed to northwest Syria since February 2 also stood at over 10,300.

The information could not be independently verified. There was no immediate confirmation from either Damascus or Ankara.

On March 5, Russia and Turkey, which support opposite sides in the Syrian conflict, came to an agreement on a ceasefire regime in Idlib, where Turkish aggression against the Syrian government had risked sparking a war.

Under the agreement, joint Russian-Turkish patrols secure a six-kilometer-wide corridor along a highway connecting the two government-held provinces of Latakia and Aleppo.

The two sides fleshed out the agreement on March 13.

Turkey sends Kurdish militants to Libya

In a separate development on Tuesday, a spokesman for the self-proclaimed Libyan National Army (LNA) under the command of renegade general Khalifa Haftar claimed that Turkey was sending the militants it had trained in Iraq's Kurdistan region to fight in the North African country.

Ahmed Mismari said in a press conference in the eastern Libyan city of Benghazi that the militants had been trained by the Turkish military in the city of Erbil in Iraq's semi-autonomous Kurdistan.

The spokesman said the militants received training from Turkey's "Lashkari Roj" forces.

In February, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan confirmed for the first time the presence of pro-Turkish Syrian militants in Libya.

Libya's internationally recognized government, led by Prime Minister Fayez al-Sarraj, has previously sought Turkey's support against rebel forces loyal to Haftar, who receives support from Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates.

Haftar's rebels have been fighting to seize the Libyan capital.

Libya plunged into chaos in 2011, when a popular uprising and a NATO intervention led to the ouster, and later killing, of long-time dictator Muammar Gaddafi.

Since 2014, Libya has been divided between the Tripoli-based government and a camp in the eastern city of Tobruk, supported militarily by Haftar's rebels.

Peace talks to end the fighting in Libya have failed. A shaky ceasefire has been agreed but has been routinely violated.

According to the latest UN tally, more than 280 civilians and roughly 2,000 fighters have been killed since Haftar launched his offensive in April to seize Tripoli. An estimated 146,000 Libyans have been displaced.

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Just a week after a part of the office of the accountant-general of the federation was gutted by fire, there has been another fire outb...

Just a week after a part of the office of the accountant-general of the federation was gutted by fire, there has been another fire outbreak at the Corporate Affairs Commission (CAC) headquarters in Maitama, Abuja.



The fire broke out Wednesday morning.

The building is located at Maitama District of the F.C.T.





As at time of filing this report, cause of the inferno is still unknown.





Details later
Eleven new COVID-19 cases were announced on Tuesday evening, bringing the total confirmed cases in Nigeria to 373.

The 11 new cases bring to 30 the total number of new cases announced on Tuesday.

This is the highest daily figure reported by the health agency since the beginning of the outbreak in Nigeria in February.

All the new cases occurred in Lagos. This implies that Lagos State reported 25 new cases of the virus on Tuesday. This is also the highest daily figure recorded in the state.

Tuesdays cases bring the total number of confirmed cases in Lagos to 214.

The additional cases were announced within an hour after the NCDC announced 19 new cases in four states  Lagos, Kano, Edo, Akwa Ibom  and the Federal Capital Territory (FCT).

Till date, 373 cases have been confirmed, 99 cases have been discharged and eleven deaths have been recorded in Nigeria

Out of the total confirmed cases, 263 are still active, 99 have been discharged with 11 deaths reported, the agency said.

As of the time of reporting, 19 states and the FCT have confirmed at least a case of the virus in Nigeria.

Lagos State has now reported 214 cases, followed by FCT  58, Osun  20, Edo  15, Oyo  11, Ogun  9, Bauchi, Kaduna and Akwa Ibom  6, Katsina  5, Kwara and Kano  4, while Ondo and Delta have 3 cases each. Enugu, Ekiti, and Rivers have two cases each, while Niger, Benue, and Anambra have recorded one each.

Community transmission

The Minister of Health, Osagie Ehanire, has said Nigeria could record more cases as there is now evidence of community transmission in the country.

Mr Ehanire, during the Presidential Task Force media briefing on Monday, stated that there is early evidence of community transmission and this reinforces the urgency of physical distancing, use of mask, maintenance of hygiene as well as strict adherence to the lockdown measures.

He also said the increasing number of confirmed cases is a result of improvements in testing capacity in the country.

READ ALSO:

He advised Nigerians living in any neighbourhood where many people have tested positive, to go for testing.

The country now has about 11 testing centres where COVID-19 cases can be tested.

However, testing is not recommended in the absence of symptoms because COVID-19 might not show during the incubation time, he said.
We want everybody to be safe, Van Dusen said. Were concerned that people might be thinking that were over the peak, were on the downward trajectory, so we can ease up. And that is not true.
Ghanas COVID-19 cases have not reached the 1000 mark yet like it is being spread on social media.

Our manifesto: This is what YEN.com.gh believes in

There is a false message making rounds on Facebook, Twitter, and WhatsApp that Ghanas COVID-19 case is now 1,064.

The viral message generated lots of reactions, causing fear and panic in Ghanaians. The fake news also captured the top trend in Ghana Twitter on Monday, April 13, 2020.

READ ALSO: COVID-19: Ghana records highest number of positive cases in West Africa

But YEN.com.gh fact checks indicate the news is an absolute falsehood and fake.

The Ghana Health Service website which remains the official channel for updating Ghanaians and the world on coronavirus cases said the countrys status was 566 cases as of April 13.

Also, the Information Ministry denied the 1,064 number on its official Facebook page and asked Ghanaians to ignore the viral message.

Meanwhile, according to the Ghana Health Service, a total of 37,954 persons have been tested with 566 being positive for COVID-19.

READ ALSO: COVID-19: 49 arrested in Obuasi for attending wedding

The breakdown of the 566 positive cases are as follows: four (4) have been treated, discharged and tested negative, 552 cases have been categorized as mild disease on treatment, two (2) moderate to severe cases, none currently on ventilators and eight (8) have died.

Also, 11 out of 16 regions in Ghana have reported cases of coronavirus and they include Greater Accra, Ashanti, Central, Eastern, Western, Volta, Northern, North East, Upper East, and Upper West.

YEN.com.gh earlier reported that former president John Dramani Mahama has been busy and has made some donations to some health facilities across the country to help in the fight of the novel Coronavirus.

The National Democratic Congress (NDC) flagbearer has also promised to build another medical research centre in the north.

He opined that this new facility will have the capacity like the Noguchi Memorial Institute for Medical Research and Kumasi Centre for Collaborative Research in Tropical Medicine.

New contactless washing tap invention to fight COVID-19 in Ghana | #Yencomgh

READ ALSO: Neymar's mother, 52, dates 22-year-old man as ex-husband congratulates her

Your stories and photos are always welcome. Get interactive via our Facebook page.

Source: YEN.com.gh
Germany's government will extend restrictions on movement introduced last month to slow the spread of the coronavirus until at least May 3, Handelsblatt business daily reported on Wednesday, citing the dpa news agency.

Chancellor Angela Merkel is holding a video conference on Wednesday first with cabinet ministers and later with the leaders of Germany's 16 states who will try to agree on whether to ease the measures given some improvement in the situation.

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A campaign of xenophobia developed in Guangdong with African residents forced to submit to mandatory testing and quarantine. A McDonalds restaurant in Guangzhou banned "black people" from entering. Some have been evicted from their homes, forced to live in the streets. Embarrassed, Chinese authorities have run for cover as Africa plays a central role in the Belt and Road Initiative.

Guangzhou (AsiaNews)  Diplomats from 20 African countries have complained about the inhumane treatment inflicted upon their citizens in China, victims of xenophobia within the campaign against the coronavirus outbreak.

The issue of racial discrimination against Africans by local authorities and residents began in the city of Guangzhou (Guangdong) after five Nigerians tested positive to the COVID-19 virus.

In the city, a McDonalds restaurant displayed a notice stating black people are not allowed to enter. After a video was posted online, the ban was lifted.

A student from Kenya living in the city told Caixin that some Africans were barred from entering supermarkets; others were evicted from their homes even though they paid their rent.

AsiaNews has learnt that some quarantined Africans have not received help and assistance from the authorities, and were forced to go out to get food.

African diplomats say that several of their citizens were forced to sleep outdoors, as hotels also refused to host them. According to the US consulate in Guangzhou, some African-Americans have reportedly received the same treatment.

Overall, 12 Africans have tested positive in Guangzhou, out of some 500 cases. African ambassadors have called for an end on compulsory testing and quarantine for their citizens.

According to city authorities, some 4,500 Africans live in Guangzhou. As the fear of contagion by foreigners developed, they were placed under greater monitoring even though most imported cases involved Chinese citizens.

The diplomatic row has embarrassed Chinese leaders. Africa plays a central part in Chinas foreign policy, and is a key component of its Belt and Road Initiative, a project launched by Chinese President Xi Jinping to turn China into into the worlds main trader.

Running for cover, Beijing announced that it would review health restrictions imposed on Africans.

Chinas Foreign Ministry yesterday reassured the 20 African diplomats, and the African Union, that Guangzhou provincial authorities are gradually lifting restrictions.

Only the individuals who contracted the virus, those who came into contact with them, and suspected cases will be closely monitored.

The government stressed that the new measures, based on the "principle of non-discrimination, will be adopted in coordination with the consulates of the countries concerned in Guangzhou.
The United States and communist People's Republic of China are rivals, engaged in competition for influence and power in East Asia and throughout the world. The spread of the COVID-19 coronavirus and its devastating effects should sharpen our awareness of the depth, extent, and intensity of this rivalry and of the stakes involved. If the United States is not vigilant, we risk handing China a decisive victory.

How could a virus that originated in China, killed many thousands of Chinese, provoked brutal repression and countless human rights violations by the regime against its own people, disrupted the Chinese economy, and brought the Chinese communist leadership into disrepute globally turn into a strategic victory for China? Through sophisticated information operations and propaganda combined with, relatively speaking, fiscal restraint, even at the expense of human life.

China's communist leaders wake up every morning with two thoughts on their minds. First and foremost, how does the Communist Party retain power and avoid a revolution? Second, how does the Communist Party reunify China to include Taiwan by its stated goal of 2049, the centennial of the communist revolution; establish dominance in the region; and eventually become the global hegemon without directly confronting the United States militarily?

The virus can serve each of these ends. China still has something approaching half of its population of over 1.4 billion living in poverty. From the perspective of the brutal communist leadership, so what if there were fewer people, even in an economically vibrant area like Wuhan? Not a problem, as long as the communist propaganda machine lays blame elsewhere other than the regime. Mass death creates greater economic opportunity for the many migrant workers who remain. The virus kills the weakest, who are an economic drag on the system. Domestic propaganda about the regime's success in combating the disease may reinforce popular approval of the government as nationalistic feelings are mobilized to place the blame on the United States enemy.

In ways surpassing even the communist leadership's hopes, the virus also is accelerating the communists' plans to overtake the United States and establish a new regional and global order to meet their own interests. The statistics coming out of the Wuhan region are unreliable, making it difficult to estimate the true number of deaths there. By one estimate, the number exceeds 40,000. It is even harder to determine what resources China expended to quell the virus within its own borders. But it seems safe to say China did not break its bank in trying to save lives. It closed the Wuhan region and other regions by using brutal tactics for a matter of several weeks, only to trumpet its economic reopening and announce that it is back in business.

Meanwhile, the virus, thanks in large part to China's cover-up of its origins, infectiousness, and lethality (a cover-up assisted by China's enablers in the World Health Organization), spread to the Middle East, Europe and eventually the United States and the world. What was the response of the United States government, largely on the recommendation of its public health officials? To shut down much of our economy, the largest economy in the world, just as China was beginning to reopen its own, which is the second largest.

The economic consequences of the United States lockdown were, and are, catastrophic. Even with massive government stimulus, over 16 million people have lost their jobs. Unemployment, however brief, may peak at a staggering, depression-level 32 percent. Entire industries, include the United States' energy industry, are at risk. Many people were unable to pay rents or to meet medical expenses. Small businesses such as family-owned restaurants have been forced to close. Markets crashed, at least for a time, diminishing lifetime savings and depleting pension funds in a few weeks. Corporate debt loads threatened to become unsustainable, and many already leveraged companies veered toward bankruptcy. Private borrowers could not meet mortgage payments or student loan obligations.

To quell the panic and prevent irreversible collapse, Congress passed stimulus measures far in excess of numbers we have seen before, injecting anywhere from 2 to 6 trillion dollars into the American economy. Hopefully at least some portion of these sums used to assist businesses will be repaid. Still, these sums could equal a quarter of the annual United States Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and exploded the already 20-plus-trillion-dollar national debt. The national debt now has either re-approached or surpassed the size of the United States economy as measured by GDP, long considered a trip-wire in the economic health of a nation. This has happened only twice in modern history  in 1947, after World War II, and in 2011, after the Great Recession. Household and business debt has increased substantially, too.

The economic damage that has already been done to the United States is significant if not severe and will require a restoration and retooling of our economy, which will take time, perhaps years. This economic disruption combined with the huge stimulus spending risks translating into a strategic blow to the United States. The vast expansion of the national debt, which was already ominously high, may eventually threaten the United States' borrowing capacity, undermine its creditworthiness, or crowd out lending for private businesses. The higher federal, state, and local taxes needed to pay for recovery measures will be a drag on the United States economy for a protracted period. The costs of funding medical care and unemployment benefits will add to these burdens.

Economic power backstops military power and enhances cultural (so-called "soft power") influence around the world. As former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Michael Mullen warned nearly a decade ago, when the national debt was last similarly exploding, "the single biggest threat to our national security is debt." China's leaders know this. We can expect them to exploit other opportunities that the pandemic offers.

The tools of 21st-century warfare, with all its domains, including land; sea; air; space; cyber; intelligence; and, prominently now, bio-defense, are extremely expensive. The United States has chosen to commit trillions of dollars in an attempt to protect against a virus that appears to have low lethality rates for the vast majority of our population and that in any case may recur within a year.

Certainly, we are not a communist dictatorship and should not react brutally as the Chinese communists did to the virus in its own country. But that does not mean that we should act without heightened fiscal awareness and prudence in response to the virus or to any other threat.

The United States could take a number of cost-effective initiatives in diplomacy, trade, finance, and military affairs to counter any attempt by China to wring advantages out of the pandemic. For instance, as Professor Charles Lipson recently argued, the United States could create an alternative organization of the Chinese-dominated WHO, using its own resources and those of allied nations, to gather and disseminate reliable information about future pandemics.

Like Japan, the United States could use its stimulus funds to repatriate United States businesses operating in China, supporting American employment at a critical juncture and increasing tax revenues.

The United States could sponsor a United Nations Security Council resolution calling on China to close its wet markets, which are believed to have created the conditions for the virus to spread to humans. Let China, a permanent member of the Security Council, veto it.

The State Department could call for an independent examination into the origins of the outbreak of the virus last year in Wuhan. China's President Xi has a lot of questions answer.

The Department of Justice can and should continue its widening dragnet against Chinese espionage underway within the United States.

Though it would require a significant investment, the United States could elevate the biological defense program to form a military branch modeled on the new Space Force, to defend against potential attacks in the microbial domain, as it does in the land, sea, air, and space domains, and to assist in times of disaster.

Our task is not simply to save lives where we can, but to live in a world that respects human life, dignity, and freedom. While the virus is in all likelihood a temporary phenomenon, our competing vision for the world with China could last for most of the 21st century and even beyond. China may well be emboldened by anything it views as a show of weakness or fiscal irresponsibility, and will be ready to fill any void that our circumstances or our responses to the virus create. We can and must find ways to fight the virus without handing China a decisive victory.

Robert Delahunty is the LeJeune Professor of Law at the University of St. Thomas School of Law in Minneapolis, Minn. Chad Bayse is a Navy judge advocate and former counselor to Attorney General Jeff Sessions and attorney at the National Security Agency. The views expressed in this article are his own.
Billy McFarland, the convicted organizer of the failed Fyre Festival, has requested early prison release due to coronavirus concerns at his Ohio jail. He is pictured leaving Manhattan federal court in 2017, the year of his conviction

Billy McFarland, the convicted organizer of the failed Fyre Festival, is making a bid to get out of jail early due to coronavirus concerns at his Ohio prison.

Lawyers for McFarland recently requested their client be granted a 'compassionate release', and allowed to serve the remainder of his sentence in 'home detention' rather than continue at the Elkton Federal Correctional Facility.

The attorneys say in a letter to a judge that 36 inmates and 26 staff members have been confirmed to have the virus and that four prisoners have died.

The lawyers also note that Republican Congressman Bill Johnson of Ohio has called the jail a 'breeding ground for the virus'.

There have been 7,543 confirmed cases in Ohio of the coronavirus, which has been blamed for 334 deaths.

Across the country, there have been more than 633,380 confirmed cases of COVID-19, which has been blamed for at least 27,613 deaths.

McFarland, 28, is currently serving six years behind bars for fraud after he conned people out of millions to fund fake music festival Fyre Festival in 2017.

In addition to the risks of being around anyone who may be infected with COVID-19, McFarland's lawyers say that he has pre-existing health issues, including asthma which he suffered as a teenager, plus allergies and 'heart issues since his early 20s.'

The lawyers note that rapper Tekashi 6ix9ine was given similar consideration and released to home detention, due to similar concerns and asthma.

Tekashi, 23, whose real name is Daniel Hernandez, is currently serving a 24-month sentence after pleading guilty to nine charges including conspiracy to murder and armed robbery.

He had already served 13 months of his two-year sentence in jail, and he was due to be released from an upstate New York prison in August 2020.

Additionally, attorney Lance Lazzaro said that Hernandez had been experiencing shortness of breath and was not being allowed to see a doctor by prison officials.

Considering the rapper's release, McFarland's lawyers say their client is an 'ideal candidate for compassionate release,' and that he already was on track for possible home confinement release in 2021.

Earlier this month, MacFarland launched a coronavirus-related non-profit from his prison cell, but admitted that: 'If I were you, I'd think this is a scam and I'm full of s**t'.

The inmate announced the business venture, known as Project-315, in a rambling Instagram post April 3, seeking to connect inmates with their families during the outbreak.

'Today I'm launching Project-315, an initiative to help bring together and connect in-need federal inmates and their families who have been affected by the coronavirus,' he wrote in the long letter, also posted on the non-profit's website.

The inmate at Elkton Federal Correctional Facility in Ohio announced his latest business venture Project-315 in a rambling Instagram post Friday (above). The non-profit aims to help to connect inmates with their families during the coronavirus outbreak

Celebrities including Elsa Hosk, Emily Ratajkowski, Bella Hadid, Lais Ribeiro, Gizele Oliveira and Rose Bertram, pictured left to right, were also paid to promote the event on Instagram

Fyre festival was heavily promoted on social media and billed as 'the cultural experience of the decade' touting plush villas and gourmet food. However, the project completely fell apart due to lack of funds, and guests arrived at a barren island with inadequate food, water, or shelter
Hyderabad, April 15 : Police in Telangana booked four government officials for allegedly celebrating a booze party in violation of COVID-19 lockdown norms.

The mandal or block level officials in the Madhira town of Khammam district organised the party in a guest house on Monday night.

Acting on a tip-off, police raided the place and found Srinivas, a doctor of a primary health centre, hiding in a room while three others managed to flee. The police seized half-consumed liquor bottle and food stuff from the guest house.

The police took up the investigation and booked four officials on Tuesday.

Tahsildar Saidulu, sub-jailer Prabhakar Reddy and Panchayat raj and Rural Development Extension Officer Raja Rao besides doctor Srinivas were booked under the Indian Penal Code (IPC) sections 188 (Disobedience to an order lawfully promulgated by a public servant) and 269 (Negligently doing an act known to likely spread infection) and section 3 of the Epidemics Act, 1897 for disobeying any regulation or order made under the Act.

Police said they were investigating if more officers were involved.

All liquor shops, pubs and bars in Telangana are shut since the lockdown began on March 24. Officials said they would remain closed during the lockdown period, which has now been extended to May 3.
BIGGS, Calif. - The Biggs City Council voted Tuesday night to approve a ban on needle exchange programs.

The vote was unanimous. The ordinance will head back to the city council for a final reading and vote. If approved, the ban would take effect 30 days later.

The Oroville City Council approved a similar ban on needle exchange programs on April 7, 2020. That ban takes effect next month.

Meanwhile in Chico, a group of Chico citizens, businesses and civic leaders announced Tuesday they have filed a lawsuit to halt the syringe distribution program in Chico.

The suit alleges a violation of the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA), failure to abate a public nuisance, a writ of mandate to set aside the unlawful approval of North Valley Harm Reduction Coalition (NVHRC) in violation of local ordinances and certification of a non-entity and seeks declaratory and injunctive relief.

The objective of the lawsuit is to stop the NVHRC operations in Chico, and to restore the safety and security of the community.
GREENVILLE, Miss., April 15, 2020 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- First Liberty Institute today filed a federal lawsuit against Greenville, Mississippi Mayor Errick Simmons on behalf of its client, King James Bible Baptist Church (KJBBC) seeking to enjoin his unconstitutional order prohibiting CDC compliant drive-in church services. Last week, the entire police force showed up prior to KJBBCs service to intimidate and disperse Pastor Charles Hamilton, Jr. and his parishioners. The church is represented by First Liberty, WilmerHale, Mississippi Justice Institute, and Sean Callaghan.



You can read First Libertys complaint here .

Mayor Errick Simmons order singles out churches for law enforcement, said Jeremy Dys, Special Counsel for Litigation and Communications at First Liberty. The Constitution did not give the Mayor a doctors note to do as he wishes. Government officials cannot send in the police just because a car is parked on a church parking lot instead of a liquor store.

The authority of any mayor is always subject to constitutional rights, said Matthew Martens, partner at WilmerHale. Even in emergencies, religious liberty does not evaporate in the face of the police power of state.

In its petition, attorneys with First Liberty explain that, By denying Plaintiff the ability to assembly via a drive-in church service, Defendants are in violation of the Freedom of Assembly Clause. Defendants cannot meet the no-less-restrictive-alternative test. The CDCs social distancing guidelines are appropriate to limit the spread of COVID-19. Imposing more restrictive requirements that target only churches and their drive-in services is not the least restrictive means of achieving Defendants public safety goal.

About First Liberty Institute

First Liberty Institute is a non-profit public interest law firm and the largest legal organization in the nation dedicated exclusively to defending religious freedom for all Americans.

To arrange an interview, contact Lacey McNiel at media@firstliberty.org or by calling 972-941-4453.

Contact: Lacey McNiel, media@firstliberty.org

Direct: 972-941-4453

A photo accompanying this announcement is available at https://www.globenewswire.com/NewsRoom/AttachmentNg/c4de4465-7e8e-46ea-a480-2a03fd4eb7d3




The latest:

CDC, FEMA draft national plan to reopen US, report says

There is a draft of a back-to-work strategy for the nation, created by a team led by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Federal Emergency Management Agency, according to The Washington Post.

The plan offers guidance for local and state governments on how to reopen the country safely and in phases, the newspaper reported.

The strategy has three phases, according to the report.

President Trump's trade adviser defends WHO funding halt

President Donald Trump's trade adviser Peter Navarro appeared on Fox News after the White House briefing to defend the Presidents WHO funding halt and discuss how it could impact US-China relations.

The World Health Organization is a single failure during this epidemic. They basically hid information from the public, they failed to call this a pandemic long after others had rightfully done so. There is blood on their hands. I think President Trump is absolutely correct to have a full investigation of how that happened and what Chinas role mightve been to that," Navarro said.

Pressed on how this could impact future trade negotiations with China, he called those interesting questions but went on to talk about supply chains.

Asked again later in the interview how coronavirus will impact the US-China relationship, Navarro said, We have to find out where it originated. We have to understand why China did not tell us for six weeks in which we lost precious time preparing for a pandemic.

This is something we will not forget: China was basically vacuuming up the worlds PPE around the world so that we didnt have it in New York and people didnt have it in Milan. Thats a question that has to be answered. The question going forward is will they provide the PPE to the world as we go through this crisis without strings?





San Francisco Pride cancels 50th anniversary celebration due to virus concerns

San Francisco Pride has decided to cancel its parade and celebration this year due to the coronavirus pandemic, the organization announced in a statement today.

Uncertainty surrounding the COVID-19 pandemic has intensified in recent weeks, and the organization has concluded that the risks to public health of a large-scale gathering such as Pride preclude this years production of the annual event, the statement said.

The two day event in San Francisco, scheduled for June 27 and 28, would have marked San Francisco Prides 50th anniversary with over a million attendees, according to the statement.

This was not a decision we arrived at lightly, San Francisco Pride Executive Director Fred Lopez said.

Nonprofit event producers are working to determine alternate ways to celebrate the 50th anniversary through digital platforms.

SF Pride will join other Pride organizations in a worldwide Virtual Global Pride event on June 27.





Trump acknowledges governors have authority to open states when ready



President Donald Trump says he'll soon reveal details and guidelines for reopening the country but appeared to acknowledge that individual state governors will ultimately determine when to reverse stay-at-home orders.

Only a day earlier, Trump insisted he had absolute authority to determine when states would be able to reopen their economies.

But his message Tuesday was different. He said governors would determine their own plans. And while he said he was authorizing them to do it, there wasn't any evidence they would require such sign-off.

Trump said he would be "authorizing each individual governor of each individual state to implement a reopening and a very powerful reopening plan of their state."

He said he would soon speak to all 50 governors about the plans, and indicated some states without major outbreaks could potentially open before May 1.

He said his administration would work to hold governors accountable for the plans.

But he said they'd be working closely with the states.





Trump halts US funding to World Health Organization

President Trump announced Tuesday he is halting funding to the World Health Organization while a review is conducted.

Trump said at a news conference the review would cover the WHOs role in severely mismanaging and covering up the spread of coronavirus.

The president said that while the U.S. imposed travel restrictions on China during the early stages of the outbreak, WHO was "opposed to what we did," he said.

"Other nations and regions who followed WHO guidelines and kept their borders open to China, accelerated the pandemic around the world," Trump said.

Trump continued: "The decision of other major countries to keep travel open was one of the great tragedies and missed opportunities from the early days."





Dr. Fauci: "We're not there yet" on reopening country



Dr. Anthony Fauci, the governments top infectious disease expert, said Tuesday the U.S. does not yet have the critical testing and tracing procedures needed to begin reopening the nations economy, adding a dose of caution to increasingly optimistic projections from the White House.

We have to have something in place that is efficient and that we can rely on, and were not there yet, Fauci said in an interview with The Associated Press.

Faucis comments come as President Donald Trump and others in the administration weigh how quickly businesses can reopen and Americans can get back to work weeks after the fast-spreading coronavirus essentially halted the U.S. economy. Trump has floated the possibility of reopening some areas by May 1 and said he could announce recommendations as soon as this week.

Fauci said a May 1 target is a bit overly optimistic for many areas of the country. Any easing off the strict social-distancing rules in place in much of the country would have to occur on a rolling basis, not all at once, he said, reflecting the ways COVID-19 struck different parts of the country at different times.

Among Faucis top concerns: That there will be new outbreaks in locations where social distancing has eased, but public health officials dont yet have the capabilities to rapidly test for the virus, isolate any new cases and track down everyone that an infected person came into contact with.



Ill guarantee you, once you start pulling back there will be infections. Its how you deal with the infections thats going count, Fauci told the AP.

While some states team up to plan for reopening, others say it's too soon

With encouraging signs that the U.S. is nearing the peak of its coronavirus outbreak, at least 10 states have created coalitions to work together toward reopening their economies.

But as they do, several other state leaders are taking a more measured approach, saying they fear the worst is yet to come for their parts of the country.

The contrasting responses reflect one of the challenges the country will face as talks turn to lifting social distancing measures and states find themselves in vastly different circumstances.

Robert R. Redfield, the director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said Monday that while the country is nearing its peak in the coronavirus pandemic, different parts of the country were affected differently and should be viewed as "separate situations."

In Pennsylvania, Secretary of Health Dr. Rachel Levine said that while social distancing measures have had a positive impact in slowing the number of new cases, it would be a "very big mistake" to think about reopening the state before it hits its peak  which she said hasn't happened yet.

North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum said Monday that governors across the Upper Great Plains region don't think they are anywhere close to opening.

"We have said all along there are going to be different curves for different parts of the country, and so we are not there yet," he said.

He said that while other states have begun showing signs of a flattening curve, in North Dakota, the numbers of cases and deaths are still on the rise.

"That is going to be confusing for people. If ... New York had all these deaths and they are opening up, why aren't we opening? That will be a communication challenge for us, but we have to just keep monitoring and see where we are going on this," Burgum said.

New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo said his state was coordinating with other Northeastern states, including New Jersey and Connecticut, and on Tuesday would begin discussions around reopening.

"Now it is time to start opening the valve slowly and carefully while watching the infection rate meter so we don't trigger a second wave of new infections," he said. "This is not a light switch that we can just flick on and everything goes back to normal  we have to come up with a smart, consistent strategy to restart the systems we shut down and get people back to work."

On the West Coast, the governors of California, Oregon and Washington said they'd also be working together with similar goals.

As those announcements began rolling in, President Donald Trump said the White House plans to unveil a committee  or multiple ones  Tuesday focused on reopening the country in the coming weeks.

"We will soon finalize new and very important guidelines to give governors the information they need to start safely opening their states," Trump said. "My administration's plan and corresponding guidelines will give the American people the confidence they need to begin returning to normal life."

What May will look like still uncertain

An influential model cited by the White House predicts the coronavirus pandemic will "peter out" in May and the expert who built the model, Dr. Christopher Murray, says it's possible to get transmission of the virus down to zero by this summer.

The model, which makes predictions until August, projects zero deaths after June 21.

"The one thing we absolutely know for sure is that social distancing measures work," said Murray, director of the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington. "It leads to a situation where every case is infecting less than one other case, and that means if you keep the course, you'll get transmission essentially down to zero."

But a timeline toward normalcy is something most governors seem hesitant to draw.

In Tennessee, the beginning of May will mark a "phased reboot of our economy" after the state's stay-at-home order ends on April 30, Gov. Bill Lee said Monday.

Lee announced the formation of an Economic Recovery Group that will work in coordination with local leaders, healthcare professionals, and representatives of impacted industries to determine what is best.

The steps the group will take in reopening the economy have not yet been determined, Lee said.

In Georgia, one of the last states to issue a sweeping stay-at-home order, Gov. Brian Kemp said plans beyond the end of the month were not the priority.

"Our focus is on the hospital surge capacity, the ability to test more because we are going to need that when we go back to work," the governor said when asked about the reopening of the state economy.

"We are a little behind the curve from when our peak is going to be to other states around the country," he added.

Louisiana Gov. John Bel Edwards announced Monday that schools would be closed through the end of the academic year but said it was too soon to know when the state could loosen social distancing guidelines.

"I cannot tell you exactly what that's going to look like yet, but we will be working really hard with all the experts to get that figured out," he said.

Four key cities are listening to stay-at-home orders

In some of the country's hotspots  New York, New Jersey, Detroit and New Orleans  cases have begun leveling off or going down, U.S. Surgeon General Dr. Jerome Adams said in a tweet Monday.

"In the midst of tragedy, there IS hope," he tweeted. "Social distancing and mitigation IS working. There is a light at the end of this dark tunnel."

"Keep at it," he added.

A report from the CDC shared a similar message. CDC researchers studied data from New York City, Seattle, New Orleans and San Francisco  four cities that had large outbreaks and implemented mitigation measures early on.

The report found that, in all four areas, the percentage of people leaving their home was close to 80% on Feb. 26. By April 1, that declined between 20 percentage points and 40 percentage points in each city.

"They didn't leave their home at any point for any reason. They didn't go outside. That's significant," said study coauthor Kathleen Ethier, leader of the CDC's community mitigation task force for the coronavirus response.

"When you put in these social distancing measures, they do seem to work," she said.

For now, Florida Surgeon General Scott Rivkees said social distancing will remain the new normal until a vaccine is developed.

"I cannot emphasize enough that we cannot let our guard down at this present time," he said. "Until we get a vaccine, which is a while off, this is going to be the new normal and we need to adapt and protect ourselves."

The Associated Press contributed to this report.
The shooting on Keeler was one of three shootings to occur on the citys West Side on Tuesday. About an hour earlier, a gunman inside a black SUV traveling east on Jackson Boulevard fired on another vehicle in the 300 block of South Homan Avenue, police said. A passenger in a vehicle was struck once in the right forearm and was treated at an area hospital in good condition. But a short time later, a 37-year-old man was dropped off at Stroger Hospital with a gunshot wound to the head, police said. He later died of his injuries.
A doctor has told of the moment he broke hospital rules to allow a daughter to say a tearful goodbye to her dying mother.

Dr. Ronald Simon, who is Chief of Trauma at Maimonides Medical Center in Brooklyn, is one of thousands of medical professionals who is working on the front lines helping treat patients with coronavirus.

In a moving Facebook post, Dr. Simon said that allowing members of a family to say their final farewells has helped him 'heal and go back to work day after day in this crisis.'

Dr. Ronald Simon, Chief of Trauma at Maimonides Medical Center in Brooklyn, wrote a moving post about how he allowed a woman's children to say goodbye to their dying mother

The doctor says the outbreak is 'different' and unlike anything else he has dealt with. Pictured, Maimonides Medical Center, Brooklyn, New York

Although the female patient ended up passing away shortly after he bent the strict rules he believes his actions ultimately 'left the family with a little more sense of peace.'

Dr. Simon wrote that part of the reason he allowed a one-off visit is because he is personally afraid of dying alone.

'For me, dying alone is more frightening than dying itself. Why? Who knows!' he wrote.

'A middle aged woman is dying from a very severe COVID pneumonia. All of our efforts are keeping her alive but barely and we knew that she could pass at any time,' Dr. Simon explained in his posting.

Accompanying the post was a picture of the doctor wearing a helmet. He explains that the headgear was graciously donated to the hospital so that medical staff could safely perform certain high risk procedures with minimal risk to doctors becoming infected

The doctor explained how he has seven face masks - one for every day of the week which allows each one a full week to decontaminate before it is used again

'Although our unit has a no visitation policy to protect the patients and staff from others, and others from the patients, we decided that we needed to make an exception here.

'She was a mother with two older children so we reached out to them to come see their mother while she was still alive. When the daughter arrived she told me she had two young children so we wrapped her up in masks, gowns, gloves and caps and let her see her mom.

Dr. Simon explained to the woman's daughter that she would be allowed to hold her mother's hand and advised her to speak to her, as she would certainly be able to hear her despite being heavily sedated.

It seemed to make all the difference in the world.

Dr Simon revealed that part of the reason he allowed the son and daughter to visit their mother before she passed away is because he, himself, is scared of dying alone

'She turned to me with a look of astonishment and relief and said "She can hear me? I need to tell her I love her."'

'With those words she walked into the room and made peace with her dying mother.

'A few minutes later her son walked in and did the same. Minutes later, she had passed,' Dr. Simon said.

'I was sad about her passing but she was just one of many,' he recalls.

'What made my day was that with her passing, her children would never lament that they never had the chance to tell their mom that they loved her before she passed,' the trauma doctor noted.

The trauma surgeon reveals how while his training prepared him to 'do battle with life and death on a large scale,' the entire coronavirus outbreak is 'different'

Since the post was written, a number of people have shared their thanks for the doctor's heartfelt words.

'This is beautiful, humane and yet... heartbreaking. A very sad joy,' wrote fellow hospital worker Dekeya Slaughter.

'You pulled the heart strings. Beautiful Ron that her kids had those few moments for the last time. May she Rest In Peace,' said another hospital worker Sally Vagnini Jacko.

'You may have lost one life that day, but you saved two by allowing the children to see their mother. You work miracles, Ron. Thanks for all you are doing,' added another.

Dr. Ronald Simon told of the moment he allowed a family to 'say goodbye' to their loved one who was dying from coronavirus despite it being against the hospital rules

Machinery which is kept outside of the patients room is seen as medical staff tend to a patient who is receiving Extracorporeal Life Support inside a COVID-19 ward at Maimonides hospital

In a separate posting online, the trauma surgeon reveals how while his training has prepared him to 'do battle with life and death on a large scale,' the entire coronavirus outbreak is 'different'.

'I give my hospital administration tremendous credit for taking action faster than most, but we are still reacting to a new situation every day,' he writes.

The doctor explained how he has seven face masks - one for every day of the week which allows each one a full week to decontaminate before it is used again.

'This would have been unheard of just a month ago,' he remarks. 'Today, I am fortunate to have this.'

'Doing battle with a hidden enemy that is potentially anywhere and everywhere is tough. Being in NYC, the epicenter of the pandemic in the U.S. is a challenge, but one shared with so many dedicated people that it is a privilege to fight side by side with them.

'Everyday choices get harder and we are just at the start. Pray for all of those ill and those caring for them,' Dr. Simon urges.
The Congress on Wednesday demanded a thorough probe into the gathering of migrants at Mumbai's Bandra railway station and smelt a political conspiracy behind a social media campaign to impose President's rule in Maharashtra.

Congress leader Rahul Gandhi also demanded that immediate ration cards be issued to the poor to enable them to get free ration, while Priyanka Gandhi urged the Prime Minister to help migrant workers stranded at various places in the country.

Seeking to blame the Centre, Maharashtra minister Ashok Chavan cited a South Central railway communication of April 13 about special trains for migrants, saying it could have triggered the gathering at Bandra.

There was, however, no immediate comment from the Railway Ministry in Delhi about the allegations made.

The Congress leader said the incident is an attempt to disrupt communal harmony in the state and negate the state's efforts in fighting coronavirus.

Rahul Gandhi demanded issuance of emergency ration cards to the poor who are struggling without food in this crisis.

"We appeal to the government to issue emergency ration cards in this crisis, for all those who are struggling due to lack of ration in this lockdown. Lakhs of Indians are not able to avail PDS facilities without ration cards. While grains are rotting in warehouses, hundreds of hungry stomachs are waiting. Inhuman!," he said in a tweet in Hindi.

Congress general secretary Priyanka Gandhi Vadra urged Prime Minister Narendra Modi to help stranded workers reach their villages, saying arrangements for sending them home should have been made in advance.

"For God's sake, Narendra Modi ji please help them," Priyanka Gandhi said while highlighting the plight of migrant workers.
Chattanooga State Community College has launched a Helping Hands Fund Campaign to support Chattanooga State students and their families impacted by the pandemic and tornadoes. The goal is to quickly help students affected financially. The Student Support Center at Chattanooga State provides one-on-one counseling services to help direct students experiencing a crisis to community resources and financial assistance.

If you have an opportunity to pay it forward during these unexpected times, we need your help, says Julie Cook Davis, president of the Chattanooga State Alumni Association Board of Directors. We are seeing a growing need of student requests for emergency assistance.

Since March 19, the Student Support Center has served 476 students in need including 72 requests for Helping Hands and food. In addition, as classes shifted to online only, the College has loaned 102 digital devices or wi-fi hotspots to students, including 32 loaned-devices from Tech Goes Home.

Established in 2018 by a donor who understood the impact of poverty and living paycheck to paycheck, the Chattanooga State Foundations Helping Hands Fund is meeting urgent and unexpected needs of students:

-An allied health student about to graduate in May has a family of five, a broken-down car, and faced unemployment due to COVID. She will be lifted out of poverty once she graduates and starts her new job. The Helping Hands Fund is her safety net.

-Another student and his wife recently became unemployedas a result of social distancing. Their rent was behind because they didnt have income, and to make matters worse, his wife was headed to the ER for suspected COVID-19. In addition to help with rent from the Helping Hands Fund, this student and his family have been referred to a local nonprofit community partner for additional assistance.

-A stay-at-home mother who is going to Chattanooga State full-time requested help with a late utility bill that would have disconnected the service to her home, preventing her from staying in school and on track to graduate. Her husband's hours had recently been cut back, impacting their ability to pay bills on time.

Chattanooga State will participate in the new global giving day, #GivingTuesdayNow, on Tuesday, May 5 with the Helping Hands Fund as the beneficiary. The needs are urgent and growing so if you are among those in a position to help Chattanooga State students who are struggling to stay in school and graduate from the impact of the virus or tornadoes, your support now will be greatly appreciated, says Reggie Piercy, Chattanooga State Foundation board member and chair of the Advancement Committee.

To get help for a Chattanooga State student or to give help to a student, please visit chattanoogastate.edu/HH.
[April 15, 2020] Brookfield Infrastructure Partners L.P. 2020 First Quarter Conference Call and Webcast for Investors and Analysts

Date: Friday, May 8, 2020

Time: 9:00 a.m. (ET) BROOKFIELD, NEWS, April 15, 2020 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- You are invited to participate in Brookfield Infrastructure Partners 2020 First Quarter Conference Call and Webcast on Friday, May 8, 2020 at 9:00 a.m. (Eastern Time) to discuss results and current business initiatives with members of senior management.

These results will be released on May 8, 2020 at approximately 7:00 a.m. (Eastern Time) and will also be available following the release on our website at www.brookfield.com/infrastructure . To participate in the conference call, please dial 1-866-688-9459 toll-free in North America, or for overseas calls please dial +1-409-216-0834 at approximately 8:50 a.m. (Conference ID: 8976257). The conference call will be webcast live at https://edge.media-server.com/mmc/p/nah3bhi9 and will be archived for future reference.



For those unable to participate in the Conference Call, a rebroadcast will also be available until midnight on May 15, 2020. To access this rebroadcast, please call 1-855-859-2056 or if outide Canada and the U.S., please call +1-404-537-3406 (Conference ID: 8976257).



Brookfield Infrastructure is a leading global infrastructure company that owns and operates high-quality, long-life assets in the utilities, transport, energy and data infrastructure sectors across North and South America, Asia Pacific and Europe. We are focused on assets that generate stable cash flows and require minimal maintenance capital expenditures. Investors can access its portfolio either through Brookfield Infrastructure Partners L.P. (NYSE: BIP; TSX: BIP.UN), a Bermuda-based limited partnership, or Brookfield Infrastructure Corporation (NYSE, TSX: BIPC), a Canadian corporation. Further information is available at www.brookfield.com/infrastructure . Brookfield Infrastructure is the flagship listed infrastructure company of Brookfield Asset Management, a leading global alternative asset manager with over $540 billion of assets under management. More information is available at www.brookfield.com .

Brookfield Infrastructure Partners is listed on the New York and Toronto stock exchanges. Further information is available at https://bip.brookfield.com and investors are encouraged to consult the website. Media: Investors: Claire Holland Melissa Low Senior Vice President, Communications Senior Vice President, Investor Relations Tel: (416) 369-8236 Tel: (416) 956-5239 Email: [email protected] Email: [email protected]

[ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ]
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To protect L.A. County juvenile hall detainees from COVID-19, two juvenile law advocacy organizations have asked the California Supreme Court to order the immediate release of some low-risk youth detainees and those with medical conditions.

The petition filed by the Center for Juvenile Law and Policy at Loyola Law School and the Independent Juvenile Defender Program at the Los Angeles County Bar Association also seeks:

Expedited review and release of all other eligible L.A. County detainees, aged 12 to 23

Suspension of new admissions into juvenile facilities

No more transfers of detained youngsters between facilities

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DRASTIC TIMES, DRASTIC MEASURES

The call for the extraordinary action by the state's highest court is made necessary by the "extraordinary circumstances" posed by the pandemic, according to the petitioners. The highly contagious nature of the novel coronavirus, they state, "poses particular risks to institutional settings and youth in confinement," 43 of whom have been quarantined after a half dozen probation staff this month tested positive for COVID-19.

During the last five weeks, the L.A. County Probation Department has reduced the overall detainee population in the county's juvenile halls and camps by "over 30%," according to Ray Leyva, the county's interim chief probation officer.

But critics say that's not enough.

"We need the immediate release of more youth, as many as possible, as fast as possible," said Patricia Soung, the lawyer representing the two petitioners in the state Supreme Court petition.

Soung is senior staff attorney and policy director at Children's Defense Fund - California. "This COVID crisis is just moving too quickly for the courts to catch up," she said, "and there has to be a combination of more blanket relief while doing some individualized review."

The petitioners argue that failure to protect confined youth from a likely COVID-19 outbreak violates the Fourteenth Amendment's due process protections; violates the Eighth Amendment's prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment; violates provisions of the California Constitution and violates the very purpose and duties of the juvenile court system under California's juvenile court law.

In particular, the petition points to the requirement to treat detained children with special care and greater leniency than adults and "to serve the youth's best interest by providing care, treatment and guidance to rehabilitate as well as to guard the public's safety."

As Soung put it, "young people in the juvenile justice system have the right to rehabilitation. That's the very premise of its existence." She added: "Federal and state constitutional safeguards as well as state statutes reflect that purpose, which is completely undermined by this crisis."

The petition also asks the state's highest court to compel the L.A. County Superior Court's juvenile court division to implement safety and health precautions inside the youth detention facilities consistent with those outlined by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

It also requests the appointment of a "special master" to oversee compliance with any such order, and to direct the presiding juvenile court judge to provide regular and timely compliance reports.

The L.A. County Superior Court said it doesn't comment on pending litigation.

CAUSE FOR CONCERN

On April 3, two days after the first L.A. County Probation employee tested positive for the virus, LAist reported about the complaints by juvenile justice attorneys and advocates that county youth facilities were not following proper social distancing mandates and other safety protocols, and potentially putting kids and staff at risk of infection.

As of April 13, five more juvenile hall employees have tested positive for the virus that causes the COVID-19 respiratory illness, according to L.A. County Probation Department Interim Chief Ray Leyva.

"Currently, no youth have tested positive for COVID-19," Leyva said during a L.A. County COVID-19 briefing on Monday. He said his department is implementing precautions to keep detained youngsters safe.

Leyva said the precautions include: Keeping the youth congregation down to six or less when possible; having them shower individually instead of group showers. During meal time we're encouraging youth to sit at separate tables or in small groups -- less than four if at all possible to maintain that social distancing.

The petition points out that a "severely reduced" work capacity at the juvenile court makes it impossible for L.A. County to adopt one of the emergency rules issued by the Judicial Council of California on April 7. That rule intended to "ensure that detention hearings for juveniles in delinquency court must be held in a timely manner to ensure that no child is detained who does not need to be detained to protect the child or community."

Soung and other juvenile justice advocates say hearings are far from timely.

Presently, the juvenile court system in L.A. is operating at less than 50% capacity, with only nine out of 18 juvenile bench officers regularly presiding over youth cases since the onset of the crisis, according to the petition.

At the same time, rather than release detainees in groups, the juvenile courts have continued to adhere to a case-by-case review, which critics say is too slow during a pandemic.

Additionally, Jerod Gunsberg, a private attorney who represents juvenile offenders as part of a partnership between L.A. County and the L.A. County Bar Association, made this critique in a declaration filed with the petition: "No directives have issued from any of the juvenile courts as to how or where defense counsel should file motions or how to direct these to the appropriate bench officer when a courtroom is closed."

NOT IMMUNE

While older adults are most at risk of complications from COVID-19, people of all ages with underlying health conditions are more likely to become seriously ill or die from it, health experts warn.

And that's potentially problematic for kids in the juvenile justice system, many of whom come from poor backgrounds, making them more likely to have chronic illnesses such as asthma and diabetes, said Dr. Elizabeth Barnert, an assistant professor of pediatrics at UCLA and a pediatrician at the Barry J. Nidorf Juvenile Hall in Sylmar.

"Children and adolescents are at risk of severe disease and death," Barnert wrote in an accompanying declaration to the court. "...Indeed, the first fatality of a person under 18 in the U.S. from COVID-19 occurred in Los Angeles County on March 24."

"Furthermore," Barnert wrote, "Juvenile facilities lack the operational capacity to address the needs of youth in custody in this magnitude of crisis. They are ill-equipped to provide youth with ready access to cleaning and sanitation supplies, or to assure that staff sanitize all surfaces during the day."

As the coronavirus spreads locally and globally, L.A. County and a growing number of other jurisdictions nationwide are releasing some incarcerated adults to prevent the pandemic from further infiltrating jails and prisons.

In L.A. County, those inmates are being released in groups, based on a number of factors, including the severity of their offenses and the potential risk they pose to the public if released.

In the adult population, the list of inmates eligible for release is determined by interested parties, including prosecutors, defense agencies and the probation department. In the juvenile justice system, the juvenile courts have the final say.

Suong, attorneys who represent youth and other child advocates have been urging the L.A. County Superior Court juvenile division Presiding Judge Victor Greenberg and Supervising Judge John Lawson to release all eligible juveniles from detention, a call echoed by the president of the L.A. County Board of Education and the superintendent of the L.A. County Office of Education. Under state law, a court would have to approve the release of juveniles from camps and halls.

"They're so worried about adults in the prisons and the county jails, it's like they put the juveniles on the back burner," said one mother of a detainee at the Sylmar facility who asked to remain unidentified in order to protect the privacy of her child. "They're in the same confined spaces as the adults if not worse in juvenile hall. I don't understand why they're not worried about the kids."

The mother said her son is among those with a chronic health condition that puts him at risk for COVID-19.

"My baby has asthma," she told LAist. "If one person is infected ... wherever that kid is walking the kids are going to get it."

Stephanie O'Neill's reporting is supported through a health journalism fellowship at the Natural Hazards Center, University of Colorado, Boulder funded by Direct Relief, a nonprofit humanitarian aid group.
Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, April 15)  Senator Juan Edgardo "Sonny" Angara, who recovered from the coronavirus disease last week, said on Wednesday the government should be at the forefront of efforts to obtain blood plasma donations from people who survive COVID-19.

While scientists have yet to find a specific cure for the viral disease, medical experts say that antibodies in fully recovered patients could help those infected.

I think the governmentand Im part of that governmentwe have to be better in organizing the efforts, Angara told CNN Philippines.

The senator said plasma donations should be government-led because the information on COVID-19 patients is with government agencies.

We shouldnt cite any technicalities, like privacy, which prevent us. Because we can try to secure [COVID-19 survivors] consent naman and protect their privacy at the same time, he added.

Angara himself has donated blood plasma for a health worker who has developed a severe case of the disease. The patient is currently admitted at a Quezon City hospital where the senator was also formerly confined.

It was very gratifying because it was the hospital where I spent more than a week at doon ako gumaling (that's where I got well), Angara said. He added that donating his plasma, especially to a medical frontliner, was the least he could to pay back.

Meanwhile, the Department of Health earlier said the effectiveness of plasma therapy to treat coronavirus is still being studied by experts.

While this procedure has been done by international health workers in the past to treat infections like severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) and Ebola, a medical expert said the Philippines is still in its early phase of testing the method.

READ: FAST FACTS: Donating blood plasma for COVID-19 patients
U.S. President Trump leads daily coronavirus response briefing at the White House in Washington

Reuters

President Donald Trump insisted on Monday that he did "a lot" to address the rapidly-spreading coronavirus in the month of February, but overwhelming evidence points to the contrary.

In the month of February, as global cases of the virus jumped from about 12,000 to over 85,000, Trump tweeted or retweeted nearly 900 messages, of which just 20 mentioned the coronavirus.

Every one of those 20 messages either praised the Trump administration's response to the virus or criticized Democrats or the media for their response to the pandemic.

Experts say Trump lost crucial time to implement diagnostic testing to identify where the virus was and contain it, build up emergency stockpiles of supplies, and recommend Americans practice social distancing.

Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

President Donald Trump insisted on Monday that he did "a lot" to address the rapidly-spreading coronavirus in the month of February, but evidence points to the contrary.

One data point are the president's tweets, his preferred mode of communication with the public. In the month of February, as global cases of the virus jumped from about 12,000 to over 85,000, Trump tweeted or retweeted nearly 900 messages, of which just 20 mentioned the coronavirus.

Every one of those 20 messages either praised the Trump administration's response to the virus or criticized Democrats or the media for their response to the pandemic.

Trump tweeted just twice about the coronavirus between February 1 and February 23. Both of those messages were about his conversation with China's top leader, Xi Jinping, who Trump claimed "will be successful" in beating the virus "as the weather starts to warm & the virus hopefully becomes weaker, and then gone."

As COVID-19 has killed nearly 25,000 people in the US in recent weeks, the president has repeatedly attempted to rewrite history, falsely asserting both that his administration never could've predicted the severity of the pandemic and that he acted as aggressively as possible to slow its spread.

Story continues

Trump took his first real step to contain the novel coronavirus in late January when he restricted travel to the US from China. But he did little to slow the spread in February, during which time the first US resident died of COVID-19, and instead aggressively downplayed the virus.

When Trump was asked about this gap during his daily White House coronavirus briefing on Monday evening, he refused to answer the question and lashed out at the reporter who asked it.

"What did your administration do in February with the time that your travel ban bought you?" CBS News' Paula Reid asked Trump on Monday.

"A lot," Trump replied before calling Reid and her network "fake."

In reality, the president spent February repeatedly claiming the infectious disease was "very much under control" in the US. In late February, Trump said the country's 15 confirmed coronavirus infections "within a couple of days is going to be down to close to zero."

Part of Trump's motivation for spinning a rosy picture of the virus in the US was clearly to calm anxiety that could hurt the stock market.

This came even as multiple top White House aides issued stark warnings about the virus's potential impact. Trump's top trade adviser, Peter Navarro, sent multiple memos to the National Security Council in January and February that predicted hundreds of thousands could die from the novel coronavirus with a loss of trillions of dollars for the economy.

Navarro recommended a significant amount of funding be appropriated to purchase essential medical supplies for frontline workers, but his request wasn't fulfilled and it took the administration until mid-March to place an order for crucial N95 masks.

Experts say Trump lost crucial time to implement diagnostic testing to identify where the virus was and contain it, build up emergency stockpiles of supplies, and recommend Americans practice social distancing.

Read the original article on Business Insider
YEREVAN, APRIL 15, ARMENPRESS. Arayik Harutyunyan, who has been elected President of Artsakh based on the preliminary results of the voting in the second round of the presidential election, says due to the spread of the novel coronavirus he will discuss the issue of directing additional funds from Armenias economy for boosting the economy of Artsakh with the leadership of Armenia.

He said there will be a necessity to discuss this issue with Armenias leadership.

In this respect I am going to have meetings with Armenias leadership in the near future. The discussion will be based on jointly conducting an economic activity, he said at a press conference.

The voting in the second round of the presidential election was held in Artsakh on April 14. According to the preliminary results, Arayik Harutyunyan was elected President of Artsakh with 88% of votes. The other candidate, current foreign minister Masis Mayilyan received 12% of votes.

Reported by Norayr Shoghikyan

Edited and translated by Aneta Harutyunyan
For high school seniors, the coronavirus pandemic has derailed several of the traditional spring rites of passage, including proms, graduation ceremonies, senior class trips and post-prom weekends at the shore.

Its not known yet when emergency declarations closing schools and banning large gatherings will be lifted, leaving uncertainty about whether some of these big moments will be rescheduled or canceled. Its not even clear if students will return to the classroom this academic year.

For a South Jersey group of seniors, the ongoing health emergency could also end up costing them a lot of money.

A group of 27 seniors from Gateway Regional High School went in together to rent a house in Wildwood for prom weekend on May 8-11.

Even if the school doesnt cancel prom, it now seems unlikely they will be allowed to gather that weekend because of ongoing bans on rentals in Cape May County and a parent says the group is having trouble getting its money back.

Theyve already put down about $5,000 toward a total tab of $7,300 to rent the house, said Kara Hickey, mother of one of the seniors. The rental business has resisted requests for a refund, instead offering a new date, according to Hickey.

I think its completely unfair, she said. This was out of everyones control. Its not like they dont want to go.

Efforts to contact the business by phone and email were unsuccessful on Monday.

Hickeys son, Tyler, signed the rental agreement and collected money from his friends, she said. They booked the house in November and have been paying toward the weekend since December.

CORONAVIRUS RESOURCES: Live map tracker | Businesses that are open | Homepage

The rental company has offered to book the group for a different weekend, but said refunds are not possible under the contract, according to Hickey. With dates for graduation, senior trip and other activities still up in the air, the group cannot simply book another date, she said.

A representative for the business is also telling her that a ban on rentals in the shore town only lasts until April 30 and that May should be fine, Hickey said.

Wildwood and some other shore towns banned short-term rentals for hotels, motels and private homes until April 30, but Cape May County then issued a blanket ban on these rentals with no date specified on when the order would be lifted.

From what I understand, there is no end date to this, Hickey said. They dont know when they are going to lift the ban.

Bans and uncertainty over how long the health crisis could last have created turmoil in the shore rental industry.

To stave off similar problems in the future, some renters are now adding coronavirus clauses to their summer lease agreements, which would allow refunds if travel plans are scuttled by the pandemic.

Hickeys son is disappointed about the entire situation.

He doesnt really talk about it, she said. Hes pretty upset. Its very upsetting for all of us. They are a close-knit group of kids. Its sad for all of the seniors. I cant imagine.

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.

Matt Gray may be reached at mgray@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter @MattGraySJT. Find NJ.com on Facebook.
BOSTON  Elizabeth Warren on Wednesday became the last of the Democratic presidential candidates to publicly back Joe Biden, endorsing the former vice president five weeks after she dropped out of the race.

The Massachusetts senator, a liberal who campaigned on breaking up "big tech" and fighting corruption, announced her endorsement in an online video that touted Biden's middle-class upbringing, years of public service and ability to face personal tragedy with "fortitude and grace."

"These experiences animate the empathy he extends to Americans who are struggling  not matter what their story," Warren said in the nearly 4-minute video. "Empathy matters. And in this moment of crisis, it is more important than ever that the next president restores Americans' faith in good, effective government."

Warren's endorsement continues the Democratic Party's unification around Biden, who is now the presumptive nominee to take on Republican President Donald Trump. Warren's support could strengthen Biden's bona fides to the progressive left, one of his areas of weakness as Democrats look to boost turnout in November.

In this moment of crisis, its more important than ever that the next president restores Americans faith in good, effective governmentand Ive seen Joe Biden help our nation rebuild. Today, Im proud to endorse @JoeBiden as President of the United States. pic.twitter.com/VrfBtJvFee  Elizabeth Warren (@ewarren) April 15, 2020

More: 'Joe has all the qualities we need in a president right now': Barack Obama endorses Joe Biden

Warren said Biden knows that "a government run with integrity, competence and heart will save lives and save livelihoods."

Story continues

"And we can't afford to let Donald Trump continue to endanger the lives and livelihoods of every American," she said. "And that's why I'm proud to endorse Joe Biden as president of the United States."

Warren's backing came a day after former President Barack Obama put his support behind his former running mate and two days after Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, Biden's last-standing rival in the Democratic primary, endorsed Biden as well.

Warren, a second-term senator and former Harvard law professor from Cambridge, exited the Democratic primary on March 5 after a disastrous Super Tuesday in which she finished no better than third in any state, including her home state of Massachusetts, which Biden won.

More: Bernie Sanders officially endorses Joe Biden for president

Former Vice President Joe Biden and Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., talk Sept. 12 during a Democratic presidential primary debate hosted by ABC at Texas Southern University in Houston.

She did not endorse Biden nor Sanders at the time, instead telling reporters, "I need some space around this and a little time to think a little more."

In her endorsement video, Warren recalled how Biden as vice president visited Boston the day after the 2013 Boston Marathon bombings and gave the community "peace and grace"  "I watched it up close."

She also pointed to his role implementing the 2009 Recovery Act after the Great Recession. Warren, who led the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau started by the Obama administration, said she saw Biden "doing the work, getting in the weeds, never forgetting who we were all there to serve."

Leading up to Biden's decisive primary wins in South Carolina and Super Tuesday, Warren indirectly gave him a boost when she relentlessly attacked Mike Bloomberg in a televised debate over his nondisclosure agreements with women concerning sexual harassment allegations. It was a devastating performance for the billionaire former New York mayor and helped secure the moderate lane for Biden.

But Biden and Warren also had their own moments of tension on the campaign trail. Ahead of Super Tuesday, Warren said nominating a "Washington insider" like Biden would be a risk to the Democratic Party.

In now supporting Biden, Warren said although she didn't agree with all her Democratic primary opponents 100% of the time, one thing she appreciated about Biden is "he will always tell you where he stands."

"When you disagree, he'll listen, and not just listen, but really hear you and treat you with respect, no matter where you're coming from," she said, adding that he's shown he's never "too afraid or proud to be persuaded."

Warren described Biden as a "selfless public servant" committed to social justice, racial and economic justice. She recounted then-Vice President Biden swearing Warren in as a senator in 2013.

"When he did, he said, 'You gave me hell, and you're going to do a great job.' Because that's the thing about Joe. He wants you in the fight with him.

"Now it's up to us to help make Joe Biden the next president of the United States. Let's get to work."

In this file photo from 2013, Vice President Joe Biden administers the Senate Oath to Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., accompanied by her husband Bruce Mann, during a mock swearing in ceremony on Capitol Hill in Washington, Thursday, Jan. 3, 2013, as the 113th Congress officially began.

For the past month, Warren has remained quiet on the election front, instead focusing her attention on congressional action on the coronavirus pandemic. She has helped lead the push to make racial data available to track the government's response to the pandemic and a plan for voting during the crisis that includes expanded vote-by-mail options.

At one time, Warren was considered a front-runner to secure the Democratic nomination. But she was unable to solidify support from the party's left-wing, which overwhelmingly backed Sanders, and she lost traction among college-educated liberals who split among several candidates.

Upon dropping out, Warren said that when she entered the race she was told two Democratic lanes existed  the progressive lane held by Sanders and a moderate lane occupied by Biden  and there was no room for anyone else.

I thought that wasnt right, but evidently I was wrong.

More: Elizabeth Warren ends her presidential campaign, holds off on endorsement

Warren faced criticism from Sanders supporters for not dropping out earlier and getting behind the Vermont senator  a decision that Trump has sought to exploit in tweets as he tries to sow divisions within the Democratic Party.

Trump has repeatedly said that if Warren had exited, it would made Sanders the favorite to win the nomination. But polling has suggested this would not have been the case because Warren supporters largely split between Biden and Sanders as their second choices.

Biden has said he will choose a woman as his nominee for vice president. Warren is considered a possible running mate among a long list of contenders that includes Sens. Kamala Harris of California, Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota, Tammy Duckworth of Illinois, Tammy Baldwin of Wisconsin, former Georgia state Rep. Stacey Abrams, and Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer

Reach Joey Garrison on Twitter @joeygarrison.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Elizabeth Warren endorses Joe Biden for president
Hyderabad: B. Somaiah, who works as a security guard at Gandhi Hospital, has been unfazed till now despite the coronavirus crisis, and given the exigencies, has braved even the lockdown with intrepid fortitude.

For a man who travelled 80 km every day to attend to duties at the epicentre of Covid care in Telangana, he is now facing a bizzare but difficult challenge  the diktat of his village sarpanch belonging to the Telangana Rashtra Samithi (TRS).

The village sarpanch has ordered that he either stay put at the hospital instead of returning to the village after work each day after duty or quit the job. Since the sarpanch belongs to the ruling TRS, he cannot defy the whip. But that is not the end of his woes.

Following the sarpanchs diktat, his family members, including his wife, have stopped giving him food. They too want him to quit his job immediately.

Security guard Somaiah, who is a resident of Anantharam village in Bhongir of Yadadri district, reveals his plight to Deccan Chronicle.

Our village sarpanch Mallikarjun called me yesterday and said that since I am working at Gandhi hospital, where Coronavirus positive patients are undergoing treatment, I should not come back to my village after duty. He wants me to stay back at the hospital as he fears I could bring Covid to the village.

To make matters worse, a group of 10 Asha workers showed up at his house today and asked him not to return home after work.

I was surprised to see Asha workers at my doorstep, demanding that I not return home after work. After making enquires, I learnt they came to my house at the sarpanchs behest. Some nurses from Bhongir area hospital also joined them. Instead of supporting me, nurses and voluntary workers who are also attending to patients, have turned against me, he said.

Somaiah, who has been working as a guard at Gandhi for more than 15 years now, added that a health supervisor also followed the sarpanchs instructions.

Like all private security guards working at any hospital, Somaiah too has been taking all precautions at work - putting on a mask, sanitizing hands throughout working hours. Before entering home, he bathes with hot water.

After the sarpanch issued threats, my wife is abusing me, demanding I quit my job. I have two children. How will I feed them if I stop work? I have no other source of income, he asked.

Earlier, Mr Somaiah would travel by local train to reach his workplace but after train services were suspended, he travels on a two-wheeler, covering 40 kms each way. After the call from sarpanch, he has reportedly been getting abusive calls, purportedly by the sarpanchs henchmen.

Working in a hospital amid Coronavirus patients is a tough task. But I am not inclined to sit at home when my services there, a dejected Somaiah said.

Asked what he would do, Somaiah, confused, said, I will go for duty tomorrow, adding he now fears being prevented physically from going. When contacted, sarpanch said after some villagers called him and expressed fears about Somaiah, he called him up.

I told him why travel between home and hospital every day. He can as well stay back there.

He said so far there has not been a single Corona-virus case in Yadadri and villagers are taking all precautions. Scared villagers complained to me that he was mingling with some people. It was my duty to suggest that he should stay in the hospital. Gandhi Hospital sources said that there are no facilities for stay of private security guards at the hospital.
Source: Xinhua| 2020-04-15 17:56:48|Editor: huaxia

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by Xinhua writer Ren Ke

BERLIN, April 15 (Xinhua) -- After a journey of more than 15 days, a Chinese freight train, filled with medical supplies and other goods, arrived in the western German city of Duisburg on Tuesday.

The train, which started off from central China's city of Wuhan, has now joined its two siblings in Europe -- one departing from southwest China's Chongqing Municipality, the other setting out from the eastern Chinese city of Yiwu.

Like sitting by a fireplace in winter, the arrivals have injected warmth into the coronavirus chill that has frozen most of the comings-and-goings between countries, adding confidence and strength to the joint China-Europe fight against COVID-19.

Sweeping through Eurasia, the three trains, all under the operation of China Railway Express, have brought with them urgently needed anti-coronavirus materials. The freight train to Duisburg was laden with over 160 tons of epidemic prevention supplies, such as medical fabrics and tablecloths, as well as must-have goods for the resumption of work and production, such as auto parts, electronic products and optical fiber.

The two trains from Chongqing and Yiwu are also of special significance. The former, dubbed "China Post" and loaded with 44 TEUs of relief supplies and parcels, rolled into the capital of Lithuania over the weekend. It became the first train of a new postal rail service to Europe to meet the rising demand for international parcel freight amid the pandemic.

The latter, leaving from the world's largest wholesale market for small consumer goods with over 200,000 parcels like face masks, protective suits, decorations, garments and shoes, has also reached its final destination -- the European commodity center of Madrid, marking the restart of the regular Europe-bound postal service initiated in 2014.

The resumption of China-Europe freight services shows that China has effectively got the domestic virus situation under control, with economic and trade activities restarting gradually.

The China-Europe freight service, as an important component of the Belt and Road Initiative, has been playing a positive role in promoting the inter-connectivity of the world.

Amid the COVID-19 crisis, the resumption of the China-Europe freight service carries a significant meaning for the international community to mitigate the negative impacts on global supply chains and promote cross-border mobility of goods and services.

The timely resumption also demonstrates the spirit of solidarity and mutual support of China by providing badly-needed medical equipment to European countries.

A friend in need is a friend indeed. When COVID-19 hit hard in China, many European countries lent a helping hand. Now it is time for China to return its love and care. The China-Europe railway freight service is a perfect symbol of the China-Europe friendship.

Viruses know no border or nationality. In the face of such a crisis, only international solidarity and mutual support can beat the disease. Among the international joint efforts, the China-Europe freight trains have put a spring in the step toward the end of the global COVID-19 battle.
BAY CITY, MI - The Bay County Board of Commissioners has voted to extend a countywide state of emergency due to the ongoing coronavirus pandemic.

Bay County originally declared a local state of emergency on March 17, when Bay County Executive Jim Barcia announced the declaration.

The original order was set to expire on Tuesday, April 14. However, with ongoing COVID-19 concerns in Bay County, the County Board unanimously voted during a virtual board meeting on Tuesday to extend the state of emergency to May 12.

According to the county, this is being done to allow Bay County and its staff to remain vigilant in its fight against COVID-19 by continuing to use the countys Emergency Operations Plan and by continuing to allow access to emergency funds as the pandemic progresses.

As of Tuesday, Bay County has 61 positive coronavirus test results, 4 probable case classifications, and 19 pending tests. Two people have died.

Bay County Health Department Director Joel Strasz explained that the probable cases are a brand new classification.

Thats a new classification from the state, a probable case is where theres a confirmed case and if youve got someone thats in close contact with the confirmed case and they have symptoms, due to the lack of testing materials right now theyre allowing that someone to be considered a probable case," he said.

Some 367 tests have been submitted so far in Bay County, with 283 coming up negative. The first Bay County death was announced on Saturday, April 11.

So far, 10 individuals have been designated as recovered from the virus.

Strasz said that he and his department are maintaining a constant dialogue with the McLaren Bay Region hospital. He said that the hospitals daily situation report is starting to show positive signs of progress.

Im glad to say as of today that their census is down and even though they have a fair number of coronavirus patients there, its not overwhelming. Theyve got enough PPE right now to continue.

Meanwhile, Strasz explained that one of the main focuses for the Health Department right now is to keep an eye on long-term care facilities to make sure that COVID-19 cases are being maintained and not spiking.

We continue to maintain a really close eye on our long term care facilities," he said. "Weve had a couple of flare ups and positive cases there and were in constant contact with the long term care facilities does not grow out of hand like it did in Washington, New York, and Boston.

Looking to the future, Barcia also reminded the Board that Bay County and its communities will also need to be prepared to take on another possibily difficult situation this summer due to record high Great Lakes water levels.

He said, "When we get through this crisis, we maybe facing another emergency with flooding in the summer. So were all going to be tested pretty hard.

Related news:

Bay City music teacher performing songs from her porch to cheer up the neighborhood

Sen. Stabenow visits Bay County to discuss flooding, erosion and other high water issues

Bay City schools buying 500 Chromebooks for its teachers to help with online instruction
As war-ravaged South Sudan confirmed its first case of COVID-19 last week, medical officers of Vietnams second level-2 field hospital stand ready to join the fight against the pandemic while undertaking their UN peacekeeping mission in the country.

A medical worker sprays disinfectant at the second level-2 field hospital in Bentiu.  Photo courtesy of the Ministry of Defence

Since the hospital is located near UN Camp in Bentiu which shelters more than 110,000 people, Vietnamese medical staffers might be exposed to the coronavirus if an outbreak hits, according to the Ministry of Defence.

The poor medical facilities and public health preparedness capabilities along with a shortage of personal protective equipment increase the risk of infection to local people and medical forces.

Facing this danger, the second level-2 field hospital has worked with health experts in Vietnam and other medical facilities of the UN mission to raise awareness of UN peacekeepers about the pandemic and develop efficient response plans.

Lieutenant Colonel Vo Van Hien, the hospitals director, said they had deployed a mobile emergency team to perform casualty evacuation, medical evacuation and other special tasks handed over by the mission.

Sub-lieutenant Tu Quang of Aero-Medical Evacuation Team (AMET) said the UN Peacekeeping Mission tasked the hospital to implement health scanning for people at Rubkona Airport to promptly handle infections and prevent community transmission.

Despite the small number of passengers since the mission has limited flights between Bentiu and South Sudans capital Juba, it takes a lot of effort to ramp up infection control and scanning due to the lack of medical supplies, Quang said. Meanwhile, wearing hazmat suits in hot conditions is another challenge.

Vietnamese medical officers help a man declare his health status at Rubkona Airport.  Photo courtesy of the Ministry of Defence

All medical officers of the field hospital have participated in online UN training on pandemic response plans. With limited access to the internet, doctors have to print all documents and guidance on COVID-19 prevention.

However, as South Sudan is prone to infectious diseases, the hospital has made thorough preparations for emergencies by stocking up on medicines and supplies.

If a UN officer is suspected infected with the virus after visiting a disease-hit area and being in close contact with a COVID-19 patient, they will be sent to a quarantine unit for examination and treatment.

Medical officers of the third level-2 field hospital, which is newly established to replace the second level-2 field hospital in the future, have contributed to the fight against COVID-19 by improving direct splash protection shields, making them lighter, safer and easier to use.

Some 1,000 shields were sent to doctors and medical staff of HCM-based Military Hospital 175.

These efforts were applauded by UN inspection team for pushing back the disease and protecting community health.  VNS

Vietnamese peacekeepers make barren Bentiu greener Just over a year ago, the station where Vietnamese military doctors are based as part of the UN Peacekeeping Mission in South Sudan was surrounded by barren land.
The Defence Headquarters says the Nigerian Navy Ship (NNS) Delta has immobilised three illegal refining sites and arrested three wooden ships laden with petroleum products in the Niger Delta.

The Coordinator, Defence Media Operations, John Enenche, disclosed this in a statement on Wednesday in Abuja.

Mr Enenche, a major-general, explained that the operation which took place on April 7, was sequel to the recent discovery that some illegal refineries that were dismantled on Bennett Island in February, had been reactivated.

He added that the Navy ship, in conjunction with an Ocean Marine Service (OMS) surveillance crew deployed two swamp buggies to the island for anti-illegal bunkering/crude oil theft operations.

The team, according to him, commenced swamp buggy operations at the illegal refining sites and deactivated 24 ovens, 35 receivers, 25 surface metal storage tanks and covered one dug out pit.

Additionally, on April 8, the team located another illegal refining site at Bennett Island. During the operation, 14 ovens, 20 receivers and 21 surface metal storage tanks were dismantled.

Similarly, on April 10, the combined team of NNS Delta and OMS surveillance crew commenced the swamp buggy operation at Bennett Island in Warri South LGA of Delta State.

The team located an illegal refining site and deactivated 4 ovens, 14 surface metal storage tanks and 5 coolers.

Furthermore, the team discovered an illegal valve connection along the Trans-Forcados pipeline suspected to have been connected by pipeline vandals.

The valve and associated fittings were disconnected and recovered to the OMS Houseboat at Yeye, he said.

Mr Enenche also said the Nigerian Navy Pathfinder ship on April 8, while on patrol located an illegal refining site in Alakiri around Okirika general area of Rivers.

He said the site, which had approximately 20,000 litres of illegally refined AGO impounded, adding that no arrest was made as the operators of the illegal refining site fled on sighting the patrol team.

The coordinator further disclosed that the Forward Operating Base ESCRAVOS team also intercepted two wooden boats along Banga village Creek, Opuedebubor in Warri South-West LGA, Delta State.

He said the boats were loaded with about 3,000 litres of product suspected to be illegally refined AGO, packaged in polyethene bags.

He said the boats were towed to a safe place and impounded.

Same day, the team visited a reactivated Illegal Refining Site (IRS) along Opuedebubor Creek behind Banga Village in Warri South West.

The site had 14 refining units, 24 metal storage tanks, 15 metal drums and 12 dugout pits.

Cumulatively, the IRS had about 400,000 litres of AGO, 2,201 barrels of crude oil and 25,000 litres of DPK respectively.

The site was deactivated while the 40HP outboard engine recovered along Banga Village Creek was taken to the Base, he added.

Mr Enenche also disclosed that the patrol team also revisited a previously deactivated IRS along Oviloye Creek, Warri South-West LGA and observed that it had been reactivated.

He said the site had two refining units and four metal storage tanks with approximately 5,000 litres of illegally refined AGO and 31.4 barrels of stolen crude oil.

Also, during the operations, the team intercepted two fibre boats laden with about 4,000 litres of illegally refined DPK with 40HP and 60 HP outboard engines.

The site and petroleum products were impounded and the 40HP and 60HP outboard engines were recovered to the Base.

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Cumulatively, the Forward Operating Base ESCRAVOS patrol teams denied oil thieves dealing of about 408,000 litres of illegally refined AGO, 2,232.4 barrels of stolen crude oil and 29,000 litres of DPK.

The Armed Forces of Nigeria hereby continue to solicit for timely and credible information for the enhancement of its operations, he said. (NAN)
Minister for Parliamentary Affairs and Majority Leader in Parliament, Hon. Osei Kyei Mensah Bonsu has disclosed that the government cannot afford a total lockdown of the whole country.



According to him, government is investing so much even in the few lockdown areas and it will be at high risk for the government to go for total lockdown.



Speaking on Okay FM's 'Ade Akye Abia' programme, he explained the inconvenience the total lockdown alone will create, adding that the majority of Ghanaians are fully going to be affected in the total lockdown.



"Though the President is taking expert advice on a total lockdown or not, I really dont think we need it now as a country.



"Albeit, the country needs to fight rigorously COVID-19, we cannot do so by totally locking the whole country down. We will end up putting the economy in great difficulty . . . Moreover, look at how people are reeling under this partial lockdown and the government is investing so much to feed the few vulnerable people in our various communities," Hon Kyei Mensah-Bonsu said.



He added that the government will have to invest so much in feeding over five (5) million people and I don't think the country's economy will be able to bounce back after the COVID-19 fight.



Ghanaians should help by adhering to the lockdown directive and help contain the coronavirus, adding that the government will continue to do its bit to ensure that Ghanaians are safe and protected.



Ghana has recorded 636 confirmed cases of the COVID-19 with 17 recoveries.



According to the GHS, the breakdown of the 636 positive cases are as follows: "seventeen (17) have been treated, reverted to negative on repeat tests and discharged, 605 cases have been categorized as mild disease and are on treatment, two (2) are categorized as moderate to severe cases, none in the critical state currently and eight (8) have died."



However, "of the 636 confirmed COVID-19 cases, 268 were reported from the routine surveillance, 253 from enhanced surveillance activities and 115 from travelers under mandatory quarantine in both Accra and Tamale.



Regions that have reported cases are Greater Accra, Ashanti, Central, Eastern, Western, Volta, Northern, North East, Upper East, and Upper West regions," the GHS said.



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Source: Isaac Kwame Owusu/Peacefmonline.com/[email protected]









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With nonessential surgeries barred during the coronavirus pandemic, Baptist Health System  one of the San Antonio areas largest hospital operators  announced Wednesday that its furloughing workers.

Baptists owner, Dallas-based Tenet Health Corp., said less than 3 percent of the systems 6,600 workers would be affected.

In a message to employees, CEO Matt Stone said the furloughs are necessary to protect Baptists financial future. Despite the reductions, he said the system will remain ready for a potential surge of COVID-19 patients.

On ExpressNews.com: San Antonio hospitals start to cut hours, furlough workers  even in face of coronavirus pandemic

A 3 percent workforce reduction at Baptist hospitals means nearly 200 employees will temporarily lose their jobs.

Baptist owns five hospitals in San Antonio and one hospital in New Braunfels, and operates eight smaller facilities  micro hospitals  with Emerus, based in the Houston area.

Our expectation is that we can return impacted staff to service once we navigate through this unprecedented time and our core business returns to normal, Stone said in a statement. These decisions, although difficult to make, will ultimately conserve resources, personal protective equipment, and ensure the safety of employees who will be sheltered in place during furloughs.

Tenet executives told investors earlier this month that it expected to furlough employees  about 500 across its 65 hospitals  because of softening patient volumes.

The company also withdrew its financial outlook because the highly contagious disease is hurting its business.

Furloughed employees will continue to receive medical benefits. including employer contributions to their health insurance premiums and supplemental life support.

On ExpressNews.com: Get the latest update on coronavirus and a tracking map of U.S. cases

Tenet previously alerted employees that it would stop making matching contributions to their 401(k) retirement plans. But Baptist officials said Wednesday that furloughed workers will continue to receive matching funds.

Hospitals across the country are reeling from weeks of lost revenue because of stay-at-home orders by local and state officials and restrictions on elective medical procedures.

Stone said funding from the $2.2 trillion stimulus package was welcome, but that it would help Baptist pay for supplies, staffing and other expenses for only a month or so.

Furloughed employees are being advised to file unemployment insurance claims with the state. The federal stimulus funds include an $600 per week in unemployment benefits through July 31.

Another measure the system announced was to funnel a percentage of executive salaries to the Tenet Care Fund to help employees who need financial assistance.

Tenet chairman and CEO Ron Rittenmeyer is contributing 50 percent of his salary, and his top executives 20 percent. In San Antonio, Stone and other Baptist leaders are donating 10 percent of their pay through June.

Laura Garcia covers the healthcare industry in the San Antonio and Bexar County area. To read more from Laura, become a subscriber. laura.garcia@express-news.net | Twitter: @Reporter_Laura
Amazon may close all of its distribution centers in France following a court order issued yesterday, Reuters reports. The warehouses will reportedly remain closed until at least April 20th. During that time Amazon will assess risks related to COVID-19 and take necessary measures to ensure employee safety. This could have serious ramifications for deliveries in the country.

The court order issued yesterday demands that Amazon carry out a thorough assessment of the risks the coronavirus pandemic poses to its employees. In the meantime, it must only deliver essential products, or it could be fined up to one million euros per day. The court gave Amazon 24 hours to comply.

In a statement provided to Engadget, a spokesperson for Amazon Europe said:

"Following the judgement of a French court on Tuesday, we have to temporarily suspend operations in our Fulfilment Centres in France. This is in spite of the huge investment we made in additional safety measures to keep our hard-working, dedicated colleagues safe, while ensuring they had continued employment at this difficult time. Our FC operations are complex and varied, and with the punitive 1M euro per incident fines imposed by the court, the risk was too high. We remain perplexed by the courts decision, which was made in spite of the overwhelming evidence we provided about the safety measures we have implemented, and have launched an appeal."

According to the court ruling, Amazon currently employs close to 10,000 people at six warehouses in France. It will reportedly use a state partial employment program to pay its employees while the facilities are closed.

Amazon is facing increased pressure over employee safety during the coronavirus pandemic. To meet a surge in demand, it announced plans to hire an additional 100,000 delivery and warehouse workers and temporarily increased pay, but cases of COVID-19 have been reported among staff from at least 19 Amazon warehouses in the US. After an employee-led protest, Amazon said it would do more to protect workers, but it has also been criticized for firing employees who spoke out against its labor practices.
If you are experiencing abuse, having a safety plan laid out can help you to protect yourself during this stressful time. A safety plan is a personalized, practical plan that includes ways to remain safe while in a relationship, planning to leave, or after you leave. You can learn more about safety plans here, and you can find an interactive guide to safety planning here. Because there may be limited shelter availability due to COVID-19, consider alternatives such as staying with family or friends, staying in motels, or sleeping in your vehicle. If youre a friend or family member of someone experiencing abuse, encourage your loved one to think about their wellbeing, safety plan and practice self-care while they are in their home.
Experts have warned about a global wave of consumer default that is underway, beginning in China. (Photo thebank.vn)

According to the latest report on labour and employment amid the COVID-19 pandemic, the Ministry of Labour, Invalids and Social Affairs said the number of people applying for unemployment insurance as of February 2020 stood at 47,164, an increase of 70 percent over the same period last year.

Though the banking system has not recorded any cases of defaults related to credit cards, experts said banks should be cautious due to COVID-19.

They took China as an example. In China, where the epidemic has taken many lives and caused heavy losses in production and business activities in the first months of 2020, overdue credit card debt swelled in February by about 50 percent from a year earlier.

Qudian Inc, a Beijing-based online lender, said its delinquency ratio jumped to 20 percent in February from 13 percent at the end of last year. China Merchants Bank, one of the countrys biggest providers of consumer credit, said last month it pressed the pause button on its credit card business after a significant increase in overdue loans. An estimated 8 million people in China lost their jobs in February.

Experts have also warned about a global wave of consumer defaults, beginning in China.

It is easy to get a credit card in Vietnam, and a number of card holders, especially young people, are finding it difficult to repay their debts as their companies scale down business due to the pandemic.

Like other young card holders, an employee in Hanoi, who declined to be named, borrowed money she thought she would be able to repay. Then the COVID-19 pandemic changed everything.

She said now all she thinks about is finding the money to repay the banks as she spent a lot on her three cards. All she had to do was swipe her cards to make a transaction so she did not know how much money was left on them, so she didn't feel sorry. It was not until the payment deadline arrived that that she realised how much she had spent.

To get a card, customers just need to visit a bank where they are guided through instructions and procedures, and they receive their card in a week.

Some banks even send staff out to help customers open credit card accounts.

Theoretically, the card limit would depend on the customers work or solvency, but increasing the card limit is very simple. Therefore, the number of young customers getting caught up in a spiral of spending is increasing during the pandemic, make the risk of defaulting higher.

According to data from the State Bank of Vietnam, there were 99 million credit cards in the country by the end of last year.
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En espanol | One of the challenging aspects of the COVID-19 pandemic is that social distancing and stay-at-home orders have made it more difficult to have a face-to-face meeting with your doctor.

For many physicians and patients, the remedy is increasingly telemedicine: the ability to remotely connect with a health care provider in real time, often over video, and sometimes via telephone, email, app or online patient portal.

While telemedicine isn't new  it's been deployed, for example, to connect rural patients with distant health care services or providers or to monitor ongoing conditions like diabetes  its use has spiked dramatically during the current crisis.

Telemedicine or telehealth  the terms are often used interchangeably  isn't a perfect solution for every wellness-related scenario. A medical emergency or a case too difficult to diagnose from afar still requires a visit to the doctor or hospital. But to me this is going to be a very desirable thing for patients, says Stephen Schloss, a urologist at Emerson Hospital in Concord, Massachusetts, whose office uses a telemedicine solution called doxy.me. They love it. They didn't have to drive, they didn't have to park, they didn't have to go through all the hassle to go see a doctor."

The protocol for arranging telemedicine sessions varies by location, by practice specialty and by your ongoing history with a physician. Here are some common steps and tips to prepare for such a virtual visit.
Fishermen and Friends of the Sea (FFOS) pays our deepest respects to a former minister of agriculture, land and marine resources (1995-1999), Dr Reeza Mohammed.

Dr Mohammed goes down in history as the man who pioneered inclusion, stakeholder empowerment and public participation in government affairs and public administration.

Dr Mohammed was the only minister of agriculture who has ever embraced the principle of inclusiveness through his appointment of the Multi-stakeholder Monitoring and Advisory Committee (MAC), which led to the passage of the Fisheries (Control of Demersal Trawling) Regulations, in 2002, as well as a range of other sustainable development initiatives.
Q: I usually take ibuprofen for aches or pains. Given the controversy about ibuprofen use during this coronavirus outbreak, is it still safe to use? Should I switch to acetaminophen now instead?

A: Indeed, the message has been mixed. Early on in the coronavirus outbreak, French doctors treating patients with COVID-19 observed that some patients taking ibuprofen were becoming more ill than those not taking it. Some of the doctors published strong recommendations against using ibuprofen for any symptoms that might indicate a coronavirus infection.

But these were only observations, which are easily influenced by bias and not supported by scientific evidence.

Still, what followed were contradictory stories about the safety of ibuprofen. In fact, the World Health Organization (WHO) initially recommended using acetaminophen instead of ibuprofen. That only lasted a couple days before the WHO position changed. Either could be used to reduce fever, aches and pains in people with symptoms of any viral infection, including COVID-19.

Taking ibuprofen clearly does NOT make a person more susceptible to getting a coronavirus infection. So, if you take ibuprofen for aches or pains related to arthritis, periodic headaches or muscle aches, you don't need to stop now.

As always, the decision about using ibuprofen (Advil, Motrin) vs. acetaminophen (Tylenol) depends on which one tends to better relieve your symptoms and the risk of side effects for you personally.

While both ibuprofen and acetaminophen reduce fever and ease pain, acetaminophen does not calm inflammation. Both have precautions but are relatively safe when recommended doses are followed.

Long term use of ibuprofen and other NSAIDs like naproxen (Aleve, Naprosyn) are more likely to cause stomach ulcers, internal bleeding, and kidney damage compared to acetaminophen. When possible, use ibuprofen in the lowest effective dose for the shortest period of time.

The worry about acetaminophen is liver damage, which can lead to liver failure and death when taken in higher than recommended doses. The safest total daily dose is no more than 3,250 milligrams spread out over 24 hours. Be sure to look at the ingredients on all the products you take and add up the amount of acetaminophen to avoid exceeding the limit. People with liver disease or drink alcohol regularly should check with their doctor before using acetaminophen.

What if you do get symptoms that could be due to coronavirus? My recommendation would be to start with acetaminophen. Or you could alternate low dose acetaminophen with ibuprofen every four to six hours, and that would moderate the amount of each one.

(Howard LeWine, M.D. is an internist at Brigham and Womens Hospital in Boston and assistant professor at Harvard Medical School. For additional consumer health information, please visit www.health.harvard.edu.)
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Canadas telecom carriers have instituted new policies to help customers get through COVID-19, but some experts say those aids need to be applied more widely, especially if consumers are not using all their monthly cellphone data.

John Lawford, executive director and general counsel of the Public Interest Advocacy Centre (PIAC), said in an interview that there are far more people using their cellphones on home WiFi networks. One way carriers could help customers who are not using all their data is to group existing cellphone data allowances as part of home internet service.

So to the extent that companies sell both [wireless and internet services], they should be crediting your home internet connection with an equivalent amount of usage you would have put on your phone, Lawford said.

However, he said this could be complicated because people have different phone plans in a household, and it would be simpler to eliminate data caps on internet services to eliminate the problem.

Ben Klass, a telecom expert and PhD candidate at Carleton University, said in an interview it would be difficult for carriers to compensate people who are not using up their data, but if they were lenient on customers it would be helpful.

They still have to make money, he said. Were in a situation right now where the companies need to continue making sure that these networks work more than ever. The idea of handing back a bunch of money [could be argued on]. One way is suspending charging overage fees to people.

He added that if more customers are relying on home networks it gives more of a reason for carriers to be lenient about data caps.

If people are using [Wi-Fi] more on their mobile, its probably because they need it. And if more people are at home using their home internet, that means there must be less congestion on mobile networks, he said.

Rogers said in an email it waived data caps for internet plans for both home and business internet customers. It said that most of its customers are on unlimited internet data plans already. The national carrier has also waived long-distance fees and roaming fees for wireless customers.

Story continues

The carrier is also making sure that no Rogers and Fido services are suspended or disconnected for customers facing financial difficulties, and is offering flexible payment options.

Telus said in an email it wont charge overage fees for customers without unlimited internet data plans. The carrier also offers flexible payment options to those unable to pay on time. It is temporarily suspending all planned deactivations and collection measures because of non-payment. Roaming fees will also be waived, Telus said.

Shaw Communications said in an email it does not have data caps on its internet plans. For its Freedom Mobile customers, Shaw said it does not charge overage fees.

If any of our customers have questions regarding their Freedom Mobile Service, we are committed to working with them to find the plan and add-ons that best suit their financial and connectivity needs, a spokesperson said.

Bell, in a March 14 tweet, said it was waiving additional usage fees for residential internet customers until the end of April.

Yahoo Finance Canada reached out to the carrier for additional measures it is taking for customers but the carrier did not respond in time for publishing.

Dwayne Winseck, director of the Canadian Media Concentration Research Project, agreed with Klass that it would be difficult for carriers to offer compensation for those who have not used up their entire cellphone data.

He too noted that carriers could offer help to customers by rolling over their allotted data to the next month as a form of compensation.

In many countries, your leftover data is rolled over into the following month. Thats the low-hanging fruit that should be implemented right now, he said, adding that it wouldnt necessarily make sense for a customer to change their plan when the pandemic timeline is unknown.

Download the Yahoo Finance app, available for Apple and Android and sign up for the Yahoo Finance Canada Weekly Brief.
Copyright  2020 Albuquerque Journal

Democratic U.S. Rep. Ben Ray Lujan had his biggest fundraising quarter since announcing his bid for the U.S. Senate a year ago.

And former television meteorologist Mark Ronchetti didnt have trouble finding donors in his bid for the Republican nomination.

They were the top fundraisers during the first quarter of the year in the race to replace Democrat Tom Udall.

Lujan raised $1.25 million in the quarter that ended March 31, according to his campaign. It was the fourth straight quarter he raised more than $1 million.

Ronchetti raised $650,000 since announcing his candidacy in January, outdistancing Republican rivals Gavin Clarkson, who raised almost $318,000, and Elisa Martinez, who raised more than $170,000.

Wednesday was the deadline for filing first-quarter financial reports with the Federal Election Commission.

Lujan ended the quarter with more than $2.45 million cash on hand and faces no opposition in the June primary. His average donation was $30, according to his campaign, with the average online donation being $18.

The Lujan campaign is so grateful for the overwhelming support New Mexicans have continued to show us during these difficult times for our country, Lujan campaign manager Travis Brimm said in a statement to the Journal. New Mexicans from all backgrounds and communities across the state are stepping up to join our campaign, and together we will elect Ben Ray to the U.S. Senate.

Ronchetti finished the quarter with $564,000 cash on hand. His campaign said almost 93% of donations were $250 or less, and about 98% of donations were from New Mexico residents.

Im humbled by the outpouring of support that we are receiving from all over our state, Ronchetti said in a news release. While Ben Ray Lujan continues to rake in campaign cash from out-of-state liberal special interest groups, we are proud to have a grass-roots campaign fueled by New Mexicans who care about the future of our state.

Clarkson, a former Trump administration official and ex-New Mexico State University professor, had the second-most cash on hand despite finishing behind Martinez and Ronchetti at the partys pre-primary convention. He had more than $173,000 cash on hand at the end of the quarter. His campaign said he had more than 9,000 contributors with an average donation of $100.

Gavins campaign continues to attract grass-roots conservative supporters who want a battle-tested swamp warrior in the U.S. Senate to support President Trump, Clarkson campaign spokesman Stephen Sebastian told the Journal.

Martinezs campaign reported more than $34,000 cash on hand, with more than 2,300 donors during the quarter, with the average donation being $46.

Elisa Martinez is a champion for working-class New Mexicans, campaign spokesman Ryan Lynch said in a statement to the Journal. She is a grass-roots candidate running a grass-roots campaign and is humbled by the thousands of donors who have stepped up and joined her in this fight for our conservative values.
The countrys largest second-level teachers union has said its members are willing to work over the summer to help students prepare for Leaving Certificate exams postponed because of the Covid-19 crisis.

The Association of Secondary Teachers Ireland (ASTI) had been criticised for saying that no teacher will be required to do anything if the exams were rescheduled for July or August.

However, the union said that it would now work to support the Governments decision to postpone the exams, although some members still had serious concerns.

The news came shortly after the Government announced Irelands highest daily Covid-19 death toll as the virus claimed a further 41 lives. There have now been 406 Covid-19 related deaths in Ireland, with 11,479 confirmed cases.

Concerns continue to grow over the effect of the

Read More:

Chief medical officer Tony Holohan said it is possible that some people who have died in nursing homes or other locations did not receive a test and will not be counted in the official Covid-19 figures. Some 187 deaths have been reported by nursing homes, with more than 150 clusters identified.

Dr Holohan said he remains concerned about the prevalence of Covid-19 in nursing homes and residential care settings.

Nursing Homes Ireland, which represents more than 300 private nursing homes, said a lack of priority placed on nursing homes in the early stages of the outbreak has contributed to the issue.

Chief Medical Officer, Dr Tony Holohan.

Testing remains a focus for the Department of Health, which was forced to apologise after 100 people received an incorrect test result.

Patients had been advised, in error, that their test did not detect Covid-19, and on review were found positive.

The Department of Health said the error occurred due to an IT glitch.

Irish patient samples  which had been sent to a laboratory in Germany in a bid to tackle the States testing backlog  had been sent back as invalid.

Ronan Glynn, deputy chief medical officer, paid tribute to his colleagues in Germany before explaining that some tests can be reported as indeterminate or invalid.

Around 100 Irish tests received this result, which the IT system in Ireland did not recognise and reverted the results to negative.

These results were then incorrectly communicated to patients.

The Department of Health said all the cases have been identified and the IT issue has been rectified.

Wed like to reassure members of the public that this is not a testing issue but an IT glitch on our side, Dr Glynn said.

Over the past week, 20,468 tests were carried out in Irish laboratories and, of these some 4,233 were positive, giving a positivity rate of 21%.

Queues in the middle of March at Intreo offices as people apply for Covid 19 unemployment payment. The IMF says 2021 could see numbers out of work increasing. Picture: Garry ONeill

Meanwhile, it has also emerged that 42% of private sector workers are now receiving some form of government payment as the economic fallout continues to bite.

Up to yesterday, 533,000 people had been issued with the Covid-19 pandemic unemployment support payment  up 26,000 on last week.

In addition, more than 42,000 employers have now signed up to the temporary wage subsidy scheme  covering 219,400 employees.

The payments are in addition to the 210,000 on the live register receiving jobseekers benefit.

Breakdown of the pandemic support payments shows accommodation and food sector (115,500) hardest hit, followed by retail (81,400) and construction (71,000).

Dublin accounts for the highest number of claims at 152,700, followed by Cork at 55,600, and Galway at 29,100.
[April 15, 2020] Little Caesars To Give 250,000 Slices Of Pizza To Healthcare Workers & First Responders Across Canada

Customers Can Also "Pie It Forward" to Local Hospitals, Police Stations, and Fire Departments Using the Little Caesars App - Little Caesars has set up a national fund to combine efforts with franchisees to give up to 250,000 pizza slices in their local communities - Customers can join the effort by using the Little Caesars app to send a pizza to medical personnel, police, and firefighters in their local areas - Little Caesars recently announced contactless delivery and pickup through the Little Caesars app TORONTO, April 15, 2020 /CNW/ -- Little Caesars, the global family-owned pizza chain that recently launched contactless delivery and carry-out, and its independent franchisees will give 250,000 slices of pizza to healthcare workers, police and firefighters across Canada. A national fund has been set up by Little Caesars Canada and with the combined efforts of Little Caesars franchisees, 250,000 pizza slices will be given directly to the communities in which they operate. The pizzas will be given to hospitals, police departments, and fire departments around the country beginning today and will continue to be delivered throughout the following weeks. "Hospital staff and first responders are working around the clock to help keep us safe and healthy, and they are true heroes," says Dave Scrivano, President and CEO of Little Caesar Enterprises, Inc. "Togethe with our franchisees across Canada, we want to give back directly to the communities they serve. Little Caesars is a family company and so, we want to thank all of them in the best way we know how - by delivering a wholesome meal."



Starting Monday, when customers use the Little Caesars app or order on LittleCaesars.ca, they can "Pie it Forward" by buying a pizza to give to their nearby hospitals, police, and fire departments at checkout. The customer-purchased pizzas will be served locally by Little Caesars franchisees during the weeks that follow. Little Caesars recently announced contactless options for both delivery and carry-out through the Little Caesars app and Pizza Portal pickup. Pizzas are baked in 475-degree Fahrenheit (245-degree Celsius) ovens to ensure food safety and not touched as food goes into the box. The chain has also reinforced cleanliness and sanitization procedures, increasing the frequency of cleaning commonly touched surfaces including door handles, glass, countertops, Pizza Portal pickup surfaces, phones, and cash registers.

ABOUT LITTLE CAESARS IN CANADA

Little Caesar of Canada ULC, is the franchisor of Little Caesars Pizza in Canada and is headquartered in Oakville, Ontario. Little Caesars opened its first restaurant in Canada in 1969 and now has restaurant locations in all 10 Canadian Provinces. ABOUT LITTLE CAESARS

Headquartered in Detroit, Michigan, Little Caesars was founded in 1959 as a single, family-owned restaurant. Today, Little Caesars is the third largest pizza chain in the world, with stores in each of the 50 U.S. states and 26 countries and territories. Known for its HOT-N-READY pizza and famed Crazy Bread, Little Caesars has been named "Best Value in America" for the past twelve years (based on nationwide survey of national quick service restaurant customers in the U.S. conducted by Sandelman & Associates - 2007-2019 entitled "Highest Rated Chain  Value for the Money"). Little Caesars products are made with quality ingredients, like fresh, never frozen, mozzarella and Muenster cheese and sauce made from fresh-packed, vine-ripened California crushed tomatoes. An exceptionally high growth company with 60 years of experience in the $145 billion worldwide pizza industry, Little Caesars is continually looking for franchisee candidates to join our team in markets around the world. In addition to providing the opportunity for entrepreneurial independence in a franchise system, Little Caesars offers strong brand awareness with one of the most recognized and appealing characters in the country, Little Caesar. SOURCE Little Caesars Pizza

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Waiting for the peak

By Malkhaz Matsaberidze

The scale of the epidemic is expected to enter its peak period in the first half of May; the peak will define the main events of the countrys socio-economic situation. The government is expecting a sharp increase in the number of patients and has already announced that mildly sick patients will be treated at home. Meanwhile, the Georgian government appealed to NATO's Euro-Atlantic Response Coordination Center (EADRCC) for help and called for equipment to fight the epidemic. On average, Georgia can handle up to 10,000 patients, but since there are about 15,000 beds in the country's hospitals, more patients can be treated. The scale of the epidemic is far from these marginal capabilities of the countrys medical sector, and doctors hope the country will survive such a large-scale increase.On April 8th, the Minister of Health Ekaterine Tikaradze explained the capabilities of the Georgian healthcare system - up to 700 respiratory devices, with the possibility to manage up to 3,500 moderate and severely infected patients, as well as quarantine zones for more than 5,000 patients.One of the main concerns of the government today is the upcoming Orthodox Easter. In previous years, the government attended the Easter service with almost the entire staff, but now, the ministers are sending messages that they are not going to attend the liturgy at home and that they will pray at home. However, they do not directly ask the parishioners to do the same and do not call on the church to close the temples. According to the established tradition, the gathering of large numbers of people in churches and cemeteries is considered a serious threat in terms of the spread of the virus.So far, the epidemic has spread and the government is trying to limit the scale and speed of its spread by imposing new restrictions. Agrarian markets were closed in the cities, leaving many more unemployed. Generally, self-employed people who depended on their daily income, found themselves in the most difficult situation. The service sector has stopped, non-food products have been traded, and now agrarian markets have been closed. Social problems are on the rise, and after a while, they become inevitable.The opposition's solidarity with the government in overcoming economic problems is noteworthy. On April 3rd, 22 opposition parties issued a joint statement, urging foreign governments and international organisations to provide financial assistance to the Georgian government to overcome the economic problems caused by the epidemic.The April 8th statement from the authorities read that the state of emergency in the country could continue after April 21nd and that everything would depend on the situation in the country at the time of the outbreak. As the peak of the epidemic is anticipated in late April and the first half of May, it is expected that the state of emergency will be extended. But here the issue of constitutional changes between the government and the opposition arises as a result of a great struggle. Change in the electoral system must take effect before the 2020 parliamentary elections. However, in case of prolonging the state of emergency, there is no time left. The opposition has not yet commented on the matter, and the government has said it will accept constitutional changes.There is another demand by the United Opposition to release the detained political leaders after the events of June 20th. The opposition said an agreement had been reached. In such a situation, on April 8th, it was reported that the trial of Irakli Okruashvili, arrested in connection with the June 20th, would be expedited. He has been sent to prison for five years for a 15 year-old case. The opposition says the government is using a panic caused by the Coronavirus epidemic to retaliate against political opponents.The issue of returning Georgian citizens living abroad is still acute. Some of them are in a very difficult situation and the news programs are full of video footage of it. Under such conditions, former President Mikheil Saakashvili says he can carry out several flights and return up to a thousand people for free. Authorities have denied the allegations in a statement issued Friday stating similar, baseless allegations concerning Iran's intelligence have been made more than once. In response, Saakashvili said that it would be better for the head of the bunker, Bidzina Ivanishvili, to transfer the money, who neither appeared nor commented after the outbreak.The subject of the discussion was the report published by the Public Defender Nino Lomjaria on April 2nd, 2019, on the protection of human rights. The events of June 20-21 were again in the spotlight of the media and the opposition. According to the report, it is not clear who issued the order to use the rubber bullets, which physically harmed many protesters.The opposition thinks that Bidzina Ivanishvili's confidant could have issued such an order. Gakharia, the Prime Minister, said he was responsible for everything that happened then and that the government had a legitimate right to use force.
 Trump intent on "reopening" some U.S. states within weeks, ignoring medical experts and the state's rights the GOP is generally so concerned with. The Washington Post reports today on FEMA and CDC draft plan that enables him to do this.

Late on Tuesday, right after we learned that Trump is halting WHO funding even as Americans die by the thousands of coronavirus  the Washington Post is reporting that the CDC and FEMA have created a plan to reopen America.

Impeached and manifestly unfit president President Trump wants a final detailed plan on reopening the country right now, so he can order some states to reopen May 1, officials said.

Note: He has no such power, though he falsely claimed to have ultimate authority.

It guides state and local governments on how they can ease mitigation efforts and move from drastic restrictions like stay-at-home orders in a phased way to support a safe reopening. CDC and FEMA officials have worked on the public health response for at least the past week, and the resulting document by the two agencies has been discussed at the White House including by members of the coronavirus task force, according to two administration officials speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations. Other agencies and White House officials have drafted similar planning documents, a White House aide said. The version obtained by The Post appears to be an early draft by FEMA and contains granular instructions for a phased reopening of institutions such as schools, child-care facilities, summer camps, parks, faith-based organizations and restaurants. Within the White House, one senior administration official said, Trump has been so insistent on the reopening that some officials worry only a narrow window exists to provide information to change the president's mind or to ensure that the effort to reopen does not significantly add to the country's still rising number of infections and deaths. The president has not committed to following the guidelines delineated in the draft. () The public health response portion of "A Framework for Re-Opening America" is dated April 10. It runs 36 pages. An 11-page executive summary called "Focus on the Future  Going to Work for America" was the subject of discussions last week by FEMA and CDC officials, among others.

Read more at The Washington Post:

CDC, FEMA have created a plan to reopen America. Here's what it says.

[Lena H. Sun, Josh Dawsey and William Wan ]
Makers of fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG) such as Dabur, ITC, and Parle Products say the detailed guidelines issued on Wednesday by the Ministry of Home Affairs will ease supply chain concerns that have marred production over the past few weeks.

Distribution will also take-off in rural areas, which had come to a near halt, owing to limited stocks that were available in the marketplace. Durables and mobile companies, on the other hand, say plants may open from April 20, but production may take time to stabilise. We are hopeful that we will be able to start our units from April 20. ...
At an extraordinary session, the Verkhovna Rada conducted a sequestration of the state budget, almost tripling its deficit to 7.5% of GDP at the Cabinet's suggestion. Under quarantine, deputies significantly reduced revenues, but at the same time raised spending on the fight against the coronavirus spread. However, there is no certainty that even such an updated budget will not undergo further changes.

The spread of coronavirus infection in Ukraine forced the government to declare a nationwide quarantine and start adapting the state treasury to work in the new crisis conditions. An almost complete halt of most of the economy led to massive changes in the priorities of state policy.

Instead of a 3.3% growth by 3.3% in 2020, as was expected before the crisis, the government is now preparing for a 5% fall. Meanwhile, experts with the International Monetary Fund in their updated outlook suggest that the Ukrainian economy will drop 7.7% this year.

The unexpected return of the Ukrainian economy to the trajectory of decline after four years of growth forced the Cabinet of Ministers, appointed in early March and headed by Denys Shmyhal, to take the initiative to amend the law on the state budget.

At the end of March, the first attempt to push budget sequestration through parliament failed: outraged by the scale and directions of expenditure cuts deputies sent the draft law for revision.

Only after two weeks of working with relevant parliamentary committees and adapting part of the budgetary changes, did Prime Minister Shmyhal submit amendments to the country's main financial document for deputies' approval at second try.

This time the attempt was a success: the amendments passed with 249 votes.

Speaking from parliament rostrum, the head of government called the proposals "an emergency budget" designed to combat the coronavirus and its consequences.

The cornerstone of the change is the creation of a special fund to combat COVID-19, for which UAH 64.7 billion is laid down in the updated state budget.

"These are additional payments to medics who treat Ukrainians, purchase of medical equipment, payments to Ukrainians who have lost their jobs due to coronavirus, provision of cash assistance to family members of medical workers," explained Shmyhal.

In addition, the health ministry's funding increased by UAH 16.4 billion, which should also help to effectively combat the spread of infection.

Additional funds in the amount of UAH 29.7 billion are provided for the Pension Fund to implement recent decisions on providing additional assistance to pensioners. "This is necessary in order to index pensions in May, as well as to pay pensioners who receive less than UAH 5,000 assistance in the amount of UAH 1,000," the prime minister said from the parliamentary rostrum.

The driver of the Ukrainian economy recovery after the crisis, Shmyhal says should be road construction. In the updated draft budget, financing of the Road Fund in the amount of UAH 72 billion remained in place. "Road construction is a quick warm-up of the economy and additional jobs," the prime minister said.

Language of numbers: cuts in funding

The Verkhovna Rada as a result almost tripled the state budget deficit  up to UAH 298.4 billion (about 7.5% of the gross domestic product). At the same time, revenues have been cut by 11%, or UAH 120 billion, down to almost UAH 976 billion. But the expenditures were increased by UAH 145 billion, up to UAH 1.282 trillion.

The government predicts that tax revenues to the state treasury this year will be UAH 145.4 billion below previously estimates and amount to UAH 781.13 billion.

The largest decrease is expected for value added tax on goods imported into Ukraine  these revenues in the conditions of a sharp drop in imports were immediately reduced by UAH 45.7 billion, to UAH 303.8 billion. The situation with VAT on goods produced in Ukraine looks a little better  it is planned to collect UAH 75.4 billion, which is UAH 21.4 billion less than previously planned.

Target income from personal income tax has been reduced by UAH 18.5 billion to UAH 110.8 billion, from corporate income tax  by UAH 20.7 billion to UAH 98.2 billion, and from rent on the use of subsoil for gas production  by UAH 20.5 billion to UAH 17.6 billion.

The authorities decided to win back some revenue drawdown by increasing revenues from profits of state and municipal enterprises. Expectations from the receipts increased by UAH 26.7 billion  up to UAH 68 billion. Also, revenues to the state budget from the National Bank were raised by $2 billion.

As for budget expenditures, in addition to the above-mentioned Fund to Combat COVID-19 and the covering of the Pension Fund deficit, it is worth noting the reduction in financing of subsidies  by UAH 8.24 billion (now it's UAH 39.3 billion).

As expected, financing of the State Regional Development Fund was reduced by UAH 2.6 billion, a subsidy to support the development of the united territorial communities  by UAH 2.1 billion, and an Energy Efficiency Fund  by UAH 1.8 billion. The Ministry of Culture and Information Policy had its funding cut by UAH 7.3 billion.

Other major receivers of budget funds have seen their funding reduced to a lesser extent or, in rare cases, there hasn't been much cutbacks.

Are prospects realistic?

Budget sequestration has been carried out, but many aren't sure that it will be completed. This is due to the fact that it is not yet clear how long quarantine will last as every day it further exacerbates the situation in the economy.

This idea was also expressed by MP Volodymyr Tsabal as he called the government version of budget changes "unrealistic".

"In this budget, we have laid down a decrease in revenues at 11%. In our country, two months before quarantine, revenues fell by 15%. We will not have UAH 551 billion tax and customs revenues, it will be significantly less, because businesses cease their work due to strict quarantine. Also, the costs are at the same time increased. And most importantly, that deficit of UAH 298 billion is financed by the IMF," he said during the debate in Parliament.

The loan of the International Monetary Fund, which Ukraine has been trying to get for several months already, looks like one of the milestones without which the adopted changes are doomed to failure. And this is directly confirmed by the head of the Ministry of Finance, Serhiy Marchenko.

"In this budget, we have laid down resources from international financial organizations, including direct IMF budget support. The support of our international partners is very important because it gives us the opportunity to fully finance all the necessary expenses, primarily the salaries of medics, social protection, and infrastructure costs," the minister said after the vote.

As we can see, without the support of the International Monetary Fund and other international lenders, the adopted changes will simply not be implemented and many areas of government funding may be left without sources to cover them.

Quarantine transit budget

Despite certain skepticism about the sequestration, many experts agree that the adoption of an updated version of the state budget in the current crisis conditions was vital for Ukraine.

Many have already branded the coronavirus a "black swan," or rather a "black elephant," which dealt a crushing blow to global economy, now threatening to plunge the world into a large-scale economic crisis comparable to world war. Therefore, financial plans for the year have to be urgently redrawn and belts need to be tightened to minimize losses from the pandemic and prevent the collapse of key industries.

"Changes to the budget were absolutely necessary due to the fact that economic realities changed dramatically: in particular, GDP forecast changed from positive to negative, and there was also a need to respond to the threat of the virus, both as regards rising medical expenses and the increased need for social assistance," said Maria Repko, deputy chief at the the Center for Economic Strategy.

Chairman of the leading Servant of the People faction David Arakhamia also spoke about the urgency of changing the law on the state budget, adding that depending on success or failure in the fight against coronavirus, the budget may be reviewed again in the coming months.

"Everyone understands that this budget is conditionally drawn for two to three months, for the period of quarantine. It will definitely be re-voted and reassembled. If the situation worsens, there will be a real anti-crisis budget. This means that we will cut a lot of other things for the country, if necessary," he said.

According to him, if the Ukrainian economy recovers after a pandemic, the budget will be revised towards increasing costs for the most important industries.

"I have a hope that at least 30-40% of the stabilization fund that was adopted will return in the form of those articles from which they were taken back to the budget. You can call it a 'quarantine transit budget,' which gives the government the right to make decisions quickly," added Arakhamia.

Hope remains that in the coming weeks, Ukraine will pass the coronavirus peak, projected by health officials, with minimal losses, while the International Monetary Fund, after the Ukrainian authorities complete their "homework," will allocate the promised billions to stabilize the situation. In this case, it will be possible to create conditions and make plans for a quick restart of the economy.

Dmytro Shvarts
After 98 years of enmity, bitterness, and division, Fine Gael and Fianna Fail have formally ended hostilities and have agreed to enter government together, thus ending Civil War politics in Ireland.

Taoiseach Leo Varadkar and Fianna Fail leader Micheal Martin yesterday signed off on a weird and wonderful coalition deal aimed at avoiding a second general election.

The agreement will now go before both parliamentary parties today for ratification before it is shared with the Green Party, Labour Party, and Social Democrats whose inclusion in government is sought.

In a joint statement, the parties said: Both Leaders met this morning and agreed the framework document. Both Leaders will brief their respective Parliamentary Parties tomorrow.

In a message to all members of the Fine Gael parliamentary party, chairman Martin Heydon wrote: The Taoiseach has asked me to inform the parliamentary party that he met Micheal Martin earlier today and that they have agreed a policy framework document that could form the basis for a Programme for Government.

They reaffirmed their commitment to forming a majority government of three or more parties/groups that will last five years with full and equal partnership between FG and FF at its centre.

Fine Gaels Minister Regina Doherty welcomed the agreement, saying: Isnt the world a weird and wonderful place. I think its a really positive development.

Fianna Fail finance spokesman and Cork South Central TD Michael McGrath heralded the deal and delivered a coded message to the other smaller parties to step up to the plate in the national interest.

The Irish people have responded magnificently in the face of the current adversity, and they now need their politicians to step forward and provide leadership as we go about the task of rebuilding our economy and society in the years ahead, he told the Irish Examiner.

I believe the principles set out in this document represent the pillars on which an exciting and ambitious programme for government can be built, and we really hope that other parties will join the process now and exert a huge influence on the direction our country takes in the next five years.

However, Opposition reaction to the deal was decidedly mixed.

Sinn Feins David Cullinane dismissed news of the agreement, saying it amounted to a power grab.

Fianna Fail and Fine Gael are only interested in power at all costs, he said. Confidence and supply was an attempt to control government and opposition at the same time. The electorate saw through it. Their aim is not to deliver real change but cling to power as they search for a mudguard.

Sources in all three of the smaller parties told the Irish Examiner that they remain sceptical as to their participation in any government involving Fianna Fail and Fine Gael.
Schools could reopen in weeks, some road closures might be lifted and small gatherings may soon be allowed under Western Australias loosening of coronavirus rules as confirmed cases continue to fall.

In coming weeks, Premier Mark McGowan said he would look at which of the states tough restrictions could be softened, with just five new cases recorded on Wednesday.

We're going to work on this over coming weeks to see what can be eased and can be tweaked, but I don't want to start ruling things in or out now, he told reporters on Tuesday.

He expressed opening interstate borders was not going to happen in the near to medium term, but other restrictions would be reviewed monthly.

Schools may be the first to reopen and could do so within a matter of weeks. Source: Getty Images

Professor Archie Clements, an expert in health sciences at Western Australias Curtin University, predicted kids could be back at school within weeks if cases continue on their current trajectory.

In my view it would be sensible for the schools to be reopened. I wouldnt be surprised if there was encouragement for people to send their kids back to school, he told Yahoo News Australia.

Possibly even a couple of weeks after school goes back [on April 28].

Certain businesses may soon also re-open their doors, Professor Clements said, but likely would need to operate under specific rules to keep staff and patrons safe.

It will be a while longer before the borders are opened up to interstate and overseas visitors. Source: AAP

WA restaurants could open under strict guidelines

Potentially there could be the re-opening of restaurants, but I think they would be enforcing very strict social distancing and number of clients arrangement, he said.

Small social gatherings and small community events might soon be given allowance to go ahead, and churches and libraries may also be allowed to open under certain rules, Professor Clements said.

He said by starting to loosen restrictions on things considered on the lower risk end of the spectrum, it would be easier to ramp those back up if there was a resurgence in confirmed cases.

Travel restrictions between regions may also be one of the first things to be relaxed, but in a staged process that would likely be rolled out over time, according to Professor Clements.

Story continues

Road travel restrictions in WA may be on the table to be eased within the next few weeks. Source: AAP

After regional borders are opened up, he said the state government may then look to allow interstate travel between South Australia and the Northern Territory where the virus has been well managed.

What will be the last to open?

International travel restrictions were likely to take much longer to be lifted, and it could be several years before overseas flights return to how they were previously, Professor Clements said.

I would expect that initially particular groups of people will be able to travel, to particular destinations and with certain restrictions and I think that will be a gradual process, he said.

Not until either theres evidence the pandemic is behind us or that theres no evidence of transmission in parts of the world or high coverage with a vaccine.

Professor Clements said bars and nightclubs may be among some of the last things to be allowed to operate as normal again.

Just because its quite hard to get young people to comply with social distancing. Plus its not been a bad thing just generally for society.

Big community events would be another one of the later things to return he said, as well as visiting people in aged care facilities and prisons.

Because those things are particularly high risk. They will look at the risk profile of each different decision and start with the lower risk things, he said.

Professor Clements said while the restrictions could begin being loosened in May, it could take many years until Australia sees the other side of the pandemic.

More than 6400 Australians have contracted the virus and about 56 per cent of them have recovered.

There have been 63 deaths in total, including 26 in NSW, 14 in Victoria, four in Queensland, six in Western Australia, six Tasmania, three in the ACT, and four in South Australia.

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.
CHICAGO - Portions of a Chicago expressway left icy by a wintry blast that brought overnight snowfall led to a pileup involving of dozens of vehicles early Wednesday, sending 14 people to hospitals, officials said.

About 50 vehicles were involved in the 5 a.m. pileup along the Kennedy Expressway, the Chicago Fire Department said. The crash prompted Illinois State Police to close all of the expressways southbound lanes near Chicagos North Avenue for about three hours, and multiple northbound lanes also were closed temporarily.

Chicago fire officials said 14 people were transported to area hospitals and 32 others were evaluated at the scene.

Officials said that low traction along expressway was responsible for the collisions.

The National Weather Service said light snow had produced accumulations of less than a half-inch (1.3 centimetres) overnight as temperatures fell below freezing and state police were urging people to stay off local roadways.

Snow fell across the region Wednesday morning as the Chicago area, northeast and north central Illinois and parts of northwest Indiana were under a winter weather advisory. It came as the weather service reported colder than usual temperatures across much of the central and eastern United States.
Stacey Abrams, the former Democratic gubernatorial candidate from Georgia who lost in a race mired in voter suppression controversies, has said she would make an "excellent running mate" for Joe Biden in a new interview.

The popular Georgia Democrat told Elle Magazine she would be honoured to serve as the former vice presidents running mate in the race for the White House against Donald Trump, while outlining her qualifications and enthusiasm for the role.

I would be an excellent running mate, Ms Abrams, who has previously pitched herself as a contender for the White House position, told the magazine in an interview published on Wednesday. I have the capacity to attract voters by motivating typically ignored communities. I have a strong history of executive and management experience in the private, public, and nonprofit sectors. Ive spent 25 years in independent study of foreign policy. I am ready to help advance an agenda of restoring Americas place in the world.

She added: If I am selected, I am prepared and excited to serve.

Ms Abrams refused to concede in the gubernatorial race to her Republican opponent, then-Secretary of State Brian Kemp, who maintained oversight of the states elections despite himself launching a campaign in 2018.

Reports indicated systemic issues with residents in Democratic-majority regions being purged from the voter rolls as polling sites in urban, largely-Democratic areas were shut down ahead of the vote  just as Ms Abrams was appearing to close in on Mr Kemps lead.

Mr Biden, who became the presumptive nominee this month after Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders dropped out of the Democratic primaries and later endorsed the former vice president, has vowed to pick a female vice president as his running mate and previously floated Ms Abrams as a contender, along with several other prominent women.

At an Iowa town hall in November, Mr Biden told an audience he was considering selecting the woman who should have been the governor of Georgia, hinting at Ms Abrams, as well as the two senators from the state of New Hampshire, referring to Maggie Hassan and Jeanne Shaheen.

Ms Abrams has never been one to hide her political ambitions: earlier this year, she said she would be happy to serve as a vice president pick to the Democratic nominee during a speech at the University of Iowa.

When I got the question (from reporters) I was, myself, contemplating my next steps, she said about the possibility of essentially running for the vice president position as Democrats battled for the presidential nomination.

 Stacey Abrams flames Trump for voter suppression in Democrats' response to State of the Union

What I said was, you do not run in a primary for second place, so no, for whatever rumours are out there, she said. However, Im not in the primary, but you can run as second in the general election, and I am happy to do so with the nominee. That is my answer.

After her defeat in the Georgia race, Ms Abrams launched a nonprofit group dedicated to expanding voting access and ending voter suppression in America, called Fair Fight.

Ive learned that failure is not permanent, the Democrat told Elle. My responsibility is to not let failure dissuade me from my core obligations. Sometimes we pursue a challenge thinking it is about our victory, but we dont know the true purpose until later. Not becoming governor of one state gave me the opportunity to launch a national network in 20 states.

We are helping reform democracy in places where it was broken and battered. We are fixing access to a census that the president of the United States tried to destroy, she added. I may not have won the office, but what I was able to earn for the causes I serve has been extraordinary, and beyond anything I could have imagined. Apparently, Im a really good loser.
Ask any expert about how to handle an epidemic like COVID-19, and theyll mention the same two concepts: testing and tracing.

You need to test widely in order to know who has or has had the disease. And you need to trace who theyve been in contact with so those people can get tested or quarantine themselves.

Those are keys at the outset to try to isolate the clusters in an outbreak. But they remain crucial in moments like this when we are looking for a way to gradually re-open the economy without having unmanageable spikes in disease.

Testing and tracing  the concepts sound simple, but Arizona and America are showing they arent easy for us.

Dr. Anthony Fauci, the governments top expert in infectious diseases, said Tuesday that we dont have an adequate system for either testing or tracing to be able to re-open the economy. We have to have something in place that is efficient and that we can rely on, and were not there yet, Fauci said in an interview with The Associated Press.

Former Arizona health director Will Humble, who is now the executive director of the Arizona Public Health Association, explained we need a quick diagnostic test with a fast turnaround time. You need to be able to find everybody whos asymptomatic and sick, so they can go into isolation. They only can do that if they can get a quick test, and its diagnostic, fast and convenient.
Ex-Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull has slammed his Liberal party colleagues, calling current leader Scott Morrison a 'daggy dad' and his rival Peter Dutton as a 'narcissist' and 'self-delusional'.

Mr Turnbull made the comments in his explosive new book called 'A Bigger Picture', which will go on sale next week.

He lead the Liberal party to victory in the 2016 federal election, before he was overthrown and replaced by Scott Morrison in 2018 - a man who Mr Turnbull believes never should have been elected to lead the nation.

Three days ago, Mr Turnbull shared a photo of the contents page, offering readers an insight into the 694-page book which will include chapters on the Abbott leadership, Barnaby Joyce's affair scandal involving a staffer, and finally, 'the coup' of 2018.

Mr Turnbull also documents his despair after losing the Liberal party leadership in 2009, confessing he became depressed and self destructive in the days and weeks to follow.

Former Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull (pictured with his wife, Lucy at a street party for the homeless) wrote a tell-all memoir detailing his time in politics

Mr Turnbull has since left politics all together. Pictured with his wife attending the opening of the Sydney Coliseum Theatre in December 2019

'For the first time in my life, suicidal thoughts started to enter my mind, unbidden and unwanted,' he wrote in the memoir.

His wife Lucy, two children and a handful of close friends were the only people who knew of his struggles with mental health and were 'horrified' at what he was going through.

Mr Turnbull explained he had periods of 'real gloom' in the past, but nothing like he was experiencing following the 2009 spill which saw Tony Abbott take over as the leader of the Opposition.

He contemplated giving up his political career entirely, but former Liberal PM John Howard encouraged him to persist.

When writing his memoir, Mr Turnbull stumbled across hidden diary entries he wrote during his darkest days.

'I feel at present an utter failure,' he wrote at one stage. 'I blame myself for losing the leadership, a job which by the time I lost it had become one of most excruciating pain and humiliation.'

Mr Turnbull narrowly survived an initial leadership challenge before losing to Scott Morrison just days later. Pictured addressing the media following the first challenge

Pictured: Mr Turnbull shared the contents page of his tell-all memoir on Twitter ahead of the book's official release

Some of the explosive chapters are 'Barnaby and the bonk ban' and 'The coup', discussing his final days in politics

Mr Turnbull was medicated with anti-depressants. He said most did little to help and one made his condition particularly worse.

Eventually, he weened himself off the medication, and said that in doing so he became calmer and more self-aware.

'While I felt at times as though I was literally clawing myself out of the deepest pit, I also recognised that my depression had been preying on the self-absorbed side of my character,' he said.

In 2015, Mr Turnbull returned serve to Mr Abbott, by contesting the leadership of the Liberal party and winning, subsequently stepping into the role of prime minister and winning the election himself the following year.

But Mr Turnbull was again the subject of a leadership spill in 2018, campaigned this time by Peter Dutton, the current Home Affairs minister.

Mr Turnbull now spends his days focusing on being a grandparent (pictured: his grandson watching him and his wife read a bedtime story)

Former prime minister Malcolm Turnbull serves lunch at the Wayside Chapel Street Party for the poor and homeless in Kings Cross in Sydney on Christmas Day, 2018

The win eventually went to Mr Morrison, who then had to campaign for a federal election just months later.

It was dubbed the 'unloseable election' for the Labor party, and 'unwinnable' for Mr Morrison, but miraculously, he delivered a win against Bill Shorten.

According to Mr Turnbull, the Liberal party never should have won the 2019 election.

He criticised Mr Morrison's bid to portray himself as the 'daggy dad' from the suburbs during the election campaign as cringe-worthy.

'He's a professional politician who understands marketing and messaging better than most,' Mr Turnbull wrote in the memoir.

'His cringe-worthy 'daggy dad' persona is more exaggerated than it is conflated, but in net terms it probably helped.

'All that aside, however, the truth is that Labor lost the election that the coalition, after the August coup, did not deserve to win.'

Mr Turnbull also takes aim at his former cabinet colleagues, including Mr Morrison, for their roles in the coup that led to his resignation in August 2018.

According to The Australian, Mr Turnbull accuses Mr Morrison of double dealing in his bid to succeed him when he had had to be 'propped up' as treasurer.

Home Affairs Minister Peter Dutton, the coup leader, was a 'narcissist' and 'self-delusional' for thinking he could be prime minister, Mr Turnbull said.
Akhil Bharatiya Akhara Parishad, the apex body of 'Hindu sants and ascetics', on Wednesday supported of the extension of coronavirus lockdown announced by Prime Minister Narendra Modi yesterday.

Mahant Narendra Giri, president of Akhil Bharatiya Akhara Parishad has appealed to the fellow saints of the thirteen Akharas to adhere to the lockdown guidelines and protect themselves from falling prey to the deadly disease.

"Prime Minister Narendra Modi has once again extended the lockdown in the interest. So, all saints should feel positive about this decision. There is no cure for coronavirus as of now and the infection is spreading at a rapid pace. The danger of coronavirus can only be prevented by following social distancing norms," he said.

Giri also urged saints to donate money as per their capacity to PM CARES Fund and Chief Minister's Relief Fund to battle COVID-19.

He also lauded Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath for working day and night to contain the spread of the virus in the state while risking his own life.

"Yogi ji is also working hard to fight coronavirus battle. He is not bothered about his life. He is tirelessly working with Team-11 to halt the spread of COVID-19," he added.

Giri also urged people to stay indoors during the lockdown period to prevent "community spread" and urged them to "offer prayers to defeat coronavirus".

The Central Government yesterday decided to extend the nationwide lockdown up to May 3.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Maharashtras public works department minister Ashok Chavan on Wednesday alleged a political conspiracy behind the Tuesdays gathering of migrants at Mumbais Bandra railway station and a social media campaign which followed demanding Presidents rule in Maharashtra.

Chavan also said the state government was investigating who was patronised the campaign on social media and who created the confusion that led migrant workers to flock the Bandra station.

We are investigating the entire episode of crowding by the migrant workers at the Bandra station on Tuesday evening. We are investigating who was patronising the social media campaign holding the state government responsible for it. It smells of a political conspiracy as the demands are being made for the imposition of the Presidents Rule in Maharashtra. It needs to come to fore who was behind the messages and wrong information spread among the workers, said Chavan at a video press conference.

Maharashra Congress president and revenue minister Balasaheb Thorat too participated in the press conference.

Chavan who is also a former chief minister said that Tuesdays incident was very serious and could have led to a stampede had it not been handled well by the police.

He also alleged that a letter issued by South Central Railways about their plans to start special trains for the migrant workers created confusion among the migrants and led to the crowding at the Bandra station.

There was a letter issued from the office of the chief commercial managers office in Secunderabad that created confusion among the workers. The letter was making rounds on the social media and led the workers to believe that the Railways were making special arrangements for them. It was an irresponsible act of the Railways administration. I am not blaming anybody, but presenting the facts related to the crowding by the migrants, he said.

Thorat said that the Railways had taken online booking till Tuesday afternoon before announcing the cancellation of all the trains. The confusion among the migrants led to the incident. It did not pertain to any specific community or the religion. The crowd included migrants from all communities, he said.
If you own shares in Fly Leasing Limited (NYSE:FLY) then it's worth thinking about how it contributes to the volatility of your portfolio, overall. In finance, Beta is a measure of volatility. Modern finance theory considers volatility to be a measure of risk, and there are two main types of price volatility. First, we have company specific volatility, which is the price gyrations of an individual stock. Holding at least 8 stocks can reduce this kind of risk across a portfolio. The second sort is caused by the natural volatility of markets, overall. For example, certain macroeconomic events will impact (virtually) all stocks on the market.

Some stocks are more sensitive to general market forces than others. Beta is a widely used metric to measure a stock's exposure to market risk (volatility). Before we go on, it's worth noting that Warren Buffett pointed out in his 2014 letter to shareholders that 'volatility is far from synonymous with risk.' Having said that, beta can still be rather useful. The first thing to understand about beta is that the beta of the overall market is one. A stock with a beta below one is either less volatile than the market, or more volatile but not corellated with the overall market. In comparison a stock with a beta of over one tends to be move in a similar direction to the market in the long term, but with greater changes in price.

Check out our latest analysis for Fly Leasing

What FLY's beta value tells investors

Given that it has a beta of 1.37, we can surmise that the Fly Leasing share price has been fairly sensitive to market volatility (over the last 5 years). If this beta value holds true in the future, Fly Leasing shares are likely to rise more than the market when the market is going up, but fall faster when the market is going down. Many would argue that beta is useful in position sizing, but fundamental metrics such as revenue and earnings are more important overall. You can see Fly Leasing's revenue and earnings in the image below.

Story continues

NYSE:FLY Income Statement April 15th 2020

Could FLY's size cause it to be more volatile?

With a market capitalisation of US$189m, Fly Leasing is a very small company by global standards. It is quite likely to be unknown to most investors. It has a relatively high beta, suggesting it is fairly actively traded for a company of its size. Because it takes less capital to move the share price of a small company like this, when a stock this size is actively traded it is quite often more sensitive to market volatility than similar large companies.

What this means for you:

Since Fly Leasing tends to move up when the market is going up, and down when it's going down, potential investors may wish to reflect on the overall market, when considering the stock. In order to fully understand whether FLY is a good investment for you, we also need to consider important company-specific fundamentals such as Fly Leasings financial health and performance track record. I urge you to continue your research by taking a look at the following:

Future Outlook: What are well-informed industry analysts predicting for FLYs future growth? Take a look at our free research report of analyst consensus for FLYs outlook. Past Track Record: Has FLY been consistently performing well irrespective of the ups and downs in the market? Go into more detail in the past performance analysis and take a look at the free visual representations of FLY's historicals for more clarity. Other Interesting Stocks: It's worth checking to see how FLY measures up against other companies on valuation. You could start with this free list of prospective options.

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.
(Natural News) You have to hand it to the propagandists at Google. Theyre as good at spreading disinformation as they are at hiding it, then looking you in the eye and telling you, convincingly, that theyre helping.

As the Wuhan coronavirus (COVID-19) spreads throughout the country, some places have been hit harder with the disease than others, and one of them is the state of California, home to Google and many other Silicon Valley tech behemoths.

Like Democrats are using the pandemic to push a Left-wing agenda including a nationwide vote fraud scheme that was actually born in California  ballot harvesting  Google is using the outbreak to virtue-signal and prove to everyone its a force for good, though the company has done more harm to people in the past by censoring information that would keep them healthier and safer overall.

As reported by CNBC, Google CEO Sundar Pichai, a multimillionaire Marxist who believes in the accumulation of wealth as long as hes the one accumulating it, donated a million of his dollars to a $5 million effort to buy affection throughout San Francisco as virus-related shutdowns of non-essential businesses spread poverty and, well, inequality:

Google is raising cash for 5,000 San Francisco Bay Area families as the Covid-19 coronavirus pandemic has led to an economic collapse in its backyard.

The companys philanthropic arm, Google.org, and CEO Sundar Pichai are each giving $1 million to the organization GiveDirectly, which delivers cash to families enrolled in a federal nutrition assistance program SNAP, the company said Sunday.

The goal is to raise $5 million and give each family $1,000. As of Monday, roughly half the amount was raised.

Meanwhile, as the Marxist-led company hands out a fraction of what it earns in a couple weeks time, it has plans to begin construction on a second massive campus in San Jose, Calif., where it will house 25,000 employees. So not only will Google be their employer, but Google will be their paymaster and landlord, too. How nice.

Google couldnt care less about improving the quality of search results

Meanwhile, the search behemoth continues to control virtually all media and search content in the United States and beyond.

Shortly after Donald Trump won the presidency, those of us in the independent media began to notice something strange: The social media and tech giants opened what became a coordinated campaign of censorship to contain and eradicate all of the good news surrounding his win.

But it didnt stop there. Other content that had been posted and shared on those same platforms for years suddenly became dangerous and offensive and therefore had to be removed so that people wouldnt get the wrong information.

What was really going on, however, was the beginning of a campaign to memory hole useful health information and other reporting that exposed the Deep State and its allies. Google led that effort, as Natural News reported:

Google is the latest corporation to join the fight against offensive speech on the Internet. Recently, the multibillion-dollar company directed its review teams to locate and flag language that could potentially be upsetting or offensive. By doing this, Google hopes to improve the overall quality of search results.

Google couldnt care less about improving the quality of search results. Google wants to control the flow and distribution of information, and because the tech giants reach is far and wide, it can do so.

One former Google software engineer has said that the company intentionally altered its search results since Trump got into office in order to present nearly all negative information while hiding news reports that praise him or highlight his accomplishments.

And now, Google is giving away money to the poor while building housing for its employees and hiding information from users. Like good little Marxists and Communists.

Sources include:

NaturalNews.com

TheNationalSentinel.com

CNBC.com
Automakers are anxious to get their assembly lines rolling again, especially since leaving factories idle is costing them billions of dollars by the week.

But the experience many of them have had in China illustrates just how long a slog its going to be before plants are producing at anywhere near pre-shutdown levels. It took almost two months for most of Chinas industry to return to some semblance of normalcy  and that was with the benefit of mobile apps the government installed on citizens cellphones to track their movements and potential exposure to COVID-19 infected people.

North American factories may have the benefit of Apple Inc. and Google trying to start a similar contract-tracing effort, but participation will be voluntary. And the tensions brewing already between President Donald Trump and state governors indicate U.S. government efforts wont be nearly as centralized as Chinas was, suggesting that already cash-strapped suppliers may also have to deal with a patchwork of state-by-state orders dictating when businesses can reopen.

Discipline is the key to success, Jim Tobin, the president of Asia operations at auto-parts maker Magna International Inc., said last week. In China, theres mandates that come out. Here, there are requests.

Magna and other companies implemented dozens of protocols  including worker-temperature screenings and physical distance barriers  to open factories on single shifts, Tobin said during a webinar hosted by the Center for Automotive Research in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Many vehicle and parts plants in North America had been running multiple shifts to meet demand thats held steady near all-time highs for years. Now, sales have cratered and are unlikely to recover quickly.

Tesla Inc. and Fiat Chrysler Automobiles NV both are planning to begin reopening U.S. plants on May 4 after idling them in mid-March. General Motors Co. and Ford Motor Co. have refrained from scheduling restart dates for their facilities, while Toyota Motor Corp. and Honda Motor Co. have said theirs will be down through at least May 1.

While setting dates to reopen sends a signal to suppliers to start getting their parts inventories ready, doing so wont be simple, with new layers of precautions and complications that didnt exist before shelter-in-place orders came into effect nearly a month ago.

Heres a rundown of what the industry is grappling with as it prepares for a restart:

Patchwork of orders

A typical vehicle has thousands of parts, and as automakers survey their supply chains, they now have to look not just at inventories, but at health orders across the country. What the virus curve looks like in Illinois compared with Michigan or Ohio could determine whether or not a vehicle will have all the components needed to resume production.

What the manufacturers need to do is be able to map out state by state, county by county, where manufacturers are with regards to local lockdown stay-at-home orders, said Brian Collie, head of Boston Consulting Groups U.S. automotive practice.

Even in states where people are allowed back to work, auto companies will likely use staggered shifts to increase social distancing and allow for more frequent deep cleaning. Theyll also likely deal with high rates of absenteeism, especially among older workers who fear getting infected, Collie said.

Supply chain

Suppliers typically need a week or two of advance work to support an automakers ability to start running their assembly lines again, said Anne Marie Uetz, a Detroit-based partner at the law firm Foley and Lardner LLP, which represents parts manufacturers. And there are at least two major impediments the supply chain will be dealing with: kids and cash.

With many school systems closed until the end of the year, parents within the workforce will have to find some form of child care before reporting back to plants. Many will be wary of bringing the virus home to their families.

The other problem is cash flow. With production already having been shut down for roughly a month, suppliers coffers are starting to run dry and many need help with the expenditures necessary to restart, Uetz said. Some are getting assistance from the federal government, but automakers also are negotiating ways to help.

The dire financial straits many suppliers are in doesnt leave much room for error in deciding on when to resume output, Magnas Tobin said.

Start-stop does not help liquidity, because we start buying material, employing people, then they say, Were going to push it out another two weeks, Tobin said, referring to supplier-carmaker relationships.

PPE needs

Much of the auto industry has pivoted to supporting the health-care industry by making ventilators, masks, face shields and medical gowns. Some of those efforts to make personal protection equipment  or PPE  will come in handy for their own workforce, which pushed back against keeping factories open last month.

Social distancing and barriers will be go-to tools, but for workers who cant avoid close interaction, theyll need face shields, said Aaron McCarthy, Magnas chief of human resources. Companies may be unable to provide them until front-line health care workers have enough.

Ford is already tallying up the equipment needs for its workplaces, Jim Farley, the automakers chief operating officer, said in a podcast interview with Automotive News last week.

Were identifying all the PPE requirements, which is millions and millions and millions of equipment were going to need to bring people back, Farley said. Were not going to bring anyone back or even think about it before we have the sufficient supplies.
The lockdown has given lovebirds rumoured Kriti Kharbanda and Pulkit Samrat a chance to spend quality time with each other, which is evident from her latest social media post!

Kriti has taken to Instagram to share a video where she can be seen enjoying a champi (oil massage on the head) by her boyfriend Pulkit Samrat. She also jokingly claimed that her new motto in life is to make Pulkit give her a champi!

The actress captioned: First I made him look like Champak, then made him give me a champi! @pulkitsamrat heya! Thanks ya! #quarantinememories #yelocozyolo (this is officially my new motto in life)

Fans loved the video and comments like cute couple and favourite couple followed.

Also read: Soundarya Sharma stuck in US amid coronavirus pandemic, seeks ministry help to return home

In an earlier interview with IANS, Kriti Kharbanda had spoke about her chemistry with Pulkit Samrat and shared: We look so hot together. We have such great chemistry and look so cute together. Pulkit is very special to me and will always be so.

Follow @htshowbiz for more
Source: Xinhua| 2020-04-15 13:58:04|Editor: huaxia

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MACAO, April 15 (Xinhua) -- China's Macao Special Administrative Region (SAR) on Wednesday unveiled an online exhibition to promote the awareness of national security among Macao residents and mark National Security Education Day.

The SAR Government Information Bureau said the exhibition was hosted by Macao SAR government with support from the Liaison Office of the Central People's Government in the Macao SAR.

The bureau added that the photo exhibition, with a theme of "national security, our responsibilities," illustrated the concept of overall national security in a changing and complex international situation, Macao's effort towards economic diversification and safeguarding of public security.

The exhibition also highlighted how the Macao community is standing in unity to fight against the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic.

Macao SAR's Chief Executive Ho Iat Seng said in a letter to mark China's National Security Education Day that safeguarding national security is the sacred duty and due responsibility of the Macao SAR and the Macao residents.

He said the outbreak of COVID-19 has presented the government and Macao residents with a great challenge in maintaining the overall security of the country. The SAR government had quickly set up the Novel Coronavirus Response and Coordination Center to cope with the development of the situation and follow the national epidemic prevention policy.

Fu Ziying, the director of the Liaison Office of the Central People's Government in the Macao SAR, and Shen Beili, the commissioner of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of China in the Macao SAR, also wrote letters to mark China's National Security Education Day.

Fu said at a time when the prevention and control of novel coronavirus in China has achieved positive results while the global pandemic continues to spread, it is vital to strengthen the consciousness of implementing the overall national security concept and to coordinate traditional security with non-traditional security in Macao.

He added that Macao has achieved remarkable results in the prevention and control of novel coronavirus, but cannot underestimate the imported risks, and it should maintain the prevention and control measures.

Shen said in order to safeguard national security, we should carry out education on national conditions and patriotism to enhance the sense of national identity and consciousness of Macao people.

The commissioner added that they also attach great importance on protecting Macao people's overseas interests, such as assisting the SAR government in evacuating Macao passengers stranded on the "Diamond Princess" cruise ship, and providing consular protection and services for overseas Macao students.
Joseph Williams, 26, was arrested for murder after getting administratively released from jail to prevent the spread of the coronavirus. - (Hillsborough County Sheriff's Office)(TAMPA, Fla.) -- A week after a Florida man was released from jail as a preventative measure against the spread of the novel coronavirus, he was arrested on charges including murder.



Joseph Edward Williams was released March 19 following the issuance of an administrative order aimed at lowering the risk of COVID-19 spread within the Hillsborough County jail, police said. Williams, 26, was being held there on $2,500 bond for felony and misdemeanor drug charges.



Seven days later, Williams allegedly shot and killed someone in Tampa, said police, who didn't disclose additional details on the victim or the crime.



Williams was arrested April 13 for second-degree murder, resisting an officer with violence, felon in possession of a firearm, possession of heroin and possession of drug paraphernalia, authorities said. A judge set bail at $250,000.



"There is no question Joseph Williams took advantage of this health emergency to commit crimes while he was out of jail awaiting resolution of a low-level, non-violent offense," Sheriff Chad Chronister said in a statement. "Judges, prosecutors, and Sheriffs around the country are facing difficult decisions during this health crisis with respect to balancing public health and public safety. Sheriffs in Florida and throughout our country have released non-violent, low-level offenders to protect our deputies and the jail population from an outbreak."



Police said Williams has a long criminal history that includes felony burglary and drug convictions.



It's unclear whether Williams has retained legal counsel at this time. No attorney information was available in online court records.



The office of State Attorney Andrew Warren did not immediately respond to a request for comment from ABC News.



As of Tuesday, 35 inmates and 56 jail employees had tested positive for the coronavirus, according to the Florida Department of Corrections.



Copyright  2020, ABC Audio. All rights reserved.
VANCOUVER, BC / ACCESSWIRE / April 15, 2020 / IMC International Mining Corp (CSE:IMCX ) (OTCPINK:IMIMF ) (FRA:3MX) (the "Company" or "IMC"), is pleased to announce that Mr. Jeffrey Reeder, B.Sc., P.Geo., a qualified person as defined in NI 43-101, has been appointed to the Company's Technical Advisory Board, specifically in relation to the Company's newly acquired 206.58 square kilometer Thane Property located in north-central British Columbia, Canada.

Mr. Reeder holds a BSc in Geology from the University of Alberta and has been involved in the Mining Exploration and Investment industries since 1988. During his career he has been involved with all aspects of junior mining companies and has held managing positions as VP Exploration, President and CEO for various companies. He is currently President and CEO of Peruvian Metals Corporation, a public company that initially staked, explored and defined a resource for a copper-molybdenite porphyry before it was sold to Penoles de Mexico.

Mr. Reeder worked 5 years as an exploration geologist for the Hunter-Dickenson Group from 1989 to 1993. He worked almost exclusively throughout BC and the Yukon on copper-gold porphyry deposits such as Mt. Milligan, South Kemess, Fish Lake and Casino. This experience aided Mr. Reeder in the discovery of two porphyry deposits in Peru that resulted in NI43-101 resources, the Aguila copper-molybdenite porphyry deposit and the Pinaya copper-gold porphyry deposit.

Of particular interest to IMC is Mr. Reeder's experience working at Mt. Milligan and South Kemess. The Thane Property owned by IMC is located within the Quesnel Terrane along the northeast contact of the Hogem Batholith, an alkalic suite of rocks hosting porphyry copper-gold deposits. The northern part of the Quesnel Terrane extends from south of the Mt. Milligan Mine northward to the Kemess Mine, with the Thane property located midway between these two copper-gold porphyry deposits. At Mt. Milligan Mr. Reeder was a drill site geologist and logged a significant amount of core from both the MBX and Southern Star zones. In 1991, Mr. Reeder's focus was mainly on the delineation of the South Kemess zone where he logged the majority of the core drilled.

"I am pleased to have Mr. Reeder join IMC's Technical Advisory Board", stated Brian Thurston, President of IMC, "I worked with Jeff on the Casino copper-gold porphyry deposit in the Yukon early in my career, and later in Peru on several properties. Mr. Reeder's technical strength as a geologist is his understanding of copper-gold porphyry systems. I look forward to seeing what value his extensive experience will add to the advancement and development of our Thane Property".

ON BEHALF OF THE BOARD OF DIRECTORS

Brian Thurston

Chief Executive Officer and President

ABOUT INTERNATIONAL MINING CORP.

IMC International Mining Corporation is a junior exploration and development company. It is focused on creating shareholder value through the advancements of its assets which include the Thane Property in Northern British Columbia and the Bullard Pass Property in Arizona. The Company continues to look for further assets in North & South America as it increases its asset portfolio. International Mining will utilize its heavily experienced management team to evaluate assets that provide shareholder value.

IMC continues to evaluate additional properties to add to its portfolio of mining assets.

INVESTOR RELATIONS:

i r@internationalmining.ca

1 (604) 588-2110

https://imcxmining.com

Forward-Looking Information: This news release contains "forward-looking information" within the meaning of applicable securities laws, including statements regarding: the completion of the Private Placement, the Company's intention to acquire further mineral properties; the Company's business plans and prospects and the future of the Company's business, the acquisition, exploration and development of its assets; and the ability to create shareholder value. Although the Company believes that the expectations reflected in the forward-looking information are reasonable, there can be no assurance that such expectations will prove to be correct. Readers are cautioned not to place undue reliance on forward-looking information. Such forward-looking statements are subject to risks and uncertainties that may cause actual results, performance and developments to differ materially from those contemplated by these statements depending on, among other things, the risks that the Private Placement may not complete in the full amount contemplated, or at all, that the Company may not acquire any additional mineral properties, that the Company's plans and prospects will vary from those stated in this news release and that the Company may not be able to carry out its business plans as expected. Except as required by law, the Company expressly disclaims any obligation and does not intend to update any forward-looking statements or forward-looking information in this news release. Although the Company believes that the expectations reflected in the forward-looking information are reasonable, there can be no assurance that such expectations will prove to be correct. Accordingly, readers should not place undue reliance on forward-looking information. The statements in this news release are made as of the date of this release.

The CSE has not reviewed, approved or disapproved the content of this press release.

SOURCE: IMC International Mining Corp.

View source version on accesswire.com:https://www.accesswire.com/585135/IMC-International-Mining-Corp-Appoints-32-Year-Mining-Exploration-Veteran-Mr-Jeffrey-Reeder-PGeo-to-its-Advisory-Board
New Delhi, April 15 : The Delhi Police have charged the chief of Delhi-based Tablighi Jamaat Markaz, Maulana Saad, under stringent sections for culpable homicide not amounting to murder, which is equivalent to second degree murder.

Legal experts say if during the investigation more serious offences are made out then police are free to add further stringent sections to the case.

According to police sources, Section 304 of the Indian Penal Code (IPC) has been added in the FIR lodged against Saad and others in the matter. Senior advocate Mukul Rohatgi speaking to IANS said: "This is a clear case of Section 302 instead of 304. The Tablighi Jamaat people were grossly criminally negligent in conducting their affairs in March, which is responsible for a large portion of positive people all over the country. They knew their action would lead to spread of infection, which is likely to cause numerous deaths." Rohtagi insisted immediate action must be taken in the matter. The cleric was last seen on March 28. Later, through an audio message he claimed to be in self-isolation.

According to Section 304, whoever commits culpable homicide not amounting to murder shall be punished with imprisonment for life, or imprisonment of either description for a term which may extend to 10 years. Earlier, Maulana Saad was booked under sections which were bailable but after the addition of Section 304, it will be tough to secure bail.

Senior advocate Aishwarya Bhati said culpable homicide can be understood as second degree murder, somebody does not have intention to cause death but they have done an act which is so dangerous it is likely to cause death.

"Currently this case is under investigation, as these people are yet to join. At any stage of the investigation if it is found their roles in the conspiracy or in crime are much more heinous then even more heinous offences may be murder can added to the investigation before the chargesheet can be filed", added Bhati.

She insisted if the accused do not join the investigation at this stage then they would end up adding more culpability to the crime.

Senior advocate Vikas Singh said more appropriate sections should have been Section 51 (b) of the National Disaster Management Act and Section 270 of the IPC. Singh said both these sections carry punishment of two years each and Section 304 will not apply.

Kumar Mihir, Advocate-on-Record, Supreme Court, said the congregation of the Tablighi Jamat by Maulana Saad was in clear contravention of the mandate of lockdown imposed by the Centre. "The subsequent act of hiding the jamaatis including foreigners affected with COVID-19, which resulted in spread of the viral infection. Deaths of the affected persons clearly amount to culpable homicide and therefore registration of FIR under Section 304 IPC is completely valid", added Mihir.
Gov. Greg Abbotts Executive Order GA-13 prevents anyone charged with or previously convicted of an offense involving violence or the threat of violence from being released on personal bond or electronic monitoring. It also eliminates the most important deadlines for prosecutors to bring charges against someone and ends good conduct credits in jails.

These policies are unwise, unfair and unconstitutional. Thats why Im standing with the judges, criminal justice professionals and civil rights advocates who filed a lawsuit this week seeking an injunction against it.

Personal bonds arent release on recognizance  theyre release with non-money conditions  and countless people cant get them under this order. Someone charged with bouncing a check will now have to sit in jail indefinitely if they got probation on a misdemeanor assault by threat decades ago. Instead of targeting dangerous criminals charged with serious violence, this order disproportionately affects poor people accused of things like minor property crimes and personal use drug possession.

Alarmingly, it also weaponizes the new stay at home orders. A local government that decides you arent essential can do more than lock you up  now, they can throw away the key.

Conditional release means alcohol monitoring in DWIs, drug testing in possession cases and orders to stay away from the victim in domestic violence cases. The governors mandate prevents those restrictions in many cases. Yet any of those people can and will be released from jail, condition-free, for a few hundred dollars, endangering us all.

That disparity was at the heart of the recent federal lawsuits over bail in Texas. The governor is attempting to require a worse version of a system thats already been held unconstitutional.

Those who cant pay, which includes more people than ever as Texans struggle to make ends meet in this economic crisis, will stay behind bars, many on cases that will eventually result in dismissal or probation. Jails will swell as they join those who the state hasnt even formally charged with a crime, which it now has little incentive to do. All of them (including those whove recently accepted plea deals for jail time after the promise of good conduct credit) have now unexpectedly had their incentive to behave removed. The danger to correctional employees from both infection and disgruntled inmates is immense.

Im an attorney, but my bachelors degree is in history, and my education in both areas tells me our founding fathers tried to prevent orders like the governors. If George Washington was the wartime soul of our young country, second president John Adams was his counterpart in peace. Adams was a criminal defense attorney by trade, and our U.S. Constitution is modeled after his Massachusetts Constitution, which enshrined the idea of a government of laws, not of men in two ways: separation of powers and a bill of rights.

Separation of powers means that the legislature makes laws, not the governors executive branch. The authority he cites to suspend the provisions of any regulatory statute during a disaster cant possibly allow him to discard the Code of Criminal Procedure. (Thats why the rest of that law, which his order doesnt mention, discusses examples like insurer signage, vehicle registration, and fuel taxes.) Applying those laws is the job of the judicial branch through judges weve elected to look at individual cases and make wise decisions. The governors order oversteps into both arenas.

Beyond that, what framers like Adams intended was for the powers of each branch of government to end where the peoples rights begin. Literally half of our Bill of Rights covers rights of the accused, including due process of law, a speedy public trial and a ban on excessive bail. The Fourteenth Amendment ensures that all rights and laws apply equally to everyone, not just the wealthy. No one, not even the governor, can suspend constitutional guarantees.

Im sure Abbott intended his executive order to protect Texans in a turbulent time. But historically, emergencies have often precipitated egregious mistakes, failed policies that attempted to sacrifice liberty for security in ways that still haunt Americans today. Thats exactly why this wasnt his mistake to make. Separation of powers and constitutional rights cant be cast aside with the stroke of a pen in the governors mansion.

In Adamss own words, The only maxim of a free government ought to be to trust no man living with power to endanger the public liberty. With due respect to the governor, we dont and wont.

Abbott must rescind his order, or the other branches of government must act immediately to do it for him on behalf of the people of Texas.

Moody (D-El Paso) is the Speaker Pro Tempore of the Texas House of Representatives.
Rev. Jesse Jackson's Rainbow PUSH Coalition is calling for COVID-19 aid to Africa.

As the coronavirus pandemic spreads to every corner of the globe, Africa, one of the poorest continents, must not be forgotten which is why Rev. Jesse L. Jackson, Sr. and the Rainbow PUSH Coalition are calling for sufficient numbers of ventilators and urgently needed assistance to be sent to Africa.

Africa deserves and needs our support as the virus begins to spread within the continent with an impact that will be more devastating due to poor health infrastructures, said Rev. Jackson. The continent is our original source of the slave trade that began 246 years ago. Africans were traded for gold, diamond, sugar, salt, gold, iron, cobalt, uranium, copper, bauxite, silver, petroleum and cocoa beans.

Africa is an American ally and despite our difficult battle with coronavirus and its devastating impact, we should be more supportive to Africa during these troubling and deadly times by providing Africa with ventilators and other vital medical needs.

To emphasize the importance and gravity of Africas situation, here is a partial list of ventilators vs. the populations.

 Sierra Leone has 13 ventilators for 7.65 million people.

 Central African Republic has 3 ventilators for 4.6 million people.

 Liberia has 3 ventilators for 4.8 million people and,

 South Sudan has 4 ventilators for 11 million people.

These and all countries of Africa need immediate U.S. assistance and that is why as a member of the Advocacy Network of Africa (ADNA) we fully support the groups appeal for urgent assistance. Below is a request for adequate funding needed for these dire and life-threatening COVID-19 times:

1. Massively increase the current $100 million pledge by Congress to $300 million in order to boost the Africa COVID-19 capabilities of the African Union, the United Nations, the World Health Organization, and the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, and UNICEF.

African governments are responding with different forms of fiscal stimulus but there is a shortfall of $100 Billion. Dedicated funds can provide a unified and coordinated response to the needs of all African countries through programs that:

 Expedite the delivery of medical support, including 1) Personal Protective Equipment, 2) test kits and 3) ventilators; 4) adequate wages for medical professionals and other essential workers on the front line of this pandemic; and 5) air-bridges or hubs across Africa to ensure the delivery of essential products and personnel.

 Support trusted civil society organizations to provide essential services to vulnerable populations with particular attention to rural areas, camps for refugees and internally displaced persons and informal settlements, beyond the reach of existing services.

2. Join Pope Francis call for a Global Jubilee for African debt forgiveness. Support debt relief measures for African countries amid the COVID-19 crisis so that they can prioritize spending on life-saving measures instead of debt repayments.

3. Collaborate in resource mobilization efforts to build a sustainable global health infrastructure capable of managing the COVID-19 and future pandemics in Africa. Consider a Global Health Marshall Plan that ensures a U.S. commitment to building such a sustainable health infrastructure.

4. Recognize the connection of climate change and pandemics. Both are affecting the health and well being of people and the planet. Invest in early warning systems and adaptation efforts to address disease challenges posed by a warming planet as part of a bold climate strategy. Fund efforts to spur renewable energy, particularly for vulnerable last-mile communities in Africa and around the world.

5. Ensure U.S. foreign assistance is grounded in human rights-based approaches that uphold the highest standards of accountability, transparency and timely information disclosures.

6. End the deportations and the use of immigration detention centers in the United States and release non-violent people who are incarcerated in jails, prisons and detention centers to slow the spread of the virus.

7. Support the UN Secretary General's call for an immediate global ceasefire so people in war-torn regions can access life-saving aid to fight the coronavirus. COVID-19 is a good indication for how interlinked we all are.

Responding to the current crisis and investing in initiatives to prevent and mitigate future pandemics will not only be in Africas interest but will benefit the entire global community, including the United States.

We look forward to working with you to implement these recommendations and anticipate seeing the United States act in a manner that is in keeping with the American peoples long-standing commitment to justice, human rights, health, and well being.

The Advocacy Network on Africa (ADNA) is a non-partisan network of over 200 US-based organizations and scholars with a programmatic focus on Africa/US-Africa policy.

Rainbow PUSH Coalition is a multi-racial, multi-issue, progressive, international organization that was formed in December 1996 by the Reverend Jesse L. Jackson, Sr. through merging of two organizations he founded Operation PUSH People United to Serve Humanity (estab. 1971) and the Rainbow Coalition (estab. 1984). With headquarters in Chicago and offices in Washington, D.C., Atlanta, Detroit, Houston, Los Angeles, New York and Oakland, the organization works to make the American Dream a reality for all citizens while advocating for peace and justice around the world. RPC is dedicated to improving the lives of all people by serving as a voice for the voiceless. Its mission is to protect, defend and gain civil rights by leveling the economic and educational playing fields while promoting peace and justice around the world.
A New York City hospital has created a new tradition to help lift spirits amid the COVID-19 crisis.

Staff at NewYork-Presbyterian Queens have started playing Journey's rousing 1981 smash Don't Stop Believin' each time a coronavirus patient is discharged from the facility and sent home.

Heartwarming video filmed April 10 shows two recovered patients partaking in the ritual as nurses push them through the lobby before they are transported back to their homes.

'Every patient discharge gives hope to NewYork-Presbyterian Queens staff. They are encouraged to see their patients recovering and going home,' Jaclyn Mucaria, the hospital's president told Storyful in a statement.

Staff at NewYork-Presbyterian Queens have started playing Journey's rousing 1981 smash 'Don't Stop Believin'' each time a coronavirus patient is discharged from the facility and sent home.

A female patient who has also been discharged is seen clapping along excitedly and, although a mask covers much of her face, it is clear she is smiling widely

In the video, a male patient is seen raising his hands victoriously in the air as he celebrates his release from hospital while the hit song plays in the background.

A female patient who has also been discharged is seen clapping along excitedly. Although a mask covers much of her face, it is clear she is smiling widely.

However, most excited about the patients' releases are the hospital workers, who dance and cheer through the hallways.

Like many medical facilities in The Big Apple, NewYork-Presbyterian Queens has been struggling in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic.

A view of refrigeration units serving as temporary morgues at NewYork- Presbyterian Queens

On Wednesday, New York state added another 752 fatalities, bringing the official death toll above 11,500

As of Wednesday afternoon, more than 100,000 New York City residents have tested positive to the virus.

One nurse from New-York Presbyterian Queens told The New Scientist last month described scenes inside the hospital as something from 'a war zone, but without the blood'.

'It's inconceivable. Everything we know about medicine is out the window,' said the nurse who has been practicing for more than 40 years.

On Wednesday, New York state added another 752 fatalities, bringing the official death toll above 11,500.

'We are not out of the woods yet,' Governor Andrew Cuomo stated at his press conference Wednesday.

'Coronavirus is still a monumental public health crisis and we are losing New Yorkers every day to this virus. Each New Yorker lost to COVID is a heartbreaking loss.'
The non-profit human rights monitoring organization Pro-Justice, is working to ensure that Assad's crimes are not forgotten and the justice is served writes Zaman Al-Wasl.

The Pro-Justice organization has continued efforts to reveal the systematic corruption of the Syrian regime, by uncovering the war criminals who committed atrocities against the Syrian people.

Months ago, the non-profit human rights monitoring organization named 93 figures from the regimes inner circle, seeking to hold them accountable by the international community.

Wael Sawah, Executive Director of Pro-Justice, told Zaman Al-Wasl that some of these perpetrators had founded and led mercenary groups and others established offshore companies and economic conglomerates and others were leading figure in the corrupt regime.

The Pro-Justice team has faced many difficulties and challenges in completing their Black List project amid a lack of information, Sawah added.

Syrias businessmen fall into two categories, according to Pro-Justice.

The first one is providing direct financial support to the Assad regime; the US administration and the EU have sanctioned most of them.

The second category includes businessmen who fund pro-Assad armed militias.

According to the Financial Times, the international sanctions have all but frozen trade with the outside world, while paying bribes are another squeeze on revenues  Syria is the second most corrupt country in the world, according to Transparency International.

But in every war there are winners. Newcomers who have profited over nearly a decade of conflict are now jostling with those at the top.

More than 80 percent of Syrians were living below the poverty line by 2015, according to the most recent data available. The UN says the signs are that this has worsened.

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.
Were always talking about equality  and the truth is that language reveals the inequalities that exist in society at large, said a Buenos Aires city judge, Elena Liberatori.

Last year, Judge Liberatori set off a controversy by issuing a ruling in which ordinarily gendered words were spelled with an e instead of the a or o that generally denote the feminine or the masculine in Spanish.

The quest to make Spanish less gendered is not limited to Argentina.

In the United States, for instance, some politicians and scholars, and even the Merriam-Webster dictionary, have embraced the word Latinx." It is an alternative to Latino, the masculine form of the word used to encompass everyone as the default in Spanish.

Not everyone welcomes the change though.

The push for gender neutrality has also been met with staunch opposition around the world, including among the foremost experts on the Spanish language. The Royal Spanish Academy, which oversees the most authoritative dictionary in the language, regards the new formulations as an aberration.

What makes Argentina notable is how widely embraced the new forms have been not just among activists but also in academic and government spheres.
Industry experts and brokerages expect IT major Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) to release a subdued set of numbers in its March quarter scorecard on April 16.

But more than the numbers, the market will keenly observe the implications of the coronavirus outbreak on the business, the outlook for FY21E and commentary on client discretionary spending and pricing pressure.

According to ICICI Direct, COVID-19 is impacting the economy, with IT companies also expected to feel the heat. COVID-19 is the respiratory disease caused by the coronavirus.

Also Read: Wipro Q4 profit falls YoY, company avoids giving guidance; 5 key takeaways

"We expect constant currency revenues to grow 0.5 percent sequentially (assuming 1 percent hit due to impact from COVID-19) mainly on the back of lockdown (in India and many other countries) and slower client- decision making led by lower discretionary spends," ICICI Direct said.

The brokerage added that the full impact of COVID-19 would be visible in Q1FY21E.

"Cross currency would act as a headwind of 10 bps leading to dollar revenue growth of 0.4 percent QoQ to $5,608 million. Rupee revenue growth is expected to grow 2 percent quarter-on-quarter (QoQ) to Rs 40,644 crore," ICICI Direct said.

The brokerage expects TCS' EBIT margins to remain flat QoQ to 25 percent, mainly aided by rupee depreciation and lower travel costs.

The estimates of Kotak Institutional Equities show TCS' CC (constant currency) revenue growth of 0.6 percent QoQ and 4.9 percent YoY.

"Our estimates for TCS bake in 1 percent hit from missed billings and lockdowns in India and developed markets in the last two weeks of March 2020. Without the COVID-19 hit, our revenue growth assumption would have been 1.6 percent QoQ in CC," Kotak said.

Kotak expects stable margins for TCS as the impact of lower billing due to COVID-19 disruptions will be offset by rupee depreciation and lower variable compensation payout.

"We note that March 2019 quarter had a one-time impact of 60 bps from contribution to electoral bonds. We expect record bookings despite disruptions in the second half of March. Robust bookings will be courtesy mega deals signed with Phoenix Group and $1.5 bn deal with Walgreen Boots," Kotak said.

Kotak believes the following 5 points will be in focus when TCS releases its numbers:

(1) Work from home -- focus will be on the percentage of employees, infrastructure readiness and client permissions.

(2) Longer-term implications on business from the current lockdown.

(3) Revenue and margin outlook for FY2021E in light of a potential recession.

(4) Nature and persistence of spending cuts and assumptions of normalization of growth, if any.

(5) Margin levers in light of potential pricing pressure. Kotak said it does not expect any change to capital allocation policy, nonetheless, this will be an area of focus.

Brokerage firm Sharekhan by BNP Paribas expects CC revenue growth of 4.8 percent YoY owing to supply disruption, lower billing and utlisation in the wake of coronavirus outbreak.

EBIT margin is expected to remain flat despite lower billing and utilisation decline due to COVID-19 disruption, offset by rupee depreciation, lower variable pays and lower travelling expense. Net profit is expected to grow by 1.3 percent QoQ during the quarter, said the brokerage.

The views and investment tips expressed by experts on Moneycontrol.com are their own and not those of the website or its management. Moneycontrol.com advises users to check with certified experts before taking any investment decisions.
UPDATE: An AWS spokesperson responds to the IG's decision -

This report doesn't tell us much. It says nothing about the merits of the award, which we know are highly questionable based on the Judge's recent statements and the government's request to go back and take corrective action. And, it's clear that this report couldn't assess political interference because several DoD witnesses were instructed by the White House not to answer the IG's questions about communications between the White House and DoD officials. The White House's refusal to cooperate with the IG's investigation is yet another blatant attempt to avoid a meaningful and transparent review of the JEDI contract award.



ORIGINAL POST FOLLOWS:

An inquiry by the inspector general for the United States Department of Defense found did not find evidence that impeached president Donald Trump swayed the decision to award the $10 Billion 'JEDI' defense contract to Microsoft, rather than Amazon or other competitors. Defense Inspector general added "we believe" evidence showed "DoD personnel who evaluated contract proposals and awarded Microsoft the JEDI Cloud" were not pressured regarding their decision" by any DoD leaders more senior" who "may have communicated with the White House."

The White House refused to turn over communications to the Pentagon inspector general that would show whether it influenced the decision not to award Amazon a $10B defense contract https://t.co/GZD8o4qZ1r  Lachlan Markay (@lachlan) April 15, 2020

From Reuters:

Known as Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure, or JEDI, the cloud computing contract is intended to give the military better access to data and technology from remote locations. "We could not definitively determine the full extent or nature of interactions that administration officials had, or may have had, with senior DoD officials regarding the JEDI Cloud procurement because of the assertion of a 'presidential communications privilege,'" the report said, referring to the Department of Defense by its acronym. Amazon, originally considered to be the favorite to win the award, has blamed President Donald Trump for bias against the company and for improperly pressuring the Pentagon. The report leaves open the question of whether Trump improperly influenced one of the most closely watched procurement contracts given its size and the high-profile nature of the bidders. The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The Defense Department said the report "should finally close the door on the media and corporate-driven attacks on the career procurement officials" involved with JEDI.

There's more reporting at Bloomberg News today, but the page may be paywalled for you.

Previously on Boing Boing:

 Amazon AWS plans to depose Trump, Esper, Mattis, others after $10 Billion Pentagon JEDI contract loss

 Amazon unhappy Microsoft won $10 billion 'war cloud' Pentagon contract

 In Amazon.com and Bezos victory, judge orders Pentagon to temporarily stop JEDI contract

Related observations from reporters and others on Twitter, below.

DoD accidently shared Microsoft's confidential information with AWS team https://t.co/fZqoTbINHh  pradeepviswav (@pradeepviswav) April 15, 2020
The headline on The Patriot screamed on Tuesday, April 16, 1912: Greatest Steamship Hits Iceberg and Sinks; 1200, or more, drown; boat cost $10,000,000.

What followed was the story about the Royal Mail Steamer sinking on her maiden voyage, loaded with prominent passengers.

While the fate of the majority of the 2,100 persons on board the mammoth White Star liner Titanic, which sank early yesterday on the Newfoundland banks after a collision with an iceberg, still remains in doubt and it is feared more than 1,200 were lost, a note of good cheer came from the ocean waves between one and two oclock this morning.

It was in the shape of a wireless message from the White Star liner Olympic, one of the vessels hovering near the scene of the disaster, flashing the news that 866 of Titanics passengers, mostly women and children, were being brought to port by the Cunard Carpathia. Other messages later brought confirmatory tidings.

The Royal Mail Steamer Titanic was one of three large ships built by the White Star Line during a time of intense competition among shipping lines, according to history.com. Construction of the lavish ship with 10 decks and 840 staterooms took two years from 1909 to 1911. It was constructed at a shipyard in Belfast, Ireland.

At the time, it was the largest passenger steamship ever built. According to history.com, the ship had 29 boilers to power two main steam engines. More than 100,000 people turned out to see it launched.

Titanic had a capacity of 3,300 people.

Titanics maiden voyage created a stir. Passengers included celebrities and dignitaries.

First-class passengers included American millionaires Benjamin Gugghenheim, John Jacob Astor and Charles M. Hays. Astor and his wife, Madeleine, 18, were returning home to await the birth of their child. He was the wealthiest passenger on board. Also on board were the owner of Macys, Isidor Straus and his wife; and heiress Margaret Molly Brown. According to history.com, Brown would earn her unsinkable nickname by helping to maintain calm and order while the lifeboats were being loaded and boosting the spirits of her fellow survivors.

Gugghenheim and John Astor did not survive.

The ship left from Southampton, England, on April 10, 1912, bound for New York. There were 2,240 people - including passengers and crew - on board. More than half of the passengers, 1,680 were men.

One person who had a ticket but was not onboard was Milton S. Hershey. Hershey bought the ticket for $300 but left England on the German liner Amerika on April 6 and arrived in New York before Titanic set sail.

Passengers did include Pennsylvanians from Philadelphia, Germantown, Bryn Mawr, Pittsburgh, Haverford and Scranton.

Another passenger was Nora Keane of Harrisburg. She was returning from her native Ireland where she had visited her mother. Keane survived the sinking of the Titanic and returned to live in Harrisburg where she and her brothers operated a hotel on Paxton Street. She eventually returned to Ireland before the death of her mother then stayed there.

Around 11:40 p.m. April 14, Titanic hit an iceberg. A lookout had spotted the iceberg and the crew attempted to move the ship quickly. Titanic grazed the iceberg but a jagged, underwater spur that no one had seen ripped a 300-foot hole below the ship's waterline.

By the time the captain toured the damaged area . Five compartments were already filling with seawater, and the bow of the doomed ship was alarmingly pitched downward, allowing seawater to pour from one bulkhead into the neighboring compartment.

The ships builder, Thomas Andrews, was on board and determined that the ship would be able to stay afloat only for another hour and a half.

The crew attempted to evacuate Titanic. The number of lifeboats on board could only accommodate 1,178 people but as they were floated, they were not filled to capacity. Each lifeboat could hold 65 people, but many left with less than half of that.

Titanic snapped in two and sank around 2:20 a.m. on April 15 in the North Atlantic Ocean about 300 miles south of Newfoundland. Passengers were dumped into the frigid water - many dying from cardiac arrest and cold incapacitation.

The Carpathia, which was headed toward Titanic after receiving a distress call, rescued 705 people from the lifeboats.

The estimated number of dead is 1,517.

The wreckage was not discovered until Sept. 1, 1985.

READ MORE HISTORY ON PENNLIVE

The violin played by bandmaster Wallace Hartley during the final moments before the sinking of the Titanic is displayed with a leather carrying case initialed W H H at a conservation studio in Lurgan, Northern Ireland, on September 16, 2013, before going on public display at the Titanic Belfast. The violin, which was owned by Titanic band leader Wallace Hartley, was recovered along with his body 10 days after he and other band members played to calm passengers on the deck of the stricken ship after it hit an iceberg on its maiden voyage. (Peter Muhly/AFP/Getty Images)AFP/Getty Images

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BERLIN, April 15 (Reuters) - German police arrested on Wednesday four suspected members of Islamic State, all from Tajikistan, believed to have been planning deadly attacks in Germany, prosecutors said.

Special forces in the western state of North Rhine-Westphalia made the arrests near the cities of Essen and Duesseldorf and raided properties in the area.

Prosecutors suspect the four men, with a fifth who has been in detention for the last year, of being in contact with leading members of Islamic State in Afghanistan and Syria and of receiving instructions from them.

"Targets for the attacks were supposed to be institutions of U.S forces in Germany or even individual people," said prosecutors in their statement.

"In particular, they planned a murder attack on one person who had made public comments that they viewed as being critical of Islam," the prosecutors added.

The prosecutors said they believed the suspects had already carried out surveillance of the targeted individual and were procuring weapons, ammunition and components for a bomb.

Prosecutors identified the suspects as Azizjon B., Muhammadali G., Farhodshoh K. and Sunatullokh K., in line with German privacy rules. The fifth man who is already in detention was identified as Ravsan B. (Reporting by Madeline Chambers Editing by Peter Graff)
Uruguay set to finish repatriation of passengers from coronavirus-hit cruise ship FILE PHOTO: FILE PHOTO: Australian cruise ship Greg Mortimer arrives at the port in Montevideo

MONTEVIDEO (Reuters) - The repatriation of the final 15 passengers from the Greg Mortimer cruise ship, stranded in Uruguayan waters since March 27 due to an outbreak of the coronavirus on board, will take place on Wednesday afternoon, the government said.

A medical plane will take the current 14 occupants of the ship, and another passenger to be discharged from a clinic in capital city Montevideo to Miami, where they will get on connecting flights to their homes in the United States, Britain, Sweden, France, Holland, Canada and Switzerland.

The Uruguayan Foreign Ministry said the ship will dock at Montevideo. Passengers will board a bus that will take them to the airport for a flight that will depart after 2000 GMT.

Four former Greg Mortimer passengers will remain hospitalized in the Uruguayan capital until they recover enough to travel home.

Over the weekend, Uruguay repatriated 112 Australians and New Zealanders from the cruise ship operated by Australian company Aurora Expeditions. Most of the total 128 passengers originally on board had tested positive for the virus.

The ship's crew must finish their quarantine on board the vessel, and then start the trip to the Spanish port of Las Palmas, which was the originally planned destination for the tourist trip, the ministry said.

(Reporting by Fabian Werner, writing by Hugh Bronstein; Editing by Bill Berkrot)
The Foundation for Environmental Rights Advocacy and Development, FENRAD, utterly condemns the recent killing of a motorist near Umuikaa Junction, Isialangwa South L.G.A of Abia state.

The tragic event occured today, April, 15, 2020, as a result of altercation between the men of the Corps and the unfortunate driver. While FENRAD awaits finalisation of the matter, it seeks to expressly state that at no point has enforcement of the statewide lockdown and its attendant stay-at-home order required dispatching of lives of Abians or resident of any part thereof.

It is sad, deplorable and condemnable that at a time when the entire world is taking the war effort and campaign to the novel COVID-19, men of the security agencies whose sworn and constitutional duty is to protect lives and properties of indigenes and nonindigenes within the state morbidly turn against their charges.

We recall, with huge sense of sorrow, that the first one-week stay-at-home order also witnessed a killing of an unarmed civilian by an officer of the Police Force along Ururuka in Osisiomangwa L.G.A of Abia state. While FENRAD wishes not to witness further this harvest of deaths, it regrets to remind the security agencies that so far and as of today, the COVID-19 pandemic has taken no life in Abia where two have already been lost to trigger-happy formation and detachment of the Force and Corps.

Having said that, it bears repeating, and FENRAD emphasizes same in no less vocal and condemnatory tone, that right to life is naturally given and should never, at any point of extremity, be taken by any security agent except under such circumstances as allowed by the law which are express too.

Recently, certain barristers were, at Omoba Road, Ogbor-Hill area of Aba, brutally manhandled by men of the Dragon Squad, Zone 6 Police, Aba. From the details the torture involved clobbering and brutalizing to the extent that severe injuries were sustained. This, obviously, is not how best to police a state. Abians are never known to be unlawful and do not deserve this, especially from those entrusted with preservation of their lives and properties.

Barring speeches that it "strongly condemns", Abia state government has done little to ensure that lives of her indigenes and residents are protected. For example, while the police officer who shot Mr. Chibuisi along Ururuka road is not at large, nobody is sure when his trial will commence and how expeditious same will be.

Again, after the alleged police raiding and burning of residential houses at Ibadan and Okujombo streets, Aba, whereupon the government set up a high-powered committee to look into the matter, FENRAD wishes to recall that nothing has been heard of the said committee in terms of report and findings, at least to the best knowledge of the Foundation! FENRAD urges the state government to do more in protecting the lives of those who elected it into office for the same reason rather than make itself a passive onlooker while things go wrong. As the Commissioner for Information, Chief John O. Okiyi

after expressing "rude shock" stated in a release dated April, 15,2020, that the government will ensure that justice is done "swiftly". Not only must justice be done; it must also be seen to be done!

Numerous are records of abuses perpetrated by uniformed men of various security agencies in the line of duty during the recent statewide lockdown. Even pressmen and newsmen on duty have fallen victims too. While myriad and plethora of records are available to this end, the case of the victimization of staff of Abia Facts News suffices as one of the latest of such brazen nihilism. Equally is FENRAD aware of exploitation meted out - by mostly the police - against drivers of vehicles conveying food, relief and other essential materials at a time when the law permits essential services and delivery of same.

FENRAD urges Abians to, in this trying time, remain law-abiding and respect constituted authorities, especially the state government while it equally urges the state government to rise to the occasion and do the needful. FENRAD believes and is equally convinced it can get things done better.

Lastly, FENRAD urges the police, state command and other security agencies to operationalize security services according to rules of engagement and desist from any acts capable of bringing shame to their respectable image.

Let peace and not fear be enforced. Let justice be done, equally.

Signed. Comrade Nelson Nnanna Nwafor

Executive Director

Foundation For Environmental Rights,Advocacy & Development (FENRAD)
Amid a spike in COVID-19



cases in various states, there was much to cheer for Kerala on Wednesday with only one person testing positive, the lowest in recent weeks, and seven people recovering, taking the total number of those cured to 218, the highest in the country.

Though the tally of active patients fell to 167 in the southern state which recorded 387 positive cases since the country's first COVID-19 case on January 30, Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan cautioned it was not yet time to lower the guard.

The state should maintain its stringent vigil and follow the lockdown restrictions without fail, he told reporters here.

"In our country, the recovery rate is the highest in Kerala and 218 patients have been completely cured of the disease.There is good progress in testing and we are doing increased numbers now.

"But we cannot afford to give more exemptions and relaxations in the lockdown conditions," Vijayan said.

Kerala reported the country's first three COVID-19 cases, all returnees from Wuhan in China, the epicentre of the deadly cornavirus, but they are among those recovered.

The death toll due to the disease remained at mere two in the state, whose management of the COVID-19 situation has already started earning accolades from various quarters.

The solitary new positive case reported from Kannur on Wednesday was the lowest in the state in the past over a month and the patient had been infected through a contact,Vijayan said.

Out of the total 387 COVID-19 cases, a total of 264 were those who had come to the state from abroad and other states, while 114 contracted the disease through their contacts, the Chief Minister said.

Eight of the infected people were foreigners.

"Seven people were cured today. Four from Kasaragod, two from Kozhikode and one person is from Kollam district. Till now387 people were affected with coronavirus in Kerala. 167 are under treatment now," Vijayan said.

A total of 97,467 were under observation, including 522 in isolation wards of different hospitals, and 16,475 samples have been sent for testing, he said.

"This is a very serious phase. We need to continue with thelockdown protocol. We need to continue with the inter- state travel, ban, closure of cinema halls, malls, places of worship etc," he said.

Under these circumstances, the government needed to identify the sectors which can have some relaxation on the restrictions imposed, he said, adding a decision will be taken during a cabinet meeting on Thursday.

The union government had announced certain relaxations in the restrictions imposed in certain sectors.

Kerala which has been pushing for financial assistance from the Centre in the backdrop of the crisis it was facing due to the pandemicis hopeful that additional financial aid would be announced soon.

"The Centre isyet to come out with any additional financial aid to the states. Hope it will be announced soon. The state will continue with the lockdown protocol and maintain stringent vigil against the pandemic," he said.

Vijayan said he has brought to the Delhi government's attention issues being faced by Keralitenurses in the national capital.

As of Wednesday, Kasaragod, the hotspot of COVID-19 has 80 people under treatment, followed by neighbouring Kannur with 44 patients.

On Wednesday, at least 2,499 cases were registered in the state for lockdown violations, 23,343 people arrested and 1,842 vehicles seized, the government said.

Police also booked cases against 17 foreign tourists who went to the Kovalam Beach in the state capital for a bath on Tuesday violating lockdown norms.

Cases were also registered against the owners and managers of the five hotels where the tourists had been put up.

Vijayan also lashed out at Opposition Indian Union Muslim League leader and legislator K M Shaji for his charge in a Facebook post that the Chief Minister's Disaster Relief Fund (CMDRF) was being used to give lawyers' fees to fight cases of the CPI-M in various courts.

He accused the legislator of trying to mislead the common people about the technicality of CMDRF and the lawyers fee.

"Why is he trying to mislead the people? peddling lies? There are many common people who lack knowledge on CMDRF. His party (IUML) has been giving unending support to the efforts of the government. TheIUML should look into the matter on why he took such a stand," Vijayan said.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
WASHINGTON

$6,106,000,000

(April 15, 2020)The U.S. Department of Defense recently announced the following contract awards that pertain to local Navy activities., is awarded amodification (P00006) to a previously-awarded firm-fixed-price contract N00019-18-C-1061 to procure eight General Electric F414-400 spare engines, 11 afterburner modules and 12 low pressure turbine modules for the Navy F/A-18 Super Hornet fighter aircraft. Work will be performed in Lynn, Massachusetts (59%); Hooksett, New Hampshire (18%); Rutland, Vermont (12%); and Madisonville, Kentucky (11%). Work is expected to be complete by October 2022. Fiscal 2020 aircraft procurement (Navy) funds in the amount $51,520,476 will be obligated at time of award, none of which will expire at the end of the current fiscal year. The, is the contracting activity., is awarded amodification (P00001) to a cost-plus-fixed-fee order (N00019-19F--2728) against a previously issued basic ordering agreement N00019-16-G-0005. This modification procures non-recurring engineering for the phase two assembly planning effort for the re-start of T-64 engine core production in support of the H-53E Engine Reliability Improvement Program. Work will be performed in Lynn, Massachusetts (89%); Rutland, Vermont (5%); Cherry Point, North Carolina (5%); and Madisonville, Kentucky (1%), and is expected to be complete by December 2021. Fiscal 2020 aircraft procurement (Navy) funds of $9,696,091 will be obligated at time of award, none of which will expire at the end of the current fiscal year. The, is the contracting activity.No applicable data., is awarded amodification (P00031) to a previously-awarded cost-plus-incentive-fee contract N00019-18-C-1048 to procure depot component repair capability for the F-35 hydraulic power generation system and land gear under low rate initial production Lot 11 for the Navy, Air Force and non-Department of Defense (DoD) participants. Work will be performed in Fort Worth, Texas (88%); and Wolverhampton, United Kingdom (12%), and is expected to be complete by April 2023. Fiscal 2020 aircraft procurement (Navy) funds in the amount of $7,156,434; fiscal 2020 aircraft procurement (Air Force) funds in the amount of $7,156,431; and non-DoD participant funds in the amount of $570,858 will be obligated at time of award, none of which will expire at the end of the current fiscal year. The, is the contracting activity., is awarded afirm-fixed-price modification (P00008) to a previously awarded cost-plus-incentive-fee contract (N00019-17-C-1057). This modification changes the contract type of the Stand-off Land Attack Missile  Expanded Response (SLAM-ER) Phase I obsolescence redesign from a cost-plus-incentive-fee type contract to a firm-fixed-price type contract. Work will be performed in St. Louis, Missouri (47%); Indianapolis, Indiana (37%); Pontiac, Michigan (9%); Melbourne, Florida (3%); Middletown, Connecticut (2%); and Black Mountain, North Carolina (2%). Additionally, this modification provides for the replacement of obsolete, nearly obsolete or uneconomical parts to support production and improve future sustainment while meeting the requirements of the Navy SLAM-ER performance specification in support of the government of Saudi Arabia. Work is expected to be complete by April 2020. Foreign Military Sales funds in the amount of $55,000,000 will be obligated at time of award, none of which will expire at the end of the current fiscal year. The, is the contracting activity., is awarded afirm-fixed-price delivery order N00019-20-F-0365 against previously issued basic ordering agreement N00019-15-G-0003 to procure 32 Tomahawk Mid-Body Range Safety Subsystems and 32 Flight Test Kits. Work will be performed in Tucson, Arizona (29.88%); Bristol, Pennsylvania (19.10%); Westminster, Colorado (16.27%); San Diego, California (11.9%); Middletown, Connecticut, (4.08%); Lancaster, Pennsylvania (3.97%); Berryville, Arkansas (3.32%); Anniston, Alabama (3.13%); Hanahan, South Carolina (2.17%); Ontario, California (2.06%); Tampa, Florida (1.73%); Joplin, Missouri (1.29%); and various locations within the continental U.S. (1.1%). Work is expected to be complete by March 2023. Fiscal 2020 weapons procurement (Navy) funds in the amount of $15,151,392; fiscal 2019 weapons procurement (Navy) funds in the amount of $11,363,544; and fiscal 2019 research, development, test and evaluation (Navy) funds in the amount of $3,787,848 will be obligated at time of award, none of which will expire at the end of the fiscal year. The, is the contracting activity., is awarded anmodification (P00012) to cost-plus-incentive-fee delivery order N00019-18-F-2474 against a previously issued basic ordering agreement (N00019-14-G-0020). This modification exercises an option to procure the tooling needed to meet both production and retrofit demands of the Technical Refresh 3 (TR3) avionics system. Work will be performed in Melbourne, Florida, and mandates that the contractor will procure materials and fabricate the special tooling that will allow for production of TR3 components for the Air Force, Navy, Marine Corps and non-Department of Defense (DoD) participants. Work is expected to be complete by May 2022. Fiscal 2020 aircraft procurement (Air Force) funds in the amount of $5,080,732; fiscal 2020 aircraft procurement (Marine Corps) funds in the amount of $1,477,775; fiscal 2020 aircraft procurement (Navy) funds in the amount of $774,073; and non-DoD participant funds in the amount of $1,588,268 will be obligated at time of award, none of which will expire at the end of the fiscal year. This order combines purchases for the Air Force ($5,080,732; 57%); Marine Corps ($1,477,775; 17%); Navy ($774,073; 9%); and non-DoD participants ($1,588,268; 18%). The, is the contracting activity.Cherokee Nation Red Wing LLC,* Tulsa, Oklahoma (N68520-20-D-0001); ACE Aeronautics LLC,* Guntersville, Alabama (N68520-20-D-0002); Orbis Sibro Inc.,* Charleston, South Carolina (N68520-20-D-0003);Precision Turbines Inc.,* Boca Raton, Florida (N68520-20-D-0005);Skyquest Aviation LLC doing business as Gold Coast Helicopters,* Glendale, Arizona (N68520-20-D-0007); Delaware Resource Group of Oklahoma LLC,* Oklahoma City, Oklahoma (N68520-20-D-0008); Erickson, Inc.,* Medford, Oregon (N68520-20-D-0009); Atlantic Diving Supply Inc.,* Virginia Beach, Virginia (N68520-20-D-0010); ASES LLC doing business as Field Aerospace,* Oklahoma City, Oklahoma (N68520-20-D-0011); AVMAC LLC,* Chesapeake, Virginia (N68520-20-D-0012); Support Systems Associates Inc.,* Melbourne, Florida (N68520-20-D-0013); Aircraft Services Alliance LLC,* Anchorage, Alaska (N68520-20-D-0014); ASR International Corp.,* Hauppauge, New York (N68520-20-D-0015); F3 Logistics LLC,* Warner Robins, Georgia (N68520-20-D-0016); Logmet LLC,* Austin, Texas (N68520-20-D-0017); Kay and Associates Inc.,* Buffalo Grove, Illinois (N68520-20-D-0018); Telford Aviation Inc.,* Milwaukee, Wisconsin (N68520-20-D-0019); Talentscale Inc.,* Las Vegas, Nevada (N68520-20-D-0020); Keystone Turbine Services LLC,* Coatesville, Pennsylvania (N68520-20-D-0021); AXXEUM Inc.,* Huntsville, Alabama (N68520-20-D-0022); Mint Turbines LLC,* Stroud, Oklahoma (N68520-20-D-0023);Strategic Technology Institute Inc.,* Rockville, Maryland (N68520-20-D-0027); Resicum International LLC,* Warrenton, Virginia (N68520-20-D-0028); Yulista Tactical Services LLC,* Huntsville, Alabama (N68520-20-D-0029); KIHOMAC Inc.,* Reston, Virginia (N68520-20-D-0030); Akima Logistics Services LLC,* Herndon, Virginia (N68520-20-D-0031); Adams Communication and Engineering Technology Inc.,* Reston, Virginia (N68520-20-D-0032); Science and Engineering Services LLC,* Huntsville, Alabama (N68520-20-D-0033);AOC Global Services LLC,* Chantilly, Virginia (N68520-20-D-0035);Commuter Air Technology Inc.,* Oklahoma City, Oklahoma (N68520-20-D-0037); Y-Tech Services Inc.,* Huntsville, Alabama (N68520-20-D-0038); Battlespace Flight Services LLC,* Reston, Virginia (N68520-20-D-0039); King Aerospace Inc.,* Addison, Texas (N68520-20-D-0040); Affordable Engineering Services Inc.,* San Diego, California (N68520-20-D-0041) and Powerhouse Resources International Inc.,* Oklahoma City, Oklahoma (N68520-20-D-0042), are awardedfor indefinite-delivery/indefinite-quantity contracts. The kits, aircraft recovery, augmentation, components and engines (KRACEn) multiple award contract will provide aircraft maintenance services and support. Specific work locations will be determined on individual orders as they are issued. Work includes modification kit build and installations; recovery of downed aircraft; repair of aircraft and components; overhaul of engines; and augmentation labor supplement for maintenance where custody of the aircraft is not required. Additionally, KRACEn will support single satellite site, simple platform and organizational level contractor logistics support requirements involving limited aircraft quantities in support of Navy Fleet Readiness Centers. Work is expected to be complete by April 2030. The estimated cumulative aggregate ceiling for all contracts is $6,106,000,000, with each company having an opportunity to compete for individual orders. No funds will be obligated at the time of award, but funds will be obligated on individual orders as they are issued. These contracts were competitively procured as a small business set-aside via an electronic request for proposals and a total of 42 offers were received. The, is the contracting activity.*Small business
Dubai Healthcare City Authority (DHCA) has launched its eLicense initiative for healthcare professionals as part of several measures to support its licensed frontline health workers.



To support national efforts towards fighting the COVID-19 pandemic, physicians, nurses and allied healthcare professionals are permitted to work in multiple facilities across the UAE. Further, several professionals are volunteering in roles that utilise their medical background in addition to their current scope of practice.



With the introduction of the eLicense, which is secure and tamper-proof, healthcare professionals will benefit from reduced administrative requirements such as shorter wait time to receive a printed license, instant updates when a new permanent employer is added or license is renewed, and no fees for printing and delivery.



Apart from the eLicense, DHCA has introduced other updates to ensure that professionals can renew their license in the face of current challenges. DHCA has studied the challenges that healthcare professionals face while renewing their licenses, mainly, stipulated number of Continuing Professional Development (CPD) trainings (50% in person) and Basic Life Support (BLS) (only in-person).



For the time being, in-person trainings are not accessible, and professionals are negatively impacted as these trainings are required for their licensure.



To support its 4,500+ professionals, Dubai Healthcare City Authority  Regulatory (DHCR), the regulator of the Dubai Healthcare City (DHCC) free zone, now accepts 100% online CPD training and BLS courses.



By introducing such measures we are reducing the administrative burden on doctors, nurses and allied professionals in the free zone who risk their lives to keep us safe as well as professionals who are licensed to work in branches of DHCC-based clinical facilities, said Jamal Abdulsalam, CEO, DHCA.



The Professional eLicense initiative is in line with the UAE Governments digital transformation efforts. It also taps into a crucial aspect of ensuring business continuity as the service in entirely online and doesnt require the healthcare professional to visit our offices in person, he added.  TradeArabia News Service
The Michigan State Capital building is seen in Lansing, Mich., on March 17, 2008. (Bill Pugliano/Getty Images)

Protesters Swarm Michigan Capitol in Operation Gridlock Over Pandemic Order

Protesters have amassed around Michigans capitol building in Lansing to demonstrate against Gov. Gretchen Whitmers latest order that places restrictions on travel, the sale of nonessential items, and more.

The Michigan Conservative Coalition organized Operation Gridlock around the capitol building. Photos and videos posted by local media outlets showed a number of people in their cars with messages while some opted to go outside the building and hold signs.

We are all concerned for those afflicted with COVID-19. Yes, many of the personal behaviors we have been reminded to use are good practices. Wash your hands. Cover your cough. Stay home if you are sick, said the organizers on their website. That said, Michiganders are fed up!

The protesters have said they are upset with the Stay Home, Stay Safe order aimed at combating the spread of the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus, a type of novel coronavirus that emerged in mainland China last year.

The order, implemented last weekend, includes limits on what types of goods stores can sell and a ban on travel from one residence to another residence, including vacation properties, rental properties, or second properties inside Michigan.

The protesters said that the order infringes upon residents Constitutional rights.

Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer listens to Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.) in Clawson, Michigan, on March 18, 2019. (Paul Sancya/File Photo via AP)

We can get this rally done and stay within the social distancing guidelines, said Marian Sheridan, with the Michigan Conservative Coalition, reported WLNS. Citizens are frankly tired of being treated like babies. As adults, we now know what needs to be done to stay safe. We also believe the liberal attack on the economy is becoming a serious threat right now. Join us in Lansing. We need to stop the madness and have a plan to re-open Michigans economy before it is too late.

Michigans order drew widespread attention when The View co-host Meghan McCain criticized Whitmers order and shared a photo on Twitter that allegedly showed a Walmart in Michigan blocking the sale of child car seats.

Guess its good I dont live in Michigan  otherwise how would I transport my child home from the hospital @GovWhitmer ? McCain wrote on Twitter. Are you going to ban cribs next? Being pregnant during this time is insanely stressful  we are all doing our best. Shame on you for doing this @GovWhitmer.

Whitmer wrote in response that the states ban on nonessential items does not encompass car seats.

Hi Meghan! Our Stay Home, Stay Safe executive order does not ban the purchasing of car seats for children  Wishing your family well, and happy Easter! she said on Twitter.

Michigan states website includes a list of items that now cant be sold in response.
The Presidential Taskforce Force (PTF) on Coronavirus has revealed why it recommended the lock down extension to President Muhammadu Buh...

The Presidential Taskforce Force (PTF) on Coronavirus has revealed why it recommended the lock down extension to President Muhammadu Buhari.





Boss Mustapha, Secretary to the Government of the Federation (SGF) and Chairman of PTF, disclosed that the committee recommended the lockdown extension because of Nigerias survival.





Mustapha made the disclosure during the joint national briefing of PTF on Tuesday in Abuja.





According to the SGF, The Presidential broadcast addressed several critical issues of concern to our survival as a nation.

After very meticulous assessment of the recommendations of the PTF, Mr. President has authorized the extension of the restriction of movement in Lagos and Ogun States as well as the FCT for an additional fourteen days effective Monday 13th April, 2020.





Such a monumental decision has been taken at great pains and we continue to appeal to Nigerians to show a lot of understanding, comply with orders, observe social distancing, keep a high level of personal and respiratory hygiene, stay at home unless it is compelling to go out and generally take responsibility for playing your individual role in this war.





Recall that Buhari had yesterday extended the lockdown in Abuja, Lagos and Ogun State in a bid to further tackle the spread of COVID-19.





In a nationwide address, Buhari had extended the lockdown by 14 days.
Transit no longer a priority

I could not believe it  at a time when hospitals, nursing homes and other front line support systems are crying for help with needed personnel and protective equipment the provincial task force says we should spend $1 billion on a transit system! If the province (we the taxpayers) have $1 billion to spare it should be put toward building more long term care homes and providing full-time, well paid employment to the angels who work there. Someone needs to use some common sense!

Suzanne Cooper, Hamilton

Who cares about LRT spending?

Our government is trying to manage the economic disaster COVID-19 has brought, going into unprecedented debt, yet some people get excited about LRT spending? Wake up ...

John Orvidis, Hamilton

Uncovering our vulnerabilities

If we have learned one lesson from this pandemic it is that Canada, and specifically Ontario, must become self-sufficient. We can no longer rely on the whims of other countries to provide for us, especially the crucial items needed for health care.

I am old enough to remember when we had viable, self-sustained Canadian industries  automotive, aerospace, furniture, clothing, food, cleaning supplies, toiletries, farm equipment and more. Drip by drip these manufacturers trickled away. Now it is almost impossible to purchase Canadian made products online.

None of this is news. It just takes a pandemic to uncover our vulnerabilities.

Susan Ruddle, Hamilton

Health care workers appreciate your support

The outpouring of support from everyone for health workers and other essential workers during the COVID-19 outbreak has been wonderful! As a health care worker, I really appreciate it. There have even been suggestions that health care workers should be allowed free parking as compensation for their commitment during the pandemic  again, thank you!

However, we are still receiving regular paycheques, unlike many less fortunate workers, so we can afford to pay our usual parking fee. Instead, I believe the additional benefit should be directed to employee health, especially mental health. As the number of infected patients rises and the hospital wards fill to capacity, perhaps beyond, there will be a huge physical and mental health burden on all hospital workers. Currently, staff and administration are working very hard preparing for an influx of contagious, sick patients. They will be working even harder once they arrive.

COVID-19 is a harsh disease. Front line staff will definitely be needing assistance to cope.

Everyone, please stay home and try to stay positive! And thank you for your unwavering support!

Margot Carhahan, Hamilton

Dont forget to honour trash collectors

I am a registered nurse working on the front lines during COVID-19. I wish to convey my gratitude to all the businesses offering discounts to health care workers. It certainly helps with expenses and stress relief. However, Id like point out that there are a variety of essential workers, including but not limited to our waste management workers.

Garbage collection is integral to the health of people and the environment. These individuals put themselves at risk of exposure. I appreciate their service; were all in this together.

Tom Priestly, Hamilton

Superwomen leading COVID-19 charge

As a woman, mother and retired educational assistant, I think a huge teachable moment is happening for our young girls. We have some amazing female role models, specifically Chrystia Freeland, deputy prime minister, Dr. Theresa Tam, chief public health officer and Patty Hajdu, minister of health. These are only a few of the amazing women on our front lines. Make your daughters and sons aware of this.

Pat Dalgleish, Dundas

We are all at risk

I would like media to stop using the terms vulnerable Canadians and the elderly. Everyone is at risk. Young people have died. Even if it was just the elderly, your boss could die, leaving you out of work. When the neighbour dies, your street will never again feel safe. It doesnt matter whether you are immune. We all need to play our part to kill this virus.

Paul Gauthier, Waterdown

Support and pray for the front line heroes

Im an optimist. An incident in the midst of the pandemic has increased my faith in humanity. We went to Florida to visit our son at the beginning of March. When the government ordered all Canadians home, we willingly came back to Canada ASAP. We have been in self isolation since March 20. Our son is a physician who works in a hospital that is in lockdown because of several patients that have COVID-19, and the cases are escalating. A real worry to my wife and me.

When we arrived home, our neighbour had a pot of lentil soup and a baguette waiting for us in the garage. A few days later another neighbour left three jars of homemade tomato sauce and some pasta on our porch. Our daughter has been driving in from Mississauga to leave our groceries in the garage. Our niece left a package of yeast in our garage when she found out that our daughter couldnt find any in the store. These small acts of kindness are very appreciated.

More than that, we all owe a great deal of gratitude to many front line workers; my son the doctor, my niece who works in an office at the Juravinski hospital, my nephew who is a firefighter in Mississauga. These are the real heroes in this crisis. We should be supporting and praying for all of them.
By Trend

The so-called election organized by Armenia in Azerbaijan's occupied Nagorno-Karabakh is nothing but a deliberate game, the Azerbaijani Foreign Ministry told Trend on April 15.

The ministry was commenting on the so-called "election" in the Armenia-occupied Nagorno-Karabakh region of Azerbaijan.

While commenting on this issue during a video conference on the socio-economic results of the first quarter of the year, Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev said that this so-called election once again showed that no one recognizes this illegal junta regime, spokesperson for the Azerbaijani Foreign Ministry Leyla Abdullayeva said.

Abdullayeva again emphasized that this so-called "election", regardless of holding any stage, has no legal force.

"Once again, referring to the unequivocal position of the international community on this illegal act in Azerbaijans Nagorno-Karabakh region, which is temporarily under occupation, I would like to remind that numerous international organizations and states categorically rejected the so-called election and its results, the spokesperson added.

Members of the international community still continue to make statements in connection with this so-called "election" and express support for Azerbaijans sovereignty and territorial integrity within internationally recognized borders, Abdullayeva said.

The election in Azerbaijan is held in accordance with the Constitution of the country, and specifically, the election in Azerbaijans Nagorno-Karabakh region may take place only after the withdrawal of the Armenian armed forces from the Azerbaijani lands and with the participation of both communities of the region," Abdullayeva added.

---

Follow us on Twitter @AzerNewsAz
New Delhi: The Delhi government has decided to undertake a massive testing exercise by conducting 20,000 RT-PCR tests for Sars-CoV-2, the virus causes the coronavirus disease (Covid-19), over the next five days on people living in containment zones and quarantine centres, according to an official order.

It has also designated private labs in each of the citys 11 revenue districts to help with sample collecting and testing because the six state-run centres that conduct these tests are already overburdened.

To put the number in perspective, a total of 16,282 tests have been conducted in Delhi since mid-January, when screening for Covid-19 began. A total of about 10,000 tests are carried out across the country in a day.

Though the government wanted to scale up testing by using rapid antibody tests -- simple blood tests that give results in 25 minutes and show the presence of antibodies that suggest a person has recovered from a mild strain of Covid-19 and is thus immune to the virus that causes it -- but the kits that were to first come from China on April 5, and then April 10, are yet to be arrive.

The Delhi government, which ordered 100,000 rapid testing kits, also planned to use them to speed up testing by pooling samples and testing in batches.

It has now been decided by the competent authority that 20,000 RT-PCR tests are to be performed on a war footing in Delhi in the coming five days for  timely containment of the disease, said the order, a copy of which is with the HT.

The exercise has already started with 692 samples collected from containment zones on Tuesday.

Until last week, the Union government was testing symptomatic people who were taken to hospitals on suspicion of having the infection; people who might have come in direct contact with those who test positive; symptomatic health care workers; and people admitted to hospitals with severe acute respiratory infections (Sari) were also being tested.

The Indian Council of Medical Research (IMRC) on April 9 changed the guidelines to also allow testing in those with flu-like symptoms from the identified hot spots, gatherings and evacuation centres.

The RT-PCR test -- for which a swab is taken from the throat and nose -- is the most accurate Covid-19 test because it detects the viruss genetic material (RNA) to diagnose current infection. The report, however, comes typically in two to three days.

The increased testing would have added to the load at six government centres testing the samples  reports for at least 714 samples were still pending on Tuesday, according to a government report. The Delhi government therefore designated private labs in of the citys revenue districts to conduct the tests for a fixed price.

Dr Lal Path Labs is the designated private lab for tests in the north, north-west, and north-east districts, according to the order. Sir Ganga Ram hospital will conduct tests for the central district, Onquest Labs for the New Delhi district, Dr Dangs Lab for the south district, Apollo laboratory for the South-east district, Max hospital in for tests in the east and Shahadara districts, Prognosis laboratories for the south-west district, and City X -Ray and Scan Clinic for the west district.

In case the designated private labs also reach capacity, the samples will have to be referred to Dr Lal Path Labs, the order adds

We are happy to share our infrastructure and expertise for the welfare of the people. This is a very fair way of involving the private labs for scaling up the tests, and Delhi government has been very proactive. They have also promised that the money will be reimbursed within the week, said Dr Navin Dang, founder of Dr Dangs Labs.

The government has also decided to seek the private sectors help in sample collection.

Private laboratories will be paid 4,500 if they collect a sample and use their own testing kit; R 3,500 if the sample is collected by the government and the kit is of the lab; and R 2,200 if the sample is collected by the government and the kit is also provided by it.

The Supreme Court last week ruled that all private labs should test for free but later modified the order to say that the tests should be offered for free only to poor patients. According to the new order by the government, the money will be released directly by the state from the Union governments National Health Mission Covid-19 fund.

The antibody tests are currently not available, and we are not sure when they will be here. Plus, they are not foolproof. Add to that the increasing number of patients in our hospitals who would need at least two tests to be discharged, there was a need to scale up our RT-PCR testing capability. As for testing in the hot spots, what we are seeing is that 30-50% of the cases are asymptomatic. In nearly 10% or 15% of the cases from Delhi we have been unable to clearly establish the source, pointing out the need for increased random testing, said Dr SK Sarin, director, Institute of Liver and Biliary Sciences and the head of a team of five doctors assisting chief minister Arvind Kejriwal in Covid-19 preparedness.

ends

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Nigeria has recorded 19 new coronavirus cases, bringing the number of infections persons in the country to 362.

The Nigeria Centre for Disease Control, NCDC, announced via Twitter on Tuesday night.

In a breakdown, NCDC said 14 cases was recorded in Lagos, 2 in FCT, 1 in Kano, 1 in Akwa Ibom and 1 in Edo state.

However, 99 patients have been discharged with 11 deaths recorded.

Meanwhile, Akin Abayomi, commissioner for health in Lagos state, says a total of 118,000 households have been reached in the active case search of possible COVID-19 cases in communities.

At a media briefing on Tuesday, the commissioner said community search was activated to limit the spread of the disease in the state which has the highest number of COVID-19 patients in the country.

Abayomi said 110 persons were found with symptoms of coronavirus but tests are being conducted to determine their status.

<blockquote class=twitter-tweet><p lang=en dir=ltr>Nineteen new cases of <a href=https://twitter.com/hashtag/COVID19?src=hash&ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw>#COVID19</a> have been reported as follows:<br><br>14 in Lagos<br>2 in FCT<br>1 in Kano<br>1 in Akwa Ibom<br>1 in Edo<br><br>As at 09:20 pm 14th April there are 362 confirmed cases of <a href=https://twitter.com/hashtag/COVID19?src=hash&ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw>#COVID19</a> reported in Nigeria. 99 have been discharged with 11 deaths<a href=https://twitter.com/hashtag/TakeResponsibility?src=hash&ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw>#TakeResponsibility</a> <a href=https://t.co/ySAhNzWnnU>pic.twitter.com/ySAhNzWnnU</a></p> NCDC (@NCDCgov) <a href=https://twitter.com/NCDCgov/status/1250157292227629060?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw>April 14, 2020</a></blockquote> <script async src=https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js charset=utf-8></script>

Post Views: 7
UPDATE: There is a total of 20 new cases of COVID-19 in New Zealand today. This is made of six confirmed cases and 14 probable.

Director-General of Health Dr Ashely Bloomfied says there are no additional deaths to report today.

The current death toll for COVID-19 sits at nine.

The number of recovered cases is now at 728, 100 more than yesterday.

Ashley says there are now 16 significant clusters.

"One more than yesterday. The new cluster is an aged care facility in Auckland."

Clusters are were there are more than 10 people with COVID-19 from one group.

Ashley says there are now 13 people in hospital.

"Three are in ICU. One is in Middlemore Hospital, one is in Dundedin Hospital and one is in North Shore Hospital."

EARLIER:

The All of Government COVID-19 National Response will provide an update at 1pm today.

Speakers:

Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern

Dr Ashley Bloomfield, Director-General of Health

What we know so far

Four additional deaths linked to COVID-19, 17 new cases

The Ministry of Health is extremely sad to report four additional deaths linked to COVID-19 infection.

One death has occurred in Wellington and there have been three additional deaths from the Rosewood cluster in Christchurch.

This brings the total of deaths in New Zealand to nine, six of which involve Rosewood residents being cared for at Burwood. The deaths we are announcing today are:

a man in his 90s at Burwood

a man in his 80s at Burwood

a man in his 90s at Burwood

a man in his 70s in Wellington  associated with overseas travel.

The Ministry has previously signalled the underlying vulnerabilities of the Rosewood group and that this group would continue to be at risk. That does not make the news any less sad.

The Director-General of Health Dr Ashley Bloomfield says the largest number of deaths reported on any one day in New Zealand is a sobering reminder of what is at stake with COVID-19.

I want to acknowledge all these families and offer New Zealands sympathy and support, says Dr Bloomfield. Whether husbands, partners, fathers, grandfathers, brothers, uncles, cousins or friends  wherever they fit in their wider whanau, we are thinking of them and of you.

In terms of case details which are appropriate to release, the Ministry can say that all the Rosewood individuals who died yesterday had underlying conditions to some degree, and all were confirmed cases for COVID-19.

The man in Wellington was admitted to hospital on 22 March and has been unwell for some time. Capital & Coast DHB and its staff have been working closely with the man and his family and will continue to offer the family support.

As the Ministry has said previously, the Rosewood group was transferred from a high level psychogeriatric (or dementia) unit. The care they have been receiving is consistent with the high level of psychogeriatric care they would have been provided at the facility and includes, where appropriate, end of life/palliative. Medical oversight at Burwood is from a GP.

On Tuesday, the Director-General conveyed feedback from families of Rosewood residents at Burwood which speaks highly of the nursing staff there.



They are just amazing, doing an incredible job. The communication with us was superb  we had lots of calls, including facetime calls with dad. Were so grateful.

We couldnt speak more highly of the staff and care dad received, both at Burwood and at Rosewood. They skyped with dad and the nurse caring for him arranged for him to see a video the family had put together, and there were lots of phone calls.

Aged Residential Care

"We know residents of New Zealand aged residential care facilities make up some of our most vulnerable communities, particularly if COVID-19 is able to take hold.

"Its been crucial for the Ministry to work closely with the New Zealand Aged Care Association, Care Association New Zealand, district health boards and facilities around the country from early on in the evolution of the pandemic.

"We worked with the sector to take specific actions such as stopping family visits and non-essential visits at facilities ahead of the country moving to Alert Level 4. Every new arrival at a facility must also now go into isolation for 14 days."

There are more than 650 aged care facilities nationwide, and there has been excellent care and preparation across the sector. This is highlighted by the fact that in New Zealand, relatively few facilities are affected compared to overseas.

The Ministry and DHBs will continue supporting work by the sector to ensure facilities have access to PPE supply lines and other support.

"DHBs are currently looking at each facility's plans and procedures to reduce risk to staff and residents, including assessing the use of PPE.

"The Ministry will also develop a plan for an independent review of the facility outbreaks so we can understand what can change and what procedures can be improved.

"The Ministry has provided guidance to the sector on managing staff and residents with potential COVID-19 infections and we continue to update this advice regularly.

"We need to stay ahead of COVID-19 and we must make sure this doesn't take hold of our older population."

Case numbers

On Tuesday, the total number of COVID-19 cases has increased by 17, made up of eight new confirmed cases and nine new probable cases.

There are now 628 reported cases of COVID-19 infection which we can confirm have recovered  an increase of 82 on yesterday. Recovered cases now firmly dominate the number of new cases.

The new combined total of confirmed and probable cases in New Zealand is 1366.

There are 15 people in hospital. The total includes three people in ICU  one each in Middlemore, Dunedin and North Shore hospitals. One of these ICU patients  in Dunedin  remains in a critical condition.

For those cases we have information on, 48% involve contact with a confirmed case within New Zealand including those in known clusters, 39% have a link with overseas travel and community transmission accounts for 2%. 11% continue under investigation.

A total 1572 tests were processed on Monday, with a rolling seven-day average of 3039 and total tests to date of 64,399. As we said yesterday, we anticipated a drop off in testing over the Easter holiday period. Partly this is due to the effect of public holidays, and also with the measures in place around Alert Level 4, we would expect fewer people to be presenting with respiratory issues.

"We will be ramping up testing again this week and were well placed to do more testing across the country."

PPE

"We expect to receive approximately 10 million items this week of which 9 million are procedure masks or equivalent - next week we expect to receive 18 million items.

"The national ordering process for DHBs has been stood up to initially distribute masks with other PPE products being added moving forward. DHBs will be placing the first lot of orders under this new system this morning with delivery by the end of the week. Health and disability service providers can expect to receive stock by early next week."
STATEN ISLAND, N.Y. -- Yes, Theyre Open" is a new web series highlighting local bars and restaurants that are still open for takeout, delivery or pickup during the coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak.

Live streams from the featured restaurants are broadcast on the Advance Facebook page every weekday around 3 p.m.

On Tuesday, the Advance visited Maxs Es-Ca, located at 1559 Richmond Road in Dongan Hills, which offers takeout and pickup options for its Italian and seafood dishes.

The restaurant is adding to-go drinks to its growing menu. Call 718-980-5006 or visit maxesca.com to place your order.

Staten Island restaurant owners: If you would like your establishment featured for free as part of Yes, Theyre Open, email reporter Victoria Priola at vpriola@siadvance.com.

For a full list of restaurants and bars that are still open for takeout, delivery and curbside pickup, click here.

YES, THEYRE OPEN: Maxs Es-ca is open for pick up and delivery. Call 718-980-5006 or visit maxesca.com to place your order. Posted by Staten Island Advance on Tuesday, April 14, 2020

MORE ON YES, THEYRE OPEN

Harvest Cafe, 694 New Dorp Lane

Tropical Smoothie Cafe, 1650 Richmond Ave., 1407 Forest Ave. and 7001 Amboy Road

Kings Arms Diner, 500 Forest Ave.

Giovannis Trattoria, 3800 Richmond Ave.

Reggianos, 7339 Amboy Road

Beso, 11 Schuyler St.

Blue, 1115 Richmond Terrace

In Fine Fettle, 961 Jewett Ave.

West Shore Inn, 3955 Victory Blvd.

Better Gourmet Health Kitchen, 2333 Hylan Blvd., 400 Forest Ave., 4077 Victory Blvd. and 877 Huguenot Ave.

Campania Coal Fired Pizza, 3900 Richmond Ave.

Call It A Wrap, 1198 Forest Ave.

Beans and Leaves, 422 Forest Ave.
The death of two elderly people on Wednesday took COVID-19 related fatalities to 12 in Karnataka, where 19 new positive cases have been confirmed, taking the total number of infections to 279, the health department said.

The government also said that 11 of the 170 districts identified as hotspots in the country are from Karnataka.

A total of 12 coronavirus deaths have been reported so far in the state with the death of a 80-year-old woman in Belagavi and a 65-year-old man from Chikkaballapura in Bengaluru hospital, the department said in a bulletin.

The woman had a heart problem and was also suffering from ashtma and high BP and was the contact of a patient who had tested positive, Primary and Secondary Education Minister Suresh Kumar told reporters, briefing about the bulletin.

The man who died was referred from a private hospital here to a COVID-19 designated hospita on late evening April 13 as he was H1N1 positive, had Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease with obstructive sleep apnea and a past history of uncontrolled diabetes mellitus and hypertension, he said.

As of 5.00 PM on April 15, Cumulatively 279 COVID-19 positive cases have been confirmed in the state, which includes 12 deaths and 80 discharges, the bulletin said.

Of the 187 active cases, 184 (including a pregnant woman) are in isolation at designated hospitals and are stable, while three are in Intensive Care Units, it said.

The 80-year-old woman who died in Belagavi is among the 19 newly reported cases, nine of whom are pharma company workers at Nanjanagudu in Mysore.

Five are contacts of patients who earlier tested positive, two with a history of Severe Acute Respiratory Infection, one with Influenza Like Illness and a policeman on duty at a madrasa in Mudhol, Bagalkote district.

Contact tracing has been initiated and is in progress for all the cases, the department said.

Nine out of total of 279 cases detected and confirmed in Karnataka so far are transit passengers of Kerala.

Bengaluru, with 71 people testing positive, topped the state with the most number of cases, followed by Mysuru 58 and Belagavi 19.

Of 80 patients discharged so far, 35 are from Bengaluru, 12 from Mysuru, eight each from Chikkaballapura, Dakshina Kannada and Uttara Kannada; while among the dead are three from Kalaburagi, two each from from Bengaluru urban and Chikkaballapura and one each from Belagavi, Bagalkote, Vijapura, Gadag and Tumakuru.

To a question on increasing number of cases linked to pharma company in Nanjanagudu, Kumar said several foreigners had visited the firm in February from countries like USA, Germany, Japan, China, among others.

"On March 24, the first case from the company was confirmed...so far 780 samples have been tested related to the company, of which 46 have tested positive. we may get more."



A total of 12,483 samples were collected for testing so far, of which 1,376 were collected on Wednesday alone.

So far 11,905 samples have reported as negative, and out of them 1,351 were reported negative on Tuesday.

The Minister said as on Wednesday India's positivity rate is 4.3 per cent, while it is 2.24 per cent in Karnataka.

To a question on hotspots in the state, Kumar said 11 districts have been identified, going by the central government guidelines, based on which measures will be taken.

Stating that the union cabinet secretary has informed Chief Secretaries of states on hotspots and containment zones during the videoconferencing, Karnataka Health Commissioner Pankaj Kumar Pandey said as per central government guidelines the state government would now go to ground level to demarcate boundaries, because it has been left to states concerned.

Earlier in the day, Chief Minister B S Yediyurappa set up four Groups of Ministers to implement extended COVID-19 lockdown and ensure smooth supply of essentials.

Meanwhile, the Commissioner, Department of Health & Family Welfare Services issued a Health Advisory on follow up of COVID-19 patients and primary contacts after discharge from hospital / release from quarantine respectively.

The HFWS Director issued a circular to all districts to consider all Influenza Like Illness and Severe Acute Respiratory Infection cases to be screened for COVID-19.

Aimed at reducing fatalities, the department has also constituted Critical Care Support team at the state level to advise and guide physicians on cases admitted in ICU with ventilator support, those admitted in ICUs with or without oxygen supply, cases with comorbidity, cases above the age of 60 years, and pregnant cases.

At the district level- district level medical expert committee has been constituted with experts from anesthesia, pulmonary medicine, cardiology, and general medicine from both public and private sector, to advise and guide in the management of COVID-19 cases on regular basis.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
About 3,500 jurists, academics, actors, artistes, writers and people from other walks of life have slammed the Uttar Pradesh government and police for filing an FIR against Siddharth Varadarajan, the founding editor of web portal 'The Wire', and demanded that all criminal proceedings against him be dropped.

In a joint statement on Tuesday, they called the registration of the FIR against Varadarajan an attack on press freedom.

They also urged the central and state governments not to use the COVID-19 pandemic as a cover to trample upon the media's freedom.

A medical emergency should not serve as a pretext for imposition of a de facto political emergency, the statement said.

The signatories to it include former Supreme Court judge Madan B Lokur,former Madras high court judge K Chandru and former Patna high court judge Anjana Prakash.

Two former chiefs of naval staff -- Admiral Ramdas and Admiral Vishnu Bhagwat -- are also among the signatories, along with former finance minister Yashwant Sinha.

The statement expressed shock at the action of the Uttar Pradeshgovernment under Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath and police in filing criminal charges against 'The Wire' and one of its founding editors for an "entirely factual story on COVID-19 and religious events".

"This attack on media freedom, especially during the COVID-19 crisis, endangers not just free speech, but the public's right to information," the statement said.

The signatories called upon the Uttar Pradesh government to withdraw the FIR against Varadarajan and 'The Wire', and drop all criminal proceedings.

They also called upon the media not to communalise the pandemic.

The Uttar Pradesh police booked Varadarajan this month over comments on Twitter, claiming that the day the Tablighi Jamaat event was held in Delhi, Adityanath had insisted that a Ram Navami fair will take place as usual.

The FIR against the journalist also mentioned his remark questioning Adityanath's participation in a religious ceremony at the Ramjanmabhoomi site in Ayodhya during the nationwide lockdown to contain the spread of coronavirus.

The statement said the target of this action was a factual story on the Tablighi Jamaat and its exposure to COVID-19.

"Towards the end, the impugned article merely pointed out that 'Indian believers' more generally have been late to adopt precautions and avoid congregation, recalling UP Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath's plans, as late as March 18, to proceed with a religious fair at Ayodhya and his flouting of the national lockdown and social distancing norms by taking part in a religious ceremony along with others on March 25," the statement said.

Two FIRs were filed under various provisions of law on April 1, one on a complaint from a resident of Ayodhya and the other on the basis of a complaint by the Station House Officer of Faizabad's Kotwali Nagar Police station, it noted.

A plain reading of the sections invoked in the FIRs made it clear that they could not possibly apply to the article in question, the statement said.

"The FIRs were followed up with a gross display of intimidation on April 10, when policemen arrived in a black SUV with no number plate at Varadarajan's residence in Delhi to issue a legal notice, ordering him to appear in Ayodhya on April 14 at 10 am," it said.

That the Uttar Pradesh government sent policemen who drove 700 kilometres during the nationwide lockdown to issue this summons, when the postal system was still operational, spoke volumes for its priorities, the statement added.

"The UP police's action is just the latest in a series of attempts by the ruling establishment, or persons close to them, to entangle 'The Wire' and its editors in legal cases in an effort to shut them down," it said.

The police action against 'The Wire' also came against the backdrop of the "demonisation of Muslims" in a section of the media as being responsible for the spread of the novel coronavirus in India, the statement said.

Several former bureaucrats, including former national security adviser Shivshankar Menon, former foreign secretary Sujatha Singh, former adviser to the governor of Punjab and former ambassador to Romania Julio Ribeiro and former CEC MS Gill, among others, are signatories to the statement.

Other signatories include authors Vikram Seth, Nayantara Sahgal, Arundhati Roy, Anita Desai, K Satchidanandan and Kiran Desai.

The statement has also been endorsed by actors and artistes such as Amol Palekar, Naseeruddin Shah, Nandita Das, Farhan Akhtar and Mallika Sarabhai. Zoya Akhtar, Kiran Rao and Anand Patwardhan are among the filmmakers, and Dayanita Singh is among the photographers who have backed the statement.

Senior journalists and over a thousand professors from universities across the globe are also among the signatories.

The FIR against Varadarajan had referred to a tweet by him, which said, "On the day the Tablighi Jamaat event was held, Adityanath insisted a large Ram Navami fair planned for Ayodhya from March 25 to April 2 would proceed as usual and that Lord Ram would protect devotees from the coronavirus."

Later, the journalist tweeted, saying, "I should clarify that it was Acharya Paramhans, Hindutva stalwart and head of the official Ayodhya temple trust, who said Ram would protect devotees from coronavirus, and not Adityanath, though he allowed a public event on 25/3 in defiance of the lockdown and took part himself."
Bucking the trend of many competitors using cheap layers of mass-produced materials, the New airweave Mattress has a low profile design  consisting of 6.0 inches of brand's proprietary airfiber block, a plush pillow top layer, and removable outer cover. Just two inches of airfiber a highly resilient interwoven resin fiber block  can improve back support and breathability, supporting the brand's core message that it's not what you feel when you get into bed, it's how you feel when you wake up.

The New airweave Mattress will also be a modular three-piece design  a key design update which is now a part of airwave's DNA. The mattress will also be softer, an improvement by the product development team to making the new airfiber block less dense yet still just as durable.

Continuing the brand's mission for sustainability, the New airweave mattress will be lighter in weight and thinner in size, making it even easier to ship and carry. The polyethylene resin used to create the airfiber blocks can also be turned back into raw polyethylene and recycled into plastic items after its use.

Below are the key benefits of the modular design of the New airweave Mattress:



Easier To Move, Easier To Clean: Carry and clean with ease thanks to the

even more lightweight and modular design. A great feature for frequent

movers and a nod to the traditional Japanese futon, which is designed to be

easily stored when not in use.

Carry and clean with ease thanks to the even more lightweight and modular design. A great feature for frequent movers and a nod to the traditional Japanese futon, which is designed to be easily stored when not in use. Longer Lasting & Sustainable: Enjoy airweave for a lifetime by easily

replacing parts rather than having to buy (or throw out) your entire

Mattress. A win for the customer's wallet and the environment.

Enjoy airweave for a lifetime by easily replacing parts rather than having to buy (or throw out) your entire Mattress. A win for the customer's wallet and the environment. A Better Mattress In A Box: Unlike typical boxed beds, the New airweave

Mattress cannot be compressed due to the properties of the airfiber

material. By dividing them into three sections, airweave developed a bed

that ships quickly and ensures simple assembly within minutes.



The New airweave Mattress will start from $1,400 and comes in a range of sizes from Twin to California King. Customers can purchase airweave online at airweave.com or at select boutiques. All U.S. orders come with free shipping and a 100 Night Trial. Customers are eligible for a full refund in the form of the original payment within 100 days from when the item was delivered, and you have tried the product for a minimum of 30 days.

About airweave

airweave was born from a desire to do things differently when, Founder & CEO, Motokuni Takaoka took over his uncle's fishing line company. A graduate of the Stanford School of Engineering, Takaoka experimented with different applications of the resin fiber used to create fishing line and discovered that the material was perfectly suited for a newer and better purpose: to revolutionize the way we sleep. Since the first mattress topper shipped in 2007, airweave has expanded to a range of lifestyle, travel, and technology sleep products in Japan, and has been adopted by elite athletes and organizations worldwide to help them perform at the highest level.

For additional information, please visit www.airweave.com.

Social

SOURCE airweave
A woman wearing a mask walks past closed store fronts in the Astoria neighborhood of Queens, New York City on April 15, 2020. (Johannes Eisele/AFP via Getty Images)

New York State Looking Into Past Deaths to Find Any Possibly Caused by COVID-19

New York officials are looking into past deaths to try to locate any that may have been caused by COVID-19 but arent included in the states current death toll.

New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo cited updated guidelines from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), saying federal officials want confirmed deaths and a new category, probable deaths, or deaths that are believed but not confirmed to have been caused by COVID-19.

The determination is made by local health departments or coroners.

Were going to rationalize those new reporting requirements with local governments and get that information out as soon as we can, Cuomo told reporters in Albany on Wednesday.

Officials are working on contacting elder care facilities to try to find out if there were people who passed away recently from COVID-19 but werent in a hospital or nursing home.

There is a sense that there may be additional people that passed away, but they werent included in the count because they werent in a hospital, they werent in a nursing home, the governor said.

Medical workers cheer and acknowledge pedestrians and FDNY firefighters who gathered to applaud them at 7pm outside Brooklyn Hospital Center, Tuesday, April 14, 2020, in New York. (John Minchillo/AP Photo)

According to CDC guidelines, people who died without having laboratory confirmed cases of COVID-19 can be listed as likely having died from the disease.

If the certifier suspects COVID-19 or determines it was likely (e.g., the circumstances were compelling within a reasonable degree of certainty), they can report COVID-19 as probable or presumed on the death certificate, the guidelines state.

The differentiation was explained by a federal official last week but wasnt widely noticed until New York City officials added more than 3,000 deaths that took place in the last five weeks to the citys official COVID-19 death toll.

We want to make sure that every New Yorker is counted that has been taken from this vicious virus, Health Commissioner Dr. Oxiris Barbot told reporters in Manhattan earlier Wednesday. She said it would take officials a fair amount of time to tease out what happened with the deaths presumed to be from COVID-19, if were ever able to do that.
The McDonalds in Downtown Easton has reopened after closing in response to an employee testing positive for the coronavirus.

Owner/operator Jim McIntyre described the temporary closure Tuesday night following an inquiry from lehighvalleylive.com about the fast food eatery at 201 S. Third St.

McIntyre in a statement said:

Our highest priority is to protect the health and well-being of our people. We recently learned that an employee at our restaurant in Easton, PA has tested positive for the coronavirus and is currently under medical care."

"As soon as we were notified of the confirmed case, we immediately alerted local public health authorities and the restaurant was promptly closed to endure a thorough deep clean and sanitization procedure. Additionally, we identified and reached out to all restaurant staff who had been in contact with the employee who contracted the virus. These employees have been asked to self-quarantine at home for 14 days to ensure they remain healthy before returning to work.

"We have been in contact with the employee and are providing support during this time. Our people are the heart and soul of the McDonalds family. We are keeping this employee in our thoughts for a fast and full recovery.

Mayor Sal Panto Jr. had announced the temporary closure during a virtual town hall meeting carried live Tuesday afternoon on the citys website and on a call-in phone number.

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.
As tales of cancelled weddings abound during the countrywide lockdown, a youth from Haryana married his girlfriend -- a Mexican citizen -- at a district court this week although there was no celebration and social distancing was followed.

Niranjan Kashyap, 22, and Dana Joheri got married on April 13 under the Special Marriage Act in Rohtak, Haryana.

Talking to PTI on the phone on Wednesday, Kashyap said he had earlier moved an application before the Rohtak District Magistrate's office and was given the date of April 13.

However, not sure if he could get married when the lockdown was announced, he sought to know from the District Magistrate's office the status of the date given earlier and was asked to visit the place on April 13.

"I along with Danna and two witnesses went there on April 13 afternoon and after a few hours wait the formalities were completed and our marriage was registered," said Kashyap, who works as a catering supervisor.

Rohtak's Deputy Commissioner R S Verma, who is the District Magistrate, said the couple's marriage was registered under the Special Marriage Act.

"My office had asked them to visit on April 13 afternoon. However, due to certain official engagements in the wake of the present situation, they had to wait until evening before their marriage was registered," he said.

Verma said all necessary formalities were completed and it was ensured that social distancing and other precautions as well as the guidelines of the government were followed when the couple visited the office.

"We also got the necessary clearances from the Mexican Embassy with regard to their citizen," Verma told PTI.

Kashyap and Joheri met through a learning app a few years back.

Kashyap said Joheri "erupted in joy" when he told her that they will be able to get married despite the lockdown.

"She had lost all hope and thought we would not get married during the present circumstances," he said.

Kashyap said his parents, grandparents and younger brother have been supportive ever since he told them about his decision to get married to the Mexican national.

"Danna had visited Rohtak in 2017 too and met my family," he said.

The Special Marriage Act, 1954, enables marriage for Indian citizens and all Indian nationals in foreign countries, especially when the religions or faiths followed by the parties are different.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
VERONA, Wis., April 15, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- The COVID-19 pandemic is threatening hospital capacity across the U.S. Epic has helped hospitals and public health authorities prepare to add up to 80,000 beds nationwide by donating software and staff to transform existing hospital areas and stand up new field hospitals to treat patients with COVID-19.

Epic software is used to care for COVID-19 patients at Ryan F. Larkin Field Hospital inside the Columbia University Baker Athletic Complex / Photo credit: Christopher Mei, New York Presbyterian (PRNewsfoto/APCO Worldwide/Epic)

"Health systems are faced with an influx of patients," said Jackie Gerhart, a physician on Epic's Clinical Informatics team. "They're asking us for guidance on how to quickly add capacity. Some hospitals are expanding into lunchrooms and converting rehab units to ICUs. Some states and public health departments are working with health systems to set up healthcare facilities in schools, hotels, gymnasiums, parking garages, and fairgrounds. Epic is partnering with these groups to get facilities up and running, and we offer a roadmap."

In the last two weeks, Epic has worked with public health departments, state governments, and 175 health systems. New healthcare facilities are being set up in cities across the country, including New York, Chicago, Boston, Atlanta, Dallas, and St. Louis. Epic is helping increase capacity in two ways: (1) at the health systems' request, adding beds in existing hospital areas, and (2) at the state's request, creating new hospitals in alternative facilities the state selects. To help the states understand how to support the operations of new sites, teams work through a list of considerations, including:

What types of patients will be seen at the new alternative care facility?

Will all patients be adults?

Will there be ventilated patients?

Will patients be directly admitted to the facility or come from other hospitals?

Will there be an ICU?

Will patients leave this site for imaging or dialysis?

Will physical therapy, social services, or respiratory therapy be offered?

What devices will providers use: smartphones, tablets, or laptops?

Will patients be discharged to home or other facilities?

How will food be delivered, and from where will it be sourced?

How will other government entities be involved? For example, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, military, or department of public health.

"Seeing an increase in numbers of COVID-19 patients, we had to adapt existing spaces or create new facilities to handle the surge," said Jeff Kalish, Associate CMIO at Boston Medical Center and the Physician IT Lead for re-opening the East Newton Pavilion, a closed off-campus hospital. "We partnered with the Commonwealth of Massachusetts to develop a plan to address the needs of our most vulnerable populationhomeless and housing-unstable patients. It was a Herculean effort to prepare and re-open the East Newton Pavilion, but our multi-disciplinary teams came together seamlessly, and with Epic's partnership and detailed project plan we successfully accomplished this feat within three and a half days."

Epic is working on capacity surge and expansion projects in the majority of states in the U.S.

Epic puts patients at the heart of everything we do by helping people get well and stay well. Visit www.epic.com/about.

SOURCE APCO Worldwide/Epic

Related Links

https://www.epic.com


Probe into 2019 deadly plane fire at Moscow airport completed

 flickr. com/ Mzximvs VdB

14:26 15/04/2020

MOSCOW, April 15 (RAPSI)  Investigation into aircraft captain Denis Yevdokimov over the deadly fire on board a passenger aircraft Sukhoi Superjet-100 (SSJ-100) at Moscows Sheremetyevo airport that had killed 41 people was completed, the Investigative Committees press service reported Wednesday.

The case has been forwarded to prosecutors for the indictment to be appoved, the statement reads.

Yevdokimov is charged with violation of air traffic safety rules and aircraft steering rules that entailed death of two and more people through negligence.

According to the investigation, on May 5, 2019, the SSJ-100 airplane bound from Moscow to Murmansk burst into flames during the emergency landing at Sheremetyevo under the pilots control. There were 78 people on board including crew members, 40 passengers and 1 crew member died in the fire and 10 persons were injured.




Authorities in Indiana said a child who was reported missing on April 13 was found dead in the next door neighbors fish pond.

The Evansville Police Department wrote in a news release on Facebook that the father noticed his 2-year-old son Carter Pickerell went missing Monday afternoon and called police.

Authorities were dispatched to the home on Conlin Avenue in Evansville to search for the missing boy.

Responding officers arrived at the scene within minutes, news outlets reported, but the boy had already been found in the next door neighbors koi fish pond.

First responders performed CPR and tried to resuscitate the boy, police said. But all lifesaving efforts were unsuccessful.

Pickerell was determined dead at the scene, with an autopsy revealing the boy drowned after falling into the pond, according to a release from Vanderburgh County Coroner Steve Lockyear.

The father said in a recording of the 911 call obtained by the Courier & Press he left his son alone for just a short period inside the living room to go and get socks from another room. After he returned, Pickerell was gone.

I didnt think hed be able to unlock the door and go outside without me knowing, he told the outlet.

Evansville officials are currently investigating the boys death, The Associated Press reported.

Detective Sergeant Peter DeYoung said that no criminal activity was suspected.

Evansville County is located about 170 miles southwest of Indianapolis.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.
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Starting point in Cold Spring Harbor Village then head east - Google map (here) for route. *All eggs can be spotted from the safety of your car."



Lucky to Live Here Realty
A three-year-old child died after its desperate mother spent more than an hour on hold to the NHS 111 helpline.

The ill child suffered a cardiac arrest at its home and died in hospital, according to details of critical incidents affecting children in London amid the coronavirus crisis.

Another case saw a six-month-old die from sepsis and liver failure because the parents feared the child could catch Covid-19 in hospital, the Evening Standard reports.

According to the latest figures, 12,868 patients have died in hospital after testing positive for coronavirus in the UK as of 5pm on Tuesday, up by 761 from the previous day.

England's chief medical officer Professor Chris Whitty warned of a possible 'bounce' in the numbers when the next set of figures are released due to delays in reporting deaths over the Easter weekend.

He said that while the UK was 'probably' reaching the peak of the epidemic, the high numbers of deaths were expected to continue for a 'short while' to come - and warned of the possible knock-on effects the pandemic will have on the NHS, with potentially fatal results.

Doctors have raised concerns that parents are not seeking treatment for their children amid the outbreak.

The ill child suffered a cardiac arrest at its home and died in hospital, according to details of critical incidents affecting children in London amid the coronavirus crisis

Chief executive of NHS England Sir Simon Stevens has urged parents not to delay going to the hospital.

The two child deaths are among 14 incidents in a coronavirus 'incident log' drawn up by North Thames Pardiatric Network.

Others cases involve treatment being delayed after parents were given incorrect advice due to the NHS helpline and London Ambulance Service being overstretched, reports indicate.

One case involved the mother of a four-year-old calling for an ambulance 'on multiple occasions', and was 'seen by paramedics and advised to stay at home'.

A three-year-old child died after its desperate mother spent more than an hour on hold to the NHS 111 helpline

The log continues: 'When child semi-conscious and vomiting could not get ambulance as too busy. Advised to bring child in herself.'

The child, which was later discovered to have septic shock and a ruptured appendix, survived.

The log for the incident involving the thee-year-old child states: 'Mum on phone to 111 for [more than] 60 minutes. Waiting for answer to call. Child arrested while mother on the phone. Mum had been to GP with seven-week history of headache and vomiting.'

The log for the six-month-old baby, who died in hospital from sepsis and 'fulminant [sudden] liver failure', states: 'Unwell five days. Parents did not bring in as risk in hospitals of Covid.'

NHS England told the Standard all serious incidents would be investigated, and NHS London said parents must not hesitate in seeking medical support.

The revelation comes as Britain's coronavirus death toll jumped by 801, taking the total numbers of victims to almost 13,000.

The Department of Health has yet to announce the official daily tally from all four of the home nations.

NHS England announced 651 more COVID-19 deaths, including a 20-year-old who had no known underlying health condition.
Texas allows voters to cast absentee ballots by mail if theyre over 65, if theyre sick or disabled, or if theyre confined to jail but still eligible to vote.

The suit argues that the coronavirus pandemic puts voters inside the absentee voting laws definition of disability: A qualified voter is eligible for early voting by mail if the voter has a sickness or physical condition that prevents the voter from appearing at the polling place on election day without a likelihood of needing personal assistance or of injuring the voter's health. Based on that, it argues that a person who considers herself to be confined at home in order to avoid the spread of disease plainly falls into the persons entitled to vote by mail under this statute.

The plaintiffs seek to allow anyone older than 18 to cast absentee ballots.

The courts will figure that out. But if the state is in the position of restricting activities  business or social  in the interest of slowing the spread of the disease, it will be hard for state officials to argue that there is no danger in putting some or all of the states 16.2 million registered voters in line for the elections in July and November.
Police have issued 3,500 fines relating to the coronavirus pandemic with anti-social behaviour uand domestic abuse both rising, it was revealed today.

But crime in general has reduced by more than a quarter during the period in the UK with assaults, robbery, rape, burglaries and shoplifting all significantly down.

Overall crime is down 28 per cent in the four weeks to Easter Sunday, while serious assaults and personal robbery have fallen 27 per cent and rape is down 37 per cent.

Meanwhile fraudsters have scammed Britons out of 1.8million, through getting into the homes of vulnerable people, phishing emails and fake products or investments.

Burglary has fallen 37 per cent, vehicle crime is down 34 per cent and shoplifting has dropped 54 per cent  but there has been a 3 per cent rise in domestic abuse.

Demand on victim support charities is also rising, and there has been a 59 per cent increase in anti-social behaviour - much of it related to social distancing breaches.

How crime has mostly fallen during the UK's coronavirus pandemic Overall crime: Down 28%

Serious assaults and robbery: Down 27%

Rape: Down 37%

Burglary: Down 37%

Vehicle crime: Down 34%

Shoplifting: Down 54%

Domestic abuse: Up 3%

Anti-social behaviour: Up 59%

999 calls: Down 14%

101 calls: Down 13%

Crime reports made online: Up 61% Advertisement

Calls to 999 are down by 14 per cent and there has been a 13 per cent drop in 101 calls, although there has been a 61 per cent increase in those reporting crime online.

Police said they have had to enforce 3,203 coronavirus-related fines for breaches of public health regulations in England between March 27 and Easter Monday. There were also 290 fines issued in Wales, although only on the bank holiday weekend.

Some 82 per cent of fines have been given to men and 15 per cent to women, with 3 per cent unknown. Two thirds of the fines have gone to those aged 18 to 34.

Sixty per cent of fines have been issued to those self-identifying as white, while a further 23 per cent of fines issued to individuals who did not identify their ethnicity.

Fines to those of Asian ethnicity stood at 10 per cent, black at 4 per cent and mixed race at 2 per cent, which police said was proportionate in relation to ethnicity data.

Police break up a group of young men for not observing social distancing rules in Brighton on Easter Sunday

The warm weather also appears to have had an effect, with fines much higher on Good Friday with 398 and Saturday with 424 when temperatures got to 25C (77F).

39 fines mistakenly issued to children for alleged breaches of virus lockdown rules Nearly 40 fines mistakenly issued to children for alleged breaches of coronavirus lockdown rules will be withdrawn. Deputy Chief Constable Sara Glen told journalists in a remote media briefing today that the law does not allow fixed penalty notices to be issued to under-18s. Between March 27 and April 13, 39 of the fines were wrongly issued to children by police in England. Members of the public as old as 100 were slapped with a 60 penalty, that is reduced to 30 if paid within two weeks. A third of the fines went to those aged 18-24, with a further third going to those aged 25-34. Police said that 83 people were brought straight to court for allegedly breaking the rules. A number of mistakes have been made in applying the sweeping new laws, with both the Metropolitan Police and British Transport Police incorrectly taking suspects to court. Advertisement

However by Easter Monday, when the mercury only got to 14.4C (57.9F), there were only 177 fines  suggesting people were more likely to stay indoors.

Some 39 fines have been issued to those aged between 16 and 17, but these have since all been rescinded. Some 26 fines have been issued to those aged over 65.

Meanwhile 10 per cent of police officers and force staff across the UK are absent because they are either ill with coronavirus or other conditions or self-isolating.

Deputy Chief Constable Sara Glen, National Police Chiefs' Council lead for out of court disposals, said there had been reports of 112,000 Covid-related incidents.

There have also been reports of 178,000 incidents of anti-social behaviour, and some 83 cases have gone into the court system straight away after people were arrested.

National Police Chiefs Council chairman Martin Hewitt said: 'With reductions in crime, policing is in a strong, resilient position due to the brilliant commitment of officers and staff and the extra hours of our police volunteers.

'Our message to the public is keep reporting crime to us  we are still here for you and our teams are working round clock to keep you safe.

'To those in danger or at risk, my message is we will come when you call for help.'

On domestic abuse, Mr Hewitt said: 'We are very closely monitoring this, and we are continuing our work to ensure victims know how to get the help that they need.'

Mounted police officers are pictured on patrol along a deserted Regent Street in London today

National Crime Agency director general Lynne Owens has also spoken about how coronavirus is changing the behaviour of organised criminals.

Highest number of penalty notices are issued in Lancashire The National Police Chiefs' Council gave a force-by-force breakdown of the number of penalty notices issued, with the highest in Lancashire where 380 were handed out. Thames Valley Police chalked up 219, while Surrey issued 205. Deputy Chief Constable Sara Glen said visitors to the seaside town of Blackpool may be why Lancashire's tally was so high. 'We absolutely see temperatures and coastal resorts having a challenge there,' she said. 'If we look at Lancashire, they had a phenomenal... 4,853 calls for service. 'They needed to issue 380 fines - very much due to barbecues, house parties... Blackpool, beaches, you've got a lot going on there in terms of temperature, location, context.' She said in England there were 398 enforcements last Friday and 424 on Saturday, when the country widely saw temperatures of above 20C, before a drop to 177 on Monday as the weather turned cooler. Advertisement

She cited the example of a Polish van driver stopped last night near Calais, who had 200 face masks in his consignment - and 14kg of cocaine in one of the parcels.

She said the NCA's cyber crime unit has taken down six domains, and a further three will come down shortly. They are also looking at 50 to 60 more suspect domains.

The NCA has carried out eight warrants against high risk child sexual abuse predators, including two involved in trans-national child abuse.

She added that criminals now known to be selling drugs in supermarket car parks and pretending they are key workers to avoid being stopped by police.

Anti-crime authorities added that there has also been a rise in the street price of cocaine because it is becoming harder to get hold of during the pandemic.

A number of mistakes have been made in applying the sweeping new laws, with both the Metropolitan Police and British Transport Police incorrectly taking suspects to court.

National Police Chiefs Council chairman Martin Hewitt admitted there had been a 'very small number' of errors but insisted 'tens and tens of thousands' of encounters with the police had been appropriate.

The new laws came in at 'great speed' and police officers were 'trying to do their best in very, very difficult and unusual circumstances.'

He said: 'We will say sorry if we got it wrong. Of course there have been mistakes and I think we have been very quick to come forward when we have made mistakes.

How fraudsters have scammed Britons out of 1.8million during the coronavirus pandemic Fraudsters have scammed Britons out of 1.8million during the coronavirus pandemic. Among the scams are fraudsters getting into the homes of vulnerable people by offering to take their temperatures or by selling anti-virus tests, masks and sanitiser. Others include investment scams, fake products and phishing emails mimicking health organisations which try to trick people into opening malicious attachments. Some criminals are also sending out fake text messages claiming to be issuing fines for going outside or offering payments related to the virus. 'Smishing' text messages claim to be from legitimate organisations such as banks or government departments. They aim to trick people into giving away their personal and financial information or money. Advertisement

'But I would like to think that the public would have some recognition of the fact that this is legislation that came in at high speed a few weeks ago, is highly, highly unusual and we are having to adapt to that across the whole of the service.

'Whenever there have been any incidents where something was done that was not how it should have been done we will rectify that.

'I think we have been absolutely clear and upfront about rectifying any mistakes that we have made.'

Ms Glen, the NPCC lead for charging and out of court disposals, said a 5 per cent 'human error rate' is factored into data when measuring performance, but the number of mistakes under the new laws is 'way below that' and the 'vast majority of officers are getting it right'.

On March 26, the Government announced new public health regulations to reduce the spread of coronavirus, allowing officers to issue 60 fines to anyone failing to comply after officers had spoken to them and encouraged voluntary compliance.

On the enforcement on these regulations, Mr Hewitt said: 'The vast majority of people are staying at home in order to protect the NHS and help save lives.

'However, we have seen a small minority of people who, despite our best efforts, have refused to follow the instructions and officers have needed to use their enforcement powers.'

A regional breakdown of where police had to enforce 3,203 coronavirus-related fines for breaches of public health regulations in England between March 27 and Easter Monday. There were also 290 fines issued in Wales, although these were only on the bank holiday weekend
(REUTERS)

The federal government is announcing new measures for people whose income has dropped as a result of the coronavirus pandemic.

Rules to qualify for the $2,000 a month Canada Emergency Response Benefit (CERB) have been relaxed to include anyone whose income fell to $1,000 a month or less. Seasonal workers and people whose Employment Insurance benefits have recently run out also qualify.

The relaxed rules mean people with reduced hours and pay, as well as those who work in the gig economy will get benefits. Applications can be submitted here.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau made the announcement during a new conference and says more measures are on the way.

For others who still need help, including post-secondary students and businesses worried about commercial rent, well have more to say to you very soon. said the Prime Minister.

The Prime Minister also says hell work with provinces and territories to top up pay for essential workers, including people working in long-term care facilities, who make $2,500 or less.

For many workers looking after the most vulnerable Canadians, including seniors and those with disabilities, we know conditions have gotten more difficult over the past weeks. And you need support right now, said the Prime Minister.

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 IDOE created an application, rubric and timeline for requests for the Career Ladder funding. Applications were reviewed by a selection committee of four IDOE staff members, one state board member and one member of the Indiana State Board of Education's staff.

In the first round of funding, 19 total applications were reviewed for the grant program. One applicant was not awarded funds because of its status as a consulting firm rather than a local education agency, according to an Indiana Department of Education memo.

In the second round of grant applications, 15 local education agencies requested a total of more than $1.5 million in funding. The six-member review committee selected its recommendation approved Wednesday through a competitive process and using the IDOE-developed application and rubric, according to the second IDOE memo.
World's Premier Mobile and Vertical Ecosystem Event Extended Through MWC2024

The GSMA today announced an agreement to extend MWC Barcelona through to 2024. In light of the current Covid-19 pandemic, the GSMA and the Host City Parties have been working through the impacts of the cancellation of MWC Barcelona 2020 and are incredibly optimistic about the future.

The GSMA, organiser of the MWC Barcelona, and the Host City Parities agree there is strong momentum to maintain and extend MWC Barcelona into the future and have agreed to hold the MWC event through 2024. The GSMA look forward to working with the Host City Parties*, the City of Barcelona, and people of Catalonia and Spain for MWC21 and through at least to MWC Barcelona 2024 by extending the current agreement.

"In these trying times, it is ever essential to look forward to the future. The GSMA, the Host City Parties, and the MWC Barcelona ecosystem look forward to upcoming editions of MWC, and MWC Barcelona 2021 will be part of the economic recovery process as we exit these trying times," said John Hoffman, CEO GSMA Limited. "By extending through 2024, we are demonstrating our commitment to our ecosystem as well as the Host City Parties and our strong and mutually beneficial working relationship. We are pleased to report that we have had tremendous support and early commitment with many exhibitors for future editions."

"The City of Barcelona, the region of Catalunya and the country of Spain are essential hubs for innovation, startups and investment. MWC Barcelona, including 4YFN and YoMo (Four Years from Now), represent significant economic value to the region and job creation," added Hoffman.

MWC Barcelona is the premier global mobile and vertical ecosystem event, convening more than 110,000 participants from over 200 countries. MWC 2021 Barcelona will take place from 1-4 March, 2021.

While we look towards the future, our thoughts remain with those around the world affected by Covid-19 and wish our attendees, exhibitors, the citizens of Barcelona and the mobile ecosystem the best during these trying times.

-ENDS-

Notes to Editors

Host City Parties include: Barcelona City Council, Generalitat de Catalunya, the Ministry of Industry, Energy and Tourism, Fira de Barcelona, Tourism de Barcelona

About the GSMA

The GSMA represents the interests of mobile operators worldwide, uniting more than 750 operators and nearly 400 companies in the broader mobile ecosystem, including handset and device makers, software companies, equipment providers and internet companies, as well as organisations in adjacent industry sectors. The GSMA also produces the industry-leading MWC events held annually in Barcelona, Los Angeles and Shanghai, as well as the Mobile 360 Series of regional conferences.

For more information, please visit the GSMA corporate website at www.gsma.com. Follow the GSMA on Twitter: @GSMA.

View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20200415005637/en/

Contacts:

Media Contacts:

GSMA Press Office

Gemma Ashley

pressoffice@gsma.com
The issue of possible Israeli land annexation in the West Bank has become an endless source of spin for Israeli politicians. The hard-line right-wing Yamina party is accusing the right-wing Likud of not really wanting to push ahead with the annexation and only giving it lip service. The centrist Blue and White party said it was willing to discuss such a move under certain circumstances, only to have its No. 2, Gabi Ashkenazi, reportedly dismiss the option out of hand.

Two things stand out in this regard. The first is the normalization of the annexation idea. The senior Israeli politicians on the verge of forming a unity government of some sort, whether now or after fourth elections are held in the summer, are addressing the annexation issue in terms of when, not if. Whereas two or three years ago, talk of annexation was the purview of Knesset members from the hard-line HaBayit HaYehudi (now Yamina) party and the most right-wing flank of the Likud, nowadays, the leader of Blue and White Benny Gantz is wrangling with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu over the manner of its execution and its extent, not over the very question of whether the issue should be considered at all. Meanwhile, members of Gantzs party, some of them originally Labor party voters, are keeping mum on the issue.

The second thing that stands out: There is a clear majority in the current Knesset, and probably in the next one, too, for annexation. The right-wing bloc, joined by the newly minted faction of Knesset members Zvi Hauser and Yoaz Hendel (Derech Eretz), Knesset member Orly Levy-Abekasis (Gesher faction) and probably Blue and Whites lawmakers, as well as the seven representatives of the Yisrael Beitenu party and perhaps even Yesh Atid, could all vote in favor of annexation. If Netanyahu (assuming he is the next prime minister) moves ahead with annexing the settlement town of Maale Adumim, its surrounding area (known as E1) or the Jordan Valley, he is presumably assured Knesset approval.

The prime ministers office continues to work on possible annexation maps, but with the coronavirus running amok, all this talk is motivated by politics rather than ideology. The controversial annexation issue serves the various parties involved as a bargaining chip and a tool with which to goad their rivals, whereas actual implementation of this move entails three conditions: formation of a government, a full return to post-corona normal, and White House support. Since a return to normal could take time, and the White House is busy managing the COVID-19 crisis and preparing for the November elections, even if a new Israeli government is sworn in, annexation legislation could be delayed until after the US presidential vote. In other words, it will not happen in the coming days, weeks or months.

The Arab world, however, does not make the distinction between the ideological component of annexation and the political one, and is monitoring the declarations of Israeli politicians with grave concern. On April 13, the Arab League warned of the severe repercussions of annexation, and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas held an urgent round of phone consultations with Arab leaders. The Palestinian leadership is convinced that Israel and the White House are pushing forward with the deal of the century that President Donald Trump unveiled in late January while the worlds attention is diverted by the coronavirus. Ramallah, as well as Amman, Cairo and Riyadh view the much-discussed annexation as an immediate threat, even if only a theoretical one, for now.

The Israeli annexation discourse bolsters radical elements in the Arab world and undermines the moderates. At this stage, with Arab regimes dealing with the COVID-19 outbreak, the issue could fan the flames of regional instability and endanger Israeli security. A recent internal Foreign Ministry assessment reflects Israels concerns over a possible collapse of several Arab regimes as a result of the coronavirus, an Iranian breakout toward a nuclear weapon and significant strengthening of radical terror organizations, such as the Islamic State and al-Qaeda. With Israel aware of the regional threats to its security, it would be logical to assume that now is not the time to rock the fragile Middle Eastern boat and to undermine cooperation with the Palestinian Authority, Jordan, Egypt and the Gulf States. Even before the pandemic, the Arab regimes and their populations were not enamored by the annexation prospects. Now, with millions in the Arab world unemployed and facing a severe economic crisis, any hasty move could deal a blow to the delicate fabric of Israels relations with the Arab world and eventually have a much harsher impact on Israels security.

Most former and current defense officials who enjoyed close relations with their senior Arab counterparts for decades are aware of the danger lurking in the annexation policy. Maj. Gen. (Res.) Amos Gilad, former director of policy and political-military affairs at the Ministry of Defense, warned Feb. 7, after President Donald Trump unveiled his plan for Israeli-Palestinian peace, that imposing Israeli sovereignty over the Jordan Valley would undermine the peace treaty with Jordan. Former Mossad chief Danny Yatom expressed a similar view, whereas Commanders for Israels Security, a nonprofit representing dozens of former defense officials, has conducted an online campaign designed to influence Benny Gantz, Gabi Ashkenazi and Labor leader Amir Peretz to withhold support for the move.

These harsh warnings of an impending disaster, particularly at such a sensitive time when the battle to defeat the coronavirus should be at the top of Israels agenda, appear to be falling on deaf ears. The distinction between army and defense agency veterans who conducted Israels ties with Arab regimes for years, and the politicians, most of whom lack any experience in defense or diplomacy, is evident. Even Netanyahu, who in the past avoided annexation moves and sidelined proposed legislation by members of his Likud party to annex Maale Adumim and the Jordan Valley, continues to throw about promises of annexation. This is a man who periodically meets and talks with Arab rulers, and knows their views on annexation and the threat that it poses in destabilizing the Middle East. His actions contradict his favorite and widely expressed thesis that the Arab world does not care about the Palestinians and would be willing to advance ties with Israel, even if it fails to reach an agreement with the Palestinians.

Israel has failed to establish formal relations with more Arab states in recent years, and it has not boosted trade or forged closer diplomatic ties. While it enjoys a slight warming of relations with some Arab rulers, and growing public interest in what it has to offer, Israel would pay dearly if it annexed the West Bank, dealing a significant blow to the Palestinians and destabilizing Jordan. The repercussions would put an end to its dreams of cooperation with the region and of a united front against Iran.
The Pennsylvania Department of Health has confirmed 1,145 new coronavirus cases, raising the statewide total to 26,490.

At least 647 have died, including 63 new fatalities today, according to the health department, which released new numbers today. All of those who have died are adults.

At least, 46 people have died in the Harrisburg regions counties, according to state figures. Four new deaths were reported today in the midstate, including three in Lancaster County and one in York County, according to the report.

Pennsylvania Health Secretary Dr. Rachel Levine said Tuesday the curve has been flattened significantly in Pennsylvania. But she also said social distancing measures must continue to reduce the spread of the virus.

The number of new cases today is almost identical to the number in Tuesdays state report. And the number of new cases today is well below the one-day high of more than 1,900 cases on April 9. The number of cases rose today by 4.5 percent and Levine has said repeatedly in recent days the state is no longer seeing exponential growth.

The health department said 111,047 people have tested negative for the virus.

A closer look

Cases have been reported in all of Pennsylvanias 67 counties. But health officials have said the states three hot spots are the Philadelphia region, the Lehigh Valley and northeastern Pennsylvania.

Philadelphia leads the entire state with 7,347 cases and 132 deaths. Neighboring Montgomery County is second with 2,475 cases and 82 deaths.

Lehigh County has had 1,922 people contract the virus - the states third largest number of cases - with 25 deaths. In northeastern Pennsylvania, Luzerne County has had 1,567 cases with 27 deaths.

The midstate hasnt been spared. More than 2,000 people have contracted the virus in the counties in the Harrisburg area.

Lancaster County leads the midstate with 914 cases and 29 deaths, according to health department figures. York County has had 381 patients test positive and four deaths.

Heres a look at the cases in the rest of the midstate counties: Lebanon (349 cases and 2 deaths); Dauphin (271 cases and 5 deaths); Cumberland (131 cases and 4 deaths); Franklin (78 cases); Adams (64 cases and 1 death); and Perry (17 cases and 1 death).

Statewide, 2,390 patients who have contracted the virus are in hospitals, according to state figures. About 9 percent of those who have been infected are being treated in a hospital. The state said those who arent in a hospital are in isolation or being treated at home.

The state health department does not release figures on how many have recovered from the virus. Most people recover without requiring hospital care and hospitals that are treating patients dont inform the state when patients are discharged, the health department has said. Some systems, including Penn State Health, have begun releasing data on those who have recovered.

Reopening the state?

Gov. Tom Wolf has continued to push for Pennsylvanians to remain home to limit the spread of the virus. The state remains under a stay-at-home order until April 30 and Wolf has closed businesses that arent life sustaining.

Republican lawmakers are pushing measures to allow more businesses open as more than 1 million Pennsylvanians have filed unemployment claims.

The state House of Representatives has passed a bill that would allow more businesses to open their doors. The House bill would apply federal standards to determine which businesses could open instead of the states more restrictive guidelines. Lawmakers pushing the measures contend the state could allow more small businesses to open without jeopardizing the health of the public.

Democratic lawmakers contend a broad reopening of businesses would endanger the public and unravel the states progress at slowing the spread of the virus. Levine said earlier this week a mass reopening of businesses would be a big mistake that would cost lives.

Wolf hasnt said if he will sign legislation to reopen more businesses. The Democratic governor said in a conference call with reporters he will review the legislation if it reaches his desk. But he has said the state must proceed carefully in reopening businesses to protect the public health and the economy.

If we dont do this right, the economy is going to be in even worse shape than it is now, Wolf said.

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(Bloomberg Opinion) -- No one could have predicted the timing and trajectory of the Covid-19 pandemic, triggered by a novel coronavirus leaping from a bat into a pangolin (apparently) and from there into a person. Even so, scientists knew that a pandemic of some kind would come our way sooner or later. In the past few decades, we've seen ever-more-frequent outbreaks of new infectious diseases, as viruses or bacteria hop from their usual animal hosts into people. After this virus, there will be others.

Outbreaks are becoming more frequent for a very simple reason: There are more people coming into contact with wildlife species, as agriculture, forestry, mining and oil exploration activities have pushed into previously unpopulated areas, destroying animals' natural habitats. The high-risk zones for new infections turn out to lie mostly in tropical regions  where biodiversity is high  undergoing significant land-use change.

Reducing the awful consequences of this pandemic is the most urgent matter right now. But protecting ourselves in the future will mean acting before the next one starts  by developing the capacity to predict where the next disease will most likely emerge. Still more important, and also more difficult, will be changing human practices to preserve animals' habitats and reduce the trade in animal products so that people and animal-borne pathogens come into less frequent contact. It's ironic  and tragic  that this pandemic is another consequence of our ever-increasing impact on the natural world.

A disease caused by a virus or bacteria that originates in another animal is known as zoonosis. The word comes from the Greek: "zoo-" for animal, "-osis" for disease. Zoonotic pathogens are a persistent menace all over the world, threatening to jump into humans and spread. The first challenge is to know how many pathogens there are and in which animals they thrive, and on this, researchers are making good progress.

Story continues

Much as NASA is working to give us advance warning of all the hazardous asteroids that could strike Earth, biologists are doing the same for the hundreds of thousands of unknown zoonotic pathogens living in animal hosts. It's an expensive undertaking, yet vastly cheaper than the costs of a global pandemic. A decadelong effort to find such viruses, the Predict project, came to an end just as the novel coronavirus was emerging. But the researchers collected 140,000 samples from animals and identified 1,000 new viruses. They also trained 5,000 people across Asia and Africa in crucial skills, such as how to collect samples from wild and domestic animals, thereby creating new resources of expertise in zones where new viruses are most likely to appear.

Fortunately, the Predict project received an emergency six-month extension effective April 1, and its work will carry on in a follow-up project called STOP Spillover, set to begin in August. Meanwhile, researchers behind a separate scientific project  the Global Virome Project  ambitiously aim to characterize within the next 10 years most of the viruses from the most important zoonotic reservoirs. But merely listing these pathogens isn't enough. We also face the harder challenge of reducing how often those pathogens come into contact with humans, each time having a small chance to create a new epidemic.

Everyone knows that human activities have disturbed ecosystems worldwide. Less well known is that our activities have also increased infectious-disease transmission between humans and animals. Never before have the reservoirs of potential zoonotic pathogens been in such intimate contact with human populations. A review of research on the consequences of land-use change over the past 30 years found consistent evidence of increased pathogen transmission.

The most obvious setting is in wildlife markets, directly implicated in the origins of both the SARS epidemic in 2002 and the current Covid-19 pandemic. In the former case, the virus moved from bats into civet cats, which were sold for meat in markets, and then into people. In response to any pandemic, nations often ban the sale of wild animal products, as China has now, temporarily. But such bans tend to be relaxed after the pandemic is over.

Exploitation of wildlife is the biggest threat to biodiversity in many Southeast Asian countries, with high demand for wildlife products combined with weak law enforcement. That's a major threat to many endangered species, and also a direct threat to all of us. After Covid-19, we should realize that the only solution is international cooperation based on the shared realization that our human activities have made the pandemic problem worse.

This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of Bloomberg LP and its owners.

Mark Buchanan, a physicist and science writer, is the author of the book "Forecast: What Physics, Meteorology and the Natural Sciences Can Teach Us About Economics."

For more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.com/opinion

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In this April 9 photo, employees observe social distancing due to coronavirus, at the entrance of Amazon, in Douai, northern France. Read more

PARIS  Amazon threatened Wednesday to suspend all activity in France after a French court found it wasnt doing enough to protect its workers from the coronavirus.

The online giant also announced plans to appeal Tuesdays emergency ruling, which requires Amazon to stop selling nonessential goods for a month while it works out new worker safety measures.

Sales of food, medicine and hygiene supplies are still allowed under the ruling. However, Amazon France said in a statement Wednesday that the decision is so disruptive that it could prompt the company to suspend all activity at its six French warehouses.

The company stressed the importance of its services to the thousands of French companies that sell on Amazon and millions of people around the country who want to have access to products they need during the crisis.

Amazon insisted that it is providing adequate security measures for staff, noting the implementation of temperature checks and mask distribution.

But the court found Amazon didnt do enough to enforce social distancing, to ensure that turnstiles and locker rooms were virus-free, or to increase cleaning of its warehouses. Unions say one worker infected with the virus is in intensive care.
When Seldon Salaj signed up for the March SAT testing day, he could not have imagined it would be canceled due to a worldwide pandemic.

But it, like nonessential businesses nationwide, was shut down in response to the spread of the novel coronavirus. He signed up for the May testing day, which was also canceled.

His last hope for improving his score from December during his junior year was June 6.

On Wednesday, the College Board announced the June 6 testing day for the SAT and the Subject Tests is canceled, and tests will not be administered until August.

Theres nothing we can do, you just have to take the cards youre being dealt and run with them, said Salaj, a Greenwich High School junior.

Six SAT testing dates in total have been canceled because of the spread of the novel coronavirus and public health efforts to keep students and their families home.

We know students are anxious about how the coronavirus crisis will affect their college application process, including taking the SAT, the College Board said in a statement on its website. Were committed to giving students as many chances as we can to show their strengths to colleges while relying on the guidance of public health officials. Throughout, well continue to focus on students with fee waivers and those with accommodations.

The College Board canceled the March 14 makeup SAT test, scheduled for March 28, as well as the May 2 SAT and subject test administration. It also canceled the School Day SAT tests, which were supposed to be administered on March 24, and April 14 and 28.

If its safe from a public health standpoint, the College Board said it will administer the SAT every month starting in August through the end of the calendar year. This includes a new administration in September and the previously scheduled tests on Aug. 29, Oct. 3, Nov. 7 and Dec. 5.

For the schools Salaj wants to go to, it makes sense to retake the SAT, he said. This fall, he has a short window to take the test, since he wants to meet the early decision deadline of Nov. 1 for his top school.

I feel like with all the testing being canceled, everyone is scrambling, he said. The day it opens, Ill be signing up.

That means more students who need to sit for the exams will have fewer opportunities to take them. In response, the College Board has asked schools and communities to accommodate the influx in test-takers.

For each administration, were preparing to significantly expand our capacity for students to take the SAT once schools reopen, the College Board said in a statement. Were calling on our member schools and colleges, as well as local communities, to provide additional test center capacity so every student who wants to take the SAT can do so.

Starting in May, students can register for the tests and the College Board will contact students directly when it has an exact date. Students can get early access to register for August, September and October if they were already registered for June or are juniors who do not yet have scores.

But if schools do not reopen this fall, which the College Board said is unlikely, the organization will make sure a digital version of the SAT is accessible for all students from home. The test would be similar to the digital AP exams getting sent to 3 million students this spring.

As were doing with at-home Advanced Placement exams, we would ensure that at-home SAT testing is simple, secure and fair, accessible to all, and valid for use in college admissions, the College Board said. Like the paper test, a digital, remote version of the SAT would measure what students are learning in school and what they need to know to be successful in college.

The College Board said almost all of its state partners and many district partners have expressed interest in administering the SAT during the school day in the fall. Some states, like Michigan, have already announced fall testing.

States and large districts that participate in school day testing can provide the SAT for free to all their students, the College Board said in the statement.

To help students keep their college readiness skills sharp when many schools are closed, College Board and Khan Academy will continue to provide free resources online, including full-length practice tests and personalized learning tools, the organization said.

Together with our member schools and colleges, we will be flexible, thoughtful and collaborative in exploring ways to continue to support student learning and provide opportunities to test during this challenging time, the College Board said. Our focus will remain on student safety and ensuring students have the tools they need and opportunities to succeed on their path to college.

jo.kroeker@hearstmediact.com
Chinese tourist numbers to Australia have plunged by 83 per cent following a ban on direct flights to tackle the spread of coronavirus.

In February, just 19,500 short-term visitors came from China - the lowest monthly tally since January 2004, Australian Bureau of Statistics figures showed.

A year earlier 116,900 Chinese tourists came to Australia but two months ago, it had fallen to ninth place, before even Singapore and Malaysia.

Chinese tourist numbers to Australia have plunged by 83 per cent following a ban on direct flights to tackle the spread of coronavirus. In February, just 19,500 short-term visitors came from China - the lowest monthly tally since January 2004, Australian Bureau of Statistics figures showed. Pictured is a woman outside the Sydney Opera House

China was last year Australia's No.1 source of international tourists, with more than 1.4million of them visiting.

Overseas tourists in February before the borders closed New Zealand: 117,100 United States: 62,300 United Kingdom: 59,100 Japan: 38,400 India: 34,400 Singapore: 32,200 Malaysia: 27,900 Hong Kong: 26,000 China: 19,500 South Korea: 17,900 Source: Australian Bureau of Statistics short-term arrivals data, February 2020 Advertisement

The tourism sector is an early casualty of COVID-19, with number of Chinese arrivals plunging by 83 per cent in February, compared with a year earlier, and by 76 per cent compared with January's 81,600 figure.

The overall number of monthly short-term visitors to Australia, from all nations, plummeted by an annual pace of 18.7 per cent in February to 647,000, following the bushfires and news of the coronavirus outbreak.

This marked the biggest drop in official records going back to 1991.

On February 1, Prime Minister Scott Morrison banned foreign nationals from arriving in Australia for 14 days, if they had left or transited through mainland China.

A level four 'do not 'travel' order was also issued for Australians to avoid mainland China.

Australia's borders were closed to all non-citizens on March 20 - two months after Chinese authorities belatedly admitted to a coronavirus outbreak in Wuhan.

The tourism sector is early casualty of COVID-19, with number of Chinese arrivals plunging by 83 per cent in February, compared with a year earlier, and by 76 per cent compared with January's 81,600 figure. Pictured is Wuhan's Huanan seafood market, the likely source of the coronavirus pandemic

New Zealand was Australia's top source of overseas tourists in February.

Over the year, 1.428million Kiwis flew across the Tasman Sea for a holiday, a two per cent increase compared with a year earlier.

The monthly tally of 117,100 in February, however, was 6.8 per cent weaker compared with a year earlier.

A record 403,900 Indian tourists travelled to Australia in the year to February, up by an annual pace of 11 per cent.

Tourists from English-speaking nations took out the top three spots, with the US in second place followed by the United Kingdom.
(Newser)  President Trump announced Tuesday he was cutting off payments to the World Health Organization for now, accusing the United Nations health agency of promoting Chinese "misinformation" about the coronavirus. Public health experts are lashing out at the US president, with some saying Trump is trying to deflect attention from his own lack of timely response to the virus outbreak, per Time. One big name in the science world has particularly harsh words. "President Trump's decision to defund WHO is simply thisa crime against humanity," Richard Horton, the editor-in-chief of the Lancet medical journal, posted online. "Every scientist, every health worker, every citizen must resist and rebel against this appalling betrayal of global solidarity." More reaction from other corners:

story continues below

"Now is a time for unity in the global battle to push the COVID-19 pandemic into reverse, not a time to cut the resources of the ... WHO, which is spearheading and coordinating the global body's efforts," UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres says in a statement, per Axios.

Germany's foreign minister also laments the US move, noting that boosting the WHO during this time is a solid investment, Reuters reports. "Apportioning blame doesn't help," Heiko Maas posted on Twitter, calling the WHO "underfunded." "The virus knows no borders."

Russia is also joining in the chorus of decrying Trump's decision, with its deputy foreign minister telling the US to back off. "We are calling on the US to refrain from further attacks on the WHO and pursue a responsible policy, which would not ruin the basis of international cooperation in the medical and biological field, but on the contrary would enhance this cooperation and create a basis for its further development," Sergei Ryabkov says, per TASS news agency, via CBS News.

Bill Gates, who recently penned an op-ed on the subject of the virus, is also weighing in. "Halting funding for the World Health Organization during a world health crisis is as dangerous as it sounds," he tweeted early Wednesday. "Their work is slowing the spread of COVID-19 and if that work is stopped no other organization can replace them. The world needs @WHO now more than ever."

At least one global health expert at the Council on Foreign Relations concedes the WHO wasn't on top of its game regarding the virus. "The WHO could have been more diligent in determining the nature of the outbreak and how serious the problem was," Dr. Yanzhong Huang says, per Time.

(Read more coronavirus stories.)
G ermany today looked set to extend its coronavirus lockdown as Chancellor Angela Merkel held a video conference with regional leaders to discuss an exit strategy.

The prominent Handelsblatt business daily reported that the government would maintain restrictions introduced last month to slow the spread of Covid-19 until at least May 3.

Germanys lockdown, which includes the closure of all non-essential shops and banning any social contact among more than two people in public, was set to run until Sunday.

It comes after a poll of Germans showed 44 per cent said they would support an extension of lockdown measures, while 12 per cent demanded even more stringent rules.

Europe takes it's first steps out of Coronavirus lockdown 1 /25 Europe takes it's first steps out of Coronavirus lockdown People queue at a hardware store during a partial reopening after the Austrian government eased lockdown restrictions Reuters A worker checks the temperature of a customer at the entrance of a supermarket in Itay Reuters Customers hold flowers in front of a DIY store in Graz, Austria, after it re-opened on April 14, 2020, following a "shutdown" in a measure to limit the spread of the new coronavirus APA/AFP via Getty Images People wearing protective face masks and gloves walk in the streets as the Italian government allows the reopening of some shops while a nationwide lockdown continues following the outbreak of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19), in Venice, Italy, Reuters People queue to enter a hardware store during a partial reopening after the Austrian government eased restrictions following the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) outbreak in Eisenstadt, Austria Reuters Camilla Cocchi wears a face mask and gloves as she sorts out clothing in her children's clothes shop after it was allowed to reopen following lockdown measures to contain the spread of Covid-19, in Rome AP A man wearing a face mask shops in a hardware store during a partial reopening after the Austrian government eased restrictions following the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) outbreak in Eisenstadt, Austria Reuters "Respect the 2 meters distance" banner is seen at a fish stand as the Italian government allows the reopening of some shops while a nationwide lockdown continues following the outbreak of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) in Venice, Italy, Reuters Customers wearing face masks push shopping carts in front of a DIY store in Vienna, Austria, after it re-opened on April 14, 2020, following a "shutdown" in a measure to limit the spread of the new coronavirus APA/AFP via Getty Images A worker checks the temperature of a customer at the entrance of a supermarket, as the spread of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) continues, in Turin, Italy Reuters Customers line up in front of a DIY store in Graz, Austria APA/AFP via Getty Images Gianfranco Mandas wears a face mask as he sorts out clothing in his children's clothes shop after it was allowed to opens following restriction measures to contain the spread of Covid-19, in Rome AP Customers wearing face masks push shopping carts in front of a DIY store in Vienna, Austria, after it re-opened on April 14, 2020, following a "shutdown" in a measure to limit the spread of the new coronavirus APA/AFP via Getty Images Customers queue at the Trastevere market, as new restrictions for open-air markets are implemented to prevent the spread of coronavirus disease (COVID-19) in Rome, Italy, Reuters Customers wearing face masks push shopping carts in front of a DIY store in Vienna, Austria, after it re-opened on April 14, 2020, following a "shutdown" in a measure to limit the spread of the new coronavirus APA/AFP via Getty Images A man wears a protective face mask and gloves at the newsstand as the Italian government allows the reopening of some shops while a nationwide lockdown continues following the outbreak of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19), in Venice, Italy Reuters People wearing face masks work in a hardware store during a partial reopening after the Austrian government eased restrictions following the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) outbreak in Eisenstadt, Austria Reuters Customers queue at the Trastevere market, as new restrictions for open-air markets are implemented to prevent the spread of coronavirus disease (COVID-19) in Rome, Italy Reuters A general view of the parking area of a hardware store during the partial reopening of shops after the Austrian government loosens its lockdown restrictions during the global coronavirus disease (COVID-19) outbreak in Vienna Reuters

Mrs Merkel has come under pressure to reopen the countrys primary schools in a gradual easing of restrictions in Europes biggest country.

Ahead of todays talks, Health Minister Jens Spahn said: In the end its about finding the right balance between health protection, public life and the economy. Figures today showed new cases of coronavirus in Germany rose after four days of decline.

The number of confirmed cases has risen by 2,486 to 127,584, while the death toll increased by 285 to 3,254, according to data from the Robert Koch Institute of Infectious Diseases.

Meanwhile a zoo director in northern Germany has admitted some animals might have to be fed to others to help the zoo survive.

Verena Kaspari from Neumunster Zoo, told Die Welt: Weve listed the animals well have to slaughter first.

In France today, finance minister Bruno Le Maire revealed the expected cost of the anti-crisis measures to support the economy has risen steeply to 110 billion.

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He added that the package included 20 billion to help big companies and said that support would be offered to the airline giant Air France KLM. Work on restoring the Notre-Dame Cathedral in Paris remained suspended exactly one year after it was devastated by fire, and there are fears that the reconstruction will fall by the wayside as the country tries to rebuild its economy after the pandemic.

In Denmark some children were today being allowed to return to school as the country begins to relax its strict lockdown measures. Older children must continue to study from home, and gatherings or more than 10 people are still banned.

Finland is also easing its restrictions, with roadblocks around the capital being lifted after nearly three weeks.
by Bernardo Cervellera

The US president is threatening to cut funds to the UN health agency. The UN secretary general responds that "this is not the time" to cut resources in the fight against the coronavirus. Beyond ideological readings, the WHO has followed China's indications step by step in keeping silent about the coronavirus, on human-to-human transmission, on delaying the pandemic alarm, on stifling Taiwan's help. Director Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus is the first to politicize the global health issue.

Rome (AsiaNews) - The UN secretary, Antonio Guterres has defended the World Health Organization against US President Donald Trump, who has announced that he wants to cut funds to the WHO for failing to manage the Covid pandemic- 19.

A similar charge has been laid at the UN Health agencys door by other members, not just the United States, with complaints that the WHO is dominated by China.

Yesterday, in a meeting with reporters, Trump accused the WHO of having "severely mismanaging and covering up the spread" of the pandemic.

Other nations and regions who followed WHO guidelines and kept their borders open to China accelerated the pandemic all around the world, Trump said. The WHO failed to investigate credible reports from sources in Wuhan that conflicted directly with the Chinese governments official accounts.

This has propelled the US presidents desire to cut the funds that the United States pays to the WHO every year. Last year Washington poured in $ 400 million, almost 15% of the UN health budget.

It is not clear whether Trump will be able to act directly: contributions to the WHO in themselves need congressional approval.

For his part, Guterres, in a written declaration, stressed that the crisis that the world is experiencing needs everyone's support. He admitted that there may be "different interpretations" in the body's work. "Once we have finally turned the page on this epidemic, there must be a time to look back fully to understand how such a disease emerged and spread its devastation so quickly across the globe, and how all those involved reacted to the crisis, he wrote. The lessons learned will be essential to effectively address similar challenges, as they may arise in the future. But now is not that time" to cut resources in the fight against coronavirus.

For several analysts, Trump's words are dictated by frustration: Over a very short space of time, the United States has become the country with the most coronavirus victims, with 25 thousand deaths and 600 thousand positive cases. Worldwide, the pandemic has so far killed more than 125,000 people and infected nearly 2 million individuals.

In addition, the pandemic was politicized as a clash between the "Chinese model" and the "US model", or more generally "Western". The "Chinese" one, praised by the WHO, seems to have been successful in containing the epidemic, reaching just over 83 thousand infected and 3300 dead. Seen in this lens, Trump is targeting China to maintain US global supremacy.

But beyond any ideological interpretations, there are some facts that reveal an over dependence of the WHO on Beijing.

First of all, the epidemic discovered already in December 2019 and reported by several doctors in Wuhan, was not taken into consideration by the WHO, which followed the Chinese government indications, despite the fact this stifled the complaints and reassured the world that there was nothing to fear.

In late December, leading Taiwanese personalities warned the WHO about the human-to-human transmission of the coronavirus epidemic. But since Taiwan is not recognized as a member of the body because it is officially part of China, its warnings were not taken into consideration. Until January 14, the WHO has maintained the same position as Beijing: there were no signs of human-to-human transmission of the virus.

On January 22, while coronavirus infections were registered in South Korea, Japan and Thailand, the WHO refused to issue a global alert. On January 23, Beijing placed Wuhan and Hubei under close quarantine.

On February 4, when Italy and the US had already closed flights to and from China, WHO director Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus criticized the decision because this may have "the effect of increasing fear and stigma, with no tangible benefit in terms of public health."

On February 26, Tedros was still unsure whether to declare a global pandemic. Tedros observed on 26 February, but it does have significant risk [and there was a risk] in terms of amplifying unnecessary and unjustified fear and stigma, and paralysing systems. It may also signal that we can no longer contain the virus, which is not true. At this point the main country worrying about stigma was China.

Only on 11 March did the WHO declare the pandemic. At that point there were already 114 countries involved.

There are two other elements that show the UN bodys "dependence" on China: firstly that of wanting to remove any geographical or ethnic indication from the disease, and slating its being termed the "Wuhan" virus or "Chinese pneumonia". The other is the way in which a WHO advisor, Bruce Aylward, declined to comment on the "Taiwan model" on the victory against the virus, after the question was posed to him by a Hong Kong journalist.

Faced with Trump's criticism, Tedros has often asked that the WHO's work not be "politicized". The real problem is that he and his colleagues are the ones to politicize first and foremost.
The Armenian authorities are considering holding the ceremonies dedicated to the Armenian Genocide during the state of emergency on April 24. This is what Minister of Education, Science, Culture and Sport of Armenia Arayik Harutyunyan said in response to a question from deputy of the ruling My Step faction of the National Assembly Arsen Julfalakyan during a question-and-answer session with government officials today.

The deputy said the traditional march dedicated to the memory of Armenian Genocide victims is not very likely this year and suggested that bells commemorating the victims be rung in all churches of the country on April 24 and recommended that all citizens respect the memory of the victims with a moment of silence in yards and from their balconies.

In response, the minister said the government will consider all the recommendations so that the innocent victims of the Armenian Genocide are properly remembered on that day.

On April 24, Armenia and all Armenians around the world commemorate the victims of the Armenian Genocide perpetrated in the Ottoman Empire.
The Union Ministry of Home Affairs on Wednesday issued revised guidelines as to which sectors and industries will continue to function during the lockdown imposed to contain COVID-19.

"To mitigate hardship to the public, select additional activities have been allowed which will come into effect from 20th April. 2020. These limited exemptions will be operationalized by states/UTs / district administrations based on strict compliance to the existing guidelines," the MHA directive noted.

The bank branches and ATMs, IT vendors for banking operations, banking correspondents, ATM operation and cash management agencies will remain functional during the period.

The Bank branches will be allowed to work as per normal working hours until the disbursal of DBT cash transfers is complete.

The local administration has to ensure that there is adequate security personnel at bank branches to maintain social distancing and law and order.

The Ministry has also given an exemption to several other services including all health services, all agriculture, horticulture activities, and MNREGA works.

The government has made it clear that strict social distancing norms have to be maintained.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
New Delhi, April 15 : The Indian Army has kept medical teams on standby for deployment in Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Bhutan and Afghanistan to help these countries in their fight against coronavirus.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi has stated that India is ready to provide medical help to the neighbouring countries following which the Indian Army was alerted.

The force had on April 11 sent eight medical officers and seven paramedics to Kuwait for capability development of that country's government and setting up of RTPCR diagnostic panel machine.

The Army had also provided assistance to other friendly foreign countries. From March 13 to March 21, a medical team comprising five doctors, two nursing officers and seven paramedics were deployed in an advisory role to assist the Male government as part of its domestic COVID protection measures.

India had also provided medicines and medical equipment to Nepal and Afghanistan governments.

Within the country also, the force has taken up various initiatives. The force has deployed four medical officers and 18 support staff at the Narela quarantine centre being run by the Delhi government.

The Army was roped in from February when coronavirus was reported in China's Wuhan.

The force was the first to set up a quarantine base in Manesar. From February 2 to February 18, a total 248 Indian citizens, mostly students, evacuated from Wuhan were quarantined at Manesar base.

Again from February 27 to March 12, a total 124 people evacuated from Diamond Princess Cruise at Japan were quarantined at Manesar base.

While the people were being removed from Manesar base, another lot of 83 people from Italy were quarantined from March 11. Out of 83 people, six citizens of India origin from Italy and three from the US were also quarantined.

A total 82 were discharged after being confirmed negative while one positive case was referred to Safdarjung hospital.

From March 15 to as on date , a total of 236 Indian citizens have been evacuated from Iran and quarantined at Jaisalmer. Out of these, 19 were COVID positive and were admitted at AIIMS Jodhpur. Nine of them have since recovered.

Nearly two battalion strength of troops vacated their living accommodation to assist in establishing these national-level facilities.

From March 16, to as on date, a total 53 citizens evacuated from Iran are quarantined at Jaisalmer. Out of these, three were COVID positive and admitted at AIIMS Jodhpur.

Another lot of 195 Indian citizens evacuated from Iran on March 18 are quarantined at Jaisalmer. Out of these, 22 were COVID positive and admitted at AIIMS Jodhpur.

A total 277 citizens evacuated on March 25 from Iran are quarantined at Jodhpur. Again on 275 Indian citizens evacuated from Iran on March 29, are quarantined at Jodhpur facility.

The force has also enhanced capability to reinforce national effort in fight against COVID.

"Three dedicated COVID hospitals at Barrackpore, Shillong and Likabali for civilians with total capacity of 490, extendable to 590, has been set up," Indian Army stated.

A total 1,200 battlefield nursing assistants are trained to augment medical resources and seven COVID response teams with personnel from engineers and Army Medical Corps are on standby.
With the mother and two other members of a three-month-olds family testing positive for Covid-19 and undergoing treatment at AIIMS Raipur, four nurses of the same facility are now looking after the infant.

The AIIMS Raipur on Wednesday posted a video on its Facebook page, in which the nurses are seen feeding the baby milk through a bottle.

The 27-year-old woman tested positive on April 12. Her two kids - a 22-month-old boy and a 3-month-old girl, were also brought along with her to AIIMS and kept in a separate room in the isolation ward. Since there was no immediate relative to take care of them, the nurses took the responsibility, AIIMS Raipurs Public Relations Officer (PRO) SS Sharma told Hindustan Times.

Sharma further said that the womans brother was called to take care of the kids but he too tested positive for coronavirus and then doctors called the maternal grandmother but she was also found Covid-19 positive.

Later, their father reached Raipur and he is taking care of the boy but the girl is with the nurses. The samples of the two children were also sent for screening which came out negative, Sharma said adding that the two children have been kept under observation.

All the twenty patients who are admitted in AIIMS are from Katghora town of Korba district.

Katghora, located around 200 km from the state capital Raipur, has emerged as a Covid-19 hotspot in the state with 24 confirmed cases reported there.

On April 4, a 16-year-old boy among 16 Tablighi Jamaat members who were staying in a mosque of Purani Basti area of Katghora tested positive for Covid-19. Later, 23 others in the same area, most of whom came in contact with this Jamaat group, were also detected positive for the disease.

Till now, a total of 33 positive cases have been reported in the state and of them, 13 have been discharged after being cured.

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Ex-Journey frontman Steve Perry shared a "little cheer" from a New York hospital that played the band's classic Don't Stop Believin' every time a COVID-19 patient gets discharged.

Healthcare workers at New York Presbyterian Queens Hospital filmed two patients being wheeled out of the hospital as the staff cheered them on. Good Morning America reported that the tradition began just last week.

Watch the video below.
A new study has found young people are leaving it 'too late' to seek help for eating disorders, citing fear of losing control over their eating or weight, denial, and failure to perceive the severity of the illness as reasons not to get professional advice.

The recent online survey of almost 300 Australian young adults aged 18-25 years found a majority had eating, weight or body shape concerns, and even those with anorexia or bulimia reportedly found reasons to delay getting treatment or expert interventions.

The first author of the study, Kathina Ali, Research Associate in Psychology at Flinders University, explains that concern for others and the belief one should solve their own problems were the two most common barriers towards seeking help for eating concerns.

"Not wanting others to worry about their problems was the highest endorsed barrier - it reflects the wish for autonomy and also the fear of being a burden to others in this group of young adults."

Feeling embarrassed about their problems or fearing that other people do not believe eating disorders are real illnesses even prevented young adults experiencing symptoms of anorexia nervosa or bulimia nervosa from seeking help, says fellow psychology researcher Dr Dan Fassnacht.

"Concerningly, only a minority of people with eating disorder symptoms had sought professional help and few believed they needed help despite the problems they were experiencing," says Dr Fassnacht, Flinders University Psychology Lecturer, co-author of a new paper just published in the International Journal of Eating Disorders.(Wiley).

In the research article, entitled 'What prevents young adults from seeking help? Barriers toward help?seeking for eating disorder symptomatology', the Australian and German researchers recommended clinicians (counsellors, health workers and others) and the public be made aware of these barriers.

More information and education about the severity and the impact of eating disorders - and how symptoms can get worse without interventions or treatment - should be available to young adults, including the importance of seeking help, and self-management strategies.

Helpful and free evidence-based online resources are available at websites such as Australia's Butterfly Foundation and the National Eating Disorders Collaboration.

###

Read the article, entitled 'What prevents young adults from seeking help? Barriers toward help?seeking for eating disorder symptomatology' (April 2020), by K Ali, DB Fassnacht, L Farrer, E Rieger, J Feldhege, M Moessner, KM Griffiths and S Bauer has been published online DOI: 10.1002/eat.23266

The study was conducted within the Australia-Germany Joint Research Cooperation Scheme with colleagues from the University Hospital Heidelberg in Germany, with support from the Young and Well Cooperative Research Centre in Australia.
Lucknow, April 15 : 'Vama Saarthi', the UP Police Family Welfare Association, will now help the policemen and their families deal with stress. The policemen are working round the clock to enforce the lockdown in the corona crisis.

According to an official release, Vama Saarthi that is headed by Vani Awasthi, wife of UP DGP Hitesh Chandra Awasthi, will provide hygienically cooked food packets to over 4,000 police personnel every day along with water bottles.

The organization will also make masks and distribute them among the cops.

Vama Saarthi has also set up a helpline for the families of policemen which will provide them medical help whenever needed.

A WhatsApp group has also been set up where the families of police personnel can discuss their problems. Online classes for the children of policemen will also be held to help them overcome the lockdown blues.

The organization also plans to hold Yoga session for policemen to help them deal with the stress in the prevailing conditions.
Covering dictator fortunes is one of the dirtiest and most dangerous jobs in journalism. Along with cartels and terrorists, it's the kind of work that can get a reporter threatened or even killed. It happened to independent journalist Alek Boyd. It happened to Wall Street Journal correspondent Jose de Cordoba. It happened to Forbes Russia editor Paul Klebnikov.

When big corrupt money is at stake, oligarchs get violent. Anyone in the news business who's surprised by this ... shouldn't be in the news business.

Dictators with money to guard do terrible things.

But in none of these cases cited above did the force exerted come from their own news agency's side.

Anyone working at Bloomberg News, the news outfit owned by Democratic moneybags and onetime presidential candidate Michael Bloomberg, wouldn't have been so lucky.

Instead of praising the courage of their reporters, as Forbes certainly did, here's the cowardly way Bloomberg dealt with the displeasure of the corrupt dictatorship of China. from NPR.

Six years ago, Bloomberg News killed an investigation into the wealth of Communist Party elites in China, fearful of repercussions by the Chinese government. The company successfully silenced the reporters involved. And it sought to keep the spouse of one of the reporters quiet, too. ... In 2012, Forsythe was part of a Bloomberg team behind an award-winning investigation into the accumulation of wealth by China's ruling classes. The Chinese ambassador warned Bloomberg executives against publishing the investigation. But Bloomberg News published the story anyway. Afterward, Forsythe received what he and Fincher considered death threats relayed through other journalists. He and Fincher moved their family to Hong Kong, believing it to be safer. Even so, the reporting team pursued the next chapter, focusing on Chinese leaders' ties to the country's richest man, Wang Jianlin. Among those in the reporters' sights: the family of new Chinese President Xi Jinping. The story gained steam throughout 2013. In emails sent back to Bloomberg's journalists in China seen by Fincher, senior news editors in New York City expressed excitement. And then: radio silence from headquarters. That story never ran. "Mike and some of the other reporters and editors who had been working on this story just were asking for answers about ... why was this story killed?" Fincher says.

Instead of standing up for their own reporters - and all the money they spent paying them to do their extremely difficult work over the course of a year -- they decided to cave to China, whose corrupt ruling elites' feelings were hurt by the coverage. And instead of doing just that, they fired their reporter and forced him to sign a non-disclosure agreement -- and told the other press they did no such thing. Worse still, they threatened their reporter's wife, who was also a reporter, but not for Bloomberg, something they had no business doing, butr in some amazing meddling, did, apparently to make someone happy.

The New York Post has an excellent editorial here.

They did it for the money. Money was more important than journalism to Bloomberg's leadership, the very people Democratic Party former presidential candidate Michael Bloomberg hired his campaign team from. Nothing, it seems, was more important than money, not even journalistic values, or, to put it in market terms, their brand and its reputation for integrity.

China knew this and unlike Russia or Venezuela, knew it didn't have to send out the thugs to get the spotlight off from it. It had a cutsey little pawn in Michael Bloomberg who would willingly do the wet ops for them, even at the cost of the brand he built.

This is the guy who pretty much finances the Democrats these days, and who might have become their nominee.

What a total disgrace. It's all part and parcel of the Bloomberg style of doing business and running things - money first, integrity only for show.

Photo illustration by Monica Showalter with use of logo and public domain sources
B anksy has revealed his latest work - a series of rats causing mayhem in his bathroom - during the coronavirus lockdown.

The elusive artist posted a set of five images on Instagram on Wednesday night, captioning the post: My wife hates it when I work from home.

It comes as the UK continues its lockdown to curb the spread of Covid-19, with millions of people now working from home.

Banksy's images show rats  which have featured in many of his previous artworks  knocking the bathroom mirror to one side and hanging on the light pull.

Others can be seen swinging on a towel ring and stepping on a tube of toothpaste.

One rat is seen skipping on a roll of toilet paper, which has rolled down and across the floor.

Banksy - In pictures 1 /85 Banksy - In pictures PA AFP via Getty Images A new artwork painted by Banksy during lockdown, which has gone on display in a hospital corridor PA Banksys Girl With A Pearl Earring modified during Coronavirus @Anth0ny_Ward Stormzy performs on the Pyramid Stage at Glastonbury Festival 2019 wearing a vest designed by Banksy EPA Sotheby's employees pose with 'Love is in the Bin' by British artist Banksy during a media preview at Sotheby's auction house Jack Taylor/Getty Images Two men are sitting in front of a famous graffiti of British street artist Banksy, painted on a wall of a gas station in the West Bank city of Bethlehem Getty Images Banksy's homage to Pulp Fiction in East London Rex Features A new Banksy artwork in Birmingham's Jewellery Quarter appears to have been vandalised days after it first appeared. The mural depicts two reindeer painted onto a brick wall appearing to pull along a bench PA Sotheby's host the first unauthorized retrospective exhibition of works by Banksy Curated by Steve Lazarides-Banksy's agent in the early years Alex Lentati Graffitti art by the 'guerilla' artist Banksy is seen on May 16, 2006 in Chalk Farm, London. The striking large scale spray-painted image entitled 'Sweeping It Under The Carpet' depicts a maid who cleaned the artist's room in a motel in Los Angeles. The piece commissioned by 'The Independent' newspaper edited on Tuesday by U2's frontman Bono, is intended to represent a metaphor for the west's reluctance to tackle issues such as Aids in Africa Getty Images Mural: the artwork before it was covered (Photo: PA) PA Banky's Les Mis artwork in Knightsbridge Jeremy Selwyn A piece of urban art by Banksy discovered on the wall of the Poundland store in Wood Green Nigel Howard A woman attacked by seagulls piece by Banksy, during the press view for the artistis biggest show to date, entitled 'Dismaland', at Tropicana in Western-super-Mare, Somerset PA Builders remove a sheet of wood covering a Banksy artwork moments after being told to take it down from the building opposite the French embassy Getty Images Banksy's Barcode Leopard Rex Features A migrant looks at the work by Banksy in the Calais migrant 'jungle' Banksy A blanket covers a mural by elusive street artist Banksy of Apple co-founder Steve Jobs, in a migrant camp on the outskirts of Calais. The piece has gained such popularity that people are being charged for the blanket to be lifted to that they can view it PA An employee holds Banksy's 'Girl and Balloon' which was painted on an Ikea frame at Bonhams auctioneers on March 23, 2012 in London Getty Images Dismal, and not how he meant it: Banksy's Dismaland PA Banksy, Brick Lane Rex Features Banksy - Love is in the Air street art, Soho, London Rex Features A graffiti titled "Art Attack" made by the British, guerrilla, graffiti artist Banksy is seen on Israel's highly controversial West Bank barrier in Ramallah Getty Images Sold: This Banksy on the Gaza Strip was bought for just 118 Banksy Banksy's provocative take on an iconic image from the Vietnam war Alex Lentati A stencil image of a Banksy rat in Haringey, London Jeremy Selwyn Children pose for their photo with an installation of British graffiti artist Banksy's art in New York in 2013 Reuters Art installation by British artist Banksy, a robot and a barcode, is seen on a wall in the Coney Island area of New York City Reuters Mobile Lovers by Banksy on Clement Street, Bristol PA Art Buff created by street artist Banksy in Folkestone, KenT PA Banksy's Walled Off Hotel in the Israeli occupied West Bank town of Bethlehem Getty Images Self-portrait by Banksy PA Grafitti by the illusive artist Banksy adorns a building August 28, 2008 in New Orleans, Louisian Getty Images Vulture Petrol Head Mural by Banksy at Dungeness Susan Pilcher British graffiti artist Banksy's artwork 'No Ball Games' EPA Banksy's Bronx Zoo at Yankee Stadium Reuters Banksy's Eton Posse PA Cardinal Sin by artist Banksy at the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool PA A worker holding Banksy's portrait of Kate Moss (2005) at a press preview for the exhibition Banksy: The Unauthorised Retrospective, curated by Steve Lazarides, at S|2 Gallery in London PA A Banksy mural which was painted on the side of one of the classrooms at Bridge Farm Primary in Bristol during half-term PA A stencil image of a rat in Haringey, London Jeremy Selwym A dancer poses with a new installation of art by British graffiti artist Banksy painted on the front door of the Hustler Club in New York Reuters "Flower Girl," a delicate stencil on a massive brick wall by popular street artist Banksy, is displayed in a warehouse in the greater Los Angeles, California AP Brexit mural: The artwork on the side of an abandoned arcade in Dover Reuters Detail from an installation by artist Banksy, entitled Civilian Drone Strike, on display at the Art the Arms Fair art exhibition 2017 PA A man takes a photo of one of two new murals painted by the artist Banksy near the Barbican Centre in London PA Banksy's lost 'Snorting Copper' at it's original home on Curtain Road in Shoreditch Gareth Richman A woman passes one of two new murals painted by the artist Banksy near the Barbican Centre in London PA The painting 'Devolved Parliament' by the graffiti artist Banksy, which is on show at Bristol Museum PA A Banksy artwork on a bridge in Hull Banksy A man walks past an artwork by street artist Banksy in Paris AFP/Getty Images People gather around fences that have been erected to protect the latest piece of artwork by the underground guerrilla artist Banksy Getty Images A street stall with oil paintings creating an image of a yacht in the Venice canal with a sign reading "Venice in oil", set up by a person purporting to be British artist Banksy, in Venice Reuters A motorboat passes in front of an alleged work of British street artist Banksy 'The shipwrecked child', that appeared on the outer wall of a house overlooking the canal Rio de Ca Foscari in Venice, Italy EPA Banksy created Stormzy's Union Jack stab proof vest worn at Glastonbury in July 2019 @banksy Banksy hits Notting Hill Bronwen Weatherby A shopfront displays a mini exhibition by secretive British artist, Banksy with the sign 'Gross Domestic Product', in Croydon AFP/Getty Images Displays in a homeware store, Gross Domestic Product, that is being launched in South London by the graffiti artist Banksy PA Banksy turned a rough sleeper's bench into Santa's sleigh in a social commentary on homelessness at Christmas Banksy A new work of art on the side of a house on Marsh Lane, Barton Hill, Bristol PA A section of the new work he has created during lockdown, in his bathroom. The artist captioned the post "My wife hates it when I work from home Banksy via PA Banksys Girl With A Pearl Earring modified during Coronavirus @Anth0ny_Ward
As the U.S. continues to deal with the feared Coronavirus, this potential crisis presents a great opportunity to be a source of strength and support for one another. Patti Garibay, Cofounder of American Heritage Girls, is available to discuss her wholesome organization and how they could help deal with fear and anxiety caused by COVID-19, as well as ways their members can serve others in this time of crisis.

Q&A:

Amidst the rapid-spreading Coronavirus, and the anxiety that it is causing so many, how does the American Heritage Girls Program (AHG) help girls overcome feelings of fear and anxiety?

The American Heritage Girls Program enables a girl to grow in her FAITH  in every sense of the word  instead of increasing in panic, fear, and anxiety. The AHG Program helps girls fortify and strengthen their faith as it pertains to believing and serving Christ and being confident and assured that God cares and protects them. During this time of the COVID-19 pandemic, AHG is equipping girls to act from a place of both faith and preparation, by adhering to the safety precautions and suggestions for disease prevention laid out by the CDC.

Girls today are experiencing heightened rates of diagnosed anxiety and depression disorders. How do you think information about the Coronavirus plays into their fears and disorders?

Information about the Coronavirus is accessible everywhere. It's nearly impossible to step into your car without hearing the Coronavirus as the topic of the hour on every radio station or scroll through your social media newsfeed without seeing countless posts about it. Coronavirus conversations are in classrooms, the workplace, the grocery store. There is no escaping Coronavirus information. Because of the nature of how we consume information in today's world, it's easy to be overwhelmed and even bogged down with the information which can quickly lead to fear and terror. I believe the speed of information sharing about the Coronavirus is significantly contributing to the rise of anxiety we are seeing all around us.

How does AHG equip its adult volunteers to engage in informed and faith-filled conversations with Girl Members and families about safety precautions to protect against the Coronavirus?

AHG has an incredible team of staff members who work to support all of our ministry's members. We are consistently monitoring how the Coronavirus could affect the everyday operations of Troops, and we have communicated to Troop leaders how to take the necessary preventative measures to stay safe while giving their Troops messages of faith and encouragement amidst this time of uncertainty. AHG leaders are calmly and carefully explaining any changes or adjustments to meetings and activities to girls and families. We are encouraging our leaders with scripture and diligently praying for them.

AHG's mission is Building women of integrity through service to God, family, community, and country. With the rapid-spreading Coronavirus, what are the ways AHG Members reach out to help and serve others?

Prayer is the first and foremost way we are serving others during this time. AHG Members are praying for those currently ill with the disease and praying that others continue to be protected. Troops are also encouraged to think of ways to help support community efforts. In the coming weeks, I know we will be receiving stories of how girls and Troops have stepped up to be a beacon of light during this time.

What is the number one message you want girls and families to know in light of having faith and letting go of fear surrounding the Coronavirus?

I want families to know and believe in 2 Timothy 1:7, NKJV, that "God has not given us a spirit of fear, but of power and of love and of a sound mind." Connect with your family by being fully present, limiting your media consumption, and maintaining as much routine as safely possible. We, as a community, will get through this in time. Join us in prayer for wisdom and the healing of all affected by COVID-19.

About Patti Garibay, Founder & Executive Director of American Heritage Girls (AHG)

Patti Garibay with her husband are co-founders of American Heritage Girls, a wholesome scouting alternative for girls. Patti is a featured speaker nationally on the topic raising Godly girls (RGG). Along with her blog posts, Patti is a popular guest on talk shows on relevant girl-centric topics ranging from body image to bullying.

In her upcoming autobiography, Patti gives readers a glimpse into her journey from the humble beginnings of American Heritage Girls around her kitchen table in Cincinnati, to where it is today, a formidable national organization offering a positive environment in a largely Godless culture.

Patti Garibay is a living tribute to traditional values of old, offering an alternative to a lonesome online world. In Patti's word of American Heritage Girls, she delights in her mission to help raise Godly girls, helping girls make real friends, who really chat, who also happen to enjoy camping and other outdoor adventures in a real world.
[April 15, 2020] Transports Vervaeke Leverages AI-Driven Network from Juniper Mist to Streamline Operations and Improve Employee Efficiency

SUNNYVALE, Calif., April 15, 2020 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Juniper Networks, (NYSE: JNPR), a leader in secure, AI-driven networks, today announced that Transports Vervaeke, a leading international chemical and fuel logistics provider, has chosen the Wireless LAN (WLAN) platform from Mist Systems, a Juniper company, to streamline network operations and improve employee productivity in the companys garages, warehouses and office locations across Europe. From the Benelux, northern France and the Ruhr region of Germany, Transports Vervaeke serves its customers all over Europe, transporting chemicals, gas, fuel and other dangersome goods. It also offers a wide range of international logistics services by road, train and sea. After doubling in size through two acquisitions in the last three years, the companys IT department has been focused on consolidating and modernizing applications and creating an agile digital workplace that fosters flexibility. An AI-driven network from Mist Systems is key to this endeavor, enabling consistent and reliable access to disparate tools from any location, while simultaneously providing the insight needed for IT to ensure the best possible user experiences. News highlights: Transports Vervaeke is in the process of modernizing fleet management operations, starting with the customization, maintenance and operation of the applications, systems and processes needed to manage 750 tractors, 1,000 tank trailers and 750 tank containers. This enables greater support for mission-critical operations around the shipping of dangerous loads, particularly where auditable compliance is important.

Juniper Mist Access Points and Wi-Fi Assurance software is essential to Transports Vervaekes digital transformation project. For instance, it enables mobile devices to gradually replace clipboards and paper in garages and warehouses so technicians can access work orders remotely, update workflow tasks, check inventory for parts, place orders and even automatically trigger invoicing when jobs are complete.

The Mist Wi-Fi solution is also available to employees and visitors in the companys corporate offices. The company now has the flexibility within its offices to be mobile with laptops and handheld devices. When employees travel to other company locations, their devices are automatically connected pon arrival.

With Mists WxLAN policy engine, office and field workers gain the benefits of remaining connected throughout the facilities while the IT team retains control over network usage. Administrators can configure role-based policies to block or shape traffic for applications that are undesired on the business network.

Transports Vervaeke has reduced troubleshooting time, using Marvis, Mists AI-Driven Virtual Network Assistant. This delivers unprecedented connectivity insights, ultimately simplifying network troubleshooting and operations for the company.

With virtual Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) built into the APs and unsupervised machine learning, Mist Systems simplifies and boosts the accuracy of location services. Transports Vervaeke plans to leverage this virtual BLE capability to identify and locate vehicles for required servicing, maintenance or cleaning as they enter a site, further streamlining operations.

Transports Vervaeke selected Juniper Networks' Elite partner Infradata, a leading cybersecurity and cloud networking solutions provider in Belgium, to design and deliver the AI-driven network solution.



Supporting Quotes: We are in the midst of a full digitalization of our company and we have made a lot of progress around our processes and information flows to ensure smooth operations and continued growth. With Mists AI-driven solution, we can revolutionize our operational environment, deliver a better experience for our employees and optimize our business processes.

- Mario De Smedt, IT Manager, Transports Vervaeke



It is essential for logistics organizations to ensure that customer orders are processed efficiently and delivered to the right place at the right time, even if circumstances and requirements suddenly change between departure and delivery. Juniper Mist will support Transports Vervaekes plan to use AI-driven IT to bring consistent visibility and real-time responses across countries, increase efficiency and ensure regulatory compliance with a visual transportation management system. Overall, this means that Transports Vervaeke is able to take its customer service into a new paradigm, as well as improving the operational experience for its employees.



- James Morgan, Vice President, Enterprise Sales, EMEA Juniper Networks Additional Resources: Success Story: Transports Vervaeke case study



Follow Juniper Networks online: Facebook | Twitter | LinkedIn



Juniper Blogs and Community: J-Net About Juniper Networks

Juniper Networks challenges the inherent complexity that comes with networking in the multicloud era. We do this with products, solutions and services that transform the way people connect, work and live. We simplify the process of transitioning to a secure and automated multicloud environment to enable secure, AI-driven networks that connect the world. Additional information can be found at Juniper Networks (www.juniper.net), or connect with Juniper on Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook. Juniper Networks, the Juniper Networks logo and Junos are registered trademarks of Juniper Networks, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the United States and other countries. Other names may be trademarks of their respective owners. Media Relations: Pelin Murphy Juniper Networks +44 (0) 1372 385 686 [email protected]

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Tiger Air and Virgin sit idle on the tarmac at Melbourne's Tullamarine Airport on April 12, 2020. (William West/AFP via Getty Images)

Shareholders Should Bail Out Virgin: Australian Treasurer

Australian Treasurer Josh Frydenberg said that he was aware of reports that Virgin Australia had hired insolvency experts and is looking at voluntary administration.

Responding to a question from a reporter at a press conference on April 15, the treasurer said Virgins first point of call is their shareholders and equity holders.

And theyve got some big equity holders there, he said.

Virgin Australias shareholders include Etihad Airways, Singapore Airlines, and two China-related companiesNanshan Village Committee and Hainan Traffic Administration Holding Co., Ltd.

A Virgin Australia spokesperson told The Epoch Times that the airline continues to monitor passenger numbers and adjust their capacity requirements as necessary to respond to the unprecedented COVID-19 crisis.

The airline said government restrictions meant fewer people are traveling.

We have made changes to our schedules to reflect this. We continue to operate a daily service between Melbourne and Sydney, provide cargo transport locally and overseas, and operate charter flights including assisting the government in bringing Australians home, the spokesperson said in an emailed statement.

Frydenberg said Australia has 25 million people, and having two airlines has served the country well in providing tourism links, movements of people, and freight services.

However, the government has taken a sector-wide approach in providing relief packages amid the crisis linked to the outbreak of the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus, commonly known as novel coronavirus.

The Virgin Australia spokesperson said the airline had been keeping the air fair for 20 years. We want to continue to provide a valuable service to all Australians, the 16,000 people employed directly and indirectly, and enable the broader economy to restart quickly once we emerge from this crisis.

Frydenberg said the government had announced over a billion dollars worth of support for the aviation sector which helps Virgin, Qantas, and regional airlines.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison said the aviation sector had already received quite significant support. We havent been picking any winners or picking any favourites here,  he told Today on April 14.

This article has been updated to include comments from a Virgin Australia spokesperson.
Making an accurate prediction based on observed data, in particular from short-term time series, is of much concern in various disciplines, arising from molecular biology, neuroscience, geoscience, economics to atmospheric sciences due to either data availability or time-variant non-stationarity. However, most of the existing methods require sufficiently long measurements of time series or a large number of samples, and there is no effective method available for the prediction only with short-term time-series because of lack of information.

To address this issue, Prof. CHEN Luonan (Institute of Biochemistry and Cell Biology, Chinese Academy of Sciences) with Dr. CHEN Chuan(Sun Yat-sen University), Prof. MA Huanfei (Soochow University) and Prof. AIHARA Kazuyuki (University of Tokyo) proposed a new dynamics-based data-driven method, Anticipated Learning Machine (ALM), for achieving precise future-state predictions based on short-term but high-dimensional data. Actually, the ALM is a multi-layered neural network, where high-dimensional variables are taken as input neurons (multiple variables but at a single time point) but a target variable is taken as output neurons (single variable but at multiple time points). In this way, ALM is able to transform the recent correlation/spatial information of high-dimensional variables to future dynamical/temporal information of any target variable, i.e. by spatial-temporal information transformation (STI) equations.

Specifically, ALM can be well trained to represent the randomly distributed embedding (RDE) map for STI equations by a large number of the generated training-samples with the Dropout scheme and the proposed consistent-training scheme, thus predicting the target variable in an accurate and robust manner even from short-term data. Extensive experiments on the short-term high-dimensional data from both synthetic and real-world systems demonstrated significantly superior performances of ALM over existing methods

Comparing with the traditional neural networks (or other machine learning approaches) which excavate the historical statistics of the original high-dimensional system and thus require a large number of samples, ALM efficiently and robustly reconstructs its dynamics even with a small number of samples by constraining to a low-dimension space which is actually an inherent property of such a dissipative system. Based on nonlinear dynamics to transform the spatial information of the all measured high-dimensional variables into the temporal evolution of the target variable by learning the STI equations, ALM open a new way for dynamics-based machine learning or "intelligent" anticipated learning.

"How to consider the strong nonlinearity or/and stochasticity of the dynamical systems also with the observed noisy data, and further how to make more in-depth theoretical analysis and further develop an appropriate framework taking these issues into consideration remain an open and interesting problem in future." Stated by the authors.

###

This research received funding from National Natural Science Foundation of China, the Ministry of Science and Technology of China, and Japanese Research Grants.

See the article:

Chuan Chen, Rui Li, Lin Shu, Zhiyu He, Jining Wang, Chengming Zhang, Huanfei Ma, Kazuyuki Aihara and Luonan Chen.

Predicting future dynamics from short-term time series by anticipated learning machine.

Natl Sci Rev, doi: 10.1093/nsr/nwaa025

https://doi.org/10.1093/nsr/nwaa025

The National Science Review is the first comprehensive scholarly journal released in English in China that is aimed at linking the country's rapidly advancing community of scientists with the global frontiers of science and technology. The journal also aims to shine a worldwide spotlight on scientific research advances across China.
Four suspected Islamic State members have been arrested in Germany for allegedly planning to launch a terror attack on American military facilities.

Federal prosecutors said the suspects were arrested by tactical police units early Wednesday at various locations in North Rhine-Westphalia, a western state in Germany.

The men were identified as Azizjon B., Muhammadali G., Farhodshoh K. and Sunatullokh K and all are citizens of Tajikistan. The suspects' surnames have not been released for privacy reasons.

The four suspects had already obtained firearms and ammunition to carry out the terror attack, prosecutors said (file photo)

The group's alleged leader, a 30-year-old Tajik man identified only as Ravsan B., has been in jail since March 2019 on unspecified charges. All suspects will be charged with membership in a terrorist organization.

Prosecutors said the men joined the Islamic State group in January 2019 and were instructed to form a cell in Germany.

According to the Federal Public Prosecutor's Office the men were planning attacks against facilities of US forces in Germany. In particular, they were planning an assassination attempt on an individual person who, in the opinion of the accused, had expressed Islam-critical views in public. Above, a police car leaves a police station in Karlsruhe

They reportedly first planned to carry out an attack in Tajikistan but later shifted their target to Germany, including US Air Force bases in the country and a person they deemed critical of Islam.

Prosecutors said the group had already obtained firearms and ammunition to carry out their attacks, while Ravsan B. had ordered materials to build an explosive device before the plot was foiled.

In order to pay for their plans, Ravsan B. allegedly accepted a $40,000 contract to assassinate someone in Albania, although the killing was not carried out.

The men were arrested at various locations in the state of North Rhine-Westphalia

The entrance to the Federal Supreme Court in Karlsruhe, southern Germany, is seen on April 15

They are also alleged to have been in contact with two high-ranking IS figures in Syria and Afghanistan.

While German authorities did not release details of which US air bases were targeted, local media outlet the Berlin Spectator reported that up to 350 police officers were involved in the operation.

The arrests come following just weeks after the publication of an IS newsletter that urged followers to 'show no mercy' and launch attacks amid the coronavirus pandemic.
Former Maharashtra chief minister Ashok Chavan on Wednesday demanded a thorough probe into Tuesday's gathering of migrants at Mumbai's Bandra railway station and said it was an attempt to disrupt communal harmony and negate the state's efforts to fight the coronavirus outbreak.

Addressing a press conference through a video link, he cited a letter of the South Central Railways for starting special trains to transport migrant labourers that might have triggered the gathering at Bandra.

A large number of migrant workers gathered at the Bandra railway station on Tuesday, forcing the police to take stern action to disperse them.

Migrant workers have been stranded at various places, including at state borders, ever since the nationwide lockdown was imposed on March 24.

Chavan said a police probe into the matter has already been launched and the guilty will be brought to book.

He said he smelt a political conspiracy behind the campaigns being run on social media to impose President's Rule in Maharashtra.

"Whatever happened on Tuesday, there needs to be a thorough investigation into it.

"There are some who want to disturb the communal harmony in Maharashtra and negate the state's efforts to fight coronavirus," he said.

Taking on the BJP, Chavan said, "Who is patronising the social media campaigns to impose President's Rule in Maharashtra? It smells of a political conspiracy. This is not the time to play politics, but who is running such social media campaigns needs to be found out.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
A February blaze inside ExxonMobils refinery in Louisianas capital city was caused by air getting into a line containing hydrocarbon material and igniting, the company said, releasing the results of an internal investigation.

ExxonMobil said it will ensure the valves involved in the problem are locked in a closed position to prevent it from happening again, WAFB-TV reported.

The fire broke out at the refinery on February 11, turning the night sky a shade of orange and sending a large plume of smoke into the air over Baton Rouge. ExxonMobil said its volunteer fire crews put out the blaze hours later. No injuries were reported, officials said.

ExxonMobil is the largest manufacturing employer in Louisiana, and its Baton Rouge refinery is the fifth largest in the nation. The facility produces gasoline, diesel, jet fuel and more.

Related:

Copyright 2022 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Topics Louisiana
What we need are government officials that provide the unvarnished truth, and the scientific facts to more fully understand how we will be able to suppress the curve, and save lives. The brave health care providers who stand on the frontlines of this battle deserve our unreserved gratitude. Their heroism is nonpartisan, as should be our admiration and support. Coronavirus knows no political affiliation, and every American is in peril. Every American should stand ready to help and adhere to the regulations put in place to slow the spread of the coronavirus. The people infected, sick and dying are not just statistics. They are our neighbors, friends, co-workers and loved ones. They are our fellow Americans.
Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, April 15)  The governments strategy after the lifting of the enhanced community quarantine over Luzon is gradually taking shape, the Inter-Agency Task Force for the Management of Emerging Infectious Diseases said on Wednesday.

Slowly we are coming up with a game plan on what will happen after April 30, said Karlo Nograles, who communicates the plans made by the countrys policy-making body on COVID-19 response to the public through televised briefings.

The spokesperson said the government is considering many options, including imposing modified lockdowns and reopening some establishments, but he said there is no definite decision yet on the post-April 30 scenario.

The official reiterated the only certain thing right now is that people in Luzon will face a new normal two weeks from now, including mandatory social distancing rules, the wearing of face masks, and the practice of proper hygiene.

We are considering ano yung mga pwede nang ibalik, pero di siya pwedeng tulad ng dati, Nograles said.

[Translation: We are considering what we could allow again, but we cannot go back to normal.]

Luzon has been under quarantine for almost a month now.

The lockdown shuttered businesses, except those offering essential goods and services. It also emptied streets by prohibiting mass gatherings and ordering most, except for those rendering vital services, to stay at home. It was the most extreme measure yet to slow the spread of COVID-19.

Nograles said the goal of the quarantine is to keep hospitals from getting overwhelmed since there is no vaccine yet for the viral disease.

Bukas na ating mga COVID-19 quarantine and isolation facilities, he added.

[Translation: Our quarantine and isolation facilities are now open.]

Ang target po natin (Our target) is we test more, we isolate them more, we treat them more and we have more recoveries, Nograles added.

He said as of April 11, there are 2,705 quarantine facilities with a total of 166,435 beds "have been built" across the country. They are serving 1,644 confirmed, probable and suspect COVID-19 cases.

The Department of Health previously referred to probable and suspect cases as persons under investigation.
The much-expected guidelines for the partial lifting of limited economic activity announced by the government are pragmatic and would be in force post April 20. It is good that the government has opened the doors towards working on an exit route and has included the most essential activity, agriculture to operate freely.

With the Rabi harvest to reach its peak this month, allowing the free flow of labour and transport to enable sale of produce is a big step that has been taken. While agriculture can be justified, allowing other activity like construction in rural areas or IT related ...
John Carter, 71, stood in line for three hours last week to cast his ballot for Jill Karofsky, the liberal candidate for the Wisconsin Supreme Court.

Carter, a retired bus driver from Milwaukee and African-American Democrat, said he wanted badly to oust conservative Justice Dan Kelly. And he wanted to send a message to President Donald Trump and state Republicans, who pushed for in-person voting despite the threat of the novel coronavirus pandemic.

"I saw the line and thought, 'Oh my God,' " Carter said. "'But I have to vote. I must stay here.' That's why so many people stood in those lines. They wanted change. They're looking for a change."

On Monday, Karofsky claimed a surprisingly decisive victory, defeating the Republican incumbent by 11 points. She was propelled by thousands of motivated Democrats, who were angered by GOP insistence on going forward with the election amid the coronavirus pandemic- seen by many as a way to suppress turnout and boost the conservative candidate in an obscure state court race.

The mobilization of these voters could signal a warning to Republicans in a state that will be key for Trump in the fall.

"There's no question in my mind that Democrats are more motivated to vote than Republicans," said Mark Mellman, a District of Columbia-based pollster who has done work for Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers, a Democrat.

A number of Republicans said too many factors were at work last Tuesday to draw conclusions about November, notably the presence of a competitive Democratic presidential primary. Scott Walker, a former Republican governor, said in an email that November turnout will be twice as large as it was last week. It's a "completely different model," he said.

But some Republicans said the results show a worrisome enthusiasm gap.

"I was surprised at the turnout in the Democratic primary. It was more than what I thought it would be," said Brandon Scholz, the former chairman of the Wisconsin GOP. The results reminded him how much Democrats hate the president, he said, and what a motivating force that could be.

Although November "will be different," Scholz said, "a cautionary note should be sounded."

Democrats are also delighted - and Republicans worried - about the geographic sweep of Karofsky's victory. She dominated not only in the states' two liberal strongholds, Milwaukee and Madison, but also in its suburbs and even some of its rural areas.

Charles Franklin, who conducts the Marquette University Law School poll, said the results underscored how changing voting patterns have increasingly cut into Republican margins in suburban counties around Milwaukee.

"Wisconsin has been a little slow to join the suburban shift that other states have seen earlier or bigger, but we are seeing the markers of that," he said.

Kelly carried suburban Milwaukee counties but by reduced margins from historical norms. "Our suburbs have been deep, deep red," Franklin said. "They still are red, but by a smaller and smaller margin."

Meanwhile, Karofsky won small majorities in three counties in the Fox Valley that have long favored Republicans. Franklin attributed the changes there to ever-stronger support for Democrats in the cities of Green Bay, Appleton and Oshkosh, which are surrounded by strong Republican rural areas.

Something else caught Franklin's eye. Karofsky swept the counties in the state's southwestern area, which included several that had voted for President Barack Obama in 2012 but shifted to Trump in 2016.

Andrew Hitt, chairman of the Wisconsin Republican Party, said Democratic turnout was much higher than on the Republican side because of the presence of a Democratic presidential primary on the ballot and an uncontested primary for Republicans. He predicted that turnout will be much more even in November.

"Hats off to Democrats for convincing Bernie to stay in the race to help Jill Karofsky," Hitt said, referring to Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., who conceded the Democratic nomination to former vice president Joe Biden the day after the Wisconsin primary. "I don't know how they did it, but clearly that's what they did."

Keith Gilkes, a Republican strategist and longtime Walker adviser, said Trump's strength in the northern part of the state remained solid, and he senses lack of real enthusiasm for Biden. But he noted that the Trump campaign cannot take for granted support from Republican suburban women and even some Republican suburban men.

"It's always a good warning for the Republican Party," he said of the primary results. "I think it's meant to help keep us on our feet. . . . This isn't a gimme state and it just fuels our toss-up nature."

Democrats who accused Republicans of trying to suppress turnout by going forward with the elections in Wisconsin said the GOP should abandon that strategy elsewhere.

"This election took voter suppression to the most dangerous level possible," said Tom Perez, chairman of the Democratic National Committee. "You were forcing people to choose between their own safety and health and their fundamental right to vote. That is such a cynical ploy."

And it didn't work, Perez added. More than 1.5 million Wisconsinites turned out to vote, either in person or by mail - more than any of the spring elections of the past three years.

"The average Wisconsin voter saw that, and saw right through it, and they made their voices heard," he said.

An additional factor may have been at work last week, and that was an infusion of money from Democratic groups keen on flipping Wisconsin back to their column in November. Among them was the National Democratic Redistricting Committee, the group founded by former Obama attorney general Eric Holder to target Republican governors, legislators and judges who could stand in the way of his fight against partisan gerrymandering of political districts.

Holder's group gave about $220,000 to support Karofsky's campaign, including $50,000 to a grass roots group in Milwaukee called BLOC - Black Leaders Organizing for Change.

That group's activity, combined with Republican insistence on going forward with voting even though Milwaukee was able to open five voting locations out of the usual 180, helped spur high turnout, Holder said.

"It's an indication how you can spend a relatively small amount of money and have an impact, a grass roots impact," he said, adding: "Republicans will act at their peril, both the president and people at the state level, if they employ tactics to deny people the opportunity to vote in a way that is safe for them and safe for their communities. I think that will drive turnout up. They will find ways to vote."

Angela Lang, the founder of BLOC, said one of the group's great successes was orchestrating a dry run for the fall election, teaching voters how to vote by mail and forging relationships that will last through the cycle. The group made nearly 35,000 calls and sent nearly 82,000 texts in Milwaukee, Lang said.

"People didn't know that requesting an absentee ballot was an option," Lang said. "We gave them a crash course in understanding the different ways to vote."

In the end, about 70 percent of voters cast ballots by mail in last week's elections - up from a typical number of less than 15 percent.

Franklin, the pollster with Marquette University, offered an additional caveat that makes direct comparisons with November's presidential election more difficult: Trump himself was not on the ballot, and his ability to draw his voters out is considered one of his strongest assets.

But the patterns that helped decide the Supreme Court race worry Republicans nonetheless. The shifts were evident in the presidential races of 2012 and 2016 as well as in the gubernatorial elections of 2014 and 2018. In all cases, the Republican suburban strongholds were beginning to erode.

Said Gilkes, the GOP strategist: "I don't think this is going to be an easy win in any way shape or form."

- - -

Simmons reported from Milwaukee. The Washington Post's David Weigel also contributed to this report.
A new poll carried out by the Pew Research Center from March 10 to March 16, 2020, shows that almost 1 in 3 Americans think the novel coronavirus, severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), that causes the current COVID-19 pandemic is the product of biological research. Despite the utter lack of evidence, the claim has found fertile breeding grounds on the Internet. It serves as an apt example of the spread of dubious or patently false information about the pandemic.

Coronavirus 2019-nCov novel coronavirus illustration: Image Credit: Creativeneko / Shutterstock

Where did the virus emerge?

All current knowledge points to the emergence of the virus from a member of the bat species, even though the very first case (Patient Zero) is yet to be identified, and though the manner in which the bat virus jumped across species barriers to infect humans is unknown.

Chinese researchers published an article in the journal Nature in early February 2020, which reported that the genome of the novel coronavirus is identical to that of a bat coronavirus. Genetic tracing shows that the virus came from a single source, which mutated to the eight strains circulating today.

Where do people say it came from?

The Pew poll results show that almost 23% of Americans say the virus is a deliberate laboratory creation, while another 7% think it was an inadvertent but nonetheless manmade creation. The difference in gullibility is obvious when the respondents are classified by age: the "manmade virus" theory is held by only a fifth of those aged 65 years or older, but by 35% of those aged 18 to 29 years.

Again, differences exist across the educational divide: 35% of those who think the virus came from a lab has at least a high school diploma, but only a fifth of people who have studied up to the level of a bachelor's degree, at least. Blacks and Hispanics are also more likely to believe this theory, at about 34% and 40%, respectively, compared to a fifth of whites.

The chief 'support' for this hypothesis is that the Chinese city of Wuhan contains not only the level IV biosafety laboratory called the Wuhan Institute of Virology but also, in close proximity, the wet seafood market where the virus was initially claimed to have emerged in humans.

Republican Senator Tom Cotton lent credibility to the idea of a conspiracy on January 30, 2020. This allowed it to spread in the mainstream, despite his later clarification that natural spread is likely. He does not exclude the possibility of it being a bioweapon, though he also says it could have escaped from the laboratory.

It is worth noting that some scientists debate the 'wet market' origin. An article in The Lancet reveals that the first patient in whom COVID-19 was confirmed, as well as another one-third of the first 40 cases, did not have any history of contact with the wet market. Despite this, most experts today do not commit themselves to the theory of laboratory origin of the coronavirus.

Fighting misinformation

It is notable that in an age of scientific advancement, conspiracy theories and superstitious fear of modern gadgets are taking over the minds of more and more people. An 'infodemic', as the World Health Organization (WHO) terms this flood of false news, is taking the world by storm.

Apart from the "virus-created-in-Chinese-lab" hypothesis, more and more people now believe that the 5G networks cause the virus to spread in some mysterious way. Some 5G cellular towers have even been destroyed as a result, which only harms the economy further, besides hampering communication between health workers and the community, as well as between isolated people and their families or caregivers.

To counter this, social media like Twitter and Whatsapp are tightening their control of what content goes online. Whatsapp, the social media giant, owned by Facebook, has put a ceiling on how many times a message can be forwarded to a user. If the same user is part of multiple groups, this will prevent the message from reaching a large number of groups simultaneously.

Over and above this, buffer messages are shown above search pages warning of misinformation being spread by some users of social media. Will these measures keep the infodemic at bay? It seems unlikely, given the modern tendency to distrust anything that runs counter to one's own thinking, no matter how reliable the source. Unless people learn to think, observe, and assimilate information, all the social messaging and education in the world will have little effect on public health or the pandemic.

What is the cost of misinformation?

When people believe the coronavirus doesn't exist, but the illness is because of 5G radiation, they won't take precautions against it. This will result in a second and third wave of infections racking already suffering countries, possibly wrecking the economy irreparably. Such conspiracy theories and misinformation only distract people and make them stop paying attention to social distancing and personal hygienic practices.

The flood of false theories about the origin of the virus takes up precious administrative time and effort to counter them. They also create fear, as well as anti-racial and nationalistic jingoism that hinders scientific collaboration at a time when it couldn't be more critical. Their promoters are responsible for the high toll they will eventually exact in terms of human suffering by promoting the spread of the virus.
The rule of thumb, or rather feet, has been to stand 6 feet apart in public. Thats supposed to be a safe distance if a person nearby is coughing or sneezing and is infected with the novel coronavirus, spreading droplets that may carry virus particles.

And scientists agree that 6 feet is a sensible and useful minimum distance, but some say farther away would be better.

Six feet has never been a magic number that guarantees complete protection. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, one of the organizations using that measure, bases its recommendation on the idea that most large droplets that people expel when they cough or sneeze will fall to the ground within 6 feet.

But some scientists, having looked at studies of air flow and being concerned about smaller particles called aerosols, suggest that people consider a number of factors, including their own vulnerability and whether they are outdoors or in an enclosed room, when deciding whether 6 feet is enough distance.

Sneezes, for instance, can launch droplets a lot farther than 6 feet, according to a recent study.

No scientists are suggesting a wholesale change in behavior or proposing that some other length for separation from another human, like 7, or 9 feet, is actually the right one.

Everything is about probability, said Dr. Harvey Fineberg, who is the head of the Standing Committee on Emerging Infectious Diseases and 21st Century Health Threats at the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine. Three feet is better than nothing. Six feet is better than 3 feet. At that point, the larger drops have pretty much fallen down. Maybe if youre out of spitting range, that could be even safer, but 6 feet is a pretty good number.

One complicating factor is that aerosols, smaller droplets that can be emitted when people are breathing and talking, play some role in spreading the new coronavirus. Studies have shown that aerosols can be created during certain hospital or laboratory procedures like when using nebulizers to help patients inhale medication, which makes such procedures risky for doctors who do them.

If the aerosols that people exhale in other settings are significant in spreading the disease, the 6-foot distance would not be completely protective because those are carried more easily by air currents.

Aerosols are generally considered to be particles under 5 microns in diameter, about the size of a red blood cell, and can be spread in the environment by talking and breathing. But some researchers argue that this is a false dichotomy. Infectious droplets cant easily be divided into those that are big enough to fall to the ground quickly and those that stay aloft because so much depends on environmental conditions and how deeply they penetrate into the respiratory tract.

Its really a continuum, said Dr. Donald Milton, who studies bioaerosols at the University of Maryland School of Public Health.

Even without the launching power of a sneeze, air currents could carry a flow of aerosol-sized virus particles exhaled by an infected person 20 feet or more away.

In any confined geometry like an office room, meeting room, department store, food store, said Eugene Chudnovsky, a physicist at the City University of New York. In a study not yet peer reviewed, he analyzed air flow and showed how the vortices in the air are taking the virus to different places.

A preliminary study at the University of Nebraska Medical Center found evidence of coronavirus genetic material on various surfaces in isolation rooms where infected patients were being treated, including on air vents more than 6 feet from the patients. The research, which has not yet been peer reviewed, indicates that the virus can occasionally travel long distances.

The virus is so small, it can hitch a ride even on tiny, tiny particles, Fineberg said. But how important is each size and how well they can transmit disease is not fully understood.

It is also unclear how many virus particles it takes to start an infection, how long the viral particles remain viable or if studies like the one in Nebraska simply detected the genetic calling card the virus left behind.

Spacing is an effective solution because it also reduces the number of people in a confined space. That reduces the likelihood of an infected person being in the group. And if there is one, fewer other people might be infected.

Dr. Michael Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota, said the 6-foot distance would clearly reduce the number of droplets you come in contact with. I have no doubt about that.

But, he said: The question is what does it take for you to get infected? And that I think is the trillion-dollar question we have.

He said, Maybe all it takes is an aerosol. You dont need any droplets at all. If thats the case, he said, then someone who is at high risk would not want to be in the same room with someone who is infected or might be infected.

Current guidelines already suggest that anyone at high risk should stay home and not be out in public in the first place. And they seem to be working. Places where people reduced travel and started social distancing weeks ago, especially in California, New York and Washington, are starting to show a reduction in the number of new coronavirus cases.

People still need to shop and take care of necessities, Osterholm said, but reducing the risk of exposure to all possible modes of transmission  infected surfaces, droplets and smaller aerosols  is important.

Your job is to limit it as much as you can.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Source: Xinhua| 2020-04-15 20:59:07|Editor: huaxia

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NAIROBI, April 15 (Xinhua) -- The United Nations migration agency said Wednesday it is assisting Kenya's COVID-19 response at border points.

Sharon Dimanche, Chief of Mission, International Organization for Migration (IOM) Kenya said in a statement that the organization has provided supplies of infection prevention and control supplies, including masks, gloves, sanitizers and masks to border officials at 27 points of entry into Kenya.

"This intervention is ensuring that frontline border officers are protecting themselves as well as the people they are serving from novel coronavirus. IOM, through the Better Migration Management program, has supported the government of Kenya to address migration issues in the country," Dimanche said.

Dimanche noted that IOM medical staff are also helping the authorities to train over 50 community health workers and volunteers in the densely migrant populated suburb of Eastleigh on the outskirts of Nairobi with COVID-19 awareness and prevention.

She noted that the training includes identifying the symptoms of the disease, knowing how the infection is spread, hygiene, social distancing, and guarding against myths around the infection.
Malaysian Anti-Corruption Commission staffers transport documents in the 1MDB case to the Kuala Lumpur High Court ahead of the second corruption trial of former Prime Minister Najib Razak, Aug. 28, 2019.

The United States government said Tuesday it had returned $300 million misappropriated by a fugitive financier from the Malaysian state investment fund 1MDB and laundered in the United States, Switzerland, Singapore and Luxembourg.

Combined with previous appropriations sent back to Malaysias government, the U.S. has returned more than $600 million (2.6 billion ringgit) to the Southeast Asian nation, the Department of Justice (DOJ) announced in a statement. It said efforts to recover more funds stolen from 1Malaysia Development Berhad were ongoing.

The repatriation of these stolen funds to the citizens of Malaysia is the result of the tireless efforts of prosecutors and federal agents to prevent foreign kleptocrats and their associates from using the United States as a playground where they can enjoy the fruits of their pilfered wealth, said U.S. Attorney Nick Hanna of the Central District of California.

In 2019, a federal court in that California district entered judgments forfeiting more than $700 million (3.03 billion ringgit) in assets acquired by fugitive financier Low Taek Jho, better known as Jho Low, and his family.

The U.S. has recovered or assisted in the recovery of more than $1 billion (4.3 billion) in assets associated with the 1MDB international money laundering and bribery scheme. This represents the largest recovery to date under the departments Kleptocracy Asset Recovery Initiative and the largest civil forfeiture ever concluded by the DOJ, it said in its news release.

This extraordinary sum of money is going back to the people of Malaysia where it belongs and where it can finally be used for its original intended purpose  to better the lives of everyday Malaysians, said Chief Don Fort of IRS-Criminal Investigations (IRS-CI).

Mr. Low attempted to launder these assets through multiple international jurisdictions and a web of shell corporations, but his greed finally caught up with him. This case is a model for international cooperation in significant cross-border money laundering investigations.

Low, who is the subject of a manhunt, faces criminal charges in Malaysia for his role in allegedly embezzling billions of dollars from 1MDB through his relationship with former Prime Minister Najib Razak.

Najib set up 1MDB in 2009 ostensibly to spur economic development, but the fund amassed billions in debts. In 2016, the U.S. Department of Justice accused Malaysian Official 1  later identified as Najib  and associates of embezzling and laundering more than U.S. $4.5 billion (19.5 billion ringgit) in 1MDB-linked money between 2009 and 2014.

Najib, who faces a total of 42 criminal counts, is standing trial in two courts on 32 of the charges linked to abuse of power and laundering money tied to 1MDB and a subsidiary, SRC International. He could face additional trials on the 10 remaining charges.

Najibs wife, Rosmah Mansor, faces charges in Malaysia related to 1MDB as well.

In March, Malaysian Prime Minister Muhyiddin Yassin said task force officials had briefed him that 1.4 billion ringgit ($323 million) tied to 1MDB had been returned and another 6.9 billion ringgit ($1.6 billion) had been identified.

The prime minister has instructed that efforts to track and reclaim 1MDB funds from various countries continue, his office said on March 17.
About 850,000 people could be seriously sickened by the coronavirus in Japan and almost half of them could die if no social distancing or other measures are followed, according to a government-commissioned estimate released on Wednesday.

Japan has the world's oldest population, and the virus can be especially dangerous for the elderly.

And there are concerns that Japan's government has done too little to stave off high numbers of badly ill patients.

Japan's current state of emergency is voluntary and doesn't compensate workers for lost earnings.

Japanese companies also have been slow to introduce remote work, and people have continued to use public transit to commute to large offices in the densely populated capital region.

Already, patients are being moved to non-specialist hospitals and even hotels as infections surge in the capital, where medical experts warn the health care system is on the brink of collapse.

The projection is a worst-case scenario, said Hokkaido University professor Hiroshi Nishiura, an expert on cluster analysis.

He urged people to cooperate in the social distancing effort.

"We can stop the transmission if all of us change our activity and significantly reduce interactions," he said.

The report projected 420,000 deaths if no preventive measures were taken.

Japan has more than 8,800 confirmed coronavirus cases and 131 deaths, including about 700 cases from a cruise ship that was quarantined at a port near Tokyo earlier this year.

The health ministry reported 457 new cases on Wednesday. Tokyo has about a quarter of Japan's total cases.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
One simple way to benefit from a rising market is to buy an index fund. In contrast individual stocks will provide a wide range of possible returns, and may fall short. For example, that's what happened with China Literature Limited (HKG:772) over the last year - it's share price is down 18% versus a market return of -15%. China Literature hasn't been listed for long, so although we're wary of recent listings that perform poorly, it may still prove itself with time. It's down 19% in about a quarter. However, one could argue that the price has been influenced by the general market, which is down 14% in the same timeframe.

Check out our latest analysis for China Literature

While markets are a powerful pricing mechanism, share prices reflect investor sentiment, not just underlying business performance. By comparing earnings per share (EPS) and share price changes over time, we can get a feel for how investor attitudes to a company have morphed over time.

During the unfortunate twelve months during which the China Literature share price fell, it actually saw its earnings per share (EPS) improve by 8.4%. It could be that the share price was previously over-hyped.

The divergence between the EPS and the share price is quite notable, during the year. But we might find some different metrics explain the share price movements better.

China Literature's revenue is actually up 66% over the last year. Since we can't easily explain the share price movement based on these metrics, it might be worth considering how market sentiment has changed towards the stock.

You can see below how earnings and revenue have changed over time (discover the exact values by clicking on the image).

SEHK:772 Income Statement April 15th 2020

It's good to see that there was some significant insider buying in the last three months. That's a positive. On the other hand, we think the revenue and earnings trends are much more meaningful measures of the business. This free report showing analyst forecasts should help you form a view on China Literature

Story continues

A Different Perspective

China Literature shareholders are down 18% for the year, even worse than the market loss of 15%. There's no doubt that's a disappointment, but the stock may well have fared better in a stronger market. Notably, the loss over the last year isn't as bad as the 19% drop in the last three months. This probably signals that the business has recently disappointed shareholders - it will take time to win them back. It's always interesting to track share price performance over the longer term. But to understand China Literature better, we need to consider many other factors. Consider risks, for instance. Every company has them, and we've spotted 3 warning signs for China Literature you should know about.

China Literature is not the only stock that insiders are buying. For those who like to find winning investments this free list of growing companies with recent insider purchasing, could be just the ticket.

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.
President Donald Trump and other G7 leaders will discuss international coordination of the coronavirus response by video conference on Thursday, the White House said.

The remote meeting convened by Trump follows up on another virtual summit held last month and comes as the leading world economies remain under lockdown due to the pandemic.

Trump convened the meeting for "Thursday morning to coordinate national responses to the Coronavirus pandemic," White House spokesman Judd Deere said.

"Working together, the G7 is taking a whole-of-society approach to tackle the crisis across multiple areas, including health, finance, humanitarian assistance, and science and technology," Deere said.

The G7 is made up of Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan and the United States, which this year holds the group's presidency.

The White House has said that the traditional annual summit, due to have been staged near Washington in June, will instead also take place by video link.

On Tuesday, Trump spoke by phone with French President Emmanuel Macron on "efforts to defeat the coronavirus pandemic and reopen world economies," the White House said.

"The two leaders also discussed the upcoming teleconference with G7 leaders, as well as critical regional and bilateral issues.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
What I like about this procedure were using, it puts it in (the commissioners) lap to do their thing - what they do best - now. So, if its 60 days, if its 90 days, whatever, before the public hearing occurs they have all this time to work on it, Szarmach said. You cannot adopt any zoning change without a public hearing in front of the Plan Commission.
STOCKHOLM (Reuters) - Swedish hygiene products group Essity <ESSITYb.ST> reported a surge in first-quarter core earnings on Tuesday after the coronavirus pandemic drove consumers to stockpile household essentials such as toilet paper.

Essity, which is due to publish full quarterly results on April 23, said already last month it had lifted its output to beyond normal full capacity to cope with higher demand across all its markets for hygiene products.

The company said in a statement that operating profit before amortisation and items affecting comparability jumped 67% from a year earlier to 5.33 billion crowns ($535.6 million) on the back of a 10% increase in sales to 33.7 billion.

"The COVID-19 pandemic has resulted in a sharp increase in sales in many markets for Consumer Tissue, Incontinence Products, Baby Care, Feminine Care and Professional Hygiene as a result of hoarding among consumers and distributors," it said.

In March alone, organic sales growth, which strips out the impact of acquisitions and divestments, reached 20% with the three divisions Personal Care, Consumer Tissue and Professional Hygiene recording increases of 17%, 20% and 25% respectively.

"Sales in future quarters may be adversely impacted by the hoarding seen in March and sales in Professional Hygiene may also be negatively impacted by reduced travel, fewer restaurant visits and more people working from home," Essity cautioned, adding it had a solid funding situation.

The rival to Procter & Gamble <PG.N> and Kimberly-Clark <KMB.N> is the global leader in hygiene products for businesses under the Tork brand, and in incontinence products with TENA.

It is the world's second-biggest maker of consumer tissue such as toilet paper and handkerchiefs under a wide range of brands such as Lotus, Edet, Tempo and Vinda.

Analysts at Credit Suisse said in a note to clients the preliminary results were a "slight positive". Essity's shares rose 2.7% at 1348 GMT.

(Reporting by Anna Ringstrom; editing by Niklas Pollard)
Moradabad : , April 15 (IANS) A team of health workers and police was attacked in Moradabad on Wednesday when they went to pick up a coronavirus patient and his family.

The incident in which several police and health workers were injured took place in Nawabpura area of Moradabad. The ambulance and four other vehicles were also damaged in the stone pelting.

According to reports, a man named Sartaj had been unwell and was admitted to the medical college in the Tirthankar Mahavir University.

His samples were sent for testing on April 9 and the report that came on April 13 found him to be corona positive. Sartaj died the same night.

Some members of his family were quarantined at the IFTM University.

The health and police team, on Wednesday, went to their house to pick up Sartaj's younger brother who had been suffering from fever.

As soon as the team reached the area, people started coming out of their houses and collecting at the spot. They tried to prevent the remaining family members from being taken for quarantine.

The health team tried to explain to the crowds but the local people became aggressive and started pelting stones.

ADG (Law and order) P.V. Ramasastry said in Lucknow that the situation was under control and efforts were on to identify the miscreants. "We will take very strict action against those involved in this incident," he said.
Actor Tisca Chopra believes it is unlikely that people would be willing to step into a cinema hall for at least a year in the aftermath of the coronavirus pandemic. The actor said in the coming days, a lot of the content will be heading directly to the streaming platforms, with the exception of the big ticket films.

A lot of the content will go direct to OTT platforms. It is the best time for OTTs because everyone is on some or the other app or platform. I think the smaller, mid-level films will go direct-to-OTT. Those who cant sustain, who borrowed money to make films and are paying interest on that money, will necessarily have to encash the films they have made, Tisca told reporters over Zoom call.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Tuesday announced the extension of the nationwide lockdown for another 19 days till May 3 to contain the spread of the coronavirus disease. So far in India, there have been 10,363 confirmed cases with 339 deaths due to COVID-19, as per the Union health ministry data.

Tisca said under the current circumstances, people will be scared to converge at a public place and theatres will be definitely facing the brunt as a result of this.

The big ticket experience films, that can wait for six months or a year and a half, might release after a year. I dont think anyone is venturing into a cinema hall for the next year at least... Right now no one knows enough about the disease. So, I am not putting myself in a situation where I am in a closed room with 500 people, where there might be a huge virus load in the air. Till such time as there isnt a vaccine found for this, no one is going to enter a theatre, she added.

Also read: Sussanne Khans sister Farah Khan Alis family faces coronavirus scare as staff member tests positive

Tisca currently stars in the web series, Hostages, which made its TV debut on Star Plus. The actor, who plays a doctor in the Sudhir Mishra-directed Hotstar Special, said the dilemma faced by the healthcare workers today is similar to what her character encountered on the show.

I see the doctors today doing exactly that. So many havent even met their families, they are staying in hotels, putting themselves at risk everyday. I cant even imagine their condition. In Hostages, my character was confronted with a choice right on the centre of her being: endangering the life of a patient and choosing between the life of her family. Strangely, the doctors today face a similar situation. If they go back home, they endanger their family, if they dont go to work, they wont be able to take care of the patients, she added.

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The regular four-day sittings continue Wednesday at the National Assembly. There are 29 issues on the agenda, including the election of the new governor of the Central Bank of Armenia.

On Tuesday, the parliament debated on only 6-7 out of the 29 issues.

On Wednesday, the legislature will discuss, in particular, and in the second reading, the controversial bill on confiscation of property of illegal origin.
As many as 183 new coronavirus



patients were reported in Mumbai on Wednesday, taking the tally of COVID-19 cases in the city to 1,936, the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation said.

The death toll due to the pandemic in the city rose to 113 with two patients succumbing during the day, it added.

On positive side, 17 patients were discharged from hospitals, taking the number of recovered patients to 181.

Two hundred and sixty-one persons were admitted to hospitals in the city during the day for suspected virus infection, the BMC release added.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Within two days of allowing production and sale of liquor amid the coronavirus-triggered lockdown, the Assam government on Wednesday withdrew its order after the Centre's guidelines on the extended shutdown did not give any such relaxation.

In its consolidated guidelines issued by the Union Ministry of Home Affairs, no relaxation has been given to liquor manufacturing or its retail sales, which was allowed in Assam from Monday by the state Excise Department.

Prohibition was lifted in Assam's next door neighbour Meghalaya too the same day.

A strict ban has been enforced on the sale of liquor, gutka, tobacco etc. under the updated guidelines that came a day after Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced extension of the nationwide-lockdown till May 3 to check spread of COVID-19 infection.

"States/Union Territory cannot dilute restrictions imposed vide the aforesaid guidelines issued by MHA. States/UTs may, however, impose stricter measures than these guidelines as per requirement of local areas," Union Home Secretary Ajay Bhalla wrote to all Chief Secretaries during the day.

Deputy commissioners of two districts of Assam told PTI that the Union Cabinet secretary during a video conference this morning specifically instructed all states to shut activities related to production and sale of alcohol.

Following this, the Assam Excise Department issued an order in evening asking all the DCs to close liquor shops, wholesale warehouses, bottling plants, distilleries and breweries indefinitely in the state.

The communication issued by Additional Commissioner of Excise S K Medhi stated that the revised order from the state government was issued "in view of the Consolidated Revised Guidelines and National Directives issued by the Central Government for COVID-19 management".

On April 12, Medhi had ordered all liquor shops, wholesale warehouses, bottling plants, distilleries and breweries across Assam to open from the next day for seven hours daily.

Opening of the liquor vends on Monday after 20 days had seen long queue of tipplers at wine shops.

Maintaining social distance, people stood in serpentine queues to have their choice of liquor bottle.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Make things better if you can. If not, at least do not make things worse. This is the golden rule of constructive engagement in any endeavour world over.

However, former Congress president Rahul Gandhis public interventions are a case study in doing exactly the opposite. He is constantly looking for opportunities to make things worse, spread negativity and panic, often using fake news.

The current coronavirus or COVID-19 crisis has brought out this facet of Rahul Gandhi to the fore like never before.

In one particular press interaction, Gandhi criticised the governments action or in his opinion, the lack of action, on fighting the virus. When asked what he would suggest to the government or what he would have done instead, he said hes not an expert and he cannot give tactical answers on how he would have dealt with the virus.

Theres a dialogue in The Dark Knight that showcases this kind of mindset. Im a dog chasing cars. I wouldnt know what to do with it if I caught one, says the Joker, an agent of anarchy.

Criticism of someones action means that one has a different idea of what needs to be done. But in Gandhis worldview, criticism is not a means to make things better, but just a poisoned dart to be thrown around without any responsibility or information.

Gandhi has now publicly urged the government to bring back Indians from the Gulf countries which are hit by the virus. Calling for India to work with the governments of these countries to ensure the welfare of these Indians would have shown political maturity.

Calling for them to be brought back wholesale is a recipe for chaos. India and West Asian countries have a large swathe of shared interests that can be leveraged to ensure the welfare of over 9 million Indians there.

Recently, Gandhi ridiculed Indias testing strategy based on a tests per million metric. Application of simple logic would suggest that given Indias 1.35 billion population, such a metric is clearly loaded against India no matter how much we test.

And despite conducting over two lakh tests, the percentage of positives unearthed were just around 4%.

Testing kits are at a premium and Indias strategy must be carefully calibrated and not based on whims. Besides, experts of ICMR are at the helm of Indias testing strategy and they know their domain.

Such incompetence and lack of application could still be seen as amusing. But what is inexcusable is Gandhis habit of shooting from the shoulders of unverified and fake news with impunity.

Recently, he promoted the tweet of a profile claiming to be a doctor in Haryana. The tweet ridiculed Prime Minister Narendra Modis request to citizens to thank doctors and said doctors did not have N95 masks and gloves. That tweet of Rahul Gandhi has over 14,000 retweets.

Subsequently, the doctor retracted her claim and apologised for spreading panic and misinformation. Protective equipment was available but she didnt know where to find it, she said. This, however, conveniently did not get Gandhis attention.

Without a second thought, he perpetuated a falsehood that could have demoralised thousands of doctors and health workers who are at the frontline of fighting the virus.

Meanwhile, it would be pertinent to remember that even Opposition leaders such as Sharad Pawar came out to applaud for health workers and doctors, the same initiative of Modi that Gandhi ridiculed.

The contagious disease of fake news that looks to show India in negative light has infected Gandhis timeline from long before the coronavirus infection perhaps broke out in China.

In 2017, he spread said India fell over 50 places in the World Hunger Index. Such a thing had not happened at all. The next year too he spread the same news again despite knowing well that the change in Indias position was due to an internal restructuring in the analysis of introducing 44 outperforming outlier countries into the list in one go.

He ridiculed Make In India campaign and Vande Bharat express. The train has since brought in excellent profit for the Railways while ensuring good customer service.

Gandhis harmful and petulant behaviour around the Rafale deal was part of the reason behind the countrys rejection of the Congress in 2019.

The way Gandhi parroted a survey of 548 people that concluded India is the most dangerous place in the world for women was an illustrative example of his propensity to play up anything negative about India, irrespective of the facts.

His meeting the Chinese ambassador in secret while ridiculing Indias action in Doklam also showed his judgement in poor light.

The anger Gandhi has towards Indian people for voting in favour of Modi is starkly visible on his Twitter timeline and in his press interactions.

The snide remarks, the name-calling, playing up fake news to hit out at the countrys image  things that Gandhis devotees lap up are the same things that repel ordinary Indians.

India deserves articulate and thoughtful Opposition leaders and Gandhi is anything but that.
ARCHIVED - Wednesday Covid-19 figures for Spain: more than 5,000 new cases in the last 24 hours



Fewer deaths, more recoveries but more new cases in the latest daily Covid-19 update

Total cases 177, 633 : 5,092 new cases in the last 24 hours

Total fatalities 18,579 : 523 in the last 24 hours

Total recoveries 70, 853 : 3,346 in the last 24 hours

During the last few days the official figures supplied by the Spanish government have indicated that in certain ways a peak may have been reached in the development of the coronavirus pandemic, especially with a levelling out in the number of confirmed active cases throughout the country, but the latest data made available on Wednesday morning (relating to the figures from Tuesday) underline the fact that it is far too early to imagine that the battle against Covid-19 has been won.

There has been strong criticism among those living in Spain of recent BBC coverage which suggested that the lockdown restrictions were being relaxed on Monday of this week, as for most people in the country this is simply not the case. The only change on Monday was that after a prolonged Easter break during which industry all but shut down, those employed in non-essential activities were allowed to return to work.

However, not all of them did so, and throughout Spain it is widely recognized that if a peak in the extent of the virus has indeed been reached then it is largely on account of the lockdown, and that no complacency can be allowed if the number of active cases is to be reduced rather than merely remaining close to constant.

This became all the more apparent on Wednesday when the latest daily bulletin showed that another 5,092 cases of Covid-19 had been confirmed, far more than the 3,159 of the day before. Another slight fall is reported in the daily death toll which now stands at 18,579, but 523 more fatalities cannot possibly be treated as good news, even though the number of patients overcoming the infection climbed by another 3,346 to over 70,000 (out of a total of 177,633 cases identified so far).

The upshot of the latest figures is that the latest data show a slight increase in the number of confirmed active cases in Spain, which now stands at 88,204, but the numbers of new cases are slowing down. This is the highest total yet reported, and not until the number of recoveries regularly exceeds the number of new cases reported will it be possible to state that the pandemic is on the wane in this country.

Another piece of positive news is that the Palacio del Hielo ice rink in Majadahonda has been officially taken out of service as an emergency morgue following a recent drop in the death rate in the region of Madrid. Of course this is to be welcomed, but at the same time another 156 deaths were reported by the regional health service on Wednesday morning. In addition, another two emergency morgues are still in use at the Palacio de Hielo in Madrid itself and at the Legal Medical Institute.

It is also worth remembering that the number of cases reported is the least reliable of the statistics, given that testing limitations have led to some analysts speculation that the real number of infections could be 10 times higher than that reported. Nonetheless, these are the data available, and if they are beginning to show tentative signs of improvement this is a vindication of the lockdown restrictions which remain in place for most of the population.

In comparison with other countries, some of which have imposed more lenient restrictions on movement, it could also be said that Spains emergency policies are bearing fruit. If the number of active cases first stabilizes and then begins to fall, this places the country more or less on a par with Germany, where the figure began to fall on 6th April, and ahead of Italy, France and the UK, where numbers continue to rise.

All of this appears to justify further extensions to the lockdown - after all, if the strategy is working, why change it?  and it appears that the government is considering a very gradual relaxation of the restrictions when eventually it becomes possible to begin. The latest indications are that the resumption of something approaching normality could be staggered over the rest of this year.

In the meantime, though, the next objectives must be for the number of patient recoveries to regularly exceed the number of new cases reported, and for the rate at which fatalities are being added to the total to slow down still further.

Remember: LOCKDOWN MEANS LOCKDOWN. STAY AT HOME. STAY SAFE AND DO YOUR BIT TO REDUCE THE SPREAD OF CORONAVIRUS.

Follow Murcia Today on Facebook to keep up to date with all the latest updates locally for the Region of Murcia and the main information for the rest of Spain: https://www.facebook.com/MurciaToday/.

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What to do if you are in the Region of Murcia and believe you may have contracted the virus

The regional government has set up a special helpline to supply information to members of the public (900 121212) if they suspect that they may have contracted the virus rather than going straight to hospital or to a medical centre.

Sensible precautions

The advice being issued to members of the public by medical authorities all over the world coincides on the following points:

- Wash hands frequently with either soap and water or a sanitiser gel

- Catch coughs and sneezes with disposable tissues  and throw the tissues away immediately after use before immediately washing your hands!

- If you dont have a tissue, use your sleeve  and wash the item of clothing used at the next opportunity

- AVOID touching your eyes, nose and mouth with unwashed hands

- AVOID close contact with people who are unwell

- Dont panic!
Just as COVID-19 has changed almost every aspect of society, it is also definitely not politics as usual. Leaders are being forged in the crucible of a pandemic, and there is plenty of criticism and kudos to go around.

One of the most remarkable transformations has been the leadership of Ontarios Premier Doug Ford. Known for his abrasive and adversarial style, prior to the pandemic, the Ontario Conservative government was mired in several controversies, like their disastrous attempt to update license plates.

But since COVID-19 has become a serious issue, Premier Ford has drawn praise from many cornersincluding the Toronto Starfor the way that he has handled this ongoing crisis.

Raju Mudhar is joined by Martin Regg Cohn, political columnist based at Queens Park for the Star, to talk about how Ford style of leadership has changed, how he compares with Donald Trump and Winston Churchill and whether we might expect this to last.

Listen here or subscribe at Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts or wherever you listen to your favourite podcasts.

Read more about:
Intrusion of online lessons is unwelcome, Letter, April 11

As a parent of three elementary aged children and a public elementary school teacher, myself, I read this letter with great interest. My first concern was with the contempt the author expressed toward her childrens teachers efforts. These past two weeks, those teachers have reached out to all of the families they teach, quickly learned an entirely new educational format and delivered the Ontario curriculum as best they could.

They are also living through this pandemic with their families, but have been asked to continue doing their job despite the circumstances. I hope for their morale none of them read the letter. If they did, and are reading this, Id like to remind them, you can never make everybody happy. I also take issue with the letter writer describing public education in Ontario as a broken system. Having taught in the system for 18 years, I can assure the author that all of us involved in public education know its not perfect. It is constantly changing and adapting to improve, but it is far from broken.

For the next several weeks, the challenges of public education will be the same, but more acute. Teachers make every effort to be accommodating to our students but, at the end of the day, students (and parents) have to take it or leave it. Try, or not try. We can never do the learning for them. The online learning plan will not be perfect, but like Easter dinner over Zoom, its our only choice as we eagerly await better days.

Allow me to use a grocery store metaphor: Public education will fill the shelves with learning as best we can in the coming weeks. Take what you will. We hope our efforts dont cause fear and restriction or drain the joy out of you. These lessons are meant to provide professional guidance, a sense of normalcy and community, and a reassurance that your teachers have not forgotten about you in this trying time.
From cross-stitching to backgammon, these millennials have picked up delightfully low-tech hobbies to pass the time during lockdown.

Speaking to FEMAIL, 20 and 30-somethings across the UK told how they are seeking out activities that take them away from their screens and help them to unwind after a day spent in front of the laptop while working from home.

Fashion PR Lauren Normyle, 29, from London, explained she had started drawing trees and birds in a bid to improve her knowledge of local wildlife, while Kirsten Millar, 23, from Edinburgh, has learned how to crochet after being inspired by her grandmother.

Kathryn Dent, 24, of Hertfordshire is one of millions of Brits who have taken up jigsaws as a way to relax, with toy companies reporting huge spikes in the sale of puzzles in the three weeks since lockdown started and Amazon selling out online.

CROCHET

Kirsten Millar, 23, Edinburgh

Family tradition: Kirsten, a student at Edinburgh University, took inspiration from her grandmother and learned how to crochet. Pictured, with a blanket and elephant she made

Kirsten, who is studying for a masters degree in Innovation and Technology Law at Edinburgh University, has made the most of her time in lockdown by learning how to crochet. Her favourite piece so far is a blanket made from 'granny squares'.

She said: 'My Italian great granny was a really skilled crocheter. While we were doing the Great Lockdown Clear Out, I found a really intricate, beautiful piece that she made and some of my mums old crochet hooks.

Kirsten with an adorable crochet elephant

'Ive always been really creative but Ive never had the time to properly focus on mastering a crafty hobby and, since I was going to be cooped up for an indefinite amount of time, this seemed like the perfect opportunity. Also I liked the idea of carrying on a bit of a family legacy.

'To make things like clothes or toys you need to follow a set pattern, which involves a lot of focus. Its a great way of really switching off for a while and concentrating on something other than work or the news, and you get the added bonus of having created something intricate and unique.

'But, to make things like the "granny squares" that I used to make up the blanket, you follow a very simple repetitive pattern. Theyre easy to make and you can do other things at the same time (in my case, binge watch the entirety of Sex and the City).'

DRAWING

Lauren Normyle, 29, London

Back to nature: Fashion PR Lauren (left) has challenged herself to sketch a new bird and tree each week (right) in a bid to learn more about local wildlife while relaxing away from screens

Fashion PR Lauren has challenged herself to sketch a new bird and tree each week in a bid to learn more about local wildlife while relaxing.

She said: 'I had been consciously looking up and around instead of down at my phone during my daily walk and I was embarrassed to realise I couldnt name many trees or birds that I saw. I made a pact to myself to learn more about them. Its something that my grandparents would know so why shouldnt I?

'I knew I wanted to learn more about nature and I was also keen to practise sketching for a dose of mindfulness. My aim is to draw a new bird and tree each week.'

She added: 'Drawing provides time out for me, Ive tried to meditate but its hard to think of nothing. When I sketch I concentrate on this 100% with no distractions.'

CROSS-STITCHING

Nicole Jordan, 24, Walsall, West Midlands

Daily hobby: Civil servant Nicole is working from home during lockdown and uses cross-stitching as a way to unwind after hours in front of the screen. Right, one of her designs

Civil servant Nicole is working from home during lockdown and uses cross-stitching as a way to unwind after hours in front of the screen.

She said: 'I've always wanted to have a hobby, and of the million I've started, cross stitching is the only one that's stuck and I'm kind of good at.

'I got a set for my birthday in February and it's just carried on from there. Lockdown has seen me amp up cross stitching, I'm doing it in a daily basis.

'One of the main reasons I enjoy it is because I can actually do it. It also really relaxes me - once I'm into a rhythm with it, I can mindlessly cross stitch for hours with music on it the background.

'Particularly being in lockdown, and sitting in front of my computer screen for eight hours a day without the usual mini breaks away from it you get in the office, it stops me spending 16 hours a day in front of either the computer or TV. It's definitely helped my mind focus more in the times were in.'

She added: 'If anyone wants to get into it, I recommend checking out the geeky stitching co., they have some really cute designs perfect for beginners.'

BACKGAMMON

Julia Andersson, 30, London

Competitive edge: Julia, sales manager at womenswear brand Chinti and Parker (pictured in the label's knitwear), is spending her free time playing backgammon with her fiance

Julia, sales manager at womenswear brand Chinti and Parker, is spending her free time playing backgammon. Her fiance gave her a selection of board games for her 30th birthday in January and backgammon has become the 'clear favourite'.

She said: 'Backgammon is something to do other than watch TV and scroll through Instagram! It gets your brain thinking and keeps you busy. And, as a relatively competitive person (or very, my fiance would say), it is perfect. You can just keep tallying up the results and its like an endless competition.'

While the couple played backgammon before, she said spending more time at home has given her an opportunity to improve her sills.

Julia added: 'Now more than ever, we all have time to learn new things and can put our phones down. Theres no one waiting for us at the pub and were not running late to meet friends. Spend time with each other whilst we have the opportunity and spend the time doing something interactive like playing backgammon.'

JIGSAWS

Charlotte Page, 28, Ware, Hertfordshire

Simple pleasures: Project surveyor Charlotte Page, pictured, who is currently furloughed, used to enjoy doing puzzles in childhood but hadn't done one in a 'very long time'

Charity shop find: Charlotte completed this 250-piece puzzle she bought before lockdown

Project surveyor Charlotte, who is currently furloughed, used to enjoy doing puzzles in childhood but hadn't done one in a 'very long time'. Having more time at home during lockdown seemed like a 'good opportunity' to pick the hobby back up.

She said: 'I like that it can easily be done at home and on my own. The only problem is I don't really have many puzzles myself as theyre all in my parents garage.

'I find it quite relaxing and satisfying when you see it coming together/being finished. This one was pretty tough as it has some very odd puzzle piece shapes! I found it in a charity shop the other week just before the lockdown.

'It was the only one left as it seems like everyone wants to do puzzles at the moment as they seem to be sold out everywhere.'

Kathryn Dent, 24, Stanstead Abbotts, Hertfordshire

Puzzle goals: Kathryn Dent, 24, enjoyed the jigsaw because it gave her something to achieve

Superhero effort: Kathryn recently completed this 1,000-piece Marvel superhero puzzle

Kathryn, a banking assistant analyst who is working remotely from home, is one of millions of Brits who has taken up puzzles as a lockdown hobby. She recently completed a complicated Marvel design.

She said: 'I started doing jigsaws because they are very time consuming but keep your brain stimulated. I've enjoyed the challenge as it's not my usual past time. It keeps my mind busy and completing puzzles gives me something to focus on achieving.'
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Nessel and the coalition filed a comment letter urging the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) to withdraw a proposed rule that threatens to undermine the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) and Congressional efforts to combat banking discrimination.

The CRA is a civil rights tool responsible for directing trillions of dollars in investments back to low- and moderate-income communities, and provides access to financial services and loans that incentivize the availability of affordable housing and support small businesses across the country.

This proposed rule looks to remove safeguards that have been in place for decades and are intended to level the playing field for those in low- and moderate-income communities, Nessel said. This proposal would undermine the CRA, a program that provides critical resources to the people who need it most, and thats reason enough to oppose it.

The CRA was enacted in 1977 to tackle concerns around racially driven redlining and disinvestment in urban communities. A study by the Senate Banking Committee at the time uncovered that banks were diverting investment funds away from the low- and moderate-income communities they served despite ample local lending opportunities. For example, only 10 percent of money invested by District of Columbia residents was reinvested back in their communities. The same pattern was reported in neighborhoods across the country.

The CRA has worked to combat these issues by unlocking lending to small businesses and increasing access to affordable housing. Between 2010 and 2016, the CRA expanded the number of small business loans to underserved neighborhoods by 38 percent. In addition, the CRA is credited with facilitating between 15 to 35 percent of home loans to Latinos in low- and moderate-income communities. For multifamily rentals, the CRA has been instrumental in connecting banks with local organizations to work hand-in-hand on smaller, more involved projects that rely on state and local subsidies or public-private partnerships. The CRA has also incentivized banks to make bank accounts and other important financial products available to members of low- and moderate-income communities.

The coalition in its letter urges the OCC and FDIC to withdraw the proposal because of fundamental flaws that run counter to the purpose of the CRA. The coalition asserts that the proposal:
In the book Command at Sea, Adm. James Stavridis wrote, In each ship there is one man alone who in the hour of emergency or peril at sea can turn to no other man. There is one man alone who is ultimately responsible for the safe navigation, engineering performance, accurate gunfire and morale of his ship. He is the Commanding Officer; He is the ship. I was proud to see how Capt. Croziers crew supported him as he crossed the brow for the last time.
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: At least 218 people who



had tested positive for COVID-19 in Kerala havebeencured and discharged so far, the highest in the country and only one person was detected with the infection on Wednesday,Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan said.

The patient had got it through contact.

"Kerala has the highest number of cured cases in the country",Vijayan told reporters here.

However, there is a need to stringently continue the vigil against the pandemic, he said.

Seven people were discharged on Wednesday-- four from Kasaragod, two from Kozhikode and one in Kollam, he said.

So far 387 positive cases have been reported from Kerala, out of which 167 are active cases.

Two COVID-19 patients had died.

At least, 97,000 people are under observation, 522 in hospitals.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
(Bloomberg) -- Divisions among the European Unions finance ministers threatened to derail, or at least delay, the blocs attempt to put forward a bold strategy aimed at mitigating the economic impact of the global pandemic.

An emergency teleconference that started Tuesday dragged on until Wednesday morning, as the regions finance chiefs struggled to reconcile their contrasting visions, forcing negotiations to continue through the night. A press conference was tentatively scheduled for 10 a.m. Brussels time.

France and Europes hardest-hit southern countries are pushing for a firm commitment to a recovery fund financed by jointly issued bonds, a proposal thats anathema to nations like Germany and the Netherlands that have strict red lines regarding the mutualization of debt. Ministers are also at loggerheads over the wording of a joint statement on the conditions for using the firepower of credit lines from the euro areas bailout fund.

The ministers had been tasked by EU leaders to come up with a toolkit of measures to address the economic impact of the outbreak by the end of this week. But even as the virus continued to engulf their economies and medical systems, governments have struggled to move past traditional dividing lines.

And the stakes couldnt be higher. Last week, IHS Markit said its monthly measure of services and manufacturing in the euro area points to an annualized economic contraction of about 10%. And thats on top of job losses that are mounting across Europe, with Spain showing a record jobless-claims surge.

Emergency Fund

With the euro area facing an economic slump of unprecedented scale, countries have instituted fiscal measures worth 3% of EU gross domestic product as well as liquidity guarantees worth up to 18% of the blocs output. The European Central Bank has also launched massive bond purchases in what could end up becoming the biggest economic rescue package the continent has seen in peacetime. But few believe thats sufficient given the scope of the downturn.

Story continues

The finance ministers were discussing three main proposals to weather the crisis: employing the European Stability Mechanism, the euro-areas bailout fund, to offer credit lines worth up to 2% of output of the blocs members; the creation of a pan-European Guarantee Fund to be managed by the European Investment Bank that could mobilize more than 200 billion euros in liquidity for companies; as well as an employment reinsurance scheme worth 100 billion euros.

But some leaders saw this package as insufficient, and demanded the inclusion of a recovery fund that would issue joint debt. I say yes to euro bonds, no to ESM, Italian Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte told reporters on Monday night.

The French government put forward a plan that would create a temporary reserve worth 3% of EU GDP, have a lifetime of as long as 10 years, and would be funded by the joint issuance of debt to mutualize the cost of the crisis.

The plan is controversial as it resembles an idea backed by several euro-area countries for so-called coronabonds -- joint debt instruments that would ease pressure on highly indebted countries like Italy and, to a lesser extent, Spain and France, and would reduce the risk of a backlash from bond investors.

While Germany has said that it supports measures to bolster an economic recovery, it has balked at any proposals that would see member states sharing debt. Other countries such as the Netherlands and Austria also oppose joint issuance, wary that they could end up on the hook for spending in the poorer south.

(Updates with talks dragging through the night)

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India has recorded 11,933 cases of the novel coronavirus and 392 deaths, according to the Union Health Ministry's latest update.

Of these, 10,197 are active cases while 1,343 have been cured or discharged.

The data was updated at 5 pm on April 15 on the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare's website.

Follow LIVE updates on the COVID-19 pandemic here

With 2,687 COVID-19 cases, Maharashtra has reported the highest number of infections, followed by Delhi (1,561) and Tamil Nadu (1,204).

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

On April 14, over 1,000 migrant workers gathered outside Mumbai's Bandra station to protest against the extension of the lockdown, demanding their right to return home. An FIR has been filed against at least 1,000 migrant workers.

A Member of Legislative Assembly (MLA) from Gujarat tested positive for COVID-19 a few hours after meeting Chief Minister Vijay Rupani.

S. No. Name of State / UT Total Confirmed cases (Including 76 foreign Nationals) Cured/Discharged/ Migrated Death 1 Andaman and Nicobar Islands 11 10 0 2 Andhra Pradesh 503 16 9 3 Arunachal Pradesh 1 0 0 4 Assam 33 0 1 5 Bihar 70 29 1 6 Chandigarh 21 7 0 7 Chhattisgarh 33 13 0 8 Delhi 1561 30 30 9 Goa 7 5 0 10 Gujarat 695 59 30 11 Haryana 199 34 3 12 Himachal Pradesh 33 13 1 13 Jammu and Kashmir 278 30 4 14 Jharkhand 27 0 2 15 Karnataka 277 75 11 16 Kerala 387 211 3 17 Ladakh 17 10 0 18 Madhya Pradesh 987 64 53 19 Maharashtra 2687 259 178 20 Manipur 2 1 0 21 Meghalaya 7 0 1 22 Mizoram 1 0 0 23 Nagaland# 0 0 0 24 Odisha 60 18 1 25 Puducherry 7 1 0 26 Punjab 186 14 13 27 Rajasthan 1005 147 3 28 Tamil Nadu 1204 81 12 29 Telengana 647 120 18 30 Tripura 2 0 0 31 Uttarakhand 37 9 0 32 Uttar Pradesh 735 51 11 32 West Bengal 213 37 7 Total number of confirmed cases in India 11933* 1344 392 *States wise distribution is subject to further verification and reconciliation #Nagaland Patient shifted to Assam

Below is the coronavirus cases/deaths state-wise tally:

Globally, nearly two million infections and over 126,00 deaths have been reported due to the COVID-19 outbreak.

Follow our full coverage here
BATON ROUGE, La., April 15, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- 19 Thanks started when Deborah Sternberg wanted to turn the number 19 on its head.

"I understand the need to focus on the numbers associated with the pandemic," Sternberg said. "But I wondered if we could turn COVID-19 on its head a bit."

Sternberg began to make plans.

"What about a collective tribute to all essential workers on the 19th of every month at 1900 hours?" Sternberg, a Baton Rouge native business leader and philanthropist, asked. "Let's all write notes and record messages of appreciation for the world to see through 19Thanks.org ."

19 Thanks also proposes that individuals, organizations and places of worship across Louisiana ring a bell 19 times at 1900 hours on the 19th of every month to show gratitude to essential workers for allowing so many of us to stay home and stay healthy while keeping the state, the country, and the world moving on our behalf.

"If you don't have a bell handy, bang a pot or pan 19 times instead," Sternberg said. "That's another reminder that there are plenty of people who are hungry."

Louisiana Gov. John Bel Edwards supports the initiative and will participate.

"Focusing on what unites us during this unprecedented time is important, and I commend Deborah for creating a way to bring us together," said Edwards. "Showing appreciation for our heroes, the men and women who are on the frontline of helping our communities through this, reminds us of their sacrifices and that the only way we are going to be successful is by working together."

The website, www.19thanks.org , gives people the opportunity to express gratitude and to give to Feeding Louisiana in support of regional food banks and local United Ways throughout Louisiana for community-response efforts.

"We invite everyone to ring a bell to pay tribute to the selfless service of so many Louisianians during this time. We extend a special invitation to places of worship and universities across the state to ring their bells 19 times, joining others on their front porches, patios and in their driveways  at 1900 hours on the 19th of every month until these uncertain times are behind us," said Sarah Berthelot, Louisiana Association of United Way President and CEO. "Coming together for this moment unites us and gives us an opportunity to help those hurting from the series of disasters over the last weeks."

Korey Patty, executive director of Feeding Louisiana, says the spread of COVID-19 has pushed many Louisianians into food insecurity for the first time, while it has exacerbated the struggle of those facing it before the pandemic hit.

"Food bank staff and volunteers stand alongside our partners on the front lines of response  from healthcare workers to the essential employees making sure our world still runs, recognizing that, together, we will get through this," Patty said.

Sternberg welcomes the growth of her idea.

"That's the beauty of it," she said. "The more people hear about it, the more that can come from it. I hope it unites the state and gives people across Louisiana something to look forward to and be proud of. It's important to come together and show our gratitude."

For more information, go to www.19thanks.org .

About 19 Thanks

19 Thanks encourages citizens to focus on gratitude and giving at the 19th hour on the 19th of each month. Individuals, organizations, and places of worship are invited to post notes or videos with messages of appreciation through 19thanks.org and to ring a bell 19 times at 7 p.m. on the 19th of each month. Learn more at www.19thanks.org .

About Louisiana Association of United Ways

The Louisiana Association of United Ways is an association of nine regional United Ways serving 53 parishes throughout Louisiana. Our mission is to integrate action and resources for the common good. We work across our communities to tackle challenges that affect individuals, families and whole communities  challenges that are ultimately bigger than any of us and impact our entire state. Our association supports statewide coordination and development of the Louisiana 211 Statewide Network. We are part of a global network of more than 1,800 United Ways, servicing communities in 41 countries.

About Feeding Louisiana

Louisiana's Food Banks distributed 53 million pounds of food in 2014. This is approximately enough food for 44 million meals. They did this through a network of more than 900 community and faith-based organizations across Louisiana. Louisiana's Food Banks served 1.3 million meals to children through the Backpack Program and After school and Summer meal programs. Food Banks distributed 2.6 million meals to seniors through Adopt a Senior and senior meal programs.

Media contact: Jan Risher, 337-230-8214, [email protected]

SOURCE 19 Thanks
BIRMINGHAM, Ala.  For people who lost homes to the deadly tornadoes that rampaged across the South, there are no comforting hugs from volunteers or handshakes from politicians. For homeless families, there are no Red Cross shelters, only hotel rooms.

These and other changes reflect how disaster response has been affected by the coronavirus pandemic: Workers are still trying to provide all the help they can, but from a distance.

Within hours of the tornado onslaught, which began Sunday and killed more than 30 people, church groups were out in damaged communities, and Southern Baptist volunteers were told to avoid holding hands with people as they prayed, said Sam Porter, director of disaster relief for the nearly 15 million-member denomination. Hugs also are out.

"You're talking about a very hard change in procedures," Porter said Tuesday. "It's agonizing. Jesus touched people all through his ministry. He created us as emotional beings. But we are trying to comply with the guidelines."

About 550 people in four states were staying in hotel rooms funded by the Red Cross since mass shelters were not an option, said Brad Kieserman, a vice president of the organization.

People are being fed catered meals delivered to the hotels instead of through a large kitchen, he said, and workers are wearing masks, gloves and other gear when dealing with people affected by the storms. Other agencies are making similar provisions, he said.

"How ironic is it that the very thing that may unify people and unify communities is the condition in which we have to remain 6 feet apart," Kieserman said.

The death toll from the outbreak rose to at least 34 as officials said a 12th person had died in Mississippi. There, Gov. Tate Reeves, who toured damaged areas, said the pandemic was making a bad situation worse.

"The fact that the coronaviruses exist is complicating the recovery from the tornado, while the tornadoes are complicating our efforts to make sure that we do everything in our power to stop the spread of the virus," Reeves said during a stop in tiny Soso. "It is it is exceptionally complicated, and it's tough on all of us."

About 40 miles away in Prentiss, around 15 people wearing masks helped clean up amid the rubble of James Hill Church, which took a direct hit from a tornado. Pastor Sean Coney said breathing through cloth made the work more difficult, "but you can't be selifsh" and risk spreading the virus.

"As difficult as it may be, you have to do it," Coney said.

A twister left shingles, insulation and other debris strewn across Chattanooga, Tennessee. Almost every official on a tour of storm damage wore a protective mask, and some wore gloves. Instead of hugs and handshakes, Gov. Bill Lee and Mayor Andy Berke offered elbow bumps while talking to affected residents.

"We need money! We need that stimulus check now!" a person in a passing pickup truck yelled out to Lee as he visited with people cleaning around their home.

The storms claimed lives in at least six states, and the National Weather Service said preliminary assessments found evidence of at least 27 twisters. The strongest confirmed so far was an EF-4 tornado that devastated southeastern Mississippi with winds as strong as 170 mph (273 kph).

Hundreds of homes and businesses were damaged or destroyed across the region, and heavy rains caused flooding in some areas. Nashville, Tennessee, broke a 71-year-old record by receiving 2.23 inches (5.66 centimeters) of rain in a day, the weather service said. A day later, on Tuesday morning, the city saw snow flurries.

Damage occurred up the East Coast, with a flurry of tornado warnings issued in Delaware after storms left the Southeast.

With the economy already faltering because of business shutdowns and job losses linked to the pandemic, the storms hit the state's $2.9 billion poultry industry. At least 90 poultry houses were damaged or destroyed, many near the city of Collins, the Mississippi State University Extension Service said.

"Although some houses were between flocks and empty, many of these houses had chickens in them," poultry specialist Tom Tabler said in a statement. "Some would have been chicks just a few days old, while others would have been flocks nearly ready for harvest."

___

Jay Reeves of The Associated Press wrote this story. AP writers Emily Wagster Pettus in Jackson, Mississippi; Kimberlee Kruesi in Chattanooga, Tennessee; and video journalist Sarah Blake Morgan in Charlotte, North Carolina, contributed to this report.
Hygiene product manufacturers are struggling to supply hospitals, aged-care facilities, schools and the hospitality industry with hand sanitiser because of severe shortages of raw ingredients and packaging.

The federal government has called on manufacturers to consider a war-style shift to produce medical supplies such as hand sanitisers, and NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian appealed to businesses to "re-tool" to supply products that are usually imported from overseas.

Chris Short, managing director of Adelaide company Dominant, said more alcohol had been available in the past week, but it had been difficult to source bottles. Credit:Tracey Nearmy

But established manufacturers say the difficulty in obtaining bottles, caps, labels, alcohol and other raw ingredients is limiting their ability to scale up to meet the demand.

About three-quarters of manufacturers reported shortages of ethanol, bottle pumps and sprays, and more than half were having trouble sourcing bottles, pouches and gelling agents, according to a survey by industry group Accord to be released on Tuesday evening.
US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo on Wednesday called for coronavirus cooperation in talks with a top Chinese official, signaling a bid to keep a lid on renewing tensions. President Donald Trump's administration has berated China for not sharing data more quickly and said Tuesday it was freezing funds to the World Health Organization for not challenging Beijing. Pompeo renewed his push for "full transparency" in a call Wednesday with senior Chinese official Yang Jiechi, but the State Department's tone was unusually positive. Pompeo "noted the aid the American people delivered to the people of China in January -- and continue to offer -- and the high importance we attach to China's facilitation of medical supply exports to meet critical demand in the United States," the State Department said. "The two sides confirmed their commitment to defeat the COVID-19 outbreak and restore global health and prosperity," it said. China is a vital source of masks and other supplies desperately needed by the United States, which has the highest number both of infections and deaths from the virus. Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping had appeared to reach a truce in a phone call late last month, with Trump and Pompeo afterward ending the provocative use of the terms "Chinese virus" and "Wuhan virus." Even if the rhetoric is more civil, Defense Secretary Mark Esper said Wednesday that China should provide more information on the virus that originated in its metropolis of Wuhan. "Even today, we see them withholding information. And so I think we need to do more and continue to press them to share," Esper told Fox News. Trump's Democratic rivals say the WHO announcement was a dangerous attempt to divert attention from problems in the US response as Trump gears up for elections. Trump himself had in January said he had the virus "totally under control" and praised China as transparent. US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Chinese politburo member Yang Jiechi shake hands following talks in Washington in November 2018
Former Real Housewives of Melbourne star Venus Behbahani-Clark is expecting her third child with husband James Nicholas Clark.

And on Wednesday, Venus spoke candidly about her fears of having another baby during the coronavirus outbreak.

'Being pregnant comes with a lot of emotions you didnt think you had. Each baby Ive carried has been different. This one during COVID-19 has been a real struggle,' she shared in a heartfelt post to Instagram.

'This one has been a real struggle': Former Real Housewives of Melbourne star Venus Behbahani-Clark (pictured) spoke candidly about her fears of giving birth to her third child during the coronavirus pandemic in a heartfelt Instagram post on Wednesday

The lawyer admitted she found social isolation 'tough' and she was 'afraid' of giving birth during a pandemic, as well as being stressed about homeschooling her two daughters Giselle, 10, and Sophia, six.

'We might be the master of our own thoughts, still we can be the slaves to our emotions,' she added.

The reality star went on to reveal the simple daily tasks she was focusing on to try and maintain some normalcy about life.

Homeschooling: Adding to her stress was that Venus is also trying to homeschool her two daughters, Giselle, 10 (front right), and Sophia, six (front left)

'I tanned myself to feel better, brush my hair every morning, put on some makeup but didnt change a stained dress,' she said.

'Point is ... we all struggle sometimes even if things appear picture perfect.'

Accompanying the touching post was a selfie of Venus proudly flaunting her burgeoning baby bump in a simple white T-shirt dress.

Focusing on self-care: Venus, who is due to give birth next month revealed she is focusing on simple daily tasks to try and maintain some normalcy about life, such as brushing her hair and putting on makeup

The mother-of-two let her luscious long curly locks cascade over her shoulder to fall at her waist.

Venus finished off her look with a full coverage foundation, plenty of bronzer and a smokey eye.

The former reality star is due to give birth next month.

Venus confirmed in February that she wouldn't be part of the upcoming season of The Real Housewives of Melbourne.

She later shared to Instagram that she would instead be focusing on her growing family and returning to work as a lawyer.
New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern announced Wednesday that she, along with her cabinet ministers and public service chief executives, would take a 20% pay cut to show solidarity with those economically impacted by the coronavirus pandemic.

"As we acknowledge New Zealanders who are reliant on wage subsidies, taking pay cuts, and losing their jobs as a result of Covid-19s global pandemic, we feel acutely the struggle that many New Zealanders are feeling," Ardern said in a press conference.

While it wont shift the governments overall fiscal position, it is about leadership, she added.

PHOTO: Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern speaks during the update on the All of Government COVID-19 national response, at Parliament on April 15, 2020, in Wellington, New Zealand. (Mark Mitchell/Pool via Getty Images)

Although the pay cut will only last six months, the prime ministers income will be reduced by nearly $30,000.

If there ever was a time to close the gap between groups of people across New Zealand in different positions, it is now, she said.

The prime minister said the pay cut would not apply to public sector workers like nurses, doctors and police officers.

MORE: 75% of migrants deported to Guatemala on single flight tested positive for coronavirus: Health minister

Several international organizations have predicted that New Zealand could see significant coronavirus-related economic weakness, with the International Monetary Fund projecting that the countrys economy could contract by 7.2 percent.

The IMFs World Economic Outlook forecasts that New Zealands economic downturn could be the worst outside Europe, except for Venezuela.

According to the Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center, New Zealand has 1,386 confirmed cases of COVID-19 and nine deaths.

New Zealand prime minister to take pay cut as country recovers from COVID-19 originally appeared on abcnews.go.com
You could spend centuries debating which of Donald Trumps decisions was the most lustrously bananas, and historians will. But to drop one contender into this teeming pot, glance at the Council To Reopen America photo montage broadcast by Fox News.

Fans of superhero movies will be familiar with posters of Iron Man, Black Widow, Thor, Captain America and Hulk, their grimly determined faces pointing towards the existential battle ahead. If Trumps gang suggests a fantasy film supergroup, however, it isnt Marvels Avengers. Its DCs Suicide Squad  although since this mob arent putting their own lives on the line, Homicide Squad seems more apt.

However bizarre the councils members, its absentees are more so. The team advising the portly old goat when and how to relax restrictions is devoid of doctors. Americas top mind on infectious disease isnt there, though Anthony Fauci is on another roster. Hes now on Trumps hit list after conceding that, had Trump acted quicker on his coronahoax, many fewer would be dead and dying.
Even as the seventh special flight bringing Canadians stranded in India back to the country departed on Tuesday, Canadas Prime Minister Justin Trudeau had a stern warning for those returning from abroad  if they dont have a viable self-isolation plan in place, the Government may place them in a facility other than their residences for the mandatory 14-day period in the view of coronavirus crisis.

The Canadian Government had put in place those mandatory self-isolation rules on March 25 but they have now been strengthened under the Quarantine Act. On their arrival in Canada, the returning travellers will have to convince authorities they have a suitable place to self-isolate for two weeks.

We now have the authority to require them to self-isolate for two weeks in a quarantine location, like a hotel, Trudeau said during his daily media briefing related to the Covid-19 crisis.

A residence may also be found unsuitable if it also houses those who may be vulnerable to the coronavirus like elderly family members or if the returnees do have a set destination, Trudeau said.

Law enforcement has been tasked with conducting periodic checks like verifying that such returnees are following the self-isolation rules. Canada has barred foreign nationals from the country, except for Americans, and is only allowing in citizens, permanent residents or their immediate relatives.

More stringent measures may have been necessitated by the attitude of some of those returning to Canada. As the countrys Chief Public Health Officer Dr Theresa Tam said, We do every day find people who havent answered our phone calls and have to be chased down.

So far, seven flights have left from India after the lockdown was announced. The latest departed from Amritsar. Other flights, chartered to repatriate Canadians, took off from Delhi, Mumbai and Bangalore.

Trudeau had even earlier flagged concerns over those returning to the country. As he said earlier this month, They pose a real risk, not just to their neighbours and their loved ones, but to our entire country. We need to ensure and we will ensure that those people are properly isolated.

Violating the Quarantine Act in Canada could attract penalties ranging from CA $750,000 to CA $1 million and between six months to three years in prison.
IRVINE, Calif., April 15, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- Mazda North American Operations (MNAO) announced it will provide free standard oil changes and enhanced cleaning services for U.S. healthcare workers at participating dealers nationwide. This program, which begins on April 16, is not limited to Mazda owners and is available for most makes and models from other manufacturers. The Essential Car Care program, developed in partnership with the Mazda dealer network, will invest a minimum of $5 million as part of the initiative.

Mazda Honors Healthcare Heroes With New Essential Car Care Program

"Supporting the communities where we live and work is rooted deeply in Mazda's 100-year history. We are honored to give back to those dedicated to saving lives during this pandemic," MNAO President Jeff Guyton said. "We understand the important role vehicles play in people's lives, and by partnering with our dealer network, we hope to make a meaningful impact in communities around the country."

Inspired by Mazda dealers who implemented similar programs for healthcare workers locally, Mazda quickly developed a nationwide plan to partner with its dealer network to invest in this initiative honoring healthcare heroes across the U.S.

"Mazda dealers prioritize giving back to the communities in which they operate," Jim McDonald, Mazda National Dealer Advisory Council Chairman said. "In this challenging time, we want to do what we can to support our local healthcare workers. We deeply appreciate all they have done and will continue to do in the fight against COVID-19."

In order to help ensure the safety of healthcare workers and service employees, dealers participating in the Essential Car Care initiative have committed to enhanced vehicle cleaning of high-touch interior and exterior surfaces using Mazda and EPA-approved cleansers. Mazda has also encouraged dealers to continue following the recommendations from the CDC and local public health and government officials, along with workplace personal hygiene practices to help ensure the safety of everyone in the service areas.

Details on the Essential Car Care initiative can be found on Inside Mazda.

Mazda North American Operations is headquartered in Irvine, California, and oversees the sales, marketing, parts and customer service support of Mazda vehicles in the United States and Mexico through approximately 620 dealers. For more information on Mazda vehicles, including photography and B-roll, please visit the online Mazda media center at InsideMazda.MazdaUSA.com/Newsroom.



Follow MNAO's social media channels through Twitter and Instagram at @MazdaUSA and Facebook at Facebook.com/MazdaUSA.

SOURCE Mazda North American Operations

Related Links

www.mazdausa.com


Bolivias self-proclaimed interim president, Jeanine Anez, announced Tuesday that the quarantine imposed in response to the coronavirus will be extended until April 30.

As of April 14, the number of people reported to have been infected with COVID-19 in Bolivia was 354, with 28 deaths. These low official numbers for infected and deceased coronavirus victims obscure the alarming threat to South Americas poorest country. An indication of the potential rapid spread of the disease came on Tuesday with a report from Oruro, the traditional mining center of Bolivia, that the number of cases had doubled in 24 hours from 14 to 27, while another 111 suspicious cases were reported and 37 more were still waiting for test results.

Anez, who was installed by a US-backed military coup and fascist violence that overthrew the government of President Evo Morales and his Movement toward Socialism (MAS) government last November, has exploited the pandemic to militarize the country and postpone elections that had been set for May.

In her televised address Tuesday, Anez offered another pittance to Bolivias impoverished workers and peasants, a universal bonus of 500 bolivianos (less than $73). This meager benefit will be offered only to those who did not receive similar paltry handouts offered earlier, including a family bonus, also worth 500 bolivianos for families with young children, and a family basket of just 400 bolivianos for older adults surviving on state pensions, low income mothers and people with disabilities.

How much of this thoroughly inadequate aid will actually get into the hands of Bolivians is in serious question.

Anez also said that within one week she would announce a decision on whether to ease the quarantine in different regions of the country. She is responding to the demands and profit interests of Bolivian and international capital, which supported the coup that brought her to power.

Newspaper coverage indicates that Bolivia is presently at risk of widespread hunger, due to failing food supply chains, especially in working class cities such as El Alto.

According to the newspaper El Alteno, Two weeks after the [March 22] quarantine was put into place, neighbors from different areas in El Alto began to worry about the lack of resources from the lockdown imposed upon them and the lack of food ... neighbors are aware that they cannot take to the streets to carry out their activities normally, they claim that money is already finished.

One woman interviewed by El Alteno said: Since the quarantine has been issued, we no longer go out to sell with my husband, everything we have earned before quarantine is gone; on the street theres everything, gas, vegetables, fruit, but theres no money.

For its part, the main union confederation, the Bolivian Workers Central (COB), which has collaborated with the coup regime, has proposed that it distribute half of the minimum wage of 2,122 Bolivianos ($320 per month) to the population, a half-hearted measure which has also been rejected.

As for the countrys health infrastructure, it is woefully inadequate to address the onslaught of the pandemic.

Doctors at the largest public hospital in La Paz issued a statement Monday warning that they lack even the basic supplies needed to deal with COVID-19 patients. We do not have the minimum supplies such as caps, chinstraps, boots, glasses, gowns, and even less high-end supplies such as intensive care medicines. They send us to war without weapons, condemning us to fight under unfavorable conditions, they said.

Bolivia is sorely lacking in such critical equipment as ventilators, and cannot compete with wealthier nations on the world market to purchase them.

The coronavirus threat is particularly worrisome in the countrys overcrowded jails. Inmates at the San Pedro prison in Oruro rioted last Saturday. We have come to serve a sentence, not to lose our lives, said one of the inmates interviewed by La Patria newspaper.

Under the national quarantine first imposed on March 22, many public and private activities have been suspended or severely curtailed, and only one person per family is allowed to make minimum and indispensable trips in the vicinity of the family residence during the hours of 7:00 a.m. and 12:00 for the purpose of acquiring food and other necessary supplies.

As of March 17, all borders were ordered closed and international flights were suspended. Interdepartmental and interprovincial land transport was also suspended, allowing only for the transport of merchandise.

More than 480 Bolivians who managed to reenter Bolivian territory, mostly workers returning from Chile where they had lost their jobs as a result of the COVID-19 shutdown there, originally were concentrated in camp Tata Santiago, in the town of Pisiga, and subjected to various health protocols. Lack of food and overcrowding was reported, including insufficient bathrooms.

Tents of 3 x 3 meters were used to house 15 people per unit, each granted a single blanket in the midst of bitter cold. Without electricity, they were effectively held incommunicado since they could not charge their cell phones.

Those who complained of mistreatment by the Bolivian military were reportedly threatened with being thrown back across the border into Chile and having their national identity cards taken.

At least another 800 Bolivians remained trapped on Chiles northern border with Bolivia, blocked by Bolivian troops from returning to their country.

Desperate after being left there for two weeks, several hundred of them attempted to force their way back into Bolivia last week, only to be repulsed with beatings and tear gas.

The Bolivian coup regime has attempted to blame the incident on the former chief minister in the Morales government, Juan Ramon Quintana, who is trapped in the Mexican Embassy in La Paz, denied safe passage out of the country. The government held a press conference Monday claimingwithout presenting a shred of evidencethat Quintana had orchestrated the rebellion of the desperate migrant workers on the Chilean border from behind the embassys walls.

Within Bolivia, the regime has enforced the quarantine with brutal police-military repression. On March 25, the Ministry of Justice and Institutional Transparency issued a statement warning that people who failed to comply fully with the quarantine would be punished with one to 10 years in prison for committing crimes against public health.

La Razon quoted the commander-in-chief of the armed forces, Gen. Carlos Orellana, as reporting that, as of April 11, Military troops arrested 9,917 people who violated the restrictions of the total quarantine in the country.

Anez concluded a recent speech by threatening brutal repression against anyone who violates the quarantine, which would bring down the active participation of the Armed Forces and the National Police.

Anezs March 25 decree that extended the nationwide lockdown until April 15 included the threat that individuals who incite non-compliance with this decree or misinform or cause uncertainty to the population will be subject to criminal charges for crimes against public health, punishable by between one and 10 years imprisonment.

The language allows for the intensification of the crackdown waged by the regime since it seized power last November, launching a pacification program that bloodily suppressed workers protests and arresting journalists on charges of sedition for reports criticizing the government, calling them communication terrorists.

Anez, who initially claimed that she would serve only as a transitional head of state until elections were held, has since announced that she will run for the presidency. She has urged voters not to allow the savages to return to power, a transparent reference to the indigenous heritage of Morales and many of his supporters. Polls, however, have shown the MAS presidential candidate, Luis Arce, as the favorite in the now-postponed elections.

While the MAS, a bourgeois nationalist party, has sought to accommodate itself to the coup regime, recognizing its legitimacy and agreeing to bar Morales from running for re-election, the military-backed government, backed by Washington, has responded only with increased repression.
The first clip for the long-awaited David Bowie biopic Stardust has been released, and offers a glimpse of Johnny Flynn's performance as the pop music icon.

The British film was scheduled to premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival, but has been delayed due to the coronavirus pandemic.

In the clip, Johnny's David doubts whether his third album will be a success in the United States, and seeks reassurance from his publicist Ron Oberman, as the film depicts the eventual birth of his alter-ego Ziggy Stardust.

Tease: The first clip for the long-awaited David Bowie biopic Stardust has been released, and offers a glimpse of Johnny Flynn's performance as the pop music icon

In the brief clip, David asks Ron whether his record label are supporting the release of his record in the US, with the film taking place in 1971 following his now-iconic album The Man Who Sold The World.

David asks Ron: 'Tony said Mercury had doubts about the record. He persuaded them to throw a load of resources behind the tour,' before insisting he doesn't want to appear 'ungrateful.'

But Ron tells him: 'The label has doubts... but I don't. I think you're going to be the biggest goddamn star in America it's a great record, just no one knows how to sell you in America.'

Legendary: The film depicts trip to the US in 1971 to try and build a career Stateside, setting the stage for the birth of his alter-ego Ziggy Stardust (pictured right in 1973)

As David questions whether Ron can 'sell him' in the States, he insists: 'Hell yeah I do! Don't get me wrong I'm a f****ng minority to one but all it takes is a believer to change the world and we've got two. If you don't we're really f****d.'

In Stardust, Johnny takes on the role of the pop music icon David Bowie, while Marc Maron plays publicist Ron Oberman.

The film depicts the pair travelling to the US in 1971, and how their struggle to win over American audiences became the birth of Bowie's iconic alter-ego Ziggy Stardust.

Pensive: In the clip David is doubting whether his album will be a success in the US, seeking reassurance from publicist Ron Oberman, played by Marc Maron

Worried: Ron insists that with his and Bowie's belief in the record they can succeed Stateside, following the release of his third album The Man Who Sold The World

Along with his band Johnny Flynn & The Sussex Wit, Johnny is also known for roles in Lovesick, Genius and most recently the period drama Emma.

Despite depicting the early days of Bowie's career, his son Duncan Jones has insisted that the family have no involvement in the making of the film.

Bowie died on 10th January 2016 at the age of 69 after battling liver cancer, just two days after the release of his acclaimed album Blackstar.

The film has been directed by Gabriel Range, who said in a statement to Variety he was striving to see the story behind one of Bowie's most famous characters.

Delayed: Stardust was schedule to premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival this month, but is being screened online for press viewing after the event was cancelled

Tragic: Bowie died on 10th January 2016 at the age of 69 after battling liver cancer, just two days after the release of his acclaimed album Blackstar (pictured with wife Iman in 2010)

He said: 'I set out to make a film about what makes someone become an artist; what actually drives them to make their art.

'That someone is David Bowie, a man were used to thinking about as the star he became, or as one of his alter egos: Ziggy Stardust; Aladdin Zane; The Thin White Duke.

'Someone I only ever saw at a great distance, behind a mask; a godlike, alien presence. Even in his perfectly choreographed death, he didnt seem like a regular human being.'

Stardust was schedule to premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival this month, but the event was cancelled due to the COVID-19 outbreak.

Instead the film will be released online through Film Constellation for press viewing on Wednesday, and a nationwide release date is yet to be confirmed.
A more recent publication of this set of statistics is available. Latest publication: Index of turnover in industry 2021, November

Published: 15 April 2020

Turnover in manufacturing decreased by 4.2 per cent in February

According to Statistics Finland, working day adjusted turnover in manufacturing (TOL BCD) decreased in February by 4.2 per cent year-on-year. Turnover in the forest industry decreased most among the main industries, by 28.7 per cent year-on-year. Industrial actions also affected the decrease of turnover in the forest industry in February. Seasonally adjusted turnover in manufacturing (TOL BCD) decreased by 0.4 per cent compared to January.

Annual change in working day adjusted turnover in manufacturing (BCD), % (TOL 2008)

Turnover also decreased from the previous year in electricity, gas, steam and air conditioning supply, by 9.2 per cent, and in the chemical industry, by 3.0 per cent. The growth in turnover was strongest in the metal industry, 10.3 per cent from the previous year.

Annual change in working day adjusted turnover in manufacturing by industry, February 2020, % (TOL 2008)

Export turnover and domestic turnover decreased most in the forest industry in January

In January, growth in working day adjusted export turnover was highest in the industry of mining and quarrying, up by 32.7 per cent from the previous year. Export turnover was also growing in the food industry, by 9.2 per cent, and in the metal industry, by 4.6 per cent from the previous year. Export turnover fell in January in the forest industry by 10.2 per cent and in the textile, clothing and leather industry by 8.5 per cent. In the electronic and electrical industry, export turnover also decreased, by 5.7 per cent, and export turnover in the chemical industry declined by 5.5 per cent from the previous year.

Annual change in working day adjusted export turnover and domestic turnover in manufacturing by industry, January 2020, % (TOL 2008)

Among the main industries, domestic turnover increased most in the metal industry in January, by 11.2 per cent, while domestic turnover in the forest industry decreased equally much year-on-year. Domestic turnover was growing in the electronic and electrical industry, by 9.0 per cent, mining and quarrying, by 6.3 per cent, and the food industry, by 1.9 per cent year-on-year. In addition to the forest industry, domestic turnover fell in the chemical industry by 8.9 per cent and in the textile, clothing and leather industry by 1.7 per cent from the previous year.

Trend series of turnover, export turnover and domestic turnover in manufacturing (BC), January 2007 to January-February 2020, % (TOL 2008)

The index of turnover in industry describes enterprises whose main industry is manufacturing. The calculation of the indices is based on the Tax Administrations self-assessed tax data which are supplemented with data obtained with Statistics Finlands sales inquiry. The monthly turnovers of manufacturing enterprises can vary considerably, especially in the metal industries. The variation is mainly due to invoicing practices. The final invoice for major machinery deliveries and projects may be recorded in the sales of one month, even if the delivery had required the work of several months or years.

The factors caused by the variation in the number of weekdays are taken into account in adjustment for working days. This means taking into consideration the lengths of months, different weekdays and holidays. In addition, seasonal variation is eliminated from seasonally adjusted series, on account of which it makes sense to compare observations of two successive months as well.

In terms of turnover, data for the latest month are preliminary and are released at a delay of around six weeks. The data may become significantly revised particularly on more detailed industry levels in coming months. Export turnover and domestic turnover are, for the time being, still released at a delay of two and a half months.

Source: Index of turnover in industry 2020, February, Statistics Finland

Inquiries: Maija Sappinen 029 551 3348, Heli Suonio 029 551 2481, myynti.teollisuus@stat.fi

Director in charge: Mari Yla-Jarkko

Publication in pdf-format (339.3 kB)

Updated 15.4.2020

Referencing instructions: Official Statistics of Finland (OSF): Index of turnover in industry [e-publication].

ISSN=1798-596X. February 2020. Helsinki: Statistics Finland [referred: 12.1.2022].

Access method: http://www.stat.fi/til/tlv/2020/02/tlv_2020_02_2020-04-15_tie_001_en.html
Today the Northside is about half black, a quarter Hmong and a quarter everything else. Its a neighborhood challenged by low wealth and some violence, but were not defined by that.

The Northside is where Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis created the Minneapolis Sound that Prince would later make famous. The Northside was the home of the underappreciated but behemoth civil rights figure and union organizer Nellie Stone Johnson. Its the place my parents were told was the hood when they arrived, but coming from Detroit, it was the only place in the city where they felt comfortable raising us.

In 2015, an Atlantic article called The Miracle of Minneapolis said that no other place in America mixes affordability, opportunity and wealth so well. But that wealth has always eluded Northsiders. And by eluded, I, of course, mean, it has been denied.

Minneapolis is not unique in its use of redlining and restrictive covenants that kept blacks from owning property. Minneapolis is not unique in using the construction of highways to annihilate black neighborhoods. Minneapolis is not unique in placing its worst polluters in and near its black and brown neighborhoods. And unfortunately, we are also not unique in our failure to seriously seek a remedy to these harms.

Minneapolis hosts some of the worst disparities between black and white success in America. Educational outcomes, wealth and wages and homeownership gaps shouldnt be this wide, much less in a place so prosperous for white people. It should be noted that disparities between whites and Latinos, and whites and Southeast Asians, are also incredibly pronounced here. And it should be doubly noted that Native Americans are the poorest residents in the city. Black people are not the only ones left behind in the miracle of Minneapolis.

During every crisis, well-meaning white people here make a ritual of acknowledging the citys steep inequities, but weve been hearing the same woe is you sentiment for a long time. Its as if people think the mere acknowledgment is the work. But as North Minneapolis prepares to brace ourselves for the grim future Detroit and Milwaukee have shown us, the death tolls suggest that acknowledgments dont mean a thing. I want to take us back to this notion of remedy.

When I joined the City Council two years ago, I focused on housing stability and environmental justice. Last year we became the first city in the country to end single-family zoning, making more housing units possible. We passed inclusionary zoning, which requires a percentage of affordable housing on every project. The Council president and I rewrote our housing-inspections approach to focus more on creating livable conditions, not just issuing citations. This allowed us to keep renters in place while holding their landlords accountable for safe, dignified conditions  a proposition that had previously been an either-or deal.
The Irish Coast Guard has brought a Spanish fisherman ashore for medical treatment after he began suffering acute abdominal pain 70 miles off the south coast.

Valentia Coast Guard said it received a call at 3.30pm on Tuesday in relation to the 47-yer-old crewman who was aboard a Spanish fishing trawler. The vessel was 70 miles southwest of Castletownbere.

Rescue Helicopter 115 was tasked from Shannon and conducted the medical evacuation, landing at Cork Airport at 6.44pm, at which point the man was taken immediately to Cork University Hospital for treatment.

It's understood the helicopter was the only aircraft over the south of the country at the time it conducted the operation.

Yesterday the Irish Coast Guard conducted a medical evacuation of an injured crew man from a fishing vessel 70 miles south of Cork. Coast Guard Helicopter R115 track shown below. Mission Coordinated by MRSC Valentia. Well done to all involved in the mission. pic.twitter.com/vfOT7q5Usf  Irish Coast Guard (@IrishCoastGuard) April 15, 2020

A spokesperson for the Coast Guard said the number of callouts it has had to deal with has fallen considerably due to the restrictions imposed because of the Covid-19 outbreak.

"The weather has calmed down, there are less storms," he said. "Fellas are not getting into too much bother."

The spokesperson said many of the callouts at this time of the year would b tourism-related, such as people taking out boats for the first time and it not being serviced or running out of fuel, or people becoming trapped on beaches or coves. However, due to the current lockdown, the number of emergency calls has fallen.
"Mrs Serial Killer", featuring Jacqueline Fernandez, is set to debut on Netflix on May 1, the streamer announced on Wednesday.

The thriller, which stars Fernandez in the titular role, is directed by Shirish Kunder and produced by his filmmaker-wife Farah Khan.

"See you on the premier on 1st of May for 'Mrs Serial Killer'," Fernandez said in a video with co-star Manoj Bajpayee, which was shared on Netflix India's Instagram account.

The one-line synopsis of the movie reads: "When her husband is framed and imprisoned for serial murders, a doting wife must perform a murder exactly like the serial killer, to prove her husband innocent."



Bajpayee and Kunder earlier collaborated on 2016 short film, psychological thriller "Kriti".

"Mrs Serial Killer" also stars "Uri: The Surgical Strike" actor Mohit Raina.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
On February 5, 2020, I wrote a column titled Mumbai real estate is on its death bed. Its time to bury it. While I was certain about the forecast I must confess I didnt expect the burial to happen so soon. COVID-19 has ensured even the real estate industry is forced to acknowledge that reality.

Even prior to the outbreak of the deadly virus the entire industry at a pan-India level was struggling. Data from Liases Foras, a non-broking real estate advisory company, showed that 7,112 developers from its database of 11,838 are in the category of high-default probability. If a check is done today it will reveal that the vulnerable list has risen even further to at least two-thirds of all developers. Further 64 percent of the total supply in the market currently is under construction. In a scenario wherein projects had just commenced activity it may have been easy to fold and abandon them. However, the average construction status for projects is at a 66 percent completion rate. That means most projects are in the final stages of completion. Given that significant investment has already taken place it is likely that developers will have to cut prices, sell apartments and complete the project.

The obvious question thereafter is  how much can prices really be slashed by? The median profitability level for most developers is around 15 percent. Even if developers are forced to slash their entire margin, that would translate into a price cut of 10-15 percent.

Will that spur demand? Thats an easy answer  no. In a phase where businesses and salaries are being de-rated by a higher amount, it will be naive to expect that a 15 percent price cut by developers will stir demand. The onus then lies on the one institution that is responsible for milking the industry dry and actually making houses unaffordable or a significant burden on the population.

In Mumbai, it is the state government and the BMC that have made homeownership so prohibitively expensive that the average transaction size over the last five years has been Rs 1.31 crore in cheque. With the assumption that 20 percent of the payment has been done in cash, that translates into an actual transaction size of around Rs 1.55 crore.

Who is responsible for this mess?

What have the authorities got in return? In the last nine years, the BMC and the state government have received a whopping Rs 120,000 crore from sale of FSI, stamp duty and property taxes in the commercial capital. Almost Rs 37,000 crore has been extracted through levies charged to developers for permission to construct more space in a project  Floor Space Index or FSI. This cost is then passed on to the buyer. Over Rs 35,000 crore has been charged through stamp duties that act as a direct additional cost to a home buyer at the time of registration. Once an apartment is purchased  the annual property tax kicks in through which the municipal corporation has received Rs 44,000 crore since 2013. (Do note this excludes central taxes like GST). In short, a home is a basic need that has been made into a luxury purchase due to government levies.

One would think that for a sector that is routinely plundered and practically funds the administration, there would be measures to revive it. Here is the challenge  there is very little that a government or municipal body can actually do at this stage. The municipal body takes most of its levies upfront so the payment has already been done by the developers. Any reduction in levies will only accrue for new development and will provide benefit only in the medium term. Refunds by the BMC towards developers are not practical while innovative solutions are beyond their imagination. The only arrow in the quiver of the state government is in slashing stamp duty down to zero. That will directly bring down the final cost to the buyer by 5 percent. If one gets more optimistic, there is a possibility of GST on under-construction properties being removed  which will trim costs by another 5 percent. The other component in the chain is the lender and it is unfair to expect that the lenders can contribute to lowering prices in the immediate term.

Cumulatively speaking there is a maximum potential of 20-25 percent price reduction on the assumption that every participant gives away everything that can possibly be waived -- builder margin, stamp duty and GST, except GST on inputs. Builders with a reputation and not completely decimated balance sheets may opt to even work with a marginal loss to see some of their projects executed fully and sold. Even with that assumption, it will not lead to a price fall of more than 30 percent for the end-customer.

Is that enough? Its complicated  but it may manage to spur demand to a limited extent for select projects and developers. The alternative is to do nothing and watch an accidental murder unravel. The famous line from Batman Begins Death does not wait for you to be ready is about to ring true. Mumbais administration will rue its moves towards the industry that fed it.

When not busy with his newstoon platform Snapnews, Vishal Bhargava is a real estate enthusiast who views and reviews new projects. The views are personal.
Kolkata, April 15 : West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee on Wednesday allotted a government flat on rent to a nurse who was prevented from staying at her house by locals wary of contracting Covid-19, warning that such people could be jailed under the Disaster Management Act.

Recounting the incident in Ranaghat of Nadia district, Banerjee said the nurse was not allowed to stay at home with her mother and brother by the locals.

"In today's world, how can people have such a mentality? A nurse is not allowed to stay at home. She has her mother and brother there, why shouldn't her family be allowed to stay? "I appeal with folded hands to tho0se doing such things. If somebody gets affected in your house, will you behave in a similar manner? Then this nurse, doctor, heath worker will save you," she said.

The Chief Minister said the government has decided to allot her a government flat on rent. "I am allotting it to her. If any more such case happens, we will take care of the victims," she said.

She also expressed dismay over a doctor being not allowed into the housing society where he resides, and having to spend the night in his car.

"We have received seven to eight cases. If the government wants, it can jail such persons for six months to one year. We are not going for that right now. We pope people will understand," she said.

Banerjee appealed to :mothers and sisters" to come forward and resist people indulging in such things. "I apeal to mothers are sisters to come forward, and resist such people. They should form Bongo Janani (Mothers of Bengal group in villages".

Banerjee also spoke out against locals preventing cremation of Covid-19 victims.

"If some positive Covid 19 patent dies, the germs don't get spread during cremation. But we find some people preventing cremation of such patients," she said.

Regarding the violence in Jamuria of West Burdwan district, where seven police personnel were beaten up by locals protesting against a quarantine centre being set up in the area, she said: "They could have told the administration not to earmark a youth hostel in the congested area as quarantine centre.

"But instead they beat up the officer-in-charge. Why? After I heard it was a congested locality, I asked the District Magistrate to shift the centre immediately." Banerjee reminded District Magistrates and Police Superintendents that she has given a standing instruction to set up quarantine centres in isolated areas.

She also said that a private hospital in North Bengal's Siliguri refused to allow the facility from being turned into a Covid hospital after agreeing initially and alleged that some political parites also started agitating that no Corona hospital can be set up there.

"Why? We can set up Covid hospitals anywhere. If the government decides to acquire, it can do so in one second. But we don't act in such manner," she said.
For more coverage, visit our complete coronavirus section here.

The California Craft Brewers Association surveyed 230 brewery owners across the state to get a sense of the impacts of the novel coronavirus and shelter-in-place mandates on craft breweries, and the results are devastating.

Of the owners the association spoke with, 99 percent of of craft breweries in the state were "negatively impacted" by stay-at-home orders and experiencing a 43 percent decrease in overall sales. (Northern California breweries specifically saw a 42 percent decrease in overall sales.)

A huge reason behind this is due to the ways most craft breweries sell its product: most sell its beer through a brewery (accounting for an average of 50 percent sales, according to respondents) as well as through bars and restaurants (20 percent of sales), almost all of which are closed or operating at a lower capacity during this time. The result is 70 percent of all craft brewers' sales are hit hard by the shelter-in-place orders, CCBA said in a statement.

SUPPORT YOUR LOCAL BAR: A list of Bay Area bars and breweries with gift cards, crowdfunders and to-go offerings

As for California brewery employees, the outlook is bleak as well: 29 percent of the owners surveyed said they had to lay off staff, while 31 percent said they furloughed their workers. About 50 percent of owners said more layoffs could be in store in the next weeks.

Breweries nationally haven't fared any better, according to a similar survey by the Brewers Association. Of 525 respondents across 49 states, the association saw that most breweries were "experiencing drops in excess of 70 percent." Brewers also stated that given the current state of the economy, federal aid and social distancing measures, 11.8 percent of brewery owners felt they could only sustain their business through the month and the plurality at 45.8 percent felt they could only weather the storm for just one to three months more before having to call it quits.

Figures from CCBA's 2018 statistics highlight the dramatic changes the industry has seen this year. In that year, the craft beer industry was said to have contributed $9.01 billion to California's economy, supporting 61,335 full-time jobs.

MORE CORONAVIRUS COVERAGE:

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Dianne de Guzman is a Digital Editor at SFGATE. Email: dianne.deguzman@sfgate.com
Due to the COVID-19 outbreak, Ethiopia has delayed elections slated for August and declared a state of emergency. Authorities should now consult with the opposition on how to manage the period ahead in order to smooth the countrys stuttering transition to multi-party democracy.

The arrival of COVID-19 could not have come at a more sensitive time for Ethiopia, which was due to hold pivotal elections in August after five years of political turmoil. On 31 March, some two weeks after authorities announced the first coronavirus case in Africas second-most populous country, the electoral board suspended preparations for the vote due to the public health risk. Then, on 10 April, parliament approved a five-month state of emergency, giving authorities sweeping powers to battle the disease. As elections will not occur before parliaments term ends in early October, an interim governing arrangement will likely be necessary. Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed now faces the daunting task of stopping the virus from spreading while limiting economic harm to a vulnerable population that relies mostly on subsistence work. Key opposition parties have broadly accepted the emergency decree so long as the government does not use it as a tool for political repression. They have also signalled that they wish to be closely consulted in devising an interim arrangement for governing the country when parliaments term ends. Abiy should heed their calls, and then work with them to tackle longer-term threats to the countrys democratic transition.

Addis Ababas response to the COVID-19 outbreak has been uneven. Authorities first confirmed the diseases presence in Ethiopia on 13 March, two days after the World Health Organization categorised it as a global pandemic. Since then, confirmed infections have climbed steadily to 82, with three deaths announced. Testing, so far, has been limited by a lack of capacity, adding to uncertainty about the extent of the viruss spread among a mostly rural population of around 110 million people. In the meantime, bucking policies elsewhere in East Africa, state carrier Ethiopian Airlines, whose hard currency earnings help fund essential imports, has continued flying wherever possible, including to Chinese and European destinations. While the federal and regional governments announced measures such as suspending large gatherings and inter-city public transport, authorities have not introduced a comprehensive lockdown to try to contain COVID-19. The disinclination to impose such measures probably reflects an effort to avoid what analysts predict could be at least one million job losses at a time when around two million young Ethiopians annually enter the labour market and the urban unemployment rate is approximately 20 per cent.

Allowing economic activity to continue unchecked could lead to millions of infections within months.

The coronavirus has the potential to sow chaos in Ethiopia due to the countrys already formidable economic and social challenges. On one hand, the public health risks presented by COVID-19 are vast. Living and working conditions are highly conducive for transmission, as people live in crowded inter-generational households that often lack running water. Allowing economic activity to continue unchecked could lead to millions of infections within months, with serious cases quickly overwhelming an already weak health system that has only a few hundred ventilators and fewer than 500 intensive care units. In 2016, only around 2 per cent of Ethiopias clinics had oxygen delivery devices .

On the other hand, a lockdown would deprive millions of Ethiopians of their livelihoods, including many who subsist on daily earnings from the informal service economy. It could also squeeze domestic food supply at a time when annual inflation is at more than 20 per cent. Vital imports such as fuel, medicine and fertiliser may become scarce if dwindling hard currency reserves are depleted further because of reduced sales for top earners such as Ethiopian Airlines (which, although it continues to operate, has seen a dramatic decline in business ) and flower exporters, combined with slowing remittances and other inflows. Given these economic frailties, the countrys leaders have sought a middle path between measures to slow the diseases spread and a more draconian approach that they rightly or wrongly fear would, because of its economic consequences, be even more harmful than the virus itself.

Either scenario (or some combination of the two) could lead to serious unrest. If the virus grabs hold and many Ethiopians find themselves without sufficient resources to care for their families, they could turn against authorities whom they perceive to be incompetent. Alternatively, if the state takes public health measures that make it impossible for people to provide for themselves, it could provoke a similar reaction. The possibility of disturbances makes it all the more important for the government to bend over backwards to foster unity among diverse constituencies in support of the political path it chooses through the crisis, even as it arrogates to itself extraordinary unilateral powers.

State of Emergency

The declaration of a nationwide state of emergency  which, according to Ethiopias constitution , can be invoked to deal with epidemics  gives the federal government sweeping authority to address the crisis. A federal minister told Crisis Group that the emergency will be managed by Abiys cabinet rather than a committee of civilian, military and other security officials as in the past. In principle, the state of emergency could allow greater federal control over regional security operations, including an enhanced role for the military, although it is not yet known whether the government intends to use this power.

The Attorney Generals Office said it will publicise regulations ordered and actions taken under the decree, adding that violations could result in fines of up to 200,000 Ethiopian birr ($6,033). It is not clear, however, exactly what those government instructions will be, with the Prime Ministers Office stressing the need for flexibility because of the pandemics uncertain trajectory in Ethiopia. The Attorney Generals Office has announced initial measures including banning meetings of more than four people and making it mandatory to cover mouths in public places. They also prohibit companies from laying off workers unless in keeping with government guidelines. For now, senior officials have suggested that they will not issue a stay-at-home order due to the severe impact it would have on the poor.

Concerns are brewing among some opposition parties about whether Abiy will use the decree and election postponement to grab more power and consolidate tactical advantages ahead of future polls.
Africas leading beverage manufacturing giant, Kasapreko Company Limited has donated to Manhyia Palace, the seat of Ashanti Kingdom, assorted drinks, water, and hand sanitizers to complement the efforts of Asantene Otumfour Osei Tutu II in providing support to the vulnerable groups in the lockdown areas in Greater Kumasi.



The total value of the donation was GHC 40,000.00 and it included packs of Awake purified drinking water, assorted quantities of Royal soft drinks, 10/10 drinks, Veraldo drinks and cartons of KCL Hand Sanitizers.



The Government of Ghana as part of the measures put in place in containing the novel Coronavirus has extended the lockdown period to another two weeks in Greater Accra and Greater Kumasi allowing the movement of essential service providers



kasapreko Company Limited is believed to be the first indigenous Manufacturing Company to produce

hand sanitizers in Ghana after the hikes of hand sanitizers in the market during the outbreak of COVID-19 in Ghana.

Before the donation to the Manhyia Palace, the Company had already presented quantities of KCL hand sanitizers to the Ministry of Information, 37 Military Hospital, Korle Bu Teaching Hospital in Accra where these hand sanitizers are currently being used in these hospitals.



Speaking to the Media, the Territory Department Officer for Kasapreko Company Limited, Nii Ahuateh Akwetey-Kodjoe explained the rationale behind the donation also touching on the Corporate Social Responsibility of the company aimed at touching lives of Ghanaians.



Nii Ahuateh Akwetey-Kodjoe said more humanitarian gestures of this kind are still ongoing to other institutions.



Receiving the items on behalf of Manhyia Palace, Baffour Yaw Boateng, Dominasehene expressed gratitude to the company for their kind gesture which according to him will help the poor in the lockdown communities.

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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Australian e-learning platform Matific, an online maths resource for kids from primary to Grade 6, has entered the Indian education technology market. This solution will be available at a monthly fee of Rs 210 in the Indian market.

The company said in a statement that the solution has been designed by mathematics professors and curriculum experts for parents looking for engaging solutions that are aligned to their childs school curriculums.

Called Matific Galaxy, this solution features hundreds of maths activities aligned with school curriculums of ICSE and CBSE boards. Matifics home product aims to provide a solution to conventional home-schooling and ensure that kids are well prepared for the future until the lockdown period ends.

Matific said that its content has been proven to help improve students' math results by 34 percent. The programme provides parents with access to a dashboard where they can keep track of their childs mathematics achievements and progress.

Given the current environment, schools institutions are going online around the world as they send students home with no timeline for return. Matifics solutions enable students to continue their learning process. We want to ensure that all students in all areas of India have the opportunity to continue learning during this time. This means ensuring that the price is not an issue. said Vibha Mahajan, VP, Matific India.

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

Matific offers a 7-day free trial for students and Matific Galaxy works in offline mode.

Right now, Matific is present in over 45 countries with adaptability in 26 languages across the world. This application is available both on Google Play and App Store. The Matific Galaxy programme can be accessed on desktop, tablets and mobile devices.

Amidst the Coronavirus outbreak, e-learning has gained momentum in India and across the world. This is because schools have temporarily suspended classes and daily lessons have moved online.

Here, schools are either conducting complete daily lessons online or are offering subject-wise classes through partnerships with education-technology players.
Abbott Laboratories announced Wednesday the launch of its third test for the coronavirus and said it could be screening up to 20 million people for antibodies for Covid-19 by June.

Abbott said it plans to distribute 4 million of the new antibody tests by the end of this month, after an initial shipment of 1 million tests this week to US customers, beginning Thursday.

"Antibody testing is an important next step to tell if someone has been previously infected," Abbott said in a press release.

"It will provide more understanding of the virus, including how long antibodies stay in the body and if they provide immunity," the company said.

Abbott's two other coronavirus tests, which only recently were introduced, determine whether a person has Covid-19 now.

One of those tests can tell in 13 minutes or less if a person at a testing site is currently infected, while the other test is performed in labs.

The new antibody test announced Wednesday will reveal if a person also had been infected in the past, even if they were no longer sick.

Infectious disease experts have said that such antibody screenings, also called serological tests, will be needed to track the spread of the coronavirus in the United States and elsewhere, and to develop containment strategies.

"We continue to contribute in a significant and meaningful way by providing new solutions across our diagnostics testing platforms," Abbott CEO Robert Ford said in a statement.

"I'm extremely proud of the many Abbott people who are working around the clock to get as many tests as we can to healthcare workers and patients."
(TNS)  The coronavirus pandemic has upended Michigan's political campaigns in a big election year, cancelling glad-handing, door-knocking, house parties and rallies out of respect for new social-distancing norms. Also canceled: The close-up selfie with supporters.In a matter of days and weeks, many candidates moved their operations into the virtual space  from town halls to volunteer training to fundraisers. Some shifted greater resources to mail and phone outreach or digital and broadcast advertising.But the new physical distance between folks is hard for candidates feeling the urge to be out on the trail engaging with voters."There really is no replacement for a good face-to-face conversation, particularly here in West Michigan where that kind of thing just goes so far," said Hillary Scholten, a Democrat aiming to win the seat of independent U.S. Rep. Justin Amash in the Grand Rapids area."We're trying to do everything we can with phone calls and virtual events."The presidential campaigns, both of which plan heavy investments in battleground Michigan, also have had to change the way they talk to voters.Campaign messaging has shifted as businesses closed, millions lost their jobs nationwide and more than 22,250 Americans died in connection with the disease COVID-19, including 1,768 deaths in Michigan as of Tuesday.President Donald Trump suspended his large arena rallies  the signature of his campaign and a key to building his contact lists for voter registration and getting out the vote in November.The campaign is now streaming virtual events online and, rather than the economy, allies are talking up Trump's response to the coronavirus.Ronna Romney McDaniel, head of the Republican National Committee and a Northville resident, kicked off a virtual training last week for 150 Michigan volunteers via Zoom video conference, organized by the partnership between the official campaign and the RNC.Their trainings went virtual on March 14 and now include tips for digital organizing  for example, how to contact voters online  and encouraging volunteers to talk up measures the president has taken to combat the pandemic."You know what? People, they want to talk to you right now. They're lonely. They want to get on the phone," McDaniel told the volunteers."It's rare that people want to talk about politics, but this is a great time to talk about the things that the president is doing."Virtual happy hoursThe campaign of presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden has adapted by hosting virtual happy hours and news conferences and doing more national TV interviews.Biden also launched a new podcast and hosted Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer as his second guest. Last week, he held a virtual fundraiser featuring California U.S. Sen. Kamala Harris who, like Whitmer, is talked about as a potential running mate for Biden.Asked at the fundraiser how he'd reclaim the public stage in the new era of social distancing, Biden said he'd keep experimenting with new methods of communicating and would be "blitzing" digital and traditional media."Now, it's a different way of campaigning. We've never had to do it before, Biden said, according to a pool report. It's going to be this way for a little while.Michigan's stay-home order complicated some campaigns' efforts to gather petition signatures needed to secure candidates' positions on the ballot.Republican Eric Esshaki of Birmingham, who is running for Congress, filed a lawsuit arguing the state's stay-home order made it impossible for him to collect the required 1,000 valid signatures by the April 21 deadline.Others found a way around the problem. Southwest Michigan U.S. Rep. Fred Upton's team got in two and a half weeks of collecting signatures after he announced his re-election campaign in late February. Then the public health crisis hit.Upton pulled back the petition gatherers and blasted out an email to supporters asking for help. His campaign offered to mail a petition to registered voters with a self-addressed envelope for them to send it back. They got 1,000 more signatures that way, a spokesman said.Shifting focus to crisisLike several other campaigns, Upton, a St. Joseph Republican, suspended digital email fundraising over the last month and has used his list instead to send out information and resources related to the public health emergency.The campaign also started highlighting individual front-line workers like doctors and grocery store workers in the district as "Southwest Michigan Heroes" on Upton's social media channels.U.S. Rep. Elissa Slotkin, a Holly Democrat, said her campaign has moved to the back burner as she focused on crisis response and constituent needs in recent weeks. She stopped asking for money for her campaign as of March 11."People's minds are not really focused the election right now," said Slotkin, who flipped a Republican district in her first bid for office."I dont think its appropriate to be doing online fundraising given everything the state is going through. But, also, people want to help their community right now. Their priority is helping their neighbors and community institutions and front-line health care workers."Instead of her campaign, Slotkin asked her fundraising network to donate to hospitals in her district and Henry Ford Health and Beaumont Health systems.As of last week, her donors had raised $50,000 for front-line health workers at Michigan hospitals, and that was before her campaign sent a second solicitation Friday.Slotkin's campaign also trained nearly 200 campaign volunteers to do community welfare checks by phone, targeting the elderly and people who might otherwise be isolated. Volunteers have placed nearly 3,000 calls since April 1, according to the campaign.Keeping in touchPaul Junge of Brighton, who is running in the GOP primary in a bid to take on Slotkin, is still making calls to residents whose support he hopes to win but no longer soliciting donations. Some don't want to talk politics anymore, he said."Personally, I dont make an ask anymore. Im calling really to keep in touch with people, to hear how things are going for them. To express interest and support in what they're facing," Junge said."...Some people, all their focus right now is, Ive got to save my business, or I've got to save my finances, so I can make sure my family is in good shape."As a first-time candidate, Junge was planning on local party events such as pancake breakfasts and the Republican womens forum to help spread the word about his campaign. Those events have been canceled."As normal life starts to come back hopefully in May and June, and hopefully, we keep the coronavirus at bay, I think things will come back," he said.Republican Peter Meijer, who is also targeting Amash's seat, reorganized his campaign volunteers to deliver grocery care packages to vulnerable residents who can't shop for themselves during the pandemic.The food is paid for by the campaign, and the deliveries are "contact-less"  left on a front porch or stoop with a ring of the bell."My background is in disaster relief and humanitarian aid and nonprofits," said Meijer, who was involved in the response after Superstorm Sandy and Oklahoma tornadoes."I was more than glad to get rid of that partisan playbook and focus on serving the community."He said in the first two weeks, the volunteers made a total 300 deliveries, with about half outside Michigan's 3rd District, which includes the Grand Rapids area.Grandson of the late retailer Fred Meijer, he named the outreach Operation F.R.E.D., which stands for Food Relief Emergency Delivery. But his team is shopping at many places other than Meijer, he said."Obviously, grocery runs in my veins, but we actually have been going to wherever the specials of the day might be and bulk purchasing might be easiest," he said.Scholten, the Democrat running in the 3rd District, said she's been reaching out to small business workers, first responders and health care workers, asking what they need and what they're experiencing.She shifted house parties and fundraisers online even before Whitmer's stay-home order three weeks ago, though she's cognizant of how her virtual events aren't accessible to people without internet access  whether that's due to financial constraints or lack of broadband internet."Its certainly something were paying attention to and already making plans for how we can connect as much in as a personable way as possible while still putting the health and safety of our community first," Scholten said."For now, that means staying home, staying safe and preventing the spread."
Source: Xinhua| 2020-04-15 21:03:11|Editor: xuxin

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ROME, April 15 (Xinhua) -- The Italian government has given a mixed response to the 540-billion-euro (588-billion-U.S. dollar) package agreed to by European financial ministers last Thursday, which aimed at softening the economic blow from the global coronavirus pandemic.

Last Friday, Italian Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte called the plan "insufficient," saying Italy would "battle to the end" to help secure a plan for what are being called "Eurobonds" -- a debt instrument that would be shared by all 19 members of the euro currency zone.

All last week, Conte's Minister of Finance Roberto Gualtieri had fought for some version of the "Eurobonds" plan. But once the financial package was agreed to, Gualtieri praised it.

"We have put a recovery fund enabling common debt issuance on the table," Gualtieri said.

Analysts said it was clear that the economic package finally agreed to was a "compromise plan" that gained traction after Germany and the Netherlands opposed any kind of common debt instrument like the "Eurobonds."

"Gualtieri has been relatively optimistic that the plan finance ministers agreed to is a step in the right direction," Lorenzo Castellani, a professor specializing in the history of political institutions at Rome's Luiss University, told Xinhua.

Castellani said the "rigid" stance from Germany and the Netherlands comes from worries they would have to assume more debt, while money raised would be disproportionally used by the countries hardest hit by the pandemic, such as Italy and Spain.

As the head of the third-largest economy in the euro zone, Conte may have been trying to strengthen Italy's hand in future coronavirus-related economic negotiations, Castellani said.

"This latest economic package won't be enough on its own," he said. "Ministers will come back to this topic again."

According to Lucio Poma, a professor of economics and industrial policy at the University of Ferrara, neither the current economic plan nor the issuance of "Eurobonds" will be enough to completely rescue an Italian economy that was already struggling before the country reported its first case of the coronavirus.

"Italy's economy has been in need of major structural reforms for many years," Poma, who is also the director of Industry and Innovation section at the economic studies firm Nomisma, said in an interview.

"This outbreak helped further expose the weaknesses in the economy, but it did not cause those weaknesses," Poma said. "Other countries will probably emerge from this crisis faster than Italy because they did not have the same weaknesses going into it."

Estimates vary widely on how big an economic impact the coronavirus outbreak and subsequent economic lockdown will have on the country's economic growth prospects.

Before the outbreak, most estimates from investment banks, economists, and multilateral institutions predicted the economy would grow around 0.5 percent this year. Now, those estimates are mostly in the range of a negative 6.0 percent to 8.5 percent, before the impacts of the latest economic package were figured in.
Due to WFH and social distancing guidelines, traditional call centers can no longer operate with customer service representatives occupying the same physical space. Yet, there has never been a greater need for clear communication between insurers and beneficiaries. The rapidly growing MA program serves 23 million people, with an additional 10,000 individuals 'aging-into' Medicare eligibility daily and seeking coverage options guidance.

SOLVING THE DILEMMA

Assessing these factors, Cavulus has created MedicareVIP, Voice (over) Internet Protocol, the first-ever virtual contact center with fully integrated inbound and outbound calling features governed by CMS-mandated workflows and call scripts.

"We've been in close contact with our MA clients as this crisis has unfolded and there's an obvious, urgent need for virtual solutions that comply with the Federal regulations," says Phillips. "Call volumes have spiked, and insurers realize this will be vastly compounded during the Fall Annual Election Period."

Cavulus has exclusively served the MA industry since its inception in 2006. "We provide secure, compliant, Cloud-based solutions, so we're in a unique position to respond to this changing landscape," says Phillips. "Our newest capabilities enable insurers to immediately shift to virtual call center operations on a single platform - with their agents, third party call centers, independent brokers and enrollment personnel working from the safety of their own homes."

According to Cavulus EVP of Product Sean O'Sullivan, "Our MedicareVIP technology incorporates all of the features that call centers traditionally rely upon in an office setting, including agent monitoring, reporting, warm transfer and whisper features. These are integrated with our existing Cavulus MAP (Medicare Advantage Platform) products, which are widely used by insurers throughout the country, including the largest licensed Medicare Advantage agent networks".

"WORK FROM HOME" REALITIES

Even before the COVID-19 pandemic, the need for virtual tools across administrative and clinical functions has been growing. "Regionalized natural disasters like hurricanes and the recent California wildfires have disrupted business continuity more frequently. And other factors like recruitment of licensed talent and rising commercial rents have compelled MA insurers to consider remote operating models," explains O'Sullivan.

"However, this current crisis has dramatically expedited the shift to virtual contact," Phillips said. "Our Medicare population is among the most vulnerable to COVID-19, and understandably, there's a lot of uncertainty and fear. MA plans are under pressure to adapt and field agents are concerned about their livelihoods."

"Our MedicareVIP technology solves these issues," asserts Phillips. "It unifies communication and will keep an extraordinary number of knowledgeable insurance experts employed. MA plans can instantly engage their available telesales agents and broker networks by compliantly routing calls to them while they're working from home."

Phillips predicts: "It will need to be 'all hands on deck' during the Fall enrollment window. Most beneficiaries have access to 28 plans from seven to 10 insurers, and there are counties with as many as 60 different options. There are more choices than any prior year. The industry relies on qualified licensed sales experts, so we've easily enabled telecommuting to remove geographic recruitment and COVID distancing barriers. Our parents, grandparents, and neighbors can now be served by the best talent in the country."

NEW OPERATING ENVIRONMENT

"Recently, there's been an expanded use of telehealth allowing patients to receive guidance from their clinicians without traveling to a healthcare facility," notes Phillips. "Similarly, MedicareVIP remotely connects beneficiaries with a trusted Medicare advisor to navigate pharmacy and medical benefits."

"The new reality is driving an overwhelming call volume to limited resources within contact centers who've sent a majority of their customer service representatives home," acknowledges Phillips. "Moreover, field agents can't sit across a kitchen table to review benefits with beneficiaries. This complicates an essential service that must be seamless, all while adhering to PHI, HIPAA and CMS regulatory standards."

"These new circumstances have been the driving force for our latest solution," declares Phillips. "Our partners like UPMC and others are contributing on the clinical front during these difficult times. Everyone is helping how they can, and our Cavulus team is focused on empowering the MA industry so there's no lapse in critical communications, and no barriers to Medicare enrollment now, or in the future."

ABOUT CAVULUS - Cavulus is a technology driven specialist in Medicare Advantage insurance solutions. The Cavulus Cloud-based Medicare Advantage Platform (Cavulus MAP) unifies marketing, sales and enrollment operations, and is utilized by many of America's top insurers, including several BlueCross/ BlueShield companies, UPMC Health Plan, Johns Hopkins Healthcare, Lumeris and United Healthcare. For details visit: www.cavulus.com.

Media Inquiries: 800-760-6915

Email: [email protected]

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Hotel and restaurant industry associations on Wednesday urged the Maharashtra government to roll back 15 per cent hike in the renewal of excise license for 2020-21, following the difficult situation of the business in the wake of COVID-19 lockdown.

All three major trade bodies -- Hotel and Restaurant Association of Western India (HRAWI), National Restaurant Association of India (NRAI) and Indian Hotel and Restaurant Association (AHAR) -- in a statement said the move by the government is equivalent to penalising a business for non-timely payment of a fee during the worst crisis.

There is zero cash flow during the lockdown as the industry stands firmly with the nation in its fight against the global pandemic, it added.

"The industry is completely shut, there is no business and we have no income and it could be a long time in future before business gets back to normal. We appeal to the state government as well as the Central government to understand our situation. It is not the time for half measures or 15 per cent cuts, but suspension of all statutory fees," HRAWI President Gurbaxish Singh Kohli said.

He said, the government should proactively take measures to boost business as the hospitality and tourism sector is one of the biggest job generators and contributors to India's GDP.

"This notice has come as a shock to us. The governments at the Center as well as the state have acknowledged the plight of the hospitality industry. We have thrown open our restaurant and hotel kitchens to prepare meals for the needy and are providing close to one lakh meals per day.

"Besides this, our rooms have been thrown open to house doctors and medical workers. Our industry was the first to get hit due to the pandemic and business has come to a complete standstill. In such a situation, instead of lending support, they are expecting us to continue paying statutory levies as before. This will break our backs," Kohli added.

AHAR president Shivanand Shetty said the industry was already going through the recessionary phase from January and the pandemic was the last nail in the coffin.

"An industry in such trying times wants to see that each member is able to restart the business. The challenges faced by a small and medium sized restaurant are huge as on one hand he is facing a huge manpower shortage and on the other hand loss of business due to the lockdown.

"Moreover, payment of salaries, general maintenance and requirements of working capital has further created a hole in his pocket," he said.

The industry needs assistance from the government in terms of relief in payment facilities for license fees and reduction in respect to the number of days lost due to the lockdown, he said.

"This would stimulate the Industry and maintain employment and help the government through taxes, which will directly help in nation building," Shetty added.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Hundreds of migrant workers



gathered on the streets of Surat in Gujarat on the second consecutive day on Wednesday, officials said.

About 300 workers came out on Ved Road in Pandol industrial area around 4 pm over some petty issues related to the food being served to them, said Assistant Commissioner of Police (ACP) DJ Chavda.

Thousands of migrants from states like Uttar Pradesh, Bihar and Odisha, who work in factories in Surat, have been stuck in Pandol area due to the coronavirus lockdown.

They are served food by authorities with the help of some NGOs.

"While one group of workers demanded that food be served near their houses, others wanted the serving point closer to them. These workers also complained that the food being served to them was tasteless. Luckily, police resolved the matter in time and dispersed these workers" said Chavda.

On Tuesday also, hundreds of migrant workers came out on roads in Varachha area of the city demanding that they be allowed to go to their native states, hours after the Centre extended the national lockdown period till May 3.

Recently, some migrant workers had hurled stones and resorted to arson in Laskana area of the city with a similar demand.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Anyone who has been to the store recently knows that hand sanitizer is still hard to come by, at a time when its most critically needed.

The BASF Corp. site in Wyandotte is doing its part to respond to this need, creating and producing a hand sanitizer known as HandClasp. A cross-functional team of BASF scientists and engineers worked on a compressed timeline to develop it, and applied for a trademark on the name.

The first 1,000 gallons in the United States was donated to the Henry Ford Health System.

The sanitizing product will help meet the increased demands needed to safely combat the COVID-19 pandemic.

The Wyandotte facility is home to one of BASFs largest Research and Development Centers and manufacturing sites in North America, with more than 1,200 employees.

BASF does not regularly produce hand sanitizer at the Wyandotte location; however, the facility received authorization from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to temporarily produce a safe and high-quality sanitizing product.

The facility has produced over 8,000 gallons of hand sanitizer being distributed to the Henry Ford Health System, and other health care systems in Michigan, Texas, Louisiana, Mexico and Canada, as well as other BASF locations in the United States.

The idea and effort began with Greg Pflum, BASFs vice president and general manager of the companys Midwest Hub. He reached out to BASF Wyandottes technical and manufacturing teams to quickly develop a solution after receiving an urgent request from the Emergency Management and Homeland Security Division of the Michigan State Police and the Michigan Manufacturers Association.

When we learned of the supply shortage of disinfectants for health care systems and hospitals, our technical experts in Wyandotte displayed amazing resourcefulness and collaboration to develop and produce a beneficial antimicrobial product within a few days, Pflum said. Because of the diligent efforts of our Wyandotte team, BASF will help alleviate the critical shortage of disinfectant agents for front-line health care workers fighting COVID-19 in our communities.

Following the companys Helping Hands campaign in Germany, BASF teams worldwide are supporting the fight against COVID-19 by producing and donating hand sanitizers to hospitals, health care facilities and other institutions.

In the United States, disinfectants are also produced at the BASF site in Washington, New Jersey.

Developing a plan and executing it in a condensed time frame wasnt an easy task, said Marika Diamond, head of communications for the Midwest Hub.

Our technical experts displayed a great deal of effort and amazing dedication to produce a lab-scale batch of the sanitizers in just four days, she said. Producing a safe, quality product in an extremely short time frame took immense collaboration and coordination across multiple teams at the BASF Wyandotte site.
April 15, 2020 -- Charoen Pokphand Foods PCL (CP Foods) has provided healthy food supports to Thai frontline medical staffs to combat COVID-19 pandemic with an approximately budget of Bt200 million. Since March 1, 2020, the company has delivered variety of food menus to 88 public hospitals nationwide as well as 20,000 quarantine people. This social responsible activity has come under "CPF's Food from the Heart Against COVID-19" Project, which 
Beatrice Longoria thought her pre-birth plans would be filled with loving baby showers and exciting doctor visits. Instead, the 32-year-old local nurse has experienced some "scary" and "disappointing" memories due to the coronavirus pandemic.

As a nurse at an urgent care clinic in San Antonio, Longoria said she came in contact with a patient who tested positive for COVID-19 in March. Thankfully, Longoria's test came back negative. After the incident, she began working from home as an over-the-phone triage nurse.

Longoria, who is now 36-weeks pregnant, said she also had to cancel her Fiesta-themed baby shower as well as go to her doctor appointments alone without her boyfriend in order to follow social distancing measures.

As a way to stay positive through it all, Longoria decided to make her pregnancy photoshoot coronavirus-themed.

Below are the photos that were taken by her sister-in-law Jamie Ruiz on Saturday at La Villita.
" " Google's Gmail Confidential Mode lets an email sender set a message to automatically expire anywhere from 24 hours to five years after it is sent. S3studio/Getty Images

Remember Inspector Gadget? If you were a child in the '80s, then you know the inept cartoon investigator used to receive his assignments through self-destructing messages that usually wound up detonating in someone's hands.

Google rolled out its own version of the Inspector Gadget message. The company's disappearing emails may not actually detonate, but they do vanish after a certain amount of time. The tool is part of Google's efforts to beef up privacy and cybersecurity for Gmail users. It will be available to corporate accounts at a later, unspecified date, but if you have a personal Gmail account, you can enable it and use it right away.

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The feature lets an email sender set a message to automatically expire anywhere from 24 hours to five years after it is sent. A lock icon at the bottom of each new email allows users to select that the message be sent in Gmail Confidential Mode. In addition to setting an expiration date, Confidential Mode messages also can't be forwarded, downloaded, printed or copied and pasted into a new email or document. Users also can select the option of requiring a pass code in order to open the message.

The service is a response to growing concerns about privacy and cybersecurity. It also comes as smartphone app messaging services like WhatsApp and Signal are attracting users to their encrypted messaging services and SnapChat's disappearing photo message platform continues to be a hit among younger users.

But, before you start emailing friends the juicy details of your diary, there are a few important limits on confidential emails you might want to keep in mind. Erased emails may fade away from receivers' inboxes, but they'll still show up in your "sent" file if you don't manually delete them. Keep in mind as well that Mac OS and Windows OS both allow the taking and saving of screenshots of anything that appears on a screen. It's also not clear how long the messages stay on Google's servers, leaving them vulnerable to be swept up in a potential hack like the one on the Democratic National Committee.

Now That's Interesting Computer engineer Ray Tomlinson sent the world's first email in 1971, a test message from one computer to another in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
To the Editor:

Re Trump, Seeing Poll Numbers Drop, Blames W.H.O. for Virus Mistakes (news article, April 15):

President Trump has halted funding for the World Health Organization over vague and ever-shifting allegations of China-centrism and delaying the pandemic response. The accusations are false and hypocritical, and betray Mr. Trumps colossal ignorance about the workings of this global organization.

The W.H.O. pressed quietly and successfully to get foreign specialists into China and issued warning after warning to the world about the urgent measures needed to stop transmission. Instead, Mr. Trump dithered and now casts about for someone else to blame.

Funding must be restored immediately. The deadly challenge of H.I.V./AIDS, malaria, polio and even Ebola (an outbreak recently thought to be over) hasnt diminished just because a new pandemic is raging. If we weaken the W.H.O.s capacity to support its member states, especially those in South Asia, South America and Africa that have yet to be seriously affected by the coronavirus pandemic, we will be part of the problem, not the solution. First, do no harm.

Suzanne Cherney

Naples, Fla.

The writer has worked as an editor and writer at W.H.O. and UNAIDS.

To the Editor:

As soon as I heard of President Trumps W.H.O. bashing and promises to end support, I went online and donated to its Covid-19 Solidarity Response Fund. Not much, but likely way more than whatever small bit of my taxes help fund it.




Sosoliso Airlines founder, Victor Ikwuemesi

Chairman of the defunct Sosoliso Airlines, Mr Victor Ikwuemesi is dead.

He died of the coronavirus pandemic in London, according to information provided by a close friend of the family on Tuesday.

Ikwuemesi, who was said to have been admitted in a London hospital for an undisclosed illness, later tested positive for coronavirus in the hospital.

Confirming the death of the businessman, Mr Ikechi Uko, a close friend of the son of the late Ikwuemesi who happened to be the Managing Director of the airline while his father was the Chairman, described the death of the airline chief as very sad

It was gathered that the late airline chief before his death was placed in an intensive care unit but when the oxygen was removed from him to eat, he found it difficult to breath on his own. He was then placed on ventilator and he died shortly.

Details later..
Thousands of Victorian families have begun trying to navigate the challenge of home-learning this morning, with class officially back in session. Others arrived at near-empty schools.

Students whose parents are essential workers, or families who face difficult circumstances, are allowed to head into the classroom, but most are encouraged to work from home.

One of those families is the Lancaster family in Inverloch.

Donna Lancaster has four children who attend Inverloch Primary School and were ready to go at home this morning.
At Viennas newly opened hospital in the north of the city, parking lots and hallways remain almost deserted, with only a handful of staff seen walking past the large glass entrance.

For now, visitors arent allowed inside the hospital and non-emergency surgeries have been postponed indefinitely.

Unlike in Italy and Spain, the eerily quiet hospital appears to show that Austrias health care system has not yet been overburdened and that capacities remain able to handle the outbreak.

Currently, Austria is treating only around 1,000 Covid-19 patients in hospitals, around a quarter of them in intensive-care units. Hastily built field clinics with hundreds of beds, most of which are housed at event venues, also remain vacant, as do about a third of ICU beds nationwide.

The ministry of health on Tuesday announced 122 new coronavirus cases, a dramatic drop from the peak of 966 cases on 26 March. In mid-March, the number of infections doubled every three days. Now, the curve has been flattened, government data shows, with infections now doubling only about every two weeks. Austria has reported 393 coronavirus deaths and 14,000 cases.

The governments success in fighting the pandemic thus far is owed mainly to an early lockdown, Thomas Czypionka, head of the Austrian Institute of Advanced Studies Health Economics and Health Policy Group and a visiting senior research fellow at the London School of Economics and Political Science, told The Independent.

The country went into lockdown on 16 March, making the small Alpine nation one of the first to introduce such sweeping measures in Europe. By comparison, the UK did so on 23 March. On Tuesday, shops began reopening in Austria as the country started to loosen restrictions  after just one month of lockdown.

Recommended Empty streets in Austria as country reopens shops and eases lockdown

We reacted very early, and very decisively, Czypionka said. Models that showed how the virus would likely spread if no measures were introduced had an impact on decision makers, he said, as did the large number of deaths and conditions in hospitals in northern Italy, a region that directly borders Austria.

Austrias lockdown was also relatively strict compared to other countries: people were only allowed to leave their homes if they were essential workers, if they needed to shop for essential items like groceries, or if they were helping people in need of support.

Police patrolled streets, parks and tourism destinations, and fined those lingering in public spaces or meeting with a person who did not live in the same household. More than 17,000 tickets were handed out.

Aside from an early shutdown and self-isolation, Clemens Martin Auer, one of the governments chief health advisors during the pandemic, says the main reason for this decrease in infection rates was a hotline that dispatches mobile testing units to people who show symptoms that would match a Covid-19 infection.

The key was to keep them out of the hospitals, where a lot of transmissions could take place, and where it could spread quickly, and that really made a difference for us, Mr Auer told The Independent.

Though mobile testing and a Covid-19 phone number are not unique to Austria, Mr Auer said that both were available from the start of the pandemic and widely advertised and promoted in the media. People showing symptoms were told to first call the freephone hotline, operated by the Austrian Agency for Health and Food Services, where an expert would determine whether the caller needed to be tested and dispatch a mobile team of health care professionals who administer tests directly at peoples homes.

The system didnt always run smoothly, with people reporting long waiting times to get through and a narrow definition of which symptoms could indicate a Covid-19 infection. The government also struggled to keep up with testing and people reported waiting more than a week from their first call until receiving results.

Still, Mr Auer says that this allowed the majority of cases to remain under self-quarantine at home, while those needing professional medical attention could be admitted to hospitals ready to handle the influx.

That was our big achievement, Mr Auer said.
The Welsh government has apologised for incorrectly sending thousands of letters warning vulnerable people to stay at home while the coronavirus crisis is ongoing to the wrong addresses.

As many as 13,000 letters were sent to the wrong addresses in Wales in a processing error, in what Plaid Cymru has called a potentially disastrous mistake.

According to the BBC, more than 80,000 people with serious underlying health conditions or the elderly were meant to receive a shielding letter by 3 April from the chief medical officer advising them to stay at home for 12 weeks.

The letter also offers essential information and advice on how to get medication and food if the recipient does not have anyone else to rely on for help. With the letters, recipients would also qualify for priority delivery slots from supermarkets.

Delyth Jewell AM, Plaid Cymrus shadow minister for local government, said in a statement: This is a potentially disastrous mistake which could needlessly endanger lives.

The mistake needs to be rectified as a matter of urgency by the Labour Welsh Government, who need to tell us exactly what went wrong for this to happen in the first place.

A spokeswoman for the Welsh Government said: Due to a processing error within the NHS Wales Informatics Service (NWIS), some shielding letters were posted to a previous address, where the intended recipient had recently moved.

All letters have since been reissued to the correct addresses. We provided all local authorities with the correct details from the start of this process and they have been directly contacting each person involved over the past two weeks.

We fully understand the concern this would have caused people and sincerely apologise for the mistake, she added.

Some people who found out their shielding letter had gone to the wrong address have complained on Twitter.

One woman said: Disappointed my shielding letter has gone to a previous address and am now UNABLE to get priority home delivery for food/essentials. Having an autoimmune disease and having had regular chemotherapy I am home and terrified.

Even some of those who have received their shielding letters have not been able to get priority delivery slots, social media posts suggest.

There are almost 6,000 confirmed positive coronavirus cases in Wales, with more than 400 deaths.
When The Bachelor Presents: Listen to Your Heart was announced, viewers vowed not to watch the new spinoff series. But after weeks of social distancing, Chris Harrison welcomed fans with open arms in the April 13 premiere, offering everyone a little escape. The debut episode also introduced a group of 20 musicians hoping to find love and promote their careers. However, the rose ceremony cut that dream short for a few individuals. So who went home on The Bachelor: Listen to Your Heart Week 1? Heres who was eliminated last night.

The Bachelor: Listen to Your Heart Week 1 cast is introduced on April 13

Even before Listen to Your Heart premiered on April 13, Harrison said the musical spinoff was Bachelor in Paradise meets A Star Is Born. Then at the start of the episode, the host prompts the question, Will a shared love of music lead to a love that is shared forever? For now, were skeptical.

As always, week 1 dives into a few cast backgrounds. We meet Brandon, the 34-year-old who operated as a scout sniper in the Marine Corps. Next up is Bri from Utah, who was previously engaged but broke things off. Then Sheridan from Texas somehow charms his way in with a Subaru ad.

Eventually, were introduced to Bekah, the 25-year-old who doesnt exist without musical theatre. Shes a real treat. Then another Texan, Gabe, comes along looking for someone who is musically and spiritually compatible. Meanwhile, Savannah is a yoga teacher from Nashville who is her own free spirit.

The final two bios for the night are Trevor and Jamie. Trevor films his sequence with his dog and apparently, he hasnt dated another musician before. Oh right, and he was a former contestant on American Idol and hit on by Katy Perry. Finally, the introductions end with Jamie, the 21-year-old who says every guy shes been with has cheated on her. However, she seems excited to find someone who speaks her love language  music.

Of course, the cast introduction segment didnt highlight every contestant. As the night continues, we also meet Ryan, Matt, Mel, Rudi, Chris, Russell, Michael Todd, Julia, Cheyenne, and Josh. Meanwhile, the remaining contestants  like Danny and Jack  receive little to no screentime. So heres guessing where theyre headed in the next few episodes.

The cast couples up on Listen to Your Heart

For the most part, the first week of Listen to Your Heart goes as expected. Connections start to form between the castmates  with a sprinkle of drama on the side. Many individuals pair off. But since theres an uneven number, some love triangles form.

Julia finds herself caught between Josh and Sheridan. But she appears to make a decision at the rose ceremony with no regrets. Meanwhile, Matt vibes with Rudi on night one and they get into the hot tub together. They dont kiss but they seem to have a good time. But when Matt receives the date card, he chooses Mel.

As a result, Rudi is upset and later calls him out on it. She wont be giving him her rose. Then when Matt and Mel see the Plain White Ts, they realize its not going anywhere. So all three of them must find other prospects.

The final triangle involves Ryan, Jaime, and Trevor. Jaime is the first person who Ryan meets at the Listen to Your Heart mansion and they seem to really like each other. But when Trevor arrives, Jaimes attention is diverted. Then when Ryan gets a date card, he takes Jaime to Capitol Records and they record John Mayers Gravity together. They definitely seem solid. But it doesnt last.

When Jaime and Ryan return to the group, Trevor tries to turn on the charm. He plays a song for Jaime and she loves it. Nevertheless, this move also confuses the 21-year-old. She doesnt know who to pick until the rose ceremony.

Who was eliminated and sent home on The Bachelor: Listen to Your Heart Week 1?

The Bachelor Presents: Listen to Your Heart Cast | John Fleenor via Getty Images

When the elimination ceremony begins, Harrison explains the rules. The women get to choose who goes home on The Bachelor: Listen to Your Heart Week 1. So with 12 men and eight women, four people will be sent packing tonight.

First up, Savannah hands out a rose to Brandon. Then Matt is nervous hell go home if Mel doesnt pick him. And in a turn of events, she chooses Gabe. Bekah keeps Danny, leaving fans confused since this relationship received zero air time.

Moving on, the Listen to Your Heart castmates correctly guess one couple when Bri gives her rose to Chris. Then Cheyenne picks Matt. We dont know why. As mentioned before, Julia makes her decision. She chooses Sheridan, sending Jack home. Finally, Jaime gives her rose to Trevor. So is Ryan out? Nope. Rudi saves Ryan.

The four men going home are Jack, Josh, Russel, and Michael Todd. But stay tuned. New contestants will arrive at the mansion to shake things up next week.

The Bachelor Presents: Listen to Your Heart airs Monday nights at 8 p.m. EST on ABC.

Read more: Hannah Brown and Tyler Cameron Shade Jed Wyatt While Watching The Bachelor: Listen to Your Heart
Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, April 15)  The first 40,000 sets of protective personal equipment donated by the San Miguel Corporation for COVID-19 frontliners have arrived from China on Wednesday.

The company said it has chartered a Philippine Airlines plane to transport the shipment sourced from suppliers in China, for distribution to various hospitals in Luzon where most COVID-19 cases are reported.

We are very fortunate to have been able to buy this much PPEs, SMC president and chief operating officer Ramon Ang said, adding that global demand for protective supplies amid the coronavirus pandemic is very high.

That is why when the opportunity to buy this much came, we grabbed it, and chartered a large aircraft to bring the supplies home, he said.

SMC earlier announced earmarking a 500-million fund to help better equip health workers trying to combat the COVID-19 crisis in the country.

It also earlier committed to procuring the initial 10,000 PPE coveralls to be produced by local garments manufacturers under the Confederation of Wearable Exporters of the Philippines.

SMC said it plans to continue buying locally manufactured PPE to distribute to medical frontliners.

We are hoping that with these developments, more doctors and nurses nationwide will have less worry about their safety and the availability of PPEs in the coming days and weeks, Ang said.

The company has also donated over P227 million in food products to underprivileged communities, as well as ethyl alcohol to hospitals, LGUs, and vital installations across the country.
Evidencing QuantHouse's commitment to improved customer experience, to manage business growth and optimise costs

LONDON, PARIS, CHICAGO, and SYDNEY, April 15, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- QuantHouse , the global provider of end-to-end systematic trading solutions including innovative market data services, algo trading platform and infrastructure products and part of Iress (IRE.ASX), today announced the completion of the first phase of their infrastructure process automation programme using cloud-based robot agents to demonstrate their commitment to delivering superior performance and resilience for their ever-growing client base.

It remains especially critical during times of uncertainty and volatility that infrastructures operate reliably, efficiently and have the necessary scale to meet ever-growing volumes and message rates. Introducing increased levels of automation enables QuantHouse to rapidly add resources to a number of their in-house processes with minimal human intervention, using widely adopted and secure cloud native technologies that deliver automated deployment and monitoring tasks. This infrastructure process automation initiative also ensures that QuantHouse is well positioned to expand easily into new markets that trade 24x7.

Emmanuel Carjat, Chief Operating Officer, QuantHouse, said: "QuantHouse has been designing and operating its own private low latency cloud for more than 15 years. With the general availability of advanced cloud management technologies, we are now leveraging those proven cloud native solutions to fundamentally review how we manage our operations. Using robot agents allows our engineers to spend their time planning for the future while out-tasking standard maintenance and client implementation processes."

Stephane Leroy, Co-Founder and Chief Revenue Officer, QuantHouse, concluded: "Over the last 15 months, QuantHouse has retained steady business growth on-boarding one new hedge fund client every week. These new hedge fund clients place a lot of value in our service resilience and performance. As a consequence, our ability to contract and deliver value to a growing number of customers are among our top priorities at QuantHouse. For this reason, this project is one of our most strategic objectives for 2020 as it combines revenue growth and operations optimisation into one single initiative."

About QuantHouse

Contact: Holly Finn, 07825-071-998, holly.finn@streetsconsulting.com
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Published April 15, 2020

On Easter Sunday, in the midst of the COVID-19 crisis, an EF-3 tornado with winds of about 140 mph struck the Monroe/West Monroe area causing destruction around Northeastern Louisiana. There were also two tornadoes that struck the Sterlington area, an EF-2 and EF-1.

The National Weather Service (NWS) in Shreveport credits the University of Louisiana Monroe Doppler radar with providing critical data which led to additional lead-time on alerts and alarms to warn the residents of Monroe and West Monroe and the surrounding area about the tornados.

Todd Murphy, Ph.D., Assistant Professor in Atmospheric Science was in communication with the NWS throughout the entire severe weather event ensuring the radar was scanning in a manner that helped their operations.

The NWS Shreveport issued the first tornado warning that included Monroe at 11:33 a.m. on Sunday, April 12 based on a radar detected surge in the line of thunderstorms. One minute later the rotation increased on the ULM radar, and a tornadic debris signature was detected on the ULM radar at 11:36 a.m.

Just a few minutes later the tornado touched down in the Brownsville - Bawcomville community and moved to the City of West Monroe damaging many homes. It then crossed the Ouachita River onto South Grand Street and impacted neighborhoods as well as the Masur Museum of Art.

It crossed near the intersection of Highway 165 and I-20 damaging structures and wooden power poles as it continued north of Millhaven Road then on to the Monroe airport causing severe damage at the airport and nearby neighborhoods.

Because of the additional lead-time for alerts and alarms to warn members of the Northeast Louisiana community to seek shelter, the ULM Doppler radar played a crucial role in the detection of the Monroe tornado and likely saved lives on Sunday.

The ULM Doppler weather radar was built specifically to close a low-level data gap within the national radar network, and it has time and again provided invaluable data to the National Weather Service to assist in the issuance of local severe weather warnings. We work closely with NWS meteorologist to ensure they receive timely and accurate data from our radar. In addition to this great service, the radar is used both in research and teaching, providing students a unique hands-on learning experience only available at some of the top atmospheric science programs in the country, stated Murphy.

Less than a year ago, ULM Doppler radar was credited for helping save lives with advance detection of the tornado which struck Ruston on April 25, 2019.

ULM installed the Doppler radar in October 2016 using a $3 million grant provided by the Louisiana Governors Office of Homeland Security and Emergency Preparedness (GOHSEP). ULM is the only primarily undergraduate institution in the United States with a S-band polarmetric Doppler weather radar. ULM students receive hands-on instruction at the undergraduate level on radar operation, in addition to advanced radar analysis and interpretation techniques.
We paid for the garage to be renovated so I could stream classes and provide private training sessions, which Alison and Donovan were well aware of and promised to help me design the space. They knew one of the main reasons we were purchasing the home was so that I could continue working while taking care of our daughter, Mostaccio said in an email. We were hopeful in the beginning and very patient and kind during the entire process of us waiting. Now we are being taken advantage of and it is hurting our family.
<! Comptroller General, Nigerian Immigration Service, Muhammadu Babandede >

By Kazeem Ugbodaga

The Comptroller-General of the Nigeria Immigration Service (NIS), Muhammed Babandede, has survived Coronavirus after he tested negative twice.

Babandede was struck with Coronavirus on March 29 after he tested positive for the virus.

He had returned from the United Kingdom and went into self-isolation before his samples were collected and found to be positive.

However, Babandede, on his twitter handle on Tuesday said he just received his second negative report on COVID-19.

He thanked all who prayed for his survival and gave God the glory for granting him victory over the pandemic.

I just receive my second negative report on COVID-19, I will like to thank all of u for your supplications. This victory is from God.

We thank Him for giving me the opportunity to have the experience which is more than my education and public service. he said.
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Stunning before and after photos show the devastationi in Mississippi and Tennessee after they were rocked by a series of tornadoes that killed 34 people across six states.

The high-resolution satellite images were collected by Maxar and shows the aftermath of tornadoes that hit Seminary, Mississippi and Chattanooga, Tennessee.

Buildings could be seen ripped completely from their foundations, with remnants scattered across fields nearby.

Many businesses and homes were ultimately destroyed by the tornadoes, with at least 27 hitting the area over Easter Weekend.

 Slide me  After (left) and before (right): The high-resolution satellite images were collected by Maxar and shows the aftermath of tornadoes that hit Seminary, Mississippi and Chattanooga, Tennessee. Remnants of farm buildings in Seminary

 Slide me  After (left) and before (right): Buildings could be seen ripped completely from their foundations, with remnants scattered across fields nearby

The death toll from the tornado outbreak that ravaged the South rose to at least 34 on Tuesday as Mississippi officials said a 12th person had died there.

The storms claimed lives in at least six states, and the National Weather Service said preliminary assessments found evidence that at least 27 twisters struck the region. The strongest twister was an EF-4 tornado that devastated southeastern Mississippi with winds as fast as 170mph.

Mississippi Governor Tate Reeve declared a state of emergency in the wake of the devastation.

'This is not how anyone wants to celebrate Easter Sunday,' he stated on Monday. 'As we reflect on the death and resurrection on this Easter Sunday, we have faith that we will all rise together. To the people of Mississippi, know that you are not alone. The state and our first responders are working around the clock and will not rest until this is over. We are mobilizing all resources available to protect our people and their property.'

 Slide me  After (left) and before (right): At least 34 people were killed in the at least 27 tornadoes that ravaged six states. Home in Chattanooga

 Slide me  After (left) and before (right): East Brainerd Elementary School and homes that were destroyed in Chattanooga

 Slide me  After (left) and before (right): Hundreds of homes and businesses were damaged or destroyed, and heavy rains caused flooding in some areas

Hundreds of homes and businesses were damaged or destroyed, and heavy rains caused flooding in some areas.

Nashville, Tennessee, broke a 71-year-old record by receiving 2.23 inches of rain in a day, the weather service said.

Governor Bill Lee on Tuesday traveled to Chattanooga and met with residents affected by the tornadoes.

Lee, a Republican, was photographed wearing a black face mask while touring the disaster area where at least three people died.

 Slide me  After (left) and before (right): Another farm building in Mississippi that was uprooted by the tornadoes

 Slide me  After (left) and before (right): Tornadoes struck several homes along Hughes road in Seminary, Mississippi

 Slide me  After (left) and before (right): Buildings that lost their entire foundations in Seminary. Debris from the buildings could be found several meters away

Nine died in South Carolina, governor Henry McMaster said, and eight were killed in Georgia.

A suspected twister lifted a house, mostly intact, and deposited it in the middle of a road in central Georgia.

In Louisiana, winds ripped apart a metal aircraft hangar.

Cleaning up and helping people after the storms was complicated by social distancing guidelines and shutdowns meant to safeguard against COVID-19, the disease caused by the new coronavirus.

Concrete safe room protects Mississippi family from tornado

A family in Mississippi managed to get to safety by hiding in their concrete safe room.

While the rest of their home in Moss, which they had just moved into last month, was obliterated in a matter of seconds on Easter Sunday, Andrew Phillips, wife Amber and their kids, ages two and six months, survived unscathed inside their concrete refuge, which doubled as a closet.

The family had been watching an online Easter service on Sunday morning. Phillips, a volunteer firefighter, then started tracking the weather online and with the help of a fire radio.

Realizing a tornado was close by, Phillips told Amber to get in the safe room with the kids and joined them. Then, after ducking outside and seeing the funnel cloud, he grabbed more bedroom pillows and jumped back inside, shielding his family with his body.

Amber Phillips stands outside the family's safe room, located on their property in Moss, Mississippi, following a tornado that destroyed their home on Sunday

While the rest of their home was obliterated in a matter of seconds, Phillips, her husband Andrew and their kids, ages 2 and 6 months, survived the storm without a scratch

Their family had just moved into the home a few weeks ago. Andrew said the safe room was one of the reason he bought the property in the first place

The powerful twister made quick work of the house, tearing it to shreds.

'I was in there about 20 seconds when it hit,' he said. 'The house is gone, everything but the safe room.'

The family had been living in the house only a few weeks. The safe room was one of the reasons he bought it, Phillips said.

Clothes were still hanging neatly inside the vault-like structure after the tumult. But the mans meat-processing business next door was smashed, as were their cars. Pieces of broken lumber, splintered trees and twisted wiring littered their property.

'I'm just going to let the insurance handle it and trust in the good Lord,' Phillips told The Associated Press by phone Monday. 'Were going to try to come back bigger and better.'

Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee, center, talks with residents as he visits a storm-damaged area Tuesday in Chattanooga
Britains world class big pharma companies were always going to be a huge asset in the fight against Covid-19 and in finding solutions, not just to this pandemic, but to future similar events.

We have now been offered insights into their thinking. Glaxosmithkline, where Emma Walmsleys first years as chief executive were marked by some slick deal making, is now laser-focused on finding a Covid-19 vaccine.

She and her team are seeking to develop manufacturing capacity to provide as many millions of doses as required, by the latter part of next year at the latest.

Britain's world class big pharma companies were always going to be a huge asset in the fight against Covid-19 and in finding solutions, not just to this pandemic, but to future similar events

As the worlds number one vaccine producer, it is linking with one of its main rivals, Sanofi, on a global rescue mission.

The British giant is to provide the pandemic adjuvant technology (used in its vaccines such as Shingrix), designed to ensure longer lasting immunity to increase chances the disease never comes back.

Sanofi is providing an antigen, which produces an immune response, based on DNA.

One suspects that given the supreme importance, the competition authorities will not be making difficulties about a humanitarian effort. Walmsley is very conscious that Covid-19 is just the first of many pandemics the world will have to face.

She views the current coronavirus vaccination work as setting up permanent research, labs and production which can give big pharma a head start in combatting further pandemics.

The world may have to wait for GSKs vaccine but Astrazeneca believes it has a good chance of producing a medicine which could provide an interim solution.

Its compound seeks to deploy the immunology skills which it has built up in its suite of cancer drugs.

The promising medicine is Calquence, which Astra is confident could fight the exaggerated immune response seen in Covid-19 patients. An announcement of clinical trials was enough to lift Astra shares.

Elsewhere, the joint effort by Glaxo, Astra and Cambridge University to turn their labs over to swab coronavirus testing is going well, and there is confidence that this could be capable of ramping up production to 30,000 tests a day as soon as next month.

The absence of Britains big pharma firms from Public Health Englands original war on coronavirus has been a lacuna in the battle against the disease. It is a relief to see that the UKs leading companies now have the freedom to punch their weight.

Early warning

The IMF Global Financial Stability report is the first port of call when looking for flashpoints on world markets, be they bad debts in Italys banks or the trillions of pounds of rotten corporate bonds.

The spring edition, focused on the impacts of coronavirus, makes for startling reading in spite of the 4.8 trillion of monetary help provided by central banks.

The Funds senior stability executive Tobias Adrian warns that despite this intervention there is a risk of a credit crunch in risky parts of the financial markets, notably high-yield loans and the private debt markets, which have soared to over 7 trillion.

He also worries that underwriting standards and, with it, investor protection have weakened.

In the last few months we have been assured on endless occasions by regulators that this crisis is different to 2008-10 because the banks are in much better shape. Adrian is not so sure.

He notes the large declines in bank share prices since January suggest that investors have real concerns about profitability.

In terms of market prices the banks are weaker in many countries than before the onset of the financial crisis.

This paper rightly has been critical of banks for failing to get loans out quickly enough to ailing enterprises. Maybe, just maybe, they are rightly concerned about a rerun of 2008 should the downturn be even more severe than expected.

Low flying

What are the owners of Heathrow up to? In April it expects flights to be 90 per cent down on a year ago, and is asking its 7,000 directly employed staff to take a pay cut.

What a pity its wealthy Spanish, Qatari and Chinese owners failed to make the same sacrifice when shareholders helped themselves to a 100million dividend in February.

By then the coronavirus had brought lockdown to Wuhan and spread to Italy.

Shameful.
BLANTYRE, April 14 (Reuters) - Malawi joined other southern African nations in announcing a three-week lockdown on Tuesday to curb the spread of coronavirus.

"If (we are ) not careful, Malawi could lose up to 50,000 lives from COVID," President Peter Mutharika said at a news conference with Health Minister Jappie Mhango announcing the lockdown lasting from April 18 until May 9.

Mhango said all non-essential businesses and services would cease.

Most southern African countries, including South Africa, Angola and Zimbabwe, have previously announced full or partial lockdowns. On Tuesday, Namibia extended its stay-at-home order by 2-1/2 weeks. No southern African nations have a significant number of cases yet, except South Africa which has 2,415 so far.

(Reporting Frank Phiri

Writing by Tim Cocks; Editing by Tom Brown)
Actress Soundarya Sharma is currently stranded in the USA amidst the Coronavirus pandemic. She and 400 other students have written to the Indian Embassy and the Ministry of External Affairs for evacuation assistance, but have not been getting positive responses.

According to IANS, Soundarya said, "These are challenging times for everyone, but my heart goes to hundreds of students including other fellow Indians who are stuck here, without proper accommodation and resources."

"I have been writing to the Indian Embassy and the Ministry of External Affairs for evacuation assistance however there has been no positive response nor any assistance to Indians who have been unable to meet their ends here," she added. Soundarya was visiting the United States to attend an acting course at the Lee Strasberg Theatre and Film Institute in Los Angeles.

"I would humbly request the Indian embassy and the MEA for a stimulus package for all those students and fellow Indians who are stuck here to help overcome this situation and hopefully arrange an evacuation flight back to India," said Soundarya.

The actress starred in the 2017 film Ranchi Diaries, a thriller produced by Anupam Kher. She was nominated for the 'Best Female Debutant' award by Zee Cine Awards and Star Screen Awards.

ALSO READ: Priyanka Chopra Joins Janta Curfew 'In Spirit' From USA; Gives Shout-Out To Heroes Of COVID-19

ALSO READ: Priyanka Chopra Rewards $100000 To Women Heroes Working Selflessly During COVID-19 Crisis



ALSO READ: Anil Kapoor Welcomes His Neighbour Anupam Kher By Serenading Him From His House Gate


The objective of the Project is to design, develop and manufacture 5,000 indigenous mechanical ventilators in the next couple of weeks and deploy them in designated hospitals in rural areas.

PGIM India Mutual Fund on Wednesday announced that as its contribution to the fight against the coronavirus, it is providing financial support to Project Breath of Hope, a unique collaborative effort led by the government of Kerala to design and produce fully indigenous mechanical ventilators at the cost of just Rs 15,000 per piece.

The project has successfully created a prototype already and is preparing to get into rapid production now. PGIM India Mutual Fund has provided a financial support of over 10 percent of the overall cost towards this path breaking project to help accelerate the process of production in the first phase. Its assistance of Rs 20 lakh at this stage, comprises employee contribution and a matching company grant.

Ajit Menon, CEO of PGIM India said, India needs to ramp up its healthcare capacities and sufficient availability of ventilators will be a critical last line of defense and a lifesaving need in the fight against COVID-19. This Kerala Startup Missions initiative to produce low-cost indigenous ventilators interested us for its potential to not only augment the supply of ventilators in our country but also the collaborative, open source way it is being done. We hope our humble support to this critical, best-practice initiative will not only fill a current need but accelerate Indias journey to healthcare preparedness.

Project Breath of Hope is a collaborative effort of Kerala Startup Mission - government of Keralas nodal agency for innovation and entrepreneurship - the state health department, various startup companies and the Super Fab Labs set up in the state in partnership with the famed Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

The objective of the Project is to design, develop and manufacture 5,000 indigenous mechanical ventilators in the next couple of weeks and deploy them in designated hospitals in rural areas. The project utilised the Fab Labs and the hardware startup ecosystem in the state to invent and design the prototype and has selected a company to produce the ventilators.

The Project will also offer the design solution to other interested manufacturers in an open-source ecosystem so that this low-cost and indigenous product can be manufactured locally in sufficient quantities in the future.

PGIM India Mutual Fund is a wholly owned business of PGIM, the global investment management business of Prudential Financial, Inc (US).
China Quietly Puts 2nd Lockdowns on Wuhan Residential Compounds as CCP Virus Continues to Spread

The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) announced to the world it would end its lockdown of Wuhan, the epicenter of the new coronavirus, on April 8. Yet, when the date arrived, the regime only partially reopened the city. Locals are now saying that the opening up of Wuhan has only applied to people traveling for work, and that entire residential compounds are being locked down with each new case of infection.

Human rights abuses in China have also continued despite the spread of the coronavirus, the CCP Virus. In March, alone, there were 747 recorded cases where practitioners of the spiritual practice Falun Gong were abducted or harassed by CCP authorities. The Epoch Times also received new leaked documents on the 610 Office, an extrajudicial police force compared to the Gestapo, that show its agents are able to override local governments and even engaged in diplomatic affairs to export the regimes human rights abuses.

And the Chinese regime was exposed in the United States and in Germany for attempting to have government officials promote its propaganda on its virus response. Wisconsin Senate President Roger Smith exposed these efforts by publicly releasing documents sent to him by the Chinese consulate in Chicago, and issued a proclamation condemning the CCPs human rights abuses and cover-up of the virus. Similar cases were exposed in Germany.

These stories and more in this episode of Crossroads.

Crossroads is an Epoch Times show available on Facebook and YouTube.
<! Dr Chikwe Iheakweazu DG NCDC >

The Nigerian Centre for Disease Control, NCDC, has announced another 11 fresh cases of Coronavirus in Nigeria, with all cases detected in Lagos.

This takes the national Coronavirus toll to 373, with Lagos having 214 cases.

The Centre had earlier announced new 19 Coronavirus cases in Nigeria, with 14 in Lagos, but it went back to release another figure at 11.00pm.

This means that Lagos has recorded 25 fresh Coronavirus cases on Tuesday, the highest figures to be recorded by the State in one day.

Eleven new cases of #COVID19 have been reported in Lagos State.

As at 11:00 pm 14th April there are 373 confirmed cases of #COVID19 reported in Nigeria. 99 have been discharged with 11 deaths, NCDC said.
WFH for Private offices in Delhi, restaurants & bars to be shut as Omicron-led to sudden rise in Covid cases

Coronavirus outbreak: Migrant crisis resurfaces after PM Modi's call on lockdown extension

India

oi-Ajay Joseph Raj P

New Delhi, Apr 15: Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Tuesday advised to the people of India to strictly follow the lockdown measure in the coming days. During this time, several people revisited the horrors of March migrant crisis when people rendered jobless due to lockdown had started walking down the empty highways to reach their hometowns instead of starving in big cities.

Thousands of migrant people in Gujarat, Maharashtra and Telangana came out on roads anticipating that the lockdown would come to an end and they would be able to get back to their families. But these migrant workers were either lathi-charged or forced to go back from where they came.

Kejriwal asks migrant workers not to fall prey to rumours about bus arrangements

In Bandra West, Mumbai, as many as 3,000 daily wage workers had gathered near the railway station, where the police, with no other choice, had to baton charge them to disperse the crowd after methods of persuasion failed to do its job.

Similar incident took place in Thane district and Surat, Gujarat where the migrant workers were seen demanding transport arrangements to return to their native places.

However, Maharashtra Chief Minister Uddhav Thackeray later appealed to people and requested them to stay where they are.

After this incident in Maharashtra and Gujarat, Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal also issued an appeal to the migrant workers in the national capital to follow the lockdown protocols. He also requested them not believe in any rumours which might tell them about the possibility of travel during the lockdown period.
Due to the COVID-19 restrictions, seafarers are having to extend their service onboard ships after many months at sea, unable to be replaced following long tours of duty or return home.

Shipping is vital to the maintenance of global supply chains, but the current situation is unsustainable for the safety and wellbeing of ships crews and the safe operation of maritime trade. Each month about 100,000 merchant seafarers need to be changed over from the ships on which they operate to ensure compliance with international maritime regulations protecting safety, health and welfare.

As a result of government-imposed travel restrictions due to COVID-19, flights to repatriate or position marine personnel are unavailable. Immigration and health screening protocols are also hampering the ability of merchant ships to conduct vitally necessary crew changes. IATA and ICS are working together to come forward with safe and pragmatic solutions that governments can implement to facilitate crew changes at certain airports.

Seafarers are unsung heroes who everyday throughout this COVID-19 crisis are going above and beyond the call of duty to ensure that countries are kept supplied with the goods they need. We are working with the airlines to come forward with solutions. We now need governments to support our seafarers and facilitate safe passage for them to get home to loved ones and be replaced by crew members ready to keep supply chains open, said ICS Secretary General, Guy Platten.

Airlines have been required to cut passenger services in the fight to stop the spread of COVID-19. But if Governments identify airports that seafarers can use for crew changes and make appropriate adjustments to current health and immigration protocols, airlines can help keep global logistics moving, said Alexandre de Juniac, IATAs Director General and CEO.

Designated Airports

ICS and IATA are calling on all governments to designate a specific and limited number of crew change airports for the safe movement and repatriation of crew. This would achieve critical mass for the resumption of crew change flights to these airports, keeping global supply chains open.

Priority airports should include those close to major shipping lanes which also have direct air connections to principal seafarer countries of residence, such as China, India and the Philippines as well as destinations in western and eastern Europe.

Facilitating Movement of International Transport Personnel

Aviation and shipping companies face common challenges in carrying out crew changes while complying with immigration and quarantine restrictions introduced by most governments around the world.

As authorities continue to battle COVID-19, international transport personnel operating aircraft and ships, or transiting international borders for duty, are often affected by national restrictions designed for passengers and non-essential personnel. When applied to crew not interacting with local communities, these restrictions unnecessarily jeopardize the ability of airlines and shipping companies to keep global supply chains operating.

IATA and ICS are working with their global regulators  the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) and the International Maritime Organization (IMO)  on recommendations to governments for standardized procedures and protocols for positioning crews whilst preventing the further spread of COVID-19.

Keeping Global Supply Chains Operating

The aviation and maritime transport industries are the lifeblood of the global economy, moving the worlds goods and products which are necessary to allow society to continue to function efficiently throughout the COVID-19 crisis.

 By volume, some 90% of global trade is delivered by ship, including food, energy, raw materials and manufactured products.

 Airlines carry, in addition to passengers, some 35% of global trade by value, including critical medicines and medical supplies.

G20 governments, at their recent emergency meetings, committed to minimize disruptions to trade and global supply chains and identified the need to prioritize keeping air and sea logistics networks open and functioning efficiently.
Adamu Adamu, minister of education, says there is an ongoing effort for students in higher institutions to receive lectures via the Ni...





Adamu Adamu, minister of education, says there is an ongoing effort for students in higher institutions to receive lectures via the Nigeria Television Authority (NTA) and the Federal Radio Corporation of Nigeria (FRCN).





Both NTA and FRCN are federal government-owned broadcast platforms with coverage across the country.





Since the outbreak of COVID-19 in the country, schools at all levels have been shut down.





At the COVID-19 presidential task force briefing in Abuja on Tuesday, Adamu said the ministry had been planning for this long before the pandemic.

The ministry has been planning even before COVID-19, only that because of it now people know about it, he said.





Some of my tertiary institutions are already giving their lessons, some online, and the ministry is working with the Nigeria Television Authority and the FRCN to start giving lectures, not just because of COVID-19, I hope this would become a permanent feature of our education system.





So, lessons would be given online. Last time I met with the vice-chancellors, I even talked to the press and told them I have directed institutions of higher learning to start thinking of giving people lessons where they are.





I am also aware that there are some private institutions who are already giving lessons online.





It is not clear if the lectures would be provided by university teachers who had embarked on strike before the pandemic led to the closure of schools.





The Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU) commenced a warning strike on March 9, 2020 after a disagreement with the government over issues of rehabilitation of universities and earned academic allowance.





The strike had continued, despite the federal governments new proposal to the lecturers.





Adamu also said salaries have been paid.





As far as I know, there is nobody who has not been paid his or her salary, he said.





And I know the directive of the president is, despite the lockdown, nobody should have his salary withheld. But since I am just coming today, and I have been meeting the education family through Zoom at home, but I hope to be at the office tomorrow and then I would find out if there is anybody and then I would attend to that.








The Egyptian Drug Authority (EDA) said it is "premature" to confirm the effectiveness of any drug or vaccine against the coronavirus, Al-Ahram Arabic website reported on Wednesday.



All proposed medicines are still under experimental use in Egypt, the EDA, the health ministrys medicine regulatory body, added in a statement.



There have been reports over the past week that developing a vaccine against the respiratory illness seems to be around the corner.



The authority added that it is following up on the latest developments in international scientific circles and bodies concerning the clinical trials and lab experiments that have been carried out to test the effectiveness and safety of the proposed drugs to cure patients infected with COVID-19.



The head of the Egyptian National Research Centre (NRC) Mohamed Hashemi had earlier said his team is working on studying the effectiveness and safety of more than 70 drugs in the treatment of coronavirus patients, including the Japanese antiviral Avigan, which he said has shown "positive indicators" against the deadly virus.



Japan decided earlier this month to provide the anti-flu drug, which it approved for use in 2014, for free to 20 countries so it can be used to treat coronavirus patients after it displayed promising results in the treatment of COVID-19.



Egypt received samples of the Avigan over a month ago and more samples were due to arrive this week for clinical trials and lab tests via the NRC, according to the Egyptian higher education and scientific research minister.



In a statement on Tuesday, the Egyptian scientific profession syndicate announced that a unit of Egyptian scientific researchers at the NRC have come close to developing a vaccine for the deadly virus.



El-Sayed El-Meligy, head of the scientific professions syndicate, expected that Egypt could develop a drug for the virus within 10 days.



He said that the research unit have accomplished about 75 percent of a plan to produce an Egyptian vaccine against the coronavirus and that it would be ready in two weeks.



On Monday, the World Health Organization (WHO) said in a statement that a group of experts is working under its coordination to speed up the development of vaccines against COVID-19.



in March, the WHO said it had set up a solidarity trial to compare the safety and efficacy of four different drugs against COVID-19 and its Regional Office for the Eastern Mediterranean called on countries in the region and beyond to take part in the historical trial.



"Finding a cure for the fast-spreading contagion is not close at hand... not before all [scientific] requirements are met," the WHO's representative in Egypt John Jabbour said at a press briefing in Cairo on Monday.



Egypt has logged 2,350 positive cases and 178 fatalities until Tuesday.

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Source: Xinhua| 2020-04-15 17:57:39|Editor: xuxin

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BANGKOK, April 15 (Xinhua) -- Thailand is looking to take measures to alleviate the people's woes under the emergency rule, currently enforced to stem the COVID-19 pandemic, Prime Minister Prayut Chan-o-cha said on Wednesday.

New measures will be provided to reduce the people's hardships and difficulties in daily life while keeping in line with medical procedures and emergency rule, which features curfew, lockdown and social-distancing measures, in response to the global pandemic, according to the prime minister.

The government-run Center for the COVID-19 Situation Administration (CCSA) is yet to decide what specific measures will be rolled out to alleviate the woes of the affected people nationwide, Prayut said.

The prime minister stopped short of saying how soon such measures will be taken, saying that the authorities are alert and readied in sustained efforts to stem the infectious disease though the number of newly reported cases has apparently dropped.

Prayut declined to comment whether curfew, enforced nationwide between 10:00 p.m. and 4:00 a.m. local time, might be prolonged or terminated later this month.

He said the CCSA, which he concurrently chairs, is yet to make decisions pertaining to such measures in line with those being taken against the pandemic.

Meanwhile, he expressed apologies for those who might be missed out on the government's 5,000-baht (153-U.S. dollar) monthly grant since more than 24 million people have applied online for it.

Many people have openly voiced frustrations for being denied the grant by the Ministry of Finance, saying they are considerably affected by the pandemic.
Jake Netter

"Just Mercy": Young, idealistic Harvard Law grad Bryan Stevenson (Michael B. Jordan) moves to Alabama after spending a summer interning there and witnessing a taste of the massive disparities and racism of its criminal justice system. With the help of a local woman, Eva Ansley (Brie Larson), he establishes the Equal Justice Initiative and sets out to help those on death row fight for their lives. One of those prisoners is Walter McMillian (Jamie Foxx), a black man who was wrongfully accused of murdering a white woman. (The film is based on Stevenson's memoir, "Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption.") McMillian is incredulous, as Stevenson has only just begun to experience the threatening uphill battles by those in local power.

Director Destin Daniel Cretton and director of photography Brett Pawlak deftly put the audience into the claustrophobic discomfort the men face, physically and mentally. They offer an empathetic lens into how the traumatic injustices add up, often leading to perhaps the most devastating kind of imprisonment: within one's wounded mind.
In a recent news report, the journalist had said that Jan Sadharan special trains would resume for people stranded due to the lockdown, said a police official

Mumbai: An FIR has been registered against a television journalist over his report that trains would restart, which may have prompted gathering of migrants in suburban Bandra on Tuesday, a police official said.

The accused, Rahul Kulkarni, based in Osmanabad district of Maharashtra, has been detained and police are in the process of bringing him to Mumbai, he said. In a recent news report, Kulkarni said Jan Sadharan special trains would resume for people stranded due to the lockdown, he said.

He has been booked under IPC Sections 188 (disobedience to order duly promulgated by public servant and 269, 270 (negligent, malignant act likely to spread infection of disease dangerous to life), 117 (abetting commission of offence by public), the official said.

More than 1,000 migrant workers, most of them from Bihar, Uttar Pradesh and West Bengal, gathered near Bandra railway station here on Tuesday afternoon. They were demanding that the state government make transport arrangements so that they can go back to their native towns and villages.
Suspected militants opened fire on a patrolling party of security forces in Pulwama district of Jammu and Kashmir on Wednesday, but there was no report of any casualty.

The ultras opened fire at the patrolling party at Barsoo in the Awantipora area of Pulwama around 2.30 pm, a police official said, adding that no one was hurt in the incident.

Security forces have cordoned off the area and launched a hunt for the culprits.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Manly Bands, the fastest growing mens online wedding ring brand has announced its renewed support for first responders and communities impacted by the coronavirus outbreak in America. In a partnership with Team Rubicon, Manly Bands has launched a series of relief efforts for paramedics, emergency medical technicians, and other healthcare workers to show our support for the essential work that they offer the healthcare system and country.

At time of publication, Manly Bands has donated more than $50,000 to Team Rubicon to aid their Neighbors Helping Neighbors initiative and meet the needs of communities struggling with the outbreak of COVID-19. A portion of all rings purchased on ManlyBands.com will go towards providing resources and financial assistance for #NeighborsHelpingNeighbors and Team Rubicon volunteers.

We at Manly Bands want to do all we can to help the brave workers on the frontline of the coronavirus outbreak, said Johnathan Ruggiero, founder and CEO of Manly Bands. Id like to encourage all of us to do our part by staying inside and helping organizations like Team Rubicon continue their work with donations and support on social media.

In addition to these efforts, Manly Bands is launching a free ring give-away on our social media channels to those who can share acts of kindness happening during the COVID-19 pandemic. While the country faces this ongoing pandemic, many of us are stuck in our homes and separated from our friends and communities. To remind everyone that we are not facing this alone, Manly Bands will be donating 1000 silicone bands to anyone who has an uplifting story to share. To nominate someone you know, please visit ManlyBands.com/pages/1-000-silicone-ring-giveaway for more contest details.

Manly Bands recognizes the need for far-reaching community support, in all of its forms. In March, the company paid for and delivered over 500 meals to hospitals and medical centers across the country from local restaurants, who are also feeling the negative side effects of the quarantine.

We will also be providing resources for couples who have had to put their weddings on hold, and will be helping our customers with special discounts and long-term financing for all of our online wedding rings. You may have to stay inside, but you and your loved ones can still wear your love with pride.

About Manly Bands

Manly Bands is the fastest growing direct-to-consumer e-commerce retailer of badass mens wedding rings. We make it easy for couples to order a ring that looks (and fits) perfect on their partner. With more than 250 unique styles made from over 15 non-traditional materials, were on a mission to give men the ring that theyll never want to take off. To see our latest collections, visit ManlyBands.com today.

About Team Rubicon

Team Rubicon serves communities by mobilizing veterans to continue their service, leveraging their skills and experience to help people prepare, respond, and recover from disasters and humanitarian crises. Founded in 2010, Team Rubicon has deployed across the United States and around the world to provide immediate relief to those impacted by disasters and humanitarian crises. In response to the COVID-19 outbreak, weve launched the #NeighborsHelpingNeighbors initiative to meet the needs of our communities through safe individual acts of service. Visit TeamRubicon.org for more information.
Times are tough for local businesses in Liberty County.

The new coronavirus has taken away normalcy for communities around the world, including small areas like Cleveland, Liberty and Dayton.

Learning at home: Cleveland ISD students, parents begin to adapt to distance learning

Businesses are seeing their cash flow decline as restaurants adjust services and nonessential industries halt temporarily to slow the spread of COVID-19.

The Greater Cleveland Chamber of Commerce is standing by the local business community, ready to lend a hand.

Theyre concerned about if theyre going to be able to stay in business for a long time through this whole thing, said Jim Carson, who is the vice president and chief operating officer of the Greater Cleveland Chamber.

Chamber leaders are keeping members and other community businesses informed through a COVID-19 resource page on the Chamber website. The COVID-19 Info & Resources page offers several links where businesses can find information on Small Business Administration loans, along with government and medical information.

Football: Video conferencing apps help new Cleveland coach keep team in shape

Community members can also find restaurant dining options and business hours for banks and retailers.

Carson believes the leaders of Liberty County have done a great job so far in response to the coronavirus pandemic. As of April 13, Liberty County had 20 confirmed cases of the coronavirus.

Liberty County has done a great job with Judge (Jay) Knight and the city of Cleveland, Carson said. Nobody wants to see the economy go. People have asked me what do I think about the economy? I say well we have had great depressions, but we have recovered from them. You dont recover from dying. Its all a process each day and were working hard with the community to help people in need.

Cleveland experienced hardships caused by Hurricane Harvey but persevered with the help of people in the community. Local churches helped along with many other volunteers.

Liberty County is hoping to get back to normalcy, like everyone else, but knows the community must remain strong during hard times.

Part of that, Carson said, is encouraging the community to shop local, worship local and volunteer local.

These are the businesses that are supporting our community, Carson said. We had Hurricane Harvey and we didnt get any outside help because people couldnt get to Cleveland. Im just glad that everyone is working together during these times.

marcus.gutierrez@chron.com

Twitter: @MarcG14Line
SAN FRANCISCO, April 14, 2020 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Hagens Berman urges investors in VMware, Inc. (NYSE: VMW) who have suffered significant losses to submit their losses now . A securities fraud class action has been filed and certain investors may have valuable claims.



Class Period: Mar. 30, 2019 - Feb. 27, 2020

Lead Plaintiff Deadline: June 1, 2020

Sign Up: www.hbsslaw.com/investor-fraud/VMW

Contact An Attorney Now: VMW@hbsslaw.com

844-916-0895

VMware, Inc. (VMW) Securities Class Action:

The Complaint alleges that Defendants made materially false and misleading statements regarding the Companys financial performance. Specifically, the Complaint alleges that Defendants falsely represented and concealed that: (i) VMwares reporting with respect to its backlog of unfilled orders was not in compliance with all relevant accounting and disclosure requirements; (ii) the foregoing subjected the Company to a foreseeable risk of heightened regulatory scrutiny and/or investigation; and (iii) as a result, the Companys public statements were materially false and misleading at all relevant times

The Complaint alleges that the truth emerged on Feb. 27, 2020, when after the market closed, the Company announced disappointing Q4 results and disclosed that in Dec. 2019 the SEC requested documents and information related to VMwares backlog and associated accounting and disclosures. Significantly, on the Q4 2019 earnings call, VMware disclosed that its total backlog was only $18 million, down massively from $449 million in the year-ago quarter. This news sent the price of VMware shares sharply lower the next day.

Were focused on investors losses and whether VMware may have manipulated its backlog metric, said Reed Kathrein, the Hagens Berman partner leading the investigation.

Whistleblowers: Persons with non-public information regarding VMware should consider their options to help in the investigation or take advantage of the SEC Whistleblower program. Under the new program, whistleblowers who provide original information may receive rewards totaling up to 30 percent of any successful recovery made by the SEC. For more information, call Reed Kathrein at 844-916-0895 or email VMW@hbsslaw.com .

About Hagens Berman

Hagens Berman is a national law firm with nine offices in eight cities around the country and eighty attorneys. The firm represents investors, whistleblowers, workers and consumers in complex litigation. More about the firm and its successes is located at hbsslaw.com . For the latest news visit our newsroom or follow us on Twitter at @classactionlaw .
Restrictions on movement will remain in place until at least May, Stormonts health minister Robin Swann said (Michael Cooper/PA)

Northern Irelands battle with coronavirus will continue for the long haul, the health minister has declared.

Movement restrictions have been extended until at least May.

Robin Swann warned the decision on when to ease them will be difficult as the economy suffers its worst damage for generations.

Mr Swann said: The prospect of a second surge later this year must weigh heavily on all our minds.

We will also have to face up to difficult conversations down the line about when or if to ease any social distancing restrictions Robin Swann

This is no time for final verdicts to be delivered, favourable or critical.

We are in this for the long haul.

We will also have to face up to difficult conversations down the line about when or if to ease any social distancing restrictions.

That time is not now. At this moment in time, we have to stick firmly with the measures we have.

Only essential travel is permitted and people are urged to remain at home to limit infection spread.

Ministers are attempting to replenish supplies of protective equipment for health workers.

A quarter of a million gowns have been sent to England and Mr Swann defended temporary sharing of materials throughout the UK.

He held discussions with fellow ministers in Northern Ireland on Wednesday about maintaining social distancing restrictions.

There will be a further review which will inform how we progress and the position will be closely monitored, however now, as before, the message remains the same  please keep safe, stay home, and protect our NHS, as they are working to protect us Robin Swann

He said: On the back of that review, the Executive today has agreed that the restrictions and requirements set out in the regulations continue to be necessary if we are to continue to flatten the epidemic curve, manage the capacity of the health service and keep Covid-19 deaths to a minimum.

There will be a further review which will inform how we progress and the position will be closely monitored, however now, as before, the message remains the same  please keep safe, stay home, and protect our NHS, as they are working to protect us.

He said the gowns had been sent to England over the last fortnight to help ease pressure on protective supplies there.

They will be immediately reimbursed once their own stocks arrive.

The minister said: But equally, when I recently reported a serious shortage of eye protective equipment, England and Wales acted quickly to help us.

And of course we must remember all of this in the context that the UK government has already sent Northern Ireland over 5.6 million items of personal protective equipment.

So I make no apologies for sharing our stock because when we need some the other UK nations are not reluctant to share theirs.

That demonstrates the value and success of the four-nation approach we have been taking.

Expand Close Mr Swann briefed Stormont Assembly members on Wednesday (Paul Faith/PA) PA / Facebook

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Whatsapp Mr Swann briefed Stormont Assembly members on Wednesday (Paul Faith/PA)

He briefed Stormont Assembly members on Wednesday.

Northern Ireland has significantly increased its supplies from local sources.

The Ulster Unionist said: Local industry is to be commended as it continues to show itself to be adaptable, innovative and responsive to changing operating environments.

China is the most significant source of world-wide supplies.

The minister said the work led by the Department of Finance and Health Department to secure equipment was at a critical stage.

We continue to work to ensure all possible steps are taken to open up a supply chain which meets our needs and supports our four nations approach.

He said they were working to make sure health care workers who needed them were tested.

Mr Swann also expressed concern that not enough people were coming forward for unrelated medical care and said anyone with emergencies should see a doctor.




Good Morning, Nigeria, Welcome To Naija News Roundup Of Top Newspaper Headlines In Nigeria For Today Wednesday, 15th April 2020

The leadership of the National Assembly represented by House Speaker, Honourable Femi Gbajabiamila and President of the Senate, Ahmed Lawan met with President Muhammadu Buhari on Tuesday at the Presidential Villa in Abuja.

Speaking after the meeting, Gbajabiamila said issues of security, free electricity and other matters during the coronavirus lockdown as it affects Nigerians were discussed during the meeting.

Administrators of the N-Power scheme, a social investment programme of the Federal Government led by President Muhammadu Buhari has confirmed when beneficiaries will get their outstanding benefits.

The beneficiaries have been assured they will receive credit alerts for outstanding payments of their monthly entitlement from today.

The Commissioner for Health in Lagos State, Akin Abayomi, says 110 persons were found with symptoms of coronavirus (COVID-19) during the states house-to-house search but tests are being conducted to determine their status.

Naija News reports that the health commissioner made this known during a media briefing on Tuesday, where he said a total of 118,000 households have been reached in the active case search of possible COVID-19 cases in communities.

The Kwara State Government has reviewed its earlier decision to allow vehicles to move on days earlier designated for restocking of foods and other essentials, directing residents to instead patronize neighbourhood shops and observe all safety protocols.

The review means that commercial and private vehicles are now barred from operating, except trucks and trailers conveying food stuffs, medicines and other essential services earlier exempted by the government in its effort to contain COVID-19.

Lagos State has discharge 8 more COVID-19 patients after testing negative consecutively to Coronavirus.

Naija News reports that this was disclosed by the Governor of the State, Babajide Sanwo-Olu in a series of tweets on Tuesday evening, April 14.

Sadiya Umar Farouq, the Minister of Humanitarian Affairs has ordered the termination of the contract of two Payment Service Providers (PSPs).

According to information gathered, the service providers were sanctioned for failing to meet the contractual agreement to commence Conditional Cash Transfer to beneficiaries in four states of the federation assigned to the two PSPs.

The Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) has debunked false reports circulated on social media that the apex bank will take some money as processing fee for COVID-19 loan application.

Naija News learnt the CBNs Director, Corporate Communications Department, Mr Isaac Okorafor debunked the report in a statement in Abuja on Monday.

China has approved early-stage human tests for two experimental coronavirus vaccines, the development was confirmed by the state news agency on Tuesday.

The vaccines are being developed by Sinovac Biotech and by the Wuhan Institute of Biological Products, an affiliate of state-owned China National Pharmaceutical Group.

The Lagos State Government has confirmed the death of a COVID-19 patient in the state.

The Commissioner of Health in the state, Prof. Akin Abayomi, who confirmed this via his twitter handle noted that the deceased is a 56-year-old Nigerian who visited the United States.

Former United States President Barack Obama has endorsed Joe Biden for US 2020 Presidential election.

Naija News reports that Obama endorsed Biden in a video released Tuesday, saying his former vice president has the character and the experience to guide us through one of our darkest times and heal us through a long recovery.

Thats the top Nigerian newspaper headlines for today. Read more Nigerian news on Naija News. See you again tomorrow.

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Actors Ju Ji Hoon and Kim Hye Soo bid farewell to their intense rivalry as elite lawyers in SBS's "Hyena." On Saturday, the drama series ended with a score of 14.6% in cable television series as per the data from Nielsen Korea.

The drama series aired 16 episodes. The viewers enjoyed as actors play in sophisticated and smart characters. We get to know high-paid lawyers are assets to any company. Kim Hye-soo portrayed Jung Geum-Ja, and Ju Ji-hoon portrayed Yoon Hee-Jae.

The lead casts are high-ranking actors like Kim Hye Soo, who is known for her various roles and a versatile actress. Ju Ji Hoon created a big name in his career as he starred in Netflix's "Kingdom" and "Along With the Gods." The show premiered on February 21 until its finale last weekend, reaching 9-12 % ratings every week.

Kim Hye Soo shared, "I devoted much affection to Jung, a very impressive character. All cast and crew worked in perfect harmony and I still can't believe that the end has come."

In her latest interview, the actress continued, "Jung Geum Ja was a special, memorable character that I had lots of affection for while acting. The overall teamwork between all of the staff members and actors was good, and it was a set where all of the staff members and actors were good, it was a set where the atmosphere was always nice."

She added, "It still doesn't feel real that it's ending. Thank you to all the viewers who loved and watched 'Hyena.' I hope it will be entertaining until the end."

Ju Ji Hoon also shared his joy on being part of the series, "Yoon Hee Jae received so much love. I could really feel that the viewers were really enjoying 'Hyena.' I feel so grateful. It's a rewarding moment as an actor. I will see you again in the future with a project that we can enjoy together."

Park Se Jin also commented, "It was exciting to be able to stand before many people as a new character named Boo Hyun Ah. I experienced many difficulties in expressing my character. But I was able to get closer to her character."

The actor went on, "Thanks to the good leadership of the director and senior actors I work with. I will work hard to return with a new character that's different from Boo Hyun Ah. Thank you to everyone who loved 'Hyena.'"

Then, fellow cast member, Lee Joo Yeon, who played as the art dealer, also shared his thoughts about the Hyena.

"It was an honor to be able to work with the director and senior actors. I learned and felt many things during the filming," he said.

"Although my appearance was short, I was happy I could play the role of Seo Jung Hwa. I would also like to thank the viewers who loved and supported 'Hyena.' I will see you again with acting that gives off good energy," he added.
[April 15, 2020] BIGO Ads starts its mobile advertising business in India

NEW DELHI, April 15, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- BIGO Ads, a part of BIGO Technology, which has an average of 350 million monthly active users across its platforms, is launching its mobile advertising solutions in India. BIGO Ads, from BIGO Technology, is an ads platform, providing mobile marketing solutions globally. Covering more than 150 countries, BIGO Ads integrates mobile marketing solutions into imo, the video and audio calling app with global monthly active users (MAU) of 210 million, and Likee, a short video creation platform with global MAU of 115 million. With its strong user base and high-quality content, BIGO Ads enriches the user portrait system and provides marketing solutions for advertisers and partners in different scenarios. BIGO Ads utilizes cutting-edge machine learning technology, powerful Artificial Intelligence algorithms, comprehensive big data analysis, and processing capabilities to support branding and performance advertising solutions for advertiers. With various advertising formats, such as Banner, Native, Video and different cooperation models like Programmatic buying, Reserved branding Ads and Auction Bidding Ads, BIGO Ads provides a one-stop integrated marketing solutions for advertisers to reach the targeted audience, increase brand awareness and maximize return of investment (ROI).



BIGO Ads announces that Ventes Avenues is to be the authorized reseller in south and west India. Ventes Avenues is a Mobile Media Company specializing in Mobile Performance and Mobile Audiences. Ventes in its mobile media journey is committed in delivering Audiences with Placement Guarantees, with its innovative ad units especially created for smartphones ensuring viewability and brand safety. Having worked with over 200 advertisers and their advertising agencies across campaigns to help them reach and engage with their audiences. Ventes' USP includes multi-level targeting and direct control over its inventory.

Niloufer Dundh, Founder & CEO of Ventes Avenues says, "Ventes Avenues is delighted to partner with Bigo in India, we are honored to be chosen and have set up dedicated teams for both Likee and imo here in India. Likee and imo makes for a unique engagement opportunity for brands to explore. We are looking forward to new learning, new highs and doing path breaking work with BIGO here in India." BIGO Ads is glad to partner with Ventes Avenues. With Ventes Avenues' in-depth understanding of market and excellent relationship in India, as well as the rich and efficient marketing solutions of BIGO Ads, we will provide advertisers with a better service and achieve marketing objectives. Now BIGO Ads is ready in India, we are looking forward to new collaboration opportunities with local business. Go BIG with BIGO Ads! SOURCE BIGO Ads

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IOWA CITY  Vile and insulting are some of the words Johnson County officials are using to describe the writings of a Muscatine County Jail official who has expressed anti-Muslim and homophobic sentiments online.

During a work session today, the Johnson County Board of Supervisors and Johnson County Sheriff Lonny Pulkrabek are scheduled to discuss those writings and what they mean to a long-standing relationship between the two counties.

The Sheriffs Office here has had an agreement with Muscatine County to house extra jail inmates there. As of Tuesday, neither Pulkrabek nor Board of Supervisors Chairman Rod Sullivan suggested that would change.

I have a good relationship with the sheriff, Pulkrabek said of his Muscatine County counterpart. I anticipate having a conversation with him about it. I dont have any preconceived notions about how thats going to go.

Earlier this month, the Iowa Capital Dispatch reported on the writings of Muscatine Jail County Administrator Dean Naylor, and on videos he has published on YouTube. In one post, Naylor writes that Muslims are at war with Christians and Jews

Muslims also do not want any use for Christians, Naylor wrote, according to the news websites report. They will attack and kill any infidel. And infidel is anyone who does not believe in Islam or in other words worship Satan. This includes both Christians and Jews.

In the writing, he refers to the gay lifestyle an an abomination.

Iowa City Mayor Pro Tem Mazahir Salih, the citys first Muslim elected official, said she can respect religious differences but called Naylors publication of his views concerning.

It really made me mad, Salih said. Im glad Im living in a county that I am proud of our five supervisors. They always protect all of the people in the community, regardless of their beliefs or religion.

Pulkrabek and Sullivan condemned Naylors writings.

I find his opinions insulting, Pulkrabek said. Its hard for me to wrap my head around someone I know who personally holds those beliefs, and sincerely holds those beliefs.

Sullivan called Naylors views vile.

Johnson County has housed jail inmates in Muscatine County for years. In August, however, Pulkrabek told The Gazette that Muscatine County was looking for other opportunities and so fewer beds were available for Johnson County inmates. The office started sending more of its inmates to the Louisa and Lee County jails.

According to the current jail roster  which is reduced during the COVID-19 pandemic  there are four Johnson County inmates being housed in the Muscatine County Jail.

Sullivan said he does not have a notion about todays discussion on Naylors views will go. He did feel it was vital to see how the county wishes to respond and ensure any inmate housed in the Muscatine County Jail is treated fairly and legally.

I think we just have to discuss it and see where our board members heads are, Sullivan said. What I want going forward is the public knows that anybody Johnson County has custody of is afforded every single one of their civil liberties all of the time.

Pulkrabek said this is the first he has ever heard of Naylors writings, and has not received any information to suggest Naylors beliefs have affected the jail environment. While Naylors views have led Pulkrabek to rethink his relationship with Muscatine County, he believes a productive conversation with the sheriff there can allow that arrangement to continue.

I think we can move forward and continue at this time being much more aware of the situation and paying attention to it, he said.

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I saw someone handing out candy to little kids barehanded, the governor told reporters. People are flying the Confederate flag, and untold numbers who gassed up on the way here or grabbed a bite on the way home. We know that this rally endangered people. This kind of activity will put more people at risk and, sadly, it could prolong the amount of time we have to be in this posture.
LOS ANGELES, April 15, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- ECMC Foundation today announced that it has committed $1.5 million in emergency aid grants to support students impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic.

"Many students are severely impacted by sudden and dramatic changes due to COVID-19, such as losing the stable housing they once had on campus and being temporarily or permanently displaced from work. For students who are also caring for children or dependents, the impact is even more severe," said ECMC Foundation President Peter Taylor. "At ECMC Foundation, we felt philanthropy had a deep and moral obligation to step in, respond and help. We understand, by no means, that this will solve the unprecedented challenges students are facing, but it is a means to mitigate the crisis."

In collaboration with national and regional foundations working to address the student impact of campus closures and local and state shelter-in-place policies, ECMC Foundation will provide funding through four organizations to facilitate emergency aid to nearly 3,000 students and provide resources for more than 100,000 students. Aid will support students with unplanned financial expenses and emergencies related to sudden lack of housing, food, healthcare, technological access and other essential supports.

The $1.5 million in emergency aid grants include:

$500,000 grant to Believe in Students to distribute emergency aid to students through the app-based Edquity platform. This ECMC Foundation grant will make emergency cash grants available to 750 students in crisis and provide access to emergency aid services for an additional 100,000140,000 students by helping make the platform services available at 50 colleges by September. The program launched with $900,000 in funding, including an additional contribution from Imaginable Futures, a venture of the Omidyar Network. The cumulative funding from both organizations will reach 1,500 students. Believe in Students and Edquity will continue to raise additional funds in order to scale up this program, with a goal of reaching $3.6 million in total funding.

grant to to distribute emergency aid to students through the app-based platform. This ECMC Foundation grant will make emergency cash grants available to 750 students in crisis and provide access to emergency aid services for an additional 100,000140,000 students by helping make the platform services available at 50 colleges by September. The program launched with in funding, including an additional contribution from Imaginable Futures, a venture of the Omidyar Network. The cumulative funding from both organizations will reach 1,500 students. Believe in Students and Edquity will continue to raise additional funds in order to scale up this program, with a goal of reaching in total funding. $500,000 grant to Mission Asset Fund (MAF) to support the launch of the California College Student Emergency Support Fund, a statewide response addressing emergency financial needs of low-income students enrolled in California's two- and four-year public higher education institutions. The Foundation's support will enable MAF to make cash grants of $500 to 1,000 students impacted by the pandemic, including foster youth, Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals recipients and Pell-eligible students. In addition to the ECMC Foundation grant, College Futures Foundation is contributing $1 million to MAF. The total funding goal of $5 million will reach 10,000 students.

grant to to support the launch of the Student Emergency Support Fund, a statewide response addressing emergency financial needs of low-income students enrolled in two- and four-year public higher education institutions. The Foundation's support will enable MAF to make cash grants of to 1,000 students impacted by the pandemic, including foster youth, Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals recipients and Pell-eligible students. In addition to the ECMC Foundation grant, College Futures Foundation is contributing to MAF. The total funding goal of will reach 10,000 students. $250,000 grant to the University Innovation Alliance , a collaborative of 11 public research universities dedicated to reshaping the educational attainment and economic prospects of low-income students. The ECMC Foundation grant will support emergency needs, such as providing technological equipment and web access, for at least 500 students at the campus level.

grant to the , a collaborative of 11 public research universities dedicated to reshaping the educational attainment and economic prospects of low-income students. The ECMC Foundation grant will support emergency needs, such as providing technological equipment and web access, for at least 500 students at the campus level. $250,000 grant to support an initiative of ECMC Foundation affiliate ECMC, which focuses on helping minority-serving institutions (MSIs) improve student success and institutional outcomes. The Foundation grant will supplement the initiative's emergency aid program, which will provide up to $500 in emergency aid for at least 500 students dealing with unforeseen financial emergencies.

In addition to emergency aid grants to students, ECMC Foundation has also issued a Rapid Response Small Grants program to support existing grantees impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic. A total of 65 grants equaling $583,850 were awarded to organizations serving 4.2 million students annually.

"In the coming months, we will continue to explore opportunities to help students in the postsecondary education field," said Lynn Alvarez, vice president of programs and strategy, ECMC Foundation. "During this uncertain time, our priority as funders is to be helpful in any way that we can. We are all in this together."

ABOUT ECMC FOUNDATION

ECMC Foundation is a Los Angeles-based, nationally focused foundation whose mission is to inspire and to facilitate improvements that affect educational outcomesespecially among underserved populationsthrough evidence-based innovation. It is one of several affiliates under the ECMC Group enterprise based in Minneapolis. ECMC Foundation makes investments in two focus areas: College Success and Career Readiness; and uses a spectrum of funding structures, including strategic grantmaking and program-related investments, to invest in both nonprofit and for-profit ventures. Working with grantees, partners and peers, ECMC Foundation's vision is for all learners to unlock their fullest potential. Learn more about ECMC Foundation by visiting www.ecmcfoundation.org and ECMC Group by visiting www.ecmcgroup.org.

SOURCE ECMC Foundation

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Evening Standard

Commuters are set to face further travel chaos in the New Year after the National Union of Rail, Maritime and Transport Workers (RMT) voted for a six-month strike from January 7. The RMT action will see its members conduct a walk-out on the Victoria and Central lines from 8.30pm on Friday until 8am on Saturday, and from 8.30pm on Saturday until 8am on Sunday. Set to be the longest strike in London Underground history, it will take place from Friday January 7 and continue each weekend until June.
Two stowaways were dumped into shark-infested waters off South Africa by a sailor and his crew who feared the two men had coronavirus, it is alleged.

The two Tanzanians say they were cast adrift in the Indian Ocean after the crew discovered them hiding on the bulk carrier MV Top Grace.

Despite the ocean currents and the danger of sharks, the two men survived and washed up on Zinkwazi Beach in their life raft.

Seven crew members including the captain have since been charged with attempted murder in South Africa.

The bulk carrier MV Top Grace arrives in Richards Bay on the coast of South Africa, where it was intercepted by police over claims that two stowaways were thrown overboard

This map shows where the ship was travelling when the two stowaways were discovered on board. They later washed up at Zinkwazi beach

The two stowaways were found hiding in a locker room after climbing up the anchor chain when the ship was docked in Durban.

Crew members on the 600ft vessel found them cowering under a pile of canvas hours after the ship left harbour.

According to the two men, the crew feared they had coronavirus and decided to throw them out rather than heading back to port or quarantining them.

The captain allegedly ordered the ship's engineer to bring the vessel to a halt before the terrified pair were put in a life raft, given some bottles of water and cast adrift.

The ship then powered away, leaving the stowaways with no food and without sight of land at the mercy of the sea currents in one of the most shark-infested areas of the stormy North Coast.

The two men told police that their ordeal ended after three days and two nights adrift, when they spotted lights on a tourist beach.

They were washed ashore on Zinkwazi Beach, by the mouth of the Tugela River, where Great White Sharks, Hammerhead Sharks, Tiger sharks and Bull Sharks gather in huge numbers.

The predators shoal there in their hundreds feeding on whatever is washed down the region's largest river and anglers rate it as the best spot in South Africa to catch sharks.

Locals found the starving stowaways wading through the surf wearing life jackets and dragging the raft behind them, begging for food and water and help.

Paramedics and police raced to the scene near the town of Nkwazi where the shivering Tanzanians said the crew had set them adrift.

The two Tanzanian stowaways (on the left in the red and green overalls) are taken to an ambulance after their raft washed up at Zinkwazi Beach in South Africa

When the MV Top Grace docked at Richards Bay harbour on April 3, having set off from Durban on March 28, it was intercepted and boarded by a South African Police Service motor launch.

The captain of the ship and his six-man crew were accused of abandoning the stowaways with no regard to their safety and were ordered not to leave port.

A spokesman for the National Prosecuting Authority confirmed the crew had appeared before magistrates last Wednesday, each charged with two counts of attempted murder.

The seven men from the Panamanian-registered ship were given bail set at R20,000 (885) each, and confined to the vessel until this Friday when they will next appear in court.

A source close to the two week long police investigation said: 'The two [stowaways] both accept they were breaking the law when they climbed the ships anchor chain but said they were only looking to find a better life.

'When they were found stowed away and realised they were being thrown off the ship they said they begged to stay on board but were given a life jacket and a few bottles of water and put onto a life raft.

'They were way out to sea so were just lucky the wind and currents washed them towards the shore and not away from it as the Indian Ocean is so vast they would probably not have been seen again.

'Those waters in that area are full of sharks and the sea can turn from flat calm to mountainous waves in minutes and you have to remember that this raft was also in a busy shipping lane as well.

'They said they were put overboard because the crew thought they may have COVID-19 and as a result of those claims they have been tested for the virus and as a precaution so have those on the ship.

'What these men say happened to them on board was more like something you would expect from a Hollywood film or in a book and it is hard to believe it could happen in this day and age' said the source.

The two stowaways were allegedly left to fend for themselves in the Indian Ocean despite the danger of encountering great white sharks (file photo)

The stowaways and the crew are now awaiting coronavirus test results ahead of their next court appearance in Durban.

Captain Vernon Keller of the South African Marine Safety Agency said the ship's Hong Kong-based owners could also face attempted murder charges.

He said: 'It is alleged two stowaways boarded the vessel at a wharf in Durban on March 23 by climbing up the mooring ropes and hiding in the chain locker until it sailed on March 28.

'Seven crew who were the the ship's master, chief officer, third officer, chief engineer, first engineer, second engineer and bosun were taken into police custody and charged with attempted murder.

'The crew had their travel documents seized and were allowed to return to the vessel on bail until their next court appearance' he said.

Maree McCreadie of the Zinkwazi Neighbourhood Watch said the stowaways had said they were at sea for three days and were cast adrift as the crew feared they had the coronavirus.

She added: 'The scene was closed off and an ambulance took the two men to hospital'.

IPSS Medical Rescue spokesperson Paul Herbs said: 'We received a call on Monday evening informing us of two men who had washed ashore and turned out to be ship stowaways.

'On arrival two Tanzanian nationals were attended to and alleged they had hidden on a vessel that departed Durban port and it is alleged that the crew of the vessel then discovered them.

'It is alleged they were forced to leave the vessel after being given life jackets and a makeshift raft and the men said they spent three days at sea before making landfall near Zinkwazi.

'They were treated for exposure and then transported to a local medical facility for further care and the South African Police Service then attended and it is now a police matter' he said.

The 600ft, 35,000-ton cargo ship was built in 2016 and transports bulk items such as grains, coal, ore, steel coils and cement in its many sealed holds around the world.

The MV Top Grace was plotted on a short 100 nautical mile trip from Durban north to Richards Bay and had spent several days moored in the channel before a berth came free for it to dock.

It will remain confined to port until the police and South African Maritime Safety Agency grants it permission to continue its voyage, possibly with a new captain and crew sent out by the owners.
Meghan Markle's high school sweetheart has been spotted in Los Angeles, as Meghan and Prince Harry are said to be looking for a home on her old crush's home turf, exclusive DailyMail.com photos show.

Pictured for the first time ever, father-of-two Luis Segura was seen having lunch with a female friend and shopping for groceries before the city went into lockdown.

The top real estate agent, 41, sells luxury homes in Pasadena, the suburb east of LA where Meghan, 38, and Harry, 35, were reportedly eyeing up properties.

The royal couple are thought to have been looking at homes in the Los Angeles area for months before flying from their hideaway in Vancouver Island, Canada, to California towards the end of March before borders were closed.

Meghan Markle's high school sweetheart Luis Segura, 41, has been spotted in LA, exclusive DailyMail.com photos show

Pictured for the first time ever, father-of-two Luis Segura was seen having lunch with a female friend and shopping for groceries before the city went into coronavirus lockdown

Last year, pictures surfaced of Meghan and Luis at joint Christmas balls for two Catholic schools in 1996 and 1997

The top real estate agent, 41, sells luxury homes in Pasadena, the suburb east of LA where Meghan, 38, and Harry, 35, were reportedly eyeing up properties

It has been claimed they are currently staying at a friend's home in Malibu and have scouted properties there and in other celebrity enclaves, such as Beverly Hills and Bel Air.

But according to a report published in Vanity Fair last September, the couple also looked at possible future homes in Pasadena.

The upmarket suburban city is known for its Rose Bowl stadium and is home to many cultural and scientific institutions and high quality private schools.

It is not known whether they have consulted Luis and he remained tight-lipped when approached at his office in the city.

Asked about his relationship with Meghan, he replied: 'I have no comment to make.'

However, he is described on his company's website as a 'constant award winner, top producer and an active member of multiple charitable organizations'.

A source told DailyMail.com: 'Luis is exactly the kind of person you would want in your corner if you were looking to buy property in Pasadena.

'He knows that market inside out and still has that sense of loyalty to Meghan not to speak about her to the press.'

It is not known whether they have consulted Luis and he remained tight-lipped when approached at his office in the city. Asked about his relationship with Meghan, he replied: 'I have no comment to make'

However, he is described on his company's website as a 'constant award winner, top producer and an active member of multiple charitable organizations'. A source told DailyMail.com: 'Luis is exactly the kind of person you would want in your corner if you were looking to buy property in Pasadena.' Pictured: Segura with a friend in LA

The source added: 'He knows that market inside out and still has that sense of loyalty to Meghan not to speak about her to the press'

The source added: 'The fact that he is active on the charity scene would also be a big plus for Harry and Meghan, who have just announced the launch their new non-profit.

'In addition to that, Luis and Meghan have that personal history and were very close when they were growing up. He ticks all the boxes.'

Despite the fevered coverage of Meghan's life and her romantic history, Luis has surprisingly remained under the radar.

He currently lives a comfortable existence with Meghan-lookalike wife Christina  who runs her own beauty business  and their two sons.

Last year, pictures surfaced of Meghan and Luis at joint Christmas balls for two Catholic schools in 1996 and 1997.

Meghan was attending girls school Immaculate Heart in the Los Feliz neighborhood of Los Angeles at the time while Luis was at all-boys St. Francis in La Canada Flintridge.

The future Duchess of Sussex can be seen beaming and wearing a long black dress as she cuddles up to Luis at the first ball held at the legendary Millennium Biltmore Hotel in Downtown LA.

Despite the fevered coverage of Meghan's life and her romantic history, Luis has surprisingly remained under the radar. He currently lives a comfortable existence with Meghan-lookalike wife Christina (pictured together)  who runs her own beauty business  and their two sons

It has been claimed Meghan and Harry are currently staying at a friend's home in Malibu and have scouted properties there and in other celebrity enclaves, such as Beverly Hills and Bel Air. But according to a report published in Vanity Fair last September, the couple also looked at possible future homes in Pasadena

In the second photo she is wearing a low-cut spaghetti strap sequined slit dress, a choker and her hair in a stylish up-do as she poses with Luis in front of a Christmas tree.

The following year Meghan took Luis' younger brother Danny to his high school prom after she was named homecoming queen.

She also got Danny  who now works in theater  to audition for his first high school musical when he was 15.

Our source said: 'Luis and Meghan were very into each during their time as high school sweethearts. It's fair to say Luis was madly in love with her.

'And she was very sweet to him, fun to be around and loved his family too, so the memories are good.'

Last week Harry and Meghan announced their plans to launch a new non-profit named Archewell after the Greek word for 'source of action'.

It comes after the couple were ordered to stop using the Sussex Royal brand after stepping down as senior royals.
Chron.com is compiling the latest headlines on the COVID-19 pandemic and its effects on the Houston area.

LATEST:

9:45 a.m.

Millions of Americans have now received their federal stimulus payments by direct deposit. If you have not yet received your payment, the IRS offers ways you can check on its status or provide additional information to receive your check.

9:25 a.m.



Fort Bend ISD has closed its campuses and will resume online instruction for the remainder of the school year due to the novel coronavirus pandemic, the district announced Tuesday.

"There are several factors we took into consideration, with safety and security being our top priority  we know that, even if Governor Abbott allows schools to reopen as of May 4, many families and staff members will be reluctant to return to school and work to avoid potential exposure to the virus," Fort Bend ISD Superintendent Charles Dupre wrote in a Tuesday letter to students and staff. "Additionally, because there are only three weeks remaining of instruction after May 4, we believe it will be even more disruptive to our students, staff and teachers to ask them to pivot back into our buildings and the traditional classroom environment."

Graduation ceremonies are postponed until July while the district works to re-schedule dates at the Smart Financial Center.

7:46 a.m.

Houston Astros stars Carlos Correa and Machete Maldanado are teaming up with team owner Jim Crane and several others to help provide $3 million worth of medical supplies for Puerto Rico.

PERSONAL TOUCH: Trump's name to be printed on stimulus relief checks

The Astros Foundation and Crane Worldwide Logistics are working to swiftly move and distribute the supplies. The Correa Family Foundation helped raise the funds for the supplies, which is when Correa reached out to Crane for help with getting the supplies to the people of Puerto Rico.

"We are more than happy to utilize our resources to help," Crane said in a statement.

Check back for updates as they come in.
The army has reiterated its advice to personnel, veterans and families to download and install Indias coronavirus disease (Covid-19) contact-tracing app Aarogya Setu (health bridge) and stressed that the existing cyber security policies on usage of mobile phones be adhered to, two officials said on Wednesday.

Service personnel have been advised not to use the app in offices, operational areas and sensitive locations, the first official said. He said personnel have been told not to disclose service identity including rank and appointment.

The second official said soldiers have been told location services and Bluetooth have to be switched on only while visiting public places, managing isolation centres, when called for Covid -19 related assistance to civil authorities and moving out of cantonments and military stations for essential administrative duties. He said personnel have also been told to update mobile operating systems and install antivirus.

As reported by Hindustan Times on Wednesday, Aarogya Setu became the worlds fastest growing mobile app on Tuesday night with 50 million users in 13 days. Of these, 11 million were in a single day after Prime Minister Narendra Modi urged people to download the application in his third televised address to the nation.

Apart from reaching out and informing users about their potential risk of infection, this privacy-first by design app also shares safe behaviours and updated medical advisories about Covid-19 containment in 11 languages.
New York Governor Andrew Cuomo on Tuesday hit back at US President Donald Trump for his comment on having total authority over states, saying America does not have a king.

Cuomo was responding to the comments made by Trump during the White House briefing on Monday when he said that the President has total authority over when the restrictions imposed across the country due to coronavirus can be lifted.

The federal-state relationship is central to our democracy. We have to remember today that the balance between the state and the federal articulated in the constitution is the essence of our democracy.

We dont a have a king in this country, we didnt want a king so we have a constitution and we elect the president, Cuomo said in his daily coronavirus briefing.

Trump had said that when somebody is the President of the United States, the authority is total and that is the way it has got to be.

Also read| Need to review WHOs role in mismanaging Covid-19 spread: Trump halts funding

The authority of the President of the United States having to do with the subject were talking about is total, he had said, adding that They cant do anything without the approval of the President of the United States.

Cuomo said the Presidents comment that he has total authority for determining how and when states reopen is not an accurate statement in my opinion. He said Trumps remarks that he has total authority over the states and the nation cannot go uncorrected. Its just a factual statement that is factually wrong. That statement cannot stand. It is not only violative of the constitution, it is violative of the very concept of democracy, he said.

Cuomo said the total number of hospitalisations continues to go down and remains flat, a good sign we think we are at the apex on the plateau. New York state recorded 778 more deaths on April 13, taking the death toll to 10,834.

You look at the past few days and the number of lives lost, its basically flat at a devastating level of pain and grief, he said, adding that other evidence suggests that the state is seeing a flattening of the curve.

Click here for complete coronavirus coverage

Cuomo said in his briefing on Monday that the President was clearly unhappy. The Governor also referred to a number of tweets by Trump attacking him and state governors.

Cuomos been calling daily, even hourly, begging for everything, most of which should have been the states responsibility, such as new hospitals, beds, ventilators, etc. I got it all done for him, and everyone else, and now he seems to want Independence! That wont happen! a tweet by Trump read.

Another tweet said: Tell the Democrat Governors that Mutiny On The Bounty was one of my all time favorite movies. A good old fashioned mutiny every now and then is an exciting and invigorating thing to watch, especially when the mutineers need so much from the Captain. Too easy! Cuomo said he did not follow the exact meaning of the tweet but added that he understood that Trump was not happy with Governors.

The President is clearly spoiling for a fight on this issue. The worst thing we can do in all of this is start with political division and start with partisanship.

Also read: US nears Covid-19 peak, Trump feuds with governors on reopening

The best thing we have done throughout this past 44 days is we work together and we havent raised political flags, Cuomo said, adding that even though this is an election year, we said not here, not in this. This is too important for anyone to play politics. Cuomo recalled that he had seen a poster in his grade school which had the message suppose they gave a war and nobody came, meaning that what would happen if people just refused to engage, refused to fight. He said sometimes it is better to walk away from a fight than engage in it.

Sometimes it takes more strength frankly to walk away from a fight than engage in it. The President will have no fight with me. I will not engage in it, Cuomo said, adding that he has been clear this is not about me, its about we. The Governor said this is no time for politics and no time to fight.

I put my hand out in total partnership and cooperation with the President. If he wants a fight, he is not going to get it from me. Period, he said.

Cuomo warned that there is a real challenge ahead and just because the curve appears to be flattening, it does not mean one can relax.

We are not out of the woods. In this reopening, we could lose all the progress we made in one week if we do it wrong, he said.

The Governors of New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island and Delaware have joined forces to coordinate a regional plan for restoring the economy ravaged by the COVID-19 pandemic and getting people back to work, Cuomo said, adding that the worst is over for the state.

Cuomo along with New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy, Connecticut Governor Ned Lamont, Pennsylvania Governor Tom Wolf, Delaware Governor John Carney and Rhode Island Governor Gina Raimondo on Monday announced the creation of a multi-state council.

The coordinating group will comprise one health expert, an economic development expert and the respective Chief of Staff from each state and will work together to develop a fully integrated regional framework to gradually lift the states stay at home orders while minimising the risk of increased spread of the virus.
South suffers deadly Easter Sunday as storm system of hail, tornadoes kills at least 18

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At least 18 people are now dead and hundreds of homes were damaged after several states in the South, including the coronavirus-ravaged Louisiana and Mississippi, were battered Sunday and early Monday by a deadly storm system of hail and tornadoes.

As of Monday, 11 of the reported deaths resulting from the storm system came from Mississippi, The Mississippi Emergency Management Agency announced. Some 72,000 homes have also been left without power in the state.

Two of the 11 people killed came from Lawrence County. The local Sheriffs Office identified the victims as Sherriffs Deputy Robert Ainsworth and his wife, Paula.

It is with heavy hearts that we announce the passing of Deputy Robert Ainsworth and his lovely wife, Paula. We, at the Lawrence County Sheriffs Office, would like to offer our most sincere condolences to the families of both of these fine individuals, the Lawrence County Sherriffs Office announced in a statement on Facebook.

Robert was a United States Marine Corps veteran and a long time employee here. Mrs. Paula was a former Justice Court Deputy Clerk at the Lawrence County Justice Court and currently a Justice Court Deputy Clerk for the Walthall County Justice Court. Robert left this world a hero, as he shielded Mrs. Paula during the tornado. He was a very valuable employee and will be greatly missed. Please remember to pray for LCSO along with their families during this tragedy. Rest in Peace, Brother. We have the watch from here. Job well done, Sir.

Monticello Fire Chief Lyle Berard told CNN that two tornadoes reportedly hit the area.

"It's pretty bad," he said. "We have downed trees and multiple homes with major damage."

Mississippi Gov. Tate Reeves, who declared a state of emergency, lamented the deadly storm strike on Easter Sunday.

"My boy's house gone, man."



Shocking footage shows significant damage done to homes in a neighborhood of Monroe, Louisiana after a suspected tornado tore through the area. https://t.co/TiQP7vbu28pic.twitter.com/nSVJAqsNAx  ABC News (@ABC) April 12, 2020

"This is not how anyone wants to celebrate Easter Sunday," Reeves said in a statement. "The state and our first responders are working around the clock and will not rest until this is over. We are mobilizing all resources available to protect our people and their property."

Candice Pitts told the network that she survived the storm in a small hallway at the Soso Volunteer Fire Station.

"All I had was my arms to put over my son and mother-in-law," she said. "Was near a solid glass door that blew out and the roof in many places tore off or collapsed. My car was park(ed) under a shed that is now blown over in a yard nearby. It's mangled."

According to the Weather Channel, there were more than 40 reports of tornadoes as the storms ripped through Texas and Arkansas, across Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and Georgia and into the Carolinas and Tennessee.

At least five people were killed when storms tore through a mobile home park near the Georgia-Tennessee border. One person in the Atlanta area died after a tree fell onto a home.

Mayor Jamie Mayo of Monroe, a city in north-central Louisiana of about 50,000 people, said hundreds of homes in his area were damaged by the storm.

At least 200-300 houses have been damaged here in the city of Monroe alone," he told CNN. "We also have had damage throughout Ouachita Parish."

In statements on Twitter, Louisiana Gov. John Bel Edwards urged residents to stay home Sunday as the area remained on high alert for other systems emerging across the state.

The images and reports of major tornado damage in the Monroe area are heartbreaking, and my prayers are with the people there. We are in contact with local officials in the area to provide support. I hope all of Louisiana is on high alert right now, he said.

As coronavirus cases continue to climb in areas of the South like Louisiana, a Pew report Monday said the region will likely endure more death and economic loss from the deadly coronavirus, which has already killed more than 20,000 people in the U.S., more than any other region in the country.

The report said the impact of the coronavirus would likely be more devastating because of high poverty rates, weak social welfare programs and healthcare infrastructure and the area's high black population, which has emerged as a vulnerable demographic often plagued by underlying health conditions.
Mothers Day is still weeks away, but its never too soon to take a tally of all the things that make mom special.

Jenna Bush Hager did just that in the pages of Southern Living, sharing with the world how grateful she is to her own mother, former first lady Laura Bush, for being such a steady source of maternal strength in her family  and for helping her be a better mother to her own children, too.

Jenna Bush Hager pays tribute to mom Laura Bush in Southern Living (Amy Dickerson / Southern Living)

My mother led by example, the TODAY with Hoda & Jenna co-host explained. She has a grace about her. Shes unflappable, so even in the midst of trying times, shes been the rock, the steady force that has kept our family calm in moments that were unspeakably turbulent.

Jenna, who serves as an editor at large for the magazine, noted that thats what allowed a sense of ease and comfort in the home as she and her twin sister, Barbara Bush, grew up.

Nobody was ever tense, she said. Nobody was walking on eggshells.

Which is an impressive thing to be able to say, having spent a portion of her youth growing up in the White House.

What she always conveyed is that we have the power to create the kind of home we want our kids to remember, Jenna said, adding that one part that she remembers about her own childhood was being allowed to be an individual, her own person  sometimes a tricky thing for a twin or any sibling with another close to their age.

My mother never once compared my sister, Barbara, and me, she recalled. And I try hard not to compare my girls.

Jenna and husband Henry Hager have three children  daughters Mila, 7, and Poppy, 4, and 8-month-old son Hal  and its the example set by her mother that helps guide them as they raise their little ones.

If they are sad, scared, or confused, we let them feel those feelings and encourage them to talk about them with us, Jenna explained. We tell them that being who they are is great and makes their dad and me so proud and happy.

And that, no doubt, makes her mom proud, too.
The urgent appeal to Taiwan on March 14 highlights a stark conflict between the Trump administrations stance then on the use of masks and the race behind the scenes to obtain them for key White House personnel. At the time, the U.S. government was discouraging the public from wearing masks, saying that healthy people didnt need them and that the gear should be saved for front-line medical workers most at risk of infection.
Compared to other natural disasters, volcanoes can and do offer clues only when they are about to erupt. Developments in monitoring systems have allowed scientists to develop sensors to detect and consequently forecast eruptions, being able to plan for them with increased precision.

University of Cambridge volcanologist Marie Edmonds says that they are now capable of putting very precise instruments that monitor the gases that volcanoes emit, which can give clues on the location of the magma. They can see trends in data relating to imminent eruptions. Edmonds have worked with fuming volcanoes for roughly 15 years.

Edmonds is connected to an international group known as the Deep Carbon Observatory that has worked to put new gas sensors on fifteen of the most active and dangerous volcanoes to improve the forecasting of various types of eruptions.

The gas sensors continually measure water vapor, sulfur dioxide, and carbon dioxide. They are placed inside large boxes with surface antennae and buried underground. Advances in electronics have increased their precision and lowered their cost, allowing more of them to be used worldwide.

Putting these sensors atop active volcanoes is dangerous. Scientists wear reflective suits that protect against heat plus gas masks for protection from corrosive gases. They sometimes hike long distances in remote regions to reach their site. However, according to Edmonds, the work they do to save people's lives makes a dangerous job worth it. She enjoys doing something that helps people.

Edmonds' team has also attached their sensors on drones to measure emissions from a Papua New Guinea volcano for a short time; a technique developed to gather "snapshots" of activity. These snapshots help researchers understand better the complexities of activities that lead to eruptions.

Sensors help predict eruptions because different gases are emitted at various stages of an eruption. When magma rises, the pressure is released along with gases. Carbon dioxide is released early on, and then as the magma goes higher, sulfur dioxide is released. The ratio of two gases is used to detect the location of magma relative to the surface, telling researchers of the imminence of the eruption.

Magma also pushes against rocks, causing earthquakes that are normally undetectable by humans but detected by seismic equipment. The gas sensor data is paired with the seismic data.

University of California at Santa Barbara researcher Robin Matoza agrees how technological advances have vastly improved the ability to understand how volcanoes work. It is now possible to install 10 or more seismic stations due to smaller and more affordable equipment. Matoza adds that the capacity to compute collected data also recently improved.

Satellites also supplement gas and seismic data. The Alaska Volcano Observatory volcanologists collect seismic, satellite, and gas data regularly, monitoring about 25 volcanoes all over Alaska and providing warnings for the population.

Researchers say that satellites are becoming increasingly useful in data collection over a broad scale. For now, they say that these are not as precise nor reliable as other tools, partly because they cannot collect data rapidly, and they cannot function appropriately in cloudy weather.

Despite challenges, Edmonds says the array of signs that precede eruptions make it easier to predict eruptions compare to certain earthquakes and some other disasters. She adds that the more sensors and instruments they have, the more precise they can be.
By West Kentucky Star Staff Apr. 14, 2020 | 07:20 PM | PADUCAH





Commissioners and Mayor Brandi Harless approved an emergency ordinance which established the criteria for businesses applying for the funds. The ordinance also authorized the City's $150,000 portion of the funding, as well as an additional $100,000 in funding to match the community's fundraising efforts through the Community Foundation.







Under the ordinance, any small businesses that are not a franchise or franchise-affiliated, with twenty-five or fewer employees and a physical presence within city limits, were eligible to apply for the funds. Businesses were also required to be categorized as non-essential, having been required to stop operations as a result of Governor Andy Beshear's executive orders. During the first round, 75 businesses received $2,000 grants each to be used for expenses like rent, mortgages, payroll, or utilities.







"I always want to say thank you to the partners who helped us put this thing together magically within two days. Our community partners were so committed to putting something together very quickly for the quick relief for our small businesses." Harless continued, "I just want to make sure we all understand what that means and what it took, really. Because it took us really having to put down our perfection goggles and putting on our 'lets get some relief to our businesses' goggles."





The program is a partnership between the City, WKCTC, and the Community Foundation of West Kentucky. Anyone that wishes to donate to the fund can do so at the link below, or by calling 270-442-8622.

The Paducah City Commission held its first entirely virtual meeting and discussed the Small Business Relief Grant.
Novelis Inc's acquisition of the American aluminium rolled products maker Aleris Corporation for $2.8 billion has lifted the clientele of Aditya Birla group to a new trajectory with additions like Boeing, Airbus and Bombardier. Aleris is a major supplier of metal sheets, used in building aircraft body, to American aerospace giants.

On Tuesday, Hindalco Industries, the non-ferrous metals arm of Aditya Birla group, completed the acquisition of the Aleris through its Atlanta-based subsidiary Novelis, which already has clients like Coca-Cola, AB Inbev, Ford Motor Company, Jaguar Land Rover and Samsung.

Beverage industry sales (mainly cans) accounted for 60 per cent of Novelis' volume, while automotive and specialty end markets accounted for 20 per cent each. With the acquisition, the volume share will change as aerospace is the major business for Aleris.

In February last year, Aleris was recognised as a Bombardier Diamond Supplier for its outstanding performance as a supplier of aluminum aerospace products from Aleris production facilities in Koblenz, Germany and Zhenjiang, China. In the next month, Aleris was recognised for the second consecutive year as the accredited supplier by Airbus. Aleris entered into a multi-year agreement with Boeing in 2018 to supply aluminium plate and sheet for a variety of its aircraft.

The acquisition of Aleris positions Hindalco as one of the world's largest aluminium companies, with a global footprint spanning 49 manufacturing facilities in North America, Europe and Asia. It will cement Hindalco's position as the world's top aluminium value-added products player.

The acquisition has been considered as risky since the global markets are crashing and demand going haywire. But Kumar Mangalam Birla, Chairman, Aditya Birla Group, says that the deal is a long-term strategic bet, much like Novelis acquisition in 2007. The deal further diversifies the downstream portfolio, into other premium market segments, most notably aerospace, he added.

"Aleris enhances our strategic position in Asia and also solidifies our position as a leading global metals player, with a stronger presence across the US and Europe," said Satish Pai, Managing Director of Hindalco.

The closing purchase price of $2.8 billion consists of $775 million for the equity value, as well as approximately $2 billion of outstanding debt and a $50 million earn-out payment. On a trailing twelve-month basis ending December 2019, legacy standalone Aleris adjusted EBITDA at $388 million. Beyond its many strategic benefits, the acquisition will generate approximately $150 million in synergies and create a strong financial profile, said the company.

Novelis will acquire Aleris' 13 plants across North America, Europe and Asia. However, to satisfy regulatory conditions, the company is required to divest Aleris' plants in Lewisport (the US), and Duffel (Belgium). Aleris will be selling this to UK-based Liberty House for $337 million. The two deals will help Novelis to reduce the acquisition cost further. The only worry is that the sale realisation will be delayed in considering current market condition.

Also read: Hindalco share price rises 9% on $2.8 billion deal to acquire US-based Aleris
Beyond our current concerns with the coronavirus pandemic looms the historic formal agreement between the U.S. and the Taliban signed on February 29, 2020.

The three-and-a-half page conditional peace agreement (which is accompanied by secret annexes) provides a means for the U.S. to draw down its forces from 13,000 to 8,600 within 135 days of the agreement, then subsequently remove all of its forces from Afghanistan within 14 months. A major part of the agreement hinges on the ludicrous assertion that Afghan soil will [no longer] be used against the security of the United States and its allies.

Apart from concerns that the Taliban has no intention of disavowing its ties to multiple terrorist organizations (including its longtime ally, al-Qaeda), upholding a reduction in violence (RiV) or consenting to a permanent ceasefire; Afghanistans future political roadmap may be more than the Afghan government can bear after the current military balance tips the other direction -- in favor of the Taliban who have already gained control of more territory in Afghanistan since 9/11.

While there are four parts to the public agreement, the obligations of the [Taliban] in [the] agreement apply in areas under their control until the formation of the new post-settlement Afghan Islamic government as determined by the intra-Afghan dialogue and negotiations. It comes as no surprise the Taliban has refused to talk to the 21-member Afghan government negotiating team.

On January 26, 2004, the former president of Afghanistan, Hamid Karzai, ratified the Constitution of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan (IRA) at a ceremony in Kabul. The text found within the document points to a deeper issue of the countrys need to confront the strict interpretations of Islamic law. Article three of the constitution states: No law shall contravene the tenets and provisions of the holy religion of Islam in Afghanistan. The broad point is that, according to the Constitution, no other proclamation will contradict Islamic law (sharia). The finer point is that -- as a result -- the United States officially entered a losing battle a long time ago.

Sharia, by its own definition, is supreme to any other form of law, including the U.S. Constitution, and certainly including any other kind of democratic structure. The Constitution of Afghanistan, the moment it was endorsed and authorized, is the moment the world lost its grip on the baton in the race. Once the precedent was set that sharia was going to be an essential component of their Constitution, the ability to successfully implement any sort of democracy or plan for peace was terminated.

The 2004 Constitution of Afghanistan establishes a latent baseline for the future of intra-Afghan dialogue and negotiations. It actually provides a foundation for the Taliban to stand on, as the group can uphold such a constitution without actually violating Islamic law. As previously mentioned, no law shall contravene the tenets and provisions of the holy religion of Islam in Afghanistan. The re-establishment of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan and the implementation of sharia remains the ultimate goal of the Taliban in the South Asian country.

Throughout the process of withdrawal talks, plenty of news outlets around the world have expressed either their weariness or support for the agreement. In what could be considered an insignificant detail, some of the published articles are accompanied by photographs of Taliban members carrying white flags. This seemingly minor detail can easily be overlooked by most viewers. However, to the Islamic world, the significance could not be any plainer.

If a thousand people in the intelligence community were queried about the photo, it would be applaudable if more than a few could comprehend the significance of the image. It is quite disconcerting that throughout the peace negotiation process, Taliban members have been parading around with a white flag of victory, while holding an increasing amount of Afghan territory. And the Taliban is not going to cede one square millimeter of this territory. In spite of signing a withdrawal agreement, they continue to achieve what they have always intended to achieve -- territory under the jurisdiction of Islamic law.

The color of the flag confirms this premise. A black background with white lettering (of the Shahada or Kalma) equates to active jihad with no establishment of sharia. Conversely, the white background with black lettering represents jihad victory with sharia established.

Flag of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, used 19972001. The black text is the Shahadah. (source)

While the U.S.-Taliban agreement refuses to recognize the IEA, it does legitimize the Taliban as a force to be reckoned with. What does this say to every other flag-waving terrorist organization around the world? It legitimizes the use of terrorist attacks against an opposing government. And it says that after all of this investment of resources, time, and loss of life in Afghanistan, national security strategists still dont have a clear understanding of how far the enemy will go to implement and maintain the supreme law of Allah.

Keep in mind, according to the March 2020 report from Jane's Terrorism and Insurgency Centre, the Taliban has overtaken the Islamic State as the world's deadliest terror group. And these are the folks partly responsible for the new post-settlement Afghan Islamic government when the U.S. finally packs up and leaves.

Terry Bishop specializes in a variety of topics related to the strategic influence of terrorism and subversion, counter-terrorism and national security. His many fields of interest and research include armed conflict and violence in South Asia with a specific focus on al-Qaeda in the Indian Subcontinent (AQS), the Taliban, and other Deobandi-linked terror groups
The diplomat considers it necessary to raise the issue of Russian responsibility at the UN platform.

A European Parliament member says Russia may face new sanctions for inaction during the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic in the occupied territories of Crimea and Donbas..

"Russia is an occupying power in Crimea and Donbas and as such it is bound by international law to protect people's life and health. Therefore, if people there will not be receiving non-arbitrary medical protection and services, if there will be deaths of COVID19, or efforts to cover up real situation, it will be the utmost responsibility of Mr Putin and his entourage. Building international diplomatic pressure is one way to act; legal approach is another, but usually takes long time. Here, the threat to people's health is immediate. Moreover, the Kremlin is not even caring for people in Russia  instead embarks on corona info wars against democracies, sends dubious medical aid to hardest hit Western countries, suppresses doctors who dear to publicly warn about lack of action," MEP Rasa Jukneviciene told Guildhall.

"Legal experts could provide a qualified assessment, but I personally believe that in case of such pandemic, failure to provide adequate medical protection and services for population by the occupying power could amount to a war crime," the politician said.

Read alsoCOVID-19 in occupied territories: European Parliament to increase pressure on Russia

"International community of democratic countries have responsibility to send a signal that it would be a breach of Russia's international obligations  and would lead to introduction of additional sanctions. I believe, France and Germany  who are members of Normandy format and have a direct contact with Russian representatives  are especially well placed to give such credible indication to Russian authorities."

"As regards raising question in the UN  of course, as this will draw the attention to the problem. However, when you have one of permanent UN Security Council members having a veto right in perpetual breach of international law it has to uphold, it is rather difficult to expect robust UN action," said the MEP.
Its OK to be tired right now. We promise.

Just thinking of all the effects the coronavirus pandemic has had on our lives is exhausting, as is the daily drone of trying to keep going even as it feels like the world is crumbling.

Some have responded to the pandemic and stay-at-home orders with a whirlwind of productivity. Many have pointed out that Shakespeare wrote King Lear amid an epidemic. Recipe challenges are swapped on email, Instagram is littered with perfectly baked sourdough bread and workout challenges, and it may seem like everyone on your social media feed is doing something with all this extra time we supposedly have without commuting, going to school or leaving our houses on the weekends.

But more time spent at home hasnt meant more free time. For many, the pandemic means balancing their jobs with child care and home schooling duties. For others, a layoff means filing for unemployment and finding ways to cut costs. Many of us are cleaning more, to prevent the spread of the virus, and cooking more, as restaurants close or offer limited takeout. As people work from home, the ability for work hours to bleed into personal hours becomes easier. Health-care and essential workers are also facing the stress of battling the virus on the front lines.

The pandemic has not given us time to self-actualize. It has robbed us of time and exhausted us. And its OK to feel that way, experts say.

Try to not judge yourself by a standard set by someone else about how you should be spending your time, says C. Vaile Wright, director of clinical research and quality at the American Psychological Association. Its OK to not be OK right now and to just do your best to get through this truly unprecedented time.

At the beginning of self- and government-imposed social distancing, there was a flood of online discourse about how to spend quarantine, and some found it overwhelming.

I felt an immense amount of pressure every time Id get an invitation to some sort of Zoom story hour or art class that conflicted with a work meeting, says Robyn Rizzi, who works in ad sales marketing in New York. (Or seeing) someones colour-coded home-school calendar. I dont even have the time to make this type of chart, let alone have any chance in the world of sticking to it.

Rizzi unequivocally says she has less time since she started staying home, between taking care of her four-year-old son with her husband, constantly disinfecting her home, doing more cooking and laundry, and checking on friends and loved ones.

Parents working from home have a unique strain during this time, says Dyan Hes, a pediatrician in New York with Grammercy Pediatrics.

Some parents feel that they have to be superproductive because the kids are out of school and they need to be occupied all the time, she says. Lots of the online schooling is really just online homework, which is super-stressful for parents. They may seem extra-productive, but they are really trying to become teachers, while working from home and maintaining their household.

Even without child care responsibilities, the threat of coronavirus makes it hard for all of us to complete tasks, says Kathleen Cadman, an assistant professor of nursing at Weber State University in Ogden, Utah.

The pandemic has placed many Americans into situations where physiological needs such as food and sleep are no longer met, she says. Safety is now a concern. ... This makes it difficult, or arguably impossible, for (people) to stay fully engaged.

Getting through a regular workday, let alone side projects like reorganizing your kitchen or writing a novel, is hard enough. Alison Green, a workplace advice columnist, thinks employers need to manage their expectations for what their staffs can achieve in the middle of this crisis.

Employers who try to hold people to the same expectations they had before are going to end up with a frustrated, demoralized workforce, she says. Once you show your employees that you dont value them as humans, you usually cant ever regain that trust.

Rather than setting unrealistic goals at work or home, psychologists recommend practicing self-care, which doesnt require much extra time.

We can practice relaxing as we are walking, cleaning our house, doing the laundry, says neuroscientist Richard J. Davidson, founder of the Center for Healthy Minds at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. We can also practice a little self-compassion at these times, recognizing that no one is perfect and not being too hard on ourselves for failing to accomplish something in the time we had originally planned, for example.

A silver lining of the coronavirus pandemonium is recognizing what we have, Davidson notes. He recommends practicing appreciation, in addition to self-care.

So much of our lives depend upon others, he says. We need others to help us get our food, to pick up the garbage, and, of course, to care for our health. Intentionally cultivating appreciation for these many people who are serving others in this challenging time can be enormously helpful in promoting our own well-being.
The 1,000 ventilators that Elon Musk promised California in an effort to help its hospitals cope with the coronavirus have not been delivered to its hospitals, said the office of governor Gavin Newsom.

On 23 March Gov Newsom announced that the machines, which can provide life-saving support to critical coronavirus patients, had already arrived in the state.

The equipment was due to be delivered straight to hospitals by Tesla, however, as of now, the governors office says no California hospital has received them, according to The Sacramento Bee.

California was one of a number of states promised the machines by Tesla when it was seeing a surge of Covid-19 patients.

The Independent has contacted both Tesla and the governors office for comment.

Mr Musk has since faced increasing scrutiny over his promises to donate machines to hospitals in the US struggling to cope with the amount of intensive Covid-19 patients.

The CEO was forced to defend sending non-invasive BiPAP machines to a hospital in New York, rather than invasive ventilators after a report by The Financial Times revealed the difference in the equipment he had purchased.

There have been claims that the BiPAP machines are not invasive enough in the treatment of the virus could actually potentially spread the virus by aerosolising it.

Mr Musk said that New York Governor Andrew Cuomo asked for both invasive and noninvasive machines.

The US Food and Drug Administration recently cleared both BiPAP and CPAP machines for use as stand-in devices when proper ventilators werent available.

Last Thursday the governor said the state has enough ventilators to cope with the outbreak, CNN reported after he announced the decision to lend 500 machines to other states across the US.

The Independent has requested comment from Gov. Newsom and Tesla.
University of Guelph researchers found changes in habitat and food webs caused from deforestation is threatening the endangered woodland caribou

Cutting down forests means we're also cutting down woodland caribou, says a pioneering study by University of Guelph ecologists showing that logging in Ontario's extensive boreal stands threatens populations of the elusive but iconic herbivore.

In what integrative biology professor John Fryxell calls the first comprehensive study looking at the status of endangered woodland caribou across Ontario, the team found habitat and food web changes caused by forestry are encouraging more wolf packs to prey on caribou. Labelling the study a "clarion call" for conservation measures, he said the new paper shows how human activity, particularly logging, is upsetting food webs and habitat involving caribou, wolves and moose.

"It's death by a million cuts," said Fryxell. "Woodland caribou are an iconic species in Indigenous culture, integral to our historical development and a cornerstone in the functioning of boreal food webs. I think of the caribou as a canary in the coal mine for the long-term sustainability and quality of the boreal forest to protect other wildlife."

Published recently in the Journal of Wildlife Management, the study entailed attaching video collars to 30 caribou to monitor their foraging. The researchers also outfitted about 120 caribou and 50 wolves with regular GPS-tracking radio collars to monitor the animals' movements, including signs that wolves likely had killed a caribou.

Ontario's woodland caribou number several thousand animals. An officially endangered species, woodland caribou live below the tree line across most of Canada except the Atlantic provinces.

Logging has moved northward in Ontario over recent decades. As cut forests regrow, their mix of new trees and shrubs attracts moose. Higher moose populations in turn attract wolves, placing caribou at risk of being hunted as well.

Those caribou could move farther north, said Fryxell, but perhaps not soon enough to sustain their numbers.

Over six years, the team studied two sites in northern Ontario spanning about 23,000 square kilometres in all.

One site in Nakina, located about 160 kilometres north of Lake Superior, has been logged extensively since 1970. Regenerating forests contain more deciduous trees such as poplar and willow as well as thicker undergrowth.

The Pickle Lake site, dominated by stands of jack pine, is located about a seven-hour drive from Thunder Bay, beyond the northern limit for forestry. That made for a perfect natural experiment for the researchers to compare conditions in both locations.

To see what caribou might be eating, they sampled kinds of plants growing in each site and analyzed the footage collected from the video collars, or "critter cams." Caribou eat mostly lichen on the ground and growing on trees.

The researchers also analyzed the information collected from the GPS-tracking radio collars on wolves. Multiple pings from a single spot over an extended period "usually means they're eating something," said Fryxell.

Team members then visited those sites to verify what prey had been eaten.

The researchers entered their information into computer models that estimate whether a caribou population will produce enough young to sustain itself or not. They found that caribou in the disturbed site were not self-sustaining, unlike healthier populations at Pickle Lake

Fryxell said the results likely would apply farther north in Ontario and in other parts of Canada where woodland caribou are endangered by resource extraction.

He said forestry companies need to consider the long-term effects of their operations on plants and animals. Companies should practice rotation cutting to prevent clear-cutting and allow forests to regenerate, said Fryxell.

More immediately, resource managers might need to consider culling wolves or hindering their movements by turning old logging roads back into forest.

He said there's no evidence that either wolves or moose are threatened.

With plans for further development of Northern Ontario communities, Fryxell hopes to see governments, conservationists, Indigenous groups, industry and others work together to address threats to woodland caribou. "We have an opportunity to learn from what was done in the past to manage better in the future."

###

Study co-authors include other researchers in the Department of Integrative Biology as well as scientists with the Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources and Forestry, and the Canadian Forest Service.

Contact:

Prof. John Fryxell

jfryxell@uoguelph.ca
Almost 1,000 tests a day for coronavirus are being carried out in Northern Ireland, the health department said.

Officials have faced calls for greater transparency over the number of people who are dying in care homes after contracting the infection as well as demands for more testing there.

Six new deaths from the Covid-19 virus have occurred since Tuesday and another 121 laboratory-confirmed cases detected.

From this Friday, a weekly bulletin will give deaths by place of occurrence, such as a hospital or non-hospital setting.

Sinn Fein Assembly Member Colm Gildernew called for Covid-19 testing to be carried out in all residential and care homes across Northern Ireland. Around 32 homes are known to be affected.

He said: I have been speaking to many families who have loved ones in residential and care homes and they are becoming increasingly and rightly concerned about the lack of information around testing for Covid-19 in these facilities.

He added: Age should not be a barrier to testing for anyone.

Testing has been rolled out to include temporary facilities at the SSE arena in Belfast and MOT vehicle testing garages.

A Department of Health statement said: The health and social care system is working intensively to significantly increase levels of testing across all our laboratory services, within health and social care facilities, other public sector bodies, and also within the commercial sector.

We have increased capacity in recent weeks and will increase further.

At the start of the outbreak, laboratories were processing around 40 tests per day.

The department said: That has now increased to almost 1,000 tests per day, adding: We expect to increase our testing capacity further once AFBI labs are operational.

AFBI is part of another branch of the devolved government outside the health system.

The department went on: We have been faced with global supply issues with regard to the procurement of reagents to use in test kits; however, the test machines that AFBI use apply Kingfisher extraction methodologies and currently we understand that reagents for Kingfisher are in relatively good supply for Northern Ireland.

This presents a significant advantage for scale-up of testing in Northern Ireland.

Subject to being able to secure the key test kits and reagents, when fully operational in a number of weeks, it is expected that AFBI may test up to 1,000 samples per day.

Meanwhile, two jet skiers have been issued with fines after breaking restrictions designed to limit journeys.

The equipment was tracked down to Millisle in Co Down.

A Coastguard statement said: Please stay at home.

Coastguard will continue to assist police with dispersing people using the coast as a recreational area during this pandemic.

The economy is enduring its fastest and deepest decline ever, Ulster Bank chief economist Richard Ramsey said.

The banks monthly survey showed the steepest ever fall in activity.
Midland ISD/Facebook

Midland ISD buildings are closed through the end of the month because of the coronavirus outbreak, but the districts nurses remain in contact with students, according to the Health Services director.

The nurses  38 registered nurses and two licensed vocational nurses -- coordinate care from home via email, telephone and video conferencing, Imo Jean Douglas said in a press release.
Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, April 15) - Antipolo City expects to start its mass testing for the coronavirus disease this weekend, the spokesperson of the city mayor said on Wednesday.

Sa ngayon, we are in the preparation stage. Hopefully this weekend, makapagsimula na kami ng mass testing, said Jun Ynares, spokesperson of Mayor Andrea Ynares, in an interview with CNN Philippines News Night.

[Translation: We are currently in the preparation stage. Hopefully, we can start the mass testing this weekend.]

Ynares said that the health workers who will conduct the testing are now undergoing training.

Hindi pa kami nagsisimula ng mass testing, we are still training our [health workers]. Because you have to understand na kapag nag-mass testing ka, maraming kasunod yan na trabaho like dadami ang gagawa ng swabbing at kukuha ng specimen collection, he said.

[Translation: We are not yet starting the mass testing, we are still training our health workers. Because you have to understand that there are other things to do after testing, like the need to have more health workers to do the swabbing and specimen collection.]

He added that the local government is also forming a contact tracing team.

Ynares also said that container vans and testing booths will be used in conducting the mass testing.

The province of Rizal is under a total lockdown to curb the spread of COVID-19. Provincial governor Rebecca Ynares earlier tested positive for the virus.
Officials with U.S. Africa Command are disputing news reports that a civilian was killed during a "precision airstrike" near Jamaame, Somalia, this month, saying the reports are based on propaganda from a terrorist group.

The strike took place April 10 and killed one terrorist, according to a release from AFRICOM: "an al-Shabaab member complicit in the murder of at least six innocent Somalis."

Al-Shabaab is an al-Qaida-linked militant group based in East Africa. Its aims include the overthrow of the Somali government.

Two news outlets falsely reported civilian casualties in the recent strike, officials said in the release. One, they said, was the al-Shabaab-linked network SomaliMemo.

The April 10 airstrike was conducted in coordination with the Somali government and took place after the al-Shabaab target had terrorized a nearby village, laying out the murdered corpses of soldiers from the Somali National Army, AFRICOM officials said. The militant was killed, they said, after departing the village with other fighters and entering "a remote and secluded area."

Related: Senior al-Shabaab Leader Killed By US Strike in Somalia, Pentagon Says

"This was no innocent civilian. This was a purposeful and heinous act. It was a war crime by an al-Shabaab terrorist who desecrated bodies to scare and intimidate innocent Somalis into submission," Army Maj. Gen. William Gayler, U.S. Africa Command director of operations, said in a statement. "This terrorist posed with al-Shabaab flags prominently displayed in the background as Somalis of all ages were exposed to his gruesome public display."

The April 10 airstrike, which officials announced publicly the same day, came a day after another coordinated strike April 9 near Kobon, Somalia. Ten terrorists were killed in that strike, according to the announcements. At the time, AFRICOM said no civilians were killed or injured in the strikes.

When it comes to civilian casualties in Africa, however, many have accused the Defense Department of failing in accountability measures and covering up evidence.

On April 1, Amnesty International accused the DoD of failing to disclose that February airstrikes in Somalia had killed two civilians and injured another three.

AFRICOM has maintained in statements that only terrorists were killed in the strikes.

"Our in-depth post-strike analysis relies on intelligence methods that are not available to non-military organizations, including Amnesty International," officials said in a statement released to Reuters at the time. "The command's civilian casualty allegation assessment process is precise, comprehensive, and led by a team of experts."

To date, AFRICOM has admitted to just one incident with civilian casualties: an April 1, 2018, strike that killed two, described by Amnesty as a woman and young child.

In the wake of a Jan. 5 al-Shabaab attack on U.S. troops at Manda Bay Airfield, Kenya, on the Somali border, the U.S. has ramped up strikes on the group. Three Americans were killed in that attack.

According to assessments from Airwars cited by Amnesty International, U.S. forces have conducted 32 airstrikes on targets in Somalia as of April 1, compared to 63 for all of 2019.

AFRICOM has announced six airstrikes in Somalia so far this month. An April 2 strike successfully eliminated Yusuf Jiis, a key member of al-Shabaab leadership, officials said.

"Weakened by sustained military operations led by the [Somali National Army] and [African Union Mission in Somalia] forces, al-Shabaab is increasingly relying on lies and propaganda, including releasing gruesome pictures of unverified civilian casualties, in an effort to grab media attention, as well as deceive the Somali public," AFRICOM officials said Wednesday.

-- Hope Hodge Seck can be reached at hope.seck@military.com. Follow her on Twitter at @HopeSeck.

Read More: SecDef Announces Plans to Extend Force-Wide Travel Restrictions
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The media narratives that have emerged from the COVID-19 pandemic are varied. Some, like the lack of supplies for medical personnel and first responders, are important. Others, like the stories about churches and their defiant pastors who refuse to comply with physical-distancing and stay-at-home orders, are mostly selective and overblown.

Of course, there are a few churches and pastors behaving badly. A few. A very few. Less than one percent, in fact. To suggest that they are representative of all Christians is both misleading and slanderous.

Also largely ignored in so many of the stories about these churches is the fact that in many towns, counties, and states, the stay-at-home orders are confusing. Some are even illegal.

Understandably, many Christians struggle to know how to take the alarming headlines about pastors being arrested, and many churches and Christian ministries struggle to know how to carry out their mission at this time.

Kristen Waggoner, vice-president of the Alliance Defending Freedom, told me that ADF is receiving about 100 calls a day from churches and other ministries about COVID-19 related issues, asking for help in understanding and complying with federal, state, county, and municipal orders.

That regulations are being issued at four levels of government is just one of the potential problems. The orders not confusing and inconsistent are, at times, being applied and enforced inconsistently, or in ways discriminatory against the free exercise of religion.

The most important thing to remember, as Waggoner stated emphatically during the podcast, is that First Amendment rights cannot be suspended permanently. This is why the threat from New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio to permanently close some churches even after the crisis is manifestly absurd.

Two main requirements must be met for any infringement on religious freedom, including during a time of national or local emergency. First, any infringement must advance a compelling state interest and, second, it must be done in the least restrictive way possible.

What constitutes a compelling state interest will, of course, vary according to the circumstances. For example, the government could have a compelling interest to limit how people can gather during an emergency or, even, how many people can gather, though this would infringe on religious liberty. Thats what the Kansas Supreme Court ruled over the weekend.

The orders, however, must be clear. A person should be able to understand what is and what is not restricted without having to hire a lawyer. According to Waggoner, many of the COVID-19 restrictions fail this clarity test, especially at the local level.

Unclear restrictions make inconsistent enforcement by government nearly inevitable. This is especially true when local officials have an agenda and see an opportunity to take advantage of a crisis to crack down on groups that they dont like, including religious ones. For instance, in Charlotte and Greensboro, North Carolina, believers were arrested for praying outside abortion clinics, even though they were obeying local distancing orders.

Last week, the mayor of Louisville, KY, inexplicably attempted to bar a church from holding a drive-in service, a service where no one gets out of their car. A federal judge sided, scathingly so, with the church, writing in his opinion that On Holy Thursday, an American mayor criminalized the communal celebration of Easter. That sentence is one that this Court never expected to see outside the pages of a dystopian novel, or perhaps the pages of The Onion.

I was encouraged when Waggoner told me that, most of the time, a simple letter written to state and local officials pointing out problems or seeking clarification in their orders, is all it takes. The professionalism of Alliance Defending Freedom is one of their best tools, but they are pretty good in court too.

Even in the best of times, guarding our First Amendment freedoms can be an uphill battle. And these are not the best of times. Thats why I am grateful that Kristen Waggoner and ADF are there to help guide us through these confusing times.

My interview with Kristen Waggoner is live on the BreakPoint podcast.

Originally posted at breakpoint.org
A man has surrendered to specialist police after he was holed up in a house in far north Queensland for more than three hours, triggering an emergency situation declaration from authorities.

Officers were called to a home on Hyacinth Close in the Cairns suburb of Edmonton about 6am on Wednesday in response to reports of an armed man at the residence.

The emergency declaration was made just before 9am as specialist police and negotiators spoke with the 42-year-old man and contained the incident to the main home and adjacent properties.

Residents were told to stay in their homes and police closed Hyacinth Close to all traffic at the intersection with Cattleya Close.
The National Communication Authority (NCA) has granted extra spectrum to MTN Ghana and Vodafone to cope with the heavy traffic generated by the use of the internet due to the 'Stay at Home' directive.



The move is intended to ease the pressure on their networks and ensure quality service delivery as the nation entered the third week of partial lockdown of COVID-19 hotspot areas.



Mrs Ursula Owusu-Ekuful, the Communication Minister, announced the incentives during a media briefing in Accra, on Tuesday, to update the public on measures and interventions instituted by Government to contain the spread of the novel Coronavirus.



In view of that, customers of the two networks could browse education websites on COVID-19 as well as the Ghana Health Service and Ministry of Information websites at no cost.



Mrs Owusu-Ekuful, therefore, advised customers of the telecos to refrain from downloading videos and making WhatsApp video calls since that would require more data bundles.



Regarding efforts the Ministry had instituted to facilitate virtual learning, she said it was collaborating with StarTimes to provide education content on the Ghana Learning Television through the 300 Digital Village Project.



This will enable pupils and students in rural settings to access educational materials for free.



Mrs Owusu-Ekuful said 600 projectors and 300 television sets were procured and supplied to beneficiary communities.



The Ministry had also made available Smart workplace platform for government workers to ensure that more than 300,000 workers provided useful services during the partial lockdown.



Currently, about 20,000 public sector workers are using the smart workplace portal to render various services to government agencies.



On March 23, this year, the Executive Instrument 23 was accented to by the President, which paved the way for the Emergency Communication Legislation, she said.



This ensures that health authorities track persons infected with the virus using communication devices without infringing on people's privacy.



It also culminated in the launch of the GH COVID-19 Tracker Application on Monday, April 13, by the Vice President, Dr Mahamudu Bawumia.



The Tracker App will enable individuals who had come into contact with COVID-19 patients or experiencing symptoms of the virus to call *769# or log onto the website: www.ghcovid19.com to report their location to health professionals for easy contact tracing.



The Minister explained that the Tracker App had been encrypted, therefore personal information of people is protected.



She said less than 24 hours after launching the App, 16,000 downloads had occurred, of which 100 of those who provided information were exhibiting symptoms of the virus.



In addition, the Ministry was supporting the Ghana Health Service to effectively utilise the emergency numbers - 112 and 311 - as well as other hotlines made available to the public to report cases concerning the respiratory disease, the Minister stated.



Ghana's case count for COVID-19 now stands at 566 as of April 11, with eight deaths and 17 persons fully recovered.



Sixty-six persons who previously tested positive for the virus are now negative and awaiting second test report, with 208 patients in mild condition and two persons critically ill.

Source: GNA









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The Delhi government has more than 1000 Food Distribution Centres and Night Shelters for those affected by the Coronavirus Pandemic. You can search for these shelters on Google Maps.

Delhi Chief Minister, Arvind Kejriwal took to twitter to announce that people can search for Delhi Governments Food Distribution Centres and Night Shelters using Google maps. The tweet reads, As we prepare for an extended lockdown, we are proud to work together with @GoogleIndia Maps in ensuring easy accessibility of all our food and night shelters. We are committed to do everything possible to make life easy for those most affected by the lockdown.

To find a food shelter, one simply needs to open Google Maps and search for food shelter in Delhi or night shelter in Delhi and the results will pop up letting users navigate to the shelter.

Google has been working closely with state and central government authorities to pin the locations of COVID-19 relief centers to highlight public food and night shelters on Google Maps since the beginning of April. When the service launched via Google Maps, shelters across 30 cities could be located. That number has now risen to 32. People can simply search for Food shelters in <city name> or Night shelters in <city name> to find the results.

Google has said on Twitter that it is Expanding beyond 30 cities: Food & night shelters can now be found in Delhi, Aligarh, and Bhagalpur.

With the increasing number of poor people affected by the lockdown, it is essential that essential services be provided to them. This is one way of them to identify the center closest to them for food and shelter.

For those working from home, telecom and broadband providers are doing everything they can to help make work from home a smooth process. Airtel is looking to offer users 1Gbps speeds wherever possible despite the lockdown. You can read more about it here. MTNL and BSNL are also doing their part to ensure users have access to broadband at home for a seamless work from home experience. Even Reliance Jio has some offers for those working from home.

For those that can not recharge their smartphones via stores, can go to the nearest ATM to recharge their devices. Airtel, Vodafone and Jio customers can recharge their phones from ATMs.
Following confessions that was broadcast on state TV, The Qasioun Brigades have denied the regimes accusations and vowed to respond writes Brocar Press.

The Qasioun Brigades issued an official statement on Monday denying that the Syrian regime had arrested a number of its members.

The Qasioun Brigades, which claims to carry out operations in Damascus and its countryside, said that the allegations broadcast by the regimes media are just an attempt to persuade people of their control over the situation as well as to boast of security achievements.

According to the statement, which Brocar Press had received a copy of, the individuals who appeared in the video released by the regimes media have no connection with the group, noting that it is likely that they are innocent citizens who were forced to make baseless confessions.

Assad and his corrupt leaders are spreading these rumors and promoting them to conceal the real reason behind the insecurity, poverty and misery that the Syrians are living, the statement said.

The Brigades vowed to attack the regime with further operations in response to its corruption, injustice, and criminality against the Syrian people.

The regimes official TV channel had broadcast on Apr. 11, 2020, confessions by young men from Knacker in Damascus countryside, and further claimed that they were arrested for carrying out terrorist operations in Damascus.

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.




Haiti - Health : Haiti requests aid of India in the fight against Covid-19





According to diplomatic correspondence, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs has taken steps with India to provide Haiti with equipment and drugs capable of helping doctors save the lives of citizens suffering from the Covid-19 coronavirus.



Following a request addressed to the Honorary Consul of India in Haiti, the Haitian Chacellery formally formulated a request concerning materials to fight against the epidemic of Covid-19 it is question among others of :



- 7 duly equipped tent hospitals in the form of a tent ready to receive infected persons;

- Medicines made in India such as chloroquine / phosphate tablets;

- Artificial respirators.



In addition, a correspondence from Regine Lamur, Charge d'affaires at the Embassy of Haiti in Cuba, addressed to Chancellor Claude Joseph, writes that the Ambassador of India to Cuba contacted her in order to find out if at instead of Chloroquine / Phosphate the Haitian authorities would not prefer HydroChloroquine in tablet, which is the type of medicine used in other countries instead of pure chloroquine, requesting that the required quantity be also specified.



Remember that hydrochloroquine creates fewer serious side effects than Chloroquine.



See also :

https://www.haitilibre.com/en/news-30353-haiti-covid-19-daily-bulletin-march-24-2020.html



HL/ HaitiLibre


















Care Agency Childrens Services Offers New Out-Reach Programme to Parents

In line with Public Health advice regarding the potential spread of COVID-19, one of the early measures taken by the Care Agency was the closure of the Family and Community Centre within Mid-Harbours Estate.

As the lockdown rules continue, families have had to adjust and adapt their usual routines, which may not have been easy. As school and work-life have been brought home for many as a result of the lockdown measures, parents and their children are spending most of their time together under one roof for very long periods of time. Furthermore, many children and families have had to deal with not seeing their loved family members and friends face to face due to social distancing and isolation measures.

Many families may be feeling the stress at home. Whether it is establishing a good work and school routine, managing childrens behaviours, or managing the worries and stresses of confinement. Keeping children occupied and entertained, while finding some adult time away from the sense of isolation may be hard.

The staff at the Family and Community Centre would like to extend its support to parents and carers during this challenging time by way of an Out-Reach service.

The Family and Community Centre still offers opportunities for families to reach out and receive necessary support. An additional helpline service has been set up to offer one-to-one support and advice to parents and those with parenting roles. The team is comprised of trained Parenting Educators, Social Workers and Therapists, who will be able to offer advice on different strategies that may help families build resilience during these difficult times. The team will also help to link those parents or children in need to other support services in the community.

The acting Chief Executive of the Care Agency, Carlos Banderas, said; The Care Agency is able to reassure parents that the staff team assigned to provide this support are dedicated, qualified professionals and trained in being able to offer parenting programmes. They are focussed on connecting, empowering and promoting the strengths in families and aim to provide parents and those in caring roles further opportunities to discuss their concerns, needs or anxieties.

The Minister for Health and Care, the Hon Paul Balban said; It is widely recognised that these are extremely difficult times, and while not everyone will require this support, some may. I am conscious that children and families may need extra support during these challenging times, and would like to reassure the community, that the Care Agency remains committed to supporting families as much as possible during this period.

The Family and Community Centre Team can be contacted on telephone number 20046386 from Monday to Friday, between the hours of 8.45  4.30 p.m., or on 20042448 after working hours.

Alternatively, the team can be contacted by email to This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
Poetry seems especially important during challenging times. It has a unique power, Nye said. Poems can express feelings. They can explore our families and identity, as do those that reflect Nyes Palestinian American heritage. Poems can encourage us to notice whats around us, both indoors and outside. You might look closely at that tassel on the lampshade or listen to the sound of your own breath. Many of the poems in Cast Away focus on small, seemingly ordinary details.
Do you ever wish you could hear a lost loved one's voice just one more time? Or wish you knew what happened to the photos from all those family holidays and special occasions years ago? Wouldn't it be nice to be able to access these at any time, wherever you are, and share them with family and friends years from now, or even your future generations who haven't even been born yet?

Prakash Patel, CEO of ForKeeps

Can you tell us a bit about ForKeeps?

Timeless Messages: you can create a message for a loved one today, and have it delivered to them after your death, or on a future known or unknown.



Forever Album: a digital album that can be created in minutes, for all occasions, from the birth of a newborn, birthdays, weddings, anniversaries, tributes or even a custom albums, to capture precious moments or events.

What sparked the idea of ForKeeps? When did you get started?

What is the core function of ForKeeps?

What are some of the offerings?

What has been the challenges to overcome since starting out?

What advice would you give to other aspiring entrepreneurs?

You dont clock hours - you create value : Creating your own business isnt about the hours you have worked or put in, but the value exchange that has been produced in the work you and the team have done. Often or not, you may not be working to any set hours, but hours of productivity that suits and creates the greatest value. Some days you may end up doing the night shift and another day the early shift. That doesnt mean not having a routine, but flexibility and managing your time.





: Creating your own business isnt about the hours you have worked or put in, but the value exchange that has been produced in the work you and the team have done. Often or not, you may not be working to any set hours, but hours of productivity that suits and creates the greatest value. Some days you may end up doing the night shift and another day the early shift. That doesnt mean not having a routine, but flexibility and managing your time. Have purpose : When the work you do is more than work, it becomes pleasurable. Or in simple words, it gives you purpose in the work you produce, to get up each day and do something you are passionate about and believe in. Something money or time cant buy.





: When the work you do is more than work, it becomes pleasurable. Or in simple words, it gives you purpose in the work you produce, to get up each day and do something you are passionate about and believe in. Something money or time cant buy. Work with the right people : Every company talks about people as being their biggest assets. Or in truth a checklist for their internal value statement. But in truth the people you work with, aren't your labelled assets, they are your reason for being and the company you are creating. They must emanate your beliefs, value and passion. In a small company or startup - a single person can be the reason for failing or succeeding. Find like-minded people driven by the same passion.





: Every company talks about people as being their biggest assets. Or in truth a checklist for their internal value statement. But in truth the people you work with, aren't your labelled assets, they are your reason for being and the company you are creating. They must emanate your beliefs, value and passion. In a small company or startup - a single person can be the reason for failing or succeeding. Find like-minded people driven by the same passion. Find people who are always greater than you : One of my favourite quotes is by David Ogilvy If each of us hires people who are smaller than we are, we shall become a company of dwarfs. But if each of us hires people who are bigger than we are, we shall become a company of giants.





: One of my favourite quotes is by David Ogilvy If each of us hires people who are smaller than we are, we shall become a company of dwarfs. But if each of us hires people who are bigger than we are, we shall become a company of giants. Challenge yourself and be challenged : Every day brings another opportunity to learn. Constantly challenge yourself and allow yourself to be challenged by others to seek the truth and the best in what you are doing, as we never stop learning





: Every day brings another opportunity to learn. Constantly challenge yourself and allow yourself to be challenged by others to seek the truth and the best in what you are doing, as we never stop learning Money doesn't grow on tree : When you spend money in building your business, be frugal and careful. It is easy to spend too much too soon, especially if you have a capital or investment. Negotiate as if it is the last cent you have and spend it wisely.





: When you spend money in building your business, be frugal and careful. It is easy to spend too much too soon, especially if you have a capital or investment. Negotiate as if it is the last cent you have and spend it wisely. Get out of your comfort zone : Some people dont like taking a risk and yet still create great things in their life or the work they do. But life is full of risks and no outcome is ever 100% so I believe there are times when you need to take calculated risk to achieve something extraordinary





: Some people dont like taking a risk and yet still create great things in their life or the work they do. But life is full of risks and no outcome is ever 100% so I believe there are times when you need to take calculated risk to achieve something extraordinary Make it happen! : Everybody has an idea. But not everybody makes it happen. Throughout my life, I have had many ideas or seen something and thought I had that idea. But that was exactly all it was, I had an idea. The most rewarding thing is seeing an idea become something through actual actions





: Everybody has an idea. But not everybody makes it happen. Throughout my life, I have had many ideas or seen something and thought I had that idea. But that was exactly all it was, I had an idea. The most rewarding thing is seeing an idea become something through actual actions It takes effort and persistence!:Nothing in life comes easy. If it does, it normally isnt worth it. In short, success doesnt come easy, and no one will see the effort. But success is the doing, not the getting

What has been your proudest achievement thus far?

What does the future of entrepreneurship look like to you?

What do you think is the importance of startup accelerator/incubator programmes?

What do you believe are the traits an entrepreneur needs in order to succeed?

Tell us about your biggest struggles as an entrepreneur, as well as some major highlights.

Why would you encourage someone to become an entrepreneur?

Where would you like to see ForKeeps in the next 5 years?

ForKeeps allows you to do just that - to create and keep memories like these alive foreverWe chat to Prakash Patel, CEO of ForKeeps to find out about the journey of the innovative digital platform...ForKeeps is a newly launched South African company with a sole vision to change the way people behave in the world towards celebrating life and the afterlife in the digital age. It's an innovative app, which specifically allows anyone to easily create, store securely and deliver messages, wishes and celebrations of a persons life, whilst they are alive and when they have sadly departed.The app has several key features that include :For example, in todays unprecedented times, you are able to create and share a tribute album for a loved one, sadly knowing you are not able to attend due to the lockdown or social distancing, and thereby still creating social closeness, where people are able to send their tributes, messages of support or even light a virtual candle. An album that can then be saved and viewed forever by loved ones for loved ones.The idea of ForKeeps was a combination of ideas and dreams from different personal experiences from the management team, which includes me, Rob Inglis, Michelle van Niekerk and Pieter Meyer.We all shared the desire to change how we currently celebrate life digitally, pay tribute to loved ones who have departed and the legacy we leave behind for loved ones.People deserve for their memories to be kept alive forever!We live in an era of digital technology  where the impossible can now be possible. Through innovative new technology and thinking, we now have the ability to create everlasting memories through key features.We currently have the 'Forever Album' which can be designed and created within minutes for any occasion.For example, if you were getting married today, you could create your wedding album in the morning, and then send the link to all your guests who are attending, and whilst the day unfolds, your guests could add real-time photos to your album, with their own messages - to give you a truly once in a lifetime view of your wedding from everyones eyes - were all your guests become your photographers capturing every single precious moment.Another feature is the 'Timeless Message' which is built based on 100s of business logics rules that allows anyone the freedom to let their loved ones know how they felt in their own words, once they have sadly departed. They can choose the format (notes, audio, or video), the occasion and also when the message should be sent. It's a message that will last forever and give you the ability to speak life into future situations even when you are no longer around.We are currently working on a feature which will allow you to build a 'Digital Legacy' that can be a glimpse for future generations to see. When your grandchildren have grandchildren, wouldnt you like them to know who their great-great-grandparents were? Imagine leaving a digital legacy documenting how cool you were back in the day or even how you all coped through the Covid-19 pandemic?ForKeeps app is available for free on the Google Play Store and iOS Apple Store with in-app purchases. There is also a desktop version available.The biggest challenge since starting out was working with five different divisions and locations. From driving and setting the strategy and UX, through to the creative interpretation and prototyping, through to the development of the total digital ecosystem (to include the mobile app, web app and basic mobile browser solutions), whilst coordinating the successful delivery via different locations.There are many trials and trepidations in building a business or brand from scratch. There are many high and there will be lows. The challenge is understanding how to navigate these paths with a goal in sight.The top lessons or advice I can give are as follows:Seeing a passion project, for the four us, become a world-first product and one of South Africa's newest innovative companies.The future of entrepreneurship in South Africa (let alone Africa as a continent), has never looked so promising (but now albeit Covid-19 and whatever the global recession looks like) with its investment landscape for entrepreneurs slowly changing at unprecedented rates over the past few years, due to greater international venture capitalists flowing into the continent.The world has clearly got its eye on the opportunity in Africa rising, but with recent problems with our parastatals and now Covid-19, I dont think anyone can predict these uncertain times. However, having lived through two recessions in my working life, and been living in SA for over a decade, I have never seen a more resilient country, a country that makes its difficulties into opportunities like mobile.Through these uncertain times, I believe it will be countries like SA, that will lead the way with new inventors and entrepreneurs who rise from the flames, if given half a chance, as innovation and disruption isnt always a plan or strategy but a necessity.The importance cannot be underestimated. It is like asking a newborn who has all the intent of walking to be then asked to start running. Good accelerators and incubation programmes are the frameworks to help budding entrepreneurs learn the basics about building a sound and successful business, from financial management, legalities, patenting, CI, building a brand, marketing and go to market strategies - mentorship, guidance and encouragement (as it can be very lonely), that any entrepreneur can gain from.Persistency over failure. As Colin Powel said,Success is the result of perfection, hard work, learning from failure, loyalty and persistence.In my opinion, the biggest issue is accessibility and access for budding entrepreneurs or small businesses to get help and assistance from financial capital, mentorship and guidance.To create something from nothing! To be a creator of opportunities for othersIn short, our vision is to see ForKeeps as the largest online album directory in the world, where we have the largest library of albums, from tributes through to newborns - where people and even historians will refer to.Our other biggest vision is to see how we have created everlasting memories and timeless messages for loved ones, by loved ones. Messages that have been created and delivered to loved ones and given priceless comfort to millions of people around the world.
Union Health Minister Harsh Vardhan on Wednesday held a video conference with WHO officials and exhorted hem to work jointly with their Indian counterparts to eradicate the coronavirus malady just like they stamped out polio and small pox from India.

Harsh Vardhan also spoke to WHO's South Asia Regional Director, Dr Poonam Khetrapal Singh, and its India's Representative, Dr Henk Bekedam, who all praised the country's ongoing fight against the pandemic.

The health minister also discussed with WHO's officials ways and means to ramp up India's fight against COVID-19 at the field level.

We can and we will defeat this virus. WHO is an important partner in our fight against COVID-19. I really value the guidance and contributions made by the WHO in containing the spread of COVID-19 across the country," the heath minister said.

Vardhan recollected how doctors, in the government or WHO, were passionate about the cause of eradication of polio and contributed a lot for the purpose.

Without their sincere contribution, it would have taken more time to eradicate polio from South East Asia including India," he said.

He further motivated doctors and reminded them of their potential and ability because of which India managed to emerge victorious from the scourge of polio.

He said India was first to respond to COVID-19 and stands on a better footing than the rest of the world because of the valuable and sincere services of our corona warriors.

"We are able to check this enemy through community surveillance, issuance of various advisories, cluster containment and dynamic strategy," he said.

Praising India's response to COVID-19, WHO's South-East Asia regional director, Dr Singh said, Despite huge and multiple challenges, India has been demonstrating unwavering commitment in its fight against the pandemic.

WHO's India Representative Dr Bekedam said, Our field personnel have been redirected to support the fight against COVID-19. The same team worked tirelessly along with the government and other partner organizations to help India become polio-free. I am confident that the WHO team can once again join hands with the government to help win this fight against COVID-19.

The key discussion points of the interaction included technical coordination with WHO officers working at district level for helping in development of micro-plan for hot spots and clusters containment, helping in analysis of existing cases to identify the possible route of transmission and devising strategy for continued surveillance of districts till such time there is reliable evidence that there is no scope for further infection in the district.

Key central and state government health functionaries were also present in the videoconference.

The experiences and strategies from three states -- Bihar, Karnataka and Maharashtra -- were also presented during the meeting.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
David Lee, owner of Blue Moon Construction, LLC, in Tampa, Florida. Bibi Sipra

A loan program meant to pump fast cash into small businesses has failed on almost all accounts, according to business owners. The Economic Injury Disaster Loan program is among the core financial-relief measures the federal government has pushed to entrepreneurs hobbled by the coronavirus pandemic. The program, overseen by the Small Business Administration, offers low-interest loans to cover operating expenses after a declared disaster. But money that was supposed to arrive within days has, weeks later, not yet shown up, and entrepreneurs are getting substantially less capital than originally envisioned.

"We feel shortchanged," said David Lee, the owner of Blue Moon Construction, LLC, a two-employee shop based in Tampa, Florida. "This was our only access to the stimulus." "Now they're pulling the rug out from under us," said Lee, 40. "It feels like the government is overlooking America's smallest companies."

'It's a nightmare'

The program is the lesser-known cousin of the Paycheck Protection Program, a $349 billion forgivable loan program created by the $2 trillion coronavirus relief package signed March 27. The relief law beefed up the disaster loans, overseen by the SBA, by giving emergency grants of up to $10,000 to businesses within three days of the agency receiving their application. The enhancement was meant as a quick infusion of capital for businesses with 500 or fewer employees. The grants don't have to be repaid even if a disaster-loan application is ultimately denied. But that three-day window turned out to be a pipe dream.

Lee applied for a loan on March 29. Two weeks have passed, and he hasn't received any funds or a communication about his application status. Meanwhile, his revenues are down 90%. Lee aimed to use the loan and grant to fund operations through the summer. Robert Miller, who owns three restaurants in the Pittsburgh area, has waited even longer. He first applied for a disaster loan on March 19.

His restaurants  Sidelines Bar and Grill, Sidelines Beer House and The Fire Side Public House  are losing $50,000 a week and revenues are down 80%. "It's a nightmare," Miller said of the program. "If they don't fix it, a lot of businesses will have trouble reopening or surviving." Many business owners are trying to leverage both disaster loans and the Paycheck Protection Program. Funds from the latter are meant primarily for payroll costs to keep workers employed. That leaves many, especially those with few employees and low payroll costs, in the lurch and in need of capital to fund other business operations. But disaster loans are much more meager than originally anticipated due to high demand and insufficient federal funding.

While the SBA website says business owners can get a disaster loan for up to $2 million, the agency is capping its loans at $15,000. Yet business owners are requesting an average $200,000, Sen. Ben Cardin, D-Md., said in a speech April 9. The coronavirus relief law, known as the CARES Act, said applicants get an emergency grant in the sum requested by applicants, up to $10,000. However, the SBA isn't allowing business owners to choose the size of their grant  they are instead limited to $1,000 per employee, up to $10,000. All together, disaster-loan funding is about 99% less than originally advertised. More from Personal Finance

7.5 million small businesses are at risk of closing

How to pin down your finances as tight as possible

Creditors can snatch your coronavirus stimulus check Around 3.8 million business owners have requested disaster loans, for a total $372 billion  but Congress only authorized $7.3 billion for the program, Cardin said. Just 4% of those who applied for a disaster loan have been approved and 1% haven't, according to a National Federation of Independent Business survey of 884 small-business owners conducted from April 6-7. The SBA didn't respond to a request for comment.

'It's not going to save you'

For Toby Rice, a sole proprietor based in Macedonia, Ohio, the new contours of the loan program are a huge blow. His recruitment marketing firm, Total Online Recruitment Advisors, has lost more than 90% of revenue. Rice, a sole proprietor, expected to qualify for a $100,000 disaster loan and planned to use the $10,000 grant to cover three months of fixed business costs. Now, he qualifies for a $15,000 loan and $1,000 grant. "$1,000 isn't enough to make a difference for anything," Rice, 33, said. "If you're in a boat that's sinking and you have 10 holes, you can plug one but you still have nine leaking. "It's not going to save you." Rice applied for a loan March 31. He hasn't received any money or word on when it will be available.
After the Food and Drug Administration changed the rules for blood donations from gay and bisexual men earlier this month, coronavirus survivor Lukus Estok saw an opportunity to help other patients recover from the disease.

For years, the FDA has restricted men who have had sex with men in the preceding year from donating blood, but loosened its rules on April 2 as a way to address a sharp drop in donors during the coronavirus outbreak.

Within days, Estok tried to donate blood plasma for a test program in New York City that treats severely ill COVID-19 patients with plasma from patients who have developed antibodies and recovered from the disease. He said he was turned away after revealing he was gay.

"I was shocked," said Estok, 36. "I've been through a month of hell with this virus. I'm finally recovered. I've been through a screening process that tells me I'm a potential candidate to help somebody else and now I'm being told I can't."

NBC News found that despite the rule change hundreds of the nations blood centers are still unable to accept blood from gay men, even though there's a desperate need for blood at U.S. hospitals and a desire to get plasma with antibodies from COVID-19 survivors. Both the Red Cross and America's Blood Centers, which together represent 800 banks nationwide, told NBC News they haven't been able to accept donations.

Estok and other gay men who have tried to give blood since April 2 have been unable to do so because many blood donation centers have not yet trained staffers or updated their computer systems to accommodate the new rule. It's also because a trade group to which nearly all U.S. blood banks belong has not yet gotten approval for an important document from the FDA.

Image: Daily Life In New York City Amid Coronavirus Outbreak (Cindy Ord / Getty Images file)

In 1985, as a way to block the transmission of HIV, the FDA blocked all men who had had sex with other men after 1977 from donating blood. The rule was changed to sex within the past 12 months in 2015, and then to sex within the past three months on April 2.

Story continues

Gay and bisexual men began showing up at blood banks to donate immediately, only to be turned away.

Estok was trying to donate his blood plasma as a part of the Mount Sinai hospital system's blood plasma therapy program. He found out about the program through friends and knew he wanted to donate his plasma to help others who were sick.

NBC OUT

"Having gone through a bit of a horrific experience with the virus and feeling pretty grateful to have come out the other side, I reached out to Mount Sinai," said Estok.

After multiple screenings, Estok said Mount Sinai called him and said his blood had sufficiently high levels of the needed antibodies and that New York Blood Center would be in touch to schedule an appointment. But once he arrived at New York Blood Center, Estok was told he would be unable to donate.

"I was not expecting the reaction I got," said Estok on when he told the staff he was gay. "It was like I was radioactive."

In an exchange that Estok recorded on his phone, the NYBC staff explained to him that they had not yet implemented the FDA's new guidelines and that the process was "complicated." Estok was forced to go home without donating plasma.

"I was so upset," said Estok. "I genuinely want to be able to contribute to help somebody and right now they're basically putting out messages that they need blood that there's shortage of blood. But at the end of it, they sent me home."

An NYBC staffer denied that a potential donor would be asked if he were gay, saying the donor would instead be asked about sexual activity with another man during the past 12 months.

Brandon Gunther, 24, of Sacramento, California, had a similar experience. He attempted to donate at a local blood bank, believing he was eligible under the new guidelines, but was turned away after revealing his sexual history.

"I hadn't had sex in the past three months so figured I was good to go," said Gunther. "But the computer rejected my eligibility to donate and I was told 'you have to remain abstinent from male to male sex for at least one year to be eligible to donate.'"

Gunther says the experience felt discriminatory and jarring.

Blood bank representatives told NBC News the experience has also been frustrating for them, especially since they have been pushing for relaxation of the rules for years. The blood centers can't just flick a switch and change their rules for donation, they say -- making such changes can take months.

Image: US-HEALTH-VIRUS (Diana Berrent / AFP - Getty Images file)

Linda Goelzer, a spokesperson for Carter BloodCare in Dallas, said "tons" of people showed up at their facilities the day after the FDA guidelines were announced, believing they were now eligible to donate. The staff were forced to turn them away.

"They were so angry with us," said Goelzer. "People were calling and saying 'You lied to us, you're not following the FDA,' and it's so unfair. Every blood center in the country has been advocating for these changes, but we have to go through some very rigorous protocols to make these changes so that we can still keep safety in the blood supply and in the process."

"When the FDA says the word 'immediately' that means something totally different in our world," said Goelzer. "It takes about three months to implement this stuff but [the FDA] is relying on us to communicate that to the public."

Kate Fry, CEO of America's Blood Centers, said that the language in the FDA's guidance was intended to mean that blood centers should immediately begin the process of implementation, recognizing that it would take some time.

"The struggle is in the public perception that it's actually blood centers who are stalling the effort," said Fry. "And that is just not the case at all. They are 100 percent working on it. It just takes time."

According to Fry and confirmed by the FDA, the phrase "immediate implementation" as used in the FDA's April 2 press release did not necessarily mean that blood centers could immediately begin collecting blood and plasma from newly eligible donors.

In a statement, an FDA spokesperson said that the agency understands that blood centers will have to undergo a lengthy implementation process and that they are willing to help blood centers if needed.

"We are hopeful that blood collectors will work expeditiously to make the changes needed to implement the modified recommendations so that they may begin collecting blood and blood products under these recommendations as quickly as possible," said Michael Felberbaum, an FDA spokesperson. "The FDA is available and willing to work with them as appropriate to assist them."

The question of a questionnaire

The spokesperson for the New York Blood Center, where Estok tried to donate plasma, told NBC News that the delay in implementation involved the time needed to train staff, but also involved receiving an updated Donor History Questionnaire from AABB, a industry group formerly known as the American Association of Blood Banks. AABB's has more than 1,400 institutional members, accredits "virtually all" the blood centers in the U.S., according to a spokesperson, and collects the majority of the blood donated in the U.S.

In fact, representatives from all blood centers NBC News contacted said they're currently waiting on AABB's updated donor history questionnaire to first be approved by the FDA and then released by the industry group, before they can begin the implementation.

Health

The AABB said it submitted its primary documents, including the donor history questionnaire, to the FDA on April 3 - just one day after the FDA announced new donor guidelines. AABB said it has since sent several documents to the FDA. An AABB spokesperson said that as of Monday it had submitted all of the needed documentation to the FDA, and is in touch with the agency, answering any questions it may have.

The FDA says it is reviewing all COVID-19 related items as quickly as possible, but also noted that the AABB's member organizations don't actually have to wait for approval of the AABB questionnaire to move forward. If they submit their own questionnaire to the FDA, they can begin accepting donors immediately.

"As noted in the guidance, while licensed blood establishments may wait to use the revised donor questionnaire and accompanying materials provided by industry associations and found acceptable to the FDA, they may also revise or create their own materials to implement these changes immediately upon receipt of this information by the FDA," said Felberbaum.

Blood centers say that when they do receive an FDA-approved updated questionnaire from AABB, they will still need to update their computer systems and train their staff on new protocols. A spokesperson for Carter BloodCare said that the staff training would take at least 30 days. The NYBC spokesperson said it hopes to be able to receive newly eligible donors by mid-May.

The Red Cross said it anticipates being able to accept newly eligible donors in June. Kate Fry of America's Blood Centers said she anticipates her network's centers will be able to accept newly eligible donors in June or July.

'The policy remains discriminatory in nature'

Gunther and Estok share in outrage from the LGBT community over what they call a discriminatory experience.

"Not only is it imperative that gay and bisexual men who are now able to donate blood be allowed to do so without delay, the FDA must also lift the 3 month deferral in its entirety," said Sarah Kate Ellis, CEO of GLAAD, a LGBTQ advocacy organization. "The policy remains discriminatory in nature, unaligned with science, and continues to prevent LGBTQ Americans from saving lives."

But those who are deferred under the old guidelines will still have to wait. Gunther said he wants to encourage others like him to keep trying to donate and not be discouraged if they are turned away.

"We have perfectly good blood to give, and we want to give it and help."

Kate Fry advised that those who are newly eligible under the FDA guidelines should keep in touch with their local blood bank to check on when the facility expects to finalize implementation.

"We're so excited to have these individuals become donors again," said Fry. "We are absolutely working as fast as we can as an industry. Patience is what we ask for our guests during this time and we'll get them into the fold as quickly as possible."
Dr Hafiz Bin Salih, the Upper West Regional Minister has allayed the fear of the people in the region as the six additional confirmed cases of COVID-19 did not come from the traced contacts of the first case recorded in the region.



Let me reiterate that, so far, test results for samples from contacts of the first confirmed COVID-19 case in the region have proved negative. The six new cases have no link with the first confirmed case, he said.



Dr. Bin Salih who made this known in a post on his Facebook wall on Tuesday morning, disclosed that, of the six new cases, five were imported cases from abroad while one returned from the Western Region.



The region now has seven confirmed cases of COVID-19 and this is alarming, stressing that, health officials in the region were, however, monitoring and supervising all the seven patients who were on isolation.



He explained that those who came from abroad, entered the country before the borders were closed and that their details at the airport in Accra were used by officials of Ghana Immigration Service (GIS) to trace them and their samples were taken by health officials.



This week, some medical experts shall be in the region to help in case management of CSM cases, Dr Bin Salih said while emphasizing that We have enough medication to handle CSM cases in the region.



It should be noted that there is no vaccine for meningitis serotype X that has emerged in the meningitis belt in Africa, stressing that early medical attention was required in their fight against CSM.



We should therefore urge our people to seek early medical attention when they begin to have headache, feel feverish and/or stiffness in the neck, the Regional Minister appealed.

Source: GNA









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NEW YORK  Lying in a hospital bed last month, Madhvi Aya understood what was happening to her.

She had been a doctor in India, then trained to become a physician assistant after she immigrated to the United States. She had worked for a dozen years at Woodhull Medical Center, a public hospital in Brooklyn, where she could see the coronavirus tearing a merciless path through the city.

Within days of her last shift as a caregiver, Aya became a patient. She had worked in Woodhulls understaffed emergency room, taking medical histories, ordering tests and asking about symptoms. Now she had become infected.

Aya, 61, was alone in a hospital, less than 2 miles from her husband and 18-year-old daughter on Long Island, who could not visit her. She did not have the solace of familiar colleagues; she had been admitted to a different facility nearer her home. In a text with her family, she described horrible chest pain from trying to get out of bed.

I have not improved the way should have been, she wrote her husband, Raj, on March 23.

As she grew sicker, her texts came less frequently and in short, sporadic bursts.

I miss you mommy, her daughter, Minnoli, wrote on March 25. She craved the reassurance of her mothers hugs, the comfort of crawling into her bed. Please dont give up hope because I havent given up. I need my mommy. I need you to come back to me.

Love you, Aya wrote the next day.

Mom be back.

Aya could not keep that promise.

Front-line health care workers face a high risk of contracting the coronavirus, and scores have become sick. But it is less known how many have died in New York from the virus after working closely with COVID-19 patients.

Health care systems by and large have not publicly revealed the identities of those employees, who include Kious Kelly, a nurse manager at Mount Sinai West in Manhattan, and Dr. Ronald Verrier, a surgeon at St. Barnabas Hospital in the Bronx. Doctors, nurses and staffers who worked in other capacities at hospitals that have been flooded with virus patients have also died, according to their families and colleagues.

Ayas text messages and her familys account of her final days reveal a woman who spent much of her life devoted to medicine before succumbing to the cruel and familiar arc of a patient with COVID-19. Her early mild symptoms and quarantine at home were followed by a rapidly escalating illness and long waits for care, until she died alone.

She was always there for us, whenever we wanted, her husband said. But when she got sick, no one was next to her, he said.

Aya moved to the United States in 1994 to join her husband, who had immigrated a decade earlier and met her on a return trip to India. She started working at Woodhull in 2008 and became a senior physician assistant. Colleagues said she nurtured younger co-workers by drawing on the experience she had gained as an anesthesiologist and internist in India, along with her instinct as a caretaker.

This has been a heavy blow to us all, Dr. Robert Chin, Woodhulls emergency department director, said in an internal email on April 1, asking for donations to help Ayas family, for whom she had been the primary wage earner.

Like many other hospitals, Woodhull had converted one ward after the next into makeshift intensive care units when the virus began its surge in New York. As the hospital verged on running out of ventilators, protective gear for medical staff and other equipment, it appealed to affiliated medical centers for help and transferred patients elsewhere.

In the week of Ayas death, Woodhulls emergency department alone had 20 patients on ventilators, Chin said.

Another Woodhull employee, a radiology clerk named Thomas Soto, died of the virus at the hospital last week, 12 days after his first symptoms. Soto, 59, worked there for decades and was close to retirement. The only reason my dad pushed to work that extra year was to retire with full pension, and I lost him because of that, Jonathan Soto, the older of Sotos two sons, said through tears.

A former hospital police officer, Herb A. Houchen, 35, returned to Woodhull as a COVID patient and also died. He had worked at Woodhull for more than five years and left behind an 11-year-old daughter.

Ayas daughter, Minnoli, said her emotions have ranged from intense grief to disbelief. She thinks about becoming a doctor herself and is angry at a health care system that she believes did not protect its front-line workers. Sometimes she is angry at her mother for not coming home.

I just want to be able to hug her and have her tell me everything is going to be OK, Minnoli said.

There is no way to determine how Aya became infected. While she worked at Woodhull in early March, front-line employees had not yet been instructed to wear protective masks for all patients, one staff member said. Later, as the crisis grew, hospitals realized that people coming in for apparently unrelated problems were also testing positive for the virus, potentially exposing unwitting health care workers.

On March 17, Woodhulls administration advised emergency department workers to wear masks for all patients. A spokesman for New York Citys Health and Hospitals Corp., which oversees Woodhull, said protective equipment was available to its health care workers.

Ayas shifts could be grueling at Woodhull, a 320-bed public hospital at the intersection of Bedford-Stuyvesant, Bushwick and Williamsburg. Her husband often drove her to work from their home in Floral Park as early as 6 a.m. and picked her up 12 hours later so she could relax in the car.

We have to take care of our patients first, she often said.

At the beginning of the outbreak, Aya worried about bringing the virus home to her 64-year-old husband, whom she had guided through an aortic bypass in 2017, and her 86-year-old mother, Malti Masrani, for whom she had cared after a stroke late last year.

She began coughing around the time of her last shift on March 12, Raj Aya said. He drove her to Woodhull the next evening so a doctor could examine her, picking her up many hours later, after she was tested.

For the next few days, they quarantined on different floors of their Cape Cod-style home. Aya had no underlying medical conditions, family members said.

But her cough worsened at home, and she developed a fever. In the early afternoon of March 18, Raj Aya dropped his wife off at Long Island Jewish Medical Center, near their home. He would not see her again.

For an hour and a half, Raj Aya sat in his car in the hospital parking lot, texting his wife  almost always addressing her as SH, for sweetheart to check if she had received a chest X-ray and to say that he had tried to get in to see her.

You go home I call you I am waiting, she wrote.

At 4:47 a.m. the next morning, Aya texted that she was still waiting for a bed. When Raj Aya woke up, he asked if he could bring her coffee. She said no. She reported her test had come back from Woodhull. Positive.

Im so sorry to hear, he replied.

They spoke by phone, and she told him to take care of her mother and bring her daughter home from school.

The next day, Minnoli Aya returned from the University at Buffalo, where she was a freshman. She believed her mother had pneumonia and hoped to surprise her. Instead, she learned her mother had contracted the coronavirus.

I was just on the floor, and I was broken, Minnoli said.

Over the next week, she texted with her mother, who continued to deteriorate. Doctors called Raj Aya daily. By the end of the week, his wife was increasingly having trouble breathing.

By the morning of March 29, doctors got ready to put Ms. Aya on a ventilator. But there was a life-threatening complication, and they asked Mr. Aya if he wanted to see his wife for what could be the last time. He worried that his heart condition would put him at risk if he caught the virus, and Minnoli could be left without a parent.

The decision not to go, he said, has haunted him. That afternoon, the hospital called to say that his wife had died.

Minnoli, her father and grandmother could not hug each other, because they were required to stay six feet apart, even though they lived in the same house. Nor did they want to plan a funeral service that almost no one would attend, one where they would not be able to view Ayas body. They decided to have her cremated.

Even after her mother died, Minnoli still texted, trying to stay connected.

I miss u, she wrote before going to bed that night. When she woke the next morning, Minnoli texted, Thank you for coming to me last night in my dreams.

Raj Aya, concerned about Minnoli, arranged for her to speak to a therapist by video after his wifes death. But he is not sure how long he can afford the expense because Ayas health care plan had covered the family. A representative of her union benefit fund told him by email that benefits would end 30 days after his wifes death. My heart is broken for you, the representative wrote in the email, which was reviewed by The New York Times.

In the weeks since Aya has been gone, Minnoli has pored over the messages still sitting in her phone.

Hi mommy. College is getting so much more stressful now that its at home, she had written, three days before her mothers death. The good thing is Im home but I need you to come back here to me. I hope you ate dinner and Im still praying for you and havent gave up hope.

Concentrate, Aya responded.

I am but I want u home.

Home soon.

I love you mommy with all my heart.

Love you.

Those were Ayas final words to her daughter.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
LONDON, UK / ACCESSWIRE / April 15, 2020 / "Trustbut verify." The phrase famously used by US President Ronald Reagan at the 1986 Reykjavik Summit, serves to illustrate that a counterintuitive tension is often the most effective way to break down barriers that prevent progress. This type of wisdom is now commonplace in business, aided by the growth of technology that gives confidence to efficiency arrangements between established partners.

Drawing inspiration from the ideal of trust, Jozef "Jos" Opdeweegh, a seasoned C-suite executive with over 20 years of experience developing, leading, and growing public and private global companies, shared his insight on what teams can do to foster their relationships and excel in an environment that supports further progress.

As someone with a true passion for talent development and business transformation, Jos Opdeweegh has demonstrated and repeated success in complex business and cultural transformations where strong teamwork mechanisms are essential. His commitment to finding the right balance in his work has been fundamental in the striking success of his career. This balance has come from finding enough room for both innovation and data to grow together and complement as a one...rather than siloed approaches.

"Fresh thinking is essential to human flourishing", Opdeweegh assured. "Without it, we stagnate, our horizons narrow and in business, our competitors overtake us". For Opdeweegh, when innovation becomes absent or curtailed by strict guidelines and dogmas, there is more likeliness for the environment to feel enclosed -- or immersed in the "dark ages' as he pointed out --- and stagnant from new fresh ideas.

But the reality is that when it comes to our own circumstances, creative leaps can be scary, evoking the sequence of "disruption, resistance and uncertainty" which characterized progress in the scientific and industrial revolutions. Today, that same pattern continues, most obviously in the digital sphere, which has supercharged the speed, reach, and risks of creative innovation.

It is a mistake, however, to think of creativity purely in terms of inspirational genius. Opdeweegh has closely observed patterns of creative pioneers and leaders in various industries such as the prominent engineer and inventor, James Dyson, whom he recalls pointing out that "practical progress is seldom made in the manner of Isaac Newton under the apple tree". Rather, it's an iterative journey, which sharpens our notions and intuition through a process of trial and error. For Opdeweegh, Dyson's brilliance isn't just his creative vision, it's also his commitment to testing, adjustment, and utilizing data to analyze and solve problems.

Opdeweegh also agrees that achieving progress is often subtly different than reinvention, and it requires a blend of aspirational and logical mindsets.

"Under this model, the creative and analytic approaches work together to make marginal gains with measurable impact by repeating the process time and again," Opdeweegh noted. "I've seen this in practice, and would observe that the most analytical people I've worked with are among the best innovators, while almost all creatives I know are deeply analytical in their approach."

Moreover, Opdeweegh also remarked how Dyson allowed innovation to flourish under an atmosphere of creative tension, where ideas are robustly and competitively challenged, in pursuit of a common goal. For Opdeweegh, he agrees to this proposition after experiencing this firsthand with his teams who have most effectively come up with the most productive ideas when being subject to the same standards.

The relevance for business leaders is that innovation works best when creativity and analytics are integral to, and not isolated from, the day to day realities of the organization.

"Analysis is, therefore, the bedfellow and not the bugaboo of practical creativity," says Opdeweegh. "By measuring and learning, not only do we sort the wheat from the chaff, we also help the good become great - or more often, just that little bit better."

CONTACT:

Website - http://jozef-j-opdeweegh.com

LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/jos-jozef-j-opdeweegh-13986b70/

YouTube - https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC_D7qf0sQsSzQeDFqAYjgLQ

Twitter - https://twitter.com/jos_opdeweegh

SOURCE: Jozef Opdeweegh

View source version on accesswire.com:https://www.accesswire.com/585276/Jozef-Opdeweegh-on-the-Roles-of-Analysis-and-Creativity-in-Business-Innovation
U.S. Defense Secretary Mark Esper and Joint Chiefs Chairman Army Gen. Mark Milley hold a news conference for a limited number of reporters at the Pentagon in Arlington, Virginia, U.S., April 14, 2020. Reuters



U.S. Defense Secretary Mark Esper said Tuesday that he continues to believe South Korea can and should pay more for the stationing of American troops on the peninsula.



Speaking at a Pentagon press briefing, he did not directly address a question about a recent Reuters report that President Donald Trump rejected South Korea's offer to increase its contribution by at least 13 percent from last year.



"I defer to the State Department on that," he said. "They're leading the negotiations."



But he noted that he has spoken with South Korean Defense Minister Jeong Kyeong-doo, and "my view remains that South Korea is a close and trusted ally of ours, but they're a wealthy country."



"They can and should pay more to help for our mutual defense and their specific defense," he said.



The two countries have been in drawn-out negotiations to renew their defense cost-sharing deal, known as the Special Measures Agreement.



The U.S. has demanded as much as US$5 billion from South Korea, or more than five times the $870 million Seoul agreed to pay under the previous SMA, which lapsed at the end of last year.



Citing the absence of a new agreement, U.S. Forces Korea has placed some 4,000 South Korean employees on unpaid leave since the beginning of the month.



Esper said the U.S. "deeply appreciate(s)" the planned shipment of Korean-made COVID-19 test kits to the United States.



A senior U.S. government official told Yonhap News Agency a day earlier that his country is "grateful" to South Korea for its assistance in procuring the test kits and for its support to the American people.



On the coronavirus pandemic, U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen. Mark Milley said it created the risk of instability in countries such as Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria.



"We don't have as good insight into North Korea as we would other countries, but we are convinced that they are challenged as well," he said at the briefing. (Yonhap)


The Irish arms of Oasis and Warehouse are subsidiaries of the UK group and employed around 300 staff here at the start of the current retail lockdown.

The company behind fashion retailers Oasis and Warehouse is close to appointing Deloitte as administrators, a UK insolvency protection process, after a planned sale fell through.

The crisis, reported by Sky News yesterday, is the latest in the retail sector following last week's collapse of Debenhams.

The Irish arms of Oasis and Warehouse are subsidiaries of the UK group and employed around 300 staff here at the start of the current retail lockdown.

Administration will put around 2,300 jobs at risk in the UK.

A sale by Icelandic owner Kaupthing, a bank that took control of the chain following the 2008 financial crisis, had been in the works but has stalled amid the fallout from the Covid-19 pandemic.

The administrators are expected to relaunch efforts to find a buyer as well as engage with landlords.
ANC party leader Musalia Mudavadi has cautioned Kenyans against calling for a total lockdown as a measure to combat the Covid-19 pandemic.

Kenyans who were polled and suggested they favoured a lockdown perhaps dont know what a lockdown means. With the partial lockdown of Nairobi, Mombasa, Kilifi and Kwale counties, I doubt the same Kenyans will vote for it again, he said.

According to Mudavadi, a total lockdown means declaring a state of emergency where police will be overwhelmed by disorder and the army will have to be deployed to help maintain law and order.

Well be practically under martial law with overzealous armed personnel. Basic civil rights will be suspended during that period, he said.

Therefore, Kenyans should not advocate for it at any cost. We must do all we can to prevent the spread of the virus by applying basic hygiene and thus avoid the declaration of a state of emergency.

If we dont keep these simple protection measures, then we are doing injustice to ourselves and creating more chances for the virus spread, which will result in a total lockdown, Mudavadi said.

But I am not saying there might not come a time when we go under total lockdown.

Mudavadi noted that the virus had narrowed the gap between the rich and the poor, as the former cannot fly out for medical treatment.

This should serve as an eye-opener to us as leaders. We need to better our country with all the required equipment for the benefit of our people, he said.

Mudavadi said Kenyans are already going through difficult times and a total lockdown would only make things worse.

The economic meltdown, business closures, joblessness, customer desertion, expensive food, hunger and loss of social networks have led to a stressful existence, he said.

A total lockdown will therefore only aggravate an already bad situation, with dire consequences.
Aviva will let car and home insurance customers struggling financially in the virus crisis to defer premiums for up to three months.

In the UK it is a legal requirement to have at least third party insurance for your car unless you declare it off the road and have a Statutory Off Road Notification certificate.

Many are not using their vehicles now but must pay for cover.

Aviva will let car and home insurance customers defer premiums for up to three months

If Aviva customers want to defer, they or their spouse must have been furloughed and are not yet receiving 80 per cent of pay; be self-employed and unable to work; or have lost their job after March 1, 2020.

They will repay the money through higher monthly instalments in the future. Aviva is also offering NHS workers extra support, as is Admiral.

And Scottish Widows is letting life insurance policyholders defer premiums for up to three months.
A general view of the future site of the Luang Prabang dam is seen on the Mekong River outskirt of Luang Prabang province, Laos, on Feb. 5, 2020. (Panu Wongcha-um/Reuters)

Mekong River Groups Urge China to Show Transparency After Dam Report

BANGKOKGroups working to protect the Mekong River have called for greater transparency and cooperation from China after a report that Chinese dams held back water during a damaging drought in downstream countries last year.

China has disputed the findings of the U.S. government-funded study and said it will do its utmost to guarantee a reasonable discharge of water to the Mekong basin countries of Laos, Thailand, Cambodia, and Vietnam.

The study, by research and consulting company Eyes on Earth Inc., said that according to satellite data 11 Chinese dams held back water at a time when China had higher-than-average levelswhile levels downstream were at their lowest in over 50 years.

General view of Mekong river, Ban Namprai village, Nong Khai province, Thailand, on Oct. 8, 2019. (Panu Wongcha-um/Reuters)

The Mekong River Commission (MRC), an inter-governmental body that works with the governments of Laos, Thailand, Cambodia, and Vietnam in managing the Lower Mekong basin, said the study did not prove that the withholding of water caused the drought.

But its secretariat said it sought more information from China as well as a more formal working relationship.

China, as an MRC dialogue partner, has provided its water level and rainfall data during flood season, from only two of its stations on the upper Mekong, it said in response to Reuters questions. The MRC has attempted to acquire dry season data from China, but no agreement has yet been reached.

General view of Mekong river, Ban Namprai village, Nong Khai province, Thailand, on Oct. 8, 2019. (Panu Wongcha-um/Reuters)

None of the governments in the downstream countries responded to a Reuters request for comment. Water flow on the Mekong is a sensitive topic in relations with China, the regions dominant power.

In Thailand, the hashtag #StopMekongDam was trending on Twitter on April 15 as a result of the new report.

Activists said the study confirmed their suspicions.

We cannot just sit around and wait for China to say when they are releasing the water from their dams; Mekong countries need to have a say on this too, said Niwat Roykaew, an environmental activist in northern Thailand.

A fisherman pulls his net from the Mekong River in northern Thailand and bordering Laos, on May 29, 2013. (Christophe Archambault/AFP/Getty Images)

China has no formal water treaties with the lower Mekong countries and shares only limited information.

In Cambodia, Hok Menghoin of the NGO Forum on Cambodia said the report would at least help downstream governments to press their case in their discussions with China.

Chinas actions must go well beyond periodic releases of water, said Pianporn Deetes, a Thai activist for the International Rivers pressure group.

There needs to be long-term change in dam operations to prioritize the ecosystem services vital to the livelihoods of downstream communities.

Washington, which has been challenging Chinas growing influence in Southeast Asia, has said Beijing essentially controls the Mekong.

By Panu Wongcha-um, Prak Chan, and James Pearson
Hyderabad, April 15 : As and when the lockdown ends, people in Hyderabad will be pleasantly surprised to see newly-laid or re-carpeted roads and new flyovers or significant progress in their construction.

The municipal authorities in the Telangana capital are making most of the coronavirus induced lockdown period to complete the construction of roads and flyovers or repair and re-carpet damaged stretches and lay the water and sewerage pipelines.

Works in various parts of the city are in full swing to make use of lack of traffic. Dozens of workers can be seen working on roads and flyovers, especially in the information technology hubs of HITEC City and Gachibowli and areas like Sheikhpet, Kukatpally, Balanagar, Santoshnagar and Secunderabad.

Immediately after lockdown came into effect, Municipal Administration Minister K.T. Rama Rao sensed an opportunity to speed up and complete the pending road and flyover works including some key components of the prestigious Strategic Road Development Plan (SRDP) which aimed at decongesting the city.

Greater Hyderabad Municipal Corporation (GHMC) along with the other executing agencies swung into action. As the construction labourers, many of them migrants, are staying in temporary sheds provided at different places, the contracting firms were told to use their services while ensuring that all norms of lockdown including social distancing are followed.

The municipal authorities have made good use of nearly 25 days of lockdown period so far to execute works including redesigning and repair in key stretches, considered as bottlenecks in free flow of vehicular movement, especially in and around IT clusters.

A municipal official said their attempts to complete these works before pre-lockdown were hampered by the continuous plying of vehicles and even diversion of traffic at few points was of not much help. "With strict enforcement of lockdown in the city, there are hardly any vehicles plying during day time while the roads are totally deserted during night hours. We feel this is the best time to complete certain works which otherwise are difficult to be executed due to high volume of traffic," the official said.

With the lockdown further extended to May 3, the GHMC is using the machines and manpower round-the-clock to ensure completion of as many works as possible.

Minister Rama Rao, who also holds the portfolios of urban development, industry and information technology, is personally monitoring the progress of the works.

A couple of days ago, he inspected the ongoing works of Balanagar flyover being constructed as a part of the Strategic Road Development Programme (SRDP) and asked the officials to utilise the lockdown period to complete the works in a hassle-free manner.

"We have been utilizing the lockdown period to expedite all roads in Hyderabad," said KTR, as the minister is popularly known.

KTR, who is son of Chief Minister K. Chandrashekhar Rao, also inspected the ongoing road expansion works at Nagarjuna circle at Panjagutta in the heart of the city.

The work was taken up on priority as municipal officials identified it as the key bottleneck in movement of vehicular traffic, especially during peak hours.

KTR has been holding meetings with officials to review the progress of the works taken up on war footing.

As part of Rs 23,000 crore SRDP, the government plans to develop 54 junctions, 111 km elevated corridors/skyways and underpasses. Under the first two phases, works worth Rs 5,335 crore were taken up. The authorities have already executed works including three underpasses and five flyovers at a cost of Rs 2,982 crore in the first phase. The works under the second phase are currently being executed.

Actively involved in the monitoring of works are top officials including Principal Secretary. Urban Development Arvind Kumar, GHMC Commissioner Somesh Kumar and Greater Hyderabad Mayor Bonthu Rammohan.

GHMC is also focusing on works in the old city which comes under Hyderabad Lok Sabha constituency represented by All India Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen (AIMIM) chief Asaduddin Owaisi.

KTR last week held a meeting with Owaisi in the presence of senior officials to review the development works in his constituency.

Arvind Kumar himself inspected ongoing roads and flyover works at Owaisi Junction, Chandrayanagutta, Aramghar and Bahadurpura.

While works in most of the places are progressing in a smooth manner as it did not require authorities to acquire private properties, the work on Amberpet flyover work in Secunderabad Lok Sabha constituency represented by Union Minister of State for Home G. Kishan Reddy triggered a row.

Some residents of Amberpet complained that GHMC officials asked them to vacate their premises by April 30. They have refused to hand over their properties during lockdown. They are also seeking payment of full compensation.

The flyover is to be built by the National Highways as part of the elevated corridor between Amberpet and Ramanthapu, a part of Hyderabad-Warangal highway.

(Mohammed Shafeeq can be contacted at m.shafeeq@ians.in)
GENEVA (AP)  Nations around the world reacted with alarm Wednesday after President Donald Trump announced a halt to the sizable funding the United States sends to the World Health Organization. Health experts warned the move could jeopardize global efforts to stop the coronavirus pandemic.

In Paris, Amazon threatened Wednesday to suspend all activity in France after a French court found it wasnt doing enough to protect its workers.

The online giant also announced plans to appeal Tuesdays emergency ruling, which requires Amazon to stop selling nonessential goods for a month while it works out new worker safety measures.

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South Korean National Election Commission officials wearing masks and face shields, sort out ballots for counting at the parliamentary election at a ballot counting office in Seoul, South Korea, Wednesday, April 15, 2020. South Korean voters wore masks and moved slowly between lines of tape at polling stations on Wednesday to elect lawmakers in the shadows of the spreading coronavirus. (AP Photo/Lee Jin-man)AP

Coronavirus could cause more countries to default on their debt, economist says (CNBC)

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How Macron bungled Frances coronavirus response (Vox)

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Read complete prior coronavirus coverage.
A group of 88 African intellectuals has come together to sign an open letter to African leaders, calling for them to re-think health as an essential public need in light of the Covid-19 crisis.

Among those who penned the initiative were Lionel Zevounou, a Paris Nanterre law professor, political scientist Amy Niang from Wits University, South Africa, and Senegalese development economist Ndongo Samba Sylla, who drummed up the support of like-minded colleagues, including in the Arab-speaking and Lusophone parts of the continent.

In such particular circumstances, it is important that African intellectuals rise to the challenge by speaking their mind and offering a new direction, Sylla tells RFI.

The Africa Centre for Disease Control and Prevention reports that more than 16,000 cases of Covid-19 have been recorded across the continent, with a death toll of 878 and 3,200 recoveries. Those figures will rise.

Part of the impetus came from statements from a number of governments, including France, that their country was at war  a point that they do not agree with. No pandemic has become so globalised, damaging economies, as the entire world seems powerless in Covid-19s path, says Sylla.

Now, we can with utmost clarity see that though international cooperation is desirable, Africa has to rely on itself to feed its populations, make sure they have access to healthcare, decent livelihoods, he says.

Putting African peoples first

The letter points out that while dealing with the Covid-19 crisis is urgent, it should not constitute a mode of governance.

It is a question of seizing this moment of major crisis as an opportunity to review public policies, in particular to ensure that they work in favour of African populations and according to African priorities, the intellectuals write.

In short, it is a question of putting forward the value of each human being.

African governments, seemingly so out of touch with their own people, have applied Western modes of containing the virus, including social distancing and lockdown measures, disregarding the informal sector, or those who must work daily in order to eat and feed their families, says Sylla.

Story continues

You want to lock down all informal sector workers? Great, will you give them food and shelter? No, you cant! You have to act with intelligence and tact and not imitate what more developed countries are doing, as their populations can better afford a total lockdown, says Sylla.

African authorities need to reconnect with local configurations, to get out of sterile imitationto think about our institutions according to our common singularities and what we have. To think inclusive governance, indigenous development, to create value in Africa in order to reduce our systemic dependence.

Africa needs inclusive societies with no one left behind. Thats what the virus is teaching us.

'Africa rising' as others suffer

The letter also tackles the Africa rising narrative of a continent in motionthe new frontier of capitalist expansion and economic growth that was convenient for middle and upper classes, but left those struggling at bottom out of the equation.

Sylla, an author and economist, sees the myth firmly planted in his own country.

Take the case of Senegal: it recorded 6 percent annual GDP growth since 2012. Yet, around 52 percent of rural households have access neither to soap nor water -- and Senegal is in a better situation than many African countries, he says.

The virus is also teaching us that our development model in Africa has not been meaningful until now. This has to change."

Since the letter was published on Monday, it has resonated with many who have written to say express their support.

A chemist from Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) wrote us that our letter resonated with her and what most people in DRC are living, Sylla says. She told us that in North Kivu there is no anaesthetist and no ventilator.

The Congolese chemist and other volunteers are trying to address the profound failings described in the letter on a local level.

We hope that the positive energy aroused by this letter will help mobilise Africans to seize this health crisis as an opportunity for the long-awaited transformation of the continent, he says.
 Flash

Chinese President Xi Jinping said Tuesday that China stands ready to continue exchanging experience in COVID-19 prevention and control with Finland and help the European country tackle such difficulties as the current shortage of medical supplies.

Xi made the remarks in a phone conversation with Finnish President Sauli Niinisto.

On behalf of the Chinese government and people, Xi extended sincere sympathies and firm support to their Finnish counterparts over their fight against the coronavirus disease.

Pointing out that humankind is a community with a shared future that shares weal and woe, Xi said that only with concerted efforts can the international community overcome the current challenge and prevail over the epidemic.

China stands ready to work with other countries to push forward the cause of global public health, he said, adding that China will give priority to restoring and raising the production capacity of medical and anti-epidemic supplies, keep the global industrial and supply chains stable, and contribute to international anti-epidemic cooperation and world economic stability.

Not long ago, China held a video conference on epidemic control with Finland and other European countries, Xi recalled, pledging to offer more help.

He said he believes that under the leadership of Niinisto, the Finnish people will carry forward the "sisu" spirit of perseverance and defeat the epidemic.

Meanwhile, Xi said he hopes for the Finnish side to pay close attention to and guarantee the safety of the Chinese nationals living in the European country, especially Chinese students.

The Chinese president added that he is confident that through the joint fight against the coronavirus, the China-Finland friendship will grow deeper.

After defeating the outbreak, Xi suggested, the two sides should resume personnel exchanges at all levels as soon as possible, and unleash the potential of cooperation in such fields as scientific and technological innovation, information and communications, as well as life sciences, so as to push for continuous progress of their future-oriented new-type cooperative partnership.

For his part, Niinisto said that the Finnish people are currently making strenuous efforts against the severe outbreak raging in their country, and that China's relevant experience is very helpful to them.

He conveyed his gratitude for China's precious support and help in medical and anti-epidemic supplies, and expressed his hope to enhance cooperation with China and overcome the pandemic at an early date.

He said he fully agrees with Xi's vision of building a community with a shared future for mankind, and appreciates China's sound cooperation with the World Health Organization and European countries as well as its push for global public health security cooperation within the framework of the Group of 20 major economies.

China restoring economic development as soon as possible is of crucial significance to the world, said the Finnish president.

Hailing bilateral relations as very good, Niinisto said Finland will continue taking good care of Chinese citizens in Finland.

He added that he hopes to make concerted efforts with his Chinese counterpart to push forward the development of Finland-China relations.
Prince Charles didnt have an easy time finding someone to marry. The prince was slowly approaching his 30th birthday without a bride, which was unusual for a royal. But it turns out his family reportedly had a long list of women they wanted their son to end up with. None of them were Camilla Parker Bowles  and one of them was his second cousin.

Prince Charles and Princess Diana wed in 1981 | Terry Fincher/Princess Diana Archive/Getty Images

Queen Elizabeth reportedly didnt want Prince Charles marrying Camilla

Charles love life hasnt been quite the fairytale that one would expect in the royal family. Charles had always wanted to marry Camilla, but reports suggest that the queen would not come around to the idea of Charles marrying someone with so much baggage. And by baggage, we mean that Camilla had a dating history, which was seen as a strike against her some 40 years ago. (Thankfully, times have changed.) Camilla had been on and off with Andrew Parker Bowles for a while when she first met Charles.

With the royals not loving Camilla for Charles, plus her iffy relationship with Andrew, the couples relationship never got off the ground. Instead, when Charles left to spend some time in the Navy, Camilla married Andrew.

The royals supposedly had a list of eligible suitors for Charles to marry

When Charles returned from the Navy, Camilla was married, and he needed to find a wife; it wasnt a good look that he was almost 30 and still single. According to the British documentary Paxman on the Queens Children, Charles was approached with a list of suitors. However, he seemingly disliked every option on the list.

According to Charles former aide Broderick Munro-Wilson, Charles reportedly asked, Shall I go gay? when he saw the list and realized he didnt want to marry any of the women. Munro-Wilson said that he was not sure I can get terribly excited about the list. Though the names of the women on the list were never fully revealed, Caroline of Monaco was rumored to be an option, along with Charles second cousin.

Charles proposed to his second cousin, but she turned him down

There was one woman, who, surprisingly, Charles was not opposed to marrying. And it happened to be Charles second cousin, Lady Amanda Knatchbull. Of course, most people would steer clear of marrying a second cousin these days, but in 1970s royal culture, it was still socially acceptable. Charles and Amanda reportedly spent some time away together, but when he asked if shed marry him, she turned him down. Charles reportedly then asked another woman for her hand in marriage, and he was turned down once more. Finally, he met Diana and proposed after only 12 dates.

Charles might be the reason why marriage rules no longer exist

Charles road to finding love started and ended with Camilla, but there was so much in between  all because Camilla wasnt seen as a good enough potential wife. But Charles might be the sole reason why marriage expectations no longer exist for royals. Meghan Markle is a commoner who had been divorced prior to meeting Prince Harry, but she was still welcomed into the family with open arms.

Though Charles and Camilla eventually found their way, it was a long road. But ultimately, Charles proves why its important to let people be with those they are truly in love with.
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Bovet has never been accused of being minimalist. Known for producing complicated, highly decorated watches, the specialized watchmakers latest release, the Virtuoso VII Retrograde Perpetual Calendar, doubles down on that reputation.

For starters, the elaborate timepiece, which comes in the brands patented Amadeo case, converts from a reversible wristwatch (complete with two faces) to a pocket watch, pendant watch and desk clockno tools required. Not only does the watch display the date, day of the week, month and leap year cycle, its two faces each display hours, minutes, and seconds.

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The faces, however, differ substantially. The first face contains a central hour and minute display, while the day and month indicators appear along the periphery of the circular, open-worked dial. The retrograde calendar hand appears beneath the central time display.

The second face, on the other hand, places all of its emphasis on the circular Cotes de Geneve-finished movement, which is visible behind the off-centered hour and minutes dial at 12 oclock.

Powered by a single barrel, hand-wound movement with five days of power reserve, this edition of the Virtuoso VII looks every bit as regal as its name suggests. Encased in either 18-karat white gold or 18-karat red gold, the model offers a choice of three dial colors: red or green guilloche, or a blue circular brushed pattern.

For lovers of Swiss watch history, its worth noting that Bovet is fast approaching its bicentennial. The brand, which traces its roots to the Swiss village of Fleurier, was founded in 1822, four years after the watchmaker Edouard Bovet boarded an East India Company ship bound for China, where he began to cultivate a thriving trade with Guangzhou.

Story continues

Chinese buyers grew so enamored of Bovets 19th-century pocket watches that the name Bovet entered the Cantonese lexicon as a generic term for a watch. Reborn in 2001 under the stewardship of Pascal Raffy, the brand markets wristwatches known for their hand-painted enamel dials and pocket watch-like construction, with crowns distinctly positioned at 12 oclock, a throwback to the models beloved by the Chinese elite nearly 200 years ago.

The Virtuoso VII Retrograde Perpetual Calendar in 18-karat white gold retails for 82,000 Swiss francs, or about $83,770; the 18-karat red gold version retails for 79,000 Swiss francs, or about $80,700.

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The U.S. agency that enforces workplace safety laws has said it will prioritize work site inspections of healthcare facilities over other essential businesses that remain open during the coronavirus outbreak.

The Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) said in guidance issued on Monday that to conserve resources, it would focus on inspecting hospitals, nursing homes, laboratories, and other high-risk settings that are the subject of complaints by workers.

As for other businesses, OSHA directed inspectors to send letters to employers requesting they conduct their own investigations of worker complaints and report the results to the agency.

OSHA can fine employers for violating workplace safety standards, but only after it conducts inspections and investigations.

A spokeswoman for OSHA did not immediately have comment.

The latest guidance comes as employees of companies like Walmart, McDonalds Corp., and Amazon have engaged in strikes and protests calling for hazard pay, protective equipment and other measures to prevent the spread of the coronavirus.

The companies have said they have taken various steps to protect employees, such as providing paid leave, adding space between workstations and cleaning work sites more frequently.

OSHA has resisted calls by worker advocates and some Democrats in Congress to adopt emergency rules requiring employers to implement specific safety measures, such as social distancing.

David Michaels, who was OSHAs administrator under then-President Barack Obama, said on Tuesday that the agency should require employers to follow guidelines issued by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and other authorities.

If the Department of Labor leadership thinks that asking politely will result in major changes in workplace conditions, they havent been watching the mounting number of disease cases in workplaces from farms to meatpacking plants to grocery stores, said Michaels, an epidemiologist and professor at George Washington University in Washington.

In a statement issued on Monday, OSHAs deputy assistant secretary, Loren Sweatt, said the agency has for months been informing employers of their legal duties and reminding them that retaliation against workers who report hazardous conditions is illegal.

Where we need to, OSHA will take enforcement action to make sure Americas workers are protected, Sweatt said.

(Reporting by Daniel Wiessner in Albany, New York Editing by Noeleen Walder and Jonathan Oatis)

Topics COVID-19 Workers' Compensation Medical Professional Liability
The Cath Lab during COVID

Interventional cardiologists should prioritize the conservation of medical resources, minimization of potential COVID-19 exposure and reallocation of resources, according to a paper published on April 9 in the Journal of Invasive Cardiology.

In the article, Le Bonheur Children's Hospital and the University of Tennessee Health Science Center Interventional Cardiologist Shyam Sathanandam, MD, suggests that catheterization laboratories should develop strategies for patient care by preserving and repurposing resources.

Sathanandam published the work after issuing a web-based survey to 56 unique U.S. centers, with the objective of describing current practice patterns and recommending potential resource allocation for congenital cardiac catheterization during the COVID-19 pandemic.

"We are faced with a fundamental question," said Sathanandam, who serves as the medical director of Le Bonheur Children's Interventional Cardiac Imaging and Interventional Catheterization Laboratory. "How can we, as pediatric and congenital interventional cardiologists, continue to care for patients who require intervention, while also being good stewards of limited medical resources and maintain an appropriate level of preparedness when we are uncertain about how this pandemic will affect our discipline?"

Medical Resource Utilization and Case Selection

The majority of survey respondents felt they had sufficient PPE to care for COVID-19 positive patients or PUIs. However, limited access to PPE and ventilators necessitates postponing elective catheterization cases to assist with the preservation of medical resources. The paper recommends using a multi-disciplinary clinical leadership team to triage case priority and timing - at present, only one-half of the reporting U.S. programs employed this strategy to review case selection.

While responding centers have canceled elective procedures with relative uniformity, centers in counties with 2,000 or more COVID-19 cases were more likely to delay certain cases including PDA closures in premature infants, pre-Glenn catheterization and coarctation stenting.

Minimizing Exposure

The responses suggest that many programs may not be adequately prepared for a surge of COVID-19 positive patients. Centers located in areas with higher number of COVID-19 cases have been more involved in a simulation of donning and doffing PPE equipment than low-prevalence centers (46.7% vs. 10.3%). Only 10.8% had converted a Cath lab to a negative pressure room for potential COVID-19 positive patient or PUI. The majority (65%) were only testing for COVID-19 prior to cardiac catheterization if the patient was symptomatic. Only 15% tested all patients prior to aerosol-generating procedures in the Cath lab.

However, responding centers were employing various strategies to reduce staff exposure to COVID-19.

31% did not allow fellow participation in cardiac catheterization cases.

76% minimized staff exposure through changes to the work and call schedule.

10.8% reassigned staff to provide clinical services outside the typical scope of practice.

41.7% had discussed or planned reassignment.

In addition, many facilities are minimizing staff presence in the Cath lab before and after airway manipulation in order to reduce potential exposure.

Resource Reallocation and Potential Repurposing

The primary way responding centers are conserving resources is by decreasing elective cases. "For subspecialists like pediatric interventional cardiologists, this raises the question of how best to utilize our clinical skills if the typical volume of patients with congenital heart is reduced," said Sathanandam.

This decision will vary by pediatric institution and may depend on geographic proximity to and relationship with adult centers. Pediatric interventional cardiologists will likely be deployed for services outside of the Cath lab depending on where resources are strained whether inpatient services, ICUs, emergency departments or vascular access teams.

###

View the paper here: https:/ / www. invasivecardiology. com/ articles/ resource-allocation-and-decision-making-pediatric-and-congenital-cardiac-catheterization-during-novel-coronavirus-sars-cov-2-covid-19-pandemic-us-multi-institutional-perspective

About Le Bonheur Children's Hospital

Le Bonheur Children's Hospital in Memphis, Tenn., treats children each year through community programs, regional clinics and a 255 bed state-of-the-art hospital. Le Bonheur serves as a primary teaching affiliate for the University Tennessee Health Science Center and trains more than 350 pediatricians and specialists each year. Nationally recognized, Le Bonheur is ranked by U.S. News & World Report as a Best Children's Hospital. For more information, please call (901) 287-6030 or visit lebonheur.org. Connect with us at facebook.com/lebonheurchildrens, twitter.com/lebonheurchild or on Instagram at lebonheurchildrens.

About The University of Tennessee Health Science Center

As Tennessee's only public, statewide, academic health system, the mission of the University of Tennessee Health Science Center is to bring the benefits of the health sciences to the achievement and maintenance of human health through education, research, clinical care, and public service, with a focus on the citizens of Tennessee and the region. The main campus in Memphis includes six colleges: Dentistry, Graduate Health Sciences, Health Professions, Medicine, Nursing and Pharmacy. UTHSC also educates and trains medicine, pharmacy, and/or health professions students, as well as medical residents and fellows, at major sites in Knoxville, Chattanooga and Nashville. For more information, visit http://www. uthsc. edu . Find us on Facebook: facebook.com/uthsc, on Twitter: twitter.com/uthsc and on Instagram: instagram.com/uthsc.

This story has been published on: 2020-04-15. To contact the author, please use the contact details within the article.
The Ghana Health Service has dispelled rumours that some people have tested positive for the novel coronavirus in Bono, Bono East and Ahafo regions.

The Service has therefore asked the public to discard that information.

At a Media Briefing in Sunyani yesterday, the Bono Regional Directorate of the Ghana Health Service was emphatic not a single positive case of the disease has so far been recorded in any of the three regions as the results of 24 out of 29 suspected cases have all proven negative while the remaining five are still being tested at KCCR, Kumasi.

Of all the samples that we have tested, we have received results of 24 of them and all of them are negative. we are yet to receive the results of the remaining five. Ill want to say categorically that Bono region, as well as Ahafo and Bono East regions have recorded no positive case of COVID-19. Dr. John Ekow Otto, the Deputy Bono Regional Director of Public Health stated.

Dr. Otto said the Ghana Health Service in collaboration with the Ghana Immigration Service and other relevant stakeholders have stepped up surveillance along border towns and other parts of the region and also following up on all alerts and rumours as they pop up.

We are collaborating with the Immigration Services to ensure that all persons who come into the country through unapproved routes and also persons who came into the country since 9th March through our airports are followed up to ensure that none of them has any ill-health.

We have our contact tracers who are in all our sub-districts and are helping with investigations on alerts and contacts that we have received so far, he noted.

Dr. Otto reminded the public to observe the rules or protocols that we have spelt out to help us all protect ourselves from being infected with COVID-19. We are encouraging everybody to as much as possible, stay at home if you dont have any business doing outside. Were also encouraging you to continuously use soap to wash your hands under running water.

The Bono Regional Director of Health Services, Dr. Kofi Issah disclosed that there are currently 9,000 sputum collection containers available for Bono, Bono East and Ahafo regions with 4,000 more on the way coming, which can aid the testing of any suspected case in these regions.

Dr. Kofi Issah, stressed the need for the public to observe social distancing and the other protocols with seriousness to avoid the spread of the virus.

He also observed that the public response to the protocols seems to be going down as some people, in their bid to be innovative have mixed soap with water and asked people to wash their hands with it, saying, that is very wrong because the hands have to rinse properly.
NEW YORK, April 14, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- WeissLaw LLP is investigating possible breaches of fiduciary duty and other violations of law by the board of directors of FGL Holdings, Inc. ("FG" or the "Company") (NYSE: FG) in connection with the proposed acquisition of the Company by Fidelity National Financial, Inc. ("FNF") (NYSE: FNF). Under the terms of the acquisition agreement, FG shareholders can elect to receive $12.50 in cash or 0.2558 shares of FNF common stock for each FG share they own.

If you own FG shares and wish to discuss this investigation or have any questions concerning this notice or your rights or interests, visit our website:

http://www.weisslawllp.com/fgl-holdings-inc/

Or please contact:

Joshua Rubin, Esq.

WeissLaw LLP

1500 Broadway, 16th Floor

New York, NY 10036

(212) 682-3025

(888) 593-4771

[email protected]

WeissLaw is investigating whether FG's board acted to maximize shareholder value prior to entering into the acquisition agreement. Notably, the acquisition will enhance FNF's financial strength and its ability to access deployable capital. FNF also anticipates that the transaction will accelerate its entry into banking channels.

Moreover, at closing, FG shareholders will own a mere 7% of all outstanding FNF common stock.

Finally, both FNF and FG share common board members. This calls into doubt the independence of the Company's board and whether the negotiation with respect to this transaction was truly arm's length.

Given these facts, WeissLaw is concerned whether the proposed acquisition undervalues the Company, whether FG's board was truly independent and acting in the best interests of the Company's stockholders, and whether all material information related to the proposed acquisition has been fully and fairly disclosed.

WeissLaw LLP has litigated hundreds of stockholder class and derivative actions for violations of corporate and fiduciary duties. We have recovered over a billion dollars for defrauded clients and obtained important corporate governance relief in many of these cases. If you have information or would like legal advice concerning possible corporate wrongdoing (including insider trading, waste of corporate assets, accounting fraud, or materially misleading information), consumer fraud (including false advertising, defective products, or other deceptive business practices), or anti-trust violations, please email us at [email protected]

SOURCE WeissLaw LLP

Related Links

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In this Jan. 21, 2020, photo, travelers wearing face masks walk with their luggage at Hankou Railway Station in Wuhan in southern China's Hubei province. AP




By Eze Nwabueze

A traditional medical expert and Chairman of National Association of Nigerian Traditional Medicine Practitioners (NANTEMP), Anambra State Chapter, Dr. Cyril Akudigwe has dismissed the fears that the deadly corona virus pandemic does not have any known curative medicine yet, saying that the virus is curable with herbal remedies.

He noted that as a herbalist of international repute, he was not in a position to confirm if orthodox medicine can cure the virus or not but can only confirm that with natural roots and herbs, the virus could easily be flushed out of a patient because the virus has a poisonous content.

Speaking to newsmen at Infection Disease Control Division of his herbal hospital located at Nkpor Junction, near Onitsha, Anambra state, Akudigwe who is the Director-General of Jeso-Du-Eme-Akapo-Ijo-Na-Igala Herbal Medicine Company Limited, insisted that since the virus has a poisonous content, herbal medicine is the major solution to it, as according to him, poison is not compatible with orthodox or western medicine.

According to him, we have an information that the symtoms of the disease are malaria, body pains, dry throat, cough and catarrh and we know that these ailments can be cured with both herbal and orthodox medicines, but since this particular virus has connection with poison, it has gone beyond orthodox medicine, leaving only herbs and roots as the only alternative curation method.

Therefore, let the government refer the infected patients to genuine herbalists for cure, particularly those whose cases have gone chronic, after being tested and confirmed positive to the virus, adding, government should also procure the testing equipment to ascertain peoples status, just like himan and domestic dogs are being tested in America and Europe.

He contended that the current lockdown in the country is not necessary, adding that what is necessary at the moment is to provide the test kits, run the tests on everybody and then refer those who tested positive to the appropriate quarters and allow others who tested negative to go about their normal businesses.

On the arrival of Chinese doctors to Nigeria, Dr. Akudigwe frowned at the invitation of the doctors by the federal government, adding that if the doctors could not cure those who died in their own country and other western countries like Europe, America and Asia, where a total death toll had already hit over 3,000 and about 82,000 infested, their coming to Nigeria is more or less not useful to Nigerians.
Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, April 15)  A government think tank is recommending the gradual relaxation of quarantine restrictions after the Luzon-wide enhanced community quarantine to restart economic activity, coupled with public health measures to detect and contain COVID-19.

In a study published early this month, the Philippine Institute for Development Studies recommended a gradual and calibrated transition  that combines relaxation of economic restriction while controlling the spread of the virus.

This includes the resumption of economic activity wherever it is safe and possible to allow the production of goods and services to be consumed in other areas and the partial operation of public transportation, subject to strict social distancing guidelines.

The think tank said the government should couple with efforts to increase the capacity to detect and isolate COVID-19 patients and identify their close contacts, protect high-risk groups, continue imposing physical distancing measures, and treat as many patients as possible.

It added that the government should continue scaling up testing for COVID-19 while rapidly increasing capabilities for contact tracing.

It also said that the government should decongest health facilities by creating more isolation and quarantine sites elsewhere for patients with mild symptoms or those suspected of infection.

In its modelling, the think tank found that if the government is able to isolate around 70 percent of patients who show COVID-19 symptoms and ramps up testing, the think tank predicts that the disease would only peak in May 2021 with 904,000 cases, even if the Luzon-wide enhanced community quarantine is partially lifted.

However, it may peak as early as August of this year with 18.9 million cases if no actions are taken to contain the virus, which may deal a bigger blow to the economy.

In a no-intervention scenario  the Philippines may lose about P2 trillion in foregone gross value added as a result of weaker household demand as more workers are unemployed for extended periods of time, the think tank warned.

But still, at the best case, the think tank said the COVID-19 crisis can deal a 276.3-billion loss to the economy.

The Inter-Agency Task Force for the Management of Emerging Infectious Diseases said Tuesday it was discussing what measures it will take and implement after April 30, the expected end-date of the enhanced community quarantine over Luzon.

Cabinet Secretary Karlo Nograles, the task forces spokesperson, said they will identify what industries could be allowed to operate or who among the labor force could get back to work.

The private sector has been calling for a "modified" quarantine where barangays or areas with limited infections can be allowed to return to work, rather than the current stringent lockdown.

That suggestion has been taken up with President Rodrigo Duterte, Philippine Chamber of Commerce and Industry president emeritus George Barcelon said.

As of March 15, a total of 5,453 people have contracted COVID-19 in the Philippines. Of them, 353 have died and 349 have recovered.
All seven members of Oregons congressional delegation are calling on Gov. Kate Brown to ensure the state waives the one-week waiting period before laid-off workers are eligible for payments for unemployment benefits.

The coronavirus rescue package Congress passed last week rescinded penalties for states that make laid-off workers immediately eligible for benefits, instead of waiting for a week. Many states quickly implemented a waiver to speed payments to workers during the coronavirus outbreak.

Oregon, though, said it would not waive the waiting period because its antiquated computer systems would require thousands of hours of reprogramming. The state said reprogramming the technology would delay the arrival of regular payments to newly laid-off workers.

One in 8 Oregonians have lost their jobs in the past few weeks as the coronavirus outbreak shut down the state, nearly 270,000 workers in aggregate. On Wednesday, The Oregonian/OregonLive reported that the decision to leave the waiting period in place could cost those laid-off workers well over $100 million in aggregate.

We urge you to work with the Oregon Employment Department to figure out a way to make sure that Oregonians receive unemployment compensation for every week of unemployment, Oregons six Democratic members of Congress wrote in a letter to the Democratic governor Tuesday.

The loss of a weeks worth of income during this time can cause extreme hardship, Rep. Greg Walden, R-Hood River, said in a separate statement Wednesday.

The governors office confirmed receipt of the Democrats letter but said she will not reply Wednesday. Browns office said Tuesday evening that the governor would like to see the waiting period waived, if the employment deployment department can engineer the change.

The employment department did not respond to a request for comment Wednesday on the congressional delegations letter. Late Tuesday, the department said it would consider waiving the waiting week but listed the change as its lowest priority.

The employment department has acknowledged that its outdated computer systems frequently produce errors and incorrectly deny claims for people who are eligible. And the department has been struggling to update its 1990s-era technology to process claims for employees newly eligible for payments, including gig workers and the self-employed.

Oregon received $86 million to pay for a new computer system in 2009 as part of the federal response to the last recession but the state delayed the overhaul for years, The Oregonian/OregonLive found.

The department said this month that waiving the waiting week could delay the payment of regular claims. Rep. Earl Blumenauer, D-Portland, said in an interview Wednesday that he is sympathetic to the departments plight.

Anybody, in this circumstance, would be overwhelmed. You get more applications in a day than you got in a previous year on a system you knew was cranky, Blumenauer said.

However, the congressman said the employment department should be clear that it intends to waive the waiting week eventually, and that the waiver will apply to workers who have already filed claims.

We have been pushing the department to deal with making it retroactive, Blumenauer said. Maybe you cant accelerate it without disrupting checks we want to get out the door to the majority of people. But make it clear that claims will be honored, they will be made up.

The congressman said his staff has spoken directly to the employment departments managers about the waiting week and believes they will ultimately implement a waiver.

I think the employment department understands we cant leave 100, 200 million dollars on the table, Blumenauer said.

Update: This article has been updated with Rep. Waldens statement.

Disclosure: On Wednesday, The Oregonian Media Group announced its journalists will be subject to a one-week furlough this year. Reporters may be eligible for jobless benefits during that period if the waiting week is waived.

-- Oregonian reporter Hillary Borrud contributed to this report.

-- Mike Rogoway | mrogoway@oregonian.com | twitter: @rogoway |

Subscribe to Oregonian/OregonLive newsletters and podcasts for the latest news and top stories.
In this screen grab from a video provided by Vietnamese national television VTV, President Moon Jae-in speaks to ASEAN Plus Three leaders during a virtual summit on Tuesday, April 14, 2020. VTV via AP



The leaders of South Korea, China, Japan and ASEAN member states reaffirmed their commitment to concerted efforts to overcome the coronavirus crisis during their special video summit on Tuesday.



"I find it very meaningful that we have once again reaffirmed our strong solidarity for collective response," President Moon Jae-in of South Korea said, wrapping up the ASEAN Plus Three (APT) Special Summit on COVID-19 Response that lasted more than two hours.



Participants included Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and Chinese Premier Li Keqiang.



They discussed "plenty of useful ideas," such as the "establishment of an 'ASEAN+3 Reserve of Essential Medical Supplies' and the 'COVID-19 ASEAN Response Fund,'" according to the president. He said the proposals are included in the joint statement. Vietnam, which chaired the session, has not made the document public yet.



"I hope that these cooperative initiatives will lead to tangible outcomes," Moon said, adding it's important to discuss follow-up measures via ministerial or working-level discussions.



During the meeting, Moon also pledged all possible support for members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) and other countries in connection with the handling of the coronavirus crisis.



He said it's essential to offer quarantine and medical supplies in a timely manner to those in urgent need,



"Korea will secure additional funding for humanitarian assistance and respond to the fullest extent possible to any calls for help from other countries, including ASEAN," Moon said during the session. It was hosted by Vietnam, this year's chair of ASEAN meetings.



He added, "We are also discussing ways to utilize



He voiced hope that the region will overcome the virus crisis at an early date by mobilizing all available resources.



Moon cited trust funds at the Asian Development Bank (ADB) and separate funding by the APT members.



Regarding the economic fallout of the pandemic, he proposed maintaining the "essential flow" of trade, investment and people-to-people exchanges.



He said the APT group can play a role as a catalyst to put global supply chains back on track.



"I hope that global supply chains will be made operational to the maximum extent beginning with ASEAN Plus Three," he stated, referring to the World Trade Organization's forecast that global trade will shrink by as much as 32 percent due to COVID-19.



The U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization also warned of a potential food crisis in vulnerable regions.



Moon suggested that APT countries explore ways to allow the cross-border travel of essential figures such as business leaders, medical professionals and humanitarian workers to an extent that does not undermine each country's quarantine efforts.



In late March, Moon attended a similar virtual summit of the Group of 20 major economies on coping with the virus, which was arranged on his own proposal.



He had an annual in-person summit with the leaders of two other Northeast Asian powers and the 10 ASEAN member states in Bangkok in November last year. (Yonhap)


Vann-Orsdel said that, thanks to the overwhelming support toward the program, they have kept all their salaried employees on payroll and will be able to do so for at least four more weeks. They were also able to bring back a few hourly employees, because of the curbside order demands.

Were doing all the things that everyone else is to survive, but to have a little bit of revenue coming in really goes a long way, Vann-Orsdel said, and I think it just showed how important each theater is to its community. As for opening their doors, he added that they are already looking at options and ways to provide space for social distancing as well as a safe and clean environment in their theaters.

With many upcoming releases having been moved to later in the year or even to 2021, Vann-Orsdel added that Fridley Theaters is also hoping to re-release classic and kids movies to bring people in again, similar to the Summer Movie Programs that the theater chain is known for. While admitting how tough the situation was, with how many of their hourly employees have had to file for unemployment, Vann-Orsdel is staying positive and looking ahead.
We also know its a particularly hard time for high school seniors, so we are providing supplemental support service to help students with their studies now, and ease their transition into college when campuses reopen.

Vaughn College of Aeronautics and Technology was in a prime position to move all of its courses online in March in an expedited manner having experience with distance learning for its degree programs. Upon hearing of the severity of the outbreak and the Governors orders, the College ramped up its efforts to train all faculty on its online teaching platform, D2L, and Zoom technology to offer synchronous and asynchronous learning. Vaughns staff was also trained on the Zoom platform to provide support to current, prospective and the New York City Department of Education high school students requiring assistance.

We are working very hard to support all those within the Vaughn community and New York City area, said Dr. Sharon B. DeVivo, president of Vaughn College. Queens, where Vaughn is located, and the entire New York metro area have been particularly hard hit and we recognize the difficulty for students and their families as they try to continue their education from home. We also know its a particularly hard time for high school seniors, so we are providing supplemental support service to help students with their studies now, and ease their transition into college when campuses reopen.

In order to provide academic support during this challenging time, Vaughn College is offering the following online services to high school students through the office of admissions, academic success center, and Vaughns pre-college enrichment programs designed for middle and high school students who want to get a head start on preparing for their college education.



Free tutoring with Vaughns regularly scheduled tutors

A free, three-credit Freshman Year Initiative summer course for students who register, designed to prepare them to be college-ready, through an online format. This course may be transferable.

Vaughns Science and Technology Entry Program (STEP) Saturday Academy has moved to an online format to support its participants

A professional weekday tutor in flight is available online for STEP students

An online format for the federally-funded Upward Bound Saturday Academy pre-college enrichment program

The purchase of grant-supported laptops for instructors and students to help with the adjustment to the online environment

Extra weekday online tutoring through Upward Bound to fill the gaps in students academics caused by educational disruption

Application fees will be waived for new applications

Unofficial documents will now be considered for admissions decisions

For those who wish to register prior to June, the tuition deposit will be waived until June 1

Vaughn typically requires all bachelor of science applicants to submit SAT or ACT test scores. In lieu of those scores, applicants will take an assessment test administered by Vaughn to determine their program acceptance and course placement.

For more information on any of these programs visit Vaughn.edu/admissions or Vaughn.edu/coronavirus.

VAUGHN COLLEGE: Founded in 1932, Vaughn College is a private, nonprofit four-year college that enrolls more than 1,600 students in masters, bachelors and associate degree programs in engineering, technology, management and aviation on its main campus in New York City and online. The student-faculty ratio of 15 to 1 ensures a highly personalized learning environment. Ninety-nine percent of Vaughn College graduates, eighty three percent in their field of study, are placed in professional positions or choose to continue their education within one year of graduation. They work in 20 countries and all 50 states. The institution serves many first-generation college students and is recognized by the US Department of Education as a Hispanic-Serving Institution.
KLAMATH FALLS  An Oregon State Police trooper who was shot and injured Friday in an incident in southern Oregon is recovering and doing well, authorities said.

Trooper Kameron Gordon was injured in an incident that began with a report of an intoxicated man trying to take his children in Klamath Falls, police said.

Klamath County Sheriffs Office deputies responded to a home but the man had reportedly left with a child and a weapon, The Herald and News reported. The mans vehicle was observed by a trooper a short time later and a pursuit began, police said.

The chase ended when deputies deployed a spike strip on U.S. 97, the vehicle was brought to a stop and the driver fired multiple times at the officers, according to police.

Law enforcement returned fire, police said. The man was pronounced dead at the scene. The man's name hasn't been released. The child wasn't hurt, police said.

The involved officers have been placed on administrative leave pending further investigation.

 The Associated Press
Chinese Australians are being assaulted, robbed, spat on, refused service and verbally abused by some Queenslanders amid the COVID-19 pandemic.

Police have laid 22 charges for racially motivated offences following 16 complaints to police.

Wilful damage, public nuisance, robberies, assaults, verbal abuse and graffiti with abusive language are among the offences that have been committed.

'These are racially motivated offences,' Police Commissioner Katarina Carroll said.

Video footage showed a woman scream at a Telstra floor manager inside the store at Miranda, in Sydney's south

Victims of racist attacks are not always coming forward to report what has happened to them she said, adding they should do so.

Commissioner Carroll and Police Minister Mark Ryan have demanded an end to the offensive behaviour.

Some of those attacks have come from far-right political extremists, Multicultural Affairs Minister Stirling Hinchliffe said.

'There are some very extreme, extreme right-wing activists who are using this current situation to attack members of our community,' he said.

'It is completely unacceptable.'

Incidents of racism against Chinese Australians had worsened, Michael Ma, secretary-general of Queensland Chinese United Council said.

Mr Ma attributed some of that behaviour to the way COVID-19 has been presented by officials around the world.

'Naming a virus after a race or a nation is unhelpful and unwise because it gives rise to stigmatisation and also encourages people who have biases to exercise their prejudice,' he said.

'Perhaps some of the comments made by some of our public personnel has not helped, not necessarily from this country, but from other countries.'

Racism against Chinese Australians caught the attention of Prime Minister Scott Morrison, who this week said the behaviour was just wrong.

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 was the Chinese Australian community that actually protected Australia so early on in this virus outbreak around the world,' he told SBS on Tuesday.

'Sure the virus started in Wuhan, in China, that's what happened, that's just a fact.

'But that doesn't mean that this was, it has any nationalistic, or or any other sort of characteristics to it.

'That's just where it started.'

There have been a number of racist attacks related to coronavirus against Asians in Australia.

An irate woman screamed racist abuse at Telstra workers and told them to 'go back to China' after they asked her questions to ensure coronavirus safety.

Video footage showed the shopper scream at the floor manager inside the store at Miranda, in Sydney's south, at about 11am on April 9.

Customers who enter Telstra stores are required to apply hand sanister and answer a series of questions, including whether they have recently been overseas or have flu-like symptoms.

The woman - who declared herself 'Queen of Australia' - told the worker he would 'be deported' during her bizarre rant.

The argument broke out in the streets of Marrickville, in Sydney's inner west with a woman in grey (pictured) racially abusing two sisters

In Sydney's Inner West, a teenage girl was charged after she allegedly spat at and racially abused two women.

Shocking footage obtained by Daily Mail Australia in March and shot in Marrickville showed two women copping a torrent of racist abuse before one of them was spat at.

Sophie Do, 23, and her sister Rosa, 19, were allegedly called 'Asian dogs' and a 'dumb wh***' as they crossed the street.

In a reference to the coronavirus outbreak and its origin in a food market in the Chinese city of Wuhan, the siblings were told they 'brought corona here'.
A 32-year-old woman was killed in police firing on Wednesday when they were trying to control a fight among volunteers of two welfare organisations distributing aid to coronavirus-affected people in a slum in Karachi.

Four police officials have been arrested for resorting to aerial firing in Karachi's low-lying Basti area, said Station House Officer (SHO) Shakir Hussain.

He said the ration was being distributed without the district administration being informed.

The SHO said proper arrangements were not made for the aid to be distributed and in the confusion a scuffle broke out between the volunteers of the welfare groups.

A police team arrived at the spot to control the situation and four officials resorted to aerial firing.

One of the bullets hit Nafesa who was standing near the window of her home.

According to the police, Nafesa sustained a head wound and was taken to a private hospital where she was declared dead.

The coronavirus lockdown has caused unprecedented job loss for daily wagers in Pakistan. Many welfare organisations and philanthropists have been distributing ration and in many cases skirmishes have broken out due to severe rush.

Sindh province has so far recorded 1,668 positive coronavirus cases with 42 deaths.

On Wednesday, six deaths were reported in the province, most from capital Karachi where areas in 11 Union Councils have been declared as coronavirus hotspots. The authorities have been sealed off these locations.

The Pakistan government on Tuesday announced the lockdown would be extended for another two weeks with some relaxations.

Prime Minister Imran Khan has reiterated the need for social distancing to tackle the coronavirus pandemic, at the same time he has called for the protecting of the poor with supply of necessities.

The coronavirus, which originated in Pakistan's Wuhan city, has claimed 107 lives and infected nearly 6,000 in Pakistan so far.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Last month, in the middle of the COVID-19 global pandemic which is causing one of the greatest economic recessions (potentially depression) our nation has ever seen, President Trumps Secretary of the Interior sent a letter to the Mashpee Wampanoag nation in Massachusetts informing them that their reservation was to be disestablished.

The Mashpee are a federally-recognized tribe, and their reservation lands had been approved in 2015 during the Obama Administration. The timing of this order is akin to giving someone an eviction notice while their neighborhood is being ripped apart by a tornado.

It was an outrage by the Trump Administration and one which many people decried, including the Democratic front-runner Joe Biden, who wrote the following in a statement posted on Medium

This past weekend, in the midst of a pandemic, the Trump Administration chose to expend effort and resources to attempt to remove land that the Obama-Biden Administration put into trust for the Mashpee Wampanoag Tribe and disestablish the Tribes reservation  before the Tribe had exhausted its ability to appeal in the courts. This is unacceptable and betrays an incredible disrespect for Mashpee rights.

On the surface, Vice-President Bidens statement appears to be about right versus wrong (along party lines of course). Mean old Republican President Donald Trump is taking reservation lands away from the poor Native tribe. A reservation that the kind-hearted Democrats, led by Joe Biden, benevolently established for them. However, this statement does not acknowledge the unjust history and policies regarding reservations, which are lands held in trust by the federal government on behalf of Native tribes. A fuller understanding of that injustice can be seen if you read carefully the next part of Joe Bidens statement.

One of the most important roles the federal government plays in rebuilding the nation-to-nation relationship is taking land into trust on behalf of tribes. It is critical for tribal sovereignty and self-determination.

Do you see the problem? If not, please read those two sentences again. But this time replace the word tribes with the name of one of our allies such as Canada, Britain, France or Germany.

One of the most important roles the federal government plays in rebuilding the nation-to-nation relationship is taking land into trust on behalf of Britain. It is critical for British sovereignty and self-determination.

Do you see the problem with such a lopsided understanding of a nation to nation relationship? If still no, try reading the sentences again, this time with the subject and object reversed.

One of the most important roles the tribes play in rebuilding the nation-to-nation relationship is taking land into trust on behalf of the United States Federal Government. It is critical for US sovereignty and self-determination.

Dehumanization is the problem. In an 1823 Supreme Court opinion (Johnson v. MIntosh) written by Supreme Court Chief Justice John Marshall, land titles are based on discovery. He justified this by writing that the tribes of Indians inhabiting this country were fierce savages and to leave them in possession of their country was to leave the country a wilderness. Later, the Doctrine of Discovery is specifically referenced by SCOTUS and used to determine that even though Native tribes were here first, but because we are savages, we are mere occupants of the land while white European/Americans are the discoverers of the land and therefore hold the true title.

It is especially at the level of the Supreme Court that the two major political parties agree the most. In a SCOTUS opinion written in 2005 by Ruth Bader Ginsburg (City of Sherrill v. the Oneida Indian Nation of N.Y.), the Doctrine of Discovery is referenced in the first footnote. Justice Ginsberg then referenced the same savage/wilderness argument used by Chief Justice John Marshall when she wrote the Oneidas sought to regain ancient sovereignty over land converted from wilderness to become part of cities like Sherrill. She also reached a similar conclusion when she stated that these arguments precluded the Oneida Indian Nation from rekindling embers of sovereignty that long ago grew cold. (Also see TEDx Talk by Mark Charles: ' We the People' - the three most misunderstood words in US history

The nation to nation relationship that exists between the United States Government and Native Nations of Turtle Island is rooted in the Doctrine of Discovery and the dehumanizing understanding that white people are superior and Natives are savages. And because both Republicans and Democrats accept this world view, the difference between the two (Trump and Biden) is merely the difference between explicit white supremacy vs. implicit white supremacy. They both agree that Native Nations are not truly sovereign over their lands (which is why the federal government holds them in trust in the first place), Vice-President Biden just promises to be a little nicer about how he wields his dehumanizing views.

The 2020 presidential election is crucial, and many Americans are focused on one thing: electability. Jill Biden summed this position up best when she said, Your candidate might be better on, I dont know, health care, than Joe is, but youve got to look at whos going to win this election, and maybe you have to swallow a little bit and say, 'Okay, I personally like so and so better,' but your bottom line has to be that we have to beat Trump.  ( Washington Post

At the time, the Democratic party had an incredibly diverse pool of presidential candidates. There were more women, more people of color and more members of the LGBTQ+ community in their pool of candidates than in any other presidential election prior. Since then all of that diversity has been removed, and today Joe Biden stands as the sole remaining Democratic candidate.

Joe Biden was not the most articulate of that diverse pool of Democratic candidates, nor was he the most passionate, and Jill Biden was absolutely right, her husband was not the best candidate on the issues. Even his vision is suspect. Joe Biden's primary vision is to erase the policies and memory of President Trump. If that sounds familiar it's because his vision is not that different from the vision of the man who currently sits in the Oval Office. Donald Trump, who also is not very articulate and frequently struggles to even display a desire to understand the issues, let alone handle them, got himself elected by promising to erase the policies and memory of his predecessor, Barack Obama, as he strove to Make America Great Again.

Neither of these men have vision, they both are running on nostalgia.

Mark Charles, a citizen of the Navajo Nation and an Independent candidate for president in 2020, addresses the Frank LaMere Native American Presidential Forum in Sioux City, Iowa, on August 20, 2019. Photo: Ho-Chunk Inc

The only time mediocrity translates into electability is when the goal is to maintain the status quo. And while the Democratic and Republican parties may dislike each other and vehemently disagree on issues like health insurance, they both have a vested interest in maintaining the status quo regarding our nations racist, sexist and white supremacist foundations.

Which is why, in important elections like this, both parties cue their most mediocre white men from the one percent whose electability is based almost entirely on their race, gender and financial class, coupled with their uncanny ability to peddle nostalgia.

The year is 2020, and our country still has not abolished slavery (the thirteenth amendment keeps slavery legal in prison). We still have not decided that we want to treat women as equal (and human) under the Constitution. We still affirm that land titles in the U.S. are based on the dehumanizing Doctrine of Discovery. Our Declaration of Independence refers to Natives as merciless Indian savages, and our Constitution never mentions women, specifically excludes Natives, and counts black people as three-fifths.

Our country needs change, foundational level change. Systemic change. But that type of change does not come easily. Foundational change requires a leader with a comprehensive understanding of the history, an articulate and honest analysis of our current problems, and a compelling vision to move us, ALL of us, forward.

Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden is promising to fight for a #Carcieri fix in order to prevent the Mashpee Wampanoag Tribe and other Indian nations from losing their homelands. @JoeBiden #StandWithMashpee https://t.co/bRBM69y5Vo  indianz.com (@indianz) March 31, 2020

In his final State of the Union, President Obama discussed the need for our nation to have a new politics. He said, We the People, our Constitution begins with those three simple words, words weve come to recognize mean all the people.

As I sat listening to him, I asked myself When? When did we decide We the People meant All the People? The Founding Fathers, who owned slaves, referred to Natives as savages and never allowed women to vote, did not believe We the People meant all the people. Abraham Lincoln, whose administration enacted atrocities like the hanging of the Dakota 38, the Massacre at Sand Creek and the Long Walk as he ethnically cleansed the states of Minnesota, Colorado and the territory of New Mexico of Native peoples to make way for the Transcontinental Railway, did not believe that We the People meant all the People.

As good as the Civil Rights movement was, it did not get us to We the People meaning all the people. President Trump definitely does not believe that We the People means All the People. And Joe Biden, who last week reaffirmed the dehumanizing worldview of the Doctrine of Discovery when he stated that the most important roles the federal government plays in rebuilding the nation-to-nation relationship is taking land into trust on behalf of tribes, does not believe that We the People means All the People.

The problem is that our country has never collectively decided that we want to be a nation where We the People includes everyone. And to prove it we continue to nominate candidates who peddle nostalgia. However, in a nation built on racism, sexism and white supremacy, the past is only nostalgic for white, land-owning men.

Mark Charles is a dual citizen of the United States and the Navajo Nation. He is running as an independent candidate for the office of President of the United States with a vision it to build a nation where We the People truly means #AllThePeople. You can learn more about his campaign on his website: markcharles2020.com

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15.04.2020 LISTEN

As the World goes through a lockdown and self-quarantine to stop the Covid-19 pandemic, which has cost millions of lives and crushed global economies, the virus of racism has raised its ugly head with the potential effect of antagonising the efforts of world leaders to contain the spread of corona virus.

The Director General of World Health Organisation Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus has finally broken his silence after several sleepless nights contemplating on how to engage and fight Covid-19 and Racism at the same time. Dr. Tedros has disclosed some unfortunate information on another virus called racism, from Taiwan, which can be worse than COVID-19.

He accuses some countries specifically Taiwan for calling him names such as African and Negro among others. According to Dr. Tedros this has been on-going for three months until he decided to disclose it to the world.

You can call me Negro, African, I dont take a damn and in fact I am a proud African so whatever slurs you are using on me cannot put me off my mission.

He reiterates that his main goal was to see to it that plastic bodies are stopped, and he cannot take time thinking about racist elements while humanity is under threat. The global Covid-19 positive cases stand at 1,487870 million people and 88,630 deaths.

Dr. Tedros, who is originally from Ethiopia, has been at the helm of the worlds hottest post for a while and is being accused by some Taiwanese officials for being inactive and failure to quickly coordinate with other member countries to effectively curb the spread of the deadly virus, the accusation he vehemently denies.

Taiwan has termed the Directors accusations of racism as untrue and requested for an immediate apology from Dr. Tedros office.

African Union under the Chairmanship of President Cyril Ramaphosa has thrown its weight behind the W.H.O Boss, and the presidency says it supports all the work and efforts of the world health body under its current leadership.

Former US, Ambassador to Tanzania, now residing in South Africa has slammed those who are accusing the Director General, and said that, you can point at someone with one finger forgetting that the other three are pointing at you. Hence urging those countries that are fighting the so called Negro Tedros to be more responsible.

This comes at a time when the US under president, Donald Trump is threatening to cut its financial support to W.H.O for allegedly being so much China-centric.

America is going through challenging times to try and control the spread of Covid-19, which has already infected 432,438 people and claimed another 14,808 people country wide, putting it in first position globally behind Spain and Italy . The US is the number one financier of the World Health Organisation.

About the Writer:

Abubakar Sematimba is a Student at DAM School of policing in Pretoria-South Africa. E-mail:[email protected]
Disadvantaged Kids Need Teachers, Schools to Remain Open: Australian PM

Prime Minister Scott Morrison took to social media on April 15 to express concern that many children who learn remotely from home will miss out on a proper education because their parents dont have the capacity to facilitate their learning the way teachers can in the classroom.

Its so important that children are able to keep physically going to school, particularly for [vulnerable] kids, he said.

A teachers union leader said the prime ministers message is in contrast to what state governmentswho run schoolstold parents and teachers on Apil 13, which is to learn from home.

For his part, Morrison said disadvantaged kids are at the most risk and he does not want a year of a childs education to be one of the things Australia loses in efforts to fight the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus, commonly known as novel coronavirus.

It is essential for those vulnerable kids who we know wont get an education at home, said Morrison.

Message to teachers Thank you to all our heroes on the frontline of our fight against the coronavirus, but especially our teachers. You do an incredible job educating our kids. During these tough times, your role has never been more important.    Scott Morrison (ScoMo)     

Australian kids are returning to school for Term 2 with the majority of states delivering lessons online.

State leaders have encouraged parents to keep their kids at home if possible reserving on-campus lessons for the children of essential workers and those classed as vulnerable.

Queensland and Victoria will provide computers, other devices, and SIM cards to help disadvantaged students overcome obstacles to learning.

The prime minister said not every parent can stay at home to facilitate their kids learning and that parents shouldnt be put in a position to decide between putting food on the table and enabling their kids to receive an education.

He said he was thankful for the teaching sector, but noted that teachers were also vulnerable to infection and said steps must be taken to mitigate risks.

Teachers unions have been critical of the federal governments approach to education during the crisis caused by the CCP virus.

In a comment published on April 15, the president of the Queensland Teachers Union, Kevin Bates, said that the prime minister was risking the lives of the people he was praisingteachers.

Bates said it was wonderful to be acknowledged by the prime minister as the essential community lynchpin we know we are but said Morrison had essentially told parents to ignore the directions from the state governments that are responsible for running the schools in their states.

Remote Learning

Education departments around Australia have risen to the challenge of remote learning during the CCP virus with teachers learning and developing online resources aiming to ensure that no student is left behind.

President of the New South Wales Teachers Federation said on Twitter on March 27 that no students in New South Wales (Australias most populated state) will be left without a learning plan.

A big shoutout to our teachers and principals. 

Its a huge scramble to do this overnightthey are doing a remarkable job under extraordinary circumstances. https://t.co/quJ2OkMUdU  Angelo Gavrielatos (@AGavrielatos) March 26, 2020

Queensland has reportedly been developing online learning resources that will be utilized across Australia in the coming months.

National public broadcaster the ABC, has programmed educational content to aid teachers and parents. The programs go to air from 10 a.m. each weekday; the broadcaster hopes to engage children around the country in learning.

#Parents and #teachers, just in case you need any extra resources to support students, heres a glimpse of whats on ABC ME tomorrow! Theres lots to choose from. View tomorrows schedule plus the rest of the week here: https://t.co/IweQRtMbso #aussieED pic.twitter.com/txtSqZzaBG  ABC Education (@ABCEducationAU) April 14, 2020
People wearing face masks as a preventive measure against the spread of COVID-19, line up to access the IMSS General Hospital Regional 1 in Tijuana, Baja California State, Mexico, on April 13, 2020 during the novel coronavirus pandemic. (Guillermo Arias/AFP via Getty Images)

Nurses at Mexico Hospital Hit by COVID-19 Say They Were Told to Avoid Masks

MONTERREY, MexicoNurses at a public hospital hit by Mexicos worst COVID-19 outbreak were told by their managers not to wear protective masks at the start of the epidemic to avoid sowing panic among patients, nurses and other medical workers said.

Two doctors and a hospital administrator have died and at least 51 staff members have been infected since the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus, commonly known as the novel coronavirus and which causes the disease COVID-19, was detected at the IMSS General Hospital in Monclova in Coahuila state in late March, the states health department said.

The hospital became Mexicos first hot spot for the COVID-19 illness caused by the virus.

At least four of the infected workers are currently hospitalized from the outbreak, which has fed concerns that Mexicos underfunded health care system is ill-prepared to cope with a major epidemic in the nation of nearly 130 million people.

At the beginning of the outbreak, managers said that protective equipment wasnt necessary, said nurse Charly Escobedo Gonzalez, who works at the Monclova hospital.

Answering questions from Reuters about the reports that hospital management told staff not to wear masks, a senior official at Mexicos main public health service IMSS, which runs the hospital, said that the health workers should be believed, but he didnt confirm details of the reports.

Specifically, if they are saying that then, of course, we have to believe it, said the IMSS official, Raul Pena Viveros. He said there can be misunderstandings inside a hospital about where it is appropriate to wear protective equipment.

Not all of the workers have to wear the same equipment inside the hospital. And when this type of equipment is used badlyit runs out more quickly and they put workers who are in contact with patients at risk, he said.

Mexico has more than 5,000 cases of the virus and 332 deaths from COVID-19.

The Monclova hospital became a focal point of the outbreak in the third week of March, highlighting a lack of masks and even soap and bleach there, staff said.

As staff began to fall ill, hospital floor managers instructed health care workers not to use face masks, which some had bought for themselves due to the lack of hospital equipment, seven workers told Reuters.

Pena Viveros said the hospital had been short of protective equipment as well as other materials to fight the virus in March.

Health officials havent given a detailed explanation of why so many Monclova health care workers became infected.

Hospital workers are at greater risk of contracting the virus if they do not wear protective equipment like face masks and gloves. N95 respirator masks offer more protection from other people who are infected while more simple surgical masks help the wearer avoid spreading the virus.

Due to a lack of proper N95 masks, some staff at the hospital were also wearing inappropriate industrial-style masks that had been donated, Pena Viveros said.

The lack of N95 masks was later resolved, said Pena Viveros, who was sent by the head of the IMSS from Mexico City to investigate the hospital and spent a week there in early April. Staff says the hospital has more protective equipment now but that they still lack gear such as masks.

Three nurses said that while some colleagues chose not to wear face masks after being told by managers or supervisors that they were not necessary, other staff kept wearing them.

No Panic

On the night of March 22, one of the heads of the nursing staff told a group of doctors and nurses gathered in the emergency room to take off their N95 masks because they werent necessary, according to a nurse who heard the order.

Another nurse surnamed Hernandez Perez was given a similar order by a deputy head of nursing a few days earlier.

In a morning clinical class, the sub-head told us not to create panicthat we shouldnt wear facemasks because we were going to create a psychosis, said Hernandez Perez, who didnt want her full name used. She is now at home sick and has tested positive for the COVID-19 respiratory illness caused by the coronavirus.

A second nurse confirmed Hernandez Perezs account.

Reuters was unable to speak to two of the nursing managers who nurses say spoke at that meeting.

After media accusations that the Monclova hospital badly lacked the equipment to deal with the virus, the head of the IMSS, Zoe Robledo, announced in early April that the director of the hospital had been temporarily replaced.

Neither the suspended hospital manager, Ulises Mendoza, nor the current hospital director answered repeated requests from Reuters for comment.

One nurse, who asked that her name not be used for fear of retaliation, said that during the second half of March she was repeatedly told by superiors not to wear a face mask while working in high-risk areas such as on the ground floor of the hospital, where the emergency room is located.

As well as the 51 confirmed cases, Pena Viveros said more than 300 other workers were temporarily sent home as the hospital scrambled to contain the outbreak.

He said the hospital contracted nurses and doctors from other facilities to address the personnel shortage, nevertheless, the hospitals ability to care for patients has been impeded, some staff said.

By MacDonald Dzirutwe. The Epoch Times contributed to this report.


On March 13, the Union Health Ministry declared that COVID-19 is not a health emergency. So a large number of Muslims travelled together from Delhi to Bhopal, Madhya Pradesh, to take part in a religious congregation there.

On the return trip to Delhi, one young man, Mehboob Ali, came under the suspicion, without any evidence, of not only being a carrier of COVID-19 but also a bioterrorist out to spread the disease.

In Delhi, the young man was picked up at the Azadpur vegetable market by the authorities and sent for a medical examination. He was then released, clean and healthy.

This incident, however, set off rumours in the young mans village of Harewali in Bawana district, about him being Covid-infected. When the 22-year-old returned to Harewali, he was set upon by a mob of suspicious, angry and violent vigilantes and beaten to within an inch of his life.

The reasons behind the near lynching of Mehboob Ali were simple: misinformation and fake news.

Several news organisations that published stories on the incident got it wrong. For instance, they reported he was murdered. Mehboob did not die; he was treated for injuries at the LNJP Hospital in Delhi. Similarly, several media outlets paid no heed to the communal aspects of this episode and the potentially explosive consequences it might have triggered.

Many people have demanded an apology from these media houses, and some have obliged. But an apology doesnt prevent violence or another mob lynching. Only effective and efficient measures would. The Supreme Court has in fact laid out guidelines to prevent, address and punish lynchings and other forms of mob violence. They have been in the books for two years, unimplemented.

This is only one of the hundreds of cases of mob violence we have seen in India. However, its an extremely significant one as it is the first instance of mob violence occurring in the context of the coronavirus outbreak, and could have led to public disorder and violence. The need for preparedness to prevent such outcomes is especially urgent considering the widening communal divide. A possible way forward is proper implementation of the safety mechanisms laid out in the judgment delivered by former chief justice of India, Dipak Mishra, in Tehseen Poonawalla v. Union of India, a case relating to lynchings and mob violence.

Earnest action and concrete steps have to be taken to protect citizens from the recurrent pattern of violence, which cannot be allowed to become the new normal," said Justice Mishra in that judgement.

This new normal is evident in the patterns of abuse that have emerged over the past few years. Yet, only a small amount of work has been done despite the Supreme Courts directions.

Tehseen Poonawalla v. Union of India, which brought the issue of vigilantism to the Supreme Courts attention, was a case of mob lynching that had typical elements: religious overtones, spread of violent and immoral content and an assault on citizens of India.

Even the lawyers appearing on behalf of the lynch mobs, the solicitor-general appearing for the Union of India; Hemant Wahi, standing counsel for the state of Gujarat; Tapesh Kumar, counsel for the state of Jharkhand and the then chief justice of India made it unequivocally clear that the "Union of India does not support the activities of vigilantes."

In late 2018, the Supreme Court passed the order making it clear that states and their officials, including police officers, have the responsibility to file an FIR immediately after an incident. Paragraph 6 of the verdict imposes a direct and undeniable responsibility on officers to ensure that vigilantes are prevented from taking the law into their own hands again.

Even previous judgements like Pravasi Bhalai Sangathan v. Union of India, and statutory provisions such as Sections 153A, 295 and 295A of the Indian Penal Code have been designed to deal with people who take the law into their own hands, causing violence, disorder, inhumanity, among a number of other social and legal ills.

Supreme Court senior advocate Sanjay Hegde and Supreme Court advocate Anas Tanwir made a number of recommendations to the court and provided certain guidelines. The petitioners and victims felt their recommendations and guidelines were necessary to protect the innocent and prevent instances of violence, harassment and intimidation through vigilantism.

The courts judgement and the accompanying guidelines are simple:

Preventive measures

It is the state government's responsibility to create the position of a 'nodal officer' (of rank not below that of a superintendent of police) who shall act under the advice and directions of the secretary in the home department of the concerned state. This must be done in each district of the state to ensure that there is no violence by people taking matters into their own hands.

A Special Intelligence Task Force must also be created to gather information about people or groups of people who intend to threaten, assault and violate the liberties of innocent individuals on 'moral grounds'. This responsibility is especially important since the task force also has the role to find out about intentionally violent and negligent news that is inaccurate and may cause public anger, disorder and more violence.

By August 2018, within three weeks of the judgement, state governments were required to identify districts that had instances of vigilante violence, disturbance and mob lynching in the past five years.

Now where the centre has failed is in the implementation of the order by the nodal officer, who must make efforts to eradicate any hostile environments against any communities or castes that may be targeted. This is clear in a number of recent cases  such as young men like Mehboob.

The judgement reinforces Section 129 of the Code of Criminal Procedure which empowers a police officer to disperse a crowd or mob that they feel may incite violence or a mob lynching.

Part 8 of the order on preventive measures is extremely important since it highlights the importance of constant surveillance and patrolling to ensure that antisocial and violent elements disperse for fear of being caught.

Part 10 of the order fixes responsibility on the central and state governments to ensure that dissemination of information is accurate. It mandates that spreading of false/fake news or misinformation should have serious consequences and made punishable under the law. The judgement reinforces Section 153 of the IPC wherein an FIR has to be filed against persons who spread messages that are likely to be explosive or incite violence.

Remedial measures

While writing the order on remedial measures, chief justice Mishra made it clear that it is the responsibility of a police officer to immediately register an FIR whenever there is information that can incite a mob lynching or violence.

Part 4 of the order on remedial measures places responsibility on the state government to create a victim compensation scheme through Section 357 of the Code of Criminal Procedure within a month of the judgement. The state must account for all kinds of injury, whether bodily, psychologically, or a loss of earning, including the loss of employment opportunities.

They must also consider expenses related to education and expenses incurred on account of legal and medical expenses. The said compensation scheme must also have a provision for interim relief to be paid to the victim(s) or to the next of kin of the deceased within thirty days of the mob violence.

Punitive measures

Lastly Justice Mishra wrote about punitive measures or punishments for offenders. If it is found that a police officer has failed in his responsibility to protect citizens against mob lynching or violence, it shall be treated as an act of deliberate negligence and/or serious misconduct.

Disciplinary action is to be taken in two primary cases:

First, where the officer had prior knowledge and took little or no action to stop the incident of mob violence.

In the second instance, disciplinary action is to be taken when the incident has already taken place, and the officer has not taken appropriate action against the culprits, whether it be arresting them or instituting criminal proceedings against them.

These guidelines are of extreme importance and urgency  we fortunately already have an effective and workable system of laws and provisions to combat class violence and mob lynchings - they just need the proper implementation.
Denmark is beginning to relax its strict coronavirus lockdown measures by allowing some classes to return nationwide Wednesday to school.

The measure applies only to preschool to fifth grade, while students above that must continue to study online from home.

Gatherings of more 10 people are still banned. Dentists, tattoo parlors, hairdressers and other trades that have close physical contacts with patrons remain closed. Restaurants and cafes can only serve takeaway.

Other shops, including supermarkets and grocery stores have remained open for weeks but have urged customers to keep a distance from each other and have put a limit on the number of people allowed inside.

On March 11, Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen began a gradual lockdown of the country, which means that, among others, celebrations marking the popular figurehead monarch Queen Margrethe's 80th birthday on Thursday have been canceled.

Frederiksen said Tuesday that Denmark can open much faster than expected citing figures showing a stabilization of the virus crisis in the Scandinavian country. Frederiksen also said that it should not go too fast because should there be a setback, it will not be too severe.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
SIOUX CITY -- In any normal year, the latter part of March and the first half of April would be a brisk time for tax preparers.

It's not exactly like that this year.

The novel coronavirus pandemic has prompted people to stay home as much as possible, to the point that some who normally get their taxes filed in person aren't doing so. Tax preparation offices that once welcomed walk-ins are now asking clients to make an appointment, in a bid to prevent waiting rooms from becoming a hive of virus transmission.

And the IRS has moved Tax Day -- normally April 15 -- to July 15, giving filers much more time.

Maria Herrera, the general manager of Liberty Tax Service on Pierce Street, had to lay off most of her staffers, including the human billboards who stand on the sidewalk and entice customers inside.

"I did have to pretty much let everybody go," Herrera said. Business has slowed and several of her employees needed to tend to their children as schools closed.

There have been days when Herrera, the sole tax preparer left in the office, had no clients at all. She has been fielding calls from people inquiring about the $1,200 stimulus checks from the federal government, as they relate to their tax status.

"It's picked up a little bit, because people want to come in and file their taxes so they can get that money," she said. "But it's still not what we would normally see because the deadline has extended."

One popular tax service for lower-income people has stopped filing returns entirely. The Center for Siouxland's Volunteer Income Tax Assistance (VITA) program was suspended March 17.

Jonette Spurlock, executive director of the Center for Siouxland, said pandemic-related staffing issues have made it largely impossible for VITA to continue its tax operations.

"Most of our volunteers are college students, which, they're gone, and then our other largest group (of volunteers) is that vulnerable population, because we have a lot of retired teachers and tax people, who are in that vulnerable category," Spurlock said.

On the plus side, Spurlock said VITA volunteers had completed nearly 1,500 tax returns by the time the program was suspended last month -- lower-income individuals are somewhat known to depend on money they get in their tax refunds, and so they often file taxes before the normal April 15 deadline.

"The majority of people who rely on it -- as their savings or their income -- come in real early and get their taxes done," she said.

Spurlock said the VITA program will re-start once it's safe for the volunteers to do so. For those who have not yet filed their taxes and feel confident about their ability to do it themselves, Spurlock recommends a website called myfreetaxes.com.

Sioux City Mayor Bob Scott, who is also the proprietor of the bookkeeping and tax preparation firm R.E. Scott Co., was a bit more sanguine about the situation. The small office is still up and running, though some clients are less interested in having their taxes filed in-person.

"We're running about the same," he said. "Historically, we do a lot of returns with the people sitting right in front of us. We've seen a lot of people wanting to drop them off, mail them in, email them, rather than actually coming in."

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A police department in Sussex County is no longer asking for the immediate cease and desist of drive-by processions for birthdays and other events, but maintains the displays are probably not a good idea amid the coronavirus outbreak.

Sparta Police Chief Neil Spidaletto has issued a revised advisory stating only that police, fire and ambulance vehicles will not be taking part in any individual celebratory processions," including the so-called birthday brigades that have been popping up across New Jersey.

The advisory further urges residents to follow Gov. Phil Murphys executive order, in place since March 21, banning public gatherings such as parties, celebrations and other social events.

Police Lt. John Lamon said the police chief modified the first version of the advisory, which drew widespread attention, upon deciding it was maybe too harshly worded.

CORONAVIRUS RESOURCES: Live map tracker | Businesses that are open | Homepage

Lamon said some mistakenly interpreted the cease and desist language as the police chief threatening to make arrests.

Were just trying to tell people to use good judgment. Were all in this together, Lamon told NJ Advance Media.

In clarifying the original announcement, Lamon said the police department wanted to make clear it would not be going after someone for, hypothetically, driving past a 5-year-olds house and honking their horn for a happy birthday greeting.

He added that no one in Sparta has been charged with violating any of Murphys executive orders issued during the coronavirus outbreak.

Everybody is looking for a way to help life other peoples spirits, but anything you do thats going to draw people out is probably not the best thing at this time," Lamon said.

Drive-by celebrations for birthdays and other milestones, including somber processions to honor someone who died, have been taking place across the state since Murphys executive order. In Hoboken, first responders wearing face masks pulled up outside the residence of a 97-year-old woman, got out and held a happy birthday sign.

Asked about such displays on Friday, Murphy urged residents to be very careful, but stopped short of saying they should not happen.

I think theyre incredibly emotional, Murphy told reporters during his daily coronavirus briefing.

And it allows folks to express their appreciation or acknowledgement in the case of someone whos passed. I dont think theres one quick answer on that. But I think weve have to be very careful because we want people to stay at home.

Even if youre in a car by yourself, you are going out, he continued. And I think we have to do this in moderation.

Sparta is home to nearly 19,000 and, of Sussex Countys 24 municipalities, has the highest number of the countys 500 confirmed coronavirus with 65.

Lamon acknowledged that some nearby municipalities have had processions led by police cars, including Easter Bunny-themed events.

In issuing the advisory, the police chief was "basically trying to get the message across that were not supporting it, Lamon said.

We dont recommend it. Its not a good idea, Lamon said.

NJ Advance Media staff writer Brent Johnson contributed to this story.

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.

Rob Jennings may be reached at rjennings@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter@RobJenningsNJ. Find NJ.com on Facebook.
The meeting conducted online featured Mayor Lori Lightfoot in a blazer seated at a desk and a few glimpses of aldermen at their homes or offices talking through basic parliamentary procedures. The council did not take up any substantive issues; the majority of the 35-minute meeting was dedicated to public comments during which citizens called in. The callers complained about the closed Lakefront Trail, construction workers not wearing masks at work sites, the lack of minority workers seen at a redevelopment project and an alleged polluter near Lincoln Park.
MEDFORD, Ore.  For every Thursday in April, the Human Bean says it will donate $1 from every drink sold to ACCESS, Jackson County's regional food bank.

With the major economic impact caused by COVID-19, food banks in Oregon have seen rising demand and a drop in donations.

"The COVID-19 pandemic and its associated devastation on local business has had a tremendous negative impact on our community," Human Bean said in a statement. "Local organizations that have a long and successful history of helping families and seniors through economic crisis are seeing unprecedented demand for help within our communities."

ACCESS has seen demand for food assistance rise about 60 percent over the last several weeks, distributing almost 100,000 pounds of food each week. That need only continues to grow.

FEEDING AMERICA: To donate directly to your local food bank, click the link to visit our page here.

The food bank serves an estimated one out of every four residents of Jackson County, helping more than 52,000 people in 2019.

"The Human Bean has a long history of partnering with local organizations and giving back," the company said. "We continue to focus on providing authentic human connections  with a bean on top."

Human Bean's goal is to provide more than 60,000 meals for the food insecure with this fundraiser. For the rest of April, thhe company says it will donate $1 to ACCESS for every drink sold on Thursdays. ACCESS says that each $1 donation can provide four meals.

"Together we can make a difference," Human Bean said.
Actress Soundarya Sharma has approached the Indian embassy and Ministry of External Affairs for assistance, along with more than 400 Indians including students who are stranded in the USA amid a coronavirus pandemic.

These are challenging times for everyone, but my heart goes to hundreds of students including other fellow Indians who are stuck here, without proper accommodation and resources, Soundarya said.

She added: I have been writing to the Indian Embassy and the Ministry of External Affairs for evacuation assistance however there has been no positive response nor any assistance to Indians who have been unable to meet their ends here.

The actress, who featured in the film Ranchi Diaries, is hoping to be evacuated back to India. I would humbly request the Indian embassy and the MEA for a stimulus package for all those students and fellow Indians who are stuck here to help overcome this situation and hopefully arrange an evacuation flight back to India, she said.

Soundarya was in Los Angeles to attend an acting course at the Lee Strasberg Theatre and Film Institute.

Follow @htshowbiz for more
Italy has seen its rate of coronavirus deaths and infections drop as the country's lockdown appears to be easing the crisis.

Today saw an additional 578 deaths - bringing the total to 21,645 - compared to 602 on Tuesday, according to the Civil Protection Agency.

The number of confirmed cases in Italy today rose by 2,667 - a sharp drop from daily increases of more than 6,000, which the country endured late last month.

Italy has now seen a total of 165,155 infections.

The country that was once the epicentre of European infections is now seeing the rate of infections and deaths stabilise, sparking authorities to reopen parts of the economy.

Today saw an additional 578 deaths - bringing the total to 21,645 - compared to 602 on Tuesday, according to the Civil Protection Agency

The number of confirmed cases in Italy rose by 2,667 - a sharp drop from daily increases of more than 6,000, which the country endured late last month

Yesterday saw shoppers back on the streets in Austria and Italy as Europe takes its first cautious steps out of the coronavirus lockdown.

Italy is opening a handful of stores including bookshops and stationery shops in a trial to see how social distancing measures can work after the lockdown, which otherwise remains in force.

However, some regions have chosen not to take full advantage. Bookshops will not open for another week in Rome and will stay closed altogether in Lombardy.

In Austria, which was the first European country to announce specific plans for ending the lockdown, shoppers were queuing outside hardware stores wearing compulsory masks as small shops re-opened today.

Experts are not expecting a surge in customers, because some people will still be too worried to make unnecessary shopping trips and certain stores may choose to stay closed.

Meanwhile, industrial and construction work is resuming in Spain where some workers were back at their jobs yesterday while other regions are returning today after an Easter Monday holiday.

Some commuters in Spain said they felt reassured by the 10million masks which authorities are handing out this week.

Elsewhere, Denmark is lining up a quicker-than-expected end to the lockdown after hospital cases continued to fall while Iceland says it will start easing restrictions next month.

In Italy, most lockdown measures have been extended until May 3 but bookshops, stationery shops and stores selling children's clothes are allowed to re-open from today.

ITALY: A worker in full protective gear including gloves and a mask inspects the stock at a children's clothes store in Rome's Trastevere district on April 14, as Italy allowed a limited number of shops to re-open

The slightly loosened restrictions also include forestry and the wood industry on the list of permitted economic activities.

Italian prime minister Giuseppe Conte wants a wider economic restart 'as soon as possible' but the government says that 'the conditions are not yet in place'.

Italy has been under a nationwide lockdown since March 9, longer than any other European country, and has seen the infection rate slow considerably in that time.

There is also some disagreement among regions. The governor of Lombardy says bookshops in his hard-hit region will remain closed, but the leader of Liguria wants some construction sites to re-open, Italian media says.

The Lazio region which includes Rome will delay the re-opening of bookshops until next week so that they can be cleaned, while Campania will open the children's clothes shops only two mornings a week.

Piedmont, which includes Turin, is not loosening the lockdown at all, according to news agency ANSA.
Cooperation between the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) and East Asian countries is the key to containing and putting an end to the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic, Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe told the press on April 14. 

Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe addresses the opening ceremony of the online Special ASEAN Plus Three Summit on COVID-19 Response.

Abe made the statement after attending the online Special ASEAN Plus Three Summit on COVID-19 Response chaired by Prime Minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc of Vietnam, which holds the ASEAN Chairmanship 2020.

The Japanese PM highlighted the need to keep trade routes open, especially for medical supplies and important goods, despite the global pandemic, saying any measures taken by countries should be in line with the World Trade Organisation (WTO)s regulations.

He also proposed the establishment of an ASEAN centre for infectious diseases, which would be financed by the Japan-ASEAN Integration Fund.

Founded in 1967, ASEAN groups Brunei, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam.

The Special ASEAN Plus Three Summit on Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) via video conference took place on April 14, with the participation of leaders from 10 ASEAN member states and their counterparts from China, the Republic of Korea, and Japan./.VNA
Is remdesivir the answer to defeat coronavirus?

India

oi-Vicky Nanjappa

New Delhi, Apr 15: Could the trial Ebola drug be the answer to stopping coronavirus? A new study has shown that the antiviral remdesivir, an experimental Ebola drug may stop COVID-19 from replicating and this could render the virus harmless.

The drug is developed by US based biotechnology company, Gilead Sciences Inc, which has a patent in India. India is taking part in the trial. Gilead has started two phase 3 clinical trials on the safety and efficiency of the drug. The phase 3 trials are required to be approved by the US Food and Drug Administration and other regulators.

WHO funding halted by Trump over handling of coronavirus

The research paper in the Journal of Biological Chemistry said that remdesivir can inhibit coronavirus polymrerases. These are enzymes that bring out the formation of polymers, particularly DNA and RNA in cell culture.

Matthias Gotte, chair of medical microbiology and immunology at the faculty of medicine and dentistry at the University of Alberta, Canada who conducted the study said that the polymerase of Sars-CoV-2 is like the engine of the virus. The virus is tricked by remdesivir by mimicking its building blocks. In a statement, Gotte explained that these coronavirus polymerases are sloppy and they get fooled, so the inhibitor gets incorporated many times and the virus can no longer replicate.

An article in the New England Journal of Medicine, said that a 35 year old man who returned to the US after a family visit to the Chinese city of Wuhan, where the virus originated was found to have improved after receiving remdesivir.

On April 10, the journal had chronicled the case of 53 patients with severe symptoms of COVID-19, who were treated with this drug. Clinical improvements were seen in 36 of them, but only placebo-controlled trials can provide an accurate picture, it said.

Loss of taste, smell symptoms associated with coronavirus: Study

Gilead's chairman and CEO Daniel O'Day said in a statement on the company's website that two Phase 3 studies are being run by Gilead in areas with a high prevalence of Covid-19 in the United States, Asia and Europe. One of these is for patients with severe disease and the other studies remdesivir in patients with more moderate symptoms. One of the many questions that these studies aim to answer is whether treatment duration can be shortened from 10 days to 5 days.

For Breaking News and Instant Updates Allow Notifications

Story first published: Wednesday, April 15, 2020, 8:35 [IST]
Bar Harbor, Maine, April 14, 2020 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- The Jackson Laboratory (JAX), in collaboration with several Maine regional hospitals, will provide additional coronavirus testing capacity for frontline health care workers and in-patients in the state of Maine.

Headquartered in Bar Harbor, the nonprofit research institution whose mission is to improve human health, is dedicated to helping both the global biomedical community as well as its local communities. Beginning on Tuesday, April 14, JAX will collaborate with hospitals in Maine, including MaineGeneral Medical Center in Augusta, Mount Desert Island (MDI) Hospital in Bar Harbor, and Northern Light Maine Coast Hospital in Ellsworth to augment their existing testing capacity for their health care workers and in-patients who are symptomatic for COVID-19. Testing for COVID-19 infection is a critical element for pandemic control and has been in short supply.

JAXs Connecticut-licensed CLIA (Clinical Laboratory Improvement Amendments) and CAP accredited laboratory in Farmington, Connecticut tests patient samples for a specific RNA signature unique to SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19. As the COVID-19 pandemic evolves, JAX is adopting advanced technologies and new assay platforms and will make these available to its partnering hospitals and health care facilities.

We are committed to using our expertise in human genomics and mammalian genetics to help address the coronavirus outbreak as rapidly as possible. It is our humanitarian duty to apply our science for the public good, said Edison Liu, M.D., president and CEO, The Jackson Laboratory. Thats why, in addition to the crucial COVID-19 mouse model and current research underway at JAX, we are focused on providing important local and regional assistance during this health crisis. We are proud to be partnering with MaineGeneral Medical Center, Mount Desert Island and Northern Light Maine Coast Hospital to augment their current COVID-19 testing capabilities for health care workers and in-patients. We also hope to soon engage additional hospitals and health care facilities in Maine to meet the critical testing needs of the State.

JAXs expanded COVID-19 testing for our clinical partners in Maine builds upon the Laboratorys recent collaborations with the Connecticut Department of Public Health and more than a dozen Connecticut-based hospitals and health care facilities, including UConn Health. JAX began COVID-19 testing on March 23 in its CLIA laboratory at The Jackson Laboratory for Genomic Medicine in Farmington, Connecticut and is currently testing 2,000 samples per week with plans to ramp up to 3,500 samples per week by mid-April. A key advantage to the JAX COVID-19 testing system is that it is calibrated to provide a short turn-around time. In this manner, information can be returned to the hospitals quickly.

We are proud to partner with our friends at The Jackson Laboratory and appreciate JAX for providing additional COVID-19 testing for hospital health care workers and patients, said John Ronan, FACHE, president Northern Light Maine Coast and Blue Hill Hospitals. We commend their work as they battle the COVID-19 pandemic through science and research and learn more about this deadly virus.

Mount Desert Island Hospital is grateful for the opportunity to collaborate with our partners at The Jackson Laboratory to provide COVID-19 testing assistance and support as our community addresses this critical challenge, said Arthur J Blank, president and CEO, MDI Hospital. We commend The Jackson Laboratory, our local representatives and employers, as well as our conscientious citizens for their efforts to flatten the curve of this pandemic in our region. We are very thankful that, so far, these efforts have been successful. We are committed to continuing to work with The Jackson Laboratory and all of our community partners to slow the spread of this disease.

Individuals seeking to be tested for COVID-19 should not call or come directly to The Jackson Laboratory, but instead, call their doctors office or local hospital for guidance. Learn more about the coronavirus and how JAX is lending its expertise in human genomics and mammalian genetics to stem the coronavirus outbreak. Find images and B-roll related to this announcement.

The Jackson Laboratory is an independent, nonprofit biomedical research institution with more than 2,200 employees. Headquartered in Bar Harbor, Maine, it has a National Cancer Institute-designated Cancer Center, a genomic medicine institute in Farmington, Conn., and facilities in Ellsworth, Maine, Sacramento, Calif., and Shanghai, China. Its mission is to discover precise genomic solutions for disease and empower the global biomedical community in the shared quest to improve human health. For more information, please visit www.jax.org.





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WESTPORT  Marc Hartog has seen a number of crises over his 20-year career with Westport EMS, but the novel coronavirus has provided unique challenges.

Clearly, this is an unprecedented challenge, certainly in any of our lifetimes, Hartog said.

Before joining Westport EMS, he worked as a paramedic in New York City for 20 years. Hartog, now deputy director of Westport EMS, said over the span of his career, hes seen a range of crises from HIV in the 80s to the Ebola scare in the 2010s.

This is unprecedented, he said of the coronavirus. Its presented us with some different challenges of ensuring all of our providers remain as safe and protected as possible while still providing the type of medical care that our residents and visitors to Westport expect of us.

Luckily, Westport EMS was proactive in training and preparation for the virus, he said. Before the first case broke in town, Hartog said staff was already being prepared with personal protective equipment.

We did this as it was starting to come over from China and that there were patients in the U.S. starting to show symptomology, he said. Following CDC and Department of Public Health recommendations, we came up with protocols and equipment that we need to use.

Westport EMS members completed their training a day before the unit was called for its first patient with COVID-19.

Were truly lucky in that respect, that our first call for a patient that might have had this  that people were already trained and equipped to be able to take care of that patient while maintaining their own safety, Hartog said.

Through the generosity of town residents and other organizations, he said, Westport EMS has been able to procure enough personal protective equipment for staff. Westport EMS also had gloves and masks in stock before the coronavirus became widespread.

We were able to retrain our staff how to use this PPE right from the start, Hartog said.

The overall call volume for Westport EMS has not increased significantly since the first case in town, Hartog said, crediting the collaborative effort of Westporters and first responders.

In addition to equipment donations, some residents have also found other ways to support Westport EMS, he said, naming Westport resident Nicole Straight, who started Food for the Front Lines to support healthcare workers and restaurants. Funds raised help to purchase meals for first responders and medical personnel, he said.

Hartog said the collaborative work between people on the front line is also important including that between first responders and residents.

We thank the public for their support as much as they seem to be thanking us for what were doing, he said.

dj.simmons@hearstmediact.com
Senior Congress leader Digvijaya



Singh and his wife Amrita have set up a series of kitchens in Bhopal to help daily wagers and poor elderly people get food during the lockdown.

The kitchens are distributing 5,000 to 7,000 food packets daily, the Congress leader's wife said.

These facilities, termed as "Diggi-Amrita Rasoi" by Congressmen, are functioning in Jatkhedi Bagh Mugalia, Village Bagli (Ward-85), Adampur Chhavni, Piplani, 50 Quarters slum area, Anand Nagar, Saint Hirdaram Nagar, Bairgarh areas of the Madhya Pradesh capital city.

"Through these kitchens, we are providing food daily to the needy persons and others as they are unable arrange for their meals due to the lockdown, former minister and Congress MLA P C Sharma told PTI.

"Volunteers are distributing 5,000 to 7,000 food packets daily to the needy people through these kitchens in places where government has not yet started providing relief to people, Singh's wife and senior journalist Amrita said.

The state Congress headquarters here and other donors are also coming forward to provide raw material for running these kitchens successfully.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
A B.C. Ambulance Service employee wearing protective gear moves a patient from an ambulance to the emergency department at Royal Columbian Hospital in New Westminster on April 12, 2020. (The Canadian Press/Darryl Dyck)

Some Canadian Hospitals Could Face Severe Shortage of ICU Beds in Coming Months, Projections Warn

If the number of COVID-19 patients surges in the next few month as expected, some hospitals could face a severe shortage of intensive care unit beds, according to projections by a team of researchers.

The model developed by the team, which consists of health professionals from the University of Torontos Dalla Lana School of Public Health, the Harvard Global Health Institute, and the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, anticipates that hospitals in many regions would need to increase their ICU bed capacity to meet the demand.

The model estimates the number of ICU beds needed to meet the demands of increased COVID-19 patients under three scenarios, in which 2.5 percent, 5 percent, and 10 percent of the population in Canada became infected over the next four months, as reported by CBC.

In the best-case scenario, hospitals in most provinces would be able to accommodate the increased number of patients, with the exception of Ontario.

As the infection rate climbs, the situation becomes more daunting. In the 5 percent infection scenario, some hospital regions across the country would have to at least double or possibly triple their current ICU bed capacity.

According to the model, some hospital regions in Ontario, Quebec, Saskatchewan, Alberta, and Manitoba would encounter challenges in ICU bed capacity.

What its really showing is that certain areas of the country are better equipped to deal with an acute stress like COVID-19 than others, Dr. Andrew Boozary, an assistant professor at the Dalla Lana School of Public Health and the co-leader of the research, told CBC.

However, the projections did not take into account government measures to expand ICU bed capacity. For example, the Ontario Ministry of Health has given general approval to public hospitals to operate on other premises under certain conditions.

Boozary said the projections will hopefully prompt health policymakers to pay attention to the significant challenges that certain regions would have to confront if the number of cases increase in the coming months.

The hope is that this effort might spur more transparency about the needs and action on the capacity front, he said.

Government Modelling Projections

On April 9, the federal government released its own projection model on how the pandemic would unfold over the long term, and it provides a more optimistic view of the infection rate.

It looks at green zone scenarios involving strong controls (1-10 percent of the population infected), blue zone scenarios with weaker controls (25-50 percent of the population infected), and red zone scenarios with no controls at all (70-80 percent infected).

Chief Public Health Officer Theresa Tam has said she is hopeful that Canada can stay within the green zone. However, to achieve that, a high degree of identified and isolated cases, physical distancing, and quarantine measures will be necessary for the foreseeable future.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said upon the release of the data that the current wave of the virus could last until late spring or into summer, with possibly other outbreaks after that.

This will be the new normal until a vaccine is developed, he said, adding that the current measures in place to combat the spread will need to continue, noting that Canada is at a fork in the road between the best and worst outcomes.
The total number of



coronavirus cases in Gujarat rose to 695 as 56 more people were found infected with the disease on Wednesday, the health department said.

Of the new cases, 42 were reported from Ahmedabad, six from Surat, three each from Vadodara and Panchmahal, and each from Botad and Kheda, it said.

With this, the total number of coronavirus cases in Ahmedabad has gone up to 404, followed by Vadodara-116, the health department said.

Botad and Kheda districts reported first coronavirus cases on Wednesday.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Former U.S. President Barack Obama endorsed his former second in command, Joe Biden, for president Tuesday, calling Biden a clear choice to replace President Donald Trump in November's national election.

"Our country's future hangs on this election," Obama said. He added that it would not be easy to defeat Trump, who won an upset victory in 2016 over former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Obama urged Americans to "keep believing in the possibilities of a better world" by supporting Biden's campaign.

Obama praised the courage and skills of health care workers treating coronavirus victims. But he said national leadership in fighting the ravages of the disease was missing in Trump's White House.

"If there's one thing we've learned as a country from moments of great crisis, it's that the spirit of looking out for one another can't be restricted to our homes, or our workplaces, or our neighborhoods, or our houses of worship. It also has to be reflected in our national government," Obama said in a nearly 12-minute video.

"The kind of leadership that's guided by knowledge and experience, honesty and humility, empathy and grace," he continued. "That kind of leadership doesn't just belong in our state capitols and mayors' offices. It belongs in the White House. And that's why I'm so proud to endorse Joe Biden for president of the United States."

Obama said, "Choosing Joe to be my vice president was one of the best decisions I ever made. And he became a close friend. I believe Joe has all the qualities we need in a president right now."

"Joe was there when we rebuilt from the Great Recession (in 2008 and 2009) and rescued the American auto industry," Obama recalled. "He was the one asking what every policy would do for the middle class." "Joe gets stuff done," Obama said, pointing to Biden's help combating the H1N1 virus and preventing the Ebola epidemic from becoming a pandemic.


MUSKEGON COUNTY, MI  Its been a month since weve had a sitdown restaurant meal or sent the children off to school.

Its been three weeks since Muskegon County recorded its first cases of coronavirus COVID-19.

Its been just as long since Gov. Gretchen Whitmer ordered all of Michigan  except for those working in essential roles  to stay home.

Life in Muskegon County has changed drastically in the face of the COVID-19 storm.

Cases and deaths on the east side of the state have skyrocketed at an alarming rate. The Michigan fatality rate roared from the first death one month ago, on March 18, to well over 1,700.

In Muskegon County, playgrounds are off limits, motorboats are docked and laid-off workers struggle for some sign of hope.

How did we get here? Follows is a timeline of the stranglehold COVID-19 has taken on Muskegon County:

Monday, March 23

Muskegon health officials announce the first coronavirus case reported in Muskegon County .

Later in the day, Muskegon health officials announce second coronavirus case.

During a press conference United Way calls for volunteers to help with coronavirus.

Tuesday, March 24

Nurses at Mercy Healths Hackley Campus concerned about coronavirus file unfair labor practice complaints.

A child is Muskegon Countys third announced coronavirus patient.

Thursday, March 26

Muskegon County cases remain at three but health director says many more likely undetected.

Friday, March 27

Two men are first two deaths from coronvirus in Muskegon County.

Health officials say new private lab means coronavirus test turnaound will speed up considerably in Muskegon County.

To help with potential coronavirus overflow, officials set up hospital beds in Muskegon Community College gym .

Total number of coronavirus cases is six.

Monday, March 30

Coronavirus cases are 13, according to the state.

Tuesday, March 31

Cases increase by five, to 18, meaning Muskegon County coronavirus cases increase at rate faster than the states.

Ahead of governors announcement, Muskegon area superintendent advises parents to tell kids schools closed for rest of the year.

Wednesday, April 1

Cases in Muskegon remain at 18 with four deaths.

Thursday, April 2

To make room for quarantining of newcomers, Muskegon County Jail releases inmates.

The total number of coronavirus cases is 29.

Friday, April 3

The total number of cases is 30 and Muskegon County reports third death .

Health care workers already worried about a lack of personal protective equipment demand Mercy Health provide safe living arrangements for staff affected by coronavirus.

Police say they are dealing with complaints about businesses still operating, domestic disputes, social gatherings, break-ins during coronavirus.

Saturday, April 4

A 57-year-old man dies from COVID-19, making his the fourth coronavirus death reported in Muskegon County

Monday, April 6

Muskegon Countys confirmed case climbs to 34.

Tuesday, April 7

The number of confirmed cases increases to 41.

The Muskegon County health department releases details about COVID patients, showing that Coronavirus cases spread throughout Muskegon County, but hit black residents especially hard.

Mercy Health announces patients referred after virtual screening can use drive-through coronavirus testing.

Wednesday, April 8

Mercy Health wont disclose the number of patients in its Muskegon hospitals as Muskegon Countys coronavirus cases take big leap.

Confirmed cases increase to 53.

Thursday, April 9

Muskegon health department says it cannot get hospitalization numbers from Mercy Health as Muskegon area African Americans disproportionate coronavirus suffering grows

Confirmed COVID-19 cases total 56. Deaths remain at four.

Friday, April 10

Muskegon Communty College provides a tour of its field hospital for overflow coronavirus patients

Cases total 57.

Saturday, April 11

No increase in cases is reported.

Sunday, April 12

The state reports 59 COVID-19 cases.

Monday, April 13

With 6,000 campers and 1,800 artists in residence expected, Blue Lake Fine Arts Camp cancels summer season due to coronavirus

The state reports 68 cases in Muskegon County

Tuesday, April 14

Muskegon County reports its fifth death.

Cases jump to 85, more than doubling in one week, according to the state.

Wednesday, April 15

Race, age and location of patients among coronavirus details in Muskegon County released by health department.

Total cases are 93, with five deaths.

Thursday, April 16

The number of cases jumps to 110.

Friday, April 17

Muskegon County coronavirus cases double over work week to 128.

Saturday, April 18

The number of cases is 136, with five deaths.

Sunday, April 19

The health department reports an additional death, bringing the total to six.

A Norton Shores woman recounts ordeal with coronavirus following her hospitalization.

Total cases are 143.

MLive has complete coverage on coronavirus COVID-19, including maps of known cases, at mlive.com/coronavirus.

Monday, April 20

Health officials report seven deaths and 149 case.

The popular tradition of Parties in the Park canceled this summer due to coronavirus

Tuesday, April 21

Muskegon County coronavirus deaths double in three days, bringing the total to 10. Confirmed cases number 160.

Tens of thousands of festival goers are disappointed after Electric Forest 2020 canceled due to coronavirus pandemic

PREVENTION TIPS

Michigans State Emergency Operations Center is coordinating state-government resources and the response to the coronavirus spread. It has shared the following tips:

What you can do to prevent the spread of COVID-19 and other respiratory diseases:

 Always cover coughs or sneezes with a tissue or sleeve.

 Stay home if you are sick and advise others to do the same.

 Avoid close contact with people who are sick.

 Avoid touching your eyes, nose and mouth with unwashed hands.

 Wash your hands often with soap and warm water for at least 20 seconds.

 Use an alcohol-based hand sanitizer with at least 60% alcohol, if soap and warm water are not available.

 Clean and disinfect frequently touched objects and surfaces (computers, keyboards, desks, etc.).

 Its not too late to get your flu shot! While the influenza vaccine does not protect against COVID-19 infection, it can help keep you healthy during the flu season.

For statewide and national information on the virus, visit Michigan.gov/Coronavirus or CDC.gov/Coronavirus.

More on MLive:

6 reasons Michigan has four times more coronavirus cases than Ohio

Takeout Tuesday: 5 Muskegon-area restaurants to visit -- from a distance

Online survey to track COVID-19 hotspots in Michigan
The Delhi government on Tuesday declared eight more areas as containment zones in the capital, taking the total count of sealed areas to 55.

Three of these are located in South East Delhis Khirki Extension, Chirag Delhi and Sangam Vihar, one each in Central Delhis Bara Hindu Rao and Nawab Ganj, one in South West districts Janakpuri, and one each in North East districts Shastri park and H block of Jahangirpuri.

On Tuesday, 51 new cases of Covid-19 were reported in the city, taking the tally to 1,561. The death toll increased to 30, as two more died of the virus. The government has directed all district magistrates to declare containment zones if there is a clustering of cases.

Two new Covid-19 clusters were detected in Azad Market in Bara Hindu Rao area and Nawab Ganj in Central Delhi. Sadar Bazaar, Chandni Mahal and Nabi Karim are existing clusters. A senior district official said, 10 persons, including nine of a family, have tested positive for Covid-19 in Nawab Ganj, while three cases, including a death, have been reported from Azad Market in Bara Hindu Rao.

Pandit Mohalla and Jain Mohalla of Chirag Delhi were declared as a containment zone after a resident, who has a milk shop in Khiri Extension, tested positive. The person had come in contact with a patient, a resident of Khirki Extension, and tested positive on April 10. He (the milk shop owner) also came in contact with 13 other persons, read the order issued by Sudhakar, SDM, Hauz Khas.

Two lanes of Chirag Delhi and street where the milk shop is located in Khirki Extension will be sealed till April 27. Two cases were reported from Chhuriya mohalla in Sangam Vihar and two lanes in the area have been sealed, besides Gali No 1, 2 and 3 that were sealed earlier.

The district administration decided to seal the entire C-2 block of Janakpuri after three people of a family tested positive. There are close to 600 households, with a population of over 3,000 and a playschool in proximity to the house where residents tested positive. The C-2 block, which is located centrally, has 32 independent houses.

A three-storeyed house in North East Delhis Shastri Park was declared a containment zone after two people of a family tested positive. According to Shashi Kaushal, district magistrate of north east Delhi district, A woman, who is undergoing cancer treatment at Rajiv Gandhi hospital, had tested positive a few days ago. Her daughter tested positive today (Tuesday). 15 members of the family who have been placed in home-quarantine. We have declared just one house as a containment zone. Neighbouring houses will not be affected by this.

Three lanes in H-block of Jahangirpuri were declared a containment zone, besides the two blocks where four cases and one death were reported.
Bob Fishman named EVP, CFO and CAO;

Mario D'Ovidio named EVP and President, Consumer Solutions;

Jerome Pedretti promoted to EVP and President, Industrial Flow Technologies

Pentair plc (NYSE: PNR), a leading global water company, announced today three appointments to its executive leadership team, naming Bob Fishman as Executive Vice President, Chief Financial Officer and Chief Accounting Officer and Mario D'Ovidio as Executive Vice President and President of the Consumer Solutions segment. Jerome Pedretti has been promoted to Executive Vice President and President of the Industrial Flow Technologies segment. Each will report to John Stauch, Pentair President and CEO.

Fishman is a recognized leader with broad experience in finance. Prior to joining Pentair, he was formerly Executive Vice President and Chief Financial and Accounting Officer for NCR Corporation, a global omni-channel technology solutions company. He served in this role from 2009 to 2018, after which he was a Senior Advisor to NCR until 2019. Fishman began working at NCR in 1996 and held numerous finance roles of increasing responsibility until he assumed the Chief Financial Officer role in 2009. Prior to joining NCR, he held finance and treasury roles at AT&T Corporation and finance and audit roles at PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP. Fishman holds an HBA from the University of Western Ontario in London, Ontario and an MBA from The Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Fishman will join Pentair on April 20, and is expected to assume the EVP, CFO and CAO roles on May 1. Mark Borin, whose resignation as CFO was previously announced, is expected to remain with Pentair until early June.

D'Ovidio brings a significant amount of leadership experience in managing consumer sales and engagement through multiple channels to Pentair. D'Ovidio was most recently SVP, Sales, Service and Ownership Solutions at Electrolux. Prior to Electrolux, D'Ovidio led global product and services businesses at Husqvarna Group and Whirlpool Corporation. Earlier in his career, D'Ovidio held a number of product development, sales and strategy roles at Fiat Chrysler (formerly DaimlerChryslerAG). D'Ovidio holds a B.B.A from Wilfrid Laurier University in Ontario, Canada and an MBA from Athabasca University in Alberta, Canada. D'Ovidio will join Pentair on May 4.

Pedretti has been with Pentair for nearly 15 years and has held positions of increasing responsibility across Business Development, EMEA, Valves Controls and Aquatic Systems and most recently leading the Industrial and Flow Technologies Segment. Pedretti has made significant contributions to Pentair's strategy, operations and as a champion of talent. Pedretti's new role is also effective May 4.

In connection with these changes, Pentair is eliminating the role of Chief Operating Officer (COO) effective June 6, 2020. Karl Frykman, Executive Vice President and COO will continue to work with D'Ovidio and Pedretti to ensure a smooth transition of the segments and businesses, and will also continue to work with John Stauch in an advisory capacity until December 31, 2020.

"Karl joined Pentair in 2000, and nearly tripled the Pool business revenue and more than quadrupled the pool income during his tenure. His leadership and deep expertise in the water and pool industry drove industry-leading product innovation, enabled a customer-first sales team, elevated customer loyalty, and shaped one of the best, most respected team of pool experts in the industry," said Stauch.

After leading the Pool business, Frykman took on full responsibility for the Water Segment where he helped stabilize performance and authored a winning filtration strategy. In 2018, Frykman was appointed as EVP and Chief Operating Officer.

"I am grateful for Karl's quiet confidence, his measured and steady leadership style, and strong counsel to me, and I look forward to his continued advice this year as we continue to execute our residential and commercial water treatment strategies," Stauch continued. "Additionally, we are pleased to have completed our migration to our new segments and businesses, and I am excited about the leadership that Bob, Mario and Jerome will bring to their positions, and grateful for the contributions that Mark and Karl have made to Pentair."

CAUTION CONCERNING FORWARD-LOOKING STATEMENTS

This release contains statements that we believe to be "forward-looking statements" within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. All statements, other than statements of historical fact are forward-looking statements. Without limitation, any statements preceded or followed by or that include the words "targets," "plans," "believes," "expects," "intends," "will," "likely," "may," "anticipates," "estimates," "projects," "should," "would," "positioned," "strategy," "future" or words, phrases or terms of similar substance or the negative thereof, are forward-looking statements. These forward-looking statements are not guarantees of future performance and are subject to risks, uncertainties, assumptions and other factors, some of which are beyond our control, which could cause actual results to differ materially from those expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements. These factors include the timing of filing of our Form 10-Q and completing the executive transitions. Additional information concerning these and other factors is contained in our filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, including our Annual Report on Form 10-K for the year ended December 31, 2019. All forward-looking statements speak only as of the date of this release. Pentair plc assumes no obligation, and disclaims any obligation, to update the information contained in this release.

ABOUT PENTAIR PLC

At Pentair, we believe the health of our world depends on reliable access to clean water. We deliver a comprehensive range of smart, sustainable water solutions to homes, business and industry around the world. Our industry leading and proven portfolio of solutions enables our customers to access clean, safe water. Whether it's improving, moving or enjoying water, we help manage the world's most precious resource. Smart, Sustainable Water Solutions. For Life.

Pentair had revenue in 2019 of $3 billion, and trades under the ticker symbol PNR. With approximately 120 locations in 25 countries and 9,500 employees, we believe that the future of water depends on us. To learn more, visit Pentair.com.

View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20200415005199/en/

Contacts:

Jim Lucas

Senior Vice President, Investor Relations and Treasurer

Direct: 763-656-5575

Email: jim.lucas@pentair.com

Rebecca Osborn

Pentair Communications

Cell: 763.203.5326

Email: rebecca.osborn@pentair.com
DALLAS  The coronavirus death toll passed 300 in Texas on Tuesday, as the states juvenile prisons announced they will temporarily stop accepting young people from county and local jails to try to limit the diseases spread.

Texas Juvenile Justice Department Executive Director Camille Cain said in a statement that the measure will remain in place for two weeks.

The Texas Department of State Health Services reported Tuesday that more than 14,600 Texans have tested positive for COVID-19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus, and 318 people who had it have died. Nearly 2,600 have recovered.

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.

No young person in a state prison has tested positive for the disease, according to Brian Sweany, a spokesman for the juvenile corrections department. He said that last year the youth prisons admitted an average of 28 new people every two weeks.

In the adult prison system, 236 prisoners and 97 staff members or contractors had tested positive for COVID-19 as of Tuesday, according to the Texas Department of Criminal Justice. More than 26,000 people were locked down in 22 prisons that are keeping prisoners their cells in an effort to contain the virus, according to the TDCJs most recent numbers.

One inmate, a 62-year-old man with a coronavirus-related illness, died Saturday after being taken to a hospital from a Texas prison at the center of a federal lawsuit over health and sanitary conditions in the nations largest corrections system.

Leonard Clerkly was pronounced dead early Saturday morning, and a preliminary autopsy found he died of viral pneumonia linked to COVID-19, according to a TDCJ statement Tuesday. His death is under investigation.

Clerkly was being held at the Wallace Pack Unit, about 70 miles (113 kilometers) northwest of Houston. Two male Pack Unit inmates, aged 69 and 73, have alleged in a lawsuit that the conditions there violate their constitutional rights by endangering their health and safety amid the pandemic. They are suing on behalf of a class of older inmates in poor health. A hearing is scheduled for Wednesday.

Clerkly is the second Texas prison inmate to die of a coronavirus-related condition. Both had underlying health conditions, and a corrections officer hospitalized with a heart condition also has died of a coronavirus-related illness. The TDCJ said no one else at the Pack unit has been diagnosed with the disease.
Let's be honest with each other -- we are living through extremely stressful times.

The effects of the coronavirus on both the physical and mental health of our communities can feel overwhelming and exhausting, especially with many of the resources and spaces we use to combat these maladies being temporarily closed.

For many, the practice of acupuncture has been a safe and reliable space for releasing those physical or mental blocks and ailments, as Kim Ross, Founder & CEO of ORA explained:

"Acupuncture helps to balance the system and increase blood flow and circulation ... your body is a see-saw between internal and external factors and acupuncture helps balance the body both out, so you are less susceptible to inflammation and other stressors on your body."

When Ross opened ORA in New York City on March 5, her mission was to create a "new type of acupuncture experience" in a luxe spa-like setting:

"ORA is where modern design meets the practices of traditional Chinese medicine, bringing it to life in a space where anyone can disconnect with the outside world and reconnect with themselves over tea, tonics and acupuncture."

When the shelter in place order hit amid the coronavirus pandemic mid-March, ORA was forced to shutter its doors that had just newly opened -- but for Ross, this was just another opportunity to help clients on their wellness journey from afar:

"ORAs mission has always been to educate people on the benefits of acupuncture and Traditional Chinese Medicine and to create a space to help people feel better, and while we cannot do that at our physical space, we are still trying to do so via free video sessions and live chat ... while you may be limited in some ways environmentally, we want you to have some easy ideas of how you can take care of yourself at home to stay healthyespecially in times of crisis, its important to stay calm and grounded."

Phoebe Cheong

These virtual sessions will set patients up with acupuncturists to "address ways you can de-stress at home" which include different breathing & calming techniques, how to find and activate the correct acupressure points on your body as well as guide users through bettering their overall wellness journeys.

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Gabriel Sher, Director of Acupuncture at ORA, explained what exactly acupressure points are and how we can use them at home to emulate the benefits of an acupuncture session:

"Traditional Chinese medicine is based on 12 meridians that run throughout the body. When there are blockages in a meridian, the movement qi/energy or blood does not flow smoothly through the body which causes sickness, pain and disease ... [acupuncture] needles are placed in different points on the body to open the specific meridian that correlates which each individual's specific problem(s).

Ear and body acupuncture points help to relax the system and calm spirit. The acupuncture points help to rebalance the system, break up stagnation throughout the body and sedate the emotions ... acupressure and meditation/breathing are two practices I am trying to get all my patients actively doing. The acupressure points are focused on anxiety, stress and immunity."

Sher explained that the practice "can boost your immune system, give you more energy and release endorphins throughout your body. Under stress, our body activates the sympathetic nervous system while acupuncture releases the parasympathetic system which relaxes the system. Acupuncture helps to regulate hormones serotonin and noradrenaline and dopamine."

For someone like Ross, who suffers from Type-1 Diabetes and other health-related issues, patients can find that the practice aids in calming the digestive system and anxiety, while increasing overall energy and immunity.

Phoebe Cheong

Sher also offered up other top tips for finding a sense of peace and relaxation in anything but tranquil times:

"Taking 15 minutes in the morning and 15 min at night to sit in a quiet place and breathe and be present with how youre feeling emotionally and physically will help with your overall well being ... Reorganize your closets, get rid of stuff you don't need ... make your home warm and comfortable -- buy soft comfortable sheets, towels and bedding, move things around ... use essential oils and candles ... try apps that help with meditation and calm."

Both Sher and Ross also stress the importance of eating and drinking certain superfoods and supplements in order to maximize wellness and stay centered.

Sher recommends "incorporating foods that help to calm the system, increase serotonin level and dopamine levels such as turkey, spinach blueberries bananas walnuts, almonds and eggs" while Ross swears by "eating a lot of ginger and turmeric."

Phoebe Cheong

A major component of the ORA space is its tea + tonic bar, which is another element of wellness Ross is working to offer to clients virtually:

"We have worked with Colleen Cackowski, the herbalist who created ORAs tea + tonic bar, Earthbar, Erewhon Natural Foods and more, to provide recipes that are easy to recreate for our community. We have been posting them on our Instagram, @oraspace."

And though all these methods and practices will help, its important to remember that some days might just be harder than others  and thats more than ok, Ross shares:

I have been trying to accept the fact that it is normal and OK to have anxiety some days and to just take deep breaths and try not to focus on it and let it pass.
M inisters responded to mounting outrage over the treatment of care home residents today by forbidding the use of blanket Do Not Resuscitate agreements that were seen as condemning elderly people to die without proper treatment for coronavirus.

The Care Quality Commission was instructed to contact homes urgently telling them to tear up any agreements that would stop residents getting access to full healthcare if they choose it.

In another move to assuage public concern, Health Secretary Matt Hancock unveiled guidance dubbed a right to say goodbye, saying relatives should be allowed wherever possible to pay a farewell visit to ageing parents who are terminally ill and isolated with Covid-19.

The moves, part of a new four-part strategy to boost confidence in the treatment of elderly people, follows shock and anger at the mounting death toll in Britains care homes.

Matt Hancock: Everybody Going From Hospital Into Social Care Will Be Tested And Isolated

Official figures from the Department of Health and Social Care said Covid-19 has been identified in 2,099 care homes in England, forcing thousands of elderly residents to be kept in isolation in their rooms with no visits. Data from the Office for National Statistics showed 217 deaths linked to Covid-19 in care homes between January and April 3  but unofficial estimates put the true figure far higher, with one report claiming 4,000 was a realistic estimate.

Staff at homes have complained about being short of personal protection equipment (PPE), such as respirator grade masks and a lack of testing.

At the same time, many families have been sent letters from GPs asking them to give consent to DNR agreements, meaning that if their relative became severely ill with coronavirus there would be no attempt to revive them from heart or respiratory failure.

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

Some families have been asked to agree in advance that elderly relatives would not be taken to hospital at all, but made as comfortable as possible at the home. There have also been reports of elderly residents being asked to sign blanket DNR agreements in advance of any infection.

Mr Hancock will set out to turn the tide of public concern at this afternoons daily No 10 press conference. He expected to say that everyone has a right to say goodbye.

He will say: Wanting to be with someone you love, at the end of their life is one most human instincts there is.

"Coronavirus has made this much more difficult, and Ive heard heart-breaking stories of people dying without a loved one nearby.

All you need to know from the latest coronavirus briefing

"We are sensitively making sure we can limit the risk of infection while giving peoples closest loved ones the chance to properly say goodbye."

Officials stress that farewell visits to terminally ill people is already allowed under existing guidelines but has not been adhered to by many homes which fear bringing in infection or spreading it outside the home.

The new guidelines come on top of an overnight announcement that all care home residents and staff with symptoms of Covid-19 will from now on be tested

The guidance states: It is unacceptable for advance care plans, including Do Not Attempt Resuscitation orders, to applied in a blanket fashion to any group of people, and the CQC have been urgently contacting providers where this practice has been brought to their attention. Everyone at risk of losing mental capacity or nearing the end of their life should be offered the opportunity and supported, if they wish, to develop advance care planning that make their wishes clear, and to make arrangements, such as lasting power of attorney for health and social care decisions, to put their affairs in order.

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It stresses: This must always be a personalised process.

On the right to see ill relatives, the guidance states: Whilst we have recommended care homes limit unnecessary visits, we are clear that visits at the end of life are important both for the individual and their loved ones and should continue.

Visitors would be dressed in protective equipment and only allowed in where it was safe and the home was able to supervise safely.

Professor Martin Green, chief executive of Care England, which represents independent social care services, said there have been thousands of cases and deaths in care homes, while HC-One, Britains biggest care home operator, said two-thirds of its homes are affected and it has seen more than 300 deaths.

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As a result of the coronavirus pandemic, the United States Postal Service, which has run at a loss for years, is even more cash-strapped.

Based on USPS projections, it will lose US$2 billion each month during the pandemic. That prompted Postmaster General Megan Brennan to ask Congress for $50 billion in funds  $25 billion to offset lost revenue from declining mail volume due to the pandemic, and another $25 billion for modernization. USPS also requested a new $25 billion treasury loan and a mechanism to pay down $14 billion in existing public debt.

House Democrats warned that without the funding, the USPS might not make it past September without missing payrolls or suffering service interruptions.

With deliveries down, business mail down, advertisements down, and the shelter-in- place rules, the USPS faces its biggest financial crisis to date, said Ray Wang, principal analyst at Constellation Research.

They will need funding, he told the E-Commerce Times.

However, President Trump threatened to veto the $2.2 trillion Coronavirus Aid, Relief and Economic Security (CARES) Act if it should include any money for the USPS.

GOP lawmakers have been trying for years to privatize the USPS, which has been running at a loss.

Over the past decade, most of the government subsidies have been reduced or removed, Wang said.

Sens. Gary Peters, D-Mich., and Ron Johnson, R-Wis., tacked on a last-minute $10 billion Treasury Department loan to the CARES Act to keep the USPS going through the spring months, after Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin warned lawmakers against making a $13 billion grant that the USPS would not have to repay.

UPS has always advocated for a healthy and viable U.S. Postal Service, said UPS spokesperson Kyle Peterson.

We have also maintained that any relief package should also be accompanied by financial and transparency reforms that ensure the USPS doesnt use its universal service obligation to deliver mail across the country to subsidize its competitive offerings in the parcel shipping market, he told the E-Commerce Times.

A D V E R T I S E M E N T

There has been a general outcry in favor of saving the USPS, which Pew Research found is favorably viewed by a majority of both Democrat and Republican Americans. Several organizations have launched campaigns to save the service.

Why the USPS Needs a Cash Infusion

During the pandemic, less mail is being sent, and sales of postal supplies are a major source of funds for the service.

Meanwhile, delivering Amazon packages no longer is a good source of income. In April 2018, the USPS handled about 62 percent of all Amazon packages shipped in the U.S.

Now Amazons own delivery network, Amazon Logistics, handles between 46 and 50 percent of all Amazon orders in the U.S.

Amazon used USPS to deliver packages at below cost, Wang said. This is why you see USPS trucks out there on Sunday morning delivering Amazon packages.

However, Amazon has built up scale in delivering on the last mile, he pointed out, and in a few years will not need the USPS.

The USPS is caught between a rock and a hard place, said Rebecca Wettemann, principal at Valoir.

Its mandate to provide a service is particularly difficult when its expected to compete with the Amazons of the world, she told the E-Commerce times.

Meanwhile, the services costs have gone up because it needs to equip employees with personal protective equipment, and postal service workers are being affected by the pandemic.

More than 6,000 postal workers are in self-quarantine because of exposure. Nearly 500 have tested positive for the coronavirus, while 462 are presumed to have been infected. Nineteen have died.

A D V E R T I S E M E N T

The USPS and Employment

If the USPS collapses, 630,000 jobs will be at risk, according to Common Dreams.

The service is one of the top five employers in the U.S., Wang noted.

The USPS is a massively vital service, he said. Its a part of critical infrastructure like interstate highways, the Internet, banking systems and military bases. This is the physical connectivity network.

Impact on E-Commerce

E-commerce has helped many large brick-and-mortar retailers, whose profiles have risen considerably in the online sales sector.

In February, Walmart ranked second behind Amazon in terms of retail e-commerce sales, while The Home Depot stood at fifth, Best Buy at seventh, Target eighth, Costco ninth, and Macys tenth, according to eMarketer.

Large companies with an online presence will not be impacted much if the USPS collapses because their high volumes mean they will have alternatives and the ability for volume price negotiations, Valoirs Wettemann observed.

Further, with store delivery becoming more widespread, theyre more likely to have the resources, at least in some areas, to deliver to the last mile themselves, as Amazon does already, she pointed out.

However, USPS is the most cost-effective option for a lot of smaller firms selling online, Wettemann noted. Elimination or reduction of USPS services would make staying in business more costly for them.

On the other hand, the SMBs that rely on the USPS also use FedEx and UPS, Wang pointed out, noting that many SMBs use Amazon Logistics as well.

Consumers wont be hit by increased shipping costs if the USPS collapses because these are now built into pricing, and there will be competition from new entrants to the courier industry, he said.

In addition to financial assistance, the USPS will need to charge Amazon more to get to market prices for the last mile, suggested Wang, and its critical infrastructure may need reform as mail volumes drop, shipping volumes shift to in-store pickup and contactless delivery, and its pension costs increase.
Lying in a hospital bed last month, Madhvi Aya understood what was happening to her.

She had been a doctor in India, then trained to become a physician assistant after she immigrated to the United States. She had worked for a dozen years at Woodhull Medical Center, a public hospital in Brooklyn, where she could see the coronavirus tearing a merciless path through the city.

Within days of her last shift as a caregiver, Ms. Aya became a patient. She had worked in Woodhulls understaffed emergency room, taking medical histories, ordering tests and asking about symptoms. Now she had become infected.

Ms. Aya, 61, was alone in a hospital, less than two miles from her husband and 18-year-old daughter on Long Island, who could not visit her. She did not have the solace of familiar colleagues; she had been admitted to a different facility nearer her home. In a text with her family, she described horrible chest pain from trying to get out of bed.

I have not improved the way should have been, she wrote her husband, Raj, on March 23.

As she grew sicker, her texts came less frequently and in short, sporadic bursts.
Washington, April 15, 2020 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- NRB, the nations pre-eminent association of Christian broadcasters and communicators, applauded the recent move by the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) in support of religious freedom.

The Department filed a Statement of Interest on Tuesday in support of a church in Mississippi that was holding parking lot worship services in which congregants listened to their pastor preach over their car radios while sitting in their cars in the church parking lot with their windows rolled up. The City of Greenville initially fined congregants $500 per person for attending these parking lot services  while permitting citizens to attend nearby drive-in restaurants, even with their windows open.

NRB thanks U.S. Attorney General William P. Barr and the Department of Justice for ensuring that the Constitutional rights of religious institutions and believers are not infringed upon even in tumultuous times such as these, said Troy Miller, CEO of NRB. The Attorney General rightly noted that the government may not impose special restrictions on religious activity that do not also apply to similar nonreligious activity. People of faith are not second-class citizens.

Craig Parshall, NRBs General Counsel, added, Attorney General Barrs leadership in the current Department of Justice has prioritized religious liberty in a remarkable way. This is just one more example of DOJs intervention on behalf of rights of faith that the Founders would have heartily supported.

In his announcement, the Attorney General said the Justice Department will continue to ensure that religious freedom remains protected if any state or local government, in their response to COVID-19, singles out, targets, or discriminates against any house of worship for special restrictions.

About NRB

NRB is a nonpartisan, international association of Christian communicators whose member organizations represent millions of listeners, viewers, and readers. NRBs mission is two-fold: To protect the free speech rights of our members to speak Biblical truth, by advocating those rights in governmental, corporate, and media sectors; and To foster excellence, integrity, and accountability in our membership by providing networking, educational, ministry, and relational opportunities. Learn more at www.nrb.org.

Craig Parshall, General Counsel

NRB

202-543-0073

cparshall@nrb.org


Opinion Article

15 April 2020

Nothing could have prepared us for the COVID-19 outbreak. It is hard to determine the true impact of this pandemic until the dust settles and the virus is completely contained, but until then, we have to prepare and come out of this stronger than ever. To win the battle, its essential to join it and fight it together. The hospitality and food & beverage (F&B) industry in India, along with the government, are constantly working to alleviate the impact.

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As per the latest HVS Report, the overall revenue of the Indian hotel sector in 2020 is set to decline by anywhere between USD 8.85 Bn to USD 10 Bn, reflecting an erosion of 39% to 45% compared to last year. Besides the actual business loss, the hotel owners will incur losses due to fixed operating expenses, debt repayments, interest payments and several other compliances required of them. In such a scenario with plummeting occupancies and revenues, the hotel leaders, operators and staff across all levels are constantly in fear of layoffs and salary cuts.

Even during such uncertain times, the hospitality industry in India is working tirelessly and has left no stone unturned when offering its services. Hotels are preparing fresh, packed meals for the needy and offering hotel rooms as quarantine centers across the nation. Every individual is doing what they know best  serving their guests and their country to the best of their abilities, while putting their own needs on hold.

The Federation of Hotel & Restaurant Associations of India (FHRAI), through its member hotels, has voluntarily offered the Government access to over 45,000 hotel rooms from across the country. The rooms have been set aside for inbound tourists who may require quarantining, tourists who are stuck in the country because of the travel ban, and doctors and healthcare workers. These hotels range from five-stars to standalone properties and have been selected based on the cluster regions identified by the Government authorities. A few examples of how the industry is stepping forward, in this hour of need, have been mentioned below.

Hotels as Quarantine Facilities:

182 Hotel rooms across the IBIS, The Lemon Tree Premier and Red Fox in Aerocity near Indira Gandhi International (IGI) Airport, New Delhi, have been set aside as paid quarantine facilities, at minimal rates, for those flying-in from abroad.

Nine hotel chains, including Lemon Tree, Radisson Hotels and Intercontinental Hotels Group (IHG), are collectively offering 392 rooms as paid quarantine facilities in Gurugram.

JW Marriott Sahar Mumbai and Renaissance Powai is offering 300 rooms to the BMC for Non COVID -19 isolation passengers at deeply discounted rates.

Apart from ITC Maratha in Mumbai, ITC Hotels has set aside rooms in its Bengaluru hotels for quarantining people.

Zostel is providing its properties as quarantine centers, if needed by the government. Zostel Srinagar has already been set aside to serve affected people in Kashmir.

OYO will be offering sanitized beds and facilities in certain Covid-19 exclusive hotels that have been identified within the proximity of Apollo Hospitals in 6 cities namely, Mumbai, Delhi, Hyderabad, Chennai, Bengaluru and Kolkata for self-quarantine and isolation of suspected Covid-19 patients, requiring medical observation and supervision.

Meanwhile, the Mahindra Group has offered to convert Mahindra Holiday Resorts as temporary care facilities.

Providing Food for the Needy:

Besides offering rooms to the BMC, JW Marriott Sahar Mumbai and Renaissance Powai are also distributing food to various organizations such as Seven Hills Hospital, Police Stations and BMC workers daily. Personal protective equipment (PPE) were also distributed to several Police Stations.

Pullman and Novotel Aerocity are working with the Earth Savor Foundation to organize food for 300 destitute people in Delhi NCR.

Ritz-Carlton Bangalore recently joined the gargantuan effort of the authorities to feed the homeless and migrant workers, as well as people quarantined in hospitals.

The Pride Group of Hotels is distributing 1,000 food parcels every day till 14th April 2020 (lockdown period) in the cities of Pune, Ahmedabad, New Delhi, Kolkata, Chennai, Bangalore, and Nagpur.

700 members of the Kerala Hotel & Restaurant Association (KHRA) are supporting the state government in their community kitchen initiative. The government is providing provisions and fuel, while the KHRA members are contributing their kitchens, utensils and vessels for this noble cause.

The Oberoi Gurgaon and Radisson Gurgaon have partnered to send 500 daily packed meals to the under privileged in Delhi NCR.

The Park Hotel Hyderabad is distributing hygienic and fresh meals to the greater Hyderabad Municipal Corporation cleaners and workers, along with under privileged people and traffic police. Twice a week, over 50 meals are distributed to all in need.

Providing Rooms for the Medical Fraternity:

IHCL is offering rooms at 8 of their hotels across India for the medical fraternity to stay while they combat the spread of the virus. The company is also providing complimentary meals, daily, to all the medical staff and patients admitted in Kasturba Hospital and other Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) hospitals, through its subsidiary Taj Sats.

The Hyatt Regency, Lemon Tree, The Piccadily and Fairfield by Marriott in Lucknow have been converted into quarantine zones by the government for the medical staff who are in constant contact with the coronavirus patients.

All doctors serving in Delhi's Lok Nayak Hospital and GB Pant Hospital on COVID-19 duty are housed at The Lalit New Delhi. The Lalit is also working with the Delhi government in providing meals to the stranded labourers & migrants. The Lalit Group has been distributing ration to the Transgender Community who are otherwise left out of most welfare programmes.

300 rooms per day have been offered to Medical staff of Seven Hills Hospital by Renaissance Powai.

Wellness Initiatives and Other Contributions:

Six Senses Hotels Resorts and Spas has started a live selection of #AtHomeWithSixSenses meditations with Six Senses hosts, including Director of Training, on the Facebook Page.

The Radisson Hotel group has contributed INR 35 lakhs to the Prime Minister's Relief Fund and also donated to United Way Delhi for Covid-19 related initiatives. The Group's Gurgaon, Delhi, Lucknow and Chennai hotels are also offering free meals to the needy and animals in the area.

A few hotel chains have gone a step further and entered partnerships to find more creative solutions. IHCL, through its Taj Public Service Welfare Trust, is joining hands with Chef Sanjeev Kapoor to provide nutritious meals to doctors and medical staff at hospitals. Ginger has partnered with MakeMyTrip to provide rooms to the medical professionals and support staff who are at work. Meanwhile, Oyo with Zomato are providing food at the isolation rooms offered by them.

Indian Food & Beverage Industry has Also Joined the Fight Against COVID-19

The Indian F&B industry and local restaurant businesses, employing over 7.3 million people, have been severely impacted by the nationwide shutdown aimed at checking the Covid-19 outbreak. Numerous restaurants across the country have created funds and are distributing meals to the needy whilst practicing safety and hygiene SOPs.

The National Restaurant Association of India has launched a "Feed the needy" campaign where donations are being used to serve meals across the country. As of 5th April 2020, over 3.5 lakh meals had been served.

Dineout has launched "Restaurant Vouchers" that customers can purchase now and redeem later at 20,000+ partner restaurants in the next 6 months once the pandemic subsides. The funds from these vouchers are being directly transferred to restaurants without any charge.

Beyond financial support from customers, Dineout has also started an online petition to support NRAI, requesting the Finance Ministry and Government of India to help restaurants with employee unemployment pay cover, moratorium on upcoming statutory dues, delay in utility bill payments, holiday/temporary stoppage on EMI payments & interest, freezing rental dues & restoration of Input Tax Credit on GST for all restaurants.

Our hotel and restaurant heroes' commitment to serve the society remains undeterred, even during these unprecedented times, as they work together to help the country tide over the current crisis.
Malaysian anti-corruption campaigners expressed concern Wednesday that the United States had returned $300 million in funds stolen from the scandal-hit 1MDB state fund to an "unelected" government. Billions of dollars were plundered from the sovereign wealth fund and spent on everything from a luxury yacht to artwork in a fraud allegedly involving Malaysian ex-leader Najib Razak and his inner circle. Najib was ejected in 2018 elections largely due to public anger over the scandal, and a new reformist government then began the process of recovering money stolen from the investment vehicle. On Tuesday the US Justice Department announced it had sent $300 million stolen from the fund to Malaysia -- and that it had now returned or helped the Southeast Asian nation recover more than $1 billion in funds and assets lost in the fraud. The US is among several countries investigating the scam. The Center to Combat Corruption and Cronyism, a Malysian activist group, welcomed the return of the funds, but said it was worried they were in the hands of an "unelected" government which had "ruthlessly seized power from the people". The administration voted-in at the 2018 election, in the country's first change of power for six decades, fell apart several weeks ago amid bitter infighting and a new coalition took power without fresh polls. The new government includes Najib's party, the United Malays National Organisation, and there has been widespread anger that his scandal-mired political vehicle has returned to office. The Maklaysian activists urged the government to be clear about how the money would be used. "The people of Malaysia are the rightful owners of the returned funds," the group said. Najib, who denies wrongdoing, is on trial over the 1MDB scandal. Malaysia's new government has vowed to fight corruption, and insists high-profile graft trials will continue. Hundreds of millions of dollars were looted from Malaysia's 1MDB fund
The Belarus Committee of ICOMOS announces the collection of cases on the effectiveness of the State List of Historical and Cultural Values as a tool of the safeguarding the cultural monuments.

Belarusan media regularly boil over the news of the destruction or neglect of monuments important to our culture. Cultural heritage experts, businessmen, activists, and many others are outraged by the actions or inaction of government officials. It is generally accepted to include a building in the State List as the first and the most important step in its rescue. But what happens next? And does it sometimes happen that, in practice, the inclusion of a monument in the State List does not always guarantee its preservation, while many other non-included monuments acquire a new life, primarily through the efforts of individuals or communities?

The Belarus Committee of ICOMOS invites you to look more closely at the whole picture of such heterogeneous situations and collectively analyze the effectiveness of the State List as the first cultural policy instrument in the preservation of heritage.

The organization is looking for cases that illustrate the following scenarios:

If the valuable heritage site was threatened with deterioration and its inclusion in the State list of historical and cultural values really contributed to its preservation and restoration, the site was put into functioning;

If an object with a given status of historical and cultural value has been abandoned and neglected for years, the investor is not there or after several attempts to start work the investor refuses to continue;

If the valuable heritage object does not have the status of historical and cultural value, however, its restoration takes place according to the rules and methods with respect its authentic elements and the role in history;

If the civic activity organized around a valuable heritage object for the purpose of its preservation and revitalization has really promoted its restoration and commissioning, whether it was entered in the State List or not.

You can submit your case for consideration by June 10, 2020 (inclusive) by sending an email to the box: belarus.icomos@gmail.com.

The description should include:

the name of the object/site, its location;

its short history (100-200 words);

contacts of the person or organization from which we can learn more.

The collected cases will be presented during the Scientific Conference The Right to Heritage and the State List of Historical and Cultural Property: Challenges and Decisions to be held on June 19-20, 2020.

The event organizers seek to analyze illustrations of the effectiveness or inefficiency of a such tool as the State List, in a dialogue with the responsible authorities. And the final analytical document, compiled from the collected case studies, will allow experts (among whom may be you) to outline the next steps in advocating for necessary changes to the legal regulation of the work with heritage.

Information

Right to Heritage a series of joint events of the Belarus Committee of ICOMOS and the International NGO EuroBelarus, dedicated to the development of relevant and effective heritage governance practices of professional, local and other communities.

The first event  already in the context of COVID-19 pandemic  was an online seminar on Participatory Governance of Cultural Heritage: Searching for an Effective Model for Belarus, where 18 community and cultural activists discussed ways to develop participatory practices for diverse communities. A conference, lectures and a round table with foreign experts in the field of heritage are expected next.
"Krista has extensive knowledge of the insurance industry, particularly with the exclusive agent model, and a history of driving results," McAnena said. "We look forward to her leadership as we continue to enhance the Farmers Agency Owner experience and focus on strategic growth."

Conte joins Farmers with more than 15 years at Allstate where she most recently served as the Field Vice President in the California region. In this role, she built strategies to support the profitable growth of the state's property and casualty business, specialty lines and financial services through exclusive agencies. Among her career accomplishments, Conte also led the development of national programming during her tenure in California, launching an initiative designed to support recruiting and retention of agency staff.

Conte has a bachelor's degree in English from State University of New York at Stony Brook.

To learn more about Farmers Insurance, visit www.farmers.com.

About Farmers Insurance

"Farmers Insurance" and "Farmers" are tradenames for a group of insurers providing insurance for automobiles, homes and small businesses and a wide range of other insurance and financial services and products. Farmers Insurance is proud to serve more than 5 million households with over 15 million individual policies nationally, through the efforts of more than 45,000 exclusive and independent agents and approximately 19,000 employees. Farmers Insurance Exchange, the largest of the three primary insurers that make up Farmers Insurance, is recognized as one of the largest U.S. companies on the 2019 Fortune 500 list.

For more information about Farmers Insurance, visit Farmers.com, Twitter and Instagram, @WeAreFarmers, or Facebook.com/FarmersInsurance.

Contact: External Communications

Farmers Insurance

(818) 965-0007

[email protected]

SOURCE Farmers Insurance

Related Links

www.farmersinsurance.com


As the number of new COVID-19 cases shows promising signs of falling to single digits, a mobile phone app could play a crucial role in opening the economy without risking a second wave of the pandemic.

Tracking apps are being used in Asia to help find contacts of infected patients. Credit:Bloomberg

The Age revealed on Tuesday that the federal government is considering asking Australians to download an app developed in Singapore called TraceTogether, which identifies people who have come into contact with someone diagnosed with the disease. Those people can then be asked to test for the disease and, if need be, self-isolate for 14 days to stop it spreading.

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The tracking app, one of several in use across Asia, would provide a back-up for hard-pressed public health officials who now have to do contact tracing by interviewing anyone diagnosed with COVID-19 about what they have done in the previous week. Most infected people are happy to help, but since COVID-19 can be contagious for as long as a week before symptoms show, it can be hard to remember all your potential contacts.
Raipur, April 15 : The outbreak of novel coronavirus has affectcd all the people. Apart from the doctors and nurses, who are fighting on the frontlines, there are other heroes too who are going the extra mile to help. Small children in Chhattisgarh are showing the way how to help the government in the fight against the deadly virus.

A seven-year-old boy named Ishan from Ambikapur in north Chhattisgarh has donated his 'entire saving' to the CM relief fund. He has donated Rs 911 to CM relief find, a heart warming story in such grim times.

Chief Minister Bhupesh Baghel has said this child is a source of inspiration for all. Citing examples of mythologial Ramayan when even small creatures came to help Lord Ram in the fight against Ravan, the chief minister said, this child's contribution will be remembered for a long time.

On the lines of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, various chief ministers have also created fund to fight novel coronavirus.
LAFAYETTE, Ind. (WLFI)- Imagine walking into a gas station to take out some cash from the ATM, and when you get your receipt it says you have over 6 million dollars in your account.

"I was able to get 20 dollars out and when it printed my receipt it showed the available balance and the ledger balance to be six million four-hundred dollars," said Robert Nikola who was surprised to see such a large amount of money in his account.

Nikola isn't the only one to have gotten a larger amount than expected. Charles Calvin from New Chicago, Indiana had 8 million dollars deposited into his account. Both seem to believe it has something to do with the stimulus checks the IRS began being deposited over the weekend.

"After I got this receipt naturally I was concerned, added Nikola. You hear about these scams and stuff you don't want to pull out any money let alone a gracious amount."

Even Nikola's bank didn't have an answer for why his statement showed as much money as it did.

"The bank had no explanation. In fact, they didn't even show it on their end," said Nikola.

Unlike the man from up north, Nikola has yet to receive his stimulus check, which as a full-time student is something he and his family are looking forward to.

"We are looking forward to that stimulus. It's definitely going to be a big help to us and everyone else," added Nikola.

As for the receipt itself, Nikola has plans to keep the memory alive.

"I told my wife I am going to frame the receipt since we will probably never have this much money in our bank account, said Nikola.

We did reach out to an IRS spokesperson to see if they had any idea why this was happening, but we did not receive a response.
[April 15, 2020] Draganfly Board Member and Former Whitehouse Chief of Staff and US Secretary of Transportation, Andrew H. Card, Jr., to be featured on Newsmax

The Segment Will Focus on Draganfly Being Selected to Integrate Health Diagnosis Technology to Help Detect & Monitor COVID-19 (Coronavirus) Los Angeles, CA, April 15, 2020 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Draganfly Inc. (CSE: DFLY) (OTCQB: DFLYF) (FSE: 3U8) (Draganfly or the Company), an award-winning, industry-leading manufacturer within the commercial Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV), Remotely Piloted Aircraft Systems (RPAS), and unmanned vehicle sector, announced today that Mr. Andy Card, Jr., member of Draganflys board of directors will be featured on Newsmax.com on April 15th at 12PM EST. Mr. Card, the second longest tenured White House Chief of Staff, has served in senior government roles under three U.S. Presidents. Mr. Card also served as Deputy Chief of Staff and then as a Cabinet Member for President George H.W. Bush, as the 11th Secretary of Transportation. The segments on Newsmax will feature Draganflys recent announcement it has been selected as the exclusive global systems integrator for a project (the Vital Intelligence Project) with Vital Intelligence Inc., a healthcare data services and deep learning company in conjunction with the University of South Australia, using technology developed with help from the Australian Department of Defence Science and Technology Group (the DST). The Vital Intelligence Project is a health and respiratory monitoring platform involving utilizing new and existing camera networks as well as UAVs and RPAS being immediately commercialized for health monitoring and detection of infectious and respiratory conditions including monitoring temperatures, heart and respiratory rates, amongst crowds, workforces, airlines, cruise ships, potential at-risk groups, i.e., seniors in care facilities, convention centers, border crossings or critical infrastructure facilities. The breakthrough technology was developed in a collaboration between the University of South Australia and the DST. 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. To watch the video of the Vital Intelligence project news release click here . To watch the live stream of the interview on Newsmax click here.



About Draganfly Draganfly Inc. (CSE: DFLY; OTCQB: DFLYF; FSE: 3U8) is the creator of quality, cutting-edge, UVS and software that revolutionizes the way people do business. Recognized as being at the forefront of technology for over 22 years, Draganfly is an award-winning, industry-leading manufacturer within the commercial UAV and UVS space, serving the public safety, agriculture, industrial inspections and mapping and surveying markets. Draganfly is a company driven by passion, ingenuity and the need to provide efficient solutions and first-class services to its customers around the world with the goal of saving time, money and lives.

For more information on Draganfly, please visit us at draganfly.com .

For additional investor information, visit https://www.thecse.com/en/listings/technology/draganfly-inc , https://www.otcmarkets.com/stock/DFLYF/overview or https://www.boerse-frankfurt.de/aktie/draganfly-inc . Media Contact

Arian Hopkins

email: [email protected] Company Contact

Phone: 1-800-979-9794

Email: [email protected] Forward-Looking Statements This release contains certain forward looking statements and certain forward-looking information as defined under applicable Canadian securities laws. Forward-looking statements and information can generally be identified by the use of forward-looking terminology such as may, will, expect, intend, estimate, anticipate, believe, continue, plans or similar terminology. Forward-looking statements and information are based on forecasts of future results, estimates of amounts not yet determinable and assumptions that, while believed by management to be reasonable, are inherently subject to significant business, economic and competitive uncertainties and contingencies. Forward-looking statements and information are subject to various known and unknown risks and uncertainties, many of which are beyond the ability of the Company to control or predict, that may cause the Companys actual results, performance or achievements to be materially different from those expressed or implied thereby, and are developed based on assumptions about such risks, uncertainties and other factors set out here in, including but not limited to: the potential impact of epidemics, pandemics or other public health crises, including the current outbreak of the novel coronavirus known as COVID-19 on the Companys business, operations and financial condition, the successful integration of technology, the inherent risks involved in the general securities markets; uncertainties relating to the availability and costs of financing needed in the future; the inherent uncertainty of cost estimates and the potential for unexpected costs and expenses, currency fluctuations; regulatory restrictions, liability, competition, loss of key employees and other related risks and uncertainties. The Company undertakes no obligation to update forward-looking information except as required by applicable law. Such forward-looking information represents managements best judgment based on information currently available. No forward-looking statement can be guaranteed and actual future results may vary materially. Accordingly, readers are advised not to place undue reliance on forward-looking statements or information. The CSE has not in any way passed upon the merits of the listing of the common shares of Draganfly and has neither approved nor disapproved the contents of this news release. Listing of the common shares of Draganfly is subject to satisfaction of the listing requirements of the CSE, including customary deliverables in satisfaction of the conditional approval.

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A child has allegedly been operating as a sex worker in Melbourne's north-east.

Three people have been charged after police determined the underage person was working at a Heidelberg West brothel between August and September last year.

It's not known how old the child was at the time of the alleged activity at the Vernon Avenue business.

A 32-year-old man and 50-year-old woman from Mitcham were charged along with a 60-year-old Doncaster man. Arrests were made in October last year.

All three were charged with: causing a child to take part in sex work; obtaining payment for sexual services by a child; agreement for provision of sexual services by a child; and allowing a child to take part in sex work.
While we have lived in the district, our family has been so well cared for by Highlands administrators, teachers, staff, students, parents, and families, Phillips said in the release. I am honored to do my best to serve our community as a member of the school board and grateful for the opportunity.


The Congress on Wednesday demanded a thorough probe into the gathering of migrants at Mumbai's Bandra railway station and smelt a political conspiracy behind a social media campaign to impose President's rule in Maharashtra.

Congress leader Rahul Gandhi also demanded that immediate ration cards be issued to the poor to enable them to get free ration, while Priyanka Gandhi urged the Prime Minister to help migrant workers stranded at various places in the country.

Seeking to blame the Centre, Maharashtra minister Ashok Chavan cited a South Central railway communication of April 13 about special trains for migrants, saying it could have triggered the gathering at Bandra.

There was, however, no immediate comment from the Railway Ministry in Delhi about the allegations made.

The Congress leader said the incident is an attempt to disrupt communal harmony in the state and negate the state's efforts in fighting coronavirus.

Congress leader Rahul Gandhi demanded issuance of emergency ration cards to the poor who are struggling without food in this crisis.

"We appeal to the government to issue emergency ration cards in this crisis, for all those who are struggling due to lack of ration in this lockdown. Lakhs of Indians are not able to avail PDS facilities without ration cards. While grains are rotting in warehouses, hundreds of hungry stomachs are waiting. Inhuman!," he said in a tweet in Hindi.

Congress general secretary Priyanka Gandhi Vadra urged Prime Minister Narendra Modi to help stranded workers reach their villages, saying arrangements for sending them home should have been made in advance.

"For God's sake, Narendra Modi ji please help them," Priyanka Gandhi said while highlighting the plight of migrant workers.

Addressing a press conference through a video link, Ashok Chavan said the police is investigating the matter to ascertain who is behind the instigation of migrants and the guilty will be brought to book.

Chaotic scenes were witnessed at the Bandra railway station on Tuesday, after a large number of migrant workers gathered there forcing the police to resort to lathocharge to disperse them.

Migrant workers have been stranded at various places, including at state borders, ever since the nationwide lockdown was imposed on March 24.

The Congress has also asked the government to probe the "role" of the Railways Ministry for migrant crisis in the country.

Chavan cited a April 13 letter by deputy chief commercial manager of South Central Railways in Secunderabad for starting 'Jansadharan specials' to clear stranded migrant workers.

Asked if he saw a conspiracy behind the Bandra gathering, Chavan said, "The matter is being investigated. The chief minister has made a statement that this matter is going to be investigated."





He said the social Media is already trying to play out this matter putting the entire blame on the government authorities.

"I think, we all know who is patronizing the social media people in the country. There was this trending in the social media about imposition of presidents rule in state of Maharashtra which certainly smacks of a political conspiracy. As you can see this is not a time to play politics, so, let us first investigate into it and this was a very serious incident," he noted.

"Whatever has happened yesterday, the letter of the railway department is on record. So, all these are under investigation...

"The Government can't be responsible for creating this. What is the point, why should the Government do such a thing," he asked.

The PWD minister said the question is who has done it should be definitely caught and action should be taken against.

"I feel this needs a proper thorough investigation. The police is already on their jobs and I think, there are some people behind this who want to disturb the communal harmony, which is existing in the state of Maharashtra, disrupt the efforts taken by the government to prevent corona and to create a very difficult situation whereby,"Chavan said.

The Congress has also questioned the government on why railway bookings continued during the lockdown.

"After all, why does every disaster break on the poor and the workers? Why are decisions not taken while taking them into consideration. Why are they left on God.

"Why was booking of railway tickets allowed to continue during the lockdown," Priyanka Gandhi asked.

She said the workers were the backbone of the country and the government should help them reach their villages.

"Why were special trains not arranged? Their money has finished and so have their stock of ration. They are feeling insecure and want to go home in their villages. Arrangements should have been made for them. They can still be helped with proper planning," the Congress general secretary said in a tweet in Hindi.

Sepa



rately, Congress leader Ahmed Patel said the "role" of the Railways Ministry must be probed for the crisis among the migrants.

"Why were train services abruptly stopped leaving migrants stranded? Why was railways accepting bookings despite no clarity on lockdown extension," Patel asked.

Maharashtra's Revenue minister Balasaheb Thorat, who is also the PCC chief, said the state government is providing ration to 7.5 crore people in Maharashtra through food security act. He said the state is also providing food to seven lakh poor and vulnerable people everyday.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
MANCHESTER, England, April 15, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- Cereal giant Kellogg's has pledged to donate thousands of boxes of cereal and snacks to help those in need across the UK.

Working with its charity partners, including national charity FareShare, the company will distribute a minimum of three million servings of food, which equates to 90,000kg, to food banks, schools, charities and NHS staff nationwide.

Kellogg's will also donate funds to help with the distribution of the food, ensuring that the donations get to those who need them most in a safe and efficient way.

Kellogg's VP and head of UK business, Chris Silcock, commented: "This is a very challenging time for so many people and inevitably the most vulnerable are those impacted the most. That's why we are doing our part by providing much needed food and cash donations to charities across the UK to support the vital work they are doing. Our goal is to get as much food as we can to the people who need it most."

FareShare Commercial Director, Alyson Walsh, said: 'We're extremely grateful to Kellogg's for their support of our COVID-19 crisis response. As a long-standing and valued FareShare food partner, Kellogg's has recognised our need to access important ambient foods, such as cereal, which enable us to plan our food provision to those in need both now and in the coming months.'

Kellogg's has a long history of helping to deliver support to families and children in need through its school breakfast club programme, which it has been running since 1998. At this time, the company is continuing to support schools that are staying open to care for the children of key workers, including those in the NHS.

Kellogg's is also supporting the Publicis 'Shop Responsibly' campaign, which encourages people to: stay home, stay safe, respect elderly people and NHS workers' shopping hours, keep two metres apart and only buy what's needed.

For more information please visit www.kelloggs.co.uk
Source: Xinhua| 2020-04-15 18:57:45|Editor: Xiang Bo

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BRUSSELS, April 15 (Xinhua) -- The European Union's foreign policy chief expressed his regret on Wednesday over the U.S. decision to suspend funding to the World Health Organization (WHO).

U.S. President Donald Trump announced on Tuesday that his administration is halting the nation's funding to the WHO.

Josep Borrell, High Representative of the EU for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, said on Twitter that he "Deeply regret US decision to suspend funding to @WHO. There is no reason justifying this move at a moment when their efforts are needed more than ever to help contain & mitigate the #coronavirus pandemic. Only by joining forces we can overcome this crisis that knows no borders."
GAITHERSBURG, Md.

April 15, 2020

Maryland

Brian Larsen

Maryland

Virginia

Washington, D.C.

Maryland

Washington, DC

Virginia

April 17, 2020

/PRNewswire-PRWeb/ -- As businesses continue to navigate the global pandemic, many have pivoted their operations to contribute to Covid-19 relief efforts. RestoraPet, a-based pet supplement company, has announced it will lead the charge on manufacturing much-needed hand sanitizer and start producing tens of thousands of bottles of premium-quality hand sanitizer under the company's newest sub-brand, Rejuvien. As a registered nurse and a former director of a nursing home who self-funded the launch of RestoraPet during his tenure at Oakview Nursing Home, RestoraPet CEOwill donate the Rejuvien hand sanitizer to nursing homes throughoutand"In these trying times, it's increasingly important for us to do what we can to provide relief for our health care heroes," said Larsen. "I have a unique understanding of how the elderly are disproportionately affected by the COVID-19 pandemic, as a registered nurse and former director of a nursing home, and can personally empathize with the needs of their health care providers."The bottles of hand sanitizer will be delivered to dozens of nursing homes and healthcare facilities throughout, and, and will be available to all residents as well as medical and administrative staff, to help prevent the spread of COVID-19 and reduce overall health risks for all who enter the facilities."Potomac Valley Rehabilitation and Healthcare Center is grateful to its community partner, RestoraPet Inc., for its generous donation of hand sanitizer. The health and safety of our residents and staff is our top priority. This donation will certainly help us in our continued efforts to remain free of COVID-19," said Michelle McEyeson, the facility's Administrator.The Rejuvien hand sanitizer RestoraPet is producing reflects the company's commitment to quality and control by adhering to the exact standards set by the World Health Organization (WHO) and the Centers for Disease Control (CDC).The first batch of hand sanitizer is expected to be ready for donation by. A limited number of bottles will also be made available to for-profit businesses to purchase. The proceeds from those sales will help fund further donations to healthcare facilities.RestoraPet is a health supplement that restores wellness in older pets experiencing age-related decline and boosts the health and well-being of younger pets. To learn more about RestoraPet, visit http://www.restorapet.com.SOURCE RestoraPet
NEW YORK, April 15, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- Harry's today announced a $1 million donation of shaving supplies to hospitals in New York City and around the country.

In partnership with the office of the Mayor's Fund to Advance New York City, $500,000 in shaving supplies will be distributed to the 11 public hospitals across New York City, which continues to be the center of the pandemic in the US. Another $500,000 in Harry's shaving supplies will be made available to hospitals across the U.S. Hospitals in need can submit requests for Harry's product by reaching out to [email protected].

As the pandemic has worsened over the last few weeks, shaving and grooming have taken on new importance. Per recommendations from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), medical workers on the frontlines must remain clean-shaven in order for their N95 masks and personal protective equipment (PPE) to properly protect them from contracting COVID-19 (link here to CDC guidance). Many medical professionals are working long hours to care for the influx of patients, and in order to protect their own families, many do not return home. Grooming and personal care products are thus desperately needed at hospitals, and Harry's hopes that this commitment will help serve that need.

"New York City has always been home to Harry's. The medical professionals on the front lines are true heroes, and it's our duty to do what we can to support them in our city and across the country. We've heard loud and clear from healthcare professionals that there is a need for our products, and we want to help meet that need," said Harry's co-founder and co-CEO Jeff Raider.

Harry's is also encouraging anyone struggling with mental health challenges during this time to seek help by reaching out to Crisis Text Line , a long-term Harry's partner that provides 24/7, free, confidential support via text. Those in need can speak to a Crisis Counselor by texting FEEL to 741741. Crisis Text Line recently launched For the Frontlines , to support workers on the frontlines dealing with anxiety, stress, fear, isolation, or other difficult emotions during coronavirus with free crisis counseling.

Harry's relationship with Crisis Text Line is part of their goal to help 500,000 men get access to better mental health care by 2021. See here for more information about Harry's ongoing mental health efforts.

About Harry's

We founded Harry's because buying shaving supplies was a really bad customer experience, and the products themselves were overpriced and over-designed. We saw an opportunity to build a brand that's more relatable, more thoughtful, and more real than the others on the market. Since taking on shaving, we've begun to address the same challenge across other categories in men's care, including body and hair. Our goal is to always put our customers first, which means being available however and wherever they want to shop  whether that's Harrys.com, mass retail, or one of our specialty partners  and giving to organizations that promote better mental health care for men. We set aside 1% of our sales to donate to charitable organizations that share our ambition to bring quality mental health care to men everywhere, committing to give $5 million to help 500,000 men by 2021. For more information on Harry's, please visit https://www.harrys.com/en/us .

Media Contact

Sarah Castille

Derris

[email protected]

646.362.4701

SOURCE Harry's
The man who was part of an alleged militia group in southern New Mexico last year will serve nearly two years in prison on firearms charges.

A federal judge in Albuquerque on Wednesday sentenced 70-year-old Larry Mitchell Hopkins, also known as Johnny Horton Jr., to 21 months in prison for being a felon in possession of a firearm, according to a release from the U.S. Attorneys Office.

Hopkins pleaded guilty to the charges in January and, according to the release, admitted to possessing ammunition and nine pistols, rifles and shotguns on Nov. 28, 2017, in San Juan County. The release states that Hopkins was a felon at the time, having been previously convicted of felony charges in Michigan, Oregon and South Dakota, including illegal weapon possession and impersonating a peace officer.

Last year Hopkins identified himself to a Journal reporter as the commander of United Patriots of the Constitution and spent at least two months camped out with the armed group near the New Mexico border fence. After his initial arrest, a spokesman for the United Patriots insisted Hopkins served as the camps cook and was not armed during his time with the group.
[April 15, 2020] ONGOING INVESTIGATION ALERT: The Schall Law Firm Announces it is Investigating Claims Against GSX Techedu Inc. and Encourages Investors with Losses of $100,000 to Contact the Firm

The Schall Law Firm, a national shareholder rights litigation firm, announces that it is investigating claims on behalf of investors of GSX (News - Alert) Techedu Inc. ("GSX" or "the Company") (NYSE: GSX) for violations of the securities laws. The investigation focuses on whether the Company issued false and/or misleading statements and/or failed to disclose information pertinent to investors. GSX is the subject of a report published by Citron Research on April 14, 2020, titled, "GSX Techedu Inc - The Most Blatant Chinese Stock Fraud since 2011." Accoding to the report, the Company "is overstating revenue by up to 70% and should immediately halt trading and launch an internal investigation." Based on this news, the ADS price of GSX fell sharply in intraday trading.



If you are a shareholder who suffered a loss, click here to participate. We also encourage you to contact Brian Schall of the Schall Law Firm, 1880 Century Park East, Suite 404, Los Angeles, CA (News - Alert) 90067, at 310-301-3335, to discuss your rights free of charge. You can also reach us through the firm's website at www.schallfirm.com, or by email at [email protected].

The class in this case has not yet been certified, and until certification occurs, you are not represented by an attorney. If you choose to take no action, you can remain an absent class member. The Schall Law Firm represents investors around the world and specializes in securities class action lawsuits and shareholder rights litigation. This press release may be considered Attorney Advertising in some jurisdictions under the applicable law and rules of ethics. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20200415005477/en/

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The coronavirus pandemic has caused increased support for the closure of markets selling illegal wildlife across Southeast Asia. That information comes from a recent public opinion study by the World Wildlife Fund.

The non-profit group based in Switzerland surveyed about 5,000 people in March in three Southeast Asian nations and in Hong Kong and Japan. About 93 percent of people who answered questions said illegal markets selling wildlife should be closed to prevent future pandemics.

Scientists believe it is likely that the virus came from a wildlife market in the Chinese city of Wuhan. Bats, pangolins and other animals known to spread coronaviruses are kept close to each other in very bad conditions in such markets.

Christy Williams is the WWFs Asia Pacific Director. She said in a news conference, This is no longer a wildlife problem. It is a global security and human health and economic problem.

Support for an end to the illegal wildlife trade was strongest in Myanmar. Wildlife has been traded openly in the country for years. About 33 percent of those surveyed in Vietnam said the crisis had led them to stop using wildlife products.

Grace Hwa is the Illegal Wildlife Trade Programme Manager at WWF Myanmar. She said in a statement, COVID is a wake-up call. The rampant unchecked trade in wildlife is a risk not only to health and the economy, but tothe region.

China has recently introduced a ban on all farming and use of live wild animals. But the ban does not cover the trade in animals as pets or for traditional medicine.

Vietnams prime minister has ordered the agriculture ministry to introduce a similar ban.

Jeremy Douglas is the Southeast Asia and Pacific representative for the United Nations office on drugs and crime. He said some of the trade had been driven underground.

He told Reuters by phone that he is concerned about areas on the Myanmar-China border controlled by ethnic armed groups. Those areas have long been a center for wildlife trafficking.

Im Jonathan Evans.

Jonathan Evans adapted this story for Learning English from a Reuters news service report. Mario Ritter, Jr. was the editor.

_________________________________________________________________

Words in This Story

survey v. to as many people a series of questions to find out what people think about an issue

pandemic n. the sudden spread of a disease that affects many people in a large area

rampant adj. something that is very common that spreads quickly

unchecked adj. something that is not controlled or slowed
The number of coronavirus infections in South Dakota has increased three-fold in a week to more than 1,000 but the state's Republican Governor Kristi Noem is still refusing to order a lockdown.

Infections in the Midwest state have trebled in just one week and the state now has one of the country's largest virus hotspots following an outbreak at a meat plant.

At the start of the month there were only 129 infections in the state but, as of Wednesday, 1,168 cases have now been reported.

The state has recorded six deaths amid the pandemic - the lowest of any state apart from Wyoming, which recorded its first death this week.

South Dakota saw its infection numbers spike following an outbreak at a Chinese-owned pork processing plant in Sioux Falls where about 500 employees tested positive for coronavirus.

An estimated 120 people, who are family members of the employees, have also now tested positive.

The combination of the figures means the outbreak at Smithfield Foods, which was forced to shut down this week, is the single largest cluster of coronavirus cases in the country.

Despite the surge in cases, Gov Noem - as recently as Wednesday - was standing firm on her decision not to issue a stay-at-home order for the state.

She has argued that it was up to individuals - and not governments - to decide if they should go to work, worship or stay at home.

South Dakota is among only five states in the country - all of which have Republican governors - that currently do not have lockdown orders in place.

Defending her decision earlier this month, Gov Noem suggested the lockdowns imposed on 95 percent of the country was 'herd mentality, not leadership'.

'South Dakota is not New York City,' she said.

In a series of tweets on Wednesday, Gov Noem accused the media of conflating her decision not to issue a lockdown with the outbreak at the food plant.

'We trusted South Dakotans to exercise personal responsibility to keep themselves and their loved-ones healthy. They've stepped up to the challenge,' she tweeted.

'Let's be perfectly clear: a shelter-in-place order would NOT have prevented Smithfield from happening. They are a critical infrastructure business. They are part of the nation's food supply chain and contribute to South Dakota's role feeding the country and the world.'

Addressing the outbreak in a Fox News interview on Monday, Gov Noem said: 'It certainly is a tense situation there but we've got a lot of people focused on helping those individuals get better.

'Overall the state is doing very, very well. This hot spot is one area that we are addressing.'

Smithfield Foods, which is headquartered in Virginia, is owned by China's WH Group Ltd. The company announced that in addition to closing its Sioux Falls plant, it was also shutting plants in Wisconsin and Missouri.

Employees, local officials and industry sources told Reuters late last year that workers box up pig carcasses to ship to China instead of providing meat to Americans.

Despite the surge in cases, Gov Kristi Noem - as recently as Wednesday - was standing firm on her decision not to issue a stay-at-home order for the state

It comes after the South Dakota State Medical Association wrote a letter to Gov Noem on April 3 urging her to issue a quarantine order for residents.

'A stay-at-home order would give our health professionals the necessary time and resources to manage this pandemic,' the group said.

'We may soon be facing the challenges and hardships being seen in New York and other cities if a shelter in place order is not issued immediately.'

Sioux Falls Mayor Paul Ten Haken, who is also a Republican, issued an ordinance this week that requires residents in the city to stay at home after Gov Noem refused his request to issue a statewide one.

His ordinance allows residents to still travel for work, as well as out for groceries and essential items. It urges people to social distance if they are outside.

In an interview with CBS This Morning on Wednesday, the mayor said the number of cases were 'staggering'.

'The growth that we've seen in our COVID cases, really in the last week, has been a bit staggering,' TenHaken said.

'We're doubling and we've been doubling every four days for the last 18 days.'

In reference to Gov Noem refusing to issue a lockdown, the mayor went on to say that he would rather be 'chastised for being over-cautious' than for not doing enough to stop the spread of the coronavirus.

The outbreak at Smithfield Foods, which was forced to shut down this week, is one of the single largest clusters of coronavirus cases across the country
Queensland LNP leader Deb Frecklington has stood by her party's decision to dump backbencher Jason Costigan after a harassment complaint made against him was withdrawn.

A woman who accused Mr Costigan of "predatory, sexual, unhinged and intimidating" behaviour against her 18-year-old daughter, has withdrawn her complaint after being sued for defamation. The defamation case settled, with the mother signing a written apology stating that her Facebook posts were "entirely unjustified".

Member for Whitsunday Jason Costigan, pictured with LNP leader Deb Frecklington, was kicked out of the party last year. Credit:Facebook

The Whitsundays MP has denied all allegations of harassment and misconduct and has called for "heads to roll" over his ousting.

"Deb Frecklington should apologise and resign," he said.
South Africa: COVID-19 cases rise to 2 506, 34 deaths

The number of COVID-19 related deaths have risen to 34 in South Africa, with infections now at 2 506.

This comes after Health Minister Zweli Mkhize on Wednesday confirmed seven more deaths. Mkhize confirmed the increase during a press briefing in which government received much-needed personal protective equipment from Multichoice, Orlando Pirates and Kaizer Chiefs.

Confirmed cases overnight rose to 2 506 from the 90 515 cases since the country began conducting tests.

Gauteng continues to have the highest number of infections at 930. The province is followed by the Western Cape and KwaZulu-Natal with 657 and 519, respectively. The rest of the cases are spread among the six other provinces as well as 18 unconfirmed cases.

Six of the latest deaths were in KZN, while the other was recorded in Gauteng. Six of the deceased, aged between 50 and 91, had underlying deceases while it was still unclear with the seventh case.

Mkhize used the briefing to thank Multichoice, Orlando Pirates and Kaizer Chiefs for the donations, saying the significant contribution would go a long way in the fight against the virus.

The three have donated 100 000 N95 masks, 350 000 surgical masks, 100 000 gloves, 10 000 protective overalls, 10 000 wipes and 100 000 shoe covers.

The two teams also pledged to use their platforms and players to amplify the message of society observing social-distancing and practicing hygienic practices in an effort to limit the spread.

Said Mkhize: We really do appreciate this. It is a huge gesture of support, of solidarity and of encouragement.

He said it is important for government to reiterate that the fight against the virus was no longer a fight that health professionals should be fighting alone.

It is a fight for the entire society and therefore what is important is for us to show a degree of solidarity, of collaboration, supporting one another in the fight against the COVID-19 pandemic, said the Minister.

He said it was commendable that the chairpersons of the countrys two biggest clubs have joined the fight against the spread of the virus.

[It] is a leadership that sends a message to the people that this issue is no longer about government or health professionals, but every one of us and we need all leaders to step up to the fore, he said.

The pandemic has already infected over two million people and has claimed 130 000 lives in over 200 countries worldwide.

Various leaders of society have embraced President Cyril Ramaphosas call for meaningful contributions. This was after the President last month met with several business leaders in an effort to diversify interventions.

These gatherings are the areas where the infections tend to happen where people go into stadia and unsuspectingly spread the virus to others who might not be aware.

This gesture was very, very important because it would have been very difficult to stop people from going to cheer the teams that they favour had there been no cooperation.  SAnews.gov.za

This story has been published on: 2020-04-15. To contact the author, please use the contact details within the article.
Good Morning, welcome to Information Nigerias Newspaper headlines for today, 15th April 2020.

Here are the major headlines.

Governor Okowa Imposes Dusk Till Dawn Curfew In Delta State

Governor of Delta State, Ifeanyi Okowa has announced a dusk to dawn curfew in the State as efforts of the State Government to curb the spread of Coronavirus intensifies.

Akeredolu Announces Dusk Till Dawn Curfew In Ondo State

The Governor of Ondo State, Rotimi Akeredolu has ordered an immediate curfew in the state. The order was issued on Tuesday by the state government and is expected to take immediate effect.

Feyemi Extends Lockdown By Two Weeks In Ekiti State

The Ekiti State Government has extended the COVID-19 lockdown and a curfew placed on movement in the state by two weeks.

FG Terminates Cash Transfer System In Four States

The minister for humanitarian affairs, disaster management, and social development, Hajia Sadiya Farouq has announced the termination of contracts for cash transfers in four states in the country.

European Union Gives Nigeria 50m

The European Union has made a whopping donation of 50 million, which equates to 21 billion Naira in local currency towards the fight against the novel coronavirus.

I Will Remain In The North East Until Boko Haram Is Defeated  Buratai

The chief of army staff, Lt Gen Buratai Tukur has vowed not to leave the forefront of battle against insurgency in the North-east region until the battle against the dreaded Book Haram sect has been won.

Lockdown: Security Agencies Have Risen To The Challenges  Buhari

President Muhammadu Buhari on Monday said security agencies have satisfactorily tackled the challenges encountered across the nation within the period of the last lockdown order.

Lockdown: Hunger Is A Bigger Pandemic  Ayada

Cross River state governor, Ben Ayade has warned that since there will be life after coronavirus, it may be wrong to completely shut down the economy without thinking about the livelihoods of the people.

Lockdown Has Reduced Spread Of Coronavirus In Nigeria  FG

The Presidential Task Force on COVID-19 has expressed that restrictions put in place in the country in the wake of the outbreak of coronavirus pandemic has slowed down the spread of the virus.

Lockdown: CAN Demands Reopening Of Churches

According to reports, the Christian Association of Nigeria (CAN) has demanded for the reopening of churches amidst the lockdown across the country to prevent Coronavirus.
Child Rights Commissioner helps schoolgirl to return from U.S. to Russia

 RAPSI, Vladimir Burnov

17:45 15/04/2020

MOSCOW, April 15 (RAPSI)  Children's ombudsman Anna Kuznetsova has helped a minor from Russias Novosibirsk Region to return to her home country by a flight carrying repatriated Russian citizens from New York to Pulkovo airport in St. Petersburg, the commissioners press-service informs on Wednesday.

Earlier, Kuznetsova turned to Aeroflot CEO Vitaly Savelyev urging him to assist the girl, who found herself in dire straits in the U.S., where she went to take a student course.

The Russian Child Rights Commissioner was informed by her regional colleague from Novosibirsk that the minor planned to leave the U.S. for Russia yet on March 30; however, she was stranded because of the suspension of regular flights. The girl filled in a required form on the official Russian website providing state services to citizens and was put on the list of Russians wishing to leave the U.S.; however, the special flight she was to be put on was cancelled. The life and health of the minor were jeopardized if she stayed in the U.S. amid the pandemic, the press-service statement reads.

On Kuznetsovas request, Aeroflot put the girl on the nearest flight to Russia; in St. Petersburg she was met by her parents, who arrived there from Novosibirsk.

The child ombudsman expresses her hope that all the passengers, who arrived to Russia by this flight, are in good health; nevertheless, every one of them, including the girl from Novosibirsk, is to undergo quarantine measures and stay under observation, the statement reads.

At the same time, Kuznetsova notes, there is the question of how many other Russian schoolchildren may find themselves in the same situation notwithstanding the measures undertaken by Russias Foreign Ministry, Transport Ministry, and other governmental structures, who established call centers, timely disseminated information about various ways to return to the homeland.

We see, she observes, that the respective work is carried on ceaselessly; new information about those wishing to return is being received, like the case of Russian schoolchildren stranded in the U.S. The ombudsmans office will continue cooperation with the Foreign Ministry and other colleagues as to settling these situations, the statement quotes Kuznetsova as saying.
Deputy Managing Director of Bulk Oil Storage and Transportation (BOST) Mr. Moses Mensah Assem, has led a delegation to the Rebecca Foundation to donate items worth hundreds of thousand Ghana Cedis.



According to Moses Assem, the donation to the foundation of the First Lady of the Republic of Ghana, Mrs Rebecca Akufo-Addo is to help in the humanitarian activities of the foundation, especially in the fight against the novel coronavirus in the country.



Speaking to the Media during the presentation of the items to the Rebecca Foundation, the Deputy MD of BOST indicated that aside the foundation of the First Lady of the Republic, BOST is also giving protective items to other hospitals within the operations of their company.



We are not only giving to the Rebecca Foundation; we acknowledge the work of the foundation of the First Lady, supporting the vulnerable in the society especially in this difficult time as we battle COVID-19 as a nation. We at BOST have come to add our widows might, knowing the challenges that BOST is going through to push the Rebecca Foundation to continue the good work of the foundation, he stated.



He again mentioned that hospitals and clinics in the catchment areas such as; Tema, Akosombo, Maame Water, Kumasi, Bolgatanga and Buipe where BOST operates also have benefited from the donations of the company in a bid to help people within these areas to receive protection from the COVID-19 outbreak.



He added that some clinics and other health institutions around Dzorwulu where BOST Head Office is located have also benefited from their donations; stressing that the company is not done with the donations as they have expenditure target from 300 to 400 thousand Ghana Cedis in the whole exercise.



The protective items donated to the Rebecca Foundation includes 30 pieces of veronica buckets and its accessories, 40 cartons of hand sanitizers made by GIHOC, several cartons of assorted liquid soap for hand wash, and packs of heavy duty paper hand towels.



Advising the general public on the need to stay safe amidst the novel coronavirus, the Deputy Managing Director of BOST reiterated the stance of President Nana Akufo-Addo to plead with Ghanaians to comply with the social distancing directive.



He further urged Ghanaians not to joke with the COVID-19 especially as it has claimed lives of even health professionals in the world; insisting that it is dangerous for people play the virus as Ghana has problems with health institutional structures such as lack of hospital beds and inadequate health professionals.



We are praying that this sickness will leave us as soon as possible; so, every Ghanaian must listen to what the President is saying that we should stay home and make sure that you observe the social distancing, wash your hands regularly with soap under running water and regular use of hand sanitizer as well as covering your nose before you step outside, he advised.



He was of the view that if we adhere to the directives of President Akufo-Addo, God will help us to overcome the global pandemic which is claiming many lives away; we should all help ourselves to drive this sickness away as soon as possible.

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.

Featured Video
When youre a production designer, every new project sparks imagination and (hopefully) joy. But Mara LePere-Schloop will have always a special place in her heart for Mrs. Americathe insightful new miniseries (premiering Wednesday, April 15 on Hulu) that chronicles the movement to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment in the 1970s as seen through the eyes of a group of feminists on one side and proud housewives on the other.

My mother was very much part of the womens movement and both my parents were politically active, LePere-Schloop (who previously worked on Django Unchained) explains to Architectural Digest. Coming off the 2016 election, I think there were so many issues weighing heavy on us. This series gave us in the art department a chance to reexamine the past and get our current frustrations out in a creative way.

Photo: Michael Gibson/FX

She had ample material to work with. Each of the nine episodes focuses on a different figure of the era, including staunch conservative Phyllis Schlafly (Cate Blanchett), activist and journalist Gloria Steinem (Rose Byrne), congresswoman Shirley Chisholm (Uzo Aduba), and feminist author Betty Friedan (Tracey Ullman). The action unfolds between 1971 through 1980, as the women respectfully plan and lobby from the suburbs of Illinois to the cosmopolitan streets of New York City to political offices in Washington, D.C., to the National Womens Convention in Houston. (All of the above were filmed around Toronto.) We knew wed be dealing with a lot of different locations, she says. So the challenge was how to make each one of these people individualized and give them realized environments that help push their personalities forward.

Photo: Michael Gibson/FX

The center of the ensemble is Schlafly, the Midwestern wife and mother of six and powerful grass-roots organizer of an antifeminist contingent. Her home base is awash in pale pastels, which underlines her defense of hearth and family values. Conservative women are living in a world thats a little bit more traditional, so our color palette is from the 1950s, LePere-Schloop says. Much of the classic furniture of the time was sourced from Detroit, while the fully functional box televisionoften tuned into the newsin the living room was shipped from a prop house in Los Angeles. (Most of the TVs would cross the border and not work. It was the bane of our existence!)

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Because the Schlafly suburban home is the one constant throughout the evolving drama, LePere-Schloop and her team were sticklers for details there. For the wallpaper, they acquired and scanned vintage prints and then enhanced them digitally and printed them ourselves. The square-patterned, earth-toned kitchen linoleum was based on real archival photos of the Schlafly residence. Its not being made anymore, so we had our graphic designers draw it, she says. It took us back to our grandparents homes. We want the audience to have the emotion that theyre going back in time.

Photo: Michael Gibson/FX

Phylliss kitchen is also more outwardly feminine, compared to the wood-paneled den of her lawyer husband (John Slattery)an aesthetic contrast that emphasizes the power structure between the sexes. LePere-Schloop applied the same principle to the politicians offices: Republican U.S. representative Phil Crane (James Marsden) has a space filled with framed diplomas and certificates on the wall, while the office belonging to Representative Bella Abzug (Margo Martindale) is decorated with colorful paintings, posters, and photos of her with her constituents. Generally speaking, its to show that men value achievement and women are more about life experiences, she explains.

Photo: Sabrina Lantos/FX

See the video.

Steinems day-to-night decor was a fascinating mix of elements. Her bustling Ms. magazine offices in New York City are cutting-edge and richly textured to illustrate her progressiveness. But at home? After poring through countless research materials, We joked in our department that Gloria redesigned her apartment based on the phases of the moon, because she constantly redecorated, LePere-Schloop says. During one period, Steinem decided the color of her sofa should look identical to her heavy living room drapes: Its interesting because we think of her as loose and bohemian, but she also liked to match her furniture.

Photo: Sabrina Lantos/FX

Indeed, LePere-Schloop says that Mrs. America enables viewers to learn about these leaders via their substance and their style. There are so many fascinating women on the screen, she says. I hope our department did a decent job at fleshing out their worlds and recontextualizing them so audiences can relate to them on another level. These arent just icons; theyre real women.

Originally Appeared on Architectural Digest
New Delhi, April 15 : The Supreme Court on Wednesday recorded the Centres undertaking that it would take measures to provide wide-ranging exemptions to farmers and farm workers to carry out activities connected with harvesting of the Rabi crop.

A plea was filed by Professor Trilochan Sastry seeking issuance of directions to the Union for enabling immediate movement of requisite labour across districts /states to be available in time for harvest of Rabi crops and sowing of Kharif crops at various locations.

Solicitor General Tushar Mehta contended before a bench of Justices N V Ramana, S K Kaul and B R Gavai that the Centre is closely monitoring the implementation of its notification giving exemption to farmers from lockdown restrictions. Mehta submitted that the Centre was also cognizant of the difficulties faced by the agricultural sector and they are taking constant measures to ease the situation, including further guidelines.

The top court directed the Centre that the suggestions made in the present petition , including any material the petitioner may wish to add , be taken into account before the issuance of further guidelines.

The court observed that it was aware of the various problems being faced by farmers and the agricultural sector, and stressed on the necessity to find solutions to these problems in these difficult circumstances. "It further observed that it had seen from reports that certain measures were already being taken by the states in order to tackle the problem of labour shortfall", said the court.

The petitioner represented by advocate Nikhil Nayyar, argued that a total of 662.13 lakh hectares was reported as sown with various rabi crops in the 2019-20 Rabi season - to be harvested in April/May 2020. But migrant labour from cities - who typically work as farm labourers in rural India during the rabi harvesting season, have not been allowed to get to their destinations, thereby creating a gruelling shortage of labour.

In another plea activist Swami Agnivesh complained that police were harassing farmers. Mehta said the Centre is taking all the necessary steps to remove difficulty for farmers, but pleas by activists restrict officers from doing their work. This was the second plea by Agnivesh.

Professor Sastry also argued that many leading companies in the organised foods industry have been noting disruptions in their supply and distribution chains, and that their factories are working with severely reduced manpower. However, due to such shortage of labour, the entire purpose behind granting exemption of farming related activities during the lockdown period fails as essential economic activities are unable to reach normalcy.

The court disposed of the petition after Mehta contended that the guidelines will be implemented and it will be ensured the police would also follow them.
On April 3, Johanna Mann sent in her application for a small-business loan to keep her pie shop in Amherst, Ohio, afloat during the coronavirus pandemic. Feeling hopeful, she shared the good news with her workers. "I said, 'It's going to be OK," Mann, 60, said. "I'm going to get this Paycheck Protection Program." That hasn't happened. Nearly two weeks later, Mann is still unable to tap into the $349 billion pot of money Congress earmarked for forgivable loans to small businesses hurting amid the public health crisis. The problem: Her bank, Buckeye Community Bank, told her it isn't participating in the government's program. And finding a bank that will lend to someone who's not already a client has proven difficult.

Johanna Mann has tried to apply for a small business loan to keep her pie shop in Amherst, Ohio afloat during the coronavirus pandemic. She can't find a bank to give her one. Source: Joe Pies

Making matters worse, the first-come, first-served program may run out of money as soon as Wednesday, reports said. In the meantime, Mann has had to lay off five of her 20 employees. "I feel like a schmuck because I told them it's going to be fine," Mann said, her voice cracking during a phone interview on Tuesday evening. "It's far from fine. I have to tell them, 'I can't even get anyone to take my application. I'm not getting the help I thought I could get it.'" Holly Wade, director of research and policy analysis at the National Federation of Independent Business, said she's heard from other small-business owners who can't find a participating bank to lend them the money. "It's a huge problem," Wade said. "You're essentially locked out of the entire loan program."

'I'm here! Will anyone take my loan papers?'

At Mama Jo Homestyle Pies, a few workers continue to bake apple, chocolate and strawberry cream cheese pies. "People say, 'I'm glad you're open. I have nothing else to do but watch TV and eat pie,'" Mann said. Still, the business's overall revenue is down by more than 50%, Mann said. The 14,000-square-foot bakery usually sends out many of its pies to restaurants across the state, many of which are now closed. "It's all going down the tubes," she said. Mann took over the bakery nearly 30 years ago and quickly fell in love with the business. "It gives me a weird joy working with my hands." With such a drastic hit to her business, Mann now fears she won't be able to meet her monthly payroll costs, which exceed $50,000. She's already had to lay off a quarter of her staff, all of whom are over 65. "I worry more for my employees than myself," she said. "They have families and house payments and car payments. "A lot of them live paycheck-to-paycheck," Mann added.

It's a huge problem. You're essentially locked out of the entire loan program. Holly Wade director of research and policy analysis at the National Federation of Independent Business

The Paycheck Protection Program was supposed to help business owners with that exact concern. Starting on April 3, banks began accepting applications for the forgivable loans that are supposed to cover up to eight weeks of a businesses' payroll expenses. Mann, for her part, hopes to secure a loan for around $133,000. However, she learned that not all banks are participating. On the Small Business Administration's website, she filled out the initial loan application and sent it to her bank, Buckeye Community. Soon after, she received an email from someone at Buckeye, explaining that it isn't giving out loans under the Paycheck Protection Program. Someone at Buckeye said she should apply for the loan through Fountainhead Commercial Capital, a bank in Lake Mary, Florida. "They told me they're not equipped to handle all of the paperwork," Mann said. "I called them and said, 'What the hell?'" Buckeye Community Bank did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Mama Jo Homestyle Pies Source: Mama Jo Pies

Mann hasn't had any luck with Fountainhead. On Fountainhead's homepage, the bank says the demand for the loans is "unlike anything we have ever seen," and warns that, "we may eventually be forced to pause our acceptance of new submissions." Mann said she filled out some information on Fountainhead's website and had someone at Buckeye contact the Florida bank, too, but she hasn't been able to submit her SBA application. "I have a feeling it's because I'm not a customer of theirs," she said. Chris Hurn, founder and CEO of Fountainhead, said he couldn't find any information under "Johanna Mann" or "Mama Jo Pies." He said they're willing to give the loans to new clients but acknowledged they were prioritizing current ones. More from Personal Finance:

How Americans plan to spend their coronavirus relief checks

Unemployed and eligible for Social Security? What you need to know

What to do if the coronavirus pandemic is rocking your finances "We're diligently trying to get through as many of these as we can, but we also know the demand is so tremendous and intense at this very moment, that we're sure to disappoint some," Hurn said. "Many people are in the same position as she is, hundreds of thousands, likely much more." Mann hoped she could send her application to another large bank in Ohio, Huntington, but heard from her sister-in-law that it's only accepting loan applications from current clients. Emily Smith, a spokeswoman for Huntington, didn't say whether or not the bank would give out the loans to new clients. Federal regulations require banks to go through a rigorous vetting process when taking on a new business as a client, said Nick Simpson, vice president of public affairs at the Consumer Banker's Association.

Mama Jo Homestyle Pies Source: Mama Jo Pies
Alphabet, the parent company of Google, is pulling back on some of its investments for the rest of the year amid the Covid-19 crisis and it's starting with hiring.

"We believe now is the time to significantly slow down the pace of hiring, while maintaining momentum in a small number of strategic areas where users and businesses rely on Google for ongoing support, and where our growth is critical to their success," CEO Sundar Pichai told workers this week in a memo first reported by Bloomberg.

"Beyond hiring, we continue to invest, but will be recalibrating the focus and pace of our investments in areas like data centers and machines, and non business essential marketing and travel."

A spokesperson confirmed the slowdown and contents of the memo. "We'll be slowing down the pace of hiring, while maintaining momentum in a small number of strategic areas, and onboarding the many people who've been hired but haven't started yet," the company said in a statement to CNBC.

Pichai noted that the company added 20,000 employees in 2019 and had planned to do the same this year. So far, it has on-boarded 4,000 new employees and a thousand more are scheduled to onboard soon, the memo stated.

The announcement comes as the company faces economic headwinds caused by the Covid-19 pandemic, which has effected the global economy. CNBC found Wednesday that the company started pulling back on skills training resources for the contractors and temporary workers that make up nearly half of its workforce. The move also comes as the company tries to motivate its workforce to stay focused on customer needs amid shelter-in-place orders triggered by the pandemic.

"Just like the 2008 financial crisis, the entire global economy is hurting, and Google and Alphabet are not immune to the effects of this global pandemic," Pichai stated in the memo. "We exist in an ecosystem of partnerships and interconnected businesses, many of whom are feeling significant pain."
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Loren Ford could see a problem coming.

He was glad that his synagogue, Congregation Beth Am in Altos Hills, Calif., was moving its meetings and services online to Zoom once the coronavirus pandemic hit. But as a former privacy lawyer and counsel for Google, and an informal tech consultant to the congregation, he was also concerned about security and privacy.

His biggest worry was the risk of Zoombombing, where outsiders disrupt meetings using threatening or offensive material.

"Zoom wasn't built for its current use," he says. "It was built for business meetings, which don't have the same level of privacy and security concerns as a massive platform for connection of all kinds."

At one of the first online synagogue events, Ford noticed that participants' home and cell-phone numbers were displayed on the screen for everyone to seea privacy misstep even in a meeting attended only by congregants. Ford and Beth Am's executive director decided to create guidelines for how to use Zoom more safely.

When Ford skipped a meeting to work on those guidelines, his fears were realized: The congregation was Zoombombed by intruders, who barraged the participants with anti-Semitic messages.

The attack fit a disturbing trend, with incidents such as the Zoombombing of an African-American student's dissertation defense by racist trolls and the disruption of many meetings of organizations ranging from schools to Alcoholics Anonymous to Muslim and Jewish groups.

"We want and need worship services and other study and informational sessions to be open not just to our members, but to non-members who might be interested in joining," Ford says. "But that's in tension with the fact that there are criminals out there trying to wreak havoc."

The advice Ford has put together to try to manage these competing priorities can serve as a guidebook for any potential Zoom host.

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Consumer Reports vetted the advice with our own in-house security team, and we are publishing the highlights below. You can also find advice in Zoom's help center.

We learned about Ford's guidelines through a fellow congregant who joined a Consumer Reports webinar on teleconferencing. These webinars are the digital version of volunteer-led meetings CR has been conducting to help consumers take control of their digital privacy. While the in-person meet-ups have been intimate, meeting in people's homes, the webinar on teleconferencing privacy and security pulled in 1,000 participants.

"I'm excited that the one-on-one relationships we're building with amazing Consumer Reports members across the country are allowing us to tap into their expertise," says Alan Smith, community leadership manager for Consumer Reports. "Folks like Loren are living on the frontier of this sudden new digital privacy world."

Striking the Right Balance

Zoom gives the host of a meeting a lot of power over who can join, and which features participants can use. If you're in charge of a Zoom meeting, Ford says, the goal is to maintain a delicate balance between openness and security.

The right strategy depends on the size of the meeting, he says. Like many organizations, Congregation Beth Am holds both small gatherings with a restricted guest list and large meetings that are open to the whole congregation as well as non-members.

Those smaller meetings are easier to moderate, because you know who's going to be attending. "You need to be thoughtful about how you control access," Ford explains. "If you're careful about who you let in the door, you can be a little more relaxed once they're in there."



Here's one difference in how Ford would handle bigger and smaller meetings. Zoom lets participants appear in front of a virtual background that they grab from their own computersno green screen needed. In smaller meetings open to only invited guests, Ford says it's fine to let members choose their own virtual backgrounds.

But for larger meetings that are open to the whole congregation and outsiders, he says, it's a good idea to consider turning off that feature because an intruder could easily post an offensive image as his or her background.

Here are more detailed recommendations.

Controlling Who Joins a Meeting

Control when people can join a meeting. First off, Ford says, for large meetings you should disable the "join before host" feature. This feature allows participants to join before the host and hang around afterward. However, it can also leave the meeting functionally unmoderated.

You can use another settingthe "lock meeting" featureto prevent anyone new from joining the meeting. Hosts can employ this at any time during the meeting. It can keep you safe from intruders who just stumble on the meeting partway through.

Also, Ford advocates disabling a setting that can allow an attendee who's been removed to rejoin a meeting.

One smart practice is to share the oversight duties by designating several co-hosts. That allows the co-hosts to keep an eye on the attendees, while the main host runs the event.

Avoid easy-to-guess meeting names. Zoombombers often gain access to meetings by guessing or searching the names of meetings using Zoom's standard naming conventions, also known as Personal Meeting IDs. (We've decided not to describe how the naming convention works, as a safety precaution.)

Ford suggests generating a Zoom link automatically instead, which is harder for bad actors to guess.

Perhaps most important of all, tell participants not to post links or other meeting information to their social networks.

Require passwords . . . sometimes. Some privacy experts tout the use of passwords for every Zoom meeting; Ford is a little more circumspect. "Requiring passwords is good policy for any meeting that is more private than public," he says. "But restricting more communal activities is a step towards less open meetings, and it should be considered very carefully."

Ford adds that passwords should be an absolute requirement for any meetings that include children or minors.

Control the door. For larger meetings, you can enable Zoom's "waiting room" function, which puts participants in a virtual vestibule outside the meeting. The host can see potential guests and then decide whether to admit them, one by one or as a group. It's a robust security practice, but it can be time and labor intensive to check everyone in a large group. (A security issue with waiting rooms has since been fixed by Zoom.)

If you become suspicious of just one attendee, you can place them "on hold." That leaves them in the meeting but blocks video and audio transmission between them and everyone else. Then you can decide whether they are simply someone you don't know or an intruder.

In-Meeting Controls

Limit sharing options. For larger meetings, Ford suggests limiting what participants can do. You can, for example, mute all participants by default. They can then click an icon to "raise their hand" when they want to speak.

He says it's also smart to disable screen sharing by anyone other than the host. Zoom also lets participants create a whiteboard for collaborative work, with everyone adding annotations. Ford suggests that you turn off whiteboard sharing in large meetings.



Disable or restrict chat. Disabling chat is an option for larger groups where you don't know all the participants, but even if chat is turned on, it makes sense to disable file transfer within chat or at least limit the kinds of files that can be shared.

That can prevent the spread of malware, but a link could still call up offensive videos or other content. For that reason, Ford says, it's smart to tell participants to be cautious when clicking on links in a chat, especially if they're from someone they don't know well.

Hit pause on recording. Zoom hosts have the option of recording events, but this should be used judiciously, and only with the permission of the attendees. Zoom hosts can allow participants to record a meeting, as well. Ford says this feature should usually be disabled. And no one should record any Zoom meeting attended by minors, unless it's done with explicit parental consent.







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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.
Mumbai Police have arrested a man



for posting messages on his social media accounts which allegedly led to a gathering of large number of migrant workers in suburban Bandra on Tuesday.

Vinay Dubey, a resident of neighbouring Navi Mumbai, was arrested in the early hours of Wednesday after he was questioned over his posts on Facebook and other social media platforms, a police official said.

He had uploaded a video on social media in which he demanded that the Maharashtra government make travel arrangements for migrants, who are stranded due to the coronavirus-enforced lockdown and want to go back to their native places, he said.

He had also tweeted about the issue and called for a national-level protest if trains are not arranged till April 18 to ferry migrants workers to their native places, he said.

Dubey was initially detained by Navi Mumbai police and later handed over to the police in suburban Bandra.

He has been booked under IPC Sections 153 A (promoting disharmony, enmity or feelings of hatred between different groups), 117 (abetting commission of offence), 188 (disobedience of order by public servant), 269, 270 (negligent and malignant act likely to spread infection of disease danger to life) and provisions of the Epidemic Diseases Act, he said.

His interrogation was underway at the Bandra police station, the official said.

The police suspect his social media messages contributed to the protest by more than 1,000 migrant workers, most of them from Bihar, Uttar Pradesh and West Bengal, near Bandra railway station on Tuesday afternoon.

They were demanding that the state government make transport arrangements so that they can go back to their native towns and villages.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Gloria Santiago, 29, of Fairhill, said it would be magnificent to be able to order food remotely with food stamps. But she cant, so she has to worry about coronavirus every time she enters the supermarket. Read more

Gloria Santiago would love to avoid the coronavirus by ordering groceries from home and having them delivered, just like the Acme and Whole Foods shoppers she hears about.

The pressure would be less heavy than bringing my 7-year-old and 3-year-old into the store with me, worrying about them touching everything, worrying about them being at risk for bringing home the virus, said Santiago, 29, of the citys Fairhill section, a single mother and now-unemployed waitress from a recently shuttered local restaurant. She qualifies for food stamps.

Under federal rules, however, it is nearly impossible for the more than 1.7 million recipients in Pennsylvania and 682,000 in New Jersey to use the benefits  known as SNAP, for Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program  to order food by phone or online and have it delivered.

So, Santiago forgoes shopping trips if she cant find a babysitter. Weighing safety against bread and milk, she absorbs the resentment from her kids, who must do without. It would be magnificent to be able to order groceries from home, she said. That would be perfect for me.

The coronavirus has underscored the disenfranchisement of low-income Americans whose poverty precludes them from numerous benefits enjoyed by better-off Americans. As health officials warn the public about the dangers of the supermarket  for workers, as well as shoppers  people who need SNAP to survive find themselves facing threats that others dont.

 READ MORE: Money can buy some protection from coronavirus. But the poor cant afford it, leaving them more vulnerable

Low-income people have been denied access to lifesaving technology that would protect them when they shop, said Jessica Bartholow, policy advocate for the Western Center on Law and Poverty, a Los Angeles-based national advocacy group for disadvantaged Americans. "The belief is, if youre out there begging for food, you dont deserve the bells and whistles the middle class has to get their food delivered.

Our food system is a cycle of inequality.

Pilot programs

In certain states, SNAP online pilot programs, conducted with select retailers, allow shoppers to use the benefit to order food and have it delivered, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which administers SNAP. Those states are: Alabama, Iowa, Nebraska, New York, Oregon, Washington, Arizona, California, Florida, and Idaho.

New Jersey was approved as a pilot state two years ago, but various barriers have kept it from happening, said Adele LaTourette, director of Hunger Free New Jersey in Bergen County. She said shes awaiting word from state officials to explain what the specific problems are.

Late last month, Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf sent a forceful letter to Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue urging him to make the program more widely available.

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," Wolf wrote, "would go hungry because of USDAs limiting interpretations and refusal to cut bureaucratic red tape during a national crisis.

In a statement, Perdue said, USDA is committed to maximizing our services and flexibilities to ensure children and others who need food can get it during this coronavirus epidemic. This is a challenging time for many Americans, but it is reassuring to see President Trump and our fellow Americans stepping up to the challenges facing us to make sure kids and those facing hunger are fed.

Participating in the pilot would present certain hurdles, according to a spokesperson for Pennsylvanias Department of Human Services.

Just three grocers involved in the program provide service in Pennsylvania: Walmart, Amazon, and ShopRite.

SNAP recipients carry Electronic Benefits Transfer (EBT) cards that are automatically loaded with benefits each month. According to a USDA spokesperson, the systems in grocery stores would have to be able to remotely accept each persons individual PIN number, as well as process, track, and store the data associated with online SNAP transactions.

Further, grocery stores often charge delivery fees, and SNAP benefits cant be used to pay those.

Logistical challenges

There may be alternate means to address some of these problems, although they present logistical challenges of their own, food industry experts say.

Theoretically, SNAP recipients could order food online, then go to stores and swipe their cards curbside, said Alex Baloga, president and CEO of the Pennsylvania Food Merchants Association in Harrisburg. Federal rules preclude SNAP recipients from prepaying for food with their EBT cards.

But, he added, that defeats the purpose [of social distancing], because you would like to have food ordering as contactless and seamless as possible. Also, its not clear how many stores are set up to do this, Baloga added.

In another possibility, a SNAP recipient could order food, then have the delivery person show up with a so-called point-of-sale (POS) device that would allow the customer to swipe his or her card.

However, Baloga said, I dont know how prevalent POS devices are in Pennsylvania. Their use is not widespread.

Kathy Fisher, policy director at the Greater Philadelphia Coalition Against Hunger, was more pointed: I dont think anyone is using POS devices for SNAP. I dont even know how real this is.

U.S. Sen. Bob Casey (D., Pa.) has introduced a bill in Congress that would utilize aspects of POS and curbside sales, allowing SNAP recipients to order groceries online or by phone. He also proposes a federal allotment of $500 million to reimburse retailers for grocery delivery fees for SNAP participants.

Last week, Casey called for increases in SNAP benefits.

SNAP program slow

Its unclear how soon residents of non-pilot states might be able to access grocery delivery via SNAP.

We are a long way from having this service made widely available, said Elaine Waxman, senior fellow at the Urban Institute, a nonpartisan research organization in Washington and an expert on food insecurity and nutrition.

The SNAP program had been slow to explore options of home delivery even before the coronavirus, she said. Critics of SNAP  which President Donald Trump has tried three times to alter and cut back  contend the program is subject to fraud and abuse, "even though all data show fraud is very low.

 HELP US REPORT: Are you a health care worker, medical provider, government worker, patient, frontline worker or other expert? We want to hear from you.

She added that the pandemic is highlighting the importance of accelerating [the pilot program], but the ability to respond is limited.

As people lose their jobs and hunger increases throughout the nation, its time for the USDA to make SNAP a more robust tool and help people eat in a time of social distancing, said Ellen Vollinger, legal director of the Washington-based Food Research and Action Center, the nations main antihunger lobbying group.

She said the USDA should suspend other rules that prevent SNAP recipients from buying hot prepared items sold at supermarkets, such as rotisserie chicken. Those regulations were formulated in the 1960s, when most stores didnt offer such foods, Vollinger said.

According to the USDA, hot foods are an allowable SNAP food purchase only in the event of a Presidential Disaster Declaration of Individual Assistance, which has not been announced.

The USDA should also allow more people with SNAP benefits to be able to use them in restaurants, Vollinger said. A modest program allows for older, homeless, or disabled recipients to buy food in places like McDonalds in just three states: California, Arizona, and Rhode Island.

Theres an economic crisis in the restaurant industry, Vollinger said. I think thered be interest in SNAP. Indeed, the National Restaurant Association has said SNAP recipients should have the ability to purchase prepared foods from restaurants with SNAP dollars.

Its not clear whether the USDA will alter the restaurant rule.

In the end, Vollinger said, the agency needs to do more.

USDA needs to be more responsive, she said. In a disaster, we need more flexibility. We need more food in peoples hands.

The Philadelphia Inquirer is one of more than 20 news organizations producing Broke in Philly, a collaborative reporting project on solutions to poverty and the citys push toward economic justice. See all of our reporting at brokeinphilly.org.
Va. governor, once accused of supporting infanticide, eases state abortion restrictions

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Virginia Democratic Governor Ralph Northam, who was accused of supporting infanticide in a 2019 interview, has signed a law that eases restrictions on abortion access in the Commonwealth.

Northam signed the Reproductive Health Protection Act into law last Friday, which, among other things, repeals measures mandating an ultrasound and a 24-hour waiting period prior to an abortion.

No more will legislators in Richmondmost of whom are menbe telling women what they should and should not be doing with their bodies, said Northam in a statement.

The Reproductive Health Protection Act will make women and families safer, and Im proud to sign it into law.

Also known as Senate Bill 733 and House Bill 980, the legislation was passed due to the General Assembly recently becoming majority Democrat.

In late January, the state Senate narrowly passed the bill, with a 20-20 tie vote being broken by Democratic Lieutenant Governor Justin Fairfax.

The Virginia Society for Human Life, a pro-life group, denounced the signing of the bill, calling it dreadful and finding it only more tragic that it was signed on Good Friday.

Now the only information women will receive is what the abortionist is willing to tell her, stated VSHL President Olivia Gans Turner.

Abortionists who are making money from the same women for every abortion performed are not likely to share the dangers of abortion or tell women that her child has a beating heart and brain waves.

Turner added that she believes the Democrat-controlled legislature has made it very clear that they intend to strip out every rational and protective pro-life law in Virginia.

Last year, Northam garnered outrage when, in an interview with WTOP, he defended a recently proposed pro-choice legislation and appeared to endorse infanticide in his comments.

When discussing third-trimester abortions, Northam gave the hypothetical example of a mother who gives birth to a baby that has severe deformities or is not viable.

In this particular example, if a mother is in labor, I can tell you exactly what would happen. The infant would be delivered, the infant would be kept comfortable, Northam told WTOP at the time.

It would be resuscitated if thats what the mother and the family desired and then a discussion would ensue between the physician and the mother.

The governors comments generated much outrage from pro-life groups and politicians, including a denunciation from United States Senator Ben Sasse of Nebraska on the Senate floor.

Let's be clear what we're talking about. We're talking about killing a baby that's been born. We're not talking about some euphemism, we're not talking about a clump of cells, stated Sasse.

Everyone in the Senate ought to be able to say unequivocally that killing that little baby is wrong. This doesn't take any political courage.

In response to the outrage over his comments, Northam, a professional pediatrician, took to social media to denounce the claim that he was supporting infanticide.

I have devoted my life to caring for children and any insinuation otherwise is shameful and disgusting, tweeted the governor in January 2019.
There are a variety of prison documentaries on Netflix that give glimpses into various aspects of life in jail. The popularity of true-crime documentaries such as Making a Murderer and series like Orange Is the New Black have only increased viewers' desires to see life behind bars (though the latter may not provide the most realistic portrait of prison life).

If you want a more real understanding of how the prison system works, these Netflix prison documentaries might just be for you. From a series documenting the crimes of those convicted of murder to one that takes place in a small correctional facility for young women in Madison, IN, these documentaries provide several details about prison life.

- Additional reporting by Haley Lyndes

Related: In the Mood For a Steamy Show? Here Are the Sexiest Options Netflix Has to Offer
A 45-year-old Jersey City man was in critical condition late Tuesday after the car he was driving crashed into the rear of an NJ Transit bus stopped at a light in Bergen County, according to police.

The man, whose name was not released, was driving at a significant speed when he slammed into the bus about 8:30 p.m. in Carlstadt, according to Det. Sgt. John Clery of the boroughs police department.

The bus was stopped at a red light near the intersection of Washington Avenue and Veterans Boulevard, Clery said. There were seven passengers and a driver on the bus, though no injuries were reported.

The driver, who was the only person in the car, was taken to Hackensack University Medical Center in critical condition, police said.

Anthony G. Attrino may be reached at tattrino@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter @TonyAttrino. Find NJ.com on Facebook.

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In a timely article last month, professor N. T. Wright addressed our collective anxiety as Christians living during the coronavirus pandemic by assuring us our faith offers no answers. At least not the answers we want. He asserts that our quest for reasons results from Christianitys faulty reliance on rationalism. Rationalists (including Christian rationalists) want explanations; Romantics (including Christian romantics) want to be given a sigh of relief. But what do we do when God gives us neither explanations nor relief? Wright says we lament.

Citing T. S. Eliot (in East Coker, the second of Eliots Four Quartets), Wright speaks about hoping for the wrong thing.

I asked Wright how might we better think about hope.

Wright: The point is that we all too quickly hope for our hearts desire without thinking that perhaps we need to let God do quite a job of reordering our hearts. In my tradition we have an old prayer which asks that God would so enable us to love what you command, and desire what you promise. Far too much of modernity, including would-be Christian modernity, is wanting God to command what we already love, and promise what we already desire. Eliot, (echoing St. John of the Cross) is challenging that and suggesting we might have to wait on Gods fresh leading before we know what we should really be hoping for.

Ive experienced deep personal sorrow myself this past year, and Ive seen lament and grief as gateways to a deeper, though more ambiguous and even mysterious, faith. Is this a kind of unknowing, as some Christian traditions would teach?

Lament and grief open all sorts of doorways into parts of our personalities, and I dare say aspects of Gods mystery, which we gain by perhaps no other means.

Wright: Lament and grief open all sorts of doorways into parts of our personalities, and I dare say aspects of Gods mystery, which we gain by perhaps no other means. But I would not let this unknowing spill over into a kind of mind-emptying philosophy; any emptying which takes place would then be the prelude to a different kind of filling. Again, Romans 8 would be important here.

I agree with Professor Wright. The eighth chapter of Romans is majestic. It leads off with no condemnation for those are in Christ Jesus (v.1), and proceeds to untangle myriad tensions: sin and law, flesh and spirit, life and death. The Holy Spirit assures our true identity as Gods children, and yet childlike faith still isnt easy. Resurrection demands crucifixion, for Jesus and all who follow him (Mark 8:34). Our souls are forged most intensely and meaningfully by suffering. Its just how it works.

Though redeemed children of God, were not yet who we are. Saved by grace, we still need grace. Resurrection has started, its just not yet completed. Creation groans in the meantime, waiting with eager longing like a mother in labor eager for her child to be born (Rom. 8:22). Her new baby takes a breath and finds life and brings life and joyeven more so if the delivery was difficult. The hope for all creation, subjected to futility and pandemics, is set to be freed from bondage and decay, born again, so to speak, into the freedom and glory of the children of God (v. 21). No matter how bad it gets, its nothing compared to the good that will be. This is our Easter hope and joy.

How this all comes about in the end, God only knows. The Bible speaks to a new heaven and earth (Rev. 21:1), freed from death and decay, and a universe lit up by Gods glory (Rev. 22:5). Were promised new kinds of bodies too (1 Cor. 15:44). Our faith aspires to realities beyond comprehension, larger than the temporal concerns over security and reputation and success and failure and even health that otherwise dominate our thoughts. From birth, weve been wired with a capacity to transcend self-interest and lose ourselves to greater purposes. In the midst of ordinary day-to-day living, were beset by the realization that this cannot be all there is to life. Jesus said only by losing your self can you find your real self (Mark 8:35).

Losing your self happens when you take up your cross. Resurrection demands crucifixion. This itself is cause for lament. Paul indicts human sin as the deadly cause and effect of so much evil, physically and metaphysically. Every relational break and breach of faith, every lie and infidelity and murder and theft and hurt and act of oppression and violence against others. Wright describes God as being grieved to his heart.

I asked, how does divine lament find resolution?

Wright: I was thinking of God lamenting that he had made humans, in Genesis 6.6; and then  granted a strong Trinitarian theology of course  the grief of Jesus both at his friends grave and in Gethsemane, and the groaning of the Spirit in Romans 8:22. The New Testament seems to be saying, at quite a deep level, that these all lead up to, and then flow away from, the cross and resurrection. Only at that point does the healing come into view.

Indeed, as, the New Testament teaches, anyone who is crucified in Christ is a new creation already in Christ, the old has gone, the new is here (2 Cor. 5:17). We live out our true identity in those moments when we do love our neighbors, when we do forgive those who wrong us, when we do care for the earth and the poor and the refugee and the widow and orphan, when we speak truth and make peace and do right and worship the Lord as living sacrifices to God (Rom. 12:1). And when we fail because of our weakness, we can repent and bear witness to a true transformation of heart, to the deep breath of the Spirit and the resurrection of our bodies and all things made new in Christ, born again yet again until that day when we are fully revealed as we hope, made new andalive in a creation finally set free.

N. T. Wright is the professor of New Testament and early Christianity at the University of St Andrews, a Senior Research Fellow at Wycliffe Hall, Oxford University, and the author of over 80 books, including The New Testament in Its World.

Daniel Harrell is Christianity Todays editor in chief.
Australia will not cut funding to the World Health Organisation, despite US President Donald Trump's decision to stop sponsoring the global health body over its bungled coronavirus response.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison has come under pressure by his own MPs to slash funding to the UN agency, after it was revealed Australia was the eighth biggest voluntary contributor of 71 member countries.

In 2018, Australia paid the WHO AUD$63million, including $9.3million in compulsory fees - a contribution five times bigger than China's.

China, the world's most populous country and home to almost 1.4 billion people, paid just $9.83million in voluntary donations.

In his announcement on Wednesday, President Trump accused the WHO of being too 'China-centric' and said it had 'severely mismanaged' the coronavirus outbreak.

The prime minister on Wednesday said he sympathised with Trump's scathing criticisms, having aired a few grievances of his own, but said he would not be following suit.

US President Donald Trump has halted funding to the WHO, with Mr Trump claiming the organisation had 'severely mismanaged' the coronavirus. Some of Prime Minister Scott Morrison's own MPs have called for reform in the WHO, saying the UN agency should face a 'reckoning'

'That said, the WHO also as an organisation does a lot of important work, including here in our own region in the Pacific, and we work closely with them,' he told Perth's 6PR radio.

'We're not going to throw the baby out with the bathwater here, but they're also not immune from criticism and immune from doing things better.'

WHO THE WORLD HEALTH ORGANISATION SAYS ARE ITS BIGGEST VOLUNTARY DONORS Top voluntary contributors United States of America United Nations Republic of Korea Australia Gates Foundation Japan GAVI Alliance National Philanthropic Trust United Kingdom New Zealand Bloomberg European Commission Source: World Health Organisation website Advertisement

The organisation, whose Western Pacific office is based in Manila, works with health authorities in 37 countries across the region, including Australia.

According to its website, the WHO's latest work with the Australian Department of Health is a 'Cooperation Strategy' aimed at improving health in the Western Pacific Region over the next five years.

'This collaboration is underpinned by three key foundations of cooperation: first, WHO contributes to the health of all Australians; second, Australia, facilitated by WHO, contributes to addressing health priorities in the Region and globally, and; third, Australia and WHO work in partnership to promote better health,' the website states.

Mr Morrison acknowledged Australia had declared the coronavirus outbreak a pandemic several weeks before the WHO.

The declaration triggered a range of boosted biosecurity and border security measures to stem the spread of COVID-19.

But even before the crisis had reached pandemic levels, Australia had taken precautions by preventing Chinese visitors and students from entering the country in early February.

Those measures were met with criticism by the Chinese embassy in Canberra which even urged the government to lift the travel restrictions, citing the WHO's recommendations.

The WHO, whose Western Pacific office is based in Manila, works with health authorities in 37 countries across the region, including Australia

'We express our deep regret and dissatisfaction over the Australian government's announcement,' a spokesman said in a statement in February.

'The World Health Organisation has repeatedly stressed that it does not recommend putting travel and trade restrictions on China.

'Only Australia and a small number of countries have taken such extreme measures which are an overreaction indeed.

'We urge the Australian side to ... respect WHO's professional recommendations, and lift the restrictions as early as possible.'

On Wednesday, Federal Cabinet ministers were shocked that, in a further sign of submission, WHO signed off on China re-opening its 'wet markets' where COVID-19 is believed to have first transmitted from bats to humans.

'It's unbelievable, it's extraordinary, that the World Health Organisation sees it fit for these wet markets to continue in China,' Mr Frydenberg said in Canberra.

'They shouldn't ... they've been the source of outbreaks that have killed people around the world.'

Mr Morrison also called the decision 'unfathomable'.

There is some confusion about the WHO's position on wet markets because different envoys have given contradictory positions to various news organisations.

Liberal backbencher Dave Sharma believes Australian funding for the WHO should be tied to 'necessary reforms'.

People wearing protective face masks shop at a chicken stall at a 'wet market' in Shanghai on February 13, 2020

A Chinese wet market in Wuhan, China, has widely been described as the epicentre of the disease. Above, a man buys seafood from a market in Macau in January

US President Donald Trump has slammed the World Health Organisation as too 'China-centric'. Above, WHO Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus (left) and Chinese President Xi Jinping shake hands in Beijing on January 28 ahead of their meeting to discuss how to curb COVID-19

'This reckoning has been coming for some time,' he told Sky News.

'I think a lot of countries, Australia included, have been less than impressed with the WHO's performance.'

Mr Sharma expects countries including Japan, South Korea and Australia to demand changes at the WHO.

'I think we should make sure we condition our future funding on necessary reforms,' the former senior diplomat said.

Labor deputy leader Richard Marles agrees there is a legitimate conversation to be had about the United Nations body.

Scott Morrison pointed out Australia had declared the COVID-19 outbreak a pandemic weeks before the WHO. Australia's infection rate has since slowed down

'But this is not a time to be abandoning it - the world needs a strong World Health Organisation,' he said.

'We can have a conversation about issues inside it, but this is not a time to abandon it.'

The size of Australia's voluntary donations to the UN agency, compared with the rest of the world's, are laid bare in WHO financial documents.

The paperwork outlines how each country makes voluntary contributions to the health agency, on top of compulsory fees.

Other rich countries such as France, population 66 million, coughed up $14million in donations and Canada, home to 37.5 million people, paid $41.8million, the documents show.

The United States and the United Kingdom chipped in the biggest voluntary donations with the US paying $AUD436.8million and the UK $318.7million.
Speaker of the National Assembly of Armenia Ararat Mirzoyan has congratulated Arayik Harutyunyan on being elected to the office of President of the Republic of Artsakh (Nagorno-Karabakh Republic).

Dear Mr. Harutyunyan,

Accept my warmest congratulatory remarks on the occasion of being elected to the office of President of the Republic of Artsakh after the competitive elections held in Artsakh.

By assuming the office of president of Artsakh in this period of great opportunities and various challenges for our homeland and people, you are assuming the mission to ensure Artsakhs security, economic development, the solution to the social issues of the people of Artsakh, radical democratic reforms and the strengthening of democratic institutions.

Through combined efforts, we must ensure protection of the indisputable right of the Armenians of Artsakh to self-determination. The Republic of Armenia and the Republic of Artsakh must continue to take active steps to strengthen the common security system and to return Artsakh to the negotiating table within the scope of the OSCE Minsk Group Co-Chairs.

I wish you great strength, endurance, wisdom and providence to make efforts for the Republic of Artsakh and the Republic of Armenia and for implementation of our pan-national goals.

I am always willing to assist you in accomplishing this mission.

Speaker of the National Assembly of the Republic of Armenia

Ararat Mirzoyan
The coronavirus pandemic has already forced Rutgers University classes online and sent students home until the fall. Now, adjunct professors worry it might cost them their jobs.

Rutgers froze all hiring earlier this month, leaving thousands of adjuncts who are employed on a semester-by-semester basis in the lurch, said Amy Higer, a leader of their labor union.

As the university looks to contain costs after a substantial loss in revenue, it has given adjuncts no indication that their jobs are safe after this semester, Higer said.

I think there is a lot of anger about how undervalued or devalued we are and how we are just seen as disposable, said Higer, executive board president of the Part-Time Lecturer Faculty Chapter (PTLFC) of the American Association of University Professors-American Federation of Teachers. We are working really hard. We really care about the students."

Rutgers, like other public colleges, is grappling with the colossal economic fallout of the pandemic, including a freeze on $73 million in state funding, more than $50 million in student room and board refunds and millions in other lost revenue. It wont know how many adjunct professors will be hired for the fall semester until registration is complete, spokeswoman Dory Devlin said.

We are working diligently to develop plans to mitigate all of our financial challenges as we continue to face uncertainty during this crisis, Devlin said.

CORONAVIRUS RESOURCES: Live map tracker | Businesses that are open | Homepage

The university employs about 3,000 adjunct professors, who have little job security and are sometimes paid less than $5,500 per course, according to the union. Those instructors worked extra time over spring break to move their courses online and were given no extra compensation, Higer said.

They now fear the university will shift more courses to tenured professors or increase class sizes to trim costs, she said.

Though Rutgers has a $1.4 billion endowment it can tap into, its operating in uncharted territory. It remains unclear if the university will lose international or out-of-state students in the fall and how other revenue will be affected.

The financial impact of the response to the COVID-19 outbreak will touch upon every aspect of what we do and how we do it, President Robert Barchi said last week.

A $323 million federal emergency aid package for colleges includes $54.2 million for Rutgers.

Adam Clark may be reached at adam_clark@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on twitter at @realAdamClark. Find NJ.com on Facebook.

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Mutual fund



distributorPGIM India on Wednesday said it has provided financial support for manufacture of indigenous ventilators in Kerala under a collaborative effort led by the state government.

As part of its contributionsin the fight against coronavirus pandemic, the company was providing over 10 per cent of the overall cost towards project "Breath of Hope to design and produce fully indigenous mechanical ventilators at the cost of Rs 15,000 a piece, a release said here.

The project has successfully created a prototype already and was preparing to get into rapid production now.

Its assistance of Rs 20 lakh at this stage comprises employees' contribution and a matching company grant, the release added.

PGIM India Chief Executive Officer Ajit Menon said the country needed to ramp up its healthcare capacities and sufficient availabilityof ventilators will be critical in the last line of defence and a life saving need in the fight against COVID-19.

The Breath of Hope is a collaborative effort of Kerala Startup Mission, the state's Nodal Agency for Innovation and Entrepreneurship, the Health Department, various startup companies and the Super Fab Labs set up in the state in partnership with the famed Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the release said.

The project's objective was to design, develop and manufacture 5,000 indigenous mechanical ventilators in the next couple of weeks anddeploy them in designated hospitals in rural areas.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
An officer attached to President Uhuru Kenyattas security detail was left embarrassed after he was arrested on Sunday night past curfew hours.

A police report at Embakasi Division indicates that the incident happened at around 10 pm at a roadblock erected at the former GSU training school junction.

The report states that Major-General Ayub Matiri, the Commanding Officer of the National Command Centre for Covid-19, was at the roadblock when a misunderstanding arose between him and Uhurus bodyguard.

His(Major Gen) observation was that most of the violators of the curfew order were police officers and army officers. He communicated the same to the IG-NPS, the report notes, adding that during that time, there came Mr Kiragu SP who is attached to Prescot (Presidential Escort Unit) and the Major Gen. ordered him to drive back to where he was coming from.

Kiragu reportedly tried to explain that he was coming from work and was going to his residence to sleep as he was reporting on duty early in the morning.

A misunderstanding arose and the Maj. Gen. called the Inspector General accusing Kiragu of lacking discipline and had a gun, the report says.

The Maj. Gen. handed over the phone to the Officer Commanding Embakasi who was instructed by the IG to disarm the officer, arrest him and place him in cells.

The officer was disarmed and arrested but was never booked after further instructions from the Inspector General of Police Hillary Mutyambai.

The officer was escorted to Embakasi Police Station but before he could be booked in, consultations were made and the IG instructed that he be released. He was released at around 2300 hrs and he left while complaining about embarrassment, the report notes.
A soldier watches over a bus carrying U.S. detainees upon their return to Guatemala. (Morena Perez Joachin / For The Times)

More than half the deportees flown back to Guatemala by U.S. immigration authorities have tested positive for coronavirus, the top Guatemalan health official said Tuesday.

Speaking to reporters in Guatemala City, Hugo Monroy, the minister of health, did not specify a time frame or the total number of deportees who had arrived home with infections.

But hundreds of Guatemalans have been returned in recent weeks, including 182 who arrived Monday on two flights from Texas.

Monroy said that on one flight  which he declined to identify  more than 75% of the deportees tested positive.

But he made clear this was not an isolated incident and said many deportees arrived with fevers and coughs and were immediately tested.

Were not just talking about one flight, he said. Were talking about all the flights.

In video later released by the government, Monroy contradicted his earlier statements and said he was referring to just one flight.

The Guatemalan Foreign Ministry said through a spokesman Tuesday that the official number of deportees diagnosed with COVID-19 is four, including one who arrived on one of the flights Monday.

A high number of infections among deportees would cast doubt on the official tally of how many of the more than 33,000 migrants in U.S. detention are infected. U.S. immigration officials have said that 77 have tested positive, noting that some of those may no longer be in custody.

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security did not respond to requests for comment.

For weeks, Guatemalan authorities have expressed concerns that the Trump administration could spread the infection in the Central American nation through deportations from the United States.

Guatemala became the first country to halt deportations when it suspended flights on March 17 to allow for both countries to establish sufficient health protocols. But the flights resumed two days later.

On March 30, Guatemalan Vice President Guillermo Castillo begged the U.S. to stop deportation flights to Guatemala, according to an interview with a local radio station.

Story continues

The flights were paused again for a week but restarted Monday.

Another flight was scheduled for Tuesday afternoon, but Guatemalan officials did not confirm whether it had arrived.

Guatemala is under a quarantine order and, as of Tuesday, had reported 150 active cases of COVID-19 and five deaths.

In the United States, at least 21 U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement employees working at migrant detention centers have tested positive for COVID-19, according to the agency.

That includes 13 at the Alexandria, La., staging facility that has been sending deportation flights to Guatemala and other countries.

An additional 80 ICE employees who work outside of detention have also tested positive. The agency has refused to provide a count for the number of cases among thousands of contractors and personnel at private facilities that contract with the federal government to hold migrants.

The agency has been engaged in an ongoing review to determine which migrants are most vulnerable and able to be released from custody as the virus spreads through its detention facilities. Only recently has it begun to test more broadly at facilities that have confirmed cases.

Because of the pandemic, Guatemala is refusing to accept deportees who are not Guatemalan, putting on hold a deal it made with the U.S. last year. Under that arrangement, Guatemala had accepted some 900 Salvadorans and Hondurans who had been denied the opportunity to seek asylum in the U.S.

As for Guatemalan deportees, officials said the first to test positive for COVID-19 was an adult male who arrived March 26 from Mesa, Ariz.

A few minors have arrived with fevers, though U.S. immigration authorities have said that all passengers temperatures are taken before boarding and that no one is allowed to make the flight to Guatemala, or anywhere else, with a fever.

On Friday, the White House threatened visa sanctions against any country that does not accept its citizens who are deported from the United States amid the pandemic  a move widely seen as directed at Central America, the biggest source of migrants arriving at the U.S. southern border.

On Monday, U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said he had notified Congress that the Trump administration would continue targeted assistance to Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador, citing their continued cooperation on immigration and the asylum deals.

Since January, the U.S. government has deported more than 11,758 Guatemalans.

Since March 20, when the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention issued an order blocking travelers from Canada and Mexico regardless of country of origin, U.S. officials have expelled nearly 11,000 migrants with minimal processing.

For the first time under the modern immigration system, the mass removals include unaccompanied minors and asylum seekers, two groups specially protected under U.S. law.

In the first week of April alone, Guatemala received about 100 unaccompanied minors expelled from the United States  as many as it took in during all of March.

Times staff writers McDonnell, OToole and Carcamo reported from Mexico City, Washington and Santa Ana, respectively. Cecilia Sanchez in The Times Mexico City bureau contributed to this report.
Credit: CC0 Public Domain

Unlike Spain, other European nations fighting the coronavirus pandemic allow children outdoors for brief periods.

Here are the measures taken across Europe regarding children, from the least restrictive to the strictest:

Youngest can go to school

Iceland has not imposed a lockdown and primary schools are open. High schools and universities are set to reopen on May 4.

In Sweden, primary schools have also remained open although with rules on social distancing in place. So far there is no date for when its high schools and universities will reopen.

Children set to return

Primary schools are closed in the rest of Europe and only a few nations have announced when they will open their doors again.

Denmark has reopened kindergartens and primary schools on April 15, while Norway will follow suit with kindergartens on April 20 and some of its primary schools on April 27.

Tiny Luxembourg wants to open both its kindergartens and primary schools on May 4. Greece will open its primary schools on May 10 followed by Estonia five days later.

While children cannot see their friends in class, they can still go outside for a walk or to exercise, at least with their families.

Restrictions by numbers

But the restrictions vary by country, often depending on age.

The Nordic countries, which are the most flexible, only set a limit on the number of people who can gather in public.

In Denmark and Finland, public crowds of more than 10 are banned, while in Norway, five is the maximum number.

Restrictions by age

In Poland and Bosnia, under-18s can only go outside if accompanied by an adult, while in Montenegro it is only children under 12 who must have an adult escort.

In North Macedonia, minors can only go outside alone between 1:00 pm and 3:00 pm, while in Serbia everyone regardless of age must be home by 5:00 pm on weekdays, and midnight on weekends.

Italy, which has the world's second-highest death toll, allows children to go outside if accompanied by a parent.

France requires everyone to carry a signed form explaining where they are headed and why, which in the case of minors must be signed by their parents.

Spain bans children from leaving home altogether while adults are only allowed out to go to work if they can't do so from home, buy food, seek medical care or briefly walk their dog.

Explore further Coronavirus: the first moves to ease lockdown

 2020 AFP
Chennai, April 15 : The Tata Group has donated PCR test kits worth Rs 8 cr to detect the coronavirus infection to Tamil Nadu, said an official statement on Wednesday.

According to the statement, the Tata Group has donated 40,032 PCR test kits to the Tamil Nadu government to detect the infection.

Tamil Nadu Chief Minister K. Palaniswami thanked the Tata Group for its gesture.
Officials in Japan's second biggest city have appealed for donations of raincoats for health workers to use as emergency personal protective gear when dealing with coronavirus patients

Japan's third-biggest city has appealed for donations of raincoats to be used as personal protection gear by hospital workers dealing with the coronavirus outbreak.

The shortage of proper protective clothing in Osaka is so acute that some health workers are resorting to wearing garbage bags over their scrubs.

"Please send us unused raincoats. Any colour will do," Mayor Ichiro Matsui told reporters on Tuesday.

The region is battling a growing number of cases, with more than 830 infections recordedthe second-highest in the country after Tokyo's 2,171.

"Some hospital workers are wearing a garbage bag as an alternative to protective gear," Matsui said, adding the makeshift fix raises contamination risks for workers as they removed them over their heads.

"It doesn't matter if you're an Osaka city citizen or not. Please provide us raincoats," the city government website said.

The request comes as Japan's two emergency medicine associations issued a joint statement saying they are "already sensing the collapse of the emergency medical system".

"The number of hospitals that can accept patients suffering from a high fever and breathing problems is decreasing," the statement said, warning these patients were instead being sent to emergency clinics which had to turn away patients with other serious medical complaints.

"We fear that patients suffering from heart attacks, strokes, or multiple injuries might lose precious time in being treated," the statement said.

State of emergency

Japan has seen a relatively smaller-scale outbreak than many other countries, with 8,100 infections and 119 deaths since the first case emerged in mid-January.

But the government has now declared a state of emergency in seven regions after medical advisors warned the outbreak could grow quickly if people did not stay inside and reduce contact.

The Nikkei business daily said the fabric used for protective gear in Japan is made overseas and was difficult to manufacture domestically, while the demand overseas made securing supplies difficult.

Healthcare workers in many other countries have been forced to improvise personal protection gear because of the global shortage.

Still, the Osaka appeal left many in Japan shocked.

"This reminds me of wartime when the government asked people to donate anything that was metal," one user wrote on Twitter.

"I feel sorry for medical workers who have to work in a raincoat," said another.

Japan is already trying to plug gaps in other supplies needed to respond to the outbreak, with inmates at some prisons in Osaka and Kyoto now making protective gear, according to the justice ministry.

Supplies for hand sanitisers are also running dry, prompting the health ministry to allow the use of spirits with an alcohol proof of between 70 and 83 percent to be used at hospitals.

Kanagawa prefecture near Tokyo, meanwhile, has called on residents to donate thermometers, which are also in short supply, for use at facilities, accepting coronavirus patients with mild symptoms.

Explore further Follow the latest news on the coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak

 2020 AFP
[April 14, 2020] Glancy Prongay & Murray LLP, a Leading Securities Fraud Law Firm, Announces Investigation of GSX Techedu Inc. (GSX) on Behalf of Investors

Glancy Prongay & Murray LLP ("GPM"), a leading national shareholder rights law firm, today announced that it has commenced an investigation on behalf of GSX (News - Alert) Techedu Inc. ("GSX" or the Company") (NYSE: GSX) investors concerning the Company and its officers' possible violations of the federal securities laws. If you suffered a loss on your GSX investments or would like to inquire about potentially pursuing claims to recover your loss under the federal securities laws, you can submit your contact information here or contact Charles H. Linehan, of GPM at 310-201-9150, Toll-Free at 888-773-9224, via email [email protected] or visit our website at www.glancylaw.com to learn more about your rights. On April 14, 2020, the investment analyst Ciron Research issued a report on GSX entitled "GSX Techedu Inc - The Most Blatant Chinese Stock Fraud since 2011." The Citron Report claimed that the Company "is overstating revenue by up to 70% and should immediately halt trading and launch an internal investigation."



On this news, the Company's American Depositary Share ("ADS") price fell sharply during intra-day trading, thereby injuring investors. Follow us for updates on LinkedIn, Twitter, or Facebook.

Whistleblower Notice: Persons with non-public information regarding GSX should consider their options to aid the investigation or take advantage of the SEC (News - Alert) Whistleblower Program. Under the program, whistleblowers who provide original information may receive rewards totaling up to 30 percent of any successful recovery made by the SEC. For more information, call Charles H. Linehan at 310-201-9150 or 888-773-9224 or email [email protected]. About GPM Glancy Prongay & Murray LLP is a premier law firm representing investors and consumers in securities litigation and other complex class action litigation. ISS Securities Class Action Services has consistently ranked GPM in its annual SCAS Top 50 Report. In 2018, GPM was ranked a top five law firm in number of securities class action settlements, and a top six law firm for total dollar size of settlements. With four offices across the country, GPM's nearly 40 attorneys have won groundbreaking rulings and recovered billions of dollars for investors and consumers in securities, antitrust, consumer, and employment class actions. GPM's lawyers have handled cases covering a wide spectrum of corporate misconduct including cases involving financial restatements, internal control weaknesses, earnings management, fraudulent earnings guidance and forward looking statements, auditor misconduct, insider trading, violations of FDA regulations, actions resulting in FDA and DOJ investigations, and many other forms of corporate misconduct. GPM's attorneys have worked on securities cases relating to nearly all industries and sectors in the financial markets, including, energy, consumer discretionary, consumer staples, real estate and REITs, financial, insurance, information technology, health care, biotech, cryptocurrency, medical devices, and many more. GPM's past successes have been widely covered by leading news and industry publications such as The Wall Street Journal, The Financial Times, Bloomberg Businessweek, Reuters, the Associated Press (News - Alert), Barron's, Investor's Business Daily, Forbes, and Money. 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/20200414006026/en/

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Mandate Trade Union has called for the immediate suspension of the decision by Debenhams management to put the company into voluntary liquidation in the Republic of Ireland, calling the move opportunistic and cynical.

Debenhams shocked almost 2,000 workers in 11 stores last Thursday, (April 9) by announcing that its Irish stores are not expected to reopen.

Its Newbridge store, which employs around 150 people, had been open for 14 years at the Whitewater Shopping Centre.

The company had already suspended trading due to the COVID-19 pandemic and Mandate believes the timing of this liquidation is cynical.

Mandate General Secretary, John Douglas, said This decision to enter liquidation without any consultation with the workers or their representatives is a hammer blow for workers who were already trying to deal with the impact of the coronavirus pandemic. All Debenhams workers are in lockdown and have no ability to travel to attend meetings and discuss the key issues with their union.

This doesn't appear to be a normal compulsory liquidation. If, as we suspect, it has been entered into freely by the Directors of the company, there should have been discussions with their workers who built this company and have given them loyal service for decades, added Douglas.

We want to see what the finances of the company are, establish whether there is a credible way any of the Irish Debenhams stores could be saved and protect jobs where possible. If this is not possible, we want to negotiate the best solutions for our members, he said.

Mr Douglas also questions the involvement of Bank of Ireland in the process.

Bank of Ireland is a part-owner of the business, along with Barclays, Silver Point Capital and GoldenTree. It beggars belief that an Irish bank, bailed out by the Irish taxpayer, would deliberately and cynically place a company into liquidation without any negotiations with workers and costing up to 2,000 jobs, said Mr Douglas.

Debenhams management should suspend their decision to enter voluntary liquidation and immediately commence discussions with its workers through their representatives, Mandate Trade Union," he added.

Mandate has now written to the Minister for Business, Heather Humphreys, asking her Department to intervene to prevent the appointment of a Liquidator.

In the letter, Mr Douglas asks the Minister to demand that the appointment of a liquidator is not made until there is full engagement with staff and their union as to the future of the Irish business and pending the ending of the COVID-19 Crisis and a return to normality. This will, we believe, allow for a genuine engagement with Debenhams Management to discuss all options open including the possibility of saving some of the jobs involved.
The death toll due to coronavirus rose to 377 while the number of cases in the country climbed to 11,439 on Wednesday, according to the Union Health Ministry.

While the number of active COVID-19 cases stood at 9,756, as many as 1305 people have been cured and discharged, and one had migrated, it said.

The total number of cases include 76 foreign nationals.

As many as 24 deaths have been reported since Tuesday evening, of which 18 were reported from Maharashtra, two each from Delhi and Gujarat, one each from Karnataka and Tamil Nadu.

Of the total 377 deaths, Maharashtra tops the tally with 178 deaths, followed by Madhya Pradesh at 50, Delhi at 30, Gujarat at 28 and Telangana at 17. Punjab and Tamil Nadu have reported 12 deaths each. Karnatakahas reported 10 fatalities while Andhra Pradesh reported nine deaths.

West Bengal has reported seven deaths while five people have lost their lives in Uttar Pradesh.

Jammu and Kashmir has reported four fatalities each while Kerala, Haryana and Rajasthan have recorded three deaths each. Jharkhand has reported two deaths.

Bihar, Himachal Pradesh, Odisha and Assam reported one fatality each, according to the health ministry data.

However, a PTI tally of figures reported by various states as on Tuesday evening showed 389 deaths.

There has been a lag in the Union Health Ministry figures, compared to the number of deaths announced by different states, which officials attribute to procedural delays in assigning the cases to individual states.

According to the ministry's data updated in the morning, the highest number of confirmed cases in the country are from Maharashtra at 2,687 followed by Delhi at 1,561 and Tamil Nadu at 1,204.

COVID-19 cases have gone up to 969 in Rajasthan followed by 730 in Madhya Pradesh, 660 in Uttar Pradesh and 650 in Gujarat.

Telangana has 624 cases, followed by Andhra Pradesh at 483 and Kerala at 387.

The number of novel coronavirus cases has risen to 278 in Jammu and Kashmir, 260 in Karnataka, 213 in West Bengal and 199 in Haryana. Punjab has reported 176 infections so far.

Bihar has reported 66 cases, while Odisha has 60 coronavirus cases. Thirty-seven people were infected with the virus in Uttarakhand, while Himachal Pradesh and Chhattisgarh have reported 33 cases each followed by Assam with 32 cases.

Jharkhand has 27 cases, Chandigarh has 21 cases and Ladakh has 17, while 11 cases have been reported from the Andaman and Nicobar Islands.

Goa and Puducherry have reported seven COVID-19 infections each, Manipur and Tripura have two cases each, while Mizoram, Arunachal Pradesh and Meghalaya have reported a case each.

"State-wise distribution is subject to further verification and reconciliation," the ministry said on its website.

The website also mentions that the patient from Nagaland has been shifted to Assam.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
U.S. Senator Kelly Loeffler said that President Trump is absolutely right to include multiple Georgia business leaders in charting the course for reopening the nations economy.

President Trump announced that leaders from Georgia-based Southern Company, Home Depot, Coca-Cola, UPS, Waffle House, Chick-fil-a and Inspire Brands will serve on the White Houses Great American Economic Revival Industry Groups. These bipartisan groups will assist the White House in charting a path forward for the economy in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic.

It is time to start discussing how we will safely get America back to work, said Senator Loeffler. Georgia is home to many businesses that are known worldwide as industry leaders. President Trump is absolutely right to take advantage of that expertise as his administration plans how to reopen our economy. These leaders will be able to provide valuable insight into how we can safely get employees back to work and bring the economy roaring back.

Senator Loeffler has been talking to business owners across Georgia daily, and over the weekend, she spoke again with President Trump about what it will take to be ready to safely reopen the economy.
NEW YORK, N.Y. -- Shop-goers will now be required to wear face coverings at New York City grocery stores and supermarkets, Mayor Bill de Blasio announced Wednesday in the citys latest effort to stop the spread of the coronavirus (COVID-19).

The mayor called on the citys supermarkets and grocery stores to put up signs at the entrance of their stores asking customers to wear face coverings if they plan to shop.

He said shop owners can call 311 to report a customer who refuses to wear a face covering and the NYPD would step in to enforce the new guidance if needed.

We will back up those stores, we will help you to enforce the rules, you have a right to have those rules in place, its the smart thing to do for the good of all New Yorkers and the City of New York will back you up, he said during his daily coronavirus press briefing.

You can shop if you have a face covering, if you don't have a face covering, you have to go back out until you get one, he continued.

The latest guidance comes nearly two weeks after the mayor called on New Yorkers to wear face coverings whenever they leave their homes.

Over the weekend, the mayor said he would also require all essential workers to wear face coverings starting Monday.

FOLLOW SYDNEY KASHIWAGI ON TWITTER.

*** CLICK HERE FOR COMPLETE COVERAGE OF CORONAVIRUS IN NEW YORK ***
Constitutional Rights Dont Disappear During Pandemic, DOJ Says

Barr: Religious institutions, believers shouldn't be 'singled out'

The Justice Department (DOJ) has weighed in on a dispute between an individuals right to exercise religious freedom with local and state officials efforts to contain the spread of the CCP virus.

The tension over the issue has sparked multiple lawsuits across the country.

As the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus pandemic continues to reshape American society, many churches and religious institutions have devised creative ways to continue faith-based activities while abiding by social distancing requirements. But some churches have faced challenges from local and state authorities for their efforts.

The DOJ recently filed a statement of interest (pdf) in support of a Mississippi church that sued the city in which its located and its mayor for ticketing congregants during a drive-in service. The department argued in its filing that individual rights under the constitution must be preserved during a public health crisis.

There is no pandemic exception  to the fundamental liberties the Constitution safeguards, the DOJ said. Indeed, individual rights secured by the Constitution do not disappear during a public health crisis.

These individual rights, including the protections in the Bill of Rights made applicable to the states through the Fourteenth Amendment, are always in force and restrain government action, it continued.

At the same time, the Constitution does not hobble government from taking necessary, temporary measures to meet a genuine emergency, it added.

A sign on the door to Grace Church Eden Prairie pointed churchgoers to online services after church leadership decided to present worship music and the sermon to an estimated 3,500 online viewers in Eden Prairie, Minn., on March 15, 2020. (Adam Bettcher/Getty Images)

This comes as many local and state officials across the country have taken action to stop people of faith from gathering, in an effort to slow the spread of the CCP virus pandemic. In New York City, Mayor Bill de Blasio has said he would impose fines or potentially close down places of worship if services continued in the city.

Thats fueled tension between localities and religious leaders as they attempt to navigate the uncertainties of how to operate during the pandemic.

In the case at hand, Mississippis governor had designated churches and other religious entities as an essential business or operation that can operate as long as they abide by the Centers for Disease Prevention and Control (CDC) guidelines.

But the City of Greenville issued an executive order on April 7 barring churches from holding in-person or drive-in services until the governors shelter-in-place order is lifted.

While many churches have moved services online or on teleconference calls, Temple Baptist Church doesnt have a website for live streaming and its congregants dont have social media accounts, the church said.

On April 8, the church broadcasted its service over a low-power FM transmitter to congregants who sat in parked cars outside the church with their windows rolled up. As they listened to the sermon, police officers began issuing $500 tickets to congregants who refused to leave, even though nobody was outside his or her car, the church asserted.

Pastor Chuck Salvo delivers his sermon to the congregation during a drive-in service at On Fire Christian Church in Louisville, Ky., on April 05, 2020. (Andy Lyons/Getty Images)

The DOJ notes the city has since dropped the fines, but continues to enforce the order.

The church subsequently sued the city on April 10, seeking to block the mayors order. It alleges that the order violates the constitutional right of freedom to exercise religion.

The DOJ intervened in the case on April 14, filing the statement of interest in support of the Mississippi church. The department argued that although its important for local and state officials to impose restrictions to enforce social distancing, they arent allowed to single out church and religious entities for distinctive treatment.

Any government restriction must be neutral, in that any restriction applied on religious activity must be applied the same as to a non-religious activity, Attorney General William Barr said in a statement.

For example, if a government allows movie theaters, restaurants, concert halls, and other comparable places of assembly to remain open and unrestricted, it may not order houses of worship to close, limit their congregation size, or otherwise impede religious gatherings, he said. Religious institutions must not be singled out for special burdens.

DOJ argued in its filing that the facts support the allegations that the City of Greenville had singled out churches for distinctive treatment because churches are forbidden to hold drive-in services, even as citizens are permitted to sit in a car at a drive-in restaurant with their windows rolled down.

Even in times of emergency, when reasonable and temporary restrictions are placed on rights, the First Amendment and federal statutory law prohibit discrimination against religious institutions and religious believers, Barr said.

The pandemic has changed the ways Americans live their lives. Religious communities have rallied to the critical need to protect the community from the spread of this disease by making services available online and in ways that otherwise comply with social distancing guidelines.

Ryan Tucker, senior counsel at Alliance Defending Freedom, a religious rights organization thats representing the church, welcomed the departments intervention.

In Greenville, you can be in your car with the windows rolled down at a drive-in restaurant, but you cant be in your car with the windows rolled up at a drive-in church service. To target churches that way is both nonsensical and unconstitutional, Tucker said in a statement.

We appreciate the DOJs support for our position that this type of government action isnt necessary to protect health and safety. It only serves to unnecessarily violate Americans freedoms protected by the First Amendment.

Temple Baptist Church isnt the only church fighting to protect congregants constitutional rights amid the pandemic.

On April 11, a federal district court granted a temporary restraining order to a Kentucky church, On Fire Christian Center, that had sued Louisville Mayor Greg Fischer over a ban on all Easter church service gatherings in the city, including drive-in services.

In his opinion (pdf), U.S. District Judge Justin Walker called the mayors decision stunning and beyond all reason, unconstitutional.

In reaction to the DOJs intervention in the Mississippi case, Jeremy Dys, a special counsel for First Liberty Institute, told The Epoch Times in an email that he hopes that mayors and municipalities will take care to ensure their orders in the defense of the public health do not single out or target churches, synagogues, or houses of worship.

First Liberty Institute represented On Fire Christian Center in the Kentucky case.

Dys echoed DOJs arguments, saying that government officials are required by law and the constitution to treat religious organizations equally. He added that places of worship are important during these uncertain times.

America needs its churches to provide the calm, comfort, and care they uniquely provide to communities across the country, he said. And the government needs churches and other houses of worship to do just that during this pandemic.

Katabella Roberts contributed to this report.

The article was updated on April 15 to provide further clarity to the DOJs argument in their statement of interest.
State Rep. Avery Bourne and several other House Republicans are petitioning Gov. J.B. Pritzker to reopen state parks and trails during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Parks have been closed since the stay-home order went into effect March 20.
Sign in Sunset Beach, California advises motorists along Pacific Coast Highway to stay at home and maintain safe distances from each other amid Coronavirus worldwide outbreak.

With millions under stay-at-home orders and working remotely, American roadways are seeing a lot less congestion and accidents. That means less risk of insurance claims  and auto insurers are taking note. Just over 80% of American auto insurance companies have announced that they will refund or credit drivers more than $6.5 billion over the next two months, according to a new report from the Consumer Federation of America. But those refund programs vary widely from insurer to insurer. Initiatives from State Farm and American Family received high marks from the consumer advocacy group for the amount of relief offered and the speed at which it's promised to be delivered. However, others fell short. "It's clear that for the bulk of insurers, there's room for improvement  even among those providing relief," says Birny Birnbaum, executive director of the Center for Economic Justice. "There's certainly room for those who haven't taken action to provide relief." If you are somebody who's had a particularly significant drop in mileage, you may want to call your insurance company and ask to be re-rated as a lower mileage driver, says Doug Heller, an insurance expert with CFA. This would make sense for someone who used to have a 50-mile daily round trip commute who's now working from home and only driving to the grocery store once a week, for instance. "This is the same advice we give to people who retire from their job: Call your insurer and tell them you're not driving to work every day anymore so you should be re-rated as a lower mileage driver," Heller says. In addition to the refund programs, many insurers are offering financial hardship programs that could provide those struggling to pay their bills with a grace period to pay their insurance premiums late without incurring late fees or losing coverage. But you'll need to call your insurer to find out if this is available and specifically request this type of relief. Don't just let your car insurance lapse with the intention of buying a new policy when stay-at-home orders are lifted. Many times, you will face a higher cost. "We definitely don't recommend people drop their coverage unless they're literally getting rid of their cars," Birnbaum says. CNBC Make It rounded up a list of insurance companies that have announced initiatives for drivers during the current coronavirus health crisis. Keep in mind that some insurers are providing relief on a case-by-case basis and you may not qualify for all of the programs. If your insurance company is not listed, you should still reach out directly to ask about what assistance it can provide. We will update this list as we receive more information.

AAA Northern California, Nevada & Utah

As of April 10, AAA Northern California says customers with an auto insurance policy in effect as of April 30 will receive a refund worth about 20% of auto premiums for two months. For those who pay in installments, the refund will be applied against customers' next payment after May 31, 2020. For customers who paid in full, CSAA will return the money to the payment account it has on file. CSAA will also pause cancellations for home and auto policies due to non-payment and offer flexible payment options through May 31, 2020. For more information or to request assistance, contact 1-800-207-3618, Monday through Friday 4 a.m. to 11 p.m. PT and Saturday and Sunday 4 a.m. to 7 p.m. PT.

Allstate

Allstate announced that personal auto insurance customers will receive a payment worth about 15% of their monthly premium in April and May through its Shelter-in-Place Payback program. The insurer will automatically deposit the funds or credit the card used for the payment. Allstate will also provide free Allstate Identity Protection for the rest of the year for customers when they sign up in April or May. Those facing financial challenges can request a special payment plan that delays payments for 60 days with no penalty. For more information or to request a payment grace period, contact Allstate's customer service at 1-877-810-2920 or contact your local agent.

American Family

As of April 6, American Family rolled out its Auto Insurance Premium Relief Payment plan, which will provide customers with a one-time, $50 payment for each vehicle insured under a personal auto insurance policy. American Family says it will print and mail checks for customers as it receives approval from each state's insurance regulator. For more information, contact American Family's customer care center at 1-800-MYAMFAM (1-800-692-6326) or your local agent.

Amica Mutual

As of April 9, Amica Mutual launched a COVID-19 Auto Premium Relief Program in which every customer that had an automobile, motorcycle or RV insured with Amica on April 1 will receive a credit worth about 20% of their monthly auto premiums for April and May, pending regulatory approval. Amica says the credit will be issued in two installments, one in May and one in June. Customers who paid in full, or have no remaining balance, will receive a refund check. Additionally, Amica will offer upon request a penalty-free grace period on payments for insurance premiums for those affected by COVID-19 and has stopped cancellations and non-renewals of policies through June 2, 2020. For more information or to request assistance, contact Amica Mutual at 1-800-242-6422.

Auto-Owners Insurance

Auto-Owners Insurance will provide a refund to personal automobile policyholders of about 15% of the premiums paid for the months of April and May. For more information, contact Auto-Owners Insurance customer service at 1-517-323-1200.

Erie Insurance

As of April 9, Erie Insurance announced it would cut rates on personal and commercial auto insurance policies, for a total reduction of $200 million throughout the 12 states it operates in. CFA warns that this program fails to provide any immediate relief to customers. It's "actually only promising to cut rates sometime in the future," CFA says. Erie also said that it will offer flexible payment and billing options for customers experiencing financial hardship upon request. For more information and to request assistance, contact Erie's customer care team at 1-800-458-0811.

Farmers Insurance

For April, Farmers is reducing auto insurance premiums by 25% on Farmers branded and 21st Century branded policies. The discount will be automatically applied as a credit on customers' next billing statement. Those who paid in full will receive a refund for the amount of the reduction. Farmers will also offer payment flexibility where state rules mandate and automatically pause cancellation policies for non-payment through May 1, 2020. Any unpaid balance will carry over to your next billing statement with no late fees. For more information or to request assistance, contact Farmers at 1-800-238-9671, Monday through Friday, 7 a.m. to 6:50 p.m. CT.

Germania Insurance

As of April 8, Germania announced a Reduced Driving Payback program that will issue customers a $50 credit for personal auto policies that were in effect in March and April. For customers who paid in full, Germania will issue a refund check. Germania will also waive installment fees for all customers through the end of May and modify its claims process to accommodate the growing number of vehicles being utilized for delivery purposes. For more information or to request assistance, contact Germania at 1-800-392-2202, ext. 4811, or email gaccount@germaniainsurance.com.

GEICO

The GEICO Giveback program will offer auto and motorcycle insurance customers an automatic credit worth about 15% of the next full policy term up for renewal between April 8 and October 7, 2020. If your policy is $1,000 for six months, for example, your credit will be $150 at your renewal, GEICO says. GEICO will also automatically pause cancellations of policies due to non-payment and policy expiration through at least April 30, 2020. CFA cautions that GEICO's program only applies to new and existing customers who are renewing over the next two to six months, so only about one-third of GEICO's policyholders will see any savings during the stay-at-home orders currently in effect. For more information, contact GEICO at 1-800-207-7847 or through the insurer's mobile apps.

The Hanover Insurance Company

As of April 10, Hanover announced the creation of the Hanover CARES Refund, in which the insurer will refund 15% of April and May auto premiums to eligible customers. Hanover will credit in-force policies in May and June. Those who have pre-paid premiums will receive credits in each of the same months. Hanover will also offer flexibility on bill payment options, waive late fees and extend at least a 60-day hold on cancellations and non-renewals for non-payment upon request. For more information, contact Hanover customer service at 1-800-922-8427.

The Hartford

Insurance company The Hartford announced its COVID-19 Personal Auto Payback Plan that will issue refunds worth about 15% of April and May auto insurance premiums within two months. Customers who paid in full will receive a credit to their credit card, a check mailed to them or have the funds automatically deposited in their bank account. Additionally, The Hartford will waive late payment fees and stop policy cancellations for non-payment until May 31 upon request. For more information or to request assistance, check out The Hartford's customer care center or call auto insurance representatives at 1-877-896-9320.

Kemper Personal Insurance

Kemper announced its Deserved Premium Credit, which will automatically issue refunds worth about 15% of auto insurance premiums for April and May and will be credited against customers' May and June payments. Customers who paid their policy in full will receive a refund of the credited amounts. For more information, contact Kemper at 1-877-252-7878 or reach out to your local agent by phone or email during business hours.

Liberty Mutual

Liberty Mutual announced its Personal Auto Customer Relief Refund that will issue refunds worth about 15% of auto insurance premiums for two months. Liberty Mutual estimates it will start issuing refunds in the coming weeks, once it has approval from state insurance regulators. Liberty Mutual will also extend payment dates if needed, automatically stop charging late fees and temporarily pause personal auto and home coverage cancellations due to non-payment through at least May 22, 2020. For more information or to request assistance, contact Liberty Mutual through its app or by calling 1-800-290-7933.

Mercury Insurance

Mercury Insurance announced a Customer Giveback Program, which will issue credits worth about 15% of monthly auto insurance premiums for two months. The insurer will automatically credit customers' accounts, pending approval from state regulators. For more information, contact Mercury at 1-800-503-3724, or email customerservice@mercuryinsurance.com.

Nationwide

Nationwide issue a one-time premium refund of $50 per policy for personal auto policies active as of March 31, 2020. The refund is roughly equivalent to 15% worth of premium payments for two months. The insurer estimates the refund will arrive in the next 30 days, pending regulatory approval. Nationwide will also work with customers experiencing financial hardship by suspending the cancellation of some policies, deferring payment deadlines and waiving some late fees upon request. For more information or to request assistance, home and auto customers can contact Nationwide at 877-669-6877, and business customers can reach Nationwide at 888-508-8622.

NJM Insurance

As of April 10, NJM (also known as the New Jersey Manufacturers Casualty Insurance Company) says it will refund the equivalent of 15% of annual premium payments that personal auto insurance policyholders paid over the last three months. The insurer says customers can expect to receive their refunds, via check or direct deposit, in the "coming weeks." NJM will also extend premium payment deadlines and provide special payment options. In New York, NJM will offer 60-day extensions to policyholders who request it through April 28 and will not charge late fees or initiate any debt collection or credit actions for failing to pay premiums. For more information or to request assistance, contact NJM at 1-800-232-6600.

Plymouth Rock Assurance

As of April 1, Plymouth announced it will issue a credit for liability and personal injury protection coverage customers worth about 25% of auto insurance premiums. Plymouth also rolled out a "pay it forward" option, which gives customers the option to donate their credit to a non-profit that is providing relief for those hit hardest by COVID-19. A list of charities available for donations will be made available in the coming days, the insurer said. Plymouth will also waive late fees, extend at least a 60-day grace period on payments and place holds on cancellations and non-renewals for non-payment upon request. Additionally, Plymouth says auto insurance customers who are health care workers and involved in an accident while driving to or from work, or in the line of duty, will not have to pay their comprehensive and collision deductible. For more information or to request assistance, auto insurance customers can contact their local provider.

Progressive

Progressive announced its Apron Relief Program, which will issue a credit worth about 20% of auto insurance customers' April and May premiums and will be applied against customers' May and June payments. For customers who paid in full, Progressive will return the money to the payment account it has on file. Progressive will waive late fees, pause collections and place holds on cancellations and non-renewals for non-payment through at least May 15, 2020 upon request. The insurer will also grant payment leniency. For more information or to request assistance, contact Progressive at 1-800-PROGRESSIVE.

Shelter Insurance

As of April 8, Shelter Insurance will pay policyholders approximately 30% of their monthly premium for their personal autos for the months of April and May. The company plans to deposit the money directly into your checking account if you paid directly from your bank account. Otherwise, it will send a check. Shelter will also offer to temporarily suspend cancellations of property and casualty policies. Payments on policies that bounce will not result in a cancelled policy, but Shelter will double bill the following month. Additionally, Shelter will waive any reinstatement fees incurred through at least April 30. For more information, contact Shelter at 1-800-743-5837 or your local agent.

State Farm

As of April 9, State Farm will issue a dividend credit of roughly 25% of the premium for in-force auto insurance policies between March 20 and May 31, 2020, applied against customers' bills beginning as early as June. State Farm estimates the 25% credit will likely be around $20 per month for each vehicle insured and says dividends will automatically appear as a credit on customers' auto policies. State Farm will also offer financial assistance programs, but customers need to call their local agent to discuss the options available. For more information, contact State Farm by phone at 1-800-STATE-FARM (800-782-8332) or use the company's mobile app.

Tennessee Farmers Insurance

Tennessee Farmers will issue a special payment to customers that is approximately 24% of auto premiums paid for each vehicle covered over the past two months. Policyholders should start receiving checks in May 2020. For more information, contact Tennessee Farmers's customer service at 1-877-876-2222 or your local insurance agent.

Travelers

As of April 8, Travelers announced a Stay-at-Home Auto Premium Credit program, in which the insurer will automatically issue U.S. personal auto insurance customers a credit worth about 15% of their April and May premiums. It will be applied against future payments. Customers who paid in full will receive a direct payment. Travelers will also waive late fees and interest, as well as place holds on cancellations and non-renewals for non-payment through at least May 15, 2020 upon request. For more information, contact Travelers's U.S. personal insurance line at 1-800-842-5075.

West Bend

West Bend announced it will send a one-time payment of $50 to customers who had bundled home and auto policies and had their vehicle insured as of March 11. West Bend has also suspended cancellations of policies due to non-payment through May 31, 2020 and will not issue late pay notices or charge late fees. For more information or to request assistance, you can contact West Bend at 1-800-236-5002, Monday through Friday from 8:00 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. CT or by emailing billing@wbmi.com.

USAA
New Delhi: Is there anything Ayushmann Khurrana cannot do? The answer is simply no. He can ace every look, play any role and win the love of the audience with every act. Recently, the actor expressed his desire to play the Professors role from TV series Money Heist and in an Instagram post of him playing the tunes of Bella Ciao from the Netflix show, he wrote to the filmmakers that he is dying to do something like this.

Ayushmann went shirtless and wore spectacles to match the Professors look and wrote, I want to be the professor. Thats why Im wearing similar glasses and playing Bella Ciao. I want to put this out in the universe. Hello, reverent filmmakers, are you listening? Please! Im dying to do something like this.

The actor went on to add that he wants to go back to work and said, Im itching to go on sets and work, like each and every human on this planet. We all want to go out and work. But patience is a virtue they say. Till then, Bella Ciao.

Heres Ayushmann for you playing Bella Ciao:

His colleagues and the internet are all praises for him and are crushing over his tunes and his look.

Shilpa Shetty wrote in the comments section, Binged on Money Heist now binging on this. Beautiful while Bhumi Pendekar said, You are totally acing his look.

On the work front, Ayushmann Khurrana will be next seen in Gulabo Sitabo along with Amitabh Bachchan.
A pregnant woman allegedly carjacked a news van - with a pregnant reporter still in the back, police in Atlanta have said.

CBS46 reporter Iyani Hughes had just finished a morning live report and was sitting in the back of the station vehicle editing footage when another woman jumped into the driver's seat and sped off.

The suspect, identified as 38-year-old Seniqua Lunsford, had reportedly crashed her own vehicle into the gate of a nearby apartment complex before trying to escape.

Without realizing there was someone in the van, but seeing it was still running, she opened the driver's side door and drove off at around 5.30am.

Iyani Hughes, a reporter for CBS46 was in the back of a news van when it was carjacked. She is pictured in the network's coverage of the incident

Hughes fell onto the floor of the van and began screaming and shouting at the driver, who still didn't stop.

The reporter managed to get up off the floor and climb into the passenger seat where she safely fastened her seat belt.

The chase came to an end when the carjacker crashed again, this time slamming the news van into another car before coming to a stop on a roundabout. The airbags deployed and Hughes was able to run away from woman and the van to safety.

Speaking to CBS46, the station which Hughes works for and that owns the van, veteran news anchor Karen Greer - who was presenting the morning broadcast when the incident took place - described what she could hear from the studio.

'It is frightening when you become the news story as a journalist,' she said. 'I could hear in my ear because they realized in master control that something was going on so they were rolling on it and I could hear her scream and I could hear Jeff our photographer yelling somebody just drove off in our car.'

'I started texting her once I knew it was her and I thought maybe they had just stolen the car and she didn't respond so I started calling her and no answer.

'I didn't know what was going on and then I get wind that she's in the car and she has been kidnapped,' Greer added.

A pregnant woman in Atlanta, Georgia carjacked a van (right) belonging to CBS46 news, which still had a pregnant reporter in the back of the van who was left screaming for her to stop

Atlanta police were already nearby the scene of the carjacking as they had been investigating the original crash involving the suspect.

Atlanta Police spokesman Steve Avery told local media: 'While the police officers got out to check on the wrecked vehicle, the driver of that vehicle got out of the vehicle  unbeknownst to the officers  walked over to the van that belonged to the news station, got in it and drove away.'

Upon seeing the speeding van and hearing Hughes' screams for help, the police immediately gave chase.

Afterwards, they praised Hughes for managing to fasten her seatbelt. 'She did the smart thing,' Avery said. 'She got into her seat and put her seat belt on.'

After the final crash, the suspect reportedly attempted to flee the scene, but police were quick to catch up with her, who said she was behaving erratically but were unable to determine whether she was mentally ill or under the influence of drugs or alcohol.

Hughes was unharmed but the suspect had an injured arm. Both were taken to hospital as a precaution. The suspect has been charged with kidnapping.
NEW YORK, NY / ACCESSWIRE / April 15, 2020 / VGTel, Inc., a New York corporation (OTC PINK:VGTL) announces that along with Kerry McDonald, Angel Laporte joined the management team of VGTeL, as the practice management COO. Angel joined us from A & M Laporte & Associates where he was the president. Angel will be responsible for all practice operations, as acquired, while building the company practice operational infrastructure and capability.

Over his 34 years of experience as a practice management Senior Executive. Angel has been primarily involved in managing day-to-day operations of major licensed, NYS Department of Health (Article 28) Diagnostic & Treatment Centers. He has deep knowledge of regulatory standards, accreditation guidelines and compliance for NYSDOH licensed programs and for Federally Qualified Health Centers (FQHCs). Mr. Laporte possesses excellent knowledge and experience in the areas of Quality and Risk Management, Compliance as well as Quality Improvement processes. Angel also has extensive experience in Joint Commission Accreditation processes in the health care areas of Ambulatory Care, In-Patients services and Nursing Homes as well as Patient Center Medical Home programs. Angel was the VP of Operations for Promesa Health Systems and during his tenure was responsible for the day to day operations of the DOH Certified Skilled Nursing Facility, "Casa Promesa". He also coordinated their first successful Joint Commission accreditation. Angel coordinated the Joint Commission accreditation for Urban Health Plan, a major health center handling well over 300,000 visits/year, where he served as V.P of Operations. Also was an initial member of the Corporate-wide group reviewing and assessing participation in the NYS Medicaid Review-Compensation Reform Program, also known as DSRIP. A program aimed at working with hospitals and significant healthcare stakeholders to reduce unnecessary admissions to hospitals by 25% in a 5 years plan. The Plan helps provider groups, at all levels, to take on Global Risk by managing the utilization of health services by patients and providers alike. Angel served as the Sr. VP, of Lutheran Family Health Centers, in Brooklyn NY. an ambulatory care network providing over 750,000 visits a year. During his tenure as Sr. VP, he administered and supervised the operations for one of the nation's largest FQHCs consisting of 9 full-time community health centers, 14 school-based health centers and a complete spectrum of supporting and enabling services. In his executive role, he facilitated the development and implementation of policies/procedures to promote efficiency and high-quality care and monitored the Network's compliance with all standards (Joint Commission). Most recently, Angel was part of the management team responsible for the financial, clinical and operations Turn Around of Magellan Complete Care of Florida. A Medicaid Plan servicing a Special Needs Population of individuals with severe mental health diagnosis. He was the Senior Director of Network services, providing a strong connection between the Health Plan and over 2,000 providers in medical offices and major health centers, in eight of the eleven Regions of the Florida. Medicaid program. In addition, he coordinated and implemented telemedicine as a major component of the services in the Panhandle Region.

His educational background includes a BA degree from the University of New Mexico and MS degree from Howard University.

Kerry McDonald, CEO of VGTeL Inc., excitedly states, "I am impressed with Angel's practice operations experience. His start up and integration success will enable him to rapidly integrate the practices we purchase. He is a great addition to our team."

Angel Laporte, COO of VGTeL Inc., states that he is looking forward to this opportunity to contribute to the success of the company. He says that this opportunity will allow him to utilize his vast and deep experience. He is looking forward to starting with the great team at VGTeL.

Forward-Looking Statements:

This press release contains forward-looking information within the meaning of section 27A of the Securities Act of 1933 and section 21E of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 and is subject to the safe harbor created by those sections. This material contains statements about expected future events and/or financial results that are forward-looking in nature and subject to risks and uncertainties. That includes the possibility that the business outlined in this press release cannot be concluded for some reason. That could be as a result of technical, installation, permitting or other problems that were not anticipated. Such forward-looking statements by definition involve risks, uncertainties and other factors, which may cause the actual results, performance or achievements of Green Stream Finance, Inc. to be materially different from the statements made herein. Except for any obligation under the U.S. federal securities laws, Green Stream Finance, Inc. undertakes no obligation to publicly update any forward-looking statement as a result of new information, future events or otherwise.

For All Inquiries Contact:

mrmcdonald@aol.com

SOURCE: VGTel, Inc.

View source version on accesswire.com:https://www.accesswire.com/585208/VGTel-Inc-Announces-New-Practice-Management-Chief-Operating-Officer
Editors note: This editorial was written before the results of the April 7 election were announced.

Political leaders in Wisconsin need to stop posturing and start working together for the good of Wisconsin residents  especially when it comes to the next election.

Gov. Tony Evers, a Democrat, and Assembly Speaker Robin Vos, a Republican, each made fools of themselves during the spring election, and the two of them need to collaborate to ensure that state residents are safe and our sacred right to vote is protected. Time is not on their side, with a special election scheduled in less than one month, and the next statewide primary set for Aug. 11.

Weeks ago, Evers issued a Safer At Home order that shut down everything from boutiques to barbershops. With the coronavirus crisis, Evers demanded that Wisconsin citizens stay away from large groups and for businesses to close.

However, for weeks, Evers and Vos insisted that the election continue as planned. Evers eventually started floating ideas about an absentee ballot-only election, which Republicans scoffed at and called a logistical nightmare.

The governor publicly stated he did not have the power to push back the election, and he repeatedly said that move had to come from the state Legislature. Vos and others in the Legislature refused to entertain the idea, encouraged voters to request absentee ballots, and demanded that the show go on  a shockingly irresponsible move that put the public and poll workers at an unnecessary risk during this public health crisis.

This election should have been postponed.

At the 11th hour, Evers changed his mind and decided he did have the power to delay the election, and he issued an executive order to do so. Within hours, the Wisconsin Supreme Court reversed the governors decision. How many people stayed at home believing the election had been postponed? Evers should have anticipated the court would overturn his order, and he should have known that would cause voter confusion.

In one of the final acts of this three-ring circus, Vos was interviewed wearing a mask, a medical gown and gloves inside a polling place in Burlington where he said it was safe for people to vote. During this interview, Vos set himself up as a punchline.

The Wisconsin Supreme Court and the U.S. Supreme Court also each got involved in the Wisconsin primary, and voters kept receiving new messages as to when their absentee ballots were due. Many voters hadnt even received their ballots by the final deadline. One must also wonder how many people decided to just stay home rather than risk exposure to the coronavirus.

After the election, more problems were discovered. Statewide, there have been reports of postal irregularities regarding the delivery of absentee ballots. Three tubs of absentee ballots for voters in Appleton and Oskhosh were located in a Milwaukee post office after the election. Additionally other problems were reported in Milwaukee and in Fox Point.

Wisconsin U.S. Senators Ron Johnson, a Republican, and Tammy Baldwin, a Democrat, issued a joint statement in which they requested the Inspector General of the U.S. Post Office to determine the cause of these failures, which appear to have disenfranchised many Wisconsin voters.

The end result of this botched election and the poor management by state leaders resulted in disenfranchisement of voters, and that is unacceptable. Every voter should trust that the system is fair, and voters on both sides of the aisle dont feel that way after this election.

Evers and Vos are political opponents. We get that. However, they both work for the people of Wisconsin, and they should stop politicking for a minute and work collaboratively on two goals  public health and ensuring that the May 12 election runs smoother than the one that just occurred. They should hope that life resumes to normal by the Aug. 11 primary and the Nov. 3 presidential election, but they should also plan on the worse.

The people of Wisconsin deserve better.
As thousands of brides around the world cancel their over-the-top ceremonies in favor of low-key weddings that are broadcast on Zoom, Meghan Markle's long-time makeup artist Daniel Martin has offered up his top tips for women who are having to do their own bridal beauty looks at home.

The New York-based beauty pro, who was responsible for the Duchess of Sussex's wedding day makeup, revealed how brides can achieve a stunning, but natural-looking, glow for their wedding day amid the coronavirus pandemic, without the help of a professional artist.

Speaking to Vogue.com, Martin also offered up expert advice on how brides can ensure that their makeup looks perfect in-person - as well as on camera, for all of those women who will be tying the knot while their loved ones watch the special moment via a livestream video.

DIY bridal beauty: Meghan Markle's makeup artist Daniel Martin has shared his top tips for women who are doing their own wedding day beauty at home amid the COVID-19 pandemic

Expertise: The New York-based beauty guru explained that the perfect bridal beauty look starts with perfecting the skin using a blurring primer

Drawing on the same technique that he used to prep Meghan for her wedding to Prince Harry, Martin shared that the key to perfecting any bridal beauty look is perfecting the skin before any makeup is applied.

'You want a little radiance, but you don't want to be too shiny,' he said, explaining that the best way to achieve this is by using a blurring primer that will help to create the perfect blank canvas for your makeup.

The next step, Martin said, is to tackle any redness, uneven tone, or blemishes by using a full-coverage concealer, which should be dotted on any areas that need some extra help - including around the sides of the nose, and on the under-eye area.

According to the makeup expert, the key is to 'balance out your skin tone' in order to achieve the most natural, flawless look, with Martin warning brides: 'This isn't the time to show off your contour skills.'

For any women who are concerned about their eye makeup abilities, Martin urges them to focus on their brows, saying that 'a nice brow finishes off the eye area' without the need to any over-the-top shadow or eyeliner.

But before you start to fill in your brows with makeup, he advises that you make sure that they are shaped to your ideal specifications - and if you're not already comfortable using tweezers to perfect your own brows, Martin says it is 'time to learn real quick'.

He advises using YouTube tutorials so you can go through the process step by step, before you move on to applying your products.

You glow girl: He told Vogue.com that brides should aim to achieve 'radiance' without making their skin look too shiny, and recommended a blurring primer

As a first step, Martin revealed that he likes to use gel, which he brushes through the brows in the opposite direction to the hair growth in order to thicken up their appearance. Then, after the gel has dried, brush them back into place and fill in any holes with your product of choice, whether that is a pencil, a gel, or a pomade.

This technique, Martin says, is the 'easiest way to get defined brows without them looking too Instagram-y'.

Whether or not you are an expert with eye shadow or someone who tends to run in the opposite direction whenever they spot a palette, Meghan's makeup artist and friend says there is an easy trick to achieving a natural look that will still help your eyes to pop.

He suggests just applying a 'wash of color or shimmer' onto the eyelid, explaining that this will help to 'open up the lid' and give your look a little something extra.

Not sure what color to use? Try applying your preferred blusher or bronzer onto your lids with a fluffy brush, or even your finger. This will 'create a natural contour' and help to bring more 'harmony' to the face, Martin said.

If you still don't feel confident adding any color to your lid, he says that a slick of waterproof mascara will add plenty of definition to the eye area - and should survive any wedding day tears.

Bridal beauty essentials for women doing their own wedding makeup Blurring primer: Tatcha The Liquid Silk Canvas (left, $52), Laura Mercier Pure Canvas Primer - Blurring (right, $38) Full coverage concealer: E.l.f. Cosmetics Hydrating Camo Concealer (left, $5.99), Dior Forever Skin Correct Concealer (right, $36) Netral lip: Maybelline SuperStay Ink Crayon in Lead The Way (left, $7.99), Charlotte Tilbury Matte Revolution Lipstick in Pillow Talk (right, $34) Shimmer shadow: Huda Beauty Desert Dusk Eyeshadow Palette ($65) Simple shades: Fenty Beauty Snap Shadows Mix & Match Eyeshadow Palette in True Neutrals ($25) Natural blush: Physicians Formula Murumuru Butter Blush (left, $13.49), Nudestix Nudies Matte Blush (right, $32) Matte bronzer: Milk Makeup Matte Bronzer (left, $28), Benefit Cosmetics Hoola Bronzer (right, $30) Setting spray: NYX Matte Finish Long Lasting Setting Spray (left, $8.50), Urban Decay All Nighter Long-Lasting Makeup Setting Spray (right, $33) Advertisement

When it comes to perfecting the complexion, Martin says that, while you shouldn't go crazy with contour, blush is a must for any bride - just don't go crazy with the color or the application. A simple tip for achieving a natural flush is to start applying your product at the center of the cheek, directly under the pupil.

He warns that you shouldn't bring the color too close to the nose, and instead sweep the product out from that center mark, bringing it back towards the ear. As far as the color is concerned, Martin says you can be pretty liberal with your choice - just make sure that it doesn't clash with your lipstick for the day.

If you feel like your face needs a bit more color, you can add some bronzer - however Martin advises that you stick with a matte shade, and only apply it to areas where the sun would naturally hit the face.

Finally, it's on to the finishing touches: a slick of neutral lipstick, and a spritz of setting spray to ensure your makeup lasts all as long as your wedding celebrations, whether they are taking place on Zoom, or in front of a crowd of millions, as Meghan's did.

And, if you make any mistakes along the way, Martin urges brides to stay calm and simply start the process over again, rather than getting worked up while trying to fix your error. After all, 'the wedding is starting on your own time,' he points out.

This is not the first time that the beauty guru has opened up about wedding day beauty - having already shared several of the secrets that went into perfecting the Duchess of Sussex's bridal makeup.

In October, Martin appeared on British morning show Lorraine, when he detailed exactly how to recreate the former actress's signature glow in ten simple steps.

He also revealed exactly what it was like on the 'incredible' morning of the day she tied the knot with Prince Harry, insisting that Meghan was completely relaxed and had 'so much fun' creating her wedding look.

After his model had prepped her skin using her own individual skincare regime, Daniel began by applying foundation the size of '5 pence piece' and applying it with an eyeshadow brush from the middle of the face.

Tip and tricks: In October 2019, Martin recreated Meghan's 8221923wedding day beauty look on morning show Lorraine

Finishing touch: He explained that the final elements of the beauty look are a neutral lipstick shade, and a spritz of setting spray

He said: ' Whether i'm working with a Hollywood artist or doing a friends wedding makeup I like to keep things natural.

'First step is to prep the skin with your individual skincare regime.

'The first thing is your complexion, so I take size of 5p of foundation I use a small eye shadow brush.

'As we have a lot of redness in the middle of our face it's better to start here and blend out so you can gauge the coverage you're getting.'

He then takes a sponge and blends the foundation with some concealer, which is applied underneath the eyes and on any blemishes on the face with his finger.

He said: 'I like to go in with a sponge and blend out.

'Now I'm taking a little bit of concealer, I like to use my finger for concealer because it enables me to feel the face and where I need to cover it.'

Next, he creates Meghan's signature dewy look by mixing together a liquid highlighter with more foundation and using the same brush to apply.

He explained: 'So the next step is a fun step and that's adding a bit of radiance to the skin.

How to achieve Meghan Markle's wedding day makeup look Prep your skin with your individual skincare regime

Apply a small amount of foundation with an eyeshadow brush

Apply concealer under the eyes and blend with sponge

Add some highlighter to your foundation and apply with the same brush

Add some setting powder to your T-zone

Use your fingers to apply dark eyeshadow and add lighter eyeshadow to the corner of your eyes

Apply mascara to your bottom and top lashes

Line your bottom lashes with liquid eyeliner

Shape your face using a light bronzer

Apply a high pigment gloss to your lips Advertisement

'For Meghan's wedding what I did was mixed the luminizer with foundation so it integrated the glow.

'I'm gonna use the same brush that I used and then I'm just gonna apply that.'

Rounding off the skin look he used a neutral setting powder just on the T-zone to allow the 'radiance' from the highlight to still shine through.

He revealed: 'I just really concentrated the powder right in your T-zone because I really want this radiance to come through.'

For the eyes, Daniel uses his finger to apply a dark brown eyeshadow as a base followed by a lighter shadow in the corner of the eyes.

He told: 'I'm going to use my finger and a brush so i'm gonna take this aubergine warm brown.

'Laying down with the brush really helps give you that form, and then I'm just gonna pop a little bit of light into the inner corners of your eye.'

He went on to use a flat brush to add mascara and 'always starts at the base' - he then finishes off the eyes by applying liquid eyeliner to the bottom of the lashes, just to 'add a bit of drama.'

To finish the look he shapes the face using a light bronzer and adds a high-pigment gloss for the lips.

When quizzed on the special day, he revealed that how 'easy' it was to spend time with the royal and her mother.

He said: 'What I do remember was how much fun it was and how easy it was just to be with your friend and her mum and get her ready on such an incredible day.

'I don't think she was nervous because we weren't nervous it was very, very chilled .'
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Entrance mats are soothing and appealing to eyes when they are correctly and finely designed either at home, restaurants, or any other place. Manufacturing of quality entrance mat is a boon to technology and construction industry. Market Research Future reveals that the global entrance matting market is ready to expand at a CAGR of 4.6% during the estimated period from 2018 to 2023. The extensive study has segmental analysis, reviews of factors that can sway the market in the coming years, and expert views for an all-engrossing understanding of the market in a detailed manner.

Market Drivers & Trends

The entrance matting market share is likely to witness a sustainable growth throughout the forecast period with the increased consumption of matting products such as walk-off mats, anti-fatigue, and logo & specialty mats mainly in residential as well as commercial areas. These factors are booming the construction industry, which is directly influencing the entrance matting market. In the past years, the sales of the entrance mats have been improved a lot, which has grabbed more demand for these mats in the coming years. Such establishment of the market is touted to achieve more valuation during its growth period.

At the same time, the supportive government regulations & initiatives have also further anticipated influencing the market prospects in terms of demand and sales. On the other hand, the growing flooring market coupled with rising in focus on interior and exterior decorations to attract customers have also impacted the entrance matting market and is going to experience impressive growth during the forecast period.

Other factors, such as rapid urbanization and industrialization, have exponentially enhanced the demand for remodeling and renovation activities, which in turn, largely contributes to the tremendous growth of the global entrance matting market.

Market Segmentation

The segmental analysis of the global entrance matting market has been done on the elements of type, material, application, and usage.

In terms of type: anti-fatigue, walk-off mats, logo, and specialty are the segments. Among these, walk-off mats segment is likely to exhibit a maximum growth rate owing to soar in commercial flooring products for hospitality, retail, sports, workplaces, healthcare, and more.

In terms of material: Nylon, rubber, polypropylene, vinyl, and others are the segments. The nylon segment accounted for the largest market share in 2017, which will retain its dominance by 2023. Nylon mats offer superior moisture absorption features which reduce the risk of tripping on a wet floor.

Regional Outlook

The region-wise analysis of the global entrance matting market has been done under the key regions of North America, Europe, Asia-pacific, and Rest of the World.

Among these, North America is recorded to have the largest market for entrance matting as this region also accounted for the leading market share in 2017. Such a significant market share is credited to the surge in adoption of walk-off mats along with the increase in the event shows in the USA, which has enhanced the growth of entrance matting market more than before in this region.

Asia-Pacific region is also ready to exhibit maximum growth rate over the forecast period, owing to the surge in the hospitality industry, mainly in developing countries such as India, China, and Indonesia. Such proliferation is creating hike in demand for entrance matting, which is simultaneously gaining popularity in the upcoming years.

Key Players

The well-known players in the entrance matting market are listed as Birrus Matting, Superior Manufacturing Group, 3M, Unifirst Corporation, Bergo Flooring AB, Cintas Corporation, Forbo Holdings AG, Eagle Mat & Floor Products, and among others.
Representational picture

The government is reportedly likely to waive the 12 percent integrated goods and services tax (IGST) on the import of many medical equipment including personal protective equipment (PPE), ventilators, masks and sanitizers.

Dealers who sell these products to hospitals will also be eligible for a tax input, a senior official said as per a report by The Economic Times.

The broad decision to give the exemption has been taken given the situation, it has been decided the credit should also be given, the official told the paper.

Follow our LIVE Updates on the coronavirus pandemic here

Moneycontrol could not independently verify the report.

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 exemption is likely to remain for a quarter staring from this month. It comes after the Centre also waived health cess and basic custom duty charges on medical equipment, PPE and COVID-19 testing kits last week, and exempted import of raw materials required to locally produce these items.

IGST is levied under GST on all inter-state supply of goods and/or services for import into or export from India. It is split between the state and central governments.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi on April 14 announced that Indias nationwide lockdown has been extended till May 3.

This comes as confirmed coronavirus infections or COVID-19 cases in India reached 11,439 as of April 15, with the death toll from the outbreak at 377. Maharashtra, Delhi and Tamil Nadu have reported the highest number of cases.

Globally, there have been over 19.8 lakh confirmed cases of COVID-19 and at least 1.26 lakh people have died so far.
A worker at an Amazon warehouse in Southern California has died from the coronavirus.

Gerard Tuzara, 35, worked as an operations manager at Amazon's Hawthorne facility near LAX airport.

Tuzara, an Air Force veteran, is believed to have passed away on March 31st and is the first known employee from Amazon to die from the disease.

His death was announced as an increasing number of claims have been leveled at the company over the level to which the company is providing safety protections for the workers in its warehouses and delivery workers.

It was revealed Tuesday that Amazon has fired three more employees who spoke out over the company's pandemic working conditions.

Gerard Tuzara, an operations manager at a fulfillment center in Southern California died from the virus on March 31

Tuzara's death is the first known COVID-19 death among Amazon's workforce

Gerard Tuzara was formerly an officer in the U.S. Air Force before he began working at Amazon

It's not known exactly where Tuzara first contracted the disease.

Tuzara's last day of work was March 6 after which point he was on vacation in Mexico until March 20.

A week later, he began experiencing flu-like symptoms and was admitted to hospital Amazon confirmed to DailyMail.com on Tuesday.

He passed away on March 31st.

'We are saddened by the passing of a member of our management team in Hawthorne, California. His family and loved ones are in our thoughts, and we are supporting his fellow colleagues,' a spokesperson said in a statement.

One of Tuzara's friends wrote a tribute which has been posted in the warehouse where he worked.

'Gerry was an Air Force officer, a loving husband, son and uncle,' the letter read. 'He will be greatly missed.'

Family members also posted their own touching tributes including Tuzara's sister, Jess.

'Today, i lost a big piece of me. My big brother Gerard lost his fight to Covid 19. I refuse to believe you're not here anymore. Everything feels so unreal and i wish to wake up from this. I feel so helpless not being able to see, hold nor talk to you one last time. I would give everything back to tell and make you feel one last time that we love you. Im sorry you left with no one by your side. I'm mad, why didn't u fight harder we're willing to wait weeks or months or even years for you to recover, why just 4 days? Everything has gone by so fast it feels unreal.'

Family members including Tuzara's sister and brother posted tributes online

Tuzara had traveled to Mexico from March 7-20 and began experiencing symptoms on March 26. He was hospitalized at that time and died on March 31st

Tuzara worked as an operations manager at Amazon's Hawthorne facility near LAX airport

The terminations came just two weeks after the company fired another employee Christian Smalls, pictured

There have been public calls by Amazon's employees for safer conditions for those working in the company's warehouse and for its delivery drivers.

In March a walkout was held at the company's Staten Island facility with up to 50 workers striking.

Chris Smalls who organized the walkout was later fired by the company.

Amazon says Smalls was dismissed on the grounds that he put others at risk by violating his paid quarantine when he joined the demonstration at the Staten Island fulfillment center.

On Friday, the company fired two user experience designers, Maren Costa and Emily Cunningham, for what it called repeated violations of internal policies, without specifying which ones.

The two workers, who gained prominence for pushing the company to do more on climate change, had recently made public statements questioning Amazon's pandemic safety measures and pledging to match donations of up to $500 to support staff at risk of getting the virus.

The e-commerce giant also said it dismissed Bashir Mohamed, a warehouse worker in Minnesota, 'for inappropriate language, behavior, and violating social distancing guidelines.'

Designers Emily Cunningham, left, and Maren Costa, right, both critics of the online retail giant's working conditions in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic, were fired from Amazon

In statements, Cunningham said she believed Amazon could play a powerful role during the crisis, but to do so, 'we have to really listen to the workers who are on the front line, who dont feel adequately protected.'

Costa said in her statement, 'No company should punish their employees for showing concern for one another, especially during a pandemic!'

Mohamed, the associate fired in Minnesota, had organized for better working conditions and started pushing for more site cleaning and protective measures.

It's believed there are at least 74 Amazon facilities with employees who have been infected, according to The Washington Post.

There have been growing cases among Amazon's workforce which have seen the company come under criticism from labor activists and politicians

Amazon employees held a protest and walked out over conditions at the company's Staten Island distribution facility last month

Amazon has not revealed any figures regarding the number of employees affected by the disease but is promising to improve safety for its workers including providing face masks and temperature checks.

In a statement, Amazon said, 'We respect the rights of employees to protest and recognize their legal right to do so; however, these rights do not provide blanket immunity against bad actions, particularly those that endanger the health, well-being or safety of their colleagues.'

Hourly pay has also been increased for its workers by $2/hour and those that are diagnosed with the disease will receive paid sick leave.

Public pressure continued on Tuesday as Senator Bernie Sanders pressed for Amazon to provide a safer workplace

After Smalls was fired in March, New York City opened an investigation and five Democratic U.S. Senators wrote to Amazon's chief executive Jeff Bezos asking him to explain what happened.

Public pressure continued on Tuesday as Senator Bernie Sanders pressed for Amazon to provide a safer workplace.

'Instead of firing employees who want justice, maybe Jeff Bezosthe richest man in the worldcan focus on providing his workers with paid sick leave, a safe workplace, and a livable planet,' Sanders tweeted.
A crash federal government lending program meant to speed money into the hands of businesses hard hit by the coronavirus downturn is nearing its $349 billion statutory limit less than two weeks after it began.

The federal government is on the verge of the lending limit on its Paycheck Protection Program that is funneling relief money to the nation's struggling small businesses amid a stunning jump in unemployment.

The Small Business Administration says that as of Wednesday afternoon, it had approved nearly 1.38 million loans totaling more than $301 billion  up more than $50 billion since Monday. The Trump administration has asked Congress, which set the original ceiling, for another $250 billion for the program. However, that request has stalled in the Senate.

The federal government is on the verge of the lending limit on its Paycheck Protection Program that is funneling relief money to the nation's struggling small businesses amid record unemployment

More than 16 million Americans filed for unemployment during the last three weekly filing periods.

An email sent to the SBA for information about the agency's next steps after the lending limit is reached was not immediately answered.

It's unclear how much money has actually been distributed from the program, which only launched April 3. Thousands of business owners are still awaiting word on their loan applications.

President Donald Trump is flanked by Small Business Administration (SBA) Administrator Jovita Carranza and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin as he departs the Roosevelt Room following a "small business relief update" video conference call event with banking executives to discuss the U.S. government's rescue program for businesses hurt by the coronavirus pandemic, at the White House in Washington, U.S., April 7, 2020

The average loan size is $240,000, according to the SBA.

However neither the Treasury Department nor the agency overseeing the lending program have put out detailed information about the taxpayer-backed loans, which are administered by banks.

An administration official told CNBC the information is not available.

The loan money is contained in a $2 trillion coronavirus bailout law. When it was announced late last month, SBA administrator Jovita Carranza said in a statement: 'Speed is the operative word; applications for the emergency capital can begin as early as this week, with lenders using their own systems and processes to make these loans.'

Having banks dole out the money was designed to get the funds out to businesses as quickly as possible.

The loans are to be completely forgiven, so long as proceeds are used to cover payroll, mortgage interest, rent, and utilities for the two months after the loan is made, according to Treasury Department guidance, and compensation levels are maintained.

Businesses getting the loans range from health care to retail to construction.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi responded to reports that the program could run out of funds today. Democrats are negotiating with the administration on a deal to provide $251 billion in new funding for small businesses.

'Democrats know that in order for the Paycheck Protection Program to succeed, it must work for everyone. That is why we have been asking for the Administration to work with us to help' small businesses that are 'underbanked,' state and local governments that are 'desperate,' and front line hospitals, she wrote.

As has been clear since last week, Republicans bill which fails to address these critical issues cannot get unanimous consent in the House,' she said, a week after refusing to go along with a stand-alone bill being sought by Republicans. Democrats want a broader deal worth $500 billion dealing with all three areas.
New Delhi, April 15 : Ten days after IANS highlighted the plight of the migrant labourers residing in the Yamua river bed near the Kashmere Gate bus terminal, the Delhi government on Wednesday finally asked the Delhi Police to get the area vacated and take the migrants to a shelter home.

Delhi Police reached the Kashmere Gate area in the afternoon with buses to relocate the migrant labourers, who were residing in the Yamuna riverbed just below the flyover that connects east Delhi's Geeta Colony with the Kashmere Gate Inter State Bus Terminal (ISBT).

The action comes exactly 10 days after IANS visited the Yamuna riverbed in the night and highlighted the plight of the migrant labourers, who were stranded here with no money and food after the 21-day nationwide lockdown to combat the spread of novel coronavirus was announced by Prime Minister Narendra Modi on March 23 in his special address to the nation.

Over 2,000 migrant labourers were forced to stay on the riverbed were living in pathetic situation with no facilities of drinking water and toilets. They got food during the day and night when it arrived at the nearby night shelters.

The Yamuna riverbed where these migrant labourers were staying for more than 10 days is just two kilometres away from the residence of Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal and Lt Governor Anil Baijal.

IANS was first to report and highlight how these migrants slept with the stray dogs nearby them and without following the government's guidelines of maintaining social distancing.

The Yamuna riverbed where these were forced to live is close to 10 night shelter homes run by the Delhi government, of which few were got burnt down last week.

Speaking to IANS, Sunil Aledia, founder member for the Centre for Holistic Development, who works for the homeless people, said: "Thanks to IANS for covering the story first on April 5 and showing the plight of the migrant labourers that has woken the Delhi government." "About 2,500 people, who are unable to find place in the night shelters in the Kashmere Gate area, were forced to sleep in the open." He said as the government has now taken to a safe place and now there will be very less chances of people contacting Covid-19.

Asked about number of people housed in each night shelter, he said: "The night shelters with capacity of lodging 50 people have now been allocated 16 beds each as per the social distancing norm, thus, bringing down the number of occupants to less than half." So, though the number of the people, looking for a shelter in the area, had swelled up in following the nationwide lockdown, the 10 night shelters in the area with a total capacity of lodging 500 persons can only accommodate a mere 160.

Aledia also pointed out that the Delhi government has not arranged for screening or health camps for labourers residing near the Kashmere Gate area.

"If someone gets ill, then it will become problematic for everyone," he said.

On April 5, IANS Correspondent visited the site in night and showed that how hundreds of people had started making a beeline for night shelters near Yamuna river to spend their nights in relative comfort. However, scores of others have to shift to the river bed under the open skies owing to the overcrowded space, flouting government's directions of maintaining social distancing amid the coronavirus pandemic.

Some, who could not manage place at the night shelters or on the river bed also rolled out their beddings at the memorial to Delhi's first Lt Governor A.N. Jha, opposite Kashmere Gate ISBT.

(Anand Singh can be contacted at anand.s@ians.in)
The Congress on Wednesday accused the Haryana government of leaving mustard farmers in the lurch by reducing the number of procurement centres for the crop at the last minute.

The state government had pushed the procurement of the crop by two weeks, starting from April 15 in the wake of the coronavirus outbreak.

In an order issued on April 11, the Food and Supplies Department earmarked 192 procurement centres, but in another order two days later, their number was reduced to 163, said Congress chief spokesperson Randeep Singh Surjewala in a video conference with reporters.

The question is where will farmers go and when will they know about their new procurement centres. What is the reason of reducing number of centres, asked Surjewala.

The Congress leader said the BJP-JJP government in state has meted out a step-motherly treatment to farmers.

It seems their priority is to get liquor factories running instead of ensuring a smooth procurement of wheat and mustard. Its proof came on the first day of the mustard procurement when the Haryana government reduced the number of procurement centres from 192 to 163, he said.

Surjewala said everyone knows that mustard is the main crop of Mahendergarh, Dadri, Bhiwani, Rewari, Gurugram, Mewat, Hisar, Sirsa and Fatehabad districts of the state.

But the government reduced the procurement centres, which is a proof of their failure and incompetence, he said.

Surjewala further claimed that even before the procurement was to start, many farmers were forced to sell their crop below the minimum support price.

They sold their crop between Rs 3,500 and Rs 3800 per quintal as against the MSP of Rs 4,425 per quintal, he claimed.

Surjewala also said the state government was involving farmers into technicalities.

Farmers have been asked to register themselves on the Meri Fasal, Mera Byora portal, but 95 per cent of them do not have access to the Internet, he said, asking how will they be able to fill their details on this portal, that too during the lockdown.

If government so wanted, they could have sent their officials in villages or do it in the 'mandis' itself, he said.

Rather than choosing this easy way, farmers are being involved in technicalities, he said.

The former Haryana minister said arhtiyas (commission Agents) too have been told to open new bank accounts in seven private banks.

When will these accounts be opened? when will the government make payments into these accounts and when will the farmers get their payment (from arhtiyas), he asked.

He wondered how will the government ensure a smooth procurement of wheat, starting from April 20, in the present state of affairs.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
The coming recession will be deeper and possibly longer lasting than the Great Recession, according to a new analysis of states forecasts by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a liberal think tank that pushes for more state spending.

Each states massive budget shortfalls will be much more severe than they faced in the Great Recession, Michael Leachman, the senior director of state fiscal research, said in a conference call Tuesday. They need substantial relief before they start laying off workers and imposing cuts that will make it even worse.

K-12 fiscal analysts have similarly concluded that Americas public school system is poorly positioned to weather the coming storm.

Below are a handful of economic trends that will prove detrimental to thousands of school districts next year.

The cuts will be deeper: Each week brings a new series of forecasts about how much revenue states expect to lose as large swaths of the economy remain shuttered due to the coronavirus outbreak. CBPP now projects states to collectively lose close to $500 billion next fiscal year. To put that in perspective, states collectively spent $1.2 trillion in 2016. About a quarter of that money was spent on public schools (more on that below).

During the last recession , between 2007-2009, states altogether laid off almost 4 percent of its workforce, or 300,000 teachers. It would have been much worse without President Barack Obamas $100 billion stimulus package , of which $54 billion was dedicated to schools.

This time around, the looming severity of the revenue losses depends on states individual taxing infrastructure and the amount of money states have placed in their rainy day funds (CPBB estimates states have collectively saved $170 billion , much more than they had saved during the last recession). Because most states have laws requiring a balanced budget, unlike the federal government which can run a deficit, states will most likely make cuts. And those cuts will likely be most severe with schools (in some states, K-12 spending amounts to almost half the state budget).

As unemployment continues to climb at a record rate, more and more people have filed to receive Medicaid and unemployment benefits. That means there will be much less money left for public schools next year.

School districts are more heavily dependent now on state aid: Since the Great Recession, states infused districts with billions of dollars, according to a recently released analysis by Georgetown University professor Marguerite Roza and published by the Brookings Institute . In North Dakota, for example, state aid shot up by 28 percent. While its true that district spending is more equitable now that states even out disparities between property-rich and property-poor districts, state aidmade up of sales and income tax revenueis extremely volatile, as we will all soon find out.

...Many of these states have effectively traded K-12 revenue stability for greater funding equity, Roza wrote. This little-discussed dynamic raises big questions as the education sector starts to grapple with the financial implications of the coronavirus-sparked economic slowdown.

In addition, most states now, because of legislative inaction, distribute billions of K-12 dollars in an outdated, inefficient and ineffective manner , leaving wide disparities between districts and many districts on the brink of insolvency. Efforts to revise those formulas since the last recession have, by and large, failed .

Pension costs will spike: During the last recession, states refinanced their pension funds so that costs would not spike. That option for many states, including Illinois and New Jersey, is now off the table. With the market crash, public pension funds have lost close to $1 trillion in value. In many states, including California and Pennsylvania, districts and teachers will have to absorb that blow through increased pension costs. Read more about that here .

Classroom costs will be higher: What makes this recession so extraordinary is that millions of children will miss out on months of class time. While the severity of whats now known as the corona slide is not yet known, many fiscal analysts predict that superintendents will want to provide smaller classrooms to help students make up lost academic ground and meet some states strict accountability standards. Districts will also want and need to provide more wraparound services to help students cope with trauma caused by the virus. Read more about classroom costs here .

The federal government may not bail schools out this time around: The $13.5 billion the federal government infused in school spending through the first round of stimulus spending (known as the CARES Act) will not be enough to make up for budget cuts, the CPBB predicts. The group is now asking for the federal government to send states close to $500 billion to make up for anticipated lost revenue (the National Education Association has asked for the federal government to send states around $175 billion). But the timing of the recession, the existing political dynamics and the looming election could make another bailout challenging. That could change. Read more about the liklihood of another bailout here .

Image: E+/iStock/Getty
Microsoft might win the award for the best company during this COVID-19 crisis if there was one, I mean -- closely followed by maybe Facebook.

Reuters

Microsoft has announced that it will be offering three months paid parental leave to all of its full-time employees, no questions asked. What's more, it's also being flexible in letting their employees decide how they want to take this leave.



This comes right after Washington State Schools have announced their closure for the rest of the school year -- and was first reported by Business Insider after it got its hands on a leaked internal memo.

Parents working at Microsoft are given the flexibility to arrange the leaves -- whether three months at a stretch or a few days a week. Microsoft is calling it 12-week Paid Pandemic School and Childcare Closure Leave.

Facebook last month had also announced that it would be offering $1000 to each one of its 45,000 employees to help them take care during COVID-19 crisis, while also promising to play standard hourly salaries, even with lesser workloads. They also promised to pay six months salary as a bonus to its full-time employees, which was a first.

Other tech giants like Twitter and Google have also promised to pay their contractual employees, apart from their regular full-time staff.

Getty Images

Microsoft has been working to help people out during COVID-19 crisis. It created its own COVID-19 tracker that helps people online keep a track of new COVID-19 cases in their country.



Additionally, Microsoft has been working dedicatedly on its Microsoft Teams videoconferencing app, bringing in new features to help people stay productive amidst the lockdown. It launched a couple of features in the past few weeks to make it more user friendly.

It introduced a way to eliminate crunching sounds of chips while eating, it also brought in background changing feature like on Zoom to make the calls more interesting.
A child rapist with a 'moderate' risk of reoffending has been released from prison because he is 'particularly vulnerable' to coronavirus and is dying of lung cancer.

Gregory David Kynuna, 55, was first jailed in 1987 for breaking into a Cairns hostel and sexually assaulting a group of ten-year-old girls.

The predator was also jailed for eight years in 2004 for snatching a six-year-old boy off a street, brutally beating him and then assaulting him in a secluded laneway.

Kynuna was released in 2011 but repeatedly breached his supervision orders by taking drugs including ice and cannabis, as well as sexually assaulting a nurse.

In September last year, he found himself behind bars again for breaching a supervision order after being caught breaking curfew to drink and smoke weed.

Despite his sickening criminal history, the terminally ill 55-year-old was released from jail on March 23.

Gregory David Kynuna, 55, has a criminal history dating back to 1987 - including assaulting a nurse, a six-year-old boy and a group of ten-year-old girls (stock)

The findings from Queensland's Supreme Court, released last week, showed Kynuna was dying from lung cancer and required palliative care.

'His various conditions result in severe respiratory restriction which makes him particularly vulnerable to the COVID-19 virus,' Justice Peter Davis said during his decision.

Those with respiratory ailments - such as asthma, pneumonia or lung cancer - are highly susceptible to coronavirus.

The judge also needed to consider the risk to the community and whether Kynuna would re-offend.

Two psychiatrists analysed Kynuna and each diagnosed him with four conditions - including anti-social personality disorder.

However the two doctors had differing opinions on his risk of committing another crime.

One of the psychiatrists 'considered the respondent as a low risk of further serious sexual offending as his severe medical conditions make offending physically difficult'.

The other described Kynuna's re-offending likelihood as 'moderate', adding that it would get lower as his health deteriorates.

The findings from Queensland's Supreme Court, released last week, showed Kynuna was dying from lung cancer and required palliative care (stock)

'I find that the respondent is a low risk of committing a serious sexual offence if released on supervision,' Justice Davis said.

'It is unnecessary to descend into detail as to his current physical condition. He is terminally ill, close to death and receiving palliative care.'

However the judge also considered Kynuna's likelihood of care if he was released from custody.

'The evidence before me is to the effect that there may be difficulties in providing full palliative care to the respondent if he is not in custody,' he said.

Kynuna is believed to have asked his legal team for push for release.
(CNN)  World leaders have been working from home during the coronavirus pandemic; and Vladimir Putin is no exception: On Monday, the Russian President held a videoconference from his official residence outside Moscow with some of the officials leading the government's efforts to tackle the disease.

It was an unusually somber meeting. Less than a month ago, Putin had radiated confidence about his government's response to a growing global crisis  reassuring his citizens that the situation was "under control," thanks to early intervention measures. A few weeks later, Putin played the role of international rescuer, dispatching a planeload of medical supplies to New York's John F. Kennedy Airport.

How quickly things can change in the time of coronavirus. In his Monday videoconference, Putin took stock of a worsening situation.

"We have a lot of problems," Putin said. "There is nothing to boast about; and we must not let our guard down, because in general, as you and your specialists say, we have not passed the peak of the epidemic yet."

The trendline speaks for itself. While Russia has comparatively few cases compared with the United States or the hardest-hit European countries, the number of confirmed cases has surged in recent days. On Monday, Russia reported a record one-day rise in cases, with 2,558 confirmed over the previous 24 hours.

On Tuesday, Russia hit a fresh record: 2,774 confirmed cases. And Putin is coming in for serious criticism over his handling of the crisis.

In a recent essay, Tatiana Stanovaya of the Carnegie Moscow Center said the coronavirus pandemic had underscored Putin's isolation from ordinary Russians.

"One of the main topics today is why Putin is almost imperceptible in the coronavirus situation," she wrote. "He only addressed the nation briefly twice, and went to the [coronavirus] hospital in Kommunarka; but he neither gave his own assessments of the crisis nor proposed a plan of action; but limited himself to scattered measures and general words. No drama, empathy, or attempts to mobilize."

Putin, Stanovaya argued, does not wish to be associated with harsh or unpopular measures, leaving such chores to local subordinates. In the case of the coronavirus, the task of rolling out some of the most heavy-handed restrictions has fallen to Sergey Sobyanin, the mayor of Moscow.

The Russian capital has been the hardest hit by the virus. Officially, Russia has 21,102 cases, according to the government's official tracking website, and the death toll has reached 170. Around half of the country's recorded cases  11,513  are in Moscow; and 82 Muscovites have died.

Sobyanin has taken the lead in enforcing lockdown measures, including the introduction of a controversial digital tracking system designed to keep residents indoors.

A recent outbreak in China has also underscored the severity of the situation in Russia. Health authorities in Shanghai recently reported a surge in imported cases, tracing dozens of cases to a single flight that arrived in Shanghai from Moscow on April 10. Chinese authorities are also fighting an outbreak in city of Suifenhe, on the border with Russia's Far East, a wave of cases attributed in large part to Chinese nationals returning from Russia.

Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov on Tuesday deflected questions about the planeload of coronavirus cases that arrived in China, referring reporters to other agencies. But the spike in cases imported to China from Russia has raised a larger question: the reliability of Russian official statistics.

The Russian government says it has carried out over 1.4 million tests for COVID-19; But Moscow doctors have recently begun diagnosing patients as positive based on lung scans because of questions over the accuracy of the tests.

In his Monday videoconference, Putin said the next few weeks would be critical for determining whether Russia is able to effectively flatten the curve and reduce the spread of coronavirus. And he said that the Russian military "can and should be deployed here, if necessary."

The next two or three weeks may be critical for another reason. The Kremlin is still planning for an important date: the May 9 Victory Day parade, a major celebration to mark the 75th anniversary of the end of World War II in Europe.

The Kremlin says plans are still underway to hold the event, which centers around an impressive display of military hardware rumbling through Red Square. Officials are reviewing plans amid coronavirus. But this prestigious event  on a holiday that is an occasion for near-religious reverence in Russia  presents a hard deadline, and a hard problem, for Putin's anti-coronavirus campaign.

This story was first published on CNN.com "Coronavirus takes a serious turn in Russia, and Putin no longer radiates confidence"
Before the pandemic, I often drove away from church wishing youth ministry could be different. I yearned for teenagers to be less busy. That hope has become a startling reality as all but a few extracurricular activities are canceled, leaving most young people with unprecedented free time.

I longed for volunteers to stop equating showing up on Sundays and Wednesdays with relational ministry. In this COVID-19 season, volunteers check in with students all week, often building better relationships than before.

I wanted taillight parentsfamily members we see only as they drop off kids and drive awayto become true partners in spiritual formation. Now, parents nationwide are improvising family church around coffee tables and kitchen islands every week.

I dreamed that youth ministry and my role as a youth pastor would be admired and valued. Today, many youth pastors are gaining more respect as the adaptability and technological mastery gained on the job is celebrated through online innovations to keep us connected as we social distance. Since the students we serve are so tech-savvy, youth leaders have had a head start in moving our weekly youth program, small groups, and prayer gatherings online. Were being tapped on the shoulder and asked for help by leaders of other departments and congregation members having a tougher transition.

In these tumultuous moments, the answer to why we need youth ministry doesnt change; we still hunger to see young people changed by Christ to change our world. But courageous leaders are unsatisfied with merely moving everything we did in person last month onto Zoom this month. Courageous leaders are wondering if this is our chance to change what we do and how we do it.

This pandemic is terrible. But how might keeping apart reinvent youth ministry and draw young people closer to God? Once this crisis ends, we cant default back to yesterdays answers that no longer fit the questions of todays young people. This is youth ministrys tipping point to move to a new and better normal.

Start with empathy

In this pressing season of adaptation, youth pastors are asking each other mostly questions about virtual connection, ranging from technological hacks to recommended teaching topics. What if we spent less time learning from the leaders we know and more time listening to the students we serve? Empathy pushes us past adaptation to true innovation.

Stars, a neighborhood ministry focused on equipping and emboldening vulnerable young people in Pasadena, California, models this creativity. At the start of the COVID-19 emergency, the Stars staff dove into scenario planning and ministry brainstorming. But they then wisely paused, realizing their strategy was guesswork at best because they hadnt yet asked what was needed .

Since then, the Stars team has surveyed all volunteers and families across their programs, discovering what each program needs and how each could assist the others. Only by asking did they hear about the neighborhoods greatest fear: large, intergenerational families living under one roof and leaving inadequate space for social isolation if a family member contracts COVID-19. Mobilized with that knowledge, the Stars team shifted its goal to investigating immediate local quarantine zones.

These leaders knew what to do by asking, not assuming. Empathy that changes both the form and function of youth ministry for the better doesnt happen by accident. Questions that purposefully challenge our current ministry habits include: How many normal ministry rhythms are devoted to listening to students and families needs? What needs adjusting so that we hear and respond to actual needs? How might God want to transform us through the gift of hearing students stories?

Experiment with discipleship models

COVID-19 has jump-started youth leaders imagination. After this emergency ends, lets preserve the risk-taking spirit that always has beat at the heart of the best youth ministries and launch new experiments. We have an opportunity to boldly reshuffle what we prioritize in our youth ministry schedule. For example, we might focus on what happens in students faith journeys between our virtual meetings than during them.

What about handing the keys of ministry to students who have newfound free time? Teenagers can inform us about who needs help and their creative solutions. Some strategic ministries are now training young people to lead online discussions, care for stressed friends, and stretch outside their relational circle to help those most vulnerable to the disease (the elderly, the poor, the already sick). Teenagers can be especially effective in re-engaging other kids who have drifted from church and ministry but in this season might be more open to connecting with a peer. As Reggie Joiner, the CEO and founder of Orange, regularly reminds leaders, A kid may get over what I teach them, but they will never get over what God does through them.

With attendance tougher to assess, now is an ideal time to adopt new, creative metrics of success that better reflect our mission and goals of discipleship. During this pandemic, lets keep measuring students attendance at online events, but lets also start tracking how their relationships with mentors and parents grow, how they tangibly serve others, and how they seek God all week. Shifting what we measure in the present will change our church culture in the future.

As students needs multiply and in-person gatherings disappear, its obvious there are more students in our ministry than one or two people can personally mentor. This is a moment to multiply our impact by training our volunteers to probe with provocative questions in one-to-one conversations and sensitively press in.

We can also take this opportunity to deepen partnerships with families. As multiple studies over decades affirm, while the church and mentors are vital in a young persons faith development, they dont outweigh the influence of parents. With more families at home, we have a ripe opportunity to curate and develop innovative tools to help parents and teens move from conversational doldrums into conversational depth. We can equip parents and stepparents to turn everything from family walks around the block to conflicts over limited wireless access into moments that build family intimacy and faith.

As our churches are forced into new ministry territory, students hold a compass that can guide senior pastors and pastoral teams. The next generation is on the leading edge of technological and relational trends and can point us to a better futureif we are willing to pay attention. A new approach can rise with the markers that have always made youth ministry great: improvisation, empathy, and risk-taking for young people and the cause of the gospel.

Youth leaders, we were made for this moment. But lets make it so much more than just a moment. Lets leverage todays changes to imagine a whole new tomorrow.

Kara Powell, PhD, is the executive director of the Fuller Youth Institute, a faculty member at Fuller Theological Seminary, and co-author of a number of books including Faith in an Anxious World, Growing With, and Growing Young.
The new Kommercial Kitchens showroom that has been under construction on the Interstate 10 corridor near Beaumonts downtown for more than a year has been approved for occupancy by the city.

Terry Woodard, owner of the restaurant supply company previously located in Rose City, said the coronavirus pandemic has slowed work for the company like many other businesses, but Kommercial Kitchens has been working out of the building to supply local restaurants.

The commercial spaces next to the new building have also been opened for lease.

Waitr is now delivering alcohol to its customers in Texas, including in Beaumont.

The new service allows anyone 21 years or older to add beer and wine to their orders when they make purchases from restaurants. The company said its restaurant partners will soon have updated menus that will allow customers to add alcohol to their usual food orders.

Waitr drivers will verify customers are 21 years of age by requesting their identification and customers will have to sign a receipt.

The company is still providing gloves and sanitizers to drivers, and has continued its option for non-contact delivery since most cities and states instituted restrictions for public contact. The company has also committed to paying any employee who gets quarantined or contracts the virus.

The new Chick-Fil-A location on the I-10 corridor in Orange opened Thursday to a long drive-thru line for most of the day.

In a Facebook post Tuesday, Orange announced the location would be open on April 9 with curbside and drive-thru service.

The nearby Starbucks location on 16th Street adjacent to the I-10 corridor is still under construction, but the city said it could open soon.

The Chick-Fil-A location has been teased for more than a year and a half after Orange Mayor Larry Spears Jr. announced the company was interested in developing the 16th Street area. The city has invested economic development dollars into the land around the commercial property for road upgrades and utility connections.
TORRINGTON  The disposition hearing of the former New Milford information technology director accused of hacking town officials emails has been pushed from May 29 to July 24.

Kendrick Protzmann, 52, is facing eight counts of third-degree computer crime and 41 counts of fifth-degree computer crime for allegedly accessing the towns email archive system without authorization between June 10 and Sept. 9, 2019, when he was no longer a town employee.
89% of childcare providers want to support frontline workers through a specially-designed childcare scheme, according to survey results released this week by Early Childhood Ireland, the membership organisation for the early years sector.

The issue has been consistently highlighted in the media since last months Covid-19 measures were first introduced, however, with no confirmed outcomes reported, Early Childhood Ireland has this week acted to survey more than 3,800 childcare-providers that make up its membership. The survey focused on a possible childcare scheme for frontline workers and received a 34 per cent response rate from providers around the country.

Key findings of the survey are as follows:

89 per cent of childcare providers want to support frontline workers; Almost three-quarters favour a setting-based model.

50 per cent are available to open their setting for this purpose in the immediate term. Those who are not available are generally already involved in other Covid-19 response activities, such as preparing meals for families in their area, or are personally involved in caring for their own parents or others who are cocooned.

Survey respondents noted the need for additional information and support on a range of issues before such a scheme could be implemented.

These include:

- The provision of PPE for childcare workers, and advice on using same.

- Information on next steps if a childcare worker becomes ill.

- Access to Covid-19 testing.

- Support for deep cleaning of childcare facilities.

- Clarity on the logistics of the programme, including hours of work and distance to be travelled; insurance cover for participating services; and the tax implications of any income received.

- Need to maintain link between employer and employee

Releasing the survey results today, Early Childhood Ireland highlighted the need for the proposed scheme to maintain a clear and strong link between childcare employers and their employees.

Teresa Heeney, Chief Executive Officer of Early Childhood Ireland, said: Any scheme to provide childcare for frontline staff should maintain the link between employer and employee. Otherwise, the Governments goal of supporting business continuity will be broken for the early years sector, with medium and long-term consequences.

To date, arbitrary arrangements have been put in place to provide childcare for frontline workers  often via social media. While laudable and well-intentioned, such measures should not form part of any government initiative. They would use precious government resources and bypass qualified childcare providers. They would also distance childcare employers from their staff.

All staff delivering childcare for frontline workers under this proposed scheme should be trained in early-years care and education and should be supported by their employer in delivering this role. If the link between employers and staff is broken, this would single out our sector for treatment that is against the overall economic recovery strategy. It could severely impact on the ability of our members to re-open, as they will not be able to meet adult: child ratios should staff not return to or delay their return to their employers, once the current crisis is over. The inability of our sector to re-open promptly and fully would, in turn, affect the wider economy.

Early Childhood Ireland has welcomed the opportunity to contribute to the design of the proposed scheme, and we have consistently offered our expertise and support to government in this regard. We will continue to liaise with the Department of Children and Youth Affairs on behalf of our membership over the coming days and weeks to ensure the proposed scheme is as effective and successful as possible.
THE Aboitiz Groups total contribution to the national coronavirus disease (Covid-19) response effort has surpassed P214 million as of Tuesday, April 14, showing the groups sustained campaign to help address the urgent needs of frontliners and affected communities nationwide.

Since the implementation of enhanced community quarantine (ECQ) in various locations nationwide, various Aboitiz business units have deployed their own Covid-19 response activities, while centralized donations were made through the groups corporate social responsibility (CSR) arm, the Aboitiz Foundation.

As the Covid-19 situation remains uncertain, the Aboitiz Group will continue to deploy assistance nationwide. Simultaneous with ensuring that our team members needs are covered, we also focused on our in-kind and monetary donations to communities that need them the most, said Sabin M. Aboitiz, Aboitiz Group president and chief executive officer.

Combined in-kind and cash donations have reached P46 million, in addition to an earlier P100-million donation made through the Philippine Disaster Resilience Foundations Project Ugnayan.

Project Ugnayan aims to provide assistance by distributing grocery vouchers. To date, about 7.6 million people in poor communities in the Greater Manila Area had benefited from the project.

Visayas and Mindanao aid

The Aboitiz Group has also poured in significant aid efforts in the Visayas and Mindanao through the initiative of Aboitiz business units based in the area.

In the Visayas, business units such as Visayan Electric Co., Inc., Therma Visayas, Inc., Therma Power Visayas, Inc., East Asia Utilities Corporation, Pilmico Foods Corporation, Aboitiz Land, Inc., Republic Cement and Building Materials, In., and Aboitiz Construction, Inc. have donated food and personal protective equipment (PPE) to various local government units (LGUs) in Cebu and Leyte. AboitizPower unit San Carlos Sun Power, Inc. donated food to ECQ-affected residents of San Carlos City, Negros Occidental.

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Privately-held Aboitiz & Co. (ACO) donated PPE sets to Vicente Sotto Memorial Medical Center in Cebu City, while the Cebu-based Ramon Aboitiz Foundation Inc. (RAFI), the Aboitiz family foundation, also partnered with the Cebu City government and Metropolitan Cebu Water District for the launching of a handwashing campaign called #Hunaw to combat the spread of Covid-19.

RAFI has also provided the accommodation, meals, and training facilities for healthcare workers at the Bayanihan Cebu SHS Field Center, with its contribution amounting to P58.2 million.

It has also provided PPE kits, relief goods to Cebu and Masbates poor residents, health kits (in partnership with World Vision) for 600 families, food and hygiene products to elderly homes and children centers, meals for select Cebu City checkpoints, and relief assistance to street dwellers. Aboitiz family members in Cebu have personally helped in these initiatives.

In Mindanao, Aboitiz business units like Davao Light & Power Co., Inc., Hedcor, Inc., Therma South, Inc., Cotabato Light & Power Co., Pilmico, and Apo Agua Infrastructura, Inc., donated food and medical supplies to the hospitals, checkpoints, and LGUs in Davao City, Cotabato City, Iligan City, Sultan Kudarat, Cotabato and Datu Odin Sinulat, Cotabato.

Meanwhile, other in-kind donations from the group consisting of medical supplies from ACO; bread and food kits, PPE kits, and sanitation supplies from Pilmico; masks, alcohol, and thermal scanners from AboitizLand; and food packs and medical supplies from Aboitiz Power Corporation, SN Aboitiz Power, Aboitiz Infracapital, Inc., and Republic Cement were turned over to frontliners nationwide.

An additional donation of P200,000 through the Aboitiz Foundation was also given to support the National Museums casual employees affected by the Luzon ECQ.

Together with these efforts, the Aboitiz Foundation has also raised P1.82 million (as of April 14) through its crowdfunding platform KINDer by Aboitiz (https://kinder.aboitiz.com/).

The proceeds of the Help Our Health Workers Fight COVID-19 campaign will be used to acquire PPE kits for several hospitals nationwide. This is being done in partnership with the University of the Philippines Medical Foundation and The Outstanding Women in the Nations Service Foundation.

These were made possible through the hard work of our team members, and the diligence of our partners inside and outside the company. These times are challenging, but we want to assure that the Aboitiz Group will do everything it can to continue building sustainable, empowered, and now more than ever, safe communities, added Aboitiz. (PR)
Editors note: This story was updated to note that police confirmed that Perez-Escobales was charged in connection with the April 12 homicide of Joseph Alaya Maya.

A 23-year-old Harrisburg man has been charged with a homicide that occurred on Easter, in which 20-year-old Joseph Ayala Maya was found dead at Harrisburg Park Apartments in the 1400 block of South 13th St. in the city.

Jomar Perez-Escobales is facing one count of criminal homicide. He was arraigned and committed to Dauphin County prison without bail. A preliminary hearing in the case is scheduled for May 5.

A check of Perez-Escobales criminal history in Pennsylvania turned up only summary citations, mostly for vehicle and traffic violations.

Police were called to Harrisburg Park Apartments around 3:30 p.m. that day and found an injured Ayala in between two parked vehicles.

Joseph Ayala collapsed in a Harrisburg parking lot on Easter after being attacked, prosecutors said.

Dauphin County District Attorney Fran Chardo said Ayala had been attacked, but did not release any further details.

Chardo said Ayala collapsed in between the vehicles about 15 minutes before someone spotted him and called 911.

Ayala did not live at the complex where he died, but instead lived in the Hall Manor community, which is nearby. Police are not sure whether he was out on foot before he was attacked or whether he drove, but his vehicle was parked in the general area.
Steven Badaczewski is a US Navy veteran who served aboard the USS Shreveport during the Beirut, Lebanon conflict in the early eighties, went on to pursue a successful career in business management in the IT, entrepreneurial, hospitality, and airline industries, and now resides with his beloved pug, Dusty, in Florida. He has published his latest book From the NSA Files: The Counsel: the first in a series of riveting and action-packed dramas.

From the NSA Files: The Counsel is a nonstop action thriller from the first page to the last page. Readers are taken on a roller-coaster technological ride that will keep them turning the pages.

A brilliant physicist, Claude Morret, wanted to change the world. His drive to discover the unknown led him to accept a lead position with MCT with unlimited resources. MCT, or Molecular Conversion Technology, is secretively financed and controlled by a nefarious billionaire at the head of the Counsel.

Special operatives of the NSA secretly infiltrated the Oregon laboratory to monitor the development of the technology. When MCT initiates the event, Claude initiates his plan to expose the Counsel. When Sarah Cooper is kidnapped, Luke and his team of special operatives track them to a world at war with opposing pirate factions. Luke and his team battle the savage pirates as they escape and go after the brutal leader of the Counsel.

Published by Page Publishing, Steven Badaczewskis engrossing book is a spellbinding work of dramatic fiction the keeps the pages turning until the stunning conclusion.

Readers who wish to experience this engaging work can purchaseFrom the NSA Files: The Counsel 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.


Source: Xinhua| 2020-04-16 05:03:51|Editor: huaxia

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HELSINKI, April 15 (Xinhua) -- Large quantities of anti-epidemic supplies have arrived in Finland from China on Wednesday, announced Finnish National Emergency Supply Agency (NESA).

The consignment, landing at Helsinki airport, included 5 million pieces of protective gloves and 170,000 pieces of respirators ordered from China.

It came a day after a total of 2.4 million pieces of surgical masks, jointly ordered from China by Uusimaa Hospital District (HUS) Logistics and NESA, arrived in the Nordic country.

The surgical masks have passed the tests conducted by the Technical Research Centre of Finland (VTT).

VTT will also test the protective gear received on Wednesday.

As of Wednesday afternoon, Finland had confirmed 3,237 coronavirus infections with 72 deaths, according to the Finnish National Institute for Health and Welfare.
India's leading digital payments and financial services platform Paytm has launched #NobodyGoesHungry campaign on social media to encourage fellow citizens to donate on the app and contribute to serve meals to daily wage earners in Noida, Mumbai, Bengaluru, Chennai, & Hyderabad. As the campaign gains momentum, the company is targeting to distribute 2 million meals in the next few weeks.

Recently, Paytm partnered with KVN Foundation to serve meals to people who have lost their source of income due to the lockdown. The company is requesting everyone to support this initiative by logging on to their Paytm App and clicking on the Feed My City tab to donate. The new social media campaign has been launched to amplify the message and connect more people to the cause.

Paytm's campaign has gained massive momentum over the last few days as more citizens are coming forward to help the ones in need. The hashtags #NobodyGoesHungry and #FeedMyCity have become quite popular, especially with the younger social media user base who are lending support to the campaign online as well as offline.

People are sharing their photographs, along with their personal messages using these hashtags. They are also tagging their family & friends and nominating them to donate as well.

Siddharth Pandey, Vice President - Paytm said, As a responsible citizen of this country, we need to ensure that the ones who cannot fend for themselves do not go hungry during this lockdown. This initiative, as well as the social media campaign, is aimed at ensuring more people come forward and help those in need. Our campaign has struck the right chord with people and the overall response has been encouraging.

The 'Feed My City' initiative has also been supported by renowned personalities including Nandan Nilekani, Sunil Shetty, Saina Nehwal, Vishwanathan Anand, Mary Kom, Anil Kumble and KL Rahul.
Britain's high street giants could be wiped out in weeks if the coronavirus continues, consumer experts have warned today.

Experts have painted a bleak picture of the scenario facing the UK high street as major retailers including Oasis and Warehouse teeter on the brink of administration.

A study of 34 non-food retailers including Dunelm, JD Sports, John Lewis and Next has found that many may not survive the pandemic sweeping the nation.

Even after government support, more than half of major non-food UK retailers will run out of cash within six months, according to the report.

The study was conducted by professional services firm Alvarez & Marsal (A&M), in partnership with Retail Economics.

It found that five out of the 34 major non-food retailers analysed already had negative cash flow at the outbreak of the pandemic.

This comes as the UK's fiscal watchdog warned that more than two million people could lose their jobs and the economy may fall off a cliff because of the lockdown.

Retail Economics estimate that non-food retailers could see a decline in sales of c.17% over 2020  equating to over 37 billion of lost revenue

The impact of COVID-19 has caused a mandated lockdown of around 70% of non-food retailing in the U.K. The initial period of store closures will last for three weeks before it is subject to review. However, it is widely expected to be extended

Closed shops on a quiet Kings Road in Chelsea, West London, as life in Britain continues during the lockdown

Analysis of 34 major British retailers shows High Street stores are on the brink of closure The report - Surviving the cash crunch: The impact of COVID-19 on the U.K. retail industry was carried out in March-April 2020. It surveyed the following retailers to assess the state of the UK high street: AO.com Mulberry ASOS N Brown Group B&M Next Boohoo Pets at Home Burberry Photo Me Card Factory Quiz DFS SCS Dixons Carphone Shoe Zone Dunelm Stanley Gibbons Group Fraser Group Studio Retail Group French Connection Superdry Games Workshop Ted Baker Halfords Topps Tiles Howdens Travis Perkins JD Sports United Carpets John Lewis of Hungerford Watches of Switzerland Kingfisher Group WH Smiths Moss Bros Group Advertisement

Modelling by A&M and Retail Economics shows that a 10 per cent reduction in sales would have resulted in over two-thirds of major U.K. retailers falling into negative cash flow.

But sales are forecasted to have dropped as much as 70 percent since the lockdown was introduced on March 23, tipping every retailer sampled into immediate negative cash flow.

A&M said: 'Should the lockdown persist into the summer, working capital demands will intensify and large parts of the sector will be decimated as swathes of retailers seek additional funding in order to survive.'

Richard Fleming, Managing Director and Head of Restructuring Europe, A&M, said: 'Government measures have spared the major retail brands from immediate collapse. You could characterise this three-month period as a payment holiday. But prudent retailers are still pivoting their focus towards what cashflow they have and can expect in future. This is the essential fact base upon which turnarounds can be built.

'The next few weeks will be critical. Retailers need to ask themselves the tough questions and take steps to address underlying operational issues while they still have the chance.'

Erin Brookes, Managing Director and Head of Retail, added: 'It has already become clear that the high street will take on a very different form once the pandemic is over.

'Weaker players will, unfortunately, cease to exist, leaving behind a smaller but more resilient sector comprising operators that acted fast.

Yesterday, the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) said unemployment could hit 3.4 million - up from 1.3 million - leaving around one in 10 of the working population without a job, while the economy may shrink by 35% between April and June.

Chancellor Rishi Sunak told reporters that not every business or household could be protected, but that a 'bounceback in growth' is expected when the crisis eases.

It came as a survey from the British Chambers of Commerce suggested around one in three British businesses has furloughed between 75% and 100% of its workforce.

Fashion sellers Oasis and Warehouse were on the brink of administration on Monday night  putting 2,300 jobs at risk.

The British high street chains called in administrators yesterday as the lockdown threatened to claim its latest victims.

The two brands, which run 90 stores, are expected to appoint auditor Deloitte to run the process.

Workers are likely to be furloughed under the Government's job retention scheme on 80 per cent of their pay during the administration until a buyer can be found.

The Oasis and Warehouse Group has been looking for a saviour for weeks but could not close a deal due to the pandemic.

It is owned by failed Icelandic bank Kaupthing.

The lockdown has already claimed Laura Ashley, electrical retailer Brighthouse, and restaurant chains Carluccio's and Chiquito.

Many firms were already reeling after last year, the worst for the high street in a quarter of a century. Deloitte declined to comment.

Meanwhile, there are fears are building that gyms, pubs and restaurants may never reopen as landlords threaten them with eviction for unpaid rent during the coronavirus lockdown.

Nearly 3,000 gyms and leisure centres now face the threat of closure, while top chef Yotam Ottolenghi has warned that restaurants are suffering the same issue.

Pubs and non-essential shops have also faced trouble paying rent, amid fears they will not be able to reopen after the pandemic because they will have no cash left.

Owners of businesses from photography studios in Southport to massage centres in Surrey have got in touch with MailOnline to tell of their concerns over rent.

Up to 100,000 jobs could be at risk at gyms with trade body UKActive calling for urgent action to protect places of exercise which remain shut due to the pandemic.

Fresh legislation to protect commercial tenants was brought in last month, but it does not stop landlords forcing them to pay rent withheld due to the lockdown.

Mr Ottolenghi told BBC Radio 4's programme: 'The biggest worry that we have is rent. When corona started and we were asked to close our doors, which is totally understandable because of safety, nobody really addressed the issue of the rents

This graphic shows the proportion of non-food retailers whose cumulative losses would deplete their working capital over the next 12 months  based on a 70% reduction in sales

The graphic shows the breakdown of operating costs for non-food retailers

'Many, many have not been paying rents. Others have got into arrangements with their landlords, but this has not been solved.

'Some landlords have been threatening to prosecute and other legal actions against the tenants at restaurants in such a time because they are not paying their rents, and landlords, many of them, rely on the rent to pay their own debts.'

Top chef Yotam Ottolenghi (pictured in May 2018 in London) has warned landlords are threatening restaurants with legal actions

He is calling on the Government to give restaurants a 'litigation ceasefire' with a debt enforcement moratorium for six months in which credit action is banned.

Mr Ottolenghi said this would mean business owners cannot be litigated against to pay rent - and the same for landlords who can't pay their mortgages.

He has also suggested a 'national timeout' of nine months rent free from April to December in which landlords would also be compensated.

As for the gym industry, UKActive chief executive Huw Edwards has told how taking legal action such as issuing statutory demands and winding up orders was 'entirely disproportionate'.

Mr Edwards said yesterday: 'A worrying number have decided to pursue statutory demand notices or winding up orders.

'We need the Government to act now to direct within the Act that landlords cannot do this. With 2,800 gyms at risk of permanent closure, and 100,000 jobs at stake, time is of the essence.'

Section 82 of the Coronavirus Act 2020 introduced on March 25 intends to help protect commercial tenants by banning the forfeiture of commercial leases until June 30 - or longer if the Government deems necessary - for non-payment of rent.

But it does not stop landlords taking action such as rent arrears recovery, making a debt claim, issuing a statutory demand, or starting winding-up proceedings.

UKActive therefore wants the Government to amend the Act so landlords cannot purse legal action, and introduce financial support for them for a rent holiday.

The Strand in Central London is pictured as the country continues to battle through a lockdown period

295,000 small firms are still waiting on loans Just 4,200 companies have been able to get the Government's emergency bailout loans  out of 300,000 applicants. The worrying figures emerged despite the scheme already being overhauled once earlier this month when firms complained they could not access the cash. Business owners have warned the failure means they could go bust. Around 800million has been handed out under the package  a figure which pales in comparison with 146billion provided to 725,000 firms in the US. Lord Mervyn King, former governor of the Bank of England, said: 'Something has gone wrong. The economy will only recover if we can keep businesses running and able to pick up the reins when this crisis is over.' Banks have been overwhelmed by demand since the launch of the Coronavirus Business Interruption Loans Scheme last month. They have been accused of refusing loans due to complex eligibility criteria. More than two-thirds of the loans, 2,500 in total, have been approved by state-owned bank RBS. Business Secretary Alok Sharma said: 'We have set this up at pace and everyone is working around the clock.' Advertisement

In one case, David Lloyd Leisure asked a landlord for a waiver of rent due on March 25 until it can reopen its clubs, but the landlord replied by threating legal action.

The chain's chief executive Glenn Earlham told BBC News: 'This situation is unfortunately entirely outside of our control.

'We want to work together with landlords to ensure we can survive this pandemic and emerge with businesses able to continue to pay rent and other costs in the future.'

And PureGym chief executive Humphrey Cobbold said: 'Time is of the absolute essence, given that proceedings such as statutory demands and winding up orders threaten to force companies into insolvency within days of being issued.'

Meanwhile Elliot Walker, co-founder of The Massage Company chain, said his firm has four centres and planned to sign leases on two more in April this year.

He told MailOnline: 'Our landlords have varied greatly in their support, one even tried to claim in their response that they 'wouldn't instigate legal proceedings' - mirroring their legal obligations from the new law.

'Landlords are not going to be the only people who post Covid-19 will have been able to get through this unscathed.

'We provide a health service and our customers who we provide pain relief are desperate for us to open and greedy landlords are jeopardising many businesses across the UK.'

The company, which launched in 2016 with its first branch in Camberley, Surrey, says it is the first membership-based massage business outside North America.

The Massage Company chain, which is based in Camberley, Surrey, said its landlords 'have varied greatly in their support', with one 'trying to claim in their response that they 'wouldn't instigate legal proceedings' - mirroring their legal obligations from the new law'

** Are you a business owner who has been threatened with legal action over unpaid rent? Email: tips@mailonline.com or mark.duell@mailonline.co.uk ** Advertisement

And David Coleman, who owns the Barrett & Coe photography studio in Southport, Merseyside, said the issues he is facing with rent are making him consider whether to 'potentially throw good money after bad or to close down now'.

He told MailOnline: 'While we have not been threatened I have no doubt we would be. We are a family run photography studio and part of a franchise.

'Our landlord ignored my email to discuss payment options and instead sent us one with all the flowery stuff about being there for us etc while inserting that they expected our rent on time and in full as per our lease terms.

An empty gym in Leicester on March 21 after the Government ordered them all to close

'Sadly, given their general attitude, this was exactly as I expected. The small grant of 10,000 we, hopefully, will receive will help but if this drags on it will be an issue.

'Also we have no clue if people will either be allowed into the studio as restrictions are relaxed, whether they will be confident enough even if allowed and/or whether they will be in a position to buy.'

Ertan Hurer, of chartered accountants Hurkan, Sayman and Co in Palmers Green, North London, said his firm has had various clients - dry cleaners and restaurants - asking their landlords to either defer the rent or give them a rent holiday or discount.

But he said in most cases the landlords have refused by sending a similar response, namely that the business can receive a grant of either 10,000 or 25,000, they should borrow under the government's loan scheme, or take out personal loans.

An outdoor gym which is closed in Leicester, after Prime Minister Boris Johnson put the UK in lockdown to help curb the spread of the coronavirus

He told MailOnline: 'Our clients in the West End of London have been particularly hard hit as their rateable values (RV) are in excess of 50.001 and therefore receive no grant and some have RVs in excess of 100,00 and not only receive no grant but will continue to pay around 1,000 per week in business rates in 2020/2021. Some have already indicated they will not bother to re-open.'

A Government spokesman told MailOnline: 'The Government has already put in place a far-reaching package of support for businesses, including grants and government-backed loans, as well as legislation to ensure both commercial and private tenants are protected from eviction if unable to pay their rent.

'In these exceptional times, we urge landlords to act in a socially responsible way, exercising judgement and discretion with their tenants.'

Gyms  alongside pubs, restaurants and other businesses  closed to customers from the evening of March 20 under measures introduced by the Prime Minister.

But many promised to freeze membership payments and deliver workouts online.

PureGym, one of the UK's largest operators with 230 premises, told its more than a million members they will not have to pay while gyms are closed.

A message on its website said it had launched 'PureGym Home', bringing workouts, on-demand classes, and ideas for nutrition and well-being, through its app.

When gyms reopen, customers' first payments will be credited by any outstanding amount from their current monthly subscription, the company said.

Virgin Active also told customers it was automatically freezing membership payments. Accounts will be credited with any frozen fees already paid as well as any pro-rata memberships fees paid for the period between March 21 and 31.

Nuffield Health also said it was freezing fee payments and told customers it would be providing ways to keep them fit and healthy, including through videos on YouTube.

David Lloyd Clubs, The Gym Group, DW Fitness First, Better Leisure Centres and Better Gyms have all confirmed a payment freeze for members covering the closure.

** Are you a business owner who has been threatened with legal action over unpaid rent? Email: tips@mailonline.com or mark.duell@mailonline.co.uk **
The death toll due to the novel coronavirus rose to 13 in Rajasthan with two fatalities reported on Wednesday, while the number of cases increased to 1,076 cases in the state, an official said.

"Two deaths have occurred in Jaipur and Kota districts. As many as 71 new cases have come up today in various districts," Additional Chief Secretary Rohit Kumar Singh said.

He said that a 65-year-old woman, who was an acute diabetic, died at the SMS Hospital here, while a 70-year-old woman having tuberculosis and diabetes died in Kota.

The total number of confirmed coronavirus cases in the state has risen to 1,076, Singh said.

Out of the 71 fresh cases, 30 are in Jaipur, 27 in Kota, 10 in Jodhpur and one each in Tonk, Dausa, Nagaur and Jhunjhunu districts.

Among the coronavirus cases in Rajasthan there are two Italian citizens and 54 people who were brought back from Iran and admitted to Army health centres in Jodhpur and Jaisalmer.

Jaipur has reported the highest number of 483 cases in the state, followed by 105 in Jodhpur, 84 in Kota, 60 in Tonk and 59 in Banswara.

One hundred and forty seven patients have recovered and 74 have been discharged after treatment.

Rajasthan is under a strict lockdown from March 22 and a massive survey and screening is underway to trace the contagion.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
The lawmaker, who is also the ex-Director of the Institute of the National Memory is a witness in the case of holding the international forum timed to the 85th anniversary of Holodomor

Volodymyr Vyatrovych, the lawmaker from European Solidarity faction and former Director of the Institute of the National Memory is summoned for the interview at the SBI, State Bureau of Investigations of Ukraine. The MP is a witness in the holding the international forum timed to the 85th anniversary of Holodomor in Ukraine. Vyatrovych reported that on Facebook.

"I'm summoned for an interview at the SBI, as the witness in the case initiated by [MP Maksym] Buzhansky for holding the international forum timed to the 85th anniversary of the memory of victims of Holodomor. Are we going to get back to putting people behind the bars for crimes of the Communists?" he wrote.

Vyatrovych added that the summoning notice was signed by investigator Amelin - "the same man whom I sued for "failing to notice" the state treason act by Yermak and Kuchma", the MP wrote.

Previously, Vyatrovych filed an appeal to the SBU, Ukraine's State Security Service, claiming that the document signed by Ukraine's representatives in Minsk and actions of these officials (Leonid Kuchma and Andriy Yermak) contradicted the Constitution and other Ukrainian laws.
UNIONDALE, N.Y., April 15, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- Arbor Realty Trust, Inc. (NYSE: ABR ), one of the nation's leading multifamily lenders, today launched an innovative $2 million rental assistance program to help thousands of tenants and families significantly impacted by the COVID-19 outbreak. The Arbor Rental Assistance Program (ARAP) is a unique goodwill initiative intended to supplement existing government rent relief programs and leverage private capital to fill critical gaps for people who are impacted by a loss of income due to COVID-19.

"As one of the most active lenders in the industry offering workforce housing loans, we want to do our part to help ease the burden for those who've been severely impacted by COVID-19," said Ivan Kaufman, President and CEO of Arbor Realty Trust. "For those who have unfortunately lost income and are temporarily unable to meet their rent obligations, we are looking to provide some much-needed relief until they are able to stabilize their situations."

What makes ARAP unique is its focus on incorporating a partnership with the Company's ecosystem of borrowers and property owners. Arbor is contributing $1 million to the program and participating borrowers will match Arbor's advances to its tenants in need to help fill the rent gap during the hard-hit months of May and June. Together, the partnership program will provide $2 million in relief, creating financial stability not only for the tenants, but for the borrowers and property owners who provide affordable housing to working families across America.

The program will be offered to tenants at the properties Arbor finances across the country on a first-come, first-served basis.

"I commend Arbor for leading this effort and for creating an approach that has the potential for helping so many people," said Mark Osgood, President of MDO Capital, Inc. "By reaching out and collaborating during this time, as an owner, I am able to help people in a truly meaningful way that, in essence, helps the entire multifamily economic ecosystem."

David Lynd, CEO of Lynd, which owns and operates more than 20,000 multifamily units across the country, added, "Crisis brings out the true character of human beings. With this program, Arbor has made a statement and we appreciate their efforts."

"The apartments we finance are homes to millions of workers who comprise the backbone of this nation," added Kaufman. "We're all in this together, and if we all come together to help, we can make a notable difference with an eye towards the future and a recovery from this unprecedented health crisis."

For more information, please visit arap.arbor.com.

About Us

Arbor Realty Trust, Inc. (NYSE: ABR ) is a nationwide real estate investment trust and direct lender, providing loan origination and servicing for multifamily, single-family rental (SFR) portfolios, seniors housing, healthcare and other diverse commercial real estate assets. Headquartered in Uniondale, New York, Arbor manages a multibillion-dollar servicing portfolio, specializing in government-sponsored enterprise products. Arbor is a Fannie Mae DUS lender and Freddie Mac Optigo Seller/Servicer. Arbor's product platform also includes CMBS , bridge , mezzanine and preferred equity loans. Rated by Standard and Poor's and Fitch Ratings, Arbor is committed to building on its reputation for service, quality and customized solutions with an unparalleled dedication to providing our clients excellence over the entire life of a loan.

Contact: Bonnie Habyan

Tel: 516.506.4615

[email protected]

SOURCE Arbor Realty Trust, Inc.
DENVER, April 15, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- Cimarex Energy Co. (NYSE: XEC) today announced that, due to the continued weakness in oil prices, it now expects a 55-60 percent reduction in its 2020 capital investment program from its original guidance of $1.25-$1.35 billion.

The company has deferred completion activities and will drop all but one drilling rig in early May.

Cimarex Chairman, President and CEO, Tom Jorden, said, "The pressure on oil prices resulting from the sudden and severe drop in demand, has caused us to defer activity in the Delaware Basin, further reducing our capital investment in 2020. Cimarex retains the flexibility to adjust our investment in the second half of 2020 as conditions change. Our balance sheet continues to be our focus and allows us to maintain a long-term perspective during this unprecedented time."

Cimarex also announced that is has curtailed approximately 30 percent of its volumes for the month of May due to weakness in realized prices.

The company plans to provide a more detailed update as part of its first quarter earnings release on May 6th.

Current Hedge Position

Oil Hedges 2Q20 3Q20 4Q20 1Q21 2Q21 3Q21 4Q21 WTI Oil Collars1 Volumes (Bbl/d) 34,341 41,000 41,000 33,000 23,000 14,000 14,000 Weighted Average Floor 48.29 40.91 40.91 38.71 34.00 29.71 29.71 Weighted Average Ceiling 58.96 49.84 49.84 46.70 41.33 36.86 36.86 WTI Oil Basis Swaps2 Volumes (Bbl/d) 27,648 32,000 32,000 24,000 18,000 13,000 13,000 Weighted Average Differential3 0.38 0.18 0.18 0.00 (0.19) (0.65) (0.65) Gas Hedges 2Q20 3Q20 4Q20 1Q21 2Q21 3Q21 4Q21 PEPL Gas Collars4 Volumes (MMBtu/d) 63,297 80,000 80,000 60,000 50,000 30,000 30,000 Weighted Average Floor 1.89 1.75 1.75 1.72 1.69 1.73 1.73 Weighted Average Ceiling 2.28 2.17 2.17 2.12 2.08 2.14 2.14 El Paso Perm Gas Collars5 Volumes (MMBtu/d) 33,297 70,000 70,000 50,000 50,000 30,000 30,000 Weighted Average Floor 1.41 1.36 1.36 1.36 1.36 1.51 1.51 Weighted Average Ceiling 1.82 1.64 1.64 1.63 1.63 1.80 1.80 Waha Gas Collars6 Volume (MMBtu/d) 33,297 50,000 50,000 50,000 50,000 30,000 30,000 Weighted Average Floor 1.56 1.32 1.32 1.32 1.32 1.50 1.50 Weighted Average Ceiling 1.95 1.58 1.58 1.58 1.58 1.75 1.75

1WTI refers to West Texas Intermediate oil prices as quoted on the New York Mercantile Exchange 2Index price on basis swaps is WTI Midland as quoted by Argus Americas Crude 3Index price on basis swaps is WTI NYMEX less weighted average differential shown in table 4PEPL refers to Panhandle Eastern Pipe Line Tex/OK Mid-Continent as quoted on Platt's Inside FERC 5El Paso Perm refers to El Paso Permian Basin index as quoted on Platt's Inside FERC 6Waha refers to West Texas Natural Gas Index ("Waha") as quoted in Platt's Inside FERC

About Cimarex Energy

Denver-based Cimarex Energy Co. is an independent oil and gas exploration and production company with principal operations in the Permian Basin and Mid-Continent areas of the U.S.

This press release contains forward-looking statements, including statements regarding projected results and future events. These forward-looking statements are based on management's judgment as of the date of this press release and include certain risks and uncertainties. Please refer to the company's Annual Report on Form 10-K for the year ended December 31, 2019, filed with the SEC, and other filings including our Current Reports on Form 8-K and Quarterly Reports on Form 10-Q, for a description of certain risk factors that may affect these forward-looking statements. Actual results may differ materially from company projections and other forward-looking statements and can be affected by a variety of factors outside the control of the company including among other things: oil, NGL and natural gas price levels and volatility, including those resulting from demand destruction from the COVID-19 pandemic; disruptions to the availability of workers and contractors due to illness and stay at home orders related to the COVID-19 pandemic; disruptions to gathering, pipeline, refining, transportation and other midstream and downstream activities due to the COVID-19 pandemic; disruptions to supply chains and availability of critical equipment and supplies due to the COVID-19 pandemic; the effectiveness of controls over financial reporting; declines in the values of our oil and gas properties resulting in impairments; impairments of goodwill; higher than expected costs and expenses, including the availability and cost of services and materials; our ability to successfully integrate the March 2019 acquisition of Resolute Energy Corporation; compliance with environmental and other regulations; costs and availability of third party facilities for gathering, processing, refining and transportation; risks associated with concentration of operations in one major geographic area; environmental liabilities; the ability to receive drilling and other permits and rights-of-way in a timely manner; development drilling and testing results; the potential for production decline rates to be greater than expected; performance of acquired properties and newly drilled wells; regulatory approvals, including regulatory restrictions on federal lands; legislative or regulatory changes, including initiatives related to hydraulic fracturing, emissions and disposal of produced water; unexpected future capital expenditures; economic and competitive conditions; the availability and cost of capital; the ability to obtain industry partners to jointly explore certain prospects, and the willingness and ability of those partners to meet capital obligations when requested; changes in estimates of proved reserves; derivative and hedging activities; the success of the company's risk management activities; title to properties; litigation; the ability to complete property sales or other transactions;and other factors discussed in the company's reports filed with the SEC. Cimarex Energy Co. encourages readers to consider the risks and uncertainties associated with projections and other forward-looking statements. In addition, the company assumes no obligation to publicly revise or update any forward-looking statements based on future events or circumstances.

SOURCE Cimarex Energy Co.

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In the first week of April, the Hyderabad police received two complaints of false advertisements on selling liquor

Hyderabad: The cases of people being cheated after online payment for the home delivery of liquor are increasing. Since the lockdown, the cyber crime department of the Hyderabad police has registered four such cases.

However, the total number of cyber crimes reported during the lockdown has decreased.

In the first week of April, the Hyderabad police received two complaints in which the name of a popular wine shop in the city was fraudulently used, with mobile numbers provided in fake Facebook profiles assuring home delivery of liquor during the lockdown.

In the second week, the police recorded two more complaints of false advertisements on selling liquor. In one instance, the victim transferred the money to the fraudsters UPI id, while in a recent incident, the victims card details were collected and then the money was siphoned off from his account.

The victim, a resident of Sultan Bazaar, contacted the number provided in the advertisement online. The advertiser asked for his card details and said he would complete the transaction to deliver a bottle of brandy for Rs 1,600.

After the money was transferred, the accused made five more transactions, convinced the victim to share the OTP for each transaction, siphoned off Rs 92,000, and then turned his phone off.

Assistant commissioner of police K.V.M. Prasad said, During the lockdown, the number of cases of cyber cheating has come down. At least 200 to 250 cases were registered every month during the normal period, but since the lockdown, the cases registered are 160. A total of 720 cases have been registered since January this year, the ACP said.

The ACP further said, "The crooks who also understood this have now changed their modus operandi and are advertising more for door delivery of liquor and siphoning money. Citizens should not believe the ads and should report it to the police."

Meanwhile, fraudsters are still making money with the old modus operandi of selling automobiles by impersonating CISF personnel and convincing the client that there is no restriction on movement of vehicles belonging to the armed forces during the lockdown.

A constable transferred Rs 36,000 to the fraudster, who promised to deliver his used car parked at the RGI Airport for Rs 1.2 lakh. The constable deposited the money and later realised he had been cheated.
Since the 2020 Democrat primary began, Joe Biden has been doing everything he can to associate himself with Barack Obama. The one thing missing from these efforts was Barack Obama, who refused to say anything nice about his former Vice President.

Now, though, with Joe Biden the last man standing, Obama finally decided to endorse Biden. Or more precisely, he finally has admitted that theres no one left but Biden to reinstate the Obama agenda and carry it through to fruition.

In a way, the endorsement is impressive. Obama delivers it in an earnest tone, almost as if he means it. In terms of substance, though, an astute listener might notice that Obama praises Biden in only the most generic and incongruous tones, while the informed listener will know that the accolades Obama expresses are untrue.

Im proud to endorse my friend @JoeBiden for President of the United States. Let's go: https://t.co/maHVGRozkX  Barack Obama (@BarackObama) April 14, 2020

Before naming Biden, Obama says that, in the abstract, America needs leadership thats guided by knowledge and experience, honesty and humility, empathy and grace. To associate those words with Biden is laughable.

Knowledge?

Joe Biden tries to quote the Declaration of Independence, failspic.twitter.com/ULzGB0XtQK  Elizabeth Harrington (@LizRNC) March 2, 2020

Experience? Well, yes . . . but is Joes the experience America wants? Robert Gates, Obamas defense secretary, wrote in his memoir that Biden has been wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades. Joe Biden engaged in a high-tech lynching against Clarence Thomas, while simultaneously demeaning Anita Hill, a black woman. The list of Bidens experience is endless, and none of it is good.

Honesty? Joe Biden was driven out of the 1988 presidential race because of his dishonesty, an echo of his law school problems. What's also inconsistent with honesty is the corruption thats benefitted his family for decades, including his dirty dealings with the Chinese government on Hunters behalf.

Humility? This is the man who keeps telling all who will listen that hes smarter than they are, and who told a voter youre full of sh*t and then threatened to beat him up.

Empathy and grace? For almost fifty years, Biden has lied about the man who was involved in the car accident that killed Bidens wife and daughter, calling him a drunk, when it was Mrs. Biden who caused the fatal accident. Defaming an innocent man is the opposite of empathy and grace. In many of his interactions with people less powerful than he is, Biden is a bully.

And of course, where in that litany of virtues does one put Bidens creepy obsession with little girls or the fact that hes credibly accused of sexually assaulting a staffer?

Obama then dedicates a mere two minutes out of twelve to discuss Joe himself. We learn, among other things, that Joe helped Obama with the slowest, lowest recession recovery in American history; Joe was the one who kept a disease in a far corner of untraveled Africa from coming to America; and Joe will surround himself with experts.

Where Obama gets excited is about his own agenda, especially if it means hewing left in Bernie Sanders fashion. Obama imagines Joe pushing Obamacare further so that its a total public option, rejoining the Paris agreement, reinstating economy-killing environmental regulations, and pardoning student loans. Hes thrilled that Biden will have what is the most progressive platform of any major-party nominee in history  although he seems more grateful to Bernie than to Biden for that fact.

Obama throws in the usual insults against Trump, lies about Trumps approach to health insurance, says that a president besieged by the entire media establishment has a propaganda network, and insists that the COVID-19 pandemic needs to be used as a springboard for progressive change (i.e., never let a crisis go to waste). Most laughably, in light of the cascade of evidence that the Obama administration attempted to steal an election and then commit a coup against a sitting president, Obama accuses the Trump administration of disregard[ing] American principles of rule of law.

Between his reluctance to endorse Biden and his damning him with faint praise, Obamas encomiums for his former Veep come across as disingenuous at best, dishonest at worst. However, what does shine through is that Obama genuinely sees a Biden victory as the last hope for a rerun of Obamas presidency.
[April 15, 2020] AM Best Removes Credit Ratings From Under Review With Negative Implications of Universal Group, Inc.'s Property/Casualty Subsidiaries; Maintains Under Review With Negative Implications Status for Credit Ratings of Universal Life Insurance Company

AM Best has removed from under review with negative implications and affirmed the Financial Strength Rating (FSR) of A- (Excellent) and the Long-Term Issuer Credit Rating (Long-Term ICR) of "a-" of Universal Insurance Company (PR) (UIC PR) (Guaynabo, PR). The outlook assigned to these Credit Ratings (ratings) is negative. Concurrently, AM Best has removed from under review with negative implications and affirmed the FSR of B++ (Good) and the Long-Term ICR of "bbb+" of Universal North America Insurance Company (UNAIC) (Arlington, TX). The outlook assigned to the FSR is stable, while the outlook of the Long-Term ICR is negative. Furthermore, AM Best has maintained the under review with negative implications status for the FSR of B+ (Good) and the Long-Term ICR of "bbb-" of Universal Life Insurance Company (San Juan, PR) (Universal Life). The rating actions taken on the property/casualty operations of Universal Group, Inc. are based on AM Best's concerns regarding the significant uncertainty at the enterprise level, driven by the issues stated below at Universal Life. Therefore, until the successful resolution of these concerns, AM Best believes reputational risk exists for the entire organization, which could create a diminished view of the enterprise's business profile. The ratings of UIC PR reflect its balance sheet strength, which AM Best categorizes as very strong, as well as its adequate operating performance, neutral business profile and marginal enterprise risk management (ERM). The ratings of UNAIC reflect its balance sheet strength, which AM Best categorizes as strong, as well as its adequate operating performance, neutral business profile and marginal ERM. The ratings further reflect the enhancement given its role within the group. The ratings of Universal Life reflect its balance sheet strength, which AM Best categorizes as adequate, as well as its strong operating performance, limited business profile and marginal ERM. The credit ratings are based on the elevated counterparty risk associated with Universal Life's fixed annuity business reinsured through its ceding agreement with Private Bankers Life & Annuity Co., Ltd. (PBLA). The elevated counterparty risk is attributed directly to the fixed annuity assets maintained by PBLA. PBLA is a Bermuda-domiciled company with direct ties to Greg E. Lindberg, who was recently found guilty of wire fraud and bribery charges y a federal jury in Charlotte, NC. These assets are being valuated by a third-party adviser including certain securities linked to operating companies affiliated with global growth. These fixed annuity assets are held in a trust, and any investment transactions require Bermuda Monetary Authority's and Universal Life's approval prior to execution. Furthermore, Universal Life has made progress toward control of the trust assets; however, PBLA remains under ultimate ownership of Lindberg and may be so for an unknown period of time. Universal Group, Inc. is exploring a capital raise, which if successful will provide additional capital to support Universal Life to strengthen its risk-adjusted capitalization. Additionally, Universal Life has a signed a letter of intent from a reinsurer to replace PBLA and assume the in-force fixed annuities, although an executed reinsurance agreement awaits the conclusion of the asset monetization plan. Even though the process continues, it has taken longer than expected.



Universal Life's operations are sound, and in 2019 reported net statutory earnings of $38.9 million, a 16% increase over 2018. The company reported return-on-equity measures in excess of 30% for the past five years, and capital has grown 26.2% compounded annually over the same period. Universal Life is exposed to concentration risk as it solely operates in Puerto Rico; however, it is part of UIC PR's diversified product strategy and has the largest share of the annuity business in the market. The ratings of Universal Life will remain under review with negative implications, pending completion of Universal Group, Inc.'s capital raise. AM Best expects the capital raise to be completed within the next 90 days. Additionally, AM Best will continue to have ongoing discussions with Universal Life's management team regarding the movement of its in-force fixed annuity business to a new reinsurer.

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. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20200415005716/en/

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The leader of the outlawed Indigenous People of Biafra, IPOB, Nnamdi Kanu, has cautioned people of the southeast against using face ma...





The leader of the outlawed Indigenous People of Biafra, IPOB, Nnamdi Kanu, has cautioned people of the southeast against using face masks imported from China.





Kanu alleged that face masks produced and imported from China are contaminated, hence the south should be avoided.





The IPOB leader made the claim in his latest broadcast on Radio Biafra.





According to Kanu, The facemasks that are made in China are contaminated; do not make use of them because you will die.





Nobody will come to your rescue, use the way in which they are sharing the relief materials only in the North as an example.





Chinese are treating our people like rags in China and you say I should be diplomatic? It is better I die standing on my feet than live a thousand years on my knees. People treat us the way they do because we see evil and keep quiet.





We are going to do what the world never expected of a black people. We want to build a Nation, God in heaven will be proud of.





How many people have you seen going to China for medical treatment?. Why then inviting China to treat you? Welcome to the zoo.





The people you brought in from China are they not the same people attacking our people in China?
By Andrew Hay

(Reuters) - Arizona on Tuesday said it would provide coronavirus antibody tests for 250,000 health-care workers and first responders in the largest such testing in the United States to date.

The blood tests show who has been exposed to the novel coronavirus and successfully built immunity, the University of Arizona, which will produce and carry out the tests, said in a statement.

With experts saying that up to 50% of people exposed to COVID-19 experience few to no symptoms, determining who has developed virus-fighting antibodies is critical to restarting social interaction, said Dr. Michael Dake, senior vice president for the University of Arizona Health Sciences.

"We're going to be the largest and certainly the first to undertake a statewide testing of all healthcare workers and first responders," Dake, who is overseeing production of the tests, said on a conference call.

The state is providing the university $3.5 million in funding to produce the tests and provide results after clinics and hospitals send blood samples of the workers.

Dake expected the university to be able to process 5,000 tests per day once the program ramps up to full speed in early May, when some models show Arizona's outbreak peaking.

First responders and healthcare workers are the first wave of testing, which may move onto other areas of the population, Dake said.

The University of Arizona has pledged to give antibody tests to all 45,000 of its students and 15,000 faculty.

The antibody tests, using decades-old ELISA technology, do not always pick up early-stage infections but show whether a person had the virus in the past, even if the person was asymptomatic.

In comparison, the so called RT-PCR-technology swab tests used at drive-through stations and clinics across the country determine whether a person has the virus at that moment by looking for it in nose or throat secretions.

Both tests are critical in the coronavirus fight, but antibody tests are seen as a relatively cheap, fast means to sort populations into risk groups and measure virus spread.

Story continues

Questions remain about how long coronavirus immunity levels last and whether people who have antibodies could still be contagious, according to some infectious disease specialists.

Antibody testing is not a cure-all," Arizona Governor Doug Ducey said in a statement. "Learning more about it is an important step to identifying community exposure, helping us make decisions about how we protect our citizens, and getting us to the other side of this pandemic.

(Reporting By Andrew Hay in Taos, New Mexico; additional reporting by David Schwartz in Phoenix; Editing by Leslie Adler)
The telecoms industry has introduced a series of new measures it says will benefit consumers during the Covid-19 pandemic fallout, including support for customers in financial straits.

BT Ireland, eir, Pure Telecom, Sky Ireland, Tesco Mobile Ireland, Three Ireland, Virgin Media Ireland and Vodafone and others have all signed up to seven key measures they say will assist working from home.

The measures include "any fixed broadband customers who do not have unlimited usage already as standard will be given the opportunity, if they require, to upgrade their package", while customers who rely solely on mobile access to get online can avail of "affordable unlimited mobile data access".

Access to healthcare and educational resource websites identified by the Government will be zero-rated for all customers where technically feasible, the agreement states. Access to a zero-rated website is completely free and so does not count for billing purposes or data usage.

Firms will engage with any customer that contacts them due to difficulty paying their bills.

Telecommunications Industry Ireland, the Ibec group for the sector that introduced the measures, said they are needed in a critical period for the country.

Director Torlach Denihan said: "The telecommunications industry is working very hard to ensure that people remain connected to their loved ones and to essential services while being able to work and study from home.

"Consumers who are in financial difficulty as a result of Covid-19 and have difficulty paying their bills, including those who are cocooning, will be assisted by their service provider to agree an affordable solution for their voice and data services."

The measures stay in place until June 30.

The Commission for Communications Regulation (ComReg) welcomed the measures, saying the economic fallout has meant many worried people now find themselves in very difficult financial circumstances.

ComReg commissioner Robert Mourik said: The commitments are designed to give consumers reassurance about communications usage while maintaining the overall stability of our electronic communications networks.

"These measures will also help to ensure that consumers who are financially vulnerable as a result of the Covid-19 crisis will get assistance from their service provider to agree an affordable solution for their voice and data service."
Storms that killed more than 30 people in the Southeast, piling fresh misery atop a pandemic, spread across the eastern United States on Monday, leaving more than 1 million homes and businesses without power amid floods and mudslides.

In Alabama, people seeking shelter from tornadoes huddled in community shelters, protective masks covering their faces to guard against the new coronavirus. A twister demolished a Mississippi home save for a concrete room where a married couple and their children survived unharmed, but 11 others died in the state.

About 85 miles (137 kilometers) from Atlanta in the mountains of north Georgia, Emma and Charles Peewee Pritchett laid still in their bed praying as a suspected twister splintered the rest of their home.

I said, `If were gonna die Im going to be beside him, the woman said Monday. Both survived without injuries.

Nine died in South Carolina, Gov. Gov. Henry McMaster said, and coroners said eight were killed in Georgia. Tennessee officials said three people were killed in and around Chattanooga, and others died under falling trees or inside collapsed buildings in Arkansas and North Carolina.

With a handful of tornadoes already confirmed in the South and storms still raging up the Eastern Seaboard, forecasters fanned out to determine how much of the widespread damage was caused by twisters.

Mississippi Gov. Tate Reeves said the storms were as bad or worse than anything weve seen in a decade.

We are used to tornadoes in Mississippi, he said. No one is used to this.

Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp said some storm victims already were out of work because of shutdowns caused by COVID-19. Now they have lost literally everything they own, he said.

Striking first on Easter across a landscape largely emptied by coronavirus stay-at-home orders, the storm front forced some uncomfortable decisions. Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey suspended social distancing rules, and some people wearing protective masks huddled closely together in storm shelters.

The storms blew onward through the night, causing flooding and mudslides in mountainous areas, and knocking out electricity for nearly 1.3 million customers in a path from Texas to Maine, according to poweroutages.us.

As much as 6 inches (15 centimeters) of rain fell over the weekend in the Tennessee Valley. The Tennessee Valley Authority said it expected to release water to regulate levels in swollen lakes and rivers in Tennessee and Alabama.

In southeast Mississippi, Andrew Phillips crowded into a closet-sized safe room with his wife and two sons hours after watching an online Easter service because the pandemic forced their church to halt regular worship. Then a twister struck, shredding their house, meat-processing business and vehicles in rural Moss, Mississippi. The room, built of sturdy cinder blocks, was the only thing on their property left standing.

Im just going to let the insurance handle it and trust in the good Lord, said Phillips.

The National Weather Service tallied hundreds of reports of trees down across the region, including many that punctured roofs and downed power lines. Meteorologists warned the mid-Atlantic states to prepare for potential tornadoes, wind and hail. The storms knocked down trees across Pennsylvania.

In northwest Georgia, a narrow path of destruction 5 miles (8 kilometers) long hit two mobile home parks. A terrified David Baggett of Chatsworth survived by cowering with his children in the bathtub of his mobile home, which was cut in two by a falling tree.

It got quiet and then the wind started coming in really fast, said Baggett, 33.

To the north in Chattanooga, Tennessee, at least 150 homes and commercial buildings were damaged and more than a dozen people treated, but none of their injuries appeared to be life-threatening, Fire Chief Phil Hyman said.

It wasnt clear whether the combination of destroyed housing and social distancing requirements would lead to problems for tornado survivors, some of whom said they planned to stay with relatives.

The deaths in Mississippi included a married couple  Lawrence County Sheriffs deputy Robert Ainsworth and a Walthall County Justice Court deputy clerk, Paula Reid Ainsworth, authorities said.

Robert left this world a hero, as he shielded Mrs. Paula during the tornado, said a Facebook message by the sheriffs office.

In Louisiana, Gov. John Bel Edwards said it was a miracle that no serious injuries or fatalities resulted from the Sunday tornadoes that damaged hundreds of homes around Monroe and in other parts of north Louisiana. But he lamented that because of coronavirus-related mandates, he felt he had to keep his distance from victims whose properties were devastated.

In north Alabama, where lightning struck Shoal Creek Baptist Church shortly after noon Sunday, catching the tall, white steeple on fire, pastor Mahlon LeCroix said the building would have been full of more than 200 people at the time had the pandemic not forced him to switch to online services.

It turned out to be a blessing, he said.

___

Reeves reported from Birmingham, Alabama. AP photographer Rogelio V. Solis in Carson, Mississippi; Emily Wagster Pettus in Jackson, Mississippi; Russ Bynum in Savannah, Georgia; Jonathan Drew in Raleigh, North Carolina; Ben Finley in Norfolk, Virginia; Jeffrey Collins in Columbia, South Carolina; and Bruce Shipkowski in Toms River, New Jersey, contributed to this report.

Copyright 2022 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Topics Catastrophe Trends Windstorm Louisiana Georgia Alabama Mississippi Tennessee
Google Subpoenaed for Emails of Mystery Gmail Account Tied to Hillary Clinton

Judicial Watch served a court-authorized subpoena to Google on April 15 requesting emails from a controversial Gmail account tied to Hillary Clinton.

The subpoena is part of a yearslong Freedom of Information Act lawsuit which has led to the discovery of Clintons use of an unauthorized private email server to conduct government business during her tenure as the secretary of state.

Judicial Watch, a conservative government transparency group, requested the emails and metadata from the carterheavyindustries@gmail.com account. Clinton IT aide Paul Combetta claimed to have used the account to transfer all of Clintons emails from a laptop to an email server.

As a result of the transfer, the Carter Heavy Industries email ended up in the metadata of all but four of the Clinton emails handed over to Congress. The email accounts peculiar namesimilar to that of a Chinese companyprompted concerns that the Chinese regime may have gained access to Clintons emails. An inquiry by two inspectors general did not find evidence of an intrusion or any association between Combetta and any Chinese company. Combettawho was granted immunity before Clintons exonerationdeclined to be questioned for the inspector generals inquiry.

A federal court, tired of the State and Justice Departments gamesmanship authorized Judicial Watchs subpoena to Google to follow a lead on the Clinton emails, Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton said in a statement. DOJ and State are AWOL and covering up for Hillary Clinton, so it is again up to Judicial Watch to do the basic investigative heavy lifting to get at the truth.

Much remains unknown about Combettas use of the Gmail account. He claims to have used it to create an archive of Clintons emails on the email server. Clintons lawyers, who were not given a copy of the archive, somehow produced emails to Congress with the Carter Heavy Industries email address in the metadata.

Notably, Judicial Watch is asking Google to produce emails from two accounts with slightly different spellings. The request is likely the result of the two spellings appearing in documents released by the inspectors general to Congress. Additional questions may arise if both accounts exist and both contain or have contained Clintons emails. For example, it may be possible that Clintons lawyers used one account while Combetta used the other.

At the time the FBI reviewed the Gmail account, hundreds of Clintons emails were still present. Neither the FBI nor the inspectors general have clarified whether anyone else but Combetta had access to the account.

Google did not respond to a request for comment.
The World Health Organisation (WHO) has upgraded its COVID-19 information dashboard with a prominent new feature.

According to details on the website, the feature allows access to current and reliable data on COVID-19 cases submitted directly to WHO by countries.

Also, the upgrade was developed and supported by the WHO Technology for COVID-19 initiative, a pro-bono collaboration of technology companies, brought together by WHO to fight the pandemic.

A prominent new feature is the release of the mobile-friendly version. In addition, the dashboard has a clean and modern interface and several data visualization tools to better grasp the current status of COVID-19 as the situation unfolds, it said.

Currently, users will have access to new and confirmed cases and deaths globally with daily statistics as well as country-specific information by clicking on any country on the interactive map.

There is an interactive chart showing reported cases by the WHO region, including daily and cumulative statistics.

Confirmed cases and deaths, and changes over time in a specific country, region, or territory, are available on the interactive chart.

There is also a new explorer tab designed to provide complex datasets for easy access and use. It allows users to select variables across three-axis, which helps see correlations and relationships that can provide insights into COVID-19 and how communities are responding to it.

The director of health emergency information and risk assessment department, Oliver Morgan, said the updated version will provide more insight about the epidemiology and response to COVID-19.

It is critically important that all countries are able to report their COVID-19 situation. The updated WHO Dashboard will now provide more comprehensive insights about the epidemiology and response to COVID-19 at the global level.

The director of digital health and innovation, WHO, Bernardo Junior, described the innovation as a work in progress.

Similarly, the health organisation launched a Facebook Messenger version of its WHO Health Alert platform.

It said the application will be offering instant and accurate information about COVID-19 via Facebooks global reach.

The WHOs Health Alert interactive service can now be accessed in English, French, Spanish, and Arabic through WHOs official Facebook page by selecting Send Message or through the dedicated Messenger link, it said.

It said the WHO Health Alert service has already reached over 12 million people via WhatsApp.

In many regions hit hardest by COVID-19, total messaging through Facebooks family of apps has increased by more than 50%, it said.

With this transition into Facebook Messenger, and other communication channels related to it, WHO Health Alert has the potential to reach 4.2 billion people helping people protect themselves from COVID-19, prevent its spread, and understand the facts related to the disease.

The chatbot was developed in collaboration with Sprinklr, as a part of the WHO Technology for COVID-19 Initiative, a pro-bono collaboration of technology companies brought together by WHO specifically to fight the COVID-19 pandemic.
While zoos usually see families and kids lining up to visit the animals, the ongoing pandemic that has placed countries in lockdown is not allowing that to happen. According to a report by BBC, zoo owners are struggling to gather funds to maintain their animals and might have to resort to unpleasant measures.

The report also states that a zoo director from Germany has claimed that animals may have to be fed to each other in order to ensure some of them survive and the zoo makes it through this time.

AFP

Neumunster Zoo's Verena Kaspari told Die Welt, a German newspaper that, "We've listed the animals we'll have to slaughter first." She also added that even though due to the unfortunate situation they will have to resort to feeding some animals to the others, it will not solve their financial problem.

She mentioned how the seals and penguins require fresh fish in large quantities on a daily basis and that is not possible with the current lockdown scenario. She said, "If it comes to it, I'll have to euthanise animals, rather than let them starve."

AFP

The report says that Ms Kaspari's zoo is not covered by the state emergency fund for small businesses. Her zoo's loss is estimated to be about 175,000 euros which is almost Rs 1.5 crore.

Zoos are requesting for public donations as well as asking the German government for aid worth 100 million euros.



Germany's national zoo association (VdZ) have presented the argument that unlike many other businesses, zoo cannot afford to go into lockdown and cut down on costs as animals still have to be fed daily and looked after.

AFP

VdZ chief Jorg Junhold also said that the lockdown was costing a typical German zoo about 500,000 weekly in lost turnover.
About two dozen protesters, spaced far apart to observe the rules of social distancing, converged on Nathan Phillips Square on Wednesday, calling on the city to speed up efforts to make shelters for the homeless and refugees safer from the spread of COVID-19.

People who live and work there are in danger  this is no way to flatten the curve, said Dr. Michaela Beder, one 313 doctors and nurse practitioners who signed an open letter earlier this week calling on the city to enforce social distancing of two metres in shelters.

Beder and others want the city to move as many clients as possible, as quickly as possible, into other housing, including hotel rooms which have already been set aside, in an attempt to prevent the spread of the illness, which has so far killed 121 people in Toronto.

No deaths have been registered at the 72 different shelters in the city, but 20 refugees at the Willowdale Welcome Centre have tested positive for COVID-19, and Toronto Public Health officers have been dispatched to piece together how it happened and how to prevent it from spreading further.

As of Wednesday afternoon, there were 40 confirmed cases of COVID-19 among shelter clients across the city that had been reported to Toronto Public Health, according to a spokesperson.

An employee at Homes First, the organization that runs Willowdale and about a dozen other sites throughout the city, told the Star its difficult to get clients at some shelters  in particular clients suffering from mental illness and substance abuse  to abide by the rules of social distancing.

She did not want to be named for fear of losing her job.

She said another contributing factor is that many staff work at more than one shelter, which puts them at greater risk of being infected, and once infected, more likely to spread the illness between facilities.

Patricia Mueller, chief executive officer of Homes First, said they are working to stop that practice, but it cant be done instantly  it involves asking each staff member where they want to work, and drawing up a new schedule for everyone.

It is a project in motion, she said. Were stopping, but we havent stopped. Were working on it.

Dixon Hall, which provides overnight shelter services, is currently monitoring several confirmed cases of COVID-19 among staff and clients, said David Reycraft, director, housing services, Dixon Hall Neighbourhood Services.

No one has been hospitalized at this time. Everyone is recovering at home or in a designated isolation centre.

Mary-Anne Bedard, general manager of the citys shelter, support and housing administration, said the city is moving as quickly as it can to improve social distancing in shelters, among other initiatives that have been taken.

I can assure the public that we are moving with all urgency, said Bedard.

Mayor John Tory said it takes time to move people with complex needs from one location to another and that had the city instead moved too rapidly wed be criticized for that.
Min Sarun and Neang Chantrea reached the Ban Laem border checkpoint in Chanthaburi, Thailand, on the morning of April 2. Around a hundred Cambodian migrant workers were waiting to cross into the country. They were informed that the Cambodia-Thai border had been closed to prevent the spread of the novel coronavirus. Unable to cross the border and desperate to return to Takeo province, the couple were told that for a fee of 1,500 baht each, a total of approximately $92, they could cross the border. Min Sarun and Neang Chantrea quickly agreed, made the payment and were escorted through three kilometers of wooded area till they reached a clearing. It was a small, military-controlled checkpoint. At the informal checkpoint, there were no government officials, only military officials, said 40-year-old Min Sarun. Our nephew came to pick us up from there. Min Sarun and Neang Chantrea, who worked at a chicken factory, were part of the nearly 70,000 Cambodian migrant workers who rushed back in the last weeks of March to avoid being stuck in Thailand on account of the novel coronavirus, which by then had been declared a global pandemic. Last week, Interior Minister Sar Kheng said 68,000 migrant workers had returned from Thailand since the onset of the COVID-19 outbreak. A week prior, the interior minister said border officials were unable to monitor and provide health checkups for the thousands of workers rushing to cross the border before its closure on March 24. Thailand is home to around 1.2 million Cambodian migrant workers, according to Cambodian government estimates, a significant number of whom are undocumented. A 2019 International Organization for Migration report showed that a third of migrant workers surveyed were unemployed before leaving Cambodia, nearly half had zero income and around two-thirds moved to Thailand due to a lack of job opportunities in the Kingdom and to earn a better income. More than half the respondents remitted up to $1,228 on average a year, adding that this money was the primary income for their families in Cambodia or was needed to improve their living conditions.

Sitting at their home in Takeo provinces Bati district, Min Sarun and Neang Chantrea were on the third day of their mandated 14-day isolation when VOA Khmer reporters met them. While the couple has a sizeable home  consisting of two separate wooden and concrete structures sitting side-by-side on the small plot  they have sent their children and Min Saruns mother to live with relatives. The bottom floor of the concrete structure has been turned into a makeshift bedroom, enclosed with loose sheets, for the couple to spend the rest of the isolation period. Neang Chantrea said local health officials visited them three times on the first day, and left frequently thereafter. Officials checked if they had a fever or other COVID-19 symptoms, but always warned them to remain in isolation. I did not get to meet them, she said, referring to neighbors she hadnt seen for months. The villagers also do not dare to talk to us. For Min Sarun, the risky, and relatively expensive journey, back to Cambodia was necessitated by his mothers failing health. I had money to send home but my mother was sick and there was no one to take care of her, he said, seated on a wooden bench outside the home. So, I had to return to take care of her, no matter if it made me broke. Working at a chicken farm in Thailand since late 2017, the couple earned around 7,000 baht ($215) every fortnight, which would increase significantly if they put in overtime. Of the close to 14,000 baht the couple earned a month, around $430, at least 5000 baht ($153), if not more, was sent to run the household in Takeo.

Additionally, 2000 baht ($61) was sent back every month to an informal lender, who had given the couple $2,000 a few years ago to migrate to Thailand. This covered the cost of their passport and other preparations they needed for the migration. Having returned to Takeo, and despite the relief of being in their hometown and with their family, the couple sees little hope in the coming months. After completing their isolation period, Min Sarun is worried about getting a job  the impetus for him to leave Cambodia in the first place. With no income, the couple reached out to Min Saruns brother to pay their monthly installment to the informal lender for April, putting an additional strain, he said, on the sibling, who had his loans to repay. It was hard to return home because we dont have any jobs, and now we are kept in isolation for 14 days, it is even harder, Min Sarun said. If it remains like this for a few months, I will not have any solution. Informal financial service providers have been a traditional source of unregulated, and pricey, debt for Cambodians, even with the more recent proliferation of profit-making microfinance institutions (MFIs). While they are still prevalent as a primary source of debt, a 2015 International Finance Corporation report pointed to the possibility that these lenders were also being used to supplement MFI loan payments, hence leading to the low rates of delinquency seen in the microfinance sector. Last year, local rights groups Licadho and Sahmakum Teang Tnaut released a report highlighting the rights abuses linked to the MFI sector, especially on land tenure security, forced migration and child labor. The reports case studies also showed that respondents had used informal loans to pay back MFI monthly installments.

Back in Bati district, Seang Naroth and her husband, Seng Va, returned to Cambodia on March 24, just as the border crossing at Poipet, Banteay Meanchey, was being closed. They found themselves stuck with hundreds, if not thousands of workers hoping to get home. After a few, rudimentary health checks from Thai and Cambodian officials, the couple crossed into Cambodia and took a minivan, which they rented for themselves, straight home. On returning home, Seang Naroth said the local police, the village chief and health officials swarmed their home, cause a sense of panic in the neighborhood. Having just finished their 14-day isolation period, Seng Naroth said the couple had not returned for fear of the viral pandemic. They, instead, were hoping to meet their young son and celebrate Khmer New Year with the family, before returning to Thailand later in April. Having worked in a garment factory before their migration, where her earnings were around $200 a month, Seang Naroth wanted a better life for her son. So, the Takeo residents borrowed around $1,200 from an informal lender to pay for all the documentation and travel needed to move to Thailand, a loan they preferred because it did not require the depositing of their land title as collateral. Working in construction in Chonburi province, the couple earned around 30,000 baht a month, around $920 combined, of which they had to send back at least $100 a month to repay just the interest, Seang Naroth said. After nearly two years of payments they still owed around $1,000, Seng Va said, and now a trip to meet their son and celebrate the annual holiday with the family had turned into a financial nightmare for the young couple. It is hard. We are here and it is hard to find a job. The villagers do not want to come close to us, Seng Va said. I am not sure if we have money to pay as now we are jobless. I have only hugged my son once, and that too only after spraying myself with alcohol, Seang Naroth said, upset that the 14-day isolation period had meant she was unable to meet her 3-year-old son.
CBS cancels God Friended Me after 2 seasons

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CBS has decided to pull the plug on its Sunday-night drama God Friended Me, which is scheduled for a two-hour season finale on April 26.

"God Friended Me," drew 10.45 million viewers in its debut episode in September 2018. The series tells the story of an atheist who receives a friend request from God. The show is based around Miles (Brandon Micheal Hall), an outspoken atheist, and his quest to find the person behind the "God account" on Facebook who continues to send him on little missions that help various people around New York City.

The atheism argument is contrasted by Miles' father, the Rev. Arthur Finer (Joe Morton), who tries to convince his son to return to his Christian faith and stop pushing disbelief on his public podcast.

According to The Hollywood Reporter, the producers of the series, Greg Berlanti, Steven Lilien and Bryan Wynbrandt, were given a good amount of time to come up with an elaborate conclusion, which viewers are hoping will finally reveal who is behind the God account.

Were extremely proud of the unique concept and uplifting stories 'God Friended Me' has told over the past two seasons, CBS and Warner Bros. TV said in a statement. We thank the brilliant cast, writers, production team and crew for a show that stirred thoughtful conversation about faith, life and happiness, and made viewers feel good at the end of each episode. The creative team behind the show has one last friend suggestion in mind, as well as an ending we hope brings a satisfying conclusion to Miles journey in search of the God Account.

The series stars Brandon Micheal Hall who's an outspoken atheist who receives a social-media friend request from God and unwittingly becomes an agent of change for the people around him. The cast also includes Violett Beane, Suraj Sharma, Javicia Leslie, Joe Morton and Erica Gimpel.

The CBS show was warmly received by Christians and mainstream audiences alike upon its release and it kept a lot of support despite the notion that the show might have lost some conservative viewers as it introduced a lesbian relationship, which was approved by the show's preacher. The show averaged a little under 7.7 million viewers on Sunday nights.

Wynbrandt told Patheos.com they were honored to have such loyal viewers.

Making 'God Friended Me' has been an absolute joy. Getting to work every day with our amazing cast and crew is what every showrunner and creator hopes for. And on top of that, we had the most amazing and devoted fans. They came out every Sunday night to support the show and we are forever grateful for that, he said.

While CBS is ending God Friended Me, the networks supernatural drama Evil has been given a season-two greenlight.
On February 26, the novel coronavirus reached Latin America. It took three months since the first cases of COVID-19 in China and one month after its first case in Europe before it reached the region, says an article.

Many countries in the region had responded immediately by implementing a variety of measures such as closing borders, lockdown orders, and curfews. These efforts aim to prevent the overwhelming of their healthcare systems. Mexico had been an exception to those nations that had taken these strategies.

Late Announcement of A National Public Health Emergency

Due to the issues of a lack of importance by President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador (AMLO) to the COVID-19 pandemic and the pressures from other countries, Mexico announced national public health emergency at a later date. The announcement came only after 40 deaths and fifteen days after the report of the first COVID-19 case in the country.

According to the decree, not a mandatory quarantine, states the postponement of the operations of non-essential public, private, and social events. These events include the federal government, all educational institutions, and a portion of the private sector. Those who work on-site are also suspended to work until April 30.

COVID-19 in Mexico

Based on the latest data from the United Nations, the population of Mexico is more or less 129 million. Also, the information reveals that there are only 29 medical workers for every 10,000 Mexican.

As of April 13, there had been a total of 332 people who have lost their battle to the illness. 5,014 confirmed COVID-19 cases were reported as of this date. Based on the estimates of the government of Mexico, the infection rate is 8.2 higher, which means that their estimated infections are 38,200.

Out of the total COVID-19 confirmed cases, 26% needed to be admitted to the hospital. 9% of the hospitalized patients are in stable condition, 14% are severe cases of the illness, and 3% have already died.

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Actions to Save the Mexican Economy

AMLO recently announce an economic reactivation plan. The plan is divided into three parts: public and social investment, creating jobs for the unemployed, and stricter federal public administration.

The president's statement had left private industries dissatisfied as they feel like the government overlooks them. One reason for this reaction is that the government did not include tax reduction to one of its plans. However, AMLO ensures that there will be no increases to the tax dues.

The business coordinating council was expecting that the Mexican government will be implementing a more aggressive fiscal policy to help the private sector survive and continue to maintain employees during the COVID-19 crisis. They call for a significant national impact on the private sector, their employees, and society.

AMLO is already facing protests from different states' chambers of commerce. They threaten to withhold taxes due to the denial of the Mexican government to implement solutions to control the impact of the current crisis on the sector.
John Travolta and his wife Kelly Preston publicly remembered their late son Jett on Monday.

The couple posted loving photos to Instagram in memory of Jett on what would have been his 28th birthday.

He died in January 2009 during a family trip to the Bahamas when he hit his head on a bathtub after suffering a seizure at their home on Grand Bahama Island.

Never forget: John Travolta, 66, and Kelly Preson, 57, shared remembrances of their late son Jett on Instagram Monday on what would have been his 28th birthday

John, 66, shared a black and white photo of himself smiling and hovering close to Jett's face as they embraced.

'Happy Birthday Jetty! We love you! ,' he wrote.

The Blow Out star previous told Us Weekly that his son's death was 'the worst thing thats ever happened in my life.'

Kelly, 57, shared her own sweet photo with Jett featuring the two hugging with snow-capped mountains in the background.

'Happy Birthday to our sweetest Jetty, we love you!! ,' she captioned the photo.

Loving family: John shared a sweet glance with his son in his black and white photo, while Kelly embraced Jett in front of a snow-capped mountain range in hers

Younger sister: The couple's daughter Ella Bleu, 20, posted a picture of the family dressed in formal wear for a special occasion. 'Happy Birthday to my brother Jett, I love you so much ,' she wrote

The couple's daughter Ella Bleu, 20, posted a picture of the family dressed in formal wear for a special occasion.

'Happy Birthday to my brother Jett, I love you so much ,' she captioned it.

The acting couple also share a younger son, nine-year-old Benjamin.

Takes after his father: The acting couple also share a younger son, nine-year-old Benjamin, pictured doing a dance with his father to promote his TikTok

Remembering his struggle: Jett, who was autistic, was on Kelly's mind earlier this month when she posted a sepia-tinted family photo

Jett, who was autistic, was on Kelly's mind earlier this month when she posted a sepia-tinted family photo.

Her son shared a special glance with John while their daughter Ella Bleu, now 20, sat on her lap.

'I have a special place in my heart for those with autism and special needs,' she wrote. 'Sending love to some of my favorite people in the world.

'My son Jetty was one of the most playful and wonderful souls youve ever met. Love to all of you with autism and special needs around the world.'

Special place in her heart: 'My son Jetty was one of the most playful and wonderful souls youve ever met. Love to all of you with autism and special needs around the world'

Medical issues: The Twins star previously revealed that Jett was autistic and had Kawasaki Syndrome during a 2012 appearance on The Doctors; pictured in 1997

The Twins star previously spoke about Jett's experience with autism during a 2012 segment on The Doctors.

'[Jett] was autistic. He had seizures and when he was very young, he had Kawasaki Syndrome,' she revealed.

The illness is a rare condition in which the walls of arteries throughout the body become inflamed. The disease is often seen in children.

'I strongly believe as a mother, as does my husband, that there are certain contributing factors that lead to autism and some of it is very much the chemicals in our environment and in our food.'
Former U.S. President Barack Obama endorsed Joe Biden as the Democratic nominee on Tuesday, breaking his silence to help his former vice president's efforts to unite the party and energize its voters ahead of the Nov. 3 election.

After staying on the sidelines as a record high number of Democratic candidates fought for the right to take on President Donald Trump, Obama gave his support to Biden in a video message.

"Choosing Joe to be my vice president was one of the best decisions I ever made, and he became a close friend. And I believe Joe has all the qualities we need in a president right now," Obama said in the video.

The endorsement by the first black U.S. president came after Biden's last remaining rival in the Democratic nominating race, Senator Bernie Sanders, backed Biden on Monday.

The swell of support around Biden gives him a dose of energy and attention at a time when the American public is largely focused on the government response to the novel coronavirus pandemic, which has pushed the presidential race out of the spotlight.

"Because he is so popular and the comparison between President Trump and Barack Obama is so stark, it will be such a unifying, motivating factor," said Terry McAuliffe, a former Virginia governor and longtime party official.

Obama had publicly remained neutral as Biden, who served him for eight years in the White House, stumbled in early 2020 Democratic nominating contests and then swept to victory in a series of primaries in March.

Three years after they departed the White House, Obama and his wife Michelle remain two of the most beloved figures in the Democratic Party. Trump won in 2016 vowing to reverse many of the two-term president's policies.

Trump's re-election campaign had painted Obama's endorsement as overdue, suggesting the former president was reluctant to back his former No. 2. But Obama had vowed to stay out of the fractious Democratic race and was only free to endorse once Sanders bowed out last week.

"Obama has no other choice but to support him. Even Bernie Sanders beat him to it," Brad Parscale, the Trump 2020 campaign manager, said in a statement. "Biden is a bad candidate who will embarrass himself and his party. President Trump will destroy him."

Obama's popularity within the Democratic Party could bolster Biden, particularly among demographic groups with which he has struggled. A CNN poll released when Obama left office showed more than 70% of voters under the age of 34 viewed him favorably as did 90% of self-described liberals.

Ben LaBolt, press secretary for Obama's 2012 reelection campaign, said while Obama can appeal to the young voters who backed Sanders, he can also perhaps return to the fold moderate voters who voted for him, but then switched to Trump in 2016.

He also can help Biden scale up his fund-raising efforts, as well as boost him using a dynamic social media presence with a sizable and dedicated following.

"There is no surrogate in the country better suited to helping Joe Biden than Barack Obama," LaBolt said.

LEADERSHIP IN CRISIS

The former president's support gives the green light to former Obama officials, wealthy donors and Democratic Party luminaries to enlist in Biden's cause if they have not done so already.

Obama said Biden had the character and experience to lead the country through its recovery from "one of our darkest times." He did not mention Trump by name nor attack him for his handling of the coronavirus pandemic, in keeping with the longtime tradition of a former president not criticizing the current office-holder during a crisis.

In the short term, that may limit Obama's effectiveness as a stand-in for Biden. More critically for the campaign, it could be weeks or even months before the two can appear together in public at a campaign rally.

Ultimately though, Obama likely will be able to do what he did for Hillary Clinton's 2016 campaign, drawing large, enthusiastic crowds in the run-up to Election Day.

Behind the scenes, Obama had been active. He offered guidance to candidates as they were looking to get in the race and even advised a few when they were considering leaving the bruising contest to effectively hand the nomination to Biden.

Obama had multiple conversations in recent weeks with Sanders and others about how to best position the party for the general election matchup against Trump, sources said.

"He was impressed by the caliber of our candidates and the strong campaigns they waged - but always urged them to keep in mind that we must be well-positioned to unify as a party once we have a nominee," said a person familiar with Obama's interactions.

Obama also has advised Biden on key elements of his general election strategy, including telling him to pick a vice president who complements him.

While vice president, Biden was a top adviser to Obama on issues such as the economic stimulus package and the war in Afghanistan. But their political worlds were largely separate.

When Biden launched his campaign for president, he did so surrounded by his own long-time team of political aides and without the assistance of top Obama veterans. In recent months, that changed somewhat when the campaign brought in former Obama campaign manager Jen O'Malley Dillon to help lead the 2020 effort.

Also read: Trump warns of coronavirus impact on US economy
Christina Anstead is enjoying her backyard as she stays home in Orange County, California during self-isolation.

The 36-year-old Flip Or Flop vet looked slender in her hot pink bikini as she cozied up to her dog.

The ex-wife of Tarek El Moussa said in her caption, 'Spring breaking at home.' And she added a red heart emoji.

No stress here: Christina Anstead is enjoying her backyard as she stays home in Orange County, California during self-isolation

With her pooch: The 36-year-old Flip Or Flop vet looked slender in her hot pink bikini as she cozied up to her dog

HGTV has renewed one of her shows, Flip or Flop, for a ninth season.

Christina - born Christina Meursinge Haack - has starred on the home renovation series since 2012, with ex-husband Tarek, 38. The couple have had their share of public drama, but it appears to have calmed down recently.

'It's definitely gotten a lot easier,' Christina said of co-parenting with the father of two of her three children.

With her love: For the past two years she has been married to Ant Anstead

They had a fairy tale wedding: Their nuptials were dreamy as seen here in 2018

'The kids love seeing us sit together and that's what's important. Me and Tarek work together still, obviously, so it's not like we don't see each other. And I'm still really close with his family, as well.'

Christina married ex-husband Tarek in 2009. The former couple are parents to daughter Taylor, eight, and Brayden, four.

The duo separated in May 2016 and officially divorced in January of last year.

Christina married British TV host Ant Anstead, 40, last December. They will celebrate their first wedding anniversary on the 22nd.

Her third child: The siren with her newborn baby as well as her daughter

Like his beauty, Ant has both a son (Archie) and daughter (Amelie) with his ex-wife, Louise Anstead.

In December she told Us Weekly that her newborn has 'definitely been [the] hardest' of all of her three children.

The reality star said that her little one doesn't take to well with leaving home, something that doesn't mesh well with her family's packed schedule.

'He still really just likes being in the house. He doesn't like going out. As a very busy family, that's been very difficult,' she began.

The 36-year-old has noticed though that her little one has improved.

'But since he hit the 3-month mark, he's been doing a lot better. A lot more smiles and coos and sleeping better, so I think we're on the right track.'
A German zoo has created a list of animals it may have to slaughter and feed to others, as it struggles for funds because of the coronavirus crisis.

Neumunster Zoo, which is located north of Hamburg, has warned it could be forced to implement the measure to prevent animals from starving.

Verena Kaspari, the zoos director, told the Die Welt newspaper: Weve listed the animals well have to slaughter first.

The director added this unpleasant decision would only be taken as a final resort, saying she would euthanise animals rather than see them starve.

Ms Kaspari estimated that her zoo is projected to lose more than 150,000 in income this spring.

The zoo belongs to an association that is not entitled to a state emergency fund for small businesses.

As well as asking for public donations, Germanys zoos are seeking 100m (87.3m) in aid from the German government, according to the DPA news agency.

Jorg Junhold, the head of Germanys national zoo association (VdZ), said an average German zoo was typically losing 500,000 each week.

The VdZ says zoos cannot cut down on running costs, as they have to continue feeding their animals.

Some zoos are allowing the public to watch their animals online. This is the case with two infant panda twins at Berlin Zoo.

Philine Hachmeister, a spokesperson for Berlin Zoo, told DPA: Constantly were thinking the visitors should be watching them live. We dont want the little pandas to be grown up by the time we finally reopen.
Most fish, from minnows to sharks, have pliant bodies, which they undulate to move through the water. But boxfish sport a set of hard, bony plates, called a carapace. The carapace acts like a suit of armor  protecting them against predators, but restricting their flexibility. So if they want to move, they can only use their fins, Mr. Boute said. It also gives them their strange shapes: other boxfish species look like purses, Frisbees or ottomans.

In 2015, a group of researchers, including Mr. Boutes two co-authors, published a study suggesting that these carapaces make the bodies of some boxfish species inherently unstable in the water. (Other studies have come to the opposite conclusion, saying that ridges on the carapace actually help with stability.)

If thats the case, the fins not only propel and steer the fish but steady it, too, Mr. Boute said. Based on previous studies, as well as his own underwater observations, he figured the tail fin was quite important for modulating yaw  swerving motions that occur in the horizontal plane. (When a car hits black ice and fishtails, for example, its experiencing yaw.)

To test this theory, Mr. Boute and colleagues used three-dimensional plastic models of finless yellow boxfish. (Such stand-ins are common in this type of study, he said, because its difficult to measure forces acting on a live fish.) They placed each model in a tank, on a rod that kept it in place, and sent water rushing past it  as though it were swimming  while a sensor measured the rotational force the fake fish experienced.
Wanderson de Oliveiras resignation comes as tensions between President Bolsonaro and the Health Ministry escalate.

Brazils Health Ministry said on Wednesday that Health Secretary Wanderson de Oliveira has resigned, as tensions between Health Minister Luiz Henrique Mandetta and far-right President Jair Bolsonaro over the handling of the coronavirus crisis escalate.

Mandetta told his team that he himself is likely to be fired by Bolsonaro this week, two people familiar with the matter told Reuters news agency, raising the prospect of political turmoil in the middle of the coronavirus outbreak.

Newspaper Folha de S Paulo first reported Mandettas comments to colleagues.

Bolsonaro and Mandetta have been at odds over the handling of the coronavirus epidemic for weeks, as the president played down the gravity of the disease, touted unproven drugs and attacked governors over lockdown orders.

Brazil has more than 25,700 COVID-19 cases and 1,500 deaths, according to Johns Hopkins University.

Mandetta emerged from relative obscurity with technocratic daily briefings presenting the latest science, stressing the need for social distancing measures and earning praise from across the political spectrum.

The Health Ministrys response to the epidemic was rated good or great by 76 percent of Brazilians surveyed by pollster Datafolha this month. Bolsonaro got the same marks from just 33 percent of those surveyed.

Adding to tensions, Mandetta called for the government to speak with a unified voice, effectively calling out Bolsonaro for downplaying the threat ahead of what may be the two toughest months for the outbreak. He made the comments during a TV interview on Sunday.

Vice President Hamilton Mourao said on Tuesday that Mandetta had crossed the line with his remarks.
Gov. Roy Cooper speaks at a Coronavirus Task Force briefing April 3, 2020. | Photo: Department of Public Safety

Gov. Roy Cooper announced an executive order Wednesday, April 8, setting new rules for nursing homes to curb the spread of COVID-19. But Cooper offered no indication when life can start returning to what will be the new normal.The new rules for the homes, or long-term care facilities, come as a number of them across the state struggle with outbreaks of the contagious respiratory disease.The state has identified 21 COVID-19 outbreaks in North Carolina, 18 of which are centered around the homes, said N.C. Department of Human Health and Services Secretary Mandy Cohen.In one of the state's worst outbreaks, at least 60 people at an Orange County nursing and rehab center have tested positive for COVID-19. Seven residents have been hospitalized, and two are dead.The governor has already issued an executive order limiting visitors to nursing homes and other long-term care facilities, but now the state is requiring additional rules.All staff must wear medical face masks. All must be screened daily for signs of the virus. Communal areas at the facilities must close. Residents with COVID-19 are urged to isolate in a separate part of the facility with designated staff.The facilities must notify local health departments of all new or suspected cases of COVID-19.Additionally, the new executive order lifts health care regulations to increase the number of hospital beds, medical equipment, and health care staffers available to combat the outbreak. Ambulatory surgical facilities will be allowed to operate as temporary hospitals. Child care rules will be streamlined to better care for children of essential workers.Copper issued a statewide stay-at home order March 30 to April 29, but whether he'll extend it is unclear.The order seems to be slowing the spread of COVID-19, Cooper said during the news conference. Meanwhile, the state will continue to consult with public health experts and businesses to determine whether an extension is warranted, he said.N.C. residents can expect another executive order April 9 for retail stores to limit the number of people who can shop at the same time.Since the lockdown, more than 450,000 North Carolinians have filed claims for unemployment insurance.
Netflixs The Innocence Files chronicles eight stories of wrongful convictions, and directors and executive producers Alex Gibney, Liz Garbus and Roger Ross Williams said they faced their fair share of challenges getting access to people necessary to tell the stories.

Access was often a problem, particularly the police, Gibney told TheWrap. But the big issue for me, at least on the film that I directed, was the fact that I didnt know I was going to turn out.

Gibney directed the episodes about Chester Hollman III, who was wrongfully convicted of robbing and murdering a man in Philadelphia in 1991. Gibney started production on his episodes in December 2018, but Hollman was only exonerated of the crime in 2019. Gibney had no idea of what the outcome of Hollmans case would be when they first started filming.

Also Read: When You've Served 20 Years in Prison for a Crime You Didn't Commit, What's a Little Social Isolation? (Guest Blog)

That was a challenge because its hard to make a film on a deadline when you dont know if theres going to be an ending before youre finished, Gibney continued. Luckily for us, and far luckier for Chester, he was exonerated.

Williams agreed that access was an issue for his episodes, as well. Williams focused on junk science, mainly about how the evidence used his cases were bite marks, which is now considered an unreliable method.

Levon Brooks served 16 years in prison for a 1990 rape and murder of a 3-year-old girl in Mississippi  a crime he didnt commit. A forensic dentist named Dr. Michael West determined that bite marks on the victims body were from human bites and after the victims sister identified him, two teeth matched the marks on the victims body. He had a plausible alibi. Four months after Brooks was convicted, a similar case happened where Kennedy Brewers bite marks were identified on the new victims body. However, DNA testing in 2001 said the semen did not match Brewer either, but another round of testing matched the profile of Justin Albert Johnson. Brooks and Brewer were freed in 2008. In the series, forensic analysts say crawfish couldve caused the marks that West was convinced were human bite marks.

Story continues

West has put more people away to the junk science of bite marks than probably any other dentist, Williams explained. And the key belief in each and every one of his testimonies stands  even after they were exonerated, he still stands behind his testimony. He was a great character to follow around and to tell the story.

Doctor Wests testimony has contributed to six wrongful convictions, but still, as of 2019, bite mark evidence is still admissible in all 50 states.

For me, the challenge was that in a place like Mississippi, Dr. West wasnt necessarily going to connect with me or talk to me, Williams explained, adding that he was a black man. I sent in a white producer and crew, and it took us a long time to convince him to tell us his side of the story You know, when we filmed in that bar that has Confederate flags everywhere, it wasnt a welcoming place for someone like me. I felt terrified.

He added: There was one point, we were filming the Confederate statue that was like a statue with one side that looked like the Ku Klux Klan. There was a guy holding a flag at the end of his gun. And if you looked at it from one angle, it looked like a hooded cloud. And these pick-up trucks started circling us, and this guy pulls up and he gets out of his pickup truck and hes walking to me, filming with the phone. I was absolutely terrified. And he actually said, you know, thats a Klan statue It wasnt always the comfortable situation, and it was a challenge to get that side of the story  there is a certain mindset that they werent going to welcome someone like me, a black gay man.

Also Read: 'Trials of Gabriel Fernandez': 9 Most Shocking Details About the Murder at Heart of Netflix Documentary

Liz Garbus, whose documentary credits include What Happened, Miss Simone? and Killing in the Name, focused on the theme of eyewitness misidentification in her episodes, where people were wrongfully convicted due to false identification.

For me, it was about peeling back the layers of ways in which the suggestion from an officer or one small suggestion, or a couple of words, can set the most well-intentioned witness or victim off in the wrong direction and have them make a decision or point to a picture that has ramifications for decades of peoples lives, Garbus explained.

One of Garbus episodes focuses on Franky Carrillo, who was convicted of the 1991 shooting murder of Donald Sarpy (you can read his guest blog here). His conviction relied solely on eyewitness testimony from six people, with two later admitting they did not actually see who the shooter was but that they were heavily influenced by police. Two men have since confessed to the crime, and Carrillo was released in 2011  20 years after serving time.

To really dive into the psychology into what happened is fascinating, she added. At the end of the day, what all these lies tell us is that there is the desire above all else for a conviction. The desire to have someone in prison for the crime. Unfortunately, once that person is convicted and goes to jail, they lose the presumption of innocence.

Williams agreed: Its also really about a criminal justice system that is focused on conviction and closing a case above some other. Theres a terrifying certainty to the process because there just seems to be a desperate need, particularly on the part of the prosecution, to take a world of gray and turn it into a world of black and white, or thumps up or thumbs down. Guilty, not guilty.

The eight cases explored in the series are cases that the nonprofit organization The Innocence Project and other organizations within the Innocence Network have worked to overturn. Its a nine-episode series that is comprised of three parts  The Evidence, The Witness and the Prosecution. Episodes in the series were also directed by Jed Rothstein, Andy Grieve and Sarah Dowland.

With this kind of thematic focus, it gave great attention to the individual stories themselves, but also highlighted systemic problems in ways that one single documentary never would have done, Gibney concluded.

The Innocence Files hits Netflix on Wednesday.

Read original story How Innocence Files Directors Overcame Major Access Challenges  And Not Knowing How Case Would Turn Out At TheWrap
- Several LTO Region VI officers came under fire from the public after they reportedly confiscated vans hired by BPO industries to service call center agents

- Reports made by local media in Bacolod City indicated that they flagged the vans and confiscated the licenses of the drivers

- The call center agents who were supposed to be taken home were made to walk several kilometers to go home

- The said officers entered Bacolod City without going through the mandatory 14-day quarantine for persons entering the city from a place with a confirmed COVID case

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Several LTO Region VI officers came under fire after they reportedly apprehended and took the licenses of the drivers of vans hired by BPO companies to service their employees in Bacolod City. The passengers of the vans, who were call center agents were then compelled to walk home.

Heard over the radio broadcast were reports that there were call center agents who were pregnant. The LTO didn't only apprehend one but several vans, with some apprehensions reportedly having taken place at night.

As per Aksyon Radyo Bacolod, Vice Mayor El Cid Familiaran is considering placing the officers under the mandatory 14-day quarantine, which they were not able to comply with.

As per the LTO officers, they will charge the drivers with a P200,000 fine saying that they did not acquire a special permit from the agency to operate.

However, Vice Mayor Familiaran is seriously considering of placing the said officers under quarantine.

The Vice Mayor, along with the other officials of Bacolod City held a meeting with the LTO Region VI officers.

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In a previous report by KAMI, the government faced problems when they imposed the initial community quarantine, which was elevated into the now ongoing enhanced community quarantine. It also suspended transportation causing massive problems with commuters.

The coronavirus outbreak started out in Wuhan, Hubei Province of China. Scientists believed that the virus came from an animal at one of Wuhan's wet markets. At present, the Philippines is under a state of calamity while the entire Luzon is under an enhanced community quarantine.

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!

Are you also wondering how you can render help to frontliners? One Filipino, Pio, was able to find ways to help them out. You will see his unique and effective means in the video we created especially for you. Check out all of the exciting videos and celebrity interviews on our KAMI HumanMeter YouTube channel!

Source: KAMI.com.gh
: Ready Assist, a Bengaluru-based



24x7 roadside assistance provider, has come forward to provide free breakdown service to doctors, police and emergency vehicles.

The company would assist them with technical support to repair their vehicles during the ongoing lockdown period, the company said in a press release on Wednesday.

The initiative is being carried out in Hyderabad, Bengaluru, Mangaluru, Mysore, and Vijayawada and the support can be availed of 24/7 by contacting its toll-free number, the release said.

Founder and CEO of Ready Assist Vimal Singh said, Being an expert in handling breakdowns on road, it is our responsibility to help our nation by making these emergency service move ahead always without getting stranded on the road.

According to him, the firm was able to successfully set right 960 breakdowns in the last few days of the lockdown.

The vehicles were used by either medical professionals, essential goods delivery executives, food delivery partners or other individuals commuting for medical and other emergencies.

Besides this initiative, Vimal Singh has decided to take 100 per cent cut from his salary till the situation is better, while top executives of the firm have volunteered to take 50 per cent pay cut, the release added.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Kanu Sarda By

Express News Service

NEW DELHI: For advocate Rohan Sharma, seeking bail for his client to take care of his ageing parents was a tough task as he first had to first convince the registrar concerned for listing the case by explaining the urgency and secondly he had to smoothly conduct the hearing via video conferencing.

Though the Supreme Court of India has started functioning smoothly via video conferencing, but the use of technology is still a huge challenge at the high courts and district court level.

On Monday, the top courts two different benches heard at least 50 plus cases via video conferencing but if one looks at the data available at trial court level, it is quite low and just 15-20 cases are being heard via the telephone.

An additional sessions judge posted at a Delhi court who did not want to be named said, We are feeling handicapped by not utilizing technology which is available around us as the court infrastructure doesnt support it. During a bail hearing on Monday, I used my own phone to hear the arguments via video call to the lawyer concerned and this is happening in most of the cases.

Though the process of providing a videoconferencing facility through e-courts platform is underway, the lawyers can use Cisco Webex for the facility in the interim period.

If the Advocates/Litigants/Police/Public Prosecutor are not equipped to conduct the hearing from their locations, the facility for video conferencing shall be made available in the Judges Conference Room and the Computer Branch shall facilitate such a hearing, the official order passed by the District Judge stated.
New Delhi, April 15 : Facing heat over use of force by the police to disperse crowd in Bandra, Mumbai, the Congress has deployed two senior Ministers Balasahab Thorat and Ashok Chavan on the damage control mission.

The Congress is part of the Uddhav Thackeray-led coalition government in Maharashtra and has been criticial of the treatment meted out to migrants in various parts of the country during the lockdown due to Covid-19 pandemic.

The Ministers blamed the Bandra incident on the news, which went viral on social media, that Jansadharan trains would ply from the terminus.

Rejecting any conspiracy, Chavan said proper action would be taken against those responsible for it.

While senior Congress leaders, including Anand Sharma, spoke in critical voice that migrants wanted "rotis not lathis (bread not beating)", the Maharashtra Ministers said it was "not the roti issue" but people wanted to go home. The state was feeding over 700,000 people a day, they added.

Even Congress General Secretary Priyanka Gandhi has criticised the Centre for overlooking the migrants.

Chavan said several PWD properties had been converted into isolation centres with 55,000 beds. Mumbai being a big international transit point, it become a Covid-19 hotspot, he said and added, 10 districts in the state had reported no cases.
A Clinical Research Coordinator at the Noguchi Memorial Institute for Medical Research has said that Ghana as a country has no allocated funds for research purposes.



"Ghana as a country do not put any money into research purposes even though the African Union has urged all African countries to invest three percent 3% of their GDP into the sector," she told UTV in an interview.



She insisted that though researching is expensive with negative and positive outcomes, every country must invest into such sectors since they will be needed as future pandemic diseases are yet to be experienced.



The Pharmacist in an exclusive interview with UTV stressed there will be no vaccine for COVID-19 anytime soon as expected because vaccines are usually introduced six or more months after a disease outbreak.



"We can't get a vaccine for COVID-19 soon, but one can be introduced in the next six or more months from now," she added.



Dr. Mrs. Susan Adu-Amankwah pointed out that as professionals they cannot speak against herbal medicines as some persons tag them to be, but they (herbal medicines) must go through vigorous scientific processes before usage.



"Lots of medicines perscribed in our hospitals today come from herbal background just that they were taken through some scientific processes, therefore it is not true that we hate or are against herbal medicines," she clarified.



Ghana's Case Count Now 636



Ghana Health Service (GHS) has confirmed that the country has recorded 636 positivd coronavirus cases.



Of the 636 confirmed COVID-19 cases, 268 were reported from the routine surveillance, 253 from enhanced surveillance activities and 115 from travellers under mandatory quarantine in both Accra and Tamale.



Regions that have reported cases are Greater Accra, Ashanti, Central, Eastern, Western, Volta, Northern, North East, Upper East, and Upper West regions," the GHS said.



Earlier on Tuesday, the GHS disclosed that seventeen (17) persons have fully recovered from the Coronavirus infection.

Source: Elizabeth Semiheva/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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COPS/Metro representatives will be making the rounds with City Council staffers this week, pushing for a rent-control measure to reduce the stress weighing down working families during the COVID-19 outbreak.

With stay-at-home policies shutting down much of our business activity, the biggest victims have been hourly workers, many of whom have been employed in sectors (namely the service industry) where working from home is not an option, and where the money to meet payroll has dried up.

The problem is most acute for undocumented immigrants, whose jobs have been among the first to go, and who dont have access to the kind of safety-net programs that are temporarily keeping others afloat.

Geoffrey Canada, a social activist who serves as the president of the Harlem Childrens Zone, talked about this problem Tuesday morning on MSNBC.

Canada said undocumented immigrants face economic desperation and are suffering from the fear of going in to get help because they might be turned in to the folks at immigration.

When COPS/Metro holds meetings with members of the community these days, the alliances reps consistently hear from low-income tenants who are worried about rent.

Low wage workers, people who work hourly jobs, their jobs are gone, said Walker Moore, organizer for COPS/Metro. Theres a lady at Sacred Heart Catholic Church whos undocumented, was putting her son through college, lost her job and now shes trying to figure out where the food will come from.

These conversations convinced COPS/Metro organizers that something needed to be done about late fees for tenants.

Thankfully, our local institutions have taken some strong steps on the housing front in recent weeks. Bexar County suspended all evictions for a 30-day period ending April 23. In addition, the city has teamed with the San Antonio Apartment Association to cover April rents for tenants who qualify for the citys risk mitigation fund.

Under the plan, qualifying tenants would get 75 percent of their April rent paid by the city and landlords would forgive the remaining 25 percent.

These efforts are crucial in a community chronically plagued by major income inequality; a county where landlords filed more than 21,000 eviction lawsuits last year under relatively good, pre-coronavirus economic conditions.

Nonetheless, these policies leave a hole when it comes to the issue of late fees. (The San Antonio Apartment Association encourages its members to temporarily waive late fees, but such actions are voluntary.)

The CARES Act, a $2 trillion federal stimulus plan enacted three weeks ago, addressed late fees to some degree. The program established a moratorium on late fees or penalties for tenants through July 24, but this provision only applies to properties participating in a covered housing program or having a federally backed mortgage loan.

Moore said that excludes roughly half of all apartment tenants.

With that in mind, COPS/Metro is proposing an ordinance that would prohibit residential property owners from charging late fees for nonpayment of rent for the duration of the emergency disaster period declared by Gov. Greg Abbott. (The alliances draft ordinance would make this policy retroactive to March 13, the date that Abbott issued his initial disaster declaration.)

Moore conceded that the proposed rent-control ordinance isnt a cure-all, but said it could offer needed protections to some of the most vulnerable members of our community.

SB 1414 limits most monthly apartment late fees in Texas to 10 percent of the rent. For out-of-work tenants currently faced with the cruel choice of purchasing food for their family or paying the rent, the threat of a late fee is too much to bear.

Among other things, the proposed ordinance would be something of an equalizer for undocumented immigrants, whose legal status prevents them from getting the kind of emergency assistance available to others in their economic predicament. This measure would mean that, as renters, they could at least share in basic protections to get them through this crisis.

Of course, this concept will outrage those who dont want to see any governmental action that event remotely hints at according legal protections to individuals who did not enter the country legally.

Anyone with that opinion, however, should ask themselves if they felt the same degree of opposition to those undocumented immigrants working hard, low-paying jobs that keep this city functioning.

This time of crisis should make us think about what truly constitutes a community and how members of a community need to look out for each other. An emergency ordinance to address late fees would be a good move in that direction.

Gilbert Garcia is a columnist covering the San Antonio and Bexar County area. To read more from Gilbert, become a subscriber. ggarcia@express-news.net | Twitter: @gilgamesh470
T he global Covid-19 pandemic may have been sparked by stray dogs eating bat meat, a study has found.

After analysing coronavirus across different species, a top biology researcher in Canada concluded that feral dogs may have helped transmit the new Sars-CoV-2 disease  which causes Covid-19  into humans.

The ancestor of the virus and its nearest relative, a bat coronavirus, could have infected the intestines of canines where it evolved before jumping to humans, Professor Xuhua Xias study suggests.

The findings of Prof Xia, from the University of Ottawas biology department, are published online in the advanced access edition of the journal Molecular Biology and Evolution.

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

In his study, Prof Xia analysed 1,252 full-length betacoronavirus genomes shared via an open access database.

He said that Sars-CoV-2 and its closest known relative, the bat coronavirus BatCoV RaTG13, which shares 96 per cent sequence similarity, have the lowest amount of a particular region of DNA which help the immune system tackle disease.

Only genomes from canine coronaviruses, which have already caused a highly contagious intestinal disease worldwide in dogs, have similar genomic values, the study found.

Dogs also have coronaviruses which affect their respiratory systems as well as their digestive systems, the paper notes.

Prof Xia wrote that the suggested link between canines and humans is further corroborated by a recent report that a high proportion of Covid-19 patients also suffer from digestive discomfort.

In fact, 48.5 per cent presented with digestive symptoms as their chief complaint, he states in the report.

These observations are consistent with the hypothesis that Sars-CoV-2 has evolved in mammalian intestine or tissues associated with the intestine.

However, the paper was criticised by professor James Wood, head of the department of Veterinary Medicine and researcher in infection dynamics at the University of Cambridge.

He said: I find it difficult to understand how the author has been able to conclude anything from this study, or to hypothesise much, let alone that the virus causing Covid-19 may have evolved through dogs.

There is far too much inference and far too little direct data. I do not see anything in this paper to support this supposition and am concerned that this paper has been published in this journal.

I do not believe that any dog owners should be concerned as a result of this work.

Prof Xia said: Our observations have allowed the formation of a new hypothesis for the origin and initial transmission of Sars-CoV-2.

The ancestor of Sars-CoV-2 and its nearest relative, a bat coronavirus, infected the intestine of canids, most likely resulting in a rapid evolution of the virus in canids and its jump into humans.

This suggests the importance of monitoring Sars-like coronaviruses in feral dogs in the fight against Sars-CoV-2.

Nearly two million people have contracted Sars-CoV-2 since it first appeared at a seafood market in Wuhan, China, in late 2019, according to a global tracker by Johns Hopkins University.
Metro Bank froze my business account without explanation and won't tell me when it plans to give me back access. I have been unable to use the account for more than four months.

I contacted the Financial Ombudsman Service, which has so far failed to look into my case. I discovered the problem when direct debits began failing. I phoned to be told my account had been suspended 'pending a review' and that the bank would contact me to ask for further details 'in due course'.

Despite my repeated calls and a letter to its chief executive, it was almost a month before the bank wrote back asking for proof of my UK address and details of my personal travel for the past six months.

One reader has been frozen out of his Metro Bank business account - which has 30,000 deposited in it - for four months

My wife is Ukrainian and we had been to visit her family in Crimea. This led to further questions about which cities I had visited.

It has been three months since I provided this information and nothing has changed. I opened an account with another bank to avoid going into debt with my VAT.

As things stand the account holds, in effect, my entire company profit for the previous financial year, which is the money I use to support my family.

A. H., London.

You tell me you had 30,000 tied up in this account, which Metro Bank arbitrarily froze.

It is one thing for a bank to have security concerns, but quite another to freeze an account for several months.

This appears to be happening with some of the challenger banks. Perhaps their fraud detection is not as sophisticated as that of the larger, older banks.

Metro Bank unfroze your account when I made contact, but it has not offered a sensible explanation of why it was locked for so long.

You suspect the Metro Bank app tracked your holiday. That might sound a bit James Bond-esque, but a bank spokesman confirms it uses 'opt-in location services to help distinguish between trusted and fraudulent behaviours'.

The spokesman adds: 'Customer location (available when the app is in use) forms part of our fraud prevention controls and is used purely for these purposes.'

I told the bank that you should be paid a considerable sum in compensation and have cited guidelines laid down by the Financial Ombudsman Service.

The bank offered 750 but you decided to take legal advice. I have warned you to be sure the cost of your solicitor does not outweigh any benefits of compensation. You have your money back and are closing your Metro Bank account.

A Metro Bank spokesman says: 'We're really sorry about what has happened. We never take a decision to suspend a customer's account lightly but we appreciate Mr H's frustration at the time [the bank] has needed to take to review the situation. The service he received wasn't up to the usual standard.'

You have YOUR say Every week, Money Mail receives hundreds of your letters and emails about our stories. Here are some about our article on how small businesses are adapting to survive the coronavirus crisis. I really hope that everyone benefiting from these shops will remember to keep visiting them when this is all over. They may not be as cheap as supermarkets, but they do what they can for their customers in a crisis. M. N., Gosport, Hants. I'm very impressed by these firms. I know a lady who has kept her Zumba business going by putting her classes online. She is still making a decent amount of money from clients taking part in her sessions remotely. T. P., Manchester. My local shops in Ryedale have been amazing. The greengrocer, farm shop and bakery all deliver for free. By contrast, I haven't been able to get a supermarket delivery for a month. F. O., Ryedale, N Yorks. We have an active village WhatsApp chat which has coordinated group purchasing and delivery from local suppliers. It's effective. I'm happy to help out the firms in these dire times. M. C., Bucks. It's good to see people adapting and being creative. However, I am worried about what long-term effects this pandemic could have on our economy and livelihoods. If there are mass redundancies then a lot of us won't be able to afford to buy much. J. J., Dunstable, Beds. I applaud these business owners. They are not whingeing and are thinking of new ways to make an income. Some may never go back to their original set-up as they may find these new methods work better. Good luck to them all, and stay safe. L. S., by email. I have been trying to shop locally for a while now. I use the baker, butcher and greengrocer. I've even bought people gift cards for these small businesses. It would be such a shame to lose them. M. Y., Luton, Beds.

I was told I cannot file my tax return on paper from this year and it must be submitted online. I do not own a computer so do not know what to do.

My return is a simple one. My pensions are taxed at source. Apart from registering my charitable donations, which differ each year, the only other detail I have to report is a small amount of taxable money received from some building society accounts.

S. N., Rochester, Kent.

Whoever told you that you must file your tax return online is wrong.

I checked with HMRC which confirms: 'Mrs N does not need to file online, and nor does anyone else. Everyone is free to file on paper if they wish.'

If your tax affairs are simple you may not need to file a return.

If you are a basic-rate taxpayer there is no benefit to registering your charity donations, as basic-rate tax relief is claimed by the good cause under the Gift Aid scheme.

However, extra tax relief is available to higher-rate taxpayers.

Basic-rate taxpayers can also receive up to 1,000 interest a year from taxable building society accounts without paying tax. Higher-rate taxpayers can receive 500. Cash Isas do not need to be declared.

If you think you no longer need to file a return, call HMRC on 0300 200 3310.

Straight to the point I am a builder working for myself, but all jobs are frozen due to the virus. I am eligible for a government grant, but it won't cover all my bills. Am I allowed to get a temporary delivery job, or will I lose my self-employment grant? C. M., by email. If you are self-employed and find part-time work with a different employer, it shouldn't affect your grant. If, however, you tried to start your own delivery service you could lose it. ** My tariff with EDF Energy is due to expire in April, so I called to see what deals it was offering. I received a long explanation about how it is protecting staff and vulnerable customers, but this did not answer my question. I am 91 and do not want to end up on a more expensive tariff. J. Q., Tunbridge Wells. After contacting EDF Energy on your behalf it has now promised to return your call to talk you through the new deals available. *** Thomas Cook discontinued its pre-paid Euro Cash Passport debit card this month. Mine expired last July with 135 still on it and a new card could not be issued. I have provided Mastercard with my bank details but it has still not refunded the outstanding amount. A. J., Sutton. Mastercard has now returned your balance and has also sent you a 100 cheque as a goodwill gesture to apologise for the delay. *** I have underlying health conditions and am almost 70, so cannot make the 30-mile round trip to my nearest M&S, yet it refuses to extend the expiry date of my 46.62 credit note. R. O., by email. M&S has apologised and issued your credit note as a gift card so you can use it online any time in the next two years.

I overcame my fears and at 85 decided to have broadband installed. I chose Shell Energy Broadband for 18.99 a month. My neighbour helped me to set up the box, which was supplied on December 27, but my iPad could not connect.

I complained, and in the meantime paid 40 for two SIM cards for my iPad and mobile to tide me over.

I heard no more so on January 13 rang again. I was offered 15 and told leaving would be expensive.

L. A., Croydon.

Yours is one of those cases where I have to say: how can you expect a company to help you if you won't speak to them?

I asked Shell Energy Broadband to resolve your issues, but you did not want to speak to the resolution agents on the phone.

I appreciate that dealings by phone can be difficult as you get older, but you should give companies a chance.

A spokesman told me: 'This made the situation harder to resolve but we got there.

'From what we could tell, there was a small drop in service when she first made the complaint, which we quickly resolved at our end. From what we could tell, the issue was with her devices, but we helped her with that.'

You have been credited for the time you had no service.
Their flight from Greece is expected to touch down at Findel airport in the late morning hours.

9 out of the 12 children come from the infamous Moria refugee camp situated on the Greek island of Lesbos.

Two children come from Chios, and one child was in a refugee camp on Samos island before being relocated to the Grand Duchy.

The children were first brought to Athens. They are flown into Luxembourg from there.

Germany accepted to take in 50 minors from Greek migrant camps. France, Portugal, Finland, Lithuania, Croatia and Ireland are also part of an EU programme to take in some of the 1,600 vulnerable minors in Greek camps.

The European initiative was launched last month by the EU commission in order to ease the pressure on European Union member Greece.

The children concerned in the programme either have medical needs or are unaccompanied and under 14 years of age, most of them girls.
Stanford and Fitbit are joining forces in a bid to develop technology that detects early signs of the coronavirus using wearables.

The team is designing an algorithm that measures the wearer's vitals such as heart rate and skin temperature to determine if the body is fighting an infection.

The software will be capable of spotting unusual patterns, allowing it to predict if the user has contracted an illness before they show physical symptoms.

Stanford Medicine researchers have partnered with Fitbit and Scripps Researcher to roll out the technology in bid to help treat illnesses, such as the coronavirus, before the wearer's symptoms become apparent.

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Stanford and Fitbit are joining forces in a bid to develop technology that detects early signs of the coronavirus using wearables. The team is designing an algorithm that measures the wearer's vitals such as heart rate and skin temperature to determine if the body is fighting an infection

Michael Snyder, PhD, professor and chair of genetics at the Stanford School of Medicine, said: 'Smartwatches and other wearables make many, many measurements per day  at least 250,000, which is what makes them such powerful monitoring devices.'

'My lab wants to harness that data and see if we can identify who's becoming ill as early as possible  potentially before they even know they're sick.'

Fibit is set to invite users to participate in the researcher in order to help train the algorithm to spot signs of an infection.

For this study, Snyder will gather data from five different wearable devices, including smart rings and other smartwatch brands. Those participating in the researcher will be asked to fill out surveys that track their health status

And the Google-owned firm will also provide researchers with 1,000 smartwatches for the project.

As part of this collaboration, scientists at Scripps Research will also work with Fitbit to try to track how infection spreads in a community.

The team hopes that by collecting data from thousands of users, the algorithm will ultimately help people monitor their health by alerting them when their heart rate, skin temperature or some other part of their physiology signals that their body is fighting an infection.

'You might wonder, "Are these sniffles allergies, or am I getting sick?" These algorithms could help people determine if they should stay home in case their body is fighting off an infection,' Snyder said.

For this study, Snyder will gather data from five different wearable devices, including smart rings and other smartwatch brands.

Those participating in the researcher will be asked to fill out surveys that track their health status.

Altogether, the group will design five algorithms tailored to each different wearable.

The coronavirus began in Wuhan, China December 2019 and has infected nearly every country in the world. However, the US has been hit the hardest with over 588,000 cases and more than 23,000 deaths reported

But Snyder notes that the timeline of developing the technology will greatly depend on the number of people who sign up for the study.

Although using algorithms to monitor the wearer's health could be valuable, Snyder has acknowledged there will be obstacles.

'It's possible that the algorithms could detect an elevated heart rate, but the user could be watching a scary movie or participating in some other activity that naturally elevates heart rate,' he said.

'An alert isn't a direct diagnosis, and it will be important for folks to be able to contextualize their situation and use some common sense.'

Snyder also adds that even as his team works to develop algorithms that can flag illness, the next step is to investigate whether those signals can be sorted to be able to differentiate between viruses.

The coronavirus began in Wuhan, China December 2019 and has infected nearly every country in the world.

However, the US has been hit the hardest with over 588,000 cases and more than 23,000 deaths reported.

And Stanford and its team hopes their algorithms could help limit the spread and curb the number of deaths by detecting the virus and other infections before the person takes a turn for the worst.
Fort Bend ISD has closed its campuses and will resume online instruction for the remainder of the school year due to the novel coronavirus pandemic, the district announced Tuesday.

Fort Bend ISD Superintendent Charles Dupre said closing campuses is "in the best interest" of families and staff members.

ON HOUSTONCHRONICLE.COM: Now more than ever, Houstons digital divide puts childrens education in peril

"There are several factors we took into consideration, with safety and security being our top priority  we know that, even if Governor Abbott allows schools to reopen as of May 4, many families and staff members will be reluctant to return to school and work to avoid potential exposure to the virus," Dupre wrote in a Tuesday letter to students and staff. "Additionally, because there are only three weeks remaining of instruction after May 4, we believe it will be even more disruptive to our students, staff and teachers to ask them to pivot back into our buildings and the traditional classroom environment."

Graduation ceremonies are postponed until July while the district works to re-schedule dates at the Smart Financial Center.

All Texas schools are closed through May 4 thanks to a mandate from Gov. Greg Abbott, but that could be extended once Abbott makes an announcement this week. Fort Bend ISD is the Houston region's first district to close campuses for the remainder of the year.

NEW DATA: See Fort Bend County coronavirus cases by ZIP code and more

Fort Bend ISD community members should keep an eye out for a second video update, which Dupre said would be released soon.

"We are continuing our work together to support students, staff and families in the short- and long-term, and we will keep you updated as there is more information to share," Dupre said.

Rebecca Hennes covers community news. Read her on our breaking news site, Chron.com, and on our subscriber site, houstonchronicle.com. | rebecca.hennes@chron.com
President Xi Jinping warned the public on the seventh day, January 20. But by that time, more than 3000 people had been infected during almost a week of public silence, according to internal documents obtained by The Associated Press and expert estimates based on retrospective infection data.

New York: In the six days after top Chinese officials secretly determined they likely were facing a pandemic from a new coronavirus, the city of Wuhan at the epicentre of the disease hosted a mass banquet for tens of thousands of people; millions began travelling through for Lunar New Year celebrations.

That delay from January 14 to January 20 was neither the first mistake made by Chinese officials at all levels in confronting the outbreak, nor the longest lag, as governments around the world have dragged their feet for weeks and even months in addressing the virus.

But the delay by the first country to face the new coronavirus came at a critical time - the beginning of the outbreak. China's attempt to walk a line between alerting the public and avoiding panic set the stage for a pandemic that has infected more than 2 million people and taken more than 128,000 lives.

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"This is tremendous," said Zuo-Feng Zhang, an epidemiologist at the University of California, Los Angeles. "If they took action six days earlier, there would have been much fewer patients and medical facilities would have been sufficient. We might have avoided the collapse of Wuhan's medical system."

Other experts noted that the Chinese government may have waited on warning the public to stave off hysteria, and that it did act quickly in private during that time.
(Natural News) Brazil, the largest country in Latin America, has 23,723 confirmed coronavirus cases and 1,355 deaths, according to the latest tally from Johns Hopkins University Monday. However, these numbers may represent just a fraction of the countrys actual caseload, reveals a shocking new study led by a consortium of universities and institutions in the country.

In their report, the team looked at the death-to-case ratio  the number of deaths caused by a certain disease during a time interval  for COVID-19 until April 10, 2020, and compared with the World Health Organizations data for the expected death rate. Based on their data, the team estimated that only 8 percent of cases in Brazil are officially reported. They also noted that the higher-than-expected death rate in the country could also indicate the virus has already spread throughout communities.

The consortium, known as the Center for Health Operations and Intelligence, also noted that the majority of the testing is done on serious cases than all suspected cases, with many medical professionals complaining of long wait times to get results.

The Ministry of Health, led by Luiz Henrique Mandetta, has acknowledged the challenges when it comes to distributing tests, primarily because of the countrys size, but also noted the need to improve testing. According to official estimates on Thursday, Brazil has around 127,000 cases, but only 63,000 tests were carried out. In addition, over 93,000 tests are still being processed for results.

In an interview with Folha, the health ministry also revealed that it had distributed 54,000 PCR kits, which take longer to process but have more accurate results, as well as 500,000 rapid kits, which respond in as little as 20 minutes, given their limitations.

The team also reported that the number of hospitalizations for severe respiratory symptoms has risen threefold, but only 12 percent of these have been tagged as COVID-19, the disease caused by SARS-CoV-2, stating in their report: The high degree of under-notification could give a false impression about control of the disease, and consequently, could lead to a decline in containment measures.

Researchers from the center predict that the countrys coronavirus caseload will surge anywhere from 25,164, in its most optimistic scenario, to up to 60,413 cases, in its most pessimistic. (Related: Prep before its too late: Important prepping lessons to learn from the coronavirus pandemic.)

President, health minister clash over measures

Brazils challenges when it comes to dealing with coronavirus is also exacerbated by the ongoing tensions between President Jair Bolsonaro and Mandetta. The former, in particular, is still downplaying the risks of the virus, even as Mandetta  together with state governors and local officials  push for stricter measures.

The conflict came to a head last week, with reports of Bolsonaro reportedly planning to fire Mandetta over their continued spat over the coronavirus. While the presidents advisers were able to change his mind, the health minister openly defied him on national television over the weekend, saying that Bolsonaros insistence on downplaying the virus is confusing the country.

They dont know whether to listen to the health minister or to the president, stressed Mandetta, while urging the Bolsonaro administration to present a single, united line on dealing with the pandemic.

He also took aim at Bolsonaros flouting of social distancing guidelines, saying: When you see people going into bakeries, to supermarkets  this is clearly something that is wrong.

On Sunday, the two presented opposing claims on the countrys handling of the coronavirus: While Bolsonaro claimed that the virus appears to be going away, Mandetta gave a more somber assessment, warning the country that very tough days lie ahead.

Learn more about the ongoing coronavirus pandemic at Pandemic.news.

Sources include:

Coronavirus.JHU.edu

Reuters.com

CDC.gov

Folha.UOL.com.br

DailyMail.co.uk

TheGuardian.com
Three Notch Rd., 19300 block, April 4. When police attempted a traffic stop, the driver continued at a high speed, struck a utility pole wire and a mailbox, then fled from the vehicle into the woods. The 43-year-old Prince Frederick man was arrested and charged with resisting/interfere with arrest, obstructing and hindering, driving on a highway without a required license, driving while license is suspended, attempt to elude uniformed police by fleeing on foot, attempt to elude by failing to stop, and failure to stop after property damage accident.
Nearly 20 European and African leaders have made a joint appeal for a massive international effort to boost Africa's coronavirus response, saying that only a global victory that fully includes Africa can bring this pandemic to an end.

The appeal signed by the leaders of France, Ethiopia, Germany, South Africa and other nations, published in the Financial Times, calls for dramatic measures that include an immediate moratorium on all debt payments, public and private, until the pandemic is over.

It comes ahead of a meeting Wednesday by finance ministers of the G20 forum on economic cooperation, which includes the US, China, India and others.

African officials have assertively joined forces in recent days to appeal for billions of dollars in financial assistance and improve their position in the global competition with richer countries for badly needed medical equipment.

The African Union has appointed four special envoys to mobilize support and created a platform to help the continent's 54 countries bulk-buy medical goods at more accessible prices.

While virus cases among Africa's 1.3 billion people total more than 16,000, health experts have said the continent is weeks behind the U.S. and Europe in the pandemic and the rise in cases looks alarmingly similar to Europe's.

As the world braces for potential waves of the virus, the joint appeal says no region will be safe if Africa, with largely weak health systems, is left to fend for itself.

An unprecedented effort is required, the appeal says, directly addressing the World Bank and IMF.

We must deploy a huge economic stimulus package of at least $100 billion to give Africa the resources it needs to fight the virus.

The IMF on Monday approved $500 million to cancel six months of debt payments for 25 of the world's most impoverished countries, including 19 African ones, so they can help tackle the pandemic.

Such calls for assistance have been growing at the highest levels. In his Easter message, Pope Francis called for debt forgiveness for the world's poorest countries, saying they are being hardest hit by the pandemic and must not be abandoned.

Africa's debt-to-GDP ratio has climbed from 30% in 2012 to 95% today, said French President Emmanuel Macron in an interview posted Wednesday with Radio France Internationale. So we absolutely must help Africa to strengthen its capacities to respond to the health shock, and we must help it to respond economically to this crisis, said Macron.

It is a moral, human duty, Macron added, also calling on China, a major lender to African nations, to help. Macron recently made a similar call at a videoconference for G20 leaders.

The UN Economic Commission for Africa has said the pandemic could seriously dent already stagnant growth in many countries, with oil-exporting nations like Nigeria and Angola losing up to $65 billion in revenue as prices fall.

Livelihoods will be wiped out in a way we have never seen before, Ahunna Eziakonwa, the United Nations Development Program regional director for Africa, has said.

The new appeal, signed by all European leaders of the G20, welcomes a European Union plan for a pledging conference in May.

And as fears grow that resources to tackle other crises on the continent from hunger to conflict to malaria and HIV will be drained by the pandemic, the appeal urges humanitarian groups to protect their aid budgets.

Meanwhile, the World Food Program should lead an effort to deliver food and other critical needs to people, including refugees and migrants, in a growing number of African countries under lockdown, the appeal says. Millions of informal workers and others who rely on daily work for their next meals have been affected.

No region can win the battle against COVID-19 alone, the appeal says. If it is not beaten in Africa, it will return to haunt us all.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
The spread of COVID-19 in developing countries will have catastrophic global consequences. Ottawas current $50-million commitment to help developing countries deal with the pandemic is a step in the right direction. However, Canada must do more to assist developing countries to contain the spread of the virus.

To date, advanced economies such as the United States, Italy and France have been suffering the most from the virus. In Canada, more than 11,000 cases have been reported along with 153 deaths. However, the next wave of the outbreak is expected to hit developing countries and the impact will likely devastate their fragile economies and weak health care systems.

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) has stated its commitment to mobilize $1 trillion to help countries that are struggling with the economic impact of the coronavirus. The IMF and the World Bank are also working together on emergency programs to help member countries, particularly developing countries and emerging markets.

However, the current aid that has been made available for developing countries will not be sufficient. Since the outbreak began, more than $83 billion worth of capital had fled the emerging markets. According to the IMF chief Kristalina Georgieva, developing countries need at least $2.5 trillion in financial assistance to cope with the pandemic. The United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres has also asked world leaders to provide developing countries with $2 trillion to help them fight the outbreak.

Unlike advanced economies such as Canada, developing countries do not have the wherewithal to contain the virus. Even without the outbreak, many low-income countries relied on foreign aid to survive. Guterres argued that 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.

In sub-Saharan Africa, there is only about one doctor per 5,000 people, compared to one for every 300 in Europe. The region is also lacking basic medical tools such as ventilators, beds and masks. In Mali, for example, there is only roughly one ventilator per one-million people.

Moreover, 41 per cent of sub-Saharan Africas population is living in poverty. According to the Brookings Institute, the pandemic could reduce sub-Saharan Africas GDP by 2.1 per cent. In a region where sustained economic growth is desperately needed to lift people out of abject poverty, the economic impact of the coronavirus will create serious economic and social problems.

The outbreak and its economic impact can also fuel political violence in the region. In 2019, political violence in sub-Saharan Africa killed over 2,000 people and displaced thousands more. In places like Kenya and South Africa, COVID-19 containment measures have already turned violent as police used excessive force to enforce lockdowns and curfews.

In the Middle East where some countries are still fighting wars, COVID-19 will escalate sectarian tensions and regional instability. For example, officials in Bahrain have accused Iran of biological aggression. The regions youth unemployment rate is currently one of the highest in the world at 26.1 per cent. Measures to contain the virus will likely increase this number and lead to civil unrest.

Many other countries in Asia and Latin America are also facing similar risks.

To date, the government of Canada has only earmarked $50 million to help poor countries deal with coronavirus. Some even suggested that now is not that time for Canada to use its resources to help people in other countries. In his tweet, Conservative leadership candidate Erin O-Toole said: Foreign aid can wait. Right now, the Trudeau government should prioritize Canadians.

But ensuring a stable international order is in Canadas national interests. A major outbreak in developing countries can lead to global security issues such as terrorism, state violence and refugee crises. All these problems will be detrimental to Canadas national security.

Currently, Canada only spends about 0.28 per cent of its GDP on international development assistance (ODA). Meanwhile, other OECD countries such as Norway and Ireland spend at least 0.7 per cent of their GDPs on ODA. Norway has also pledged $30 million to help developing countries fight the coronavirus, despite having a GDP of a mere $402 billion. With a GDP of more than $1.6 trillion, Canada should spend at least $150 million.

The current pandemic requires Canada to step up and demonstrate its global leadership. Providing other countries with the financial resources to contain the spread of the virus will help protect Canadians now and in the future.
The Nokia OZO brand is hardly too popular, at least since Nokia shut down work on the eye-catching VR 360-degree camera. Still, OZO Audio is alive and well and periodically when Nokia strikes a technology licensing deal and OnePlus is the latest party in such an agreement. The flagship OnePlus 8 Pro has a triple-microphone array, powered by Nokia OZO.



OnePlus 8 Pro: Ultramarine Blue  Glacial Green  Onyx Black

Still, OnePlus did spend a good couple of minutes on stage, during the announcement, to explain Audio 3D, Audio Zoom and Audio Windscreen - all three camera features enabled by the OZO tech.

Audio Zoom is pretty self-explanatory, offering an audio boost, to go along with the cameras digital zoom level. Windscreen promises advanced and dramatic reduction in wind noise in video recordings. And Audio 3D is simply an umbrella name for advanced special audio capture. Nothing really revolutionary, but still beneficial to users and a great deal for both parties involved.

Jyri Huopaniemi, head of Technology Licensing at Nokia Technologies expressed his satisfaction with the new deal:

We are thrilled to enable OnePlus latest smartphone model to capture and record immersive, high-quality sound with OZO Audio, enabling their customers to experience vivid, dynamic recordings. This is yet another testament to our leadership as a licensor of advanced technologies for smartphone and camera manufacturers. Nokia Technologies is focused on licensing Nokia intellectual property, including patents, technologies and the Nokia brand, building on Nokias continued innovation and decades of R&D leadership in technologies used in virtually all connected devices used today. We license our innovative OZO spatial audio and visual technologies to smartphone and camera manufacturers through our Technology Licensing business.

Quickly flipping through the news section, we can clearly spot a few other recent phones of Oppo devices, like the Find X2 and Find X2 Pro, also sporting OZO tech. Hence, this Nokia partnership is likely a part of a wider deal involving multiple brands in the BBK Electronics umbrella. In that case, we can potentially expect the tech to eventually trickle-down to even more on the parent companys phone brands and branches.

Source
The antimalarial drug hydroxychloroquine did not speed up coronavirus patients' recovery in a trial in China, scientists have revealed.

In a disappointing blow for the promising drug, which is being trialled against COVID-19 in the UK and around the world, doctors said it did not work as a cure.

Patients who were taking it suffered fewer symptoms than others who were treated alongside them without the medication but their recovery time was the same.

It is the second setback in a week for the medication, after a clinical trial in Brazil had to be stopped because patients developed heart problems.

Hydroxychloroquine, marketed as plaquenil, was touted as a wonder treatment by President Donald Trump and is already being used in hospitals around the world and in a trial co-ordinated by the World Health Organiation.

Scientists think it might work by controlling the immune system to prevent COVID-19 infection getting too severe.

Hydroxychloroquine, also known as Plaquenil, is one of the most promising drugs emerging as a potential treatment for COVID-19. It is being trialled worldwide

In a scientific paper published online, doctors from across China, including in Wuhan and Hubei, the centre of the coronavirus outbreak, revealed their study's disappointing results.

They had tested hydroxychloroquine on 75 COVID-19 patients in hospitals and compared their illnesses to 75 patients who didn't receive the drug.

Patients received the medication for two or three weeks depending on the severity of their illness and all were tested 28 days after being diagnosed.

The doctors, led by Wei Tang from Ruijin Hospital in Shanghai, wanted to compare 'negative conversion rates' - the number of people who healed completely and tested negative for the virus after a month.

FRENCH DOCTOR CLAIMS THE DRUG IS WORKING ON HIS PATIENTS An eccentric French doctor has become a YouTube sensation and been approached by the French president for advice after he claims he has gotten astonishing results using Donald Trump's favorite coronavirus treatment on sick patients. Didier Raoult, a 68-year-old French infectious-disease specialist, has been using controversial antimalarial drug hydroxycholoroquine to treat COVID-19 patients. The doctor has a history of defying conventional medicine practices and even denying climate change. But Raoult has now become an unlikely hero amid the pandemic after he said he has given the experimental drug to more than 2,400 patients, with highly positive results. Didier Raoult has been experimenting with hydroxycholoroquine on his COVID-19 patients The doctor has spoken out on Twitter and YouTube urging healthcare professionals and governments to not delay their use of hydroxychloroquine until after clinical trials. Trials could take several months by which point thousands more lives could be lost to the killer virus. 'Some people have gone crazy with methodology,' Raoult argues in a video posted this week. 'Our objective as doctors is to make people better.' Emmanuel Macron met Raoult this week at his research institute in Marseille, where the doctor presented his research on coronavirus to the French President. French authorities have now permitted the drug to be used in 'the most severe cases.' However, Raoult's approach has come under fire from many in the medical world. Several experts have argued that further clinical trials are needed to determine its effectiveness in treating coronavirus. Concerns have also been raised that it can have fatal side effects, especially in people with pre-existing heart conditions. Advertisement

'The overall 28-day negative conversion rate was not different between [standard care plus hydroxychloroquine] and [standard care] groups,' they wrote.

They said that 85.4 per cent of people taking hydroxychloroquine tested negative after four weeks along with 81.3 per cent of those without the drug - a non-significant effect.

After careful analysis of the data from the study, the scientists did find that symptoms appeared to be milder in people being given the antimalarial medication, which is used in the UK to treat people with rheumatoid arthritis and lupus.

And their white blood cell counts and C-reactive protein, which increases during a body's fight against an infection, returned to normal faster than other patients'.

The researchers added hydroxychloroquine results in 'more alleviation of clinical symptoms than [standard care] alone in patients hospitalized with COVID-19'.

They said diarrhoea was the most common side effect and occurred in 10 per cent of the patients.

The study has not been reviewed by other scientists or published in a journal but was published directly onto the website medRxiv by the doctors.

More in-depth, larger studies of hydroxychloroquine are being done around the world.

Notably, the World Health Organization is co-ordinating a trial named 'Solidarity' and hydroxychloroquine is one of four drugs on test.

When results from this are compiled they will provide a much larger, more accrurate set of data for doctors to judge whether the medication works.

Its prospects were dealt another big blow just days ago when a trial in Brazil had to be halted because a quarter of the patients developed abnormal heart rhythms.

The Brazilian study, taking place in the Amazonian city of Manaus, had planned to enroll 440 severely ill COVID-19 patients to test two doses of chloroquine.

But researchers reported their results and called a halt to the experiment after only 81 people had received the high-dose treatment which gave them 1,200mg per day.

One in four of the patients had developed heart rhythm problems and early data suggested death rates were higher among those patients.

Results of trials of hydroxychloroquine have been mixed. The drug has already been widely deployed in countries like South Korea and China, but data on its safety and efficacy are still being collected in those countries as well as in the US.

However, a recent worldwide survey found that hydroxychloroquine was not only the potential treatment used most often by doctors internationally, but the one they thought most likely to be effective.

Brazil's trial failure came amid growing concerns that coronavirus itself may attack the heart.

The first evidence that the virus may be dangerous to the heart came out of China, which, as the origin of coronavirus, has been the bellwether for the disease's patterns.

Nearly 20 percent of 416 hospitalized coronavirus patients in one study conducted there showed signs of heart damage.

And more than half of the patients that had heart damage died while hospitalized for coronavirus. By comparison, just 4.5 percent of patients without heart damage died.

So the combination of the impact of coronavirus itself on the heart combined with hydroxychloroquine's potential to trigger heart arrhythmias could prove dangerous to patients.

But it may be that at a lower dose - a trial by America's National Institutes of Health is giving patients two 400mg doses of the drug on the first day of treatment, followed by 200mg twice daily for the following eight days - the drug poses a lesser cardiac risk.
Donald Trump has so mishandled the coronavirus crisis in America that the US president has blood on his hands according to Nobel prize-winning economist Professor Joseph Stiglitz.

Professor Stiglitz, who was called upon to advise Democratic presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, said the White House incumbent was culpable for cutting the Government budget for pandemic preparedness and failing, in recent weeks, to use his powers to get ventilators to hospitals and vital protective equipment to front-line health care workers.

He has equivocated over and over again, Professor Stiglitz told Econ Films CoronaNomics show.

Many people will die as a result. So, in short, there is blood on his hand. And let me emphasise, [its] unnecessary, totally. If he had simply looked at what the science said, he would have acted much earlier. Its that he doesnt understand the science, hasnt understood the science from the beginningThat has left us unprotected.

27,085 people have died in the US as a result of the Covid-19 outbreak, a higher death toll than in any other country in the world.

Dr Anthony Fauci, the official leading the USs own pandemic response, admitted to CNN on Sunday 12 April, that earlier action to shut down activity in the US could have saved lives.

Professor Stiglitz also warned that almost a third of the US workforce could end up jobless as a result of the lockdowns imposed across America to suppress the outbreak.

That would take unemployment rates to the heights seen during the Great Depression of the 1930s, an era that has scarred the American psyche for generations.

Weve never had anything quite like this where its being so sudden, he said.

The estimates are that we already are have around 15 per cent unemployment, the highest since the Great Depression. And I wouldnt be surprised if we had 20, 30 percent.

Some 16 million Americans have applied for unemployment insurance in the past three weeks a surge unseen in American history.

During the global financial crisis 12 years ago, when unemployment surged to 10 per cent, the weekly insurance claims were never higher than 700,000.

In the most recent week 6.6 million Americans registered claims, indicating a tidal wave of layoffs.

Sir Vince Cable, the former leader of the Liberal Democrat, also appearing on CoronaNomics, said that something similar could happen in the UK.

Were already seeing signs of it, he said, pointing to massive job losses in the informal as well as formal employment sectors.

Around 1.2 million people in the UK have made claims for Universal Credit in the past three weeks, indicating a surge in unemployment.

Sir Vince, who made his name for warning about the fragility of the UK economy prior to the credit crunch of 2007, also cautioned against assuming that the British recovery would be rapid.

What really matters is not how far the economy falls in the next few weeks, but how quickly it recovers and then what kind of profile, he said.

We could well progress from this to a balance sheet recession of the Japanese kind. And we just never get back to normal.

Professor Stiglitz said the economic support packages devised by European governments, including the UK  paying companies to keep on their workers rather than lay them off  was superior to the US approach of sending every adult a $1,200 cheque.

For most Americans, they rely on their employer for their health insurance. In this time of Covid-19 thats a disaster, he said.

Professor Stiglitz said he favoured sending cheques to individuals but warned that they would not reach those who needed it the most.

Unfortunately, the way its being administered by the Trump administration, those very individuals who are most in need are those who did not file tax returns, he said.

The administration now says its going to be months before they get their cheques, leaving these individuals, the most vulnerable, without life support.

Watch the first episode of CoronaNomics here
A fortnight ago, my boyfriend reset the wi-fi without bothering to check with me, unwittingly throwing me off an important Zoom video call and making me look like a confused baby boomer who cant work technology.

Normally I might have got angry with him, but we were a week into lockdown and I knew we were stuck in our desert island living quarters for the rest of the day.

So instead, I deployed my own superior tactic: secret revenge.

Rather than storm next door and confront him, I stayed in my bedroom-cum-office, leant over to his side of the bed and took his book off the nightstand. I then moved his bookmark three pages forward.

When Flora Gill's boyfriend Adam (right) reset the wi-fi while she was in the middle of a Zoom call she moved his bookmark forward by three pages

A fight had been avoided, but I was satisfied because I knew Id robbed him of some joy in those few pages.

That evening he picked up his book, none the wiser. His mildly confused face as he tried to follow the plot was all the apology I needed.

Good book? I asked innocently. Pretty good, he said. Little confusing though.

Some other minor victories of mine which he knows nothing about: me accidentally finishing all the chocolate biscuits, subtly removing his beer from the online shop before the order was placed, and not reminding him about a work call that I just know hes forgotten.

In normal times, the key to a happy relationship is being good at fighting. Two people can be as compatible as Ant and Dec in every way, and in the bedroom, too, but if theyre incompatible in an argument, the relationship is doomed.

After a decade together, my boyfriend Adam and I have managed to finesse our epic fights to a flawless recipe.

It involves a few minutes of shouting, followed by a storm-off separation. He takes a walk, I rant to my friends, then later in the day we both say sorry while sidestepping any admission of fault. A perfect cocktail.

After a decade together, Adam and Flora (pictured together) have managed to finesse their epic fights to a flawless recipe

The only issue is that in lockdown he cant just walk off any time he wants and I cant call my pals to rant when hes sitting in the same room.

Add to this the fact were with each other 24 hours a day and the opportunity to argue has risen dramatically.

All of which means fighting is a luxury that has gone the same way as dinner parties, on hold until were out of this mess.

As a writer, I work from home, so Im used to a day spent indoors, but what Im not used to is my lawyer boyfriend infiltrating my work space.

I know hes been forced inside, but somehow it doesnt feel like were both working from home: it feels like hes camped out in my office, ruining my routine, and commenting on how many snacks I eat.

From looking at social media, you might think arguing has been conveniently paused, that families are blissfully baking banana bread together and cutting each others hair in front of the Netflix must-watch Tiger King. But we all need to let off steam somehow.

In a now-deleted Facebook post, the Malaysian womens ministry suggested wives avoid nagging their husbands at this difficult time.

On top of this, while the rest of us rotate between day pyjamas and night pyjamas, it advised women to wear make-up and continue to dress well.

Now they're in lockdown Flora has taken to small acts of revenge as a way to vent any frustration, rather than starting an argument

The horror and ridicule that greeted these suggestions eventually elicited an apology and the clarification they were only trying to maintain positive relationships among family members.

Its the right idea, but entirely the wrong method  dressing up and pretending not to find my boyfriend annoying would only make me more likely to tear him off a strip in the long run.

No, it is my belief that small acts of passive aggression are the only way to keep the peace in lockdown, when blow-ups are so highly ill-advised.

I feel I must now add a caveat: my revenge is mostly in jest. There is a serious issue with isolation increasing incidents of domestic violence.

So only use these helpful tips if youre in a good relationship and, like me, have a healthy hatred for your other half.

Allow me to set the scene: a few days after the bookmark incident and after a stressful day, I cosied up on the sofa to watch the latest episode of RuPauls Drag Race together, only to be told that as my working day had gone on too long, he had watched it without me.

In the best of times, skipping ahead on shows is a cardinal sin, so when it was time to pass him his glasses as we watched the subtitled family drama Shtisel, I pushed my thumbs onto each lens, leaving an oily smudge.

If I couldnt watch my show, then it seemed fair he couldnt see his.

He hasnt noticed any of my little revenges, or rather he hasnt realised their calculated origins.

But thats part of their beauty. We sidestep any confrontation and I feel like Ive received an apology without hearing one.

They also give me the illusion of control, in a situation where we all have so little.

Most couples will be going through episodes of feeling a little unhinged. You can hate your boyfriend, and still love him; you can feel lucky to be isolated with your wife and still miss your alone time.

If you need to move a bookmark to feel better, then go ahead.

And just to prove that youre not abnormal, when I shared my tactic on Twitter, I got an avalanche of revenge plots.

One of my followers said they took the beer from the fridge and put it in the cupboard so it would warm up, while another suggested swapping the Earl Grey and English breakfast tea.

Other devious plans included pulling the phone charger out of the socket ever so slightly, so your other halfs battery stays depleted.

At its best, a little morsel of revenge is something youll be able to tell your partner at a later time and hopefully theyll laugh it off as part of your cabin fever.

So if you put on your glasses tomorrow and find your Daily Mail a little dog-eared and your lenses a little blurry, know that you probably did something to upset your other half.

But be glad in the knowledge that you avoided a much bigger fight, and prepare to hide the loo roll at an inconvenient moment.

Flora is donating her fee from this article to Refuge, a UK charity for women and children experiencing domestic violence.
The AUD/USD exchange rate has recovered over 16% from the March lows in a rally driven by relief and risk-on sentiment.

However, AUD is showing relative weakness as Consumer Confidence plunges. AUDUSD is lower by around -1.8%.

Data has been ignored recently for several reasons, but this suggests focus could start shifting back to the economy.

After a strong session on Tuesday when Tech stocks led the risk-on rally of over 3% in US stocks, early trading in Wednesdays session is taking back some of the gains. The FTSE is down around 1.7% and the Dax in Germany is lower by 2%. Oil is once more a concern with a further drop to a new low in WTI below the $19.27 low made in March. This comes even after a deal was made by OPEC+ nations to cut production and clearly demand is more important than any cuts to supply. Such low prices will be a problem for a lot of oil companies and will also weigh on commodity currencies such as the Canadian Dollar.

The risk-off tone in Wednesdays session has translated to currencies such as the Australian Dollar and the British Pound, with the US dollar strengthening across the board. AUDUSD is the worst performer with a fall of around -1.8%, taking it to 0.632 support. This comes after an historic fall in consumer sentiment data.

Data Concerns

A feature of the recent price action in stocks and even currencies is the apparent insensitivity to recent poor data. Record unemployment growth in the US was met with a risk-on rally and data such as PMIs were largely ignored.

This happened for several main reasons. Firstly, the markets main focus has been on the spread of the coronavirus and the concerning increase in the death rate. This looks to have peaked in most areas and it was this that sparked the large relief rally we have seen, allowing poor data to take a back seat. Secondly, the poor data was expected and while many releases have exceeded the projected numbers, traders have accepted the data will be awful for March and April and are unlikely to sell because the official releases confirm that view.

The concern for risk markets is that the relief rally will fade and data will come back in focus. Analysts are now getting to grips with how severely the lockdowns have affected economies and forward guidance from companies during earnings season will also help shape expectations.

AUD Reacts

As already highlighted, AUDUSD is Wednesdays worst performer and this may be a sign that data is starting to matter once more as some very weak data has just been released. Consumer Sentiment dropped 17.7% to 75.6 in April from 91.9 in March. This is the single biggest monthly decline ever and takes the Index beyond the 2008-2009 lows.

The details of the surveyare all very disturbing and reflect the large shocks to jobs and spending. However the most surprising message is the collapse in confidence in the housing market, reports Westpac.

All five component sub-indexes fell in April. By far the biggest falls were in the near term outlook for the economy and in attitudes towards spending  reflecting the immediate effects of the shut-down.

Again, this not exactly surprising given the conditions created by the pandemic, but it does highlight how much confidence has been dented and the fear is that it will take a long time to restore. Governments will be keen to ease the lockdowns soon but what if citizens do not return to their prior behaviours (and spending habits) for a long time? The length of the lockdowns and how quickly economies bounce back will be key.

For now, AUD/USD has dropped into 0.632 but looks like it could still continue higher if markets switch back to risk on. 0.62 is key support and a break could cement a reversal back towards the March lows of 0.55.
Tripoli, Libya (PANA) - The chairman of the managing board of the Libyan National Oil Company (NOC), Mustapha Sanalla, has warned against the negative consequences of the illegal and continued closure of oil installations on the lives of citizens
Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, April 15)  The Metro Manila Development Authority (MMDA) will serve as a coordinating agency of local government units, hospitals, and crematory services to steer clear of problems hounding the burial and cremation procedures for the remains of COVID-19 fatalities, its spokesperson said.

"We'll try to bridge the gap between LGUs, hospitals, and crematory services," MMDA Spokesperson Celine Pialago stated in a public briefing Wednesday.

"Tayo ho ang magsisilbing coordinating agency dahil ho nakaka-encounter ng iba't ibang problema ang mga local government at hospital, kagaya po ng delayed release[s] sa [burial] certificate. [....] Kailangan po may lead agency na mag-cocoordinate," she added.

[Translation: We will act as the coordinating agency because local government units and hospitals encounter various problems, like the delayed release(s) of (burial) certificates. (....) There should be a lead agency for coordination.]

The MMDA clarified that it will not take charge of the transport of remains of COVID-19 infected patients.

"Ang MMDA po will not be responsible in terms of collecting, transporting, and disposing [remains] na mula po sa COVID-19 casualties po natin," Pialago said.

[Translation: The MMDA will not be responsible for collecting, transporting, and disposing (remains) from our COVID-19 casualties.]

She said officials of the Department of the Interior and Local Government (DILG) and representatives of the concerned agencies will meet on Thursday to address logistical issues and other concerns.

"Most probably po the day after the meeting, makakapaglabas na po tayo ng proper guidelines on how to effectively and efficiently manage the [remains]," the MMDA spokesperson said.

[Translation: We will release proper guidelines on how to effectively and efficiently manage the (remains) most probably the day after the meeting.]

"Lahat po ng limitasyon ng aming ahensya ay mapag-uusapan sa meeting," she added.

[Translation: The limitations of our agency will be tackled in the meeting.]

The Philippines now has 5,223 confirmed COVID-19 cases, with 335 deaths and 295 recoveries.

The entire Luzon has been placed under enhanced community quarantine to prevent the spread of the viral disease. Provinces and municipalities outside the most populous island group have also implemented community quarantine amid the continuing rise in the number of COVID-19 cases.
Delhi Police Crime Branch on Wendesday (April 15) issued Lookout Circualrs (LOC) against 1890 foreigners belonging to Tablighi Jamaat. Sources told Zee Media that all these foreigners had violated the visa rules by participating in religious activities in different parts of the country. Delhi Police team is searching these foreigners on the basis of their locations.

Crime branch has managed to apprehend 1,500 people who had visited Jamaat's Markaz building in Nizamuddin during March. It includes 400 Jamaatis from outside country who were living at different mosques in Delhi's Malviya Nagar, Shastri Park, Welcome, Chandni Mahal, Turkman Gate, Hauz Rani.

It is learnt that Delhi Police's Crime Branch has also issued notice to 18 people associated with Jamaat to join a probe into allegations that the Jamaat chief Maulana Saad encouraged people to defy the lockdown and social distancing norms and congregate at Markaz Nizamuddin.

Meanwhile, the 14-day coronavirus COVID-19 quarantine period of Tablighi Jamaat chief Maulana Saad Kandhalvi and six others ended on Monday (April 13) and it is expected that Delhi Police would soon ask Maulana Saad to join a probe in connection with this case.

The 56-year-old Maulana Saad had been under quarantine at an unknown location since March 28. On April 8, Maulana Saad's lawyer had said that he will join the probe after the end of quarantine period. According to Delhi Police, the Jamaat chief ignored two notices to vacate the Markaz building located in south Delhi's Nizamuddin.

On March 23, Maulana Saad had delivere da sermon at Markaz in which he had called social distancing warnings a conspiracy to create divide among Muslims. "Where will you run from death? Death is in front of you...This is an occasion to seek penance from God. Not an occasion where one comes under the influence of doctors and stops Namaaz, meeting each other...Yes, there is a virus. But 70,000 angels are with me and if they can't save me, who will? This is the time for more such gatherings, not the time to avoid each other...," Maulana Saad said in the sermon, the audio clip of which is currently with Delhi Police.
Kojo Musah aged 16, has downs syndrome. His parents, who hail from Ejura in the Ashanti Region of Ghana, were initially not enthusiastic about sending Kojo to school because of his disability. However, a little over a year ago they noticed he was getting along well with few friends he plays with in the community. They have also noticed some improvement in his level of assertiveness as a result of the constant interaction with his playmates. Such observations changed their initial perception and decided to enroll Kojo in the community primary school. Several attempts to get him enrolled in the local authority school proved futile because teachers and school administrators alike did not consider him to have the intellectual capacity to be formally educated. The head teacher of the school in particular was reluctant to enrol Kojo on the grounds that he is a special needs child and the school did not have the support he may need. He further explained that it will be difficult for Kojo to cope with the pace of learning, and that adapting the teaching and learning approach to Kojos pace will negatively affect the other pupils in the class. Consequently, the head teacher suggested that enrolling Kojo in a special school, with boarding facilities was his best shot at education.

The above narrative captures a running theme regarding the challenge of inclusive education, particularly of children with intellectual disabilities (CWIDs) in Ghana. The concept of Inclusive Education (IE) is geared towards offering opportunities to all children to participate in regular school learning. In my view, it offers hope to children of differing backgrounds  disability, orphans and vulnerable children, ethnic minority, migrant, street children, displaced, children living with HIV/AIDs - to access formal education in regular schools. Despite the adoption of the Inclusive Education Policy in 2015, many decision-makers at national and sub-national levels in Ghana continue to hold on to the old tradition that fulfilling the right of CWIDs to education is to have special schools where they are enrolled and learn together. There are also key issues such as stigma and discrimination against CWIDs, structural inaccessibility, inadequate skilled personnel and learning materials.

To address the above highlighted issues pertaining to inclusive education of CWIDs in Ghana, there is the need to address barriers that confront them and limit their meaningful participation in inclusive learning environments. A ray of hope is the recent modifications of Ghanas Teacher Training curricula to incorporate modules on inclusive education, and the development of In-Service Training (INSET) modules to ensure that all teachers have the needed skills to manage inclusive classrooms consisting of pupils such as Kojo Nsiah, to enable them participate meaningfully in classroom learning. In addition, the recently introduced first-day-at-school programme by the Ghana Education Service is another effort to ensure effective implementation of inclusive education in Ghana. It is hoped that through this annual exercise, pupils who require assistive devices to enable them meaningfully participate in classrooms can be identified early enough for appropriate support.

Moreover, there are in place social protection interventions such as the Livelihood Empowerment Against Poverty (LEAP) programme being implemented in the country, which could directly or indirectly facilitate enrolment and retention of children with intellectual disabilities in schools. Besides, parents/caregivers of CWIDs must not lose sight of their role in raising awareness on intellectual disabilities and advocating for their childrens right to inclusive education on an equal basis with others. It is my fervent hope that as more and more parents/caregivers become aware of the rights of CWIDs to inclusive education, and the part that they should play to promote, protect and fulfill this right, a positive behaviour change will happen amongst parents/caregivers, which may culminate in the removal of the systemic, domestic or social barriers that confront CWIDs and limit their meaningful participation in inclusive learning environments.

The story of Kojo Musah, albeit common to many children with intellectual disabilities in Ghana, calls for direction of focus to ensure it does not become a consistent barrier to meaningful participation of children in our educational system. The countrys inclusive education policy presents us good opportunities to realise inclusive education for all children irrespective of their disabilities or vulnerability. On this note, on-going efforts need to be sustained or modified if necessary to make our educational system truly inclusive.

The Writer is Auberon Jeleel Odoom, a graduate student at the Faculty of Law, University of Pretoria

Telephone: +233 30 224 3291 /+233 20 815 1523; Email: [email protected]

[1] Ghanas Inclusive Education Policy of 2015.

[2] P Deku & AK Mensah Inclusive education: The Ghanaian perspective (2004) 11(1) West African Journal of Research and Development in Education 8-15.
Islamabad, April 15 : Sindh Chief Minister Murad Ali Shah on Wednesday once again called for the provincial and federal governments to get on the same page to tackle challenges arising out of the coronavirus epidemic in the country.

"During our meeting with the federal government yesterday, we asked for a uniform policy to deal with the situation," Shah said while addressing a press conference in Karachi.

"It was decided in Tuesday's meeting that the lockdown in the country would be extended for 14 days. All the provinces were unanimous in the decision that the lockdown should be extended," he said.

The Chief Minister added that there were some issues, however, that the provinces and the federal government did not agree on, Geo TV reported.

"Some provinces and the federal government agreed that some essential workplaces should reopen. We did not agree to open shops for barbers, plumbers, electricians etc," he said.

"We all agreed to restart the automobile sector and domestic flights with the implementation of decided SOPs. We, however, suggested that the federal government wait for another two weeks before resuming domestic flight operations," Shah said.

We also agreed on the reopening of export-related industries, he added.

Speaking about an announcement by religious leaders and traders that they would no longer abide by lockdown guidelines, the Chief Minister said: "We will facilitate ulema and traders in this regard by meeting them and keeping them in the loop for all discussions. I would like to thank the ulema and traders for cooperating with us (so far)." Pakistan Prime Minister Imran Khan has extended the ongoing lockdown till April 30, as the number of coronavirus cases in the country crossed 6,000, with 113 deaths, the Health Ministry said on Wednesday.
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Franklin Sirmans has been director of Perez Art Museum Miami (PAMM) since 2015. He worked as an art critic in Milan before becoming an independent curator. His reputation soared after he mounted a blockbuster 2005 show on Jean-Michel Basquiat at the Brooklyn Museum, leading him to positions at Houstons Menil Collection and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.  A recent graduate of the University of Texas at Austin, Ade Omotosho also studied the Yoruba language in Nigeria on a Fulbright-Hays grant and served as a fellow at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. He is now an independent writer and curator based in Miami.  They met a little over two years ago, when Omotosho successfully applied for the inaugural Ford Foundation Curatorial Fellowship at PAMM, earmarked to support students of color aiming for a career in the field.

Ade came to the museum [world] not through curating but through writing and poetryas I did. Greg Tate is a really strong spot for both of us. Ade has a fascination with how literature evolves and is a part of the conversation with visual culture. And to be able to talk about that with someone in their early 20s? Its quite amazing and phenomenal. I feel like Ive learned just as much from him.

More from Robb Report

People always said, Youre going to love him because youll be able to relate to him. One of them was [Studio Museum in Harlem director] Thelma Golden, who curated the landmark exhibition Black Male [at the Whitney Museum]. Hes been doing a lot of work on the body, in particular looking at black males, as I have.

His ambition is for art and creativity to make a difference in the world. Its not just about making an art show to him but also: Whos going to be affected by it? What kind of social agency will that idea or exhibition lead to? He thinks about shows in a wider context, and thats absolutely the way I think, too.

Story continues

Right now, hes doing the damn thing I did, trying to figure things out by engaging in deep conversations with his peers: artists, sculptors, photographers. And hes writing and writing, which means hes figuring shit out. Will that turn into a degree? Probably at some point.

He has a genuine sense of humanity about him that attracts people. Thats why all these people have had so many amazing things to say about this kid, as he only got out of school in 2017. Hes optimistic, and he believes in the power of creativity, so hes a very special person in that way.

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A South Dakota plant operated by Smithfield Foods, a Chinese-owned meat company with facilities across the United States, is now possibly the largest CCP virus outbreak hot spot in the United States. (Google Maps)

Smithfield Foods Plant One of the Top CCP Virus Hotspots in US

A South Dakota plant operated by Smithfield Foods, a Chinese-owned meat company with facilities across the United States, is now possibly the largest CCP virus outbreak hot spot in the United States.

More than 518 employees at the Sioux Falls pork processing plant have tested positive for the virus, and 126 non-employees have become infected after coming into contact with a Smithfield employee, said the South Dakota Department of Health. Meanwhile, in the past 24 hours, 80 of South Dakotas 180 new cases came from people who work at the Smithfield plant, according to the local Argus Leader newspaper and KELO.

The surge in cases at the plant comes as South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem defended not her decision not to issue a shelter-in-place order.

Lets be perfectly clear: a shelter-in-place order would NOT have prevented Smithfield from happening. They are a critical infrastructure business. They are part of the nations food supply chain and contribute to South Dakotas role feeding the country and the world, she wrote on Twitter.

A team from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) will arrive in South Dakota to assess the situation, Noem wrote.

South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem in a 2014 file photo. (Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images)

On Sunday, Smithfield announced it would shut down the Sioux Falls plant indefinitely following the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) virus outbreak.

The closure of this facility, combined with a growing list of other protein plants that have shuttered across our industry, is pushing our country perilously close to the edge in terms of our meat supply, Smithfields chief executive, Kenneth Sullivan, said in a statement on Sunday. The plant employs about 3,700 workers and produces between 4 percent and 5 percent of the U.S. pork.

We have a stark choice as a nation: we are either going to produce food or not, even in the face of COVID-19, Sullivan warned.

According to the Reuters news agency, other poultry and meat processors including Cargill, Tyson Foods, and JBS USA have idled plants in other parts of the country.

Smithfield Foods is headquartered in Smithfield, Virginia, and it is wholly owned by the WH Group of China. The company was bought by the Chinese firm in 2013 for $4.72 billion, and at the time, the acquisition of Smithfields 146,000 acres of land made WH Group one of the largest international owners of American farmland.

Executives from WH Group, Smithfields parent company in China, regularly visited the plant, according to two employees. The visit preceding the first confirmed case did not include a plant tour and was limited to meetings in a separate building, another employee said. The visit took place roughly one month after President Donald Trump banned travel from China, where the pandemic originated. All of the employees spoke on the condition of anonymity.

Three Smithfield employees told The Epoch Times Wednesday that the company offered workers a $500 bonus to keep working after the plant had its first confirmed case. One employee said they had informed the management multiple times about feeling sick, but was told to keep working. The worker eventually tested positive for COVID-19.

Whenever anyone felt sick or didnt feel the best after we started becoming short staffed they would try [and] keep [you] there no matter what, the employee said.

Ivan Pentchoucov contributed to this report.
Julia Louis-Dreyfus' battle cancer against inspired her commitment to fighting climate change.

The Seinfeld actor, 59, explained how her 'near-death experience' made her think about the impact she wanted to make on the world while chatting with People for their latest cover story.

'Once you've faced a near-death experience like that, you do begin to realize that, at some point, you're going to be out of here. We all are. So, how best to spend my remaining time on this planet?' the native New Yorker told the magazine.

Perspective: Julia Louis-Dreyfus revealed how her 'near death experience' with breast cancer inspired her dedication to environmental activism in a new issue of People

Julia, who overcame breast cancer in 2017, said: 'I never thought I was immortal, but you don't spend a lot of time thinking about the end of your life.'

'But once you've faced a near-death experience like that, you do begin to realize that, at some point, you're going to be out of here. We all are. So, how best to spend my remaining time on this planet?'

Realizing she wanted to make the world a better place with the time she has left, the environmental activist to become even more dedicated to using her influence to fight climate change.

To do her part, Julia joined the Board of Trustees at the Natural Resources Defense Council - a leading environmental advocacy organization.

Impact: 'Once you've faced a near-death experience like that, you do begin to realize that, at some point, you're going to be out of here. We all are. So, how best to spend my remaining time on this planet?' the native New Yorker told the magazine

How it began: Her interest in environmentalism was sparked during a beach visit with her sons Henry, 28, and Charlie, 23, when they were young. Julia, husband Brad Hall and sons are seen at the 65th Annual Primetime Emmy Awards in 2013 above

Her interest in environmentalism was sparked during a beach visit with her sons Henry, 28, and Charlie, 23, when they were young.

'I had kids, and I wanted to take them to the beach,' she says. 'They'd just go down and play for an hour and a half. But there was a beach closure, and I thought to myself, "That can't be right. They close the beach because of pollution?" It was happening in my own backyard.'

She got involved with the organization Heal The Bay, a non-profit dedicated to protecting California's coast.

'Through that organization I met many members of the NRDC. They often worked together,' Julia went on. 'And thats how I first became involved.

Using her influence: Julia is on the Board of Trustees at the Natural Resources Defense Council and is active with Heal The Bay. She's seen in 2013 above

Explaining another reason she was so committed to the cause, Julia said she wanted to support future generations as they battle environmental changes.

'Im keenly aware of the burden that my children will have, and their children will have, if this challenge doesnt get met. I see it as my responsibility to try and right this ship. My life will be well-spent doing that,' she said.

And she's convinced that together, we can really make changes happen.

'The American people are go-getters,' Julia said. 'When theres a problem, they roll up their sleeves. No matter what party youre in, we all want to leave a clean and better planet for our children and our childrens children.'
Weekday traffic on all four major interstates in the Portland area is down 46% from levels last year, according to a report compiled by the Oregon Department of Transportation.

Interstates 5, 405, 84 and 205 are all seeing significant traffic declines, and the freeways are only becoming less congested as the weeks stretch on and our collective memories of a previous life fade away like Mt. Hood in the rear view mirror while driving on U.S. 26 toward Central Oregon.

Traffic on weekends is down even more precipitously, the state report found.

And as Portland police and other law enforcement agencies say that dramatic speeding on surface roads is up considerably, the state data show drivers are taking advantage of the free-flowing traffic conditions to rip through town.

I-5, in particular, is seeing the most significant declines of metro-area freeways. The average weekend traffic was down 64% for the most recent full week of data available (March 30-April 5).

According to Oregon Department of Transportations first COVID-19 monitoring report, released Friday, the largest decreases occurred initially on highways and freeways to the coast and mountains. The report looked at the change in traffic patterns in the past month, starting with the week schools closed, then subsequent weeks under a stay-home order as well.

The largest decreases occurred on Oregon 18, U.S. 26, U.S. 20, U.S. 30 and U.S. 101, which see high use for commute and recreation-based travel, the state analyst wrote.

Willamette Valley residents, it seems, were by and large avoiding the beach and the mountains, as directed. The drop on Highway 26, for instance, coincided with the city of Seasides order closing all its beaches the Monday after spring break tourists flooded in from Portland and elsewhere.

Week two after the stay-home order reveals further decreases in traffic volumes in I-5, I-205, I-405, and I-84. U.S. 97 and U.S. 197 saw small increases in traffic volume relative to the previous week, likely related to rising truck freight movement, the report said.

State officials compiled the data from 38 traffic monitoring locations across 13 freeways and highways in Oregon.

Traffic counts on 13 freeways and corridors in recent weeks

With wide open interstates and highways come the speeders.

According to the state data, as every week stretches on and slowly erodes portions of our collective souls, people are driving faster.

For example, average speeds on I-5 northbound during what used to be the afternoon rush hour were up to 60 miles per hour in the most recent week of figures. Back during the week of March 1, the average rush hour speed there was 33 mph.

The state found traffic is mostly at free flow across the metro area.

Average freeway speed in the Portland area

Freight traffic is a different story.

The state found that two weigh stations, in particular, have seen large increases in recent weeks: those on I-5 at Woodburn and I-84 near Huntington on the Snake River, roughly 30 miles from Idaho border.

This chart shows increases in orange and decreases in blue.

One way to measure freight traffic is by analyzing weigh stations statewide.

Heres the full report.

-- Andrew Theen; atheen@oregonian.com; 503-294-4026; @andrewtheen

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Authorities in Malaysia have been instructed to take action against online media publishing inaccurate and misleading news. The International Federation of Journalists (IFJ) express concern over the governments unclear directive and lack of transparency during the global pandemic.

A member of the City Hall sprays disinfectant on a bridge near the Malayan Mansion apartment building, which was cordoned off after cases of individuals infected with the COVID-19 novel coronavirus were detected at the residence, in Kuala Lumpur on April 8, 2020. Credit: Mohd Rasfan/AFP

On April 11, the National Security Council briefed the police and Communications and Multimedia Commission (MCMC) to take stern action against online media that misreport the news. Ismail Sabri Yaakob, the defence minister said, We have been reading a lot of news in online media portals that publish incorrect and untrue news, especially when it comes to official statements from the government. Ismail said, adding he hoped that online media would be more ethical in their coverage.

The statement from the defence minister follows a tweet posted by the Information Department defining fake news as news that instils hatred towards the ruling government and leaders, linking the dangers of fake news to Covid-19. In the infographic, the Information Department said that such news could cause distrust in the ruling government.

The post contained other definitions of misinformation, such as news covering the countrys critical information systems, news that touches on religious and racial sensitivities and news that lowers the reputation of an individual, organisation and country.

According to the National Union of Journalists (Malaysia), in the past authorities have used the Printing Presses and Publications Act 1984 (PPPA) and the Communications and Multimedia Act 1998 to arbitrarily control press freedoms. The last amendment to the PPPA was made in 2012, removing, the home ministers absolute discretion to suspend newspapers ability to publish, allowing the decision to be reviewed by a court.

Malaysia has 4,987 positive Covid-19 cases with 82 deaths as of Tuesday, April 14. The country has extended its partial lockdown for the second time until April 28. Any person who breaches the restricted movement order will face immediate arrest.

The IFJ said: The governments stern action will hinder the medias oversite of the government and decrease transparency, ultimately endangering society amid the global pandemic. The IFJ urges the government to review the directive to emphasise the importance of press freedom, accurate reporting and the publics right to know.
US expresses interest in discussing arms control, Russia ready to go ahead

Iran Press TV

Tuesday, 14 April 2020 3:08 PM

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov says the United States has expressed interest in holding talks with Russia about arms control, months after Washington pulled out of a missile treaty with Moscow.

The top Russian diplomat made the announcement during an online press conference on Tuesday, saying that his American counterpart, Mike Pompeo, had earlier expressed America's interest to resume talks, Russia's Sputnik news agency reported.

"[US Secretary of State] Mike Pompeo called me couple of weeks ago. I want to discuss this matter with him via a telephone talk in the coming days. [He] touched upon the issue of arms control and strategic stability in general. We welcome the interest of our American partners in this topic as we have long urged them to work on these issues more actively," Lavrov said.

He added that Moscow was ready to discuss the development of hypersonic weapons with Washington.

However, he said issues about global strategic stability would be discussed by the two sides once the current COVID-19 pandemic was over.

Tensions between the two former Cold War adversaries escalated in early August last year, when Washington formally and unilaterally pulled out of the 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF), which had banned all land-based missiles with ranges of between 500 and 5,500 kilometers.

Washington alleged at the time that Moscow had first violated the INF by test-firing a missile that had been banned under the pact. Russia denied the allegation and publicly disclosed the specifics of the missile in question to refute the US accusation.

Later that same month, the Pentagon announced that it had tested a type of a ground-launched missile that had been banned under the bilateral pact.

Both Russia and China renewed a warning at the time that the testing of the missile would trigger an arms race.

In September last year, Russia pulled out of the pact.

Moscow recently reportedly upgraded its arsenal with a number of hypersonic missiles, while the US is actively working to develop its own.

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SAN FRANCISCO, April 15, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- Splice Machine , the leading scale-out SQL database with native machine learning, has today announced that it has launched a new Industrials division, including establishing a Middle East presence in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. The new regional office will focus on providing predictive maintenance for outage avoidance for the oil & gas, renewable energy, communications and petrochemical industries.

Splice Machine will leverage its unique converged database platform to address some of these industries toughest challenges including predicting equipment failures, eliminating avoidable downtime, and reducing corrosion. Splice Machine will also focus its efforts on reducing the pain experienced by network-intensive industries including utilities and telecom to optimize load, yield, resource efficiency, and asset reliability.

"Asset-heavy industries like oil and gas, utilities, and telecom have traditionally relied on calendar-based maintenance to keep operations running, but there are several downsides to this preventive maintenance approach," said Monte Zweben, co-founder and CEO, Splice Machine. "These industries can greatly benefit from using real-time predictive analytics with midstream control system data to avoid outages and optimize the availability of spare parts. Our solution combines three elements of computation that are typically separate  operational, analytical, and AI  to make that optimization happen."

Global leaders in financial services, healthcare, consumer products, and supply chain have partnered with Splice Machine to digitally transform their organizations and modernize their legacy and custom-built applications. Now, with its new Industrials division, Splice Machine will be able to better serve oil and gas, telco and energy clients globally.

For more information about Splice Machine, visit https://splicemachine.com/ .

About Splice Machine

Splice Machine is the only scale-out SQL database with native machine learning. Splice Machine slashes software, infrastructure and people costs by combining operational workloads (OLTP), analytical workloads (OLAP), and machine learning (MLOps) into one seamless Kubernetes-powered architecture. Enterprises build new intelligent applications on the Splice Machine RDBMS, extend existing applications with AI, and modernize their applications in the cloud with virtually no rewrites. Companies can offload data from more expensive RDBMS systems easily and get the most efficient path to operational AI. Splice Machine is available as a fully-managed cloud service on AWS, Azure, and GCP and is also available on-premise.

Splice Machine is a trademark of Splice Machine, Inc. All other trademarks are the property of their respective registered owners. Trademark use is for identification only and does not imply sponsorship, affiliation, or endorsement.

SOURCE Splice Machine

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Chinese Arms to Help Nigeria Combat Terrorists

Sputnik News

12:18 GMT 14.04.2020

China and Nigeria are strengthening their military-technical cooperation: 17 Chinese armoured vehicles have been unloaded at the port of Lagos under a new contract signed in 2019. The contract, worth $152 million, was signed following a tender that was won by the China Ordnance Industries Group Corporation, known as Norinco.

The Nigerian newspaper This Day Live, citing the chief of policy and plans of the Nigerian Army Headquarters, Major General Lamidi Adeosun, notes that the China Ordnance Industries Group Corporation, known as Norinco, won the military tender because of the reliability of its equipment, as well as due to the fact that Chinese vehicles are equipped with the latest technology and weaponry.

The first batch of armoured vehicles delivered to Nigeria includes VT-4 tanks, a new generation of battle tanks with a range of over 500 kilometres, wheeled new generation self-propelled ST1 lightweight tanks, and 122mm SH2 self-propelled howitzers. Nigeria previously received the first set of spare parts and supplies for this equipment, which was delivered in 15 40-foot shipping containers.

According to the Nigerian newspaper, Chinese armoured vehicles are customised for the specific conditions in Nigeria. The weapons are primarily intended for use in the northeast of the country to combat attacks by the Boko Haram terror group. This is the region where Nigeria shares borders with Chad and Cameroon.

China's assistance in strengthening the technical capacity of the Nigerian Army shows the high level of interstate relations, says Liu Qinghai, a director of the Centre for African Economic Studies at the Institute of African Studies, Zhejiang Normal University.

"There are several reasons why China is chosen as a partner in military-technical cooperation in Africa. First of all, China offers an excellent price-quality ratio for its weaponry. For example, the VT-4 third-generation battle tank has high manoeuvrability, good protection and powerful weapons. These vehicles were exported to Thailand and were highly appreciated by the Royal Court. It can be said that they have good quality and moderate price", the expert believes.

At the same time, China offers good after-sales service, timely delivery, and does not attach political conditions to a deal, Liu Qinghai notes.

"For example, China provides flexible maintenance services and trains Nigerian soldiers on how to operate the equipment. Chinese consultants also come to Nigeria to assist with training", he adds.

The Chinese expert believes that military-technical cooperation between China and Nigeria has been successfully developing due to the friendly nature of Sino-Nigerian relations, noting that Nigeria is one of the friendliest African countries for China.

"According to the surveys, 70 percent of Nigerians have friendly feelings towards China and appreciate Sino-Nigerian cooperation. Nigeria has the largest Chinese language newspaper in Africa. The domestic market is dominated by Chinese goods, and for Nigerians, China is the most popular tourist destination. Cooperation between the two sides is mutually beneficial and extremely useful", the expert concludes.

Speaking to Sputnik, Nikolai Shcherbakov, an analyst at the Centre for African Studies of the Institute of General History of the Russian Academy of Sciences (RAS), says that China's participation in the rearmament of the Nigerian Army is logical as this process began long ago.

"The value of the new contract is not huge but it is a message of renewed commitment to cooperation. Chinese weaponry is of decent quality, its decisive advantage is its price. Nigeria cannot afford to buy expensive pieces of weaponry. Chinese weapons are cheaper than Western ones, but they are almost as effective. At the same time, they are easy to use and maintain", the expert says.

Shcherbakov stresses that this is important given the specifics and level of training of the Nigerian government's military units, which are comprised mainly of contract soldiers.

"Nigeria sees an opportunity to strengthen internal security and public stability in its military-technical cooperation with China. Beijing, for its part, is interested in protecting its economic interests in Nigeria and maintaining its presence in the huge Nigerian market. It does not want to lose this market due to internal instability in that country. Nigeria is one example of how China operates in Africa. If it comes to a country, it will be solid and lasting", the Russian expert notes.

Nigeria is one of the 18 countries in Africa that will receive medical supplies sent by China to help them fight the ongoing coronavirus pandemic. A Chinese company, China Air Cargo, delivered crucial and vital goods by charter on 6 April to Accra, Ghana's capital city, from where they are distributed to other countries.

The humanitarian cargo includes personal protective equipment, protective masks, medical protective suits, safety goggles, gloves, infrared thermometers, and ventilators. At the same time, a team of experts from China provides advice and guidance to Nigerian medical specialists.

 Sputnik

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Virgin Australia is reportedly considering going into voluntary administration, as the coronavirus continues to ravage the aviation industry.

The embattled airlines is buckling under debts of $5 billion, has already stood down around 8,000 workers and had its credit rating downgraded.

It has cancelled all of its international and domestic flights, apart from one daily return service Sydney and Melbourne.

The airline has asked the government for a $1.4 billion bailout to help it survive the economic downturn - as experts are concerned it may not last until September.

But fearing this may not come to pass, it is understood Virgin has now employed a company to assess how else it could escape the financial turmoil - which could include going into voluntary administration.

Domestic flights across Australia have been slashed, with Virgin only running one flight a day (pictured, grounded planes at Melbourne airport on April 12)

Virgin Australia halted trading of its stock on Tuesday for the second time this month, as the airline waits to find out whether it will receive the government bailout.

Along with its biggest rival Qantas, it is understood to be closing in on a multi-million-dollar deal with the federal government to support domestic flights between capital cities.

But if the deal fails to materalise, the airline may be forced into an alternative financial restructure - which could include going into voluntary administration.

Sources told the Guardian that the airline had hired economic consultants Deloitte, to work on a range of possible options.

All of Virgin Australia's international flights have been suspended during the coronavirus crisis (pictured, a Virgin plane taking off from Sydney airport on March 18)

Deloitte specialist in insolvency and the turning around of companies, hinting that voluntary administration could be being considered.

Pauline Hanson slams $1.4bn bailout for struggling airlines Ms Hanson said Virgin's 'billionaire overseas investors' should pay to cover the airline's dwindling profits. 'The Australian Government have a choice on their hands right now,' she wrote on Wednesday. 'Bailout Virgin Australia, or let its billionaire overseas investors stump up the cash? 'The truth is, Australian investors own just nine per cent of the company. The other 91 per cent is owned by overseas billionaires and foreign governments.' 'I feel gutted for the staff of Virgin Australia, because I spend so much time travelling with them. 'But I don't agree with Australian's paying to bailout a company who hasn't paid tax in this country for the past 6 or more years.' Advertisement

The government is already stumping up $100 million to help with cashflow for a dozen small airlines running important regional routes.

Deputy Prime Minister Michael McCormack is working with Qantas and Virgin to subsidise flights between major cities.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison said any public funding for aviation would be spread across the entire sector.

'We haven't been picking any winners or picking any favourites here,' he told Nine.

'What we have been doing is ensuring sector-wide support, which has been already quite significant for the aviation sector.'

'Virgin Australia has requested a trading halt as it continues to consider ongoing issues with respect to financial assistance and restructuring alternatives,' a spokesman for Virgin Australia said on Tuesday.

'This has arisen due to the unprecedented COVID-19 crisis which has particularly impacted the aviation sector.'

A spokesman for the airline said government advice urging Australians not to travel - even between the states - had drastically slashed demand.

'As a result of Government restrictions, less people are travelling and we have made changes to our schedules to reflect this,' a statement released on Thursday regarding the changes read.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison closed Australia's borders in response to the crisis after figures suggested many COVID-19 cases in Australia were brought in by travellers returning home from overseas.

The decision stripped tens of thousands of airline staff, travel agents and others in the industry of their jobs.

Virgin alone was forced to stand down 8,000 staff members without pay when it grounded its entire fleet of 125 planes.

Flights across Australia have been cancelled, with less than 10 flights leaving Sydney International Airport on average every day during the pandemic - most of them cargo planes

The airline has even accused its rival Qantas of spreading rumours it would collapse following the decision to suspend services.

Both carriers have suspended international flights until at least mid-year.

AUSTRALIA'S BORDER RESTRICTIONS Prime Minister Scott Morrison brought in tough new border restrictions from 9pm on Friday March 20: 'Australia is closing its borders to all non-citizens and non-residents. 'The entry ban takes effect from 9pm Friday, 20 March 2020, with exemptions only for Australian citizens, permanent residents and their immediate family, including spouses, legal guardians and dependents. 'New Zealand citizens who live in Australia as Australian residents are also exempt, as are New Zealanders transiting to New Zealand. Exemptions for Pacific Islanders transiting to their home countries will continue to apply. 'Australian citizens and permanent residents and those exempt from our entry restrictions will continue to be subject to a strict 14 days self-isolation. 'Our number one priority is to slow the spread of coronavirus to save lives.' Advertisement

Virgin Australia complained to the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission after Qantas chief executive Alan Joyce told Sky News it would be unfair for the government to effectively nationalise Virgin to stop it from being placed into administration.

'The government can't pick winners and losers,' Mr Joyce said following the announcement.

'Whatever aid is given to one company has to be given to every company in that sector.'

ACCC chairman Rod Sims confirmed Mr Scurrah had launched a complaint against Qantas, following Mr Joyce's comments.

Under strict laws designed to stop the spread of COVID-19, the federal government has banned Australians from flying abroad in all but essential circumstances.

Anyone returning to the country has to enter a mandatory 14-day isolation in a hotel, supervised by the police and Australian Defence Force.

When lockdown is finally lifted, there are concerns in the travel industry that the cost of flying could soar - even on domestic routes.

Domestic flight numbers have been slashed during the pandemic, with most international flights also cancelled (pictured, a departures board in Sydney on March 25)

Industry experts said airlines are preparing to be given social-distancing guidance, meaning they will sell less seats on every plane.

This could see the price of a single airfare skyrocket, for example if an airline can only fill half its seats, it must charge double the usual price to maintain its profits.

An industry source told Traveller: 'After lockdown there will be a mad rush and a price surge for airline fares.

'It would be no surprise to see social distancing on planes, and we will probably see some set guidance on how planes should do this.

'There are currently cheap fares available, but this pricing is based on a full plane. It is inevitable that ticket prices will have to go up to maintain this if only a proportion of seats are allowed to be sold.'

Daily Mail Australia approached Virgin Australia for comment.
Like many of us stuck inside due to the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic, Kim Kardashian West has a lot more time on her hands. The Keeping Up With the Kardashians starlet has been quarantining and social distancing in her Calabasas home with her husband, Kanye West and her four children, North, Saint, Chicago, and Psalm.

In addition to tackling all of the daily duties that are required to run her household, Kardashian West was sucked into one of Netflixs newest docuseries, Tiger King. The true-crime series explores big cat breeding and zookeeper Joe Exotic, who is currently imprisoned for paying a hitman to murder his adversary, Carole Baskin. It is truly an insane story that has taken the globe by storm.

Since Kardashian West is studying for the California State Bar Exam which she hopes to take in 2022, she has been using this extra time to keep up with her studies while using Tiger King-themed questions about the law.

Kim Kardashian West is following in her fathers footsteps

Though Kardashian West is known as a reality star and a beauty mogul, her other passions are aligned with the work of her late father, Robert Kardashian Sr., did as a defense attorney. Though the starlet worked in her fathers office as a teenager, she became really inspired to learn the law and study for the Bar Exam in 2018 when she campaigned for the release of Alice Maria Johnson. Johnson was freed after serving 20-years on a life sentence for a nonviolent drug offense.

I had to think long and hard about this, Kardashian West explained to Vogue Magazine. The White House called me to advise to help change the system of clemency, and Im sitting in the Roosevelt Room with, like, a judge who had sentenced criminals and a lot of really powerful people and I just sat there, like, Oh, sh *t. I need to know more. I would say what I had to say, about the human side and why this is so unfair. But I had attorneys with me who could back that up with all the facts of the case. Its never one person who gets things done; its always a collective of people, and Ive always known my role, but I just felt like I wanted to be able to fight for people who have paid their dues to society. I just felt like the system could be so different, and I wanted to fight to fix it, and if I knew more, I could do more.

Kim Kardashian West has a rigorous study schedule

Instead of going to law school which is the traditional route for lawyers, Kardashian West has chosen to do a four-year apprenticeship with a San Francisco law firm. She hopes to take the bar exam in 2022 when her apprenticeship is complete. Still, the KKW Beauty mogul wants people to know that she isnt taking the easy way out.

My weekends are spent away from my kids while I read and study, she shared on Instagram. I work all day, put my kids to bed and spend my nights studying. There are times I feel overwhelmed and when I feel like I cant do it but I get the pep talks I need from the people around me supporting me. I changed my number last year and disconnected from everyone because I have made this strict commitment to follow a dream of mine  Its never too late to follow your dreams.

Kim Kardashian West Tiger King Law Questions | Instagram

Kim Kardashian West is using Tiger King-themed questions to study for the Bar Exam

Since the Skims mogul has two more years of studying to tackle, shes trying to make sure things remain as fun and refreshing as possible. Recently, Kardashian West shared a Tiger King-themed question that she was using to help her better understand the law.

The question read, A woman visited a tiger rescue zoo with her family. While she was there, she tripped over a tigers tail and injured her arm. Who should the woman sue and what is her best theory of liability? The KUWTK star captioned her photo saying, OMG my law school studying is Tiger King-themed today, Kardashian West captioned the image alongside a GIF of Maldonado-Passage laughing.

Though Kardashian West did attend college for some time, she never graduated. However, in California, prospective lawyers are allowed to study by reading the law, or apprenticing with a practicing lawyer or judge. If Kardashian West passes the baby bar, which is the first-year law student exam, she will be given the OK to continue for three more years of study.
This is a challenging time for nonprofits that work with schools to serve the most vulnerable children and their familiesincluding poor students and many students of color who, without a doubt, will be hurt more by the pandemic and its far-reaching consequences than their peers will be. The coronavirus school closures have made clearer than ever that public education is not supported just by public funding but also by nonprofits like the members of the federated network of affiliates I lead. These local organizations work inside schools providing wraparound supports for students in 26 states and the District of Columbia, in urban, rural and suburban America.

Were doing as much as we can to keep supporting students even when school buildings are closed. Local affiliates of my organization are helping to deliver food in concert with school districts, pantries and food banks. Theyre connecting with the children they work with via video chat. Theyre hooking students up with online libraries and telehealth counseling. Theyre providing financial assistance to families who have lost jobs or been furloughed and whose situations have become even more precarious than they were before the pandemic.

I know how important these supports are, and how much children have lost by not being in school. I grew up in the Southside area of San Antonio, where my family and neighbors often struggled with the effects of poverty and limited access to health care, stable jobs, food security, reliable transportation, and social and emotional support. School was the safest place for me and many of the kids I knew. Now, my heart goes out to the students in every state who have lost access to their safe place because of COVID-19.

Congress must ensure every student in every Title I school in America has access to a staffer who can provide them with integrated supports."

As the pandemic spread across the country and schools closed, the work of our local affiliates and other youth-serving nonprofits had to change. We were able to quickly adapt to social distancing guidelines and continue to fill gaps to meet the needs of students and families as the crisis heightened. Yet, in this ever-changing crisis and as more people become sick, families and communities will be affected in ways we can hardly yet imagine. After the COVID-19 threat lessens, well face an epidemic of lost learning, lost jobs and family security, increased mental illness and trauma, and increased family violence exacerbated by social isolation.

Even in the midst of this pandemic, the nation must prepare for how it will respond to that crisis.

In normal times, polite requests for funding to meet student needs would be enough. But this is an extraordinary time in the history of public education. And so, as Congress is considering a new round of stimulus, we must raise our voices and make this urgent appeal: Give states, schools, and their nonprofit partners the means to support every student and their familiesduring and after the pandemic.

Soon, nonprofit budgets will be stretched to the max. Among other things, that means less money and human capital for fundraising. States will need far more than the $31 billion allocated for education stabilization in the congressional relief package enacted at the end of last month. That money will help reduce funding cuts for education and essential activities such as serving English-language learners and students with disabilities, continuing remote learning, and providing mental health services. But compare that amount with the more than $53.6 billion for education stabilization allotted to states by the federal American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, which provided stimulus funding during the 2008 recession.

Ensuring educational equity will require an even bigger investment because we must address long-standing differences in access to health care, jobs, food, housing and digital tools. Those are the differences that will leave low-income communities and communities of color the most impacted by COVID-19 and its economic and educational consequences. To help the most at-risk students and their families, Congress must ensure every student in every Title 1 school in America has access to a staffer who can provide them with integrated supports, including physical- and mental-health services, housing, food, and assistance with other needs. These critical student services and professionals can no longer be seen as nice to have.

Congress should also:

 Increase funding for Title I of the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), the largest federal funding source dedicated to children attending high-poverty schools, by $12 billion.

 Allocate $2 billion in funding to the E-Rate program, the governments largest educational technology program, for students who do not have access to broadband internet service, now even more critical than before for student learning.

 Designate at least $175 billion for K-12 education at the state level, with funding allowances for support for youth-serving organizations to provide social-emotional support, mental-health services, and basic needs.

 Provide $250 million in emergency funding to the Corporation for National and Community Service, which oversees national service initiatives such as AmeriCorps, that help nonprofits hire staffers at low cost to tackle emerging community needs.

 Increase the Nita M. Lowey 21st Century Community Learning Centers Program by $500 million. This funding will support grantees in their efforts to provide academic enrichment and remedial instruction to more students, particularly in response to an extended period of potential learning loss, and to prepare students and families for a completely different back-to-school experience this fall.

 Provide $60 billion in emergency assistance loans to 501(c)(3) nonprofit organizations that are serving students, families, and communities during the pandemic and will continue to do so as needs increase post-pandemic.

When I was a local official in my hometown of San Antonio, I saw crisis response every time I rode with our EMTs. The initial response is to identify the level of immediate need, to bandage the wound, and to soothe the patient. As COVID-19 ravages communities, our national nonprofits are responding to the immediate needs, but we also have to dig in for the long haul. Thats the work thats going to matter when the fog lifts and our students and families deal with the aftershock.

These cant be stop-gap measures that happen only in the nations moment of greatest need. This is a chance for us to refocus our attention and ensure that every child and family has the educational and social resources to survive this unprecedented moment in our nations history, heal from the trauma, and thrive far into the future.
/ -- Tupperware, a conscientious global premium homeware brand based out of Orlando, US, announced measures to support daily wage earners during these times of distress. The brand has partnered with Zomato Feeding India in their effort to eradicate hunger amidst the chaos spread by COVID-19. Caring for food, particularly preservation is a part of Tupperware brand's DNA and therefore Tupperware wants to ensure that no one goes hungry in times where there is paucity of food. To assist Zomato Feeding India with their endeavor to feed daily wage workers who have been hit the hardest during this lockdown, Tupperware is extending its support to serve over 5000 families. Zomato Feeding India's initiative, 'Feed the Daily Wager', aims to provide food support to families and to help them have a reliable and nourishing supply of meals in the absence of employment opportunities. To add to that, Tupperware is running a campaign called 'Nourish the Needy', under which the brand is asking their associates to contribute towards the cause. Tupperware India will further match the total contribution made by their associates.

Tupperware as a brand believes in conserving, preserving and celebrating food, and all its solutions aid effective utilization of resources, including time, effort and food items - raw or cooked. The brand celebrates the spirit of 'Care for Food' in the month of April every year and undertakes various initiatives to spread the message of reducing food wastage. Tupperware is in its 4th year of association with Zomato Feeding India, has also provided about 500 durable and reusable plastic containers to the organization that will be utilized in the collection and storage of food grains for the needy. The brand will also donate INR 5 for sale of every 'Keep Tab' product in the month of April. These donations will be utilized by Zomato Feeding India to set up community fridges across cities. To add volume to the food being collected, Tupperware will organize a grain collection drive with select distributors once the lockdown is over. Tupperware has donated over 2500 containers to Zomato Feeding India, in the 4 years of their association.

Commenting on Tupperware's contribution towards fighting hunger and food wastage, Mr. Deepak Chhabra,Managing Director, Tupperware India, said, "The situation worldwide right now is extremely unfortunate, and the pandemic has brought the world to a standstill. Not everyone has the fortune of receiving two full meals in a day. Innumerable people are left hungry especially the daily wage earners as they have lost employment opportunity and have nowhere to go. Therefore, there is a great need for everyone to be involved in identifying and providing solutions to address this raging problem. We're proud that through our association with Zomato Feeding India, we're able to do our part.

We're contributing for the meals of 5,000 families and also running a similar campaign internally called 'Nourish the Needy'. We're sure that our associates will wholeheartedly contribute towards this cause, and Tupperware pledges to match their contributions as well. Through our durable and reusable containers, Zomato Feeding India's volunteers can store food safely, as they work tirelessly to feed the hungry. Not only do the containers make the transportation easier, they extend the shelf life of the food so that it remains fresh, with the nutritional value intact . We're honored and proud to be a part of this movement and we encourage everyone to do their part."



Commenting on their association with Tupperware India, Chandan Mendiratta, Head, Zomato Feeding India, said, "We work for our mission to end hunger. The current situation due to the COVID-19 pandemic has brought the world, and our country to its knees. The fact that daily wage earners don't even have food to sustain themselves is a very unsettling feeling, and we want to change that. We're thankful that Tupperware is lending a helping hand and aiding us in feeding the needy. Through their support we would be able to go the extra mile in our mission. Tupperware has supported us in the past as well in terms of storage containers. They continue to lead by example."



This pandemic was nobody's choice. Together we can lessen the suffering. Together we care.

Here is the link to donate: https://www.feedingindia.org/donate



Below are the links to Tupperware India's social media handles:



Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/tupperware_india/?hl=en



Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/TupperwareIndia/



About Tupperware Brands Corporation



Tupperware Brands Corporation, with Global Headquarters in Orlando, USA, is a leading global marketer of innovative, premium products. After a decade of success in United States beginning 1946, Tupperware expanded into Europe. In 1963, the company had a presence in six European countries and then launched in Japan and Australia. Tupperware also had sales offices in Africa and Latin America before 1970. Tupperware Brands has expanded to almost 100 countries around the world and entered India in 1996. Tupperware brands span several categories including design-centric food preparation, storage and serving solutions for the kitchen and home through the Tupperware brand and beauty and personal care products through the Avroy Shlain, Fuller Cosmetics, NaturCare, Nutrimetics and Nuvo brands. For more information, visit www.tupperwarebrands.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
MEMPHIS, Tenn., April 14, 2020 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- First Horizon National Corp. (FHN) will announce first quarter financial results in a news release, financial supplement, and slide presentation, prior to the market opening on April 21, 2020. A conference call will follow at 9:00 a.m. CT (U.S.) during which management will review earnings and performance trends. The call will also be available as a live webcast, accompanied by a slide presentation. The news release, call, and slide presentation may involve forward-looking information, including guidance.

The slide presentation, financial supplement and news release will be available by 6 a.m. CT that morning at http://ir.fhnc.com/Event .

Conference call information

Analysts, investors and interested parties may call toll-free starting at 8:45 a.m. CT on April 21by dialing 1-888-317-6003 (if calling from the U.S.) or 412-317-6061 (if calling from outside the U.S) and entering access code 1397185. The conference call will begin at 9:00 a.m. CT.

Participants can also opt to listen to the live audio webcast with the accompanying slide presentation at http://ir.fhnc.com/Event .

A replay of the call will be available beginning at noon CT on April 21 until midnight CT on May 5. To listen to the replay, dial 1-877-344-7529 (U.S. callers) or 412-317-0088 (international callers); the access code is 10141967. A replay of the webcast will also be available at http://ir.fhnc.com/Event by midnight CT on April 21 and will be archived on the site for one year.

About First Horizon

First Horizon National Corp. (FHN) provides financial services through First Horizon Bank, First Horizon Advisors, and FHN Financial businesses. The banking subsidiary was founded in 1864 and has the largest deposit market share in Tennessee. The company operates approximately 270 bank locations across the Southeast U.S. and 29 FHN Financial offices across the entire U.S. First Horizon Advisors wealth management group has more than 300 financial professionals and about $4.8 billion in assets under management. FHN Financial is a capital markets industry leader in fixed income sales, trading and strategies for institutional customers in the U.S. and abroad. The company is recognized as one of the nations best employers by Fortune and Forbes magazines and a Top 10 Most Reputable U.S. bank. More information is available at www.FirstHorizon.com .

FHN-G

CONTACT:

First Horizon Investor Relations, Aarti Bowman, (901) 523-4017

First Horizon Media Relations, Silvia Alvarez, (901) 523-4465
Dolores Denise Shaw, 64, of Philadelphia, a community and parent leader who served as vice president of the Eastern Pennsylvania Organizing Project (EPOP), died Friday, April 3, of heart failure at Somerton Nursing & Rehabilitation Center in Northeast Philadelphia.

Although Ms. Shaw held modest jobs, including work for a uniform-rental company, and later relied on public assistance, she became a dynamic leader and outspoken advocate for public schools and neighborhoods.

Public education was her passion, and she knew what needed to be done, said Steve Honeyman, a past president of the now-defunct EPOP. Dolores was a great agitator who was able to get parents in touch with their own anger so they could raise their voices and fight to improve schools for their children.

EPOP began in 1992 as a faith- and parent-based group of North Philadelphia church congregations, and was organized to improve communities and schools, Honeyman said. Ms. Shaw was vice president from about 2003 to 2006.

One of EPOPs successes was helping parents pressure the Philadelphia School District to build a new Frances E. Willard Elementary School at 1930 E. Elkhart St. in Kensington. The old school had been on a list of buildings to be replaced for seven years when a new construction program was launched in 2002.

Willard might have languished on that list for many years more but for Willard parents work with the Eastern Pennsylvania Organizing Project (EPOP) and the Free Church of St. Johns in Kensington," the Philadelphia Public School Notebook wrote in 2007.

At the time, the original Willard, at Emerald and Orleans Streets, was nearly 100 years old. It did not have a library, gym, cafeteria, or handicapped access  and the only bathrooms in the four-story building were in the basement.

Tomas Hanna, a former Philadelphia school principal and deputy superintendent, said Ms. Shaws death was a huge loss.

She was not only an advocate, but a teacher," he said. "It was clear we all worked for her. She made it easy, though never comfortable, because she was so clear regarding needs and expectations. We are all better and stronger for having known and worked with Dolores.

In a 2003 interview, Ms. Shaw said she got involved with EPOP around 1995, when her two younger children were attending McClure Elementary in Hunting Park, and parents were upset because many children at the school werent reading well. With EPOPs assistance, McClure parents set up a system to track how their children were progressing in reading.

In the following years, EPOP helped McClure reopen its library; assisted Sheppard Elementary in Kensington in establishing full-day kindergarten; and aided parents at Cayuga Elementary in Hunting Park in halting asbestos removal from the building while students were present.

We realized as an organization that education and schools and families are the front line in what goes on in communities," Ms. Shaw told the Notebook.

Ms. Shaw was born in Brooklyn, N.Y., to Marguerite Shaw and Major Vandiver. She was her mothers second child. At a young age, she came to Philadelphia, where she lived in Nicetown and graduated from Philadelphia High School for Girls. The mother of three later moved to Hunting Park.

She was a typical old-fashioned mom; she helped with my homework, said son Thaddeus. And she thought of others before she thought of herself.

He said his mother entered the Somerton nursing facility in February to undergo rehabilitation following surgery for a leg infection.

After his sister, Samantha, died of cardiac arrest on Feb. 24 at age 28, Thaddeus Shaw said, he signed his mother out of Somerton to attend her March 6 funeral. After that, he said, she fell ill and never recovered.

In addition to her son, Ms. Shaw is survived by son Daniel; four grandchildren; a brother; and other relatives and friends.

A funeral service was Thursday, April 9.
A court in Nanterre, France, has ruled that Amazon should greatly restrict orders in France in the coming weeks. According to the decision that AFP and a union have obtained, Amazon can only accept orders of groceries, hygiene and health-related products.

The company has 24 hours to comply or itll have to pay a fine of 1 million per day.

Since the coronavirus pandemic-induced lockdown started in France, Amazon has already been prioritizing essential items over non-essential ones. It means that if you order a video game on Amazon, it might take a week or more to show up at your home.

But all six fulfillment centers in France are still operating as usual as of today. Last month, Mediapart shared audio recordings of Amazon executives saying that they havent been doing enough to protect warehouse workers  it has been particularly hard to respect social distancing for instance.

Since then, at least one Amazon employee has been diagnosed with coronavirus in France. A union (Sud Solidaires) referred to a court, asking Amazon to shut down its warehouses altogether in order to protect employees.

The court has ruled that Amazon cant keep operating as usual under these circumstances. But the company can still accept orders of essential items. It has to overhaul its operations if it wants to accept more orders going forward.

According to Le Parisien, the decision will remain valid for up to one month, pending a review of COVID-19-related risks. The court could decide to extend the restrictions.
A woman who was told by doctors that her husband had zero chance of surviving Covid-19 after being admitted to intensive care has said he is being moved into the weaning phase of ventilation by doctors.

Sue Martin from south Wales, spoke to The Independent, about her husband Mal, 58, on 7 April  after he was admitted to ICU on 29 March  and said doctors would have expected to see improvement if he was going to survive the virus.

The doctors were so sure that Mal was going to die that they allowed Sue and her two children 10 minutes with him to say goodbye - but they had to wear PPE (personal protective equipment) and couldn't touch him.

The 49-year-old said: "All three of us stood around his bed. My children said their goodbyes to their dad who, just a few short weeks ago was absolutely fine. I never thought I could feel this much pain."

But over a week later he is still alive and is being gradually taken off the ventilator after 17 days on it.

Recommended How it feels to have your husband in intensive care with coronavirus

Ms Martin told The Independent: He isnt getting better as such, he is pretty much the same but the hospital have now said he has moved on to the weaning phase which is brilliant news.

So he isnt out of the woods and its going to be a long and painful process. We dont know whether he will wake up, or how he will be.

We also dont know yet if he will need a tracheotomy, but he is still here which is amazing.

"Ive been completely open with [the children] about everything and it was awful when we thought we were going to lose him to have to have a conversation about what we would do about a funeral in these awful times," she added.

Ms Martin confirmed to The Independent that the family has still not been able to visit Mal at the hospital and instead wait at home for their daily phone call from the consultant.

She added that the weaning phase is going to be extremely long, slow and painful and there are no guarantees it will be successful. But we are prepared for whatever it brings.

Coronavirus: London on lockdown Show all 29 1 /29 Coronavirus: London on lockdown Coronavirus: London on lockdown A man walks down a deserted Camden High Street Photos Angela Christofilou Coronavirus: London on lockdown Goodge Street Station is one of the many stations closed to help reduce the spread Angela Christofilou Coronavirus: London on lockdown An empty street in the heart of Chinatown Angela Christofilou Coronavirus: London on lockdown People in masks in Chinatown a day after the lockdown Angela Christofilou Coronavirus: London on lockdown A near-empty Piccadilly Circus during the first week of lockdown Angela Christofilou Coronavirus: London on lockdown Sonja, my neighbour, who I photographed while taking a short walk. It was nice to briefly chat even from a distance Angela Christofilou Coronavirus: London on lockdown A couple sit on the empty steps of the statue Eros in Piccadilly Circus Angela Christofilou Coronavirus: London on lockdown Making sure I stay two-meters apart  DArblay Street, Soho Angela Christofilou Coronavirus: London on lockdown A mannequin behind a shop window. UK stores have closed until further notice Angela Christofilou Coronavirus: London on lockdown A notice displayed on a shop window in Camden Angela Christofilou Coronavirus: London on lockdown As part of the lockdown, all non-essential shops have been ordered to close.Image from Camden High Street Angela Christofilou Coronavirus: London on lockdown A skateboarder wearing a mask utilises his exercise allowance in the Camden area Angela Christofilou Coronavirus: London on lockdown Communities have been coming together in a time of need Angela Christofilou Coronavirus: London on lockdown A woman stands alone in a deserted Oxford Street. Up until a few weeks ago, on average, half a million people visited the street per day Angela Christofilou Coronavirus: London on lockdown A couple walk hand in hand down a street in Soho, a day before the stricter lockdown was announced Angela Christofilou Coronavirus: London on lockdown During the first week of March, shoppers focused on stockpiling necessities ahead of a countrywide lockdown Angela Christofilou Coronavirus: London on lockdown Many supermarkers are operating a queuing system to make sure only a limited amount of customers are allowed in at anyone time Angela Christofilou Coronavirus: London on lockdown Stay Safe  Curzon cinemas are temporarily closed under the new measures Angela Christofilou Coronavirus: London on lockdown Pubs, restaurants and bars were ordered to shut as part of the lockdown Angela Christofilou Coronavirus: London on lockdown Camden High Street There are fears that coronavirus could lead to permanent closure of struggling shops Angela Christofilou Coronavirus: London on lockdown Camden Town is eerily silent on a normal working day Angela Christofilou Coronavirus: London on lockdown Shops and supermarkets ran out of hand sanitisers in the first week of the lockdown. As we approach the end of the second week most shops now have started to stock up Angela Christofilou Coronavirus: London on lockdown Empty streets around Soho Angela Christofilou Coronavirus: London on lockdown A noticeboard on Camden High Street urges the public to stay at home Angela Christofilou Coronavirus: London on lockdown Camden High Street, one of Londons busiest tourist streets turns quiet Angela Christofilou Coronavirus: London on lockdown Thriller Live confirmed its West End run ended in the wake of the coronavirus outbreak Angela Christofilou Coronavirus: London on lockdown Empty and eerie Soho streets after stricter rules on social distancing announced Angela Christofilou Coronavirus: London on lockdown A woman pauses for a cigarette on Hanway Street, behind Tottenham Court Road Angela Christofilou Coronavirus: London on lockdown A man steps outside onto Hanway Street, that sits behind what is usually a bustling retail hub Angela Christofilou

Ms Martin previously said that she wouldnt mind being a carer for the rest of her husbands life if it meant he could come home to her and their children.

Whilst we are trying to keep our feet on the ground, we continue to hope. It doesnt matter how long it takes, we just want him home with us.

Ms Martin also expressed her gratitude to the team of NHS staff caring for Mal: We are so, so grateful to the ICU team who are continuing to care for Mal, they, and everyone else on the front line are wonderful human beings.

The family have also been overwhelmed by support from around the world since the publication of their story in The Independent.

Im sorry I cant reply to every one of them [messages], she said.

"Our friends and neighbours have been just incredible, constantly checking in, providing meals, bread, cake and plants."
A woman who allegedly spat at a Garda in Dublin and claimed she has coronavirus has been remanded on bail.

Caroline Farrell, 34, of St Attracta Road in Cabra appeared at Dublin District Court today in connection with the alleged assault yesterday evening.

The court heard that the defendant assaulted a guard, engaged in threatening or abusive behaviour, and was intoxicated in a public place, on Attracta Road.

Ms Farrell was remanded until April 22 on a number of conditions including that she self isolate at her home and the judge imposed a 4pm to 6am curfew.

Woman who spat at garda arrested in Dublin

A woman in her 30s has been arrested and charged following a public order and assault incident, gardai have said.

They said it took place on St Attracta Road, Cabra at around 6.20pm on Tuesday.

A garda spokesperson said: The incident occurred when a woman approached a marked car and began banging on it and shouting.

When a Garda member exited, the woman spat at the Garda member and advised she was awaiting test results for coronavirus.

The woman was arrested at the scene and detained at Blanchardstown Garda Station.

Gardai said she has since been charged in connection with this incident and will appear at Dublin District Court this morning.
Marianne Long of the Atlantic White Shark Conservancy interviews Dr. Greg Skomal, a shark scientist with the Division of Marine Fisheries, during a special video that aired on the AWSC Facebook page on April 9. PHOTO COURTESY OF AWSC/Facebook

CHATHAM  Lucky students from across the country, and even other parts of the globe, had quite an opportunity when shark enthusiast and expert Greg Skomal joined the Atlantic White Shark Conservancy for an online Q&A session in which he shared some fun tidbits about his long history as a shark scientist.

On April 9 Skomal joined Marianne Long, education director for the AWSC, for a 45-minute chat about how Skomal got into the study of sharks. While most folks on the Cape are familiar with Skomal, a marine biologist with the Massachusetts Division of Marine Fisheries, they might not have previously known that it was a classic 1970s film that sparked his affinity for sharks.

I decided to become a shark scientist after watching 'Jaws,' Skomal said, offering an overview of his schooling, which includes an undergraduate degree from the University of Rhode Island and a PhD from Boston Universitys marine program.

You can always go back to school, Skomal said. Its never too late. Its really worked out well for me. I absolutely love what I do.

In response to chat-submitted questions from viewers in Texas, Canada, and other parts of the United States, Skomal gave an overview of his work, explaining that the division of marine fisheries is an extension of the National Marine Fisheries, each of which are part of state and federal environmental agencies. By working through and with such organizations, scientists like Skomal develop best practices for the various marine industries, including fishing.

Skomal explained how hed worked up through his career to becoming the on-the-water person most shark enthusiasts are familiar with. But it took time, and much of his early years were spent doing work on dead sharks, rather than on the water tagging live sharks.

Hes been focused primarily on Cape Cod in recent years because of the increase in the white shark population here, which correlates directly with the burgeoning gray seal population. Skomal and other shark scientists are in the process of sifting through years of data complied as part of a population study off the Capes coast that will hopefully give them a better understanding of why there are so many white sharks here.

One viewer asked how, without pulling sharks out of the water, Skomal and his team can assess the size of sharks, and what the largest shark theyve seen is.

We use a couple of different methods to come up with sizes of our sharks, Skomal said, adding that thanks to Wayne Daviss spotter plane, which results in photos of sharks alongside the research boat, they can use the boats pulpit and tagging pole to get a good idea of a sharks length. We come up with a pretty good estimate of how big a shark is. Our average size is around 11 to 12 feet long, but weve seen them up to 18 feet.

Skomal also told the students tuning in that a well-rounded education makes sense in pursuing a shark science career. He urged them to start with books and documentaries in the lower grades, and then narrow the focus to physics, biology, chemistry, and mathematics in high school.

Math is a major component of the research, he said. If youre interested in science, its not just riding around on boats and seeing some cool things. Theres a lot of math involved.

Skomal then explained his chosen method of tagging, why video matters, and what the difference is between sharks from different parts of the world. Shark science, he said, never gets old.

Im kind of living the dream right now just by doing what were doing, he said. [Todays students will] eventually replace me. If this is what you love, do what Im doing.
The spokesman of the Ogun state Police Command, Abimbola Oyeyemi, has debunked a trending video which insinuated that a Chinese company in Ibese area of the state had forcefully locked in its Nigerian workers.

In the video now making the rounds on social media, the workers were said to have gone on rampage because they were hungry and have been forcefully locked in by the companys authority.

Some of the protesters were heard saying no more management. This management should have sorted this since yesterday, pay us at least two month salary.

It also appeared the protesters were destroying some parts of the companys facility.

However, Oyeyemi said it was an issue between the company and its workers, and not a case of angry youths going about to destroy Chinese facilities as the video is being portrayed in some quarters.

What happened is a dispute between the workers and the management of that company, he said.

The workers said since the lockdown started, the management of the company did not allow them to go out of the company; that they locked them inside. So that was what sparked the protest.

It was the workers that were having problem with the management and it has been resolved. The incident happened three days ago. It is not as if members of the public are attacking the company, no.

As a part of measures to stop the spread of COVID-19, President Muhammadu Buhari had ordered a two-week extension of the lockdown in the federal capital territory (FCT), Lagos and Ogun states.

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Two more persons tested positive for COVID-19 on Wednesday, taking the total number of coronavirus cases in Himachal Pradesh to 36, a senior official said.

One person each from Kangra and Chamba district tested positive at Dr. Rajendra Prasad Government Medical College (RPGMC) in Kangra district, officials said.

Their history could not be immediately known. However, one of the two positive persons is said to be a journalist who travelled to Himachal Pradesh from Punjab's Jalandhar recently, sources said.

A total of 115 samples were tested on Wednesday at IGMC Shimla, Dr. RPGMC Tanda and CRI Kasauli. Two of them tested positive, 23 are tested negative. Report of the rest 90 samples is still awaited, a health official said.

The number of active cases in the state has risen to 18. They are being treated in various hospitals of the state.

Twelve patients - three each from Chamba, Kangra, Una and Solan districts - have recovered.

Four were shifted to a private hospital outside Himachal Pradesh, while two died.

The two deaths include a 70-year-old Delhi woman, who had been staying in a factory''s guest house in Baddi since March 15, tested positive and died at PGIMER, Chandigarh on April 2.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Meladul Haq Ahmadzai is a Global Health researcher and CEO of Taleam Systems who is hoping to use his experience of over ten years in the technology sector and three years in the global health field to assist affected people.



OTTAWA, April 15, 2020 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- As of today, there are about 714 cases registered in war-torn Afghanistan for positive Coronavirus. Meladul Haq Ahmadzai, CEO of Taleam Systems who is based in Canada, aims to use his expertise and experience to help the people affected by COVID-19.

Ahmadzai says, My vision is to bring the healthcare field and technology together to provide much more efficient, urgent and exceptional health care to affected war people in Afghanistan but also across the globe.

With the Coronavirus happening, Afghanistan not only needs funding, but as well as essential supplies and professional help from the private sector.

Ahmadzai adds, A solution to this pandemic especially for the people of Afghanistan is a program called tele health which consists of a device that allows you to chat with a real doctor to get urgent help without being exposed to COVID-19.

Meanwhile, the Coronavirus pandemic has caused chaos to the entire globe and has put tremendous pressure on the healthcare system in Canada and as well in the U.S. where hospitals dont have the capacity to aid for the sick.

Ahmadzai concludes, We have the power to be able to help everyone by using our knowledge and robust technology, and I believe we can make a change and help those in need during these tough times.

Taleam Systems currently provides computer support to hospitals and medical clinics in Canada. To learn more about the computer business, visit www.taleamsystems.com website.

Media Contact Info:

Meladul Haq Ahmadzai

melad@taleamsystems.com

613-521-9229

A photo accompanying this announcement is available at https://www.globenewswire.com/NewsRoom/AttachmentNg/7ae51a85-05e6-4bee-a63b-1e766b40551b
[April 15, 2020] Protective Life Pledges $1 Million to COVID-19 Relief Efforts

Protective Life Corporation has announced that the Protective Life Foundation has made a $1 million commitment to support both immediate and longer-term COVID-19 relief efforts. The giving will be directed to Protective's community partners across its company footprint, providing relief, support and recovery solutions for those who need it most. "As COVID-19 began to spread in the United States, the Protective Life Foundation immediately started working in our local communities to identify ways we can support those most impacted by this crisis," said Rich Bielen, President and Chief Executive Officer, Protective. "Serving others is part of our corporate DNA, and now more than ever, we feel a sense of responsibility to help lead in the response to these challenging times." The Foundation will work with a range of nonprofit organizations to meet critical needs, including food security, education, childcare for essential workers, economic recovery, and more. To date, the Protective Life Foundation has made commitments to: Birmingham Strong Fund, an emergency loan fund for small businesses in Birmingham, our headquarter city, that is focused on stabilizing employment, stimulating economic vitality and offsetting losses related to COVID-19.

University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) fund focused specifically on COVID-19 research and treatment development. Organizations supporting childcare for essential frontline workers, including YMCA of Greater Birmingham and the Rapid Operating and Relief (ROAR) for Women Fund.



Through its Foundation, Protective is committed to improving the quality of life in our local communities and collaborating with others to create the greatest possible impact. In 2019, the Foundation provided $4.5 million of financial grants to support organizations that impact our communities and create a social safety net, including many whose work will support COVID-19 relief and recovery.

About Protective Life Corporation Protective Life Corporation (Protective) provides financial services through the production, distribution and administration of insurance and investment products throughout the U.S. Protective traces its roots to its flagship company, Protective Life Insurance Company - founded in 1907. Throughout its more than 110-year history, Protective's growth and success can be largely attributed to its ongoing commitment to serving people and doing the right thing - for its employees, distributors, and most importantly, its customers. Protective's home office is located in Birmingham, Alabama, and its 3,000+ employees are located in offices across the United States. As of December 31, 2019, Protective had assets of approximately $121 billion. Protective Life Corporation is a wholly owned subsidiary of Dai-ichi Life Holdings, Inc. (TSE:8750). For more information about Protective, please visit www.Protective.com. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20200415005171/en/

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Nagorno-Karabakh Election Runoff Under Way Amid Criticism, Coronavirus Concerns

By RFE/RL April 14, 2020

De facto authorities in Azerbaijan's breakaway region of Nagorno-Karabakh are holding a second round of elections for the disputed region's leader on April 14 amid international criticism and safety concerns due to the coronavirus outbreak.

Voters headed to polls on April 14 after results from the first round of the vote on March 31 showed Ara Harutyunian, a wealthy businessman and former prime minister, winning over 49 percent, just short of the majority needed for an outright victory.

Masis Mayilian finished second with 26.4 percent.

On April 12, Nagorno-Karabakh's outgoing de facto leader, Bako Sahakian, declared a coronavirus-related emergency situation in the region, but stopped short of postponing the runoff election, sparking criticism from some who feared bringing groups of people together for voting may exacerbate the coronavirus outbreak.

Mayilian has urged people not to go to the polls because of the pandemic, saying he will not cast his vote today either, though he has stopped short of withdrawing from the race.

No international observers are monitoring the elections because of the outbreak. Only local observers and observers from Armenia are participating in a monitoring mission.

Nagorno-Karabakh was seized by Armenian-backed separatists who declared independence amid a 1988-94 conflict that killed at least 30,000 people and displaced hundreds of thousands.

Following a Russia-brokered fragile truce in 1994, the region has been under the control of ethnic Armenian forces that Azerbaijan says include troops supplied by Armenia.

The region's claim to independence has not been recognized by any country.

Periodic skirmishes have been taking place in the region.

Russia, the United States, and France are the co-chairs of the Minsk Group of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) that acts as a mediator in resolving the crisis. The group has been struggling for years to mediate a solution to the crisis.

After the first round, the European Union reminded Karabakh leaders that it does not recognize their entity and warned that the move could hamper the progress of international negotiations on resolving the conflict.

"In view of the so-called 'presidential and parliamentary elections' in Nagorno-Karabakh on 31 March 2020, the European Union reiterates that it does not recognize the constitutional and legal framework within which they are being held," EU spokesperson Peter Stano said.

Stano also reiterated the EU's "firm support to the OSCE Minsk Group and, in particular, to its co-chairs' efforts to bring about progress beyond the status quo and substantive negotiations towards comprehensive and sustainable peace."

The OSCE Minsk Group also issued a statement on March 31 saying it "recognizes the role of the population of Nagorno-Karabakh in deciding its future," but reminded the de facto leaders of the breakaway region that "Nagorno-Karabakh is not recognized as an independent and sovereign state" by any country.

"Accordingly, the co-chairs do not accept the results of these 'elections' as affecting the legal status of Nagorno-Karabakh and stress that the results in no way prejudge the final status of Nagorno-Karabakh or the outcome of the ongoing negotiations to bring a lasting and peaceful settlement to the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict," the statement said.

With reporting by RFE/RL's Armenian Service

Source: https://www.rferl.org/a/nagorno-karabakh- election-runoff-under-way-amid-criticism- coronavirus-concerns/30552387.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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Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf ordered all of the states K-12 schools closed through the remainder of the academic year on April 9 because of the coronavirus pandemic.

By doing so, he joined an ever-growing list of colleagues who made the same decision, but it is also one that is far from unanimous nationwide.

In fact, Education Weekly reports that only 23 states, including Pennsylvania, and 3 U.S. territories have ordered or recommended school building closures for the rest of the academic year as of April 14. As it relates to the northeast, only Vermont has followed suit, with Maine recommending but not mandating it. New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo shut down schools through April 29 but hasnt yet closed the door on the academic year, even though the state is the epicenter of the pandemic.

Wolfs decision, while long expected by many, surely came as a disappointment to students and their families who had hoped to get back into their buildings, even if it was just for a short while before the June 30 deadline to end the school year.

The news also came around the same time when the governor signaled hope that the state could reopen in a piecemeal fashion and relax the stay-at-home order in some places at some point, leading many to wonder why he didnt wait before making the final decision that would move all learning online until at least next fall.

So, why now and not later?

The administrations primary consideration has always been to make the best decision in the context of student and community health and safety, a statement from Pennsylvanias Department of Education said.

The decision to close schools for the remainder of the academic year was a difficult choice, but it is the safest, most responsible course. It provides schools, students and families with predictability and will allow school leaders and educators to focus on how to use the remaining weeks of the school year to focus on the innovative, collaborative work theyve been doing to continue to educate students.

Many districts across the state had already started virtual learning before Wolfs announcement came, and now they must find a way to have annual staples such as graduation ceremonies virtually.

Its likely, too, that other states will soon follow Wolfs initiative, but as of Wednesday, New York, New Jersey, Delaware, and Connecticut, and Rhode Island, which are all part of a multi-state council that will work together with Pennsylvania to reopen their economies in a safe and responsible way, have yet to completely pull the plug on returning to classrooms.

"We must continue our efforts to mitigate the spread of the virus during this national crisis, Wolf said on April 9. 

"This was not an easy decision but closing schools until the end of the academic year is in the best interest of our students, school employees and families.

As for graduations, Wolf said Tuesday that schools can decide at the local level how to honor their seniors. But he said schools are going to have to incorporate social distancing measures because the virus wont vanish by early June, when graduations occur.

They cant mass a lot of people together, Wolf said.

More from PennLive

High school students face missing big milestones during coronavirus pandemic

What will happen to lunches, proms and graduation?: Q&A on school years end in Pa.

Impact of coronavirus on school property tax bills remains a lingering question
A Delhi court Wednesday sent a student of Jamia Millia Islamia, arrested for allegedly hatching a conspiracy to incite communal riots in northeast Delhi, to judicial custody for 14 days, said his lawyer.

Metropolitan Magistrate Rohit Guliya sent Meeran Haider (35), PhD student and the president of RJD youth wing's Delhi unit, to judicial custody after the expiry of his police remand in the case related to the communal violence in northeast Delhi in February over the Citizenship (Amendment) Act, his advocate Akram Khan said.

The court had earlier sent him to the custody for nine days after the police said it was needed to unearth a larger conspiracy in the case.

Rajya Sabha MP and RJD leader Manoj Jha had tweeted, "Delhi Police called him for investigation and then received orders from above and arrested Meeran Haider, who has been helping people during the time of coronavirus outbreak."



The Jamia Coordination Committee (JCC), a group comprising students and alumni from the varsity, had condemned the arrest and demanded his immediate release.

"The country is facing a massive health crisis, however, the state machinery is busy harassing and framing student activists in false cases to suppress voices of dissent," they said.

The JCC said Haider was diligently working to provide ration to the needy during the lockdown.

Communal clashes had broken out in northeast Delhi on February 24 after violence between the citizenship law supporters and protesters spiralled out of control leaving at least 53 people dead and around 200 injured.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Naomi Watts and Liev Schreiber continued to prove they were amicable exes while out as they continue to self-isolate with sons Sasha and Samuel in The Hamptons.

The former couple were dressed for comfort are they made a supply run to their local grocery store.

Later the Aussie actress, 51, and Ray Donovan star, 52, were seen exercising separately outside their Hamptons home.

In it together: Naomi Watts and ex Liev Schreiber looked like they were still getting along during quarantine while out for a grocery run near their Hamptons, New York home on Wednesday

Naomi was dressed down but stylish in a denim jacket and snug lettings.

She tied her hair back into a messy ponytail and hid her face with sunglasses, also making sure to protect herself and her community with a face mask and disposable gloves.

Meanwhile Liev looked laid back in track pants and a zip-up hoodie, all worn with hippie-chic blue Birkenstocks.

After their grocery run Naomi did some light stretching while Liev shot some hoops.

Safety first: Naomi made sure to protect herself and her community with a face mask and disposable gloves

Game on: After their grocery run Naomi did some light stretching while Liev shot some hoops

While the former pair certainly seemed to be getting along, Naomi appeared to be going a bit stir-crazy in an Instagram video she shared last week.

The star shared her anguish with fans by uploading a slow-motion video of herself screaming hysterically.

Naomi violently flung her head backwards and forwards in a fit of rage as the sound of a lion's roar played in the background.

'Quarantine Day #756: When your printer, vacuum cleaner and dishwasher all break in the same day.... #ffs,' she lamented in the caption.

Quarantine crazy! Naomi Watts had an epic meltdown during self-isolation in her LA mansion on Tuesday after three household appliances broke in one day

Meltdown! The star- who has been self-isolating inside her Los Angeles mansion for three weeks - shared her anguish with fans by uploading a slow-motion video of herself screaming hysterically

Before heading to the Hamptons, Naomi and Liev were hunkering down as a unit in Los Angeles with their sons and his girlfriend Taylor Neisen.

New York-based Liev and Taylor have now moved to a condo in Los Angeles' Venice Beach so they could be nearby. It is unclear if she made it to the Hamptons with the blended family.

Liev and Taylor, who was crowned Miss South Dakota in 2012, began dating in 2017.

Meanwhile Naomi has spent more than a year dating Billy Crudup, whose wife she plays on the Netflix show Gypsy.
It's been a wet April across the Iberian Peninsula, and that trend will continue through this weekend as another storm systems take aim at southwestern Europe.

The first storm passed from south to north along the western Iberian coast toward the Bay of Biscay on Thursday and Friday. Areas of rain spread across Portugal and western Spain to end the week.

The heavier rain and delays will shift to eastern Spain later in the weekend as another area of low pressure moves from northern Africa into the western Mediterranean.

Areas outside of the heaviest rain will still have cool and showery weather to contend with.

This will add to rainfall totals that, in spots, are already above average for the whole month of April, let alone just halfway through.

As of Saturday, Madrid surpassed the normal amount rainfall for the month. The capital city has received 52 mm (2.05 inches) of rainfall so far in April, which is 115% of their normal rainfall for the whole month. The normal amount in Madrid for the month of April is 45 mm (1.79 inches).

Rainfall totals for the month continue to climb above normal in Barcelona and Lisbon. Barcelona has received 48 mm (1.90 inches) which is 115% of normal for April. Lisbon has already picked up 124 mm (4.87 inches), which is 229% of normal for the month.

While there can be localized flooding from heavier downpours, especially given the already damp antecedent conditions, widespread flooding is not expected to be a significant threat.

Instead, the continuing of the rainy pattern can lead to impacts such as delays in crop planting and disruptions to those trying to get outside for walks and other forms of exercise.

This comes as Spain begins to ease restrictions amid the COVID-19 lockdown, allowing some workers in industries such as construction to return to work. The continued rainy pattern could make it difficult for some outdoor projects to get started again.

CLICK HERE FOR THE FREE ACCUWEATHER APP

Spring agriculture is also being impacted, and that's brought a mixture of positive and negative expectations.

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"The rain will maintain good moisture levels for reproductive winter wheat and barley, and cotton and rice planting should be done, so the rain will maintain favorable moisture levels for these crops as well," said AccuWeather Senior Long-Range Meteorologist Jason Nicholls.

"On the other hand, the wet weather will likely lead to delays in corn and sunflower seed planting," Nicholls added.

The impacts of the wet pattern could even extend into the summer.

"The persistent rain will likely at least delay the onset of wildfire season, especially in the northeast," explained AccuWeather Meteorologist Tyler Roys.

"The rain can be a double-edged sword, though," added Nicholls. "If it turns too dry in the summer, then all of the extra growth caused by the spring rain can become extra fuel for wildfires."

So how long will the wet weather last?

"The pattern looks to stay wet and unsettled through at least the end of April," Roys said. "As the calendar turns to May, we will start to see a drying trend, but it will likely be gradual."

Keep checking back on AccuWeather.com and stay tuned to the AccuWeather Network on DirecTV, Frontier and Verizon Fios.
W ere a few weeks in now, and the UK like the rest of the world is still in the grips of the coronavirus lockdown.

Things are tough out there, but theres a silver lining  the UKs cultural output has moved online, and millions of us have been tuning in for theatre shows, live comedy and art exhibitions from our sofas.

Nightlife, too, has been making its way into peoples homes through virtual club nights, and people are finding ways of enjoying live music during testing times.

These are our top picks of the things to get up to online today  make sure to check out our main guide for things to keep yourself occupied with at home, too.

Take a pub quiz with Sink the Pink

Sink the Pink are bringing the party to the living rooms of the nation tonight with its first virtual pub quiz. The LGBTQ+ collective is teaming up with Wildcat Gin to open up "The Queens Head" for its first weekly event  expect an appearance from Ginger Johnson, as well as cabaret, fantastic cocktail recipes and lockdown prizes like booze and bog roll. Tune into Sink the Pinks Instagram from 7.30pm to get involved.

Learn how to pair beer with food

Learn how best to partner up your favourite booze with your favourite food with Camden Town Brewery, who are hosting an online session on Instagram live from 7pm. Beer expert Mark Dredge will talk viewers through the science behind food pairing, as well as his top tips for getting the most out of your beer. The brewery is also encouraging viewers to donate and support the industry via JustGiving.

Head to Ross Nobles comedy bunker
Labster, a virtual science lab edtech company, today announced that it is partnering with Californias community college network to bring its software to 2.1 million students.

California Community Colleges claims to be the largest system of higher education in the country. The Labster partnership will provide 115 schools with 130 virtual laboratory simulations in biology, chemistry, physics and general sciences.

As COVID-19 has forced schools to shutter, edtech companies have largely responded by offering their software for free or through extended free trials. Whats new and notable about Labsters partnership today is that it shows the first few signs of how that momentum can lead to a business deal.

Based in Copenhagen, Labster sells virtual STEM labs to institutions. The startup has raised $34.7 million in known venture capital to date, according to Crunchbase data. Labster customers include California State University, Harvard, Gwinnett Technical College, MIT, Trinity College and Stanford.

Lab equipment is expensive, and budget constraints mean that schools struggle to afford the latest technology. So Labsters value proposition is that it is a cheaper alternative (plus, if students spill a testing vial in a virtual lab, theres less clean up).

That pitch has slightly changed since COVID-19 forced schools across the world to shut down to limit the spread of the pandemic. Now, its pitching itself as the only currently viable alternative to science labs.

For many edtech companies, the surge of remote learning has been a large experiment. Often, edtech companies are giving away their product and technology for free to help as schools scramble to move operations completely digital.

For example, last week self-serve learning platforms Codecademy, Duolingo, Quizlet, Skillshare and Brainly launched a Learn From Home Club for students and teachers. Before that, Wize made its exam content and homework services available for free. And Zoom offered its video-conferencing software for free to K through 12 schools, which had mixed results.

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Labster itself gave $5 million in free Labster credits to schools across the country. The list continues.

Labsters new deal shows edtech companies can secure new customers right now -- without breaking the bank.

Labster CEO and co-founder Michael Bodekaer declined to give specifics on what the deal is worth. He did share that Labster works with schools one by one to understand how much they can, or want to, invest in teacher training and webinar support. He also confirmed that Labster does profit from the deal.

We want to make sure that we set ourselves up for supporting our partners but still also make sure that Labster as a financial institution can pay our salaries, Bodekaer said. But again, heavy discounts that help us cover our costs.

The long game for Labster, like many edtech companies, is that schools like the platform so much that these short-term stints have a better chance to lead to long-term relationships.

Well be keeping these discounts as long as we possibly can sustain as a company, he said. It looks like initially the discount was until August and now were extending it until the end of the year. If that continues, we may extend it even further.

Pricing aside, the real struggle toward implementation for Labster, and honestly any other edtech company focused on remote learning, is the digital divide. Some students do not have access to a computer for video conferencing or even internet connection for assignments.

The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted how many households across America lack access to the technology needed for remote learning. In California, Google donated free Chromebooks and 100,000 mobile hotspots to students in need.

Bodekaer said that Labster is currently working on providing its software on mobile, and has worked with Google to make sure its product works on low-end computers like Chromebooks.

We really want to be hardware agnostic and support any system or any platform that the students already have, he said. So that hardware does not become a barrier.

While todays partnership brings 2.1 million students access to Labsters technology, it does not directly account for the percentage of that same group that might not have access to a computer in the first place. The true test, and perhaps success, of edtech will rely on a true hybrid of hardware and software, not one or the other.
Showing their large-heartedness some Telugu film stars have donated big money to relief funds during this corona crisis. On the other hand, the current heartthrob Vijay Deverakonda has gone a step ahead. He is actively participating to act in all the Telangana government ads, actively contributing to all the initiatives the government and police have taken. He had even gone to the offices of Hyderabad police commissioner and Telangana DGP to motivate the field officers through a video conference.

It was said that the field officers (police) who have been working relentlessly in these stressful situations went emotional when he had interacted with them. He cheered them up with his jokes and speech. It was said that many police stations were seen holding thank you cards.

Vijay Deverakonda has always been a star with a different approach attitude. He is going all out to help the government agencies and use his celebrity status effectively during this gloomy period.
Local businesses are partnering to give meals to hospital staff members and first responders.

Mtuccis Restaurants, one of New Mexicos largest independent restaurant groups, is leading the efforts. The restaurant group is partnering with local businesses to pay for the food, and is handling the preparation and delivery.

Our hope is to be able to serve meals to all hospital workers and first responders in the metro area, said Austin Leard, one of the Mtuccis Restaurants partners. This is a time when everyone in the community working together will make a huge difference.

On the first day of the program, the team delivered more than 50 meals to nurses and doctors in the intensive care unit and the pulmonary unit, as well as custodial workers at Presbyterian Rust Medical Center.

We would like to thank Mtuccis for supporting our clinicians and staff members by donating food to our front-line workers, said Presbyterian Healthcare Services spokeswoman Alyssa Armijo. We would also like to thank everyone in our community for their continued support and donations as we work to combat this public-health crisis.

Southern Glazer Wine & Spirits and Beam Suntory Distillers paid for the food on Day 1.

Anyone interested in donating food to first responders and emergency workers should contact Leard at austinleard1@outlook.com.
Thousands of Americans would be alive today if President Trump had spent more time listening to the World Health Organization instead of trying to destroy it.

Trumps announcement that he is halting American funding for the W.H.O. just as the world is facing a raging pandemic is a dangerous attempt to find a scapegoat for his own failings. It is like taking away a fire departments trucks in the middle of a blaze.

Many Americans know nothing about the W.H.O., but its worldwide budget (of which the United States pays about one-fifth) is less than that of some American hospital centers. Yet it is charged with fighting Ebola and polio, saving childrens lives and keeping the world safe from pandemics like this one.

Trump says that he is cutting the funds while his administration reviews the agencys handling of the coronavirus. His administrations own pandemic preparedness plan, which he characteristically has failed to implement, calls for building support for the W.H.O.  because its a critical player to keep Americans safe.
Meghalaya reported six new Covid-19 positive cases on Wednesday morning with all of them having links to the first patient, a doctor who expired in the wee hours of the day.

Chief Minister Conrad Sangma took to Twitter to inform that of the total tests conducted, 6 have come positive and all had connections to the doctor who was the states first Covid-19 patient and was also the managing director of Shillong-based Bethany Hospitals group .

Of the 68 tested so far, 6 have come out positive who are all family members and helpers of the first Covid-19 positive case. 6 other cases are being retested. All the rest of the cases are negative, Sangma tweeted.

The deceased patient had tested positive on Monday and the state government had traced nearly 2,000 primary and secondary contacts. Tests had been conducted on 90 samples, nearly half of the primary contacts of the patient.

I am deeply saddened to inform that the first Covid-19 positive patient in Meghalaya passed away this morning (Wednesday) at 2:45 am. My heartfelt condolences to his family and loved ones, Sangma tweeted.

The first patient, a popular doctor in Shillong, passed away in Bethany Hospital. It is suspected that he got infected from his son-in-law, a pilot with Air India who had returned from New York to Delhi on March 16 and came to Shillong on March 24.

Though the pilot was under quarantine till April 7, he was asymptomatic and wasnt tested for Covid-19 earlier.

Preliminary investigations suggest that one of the relatives of the concerned person had a travel history to one of the infected countries and he was back in Shillong before the 14-day quarantine period was over, Sangma said on Tuesday.

Though the person took all precautions but sometimes we see asymptomatic cases as well, who dont show any signs but could be a carrier. Therefore there is a high chance that it could have been passed on from there. We are looking at all possibilities of how this could have happened, he added.

Meghalaya now has a total of seven Covid-19 cases and one fatality. The total number of cases in Northeast stands at 46 with Assam recording 32 cases, 7 cases in Meghalaya, 2 each in Manipur and Tripura and one each in Mizoram, Nagaland and Arunachal Pradesh.

While one patient each has recovered in Manipur and Tripura, two deaths have been recorded, one each in Assam and Meghalaya.

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Kazakhstan Protests Over Chinese Article Questioning Its Territorial Integrity

By RFE/RL's Kazakh Service April 14, 2020

NUR-SULTAN -- Kazakhstan's Foreign Ministry has officially protested an article published on a Chinese website that questioned Kazakhstan's territorial integrity.

The ministry said on April 14 that it "held talks with the Chinese ambassador to Kazakhstan, Zhang Xiao, during which the ministry protested against the publication of an article on the website sohu.com in China titled 'Why Is Kazakhstan Eager To Get Back to China?'"

The article's author wrote that Kazakhstan is located on territories that historically belong to China.

According to the ministry's statement, Ambassador Zhang was informed that the publication of the article in question "does not correspond to the spirit of the eternal multilateral strategic partnership stressed in the joint statement," a reference to an accord signed by Kazakh and Chinese leaders in September 2019 that aims to develop closer ties between the neighboring countries.

Source: https://www.rferl.org/a/kazakhstan-protests -over-chinese-article-questioning-its- territorial-integrity/30553141.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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"Our approach identified two genes  Forkhead Box I1 (FOXI1) and Rh family C glycoprotein (RHCG)  and one long non-coding RNA (LINC01187) that are overexpressed in chromophobe renal cell carcinoma and positive in related oncocytic tumors," says senior study author Rohit Mehra, M.D., an associate professor of pathology at Michigan Medicine and member of the Michigan Center for Translational Pathology."We investigated both cancers primary to the kidney as well as those which had spread out, and found strong expression of these three biomarkers," he adds. "Importantly, we did not find them to be associated with other subtypes of kidney cancer, especially in metastatic state."Follow-up work is being conducted to validate the new biomarkers for use in the clinic at U-M and beyond, Mehra notes, where they may be particularly useful in diagnosis of metastatic tumors or a subset of primary tumors that can't be readily identified under the microscope.The success of the group's integrative sequencing analysis approach is helping them develop a more specific kidney cancer diagnostic panel to complement existing tools, Mehra says. He notes the approach allowed the group previously to identify a specific biomarker for another rare kidney cancer called mucinous tubular and spindle cell carcinoma, helping to aid the diagnosis of challenging samples from U-M and other institutions.The current analysis also points toward the type of cell within a normal kidney from where chromophobe renal cell carcinoma and related cancers originate  a specialized cell in the lining of the small tubules in the kidneys called an intercalated cell. This information could be helpful in future efforts to treat or better classify these tumors.Importantly, the study also throws light on possible mechanisms that may underlie a variant of the disease called sarcomatoid ChRCC, where the scientists observed a complete lack of FOXI1 and long non-coding RNA. Loss of FOXI1, a key transcription factor, may contribute to de-differentiation in these tumors which tend to be more aggressive and may require additional therapeutic strategies.The research was led by co-first authors Stephanie Skala, M.D, Xiaoming Wang, Ph.D., Yuping Zhang, Ph.D., and Rahul Mannan, M.B.B.S. The other senior authors include Arul Chinnaiyan. M.D., Ph.D., and Saravana Dhanasekaran, Ph.D.The study was supported by the Michigan Prostate SPORE (2P50CA186786-06), National Cancer Institute (1U01CA214170-01, 1R35CA231996-01) and Michigan Medicine Department of Pathology.Paper cited: "Next-Generation RNA Sequencing-Based Biomarker Characterization of Chromophobe Renal Cell Carcinoma and Related Oncoyctic Neoplasms," European Urology. DOI: 10.1016/j.eururo.2020.03.003Source: Newswise
Virgin Australia could collapse and leave 16,000 people without a job if the Federal Government doesn't agree to a $1.4billion bailout package.

The airline has copped a battering during the coronavirus crisis and went into a trading halt on Tuesday for the second time this month on Tuesday.

It was widely reported on Thursday the carrier could go into voluntary administration 'within days' as it awaits the government's response to its plea to save it from ruin.

Virgin Australia chief executive officer Paul Scurrah said the airline's demise would have a 'catastrophic' impact on the economy and warned other suppliers 'won't survive this crisis if we don't.'

Virgin Australia could collapse if the federal government doesn't agree to a $1.4billion bailout package

Chief executive officer Paul Scurrah (centre) said the airline's demise would have a 'catastrophic' impact on the economy

'The impact of not being here would be catastrophic for the Queensland economy,' Mr Scurrah told the Courier Mail on Wednesday. 'This is where the real heart of our company is.'

The airline's international hub is based in Brisbane, employing about 5,000 people and contributing $1.2billion a year to the state's tourism industry.

As one of the country's two major airlines, its collapse would not only devastate the aviation industry, it would also potentially create a monopoly that would drive up the prices of flights.

Virgin Australia has already suspended all but one domestic route, stood down 8,000 workers and had its credit rating downgraded.

It has asked the government for a $1.4billion bailout to help it survive the economic downturn, and said this week it could fall into voluntary administration with a month if it failed to secure the lifeline.

However, Prime Minister Scott Morrison on Tuesday said any public funding for aviation would be spread across the entire sector.

'We haven't been picking any winners or picking any favourites here,' he told Nine on Tuesday.

'What we have been doing is ensuring sector-wide support, which has been already quite significant for the aviation sector.'

Domestic flight numbers have been slashed during the pandemic, with most international flights also cancelled (pictured, a departures board in Sydney on March 25)

Prime Minister Scott Morrison on Tuesday said any public funding for aviation would be spread across the entire sector

The government has already confirmed it will provide financial support for regional routes and stump up $100 million to address the cashflow crisis among a dozen small airlines.

Along with its biggest rival Qantas, Virgin is understood to be closing in on a multi-million-dollar deal with the federal government to support domestic flights between capital cities.

Pauline Hanson slams $1.4bn bailout for struggling airlines Ms Hanson said Virgin's 'billionaire overseas investors' should pay to cover the airline's dwindling profits. 'The Australian Government have a choice on their hands right now,' she wrote on Wednesday. 'Bailout Virgin Australia, or let its billionaire overseas investors stump up the cash? 'The truth is, Australian investors own just nine per cent of the company. The other 91 per cent is owned by overseas billionaires and foreign governments.' 'I feel gutted for the staff of Virgin Australia, because I spend so much time travelling with them. 'But I don't agree with Australian's paying to bailout a company who hasn't paid tax in this country for the past 6 or more years.' Advertisement

Deputy Prime Minister Michael McCormack told Sky News on Sunday the government was still monitoring the situation.

'I'll continue to talk to the key stakeholders, Qantas and Virgin, we need a two-airline aviation sector coming out of this (pandemic),' he said.

Labor has welcomed plans for the government to cover the cost of some trunk routes but said it would not be enough to save Virgin from going broke.

Opposition Leader Anthony Albanese said the government should purchase equity in airlines that need support so taxpayer money is protected, jobs are saved and Australia is not left with just one operator.

'We're talking here about 15,000 direct and indirect jobs,' he told reporters in Sydney.

'This isn't about favouring one airline or another, this is about favouring an industry structure that serves the national interest.'

Labor transport spokeswoman Catherine King also urged the government to extend a lifeline to Virgin to ensure there are 'two strong airlines.'

'Frankly, if the Government doesn't get on with the job now and quickly assist Virgin, I think we're in a really terrible position where it potentially will fail. We'll lose 16,000 jobs,' she said.

The Australian Council of Trade Unions says the government must do what it can to prevent an airline from collapsing, as Ansett did nearly a decade ago.

The union says the government's first support package is no longer fit for purpose because most of it is for fuel excise relief, which doesn't help airlines when planes aren't flying.

The government's total commitment to the aviation sector so far is more than $1billion.
Findings from a study conducted by Chinese researchers suggest that similar species of bats carry similar viruses and that when these bats reside in overlapping areas, transmission between species occurs more easily.

The authors say the study provides an important basis for studying the evolutionary history of bats and viruses in the context of understanding how to monitor host species and endemic areas to prevent and control emerging viruses.

Bats are reservoirs for coronaviruses and paramyxoviruses that have been responsible for various life-threatening pandemics including the severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) outbreak in 20022003, the Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS) outbreak in 2012, the 1994 Hendra virus (HeV) outbreak and more recently, the novel coronavirus 2019 (COVID-19) outbreak.

It is important to understand the bats-viruses evolutionary history

Given that bat-borne viruses are already known to be relatively host-specific, the researchers wanted to investigate this host specificity to see whether bats, as an ancient species, may have co-evolved with the coronaviruses and paramyxoviruses they carry.

It is important to understand the bats-viruses evolutionary history and rules for the virus tracing, say the authors This is the first systematical summary elucidating the relationship between coronaviruses, paramyxoviruses, host and geographical areas. It provides a theoretical basis for the viruses trace.

For the study, Libiao Zhang (Guangdong Institute of Applied Biological Resources) and colleagues performed co-evolution analyses using nucleotide sequences of the RNA dependent RNA polymerase (RdRp) gene from 60 coronaviruses found in 37 bat species and of the RNA polymerase large (L) gene from 36 paramyxoviruses found in 29 bat species.

The team says the findings confirmed their hypothesis that coronaviruses and paramyxoviruses co-evolve with their bat hosts. The results can be found in a pre-print version of the paper (currently available in Research Square), which is undergoing peer review.

MERSr-CoVs and human and camel MERS-CoVs

The study found that MERS related coronaviruses (MERSr-CoVs) isolated from the host species Pipistrellus hesperidus (P. hesperidus; found in Uganda) and Neoromicia capensis (N. capensis; found in South Africa) were the most closely related to MERS-CoVs carried by humans and camels.

The nucleotide sequencing similarity between the isolates was more than 91%, and both bat species are members of the Vespertilionidae family, suggesting that the viruses may have evolved from a common ancestor that infects different species of bats found in Africa.

MERSr-CoVs isolated from the Pipistrellus abramus bat, the Tylonycteris pachypus bat and the Myotis daubentonii bat also shared a nucleotide sequencing similarity of more than 83% with camel and human MERS-CoVs and all these bat species are distantly related to the N. capensis bat.

Daubenton's bat - Myotis daubentonii. Image Credit: D. Kucharski K. Kucharska / Shutterstock

Other viruses isolated from N. capensis, Hypsugo pulveratus, Vespertilio sinensis, Hypsugo savii, and Pipistrellus kuhlii shared a sequencing similarity with camel and human MERS-CoVs of more than 85%. Of these hosts, the Vespertilio sinensis, Hypsugo pulveratus, Hypsugo savii bats are closely related to the N. capensis bat and the Pipistrellus kuhlii bat is closely related to P. hesperidus.

The team says the 99.46% similarity in nucleotide sequencing and areas of bat host distribution between isolates from host Hypsugo savii and host Pipistrellus kuhlii suggests that the viruses might have originated from inter-species transmission of the same coronavirus strain in bats.

Pipistrellus kuhlii bat. Image Credit: Yakovchenko Iryna / Shutterstock

We speculate that the ancestors of the hosts of bat MERS-CoVs may be Vespertilionidae bats that are evolutionarily close to N. capensis and P. hesperidus bats distributed between West Asia and East Africa, and more attention should be pay on N. capensis, writes the team.

SARSr-CoVs

SARSr-CoV isolated from Rhinolophus ferrumequinum (R. ferrumequinum) shared a sequence identity of 99.71% with another R. ferrumequinum isolate and a 99.68% similarity with a further R. ferrumequinum isolate.

Group of Greater horseshoe bat (Rhinolophus ferrumequinum). Image Credit: Shutterstock

This high pairwise nucleotide sequence similarity among SARS-CoVs suggests that their hosts might be derived from the same ancestor.

One SARSr-CoV isolate was also found in the Aselliscus stoliczkanus host  a species that is phylogenetically related to the Rhinolophus bat.

The team says their study found that Rhinolophus bats were mostly found to be infected with SARSr-CoVs, while Vespertilionidae bats were mostly found to be infected with MERSr-CoVs, thereby demonstrating the host specificity of these coronaviruses.

Least Horseshoe Bat (Rhinolophus pusillus). Image Credit: Binturong-tonoscarpe / Shutterstock

Bat species and paramyxoviruses

On analyzing the cophylogenetic relationships between bat species and paramyxoviruses, the team found that group 1 paramyxoviruses are mostly carried by Hipposideridae bats, which are from Africa and tropical Asia. Pteropodidae bats in Africa mainly carry group 2, and the hosts carrying group 3 are closely related to the Phyllostomidae and Mormoopidae families, which are found in the Americas. Group 4 paramyxoviruses are carried by Vespertilionidae bats, which are found in Europe, Asia, and Africa

These observations suggest that closely related viruses share similar host species and that these viruses were carried by an ancestor bat that migrated from one region to another and then diverged into different bat species, writes the team.

Continual surveillance is warranted

The researchers say that overall, the findings indicate that similar bat species share the same geographical location and that these similar species carry similar viruses. The study also suggests that overlapping distribution areas are needed for inter-species transmission.

Therefore, the similarity of bat viruses is related to both the evolution and geographical distribution of their hosts, writes the team.

Liang and colleagues also suggest that outbreaks may be related to how species are distributed in a given area.

Continual surveillance of natural bat hosts of emerging viruses and endemic areas of viruses is warranted, concludes the team.
After a brief shot of cool air early this week, warm and dry conditions will once again build across northern Europe through the rest of this week.

A cold front ushered in a blast of cooler air from Scandinavia and the North Sea to start the week across the United Kingdom, Germany and northern France. However, as high pressure and sunshine return to the region, temperatures will return to above-normal levels for the middle and end of the week.

A chilly wind off the North Sea kept temperatures held to below 10 C (50 F) along the coast of eastern England as well as northern Germany and the Netherlands on Monday.

While it stayed mild in Paris on Monday, Tuesday brought the return of chillier air in northern France. While Tuesday's high of 13 C (55 F) was close to the average of 14 C (58 F), it was much lower than the recent warmth that was experienced late last week and over the weekend when temperatures rose into the middle 20s C (upper 70s F).

As the northerly wind lessens and the air flow returns out of the southwest, the cool air from early this week will once again be replaced by warm and dry conditions.

CLICK HERE FOR THE FREE ACCUWEATHER APP

High temperatures that began the week near or a little below average will return to above-normal levels by the middle off the week and will remain there through Friday.

In London, a high temperature of 21 C (70 F) is expected on Thursday. This will be the warmest day of the week and is 8 C (14 F) above average. While warmth will not reach to the same level that was recorded late last week and over the weekend, it will be a dramatic change from the cool air early this week.

While the upcoming weather will be ideal for getting outside for activity, amid the COVID-19 pandemic, people are urged to continue using appropriate social distancing practices.

Although the warm, dry weather is welcomed by many, rainfall is needed across much of northern Europe. So far this month, nearly all of northern and central Europe has received little to no rainfall.

Story continues

The dry spell stretches back to the middle of March is some locations. AccuWeather Long Range Meteorologist Tyler Roys warned that, "The lack of rain will become an issue for the rest of spring with drought conditions possibly developing." He added, "There may be some drinking water restrictions where drought conditions persist the longest."

London's Heathrow International Airport has reported less than 1 mm (0.03 of an inch) of rain all month. Similarly, Paris has received only 2 mm (0.07 of an inch) of rain. Frankfurt recorded their first measurable rainfall of the month on Monday, receiving 4 mm (0.14 of an inch) of rain.

Roys adds, "Much of these areas have had some kind of drought the last couple of years; for some, it would be back-to-back years."

Some rain may move into Ireland, Wales and southern England late in the week, but this may be light and not bring significant relief from the dry weather. Most of the area from northeastern France to Poland will be dry the rest of the week.

Keep checking back on AccuWeather.com and stay tuned to the AccuWeather Network on DirecTV, Frontier and Verizon Fios.
With the COVID-19 outbreak at Anson Place Care Centre in Hagersville having already claimed 19 lives, some worried families would like to bring their loved ones home if they test negative for the virus.

The health unit says thats not going to happen.

The short answer is no. If you are in a place that has an outbreak, the public health unit would not recommend somebody leaving the institution, said Dr. Shanker Nesathurai, Haldimand-Norfolks chief medical officer of health.

Nesathurai said he is taking this stance because of the complexity of diagnosing COVID-19.

The test is not perfect. So, in fact, people who test negative might actually be positive, he said. Some people (at Anson Place) have been tested twice because they were initially negative and became positive.

At first, only residents and staff showing symptoms were tested. But the health unit recently decided to test everyone at Anson Place.

Thats when Rob Ferguson found out that his mother, Ruby Reichheld, has COVID-19.

Reichheld, 99, has been living in a private room on the retirement home floor of Anson Place since moving off the family farm between Jarvis and Caledonia in the fall of 2018.

Shes shown no symptoms and she sounds quite fine. Weve been talking every day, said Ferguson. Her mental state is fine. Shes 99 years old and has high blood pressure, but thats it. She doesnt have anything else wrong with her.

Ferguson said he was worried this day would come and had been pushing to remove his mother from Anson Place.

I wouldve liked to have taken her out earlier, he said. My efforts were to do everything I could to get her out before she got it, and I hit a brick wall.

He now wishes Reichheld had been tested sooner, since she could have been ruled out as a carrier before the illness spread throughout the facility.

The longer she was in there, the more reluctant I was to take her out without having some testing done, Ferguson said.

Nesathurai said the health units policy of not letting seemingly healthy residents leave Anson Place balances the needs of residents, their families, and the broader community.

He noted that residents are in isolation and staff wear full protective equipment when interacting with them.

At this point, the residents are at low risk of getting sick from the staff transmitting to them, or from other patients transmitting to them, Nesathurai said.

At the end of the outbreak, if people choose to relocate to other places, thats something that can happen. But during the outbreak, we do not allow people to be discharged from the institution.

Nesathurais admission that the test results arent guaranteed gives Ferguson hope for his mothers prognosis.

A positive (test result) could be a negative, Ferguson said.

Hed like to see two confirmed positive tests on residents like his mother before a diagnosis is made, just as Anson Place staff need two negative tests to be cleared to come back to work.

But I know were short of the (testing) materials, Ferguson said.

Reichheld was last outside the retirement home on March 26, when Ferguson drove her to a Hamilton hospital to get the battery in her pacemaker replaced.

Prior to that, I had self-isolated myself for over a week and a half, Ferguson said.

He showed no symptoms when he went to pick up his mother.

As far as I know, my mom didnt have it either, he said. Im pretty sure we didnt introduce it (into Anson Place). ... Where she got it? Im not sure.

Ferguson remains frustrated that he couldnt get his mother out of Anson Place, but he had high marks for staff at the home.

I do appreciate the professional response Ive had from Anson Place and public health officers. Theyve been very understanding, he said. Theyve returned my calls and emails and havent ignored me.

With the news out of Anson Place changing daily, Ferguson is staying in touch with his mother from his Oshawa-area home and hoping for the best.

Its kind of out of my hands, he said. She had a good life. I dont want to see her end it that way, on a respirator. I hope she can recover from it, because I think shes got another 10 years in her. Well have to wait and see.
: A worker sprays disinfectant at the COVID-19 OPD at Government Kilpauk Medical College (GKMC) during the nationwide lockdown imposed to contain the spread of the COVID-19, in Chennai. PTI Photo

Chennai: For the first time in two weeks, the curve of new patients testing positive for the new coronavirus (Covid-19) on a daily basis dropped to a remarkable low of 31 on Tuesday, while taking the total number of positive cases in Tamil Nadu to 1,204.

There was one more death today, of a 94-year-old male patient from Dindigul at the Karur government medical college hospital who collapsed due to severe respiratory problems, taking the total State death toll to 12.

This may be the beginning of the flattening of the curve vis-a-vis incidence of positive Covid-19 cases in Tamil Nadu, but the Health Secretary, Dr Beela Rajesh, was not overawed by just one day's drop. She hoped that the trend would come down with more rigorous and quick testing and intensifying the Containment Plan (CP) to ensure the virus does not spread.

Of the 31 new Covid-19 positive cases today, which included 15 males and 16 females, Dr. Beela Rajesh said 21 of them were from a "single source" travel history, one had an inter-state travel history and the remaining nine their contacts. While 69 persons with 'severe acute respiratory infection (SARI) cases were tested today, none in that tested positive for the virus.

Denying the charge that Tamil Nadu had tested less samples, compared to other States like Maharashtra and Kerala, she said they cannot be compared in a facile manner as the date of the first case appearance and the base incidence cases were different for different States. "Tamil Nadu is hailed as one of the front-runners in containing this new disease," she said. To a query, she clarified the different types of masks for different people. "As the protocol is changing, everybody is on a learning experience every day and we change according to that," she added to a related question.

Delhi escapee held

Meanwhile, 30-year-old Nitin Sharma, a Covid-19 positive patient from Delhi, who escaped from the special ward at the Government medical college hospital in Villupuram last Wednesday, was nabbed by the police at Padalam near Maduranthakam late on Tuesday.

ends.
Artsakh presidential candidate Arayik Harutyunyan accused opponents of politicizing the coronavirus issue.

Speaking at a press conference on Wednesday, Harutyunyan announced the next victory of the Artsakh people after the holding of democratic elections.

According to Harutyunyan, the behavior of opponents and calls to postpone the elections are not dictated by concern for the people amid the pandemic, but by the realization of what the result of the vote will be.

All statements by political opponents about the postponement were political, he noted.

However, Harutyunyan assured he had no problems with individual politicians or figures. And he immediately added that "there will be no political persecution."

When asked about personnel policy, Harutyunyan noted that officials should first of all be accessible to citizens, work transparently and professionally.

Harutyunyan once again expressed his readiness to cooperate with everyone.
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Linkedin Shirley Ayorkor Botchwey and Retno L.P. Marsudi (The Jakarta Post) Accra/Jakarta  Wed, April 15, 2020 17:54 636 fc6853813033f564188675f8bd218a40 3 Opinion United-Nations,COVID-19,pandemic,solidarity,infectious-diseases Free

We the peoples of the United Nations... reads the immortal opening line of the Charter of the United Nations. It paints a picture of the creation of an organization from the ashes of World War II. A coming together of nations to overcome adversity.

Seventy-five years on, in the face of a deadly pandemic, we must again live up to our founding principles. As the secretary-general of the UN, Antonio Guterres, has underlined, COVID-19 is the greatest test we have faced since the formation of the UN. The virus is oblivious to national boundaries and immigration procedures in its trajectory of destruction and pain across our world. A formidable threat to the human race, this challenge undoubtedly requires a multilateral response for meaningful impact.

This is why our countries Ghana, Indonesia, Liechtenstein, Norway, Singapore and Switzerland have come together at the UN to draft the first resolution on the fight against COVID-19 (A/RES/74/270 Global solidarity to fight the coronavirus disease 2019).

While a resolution on the given crisis of the day is to be expected from the UN, this one represents much more. It is a signal of global solidarity. It is a show of force. It is the first intergovernmental statement from the UN on COVID-19, but it certainly will not be the last. This resolution is an overdue first step to convey a message to people around the world that the UN is responding to this crisis.

Beyond the words of the General Assembly, we must now give our full support to the UNs operational work at the service of the countries and the people most in need of international cooperation. This human crisis has proven to be a monumental national challenge for every government to reallocate resources and reformulate priorities. On the front line, meanwhile, our healthcare professionals and other essential workers are risking their lives  literally, to save humanity.

The UN system, in particular the World Health Organization, plays a central role in mobilizing and coordinating the worldwide response to this pandemic and in supporting national efforts. Beyond the short term, the WHO, in addition to addressing urgent humanitarian needs, is also dealing with the inevitable long-term economic, social and developmental consequences of this crisis, and building future resilience.

The UN with its convening power and resources on the ground is best placed to bring together not just every country, but also every possible partner, from civil society to the private sector. To overcome this health emergency with a spirit of solidarity, we need to promote action without stigma or discrimination, and ensure that no one in our society is left behind.

It is imperative to underscore that personal and individual efforts are required to complement the national and international response to the pandemic. We are therefore reminded that the first front line in the fight against COVID-19 is our own front door, hence the call on people to stay at home for containment. It is vitally important that every individual adheres to the social distancing and enhanced hygiene protocols.

The challenges we face remain vast. Nevertheless, the resolution adopted on April 2 expresses our optimism. We have put on record our conviction that the unprecedented crisis caused by the COVID-19 pandemic can be mitigated, and successfully reversed, through leadership and sustained global cooperation. We hope this resolution is one of we the peoples, towards a new kind of multilateralism, where the UN again rises to face a global challenge with a truly united response.

***

Shirley Ayorkor Botchwey and Retno L.P. Marsudi are, respectively, the foreign ministers of Ghana and Indonesia. Katrin Eggenberger, Ine Eriksen Sreide, Vivian Balakrishnan and Ignazio Cassis, respectively the foreign ministers of Liechtenstein, Norway, Singapore and Switzerland, have also signed the article.

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not reflect the official stance of The Jakarta Post.
The pandemic-induced lockdowns are widely expected to throw Europe into a deep crisis. Will Luxembourg's economy also be pushed to the brink?

The so-called RECOVid group consists of 27 international economists who work for the University of Luxembourg, national statistics service Statec and the Liser research centre.

The panel of experts analysed the potential repercussions of the coronavirus crisis on Luxembourg's economy and devised strategies that could minimise rising inequalities and soften the blow to the welfare state. Their findings helped the government to take coronavirus-related measures and also shaped Luxembourg's lockdown exit plan.

It is a tale of woe all too well-known: if employees cannot work and consumers cannot buy, the lockdown risks triggering an unprecedented recession.

According to calculations of the RECOVid group, Luxembourg's production is currently being reduced at a monthly rate of 28-42%. Each additional month that the country spends in confinement sees the GDP drop by 2-3.5%.

Even if Luxembourg's economy is relaunched at full swing after the lockdown, the country is still bracing for a recession greater than the one after the 2008 financial crisis, the RECOVid economists argue.

A collapse of the worldwide and European finance system cannot be ruled out, the economists said.

Many sectors that are particularly feeling the sting of the ongoing crisis are already sectors with low-paid workforces. The crisis could therefore steepen social inequalities. If the lockdown is comparatively short, the experts explained, poverty rates would only increase insubstantially over a one-year period - workers suffering income losses should be compensated, they added.

The economists argued in favour of the so-called "double-testing" method. This would allow officials to find out whether or not individuals have fully recovered or built immunity to the virus. The implementation of the method, however, can be complicated as 40% of Luxembourg's workforce are non-residents.

The group also addressed lasting effects of the pandemic on political orientations, international relations and cooperation.
Wrexham Council urged to open school fields and green spaces to public during coronavirus crisis

This article is old - Published: Wednesday, Apr 15th, 2020

Calls have been made for school fields and other green spaces in Wrexham to be opened to the public during the coronavirus crisis.

Restrictions have been imposed on non-essential travel during the COVID-19 pandemic, resulting in people being urged not to drive to parks in the county borough for exercise.

A petition has now been created asking Wrexham Council to give greater access to fields in the area.

It has been launched by members of a campaign group, who are opposing plans to build a school on the Nine Acre Field in Maesydre.

They want the land, which is currently locked off, to be made available for exercise, as well as the nearby Groves School site and other locations.

On the petition page, a spokesperson said: The restrictions on public movement during the current Covid-19 pandemic have created a need for Wrexham residents to have much more access to fields and green spaces in their own communities.

Wrexham has a deficit in publicly accessible green space, this includes local playing fields and school fields.

The restriction on movement serves to highlight how many of us are forced to use our vehicles to access open public green space because the amenities in our own communities are closed for daily use.

The few remaining parks that are open are becoming too overcrowded for residents to maintain strict social distancing protocol.

They added: We recognise that playgrounds remain unsafe to use due to the ease of contamination on play surfaces.

However, opening school and other playing fields will allow residents to pursue healthy activities, such as jogging and walking (many with dogs) while keeping the appropriate social distance.

The petition asks the council to open up all fields between the hours of 8am and 7pm.

It also appeals for Wrexham Glyndwr University to allow access to a fenced-off area of green space on Dean Road in Rhosnesni, where the institution wants permission to build houses.

The university has previously rejected the suggestion as it said the land was private.

The petition can be found here. Wrexham Council has been asked to comment.

By Liam Randall  BBC Local Democracy Reporter (more here on the LDR scheme)
Cabinet Holds Session via Virtual Network Under Chairmanship of Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques

Saudi Press Agency

Tuesday 1441/8/21 - 2020/04/14

Riyadh, April 14, 2020, SPA -- Under the chairmanship of the Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques King Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud, the Cabinet held its session today via virtual network.

At the outset of the meeting, the Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques briefed the Cabinet on the contents of the two joint telephone calls with President Donald Trump of the United States of America and President Vladimir Putin of the Russian Federation, reviewing exerted efforts to maintain the stability of oil markets to support the growth of the global economy, the importance of cooperation between producing countries, the contribution of other producing countries, and expressing satisfaction at what was reached at the OPEC+ meeting hosted by the Kingdom.

The King also briefed the Cabinet on the contents of the telephone call received from President Mahmoud Abbas of the State of Palestine, who praised the Kingdom's stances in supporting Palestinians and their cause, wishing the Kingdom and its people overcoming the Coronavirus pandemic.

In light of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia's efforts to stabilize the global energy markets and maintain fair prices for producers and consumers alike, and in the context of its constant endeavor to support the growth of the global economy in light of the developments that have occurred in those markets, the Cabinet praised the calls made by the Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques and His Royal Highness the Crown Prince and Deputy Prime Minister among heads of friendly countries in this regard, which resulted in OPEC and non-OPEC oil producing countries agreement during the 9th extraordinary Ministerial Meeting, announcing the Declaration of Cooperation, reaffirming the ongoing commitment to achieve stability, preserving common interests of producing countries, providig safe, economic, and highly efficient supplies to consumers, and adjusting reductions of their overall crude oil production gradually.

The Cabinet reviewed the final statement of the G20 Energy Ministers Extraordinary Meeting reviewing the effects on global oil markets due to the Coronavirus pandemic, its effects on worsening the global economic crisis, and the impact on sustainable development programs. The statement also affirmed the commitment to work together to reach cooperative responses in available policies, which will ensure the stability of the markets for various energy sources, taking into account the specific circumstances of each country, take the necessary and immediate measures to meet the challenges, and ensure a balance of interests between producers and consumers, in addition to ensuring the availability of energy sources needed in the health sector and other sectors that lead efforts against the Coronavirus pandemic.

The Cabinet discussed the precautions taken to confront the COVID-19 pandemic, the implementation of orders and directives by the relevant authorities in this regard to preserve the health and safety of citizens at home and abroad, as well as residents in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, and the provision of the necessary medicine, food and living needs, lauding the results of the Royal instructions to bring citizens back from abroad in coordination with a number of relevant authorities as they have started to arrive in the Kingdom from a number of countries, whereas they have been provided with necessary health care and preventive precautions.

The Cabinet was also briefed on reports and developments as regards the local and international levels of Coronavirus infection and expressed satisfaction with what was done in the Kingdom.

The Cabinet emphasized that all citizens and residents should comply with orders and instructions imposed by the relevant agencies to preserve their safety and contribute to stop the spread of the disease.

The Cabinet considered the positive estimates of global rating agencies on the strength and resilience of the economy of the Kingdom through stabilizing the credit rating of the Kingdom's economy with a stable outlook, as the move is considered an expression of the great confidence enjoyed by the Saudi economy, and a reflection of the strength of its financial position in facing challenges, especially in light of crises in general and the current exceptional circumstances.

The Cabinet reviewed a number of issues on the latest developments at regional and international arenas, pointing in this regard to the initiative of the "Alliance to Support Legitimacy in Yemen" for a comprehensive two-week extendable ceasefire to confront COVID-19 pandemic in Yemen, and prevent its spread, and create the appropriate conditions for the success of the call extended by the United Nations Secretary-General and his Special Envoy for Yemen to hold a meeting to discuss a proposal for a permanent ceasefire, and other confidence-building steps to pave the way for political consultations between the Yemeni parties to reach a comprehensive political solution in Yemen.

The Cabinet reviewed topics on its agenda, including some being co-studied by the Shura Council. The Cabinet was also briefed on the outcomes reached by the Economic and Development Affairs Council, the Political and Security Affairs Council, the General Committee of the Council of Ministers, and the Cabinet's Panel of Experts with regard to the agenda.

The Cabinet reached the following conclusions:

First:

The Cabinet approved amendments of its former resolution regarding a draft memorandum of understanding between the Nuclear and Radiological Supervisory Authority of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission of the United States of America in the field of technical information exchange and cooperation in the regulatory affairs of nuclear safety.

Second:

The Cabinet approved a memorandum of understanding between the government of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and the government of the Islamic Republic of Pakistan in the fields of developing renewable energy projects, and studying investment opportunities in the refining and petrochemical sectors as well as the mineral wealth sector.

Third:

The Cabinet approved a memorandum of understanding between the Ministry of National Guard of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and each of the Seoul National University, the Korea National Enterprise for Clinical Trials and the Seoul National University Hospital of the Republic of Korea.

Fourth:

The Cabinet approved an agreement between the Government of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and the Government of the Russian Federation regarding the mutual establishment of diplomatic commercial offices.

Fifth:

The Cabinet approved a memorandum of understanding for cooperation and exchange of news between the Saudi Press Agency and the Bangladesh News Agency.

Sixth:

The Cabinet authorized the Minister of Finance, who is also Chairman of the Board of Directors of the General Authority of Zakat and Tax, or his deputy, to discuss with the relevant authorities in other countries regarding a draft memorandum of understanding between the General Authority of Zakat and Tax of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and its counterparts in other countries to cooperate in the area of tax administration, sign it, and submit the final version to complete formal procedures.

Seventh:

The Cabinet authorized the Minister of Finance, who is also Chairman of the Board of Directors of the General Authority of Customs, or his deputy, to sign a draft memorandum of understanding between the General Authority of Customs of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and Singapore Customs of the Republic of Singapore on cooperation and mutual assistance in customs matters, and submit the final version to complete formal procedures.

Eighth:

The Cabinet approved a cooperation agreement between the government of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and the government of the People's Republic of China in the field of maritime transport.

Ninth:

The Cabinet authorized the Chairman of the Board of Directors of the Saudi Food and Drug Authority, or his deputy, to discuss with the United Arab Emirates (UAE) side a draft memorandum of understanding between the Food and Drug Authority of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and the Ministry of Climate Change and Environment of the UAE in the field of food safety, sign it and submit the final version to complete formal procedures.

Tenth:

The Cabinet decided to transform of the Historic Jeddah Project management into a program aimed at rehabilitating and developing Historic Jeddah in the urban, economic, social, cultural, historical, and environmental fields, and making its public facilities and services needs available.

Eleventh:

The Cabinet approved the system of pharmaceutical and herbal accessories facilities.

Twelfth:

The Cabinet drew the attention that the period of suspension of international flights, which the government has taken as part of the precautionary measures to prevent the spread of Coronavirus in the Kingdom, is not considered as part of either the duration of a valid visit visa for the purpose of tourism which was not used or its holder was inside the Kingdom during the suspension period or even the duration of the insurance policy.

Thirteenth:

The Cabinet amended Articles 1, 13, 23, 26 and 27 of the system of accredited residents issued by Royal Decree No. (M / 43) dated 9/7/1433 AH, as stated in the decision.

Fourteenth:

The Cabinet approved two systems: one regulating conflict of interests in applying government procurement and competition system and the other regulating behavioral and ethical standards of those responsible for applying government competition and procurement system in addition to their executive regulations.

Fifteenth:

The Cabinet approved the establishment of an academy to be named "Financial Academy" and its organizational arrangements.

Sixteenth:

The Cabinet approved two final accounts of the Decision-making Support Center and Saudi Irrigation Organization (SIO) for a previous fiscal year.

Seventeenth:

The Cabinet approved a number of promotions on the 14th and 15th ranks as follows:

-Adel bin Saleh bin Mohammed Al Al-Sheikh is promoted to the post of Undersecretary of Hail Region Principality (rank 15) at Hail Region Principality.

-Eng. Abdullah bin Mohammed bin Munahi Al-Otaibi is promoted to the post of Advisor of Information Technology (rank 15) at the National Information Center.

-Abdurrahman bin Mohammed bin Abdurahman Al-Amer is promoted to the post of Administrative Advisor (rank 14) at the Public Security.

-Mohammed bin Nasser bin Abdullatif Al-Manna is promoted to a post of Legal Advisor (rank 14) at the Supreme Court.

The Cabinet was briefed on a number of issues on its agenda, including an annual report of the former Ministry of Civil Service for a previous fiscal year. In this regard, the Cabinet took relevant recommendations.

--SPA

19:29 LOCAL TIME 16:29 GMT

0022

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Officers tracked down the woman who allegedly drove away after fatally striking a man Wednesday afternoon on East Central, according to the Albuquerque Police Department.

APD spokesman Gilbert Gallegos said the woman is expected to be charged with vehicular homicide and leaving the scene of an accident involving great bodily harm or death. He did not identify her.

Gallegos said the crash occurred shortly before 2 p.m. at San Pablo and Central SE, when a man was struck by a vehicle. The man was pronounced dead at the scene.

The driver fled the scene, but officers later tracked down the vehicle and eventually found the driver at her apartment, Gallegos said.

Police closed off both directions of Central at San Pablo, where a body could be seen lying in the median as officers collected evidence.

A few miles away, in the 1020 block of Valencia SE, police searched a heavily damaged white SUV with a handicapped placard. The drivers side of the windshield was severely smashed inward with large dents along the hood.

Officer questioned two people, a man and a woman, in the street beside the SUV.
Taking load of some ministers, scores of new entrants expected at Cabinet reshuffle

Supreme Court to hear Centres petition over new IT Rules on July 16

Coronavirus outbreak: Central government bans sale of liquor, tobacco during extended lockdown

India

oi-Ajay Joseph Raj P

New Delhi, Apr 15: The central government has banned the sale of liquor and tobacco during the extended lockdown that was called by Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Tuesday. This move, by the Centre is to ensure social distancing is practised to the fight against the coronavirus.

In a list of directives that was released by the Ministry of Home Affairs on Wednesday, enforceable under the Disaster Management Act, 2005, the government banned the sale of liquor, tobacco and gutka. Also, the directives said that people who spit in public would be fined.

Coronavirus lockdown: Allow liquor sale; illicit trade burden on exchequer, CIABC to 10 states

The novel coronavirus causes a fatal respiratory illness to people who test positive for Covid-19 and spreads primarily through respiratory droplets produced when a person talks, coughs or sneezes.

On Tuesday, Prime Minister Narendra Modi took a decision after holding a round of meeting with the Chief Minister and extended the lockdown till May 3.
By Lambert Strether of Corrente.

Patient readers, Yves asks me to say that concerns about Richard Vagues recent post will be addressed in due course, hopefully quite soon. lambert

#COVID-19

At reader request, Ive added this daily chart:

New York slightly, though perceptibly, flattening, still

The data is the John Hopkins CSSE data. Here is the site. I have changed to a logarithmic scale for US States and territories, adjusted for population. See Vice, How to Read the Coronavirus Graphs:

Quantities that grow exponentially, when depicted on a linear scale, look like curves that bend sharply upward, with the curve getting constantly steeper. On a log scale, exponentially growing values can be depicted with straight diagonal lines. Thats the beauty of plotting things on log scales. Plots are meant to make things easy to understand, and we humans are much more adept at understanding linear, straight-line behavior. Log plots enable us to grasp exponential behavior by transferring the complexity of constantly steepening curves into the simplicity of an exponentially increasing scale. On a log scale, we want to constantly be making the line more and more horizontal. The general concept of flattening is still a good one, but its never going to curve down. And so what we should be looking, and hoping for is a trend toward horizontal.

I removed population adjustment, based on this exchange from alert reader dk:

A quick chart for those who keep asking for per-capita adjustment: Heres population vs total death toll one week after 10th death. No relationship. As Ive been saying, population does not affect pace of spread. All per-capita figures do is make smaller countries look worse. pic.twitter.com/yWsa4YNNxI  John Burn-Murdoch (@jburnmurdoch) March 29, 2020

I hope this change is helpful. One also notices at once that the New York and New Jersey metroplexes stand out.

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

* * *

2020

* * * Biden (D)(1): Barack Obamas endorsement of Joe Biden, annotated [WaPo]. He was the one asking what every policy would do for the middle class and everyone striving to get into the middle class . For the second time in 12 years we will have the incredible task of rebuilding our economy, and to meet the moment, the Democratic Party will have to be bold. We have to protect the gains we made with the Affordable Care Act, but its also time to go further. We should make plans affordable for everyone, provide everyone with a public option, expand Medicare and finish the job so that health care isnt just a right but a reality for everybody.  a politics that too often has been characterized by corruption, carelessness, self-dealing, disinformation, ignorance and just plain meanness, and to change that, we need Americans of all political stripes to get involved in our politics and our public life like never before.  Worth a read, especially if youre not drinking coffee. Its a good speech, and I might even find it credible and heartening if I didnt know the guy. Noteworthy: In all the platitudinous orotundity, there is exactly one concrete policy statement that mentions a statute: #MedicareForAll is off the table (as indeed Biden already signaled, with his insulting proposal to lower Medicare eligibility to 60. WaPos annotation: Since Sanderss exit, Biden has moved further left on health care. Well, they would say that, wouldnt they?) So the deliverable from the domestic policy task force will be a shit sandwich. Of course, a miracle could always occur. Biden (D)(2): Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Has Never Spoken to Joe Biden. Heres What She Would Say. (interview) [New York Times]. [AOC:] Theres this talk about unity as this kind of vague, kumbaya, kind of term. Unity and unifying isnt a feeling, its a process. And what I hope does not happen in this process is that everyone just tries to shoo it along and brush real policies  that mean the difference of life and death or affording your insulin and not affording your insulin  just brush that under the rug as an aesthetic difference of style. Theres also this idea that if we all just support the nominee that voters will come along as well. Ive flagged, very early, two patterns that I saw [among Bidens campaign], which is underperformance among Latinos and young people, both of which are very important demographics in November. And so, I dont think this conversation about changes that need to be made is one about throwing the progressive wing of the party a couple of bones  I think this is about how we can win. For example: They floated this olive branch to the progressive left of lowering the Medicare age to 60. And its almost insulting. I think Hillary was looking at policies that lowered it to 50. So were talking about a progressive concession that is 10 years worse than what the nominee had in 2016. No almost about it. Bidens people arent dumb. The Democrat Party model has been appealing to suburban Republicans for some time. I think, to them, Sanders voters are nice-to-have, not have-to-have. That doesnt mean theyre right; these are, after all, the same factions of the political class that elevated Trump, and then spent $1.4 billion losing to him and, while Obama was in charge de jure, lost 1000 seats to the Republicans. Meritocrats cannot accept that they are not smart or good, any more than a feudal knight would consider not being a Christian. But it aint necessarily so. UPDATE Regarding if we all just support the nominee that voters will come along as well, I am sure most Sanders supporters remember this statement very well: "We are not a movement where I can snap my fingers and say to you or to anybody else what you should do, because you won't listen to me. You shouldn't. You'll make these decisions yourself." pic.twitter.com/4pkGmQIr5L  Mattie Washburn (@MattieWashburn) April 13, 2020 Of course, its hard to snap your fingers when your knuckles have been smashed by some goons hard men, so even gestures are not so easy. Biden (D)(3): You can bet she cleared through Neera: Stacey Abrams on VP: I would be an excellent running mate. I have the capacity to attract voters by motivating typically ignored communities. I have a strong history of executive and management experience in the private, public, and nonprofit sectors. https://t.co/WyaJ1xCXNi  Alex Thompson (@AlxThomp) April 15, 2020 UPDATE Biden (D)(4): The Media Floodgates Finally Open on Biden Sexual Assault Allegation [Vanity Fair].  Oddly late, no? A media wrap-up. (I think the major effect will not be on Biden, but on Sanders voters, some measurable proportion of whom will not vote for a (candidate for whom there is a prima facie case that he is a) rapist on principle. UPDATE Biden (D)(5): Old Folks Like Biden, and That Could Really Matter in November [New York Magazine].  Im an old codger, so I get to play this musical interlude: With the right medication Sanders (D)(1): Bernie Offered Us the Future. Why Did He Failand What Did We Forfeit? [Moshik Temkin, Newsweek]. This is the most measured assessment Ive seen: In the end, though, Sanders was defeated by circumstances beyond his control. As in 2016, he faced unrelenting hostility and derision from much of the media, especially cable news networks such as CNN and MSNBC, the channels beloved by the boomers who voted overwhelmingly for Biden. On those networks it is practically impossible to hear anyone remotely friendly to Sanders. He was smeared as sexist and racist and breezily compared to Trump, or the Nazis, or the coronavirus. Financial elites despised him, warning incessantly that a Sanders presidency would destroy the economy, when what they really meant was that he would try to make the economy more equitable by forcing billionaires and corporations to pay taxes. Over it all hung the stench of anti-Semitic tropes: Sanders yelled too much, was angry all the time, wasnt a team player, waved his arms or pointed his finger, was hiding his taxes, harbored secret wealth. One wealthy MSNBC pundit, without offering an explanation, stated that Sanders is sort of not pro-woman and makes my skin crawl (while another pundit vigorously nodded). The ugly media narrative about so-called Bernie Bros served to erase the fact that his supporters are disproportionately poor, working class, and women, from communities of color, working at Amazon, Wal-Mart, public schools, and the postal service, unable to buy a home or get out of debt, donating what little they could to the Sanders campaign. Despite all this, Sanders rose steadily in the polls during the race and was the front-runner after the first three state primaries; no other candidate had ever won the first three states and gone on to lose the nomination. It took an extraordinary political consolidation, organized by a panicked Democratic leadership to stop him (reportedly, Barack Obama himself was involved, far ahead of his endorsement of the presumptive nominee earlier today.) Worth reading in full. UPDATE Sanders (D)(2): Scahill zeroes in on two key questions: Just as it is a waste of energy to attack Sanders, it is beneath Sanders to lecture his supporters for having serious questions about Bidens candidacy. Or to disavow former staffers like @briebriejoy. People have every right to be angry at the choices they now face in November.  jeremy scahill (@jeremyscahill) April 15, 2020 As I have repeatedly said, Sanders should immediately start using his list to raise money for strikers: There is a tide in the affairs of men, Which taken at the flood, leads on to fortune (of course, Shakespeares irony here is savage, since it is Brutus who speaks this line But its still true, isnt it? A movement needs to move! And if you want a revolution, there it is. And the beauty part is that this pivot in no way contradicts his undertaking to Biden! Trump (R)(1): For good or ill, tech profits from social distancing, inserting itself into all human relations mediated digitally in order to extract rents: President Trump just tapped top tech and telecom execs for his Great American Economic Revival Industry Groups Includes Apple's @tim_cook, Google's @sundarpichai, Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg + Verizon CEO @hansvestberg, T-Mobile's @MikeSievert, Comcast's Brian Roberts pic.twitter.com/RjXDRnr2Rw  John Hendel (@JohnHendel) April 14, 2020 One might also wonder how many of these executives have side gigs at the bailout trough, and whether that will affect their campaign donations. Warren (D)(1): Oh, Liz: I figured Democrats would come together quickly but I dont think I would have imagined Elizabeth Warren releasing a pro-Biden video that includes a shot of him working alongside Tim Geithner pic.twitter.com/S2mpbPiP30  Ryan Lizza (@RyanLizza) April 15, 2020 I guess this once-famous video of Warren grilling Geithner was just kayfabe? Warrens endorsement of Biden with this video is a gesture of ritual fealty far more grotesque and damaging than the Sanders endorsement, because it forecloses discussion of Obamas miserable performance in the last crash, by one who might be presume to be an expert in that subject. Gaaaaaaah. Warren (D)(2): A call to Elizabeth Warren to resume her candidacy for the 2020 election [The Hill]. Stop for a minute and think about this. This means both the presumptive Democratic nominee for president, Joe Biden, as well as the presumptive Republican nominee for president, Donald Trump, have been accused of sexual assault. These are incredibly serious allegations. It is possible that some allegations are not true, but that is not very likely given the number of accusers and the fact that false reporting of sexual assault is rare. How can it be that in the United States, a country of more than 330 million people, and in a field that started with more than 30 candidates, these are the two choices we are left with? It is preposterous and unacceptable.  It is, that. * * * Voter Suppression At Its Finest: Wisconsin Citizens Say Missing Ballots, Lines and Coronavirus Kept Them from Being Counted in Election [PBS]. Over the past several days, reporters interviewed 32 would-be voters who said they were forced to choose between going to the polls during a pandemic and not having their votes counted. More than 500 people, responding to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel in an online form, said they requested their ballots in advance but did not receive them in time. A picture emerged of voters disappointed, angry and confused about how the election played out in a state that has long prided itself on taking voting seriously.  Well, Bernie did say to postpone it



Realignment and Legitimacy

UPDATE Nothing fundamental will change: "I immediately sought out advice from Bob Rubin." That's how House Democratic Ways and Means leader Richard Neal describes how he and Pelosi put together the bailout. Don't worry, he also asked Hank Paulson. Gotta get both co-CEOs of Goldman. https://t.co/AzTB7VTOmH  Matt Stoller (@matthewstoller) April 13, 2020 Congress negotiations on emergency relief funds stall as lawmakers hear from constituents [CNN]. Lawmakers are pressing for these programs to work probably more than anyone else in the system right now. They drafted them, they voted for them, they own them. But more importantly, their days are spent inundated with calls from constituents asking for answers or raising concerns, according to more than a dozen CNN has spoken to over the last few weeks.  And they all held hands and leaped over the clip together, both in the House and the Senate, didnt they? High stakes. Oh, and the (current) date for Congress to reopen is May 4, barring an emergency. Leaders dont want their members back in Washington in April. If theyre being candid, they dont want their members back until the country starts to open up. Members dont want to be back either. Whether the economic situation allows that to hold remains to be seen.  I guess our legislators arent (ugh) essential workers, then?

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.

Retail Sales: Retail Sales Hit By The Coronvirus in March 2020 [Econintersect]. Retail sales SIGNIFICANTLY declined according to US Census headline data  and now is in contraction. The three-month rolling average also significantly declined. This is the first major report which was affected by the coronavirus shutdown. And this was not a complete month so hold on and wait for next month which should be much worse.  Brutal:

The details of the retail sales report are absolutely brutal. pic.twitter.com/is0WK3p5YP  Bespoke (@bespokeinvest) April 15, 2020

Industrial Production: March 2020 Headline Industrial Production In Coronavirus Contraction [Econintersect]. The best way to view this is the 3-month rolling averages which declined. The decline was due to the impact of the coronavirus which caused many firms to suspend operations. Note that manufacturing is in contraction year-over-year  and capacity utilization remained in expansion year-over-year. Consider this report significantly worse than last month.

Manufacturing: April 2020 Empire State Manufacturing Index Now At Lowest Level In History [Econintersect]. The Empire State Manufacturing Survey index again significantly declined to levels not ever seen before. Key elements significantly declined  it seems we are in a recession. Note that survey responses were collected between April 2 and April 10.  This is survey, however. I would guess that survey and data will, unusually, correspond.

Inventories: February 2020 Business Inventories Level Remain Elevated But Improved Again [Econintersect]. Headlines say final business sales data (retail plus wholesale plus manufacturing) declined month-over-month. The rolling averages improved. Inventories remain elevated. This data set is for the month before any coronavirus impact was observed.

* * *

Commodities: Wheat Giants Are Starting to Hoard Supply [Bloomberg]. The wheat market is starting to get shaken up by the coronavirus pandemic. Panic buying of food might have largely eased at grocery stores, but governments are beginning to get more serious about securing supplies of key staples like grains. From export restrictions to plans to hoard more, there are signs that typical trade routes are being affected as this season nears an end. Shipment limits across the key Black Sea region are already having knock-on effects, with cargoes being held up and offers dwindling in the latest tender by Egypt, the biggest buyer.  Bread, IIRC, figures largely in slogans devised by insurgents. Peace, Land, Bread from the Bolsheviks, for example.

Concentration: Amazon slashes commission rates for program that gives publishers a cut of sales [CNBC]. [Amazon] notified members of the program, known as Amazon Associates, that it will slash commission rates beginning April 21, according to an email obtained by CNBC Rates are being cut for a number of affiliate product categories. For example, the affiliate cut from purchases of furniture and home improvement products has fallen from 8% to 3%, while the commission rate for grocery products has slid from 5% to 1%, according to a document obtained by CNBC. An Amazon spokesperson confirmed to CNBC that the company notified U.S. associates Tuesday of the fee change. The spokesperson declined to comment on whether the decision was a result of the coronavirus pandemic.  Hmm. Everywhere I hear that online retail is going through the roof, so this would seem an especially opportune time for Amazon to screw its affiliates. Good job, Jeff.

Tech: Grinning Tim Cook Announces New iPhone Will No Longer Be Compatible With AirPods [The Onion].  You know he wants to.

Manufacturing: Boeing Lost Orders for 150 Max Jets in March [Bloomberg]. Boeings order book for the Max is shrinking as the planemaker works with global regulators to clear its best-selling jetliner to resume commercial flight by midyear. The company couldnt face worse timing for the comeback effort, with airlines that until recently had clamored for the single-aisle aircraft now fighting for their financial lives. The planemaker suspended output of the Max in January and plans to slowly restart manufacturing soon to stress-test its supply chain and avoid flooding the market with unneeded planes. The long grounding may have an unexpected benefit for some cash-strapped customers. If they exercise a clause that allows them to walk away from an order after a 12-month delay, Boeing is typically obligated to refund any advance payments.

Manufacturing: White House Lauds GM for Quickly Starting Ventilator Output [Bloomberg]. GMs one-month sprint to turn one of its car-parts plants into a ventilator production facility prompted Peter Navarro, the White House trade adviser tapped to coordinate Defense Production Act matters, to praise the company for moving swiftly and in Trump time to manufacture the devices for delivery to hospitals in Chicago and elsewhere.

Honey for the Bears: Goldman Sees Advanced Economies Shrinking 35% Amid Pandemic [Bloomberg]. Advanced economies will shrink about 35% this quarter from the prior three months, four times as much as the previous record set in 2008 during the financial crisis, according to annualized figures from Goldman Sachs Group Inc. How fast economies will rebound is an open question because nobody knows how quickly people can get back to work, New York-based economist Jan Hatzius wrote in a note to clients dated April 13. The number of new virus cases appears to be peaking globally, but the bad news is that the improvement is probably a direct consequence of social distancing and the plunge in economic activity, and could reverse quickly if people just went back to work, Hatzius wrote.

Todays Fear & Greed Index: 40 Fear (previous close: 45 Neutral) [CNN]. One week ago: 31 (Fear). (0 is Extreme Fear; 100 is Extreme Greed). Last updated Apr 15 at 12:17pm. Cant believe the Index made all the way back to neutral yesterday. Wowsers.

The Biosphere

Evolutionary trees cant reveal speciation and extinction rates [Nature]. Evolutionary-tree diagrams, which show the branching relationships between species, are widely used to estimate the rates at which new species arise and existing ones become extinct. New work casts doubt on this approach.  Important: The novelty and mathematical sophistication of their work lie in showing that we cannot estimate these time-varying speciation and extinction rates. Louca and Pennells key result is then to show that there is an infinite number of alternative sets of time-varying speciationextinction rates that yield the same number of lineages at any given time as does the deterministic lineage-through-time curve. They further show that the most probable estimates of the two rates (calculated by maximum-likelihood methods) do not necessarily identify the correct underlying model  as demonstrated by an analysis of hypothetical cases for which the true time-varying speciationextinction rates are known.  If I may summarize, its silly to assume that species evolve at fixed rates.

Health Care

April 14 Update: US COVID-19 Test Results [Calculated Risk]. Test-and-trace is a key criterion in starting to reopen the country. My current guess is test-and-trace will require around 300,000 tests per day at first since the US is far behind the curve. Some scientists believe we need around 800,000 tests per day.. There were 146,614 test results reported over the last 24 hours.

Ending coronavirus lockdowns will be a dangerous process of trial and error [Science]. But what is the exit strategy? Weve managed to get to the life raft, says epidemiologist Marc Lipsitch of the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health (HSPH). But Im really unclear how we will get to the shore. As they seek a path forward, governments around the world must triangulate the health of their citizens, the freedoms of their population, and economic constraints. Could schools be reopened? Restaurants? Bars? Can people go back to their offices? How to relax the lockdown is not something around which there is a scientific consensus, says Caroline Buckee, an epidemiologist at HSPH. Most researchers agree that reopening society will be a long haul, marked by trial and error. The number to watch in the next phase may no longer be the actual number of cases per day, but what epidemiologists call the effective reproduction number, or R, which denotes how many people the average infected person infects in turn. To regulate R, Governments will have to realize that there are basically three control knobs on the dashboard, says Gabriel Leung, a modeler at the University of Hong Kong: isolating patients and tracing their contacts, border restrictions, and social distancing.

Drug Evaluation during the Covid-19 Pandemic [New England Journal of Medicine]. After Trumps initial assertions, the FDA  still facing criticism that its delays in approving testing kits for the virus hindered prevention efforts  issued an Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) on March 28 that allowed for use of [chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine] to treat patients with Covid-19.  These developments represent fundamental threats to the U.S. drug-evaluation process. Advocating that the FDA should quickly approve drugs without randomized trial data runs counter to the idea of evidence-based medicine and risks further undermining the publics understanding of and faith in the drug-review process, which requires substantial evidence of safety and efficacy based on adequate and well-controlled trials before a drug can be marketed. Though this unprecedented emergency provides a compelling reason for the FDA to act as efficiently as possible, the agency and the medical community can still maintain the highest scientific standards while acting expeditiously. The new EUA represents only the second time the FDA has ever used emergency authority to permit use of a medication for an unapproved indication. Hydroxychloroquine is already marketed for other conditions, so physicians were allowed to prescribe it off-label to patients with Covid-19 even before the EUA or CDC dose recommendations were issued. In addition, for investigational drugs that are not yet marketed, providers can request expanded access for severely ill patients who lack alternative treatment options and are not eligible for clinical trials  permission the FDA nearly always grants. This option has already been used for remdesivir, an investigational antiviral drug whose manufacturer has provided it to more than a thousand patients with Covid-19 outside clinical trials. Even before the pandemic, many conservative and libertarian politicians and advocacy groups supported expanding patients right to try unapproved experimental drugs. This position has intensified a commonly held but spurious belief that slow processes and overly onerous requirements by the FDA prevent patients from accessing many clinically useful drugs. In fact, the FDA presides over one of the fastest drug approval processes in the world, with a majority of drugs gaining approval in the United States before they are approved in Europe or Canada.

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Chronicle exclusive: Alameda County 911 ambulance provider weighs furlough during coronavirus crisis [San Francisco Chronicle]. In the midst of the coronavirus pandemic, the company contracted to provide 911 ambulance services for Alameda County may soon dial back its operations and furlough many of its 600 employees, The Chronicle has learned. Falck, a Denmark-based health care giant, said transport volume has fallen dramatically since the virus took hold and Bay Area governments implemented stay-at-home orders that have kept people off the streets, temporarily reducing revenue.  Oh.

Our Famously Free Press

L.A. Times to Furlough Workers as Ad Revenue Nearly Eliminated' [Variety]. The Los Angeles Times announced on Tuesday that it will furlough some business-side employees and that senior managers will take pay cuts, as advertising revenue has been nearly eliminated due to the coronavirus pandemic. The company will also suspend its 401(k) match for non-union workers, according to a company memo sent by Chris Argentieri, president of the California Times.  This is a shame, because IMNSHO the Los Angeles Times has greatly improved under its new management.

RussiaGate

Class Warfare

A Tragedy Is Unfolding: Inside New Yorks Virus Epicenter [New York Times]. In a city ravaged by the coronavirus, few places have suffered as much as central Queens, where a seven-square-mile patch of densely packed immigrant enclaves recorded more than 7,000 cases in the first weeks of the outbreak. In the month since the virus exploded in New York, it has claimed rich and poor, the notable and the anonymous. But as the death toll has mounted, the contagion has exposed the citys stubborn inequities, tearing through working-class immigrant neighborhoods far more quickly than others.  Just to remove the obvious erasure, the epicenter of #COVID19 is JFK and Newark (and possibly LaGuardia). The aftershocks are being felt in Queens.

US downturn very harmful to low wage workers and their communities [Bill Mitchell]. In terms of total numbers of jobs lost: (a) 12 per cent (341 thousand) have been in above-median pay occupations. (b) 88 per cent (2,507 thousand) in below-median pay occupations. (c) 32.8 per cent of the total (933 thousand) have been in low-pay occupations (in the GFC downturn only 1.3 per cent of the jobs lost were low-paid).  With handy map of the geographical distribution of job losses so far:

Note that two states Trump must win  MI, PA  are heavily impacted. Mitchell can, at times, be prolix. This post is much more focused and well worth a read.

News of the Wired

UPDATE Bishop who said God is larger than Covid-19 has died from the disease [CNN]. Despite warnings from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to avoid mass gatherings and maintain social distancing, Glenn said in a sermon on March 22, I firmly believe that God is larger than this dreaded virus, and announced he was not afraid to die.  Thats fine, Glenn, you do you, but how many members of your congregation did you infect? Were they afraid to die?

How citizen scientists can help fight COVID-19 [Los Angeles Times]. As the new coronavirus continues its assault on humanity, scientists are fighting back by gathering data from an unlikely source: ordinary people. With a smartphone app and a little free time, anyone 18 or older can contribute valuable information that might help bring the COVID-19 pandemic under control, researchers say.  That, in my view, is not citizen science. Its simply data collection.

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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 (PM):

PM writes: Flowering Quince, Idylwood Park, WA. This photo is a neat illustration of the idea that your subject doesnt always have to be in the center of the photo

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: 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:

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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!
The BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award in Social Sciences has gone in this twelfth edition to psychologists Susan Fiske and Shelley Taylor for their "outstanding contributions" in social cognition, a field which examines the "social mind," i.e. the cognitive processes individuals use to understand other people and themselves. The committee reached its decision through a remote assessment process due to the extraordinary measures imposed in response to the Covid-19 pandemic.

Fiske and Taylor are described in the citation as "two of the most influential social psychologists working today" whose "amazing insights" have elucidated the role of cognitive shortcuts in shaping social interactions. These shortcuts in mental processing intervene in the formation of value judgments about other people or social situations.

The committee also made reference to the work done individually by each laureate. Taylor, a Distinguished Research Professor at the University of California, Los Angeles (United States), is at the forefront of research into "how stress affects health, and how social factors can serve as a buffer in this respect." She was also the first to propose the prevalence of "positive illusions," namely "the rather functional human tendency to see the future as more positive than is perhaps likely," and has carried out innovative work in social neuroscience involving the use of neuroimaging technology.

Fiske, a Professor of Psychology at Princeton University (United States), has researched extensively into the formation of stereotypes, prejudices and discriminatory attitudes, and how they may be alternatively encouraged or discouraged by social relation properties like cooperation, competition and relations of power.

Fiske and Taylor were nominated for the award by Jose Maria Peiro, Professor of Social and Organizational Psychology at the University of Valencia, Alicia Salvador, Professor of Psychobiology at the same institution, and Jose Muniz-Fernandez, Professor of Psychometrics at the University of Oviedo

The awardees met at Harvard in the early 1970s, when Fiske joined Taylor's class. The professor had developed an interest in attribution theory, concerned with how people explain the causes of their own behavior and that of others, and she and her student began working on it together. By the start of the 1980s, their efforts and those of other groups pursuing a similar direction had led to a merging of approaches in what, up to that point, had been the separate, even distant fields of social and cognitive psychology.

This was nothing less than "a daring and risky revolution," say nominators Jose Maria Peiro and Alicia Salvador. "Cognitive psychologists were closely focused on information processing, attention, memory, learning, and so forth, and not much interested in social issues." But Fiske and Taylor would successfully "hybridize and cross-fertilize" the two fields. For Peiro, their work stands as a "milestone in our understanding of how people process information, and in demonstrating that by interpreting reality we transform it, acting on it as it acts on us; that we are influenced by context."

In 1984 Fiske and Taylor published Social Cognition, a landmark work which, the committee remarks, "put social cognition on the map." After four editions, the most recent in 2012 with the revelatory title Social Cognition: From Brains to Culture, "it has become a modern classic, inspiring and energizing countless researchers for over three decades." Fiske confirms that a fifth edition is in the pipeline.

In its pages the authors propose a "groundbreaking model" that posits two speeds of information processing: the first fast and relatively superficial, working on the basis of what are presumed to be group-wide characteristics (stereotypes); the second slower, more careful and drawing on individuated information. In the fast mode, "people often make judgments about social life based on whatever happens to catch their attention at the time," the committee notes, "rather than systematically processing all the available information."

In phone conversation after hearing of the award, Taylor recalled the beginnings of her collaboration with Fiske: "Susan was a final-year undergraduate student at the time. One day there was a knock on my door and it was her asking if she could work with me. We have been collaborating since 1972, a hefty amount of time and all of it satisfying and fruitful."

Their first object of study was the phenomenon of salience: "Whatever information is salient or stands out will come to be thought of as the cause of the other things going on in that situation. Likewise, when a person is salient, even doing something really simple - putting them in front instead of off to the side - means that person will be judged to have a more important role in the conversation, setting the agenda and introducing topics, simply by the fact that they overwhelm your visual field."

Fiske and Taylor defined several types of social thinker, including what they termed the "cognitive miser," who exhibits a kind of bias favoring information that confirms their own beliefs, thus cutting down the mental effort involved in processing. Although this mechanism encourages a partial interpretation of reality, it has the virtue of enabling us to manage in fragments of a second the vast quantity of data present in any social interaction.

Their model, the committee adds, "also details the conditions under which more elaborative cognitive processes are used as a basis for decision."

The cognitive miser simultaneously draws on and reinforces existing stereotypes. As Peiro and Salvador explain, "we need to understand when this can be useful and when it may be harmful." The ideal solution, they continue, "would be a combination of rapid thinking with a slower, individuated approach, more rigorous, painstaking and self-critical where need be, that pays heed to people's idiosyncrasies." Their fellow nominator Jose Muniz-Fernandez describes Fiske and Taylor as "opening up the field of social cognition, and extending its influence to sociology, economics, politics and health. Their key contribution has been to overturn the classical view that we arrive at judgments in a rational, analytic manner, showing that instead we use shortcuts, deploying automatic mechanisms that are imperfect but useful."

Innate but modifiable biases

As Fiske explains, "the social world is intrinsically complicated and our minds are limited, so we take shortcuts. You couldn't walk down the street if you were individuating everyone you pass. You have to make quick decisions - this person is dangerous, this one is not. And the shortcuts we take mostly work well enough, because, after all, we survive. But some are malignant, including racial or social class categories or other unfair stereotypes."

Taylor reflects on whether such prejudices can be remedied: "I think that a lot of social cognition is innate in the sense that, for example, in any social situation we orient to people's faces, since people are the most important source of information in most situations. All of that is probably innate, it's hard to imagine how we would have survived as a species if it weren't. But beyond that, most of how we think about people, particularly specific people, comes from our experiences, so the dimensions we use for thinking about them are modifiable over the whole lifespan."

Fiske concurs: "It's human nature to be uncomfortable around people who are different from you. You have grown up in a familiar environment, and with people who are different you cannot predict what they're going to do. But our data show that if nothing terrible happens and there is no demagogue leader exploiting distrust, people in different groups get used to each other. If people live together, you find that, with time, the stereotypes fade away."

The psychology of health

Taylor is also acknowledged as among the founders of the health psychology field, especially for her contributions on how stress affects health, and how social factors are able to buffer this effect. "When I began working in this field there was barely any interest in the relation between mind and body, or between psychology and health," she recalls. Since then, however, the example of her work "has attracted more and more researchers into what is now a major sub-field in psychology."

It was a friend's breast cancer that set Taylor thinking about what principles of social psychology might help people in their adjustment to the disease. Initially skeptical, she found as her research progressed that the mitigation of stress through positive self-perceptions and social support has a closer relationship to physical wellbeing than was considered at the time, and is in fact a contributing factor to the quality of life of those suffering chronic conditions.

As well as fuelling the growth of this burgeoning field, these findings opened up new research directions in Taylor's own career, linked, once again, to the role of social interactions and cognitive bias. What she was able to show was that social support, and above all the perception that such support is available, can mitigate the effects of stress in conditions like metabolic syndrome, hypertension or diabetes. "Social support is essential," Peiro and Salvador remark, "because people would not be viable without society."

Her work in health psychology also led her to the discovery of "positive illusions," whereby people tend to perceive things in an optimistic light, believing they are better than they are, and ascribing themselves more control or mastery over outcomes. Taylor showed that this bias contributes to the improvement of health.

She explains it thus: "When Susan and I were working on how people thought about themselves and other people, it became apparent that they thought better of themselves than reality could sustain, and also better about their future. And I started getting very interested in why these positive biases were sustained, what was valuable about them. I think the answer is that it serves people well from both an emotional and cognitive standpoint to think about themselves as doers, well regarded by others, with many talents... They may be illusions, but they are very functional and adaptive."

Power reinforces stereotypes

The committee also singled out Fiske's research into how social relations color the formation of stereotypes and prejudices. The awardee starts from the premise that people are quick at categorizing others based on obvious traits such as race, gender or age. Going beyond that, Fiske says, "requires motivation," and that motivation comes, for example, from social relationships like cooperation, competition and power.

Specifically, Fiske believes that when faced with a person who has power over us, we arm ourselves with information in a methodical, individuated manner, resorting less to stereotypes. Conversely, when it is we who hold power, we are much less concerned about knowing our subordinates in detail, making it easier to assign them a group label or stereotype.

"I've spent most of my career studying how to overcome harmful stereotypes," says Fiske. "We have found, for instance, that if you put people on teams, when they are independent and need each other, they take more trouble to form individual impressions and get beyond racial, class or other kinds of discriminatory biases. If you get people of different categories within an organization and tell them their bonus depends on them working together, it's amazing how fast people get over their prejudices."

Asked about the application of her research to the lockdown imposed by the coronavirus pandemic, Taylor states that positive illusions can be a way to adapt and mitigate the stress caused by social distancing, and highlights the value of maintaining social support by electronic means. Fiske seconds this view, adding that as social beings we need to feel connected, if only through technology.

###

Laureate bio notes

Susan Fiske (Chicago, 1952) received a PhD in Social Psychology from the University of Harvard (1978). She began her research and teaching career at Carnegie Mellon University (1978-1985), before taking up more senior appointments at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst (1986-2000). In 2000 she moved to Princeton University, where she is now Eugene Higgins Professor of Psychology, and an affiliated member of the Scully Center for the Neuroscience of Mind and Behavior. Since 2012, she has also served as Professor of Public Affairs at Princeton's Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. Author of over 380 publications, she currently edits the Annual Review of Psychology and the Handbook of Social Psychology, and is a former editor of Policy Insights from Behavioral and Brain Sciences and associate editor of, among others, Psychological Review and Journal of Experimental Social Psychology. She has served as president of a number of learned societies including the Federation of Associations in Behavioral and Brain Sciences and the American Psychological Society.

Shelley Taylor (Mount Kisco, New York, 1946) earned a BA in Psychology at Connecticut College (1968) and a PhD in the same subject from Yale University (1972). After a series of research and professorial appointments at the University of Harvard, in 1979 she joined the faculty at the University of California, Los Angeles, where she is currently a Distinguished Research Professor. She has over 500 publications to her name, including the books Health Psychology, Positive Illusions: Creative Self-deception and the Healthy Mind, The Tending Instinct: How Nurturing is Essential to Who We Are and How We Live and Social Cognition: From Brains to Culture (with Susan Fiske). A former president of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology and the Western Psychological Association, she has held editorial positions with the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology and Social, Cognitive, and Affective Neuroscience, among other publications.

Humanities and Social Sciences committee and evaluation support panel

The committee in this category was chaired by Jon Krosnick, the Frederic O. Glover Professor in Humanities and Social Sciences at Stanford University (United States), with Dolores Albarracin, Professor of Psychology, Business and Medicine at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (United States) acting as secretary. Remaining members were Bruno Cautres, a research fellow of the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), attached to CEVIPOF, the Centre de Recherches Politiques of Sciences Po in Paris (France); Cees Midden, Professor Emeritus of Human-Technology Interaction at Eindhoven University of Technology (Netherlands); Brian Parkinson, Professor of Social Psychology in the Medical Sciences Division at the University of Oxford (United Kingdom); and Simone Schnall, a Reader in Experimental Social Psychology in the Department of Psychology at the University of Cambridge (United Kingdom).

The evaluation support panel of the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC) was coordinated by M. Victoria Moreno, the Council's Deputy Vice President for Scientific and Technical Areas, and formed by: Marta Fraile Maldonado, tenured researcher at the Institute of Public Goods and Policies (IPP); Elea Gimenez Toledo, tenured researcher at the Institute of History (IH); Ignacio Montero Ruiz, Deputy Coordinator of the Society Global Area and scientific researcher at the Institute of History (IH); Julio Perez Diaz, tenured researcher at the Institute of Economics, Geography and Demography (IEGD); and Sebastian Rinken, tenured researcher at the Institute of Advanced Social Studies (IESA).

About the BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Awards

The BBVA Foundation centers its activity on the promotion of world-class scientific research and cultural creation, and the encouragement of talent. The BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Awards, established in 2008, recognize and reward contributions of singular impact in diverse fields of science, technology, social sciences and the humanities that have demonstrably expanded the frontiers of the known world, opening up new paradigms and knowledge fields. Their eight categories are reflective of the knowledge map of the 21st century, encompassing basic research in Physics, Chemistry and Mathematics, Biology and Biomedicine, Information and Communication Technologies, Humanities and Social Sciences, Economics, Finance and Management, Ecology and Conservation Biology, Climate Change, and, within the arts, the supremely creative realm of music.

The BBVA Foundation is aided in the evaluation process by the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC), the country's premier public research organization. The Foundation and CSIC jointly appoint the evaluation support panels charged with undertaking an initial assessment of the candidates proposed by numerous institutions across the world and drawing up a reasoned shortlist for the consideration of the award committees. CSIC is also responsible for designating the chair of each committee, formed by eminent authorities in the subject area.
PM Modi on Tuesday extended the nationwide lockdown to May 3 to contain the spread of coronavirus in the country. The govt may soon come up with details of a second stimulus package.

Meanwhile, thousands of H-1B visa holders who lost their jobs will not be sent back to India as US govt extended the visa stay. Here are the events which made it to the business headlines today: Covid-19 crisis: PM, FM to finalise details of second stimulus package soon Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman are expected to meet soon to finalise the details of a second ...
Coronado Beach in San Diego County. (Associated Press)

Should you book summer travel now? If youre planning to visit the Pacific Northwest, you can fly round-trip to Seattle for $117 in basic economy on legacy carriers. Deal site Travelzoo is offering the Handlery Hotel in San Diego for as little as $99 a night in June and July. Or you can book, say, a rafting adventure in Colorado.

Why not go ahead and book it? After all, leisure travelers find two things irresistible: going and doing, and the value they get for money spent.

To which you may reply, Are you out of your mind?

Its a possibility. But its also possible you may be financially protected in a way you have not been before. Refunds are more plentiful, but so are problems. And the issue of refunds has continued to evolve, as have polices and practices that determine whether you get your money back, a credit or nothing at all.

For those who fret, the loosening of restrictions, particularly on airline tickets, may be of some comfort. But it's still a gamble, especially because it's unclear whether the curve is beginning to flatten.

Heres a guide to help you decide whether to take a chance and be rewarded with good value or take a chance and suffer a financial beating.

Can I get an airline ticket refund?

Up until a week ago, there was this surprising variance in policy between even the big three major airlines, said Seth Kaplan, an airline analyst.

The Department of Transportation last week said airlines should give refunds if they canceled flights, which some were not doing. Rather than issue a mandate, the DOT said it wanted airlines to comply voluntarily.

Now, it appears, more are adhering to their own rules.

Here are the basics: If your flight is changed and you wont arrive at your destination within "X" number of hours of when you should have, you may be entitled to a refund.

The airline gets to determine the X factor. Not all are the same. Each airline has its own terms and conditions, usually called a contract for carriage (or conditions) that specifies that number.

Story continues

Deltas Rule 19 in its contract pegs X, the length of delay, at 90 minutes. Uniteds Rule 24, which bounced from two hours to 25 hours to six within the last two weeks, has settled at 30 minutes.

Even Spirit Airlines, the low-cost carrier that once prided itself on how much people hated it, offers, in section 10.2.3 of its contract, refunds for flight cancellations that inconvenience passengers by more than two hours.

Because airlines generally will offer refunds if they cancel the ticket, its wise to wait and see whether your ticket is canceled instead of canceling it yourself, Kaplan said. Just remember to do so.

Some airlines have tried to wiggle out of providing refunds, despite their own rules, offering a credit instead, which means they're holding on to your money.

Others will give you a refund but also offer you a sweetener for a credit instead: Delta gives you up to two years to use that credit. Singapore Airlines has just announced it is offering flight credit bonuses if you choose a voucher; they begin at about $53 for an economy-class ticket and can be as much as $353, based on the current value of Singapores dollar.

What you need to consider before deciding to purchase your flight: Whats your risk tolerance? Whats your financial situation? What is the airlines financial situation? If your flight has been canceled and youll need the money, take the money. If your airline is in a shaky financial position, take the money.

If you dont follow airline financial news, know that the survival of the fittest airline isn't necessarily the rule, Kaplan said. Some airlines are subsidized by the country whose name they share (Alitalia); others are not (Norwegian). Some airlines have more international flights which increases the risk; others, including Southwest, are more domestic.

What you need to do before deciding: Read the contract or terms and conditions to understand what you can and cannot expect.





What if I get scared and want to cancel my airline ticket?

If you decide to cancel, youre more likely to get a credit than a refund, but legacy airlines have been generous in allowing cancellations without penalties or change fees.

So have, surprisingly, Alegiant and Frontier, low-cost carriers that sometimes feel as though theyre in a game of gotcha with ticket changes. Not this time. They're being generous with credits; just check dates of travel that are covered.

Can I get a refund for a hotel stay?

Again that depends not only on the property but on the kind of reservation.

These days, many hotels will allow you to make a reservation that saves you money if you choose non-refundable. Make sure you understand what you are booking.

The Travelzoo example above for the Handlery Hotel in San Diego is a refundable stay, so you should be able to get your money back. Read the terms and conditions.

What you need to do before deciding: If youre asked to choose between saving money and getting your money back, again, it depends on your risk tolerance. On the other hand, if the difference is $10 to $20 for a fully refundable stay, pay the extra and consider that a mini insurance policy. Also read the cancellation terms before you commit to either, and if its a hotel that charges resort fees, be sure those are covered as well.





Should I book an activity now?

Although you may well get a discount if you book early, as some Colorado rafting companies are offering, you may not get a refund if something goes amiss and you can't go. Better to wait until you are at your destination.

There are exceptions, of course. The Oberammergau Passion Play, which occurs every 10 years in Garmisch-Partenkirchen, Germany, was scheduled for May 16-Oct. 4. It has been postponed until May 14-Oct. 2, 2022. The website offers refund information if you cannot make it.

Likewise, the 2020 Olympics have been postponed until July 23 to Aug. 8, 2021. Already purchased tickets will be available for the new dates, but if you cant be there, you can get a refund. Details on how to get a refund have not yet been explained.





One final step

After evaluating the risks, just when should you book your summer travel? I would say wait as long as you can, said Sara Rathner, a credit card expert at NerdWallet, a personal finance site.

Check with your credit card company to see whether its offering travel insurance that may help; many policies will not because the coronavirus is now a known event and has been since mid-January, making it ineligible for coverage. Rathner also suggested, especially for international travel, considering cancel-for-any reason insurance. It costs more and doesnt refund as much, but you wont be left holding the bag  at least, not all of it.

Assistant travel editor Mary Forgione contributed to this report.




President Donald Trump's move to halt funding to the World Health Organization has been met with severe criticism at home and abroad, with the United Nations secretary-general saying "now is not the time" for such a drastic move while the coronavirus pandemic is gripping the globe.

Trump made the announcement Tuesday pending a review of the WHO's response to the initial coronavirus outbreak in China. He claims the agency has been too close to Beijing and covered up for its mistakes.

Congressional Democrats are disputing the president's authority to do this. Meanwhile Republican lawmakers are planning their own investigation, examining the early response by the WHO and the Chinese government.

"Now is a time for unity in the global battle to push the COVID-19 pandemic into reverse, not a time to cut the resources of the World Health Organization, which is spearheading and coordinating the global body's efforts," said U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres in a statement Tuesday.

China meanwhile expressed "deep concern" about Trump's announcement, its foreign ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian told a briefing.

"As the most authoritative and most professional organization, the World Health Organization has played an irreplaceable role in global public health crisis," the spokesman said. "The decision of the U.S. will undercut the ability of the WHO and damage the global cooperation of fighting the epidemic."

The European Union's foreign policy chief Josep Borrell tweeted similar misgivings.

Deeply regret US decision to suspend funding to @WHO. There is no reason justifying this move at a moment when their efforts are needed more than ever to help contain & mitigate the #coronavirus pandemic. Only by joining forces we can overcome this crisis that knows no borders.  Josep Borrell Fontelles (@JosepBorrellF) April 15, 2020

Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov slammed Trumps move as "a very selfish approach." He told the TASS news agency, "We urge the United States to abandon further attacks on the WHO and pursue a responsible line."

Story continues

And Moussa Faki Mahamat, the chairperson of the African Union Commission, called the decision "deeply regrettable."

It's not just governments and international organizations that have lined up to express dismay at Trump's move. Experts, entrepreneurs and others have also been quick to condemn the announcement.

Microsoft founder and philanthropist Bill Gates told his 50 million Twitter followers that halting the WHO's funding was "as dangerous as it sounds."

"Their work is slowing the spread of COVID-19 and if that work is stopped no other organization can replace them," Gates tweeted. "The world needs the WHO now more than ever."

Dr. Amesh Adalja, a senior scholar with John Hopkins University Center for Health Security, told Reuters, "The move sends the wrong message during the middle of a pandemic." While the WHO has made mistakes in the past, he added "It's not the middle of a pandemic that you do this type of thing."

And Richard Horton, editor-in-chief of the Lancet medical journal, described Trump's move as "a crime against humanity." He tweeted that "every scientist, every health worker, every citizen must resist and rebel against this appalling betrayal of global solidarity."

A slew of other world leaders and senior officials lined up to express their dismay over what they said was Trump's willingness to hamper the WHO just when the world needs it most.

The U.S. is the world's largest financial contributor to the organization, accounting for roughly 15 percent of its budget. Trump has said that amounts to some $500 million each year.

German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas said that ascribing blame "does not help" because "the virus knows no borders. We have to closely work together."

While New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Arden said that "at time like this when we need to be sharing information and we need to have advice we can rely on. The WHO has provided that."

Not everyone was quite so scathing. Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison said he sympathized with some of Trump's criticisms of the WHO, but nevertheless said now was not the time "to throw the baby out with the bath water" and hobble the agency at a time of global crisis.

Image: A medical staff member treats a patient infected with coronavirus at a hospital in Wuhan on Feb. 22, 2020. (AFP - Getty Images file)

Trump has accused the WHO of "severely mismanaging and covering up" the coronavirus crisis, specifically the initial outbreak in Wuhan, China. He also claimed that the WHO "pushed China's misinformation about the virus ... and there was no need for travel bans."

He took particular issue with the agency's criticism of his order to temporarily deny entry to the U.S. by most foreign nationals who had recently been in China. The order was issued Jan. 31, when China was the center of the pandemic.

The president claimed that the WHO "pushed China's misinformation about the virus ... and there was no need for travel bans."

Download the NBC News app for full coverage and alerts about the coronavirus outbreak

The organization was informed of the first cases on Dec. 31. The next day the agency requested information from Chinese officials, and the Wuhan market where the outbreak is believed to have originated was closed for disinfection, according to a WHO report.

Then, on Jan. 30, the organization declared a global health emergency, as the number of cases hit 10,000.

Trump's move to halt funding for the agency that oversees international public health has raised questions about whether it could affect efforts by other countries to curtail coronavirus cases.

Dr. Patrice Harris, the president of the American Medical Association, excoriated the president in a statement Tuesday for making the move "during the worst public health crisis in a century."

"Cutting funding to the WHO  rather than focusing on solutions  is a dangerous move at a precarious moment for the world," Harris said. "The AMA is deeply concerned by this decision and its wide-ranging ramifications, and we strongly urge the President to reconsider."
By Ned Parker and Chad Terhune (Reuters) - As coronavirus infections exploded in New Orleans, state and local officials repeatedly told the Trump administration that its new drive-through testing effort wasnt going well. Those tested often waited more than a week for results, and local officials had no information on who had been notified by a federally contracted call center, according to emails between local and federal officials reviewed by Reuters. As deaths mounted, local officials requested details on the notifications as they increasingly fielded calls by those left in limbo - including health workers

By Ned Parker and Chad Terhune

(Reuters) - As coronavirus infections exploded in New Orleans, state and local officials repeatedly told the Trump administration that its new drive-through testing effort wasnt going well. Those tested often waited more than a week for results, and local officials had no information on who had been notified by a federally contracted call center, according to emails between local and federal officials reviewed by Reuters.

As deaths mounted, local officials requested details on the notifications as they increasingly fielded calls by those left in limbo - including health workers. But Washington officials largely brushed off their concerns, according to the correspondence, which has not been previously reported.

Frustrated city officials started their own operation to notify people after the state began receiving test results on March 26, nearly a week after testing started. One big problem: The lab initially sent many results with no phone numbers to reach those tested.

The delays and confusion created new problems for local officials managing the crisis in one of Americas emerging hot spots. As of Tuesday, Louisiana had more than 21,500 confirmed cases, including more than 1,000 deaths. Timely test results are crucial to containing the virus and enabling essential workers such as doctors and nurses to stay safely on the front lines. The problems in New Orleans underscore the challenges the Trump administration faces in ramping up testing nationwide in hopes of reopening the U.S. economy.

On March 25, city health director Jennifer Avegno sent one of the many requests for information to federal officials.

We are receiving many calls today from citizens who went through the drive through testing in the earliest days and have not gotten a call, she wrote. Can you update us on how many results have been received, turnaround times, and how many individuals have been contacted?

Kristina Harder, an official at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) who was working with the federal call center, did not address the information request and instead suggested telling people to be patient. The call center should be contacting those folks who were at your sites in the beginning days, she wrote. I hope this is helpful!

Harder did not respond to a request for comment.

A day later, Avegno forwarded a doctors plea to the Trump administrations new testing czar, Brett Giroir, and other federal officials. Im just looking to get my results, the surgical resident at Tulane University had written.

HHS never provided an accounting of who the call center had notified, city and state officials told Reuters.

In a statement, HHS called the drive-through sites a profound success with more than 77,000 people tested nationwide. HHS didnt address specific questions about problems with the operation in Louisiana or elsewhere. The agency said delays in getting results and notifying patients were resolved and results were now being given within three to five days.

Lisa Miles, a spokeswoman for the company running the federal call center - Maximus Inc. - declined to comment and referred questions to HHS.

In interviews, Louisiana officials said they welcomed the federal testing program despite the problems. About 13,000 people were eventually tested over a three-week period.

Even though there are issues with the processing, it has significantly contributed to our ability to understand and map this disease, Avegno said.

A QUESTION OF PRIORITIES

In mid-March, President Donald Trump tapped Giroir, an HHS assistant secretary, to oversee testing nationwide, including the initiative for drive-through operations that would expand to more than 40 sites, including three in the New Orleans area. U.S. officials were eager to show progress after widespread problems with a defective government test kit that delivered inconclusive results, hindering the public-health response for weeks.

On March 14, federal officials reached out to Louisiana leaders about hosting testing sites, records show. Two days later, a top Louisiana health official questioned whether drive-through centers were a wise use of scarce testing supplies and protective gear. Alexander Billioux, a Louisiana Department of Health assistant secretary, emailed Giroir and suggested the limited supply of test swabs might be better used at hospital labs that were prioritizing tests for health workers, hospitalized patients and nursing home residents. A drive-through wouldnt help those people, he told Giroir. He also asked for an estimated wait time for results.

Giroir wrote back that he expected a 48-hour turnaround time but said he made no guarantees.

On March 20, the first two drive-through sites opened in the New Orleans area. The people tested were told their results should be available in three to five days and advised to call the state health department if they didnt hear from the federal call center within a week.

On March 23, Joseph Kanter, an assistant state health officer and emergency physician, asked how the call center would share notification details with state authorities in an email to Erica Schwartz, the U.S. deputy surgeon general who served as the ordering physician for drive-through tests.

We will need to know which patients remain without knowledge of their results, Kanter wrote.

Schwartz replied that the call center will not communicate to the state or local health department, without explaining why. She recommended that the state go through their normal processes to contact patients with positive results, a statement that confused state and local officials - who at the time had no test results and had been instructed that the call center would handle all notifications.

Schwartz did not respond to a request for comment.

MISSING PHONE NUMBERS

On March 26, Billioux emailed Harder at HHS about the high volume of people calling the state for results. He asked for a phone number that people could use to reach someone at the federal level or at Laboratory Corporation of America Holdings, or LabCorp, the company processing the New Orleans tests.

A few hours later, LabCorp sent state officials their first batch of results - but with no corresponding phone numbers for many of those tested, according to the email from Billioux to Harder. Harder replied that she would notify LabCorp and noted a similar problem receiving partial data in the beginning days.

Thats when the state transferred the testing data to the city, which on March 28 assigned eight people to field calls and reach out to those tested, which included efforts to track down the people whose information arrived with no phone numbers. As of Monday, the city health department said it still awaited results from LabCorp on about 1,000 tests, some of which have been pending for as long as 10 days.

LabCorp spokesman Mike Geller said the company has faced unprecedented demand during the pandemic but now targets delivering results in four to five days. We understand how disconcerting it is to not receive test results in a reasonable time frame, he said.

Avegno told Reuters that relying on the federal call center was untenable. We were getting flooded with calls from residents, and we had nothing to tell them, she said. Its important to have a local point of reference ... residents want to hear from someone to walk them through a positive or negative test.

Last week, the Trump administration said it was encouraging state and local officials to take over many of the drive-through sites. Some local officials expressed concern about losing federal funding and testing supplies. At a White House press briefing on Thursday, Vice President Mike Pence said the administration would continue to partner with states to the extent that they prefer us to be part of it.

Valerie Arkoosh, chair of the Montgomery County commission outside Philadelphia, said she was surprised by the federal announcement and reached out to Giroir and Schwartz to secure an extension of federal funding until May 30. Arkoosh said her testing site also had trouble getting information from the federal call center and that shes awaiting results from LabCorp on more than 400 tests.

They were both supportive and helpful, Arkoosh said of Giroir and Schwartz. But we are pretty busy here, so it would have been great not to go through all that.

Louisiana officials said they are looking into moving drive-through operations to other areas of the state that have less access to testing.

Everything with COVID-19 has been difficult. I don't necessarily put the fault on anybody's lap, Billioux said. The most important thing from our perspective is that we have more and more testing on the ground.

(Reporting by Chad Terhune and Ned Parker; Editing by Brian Thevenot)

This story has not been edited by Firstpost staff and is generated by auto-feed.
NEW YORK, April 15, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- The ratings for TV are soaring and the internet is on the verge of crashing as Americans search for the latest news of the coronavirus. Many are also turning to books for a respite and an escape to adventure, history, and inspiration. Some families have created a new highlight of the day by selecting a reading hour, and grandparents listen in at storytelling time on Facetime, Zoom or Skype.

"Books allow us to travel, in place, in time and in thought, without leaving home," said Tony Rossi, director of communications for The Christophers, a non-profit group founded in 1945 by Maryknoll Father James Keller. With its annual Christopher Awards, which are scheduled to be presented in New York in October, the group recognizes outstanding storytelling in books, TV, and film that lifts the spirit and shows how every individual has worth and can make a difference.

While the TV and film winners will be announced shortly, Rossi believes the five books for adults and the six for young people that have just been selected to receive a Christopher Award can help distract readers from the emotional crisis we are all facing at this time.

Five Books for Adults

Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Jennifer Berry Hawes explores the difficult road to healing and forgiveness faced by family members and the community at large after the racist murders of 12 members of Charleston, South Carolina's Emanuel AME Church in Grace Will Lead Us Home (St. Martin's Press).

Chris Edmonds reveals his father Roddie's untold story of courage, which saved the lives of hundreds of American soldiers being held in a Nazi POW camp during World War II, in No Surrender (HarperOne/Harper Collins), written with Douglas Century.

After discovering that professional and personal success leave many feeling unfulfilled, best-selling author David Brooks turns his attention to the quest for moral joy found in living a selfless life of purpose in The Second Mountain (Random House/Penguin Random House).

Attorney and former Olympian Rachael Denhollander documents her relentless pursuit of justice for herself and hundreds of her fellow athletes, who were sexually assaulted by the USA Gymnastics team doctor, in What Is a Girl Worth? (Tyndale Momentum/Tyndale House Publishers).

Jeannie Gaffigan, mother of five and comedy writing partner of husband Jim Gaffigan, revisits her 2017 diagnosis with a life-threatening brain tumor, her arduous surgery and recovery, and her renewed gratitude for God, family, and friends in When Life Gives You Pears (Grand Central Publishing/Hachette Book Group).

Six Books for Young People

One More Hug by Megan Alexander, illustrated by Hiroe Nakata (Preschool and up, Aladdin/Simon & Schuster Children's Publishing), follows a young boy from infancy through his departure for college, reminding readers about the difference that unconditional love can make in a child's life.

Sergeant Billy by Mireille Messier, illustrated by Kass Reich (Kindergarten and Up, Tundra Books/Penguin Random House), shares the true story of a goat who joined a Canadian battalion during World War I, saved the lives of his comrades, and returned home a hero.

The promise of liberty for a Jewish mother and daughter fleeing persecution in their homeland comes to life in the early-twentieth century tale Gittel's Journey by Leslea Newman, illustrated in period style by Amy June Bates (ages 6 and up, Abrams Books for Young Readers).

A girl's rift with her best friend over their town's annual pumpkin race leads her to learn lessons about forgiveness, character, and her unhealthy obsession with winning in The Pumpkin War by Cathleen Young (ages 8 and up, Wendy Lamb Books, Penguin Random House).

In Nazi Germany, two boysone Christian, one Jewishtry to make sense of the growing violence and anti-Semitism around them as they're faced with life-and-death moral choices in Crushing the Red Flowers by Jennifer Voigt Kaplan (ages 10 and up, IG Publishing).

With the help of a seemingly-magical wishing well, three sixth graders discover that acts of kindness can have positive ripple effects and that storytelling can bring people together in A Drop of Hope by Keith Calabrese (young adult, Scholastic Press).

"Each of these special books can provide a welcome break from today's troubling headlines while transporting you to a different place or time, to see the world from another perspective that can offer insight, hope and solace," said Rossi.

The Christophers is rooted in the Judeo-Christian tradition of service to God and humanity, guided by the ancient Chinese proverb"It's better to light one candle than to curse the darkness." Information about The Christophers and its publishing, radio, and awards programs is available at www.christophers.org.

Contacts:

David Reich Jeanne Byington Reich Communications J M Byington & Associates, Inc. 914-325-9997 917-696-1265 [email protected] [email protected]

SOURCE The Christophers

Related Links

https://www.christophers.org


[April 15, 2020] Publishing of Caverion Corporation's Interim Report for January-March 2020 on 30 April 2020

Caverion Corporation Investor News 15 April 2020 at 10.00 a.m. EEST HELSINKI, April 15, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- Caverion Corporation's Interim Report for January-March 2020 will be published on Thursday, 30 April 2020, at approximately 12:00 noon (Finnish Time, EEST). The stock exchange release and presentation materials in Finnish and in English will be published at that time on the company's website at www.caverion.com/investors. Webcast news conference for investors and media Caverion will hold a news conference on the Interim Report as a live webcast at www.caverion.com/investors on Thursday, 30 April 2020, at 2.00 p.m. Finnish time (EEST). Due to the coronavirus pandemic, the news conference cannot be attended in person. The presenters at the event are President and CEO Ari Lehtoranta and Chief Financial Officer Martti Ala-Harkonen. A recording of the webcast will be available at the same address at approximately 4.00 p.m. (EEST). Conference call It is also possible to participate in the event through a conference call. Participants are requested to call one of the assigned numbers at least five minutes before the conference call begins, at 1.55 p.m. (EEST) at the latest: +44 (0)330-336-9105 +46 (0)8-5033-6574 Participant code for the conference call is "1717650 / Caverion". During the webcast and conference call, all questions should be presented in English. Schedule in different time zones









Interim Report published Webcast news conference and conference call Recorded webcast available EEST (Helsinki) 12.00 14.00 16.00 CEST (Paris, Stockholm) 11.00 13.00 15.00 BST (London) 10.00 12.00 14.00 EDT (New York) 05.00 07.00 09.00

For additional information, please contact: Milena Hggstrom

Head of Investor Relations and External Communications

tel. +358-40-5581-328

[email protected] This information was brought to you by Cision http://news.cision.com https://news.cision.com/caverion/r/publishing-of-caverion-corporation-s-interim-report-for-january-march-2020-on-30-april-2020,c3087530 The following files are available for download: https://mb.cision.com/Main/14078/3087530/1229355.pdf Release

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There are currently over 550,000 job opportunities across the UK, according to new research. (Getty)

With the UK unemployment rate predicted to more than double to 10% of the active workforce  a 27-year high  and up to 11 million workers expected to be furloughed under the governments new retention scheme in the coming weeks, some UK cities are still offering opportunities to local job hunters.

There are currently over 550,000 job opportunities across the UK, according to the latest research from job search website Adzuna.

Manchester has the highest number of job vacancies outside London, with 16,237 jobs advertised, and 117,207 open job vacancies in the capital.

Bristol comes in third place with 9,925 vacancies, followed by Birmingham and Leeds.

London has the most demand for IT, accounting, and teaching jobs while Bristol is looking for workers to fill engineering and healthcare and nursing jobs.

Birmingham has 1,163 open healthcare positions and 1,013 vacancies in the IT and tech industry.

READ MORE: Coronavirus: How to job hunt when businesses aren't hiring

Leeds, which saw the highest level of private sector growth in 2019, is registering strong demand for accounting and finance jobs, with teaching jobs also in high demand in Leeds, as people search for tutors amid school closures due to the coronavirus pandemic.

Despite the number of jobs vacancies still available, the UK has seen a 35% drop in the number of open vacancies over the past seven weeks.

Conversely, there has been a 22% increase in job seekers searching for jobs near me in the last month as people continue to observe social distancing guidelines.

Some small and medium sized businesses are still hiring with positions open at companies including Burtons Biscuits in Blackpool, Llantarnam, and Edinburgh, LADbible Group in London and Manchester, and Just Eat across the UK.

Andrew Hunter, co-founder of Adzuna.co.uk said: Coronavirus has changed the job market landscape for key industries across the board and caused an unprecedented spike in unemployment in recent weeks.

Story continues

We have seen job cuts and hiring freezes across the country, sparking major concern for the U.K. economy.

READ MORE: UK budget watchdog: Economy could crash 35% due to coronavirus lockdown

However, we are pleased to see that many SMEs are still in the market for new employees, so we wanted to highlight which smaller organisations are looking to strengthen their teams amid Coronavirus, and are offering Brits new opportunities.
Representational image

Human trials of ayurvedic medicines to treat the novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19) may begin in India soon; in states like Haryana, Kerala and Goa, doctors have already started administering ayurvedic medicines to asymptomatic patients and frontline workers.

For live updates on coronavirus, click here

A source privy to the development has informed that the Ayush Ministry had sought suggestions from doctors across India practising Ayurveda and Homeopathy and received around 2,000 proposals. A Business Standard report states that the task force that studied these proposals, has shortlisted one protocol, which may be notified soon. Once it gets notified, the trials on COVID-19 patients can begin. However, at first, it will be administered to the asymptomatic patients and suspected patients, gradually moving to the non-severe ones and so on.

Notably, the task force, which was formed to scientifically validate the efficacy of ayurveda and other traditional medicines, includes members of the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research, the Department of Biotechnology, alongside ayush practitioners.

Coronavirus pandemic | How does COVID-19 compare to other pandemics, outbreaks?

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

Ayush Minister Shripad Y Naik has informed that the task force is studying the proposals before they are sent to research organisations that are involved in tackling the coronavirus crisis, such as the Indian Council of Medical Research.

He added: The ICMR would then revert to the ministry with its opinion on whether or not to go ahead with this line of therapy. In China, they have used traditional medicines along with allopathic drugs. We are awaiting a final decision on this and can expect it within this month.

Meanwhile, Prime Minister Narendra Modi has also been exhorting the citizens of India to fall back on traditional home remedies during times of such global health crisis to boost their immunity. He has also interacted with ayush practitioners and the task force, that is currently engaged in finding out if there is any inter-drug reaction when patients are given ayurvedic medicines alongside allopathy drugs to fight COVID-19.

Coronavirus pandemic | Mental illness cases rise in India after COVID-19 outbreak: Study

In Kerala, the government has already recommended taking recourse to ayurveda to contain coronavirus infections; it will be administered to patients recovering from coronavirus infection, to improve their overall health and boost immunity. Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan has announced that Ayur Raksha clinics will be set up at all ayurveda hospitals and dispensaries. Telangana, on the other hand, has already notified Ayurvedic hospitals to treat patients who have contracted COVID-19.
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Linkedin News Desk (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Wed, April 15, 2020 09:45 636 fc6853813033f564188675f8bd1f37f2 1 Lifestyle Tony-Hawk,Vans,skateboard,skateboarder,skateboarding,united-states Free

Retired professional skater Tony Hawk from the United States has teamed up with footwear brand Vans as its global brand ambassador.

In the partnership, which is seen to last beyond 2020, Hawk will promote Vans skating initiatives around the world and produce a new professional vertical skateboarding competition.

Vans has supported skateboarding since the very beginning and never wavered in its commitment, even with massive mainstream success, said Hawk as quoted in Hypebeast. I have always respected their integrity, so it is an honor to officially join forces and help continue to grow skateboarding culture in the most authentic way possible.

Hawk is known as a pioneer and the best vert skater in the world, unbeatable with 15 X Games vert medals under his belt. He was also the very first skater to complete the 900 trick, a 2.5-revolution or 900 degrees aerial spin performed on a skateboard ramp.

Hawk was previously known to skate in Lakai sneakers and in footwear released through his own skateboarding equipment and clothing brand, Birdhouse.

Read also: Skateboarders roam, restaurateurs fret as coronavirus fears clear New York after dark

Hawk said Vans had been his very first pair of skate shoes. On Vans official website, it was reported that 10-year-old Hawk purchased his first pair of Vans in 1978.

I remember stepping on my board and feeling like I suddenly had the best grip tape ever, he said as quoted on the website.

Now 51, Hawk is one of the most renowned skaters in the world and also a successful entrepreneur. He became a professional skateboarder at the age of 14 and was considered one of the top players in the world by the time he was 16.

He joined forces with Activision in 1999 to launch Tony Hawks Pro Skater, a billion-dollar video game franchise. Along with Birdhouse Skateboards, Hawk has also created Hawk Clothing and the Tony Hawk Signature Series, sporting goods and toys.

His charity project, the Tony Hawk Foundation, has given away US$9 million to over 600 skate park projects around the US. (gis/wng)
Nine more recovered patients of coronavirus disease (COVID-19) have been discharged from treatment centres in Abuja.

The minister of the Federal Capital Territory (FCT), Musa Bello, announced the new recoveries in a Wednesday morning tweet.

I am delighted to announce the discharge of additional nine (9) #COVID19 patients in the FCT after they tested negative. They have now returned to their homes.

The total number of discharged patients in the FCT is now 20 as at 5:50 a.m., April 15th, 2020, Mr Bello tweeted.

He said out of the nine newly discharged cases, seven were treated at the University of Abuja Teaching Hospital Isolation Centre in Gwagwalada.

The other two were treated at the National Hospital Isolation and Treatment Centre.

Mr Bello urged residents to comply with safety measures against the pandemic.

Two new cases were announced for the FCT on Tuesday after a three-day break without a confirmed case.

The FCT Administration on Tuesday announced the commencement of community search for persons with COVID-19 symptoms for mass testing.
STATEN ISLAND, N.Y. -- John Vincent Scalia has been burying homeless people and those who have little means to pay for funeral costs since the 1970s.

So the owner of the 49-year-old, family-owned Eltingville-based funeral home, knew his services would be in great demand during the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic.

Even so, it was hard to foresee the unprecedented demand Scalias funeral home now faces. Since April 1, John Vincent Scalia Home for Funerals has hosted 40 wakes -- which is usually the amount handled per month on average, he said.

And Scalia said hes handled more than 200 funerals since March 1.

With millions of New Yorkers out of work, paying for a funeral for a loved one could be impossible right now. For this reason, Scalia is offering to bury unclaimed coronavirus victims who have no known loved ones, and he will also assume costs for families without the ability to pay, he said.

The less fortunate are having difficulties arranging funerals because of costs, or many funeral homes are not able to service requests, said Scalia.

Scalia said he is sending out a letter to religious institutions and the public administrators office about his offer to bury those coronavirus victims with no financial means or family.

The public administrator of Richmond County, Edwina Martin, has been searching for family of at least five unclaimed people who had died on Staten Island after contracting the coronavirus.

Martin said that, given the overwhelming COVID-19 death toll, unclaimed Staten Islanders who otherwise would have been buried on the borough could end up at the public cemetery at Hart Island -- though she was working toward another solution.

With the situation with COVID-19 the city has said they were instituting a process where any unclaimed bodies were being sent to Hart Island...Weve asked for Richmond County that we be notified before any unclaimed decedents are sent to Hart Island, Martin said.

SCHUMER CALLS ON FEMA TO PROVIDE FUNERAL COST RELIEF

At a Tuesday press conference, Minority Leader Charles Schumer and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said Disaster Funeral Assistance should be granted by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to New Yorkers who lost loved ones to COVID-19.

Its bad enough people are losing their jobs and dont have food to eat, are separated from their families and loved ones, but to not be able to give a decent funeral and burial to someone who is near and dear to you is outrageous, Schumer said.

FEMA paid funeral and burial costs after Hurricane Sandy. Schumer said they are demanding the agency do the same during the COVID-19 pandemic.

It is only decent and honorable and American to make sure that those afflicted are able to give a decent funeral and burial to a loved one, he said.

A CHALLENGING TIME FOR FUNERAL HOMES

Economic difficulties, funeral costs and social distancing mandates are making a heartbreaking time even harder for grieving families, and at the same time the funeral homes themselves face a range of extreme challenges.

Across the borough those include the incredible demand, developing rules that keep mourners safe and fall within social distancing guidelines and state mandates, and in some cases, even facing an outbreak of illness on staff.

We understand its an overwhelming time for families. Its also an overwhelming time for the staff and the funeral industry, Amanda McInerney, of Cherubini-McInerney Funeral Home, Port Richmond, previously told the Advance.

In fact, there appear to be more deaths than funeral homes can handle at a time when staff has been reduced at many facilities.

A lot of the funeral homes in the city that are not conglomerates are small funeral homes that dont do their own work...They are so backed up, bodies are remaining in the morgue, Scalia said.

Keeping the funeral home staffs healthy is also a concern, as COVID-19 spreads among essential workers of all stripes.

Since the AIDS epidemic in the 1980s, workers at John Vincent Scalia Home For Funerals have used the same protective gear to embalm and handle bodies that medical professionals wear, said Scalia.

ABBREVIATED FUNERALS

There is a longer wait time for burials, because cemeteries are giving funeral homes appointments, said Scalia.

[A lot of the cemeteries] cut their crews in half," he said noting most cemeteries will only have between two and eight burials per day.

And since the coronavirus mandate limiting the number of people who can be in a room at one time was put in place, funeral services have been abbreviated, Scalia said.

We only have the wake for two hours, and we only allow 10 people in the room at one time, he said. We provide artificial flower arrangements, so it looks like it did before, because we really believe people need closure.

He said people have been very appreciative of funeral directors at this time.

They cant thank you enough right now, he said of families gratitude.

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Critics call US presidents move a dangerous step in the wrong direction after he cuts 15 percent of UN agency budget.

US President Donald Trump has instructed his administration to temporarily halt funding to the World Health Organization (WHO) over its handling of the coronavirus pandemic.

Trump said the WHO failed in its basic duty and it must be held accountable. He said it promoted Chinas disinformation about the virus that likely led to a wider outbreak.

The United States is the biggest overall donor to the Geneva-based WHO, contributing more than $400m in 2019, roughly 15 percent of its budget.

Reaction to Trumps move was fast and furious worldwide.

WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus

Tedros, the director-general of the global health agency, said he regrets Trumps decision to

halt funding of the UN body.

This is a time for all of us to be united in our common struggle against a common threat, Tedros told a press conference in Geneva.

When we are divided, the coronavirus exploits the cracks between us, he warned. The WHO will review the impact of the funding gap and will continue its work without fear or favour, Tedros added.

Earlier, he had written on Twitter: There is no time to waste. WHOs singular focus is on working to serve all people to save lives and stop the COVID-19 pandemic.

One of the main things weve learned in the past months about #COVID19 is that the faster all cases are found, tested, isolated & cared for, the harder we make it for the virus to spread. This principle will save lives & mitigate the economic impact of the pandemic.  Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus (@DrTedros) April 15, 2020

United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres

This is not the time to reduce resources for WHO operations, Guterres said.

Now is the time for unity and for the international community to work together in solidarity to stop this virus and its shattering consequences, he said.

Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security

The move sends the wrong message during the middle of a pandemic, said Dr Amesh Adalja, an infectious disease expert and senior scholar at the centre.





Adalja said the WHO does make mistakes, as it did in delaying the response to the Ebola outbreak in 2013 and 2014 in West Africa. He said reforms might be needed, but that work needs to take place after the pandemic has passed.

Its not the middle of a pandemic that you do this type of thing, he said.

Adalja said the WHO collects information about where the virus is active in every county in the world, which the United States needs to help guide decisions about when to open borders.

EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell

Borrell said the 27-nation bloc deeply regrets the suspension of funds and added that the U.N. health agency is now needed more than ever to combat the pandemic.

Only by joining forces can we overcome this crisis that knows no borders, he said.

US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention

Directed requests for comment to the White House.

American Medical Association

AMA President Patrice Harris called it a dangerous step in the wrong direction that will not make defeating COVID-19 easier and urged Trump to reconsider.

Protect Our Care

This is nothing more than a transparent attempt by President Trump to distract from his history downplaying the severity of the coronavirus crisis and his administrations failure to prepare our nation, said Chair Leslie Dach, who served as the global Ebola coordinator for the US Department of Health and Human Services.

To be sure, the World Health Organization is not without fault but it is beyond irresponsible to cut its funding at the height of a global pandemic. This move will undoubtedly make Americans less safe.

African Union head Moussa Faki Mahamat

Faki Mahamat termed the decision deeply regrettable and said the world had a collective responsibility to help WHO during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The USgovt decision to suspend funding to @WHO is deeply regrettable. Today more than ever,the world depends on WHOs leadership to steer the global #Covid_19 pandemic response.Our collective responsibility to ensure WHO can fully carry out its mandate, has never been more urgent  Moussa Faki Mahamat (@AUC_MoussaFaki) April 15, 2020

Vanderbilt University Medical Center

This virus doesnt need passports. In a few short months it has travelled to all of the continents of the world except Antarctica. If there were ever an event that showed us how we need to work tougher as a global community, this is it, said Dr William Schaffner, an infectious disease expert.

Central African Republic Health Minister Pierre Somse

Somse, CARS health minister, said Trumps move was a regrettable decision that will have harmful effects on the functioning of the WHO and on world health, because the WHO supports many countries in the health sector.

Chairman, US House of Representatives Foreign Affairs Committee

With each passing day of this worsening crisis, the president is showing us his political playbook: Blame the WHO, blame China, blame his political opponents, blame his predecessors  do whatever it takes to deflect from the fact that his administration mismanaged this crisis and its now costing thousands of American lives, Democratic representative Eliot Engel.

New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern

At a time like this when we need to be sharing information and we need to have advice we can rely on, the WHO has provided that. We will continue to support it and continue to make our contributions, Ardern said.

Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov

We see yesterdays announcement by Washington on freezing funding of the WHO as most concerning. It is a sign of the very selfish approach of the US authorities to what is happening in the world due to the pandemic, deputy foreign minister Ryabkov told state news agency TASS.

Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison

Morrison said he sympathised with Trumps criticisms of the WHO, especially its support of reopening Chinas wet markets where freshly slaughtered animals are sold and where the outbreak first appeared in the city of Wuhan late last year.

But that said, the WHO also as an organisation does a lot of important work including here in our region in the Pacific and we work closely with them, Morrison said.

We are not going to throw the baby out with the bathwater here, but they are also not immune from criticism and immune from doing things better.








Left red-faced after a protest by migrant workers during lockdown, authorities in Maharashtra moved to take action in the matter as they arrested a man on Wednesday for offensive social media posts and registered an FIR against a TV journalist over a false report.

A Navi Mumbai resident was arrested on early Wednesday for posting messages on his social media accounts which allegedly led to hundreds of migrant workers, stuck in Mumbai due to the lockdown, gathering near suburban Bandra railway station on Tuesday afternoon, police said.

The accused, Vinay Dubey, was produced in a court which remanded him in police custody April 21, a police official said.

Dubey had uploaded a video on social media in which he demanded that the Maharashtra government make travel arrangements for migrants, who are stranded due to the coronavirus-enforced lockdown and want to go back to their native places, he said.

He had also tweeted about the issue and called for a national-level protest if trains are not arranged till April 18 to ferry migrants workers to their native places, he said.

Dubey has been booked under IPC Sections 153 A (promoting disharmony, enmity or feelings of hatred between different groups), 117 (abetting commission of offence), 188 (disobedience of order by public servant), 269, 270 (negligent and malignant act likely to spread infection of disease danger to life) and provisions of the Epidemic Diseases Act, he said.

In a related development, an FIR has been registered against a television journalist over his report that trains would restart, which may have prompted the gathering in Bandra, a second police official said.

The accused, Rahul Kulkarni, based in Osmanabad district of Maharashtra, has been detained and police are in the process of bringing him to Mumbai, he said.

In a recent report, Kulkarni claimed Jan Sadharan (unreserved) special trains would resume for people stranded due to the lockdown, he said.

He has been booked under IPC Sections 188 (disobedience to order duly promulgated by public servant and 269, 270 (negligent, malignant act likely to spread infection of disease dangerous to life), 117 (abetting commission of offence by public), the official said.

Openly defying the coronavirus-enforced lockdown, more than 1,000 migrant workers, most of them from Bihar, Uttar Pradesh and West Bengal, had taken part in the Bandra protest.

They were demanding that the state government make transport arrangements so that they can go back to their native towns and villages.

Police had used mild force to disperse the crowd.

Meanwhile, the NCP termed the protest as unfortunate, while the Congress demanded a thorough probe.

Both parties are constituents in the Shiv Sena-led government in the state.

NCP chief Sharad Pawar termed the gathering of migrant workers as unfortunate and stressed such incidents should not recur in the face of the COVID-19 crisis.

Pawar said people gathered outside the station after somebody circulated the rumour that trains services will resume, adding precautions need to be taken to ensure that such confusing messages are checked.

The former Union minister urged political parties to desist from scoring points over each other during the ongoing crisis and asked them to defeat COVID-19 collectively.

Congress leader and Maharashtra minister Ashok Chavan demanded a thorough probe into the gathering and said it was an attempt to disrupt communal harmony and negate the state's efforts to fight the coronavirus outbreak.

Addressing a press conference in New Delhi through a video link, Chavan cited a letter of the South Central Railways for starting special trains to transport migrant labourers that might have triggered the gathering at Bandra.

The former chief minister said a police probe into the matter has already been launched and the guilty will be brought to book.

Chavan said he smelt a political conspiracy behind the campaigns being run on social media to impose President's Rule in Maharashtra.

"Whatever happened on Tuesday, there needs to be a thorough investigation into it. There are some who want to disturb the communal harmony in Maharashtra and negate the state's efforts to fight coronavirus," he said.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
FAIRFIELD  Fairfield police officers made up the entire list of the top 10 earners of town employees in 2019.

K9 Officer Kevin Wells was first on the list, with a gross income of $267,651, though $77,381 of that came from outside jobs where contractors pay officers for police services.

Lt. Keith Broderick, the Fairfield Police Department union president, said assignment to outside services is determined by a rotating list; officers will typically get assigned to a contracting job once every six or seven weeks.

The town actually makes money on the outside jobs, Broderick said. The outside job fund is over-funded.

Second on the list was Police Sgt. Jeremy Zdru, who brought home $267,266. Outside jobs made up $72,532 his gross pay.

Broderick said training is a big factor on officers compensation, including training in firearms, medical response and active shooter situations. Training is mandated by the state and the cost is significant.

These are all things to keep people proficient, he said. If someone is off-duty (when the training occurs), we have to pay them overtime.

Depending on the shift  say a Monday through Friday day shifts  the department has to hire someone to take their spot while theyre in training, he said.

More Information 2019 Top Earners (amount in parenthesis is outside pay) 1. K9 Officer Kevin Wells $267651 ($77,381) 2. Police Sgt. Jeremy Zdru $267,266 ($72,532) 3. Police Lt. Jeffrey Bloch $262,411 ($87,237) 4. Police Cpt. Christopher Tursi $250,343 ($100,051) 5. Police Officer Donald Matejek $247,696 ($104,827) 6. Police Sgt. Christopher Mastronardi $247,069 ($62,885) 7. Police Officer Keith Perham $218,226 ($107,858) 8. Police Lt. Keith Broderick $216,400 ($33,479) 9. Police Sgt. Michael Paris $215,008 ($13,921) 10. Detective Sgt. Mathew Reindeau $210,984 ($19,354) See More Collapse

The lieutenant said one reason the numbers are particularly high compared with other years is because the officers were eligible for back pay because the union was working with an expired contract from July of 2017 to January of 2019.

So, theres going to be retro-pay for almost all officers, Broderick said, adding that they were compensated a 2 percent raise for a year of that and another 2 percent raise for sixth months of it. Back pay on your overtime and your straight time. So, some guys got $10,000, $15,000 sometimes $20,000.

Number 10 on the list was Detective Sgt. Mathew Reindeau with $210,984, $19,354 in outside jobs.

Broderick said many officers are working many hours on top of their regular shift.

If one of our guys, or say anybody in the world, had two jobs, Broderick said. Say they worked eight hours a day in their office job, and then they worked (another job on top of that)... theyre labeled a hard worker. But, since ours is in one number, it really gets frowned upon. I dont think it should be.

Notably not on the list is Superintendent of Schools Mike Cummings, who serves in a role that has made the list in years past. According to Fairfield Public Schools, Cummings salary for 2019 was $202,373, and his total compensation was $203,506, putting him number 15 on the list.
Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, April 15)  Finance Secretary Carlos Dominguez III has rejected a proposal for government to halt payments for maturing foreign debts to free up cash for COVID-19 response, calling it a "narrow-sighted" measure.

Dominguez shot down the call made by Senator Imee Marcos to temporarily suspend loan payments to foreign lenders  a tactic used by her father, the late strongman Ferdinand Marcos  so that government can extend more subsidies to struggling families and companies forced out of business due to lockdowns.

Marcos, chairman of the Senate Committee on Economic Affairs, said this would unlock some 451 billion under the 2020 national budget. That amount covers interest payments on both domestic and foreign loans, a check with the General Appropriations Act showed.

"Debt moratorium has not crossed our mind. It was never entertained or will ever be a part of our crisis response measures," Dominguez said in a statement sent Tuesday evening, adding that doing this would put the country's track record in peril.

READ: Gov't readies 600-B for COVID-19 response, but more than half funded with loans

The Philippines has been regularly paying its loans to both local and foreign debtors as they are due. The debt burden is a mix of short-term and long-term borrowings, which have piled up as the government invests for development.

The country's debt burden is at 44.2 percent relative to the economy, lower than a peak of 78.3 percent in 1986, the DOF said. That was the year former President Marcos was booted out from power by a popular revolt that installed Corazon Aquino as the country's leader.

"We have built a 34-year track record, beginning with the Cory Aquino administration, of honoring our countrys obligations. Honoring our word has allowed us to remain as one of the most attractive investment destinations and one of the worlds favorite bond issuers," the Finance chief added.

He said the Philippines' regular debt payments made it trustworthy in the eyes of global banks and financial institutions.

READ: Philippines 'financially prepared' for COVID-19 quarantine measures until end of May

Marcos told Dominguez on Tuesday night to "have a heart," saying that postponing debt payments would be a better option to shore up funds compared to President Rodrigo Duterte's suggestion for the economic team to sell assets and steal if they have to. She also cited a debt relief program granted by the International Monetary Fund to 25 poor nations  mostly from Africa  that will restructure their loans for the next six months.

On Wednesday morning, Marcos appealed for Dominguez "not to take things personally" as he rejected the senator's proposal.

"COVID-19 is the enemy, not me," the senator said in a statement.

"While Secretary Dominguez and I are still lucky to have three square meals a day, hundreds of thousands if not millions of Filipinos with no access to the media are going hungry, unseen Filipinos whose patience and belief in government are being tested every single day that promised aid does not arrive," she added.

Dominguez earlier said that the government would be borrowing about $5.6 billion (around 280 billion) from the Asian Development Bank, the World Bank, and the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank for additional funding, on top of cash generated from identified savings and budget realignments to finance subsidies as well as other interventions to contain the spread of the disease.
Houstons two major airports are receiving a combined $200.9 million in federal funding to keep them operating as COVID-19 puts the kibosh on most air travel, according to a breakdown released Tuesday by transportation officials.

The Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act Airport Grant Program was part of the package approved by Congress to stem economic losses.
State-run Saudi Telecom Com (STC), the kingdoms largest telecom company, Tuesday said its planned $2.4-billion deal to acquire 55 per cent of Vodafone Egypt has been postponed for at least three months owing the Coronavirus pandemic.

STC in a statement pinned the decision on logistical challenges caused by the Covid-19 pandemic.

The company also said both parties have agreed to take more time for the completion of the transaction processes.

The transaction has been in the pipeline since January this year after the Saudi telecom giant indicated that it had reached a primary deal to buy the shares for $2.4 billion, as part of its entry into the Egyptian market, the largest Arab population in the Middle East region.
For a man who boasts of an illustrious career in the public service, Andrew Motsamai presents simply a resourceful and great leadership opportunity for Botswana National Front and by extension the Umbrella for Democratic change (UDC). His name appears in two of the BNF lobby lists, as a possible contestant for the position of Health Secretary.

Interestingly, he is the only contender for the position, thereby suggesting that both lobby lists have faith in him and endorse him. He appears in the lobby list led by President Advocate Duma Boko and another led by Vice President Dr. Prince Dibeela who is challenging the former for the top seat. Motsamai's close associates are quick to point out that, this latest move was long overdue. In fact to them it was always going to be a matter of fate. His father, the late Frank Motsamai, was a BNF stalwart, whose close collaboration with the regional BNF leadership in the 1980s consolidated the party's dominance in Kgatleng East.

It is said that BNF committee meetings were held in the family household, from which regional campaigns were often launched. This was an exciting time for opposition politics, which birthed the radical and intellectual generation of activists that came of age under the stewardship of political giants such as Isaac Mabiletsa, Lemogang Ntime and the late Paul Rantao.

Andrew Motsamai was to carry this political orientation throughout his student life and professional career. He was to later engrave his name in the labour movement as a trade unionist. As president of Botswana Civil Service Association (BCSA), Motsamai was instrumental in its transformation to the present-day Botswana Public Employees Union (BOPEU), which he served as president until 2016.

He was also to later become instrumental in the formation of Botswana Federation of Public Sector Unions (BOFEPUSU), serving as founding President and later as full time Secretary General.

It was during this period at the helm of BOFEPUSU, that Motsamai coordinated a spirited command of union activists comprising of Goretetse Kekgonegile, Ibo Kenosi, Raymond Malanga including his estranged comrade-turned rival Johnson Motshwarakgole of Manual Workers Union in the largest mass-action ever, the 2011 public sector strike dubbed 'The mother of all strikes'.

The period after the 2011 public sector strike, saw concerted efforts by the progressive left forces to unite the opposition parties in Botswana. Owing in part to his influential role within the leadership of BOFEPUSU, Motsamai became a contact point between opposition parties (BMD, BPP, BNF & BCP) with the convenors of opposition talks Emang Maphanyane and Lebang Mpotokwane and BOFEPUSU.

It was not surprising then that following the death of BMD president Gomolemo Motswaledi, Motsamai's name alongside that of Uyapo Ndadi, Rasina Winfred Rasina, Thuso Tiego and Dr. Phenyo Butale, was mentioned as likely favourites to contest for the Gaborone Central Parliamentary seat. However, Motsamai publicly denied harbouring any political interests at the time, most likely owing to his immediate responsibilities as then President of BOPEU.

Motsamai is however not without controversy. He was alleged to be assisting the BNF with financial and political support through BOPEU, which assistance led to BNF winning the Goodhope / Mabule and Tlokweng 2017 bye-elections under the UDC ticket and subsequent council seats in other constituencies.

When contacted to comment whether indeed he will be contesting for the Central Committee position in the BNF, Motsamai confirmed his appearance in the lobby list but declined to discuss any further, what he terms, internal party matters. Reached for comment, Motsamais known close ally, Rasina who worked with Motsamai at BOPEU said that:

Motsamai has always been a BNF stalwart. He has always been clear about it and his thought process is that of the BNF command and his views about governance are equally too BNF oriented. Although Rasina was cagey with details, he however confirmed to this publication that he has had discussions with Motsamai after he (Motsamai) was talked into campaigning.

On Motsamai's decision to shun the opportunity to show his political prowess when approached in 2014 to replace the late Motswaledi Rasina said: "I discussed that with him and his position was that Sir G was his brother and was protecting his legacy by refusing to contest. He explained that he would like to carry the legacy on unionism platform. He welcomed the arrival of Dr. Butale on grounds that he came sober at the time when there were differing views by contracting partners on who should be considered."
Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, April 15) - Financial adviser and best-selling author Chinkee Tan told CNN Philippines that businesses must innovate to thrive in the 'new normal' after the enhanced community quarantine is lifted.

"You have to already start changing and adapting, and there are certain industries who are willing to change and adapt, they will thrive," Tan said in an interview on CNN Philippines.

Tan shared the experience of a female vendor he buys fish from, who saw sales drop by about 80 percent during the onset of the COVID-19 crisis.

Tan said he provided her with some advice - simply go online and deliver to customers. A week later her sales had improved, he said.

"If you do not innovate, you will evaporate right now," Tan added.

The financial adviser told CNN Philippines he expects four industries to perform strong after the quarantine, namely the food industry, health and wellness industry, technology industry and transport industry.

Tan said the groceries, pharmaceutical companies and stores providing medical supplies are among the big winners in this scenario.

He added that insurance companies will benefit, as more Filipinos recognize the need to invest in health and life insurance because of COVID-19.

"People will be more concerned about their health, because they know for a fact that once they get hospitalized, it will cost them much," Tan said.

Tan also expects online industries to perform well, among them telemedicine, online gaming and online shopping, as Filipinos remain cautious about going to public and crowded places.

"I believe that this will be a lifestyle," Tan said. "I don't see it going back to normal."
Major international creditors will relieve the world's poorest countries of debt payments this year to help them deal with the coronavirus pandemic that has sparked the steepest downturn in the global economy since the 1930s, France announced on Tuesday.

Finance officials from the United States, China and other Group of 20 major economies are expected to finalize the agreement when they meet online on Wednesday, French Finance Minister Bruno Le Maire told reporters.

He said some 76 countries, including 40 in sub-Saharan Africa, would be eligible to have debt payments worth a combined $20 billion suspended by official and private creditors, with a remaining $12 billion in payments due to multilateral institutions still to be sorted out.

"We have obtained a debt moratorium at the level of bilateral creditors and private creditors for a total of $20 billion," Le Maire told journalists. He spoke just before Group of Seven (G-7) finance ministers and central bank governors met by video conference on Tuesday and threw their support behind temporary debt relief to the poorest countries, as long as it was backed by the G-20 and the Paris Club.

In a joint statement, they said they were ready to provide "a time-bound suspension on debt service payments due on official bilateral claims for all countries eligible for World Bank concessional financing" if joined by China and other countries in the Group of 20 major economies, and as agreed with the Paris Club group of creditors.

Sources familiar with the process had told Reuters this week they expected the G-20 to endorse a suspension of debt payments at least until the end of the year, despite some resistance from China, which has overtaken the World Bank as a major lender to developing countries, especially in Africa.

IMF chief economist Gita Gopinath told Reuters the agreement offered "hugely welcome" relief for the poorest countries, freeing resources that could be used to improve healthcare systems at a time when resources are strained by plunging commodity prices and massive capital outflows.

World Bank President David Malpass, in a tweet, thanked U.S. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin for hosting the G-7 meeting and backing his joint call with International Monetary Fund Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva for the temporary debt standstill.

The World Bank and the IMF have begun disbursing emergency aid to countries struggling to suppress the coronavirus and mitigate its economic impact. They first issued their call for debt relief on March 25, but it has not been formally endorsed by the G-20 nations.

The IMF, in its 2020 World Economic Outlook, said the pandemic would cause a 3.0% contraction in the global economy, but warned the impact could be far worse.

Gopinath said the pandemic could be far more severe in developing economies that had not yet seen the kinds of lockdowns already implemented in China, the United States and Europe, adding a "serious downside risk" to the IMF forecast.

The forecast provided a somber backdrop to the IMF and World Bank spring meetings, which normally draw 10,000 people to Washington but are being held by video conference this week because of the pandemic.
Source: Xinhua| 2020-04-15 19:33:04|Editor: huaxia

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BEIJING, April 15 (Xinhua) -- The Chinese government has decided to send teams of medical experts to Ethiopia, Burkina Faso and Saudi Arabia to help the countries fight the COVID-19 pandemic, Foreign Ministry spokesperson Zhao Lijian announced Wednesday.

China and African countries are longtime brothers who share weal and woe. African countries had supported China during China's most difficult times fighting the pandemic, which China will never forget, Zhao said at a news briefing, adding that China is paying close attention to the situation of the pandemic in Africa, and has overcome its own difficulties and provided anti-epidemic materials and aid to the African Union and all African countries with diplomatic relations with China.

"These steps are all a reflection of building an even stronger China-Africa community with a shared future," said the spokesperson.

He said after the outbreak in China, the Saudi leaders immediately expressed their condolences and support. The Saudi government and public have provided China with many batches of aid materials.

Saudi Arabia is also facing severe challenges amid the pandemic. China also firmly supports Saudi Arabia's anti-epidemic efforts and is willing to provide assistance within its capability, he said.

He said as comprehensive strategic cooperation partners, China will maintain close cooperation with Saudi Arabia to safeguard the safety and health of peoples of the two countries.

The team of Chinese medical experts to Saudi Arabia left for the country Wednesday morning.
Mackenzie Bezos, after divorcing Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, made to the Forbes Billionaire List. With a whopping net worth of $36 Billion, she became a part of the list and is now one of the richest people in the world. She is also among the world's 25 richest people.

 iStock

MacKenzie, post her divorce with Jeff, that also went onto become 'the most expensive divorces' of all the times, left with 25% of Jeff's Amazon Stake. Her net worth has now shot up and has climbed from $8.2 billion to $45.3 billion, even though the whole world is suffering from a financial crisis due to the pandemic. According to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, MacKenzie ranks 18 on the list.



 iStock

But, coming to what's catching all the attention at the moment is the fact that her net worth has crossed India's richest man, Mukesh Ambani, as well.



 Twitter

Mukesh Ambani has now fallen one step down from Mackenzie with a current net worth $43.4 Billion The majority of Ambani's wealth comes from his stake in Reliance Industries. Reliance Industries is one of the largest oil refining complex in the world.



Even the Billionaire's mansion, Antilia is worth $400 Million approximately as per September 2014 analysis. Currently, MacKenzie stands 18th on the list of Bloomberg Billionaire index whereas Ambani is on number 19.

 Twitter

As per Business Today's report, Mukesh Ambani lost $1.8 Billion and the share price of RIL has dropped too. His net worth, according to Forbes Real-time billionaire list, fell to $40.2 billion. This decline brings his wealth to 8% of RIL as per March 12, 2020 report of Business Today.



Due to the pandemic, after French Fashion Giant LVMH's Chief Executive Bernard Arnault, whose wealth also dropped by 28 per cent to $77 Billion, even Mukesh Ambani has suffered a major loss.

 iStock

Speaking of MacKenzie, she has been in the limelight for quite some time now. Let us also tell you that she is not just number 18 on the list, but also has a net worth that makes her the fourth-richest woman in the world.



Besides that, she is also a noted American Novelist who has won an award for her debut for 'The Testing of Luther Albright' in 2005. All in all, even though MacKenzie has now parted ways from Bezos, she will still reign supreme in the list of richest people, we reckon!
New Delhi/IBNS: India will export hydroxychloroquine (HCQ) tablets to Malaysia for the treatment of COVID-19, a Malaysian minister has told Reuters on Wednesday, adding that the country will receive 89,100 tablets in the first order.

India had put a ban on the export of the drug last month to secure stock of the medicine for domestic use but lifted it partially to help some of its neighbours and "nations who have been particularly badly affected by the pandemic".

India is the largest producer of the medicine which is believed to be effective in the treatment of COVID-19. Last week, US President Donald Trump warned India of retaliatory action if it did not release the medicine for the US.

The US President has touted HCQ as a potential weapon against COVID-19, after which its demand skyrocketed across the world.

"On 14 April, India has given permission for Malaysia to import 89,100 tablets," Malaysia's Deputy Foreign Minister Kamarudin Jaffar was quoted as saying by Reuters on Wednesday.

"We will try to get more hydroxychloroquine tablets from India, which is also subject to stock availability."

According to the Reuters report, the Ministry of External Affairs has not responded to a query in this regard.

India's decision to sell HCQ to Malaysia amid COVID-19 is being viewed as an improvement of relations between the two countries which had soured over former Malaysian President Mahathir Mohamad's anti-India stand on international platforms and his criticism of Indian policies, including the Citizenship Amendment Act(CAA) and the abrogation of Article 370.

The Reuters report said Teva Pharmaceutical Industries, IPCA Laboratories and Cadila Healthcare are some of the largest producers of hydroxychloroquine.

Cadila has increased its production 10 times to 30 metric tonnes per month and is ready to produce more if required, Managing Director Sharvil Patel said last week, it added.
Moscow calls on Washington to refrain from further attacks on the World Health Organization after the US announcement on halting funding to the UN agency, Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov said on Wednesday, TASS reports.

According to the senior diplomat, the WHO is working in full compliance with its charter and is respected in the world among the governments of the majority of countries as well as scientists, medics and epidemiologists.

"We are calling on the US to refrain from further attacks on the WHO and pursue a responsible policy, which would not ruin the basis of international cooperation in the medical and biological field, but on the contrary would enhance this cooperation and create a basis for its further development," Ryabkov stressed.
On April 9, Iraqi President Barham Salih gathered the Shia, Kurdish and Sunni political blocs at the presidential palace to task head of intelligence Mustafa al-Kadhimi with forming a new government. Kadhimi is the third prime minister-designate assigned since Prime Minister Adil abd al-Mehdi resigned in November, in the wake of mass protests against government corruption and the country's ethno-sectarian based political system. Kadhimi's two predecessors, Muhammad Tawfiq Allawi and Adnan al-Zurfi, both failed to form a government.

This third attempt came as Iraq struggles with repeated crises since October 2019, when the government began responding with deadly force to large-scale mass protests, killing over 600 and injuring tens of thousands.

In January, the U.S. assassination of Qasem Soleimani escalated tensions between the United States and Iran, with Iraq stuck in the middle and becoming the home for regular tit-for-tat attacks. The Islamic State - never completely defeated - took advantage of these crises and increased its attacks in disputed territories. The outbreak of covid-19 challenges the country's fragile public health sector, while the decline in the price of oil will make it harder for leaders to pay the public salaries that keep the system (and patronage) moving.

What does the delay in forming a government amid multiple crises mean for the post-2003 Iraqi political system?

- Since 2003, Iraq's elites have overcome fragmentation during crises

Iraq's post-2003 political system is designed to withstand crisis. Over the years, political parties reflecting the country's ethnic and sectarian divides have had a tacit understanding that crises represent a risk to their collective interests. These elite stakeholders have together weathered civil war, insurgency and multiple protests - despite deep conflicts with one another.

For instance, in September 2018 protesters attacked most major political party headquarters and the Iranian consulate in Basra, and authorities killed some 20 protesters. Since the May election of that year, the fragmented Shia elite had been unable to even declare which side has the largest parliamentary bloc, let alone decide on a government. But after the September crisis, the previously gridlocked parties swiftly came together to form an "understanding" that pushed through the impasse leading to the Mehdi government.

In 2020, however, Iraq's political parties were slower to come back together despite the multiple crises - far greater than 2018. The system is less able to swiftly fix itself, based primarily on the fragmentation of the elite - and their determination to prevent any challenge to their rule.

- Why did the two prior attempts fail?

The two previous prime minister-designates each fell short for different reasons. When I met Allawi in February at the prime minister's guest house in Baghdad, he was very clearly convinced that his mandate was to sideline the parties. He hoped that simply choosing technocratic ministers outside the elite pact, with the support of Moqtada al-Sadr behind him, would garner support from protesters and the disillusioned public. He failed, however, because his cabinet had to go through parliament and the parties rejected what they saw a threat to the elite pact and the system.

Zurfi similarly failed after being directly appointed in March by Salih after the Shia parties failed to come up with a candidate. From the beginning, then, Zurfi faced challenges because parties were not in agreement. He attempted to directly confront his opposition, and spoke out against Iranian influence in Iraq. As a result, Zurfi was unable to even get to parliament with his proposed cabinet, as the Shia parties got back together to bring him down.

The failure of both strategies - Allawi attempting to work outside the elite party system and Zurfi trying to target certain parties - reveals tensions in Iraq's political system. This fragmentation strains the parties' ability to swiftly unite, and the system's ability to withstand crises. The endemic problems are a consequence of fragmentation, including the failure following the 2018 elections to declare governing parliamentary bloc. Moreover, after that election, newcomers into the political system (two-thirds of the MPs are serving their first term) are increasingly making their own demands and less willing to blindly toe party lines.

- Can Kadhimi overcome the impasse?

Kadhimi's appointment as prime minister-designate nonetheless is on shaky foundations. His appointment had previously faced a veto from Iran and its allied groups, which make up the Fateh bloc. Kataeb Hezbollah, an armed group close to Iran and linked to the Popular Mobilization Units, issued a statement accusing Kadhimi with blood on his hands for the deaths of Soleimani and Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis. Many Fateh bloc members had for months vetoed Kadhimi's name due to this allegation.

Immediately before Kadhimi addressed the nation for the first time, Iraqi state television broadcast a prerecorded statement by PMU (and Fateh) leader Qais al-Khazali, who had also previously accused Kadhimi of spying for the Americans and being complicit in the two killings. Khazali, who commands the second-largest party within Fateh, accepted the party line to back Kadhimi but came out with his own conditions on television.

However, the concerns about the covid-19 crisis and the collapse of the price of oil finally brought all sides to compromise - a design of the political system. Kadhimi has signaled that he will play by the old rules with these stakeholders.

Because of the magnitude of these simultaneous crises, Iraqi politics is moving back to the post-2003 norm. The ethno-sectarian based political system is geared to weather such existential crises more than it is to handling day-to-day governance. Despite the notion of "post-sectarianism" in Iraq, this system is based on ethno-sectarian political party compromise. In his television address, Khazali, who had previously attempted to move away from sectarian language, explained that the process of selecting a prime minister is reserved to the Shia, who have the right as the majority, and not to Salih, a Kurd.

Over the years Kadhimi has expressed an admiration of the bravery of the protesters and of the importance of civil society. Many Iraqi civil society activists owe their lives to the work of the former intelligence chief. However, as the compromise prime minister-designate, he will find it difficult to transform his country as long as he plays by the rules of post-2003 Iraq - an irony not lost on the protesters who immediately rejected the candidacy of a man who until recently many protesters had supported.

- - -

Mansour is a senior research fellow with the Middle East and North Africa Program at Chatham House and co-author of "Between Chaos and Order: A New Approach to Stalled State Transformations in Iraq and Yemen".

For other commentary from The Monkey Cage, an independent blog anchored by political scientists from universities around the country, see www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/monkey-cage
Summit Mayor Nora Radest is emphasizing to residents that any little bit will help in her citys effort to provide financial relief for its many small businesses being impacted by the coronavirus lockdowns.

But it has been Radests experience in her two terms as mayor and more than 30 years as a resident that a little typically transforms into a lot whenever the call goes out for a helping hand.

And Radest hopes the legacy of generosity lives on as the Sustain Summit Fund is launched to establish an emergency assistance grant program for those suddenly struggling small businesses that have long been the heartbeat of the citys vibrant downtown district.

The same thing is happening in towns like Somerville, Westfield, Morristown and Madison, which also have developed platforms to help the small businesses in their communities.

Summit it a very generous town, Radest said, and people are always helping out in a number of ways.

A few cases in point:

More than 100 concerned residents have volunteered their services to shop for groceries and pick up pharmaceutical needs for the elderly or for anyone who is self-quarantining out of health concerns, Radest noted.

More than 20 people have volunteered to assist ailing small business owners in the lengthy and complicated process of applying for state and federal grants and loans (these, incidentally, are independent of the Sustain Summit Fund application, which is concise and straightforward).

The Front Line Appreciation Group of Summit , known as FLAG, already has raised more than $100,000 to purchase meals from local establishments for the emergency room and ICU staff at Overlook Medical Center.

Actually, Radest is seeing the Sustain Summit Fund already is falling in line with that tradition of giving, as $135,045 had been raised as of Tuesday morning on the GoFundMe link established by Radests office in partnership with the Summit Foundation and Summit Downtown Inc.

The fund will provide grants to qualifying small businesses.

Thats a very good number, particularly because we know the Summit Foundation is going to match the first $50,000, Radest said on Monday, when the GoFundMe total was just over $72,000. I know some other checks or HCH transfers that have gone directly to Summit Downtown Inc., which is not evidenced on the GoFundMe page.

Summit has followed funding models established recently by Westfield and Madison, though Radest said the idea in her city was hatched almost as soon as it became clear that essential businesses such as restaurants would be limited to curbside pickups and deliveries and that non-essential establishments would be closed except for those offering online services.

We had the notion weeks ago to do this, Radest said. It took a little time to create a form and sure we knew exactly what we were trying to to do, what organizations would be included, which ones would not. Its businesses with under 50 employees; we tried to keep it small.

Somerville has not yet solicited direct funding from residents, though is encouraging their support via the recently launched Somerville at Home website created by the Downtown Somerville Alliance, or D.S.A. This attractive and well-organized site was introduced last Friday.

Scenes like this aren't taking place these days in downtown Somerville, but the Downtown Somerville Alliance is promoting the wares of the district on its "Somerville at Home" website.Courtesy Somerville Downtown Alliance

Downtowns are a critical element of New Jerseys economic well-being, said Natalie Pineiro, executive director of the D.S.A. We know the economic impact of the coronavirus will be immense, and it is the responsibility of district management corporations like the D.S.A. to ensure that we are doing everything we can to keep our family of small businesses on the map during these difficult times.

This website provides hours, menus and delivery details of the eating establishments still operating in town, but also offers other experiences that reach beyond dining options.

Social distancing doesnt mean you have to forego the staples of downtown Somerville, Pineiro said. The Somerville at Home site even features videos from your favorite businesses with tips, recipes and activities that will bring us into the comfort of your home.

Ah, but both Pineiro and Radest know one of the most endearing comforts of home has always been the knowledge that you can leave it occasionally to enjoy some shopping, dining or social time downtown.

Before all this, we had about a one-percent vacancy rate downtown, which is pretty remarkable, Radest said. "Were hoping desperately that the stores can stay open and stay in business.

The landlords have been reaching out and tenants have been talking to their landlords. And I know the banks all have been reaching out to the landlords on the other end, extending their loans and things like that, she said. Everyone is trying to help each other.

That includes some of the larger businesses in town that already have provided capital to other projects throughout Summit.

Bristol Myers Squibb is our new corporate partner in town and theyve been very generous, Radest said. I expect them to donate to this, but I also know they have donated to various organizations in town.

As generous as her people have been, Radest knows the Sustain Summit Fund is not going to provide salvation for every small business owner in town. There are more 200 spread throughout the city of 22,000 people in Union County; these dollars can only go so far.

Were not going to be able to raise enough funds to help everyone stay open for the long haul, Radest said. "But hopefully its something where we can tide people over as sort of a lifeline until they get some of the state and federal funding.

Also, hopefully its a sign of support for our merchants that they know the town believes in them and supports them.

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.

This article is part of NJ Is Open*, an important initiative designed to help essential businesses that are still open get the word out and connect with customers. Business owners can become part of our comprehensive resource by filling out this simple Google form. Have several locations? Fill out a new form for each one.

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Chandigarh, April 15 : The Chandigarh administration on Wednesday announced that it will make public the names of curfew violators. Taking the initiative to strictly implement the lockdown to contain the spread of coronavirus pandemic, Adviser Manoj Parida said the Administration would begin publishing names of VIPs defying curfew orders.

"From tomorrow we will publish name and designation of VIPs violating curfew orders and going for morning and evening walk. Be warned," Parida tweeted.

In another tweet, he said: "Do u (you) know the full form of VIP? Very Idiotic Person".

Chandigarh has imposed restrictions until May 3. But Parida said any relaxations would be considered only after April 20.

Chandigarh has reported 21 coronavirus cases to date.

A number of Punjab and Haryana bureaucrats were among 466 rounded up and let off with a warning for violating curfew norms on April 13.

The special drive to nab walkers was carried out in 120 parks across the city.

The 'City Beautiful' has the distinction of having one of the highest densities of motor vehicles in the country. For a population of just over one million, there are nearly 650,000 registered motor vehicles in the city.
VANCOUVER, BC / ACCESSWIRE / April 15, 2020 / Universal Copper Ltd. ("Universal Copper" or the "Company") (TSXV:UNV)(Frankfurt:3TA1) is pleased to provide an update for current and prospective Shareholders regarding the Company's 2019 exploration activities and milestones.

2019 was a busy and successful year for Universal Copper with exploration efforts focussed on the Houston, B.C. Poplar copper-gold project and through its joint venture partner on the Princeton, B.C. gold project. In addition, the Company's technical team continued to review domestic and international projects with the aim of increasing the Company's copper and gold exposure.

Universal also made a significant technical addition with Mr. Wesley Hansen joining the Board of Directors. All Universal employees and contractors are working at home during the current COVID-19 pandemic crisis. The health and safety of our personnel and the wellbeing of the public is always paramount.

Poplar

The Company continued to expand the copper deposit footprint with a deep 538 metre drill hole to compliment its 2018 drill program. These holes have confirmed the historic drilling data and expanded the mineralization at depth.

19-PC-129 intersected 257.61 metres at 0.488% copper within a 394.82 interval grading 0.413% copper. Complete details of the intersection can be found in the 16-Oct-2019 news release.

18-PC-126 intersected 380.97 metres at 0.365% copper, 18-PC-127 intersected 264.86 metres grading 0.421% copper and 18-PC-128 intersected intervals of 151.1 metres at 0.330% copper and 71.0 metres at 0.373% copper. Complete details of the intersection can be found in the 22-Jan-2019 news release.

The Company has also completed a Long Wave InfraRed (LWIR) survey over the entire 62,000 hectare claim block and follow up ground surveys on both historic occurrences and newly identified anomalies. Universal's technical team is commencing planning for the 2020 exploration season.

Princeton

Through its joint venture partner Canarc Resources Corp., exploration continued at the Princeton Gold project, where Universal's 2018 exploration returned 219 g/t gold over 0.9 metres and 99.7 g/t gold over 0.9 metres from bedrock trenching of quartz veins. (See UNV 10-Jan-2019 news release).

The 2018 property wide airborne geophysical survey identified several linear trends

2019 trenching extended the known vein system to 235 metres before the veining trending under thick overburden. Highlights included 44.2 g/t Au over 1.6 metres. The trenching help better define priority targets for drilling.

Board of Directors

Mr. Wesley Hanson joined the Board of Directors 01-May-2019. A Professional Geoscientist, Mr. Hanson has over 32 years of domestic and international exploration, mine development and mine operations experience. Highlights include: Director Technical Services for Kinross Gold (2002 to 2006), President and CEO for Noront Resources (2009 to 2012). Mr. Hanson's technical expertise is a key addition to the existing Universal technical team.

Clive Massey, Universal Copper's CEO, stated: "As demonstrated, the Company had a very successful 2019 both project wise and corporately. I would like to extend our sincere thanks to our suppliers, contractors, partners and most importantly to our shareholders, for their cooperation and understanding in these unprecedented times. We look forward to getting back in the field and moving the Company forward."

The Year in Review:

Universal Copper Closes Ft and NFT Private Placements for Proceeds Of $690,325

As previously announced in April 15, 2019 news release, the Company closed its private placements of Non Flow Through Units (each "NFT Unit") and Flow Through Units (each a "FT Unit"), receiving subscriptions for aggregate gross proceeds of $690,325.

Universal Copper Appoints Wesley Hanson To Its Board of Directors

The Company announced on May 1, 2019 news release, the appointment of Wesley Hanson to its Board of Directors. Mr. Hanson has held several senior positions in the mining sector bringing to the Board over 32 years of industry experience in exploration, mine development, mine operations, project evaluation and financing including direct involvement in the engineering, construction and commissioning of numerous mining projects in Canada, the US, Brazil, Chile and Russia. Mr. Hanson is a Professional Geologist and received a Bachelor of Science degree in Geology from Mount Allison University in 1982. The Company intends to further strengthen the Board of Directors, in due course.

Universal Commences 2019 Exploration Poplar Copper Property

The Company announced on June 11, 2019 news release, the commencement of its 2019 exploration program at its 62,000 hectare Poplar copper property, southwest of Houston, British Columbia. Prior to executing the 2019 drilling program, Universal undertook a ground survey to evaluate several peripheral gold targets identified during historic exploration programs and/or by the 2018 Long Wave InfraRed Survey. The program consisted of prospecting, mapping, soil and rock sampling concentrating in the western portion of the property where last year's forest fire should provide new outcrop exposure in a number of the target areas. The Company developed multiple drill targets as a result of this exploration program.

Universal Copper Receives TSX Venture Exchange Approval to Amend Poplar Property Agreement

The Company announced on July 22, 2019 news release, that the Company received TSX Venture Exchange approval to amend the Poplar Property Option to purchase agreement with the Vendor whereby the Company and the Vendor have agreed to extend the time in which the Company has to fulfill its obligations (the "Poplar Agreement"). As a result, the Company has the option to acquire a 100% ownership of 81 mineral titles (the "Poplar Property") from the Vendor whereby Universal Copper can earn a 100% interest, subject to legacy NSR interests ranging from 1% to 2%, in the Poplar Property by completing the share issuances, exploration expenditures and cash payments to the Vendor.

Universal Commences 2019 Drilling on Poplar Property

The Company announced on August 20, 2019 news release, the commencement of the 2019 drilling campaign at its 62,000 hectare Poplar copper property, southwest of Houston, British Columbia. The purpose of this program will be to expand the known copper deposit to depth, and the initial drill campaign will encompass a 550 metre vertical hole. Additional holes are in the planning stages.

Universal Intersects 257.61 M Of 0.488% Copper Within 394.82 M At 0.413% Copper at Poplar Property

The Company announced on October 16, 2019 news release, release the results from Drill Hole ("19-PC-129") from its 62,000 hectare Poplar copper property, southwest of Houston, British Columbia.

The purpose of 19-PC-129, drilled at an angle of -80o, was to test the main Poplar deposit to depth. The hole was successful with continuous copper mineralization from 48.8 metres through to a major shear zone fault at 538 metres.

The full interval averaged 0.362 % copper over 489.2 metres with a higher-grade interval of 0.488% copper between 230.36 metres and 487.97 metres within a larger interval of 0.413% copper between 143.18 and 538 metres. The hole was terminated at 551 metres on the other side of the shear zone fault. Further exploration needs to focus on locating the copper mineralization below the fault.

About the Poplar

The Poplar copper deposit hosts an historical indicated mineral resource of 131 million tonnes grading 0.31 per cent copper, 0.009 per cent molybdenum, 0.09 gram per tonne gold and 2.39 grams per tonne silver, and a historical inferred mineral resource of 132 million tonnes grading 0.27 per cent Cu, 0.005 per cent Mo, 0.07 g/t Au and 3.75 g/t Ag has been identified through the drilling of 147 historical holes.

These historical indicated and inferred resources were disclosed by Lions Gate Metals Inc. in its technical report dated March 30, 2012, prepared by Gary Giroux, PEng.

To determine the historical resource, a 3-D solid was constructed to constrain the mineralized area, using a 0.1-per-cent-copper-grade shell as a guide. Large internal waste zones were modelled as were some larger-post mineral dikes. Of the total database, 129 drill holes totalling 37,205 metres were within the mineralized zone and were used to estimate the resource. Drill holes were compared with the mineralized solid, and assays were tagged if inside. Copper, molybdenum, gold and silver assays within the mineralized solid were capped at 1.4 per cent Cu, 0.14 per cent Mo, 0.34 g/t Au and 41 g/t Ag, respectively. Five-metre composites were formed and used for variography.

For this estimate and to aid with some preliminary planning, the blocks were reduced to five by five by 10 metres in dimension and were estimated for Cu, Mo, Au and Ag by ordinary kriging. The historical resource is classified as indicated and inferred based on each block's proximity to data and the grade continuity. The historical indicated and historical inferred resource uses the categories set out in Section 1.2 of National Instrument 43-101.

Universal will need to review and verify the historical drilling database and twin a number of the existing drill holes to bring the historical resources current. Investors are cautioned a qualified person has not done sufficient work to classify the historical estimate as current mineral resources or mineral reserves and therefore Universal is not treating the historical estimate as current mineral resources or mineral reserves.

Qualified Person

R. Tim Henneberry, P.Geo. (BC) and Universal Copper's geologist, is the Qualified Person who has reviewed and approved the technical content of this news release.

For additional information, please visit the Company's website at www.universalcopper.com

ON BEHALF OF THE BOARD OF DIRECTORS

"Clive Massey"

Clive H. Massey

President & CEO

For further information, please contact:

Investor Relations

Phone: (604) 341-6870

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 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 Universal Resources Ltd. 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 Universal Copper Ltd. management on the date the statements are made. Except as required by law, Universal Copper Ltd. 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: Universal Copper Ltd.

View source version on accesswire.com:https://www.accesswire.com/585175/Universal-Provides-Corporate-Update-on-Companys-Activities-to-Shareholders
CAMBRIDGE, Mass., April 15, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- The COVID-19 pandemic is raising critical questions regarding the dynamics of the disease, its risk factors, and the best approach to address it in healthcare systems. MIT Sloan School of Management Prof. Dimitris Bertsimas and nearly two dozen doctoral students are using machine learning and optimization to find answers. Their effort is summarized in the COVIDanalytics platform where their models are generating accurate real-time insight into the pandemic. The group is focusing on four main directions; predicting disease progression, optimizing resource allocation, uncovering clinically important insights, and assisting in the development of COVID-19 testing.

"The backbone for each of these analytics projects is data, which we've extracted from public registries, clinical Electronic Health Records, as well as over 120 research papers that we compiled in a new database. We're testing our models against incoming data to determine if it makes good predictions, and we continue to add new data and use machine-learning to make the models more accurate," says Bertsimas.

The first project addresses dilemmas at the front line, such as the need for more supplies and equipment. Protective gear must go to healthcare workers and ventilators to critically ill patients. The researchers developed an epidemiological model to track the progression of COVID-19 in a community, so hospitals can predict surges and determine how to allocate resources.

The team quickly realized that the dynamics of the pandemic differ from one state to another, creating opportunities to mitigate shortages by pooling some of the ventilator supply across states. Thus, they employed optimization to see how ventilators could be shared among the states and created an interactive application that can help both the federal and state governments.

"Different regions will hit their peak number of cases at different times, meaning their need for supplies will fluctuate over the course of weeks. This model could be helpful in shaping future public policy," notes Bertsimas.

Recently, the researchers connected with long-time collaborators at Hartford HealthCare to deploy the model, helping the network of seven campuses to assess their needs. Coupling county level data with the patient records, they are rethinking the way resources are allocated across the different clinics to minimize potential shortages.

The third project focuses on building a mortality and disease progression calculator to predict whether someone has the virus, and whether they need hospitalization or even more intensive care. He points out that current advice for patients is "at best based on age, and perhaps some symptoms." As data about individual patients is limited, their model uses machine learning based on symptoms, demographics, comorbidities, lab test results as well as a simulation model to generate patient data. Data from new studies is continually added to the model as it becomes available.

"We started with data published in Wuhan, Italy, and the U.S., including infection and death rate as well as data coming from patients in the ICU and the effects of social isolation. We enriched them with clinical records from a major hospital in Lombardy which was severely impacted by the spread of the virus. Through that process, we created a new model that is quite accurate. Its power comes from its ability to learn from the data," says Bertsimas.

"By probing the severity of the disease in a patient, it can actually guide clinicians in congested areas in a much better way," says Bertsimas.

Their fourth project involves creating a convenient test for COVID-19. Using data from about 100 samples from Morocco, the group is using machine-learning to augment a test previously designed at the Mohammed VI Polytechnic University to come up with more precise results. The model can accurately detect the virus in patients around 90% of the time, while false positives are low.

The team is currently working on expanding the epidemiological model to a global scale, creating more accurate and informed clinical risk calculators, and identifying potential ways that would allow us to go back to normality.

"We have released all our source code and made the public database available for other people too. We will continue to do our own analysis, but if other people have better ideas, we welcome them," says Bertsimas.

The MIT Sloan School of Management is where smart, independent leaders come together to solve problems, create new organizations, and improve the world. Learn more at mitsloan.mit.edu.

For further information, contact:



Paul Denning or Patricia Favreau Director of Media Relations

Associate Director of Media Relations (617) 253-0576

617-253-3492 [email protected]

[email protected]

SOURCE MIT Sloan School of Management

Related Links

http://www.mitsloan.mit.edu


(CNN) -- This may be the new normal for quite a while.

The US may have to endure social distancing measures -- such as stay-at-home orders and school closures -- until 2022, researchers projected on Tuesday. That is, unless, a vaccine becomes quickly available.

That's according to researchers from the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, who published their findings in the journal Science on Tuesday. Those findings directly contradict research being touted by the White House that suggests the pandemic may stop this summer.

The team at the Harvard School of Public Health used what's known about Covid-19 and other coronaviruses to create possible scenarios of the current pandemic.

"Intermittent distancing may be required into 2022 unless critical care capacity is increased substantially or a treatment or vaccine becomes available," they wrote in their report.

"Even in the event of apparent elimination, SARS-CoV-2 surveillance should be maintained since a resurgence in contagion could be possible as late as 2024."

Another important factor: Whether people become immune to the new coronavirus after they have been infected. That's not yet known.

Potential challenges include finding a reliable test to determine who has antibodies for the coronavirus, establishing the level of immunity conferred by previous infection and how long it lasts, and the capacity of overstretched health systems to carry out reliable, widespread antibody tests in the general population.

There's also the difficult social questions around immunity certificates, which have been floated as a possibility in the UK. Would they create a kind of two-tier society, where those who have them can return to a more normal life, while others remain locked down?

The study researchers say they are aware that such prolonged distancing, even if intermittent, would likely have "profoundly negative economic, social, and educational consequences." They hope their research will help identify likely trajectories of the epidemic under alternative approaches, identify complementary ways to fight it, and to spur further thinking about ways to get the pandemic under control.

Though coronavirus cases in the US have been soaring, social distancing appears to be effective.

Social distancing is "one of the most powerful weapons" against COVID-19, said Robert Redfield, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

"If we can just maximize that social distancing, we can limit this virus's ability," he said earlier this month.

States across the country have issued stay-at-home orders, allowing only for essential errands or tasks.

Penalties for breaking the order vary by state. In Maine, the penalty for breaking the order can be up to six months in jail and up to a $1,000 fine.

In Florida, a pastor was arrested last month for continuing to hold large services and is charged with unlawful assembly and violation of public health emergency rules, both second-degree misdemeanors.

This week, states on the East and West coasts announced they are forming their own regional pacts to work together on how to reopen after the stay-at-home orders.

New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Rhode Island and Massachusetts each plan to name a public health and economic official to a regional working group.

West Coast states of California, Washington and Oregon also announced they are joining forces in a plan to begin incremental release of stay-at-home orders.

This story was first published on CNN.com "US may have to endure social distancing until 2022 if no vaccine is quickly found, scientists predict"
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Kokuyo Camlin extends suspension of its manufacturing operations at the plants located in Maharashtra and Jammu & Kashmir till further notice. This action is in line with the announcement made by the Hon'ble Prime Minister of India regarding further extension of lockdown period.

The duration of the shutdown will depend upon directives to be further issued by the Government authorities in this regard. The Company will continue to closely monitor the situation and take appropriate action as per regulatory guidance.

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(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, April 15)  The Metropolitan Manila Development Authority reminded the public on Wednesday that barangay quarantine passes are not for use at quarantine checkpoints along national highways.

MMDA Spokesperson Asec. Celine Pialago clarified that the barangay quarantine passes are meant to be presented only in barangay or city quarantine checkpoints.

If youre from Makati and youre going to Quezon City to buy goods, it is not reasonable, said Pialago in an interview with CNN Philippines Ruth Cabal.

This week, members of the Philippine National Police-Highway Patrol Group were positioned at EDSA and other major thoroughfares in Metro Manila due to the influx of vehicles despite the Luzon-wide enhanced community quarantine.

Pialago reiterated the list of Authorized Persons Outside Residence allowed during the ECQ, including essential workers in the health, security, emergency response, banking, vending, delivery, and sanitation sectors.

Other workers with IDs issued by the Inter-Agency Task Force on Emerging Infectious Diseases are also permitted to pass through quarantine checkpoints.

Delivery vans must have a permit from the Department of Agriculture showing the goods being delivered to supermarkets to quarantine checkpoints personnel, Pialago added.

She also said food delivery services can also ply Metro Manilas major thoroughfares.

Pialago warned violators will be fined 5,000 and forced to turn back.

Ang mga lalabag ay pababalikin. Hindi sila makakatuloy kung saan sila pupunta, lalo na kung hindi sila awtorisado, she said.

[Translation: Violators will be instructed to turn back. They cannot continue where they are going, especially if they are not authorized.]

Motorcycle drivers with riders will be penalized with a 2,000 fine.

Persons with valid appointments in hospitals must show proof for such visits. The elderly and persons with disabilities need only to present their senior citizen or PWD IDs to pass through the checkpoints.

She also mentioned that based on the guidelines of the Department of Transportation, only four persons are allowed inside a sedan car. If there are more than four inside the car, the driver will be issued a ticket for violation of physical distancing measures which carries a 5,000 penalty.

The Luzon-wide enhanced community quarantine due to the COVID-19 pandemic will last until April 30.
The Justice Minister says reports of hundreds of cars arriving into Ireland at ferry ports last week "don't stack up".

There has been some concern after photos emerged online appearing to show British-registered cars driving off ferries at Irish ports last week.

Justice Minister Charlie Flanagan says gardai have looked into it, and found it not to be true.

What was reported and rumoured in advance of the Easter weekend actually didnt stack up, he said.

And the gardai have verified that.

He says some cars were turned back, though, and that the issue will continue to be monitored.

Meanwhile, Dublin Airport says it remains open as an essential service for cargo and repatriation flights.

Yesterday, there were 58 scheduled flights and fewer than 300 passengers arrived at the airport.

Most of them were Irish people travelling home. The advice to them is to restrict their movements for two weeks.

The exceptions are for essential workers like pilots or hauliers.

But infectious disease specialist at the Royal College of Surgeons, Sam McConkey, thinks the rules should be stricter.

What I have proposed is actually two weeks of quarantine," he said.

So I would re-profile many of the empty hotels in Dublin Airport and say: people are welcome to come in but its two weeks in essentially mandatory, enforced, personal quarantine.

The Department of Foreign Affairs says the most recent repatriation flight was from India over a week ago.
Anne Graham Lotz: Coronavirus time 'to turn away from sin, self-centeredness and secularism'

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Evangelist Anne Graham Lotz recently explained how painful situations in her life allowed her to encounter God in a fresh way and said God might also be using the COVID-19 pandemic to get our attention so that we will listen to His message.

In a blog post last month, the founder of AnGel Ministries and daughter of the late Billy Graham said the threatening black cloud of the coronavirus has enveloped our nation, reminding her of Exodus 19:9, where God said to Moses, I am going to come to you in a dense cloud, so that the people will hear me speaking with you and will always put their trust in you.

In the past four years, I, too, have entered into a black, terrifying cloud, she admitted. My husbands sudden, unexpected death; my fathers death three years later; my diagnosis of cancer and the subsequent surgery and follow-up treatments have been personal storms as fiercely threatening as the storm that has now broken upon all of us.

But there was a silver lining to the black cloud in my life because it was in the cloud where I encountered God in a fresh way, the Jesus in Me: Experiencing the Holy Spirit as a Constant Companion author continued. I have seen His glory, His character in the dark cloud. I have experienced Gods faithfulness to meet my needs, His grace to pour out His blessings through family and friends, His strength to enable me to endure triumphantly, and His goodness to bring me through one day at a time.

Throughout the four stormy years, I never once lost my joy, or my inner peace, or the steadfast hope that God was in control and would work out all things for my good.

The 71-year-old Bible teacher asked, Could it be that God is using the coronavirus to get our attention so that we will listen to His message?

Its time to pray! Its time to turn away from our sin, self-centeredness and secularism, and turn to God in faith and trust, she stressed. Now. Return to the Lord your God, for He is gracious and compassionate, slow to anger and abounding in love, and He relents from sending calamity

If we heed Gods message, He can calm the storm and bring us through to a time of spiritual revival and national renewal, she concluded.

Previously, Lotz suggested the new coronavirus  which has affected over 609,600 people in the United States as of Wednesday  might be a sign of the coming end times and stressed the importance of making sure we are right with God so that we are ready to meet Him whenever the time comes.

"This is a time to pray for ourselves, our families, our nation, and all those worldwide whose lives are being devastated by the death and disruption this disease is causing, she said. You and I need to make sure we are right with God so that we are ready to meet Him whenever the time comes. And then join me in helping someone else get right with God.

Lets pull out all the stops as we tell others that its possible to have peace in the midst of the storm and confident hope for tomorrow, claiming Jesus promise, Surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age, she concluded.

Last month, pastor David Jeremiah cautioned against speculating the coronavirus is a sign of the Second Coming of Christ, encouraging Christians to instead view it as a sign for today. A reminder of things we too easily forget.

The coronavirus teaches us the vulnerability of everyone; the credibility of the Bible; the uncertainty of life; the scarcity of hope; and finally, the sufficiency of Jesus, the bestselling author said.

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.
Source: Xinhua| 2020-04-15 12:25:36|Editor: huaxia

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A man crosses a road in the rain near the International Monetary Fund (IMF) Headquarters in Washington D.C., the United States, April 13, 2020. The global economy is on track to contract "sharply" by 3 percent in 2020 as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, much worse than during the 2008-09 financial crisis, according to the International Monetary Fund (IMF)'s World Economic Outlook released Tuesday. (Xinhua/Liu Jie)
As the state of emergency was issued in Tokyo and six other prefectures to curb the spread of coronavirus infections, companies' screening of job-seeking university students is on the brink of suspension. There is a noticeable number of companies that have decided to put off job interviews during the state of emergency, prompting universities to call on companies to postpone interviews altogether.

Mixed opinions being heard from job-seeking students include: I am worried about getting infected when going for an interview but, at the same time I am worried about not getting a job.

Yamato Transport Co., based in Tokyo, told university students who applied for employment about the postponement of its screening even before April 7 when the state of emergency was issued.

An official in charge of public relations, said, "Even during the month of March, we made special consideration for students by, for instance, holding interviews of multiple candidates in small number of groups. But postponement is the only way to prevent students from being infected." The company will also consider adopting online interviews, and resuming its screening in May or later.

There are also a number of companies which have notified, on job-placement websites, students about postponing their screening sessions.

An automobile sales company in Tokyo placed a notice on such sites that it will put off screening till May 6, the day when the month-long state of emergency is scheduled to end. As there are no signs of the infections coming under control, however, an official in charge of public relations said, "The restart of the screening process can be postponed." On the other hand, there are companies that have announced they will continue their screening process in places other than Tokyo.

Recruit Career Co., a job-placement company based in Tokyo, conducted a survey on officials in charge of recruitment at about 1,200 companies in late March, and found that about 30% of these companies said they will postpone the timing of making unofficial job offers to students.

Head of Recruit Works Institute, a unit under Recruit Career Co., said, "Due to the spread of infections, screening had apparently been delayed, but since the announcement of the state of emergency, most companies are having difficulty in moving ahead. Postponing screenings may increase."

Added to the current state of job-seeking activities for students, universities have begun voicing their concern. Gakushuin University, based in Tokyo, sent a request at the end of March to three leading recruitment-information service companies, including Mynavi Corp., asking them to suspend recruitment activities at least within April."

A deputy chief of the university's career center said, "Students have been forced to engage in job-seeking activities with lack of preparation and without a face-to-face job-seeking consultation session, they have no other choice but to go to an interview when requested by the company, amid calls for refraining from going out."

There are also voices from other universities that echo the call from Gakushuin University. An official from a private university in Tokyo noted that, "The fact that there are companies postponing their recruitment activities and those which continue such activities is also a cause for confusion among students. An official in charge at yet another university, said, "It is difficult for students to continue job-seeking activities in areas where the state of emergency is issued. Recruitment activities should be suspended altogether."

There was a case in which a student was infected with the virus while participating in job-seeking activities. According to Nagasaki International University in Nagasaki, a male student tested positive after taking part in an internship in Osaka.

Yet an official from the university revealed that, "We are advising students who attend interviews in Tokyo or Osaka that they should consult with companies over such arrangements as postponement of the screening. But students are the ones chosen [by the companies] and cannot afford to ask the companies firmly."

A 21-year-old female student, a senior at a private university in Tokyo, said, "The company where I managed to reach the final-stage of the interview process has decided to postpone it, making my job-seeking activities likely to last for a lengthy period. But it is also scary to go out [for interviews] and get infected, and then infect others around me. I was feeling reassured that it is a sellers' market this year, with students placed at an advantage. I can't believe things have turned out this way."
The Congress in Karnataka on Wednesday accused the state government of "discrimination" in providing relief materials to those affected by the COVID-19 lockdown, by favouring constituencies represented by ruling BJP legislators.

Claiming that the party intends to extend full cooperation to the government during this hour of crisis without indulging in politics, it urged the administration to be "transparent". "We have had our (Congress) task force meeting today, during which we have discussed several matters. There is a lot of difference between government's talk and its deeds," KPCC President D K Shivakumar said.

Speaking to reporters here, he said the distribution of food grains is being done only in the constituencies represented by ruling party MLAs and not in those represnted by opposition legislators. "Our MLAs Byrathi Suresh, Sowmya Reddy, Ramalinga Reddy, N A Haris and other have spoken to me. No help is reaching the constituencies represented by Congress MLAs.

There is lot of misuse happening, we will bring it to the notice of the Chief Minister," he said. Accusing the BJP of 'misusing' the power, despite Congress extending full cooperation in this hour of crisis, Shivakumar alleged that there was discrimination that is going on.

"I'm not able to understand why only one party is being favoured. Several organisations are helping. Officials are being misused for discrimination, what can they (officials) do, they will have to listen to those in the government," he said.

Alleging that police have not taken suo moto action against BJP leaders who made comments against a particular community in reference to coronavirus spread, the KPCC chief said, social boycott is still happening against a community, we don't want to make it big at this point in time. "Until May 3, we will remain quite and cooperate with the government.... but things should be transparent.

We will cooperate, we don't want to do politics," he said, adding that the party plans to meet the Chief Minister with list of issues and bring it to his notice. Referring to the Gujarat Chief Minister's claim that he has brought 1,800 migrant workers back to the state by arranging buses, Shivakumar urged Karnataka Chief Minister Yediyurappa to follow suit.

"We are asking to get back migrant workers of the state after subjecting them to medical check ups.... still no action in this regard, now lockdown also has been extended, people are at the border, spending time in vehicles. We have got information," he said. PTI KSU ROH.
San Francisco must procure more than 8,000 hotel rooms for the citys homeless and frontline workers under an emergency ordinance passed by the Board of Supervisors on Tuesday.

The ordinance, which passed unanimously, requires the city to lease 8,250 rooms in hotels and motels by April 26. That is 1,250 more rooms than Mayor London Breeds staff is currently working to lease.

If we are successful with everyone in San Francisco who is housed, but not everyone who is unhoused, we will be putting everyone in danger, Supervisor Matt Haney, whose district includes the bulk of the citys homeless population, said at Tuesdays meeting.

The mayor and Board of Supervisors have sparred for weeks over how many hotel rooms the city should lease and who should move into them. While several members of the board argued that anyone experiencing homelessness should get a hotel room, the mayor and her homeless and health department chiefs have focused on lining up hotels for the vulnerable homeless, which include those who have tested positive for the coronavirus or are exhibiting symptoms, have existing health problems or are age 60 and older.

The emergency ordinance expands the citys current plans to allow anyone experiencing homelessness who can care for themselves to move into an available hotel room, with the most vulnerable still prioritized.

Those exiting jails who would otherwise be homeless, people living in single-room occupancy hotels, frontline workers on the coronavirus crisis, and people released from local hospitals may also use an available hotel room to quarantine.

City officials have already leased more than 2,000 hotel rooms and moved about 780 people into the rooms. Still, neighborhoods like the Tenderloin, Mission and Bayview remain crowded with people living in tents and congregating on the streets. San Francisco has been applauded for acting early and swiftly in imposing strict shelter-in-place policies, but officials worry all that progress will unravel if the virus takes hold in the citys homeless population.

The urgency of creating more accommodation for the citys homeless was sharpened last week when 70 people tested positive for the virus at San Franciscos largest shelter, MSC South. By Tuesday afternoon, the confirmed number increased to 102 infected residents and staff.

Supervisor Hillary Ronen said she and a group of her colleagues spent a month trying to convince the mayors office behind the scenes to lease more hotel rooms and move as many homeless people into them as possible.

The board passed a resolution earlier this month urging the mayor and her agencies to expand plans, but after struggling to get their way, Ronen said they had to resort to legislation. An emergency ordinance does not require two readings and may be enacted as soon as the mayor signs it. Breed has the authority to veto emergency legislation, though it was not clear Tuesday whether she would.

From the get-go, I have not agreed with the mayors office and their handling of the homeless crisis within the larger COVID crisis, Ronen said.

Breed said at a Monday news conference that procuring hotel rooms and moving people in them isnt as easy as simply signing a lease agreement. She reiterated that there also needs to be an adequate amount of food, staff, security and cleaning for each person moved inside.

It is not as simple as people express it is, she said. But that doesnt mean we are not trying every single day.

After the vote Tuesday, Andy Lynch, a spokesman for Breed, said opening and operating hotels in a matter of weeks is an incredible logistical challenge.

The city is continuing to open and operate thousands of hotel rooms, as we have been doing, under the guidance of our public health leaders, Lynch said. We need to make sure we have adequate staffing to run these hotels, which requires hundreds of workers being trained and working around the clock to provide support for people staying in these rooms.

According to the Budget and Legislative Analysts Office, it will cost an estimated $58.6 million to lease the hotel rooms per month, and also provide security, food, and personal care and room cleaning. According to the office, FEMA and the state Office of Emergency Services could reimburse between about $10 million up to $40 million of the citys monthly costs  depending on whether the population placed in the proposed rooms are considered eligible for reimbursement.

Under the order, the city must secure 7,000 rooms for those who are homeless, 500 rooms for those recently discharged from the hospital who need to be quarantined, and 750 rooms for frontline workers.

This is literally about life and death, said Supervisor Shamann Walton, whose district includes the Bayview.

Trisha Thadani is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: tthadani@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @TrishaThadani
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Roya TV general director, Mohamad al-khaldi, and owner Fares Sayegh were arrested after broadcasting a program interviewing workers complaining about the lack of money to buy food during the pandemic. In the video, which has been removed from the station's website, workers said that if they dont receive help or are not allowed to work they will have no option but to steal or become drug dealers.

As in many other countries in the world, Jordan is under lockdown to tackle the COVID-19 pandemic and the authorities passed emergency laws to tackle it. The two journalists were arrested under those emergency laws.

"We have been and will continue to support the efforts of the Jordanian state during the crisis, committed to high standards of professionalism and national responsibility and the respect to the role of law", Roya Media said in a statement.

IFJ General Secretary, Anthony Bellanger, said: Emergency laws to fight against the pandemic can never be used as tools to stifle the media and restrain fundamental rights. Journalists must be able to work in freedom and report on the real situation in the country. Jordanian authorities must release the two journalists immediately and stop silencing media.
An hour before her shift starts in an emergency room at University Hospital in London, Ont., Dr. Allison McConnell has isolated herself upstairs in her home so she can talk without being disturbed by her two young children.

Downstairs, her husband, a firefighter who has just finished a 24-hour shift, keeps an eye on the kids  one, a-year-and-a-half, the other, 4-and-a-half  while she talks.

In a few minutes, McConnell is going to hang up the phone, say goodbye to her husband and children and then head off to work. After that, shes not sure whats going to happen.

She doesnt know if shell see another set of young, once healthy COVID-19 patients wheeled off to ICU. She doesnt know if there will be enough personal protective equipment for herself and her co-workers  so far there has been. She doesnt know if the hospitals resources are going to be outstripped by a rush of COVID patients. She doesnt know if tonight is the night one of her colleagues will be exposed to a coronavirus infection.

She doesnt know if, by the time she returns home, she might have one too. She doesnt know if shell pass that along to her husband or her children.

In the back of your mind at all times, home or work, youre anticipating something bad is going to come out of this and its going to be someone close to you. Whether its a colleague or a friend or family member  someone is probably going to get sick and may or may not die, she said.

I think thats the most difficult part. Is not knowing what form thats going to come in as you go to work every day and as you come home every day.

This is the world that front-line health-care workers live in now. Its a world filled with uncertainty, anxiety and trepidation, both at work and at home. And history tells us if these arent dealt with early, at the end of this road lies more anxiety, depression and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

What McConnell and her colleagues are going through has a name: anticipatory grief  that feeling we get about the future when the future is uncertain. Usually that feeling is centred around death.

A recent study conducted in China surveyed some 1,200 health-care workers from 34 hospitals, mostly in Wuhan, close to the peak of the outbreak there.

It found 50 per cent of those workers reported depression, 45 per cent reported some anxiety, 34 per cent reported insomnia and 72 per cent suffered some form of psychological distress.

For ER physicians like McConnell, it can be difficult to leave those worries at work. Ultimately, theres a toll on family life.

I feel like (sometimes) Im not as present as I should be, said McConnell. And I definitely see it taking its toll from that perspective in some of my interactions with my kids when Im stressed, or when Im maybe not as present as I could be.

I can tell its always on everyone elses mind as well that were not escaping this. Whether were at work or at home, its always there.

To help share the load, the London Health Sciences Centre, where McConnell works, has installed a buddy system. Physicians are encouraged to pair up, and check in with their buddy daily to see how the other is doing. The purpose is to make it easier for ER physicians  a group notorious for generally being reluctant to ask for support  to speak with colleagues about their concerns.

Its one of a growing number of methods  along with social media-based technology, like group chats  that front-line workers use to support each other.

That support, that camaraderie, that feeling were all in this together amongst health-care workers represents a culture shift, says Dr. Randy Wax.

Wax, a critical care physician at Lakeridge Health in Oshawa, worked through the SARS epidemic in 2003. He says what hes seeing during this epidemic is something new.

One thing thats very different in 2020 is social media. And its been very interesting, the role of social media, not only exchanging medical tips from people experiencing the pandemic all around the world, but theres a certain ability to connect with others who are fighting the same battle thats created a whole new source of support for people that they didnt have, said Wax.

When ICU staff at Markham Stouffville hospital danced in the hallways after removing a recovering patient from a ventilator, every other front-line worker who saw the video on social media celebrated along with them. When health-care workers see musicians serenading health-care workers in Spain, or applauding from balconies in Vancouver; when lines of fire trucks and police cars drive by hospitals with lights flashing in tribute each evening, it boosts spirits and adds to a newly-thriving esprit de corps.

For other work cultures, like police, fire, paramedics, and military, theres a certain supportive culture, brotherhood and sisterhood, said Wax. I would say that in the hospital environment, doctors, nurses, respiratory therapists, others  I dont think until now, weve really moved into that understanding of how important we are to each other. That change in culture is something that has helped everyone cope with the stress of this pandemic.

I think the health-care system and health-care workers are never going to be the same in Ontario and Canada after this.

Other health-care workers have different experiences, however. Each province has its own protocol for dealing with the burdens placed on their health-care workers, and within those provinces, each hospital administration may have different ideas.

Whats needed is a consistent approach across the country to supporting front-line health-care workers.

Right now in the front lines, its very, very quiet, said Dr. Rodrick Lim, chairperson for the wellness committee at the Canadian Association of Emergency Physicians. Its the calm before the storm. Everyone knows thats the situation. And in some ways, its a harder place to be in. When youre preparing, theres things to do, theres plans to be made. And now were sitting, waiting to see how bad its going to be.

Theres a term coined for this too: pre-TSD. The stress caused by waiting, anticipating there will be trauma up ahead. Dealing with it, making sure it doesnt grow is difficult because, across the country, front-line health-care workers have different kinds of access to different types of help.

Whats needed, says Lim, is policy at a national level.

I think we need to guarantee that any worker no matter where they are, or who they are, can have access to free, immediate resources through the duration of this crisis and beyond, said Lim. I think that someone in the federal level needs to say that this is going to happen.

Psychotherapist Karen Dougherty is trying to make that kind of easily accessible, widespread support happen. Shes the founder of the Ontario COVID-19 Mental Health Network, a grouping of mental-health professionals supporting front-line health-care workers in Ontario on a pro-bono basis.

Dougherty and some colleagues put together the network three weeks ago after having conversations about a similar network based in New York. Within hours of making the decision, a website (covid19therapists.com) was up and running. Within three days, they had 450 volunteers; two weeks later, that number was up to over 800 Ontario licensed mental-health professionals.

When a front-line health-care worker feels theyre in need of help, Doughertys network takes some information through the website, and then matches them with two or three mental-health professionals. The worker touches base with one of the professionals and together they decide how the therapy will work.

I think people generally speaking dont ask for help until they reach a level of intolerance for the way things are  they cant stand it. But if its difficult to do or if you need to make a bunch of calls and do your own research or tip your hand to your employer, youre probably not going to do it.

I think the fact that this is sort of pro bono, simple, its just an email and then you just call the therapist yourself. Weve already done the selecting for you. I think thats helping.

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In the old days, doctors would make house calls; that rarely happens today. However, a new kind of "house call" is in the works: in many cities it's now possible to receive hospital care at home for certain conditions.

Such "home hospital care" programs are gaining in popularity. A randomized controlled Harvard study published online Dec. 17, 2019, by Annals of Internal Medicine suggests that the home hospital model of care is less expensive and leads to fewer readmissions than in-hospital care.

Researchers studied about 90 people who'd been diagnosed in the emergency room with infections or flares of heart failure or breathing problems. Half of the people were admitted to hospitals, and the other half were enrolled in home hospital care. The home hospital care group received visits from doctors and nurses, intravenous medications, and video monitoring. People in the home group had 38% lower hospital costs than those in the hospital group, they were more active during care, and they were readmitted to the hospital within 30 days after their care less frequently (7% vs. 23%) than those in the hospital group. Home hospital care is not appropriate for everyone.

"If someone is too sick or is in need of advanced procedures, their care may be better delivered in a traditional hospital," says Dr. David M. Levine, the study's lead author and an internal medicine specialist with Harvard-affiliated Brigham and Women's Hospital.

However, if you have an illness that needs constant monitoring and treatment for several days  in other words, it can't be done in a doctor's office  yet it also doesn't require advanced procedures or constant and intensive nursing care, the home hospital care model may make sense.

"If the home hospital model were offered to a member of my family, I'd encourage them to do it," says Dr. Levine.

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ABB wins $100 million framework contract to strengthen South America's power grid

Group release | Zurich, Switzerland | 2020-04-14

ABB Power Grids partners with ISA in building a reliable and efficient power grid, improving the quality of life of millions of people in South America

ABB's Power Grids business has signed a five-year framework contract estimated to be worth around $100 million with South America's largest utilities company, Interconexion Electrica S.A. E.S.P. (ISA). ISA currently operates over 62,000 kilometers of power transmission infrastructure with over 7,000 kilometers more under construction. The company also provides services in transportation, information and telecommunications.

"ABB Power Grids is shaping the future of sustainable energy and our purpose is fully aligned with ISA's goal of ensuring a sustainable power supply in South America and mitigating climate change," said Claudio Facchin, President ABB Power Grids. "Our pioneering technologies are extending access to affordable, reliable, sustainable and modern energy for all, increasing efficiency and competitiveness, whilst paving the way for bulk renewable integration and an interconnected global grid."

As the largest transmission system operator in South America, ISA is responsible for serving millions of people and businesses with electricity. As such, it's critical that the power equipment ISA uses is of highest reliability, as this is not just a business but an investment in society. Over the decades ABB Power Grids has developed a long and successful partnership with ISA.

Highly reliable shunt reactors will be supplied ensuring that the voltage stays within safe limits, avoiding possible blackouts. Managing electrical transmission is a constant balancing act and electrical stability can be a challenge at high-voltages and over long distances, because, as distance increases, voltage becomes less stable.

To protect the electrical network and help prevent power outages, the contract also includes the supply of gas-insulated switchgear (GIS), air-insulated switchgear (AIS) equipment such as circuit breakers, instrument transformers and hybrid modules.

Shunt reactors are based on the same technology as transformers and ABB Power Grids pioneered transformers and high-voltage equipment over 130 years ago, continuing to drive innovations in this space. It has an unparalleled track record with about two and half million power and distribution transformers and one million high-voltage switchgear installations across the world, that is the largest accumulated operating experience in the world.

Decades of enabling sustainable energy integration in South America

ABB Power Grids has been contributing to the integration of sustainable electricity generation in South America for decades. Notable projects include the Itaipu HVDC transmission system in Brazil, first commissioned in 1984, transmitting up to 6.3 gigawatts of hydropower and holding the world record for the world's most powerful HVDC system for over 20 years. Another being the supply of essential power equipment for integration of the Ituango hydro power station into the power grid, which promises to be the most important hydro power plant in Colombia when it comes online in 2021, generating up to 14 percent of the country's electricity. Additionally, ABB Power Grids solutions are also being used in the integration of vast wind and solar power systems throughout Chile and in Brazil's largest solar farm, supporting the rapidly growing renewable power sector.

ABB Power Grids is a global leader and pioneer in power technologies. We create value for customers across the energy, industrial, transportation and infrastructure sectors, delivering an extensive range of digitally advanced solutions. Active in 90+ countries, our experts contribute deep insight that enhances reliability, efficiency and safety. Together, we are committed to shaping the future of sustainable energy for generations to come, as the partner of choice for a stronger, smarter and greener grid. www.abb.com/grid

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. ABB's 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

Notes to Editor
Despite being engaged in a continuous fight against the pandemic, the authorities havent lost their sense of humour and its aptly reflected in the awareness posts they often share online. Just like this recent tweet from IRCTC which is inspired by the famous Mere Paas Maa Hai dialogue from the popular 1975 film Deewar.

For the uninitiated, the dialogue is a part of an iconic scene of the movie between two brothers, one of whom is a good cop Ravi (Shashi Kapoor) and the other is a criminal Vijay (Amitabh Bachchan). In the scene, Vijay says Aaj mere paas property hai, bank balance hai, bangla hai, gaadi hai.. kya hai tumhare pass? [I have property, bank balance, bungalow, car what do you have?]. To this, Ravi, quite proudly and emotionally, replies Mere Paas Maa Hai [I have my mother].

IRCTC wittily  and quite creatively  gave a tiny twist to Ravis dialogue to spread awareness about the importance of wearing masks. Heres what they did:

To win over this pandemic, you need both Maa and Ma-Sk . Keeping your family close and Ma-sk closer. Always wear a mask when stepping out to buy essentials. Else #StayHome #StaySafe #SaveLives#IndiaFightsCorona  IRCTC (@IRCTCofficial) April 14, 2020

Just two days ago, Mumbai Police used a dialogue from the popular Netflix series Money Heist to urge people to stay inside their homes during the lockdown.

What do you think of IRCTCs tweet?

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Ghanaians in China are calling on government to come to their aid and replace their expired passports as a matter of urgency.



According to them, life in China is not rosy at the moment the non-acquisition of documents (passport) to prove their legality is worsening the case.



In a video shared with GhanaWeb, a Ghanaian based in Beijing, Grace Tetteh, revealed that Ghanas Embassy in China has failed to replace the expired passports of some citizens who had submitted applications for new ones and had paid for the required processes.



The embassy, according to her, informed them they couldnt replace the passports due to the lockdown in the country.



Some peoples passports have expired, and they applied for new ones at the embassy but were told they cant get them because of the lockdown in Ghana. If you remain here with an expired passport, youll be deported after paying so much money so the embassy is not helping us, she said in the video.



As several Africans in China, especially in the Guandong Province, have already been evicted from their homes, Grace Tetteh is bracing herself for the inevitable with her luggage packed, just in case it gets to her doorstep.



She also added her voice to calls for evacuation of Ghanaians in China noting that they are no longer welcome by the Chinese as they are blamed for new cases of the Coronavirus pandemic.



The white man thinks the black man is responsible for every negative thing. They now believe we are the cause of coronavirus so wherever we go, we are turned away.



She further noted that they have learnt a lot and can help stem the spread of the virus in Ghana if brought back home.



Her pleas, like others, come after the Foreign Affairs Ministry assured that the Chinese government has reached an agreement with the leadership of African countries in China to end the ill-treatment meted out to Africans in the country.

Source: ghanaweb









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 Governor of Gombe State, Inuwa Yahaya, has stated that arrangements have been made with the Nigeria Center for Disease Control (NCDC) to establish a COVID-19 testing laboratory in the state.

The governor stated this on Tuesday in a state broadcast on the states efforts to tackle the COVID-19.

Gombe is one of the 17 states in Nigeria yet to record any coronavirus case.

Read the full text of the governors speech below.

TEXT OF A STATE BROADCAST BY HIS EXCELLENCY, MUHAMMADU INUWA YAHAYA, THE GOVERNOR OF GOMBE STATE ON COVID-19 PANDEMIC RESPONSE IN GOMBE STATE ON TUESDAY, 14TH APRIL 2020.

1. My fellow residents of Gombe State.

2. It is with gratitude to Allah (SWT) that I address you once again on the topical issue of Coronavirus pandemic otherwise known as Covid-19.

3. As you are aware, the Covid-19 pandemic continues to ravage communities across the world, with devastating effect on human lives, livelihoods and their economies. Nigeria, is not spared from this invisible enemy that continues to defy physical boundaries or social status.

4. On our part, we took pro-active measures to prevent the importation of this virus into our communities, and equally prepared to detect and contain any possible outbreak or spread of the disease should it occur in our state.

5. As at this morning, there are 343 confirmed cases of Covid-19 in Nigeria, spread across 19 States and the FCT. While 91 cases have been successfully managed and discharged, 10 deaths were recorded.

6. Fortunately, Gombe State still maintains a zero-case status and we pray and hope that the situation remains so. However, considering our strategic position as the commercial nerve center of the North East sub-region, the need for a sustained vigilance, enforcement and control becomes even more imperative. This is because our State continues to attract the movement of people, goods and services from other parts of the country, including States with confirmed Covid-19 cases such as Bauchi, Kano and the FCT all of which have historical, social, cultural and economic relationships with our people.

7. You will recall that on Monday 23rd, March 2020, I inaugurated a 23-member Task Force on Covid-19 in Gombe State, under the leadership of a renowned immunologist and public health specialist, Professor Idris Mohammed, in order to guide our response to the Covid-19 pandemic. So far, the Task Force has succeeded in achieving the following:

I. It has identified and prepared three centres for isolating Covid-19 patients as follows:

a) A 150-bed capacity hospital at Kwadon which has been fully renovated and furnished for the management of mild-to-moderate cases;

b) A 12-bed capacity Intensive Care Unit (ICU) at the State Specialist Hospital, Gombe has been established and is fully equipped for the management of severe cases including mechanical ventilation and other intensive care needs;

c) A 50-bed capacity fully equipped facility at Federal Teaching Hospital, Gombe;

d) Additional isolation facilities are also being prepared at Funakaye and Kaltungo LGAs in order to ensure effective coverage of the state

II. The Task Force has procured over 200 Million Naira worth of medical supplies and consumables including personal protective equipment (PPEs), which have been prepositioned in all health care facilities across the state

III. It has built the capacity of our frontline health workers to enable them to detect and respond to any suspected case according to the guidelines issued by the Nigeria Centre for Disease Control (NCDC)

IV. It has carried out an intensive sensitization and mobilization activities aimed at raising the awareness of the general public on preventive measures against the pandemic in all the 11 LGAs

V. In addition, Rapid response teams in all the 11 LGAs have been set up in order to manage suspected cases

VI. Arrangements have been concluded to establish a testing laboratory in the state. Already a PCR machine has been procured and we are currently engaging the NCDC with a view to obtaining the requisite accreditation.

8. Other measures we took to contain the spread of Covid-19 in Gombe State included the closure of schools, stay-at-home order for civil servants from Levels 1 to 12, closure of state boundaries and the ban on large social, economic and religious gatherings. These are going to remain in place and would be reviewed as the situation unfolds, based on the advice of public health experts, disaster management professionals, the Nigeria Centre for Disease Control and the Federal Government of Nigeria.

9. While compliance with the restriction order was to a large extent encouraging, we however, observed with dismay the attitude of some community members and security agencies in helping motorists to sneak into our State.

10. In addition, we also received reports of the influx of Almajirai into our communities from the neighbouring States. It is disturbing to note that many local Mallams are encouraging such migrations, thereby increasing the risk of importing the virus into our communities.

11. We appeal to all concerned to show more responsibility and patriotism. We shall continue to work with all stakeholders to ensure strict compliance with all restrictions and directives.

12. On the medical front, it is gratifying to note that we continue to receive reports of exposed individuals under our robust local surveillance system. I am impressed by the speed with which our response teams were mobilized to contact them and take necessary actions.

13. So far, the twenty-two suspected cases our teams identified and sent samples for testing at the NCDC Laboratory in Abuja, returned negative. This suggests that our risk mitigation measures are effective, and hopefully will continue to be so.

14. I would like to use this opportunity to pay special tributes to the State Task Force on Covid-19, our surveillance and response teams, and our entire health workers on the front-line as we continue to prepare against Covid-19 with remarkable commitment and sacrifice.

15. Regrettably, the Covid-19 pandemic has triggered an economic meltdown, which further deprives us the financial resources needed to adequately confront it. However, we are working with the Federal Government with a view to expanding existing palliative measures through the Social Investment Program and the development of new strategies in order to further cushion the effect of the crises on our people.

16. While we are putting measures in place to prevent the spread of Covid-19, we are aware of the impact some of these measures like a total lockdown could have on the livelihoods of our people, majority of whom live on daily wages.

17. As we continue to monitor and enforce the above restrictions, we will not hesitate to deploy more stringent measures when and where necessary. Our response will continue to be guided by empirical evidence and pragmatism.

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18. I would like to thank our traditional rulers, religious and community leaders, members of the media and the civil society as well as other stakeholders for their support and understanding. Let me further solicit for their continuous support in this gigantic battle against coronavirus.

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19. My special thanks also go to the Honourable Members of the state House of Assembly and all other political office holders who have contributed their one-month salaries to the fight against the pandemic.

20. I also appreciate other numerous public-spirited individuals and corporate organizations for their financial and material contributions. I will like to use this opportunity to appeal for more support from both individuals and organizations to further complement our effort against the Covid-19 onslaught.

21. The battle against Covid-19 pandemic can better be won by preventing its importation and spread into our communities through the enforcement of strict vigilance, observing recommended practices like hand-washing, social distancing and compliance with medical advice.

22. It is my hope that our people will continue to abide by the standard protocols issued by the Authorities.

23. Thank you for listening and may God keep us all safe.
Source: Xinhua| 2020-04-15 10:54:30|Editor: huaxia

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URUMQI, April 15 (Xinhua) -- While most Kazakh people in northwest China's Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region have bid farewell to their past nomadic life, Kinesgul Nurtanakin persists in keeping their ethnic memory alive with a craft she inherited from her family.

The 52-year-old Kazakh lady runs a company in the city of Yining, Ili Kazakh Autonomous Prefecture. She has been dedicated to designing, making and promoting Kazakh yurts and clothing for 22 years.

Kazakh embroidery is commonly adopted on carpets and tapestries found inside Kazakh ethnic yurts and clothing as well as other ornaments and articles for daily use.

CHANGLAK: A SKYLIGHT FOR ETHNIC GLORY

A yurt is a "mobile home" for Kazakh nomads. But today, many would prefer to settle in brick-and-mortar apartments instead of clinging to their past lifestyle on the grasslands.

Kinesgul said "Changlak" refers to the skylight in a yurt's roof in the Kazakh language. It bears symbolic significance that indicates a Kazakh family's vicissitudes.

"Elders in the family usually pass 'Changlak' to the youngest family member. By accepting 'Changlak,' the child also inherits all the glory, property and culture in the family," Kinesgul said. "It's a solemn ceremony, and I want to protect the culture behind it."

What Kinesgul inherited from her family is embroidery artistry.

In her college years, she began collecting clothing patterns and Kazakh ethnic symbols, which later inspired her to enter the embroidery business.

In 1998, Kinesgul set up a workshop to make Kazakh yurts and clothing. They sold well both in China and overseas.

TASBULAK: KAZAKH EMBROIDERY FLOWING NON-STOP

Kinesgul's company name is "Tasbulak," which means spring water that flows out of rocks. "I hope Kazakh embroidery culture will keep flowing just like springs," she said.

When she started to establish her factory over two decades ago, she spent a long time traveling around Ili to visit elderly embroiderers. They were surprised to see a young lady who had such passion for traditional embroidery.

"An elderly lady from the county of Tekes was so excited that she even cried. She taught me everything she knew about embroidery," Kinesgul said. "I received many embroidery collections from them. Some even contacted me in their last days and entrusted me with their wishes to protect this cultural heritage."

In the exhibition area of Kinesgul's company hangs a tapestry, which was "saved" from a nomadic household. "They used the tapestry to keep dust and dirt away from the clay oven. I bought it from the family and soaked it in water for 10 days for the exquisite embroidery patterns to appear."

She believed it was made more than a century ago and regarded it as the treasure of her company.

The local government has been very supportive by creating favorable policies. Her business also increased the incomes of thousands of nomads.

Kinesgul has so far collected over 1,000 Kazakh ethnic patterns and trained hundreds of apprentices.

Some artisans from Kazakhstan visited her to exchange experiences of Kazakh embroidery inheritance and business.

SIRMAK: ETHNIC CULTURE FLOURISHING BRIGHTLY

"Sirmak" is felt carpeting for yurts. They are tailored into different sizes and with various patterns. Kinesgul's products are popular because customers believe that she respects tradition and seeks innovation.

As the main material used in a yurt, traditional felt is susceptible to humidity and worms and does not smell good.

To solve these problems, Kinesgul cooperated with an Inner Mongolian-based enterprise to develop a new type of felt, which has gained popularity among customers.

She employed four graduates majoring in art and design, whose main task was to bring in varied art elements into the products.

Her son Marhulan Jarkin is also by her side to help. Marhulan returned to Ili after graduating from college in Beijing.

He felt obliged to inherit the precious technique as his mother did.

With the knowledge he learned at school, Marhulan displayed the yurt samples online via digital modeling. Last year, he and his mother built a huge yurt that covered 350 square meters and stood 10.8 meters in height and 20 meters in diameter. It instantly became a local landmark.

"Our products will be presented with virtual reality technology, and we can also design items such as magnets and jewelry boxes," the son said, enthusiastic about their future plans.

"The business has been burgeoning with the help from my son," Kinesgul said.

"We want to bring traditions to life so that the yurt can tell its own story," she said.
Born into poverty in New Orleans in 1901, and growing up during some of the most brutal years of segregation in the South, Louis Armstrong first lived with his grandmother, next in a Colored Waifs Home after dropping out of school at age 11, then with his mother and sister in a home so small they had to sleep in the same bed. After already living through the first World War, he would go on to witness the Spanish Flu epidemic, the Great Depression, World War II, the Cold War, and the turbulent 1960s and the Vietnam conflict.

Thats a lot for one lifetime, though for much of it, Armstrong was a star and living legend who beat the odds and rose above his origins with will and talent. Even so, he suffered some severe ups and downs during the hard times, touring so much to cover his debts in the lean 1930s, for example, that he injured his lips and fingers, and finally moving to Europe when the mob came after him.

Armstrongs descriptions of his experience of the 1918 influenza pandemicas he remembers it in his 1954 memoir Satchmo: My Life in New Orleansare almost jaunty, as you can partly see in the typescript page above from the Louis Armstrong House. But he remembered it from the perspective of a 17-year-old musician in robust healthwho seemed to have some kind of resistance to the flu.

He devotes no more than two paragraphs to the flu, which hit the city hard in October of that year. According to the Influenza Encyclopedia, an online project documenting the flu in the U.S. between 1918-1919, New Orleans city authorities acted immediately, once they discovered the outbreak, arrived by cargo ship the month before.

On October 9th, the New Orleans Superintendent of Health, with Mayor Martine Behrmans consent and the blessing of state authorities ordered closed all schools (public, private, and parochial, as well as commercial colleges), churches, theaters, movie houses, and other places of amusement, and [prohibited] public gatherings such as sporting events and public funerals and weddings.

For a struggling young musician making a living playing clubs and riverboats, the closure of other places of amusement took a serious toll. The loss of livelihood is what seems to have hurt Armstrong the most when he returned to the city from touring, still unsure if the Great War would end.

When I came back from Houma things were much tougher. The Kaisers monkey business was getting worse, and, what is more, a serious flu epidemic had hit New Orleans. Everybody was down with it, except me. That was because I was physic-minded. I never missed a week without a physic, and that kept all kinds of sickness out of me.

Whatever physic helped Armstrongs avoid infection, it wasnt for lack of exposure. In lieu of playing the trumpet he began caring for the sick, since all of the hospitals, even those that would take black patients, were completely overcrowded.

Just when the government was about to let crowds of people congregate again so that we could play our horns once more the lid was clamped down tighter than ever. That forced me to take any odd jobs I could get. With everybody suffering from the flu, I had to work and play the doctor to everyone in my family as well as all my friends in the neighborhood. If I do say so, I did a good job curing them.

We might imagine some of those odd jobs were what we now call essentiali.e. low paid and high risk under the circumstances. He persevered and finally got a gig playing a honky-tonk that avoided a shut-down because it was third rate, and he could play a lot of blues for cheap prostitutes and hustlers. Few things could get Satchmo down, it seemed, not even a flu pandemic, but he was one of the lucky onesluckily for the future of jazz. Only, we dont have to imagine how hard this must have been for him. We just have to take a look around.

Learn more about the 1918 influenza epidemic in the U.S. at the Influenza Encyclopedia and read the rest of Armstrongs account of his formative years at the Internet Archive.

via Ted Gioia

Related Content:

The Only Known Footage of Louis Armstrong in a Recording Studio: Watch the Recently-Discovered Film (1959)

Louis Armstrong Plays Historic Cold War Concerts in East Berlin & Budapest (1965)

What Happened to U.S. Cities That Practicedand Didnt PracticeSocial Distancing During 1918s Spanish Flu

Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness
Two women in Idaho have been arrested and charged with the robbery, kidnapping and aggravated assault with a deadly weapon of one of their love rivals.

Chelsi Urias, 32, said she was sitting in a friend's garage around 8.30pm on March 24 when three masked women came in and beat hear with a socket wrench and brass knuckles, stealing her cell phone and $400.

Maddeline McKenzie Ovard, 29, allegedly warned she'd 'slice [her] throat' and Tabatha Gigi McKnight, 37, allegedly threatened to 'shoot her' during the four-hour-long attack that ended with the victim being dumped nude in Wolverine Canyon, and with a fractured skull and bleeding on the brain.

The third woman has not been identified. According to the homeowner witness, at least one of the assailants was a 'blonde' woman and one was referred to as 'Tabby'.

Chelsi Urias, 32, said she was attacked by three women on March 24 at 8.30pm. Pictured is the woman believed to be Urias

Maddeline McKenzie Ovard, 29, allegedly warned she'd 'slice [her] throat'. Urias told the Post Register that they believed she was in a relationship with Ovard's ex-boyfriend

Tabatha Gigi McKnight (pictured left in her mug shot, and right), 37, allegedly threatened to 'shoot' Chelsi Urias during the four-hour-long attack on March 24

The Daily Beast reports that court document identify Urias as the victim. The victim told the Post Register that they believed she was in a relationship with Ovard's ex-boyfriend.

In video footage filmed from the incident and sent to a friend of Urias via Facebook at 9.30pm, the victim 'argues with 'Tabatha' about sleeping with 'Javier,' the police report states.

After leaving the floor of the garage covered in blood, they bundled Urias into her own car blindfolded and drove to a second residence. A friend said he saw her car being driven by someone else and attempted to follow it but lost track.

Urias states they attempted to use a taser on her throat but it malfunctioned.

The assailants told Urias that 'if she cooperated she would be ok', police documents state.

The four-hour-long attack ended with the victim being dumped in Wolverine Canyon, Idaho

Urias states they attempted to use a taser on her throat but it malfunctioned. She was left with a fractured skull and bleeding on the brain

'Chelsi said that she didn't see any knives or guns on them, but that she knew that both Maddeline and Tabatha had access to those weapons and she feared that they were going to kill her and that she would never see her kids again,' the affidavit continues.

As part of the torture the assailants shaved the victims head. Urias was left on a rock in the Bingham County canyon with only a towel, sweater and the blindfold. She experienced bruising, black eyes, dizziness and a loss of vision.

Police learned of the incident around 5am the next day when the friend who received the Facebook Messenger video called 911.

Ovard was arrested last Monday and her bond was set at $75,000. Her preliminary hearing is set for Friday at Bonneville County Courthouse. McKnight's hearing is next Wednesday.

First-degree kidnapping is punishable with up to life in prison. Robbery is punishable by five years to life. Aggravated battery is punishable up to 15 years.

Both women have been ordered not to have any contact with Urias.

Anyone with information can call the Idaho Falls Police Department at 208-529-1200 or Bonneville County Crime Stoppers at ifcrime.org.
Dr Caroline McElnay, the director of public health in New Zealand, speaks to the media in Wellington

A Northern Ireland woman who is leading New Zealand's fight against the coronavirus has revealed how her adopted country has largely eliminated the pandemic.

Dr Caroline McElnay, who grew up on a dairy farm near Bushmills in Co Antrim and went on to study medicine at Queen's University Belfast, emigrated to New Zealand 25 years ago.

Now director of public health in New Zealand, she appears frequently at press briefings with Prime Minister Jacinta Ardern on Covid-19.

The country has been hailed as an example of how governments can successfully tackle the crisis after recording yesterday just 17 new cases of the virus, bringing the total to 1,366 and nine deaths to date.

New Zealand adopted a policy of elimination at the outset of the pandemic.

Other countries, including the UK, opted for a containment approach.

A strict lockdown is in place, which prevents citizens from swimming in the ocean or hunting in bushland.

Dr McElnay told the Irish Times that she attributed the country's low case and death rates to its swift response.

"We haven't seen the rapid escalation of cases seen in so many other countries because we went into lockdown earlier, before we had significant numbers of cases," she said.

Efforts have been helped by its remote location as well as air travel restrictions.

Around 1,000 people who arrived in New Zealand after the lockdown were held in commandeered hotels and monitored until they are shown not to have the virus.

A highly efficient contact tracing system is also helping.

Dr McElnay said: "Our advantage is that we are an island nation, so we can have strict border controls and that is really helpful."

The public health expert relocated to New Zealand in 1995 with her husband and is now a citizen with three children: Caitriona, Roisin and Connor.

With over two decades of work in public health, she is no stranger to dealing with emergencies, but says "no training can really prepare you for what it's actually like" tackling a pandemic.

New Zealand will decide early next week what will happen after an initial four-week lockdown ends on April 22 - weeks before other countries will expect to follow suit.

However, Dr McElnay admitted the pandemic has still posed considerable challenges, with the indigenous Maori and Pacific Island people more at risk from the spread of Covid-19.
A woman who believes that she was drugged and violently raped in a Dublin hotel while travelling to her fathers funeral is speaking out about her ordeal in a bid to dismantle the shame and stigma that silences victims.

Naomi Woodyatt woke up in a haze with burn marks on her arms, bruises on her legs, pains all over her body, while a naked man with cold, lifeless eyes smirked down at her before raping her again.

Discouraged by gardai to formally report the crime because the justice system is a joke, weighted towards perpetrators and against victims", her alleged abuser walked free. And Naomi believes that he is a calculating, serial rapist who will strike again.

But she believes that speaking out is an important step towards ending rape culture.

Abuse thrives in secrecy, she said.

We have to break the stigma. Theres so much shame and that stops people speaking out.

Since I shared my story online, so many people have contacted me saying that they were raped too but they never reported it. That shame and silence has to break.

Naomi, who lives in Cork but is originally from Canada, was travelling back home to her fathers funeral after his sudden death when her ordeal began on September 1 last year.

Her grandmother who was like her mother, had died days earlier, and then her father, who she spoke to every day, unexpectedly died in his sleep.

When she arrived at Dublin Airport to get her flight she was told at check-in that she was not allowed to board on her British passport without a visa and her Canadian passport had expired.

Grieving, vulnerable and alone, she booked into a Dublin airport hotel while she tried to iron out her visa problems.

It was was the lowest point in my life, she said. I had been crying for three days straight, dads death had really hit me and I didnt know if Id make his funeral. It was a horrible, horrible time.

I went down to the bar to get a glass of wine and this guy started talking to me. He said that he was going to Colorado for his work as an engineer. I told him I was trying to get to my dads funeral. It wasnt flirty at all, he just seemed like a normal, respectable businessman in his 40s.

He offered to buy me a drink and I dont remember anything after that.

I woke up in the room I had paid for, he must have gone through my bag to get the key. I was lying on the twin bed and he was on the double just staring at me. It was terrifying. I said I was in pain and he just smirked, he had this lifeless, cold look in his eye, but cocky.

He didnt answer but came over and raped me again. I said, stop, stop, I just woke up, stop, I was in a haze from the drugs Im sure he gave me.

Then he got dressed and left. I saw two glasses of Prosecco on the table - one had a strawberry in it. Thats when I realised he had drugged me.

He knew I was going to my dads funeral. That must take some level of depravity. How could you have a soul and do that?

I had bruises all over my legs, burn marks on my arms and the ring I wore every day was gone. It was just costume jewellery but it felt so personal.

Naomi was permitted to travel to Canada that day, and she emotionally detached herself from the ordeal to get through her fathers funeral.

But when she returned, she couldnt concentrate fully at work and fell into a dark place.

She got help from the Cork Rape Crisis Centre and reported her ordeal to gardai.

The gardai knew of a similar case in which the victim had forensic evidence from the night, witnesses had been in the house, but the alleged rapist had still walked free. Naomi said that she advised her against formally reporting it because it would be hugely traumatic and she was unlikely to get any justice.

The Garda was so nice. She was trying to protect me, Naomi said.

She said that the system was awful, that Id be two years going through hell and hed still probably walk free. There was no forensic evidence because I didnt report it that day, and although there would be CCTV, she said that was unlikely to get a conviction.

She said that the justice system is backward. All the weight is on the victim to prove it and the rapist just gets a free pass.

So I went to gardai about it but the report was never filed.

Naomi tried to resume her busy life but she found that she couldnt.

I was an outgoing person before, career-focused, I used to be able to handle so much but I started dropping things at work. I wanted to get back to my normal self but I couldnt.

The last six months I havent been functional. I lost myself. It has felt like my personality had been taken out of my body. Like my soul was gone and just this shell of me was left.

I quit work at the end of September. The last six months have been hell but Im just starting to see me again.

Naomi said that her alleged attacker had seemed perfectly normal before the incident and it has damaged her trust in people.

He had had a kind demeanour. People say criminals come in all shapes and sizes but I saw no red flags the night before.

I have mixed emotions speaking out now, she said, That rawness is still there, but it also gives me some sense of control, of power. Feeling powerless is terrible.

And rape, as Mary Crilly of Corks Rape Crisis Centre told her, is all about power.

Rape is not about lust or sexual attraction. Its about power, Mary told me.

And silence allows that power to persist.

Theres a lot of pressure on women to stay silent. That makes it harder to get over - having to cope in silence on your own - but also as a society it allows the stigma to persist - What were you wearing? Were you drinking?

I considered not reporting it because I had gone to the bar for a glass of wine. But that is a normal thing to do.

I want to be able to go to the bar for a glass of wine and not be attacked. All the focus is on the victim and stigmatising them when it should be on the perpetrator.

We need to believe women more. Women need a voice. Women need to be treated better.
Local content sub-quotas suspended for rest of year

Spectrum fee relief

$50m for regional journalism

Fast-tracked consultation on quotas for streaming services

Australian drama, children & documentary content obligations have been suspended until the end of the year as part of a major assistance to the media sector, reeling from COVID-19 impact.

Spectrum fees are also being waived and the Federal Government will provide $50 million for regional journalism.

Minister for Communications, Cyber Safety and the Arts, Paul Fletcher said Many Australians are doing it tough right now and the media sector is sharing that pain, especially in regional areas. Broadcasters and newspapers face significant financial pressure and COVID-19 has led to a sharp downturn in advertising revenue across the whole sector.

We are acting to offer urgent short-term support to the media sector. At the same time we are progressing our December 2019 commitment to consult on the future framework to support Australian stories on our screens.

Radio & TV broadcasters will receive $41 million worth of financial relief, while a $50 million Public Interest News Gathering (PING) program will support journalism in regional Australia.

The Government recognises that public interest journalism is essential in informing and strengthening local communities, Minister Fletcher said.

As an emergency red tape reduction measure, I have suspended Australian drama, childrens and documentary content obligations on free-to-air and subscription television for 2020. A decision will be taken before the end of this year as to whether this suspension should continue in 2021.

COVID-19 has effectively halted production of Australian screen content, making it impossible for free-to-air and subscription television businesses to meet Australian content obligations.

I want to thank ACMA and Screen Australia for their detailed, evidence-based study of the state of the Australian film and television sector, which carefully considers the cultural and economic importance of screen stories, the regulatory framework, and the support the Government provides to the screen sector through a range of mechanisms and policy settings, Minister Fletcher said.

Regulated free-to-air broadcasters are competing with unregulated digital platforms and video streaming services. It has been evident for some time  and the COVID-19 crisis has made it even more obvious  that this is not sustainable.

These arrangements threaten the sustainability of television broadcasters  and in turn the sustainability of the film and television content production sector.

That is why I want to seek industry feedback on the options put forward by ACMA and Screen Australia, and work with industry on a plan for the future, including how to best secure the market opportunity created by the explosion of streaming services.

We need to re-emerge from COVID-19 with a regulatory framework suited to the twenty-first century that recognises todays competitive landscape  where television broadcasters compete with streaming services and a myriad of other internet-based businesses  and which positions both the television sector and the content production sector for a sustainable future, the minister said.

The government will also release an options paper put together by the Australian Communications and Media Authority and Screen Australia, to determine the future extent of Australian content obligations on free-to-air television broadcasters, and whether these should apply to streaming services.

Nine:

Hugh Marks, CEO of Nine, said in a statement, We thank the Minister for his efforts and the measures announced today which provide some short term relief to Australias media businesses. However, the current COVID-19 crisis only serves to further highlight the need for urgent long term solutions to the regulatory imbalance between highly regulated domestic media players and unregulated international technology companies.

Seven:

Seven West Media Managing Director and Chief Executive Officer James Warburton said: We welcome todays announcement from the Government outlining a range of short term measures to assist our industry deal with the immediate impacts of COVID-19.

The media is playing a critical role during this crisis in keeping the public informed with Australians turning to our trusted and reliable news and public affairs services for accurate information, as shown by the substantial lift in viewership for 7NEWS, Sunrise and The Latest. Were also seeing strong readership growth for The West Australian, Sunday Times and our regional papers. We are not businesses that can hibernate during these events but our revenue is significantly impacted.

The impacts of COVID-19 on our industry further highlights the urgent need for regulatory reform to ensure media businesses in Australia are sustainable in the long term. This includes ensuring that foreign digital platforms are paying fairly for our content as well as reform of Australian content obligations, so we welcome the Government announcing its fast-tracked consultation process to deliver content reform.

Screen Producers Australia

Screen Producers Australia (SPA) today expressed deep concern at the Governments announcement that Australian content quotas would be suspended for 2020, with the option to extend into 2021. SPA CEO Matthew Deaner stated:

These hard cuts have the potential to at worst cripple Australias production industry and at best snuff the opportunities for a rebound for much of our sector at a time when it is facing a very real battle for survival.

Coronavirus assistance for Australias broadcasters should not have to come at the expense of our production sector, which has been amongst the hardest hit by widespread shutdowns and which is in need of a comprehensive support package itself. This announcement will just load up the pain on Australias struggling arts and creative sector, most of whom are now out of work and falling through the cracks of assistance measures.

We understand better than most that there will be disruptions to the supply of Australian content, particularly drama, documentary and childrens content. Our members are standing down production teams, cast and crew and halting production activity on over 100 productions, with devastating economic and employment impacts. However, rather than a hard suspension of quotas, we suggested temporary averaging flexibility, to allow broadcasters relief in the coming year, contingent on the overall obligations being acquitted across the coming years when production activity can return. This would ensure demand returns to the system at levels sufficient to get the sector back on its feet and able to pump out productions and employ large numbers of people.

It would also recognise that there is a significant amount of quota content already completed and sitting with the broadcasters (or soon to be delivered). We have surveyed our members and determined that there is a substantial amount of content ready to go on free-to-air television this year. A complete suspension of the quotas in 2020 is disproportionate to the actual level of disruption to the supply pipeline.

Furthermore, with no incentive for the broadcasters to release hundreds of hours of already delivered but not yet broadcast childrens, drama and documentary content, it harms the Australian publics ability to access the content which is sitting gathering dust on shelves.

A complete suspension is also a very blunt tool when it is considered that some sub-types of production are still able to be commissioned, including animation and documentary. Suspension of commissioning activity essentially knocks out demand for these productions, which would have been crucial in keeping people in jobs in the industry during the wider shut down.

It is imperative that these quota suspensions are strictly limited in time, so that when production activity can resume, there is sufficient commissioning activity to stimulate the rapid upscaling of production to drive the delivery of much-loved content and to reignite employment in the sector, which will be vital for the wider economy.

The Government must institute a rigorous, evidence-based and open process to determine whether the suspension should be extended into 2021. This will require a detailed assessment of supply and likely production activity and must preclude any potential for gaming the suspension by broadcasters who have already publicly indicated their pre-coronavirus preference to dial down commissions in complete contravention of regulatory obligations.

SPA today also welcomed the release of an Options Paper to look at how best to support Australian stories on our screens in a modern, multi-platform environment.

We have been talking to Government for several years as to how to best ensure the continued production and distribution of the Australian stories audiences love and expect to see on their screens. We are pleased the Government has taken this step and look forward to engaging with the proposals in the options paper.

However, an immediate crisis is unfolding in the production sector, and bold and decisive Government intervention is required to secure the future of the screen industry and harness its ability to gear up and return to making great local content as soon as possible. As announced yesterday, SPA is calling on the Government to implement a $1 billion content fund over the forward estimates to top up the existing tax offsets and supplement Screen Australia direct investment, and the immediate extension of content obligations onto SVOD services, to help share the load.

This package is critical not only for our economy and cultural recovery but also to protect our national sovereignty.

Free TV Australia:

Free TV has welcomed the urgent relief package announced today by Minister Fletcher which will greatly assist the commercial television broadcast industry to deal with the immediate impacts of the COVID-19 crisis.

Free TV CEO, Bridget Fair said While we are still working through the details of the package, the suspension of content quotas for 2020, waiver of spectrum fees and support for regional journalism are very positive for the immediate pressures being experienced by the industry. However the ongoing requirement to meet the overall 55% Australian content quota remains a concern for the industry in an environment where there is less sport, drama and entertainment programming available due to the suspension or cancellation of many productions.

The COVID-19 crisis is having significant financial and operational impacts on our sector and these will take years to play out. It is therefore pleasing to note that the Minister has flagged that further consideration of content quotas for 2021 will occur later this year as we expect that further relief will be required in future years.

We also welcome the immediate release of the Options Paper and expedited consultation period for long term Australian Content quota settings. We are still working through the detail of the Options Paper and look forward to responding as part of the consultation process in coming weeks.

Free TV would also urge the Government to expedite the process for the ACCC Digital Platforms Code of Conduct. It is clear that negotiations between the parties to date have been deeply unsatisfactory. These platforms derive value from the news and Premium Australian Content generated by commercial broadcasters, but their market power means they do not pay a fair price for it. The Government must step into this process and drive a speedy resolution to the bargaining imbalance between the parties.

As the world cranks into post-isolation reality, commercial television will need an operating environment that provides certainty for the future. We need a new regulatory framework suitable for a world where broadcasters compete with unregulated online content providers and digital platforms that dont have any of the same rules that apply to Free TV broadcasters.

We look forward to working with Minister Fletcher and the Morrison Government to achieve regulatory settings that are suitable for the post COVID world. Free TV broadcasters still account for the lions share of spending on film and television production in this country. A sustainable commercial television sector is crucial to the health of the broader production sector.

MEAA:

The release of a screen options paper will guide the overdue debate about the future Australian screen content, says the Media, Entertainment & Arts Alliance.

MEAA, along with other members of the Make It Australian campaign, has long argued for Australian content rules to be brought into the 21st century to recognise audience preferences for streaming services.

The options paper is extensive and will take some time to digest and respond to. While some of the proposals in the four models set out in the paper should be ruled out, such as total deregulation, a range of viable positions are canvassed.

MEAA strongly supports regulatory equality and platform neutrality. This means platforms have meaningful obligations, rather than all platforms being subjected to a vastly diluted Australian content regime.

The Australian screen sector employs tens of thousands of creatives, performers and technicians, Mr Murphy said.

The sector has been pummelled by the coronavirus. As we look to the future, one of the most significant pathways to resuming production and getting our creative workforce back in business will be strong, fit-for-purpose content regulations that apply to all platforms in a balanced manner.

10:

ViacomCBS Australia and New Zealand chief content officer and EVP, Beverley McGarvey, said: The measures announced by the Communications Minister are a great first step in helping us keep our focus on delivering important news and entertainment to our growing community of Network 10 viewers during these uncertain times.

Its important to remember that we are only at the beginning of this global crisis and the impacts to our industry, in both the revenue and production capacity, are likely to be felt well into the future. We need to look at further measures in the short-term that will help us plan ahead so we can continue to deliver free, high-quality content to our audiences.

The Minister was right to release the local content options paper without delay because it gives us the chance to shape the long-term future of our important industry before the impacts of the COVID-19 crisis make the decisions for us.

We hope that all stakeholders can work together on outcomes that not only build a flourishing local production sector but allow the commercial free-to-air broadcasters to thrive amongst the growing global competition for Australian audiences.

AWG:

In response to the COVID-19 pandemics impact on the financial sustainability of our national television broadcasters, the Morrison Government today announced a suspension of content obligations until the end of this calendar year. While there will be no change to the requirement for broadcasters to meet a 55% Australian content obligation, broadcasters have been released from drama, children and documentary content quotas. This news is delivered at a time when Australians are streaming more content than ever, and global tech giants are prospering without regulation.

Over recent weeks, Seven West (with a net debt of $540m) cut salary costs by 20% and Nine communicated a $200m cost-saving strategy. The current crippling cashflow crisis facing commercial broadcasters has precipitated a federal decision that was being carefully considered by multiple stakeholders prior to COVID-19. By postponing local content quotas to alleviate immediate financial pressure, the government will prematurely alter our TV landscape, in turn diminishing long-term employment prospects for writers and weakening our unique cultural voice. Paul Fletchers suspension of Australian drama, children and documentary content obligations until the end of December 2020 will allow broadcasters to evade local scripted production across two financial years and give them the option to hold back content that has already been produced.

The suspension of the quotas for Australian drama, children and documentary content until at least the end of the year is deeply concerning for the future of the entire industry, said President of the Australian Writers Guild, Shane Brennan.

The economic downturn caused by COVID-19 has given Australian networks the excuse they need in their quest to end the quota system once and for all. With this decision, the Federal Government has turned its back on the thousands of talented workers in this industry in favour of supporting a handful of media companies, said Mr Brennan.

In response to this announcement, the Australian Writers Guild urges Paul Fletcher to strengthen his position on the regulation of global streaming services such as Netflix, Amazon, Apple and Disney+ by imposing local content obligations to mitigate the negative impact on the Australian screen industry. AWG welcomes todays release of an options paper that was co-authored by Screen Australia and the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) to consider an updated support framework for Australian stories in a multi-platform environment.

Alongside SPA, MEAA and ADG, AWG is calling for the government to contribute a $1bn content fund to supplement Screen Australia investment and the immediate imposition of content obligations on SVOD services.

The Australian playwriting community is also reeling from the Australia Councils recent four-year funding announcements, where small-mid producing companies with track records of commissioning, developing and producing new Australian plays were hit hard. La Mama, ATYP, The Blue Room and Barking Gecko were all unsuccessful in securing four-year funding, decimating opportunities for playwrights. ATYPs National Studio was celebrated by playwrights as one of the best script development programs in the country. This feedback was highlighted in AWGs submission to last years REA Review. The Guild is in conversation with Australian Plays and Playwriting Australia as they strive to achieve funding beyond 2021 for a new entity for playwright and play development.

AWG will continue to fight to protect local content quotas, effective arts funding, our members livelihoods and our national cultural identity.
The Delhi Police crime branch has added the Indian Penal Codes (IPC) stringent Section 304 to the list of laws used against Maulana Saad, booking the head of the Tablighi Jamaat for culpable homicide not amounting to murder in connection with the coronavirus disease outbreak at the Muslim missionary groups headquarters in Nizamuddin Basti, which has emerged as the biggest Covid-19 hot spot in India.

The police filed a criminal case against Saad and six other top officials on March 31 for defying a series of government directives, which curbed religious and large gatherings, issued to contain the spread of the disease in the capital. Of the 1,578 cases reported in the city till Wednesday, 1,080 were linked to gatherings at the Jamaats Markaz building in Nizamuddin in mid-March.

Senior police officers said they will soon summon Saad because his 14-day period of self-quarantine (for being in contact with people who later tested positive) is over. The Tablighi Jamaat management said earlier this month that Saad was in isolation on his doctors advice.

A senior police officer said that the first information report (FIR), filed on March 31, was first registered under sections of Disaster Management Act and the sections of the IPC including criminal conspiracy (120 B), a negligent act likely to spread disease (269), malignant act likely to spread infection (270), disobedience of quarantine rule (271) and defying prohibitory orders (188). The maximum punishment, if convicted, under those sections is a two-year prison term with a fine or both.

Section 304 has now been added against Saad, the officer said. The maximum punishment under this law is a 10-year prison term.

Last month, police officers and state government officials evacuated more than 2,300 people from inside the Markaz building, where they had gathered for a religious congregation of indeterminate length. The meetings continued despite orders by the Delhi government banning all religious events (March 13), restricting gatherings to 200 people (March 16), and then putting a five-person limit on March 21 on all gatherings.

The gathering inside the Markaz  where people from several other countries including Malaysia, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia and Kyrgyzstan were also present  has been linked to at least 1,445 infections, spread across 17 states, including Tamil Nadu, Delhi, Andhra Pradesh, Assam, Jammu & Kashmir, Rajasthan, Telangana, Andaman and Nicobar Islands, Arunachal Pradesh, Haryana, Himachal Pradesh, Jharkhand, Karnataka, Kerala, Maharashtra, Uttarakhand and Uttar Pradesh.

Explaining why the police added the stringent section, a mid-level officer said the Tablighi Jamaat management had defied the polices order urging them not to gather inside the Markaz. There is an audio clip, in which Saad is heard telling his followers that the Covid-19 scare is a conspiracy. This audio tape is also mentioned in the FIR. He knew about the consequences of the disease but ignored it deliberately. Police had informed him before the lockdown to disperse the gathering but despite that they continued to live in the building. We also have a video recording of the local police telling the management to disperse the gathering but despite that the thousands of persons continued to stay inside. They had to be evacuated by police and government.

His 14-day quarantine period is over. He was not there during the evacuation process. His interrogation is important to get more details about the gathering. Our officers are in touch with the Tablighi Jamaat management. We are yet to get a nod from our seniors on summoning him to join the investigation, said a second senior officer familiar with the investigation who asked not to be named.

Advocate LN Rao, who worked with the Delhi Police for over three decades till he retired in 2014, said that the police are within their rights to add another section to an existing FIR. Across the world, people were dying of Covid-19. The government had issued the directions to stop such deaths and the spread of the disease. Despite knowing this, if the head of the Tablighi Jamaat continued with the gathering knowing fully well that it could result in deaths, then using Section 304 is a sound thing to do for an investigator. Police will now have to find evidence suggesting that the Maulana knew his action was likely to kill someone. Police are legally allowed to add the section and prima facie, it may seem to be the right thing to do. But if they are unable to find evidence against Saad under 304 then the court will not allow trial to proceed under that section. In some cases, police also do not file a charge sheet under that section, if they know that it will not pass the courts scrutiny.

A third officer aware of the matter said that the police know about Saads whereabouts and will ensure that he does not leave the city, which is in any case under a lockdown.

The crime branch has seized the computers and attendance registers from inside the Markaz, where the details of all the visitors and the gathering were noted. In reply to the questionnaire, they have also sent us some documents. The investigating officer will quiz Saad about the records, the third officer said on condition of anonymity.

On the polices move to add the stringent section to the FIR against Saad, his counsel, Fuzail Ayyubi, said,  We have only heard from the media about the case update and the summoning of 18 persons. We wont comment until police inform us about it.

Earlier this month, police sent two questionnaires to Saad with 29 questions related to the Tablighi Jamaat and the gatherings between March 10 and 15. In the first notice, which had 26 questions, sent on April 1, the investigating officer sought details of CCTV cameras inside the building and asked Saad to preserve the footage. The police asked for details of all people, including foreigners, present in the building last month. There was also a question about the steps taken by the management to disperse the gathering after the governments prohibitory orders were issued.

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Moradabad : , April 15 (IANS) A team of health workers and police was attacked in Moradabad on Wednesday when they went to pick up a coronavirus patient and his family.

The incident in which several police and health workers were injured took place in Nawabpura area of Moradabad. The ambulance and four other vehicles were also damaged in the stone pelting.

According to reports, a man named Sartaj had been unwell and was admitted to the medical college in the Tirthankar Mahavir University.

His samples were sent for testing on April 9 and the report that came on April 13 found him to be corona positive. Sartaj died the same night.

Some members of his family were quarantined at the IFTM University.

The health and police team, on Wednesday, went to their house to pick up Sartaj's younger brother who had been suffering from fever.

As soon as the team reached the area, people started coming out of their houses and collecting at the spot. They tried to prevent the remaining family members from being taken for quarantine.

The health team tried to explain to the crowds but the local people became aggressive and started pelting stones.

UP Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath has taken a strong view of the incident and has asked district officials to book the accused under the National Security Act.

ADG (Law and order) P.V. Ramasastry said in Lucknow that the situation was under control and efforts were on to identify the miscreants. "We will take very strict action against those involved in this incident," he said.
Both Iran and the United States are fighting a common enemy in the coronavirus pandemic. Yet the two sides are continuing actions meant to pressure each other.

At first, Iran appeared to be losing the battle to contain COVID-19, the disease caused by the virus. Now, the Iranian government is seeking to use its struggles with the disease to influence international opinion on U.S. sanctions against Iran.

The government has asked for $5 billion from the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Yet the country continues to break the rules of its 2015 nuclear agreement with world powers. The United States withdrew from the deal in 2018 under President Donald Trump.

The Trump administration has said that aid can reach Iran, but humanitarian organizations say the U.S. sanctions make that difficult.

At the same time, the U.S. military is now pulling its soldiers out of Iraq. Trump says this troop redeployment was the plan all along. And he adds that Iran plans a sneak attack against U.S. forces.

The possibility of war between the countries is not discussed openly as both governments fight the pandemic. Yet it is still a possibility. Some observers say it is just as possible as it was after the drone strike that killed Iranian General Qassem Soleimani in Iraq. The U.S. military carried out the attack in January.

After Soleimanis killing, everybody thought there will be war, but nothing happened, said Mahsa Rouhi. She is with the International Institute for Strategic Studies. She added that the two nations are back in a situation where any move could easily lead to a conflict.

Whereas we were so close to war that its not that nothing happened, Rouhi said. And we are not back to normal. ... We are back to a situation where any move could easily escalate into a conflict.

Tensions between the two countries can seem unimportant when compared to the pandemic.



During the first few days of the coronavirus outbreak in Iran, Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif was mostly silent. Now, he is speaking up against the U.S. sanctions, which make it difficult to get some medical supplies. He claims that the United States is using medical terror against Iran.

It is also a way to blame the U.S. government for Irans unwillingness to fight the virus in the early days, leading to many deaths.

Human Rights Watch said American laws as written affect Irans ability to get important medical equipment. International companies are afraid to sell to Iran because they do not want to be accused of violating the sanctions.

Olivier Vandecasteele is Relief Internationals country director for Iran. He said in a statement that the sanction rules about medical supplies are unclear and have slowed the health response in the first weeks of the outbreak.

Both China and Europe have provided aid to Iran, as have the Gulf nations. They are worried the virus could spread beyond Irans borders to their countries.

Iran says it can make its own protective equipment to fight the coronavirus. U.S. officials say this means that the Iranians do not really need money from the IMF.

The U.S. campaign against Iran seeks to force Iran to stop using its money to interfere with other countries, such as Iraq. U.S. officials fear that if Iran is given IMF money, it will continue to finance military interference in those countries.

The Iranian government believes its actions are defensive.

For now, people continue to die of the virus in Iran, noted Rouhi. She adds the pandemic could spread to U.S. allies in western Asia, forcing the world to still work with Irans government.

I'm Bryan Lynn.

The Associated Press reported this story. Susan Shand adapted it for Learning English. George Grow was the editor.

________________________________________________________________

Words in This Story

pandemic  n. a contagious illness the affects many countries

escalate  v.to increase

sneak  adj. done quietly and secretly

sanctions  n.a financial blockade against a nation to make it change its behavior

drone  n. an unmanned plane

response  n.an answer

outbreak  n. the sudden appearance of a contagious illness
The coronavirus-led lockdown has put a lid on global oil demand as the drastic decline in travelling is hitting the industry hard. In addition, a month-long dispute between major oil producers Saudi Arabia and Russia had dragged oil prices as well.

However, the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries and its allies (OPEC+) finally drafted a historic plan to curb global oil output in a bid to diminish the oversupply of oil at a time when demand for the commodity is nearing rock bottom.

Now it remains to be seen if this production cut alone can sustain oil prices in the months ahead. After all, the reduction in production will begin in May and continue through April 2022. Keeping these cutbacks in mind, lets take a look at a couple of stocks within the industry.

Effective Global Oil Cuts Above 19 Million bpd

Oil prices already touched the nadir during the lockdown. U.S. crude dropped to $19.27 a barrel in March-end, its lowest since 2002 while Brent crude dropped below $23 on the same day, hitting its worst level in 17 years. Fears about the price war between Saudi Arabia and Russia triggered a sell-off as well. All this eventually caused a sharp drop in oil prices.

However, after almost a week-long discussion, bilateral calls and ministerial video conferences, the OPEC+ and the group of 20 countries arrived at a consensus to lift oil prices. The proposal was even supported by Mexico, which had earlier refused to settle for production ramp-down.

Mexico had been asked to trim production by 400,000 bpd initially, which the country opposed. The country agreed upon 100,000 bpd cuts, which werent enough to address the excess supply of the commodity in global markets. This is where the United States stepped in. President Donald Trump nodded to compensate Mexicos share by slashing volumes by 250,000-300,000 bpd, a move the president confirmed was already on track.

OPEC+ will reduce 9.7 million barrels a day, which is just lower than the initially proposed 10 million. The production cuts will be effective May 1 through June-end. From Jul 1 through Dec 31, total production will decrease to 8 million bpd. These cuts will be followed by a production decline to 6 million bpd from Jan 1, 2021 to Apr 30, 2022.OPEC+ will meet in June via teleconference to make a decision on output policy.

Story continues

However, even if the production cuts are in place, demand for oil will play a crucial role in boosting prices. Demand for the commodity has already shrunk to a third by the pandemic. After all, airplanes are grounded and vehicles are off the road because of the stringent standstill measures by countries. This is why the production cuts were agreed upon until 2022, in case the virus continues to take a toll on global economies.

However, these collective production cuts could certainly stop oil prices from sliding further in such trying times. For this reason, investors could keep an eye on stocks in the Oils-Energyindustry.

3 Stocks to Consider

We have, therefore, rounded up three stocks that are involved in activities in the oil industry. You can see the complete list of todays Zacks #1 (Strong Buy) Rank stocks here.

Superior Energy Services, Inc. SPN is a provider of oilfield services and equipment to oil and natural gas exploration and production companies. The Zacks Consensus Estimate for Superior Energy Services current-year earnings has moved 1.3% north in the past 60 days. The companys expected earnings growth rate for the current year is more than 100%. Superior Energy Services, which belongs to Zacks Oil and Gas - Mechanical and Equipment industry, carries a Zacks Rank #2 (Buy).

Noble Corporation plc NE is an offshore drilling contractor for the oil and gas industry. The Zacks Consensus Estimate for Nobles current-year earnings has moved 15% north in the past 60 days. The companys expected earnings growth rate for the next quarter is 11.8%. Noble, which belongs to Zacks Oil and Gas - Drilling industry, carries a Zacks Rank of 2.

Kinder Morgan, Inc. KMI is an energy infrastructure company. The Zacks Consensus Estimate for Kinder Morgans current-year earnings has moved 1% north in the past 60 days. The companys expected earnings growth rate for the current year is 3.2%. Kinder Morgan, which belongs to Zacks Oil and Gas - Production and Pipelines industry, carries a Zacks Rank #3 (Hold).

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Some of the farm machinery found buried near Belfast

Three men have been released on bail following the discovery of stolen farm machinery that had been buried on farmland near Belfast.

Detectives in Lisburn recovered a number of items of farm machinery that were reported stolen and arrested three men on suspicion of handling stolen goods.

Among the haul recovered from under the ground was a John Deere round baler and a McHale bale wrapper.

Farm vehicle and machinery theft in the UK costs the industry around 10m per year.

Stolen machinery reports have increased since the outbreak of the coronavirus.

The PSNI said: "The arrest of the three males and recovery of machinery followed the report that a number of items of stolen machinery were recovered in the Ballynagarrick Road area of Carryduff.

"Police attended and recovered pieces of farm machinery believed to have been stolen from the Carryduff area on April 13.

"A further report was made to police that another piece of agricultural equipment was recovered from a field on the Mill Road in Carryduff.

"Officers attended the address and located a further piece of farm machinery, believed to have been stolen from the Carryduff area.

"Police subsequently arrested three males aged 18, 21 and 23 on suspicion of handling stolen goods. The 21-year-old was also arrested on suspicion of fraud by false representation and possession of articles for use in fraud.

"We understand the impact that crime against the farming community has on farmers, their families, farm workers, businesses and the wider rural community. It is for that reason that we take it seriously. We would like to hear from anyone who can help with our enquiries.

"We are appealing to anyone who witnessed anything suspicious in these areas to contact police on 101."

It was also confirmed the three men were all released on bail pending further enquiries.
President Donald Trump speaks about the coronavirus in the Rose Garden of the White House. Read more

President Donald Trump's inaccurate assertion that he has "total" authority to reopen a nation shuttered by the coronavirus is igniting a fresh challenge from governors scrambling to manage their states and highlighting a Republican Party reluctant to defy a president who has relished pushing the boundaries of executive power.

The president's claim, first conveyed in a tweet Monday morning and underscored at a White House news conference and subsequent social media posts, caught his aides off guard and prompted them to study whether Trump would have such authority in a time of emergency like the ongoing pandemic.

Republicans were largely tepid in their criticism of Trump's expansive views on his power, which he has wielded throughout his presidency as he circumvented the legislative branch on matters of spending and subpoenas, while enjoying decisions in which he maintained universal authority such as issuing pardons. Trump has also issued a multitude of executive orders while relying heavily on myriad acting administration officials rather than subjecting them to the Senate confirmation process.

At a White House briefing late Tuesday, Trump offered conflicting statements about which entity had the authority to reopen, seeming to backtrack from his claim Monday but at the same time insisting the federal government would have the final say.

"The governors are responsible. They have to take charge," said Trump, who added that some states want to reopen now and probably can before May 1, while others aren't there yet. He said that if a state with many cases tries to reopen early, the federal government might step in.

"If we disagree with it, we're not going to let it open," he said, before adding, "We're there to help. But we're also there to be critics."

Earlier in the day, Trump's comments on reopening the nation were challenged by his presumptive Democratic rival this fall, former vice president Joe Biden, and also by prominent governors overseeing the public health crisis in their states such as New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who in his daily news conference Tuesday skewered at length Trump's position as wildly off-base from the Constitution.

Cuomo said the president's claim of total authority is "not an accurate statement," because the basic principle of federalism is enshrined in the Constitution, in which powers not given to the federal government remain with the states.

"The statement that he has total authority over the states and the nation cannot go uncorrected," Cuomo said. "There are many things that you can debate in the Constitution because they're ambiguous. This is not ambiguous."

Later Tuesday in his own remarks, California Gov. Gavin Newsom, a Democrat, was less pointed toward Trump but nonetheless unequivocal, tweeting: "When it comes to reopening, SCIENCE - not politics - must be California's guide." Newsom outlined six factors he will consider in doing so, including protecting communities from the spread of the virus and ensuring that hospitals could handle any surge in cases.

The fresh power struggle between the federal government and state officials came as the toll of the pandemic continued to grow, with more than 25,000 people dead from the virus in the United States and more than 600,000 confirmed to be infected.

The International Monetary Fund said Tuesday that the pandemic is causing the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression of the 1930s. It is also inflicting acute pain in the medical sector, which continues to struggle with supplies and personnel becoming sick, with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention saying Tuesday that 9,000 health care workers have tested positive.

In another assertion of authority, Trump said he would halt funding to World Health Organization while a review was conducted. He has criticized the organization for its slow response in the early days of the outbreak, but by Jan. 30, the organization declared a global health emergency, after which the president continued to play down the outbreak and compared it with seasonal flu.

Governors also began outlining their strategy for reopening their states in the coming weeks and months, while a consortium of seven states on the East Coast continued a plan to explore how and when to lift restrictions in their geographically aligned states.

Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine, a Republican, was among the state leaders who made clear Tuesday that the facts on the ground must dictate when the current restrictions can begin to ease.

"This monster is still going to be with us at least until we get a vaccine," DeWine, who has said his state has had a good working relationship with federal officials so far, said at a Tuesday news conference. "It's not going away, and that's the sad news. . . . We are 12-18 months away from this going away. We're going to have to live with it."

Two White House officials said there was no broader planning for Trump's comments that he had "total" authority and that they were both surprised by his tweets to that effect Monday. There was no legal underpinning for the remarks in advance, said the officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to talk frankly, and "it is widely viewed with skepticism in the building that we should be doing this."

The White House Counsel's Office is studying what authority the president actually does have during a national emergency, according to the officials. But the operating plan in the White House is not to try to force any state to reopen, although one senior White House official said they had been in contact with some states - such as Texas, Mississippi and Tennessee - about reopening sooner rather than later.

"I am almost positive James Madison fell off a cloud somewhere today when Trump said that," said Dan Eberhart, a Republican donor. "The founders of the republic stitched together a complicated game of chess to ensure our president was a very weak king who could be simultaneously slowed down by the legislature, judiciary and federalism. His authority is far from total."

Another prominent GOP donor, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss private deliberations, said there was an effort "to talk him into a better place."

One official said Trump is frustrated that the governors are getting so much credit and no blame while he gets all the blame and none of the credit. He particularly complains about Cuomo, this official said.

"Cuomo's been calling daily, even hourly, begging for everything, most of which should have been the state's responsibility, such as new hospitals, beds, ventilators, etc.," Trump tweeted earlier Tuesday. "I got it all done for him, and everyone else, and now he seems to want Independence! That won't happen!"

Trump has said repeatedly that the federal government is merely a backup to the states and that the onus is on the governors to deal with the pandemic.

Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., said in a recent interview that "at the end of the day, it will be the governors that make these decisions."

One Republican ally close to the president said Trump did not initially want to be associated with decisions to close down the government because "closing is bad news, and opening is good news." And he spoke with governors such as Florida's Ron DeSantis, a Republican, who were skeptical, said this person, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private conversations.

Trump was happy to accept the argument from some advisers that he should invoke federalism, and the president repeatedly emphasized states' rights when questioned by reporters in recent weeks why he was not instituting a national stay-at-home order.

But Trump sees a political triumph in reopening the economy and wants credit for it, this person said.

In a tweet Monday, Biden said that he is "not running for office to be King of America."

"I respect the Constitution," Biden said. "I've read the Constitution. I've sworn an oath to it many times. I respect the great job so many of this country's governors - Democratic and Republican - are doing under these horrific circumstances."

Within the GOP, Trump's biggest challenge to his exertion of executive power came last year, when a dozen GOP senators voted to reject an emergency declaration the president issued to take taxpayer dollars from the military and other accounts for a border wall that Congress had denied.

Of that dozen, two - Sens. Rand Paul of Kentucky and Marco Rubio of Florida - issued comments Tuesday, both stressing that states should retain the power to regulate their own activities. Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, said in a statement: "I respect the authorities of the office of the presidency. I also recognize that it will take all of us - elected leaders and citizens - to effectively stop the spread of this virus."

Aides to two others - Utah Sens. Mitt Romney and Mike Lee - said the senators would have no response.

None of the other seven responded to requests for comment. They were Sens. Lamar Alexander of Tennessee, Roy Blunt of Missouri, Susan Collins of Maine, Jerry Moran of Kansas, Rob Portman of Ohio and Patrick Toomey of Pennsylvania, and Roger Wicker of Mississippi.

At least two other prominent elected GOP officials, past and present - Rep. Liz Cheney, R-Wyo., the third-ranking leader among House Republicans, and Republican-turned independent Rep. Justin Amash of Michigan - challenged Trump's notion.

Cheney, whose father, Richard Cheney, had pushed for broad executive authority as vice president in George W. Bush's administration, cited the text of the 10th Amendment in a tweet: "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people."

But other GOP lawmakers questioned about Trump's bold claim, an assertion refuted by constitutional experts, were reluctant to challenge the president.

Rep. Steve Scalise, R-La., the No. 2 House Republican, argued in a Fox News interview Tuesday that states had largely taken their cue from Trump and the federal government over the past two months, particularly when it comes to social distancing guidelines.

"When the president said that, you saw almost every governor in the country take that cue and say, 'OK, we're going to institute a new set of policies,' " Scalise said. "And so, while the president hasn't said every state has to do this, he's been setting the guidance using the experts from CDC and other agencies, and then you see states following suit."

A spokesman for Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan, a Republican, on Tuesday declined to comment beyond the governor's remarks to CNN on Monday in which he said governors were best positioned to make the ultimate decision on when their states can safely resume everyday activities.

Its not my understanding of the Constitution, Hogan said in the CNN interview of Trumps interpretation of his own powers.
By PTI

NEW DELHI: CRPF ASI Padmeswar Das is on leave at his home in Assam but not off-duty as he prepares ration packets, using his savings, for the poor in his village who are worst hit by the coronavirus lockdown.

The 48-year-old trooper, whose unit is deployed in south Kashmir's terrorist violence-hit Shopian district, is helping those affected by the lockdown in his tiny village of Chatanguri, about 76 kms from the headquarters of Morigaon district.

Moved by the plight of the distressed, Das discussed with his mother and wife about the possible help they could extend and they enthusiastically joined him in the endeavour.

"I came home for my scheduled leave on March 3 and by the time I was supposed to return, the lockdown was declared.

My unit based in the Kashmir valley also sent a message, asking me to stay put and not return.

"Had I been with my force, I would have had an army of my colleagues and officers to help the needy.

Then I thought I can be a one-man army," Das told PTI over phone from his village.

"My force stands for the motto 'service and loyalty' whether a jawan is alone or in a group," he said.

The assistant sub-inspector (ASI), who joined the CRPF as a constable in 1991, said he took his scooty and went to the nearest market to fetch about 80 kg of rice and other dry ration.

The next day, he and his family prepared over 50 packets, each containing two kgs of rice, one kg potato, a small bottle of mustard oil, a packet of salt, onions and half-a-kg of pulses.

"I spent about Rs 8,000-10,000 for purchasing and packing these items," Das said hesitatingly, as he did not seem keen to share the cost of his noble deed.

He said he used his uniform for the service of people.

"I donned my uniform as the movement of civilians was barred due to the lockdown, used my 'gamocha' (a traditional Assamese scarf) as a mask and got a handcart to distribute the packets among the needy," Das said.

When reminded that he acted like a good samaritan, he said he only knows that "efforts of any kind always count".

"My colleagues in my delta company unit in Shopian and in the entire force are spread out to help in the fight against coronavirus and the lockdown-affected people in whatever way they can.

I am just one among them," Das, who has a young son and a daughter, said.

His boss and Commandant of the 76th battalion of the Central Reserve Police Force (based in Jammu) Neeraj Pandey is all praise for his "tough and dedicated" colleague.

"I am proud of what Das did to help people, despite being on official leave.

He has gone beyond his call of duty, but that is what our ethos and regimentation are all about," he said.

Unfazed by the continuing lockdown, Das plans to replenish the stocks for those who need his help.
Wearing masks and gloves, South Korean voters cast their ballots on Wednesday to elect 300 parliamentary lawmakers amid the coronavirus outbreak.

Voting kicked off at 6 am (local time) and was to run until 6 pm (local time) at 14,330 polling stations across the country, according to the National Election Commission (NEC). The number of eligible voters is 44 million, according to Yonhap news agency.

The once-in-four-years legislative election is widely seen as a referendum on President Moon Jae-in, whose five-year term will end in mid-2022, as well as a test of the country's fight against COVID-19 under the leadership of Moon, The Strait Times reported.

South Korea has received international praise for its massive testing capability and other innovative measures, such as drive-through testing and high-tech contact tracing.

Experts, therefore, expect the ruling Democratic Party (DP) to extend its lead in Parliament, given that the government's handling of the virus outbreak is viewed positively both at home and abroad, as per The Strait Times.

At least 10,564 people in the country have been infected by coronavirus, which has claimed 222 lives. About 2,800 patients are undergoing treatment.

The number of new cases has fallen from a high of 813 on February 29 to below 50 for six days in a row as an intensive social distancing campaign that started on March 21 remained in place.

Several surveys cited by the newspaper also showed that voters consider the pandemic as the biggest factor in their decision. A recent poll showed that 72.6 per cent of respondents rated the government's response to the outbreak as positive.

The NEC has said that public safety at polling stations will be a priority to prevent any possible spread of the virus.

All 14,330 polling stations and 251 counting stations will be disinfected on polling day, the NEC was quoted.

Voters will undergo temperature screening and those registering temperatures of 37.5 degrees Celsius or higher or display respiratory symptoms will have to exercise their franchise at a separate booth.

Tuesday was the last of 13 days of campaigning, which saw most candidates reducing their ground activities and face-to-face encounters with voters. Instead, the candidates boosted their online presence with videos and social media engagements in a bid to win votes, according to The Strait Times.

In addition, the government has also decided to temporarily lift quarantine rules to permit self-isolators to vote in the elections. Some 50,000 people in self-isolation who have no symptoms and expressed a willingness to vote will be allowed to cast ballots after the regular voting ends in the evening.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)






By Tom Plate




Teraco, an African vendor-neutral data centre provider, has announced it will provide a support grant valued at R7.5m to the South African Broadband Education Networks (Saben) via the Teraco Connect Foundation. Over the next five years, Teraco will partner with Saben to support the national drive to end bandwidth poverty among South Africa's schools and public TVET colleges.

Jan Hnizdo, CEO of Teraco

Getting connected

Jan Hnizdo, CEO of Teraco, says that the grant will help to facilitate the changing landscape of education in South Africa. Digital infrastructure initiatives, including remote learning and educational streaming will become more efficient and easier to implement.Saben is a non-profit company serving the public Technical and Vocational Education and Training (TVET) sector in South Africa. It is purpose-built to solve the digital requirements of this sector. Hnizdo says that the Teraco Connect Foundation grant will not only enable these educational institutions to access content directly and grow their collective digital strategy, but will also assist in laying essential foundations for future digital remote learning strategies: To enable digital transformation, Sabens need for direct access to a rich ecosystem of content and cloud providers can be realised, enabling efficient connections to education cloud services, streaming, and remote learning possibilities.Technically, the grant provides Saben with a physical presence in Teraco data centres located in Durban, Cape Town and Johannesburg, and gives colleges direct network access to Platform Teraco, where the institutions will benefit from highly secure and direct interconnection to Africas largest digital ecosystem. Platform Teraco allows for the configuration of scalable interconnections to all the major cloud onramps, 250 network providers (including carriers, terrestrial fibre, satellite connectivity and submarine cables), 50 global content providers, 130 IT service providers, 130 enterprises and financial services providers and access to several Internet eXchange Points (IXPs) at NAPAfrica and INX.Garth Scholtz, Saben general manager, says there has been a renewed focus on post-school education, in particular the TVETs, which over the past three years has also become an increasing priority for Government: It is thus vital for Saben to do all we can to support all endeavours and to put systems and structures in place to level the playing field for all South Africans. Collaboration with industry is key, and the grant from Teraco will greatly assist us in meeting the evolving digital requirements of all the institutions.He says that South Africas skills shortage cannot be addressed unless our education system produces a labour force with the right skills to meet the industrys demand. Additionally, Scholtz believes that poverty and inequality can never be genuinely eliminated unless the next generation of previously disadvantaged citizens are economically empowered: It is here that the role of all of these educational institutions will play a significant role and as Saben, we need to ensure that this journey is not only just supported but enabled.
Its a troublesome time for everyone in the business world right now, particularly for those of us who own our own businesses. My business, Student Loan Planner, launched in 2016 and grown steadily over the past four years. However, as a CFA and former bond trader, I always knew the day would come when wed need to weather a storm.

Here are six smart money moves Im taking for my business right now that I suggest you do as well. You want to set your business and employees up for the best possible success as our country navigates this health and financial crisis.

Apply for the government bailout programs

This should be No. 1 on your list before doing anything else I mention in this article. Under The Paycheck Protection Program, employers with less than 500 employees can access funding to cover up to eight weeks of payroll and certain other operating expenses. That gives you more cash to motivate and retain your team. Throw your hat into the ring like everyone else. You want this lifeline.

Related: How to Submit Your SBA PPP Loan Application and Calculate the Loan Amount

The U.S. Small Business Administration is providing low-interest working capital loans of up to $2 million. These loans are designed to provide economic support for small businesses that have lost revenue caused by the coronavirus pandemic.

Check out your states programs for businesses. Many states are providing resources and support to small businesses. For example, California and Colorado have work-sharing programs that provide partial unemployment benefits as an alternative to layoffs. Lastly, for local business support, contact your local SBA office or Chamber of Commerce for additional resources specific to your area.

Protect your team  even if that means paying them less for a period of time

Most people are assuming they will be let go at this point. More than 6.6 million U.S. workers filed new claims for unemployment benefits last week, on top of 3.3 million a week earlier, which means if you can offer anything better than a layoff, your team will greatly appreciate it.

My company is trying to retain as many employees as we possibly can by cutting their hours but continuing to pay them something. Doing this means we can conserve cash but try to mitigate the psychological turmoil that comes from being furloughed or laid off completely.

Related: What Leaders Can Learn From Governor Cuomo About How to Communicate During a Crisis

Going this route also encourages employee loyalty  your employees will always remember how you acted at this time. If you did everything you could to keep them on payroll during one of the biggest financial crises weve ever seen as a country, they'll support you too.

Listen to what your clients or customers need and try to give it to them

Your customers and clients are going to remember what you did right now for a very long time. How can you prioritize customer service and content at a time when they need it most, even if that means a loss in short-term revenue?

Right now, my company doesn't expect to make much money from the content we're producting  in the short term, at least. From showing people how to get their seized tax refunds back if they're in default, to advice on how to cut their monthly payments, to demonstrating how to get loan forgiveness credit instead of refinancing, on which we make a commission.

Customers need guidance right now, and the best brand advertising you can do is to have them remember your company was there for them during this economic crisis.

If your company is in a good financial position, think long-term

Many businesses that were already in tenuous positions before the disease started spreading will likely not reopen. If you think about the supply-demand curve you probably learned in your Econ 101 course in college, the supply curve probably shifts up and to the left after this because fewers businesses will exist to buy goods.

That means the quantity supplied of goods and services will be lower, and the price you can command will be higher. Meaning, if your company survives, having fewer businesses to compete with will mean higher profits for your company long-term. If your company is in a financial position that gives it a good chance of surviving this crisis, implement this strategy into your long-term plan.

Related: Entrepreneurs Review the SBA PPP Loan-Application Processes

In addition, businesses have pulled back from paid advertising in a huge way  thats a big opportunity if you have cash to burn. For example, say you know each of your email subscribers is worth $5 long-term because you sell a digital product. If the cost of acquiring one of these subscribers on Facebook was $2 but is now $1, you should be excited to spend that money right now. You can acquire these leads for 50 percent off.

If you dont have an emergency savings fund, start one

As a business owner  particularly one who is trying to protect his or her employees from layoff  youre going to take a hit to your personal finances right now. That's where an emergency cash fund comes in. In a recession, even if you have a stable job, you should have cash to cover six months of expenses on hand. If you have an economically sensitive job, it should be one year's worth. You need to include any required loan payments as part of this calculation.

As a business owner, conserving cash is everything right now. If you have to borrow money to get emergency savings, do it. You know how they say on planes that you must put your own oxygen mask on first before helping others around you? The same goes for your personal finances when you own your own business.

Take walks and relieve your anxiety with whatever you enjoy

This is perhaps the most important tip I can give you right now. Youre not going to make the best financial decisions for your company if you dont take time to blow off steam and relieve anxiety. The worst thing you can do is sit down and stew about your business 24/7. Whether its watching Tiger King or Ozark on Netflix or taking a walk in nature, make sure to clear your head every day  for the sake of your business and your own personal well-being.

Related: What the Entrepreneur Staff Is Doing to Stay Sane and Productive While Working From Home

Related:

Why Entrepreneurship Should Be Taught Before College

This Entrepreneur Harnessed the Power of Digital Marketing And Advertising Techniques To Reach the Top

6 Smart Money Moves to Make Right Now as a Business Owner



Copyright 2020 Entrepreneur.com Inc., All rights reserved
Lyricist and poet Javed Akhtar is the master of words and there is no doubt about the rich literary legacy of the screenwriter. In fact, he is so genius at his work that no matter what the situation is, Akhtar can describe it in apt words within seconds.

His wife and actress Shabana Azmi shared a funny incident, throwing some light on the lyricists promptness. The veteran actress came to Facebook live on Sunday, where she revealed some secrets about Akhtars fun, food and laughter episodes.

Shabana shared an incident when her husband, whom she fondly calls Jaadu, was having soup and spilling it. She scolded him on spilling the food while eating. To this, the poet immediately came up with a song based on the tune of Lata Mangeshkars superhit Abhi Naa Jao.

The lyrics of the funny rendition were, Jo iss tarah se khaaoge, toh kitna tum giraoge, jo soup ispe gir gaya, toh jaante ho hoga kya, yeh daag dhul na paega, jo dhoega bataega, ke sabun ispe ghis diya, yeh daag par mita nahi.

While we are definitely impressed with the lyrics, Shabana Azmis voice makes it sound so much better.

A lot of people reacted to the incident, sharing compliments for the couple.

I don't know, what should I say? But the voice quality was amazing, keep singing like this Shabana ma'am. Kazi Ashikur Rahman (@kaziashikurrah3) April 13, 2020

That is hilarious! How lucky to be married to a man of such genius & humour! Sands (@Sandhya108is) April 13, 2020

How awesome!!! You both are the epitome of intelligence, talent, niceness and couple goals You sing so well!! Seema (@seematyagi007) April 14, 2020

Chef Vikas Khanna, who has turned a filmmaker with his release The Last Color, also shared the incident on his media account, with the caption, Poetry, Love and Food.
Washington

Setting the stage for a possible power struggle with President Donald Trump, governors around the U.S. began sketching out plans Tuesday to reopen their economies in a slow and methodical process so as to prevent the coronavirus from rebounding with tragic consequences.

In Italy, Spain and other places around Europe where infections and deaths have begun stabilizing, the process is already under way, with certain businesses and industries allowed to start back up in a calibrated effort by politicians to balance public health against their countries' economic well-being.

While the crisis is far from over in the U.S., with over 25,000 dead and approximately 600,000 confirmed infections by Johns Hopkins University's count, the doomsday scenarios that were predicted just two weeks ago have not come to pass, raising hopes from coast to coast.

California Gov. Gavin Newsom, who has joined a coalition with his West Coast counterparts in Oregon and Washington on how to emerge from the crisis, outlined a set of conditions Tuesday for lifting the coronavirus restrictions in America's most populous state. Among other things, he said hospitalizations will have to decline and more testing will have to become available.

And when the state does reopen, he warned, things will not look the same. Waiters will probably be wearing masks and gloves, schools may stagger students' arrival times to reduce crowding, and large gatherings such as sporting events and concerts are "not in the cards," the Democrat said.

A similar coalition has taken shape in the Northeast, encompassing Connecticut, Delaware, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania and Rhode Island.

"The house is still on fire," New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy said. "We still have to put the fire out" but also "make sure this doesn't re-ignite."

Politicians and public health authorities alike warned that an easing of the restrictions in the U.S. and Europe will have to be accompanied by widespread antibody testing to see who might be immune and ramped-up tracing of infected people's contacts with others. That could entail the use of such technology as cellphone location-tracking software.

Trump has repeatedly expressed his desire to see the U.S. reopened for business quickly.

Special Investigation 147 NY dams are 'unsound,' potentially dangerous Thousands of dams have not been inspected in over 20 years.

While the president has issued national social-distancing guidelines advising people stay home, it has been governors and local leaders who have instituted the tough, mandatory restrictions, such as lockdowns and the closing of schools and nonessential businesses.

Still, there were glimmers of hope, even in New York, where the death toll topped 10,800. Gov. Andrew Cuomo reported 778 deaths over the previous 24 hours but said fatalities were leveling off, and hospitalizations and the number of new patients put on ventilators were continuing to drop.

At the same time, he warned against complacency: "We could lose all the progress we made in one week if we do it wrong."

Governors across the country echoed that sentiment. Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer said, "We've got to make sure that we avoid a second wave at all costs. That would be devastating for our economy. So we're going to make decisions based on science and having a real strategic phase-in of our economy when it's appropriate and safe to do so."
BEIJING -- China reported on Wednesday a decline in new confirmed cases of the coronavirus in the mainland, although an increasing number of local transmissions in its far northeast bordering Russia remained a concern for authorities.

China reported 46 new confirmed cases on Tuesday compared with 89 cases a day earlier, according to the National Health Commission.

Of the new cases, 36 involved travellers arriving in China from overseas, compared with 86 a day earlier.

The 10 remaining cases were new locally transmitted infections, with Heilongjiang province accounting for eight of them and southern Guangdong province two.

The northeastern province of Heilongjiang has become a front line in Chinas fight to keep out imported cases as infected Chinese nationals return overland from Russia.

China has closed the border with Russia at Suifenhe, a city in Heilongjiang with a checkpoint into Russia.

New infections involving travellers arriving from Russia have also hit other parts of China such as the northern autonomous region of Inner Mongolia and the financial hub of Shanghai.

Some of the new confirmed cases had been asymptomatic.

Two of the latest confirmed Heilongjiang cases on Tuesday were patients who showed no symptoms of the virus previously.

Heilongjiang reported one new asymptomatic case on Tuesday, a Chinese national returning from Russia.

That brings the current number of asymptomatic cases in the province involving travellers arriving from abroad to 52.

No symptoms

In mainland China, the number of new asymptomatic cases increased to 57 on Tuesday from 54 a day earlier.

China does not include patients with no clinical symptoms such as a cough or a fever in its tally of confirmed cases.

China has launched an epidemiological survey in nine regions in an effort to determine the full scale of asymptomatic infections and overall immunity levels, the official China Daily newspaper reported on Wednesday.

Chinese authorities said earlier in April that two-thirds of asymptomatic cases develop symptoms.

Central Hubei province, the origin of the coronavirus outbreak in China, reported just two asymptomatic patients who went on to develop signs of infection between March 31 and April 14.

Hubei provinces health authority has reported 429 new asymptomatic cases since it began publishing data for such cases on April 1.

As of Tuesday, the total number of confirmed cases in mainland China reached 82,295.

Authorities said 3,342 people have died from the virus in China, including one new fatality in central Hubei province, the origin of the outbreak in the country.
Of the two, forcing insurers to pay for claims through legislative changes is the bigger risk to companies, Badger told Reuters. While the lawyer is confident that any attempt to rewrite insurance contracts would be deemed unconstitutional under the Contracts Clause of Takings Clause, he fears what would happen should such changes come to pass.

Badger said that commercial insurers hold over $800 billion in reserves. If those companies are forced to liquidate those reserves under the proposed laws to pay for pandemic-related losses, it could leave those companies unable to pay for other legitimate claims, he warned. The lawyer also cautioned that the legislation might cause reinsurers to hesitate acting as backstops for risk that is not specified in their contracts with insurers.

That will completely disrupt and could bankrupt the insurance industry, Badger told Reuters in an interview. And its horrible policy.

Insurers typically pay out business interruption insurance if a business has to shut down due to a fire or natural disaster. Meanwhile, civil authority provisions cover shutdowns required by the state of local government in response to disasters. Badger explained that the COVID-19 shutdowns do not fit either of those scenarios.

The entire concept of insurance depends upon just a few people having losses that everyone contributes to with their premiums, he said. The concept doesnt work when everyone has the very same loss.
A manager examines a face mask produced in a factory in southern Long An Province. Photo by VnExpress/Quynh Tran.

Vietnamese garment companies have signed deals to export hundreds of millions of face masks to the U.S. and the E.U.

Hanoi-based Garment 10 Jsc (Garco 10) recently received orders for 400 million medical masks and 20 million cloth masks from buyers in the U.S. and Germany.

TNG Investment and Trading Jsc in the northern Thai Nguyen Province has been exporting cloth masks to France, Belgium and Germany for almost a month.

Its Chairman Nguyen Van Thoi said the U.S. market is wide open for masks. The company is now working on administrative procedures to gift 500 cloth masks to the New York Police Department.

It is also planning to produce medical masks from mid-May since there is huge demand for them, he said.

Vietnams textile industry faces major problems in the first quarter due to the coronavirus outbreak.

In the first two months it struggled to source feedstock from China, and in March the E.U. and U.S. canceled orders as demand slumped.

Industry insiders said shifting from garments to masks allows them to keep production going and pay employees, somewhat mitigating the losses caused by canceled orders, which are estimated at over $470 million.

Garco 10 CEO Than Duc Viet said mask exports account for almost 30 percent of the companys revenues this year.

TNG also saw domestic sales rise 10 percent year-on-year in the first quarter, mostly from masks.

The Foreign Trade Agency said in a recent release that Vietnam has the potential to become a major global mask exporter.

It can make at least 200 million masks a month, and some producers have been able to make their own raw materials to reduce dependence on imports.

But the agency said face masks are only a temporary solution since demand would taper off as soon as the disease is contained.

Producers said they have to cap medical mask exports at 25 percent of production to comply with the governments orders to ensure domestic demand is fully met.

There are around 6,800 textile businesses in Vietnam. Last year they exported goods worth $32.85 billion, up 7.8 percent year-on-year, with the U.S., the E.U. and Japan being the largest buyers.
Pakistan Foreign Minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi on Wednesday called his Chinese counterpart Wang Yi to seek China's support for a global initiative to give debt relief to developing countries that are fighting the novel coronavirus pandemic.

The Foreign Office in a statement said that Qureshi underlined that the COVID-19 had a devastating impact on global economy and its aftermath was far more severe than the great depression.

The impact on the developing countries would be most severe, he said, adding that keeping these factors in view, Prime Minister Imran Khan had appealed to the world community to work for providing debt relief to the developing countries.

The foreign minster sought China's support for the initiative, including at the G-20 platform.

The Group of 20 nations announced support Wednesday for a temporary halt to debt payments by the world's poorest nations as they struggle to deal with the coronavirus pandemic.

Finance ministers of the G-20 group of major economies, which includes the US, China, India and others, said they will immediately put on hold poor countries' obligations to service debt they owe.

Qureshi during his call to Wang underscored that Pakistan and China are All-Weather Strategic Cooperative Partners and have preserved the fine tradition of solidarity, mutual assistance and mutual support and thanked China for extending solidarity and moral and material support to Pakistan in the wake of outbreak of COVID-19.

Qureshi said that generous donations and assistance sent by China for Pakistan to contain coronavirus were greatly appreciated by Pakistan and its people.

Wang thanked him for reaching out to China and assured that China will support the initiative at the G-20 as well as other relevant fora.

He said that COVID-19 had posed great danger to global economic and stability and coordinated and equitable efforts were needed to deal with its aftermath.

He also maintained that during President Arif Alvi's recent visit to China, Pakistani and Chinese leaders had reached a consensus to jointly fight COVID-19.

The novel coronavirus, which originated in the central Chinese city of Wuhan in Hubei province late last year, has so far killed over 1,20,000 people globally.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Indianapolis Public Library offering resources during pandemic

In light of the recent announcement that the rest of the academic school year will be conducted online, Indianapolis Public Library is providing a collection of free research and study tools to help students.

Students from all grade levels can find resources, such as Homework Help, National Geographic Kids and e-books for math help online. Teachers can search for activities on the librarys blog based on curriculum standards. Many of these resources can be accessed without a library card.

IPS focuses on equity

Indianapolis Public Schools (IPS) launched the IPS Education Equity Fund to eradicate inequities students in the township face during the COVID-19 pandemic. The fund will focus on e-learning initiatives to ensure students have adequate access to technology, as well as funds to support students handling the trauma that comes with a pandemic.

Tackling even just part of this list requires tremendous financial support, and we need to do all of this and more, IPS Superintendent Aleesia Johnson said. Thats why this fund is so critical. School closures will have a negative impact on low-income families who disproportionately lack access to technology, internet service, food, childcare and healthcare services. Many of these families are Black and brown. Our districts commitment to a racial equity mindset makes it imperative that the collective we make immediate plans to support all of our students and families.

Indianapolis Bar Association reformed

In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, the Indianapolis Bar Association is now offering virtual legal advice, as opposed to its traditional in-person services.

Now, you can submit your legal questions in an online chat, which you can find online. The service is available 8 a.m.-5 p.m. Monday through Friday. The Indianapolis Bar Association will continue this practice for the foreseeable future to prevent the spread of COVID-19.

New fund aids online learning

A collaboration between local stakeholders led to the creation of the Indianapolis E-Learning Fund. More than $2.6 million has been put into the fund, which was created to support Indianapolis teachers, students and families during the transition to e-learning in response to COVID-19.

Partners include the Richard M. Fairbanks Foundation, Eli Lilly and Company Foundation, The Mind Trust, among others.

The fund will be administered by Mayor Joe Hogsetts Office of Education Innovation, and community leaders will advise the office on funding allocations.

Already, students teachers and parents have worked miracles to ensure that education remains a top priority during this difficult time, Hogsett said in a statement. Solutions for e-learning are on the horizon for all schools in Marion County. It is my hope that this fund will give every family, school and teacher the tools they need to educate all students in Indianapolis.

Free e-learning resources

Junior Achievement of Central Indiana has free virtual resources for students, parents and the education community.

Junior Achievement, which helps students with career exploration and life skills, has printable activity sheets, games, videos and apps online. Resources are organized by grade level and focus on three areas: career readiness, entrepreneurship and financial literacy.

State waives incomplete education requirements

Gov. Eric Holcomb signed an executive order to waive education requirements that schools wont be able to meet because of school closures. The waived requirements include school bus drills and emergency preparedness drills. The executive order also outlines options for school corporations to complete 2019-2020 annual staff performance evaluations.

News In Brief
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The COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted many of our lives. It has had a particularly hard impact on the African American community. Ive seen the effects of this health crisis firsthand  both on a sister who works as a nurse at a local hospital and on friends who have been stricken with this illness. As a community, we must do everything we can to flatten the curve  especially because current data suggest we are disproportionately affected by COVID-19.

Science and experience show that social distancing is the most important and effective tool we have right now to slow the spread of COVID-19. For most of us, social distancing wasnt even on our radar a couple of months ago. Now its part of everyones reality and routine.

Earlier this month, Eli Lilly and Co. joined Gov. Eric Holcomb, Mayor Joe Hogsett and many others to launch a statewide social distancing campaign called #INthistogether. The #INthistogether campaign is designed to unite, connect and empower every one of us to spread the word, not the virus.

At Lilly, were bringing everything we can to attack this epidemic in our home state of Indiana and our hometown of Indianapolis. Were applying our scientific expertise to search for new therapies. Were offering free testing at our headquarters for frontline workers and other high-risk groups. And were collaborating with others in our community to lift up the most vulnerable, as supporters of the Central Indiana COVID-19 Community Economic Relief Fund and the Indianapolis E-Learning Fund.

Still, social distancing remains key to combatting COVID-19. Physical distancing isnt always easy. It can feel isolating, but it doesnt have to be. Acclimating to our new reality requires a new perspective  one that not only prioritizes our physical health, but our mental and emotional well-being too. It is important to find new ways to connect socially with one another and to lift up everyone in our community. We can come through this stronger.

Thats the power of the governors campaign. It reminds us that we are part of something bigger and #INthistogether. This campaign is a movement with the potential to save lives. It encourages positivity and connectivity through social media. It reminds us to give ourselves grace as we maneuver this new normal.

Here are some steps we all can take.

Stay connected socially with technology. Offer to help family members who arent tech savvy get comfortable with video technology like FaceTime or Zoom.

Exercise. Even a five-minute walk can help you relax and clear your mind.

Be flexible. Extend grace to yourself, your family and your colleagues. Were all trying to figure out how to live, e-learn and work at home.

Find a way that you can help others and lift up your community. We all have something we can contribute. Call an elderly neighbor. Donate to a community fund.

Practice gratitude.

Be mindful of your own thoughts and feelings and those of the people around you, including your children.

Some of us now have fewer outside activities and commitments. Take advantage of this time. Slow down. Reconnect. Listen.

Ask for help. We all are affected in some way by what is happening in our external environment. Dont struggle alone.

I had the privilege of joining several community leaders earlier this month for a Facebook town hall hosted by the Indianapolis Recorder. I encourage you to listen to this archived discussion as it offers practical tips and resources to help us take care of our mental health and well-being during this challenging time  from free testing to counseling services to parish resources.

Lets continue to support each other and our community as we work to flatten the curve and save lives. We can do this. #INthistogether.

Tiffany Benjamin is president of the Eli Lilly and Company Foundation. Learn more about Lillys response to the COVID-19 pandemic at www.lilly.com. For social distancing tips and ways to join the statewide campaign, visit www.INthistogethercampaign.com.
The owner of Britain's stricken 'Jewish Chronicle' is battling to save a newspaper for the Jewish community by seeking to buy the assets of the title along with another failing newspaper, the 'Jewish News', from liquidators.

Both newspapers said last week they were set for liquidation after the coronavirus pandemic led to a collapse in advertising spending.

The 'Jewish Chronicle', which describes itself as the world's oldest Jewish paper and is also known as the 'JC', says its owner, the Kessler Foundation, has submitted an offer to the proposed liquidators.

It is seeking to buy the assets of both titles to preserve a single merged newspaper for the community that will "benefit from all the existing protections which guard its independence".

"We are pleased to inform you that the Kessler Foundation, owner of the 'Jewish Chronicle', has today submitted an offer to the proposed liquidators of both the 'Jewish Chronicle' and the 'Jewish News' for the assets of both titles," it said on the Chronicle's website.

Stephen Pollard, editor of the 'JC' for 11 years, will step down from day-to-day responsibilities and become editor at large, while Richard Ferrer, editor of the 'Jewish News' for 11 years, has been invited to become editor of the merged title should the plan succeed.

"In the meantime, the 'Jewish Chronicle' and 'Jewish News' will be published as usual," it said.

The possible demise of the two titles had sparked headlines around the world, while newspapers everywhere are grappling with a plunge in advertising sales and circulation.

The London-based 'Jewish Chronicle' says it strives to reflect a diversity of Jewish religious, social and political thought. The 'Jewish News' focuses on serving the Jewish communities of greater London.

Reuters
By ANI

MUMBAI: A man who allegedly incited migrant labourers to protest here amid lockdown was arrested by the police on Wednesday.

The man, Vinay Dubey, who was earlier detained for threatening to launch an agitation on April 18, was booked under Sections 117, 153 A, 188, 269, 270 and 505 (2) of the Indian Penal Code (IPC) and Section 3 of The Epidemic Diseases Act.

He will be produced before a local court later today.

Dubey has been accused of inciting migrants through his social media posts calling for action.

More than 1,000 migrant workers here gathered outside the station in Bandra on Tuesday and demanded transportation arrangements to go back to their hometowns, hours after Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced the extension of the ongoing nationwide lockdown till May 3.
Source: Xinhua| 2020-04-15 02:43:07|Editor: huaxia

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Photo taken on April 14, 2020 at the UN headquarters in New York shows Carlos Ruiz Massieu, United Nations envoy for Colombia, briefing the Security Council at a virtual meeting on the situation in Colombia. Carlos Ruiz Massieu on Tuesday told the Security Council that the COVID-19 pandemic is having a profound impact on the country, but it is encouraging to see Colombians finding creative responses to the pandemic. (Xinhua/Xie E)

UNITED NATIONS, April 14 (Xinhua) -- The UN envoy for Colombia, Carlos Ruiz Massieu, on Tuesday told the Security Council that the COVID-19 pandemic is having a profound impact on the country, but it is encouraging to see Colombians finding creative responses to the pandemic.

"The COVID-19 pandemic is having a profound impact on Colombia, and the peace process will undoubtedly feel its effects," Massieu told the virtual council meeting on the situation in the country.

"The consequences of the pandemic make it even more crucial to pay particular attention to former combatants ... as they have more precarious access to basic services like clean water and sanitation," he said.

However, he said "it is encouraging to see Colombians finding creative responses to the crisis."

The envoy said the implementation of the peace agreement between the government and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) "depends on constant engagement between the parties, as well as key state institutions, civil society organizations, partners from the international community and others."

He added that this continues to "happen remotely, given the current circumstances."

The envoy added that the UN Mission there has also taken measures "in line with our business continuity and contingency plans" so that the UN country team in the country is also supporting the government in its response to the pandemic.

Massieu noted that despite the global ceasefire call, clashes continue between illegal armed groups, and he said he urged them to "desist from perpetrating violence."
Despite this world orders imperfections and glitches, Western leaders, at least, believed its advantages outweighed its disadvantages, and those who disagreed had little power to force change. Yet the political winds and pressures of the 21st century, from human migration and extreme income disparity to protectionism and rising new powers, have weakened its foundations, leaving it ill-equipped to handle the first truly global threat to its very existence.
Read next: State looks at legislation to void coronavirus exclusion clauses

When preparing for something like this, the first important thing for agencies to do is take an inventory of digital assets and make sure that all employees can actually work from home, said Caldwell, founding partner of the independent agency, Oklahoma Business Insurors. We discovered early on, for example, that we had an employee that didnt have a home computer, so we provided that person with a computer and all the other equipment they needed in order to communicate.

We then had to verify that all of our software programs would actually work from remote locations. Some automation systems, for example, require IP address authentication. So, we had some work to do with our IT department to make sure that everyone could access our systems. Then we needed to be sure that we werent sacrificing any of our digital security with email or other systems. Those three things didnt happen overnight - it took a few days to get all of that accomplished.

The second key element thats important for agencies that are transitioning / have transitioned to virtual operations is communication. According to Caldwell, there are three core audiences that agencies need to reach out to: their employees, their clients, and the insurance carriers. Internal communication with employees is essential throughout the transformation process - before the transition to digital, during the transition, and immediately after.

Read more: Allstate announces coronavirus assistance for customers, employees

Caldwell explained: Telling your employees how all this is going to work and what your expectations are is really important. For example, we wrote to everyone in our company and we said: We want business to operate as near normal as possible, so we expect you to be at your workplace, wherever that is, by normal business hours, and we expect you to be available during normal business hours. Also get up, put on your business clothes, put on your business mindset, and come to work. We are using Microsoft Teams (Slack is another common tool that companies like to use) so that we can keep up that communication and have video meetings. I think thats very important to remove social isolationism and to maintaining high morale, as well as high productivity.

As for the other two groups  clients and insurance carriers  again, communication is important in terms of reassuring them that its business as usual (only virtual). Agencies need to tell clients theyre still there for them, and that they can connect via phone or online. Its more of a partnership between insurance agencies and carriers. They need to communicate how COVID-19 is impacting their respective businesses, how theyre adapting to that, and how they can help each other.

Once your agency has moved to the virtual environment, then its a question of adaptation, Caldwell told Insurance Business. Were learning new things every day. Were experiencing challenges with video calls, for example, as the internet bogs down. And so, from a leadership point of view, I think its very important to stay on top of it all.

One of the keys to this that were advising agents is, no matter how you managed your staff in the past, you need to think about managing them based on productivity rather than attendance. Many business owners think: Everybodys here, so everybodys working. But you cant watch everybody any more. Thats an antiquated, outmoded means of management in the first place, but thats still a reality. The reality going forward is that to be effective, youve got to manage productivity and output. And that has some implications for work and for employees by the way, because as people have children at home, theyre going to be inevitably distracted, and so their work days may get longer because they deal with a distraction for a little bit and then they go back to work.

The earlier the better rings true, but its not too late to prepare your business for a virtual transition. There are going to be many challenges and hiccups along the way as more and more insurance agencies adopt digital operations, but a solid business contingency plan is a good place to start.
Damian Hurley enjoyed some down time in the sun on Tuesday as he enjoyed a picnic in the grass amid lockdown.

Damian, 18, posed for a shirtless snap as he read Enid Blyton classing The Famous Five as he sat among the daffodils.

'Conquering serious literature,' he wrote alongside the sultry snap, channeling his model mother Elizabeth with a smoldering pose.

Enjoying the peace: Damian Hurley enjoyed some down time in the sun on Tuesday as he enjoyed a picnic in the grass amid lockdown

Damian is in lockdown in Hertfordshire with his mum, great-aunt and grandmother, Angela - and Elizabeth told Hello! that her hopes of meeting a new man have been scuppered by the coronavirus pandemic.

Elizabeth said: 'I'd love to fall madly in love with someone, which certainly won't happen whilst I'm locked down with blood relatives.

'Maybe when it's over I'll put my headlamps on full beam and make an effort.'

Nautical but nice: Damian's mum Elizabeth Hurley, 54, put on a very busty display in a striped bikini on Instagram on Tuesday as she said she would 'love to fall madly in love with someone'

Toned: Elizabeth was pining for sunnier climes on Tuesday as she shared a sizzling swimsuit snap to Instagram

The beautiful brunette was pining for sunnier climes on Tuesday when she shared another sizzling swimsuit snap to Instagram.

The Austin Powers actress was typically age-defying as she slipped her toned frame into a fuchsia one-piece, with a cleavage-baring cut-out section.

The halterneck swimsuit hugged the star's slender waist and drew the eye to her bronzed legs as she sat by a tropical pool

Sizzling: Elizabeth shared a racy lingerie snap on Saturday as she urged fans to stay at home on her 11th day in self-isolation during the coronavirus pandemic

Her brunette tresses were styled sleek and straight while her pretty features were enhanced with smoky shadow and liner.

It comes just days after the actress shared a racy lingerie snap on Saturday as she urged fans to keep themselves safe on what was her 11th day in lockdown.

She sported a lacy black negligee for the post as she told fans she was holed up in her Herefordshire home with eight others, including her elderly mother and aunt.

Candid: The actress told fans she was 'incredibly lucky' to be isolating in her countryside home, and revealed she had been isolating with eight other people

In her post, Elizabeth admitted that after days of going makeup free in her home she decided to get dressed up in her best lingerie for her latest post.

The star explained that she'd been self-isolating with her son Damian, her mum Angela, 79, and her elderly aunt, as well as a close friend who was considered high risk.

As Elizabeth urged her followers to self-isolate to try and prevent the spread of the virus, she said she felt 'incredibly lucky' to be in her country home during this time of social distancing.

She penned: 'Day 11 of my family's lockdown in Herefordshire and I finally washed my hair, put on some make up and found time to post.

'In these scary times I feel incredibly lucky to live in the countryside and have lots of outside space.

'As well as my son, I have seven other people living with me including my 79 year old mother and her sister- also in her late 70's- and one of my best friends who is in the highest risk group with severe respiratory problems.

'Keeping everyone as safe as possible (and fed) is a full time job. We all are full of the highest admiration for our wonderful NHS staff and are doing everything we can to not add to their burden.

'Thank God it's Sat night and we can r-e-l-a-x and take a break from being glued to the news #stayhome #staysafe #nhsheroes.'

Open: Among those joining Elizabeth in isolation were her son Damian, 17, along with her elderly mother and aunt




A view shows the JBS USA meat packing plant, where two members of the staff have died of coronavirus disease (COVID-19), as it remains operational in Greeley, Colorado, U.S. April 8, 2020. Picture taken April 8, 2020. REUTERS/Jim Urquhart

At a Wayne Farms chicken processing plant in Alabama, workers recently had to pay the company 10 cents a day to buy masks to protect themselves from the new coronavirus, according to a meat inspector.

In Colorado, nearly a third of the workers at a JBS USA beef plant stayed home amid safety concerns for the last two weeks as a 30-year employee of the facility died following complications from the virus.

And since an Olymel pork plant in Quebec shut on March 29, the number of workers who tested positive for the coronavirus quintupled to more than 50, according to their union. The facility and at least 10 others in North America have temporarily closed or reduced production in about the last two weeks because of the pandemic, disrupting food supply chains that have struggled to keep pace with surging demand at grocery stores.

According to more than a dozen interviews with U.S and Canadian plant workers, union leaders and industry analysts, a lack of protective equipment and the nature of "elbow to elbow" work required to debone chickens, chop beef and slice hams are highlighting risks for employees and limiting output as some forego the low-paying work. Companies that added protections, such as enhanced cleaning or spacing out workers, say the moves are further slowing meat production.

Smithfield Foods, the world's biggest pork processor, on Sunday said it is indefinitely shutting a pork plant that accounts for about 4% to 5% of U.S. production. It warned that plant shutdowns are pushing the United States "perilously close to the edge" in meat supplies for grocers.

Lockdowns that aim to stop the spread of the coronavirus have prevented farmers across the globe from delivering food products to consumers. Millions of laborers also cannot get to the fields for harvesting and planting, and there are too few truckers to keep goods moving.

The United States and Canada are among the world's biggest shippers of beef and pork. Food production has continued as governments try to ensure adequate supplies, even as they close broad swathes of the economy.

The closures and increased absenteeism among workers have contributed to drops in the price of livestock, as farmers find fewer places for slaughter. Since March 25, nearby lean hog futures have plunged 35%, and live cattle prices shed 15%, straining the U.S. farm economy.

North American meat demand has dropped some 30% in the past month as declining sales of restaurant meats like steaks and chicken wings outweighed a spike in retail demand for ground beef, said Christine McCracken, Rabobank's animal protein analyst.

Frozen meats in U.S. cold storage facilities remain plentiful, but supply could be whittled down as exports to protein-hungry China increase after a trade agreement removed obstacles for American meat purchases.

Expand Close Employees walk around with face mask at the JBS USA meat packing plant, where two members of the staff have died of coronavirus disease (COVID-19), as it remains operational in Greeley, Colorado, U.S. April 8, 2020. Picture taken April 8, 2020. REUTERS/Jim Urquhart / Facebook

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Whatsapp Employees walk around with face mask at the JBS USA meat packing plant, where two members of the staff have died of coronavirus disease (COVID-19), as it remains operational in Greeley, Colorado, U.S. April 8, 2020. Picture taken April 8, 2020. REUTERS/Jim Urquhart

"There's a huge risk of additional plant closures," McCracken said.

The latest came on Monday when JBS said it will shutter its Greeley, Colorado, beef plant, which accounts for about 5% of the country's production, until April 24.

JBS previously had to reduce production at the facility as about 800 to 1,000 workers a day stayed home since the end of March, said Kim Cordova, president of the local United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) union that represents employees. She added that the union knew of at least 50 cases and two deaths among employees as of Friday.

Plant worker Saul Sanchez, known affectionately as "grandpa" among some co-workers, tested positive for the virus and died on April 7 at 78 years old, according to his daughter, Beatriz Rangel. She said he only went from home to work before developing symptoms, including a low fever.

"I'm heartbroken because my dad was so loyal," Rangel said.

Brazilian owned JBS confirmed an employee with three decades of experience died from complications associated with COVID-19, without naming Sanchez. He was never symptomatic while at work and never worked in the facility while sick, according to the company.

JBS said it was working with federal and state governments to obtain tests for all plant employees.

Weld County, where the plant is located, had the fourth highest number of COVID-19 cases of any county in Colorado on Friday, according to the state. Health officials confirmed cases among JBS workers.

JBS said high absenteeism at the plant led the process of cutting carcasses into pieces of beef to fall behind slaughter rates. The company disputed the union's numbers on worker absences but did not provide its own. It took steps including buying masks and putting up plexiglass shields in lunch rooms to protect employees, said Cameron Bruett, spokesman for JBS USA.

Expand Close Estela Hernanez, a daughter of longtime JBS USA meat packing plant employee Saul Sanchez, holds a photo of him at his home after he died of coronavirus disease (COVID-19) in Greeley, Colorado, U.S. April 10, 2020. REUTERS/Jim Urquhart / Facebook

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Whatsapp Estela Hernanez, a daughter of longtime JBS USA meat packing plant employee Saul Sanchez, holds a photo of him at his home after he died of coronavirus disease (COVID-19) in Greeley, Colorado, U.S. April 10, 2020. REUTERS/Jim Urquhart

"MY LIFE IS IN JEOPARDY"

At Wayne Farms' chicken plant in Decatur, Alabama, some workers are upset the company recently made employees pay for masks, said Mona Darby, who inspects chicken breasts there and is a local leader of hundreds of poultry workers for the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union.

"My life is in jeopardy because we're working elbow to elbow," she said.

Wayne Farms, with annual sales exceeding $2 billion, is trying to obtain masks to distribute to employees, though supplies are limited, spokesman Frank Singleton said. He said he did not know of any instances where employees were charged for masks.

Workers at a Tyson Foods Inc chicken plant in Shelbyville, Tennessee, bought their own masks when the facility ran out, said Kim Hickerson, who loads chicken on trucks there and is a union leader. Some are talking about quitting because they are scared of getting sick, he said.

"I just put it in God's hands," he said.

Tyson, the top U.S. meat producer, is working to find more personal protective equipment for employees, spokesman Worth Sparkman said. The company increased cleaning at facilities and sought to space out employees, which can both slow production, according to a statement.

Workers have lost their trust in Olymel after an outbreak of the coronavirus closed a plant in Yamachiche, Quebec, according to union spokeswoman Anouk Collet. "They do not feel that the company took all the measures they could have taken to keep them safe," she said.

Company spokesman Richard Vigneault said the plant will reopen on Tuesday with new measures in place, such as separating panels, masks and visors.

Marc Perrone, international president of the UFCW union, said meat plant workers are increasingly weighing concerns about their own safety and their responsibility to produce food.

"If we don't take care of the food supply, the American people are going to panic," he said.
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The lasting impression of the coronavirus pandemic will undoubtedly be the phenomenon of isolation, of maintaining distance, of standing alone.

Yet identifying the appropriate exit strategy calls for the opposite. Decision-makers in local, state and federal government need to reach out, to unite, to stand together.

The formation of a consortium of seven governors to start planning how to reopen the region for business should be celebrated. We routinely call for collaboration between municipalities, but this effort reaches far beyond that.

The team could grow, but now consists of governors from Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island and Delaware.

Its an acknowledgment that a virus scoffs at borders, akin to our waters, and much like air itself. Thats why perhaps the greatest progress in confronting environmental challenges regarding air pollution and cleanup of Long Island Sound has occurred when states work together.

Backlash, of course, was swift. President Donald Trump is challenging such initiatives (there is a mirror one developing between California, Washington and Oregon), clinging to the stand that this will be his call. The governors, though, were the ones who locked down their states, and have the backing of the 10th Amendment in choosing when to reopen. In Connecticut, state Senate Minority Leader Len Fasano is accusing Gov. Ned Lamont of not consulting other state leaders on easing restrictions and for not moving fast enough, which feels like a compulsion to be oppositional. Such reactions contradict one another.

Our immediate neighbors are tied together by the umbilical cords of mass transit, including Metro-North and Interstate-95. The huddled masses in the tristate area are precisely the reason this is the epicenter of the pandemic in the United States.

For this temporary fraternity they will need to be co-workers, and must make decisions beyond self-interest.

Lamont noted that if New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo is going to open his bars and restaurants at some point indeterminate in the future, we should probably be on the same path as New York, and vice-versa.

What they cant do is contradict one another. It may sound hopeful when Cuomo suggests the pandemic is plateauing in New York, but after the daily death toll there fell below 700, it returned to about 800 Tuesday. Plateauing is not the same is saying it is nearly over.

The positive spin on this is that everyone  Lamont, Fasano, Cuomo, Trump and all other elected officials  wants the same thing: Life to return to a sense of normalcy.

Gathering leaders to plan ahead raises the potential for identifying obstacles to reviving practices of just a few months ago. Yes, revitalizing the economy is forefront on everyones mind, but they will need to acknowledge and identify the the risk of the virus roaring back, as well as the grim inevitability of aftermath social challenges such as depression, substance abuse and suicide.

Someday, we hope to look back and point to ancillary benefits that resulted from collaborations like this, that it became a model.

But it starts with teamwork. It begins with forging united states.
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The former prime minister of the unrecognized region of Nagorno-Karabakh has won a runoff presidential election in the disputed region, an expected result after his rival asked his supporters not to vote in the second round.

De facto election officials in the breakaway Azerbaijani region said on April 15 that Arayik (Ara) Harutyunian, a wealthy businessman, received 88 percent of the vote, compared with 12 percent for Masis Mayilian.

The runoff was held on April 14 amid international criticism and safety concerns due to the coronavirus outbreak.

Mayilyan had called on voters to stay away from the second round to minimize the spread of the virus, though some opposition figures have questioned the legitimacy of the first-round results, claiming violations.

In the initial vote on March 31, Harutyunian won around 49 percent, just short of the majority needed for an outright victory. Mayilian finished second with 26.4 percent.

Voters appeared to heed Mayilian's call, with turnout falling to just under 45 percent in the second round, compared with more than 72 percent in the first round.

Nagorno-Karabakh was seized by Armenian-backed separatists who declared independence amid a 1988-1994 conflict that killed at least 30,000 people and displaced hundreds of thousands.

Since a fragile, Russian-brokered truce in 1994, the region has been under the control of ethnic Armenian forces that Azerbaijan says include troops supplied by Armenia. The region's claim to independence has not been recognized by any country.

Since then, periodic skirmishes have taken place in the region.

Russia, the United States, and France are the co-chairs of the Minsk Group of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), which acts as a mediator in resolving the crisis. The group has been struggling for years to mediate a solution.

After the first round of what it called "the so-called 'presidential and parliamentary elections' in Nagorno-Karabakh," the European Union reminded the region's leaders that it does not recognize their entity.

The OSCE Minsk group also issued a statement on March 31 saying it does "recognize the role of the population of Nagorno-Karabakh in deciding its future," but reminded the de facto leaders of the breakaway region that "Nagorno-Karabakh is not recognized as an independent and sovereign state" by any country.

"Accordingly, the co-chairs do not accept the results of these 'elections' as affecting the legal status of Nagorno-Karabakh and stress that the results in no way prejudge the final status of Nagorno-Karabakh or the outcome of the ongoing negotiations to bring a lasting and peaceful settlement to the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict," the statement said.

With reporting by Armenpress, RIA Novosti, and Interfax
New Delhi, April 16 : Two days after the nationwide lockdown was extended, the Central Government has released a list of 170 hotspot districts, which includes all six metros and various other large cities. The list includes all nine districts of national capital.

According to the government, any hotspot called as a red zone would be a district or city that contributes to more than 80 per cent of the cases in the country or the state. Besides, places that show a high rate of infection that has a doubling rate of less than four days -- will also be tagged in this category.

According to the list, there are 207 other districts marked as potential hotspots and the government has tasked the states to ensure the containment of outbreak in these regions.

The only way that a district or region can be brought out of the red zone is when there is no new case of COVID-19 for at least 28 continuous days, and once this is achieved, the district would be called green zone -- COVID-19 free area.

Union Health Secretary Preeti Sudan also wrote to chief secretaries of states and Union territories, asking them to divide their states and UTs into two sections -- hotspot and non-hotspot areas.

The states also need to identify hotspots based on doubling rate of confirmed cases. The exercise of identification of hotspots, she says, has to be done on a weekly basis, every Monday.

She has advised strict containment plans for such clusters. Segregating areas into three zones, she said, "Containment operation would be deemed over when there is no case reported in 28 days from an area after the last case tests negative. Hotspots (designated red zones) will be assumed to be undertaking effective containment activities, if no case is reported in the next 14 days (designated orange zones) and will be deemed successful in containment, if no case is reported for 28 days (designated green zones).
Efforts to contain coronavirus outbreaks in Irish nursing homes must be redoubled, the chief medical officer has said.

Dr Tony Holohan said nursing homes and other long-term community residential facilities were a priority as he again expressed concern at the rate of infection in the sector.

His comments came as Dr Siobhan Ni Bhriain, the HSE Integrated Care lead, insisted nursing homes were not the poor relation when it came to the distribution of personal protective equipment (PPE).

Cocooning is a way of protecting the people in our communities that are most at risk of serious illness. Everyone over 70 years of age or with a serious medical condition should stay home. 

Find out more about cocooning here: https://t.co/ksgUU5wMA9#COVID19 #coronavirus  pic.twitter.com/gNS8KPJZNM  HSE Ireland (@HSELive) April 15, 2020

Earlier on Wednesday, it emerged that some healthcare workers are set to be redeployed to private nursing homes in an effort to stem the spread of the virus.

There had been 250 infection clusters identified in residential community settings as of midnight on Monday this week, with 159 of those in nursing homes.

(PA Graphics)

Dr Holohan said: A range of different measures are in place at this point in time to help to address that sector because that sector is a priority for us.

It is the area within our population or society where we have a particular challenge and its therefore a particular focus of our work.

We think, for the most part, we have made significant progress in reducing the risk of transmission of this infection in the wider community, out in the streets and out in communities and so on for the reasons that are clear and obvious weve seen that in the disease, but we have a continuing challenge in nursing home and community settings.

And weve set that out  there has been a pattern of mortality and infection in that sector that means that we need to redouble our efforts, we need to continue to prioritise and weve said all along that we continue to be concerned about that.

At the daily Covid 19 briefing by the National Public Health Emergency Team, Dr Holohan was asked if advice to close nursing homes to visits had been issued too late in the outbreak.

The chief medical officer said all measures were timed to maximise their impact, stressing that to introduce restrictions too early risked the potential for them to start slipping when they were most needed.

Dr Ni Bhriain said the HSE was involved in a range of initiatives to control infection rates in the sector.

I think its important to emphasise that its not just nursing homes were talking about, its longer term residential care facilities in the disability and mental health sector as well, she said.

We have a range of responses to the nursing home and longer term residential care settings, which includes clinical guidance, includes support.

And certainly theres no question of those institutions in any way being a poor relation in terms of PPE.

It is being taken very seriously and responded to with both clinical response infection control and occupational health responses.
15.04.2020 LISTEN

I will begin the writing of this article with a reference to the holy Bible, the source of all the wisdom human beings need in this world. I am aware that not all humans are Christians but I believe that what the Bible teaches about human behaviour is not different from that of the Koran or of the other faiths. Again, even pagans or fetishes do mention the name of God in at least some of their daily deliberations or performances.

When God rejected Saul as king of the Israelites of old because of his disobedience, He sent Samuel to Jesse to anoint one of his sons as king of Israel. As soon as Samuel saw Eliab, he thought he was the anointed one. But the Lord said no. Not as man sees does God see but the Lord looks into the heart.(1 Samuel 16: i-13). Jesse presented seven more sons but the Lord again said no. Then Samuel asked, are these all the sons you have? Jesse then sent for the youngest son who was gracing the sheep on the fields. When David appeared the Lord approved of him and he was anointed king of Israel, and the Lords spirit descended on him. David lived in Gods favour to be a great king and the nation of Israel prospered.

I have decided to use the above reference as an introduction to my article because it aptly underlines the theme I intend to portray. God is the only One who knows best and so whatever is done in this world, especially, the election of kings or heads of state, His hand must be allowed to prevail. A ruler is to preside over a whole nation like Israel of old, and so it is absolutely necessary that such a person should be one with pure heart and great humility if the nation is to be successful. That is the reason why the Lord looks into the heart and not appearance in the choice of kings. Of course as human beings, we cannot look into the heart but a consideration of the persons utterances, his actions and what other people say about him can help us to know what his heart is and therefore his character. This important common sense way of looking into a persons heart is a necessary process that should be followed in the choice of modern day election of a head of state. I believe people know its importance too but because of greed and selfishness, modern rulers are elected through other ungodly and dubious ways. One of these is by looking just at the persons appearance and considering the tribe he comes from and not looking into the heart as the Lord wants. The result is that the wrong person, one who is very insensitive, greedy, corrupt and visionless is elected as head of state or into a public position. Ultimately, the nation ends up in underdevelopment and hardships to the people. This is exactly what happens in Ghana and in most countries, especially in Africa. This election of a person into a national office based on the tribe the person belongs to is the canker that is destroying the development of the country. And unless people realize this destructive way of thinking and change their mentality the country will remain undeveloped.

Almost all the major tribes in the country are guilty of this but it is not too prevalent among the Ga-Adangmes or the Ewes. They do accept leaders from other tribes once they are elected. The other tribes from the west, especially the Nzemas, and those from the north also have a national spirit and do like and accept nationally elected leaders from other tribes.

At the moment there are two main political parties in the country, namely the National Democratic Party (NDC) and the New Patriotic Party (NPP). The NDC was formed by people from Ewe tribal decent but it produced two candidates who were not Ewes for national elections and were eventually elected as heads of state. This shows that the party is really a national one. On the other hand, the NPP which was founded by the Ashanti and Akyem dominated Akan tribe never even accept any member from any other tribe as the leader of the party or presidential candidate. This makes it an Akan tribal party and not a national one. I wonder whether the hierarchical members see it like that but whether they do or not, this is how the outsider does. The behaviour of the members of the party supports this Assumption.

By their nature, particularly by the way they behave, Akans think they are the only people who have the legitimate right to rule the nation. That is why they want their party leader to be an Akan all the time. In the event of a presidential election, they do all they can, physically and spiritually, to win it even if it involves sacrificing something, And if their candidate fails to win the election the security of the nation is always put at high alert and its peace at risk. They will not want to accept the non-Akan ruler and they will do all that they can to undermine, discredit, or destroy him.

Surprisingly, this attitude is not seen in the ignorant members only but also in the educated, and most shockingly, those who call themselves pastors and bishops, and members of the clergy who sympathise with them. These so-called men of God put their bibles aside and discriminate against, hate and criticise opponents, and join party members to destabilize the country. They do this without any thought of the impact their selfish actions will have on national development.

The late Dr. Kwame Nkrumah fought very hard for the independence of Ghana. When independence was about to be given, members of the then Akan dominated party from which NPP sprang, out of hatred for him, went to Britain and asked the Queen not to grant independence to the country. This was mainly because Dr. Nkrumah was not an Ashanti. He was an Nzema. Soon after independence, they started giving Nkrumah many internal problems including a bomb attack on him. This continued until they were able to assist the imperialists to overthrown him in a coup de tat.

The late Dr. Atta-Mills and ex-president John Mahama of the NDC were given the same problems in governing the country. Their aim was to make the country ungovernable for them, as one of them once said without any iota of guilt or shame. They did not see anything worthy or beneficial in whatever the ex-presidents were doing for the country. Even at the time the late Dr. Atta-Mills was very ill he was always bombarded with stinging criticisms and insults until he died. As for the late ex-president John Mahama, he had to endure the criticisms and stack lies until he lost a presidential election through dubious means. One of them later confessed that the election was not won through physical or democratic means.

One thing that NPP have to realise, if they have not quietly done so by now, is that it is the inclusive NDC whose heads of state really work for social and economic development of the country. No Ghanaian or outsider who is familiar with the countrys socio-economic situation can dispute that. The late Dr.Nkrumah was still developing the country when he was overthrown because of sheer dislike. His developmental work was continued by the late Atta-Mills and then by John Mahama who was also undermined and removed from office because he was not an Akan.

It is a general knowledge that members of the Akan NPP feel they should be ruling the country all the time. So they do all that are humanly and spiritually possible to gain and remain in power. But when they do get the chance, they never develop the country. Because of their greed and self-centredness, they rather destroy what had been put in place in their quest to acquire wealth. As I write now, the amount of money they have siphoned out of the country into foreign banks and the number of propertiesmansions, hotels, petrol stations, etc- they have acquired in Accra alone during their terms in government will be more than all that is owned by other Ghanaians combined.

All this misappropriation of state resources can go on and on and the ordinary Ghanaians will continue to complain about the resultant hardships but their supporters will not caution or criticise the party and its government as they do criticise non-Akan heads of state or governments. Even if the whole country is excruciatingly suffering and dying, they will not open their mouths. This is because, to the vociferous party members and ignorant sympathisers, their heart and soul is the party and so no one dare criticise it or its government. Even the so-called men of God and members of religious bodies such as the Christian Council of Ghana and the Catholic Secretariat will insensitively and unashamedly be quiet. They will not like to condemn the party or government they secretly belong to.

So in the midst of severe suffering as it is usually the case, a few thieves from one tribal group in the guise of governmental duties, continue to rape the resources of the country. This is the sad tribal situation in Ghana. It is a worrying one and if it is not checked, it will take a long time for the country to develop. Jones Ababio.
Bihar School Examination Board (BSEB) has further postponed the evaluation of papers of class 10th board exams till May 3.

The decision has been taken after Prime Minister Narendra Modi extended the lockdown from April 14 to May 3 to reduce chances of the further spread of coronavirus disease.

Earlier, the evaluation of class 10th board exam answer sheets were suspended till April 14.

Also Read: Bihar Board 10th result 2020 will be declared only after the lockdown ends

BSEB informed about the postponement of evaluation through a press release, on Wednesday.

With the postponement of evaluation, Class 10 students of Bihar Board will have to wait a little longer for their results.

Bihar Board has already declared the class 12th results on March 24.

The board has set up a total of 100 evaluation centres in Bihar and deputed over 20,000 evaluators to check the answer sheets of the students.

Click here for full coverage on Bihar board (BSEB) result 2020

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The European Union expressed serious concern Wednesday over escalating jihadist violence and a worsening humanitarian situation in northern Mozambique.

Militants have in recent weeks stepped up attacks as part of a campaign for an Islamist caliphate in the gas-rich region, seizing government buildings, blocking roads and briefly hoisting their black-and-white jihadist flag over towns and villages across Cabo Delgado province.

The EU "expresses its grave concern at the visible deterioration of the security situation in Cabo Delgado province in recent weeks, particularly the significant increase in attacks," the delegation said in a statement.

It also said it was worried over the worsening humanitarian situation, with a spike in the number of internally displaced people.

"The present situation requires effective action to protect citizens, to carry out investigations to bring those responsible to justice, and to identify the role played by violent extremist groups," it said.

The delegation also called on the authorities to "quickly and thoroughly" investigate the disappearance last week of a journalist working for a community radio in Palma.

Radio Comunitaria de Palma's Ibraimo Abu Mbaruco went missing on his way home from work on April 7.

He texted his co-worker to say that he had been surrounded by soldiers, and thereafter he did not answer his calls, according to the Media Institute for Southern Africa (MISA-Mozambique).

The EU said it stands ready to help Mozambique resolve the crisis.

Soldiers from the Mozambican army (pictured March 2018) patrol the streets after security in the area was increased, following a two-day attack from suspected islamists in Mocimboa da Praia. By ADRIEN BARBIER (AFP/File)

Despite President Filipe Nyusi's promises, neither the police nor the army, recently shored up by foreign private security companies, has succeeded in preventing attacks.

The conflict has already killed more than 700 people according to Doctors Without Borders (MSF). The bishop of the diocese of Pema, Dom Luiz Fernando Lisboa, has said more than 200,000 people have been displaced by the fighting.
Oil and gas production in the United States has peaked and is already in decline.

The latest data from the EIAs Drilling Productivity Report sees widespread production declines across all major shale basins in the country. The Permian is set to lose 76,000 bpd between April and May, with declines also evident in the Eagle Ford (-35,000 bpd), the Bakken (-28,000 bpd), the Anadarko (-21,000 bpd) and the Niobrara (-20,000 bpd).

Natural gas production is also in decline, a reality that occurred prior to the global pandemic but is set to accelerate. The Appalachian basin (Marcellus and Utica shales) are expected to lose 326 million cubic feet per day (mcf/d) in May, a loss of 1 percent of supply. In percentage terms, the Anadarko basin in Oklahoma is expected to see an even larger drop off  216 mcf/d in May, or a 3 percent decline in production.

The sudden declines in production illustrates the fatal flaw in the shale business model. Once drilling slows down, production can immediately go negative due to steep decline rates. Shale E&Ps have to keep running fast on the drilling treadmill in order to keep production aloft. But the meltdown in prices has forced the industry to idle 179 rigs since mid-March.

With drilling grinding to a halt, output has slumped as legacy production declines take hold. That is, without new wells coming online to offset the declines from existing wells, overall production falls.

In specific terms, the Permian, for example, will lose 356,000 bpd from legacy wells in May, more than overwhelming the 280,000 bpd in new output from new wells. On a net basis, the Permian is set to lose 76,000 bpd in May.

Premium: Missiles Fired In Iraq As Proxy War Heats Up

That legacy decline rate has deepened with each passing year, requiring more aggressive drilling each month to keep production on an upward trend. But the treadmill has finally caught up to the industry.

Story continues

The OPEC+ deal wont rescue a lot of shale companies. The demand destruction is simply too large for the OPEC+ cuts. With WTI at $20 per barrel on Tuesday, Permian drillers are actually receiving quite a bit less than that.

Since humans started using oil, we have never seen anything like this, Saad Rahim, chief economist at Trafigura Group Pte. Ltd., told the Wall Street Journal. There is no guide we are following. This is uncharted. He estimates demand has plunged from 100 million barrels per day (mb/d) to just 65-70 mb/d currently.

The WSJ says that oil storage in Cushing, OK could be full by the end of the month, which could abruptly force production shut ins in Oklahoma and Texas. That suggests the EIA estimate for a decline in U.S. shale production of 183,000 bpd in May could be optimistic.

Meanwhile, analysts are eyeing a rebound for gas because of the supply curtailments already underway. The shut-ins in the Permian also help balance gas markets because associated gas will decline along with oil.

Premium: U.S. Oil Production Has Already Peaked

We believe the prospects of crude oil shut-ins and lower oil drilling activity are likely to shift the natural gas supply-demand picture from bearish to bullish over the next 9months assuming normal weather, Goldman Sachs wrote in a note. We assume 2021 Henry Hub natural gas price of$3.25/MMBtu on average, above our $2.75/MMBtu mid-cycle estimate. Henry Hub is currently trading at around $1.70/MMBtu.

The crisis for oil drillers has some of them clamoring for regulation from the Texas Railroad Commission. But no matter which way the RRC decides, cuts are in the offing.

A more worrying prospect for U.S. shale is that the OPEC+ deal, as ineffectual as it was at boosting prices, may not prove sustainable. The current deal has been forged under duress and is much more likely to fall apart over time, Bjarne Schieldrop, chief commodities analyst at SEB, said in a statement. Saudi Arabias economic need for a production volume of 12-13m bl/day in a $50/bl world, and Russias strong distaste for production cuts as a means for achieving higher prices, are fundamentals which the current deal cannot circumvent.

Saudi Arabia hiked prices for shipments heading to the U.S., a nod to President Trump and the OPEC+ agreement. But it cut prices to shipments to Europe and Asia, evidence that Riyadh is not done with its market share strategy.

The official selling prices for its May oil shipments, which have been announced after a one-week delay, should be interpreted as a warning to other oil exporters if they do not toe the line, Commerzbank wrote on Tuesday. [T]he price war is continuing to simmer on a low level.

By Nick Cunningham of Oilprice.com

More Top Reads From Oilprice.com:

Read this article on OilPrice.com
The Duke and Duchess of Sussex have arranged for money generated from their royal wedding broadcast to be used to help feed children during the coronavirus pandemic.

Harry and Meghan asked for 90,000 - the profits from the BBC's broadcast - to be given to the charity Feeding Britain.

A spokesman for the couple said they had been moved to hear of the organisation's work during the coronavirus crisis.

Harry and Meghan, who have now quit as working royals and are living in the US, phoned the Archbishop of Canterbury, who conducted their marriage ceremony in 2018 and who is president of Feeding Britain, to discuss the donation to the charity's countrywide projects.

The Duke, 35, and Duchess of Sussex, 38, are said to be 'delighted' to see the money from their BBC wedding broadcast go to 'such a great cause' as Feeding Britain. Pictured, at Commonwealth Day Service 2020 on March 09, 2020 in London

The Duke, 35, and Duchess of Sussex, 38, attracted a combined audience of 11.5 million people when they tied the knot at Windsor Castle on May 19

They became aware of Feeding Britain after paying a royal visit to the Feeding Birkenhead community supermarket in Merseyside in January last year, when Meghan was pregnant.

'The duke and duchess were able to speak to the archbishop recently, and were moved to hear all about the work Feeding Britain was doing to support people during Covid-19,' a spokesman for the Sussexes said.

'They have particularly fond memories of their visit to the citizens' supermarket in Birkenhead, especially the generosity and compassion of everyone working there to help others.

'They are delighted to be able to ensure this money is donated to such a great cause.'

Supermarket sweep: Harry and Meghan officially opened Number 7, a Feeding Birkenhead citizens' supermarket and community cafe, at Pyramids Shopping Centre, as part of their visit to Merseyside in January - their first joint engagement of 2019

The couple felt it was particularly fitting to be able to support the archbishop's charity after he played such an important part in their lives and their wedding day.

Andrew Forsey, national director of Feeding Britain, said: 'We are incredibly grateful for such generous support which, thank God, will sustain our emergency response to coronavirus until the schools return.

'During that time, there are many tens of thousands of children who we are helping to supply with breakfast, lunch and dinner every day.

'We're just so grateful that the duke and duchess have contributed to that programme.'

The BBC covered most of the costs of the wedding broadcast, and used money raised from transmission rights and subsequent sales.

It was agreed at the time of the wedding that a percentage of the profits would go to a charity nominated by Harry and Meghan.

The independent charity Feeding Britain works to eliminate hunger and its root causes from the UK.

It has warned that 'schools are the first line of defence against hunger for so many children - at both breakfast and lunchtime. We cannot allow coronavirus to breach that defence'.

A BBC Studios spokesperson commented: 'As agreed from the outset, BBC Studios is donating all profit arising from the commercial distribution of the Duke and Duchess of Sussex's wedding ceremony to their charity foundation.'
According to investigators, they are involved in the mining and arson of residential and commercial buildings

In Dnipro, the State Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) detained leaders of a criminal group involved in committing 18 acts of terrorism in Dnipropetrovsk, Zaporizhia, Kharkiv and Poltava regions, namely: mining and arson of residential and commercial buildings. This was reported on the SBUs website.

The group was headed by the criminal authority of Ariiets (Arian), a previously convicted resident of annexed Crimea. The perpetrators specialized in the commission of particularly serious crimes.

They coordinated activities with Russian intelligence agencies under the control of Russian criminal circles. The leaders of the group met with Russian curators on the territory of Russia, EU countries and the Middle East in order to plan and coordinate criminal acts.

During the searches in the perpetrators premises, vehicles and offices, 16 pieces of firearms, nearly 1,700 rounds, grenades, electronic and paper media were seized.

As we reported earlier, on April 14, the counterintelligence of the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) detained Major General of the service Valeriy Shaitanov who planned the murder of volunteer Adam Osmayev on the assignment of the Russian special services.
Though Universal delayed the Vin Diesel-led Fast 9 nearly a full year, from May 2020 to April 2021, other studios have been more cautious about making changes to their schedules. Warner Bros. has not yet announced a new release date for Christopher Nolans Tenet, currently parked on July 17, and though the studio moved Wonder Woman 1984 off its June 5 berth, that superhero sequel is still set to come out in August. Both films are intended to be billion-dollar grossers, but that hardly seems realistic if people remain discouraged from gathering en masse, especially in hard-hit markets like China.

Still, many in Hollywood are taking a wait-and-see approach to the pandemic. Disney postponed early-summer films like the Marvel entry Black Widow and the Pixar title Soul, but the studios live-action take on Mulan, already bumped from its spring slot, is currently scheduled to come out July 24. Is it because the movie is aimed at a young audience, the demographic that has so far proven most resistant to the coronavirus? Or will Disney need every part of its empire projecting confidence in order to get people back into its theme parks and onto its cruise ships by the end of summer?

Some studios have pivoted to digital debuts or shifted smaller and already-released films onto streaming services. Paramount sold its imminent Kumail Nanjiani-Issa Rae comedy, The Lovebirds, to Netflix, while Universal just released the pricey animated film Trolls: World Tour on demand for $19.99. The studio bragged that Trolls set an all-time digital record but declined to release figures, leaving it still unclear how profitable a digital-only release can be for a big-budget tentpole.

And while families will pay less for a Trolls rental than they would on several movie tickets, the price still compares unfavorably to a monthly Netflix subscription ($8.99 to $15.99). The streaming behemoth is well-suited to ride out the pandemic, and its summer slate remains unaffected. Audiences allegiance to Netflix and other new streaming services will probably grow even more entrenched the longer theaters are closed.
Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary has the largest evangelical archeology program. Its also the only evangelical institution to offer a doctoral degree in the field. But this school year will be its last.

We will no longer offer degrees in archaeology because they are incongruent with our mission to maximize resources in the training of pastors and other ministers of the gospel for the churches of the Southern Baptist Convention, Southwestern announced in a statement.

Southwestern also suggested that its decision was linked to the spread of COVID-19, and the pandemic will curtail some digs this year, says John Monson, associate professor of Old Testament and Semitic languages at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School.

But ultimately, Monson doesnt think that the disease is the greatest threat to the discipline.

This is a field that's been around since Napoleon Bonaparte, so about 1799, and it's weathered a lot more than this coronavirus, said Monson, whose archaeological fieldwork has taken him to Syria, Lebanon, and numerous excavations in Israel. And there's always been an interest in the Bible and there still is an interest in the Bible in much of the world today.  I think the bigger challenge is going to be continued interest on the part of Christians and particularly evangelical institutions.

Monson joined digital media producer Morgan Lee and editorial director Ted Olsen to discuss where Southwesterns shutdown of their program leaves the state of biblical archeology, how apologetics fits into this discipline, and what happens when what Scripture suggests and what is found on the ground doesnt exactly line up.

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The transcript is edited by Bunmi Ishola

Highlights from Quick to Listen: Episode #208

What was your initial reaction to the news that Southwestern would be shutting down its Biblical archaeology program? Did it surprise you at all?

John Monson: No, not at all; institutions make priorities and things come and go.

I think essentially, I would say it's being swept along with larger tides of the age, which is trending much more towards the sciences and less towards the humanities. And that's understandablealthough Archaeology is a hybrid between social science, hard science, and humanities.

But I think there are two other major elements here, at least in my view, thats playing into this choice. One is that not only are we in a post-Christian culture, but we're also in a post-Biblical church. The Church was anchored in the Bible historically, but there's a lot more competition for people's attention these days. And the Bible itself needs to reassert its place.

And secondly, I think it's an epic fail on the part of the guild. You can get all kinds of itemized information, but where's the glue? Where's the larger context? Where's the understanding of why this matters? And I think that the guild has really failed, and maybe also the church, by not being more deliberate in giving a take-home value for understanding the text through Archaeology.

Help us understand the larger landscape in the history of biblical archaeology. What exactly is it? And what separates it from other types of archaeology?

John Monson: Archaeology is essentially doing history. And humanity has been doing history for a long, long time. Even in the pre-writing eras, people were doing history through iconography and storytelling and so forth.

So Archaeology is the distinct exploration of human culture within the framework of seeing what has gone before through artifacts and context. History is largely accessible through texts, but history can be supplemented with real human activity and things that are recorded in artifacts and in other contextual resources.

Article continues below

Archaeology really took off with the exploration of the new worlds by the Europeans and Americans. They were engaging in various conquest and were curious about what they were seeing. They began to find monuments and began to scratch around and find out that there was a lot that could be extracted from the ground.

What makes Biblical Archaeology peculiar is that it's linked both to the history and to the text of the Bible.

CT has covered some of the fights between the minimalists and the maximalists in biblical archaeology, and how the effort to prove the Bible, to add context to the Bible, or to disprove the Bible. How does that fit in here?

John Monson: There are a couple of narratives here. With all the debates around the turn of the century, there came to be an urgent question about the reliability of the Bible and also a question about miracles in the Bible. Should we be taking the Bible as a reliable historical source and also as the normative text for one's faith and for one's life? And of course, Biblical Archaeology came in the middle of it because there were a number of people who felt if you could find records of things in non-Biblical texts that matched the Bible, how can you say the Bible is not reliable?

And then a lot of conservative, evangelical Biblical archeologists lost credibility for a season because they basically tried to make Archaeology say things that it didn't really say. It became more of a quest to support and prove the Bible than an illumination of the Bible. It became an annex of apologetics rather than an annex of Biblical interpretation and understanding. So then there was a little bit of a challenge to integrate the intellectual scientific pursuit with the faith pursuit. And I think that this prior generation of archeologists was a little too aggressive in trying to fight a larger theological battle through the venue of Archaeology.

In the last year, there has been a considerable number of news stories about fights over different biblical archeological discoveries. Is this a new thing or has this always been a part of biblical archaeology?

John Monson: You have to think of it as entering into a super, supercharged environment. And the so-called Christian fundamentalists are not the only fundamentalists in the room. There are quite a few secular fundamentalists who are absolutely adamant that the Biblical texts do not hold historical truth.

The problem that often presents itself in Biblical Archaeology is that we're getting an artifact that we don't always know its complete history, especially if it's coming out of the antiquities market. And with manuscript fragments, you get them from all over the place and theres the issue of determining the legitimacy of the manuscript and the claims it's making because it's like taking the drop out of the ocean.

So it becomes supercharged when everyone in the room with an agendathere are those who are adamant that the Bible is not a reliable source and there are those who are adamant that it is because their faith and life depend upon it.

Is this a field that younger students are still passionate about getting into? Or has the interest in the field waned over the years?

John Monson: Biblical Archaeology is partly tied to the fate of Biblical studies and the history of the church and perhaps the Jewish community as well.

Its also a subset of what people would call Near-Eastern Archaeology, where the Biblical text is not really part of the conversation except when its alongside other ancient Near-Eastern texts. Theres a whole generation of Ancient Near-Eastern archeologists who are at evangelical schools doing Near-Eastern Archaeology as a professional guild. They invoke Archaeology to understand the Bible in their personal faith, but they do their professional work just like you would be a biologist or a zoologist or a teacher of math.

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From your experience, what passions are people and new students coming in with when they decide to pursue biblical archaeology?

John Monson: I think there are a couple of different strands and categories. There are those who have had an interest in history and the idea of piecing together pottery and whatever. They are in it out of genuine curiosity. And then you've got those who are really want to understand the Bible better. So they could've gone into linguistics and they could've gone into theology, but a small strand of them will go into Archaeology.

But I think it's important for us to remember that if Jesus Christ did not rise from the dead, then to quote Paul, We're wasting our time. If you don't have Moses as a real historical figure, if you don't have Abraham and if you don't have David, and you don't have Joshua, then you don't have Jesus. And if you don't have Jesus, then you don't even have that little thread of a creed that you're hanging on to with the virgin birth and the resurrection.

So I think it's important for us to not get swept into categorizing what's legit and what's not. And the problem is, the further back we go, the broader strokes we have to use for painting because the days of Abraham are very different than the days of Josiah or the days of Ezra or Nehemiah, or even the days of Jesus, where we have much more clarity and much more data.

We want a pixelized picture and what we mostly get is a portrait. But sometimes the caricature and the portrait communicates more than a pixelized picture, doesn't it?

How do biblical archeologists determine what is significant? And could you share examples of some of the most significant discoveries in the past decade?

John Monson: The basic movement in Archaeology has gone from an accidental treasure hunt to a legit scientific pursuit. And so today's archeologists want to have a research question: Am I exploring village life in the first century or during Jesus life? Or am I exploring a historical problem that is related to this site? Although, some Archaeology comes about through necessity because of development.

Both types of excavations have yielded things in a very purposeful and strategic way. So for example, a little more than 10 years ago, one of the great finds was the famous Tel Dan inscription [29:04]. While archeologists were digging in the area, they found an inscription that mentioned battles between the kings of Israel and the kings of Aram-Damascus. And in that text, it says I utterly destroyed themso-and-so from the house of David. While it doesn't prove everything in the Bible, its another data point, another dot you can connect, to bring more refinement to our picture of the Biblical world.

Another big one in the last 10 years is when the Islamic authorities emptied and dumped the material from the Temple Mount out into the wilderness. Shifting through that material has revolutionized our understanding of the period of Jesus and the temple in Jerusalem.

Another really big one is Qeiyafa in the lowlands of Judah. It towers above the place where David met Goliath. And it represents an Israelite fortress that expanded Israel's control westward towards the Philistines, right during the period of Saul and David. And not only is it a strategic site that we have the name for, but it also had a small shrine that had a small model of the temple or tabernacle. And there were also inscriptions there that had statements which sounded like Biblical material and were datable to the time of Saul and David.

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So things like that are rounding out our understanding of how people lived, what motivated them, what were the geopolitical developments, and even some of the religious developments. So those are all things that are giving us very good anchors for making the Bible come to life. And along the way, maybe even giving us significant support for a favorable interpretation of these events of scripture.

Are there archeological discoveries from the past decade that you would say have challenged or undermined the Biblical narrative?

John Monson: Kathleen Kenyon, when she excavated Jerusalem 50 years ago, said, Doing the Archaeology of Jerusalem is like performing acupuncture on an elephant. You have this massive city that's been destroyed 20 times. How are you going to find anything remaining there?

One challenge is that we get very, very little information from architecture, and theres relatively scarce pottery, from the time of Solomon. And what do we read about the time of Solomon? It was a city, where gold was more plentiful than stone, and it was the center of the Near-Eastern world at that time. Well, does that measure up to what we excavate in Jerusalem? Absolutely not. There is relatively very little from the days of Solomon.

For people of faith, that's a challenge. Does it mean we throw out the Bible? No. Does it mean we manufacture desperate explanations? No. What it does mean is that we put one and one together as we do in other Biblical sites and other cultures. And we say Solomon's empire was a large kingdom governed by a relatively small town. We have examples of that from other Near-Eastern cultures that tell us we should be looking for small regional power and a relatively small city that was immensely wealthy for a brief time. Now, that may sound like a desperate conclusion, but that's just putting one and one together.

I always encourage my students to put one and one together and see where the datasets lead you. And then, to be honest about their faith. Youre going to get no bigger challenge than trying to explain the resurrection, no bigger challenge than trying to explain the virgin birth, and no bigger challenge than explaining any number of other things. And Biblical Archaeology is small fry compared to those challenges.

How has the coronavirus impacted archeological digs? And what about the Israel and Palestine conflict?

John Monson: This is a field that's been around since Napoleon Bonaparte, so about 1799, and it's weathered a lot more than this coronavirus. And there's always been an interest in the Bible and there still is an interest in the Bible in much of the world today.

In the broader scope of things, Archaeology has had to adapt to the Middle East, especially in an age where nationalism and pride in one's culture has taken root. The countries there are proud of their heritage and kind of upset that the Western powers pillaged their heritage for a time to fill their museums. There are now lots of local archeologists and you will not find a more excavated land than the land of the Bible.

I think the bigger challenge is going to be continued interest on the part of Christians and particularly evangelical institutions.

Has being in the world of biblical Archaeology helped you read the Bible better? And are there any areas where youve had to break out of Archaeology mode to be able to read the Bible as a believer?

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John Monson: One might think of it with an analogy to music. My son plays the French horn, my other son plays the cello. When they're playing for a recital, they may be in one mode. When they're playing at church, they may be in a different mode. When they're horsing around, they may be in a different mode. And then when they're in their lessons, they're in an entirely different mode. I think its the same technique being invoked, just with a different mindset in each case.

But I don't think those boundaries need to be firmed up at all. At least not for me. I think for every archeologist and every Bible scholar, there's something beautiful about exploring the sometimes challenging and, of course, mysterious word of God. The Bible is telling a story to show who God is, and how his creation and creatures should behave in response to Him. And to be perfectly honest, I think the goal of every believer, whether they're an archeologist or not, is to read the Bible as a legit story of human characters, the Lord himself being among those human characters and condescending to become human among those characters.

I think we should read the Bible in a way that doesn't have to be, Now I've got my devotional cap on. Now I got my academic cap on. And now I have my teaching cap on. I think they very much can be blended together. And I think we have to go back even to the Reformation and look at the work of the early church fathers and mothers. Their work was done out of the joy of learning the Bible, not some external professional demand. It was an exploration of both the Word and the author of the Word.
A memorial outside of the ShopRite at Evesham and Springdale Roads in Cherry Hill for Steve Ravitz. The owner of five ShopRite stores in New Jersey, Ravitz died from the coronavirus. Read more

The number of deaths from the coronavirus continued to rise in the United States this week. By midday Tuesday, more than 25,000 Americans had died from COVID-19, the highest reported death toll in the world.

According to the Centers of Disease Control and Prevention, 78% of deaths occurred in those age 65 and older. Children are generally safe from the diseases physical risks, but many could lose a grandparent or someone else whos important to them. Thats why its important to be prepared to talk about grief with even young kids, said Bob Jann, a child psychologist in Bucks County.

The loss of a grandparent creates a kind of loss children are unaccustomed to experiencing, he said. They often dont know how to deal with feelings theyre having, and parents should explain how grieving makes people feel better."

According to the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, children who have problems with processing grief may experience extended periods of depression, inability to sleep, or a sharp drop in school performance. Having conversations with children now about the possibility of losing a close family member can better prepare them emotionally, said Gail Karafin, a certified school psychologist based in Doylestown.

 READ MORE: As we grieve whats been lost to coronavirus, 12 experts share ways we can cope together | Perspective

If a child overhears conversations a parent is having with doctors or relatives on the phone, its good to address any questions the child may have afterward, Jann said.

You can say something like Grandma is getting sicker in the hospital and the doctors are trying very hard to help her,  he said. That way, the child has some kind of expectation that all is not going well, even though youre not giving them the same kind of detail. Dont send children out of the room, because it could make things worse.

One thing parents should keep in mind is that children grieve differently, said Karafin. If theyre really young, they might not understand the permanence of death. In that case, calm conversations about how doctors are trying very hard to make their grandparents or parents healthy again can be helpful. But no matter how children react, parents should try to maintain a sense of normalcy and tell them its OK to feel the physical effects of worry or sadness like stomachaches or trouble sleeping.

Children will need the opportunity to discuss their feelings, and its important for parents or parental figures to be a role model to the child as the family endures stress at this time, Karafin said. Its important to convey to the child that there is someone there to take care of them, to love them. If their parents are very distressed, its going to increase stress on the child.

Instead, she said that conversations should focus on how the person who died loved and cared about the child, so they can move forward with a positive mind-set.

Its also helpful during those conversations to be as open and frank as possible without using euphemisms, like saying someone went to sleep, since kids can be extremely literal, Jann said.

Its important to make sure children know theyre not alone during the grieving process, said Mary Fitzgerald, CEO of Eluna Network, a Philadelphia-based nonprofit that supports children and families affected by grief.

When kids are kept in the dark, they have more anxiety and fear, Fitzgerald said. If you give them permission to grieve, to share their emotions and open up a little more, and take the stigma out of talking about this in a safe and supportive environment, it can help them develop resilience.

Fitzgerald recommended taking cues from children about what theyre worried about, instead of bringing up conversations about grief when theyre not ready to talk about it yet.

You want to be age appropriate, she said. As adults, whether we are parents or guardians, we should focus on being reassuring and let kids know what were doing to keep them safe.

Having a small memorial ceremony in a family setting during a time when traditional funerals are near-impossible could be helpful for children, Jann said.

It can be very spontaneous, just people talking about Grandma or Grandpa, he said. Like getting some pictures out and talking about happy memories. Knowing that someone has been memorialized can help ease that emptiness a little bit.
[April 15, 2020] Radar Sensors Market 2019-2023 | Demand for UAVs to Boost Growth | Technavio

Technavio has been monitoring the radar sensors market and it is poised to grow by USD 7.9 billion during 2019-2023, progressing at a CAGR of almost 18% 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. This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20200415005249/en/ Technavio has announced the latest market research report titled Global Radar Sensors Market 2019-2023 (Graphic: Business Wire) Technavio suggests three forecast scenarios (optimistic, probable, and pessimistic) considering the impact of COVID-19. Please Request Latest Free Sample Report on COVID-19 Impact The market is concentrated, and the degree of concentration will accelerate during the forecast period. Continental AG, Infineon Technologies (News - Alert) AG, NXP Semiconductors, Robert Bosch GmbH, and ZF Friedrichshafen AG are some of the major market participants. The demand for UAVs 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 UAVs has been instrumental in driving the growth of the market. Radar Sensors Market 2019-2023: Segmentation Radar sensors market is segmented as below: Application Automotive Aerospace And Defense Industrial Others

Product Non-imaging Sensors Imaging Sensors

Geographic Landscape APAC Europe MEA North America South America

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=IRTNTR31108 <>Radar Sensors 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 radar sensors market report covers the following areas: Radar Sensors Market Size

Radar Sensors Market Trends

Radar Sensors Market Industry Analysis This study identifies increasing adoption of sensor fusion technology as one of the prime reasons driving the radar sensors market growth during the next few years.

Radar Sensors Market 2019-2023: Vendor Analysis We provide a detailed analysis of vendors operating in the radar sensors market, including some of the vendors such as Continental AG, Infineon Technologies AG, NXP Semiconductors (News - Alert), Robert Bosch GmbH, and ZF Friedrichshafen AG. Backed with competitive intelligence and benchmarking, our research reports on the radar sensors market are designed to provide entry support, customer profile and M&As as well as go-to-market strategy support. Register for a free trial today and gain instant access to 17,000+ market research reports. Technavio's SUBSCRIPTION platform Radar Sensors Market 2019-2023: Key Highlights CAGR of the market during the forecast period 2019-2023

Detailed information on factors that will assist radar sensors market growth during the next five years

Estimation of the radar sensors market size and its contribution to the parent market

Predictions on upcoming trends and changes in consumer behavior

The growth of the radar sensors market

Analysis of the market's competitive landscape and detailed information on vendors

Comprehensive details of factors that will challenge the growth of radar sensors market vendors Table Of Contents: PART 01: EXECUTIVE SUMMARY PART 02: SCOPE OF THE REPORT 2.1 Preface

2.2 Preface

2.3 Currency conversion rates for US$ 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

Automotive - Market size and forecast 2018-2023

Aerospace and defense - Market size and forecast 2018-2023

Industrial - Market size and forecast 2018-2023

Others - Market size and forecast 2018-2023

Market opportunity by application PART 07: CUSTOMER LANDSCAPE PART 08: MARKET SEGMENTATION BY PRODUCT Market segmentation by product

Comparison by product

Non-imaging sensors - Market size and forecast 2018-2023

Imaging sensors - Market size and forecast 2018-2023

Market opportunity by product PART 09: GEOGRAPHIC LANDSCAPE Geographic segmentation

Geographic comparison

Europe - Market size and forecast 2018-2023

North America - Market size and forecast 2018-2023

APAC - Market size and forecast 2018-2023

MEA - Market size and forecast 2018-2023

South America - Market size and forecast 2018-2023

Key leading countries

Market opportunity PART 10: DECISION FRAMEWORK PART 11: DRIVERS AND CHALLENGES Market drivers

Market challenges PART 12: MARKET TRENDS Emergence of high-resolution radar imaging sensor

Increasing investments in autonomous cars

Growing adoption of sensor fusion technology PART 13: VENDOR LANDSCAPE Overview

Landscape disruption PART 14: VENDOR ANALYSIS Vendors covered

Vendor classification

Market positioning of vendors

Continental AG

Infineon Technologies AG (News - Alert)

NXP Semiconductors

Robert Bosch GmbH

ZF Friedrichshafen AG PART 15: APPENDIX Research methodology

List of abbreviations PART 16: 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/20200415005249/en/

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Synovus Financial Corp. (NYSE:SNV) shareholders should be happy to see the share price up 11% in the last month. But that doesn't change the fact that the returns over the last three years have been disappointing. In that time, the share price dropped 56%. So it's good to see it climbing back up. While many would remain nervous, there could be further gains if the business can put its best foot forward.

See our latest analysis for Synovus Financial

While markets are a powerful pricing mechanism, share prices reflect investor sentiment, not just underlying business performance. By comparing earnings per share (EPS) and share price changes over time, we can get a feel for how investor attitudes to a company have morphed over time.

Although the share price is down over three years, Synovus Financial actually managed to grow EPS by 23% per year in that time. This is quite a puzzle, and suggests there might be something temporarily buoying the share price. Alternatively, growth expectations may have been unreasonable in the past.

It's worth taking a look at other metrics, because the EPS growth doesn't seem to match with the falling share price.

We note that the dividend seems healthy enough, so that probably doesn't explain the share price drop. It's good to see that Synovus Financial has increased 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).

NYSE:SNV Income Statement April 15th 2020

It's good to see that there was some significant insider buying in the last three months. That's a positive. That said, we think earnings and revenue growth trends are even more important factors to consider. If you are thinking of buying or selling Synovus Financial stock, you should check out this free report showing analyst profit forecasts.

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What About Dividends?

As well as measuring the share price return, investors should also consider the total shareholder return (TSR). 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. As it happens, Synovus Financial's TSR for the last 3 years was -52%, which exceeds the share price return mentioned earlier. The dividends paid by the company have thusly boosted the total shareholder return.

A Different Perspective

We regret to report that Synovus Financial shareholders are down 47% for the year (even including dividends) . Unfortunately, that's worse than the broader market decline of 3.5%. 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 6.1% 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. For instance, we've identified 3 warning signs for Synovus Financial (1 is significant) that you should be aware of.

If you like to buy stocks alongside management, then you might just love this free list of companies. (Hint: insiders have been buying them).

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.
Bhubaneswar, April 15 : The Ganjam district administration in Odisha has decided to impose fine on people for spitting in public places.

The administration has decided to penalise Rs 500 for spitting in public places.

Ganjam district collector Vijay Amruta Kulange said that spitting in public places shall be prohibited and violators will be levied a fine of up to Rs 500.

"We have started the initiative to strengthen the fight against Coronavirus and to prevent its spread. We have to work together in the fight," said the district collector.

He also requested to use mask and maintain social distance.
The Hall of Names at the Yad Vashem Holocaust museum in Jerusalem, which commemorates the 6 million Jews killed by Nazis during World War II. (Uriel Sinai / Getty Images)

Celebrating Passover during the COVID-19 pandemic brings back memories of Seders spent in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, starting when my twin brother and I were 6 years old.

At 82, we are in all likelihood the last surviving twins of the Holocaust  in any case, a shrinking remnant of the 5% of Jews from Holland who were deported to Nazi camps and returned.

Under impossible conditions, a group of prisoners in Bergen-Belsen from Salonika, Greece, managed to make Passover matzos. Clearly this was not a communal meal, the matzos produced were only a very few, but it spoke to the strength of the human spirit in the face of death, the courage to maintain an ancient and hallowed Jewish tradition in a world of fear and terror.

Not to minimize the catastrophe of the current pandemic, with soaring numbers of people infected and a numbing death toll, but the odds of survival in Bergen-Belsen were of a different magnitude, infinitesimally small. To put it simply, all Jews in German-occupied Europe were sentenced to death under the terms of the Nazi regimes Final Solution and its orchestrated plan to exterminate the Jewish people.

Marion Ein Lewin and her twin brother, Steven Hess, around six-years old in Amsterdam. (Courtesy of Marion Ein Lewin)

Even those sent to a slave labor camps rather than an extermination camp had their days numbered because the Nazis carefully calculated how long those prisoners could live under conditions of forced labor, starvation, beatings, exposure and exhaustion. No amount of social distancing or hand washing could change the odds of our survival.

Under all this horror, there was one freedom our tormentors could not control or vanquish: freedom of the mind and freedom of the human spirit to rise above what had befallen us, to find occasional refuge from the tragedy of our circumstances.

My mother at times mentally cooked a favorite meal, recalling every step of its preparation and its pleasures. When I visited my father after he had been beaten almost to death when SS guards caught him giving debilitated laborers under his supervision some moments of rest, he asked me to hold a lid of a tin can to his face so that he could shave. Many of his bones were broken, but he still wanted to maintain his dignity, to make a statement that his spirit could not be bowed.

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There were other inmates who risked their lives by missing a patrol to take care of a dying relative or friend. Some prisoners helped inmates find shoes, however shoddy, to replace a pair that had been lost or stolen or disintegrated beyond repair. Without shoes, without a tin cup to hold the meager rations, a prisoners life was in effect over.

From a letter I received after the war, even I as a child seemed to have offered advice on alleviating painful and incessant hunger by encouraging those in line for our daily meager rations of turnips to swallow as slowly as possible. In retrospect that was not helpful, since the adults were given only a few minutes to gulp down their slop before harsh orders and loud whistles called them back to racking toil.

In this unfathomable abyss it was all about maintaining hope in a dystopian world  looking to the light in a world of seeming darkness, remaining strong, remaining human, thinking of others when staying alive was a full time and mostly doomed effort.

Passover this year coincides with the liberation of Bergen-Belsen on April 15, 1945. A few days before that day, my family and 2,500 other prisoners were put on what was later famously known as the Lost Train, headed east, ostensibly to the gas chambers when in fact the gas chambers had already been bombed by the Allies. After traveling for 13 days in a tortuous journey during which a third died without adequate food or water, the train was liberated by Russian troops in a small town in eastern Germany.

When British troops reached Bergen-Belsen, they found 13,000 unburied dead added to thousands of others who met their final end from typhus, an epidemic that raged through the camp in its final months, among its victims Anne Frank and her older sister, Margot.

Now we are fighting an enemy that no one can see, not as ruthless as the Nazis but nevertheless truly frightening. Our lives have been transformed, and every day brings new anxieties, new limitations, new fuel for feeling overwhelmed and helpless.

With vigilance, science and a medical system now in fuller throttle, this nightmare will come to an end and we will be better prepared the next time the world becomes unhinged by a new pestilence.

In the fear and uncertainty of this time, I am struck by the heroic and merciful acts I first encountered as a young child behind barbed wire. We witness medical workers who take on herculean tasks of care and compassion when their lives are at stake. We see volunteers from all over the country who see a need and go that extra mile. Once again, it is that best in humanity that inspires and leaves a lasting legacy.

Marion Ein Lewin and her twin brother, Steven Hess, survived the Westerbork and Bergen-Belsen concentration camps. She directed the Office of Health Policy Programs and Fellowships at the Institute of Medicine of the National Academies in Washington, D.C., from 1987-2001.




A passenger in a car that collided with Salim Mehajer's Mercedes in a staged Sydney crash has been sentenced to a community penalty.

The businessman and former Auburn deputy mayor was on his way to court in October 2017 to face a charge of assaulting a taxi driver at The Star Casino.

In the NSW District Court on Wednesday, Nora Anne Bush testified to being ashamed of her involvement in the scam, which was set to earn the participants $10,000 to be partly used for a funeral in Tonga.

A passenger in a car that collided with Salim Mehajer's Mercedes in a staged Sydney crash has been sentenced to a community penalty

The businessman and former Auburn deputy mayor was on his way to court in October 2017 to face a charge of assaulting a taxi driver at The Star Casino when the crash took place

The 34-year-old pleaded guilty to dishonestly destroying or damaging property for financial gain and to negligent driving.

Judge Andrew Colefax imposed a two-year jail term, to be served by way of an intensive corrections order with conditions, including she partake in 500 hours of community service.

She was also fined $2000 and disqualified from driving for two years.

Bush, her husband Michael Moufferrige, his brother Elias Moufferrige and wife Fakaha Malinda Moufferrige lived together in Lidcombe in October 2017.

According to the agreed facts, a friend of Bush's husband, Ahmed Jaghbir, asked the brothers if they wanted to make $10,000 by being involved in a car 'accident' for the benefit of Salim Mehajer.

The judge said nothing in the facts suggested any of the four relatives was aware that Mr Mehajer was due to appear in court that day.

Nora Anne Bush testified to being ashamed of her involvement in the scam, which was set to earn the participants $10,000 to be partly used for a funeral in Tonga

The wreckage of Mehajer's car is seen after the crash in October 2017

Elias Moufferrige later told Jaghbir he wanted to be involved indirectly and 'put pressure on his wife to do the dirty work for him', the judge said.

She drove a hired car while Bush agreed to accompany her, telling the judge she was concerned with helping her anxious sister-in-law.

This may have been so but the judge found the potential reward of $10,000 for the family was part of Bush's motive.

She testified the money was to be partly used for the funeral of her husband's grandmother in Tonga and she had no need for anything left over.

'Whether you intended it to be in your personal pocket or for the advantage of your family is neither here nor there,' the judge said.

Jaghbir gave directions via a mobile phone, but the women got the timing wrong when they came up to an intersection and Mehajer's car drove past.

The women were told to go back, then repositioned themselves before the cars collided.

Mehajer has denied being behind the crash and will face court later in the year

They gave a false version of what happened to police and the insurance company, which paid out $6000 for the damaged hire car.

Far from receiving the $10,000 for the 'accident', the brothers ultimately were only paid $3600.

'To an extent, it may be that your involvement in this criminal enterprise was to obtain approval of your husband who seems to have a capacity to overbear lots of people,' Judge Colefax said.

'These offences against insurance companies are difficult to detect and sentences imposed must be meaningful and discourage you and others from this type of offending.'

Mehajer has denied being behind the crash and will face court later in the year.
Sheri and David* were counting down to the day their daughter could come to live with them.

We were right at the end of a family reunification order,' Sheri says. We had been doing very well with the order, meeting all the court conditions. Our access to our daughter had increased to 56 hours per week  two overnights and four days.

And then on March 24  a week after their daughters first birthday  a Department of Health and Human Services worker told them all contact would be suspended indefinitely owing to the risk posed by the coronavirus.

Children's Court specialist lawyer Joel Orenstein warns suspending face-to-face visits between children from out-of-home care and their birth parents are having devastating consequences. Credit:Jason South

I was bawling for two days, Sheri says. I was crying uncontrollably, having panic attacks, worrying all the time. We were so close to the finish line and now we are not able to see our daughter.
Badges with green CARE logos will be sent to social care staff in next few weeks

A drive will also be mounted to recruit 20,000 employees within three months

Care home staff are to be recognised for their heroic work in the pandemic.

Following a campaign by the Daily Mail, Matt Hancock has promised to put them on the same footing as NHS doctors and nurses.

This newspaper has revealed in a series of harrowing stories that care home residents are the forgotten victims of coronavirus, left to die in huge numbers.

Health Secretary Mr Hancock vowed a set of measures to alleviate the dire situation in the nations 11,000 care homes.

Health Secretary Matt Hancock pictured at the daily coronavirus press briefing from Downing Street on Wednesday, wearing one of the badges with green CARE logos

Families will again have the right to say goodbye to their dying loved ones and there will be a blanket ban on Do Not Resuscitate orders.

To tackle chronic under-staffing, a drive will be mounted to recruit 20,000 employees within three months.

And Mr Hancock has vowed to increase the amount of personal protective kit given to homes and to offer testing to all residents and staff with symptoms.

Crucially he unveiled a single brand for the social care workforce in the hope of instilling the same level as pride as in the NHS. Badges with green CARE logos will be sent to staff over the next few weeks enabling them to access free coffees as well as discounts at stores and cafes.

As with Mr Hancocks bold target on testing  to boost capacity to 100,000 a day by May  the Health Secretary will be held to account on his promises.

Yesterday brought more distressing reports from care homes, with one in Peterborough revealing that a third of its residents had died in ten days. In a Staffordshire home, 24 of the 140 residents died over three weeks.

The badges (above) will be sent to social care staff over the next few weeks, enabling them to access free coffees as well as discounts at stores and cafes

It has emerged that residents who are seriously ill with coronavirus will not be taken to hospital if doctors decide it is inappropriate. Guidelines have been issued to managers warning them that ambulances will refuse to take patients to hospital if conservative care at a care home is deemed preferable.

As confirmed cases of the virus passed two million worldwide, with more than 131,000 deaths:

The UKs hospital death toll rose by 761 to 12,868, a smaller increase than in recent days;

The Chief Medical Officer suggested ministers could start planning an exit from the lockdown within ten days;

He also said Britain was probably reaching the peak of the pandemic;

NHS leaders said there was now sufficient space on hospital wards and in intensive care units;

A quarter of coronavirus deaths in Scotland were in care homes;

A care home provider said it was paying five times the usual rate for face masks;

Donald Trump was under fire for cutting funding to the World Health Organisation;

The Duke of Westminster, 29, donated 12.5million to coronavirus relief;

Spitting or coughing will be considered aggravating factors when criminals are sentenced for attacks on emergency workers;

Fewer than a quarter of businesses to apply to the coronavirus loan scheme have secured support;

Oasis and Warehouse collapsed into administration.

The Mail has campaigned for better recognition for care homes battling the virus. We have revealed how some of the biggest providers had been denied tests for residents or staff even though they are offered to NHS workers.

Other homes told us they were playing Russian roulette by being forced to accept from hospital patients with virus symptoms.

Some staff claimed that GPs were refusing to visit and admitted being terrified of catching the virus due to a lack of protective clothing.

Mr Hancock said that wherever possible families would be given the chance to say goodbye to loved ones dying with coronavirus in care homes or indeed hospitals. He told the Downing Street press briefing that he would work with Public Health England and the care sector to try to limit the risk of infection.

The Health Secretary also said the Government was making it clear that blanket Do Not Resuscitate orders should not be applied to care home residents.

Other measures include plans for care home residents and hospital patients to be able to speak to their loved ones through Facebook.

Connie Titchen (left), a 106-year-old recovered coroanvirus patient, with Sister Kelly Smith, wearing PPE. Ms Titchen was discharged on Wednesday to a round of applause from carers

Referring to the CARE brand, Mr Hancock said: This badge will be a badge of honour in a very real sense, allowing social care staff proudly and publicly to identify themselves, just like NHS staff do.

Figures from the Office for National Statistics showed there had been just 237 deaths in care homes in two weeks. Some charities believe the true number is nearer 4,000.

Liz Kendall, Labours social care spokesman, said: For millions of elderly and disabled people and their families, actions will speak louder than words. We need a clear and detailed plan about how  and by when  the Government is going to test more than 1.2million front-line social care workers, up from only 505 who have been tested so far.

More still needs to be done to ensure enough PPE regularly gets to front-line staff, who are desperate not to infect the elderly and disabled people they care for.

Kate Lee of the Alzheimers Society said: Whats missing from the Governments plan is a commitment to accurately record and publish coronavirus deaths in care homes on a daily basis.

Without this we cant know the scale of the crisis were dealing with, and whether PPE and testing are working.

Dave Prentis of Unison, which represents many care workers, said: For all the warm words and promises about supplies of protective equipment, the situation appears to be getting worse, not better.

Latest coronavirus video news, views and expert advice at mailplus.co.uk/coronavirus
SCOTTSDALE, AZ / ACCESSWIRE / April 15, 2020 / CBD Life Sciences Inc. (OTC PINK:CBDL) through its wholly owned subsidiary, LBC Bioscience "LBC Bio" is pleased to announce that our brand-new proprietary product 100 mg CBD + CBG with Vitamin E Hand Sanitizer has arrived to our facility. Our new Hand Sanitizer Gel product is in a 4 oz bottle containing CBD (cannabidiol) and CBG (cannabigerol) ingredients which will be marketed as "CBG+CBD Hand Sanitizer Gel Infused with Vitamin E Oil " is now available for purchase. You can place your order today on our website www.lbcbioscienceinc.com. Follow our social media accounts at www.instagram.com/lbcbioscience, www.twitter.com/lbcbioscience for updating information regarding LBC Bioscience Inc. CBD products.

Lisa Nelson, CEO of CBD Life Sciences, Inc. commented "During this Pandemic, hand sanitizer is one of the most out of stock products in all retail stores. LBC Bio Science Inc. is proud to provide the public with this most needed product. We do expect to sell our hand sanitizers quickly. In today's COVID-19 environment, keeping our hands clean and virus free is critical."

Lisa Nelson continued "We are now selling our new product on our website www.lbcbioscienceinc.com and also in our LBC Bioscience Inc. store located at 10855 North 116th Street. Suite 115 in Scottsdale, AZ 85259. We would look forward to meeting interested readers at our LBC Store and welcome their inquiries."

The Company also plans to offer its proprietary hand sanitizer in our upcoming Scottsdale Fashion Square mall kiosk. This is a quick update on our previously announced kiosk opening schedule of April 1, 2020. Due to the COVID-19's effects on retail malls, we will be postponing our Grand Opening until Fashion Square retail operations return to normal. Look for more information to come on the opening of our kiosk as retailer operations at Scottsdale Fashion Mall start to re-open for business. We cannot currently predict the exact timing of normal retailer operations but are confident that Scottsdale Fashion Mall will return to normalcy when today's extraordinary health crises do pass.

Lisa Nelson finished "We think that our new "CBG+CBD Hand Sanitizer Gel Infused with Vitamin E Oil" is timely and on point

given the public's current need to avoid today's COVID-19 viruses. We believe that the new norm will include using hand sanitizers on a regular basis and feel with the addition of this new product we are well positioned for the future."

About CBD Life Sciences Inc.

CBD Life Sciences Inc. is a publicly traded company having its common shares quoted on the OTC Markets under the symbol "CBDL'. The Company's main focus is to identify, evaluate and acquire undervalued opportunities with the objective of increasing shareholder value. The acquisition of LBC Bioscience Inc. is the first in the CBD space and the Company is actively pursuing for additional opportunities within this emerging sector.

About LBC Bioscience Inc.

LBC Bioscience Inc. is a wholly owned subsidiary of CBD Life Sciences Inc. LBC has developed and is retailing/wholesale a full line of cannabidiol based organic products including: CBD hemp drops, pain relief creams, anxiety & sleep supplements, CBD edibles including brain booster coffee, weight loss coffee , anti-aging skin line and a full line of CBD infused supplements for your pets. LBC's products can be viewed and purchased on the Company's website at www.lbcbioscienceinc.com.

Contact Information Investor Relations

Ten Associates LLC.

Scottsdale, Arizona

Telephone: (480)326-8577

Contact: Thomas E. Nelson

Email: tenassociates33@gmail.com

Website: www.tenassociatesllc.com

Forward-Looking Statements

Except for the historical information contained herein, the matters discussed in this press release are forward-looking statements. Actual results may differ materially from those described in forward-looking statements and are subject to risks and uncertainties. See CBD Life Sciences, Inc's, Inc.'s filings with OTC Markets, which may identify specific factors that may cause actual results or events to differ materially from those described in the forward-looking statements.

Safe Harbor Statement

This release includes forward-looking statements, which are based on certain assumptions and reflects management's current expectations. These forward-looking statements are subject to a number of risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results or events to differ materially from current expectations. Some of these factors include: general global economic conditions; general industry and market conditions, sector changes and growth rates; uncertainty as to whether our strategies and business plans will yield the expected benefits; increasing competition; availability and cost of capital; the ability to identify and develop and achieve commercial success; the level of expenditures necessary to maintain and improve the quality of services; changes in the economy; changes in laws and regulations, including codes and standards, intellectual property rights, and tax matters; or other matters not anticipated; our ability to secure and maintain strategic relationships and distribution agreements. The Company disclaims any intention or obligation to update or revise any forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise.

SOURCE: CBD Life Sciences Inc.

View source version on accesswire.com:https://www.accesswire.com/585092/CBD-Life-Sciences-Announces-Its-Proprietary-CBDCBG-Hand-Sanitizer-Gel-Infused-with-Vitamin-E-Oil-Is-Here-Place-Your-Order-Today
HONOLULU - A Hawaii program providing free hotel rooms to health workers responding to the coronavirus has been modified after the demand exceeded the number of available rooms.

More than 870 room nights have been reserved through the Hotels for Heroes program, The Honolulu Star-Advertiser reported Tuesday.

The overwhelming demand forced organizers to make changes including limiting workers to seven-day reservations.

Theres been incredible demand and interest for these rooms, said Hilton Raethel, president and CEO of the Healthcare Association of Hawaii.

Hotels for Heroes was established to use extra hotel rooms while helping financially support the visitor industry and the community.

Hotels on Kauai, Maui, Hawaii island and Oahu with approved reservations are compensated $85 per room per per night from state tourism funds. The program was developed by the Hawaii Tourism Authority, the Hawaii Visitors and Convention Bureau and the Hawaii Lodging & Tourism Association.

The program does not accept health workers who have tested positive for COVID-19 or who have been required to quarantine.

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.

Hotels have been generous with their space, but organizers had to set limits after the demand outstripped supply, Raethel said.

Different institutions have different needs, Raethel said. We are incredibly appreciative to have this opportunity for workers to have some time to themselves. We recognize this is an incredibly challenging time for the hotel industry.

Honolulu Fire Department Battalion Chief Kevin Mokulehua said the program will help about 1,000 active department workers.

Weve been receiving a lot of interest in the program and have seen a steady increase since it started, Mokulehua said.

The program should help reduce the number of first responders who have been staying in tents to isolate themselves from their families, he said.

Department members practice good hygiene and social distancing, but theres always this thing in your mind that Im going home and I want to keep the family safe, Mokulehua said.
U.S. Army medical officials say they have successfully treated two soldiers diagnosed with the novel coronavirus, using an experimental antiviral drug designed to treat pathogens such as Ebola.

Army Secretary Ryan McCarthy described the use of remdesivir on COVID-19 patients on Friday, according to an Army news release.

Scientists at the U.S. Army Medical Research and Development Command at Fort Detrick, Maryland, have been working with researchers around the world on COVID-19 vaccines, McCarthy said, adding that six possible vaccines have shown the most promise. Four are being tested on animals and two on human subjects.

Related: Army Researchers Begin Animal Testing of Coronavirus Vaccine

"Two soldiers diagnosed with coronavirus were given an antiviral drug used to treat the Ebola virus and successfully recovered," McCarthy said in the release. "They're up and walking around. Obviously, that's not that substantial of a sample size, but it shows that it can work."

The Army has a cooperative research and development agreement with Gilead Sciences -- the firm that makes remdesivir -- for the treatment of U.S. military personnel exposed to COVID-19.

"Currently, there are 12 Military Treatment Facilities capable of treating COVID-19 patients under this protocol, and several patients have received or are currently receiving the treatment," Lori Salvatore, a spokeswoman for Army Medical Research and Development Command, told Military.com.

In February, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration allowed Gilead's remdesivir to proceed to clinical trials to evaluate its effectiveness for treating COVID-19, according to a U.S. Army Medical Materiel Development Activity release.

Remdesivir is an investigational drug for the possible treatment of multiple emerging viral pathogens including Ebola and Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome, also known as SARS-CoV-1, the release states.

In one limited study, 36 of 53 patients hospitalized with severe COVID-19 showed clinical improvement after receiving remdesivir from Jan. 20 to March 7, according to an April 10 article in the New England Journal of Medicine.

Of the 53 patients whose data were analyzed, 22 were in the United States, 22 in Europe or Canada, and 9 in Japan, according to the article.

"At baseline, 30 patients (57%) were receiving mechanical ventilation and 4 (8%) were receiving extracorporeal membrane oxygenation," a process that involves pumping and oxygenating a patient's blood outside the body, so the heart and lungs can rest, the article states.

"During a median follow-up of 18 days, 36 patients (68%) had an improvement in oxygen-support class, including 17 of 30 patients (57%) receiving mechanical ventilation who were extubated," or taken off ventilation, according to the article.

A total of 25 patients were discharged from the hospital and seven patients in the group died from the virus, according to the article.

Military.com reached out to Gilead Sciences, based in Foster City, California, but did not receive a response by press time.

Seven clinical trials have been initiated to determine whether remdesivir is a safe and effective treatment for COVID-19, according to an "Open Letter" from Daniel O'Day, chairman and CEO of Gilead, posted on the company's website April 10.

O'Day said he recognized that the study in the New England Journal of Medicine represents only a small portion of the critically ill patients who have been treated with remdesivir, according to the website.

"In the broader efforts to determine whether it is a safe and effective treatment, we have some way to go," O'Day said.

"Multiple clinical trials are underway across the world to build a complete picture of how remdesivir works in various contexts.

"We know that there is tremendous interest around when the data from these trials will be available and what they will tell us about remdesivir. ... We are working with intense speed to determine whether remdesivir could be an option, and we are committed to sharing information when it becomes available to us."

-- Matthew Cox can be reached at matthew.cox@military.com.

Read More: Meet the Army Lieutenant Racing to Develop a Coronavirus Vaccine
COLUMBUS, OhioSeveral Ohio advocacy groups are asking Attorney General Dave Yost to stop the collection of any student debt from public colleges and universities in the state during and after the coronavirus pandemic.

In a letter to Yosts office sent Wednesday, the groups cited a recent study by left-leaning Policy Matters Ohio showing that collecting such debt disproportionately affects Ohioans who are least able to afford it, including lower-income, minorities, first-generation, part-time, and older students.

The groups, which include Policy Matters Ohio, Innovation Ohio, the Ohio Student Association, and College Now Greater Cleveland, praised Yost for negotiating with state colleges and universities to stop creating new student debt through at least April 27 and for agreeing to review requests for relief on existing debt on a case-by-case basis.

But they urged Yost to go further and impose a blanket freeze, noting that the massive federal stimulus package signed by President Donald Trump late last month suspends collection of federal student-loan debt through Sept. 30. The letter also points to New York States agreement with private student-loan lenders to stop collecting debt.

In addition, the letter asks Yost to forgive 30 percent of student debt in Ohio owed by people who are out of work because of the coronavirus crisis, citing the leeway the Ohio Revised Code gives the attorney general in collecting state debts. That amount is based on the assumption that those who have been laid off since March and cant find new work could lose up to half of their annual income, according to the letter.

Collecting on debt already with the AGs office runs counter to other steps other government entities are taking, at all levels, to provide relief during the pandemic, the letter stated.

Asked to comment on the proposals laid out in the letter, AG spokesman Dave ONeil didnt say what Yost, a Columbus Republican, thinks about the ideas.

As Policy Matters Ohio has acknowledged, the Ohio Attorney Generals Office has agreed to review requests for relief from ongoing collection of previously certified debt on a case-by-case basis with the full cooperation of and direction from individual institutions, ONeil stated in an email. Existing debt collection efforts are at various stages depending upon the situation, previously entered agreements, and pending litigation.

Read more Ohio coronavirus coverage:

How to track your federal stimulus check

Tuesday was a good day for Ohios updated total of coronavirus cases

'An existential threat: Ohios restaurant, hotel, and salon industries detail economic devastation from the coronavirus crisis

Ohio coronavirus deaths increase by 50, peak still expected Sunday: Gov. Mike DeWines Tuesday, April 14 briefing
Antonio Guterres urged social media organisations to do more to counter the misinformation and to root out hate and harmful assertions about COVID-19

United Nations: UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres warned Tuesday that the world is facing a dangerous epidemic of misinformation about COVID-19 and announced a UN campaign to flood the internet with facts and science to counter what he called a poison that is putting lives at risk.

The UN chief decried what he described as a global misinfo-demic that is spreading harmful health advice, snake-oil solutions, falsehoods, and wild conspiracy theories.

Guterres urged social media organisations to do more to counter the misinformation and to root out hate and harmful assertions about COVID-19.

Hatred is going viral, stigmatizing and vilifying people and groups, he said in a video statement. Mutual respect and upholding human rights must be our compass in navigating this crisis.

The UN chief said people around the world are scared and want to know what to do and where to turn for advice, and they need science.

UN spokesman Stephane Dujarric stressed the importance of accurate information,

He said the United Nations will be in touch with various social media companies, adding that quite a few of them are actively trying to root out disinformation and suspending accounts of people pushing out information that is plain wrong and dangerous.

Dujarric said the UN recognizes the delicate balance between free speech and misinformation, saying thats a balancing act that is played out every day around the world even in the most free democracies.

The secretary-general is not going to be the one to decide, Dujarric said.

What we are doing is we will push out scientifically based information, information that will help us as a global community fight the virus," he said. Social media companies, news organizations are making those decisions all the time, but I think it is important that we all do what we can to fight the spread of dangerous misinformation on fighting the virus.

Click here to follow LIVE updates on coronavirus outbreak

The secretary-general saluted journalists and others fact-checking the mountain of misleading stories and social media posts.

He called for trust in science and in institutions grounded in responsive, responsible, evidence-based governance and leadership.

Together, lets reject the lies and nonsense out there, Guterres said. With common cause for common sense and facts, we can defeat COVID-19, and build a healthier, more equitable, just and resilient world.
A senior UK health official said Britain had seen outbreaks of the new coronavirus within care homes.

Yvonne Doyle, Public Health England Medical Director, said health authorities were working "very actively" to ensure the impact on the social care sector was mitigated.

Deaths in care homes linked to the virus have so far not been included in the UK's national statistics, suggesting the reported death toll of 12,107 could be higher.

The National Medical Director of NHS England Professor Stephen Powis said public hospitals were more used to supplying data than the social care sector, which is largely privately run.

But Powis stressed the country was seeing the benefit of social distancing measures and it was not the time to "take a foot off the pedal" in terms of lifting restrictions.

Chancellor of the Exchequer Rishi Sunak denied reports companies were being told to prioritise essential personal protective equipment for England over Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.
SAN DIEGO, April 15, 2020 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Crinetics Pharmaceuticals, Inc. (CRNX), a clinical-stage pharmaceutical company focused on the discovery, development and commercialization of novel therapeutics for rare endocrine diseases and endocrine-related tumors, announced today the pricing of an underwritten public offering of 7,150,000 shares of its common stock at a price to the public of $14.00 per share. All of the shares to be sold in the offering are being sold by Crinetics. The gross proceeds to Crinetics from the offering, before deducting the underwriting discounts and commissions and other offering expenses, are expected to be $100.1 million. In addition, Crinetics has granted the underwriters a 30-day option to purchase up to an additional 1,072,500 shares of common stock. The offering is expected to close on or about April 17, 2020, subject to the satisfaction of customary closing conditions.



Crinetics intends to use the net proceeds from the proposed offering to fund the development of paltusotine and its other research and development programs, and for working capital and general corporate purposes.

SVB Leerink, Piper Sandler and Cantor are acting as joint bookrunning managers for the offering. H.C. Wainwright & Co. and Roth Capital Partners are acting as co-managers for the offering.

The securities described above are being offered by Crinetics pursuant to a shelf registration statement previously filed and declared effective by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). A preliminary prospectus supplement relating to this offering has been filed with the SEC and a final prospectus supplement relating to this offering will be filed with the SEC. The offering may be made only by means of a prospectus supplement and accompanying prospectus. When available, copies of the final prospectus supplement and the accompanying prospectus relating to this offering may be obtained from: SVB Leerink LLC, Attention: Syndicate Department, One Federal Street, 37th Floor, Boston, MA 02110, by telephone at 800-808-7525, ext. 6218 or by email at syndicate@svbleerink.com; Piper Sandler & Co., Attn: Prospectus Department, 800 Nicollet Mall, J12S03, Minneapolis, Minnesota 55402, by telephone at 800-747-3924 or by email at prospectus@psc.com; or Cantor Fitzgerald & Co., Attn: Capital Markets, 499 Park Ave., 6th Floor, New York, New York 10022, by telephone at 212-829-7122 or by email at prospectus@cantor.com. Electronic copies of the final prospectus supplement and accompanying prospectus will also be available on the website of the SEC at http://www.sec.gov.

Story continues

This press release shall not constitute an offer to sell or the solicitation of an offer to buy, nor shall there be any sale of these securities in any jurisdiction in which such offer, solicitation or sale would be unlawful prior to the registration or qualification under the securities laws of any such jurisdiction.

About Crinetics Pharmaceuticals

Crinetics Pharmaceuticals is a clinical-stage pharmaceutical company focused on the discovery, development and commercialization of novel therapeutics for rare endocrine diseases and endocrine-related tumors. The companys lead product candidate, paltusotine (formerly CRN00808), is an oral, selective nonpeptide somatostatin receptor type 2 biased agonist undergoing two Phase 2 clinical trials for the treatment of acromegaly, an orphan disease affecting more than 25,000 people in the United States. Crinetics plans to advance paltusotine into a Phase 3 trial in acromegaly and a Phase 2 trial for the treatment of carcinoid syndrome associated with neuroendocrine tumors in 2021. The company is also developing an oral nonpeptide somatostatin sst5 agonist for hyperinsulinism, as well as an oral nonpeptide ACTH antagonist for the treatment of Cushings disease, congenital adrenal hyperplasia and other diseases of excess ACTH excess. All of the companys drug candidates are new chemical entities resulting from in-house drug discovery efforts and are wholly owned by the company.

Forward Looking Statements

This press release contains forward-looking statements within the meaning of Section 21E of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, as amended. All statements other than statements of historical facts contained in this press release are forward-looking statements, including statements regarding Crinetics expectations of market conditions and the satisfaction of customary closing conditions related to the public offering, the expected closing of the offering and the anticipated use of proceeds therefrom; the potential to initiate a Phase 3 trial of paltusotine in acromegaly and the expected timing thereof; and the planned expansion of the paltusotine development program to include the treatment of carcinoid syndrome of patients with neuroendocrine tumors and the expected timing thereof. In some cases, you can identify forward-looking statements by terms such as may, will, should, expect, plan, anticipate, could, intend, target, project, contemplates, believes, estimates, predicts, potential or continue or the negative of these terms or other similar expressions. These forward-looking statements speak only as of the date of this press release and are subject to a number of risks, uncertainties and assumptions, including the risks and uncertainties associated with market conditions and the satisfaction of customary closing conditions related to the proposed public offering, the risks and uncertainties inherent in Crinetics business, including uncertainties related to the COVID-19 pandemic, which may disrupt the companys business and that of the third parties on which it depends, delay or otherwise disrupt the companys clinical trials and preclinical studies, manufacturing and supply chain, or impair employee productivity, and the other risks and uncertainties described in the companys periodic filings with the SEC. The events and circumstances reflected in the companys forward-looking statements may not be achieved or occur and actual results could differ materially from those projected in the forward-looking statements. Additional information on risks facing Crinetics can be found under the heading Risk Factors in Crinetics periodic reports, including its annual report on Form 10-K for the year ended December 31, 2019, and in the preliminary prospectus supplement related to the proposed offering filed with the SEC on April 14, 2020, each available on the SECs web site at www.sec.gov. Except as required by applicable law, Crinetics does not plan to publicly update or revise any forward-looking statements contained herein, whether as a result of any new information, future events, changed circumstances or otherwise.

Contacts:

Marc Wilson

Chief Financial Officer

IR@crinetics.com

(858) 450-6464
Dr. Valdilea Veloso is racing against time: she needs ventilators, face masks and medical staff before the coronavirus outbreak peaks in Brazil, where social distancing is proving problematic, not least because of President Jair Bolsonaro. With Brazilians increasingly ignoring health officials' warnings to stay home -- encouraged by their far-right president, who has condemned the "hysteria" over the virus -- predictions for how the pandemic will play out in the hardest-hit country in Latin America are getting dire. Brazil, an country of 210 million people, has registered 1,532 deaths from the new coronavirus so far. But the state of Sao Paulo alone is expecting 111,000 deaths over six months, nearly equal to the entire worldwide toll to date. A number of states face the possibility that their healthcare systems will collapse. They include Sao Paulo; Rio de Janeiro, the second-hardest hit; and Amazonas, a huge territory with a large number of indigenous communities that have a tragic history of being decimated by new diseases. Veloso, the head of the main hospital fighting COVID-19 in Rio de Janeiro, says her staff are already tired, sick and running out of protective equipment. Her hospital, the National Infectious Diseases Institute, is rushing to build a new facility with 200 intensive care beds, train new staff, and buy scarce ventilators and face masks. What happens if they are not ready for the crush of patients expected to start later this month? "I try not to think about that," she told AFP. "It's too much stress. When I do think about it, I think about all the deaths we'll have here, and how they will hit us unequally. The wealthiest people will not be hurt as much as the poorest, the people who live in the favelas" -- the crowded slums of tin-roof shacks that coexist, sometimes side by side, with Brazil's posh neighborhoods. - Anti-isolationist-in-chief - Known for its wild carnivals, sultry climate, pulsing mega-cities and sprawling size, Brazil has not been very good at social distancing. Surfers in Rio de Janeiro, anti-isolation protesters in Sao Paulo and people who simply need to work are increasingly flouting state and local authorities' measures to "flatten the curve." In Sao Paulo, the proportion of the population staying home has dipped as low as 47 percent, according to monitoring based on cell phone location data -- far below the goal of 80 percent. The offender-in-chief is Bolsonaro, who has compared the virus to a "little flu," condemned the economic impact of stay-at-home measures and proudly broken them himself, insisting on his "constitutional right to come and go as I please." Dr Veloso said she was worried by a visible decline in social distancing. "It's the only chance we have to avoid the collapse of the healthcare system," she said. - Alarm bells - There are worrying signs in various places. Sao Paulo has at least five hospitals with more than 70 percent of intensive care beds occupied by coronavirus patients -- a percentage that is rising rapidly. A study found the municipal health system faced collapse by April 19 if social distancing measures were not intensified. Rio Health Secretary Edmar Santos said his state can handle around 16,000 hospitalizations, but fears the number will reach 40,000 to 50,000. Rio Governor Wilson Witzel, himself fighting off the virus, said the state could run out of ventilators by April 28. In Amazonas, the health system is already on the brink of collapse. Its capital, Manaus, is the only city with an intensive care unit. Its 50 beds serve a state more than four times the area of Germany. Brazilian media report that new patients have to wait for someone to die to be admitted. The government has started building field hospitals to boost capacity in such cases. It is urgently sourcing ventilators and medical supplies, and deploying more than 1,000 nurses and 80 doctors as reinforcements. "The curve (of infections) in Manaus is very close to the line of health system capacity... So we are trying to move that line, to increase capacity," health ministry official Joao Gabbardo said Saturday. But there are limits to how far and how fast it can move. Public health officials report that vital supplies and equipment such as face masks and ventilators are increasingly difficult to source, with international suppliers sometimes charging quadruple the usual price or more. Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro (3-L), who has scorned social distancing measures to combat COVID-19, is pictured here without a mask as he visits the site of a field hospital under construction in Aguas Lindas, Goias State to handle virus cases Health care workers in Brasilia applaud a 99-year-old former WWII combat veteran Ermando Armelino Piveta as he leaves a military hospital in Brasilia after surviving a bout of COVID-19 People go through a spray of disinfectant solution at the entrance of a train station in Osasco, Sao Paulo state, Brazil, on April 14, 2020 Brazil is erecting field hospitals, like this one in Aguas Lindas, Goias State, in a race against time to prepare for a mounting wave of coronavirus cases
But there are professional, educational and financial resources for laid-off and furloughed workers.

WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind.  Like the rest of the United States, Tippecanoe County has been hit hard by unemployment caused by the COVID-19 crisis. As many companies temporarily halt operations, recently laid-off or furloughed workers still have opportunities to advance their careers, education and finances, according to Purdue career and personal finance experts.

Each of the past three weeks saw a record-breaking number of people filing for unemployment insurance in the county. As of Monday (April 13), more than 5,600 initial unemployment claims were filed in the three-week period, according to statistics from the Indiana Department of Workforce Development. By comparison, the same three weeks in March and April last year totaled just more than 70 claims.

Some of the countys largest employers and manufacturers, including Subaru of Indiana Automotive Inc. (SIA) and Caterpillar Inc., have temporarily suspended operations, with SIA ceasing pay beginning this week for all nonessential employees. Wabash National Corp. is set to furlough most of its hourly and salaried staff from April 20 through May 3.

These are cyclical industries, said Purdue labor economist Timothy Bond, an associate professor in the Krannert School of Management and faculty affiliate in the Purdue University Research Center in Economics. These are industries that thrive when times are good but are vulnerable to a downturn if the economy gets hit really hard. An automobile, for example, is a durable good that consumers can delay purchasing if times are rough.

But there are jobs available in Tippecanoe County and across the country, Bond said. Lafayette Venetian Blind Inc., another top-10 employer in the county, temporarily reopened to produce N95 masks, while other manufacturers in Indiana and the United States are converting operations to make ventilators and other medical equipment. Meanwhile, grocery stores like Pay Less Super Markets and e-commerce companies like Amazon are hiring to cope with a spike in demand.

Demand has suddenly been shifted toward grocery stores, so theres been a reallocation of workers into that supply chain, Bond said. But two to three months from now there could be layoffs as they reorient the supply chain back to where it was. The same thing could happen for manufacturers that switch to making ventilators, which have a finite demand. Once that demand is met, the industry is going to be laying off workers or reallocating them back to a different manufacturing purpose.

Job search going virtual

One industry is thriving amid historic unemployment and unprecedented measures encouraging Americans to stay at home: virtual platforms, such as CareerEco, vFairs and Brazen, that allow companies to remotely host job fairs, as well as recruit and hire job candidates.

And there are a number of online tips and resources available to Purdue students, alumni and the general public who are considering going back to school, starting their own businesses or changing career fields, said Timothy Luzader, director of the Center for Career Opportunities (CCO). Those include:

Update LinkedIn accounts and personal websites.

Apply for jobs online and participate in virtual job fairs.

Keep a professional appearance for remote video interviews.

Check out the Career Success Handbook for tips on resume writing, interviewing and interview attire.

Utilize entrepreneurial resources through the Purdue Foundry.

Take advantage of Purdues free and discounted tuition options for recently laid-off and furloughed workers.

Purdue students and alumni can use the Purdue Career Research Portal, schedule virtual, one-on-one meetings with career consultants, and get resume and cover letter advice by emailing askcco@purdue.edu.

CCO is hosting the Just-in-Time Virtual Job Fair on April 22 with 49 companies from a variety of industries.

People should utilize the online resources that are available to them through LinkedIn, virtual job fairs and their university career and alumni centers, Luzader said. Obviously, even if an interview is virtual, they want you to dress the part and make a professional appearance.

Financial resources to make ends meet

Many peoples finances are taking a hit during the economic downturn, while others are preparing for economic uncertainty ahead, both of which are stressful experiences, said Naomi Bechtold, a Purdue Extension specialist in family resource management and an accredited financial counselor.

The first thing people are experiencing is a tremendous amount of stress, Bechtold said. Dont blame yourself. Dont keep this anxiety bottled up, and take things one at a time. If youre busy panicking, you cant do anything else. Take a deep breath.

People facing unemployment or reduced income can use these tips and resources available through Purdue Extension and other organizations to safeguard their finances and apply for public assistance, Bechtold said.

Create a spending/saving plan, learn how to manage stress and seek other resources by using nine Purdue Extension fact sheets on maintaining financial control during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Visit Aunt Bertha to find a variety of local, community-specific resources for income assistance, housing needs, education needs, food needs, transportation and other social services.

Contact your township trustee for income assistance.

Call Indiana 211 or visit online.

Writer: Joseph Paul, 765-494-9541, paul102@purdue.edu

Sources: Timothy Bond, bond10@purdue.edu (also available for phone and webcam interviews)

Timothy Luzader, tluzader@purdue.edu (also available for phone and webcam interviews)

Naomi Bechtold, nbechtol@purdue.edu (also available for phone and webcam interviews)
The Centre for Democratic Development (CDD-Ghana) is urging the Electoral Commission (EC) to find other ways to compile a new voters register ahead of the 2020 general elections.

Its Director of Advocacy and Policy Engagement, Dr. Kojo Asante, noted that if the Coronavirus Pandemic persists beyond the month of May, the EC will be left with very little room to roll out its full calendar including the compilation of a new register.

The Electoral Commission has been forced to suspended indefinitely plans to compile a new voters register which was scheduled to begin on April 18th.

By the time you take nominations [from political parties], you are close to October or the end of October. That is the reality you are dealing with. And that is why I make the point that if you can't do May then really you have to look at alternatives to actually compiling a new register, Dr Kojo Asante said to Citi News.

The EC has it is collaborating with health experts to decide on a more favourable date depending on the prevalence rate of the virus.

The virus, which has infected 636 persons across 10 regions, has prompted a ban on public gatherings and a partial lockdown of Accra, Kasoa, Kumasi and Tema.

Nonetheless, a lawyer and member of the Council of State, Sam Okudzeto, has urged the EC to start the voters' registration exercise outside the partial lockdown.

Our cases of the Coronavirus is not as dramatic as it is in many countries which means that we only have few pockets in the two big municipalities and few of the smaller ones but also just small areas of the regions. So since the lockdown is not the whole of Ghana, the EC should start the registration in the areas there is on lockdown and that would have covered a large chunk of the country, he argued.

---citinewsroom
(Bloomberg Opinion) -- For Lukoil PJSCs billionaire shareholder, Leonid Fedun, Russias decision to sign up to the OPEC+ oil deal was akin to its signing of the 1918 Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, which dragged the country out of the First World War. Both were humiliating, but necessary, he implied. The alternative was far worse.

Back in early March, Russia, with its strong foreign currency reserves and low-cost producers, had expected to ride out the misery of tumbling crude prices. Unable to extend an existing output reduction deal with its fellow oil exporters, it spied an opportunity to squeeze out those seen by Moscow as free riders: namely, the U.S. shale producers who benefited from others production restraint, only to flood the market with supply.

In the end, though, the damage inflicted by the coronavirus lockdowns on oil demand was too great. The potential geopolitical gains from being seen to participate in a solution  and the losses from being seen to hamper one  were too significant. Storage was running out. Russia agreed to cut.

The real challenge lies ahead. Saudi Arabia and Russia have said they will split the burden of the reductions, cutting 5 million barrels a day between them initially from a baseline set at 11 million. Thats half the total cuts agreed by the OPEC+ group (including the old OPEC nations and other producers). Yet Moscows concessions will mean far greater technical risks and future costs for its oil companies, which have had to become increasingly ingenious to keep mature fields alive. That means compliance with the deals targets looks trickier too.

Russia could have coped for longer with rock-bottom prices. It has a rainy-day fund for just such times. Yet President Vladimir Putin needed to ease the economic pain from Covid-19 at home, and higher crude prices would help. He will also hope that participating in a deal that satisfies U.S. President Donald Trump may pay dividends elsewhere, say, in sanctions. Unfortunately, what makes sense at the virtual negotiating table isnt always straightforward in practice.

Story continues

To hit its target for May and Junes cuts, Russia will need to remove 2.8 million barrels a day from its reported March liquids production levels. Even if you exclude gas condensate, the Oxford Institute for Energy Studies estimates thats still 2 million barrels to be cut  one-fifth of the countrys crude production and double what commodities trader Trafigura estimated that Russia could concede, and what Moscow itself had indicated. It would take Russia back to production levels last seen in 2003.

The difficulty isnt cutting back. Indeed, thats the easy bit. The trouble is that Russias mature fields account for some 80 percent of its production, and they arent easy to just turn off and on again. Cuts need to be made without hurting companies ability to ramp back up at a reasonable cost. Plus theyll need to be delivered in a way that doesnt make the remaining production uneconomic. Kirill Tachennikov, an analyst at BCS Global Markets, estimates that half of these fields arent technically equipped to easily alter supply. And thats before considering other implications, such as local employment and changes to electricity consumption.

The question, then, is how Russias commitment will be spread between producers, not all of them state-controlled. So far, Energy Minister Alexander Novak has said the companies agree that radical measures are needed, but theres scant detail on how theyll deliver them. Rosneft PJSC accounts for almost 40% of Russian production, but it may find it easier to argue its way out of some restrictions thanks to its crude production thats pre-sold to China. Producers such as Tatneft PJSC, with a greater share of mature fields, will suffer more.

There are some levers that Russian producers can pull: Turning more crude into profitable refined products, for example. There may be some room too for maneuver around the conversion between Russias official numbers, in metric tons, and the statistics in barrels per day. Vitaly Yermakov at the Oxford Institute for Energy Studies points out that much of Russian production, say from Eastern Siberia and Sakhalin, is of lighter oil, so that means producers get more barrels from their oil, which should make the cuts more manageable.

There are some silver linings, too: The weather is warming, which may reduce some of the difficulties in making these changes to ice-bound facilities. The weaker rouble will also reduce costs and may protect future projects, as their cost in dollar terms come down. And at the best of times its hard for OPEC+ to monitor compliance, especially for pipeline exports.

Avoiding short-term pain, though, looks impossible.

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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The Ghana Energy Awards (GEA) on Tuesday commended government for its intervention in both the electricity and water sectors in the wake of the COVID-19 to ease the hardships on Ghanaians.



President Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo, in his last address to the nation, said government had absorbed full electricity bills for all lifeline consumers and 50 per cent for both residential and commercial consumers for the months of April, May and June.



The Government has also absorbed the water bills for all citizens to facilitate the handwashing with soap and generally lesson the economic hardships on the public for those three months.



This was in a statement signed by Henry Teinor, Event Director of GEA, and copied to the Ghana News Agency in Accra.



It said the swift steps taken by government to contain the spread of the virus had been applauded by Ghanaians and the international community.



"GEA will like to appeal to energy sector players in the country to join government in the fight against the spread of the Coronavirus and its impact on economic and social life," it said.



The statement encouraged the stakeholders to support affected communities through preventive interventions and provision of relief items to complement government's interventions.



It commended various industry players and other private organisations for their donations to the COVID-19 Fund, urging other individuals and corporate groups to emulate this gesture of humanitarianism.



"We commend our frontline workers and those directly involved in the fight against the spread of the disease and urged all stakeholders to keep safe and trust that the nation will emerge out of the pandemic".



The statement implored on all and sundry to adhere to the precautionary measures by the President and the health authorities to stay safe.



The Ghana Energy Awards aims to recognise the innovation, excellence and efforts of stalwarts within the energy sector.

Source: GNA









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Pearland Mayor Tom Reid has signed an order expanding where registered food truck vendors can operate while requiring that they adhere to social distancing guidelines during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The order came in response to public complaints over people crowding in front and around the trucks, which goes against the Centers for Disease Control guidelines and local orders requiring social distancing, city spokesman Josh Lee said.

ON HOUSTONCHRONICLE.COM: Coronavirus live updates: Houston approves airlines deal, Texas businesses fight to be 'essential'

Concerns were expressed about food trucks operating in nonpermitted areas and the crowds that were gathering around them and in their vicinity, he said.

Under the new order, food trucks registered with the city can operate their vehicles on private property with owners permission and off public streets to prevent any traffic or other hazardous conditions. No more than two trucks can operate in the same location at one time, and vendors must serve by pre-order from vehicles for pick up. Trucks must also display and abide by social distancing guidelines as well as supply hand sanitizer for customers to use.

Prior to order, food trucks were limited to (operating) in only permitted special events and the two breweries (in the city), Lee said. Additionally, there was no specific regulation related to spacing of customers or provision of hand sanitizer.

COVID-19 PROMPTS ORDER: Pearland mayor issues stay-at-home order

The order went into effect on April 8 and will remain in effect until April 30.

According to the city, the order is a safety-first initiative that also supports local vendors efforts to remain in business.

In late March, Reid issued a stay-at-home order for residents, following Brazoria County Judge Matt Sebestas Stay Safe at Home directive.

yorozco@hcnonline.com
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Britain's coronavirus lockdown looks all but certain to be extended, forcing Britons to stay at home for several more weeks at least, after the Health Secretary warned tonight there could be no 'let up' yet.

On the eve of a formal UK government announcement on whether to keep the movement restrictions in place Matt Hancock warned the public that the stringent measures would not be relaxed 'until it is safe to do so.'

His announcement at the daily Downing Street news conference claim after Northern Ireland declared its coronavirus lockdown will stay in place for another three weeks.

First Minister Arlene Foster said the measures were still 'appropriate and proportionate' in the province as the disease continues its deadly progress.

Addressing the public tonight Mr Hancock said: 'We cannot let up in our efforts, we cannot let go of the hard work that's been done so far.

'This shared sacrifice - and I know it's a sacrifice - is starting to work but we will not lift these measures until it is safe to do so.'

On the eve of a formal UK government announcement on whether to keep the movement restrictions in place Matt Hancock warned the public that the stringent measures would not be relaxed 'until it is safe to do so'

Ulster's First Minister Arlene Foster (pictured in Stormont today) said the measures were still 'appropriate and proportionate' in the province as the disease continues its deadly progress

The news comes with ministers under huge pressure to come up with an 'exit strategy' from the draconian restrictions after the scale of the looming economic meltdown became clear.

Although the decision tomorrow is now a formality, Cabinet infighting is in full swing over how and when to ease the draconian curbs strangling UK plc - with demands for primary schools and non-essential shops to reopen early next month.

The row escalated after the government's own watchdog issued apocalyptic estimates for what three months in lockdown would mean - suggesting GDP will crash 35 per cent this quarter and two million people lose their jobs. It said 'for now' it was assuming there would be a fairly rapid bounce back - but the recession would still be the worst for 300 years.

Labour has also turned up the temperature on the government, with new leader Keir Starmer saying it is 'obvious' restrictions must continue in the coming weeks, but calling for clarity on 'what happens next'.

However, a senior government source suggested they could not trust the public with their plans. 'Talk of an exit strategy before we have reached the peak risks confusing the critical message that people need to stay at home in order to protect our NHS and save lives,' the source said.

Speaking at a briefing at Stormont this afternoon Ms Foster said: 'The next phase is recovery. We are not at that stage yet... but it is right we have to plan for the recovery.

'The regulations staying place for the next three weeks and we will be reviewing that coming up to that date as to whether we can relax those or we need another period of time.

'But I think it is right, it is appropriate and it is proportionate that we keep in place these regulations for another three weeks.'

On another tumultuous day of crisis:

Sir John Sawers said Beijing was not honest when the disease first surfaced and faced 'anger' from the international community;

Health minister Helen Whately has been criticised for smiling in an interview as she was confronted with claims over 4,000 deaths in care homes;

Questions have been raised over why the membership of the influential Scientific Advisory Group on Emergencies (SAGE) is being kept secret;

Just a quarter of firms applying for business interruption loans have received support, despite over 1.1billion being handed out so far;

Captain Tom Moore, a 99-year-old veteran who is walking 100 lengths of his garden to support the NHS, has now raised more than 6million;

The Duke of Westminster has donated an extra 10million to the UK's coronavirus relief effort, with the majority going to the NHS.

The OBR's estimate of a 13 per cent plunge in GDP this year would be the largest since 1709 when the coldest winter in 500 years - known as the Great Frost - wreaked havoc across Europe

Labour has also turned up the temperature on the government, with new leader Keir Starmer saying it is 'obvious' restrictions must continue in the coming weeks, but calling for clarity on 'what happens next'

Keir Starmer urges ministers to unveil plan and slams 'mistakes' Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer today urged ministers to show Britons 'light at the end of the tunnel' over the coronavirus outbreak. Sir Keir also insisted that while he backed the lockdown staying in place for now, the government had made 'mistakes' in its handling. He told ITV's Good Morning Britain: 'It's obvious that the lockdown is going to continue and we are going to support the Government in that. 'But, I do think, the question therefore is what comes next?' He added: 'People are trusting the Government... but they do need to see light at the end of the tunnel. 'I'm not asking the Government for timings, of course, I understand why they can't give us timings. But we do need the trust of the public as we go forward.' Sir Keir said: 'There are some criticisms of the planning of the Government previously, and what we need to make sure is that the planning is going in now for the exit strategy.' The Labour leader said: 'It is clear to me that mistakes have been made and things haven't been done as quickly as they should. 'I'm challenging the Government today to make sure we don't make those mistakes again.' Advertisement

The wrangling came as the death toll for patients in hospital who tested positive for coronavirus rose above 12,000 - and fears were raised the numbers in care homes could be far more.

There are growing complaints that the Cabinet is rudderless, with decisions being effectively put on ice until Boris Johnson completes his recovery from coronavirus.

Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab, who is deputising for the PM, has been dismissed as a 'convenor' of the Cabinet rather than a leader.

Chancellor Rishi Sunak is understood to be among the 'hawk' ministers emphasising the need for lockdown to be eased as early as possible.

After the grim Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) figures yesterday - as well as dire IMF forecasts that the global economy is facing its deepest recession for 90 years - Mr Sunak told a Downing Street briefing that people must brace for 'hardship'.

Whitehall sources told the Mail that the Chancellor fears some members of the public have 'over-interpreted' the lockdown advice and believe only designated key workers should be working.

He is said to be pushing for ministers to 'strengthen the message' that people should be trying to work unless their sector has been directly shut down or they can not practise social distancing.

And he warned colleagues the Government risks causing permanent damage to the economy if the lockdown goes on too long.

In a sign of tensions, one Cabinet minister told The Daily Telegraph: 'We should begin to release the things that can be released, so primary schools and non-essential shops could reopen. If you can go into Sainsbury's to buy non-essential items while observing social distancing rules, why not other shops?'

Suggesting that pensioners will have to sacrifice their freedom to let the country get back to normal, the minister added: 'It looks like elderly and vulnerable people are going to be self-isolating for six months rather than three.'

Former chancellor Sajid Javid told BBC Radio 4's Today programme the government must 'phase out' lockdown 'as soon as we possibly can'.

'I think it is the right policy because it is based on scientific and medical advice,' he said.

'That said, we should be trying to phase out this lockdown as soon as we possibly can, based on that scientific and medical advice.

'Because that will make the biggest immediate difference to the economic pain the country is going through.'

The OBR said unemployment could hit 3.4 million - up from 1.3million - leaving around one in 10 of the working population without a job, while the economy may shrink by 35 per cent between April and June.

In its first estimate of the economic toll taken by the crisis, the watchdog said public sector net borrowing is expected to increase by 218billion this year, compared with March forecasts, hitting 273billion, or 14 per cent of GDP.

Sunak 'pushing to ease lockdown next month' Chancellor Rishi Sunak is pushing to ease the lockdown next month by encouraging more people to return to work where they can do so safely. Whitehall sources told the Daily Mail that the Chancellor fears some members of the public have 'over-interpreted' the lockdown advice and believe only designated key workers should be working. He is said to be pushing for ministers to 'strengthen the message' that people should be trying to work unless their sector has been directly shut down or they can not practise social distancing. And he warned colleagues the Government risks causing permanent damage to the economy if the lockdown goes on too long. Advertisement

'That would be the largest single-year deficit since the Second World War,' the independent forecaster said.

'The sharp rise in borrowing this year largely reflects the impact of economic disruption on receipts (with smaller effects from policy measures like the business rates holidays) and policy measures that add to public spending (with smaller effects from higher unemployment).'

It based the outlook on a scenario where the lockdown lasts three months followed by a partial lifting for three months, but said, in this case, that there would be a sharp bounceback in the economy, with gross domestic product likely to jump 25 per cent in the third quarter and a further 20 per cent in the final three months of 2020.

A separate survey by the British Chambers of Commerce today suggested around one in three British businesses has furloughed between 75 per cent and 100 per cent of its workforce due to the coronavirus crisis.

The OBR revealed grim estimates for what could happen to the economy if lockdown goes on for three months, and is then partially lifted for another three months. An eye-watering 35 per cent crash in GDP during the second quarter would be partially offset by a rebound in the rest of the year due to pent-up demand and government bailouts (left). Meanwhile, the spike in unemployment would take much longer to unwind (right)

Medical staff done personal protective gear as they get ready to carry out tests on NHS workers in Belfast today

World economy faces worst slump since Great Depression, says IMF The world economy is facing its worst year since the Great Depression of the 1930s, the IMF has warned. The fund said it expects the global economy to shrink 3 per cent - far worse than its 0.1 per cent dip in the Great Recession year of 2009 - before rebounding in 2021 with 5.8 per cent growth. The 'best case' scenario would see $9trillion wiped off global GDP over this year and next - greater than the size of Germany and Japan combined. It acknowledged that prospects for a rebound next year are clouded by uncertainty. The bleak assessment represents a breathtaking downgrade by the IMF. In its previous forecast in January, before Covid-19 emerged as a grave threat to public health and economic growth worldwide, the international lending organisation had forecast moderate global growth of 3.3 per cent this year. 'The world has been put in a great lockdown,' the IMF's chief economist, Gita Gopinath, told reporters. 'This is a crisis like no other.' Advertisement

Mr Sunak told the daily Downing Street press conference last night: 'These are tough times and there will be more to come. As I have said before, we cannot protect every business and every household.

'But we came into this crisis with a fundamentally sound economy, powered by the hard work and ingenuity of the British people and British businesses.

'So while those economic impacts are significant, the OBR also expects them to be temporary, with a bounceback in growth.'

Sir Keir Starmer has added his voice to calls for the Government to publish its exit strategy from the lockdown this week.

In a letter to Dominic Raab, who is deputising for Boris Johnson, Sir Keir said Labour would support the Government if, as is expected, it keeps the current measures in place.

But he said: 'The question for Thursday therefore is no longer about whether the lockdown should be extended, but about what the Government's position is on how and when it can be eased in due course and on what criteria that decision will be taken.'

Elsewhere, Health Secretary Matt Hancock said all care home residents and social care staff with coronavirus symptoms will be tested as capacity increases.

He also vowed to provide tests for all potential care home residents before they are discharged from hospital.

It follows intense criticism of the Government's treatment of the sector, with claims it has been forgotten as the disease spread.

Figures released by the Office for National Statistics yesterday showed that 16,387 people died in England and Wales in the week to April 3 - an increase of 5,246 deaths compared with the previous week and 6,082 more than the five-year average.

Covid-19 was mentioned on 3,475 death certificates in the same week, including hospital, care home and community deaths.

But care home providers have warned they are seeing a higher number of cases and deaths than are officially reported, in part due to a time lag with the ONS figures.

Sir Simon Stevens, chief executive of NHS England, is reported to be the latest senior figure leading the UK's response to the crisis to have suffered from coronavirus. The BBC said he had self-isolated for just over a week.

Over GBP1.1 billion has been handed to UK businesses through the Coronavirus Business Interruption Loan Scheme (CBILS), according to new figures.

However, less than a quarter of firms which have formally applied for the loans have secured cash support.

UK Finance said lending through the scheme has grown by 700million over the past week, an increase of around 150 per cent.

It said 6,020 loans have now been provided to businesses through the programme.

The pace of loan approvals has increased in recent days, rising from 240 loans on April 2 to 910 on April 8, with a further 1,800 loans worth over 300million recorded over the bank holiday weekend.

It comes after calls from business groups, such as the British Chamber of Commerce (BCC), for the loan scheme to be accelerated to ensure small and medium-sized businesses can stay afloat.

UK Finance said lenders have received 28,460 formal applications from businesses, meaning that fewer than one in four applications have currently been approved.

However, it is understood that around 300,000 businesses have made inquiries regarding the loan scheme.
Malta Issues Payroll Tax Guidance On COVID-19 Wage Supplement

by Jason Gorringe, Tax-News.com, London

15 April 2020

On April 4, 2020, Malta released payroll tax-related guidance for employers on the Government's responses to the COVID-19 epidemic.

Malta has introduced a wage supplement, of EUR800 or less according to eligibility. The payment is intended to replace the normal wages of an employee. It is taxable in the hands of the employee.

The guidance advises that, for payroll purposes, the income should be added to any income received by the employee during the pay period and tax and social security contributions liability should be calculated using the standard method.

The employer should record receiving the wage supplement and pay this gross to the employee. The payslip should show the gross paid (that is, EUR800 or the amount eligible), the guidance states.

The wage supplement paid to employers will not be treated as income or grant to the employer for Income Tax purposes. It is therefore not taxable or tax deductible for the employer.

Government will give EUR800 (or less according to eligibility) to the employer for each employee, though it will retain 10 percent SSC (EUR80 or less) as prepaid employees' share of social security contribution (SSC).

The employer will then calculate what is due in totality to CFR (that is, the employer's and employee's share, Maternity Contribution, and taxes) and deduct therefrom the amount of SSC prepaid to the Commissioner for Revenue (CFR).

On Form FS5, the total due to CFR less the SSC when the wage supplement is paid, will be shown in box D5.

On FS7/FS3 reporting, the Government said Malta Enterprise will provide the full details of the applications to the CFR. Therefore, employers will report the wages supplement paid to employees in the normal FS3 forms. FS7 will be modified to show the amounts paid to employers and the SSC withheld from the wage supplement, the guidance concludes.
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The following is adapted by Dr. Lewis Andrews from his new book,Living Spiritually in the Material World(Fidelis Books).

As people around the world self-quarantine with no clear end in sight, there is a growing restiveness for which the predictable advice of catching up on long-deferred chores or finding something new on Netflix goes only so far. For those of us long accustomed to the convenience of cars, subways, planes, and trains, it should be no surprise many have begun to feel tortuously confined.

Yet it is easy to forget the wide-ranging mobility we all miss is a very recent historical development. Little more than a century ago, almost every American lived on a remote farm, in an isolated hunters cabin, or in a small village.

Prior to the Industrial Revolution, helping rural Americans cope with seclusion was one of the Christian ministers most important tasks. It was for this reason those who trained pastors  the clerical presidents of Americas early colleges and universities thought a lot about Biblical solutions to the challenge of geographic confinement.

Unsurprisingly, prayers for Divine guidance and expressions of gratitude for daily blessings were considered as necessary to tackle this problem as any other. But the presidents also knew Scripture contained important teachings for specific problems teachings which in the case of restless boredom had the power, not only to calm it, but to make believers even better for their trial.

The Great Insight

What the early college presidents learned from their reading of Scripture was what we today call cabin fever is in many ways psychologically similar to the experience of any person who has drifted too far from God. The self-quarantined individual may be more quick tempered, more susceptible to exaggerated fears, and more inclined to overeat  while the spiritually empty person tends to act out escapist fantasies involving drugs, illicit sex, or other irresponsible behaviors  but both are suffering from moodiness and discontent.

Of course, the one whose distress comes from a physical, as opposed to spiritual, isolation at least knows why he or she is miserable. This was why Princeton president James McCosh (18681888) took pains to warn graduating seniors that a cosmopolitan career might save them from the boredom of country living, but not from the psychological consequences of becoming too materialistic.

You [will frequently] feel that there is something unsatisfying in these very comforts and enjoyments you choose to pursue, he said. The eye is not satisfied with seeing, nor the ear with hearing, nor ambition with success, nor the lust with gratification. Ay, there is something wanting, and you know it; you feel it at times, though you may not yet know what it is that would fill the void.

Like another famous nineteenth-century college president, Yales Theodore Woolsey (18461871), McCosh knew this secular want of enjoyment for which no earthly enjoyment can compensate is just as likely to occur in the best of times as in the worst. Even when ones personal and career dreams seem to be coming true and there is not a financial or health-related cloud in the sky.

The Christian Solution

If both physical and spiritual isolation produce a similar kind of cabin fever, the early college presidents knew, so they require a similar cure: to stop what one is doing in moments of desperation, to carve out sufficient time and space to turn inward, and to ask Jesus what he would want done. The temptation to seek relief in change of circumstances rather than in change of self is perhaps peculiarly strong for Americans, Oberlin College president Henry Churchill King (19021927) once observed, but in any pressured situation there are always two conceivable ways of deliverance: the one, that of simple escape from the circumstances; the other, that of rising superior to the circumstances .

King, like every other clerical college president, understood the design of the Lords Prayer was no accident. It begins, not with give us this day our daily bread, forgive us our debts, or lead us not into temptation but with, hallowed be Thy name. Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done in earth, as it is in heaven. (Matthew 6:913)

The very act of deferring to Christ, even when extremely agitated or despairing, has the immediate effect of making ones material conditions seem less dire, Franklin and Marshall College president John Williamson Nevin (18661876) would tell his students: The simple act of turning to Christ is itself at once somehow felt to be an act of rest and peace, a sense of returning health, which no power on earth [can] give.

Though at first there is no perfect harmony in the soul when that step is taken, and all around still seems confusion and darkness, Nevin went on to explain, the restlessness and sense of being hopelessly boxed-in will ebb over time. There springs up  a light on the tempest-tossed sea of life,  a star of hope rejoicing the soul.

As Scripture tries to inform us, [K]nock, and it shall be opened unto you. (Matthew 7:7) Or as it says in John 14:27: Peace I leave with you, my peace I give unto you: not as the world giveth, give I unto you. Let not your heart be troubled, neither let it be afraid.

Augustus Hopkins Strong, president and professor of theology at the Rochester Theological Seminary from 1872 until 1912, liked to tell the story of a young minister who once complained that all his projects, no matter how well-intentioned, always left him feeling moody and dissatisfied. Irritated and discouraged, he feared his studies had come to nothing and desired to know what he should do.

This mans problem, Strong explained, was in looking for a dramatic change of external circumstances. He forgot Gods greatest gift is the knowledge one is working with and for Christ: While he has been looking outside for this thing or that, for this communication or that, he has been ignoring the fact that the one unspeakable gift of God is Christ himself.

In telling this story, Strong went on to confess that before he learned this lesson for himself, he typically worked in a plodding, burdened, fearing, [and] distressful way. I had none of the joy that normally belongs to the Christian life, he admitted.

It was not until he pondered the Scriptural words I am the vine; ye are the branches (John 15:5) when Strong realized the early disciples were full of hope and power just because they knew Christ was in them. They lived by faith in the Son of God, regardless their immediate situations. With that realization, Strong learned the secret of Christianity and it wrought a great transformation in my experience.

A Uniquely Favorable Position

Those of us self-quarantining in the common effort to flatten the coronavirus curve are in a uniquely favorable position to act on Strongs wisdom. Not currently slaves to the tighter schedules and heightened social expectations of living in the larger world, we can more easily turn inward and ask for Christs guidance when especially stressed. Even with the demands of a large household, the customs required to negotiate conventional reality can be more comfortably suspended, freeing the soul to less self-consciously reach beyond itself.

Not everyone is fortunate enough to live near the ocean, a lake, or some other inspired setting, but our neighbors willingness to also self-quarantine has produced an additional benefit. The reduction in street noise, traffic congestion, and hurried activity in general has, in effect, returned us to a quieter time.

This slower pace of outside activity will, if we allow ourselves to appreciate it, constructively seep into our being. And as we turn our cabin fever over to Christ, we should not be surprised that ordinary sunsets, morning fogs, or passing rain showers begin to radiate a delightful, almost otherworldly, luminescence.

There is no need for self-quarantine to turn us into chained beasts which howl with rage and bite at our tethers or caged birds that fly about our little prisons looking for the first chance to escape. Our current restriction can, in fact, prompt the most profound liberation.

As Americas early college presidents advised seminary students about to head for the distant reaches of a vast and undeveloped country: the happiness of their parishioners would depend less, in the end, on any kind of civic progress than on their willingness to look up just as often as they looked around.
Today, 15th April Ghana and nations around the world commemorate World Art Day with art exhibitions, symposiums, conferences, workshops, etc in the spirit of world peace, freedom of expression, tolerance, brotherhood and multiculturalism as well projecting art as an important discipline to the other fields of study.



This years celebration marks the 8th edition of the international Association of Art (IAA) and the 5th for Ghana. Ghana Association of Visual Artists (GAVA) as the umbrella artistic body and for that matter Ghana, became a member of the international Association in 2015 and has since spearheaded the celebration of the event in Ghana with active support from Accra Metropolitan Assembly and other artistic organizations including Ghana Grafiti and PITO among others.



Every year on 15th April, World Art Day is celebrated globally. This decision was the result of extensive debate conducted by an ad hoc, Turkish committee constituted for that purpose, where other dates were considered. The date happened to be the birth date of Leonardo Da Vinci. As an artist of great exploits, with many discoveries in Art, Civil Engineering, Optics, Hydrodynamics and Creative writing skills, he was adjudged to stand head and shoulders above all other honourable artists who had left their permanent mark on our world, including Michelangelo, Rembrandt, Picasso, Salvador Dali and Marcel Duchamp among others.



ln the Report of the Turkish Committee, to the 17th General Assembly of the International Association of Art (IAA) in Guadalajara  Turkey, 15th April was recommended for the celebration of World Art Day annually, across the world. ln the year 2012, the celebration of World Art Day commenced.



Currently however, the scourge of the Covid19 Pandemic has brought to the fore, the importance of observing all the safety protocols as directed by the state, towards the effective and efficient management of the disease. Some activities such as art exhibitions, conferences, symposiums, workshops etc., that could have brought people together to celebrate the occasion, have been temporarily put on ice, as a result of the strict observance of directives such as social distancing, avoiding of handshakes, frequent washing of hands and other hygiene protocols to prevent the spread of the Corona virus.



President of the Ghana Association of Visual Artists (GAVA), Nana Otuo Owoahene Acheampong who spoke to newsmen in an interview noted that in spite of this unfortunate development of the Covid-19 pandemic, Ghanas version of the World Art Day shall be observed by artists and others around the world in innovative ways under the theme: Artists and Creativity beyond Crisis and will be done in the absence of physical meetings because art is a creative endeavour he observed.



Nana Owoahene Acheampong was optimistic that as safety precautions are adhered to, by all and sundry in Ghana and around the world and the necessary remedies are obtained by the state towards the effective management of the Covid19 Pandemic, the disease shall be eventually eradicated.



He urged all Artists and the general public to endeavour to stay safe by following protocols outlined by the Government and Health officials as we celebrate World Art Day today.

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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ALBANY  Catholic Charities is teaming up with the Regional Food Bank to host a mass food distribution event in the city of Albany on Thursday.

The event, which is expected to feed hundreds, will start at 9:30 a.m. at the Pastoral Center located at 40 North Main Ave. in Albany. There will be two distribution lines: one for walk-ins and another for drive-through pickup.
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Linkedin Adrian Wail Akhlas (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Wed, April 15, 2020 07:30 637 fc6853813033f564188675f8bd1e9506 1 Business economic-growth,IMF,poverty,unemployment,global-recession,Great-Depression,COVID-19,coronavirus,Indonesia Free

The government estimates that up to 3.78 million Indonesians will fall into poverty and 5.2 million lose their jobs during the coronavirus pandemic, while the International Monetary Fund (IMF) projects the worst global recession since the Great Depression.

Finance Minister Sri Mulyani Indrawati said Tuesday that, with economic growth projected at the lowest level since the 1998 financial crisis, 1.1 million to 3.78 million people could fall into poverty and 2.9 million to 5.2 million workers could lose their jobs.

COVID-19 has resulted in the global economy entering a recession, Sri Mulyani said in a teleconferenced briefing, reiterating the governments use of state funds to increase spending on health, social safety and support for businesses.

The minister explained there would be support for business activity from the informal sector to micro, small and medium enterprises and the business world. Because this is related to layoffs and social repercussions.

The IMF on Tuesday released its new World Economic Outlook titled The Great Lockdown, estimating Indonesias economic growth to plunge to 0.5 percent this year from a four-year low of 5.02 percent in 2019.

The IMF also projects that the countrys unemployment rate will rise to 7.5 percent this year, from last years 5.3 percent as the pandemic has upended supply chains, forcing companies to lay off employees, and crushed demand for goods as consumers stay at home.

Read also: Indonesia braces for recession, activates crisis protocol

As many as 2.8 million people have lost their jobs as of Monday, according to data from the Manpower Ministry and the Workers Social Security Agency (BPJS Ketenagakerjaan). More than half were furloughed and placed on paid or unpaid leave.

The significant downward revision to the 2020 growth projection reflects large anticipated domestic disruptions to economic activity from COVID-19, the report says. The IMF expects the virus to hit Indonesias economy as the country relies heavily on the export of commodities rather than finished goods.

Among developing economies, all countries face a health crisis, severe external demand shock, dramatic tightening in global financial conditions, and a plunge in commodity prices, the report says. They will have a severe impact on economic activity in commodity exporters.

However, the IMF expects that recovery will take place in 2021 as the countrys economy may expand by 8.2 percent, the highest since 1995 during former president Soeharto's leadership.

The global economy is projected to contract by 3 percent this year, but growth is expected to recover in 2021 with a projected rate of 5.8 percent.

It is very likely that this year the global economy will experience its worst recession since the Great Depression, surpassing that seen during the global financial crisis a decade ago, IMF chief economist Gita Gopinath said. Worse growth outcomes are possible and even likely.

This would follow if the pandemic and containment measures last longer, emerging and developing economies are even more severely hit [] or if widespread scarring effects emerge due to firm closures and extended unemployment, she added.

Read also: Avoiding quarantine will inflict greater economic harm, says survey

The highly contagious novel coronavirus has infected more than 1.9 million people and killed over 119,000. In Indonesia, more than 4,500 people have tested positive for COVID-19 so far, while at least 399 have died.

President Joko Jokowi Widodo has declared a public health emergency and a national disaster as large-scale social restrictions are in place in several regions with high numbers of confirmed cases.

The economic growth target for 2020 will be corrected sharply, but this will not happen only in Indonesia but also in other countries, Jokowi said on Tuesday. We must prepare ourselves for every scenario and work very hard for public health recovery and economic recovery.

The governments baseline scenario is for Indonesias economic growth to drop to 2.3 percent, the lowest in 21 years, with a worst-case scenario of an economic contraction of 0.4 percent.
Confirmed coronavirus cases neared 2 million worldwide, with over 120,000 people dead.

This year is likely to be the worst for the global economy since the Great Depression, the International Monetary Fund says.

New York City revised its coronavirus toll, adding 3,700 people who were not tested for the virus before they died.

Read the latest updates: World | U.S. | New York | Business

California, spared the worst, considers what comes next

California could have been a catastrophe. It had some of the countrys first coronavirus cases, and its extensive ties to China  150,000 people flew in from there in January alone  made it appear highly vulnerable.

But the state seems to be beating the odds. The virus hasnt spread nearly as explosively in California as it has in New York and New Jersey, and it currently ranks 30th in the nation in coronavirus deaths per capita

Its leaders are now inching forward with plans to gradually ease restrictions as the pandemic ebbs. Gov. Gavin Newsom said on Tuesday that the state intended to switch to less restrictive and more localized measures, but that was not for several weeks at least.

Face coverings will probably still be needed in public, he said. Large gatherings may remain banned through the summer, and students may have to attend school in shifts in the fall to avoid crowding classrooms. Restaurant patrons will probably have their temperature taken before being seated.
According to news published on the Facebook account of ROK armed forces, April 14, 2020, the Republic of Korea Navy's 4th Yangyang-class minesweeper ROKS Namhae (MSH-575) was recently launched by Kangnam Corporation shipyard.

According to news published on the Facebook account of ROK armed forces, April 14, 2020, the Republic of Korea Navy's 4th Yangyang-class minesweeper ROKS Namhae (MSH-575) was recently launched by Kangnam Corporation shipyard.

Yangyang-class minesweeper Ongjin. (Picture source Wikimedia)

The South Korean Navy originally planned to build a total of 8 Yangyang-class MSH, but only 3 were built likely due to budgetary restrictions. The minesweeper acquisition program, once thought abandoned, was recently revived with news of additional ships being built.

Yangyang-class ship is a ship class of minesweepers currently in service on the Republic of Korea Navy. A minesweeper is a small warship designed to engage in minesweeping. Using various mechanisms intended to counter the threat posed by naval mines, waterways are kept clear for safe shipping.

Yangyang-class ships are 60 meters long, 10.5 m wide. They are equipped with a Multi-purpose machine gun, a 20 mm main gun, and Mine Disposal Vehicle (MDV). They use two Voith Schneider Propellers as propulsion, to control the ship more precisely. To perform minesweeping activities, mechanical/inductive minesweeping device and sonars are equipped

To protect the ship from magnetic mine, the ship's hull is made of fiber-reinforced plastic, which does not have a magnetic attraction, and lasts longer than commonly used material. It also minimized metallic equipment to tightly control the magnetic material inside the ship. Steel objects that are brought into the ship, like canned food, are heavily restricted and strictly controlled.

A Kongsberg Simrad integrated navigation and dynamic positioning system is fitted to aid in precise maneuvering during mine hunting and route survey operations. The machinery system comprises two MTU 2,000 bhp diesel driving two independent vertical Voith-Schneider cycloidal propellers through a gearbox and universal joint shaft.
A group of over 50 senior clerics in Pakistan has issued a stern warning to the Imran Khan-led government against the ban on religious congregations during the coronavirus outbreak.

Clerics defy social distancing norms

The Islamic clerics have said the authorities should instead abide by religious norms and allow more worshippers in mosques to seek forgiveness from Allah and to beat the coronavirus, reports Economic Times.

The diktats by the hardliner clerics come after the Pakistan government had decided to ban prayer congregations of more than five people as part of its measures to curb the spread of the deadly coronavirus, which has infected over 5,715 people in Pakistan.

Despite the governments warning not to assemble, more than 53 senior clerics of Rawalpindi and Islamabad belonging to the Wafaqul Madaris al Arabia on Monday held a meeting in Jamia Darul Uloom Zakria to discuss the ban on prayer congregations. Representatives from the Jamiat-e-ulema Islam, Jamiat-e-ulema Pakistan, Jamaat-i-Islami and Tanzeem-e-Islami nad many other religious parties had also attended.

Pakistan Prime Minister Imran Khan had announced a 14-day extension of a national lockdown on Tuesday. He, however, had said the government would make selective exemptions for essential industries to curtail rising unemployment.

Warning to Imran Khan government

The meeting attended by clerics representing various seminaries, banned groups, proscribed persons and political and non-political parties warned the authorities against the ban and said government leaders should abide by religious norms and seek forgiveness.

The warning came anticipating that the government may come up with a plan to impose much more restrictions during the holy month of Ramazan, which will begin in the last week of April.

Mufti Taqi Usmani, a religious scholar and former judge of the Federal Sharia Court in Pakistan stated that the five times daily prayers, and Friday prayers will continue to be held in the Mosques.

Pir Azizur Rehman Hazarvi, president of the Jamia Darul Uloom Zakaria in Islamabad, said, The closure of mosques, shutting down Friday prayers and Taraweeh is unacceptable to the countrymen.

The meeting also did not acknowledge the official directives of a maximum of five persons inside mosques for the collective prayers as the clerics said that the testing times demanded more time for prayers and announced that apart from the five times prayers, Friday and Taraweeh congregations will continue.

However, the clerics agreed to follow some guidelines like the use of hand sanitisers, removal of rugs and carpets, washing of floors, cleaning of hands with soaps and obeyed to follow some sort of social distancing.

Hazarvi said that the senior clerics have noted that all efforts will be made to avoid clash and confrontations with the government and the state institutions.

Willful defying of lockdown

Maulana Abdul Aziz of the Lal Masjid, one of the influential clerics in Pakistan, continued to challenge the authority of Islamabad Capital Territory (ICT) administration by openly flouting the stipulated precautionary measures.

Every week, Aziz reportedly releases footages of huge congregations gathered for Friday prayers, defying the restrictions imposed by the government. As a result, the number of mosques organising large Friday congregations is increasing in Islamabad.

Meanwhile, on Tuesday, 342 new coronavirus cases have been reported in the last 24 hours in Pakistan, taking the total number to 5,716. While 1,378 people have recovered, 96 people have died due to coronavirus in Pakistan.
Like most stocks in this market, Coca-Cola Company (KO) stock has been hit hard by the COVID-19 pandemic. From the market peak in late February through its nadir in late march, Coca-Cola shares lost about 38% of their value. The next three weeks -- through Tuesday's close -- saw Coke shares make up about half of those losses.

Still the stock is down 18% from its February 21 high. Does this make Coke stock a buy?

Investment bank HSBC thinks so. In a recent report to clients, HSBC analyst Carlos Laboy argues that Coca-Cola stock is undervalued at its present price of just under $49 a share, and should fetch a price closer to $53 within a year -- assuming a few conditions are met. (To watch Laboy's track record, click here)

For one thing, Laboy notes that over the past three years, Coca-Cola's profits, and its growth rate, have been bolstered by a policy of charging more for soda "concentrate" sold to its South American bottlers. Problem is, South America is as affected by the global pandemic as any other region, and unlikely to be able to continue paying steep price increases for concentrated sugar water. Additionally, Laboy worries that currency exchange rates between Latin American countries and the U.S. will prove unfavorable to Coke's profits, i.e. weak currencies south of the U.S. border will translate into fewer "dollars" earned on the income statement north of that border.

So going forward, Coke is going to have to find other sources of growth.

Europe, and the United States, are two places to look for such growth. As Laboy explains, bottlers in Europe and the U.S. are "poised to accelerate their growth contribution [to Coca-Cola's profits] as they grow into market developers with better tools and a richer service culture." They're entering this present crisis "with low debt" levels and the capital they will need "to accelerate investment in the Coke system," assuming Coke permits them to do so.

Story continues

Adding growth from Europe and the U.S., argues Laboy, to the strong businesses Coke has built in Latin America, could be the thing that pulls Coke's profits out of the $2-a-share range and pushes them higher.

And yet, at the same time as he expresses this hope, Laboy seems uncertain that Coke will in fact earn more than $2. In fact, in making his projections for the next three years, Laboy projects Coke's earnings first falling from $2.11 earned last year, to just $1.73 earned this year (because of the coronavirus), and growing thereafter -- but only to $1.82 per share in 2021 and $1.93 per share in 2022.

Now, will Coke's earnings be close enough to $2, though, to justify Laboy's "buy" rating on the stock? That depends on how much growth you demand from your investments. $2 a share, dividend into Coke's current share price of about $49, works out to a P/E ratio of 24.5. That's hardly a cheap valuation. It's especially not cheap if you assume (as Laboy does) that Coke will only grow earnings 6% year over year in 2022... and grow only 5% in 2021... and shrink earnings 18% this year.

Even discounting this year's earnings drop as a pandemic-induced fluke, an earnings growth rate of 5% or 6% annually hardly seems fast enough to justify paying 24.5 times earnings. If you ask me, Coke may be "the real thing" -- but Coke stock is hardly a really good deal.

What does the rest of the Street have to say? 13 Buy ratings and 5 Holds add up to a Moderate Buy consensus rating. With a potential upside of nearly 13%, KO stock forecast, on average, stands at $55.24. (See Coca-Cola stock analysis on TipRanks)

To find good ideas for stocks trading at attractive valuations, visit TipRanks Best Stocks to Buy, a newly launched tool that unites all of TipRanks equity insights.
The wheat market is starting to get shaken up by the ,.

Panic buying of food might have largely eased at grocery stores, but governments are beginning to get more serious about securing supplies of key staples like grains. From export restrictions to plans to hoard more, there are signs that typical trade routes are being affected as this season nears an end.

Shipment limits across the key Black Sea region are already having knock-on effects, with cargoes being held up and offers dwindling in the latest tender by Egypt, the biggest buyer. Russia also risks having to share the crown as the worlds top exporter. Plus, the challenges are happening as a threat looms from an enduring wildcard at this time of year: the weather.

The market cant afford any weather-related major accident for production in the coming season since exporters stockpiles are already declining, said Benjamin Bodart, a director at CRM AgriCommodities.

Heres a breakdown of some key factors for the wheat market:

Romanian Ban

The European Unions No. 2 wheat exporter became the first major shipper to formally halt exports last week when it banned sales outside the bloc. While Romania has already sold most of its wheat this season, the ban stranded some vessels at the nations Constanta port and snarled truck traffic, lobby group Coceral said.

The European Commission objected to the move, saying that there arent any signs of food shortages in Romania that warrant limiting trade. The restrictions may help support wheat prices in other suppliers, consultant UkrAgroConsult said. Romanias agriculture minister on Wednesday said the government is monitoring domestic supply and could either extend the export ban or ease it.

Other Black Sea Limits

Russia, Ukraine and Kazakhstan have also put limits on agricultural trade. Though the restrictions are seen loose enough to keep grain flowing, the U.S. government last week cut its outlook for Russian exports to the same level as the EU. That would strip Russia of holding the top ranking alone for the first time since 2016-17.

Russia has already shipped out about a fifth of its 7 million-ton grain quota for the three months through June. Though Russias limit will end before the next harvest, Kazakhstan recently extended its export quota on wheat, flour and other staples until September.

Boosting Imports

There may be no grain shortages yet, but some importers are taking extra and unusual precautions just in case. Egypt plans to buy 800,000 tons of overseas wheat in the next few months, a time it usually focuses on purchasing grain from its own harvest. That may prove challenging, as its tender on Tuesday drew the fewest companies offering in a year.

Lebanon is considering its first wheat imports since 2014, and Saudi Arabia issued a wheat tender for supplies from domestic companies with overseas agricultural investments. Also, Jordan is working to expand its grain storage capacity.

Weather Risk

The supply-chain issues are happening against the usual swing factor at this time of year  the weather. Many top shippers are in the Northern Hemisphere, making April the start of a key period for crop conditions. Dryness in Russia is raising worries about damage to what could be one of the nations biggest-ever crops, and much of Europe has seen a dry spring after an overly-wet winter.

That poses a risk that supply challenges may drag into the 2020-21 season. Though the International Grains Council has forecast global wheat reserves to swell next season, it warned that stockpiles across top exporters may decline.

The current crop year is drawing to a close and exports have already been completed for the most part, Commerzbank analyst Carsten Fritsch said in a report. However, there are signs that the new crop will also experience problems.

About the photo: Hard red spring wheat grows in a field. Photographer: Shannon VanRaes/Bloomberg

Copyright 2022 Bloomberg.
An increasing number of countries could default on their debt in the coming 12-18 months as governments globally increase spending to limit the economic damage from the coronavirus pandemic, an economist said on Wednesday.

"I do think we will see some issues there, possibly we could see a euro zone crisis come back with countries like Greece or Italy ... likely to be at the center of that," Simon Baptist, global chief economist at consultancy The Economist Intelligence Unit, told CNBC's "Capital Connection."

"Across the emerging world, I'll pick out countries like South Africa and Brazil as being likely to suffer a further crisis as a result of this," he added. "And, of course, Argentina has effectively gone back into sovereign default already."

The coronavirus, which has infected more than 1.9 million people globally, has caused governments to take unprecedented actions to lock down entire countries or cities  bringing much of the world's economic activity to a halt.
A "rice ATM" invented in HCMC has inspired similar initiatives nationwide to help those in poverty survive the pandemic.

After Vietnam commences a 15-day nationwide social distancing campaign on April 1, and with all "non-essential" stores shut, Hoang Tuan Anh, an entrepreneur in Ho Chi Minh City, decided to lend those in need a hand.

Worried about the risk those face gathering and waiting on the street for free food, Anh invented an automatic machine that dispenses rice in Saigon's Tan Phu District.

Now, at the touch of a button, the poor can collect 1.5 kilograms of rice 24/7, with three employees working shifts to monitor the system via remote camera.

Anhs rice machine has provided a life-line to those in dire need. Photo by VnExpress/Diep Phan.

Anh had planned to dispense 500 kilograms of rice per day, but distributed nearly one tonne on the first. Since, he has had many offers of support.

"The thing we need most now is rice. I hope to receive more community support," he stated, adding additional "rice ATMs" have been set up in District 12 and Binh Chanh.

Before long, similar machines sprouted in Hanoi and other regions across the country.

Last Saturday, over 700 people in need collected rice from a machine in Hanoi's Cau Giay District. Waiting in line, they were required to stand two meters apart and sanitize their hands before leaving with three kilograms of rice.

It took Nguyen Manh Hung two days to design and gain support for the machine after he learned about the "rice ATM" in Saigon. He dispensed 2.3 tons out of 10 on the first day, mostly to students, workers and the disable.

A motorbike taxi driver collects rice from the Hanoi "ATM". Photo by VnExpress/Phan Duong.

"It is such a pity my house is too far from here, as I will finish the rice soon. I am afraid I couldnt come back for more," said motorbike taxi driver Nguyen Trung Kien, residing 30 kilometers away in Thanh Tri District.

Another "rice ATM" was set up in Hanoi's Bac Tu Liem District on April 13.

In southern Binh Thuan, Dak Lak and Ca Mau provinces, the poor have also collected rice from similar machines amid the national semi-lockdown, posing numerous challenges to their livelihoods.

In Binh Thuan's Phan Thiet Town, a "rice ATM" commenced operation on Monday with nearly 1,000 people waiting in line to receive rice.

Nguyen Thi Nen, 73, said her family did not have enough food since she could not collect and sell trash and used bottles during the social distancing campaign.

"I am happy. I have rice and we will be fed."

Authorities have since printed locals special cards for use at the "ATMs" to receive rice.

In central highlands Dak Lak Province, hundreds queued to receive rice from an "ATM" in Buon Ma Thuot Town Monday.

Dak Lak residents join the rice line on April 13, 2020. Photo by VnExpress/Ngoc Oanh.

Equipped with a sensor, the machine, set up by the local youth association and supporting enterprises, does not require people to press any button, two kilograms of rice dispended at the mere wave of a hand.

"After one day, we supplied over one ton to around 500 people," according to Pham Thanh Thuan, from Phan Chu Trinh book street where the "rice ATM" is located.

As of Wednesday, Vietnam had recorded 267 Covid-19 cases. Of the total, 98 are active and the remaining 169 have been discharged from hospitals.
On March 27-28, the Belarus ICOMOS and the EuroBelarus held an online expert workshop on expanding opportunities for community participation in the governance of historical and cultural heritage.

The workshop was the first in a series of events entitled The Right to Heritage, scheduled for the spring-summer of 2020 and aimed at discussion of the actual possibilities and prospects of civic participation in heritage governance.

The 18 experts and public activists gathered at the workshop jointly analyzed the existing opportunities in Belarus for participating in the heritage governance by professional local and entrepreneurial communities.

The participants considered the prospects of adopting in Belarus the principles laid down by the Council of Europe Framework Convention on the Importance of Cultural Heritage for Society, 2005 (Faro Convention). Participatory governance approaches to heritage have been developed in many countries of Western Europe and today are a kind of European standard. Belarus is not a party to the Convention, however, these approaches, which determine the trends in good governance of the historical and cultural heritage today, can be applied in our practice. How exactly  it was proposed to find out.

On the first day of the online seminar, Stsiapan Stureika, the head of the Belarus Committee of ICOMOS, compared two discourses of heritage  classic and new ones  that coexist in the discussion of heritage and are transformed into actions. So, for example, national rhetoric is supplemented by the priority of the local significance of the heritage. Decisions on the restoration of monuments, according to the new discourse, are made not only because of the need for conservation, but with an orientation on their socio-economic potential. From a purely professional field, protection and revitalization of cultural heritage is turning into a zone of cooperation for a wide range of parties involved.

When discussing ways to improve the heritage governance situation in Belarus, the participants noted the importance of collecting and popularizing successful cases of participation of local initiatives and communities, the challenge of increased requirements for their competencies, and the need to develop a qualified customer as a public institute, as well as developing methods for overcoming conflicts related to heritage.

To continue the conversation, the Belarusan Committee of ICOMOS and INGO EuroBelarus plan to systematize the discussion materials and propose new events on this topic.

So, on June 19-20, the conference entitled The Right to Heritage and the State List of Historical and Cultural Values is planned. A collection of cases on the effectiveness of the list as a tool will also be announced.

Stay tuned for updates on the conference website and the organizers' Facebook pages.
OFFICIALS, including experts and authorities dealing with land management in Dodoma region have been urged to desist from indulging in bureaucratic practices in service delivery, and instead their conduct should be guided by rules and regulations.

The advice was issued here over the weekend by the Permanent Secretary in the Ministry of Lands, Housing and Human Settlement Development, Ms Mary Makondo to regional authorities, where she said the government expects the best services with increased productivity to the public.

She said apart from being guided by the laid down rules and regulations, the region's land authorities, she said, must settle land conflicts by meeting with all conflicting parties to look for lasting solutions.

Bureaucracies should come to an end, our core objective is to serve the public, as our customer has to be told where he/she has gone against the procedures, and in so doing, rectify the situation for the best land sector and offer the best services said Ms Makondo

She was also closing a training program for regional land officers from Morogoro, Manyara, Singida and Dodoma, where she insisted on the need for them to be innovative and fast tracking issues that are of great importance in their respective areas.

Lets stop bureaucracy, our target should be to serve customers instead of threatening and disappointing them. You should also abide by the codes of ethics for civil servants as well as the countrys laws and guidelines, she said.

She called on regional land commissioners to give priority in resolving land disputes since they are among the major challenges facing the sector.

Makondo directed land officers to speed up issuance of title deeds so that many Tanzanians can own their land plots legally. She added that provision of title deeds would enable them to use the documents as collateral when accessing bank loans.

Chief government land valuer, Evelyn Mugisha said the training will go a long way into reducing land conflicts and improve service provision in the country.

Land conflicts have been a common feature of economic livelihoods in Tanzania.

The conflicts have been on the increase, and one of the causes for increasing conflicts over land resources are due to human population.

Various actors, including civil society organisations, have tried to address the farmerpastoralist conflicts through mass education programmes, land-use planning, policy reforms and the development of community institutions.

The main cause of the challenge have been nomadic farming and double allocation.
Source: Xinhua| 2020-04-15 21:18:38|Editor: huaxia

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Photo taken on April 15, 2020 shows the page of a website named National Security Education Day 2020. The website was launched Wednesday by the Hong Kong Policy Research Institute. (Xinhua/Wang Shen)

HONG KONG, April 15 (Xinhua) -- The Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (SAR) government's Secretary for Security John Lee said on Wednesday that the SAR and its people have the responsibility and obligation to safeguard national security and he called on the public to take part in maintaining the law and order of the society.

A website named National Security Education Day 2020 was launched Wednesday by the Hong Kong Policy Research Institute, when Lee and the SAR government's Commissioner of Police Tang Ping-keung introduced the work of the SAR government in stopping violence.

Lee said, as a part of the country, Hong Kong must play its part to safeguard the security of the SAR itself and it is even more important to prevent the SAR from being used as a springboard into other parts of China, which may affect national security.

"The SAR government departments are also committed to combating the budding of local terrorism," Lee said, adding that the SAR has a series of laws, such as the United Nations (Anti-Terrorism Measures) Ordinance, to deal with Hong Kong's security and the common security of the country.

Lee emphasized that the public also have a role in safeguarding national security, including having a correct understanding of the principles and concepts of the Basic Law, "one country, two systems", "Hong Kong people administering Hong Kong" and a high degree of autonomy.

Tang said that from the perspective of Hong Kong, maintaining public order and social order is the most basic embodiment of safeguarding national security. Over the years, thanks to the joint efforts of the police and the public, Hong Kong's crime rate has dropped for 12 consecutive years since 2007, becoming one of the safest and most stable cities in the world. However, the situation has changed since last June, when violence has been intensified in a wave of protests.

The police has had initial success in stopping violence, combined with the COVID-19 epidemic, violent demonstrations have recently dropped slightly, Tang said. However, it does not rule out that the concept of extreme violence has infiltrated into Hong Kong.

In face of the threat of "local terrorism", the police will step up intelligence gathering and beef up the counter-terrorism unit, and educate Hong Kong people on the threat of terrorist attacks, Tang said, urging the public to join forces with the police to safeguard public order and national security.
PR-Inside.com: 2020-04-15 10:03:02

GSMA Calls for Applications to Develop Digital Access Solutions in Africa and Asia

GSMA Opens Innovation Fund for Mobile Internet Adoption and Digital Inclusion

Media Contacts:

GSMA Press Office

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The GSMA today opened applications for the Innovation Fund for Mobile Internet Adoption and Digital Inclusion. The Innovation Fund aims to increase mobile internet adoption and usage among those who have mobile internet coverage but are not using it in countries in Africa and Asia. The Fund is supported by the UK Department for International Development (DFID), BMZ the Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development in Germany, the GSMA and its members.

Today, we understand the value of being connected like never before. Mobile operators have invested almost 1 trillion USD in network infrastructure over the past five years, bringing mobile internet coverage to 91 per cent of the worlds population. Despite this, 3.3 billion people are not using mobile internet services, said John Giusti, Chief Regulatory Officer, GSMA. Now is the time to find innovative ways to solve this usage gap for the digitally excluded  regardless of who they are or where they are. The Innovation Fund for Mobile Internet Adoption and Digital Inclusion will drive partnerships to develop new and innovative ways of increasing use of the mobile internet so that more citizens can fully participate in society and the economy.

The reach of mobile has expanded significantly in recent years. Today mobile broadband networks cover more than 7.1 billion people globally, but 3.3 billion of those already covered are not using mobile internet services. These citizens tend to belong to the most marginalised members of society  disproportionately rural, female and illiterate. Women, for example, are 20 per cent less likely to use mobile internet than men in low- and middle-income countries. The Innovation Fund focusses on addressing this usage gap to ensure underserved citizens can use the mobile internet. As mobile networks have become the primary way of accessing the internet globally, the ability to access and use mobile services is critical to driving economic growth and creating opportunities for citizens and businesses to thrive.

The objective of the Fund is to support solutions that seek to address one or more of the following barriers to mobile internet adoption:

Accessibility : Innovations which improve the accessibility and usability of handsets and mobile internet services for citizens who are unable to access them; not including network accessibility, electricity or IDs

: Innovations which improve the accessibility and usability of handsets and mobile internet services for citizens who are unable to access them; not including network accessibility, electricity or IDs Affordability : Innovations which improve the affordability of handsets and mobile internet services.

: Innovations which improve the affordability of handsets and mobile internet services. Digital skills : Innovations which focus on improving basic digital skills and confidence to access and use mobile internet.

: Innovations which focus on improving basic digital skills and confidence to access and use mobile internet. Safety and security: Innovations which focus on safety and security of individuals regarding the use of mobile internet; these innovations will not include tackling issues of data privacy and fraud.

The Fund will support start-ups or small to medium enterprises (SMEs) with innovative new products, services or business models which can address key barriers to mobile internet adoption and use, driving digital inclusion for those currently digitally excluded, including women. It will test innovations with the most significant potential for growth and impact in Asia and Africa and provide lessons, and examples on how mobile is driving positive socio-economic change.

For further information on the GSMAs Innovation Fund or how to apply, please refer to the Innovation Fund application website www.gsma.com/mobilefordevelopment/gsma-innovation- where applications will be accepted up to the closing date of 22 May 2020.

-ENDS-

Notes to Editors

The GSMA Innovation Fund supports innovative start-ups or small to medium-sized private sector companies in emerging markets to achieve sustainable growth and improved socio-economic impact. The Fund supports innovation that increases mobile internet adoption and usage for the underserved and those who are currently not using mobile internet services. The Fund works with start-ups or SMEs willing and able to work with mobile operators on projects which advance the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals.

About the GSMA

The GSMA represents the interests of mobile operators worldwide, uniting more than 750 operators and nearly 400 companies in the broader mobile ecosystem, including handset and device makers, software companies, equipment providers and internet companies, as well as organisations in adjacent industry sectors. The GSMA also produces the industry-leading MWC events held annually in Barcelona, Los Angeles and Shanghai, as well as the Mobile 360 Series of regional conferences.

For more information, please visit the GSMA corporate website at www.gsma.com. Follow the GSMA on Twitter: @GSMA.

View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20200415005
There could be sweet relief coming for health workers worried about supplies of protective equipment to guard against coronavirus, with Queensland researchers perfecting a method to turn sugar cane waste into face masks.

The scientists from QUT have spent the past few years perfecting the material, which is a nanocellulose membrane made out of agricultural waste such as sugar cane mulch.

Dr Thomas Rainey, left, and Dr Thuy Chu Van have developed a new material for medical-grade masks using sugar cane waste. Credit:QUT

QUT process engineer Dr Thomas Rainey said the material is able to filter out particles at the scale of 100 nanometres, which is in the range of viruses such as SARS-CoV-2.

"We have tested this material thoroughly and found it to be more efficient in its ability to remove virus-size nanoparticles than the high-quality commercially available masks we tested and compared it with," he said.
YEREVAN.  The Eurasian Economic Union (EEU) is actively discussing the temporary reduction, or complete cancelation of customs duties on some important economic and social goods. Armenias Deputy Minister of Economy Varos Simonyan stated this during a meeting with journalists on Wednesday. According to him, which products will be a priority is currently being discussed.

At the same time, he recalled that the European Union (EU) has decided to provide 92 million to Armenia to support the healthcare system, vulnerable segments of the population, as well as small and medium-sized enterprises. "The amount may be increased, given that the EU plans to allocate a total of 20 billion to various countries under the Team Europe program," he noted. "In addition, 80 million will be provided under the Eastern Partnership program, which will be distributed among all participating countries. The EU could also provide an additional 880 million through financial instruments to stabilize the economic situation in the regional countries.

Anna Ohanyan, the spokesperson for the minister of economy, stated that the EU will provide 456,500 to support Armenia's agriculture.

In his turn, other Deputy Minister of Economy Avag Avanesyan stressed that the government will direct the $280 million provided by the International Monetary Fund at eliminating the consequences of the novel coronavirus in Armenia. "The Armenian government can choose for itself what to spend that money on," the official explained. "The funds will be used to strengthen the healthcare system, as well as to mitigate the social and economic consequences."

As for the predictions by various international organizations on the downgrading of Armenia's rating, they, according to him, are not substantiated, taking into account the current crisis situation around the world.
Foreign Minister of Ukraine Dmytro Kuleba has said that Yevhen Yenin, appointed on his initiative as Deputy Foreign Minister, will oversee the cases of the Malaysian Boeing MH17 downed over Donbas in 2014 and UIA aircraft downed in Iran in 2020, as well as cases of legal prosecution of Russia in international courts.

"He already has more than solid experience in this area - three years before that he had been engaged in the Prosecutor General's Office in collecting and transmitting evidence of Russia's violation of international law to the international courts," he wrote on his Facebook page on Wednesday.

As reported, the Cabinet of Ministers of Ukraine appointed former Deputy Prosecutor General Yevhen Yenin as Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs.

The corresponding decision was made at a government meeting on Wednesday.

From 2005 to 2010, Yenin served as secretary of the Ukrainian Embassy in Moldova. Then for several years he worked in various positions in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. In 2012-2016, he was an advisor to the Ukrainian Embassy in Italy.

In 2016, he was appointed Deputy Prosecutor General and dismissed at his own request in April 2019.
Ralat also isnt afraid to wade into complex issues. He devotes a number of pages to fry bread tacos, a dish that he explains was born from one of the darkest periods of this countrys history. While some indigenous people celebrate the dish, others find it a product of American occupation, Anglo settlement of the Southwest, and the forced relocation of local populations. Ralat says that some of the classically trained indigenous chefs that he talked to were pushing against fry bread. It is unhealthy, but it also represents innovation and survival in the face of almost certain death, says Ralat. So its a complicated thing.
Renowned Swahili author and former Nation TV news anchor Ken Waliaula, better known by his pen name Walibora is dead.

Unconfirmed reports started making their way to social media on Tuesday night, but it wasnt until today that news has been officially confirmed.

Walibora was reportedly hit by a matatu along Ladhies road on Friday. It is unclear whether he died instantly or later in hospital. His body was found at Kenyatta National Hospital Morgue by family members who had been looking for him since Friday.

The literary scholar is best known for his widely read book Siku Njema  which was a required secondary school set book for many years, but also has other titles like Ndoto ya Amerika and Kidagaa Kimemwozea.

It appears Walibora had returned to Kenya full-time, following a stint in the US as an assistant professor of African languages and literature at the University of Wisconsin  Madison.

While there, he had trouble with the law, once getting himself arrested for sexual misconduct. He later explained that all his charges had been dropped.

Ken Walibora has died at 55.

May he rest in peace.
English-American rock band, The Pretenders, has shared a new song with a slow-burning R&B track called 'You Can't Hurt a Fool'.

Pretenders frontwoman, Chrissie Hynde explained that their biggest influence "apart from crazy, hardcore rock 'n' roll' was rhythm and blues, more commonly known as R&B.

"[Guitarist James Walbourne] and I really grappled with this one to get in all the subtleties and nuance of an R&B classic, albeit with modern, autobiographical lyrics. The fool is me!"

Listen to their new song below.
Volleyball star Kim Yeon-koung of Turkish club Eczacbas VitrA returned to Seoul early Wednesday after matches in Turkey were canceled due to the coronavirus pandemic.

The club came second in the Turkish volleyball league and was planning to compete in the quarterfinals, but matches were halted indefinitely.

Kim will quarantine herself for two weeks here before resuming training.


The Delhi government on Wednesday decided to use the plasma enrichment technique to treat severely-ill coronavirus patients on a trial basis as the total number of COVID-19 positive cases in the national capital reached 1,578.

The clinical trial of the plasma enrichment technique will be conducted at the Institute of Liver and Biliary Sciences (ILBS), according to an official.

In the technique, antibodies from blood of patients, who have recovered from coronavirus, are used to treat severely infected patients. It is aimed at assessing the efficacy of convalescent plasma to limit complications in COVID-19 patients.

Convalescent plasma is an experimental procedure for coronavirus patients.

The total number of COVID-19 cases increased to 1578, with 17 fresh cases and two deaths being reported in a day, according to Delhi government authorities. With two more fatalities reported, the death toll from COVID-19 in Delhi has jumped to 32.

The total number of COVID-19 containment zones has also increased to 56.

In a tweet, Lt Governor Anil Baijal said that the officials concerned have been advised to strictly adhere to guidelines and protocols issued by the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare while dealing with coronavirus patients.

"Delhi to use plasma technique for treatment on trial basis to save life of critical COVID-19 patients. Advised all to strictly adhere to SOPs/guidelines & protocols issued by MoHFW while dealing with COVID-19 patients," the LG tweeted.

The official said a five-member committee headed by ILBS Director S K Sarin had recommended use of this therapy to treat severally-ill coronavirus patients.

"The Delhi government has received approval from the Union Health Ministry to use convalescent plasma technique on trial basis to save the life of severely-ill COVID-19 patients," the official said.

Earlier this month, the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) sought participation in a randomised controlled study to assess the safety and efficacy of convalescent plasma to limit complications associated with coronavirus.

To deal with issues related to stranded migrant workers, the Delhi Chief Secretary Vijay Dev appointed 10 bureaucrats as nodal officers for coordination with resident commissioners to address the concerns of migrant workers in the city amid the on-going lockdown.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Tuesday had announced extension of the lockdown until May 3.

The move by Dev comes a day after a large number of migrant workers gathered in Mumbai and Surat despite the nationwide lockdown to contain the spread of COVID-19.

According to an official, the 10 IAS officers will coordinate with resident commissioners of states and union territories to address issues being faced by migrants in Delhi, be it food, shelter, essential supplies, payment of wages or other livelihood issues.

Dev has asked the nodal officers to submit a report twice a week on the efforts and measures taken by them.

In another decision pertaining to migrant workers, Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal said the government has ordered shifting of those people gathered at the Yamuna Ghat.

He said arrangements have been made to provide them food.

The move comes after some media reports highlighted the plight of migrant workers who had taken shelter below a bridge on the banks of the Yamuna in wake of coronavirus lockdown.

The Delhi government also issued revised guidelines for compliance of the second phase of the lockdown as prescribed by the Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA). According to the MHA's guidelines, industrial units in rural areas will be allowed to function from April 20 provided they follow social distancing norms while all kinds of public transport will be barred and public places closed till May 3.

Wearing masks and face covers in public places will also be compulsory across the country. Besides, spitting in public has been made a punishable offence and a strict ban enforced on the sale of liquor, 'gutka' tobacco etc under the new MHA guidelines



The Delhi police booked Tablighi Jamaat cleric Maulana Saad Kandhalvi for culpable homicide after some of the attendees of the religious congregation died due to coronavirus.

Kandhalvi had organised the religious congregation at the Nizamuddin Markaz last month against the social distancing protocol imposed by the Centre to curb the spread of the deadly disease.

An FIR was registered against the cleric on March 31 at Crime Branch police station on a complaint of the Station House Officer of Nizamuddin.

He was earlier booked for holding the event, police said.

The Nizamudddin centre, attended by thousands, turned out to be a hotspot for spread of coronavirus not only in the national capital, but the entire country. More than 25,500 Tablighi members and their contacts have been quarantined in the country after the Centre and the state governments conducted a "mega operation" to identify them.

At least 9,000 people participated in the religious congregation in Nizamuddin. Later, many of the attendees travelled to various parts of the country.

Cracking down on those violating the lockdown orders, the police detained 3,473 people. Since March 24, a total of 84,030 people have been detained for violating orders under section 65 of the Delhi Police Act.

An ambulance driver was also arrested for ferrying eight people from Haryana to Delhi after charging money during the lockdown.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
The Indian Rapid Response Team is expected to stay in Kuwait for over two weeks in order to impart and train the Kuwaiti personnel at Jaber Al Ahmed Hospital and help the government with testing and treatment of the COVID-19 patients during the pandemic, confirmed media reports.

As a part of capacity building, the team will assist Kuwait in its fight against the deadly coronavirus as leaders of the nations, Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Prime Minister of Kuwait Sheikh Sabah Al-Khaled Al-Hamad Al-Saba agreed to in a phone call. The exercise would strengthen the bilateral ties between India and Kuwait, according to External Affairs Ministry press release. Both the heads of the state decided to opt a coordinated approach to address the global health emergency.

Earlier, External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar reportedly spoke with the Kuwaiti counterpart and discussed the prevailing situation of the COVID-19 pandemic in Kuwait. The two countries explored ways to further strengthen cooperation during these challenging times and agreed for a concerted and coordinated effort against the coronavirus pandemic.

Indians constitute the largest group of expatriates with an estimated population of about ten lakhs in the State of Kuwait. India is reaching out to Kuwait in the extended neighbourhood to further complement its efforts to fight the menace effectively, Kuwaits foreign ministry said in a statement.

Read: Coronavirus Relief Checks Wont Have To Be Repaid, Feds Say

Read: Coronavirus Outbreak: Kuwait Health Ministry Confirms 45 Cases Of Epidemic

PM Modi dials to world leaders

According to reports, Prime Minister Modi has been dialling to the world leaders to mend relations and ensure assistance and co-operation in their fight against the coronavirus. In a telephonic conversation, PM Modi spoke to his Nepali counterpart KP Sharma Oli to discuss the prevailing COVID-29 situation and expressed solidarity with the neighbouring country in the fight against COVID-19. Earlier, he was also reported to have spoken with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and conveyed the greetings for the forthcoming holy month of Ramadan to Abbas and the people of Palestine.

Spoke today with Prime Minister of Nepal, Shri @kpsharmaoli. We discussed the prevailing situation due to COVID-19. I appreciate the determination of people of Nepal to fight this challenge. We stand in solidarity with Nepal in our common fight against COVID-19.  Narendra Modi (@narendramodi) April 10, 2020

Read: After Covid Lockdown Extension, PM Modi To Chair Key Cabinet Meeting At 7 LKM On Wednesday

Read: PM Modi's Covid Lockdown Address Not Up To Congress' Expectations; Party Disappointed

(With ANI inputs)
3D print of a spike protein of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19--in front of a 3D print of a SARS-CoV-2 virus particle. The spike protein (foreground) enables the virus to enter and infect human cells. On the virus model, the virus surface (blue) is covered with spike proteins (red) that enable the virus to enter and infect human cells. Credit: NIH

A new paper, to be published today in The Lancet Psychiatry, highlights an urgent need to tackle the harmful impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on mental health and potentially the brain and calls for research on these areas to be central to the global response to the pandemic.

The paper warns that the COVID-19 pandemic could have a 'profound' and 'pervasive impact' on global mental health now and in the future, yet a separate recent analysis shows that so far, only a tiny proportion of new scientific publications on COVID-19 have been on mental health impacts.

The paper calls for more widespread mental health monitoring and better ways to protect against, and treat, mental ill healthboth of which will require new funding and better coordination.

The general public already have substantial concerns about mental health in relation to the pandemicaccording to an Ipsos MORI poll of 1099 members of the UK public, and a survey of 2198 people by the UK mental health research charity, MQ, that included many people with experience of mental health conditions.

Both surveys were carried out in late March, the week lockdown measures were announced, to inform the Lancet Psychiatry paper. They showed the public had specific concerns related to COVID-19 including increased anxiety, fear of becoming mentally unwell, access to mental health services and the impact on mental wellbeing.

Paper author Professor Emily Holmes from the Department of Psychology, Uppsala University in Sweden, commented:

"We are all dealing with unprecedented uncertainty and major changes to the way we live our lives as a result of the coronavirus pandemic. Our surveys show these changes are already having a considerable impact on our mental health.

"Governments must find evidence-based ways to boost the resilience of our societies and find ways to treat those with mental ill health remotely to come out of this pandemic in good mental health.

"Front line medical staff and vulnerable groups such as the elderly and those with serious mental health conditions must be prioritised for rapid mental health support."

The paper calls for 'moment to moment' monitoring of anxiety, depression, self-harm, suicide, as well as other mental health issues in the UK and global population. It also calls for the rapid roll out of evidence-based programmes and treatments, which can be accessed by computer, mobile phone or other remote ways, to treat mental health conditions and increase resilience to keep people mentally healthy.

24 leading experts on mental health, including neuroscientists, psychiatrists, psychologists, public health experts and those with lived experience of a mental health condition, came together to create the roadmap that is published today. The expert group was established and supported by the Academy of Medical Sciences and the mental health research charity, MQ.

Professor Matthew Hotopf CBE FMedSci, Vice Dean Research at King's College London's Institute of Psychiatry Psychology & Neuroscience and Director NIHR Maudsley Biomedical Research Centre and one of the paper authors, said:

"This paper gives us a research roadmap to help protect our mental health at this incredibly difficult time and in the future.

"We are calling for real time monitoring of mental health of the population to develop effective treatments. This needs to be on a bigger scale than we have ever seen previously, and must be coordinated, targeted and comprehensive to give us an evidence based picture of what is really going on in societies around the world.

"Knowing what is happening in real time will allow us to respond by designing more user friendly and effective ways to promote good mental health while people are in their homes. Above all, however, we want to stress that all new interventions must be informed by top notch research to make sure they work."

The paper stresses there will be no 'one size fits all' approach to keeping us mentally healthyand any new approaches will need to be tailored to particular groups of people, such as front line medical and social care staff.

It also calls for research to understand what makes people resilient in the face of this crisis, and actions to build resilience in societywhether supporting people to sleep well, be physically active or do activities that improve their mental health. The surveys showed many people had already started activities to boost their mental health, such as prioritising family time, staying connected, connecting to nature and doing exercise.

Study author Kate King MBE, Adviser on lived experience to The Mental Health Act Review 2018, has personal experience of severe depression and said:

"It is not surprising that concerns reported in our surveys related to anxiety and isolation, or that social communication is seen by many as important in supporting good mental health. This highlights the vulnerability of those who have little contact with family or friends, and particularly those for whom relationships are abusive.

"The digital age, for all its problems, has bestowed a real gift: social media, the internet, video and phone meetings mean that social communication and research can continue in a way that would have been impossible even twenty years ago. We are all in this together so at this time it's essential that researchers continue to listen and work with people with lived, and living, experience to help those living with mental health challenges."

The paper notes that 'almost nothing is yet known with certainty about the impact of COVID-19 on the human nervous system'. As other coronaviruses have been shown to pass into the central nervous system, the paper recommends research to monitor and understand whether COVID-19 also has effects on the brain and nervous system. It calls for a new database to be set up to monitor any psychological or brain effects of COVID-19 and for research to look at the way the virus could enter the nervous system.

Study author Professor Ed Bullmore FMedSci, Head of Department of Psychiatry, University of Cambridge, said:

"We need an unprecedented research response if we are to limit the negative consequences of this pandemic on the mental health of our society now and in the future.

"To make a real difference we will need to harness the tools of our digital agefinding smart new ways to measure the mental health of individuals remotely, finding creative ways to boost resilience and finding ways to treat people in their homes. This effort must be considered central to our global response to the pandemic."

Previous outbreaks of infectious disease have been known to have an impact on mental health of the population, for example, the SARS epidemic was associated with a 30% increase in suicide in over 65s and 29% of healthcare workers experienced probable emotional distress. Authors stressed that an increase in suicides as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic was not inevitable, but that monitoring and research is needed urgently.

The paper urges UK research funding agencies to work with researchers and people with experience of the mental health impacts of the pandemic to create a 'high-level co-ordination group' to ensure these mental health science research priorities are tackled as a matter of urgency.

Professor Rory O'Connor, Professor of Health Psychology, University of Glasgow, and one of the paper authors said:

"Increased social isolation, loneliness, health anxiety, stress and an economic downturn are a perfect storm to harm people's mental health and wellbeing.

"If we do nothing we risk seeing an increase in mental health conditions such as anxiety and depression, and a rise in problem behaviours such as alcohol and drug addiction, gambling, cyberbullying or social consequences such as homelessness and relationship breakdown. The scale of this problem is too serious to ignore, both in terms of every human life that may be affected, and in terms of the wider impact on society.

"Despite this situation making some of us feel trapped, it shouldn't make us feel powerlesswe can make a difference if we act now. We are calling on funding bodies, research institutes and policy to act now to limit the impact the pandemic has on all our lives."

Explore further New research to uncover the effects of COVID-19 on mental health

Provided by Academy of Medical Sciences
Renaud Perrier to Drive Strategic Growth Initiatives in EMEA and APAC for Data Privacy Innovator

WASHINGTON, April 15, 2020, the new standard in data protection, today announced the appointment of Google's former Head of Cloud ISV Partnerships, Renaud Perrier, as Senior Vice President of International Business Development and Operations. Based in Paris, Perrier is charged with directing Virtru's operations, product strategy, and technology partnerships in EMEA and APAC to help the company further expand into key international markets.



A cloud industry veteran, Perrier brings more than 20 years of sales engineering, product management, and partnership development expertise to Virtru. Prior to joining the company, he co-founded We Advocacy, and before that, served as Chief Product Officer at LumApps overseeing the collaborative platform provider's product strategy and marketing. In his roles at Google, he developed its global ISV program and helped launch Google Cloud solutions in EMEA. Earlier in his career, Perrier held sales engineering positions at Microsoft.

"We are experiencing unprecedented change as a global workforce - already more distributed than ever before - and seeing an accelerated rise in services from telehealth to distance learning, that will likely be the go-forward norm, rather than the exception. G Suite and other cloud solutions have become essential to powering the vital connection and collaboration between individuals and among businesses," said Virtru Co-founder and CEO John Ackerly. "Renaud is a tremendous asset and joins us at a time when data has never been more valuable, and privacy has never been more important. We have seen our product usage in EMEA double year-over-year, and Renaud's cloud and security expertise will help us further grow internationally, as we continue our mission of unlocking the power of data by creating a world where it is always under your control - everywhere."

"Agile, secure collaboration is paramount during this time of uncertainty, especially when extended enterprises are already challenged with navigating a morass of industry regulations - chief among them, GDPR - while seeking to optimize the benefits of multicloud architectures," said Perrier. "Virtru enables businesses to enjoy the full power and potential of G Suite and other SaaS applications, like Salesforce, while ensuring the protection of their corporate information and customer data. I'm honored to lead Virtru's expansion in EMEA and APAC as we look to provide security at scale to critical markets within those regions."

Virtru's proven architecture and out-of-the-box applications for Gmail and Google Drive prevent unauthorized access to sensitive data to ensure privacy with end-to-end encryption, granular access controls, and customer-hosted keys. Virtru gives organizations the freedom to focus on their mission, innovate, and obtain the peace of mind that comes with the power of privacy. More than 5,000 organizations worldwide across several vertical markets, including education, financial services, government, healthcare, manufacturing, and technology, trust Virtru for data security and privacy protection.

About Virtru

At Virtru, we empower organizations to easily unlock the power of data while maintaining control, everywhere it's stored and shared. Creators of TDF or follow us on Twitter at @virtruprivacy .

All product and company names herein may be trademarks of their respective owners.

Contact:

Shannon Kelley

CHEN PR for Virtru

skelley@chenpr.com

781.672.3132

A photo accompanying this announcement is available at https://www.globenewswire.com/NewsRoom/AttachmentNg/08ad7b49-7dd0-4e47-8e07-913cccecd553
[April 15, 2020] MakerCause Launches to Create 3D Printing Collaboration Network in Partnership with MaketheMasks to Support COVID-19 Efforts

DALLAS, April 15, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- Unique Software Development announced today that it has launched the "MakerCause" initiative at makercause.com to centralize efforts to produce 3D-printed respirator masks, face shields and nasopharyngeal (NP) swabs to support healthcare workers, first responders and individuals with suppressed immune systems during the COVID-19 pandemic. This launch coincides with the formation of a partnership with MaketheMasks, an initiative by the inventors of the Montana Mask, a 3D-printed respirator mask that is in wide use across the country. Unique Software Development was recently highlighted in the media after marshaling its inventory of 3D printers to produce reusable respirator masks using the open source design made available by the inventors of the Montana Mask. The response for masks has been overwhelming, which led USD to seek additional assistance from companies and individuals with 3D printers to help increase production to meet the large demand. The maker community answered the call, and this inspired Matt O'Brien, CEO of Unique Software Development, to conceptualize and launch MakerCause to create a movement to help fight COVID-19. "After receiving an outpouring of offers from makers to help print respirator masks during this time of great need, we realized that this was a perfect opportunity to formalize this energy into its own initiative whee efforts can be centralized and coordinated," stated Mr. O'Brien. He added, "With MakerCause, our partnership with MaketheMasks and the generous volunteer support of Team Rubicon USA, it is my hope that our collective efforts will help keep more Americans safe from coronavirus while laying the groundwork for an organization that will be able to spring into action to collaborate on future initiatives and causes. I'm thrilled to have partnered with the team at MaketheMasks and look forward to our joint collaborations on 3D-printed personal protective equipment."



"This is about empowering people to help each other," said Corie Hawks, Operations Lead at MaketheMasks. "Montana has led by example and shown that one brilliant idea can lead to a worldwide solution." The MakerCause website offers a variety of informational resources and provides STL files for the 3D printing of the Montana Mask, the Prusa Face Shield and USF's Nasopharyngeal Swabs, which are being widely used as personal protective equipment and testing supplies in light of the critical shortages affecting the country. If you have 3D printing capacity or would like to volunteer or donate funds or materials, visit the website to learn more about how you can help support MakerCause.

About MakerCause

Launched in March 2020 to centralize efforts by the maker community to support initiatives to produce 3D-printed personal protection equipment, MakerCause is an organization of makers who contribute their time, resources and efforts to support charitable endeavors. Learn more at makercause.com. About Unique Software Development

Unique Software Development is a Dallas, TX based Digital Innovation Agency for Mobile Apps, Web Applications, eCommerce, Augmented Reality, Wearables, and IoT. USD is a custom software development firm that specializes in building advanced solutions for the financial services, transportation, healthcare, utility, hospitality, commodity, social and other industries. Combining domain knowledge with some of the most capable developers in the world, USD develops industry-defining applications, helping clients optimize time-to-market and minimize software development risks in mission-critical systems. For more information, visit uniquesoftwaredev.com or call 855-976-4873. About MaketheMasks Formed one month ago by the Montana Mask inventors Dr. Dusty Richardson, Dr. Spencer Zaugg, Colton Zaugg, and a group of volunteers, MaketheMasks has dedicated their efforts to helping save lives during the pandemic. The files have been downloaded over 200,000 times and are being viewed in over 150 countries worldwide. Media Contact:

Matt OBrien

(855) 976-4873

[email protected] View original content to download multimedia:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/makercause-launches-to-create-3d-printing-collaboration-network-in-partnership-with-makethemasks-to-support-covid-19-efforts-301040721.html SOURCE Unique Software Development

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US, Taliban meet over prisoner release dispute: Militant group

Iran Press TV

Tuesday, 14 April 2020 5:41 AM

The Afghan Taliban militant group has reportedly held talks with US officials in the Qatari capital, Doha, to discuss a prisoner release dispute.

US Special Representative Zalmay Khalilzad and US Army General Scott Miller met with Taliban co-founder Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar in Doha on Monday, a Taliban spokesman said on Tuesday.

They discussed the "complete implementation" of a US-Taliban deal signed in late February for a phased US troop withdrawal "as well as delay in the release of prisoners" by the Afghan government, spokesman Suhail Shaheen said on Twitter.

He said that "violations of the agreement and other issues and ways of their solutions were also discussed."

Last week, the Taliban accused Washington of violating the accord by supporting Afghan security operations in some parts of the country. The militants said that such support could jeopardize the deal.

They also accused the Afghan government of delaying the release of prisoners envisaged under the agreement.

The Afghan government was kept out of the talks that led to the US-Taliban deal. And the militants have not stopped attacking government security forces.

Despite its exclusion, Kabul is required under the deal to release up to 5,000 Taliban prisoners. The militants are obliged to free 1,000 pro-government captives in return.

The Taliban have demanded the release of all the 5,000 detainees before they engage in a peace process with Kabul. Afghan President Ashraf Ghani has rejected that demand, ordering a phased release of 1,500 militant detainees instead.

Some 300 militants have been freed since Wednesday. And the Taliban have turned 20 government prisoners over to the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) in Kandahar.

Washington is compelled under the deal to pull out American forces and foreign troops from Afghanistan by July next year, provided that the militants start talks with Kabul and adhere to other security guarantees.

About 14,000 US troops and approximately 17,000 troops from NATO allies and partner countries remain stationed in Afghanistan years after the invasion of the country that toppled a Taliban regime in 2001.

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Supporters of world No.1 Novak Djokovic gathered outside a courthouse in Melbourne on January 10 as the player appealed against his deportation from Australia in the hope of staying to play in the Australian Open.According to court filings, Djokovics lawyers say he was granted a visa on November 18. An exemption certificate was issued by Tennis Australias chief medical officer on December 30, they said.The hearing on Monday was due to start at the Federal Circuit and Family Court at 10am but was delayed multiple times due to technical issues. According to local reports, Judge Anthony Kelly said a professor and an eminently qualified physician have produced and provided to the applicant a medical exemption.Further to that, that medical exemption and the basis on which it was given was separately given by a further independent expert specialist panel, established by the Victorian state government. And that document was in the hands of the delegate.And the point Im somewhat agitated about is, was what more could this man have done? Judge Kelly asked.Footage by Slobodan Bendjo shows fans waving Serbian flags and dancing outside the Federal Circuit and Family Court in Melbourne. Credit: Slobodan Bendjo via Storyful
New York, US (PANA) - Now is a time for unity in the global battle to push the COVID-19 (coronavirus) pandemic into reverse, not a time to cut the resources of the World Health Organization (WHO), which is spearheading and coordinating the global bodys efforts, UN chief Antonio Guterres said on Tuesday
One such organization that had big hurdles to cross was the United States Senate Federal Credit Union (USSFCU) in Alexandria, Virginia. USSFCU's entire workforce was predominantly in-office only and without any expectation to move an entire workforce to work remotely. Additionally, some employees simply could not work from home. The Credit Union seemed to face a daunting task to move its entire operation from an in-office only operation to a remote-only operation in just a few weeks. This task landed squarely in the lap of USSFCU President and CEO, Timothy L. Anderson. The change had to happen to safeguard USSFCU members' health as well as the health and wellness of the USSFCU workforce. Anderson and his team had an uphill battle but it was a battle they were determined to win.

"We had a couple of people work from home, for example, the head of our ACH department," said Anderson. "We have people who sometimes work from home, but to do something on the scale of shutting down the entire Credit Union and have every single operation from employees' homes; that's just an incredible concept."

Anderson gathered his Senior Management Team to strategize and weigh their options on how to move forward. The first steps were creating a Crisis Management Taskforce that would streamline decision-making and hammer out policies and procedures to ensure all of the transitions were manageable for overall security, compliance, and reduced risk. This team was made up of senior management from USSFCU's Project Management, Risk Management and Human Resources and working around the clock for days produced the roadmap to take care of employees, members and the organization. The Crisis Management Team took over the Board Room, turning it into the Crisis Room.

Next, USSFCU's IT department had the enormous task of moving all of the organization's 115+ employees to remote work while safeguarding the world-class data security that is one of USSFCU's philosophical cornerstones. The department spent tireless hours in setup and testing to ensure the new work environment would be functional for employees and have airtight security. Their hard work paid off and the deadline was set. The week of March 16th USSFCU would make their big switch.

There were a few bumps in the road leading up to the point of the launch. Not all employees were equipped or had access to devices that would allow them to work remotely. Additionally, there were bandwidth limitations and not all employees would have access to work remotely. How would these employees who wouldn't be able to work be addressed by the organization? Many companies and organizations, when faced with similar challenges, were either furloughing employees or simply letting them go during the wake of the pandemic. Having great respect and appreciation for staff, USSFCU decided not only would all employees stay on regardless of their remote work accessibility; they would also continue to receive their regular pay during these challenging times.

On Wednesday, March 19th USSFCU did what seemed impossible and launched its official first day as a predominantly remote work organization. All branches closed their doors except one, keeping the drive-thru open a few hours per week. The Member Services Call Center all logged on from their homes and began taking member calls without missing a beat.

"I am really proud of how our teams were able to pull this off," said Anderson. "Our call center representatives are set up remotely, so they're taking calls from their homes. The loan operation folks are receiving applications. ACH, support services and marketing are doing their jobs. You name it, HR and payroll are doing fine, every single department. We have not missed a beat. I never thought I'd see something like this."

Anderson and his team met their goal and provided a safe & healthy work environment for both their employees and members. They are continuing to refine and expand on making the system run more smoothly, efficiently and have more capacity. There are now plans in place to bring the last group of employees online in the coming weeks. Another remarkable action taken is the credit union recognizing essential employees who had to physically come into the office or branches since March 16th. These employees are being rewarded with supplemental pay.

All of these measures put in place, allowed USSFCU to continue serving their members and quickly put in place measures to assist members in need during these difficult times. From offering 90-day deferred loan payments, waiving certain fees and penalties, a special Relief Loan and a modified Signature Loan with a 90-day "No Pay" option are a handful of ways USSFCU is continuing to support its members during the Coronavirus Pandemic crisis.

"What has been so rewarding," said Anderson, "is how we have all pulled together during these very trying times. Everyone has a shared goal and is working together. I'd say during these times, as people are isolated in their homes, I have the feeling we've never been closer. This terrible event has brought us all closer."

USSFCU will continue to work remotely until there is new guidance from the CDC, federal, state and local officials. While this new way of doing business had some growing pains, it has also created more organizational flexibility and pulled this credit union and potentially many others into what could be the wave of the future. USSFCU's Human Resources department continues to engage managers and staff working remotely through training opportunities, encouraging daily messages, and proactively reminding managers to positively communicate often with their teams.

"During these critical times, the CU's culture and engagement are essential for employees to successfully support our members," Heather Mansour, SVP, Human Resources & Training shares, "The best way to do this during a crisis is to keep their spirits up, communicate effectively, and take the time to really care, both personally and professionally."

About USSFCU

For 85 years, USSFCU has provided the U.S. Senate and Capitol Hill communities with world-class financial stability, security and service. Now with 100 plus paths to membership, almost anyone has the opportunity to experience the USSFCU difference. Learn more at www.ussfcu.org.

https://www.ussfcu.org/media-center/press-releases/press-releases-detail.html?cId=29386&title=people-first-in-the-age-of-the-coronavirus

CONTACT:

Arthur Green

571-253-6363

[email protected]

SOURCE US Senate Federal Credit Union

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Source: Xinhua| 2020-04-15 02:56:59|Editor: huaxia

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Turkish Health Minister Fahrettin Koca speaks during a press conference in Ankara, Turkey, April 14, 2020. Turkish Health Minister Fahrettin Koca on Tuesday confirmed 4,062 new COVID-19 cases and 107 more deaths from the virus. The total number of confirmed COVID-19 cases in Turkey rose to 65,111, while the death toll surged to 1,403, Koca said at a press conference. (Photo by Mustafa Kaya/Xinhua)

ANKARA, April 14 (Xinhua) -- Turkish Health Minister Fahrettin Koca on Tuesday confirmed 4,062 new COVID-19 cases and 107 more deaths from the virus.

The total number of confirmed COVID-19 cases in Turkey rose to 65,111, while the death toll surged to 1,403, Koca said at a press conference.

Turkey conducted a total of 33,070 tests for coronavirus in the last 24 hours, bringing the total number of tests carried out so far to 443,626, he said.

The minister noted that 4,799 patients have recovered since the outbreak of the pandemic, while 1,809 patients are being treated at the intensive care units and 1,087 others being intubated.

"The speed of the coronavirus spread is under control," he said, noting that Turkey expects the peak of the outbreak to appear in one or two weeks.

Turkey reported the first COVID-19 case in the country on March 11.
The official reason for the unprecedented closure of much of the United States in response to COVID-19 is that lives matter. Indeed, lives apparently matter so much that no sacrifice is too great  including to our freedoms and the economy  if it can save even one life from the virus.

Surely this is a noble sentiment; and I for one certainly do not mean to argue against it.

But it also raises the question: where was this altruistic concern before  when tens if not hundreds of millions of American lives were needlessly sacrificed, ironically, in the name of freedom and economics?

Consider the top three leading causes of preventable deaths in the U.S.: every year, about 480,000 Americans die from smoking, 300,000 die from obesity, and 88,000 die from alcohol.

Together with the other leading causes of preventable deaths in the US  such as drug abuse and motor vehicle accidents  this means that well over one million American lives are needlessly lost every single year, mostly from tobacco, alcohol, and overeating.

Yet this hasn't changed a thing; they are all legal. Why? Because of freedom and economics. You see, it's your American right to smoke, drink, and overeat  just as it is the tobacco, alcohol, and food companies' right to profit from these.

There's much more than "freedom" at stake here. There's also enticement and addiction  that is, the programming or habituating of people to do what they normally ("freely") wouldn't. In other words, it's not just that you're free to smoke, drink, and overeat, but that billions of dollars are spent in advertisement for the express purpose of making you want to smoke, drink, and above all else overeat.

Despite the million or so American lives lost every year from these vices  and the fact that most of them died more from addiction than freedom  the government has done essentially nothing about it, aside from requiring warning labels on tobacco and alcohol products. And you can't really blame it; after all, we're adults here, and freedom is a big premium in America.

But then COVID-19 happened, and suddenly, our betters have seen the light; suddenly, no sacrifice is great enough if it can save just one life from the coronavirus.

Consider some facts and statistics: 240,000 has long been the maximum number of deaths from the coronavirus that the U.S. government predicted, based on figures reached by leading health experts. Although that number has significantly dropped to something like 60,000, for argument's sake, let's stick with 240,000. In order to save that number of lives, no price  including severely curtailing our personal freedoms and destroying the economy  has been deemed too great.

It must logically follow that our suddenly enlightened betters will enact laws and take measures to save the exponentially greater number of American lives needlessly lost every single year from their addictions to tobacco, alcohol, and overeating, right? (By the way, I'm not personally calling for the banning of these vices, but rather connecting the dots.)

Look at it this way: if trapping people in their homes for weeks, destroying countless mom-and-pop stores around the nation, and even arresting fathers who play ball with their daughters in empty parks  and creating a culture where people are "rewarded" for reporting on such "lawbreakers"  are now deemed necessary evils, or the "new norm," to save 240,000 potential lives, then surely something as commonsensical as outlawing intrinsically unhealthy and addictive products  or at the very least their aggressive, exploitative advertisement  must be right around the corner. After all, doing so would save millions of lives each year  as opposed to 240,000 "potential" lives.

As such, and because COVID-19 has ushered in a new era of appreciation for American lives, I fully expect to see such conscientious laws enacted soon  just as I expect the newsrooms to keep the issue at the fore, including by daily reporting the exact number of deaths from smoking, overeating, and drinking, the way they do with coronavirus cases.

Don't you?

Raymond Ibrahim, author of Sword and Scimitar: Fourteen Centuries of War between Islam and the West, is Shillman fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center, Judith Friedman Rosen fellow at the Middle East Forum, and distinguished senior fellow at the Gatestone Institute.
" " A young Emmett Till (left) is seen here riding bicycles with his friend Wheeler Parker (right). Courtesy of the Wheeler Parker collection, Delta State University Archives & Museum, Cleveland, MS.

Emmett Till was just 14 years old in the summer of 1955 when he traveled to visit family in the tiny community of Money, in the Mississippi Delta. Till was born and raised in a suburb of Chicago. He had never been to the Deep South.

The tragic story of what happened to young Till became, to many, a catalyst for the American Civil Rights Movement. But his story did not end in Mississippi. It never really ended.

"I'd like to think that if we had the trial again that, No. 1, we'd have some black jurors ... and some women. That in fact, justice would be done. That's the optimist in me," says Florida State University professor Davis Houck, who helped create the Emmett Till Memory Project and has been instrumental in building FSU's Emmett Till Archive. "But I don't want to be too optimistic, because we're at a time in our country right now where anything goes. In terms of violence visited upon young black boys for whistling at a white woman ... yeah. I think we're pretty far down the road from that. But I don't want to say we've arrived at some ideal place. We haven't."

" " Emmett Till is seen here with his mother, Mamie Till Bradley, ca. 1950. To expose the horror of her 14-year-old's lynching, Bradley insisted on an open coffin funeral to show his tortured and mutilated body. Collection of the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, Gift of the Mamie Till Mobley family

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The Story of Emmett Till

The brutal murder of Emmett Till might have been lost to time, just another of the thousands of lynchings that were perpetrated all over the United States after the Civil War. The Equal Justice Initiative has documented more than 4,400 lynchings, in 20 states (mostly in the Deep South), between 1877 and 1950.

Till's murder stands out separately from those, though, not because of its sheer violence  lynchings were, by definition, alarmingly savage  but because the particular inhumanity brought upon him was not automatically relegated to the inside pages of newspapers, as many others had been. Even in Mississippi, shortly after his death, news accounts almost immediately condemned the boy's murder. The governor of the state at the time  Gov. Hugh White  even spoke out against it.

Still, it wasn't until Till's mother, Mamie Till Bradley, demanded that her son be returned to Chicago for burial that the entire world took notice. She held an open-casket funeral to show what happened to him. He was beaten, shot, a 75-pound fan tied to his neck with barbed wire and then tossed into the Tallahatchie River, where he was found several days later. The brutality was hard to ignore.

"Oh, yes, we're going to open the casket," Bradley told documentarian Keith Beauchamp years later, in retelling the story of the day she saw her son's body return from Mississippi. "Let the people see what I see. I want the world to see this."

More than 100,000 people attended Till's funeral. Jet magazine published graphic photos  including one depicting Bradley above the coffin containing her battered son's body  and the outrage grew louder. When the two men accused of the murder, Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam, were acquitted by an all-white jury weeks later, anyone looking for further reason to put an end to lynching and demand racial justice had a rallying point.

" " During his murder trial of Emmett Till at the Tallahatchie County Courthouse, defendant Roy Bryant (left) sits with his family. His wife Carolyn (far right), accused Till of flirting with her. She later recanted her story. Ed Clark/The LIFE Picture Collection via Getty Images

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What Really Happened?

What prompted Till's kidnapping and murder is still debated and, in reality, beside the point.

The jurors were told by Bryant's wife, Carolyn, that Till had whistled at her, come into the Bryant family store, grabbed her by the wrist, put his hands on her waist and bragged about being with white women.

It was a lie. She recanted that story years later. What she told author Timothy Tyson for his 2017 book, "The Blood of Emmett Till," strikes at the very truth of that night. "Nothing that boy did could ever justify what happened to him," Bryant said.

Still, the original retelling of the encounter between 14-year-old Till and 21-year-old Carolyn Bryant has had remarkable staying power, despite the fact that version has been disavowed by its creator. A 1956 Look magazine article by William Bradford Huie, containing a "confession" from the murderers (Look paid them to be interviewed), was purported to tell the "true account" of the murder.

"That so-called confession continues, in some, to function as the history of what happened to Emmett Till that night," Houck says. "What the article has done, what I see, is it still divides Mississippi along black and white lines. 'Oh, Emmett Till was kind of this borderline rapist man-child who had it coming to him.' You will hear that in polite company in Mississippi to the present day."

" " Mamie Till Bradley (middle) grieves during her 14-year-old son, Emmett Till's funeral services on Sept. 6, 1955. Collection of the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, Gift of Lauren and Michael Lee, Photo courtesy of the Chicago Sun-Times

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The Aftermath of the Murder

Till's story had an immediate and profound effect on Americans at the time, both black and white  largely because of his mother's bold decision to display his body, and Jet's decision (among others, including the Chicago Defender) to publish the pictures. Former politician and activist Julian Bond, who died in 2015, explained in a foreword to Devery S. Anderson's indispensable look at the events, "Emmett Till: The Murder That Shocked the World and Propelled the Civil Rights Movement:"

The Till story was a touchstone narrative of my generation. Among many southern horror stories, this was among the most morbid. The Till death picture was proof of white southerners' malevolence. Their refusal to acknowledge the killer's guilt was proof of their acceptance of evil.

Till's story was recounted throughout the 1960s as the Civil Rights Act became law. It is still widely cited by activists from Bond to Rosa Parks and beyond.

And the story of what happened in Mississippi in August 1955 may not be finished, either. Till's body was exhumed and positively identified as part of a 2004 Department of Justice reopening of the case, which resulted in no new charges. A Mississippi grand jury in 2007 found no evidence, suggested by documentarian Beauchamp that as many as 14 people may have taken part in his kidnapping and murder. In 2018, the Department of Justice again opened up an investigation; it's evidently still pending.

Many articles, books and documentaries have been produced on the story. There's now an Emmett Till Interpretive Center in Sumner, Mississippi. A few other museums are in the works. The state of Mississippi has several road signs that detail places in the Emmett Till story, though many of the signs continue to be shot and otherwise vandalized.

The National Memorial for Peace and Justice, dedicated to black people terrorized by lynching, opened in 2018, not far from The Legacy Museum: From Enslavement to Mass Incarceration. Both are projects of the Equal Justice Initiative.

And finally, on Feb. 26, 2020, the United States House of Representatives overwhelmingly passed the Emmett Till Antilynching Act 410-to-4, to make lynching a federal hate crime. This comes after lawmakers have tried and failed more than 200 times. The bill still needs to be passed in the U.S. Senate and signed by the president to become law.

NOW THAT'S INTERESTING Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam never took the stand in their 1955 trial for murder. They didn't need to. The jury deliberated for only 67 minutes before acquitting them. Afterward, both Bryant and Milam celebrated by lighting cigars and posing with their wives for photographs. Milam died in 1980, at age 61. Bryant died in 1994, at age 63.

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Originally Published: Apr 14, 2020
JAKARTA, Indonesia - Indonesian security forces on Wednesday shot and killed two alleged members of an Islamic militant group suspected of involvement in attack on a policeman on Sulawesi island earlier in the day.

The two men, believed to be members of the East Indonesia Mujahideen militant group, were killed in a gunfight in Kayamanya village in Poso, a mountainous district considered an extremist hotbed in Central Sulawesi province, local police spokesman Didik Supranoto said.

Supranoto said a security video led police and military to a house in the village while they were searching for two gunmen who critically wounded a police officer in an attack in front of a bank on Wednesday afternoon.

The video showed two attackers wearing helmets shooting the policeman and then fleeing on a motorbike when the injured officer tried to resist with a gun.

Supranoto said the suspects refused to surrender and shot at police during the raid on the house.

They were the planners and were directly involved in the attack, Supranoto said.

Police seized weapons and the motorbike used in the attack, and defused at least two bombs found in the house, he said.

Security operations have been intensified in the past months in Poso to try to capture the groups members. It still has an estimated nine members after more than 30 were captured or killed in the past year. Its leader, Abu Wardah Santoso, was killed in a shootout with security forces in 2016.

Supranoto said groups strength was weakened after the death of Santoso, but it remains dangerous under its current leader, Ali Kalora.

Indonesia, which is home to some 230 million Muslims, has carried out a sustained crackdown on Islamic militants since bombings on the tourist island of Bali in 2002 killed 202 people, mostly foreigners.

The Jemaah Islamiyah network, which was blamed for the Bali attacks, was neutralized following the arrests of hundreds of its members and leaders. But new threats have emerged in recent times from Islamic State group-inspired radicals who have targeted security forces and local infidels instead of Westerners.

Late last year, a suicide bomber blew himself up at the Medan city police station, wounding at least six people. That attack came as Indonesias counterterrorism force worked to root out suspected Islamic militants following an assault by a knife-wielding militant couple who wounded Indonesias top security minister in October.

___

This story corrects the spelling of the police spokesmans name to Supranoto instead of Supranto.
A year ago today, a fire began in the world-famous Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris, with images of the building engulfed in flames sending shockwaves around the world.

The blaze destroyed its roof and toppled its 300ft, 750-tonne spire, as the cathedral was undergoing renovations on April 15, 2019.

The Paris landmark remains empty from tourists, while wooden buttresses and scaffolding surround the 12th Century building.

Patrick Chauvet, rector of Notre Dame told the BBC the cathedral is still very "fragile".

Coronavirus lockdown restrictions have temporarily stopped work on the cathedral / AP

"It just takes a storm, a tornado, and it will move," he said. "When the old scaffolding that is welded together is removed, then we can say the cathedral is 100 per cent saved.

"Notre Dame is an 850-year-old lady. She's an injured, old lady."

The restrictions in place to manage the spread of the coronavirus has meant that all restoration work on the Paris landmark has temporarily stopped.

Lead contamination also posed obstacles for specialists working on restoring the cathedral and there were long delays after the fire before work could be started.

Notre Dame Cathedral fire - In pictures 1 /64 Notre Dame Cathedral fire - In pictures Aerial image if Notre-Dame Cathedral fire AP An image taken from a television screen shows an aerial view of the Notre-Dame Cathedral engulfed in flames. AFP/Getty Images The steeple of the landmark Notre-Dame Cathedral collapses as the cathedral is engulfed in flames AFP/Getty Images Smoke rises around the alter in front of the cross inside the Notre-Dame Cathedral AFP/Getty Images A man watches the landmark Notre Dame Cathedral burn AFP/Getty Images People kneel on the pavement as they pray outside watching flames engulf Notre Dame Cathedral AFP/Getty Images Security forces evacuate artifacts from inside the Notre Dame cathedral Franck Riester Security forces evacuate artifacts from inside the Notre Dame cathedral Franck Riester Notre Dame cathedral burning in Paris AP Seen from across the Seine River, smoke and flames rise during a fire at the landmark Notre-Dame Cathedral in central Paris AFP/Getty Images General view of the roof of the Notre-Dame Cathedral after a massive fire in Paris EPA French President Emmanuel Macron (C) speaks with firemen as they fight against a fire burning the roof of the Notre-Dame cathedral in Paris EPA Smoke and flames rise during a fire at the landmark Notre Dame Cathedral in central Paris AFP/Getty Images Flames on the roof of the Notre-Dame Cathedral in Paris AFP/Getty Images The cathedral entrance shows smoke rising around the alter in front of the cross inside Reuters People pray as Notre Dame cathedral burns in Paris AP The Notre Dame cathedral spire collapses EPA Flames as a fire engulfs the world famous Notre Dame cathedral in Paris AFP/Getty Images Smoke and flames billows into the sky as the Notre Dame cathedral in Paris AFP/Getty Images Flames on the roof of the Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris EPA Smoke billows into the sky as a fire rips through the Notre Dame cathedral in Paris AFP/Getty Images The gothic cathedral attracks millions of tourists every year AFP/Getty Images Smoke billows from the Notre Dame Cathedral after a fire broke out Reuters Bright orange flames lick the air during a fire at the Notre Dame cathedral in Paris AFP/Getty Images People kneel on the pavement as they pray and sing while flames engulf Notre Dame AFP/Getty Images Smoke billows as fire engulfs the spire of Notre Dame Cathedral Reuters A fire fighter uses a hose as Notre Dame cathedral is burning in Paris AP Smoke billows across Paris following the Notre Dame fire Reuters Firefighters tackle the blaze as flames and smoke rise from Notre Dame cathedral as it burns. AP General view of the roof of the Notre-Dame Cathedral after a massive fire in Paris EPA French President Emmanuel Macron (C) and his wife Brigitte Macron (R) pay a visit to firemen fighting against a fire burning the roof of the Notre-Dame cathedral in Paris, France EPA A statue of Saint John is removed from the spire of Notre Dame cathedral by a crane before restoration work last week Reuters Smoke billows as flames burn through the roof of the Notre-Dame de Paris Cathedral AFP/Getty Images Flames are doused through the scaffolding erected on the roof of the Notre-Dame de Paris Cathedral AFP/Getty Images Firefighters douse flames billowing from the roof at Notre-Dame Cathedral in Paris AFP/Getty Images Firefighters douse flames billowing from the roof at Notre-Dame Cathedral in Paris AFP/Getty Images People react as they watch flames engulf the roof of the Notre-Dame de Paris Cathedral AFP/Getty Images A firefighter uses a hose to douse flames and smoke billowing from the roof at Notre-Dame Cathedral in Paris AFP/Getty Images Smoke and flames rise during a fire at the landmark Notre-Dame Cathedral in central Paris AFP/Getty Images Firefighter douse flames billowing from the roof at Notre-Dame Cathedral in Paris AFP/Getty Images People look at smoke and flames rising during a fire at the landmark Notre-Dame Cathedral AFP/Getty Images Smoke and flames rise during a fire at the landmark Notre-Dame Cathedral AFP/Getty Images People stand on the banks of the Seine river as they look at a fire at the landmark Notre-Dame Cathedral AFP/Getty Images The steeple collapses as smoke and flames engulf the Notre-Dame Cathedral AFP/Getty Images A woman reacts as she watches the flames engulf the roof of the Notre-Dame Cathedral in Paris AFP/Getty Images Paris Fire brigade members are seen at an entrance that looks into the Notre Dame Cathedral Reuters Flames and smoke are seen billowing from the roof at Notre-Dame Cathedral in Paris AFP/Getty Images The steeple engulfed in flames collapsing as the roof of the Notre-Dame de Paris Cathedral burns AFP/Getty Images

At the time of the fire around 400 firefighters worked throughout the night to tackle the blaze, battling to stop it wreaking complete destruction.

Crowds of people flocked to the scene of the fire to view the damage and take pictures and millions of pounds were soon donated to rebuild the cathedral.

One French billionaire pledged 100 million to the cause.

The 12th century building is covered in scaffolding / AP

The scaffolding on the Notre Dame should be removed by mid-2020 and French President Emmanuel Macron has said he wants the cathedral rebuilt by 2024, when Paris hosts the Summer Olympics.

Jean-Louis Georgelin, the army general in charge of the rebuilding, believes the 2024 reopening date can still be achieved.

He told L'Express magazine: "If everyone rolls up their sleeves and the work is well planned, it is conceivable that returning the cathedral to a place of worship within five years will not be an impossible feat.
German luxury car maker Mercedes-Benz India reported a massive over 38 per cent decline in sales at 2,386 units in the March quarter.

The company had posted a total sale of 3,885 units clocked in the corresponding quarter of the previous year.

The production at its Chakan plant in Pune remains suspended since March 21 and subsequently, the operations across dealerships was also shut due to the nationwide lockdown amid the coronavirus pandemic.

Despite challenging market conditions, ongoing macroeconomic headwinds and the current lockdown, Mercedes-Benz India registered a total sale of 2,386 units in the March quarter as compared with 3,885 units during the January-March period of 2019, the company said in a statement.

In view of the current situation, Mercedes-Benz India has strengthened its online offering with increased focus on new modes of digital sales like the e-commerce venture launched in October last year, the company said.

The company said it expects a significant part of its sales to be online by 2025.

Stating that Mercedes-Benz India migrated to BS-VI technology as early as December 2019, it said the comprehensive and early shift to BS-VI also led to temporary unavailability of volume models like CLA, GLA and GLS.

The newly launched GLE 300d SUV continues to have a waiting period of three months, it added.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
On Tuesday, 2,349 people succumbed to COVID-19 in the United States, in the highest daily death toll in the USor any other country. But with the US media promoting the narrative that the pandemic was showing glimmers of hope and hopeful signs, this staggering toll did not even make the evening news.

With Wyoming reporting its first COVID-19 death Monday, every state in the country now has a recorded death from the virus. The state of New York reported 778 deaths Tuesday, New Jersey 362, Michigan 166, Massachusetts 113 and Louisiana 129.

The state of New York has reported 202,208 cases, approximately one third of all US cases. Its death toll stands at a harrowing 10,834. However, this figure does not take into account that New York City has added 3,700 additional people to its list of those who have presumably died from COVID-19 at hospitals, nursing homes and long-term care facilities, but were never tested. The New York City health department released figures that now place the number of deaths in the city alone at over 10,000.

Elmhurst Hospital, Andrew Lichstein (Getty images)

The pandemic has led to a rise in collateral deaths, or deaths not directly related to COVID-19, but to the inability of the health system and first responders to focus attention on the basic health needs of the population due to a lack of resources. Mayor Bill de Blasio of New York City said last week, The driver of this huge uptick in deaths at home is COVID-19. And some people are dying directly of it, and some people are dying indirectly of it, but it is the tragic 'X' factor here.

Massachusetts has climbed into the third position as the number of new cases has grown. Per capita, it is just behind the state of Louisiana, which recorded 129 deaths today to surpass the 1,000 mark. Governor Charlie Baker said that Massachusetts is bracing for a surge in cases expected in mid-to-late April, with an anticipated 2,500 new cases per day.

The state of Michigan, with over 27,000 cases, has a case fatality rate of 6.5 percent and over 1,768 deaths. Yesterday, the state reported 166 new deaths.

In a gruesomely emblematic scene, photos taken by emergency room staff show bodies in white bags piled in closets and vacant spaces, and strewn on the floor because the morgue was too full to take more corpses. Yet, a hospital spokesman told a CNN reporter, Surge plans are in place at our hospital to handle the increase in inpatient volumes to ensure we provide the safest and most appropriate care for our patients.

Corpses piled in storate at Detroit's Sinai-Grace hospital

Detroits convention center has been turned into a field hospital and began to receive patients on Tuesday. So far, eight patients have been transferred to begin relieving overcrowded hospitals. There are no ventilators or ICU beds in the facility. The center has 970 beds with patient support services, showers, toilets and a command center including a pharmacy. Mayor Mike Duggan said, The TCF Center will start off-loading a lot of that stress with 50 today and 50 tomorrow.

The epidemic has taken a heavy toll on the state of Louisiana, with over 21,500 cases and more than 1,000 deaths. Louisianas case fatality index is near 5 percent. Governor John Bel Edwards noted concern that though the number of daily cases has been declining, several groups recently gathered over Easter weekend to celebrate the holiday.

Todays death count is the largest we have reported in a single day since this COVID-19 outbreak started and it brings the number of Louisianans we have lost to more than 1,000, he said. Thats 1,013 people who are someones mother, father, sister, or brother or child or aunt or uncle. He appeared visibly morose during his press briefing.

The neighboring state of Texas added 736 new cases, topping 15,000 cases. Mississippi now has 3,000 cases, adding 145 new cases, and has 111 deaths.

Despite the disastrous daily death toll, the Trump administration and state governments are working to reopen businesses as rapidly as possible. These moves take place despite the fact that the testing, quarantine and contact tracing measures necessary to contain the disease are not in place.

More bodies piled haphazardly in the hospital

The worst is not over, the World Health Organization said Monday. Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus warned, As COVID-19 accelerates very fast, it decelerates much more slowly. The way down is much slower than the way up. That means control measures must be lifted slowly and with controlit cannot happen all at once. Control measures can only be lifted if right public health measures are in place, including a significant capacity for contact tracing.

However, despite Trumps constant boasting, the US has tested less than 0.9 percent of the population, and there are reports throughout the country of ill people unable to obtain testing.

At a White House briefing yesterday, President Trump announced that all funding to the World Health Organization would be suspended. He sought to place the blame for the pandemicwhich has been massively exacerbated by his administrations disastrous responseon the United Nations agency and on China, with which he claimed the World Health Organization was too friendly.
Here is a sentence I almost darent write: in less than three months time, I will have a baby.

My official due date is no longer a vague point on a hazy horizon but is galloping into sharp focus.

Not that youd guess as much, were you to ask me or my husband how the preparations are going.

We have not decorated the nursery yet, nor so much as looked at a pram. I have not made a birth plan or decided when my maternity leave will start. Weve not even discussed names.

Jenny Agg (pictured) is due to give birth in three months' time but is yet to decorate the nursery or prepare a birth plan

None of this is by accident. We are not one of those charmingly disorganised, go-with-the-flow sort of couples.

Nor have we been caught off guard by a happy surprise. This pregnancy is something we have hoped for  longed for  for four years.

No, what we are is scared. Scared that this pregnancy  my fifth, after four miscarriages  will also end without a baby in our arms.

We are all too aware that a fully tricked-out nursery could still go unused, haunted by the image of an empty Moses basket, deeply afraid of enacting our own version of the famous six-word story, sometimes attributed to Ernest Hemingway, For sale: Baby shoes, never worn.

For this reason, we waited until wed passed 24 weeks before buying even a single Babygro.

Jenny has previously gone through four miscarriages, all before the 12-week mark, and she's worried something could go wrong with her pregnancy. Pictured, last June

Despite our fears, we wanted to mark this milestone, one wed never reached before and which felt especially momentous, as 24 weeks is widely considered to be the point after which a baby stands a fighting chance of surviving outside the womb.

So, Dan and I allowed ourselves 20 minutes in John Lewis (pre-lockdown) in blissful, suspended reality.

We pretended we were like any other expectant couple, all innocent, excited smiles when the till assistant asked when I was due.

A summer baby  how lovely! she said, and we beamed.

Back at home though, our prize an implausibly tiny, white cotton sleepsuit, embroidered with bunny rabbits  was swiftly consigned to a box upstairs, packed neatly away in tissue paper, along with our fragile hopes. Out of sight, out of mind.

Perhaps, to an outsider, this all sounds unduly pessimistic. Surely we can see that things are different this time? Surely we can relax a little, now were so much further along?

On Saturday I officially made it into the third and final trimester  the home stretch (no pun intended). By comparison, all of our previous pregnancies ended before 12 weeks.

But if recurrent miscarriage teaches you anything, its that there are no guarantees.

The mother-to-be feels blessed every time she feels her baby kick because its a reminder her baby is still safe and well

After some early bleeding in our first pregnancy, more than three years ago, we went to a scan and were shown a flickering but insistent six-week heartbeat.

Thats a really good sign, the midwife said. The chance of miscarriage goes right down once weve seen the heartbeat. And so we let ourselves be reassured  only to lose the pregnancy six weeks later, in a rush of blood and panic on a ward in A&E.

Afterwards, we were told that although miscarriage is common, it was unlikely it would happen a second time. Or a third.

After the third, and tests that concluded there was no medical reason for my bodys inability to hang on to a pregnancy, the consultant we saw cajoled us by saying the odds of a healthy baby next time were still very much in our favour, if we would only keep trying 

But after we struck fourth time unlucky, six months later, it was hard to know who or what to believe.

Even now, after multiple scans showing all is well (weve had six already, where most people would have had two) and two perfect ultrasound images pinned above my desk to prove it, not to mention the burgeoning bump, it is hard to feel truly reassured when youve had so much false reassurance in the past.

Being braced for disappointment becomes a habit. What was once dread that wed fail to get out of the starting blocks has mutated into fear that we will fall at the final hurdle. (And that was before a global pandemic was added to the mix.)

I am conscious our approach to this pregnancy cant be easy for our friends and family.

We still find it hard to talk in any great detail about our plans for when the baby comes  words we never use ourselves. It is always if all goes to plan, or all being well, or, vaguely, after July.

Relatives will say: I know were not allowed to get excited yet or are we allowed to say congratulations?.

My mum knows to double-check before she texts me pictures of the things shes been knitting and sewing for us (and, even then, she was under strict instructions to wait until after 20 weeks  the halfway point).

I do sometimes worry about being such a killjoy  that it comes across as churlish, even.

Yet I also know we cant be alone in feeling and behaving this way. After all, there are so many potential hurdles that can steal away some of the joy and innocence of having a baby.

As many as one in five pregnancies ends in miscarriage; one in every 90 pregnancies is ectopic (in which a fertilised egg implants outside of the womb, where it cannot survive); and one in 250 babies will be stillborn.

Thats a lot of people who may be embarking on their next pregnancy in the shadow of grief and fear.

Then theres the one in seven couples who struggle to conceive, potentially enduring the intimate torture of failed IVF cycles before they get a positive pregnancy test.

For others, pregnancy might be clouded by a diagnosis of pre-eclampsia or gestational diabetes  or news their baby is unwell and could need serious medical treatment soon after birth.

Whatever the root of it, anxiety affects half of all pregnant women, according to a 2017 survey conducted by the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists.

Yet this isnt a side of the pregnancy story we hear very often. Instead, the cute internet pregnancy announcements, Pinterest-perfect baby showers and gender reveal parties hog the spotlight.

Chirpy advice and breathless daily updates can be beamed to your smartphone via pregnancy apps that seem built around a naive surety that two pink lines on a pregnancy test always adds up to a baby in a few months time.

This is not to say, of course, that just because pregnancy isnt always fun for some of us, there should be no fun for anyone. But it can start to feel alien and alienating in a pregnancy like ours.

Ditto pregnancy books that talk about empowering birth choices and making sure you get the blissful, midwife-led waterbirth youve meticulously planned, down to the last soothing whale sound.

Dont get me wrong, it is a womans right to give birth how she wants. But I absolutely cannot relate to this. However hard I try, having birth preferences feels too much like pushing my luck.

I feel cut out of the normal pregnancy script. The expected lines feel uncomfortable and false in my mouth.

Is this your first pregnancy? is a question Ive been asked countless times, by everyone from hospital receptionists to yoga instructors, and I still dont know how to answer it: at least, not elegantly.

Generally, I look at my shoes and nod dumbly. No need to fill in the gory details for relative strangers.

Its trickier still with fellow pregnant women; women you hope might become friends, if you end up with babies of a similar age.

An obstetric history like ours is not easy to bring up in a chat. At what point do you explain yourself? Is it ever fair to burden other pregnant women with this knowledge?

And if you do, do you risk making yourself the ghost at the feast for evermore? The subject of playdate whispers: Shes the one who had all those miscarriages.

No. Somehow it feels safer not to say anything. Even if it would help explain why Im so neurotic about some things  decaf coffee, properly cooked meat, not dyeing my hair  yet apparently relaxed about anything that involves planning, such as buying a cot or a car seat, or breastfeeding classes.

Even so, keeping quiet comes with a side-helping of guilt. In recent years, Ive connected with many other women grappling with the invisible grief of miscarriage, infertility, stillbirth, neonatal death or termination for medical reasons, through writing about my experiences and sharing other peoples stories via my blog (uterus monologues.com).

Its a close-knit and fierce community, forged by a shared conviction that there is not nearly enough knowledge of, or openness around, these subjects.

So my own tactical silences now can feel a little like hypocrisy. And Ive often wondered, when chatting to other pregnant women, whether they, too, could be harbouring a story not unlike ours. This is how taboos fester.

None of which is to say there arent upsides to a pregnancy like mine. Even amid the angst, trepidation, and, yes, sometimes terror that something could still go wrong, there is also a delicate thread of pure, golden joy.

I am insanely, giddily grateful to be pregnant. Watching the needle on the bathroom scale nudge upwards each week feels like a pleasure, not an imposition.

Even morning sickness has been a cause for celebration at times. Although Ive had roiling nausea in all five of my pregnancies, it was only this time around, in week 13, that I really threw up.

I cant say I exactly grinned as I hugged the toilet bowl, but I did feel a mad rush of happiness and hope.

Pregnancy isnt uniformly magical, of course it isnt. Even I struggle to put a positive spin on the constant reflux I seem to get. But other minor indignities, such as having to remove my wedding and engagement bands as my fingers puff up, have felt like small, triumphant rites of passage.

When things unfold just as the pregnancy manuals promise, for a second you feel normal, and your world feels safe and predictable.

Sometimes I feel I could happily lie awake all night, counting every kick and squirm, mesmerised as the skin of my stomach ripples and dints.

A private, semaphored conversation between me and the brand-new person just below the surface: Hello, hello again, youre really in there, I know you

Its these tiny moments of grace that you have to hold on to, I think. And if I could look back and tell myself anything, it would be this: all those things you have dreamed of for so long, they will feel just as good as youd hoped and then some.

If anything is going to pull you through the dark, fretful hours, the days that feel as long as a week, the weeks as long as a year, expecting to be bleeding every time you go to the bathroom, holding your breath for bad news at every scan and blood test, its the promise of these moments.

This is also what I would tell anyone who is where I was nearly two years ago, reeling from yet another loss, another disappointment, and feeling like you cant put yourself through it again.

Finally holding that scan picture in your hand, the hug of maternity jeans elastic around your waist, the first kicks  they dont make it easy, but it does start to feel like it might just be worth it after all.
- Ken Walibora was born in Bungoma county in 1965 though his family moved to Kitale and later Cheranganyi, both in Trans Nzoia county

- In his autobiography, Nasikia Sauti Ya Mama, he said his mother, Ruth Nasambu, passed on when he was barely 20 years old

- The novelist admitted he always wanted to be a police officer only to join the University of Nairobi to pursue Bachelor of Arts in Literature and Swahili

Renowned and perhaps one of the remaining prolific Kenyan Swahili fiction writers, Ken Walibora Waliaula, has breathed his last aged 55.

Ken met his death in the hands of a rogue public service vehicle driver on Friday April 10, while crossing Ladhies road after parking his car.

READ ALSO: Kenyan Reverend Evans Kariuki holds parking lot Easter Service in US amid coronavirus scare

Ken Walibora was born on January, 1965 at a place known as Baraki in Bungoma county. Photo: Ken Walibora.

Source: Facebook

READ ALSO: Pasta Ng'ang'a asema ni mhubiri tajiri ambaye haitegemei sadaka ya waumini

He was rushed to Kenyatta National Hospital where his body was found on Wednesday, April 15, after family and friends failed to reach him throughout the weekend.

As a scholar, journalist and a celebrated writer, Ken literally walked into the hearts of many people either through his literary works, news reading at NTV or as a university professor.

Place of birth

The award-winning writer was born on January, 1965 at a place known as Baraki in Bungoma county. His family moved to Kitale and later on Cheranganyi, both in Trans Nzoia county.

Like in most African traditions, traditional midwives would suggest various names for the new born until he stops crying. In Ken's case, mentions of Atanasi and Waliaula soothed him hence Ken Walibora Waliaula.

READ ALSO: William Ruto allies to lose house leadership posts for sabotaging Uhurus agenda - Murathe

Ken Walibora (left) speaking at a past workshop. He authored many Swahili novels and short stories. Photo: Ken Walibora.

Source: Facebook

READ ALSO: Nairobi police officer found dead in girlfriend's Umoja house after a good time together

His mother, Ruth Nasambu, passed on when Ken was barely 20 years old. In deed, in his autobiography, Nasikia Sauti ya Mama, he acknowledged his mum for playing a role in influencing his creativity.

Education

In a number of interviews and workshops, Ken admitted he always wanted to be a police officer but that was never to be the case. He joined the University of Nairobi to pursue Bachelor of Arts in Literature and Swahili.

He topped it up with a master's of art in African-American and African studies and later a PhD in Comparative Cultural Studies from the Ohio State University, USA.

His research interests covered culture, world literature, postcolonial literature, Anglophone African continental and diasporic literatures, and Swahili literature.

Employment and work

Ken's career began as a high school teacher of English and Kiswahili subjects from 1988 to 1996 when he resigned to work with the Kenya Broadcasting Corporation (KBC).

At KBC, he served as Swahili news reader and a translator before rising through the ladder to become news editor.

He left KBC in 1999 to join Nation Media Group as a news anchor up to 2004 when he flew to USA for his masters and PhD studies.

In 2007, he was appointed as an assistant professor of African Languages and Literature at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA.

When Nation Media Group launched a 24-hour Swahili TV channel QTV, Ken was made the group Kiswahili quality manager.

He was also involved in the translation of Google and Microsoft websites user translation from English to Kiswahili.

Awards and prizes

The novelist was a regular face in many literature awards nominations as the best writer.

Among them was Jomo Kenyatta Literature Prize which he won thrice with his Swahili texts, Ndoto ya Amerika in 2003, Kisasi Hapana in 2009 and Nasikia Sauti Ya Mama in 2014.

In deed, Siku Njema and Ndoto ya Amerika were used as set books in secondary schools.

He had other publications to his names in academic journals including Research in African Literatures and Journal of the Association of African Literature, and Journal of African Language Teachers Association and Masculinity in African Cultural and Literary Texts

No doubt the 55-year-old made a name for himself and touched many lives through his literary works such Siku Njema, Kidagaa Kimemwozeaa, Kufa Kuzikana, Ndoto ya Almasi among others.

President Uhuru Kenyatta and his Deputy William Ruto as well as ODM leader Raila Odinga mourned the deceased as a distinguished journalist and an ingenious author.

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.

Kenyans in China speak out on the discrimination of Africans by Chinese citizens | Tuko TV.

Source: TUKO.co.ke
A holocaust survivor recalled the best day of her life 75 years on after a British soldier helped to liberate the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp.

Mady Gerrard, 90, described the impossible to imagine conditions in the camp, where more than 50,000 prisoners suffered from disease, starvation, neglect and torture.

Lieutenant John Randall on 15 April discovered the camp during a reconnaissance mission.

Initially taken to Auschwitz from her home country of Hungary in July 1944 as a 14-year-old, Mrs Gerrard would later become friends with Lt Randall and now keeps a picture of him at her home.

I saw a man in uniform, he came to our door and opened it. It was full of girls like me, the same age and size  skeletons, most sat on the floor unable to stand, Ms Gerrard told the Press Association.

She said she had arrived at Bergen-Belsen in January after being forced to walk in freezing conditions for 10 days.

Holocaust survivor Mady Gerrard with her picture of Lieutenant John Randall (PA)

I later found out it was John Randall. He couldnt believe what he saw. We spoke to him in German, saying we couldnt speak English but we were terribly grateful.

We knew it was liberation, and we thought it was wonderful, because we knew we only had a few days left to live.

It mustve been the best day of my life. The conditions were impossible to imagine, to be there, I dont wish it on anybody.

Ms Gerrard was then transferred to the town of Belsen, before later recovering in Sweden. After returning to Hungary as a 16-year-old, she got married and had a daughter before divorcing and illegally fleeing the country with her child once the revolution broke out.

It was then that she made Cardiff her home, gaining British citizenship five years later while gaining acclaim as a fashion designer, specialising in crocheted and painted silk garments. Her career led to a period living in New York before returning to settle in Wales, which she refers to as the most decent country in the world.

It was 60 years after their chance encounter that Ms Gerrard noticed Lt Randall in a Sunday Telegraph article, which prompted her to contact the newspaper and hastily organise a meeting in London.

The pair would become very good friends for 11 years until Lt Randall died in 2016.

He was a friend, but he was also my hero, she added. I was lucky it was him and not anyone else who walked through the gates, and the fact I found him all those years later makes the story even more remarkable.

If he hadnt have come in, more of us wouldve died. I think about him. I miss him terribly.
15.04.2020 LISTEN

Contrary to the beliefs by a section of Ghanaians, especially some NPP members that former President Jerry Rawlings wants His Excellency, Nana Akufo Addo to continue his governance after the upcoming elections, the Second Deputy Speaker of Parliament, Hon. Alban Kingsford Bagbin has advised Ghanaians abroad to rubbish such speculations.

According to him, the NDC founder wants his party to win and at the same time wants to ensure that the next Mahamas administration performs outstandingly without repeating certain past mistakes.

Speaking to the Ghana current affairs host, Mansa Musa during a phone interview on GM Radio in London, United Kingdom, Mr. Bagbin disclosed that former president Rawlings is willing to see that the party he founded gets back to power to save Ghanaians from the unprecedented hardships they are experiencing now under Akufo Addo but he doesnt want to see any repetition of past mistakes in the next NDC government.

J. J Rawlings has stated on a number of times that he will love to see his party winning the elections. He has stated it a number of times but that does not prevent him from making efforts to ensure that the party would be put in a position that will let the party win, Hon Bagbin explained.

Again, the Deputy Speaker hinted that Ex-President Rawlings has held reiteration of meetings with Ex-President Mahama and the partys Chairman of the Council of Elders to brainstorm on the way forward to ensuring that certain past mistakes are not repeated upon winning the elections.

Bagbin assured Ghanaians in the diaspora that the next Mahamas administration will exceptionally perform to the benefit of all Ghanaians, including those living abroad, considering the structures Ex-President Rawlings and Ex-President Mahama are currently putting in place.

He has held a number of meetings with our flagbearer, our presidential candidate and our former president, His Excellency John Dramani Mahama. Also, he has held meetings with the chairman of the Council of Elders of the party so he doesnt want us to win and not behave better than NPP, he said.

Touching on corruption in the current NPP administration, Mr. Bagbin disclosed to the Ghanaians in the different parts of the world that, unlike the late Professor Atta Mills who decided not to prosecute the alleged criminals in the past NPP government, the next NDC government will investigate and prosecute all persons indicted in the uncountable number of corrupt practices in the current Akufo Addo led government.

In his view, the embezzlement of public funds by civil servants and government officials in Ghana seems to have reached an all-time high and the canker has pervaded the fabric of public sector institutions, posing grave repercussions for the socio-economic growth of the country.

On the issue of corruption under the previous Mahama led NDC government, the lawmaker revealed that the current administration has not found any financial malfeasance after conducting investigations into the various projects initiated by the past government. No official report has been brought to my attention, after investigations conducted on past projects but I am aware from my colleagues in government that they have not found any wrongdoing on most of the investigations they conducted into the alleged corrupt practices.

Declaring his position as far as corruption is concerned in both the past and the current administrations, the legislator affirmed that he supports any government to prosecute and punish any corrupt official to serve as a deterrent to others. He declared that even if he is found culpable of any corruption, the law should deal with him. Hon Bagbin announced that he has no bank account outside Ghana, none of his children attends school outside Ghana and none of his relative's works outside Ghana.

The NDC stalwart underpinned his incorrupt declaration by stating that he did not join politics to enrich himself. He quoted his biblical guidance in his political career from 1 Timothy 6:7, which says we came to this world with nothing and we shall go with nothing.

Mr. Bagbin won the hearts of many Ghanaians both at home and abroad, who listened to the interview. A caller cried on the programme after listening to the lawmaker, saying Ghana needs people like him to change the status quo.
Source: Xinhua| 2020-04-15 18:33:38|Editor: huaxia

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SHIJIAZHUANG, April 15 (Xinhua) -- China's benchmark power coal price fell by five yuan per tonne during the past week.

The Bohai-Rim Steam-Coal Price Index (BSPI), a gauge of coal prices in north China's major ports, stood at 530 yuan per tonne Wednesday, a drop of five yuan week on week, according to Qinhuangdao Ocean Shipping Coal Trading Market Co. Ltd.

Analysts said that in the coastal coal market, strong supply and weak demand for thermal coal has been unchanged. The rising coal stocks at ports and the sluggish demand for domestic coal have led to a deep drop in coal prices.

The supplementary effect of imported coal was still strong, impacting the demand for domestic coal, but the price advantage was obviously reduced. China imported 95.78 million tonnes of coal in the first quarter, up 28.4 percent year on year, according to the latest data from the General Administration of Customs.

The futures prices and the shipping prices of thermal coal were both weak, leading to a strong bearish sentiment in the market, according to analysts.

Released every Wednesday, the BSPI is a leading indicator of China's coal prices.
Coronavirus-related health projects for the northeast will get priority financial sanctions and the DoNER ministry will make sure that funds are made available for each state of the region, Union Minister Jitendra Singh said on Wednesday.

He was speaking at a meeting of the Ministry of Development of the North Eastern Region (DoNER) convened to discuss issues related to social distancing norms.

Each of the eight northeastern states will get priority funding for COVID-19 related projects, the minister said.

Singh said these states have been asked to submit projects related to the COVID-19 pandemic or health infrastructure under the North East Special Infrastructure Development Scheme (NESIDS).

The projects submitted under this scheme will be sanctioned on priority and promptly if they are meant to strengthen the healthcare infrastructure and to fight the pandemic, he said.

Singh said some of these states have already started submitting their projects.

Mizoram has sent a proposal worth Rs 25.7 crore for augmenting ICU bed capacity and related infrastructure, setting up oxygen plants, CT scan machine, protection and sterilisation facility etc, he said.

Similarly, Meghalaya has also sent a proposal for setting up a corona care center in West Garo Hills district at a cost of Rs 10.67 crore, he added.

The Manipur government is also planning to send a proposal for setting up an infectious diseases hospital devoted to COVID-19 and other infections, according to the minister.

Singh expressed satisfaction over the manner in which the northeastern states have, by and large, been able to contain the spread of coronavirus in the region.

These containment measures, he said, could very well be a model for the rest of the country.

Singh appreciated the proactive role of DoNER ministry which provided an immediate relief of 25 crore to these states in the beginning itself and established a control room at the North Eastern Council headquarters in Shillong.

He said he is in regular touch with all the eight chief ministers of the region, state ministers and resident commissioners based in Delhi.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Read what is in the news today.

Politics

 Vietnams Ministry of Foreign Affairs said on Tuesday night Vietnamese authorities are closely monitoring developments in the East Vietnam Sea, in response to Tuoi Tre (Youth) newspapers inquiry regarding recent media reports on the return of the Chinese geological survey vessel Haiyang Dizhi 8 and its escorts to Vietnams Exclusive Economic Zone.

 Leaders of the ASEAN+3 countries, including ten member states of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) and three partner countries  China, Japan, and South Korea  attended an online Special ASEAN+3 Summit on novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19) response on Tuesday, during which they shared experience and discussed concrete measures to stamp out the pandemic.

Society

 Vietnams Ministry of Health has announced two new COVID-19 patients since Tuesday evening, including one linked to Bach Mai Hospital in Hanoi and another linked to the capital citys Ha Loi Village infection cluster, bringing the national tally to 267, with 169 recoveries.

 The family of Nguyen Minh Son, a 58-year-old Vietnamese living in Germany who passed away recently after contracting COVID-19, has agreed to donate his body to science for research on the novel coronavirus, the late mans brother-in-law Pham Hoai Nam told Tuoi Tre on Tuesday.

 Donations to COVID-19 relief efforts received by the Vietnam Fatherland Front (VFF), including those made by organizations, businesses and individuals, had exceeded VND845 billion (US$36.14 million) as of Tuesday, according to VFF President Tran Thanh Man.

 A neighborhood in Hanoi with 60 residents living in ten households have been fenced off after one was confirmed to have caught COVID-19 on Tuesday evening. The patient had visited Bach Mai Hospital to take care of her ill mother.

 The Authority of Information Safety under Vietnams Ministry of Information and Communications has advised state-run organizations and financial institutions against using the popular video conferencing platform Zoom for their online meetings after it was reported that the personal user information of at least 500,000 Zoom accounts, including email addresses, passwords and meeting URLs, has been leaked.

Business

 Small- and medium-sized enterprises are finding it difficult to access the Vietnamese government's credit package worth VND250 trillion ($10.7 billion) to support those affected by the COVID-19 pandemic because of a lack of trust in their ability to repay, the Vietnam News Agency reports.

 About 700,000 enterprises are expected to enjoy a cut in corporate income tax from July 1 this year of 3-5 percentage points to 15-17 percent from the current rate of 20 percent, according to a proposal by the Ministry of Finance to be submitted to the lawmaking National Assembly in a May sitting.

World News

 The novel coronavirus has infected over 1.99 million people and killed more than 126,500 around the world, according to statistics. More than 478,500 patients have recovered worldwide.

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Good morning. I find its the condiments keeping me humming along in the kitchen these days, shortcuts to complexity, a way to bolster flavor with stuff from a jar. I wrote about them for The Times this week in an ode to chile crisp, a Sichuanese concoction that marries fire to texture with incredible results.

The recipe that accompanies the words: a roasted tofu and green bean sheet-pan dinner (above), to serve with rice. Its fantastic, but if you dont have chile crisp, you could try a similar cooking technique with peanut butter and miso that Yewande Komolafe ginned up for us a while back, equally delicious in an entirely different sort of way. Or, failing that, do give Mark Bittmans recipe for stir-fried chicken with ketchup a try. (Its a nod to an old Suvir Saran recipe for Manchurian cauliflower.)

Cook with condiments even if you dont have a recipe, only a bunch of ingredients in the fridge. For instance, to make dinner the other night I thawed a vacuum-packed bag of pork chunks left over from my friend Nick Rubiccos 2019 experiment in animal husbandry  a pair of pigs named Peanut Butter and Jelly he raised in his yard in the Catskills and harvested in the fall. I seared the beautiful, marbled stew meat in a Dutch oven, then sprinkled dried ginger over it because I didnt have fresh. I added a few cups of stock in which Id simmered some kombu to the pot, though if you dont have kombu so be it. Then I added chopped sweet potatoes, carrots and white potatoes and crucially a quarter-cup each of mirin and soy sauce. I let the whole thing simmer for an hour, and it resulted in an insanely good meal. Riff on that as you will.

Other recipes worth examining in these days of heartache and anxiety: Dawn Perrys new pantry pasta recipes: for fast spaghetti Bolognese; for blistered broccoli with walnuts and pecorino; and for brussels sprouts with bacon and vinegar. Alternatively: spring minestrone with kale and pasta; creamy cauliflower pasta with pecorino bread crumbs; three-cup vegetables. And, for pure pleasure, give these peppermint brownies a whirl.
Archbishop Paul Hinder appeals for a ceasefire in Yemen where Covid-19 could prove calamitous.

By Linda Bordoni

The Vicar Apostolic of Southern Arabia and Yemen, Archbishop Paul Hinder, has issued an appeal for a ceasefire in Yemen where Covid-19 presents an imminent danger that threatens the already ravaged nation.

Yemens 30 million people have endured more than 5 years of fighting between the Saudi-led coalition and the Houthi armed group. The violence has precipitated a grave humanitarian crisis, including outbreaks of cholera, diphtheria, measles, and dengue fever.

The war in Yemen has left the nations health care system in tatters and relief organizations say it will be impossible to respond to coronavirus casualties in the face of fighting and armed groups continuing to block access to humanitarian aid.

In this situation, said Archbishop Hinder in an interview with Vatican Radio, it seems to be more urgent than ever that the war should stop or at least that a ceasefire should be agreed upon.

Referring to Pope Francis Urbi et Orbi message on Easter Sunday, in which the Pope appealed for an immediate global ceasefire, denounced those who continue to manufacture and deal in arms, and specifically mentioned the conflict in Yemen, Archbishop Hinder said he has personally had occasion, more than once, to speak to the Holy Father about this issue.

It is clear that there is a real problem in arms trafficking because it is fuelled by interests, he said, pointing out that there are people who have no interest in stopping the war.

An appeal to those in power

Archbishop Hinder said he is appealing to the conscience of the people who have the power to make decisions: May they open themselves to this reality and look not only to economic profit.

Whats more, he continued, It is even more dangerous for everyone, that in times of a pandemic, the economic aspect should prevail over the human aspect of safeguarding lives, an aspect that appears to have been completely forgotten.

Looking to a future in which the Pope has asked leaders to find just solutions and Christians to remain united, Hinder said that within the current climate of uncertainty, he carries within himself the light of hope given to us by the Risen Christ and that he will try to communicate that to others.

Do not be afraid of tomorrow, even if we do not know what it will be. This is the reality that we have celebrated during these Easter days, especially on Holy Friday, he said, pointing out that We are not spared Holy Friday, we cannot go directly to Easter.

Each one of us, Hinder explained, is called to make this passage, and in many occasions, it is a passage that lasts for well over three days.

The Christian message of hope

This is the message that I also try to give to my people: they are anxiously waiting for tomorrow and they ask me what will happen after the pandemic What will we do if we lose our jobs? How will we care for our families? These are the questions of many people, and not only in Yemen, which is a particularly problematic place, he said.

Archbishop Hinder concluded quoting the words of the Pope during the Urbi et Orbi message: This is not a time for division. May Christ our peace enlighten all who have responsibility in conflicts, that they may have the courage to support the appeal for an immediate global ceasefire in all corners of the world.

I repeat this appeal for the whole of my region, he said, it is clear that we have no real power to intervene, but we bear witness to the reality of the Risen Christ, And it is not always easy to make an increasingly secularized world understand this message.
Australia could eradicate local transmission of coronavirus by the middle of June if it stays in lockdown another two months, scientists predict.

Travel bans, closed borders, and business shutdowns have slashed the number of new cases a day by up to 90 per cent in less than a month.

The country only recorded 49 new cases on Tuesday, compared to 460 on March 28.

That raised the total number to 6,415 with 62 deaths.

Stage three restrictions on gatherings and leaving the house brought in on March 31 are expected to crush the curve further over the rest of April.

Modelling from the Universities of Sydney (orange) and Melbourne (green) shows Australia can get to zero new cases within 90 days of lockdown. The current trend in recorded cases (yellow) is already ahead of this

Scenes like this one in Melbourne where a family is told to go home from St Kilda beach under stage thee lockdown need to continue for another two months

Australia's measures have been so successful that Prime Minister Scott Morrison and state premiers next month will begin planning how to wind back the lockdown.

However, a collection of scientists believe Australia's local transmission cases could be reduced to zero if the restrictions are kept in place another two months.

Analysis by the Grattan Institute concluded that the country would not need a tougher lockdown to achieve this, but to extend stage three a little longer.

'A successful elimination strategy would give most Australians a good chance of resuming a near-normal life well before the end of the year,' authors Stephen Duckett and Jonathan Nolan wrote.

They pointed to separate recent modelling by two Australian universities predicting a 90-day lockdown would result in no new cases by mid to late-June.

Dr Jason Thompson at the University of Melbourne said his modelling showed local transmission of coronavirus would be eradicated by June 19 on average across states.

His model assumed 85 per cent of Australians followed social distancing rules 85 per cent of the time and 90 per cent of those told to self-isolate did so.

Analysis by the Grattan Institute of these models concluded that the country would not need a tougher lockdown to achieve this, just extending stage three a little longer

Dr Jason Thompson at the University of Melbourne said his modelling showed coronavirus would be eradicated by June 19 on average

James Jansson at the University of Sydney came to the same conclusion, writing that if Australia tried to eliminate transmission of the virus, the 'pain would be measured in months, rather than years'.

'This can give both business and citizens the strength and determination to stick to the lockdown and be ready to exit the other side with all pistons firing,' he wrote.

Dr Ducket and Dr Nolan said this strategy was being employed in New Zealand with its even harsher lockdown with great results - and Australia could do even better.

'The prospect of 90 days of stage three restrictions is daunting, but there are good reasons to believe we could bring cases down to zero earlier than that,' they wrote.

The pair wrote that Australia's new cases have been halving every 4.2 days for the past week, far less than the 16 days employed by the models.

'Even if that trend slows over the next few weeks, there's a real prospect that many states could begin easing spatial distancing as early as May, with a clear plan in place by Anzac Day,' they wrote.

Australia has made significant progress in the fight against coronavirus, with a clear flattening of the curve on the graph that measures the daily infection rate

Manly Beach in Sydney is shut down to stop the spread of coronavirus. Big beaches could be reopened soon but scientists argue they should stay shut another 2 months

Knocking out that last few cases and preventing them from starting new outbreaks would be the hardest part, requiring every patient to be locked down fast. Testing centres like this one in Bondi will be a key part of that effort

Knocking out that last few cases and preventing them from starting new outbreaks would be the hardest part, requiring every patient to be locked down fast.

Australia is already gearing up for this by ramping up contact tracing abilities with an army of health workers tracking down everyone an infected person had contact with.

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 government is also floating the idea of digital tracking of the individual's movement via mobile phones, as used in Singapore and Taiwan.

The app, which will be optional, would require at least 40 per cent of the population to be on board for it to be effective, according to the ABC.

However, the trade off is that international travel would be off limits for many months to come, to prevent Australians contracting it abroad and bringing back, restarting local transmission.

The downside of Australia's relatively few cases is the lack of herd immunity, leaving locals vulnerable to any new flare-up.

Dr Thompson said there are means to regulate international travellers, such as requiring them to be certified as virus-free before arriving, being quarantined for two weeks upon return as they are now, or both.

'Wouldn't we all prefer to at least have unrestricted movement within our own country in the meantime?' he wrote.

Borders could also be opened to individual countries as they got the virus under control, such as New Zealand which is on track to stop their transmissions.

Grattan Institute said this strategy was being employed in New Zealand with its even harsher lockdown with great results - and Australia could do even better

Overseas travel would be off limits for some time, but could be relaxed if arrivals were quarantined in hotels, like this woman at Sofitel Wentworth in Sydney

Australia's policy had been to flatten the curve of the rate of infection to prevent a spike in pressure on hospitals rather than introduce the most stringent methods to eliminate transmission.

Chief medical officer Brendan Murphy said the country's peak of cases could be as late as November based on current modelling.

Under this suppression method, stage three restrictions could be relaxed within weeks but others may have to remain for far longer.

'Unless herd immunity is achieved, a significant proportion of the community will continue to be susceptible and illness and death will result, albeit at a lesser rate than in the 'let it rip' scenarios,' Dr Thompson wrote.

'Significant social and economic restrictions will still need to continue for an unknown duration.'

State and federal leaders will meet on Thursday to discuss when restrictions on travel and gatherings of people can be relaxed.

Mr Morrison has stressed that a premature relaxation of all restrictions risked a rise in infections, but said the government was ready to discuss plans to gradually re-open the economy.

'That's what we're working on as a National Cabinet,' he said.

'We will be considering further plans about how we can chart that way back to get the economy operating at a much higher level than it is now so it can support people's incomes.'
(@ChaudhryMAli88)

Orthodox Christians in North Macedonia and Serbia are preparing for an Easter weekend with closed churches, as officials ramp up measures to stem the coronavirus pandemic

Belgrade, (APP - UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 15th Apr, 2020 ) :Orthodox Christians in North Macedonia and Serbia are preparing for an Easter weekend with closed churches, as officials ramp up measures to stem the coronavirus pandemic.

The two Balkan nations introduced nationwide curfews in March to halt the spread of the COVID-19 disease -- including a total weekend lockdown from Friday afternoon until Monday morning.

The Serbian Orthodox Church wanted the curfew to be lifted on Easter Sunday to enable believers to attend Mass.

But officials in Belgrade and Skopje instead tightened the measures for the Easter weekend, extending the usual lockdown until Tuesday morning.

Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic announced the stricter measures for Easter but did not directly respond to the Church's request.

"I will beg the patriarch on my knees to reconsider this demand .

.. but we will certainly not arrest priests," Vucic told the state-run RTS television late on Tuesday.

The president said he was acting on the advice of doctors who proposed the longer curfew.

Most of Serbia's 7.1 million people are Orthodox.

The country currently has 4,456 confirmed cases of the coronavirus and 94 deaths.

In North Macedonia, the Church has told believers who wish to go to church before the curfew to respect social distancing measures and not to kiss the icons.

The country has 908 people infected and 44 have died.

In neighbouring Montenegro, where Orthodox Christians are also a majority, officials banned Masses in March.

Archbishop Amfilohije, leader of the Serbian Orthodox Church in Montenegro, was detained on Sunday along with several priests for violating the measure.
Source: Xinhua| 2020-04-15 21:17:48|Editor: Wang Yamei

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Chinese Consul General to San Francisco Wang Donghua speaks at a donation ceremony in San Francisco, the United States, April 14, 2020. (Xinhua/Wu Xiaoling)

SAN FRANCISCO, April 14 (Xinhua) -- The Chinese Consulate here as well as Chinese companies in the United States donated personal protective equipment to the local community on Tuesday to help its fight against COVID-19.

"The coronavirus does not respect any border or race. It is our common enemy, the only way to defeat the virus is for all of us to work together in a spirit of solidarity and cooperation," Chinese Consul General to San Francisco Wang Donghua said at the donation ceremony in Redwood City, the San Mateo County seat.

A total of 175 protective clothes, 1,600 N95 masks and 3,000 other medical masks were delivered at the ceremony.

"As the virus is still accelerating its spread in the United States, many medical supplies are badly needed. This is only part of our donations to this area," Wang said, adding that "we are trying to bring more donations so that the people here would be in a better place to fight the virus."

"I think the experiences we have gained during the combat against the coronavirus could also be helpful, and we are ready to share them with the people in the United States," he added.

David Burruto, chief of staff at the office of the county's Supervisor Dave Pine, expressed his gratitude, saying that the donation is crucial to keep frontline health care workers safe and to help defeat the virus and get back to normal.

"When America needs help, we are all here together to help. That's how we establish relations and friendship," said Jojo Zou, principal China advisor to San Mateo County Trade Office.

"This just shows if we come together, we can give hope to everybody, and we can defeat the virus," said Wayne Lee, a council member of Millbrae, a city located in northern San Mateo County.

San Mateo County is located in the San Francisco Bay Area and is part of Silicon Valley, a global center for high-tech and innovation.
New York, April 14, 2020 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Reportlinker.com announces the release of the report "Hong Kong Wound Care Market" - https://www.reportlinker.com/p05879085/?utm_source=GNW



The Hong Kong wound care market held an estimated value of $44.6 million in 2019, which is projected to reach $58.4 million by 2024, progressing at a CAGR of 5.6% during the forecast period (20192024). Based on type of advanced wound dressings, the foam category held the largest market share, of 29.3%, in 2019, mainly on account of the fact that wound management with foams reduces the need to change the dressings frequently.

Whereas, the Hong Kong wound care market is expected to witness faster growth in the chronic wounds category under the application segment during the forecast period. This can be attributed to the high incidence of chronic wounds, such as diabetic foot ulcer (DFU), venous leg ulcer (VLU), and pressure ulcer.

The region is encountering a positive shift in consumer preference from traditional wound care products to advanced therapies. This is mainly due to the advanced wound care products that accelerate healing in addition to providing quick relief to patients. Whereas, traditional wound care products facilitate dry healing when used for primary dressing and also serve as secondary dressing products either to hold the primary dressing in place or to absorb excess exudate.

Surging geriatric population in Hong Kong is playing a pivotal role in the growth of the wound care market in the region. This is due to the fact that elderly people are more prone to developing medical conditions and are susceptible to chronic diseases, such as cancer, diabetes, neurological disorders, and cardiovascular diseases. In addition, the process of wound healing in the geriatric population is delayed, owing to the reduced elasticity of skin and slower collagen production. This in turn, leads to increase the demand for wound care products in the region.

Furthermore, increasing prevalence of diabetes is also a major factor driving the Hong Kong wound care market. According to the Centre for Health Protection, Department of Health in Hong Kong, diabetes is a leading cause of mortality and morbidity in the region. The agency claimed that there were 13,700 in-patient discharges and in-patient deaths in hospitals in 2015, due to diabetes. Later in 2017, this number increased to 14,076.

 The advanced category is expected to hold larger share, of 69.0%, in the Hong Kong wound care market in 2024. This can be attributed to fact that advanced wound care products induce rapid healing with minimal inconvenience to patients.

 The chronic wounds category is expected to witness higher CAGR, of 5.7%, during the forecast period. This can be primarily attributed to the increasing incidence of DFU, VLU, and pressure ulcer in Hong Kong.

 The hospitals and specialty clinics category held the largest share, of 67.0%, in 2019. This is mainly due to a large number of patients prefer to visit hospitals and specialty clinics in case of severe injuries.

 The Hong Kong wound care market in the pharmacies category is projected to grow at a faster rate, with a CAGR of 6.1%, during the forecast period. This can be ascribed to the easy availability, accessibility, and reliability of wound care products in pharmacies.

Read the full report: https://www.reportlinker.com/p05879085/?utm_source=GNW



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In a significant development in the Tablighi Jamaat case, Nizamuddin Markaz's Maulana Saad Kandhalvi along with others has now been booked under stringent IPC sections on culpable homicide charges on Wednesday. Along with this Lookout circular (LOC) has been issued against 2000 foreign Tablighis by the officials.

Earlier on, April 8, the Delhi Police has traced Tablighi Jamaat leader Maulana Saad Kandhalvi, who has been on the run after an FIR was registered against him for organising a religious gathering last month despite restrictions to combat the coronavirus, sources said. The cleric has been traced to Zakir Nagar in southeast Delhi, sources said. His lawyer Tauseef Khan, however, said Saad is under self-quarantine and will join investigation after his quarantine period is over.

READ | Punjab Govt Warns Tablighi Jamaat Attendees Of Criminal Prosecution; Sets Timeline

On March 31, Delhi Police's Crime Branch lodged an FIR against seven people, including the cleric, on a complaint by Station House Officer Nizamuddin for holding the congregation here allegedly in violation of the orders against large gathering and not maintaining social distancing to contain the spread of coronavirus.

A day later, the Delhi Police's Crime Branch wrote to Saad and others, seeking the details under Section 91 of the Code of Criminal Procedure. A second notice was also issued to him. In an audio message last week, Saad said he was exercising self-quarantine after several hundred who visited the Tablighi Jamaat's Nizamuddin Markaz tested positive for coronavirus. An audio tape from the congregation had created ripples for unscientific descriptions of the Covid outbreak.

READ | Himachal CM Jairam Thakur: '50% Of Total COVID-19 Cases Linked To Tablighi Jamaat'

What is the Nizamuddin COVID-19 scare?

On Monday, sources reported that a religious programme was organised at Tablighi Jamaat's headquarters Markaz Nizamuddin mosque between 13-15 March which had over 3400 attendees from Malaysia, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia and Kyrgyzstan and from several states in India. After attending the meeting, prior to the nationwide lockdown, 1500 of these attendees returned to several parts of the country, possibly spreading the COVID-19 virus.

The mosque has claimed that while they were letting small groups of attendees leave from the venue prior to the Janta Curfew, several were stuck in the area owing to the nationwide lockdown. All 2631 occupants have been evacuated and the building has been sanitised. The Delhi Crime Branch which has booked the Markaz chief Maulana Saad for violating lockdown is currently searching for him by raiding possible hideouts.

READ | HUGE Tablighi Jamaat Scare In Pakistan Over 250,000-strong March Congregation Amid Covid

READ | Mumbai Police Registers FIR Against 150 Tablighi Jamaat Attendees; Probe Underway
Dr. Michael Hirsh said Worcesters medical officials are seeing that the COVID-19 surge is upon us.

Hirsh, the medical director of the citys public health department and a UMass Memorial physician, said he had very serious talks on Wednesday with the citys federally-funded health centers and its two medical centers.

Theyre recognizing the surge is here, said Hirsh, at the citys daily COVID-19 press conference. Theyre recognizing their numbers are going up and that the percentage of ICU beds, availability is going down.

State health officials on Wednesday afternoon announced 151 new deaths related to COVID-19, the disease caused by the new coronavirus. Those deaths, the largest number announced in a single day so far during the pandemic, bring the states toll to more than 1,000 people.

Between the UMass Memorial Health Care system and Saint Vincent Hospital in Worcester, there are currently 208 inpatients with coronavirus, an increase of eight since Tuesday. Of those patients, 79 are in the intensive care unit, which is a decrease of one patient since the day prior, said City Manager Edward Augustus Jr.

The two systems have seen 36 patients die from illness related to coronavirus, three more since Tuesday. And 106 employees of the two systems have tested positive for the virus, Augustus said.

Saint Vincent Hospital got a shipment of ventilators on Wednesday, said Hirsh, who added that he is also working to identify more sources of personal protective equipment for the employees of the citys health care centers.

Hirsh said small outbreaks of the respiratory illness continue at city longterm care centers.

Overnight, one resident of the Blaire House of Worcester who had tested positive for coronavirus died, Hirsh said. Eight residents and two staff members had tested positive as of Tuesday and results for four residents are still pending on Wednesday afternoon.

At Eisenberg Assisted Living, a new case has been identified in a staff member, Hirsh said.

Overall in Worcester, 42 new cases were counted Wednesday, bringing the citys total to 910 cases, Augustus said.

At Worcester Technical High School, a shelter designated for members of the citys homeless population who have tested positive has 24 people staying there in isolation. That shelter only has room for about 25 people and the city is now looking for another place to designate for any more members of the homeless population who test positive, the city manager said.

Another round of testing at the SMOC shelter is expected to start soon, said Augustus, noting that new people have been to the shelter in recent days. The next round of testing will also be a precaution in case any tests were a false positive, Augustus said.

As of Tuesday, 168 members of the citys homeless population had been tested and 24 were positive.

At the Beaumont Rehabilitation and Skilled Nursing Center, which has become a designated center for coronavirus patients, there are currently 60 patients. The center is admitting six to eight patients a day and some patients have already completed treatment there and have gone home, Augustus said.

Across Massachusetts, 1,108 residents have died from illness related to coronavirus and at least 29,918 people have tested positive for the respiratory illness, according to the state Department of Public Health.

In Worcester County, there are at least 2,350 cases, per DPH data.

Related Content:
Prince Harry and Meghan Markle may be trying to live a quiet life in Los Angeles but the media does not seem to be loosening up.

One of Britain's infamous media personalities, Piers Morgan, blasted the former royal couple for constantly "seeking attention."

Morgan, 55, took a swipe at the pair on "Good Morning Britain," where he has been hailed an unlikely hero for his response during the COVID-19 pandemic.

He criticized the Duke and Duchess of Sussex for fleeing the U.K. in the midst of the novel coronavirus pandemic.

In contrast, he lauded how the other royal family members have carried out a "great job" during the crisis.

"I've got to hand it to them and say they've done a great job of what they should be doing. Which is just being comforters and consolers for the nation, stable and calm."

Markle, 38, has already worked on her first project for Disney, providing a voice-over for the documentary "Elephants."

He praised the Queen for her calming and uniting speech addressed to the public and quoted Prince William when he said, "The coronavirus outbreak has again shown Britain is at its best during a crisis."

Morgan especially mentioned Prince Harry for finding the lockdown "challenging," laying into the former royal for complaining about the ordeal in his lavish L.A. mansion, while hundreds of thousands of Britons are suffering from poverty during the pandemic.

Dr. Jane Goodall, a world-renowned primatologist and a friend of the duke, remarked that she had been in touch with Prince Harry and he was finding L.A. life challenging.

Also Read: Meghan Markle True Colors Revealed: Former Friend Says She's a 'Shapeshifter

The Chimpanzee expert attended the duchess' Frogmore Cottage on the grounds of Windsor Castle last summer. She also believes that she is one of the first people to hold baby Archie outside of the family.

Morgan, a critic of the Sussexes, said, "Nobody wants to hear about Prince Harry's challenging life. We don't want to hear about the struggle and battle of celebrities in multi-million-pound mansions."

Prince Harry was not yet given an interview, but Morgan advises all the couple's friends not to grant him one.

Morgan added, "I don't blame particularly...I don't think Harry and Meghan wanted to be on the front pages today, I think they probably just wanted to be quiet but they're on the front pages because one of their friends had spoken to Harry and said he's finding it challenging."

Morgan also backed comedian Ricky Gervais who gave an earful to moaning celebrities isolated in multi-million-pound mansions

The Duke of Sussex had been living in Canada with his wife and son before they relocated to North America.

Their current home is close to Markle's mother Doria Ragland and her friends, believed to be part of the motive for the move.

Related Article: Royal Heartbreak: Prince Harry Regrets Megxit, Misses Royal Family

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S outh Koreans are today going to the polls in one of the first national elections held amid the coronavirus pandemic.

Voters were told to attend polling stations wearing masks and plastic gloves and were having their temperature taken on arrival.

Anyone whose temperature was higher than 37.5C (99.5 F) is being led to a special booth.

All voters must use hand sanitiser as they cast ballots and maintain one metre (40 inches) distance between each other.

A voter has his temperature checked at a polling station in South Korea's capital / AP

The election is set to decide control of parliament and shape President Moon Jae-in's ability to push through his agenda in the final two years of his administration.

His agenda includes looser fiscal policy aimed at creating jobs, raising the minimum wage, and continued re-engagement with North Korea.

Globally, South Korea was one of the first countries to hold a national election since the coronavirus epidemic began, while many others postponed votes.

Once grappling with the first large outbreak outside China, South Korea has largely managed to bring its cases under control without major disruptions thanks to a massive testing campaign and intensive contact tracing.

Voters wearing protective face masks queue to vote in South Korea's national election on Wednesday morning / YONHAP/AFP via Getty Images

The Korea Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported 27 new coronavirus cases on Tuesday, bringing the total infections to 10,564.

The daily tally has hovered around 30 over the past week, most of them from overseas travellers.

But authorities have warned that infections could resurge at any times, calling for special caution on election day.

More than 13,000 people in self-quarantine have signed up to vote and will be allowed to do so after other voters leave at 6pm (9pm UK time)
MAINZ, Germany  Four suspected ISIS members who were plotting to attack U.S. military facilities and other targets have been arrested in Germany, prosecutors in the country said Wednesday.

Specialist tactical police units swooped on the suspects in the western state of North Rhine-Westphalia, arresting the men who were all originally from Tajikistan, the prosecutors said in a statement.

The suspects, named as Azizjon B., Muhammadali G., Farhodshoh K. as well as Sunatullokh K., were arrested near the cities of Essen and Duesseldorf, the statement added.

A fifth man, Ravsan B., who was already in custody, was also arrested. Their last names were not released for privacy reasons, in keeping with German law.

State Interior Minister Herbert Reul said in a statement that the group had spied on two U.S. air bases.

He added that they had already bought weapons and ammunition and in addition, one suspect has knowledge how to make explosives.

He added: This shows that the suspects were very serious about their attacks."

Prosecutors said individual people were also targeted by the group.

"In particular, they planned a murder attack on one person who had made public comments that they viewed as being critical of Islam," they added.

The group had contacted high ranking ISIS members in Syria and Afghanistan, the statement said.

Having initially planned to carry out attacks in Tajikistan, prosecutors alleged that they later changed their target to Germany, where they raised money to finance their operations before transferring it to Turkey.

They added that Ravsan B. had also tried to take $40,000 to murder someone in Albania.
Inside The Factory

Rating:

Quiz

Rating:

Buying the birthday presents for Bouncing Gregg Wallace must be so easy. The simplest things fill him with excitement.

Let him unwrap a yo-yo or a hula hoop and I bet his little face would be beaming all day long.

He watched a truck unload a dumpster full of iron ore into a skip on Inside The Factory (BBC2) and his joy was unconfined.

'Wow!' he bellowed. 'Woo-wee! I have never seen a lorry empty its load so fast. Incredible!'

Obviously, gravity being what it is, sackfuls of potatoes or boxes of crisps would have tumbled out at exactly the same speed as the unsmelted iron. But telling that to Gregg would be heartless.

He's still at that age where he thinks a big slice of cake tastes better than a small one. A movie with ten car chases is twice as good as a movie with only five. And heavy things fall faster.

It's logic, innit?

Bouncing Gregg didn't gawp in wonderment at the heap of iron ore in its dust cloud for long. He bounded away to see the next exciting machine, with a grin stretching around his bald head like an unzipped egg.

This edition of the 'how-things-are-made' show came from the Le Creuset plant in northern France. Here, the enterprising French produce iron cookware for export to us Brits, so that we can make Lancashire hotpot.

If you're wondering how we managed before the Common Market, historian Ruth Goodman had a fascinating story about stew during the Industrial Revolution. I'm not being sarky: it was genuinely interesting.

Mother love of the night: Prue Leith, unlike certain Bake Off judges we could mention, usually keeps her family life out of the limelight. But she talked candidly about adoption in Journey With My Daughter (C4), often in tears. What a showstopper. Advertisement

Before heading to the cotton mills for a 12-hour shift, Manchester mums would chop some veg and a scrag-end of mutton into the family's ancient black pot and take it to the street's communal oven, or the bakery, where it could simmer all day long. Come nightfall, a hot meal was waiting.

Think of that next time you watch Belgravia. All the male weavers at Mr Charles Pope's cotton factory are cooking up insurrection, but their working wives are smarter: they've got a hotpot stewing for when everyone gets home.

Charles and Diana Ingram were in the mother of all stews by the end of the second part of Quiz (ITV). They appear, in Chris Tarrant's words, 'as guilty as sin', after the Major cheated his way to the jackpot on Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?

But there was a whiff of redemption, as the Ingrams' barrister (played by Helen McCrory) popped up and stared into the camera as if we were the jury and she was about to wrap us around her finger.

How will she convince us that these colossal chancers were honest quizzers who won the pay-out fair and square? I am agog to find out.

This true-life drama has been all kinds of wonderful, not least because of the pitiless portrayal of the TV execs as vain, swaggering bullies and sycophants. It is ITV's answer to the BBC sitcom W1A, except that here all the incompetence and back-stabbing ends in a national scandal.

Characters such as David Liddiment (Risteard Cooper) and Claudia Rosencrantz (Aisling Bea) are real people.

Do they realise how appalling they look . . . and do they secretly love it?

The poor old Ingrams, who now eke a living by selling home-made jewellery at craft fairs, can't be enjoying it much.

Think of that perennial pub conversation where friends name the actor who would play you in a story of your life.

If Matthew Macfadyen is cast in your shoes, you know you're in trouble. The word 'hangdog' was coined to describe his face.
Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam this week signed multiple criminal justice bills, including one that eliminates jail time for possession of marijuana in the state, making the offense a civil penalty and fine.

Why it matters: Virginia becomes the 27th state to legalize or decriminalize marijuana. "These bills combat mass incarceration, increase support for returning citizens, and ensure that those who have paid their debt to society have a meaningful second chance," he said in a statement.

Go deeper: Los Angeles County to clear 66,000 marijuana convictions
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A "wheeler-dealer" businessman who is "down on his luck" is at the centre of a fraud squad probe into a sophisticated international 15m Covid-19 scam.

The 48-year-old man, who is originally from Co Clare but now lives in Co Roscommon, was questioned by specialist officers for a number of hours last Friday before being released without charge.

He is understood to be co-operating with the Garda probe, and he was not arrested.

Gardai said documents and electronic devices were obtained and are being forensically examined but this process may take a number of months to complete.

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"This individual was not previously known to gardai for involvement in crime and he certainly does not fit the profile of someone involved in organised crime at this level," a source said.

"It would be fair to say that he is a failed businessman who is down on his luck. He has been involved in many enterprises over the years including senior roles in the retail and hospitality sectors as well as a number of other enterprises.

"1.5m has been found in his bank account. This cash has been frozen.

"It is fair to say that he is an eccentric type of person."

The investigation was launched when German health authorities made an upfront payment online of 1.5m for face masks, only to discover the website advertising the personal protective equipment (PPE) was being operated by scammers.

The German state of North Rhine-Westphalia (NRW), which includes the city of Cologne and is the worst affected for coronavirus cases in the country, contracted a German company for 10 million face masks at a cost of 14.7m.

The German health authorities then went to a trusted supplier in Spain but the scammers had set up a cloned website claiming it could not fulfil the order due to high demand for PPE because of the global pandemic.

The officials were then directed to an Irish middle-man who put them in touch with a Dutch company and distributor, whose website and details have been cloned by scammers.

A deal was made and 1.5m was paid up front to an Irish company based in Roscommon, and 880,000 forwarded to the account of a Dutch firm, with the rest of the money to follow.

On March 27 Irish and German stakeholders travelled to Amsterdam to oversee the handover.

Fifty two vehicles had been sent from Germany to collect the masks and were due to receive a police escort at the border, but the shipment never arrived.

The transactions were made by the German company's managing director while in home quarantine in Bavaria at the end of March after a holiday in Austria, and a complaint was made to police in the Traunstein region on March 30.

A total of 12.3m was returned from the company to the German health authorities, and the 1.5m was traced to a bank account in Roscommon and frozen.

Of the 880,000 sent to the Dutch account, 490,000 was traced to a Nigerian bank account which was deposited from a UK account. That money was recovered. A further 125,000 was transferred to another Dutch bank account.

Two men appeared in a Dutch court on April 9 in relation to alleged fraud, falsification and money laundering in connection with more than 880,000 in proceeds of crime.

Yesterday gardai announced details of the investigation which is being led in this state by the Garda National Economic Crime Bureau (GNECB).

The man was questioned last Friday under section 7 of the Criminal Justice (Money Laundering and Terrorist Financing) Acts 2010 to 2018.

"This is a serious offence carrying a maximum term of imprisonment of 14 years after conviction on indictment," a spokesman said.
A total of 41 people have been arrested by personnel of the Ghana Immigration Service (GIS) at Babile Inland Post in the Lawra District of the Upper West Region for attempting to enter the country illegally.



The people, comprising of 39 Ivoirians and two Ghanaians who were traveling on two Sprinter buses with Registration Numbers AW 253-14 and GE 8700-12 through an unapproved route were intercepted on Monday by personnel of the immigration service at Babile through intelligence.



Assistant Commissioner of Immigration, Mr Peter Nkrumah, Upper West Regional Commander of the GIS disclosed this to the media on Tuesday.



He said the two Ghanaians were sent to where they came from while the 39 Ivoirians have been sent to Sampa in the Bono Ahafo Region to be dispatched back to where they came from.



He also disclosed that eight others including two Ghanaians and six Burkinabes were also arrested for passing through unapproved route into the country.



The Regional Commander of the GIS further disclosed that on Monday, April 13, at about 0945hrs, a Malian was also arrested for coming into the country through unapproved route and was picked up by two Ghanaians including a police man using a Land Cruiser Vehicle.



Mr Nkrumah said after briefing the Regional Minister, Dr Hafiz Bin Salih and the Regional Director of Health Services, Dr Osei Afreh Kuffuor, they agreed that the Malian be quarantined at the Regional Hospital.



We know the economic hardship in the sub region but this is an enemy we are fighting  COVID-19 is a giant enemy we are fighting and we must all collaborate to make sure that we defeat the enemy, he said.



We the Immigration personnel who are on the ground will make sure that the directive of the President is implemented to the latter; we are not going to accept anybody that passes through unapproved route into the country, he emphasized.



Monitoring the event on daily basis, we are realizing that all those crossing through the illegal routes are positive to the virus, said the Regional Commander of Immigration.



Mr Nkrumah appealed to residents of the border communities to give out information on all those people trying to use the unapproved routes to enter into the country.



We should all know that government is fighting for the safety of all citizens, therefore, this fight should not only be for the security officers alone, he added.



We are appealing to everybody to come on board; border residents must come on board to help Immigration and other security officers to make sure that we protect our borders from the illegal immigrants who might carry the disease into our country.



Mr Nkrumah appealed to the people who were engaged in illegal aiding of people into the country as a business to stop; emphasizing these are not normal times.



On challenges, the Regional Commander of Immigration noted that the unapproved routes were many with less men and logistics such as vehicles for effective monitoring, hence, the need for all to support.

Source: GNA









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The elderly and immunocompromised are most at risk of severe coronavirus complications, but over the last several weeks there's been growing evidence that younger, otherwise healthy people can also fall victim to the deadly virus. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports that at least three children in the U.S. have died as a result of COVID-19 and that infants can be vulnerable to severe infections.

Dr. Dyan Hes, a pediatrician with New York City's Gramercy Pediatrics, spoke with CBSN's Anne-Marie Green and Vladimir Duthiers to break down how coronavirus can affect children and how families should handle the situation if their kids get sick.

"We have zero tests for children. We have zero swabs," she said. "I've had patients whose parents have COVID, child has a 102.5 fever. At the beginning when we were doing this, we were sending them to the ER. They got turned away. They were not tested because we do not have enough tests and the kids are doing well."

Due to that lack of testing, Hes says families should just assume their children have COVID-19 if they begin to show symptoms consistent with the virus.

"You won't know," she said. "If your child does have a low-grade fever right now and a cold, you have to assume that it's COVID because you're really not going to get tested in New York City. In other states, maybe you'll get tested. But in most places, we're saving the tests for the sickest."

So should you take a sick child to see their pediatrician? Hes says that's best avoided at the moment, and that many doctors are offering video consultations instead.

"The really only reason your child should be going to a physician at this point, aside from a vaccine visit, is if they're short of breath," she said. "If you're social distanced and your child has a fever, then somehow that child probably brought it into the house by playing with a neighbor or maybe when you went grocery shopping, you brought it in. But you just have to keep that child at home for 14 days. Socially distance. When they go back out, if they're above age 2, they should be wearing masks."

Story continues

She notes that children under the age of 2 do not usually tolerate a mask.

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A CDC report published April 6, entitled "Coronavirus Disease 2019 in Children," says, "Although most cases reported among children to date have not been severe, clinicians should maintain a high index of suspicion for COVID-19 infection in children and monitor for progression of illness, particularly among infants and children with underlying conditions."

Among the 149,082 confirmed U.S. cases of COVID-19 reported as of April 2, for which the patient's age was known, 2,572  or 1.7% of the cases  were in children under 18 years old. Of the 745 cases in which data was available on whether or not the child was hospitalized, 147 children were reported to have been hospitalized, including 59 under the age of 1 year old.

The most common symptoms reported in pediatric patients were fever, cough, and in a smaller number, shortness of breath, the CDC said.

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Centers for Disease Control and Prevention

However, Dr. Hes believes the official numbers don't reflect the true scope of of the outbreak due to the lack of widespread testing.

"I don't mean to be rude, but the numbers are totally wrong," Hes said on CBSN. "I think that probably 80% of the children have coronavirus. We are not testing children. I'm in New York City. I can't get my patients tested. And we have to assume, if they are sick, they have coronavirus. Most of them, probably 80 to 90% of them, are asymptomatic. So, these numbers are so skewed. I think that the mortality rate is way, way less than 0.5% for children who have it because it is so prevalent. You have to remember thousands of kids die from flu a year. This is much, much less virulent in children."

The greater danger, she argued, was that all of these asymptomatic children could potentially infect others who are at higher risk.

"The problem with children is that they are so asymptomatic that they are spreading it. And our biggest mistake was that we didn't close the public schools when we should have," said Hes. "So the children were the vectors to the teachers, who might be elderly or immunocompromised. They might have diabetes or cancer, but they still had to come to work every day. They still had to take the subway every day."

On Monday, the New York City Department of Education announced that 21 teachers have died as a result of coronavirus. The CDC report acknowledges the role that children with only mild or no symptoms may have played in the transmission of COVID-19.

"Because persons with asymptomatic and mild disease, including children, are likely playing a role in transmission and spread of COVID-19 in the community," the report reads, "social distancing and everyday preventive behaviors are recommended for persons of all ages to slow the spread of the virus, protect the health care system from being overloaded, and protect older adults and persons of any age with serious underlying medical conditions."

To keep children healthy while school's out, the CDC recommends cleaning their hands often with soap and water, disinfecting high-touch surfaces daily and laundering items like washable plush toys. In-person playdates with children from other households are to be avoided and trips to see grandparents should be postponed. If your child begins to exhibit any symptoms like fever, cough or shortness of breath, call their doctor immediately, keeping your child at home and away from others as much as possible.

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BAKU, Azerbaijan, April 15

By Elnur Baghishov - Trend:

Some 94 people have died from the coronavirus (COVID 19) over the past day in Iran, said Kiyanush Jahanpur, spokesman for Iran's Ministry of Health and Medical Education, Trend reports citing Ministry.

According to Jahanpur, as many as 1,512 people got infected with the coronavirus in the past 24 hours. Jahanpur added that the condition of 3,643 people is critical.

So far, more than 299,000 tests have been conducted in Iran on coronavirus. The official said that the number of coronavirus infected and death toll was declining in Iran.

Iran is one of the countries heavily affected by the rapidly-spreading coronavirus. According to recent reports from the Iranian officials, over 76,300 people have been infected, 4,777 people have already died. Meanwhile, over 49,900 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.
<! Governor Sanwo-Olu >

By Kazeem Ugbodaga

Lagos State Governor, Babajide Sanwo-Olu on Tuesday announced a programme, tagged: Food Kitchen aimed at feeding 100,000 youths daily to cushion the effect of Coronavirus lockdown in the state.

The governor disclosed this while giving update on the Coronavirus situation in Lagos in Marina, Lagos Island, Lagos, Southwest Nigeria.

According to Sanwo-Olu, in the next couple of days, we will commence a daily Food Kitchen programme which will see us aim to feed about 100,000 people daily.

This will largely target the youths. We are identifying local food vendors who will pilot this programme and ensure that the process of cooking and serving of the meals adhere strictly to public health guidelines.

The governor also said his administration was cleaning up its data from various social registers to get a clean list of truly vulnerable and economically challenged persons to enable it remit some cash to them.

We aim to do these cash transfers by the end of the week to a minimum of 250,000 indigent citizens, he said.

Also, Sanwo-Olu said he had just issued an order to the Police; LASTMA and the VIO to release all impounded vehicles arrested for minor traffic offences from the 1st of March 2020 to date.

He said the directive would take effect at the end of the lockdown.

The governor also announced that all the Micro-Small and Medium Enterprises, MSMEs and Small and medium-sized Enterprises, SMEs who had taken Lagos State Employment Trust Fund loans and other government programme loans would enjoy a three months moratorium.

This will further help to cushion the effect of the lack of economic activities occasioned by the lockdown, he said.

Sanwo-Olu reminded Lagosians that this is a season for obedience and personal responsibility, urging them to follow the guidelines as issued by the health experts and authorities.

Please, let us cooperate with the government to ensure that we have an outcome that is favorable to all. I can assure you that we will surely overcome this pandemic, and we will emerge stronger and more determined to transform the lives of all Lagosians and all the people of Nigeria, for the better, he said.
"Anyone attempting to split China in any part of the country will end in crushed bodies and shattered bones, Chinese President Xi Jinping was quoted as saying during his meeting with Nepali Prime Minister Khadga Prasad Sharma Oli, during his visit to Nepal on 13 October 2019.

Since the COVID-19 outbreak, some Western countries have been blaming, bashing, and coercing China. The use of derogatory remarks, humiliation of Chinese nationals, and putting the blame on China is often seen in the Western media.

It reminds me of 120 years ago, when the so-called Eight Allied Powers  Gengzi (Austria-Hungary, Britain, France, Japan, Italy, Russia, Germany, the US) declared war on China for its alleged anti-Western tendencies. In 1901, China agreed to pay reparations of 450 million taels of silver.

Today, we have noticed some Western powers wanting to do the same and demanding compensation for losses brought by COVID-19. The Mail Online said on April 4 that China owes us 351 billion in compensation.

I also recalled the great leader Deng Xiaoping telling British PM Margaret Thatcher that China would take back Hong Kong in 1997 no matter what, otherwise the Chinese government would have been like the late Qing dynasty. China after 1949 was not Qing-China, and Hong Kong had to be returned!

China has emerged as a geopolitical power, and has proved its capabilities during its fight against COVID-19. The whole world has witnessed its visionary leadership and strong strategy during the outbreak. Most sensible nations have acknowledged and admired the role played by the Chinese during the outbreak. Not only has China succeeded in controlling the contagion in China, it is also assisting the world in fighting the pandemic. Chinese experience may serve as a guideline for the rest of the World. China has already emerged as a global leader.

China has an interest in a stable and peaceful world. The country is promoting diplomacy, understanding, cultural integration, free and fair trade, globalization, and prosperity. It is keen on maintaining a stable and safe world order.

Media war, trade war, visa sanctions, blacklisting of Chinese companies, and pandemic as a political tool are all methods of a hybrid war being waged against China. The country is fully aware of all these threats and still not openly retaliating, due to its centuries-old wisdom and deep strategy. China has set its goals for development and wants to meet its targets peacefully. China does not want any confrontation with any nation on any issue.

The Chinese system of governance is very robust and comprehensive. It has its own merit of democracy, which might be very different from Western-style democracy. The Chinese public trusts its leadership and strengthens its hand, while the Chinese leadership protects the public interest and works hard for its welfare. The Chinese people and the government are on the same page. There is no deficiency of trust on either side. China can resolve its domestic issues.

President Xi loves his people, and as was seen during the outbreak, he made every possible effort to save the lives of Chinese people. He also loves humankind and is trying his best to save human beings in any part of the World. China is providing medical supplies, medical teams, and experts to the rest of the world. China is sharing its proven successful experience with other nations.

China believes in the basic principles set by the United Nations Charter and abides by them strictly, that is to say, non-interference in other countries domestic affairs. In the history of modern China since 1949, China has never interfered in the internal issues of any other nation. China maintains its relations with all countries on the basis of equality, mutual respect, mutual interests, and non-interference in each others domestic affairs, and expects other nations to follow a similar policy of non-interference in Chinese affairs. China is a sovereign state and possesses the capacity to handle all its issues.

China has developed in all dimensions, including economy, S&T, defense, industry, agriculture, health and so on, to a stage where no other country can challenge it. China has already surpassed this threshold. Any conspiracy against China will be unsuccessful. China can easily face any challenge posed to its sovereignty, and no one can coerce China anymore.

The opinions expressed in this article belong solely to the author, and not necessarily to People's Daily Online.

Zamir Ahmed Awan is a senior fellow with the Center for China and Globalization (CCG) and a sinologist at the National University of Sciences and Technology in Pakistan. E-mail: [email protected]
Interventional cardiologists should prioritize the conservation of medical resources, minimization of potential COVID-19 exposure and reallocation of resources, according to a paper published on April 9 in the Journal of Invasive Cardiology.

In the article, Le Bonheur Children's Hospital and the University of Tennessee Health Science Center Interventional Cardiologist Shyam Sathanandam, MD, suggests that catheterization laboratories should develop strategies for patient care by preserving and repurposing resources.

Sathanandam published the work after issuing a web-based survey to 56 unique U.S. centers, with the objective of describing current practice patterns and recommending potential resource allocation for congenital cardiac catheterization during the COVID-19 pandemic.

"We are faced with a fundamental question," said Sathanandam, who serves as the medical director of Le Bonheur Children's Interventional Cardiac Imaging and Interventional Catheterization Laboratory. "How can we, as pediatric and congenital interventional cardiologists, continue to care for patients who require intervention, while also being good stewards of limited medical resources and maintain an appropriate level of preparedness when we are uncertain about how this pandemic will affect our discipline?"

Medical Resource Utilization and Case Selection

The majority of survey respondents felt they had sufficient PPE to care for COVID-19 positive patients or PUIs. However, limited access to PPE and ventilators necessitates postponing elective catheterization cases to assist with the preservation of medical resources. The paper recommends using a multi-disciplinary clinical leadership team to triage case priority and timing - at present, only one-half of the reporting U.S. programs employed this strategy to review case selection.

While responding centers have canceled elective procedures with relative uniformity, centers in counties with 2,000 or more COVID-19 cases were more likely to delay certain cases including PDA closures in premature infants, pre-Glenn catheterization and coarctation stenting.

Minimizing Exposure

The responses suggest that many programs may not be adequately prepared for a surge of COVID-19 positive patients. Centers located in areas with higher number of COVID-19 cases have been more involved in a simulation of donning and doffing PPE equipment than low-prevalence centers (46.7% vs. 10.3%). Only 10.8% had converted a Cath lab to a negative pressure room for potential COVID-19 positive patient or PUI. The majority (65%) were only testing for COVID-19 prior to cardiac catheterization if the patient was symptomatic. Only 15% tested all patients prior to aerosol-generating procedures in the Cath lab.

However, responding centers were employing various strategies to reduce staff exposure to COVID-19.

31% did not allow fellow participation in cardiac catheterization cases.

76% minimized staff exposure through changes to the work and call schedule.

10.8% reassigned staff to provide clinical services outside the typical scope of practice.

41.7% had discussed or planned reassignment.

In addition, many facilities are minimizing staff presence in the Cath lab before and after airway manipulation in order to reduce potential exposure.

Resource Reallocation and Potential Repurposing

The primary way responding centers are conserving resources is by decreasing elective cases. "For subspecialists like pediatric interventional cardiologists, this raises the question of how best to utilize our clinical skills if the typical volume of patients with congenital heart is reduced," said Sathanandam.

This decision will vary by pediatric institution and may depend on geographic proximity to and relationship with adult centers. Pediatric interventional cardiologists will likely be deployed for services outside of the Cath lab depending on where resources are strained whether inpatient services, ICUs, emergency departments or vascular access teams.

###

View the paper here: https://www.invasivecardiology.com/articles/resource-allocation-and-decision-making-pediatric-and-congenital-cardiac-catheterization-during-novel-coronavirus-sars-cov-2-covid-19-pandemic-us-multi-institutional-perspective

About Le Bonheur Children's Hospital

Le Bonheur Children's Hospital in Memphis, Tenn., treats children each year through community programs, regional clinics and a 255 bed state-of-the-art hospital. Le Bonheur serves as a primary teaching affiliate for the University Tennessee Health Science Center and trains more than 350 pediatricians and specialists each year. Nationally recognized, Le Bonheur is ranked by U.S. News & World Report as a Best Children's Hospital. For more information, please call (901) 287-6030 or visit lebonheur.org. Connect with us at facebook.com/lebonheurchildrens, twitter.com/lebonheurchild or on Instagram at lebonheurchildrens.

About The University of Tennessee Health Science Center

As Tennessee's only public, statewide, academic health system, the mission of the University of Tennessee Health Science Center is to bring the benefits of the health sciences to the achievement and maintenance of human health through education, research, clinical care, and public service, with a focus on the citizens of Tennessee and the region. The main campus in Memphis includes six colleges: Dentistry, Graduate Health Sciences, Health Professions, Medicine, Nursing and Pharmacy. UTHSC also educates and trains medicine, pharmacy, and/or health professions students, as well as medical residents and fellows, at major sites in Knoxville, Chattanooga and Nashville. For more information, visit http://www.uthsc.edu. Find us on Facebook: facebook.com/uthsc, on Twitter: twitter.com/uthsc and on Instagram: instagram.com/uthsc.
One of the big questions remaining about our universe is why there is more matter than antimatter.

We may be a big step closer to cracking one of the universe's biggest and most fundamental mysteries.

Scientists think that, when the universe was born nearly 14 billion years ago, it contained equal amounts of matter and its bizarro counterpart, antimatter . Antimatter particles have the same mass as their "normal" cousins but opposite electrical charges. Perhaps the most famous such duo is the electron (normal, negatively charged) and the positron (antimatter, positively charged).

When matter and antimatter particles collide, they annihilate with perfect efficiency, converting into 100% pure energy. (This handy fact is why sci-fi writers love putting matter-antimatter engines on their starships.)

Related: 8 baffling astronomy mysteries

And therein lies the mystery: If there were an equal number of particles and antiparticles at the universe's birth, they should all have found and annihilated each other, leaving our cosmos utterly bereft of each. But that obviously didn't happen, as your existence clearly shows. There ended up being a tiny excess of matter over antimatter  just a single particle per billion matter-antimatter pairs .

Physicists have gathered some clues about this excess-matter mystery over the years. For example, in the 1960s, they figured out that quarks and antiquarks don't behave in exactly the same way. But this violation of "charge-conjugation parity-reversal symmetry," or CP symmetry for short, wasn't substantial enough to explain the matter-antimatter disparity.

A different type of symmetry violation just might be, however. After all, quarks  the building blocks of protons and neutrons  aren't the only subatomic particles out there. They have relatives known as leptons, a category that includes electrons, muons, tau particles and neutrinos. (Quarks and leptons, in turn, are fermions, one of the two main categories of subatomic particles. The other category is bosons, which include force-carrying particles such as the photon, the gluon, the Higgs and the as-yet unconfirmed graviton.)

A new study looked hard for signs of CP symmetry violation in neutrinos and came up with some intriguing results. The data come largely from the T2K project, which generates beams of neutrinos or antineutrinos, depending on the experimental setup, at the Japan Proton Accelerator Research Complex in the city of Tokai.

The vast majority of the beam particles zoom through Earth like our planet's not even there. (Neutrinos, nicknamed "ghost particles," are weird that way.) But a few get flagged by an underground detector at Kamioka Observatory, 183 miles (295 kilometers) from Tokai. This detector is a tank filled with 55,000 tons (50,000 metric tons) of very pure water. When a neutrino interacts with a neutron in the tank, a muon or an electron can be produced. And sensitive equipment picks these secondary particles up.

Such detections contain a lot of information. For example, as neutrinos travel, they oscillate between three different "flavors": electron, muon and tau. (Yes, the flavor names are confusing, given that electron, muon and tau are also monikers for different particles. But particle physics is confusing!) And the flavor type determines what secondary particle is produced during a collision with a neutron.

Related: The universe: Big Bang to now in 10 easy steps

The T2K Collaboration analyzed data gathered by the project from 2009 to 2018, as well as observations from similar experiments. In the new study, which was published online today (April 15) in the journal Nature , the researchers report that they found evidence that neutrinos and antineutrinos oscillate in different ways.

"The results exclude CP conservation (that is, they suggest that CP violation has occurred) at a 95% con- fidence level, and show that the CP-violating parameter is likely to be large," physicists Silvia Pascoli and Jessica Turner  of the University of Durham in England and the U.S. Department of Energy's Fermilab in Illinois, respectively  wrote in an accompanying "News & Views" piece in the same issue of Nature.

"These results could be the first indications of the origin of the matterantimatter asymmetry in our universe," added Pascoli and Turner, who were not involved in the new research.

To be clear, however: The results themselves are not a convincing demonstration of CP violation with neutrinos and antineutrinos.

"We are seeing some indication," study lead author Atsuko K. Ichikawa, of Kyoto University in Japan, told Space.com via email. "The present result is an important step to observe CP violation."

Taking the next step will require more data, Ichikawa stressed. But there's good news on this front: Several next-generation neutrino experiments are already in the works. For example, Japan's T2HK, which will be similar to but more powerful than T2K, was officially greenlit in February, Pascoli and Turner noted. And the Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment (DUNE), which will employ a beam at Fermilab and detectors there and in South Dakota, is scheduled to come online in the mid-2020s.

T2HK and DUNE will "provide complementary techniques and measurements," Pascoli and Turner wrote. "They will probably give us a definitive answer in the quest for CP violation in the next 15 years."

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 .
Paul Gregory produces honey from about 1,800 hives at his operation near Fisher Branch.

Hey there, time traveller!

This article was published 14/4/2020 (637 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Paul Gregory produces honey from about 1,800 hives at his operation near Fisher Branch.

But if a handful of workers from the Philippines are not able to arrive in time to tend to the hives by early May, his production might be cut in half.

The beekeeping industry across Canada  which predominantly operates in the three Prairie provinces  relies on temporary foreign workers for as much as three-quarters of its workforce.

But those workers are having a devilish time landing in Canada with international travel restrictions in place in just about every country and international air travel virtually grounded.

Those workers typically start arriving soon and the COVID-19 pandemic that has caused a global standstill could not have come at a worse time.

Earlier this week, the Canadian Honey Council with the help of Global Affairs Canada succeeded in landing a chartered plane in Alberta from Nicaragua with 83 beekeepers.

Rod Scarlett, executive director of the Alberta-based CHC, said he is hopeful that another 50 Nicaraguan workers will have all their travel documents in place for another chartered airlift to Alberta in another few days.

"I spent about 10 years working for general farm groups," Scarlett said. "When I went into the apiary industry I never thought I would be getting into the aviation industry."

This is not just grunt labour... These are skilled workers who know how to deal with bees and the same individuals are returning. Some come back 20 years in a row. Rod Scarlett, Canadian Honey Council

Nicaraguan and Mexican workers are the largest component of the 1,500 to 2,000-strong temporary foreign workers who tend honey bee hives across the country.

But Mark Friesen, president of the Manitoba Beekeepers Association, said getting those Nicaraguan workers here will not solve all of the industrys problems.

Its still uncertain if workers from the Philippines as well as small Caribbean island nations including St. Vincent and Barbados will be able to make it into Canada to manage about a half million honey bee colonies in the three Prairie provinces. (Albertas industry is about three times the size of Manitobas and Saskatchewans.)

"We could have a significant lack of employees this summer and it could be disastrous for some producers," Friesen said.

For instance, Gregorys workers from the Philippines, where people are under threat of gunfire if they are caught violating the strict freedom of movement regulations in place to halt the spread of COVID-19, are having a hard time just getting to the airport.

"Many temporary foreign workers would typically be arriving now," Friesen said. "Things have been disrupted to the point that some beekeepers will have to downsize their operations or their hives will die or their businesses will fail."

Manitoba has about 900 beekeepers  which has just about doubled in size over the past decade  who typically employ 150 to 200 temporary foreign workers every year.

Earlier this week, as part of a $50-million COVID-19 support package, Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada said it will provide support of $1,500 for each temporary foreign worker to help cover the cost of two weeks of self-isolation after arriving.

There are mixed opinions regarding the level of support the industry has received from the federal government. Scarlett said the industry was prepared to do whatever it took to get its workers in so the just-announced worker support was appreciated.

Friesen, on the other hand, does not believe government has done enough.

I have neighbours who say I should hire Canadians but when it comes down to it, it is a hard job that requires experience... It is so easy to kill a queen bee or misidentify disease. Paul Gregory, honey producer

Honey production in Manitoba is worth more than $30 million per year but is valued even more for pollination that bees provide enhancing yields of canola and other crops.

And for all sorts of reasons, the industry needs foreign workers from poorer countries like Nicaragua and the Philippines where they can earn enough from seasonal employment in Canada to provide for their families back home for the whole year.

"This is not just grunt labour," Scarlett said.

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"These are skilled workers who know how to deal with bees and the same individuals are returning. Some come back 20 years in a row."

Employers have to prove that they could not find Canadian workers to fill the positions in order to hire the foreign workers.

Friesen, who runs about 1,200 hives near Morden, is able to find the five or so workers he needs from the local labour force, but said it would be a different story if he needed 20 workers.

"I have neighbours who say I should hire Canadians but when it comes down to it, it is a hard job that requires experience," Gregory said. "It is so easy to kill a queen bee or misidentify disease."

Then there is the matter of working in 30 Celsius summer temperatures, often in remote locations wearing heavy bee suits and often getting stung on exposed flesh.

martin.cash@freepress.mb.ca
A Rs 10,000 crore 'Fund of Funds' will soon be approved by the government to buy up to 15 percent equity in MSMEs with a high credit rating that want to list on stock exchanges and raise money from the capital markets, Union Minister Nitin Gadkari said on Wednesday

New Delhi: A Rs 10,000 crore "Fund of Funds" will soon be approved by the government to buy up to 15 percent equity in MSMEs with a high credit rating that want to list on stock exchanges and raise money from the capital markets, Union Minister Nitin Gadkari said on Wednesday.

He also said a separate scheme was being formulated for according credit rating to MSMEs based on their annual turnover, exports and GST payments, and that the National Small Industries Corporation or another government body will control the Fund of Funds.

.@nitin_gadkari says govt to soon unveil fund of funds for MSME of Rs 10,000 Cr. MSME Min to seek Cabinet nod for the fund. Finance Min approved the creation of fund. Fund to be used to assist MSMEs with good credit rtg. Credit rtg to depend on track record of I-T, GST returns pic.twitter.com/RCAMGFA2mN  CNBC-TV18 (@CNBCTV18Live) April 17, 2020

He said the government wants the Fund's corpus to be utilised by micro, small and medium enterprises (MSMEs) having AAA rating. The AAA rating implies high credit worthiness.

"We have submitted a proposal for a Fund of Funds of Rs 10,000 crore which has been approved by the Finance Ministry. It is going to be placed before the Cabinet and will soon be cleared," said the minister for MSMEs.

Gadkari said up to 15 percent of the amount an AAA-rated MSME raises from the capital market will be contributed by the government through the Fund as equity.

The minister said he was expecting Cabinet clearance for the Fund soon and will implement it immediately upon approval.

Interacting with members from the PHD Chamber of Commerce and Industry via video conference, Gadkari exhorted India Inc to also consider the financial condition of the government and banks while placing forth their demands, amid the coronavirus-induced economic crisis.

"The government is also facing a financial crisis. Some state governments do not have enough money to pay salaries to staff next month. The situation of banks is also challenging in terms of their survival," said the minister, emphasising the need to strike an equilibrium to ensure everyone's survival.
Actor Shraddha Kapoor has donated to an NGO to help them feed stray animals during the lockdown period.

The NGO, People For Animals India, took to Twitter on Tuesday to thank Kapoor for her donation.

"@ShraddhaKapoor We thank you for your generous donation to the voiceless! PAWSITIVE HEARTS is an initiative launched by PFA in order to overcome the problem of starvation during lockdown," the NGO tweeted.

On Wednesday the 'Ek Villain' actor took to Instagram to share a heart-touching post of animals in captivity and how it affects them just in the way lockdown affects us.

The picture which Kapoor reshared from an Instagram page 'Earth' featured animals like Tiger, Elephant, Bear, Chimpanzee, and Dolphin under captivity and isolation.

Many stray animals across the world are going hungry and are starving to death as people mainly remain homebound owing to the lockdowns to prevent the spread of COVID-19.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
In a 2-1 decision, a federal appeals court has ruled against victims of sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein, who were seeking to overturn the late multimillionaires secret 2008 federal plea deal in an effort to go after co-conspirators who received immunity under the agreement.

Despite calling the case a national disgrace, two judges with the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals said victim Courtney Wild was not entitled to confer with the government about the case, appear at Epsteins sentencing or to even have been informed that he had received a non-prosecution agreement.

The lawsuit arose in 2008 after federal prosecutors and Epsteins lawyers reached a deal to allow Epstein to plead guilty to two prostitution charges in state court, rather than face a 53-page federal indictment on sex trafficking charges. As part of the agreement, Epstein and an untold number of alleged co-conspirators were also given immunity, despite allegations that they had sexually abused some three dozen girls at his mansion in Palm Beach.

Wild, who was 14 when she was first sexually abused by Epstein, petitioned the federal court in 2008 to throw out the deal, arguing that it violated the federal Crime Victims Rights Act, which gives victims certain rights, including the right to be informed by prosecutors how the case is being disposed of. In Epsteins case, then-U.S. Attorney Alexander Acosta agreed to keep the deal secret  and allowed it to be sealed  so that none of Epsteins victims would be able to raise objections to it and possibly sway the judge until after Epstein had already been sentenced and sent to jail.

Epstein was re-arrested in New York in July 2019, and was found dead a month later in his Manhattan jail cell, where he was awaiting trial on sex trafficking charges brought by the U.S. attorney in the Southern District of New York. His death was ruled a suicide. The arrest came after the Miami Herald published an investigative series, Perversion of Justice, dissecting the case.

Story continues

Epsteins victims had hoped that federal prosecutors would prosecute Epsteins alleged accomplices, identified in the agreement as Sarah Kellen Vickers, Nadia Marcinkova, Lesley Groff and Adriana Ross. The women were accused of helping Epstein recruit and schedule underage girls for sex. The deal, however, also mentions that it covers unnamed co-conspirators who have never been identified.

Tuesdays court decision could impact whether its possible to charge the co-conspirators with crimes that they were given immunity for in Florida.

A lower court decision, in February 2019, concluded that prosecutors had violated the CVRA by intentionally misleading Epsteins victims, and telling them that the criminal case was still moving ahead, when in fact, a deal had been signed months earlier. But the judge stopped short of voiding the agreement, which led to Tuesdays ruling.

Despite our sympathy for Ms. Wild and others like her, who suffered unspeakable horror at Epsteins hands, only to be left in the dark  and so it seems, affirmatively misled  by government lawyers, we find ourselves constrained to deny her petition, said judges Kevin Newsom and Gerald Bard Tjoflat, in writing for the majority.

They explained: Because the government never filed charges or commenced criminal proceedings against Epstein, the CVRA was never triggered.

Former South Florida U.S. Attorney Alexander Acosta never told underage sex abuse victims of the plea deal he helped engineer for Jeffrey Epstein. A federal judge found that to be a violation of the Crime Victims Rights Act.

In dissenting, Judge Frank M. Hull pointed out that not only were criminal proceedings already well underway, but the government had assured Epsteins lawyers they had proof beyond a reasonable doubt of his crimes  as evidenced by the 53-page draft federal indictment. Prosecutors inexplicably shelved the case upon reaching an agreement with Epsteins lawyers. The only female on the panel, Hull chastised the majority for making a decision that essentially will allow prosecutors in the future to continue to make secret plea deals with wealthy criminals.

The majoritys new blanket restriction eviscerates crime victims CVRA rights and makes the Epstein case a poster-child for an entirely different justice system for crime victims of wealthy defendants, Hull said.

Wild was stunned, saying Tuesday that she had hoped the panel would recognize the significance of the case and use it to set a precedent that sends a message to prosecutors that they cannot make backroom deals with wealthy and powerful sex predators and child molesters.

Justice has never been served in this case, and its a sad day because this is just another victory for Jeffrey Epstein, and other people committing crimes against women and children, Wild said.

Every time we get to the point that we are going toward the greater good, that maybe we will get justice, we get shut down.

One of her attorneys, Paul Cassell, said he would appeal the decision en banc to the entire 11th Circuit.

For all the reasons given in the 60-page dissenting opinion, we strongly disagree with todays ruling, which leaves victims like Ms. Wild without any remedy, even for victims like her who have been affirmatively misled by federal prosecutors. We will be seeking a rehearing en banc before the full 11th Circuit.

The 120-page decision is rife with criticism from both sides on how federal prosecutors  and even the news media  handled the case.

We are doubtlessly omitting many of the sad details of this shameful story. For our purposes, we neednt discuss the particulars of Epsteins crimes, or the fact that the national media essentially ignored for nearly a decade the jailing of a prominent financier for sex crimes against young girls, the majority wrote.

Today, the public facts of the case are well known  Epstein was eventually indicted on federal sex trafficking charges in the Southern District of New York, and in August 2019, while awaiting trial, he was found dead in his jail cell of an apparent suicide.

Hull disagreed with their assessment, writing: while the majority laments how the national media fell short on the Jeffrey Epstein story, this case is about how the U.S. prosecutors fell short on Epsteins evil crimes. Our criminal justice system should safeguard children from sexual exploitation by criminal predators, not revictimize them.
Introduction

Globally, most countries refer to their seat of government and residence of the head of state as presidential palace as it is the case in Vietnam and Mauritania, for example.

Other countries also call it, government house, presidential villa, state house, executive mansion etc. For security reasons, such edifices are more than one in some countries. Egypts presidential mansions, for example, are more than one presidential.

As enumerated below, other countries also choose to call such edifices with unique names and they have maintained those names over so many years irrespective of the political party in power. For example, it is called the White House in the US, the Union Buildings in South Africa, Rashtrapati Bhavan in India, Scloss Bellevue in Germany, Kremelin in Russia, Palais de IElysee in France and Casa Rosada in Argentina.

In the case of some of the aforementioned presidential edifices, the names were given so many years ago. That of Russia for example was named in the 1320s, US in 1860, France in 1722 and Argentina in 1873 but the names do not change to suit partisan political ideology. This is because the presidential palace is a national asset built with public funds so a certain political party or the other should not dominate it and keep changing its official name. Doing so is a sin against the people. Paradoxically, the name of Ghana's current presidential building has been changing since 2009 depending on the political party in power.

Brief History of Osu Castle, Former Seat of Government of Ghana

Prior to the rebuilding of the current presidential palace in use in Ghana, the seat of Government has been the Christiansborg Castle, which is also called Osu Castle or Fort Christiansborg. It was built by the Danes in the 1660s, and mostly used as the seat of government in the past. The forte was named eponymously after the King of Denmark, Christian IV so Christiansborg means Christians Fortress.

In 1693, the Forte was even invaded and occupied by the Akwamus, after they overpowered the Dutch occupants in war. A chief and a business tycoon of Akwamu called Assameni took over the castle and occupied it for about a year until he sold it back to the Danes in 1694. The cost price was 50 marks of Gold but he retained the keys, which have been in the possession of the Akwamus as part of their historical royal assets till today. The British later bought the Fort from the Danes in 1850.

The Osu Castle therefore remained a British property until Ghana became an independent nation in March 1957. and when in July 1960 Ghana became a Republic, President Nkrumah once used the place briefly as his residence. Subsequent leaders after Nkrumah who ruled Ghana also used the Castle as the seat of government. It however ceased to be the seat of the Government of Ghana on 6th January 2009 when the new presidential palace was put to use. In view of partisan political interests however, both the opposition NDC and the ruling NPP have named Ghanas current presidential palace differently. The NDC calls it Flagstaff House and the NPP calls it Jubilee House.

History Of The Flagstaff House And Its Usage Over The Years

As indicated earlier, until January 2009, the Christiansborg Castle or Osu Castle was used as the seat of government. Immediately after independence, Kwame Nkrumah, the first President of Ghana used the Flagstaff House mostly as the seat of government and his residence.

After the 24th February 1966 coup d'etat which overthrew Nkrumah, the use of the Flagstaff House as the seat of government ceased. The Christiansborg Castle was again used for the said purpose until 2008 when President Kufour reconstructed the old flagstaff house at an estimated cost of 40-50 million dollars, with assistance from India.

The Kufour Administration then changed the name from Flagstaff House to Jubilee House but because the NPP left power, they could not use the place until 2017 when President Akufo Addo of the same party (NPP) occupied it. The NDC was the first to use it after the reconstruction.

Initially, the NDC government led by the late President JEA Mills was hesitant in moving into the Flagstaff House until January 2009. When they moved in, it has been known and called the Flagstaff House. However, the current Nana Addo (NPP) administration had changed the name of the presidential edifice again to Jubilee House. One should not be surprised if the NDC also changes the name again to Flagstaff House whenever they return to power.

One equally wonders why the inconsistencies in the choice of the name for Ghanas seat of government when other countries have maintained the same names for theirs for over 100 years. The US has called it the White House since 1860 (160 years). Other countries equally do not change the names to suit partisan interests. Why is Ghana doing so? Is it relevant or trivial to do so? Does the change of name of such monuments have any cascading positive impacts on development?

Conclusion

Are the NDC and NPP - the two contending major political parties who have been able to rule Ghana in the 4th Republic since January 1993- not taking Ghanaians for a ride? My thesis is that changing the name of the seat of Government of Ghana from Flagstaff to Jubilee House and vice versa is uncalled for. Let us be serious as a country and focus on very important issues but not the storms in a teacup that are not germane to the pace at which we develop. The world is never standing still like a pillar of salt figure of Lot's wife waiting for Ghana before it moves forward. Despite that, we need stability in the name for our presidential palace so we do not continue confusing ourselves and the world regarding the actual name of the edifice. Ghana has a chequered history so we should not make the history more chequered by changing the name of the presidential palace due to partisan political interests. The change of name and change of letterhead and other things come with cost. We should not be wasting money on trivialities. We should rather channel that money to develop our health system so that diseases like the current pandemic will not catch us pant down and send us to early grave.

If indeed Ghana wants to be changing the name of the presidential building, then it should have more than 2 of such edifices like Egypt has. In that case, one will be called the Flagstaff House and the other, Jubilee House. But that too will be money wasting because we already have the Peduase Lodge. Another way out is that the current presidential palace should be called The Jubilee Flagstaff House. This is my view, no matter how dissenting it may sound. Dear reader let me know your view so we learn together. Thank you for reading.

~Asante Sana ~

Author: Philip Afeti Korto.

Email: [email protected]
It typically takes several million dollars in revenue for companies to develop meaningful data, so the challenge for entrepreneurs between the coasts is how to raise enough money to build a business that has a track record to interest outside investors.

Its a catch-22, said Mr. Price. Without a local source of capital to get start-ups over that hurdle, the big firms will never look at you.

These new hubs are following the trajectory of Silicon Valley, which got its start in the mid-1950s. But Silicon Valley  and New York City and Boston, the other places where start-up capital is concentrated  have been victims of their own success. Real estate prices have soared, salaries have surged and competition at all levels has intensified. For a young person, it is now almost impossible to buy a house in Silicon Valley or New York.

Even Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook, has said that he would not start a company in Silicon Valley these days. The infrastructure exists for people to do stuff like this in more places, he told a crowd in late January at a conference in Utah.

Tore Steen grew up outside of New York City and worked in Silicon Valley until the dot-com bust of 2001. After that he spent a few years in Atlanta before deciding with his wife that they wanted a less stressful lifestyle. They moved to Portland, and Mr. Steen, 51, worked at a website analytics company before the 2008 financial crisis interfered. We made the tough choice not to pack up and scurry back to the Bay Area, because this is where we wanted to raise our boys, he said.
Reliance Industries Ltd (RIL) share price rose in early trade today amid reports that the Mukesh Ambani-led conglomerate was looking to raise around Rs 10,000 crore by issuing bonds. Share price of RIL surged 3.93% to Rs 1,235 compared to the previous close of Rs 1,189 on BSE.

Share price of Reliance Industries, which runs the world's biggest refining complex at Jamnagar in Gujarat, has lost 5.38% in last two sessions. The RIL stock lost ground on profit-booking and closed 3.30% or 39 points lower at Rs 1,150 on BSE. It has gained 3.9% in last one month.

The large cap stock has fallen 14.16% during last one year and lost 24.04% since the beginning of this year.

On December 20 last year, the stock had hit its 52-week high of Rs 1,617 on BSE. It touched fresh 52-week low of Rs 875 on March 23 this year.

Coronavirus lockdown: RIL, Tata Steel, JSW, others gear up to restart production

Total 8.34 lakh RIL shares amounting to turnover of Rs 98.59 crore changed hands on BSE. Market cap of the RIL stood at Rs 7.29 lakh crore on BSE.

RIL's plan to raise funds by issuing bonds came after the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) last month decided to provide additional liquidity in the system to help borrowers dealing with the economic damage caused by coronavirus pandemic.

The oil-to-telecom conglomerate was holding talks with banks to raise the amount through bond sale this week. Earlier this month, the board of RIL approved a proposal to raise up to Rs 25,000 crore through non-convertible debentures (NCDs) in tranches, on a private placement basis.

The company is looking at refinancing Rs 10,000 crore worth of non-convertible debentures (NCDs) maturing in this financial year, and a portion of high cost loans with private placement of new NCDs.

Share Market Update: Sensex ends 310 points lower, Nifty at 8,925; Kotal Bank, M&M top losers

Coronavirus: RIL donates Rs 5 crore to Andhra Pradesh CM fund

By Aseem Thapliyal
SHARON  While officials from the governors office and the Department of Health and Medicaid answered concerns Tuesday about Sharon Health Care Centers designation as a facility for COVID-19 patients, First Selectman Brent Colley remains unconvinced.

During a Zoom meeting Tuesday Colley reiterated his objection to using Sharon Health Care as a repository for coronavirus patients from other parts of Connecticut.

Our numbers are relatively flat, he said, referring to coronavirus cases. A lot of people are concerned about that, as well as the burden on local emergency services, including ambulance and fire.

As Sharon Health Care Center has been designated as facility for COVID-19 patients, leaving residents and town officials with many questions, the state officials joined the Zoom meeting to answer them.

The decision to use the Sharon facility is a response to Gov. Ned Lamonts executive order, which was first announced April 2 and has been in development since that time.

Moving COVID-19 patients who must be isolated is driving the order, as more and more nursing homes find patients and residents are infected with the coronavirus.

Attendees at the meeting included state Rep. Maria Horn, D-Salisbury; Kate McEvoy, Medicaid director at the Department of Social Services; Jonathan Harris, Senior Adviser to Lamont; Colley and the Board of Selectmen, emergency service volunteers and residents.

Barbara Cass, branch chief of the states Health Care Quality & Safety Branch of the Department of Public Health, led a discussion on how non-COVID-19 patients who reside at Sharon Health Care Center would be moved to an alternative facility, while people who have been hospitalized for treatment for the virus will be discharged and placed in Sharon.

This is a very fluid and ever-changing environment, Cass said, addressing more than 40 people on the Zoom call. We have been working on this COVID-19 response plan for weeks, and were learning every day how important nursing homes are going to be.

In anticipation of a surge of COVID-19 patients, we are readying facilities for people in need of acute care, Cass said. If a nursing home resident has been hospitalized (with the virus) and are ready to be discharged, they would need two negative test results before theyre admitted back to their nursing home. If theyre hospitalized for some other reason, they will also be tested once to be readmitted.

Sharon Health Care, Cass said, will be a receiving facility for patients with the virus.

The plan is to transfer all negative-test residents to another nursing home, which hopefully also has all negative-tested residents, Cass said. What were learning is that every day, nursing homes are finding more patients who are COVID-19 positive. so we have set up these alternative COVID-19 locations, such as Sharon Health Care.

The state looked at existing nursing homes like Sharon Heath Care as well as vacant sites such as Torrington Health Care, a closed facility on Wyoming Avenue, Cass said. We anticipate that the Torrington location will be ready to receive patients by the end of the week, she said.

McEvoy, of the Department of Social Services, said nursing homes across the state are experiencing extraordinary costs to cope with sick patients. The governor and the Office of Policy and Management have provided enhanced funding to all nursing homes for staffing, she said.

After Cass explained the states plan to handle this anticipated surge in COVID-19 patients, several residents asked if the state had considered the impact of moving uninfected residents of Sharon Health Care out of their home, where some have lived for a number of years.

Resident Betsy Pearson asked whether the state was considering the well-being of people who live at Sharon Health Care now.

Has anyone considered the effect of dislocating the most vulnerable and infirm, and how it will affect them, and that it may even cause their death? she asked. What about the stress? Youre reestablishing them in a strange environment.

There was a great deal of thought and sensitivity in what youve just raised, Cass said. Weve been working with families and residents on this ... once the health crisis is over, they will be returned to their home.

Horn said, I am keenly aware of the impact this will have on residents here, but we are trying to preserve life. Its a frightening situation. In our nursing homes, infection rates are alarming.

This was not an easy decision for anyone, but we have responsibility to look at what happened in other town, other states, countries ... infection has spread quickly in other nursing homes, Cass said. We need to make sure we meet the needs of everyone.

Harris tried to assure those participating in the meeting that none of the states decisions were made lightly or casually. Your question goes to the heart of things, he said, addressing Pearson. Its a struggle. Its a complex situation. There are risks, and we are aware of them.

At this point, some residents at Sharon Health Care have already moved out voluntarily, Horn said, while others are being moved this week.

People are already being taken out of Sharon Health Care, and are going to another designated facility, Cass said.
Once were back, the schedule will likely change to accommodate the work we have to get done, Hoyer told reporters during a conference call, predicting some recess weeks for lawmakers to work in their districts would be canceled. Theyll have less time at home, less time with their constituents, but more time acting on behalf of their constituents on work that we need to do.
COLUMBUS, OhioTwo more inmates at Ohios Pickaway Correctional Institution have likely died from coronavirus, Gov. Mike DeWine announced Wednesday.

If coronavirus is confirmed in the two, they would be the second and third Ohio prison inmates to die from the disease. The first Ohio inmate to die of the virus, announced by DeWine on Monday, was also incarcerated at the Pickaway prison.

The two inmates were identified as Christopher Malone and James Woodward by state prisons spokeswoman JoEllen Smith.

Malone, 68, was convicted in 1987 of murdering a Dayton man whom Malone accused of working at a crack dealers house. Malone loudly confessed his guilt in court and claimed in a letter to the media that he had declared a holy war against crack in Dayton. He was set to be released in July 2023.

Woodward, 70, was convicted in 2011 of raping a 9-year-old girl in Butler County. His expected release date was October 2029.

As of late Tuesday afternoon, 74 inmates and 38 staffers have tested positive for coronavirus at the Pickaway prison, located near Orient, south of Columbus, according to state data. On Monday, DeWine deployed members of the Ohio National Guard to the prison to help provide medical care, and he pledged that every prisoner at Pickaway and some other prisons will be tested for the disease.

DeWine also announced Wednesday that he has approved the early release of 105 inmates from across Ohios prison system. Each of them was convicted of non-violent crimes and were already within 90 days of completing their sentences.

The 105 were among 141 inmates that DeWine flagged last week for early release in order to help free up space at Ohio prison for social-distancing purposes. The Correctional Institution Inspection Committee, a panel made up of state lawmakers, recommended Tuesday that each of the 141 be released.

Each of the 105 inmates will be tested for coronavirus before they are released, DeWine said.

DeWine has also recommended the release of more than 60 other Ohio inmates deemed to be particularly vulnerable to the coronavirus, including 41 inmates aged 60 and older who have a chronic health condition and/or are nearing their release, as well as 23 women who are either pregnant or who recently gave birth in prison. State officials are still working to review their cases before submitting recommendations to DeWine for approval.

Going forward, state prisons officials will continue to look for non-violent offenders who come within 90 days of finishing their sentences and consider them for early release, the governor said.

DeWine also thanked judges around the state for taking action not to sentence newly convicted Ohioans to prison time during the coronavirus emergency. Because of their efforts, the governor said, Ohios prison population has declined by about 500 people in the past three weeks -- a number that does not include the inmates approved for early release.

The American Civil Liberties Union of Ohio and other groups have repeatedly called on DeWine to release a far greater number of inmates, noting that Ohios 28 state prisons have been overcrowded for years.

As of Wednesday, 361 Ohioans in total have died from coronavirus, from among nearly 7,800 infections, according to state statistics.

Read more Ohio coronavirus coverage:

Ohio coronavirus deaths up to 361, with 7,791 infections: Gov. Mike DeWines Wednesday, April 15 briefing

Groups ask AG Dave Yost to halt student-debt collection until coronavirus crisis ends

How to track your federal stimulus check

Fifth inmate dies of coronavirus at Elkton federal prison in Ohio
Dublin, April 15, 2020 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- The "Impact on Global Chemical Industry due to COVID-19 Pandemic" report has been added to ResearchAndMarkets.com's offering.





The chemical industry has been noticing the adverse effects of the COVID-19 outbreak. The chemical industry plays an important role in the production of countless products such as plastic, fertilizers, medicines, packaging products and so on. With the widespread of the coronavirus, many production facilities of several end-user industries have been halted.



With this, the demand for chemicals used in these facilities has been declined. For instance, the large butadiene derivatives such as poly-butadiene rubber and styrene-butadiene rubber are among the major components to produce auto tires and other auto parts including hoses, belts, and gaskets. With the halt in production facilities of several automobile manufacturers, a steep fall in the supply of tires in automotive industries has been witnessed. Thus, the continuing spread of COVID-19 across the globe is likely to impact demand chemicals.



However, with the outbreak of this pandemic, a light rise in the demand for the packaging materials has been increased to prevent the contamination of food, medicine, personal care, and medical products thereby creating a significant demand for chemicals involved in the packaging industry.



Based on chemical type, the industry is segmented into petrochemicals, basic inorganic, polymers, specialty chemicals, consumer chemicals, and others. Due to the downfall in crude oil prices, the market of petrochemical is expected to be most affected. Based on geography, the global chemical industry is classified into four key regions, including North America, Europe, Asia-Pacific, and Rest of the World. Asia-Pacific is anticipated to get highly affected by the spread of the COVID-19 due to the effect of the pandemic in China, Japan, and India. China is the epic center of this lethal disease.



China is a major country in terms of the chemical industry. As per the CEFIC Chemdata International, in 2018, the chemical sales in China hold for around $1.32 trillion. According to the International Council of Chemical Associations (ICCA), China is the eighth largest chemical importing nation and the twelfth largest chemical exporting nation across the globe. After China, the US is anticipated to get majorly impacted by the spread of COVID- 19.



The major companies operating in the Chemical industry getting affected due to coronavirus outbreak include BASF SE, DowDuPont, China Petroleum & Chemical Corp., SABIC, Mitsubishi Chemical Corp., Wanhua Chemical Corp., Chevron Phillips Chemical, Evonik Industries, Jianshi Yuantong Bioengineering Co., Ltd., PPG Industries, The Linde Group, and others. Looking towards the alerting situation many chemical companies have halted their production facilities across the globe. Some other companies which are still working are operating at only 40-60% efficiency.



Research Methodology



The research team recently published a report addressing the impact of COVID-19 on the global chemical industry. The study is incorporated by extensive primary and secondary research conducted by the research team. Secondary research has been conducted to refine the available data. Different approaches have been worked on to derive the market value and market growth rate. In the report, the analysis of the country is provided by analyzing various regional players, laws and policies, consumer behavior and macro-economic factors. The report includes analysis of different regions and countries and the effect of COVID-19 on the chemical industry of each respective region. Besides, an expected recovery timeline of the industry will also be included with the best- and worst-case scenario which will aid clients to take their future steps in the decision-making process.



Sources Include

Story continues

Financial reports of companies involved in the market

Whitepapers, research-papers, and news blogs

Company websites and their product catalog

Government Organizations Reports

The report provides an in-depth analysis on market size, intended quality of the service preferred by consumers. The report will serve as a source for 360-degree analysis of the market thoroughly integrating different models.



The Report Covers

Comprehensive research methodology of the Global Chemical Industry.

This report also includes a detailed and extensive market overview with key analyst insights.

An exhaustive analysis of macro and micro factors influencing the market guided by key recommendations.

Analysis of regional regulations and other government policies impacting the Global Chemical Industry.

Insights about market determinants that are stimulating the Global Chemical Industry.

Detailed and extensive market segments with regional distribution of forecasted revenues.

Extensive profiles and recent developments of market players.



Key Topics Covered:



1. Report Summary

1.1. Research Methods and Tools

1.2. Market Overview and Insights

1.3. Scope of the Report

1.4. Analyst Insight & Current Market Trends

1.4.1. Key Findings

1.4.2. Recommendations

1.4.3. Conclusion



2. Historical Market Overview

2.1.1. Past Market Growth Estimation without COVID-19 pandemic

2.1.2. Deviations in growth rate due to COVID-19 pandemic



3. Supply Chain Analysis

3.1. Supply Chain Disruption of the chemical industry

3.2. Supply Chain Disruption due to chemical industry in other industry



4. Market Segmentation

4.1. Petrochemical

4.2. Basic Inorganic

4.3. Polymer

4.4. Specialty Chemical

4.5. Consumer Chemical

4.6. Others



5. Regional Analysis

5.1. North America

5.1.1. United States

5.1.2. Canada

5.2. Europe

5.2.1. UK

5.2.2. Germany

5.2.3. Italy

5.2.4. Spain

5.2.5. France

5.2.6. Rest of Europe

5.3. Asia-Pacific

5.3.1. China

5.3.2. India

5.3.3. Japan

5.3.4. Rest of Asia-Pacific

5.4. Rest of the World



6. Companies Studied

6.1. BASF SE

6.2. DuPont de Nemours, Inc.

6.3. China Petroleum & Chemical Corp.

6.4. SABIC

6.5. Mitsubishi Chemical Corp.

6.6. Wanhua Chemical Corp.

6.7. Chevron Phillips Chemical Co. LLC

6.8. Evonik Industries AG

6.9. Jianshi Yuantong Bioengineering Co., Ltd.

6.10. PPG Industries, Inc.

6.11. Linde PLC

6.12. Formosa Plastics Corp.



For more information about this report visit https://www.researchandmarkets.com/r/qdykp

Research and Markets also offers Custom Research services providing focused, comprehensive and tailored research.



CONTACT: ResearchAndMarkets.com

Laura Wood, Senior Press Manager

press@researchandmarkets.com

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A gay couple whose marriage was downgraded to civil partnership status on their return to Northern Ireland suffered unjustified discrimination, the Court of Appeal has ruled.

Senior judges identified a failure to provide them with the same recognition as heterosexual couples in the region who wed elsewhere.

But with equal status now ensured through new legislation, no formal declaration was made on any human rights breach.

The ruling marks the culmination of a six-year legal battle by the couple at the centre of the case.

The two men said they may now seek damages for the period of discrimination covered by the judgment, their lawyer said.

Granted anonymity in the proceedings, Petitioner 'X' and his husband wed in London in 2014.

They issued proceedings to secure a declaration that their marriage remains fully constituted throughout the United Kingdom.

Until this year the couple could only be classified as civil partners in their native Northern Ireland, an alleged reduction in relationship status which they said violated their human rights.

The situation changed in January, however, when same-sex laws passed at Westminster brought the region into line with the rest of the UK and the Republic of Ireland.

It enabled gay couples to get married in Northern Ireland, while the relationship status of those who had already wed elsewhere was also ensured the same recognition.

Before those developments, however, the High Court had dismissed Petitioner X's initial challenge.

In August 2017 a judge held that it was up to government and parliament to provide same-sex marriage rights, not the judiciary.

Appealing that verdict, counsel for Petitioner X stressed the case was about the right to equal recognition of an existing marriage performed in the UK under the law of Northern Ireland, and the related entitlement to remain married throughout the UK.

With any heterosexual couples who wed in England remaining married if they move to Northern Ireland, the barrister claimed the situation her client faced was "derogatory and undermines his marriage".

The challenge was taken against the Northern Ireland Assembly and the UK Government.

In a separate ruling earlier this month the Court of Appeal said the prohibition on same-sex couples getting married in Northern Ireland over a period from August 2017 to January this year could not be justified.

Delivering judgement in the Petitioner X case today, Lord Chief Justice Sir Declan Morgan confirmed: "The failure to recognise the appellant's marriage must give rise to the same unjustified discrimination as compared ton heterosexual couples whose marriages were recognised in similar circumstances."

He then concluded: "The legislative changes introduced by the 2019 Act mean that there is no purpose to be served by any order in this case."

Following the ruling Petitioner X's solicitor, Ciaran Moynagh of Phoenix Law, said: "We are relieved the court has found there was unjustified discrimination.

"My client has always wanted respect and dignity in Northern Ireland for their marriage."

Mr Moynagh added: "We are going to read the judgment carefully and consider our position - there could potentially be a claim for damages for a breach of European Convention rights over a period of two and a half years."
Voting kicked off at 6 am (local time) and was to run until 6 pm (local time) at 14,330 polling stations across the country, according to the National Election Commission (NEC). The number of eligible voters is 44 million, according to Yonhap news agency.The once-in-four-years legislative election is widely seen as a referendum on President Moon Jae-in, whose five-year term will end in mid-2022, as well as a test of the country's fight against COVID-19 under the leadership of Moon, The Strait Times reported.South Korea has received international praise for its massive testing capability and other innovative measures, such as drive-through testing and high-tech contact tracing.Experts, therefore, expect the ruling Democratic Party (DP) to extend its lead in Parliament, given that the government's handling of the virus outbreak is viewed positively both at home and abroad, as per The Strait Times.At least 10,564 people in the country have been infected by coronavirus, which has claimed 222 lives. About 2,800 patients are undergoing treatment.The number of new cases has fallen from a high of 813 on February 29 to below 50 for six days in a row as an intensive social distancing campaign that started on March 21 remained in place.Several surveys cited by the newspaper also showed that voters consider the pandemic as the biggest factor in their decision. A recent poll showed that 72.6 per cent of respondents rated the government's response to the outbreak as positive.The NEC has said that public safety at polling stations will be a priority to prevent any possible spread of the virus.All 14,330 polling stations and 251 counting stations will be disinfected on polling day, the NEC was quoted.Voters will undergo temperature screening and those registering temperatures of 37.5 degrees Celsius or higher or display respiratory symptoms will have to exercise their franchise at a separate booth.Tuesday was the last of 13 days of campaigning, which saw most candidates reducing their ground activities and face-to-face encounters with voters. Instead, the candidates boosted their online presence with videos and social media engagements in a bid to win votes, according to The Strait Times.In addition, the government has also decided to temporarily lift quarantine rules to permit self-isolators to vote in the elections. Some 50,000 people in self-isolation who have no symptoms and expressed a willingness to vote will be allowed to cast ballots after the regular voting ends in the evening. (ANI)
The Minister of Tourism has confirmed that religious trip to Syria remain prohibited, but that options for the future are being explored reports Al-Watan.

Tourism Minister Mohammad Rami Martini confirmed that he did not receive any request from the Iranian side regarding the resumption of religious visits.

Commenting on rumors claiming that religious visits resumed to shrines in Iran, Syria and Iraq, Martini stressed to Al-Watan that all precautionary measures are being carried out all over Syrian territories, which stipulates that movement and travel in Syria is prohibited until further notice.

The Minister noted that the Iranian Hajj and Pilgrimage Organization is studying the option to allow visits to Syria and Iraq, as well as Hajj and Umrah, once the conditions become appropriate. However, he said this process needs time and it hinges on global procedures and travel bans, in addition to national precautionary measures.

When these measures are eased, we can then talk about tourism, he added.

According to Russia Today, the Fars News Agency quoted the head of the Iranian Hajj and Pilgrimage Organization, Ali Reza Rashidian, as saying that Iran is planning to resume visits to the holy shrines in Iraq and Syria, taking into account health-related conditions.

This came during a meeting of the Coordination Council between the delegation of His Eminence the Leader of the Islamic Revolution and the Hajj and Pilgrimage Organization.

We have prepared protocols on sending visitors to the holy shrines in Iraq and Syria and presented them to both countries to hopefully resume mutual travel between Iran and these two countries under coordinated health and safety measures and as conditions caused by the outbreak improve, said Rashidian.



Notably, the visits of Iranians to the holy shrines in Iraq and Syria was suspended for about two months due to the outbreak of coronavirus.

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.
How To Continue Earning Money In The Music Industry During Isolation

The COVID-19 pandemic has brought multiple industries to a grinding halt, the music business among them. As a result, music creators and companies are forced to reassess how theyre going to continue making money in a radically transformed industry.

Guest post by Erin M. Jacobson Esq. of The Music Industry Lawyer

The COVID-19 pandemic is requiring people all over the world to adjust to new daily practices for public health and safety. The pause on live events and productions has caused uncertainty and worry among many in the music community. There is still business to do, but it will require a more creative approach.

Here is a list of ways for music creators and companies to continue doing business and earning money during this uncertain time.



For Music Creators:



1. Make time for registrations. If you havent registered for royalty collection services, like performance rights organizations, mechanical societies, Sound Exchange, etc., you are likely missing out on royalties owed to you if your music is being used in ways that trigger these royalties (streaming, performances in audiovisual works, etc.). If you are registered with these companies, but havent registered your individual songs, then you are still likely missing out on royalties. Similarly, if you know your registrations are incorrect, then  you guessed it  you are likely missing out on royalties. Quarantine or not, pandemic or not, people are still streaming music, and music is still being performed on TV and online, which means music is generating royalties. When income in other areas has decreased, royalty income can be of great help. Now is the time to get caught up and get royalty income flowing in. If you need assistance with preparing these registrations, hire an experienced music industry professional to prepare and submit them.



2. Protect Yourself. If you havent registered your works for copyright, now is a good time to complete your applications to reap the benefits copyright registration provides. If youve been meaning to get contracts together with your collaborators to protect your work, now is a good time for that too. Again, if you need assistance with protecting your work in these ways, hire an experienced music attorney to handle these matters.



3. Get creative! Youve likely got more time on your hands right now  use some of it to create new music! You might start writing for your next album, or maybe for libraries or placements. If you are worried about the current state of the world, channel that worry into your music as a healthy outlet for your stress. If you want to make a positive difference, write songs to uplift others in this uncertain time.



4. Collaborate (virtually). The beauty of technology means you can still collaborate with others during social isolation. Before computers, some songwriters would snail mail cassette tapes to each other to work on songs together over long distances. Now, you can send mp3, ProTools, or other files to each other via email or file transfer websites (or keep them in a shared cloud drive) to work with collaborators you already know. You can also use video chat programs such as Zoom or FaceTime to collaborate in real time. If you dont have anyone to collaborate with, you can find people by using gig sites such as Airgigs.com.



5. Get social (from a distance)! Many consumers are spending more time on social media, YouTube, and apps like TikTok. Take some of your newly created works and post them to social platforms so that people staying at home have new music to enjoy. Maybe one of your songs about hope will resonate with people everywhere and gain you new fans. If you are a performing artist, you could also do live virtual performances for or virtual video chats with your fans. Fans would love the opportunity to connect with their favorite artists in a way they cannot under normal circumstances.



6. Check for aid. If you are really in dire straits, some organizations have put together funds to help the music community in this time of need. Here is a list of many national and state-based funds in the United States. Heres a list for anyone affected in Canada, and the PRS Foundation in the UK also has a fund. Many companies, like Sony Music, also have established their own assistance funds for the music community.

For Music Companies:

As mentioned above, this is a good time to catch up on registrations, paperwork, or anything youve been putting off that will help bring in additional money. Not only will companies help themselves by doing this, but will also help their employees and their families, and their songwriters, composers, artists, and their families. Some companies, at least in the United States, may also be eligible for government assistance or deferment of payroll taxes, and should check with their financial advisors for options.

Keep business going as much as possible.

Do business virtually as much as possible. Set up employees to work from home if work-from-home practices have not already been established.

For publishers that usually set up co-writing sessions for writers, dont stop the sessions, set up virtual co-writing sessions for them instead.

For companies needing cuts, keep sending songs to producers and artists to record at a future time.

Set up online showcases for songwriters and artists (Ive already been invited to a few of these virtual showcases by established music companies).

For licensing companies or publishers who seek out placements, keep sending music to music supervisors, as it is likely that supervisors may still be looking for music to use for productions currently on hold, and can thereby make their choices and complete the licensing paperwork in advance.

These companies can also keep building catalogue by signing new writers and composers. Not only will this practice make for a more robust catalogue for placements once films and show resume production, but it will also boost morale and provide hope to music creators during this period.

Companies can also focus on projects that may not require in-person productions, for example, many game developers may be working from home so new games will need music. Maybe there are new online shows or virtual shows that need music. Get creative with who might need music in a virtual world and how to get it to them.

For everyone, follow the CDC guidelines and keep yourself and those around you safe by staying home except for essentials, practicing social distancing when you do have to go out, and washing your hands well and often. You need to stay healthy to continue business. Also, focus on hope. Although we dont know exactly when, this will pass and the music industry will survive.

Stay safe and be well.

This article does not constitute legal (or medical) advice. Any advertisement is general in nature and not directed toward any particular person.

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Coronavirus lockdown: To spread awareness among people related to COVID-19, Pune Police came up with a creative idea to explain the importance of wearing a mask and practicing social distancing.

Coronavirus lockdown: In the coronavirus crisis, front line workers are standing like a brick wall to protect the nation. From police to medical staff all are risking their lives to save ours. Midst of all, police brought new creative ways to spread awareness related to the contagious virus with a bit of filmi tadhka.

Sounds interesting, the poster shared on the Pune Police official twitter handle will brief all. To inspire people, a photoshopped poster of Ghajini with a mask was used to make people wear the mask whilst steeping outside to purchase essential items.

Another poster was shared of 13 Reasons Why from an English web series with a twist of a menacing sign of not to step outside. Indeed, thats quite a good way to make people learn the importance of maintaining social distancing.

1. Wear a mask

2. Practice social distancing

3. Wash hands frequently You dont need to cover your entire body with tattoos for that, do you?#OnGuardAgainstCorona pic.twitter.com/CbJmLB9KoB  PUNE POLICE (@PuneCityPolice) April 14, 2020

Meanwhile, Bollywood actors like Akshay Kumar, Ajay Devgn, Alia Bhatt, Arjun Kapoor shared a thanking note on twitter to which Mumbai police gave hilarious replies in a filmi way.

Check the post here:

Many a roads meet & diverge. But we  we will take none of them to travel by. And that will make all the difference.#OnGuardAgainstCorona pic.twitter.com/CKH1Yd3GKB  PUNE POLICE (@PuneCityPolice) April 15, 2020

However, some actors also condemned the act of attacking policemen while doing their duties. Anushka Sharma and Ayushmann Khurrana through her recent post raised their voice and wrote a note on all those who are still not respecting the work front liners are doing for the nation. The actors urged their fans to respect them for the work they are doing for society.

Currently, Maharastra is the worst-hit state in India by COVID- 19 with the total number of cases, 2,687 with the death toll of 178. Till now 259 has been recovered from the virus, according to the Health Ministry.

Stay Home Stay Safe pic.twitter.com/jUq2qTLekj  Pune City Traffic Police (@PuneCityTraffic) April 15, 2020

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By Khanh Vu and James Pearson

HANOI (Reuters) - A Chinese ship embroiled in a standoff with Vietnamese vessels last year has returned to waters near Vietnam as the United States accused China of pushing its presence in the South China Sea while other claimants are pre-occupied with the coronavirus.

Vietnamese vessels last year spent months shadowing the Chinese Haiyang Dizhi 8 survey vessel in resource-rich waters that are a potential global flashpoint as the United States challenges China's sweeping maritime claims.

On Tuesday, the ship, which is used for offshore seismic surveys, appeared again 158 km (98 miles) off Vietnam's coast, within its exclusive economic zone (EEZ), flanked by at least one China Coast Guard vessel, according to data from Marine Traffic, a website that tracks shipping.

At least three Vietnamese vessels were moving with the Chinese ship, according to data issued by the Marine Traffic site.

Vietnam was closely monitoring activity in the South China Sea, its Ministry of Foreign Affairs said.

China's foreign ministry said the ship was not doing anything unusual.

"The Chinese survey ship was conducting normal activities in waters administered by China," ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian told a daily news briefing in Beijing on Wednesday.

The presence of the Haiyang Dizhi 8 in Vietnam's EEZ comes towards the scheduled end of a 15-day nationwide lockdown in Vietnam aimed at curbing the spread of the coronavirus.

It also follows the sinking of a Vietnamese fishing boat near islands in the disputed waters this month, an act that drew a protest from Vietnam and accusations that China had violated its sovereignty and threatened the lives of its fishermen.

The United States, which last month sent an aircraft carrier to the central Vietnamese port of Danang, said it was "seriously concerned" about China's reported sinking of the vessel.

"We call on the PRC to remain focused on supporting international efforts to combat the global pandemic, and to stop exploiting the distraction or vulnerability of other states to expand its unlawful claims in the South China Sea," the U.S. State Department said in a statement, referring to China.

Story continues

But Zhao said some U.S. officials had been using the South China Sea issue to smear China.

'BASELESS'

The Philippines, which also has disputed claims in the South China Sea, has raised its concerns too.

On Saturday, China's Global Times, published by the official People's Daily newspaper of China's ruling Communist Party, said Vietnam had used the fishing boat incident to distract from its "ineptitude" in handling the coronavirus.

Helped by a mass quarantine and aggressive contact-tracing, Vietnam has recorded 267 cases of the novel coronavirus and no deaths. Nearly 122,000 coronavirus tests have been carried out in Vietnam.

China and Vietnam have for years been at loggerheads over the potentially energy-rich waters, called the East Sea by Vietnam.

China's U-shaped "nine-dash line" on its maps marks a vast expanse of the waters that it claims, including large parts of Vietnam's continental shelf where it has awarded oil concessions. Malaysia and Brunei claim some of the waters that China claims to the south.

During the standoff last year, at least one China Coast Guard vessel spent weeks in waters close to an oil rig in a Vietnamese oil block, operated by Russia's Rosneft, while the Haiyang Dizhi 8 conducted suspected oil exploration surveys in large expanses of Vietnam's EEZ.

"The deployment of the vessel is Beijing's move to once again baselessly assert its sovereignty in the South China Sea," said Ha Hoang Hop, at the Singapore-based ISEAS-Yusof Ishak Institute.

"China is using the coronavirus distraction to increase its assertiveness in the South China Sea, at a time when the U.S. and Europe are struggling to cope with the new coronavirus."

(Reporting by Khanh Vu and James Pearson; Editing by Robert Birsel)
Dorothea "Dee" Gillette-Spencer, CEO of DGI in Bangor, Pa, received an SBA loan of $135,000 through Oceans First Bank. Read more

Small businesses in Pennsylvania have received just shy of $10 billion in relief loans as part of the sweeping coronavirus economic rescue package, according to new federal figures.

The Small Business Administration released a report late Tuesday showing that the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) has approved more than one million loans for a total of more than $247 billion, through more than 4,000 participating lenders nationwide. Seventy percent of the loans approved were for amounts less than $150,000.

And 36,604 Pennsylvania companies received about $9.9 billion through local banks and other lenders.

The SBA and our partner federal agencies alongside state and local government, are working together to protect public health and the future of small business," Steve Bulger, SBAs Mid-Atlantic regional administrator, said in a statement. "SBAs top priority is to ensure small businesses can continue their contributions to the states economy, and our nation.

Pennsylvania ranked in the top 10 states based on both loan dollars and the total number of loans.

 ASK US: Do you have a question about the coronavirus and how it affects your health, work and life? Ask our reporters.

Separately, the SBA also issued new guidelines for independent contractors and self-employed workers, who had to wait until late Friday to apply for PPP loans. They can get PPP loans equaling 2.5 times their monthly salary in the form of a forgivable low-interest loan, the SBA said, and can use up to 75% of the money for payroll.

The new SBA guidance for contractors and the self-employed outline what they can include as payroll, how to calculate the maximum amount of the loan, what they can do with the loan proceeds, and how it can be forgiven.

The Paycheck Protection Program is providing forgivable loans for small businesses to keep workers employed. SBA will forgive the loans if all employees are kept on the payroll for eight weeks and the money is used for payroll, rent, mortgage interest, or utilities. The $350 billion program had a rocky start, and the Trump administration is pushing for an additional $250 billion for more loans.

Dorothea Dee Gillette-Spencer, the owner and CEO of D. Gillette Industrial Services, a family manufacturing business in Bangor, Northampton County, said she applied for and received a $135,000 loan to keep her 10 employees on the payroll. DGI makes equipment for the Department of Defense.

DGI submitted its PPP loan documents to OceanFirst Bank, she said. We supplied them with all the documents required from QuickBooks and from ADP, which does our payroll.

From start to finish, the application process took two weeks, Gillette-Spencer said.

This has allowed DGI to remain fully staffed and producing equipment for U.S. war-fighters, as well as now exploring the possibility of producing equipment for medical first responders, she said, adding that working with a smaller bank likely helped speed the flow of cash.

I imagine the larger banks are overwhelmed," Gillette-Spencer said. "We have an existing relationship with a smaller bank, OceanFirst, and that made the difference.

Frank Giordano was a unique borrower, securing three separate loans, each under $1 million, from Republic Bank: one for his company, Atlantic Trailer Leasing Corp., and two for nonprofits he leads, the Philly Pops and the National Italian American Foundation.

I heard some horror stories from friends [at other banks]. But our process at Republic was smooth, he said. His three organizations employ roughly 250 people, he said, and the nonprofits have no income coming in at this time, so we needed the loans to keep the staff going.

Borrowers can apply through existing SBA lenders or through any federally insured depository institution, federally insured credit union, and Farm Credit System institution that is participating. The average loan is $239,152. About 85% of the loans approved were for less than $350,000, representing about 30% of total loan approval amount, according to Keefe Bruyette & Woods banking analyst Kelly Motta.

The top five industries by approval amount are construction (14% of the total money loaned); professional, scientific, and technical services (12%); manufacturing (12%); health care and social assistance (11%); and accommodation and food services (9%).

Go online to the Treasurys website here for the full document: https://home.treasury.gov/system/files/136/Interim-Final-Rule-Additional-Eligibility-Criteria-and-Requirements-for-Certain-Pledges-of-Loans.pdf.

You will likely need your 2019 tax returns and payroll information, so check with your payroll company or accountant for any needed documents. Also, have your mortgage interest, utilities and other expense documents available, as well.

Will PPP Run Out?

After reports late Wednesday that the PPP loans might run out, small business advocates said new data show 90% of small businesses have been impacted by COVID-19 with a large percentage reporting a severely negative impact.

:One in three business have closed and 14% more plan to do so. While it is clear that PPP is not a long-term nor an efficient solution, Congress must immediately add robust funding to keep it solvent, and not delay any further in providing direct cash grant assistance to the smallest, most vulnerable businesses, said John Arensmeyer, Founder and CEO at Small Business Majority.
A British company offering a million coronavirus tests a week has not been taken up on their offer by Public Health England, it is claimed.

Apacor, based in Berkshire, has approval from the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency for supplying coronavirus antigen tests and says they could 'do 150,000 [tests] tomorrow' but they're just 'sitting in a warehouse, ready'.

The South Korean test, produced by Wells Bio, is being used in Germany, but PHE's laboratory in Colindale has not sent for a sample to be verified and claims it cannot speak with the company until next week, the Daily Telegraph reported.

Apacor's managing director Anthony Bell said: 'Our main product is the global gold standard. We have been waiting for Colindale for two weeks. It's frustrating because this supplier isn't some small unknown company.

'This is the largest manufacturer of some types of tests in the world, and they can do a million tests a week. So we're waiting. We are ready and able to help. We could do 150,000 tomorrow.'

The Government has achieved 15,994 tests a day despite setting a target of 25,000 by the middle of April  but Health Secretary Matt Hancock denied that this target was ever set.

Health bosses have insisted they are still struggling to get their staff tested for coronavirus despite Matt Hancock claiming demand has dipped in recent days.

The Health Secretary told the daily Downing Street press conference that he is sticking to his target of achieving 100,000 daily tests by the end of the month.

He claimed that 'demand has been lower over the Easter weekend' for the checks and said that meant the government could now expand its testing regime in the care sector.

Health Secretary Matt Hancock today claimed testing demand had been lower than expected over the Easter weekend as he announced more tests for the social care sector

However, health chiefs responded to testing being extended in social care by claiming they are 'continuing to experience difficulties with getting their staff the tests they need to get back to work' - casting doubt on Mr Hancock's claims.

The Health Secretary said all care home residents who need a test will now get one while all care home residents in hospital will be tested before they are discharged.

Antibody tests 'don't work on under-40s' Tests to discover whether someone has recovered from coronavirus could not be useful because young people's bodies do not produce enough anti-bodies to be detected, early research suggests. Supplies from China have not yet passed sensitivity and specificity tests, and Professor Karol Sikora, a private oncologist, found that results for those under 40 who recovered from the virus had negative test results. He told the Telegraph: 'I think the antibody tests do work, but young people just don't seem to hae the antibodies, which suggests they are using other mechanisms to fight off the virus.' Professor Sikora says that younger people could be fighting off the virus using 'natural killer cells' that condume the virus, meaning antibodies are not necessary. Advertisement

He had already announced that all care home staff and their households who need a test because of the presence of coronavirus symptoms will have access to one.

The latest testing statistics showed there had been 14,982 carried out in the 24 hours to 9am yesterday. The UK's current testing capacity is just shy of 20,000.

The Health Secretary said: 'We have hit each of the goals that we have set on testing and as I say we have had capacity continuing to ramp up this month.

'The demand has been lower over the Easter weekend as staff haven't wanted to come forward for testing which is understandable during a long weekend.

'But the goal is still clear to reach 100,000 by the end of this month.'

Previously, the government's approach to care home patients who developed coronavirus symptoms was that people would not be tested after five residents tested positive.

The assumption was then that it would be 'highly likely to be coronavirus', Mr Hancock said.

The government has been criticised over its approach to helping the social care sector during the current outbreak with claims that ministers had forgotten about staff.

Mr Hancock used today's press conference to stress that was not the case as he set out the new testing regime.

He was asked how it is possible for the government to roll out more tests to the social care sector given the apparent struggle to increase testing capacity which has been seen in recent weeks.

He said: 'I am very glad to say that we now are testing regularly NHS staff across the board and we rolled that out from last weekend and we have started also testing social care staff, 4,100 social care staff have already been referred for tests.

'And as our testing capacity increases so this means that more and more people can be tested.

'In fact, as some people have reported, over the Easter weekend we had some spare capacity because the number of people coming forward for testing was not as high over the Easter weekend which means that we can now expand testing not only to staff in social care but also within social care settings.

'The previous rule had been that once five people in a social care setting had tested positive then others with symptoms were deemed to have coronavirus because it was highly likely to be coronavirus.

'We will now ensure that everybody who has symptoms gets tested and the critical other change is that those leaving hospital will now be tested and they will be put into isolation until those test results come through.

'If the test results come through positive then they will be held in isolation to make sure that they protect those currently in the care home.'

The NHS Confederation, which represents organisations across the healthcare sector, said the announcement on social care testing was welcome but that the country's testing capacity is 'far from where it needs to be'.

Dr Layla McCay, NHS Confederation director, said: 'The offer of more tests for social care staff is desperately needed as this sector has been suffering in silence during this pandemic.

'But it comes as health leaders across primary, community and mental health services are continuing to experience difficulties with getting their staff the tests they need to get back to work, despite similar promises being made by government.

'Things are improving but the country's testing capacity is far from where it needs to be to meet the ambition of 100,000 a day in just over two weeks - that's over 85,000 more tests a day than what is happening now.

'We need absolute clarity from the government on how this will be achieved in such a short space of time, otherwise it will be viewed as a false promise.'
Worried about a "coronavirus divorce"? An enterprising Japanese short-term rental firm is marketing its empty apartments as a way for stressed couples to get some time apart during the virus lockdown. "Please consult with us before thinking about 'coronavirus divorce'," the Tokyo-based Kasoku urges customers, offering its Airbnb-like fully-furnished units as "temporary shelters" for people to escape the family, whether to work or just get some peace and quiet. Japan's government has declared a state of emergency in seven regions over the virus outbreak. While the measures do not include prohibitions on going out, people have been asked to avoid unneccessary outings, schools are closed and many people are working from home. For those finding that arrangement onerous, Kasoku is offering apartments priced at 4,400 yen ($40) a day. Spokesman Kosuke Amano told AFP the company has had 20 customers since it began the campaign on April 3. The service also comes with the offer of a free 30-minute divorce consultation with a legal official. "Among the users of this service are a wife who said she fled after having a big fight with her husband, and a woman who said she wants time to herself as she is tired of taking care of her children who are at home all day because of school closures, while her husband works remotely at home," Amano said. "We don't have solid data showing divorce is on the rise, but media reports that divorce rates are rising in China and in Russia after lockdowns there led us to come up with this service," he added. While the firm is marketing the apartments in a tongue-in-cheek fashion, the service has also attracted users facing serious problems, including a woman fleeing domestic violence. The company has about 500 units around the country, mainly in central Tokyo, and a fall in tourism means many are empty, though demand for remote offices for telework is helping offset the impact. The firm's campaign comes as the hashtag "corona-divorce" has trended on Japanese Twitter. Public broadcaster NHK is devoting part of its breakfast show to tips on avoiding potentially marriage-ending frustrations while stuck inside often cramped Japanese apartments. Despite its highly-educated female population, Japan ranked 121 out of 153 countries in the World Economic Forum's 2020 gender gap index, primarily because of its poor showing in political representation. Traditional gender roles are deeply rooted in Japanese society and women are often still expected to take primary responsibility for childcare and domestic chores, even while holding down professional employment.
Benchmark indices failed to hold on to gains and closed in the red on April 15.

Sensex closed 310 points, or 1.01 percent, down at 30,379.81 while Nifty finished 69 points, or 0.76 percent, lower at 8,925.30.

The broader markets outperformed as BSE Midcap and Smallcap indices ended higher by 1.3 percent and 1.2 percent, respectively.

The sectoral indices witnessed a mixed trend wherein FMCG, Realty, Capital Goods and Metals ended with gains whereas other indices like Auto, Banking, Finance and Consumer Durables ended with losses.

"We reiterate our cautious view on Indian markets and suggest not to go overboard during this recovery move. Domestic factors such as a sharp surge in the coronavirus cases and extension of the lockdown will continue to weigh on investors sentiment ahead," said Ajit Mishra, VP - Research, Religare Broking.

We have collated 15 data points to help you spot profitable trades:

Note: The OI and volume data of stocks given in this story are the aggregates of the three-months data and not of the current month only.

Key support and resistance level for Nifty

According to the pivot charts, the key support level for Nifty is placed at 8,779.2, followed by 8,633.1. If the index starts moving up, key resistance levels to watch out for are 9,166.3 and 9,407.3.

Nifty Bank

Nifty Bank closed 2.21 percent down at 19,057.05. The important pivot level, which will act as crucial support for the index, is placed at 18,494.57, followed by 17,932.04. On the upside, key resistance levels are placed at 19,901.87 and 20,746.63.

Call options data

Maximum call open interest (OI) of 15.29 lakh contracts was seen at the 9,000 strike price. It will act as a crucial resistance level in the April series.

This is followed by 8,500 strike price, which holds 6.93 lakh contracts in open interest, and 9,200, which has accumulated 3.05 lakh contracts in open interest.

Significant call writing was seen at the 9,200 strike price, which added 88,950 contracts, followed by 9,300 strike price that added 30,225 contracts.

Call unwinding was witnessed at 9,000 strike price, which shed 90,450 contracts.

Put options data

Maximum put open interest of 19.31 lakh contracts was seen at 9,000 strike price, which will act as crucial support in the April series.

This is followed by 8,500 strike price, which holds 18.27 lakh contracts in open interest, and 8,800 strike price, which has accumulated 4.24 lakh contracts in open interest.

Put writing was seen at the 9,000 strike price, which added 2.07 lakh contracts, followed by 8,500 strike, which added 64,200 contracts.

No put unwinding was seen on April 15.

Stocks with a high delivery percentage

A high delivery percentage suggests that investors are showing interest in these stocks.

35 stocks saw long build-up

Based on open interest (OI) future percentage, here are the top 10 stocks in which long build-up was seen.

30 stocks saw long unwinding

Based on open interest (OI) future percentage, here are the top 10 stocks in which long unwinding was seen.

37 stocks saw short build-up

An increase in open interest, along with a decrease in price, mostly indicates a build-up of short positions. Based on open interest (OI) future percentage, here are the top 10 stocks in which short build-up was seen.

41 stocks witnessed short-covering

A decrease in open interest, along with an increase in price, mostly indicates a short-covering. Based on open interest (OI) future percentage, here are the top 10 stocks in which short-covering was seen.

Bulk deals

(For more bulk deals, click here)

Board meetings

Motherson Sumi Systems: The board will meet on April 16 for general purposes.

TCNS Clothing: The board will meet on April 16 for general purposes.

Stocks in the news

Wipro: Software services provider, Wipro, has reported a 6.3 percent year-on-year (YoY) fall in its consolidated profit at Rs 2,326.1 crore for the quarter ended March 2020.

TCS: The IT major will release its March quarter scorecard on April 16. Industry experts and brokerages expect the IT major to release a subdued set of numbers. The estimates of Kotak Institutional Equities show TCS' CC (constant currency) revenue growth of 0.6 percent QoQ and 4.9 percent YoY.

Bajaj Auto: The company has proposed a 10 percent pay cut for factory employees if production does no resume on April 21.

India Cements: CARE has revised ratings on the company's long-term bank facilities and non-convertible debentures as 'CARE A-' from 'CARE A'. The outlook remained 'stable'. On the short-term bank facilities, the revised rating is 'CARE A2+' from 'CARE A1' earlier.

Essel Propack: The company has appointed Sudhanshu Vats as Managing Director & CEO of the company w.e.f. April 16, 2020.

JSW Energy: Brickwork Ratings India has reaffirmed its ratings of 'BWR A1+' on commercial papers of the company.

Seshasayee Paper: The collector of Namakkal District has given permission to the company to recommence its operations at Erode unit.

Fund flow

FII and DII data

Foreign institutional investors (FIIs) bought shares worth Rs 1,358.66 crore, while domestic institutional investors (DIIs) sold shares of worth Rs 1,097.86 crore in the Indian equity market on April 15, provisional data available on the NSE showed.

Stock under F&O ban on NSE

No security is under the F&O ban for April 16. Securities in the ban period under the F&O segment include companies in which the security has crossed 95 percent of the market-wide position limit.
 Flash

Chinese Premier Li Keqiang on Tuesday emphasized strengthening the awareness of a community with a shared future for humanity to clinch an early victory against COVID-19 in East Asia.



Li made the remarks in Beijing while attending a special summit of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, China, Japan and the Republic of Korea (ASEAN Plus Three or APT) on COVID-19 via video link.

As COVID-19 is spreading globally, the APT countries are also affected, Li said, noting that the virus is gravely threatening the health, safety and lives of people around the world.

The global economy has come under severe strain, with simultaneous contraction of supply and demand, massive volatility in the financial markets, and plummeting trade and investment, he said.

Li pointed out that as close neighbors, the APT countries have developed a full-fledged industrial chain and a mutually complementary specialization structure.

On emergency response, the APT countries have gained valuable experience of jointly tackling crises and put in place mechanisms for enhancing emergency preparedness, he said.

"The battle against COVID-19 has made us more aware that we are in a community with a shared future," Li said. "We must act with greater synergy and common purpose, and articulate our determination to work together in closer coordination and cooperation and make a collective response to the epidemic."

He called on the APT countries to demonstrate their positive and special role in fighting the epidemic and revitalizing the economy, and to send a message of partnership, solidarity and mutual assistance among East Asian countries to boost confidence in the region and beyond.

"Together, we will work for an early victory against COVID-19 in East Asia," said Li.
The Pakistan army shelled areas along the Line of Control (LoC) in Jammu and Kashmir's Poonch district on Tuesday night, officials said.

"At about 9.15 pm today, the Pakistan army initiated unprovoked ceasefire violation by firing with small arms and intense shelling with mortars along LoC in Balakote and Mendhar sectors in Poonch district," a defence spokesman said.

The Indian Army is giving a befitting reply, he said. The Pakistan army has resorted to heavy firing and shelling along the LoC in Poonch, Rajouri and Kupwara sectors of Jammu and Kashmir during the past one week.
Millions of South Koreans wore masks and disposable gloves as they voted in parliamentary elections Wednesday, the highest turnout in nearly three decades despite the coronavirus.

The government resisted calls to postpone the elections billed as a midterm referendum on President Moon Jae-in, who enters the final two years of his single five-year term grappling with a historic public health crisis that is unleashing massive economic shock.

Exit polls conducted by TV stations indicated that Moon's Democratic Party and a satellite party it created to win proportional representative seats would comfortably combine for a majority in the 300-seat National Assembly.

While South Korea's electorate is deeply divided along ideological and generational lines and regional loyalties, recent surveys showed growing support for Moon and his liberal party, reflecting public approval of an aggressive test-and-quarantine program credited with lowering fatality rates for the coronavirus compared to China, Europe and North America.

The long lines that snaked around public offices and schools followed record-high participation in early voting held on Friday and Saturday, and defied expectations of a low turnout because of fears of contracting the virus.

In an initial count, the National Election Commission said more than 17.2 million people voted Wednesday. Combined with the 11.8 million who cast their ballots during early voting or by mail, the overall turnout was 66.2 per cent, the highest since 71.9 per cent turnout in a 1992 general election.

Analysts struggled to find explanations for the unexpectedly high turnout. Some simply gave up.

Sorry, I really don't have any theory for this, said Yul Shin, a professor at Seoul's Myongji University. When turnouts are high, voters are usually trying to lay down judgment on a government that disappoints them. But the exit polls predict a crushing win for the ruling party.

We are going through difficult times, but the coronavirus and are two different things, said one voter, Lee Kum.

Another Seoul resident, Chung Eun-young, said she arrived at the polling station just after it opened at 6 a.m. to avoid crowds.

They checked my temperature and handed me gloves, but it wasn't as bothersome as I thought it would be, she said.

The voting draws a contrast with an upended election cycle in the United States, where some states have pushed back presidential primaries or switched to voting by mail.

To hold the elections as scheduled, South Korean officials and health authorities carefully prepared safeguards to reduce the risk of the virus being transmitted.

Duct tape or stickers marked a meter (3 feet) of social distancing space from nearby streets to ballot booths. Masked poll workers checked temperatures of arriving voters and whisked anyone with a fever or not wearing a mask to separate areas to vote, sanitizing the facilities after each one. Voters who passed the fever screening were given sanitizing gel and disposable plastic gloves before entering booths.

The government also mapped out a voting process for those quarantined in their homes, a number that ballooned after the country began enforcing two-week quarantines on all arrivals from overseas on April 1.

Officials texted eligible voters in self-quarantine before the vote and about 13,000 affirmed they wanted to participate. Those without fever or respiratory symptoms were permitted to leave their homes from 5:20 p.m. to 7 p.m. so they could cast their ballots after 6 p.m., when polling stations closed for other voters.

They were escorted or monitored through tracking apps and required to maintain a 2-meter (6-foot) distance at polling places, while workers dressed in full protective suits disinfected the booths after each voted. Hospitalized patients or those under two-week quarantines were able to vote by mail if they applied in late March. Around 400 of the mildly ill voted at temporary shelters during last week's early voting.

South Korea has confirmed more than 10,590 coronavirus cases, including 225 deaths, with the number of new infections decreasing in recent weeks. But there's concern about rising cases in the densely populated Seoul metropolitan area, and worries that crowds at parks and on mass transportation may indicate a relaxing of social distancing.

The National Assembly is elected every four years. Voters directly elect 253 district seats, while the remaining 47 go to proportional representatives. While dozens of parties registered candidates, the elections were seen largely as a two-way race between Moon's ruling Democratic Party and the main conservative opposition United Future Party. Both registered satellite parties in a bid to win more proportional representative seats.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
PARIS - French President Emmanuel Macron says he hopes that in the coming days the five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council can discuss and endorse U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres call for a cease-fire to all conflicts in the world in order to tackle the coronavirus pandemic.

Macron, who has been pushing for more international co-operation in fighting the virus, said in an interview with French radio RFI broadcast on Wednesday that he is only waiting for agreement from Russian President Vladimir Putin to hold the 5-country video conference.

Chinas President Xi Jinping confirmed to me he agrees. (U.S.) President (Donald) Trump confirmed to me he agrees. (British) Prime Minister Boris Johnson confirmed to me he agrees, Macron said. I think President Putin will agree too.

When he does, we can have this video conference and therefore endorse it (Guterres call) with great solemnity, strength, and even more efficiency, the French president said.

Russias Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said Tuesday, when asked about a videoconference of the so-called P-5 leaders, we do not rule it out. He stressed that a video conference cannot substitute for an in-person summit of the five leaders, whose countries have veto-power in the 15-member Security Council.

There is an agreement of principle for this event (an in-person summit) to focus on a large-scale, major analysis of global developments in all areas that one way or another bear on peoples safety and strategic stability, Lavrov told reporters during a conference call.

Guterres said on April 3 that warring parties in 11 countries had responded positively to his March 23 appeal  Cameroon, the Central African Republic, Colombia, Libya, Myanmar, the Philippines, South Sudan, Sudan, Syria, Ukraine and Yemen have also expressed their acceptance. But he warned that turning words into peace will be enormously difficult.

The U.N. Security Council has been stymied on adopting a resolution on the COVID-19 pandemic and the secretary-generals call for a cease-fire to all conflicts because of differences among the five permanent members  the United States, Russia, China, Britain and France.

Diplomats said the Security Council was initially blocked from issuing a statement or adopting a resolution by U.S. insistence that the origin of the virus in China or Wuhan be included, which China objected to, but the Trump administration relented on that and is now insisting on a reference to transparency. According to diplomats, another holdup was Macrons desire to hold a P-5 summit meeting before a full Security Council meeting was held or a resolution adopted.

But the 10 elected Security Council members had been pressing for a council meeting and briefing from Guterres  and they had the nine votes needed for it to finally happen last Thursday. They have also drafted a resolution, as has France, but diplomats said talks have not yet started on trying to unite the rival drafts.

At Thursdays closed council meeting, secretary-general Guterres warned that the coronavirus pandemic is threatening international peace and security and said this can potentially lead to an increase in social unrest and violence that would greatly undermine our ability to fight the disease.

He urged the Security Council, whose mandate is to preserve international peace and security, to unite on tackling the virus.

U.N. spokesman Stephane Dujarric said Wednesday that the U.N. is very pleased with the impact and resonance Guterres call has had and a united and strong message from the Security Council would go a long way in pushing that call further and making it a reality.

___

Lederer reported from New York. Vladimir Isachenkov contributed to this report from Moscow.
ROCKVILLE, Md., April 15, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- Federal Realty Investment Trust (NYSE: FRT) announced today additional information regarding the Annual Meeting of Shareholders to be held on Wednesday, May 6, 2020.

The following materials relate to the Notice of Annual Meeting of Shareholders and Proxy Statement (the "Proxy Statement"), dated March 20, 2020, for the 2020 Annual Meeting of Shareholders (the "Annual Meeting") of Federal Realty Investment Trust (the "Company"), furnished to shareholders of the Company in connection with the solicitation of proxies by the Board of Trustees of the Company for use at the Annual Meeting scheduled to be held on Wednesday, May 6, 2020. These definitive additional materials are being filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission and are being made available to shareholders on or about April 15, 2020. PLEASE READ THESE MATERIALS CAREFULLY IN CONJUNCTION WITH THE PROXY STATEMENT AND OTHER PROXY MATERIALS.

NOTICE OF CHANGE TO A REMOTE-ONLY ANNUAL MEETING OF SHAREHOLDERS TO BE HELD ON MAY 6, 2020

To the Shareholders of Federal Realty Investment Trust:

Due to the public health impact of the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic and the related limitations within the state of Maryland on all non-essential gatherings of individuals, and in order to support the health and well-being of our shareholders, employees and the greater community, the Company has changed the format of the Annual Meeting to a remote only format. Shareholders will NOT be able to attend the Annual Meeting in-person. As previously announced, the Annual Meeting will be held at 9:00 a.m. local time, on Wednesday, May 6, 2020.

The date, time and webcast link for the Annual Meeting are as follows:

Federal Realty Investment Trust Annual Meeting

Date: May 6, 2020 Time: 9:00 a.m. local time Webcast Link: https://web.lumiagm.com/202329683

The proposals to be voted on at the Annual Meeting remain the same as those set forth in the Notice of Annual Meeting of Shareholders and Proxy Statement for the Annual Meeting previously mailed or made available to shareholders (the "Proxy Materials"). As described in the Proxy Materials, you are entitled to vote at the Annual Meeting if you were a shareholder as of the close of business on March 16, 2020, the record date. The proxy card that was included with the Proxy Materials will not be updated to reflect the change in location but may continue to be used to vote your shares in connection with the Annual Meeting.

THE COMPANY ENCOURAGES ALL SHAREHOLDERS TO REVIEW THE PROXY MATERIALS, AND THIS NOTICE SHOULD BE READ IN CONJUNCTION WITH THE PROXY MATERIALS.

Voting

Instructions for how to submit a proxy and vote prior to the Annual Meeting can be found on page 1 of the Proxy Statement. The Company encourages eligible shareholders to vote on the proposals disclosed in the Proxy Materials prior to the Annual Meeting using the instructions provided in the Proxy Materials.

If you have already submitted a proxy, you do not need to vote again unless you would like to change or revoke your prior vote on any proposal. If you would like to change or revoke your prior vote on any proposal, please refer to page 1 of the Proxy Statement for instructions on how to do so. If you wish to vote at the Annual Meeting itself, you will need to follow the instructions below.

Attending the Annual Meeting

The Company hopes that all shareholders who can do so will attend the Annual Meeting via the live webcast. The meeting has been designed to provide the same rights to participate as you would have at an in-person meeting. During the Annual Meeting, shareholders who held shares as of the Record Date may ask questions on the proposals and will be able to vote their shares electronically. The Company will respond to as many inquiries at the Annual Meeting as time allows.

Both shareholders of record and shareholders who hold their shares in "street name" can attend the Annual Meeting via live webcast, submit their questions during the Annual Meeting and vote their shares electronically at the Annual Meeting by following the instructions below.

You may also attend the Annual Meeting as a guest, but you will not be able to ask questions or vote your shares during the meeting using the webcast platform.

To attend the Annual Meeting with the rights of a shareholder of record, you must :

First access the Annual Meeting by entering the webcast link address of https://web.lumiagm.com/202329683 into your internet browser and then click "Join". Next you should click on "I have a control number", enter the control number found on your proxy card or Notice of Internet Availability of Proxy Materials you previously received, and enter the password " federal2020 " (the password is case sensitive).

into your internet browser and then click "Join". Next you should click on "I have a control number", enter the control number found on your proxy card or Notice of Internet Availability of Proxy Materials you previously received, and enter the password " " (the password is case sensitive). To vote your shares electronically at the Annual Meeting, you can do so by clicking on the Shareholder Central link on the screen to submit your ballot. You may also continue to vote using the instructions provided in the Proxy Materials until the Annual Meeting concludes.

If you do not have your control number, you may still attend the Annual Meeting as a guest (non-shareholder) but you will not have the option to participate in or vote your shares electronically at the Annual Meeting. Should you wish to obtain a duplicate control number, you must submit a request for a duplicate control number to American Stock Transfer & Trust Company, LLC: (1) by email to [email protected] ; (2) by facsimile to 718-765-8730 or (3) by mail to American Stock Transfer & Trust Company, LLC, Attn: Proxy Tabulation Department, 6201 15th Avenue, Brooklyn, NY 11219. Requests for a duplicate control number must be labeled as "Duplicate Control Number" and be received by American Stock Transfer & Trust Company, LLC no later than 5:00 p.m. local time on May 5, 2020 .

To attend the Annual Meeting with the rights of a holder of shares in "street name," you must :

Obtain a legal proxy from your broker, bank or other nominee.

You then must submit a request for registration to American Stock Transfer & Trust Company, LLC: (1) by email to [email protected] ; (2) by facsimile to 718-765-8730 or (3) by mail to American Stock Transfer & Trust Company, LLC, Attn: Proxy Tabulation Department, 6201 15th Avenue, Brooklyn, NY 11219. Requests for registration must be labeled as "Legal Proxy" and be received by American Stock Transfer & Trust Company, LLC no later than 5:00 p.m. local time on April 27, 2020 .

; (2) by facsimile to 718-765-8730 or (3) by mail to American Stock Transfer & Trust Company, LLC, Attn: Proxy Tabulation Department, 6201 15th Avenue, 11219. Requests for registration must be labeled as "Legal Proxy" and be received by American Stock Transfer & Trust Company, LLC no later than local time on . If you have registered with American Stock Transfer & Trust Company, LLC as outlined above, you can vote your shares electronically at the Annual Meeting by clicking on the Shareholder Central link on the screen to submit your ballot. You may also continue to vote using the instructions provided by your broker, bank or other nominee.

Please note, if you do not complete the registration process with American Stock Transfer and Trust Company, LLC, you may still attend the Annual Meeting as a guest (non-shareholder) but you will not have the option to participate in or vote your shares electronically at the Annual Meeting.

Technical Difficulties

We will have technicians ready to assist you with any technical difficulties you may have accessing the Annual Meeting live webcast. Please be sure to check in by 8:30 a.m. local time on May 6, 2020, the day of the Annual Meeting, so that we may address any technical difficulties before the Annual Meeting live webcast begins. If you encounter any difficulties accessing the Annual Meeting live webcast during the check-in or meeting time, please go to https://go.lumiglobal.com/faq or call 718-931-8399, ext. 6449.

Additional Supplemental Information

Page 3 of the Proxy Statement refers to our inaugural corporate responsibility report. The report can be found at https://www.federalrealty.com/Federal-2019-Corporate-Responsibility-Report.

About Federal Realty

Federal Realty is a recognized leader in the ownership, operation and redevelopment of high-quality retail based properties located primarily in major coastal markets from Washington, D.C. to Boston as well as San Francisco and Los Angeles. Founded in 1962, Federal Realty's mission is to deliver long term, sustainable growth through investing in densely populated, affluent communities where retail demand exceeds supply. Its expertise includes creating urban, mixed-use neighborhoods like Santana Row in San Jose, California, Pike & Rose in North Bethesda, Maryland and Assembly Row in Somerville, Massachusetts. These unique and vibrant environments that combine shopping, dining, living and working provide a destination experience valued by their respective communities. Federal Realty's 104 properties include approximately 3,000 tenants, in 24 million square feet, and over 2,700 residential units.

Federal Realty has increased its quarterly dividends to its shareholders for 52 consecutive years, the longest record in the REIT industry. Federal Realty is an S&P 500 index member and its shares are traded on the NYSE under the symbol FRT. For additional information about Federal Realty and its properties, visit www.FederalRealty.com.

Investor Inquires: Media Inquiries: Leah Andress Brenda Pomar Investor Relations Senior Manager Corporate Communications Manager 301.998.8265 301.998.8316 [email protected] [email protected]

SOURCE Federal Realty Investment Trust

Related Links

http://www.federalrealty.com


Passenger traffic down across all countries of operations as a result of COVID-19 pandemic and travel restrictions worldwide

Corporacion America Airports S.A. (NYSE: CAAP), ("CAAP" or the "Company") the largest private sector airport operator in the world by number of airports, reported today a 48.7% decline year-over-year passenger traffic in March 2020.

Passenger Traffic, Cargo Volume and Aircraft Movements Highlights Statistics Mar'20(2) Mar'19(1)(2) % Var. YTD'20(2) YTD'19(1)(2) % Var. Domestic Passengers (thousands) 2,056 3,945 -47.9% 9,861 11,545 -14.6% International Passengers (thousands) 1,055 2,267 -53.4% 5,347 6,754 -20.8% Transit Passengers (thousands) 429 694 -38.1% 1,903 2,272 -16.2% Total Passengers (thousands) 3,540 6,906 -48.7% 17,111 20,571 -16.8% Cargo Volume (thousand tons) 24.5 38.2 -35.9% 83.3 104.8 -20.6% Total Aircraft Movements (thousands) 42.0 71.5 -41.3% 178.6 212.7 -16.0% (1) Note that preliminary passenger traffic figures for Ezeiza Airport, in Argentina, for 2019 as well as January 2020 were adjusted to include additional inbound passengers not accounted for in the initial count, for an average of approximately 5% of total passenger traffic at Ezeiza Airport and 1% of total traffic at CAAP, during that period. Importantly, inbound traffic does not affect revenues, as tariffs are applicable on departure passengers. (2) Preliminary data on 750 flights in August, 873 flights in September, 547 in October, 423 in November, 280 in December 2019, 1,256 in January and 195 in February 2020 at Brasilia Airport, due to delays in the submission of information by third parties. Moreover, starting November 2019 the Company has reclassified its passenger traffic figures for Brasilia Airport between international, domestic and transit retroactively since June 2018 to return to the count methodology utilized until May 2018. Notwithstanding, total traffic figures remain unchanged.

Passenger Traffic Overview

Total passenger traffic in March 2020 dropped 48.7% YoY, primarily reflecting lower travel demand along with travel restrictions imposed by governments, aiming to containing the spread of COVID-19 pandemic. International traffic declined by 53.4% YoY, while domestic traffic dropped 47.9% YoY.

In Argentina, total passenger traffic decreased 49.9% YoY, as a result of certain measures implemented by the Government mid-March in order to restrict both international and domestic flights. International passenger traffic declined 49.5%, while domestic passenger traffic dropped 50.0% YoY.

In Italy, as per government regulations, Florence Airport temporarily halted its operations starting March 14. Passenger traffic declined 82.9% YoY, with traffic at Florence airport down 83.8% YoY and traffic at Pisa Airport down 82.4% YoY.

In Brazil, total passenger traffic dropped 38.4% YoY, driven by a drop of 39.4% in domestic passenger traffic and a 42.1% decline in international passenger traffic. In Uruguay, passenger traffic declined 45.6% YoY. Containment measures implemented by the government include travel restrictions from certain countries, including Argentina, US and certain countries in Europe.

In Armenia, where travel restrictions were imposed late March, total passenger traffic dropped 38.2% YoY. In Ecuador, total passenger traffic declined 47.0% YoY, with government containment measures, including borders closure, implemented mid-march.

Cargo Volume and Aircraft Movements

Cargo volume decreased35.9% on March 2020, mainly due to declines of 37.4% in Argentina, 46.6% in Brazil and 59.3% in Ecuador; partially offset by increases of 3.0% in Italy, 6.0% in Uruguay and 29.8% in Armenia.

Aircraft movements declined 41.3% YoY in March 2020, driven by decreases across all segments due to travel restrictions: 42.4% in Argentina, 63.4% in Italy, 26.6% in Brazil, 39.2% in Uruguay, 54.5% in Ecuador, 23.5% in Armenia and 34.7% in Peru.

Summary Passenger Traffic, Cargo Volume and Aircraft Movements Mar'20(2) MAr'19(1)(2) % Var. YTD'20(2) YTD'19(1)(2) % Var. Passenger Traffic (thousands) Argentina 1,873 3,741 -49.9% 8,894 11,103 -19.9% Italy 91 531 -82.9% 1,003 1,420 -29.3% Brazil 974 1,582 -38.4% 4,365 4,968 -12.1% Uruguay 101 185 -45.6% 526 643 -18.1% Ecuador 217 410 -47.0% 980 1,105 -11.3% Armenia 124 200 -38.2% 554 579 -4.2% Peru 161 258 -37.5% 787 753 4.4% TOTAL 3,540 6,906 -48.7% 17,111 20,571 -16.8% (1) See Footnote 1 in previous table. (2) See Footnote 2 in previous table.

Cargo Volume (tons) Argentina 12,614 20,145 -37.4% 45,546 56,057 -18.8% Italy 1,096 1,064 3.0% 3,212 3,081 4.3% Brazil 4,827 9,042 -46.6% 15,690 23,524 -33.3% Uruguay 2,383 2,249 6.0% 6,302 6,095 3.4% Ecuador 1,611 3,955 -59.3% 7,134 11,313 -36.9% Armenia 1,728 1,331 29.8% 4,331 3,558 21.7% Peru 227 404 -43.7% 1,051 1,191 -11.7% TOTAL 24,486 38,189 -35.9% 83,266 104,818 -20.6% Aircraft Movements Argentina 22,666 39,347 -42.4% 93,770 115,890 -19.1% Italy 1,904 5,206 -63.4% 11,307 14,152 -20.1% Brazil 9,815 13,371 -26.6% 36,664 40,751 -10.0% Uruguay 1,548 2,548 -39.2% 7,685 9,337 -17.7% Ecuador 3,157 6,937 -54.5% 17,200 20,636 -16.7% Armenia 1,396 1,826 -23.5% 5,471 5,326 2.7% Peru 1,506 2,308 -34.7% 6,497 6,646 -2.2% TOTAL 41,992 71,543 -41.3% 178,594 212,738 -16.0%

About Corporacion America Airports

Corporacion America Airports acquires, develops and operates airport concessions. Currently, the Company operates 52 airports in 7 countries across Latin America and Europe (Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay, Peru, Ecuador, Armenia and Italy). In 2019, Corporacion America Airports served 84.2 million passengers. The Company is listed on the New York Stock Exchange where it trades under the ticker "CAAP". For more information, visit http://investors.corporacionamericaairports.com.

View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20200415005782/en/

Contacts:

Investor Relations Contact

Gimena Albanesi

Email: gimena.albanesi@caairports.com

Phone: +5411 4852-6411
The Woodlands Township Board of Directors is expected to make an appointment to the Development Standards Committee and consider candidates for replacing one board member during the Thursday regular meeting of the board  which will again be hosted remotely via Zoom video conferencing technology.

On the agenda for the regular meeting is consideration of candidates and a process for a temporary replacement director to fill the Position 2 seat on the board, which was unexpectedly vacated on April 9 after the resignation of Director Brian Boniface.

The board will also consider an appointment to the townships Development Standards Committee, which has only six members due to the resignation of Bala Iyer, the newest member of the committee, who tendered his resignation in February.

Boniface resigned his seat on the board effectively immediately at the end of the April 9 virtual meeting, telling directors and online viewers that he had been activated the U.S. Army Reserves to serve a six-month humanitarian mission to assist with the response to the COVID-19 novel coronavirus pandemic.

Boniface is a captain in logistics in the Army Reserves, a role that has required him to miss other meetings over the more than three and a half years he has been on the board.

ON HOUSTONCHRONICLE.COM: Boniface resigns from Woodlands board due to Army Reserves call-up

The directors are expected to decide on how to replace Boniface and also unveil potential candidates for consideration, the names of which are due to the township by the end of the day Wednesday.

Bonifaces term expired in November and whomever is tabbed to replace him will have the option of seeking the seat permanently by filing candidate papers in July or August.

DSC appointment expected

The other main item on Thursdays agenda is the possible appointment of a replacement on the DSC for Bala Iyer, who recently resigned from the seven-member committee after a series of missed meetings.

Iyer had only been appointed to the DSC in December 2018, officially joining the entity that oversees township covenants and exterior design standards in January 2019. Iyer was often missing from meetings, which occur twice a month at 5 p.m. on Wednesdays, but did not explain his resignation in a brief February email to the township.

Three candidates are in consideration for replacing Iyer, all of whom had previously applied to fill three spots on the committee in November 2019, but were not officially appointed. The three candidates are: Mary Funderburg, Vince Fredrick and Randolph Schulze.

In December, Funderburg and Frederick were initally appointed to the DSC but they never joined the committee.

The DSC is composed of four members appointed by the township and three members are appointed by The Woodlands Develpoment Co.

In December an agreement extension between the township and development company had not been approved so the temporary appointments were a back-up in the event the agreement was not extended. On Dec. 31, the two entities renewed the pact leading to the rescinding of the initial appointments.

ON HOUSTONCHRONICLE.COM: Woodlands board tabs 5 new DSC members; 3 of appointees are conditional

Mary Funderburg is the only woman who applied to join the DSC and resides in The Village of Panther Creek. She has been a township resident since the early 1990s. In addition to numerous jobs in engineering over her several decades-long career, she has multiple advanced degrees in industrial engineering. She is a member of the Professional Women in Petroleum society as well as an active volunteer with STEM-related educational entities.

Fredrick is a long-time resident of The Village of Grogans Mill and was a member of the Grogans Mill Residential Design Review Committee  a more hyper-local version of the DSC  for 20 years, serving as chairman or vice chairman over five of those years. Fredrick has an extensive engineering resume, is a Certified Safety Professional and was the Township Volunteer of the Year in 2015.

Schulze is currently the chairman of the Alden Bridge RDC and has an extensive resume with experience interacting professionally with the city of Houston and Bellaire Planning and Zoning boards. He is also a Certified Safety Professional, with a bachelors of science degree in civil engineering, and is a Certified Professional Traffic Operations Engineer.

The new appointment to the DSC will serve the remainder of Iyers unfilled term, which was slated to end on Dec. 31, 2020.

The board will also discuss several other issues, including the now-halted incorporation planning studies and receive public comment.

Residents can watch the meeting live on the townships website.

Any residents interested in making public comments can do so by telephone via a special number that is published each week in the online agenda packet. Calls will be taken in the order the calls are received and only during the public comment agenda item.

The meetings can be viewed online at http://www.thewoodlandstownship-tx.gov/778/Meeting-Videos.

jeff.forward@chron.com
A medical doctor who attempted to manage a Coronavirus patient at a private hospital has been struck dead by the virus.

The doctor, 51, was the first health worker in Nigeria who died of Coronavirus after he contacted the deadly disease while managing a patient.

He is the second medical doctor to have died of Coronavirus in Nigeria. A medical doctor was also killed by the disease in Katsina State recently.

He reported died at the Lagos University Teaching Hospital, LUTH, on Wednesday after he was rushed to the hospital.

Prof. Wasiu Adeyemo, Chairman, Medical Advisory Committee of the hospital, said the doctor was not a staff of the hospital but was rushed to the facility after he showed symptoms of the disease.

The doctor is not a LUTH staff; he was a private practitioner, though he trained in LUTH some 18, 20 years ago. I remember I met him, I know him, he left LUTH around 2002. One of his classmates called me that he has some issues in his private hospital, so I asked that he should be brought to LUTH.

He was COVID-19 positive, we started him on drugs but unfortunately, he died this morning (Wednesday), Adeyemo told The PUNCH .

He refused to disclose the name of the doctor in line with the ethics of medical profession.
A Lehigh Valley Lowes employee has tested positive for the coronavirus, the company confirmed Wednesday to lehighvalleylive.com.

The employee works at the store at 4443 Birkland Place, in the Southmont Plaza shopping center in Bethlehem Township, and was last in the building on April 3.

The associate has been quarantined and is receiving care, a Lowes spokesman said, and co-workers who worked closely with the person over a period of time have been put on a paid leave.

The store off of Freemansburg Avenue and Route 33 remained open, following an extensive cleaning per CDC guidelines.

The Lowes is in the same shopping complex as the Texas Roadhouse that closed April 6 after several employees tested positive for COVID-19. The restaurant reopened this past Monday.

Lowes said it is not aware of any confirmed coronavirus cases at the Bethlehem store on Eighth Avenue or the Whitehall Township store on MacArthur Road.

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.

Sarah Cassi may be reached at scassi@lehighvalleylive.com. If theres anything about this story that needs attention, please email her. Follow her on Twitter @SarahCassi. Find lehighvalleylive.com on Facebook.
Imagine sitting in a crowded jail cell for days, weeks, even years, waiting for your day in court, not yet convicted of any crime, unable to make bail.

Now imagine yourself there amid the spread of COVID-19  unable to wash your hands or socially distance yourself from dozens of other inmates. The entire time you're incarcerated, you have little to no access to quality health care. That is the grim reality for hundreds of thousands of people across the United States.

Today, a judges decision to set bail is the equivalent of a death sentence. With the virus rapidly spreading, COVID-19 is quickly infiltrating prison and jail settings where conditions are the worst.

Last week, an inmate died of coronavirus at Rikers Island. It was one of the first such incidents at the prison. According to a Time magazine report, 53-year-old Michael Tyson fell ill and, days later on March 26, was moved to the hospital.

POLICING THE USA: A look at race, justice, media

Tyson was booked into Rikers just the month prior for a technical parole violation. As of last week, more than 850 people within New York's correctional system  including inmates, staff and health care workers  had contracted COVID-19, according to a New York Times report.

A security fence surrounds inmate housing on the Rikers Island correctional facility in New York. Prisons and jails are a potential epicenter for Americas coronavirus pandemic.

Across this country, people are adhering to the federal and state mandates designed to prevent the spread of COVID-19  washing ones hands several times a day, avoiding mass gatherings, practicing social distancing. Restaurants and bars have been ordered closed to ensure there will be no massive crowds of people.

For the hundreds of thousands of individuals who are too poor to pay their bail and are subsequently housed in jail, it is impossible to comply with the government mandates preventing infection.

The spread of the virus is exacerbated by the close quarters of overcrowded jails. But it may find its way into a prison system through a number of different means. At Chicagos Cook County jail, a correctional officer who tested positive for the virus immediately went into quarantine. Soon after, two of the jails 4,500 inmates also tested positive.

Story continues

HOTLINE: Share your coronavirus story

In Dallas County, nearly two dozen inmates have tested positive for the disease. That's on top of the 12 members of the county sheriffs office who contracted it. COVID-19 has also either taken lives or infected inmates at correctional facilities in Michigan and New Jersey.

The problem is severe.

It's also solvable.

Judges have used factors proven to rely on racial bias more than science to determine whether to set bail, such as the defendant's risk of fleeing and "dangerousness." While some have long argued (and stats have proved) that most individuals aren't flight risks, COVID-19 should eliminate that consideration entirely.

VOICES: America is isolated. I've been there before. Lessons I've learned from San Quentin

Those pretrial incarcerated individuals who cannot afford to pay nominal amounts of bail surely cannot afford to flee given COVID-19 restrictions that have canceled flights. Furthermore, data from the Brooklyn Community Bail Fund  which provides money for people who can't afford the cost of waiting for trials at home  shows a 95% court attendance rate for individuals in their program who have been released.

New Jersey eliminated money bail in 2017, releasing thousands more people pretrial. The state did not experience an uptick in new crime or failures to appear. When Philadelphia did away with cash bail and more people were released, the citys crime rate did not significantly change.

Counties and jurisdictions have always been burdened with the expensive and counterproductive responsibility of warehousing people in jail who have not been found guilty of a crime. But retaining pretrial individuals now not only adversely impacts those who are jailed, it also impacts prison employees, and those working on their behalf such as public defenders.

Acknowledging the problem, jurisdictions across the country are slowly releasing certain incarcerated populations. But far too many people are being left behind. These preliminary releases have just put a Band-Aid on a broken leg. They fall short of adequately dealing with what is certain to be a public health disaster.

Absent the release of the vast majority of pretrial detainees, this country will witness the deaths of many simply because bail was set too high and they could not afford their own freedom and the lifesaving measures accompanying that liberty.

The need to deploy sensible, proven, cost-saving and humanitarian solutions is ever so dire. There indeed are workable alternatives that fulfill criminal justice objectives and protect the health needs of a historically vulnerable population.

As weve seen in Brooklyn, if contact information is collected and people are reminded of their court dates, they show up. Just as our government leaders have shown faith in Americans to follow strict rules about where to go and who to fraternize with in order to flatten the curve, we need to have faith in our fellow citizens and release people out of harm's way.

There is absolutely no justification for placing lives of entire population groups in jeopardy simply because they are poor.

Seann Riley is director of partnerships for Uptrust, a technology company fighting mass incarceration.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Coronavirus: Cash bail is a virtual death sentence
SpiceJet on Wednesday said it has sent its freighter flight to China to bring medical supplies from Shanghai to Hyderabad amid the nationwide lockdown to combat the coronavirus threat.

The flight left from Kolkata airport at 8.25 am Wednesday and landed at 3.30 pm (local time) at Shanghai, it said.

It would then depart from Shanghai at 5 pm (local time) and arrive at Kolkata airport at 8.10 pm. After leaving Kolkata at 9 pm, the flight would land at 11.10 pm in Hyderabad on Wednesday, SpiceJet said.

The is for the first time that SpiceJet is operating a freighter to Chian, the airline said.

"SpiceJet is also operating a freighter flight to Colombo carrying farm produce from West Bengal and another cargo flight to Singapore today," the airline said in a press release.

The budget carrier said it has till date transported over 2,700 tons of cargo on more than 300 flights since the country-wide lockdown began on March 25.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
AMMAN (Reuters) - Jordan will not allow public worship in mosques during the holy month of Ramadan that begins next week as part of measures to stem the spread of coronavirus, the religious affairs minister said on Tuesday. Mohammad Khalaylah said evening prayers known as Taraweeh, a main part of the religious observance of the month-long fasting, would be banned

AMMAN (Reuters) - Jordan will not allow public worship in mosques during the holy month of Ramadan that begins next week as part of measures to stem the spread of coronavirus, the religious affairs minister said on Tuesday.

Mohammad Khalaylah said evening prayers known as Taraweeh, a main part of the religious observance of the month-long fasting, would be banned.

As in other Muslim countries, the authorities have closed mosques and public places of worship as part of a tight lockdown and ban on gatherings to stem the spread of the virus in a country with 391 confirmed cases and seven deaths.

(Reporting by Suleiman Al-Khalidi; Editing by Alison Williams)

This story has not been edited by Firstpost staff and is generated by auto-feed.
By Anna J. Park



Despite ongoing market volatility and downturns stemming from the global pandemic, research chiefs at major securities firms in Korea largely share the view that the market will slowly begin to recover as early as the second half of the year, as stimulus policies take effect and pent-up consumption demand expands.





Yun Hee-do, head of research at Korea Investment & Securities



The Korea Financial Investment Association recently held a conference with research center heads at eight major securities firms  Mirae Asset Daewoo, NH, Korea, Samsung, KB, Shinhan, Hana and Meritz Securities  to listen to what they had to say about the current crisis.



Yun Hee-do, head of research at Korea Investment & Securities, stressed that once the spread of the coronavirus slows, consumption, which has experienced a massive reduction, will be the first to see recovery.



"It seems inevitable that corporate profits would plunge during the first half this year. Yet the stock markets are expected to show a gradual upward trend from the second half, as corporate profits increase based on pent-up demand and the government's liquidity supply," Yun said.





Oh Hyun-seok, head of research at Samsung Securities



Samsung Securities' research chief Oh Hyun-seok also expected the second half will witness accumulated policy effects as well as pent-up consumption. As for long-term prospects, the online platform industry will gain traction for further growth.



"The global economy will gradually get back to a recovery cycle, restoring to the level of the pre-COVID-19 period," Oh said. "The slashing of global value chains in manufacturing industries will give differentiated momentum to stock markets in each country. Online and platform-based industries are expected to log structural growth as social distancing and non-contact culture become more solidified in societies," he added.





Yoon Chang-yong, head of research at Shinhan Financial Investment



Yoon Chang-yong, who leads research at Shinhan Financial Investment, emphasized that a key variable in the next phase of the global stock markets is whether COVID-19 will be mitigated in the U.S. and major countries in Europe.



"If the spread of the pandemic shows signs of abating in those countries, we can expect a normalization of the global economy in earlier stages as well as favorable stock market environments, based on eased global liquidity and stimulus policies," Yoon explained.



He also expected that global policy coordination would lessen the threat of a global economic crisis, although concerns on the after-effects like debt expansion and excessive global supplies remain.



Lee Kyung-su, head of research at Meritz Securities, said that he sees the current recession would be the shortest yet strongest recession.



"The global economy has already entered a recession phase. Yet it is possible that the current state would be the shortest but most impactful recession, as it is being caused by lockdowns which send shocks to both supply and demand chains," Lee stressed, adding that restoration is expected to be fast when the real economy normalizes.





Lee Kyung-su, head of research center at Meritz Securities
The United States has been one of the world's worst-hit countries when it comes to the COVID-19 outbreak. To add to the country's troubles, deadly tornadoes have ripped through it's southern region killing at least 32 people and leaving many more homeless, US media confirmed Monday.

Here's what conditions after Tornadoes bring death, destruction in the southern USA.

2. President Donald Trump offered his "warmest condolences" to those affected.

AFP

3. "By the grace of God, early reports show only a few minor injuries," Monroe Mayor Jamie Mayo said on Twitter.

AP

4. After the tornadoes tore through, h omes were reduced to piles of rubble.

AP

5. Area residents look through what now remains of houses and mobile homes in Bassfield, a town in Mississippi.

AP

6. Emma and husband Charles Pritchett stand in front of what was their home the day after a tornado hit in Chatsworth, Georgia.



AP

7. Matthew Alexander looks through a photo album as he tried to remove items from the damaged home of his parents-in-law.

AP

8. Michelle Reeves comforts her dog, Marley, while looking through items at the site of her damaged home in Chattanooga.

AP

9. The governors of Mississippi and Louisiana declared states of emergency. "The damage is devastating," Louisiana Governor John Bel Edwards said on Twitter.

AP

10. Thousands of homes were without power after the tornadoes hit.

AP
PAXTON  After spending a month stranded in Paxton because of the COVID-19 pandemic, Charles Magumba and his wife, Destiny, were hoping to return home, perhaps on Wednesday, to Uganda.

But on Tuesday, the couple learned Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni had extended his lockdown of the East African country by another 21 days.

The couple are eager to return home, where their four children are being cared for by Magumba's mother in Iganga, Uganda, where he leads two Christian ministries and a school and other programs for children.

"My mother, who is single, can't go out to walk because of this lockdown and she has a family now of 11 people in the house," said Magumba. "She has to feed 11 people without any government support. We would love to go home to be with our children and take care of them and live a normal life in some way in our home.

"We are a bit confused, disappointed and very sad in that we can't go home until the fifth of May, but at the same time we are very grateful that Royce Baier and his family and the First United Methodist Church of Paxton and some others, including the Hudson drug store and the IGA grocery store, have been so generous."

Since March 12, the Magumbas have been staying in a guest house next door to Baier Funeral Home, operated by Royce and Sheila Baier.

"The Methodist minister called and asked if we would provide lodging for them and I said, 'Sure,'" said Royce Baier. "What a weird set of circumstances for them to be stuck here. They come here to this country on a mission, a journey and get here right when the pandemic hits. And here we are. God works in mysterious ways."

The Magumbas came to Paxton to attend a three-day prayer conference at the invitation of the First United Methodist Church of Paxton. They planned to leave on March 23 to visit three Rockford pastors for two weeks before heading to Tennessee to attend a retreat for ministers and their spouses for a couple of weeks before returning to Uganda on April 30.

But they never left Paxton: Their Rockford host's doctor advised against anyone staying in his home because the host's pre-existing medical issues could put him at greater risk of contracting the deadly virus.

Then Uganda banned all commercial flights, except for cargo transports and emergencies due to COVID-19.

"What troubles me a bit is why (the Ugandan) government wouldn't let us go home. Of course I understand the whole world is on lockdown. People are afraid, the numbers are still up," said Magumba. "So why not let the citizens return home and put us in institutionalized quarantine for 14 days and and then afterward we could be freed?"

"I told Charles that he had to stay here; that he had no business going anywhere else," said Baier. "Who knows what is going to happen in (Uganda). This is the safest place for him to be and he can stay here until he can go home."

The generosity of the Paxton community has turned their predicament into a positive one, said Magumba. "They have done so much for us, and it has made us develop deep relationships with people in Paxton," he added.

The Baiers have "accommodated us in their guest house at no cost to us. They have been paying all the (utility) bills. And for that, we are very appreciative," said Magumba.

Other Paxton residents, including Carl Hudson, come almost daily to bring cooked meals. The IGA grocery store provided a gift card so they could get up to $50 of free groceries, said Magumba.

Hudson, whose son operates the Hudson Drug Shop, "just checks on us and gives us little gifts to keep our spirits high," said Magumba.

"We are just one family among many," said Hudson about his assistance. "I think that's just the spirit you find in our central plains, so to speak."

And on Sunday, Magumba was able to do something he does in Uganda: preach.

"The local radio station called us. We didn't ask them. They said, 'We know you are stuck here and you are a pastor. Could you please say something to the people on Easter Day?'"

So Magumba delivered a 20-minute sermon over the airwaves.

"We celebrated Easter during COVID-19, a very difficult, unprecedented time ... and I just reminded people that we don't belong to ourselves, that we belong to God," he said.

Hudson listened to the radio sermon.

"He said, 'God is in control. I acknowledge that. Here I am and when we get back, hopefully, we'll go on with our lives,' in so many words," said Hudson. "He accepted his situation and was quite thankful that he'd been provided for.

"In my words, there was a possibility that he could have been stuck in a tent between Rockford and Nashville," said Hudson. "Thank God, he was placed where a community spirit lives."

Contact Maria Nagle at (309) 820-3244. Follow her on Twitter: @Pg_Nagle
A colectomy is a procedure that involves removing all or a portion of the colon. Although it's commonly recommended as an intervention for patients with colon cancer, it is also an option for some patients that have other ailments.

Image Credit: Java Jar/Shutterstock.com

For example, if a patient has ulcerative colitis or Crohn's disease that is not well controlled with medication, or if a colonoscopy shows precancerous lesions, a doctor may recommend a total or partial colectomy. A colectomy can also be a treatment option for patients with bowel obstructions.

Concerning cancer, specifically, a surgeon may only remove small segments of a cancer patient's colon at first, and potentially extract more as the patient's illness progresses. Moreover, if a person has an exceptionally high risk of developing cancer due to the presence of numerous precancerous colon polyps, a physician may recommend a colectomy as a preventative measure.

Colectomy patients usually go through bowel preparation measures before the procedure. Taking these steps can reduce the risks a person faces.

Reducing surgical site infections with a combined approach

Surgical site infections (SSI) are risks that can manifest after a person undergoes a colectomy. Two of the main ways to reduce such complications are to put the patients on a regimen of oral antibiotics and to prescribe mechanical bowel preparation, whereby a person ingests a liquid that stimulates the clearing of the bowel.

The removal of feces from the body reduces the bacteria that could contribute to future infections. There is a debate in the medical community about whether patients should receive oral antibiotics, instructions for mechanical bowel preparation or do both of those things to reduce the risks of colectomy complications.

A 2018 meta-analysis examined the results of 38 randomized clinical trials with a total patient pool of 8,458 patients who were undergoing elective colectomies. The goal was to see which preparation methods proved most effective for reducing SSI.

One group only took oral antibiotics, while another solely did mechanical bowel preparation. A third group received both preparatory measures, and a fourth had no bowel preparation at all.

The results showed that patients who underwent mechanical bowel preparation and received oral antibiotics had the lowest rate of organ/space and incisional infections. An anastomotic leak, whereby the luminal contents start to seep from two parts joined during surgery, is another risk associated with colectomy.

However, this research did not show substantial reductions in that complication for any single bowel preparation method  or lack thereof  versus another.

Thus, if physicians are trying to decide between instructing a patient to follow a schedule for mechanical bowel preparation or prescribe them a round of oral antibiotics, the ideal approach may be to do both.

Specific Infections May Persist After a Colectomy

Clostridium difficile, sometimes called C. diff, is a type of spore-forming bacteria that lives in the bowel. C. diff infections can cause life-threatening complications, including colon inflammation. Research published in 2009 showed isolated cases whereby C. difficile enteritis affects the small bowel and requires treatment with antibiotics.

However, a more recent case concerned an allogeneic stem cell recipient who developed a recurrent C. difficile infection after a total colectomy. The researchers clarified that the patient is the only person in that situation to develop such an infection. Although this case was the first involving a stem cell patient, there are other reported cases of C. diff infections in colectomy patients.

Thus, physicians must be aware of and tell patients about the risks associated with colectomies and these kinds of infections. Such information should be given throughout a patient's care. Regarding colon cancer, a person may need further treatments after a full or partial colectomy, depending on whether cancer spreads. This is due to the risk of additional health issues such as colorectal liver metastasis, which may require another surgery.

It occurs when cancer spreads to the liver from the colon or rectum. Doctors tend to discover this issue during routine screenings as well as appointments that occur after a colon removal procedure. Physicians can help people understand the risks of C. diff infections as well as other complications and associated procedures during their conversations about colectomy risks.

Finnish study indicates bowel preparation may not help

Many physicians view bowel preparation as an essential step to help colectomy patients reduce the risk of things going wrong associated with the procedure. However, a 2019 study suggests the need to revisit whether it's effective in cutting down the probability of complications.

Patients at four hospitals in Finland who were undergoing colectomies got randomly assigned to either undergo mechanical bowel preparation and take oral antibiotics or not participate in those measures at all.

The results associated with these 400 patients showed that bowel preparation did not reduce the rate of SSI or morbidity in the patients. Moreover, there was no difference in the groups regarding the length of the required hospital stay.

The researchers suggest further investigations into the efficacy of bowel preparation before colectomies. The team pointed out that bowel preparation is stressful for patients, but the studys conclusions indicate it does not benefit them.

Considerations for future conversations with colectomy candidates

The research covered here may reshape physicians' decisions as they determine whether or not to have colectomy patients go through with bowel preparation measures and, if so, which options to use.

However, a health care provider must always engage in thorough discussions with the people in their care and take all personal and case-related factors into account when assessing the best ways to minimize risks.

Sources: Toh J, Phan K, Hitos K, et al. Association of mechanical bowel preparation and oral antibiotics before elective colorectal surgery with surgical site infection. JAMA Network Open. 2018;1(6):e183226. doi:10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2018.3226

Causey MW e. Clostridium difficile enteritis after colectomy. - PubMed - NCBI. Ncbi.nlm.nih.gov. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19999913. Published 2009. Accessed February 3, 2020.

Chang K, Kreuziger L, Angell K, Young J, Ustun C. Recurrence of Clostridium difficile infection after total colectomy in an allogeneic stem cell transplant patient. Bone Marrow Transplant. 2011;47(4):610-611. doi:10.1038/bmt.2011.132

Fraiman M. Liver Surgery for Colorectal Metastasis to the Liver. Baltimore Liver & Pancreas Surgeon - Dr. Mark Fraiman. liverandpancreassurgeon.com/.../. Published 2018. Accessed February 3, 2020.

Koskenvuo L, Lehtonen T, Koskensalo S et al. Mechanical and oral antibiotic bowel preparation versus no bowel preparation for elective colectomy (MOBILE): A multicentre, randomised, parallel, single-blinded trial. The Lancet. 2019;394(10201):840-848. doi:10.1016/s0140-6736(19)31269-3

Lehtinen P. A Finnish study finds bowel preparation for colon surgery unnecessary | University of Helsinki. University of Helsinki. www.helsinki.fi/.../a-finnish-study-finds-bowel-preparation-for-colon-surgery-unnecessary. Published 2019. Accessed February 3, 2020.

Further Reading
Australians young and older are copping $1,000 fines for disobeying coronavirus restrictions in bizarre ways.

During the past four weeks alone, the New South Wales Police Force has issued 560 penalty infringement notices for being out of home without a reasonable excuse.

A 26-year-old man from south-west Sydney is the latest to get busted, with police revealing he had 'told officers he was going to see a friend for relationship advice'.

Australians young and older are copping $1,000 fines for disobeying coronavirus restrictions in bizarre ways. A 26-year-old man from south-west Sydney is the latest to get busted, with police revealing he had 'told officers he was going to see a friend for relationship advice'. Pictured is a NSW Police officer pulling over a P-plate driver in Sydney

The resident of Heckenberg was given a $1,000 fine, 10 minutes after he had disobeyed a formal warning from the Liverpool area command to go home.

At the other end of the age spectrum, a 64-year-old man from Woollahra, in Sydney's east, was found almost 300km at Boomerang Beach, near Forster, on the state's mid-north coast.

Asked why he was there, he allegedly told police 'he had been on the beach for two hours using his mobile phone'.

Last week, a 41-year-old man from Bathurst, in the state's central west, was fined $1,000 for taking a morning walk, even though exercise is allowed under tighter COVID-19 public health order restrictions that came into effect on March 31.

Despite that, the police argued 'he gave several different reasons for being out of his home'.

At the other end of the age spectrum, a 64-year-old man from Woollahra, in Sydney's east, was found almost 300km at Boomerang Beach, near Forster, on the state's mid-north coast. Pictured is a quiet road in central Sydney on March 31

Under stage three restrictions in NSW, gatherings are restricted to no more than two people except for members of someone's immediate household.

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

Residents are only allowed to leave their homes for essential reasons, including for food, work or education, exercise and medical care or compassionate needs.

Disobeying a COVID-19 rule incurs a $1,000 fine in NSW, Western Australia, South Australia and the Australian Capital Territory.

In Queensland it's $1,334.50, in Victoria it's $1,652 and in the Northern Territory, $1,099.

Fines across Australia are a controversial issue, considering people are being penalised even for obeying strict rules to remain 1.5 metres apart in public.

In Victoria, the state's deputy commissioner Shane Patton has promised to review every fine, after police interrupted a funeral despite mourners adhering to the 10-person rule.

'I will review every one of those personally to ensure they have been appropriately issued and that common sense is being applied,' he said on Tuesday.

Victorian police last week dropped a $1,652 fine handed out to 17-year-old learner driver Hunter Reynolds, who was receiving driving lessons from her mother Sharee, about 30km from their Hampton home, in Melbourne's south-east.
Senior Congress leader Mohammed



Arif Naseem Khan on Wednesday claimed the Maharashtra government was ready to send migrant workers back to their native states in view of the lockdown, but respective chief ministers were not ready to accept them.

Khan's statement came in the backdrop of a protest by migrant workers in Bandra on Tuesday, demanding that they be sent back to their native places in view of the coronavirus- enforced lockdown which has rendered them jobless. Most of them were from Bihar, Uttar Pradesh and West Bengal.

In a statement, Khan said he had discussed the issue of migrant workers in Mumbai and neighbouring areas with senior ministers in the Maha Vikas Aghadi (MVA) government, of which the Congress is a constituent.

"All ministers with whom I discussed the problems of migrant workers told me that the Maharashtra government was ready to send them back (to their respective states).

"But the chief ministers of the states the migrant workers belong to were not ready to take them back," the former state minister claimed.

Due to the lockdown, which has been now extended till May 3, poor labourers from other states have lost their jobs and run out of money and food.

The state government, which has been arranging food and shelter for them, will find it difficult to do the same for another fortnight, he said.

He said the Centre should intervene and find a solution to the problem of these migrants who number around 20 lakh in the MMR (Mumbai Metropolitan Region)area.

Khan said Maharashtra ministers Aaditya Thackeray and Ashok Chavanhad earlier also spoken about sending the migrant labourers back to their states.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
As American credit unions face their own unique struggles with the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic, so too do financial cooperatives in countries across the globeincluding the Philippines.

Despite a citywide lockdown in Manila and the closure of most businesses in some of the provinces, more than half of the nations credit unions remain open to serve their membersand more are reopening each week. With skeletal workforces inside, staffers wearing personal protective equipment greet members outside to give them cash withdrawals or provide other services.

And there is light on the horizon. After the crisis passes, credit unions expect to see a big increase in membershipbecause they are still working to serve their members while other institutions are not.

Leni San Roque, CEO of the Association of Asian Confederation of Credit Unions (ACCU), says credit unions in the Philippines were also able to convince their regulator to let them use funds that are required to be set aside for member education to instead assist frontline health workers and communities in response to the crisis.

And several credit unions belonging to both the National Association of Credit Cooperatives (NATCCO) and the Philippine Federation of Credit Cooperative (PFCCO) have stepped up to help:

The Most Holy Rosary Multi-Purpose Cooperative (MHRMPC) has released four million pesos from the community develop fund and optional funds to ease their member need along with the distribution of 500 pesos worth of commodity packs to 8,000 families.

Oro Integrated Cooperative provided 14 Barangays (villages) in Cagayan de Oro City with knapsack sprayers to aid them in their fight against the spread of COVID 19. Each spray tank can hold up to 16 liters of cleaning solution, which can be used to disinfect possibly contaminated areas.

Mediatrix Multi-Purpose Cooperative donated face masks to City LGU of Kidapawan. The masks will be given to the frontline workers battling COVID-19.

The NEC Multipurpose Cooperative founded by NATCCO employees provided food packs to volunteers manning the check points in their locality.

Disenyo Pandi Cooperative, a cooperative of garment producers, made improvised personal protective equipment (PPE) that they will donate to the health workers. Due to the fast escalation of cases, hospital workers are running out of PPE.

The Bohol Community MPC provided food aid to displaced workers/members. The food pack includes rice, noodles, coffee, biscuits and canned goods.

Paco Savings and Credit Cooperatives provided food packs to their vulnerable members. Being aware of the shortage of supplies, the cooperative donated PPE and disinfectant to the health workers of the Lung Center of the Philippines.

Mediatrix Multi-Purpose Cooperative donated face masks to City LGU of Kidapawan. The masks will be given to the front liners battling COVID-19.

The NEC Multipurpose Cooperative founded by NATCCO employees provided food packs to volunteers manning the check points in their locality.

NATCCO also opens a Co-op Consultancy Clinic online at 3:00 pm every Tuesday. Leni San Roque joined the March 24 session, in which the NATCCO team shared the policy on loan repayment moratoriums as an immediate measure to help members whose income is affected due to the lockdown.

Despite all the positives, concerns about things like liquidity and regulatory relief remain for credit unions across the country. World Council of Credit Unions is working with ACCU to plan a webinar for Filipino credit unionsfocused on regulatory advocacy issues and the importance of digitization going forward. It would be the latest in a series of COVID-19 webinars World Council has conducted for member credit union associations around the globeand will continue to provide as long as this crisis continues.

What is happening in The Philippines is a microcosm of the struggles and triumphs facing our global credit union community. To learn more about how credit unions across the world are responding to the crisis, visit World Councils COVID-19 Resource Page.
2020 first quarter revenue rose by +14.3% at comparable exchange rates, significantly impacted by anticipatory buying

Key figures Revenue

1st quarter 2020







247.7 M Total

growth







+13.9% Growth at

constant exchange rates







+14.3% Growth at constant exchange rates

and scope 1







+14.3% including



companion animals +18.4%

food producing animals +9.8%



1 Growth at constant exchange rates and scope is the organic growth of sales, excluding the impact of exchange rate changes, by calculating the indicator for the financial year in question and that for the previous financial year on the basis of identical exchange rates (the exchange rate used is that in effect for the previous financial year), and excluding the impact of changes in scope, by calculating the indicator for the financial year in question on the basis of the scope of consolidation for the previous financial year.





Quarterly consolidated revenue

Virbac revenue in the first quarter was 247.7 million, with a sharp increase of +13.9% compared to the same period in 2019. At constant exchange rates, growth was at +14.3%, buoyed by Europe and the United States, with however a very positive effect related, on the one hand to anticipatory buying linked to Covid-19, and on the other hand to price increases in the United States. As described in the second part of the press release, we anticipate a slowdown in activity in the coming months.



All areas show growth compared to the same period last year. In the United States, first quarter activity showed a marked increase of +47.4% (+42.5% at constant exchange rates). It benefited from very large purchases by distributors of the Sentinel and Iverhart ranges, in anticipation of price increases applied in the first quarter of 2020. Ex-Virbac sales in the parasiticide and dermatology ranges are growing, driven by the launch of Easotic, whereas the other ranges were down compared to the same period in 2019, which had seen strong growth.

Outside the United States, the Group grew +9.1% at real rates, or +10.3% at constant rates favorably impacted by Covid-19, which generated advance purchases. In Europe, revenue grew +13.6% at real rates (+13.2% at constant rates). The major contributors to this performance were France, Germany, Belgium and Poland, boosted by a high level of activity in the companion animal ranges (including petfood related to advance purchases in anticipation of lockdown, and parasiticides), as well as ruminant products, which offset the decline in sales in Italy (impacted by Covid-19). In Latin America, excluding Chile, the Group had a good start to the year. Activity grew by +10.9% at real rates (+15.5% at constant exchange rates), due in particular to contributions by Brazil and Mexico. In Asia Pacific, growth at real rates was +3.4% (+4.8% at constant exchange rates), New Zealand drove the areas growth with substantial purchases of intramammary products in anticipation of Covid-19, thereby mitigating the more moderate growth in Asia, impacted by the drop in Vietnam, Taiwan and India. Lastly, in Chile, first quarter activity grew +3.4% at real rates (+5.2% at constant rates), driven by sales of antibiotics and parasiticides for aquaculture.

Story continues

In terms of species, the companion animal activity grew globally by +19.2% at real rates (+18.4% at constant rates), primarily buoyed by growth in internal and external parasiticide ranges (significant anticipatory buying related to price increases), the petfood range (pre-lockdown purchasing prior to Covid-19), dermatology and specialties, which offset the decline in the dental, antibiotic and vaccine ranges. The food producing animal segment showed strong growth of +7.8% (+9.8% at constant rates), also with advance purchases related to Covid-19. It was driven by sales in the ruminant sector (+13.9% at constant rates) and aquaculture (+5.1% at constant rates), which offset the slight decline in the industrial farming sector (swine and poultry) of -1.3% at constant rates compared to the same period in 2019.



Covid-19 - Virbac status report

Our thoughts go out to people around the world who are directly or indirectly affected by this coronavirus pandemic (Covid-19).

Our top priority is the health and safety of our employees and we are following the evolution of this pandemic very closely. All of our efforts are focused on finding the best ways to protect our teams and taking every action possible to help slow the spread of the virus and avoid overwhelming healthcare systems. Because animal health is at the heart of public health, we are also striving to ensure continuity as much as is possible with regard to our commitments to veterinarians, farmers and animal owners. We warmly thank them all, especially veterinarians and farmers, who are on the front lines every day, continuing their essential work to feed the planet and protect animals.

To address this situation, we quickly assembled a dedicated committee that coordinates all positions and maintains contact with all subsidiaries to monitor the situation as it evolves, and to quickly and effectively make the best decisions. Measures have been introduced at various Group sites: communications on how the virus is spread and the barrier gestures to be followed, monitoring of evocative symptoms, social distancing and contact prohibition, flow control, moving work stations to different locations (production, R&D, administrative), guided management of outside providers, personal protective equipment such as masks and gloves for those in the most exposed positions, etc. These measures were designed based on recommendations by the World Health Organization and country-specific health authorities.

Our business continuity plans have been triggered. Projects have been prioritized and a new work organization has been established by dividing the teams and spreading the time slots to avoid any overlap, as well as imposing teleworking for all eligible positions. Our remote communication channels have also been strengthened to better communicate with veterinarians and farmers as well as with employees, all to ensure continuity in our activity and our commitments to our customers in the animal care and feeding chain.

To date we count 30 cases of Covid-19 in our global workforce including 28 cases in France. We are continuously monitoring their health progress and that of their relatives. The majority of these cases are in our industrial teams at our major production sites in France (50% of our global productions) and in the U.S. After a temporary shutdown of our Carros site during the last week of March, we partially re-started production (current activity rate ~50%), with additional constraints, reduced staff and slower work rates. Our St. Louis site (current activity rate ~70%), as well as several of our other industrial sites are working at a slower rate, and we are unable at this point to determine when we can resume normal operations.

In terms of supply, we were able to mitigate impacts in the first quarter. However, we anticipate possible worldwide strain on the delivery of certain components or even certain products in the second quarter. For our Chinese suppliers, we are seeing a very gradual return of our supplies after a period of sharp slowdown. Our Indian subsidiary (the Groups number 3 subsidiary), which sources locally, will very likely be affected by the countrys complex situation in terms of health and economics and recently mandated containment measures. With respect to our inventory, except for the companion animal vaccines for which we have temporarily stopped production, we have safety stocks on our main products that should cover us until the end of June 2020.

Meanwhile, we expect our business to slow during containment periods, even if disparities may exist between segments. In many countries, our sales representatives are confined to their homes, with less frequent contact with veterinary clinics for companion animals. Those clinics have reduced activity or may even only be seeing patients by appointment and for essential and urgent interventions. Overall, the food producing animal segment could be less impacted.

Suspension of the 2020 outlook



Given these elements, at this point, we anticipate a decline in our activity and profitability in the second quarter of 2020, and most likely throughout all of 2020. As a result, due to uncertainties related to the number of countries affected by containment measures, the magnitude of the impact of these measures on our activity, the length of time that the outbreak continues to grow, and thus the duration of containment periods, we are not able to accurately assess the extent of the decline in our activity over the entire year. Consequently, it is also difficult to confirm at this stage the objective of an EBITA2 ratio around 15% around 2022 at constant rates and scope.

In addition to the measures we initiated to freeze spending and investment, government support measures for businesses, and the non-payment of dividends in 2020, we have the assets to deal with this crisis, including a solid financial structure, no significant repayment of debt in 2020, a drawing capability on our lines of credit that remains significant (~250 million) and a positive cash position at the end March of ~50 million. Lastly, thanks to our very diverse activity, our worldwide footprint (33 subsidiaries and a presence in over 100 countries via distributors), our highly engaged and supportive teams, and the stability of our shareholding, we remain very confident in the future.





2 Ebita: Current operating profit before depreciations of assets arising from acquisitions







Virbac: NYSE Euronext - Compartment A - ISIN code: FR0000031577/SYMBOL: VIRP

Financial Affairs Department: tel. 04 92 08 71 32 - email: finances@virbac.com - Website: corporate.virbac.com

Attachment
Police warning to key workers following reports of scum bag drug dealers stealing uniforms

This article is old - Published: Wednesday, Apr 15th, 2020

Police have issued a warning for shop workers and other key workers to beware following reports scum bag drug dealers are stealing uniforms in a bid to disguise themselves from officers.

No details of specific incidents or locations have been shared by North Wales Police but the forces Eastern Community Safety Team sent us an update on social media stating:

Shop workers / Key Workers Beware Scum bag drug dealers are stealing uniforms so that when they are stopped by police they identify as a key worker.

Take care with your uniforms and report anything suspicious on 101.

Thank you for your brilliant work
Vicki Kap's family thought she had a cold but less than two days after arriving in hospital she was placed on a ventilator and died of COVID-19.

Hey there, time traveller!

This article was published 15/4/2020 (636 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Vicki Kap's family thought she had a cold but less than two days after arriving in hospital she was placed on a ventilator and died of COVID-19.

Her daughter, Jody Brouwer, said Kap, 75, started having trouble breathing before being taken by ambulance to a hospital in Sarnia, Ont., where she would spend a week before dying in the intensive care unit.

Vicki Kap is seen in this undated handout photo. Vicki Kap's family thought she had a cold but less than two days after arriving in hospital she was placed on a ventilator and died of COVID-19. Her daughter, Jody Brouwer, said Kap, 75, started having trouble breathing before being taken by ambulance to a hospital in Sarnia, Ont., where she would spend a week before dying in the intensive care unit. THE CANADIAN PRESS/HO *MANDATORY CREDIT*

"Mom didn't wish to be on a ventilator for more than four days if she wasn't making any progress," Brouwer said, adding her parents had end-of-life conversations because her father has stage-four bowel cancer and was presumed to have the virus.

"We were told with my mom that she'll be on a breathing apparatus for the rest of her life, she'll never be able to go home, she'll be going to a nursing home if they kept her on a ventilator for months."

Kap's heart was going into distress before she died on March 29, three days after she would have celebrated her 54th wedding anniversary with her husband Frank, Brouwer said. She was her husband's sole caregiver at their home while he waited to go into hospice.

She believes her parents contracted the virus after having coffee with friends who had returned from Portugal in early March. The friends were asymptomatic then, but later became sick themselves.

Brouwer's uncle and his wife from nearby Strathroy had travelled with the couple and also became sick, one of eight people in their circle of family and friends who contracted the virus, Brouwer said.

Her uncle, Martin Postma, died two days before her mother and had also been on a ventilator, his wife said.

Mieke Postma said her family decided to take her husband off the ventilator after nine days because they feared his quality of life would be poor if he survived.

"He didn't really show much improvement over that time. If anything, it got worse with his kidneys completely failing," Postma said, adding her husband's heart was also affected.

Kap had minor chronic obstructive pulmonary disease but was otherwise in good health, said Brouwer, who has questions about what's being learned about the use of ventilators.

Doctors around the world have little data from limited studies. Much of the research includes patients still on the breathing machines, with no information on long-term outcomes for those who may survive.

Kap ended up in hospital after her nephew, Jeff Cain, spoke with her by phone and realized her breathing was laboured.

Cain, who is a former respiratory therapist, said he dropped off a small device called a pulse oximeter outside Kap's home so she could place it on her finger to measure the level of oxygen saturation in her blood and go to hospital if the level was too low.

Cain said both of his parents were also diagnosed with COVID-19 and are recovering well.

"I know a gentleman in the same community who came off the ventilator this week," he said.

"My mom asked, 'Is this automatically a death sentence?' I said, 'No, it depends on what else is going on.' "

Thomas Piraino, a respiratory therapist in the intensive care unit at St. Michael's Hospital in Toronto, said patients are placed on ventilators after developing a lung injury called acute respiratory distress syndrome.

Those with a condition like chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, as in Kap's case, have reduced air flow to the lungs and could be provided with non-invasive oxygen therapy depending on the severity of infection from COVID-19 by the time they get to hospital, said Piraino, who oversees the integration of clinical research and the practice of mechanical ventilation at St. Michael's.

"They could be at an early stage where when you put the tube in, the lungs are very compliant, like a balloon that can inflate very nicely. Or they could be at a stage where they have much more stiff lungs and it's more challenging to ventilate them," he said.

By then, the lungs may be akin to a sponge that has hardened, impeding oxygen from flowing to air sacs called alveoli and making it impossible to breathe, Piraino said. A medical coma is induced at that point before a tube is inserted into a patient's windpipe so a ventilator can deliver oxygen and take over breathing.

"In terms of why (the virus) gets to that point it's a number of components and we're still trying to learn about it because it has only been around for a few months."

Small studies from around the world are showing mixed results about survival rates for COVID-19 patients. They include limited data and involve patients who are still on the machines so it's not known if they will survive or what their long-term outcome or quality of life will be if they start breathing on their own.

For example, a study published recently in the Journal of the American Medical Association of 1,591 patients across hospitals in Lombardy, Italy, showed 68 per cent were placed on a ventilator and 26 per cent of them died.

It said 58 per cent of the patients remained on a ventilator when the nearly five-week study was completed on March 25.

"Every single study that's getting published right now is in the midst of it all so it's helpful to see where people are at but it doesn't really give us an overall view," Piraino said, adding concerns range from whether patients should have been ventilated earlier or if intubation happened too soon.

"Most people that go on a ventilator come off a ventilator. With COVID we just don't know."

Mortality rates from studies so far are between 26 per cent and 70 per cent, he said.

Dr. Michael Curry, an emergency room doctor at Delta Hospital in the Vancouver area, said he has seen studies citing mortality rates as high as 80 per cent, depending on the data being used.

"Ventilators can be life-saving for some people that are going to die without a ventilator," he said. "A ventilator can buy them time for the body to fight off infection and they can do well after the ventilator is discontinued. But for a big chunk of people put on a ventilator they're not ever going to come off it, at least not alive."

Curry said Canada has about seven or eight ventilators per 100,000 people and there is no shortage of the breathing machines, which require high staffing levels of doctors, nurses and respiratory therapists.

"What's going to happen in the future we don't know. But we have seen from countries like Spain and Italy that there could be a dramatic demand for ventilators if we don't get a handle on this disease soon," he said.

The federal government has announced plans to order 30,000 ventilators.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published April 15, 2020
Probe opened into mass COVID-19 infection in Leningrad Region migrant hostel

 RAPSI, Vladimir Burnov

10:50 15/04/2020

ST. PETERSBURG, April 15 (RAPSI, Mikhail Telekhov)  A criminal case over sanitary and epidemiological violations resulted in the coronavirus mass infection has been opened in the Leningrad Region, RAPSI has learnt in the Investigative Committees Leningrad Region Investigations Office.

The probe was launched after coronavirus 35 residents of a local migrant hostel had been tested positive for coronavirus.

According to case papers, on April 10, the officers of Russias consumer rights watchdog conducted a coronavirus prevention check in one of the residential buildings where the migrant hostel is located. Several persons were given a self-isolation order. An undertenant company was ordered to take sanitary and epidemiological measures to prevent the infection spread.

The check revealed infected residents of the hostel. In total, there are about 500 migrants living in it, the statement reads.




Pakistan's prominent religious scholar and chairman Ruet-e-Hilal Committee Mufti Muneeb ur Rehman on Tuesday said the lockdown was not applicable to mosques, adding that arrangements would be made for Friday congregational prayers and tarawih in Ramazan.

In a video shared by Pakistani journalist Naila Inayat, Mufti Muneeb can be heard saying, "We want to give the government a message that mosques should not be closed" Speaking after a meeting of ulema at the Karachi Press Club, Mufti Muneeb asked people coming to mosques to practice social distancing. "Now, the lockdown will not be applicable on mosques, Friday and Ramadan prayers will be held at mosques," he said.

'No lockdown for mosques'

Another cleric, Mufti Taqi Usmani instructed mosque administrators to "Remove prayer mats from mosques and ensure sanitisers are available."

No lockdown for mosques, all congregational prayers will continue, announces Mufti Muneeb. Says as PM Imran Khan said important businesses will open, so mosques and madrassas are important and will remain open. pic.twitter.com/vXbe3IIn9h  Naila Inayat   (@nailainayat) April 14, 2020

Lockdown in Pakistan extended

This comes after Pakistan Prime Minister Imran Khan on Tuesday extended the ongoing lockdown due to the coronavirus pandemic until the end of this month as the total number of COVID-19 cases in the country rose to 5,837. Addressing reporters following the National Coordination Committee meeting, Khan said that the ongoing restrictions have helped contain the spread of the deadly coronavirus.

It has been decided that the lockdown will continue till April 30, he said. However, Khan said that some key industries would be opened in order to start business activities.

"Our estimate was that 190 people will die until today but so far we saw 96 deaths. The spread of the virus is just 30% of our projections," Khan said.

Meanwhile, as restrictions were placed on congregational prayers in mosques, more than 50 clerics belonging to different organisations, including some banned outfits, warned the government not to further place restrictions on prayer congregations.

READ | Imran Khan's S.O.S answered; IMF to consider $1.4 bn loan to Pakistan to deal with Covid

Despite the government's pleas to observe social distancing, more than 53 senior clerics of Rawalpindi and Islamabad, belonging to the Wafaqul Madaris al Arabia, held a meeting in Jamia Darul Uloom Zakria, Tarnol, Islamabad, according to report in Dawn news. The meeting was attended by senior clerics representing various seminaries, banned groups, proscribed persons and political and non-political parties.

READ | Imran Khan extends lockdown until Apr 30 as COVID-19 cases near 6,000 mark

Prime Minister Khan announced to call a meeting of key clerics to chalk out plans as to how to use mosques in the holy month of Ramadan which is set to start from April 25.

READ | Trouble for Imran Khan: Pak clerics warn against religious congregation ban amid Covid

READ | Imran Khan named & shamed; USCIRF troubled by food denial to Pakistan Hindus, Christians

(With PTI inputs)
(Photo : Saptarshi Bandyopadhyay/NASA ) NASA Builds Telescope Design That'll Show Moon's Dark Cosmos Unseen by Humans (Photo : Saptarshi Bandyopadhyay/NASA) NASA Builds Telescope Design That'll Show Moon's Dark Cosmos Unseen by Humans

On Apr. 8, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) formulated a plan to create the possibly largest filled-aperture telescope in the history. This huge telescope will be used to see the 'dark cosmos' or the areas of the moon that are still unseen or undiscovered by the human eyes. What could be hiding there?

NASA builds a telescope plan to see hidden parts of Moon

If you think that you've already seen the full Moon, you're wrong. Apparently, there are parts of the Moon that are not yet being discovered by astronomers and seen by humans.

Experts claim that there are still hidden craters or 'dark cosmos' located at the Moon. These areas are the spots from the natural satellite that are positioned away from the Earth-- making it difficult for astronomers to discover what's underneath the Moon.

With the help of an ultra-long-wavelength radio telescope that will be called the "Lunar Crater Radio Telescope," NASA aims to get inside a crater on the faraway side of the Moon. Once accomplished, the agency said that it will open up other opportunities for them to further study the Moon and other planets.

As reported via Space, the idea behind the huge telescope was proposed by a robotics technologist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory named Saptarshi Bandyopadhyay.

He explains that the creation of the LCRT "could enable tremendous scientific discoveries in the field of cosmology by observing the early universe in the 10- 50m wavelength band...which has not been explored by humans till-date."

See how the Moon really works up in space

Unfortunately, the proposal for this large telescope is still under process. As of now, NASA's Innovative Advanced Concepts Program awarded $125,000 for a Phase 1 study of the feasibility of LCRT.

Once Bandyopadhyay gets the chance to build the telescope, it will be the largest filled-aperture radio telescope in the solar system. The device will dig a 2- to 3-mile-wide or 3 to 5 kilometers crater on the Moon's dark cosmos. Once done, a 1 km wire-mesh telescope, will then be stretched across the crater by NASA's DuAxel Rovers, or the wall-climbing robots.

Other than this process, the telescope will also come handy for other NASA projects directly related to Earth. Normally, the planet's atmosphere is a good thing for humans since it keeps us alive; however, for Moon astronomers, the Earth's atmosphere could be a hindering factor to receive wavelengths from the Moon.

If LCRT comes true, this factor will be wiped away.

"An ultra-long-wavelength radio telescope on the far side of the Moon has tremendous advantages compared to Earth-based and Earth-orbiting telescopes," Bandyopadhyay said in his proposal abstract.

For now, it is waiting for progress.

ALSO READ: Meteor Shower: 'Lyrid' Could Send Fireballs Through The Sky This April; Here Are Tips For Perfect Viewing

 2021 TECHTIMES.com All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission.
Contractors at an Amazon warehouse in Darlington say they have walked out over a lack of personal protective equipment (PPE) and inadequate social distancing measures.

Builders have claimed they were working under unacceptable and unsafe conditions at the distribution centre and face being sacked for walking out over coronavirus safety fears.

Amazon strongly rejected the allegations. The online retailer insisted that it has implemented proactive measures at all of its sites and ensured face masks are available for workers to use to use.

One worker said: Its a big site and the Amazon building is huge and there is nobody wearing masks or gloves  people are not social distancing.

Bosses have said if people walk off the site they will be sacked and replaced with someone else.

The only way you can work safely is if there were five people on site. Its impossible. There are hundreds.

A cleaner who works for TC Facilities Management, accused Amazon of ignoring a worsening situation.

The worker said: There is nobody enforcing social distancing rules, people are in very close proximity with each other.

Cleaners do not have PPE, we have the worst rubber gloves to clean the area, no aprons and no masks.

When I approached my manager about it they said youve got to sneeze and cough over you to catch it.

Workers who dont feel safe are told they can have agreed unpaid leave  a few have already quit from the agency.

Some have gone home with symptoms in the last two weeks.

Amazon should be overseeing this to make sure everyone is doing their part. They are still letting contractors put everybody at risk.

TCFM said that contract workers would be provided with face masks and that it would ensure that social distancing was being adhered to.

The company said: We take seriously the responsibility we have to our people in keeping them safe and well at work, and in doing so make sure that every colleague is provided with the correct equipment and tools for the jobs they are asked to complete, we can confirm that there is no shortage of the correct Personal Protective Equipment in any of our sites.

We are working closely with our partners  we have been able to go further to support our teams by providing face masks to all and also temperature checking everyone on entry to sites for all colleagues protection.

Alan Marshall, Darlington Borough Councils cabinet member for the economy, said: Our environmental health team has received several complaints relating to various companies claiming that public health guidelines are not being followed, but we have received no specific evidence to support this.

We have discussed the complaints with the companies who have assured us they have policies and procedures in place and comply with the guidelines.

An Amazon spokesperson said: Amazon is disappointed that some individuals working on the completion of the Darlington site have not complied with social distancing guidelines set by the contractors.

Agencies contributed to this report
The City of Midland Planning Commission hosted its first ever virtual meeting Tuesday night, April 14, unanimously approving a new oral surgery facility for Eastman Avenue and student apartments for Universal Drive.

Grant Murschel, director of planning and community development in Midland, said the meeting went well even though the more face-to-face human elements, such as nonverbal cues, were lost. He said the virtual format does still allow for presentation-sharing and engagement, but there is value in physical meetings.

Theres still a lot of functionality with the virtual format, and it seems to work well but I think certainly there is a value to that person human interaction, being face-to-face, he said.

When it comes to the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic, the city is not unaffected, as it has had to halt many services and close its public offices, such as City Hall. Still, Murschel said the city is just as concerned now with transparency.

Were still very committed to transparency, he said. We want the public to still be able to participate. We want people to be able to engage with us like they normally would and so weve really committed to get that information out to people as best as we can through social media, through press releases, postings at City Hall  but were really doing our best to still try and maintain that high standard of transparency that we usually function with even though its in a very different means since we cant be together.

However, as Murschel had pointed out during the commission meeting, they werent the first to host a virtual meeting. Rather, Midland City Council took the maiden voyage and hosted its own regular meeting in a virtual format Monday night, April 13.

City Manager Brady Kaye said prior to Gov. Gretchen Whitmers executive orders, the city was not allowed to host its meetings virtually. So, this was a new endeavor for the council and boards, and he thought the council meeting was a good first trial.

Kaye also acknowledged the limitations that come with hosting virtual meetings.

Obviously there are limitations if people dont have good computer access and they dont have the ability to watch online and stream that and participate in the Zoom process in that manner. And if theyre only listening to it, they do lose the ability to see the slides, he said.

In addition to watching the video livestreams on the citys website and on MCTV, the public could tune in by phone or via Zoom to offer public comment. Other than a few protocol changes and a lack of the Pledge of Allegiance, the meetings went on as they normally would.

On Tuesday night, the commission discussed three different agenda items, including a site plan for a 9,000-square-foot oral surgery medical clinic and office located at 5220 Eastman Avenue, across the street from Eastman Party Store. The plan was initiated by Fashion Square Investments LLC.

The facility will house Greater Michigan Oral Surgeons and Dental Implant Center, a one-and-a-half storied office with driveway access on Sylvan Lane, as opposed to Eastman.

Out of all the uses of this space, this seems like a very good use and I do appreciate that the applicant has taken into consideration the access and the potential impact on Eastman from Sylvan, said Commissioner Jamie Broderick. And, the use for the space, I think, would limit a lot of the potential use of Sylvan onto Eastman compared to other potential uses for that vacant land.

Another item that was approved by the commission was a site plan for a 22-unit housing facility, Danbury Place, which Scott Bell with Lapham Associates said was intended to be student housing. The property is located on Universal Drive, next to the Midland American Legion Post 165 and some other apartment complexes.

The property will have four separate buildings with three-story townhomes that have rear-yard access.

During the public hearing, Bob Koeppen, vice president of the adjacent Raintree Condominium Association, expressed the concerns of the neighbors about living next to students. Specifically, worried about privacy, having a barrier and water drainage.

Bell replied by saying there will be a deep retaining basin that acts as a natural barrier, and Patrick Pnacek with PKP Properties, said that they deal with serious tenants as they perform background and credit checks on all tenants.

Were always concerned about our neighbors, Pnacek said.

In addition to site plan approvals, the commission approved a zoning change for a property located at 1420 Bayliss St., which is just south of Creative 360, across the street. The vacant lot is currently designated for commercial zoning; however, it is in a transitional part of town with a mix of uses.

So, owner of the property, Dave Rapanos, had it changed to residential to match an adjacent property he owns along Bayliss, which was already residential. He said the plan is to build either a four-unit or two-unit apartment on the combined properties.

I dont think that area of town needs to see commercial come out there in a big way; I think it needs to be regentrified, he said. I think that area of town right there is one of the areas remaining that I would like to see  whether its Habitat (for Humanity) or Dow or regentrification or private development  put some money into because it could use a little help. But anyways, thats what Im doing here.

These planning commission recommendations will next appear in front of Midland City Council for final approval at their next regular meeting.
CLIFTON PARK  There's a new pick-up routine at Kidzlodge Early Learning Center in Clifton Park.

Parents must wait outside the building for their toddlers, who exit through a glass door marked with an orange cone. The environment is sterile: children are scanned for symptoms each morning and personal items are wrapped in plastic.

Colorful classrooms are kept small to align with New York's social distancing guidance to prevent the spread of COVID-19. The center typically enrolls 205 children, filling 15 classrooms. Now Kidzlodge serves about 50 kids, mostly children of essential workers from the area, in four rooms.

Teachers talk to the children about importance of washing hands, personal space, and bumping elbows, but there are limits to applying state's public health guidelines in a child care setting particularly at a time when children need comfort, according to Deb Round, the center's director.

"We are practicing social distancing, but we are also nurturers  you know, that's our field  so we want to hug," Round said. "We want to help them and that's been kind of a battle for us."

The Clifton Park child care center, one of four in the region run by the Capital District YMCA, is an outlier, keeping most of its staff on payroll and its doors open through the pandemic despite a steep drop-off in enrollment and new expenses associated with cleaning.

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Day care centers, particularly early childhood facilities, operate with slim margins. Low enrollment, COVID-19 cases, and difficulty finding protective equipment have forced numerous child care providers in the Capital Region to shut down, advocates say.

New York should take a comprehensive action to stabilize the industry, including paying the child care fees of essential workers, according to Dorothy (Dede) Hill, director of policy at the Schuyler Center for Analysis and Advocacy.

"All providers  both those keeping their doors open and those that have temporarily closed, fear that without financial supports, they will not have the resources to reopen when the pandemic subsides," Hill said.

Other states, like Vermont and Illinois, and New York City are now providing free day care for children of essential workers. New York has enabled counties to expand eligibility for childcare subsidies in a variety of different ways, which has resulted in patchy child care access for essential throughout the state.

Special Investigation 147 NY dams are 'unsound,' potentially dangerous Thousands of dams have not been inspected in over 20 years.

Some localities may waive childcare co-pays for essential workers, while others are choosing to lift the income eligibility for day care subsidies. Some school districts are providing free care to school-aged children of essential workers, but others don't have the resources.

The federal CARES Act included $3.5 billion for child care, including an estimated $162.4 million for New York. Larger facilities, like those run by the YMCA, were excluded from the first wave of federal funding because they are not considered small businesses.

"Notwithstanding these new federal funds, New York still has not committed to, nor implemented a bold, comprehensive plan to provide free, safe access to child care to the children of essential workers and to shore up the industry in general," Hill said.

The rate of confirmed COVID-19 cases in New York has begun to flatten in New York and some state officials are already talking about relaxing guidelines. The YMCA and other facilities that have survived the pandemic have seen an uptick in inquiries about registration for the summer and fall.

The Capital Region had a severe childcare shortage before COVID-19 swept through the state, forcing schools and businesses to close. Smaller day cares and home-based providers may receive some stimulus funds, but the cost of reopening, hiring and training staff, will be insurmountable for many, which will inevitably deepen the crisis, advocates say.

Larger providers, also taking a hit, say they hope the next stimulus package will be more inclusive of large providers.

"The only option for us is to take out loans," Erin Breslin, spokeswoman for the Capital District YMCA, said. "We are really hoping (the federal government]) continues to provide stimulus support and that charitable non-profits will be included sooner rather than later."
A woman and teenage boy were critically injured in a house fire late Tuesday afternoon near 44th and Pratt Streets.

Both were taken to the Nebraska Medical Center in critical condition, according to a report by the Omaha Fire Department.

Omaha Fire Battalion Chief Rob McEvoy said the woman was dazed and sitting outside the home when firefighters arrived. The youth was inside and had to be rescued, he said.

McEvoy said the department was alerted to the blaze by a neighbor or someone passing by. The fire was called in about 5 p.m.

Firefighters first searched the basement for the youth, but found him on the homes second floor. They carried him to safety, McEvoy said.

The house sustained heavy damage from smoke, fire and water, so the department called the American Red Cross for assistance.

Fire investigators were on scene Tuesday evening seeking a cause.

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There are about seven crore traders in the country, of which about 1.5 crore traders deal in essential commodities

Noida: The retail trade has suffered a loss of Rs 3.15 lakh crore during the lockdown, the Confederation of All India Traders (CAIT) said on Tuesday, even as it "strongly supported" Prime Minister Narendra Modi's move to extend the curbs to fight coronavirus.

CAIT has also assured the government that the traders will continue to run the supply chain of essential goods in a "most efficient and effective" manner so that citizens do not face any difficulty.

CAIT National President BC Bhartia and Secretary General Praveen Khandelwal said in a statement that there are about seven crore traders in the country, of which about 1.5 crore traders deal in essential commodities but only 40 lakh of them have been able to continue operations because of difficulties in obtaining passes from the authorities and also non-availability of transport.

"On the other hand nearly 80 percent of the employees of traders have migrated to their villages at the time of earlier lockdown while only 20 percent of employees are working with traders for supply of essential goods," according to the statement.

CAIT's Delhi NCR unit Convener Sushil Kumar Jain said the traders' community "strongly supports" the Prime Minister's decision to continue the lockdown in the country.

"It is a logical and extremely important step desired under the present circumstances due to COVID-19 and we have assured Prime Minister that the traders under any circumstances will continue to run supply chain of essential goods in a most efficient and effective manner so that citizens of the country may not face any difficulty in obtaining essential commodities," CAIT said.

"Due to the lock down of the past 21 days in the country, the retail trade has suffered a loss of business to the tune of Rs 3.15 lakh crores," it added.

Earlier on Tuesday, the Prime Minister announced that the current lockdown will be extended till 3 May, saying it is necessary to contain the spread of the novel coronavirus in the country.

He said detailed guidelines on implementation of the new lockdown will be announced on Wednesday, and some relaxations may be allowed after April 20 in places where there are no hotspots.
Were answering your questions about life in the time of coronavirus. Heres one about pregnancy:

Q: If a pregnant woman contracts the virus shortly before giving birth, will the baby be infected?  Rosanne

A: Probably not, said Dr. Rob Silverman, professor and chair of the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology for Upstate Medical University and Crouse Hospital, and an expert in maternal-fetal medicine. Silverman cautioned that doctors are still learning about this new coronavirus. But based on other types of viruses, such as influenza, the current belief is that mothers do not transmit the coronavirus to their babies in utero.

The big question, Silverman said, is the rate of coronavirus transmission after the baby is delivered. Moms are tested using the rapid test, which gives a result in two to four hours, Silverman said. If (the patient) is negative, the transmission rate is zero," he said. If (the patient) is positive, we ensure that we do everything in the way that keeps the mom, the health providers and the babies safe.

Crouse had not yet had a baby born to a coronavirus-positive mom, Silverman said, but the anticipated surge of cases is four or six weeks away.

You can read the U.S. Centers for Disease Controls guidelines on pregnancy and coronavirus here.

We also asked Silverman some follow-up questions about pregnancy and childbirth:

Q: Is it safe to give birth in the hospital?

A: Even in the midst of a pandemic, I can reassure everybody that the hospital is the safest place to have a birth, Silverman said.

The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, the Society for Maternal Fetal Medicine, the American Academy of Family Physicians and the American College of Nurse Midwives all agree with that view.

Silverman said hospitals are able to screen people who are coronavirus positive. That would not happen at home, where someone could have no symptoms and still be shedding the virus, he said.

Q: Are spouses/partners allowed to be in the hospital for the birth?

A: Yes  as long as the person who is going to accompany the laboring patient is asymptomatic, Silverman said. That means no fever and no symptoms of a coronavirus infection. It goes without saying: If the significant other is positive, theyre not coming in," the doctor said.

Silverman noted that New York state had clarified the rules to ensure that women do not have to go through labor alone.

Q: Is it safe to breastfeed?

A: Yes, it seems to be, Silverman said. Our information so far seems to indicate the virus has not been transmitted in breast milk. Because we are still learning about this new coronavirus, women should talk to their doctors about the risks and benefits of breastfeeding, he said.

If the mother is COVID-positive, the recommendation is that she wear a mask, wash her hands often and meticulously, and if she uses a breast pump, to wash that meticulously, as well.

Silverman noted that the World Health Organization and the CDC both say women can breastfeed if they wish to do so.

Q: How is coronavirus changing care for pregnant women and new mothers?

Silverman said doctors are still closely monitoring their pregnant patients and delivering prenatal care, but are asking, Are there things that we can do remotely?

Practitioners are careful to screen patients before they come in to make sure they arent ill. Anyone who comes into a doctors office now is wearing a mask, and will undergo screening, Silverman said. Visits and procedures may be spaced out.

Birth is a whole different world, the doctor said. Everyone is wearing masks and there is a lot more screening. Its a lot more invasive. Were doing it in such a way that we remain safe  because it is a different world.

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Over 106,000 people working in the U.S. "clean energy" sector lost their jobs in March as the industry struggled to soften the impact of the coronavirus pandemic, it was claimed Wednesday.

The analysis of Department of Labor data, released by Environmental Entrepreneurs (E2), the American Council on Renewable Energy, E4TheFuture and BW Research Partnership, paints a challenging picture for the industry. For the purposes of the analysis, the term "clean energy" encompasses a range of areas including: renewables such as solar and wind; energy storage; energy efficiency; and "clean fuels."

It shows that, last month, 106,472 people working in clean energy roles filed for unemployment benefits. Looking further ahead, the analysis projects that over 500,000 people working in clean energy  15% of the sector's workforce  will lose their jobs in the following months unless "quick and substantive action" is taken by both the administration of President Donald Trump and Congress.

"The economic fallout from COVID-19 is historic in both size and speed," Phil Jordan, vice president and principal at BW Research Partnership, said in a statement issued alongside the analysis.

Jordan explained that activities, from the manufacture of electric vehicles to the installation of solar panels, were being impacted. "And the data pretty clearly indicate that this is just the beginning," he added.

Wednesday's figures are a heavy blow for an industry that added over 70,000 jobs in 2019. The clean energy workforce in the U.S. grew to almost 3.4 million people at the end of last year, according to E2's Clean Jobs America 2020 report, which was also released on Wednesday.

This year looks set to pose a number of challenges for the renewables sector, many of them connected to the coronavirus pandemic, which has caused issues with supply chains and forced some factories to shut.

In a blog post toward the end of March, Abigail Ross-Hopper, the president and CEO of the U.S.-based Solar Energy Industries Association (SEIA), wrote that the solar industry was "at risk."

Citing a survey carried out with the SEIA's member companies, Ross-Hopper said data showed that "solar companies and workers are losing business and being put out of work by COVID-19."

Last week, research and consultancy firm Wood Mackenzie said global solar installations for 2020 had been revised down from 129.5 gigawatts (GW) to 106.4 GW, which represents an 18% drop compared to pre-coronavirus levels.

In the wind energy sector, last week also saw Danish wind turbine manufacturer Vestas suspend guidance for 2020, noting that the global spread of Covid-19 and national measures taken to contain it had caused disruptions to installations, manufacturing and its supply chain.

"The situation changes daily and my colleagues' ability to adapt fast and follow our extensive safety measures have been key to keeping performance in the first quarter in line with expectations," Henrik Andersen, Vestas' group president and CEO, said in the statement.

"Unfortunately, the pandemic continues to spread and with no clear prognosis on when key wind markets such as the USA, Brazil and India will recover, we are suspending our guidance due to the poor visibility for the remainder of the year."
At Fort Defiance, in Red Hook, you can get a CSA box and bottled martinis to go. Photo: Eric Isaac/Getty Images

Like most restaurants peppered throughout Crown Heights, Francisco Antons tapas bar La Napa caters to its communitys wants and desires. When it opened nearly a year ago, that meant offering puffy golden arepas and glistening grilled shrimp smothered in tamarind sauce.

But when lockdown became all but guaranteed in the pandemic-stricken city, and customers collective anxieties spiked as hoarders began to strip grocery stores refrigerated aisles of staples like eggs and milk, Anton and his family expanded their delivery and takeout options from fish tacos and burgers to paper bags full of riojas, chalk-white lima beans, and wedges of manchego.

I watched a lot of stuff from China, I tried to see their lifestyle throughout the virus, and I saw they had these vegetable boxes similar to those in Latin America, he said. I thought it would be convenient to offer vegetables, and give us some sort of reason to stick around and survive all this madness.

With coronavirus continuing to put an indefinite hold on dining out, restaurants across the city have attempted to scrape by for the last month with delivery and takeout menus. But in the throes of survival mode, awaiting bailout loans and pursuing additional cash to stanch further losses, restaurants and bars are also blurring the line between hospitality and retail, offering themselves as another source of produce and pantry staples to the citys new population of home cooks, many fearful of possibly contracting COVID-19 during their next elbow-to-elbow supermarket run.

St. John Frizell, the owner of Red Hooks communal haunt Fort Defiance, switched from food delivery to selling specialty groceries in a final attempt to keep his doors open. While offering bottled Manhattans and Negronis, plus family-style roast chicken meals and shorter delivery windows, each attempted adjustment in food delivery amid the shutdown seemed to cost him another $1,000. At the same time, COVID-19 infections ravaging the city made it questionable in Frizells eyes to have more than one person working inside the building. After shutting down his restaurants delivery and takeout operations entirely in late March, he reached out to his vendors that were still operating, like Lancaster Farm Fresh Cooperative in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, who had farmers sitting on all this produce that they were eager to offload to consumers.

With zero grocery experience, Frizell converted the restaurant into a makeshift warehouse, stuffing his walk-in fridges with Pat LaFrieda meat and Cabot mild cheddar. Through an online ordering system, he began offering contactless pickup on Van Brunt Street three times a week for CSA vegetable shares that cost $28  a slight markup that Frizell says is just enough to keep the lights on  along with a rotating array of supplies befitting an acclaimed restaurant: frozen Scottish salmon from Pierless Fish, coffee beans from Counter Culture, and, of course, raw littleneck clams. So far, Frizell has prepared on average 90 orders per pickup date, a number he expects to grow as he continues to settle into this new industry. Were kind of flying blind right now, he says, but I know that Im burning through whatever inventory I bring in, so I have to trust that its better than nothing at all.

Meanwhile, Henry Rich and Halley Chambers are assuming the worst financial outcome possible  specifically, that none of the recently announced small-business loans they applied for would come through. So, they have begun to convert their zero-waste wine bar Rhodora into a neighborhood provisions store. Sales of natural wines and tinned seafood so far have brought in around $1,000 a day, while newly conceived weekly wine bottle clubs and CSA shares garner an additional $3,000 of weekly revenue. This week, theyre adding Sey Coffee, cheese from Cato Corner Farm, and Soom tahini, among other pantry staples, to their shelves.

Well sell as long as its not against our mission, Rich says. Were not gonna be selling individually portioned cheese  well sell the big blocks of cheese. People can do as they wish. But, he noted, even if they do reach weekly sales of $15,000, which would enable them to cover fixed costs and fees including rent, utilities, labor, and caviar delivery throughout the shutdown, debt overhang still awaits them on the other side. Our main goal is to not gather more debts in this period of shutdown, Rich says. If the debt burden gets too large, theres no chance of reopening.

Others operators are simply using groceries as another source of revenue to supplement their takeout options. With Hill Country Barbecue Market in Manhattan currently averaging only 20 percent of its usual sales numbers, customers buying new offerings like whole limes with their brisket, or orders of six-packs plus toilet paper and raw potatoes, are the equivalent of selling them an extra dessert or extra round of drinks, director of culinary operations Ash Fulk explains.

In Bushwick, Robertas continues run deliveries for its Bee Sting pizzas and romaine salads, but co-owner Brandon Hoy says that with customers increasingly cooking to pass the time during the pandemic, it made sense to muscle in on Fresh Directs turf by selling their spaccatelli and meatballs, too. Now, a storefront catches stroller-toting parents eyes with dry pasta, mozzarella, and other ingredients made in-house. When you dont have dine-in service, Hoy says, you dont need 700 pounds of pasta.

Anton of La Napa similarly notes that what began as a possible supplement to his diminished food sales has increasingly revealed peoples growing appetite for preparing recipes at home. Between April 3 and April 9, he says the store sold 1,400 pounds retail of vegetables, milk, eggs, cheese, grains, and pasta, and sales have increased 20 percent week by week since March 18. You have no choice but to operate, Anton says, and find out how youre gonna be able to fit into the need of the community at this moment.

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LIVE Updates | File image: Prime Minister Narendra Modi addressing the nation

The government has released the consolidated guidelines detailing the modus operandi during the extended lockdown period as announced by PM Modi on April 14.

The lockdown which will now continue till May 3 will see stricter norms in the first week and after April 20 the restrictions will be eased in non-containment zones.

As per a release issued by the I&B ministry, the activities prohibited across the country include travel by air, rail and road; operation of educational and training institutions; industrial and commercial activities; hospitality services; all cinema halls, shopping complexes, theatres, etc.; all social, political and other events; and opening of all religious places/ places of worship for members of public, including religious congregations.

There are certain national guidelines like mandatory home-made face covers at workplaces and in public places, strong hygiene and health care measures like provision of sanitisers, staggered shifts, access control, thermal screening and imposing fines for spitting among other things penalties will be imposed for violation.

Follow our LIVE Updates on the coronavirus pandemic 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 government has allowed select additional activities which will come into effect from April 20, 2020, only in non-containment zones.

The document notes that "additional activities as permitted in these guidelines shall be implemented in a phased manner, after making all arrangements necessary for strict implementation of the guidelines."

Here are some of the activities that will be allowed: -

1. All health services (including AYUSH).

Hospitals, nursing homes, clinics, telemedicine facilities. Dispensaries, chemists, pharmacies, all kinds of medicine shops including Jan Aushadhi Kendras and medical equipment shops. Medical laboratories and collection centres. Pharmaceutical and medical research labs, institutions carrying out COVID-19 related research. Veterinary Hospitals, dispensaries, clinics, pathology labs, sale and supply of vaccine and medicine. Authorised private establishments, which support the provisioning of essential services, or efforts for containment of COVID-19, including home care providers, diagnostics, supply chain firms serving hospitals. Manufacturing units of drugs, pharmaceuticals, medical devices, medical oxygen, their packaging material, raw material and intermediates. Construction of medical/ health infrastructure including the manufacture of ambulances. Movement (inter and intra State, including by air) of all medical and veterinary personnel, scientists, nurses, para-medical staff, lab technicians, mid-wives and other hospital support services, including ambulances.

2. Agricultural and related activities

All agricultural and horticultural activities to remain fully functional, such as:

i. Farming operations by farmers and farm workers in the field.

- Agencies engaged in procurement of agriculture products, including MSP operations.

- 'Mandis' operated by the Agriculture Produce Market Committee (APMC) or as notified by the State/ UT Government (e.g., satellite mandis).

- Direct marketing operations by the State/ UT Government or by industry, directly from farmers/group of farmers, FPOs' co-operatives etc. States/ UTs may promote decentralised marketing and procurement at village-level.

- Shops of agriculture machinery, its spare parts (including its supply-chain) and repairs to remain open.

- 'Custom Hiring Centres (CHC)' related to farm machinery.

- Manufacturing, distribution and retail of fertilizers, pesticides and seeds.

vii. Movement (inter and intra state) of harvesting and sowing-related machines like combined harvester and other agriculture/horticulture implements.

Fisheries - the following activities will be functional:

- Operations of the fishing (marine and inland)/ aquaculture industry, including feeding & maintenance, harvesting, processing, packaging, cold chain, sale and marketing.

- Hatcheries, feed plants, commercial aquaria.

- Movement of fish/ shrimp and fish products, fish seed/ feed and workers for all these activities.

Plantations- the following activities will be functional:

- Operations of tea, coffee and rubber plantations, with a maximum of 50% workers.

- Processing, packaging, sale and marketing of tea, coffee, rubber and cashew, with a maximum of 50% workers.

Animal husbandry - the following activities will be functional:

Collection, processing, distribution and sale of milk and milk products by milk processing plants, including transport and supply chain.

- Operation of animal husbandry farms including poultry farms & hatcheries and livestock farming activity.

- Animal feed manufacturing and feed plants, including the supply of raw material, such as maize and soya.

- Operation of animal shelter homes, including Gaushalas.

3. From the financial sector the following entities will remain functional:

a. Reserve Bank of India (RBI) and RBI regulated financial markets and entities like NPCI, CCIL, payment system operators and standalone primary dealers.

b. Bank branches and ATMs, IT vendors for banking operations, Banking Correspondents (BCs), ATM operation and cash management agencies.

c. Bank branches will be allowed to work as per normal working hours till the disbursal of DBT cash transfers is complete.

i. Local administration to provide adequate security personnel at bank branches and BCs to maintain social distancing, law and order and staggering of account holders.

c. SEBI, and capital and debt market services as notified by the Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI).

d. IRDAI and Insurance companies.

4. Social sector: following to remain functional.

5. Online teaching/ distance learning to be encouraged

6. MNREGA works to be allowed.

4. Public utilities - the following to remain functional

i. Operations of Oil and Gas sector, including refining, transportation, distribution, storage and retail of products, e.g., petrol, diesel, kerosene, CNG, LPG, PNG etc.

ii. Generation, transmission and distribution of power at Central and State/ UT levels.

iii. Postal services, including post offices.

iv. Operations of utilities in water, sanitation and waste management sectors, at municipal/ local body levels in States and UTs.

v. Operation of utilities providing telecommunications and internet services.

5. Social sector: following to remain functional:

- Operation of homes for children/ disabled/ mentally challenged/ senior citizens/ destitute / women/ widows.

- Observation homes, after-care homes and places of safety for juveniles.

- Disbursement of social security pensions, e.g., old age/ widow/ freedom fighter pensions; pension and provident fund services provided by Employees Provident Fund Organisation (EPFO).

- Operation of Anganwadis - distribution of food items and nutrition once in 15 days at the doorsteps of beneficiaries, e.g., children, women and lactating mother Beneficiaries will not attend the Anganwadis

6. Online teaching/ distance learning to be encouraged:

- All educational, training, coaching institutions etc. shall remain closed.

- However, these establishments are expected to maintain the academic schedule through online teaching.

- Maximum use of Doordarshan (DD) and other educational channels may be made for teaching purposes.

7. MNREGA works to be allowed:

-MNREGA works are allowed with strict implementation of social distancing and face mask.

- Priority to be given under MNREGA to irrigation and water conservation works.

- Other Central and State sector schemes in irrigation and water conservation sectors may also be allowed to be implemented and suitably dovetailed with MNREGA works.

8. Movement, loading/ unloading of goods/ cargo (inter and intra State) is allowed, as under

i. All goods traffic will be allowed to ply.

ii. Operations of Railways: Transportation of goods and parcel trains.

iii. Operations of Airports and related facilities for air transport for cargo movement, relief and evacuation

iv. Operations of Seaports and Inland Container Depots (ICDs) for cargo transport, including authorized custom clearing and forwarding agents.

v. Operations of Land Ports for cross land border transportation of essential goods, including petroleum products and LPG, food products, medical supplies.

vi. Movement of all trucks and other goods/ carrier vehicles with two drivers and one helper subject to the driver carrying a valid driving license; an empty truck/ vehicle will be allowed to ply after the delivery of goods, or for pickup of goods.

vii. Shops for truck repairs and dhabas on highways, with a stipulated minimum distance as prescribed by the State/ UT authorities.

viii. Movement of staff and contractual labour for operations of railways, airports/ air carriers, seaports/ ships/ vessels, landports and ICDs is allowed on passes being issued by the local authority on the basis of authorizations issued by the respective designated authority of the railways, airports, seaports, landports and ICDs.

9. Supply of essential goods is allowed, as under

i . All facilities in the supply chain of essential goods, whether involved in manufacturing, wholesale or retail of such goods through local stores, large brick and mortar stores or e-commerce companies should be allowed to operate, ensuring strict social distancing without any restriction on their timing of opening and closure.

ii. Shops (including Kirana and single shops selling essential goods) and carts, including ration shops (under PDS), dealing with food and groceries (for daily use), hygiene items, fruits and vegetables, dairy and milk booths, poultry, meat and fish, animal feed and fodder etc., should be allowed to operate, ensuring strict social distancing without any restriction on their timing of opening and closure.

iii. District authorities may encourage and facilitate home delivery to minimize the movement of individuals outside their homes.

10. Commercial and private establishments, as listed below, will be allowed to operate:

i. Print and electronic media including broadcasting, DTH and cable services

ii. IT and IT enabled Services, with up to 50% strength.

iii. Data and call centers for Government activities only

iv. Government approved Common Service Centers (CSCs) at Gram Panchayat level.

v. E-commerce companies. Vehicles used by e-commerce operators will be allowed to ply with necessary permissions.

vi. Courier services.

vii. Cold storage and warehousing services, including at ports, airports, railway stations, container Depots, individual units and other links in the logistics chain.

viii. Private security services and facilities management services for maintenance and upkeep of office and residential complexes

ix. Hotels, homestays, lodges and motels, which are accommodating tourists and persons stranded due to lockdown, medical and emergency staff, air and sea crew.

x. Establishments used/ earmarked for quarantine facilities.

xi. Services provided by self-employed persons, e.g., electrician, IT repairs, plumbers, motor mechanics, and carpenters.

11. Industries/ Industrial Establishments (both Government and private), as listed below, will be allowed to operate:

i. Industries operating in rural areas, i.e., outside the limits of municipal corporations and municipalities.

ii. Manufacturing and other industrial establishments with access control in Special Economic Zones (SEZs) and Export Oriented Units (EoUs), industrial estates, and industrial townships. These establishments shall make arrangements for stay of workers within their premises as far as possible and/ or adjacent buildings and for implementation of the Standard operating protocol (SOP) as referred to in para 21 (ii) below. The transportation of workers to work place shall be arranged by the employers in dedicated transport by ensuring social distancing.

iii. Manufacturing units of essential goods, including drugs, pharmaceuticals, medical devices, their raw material and intermediates.

iv. Food processing industries in rural areas, i.e., outside the limits of municipal corporations and municipalities.

v. Production units, which require continuous process, and their supply chain.

vi. Manufacturing of IT hardware.

vii. Coal production, mines and mineral production, their transportation, supply of explosives and activities incidental to mining operations.

viii. Manufacturing units of packaging material.

ix. Jute industries with staggered shifts and social distancing.

x. Oil and gas exploration/ refinery.

xi. Brick kilns in rural areas i.e., outside the limits of municipal corporations and municipalities.

12. Construction activities, listed as below, will be allowed to operate:

i. Construction of roads, irrigation projects, buildings and all kinds of industrial projects, including MSMEs, in rural areas, i.e., outside the limits of municipal corporations and municipalities; and all kinds of projects in industrial estates.

ii. Construction of renewable energy projects.

iii. Continuation of works in construction projects, within the limits of municipal corporations and municipalities, where workers are available on site and no workers are required to be brought in from outside (in situ construction).

You can read the full document here: -

Find other stories related to MHA guidelines on Lockdown 2.0 here.
* Poland's abortion laws already restrictive

* Deputies to debate further curbs late Wednesday

* Protests hit by coronavirus limits on public gatherings

* Protesters take to social media

By Anna Koper

WARSAW, April 15 (Reuters) - Polish lawmakers are to debate a proposal to tighten already restrictive abortion rules on Wednesday, while rights activists protested on social media as coronavirus limits public gatherings.

Abortion rights are a contentious issue in Poland, one of Europe's most devout nations, with the nationalist ruling Law and Justice (PiS) party keen to burnish its conservative credentials despite considerable public opposition to further restrictions.

Proposed as a citizens' initiative, the draft legislation would ban abortion if prenatal tests show serious, irreversible damage to the foetus, one of the few instances in which the procedure is allowed in Poland.

Others are incest, rape and risks to maternal health.

PiS, a party that campaigns on introducing more religious values into public life, has signalled some reluctance to back the bill in parliament, which it controls, ahead of a presidential election on May 10.

The issue poses a dilemma for PiS, which had previously retreated from proposals to nearly ban abortion after a massive public outcry, because it could galvanise voters on either side of the divide.

Campaigners also say it would face renewed criticism if it pushed through legislation when restrictions on public life because of the coronavirus pandemic prohibit large-scale demonstrations.

"It is a difficult subject, and the timing is unfavourable," said Tadeusz Cymanski, a senior PiS lawmaker.

Deputies are due to debate the issue late on Wednesday.

TERMINATIONS ABROAD

Underscoring deep-seated support for further restrictions on the right in Poland, President Andrzej Duda told a Catholic news outlet Niedziela that he would sign further curbs into law.

"I believe that killing disabled children is simply murder," Duda, a PiS ally, was quoted as saying.

Story continues

Opinion polls show Duda wining the May 10 election, although the ballot is clouded in uncertainty because of the COVID-19 pandemic.

PiS is seeking to hold the ballot via post rather than polling booths but a legislative proposal on the issue might clear parliament only days before the election date, leaving little time to organise.

The opposition has said the vote should be postponed because the election campaign has been curtailed by the pandemic, accusing Duda of taking advantage of his position to continue campaigning.

Rights activists in Poland say the pandemic has also curbed women's access to abortion abroad because of travel restrictions throughout Europe.

Many women terminate pregnancies in Germany, Slovakia and further away, in cases when it would be illegal in Poland or when hospitals refuse to perform an abortion that would technically be allowed under Polish rules.

Andrzej Rychard, a sociologist, said a vote for new abortion rules would likely undermine unity within PiS and its conservative ruling alliance, already strained by internal debates over whether the presidential vote should be delayed.

"It would remind people that they can mobilise and protest," Rychard said. "And that could shake up the ruling alliance." (Writing by Justyna Pawlak; Editing by Janet Lawrence)
A short film of frontline workers reading lines from a poignant poem has highlighted the role of immigrants in the fight against the coronavirus.

You Clap for Me Now features a mix of first, second and third generation immigrants who are essential workers during the global pandemic, including doctors, nurses, teachers, shopkeepers and food delivery drivers.

The poem was written by illustrator Darren Smith to highlight the diversity of those working to keep the UK running and to encourage members of the public to continue supporting key workers after the pandemic.

Mr Smith said he also wanted to show the importance of some roles that might have been considered as "unskilled" before the virus outbreak.

The clip has been viewed hundreds of thousands of times and sparked an outpouring of support, including from celebrities and politicians such as Gary Lineker, Baroness Sayeeda Warsi and Labour MP Jess Phillips.

A host of NHS staff, shop keepers, delivery drivers and teachers took part in the video / Sachini Imbuldeniya

Liberal Democrat mayoral candidate Siobhan Benita said on Twitter: "When this outbreak is over, let us never again forget who puts their lives on the line to keep us all safe."

Award-winning filmmaker and actor Daniel York Loh said he was brought to tears by the short film, while California State Assembly member Buffy Wicks also took to Twitter to share her thoughts on the "powerful video".

The film was put together by creative director Sachini Imbuldeniya, who said the team was inspired by a United Nations global brief to spread messages of positivity, kindness and solidarity during these uncertain times.

She said: "I definitely wasn't expecting it to go viral, but am so glad that it has, as I feel like it's such an important message to send out. Not just for the UK, but globally."

In the videos caption on Instagram, she said the poem was written to remind us all that a large majority of key workers are from Black and Minority Ethnic families.

Sachini contacted friends and NHS workers for the video, including celebrity doctor Zoe Williams, comedian Tez Ilyas, radio presenter Mim Sheikh and influencer Doctor Kiran, also known as the Munching Medic.

Each person then reads out a word or a line from the poem, against the backdrop of music.

Halfway through the clip, those in the video reference the Clap for our Carers initiative, which has seen millions of people join in a national round of applause for NHS workers at 8pm every Thursday.

One verse in the poem reads: "No, you clap for me now. You cheer as I toil. Bringing food for your family. Bringing food from your soil."

It continues: "So you clap for me now / all this love you are bringing.

Clap for Carers returns - In pictures 1 /29 Clap for Carers returns - In pictures NHS workers applaud on the streets outside Royal Liverpool University Hospital REUTERS Firefighters are seen applauding at Cadogan Fire Station REUTERS NHS workers applaud on the streets outside Chelsea and Westminster Hospital REUTERS Members of the public take part in a national "clap for carers" in London AFP via Getty Images People are seen applauding from flats in Riverlight Quay during the Clap for our Carers REUTERS Members of the public take part in a national "clap for carers" AFP via Getty Images Members of the public take part in a national "clap for carers" AFP via Getty Images Fireworks are seen during the Clap for our Carers campaign in support of the NHS REUTERS Firefighters are seen applauding at Cadogan Fire Station REUTERS NHS workers applaud on the streets outside Chelsea and Westminster Hospital REUTERS People stand on their balcony and clap near West Middlesex University Hospita AP NHS workers in the Chelsea and Westminster Hospital PA Members of the public take part in a national "clap for carers" AFP via Getty Images Members of the public take part in a national "clap for carers" AFP via Getty Images Finlay MacDonald plays the pipes at his home in Glasgow alongside sons Elliott, ten, and Fionn, eight PA NHS workers applaud on the streets outside Royal Liverpool University Hospita REUTERS Members of the public clap outside the Chelsea and Westminster Hospital PA Members of the public take part in a national "clap for carers" AFP via Getty Images Members of the public take part in a national "clap for carers" AFP via Getty Images Members of the public take part in a national "clap for carers" PA Members of the public take part in a national "clap for carers" AFP via Getty Images A member of the public bangs a pot outside the Chelsea and Westminster Hospital PA

"But dont forget when its no longer quiet / dont forget when you can no longer hear the birds singing.

"Or see clearer waters that I crossed for you / to make lives filled with peace / and bring peace to your life too."

Mr Smith, a content director for Bridge Studio, had previously interviewed Sachini's mum, a retired nurse left Sri Lanka to move to Britain to work for the NHS.

The writer of the poem wanted to make a 'humanitarian' point / Sachini Imbuldeniya

He said: "The coronavirus pandemic has seen a much-deserved shift in the what we now think of as an essential key worker.

"Ironically, despite being socially distanced from one another we are a far more United Kingdom."

Clap For Carers Returns To The UK

Mr Smith added: "We are not trying to make a political point," he said. "It is a humanitarian one.

"When we emerge from our homes blinking in the sunlight and hopefully freed from the grip of Covid-19, we want to remind people not to go back to old, blind ways of thinking. Of assuming that certain jobs are unskilled and therefore unworthy.

"And we ask everyone to remember that we are stronger as a nation when we welcome people of all ethnicities and backgrounds to our shores to work and live and love alongside us.




Haiti - Heritage : Fire of the Chapel of Milot, open letter





Following the fire of the royal chapel of Milot, classified world heritage by UNESCO in 1982, on the night of Sunday to Monday April 13, 2020 https://www.haitilibre.com/en/news-30523-haiti-flash-the-royal-chapel-of-milot-world-heritage-destroyed-by-fire.html , Haitian citizens and representatives of institutions of the private, socio-professional and academic sector, published an open letter to express their indignation at this heritage disaster, which we invite you to share



Open letter :

"Ladies / Gentlemen,



The signatories of this open letter, Haitian citizens and representatives of the country's private, socio-professional and academic institutions, express their indignation at this disaster which reduced to ashes on the night of April 12 to 13, 2020 the rotunda of the Catholic church of Milot, built between 1810 and 1813 by Henry Christophe.



A catastrophe, to say the least, in this year which recalls the 200th anniversary of the death of King Henry I, because our historic monuments, testimonies of our history of people, even those classified world heritage by UNESCO, are still not on the list of priorities of our leaders. With few resources, the organization in charge of maintaining them, ISPAN, cannot ensure the safeguarding of these heritages.



What explains why the Sans Souci Palace cannot have police officers 24/24 to ensure the security of the premises ? This question also arises for the Citadelle, vandalized the day before, on the night of April 11 to 12, 2020. Vertieres, in the Haut-du-Cap, served as exhibition space for a dealer of used cars in time and has now become a welding shop. In Breda, the space reserved for Toussaint ? A place occupied by weeds and rubbish.



Too many leaders do not dare to take serious decisions, which they consider unpopular, in the management of public affairs. Because the ultimate goal is always the next electoral contests.



Of course, the resources of this weak State are limited and too often misused. Precisely because of its shortcomings, we need to be creative and initiative. The State and civil society must organize themselves together to find possible solutions in consultation with citizens or organized groups in the diaspora.



Stop this denial of our history as a people ! Only these monuments remain, testimonies of our history of struggles, suffering and hope.



Follow signatures :



Emile Eyma Jr.: President of the Capoise Historical Society

Pierre Buteau: President of the Haitian Society of History and Geography and Geology

Marc Georges: President of the Northern Chamber of Commerce and Industry (CCIN)

Ary Pierre: President of the North-East Chamber of Commerce, Industry and Professionals (CCIPNE)

Audalbert Bien-Aime State University of Haiti, Lemonade Campus

Fritz Alphonse Jean: President of the Haitian Institute for Public Policy Observation (INHOPP)."



See also :

https://www.haitilibre.com/en/news-30523-haiti-flash-the-royal-chapel-of-milot-world-heritage-destroyed-by-fire.html



HL/ HaitiLibre


















[April 15, 2020]

Predictive Analytics in Banking Market to Reach $5.43 Bn, Globally, By 2026 at 20.8% CAGR: AMR

Availability of billions of IoT-based devices worldwide and surge in fraudulent activities including money laundering, accounting fraud etc. drive the growth of the global predictive analytics in banking market

PORTLAND, Oregon, April 15, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- Allied Market Research published a report, titled, "Predictive Analytics in Banking Market By Component (Solution and Service), Deployment Model (On-Premise and Cloud), Organization Size (Large Enterprise and SME), Application (Fraud Detection and Prevention, Customer Management, Sales and Marketing, Workforce Management and Others): Global Opportunity Analysis and Industry Forecast, 20192026." According to the report, the global predictive analytics in banking market garnered $1.20 billion in 2018, and is expected to generate $5.43 billion by 2026, growing at a CAGR of 20.8% from 2019 to 2026.

Drivers, Restraints and Opportunities

Availability of billions of IoT-based devices worldwide, surge in fraudulent activities including money laundering, accounting fraud, and payment card fraud, and ability to predict incoming and outgoing flow of property payment and customers drive the growth of the global predictive analytics in banking market. However, concerns related to implementation and integration in banks and financial institutions restrain the market growth. On the other hand, surge in demand for developing economies and implementation of artificial intelligence (AI) in mobile banking apps create new opportunities in coming years.

Download Latest Coverage of Predictive Analytics in Banking [email protected] https://www.alliedmarketresearch.com/request-sample/232

The On-Premise Segment to Retain Its Dominant Position throughout the Forecast Period

Based on deployment model, the on-premise segment contributed to the largest market share in 2018, holding nearly three-fifths of the global predictive analytics in banking market, and is expected to retain its dominant position throughout the forecast period. This is attributed to rapid delivery of predictive insights by lowering errors with automated techniques and quality measures. However, the cloud segment is estimated to portray the highest CAGR of 22.6% from 2019 to 2026, owing to less dependency of an organization on IT resources by adopting cloud.

The Customer Management Segment to Maintain Its Highest Share By 2026

Based on application, the customer management segment held the highest market share of the global predictive analytics in banking market, contributing to more than one-third of the total share in 2018, and is estimated to maintain its highest share by 2026. This is attributed to increase in need for customer management in the banking sector. Howeer, the fraud detection & prevention segment is estimated to register the highest CAGR of 24.9% from 2019 to 2026, owing to rise in number of transactions in banking and financial institutions.







North America to Maintain Its Lead Status during the Forecast Period

Based on region, North America held the highest market share in terms of revenue in 2018, accounting for nearly two-fifths of the global predictive analytics in banking market, and is expected to maintain its lead status during the forecast period. This is due to stringent regulatory measures implemented by the government in North America to carry out data safety & security. However, Asia-Pacific is estimated to witness the largest CAGR of 23.5% from 2019 to 2026. This is attributed to implementations to raise the revenue of an organization and enhance decision making capabilities in the organization.

To Explore More, Make Purchase Enquiry @ https://www.alliedmarketresearch.com/purchase-enquiry/232

Leading Market Players

Alteryx Inc.

Fair Isaac Corporation

IBM Corporation

Microsoft corporation

Oracle Corporation

SAP SE

SAS Institute Inc.

Tableau Software Inc.

Teradata Corporation

TIBCO Software Inc.

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The President of the Republic, Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo, has, on Wednesday, 15th April, 2020, received the resignation from office of Mr. Asante Berko as Managing Director of the Tema Oil Refinery (TOR).



This was after he submitted his resignation letter, dated 15th April, 2020 to the President.



"President Akufo-Addo has accepted Mr. Asante Berko's resignation, and duly notified the Board of Directors of TOR of this development. The President wished him well in his future endeavours," a statement signed by Director of Communications at the presidency, Eugene Arhin stated.



Asante Berko Charged With Violation of US anti-corruption Law



The Managing Director of the Tema Oil Refinery (TOR), Asante K. Berko has been charged under the United States Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA).



In a press release issued Monday April 13, 2020, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) of the US charged Berko with orchestrating a bribery scheme to help a client win a contract to build and operate a power plant in Ghana.



The SECs complaint which has been filed in the US District Court for the Eastern District of New York, charges Berko with violating the anti-bribery provisions of the FCPA and federal securities laws. The SEC is seeking monetary penalties against Berko among other remedies.



The SEC alleges that 46-year-old Berko, a dual US and Ghana citizen who is a former executive of Goldman Sachs in London, a subsidiary of Goldman Sachs Group Inc. of the US, helped his firms client, a Turkish energy company, to funnel at least $2.5 million to a Ghana-based intermediary to pay illicit bribes to Ghanaian government officials in order to gain their approval of an electrical power plant project.



The SEC in its complaint, further alleges that Berko helped the intermediary pay more than $200,000 in bribes to various other government officials, and Berko personally paid more than $60,000 to members of the Ghanaian parliament and other government officials.



The SEC indicates that, Berko took deliberate measures to prevent his employer from detecting his bribery scheme, including misleading his employers compliance personnel about the true role and purpose of the intermediary company.



Berko who is currently living in Ghana was appointed the MD of the countrys only refinery at Tema in January 2020 following the resignation of its former MD, Mr. Isaac Osei.



Read below the statement from the Presidency

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
Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, April 15)  The governor of Marinduque is pushing for a fixed salary for barangay workers, saying they are also frontliners in the fight against COVID-19.

Governor Presbiterio Velasco Jr. said barangay officials and employees were necessary in the efforts against COVID-19, but do not receive the compensation they deserved.

"Dapat po bigyan itong mga barangay captains, kagawad, tanod at barangay health workers, barangay nutrition scholars po at day care workers at ibang workers ng barangay. Kasi po, hindi naman po sila tumatanggap ng salary. Sila po ay tumatanggap ng honorarium, at mabababa po yung natatanggap nila," he said.

[Translation: village captains, watchmen, health workers, nutrition scholars, day care workers, and other workers should be given a salary because all they are receiving now is an honorarium which is very low.]

Velasco, who is also the president of the League of Governors, said he was drafting a letter to be sent to President Rodrigo Duterte which would include this request.

READ: DSWD to assess appeals from people who believe they should receive cash aid

He added barangay officials and workers should also receive social amelioration packages.

READ: DA: Agriculture and fisheries workers are frontliners in COVID-19 fight
TCM teachers and students light up Britains dark epidemic

By:Zheng Qian | From:english.eastday.com | 2020-04-14 17:32

As the coronavirus outbreak is raging in Britain, students and teachers from the Shanghai University of Traditional Chinese Medicine who are studying in Britain are playing a role with their professional knowledge in the countrys outbreak control.

To provide consultancy to the Chinese in Britain about disease prevention, a free treatment WeChat group was initiated by Peng Weihua, the universitys visiting scholar, together with a TCM doctor and also an alumnus living in the country. At the beginning, the WeChat group only served the Chinese in Oxford, where Peng stayed, but later more and more people from other areas sought help there, making it a channel for Chinese across Britain.

(The WeChat group Peng Weihua launched to give health suggestions)

Apart from the teachers, students are also actively contributing. Wu Weidong, a student of the university who majors in Pharmacy (Sino-British Cooperation) is one of the contributors. When the disease broke out in Britain, he remained there and prescribed Chinese medicine from a Beijing Tongrentang London pharmacy for the Chinese.

Although someof the public transportation has been closed due to the outbreak, Wu keeps getting up early and transfers to other transportation lines to reach his destination. Within one month, he has prescribed nearly 2000 doses for those in need.

(Traditional Chinese medicine Wu Weidong prescribes for the Chinese in Britain)
Filmmaker Jordan Peele says he handed over the reins of "Candyman" remake to director Nia DaCosta as he would have messed it up.

Peele, who won an Oscar for his directorial "Get Out", has co-written and co-produced the new project which will be a "retelling" of the 1992 horror film.

The original film featured Tony Todd as the hook-wielding supernatural killer who, according to a legend, appears after his name is called five times. It was directed by Bernard Rose from a Clive Barker's script.

The remake, featuring Yahya Abdul-Mateen II in the lead, has been directed by DaCosta, who is best known for 2018 thriller "Little Woods".

In an interview with Empire magazine, Peele explained why he decided against directing the film.

"I was working on 'Us' when this would have happened. But quite honestly, Nia is better to shoot this than I am. I'm way too obsessed with the original tales in my head. I probably wouldn't be any good.

"But Nia has a steady manner about her which you don't see a lot in the horror space. She's refined, elegant, every shot is beautiful. It's a beautiful, beautiful movie. I'm so glad I didn't mess it up," the filmmaker said.

The new film has been described as a "spiritual sequel" to the original with the story returning to the same neighbourhood where the legend of Candyman began, a section of Chicago where the Cabrini-Green housing projects once stood.

DaCosta said she felt a "sense of ownership" in telling "a Black story about Black people".

"Itwas very important for all of us to have our main character be Black, and for this experience to be through the Black lens. Let's make sure we change the lens now," she added.

Produced by Peele's Monkeypaw Productions in collaboration with MGM and Bron Creative, "Candyman" is scheduled to be released on September 25 in the US.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Srinagar, April 16 (IANS High -speed internet will continue to remain suspended across the Union Territory of Jammu until April 27, an order issued by Principal Secretary, Home, Shaleen Kabra, said on Wednesday.

The order said social media applications are used for the circulation of photographs of terrorists of proscribed terror organisations and for mobilising crowds. "One such instance being when more than 500 villagers gathered to attend funeral of a terrorist, defying lockdown and throwing social distancing norms to the wind," the order reads.

The order also said the Pakistan-based terror outfits are leaving no stone unturned to exploit the present situation as seen by recent infiltration attempts, which also caused security forces casualties.

"There have been many instances of civilian killings by terrorists, attacks on security forces, recoveries of arms and ammunition, attempts to propagate terrorism through uploading of videos, coordinating infiltration from across the border, launch of new terror outfits," the order reads.

The internet was banned in J&K at the time of revocation of Article 370 on August 5. It was restored in in a phased manner across the UT. However, high speed mobile internet continues to remain suspended.
REDCOM equipment, coupled with Base Camp Connects in-country expertise enables CAF to efficiently respond to an increasing spectrum of operations in Canada and internationally.

REDCOM Laboratories, Inc., in partnership with Base Camp Connect, has received an order for upwards of $3M from the Canadian Department of National Defence (DND) and Canadian Armed Forces (CAF). The contract will be primed by Base Camp Connect, one of Canadas leading suppliers of communications systems. REDCOM expects an additional $4M through 2024 for supplementary equipment and support and maintenance services.

REDCOM was selected for this contract due to the companys proven history of delivering highly interoperable and reliable communications systems with very low SWaP (size, weight, and power). The REDCOM equipment will be replacing the DNDs existing systems and upgrading their network while ensuring flawless service to deployed operations across the world. The upgrade to the DND network provides services for both data and voice to operational theaters within Canada and overseas, including the High Arctic Data Communications Systems (HADCS).

REDCOM is excited to partner with Base Camp Connect to provide stationary and deployable voice communications technology to the DND, said Roy Szelewski, Director of Government Operations. REDCOM equipment, coupled with Base Camp Connects in-country expertise enables CAF to efficiently respond to an increasing spectrum of operations in Canada and internationally. We look forward to a continued partnership with Base Camp Connect to bring REDCOMs reliable and scalable technology to its customers.

Jean-Philippe Grondin, Base Camp Connect President and CEO commented: We are proud to have been awarded this contract by the Canadian Department of National Defence. After our evaluation, REDCOM was the best partner we found to complement our offer. Their long-standing reputation and extensive experience as a leader in secured communications for the U.S Army, amongst other customers, will facilitate our custom work for DND.

Several different configurations of REDCOM equipment will be used, including stationary systems, plus small, medium, and large form factor deployable systems. In addition to delivering REDCOM HDX and SLICE 2100 systems, REDCOM and Base Camp Connect plan to coordinate with the DND to conduct all site surveys, installations, and training on this equipment.

About Base Camp Connect

Base Camp Connect provides rapidly deployable communications to the National Defence and public safety agencies throughout North America, Europe, and Indonesia, to help them bridge communication gaps in the field. Base Camp Connect empowers them by proposing communications go-kit that are simple to use, portable, configurable, interoperate with existing equipment, and dont require training to operate. For more information, please visit the Base Camp Connect website at http://www.basecampconnect.com.

About REDCOM

REDCOM Laboratories, Inc., a 2020 Rochester Top Workplace, is a woman-owned small business that specializes in the design and manufacture of advanced tactical and strategic communications solutions with a focus on security, reliability, and interoperability. REDCOMs customers include all branches of the military, government agencies, emergency responders, integrators, and telecom service providers. For additional information, please visit the REDCOM website at https://www.redcom.com.
Claim: Protests are taking place in the Philippines due to COVID-19 lockdown

ALSO READ| Fact Check: Did 7 Children Die In Senegal Due To COVID-19 Vaccine?

What is the rumour about?

The images and videos that are being circulated on social media show that protests are taking place in the Philippines currently due to the COVID-19 lockdown.

Images show groups like Anakbayan and Kilusang Mayo Uno (KMU) from the Philippines who are seen protesting in Manila, Phillippines. These protests are said to be carried out due to the Coronavirus lockdown which has now been extended.

Some videos also show the police arresting and dispersing people who are protesting on the streets after the government announced lockdown post the Coronavirus outbreak.

Image courtesy: Facebook

Image courtesy: Facebook

ALSO READ| Fact Check: Is Tiger King Positive For Coronavirus? Did He Contract The Virus In Prison?

Image courtesy: Facebook

Image courtesy: Twitter

ALSO READ| Fact Check: Do Kalonji Seeds Contain Hydroxychloroquine Used To Treat Coronavirus?

Google Trends

After an analysis of the Google Trends with respect to the people protesting in the Phillippines due to Coronavirus lockdown, one can see that the people have been hugely interested to know about the same. The maximum number of searches have been done on April 13, 2020.

Image courtesy: Google Trends

ALSO READ| FACT CHECK: Is Video Showing South Africans Looting Shops During COVID-19 Lockdown True?

Rating: False

Republic World did a fact check

Republic World did a fact check on the "protests in Phillippines due to COVID-19 lockdown" rumour and the claims were found to be False .

. These photos are actually from the protests done by the groups in the Philippines on February 4, 2020. The protests were carried out in February which is almost a month before the lockdown was imposed in the Philippines. So the photos have no relation to the current scenario in the country.

The photos were circulated in the media before the Philippines imposed a lockdown on the main island.

Group members in the Philippines took to the streets on February 4 to condemn the slow action of the government with regards to the coronavirus outbreak. They staged protests in front of PGH (Philippine General Hospital) in Manila on February 4, 2020.

Image courtesy: Facebook

Even a Phillipino publication named Abante Tonite shared the post with similar photos on February 4, 2020.

A day before the militant groups protested in February, President Duterte had actually mentioned that the situation of Coronavirus in the Philippines is under control. However, currently, the country is facing many difficulties managing the outbreak.

ALSO READ| Fact Check: Did Kathleen OMara Actually Write A Pandemic Poem In 1919?

Is there any rumour you want Republic World to do a fact check on? Do you have facts about a rumour? Share your pictures or videos with Republic World on contact@republicworld.com or comment on this story itself.

ALSO READ| Fact Check: Did NASA Issue An Alert About The Earthquake In Delhi Beforehand?

ALSO READ| Fact Check: Are Beijing And Shanghai In China Not Affected By The Coronavirus Outbreak?
STATEN ISLAND, N.Y. -- Students at Monsignor Farrell High School are bringing joy and companionship to residents at a Staten Island nursing home through virtual visits during the coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak.

The Oakwood high schools Visiting Brother Society, a service club founded by senior Nikolas Greenberg, works to make sure residents of Eger Health Care and Rehabilitation Center still have visitors while a state mandate bans in-person visits to nursing home facilities.

The safety measure, meant to protect people most vulnerable to complications of COVID-19, is leaving many residents lonely, Greenberg explained. The mission of the service club is to bring a smile to the residents faces and let them know someone is thinking of them.

It was really great just to see the smile on the residents face, said Andrew Boyd, a senior at Farrell. Just taking 10 minutes out of my day to talk to them made them so happy and hopefully helped them during these difficult times.

*** CLICK HERE FOR COMPLETE COVERAGE OF CORONAVIRUS IN NEW YORK ***

Students are using FaceTime, Skype, and other video conference platforms to speak with residents virtually from the comfort and safety of their own homes.

Staff at Eger Health Care -- who are supervising and observing the virtual calls -- were excited to connect students with residents.

Being able to have students from Monsignor Farrell High School talk to the residents at Eger Health Care and Rehabilitation Center is such an eye-opener to how many people are helping out in a time of need for our residents, said Stephanie Berman, therapeutic recreation director at Eger.

Danita S., an Eger resident, described the virtual visits as reaching out without touching hands.

I felt that the resident that I connected with was very happy to speak to someone, especially with everything going on right now and her family not being able to visit, said sophomore Daniel Verticchio.

Senior Steven Pasquale said he connected with a resident after learning she was also a bowler when she was in high school.

I am sure that she and I are off to a good start, he said.

Once the health crisis ends and visitation is allowed once again, students in the Visiting Brother Society will go to Eger Health Care, and in groups of two to three students, will meet with a resident and establish or continue a relationship.

I am so proud of Nikolas [Greenberg] and the members of the Visiting Brother Society for being shining examples of our school motto, Vir Fidelis, the faithful man, said Louis R. Tobacco, president and CEO of Monsignor Farrell High School. I am overwhelmed with stories of how our current students are providing assistance to members of the Staten Island community who are in need.

In addition to virtual visits at Eger, Tobacco said Farrell students are delivering cleaning supplies and masks to local police precincts and firehouses, bringing food and water to Alzheimers and dementia patients, and are 3-D printing parts to use for ventilators.

FOLLOW ANNALISE KNUDSON ON FACEBOOK AND TWITTER.
MIDDLETOWN  City firefighters and police thanked doctors, nurses and other personnel during an unexpected visit to Middlesex Hospital Tuesday with a truck brigade supporting their sacrifices during the coronavirus pandemic.

Firefighters from the downtown, Westfield, Cross Street and South Fire District units lined up along Crescent Street in a show of solidarity for those working very long hours to care for and save patients suffering from COVID-19.

Were all in this together  whether were on the front lines or not, everybody has a role, said Mayor Ben Florsheim, who added people have been joking that he didnt sign up for this responsibility of leading the city during a crisis so early in his tenure.

All across Middletown  like the rest of the country  people have been showing their appreciation by making masks, donating PPE and other vital items as well as sending food and care packages to police.

They are the heroes. Weve all been pushed to the limits. Its fitting to give them the recognition they so much deserve, said Middletown Fire Chief Robert Kronenberger.

Although EMS workers are trained in case of a mass health crisis erupts, the stress is wearing on them, the chief said. Its something none of us have ever seen before.

Applause erupted several times during the visit: from firefighters, police and other first responders, as well as hospital staff, who held up handmade signs of thanks saying Middletown strong and other words to boost morale. They also chalked words with inspirational messages on the street.

To see our first responders support us in this way is amazing. We appreciate the kind gesture, and it helped to bolster our spirits. They wanted to thank us, but we also need to thank them, hospital Communications Director Amanda Falcone said.

You can prepare for it all you want, said the chief, who believes the state has not yet reached the halfway point of cases. He predicts the slowdown will begin sometime between April 21 and 25.

But thats been moving constantly. Were up for a really bad week to 10 days. Eventually, well get to the other side of the curve and get back to normal, Kronenberger said.

He worked with town officials to relocate crews taking coronavirus-related calls to a location near the Harbor Park boat dock at the Connecticut River to avoid spreading the illness.

We had to make sure we could still maintain our position, he said.

I need a day off, Local Union 1073 President Chris Augeri said with a laugh. It keeps on going, they dont complain, they do their job, he said.

For six weeks, EMS and fire personnel have been separated from those manning the stations, staffed by eight first responders on two shifts. Theyre running 95 percent of the medical calls, Augeri said. They stepped up to the plate. It was not ordered.

Some of those who call 911 are being redirected to their physicians to alleviate non-emergencies, Kronenberger said.

South Fire Chief Michael Howley tested positive for COVID-19 and recently recovered. I was sick for about four or five days. Luckily  knock on wood  I feel very fortunate that I went through this compared to a lot of people. Its no fun, he said.

Howley has since been cleared to return to work.

Personnel have dealt with other health emergencies, but nothing to this magnitude, he said. Nobody has seen this, but we do what we do: business as usual.

Brian Albert, Middlesex Hospital director of marketing and internet strategy, said the brigade was a welcome boost for staff. It lets them all know the entire community is standing behind them. This is a very public way of saying it. We have a constant stream of community donations, he said.

Florsheim praised hospital staff, saying that although they expect to triage situations such as coronavirus, they didnt think theyd be putting themselves at risk to save patients.

You expect the unexpected in this job, but you dont expect it to be this crazy. Its the same thing for a doctor, nurse or anybody whos working in the hospital. Its not easy to go into overdrive like this. I can attest to that, the mayor said.

There are still not enough COVID-19 test kits, Florsheim added. The capacity of testing is really a problem. We dont have enough to test everybody.

As for the peak, Florsheim said cases are on the upswing, but he hopes to see a plateau of infected people soon. We have a little ways to go. I hope the numbers will continue to go in the right direction, but thats going to be dependent on what people do.

As of Tuesday afternoon one more person in Middletown died from COVID-19, bringing the total deaths to seven. The number of infections  151 as of Tuesday  are still increasing every day in the city, Florsheim said.
LOS ANGELES, April 15, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- A Texas woman is suing Princess Cruise Lines for knowingly exposing her and her husband to the new coronavirus and for preventing her husband from leaving the ship while his health deteriorated, leading him to ultimately die alone days later in a California hospital.

On Feb. 21, Susan Dorety and her husband Michael, a retired firefighter, of Crowley, Texas, boarded the Grand Princess cruise ship in San Francisco to celebrate their 40th anniversary. Little did they know that some passengers who had COVID-19 symptoms had just disembarked while more than 60 others were allowed to remain on-board after they had been exposed to the virus.

Four days after the Doretys boarded, Princess Cruise Lines emailed the previous passengers who were no longer on the ship, alerting them that they had been exposed to the dangerous virus. But there was no warning to the new passengers including the Doretys.

"It is shocking to me that a cruise line that had just discharged coronavirus-infected passengers took on board a new group of passengers to then mingle with others who had been exposed. Princess had notice of the dangers, the Doretys did not," said Rusty Hardin of Rusty Hardin & Associates of Houston, who represents Mrs. Dorety.

In addition, when a crew member with COVID-19 symptoms left the Grand Princess in Hawaii, there still was no alert to passengers. Mrs. Dorety says she and her husband would have disembarked there had they known about the risks to their health.

"The behavior of Princess Cruise Lines is all the more outrageous because just a few weeks earlier, one of their ships had a coronavirus outbreak infecting 700 people while docked in Japan," said Mr. Hardin. "This cruise line company put money ahead of its passengers' well-being, and it cost Michael Dorety his life."

After two weeks on the cruise, passengers were placed in quarantine off the California coast, and Mr. Dorety fell ill. Mrs. Dorety called the ship's emergency line multiple times, but no one responded. Her husband became weak and was shivering and feverish as his health deteriorated. A ship's doctor came at last, giving him Tylenol and Tamiflu, but the couple was not advised until later that they could leave the ship for medical treatment.

Mr. Dorety died in an Oakland hospital days later with no family by his side. Mrs. Dorety, meanwhile, also contracted COVID-19.

The lawsuit, filed April 14, seeks damages for negligence, gross negligence and for other unlawful acts. Other members of the Rusty Hardin & Associates team are Ryan Higgins, Daniel Dutko and Leah Graham. Serving as local counsel in California are Gerald Singleton and J. Ross Peabody of the Singleton Law Firm of San Diego. The lawsuit is Susan Dorety individually and on behalf of the estate of Michael Dorety vs. Princess Cruise Lines, Ltd., Case No. 2:20-cv-02458, in the Central District of U.S. District Court of California.

Rusty Hardin & Associates, LLP has built an outstanding reputation for taking on the causes of its clients and obtaining favorable results in both civil matters and significant criminal cases. Visit https://www.rustyhardin.com.

Media Contact:

April Arias

Androvett Legal Media

[email protected]

800-559-4534

SOURCE Rusty Hardin & Associates

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NEW YORK, April 15, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- Americans ordered to stay at home during the COVID-19 pandemic are being forced to find new ways to fulfill their daily responsibilities and occupy their free time. A new study released today offers a glimpse at how the coronavirus crisis is impacting adult American consumers' food preferences and behaviors, as well as the potential for these new habits to result in lasting change.

America Gets Cooking: Food Trends During COVID-19

Since 2003, HUNTER, a leading food and beverage public relations and marketing communications consultancy, has commissioned an annual Food News Study to identify the top food news stories according to the opinions of Americans, as well as the impact of these stories on their behavior and top sources for information about food, recipes, and nutrition. For this Hunter Food Study Special Report: America Gets Cooking, 1,005 American adults were surveyed online and asked to compare their cooking and eating habits now vs. prior to COVID-19, and share resulting changes in their cooking confidence and enjoyment, ingredients, recipe usage, food waste, and more.

Top findings include:

With Home Cooking and Baking on the Rise, Confidence in the Kitchen and the Joy in Cooking Soar

The Hunter Food Study Special Report: America Gets Cooking confirms statistically that Americans are cooking and baking more now, with over half of consumers reporting they are cooking more (54%), and almost as many baking more (46%). While use of mail-ordered prepared meals and meal kits (22%) and ordering takeout and delivery (30%) are also increasing among some consumers, this is being offset by decreases in these behaviors by others (38% and 28%, respectively). A total of three-quarters (75%) of all American adults who are cooking more report that they are more confident in the kitchen (50%) or learning more about cooking and starting to build more confidence (26%). Not merely a chore, a total of 73% are enjoying it more (35%) or as much as they did before (38%).

Americans Become More Adventurous and Creative in the Kitchen

Many of those surveyed have discovered new ingredients (38%) and new brands (45%) and are rediscovering ingredients they have not used in a long time (24%). Meanwhile, the consumers who claimed to be cooking more often are embracing these new habits even more enthusiastically (44%, 50% and 28%, respectively). Creativity abounds, with roughly one-third (34%) of all adults searching for more recipes and meal prepping (31%). Top recipes consumers are searching for are simple, practical meal solutions (61%) and ways to use up current ingredients (60%), although almost half of consumers are also looking for ways to cook healthier (47%) and inspiration to try new foods (45%). More than one-third (35%) of recipe users are searching for a cooking project and inspiration to learn new techniques.

Households Are Wasting Less Food with Help From Recipes Designed to Use Ingredients On Hand

The Hunter Food Study Special Report: America Gets Cooking found that 57% of Americans are wasting less food than before the coronavirus crisis, with 60% of all adults polled reporting that they are looking for recipes to use the ingredients they have on hand in their pantry or refrigerator. And where are they finding these recipes? Top sources include websites (66%), social media (58%), and family and friends (52%), with Facebook leading the pack as the preferred social platform for recipes, for all but Gen Z.

A Tale of Two Waistlines? Americans Split on Eating Healthier and Eating More Indulgent and Comfort Foods

Almost identical numbers of Americans are reporting that they are eating healthier foods (39%) as those turning more to indulgent and comfort foods (40%). Alcohol beverage consumption remains relatively the same, with equal portions of consumers drinking more wine/beer/spirits (29%) as drinking less (25%), and the majority holding steady (46%) drinking the same amount as they were before the coronavirus crisis. Those drinking more profile to 25-34 (33%) and in higher-income households (38% in HH with an income of $100K). Meanwhile snacking throughout the day is at an all-time high, especially in households with children, with half (50%) reporting they are snacking more than before.

The New Normal: Cooking Practices Impacted Long Term

Importantly, among the Americans who are cooking more, more than half (51%) reported that they will continue to do so when the coronavirus crisis comes to an end. Top motivators include: cooking at home more often saves money (58%), cooking helps them to eat healthier (52%), trying new recipes (50%), and they find cooking relaxing (50%).

"The study results confirm many of our suspicions and certainly corroborate many of the sales trends we are seeing in the marketplace," states Heddy DeMaria, chief insights officer at HUNTER. "We have long regarded Americans as consummate optimists. When the going gets tough, they find a way to prevail and in this case, they are choosing to redirect their energy and creativity to the kitchen, not only finding joy in the process of cooking, but also in the benefits that come from it."

For the full Hunter Food Study Special Report: America Gets Cooking and additional information about the annual Hunter Food News Study, visit www.hunterpr.com/news.

ABOUT HUNTER

Founded in 1989, HUNTER is an award-winning consumer marketing communications firm with primary offices in New York and London and a footprint across North America. Beginning with research-driven consumer insights, HUNTER executes strategic, integrated programs that build brand equity, increase engagement, and drive measurable business results for consumer products and services. The 120-person firm employs a powerful blend of marketing solutions including strategic planning, social and digital media, talent and influencer engagement, media relations, experiential, multicultural, and content creation and distribution for all platforms and channels to earn consumer attention on behalf of some of the world's best known and most beloved brands. The agency is a member of MDC Partners Inc. (NASDAQ: MDCA; TSX: MDZ.A).

ABOUT THE STUDY

The Hunter Food Study Special Report: America Gets Cooking provides a comparative perspective on consumers' meal preparation and consumption behaviors and attitudes now versus prior to the coronavirus pandemic. HUNTER utilized the national panel and insight platform, SUZY for this study. The study surveyed 1,005 Americans ages 18-73 years old via an online survey. The survey was fielded on April 2, 2020 to a national demographically and geographically-balanced sample, evenly split between males and females.

Links:

Visit HUNTER for Study Results: www.hunterpr.com/news

Follow HUNTER on Facebook: @HunterPR

Follow HUNTER on Twitter: @hunterpr

Follow HUNTER on Instagram: @hunterprny

CONTACT:

Samara Farber Mormar

HUNTER:

[email protected]

SOURCE HUNTER

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At least 56 foreigners, including 16 Kyrgyzstan nationals, 14 from Malaysia, 9 from Bangladesh and 17 from Indonesia who were spotted at separate mosques in Patna, Buxar, Araria and Kishanganj and later put under home quarantine, were finally sent to judicial custody late on Monday night after the Emigration Department sent a directive to the Bihar police. All have been found to have Tablighi Jamaat connections.

Patna SSP Upendra Sharma said on Tuesday that 16 people from Kyrgyzstan and one from Kazakistan had been sent to judicial custody after two separate FIRs were lodged against them with Digha and Phulwarisharif police stations.

The case was lodged under section of 14b of the Foreign National Act, which provides for five years of imprisonment to the guilty. In the course of investigation, police found that these preachers used tourist visa to enter India but later indulged in religious preaching activities. Their passports have been seized by the police.

According to the police headquarters, police detained them after Digha locality people raised an alarm about their illegal stay in the mosque when delegates of the Tablighi Jamaat, a religious congregation, died in Telangana.

During interrogation, they confessed they had attended Nizamuddin Markaz function and returned to Patna in March. Their visa was valid till July this year, they said.

All the 17 foreign preachers tested Covid-19 negative but were placed under quarantine. All 17 have now been sent to judicial custody as their quarantine period came to an end.

Sharma said 10 Kyrgyzstan nationals were staying in Kurji mosque and seven in Phulwarisharif mosque. He said they were taken to AIIMS-Patna on March 23 and screened.

They are here on tourist visa and with valid passport. For precaution, they had been home quarantined. One group stayed at a mosque in Phulwarisharif and another group in a flat at Samanpura. Local police stations have kept their passports so that they did not move during the quarantine period, Sharma said.

Kishanganj SP Kumar Ashish said that 11 foreigners, one from Malaysia and the rest 10 from Indonesia, were detained when they alighted from a train on March 22.

Another group of 13 persons, including seven from Indonesia and four from Malaysia, were detained on March 28 from a mosque located at New Bhojpur locality of Dumraon sub-division in Buxar district. After a preliminary examination, all of them were quarantined in a local madarsa. According to the Buxar DM Aman Samir, all the foreigners entered India on March 3 and preliminary investigations showed all had Jammat connection.

In Araria, a Malaysia national, preacher, identified as Md Khairani Bin Lookman, 65, had reached Araria on March 21 died on March 26. He had landed in Delhi on March 6.

Araria SP Dhurat Saayli Savlaram said all the 18 foreign nationals, including 9 from Malaysia and 9 from Bangladesh, were arrested from Araria and Narpatganj police stations area and were sent to judicial custody on Tuesday.

The union home ministry had earlier blacklisted tourist visas of over 700 foreign Tablighi Jamaat members for violating visa conditions by engaging in missionary activities in India.

The home ministry has also asked the states and union territories to take action against foreign Tablighi Jamaat members for violating the provisions of the Foreigners Act, 1946

They could not only face deportation but also end up paying a penalty.

Earlier, Union Cabinet Secretary Rajiv Gauba had told the chief secretaries and DGPs of all states to initiate intensive contact tracing of Tablighi Jamaat participants.

Bihar witnessed an increase in Covid-19 cases after Tablighi Jamaat delegates from the Nizamuddin Markaz came to the state. At least eight persons in Begusarai and Nawada districts have been found Covid-19 positive after coming in contact with the people who attended the Nizamuddin Markaz event.

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AP

Grocery stores and supermarkets in New York City should require customers to wear masks, the mayor's office said on Wednesday.

In a press conference, a city official announced new guidelines urging grocery stores to require the provision in order to protect store workers and customers.

Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

New York City grocery stores and supermarkets are set to require customers to wear masks or other facial coverings under new guidance from the mayor's office.

A city official said in a press conference on Wednesday that the mayor's office is issuing guidance to grocery stores that they should require the precautions from customers in order to protect employees and other customers.

New York City is also coordinating with vendors to assist stores in ordering non-medical protective equipment for their employees.

Last week, the District of Columbia's mayor ordered grocery store shoppers to wear masks.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said earlier this month that Americans should wear masks or other facial coverings in public.

Experts have told Business Insider that masks are most effective at "source control" to potentially prevent spreading the virus to others, especially if you are asymptomatic, rather than as a means to protect yourself.

Read the original article on Business Insider
Meghan Markle had more problems in her royal 'stint' than the public was aware of. According to a royal expert, her "demanding celebrity background" made her feel the Palace as too slow and probably too stifling. On the other hand, Buckingham Palace aides experienced a shock with her around, mainly because of a culture clash.

Hollywood Background Causing Rift Between Meghan Markle and Palace Aides

Speaking with the New Yorker, expert Camilla Tominey revealed that Meghan's self-confidence and showbiz connections were liabilities instead of boons in her life as a royal. Since she's so used to a fast-paced lifestyle in Hollywood, everything in the Palace started to feel slow.

Her background, however, was not only making things hard for herself, but also the people around her. Tominey claimed that the warm welcome she received ahead of her wedding probably turned sour immediately as she settled into her supposedly new role.

"She was this extremely glamorous woman who had a lot to say for herself, and had an interesting past as a campaigner for women's rights," the expert said. "She was a woman who meant business, and it looked like she would be an instant asset to the Royal Family."

But things changed because Meghan Markle cannot slow down and her aides cannot work fast enough. Her good qualities soon enough provoked a clash between her past and present (at the time).

Meghan Markle Regrets Leaving Hollywood For Royal Life: 'It's Slow, Hiearchical"

The expert deemed that the royal world cannot compare to Hollywood. The former was "slower-paced, hugely hiearchical," while the latter was "fast-paced, demanding."

"In the royal world, it's 'What should we do next? Well, what did we do last time?'" Tomley explains.

This is probably why week after or week or even day after day, Meghan might have broken some unwritten rules in the Palace. Ultimately, they added up and caused problems, such as the close aides leaving. Melissa Touabi left only six months after starting as the Duchess' personal assistant.

At the same time, Samantha Cohen, who was with the Palace already for 17 years, later announced she would leave in spring.

The Daily Express has once reported that Meghan Markle gained the label "Duchess Difficult" from the members of the royal staff.

Tominey added that Meghan Markle failed to respect the hiearchy. Staff were likely to cater to the Queen's demands or the country's and found her and probably Prince Harry's demands to be insulting. The expert believed that some could have said, "Well, hang on a minute, who do you think you are?'"

Megxit, Coronavirus and Hollywood

Now that Megxit happened and the two are in the United States, it is unclear or unknown whether royal staff feel relieved. What is apparent, however is that escaping to another part of the world is hardly stemming all the press, good and bad, about them.

They also left at such a lousy timing - in the middle of the coronavirus, that some cannot help but call them selfish and insensitive. If moving to America was for them to start afresh, it seems they are failing. Prince Harry is struggling with isolation. Meghan Markle cannot also return to her "fast-paced" life because the virus just slowed the whole world down, Hollywood not excluded.

READ MORE: Royal Interview: Prince Harry And Not Meghan Markle, Can Do a Tell-All Like Princess Diana
The worldwide number of confirmed coronavirus cases has surpassed two million, a figure that doubled in less than two weeks.

About 76, 000 deaths have been recorded in 13 days, bringing the total number of fatalities to over 126,000.

There is no vaccine yet for the COVID-19 but experts believe the darkest days are almost over as the lack of fresh hot spots globally yielded a ray of optimism and fueled discussions about how some nations might begin to reopen.

But the World Health Organisation (WHO) cautioned patience before lifting social distancing restrictions, noting that the repercussions of any premature end to lockdown could be more deadly.

The brunt of the coronavirus has been felt most heavily in the U.S., Italy, France, Spain, the United Kingdom, and southeast Asia.

The disease is gradually starting to wreak havoc in Africa and South America and the WHO is particularly concerned about the ability of the poorest countries in the world to control the disease.

Confirmed cases

Early Wednesday, there were 2,000,728 confirmed cases across the globe, data from worldometers.info, an online dashboard that tracks the global number of confirmed coronavirus cases showed.

The number of infected people crossed a million threshold on April 2 barely a week after the figure hit 500,000.

The three worst-hit countries: the U.S., Spain, and Italy alone have a combined figure of nearly a million infections, almost half of the global total.

There are 1,389,171 active cases as of the time of reporting. Of that number, over 1,337, 000 are in mild conditions.

Over 51,000 cases are in serious or critical conditions.

Meanwhile, over 484,000 people have recovered after treatment so far worldwide. That is approximately one in four persons.

Death toll

After the U.S. registered a record 2, 400 deaths from the coronavirus in the last 24 hours, the total global body-count reached the scary landmark of 125,000 and counting.

As of the time of reporting, about 126,776 people have died from the virus, a strain of coronavirus which causes a pneumonia-like disease, data from worldometers.info showed.

Experts believe the death toll might even be twice the current figure as many people die without being tested.

Countries have continued to report inadequate testing kits for potential patients of virus which has continued to defy science.

U.S.

With 614, 246 confirmed cases, infections in the U.S. now account for more than 25 per cent of infections globally, according to worldometer.info.

The virus has infected more than 200,000 people in New York alone.

U.S. officials and some economists have warned against comparing coronavirus case numbers from country to country due to concerns around reporting methodology.

Local and state officials in the U.S. have also acknowledged that the true number of COVID-19 cases in the country is likely far higher than those that have been confirmed due to testing shortages and restrictions.

Africa

There are now more than over 16,000 confirmed cases of coronavirus across Africa, with a number of African countries imposing a range of prevention and containment measures against the spread of the pandemic.

According to the latest data by the Africa Center for Disease Control on COVID-19 in Africa, the breakdown remains fluid as countries confirm cases erratically. Africa has rising cases with only two countries holding out.

Algeria has the highest number of fatalities  326 with over 2,000 infections, closely followed by Egypt with 178 deaths and about 2,350 cases. About 126 deaths and 1,888 infections have been recorded in Morocco.

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South Africa still leads the continent with over 2, 400 cases with just 27 deaths.

Nigeria recorded 11 new COVID-19 cases on Tuesday evening, bringing the total confirmed cases to 373.

Nigerias President Muhammadu Buhari on Monday, during his second national address since the coronavirus outbreak, extended total lockdown in Lagos, Abuja and Ogun in a bid to continue reducing the transmission of the disease in the country.

But the WHO officials said statistics are likely to significantly underestimate the true number of cases in Africa, raising concerns that the disease could overwhelm the continents under-resourced health services.

This is not a joke. It is a matter of life and death, a worried Mr Buhari said.
NEW YORK, April 14, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- Connected Car Market Research Report by Transponder (Onboard Unit and Roadside Unit), by Form (Embedded, Integrated, and Tethered), by Network, by Service, by Component, by End User - Global Forecast to 2025 (Cumulative Impact of COVID-19)







Read the full report: https://www.reportlinker.com/p05881725/?utm_source=PRN







The Global Connected Car Market is expected to grow from USD 64,941.56 Million in 2019 to USD 170,256.69 Million by the end of 2025 at a Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 17.42%.



Market Segmentation & Coverage:

This research report categorizes the Connected Car to forecast the revenues and analyze the trends in each of the following sub-markets:



"The Roadside Unit is projected to witness the highest growth during the forecast period"



On the basis of Transponder, the Connected Car Market is studied across Onboard Unit and Roadside Unit. The Onboard Unit commanded the largest size in the Connected Car Market in 2019. On the other hand, the Roadside Unit is expected to grow at the fastest CAGR during the forecast period.



"The Embedded is projected to witness the highest growth during the forecast period"



On the basis of Form, the Connected Car Market is studied across Embedded, Integrated, and Tethered. The Integrated commanded the largest size in the Connected Car Market in 2019. On the other hand, the Embedded is expected to grow at the fastest CAGR during the forecast period.



"The Dedicated Short Range Communication is projected to witness the highest growth during the forecast period"



On the basis of Network, the Connected Car Market is studied across Cellular and Dedicated Short Range Communication. The Cellular commanded the largest size in the Connected Car Market in 2019. On the other hand, the Dedicated Short Range Communication is expected to grow at the fastest CAGR during the forecast period.



"The Safety & Security is projected to witness the highest growth during the forecast period"



On the basis of Service, the Connected Car Market is studied across Autonomous Driving, Connected Services, and Safety & Security. The Connected Services commanded the largest size in the Connected Car Market in 2019. On the other hand, the Safety & Security is expected to grow at the fastest CAGR during the forecast period.



"The Vehicle Services is projected to witness the highest growth during the forecast period"



On the basis of Component, the Connected Car Market is studied across Connected Hardware, Infotainment Services, and Vehicle Services. The Connected Hardware commanded the largest size in the Connected Car Market in 2019. On the other hand, the Vehicle Services is expected to grow at the fastest CAGR during the forecast period.



"The Aftermarket is projected to witness the highest growth during the forecast period"



On the basis of End User, the Connected Car Market is studied across Aftermarket and Original Equipment Manufacturer. The Original Equipment Manufacturer commanded the largest size in the Connected Car Market in 2019. On the other hand, the Aftermarket is expected to grow at the fastest CAGR during the forecast period.



"The Americas is projected to witness the highest growth during the forecast period"



On the basis of Geography, the Connected Car Market is studied across Americas, Asia-Pacific, and Europe, Middle East & Africa. The Americas region is studied across Argentina, Brazil, Canada, Mexico, and United States. The Asia-Pacific region is studied across Australia, China, India, Indonesia, Japan, Malaysia, Philippines, South Korea, and Thailand. The Europe, Middle East & Africa region is studied across France, Germany, Italy, Netherlands, Qatar, Russia, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, Spain, United Arab Emirates, and United Kingdom. The Europe, Middle East & Africa commanded the largest size in the Connected Car Market in 2019. On the other hand, the Americas is expected to grow at the fastest CAGR during the forecast period.



Company Usability Profiles:

The report deeply explores the recent significant developments by the leading vendors and innovation profiles in the Global Connected Car Market including Aisin Seiki Co., Ltd, Aptiv PLC, Autoliv Inc., Continental AG, DENSO Corporation, HARMAN International, Hella KGaA Hueck & Co., Infineon Technologies AG, NXP Semiconductors N.V., Robert Bosch GmbH, Valeo, Visteon Corporation, and ZF Friedrichshafen AG.



FPNV Positioning Matrix:

The FPNV Positioning Matrix evaluates and categorizes the vendors in the Connected Car Market on the basis of Business Strategy (Business Growth, Industry Coverage, Financial Viability, and Channel Support) and Product Satisfaction (Value for Money, Ease of Use, Product Features, and Customer Support) that aids businesses in better decision making and understanding the competitive landscape.



Competitive Strategic Window:

The Competitive Strategic Window analyses the competitive landscape in terms of markets, applications, and geographies. The Competitive Strategic Window helps the vendor define an alignment or fit between their capabilities and opportunities for future growth prospects. During a forecast period, it defines the optimal or favorable fit for the vendors to adopt successive merger and acquisition strategies, geography expansion, research & development, and new product introduction strategies to execute further business expansion and growth.



The report provides insights on the following pointers:

1. Market Penetration: Provides comprehensive information on sulfuric acid offered by the key players

2. Market Development: Provides in-depth information about lucrative emerging markets and analyzes the markets

3. Market Diversification: Provides detailed information about new product launches, untapped geographies, recent developments, and investments

4. Competitive Assessment & Intelligence: Provides an exhaustive assessment of market shares, strategies, products, and manufacturing capabilities of the leading players

5. Product Development & Innovation: Provides intelligent insights on future technologies, R&D activities, and new product developments



The report answers questions such as:

1. What is the market size and forecast of the Global Connected Car Market?

2. What are the inhibiting factors and their impact analysis shaping the Global Connected Car Market during the forecast period?

3. What is the competitive position if vendors in the Global Connected Car Market?

4. How Porters Five Forces define the Global Connected Car Market landscape?

5. What are the technology trends and regulatory frameworks in the Global Connected Car Market?

6. Which are the products/segments/applications/areas to invest in over the forecast period in the Global Connected Car Market?

7. What is the competitive strategic window for opportunities in the Global Connected Car Market?

8. What are the modes and strategic moves considered suitable for entering the Global Connected Car Market?



Read the full report: https://www.reportlinker.com/p05881725/?utm_source=PRN



About Reportlinker

ReportLinker is an award-winning market research solution. Reportlinker finds and organizes the latest industry data so you get all the market research you need - instantly, in one place.



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BAKU, Azerbaijan, April 15

Trend:

Over the past 24 hours, Armenian armed forces have violated the ceasefire along the line of contact between Azerbaijani and Armenian troops 22 times, Trend reports referring to Azerbaijani Defense Ministry on April 15.

The Armenian armed forces were using 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 districts.

The 1994 ceasefire agreement was followed by peace negotiations. Armenia has not yet implemented four UN Security Council resolutions on withdrawal of its armed forces from Nagorno Karabakh and the surrounding districts.
Research Scientist and Quality Manager, Monaco

Organization: IAEA - International Atomic Energy Agency

Country: Monaco

Field location: Monte Carlo, Monaco

Office: IAEA-EL - Environment Laboratories Monaco

Grade: P-3

Closing date: Saturday, 23 May 2020

Research Scientist and Quality Manager (P3)

( 2020/0193 (013457) )

Organization: NAEL-Radiometrics Laboratory

Primary Location: Monaco-Monaco-Monaco-IAEA Environment Laboratories in Monaco

Job Posting: 2020-04-08, 1:50:20 PM

Contract Type : Fixed Term

Regular

Probation Period : 1 Year

Organizational Setting

The Department of Nuclear Sciences and Applications implements the IAEAs Major Programme 2, Nuclear Techniques for Development and Environmental Protection. This Major Programme comprises individual programmes on food and agriculture, human health, water resources, environment and radiation technologies. These programmes are supported by laboratories in Seibersdorf, Monaco and Vienna. The Major Programmes objective is to enhance the capacity of Member States to meet basic human needs and to assess and manage the marine and terrestrial environments through the use of nuclear and isotopic techniques in sustainable development programmes.

The IAEA Environment Laboratories Division consists of four laboratories, three of which are located in Monaco and one in Seibersdorf. The Division supports Member States in enhancing their capacity to use nuclear and isotopic techniques to understand marine, terrestrial and atmospheric environmental processes and dynamics, and to identify and address environmental problems caused by radioactive and non-radioactive pollutants and climate change.The Radiometrics Laboratory has expertise in the fields of marine radioactivity measurements, development of radioanalytical methods, low-level counting, modelling of dispersion, environmental and radiological assessments, marine database management, and radiotracer applications in oceanographic, pollution and climate studies. It collaborates with Member States to assist them in their development and to implement capacity building technical cooperation projects. It also helps them to prepare for emergency situations, carries out missions at sea, supports analytical quality in Member States laboratories and provides training.

Main Purpose

The incumbent Research Scientist is a specialist in radioanalytical methods and techniques for the assessment of radionuclides in the environment and contributes to related activities in the IAEAs programme. The Research Scientist liaises with scientists and institutes in Member States; contributes to the continuous improvement of methodologies for effective applications of nuclear and associated techniques in marine environmental and related sciences; and, as IAEA Environment Laboratories Quality Manager, coordinates the implementation and maintenance of the Laboratories Quality Management System in line with relevant ISO Standards.

Role

The Research Scientist is: (1) a programme developer and implementer, contributing to the IAEAs programme for applying radioanalytical methods and techniques for the measurement and assessment of marine radioactivity; (2) a scientific secretary/technical expert, planning and leading Technical Meetings and related initiatives to support and improve environmental radioanalytical capability in laboratories in IAEA Member States and (3) a project officer, managing the technical aspects of coordinated research projects (CRPs) focussed on promoting nuclear analytical techniques to support environmental research (4) a technical officer, providing scientific and technical input to Technical Cooperation Projects; (5) the IAEA Environment Laboratories Quality Manager.

Functions / Key Results Expected

Develop and implement radioanalytical methods and techniques for the measurement and assessment of marine radioactivity.

Contribute to the continuous improvement of methodologies for the application of nuclear and associated techniques in marine environmental and related sciences.

Carry out research on marine radioactivity.

Promote, coordinate and evaluate coordinated research projects (CRPs) and conduct related complex studies.

Tags civil servants climate change continuous improvement database management emergency situation environmental chemistry environmental monitoring environmental protection marine environment marine radioactivity monitoring and assessment nuclear science project management quality management radioactive materials safety regulations sustainable development technical aspects technical cooperation water resources

Provide scientific and technical support to Technical Cooperation projects.

As IAEA Environment Laboratories Quality Manager, coordinate the implementation and maintenance of the Laboratories Quality Management System.

The incumbent may perform his/her work in areas involving exposure to radioactive materials. Therefore, as an Occupationally Exposed Worker, he/she must be medically cleared by VIC Medical Service and is subject to an appropriate radiation and health monitoring programme, in accordance with the IAEAs Radiation Safety Regulations.

Competencies and Expertise

Core Competencies

NameDefinition

Planning and Organizing

Plans and organizes his/her own work in support of achieving the team or Sections priorities. Takes into account potential changes and proposes contingency plans.

Communication

Communicates orally and in writing in a clear, concise and impartial manner. Takes time to listen to and understand the perspectives of others and proposes solutions.

Achieving Results

Takes initiative in defining realistic outputs and clarifying roles, responsibilities and expected results in the context of the Department/Divisions programme. Evaluates his/her results realistically, drawing conclusions from lessons learned.

Teamwork

Actively contributes to achieving team results. Supports team decisions.

Functional Competencies

NameDefinition

Judgement/decision making

Consults with supervisor/manager and takes decisions in full compliance with the Agencys regulations and rules. Makes decisions reflecting best practice and professional theories and standards.

Partnership building

Identifies and builds partnerships. Develops and maintains long lasting partnerships to strengthen relationships. Delivers programmatic outputs and acquires resources in support of Agency goals.

Technical/scientific credibility

Ensures that work is in compliance with internationally accepted professional standards and scientific methods. Provides scientifically/technically accepted information that is credible and reliable.

Required Expertise

Function

NameExpertise Description

Environment

Environmental Monitoring and Assessment

Broad knowledge of sampling strategies and techniques, establishment of monitoring programmes, measurements and assessment

Environment

Quality Management

Good awareness of accreditation to ISO standards, quality management and good laboratory practice for radioanalytical techniques

Chemistry

Radioanalytical Techniques

Demonstrable competence in radiochemical techniques for the determination of alpha and beta emitting radionuclides in environmental samples

Asset Expertise

FunctionNameExpertise Description

Management and Programme Analysis

Project Management

Expertise in project management principles and practices

Training

Training Implementation

Experience in provision of training and in supervision of students and trainees

Qualifications, Experience and Language skills

Bachelors Degree

University Degree in Analytical or Environmental Chemistry

At least five years of working experience in radiochemistry.

Excellent oral and written command of English. Knowledge of other official IAEA languages (Arabic, Chinese, French, Russian and Spanish) is an asset.

Remuneration

The IAEA offers an attractive remuneration package including a tax-free annual net base salary starting at US $60962 (subject to mandatory deductions for pension contributions and health insurance), a variable post adjustment which currently amounts to US $ 29506*, dependency benefits, rental subsidy, education grant, relocation and repatriation expenses; 6 weeks annual vacation, home leave, pension plan and health insurance

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Applications from qualified women and candidates from developing countries are encouraged

Applicants should be aware that IAEA staff members are international civil servants and may not accept instructions from any other authority. The IAEA is committed to applying the highest ethical standards in carrying out its mandate. As part of the United Nations common system, the IAEA subscribes to the following core ethical standards (or values): Integrity, Professionalism and Respect for diversity. Staff members may be assigned to any location. The IAEA retains the discretion not to make any appointment to this vacancy, to make an appointment at a lower grade or with a different contract type, or to make an appointment with a modified job description or for shorter duration than indicated above. Testing may be part of the recruitment process
The unsettling images of long lineups of panicked buyers at gun stores across the U.S. are iconic.

They tell a disturbing story about the popularity of guns in America and about the belief held by many Americans that the best way to protect themselves and their families in times of trouble like the current COVID-19 crisis is to arm themselves to the teeth.

Americans are leaving their homes and lining up at grocery stores in the desperate hope of buying not only food, but scarce toilet paper, given that so many others have panicked and horded enough rolls of toilet paper to last them until 2022.

However, in many U.S. communities you can also head out to you nearest gun store to pick up a new pistol, assault rifle or stock up on bullets. Thats because gun shops in those spots have been declared essential services. Also, the U.S. federal government has also issued a guidance deeming the firearms business critical infrastructure, which let it stay open.

Crazy? You bet!

Do gun lovers need more bullets to protect their secret stashes of toilet paper?

And before Canadians become too smug about how we are somehow different than Americans when it comes to guns, the same lineups for bullets occurred here from Nova Scotia to Vancouver Island before retail stores were ordered closed to walk-in customers.

Leading the charge to keep U.S. gun stores open is the notorious and powerful National Rifle Association. Even in these anxiety-ridden times, the NRA keeps driving ahead with its lethal agenda of more, not fewer, gun rights, launching lawsuits across the country aimed at overturning government moves to close gun shops.

Last week, the NRA sued New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo for declaring gun shops non-essential, forcing them to close their doors.

There isnt a single person who has ever used a gun for self-defence who would consider it non-essential, said Wayne LaPierre, head of the NRA. This is clearly another assault by Gov. Cuomo on the NRA, on the rights of New Yorkers to defend themselves and their families, and on our Second Amendment freedoms.

It launched a similar lawsuit in late March in California and now gun shops are open in many cities in that state.

Guns and panic and the virus are a potentially lethal mix. And yet theres no evidence of widespread looting or increases in violent crime. So why on earth are gun lovers loading up on bullets and more guns  and why is the NRA clearing the legal path for them to go on buying sprees?

In March, the FBI conducted 3.7 million background checks for Americans wanting to buy guns. Thats the highest number recorded since such background checks were launched 22 years ago. In addition, more than 2 million guns were purchased last month, many by first-time buyers alone

Sales are spurred by a fear of the breakdown of civil society. But the truth is that by arming themselves, buyers only heighten the overall level of anxiety and lower the level of safety that everyone deserves.

In Canada, the COVID-19 virus has set off some panic-buying, with shoppers worried about running short of ammo and other gun supplies, most of which come from the U.S. Even today, gun stores here are still selling their products, although you must order in advance and pick up your ammo or gun supplies at the door or by delivery.

Pro-gun lobby groups, such as the Canadian Coalition for Firearms Rights, the Canadian Sporting Arms and Ammunition Association and the National Firearms Association, talk about protecting firearm rights and work hard to oppose any move to restrict gun sales. Thankfully, in fact theres no such thing as firearm rights in Canada.

And on social media Canadian gun enthusiasts are rejoicing these days in the COVID-19 crisis diverting Ottawas attentions away from its much-welcomed plan to restrict sales of military-style assault rifles.

Instead of riling up their members, Canadian gun lobbies should be telling their followers to calm down, hunker down and put aside for now their fight with Ottawa over gun controls.

Surely thats not too much to ask in these unprecedented and stressful times.
Prince Edward was joined by a string of celebrities as he congratulated recent recipients of the Duke of Edinburgh Gold Award.

The Earl of Wessex, 56, praised their achievement in a video message that was shared on the official Royal Family Twitter account. In a separate post stars including Marvin Humes, Hugh Bonneville and Judy Murray added their well-wishes.

More than 8,000 new Gold Award holders had their official presentation ceremonies at St James's Palace and Buckingham Palace were cancelled because of the coronavirus pandemic.

Last year Prince Edward was joined by his niece Princess Eugenie in hosting the Buckingham Palace event.

The Earl of Wessex, 56, praised their achievement in a video message that was shared on the official Royal Family Twitter account, pictured

Edward, who has been a UK trustee for the Duke of Edinburgh's Award since 1988, told the young people they should 'feel justifiably proud of what you've achieved'.

He added: 'As some of you are aware, we regrettably had to cancel the Gold Award ceremonies at St James's Palace in the middle of March, and now we've lost the ones planned for Buckingham Palace in May - for which I'm very sorry.

'However, I can assure you we will do everything we can to reschedule as soon as the time is right.

'In the meantime, I and a few others wanted to congratulate you on achieving your Gold Duke of Edinburgh's Award.'

In a separate post stars including Judy Murray (pictured) added their well-wishes

Marvin Humes (left) and Hugh Bonneville (right) also recorded video messages to share

The posts were shared on Twitter account as a way to celebrate Gold Award holders

Other stars in the video included presenters Chris Tarrant and Gaby Roslin, and actors Larry Lamb and Iain Glen.

The celebrities were due to be guest presenters at the award ceremonies this spring.

Edward, the youngest son of the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh, joked about the gruelling challenges of the Gold Award, saying: 'There were probably times when you were doing it when you were wondering 'Why?', and, if it was anything like mine, it was probably halfway through the expedition.'

He added: 'I know that lots of you are out there using your volunteering skills and life experiences to contribute to efforts in your local communities, especially supporting the vulnerable and the isolated. Thank you so much.'

More than 8,000 new Gold Award holders had their official presentation ceremonies at St James's Palace and Buckingham Palace were cancelled because of the coronavirus pandemic. Last year Prince Edward was joined by his niece Princess Eugenie at the event, pictured

A Buckingham Palace spokeswoman said: 'For the almost 8,000 young people who were due to be welcomed by the earl at the official presentation ceremonies at St James's Palace and Buckingham Palace this spring, it is hoped that the videos will provide a chance for them to celebrate their brilliant achievement virtually, at this challenging time.'

Edward's father Prince Philip set up The Duke of Edinburgh's Award in 1956. It has become one of the country's best-known youth self-improvement schemes for 14 to 24-year-olds.

More than six million people across the globe have taken part to try to gain their Bronze, Silver and Gold Awards.

The earl has been a UK Trustee of The Duke of Edinburgh's Award since 1988.
The All India Cine Workers



Association (AICWA) on Wednesday wrote to Maharashtra Chief Minister Uddhav Thackeray seeking financial assistance for its workers who have lost their livelihood due to the COVID-19 lockdown.

In his letter, AICWA president Suresh S Gupta said the Indian film industry that generates revenue to the tune of Rs 2 lakh crore was unable to feed a large chunk of its labourers who were on daily wages.

There were a few film stars and directors who have come forward to support families of such labourers but that was not enough as there are lakhs of them, he said.

As the lockdown was now extended till May 3, the AICWA requested the state government to provide Rs 5,000 per month and monthly essentials to family of each worker.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Premier Doug Ford is putting the lives of vulnerable seniors at risk by delaying a measure to slow the deadly spread of COVID-19 in nursing homes by one week, critics charge.

Despite the premier declaring that the illness is spreading like wildfire in long-term care, Fords measure to restrict staff to working in just one nursing home wont take effect until April 22 and will be in effect for only 14 days.

You bring the bucket a week from now to a wildfire thats raging today? Lives are at stake here, NDP Leader Andrea Horwath said after details of the emergency order became public Wednesday.

Horwath also said there is a giant loophole in the emergency order that exempts staff sent by temp agencies to nursing homes.

The time lag was not mentioned by Ford or Long-Term Care Minister Merrilee Fullerton at their news conference Wednesday, where the premier spoke with urgency about the need to fortify the iron ring of protection around nursing-home residents.

At least 144 people who live in Ontario nursing homes have died from COVID-19, representing about 40 per cent of the official provincial tally. The 65-bed Pinecrest home in Bobcaygeon, for example, has lost 29 residents. More than 800 of the provinces COVID-19 cases are in nursing homes, split between residents and staff. There are outbreaks in more than 100 facilities.

Other new measures in what Ford called an all-out plan include hospital SWAT teams being sent to nursing homes with severe outbreaks to boost infection control and help care for residents, along with increased testing in nursing homes to better understand how the virus is spreading in close confines.

Were throwing everything we got at our long-term care homes, Ford said. Well spare no expense.

Ontarios chief medical officer of health, Dr. David Williams, said it takes time to implement the prohibition against nurses, personal support workers, kitchen staff and cleaners working in more than one nursing home.

I dont have evidence that it contributed extensively thus far to the spread of the infection, added Williams, who had previously recommended workers not hop from one home to another.

Opposition parties, which have refrained from strong criticism of Fords Progressive Conservative government in a spirit of collaboration during the pandemic, said the restriction should have been put in place sooner given the urgency of the situation.

The bottom line is that the government has been slow to react to the 114 outbreaks and counting in Ontario, compared to B.C. and Quebec, which reacted quicker with expanded testing and emergency orders to limit staff movement, said Green Leader Mike Schreiner.

Liberal Leader Steven Del Duca said Ford is responsible for chaos in long-term care.

Starting this plan in a week rather than immediately is ineptitude that will cost lives, he warned.

Fullerton, a former doctor, maintained the government has acted swiftly and decisively in recent weeks to restrict visitors to nursing homes, improve screening of staff and boost cleaning protocols.

There were no details, however, on the number of teams being sent to an unknown number of nursing homes in need of assistance. Fullerton promised that would happen within 24 to 48 hours.

Its already happening in some areas where the local hospitals have rallied, said Fullerton, who could not provide examples.

Horwath said the lack of specifics does not inspire confidence. They are making it up on the fly, she charged.

The Ontario Hospital Association said its member hospitals, which have not seen a surge in patients that had been feared, are pleased to provide reinforcements to help nursing homes overwhelmed by the COVID-19 crisis.

Given these extraordinary circumstances, Ontario hospitals are deepening their collaboration with health system partners to prevent the unnecessary loss of life in these settings, said association president Anthony Dale.

As heartbreaking stories continue to emerge, time is of the essence. Our success or failure as a province in coping with this pandemic will be determined by how well we collaborate as a single, interdependent system to support those who need help the most.

In Ottawa, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said the dire situation in nursing homes across the country will be high on the agenda in his weekly teleconference with premiers and territorial leaders Thursday.

We all need to do better, Trudeau said.

The health crisis has brought conditions within long-term care homes into stark relief, one federal official told the Star.

COVID has exposed a kind of shameful, tragic truth about our society, that we dont do a very good job of looking after our elderly, said the official, who spoke on background.

One of the lasting legacies that ought to come out of this is how do we improve standards and services in elder care.

Ford agreed that the pandemic has revealed cracks in the system that will need to be fixed.

This is a wake-up call to the world, he said.

Read more about:
Featured stories

Gabes in Akron refuses to close despite order from Summit Co. Public Health (WEWS Channel 5)

Cuyahoga County considering 15% spending cuts, including contracts, purchases and staff hours (cleveland.com)

Ohio AG files price-gouging lawsuit against Chagrin Falls man accused of hoarding N95 masks needed for coronavirus response (cleveland.com)

New report by Cleveland Clinic doctor gives glimpse into why coronavirus patients die (cleveland.com)

Social distancing dramatically changed Ohios coronavirus outlook. Could the U.S. have done even better? (cleveland.com)

Coronavirus in Ohio

Ohio's reported coronavirus cases are spread across these 86 counties.Rich Exner, cleveland.com

Ohio coronavirus deaths increase by 50, peak still expected Sunday: Gov. Mike DeWines Tuesday, April 14 briefing (cleveland.com)

Mapping Ohios 7,280 coronavirus cases, updates and trends (cleveland.com)

Fourth inmate dies at sole federal prison in Ohio as coronavirus spreads among inmates, staff (cleveland.com)

28 county jails inmates across Ohio have tested positive for coronavirus, 46 are in isolation and 280 are quarantined, state says (cleveland.com)

'An existential threat: Ohios restaurant, hotel, and salon industries detail economic devastation from the coronavirus crisis (cleveland.com)

Pressure from Republicans mounts on Gov. Mike DeWine to loosen coronavirus restrictions (cleveland.com)

Why Ohio widened criteria for counting coronavirus cases, what other states are doing, and the difference in numbers (cleveland.com)

Michigan coronavirus cases pass 25,000, as governor bans visits between neighbors or vacation homes (cleveland.com)

NIH launches nationwide coronavirus antibody test trial to find true magnitude of pandemic (cleveland.com)

How remdesivir limits replication of coronavirus: New study shares insight into anti-viral drug (cleveland.com)

Coronavirus 'fingerprints shows virus RNA travels on shoes -- but that doesnt mean the floor is contagious (cleveland.com)

An Ohio doctor came up with an idea to help with ventilator shortages (cleveland.com)

Crime

Cleveland Heights man cited twice in three days for violating Ohio Gov. Mike DeWines stay-at home-order after two large house parties (cleveland.com)

Cleveland police issue first citation for violation of Ohios stay-at-home order to beauty supply store (cleveland.com)

Ohio Supreme Court overturns appeals court, reinstates Parma arsonists guilty pleas (cleveland.com)

Gunman chased man into Cleveland yard before fatally shooting him, police say (cleveland.com)

17-year-old accused of fatally shooting mothers boyfriend in Akron, police say (cleveland.com)

Man arrested in roommates stabbing death in Clevelands Edgewater neighborhood, police say (cleveland.com)

Concord Township double murder suspect arraigned on 18 charges (News-Herald)

Man robs bank near Clevelands Playhouse Square (cleveland.com)

Cleveland / Cuyahoga County

These graphics show the day-to-day changes in total coronavirus cases reported in Ohio.Rich Exner, cleveland.com

Cleveland records a 6th death from COVID-19 coronavirus, 19 new cases (cleveland.com)

Cleveland awarded more than $19M to address COVID-19 coronavirus economic fallout (cleveland.com)

Cuyahoga County Council approves $5 million for PPE, other needs related to coronavirus crisis (cleveland.com)

Greater Cleveland RTA projecting big losses in sales tax revenues, fares (cleveland.com)

Cuyahoga Countys computer system overhaul is now $10M-plus over budget (cleveland.com)

New Cleveland company gets federal approval to produce ventilators during coronavirus pandemic (cleveland.com)

Greater Cleveland Partnership forms committee to plan for emergence from coronavirus crisis, freezes hiring (cleveland.com)

University Hospitals receives $5 million in donations to fight coronavirus (cleveland.com)

No nonstop flights between Cleveland Hopkins and New York City for now due to coronavirus pandemic (cleveland.com)

MetroHealth video shows how hospital tests for coronavirus (cleveland.com)

Mike DeWine vs. Donald Trump, Chris Quinn on subscriptions: This Week in the CLE (cleveland.com)

Cleveland Hopkins Airport to get $46 million from federal stimulus package (WKYC Channel 3)

Local news East

Health crisis deepens into employment as Cleveland Heights announces layoffs of over 100 city workers (cleveland.com)

Portage County judge wont lose law license after drunken-driving crash, Ohio Supreme Court says (cleveland.com)

Bedford Heights-based nursing home company agrees to pay $10 million to resolve Justice Department claims of false billing (cleveland.com)

Shaker Heights proceeds with issue of $3.4 million in notes for street, sewer improvements (cleveland.com)

Kent State to hold online spring graduation ceremony due to coronavirus (cleveland.com)

'I want you to survive: South Euclid women work together to make masks for all (cleveland.com)

Local news West

23 A Special Wish and Lakewood Fire and police give Lakewood boy a birthday parade, April 14, 2020

Parma laying off more than 40 employees with additional tough choices expected (cleveland.com)

Lakewood Fire Departments birthday parade for 5-year-old resident diagnosed with leukemia draws big smiles (photos) (cleveland.com)

Cedar Point will honor 2020 season passes in 2021, because of coronavirus uncertainty (cleveland.com)

Brecksville temporarily allows coronavirus workers to park RVs in driveways; updates from Broadview Heights, Brecksville-Broadview Heights & North Royalton schools (cleveland.com)

Akron / Canton area

Akron-Summit County fund to address coronavirus crisis nears $1.3 million, to distribute $185,000 (cleveland.com)

Medina County Domestic Relations Court gets grant to hold video hearings during coronavirus pandemic (cleveland.com)

Medina City Council discusses Love Dash program to aid residents during coronavirus crisis (cleveland.com)

Hey, Medina County: Get off your couch, put on some decent clothes and smile for the camera! (cleveland.com)

State

Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine delays three executions, again citing inability to get new lethal-injection drugs (cleveland.com)

Ohio Supreme Court: State must present voting access ballot measure as single issue (cleveland.com)

ECOT legal battle continues as Ohio Supreme Court accepts appeal (cleveland.com)

Ohio Supreme Court reinstates previously disqualified state legislative candidate (cleveland.com)

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WFH for Private offices in Delhi, restaurants & bars to be shut as Omicron-led to sudden rise in Covid cases

Lata Mangeshkar admitted to ICU in Mumbai Hospital after testing positive for Covid

USCIRF criticism of religious segregation at Gujarat hospital based on 'misguided' report

India

pti-PTI

New Delhi, Apr 16: India on Wednesday came down hard on the US Commission on International Religious Freedom for its criticism of the country based on a "misguided" report that COVID-19 patients in a hospital in Ahmedabad were segregated on the basis of their religious identities.

The US Commission expressed concerns over the way India is fighting the coronavirus pandemic following a media report that a government-run hospital in Ahmedabad segregated the infected patients on the basis of their religions.

"As if its peremptory commentary on religious freedom in India is not enough, the USCIRF is now spreading misguided reports on the professional medical protocols followed to deal with spread of COVID-19 in India," MEA Spokesperson Anurag Srivastava said.

He said no segregation of patients is being done in the civil hospital on the basis of religion as clarified by the Gujarat government.

Srivastava said the USCIRF "must stop adding religious colour to our national goal of fighting the pandemic and distract from larger efforts".

Earlier in a tweet, the Commission said it was concerned over the reports of Hindu and Muslim patients being separated in the hospital.

"Such actions only help to further increase ongoing stigmatization of Muslims in #India and exacerbate false rumors of Muslims spreading #COVID19," it said.

The USCIRF had earlier criticised India on the Citizenship (Amendment) Act.
Army chief General Manoj Mukund Naravane will visit Kashmir on Thursday for a security review, amid the national lockdown and an unusual spike in cease-fire violations by Pakistan army along the Line of Control, a senior officer said on Wednesday on condition of anonymity.

This will be the army chiefs first visit to a forward area after the lockdown was imposed to halt the spread of the coronavirus disease (Covid-19), he said, adding that the chief will be accompanied by minimum staff. He will return to Delhi on Friday.

As reported by Hindustan Times on April 8, there has been an unusual spike in cease-fire violations by the Pakistan army on the LoC this year to help infiltrators sneak into Jammu and Kashmir compared to border violations in the previous years.

The neighbouring army has carried out more ceasefire violations during January-March this year compared to the corresponding periods of the previous two years.

Pakistan violated the ceasefire 1,144 times between January and March), with the highest number of violations (411) being recorded last month when Covid-19 cases started peaking globally. The Pakistan army violated the cease-fire 685 times in 2019 and 627 times in 2018 for the period January to March.

Last Friday, the Indian Army targeted Pakistani positions facing Kupwaras Keran sector across the LoC with artillery guns and caused severe damage to Pakistani army posts, terror launch pads and an ammunition dump.

The fire assault was the Indian Armys response to an unprovoked ceasefire violation by the neighbouring army.

Five commandos belonging to an elite army Special Forces (SF) unit were killed in action along the LoC in the same sector in Kashmir on April 5 during an intense close-quarters battle with an equal number of terrorist infiltrators who were all eliminated.
So long as there is no outward sign of spoilage (such as bulging or rust), or visible spoilage when you open it (such as cloudiness, moldiness or rotten smells), your canned fruits, vegetables and meats will remain as delicious and palatable as the day you bought them for years (or in the case of, say, Vienna sausages at least as good as they were to begin with). The little button on the top of jarred goods, which will bulge if there has been significant bacterial action inside the jar, is still the best way to tell if the contents are going to be all right to eat. Depending on storage, that could be a year or a decade. Similarly, cans of soda will keep their fizz for years, glass bottles for up to a year and plastic bottles for a few months. (Most plastics are gas-permeable.)

Oils, even rancidity-prone unrefined oils, stored in sealed cans are nearly indestructible as well (as evidenced by the two-gallon tin of roasted sesame oil that Ive been working through since 2006). Oils in sealed glass bottles, less so. Oil in open containers can vary greatly in shelf life, but all will last longer if you dont keep them near or above your stovetop, where heat can get to them.

How do you tell if your oil is good? The same way you would with most foods: Follow your nose. Old oil will start to develop metallic, soapy or in some cases  such as with canola oil  fishy smells. Dont trust your nose? Put a drop on your fingertip and squeeze it. Rancid oil will feel tacky as opposed to slick.

Also from the oil-and-vinegar aisle: Salad dressings will last for months or over a year in the fridge, especially if they come in bottles with narrow squeeze openings (as opposed to open-mouthed jars).

Mustard lasts forever. Ketchup will start to turn color before the year is out, but will still remain palatable. Contrary to popular belief, mayonnaise  especially when it doesnt contain ingredients like fresh lemon juice or garlic  has an exceptionally long shelf life. (High concentrations of fat, salt and acid are all enemies of bacteria and mold.)

The international aisle is a den of long-lasting sauces, pickles and condiments. Ive yet to find the quality inflection point for oyster sauce, pickled chiles, chile sauces (like sambal oelek or Sriracha), fermented bean sauces (like hoisin or Sichuan broad-bean chile paste) or fish sauce. Soy sauce has a reputation for longevity, but I keep mine in the refrigerator to fend off the fishy aromas that can start to develop after a few months in the pantry.

We all know what a rotten egg smells like, right? Why else would it be a benchmark for describing so many other bad smells? But how many times have you actually smelled one: Once? Twice? Never? Probably never, at least according to the impromptu poll I conducted on Twitter. Thats because it takes a long time for eggs to go bad.
New homes: Work on a major residential site in Kilternan has been given the go-ahead

An Bord Pleanala has given the green light to fast-track plans to construct 197 residential units at a site in Kilternan in south Co Dublin.

The appeals board has granted planning permission to receivers Declan Taite and Anne O'Dwyer in spite of concerns from Dun Laoghaire County Council over the plan for Glenamuck Rd and Enniskerry Rd. The proposal is made up of 62 houses, 115 apartments and 20 duplex apartments, plus a creche.

Mr Taite and Ms O'Dwyer are receivers over certain assets of Michael Doran and Martin Doran. In its recommendation to the appeals board, the council found that the proposal would be premature due to the existing deficiencies in the road network. However, the appeals board concluded the plan would not seriously injure residential amenities.
Source: Xinhua| 2020-04-15 17:58:00|Editor: huaxia

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Members of the medical assistance team from the Peking Union Medical College Hospital wave after arriving at Beijing Capital International Airport in Beijing, capital of China, April 15, 2020. (Xinhua/Zhang Yuwei)

WUHAN, April 15 (Xinhua) -- The last medical assistance team started leaving Hubei Province Wednesday as the COVID-19 epidemic in the hard-hit province has been subdued.

The medical team consisting of over 180 medical workers from the Peking Union Medical College Hospital arrived in the provincial capital of Wuhan on Jan. 26.

Among the total, 179 medics left Wuhan Wednesday, and six will continue to stay there to assist local medical personnel in the treatment of patients.

"There are still a small number of patients who have not fully recovered. We hope they can get better as soon as possible," said Guo Fan, a member of the medical team assisting the Tongji Hospital in Wuhan.

The medical team treated 109 critically ill patients admitted to the designated hospital.

"I have left home for over 80 days, I'm looking forward to seeing my family," said Guo.

A farewell ceremony was held in the early morning in Zhonghe International Hotel, where the medical team stayed in Wuhan.

"They worked very hard. I often saw many fall asleep while having breakfast. They deserve our heartfelt gratitude," said Liu Yanxia, a kitchen helper in the hotel, who left her post to see off the medical team.

Liu Chunhong, 56, is a community volunteer in Wuhan. He and another four volunteers drove to the hotel to bid farewell to the medical team.

"The medical personnel have sacrificed a lot for Wuhan. I come here to express my appreciation," said Liu, who put on a volunteer vest with names of the team members signed on it. "I will keep this vest permanently as a souvenir."

After the ceremony, the medical workers headed for Wuhan Tianhe International Airport at around 10:50 a.m., with police motorcycles and cars escorting the buses and local residents lining the streets and waving goodbye to them.

GONE BUT REMEMBERED

Many citizens also came to the airport to bid farewell to the batch of medical personnel. Doctors and nurses received several souvenirs, including local signature snacks, books, and a special boarding pass.

"The withdrawal of the last medical assistance team shows that the epidemic is under well control in Hubei. I am very happy to see the victory day against the epidemic," said Li Tong, a nurse who was dispatched from Beijing to Wuhan on Feb. 7.

"There were so many unforgettable moments during my 69 days here. Wuhan is my second hometown. I hope it gets better and better," said Li.

Ma Xiaowei, head of the National Health Commission, also spoke highly of the medics for their extraordinary contributions to the fight against the epidemic.

"The assistance team was one of the first medical teams to arrive in Wuhan and the last to leave. They are a team of heroes," said Ma.

Since the virus outbreak, over 42,000 medical workers from across the country were dispatched to aid Hubei to curb the spread of the epidemic.

"Medics, like diseases, have no borders. They have done a wonderful job and that everyone is grateful to them. I hope that all these doctors who came to help our city will be able to rest a little," said Frederick Simon, a French national living in Wuhan.

"They have all my respect, recognition and admiration for their sacrifices," he added.

While reporting their departure at the airport, Pablo Diez, a journalist with Spanish newspaper ABC, said he was deeply impressed by their selfless dedication to the fight against the epidemic.

"The doctors and nurses are the real heroes. Everyone's lives are in their hands. I want to thank them," said Pablo Diez.

"As for the people of Wuhan, we have to support them and to honor them because they have gone through a challenging time," the journalist added.
[April 14, 2020] Global Semiconductor Chemical Vapor Deposition (CVD) Equipment Market 2019-2023 | Rising Demand for Semiconductor Lasers to Boost Growth | Technavio

Technavio has been monitoring the semiconductor chemical vapor deposition (cvd) equipment market and it is poised to grow by USD 2.88 bn during 2019-2023, progressing at a CAGR of almost 8% 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. This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20200414005783/en/ Technavio has announced its latest market research report titled Global Semiconductor Chemical Vapor Deposition (CVD) Equipment Market 2019-2023 (Graphic: Business Wire) Technavio suggests three forecast scenarios (optimistic, probable, and pessimistic) considering the impact of COVID-19. Please Request Latest Free Sample Report on COVID-19 Impact The market is concentrated, and the degree of concentration will accelerate during the forecast period. AIXTRON, Applied Materials (News - Alert), Inc., ASM International, LAM RESEARCH CORPORATION, and Tokyo Electron Limited, are some of the major market participants. Although the rising demand for semiconductor lasers will offer immense growth opportunities, growing demand for ALD equipment will challenge the growth of the market participants. 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. Rising demand for semiconductor lasers has been instrumental in driving the growth of the market. However, growing demand for ALD equipment might hamper market growth. Semiconductor Chemical Vapor Deposition (CVD) Equipment Market 2019-2023 : Segmentation Semiconductor chemical vapor deposition (CVD) equipment market is segmented as below: End-user Memory Foundry IDM

Geographic Landscape Americas APAC EMEA.

To learn more about the global trends impacting the future of market research, download a free sample: https://www.technavio.com/talk-to-us?report=IRTNTR30872



Semiconductor Chemical Vapor Deposition (CVD) Equipment 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 semiconductor chemical vapor deposition (CVD) equipment market report covers the following areas:

Semiconductor Chemical Vapor Deposition (CVD) Equipment Market Size

Semiconductor Chemical Vapor Deposition (CVD) Equipment Market Trends

Semiconductor Chemical Vapor Deposition (CVD) Equipment Market Industry Analysis This study identifies growing market for carbon nanotubes as one of the prime reasons driving the semiconductor chemical vapor deposition (CVD) equipment market growth during the next few years. Semiconductor Chemical Vapor Deposition (CVD) Equipment Market 2019-2023 : Vendor Analysis We provide a detailed analysis of around 25 vendors operating in the semiconductor chemical vapor deposition (CVD) equipment market, including some of the vendors such as AIXTRON, Applied Materials, Inc., ASM (News - Alert) International, LAM RESEARCH CORPORATION, and Tokyo Electron Limited. Backed with competitive intelligence and benchmarking, our research reports on the semiconductor chemical vapor deposition (CVD) equipment market are designed to provide entry support, customer profile and M&As as well as go-to-market strategy support. Register for a free trial today and gain instant access to 17,000+ market research reports. Technavio's SUBSCRIPTION platform Semiconductor Chemical Vapor Deposition (CVD) Equipment Market 2019-2023 : Key Highlights CAGR of the market during the forecast period 2019-2023

Detailed information on factors that will assist semiconductor chemical vapor deposition (cvd) equipment market growth during the next five years

Estimation of the semiconductor chemical vapor deposition (cvd) equipment market size and its contribution to the parent market

Predictions on upcoming trends and changes in consumer behavior

The growth of the semiconductor chemical vapor deposition (cvd) equipment market

Analysis of the market's competitive landscape and detailed information on vendors

Comprehensive details of factors that will challenge the growth of semiconductor chemical vapor deposition (cvd) equipment market vendors Table Of Contents : PART 01: EXECUTIVE SUMMARY PART 02: SCOPE OF THE REPORT 2.1 Preface

2.2 Preface

2.3 Currency conversion rates for US$ 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 END-USER Market segmentation by end-user

Comparison by end-user

Memory - Market size and forecast 2018-2023

Foundry - Market size and forecast 2018-2023

IDM - Market size and forecast 2018-2023

Market opportunity by end-user PART 07: CUSTOMER LANDSCAPE PART 08: GEOGRAPHIC LANDSCAPE Geographic segmentation

Geographic comparison

APAC - Market size and forecast 2018-2023

Americas - Market size and forecast 2018-2023

EMEA - Market size and forecast 2018-2023

Key leading countries

Market opportunity PART 09: DRIVERS AND CHALLENGES Market drivers

Market challenges PART 10: TRENDS Increasing investments in fabs

Growing market for carbon nanotubes

Rising investments in thin-film solar photovoltaics PART 11: VENDOR LANDSCAPE Overview

Landscape disruption PART 12: VENDOR ANALYSIS Vendors covered

Vendor classification

Market positioning of vendors

AIXTRON

Applied Materials, Inc.

ASM International

LAM RESEARCH CORPORATION

Tokyo Electron Limited PART 13: APPENDIX Research methodology

List of abbreviations 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/20200414005783/en/

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Kansas Supreme Court strikes down measure that allowed large church gatherings

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The Kansas Supreme Court has ruled against a legislative effort to allow for houses of worship to hold large gatherings, upholding an earlier executive order from the governor.

In a per curiam decision released Saturday, the day before Easter, the states highest court concluded that the state Legislative Coordinating Council did not have the authority to revoke Governor Laura Kellys order that banned gatherings of more than 10 people.

The LCC purported to revoke one executive order. We are asked to determine whether it acted within its lawful authority. We hold that it did not, ruled the court.

As ultimately acknowledged by all counsel during oral arguments today, even if we accept House Concurrent Resolution 5025 as an otherwise valid exercise of legislative authority, its plain text did not authorize the LCC to revoke Executive Order 20-18. That acknowledgment ends this controversy.

The state supreme court stressed that their decision was not meant to address any other concerns with the executive order, including questions of alleged religious liberty violations.

And finally, it is worth emphasizing a point clarified at the outset of the majority opinion. Today's decision does not decide the religious liberty dimensions of this dispute, concluded the opinion.

All the parties, including the legislative parties, agreed that those arguments and claims are not properly before this court in this action, and must wait to another day for resolution.

Last week, Kelly announced that she was expanding a statewide ban on gatherings of more than 10 people to include religious services, which had previously been exempted.

In a statement, Kelly explained that it was a difficult decision to reach given that Easter was only days away, but considered it necessary to curb the spread of coronavirus.

As Holy Week gets underway  and with Kansas rapidly approaching its projected peak infection rate in the coming weeks  the risk for a spike in COVID-19 cases through church gatherings is especially dangerous, said Kelly.

Ive said repeatedly during this crisis that we will adjust to circumstances as they develop to make sure we do everything we can to protect Kansans.

Soon after the expanded order took effect, the LCC overturned the measure, arguing that the limitation on houses of worship was constitutionally problematic.

Ive received an absolute outpouring of concerns from people of faith. And it's not because they were planning on attending a worship service for Easter, stated Kansas Senate President Susan Wagle, as reported by KCUR.

They think its totally inappropriate for the governor to tell them that they cannot worship in a way and in the manner that they choose to on Sunday.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is set to release nearly 700 migrants who are at most risk of a coronavirus outbreak at their detention centers including immigrants who are elderly, pregnant, or have underlying conditions.

ICE said they also took into account the danger to the public and flight risk of the 693 detainees they were releasing.

The decision comes on the heel of mounting pressure from Democrats and pro-immigrant groups who have demanded the mass liberation of more than 34,000 who are incarcerated and remain at risk of contracting the deadly coronavirus.

Acting Deputy Homeland Security Director Ken Cuccinelli revealed on Tuesday that the agency had initially chosen a small group of 160 people who are over the age of 60 or pregnant.

ICE then conducted a study of the rest of its prison population and found that hundreds of others who suffered lung illness or other medical conditions also qualified to be released.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is set to release nearly 700 migrants who are at most risk of a coronavirus outbreak at their detention centers including immigrants who are elderly, pregnant, or have underlying conditions. Pictured: Sibling protesters gather outside an ICE facility in Aurora, Colorado, Thursday to demand the release of their father

ICE announce Tuesday it will be releasing 693 undocumented immigrants who are at risk of being infected with the coronavirus. Pictured above are ICE agents during a worksite operation on August 7, 2019

'As a special response to this particular crisis, ICE has instructed its field offices to further assess for the purpose of considering releases of certain individuals deemed to be at greater risk of exposure,' Cuccinelli told reporters, according to Fox News.

'ICE continues to reevaluate all individuals in custody who make up vulnerable populations and they've been modifying practices based on recommendations of the CDC.'

The federal immigration enforcement agency is currently holding 33,800 people who unlawfully entered the United States, but more than half of the population have never been charged of a criminal offense or convicted of a crime.

Though the Trump administration has effectively shut down new asylum claims during the pandemic, it's still holding people who were apprehended months or years earlier for civil violations, including over 5,800 people who passed government asylum screenings.

Those who are eligible to be released will be subjected to several restrictions, including the use of a monitoring device.

The ravaging illness has caused the death 26,059 people and sickened 609,696 in the United States.

Supporters and family members protest outside an ICE detention center in Colorado where undocumented migrants are being held. Democrats and immigration activists have called on the U.S. government to release more than 30,000 detainees due to fears of the coronavirus outbreak

As of Sunday, ICE had reported that 77 detainees had tested positive for the coronavirus.

The most recent case is that of a 40-year-old Mexican man who was being held at an ICE detention facility in Livingston, Texas.

Nine leaders at evangelical Christian organizations urged the Trump administration to release people from immigration detention facilities 'who do not pose a threat to public safety' during the coronavirus pandemic, particularly those who are elderly or otherwise at higher risk for contracting COVID-19.

In a letter dated Monday to Chad Wolf, acting secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, the evangelicals called for alliances with religious and other local groups to help find released detainees 'safe accommodations in which to `shelter in place for as long as such practices are advised.' Such actions to aid social distancing in detention, the faith leaders wrote, would help staff as well as detained migrants.

'Our concern is rooted in our Christian belief that each human life is made in the image of God and thus precious, and, like you, we want to do everything possible to minimize the loss of life as a result of this pandemic,' the prominent evangelicals wrote.

The evangelicals signing the letter said they would 'encourage the many churches and ministries within our networks to provide any assistance they can' to help released detainees shelter safely.

The letter was signed by Russell Moore, president of the Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention; Walter Kim, president of the National Association of Evangelicals; and Samuel Rodriguez, president of the National Hispanic Christian Leadership Council, among others. The signatories are senior members of the Evangelical Immigration Table, a group of Christian leaders who support comprehensive immigration reform.

Rodriguez delivered a prayer at President Donald Trump's inauguration and has advised Trump on immigration, but has previously criticized some elements of the administration's immigration policy.
Pauline Hanson has called for the Australian government to slash its funding the the World Health Organisation over its handling of the coronavirus outbreak.

The One Nation leader slammed the UN agency as a 'waste of money' and said it's full of 'lefty elitists pushing their own agenda'.

Her comments come after US President Donald Trump suspended funding to the under-fire World Health Organisation (WHO), accusing the organisation of 'severely mismanaging and covering up the spread of the coronavirus'.

Australian taxpayers paid the WHO $AUD63million in 2018 - vastly more than China's $38 million.

Pauline Hanson has called for the Australian government to slash its funding the the World Health Organisation over its handling of the coronavirus outbreak (Pictured: People collect parcels after the easter weekend during COVID-19)

Australia's is the eighth biggest donor to the World Health Organisation by voluntary contributions, while China is 21st, 2018 financial figures show. The countries also pay compulsory dues each year. In 2018, China paid $28 million and Australia $9.3million. But China paid more than Australia over a two year period, thanks to hefty fees

During an interview on SkyNews on Wednesday, Ms Hanson said the WHO had been 'full of people abusing it and buying luxury cars and travelling first class around the world' since 1996.

'I dont think anything has changed,' she said.

'I think it's a waste of money...it's full of lefty elitists who are actually just pushing their own agenda for a one world government.

'I don't trust them, I don't think we need to be involved in this - save our ($63million), get out of it.

'And think Trump's doing a fantastic job.'

Australian taxpayers have donated vastly more money to the organisation (WHO) than China, according to financial documents.

The size of Australia's voluntary donations to the UN agency, compared with the rest of the world's, are laid bare in WHO financial documents.

The One Nation leader slammed the UN agency as a 'waste of money' during a SkyNews interview on Wednesday and said it's full of 'lefty elitists pushing their own agenda'

US President Donald Trump has slammed the World Health Organisation as too 'China-centric'. Above, WHO Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus (left) and Chinese President Xi Jinping shake hands in Beijing on January 28 ahead of their meeting to discuss how to curb COVID-19

The paperwork outlines how each country makes voluntary contributions to the health agency, on top of compulsory fees.

The latest figures show Australia's voluntary contributions to the WHO in 2018 were more than five times the size of China's.

Australia, population nearly 25 million, paid the UN agency AUD$54.5 million in 2018 - the eight biggest voluntary contribution of 71 member countries.

China, the world's most populous country and home to almost 1.4 billion people, paid a pitiful $9.83million in voluntary donations.

Other rich countries such as France, population 66 million, coughed up $14million in donations and Canada, home to 37.5 million people, paid $41.8million, the documents show.

The United States and the United Kingdom chipped in the biggest voluntary donations with the US paying $AUD436.8million and the UK $318.7million.

Countries are also required to pay the WHO compulsory dues each year in order to remain a part of the organisation.

In 2018, China paid $AUD28.4million in dues, while Australia forked out $9.3million. Overall, that means Australia paid the WHO more money in 2018, $63 million in total to $38.2million.

US President Donald Trump has halted funding to the WHO, with Mr Trumpy claiming the organisation had 'severely mismanaged' the coronavirus. Some of Prime Minister Scott Morrison's own MPs have called for reform in the WHO, saying the UN agency should face a 'reckoning'

But Government sources pointed out that China paid more money than Australia overall through the two year funding period of 2018 and 2019 ($135 million to $106 million) because of China's compulsory dues.

The financial figures can be revealed as senior Federal Government ministers took aim at the WHO's decision to approve China re-opening its 'wet markets' - where the virus is believed to have started.

Treasurer Josh Frydenberg said: 'It's extraordinary that the World Health Organisation sees it fit for these wet markets to continue in China. They shouldn't.

Mr Frydenberg said the WHO played an important role in the Asia-Pacific but 'that doesn't mean that we've agreed with them on everything.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison told Perth radio station 6PR he was 'sympathetic' to Mr Trump's position 'but you don't throw the baby out with the bathwater'.

Liberal MP David Sharma told Sky News on Wednesday that a 'reckoning' was coming for the WHO and described Australia as a 'significant' donor to the agency.

'I think a lot of countries, Australia included, have been less than impressed with the WHO's performance,' Mr Sharma said.

A tweet from the WHO on 24 January which shows it repeating Chinese insistence that the virus did not spread between humans

Australia appears to be finally flattening the infection curve in its battle against COVID-19 after the government decisively chose to ignore the World Health Organisation. (Pictured: medical staff hug in Wuhan before leaving Hubei province this month)

'I think we should make sure we condition our future funding on necessary reforms,' he said.

'We will need to settle on those reforms with a group of other countries, like-minded countries as well.'

Deputy Labor leader Richard Marles told the same network that Australia shouldn't 'abandon' the WHO.

'We should be raising whatever issues we have from inside the organisation. We should not be abandoning the World Health Organisation.

'With everything that's going on at the moment, the idea that we would be walking away from the globe's multilateral response to health issues, I think makes no sense at all.

'There's a conversation that can be had about how the World Health Organisation can be reformed but at the end of the day, we should not be walking away from it.'

Answers were sought Health Department as to how Australia's voluntary contributions to the health body are used.

Daily Mail Australia has been told many of the government's voluntary donations are targeted to particular programs by the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade.

DFAT and a WHO representative were approached for comment.
One of Ireland's leading immunologists has criticised the British government's delay in restricting citizen's movements, as the UK's death toll continues to climb.

As of today, the UK has confirmed 11,329 coronavirus deaths, giving a per capita death rate of 16.9 per 100,000 people.

Ireland has registered 365 deaths, with a per capita rate of 7.4 per 100,000 people.

"We're shocked by what's happening in the UK", says Prof Luke O'Neill, an immunologist at Trinity College Dublin.

"I've got lots of scientist collaborators [in the UK] and their jaws are dropping...twice the death rate of Ireland?

"It could be population density, but that doesn't seem to be the case. The only explanation at the moment has to be shutting things down quickly.

"The UK delayed, and that could be disastrous."

Prof O'Neill attributes the Irish government's swift decisions to close schools and pubs as key factors in preventing asymptomatic infection, and keeping Ireland's outbreak at a relatively manageable level so far.

Ireland's schools closed on 12 March, just three days after St Patrick's Day celebrations were cancelled. The UK didn't follow suit until 20 March.

Irish pubs were closed on 16 March, five days before the UK. In between, more than 250,000 racegoers attended the four-day Cheltenham festival, many of them visitors from Ireland.

Boris Johnson's government then undertook a change in direction and brought in "lockdown" measures four days before Ireland.

Some aren't persuaded by the argument that earlier action has led to lower mortality in Ireland.

Prof Keith Neal, emeritus professor in the epidemiology of infectious diseases at the University of Nottingham, argues that higher numbers of international travellers put the UK at a disadvantage.

"The most likely explanation is we got COVID-19 much earlier than Ireland," he says. "The risk of introduction is related to the number of travellers coming back with an infection.

Story continues

"Although Ireland may have the same number of international travellers per head of population, your risk of first introductions is related to the actual number of travellers.

"The UK is 13 times larger in population than Ireland and London is much more of an international centre and hub than Dublin."

Prof Paul Hunter of the University of East Anglia thinks different demographics need to be considered.

He said: "One possibility is the higher proportion of BAME people in UK as there is some evidence that this group are more likely to get more ill.

"Other factors such as poverty and relative deprivation could also play a part but it's too early to say for certain."

However, the Irish government has no such reservations.

Minister for Health Simon Harris told Sky News: "I think there's no doubt the early introduction of measures in Ireland to restrict movement and cancel mass gatherings has been absolutely essential.

"We've had people look at our modelling here and they tell us we'd be in a very different place in Ireland if we hadn't made those decisions."

Experts appear to agree that the differing death rates in the two neighbouring countries need to be explored - and lessons can still be learnt.

Prof Hunter added: "The underlying mechanisms between the differing mortality rates between the UK and Ireland are still unclear and need to be investigated very carefully to ensure that we do not miss the opportunity to reduce deaths in the UK."
Karnataka Chief Minister B. S. Yediyurappa and Congress leaders Mallikarjun Kharge and DK Shivakumar pay tributes to the architect of the Indian Constitution B.R. Ambedkar on his birth anniversary, at Vidhana Soudha in Bengaluru on Apr 14. (IANS photo)
Former president Barack Obama endorsed Joe Biden on Tuesday, calling on Americans to unite in a "great awakening" in November and offering the presumptive presidential nominee a boost as he seeks to coalesce support in the Democratic Party.

In a 12-minute video posted online that served as part endorsement and part political blueprint, Obama said Biden "has the character and the experience to guide us through one of our darkest times and heal us through a long recovery."
A variety of businesses of different types and sizes are applying for financial aid from Johann Ruperts R1-billion SME fund.

This is according to Business Partners regional general manager Jeremy Lang, who said that all businesses in South Africa are affected by the coronavirus crisis in some way.

The R1-billion Sukuma Relief Programme for SMEs and sole proprietors is administered by Business Partners on behalf of the Rupert family and Remgro.

The nature and size of businesses that have applied for funding are widespread, confirming that all businesses are impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic in some way or form, Lang told MyBroadband.

Industries that seem to be particularly affected are in the following sectors:

Tourism

Hospitality

Events Management

Retail

Manufacturing

Mining

Lang said this is concerning, as these industries employ a large number of people.

Why businesses need funding

Lang said that most of the businesses which applied for support require money to pay salaries and wages during the pandemic  as well as rent on their properties.

This data aligns with the findings of MyBroadbands Working from Home 2020 Survey.

The survey found that many South Africans expect salary or staff cuts at their companies as a result of the national lockdown.

Lang told MyBroadband that Business Partners was still processing applications and could not confirm when its online application portal would be reopened.

We are currently still processing in excess of 10,000 applications we have received, he said.

At this stage, there is unfortunately no specific date confirmed as to when the online application portal may be reopened.

Massive demand

On 7 April, the Sukuma Relief Programme closed access to its online application portal following huge demand from South African businesses.

In the three days which followed the portals launch, the combined value of the applications for the programme reached over R2.8 billion.

This included both completed applications and applications in progress.

Business Partners said the response to the programme showed the situation in South Africa was dire, with thousands of local SMEs in desperate need of assistance.

The programmes funding will be made available to smaller businesses in the form of a grant, which means there will be no repayment obligations.

For larger businesses, there will be a loan component which will have to be repaid at some point in the future.

Business Partners is expected to provide more information regarding the disbursement of funds and affected industries later this week.

Now read: Tool to help South African businesses find support
A study in Brazil using chloroquine was halted as it causes heart complications in patients and killing two, proving it might not be the 'game-changer' it hoped to be.

Since the endorsement of chloroquine in several studies to prove it is 'not anecdotal', a Brazilian test of the drug resulted in shocking results. One group of patients given the anti-malaria drug had cardiac problems caused by taking the drug, which means it may have deadly side effects.

Chloroquine: not the miracle cure we're hoping?

The dosage given to these patients were quite high, and chloroquine is not one of those drugs meant for COVID-19. Experts learned that the treatment is not successful as the anti-malaria drug is an anti-parasitic drug, not an anti-viral.

Brazilians researchers are intent on proving that chloroquine is a safe cure for COVID-19. As many as 440 people were to enrol in the study to prove that results from China were legitimate, hoping the study will yield positive results.

Those who were in the drug trials were given a high dose of chloroquine (600 milligrams 2x a day for 10 days), and a low dose (450 mg 5x a day, double dose on the first take). It was meant as a 'double-blind', so neither the doctors or patients knew what dosage went to whom.

Failure of clinical trials in high dosage

It did not go smoothly, with only 81 patients enrolled who exhibited alarming signs that chloroquine is not a 'game-changer'. Soon after the trials were underway, the treatments went sideways and caused alarm for the researchers.

A few days later, the patients of the high dose group (600 milligrams) were having heart rhythm problems, compared to the low dosers (450 mg.) who fare better.

Soon after the symptoms were detected in the high dosers, two in the group had died but they had an abnormal heart rate known as ventricular tachycardia before getting deceased.

Taking chloroquine or hydroxychloroquine has the side effect of causing irregular heartbeats, caused by altering the electro-impulses in the heart muscle. At times, this is serious and can even be fatal.

The unwitting death of two subjects, with heart problems, cause the high dose to be dropped from the study. A bulletin was issued to avoid high doses for COVID-19 patients.

Also read: Anti-Body Based COVID-19 Drugs May Have More Advantages Than Drug Based-Cures Like Hydroxychloroquine

Is it worth the risk?

Researchers in the study later warned that futures trials should not include high doses to avoid disastrous effects. They posted the findings on April 11 to pre-print database medRxiv, not published in a peer-review journal yet.

One hospital in France stopped giving hydroxychloroquine to one COVID-19 patient as it affects the cardiac cycle, reported News Week.

Chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine are used for treating malaria, works most of the time but can sometimes cause a heart condition 'QT prolongation'. Never use it unless supervised or else it can be fatal for those with heart conditions.

The combination of azithromycin and hydroxychloroquine is also being used in hospitals in the United States, The New York Times reported. There is still a risk of symptoms to worry about. Later, all subjects in the study were in low dose groups, but chloroquine that causes heart complications is now under study if it is truly suitable for treating COVID-19.

Related article: Blood Plasma From COVID-19 Survivors Can Be Used to Fight Infection

@ 2022 HNGN, All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission.
Photo credit: Refraction AI

From Car and Driver

Delivery robots helped deliver food and medicine in Wuhan, China, during the coronavirus-related quarantine.

In the United States, autonomous shuttles from the French company NAVYA have been repurposed as delivery robots to transport COVID-19 tests.

Most of these delivery robots still have human controllers keeping track of them and driving them when needed.

While the Wuhan district in China was under quarantine, news surfaced of robots delivering food and, later, medical supplies. Meanwhile, in the United States, the French company NAVYA configured its autonomous passenger shuttles in Florida to transport COVID-19 tests to the Mayo Clinic from off-site test locations. As the weeks of stay-at-home orders and recommendations slip into months, the delivery robots that were seen as a joke, fad, or nuisance have in some instances found a way into the public consciousness as important tools to combat the spread of coronavirus. The question is, will their usefulness extend post-lockdown?



The novelty of the delivery robot has been in full swing for the past few years. As a lark, people may order something just to have it delivered to their office or home. But for the most part, we still rely on humans to drop off our food and groceries. One simple reason is that a human will come to the door. The robots need you to go outside to grab your food.



Theres also the concern that these cute machines with sandwiches stuffed inside are taking jobs away from people. On the whole, if they gain broad acceptance, it's likely there will be fewer jobs. But these "autonomous" machines arent as autonomous as they seem.

Phantom Auto has made a business out of making sure that self-driving systems have a remote human controller ready to go in case things get complicated. The companys teleoperation system is used to control cars, trucks, forklifts, and even delivery robots. Its currently working with Postmates to make sure those delivery vehicles make it where they need to go.

Story continues

"We provide software that enables delivery robot companies to remotely monitor and/or remotely assist and or remotely drive their fleets of delivery robots from up to thousands of miles away," Phantom Auto co-founder Elliot Katz told Car and Driver. The company is working with other partners on this, but won't give details.



The system uses humans to monitor deliveries and in some cases drive the vehicles when they encounter a situation the robot cant figure out. The remote drivers can handle a few robots at a time monitoring their status and jumping in when needed. Katz says it's sort of like Zoom, but for physical work.

While some of us can work from home, delivery drivers can't. But if they could control a group of delivery robots, they could do their jobs without putting themselves at risk. Right now, that seems like a good idea not just for drivers, but for companies as well as they try to navigate the current situation.

Photo credit: Karl Nielsen / Phantom Auto

For Phantom Auto, that means increased interest in the company. "Supply-chain tech, which is what we are, generally speaking: everything is going to change post-coronavirus," Katz said.

Refraction.ai co-founder and CEO and Matt Johnson-Roberson is figuring out ways to help restaurants that have had to change the way they do business almost overnight. "I'm a huge patron of restaurants," he said, "and I would like all my favorite restaurants to still be around.

One of the ways robotic delivery can help restaurants is by essentially halving the costs of delivery. Most of the main services (UberEats, GrubHub, Seamless) charge up to 30 percent. Refraction is charging 15 percent. But now it has gone beyond reducing friction and saving money for restaurants, Johnson-Robertson, seeing autonomous deliveries as a huge public health benefit, says his company is adjusting its machines to work within the new reality.

The company recently installed UV lights in its vehicles and moved to no-touch. When a robot arrives, the customer receives a text. They reply to that message, and the door of the vehicle opens without requiring the use of a keypad.

Refraction.ai is also investigating grocery delivery and delivering items to elder-care facilities. Grocery deliveries have seen a huge spike in demand as people opt to stay home instead of going out to buy supplies. The issue is that, for senior citizens and those with compromised immune systems, this is potentially the only way they can get food without putting themselves at increased risk. But many services, such as Amazon's Whole Foods, have seen delivery windows booked up while workers are going on strike for better protection, sick pay, and better wages for essentially putting themselves at risk to drop off our food.

Like companies that are working with Phantom Auto, Refraction.ai's robots have human monitors who can take control of the vehicle when needed. They've sent out modem boxes so its drivers can work from home. The company is also taking precautions to help it build robots to keep up with demand.

"We have the different pieces of the robot assembly process on different floors in the building so everybody has their own floor and they're using their own bathroom," Johnson-Robertson said.

In Florida, those autonomous NAVYA vehicles are driving along a set route without interaction with other traffic. They were built to move humans around. Pilot programs in Las Vegas, Nevada, and Ann Arbor, Michigan, shuttled people around at slow speeds as a glimpse into a world where autonomous vehicles move us around cities.

The reality seems to be moving to these types of vehicles offering safe ways to deliver packages while reducing the risk that comes with people going door to door with food, groceries, or other items. As more of these robot delivery machines venture out into the world to deliver food or medicine, communities will become accustomed to their presence.

We tend to mock or fear something that's new. Cell phones and computers were initially owned only by the rich and nerds. Now we're all on our phones and using the computer. We didn't become rich nerds overnight; we just got used to seeing them everywhere until they eventually filled our pockets and sat on a desk in our home. Delivery robots might travel that same path, although at an accelerated pace due to the pandemic.

Right now they seem like a necessity. In the future, they might just be commonplace.

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Fianna Fail and Fine Gaels parliamentary parties will hold separate meetings later today to sign off the details for the joint blueprint for government.

Micheal Martin and Leo Varadkar reached agreement on Tuesday following weeks of talks.

The two parliamentary parties will be briefed on the policy document on Wednesday ahead of engagement with other potential coalition partners.

Following the conclusion of the parliamentary parties, Mr Varadkar and Mr Martin will together approach other party leaders of the Green Party, the Labour Party and the Social Democrats.

The document will be shared with the other parties and the group of Independent TDs.

Statement from Fine Gael:https://t.co/YDFRN5vfLa  Fine Gael (@FineGael) April 14, 2020

Fianna Fails negotiator, Michael McGrath, said the document sets out a number of key missions that an incoming government will need to deal with.

Speaking to RTE Morning Ireland, he said: First and foremost being, of course, dealing with the enormous economic fallout from the Covid-19 crisis, the preparation of a national economic recovery plan, but also drawing on the lessons from the general election and dealing with the issues that people demand.

He said the issues include affordable housing and universal access to health care.

He added: It also sets out a renewed focus on quality-of-life issues, on wellbeing and, critically, from a Fianna Fail perspective, it again reaffirms the vital importance of our education system, of the legitimate aspiration of working towards Irish unity and reaffirming our role as a country that is fully committed to the European Union, and dealing with the challenges that will emerge again from the Brexit negotiations.

Its a foundation document which will be the basis of discussion on a programme for government.

Its not a programme for government, but it is the basis we believe of a negotiation that could ultimately lead to one, and we want other parties now to join us in that process with a view to meeting the enormous challenges that have been presented by the health crisis that were still grappling with.

Expand Close Fianna Fail negotiator Michael McGrath said the document sets out a number of key missions an incoming government will need to deal with (Niall Carson/PA) PA / Facebook

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Whatsapp Fianna Fail negotiator Michael McGrath said the document sets out a number of key missions an incoming government will need to deal with (Niall Carson/PA)

He said that the Fianna Fail and Fine Gael parliamentary party members will receive a copy of the document later on Wednesday.

Asked whether Mr Martin will become the next Taoiseach, Mr McGrath said it was not an issue that was discussed by the negotiating teams.

He added: We are a long way off the formation of a government yet because we need others to join us in that discussion and that is an issue that Im sure has been discussed by the party leaders, and they will address that at the appropriate time, but its not the priority issue for us know.

Justice Minister Charlie Flanagan said the deal between Fine Gael and Fianna Fail is a no brainer but that a lot more work needs to be done in order to form a stable coalition.

We need to move on and see if we can form a government. It has been over two months since the election. I believe it is a no brainer. I very much welcome the proposed deal between the two historic foes.

There will be an equality of authority between Fianna Fail and Fine Gael. There will be an equality of ministers because parties will be entering this historic agreement and doing so on the basis of equality.

Speaking to Newstalk FM, he said: There is a lot of work to be done here. All we have is a framework and a handshake. We have to ensure flesh is put on the bones of the deal.

When asked about who could potentially lose their seat at Cabinet, he said: These issues have not been the subject of discussion and I dont think it is appropriate to get into the personalities of it.

In fact the idea that any particular party leader might go first or second  these issues have not been discussed. They are just the subject of speculation at this stage.
A veteran and established investor who has managed to build up his retirement income to a staggering $400,000 per year has shared his top investing tips so you can get started successfully.

Peter Thornhill, who is the best-selling author of Motivated Money and one of Australia's leading investors, has been working with money since 1982, before 'semi-retiring' so he now only does some public speaking and events.

'I deferred my lifestyle to this point in time, and I've got to say it's a hell of a lot more fun,' Peter said in conversation with the Sydney-based financial advisor Canna Campbell.

But how did he make the money that allowed for an affluent retirement?

Scroll down for video

A veteran and established investor who has managed to build up his retirement income to a staggering $400,000 per year has shared his top investing tips so you can get started (PeterThornhill pictured with Canna Campbell)

Peter Thornhill (pictured), who is the best-selling author of Motivated Money and one of Australia's leading investors, has been working with money since 1982

Mr Thornhill, from Melbourne, said his investments began in the 1980s when he got a job in London at one of the big merchant banks as a private client adviser and was later promoted to director.

'What I learned there has irrevocably changed mine and my wife's lives for the better,' Peter, 72, said.

He explained that the first investment he made was shares in the company he worked for, before he went on to invest in a diversified portfolio of dividend-paying shares elsewhere and slowly built up his portfolio.

'The lesson was that it is all basically about creating an income stream and letting that income stream create all sorts of fabulous opportunities in life,' Peter said.

'It's a bit like taking an avocado, planting it and watching it grow.'

What are Peter's top tips for investors? Peter (pictured with Canna) shared his top tips including spending less than you earn and borrowing less than you can afford 1. Spend less than you earn: This one is absolutely key and will set you up for financial success in the long run. 2. Borrow less than you can afford: This might sound simple, but almost no one does it. 3. Invest in a diversified basket of dividend-paying shares: Own a portfolio of productive businesses which deliver a passive income stream. 4. Use your dividends to buy more shares: The best thing to do with extra dividends is to use them to buy more shares. 5. Keep building your portfolio until your dividends exceed your spending: Use your monthly savings and your increasing dividends to continue growing the portfolio. 6. Retire and live off your portfolio: By this time, you should be able to retire and live off your portfolio. Advertisement

He said the lessons he learned during the 'tough' early years - when he was trying to build a portfolio as well as raise his children - still applied today.

'Spend less than you earn and borrow less than you can afford,' he said.

While they sound obvious, Peter said 'so many' people find it impossible to do.

'If you can stick to those two things alone, then I can guarantee you will have a comfortable lifestyle down the track,' he said.

Peter's philosophy over the years has been to buy shares and build his holdings when he could afford to, until he reached the point where the dividends exceeded his spending and he could live off that passive income.

Canna (pictured) has long subscribed to Peter's ideas that you should spend less than you earn and borrow less than you can afford

'It sounds simple, but you need to live within your means,' he said.

'There have been times in my life when I could invest less, such as when the kids were going to school, and then times where I could work really hard on the investing side of things - when their school fees dropped away.'

Today, Peter said he has a retirement fund of more than $400,000 per annum.

Peter said you absolutely must have defined goals before you start, but you also need to keep an eye open for how you can do things better (pictured with Canna)

For those starting out in the market, he stressed the need for having defined goals, and also to learn from mistakes as it will improve your investment strategy.

'Regularly invest when you can as every little bit adds up,' he said.

'And remember to always spend less than you earn and borrow less than you can afford. It's all about focusing on the long-term financial goal for success.'

For more information about Peter Thornhill, you can visit his website here.
A more recent publication of this set of statistics is available. Latest publication: Turnover of trade 2021, November

Published: 15 April 2020

Turnover in trade grew by 1,2 per cent in February

According to Statistics Finland, turnover in total trade adjusted for working days grew by 1.2 per cent in February from February 2019. Over the same period, the working day adjusted volume of sales, from which the impact of prices has been eliminated, rose by 1.3 per cent. Turnover grew in all sectors of trade apart from wholesale trade. Turnover in retail trade increased by 3.5 per cent and in motor vehicle trade by 8.2 per cent year-on-year.

Annual change in working day adjusted turnover and sales volume in total trade (G), %

Working day adjusted turnover in retail trade rose by 3.5 per cent in February from February 2019. Sales volume grew by 3.3 per cent during the same period. Growth in retail trade was particularly attributable to specialised store trade, because working day adjusted turnover in that industry grew by 5.9 per cent and sales volume by 7.1 per cent. Turnover in department store trade rose by 5.2 per cent and sales volume by 4.2 per cent. In turn, turnover in daily consumer goods trade increased by 2.6 per cent and sales volume by 0.6 per cent year-on-year. The great differences in working day adjusted turnover and sales volume in daily consumer goods trade are explained by risen prices and correspondingly, in specialised store trade by fallen prices.

Annual change in working day adjusted turnover and sales volume in industries of trade, February 2020, % (TOL 2008)

Turnover and sales volume weaker than in the previous month

Seasonally adjusted turnover in total trade fell by 0.6 per cent in February compared to January. Over the same period, the volume of sales fell by 0.1 per cent. In turn, turnover and sales volume both rose in January from the previous month.

Change in seasonally adjusted turnover and sales volume in total trade (G) from the previous month, %

Trend of turnover and sales volume in total trade

The calculation of indices of turnover of trade is based on the Tax Administrations data on self-assessed taxes, which are supplemented with Statistics Finlands sales inquiry. The volume index of sales is calculated by removing the effect of price changes from the value index series.

The factors caused by the variation in the number of weekdays are taken into account in adjustment for working days. This means taking into consideration the lengths of months, different weekdays and holidays. In addition, seasonal variation is eliminated from seasonally adjusted series, on account of which it makes sense to compare observations of two successive months as well.

The data for the latest month are preliminary and they may become significantly revised particularly on more detailed industry levels in coming months.

Source: Turnover of trade, Statistics Finland

Inquiries: Suvi Kiema 029 551 3509, Reetta-Maria Salokannel 029 551 3657, palvelut.suhdanne@stat.fi

Director in charge: Mari Yla-Jarkko

Publication in pdf-format (288.8 kB)

Updated 15.04.2020

Referencing instructions: Official Statistics of Finland (OSF): Turnover of trade [e-publication].

ISSN=1799-0939. February 2020. Helsinki: Statistics Finland [referred: 12.1.2022].

Access method: http://www.stat.fi/til/klv/2020/02/klv_2020_02_2020-04-15_tie_002_en.html
The latest rumor regarding the Nokia 9.3 PureView suggests it will hop onto the high refresh rate bandwagon with a 120Hz screen. It's unclear whether it will be an LCD or OLED, but given rumors of an under-display selfie camera, and the Nokia 9 heritage, it will likely be an OLED panel.

According to rumors the Nokia 9.3 PureView will also likely ditch the simultaneously-firing cameras for a conventional setup, highlighted by a 108MP Samsung-made main camera and possibly at least another 64MP camera (perhaps as a zoom?).

Reports suggest HMD has experimented with 24MP, 20MP and 48MP sensors for the Nokia 9.3 PureView, before landing on the 108MP main snapper. The device is expected to launch in August or September.

The Nokia 9.3 PureView has been delayed a few times - it was originally under work as the Nokia 9.1, mind you, then the Nokia 9.2 and now the Nokia 9.3. It's rumored that a jump from the originally-planned Snapdragon 855 to the Snapdragon 865 is the reason for one of the delays.

HMD's last proper flagship was the Nokia 9 PureView and that was a bit underwhelming in real life even if it sounded exciting on paper. We're looking forward to a harder-hitting Nokia 9.3 PureView.

Source 1 | 2 | 3
This is the week the number of people infected with coronavirus worldwide officially exceeds two million. Since this figure only relates to detected cases, the real number is likely much higher.

The pandemic is ongoing, and while some countries begin confinement, others hope to ease it soon. At the same time, it is inevitable to think about how the world might change once this is all over, and if a return to normality is even possible.

This sixth weekly column by our team of international health editors summarises some of the recently published articles from The Conversations global network.

This is our weekly roundup of expert info about the Coronavirus.

The Conversation, a not-for-profit group, works with a wide range of academics across its global network. Together we produce evidence-based analysis and insights from across academia. The articles are free to read  there is no paywall  and to republish.

Treatments, promises and risks

Developing treatments and vaccines against a disease takes years, often decades, but right now we do not have the luxury of time. To this end, many researchers are testing the effectiveness of old, already approved drugs against SARS-CoV-2. Some of the findings so far relate to:

The effectiveness of hydroxychloroquine. This controversial purported treatment for COVID-19, championed by Donald Trump, the US president, has had many doubts cast on its effectiveness. Katherine Seley-Radtke of the University of Maryland summarises the many questions raised by this antimalarial drug.

This controversial purported treatment for COVID-19, championed by Donald Trump, the US president, has had many doubts cast on its effectiveness. Katherine Seley-Radtke of the University of Maryland summarises the many questions raised by this antimalarial drug. Antibodies in the blood of survivors. Our immune system is a powerful weapon against infection. Ann Sheehy of the College of the Holy Cross tells us how blood plasma from recovered patients could help fight coronavirus.

Our immune system is a powerful weapon against infection. Ann Sheehy of the College of the Holy Cross tells us how blood plasma from recovered patients could help fight coronavirus. The importance of reducing risks. Social distancing is a fundamental measure to delay the advancement of coronavirus, but its success depends on understanding social interactions must be redefined. Catharine Chambers and Daniel Harris of the University of Toronto explain why we should not make exceptions or let our guard down.

Issues of race and gender

The pandemic is not affecting everyone equally. The effects of coronavirus differ greatly between different classes, races and genders. Our authors have covered:

How racism impacts health. Data is now available that indicates African Americans are suffering more severely during the epidemic. Roberta K Timothy of the University of Toronto explains the causes and proposes solutions.

Clinical trials not reaching Africa. There are over 150 ongoing clinical trials researching the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus. Only three are taking place in Africa, and all of them in Egypt. Jenniffer-Mabuka-Maroa, from the African Academy of Sciences, believes the continent has the necessary infrastructures to assist the research.

There are over 150 ongoing clinical trials researching the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus. Only three are taking place in Africa, and all of them in Egypt. Jenniffer-Mabuka-Maroa, from the African Academy of Sciences, believes the continent has the necessary infrastructures to assist the research. The consequences for women. Not only does confinement disproportionally affect the work/life balance of women generally, it raises many issues for women suffering domestic violence. Maria Lopez Belloso, from the University of Deusto, Spain, defends (in Spanish) the incorporation of a gender perspective in the data and analysis of the pandemic.

Populism and dictatorship

The price of populism. Jonatan A Lassa and Miranda Booth, from Charles Darwin University (Australia), discuss the role populist leaders have had in the global failure to respond to COVID-19. Despite this, they fear those same leaders will be able to take advantage of this crisis.

Jonatan A Lassa and Miranda Booth, from Charles Darwin University (Australia), discuss the role populist leaders have had in the global failure to respond to COVID-19. Despite this, they fear those same leaders will be able to take advantage of this crisis. The Ghanaian law against coronavirus. The government of Ghana has approved an act to combat the pandemic that opens the door to violations of human rights and freedoms. Kwadwo Appiagyei-Atua, from the University of Ghana, discusses the law, its problems and risks.

Past lessons

Advice from Nelson Mandela. The South African leader spent decades in a tiny cell, where he had to learn to keep his body active. Gavin Evans of Birkbeck, University of London explains how the Nobel Prize winner managed to keep his body and mind healthy thanks to a strict routine.

The South African leader spent decades in a tiny cell, where he had to learn to keep his body active. Gavin Evans of Birkbeck, University of London explains how the Nobel Prize winner managed to keep his body and mind healthy thanks to a strict routine. Parallels with the Spanish Civil War. Spain has not experienced a situation similar to the current one since the Civil War of 1936. In a similar fashion to today, volunteering and messages of consolation played an important role in overcoming the tragedy. Dolores Ruiz Berdun, from the University of Alcala (Spain), explains the commonality between past and present (in Spanish).

Looking to the future

The Chinese economy needs the rest of the world. The pandemic is a global challenge, and no less for the worlds largest exporter. China struggles to regain lost ground, but it cannot do it alone. Rusli Abdulah of the Institute for the Development of the Economy and Finance (Indonesia) explains why.

The pandemic is a global challenge, and no less for the worlds largest exporter. China struggles to regain lost ground, but it cannot do it alone. Rusli Abdulah of the Institute for the Development of the Economy and Finance (Indonesia) explains why. Phasing back to normality. After more than a month of confinement in some countries, citizens are wondering when things will return the way they were. Ignacio Lopez-Goni, from the University of Navarra (Spain), explains the phased return to life as it was, and how to guarantee its success.

Questions and answers

Can mothers continue to breastfeed? Although the mortality of COVID-19 in children and babies is low compared to other ages, that does not mean that they cannot experience more severe symptoms. Andini Pramono, from the Australian National University, explains how to breastfeed safely in the midst of the pandemic.

Although the mortality of COVID-19 in children and babies is low compared to other ages, that does not mean that they cannot experience more severe symptoms. Andini Pramono, from the Australian National University, explains how to breastfeed safely in the midst of the pandemic. What does recovered mean? Most coronavirus patients return to full health. So Tom Duszynski of Indiana University answers some questions about how our bodies fight the virus  and how the immune system prevents new infections.

Most coronavirus patients return to full health. So Tom Duszynski of Indiana University answers some questions about how our bodies fight the virus  and how the immune system prevents new infections. What about the masks? Kieran Moore of Queens University, Ontario, answers the most frequently asked questions about SARS-CoV-2, such as the advisability of wearing face masks, the length of school closings and how long we can be infected before showing symptoms.

Get the latest news and advice on COVID-19, direct from the experts in your inbox. Join hundreds of thousands who trust experts by subscribing to our newsletter.

Sergio Ferrer Perez, Ciencia+Tecnologia, The Conversation

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

The conversation
HOUSTON, April 15, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- (OTCPINK: WFTLF) Weatherford International plc ("Weatherford" or the "Company") provided an update today on its expected results for the first quarter of 2020 and announced its intention to delist from the New York Stock Exchange ("NYSE").

FINANCIAL UPDATE

Despite the challenging environment, the Company's preliminary financial results improved during the first quarter of 2020 due to operational and cost reduction initiatives.

The Company's preliminary financial results for the first quarter of 2020 are:

Revenues in the range of $1,190 to $1,210 million ;

to ; Net loss attributable to Weatherford in the range of $185 to $210 million ;

in the range of to ; Adjusted EBITDA, a non-GAAP measure, in the range of $160 to $170 million ;

to ; Cash flow from operations in the range of $5 to $25 million and capital expenditures in the range of $30 to $40 million ; and

to and capital expenditures in the range of to ; and Free cash flow, a non-GAAP measure, in the range of negative $15 to negative $25 million , including payments of approximately $80 million primarily associated with prior year's financial restructuring and legacy corporate development activities.

The impact of the COVID-19 pandemic and recent actions by certain producing nations have had an unprecedented disruption on the supply/demand equation for oil, resulting in a precipitous decline in commodity prices and substantial reductions to the capital spending plans of exploration and production companies. In response, Weatherford supplemented its cost reduction initiatives with a number of actions, including:

Temporary pay reductions of 20% for management and to the Board of Directors' annual cash retainer;

Total headcount reductions across North American operations and the global support structure of 38% and 25%, respectively;

Furloughs and pay reductions for remaining employees in the United States and selected international locations;

and selected international locations; Reducing planned capital expenditures by approximately 50% in 2020 versus 2019 levels; and

Further consolidating geographic and product line structures to better align with market conditions.

Currently, Weatherford has adequate liquidity and is compliant with its financial covenants. However, the emerging operating environment has led to the inability to predict the depth and length of the industry's weakness. In this backdrop, the Company's debt levels are too high. Management and the Board of Directors are evaluating options to improve liquidity and address the Company's long-term capital structure.

Weatherford plans to release its first quarter 2020 Form 10-Q on May 11, 2020 and the preliminary financial results noted above are subject to finalization.

NYSE DELISTING

The Company has been evaluating its options with respect to its NYSE listing and, after careful deliberations, the Board of Directors has determined that delisting is in the best interest of the Company. As such, the Company will withdraw its appeal to the delisting proceedings by the NYSE.

The Company's shares of common stock will be delisted from trading on the NYSE through the filing of a Form 25 with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (the "SEC").

Weatherford will continue to evaluate listing on the NYSE or other trading platforms and will provide updates as necessary. The Company will continue to trade on the OTC Pink Marketplace under the ticker symbol "WFTLF".

Non-GAAP Measures

Weatherford reports its financial results in accordance with U.S. generally accepted accounting principles (GAAP). However, the Company's management believes that certain non-GAAP financial measures and ratios may provide users of this financial information additional meaningful comparisons between current results and results of prior periods and comparisons with peer companies.

EBITDA is defined as earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization expense.

Adjusted EBITDA, a non-GAAP measure, is defined as EBITDA adjusted for impairment charges, restructuring charges (severance and facility charges), asset write-downs, noncash stock-based compensation, prepetition charges, reorganization items, gain or loss on sales of businesses, and other non-operating expenses.

Free cash flow is defined as operating cash flow less net capital expenditures (net of any proceeds from the disposition of assets).

The following table sets forth a reconciliation of preliminary GAAP to non-GAAP measures:

Reconciliation of GAAP to Non-GAAP Preliminary Financial Measures (Subject to Finalization) (Unaudited; $ in millions)

Preliminary Range

Low

High







Net Loss Attributable to Weatherford ($210)

($185) Net Income Attributable to Noncontrolling Interests 7

7 Net Loss (203)

(178) Interest Expense, Net 58

58 Income Tax Provision 29

29 Depreciation and Amortization 224

204 EBITDA 108

113







Other (Income) Expense Adjustments:





Restructuring Charges 15

20 Asset Write-Downs and Other 7

7 Reorganization Items 8

8 Other Non-Operating Expenses 22

22 Adjusted EBITDA - Non-GAAP $160

$170







Cash Flow from Operations - GAAP $5

$25 Capital Expenditures, Net 30

40 Free Cash Flow - Non-GAAP ($25)

($15)

In this release, the Company has included certain preliminary estimates of its results of operations for its fiscal quarter ended March 31, 2020 (the "First Quarter 2020"). The preliminary estimates are based on the Company's internal management accounts and reporting as of and for the First Quarter 2020 based on currently available information. The preliminary results of operations are subject to revision as the Company prepares its financial statements and disclosures in connection with the future filing of its Form 10-Q for the First Quarter 2020. Such revisions may be significant, including as a result of completing the assessment as to whether there was any impairment of goodwill, intangibles, property, plant and equipment, inventory and accounts receivable in the First Quarter 2020. In connection with its quarterly closing and review process for the fiscal quarter, the Company may identify items requiring adjustments to the preliminary results of operations included herein. Accordingly, the final results and other disclosures for the First Quarter 2020 may differ materially from this preliminary data. This preliminary financial data should not be viewed as a substitute for the Company's financial statements prepared in accordance with U.S. GAAP. The Company's condensed consolidated financial statements for the First Quarter 2020 will not be available until the filing of its Form 10-Q for the First Quarter 2020 on or about May 11, 2020.

About Weatherford

Weatherford is the leading wellbore and production solutions company. Operating in more than 80 countries, the Company answers the challenges of the energy industry with its global talent network of 24,000 team members and 610 locations, which include service, research and development, training, and manufacturing facilities. Visit www.weatherford.com/ for more information or connect on LinkedIn , Facebook , Twitter , Instagram , or YouTube .

Forward-Looking Statements

This press release contains forward-looking statements concerning, among other things, the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic and the Company's response to COVID-19, the Company's liquidity and financial covenants and plans to evaluate the Company's capital structure and future listing options. These forward-looking statements generally identified by the words "believe," "project," "expect," "anticipate," "estimate," "outlook," "budget," "intend," "strategy," "plan," "guidance," "may," "should," "could," "will," "would," "will be," "will continue," "will likely result," and similar expressions, although not all forward-looking statements contain these identifying words. Such statements are based upon the current beliefs of Weatherford's management and are subject to significant risks, assumptions, and uncertainties. Should one or more of these risks or uncertainties materialize, or underlying assumptions prove incorrect, actual results may vary materially from those indicated in the Company's forward-looking statements. Investors are also cautioned that forward-looking statements are only predictions and may differ materially from actual future events or results, including as a result of changes in the macroeconomic outlook for the oil and gas industry, realization of additional cost savings and operational efficiencies, the impact of impairment tests on the carrying value of the Company's assets, the Company's preparedness for and response to the COVID-19 pandemic and the impact of logistical issues and business interruptions associated with COVID-19 on the Company and its customers and suppliers. Forward-looking statements are also affected by the risk factors described in the Company's Annual Report on Form 10-K for the year ended December 31, 2019, and those set forth from time-to-time in the Company's other filings with the SEC. Additionally, many of these risks and uncertainties are currently amplified by and will continue to be amplified by, or in the future may be amplified by, the COVID-19 pandemic. We undertake no obligation to correct or update any forward-looking statement, whether as a result of new information, future events, or otherwise, except to the extent required under federal securities laws.

Contact

Sebastian Pellizzer

Senior Director, Investor Relations

+1 713-836-6777

investor.relations@weatherford.com

Logo - https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/73933/weatherford_international_logo.jpg
This new funding is the latest initiative in Liberty Mutual's strategic portfolio of community support in response to the coronavirus, which was launched early March with an initial philanthropic pool of $4 million for its current 450 nonprofit partners. This original round of grants was designed to help current organizations address a wide range of immediate community needs such as providing students with computers for remote learning, setting up special training for community volunteers and helping fund increased facility cleaning. The company fast-followed that investment with $1 million in support of the Boston Resiliency Fund .

With this latest $10 million pledge, Liberty Mutual has committed a total of $15 million to coronavirus relief efforts to date.

"During this unprecedented time, providing extra help for our longtime nonprofit partners is not only critical in overcoming this pandemic, it is core to our value of being there for people when they need us most," said Liberty Mutual Insurance Chairman and CEO David Long. "We are grateful for the nonprofit leaders and staff who are so selflessly caring for our most vulnerable populations."

"COVID-19 is disproportionately impacting communities in greatest need and our nonprofit partners are responding urgently and with extreme care," said Liberty Mutual Foundation President Melissa MacDonnell. "By offering this portfolio of funding, we are striving to help curtail the current emergency and support our partners as they continue to serve in varied ways."

The additional $10 million in grants will be distributed to Boston-based nonprofits  the initial distribution of $5 million will include $1 million each to Boston Healthcare for the Homeless Program; Boston Medical Center; Pine Street Inn; and $500,000 each to Friends of Boston's Homeless; St. Francis House; and Greater Boston Food Bank.

"COVID-19 is presenting such unprecedented challenges for all of us, especially as we strive to care for the most vulnerable among us," said Boston Health Care for the Homeless Program CEO Barry Bock. "I am so deeply grateful for this incredible support from Liberty Mutual - it is a true game-changer in these difficult times. It will allow us to be on the front lines during this crisis and meet our tangible needs, and at the same time is providing a tremendous morale boost to our health care teams who are working so bravely and tirelessly to care for people affected by this virus."

Liberty Mutual's strategic support of its nonprofit partners in their response to the coronavirus also includes donations to each of the over 800 nonprofits the company partners with during its employee volunteering program; employee online charitable donations that are supported further by company gifts; employee phone outreach to those in the community who are socially isolated; and redeployment of catering teams in the Boston and Dover, New Hampshire offices to prepare 100 lunches per day for homeless individuals in the area.

For more information on Liberty Mutual's coronavirus response, please visit lmi.co/covid19.

About Liberty Mutual Insurance

At Liberty Mutual, we believe progress happens when people feel secure. By providing protection for the unexpected and delivering it with care, we help people embrace today and confidently pursue tomorrow.

In business since 1912, and headquartered in Boston, today we are the sixth largest global property and casualty insurer based on 2019 gross written premium. We also rank 75th on the Fortune 100 list of largest corporations in the U.S. based on 2018 revenue. As of December 31, 2019, we had $43.2 billion in annual consolidated revenue.

We employ over 45,000 people in 29 countries and economies around the world. We offer a wide range of insurance products and services, including personal automobile, homeowners, specialty lines, reinsurance, commercial multiple-peril, workers compensation, commercial automobile, general liability, surety, and commercial property.

Contact: Adrianne Kaufmann

617-574-5983

[email protected]

SOURCE Liberty Mutual Insurance
Chandigarh on Wednesday was declared a coronavirus hotspot, and one casualty of the move could be city's VIPs who have continued with their morning walks despite the curfew so far.

The administration is now threatening to name and shame them, if they continue with this.

According to an officials release, UT Administrator V P Singh Bandore said strict restrictions are required in the wake of the Centre declaring the city a coronavirus hotspot.

The city, which serves as the capital for both Punjab and Haryana, has so far reported 21 cases, nine of which have recovered.

In a tweet on Wednesday, UT Adviser Manoj Parida said, From tomorrow, we will publish name and designation of VIPs violating curfew orders and going for morning and evening walks. Be warned.

Parida's tweet has come as a warning to some retired bureaucrats who ventured out out of their homes for morning and evening walks despite the curfew imposed in the wake of the COVID-19 outbreak.

On Monday, the Chandigarh Police had arrested 182 people who stepped out of their homes for morning and evening walks.

Police have been regularly issuing warnings to people against going to city parks for a walk.

Meanwhile, the UT administrator directed officials to ensure that the instructions received from the Centre are strictly implemented and supervised.

Badnore also ordered a total ban on spitting in public places.

The principal secretary (home) was directed to issue a necessary notification in this regard, the release said.

Director Health G Dewan said 5,75,670 lakh people have been screened in a door-to-door survey.

Chandigarh Director General of Police Sanjay Beniwal said till date, 3,772 vehicles have been impounded and 485 persons booked for violating the curfew orders.

(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 COVID-19, mango farmers in Malihabad say they are worried about their business.

"Compared to last year, there has been 25 per cent less production of crop due to rain in February and March. Now due to lockdown, there is a shortage of labourers," said one of them.

"Government should provide us with facilities so that mangoes can be transported easily in India and abroad," he added.

Another mango farmer said, "The production should have been more this time compared to 2019, but this has not happened. People should follow the guidelines by central government, otherwise, it will become a big problem if the virus spreads further."

Besides Malihabad, the situation is similar in Pune, Maharashtra.

Earlier, Balraj Bhosle, a Pune wholesale dealer, said, "The Alphanso business has been severely affected due to the countrywide lockdown. Half of the stock that we have is not being sold as there are no customers. Though there is the demand of mangoes in the market, the fear of coronavirus is stopping people from stepping outside their houses."

Traders at Pune APMC market had ordered the world-famous Alphonso mangoes from Ratnagiri and Sindhudurg district. But due to the lockdown and voluntary closure of APMC market, the mango cartons were lying in godowns.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Malaysia has been using hydroxychloroquine for mild to severe COVID-19 cases along with other drugs.

New Delhi/Kuala Lumpur: India has agreed to sell hydroxychloroquine tablets to Malaysia for use in the treatment of COVID-19 patients, a Malaysian minister told Reuters on Wednesday, with New Delhi partially lifting its bar on exports of the anti-malarial drug.

India is the worlds largest producer of hydroxychloroquine, sales of which have soared across the world including in the United States, especially after President Donald Trump touted it as a potential weapon against COVID-19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus.

New Delhi had last month put a hold on exports of hydroxychloroquine to secure supplies for itself, before agreeing this month to supply it to some of its neighbours as well as nations who have been particularly badly affected by the pandemic.

On 14 April, India has given permission for Malaysia to import 89,100 tablets, Malaysias deputy foreign minister Kamarudin Jaffar told Reuters.

We will try to get more hydroxychloroquine tablets from India, which is also subject to stock availability.

Indias ministry of external affairs did not respond to requests for comment from Reuters.

Malaysia has been using hydroxychloroquine for mild to severe COVID-19 cases along with other drugs, according to its treatment protocol seen by Reuters.

Drug deal signals turnaround in ties

Doctors and pharmacists from more than half a dozen large healthcare systems in New York, Louisiana, Massachusetts, Ohio, Washington and California have also told Reuters they are routinely using hydroxychloroquine on patients hospitalised with COVID-19. At the same time, several said they have seen no evidence that the drug had any effect on the virus.

In one small French study, some COVID-19 patients showed improvements but there was no way to know if the drug was the reason. Results published in April from another study in France and one in China found no benefit in patients treated with the drug. Dozens more clinical studies are under way around the world.

Malaysias health ministry told Reuters it had faced challenges in securing the drug, which it said may be able to reduce the progression of the disease and lung inflammation. It said the drug has been used in Malaysia for the treatment of COVID-19 since January.

Malaysia had asked India for more than 1 million hydroxychloroquine tablets, two sources with direct knowledge of the matter told Reuters, requesting anonymity as they were not authorised to speak with the media.

I am not sure if that much can be given, one of the sources said. India is also giving hydroxychloroquine to some less developed countries. In Africa.

Malaysia has the third highest number of infections of COVID-19 in Southeast Asia with more than 5,000 cases, 83 of whom have died.

Indias decision to sell the sought-after drug to Malaysia signals a turnaround in relations between the countries that had soured because of repeated criticism of some Indian policies by Mahathir Mohamad, before he resigned as Malaysias prime minister in February. The tension had also affected palm oil trade between the countries.

Broadly, nations will need each other to fight this pandemic, said an Indian source with direct knowledge of the discussions with Malaysia. Globally, there will be a new alignment of relationships.

Teva Pharmaceutical Industries, IPCA Laboratories and Cadila Healthcare are among Indias leading suppliers of hydroxychloroquine. Cadila said last week it had increased production tenfold to 30 tonnes per month and was ready to produce more if needed.
The Congress on Wednesday urged the government to probe the "role" of the Railways Ministry for migrant crisis in the country, with party general secretary Priyanka Gandhi Vadra urging Prime Minister Narendra Modi to help the stranded workers reach their villages.

The Congress also questioned the government on why railway bookings continued during the lockdown.

"After all, why does every disaster break on the poor and the workers? Why are decisions not taken while taking them into consideration. Why are they left on God. Why was booking of railway tickets allowed to continue during the lockdown," Priyanka Gandhi asked.

She said the workers were the backbone of the country and the government should help them reach their villages.

"For God's sake, Narendra Modi ji please help them," Priyanka Gandhi said.

"Why were special trains not arranged? Their money has finished and so have their stock of ration. They are feeling insecure and want to go home in their villages. Arrangements should have been made for them. They can still be helped with proper planning," the Congress general secretary said in a tweet in Hindi.

Congress leader Ahmed Patel said the "role" of the Railways Ministry must be probed for the crisis among the migrants.

"Why were train services abruptly stopped leaving migrants stranded? Why was railways accepting bookings despite no clarity on lockdown extension," he asked.

Chaotic scenes were witnessed in some railway stations in Mumbai on Tuesday after a large number of migrants landed up there looking for trains to reach their homes. Police had to intervene to disperse them.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
The late Sage of Baltimore, H. L. Mencken, once wrote, Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.

Polling suggests that Americas governors and mayors have done the terrified, beaten-down peoples bidding after saturation media coverage of panic-inducing epidemiological modeling made Americans strangely docile.

If a poll released by Zogby Analytics on April 10 is to be believed, a supermajority of likely voters are fine with the lockdowns -- and perhaps the harsh un-American tactics -- used by states and localities to secure compliance with their emergency fiats aimed at the Chinese novel coronavirus that causes the occasionally deadly disease COVID-19.

Sixth Avenue near Rockefeller Center almost deserted last week (YouTube screen grab, cropped)

According to the polling firm, social distancing policies enjoy bipartisan support, while 84 percent of likely voters at least somewhat support federal, state and local governments telling Americans that they cant go to work to help prevent the spread of COVID-19. The older you are, the more likely you are to support the lockdowns. Only 889 likely voters were polled.

Even if we assume the poll results reflect reality, they are almost three weeks old; the survey ran from March 24 through 26.

Death forecasts since then have been drastically revised downward and the public mood seems a little less bleak.

Peak Fear is probably behind us.

Three weeks ago, re-opening the country was barely on the radar as the nation attempted a partial trial run of the Green New Deal and do-gooder snitches started turning America into East Germany. Back then Americans, shocked and awed into becoming couch potatoes, were still struggling to figure out how to wear face masks to the grocery store, if only they could find them.

Most of us hadnt figured out yet that the method of counting COVID-19 deaths adopted during this pandemic had been corrupted by politics, designed to maximize the COVID-19 body count. Nor did many know about the relative arbitrariness of the death certification process itself that predates the virus by many years. (See my April 9 American Thinker column, The CDC Confesses to Lying About COVID-19 Death Numbers)

But today, searching for a way out of the lockdown and reopening America is being widely discussed, in part because President Donald Trump and other public figures, including governors and local leaders, have begun talking about it in earnest. Even law-and-order conservatives have been appalled at reports of heavy-handed actions by overzealous police officers who have been saddled in many jurisdictions with poorly drafted enforcement instructions.

My guess is support for our collective national suicide attempt and the sick coercive egalitarianism behind locking up everyone for the benefit of a vulnerable sliver of the population has been steadily falling off since the Zogby poll was conducted. Since then, joblessness has been shooting up, businesses large and small have been collapsing, and people have started thinking long and hard about what the future holds. (See my March 27 American Thinker column, Dictatorship of the Immunocompromised?)

Now it is time to take the country back.

Dont accept the silly argument I keep hearing that it is too difficult to determine who the vulnerable are in order to isolate them and let Americans get back to work. Politicians wrote their emergency edicts, some of which are incredibly detailed, quickly, not wanting to be blamed if mass death followed. Figuring out who the people are who still need to be shielded from the Chinese contagion and balancing competing interests in society while making a plan for the liberation of the country has to be easier than policing an America that has been turned into a minimum-security prison.

It is time to turn the pain for despotic politicians up to 11, to borrow a phrase from This Is Spinal Tap (1984). Send emails, melt down telephone switchboards at all levels of government, visit lawmakers, write letters to the editor, make videos on social media, and in general make your views known. Put pressure on politicians, including, yes, President Trump, who despite his strong leadership has inexplicably surrendered so much of his bully pulpit to unelected bullies like Dr. Anthony Fauci.

The politicians are listening and theyre beginning to get worried. They took draconian steps because its what they thought you wanted.

Now you need to correct that impression if you want your God-given freedoms back.

Matthew Vadum is an independent investigative reporter in Washington, D.C. and author of Team Jihad: How Sharia-Supremacists Collaborate with Leftists to Destroy the United States and Subversion Inc.: How Obamas ACORN Red Shirts Are Still Terrorizing and Ripping Off American Taxpayers.
Officials delayed announcement for six days allowing over 3,000 new cases to emerge, according to internal documents.

In the six days after top Chinese officials secretly determined they were probably facing a pandemic from the new coronavirus, the city of Wuhan hosted a mass banquet for tens of thousands of people and millions began their annual trip home for the Lunar New Year celebrations.

President Xi Jinping warned the public on January 20  the seventh day  but by then, more than 3,000 people had been infected during almost a week of public silence, according to internal documents obtained by The Associated Press (AP) news agency and estimates based on retrospective infection data.

The delay from January 14 to January 20 was neither the first mistake made by Chinese officials, nor the longest lag, as governments around the world have dragged their feet for weeks and even months in addressing the virus.

But the delay by the first country to face the new coronavirus came at a critical time  the beginning of the outbreak. Chinas attempt to walk a line between alerting the public and avoiding panic set the stage for a pandemic that has now infected nearly 2 million people and taken more than 126,000 lives.

This is tremendous, said Dr Zuo-Feng Zhang, an epidemiologist at the University of California, Los Angeles. If they took action six days earlier, there would have been much fewer patients and medical facilities would have been sufficient.

Balancing act

However, another epidemiologist, Benjamin Cowling at the University of Hong Kong, noted that it may have been a tricky call. If health officials raise the alarm too soon it can damage their credibility and cripple their ability to mobilise the public, he said.

The six-day delay by Chinas leaders in Beijing came on top of almost two weeks during which the national Center for Disease Control (CDC) did not register any new cases, internal bulletins obtained by AP confirmed. Yet during that time, from January 5 to January 17, hundreds of patients were appearing in hospitals not only in Wuhan, where the illness was first detected in a market, but also across the country.

Chinas rigid controls on information, bureaucratic hurdles and a reluctance to send bad news up the chain of command muffled early warnings, analysts say.

Without these internal reports, it took the first case outside China, in Thailand on January 13, to galvanise leaders in Beijing into recognising the danger before them.





The Chinese government has repeatedly denied suppressing information in the early days, saying it immediately reported the outbreak to the World Health Organization (WHO).

Allegations of a cover-up or lack of transparency in China are groundless, said foreign ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian at a Thursday news conference.

The documents show that the head of Chinas National Health Commission, Ma Xiaowei, laid out a grim assessment of the situation in a confidential January 14 teleconference with provincial health officials.

A memo states that the teleconference was held to convey instructions on the coronavirus from President Xi, Premier Li Keqiang and Vice Premier Sun Chunlan, but does not specify what those instructions were.

The epidemic situation is still severe and complex, the most severe challenge since SARS in 2003, and is likely to develop into a major public health event, the memo cites Ma as saying.

In a faxed statement, the National Health Commission said China has published information on the outbreak in an open, transparent, responsible and timely manner, in accordance with important instructions repeatedly issued by Xi.

The documents come from an anonymous source in the medical field who did not want to be named for fear of retribution. The AP confirmed the contents with two other sources in public health familiar with the teleconference.

Under a section titled sober understanding of the situation, the memo singled out the case in Thailand, saying that the situation had changed significantly because of the possible spread of the virus abroad.

All localities must prepare for and respond to a pandemic, it said.

Threat downplayed

The National Health Commission distributed a 63-page set of instructions to provincial health officials, obtained by the AP. The instructions, marked not to be publicly disclosed, ordered health officials nationwide to identify suspected cases, hospitals to open fever clinics, and doctors and nurses to don protective gear.

In public, however, officials continued to downplay the threat.

The risk of sustained human-to-human transmission is low, Li Qun, the head of the China CDCs emergency centre, told Chinese state television on January 15.

Under the new orders, the next day officials in Wuhan and elsewhere finally got CDC-approved testing kits and a green light to start confirming new cases. Across the country, dozens of reported cases then began to surface, in some cases among patients who were infected earlier but had not yet been tested.

On January 20, Xi made his first public comments on the virus, saying the outbreak must be taken seriously. A leading Chinese epidemiologist, Dr Zhong Nanshan, meanwhile, announced for the first time that the virus was transmissible from person to person on national television.

The delay may support accusations by US President Donald Trump that the Chinese governments secrecy held back the worlds response to the virus. However, even the public announcement on January 20 left the United States nearly two months to prepare for the pandemic.

Medical staff at the Wuhan Red Cross Hospital in Wuhan on January 25 as the army deployed medical specialists to the city that was then at the epicentre of the outbreak and had been sealed off from the outside world [Hector Retamal/AFP]

Some health experts said Beijing took decisive action given the information available.

They may not have said the right thing, but they were doing the right thing, said Dr Ray Yip, the retired founding head of the US Centers for Disease Controls office in China. On the 20th, they sounded the alarm for the whole country, which is not an unreasonable delay.

But others say an earlier warning would have saved lives. If the public had been warned a week earlier to practise social distancing, wear masks and cut back on travel, cases could have been cut by up to two-thirds, one paper later found.

The earlier you act, said Los Angeles epidemiologist Zhang, the easier you can control the disease.
(Newser)  Because up to half of COVID-19 patients may be asymptomatic or show very mild symptoms, it's important to be able to identify early, subtle signs of the disease. A new study published in the International Forum of Allergy and Rhinology journal lends support to what's till now been anecdotal documentation on a somewhat odd coronavirus signal: the loss of one's sense of taste and smell. UC San Diego scientists say their research has turned up the first empirical findings that "strongly" link such sensory loss with COVID-19, and that pinpointing people who show such a manifestation can be a big help in fighting the infectious disease. Study co-author Carol Yan says in a release that although fever remains the most common first sign of the coronavirus, "if you have smell and taste loss, you are more than 10 times more likely to have COVID-19 infection than other causes of infection."

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Yan's team examined 59 patients who tested positive for COVID-19, as well as 203 who showed flu-like symptoms but tested negative. Loss of smell was found in 68% of the coronavirus patients, while 71% of that same group experienced taste loss. The non-COVID-19 patients showed 16% and 17% for those sensory impairments, respectively. Although study patients who experienced sensory loss typically found those symptoms to be profound, an encouraging sign is that such loss seems to be temporary and short-lived. "In the majority of people, within two to three weeks, they were starting to see improvement," Yan says, per NBC San Diego. Her team also found that non-COVID-19 patients reported sore throats more often than those with the coronavirus. The researchers hope their findings "may help facilitate screening and early isolation of [COVID-19] cases," the study notes. (Read more coronavirus stories.)
Governments will make mistakes during the pandemic  and they won't be able to pin them on 'experts'

Chrystia Freeland said Tuesday that chief public health officers have become "this generation's rock stars." And as long as rock stars have existed, there have been rock critics.

Those with learned expertise rightly come to the fore in a public emergency. In a world of sickness and fear, the epidemiologist is king.

But challenges to that expertise were always inevitable  and are probably even healthy.

Experts are not infallible. On matters that transcend popular opinion, they're also the best we've got.

Alberta Premier Jason Kenney is not an expert in infectious diseases. On Monday, however, he decided to publicly question the wisdom of someone who is  Dr. Theresa Tam, Canada's chief public health officer.

Pushed to defend his decision to allow Alberta doctors to use tests that have not yet been approved in Canada, Premier Kenney decided to attack Dr. Tam directly over how she reacted initially to the COVID-19 outbreak and how she has advised the federal government.

"This is the same Dr. Tam who is telling us that we shouldn't close our borders to countries with high levels of infection and who in January was repeating talking points out of the [People's Republic of China] about the no evidence of human-to-human transmission," Kenney said.

Unanswered questions

This isn't the first time Kenney has criticized someone in Ottawa since he decided to enter provincial politics, of course  but it is the first time he's challenged a non-partisan health official and there's much to unpack in his comments.

There are significant unanswered questions about China's actions and the World Health Organization's handling of the initial outbreak. And it's true that the human-to-human transmission of COVID-19 was only confirmed by Chinese officials on January 20.

But Kenney seems to be implying here that Dr. Tam should have somehow been ahead of both China and the WHO on describing the outbreak  or that she was easily duped by the Chinese government.

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Even if either of those charges could be sustained, it's not clear how that would have any bearing on Canada's current situation.

Adrian Wyld/The Canadian Press

More obviously relevant (at least in theory) is Kenney's criticism of Tam's early approach to the idea of closing Canada's borders to slow the pandemic.

Dr. Tam did say publicly that closing borders is an ineffective response to a contagious disease. But she was hardly the only one saying it.

"We look at the United States, we look at Italy, for example  both countries [that] had bans on people coming into the country from certain other countries," Dr. Bonnie Henry, the chief health officer in British Columbia, said on March 3. "Those don't work."

When did Kenney speak up?

Asked Tuesday whether Kenney had expressed his views on closing borders before this week, the premier's office suggested he had conveyed his thoughts privately  but pointed to public comments he made on March 12 and March 13.

"I also discussed with the deputy prime minister my belief as the former immigration minister that there should be some tighter control of our borders, particularity from countries with very high levels of infections," he said on March 13.

By that measure, Kenney was just a few days ahead of the Trudeau government: on March 16, Ottawa announced a ban on travellers from countries other than the United States. Days after that, the ban was extended to all non-essential American travel.

Speaking with CBC's Power & Politics on Monday, Kenney suggested Canada should have followed "the lead of jurisdictions like South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, and others who closed their borders from countries with a high rate of infection months earlier than Canada did."

You can't fight a virus simply by closing the gates

Comparisons between countries call for caution (in terms of geography and size, Canada and Singapore don't have a lot in common) but a global view might also underline the complexity of responding to a global pandemic.

South Korea, for instance, did implement a ban on travel from China's Hubei province  the epicentre of the COVID-19 outbreak  in early February, but it stopped short of a total ban on Chinese travellers. Its national government also struggled badly with its initial response to the virus.

A month later, South Korea was being held up as a model for other countries to emulate  largely because of a massive effort built around domestic testing and extraordinary surveillance.

As Dr. Henry noted in March, the United States and Italy both banned travellers from China. Both have fared much worse than Canada.

That doesn't prove that closing the border was necessarily a mistake, but it does suggest that responding to a pandemic might not be as simple as turning travellers away.

Is there any evidence that not banning foreign travellers from China led to a higher rate of infection or death in Canada? Maybe only an official inquiry or Royal Commission will be able to answer that in hindsight.

A shift in the official message

But according to the Ontario government, just five of the people who have tested positive for COVID-19 in that province so far had travelled recently to China  the same number of cases that could be linked to Costa Rica, Ecuador and Jamaica. By comparison, 383 people in Ontario who tested positive for COVID-19 had recently been to the United States, while 119 had returned recently from the United Kingdom.

Questions about border restrictions and travel bans likely persist because the position of federal officials changed  from arguing that such measures were not an effective response to joining other countries in implementing tight controls. Whether border policies had any impact on the spread of COVID-19 in Canada or not, that change in messaging has never been thoroughly explained.

Political leaders are likely to be applauded for deferring to experts in moments like this and non-partisan experts are generally given a higher degree of public deference. But trust can't be taken for granted and decisions need to be explained fully  particularly when those decisions change.

Experts might even disagree among themselves  but even that can be acknowledged and explained.

Politicians also can't assume that pointing to the advice of experts will allow them to escape accountability. Ultimately, it's elected governments that will be held responsible if efforts to combat COVID-19 seem to fail markedly. Privately, at least, government ministers need to be sure they're getting the best advice.

But all leaders are now deeply dependent on those experts for advice. They also rely on them to explain to the public why difficult decisions are being made, why schools are closed and people are being told to stay home. For as long as this pandemic lasts, the credibility of public health officers will be crucial.

So if a premier or prime minister wants to publicly criticize the counsel that those experts are providing, they had better be sure they're right and the criticisms are warranted.
New Delhi, April 15 : With the COVID-19 outbreak, the number of cases and fatalities is rising intensely over the recent weeks. Keeping in mind the employee's physical and emotional well-being, companies and employers should look at ways to support their workforce.

One such firm is Schindler India, which reinforces the access and use of its Employee Assistance Program called 'Schindler Cares' which was started in 2016.

Schindler Cares partners with Santulan and its expert team of psychiatrists, psychologists, behavioural researchers and ~100 Partner Counsellors to provide proactive guidance to deal with life's expected and unexpected events, as the employees and their family's physical and emotional well-being is crucial in these trying times #CoronaVirus. Santulan is administering the EAP services for Schindler India employees and their eligible dependents across the country. The employees can reach out to the counselling team for telephonic, face to face or e-counselling sessions.

Providing an avenue of support that respects Schindler India's employees' privacy, the EAP service is absolutely confidential. No identifying information will be given to or shared with anyone in the organization. The EAP provides professional assistance for a wide range of issues, including: a Couple and marital relationship issues

a Personal and emotional difficulties

a Death, grief and bereavement issues

a Family matters / parenting concerns

a Stress, anxiety and depression

a Work-related issues

a Work and personal / family balance

a Alcohol and drug misuse

a Crisis counselling

a Managing life's changes

a Personal Legal and Financial Stressors

Shubha Arora, Chief People Officer, Schindler India & South Asia says, "Our employees and their families through our Employee Assistance Program, 'Schindler Cares' can access wellbeing services confidentially. We are pleased to have partnered with Santulan, and their team of experts to help provide guidance and counselling to deal with life's expected and unexpected events".
In a video update, Queenstown Lakes District (QLD) Mayor Jim Boult expressed his concern over the fate of the districts 3000  4000 migrant workers.

4285 have registered on the QLD database ( as of April 13) to receive a Civil Defence grant of $240 per week to tide them through unemployment during the lockdown.

By the time you pay your rent, your food bill and top up your phone there is not a lot of change out of that and they have to live pretty frugally, Boult said.

Let's not forget that these folk got the district to where it was before coronavirus, he said. The workers who staffed the hotels and the bars and the restaurants and like - they are a very vital part of creating our industry. Most of them are out of work.

Boult said the Queenstown Lakes District Council (QLDC) had always estimated there to be around 3000 migrant workers in the district at any one time. But if anything the estimate was conservative. It could be 3500; it could be 4000, he said.

We found out on April 13 we had 4285 of these folk registered on our database. Currently, they are receiving a grant through Civil Defence of $240 per person per week to live on.

What is worrying me is that going by the numbers we are seeing we will end up with about 4500 of these people on the list looking for assistance and at $240 times 4500 that's $1,080,000 per week has to be found to fund the issue.

When the lockdown finishes the Civil Defence money goes away, he said, and there will be no income for these people.

Also, at the moment, they cannot be evicted from their accommodation. After lockdown finishes, they may well be evicted.

I am anxious that we will have something approaching a humanitarian crisis on our hands with folk unable to be fed and nowhere to live.

Boult said that right now a fair bit of his time was spent convincing the government that it needed to pick up the problem.

A few people have said pop them on planes and allow them to go back to their home countries, but unfortunately we don't have too many planes flying around the world at the moment, and these people don't have any money (to pay for flights), so it would have to be funded by the government. It is an option, and I'm hopeful that some will be offered this option to go home, but it is a real problem.

Seasonal work contractor Gary Ford said his crew from Vanuatu were the lucky ones in that they had work harvesting the grape season and somewhere to stay for the lockdown.

But many seasonal workers had finished their regulatory six month stay in New Zealand and were due to go home but were now stuck in limbo. And there were many workers in the tourism industry made redundant and left high and dry, he said.

We have some Vanuatu boys come in for our whole season, on rotation throughout the year. We get them in April, and they generally go home late October and then we have some others that come out in November who go home in April.

The people we brought out for the moment all have work. The big problem there has been a cyclone going through the islands, and so they have that worry, and with no flight going they don't know when they are going to be able to go home or what they will do once the harvest is over.

We are about halfway through the grape harvest. It's been erratic because normally we run bigger crews, but because of MPIs social distancing rules, we have to match eight people with a plot. It's a slower-paced harvest which is good in some ways because the work tends to wear people out and make them more susceptible to illness.

At the moment we have quite a few backpackers because we haven't been able to get all the boys out from the islands.

Backpackers are particularly lucky because they have somewhere to stay for lockdown, had to have an address and a bubble. When not harvesting, they are at that place, Ford said.

They are also lucky they had somewhere to work within the rules with MPI as to how we work social distancing.

I think those in the grape industry will be busy. But there are a lot of seasonal workers around the Queenstown Lakes District left high and dry, Ford said.

Boult said: Our migrant workforce arent eligible for any other support from Work and Income and may play an important part in our regions recovery. Remember: your migrant workforce are also eligible for the wage subsidy - if you have laid them off, you can re-employ them and apply for the wage subsidy to ensure they retain some level of income. We expect to see more demand for welfare in the coming weeks as the 12-week subsidy nears the end.

Read edition 970 of the Wanaka Sun here.
NEW DELHI: The Ministry of Health and Family Welfare has issued an advisory to states to ensure adequate supply of potable water during coronavirus lockdown, particularly in rural areas where medical sanitisers may not be available, stating that frequent washing of hands with frothing soaps is recognised as the most-effective measure to control the spread of coronavirus.

It highlighted the need to augment supply in water-deficient areas and give special care to vulnerable sections such as people in relief camps, places of quarantine, hospitals, old-age homes and slums.

It asked states to assess the availability of water-purifying chemicals. "The purifying chemicals are among the essential commodities and therefore it may be ensured that these are part of the running supply chain.

It also advised states to ensure round-the-clock vigil and functionality of water supply systems and provide protective equipment like masks and sanitisers to officials managing the operation of the systems.

"It is possible that demand during this period may go up and if people have to fetch water from the public stand post, supply hours may be required to be increased to ensure social distancing," the advisory stressed.

The Union Health Ministry also told states to make use of tele-medicine and triaging to avoid crowding of hospitals. It said non-COVID-19 services, including health promotion and community-based screening for chronic conditions, could be deferred until the lockdown is lifted.

States should develop a phased engagement with the not-for-profit and private sector for use of their infrastructure if there is a shortfall in government health facilities, it said.

Heres the Advisory for ensuring safe drinking water during lock down and effective management of pandemic caused by coronavirus

COVID-19 has taken pandemic proportions in many countries and in view of the seriousness of the matter, Govt of India and State Governments have taken several pre-emptive measures to contain this disease in the country. Frequent washing of hands with frothing soaps is recognized as most efficient and effective measure in the listed

preventive measures for controlling the spread of the virus.

Thus, there is an urgent need to ensure that safe potable water is available to all citizens particularly in the rural areas where facility of medical sanitizers may not be available.

Public Health Engineering Departments/ Boards/ Nigams of the State Governments need to accord top priority for taking measures to augment supply in areas where water

supply may be deficient as of now and special care may be given to vulnerable sections of the society like people residing in relief camps, places of quarantine, hospitals, old

age homes, poor strata of society, slums, etc. It will be appropriate to integrate the identified needs of potable water in the micro-plans of the districts being formulated to

combat the spread of COVID-19 disease.

Further, wherever chemical treatment for enhancing the safety of potable water is required, appropriate purifying chemicals like Chlorine tablets, bleaching powder,

Sodium hypochlorite solution, Alum, etc. as may be needed, should be used. State Governments may assess the requirements of water purifying chemicals and availability

of the same.

In case the supply of the same is deficient, to meet the immediate requirement, then suitable intervention for their procurement from elsewhere sources may be resorted to. The purifying chemicals are among the essential commodities and therefore it may be ensured that these are part of the running supply chain.

In addition, sufficient field test kits may be made available to the villagers trained in their use and they may be advised to do periodic testing of water supplied and alert all

concerned in the event of any contamination.

Arrangements for round the clock vigil may be made to ensure functionality of water supply systems from source to delivery points. Personal safety measures like masks, sanitisers, etc. may be provided to the officials of PHED, particularly who are managing the operation and maintenance of the water supply systems in the field. Alternate arrangement should be in place to replace the staff managing water supply, in case they get infected.

It is possible that demand during this period may go up and if people have to fetch water from the public stand post, supply hours may be required to be increased to ensure

social distancing.

Further, existing grievance redressal mechanism may be strengthened so that any interruption in water supply can be immediately brought to the notice of all the concerned

and timely action can be ensured to reinstate the supply.

The principles of social distancing and relevant instructions issued by the Ministry of Home affairs, GoI to combat the COVID -19 pandemic may be complied with, by

following the prescribed protocols.
He remembered Jolley as someone with a heart and soul who worked for "the least of these"  Alexander's expression for the poorest and least represented members of the community  including taking money out of his own pocket to keep people out of jail or to provide a family with food.

Alexander eventually left Jolley's agency to work for Congressman Robin Talon's office.

Talon, a Democrat, represented Congressional District 6, which formerly included all of the Pee Dee, from 1982 to 1993. He decided not to run for reelection in 1992 after the district was converted into a majority-minority district.

Alexander remembered Jolley telling him to make sure that he was helping someone.

Even as he moved up the political ladder from the Florence County Council to the South Carolina House of Representatives, Alexander said, he continued to work on behalf of the organization Jolley founded to make sure the power company or the city did not turn the water or the lights off on people that the organization was working to help.

Alexander served on the Florence County Council from 1990 to 2006 and has served in the House since then.
DURING Ebola outbreak in some neighboring country, Media reported that some patients w ere running aw ay from q uarantine and hospitals w ithout realizing that they w ere posing g reat risk to the society and their beloved ones.

This is not ex pected w ith coronavirus, w here asy mptomatic people may run aw ay from hospitals and q uarantine institutions without being officially discharged, because they w ould also pose the same great risk to the society and lead to unnecessary panic and spread of the deadly disease.

In the realm of medicine, there are professionals w ho are task ed by individual government(s) and World Health Organisation (WHO) to lead, advice and update on any disease be it pandemic or endemic, hence citizens should not w orry and panic.

It is also the same medics w ho should certify and shed light on w ho is asy mptomatic person (a person who carry the active virus in his/her body but never develops any sy mptoms), not just necessarily one being j udg ed by the public.

For that matter, it is the health professionals w ho should be answ ering any q uestion on such diseases, w hich may include: Who is a silent spreader?

Is it possible to be infected w ith the coronavirus and show no sy mptoms? Or g o through a period of several days before sy mptoms kick in?

And even in this stag e w ith no cough, no fever, no sig n of illness, could y ou be transmitting the virus to others?

This is not an area w here q uack doctors, herbalists and unlicensed individuals should capitalize to mint extra coin in the society by advertising in the public that they have cures for the ailment.

This is eq ually , the time for our medics to shed more light on the disease, which according to Tara C Smith, an epidemiologist at Kent State Universitys Colleg e of Public Health, an asymptomatic show s no fever, no gastrointestinal issues, no breathing issues, no coughing , and as you might imagine, hence its hard to fig ure out w hen someone has the disease.

Some cases of asymptomatic carriers have been confirmed by finding and testing people who were in close contact with COVID-19 patients.

For those w ho tested positive w ithout sy mptoms, follow - up exams confirmed that about 25 percent continued to show no sig ns, World Health Organisation officials said on April 1, citing data from China.

Here a small clinical study from Nanjing , China, follow ed 24 people w ho tested positive but didnt show overt symptoms at the time.

In the one to three w eek s after diag nosis, seven continued show ing no sy mptoms. Another group could be pre-sy mptomatic: People w ho have been infected and are incubating the virus but dont y et show sy mptoms.

After infection, sy mptoms might not develop for five to six day s- or even tw o w eek s, according to the Annals of Internal Medicine.

The time betw een catching the virus and show ing sy mptoms is called the pre-sy mptomatic phase.
President Donald Trump said he's open to some states reopening before federal social distancing guidelines expire at the end of month, as he appeared to back off his claim of absolute authority to decide when the time was right to act.

Hours after suggesting that the bipartisan concerns of governors about his assertion of power would amount to an insurrection, Trump abruptly reversed course Tuesday, saying he would leave it to governors to determine when and how to revive activity in their states.

He said he likely would discuss his plans with governors on Thursday.

The governors are responsible," Trump said. They have to take charge.

Still, he insisted, The governors will be very, very respectful of the presidency."



Democratic and Republican governors had objected after Trump asserted Monday that he alone would determine when and how to reopen the economy, despite clear constitutional limitations on federal powers.

Trump said Tuesday he would authorize governors "of each individual state to implement a reopening and a very powerful reopening plan of their state at a time and in a matter as most appropriate.

Trump added that he would support moves by states that haven't been hit hard by the outbreak to ease restrictions even before federal guidelines on social distancing expire April 30.

Trump said the country would open up in beautiful little pieces, adding that some states with low rates of infection have fewer people and they have lots of room."



It's unclear if any states are actively considering reopening their economies before May 1.

In a departure from recent tradition, Trump ended his daily briefing without turning the mic over to federal health experts, who have cautioned against moving too quickly to restart economic activity.

Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation's top infectious diseases expert, told The Associated Press earlier Tuesday that the country is not there yet when it comes to the kind of testing and tracing needed for the economy to reopen. But Trump made clear Tuesday he is intent on proceeding with his plans.

Trump outlined a vision in which workers would be tested, perhaps weekly, and governors would test travelers arriving at their states' borders.

But the U.S. is nowhere near having that kind of infrastructure, with testing still largely reserved for those with serious symptoms and results taking days to learn.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has been working with other federal officials to develop detailed plans for how reopening should occur, including determining what measures will need to be tracked and what conditions met before such steps occur.

The plans include separate steps for schools, businesses and other entities, the CDC's Dr. Anne Schuchat said. The proposals are currently under review, she added.

Kellyanne Conway, a top adviser to Trump, told reporters Wednesday that about 29 states feel that they, perhaps, could come back online a little bit more robustly. It's not going to be turning a spigot everywhere immediately.

She said Trump isn't looking at a certain date. He's looking at data." House Speaker Nancy Pelosi criticized Trump for trying to lift social distancing without adequate testing.

The failure to test is dangerous and deadly, and without testing, we cannot resume our lives, she said in a letter to lawmakers.

In expressing an openness to states setting their own timelines, Trump was largely acknowledging the authority governors have already exercised.

While Trump has issued national recommendations advising people to stay home, governors and local leaders are the ones who ordered schools and nonessential business to close.

After weeks of saying he would leave major decisions about imposing such restrictions to the states, Trump claimed his power to ease them was absolute.

When somebody is president of the United States, the authority is total, Trump said Monday at the White House.

The governors know that.

He declined to state the source of his asserted power, claiming he would provide a legal briefing at a later date.

But governors in both parties made clear they saw things differently and said they would decide when to return to normal just as they decided to close things down.

The president's position is just absurd, New York Democratic Gov. Andrew Cuomo said Tuesday on CBS This Morning. Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson, a Republican, said he, would do what is "in the best interest of Arkansans and I think that's what the people expect.

Anxious to put the crisis behind him, Trump launched a new advisory council that will hash out plans to reopen the economy, which has dramatically contracted as businesses have shuttered, leaving millions of people out of work.

He also directed his administration to freeze funding to the World Health Organization, claiming the international body didn't deliver adequate early reports on the virus and cost the U.S. valuable response time.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
In recent weeks, the food company with deep Omaha roots has seen more than a 50% increase in its grocery business as consumers both stock up their pantries and increasingly eat at home due to stay-in-place directives and the closure of many restaurants. Sean Connolly, the companys CEO, said Conagra employees are proud of the role theyre playing in the nations battle against COVID-19.
Elizabeth Holmes, founder and former CEO of Theranos, arrives for motion hearing on Monday, November 4, 2019, at the U.S. District Court House inside Robert F. Peckham Federal Building in San Jose, California.

Elizabeth Holmes, the once heralded visionary who claimed to revolutionize blood testing in America, got her fate delayed on Wednesday when a judge set a new trial date of Oct. 27 due to the coronavirus pandemic.



As the economy is screeching to a halt and millions are scrambling to get tested for whether they have the virus, a judge said it's impossible to keep Holmes' original trial date in July.

"We're in unchartered waters and unchartered territories," U.S. District Judge Edward Davila said. "We need to make sure the environment is safe for all parties, including the jury that's called to hear the matter."

The judge said he would consider moving the trial to early 2021 if the coronavirus remains a threat in the fall.



In a status memo filed this week, attorneys for Holmes pointed to the dangers of conducting such a high-profile trial amid a health pandemic.

"The defense, jurors and witnesses will all enter the courthouse through crowds of onlookers who have often approached and even touched counsel and the defendant during entry to the building," they wrote, adding if anyone in the trial contracted the virus "the risk of a mistrial would be substantial."

Prosecutors are also looking to expand the case against Holmes with a superseding indictment, which would introduce two new wire fraud counts relating to a patient and doctor who were allegedly defrauded by her company Theranos and broaden the timeframe of her alleged crimes by three years.

Prosecutors said they also want to include former Theranos business partners, Walgreens and Safeway, as victims of fraud.

"Counsel for Ms. Holmes does not understand why it took the government nearly two years post-indictment, and more than five years into its investigation, to bring these new charges," Holmes' legal team said in a filing.

On Wednesday, Davila said a grand jury, which would need to return a new indictment with the additional charges, cannot convene until the courthouse reopens.

Holmes founded blood-testing startup Theranos in 2003, with the promise of running hundreds of lab tests from just a drop or two of blood.

At one time, Theranos had a private valuation of more than $9 billion, making Holmes the nation's youngest self-made female billionaire.

Prosecutors say she and co-defendant Ramesh "Sunny" Balwani duped investors, policymakers and doctors about the accuracy of Theranos' blood-testing technology.

They each face up to 20 years in prison if convicted.
Atlanta police are hunting for a woman who filmed herself coughing on a family with four children and saying 'corona' in what they believe to be a social media challenge.

The female suspect allegedly targeted the family of six while they were out exercising in Atlantic Station on the evening of April 5.

Police said the woman approached the four children and coughed on them, before saying the word 'corona' and laughing.

The suspect appeared to be holding a cellphone and using a video app at the time.

Authorities believe she was filming the incident as part of a coronavirus social media prank, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported.

It comes amid a disturbing trend of people playing pranks in public by claiming they are infected or coughing on people, just so they can get likes on social media.

Atlanta police are hunting for a woman (above) who filmed herself coughing on a family with four children and saying 'corona' in what they believe to be a social media challenge

The woman disappeared on foot before the horrified parents could confront her, police said.

The Atlanta Police Department has released surveillance footage of the woman walking through a store holding a drink and shopping bag and are asking the public to help identify her.

She is facing charges of reckless conduct, which carries a penalty of up to 12 months in jail and a $1,000 fine.

This is believed to be the latest in a string of sick pranks circulating on social media where people have filmed themselves coughing on people or on store produce for challenges and uploaded them under the hashtags #coronaviruschallenge or #coughingchallenge.

The female suspect allegedly targeted the family of six while they were out exercising in Atlantic Station on the evening of April 5

Police said the woman approached the four children and coughed on them, before saying the word 'corona' and laughing. The suspect appeared to be holding a cellphone and using a video app at the time

Police are coming down hard on the pranksters, slapping them with terrorism charges, as the pandemic continues to ravage the US and devastate lives.

Back in March, Virginia authorities warned of a 'disturbing trend' where young people were filming themselves coughing on food in grocery stores and posting it on social media.

Videos showed a trend for one person coughing on goods while their accomplice reacts to it for the camera.

Two teenagers in Virginia filmed themselves coughing on produce in a Harris Teeter store on March 18 and uploaded the video to social media.

Authorities believe she was filming the incident as part of a coronavirus social media prank and are asking for the public's help in identifying the suspect

Over in Missourri, a man allegedly recorded a video of himself saying 'who's scared of coronavirus?' before licking several items in a Walmart store.

Cody Lee Pfister, 26, was tracked down after the footage surfaced on social media and he was charged with making a terrorist threat.

A Texas teenager was then arrested and charged last week on terrorism charges after she posted a video on social media threatening to deliberately spread coronavirus in a Walmart store.

Lorraine Maradiaga, 18, posted a series of videos on Snapchat where she said she had tested positive for the deadly virus, before she headed for the Dallas store and vowed to 'shorten your life'.

'I'm here at Walmart about to infest every m**********r, because if I'm going down, all you m***********s are going down,' the girl said in the video.

The video later shows her in a car as she coughs into the camera.

Videos have been emerging on social media such as this one where a person pretends to cough in a grocery store and the other reacts to it

Lorraine Maradiaga, 18, (left) posted a series of videos on Snapchat where she said she had tested positive for the deadly virus, before she headed for the Dallas store and vowed to 'shorten your life'. NJ man George Falcone, 50, (right) has been charged with terroristic threats in the third degree for coughing on a supermarket worker claiming he has COVID-19

'If you want to get the coronavirus and f****** die, call me,' she said in the video.

'I'll meet you up and (cough, cough) and I will shorten your life.'

There has also been a spate of incidents not thought to be filmed but where individuals have deliberately targeted and coughed on people in public places.

In Pennsyvlania, Daniel Tabussi, 57, was charged with terroristic threats, simple assault, disorderly conduct and harassment after he allegedly approached an older man in a Karns grocery store who was wearing a medical face mask and gloves and made deliberate coughing sounds near the man then smiled and laughed.

He had reportedly mocked the man for wearing a mask and claimed he was infected with the coronavirus.

A few days later, a man in New Jersey was charged with making terrorist threats after he allegedly coughed on a supermarket employee in a Wegman's supermarket in Manalapan claiming he was infected with the contagious coronavirus.

George Falcone, 50, was charged for terrorist threats in the third degree and other charges after he leaned toward an employee and purposely coughed, laughing and saying he was infected with COVID-19.

More than 27,000 Americans have been killed by the deadly virus and there are now more than 633,000 infections.
Roseburg Public Schools is suspending all planned video conference lessons after an incident Monday where an unknown person took control of a middle school class session and displayed graphic content.

"We are deeply disheartened by this incident, and the district is investigating," a message on the school district's Facebook page said Monday evening. "At this time, we do not know who is responsible for hacking the platform. The teacher leading the class discussion had followed safety protocols for online lessons and was unable to control the screen once it was hacked."

The school district was using the platform Zoom to have face-to-face interactions with students. The platform has reportedly had a number of disruptions this year in what is known as Zoombombing or Zoom raiding, as the platform became more popular during the pandemic.

Coronavirus in Oregon: Latest news | Live map tracker |Text alerts | Newsletter

The school district said if necessary it would look into other platforms that could guarantee safety and it may reevaluate online classroom tools that involve live streaming.

All schools in Oregon started Distance Learning for All on Monday after an executive order by Gov. Kate Brown to extend the school closure for the remainder of the academic year amid the coronavirus pandemic.

Distance Learning for All can be online learning, homework packets or a combination of the two. The decision on what distance learning looks like will be decided by each school district based on what best fits the need of their students and community.

School districts across the country are currently adjusting to the opportunities and challenges of educating students from a distance, and while we understand that there will be some difficulties in the process, there is no excuse for this type of incident to occur, the districts message on social media said. We value our students and their well-being, and we will do everything in our power to protect them and provide healthy learning environments.

--The Associated Press

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Grand Junction, Colorado--(Newsfile Corp. - April 15, 2020) - Bullfrog Gold Corp (OTCQB: BFGC) (CSE: BFG) (FSE: 11B) ("Bullfrog", "BFGC" or the "Company") wishes to clarify its April 8, 2020 press release (the "April 8th Press Release") at the request of the Investment Industry Regulatory Organization of Canada. The April 8th Press Release announced the commencement of a drill program at the Company's Bullfrog Project ("Project") located 125 miles NW of Las Vegas, Nevada. This clarifying news release specifically identifies the deficient disclosures, discloses why it is deficient, and provides the required clarifying disclosure or states that the disclosure is being retracted.

The April 8th Press Release included the following statement:

"A few priority, but discretionary holes are planned in our new Paradise Ridge exploration target located one mile east of the Bullfrog Pit. Geological studies of this target have identified an undrilled area 2,000 meters long and 350 meters wide that has the identical host rocks as the 2+ million ounce Bullfrog deposit, similar structures and gold in surface samples."

The news release in referencing "identical host rocks" didn't include any further information regarding the host rocks and could be seen as misleading and promotional. The Company wishes to now reference the US Geological Survey's Bulletin 407 that clearly shows the same rock units that hosted the Bullfrog deposit also occur in the Paradise Ridge target area. Notwithstanding, the mineralization hosted in the Bullfrog deposit is not necessarily indicative of mineralization that may be hosted in the Paradise Ridge target and the reader should not infer that this is the case. Testing the entire target will require much more drilling in subsequent programs.

In the "About Bullfrog Gold Corp." section of the April 8th Press Release the Company included the following statement:

"Bullfrog Gold Corp. is a Delaware corporation that controls the commanding land and mineral positions in the Bullfrog Mine area where Barrick Bullfrog Inc. produced 2.3 million ounces of gold by conventional milling beginning in 1989 and closing in early 1999, at which time the gold price was under $300/ounce."

The Company wishes to clarify this statement as it only considers the price of gold at that time vs. current prices and does not consider the current costs of exploitation. The Company notes that the gold grades milled by Barrick were nearly three times higher than current heap leach resource grades, nearly all operating costs in 1999 were much lower than costs in 2020 and front-end capital or exploitation costs are not included in the statement.

In the same section of the April 8th Press Release, the Company referred to estimated mineralization of 624,000 ounces of 0.7 g/tonne gold.

The use of the word mineralization and reporting of additional unclassified mineralization between 0.20 g gold/t and the base case cutoff grade of 0.36 g/t is not compliant with National Instrument 43-101. Instead the news release should have referred only to the base case measured and indicated resources of 525,400 ounces averaging 1.02 g/t using a 0.36 g/t cutoff as reported in the Company's Technical Report entitled Mineral Resource Estimate, Bullfrog Gold Project, Nye County, Nevada and dated August 9, 2017, which is available under the Company's profile at www.sedar.com. The Company's resources for all classifications are summarized below:

Total Project Resources Tonnes Gold Gold Oz Silver Silver Oz Classification Millions g/t 000's g/t 000's Measured 2.46 0.91 71.7 2.66 210 Indicated 13.61 1.04 453.7 2.58 1,130 Total M & I 16.07 1.02 525.4 2.61 1340 Inferred 2.85 1.20 110.7 2.63 248

Based on a $1200 gold price, 0.36 g gold/t cutoff and 72% gold recovery

This section also included the following statement:

"An annual production rate of at least 60,000 ounces is currently envisioned by management, or more depending on success from drill programs."

The Company wishes to retract the statement above from its April 8th Press Release, as the Company does not have an independent study to support the economic viability and technical feasibility of the Project:

Cautionary Note Regarding Forward Looking Statements

This press release contains certain "Forward-Looking Statements" within the meaning of Section 27A of the Securities Act of 1933, as amended, and Section 21E of the United States Securities Exchange Act of 1934, as amended. All statements, other than statements of historical fact, included herein including those with respect to the objectives, plans and strategies of the Company and those preceded by or that include the words "believes," "expects," "given," "targets," "intends," "anticipates," "plans," "projects," "forecasts" or similar expressions, are forward-looking statements that involve various risks and uncertainties. Forward looking information in this press release includes but is not limited to statements regarding increased liquidity for the Company's shareholders and the application of metallurgical testing results.

Such forward-looking information and statements are based on numerous assumptions, including among others, the Company's ability to successfully maintain its listings, the stability of industry and market costs and trends and the Company's ability to obtain all regulatory approvals required for its planned objectives. Furthermore, by their very nature, forward-looking information involves a variety of known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors which may cause the actual plans, intentions, events, results, performance or achievements of the Company to be materially different from those expressed or implied by such forward-looking information. Such risks, uncertainties and other factors include, without limitation, those related to: (a) adverse regulatory or legislative changes (b) market conditions, volatility and global economic conditions (c) industry-wide risks (d) the Company's inability to maintain or improve its competitive position and (e) the ability to obtain financing needed to fund the continued development of the Company's business.

We use certain terms in this valuation such as "mineralization" and "mineral inventory estimates" that are not defined in Canadian National Instrument 43-101; or recognized under the U.S. SEC Industry Guide 7. The Company is presently an exploration stage company. Exploration is highly speculative in nature, involves many risks, requires substantial expenditures and may not result in the discovery of mineral deposits that can be mined profitably. Furthermore, the Company currently has no resources or reserves on any of its properties. As a result, there can be no assurance that such forward-looking statements will prove to be accurate, and actual results and future events could differ materially from those anticipated in such statements. Additional information regarding important factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from the Company's expectations is disclosed in the Company's documents filed from time to time with the United States Securities & Exchange Commission. Investors are urged to consider closely the disclosures in our Form 10-K and other SEC filings, which can be obtained from the SEC's website at http:www.sec.gov/edgar.shtml.

Qualified Person

David Beling, P.E. has 55 years of project and corporate experience in the mining industry and is a qualified person as defined by Canadian National Instrument 43-101 - Standards of Disclosure or Mineral Projects. Mr. Beling has prepared, supervised the preparation of, or approved the technical information that forms the basis of the Company's disclosures, but is not independent of Bullfrog Gold Corp, as he is the CEO & President and holds common shares and incentive stock options of the Company. For further information, please contact David Beling, CEO & President, at (970) 628-1670.

To view the source version of this press release, please visit https://www.newsfilecorp.com/release/54467
The global economy is on track to contract "sharply" by 3 percent in 2020 as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, much worse than during the 2008-09 financial crisis, according to a World Economic Outlook (WEO) report released by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) on Tuesday.



"The world has changed dramatically in the three months since our last update of World Economic Outlook in January," IMF Chief Economist Gita Gopinath said at a virtual press conference, noting that the latest projection is 6.3 percentage points lower than the previous estimation.

"As countries implement needed containment measures to control the pandemic, the world has been put in a great lockdown," Gopinath said. "The magnitude and speed of collapse in activity that has followed is unlike anything experienced in our lifetimes."

In addition, many countries face multiple challenges, including health crises, financial crises, and a collapse in commodity prices, all of which "interact in complex ways," she said.

While noting that policy makers are responding in an "unprecedented" manner by helping households, firms and financial markets, the IMF chief economist said there is still "considerable uncertainty about what the economic landscape will look like when we emerge from this lockdown."

Calling it the "worse recession" since the Great Depression of the 1930s, Gopinath said the cumulative global output loss across 2020 and 2021 is expected to reach about 9 trillion U.S. dollars, greater than the economies of Japan and Germany combined.

"Assuming the pandemic fades in the second half of 2020 and that policy actions taken around the world are effective in preventing widespread firm bankruptcies, extended job losses and system-wide financial strength, we project global growth in 2021 to rebound to 5.8 percent," she said, stressing that the recovery is "only partial."

The latest WEO showed that advanced economies will shrink significantly by 6.1 percent in 2020, and emerging market and developing economies, which typically have growth levels well above advanced economies, will decline by 1.0 percent.

Noting that this is a baseline scenario, the IMF chief economist said in a more adverse scenario, global gross domestic product (GDP) could fall even further by an additional 3 percent in 2020 if the pandemic does not recede in the second half of this year.

Flattening the spread of COVID-19 using lockdowns allows health systems to cope with the disease, which then permits a resumption of economic activity, said the IMF chief, urging countries to continue to spend generously on their health systems, perform widespread testing, and refrain from trade restrictions on medical supplies.

In response to a question from Xinhua, Gopinath said this is not a time to restrict the trade of medical supplies and essential equipment around the world, and that "it is very important that this does not become a feature where we reverse all the gains that we've got from globalization."

"The world needs a healthy recovery. It needs a strong recovery. And that will not come about if the world de-globalizes because that would severely reduce productivity in the world. And that's the last thing we want at this time," she said.
5. Crazy Rich Asians

Hulu

This modern romance is as hilarious as it is touching. Rachel (Constance Wu) has no idea what shes getting into when her boyfriend, Nick (Henry Golding) invites her back to his home country of Singapore for his best friends wedding. Thats because he left out some significant details about his family, such as their extreme wealth. Rachel attempts to navigate the elaborate affluence with the help of a friend (Awkwafina).

6. The Week Of

Netflix

Adam Sandler and Chris Rock star in this Netflix original. Set to be prospective in-laws, the two fathers clash over how best to plan a wedding for their kids. Sandlers character, Kenny, is threatened by Kirbys (Rock) wealth and refuses to let him pay for anything, even though he himself has little money to spend. The stream-worthy comedy serves as a reminder for what the wedding is all about, even when things go awry.

7. Bridesmaids

Hulu
IT major Wipro on Wednesday reported a 8.3 per cent year-on-year growth in its net profit at Rs 9,772 crore for the financial year ended March 31, 2020, and suspended revenue growth guidance for April-June quarter due to uncertainty amid coronvirus pandemic.

The Bengaluru-based company had posted net profit at Rs 9,017 crore in the financial year 2018-19.

The company posted 4.2 per cent growth in revenue at Rs 61,023.2 crore in FY20 as compared to Rs 5,8584.5 crore in FY19.

On the quarterly basis, the company reported a 5.3 per cent decline in consolidated profit at Rs 2,326 crore in the March quarter of 2020. In the quarter ended December 2019, Wipro had reported a profit of Rs 2,456 crore.

The IT company, however, reported a 1.3 per cent rise in revenue at Rs 15,296 crore compared to Rs 15,100 in the last quarter.

On the yearly basis, Wipro reported a 6 per cent decline in profit at Rs 2,345.20 crore during the March quarter compared with Rs 2,493.90 crore in the corresponding quarter last year. Revenue was up 4.7 per cent YoY at Rs 15,711 crore from Rs 15,006 crore in the year-ago period.

It's the first time ever that Wipro announced the quarterly earnings before its larger peers namely Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) and Infosys. Wipro has not given revenue guidance for the April-June quarter due to uncertainty over coronavirus outbreak.

The revenue from operations was recorded at Rs 15,711 crore. IT services segment revenue was at $2,073.7 million, a fall of 1 per cent sequentially, while IT Services operating margin stood at 17.6 per cent, down 0.8 per cent on quarterly basis.

The company said that its board has not recommended any final dividend. The interim dividend of Rs 1 declared by the board at its meeting held on January 14, 2020 will be considered as the final dividend for the financial year 2019-20. Thus, the total dividend for the financial year 2019-20 remains Rs 1 per equity share, it said.

In December quarter, Wipro reported a year-on-year fall of 3.2 per cent in consolidated profit to Rs 2,462.90 crore. However, its revenue rose 2.73 per cent to Rs 15,470.50 crore from Rs 15,100.60 crore in the corresponding period of last year. The operating margin in the third quarter was at 18.4 per cent, an increase of 0.3 per cent sequentially.

Also Read: Wipro Q4FY20 earnings preview: Coronavirus impact, update on CEO search among key things to watch out
BC Sikh groups are combining efforts to raise funds to help ease those suffering economic hardships related to the COVID-19 pandemic during April, Sikh Heritage month. Virtual Vaisakhi is the name of the initiative. All proceeds raised will go to community initiatives.

This year, we are asking and inspiring Sikhs and non-Sikhs to collectively open their wallets and hearts to help invoke the Spirit of Vaiskahi to address the most pressing and emerging needs with organizations working with local food banks, seniors outreach, marginalized communities and domestic support services. Lets celebrate Vaisakhi by helping others. Were all in this together, said Jessie Kaur Lehail of Kaur Project/Virtual Vaisakhi.

Currently the collective includes Kaur Project, One Voice Canada, SAF, Khalsa Aid, Guru Nanaks Free Kitchen, SAMHAA, SikhRi, Future is Partnership, Gurdwara Sahib Dasmesh Darbar, Gurdwara Sahib Sukh Sagar, Gurdwara Sahib Sukh Sagar, SEYVA, S.A.L.M.O.N Project and many others.

To donate, volunteer or request help, visit the Virtual Vaisakhis website www.virtualvaisakhi.com
By SeaWestNews

Canada is shoring up its support for the fisheries and aquaculture sectors with multi-million-dollar aid packages after declaring the nations seafood sector as an essential service during the current COVID-19 crisis.

Our wild and farmed fish and seafood sector has been working closely with other food organizations, together with Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada, Fisheries and Oceans Canada, and other departments to address the COVID-19 challenge, said Paul Lansbergen, President of the of Fisheries Council of Canada (FCC).

It is critical that our members, as important contributors to the food supply chain, maintain their ability to operate and fill grocery store shelves during this crisis.

Timothy Kennedy, President & CEO, of Canadian Aquaculture Industry Alliance (CAIA) said continued operations will help to secure the livelihoods of over 80,000 Canadians, mainly in coastal and rural communities, as the economic impact of the pandemic, evolves.

The federal government has now announced numerous programs that will help our essential workers and businesses to continue to operate and supply Canadians and the global community with Canadian seafood, he said.

Wage supports and essential worker definitions are critical programs to support  both financially and morally  our Canadian fish and seafood workers. Our members are committed to maintaining our high-quality standards for Canadians during this challenging time.

In addition to supporting the food supply chain, our members in Canadian fish and seafood  both wild and farmed  promote a healthy resource and work to develop an economically sound, market-driven, competitively-structured industry, both organisations said in a statement.

The Fisheries Council of Canada (FCC) is the voice of Canadas wild capture fish and seafood industry, while the Canadian Aquaculture Industry Alliance (CAIA) is the national association that speaks for Canadas seafood farmers.

Earlier this month, Canadas Minister of Fisheries, Oceans, and the Canadian Coast Guard Bernadette Jordan announced aquaculture and seafood processing companies will have access to the $5 billion Farm Credit Canada loan program. And fishermen, processing workers, and front-line aquaculture workers are entitled to the Canada Emergency Response Benefit, which provides $2,000 per month for up to four months for workers who lose their income as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Additionally, small- and medium-sized businesses will have access to $65 billion in support via interest-free loans provided through the Canada Emergency Business Account and the Export Development Canada and Business Development Bank.

We continue to work together, across all levels of government, and in partnership with harvesters, processors, seafood farmers, and industry, to keep Canadians safe and communities supported, Jordan wrote in a 27 March statement.

The seafood sector, and the hard-working women and men behind it, are essential to our collective food security and to Eastern Canadas economies, she said.
Yesterday, I wrote about how Germanys coronavirus death numbers were extremely low compared to nearby countries. I noted that Germany had about the same number of reported cases as France (approximately 130,000 cases). Italy had about 155,000 cases. Spain had about 165,000. Yet, Germany was reporting only 3,022 deaths. France was reporting more than 14,000. Spain was reporting around 17,000 and Italy nearly 20,000. Looking at the numbers on a per capita basis revealed a similar picture.

I threw out three possible explanations for Germanys comparatively low death count: (1) that Germany counts coronavirus deaths differently; (2) that Germany treats infected patients much more effectively; and (3) that Germany had a weaker strain of the virus.

Today, the Washington Post takes up the question mostly, it seems, for the purpose of slamming Boris Johnsons response to the pandemic. France goes unmentioned. Spain and Italy are deemed, implausibly, to have done better than the UK did.

The Post tries its hand at explaining Germanys low death rate. It suggests that early testing was a key factor.

It seems to me, however, that testing (coupled with tracing and isolation) can be expected to slow the infection rate, not the death rate per infection (because there is no known cure for this virus). Germanys number of cases per 1 million people is actually higher than the UKs. Yet its deaths per million people are less than one-quarter of the UKs.

The Post seems bound and determined to attribute anything positive to testing. I assume it does so to advance its ability to bash Trump over Americas slowness in ramping up testing.

There is, though, an anomalous reason why testing might have helped produce a lower death rate in Germany. I discuss it at the end of this post.

The Post also points to superior German health care as an explanation for the low death rate. This is a plausible explanation  one I suggested yesterday.

The Post attributes superior German treatment of the virus in part to Germanys universal health care system. But the UK, France, and Italy also have universal health care.

The Post offers another explanation that seems plausible  one Ive seen elsewhere, but forgot to include in my earlier post. Reportedly, the infection spread to Germany via young people who were vacationing in southern Europe. Nearly all of these people, and the members of their age group whom they infected early on, survived.

The virus spread to older populations but, perhaps thanks to testing and tracing, that population was never as heavily infected as older populations in countries like Italy were.

Other things being equal, testing shouldnt produce a lower death per infection rate. However, in Germany, other things dont seem to have been equal because the population first hit by the virus was young and healthy.
Authorities in Odishas coastal district of Ganjam have banned spitting in public places to check the spread of coronavirus and warned that those violating the ban will be fined Rs 500.

Warning people against spitting outside, Ganjam district collector Vijay Amruta Kulange in a tweet said if caught in the act, violators will have to pay a fine of Rs 500.

In Odisha, 60 positive cases of Covid-19 have been reported so far. The disease has claimed one life in the state.

Follow coronavirus latest updates here.

A month ago, chief minister Naveen Patnaik too had appealed to the people to stop chewing paan and spitting in the open to stop the virus from spreading.

The ban on spitting came in the wake of the Union health ministry asking all states to prohibit the use of smokeless tobacco and spitting in public places to prevent the spread of the novel coronavirus.

Chewing smokeless tobacco products, paan masala and areca nut increases the production of saliva followed by a very strong urge to spit. Spitting in public places could enhance the spread of the Covid-19 virus, the ministry said in a letter to chief secretaries of all states and union territories a few days ago.

States and Union Territory governments have necessary authority to ban spitting under the Epidemic Diseases Act, the Disaster Management Act and under various provisions of the Indian Penal Code 1860 and the Code of Criminal Procedure (CrPc).

The Indian Council for Medical Research (ICMR) had also appealed to people to refrain from consuming smokeless tobacco products and spitting in public places.

Earlier this month, the Ganjam district administration had made it compulsory for anyone coming out on the street to wear masks and said those violating would be penalized with Rs 1000 in urban areas and Rs 500 in rural areas.

India now has over 11,000 cases of Covid-19 and almost 400 people have died of it.
Many students think about how to best spend their time while studying. But what comes before study sessions can be important too - especially if you want to improve your memory of what you have learned.

In today's Education Tips, we will explore different ways that you can improve your memory and learning. We will examine some useful, no-cost things you can do before you study.

Three important ideas to think about before studying include exercise, study location and pre-study tests. Lets look at each of these in turn.

Exercise

Before you study, doing cardiovascular exercise may help you better remember what you learn. High-intensity exercise may be especially helpful.

In a 2018 study, published in the journal Physiology and Behavior, researchers found that a group of young people who did 15 minutes of high-intensity training on a treadmill remembered more words.

Some studies have also shown high-intensity exercise to help improve the memories of older people.

Other studies suggest the importance of different kinds of exercise. It seems that both long, slow cardiovascular exercise and high-intensity exercise have different effects on memory. Researchers have suggested combining the two to get the best effects for your memory.

The important idea is this: exercise is good for your memory. Even if you cannot exercise right before a study session, it is still probably a good idea to be active in general.

Location

Location is also important for improving your learning. While it is good to have a desk or a special study area, some research suggests that changing where you study could help you remember more of what you study.

Our memories sometimes depend on things in our environment. For example, a book might remind you of something interesting or strange you learned while reading it.

Environmental Context and Human Memory, a famous study on memory, dealt with the question of memory and our surroundings. Researchers Smith, Glenberg and Bjork found that environmental context played a big part in how well people remembered words. The researchers noted that subjects who learned from a list remembered an average of 15.9 words, while subjects who learned in two different contexts remembered an average of 24.4 words.

Be sure to plan your location before you start to study. You might want to try studying in different places. Perhaps one day you could study in your room, and then the next day you could study in the kitchen, or outside. You do not have to change locations every day, but try to at least sometimes.

Pre-study test

We have talked about exercise and location. Now lets talk about a third way you can improve your study session: taking a pre-study test.

Students often study with a test in mind. They consider the test the final step to show how much they have learned.

But, students need to test themselves often. Testing is one of the best ways to make yourself remember new information.

In 2018, researchers found that students who took a test before learning new material did much better after studying the material. The research was published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology.

The students failed on the tests, but they were better able to remember the material than students who were only asked to read the information.

The testing effect appears to be attributable, in part, to the role unsuccessful tests play in enhancing future learning, the researchers wrote.

So, try to take a pre-study test. If you are using a textbook, you might want to look to the end of the chapter and do a few practice questions before you read it.

You could look at some important words at the end of a chapter of an English book, for example. And you could ask yourself what they mean, or how they are used. While you might not know the answer, you will probably be better able to learn and remember the answer when you study it!

Closing thoughts

In todays report, we have explored three things you can do to improve your learning. Try them out and let us know about your results.

In future education tips stories, we will explore things you can do during and after your study sessions to improve your learning.

Im John Russell.

John Russell wrote this story for Learning English. Mario Ritter, Jr. was the editor.

________________________________________________________________

Words in This Story

session  n. period of time that is used to do a particular activity

location n. a place or position

cardiovascular exercise n. exercise that raises your heart rate and pushes blood through the body

context  n. the situation in which something happens : the group of conditions that exist where and when something happens

attributable  adj. not used before a noun: caused by a particular thing

enhance  v. to increase or improve (something)

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OTTAWA - Federal and provincial officials are starting to discuss how and when to start reopening schools and businesses but Prime Minister Justin Trudeau warned Tuesday the full-scale lockdowns most Canadians are living with right now will remain in place for at least several more weeks.

Hey there, time traveller!

This article was published 14/4/2020 (637 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

This Wednesday, March 11, 2015 photo shows the World Health Organization (WHO) headquarters building in Geneva, Switzerland. THE CANADIAN PRESS/AP, Raphael Satter

OTTAWA - Federal and provincial officials are starting to discuss how and when to start reopening schools and businesses but Prime Minister Justin Trudeau warned Tuesday the full-scale lockdowns most Canadians are living with right now will remain in place for at least several more weeks.

Similar discussions are happening around the world, as many countries are starting to show some positive signs of slowing the spread of COVID-19  even as experts warn limited testing in most places could be masking the real picture of the disease.

The World Health Organization is trying to inject some co-ordination into these decisions, releasing new guidelines Tuesday for what should be in place before easing restrictions.

"The way down is much slower than the way up," Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, director-general of the WHO, said in a speech Monday. "That means control measures must be lifted slowly, and with control. It cannot happen all at once."

The WHO guidelines outline six areas officials must consider if they are to look at resuming activities. Here is where Canada stands on each of them.

1. Is transmission of the virus under control?

Short answer: We're not testing enough to know.

What the experts say: Eleanor Fish, a professor of immunology at the University of Toronto, said testing must become much more widespread before we really understand the state of community transmission.

Alison Thompson, a public health professor in the Leslie Dan Faculty of Pharmacy at the University of Toronto, said it takes a significant amount of time between a confirmed infection and fully tracing a person's contacts and testing them, to know whether that confirmed infection has resulted in many more infections.

"We have to make sure it actually is levelling off, or that community transmission has actually ground to a halt, which can take quite awhile," she said.

If restrictions are removed too quickly, thousands of people with COVID-19, who may not know they are infected, could potentially spread it fast and wide, she said.

Thompson also said it's time to stop thinking of the pandemic in terms of health versus the economy. If there isn't a healthy workforce the economy will continue to suffer, she said.

"We may see some short-term gains if we did ease up on some of these restrictions," she said. "But in the long run if we end up with an out-of-control situation with COVID, the economy will take much, much longer to recover."

2. Is the health-care system equipped to detect, test, isolate and treat every case, and trace every person who came into contact with a positive case?

Short answer: Not yet.

What the experts say: Timothy Sly, professor emeritus at Ryerson University's school of occupational and public health, said Canada has done "an abysmal job" at testing and tracing.

"We have a situation now essentially where we're groping along in the dark in terms of finding out who in fact is virus positive and who's virus negative. We've done an abysmal job at that," said Sly, who specializes in epidemiology.

Sly pointed to an especially woeful rate in Ontario where Premier Doug Ford has vowed to perform 8,000 tests daily by Wednesday, up from about 5,000. Alberta is among Canada's testing leaders with about 7,400 tests conducted daily, which Sly said is still not enough.

Still, he acknowledged there have been hurdles beyond Canada's control that have handcuffed efforts  notably, global shortages of equipment including swabs and laboratory chemicals needed to process test samples.

Sly said Health Canada's recent approval of a rapid, mobile hand-held testing device from an Ottawa company should help, as will a series of expanded testing criteria that various provinces have adopted in recent days.

Jianhong Wu, a distinguished research professor at York University who has led multiple national projects on SARS, pandemic influenza and immunization evaluation, said there is a close relationship between contact tracing, testing and social distancing.

"If you don't do well in one component, you need to significantly magnify your effort in other components," he said.

Sly said provinces are largely trying to contact people exposed to a confirmed case by telephone, which is not sustainable given the soaring number of cases.

He pointed to countries such as South Korea, which have employed cellphone data to track possible contacts. He said that is much more effective, but it would raise privacy issues.

"People are going to be hollering and screaming about that but it does seem to work," he said.

3. Are outbreaks minimized in special settings like health facilities and nursing homes?

Short answer: No.

What the experts say: Risks remain dangerously high in hundreds of nursing homes across the country.

Quebec, where long-term care centres have been particularly hard hit, announced Tuesday that inspections have identified 41 seniors residences that require special monitoring because of a high number of COVID-19 cases. Premier Francois Legault on Tuesday appealed for people with experience in health care to help out in understaffed long-term care facilities.

Canada's chief public health officer, Theresa Tam, said Monday nearly half of the country's deaths from the novel coronavirus have come from long-term care facilities, and she predicted the number will increase despite provinces' efforts to fight the problem.

Twenty-nine residents in a 65-bed nursing home in Bobcaygeon, Ont., have died amid the pandemic. Another facility in Toronto recorded 22 deaths by Monday, while the Lynn Valley Care Centre in North Vancouver, B.C., has had 18 residents die. In many facilities workers are also getting sick in high numbers.

After the Lynn Valley Care Centre outbreak, British Columbia moved to stop staff from working in multiple facilities as a way to slow the spread of the virus. Ontario made the same move Tuesday.

Isaac Bogoch, an infectious-disease specialist at the University of Toronto and the University Health Network, feels that strategy, along with limiting visits with seniors and infection-prevention methods, could go a long way in minimizing risks for possible subsequent waves of COVID-19 among the elderly.

Canada now has guidelines for helping to protect long-term care residents and workers, but Tam indicated this week the outbreaks are the biggest concern that has arisen in Canada's COVID-19 situation over the last two weeks.

4. Are there measures in workplaces and schools to prevent the spread of the virus?

Short answer: Not yet.

What the experts say about workplaces: In most provinces, only essential businesses like grocery stores and pharmacies can remain open. All others must operate with employees working from home. If they can't do that, they must close. Restaurants can generally only allow takeout or delivery.

Many businesses report being too focused on setting their employees up to work from home, and haven't yet begun to think about what to do to reopen.

Provinces and business groups say it's too early to speculate on which measures can be lifted. Any shift in approach would come at the advice of the chief medical health officer "and with extreme caution so as to avoid a resurgence of the virus as has been seen in other jurisdictions," said Hayley Chazan, a spokeswoman for Ontario Health Minister Christine Elliott.

The Canadian Chamber of Commerce says it wants clear advice from public health authorities before restrictions loosen.

"We fully expect that there will unfortunately be an instance where an employee does test positive. What does that mean for the workplace? Does there have to be a total shutdown? A deep clean?" asked Mark Agnew, the chamber's senior director of international policy.

Sector-specific rules will remain critical as the lockdown starts to lift, he said, noting that retailers, meat processors and refrigerator technicians might all require different protocols around physical distancing and personal protective equipment.

What the experts say about schools: Kids, while less susceptible to the novel coronavirus, are well equipped to transmit it.

"Children are generally less compliant with effective hand hygiene, and they don't necessarily control their secretions," said Dr. Nisha Thampi, infection prevention and control lead at Children's Hospital of Eastern Ontario in Ottawa. "That presents an exposure risk to the staff as well as to other children."

The Public Health Agency of Canada has stopped short of recommending specific changes schools could make to their operations, but did offer more general guidance for schools in February, before Canada began to really experience the impact of COVID-19. That included regular hand-washing and supervised use of hand sanitizer, education on proper "respiratory etiquette" such as covering coughs and sneezes, ramped-up cleaning and disinfection routines within school buildings, and reinforcement of "no sharing" policies.

Thampi said medical experts will also have to craft advice that strikes a balance between student safety and developmental needs.

"Children have always seen school as being a social environment," she said, adding many are no longer getting that kind of stimulation in the era of physical distancing. "How can we be sensitive to that while also teaching them about infection-prevention strategies?"

5. Are the risks of importing more cases from outside the country being managed?

Short answer: Mostly yes.

What the experts say: The federal government has adopted once-unthinkable measures over the past month to keep more cases of COVID-19 from arriving in Canada. Those include banning most non-Canadians from entering the country and a 14-day mandatory quarantine for anyone who does.

On Tuesday, Ottawa upped that game again, now requiring anyone arriving to explain their quarantine plan and if it's not good enough, they will be forced to stay in federal sites.

The trouble is that Canada is heavily reliant from both an economic and social perspective on foreign trade and immigration. That means it can't keep the border closed forever.

"We have done a lot, but economically it's not sustainable," said Daniel Beland, director of the McGill Institute for the Study of Canada.

Experts say there is a variety of potential avenues to reopen the border and manage the risk.

Being able to screen potential visitors, preferably with on-the-spot testing at airports and other ports of entry, would make it much easier to identify carriers and either bar them from coming into Canada or put them into quarantine.

Steven J. Hoffman, a York University professor and the scientific director of the Canadian Institutes of Health Research's Institute of Population and Public Health, said the 14-day quarantine "could be the enabler that allows government to reopen our borders, particularly if that system is really up and running and fully implemented. And enforced in a way that we can have confidence in it."

There could also be more targeted travel restrictions for visitors from different countries, depending on how those countries are managing the virus, though experts acknowledge partial bans and quarantine requirements could create challenges and anger.

Beland nonetheless believes Canadians will need to accept that there will be changes in the way they travel, similar to how the 9/11 terrorist attacks led to increased security measures.

6. Are local communities are educated, engaged and empowered to adjust to the "new norm"?

Short answer: Maybe

What the experts say: Canadians have been inundated with warnings from political leaders and public health experts for weeks now to be prepared for bad news. Trudeau has not been shy about making sure people know that until there is a vaccine, we are all going to have to get used to having at least some restrictions on our movements and behaviours.

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In Canada, most experts think the number of cases is going to peak this month. The data based on the limited epidemiology Canada has shows the number of cases was doubling every three to four days in the last two weeks of March, but had slowed to doubling every five to eight days in the first two weeks of April.

But officials also warn of more than one wave, with flare-ups and new infections continuing for months. A vaccine is at least 12 to 18 months away, and the "new norm" really means longer-term adjustments to limit the impact of those new outbreaks.

There have been warnings from some experts around the world that things like live concerts and massive public gatherings for sporting events won't be safe for months to come.

Hoffman said he thinks Canadians must get ready for an up-and-down scenario, "where first the government lessens these restrictions and then a couple weeks later has to tighten them again in light of new data and new information about where spread is happening or how it's happening."

This report by The Canadian Press was first published April 14, 2020.

 With files from Mia Rabson and Lee Berthiaume in Ottawa, Kelly Geraldine Malone in Winnipeg, Cassandra Szklarski and Michelle McQuigge in Toronto, and Christopher Reynolds and Julian McKenzie in Montreal.
San Antonio investor Sardar Biglari, a longtime critic of Cracker Barrel Old Store Inc. despite generating hundreds of million in profits from investing in the restaurant and retail chain, is once again on the rampage.

In a letter to Cracker Barrels CEO Wednesday, Biglari took issue with the company writing off its $133 million investment in Punch Bowl Social  a restaurant chain combining food and drinks with arcade games  amid the coronavirus pandemic.

Biglari accused Cracker Barrels management and board of demonstrating a profound lack of business judgment by panic exiting Punch Bunch Social.

Punch Bowl Social operated 19 locations, including two in Austin, before suspending operations and laying off substantially all restaurant and corporate employees last month in response to the crisis. The Denver-based chain launched in 2012.

On ExpressNews.com: Get the latest update on coronavirus and a tracking map of U.S. cases

Punch Bowl Socials primary lender subsequently declared a default under a credit facility and indicated it would foreclose on its collateral interest in the assets and equity of the chain unless Cracker Barrel guaranteed the debt or paid it back.

On March 25, Cracker Barrel stated in a Securities and Exchange Commission filing that in light of the substantial uncertainties surrounding the Punch Bowl Social business coming out of the pandemic, (Cracker Barrel) has decided not to invest further resources to prevent the foreclosure or provide additional capital.

Biglari expressed astonishment over the decision, saying in his letter there was no sound justification for abandoning the investment two days prior to the passage of the CARES Act.

At the very moment when landlords and lenders were negotiating with tenants and borrowers to mitigate the economic damage caused by the pandemic, including the cessation of parts of the economy, the board and management acted hastily to rid themselves of a significant investment without first obtaining details of the $2 trillion stimulus package, Biglari said.

Biglari demanded that Cracker Barrel release records related to Punch Bowl Social and other investments. A similar request in October was rebuffed.

He is chairman and CEO of San Antonio-based Biglari Holdings Inc., parent company of the Steak N Shake restaurant chain that lately has had its own troubles.

On ExpressNews.com: Steak n Shake drags down San Antonios Biglari Holdings

Biglari Holdings had a $666 million investment in two partnerships collectively called the Lion Fund as of the end of last year. Biglari manages the funds.

Biglaris $241.1 million investment in Cracker Barrel turned into almost $1 billion in value, he said earlier this year. That includes proceeds from stock sales, dividends and its remaining stake in Cracker Barrel.

Hed been Cracker Barrels largest shareholder with a 19.9 percent stake. He now controls about 2 million shares, or 8.6 percent of the shares, making him the third largest shareholder.

Biglari has criticized Cracker Barrel over the years for store expansions and side ventures like the launch of the Holler & Dash Biscuit House in 2016. He has called the fast-casual restaurant, which serves Southern food, an ill-conceived project destined to fail.

Since first acquiring Cracker Barrel shares in 2011, Biglari has failed three times to win seats on its board. In 2014, shareholders defeated a proposal that could have allowed him to engage in an acquisition of the Lebanon, Tenn., company.

On ExpressNews.com: replace this text with your teaser head and add hyperlink

That didnt stop Biglari from threatening to wage another proxy fight if he doesnt get the information about Punch Bowl Social.

The companys continued failure to provide pertinent financial and operating data to its shareholders will leave us no choice but to pursue board representation at the companys next annual meeting, Biglari said.

Cracker Barrel invested in Punch Bowl Social in July. It agreed to invest up to $140 million to acquire a non-controlling stake. But the agreement included provisions for it to potentially acquire a controlling or full ownership position.

Biglari wasnt a fan of the deal, saying Punch Bunch Social lacks any resemblance to Cracker Barrels country-cooking family dining business.

Cracker Barrel didnt immediately respond to a request for comment. Biglari was not available for comment, but he generally does not speak to the media.

Patrick Danner is a San Antonio-based staff writer covering banking and civil courts. To read more from Patrick, become a subscriber. pdanner@express-news.net | Twitter: @AlamoPD
LONDON, April 15, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- COVID-19 will lead to a strong decline in telecoms revenue. Revenue for telecoms operators will fall by 3.4% in 2020 compared to 2019, before returning to growth (0.8%) in 2021, according to a new impact assessment report published by Analysys Mason today.

Analysys Mason had previously forecast growth of 0.7% in 2020 and 0.8% in 2021. The overall impact for operators in developed economies is "lost" revenue of more than USD40 billion in each year.

The report argues that telecoms is a relatively resilient sector and will perform ahead of general GDP trends. Analysys Mason expects telecoms to account for 2.0% of GDP in 2020, an increase from 1.9% in 2019.

"Consumer telecoms services, which account for the majority (68%) of telecoms revenue, tend to be relatively resilient during economic downturns," said Stephen Sale, Research Director and co-author of the report, "but large increases in unemployment, business closures and the overall decrease in economic activity will cause a sharp decline in business services revenue."

Operators should be able to limit the impact on profitability. Operator capex is likely to fall in 2020 because of constraints in the ability to build and because of disruption to supply chains. The pandemic will reinforce and accelerate existing downward opex trends rather than introduce new ones. Profits will fall, but we do not expect overall EBITDA margins for the sector to decline by more than 2 percentage points.

"Telecoms should stay healthier than almost any industry in this crisis," said Rupert Wood, Research Director and also co-author of this report. "Telecoms should show some of the strongest post-crisis investment, in part because cashflow is more resilient in the telecoms sector than it is most others, and because some governments will emphasise 5G and fibre in stimulus packages."

The report, available at www.analysysmason.com/covid-19-operator-revenue-impact, explores and quantifies the impact of COVID-19 on different categories of revenue - consumer mobile, consumer fixed, digital services, pay TV/video, business mobile, business fixed, ICT, IoT, wholesale - and capex and opex spend, also by category.

The impact assessment focuses on aggregate of 32 developed economies across Asia, Europe and North America. It is based on an assumed fall in GDP for these countries of 6% in 2020 followed by an increase of 4.6% in 2021.

About Analysys Mason (www.analysysmason.com)

Analysys Mason is a global specialist adviser in telecoms, media and technology (TMT).

At the core of Analysys Mason's offer are two key services: TMT consultancy and research.

Since 1985, Analysys Mason has played an influential role in key industry milestones and helping clients through major shifts in the market.

We continue to be at the forefront of developments in the digital economy and are advising clients on new business strategies to address disruptive technologies.

Our teams of consultants and analysts have developed skills, techniques and methodologies that deliver tangible results for clients the world over.

Infographic - https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/1155730/Analysys_Mason_COVID_19_Infographic.jpg
Former President Barack Obama reportedly played a significant role in convincing Bernie Sanders to bow out of the Democratic primary, paving the way for his former Vice President Joe Biden to seal the nomination uncontested.

Though Obama has politically distanced himself publicly from Biden since he announced his White House bid last year, over the last few weeks he's reportedly been working quietly to help 'accelerate the endgame' for his former sidekick, the New York Times reported.

Since Biden cemented his place as the presumptive nominee with a series of resounding Super Tuesdays victories, Obama reportedly had at least four conversations with Sanders - Biden's last remaining competitor - trying to convince him to step aside.

According to sources close to the Democratic Socialist, Obama's efforts had a considerable impact on Sanders' eventual decision to end his bid last week. He allegedly reassured Sanders he'd already accomplished what he'd set out to do: by pushing the Democratic party substantially to the left.

Since Biden cemented his place as the presumptive nominee with a series of resounding Super Tuesdays victories, Obama reportedly had at least four conversations with Sanders - Biden's last remaining competitor - trying to convince him to step aside

Though Obama has politically distanced himself publicly from Biden since he announced his White House bid last year, over the last few weeks he's reportedly been pulling a number of strings in the shadows to help 'accelerate the endgame' for his former sidekick

Obama motivations were reportedly simple: he wanted to avoid a repeat of the protracted 2016 primary, in which many - including Hillary Clinton - accused Sanders of staying in the race long after his conceivable path to victory had closed.

'He hurt me, there's no doubt about it,' Clinton told Howard Stern late last year. 'And I hope he doesn't do it again to whoever gets the nomination. Once is enough.'

But Sanders wasn't the only 2020 Democratic hopeful who shared numerous interactions with Obama during the primary trail.

Despite his relative public silence, the former president held regular conversations with each of the candidates - both during their bids and after they concluded.

'[Obamas] private counsel consistently emphasized staying focused on the ultimate goal: winning the White House in November,' a source close to Obama told CNN.

It's said that Obama 'urged [candidates] to keep in mind that we must be well-positioned to unify as a party once we have a nominee.'

According to sources close to the Democratic Socialist (pictured with Obama in 2006), Obama's efforts had a considerable impact on Sanders' eventual decision to end his bid last week. He allegedly reassured Sanders he'd already accomplished what he'd set out to do: pushing the Democratic party substantially to the left

The Vermont senator clearly heeded Obama's advice once more, endorsing Biden on Monday night during a livestream broadcast alongside his former rival, as he and Biden preached the importance of coming together to defeat Trump in November.

'Today I am asking all Americans, I'm asking every Democrat, I'm asking every independent, I'm asking a lot of Republicans , to come together in this campaign to support your candidacy, which I endorse,' Sanders said to Biden on the split-screen, as both men were broadcasting from their homes.

'To make certain that we defeat somebody who I believe, and I'm speaking just for myself now, is the most dangerous president in the modern history of this country,' Sanders went on.

In a bid to sway the progressive vote in his favor, Biden assured Bernie's loyal following that the veteran senator would help to advise him on a number of key issues, from the economy to health care.

SURPRISE: Joe Biden's (left) campaign teased a 'special guest' on his livestream on Monday. It was Bernie Sanders (right) who endorsed him

Barack Obama's long-anticipated public endorsement of Biden followed on Tuesday afternoon in the form of a 12-minute monologue.

Obama said Biden possessed the right kind of leadership, 'the kind of leadership guided by knowledge and experience, honesty and humility, empathy and grace.

'That kind of leadership doesn't just belong in our state capitals and mayors offices, it belongs in the White House,' Obama continued. 'And that's why I'm so proud to endorse Joe Biden for president of the United States.'

The former president also did his part to unify the Democratic Party, giving Bernie Sanders an honorable mention by saying he is an 'American original' and said his ideas will be crucial moving forward.

'Because for the second time in 12 years, we'll have the incredible task of rebuilding our economy,' Obama said. 'And to meet the moment, the Democratic Party will have to be bold.'

Barack Obama's long-anticipated public endorsement of Biden followed on Tuesday afternoon in the form of a 12-minute monologue.

The Biden campaign is said to be eager to utilize Obama as quickly as they can, particularly where fundraisers are concerned, as they attempt to do battle with President Trump's multitudinous supply line of small-dollar donations

Obama said that what Biden and Sanders have in common is that they agree that change needs to occur.

'And that only happens if we win this election,' Obama warned. 'Because one thing everybody has learned right now is the Republicans occupying the White House and running the U.S. Senate are not interested in progress, they're interested in power.'

In the meantime, Obama and Biden are said to be working together to best determine how, when and where they will deploy the former president to best help Biden's 2020 ticket.

The Biden campaign is said to be eager to utilize Obama as quickly as they can, particularly where fundraisers are concerned, as they attempt to do battle with President Trump's multitudinous supply line of small-dollar donations.
BAKU, Azerbaijan, April 15

By Samir Ali - Trend:

Today, the cases of mass coronavirus infection are not observed in any hospital in Azerbaijan, Chairman of Azerbaijan's Management Union of Medical Territorial Units (TABIB), Member of the Operational Headquarters under the Cabinet of Ministers Ramin Bayramli said.

Bayramli made the remark in Baku at the briefing of the Operational Headquarters on April 15, Trend reports.

The information about 10 doctors infected with coronavirus in the Jalilabad hospital is false, the chairman said. In this hospital, one doctor and one health worker were infected with coronavirus.

The chairman added that the fact of infection of an employee of the hardware department of another hospital was revealed and he was placed in a special hospital for medical treatment.

Bayramli stressed that special attention is paid to the protection of doctors in the special treatment hospitals in which coronavirus infected patients are treated.

"The cases of infection occur in polyclinics or outpatient facilities as protective equipment in such facilities is not used properly, the chairman added. Moreover, the infection penetrates such medical facilities from the outside. For example, an employee of the hardware department became infected in one of the medical facilities yesterday. The cases of internal infection were not detected. This person has been infected at home. This was confirmed as a result of epidemiological analysis."

The chairman stressed that there are also infected doctors.

Six doctors were infected in one of the medical institutions, but they have already been cured, Bayramli said. The cases of infection of two doctors were detected in Jalilabad district.
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A Florida man is accused of killing a man the day after being released from jail because of fears that coronavirus could spread in corrections facilities, authorities said Tuesday.

Edward Williams, 26, of Tampa, was arrested Monday and is facing charges of second-degree murder, gun possession, violently resisting an officer, drug possession and paraphernalia possession, the Hillsborough County Sheriff's Office said.

He remained in lockup Tuesday night with no bond, according to jail records.

Williams was freed last month, six days after being arrested on suspicion of heroin possession, a third-degree felony, and possession of drug paraphernalia, a misdemeanor, according to jail records.

A state judge had authorized the local sheriff "to release any pretrial detainee arrested for a municipal or county ordinance violation, a misdemeanor offense, a criminal traffic offense,or a third-degree felony offense."

Related Video: Prisoners at High Risk For Contracting COVID-19

"The order was drafted in an effort to lower the risk of the spread of COVID-19 within the Hillsborough County detention facilities and to protect the inmates, deputies and civilian staff working within the jails," the sheriff's department said in a statement.

On March 20, a man was fatally shot in a community called Progress Village, sheriff's officials said. Williams was allegedly involved in the slaying, authorities said.

"There is no question Joseph Williams took advantage of this health emergency to commit crimes while he was out of jail awaiting resolution of a low-level, non-violent offense." Hillsborough County Sheriff Chad Chronister said in a statement Tuesday.

The sheriff's statement, however, acknowledged that Williams could also have been freed on those prior charges if he had come up with $2,500 bond.

"Judges, prosecutors and sheriffs around the country are facing difficult decisions during this health crisis with respect to balancing public health and public safety," Chronister said. "Sheriffs in Florida and throughout our country have released non-violent, low-level offenders to protect our deputies and the jail population from an outbreak."

NBC News affiliate WFLA of Tampa reports that the sheriff's department has so far released 164 low-level and non-violent offenders.
NASA astronauts and Expedition 62 Flight Engineers Andrew Morgan and Jessica Meir collect frozen research samples for loading into the SpaceX Dragon resupply ship. Dragon returned to Earth the following day, splashing down in the Pacific Ocean packed with over 4,000 pounds of science experiments and station hardware for analysis. Credit: NASA. (Apr. 5, 2020)

The six crewmembers aboard the International Space Station continued advanced space research today promoting health for humans on and off Earth.

The crew will split up at the end of the week when the Expedition 62 trio undocks and returns to Earth.

Scientists are looking at how human muscles adapt to microgravity for the Myotones space biology study. NASA astronaut Chris Cassidy began the first of his four sessions for the human research experiment today. He marked muscle points on his skin then used a specialized device to measure his muscles' biochemical properties. The research could prepare astronauts for longer space missions and help people on Earth with muscle conditions.

His two crewmates, Anatoly Ivanishin and Ivan Vagner, are getting used to life on the orbiting lab while maintaining Russian station hardware. The cosmonauts are deactivating communication systems in the new Soyuz MS-16 crew ship and getting up to speed on their complement of space research.

NASA Flight Engineers Jessica Meir and Andrew Morgan contributed to different experiments today as they complete their final week in space. Meir collected her saliva samples for microbial analysis then documented her thoughts about the station's food menu. Morgan cleaned and closed out life science hardware that housed live mice that returned to Earth on the last SpaceX Dragon cargo mission.

The two astronauts are also getting ready to end their mission with Commander Oleg Skripochka and return to Earth on Friday. The trio is packing the Soyuz MS-15 crew ship with cargo and personal items. They will undock Thursday at 9:53 p.m. EDT and parachute to landing in Kazakhstan less than three-and-half hours later.

On-Orbit Status Report

Standard Measures (SM): The crew performed their saliva collection and insertion into MELFI. The aim of the SM investigation is to ensure consistent capture of an optimized, minimal set of measures from crewmembers until the end of the ISS Program in order to characterize the adaptive responses to and risks of living in space. Among other things, the ground teams perform analyses for metabolic and chemistry panels, immune function, microbiome, etc.

Vection: The crew setup the appropriate hardware, performed the Vection science session, stowed the hardware and transferred to the session data to the ground. The principal investigator confirmed the data is on the ground and looks good. Vection is made up of 3 tasks that test how orientation perception, motion processing, and depth perception are affected by long duration 0g and return to 1g. The objective of the study is to determine to what extent an astronaut's ability to visually interpret motion, orientation, and distance may be disrupted in a microgravity environment, and how it may adapt, and how it may be changed upon return to Earth. Multiple experimental time points inflight and upon return to Earth allows for the adaptation and recovery process to be investigated.

Veggie PONDS (Passive Orbital Nutrient Delivery System): The crew reviewed the On-Board Training (OBT), inspected/took imagery of the Veggie PONDS plant growth units, and watered them as needed. It has previously been noted that germination has been delayed or has not occurred at all in the various PONDS units in the on-going experiment session. Organisms grow differently in space, from single-celled bacteria to plants and humans. Future long-duration space missions will require crew members to grow their own food. Therefore, understanding how plants respond to microgravity and demonstrating the reliable vegetable production on orbit are important steps toward that goal. Veggie PONDS uses a newly developed passive nutrient delivery system and the Veggie plant growth facility aboard the ISS to cultivate lettuce and Mizuna greens which are to be harvested on-orbit, and consumed, with samples returned to Earth for analysis.

Systems

Food Consolidate: Crew performed a food consolidation to reorganize Node 1 to make room for the transfer of food items from the Permanent Multipurpose Module (PMM) to Node 1 for the newly arrived USOS crewmember. These crew provisions were delivered on various vehicles including NG-13 and SpX-20. Unused items and United States Crewed Vehicle (USCV) food provisions removed from the food pantry were stowed in the PMM.

Soyuz Descent Drill: In preparation for their departure from the ISS on Thursday evening, the 61S Crew completed a nominal descent and landing drill today. During this training, the crew was inside their Soyuz spacecraft reviewing and practicing undock and landing procedures.

ISS Crew Handover: 61S crew continued handover to 62S crew including on-orbit practices and lessons learned related to ISS systems and payloads. They also reviewed topics that are not limited to a particular module or scheduled activity as well as those that are usually scheduled as separate activities. This will allow the crew to be on the same page regarding various onboard techniques.

Waste & Hygiene Compartment (WHC) Routine Maintenance: Today, the crew replaced the receptacle and filter in the WHC. Upon replacing the components, the crew performed a successful functionality test of the unit. Routine maintenance allows for continuous hardware operation and minimizes the possibility of a functional failure. Periodic checks during this maintenance verifies the equipment is operating within specification.

Completed Task List Activities:

Nominal Ops AC Dry Vacuum Cleaner debris bag/filter R&R

Today's Ground Activities:

All activities are complete unless otherwise noted.

 undock test ground support

INT MDM Swap

Look Ahead Plan

Tuesday, 4/14 (GMT 105)

Payloads:

CBEF cleanup

Food Acceptability

Food Physiology

GLACIER desiccant swap

Myotones

Probiotics

Standard Measures

Veggie monitoring BPW review

Systems:

Portable Emergency Provisions (PEPS) Inspection

ARED Quarterly Inspection

HMS Personal Medication Stow

Crew Handover

Wednesday, 4/15 (GMT 106)

Payloads:

Food Acceptability

Food Physiology

Functional Immune

Repository

Standard Measures

Systems:

Microbial Air Sampler (MAS) Kit Sample Collection

Surface Sample Kit (SSK) Collection/Incubation

Crew Departure Prep

JEM Ethernet Hub Unit Power Cable Reconfiguration

Thursday, 4/16 (GMT 107)

Payloads:

AWP

Food Physiology

Functional Immune

ISS Experience

Repository

Standard Measures

Systems:

61S Departure Ops

Relocating Emergency Hardware from SM Aft

JEM ORU Transfer I/F Removal

Today's Planned Activities:

All activities are complete unless otherwise noted.

HRF Generic Saliva Collection 10 Minutes

HRF Generic MELFI Sample Retrieval And Insertion Operations

HRF Generic Saliva Collection 10 Minutes

Control of the closed state of a window 6,8,9,12,13,14 cover

OMIKi-SPK. Experiment setup

HRF Generic MELFI Sample Retrieval And Insertion Operations

OMIKi-SPK. Capillary Blood Collection

Crew Departure Preparations for Return to Earth

BIOPLENKA. Retrieval of Bioplenka kit from the thermostat, squeezing. Insertion of kit for incubation in - at +37 deg .

Auxiliary Laptop Computer System Anti-Virus Software Update

ISS Crew departure preparation

Environmental Health System (EHS) Total Organic Carbon Analyzer (TOCA) Water Recovery System (WRS) Sample Analysis

Vection Hardware Deployment

Vection Crew Member Training

OMIKi-SPK. Closeout Ops

IDENTIFIKATSIYA. Copy - Micro-Accelerometer Data to HDD for return

ISS Crew Orientation

Soyuz 744  Activation

 configuration for MRM1

Magnetic 3D-bioprinter. Session 1 Closeout.

Soyuz 744  No.2 test prior to undocking.

Vection Experiment Session

VECTION Hardware Teardown

COLUMBUS Bay 1, 2, 3 clean-up

MATRYOSHKA-R. Removal of Passive Detector Assemblies (PDA) and prepack for return on Soyuz 744

VEGGIE Display On-Board Training

Soyuz 744 Stowage Ops for Return

Magnetic 3D-bioprinter. Preparing Cuvettes No.2 kit for the activity

LOR. Experiment Session

ISS Crew Adaptation

Magnetic 3D-bioprinter. Configuring magnetic bioprinter for operation

Magnetic 3D-bioprinter. Session 2 ops. Shaking cuvettes No.2-1, No.2-6 S/N 09 and setup in magnetic bioprinter

Comm reconfig for nominal ops

Atmosphere Control and Supply (ACS) Nitrogen Transfer (N2 XFER) Terminate

Waste and Hygine Compartment Urine Hose Inspection

In Flight Maintenance (IFM) Waste & Hygiene Compartment (WHC) Urine Receptacle (UR) & Insert Filter (IF) Remove and Replace with Pre-Treated Urine Inspect

Vection Flash Drive Stow

LBNP Training (PRELIMINARY)

LBNP - Exercise (PRELIMINARY) assistance

Magnetic 3D-bioprinter. Video recording of constructs in magnetic bioprinter with installed cuvettes Nos.2-1 - Nos.2-6 S/N 09

Replace urine receptacle () and filter-insert (-) in []. [] Activation after replacement

Probiotics Item Gathering

Soyuz 744 Descent OBT

BIOPLENKA. Retrieval of Bioplenka kit from the thermostat, squeezing. Insertion of kit for incubation in - at +37 deg .

Removal of TV cameras 1,2 and Light Units -302 in Soyuz 745 (MS-16) [CA]

Arrival Private Medical Conference (PMC)

Food Consolidation

Air sampling for CO in SM

Air sample collection using Draeger tube air sampler () in SM for ammonia

Air sample collection SM and FGB using -1 sampler

Air sample collection using -1 absorber in SM for Freon

Soyuz 745 Transfers and IMS Ops

Environmental Health System (EHS) Total Organic Carbon Analyzer (TOCA) Sample Data Record

Public Affairs Office (PAO) High Definition (HD) Config JEM Setup

Recharging Soyuz 744 Samsung tablet, initiate recharge

Environmental Health System (EHS) Total Organic Carbon Analyzer (TOCA) Waste Water Bag (WWB) Changeout

PAO Preparation

Veggie Ponds Plant Photography

Public Affairs Office (PAO) Event in High Definition (HD) - JEM

Health Maintenance System (HMS) ISS Food Intake Tracker (ISS FIT)

Descent Private Medical Conference (PMC) - [Aborted]

Handover of Increment 62 Crew

Food Acceptability Survey

POIC Overview OBT

Private Special Conference (PSC)

BIOPLENKA. Retrieval of Bioplenka kit thermostat, squeezing. Insertion of kit for incubation in - at +37 deg .

Preparing for SW Antivirus Scan on Auxiliary Computer System Laptops

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A sailor on the aircraft carrier USS Theodore Roosevelt died this week from COVID-19, and nearly 600 sailors on the ship have tested positive for the novel coronavirus.

Why it matters: The effective loss of one of the U.S. Navy's prime assets because of the spreading pandemic underscores the threat infectious disease poses to American military readiness  and the failure of the national defense establishment to prepare for it.

The U.S. spends nearly $700 billion a year on national defense  more than the combined budgets of its closest competitors. But that hasn't protected the military from COVID-19.

The Theodore Roosevelt has essentially been knocked out by the novel coronavirus, something no enemy combatant has managed since World War II. (And crew members have reportedly tested positive on other carriers.)

More than 27,000 Americans have so far died from COVID-19, a number that easily exceeds U.S. combat deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan, and models suggest the coronavirus death toll will eventually surpass casualty numbers from bloodier conflicts like the Vietnam War.

Between the lines: The U.S. military is set up to fight physical threats, not biological ones  but in an age of pandemics, that's arguably a failure.

"We need to think about national security not just in terms of tanks and nation-states, but in terms of viruses and disease," says Gregory Koblentz, an associate professor at George Mason University's Schar School of Policy and Government.

That may mean rethinking how we allocate funding. The Defense Department, as Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) wrote on Twitter last week, gets about 100 times as much money as non-HIV global health programs.

"Hopefully this will be an important moment for policymakers to realize there is more they could do with the threat of disease," says Michael Hunzeker, a Marine veteran and the associate director of the Center for Security Policy Studies at George Mason.

Go deeper: Navy sailor who was aboard USS Theodore Roosevelt dies of coronavirus
Air Force update for COVID-19

By Secretary of the Air Force Public Affairs / Published April 14, 2020

WASHINGTON (AFNS) -- In an effort to minimize the spread of the coronavirus disease 2019 and to prioritize the health and safety of Department of the Air Force personnel, the following modifications have been made:



April 14, 2020

The Air Force Reserve celebrates its 72nd birthday today. Lt. Gen. Richard Scobee in a video message said the reserve has been a part of every military operation since its beginning, supported humanitarian and defense for civil authorities missions and it currently on the frontlines battling the COVID-19 pandemic. Regardless of the mission Air Force Reserve Airmen have answered the nations call and will continue for decades to come.

In collaboration with the COVID-19 National Response Team, AFVentures has created an industry portal to assess and respond to challenges presented by the pandemic. This initiative was created as part of the Department of the Air Force's Acquisition COVID-19 Taskforce, or ACT, as a one-stop shop for defense industry, commercial companies and academia to share creative ideas with federal agencies to combat the virus.

Read more about this initiative here: https://www.af.mil/News/Article-Display/Article/2148944/air-force-dod-rallies-industry-academia-service-members-to-combat-covid-19/

Air Force doctors Maj. Evan Fisher, chief of Nephrology, and Maj. Matthew Koroscil, a Pulmonary and Critical Care specialist from the 88th Medical Group at the Wright-Patterson Medical Center, are leading the way in coordination with the Dayton medical community on a new drug protocol for COVID-19 patients. Their work on the project allowed Premier Health's Miami Valley Hospital to potentially lead the country in the administration of the Mayo Clinic-approved plasma protocol.

Read more about their efforts here: https://www.af.mil/News/Article-Display/Article/2148234/wright-patterson-afb-physicians-coordinate-new-protocol-for-covid-19-patients/

The Air Force is promoting a campaign to recognize those on the front lines battling the COVID-19 pandemic. Air Force Salutes is a way Airmen can honor someone in their community who doesn't wear the Air Force uniform but still embodies the Air Force core value of service before self.

Read more about this campaign effort here: https://www.aetc.af.mil/News/Article/2148925/air-force-salutes-campaign-to-honor-those-working-the-front-lines/

In an effort to mitigate the effects of the COVID-19 outbreak and to continue executing rapid global mobility operations, the U.S. Air Force's Air Mobility Command sent multiple airframes to participate in particle and airflow testing at Nebraska Air National Guard air base April 4-11, 2020.

Read more about this testing here: https://www.dvidshub.net/news/367325/covid-response-dod-academia-partner-conduct-aircraft-airflow-testing-nebraska

Airmen and Soldiers with the West Virginia National Guard's Task Force Chemical, Biological, Radiological and Nuclear (CBRN) Response Enterprise (CRE) (TF-CRE) test students and faculty from West Virginia University for COVID-19.

You can find imagery of here: https://www.dvidshub.net/image/6172593/wva-guard-test-wvu-faculty-and-staff-covid-19

Essential missions throughout the Air Force still continue even during this pandemic. Below are some links to stories on how these units have adapted to make sure they can continue to execute these missions despite COVID-19.

PRANG Airman helps ensure proper PPE for security forces during COVID-19 - https://www.dvidshub.net/news/367263/prang-airman-helps-ensure-proper-ppe-security-forces-during-covid-19

50th Contracting Squadron uses creativity to obtain supplies - https://www.af.mil/News/Article-Display/Article/2148448/50th-contracting-squadron-uses-creativity-to-obtain-supplies/

Dover reservists support nation's counterdrug effort - https://www.afrc.af.mil/News/Article-Display/Article/2147034/dover-reservists-support-nations-counterdrug-effort/

Be Ready, stay ready: First to the fight - https://www.acc.af.mil/News/Article-Display/Article/2148739/be-ready-stay-ready-first-to-the-fight/

Renovating for readiness - https://www.usafe.af.mil/News/Article-Display/Article/2146822/renovating-for-readiness/

613th Air Operations Center maintains a healthy, ready force - https://www.pacaf.af.mil/News/Article-Display/Article/2146119/613th-air-operations-center-maintains-a-healthy-ready-force/

Air Force Totals of COVID-19 Positive Cases as of 9 p.m., April 13, 2020.

USAF TOTAL STATS CASES HOSPITALIZED RECOVERED DEATHS MIL 294 (+6) 9 51 (+8) 0 CIV 153 (+3) 11 (+2) 16 (-6)* 0 DEP 150 (+8) 5 32 (-1)* 0 CTR 62 (+2) 4 7 (+1) 1 Total 659 29 106 1

* These negative deltas reflect corrected reports.

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Ama Serwaa [Not her real name] is a twenty-four-year-old blind girl who lost her eyesight some four years ago and is one of the vulnerable in society who is finding difficulties surviving amid the COVID-19 pandemic.

Ama is an orphan and lives with her 70-year-old grandmother who sells sachet water in Accra. She sees herself as a burden.

Starr News got hold of information about her predicament and threw more light on her with Francis Abban on the Morning Starr Wednesday.

According to Ama, friends she assumed would help demand sex from her before rendering help. She also noted that she had at a point contemplated suicide.

The Minister for Gender Children and Social Protection, Cynthia Morrison announced that about 400,000 vulnerable Ghanaians will receive free food amid the lockdown in Greater Accra and Greater Kumasi.

However, Ama says due to her condition, she cannot go to the collection point to take a share of the food packages.

Meanwhile, Local government Minister Hajia Alima Mahama has directed NADMO officials to take food aid to homes of the vulnerable instead of sharing them on streets.

The directive came on the back of the public anger at how food distribution to the vulnerable in the wake of the coronavirus lockdown has been done.

Ama Serwaa explained on the Morning Starr that because of social distancing I cannot go with anybody since I cant see properly, how can I go and do things for myself. Im an orphan and its very hard for me, its not easy for me at all and Im really suffering.

Francis Abban asked; Because of this challenge have you had people who have offered to help you? She replied, no sir, as I said when you go to someone for the person to help you, that person wants to sleep with you before helping you.

Reiterating the question for clarity he asked wait let me be sure I heard you right. You are saying that when you go to people to help you in giving you food, in giving you things to survive, they demand sex from you? She replied yes please. As a pre-condition, yes please.

When asked whether these were people who live in her neighbourhood, she replied: yes pls, some too are my friends when I was sighted.

The host went on I hope you are saying no to them. Ama responded Yes I dont. I always say Ill not want my condition to be that people will help me because God has a purpose for everything. If God willing Ill get it back, fine, so I dont have to do anything like that.

Ama Serwaa indicated that she sometimes cries a lot, but her friends dont care. She was a beautician and became blind after graduating from the beauty school.

When I think about it, I shed tears a lot, she lamented.

It even came to a time I wanted to take my life. Because being in this situation and all these things are happening then it will be better for me to end my life. I know that will be okay for me. I will not be a burden to anybody, to my friends or granny.

When asked what she needed in terms of supplies to survive she stated: I had a surgery and sometimes I do feel pains in the eyes and I dont have money to buy drugs, eye drops to put in the eye.

Im a woman, I may have my menses and all that. Ill need soap to bath. And also the food Ill eat and all that. And some little money that I think ill need to take care of myself as well.

She is currently a student at the Akropong School for the blind but is currently home because of the lockdown.

---Starrfm.com
Using Metro Health data, two teams at the University of Texas at San Antonio predict an astronomical increase in local coronavirus cases without continued social distancing measures.

As leaders across the country begin to consider how to restart the sputtering economy, one of the modelers  Juan Gutierrez, chairman of UTSAs math department  called the deadly virus unstoppable without a vaccine.

With the evidence that we have, (the virus) cannot be stopped, Gutierrez said. Were going to change our social norms, the way we operate, the way we work, until there is a vaccine.

Under current local restrictions, Gutierrez has projected about 3,600 total cases of the novel coronavirus in Bexar County through July, with a peak coming in early May.

His model projects that number would leap to 300,000 with just a 50 percent increase in mobility  people leaving their homes, shopping, going to work and socializing  while a sudden return to normal would bring 920,000 total cases.

Another university initiative, Project Alpha, used artificial intelligence and publicly available data to project a much higher toll even under current conditions: about 29,818 total cases here through August, with a peak arriving in mid-May.

UTSA

If measures are relaxed by 50 percent, the model projects that number would rocket to 641,000, and a return to normal would bring 850,608 cases.

Bexar County has recorded a total of 890 cases since the outbreak began  up 75 from Tuesday to Wednesday. Thirty-seven people have died since the first local case was reported March 13.

Metro Health also is using a model produced by Oliver Wyman, an international management consulting firm that is projecting coronavirus epidemics in counties across the United States. In Bexar County, the firm is predicting nearly 1,700 total cases through May, with the peak coming later this month.

Oliver Wyman

At UTSA, each model used different variables to reach its conclusions. Neither model projects the number of deaths.

Assistant City Manager Colleen Bridger cautioned that any projection should be viewed with some skepticism.

The fun thing about models is that theres not a lot of knowns, she said. You inherently have to make assumptions when you dont know all the facts. Because if we knew all the facts, we wouldnt be doing models.

Bexar County Judge Nelson Wolff agreed.

I always have deep reservations about any model, he said. The thing about models is they can build a false hope. They can scare people if theyre inaccurate.

Wolff added, The thing that I watch more than anything on the reports is how many people are in the hospitals, people in the ICU, and how many people are on ventilators. If those numbers drive up, then you really have a serious problem.

On Wednesday, only 77 hospital beds were being used by patients with COVID-19, the disease caused by the virus, with 50 people in ICUs, and 36 on ventilators. The numbers are far below the local availability of hospital beds and resources.

Gutierrezs model assumes a large number of coronavirus cases go unreported, likely because many of those who are infected have no symptoms or their symptoms are so mild that they dont seek medical attention.

As a result, his model found a carrier of the virus would infect around 10 people. Thats much higher than the contagion factor of two to three thats generally assumed for the coronavirus, in part because Gutierrez believes an average of 60 percent of carriers are symptom-free.

A study published Wednesday in the journal Nature Medicine inferred that people might be most infectious before they show any symptoms at all.

It was very evident to me once Italy started showing those numbers of cases that this was, first, very contagious, Gutierrez said, and second, given the number of cases that were being reported, it was impossible for this pathogen to spread without having asymptomatic carriers as the main driver.

Given this high contagion factor, Gutierrez predicts future spikes in infections as the economy reopens.

Restrictions will have to be lifted. There is too much economic pressure, he said. If we go back to business as usual, the most likely scenario is a spike in cases that would go in full force to the number of cases that we saw in the beginning.

Mayor Ron Nirenberg echoed the concern that carriers of the virus who lack symptoms likely are highly contagious.

Thats so incredibly important to emphasize, Nirenberg said, which is why the next step in this process is for (Wolff) and I to appoint a panel of medical experts to set the conditions and circumstances by which we would go out of, and potentially back into, social distancing protocols. Thats not a decision that can be left up to policymakers or business considerations. Its got to be public health leading the way on this.

Gutierrez said he hopes the city will begin to require residents to wear masks, particularly in hubs for transmission such as buses or restaurants. Similar mandates already are in place in Austin, Los Angeles and New York.

Mike Fisher

Project Alpha arrived at its steep prediction of nearly 30,000 cases here in part by using cellphone mobility data that shows how much Bexar County residents still are moving around despite the mayor and county judges stay-at-home orders.

Compared to other regions, residents here are more mobile, possibly due to the citys concentration of military personnel and other essential workers.

Were about middle of the pack, Bridger said. The thing we cant figure out, when you look at cellphone use, places like Austin have a much steeper decline than San Antonio does.

Nirenberg said the citys sprawl might have contributed to the finding.

Essential workers in our city are likely traveling a greater distance than a city thats more densified and has a greater urban population, he said.

Dr. Dhireesha Kudithipudi of Project Alpha stressed that coronavirus cases here would skyrocket in the absence of the current restrictions.

Its very important that we take a very balanced approach in the way that we incorporate these social distancing measures, Kudithipudi said. I think a mixture of behavioral, clinical and policy interventions are needed to really fight this.

The city has posted both UTSA models online and will update them on a regular basis.

As we get more data, as we get closer to the peak or closer to the end, these models are going to sync up and theyre going to come more closely together, Bridger said, and theyre going to become more accurate.

bchasnoff@express-news.net
Both of them are using the court system as a way to try to portray the city and my administration in a negative light, the mayor said. The problem is that they failed to understand that when the real truth comes out its going to make them look a different way.
Sources said a merger could benefit both as Grofers private labels business would be a draw for Zomato, as well as its experience in the online grocery delivery space.

Zomato and Grofers are believed to have held preliminary talks over a potential merger according to sources, but a deal has not materialised because of the current coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic.

Reports of a possible deal surfaced Tuesday, and sources confirmed that talks were held between high-level officials of the firms.

However, these were preliminary talks and a deal may not go through.

Their partnership in the grocery delivery segment with Zomato Market has worked well.

"This led to the two founders exploring the possibility of a merger, but then the situation changed with coronavirus, said a person aware of the discussions.

Zomato entered the hyperlocal grocery delivery space with Zomato Market earlier this month, with doorstep delivery of groceries in Delhi, Punjab, and Kerala.

In January, Zomato bought Ubers food delivery business UberEats in an all stock deal for $206 million, as part of its plans to expand its presence in the country.

Sources said a merger could benefit both as Grofers private labels business would be a draw for Zomato, as well as its experience in the online grocery delivery space.

Grofers CEO Albinder Dhindsa had said last year that the firms private label business was expected to reach 1,200 brands by 2020.

Meanwhile, Grofers has been looking to enter the business-to-business (B2B) grocery delivery market for some time now.

Zomato, on the other hand, forayed into B2B grocery delivery with the acquisition of WOTU, which it rebranded as Hyperpure.

It delivers grocery and fresh produce to restaurants.

The firms, however, denied that any such deal was in the works.

We have partnered with Grofers, along with various FMCG (fast-moving consumer goods) companies, local groceries stores and modern retail chains, to pilot our grocery delivery service.

"We are not aware of any other conversation with Grofers, said a spokesperson at Zomato.

The news on the merger is pure speculation and completely untrue.

"Grofers is the countrys biggest online grocery retailer and has been growing at 2x every 6 months, said a Grofers spokesperson.

E-grocery

The e-grocery space went through a period of churning in 2015, with several businesses - including Local Banya, PepperTap, AskMe Bazaar - shutting shop because of deep discounting and low margins.

It has, however, picked up in the past few years, and become among the most sought-after segments.

Since the outbreak, malls and most other retail outlets have been shut, prompting e-commerce portals such as Amazon and Flipkart to strike deals with online grocery firms such as Bigbasket to deliver essentials.

Added to this is the fact that delivery of grocery has been classified as essential, and there is a clear demand for these services.
A police inspector on Wednesday



tested positive for coronavirus here in Madhya Pradesh, an official said.

Indore, a commercial and industial hub, is the worst- hit city by the coronavirus infection in Madhya Pradesh, accounting for 544 of the 938 cases and 37 of the 53 fatalities recorded so far.

A police inspector in the city has tested positive for the infection, Chief Medical and Health Officer Dr Praveen Jadia said.

The policemen who came in his contact have been placed in isolation, he added.

Earlier, two police officers - an additional superintendent of police and an inspector - had tested positive for the infection in the city, officials said.

In a related development, a top official spelt out guidelines to prevent police personnel, who are at the forefront of enforcing the lockdown, from getting infected by the deadly virus.

Inspector General of Police (Indore Range), Vivek Sharma said policemen deployed in virus-hit areas should be shifted after three days to reduce their chances of getting infected.

"During my visits to affected areas, I have been told that policemen are being deployed in these localities at a stretch, he added.

Sharma said he had instructed that 50-year-old perosnnel with existing ailments should be deployed in police stations rather than giving them field duty.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Washington: China may have secretly set off low-level underground nuclear test explosions despite claiming to observe an international pact banning such blasts, the US State Department said in a report on Wednesday that could fuel US-Chinese tensions.

The finding, first reported by the Wall Street Journal, may worsen ties already strained by US charges that the global COVID-19 pandemic resulted from Beijing's mishandling of an outbreak of the coronavirus in the city of Wuhan.

Military vehicles roll down as members of a Chinese military honour guard march during the 2019 parade to commemorate the 70th anniversary of the founding of Communist China in Beijing. Credit:AP

US concerns about Beijing's possible breaches of a "zero yield" standard for test blasts have been prompted by activities at China's Lop Nur nuclear test site throughout 2019, the State Department report said.

Zero yield refers to a nuclear test in which there is no explosive chain reaction of the type ignited by the detonation of a nuclear warhead.
Meghalaya Chief Secretary M S



Rao on Wednesday said the state government will provide one- time financial support to people of the state stranded across the country due to lockdown to control the spread of COVID-19 pandemic.

In a notification issued here on Wednesday, Rao said that many residents of Meghalaya including workers in the service industry, students, professionals and others are stranded across the country and are unable to return to the state owing to the national lockdown and the suspension of air and train services.

He said state governments across the country are providing support to these individuals.

"To further ease their discomfort, it is decided that the Government of Meghalaya will provide one-time cash support of Rs 3000 to these individuals, through the Chief Ministers Special Grant," the chief secretary said.

Rao said all individuals wanting to avail the cash support should fill up a short online form providing their information including bank account details. Documentary evidence of being outside the state currently will have to be provided. The weblink for the form is at www.meghalayaonline.gov.in/covid/.

He also said the cash support will be directly credited to the bank accounts of the individuals.

Earlier Deputy chief minister Prestone Tynsong had said that there are over 3,000 citizens of the state who are stranded in different parts of the country due to the lockdown.

He also urged them not to return to the state until the end of this month.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
By Former Nebraska State Treasurer/Attorney General with Harvard MBA

Joining us today is Don Stenberg, former Nebraska State Treasurer. Don says that it is vital that most businesses be allowed to reopen by early to mid-May at the latest. Stenberg holds an MBA from Harvard Business School and is the author of a new book, Eavesdropping on Lucifer.

Q1. Why do you say that it is urgent that America get back to work in the next few weeks despite the coronavirus?

A1. The shutdown of businesses across the nation is having devastating effects on businesses and individuals. In the last 3 weeks nearly 17 million people have become unemployed in the United States. Already, there are many small businesses that are essentially bankrupt and will never be able to reopen. For many of them, this is the loss of a small business that has taken a lifetime to build. We cannot allow this to continue or millions more will become unemployed and tens of thousands of additional businesses will be destroyed.

Q2. So, what are you proposing exactly?

A2. In most places in the country, by early to mid-May, we need to allow virtually every business and organization that has been shut down to reopen. That would include restaurants, bars, retail stores, hairdressers, parks and places of worship. People would be strongly encouraged to maintain six-foot social distancing whenever possible and to wear masks. Anyone who is sick would be asked to remain at home. Older persons and persons with weak immune systems would be encouraged to remain isolated to the extent possible. Restrictions on international travel would continue.

Q3. Medical experts say that opening businesses too soon will be too dangerous. What is your answer to that?

A3. First of all, let's remember that the medical experts told us that 2.2 million people in the United States would die of coronavirus. Those same experts now tell us that perhaps just 60,000 people in the United States will die of the coronavirus. So, we already know that the experts can be very wrong.

Second, the medical experts don't take into account the economic devastation that may turn into a Great Depression if current restrictions remain in place much longer. Our political leaders do need to take that into account.

Third, while we all regret any loss of life, the fact is that as a society we accept a certain loss of life caused by disease without taking the drastic measures that are now in place. For example, the CDC estimated that in 2017  2018 there were 61,000 deaths caused by influenza in the United States. No doubt, if the extreme measures being imposed now for coronavirus been imposed in 2017  2018 to reduce flu deaths, many thousands of lives could have been saved. No one suggested that we do that.

Q4. Are people who say the lockdown needs to continue moving the goal posts?

A4. Yes. We have been told over and over again that the purpose of the extreme restrictions is to bend the curve. In other words, while the same number of people will eventually become infected with the coronavirus, we need to spread those infections out over a longer time, so that our hospitals and medical staff will not be overwhelmed.

That objective will largely have been achieved in most places in the country by early May, but still they want to keep most of the same restrictions in place.

Q5. Some medical experts say that the country cannot get back to normal until we have a coronavirus vaccine. Doesn't that make sense?

A5. No. First of all, there is no assurance that there will ever be a vaccine. There is no vaccine for HIV or for the common cold, despite many years of effort to develop one. Many years, flu vaccines are only 40% to 60% effective. I hope that there will be a coronavirus vaccine that is 100% effective, but we cannot afford to have the economy shut down to wait for something that may never happen. Meanwhile, hydroxychloroquine and other drugs show promise of being effective treatments.

Q6. Won't the President and Governors be accused of having blood on their hands if they open most businesses in a few weeks?

A6. In today's political climate, sadly yes. I don't think that the critics will keep the President from moving forward, but I'm not so sure about some of the Governors. But if they don't have the courage to act, they will responsible for economic devastation that we haven't seen since the Great Depression  tens of millions of people unemployed, life savings wiped out, tens of thousands of businesses that will not be able to ever reopen, and increases in suicides and domestic violence.

Q7. Tell us a little bit about your new book, Eavesdropping on Lucifer.

A7. It is similar to the Screwtape Letters by C.S. Lewis. In the book, Lucifer explains to his apprentice how the drastic changes in our culture came about  from abortion on demand to Ten Commandment monuments being removed and religious freedom being restricted. The story follows the apprentice as he tries to silence a fire-and-brimstone preacher, encourages abortion, tries to convince some college students that there is no devil, and encourages divorce. In the end, Lucifer admits and complains that his evil work can be defeated by belief in God's Son.

Q8. Where can we get a copy of your new book, Eavesdropping on Lucifer?

A8. You can pre-order the book on Amazon.com or barnesandnoble.com. Or, if you can't wait, the e-book is currently available on both Amazon.com and Barnes & Noble.com. For more information about the book go to EavesdroppingOnLucifer.com.

Here's an endorsement by former U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft:

"Eavesdropping on Lucifer is common sense, digestible wisdom that can be easily understood by every generation. C.S. Lewis would have given it his stamp of approval." Former U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft

ABOUT DON STENBERG

Don Stenberg (born September 30, 1948) served as legal counsel to Nebraska's Governor from 1979 to 1983, Attorney General of the state of Nebraska from 1991 to 2003 and later served as the Nebraska State Treasurer from 2011 to 2019.

As Nebraska's Attorney General, Stenberg argued several constitutional law cases in the Supreme Court of the United States, including the case of Stenberg v. Carhart, in which he defended Nebraska's ban on partial-birth abortion.

Today Don Stenberg is on a media and book tour aimed at exposing evil in realms that go far deeper than our mere five senses. In the book, Lucifer explains to his apprentice how the drastic changes in our culture came about  from abortion on demand to Ten Commandment monuments being removed and religious freedom being restricted. In the end, Lucifer admits and complains that his evil work can be defeated by belief in God's Son.

Don's new book is scheduled to be released May 5, 2020 and it's titled, "Eavesdropping on Lucifer." The book has received critical acclaim from dignitaries and leaders including The Honorable John Ashcroft, Former U.S. Attorney General.
THE government yesterday announced that all schools and colleges will remain closed until further notice as coronavirus cases climbed to 53.

Prime Minister Kassim Majaliwa made the announcement in Dodoma, adding President John Magufuli announced the postponement of May Day celebrations that are normally held on May 1 and the Union celebrations that are held on April 26.

According to Mr Majaliwa, President Magufuli made the decision to cancel May Day and 56th Union anniversary celebrations as part of the measures to contain the spread of the pandemic as the occasions bring together a huge number of people.

He said the Head of State ordered that the 500m/- that had been earmarked for marking the 56th Union anniversary be allocated to Zanzibars anti COVID-19 fund.

The prime minister made the announcement during a meeting with members constituting the Anti-COVID-19 National Co-ordination Task Force held in Dodoma.

According to the prime minister, the country recorded four new cases yesterday, pushing the figure to 53. He said all the new cases recorded yesterday involved residents of Dar es Salaam Region.

Speaking on the closure of schools and colleges, Prime Minister Majaliwa said the government has not issued any new announcement related to resumptions of lessons, insisting pupils and students must continue to remain at home.

The Prime Minister asked stakeholders to continue supporting the government in the fight against the pandemic by contributing through ACC No. 9921159801 named National Relief Fund Electronic.

He said sensitization of the public on the pandemic should continue, stressing the need for people to stay indoors if there was nothing that compels one to move around.

The premier has directed that professionals, including doctors, who are providing services at centres catering for COVID-19 infected people should be given protective gear as a safeguard against falling prey to the killer disease.

He said people who have been in contact with the patients should be closely monitored and they should involve grassroots leaders. Plus, the economic effects stemming from the disease should continue to be analyzed.

On March 17, 2020 and March 18, 2020, the government directed the closure of all learning institutions from primary to university level for 30 days, and that Form Six students who had been scheduled to start sitting for their examinations on May 4, 2020 would have to await alternative arrangements by the education ministry, based on the outlook of the disease.

The prime minister also stressed that a ban would remain in force on all unwarranted indoor and outdoor mass gatherings, including those related to sports, music shows, graduation ceremonies, political meetings and social get-togethers.

He directed ministries and institutions to halt seminars, workshops, symposiums and meetings in the country, which would involve participants from severely COVID-19 affected countries.

Tanzanians scheduled to travel to severely affected countries are advised to call them off, Mr Majaliwa stressed.
The University of Bern is welcoming six Marie Sklodowska-Curie fellows this year. The "Marie Sklodowska-Curie Individual Fellowships", awarded annually by the European Commission, give experienced researchers the opportunity to enrich their scientific careers with a stay abroad.

Every year, the European Commission offers experienced researchers the opportunity to advance their career by spending two years researching at a university in another European country. It awards "Marie Sklodowska-Curie Individual Fellowships" to postdoctoral researchers for this purpose. The fellowships are funded by the European Framework Programme for Research and Innovation, Horizon 2020.

The aim of the funding programme is to support the career development of experienced researchers by enabling them to carry out an individual research project abroad to expand their skills. The researchers look for a supervisor in their field at a European university who can offer them an excellent environment for further education. In 2020, the University of Bern is welcoming six fellows and supporting them in taking the next step in their careers.

Focus on natural sciences and medicine

The six researchers coming to the University of Bern with a Marie Sklodowska-Curie fellowship are addressing topics from the natural sciences and medicine in their research projects. "The range of research fields is broad," says Daniel Candinas, Vice-Rector for Research at the University of Bern. "We are delighted that our excellence in several areas is recognized throughout Europe and attracts experienced researchers."

The funded projects range from pest control and climate change, non-coding RNA for breast cancer and the "dark matter of the genome" to teamwork in the emergency room. The supervisors supporting the fellows are professors from the Institute of Plant Sciences, the Institute of Cell Biology, the Geographical Institute, the Department of Emergency Medicine and the Department for BioMedical Research (DBMR).

List of the Marie Sklodowska-Curie Fellows

Dr. Lei Wang

Institute of Plant Sciences, University of Bern

Supervisor: Prof. Dr. Matthias Erb

Project title: Integration of volatile cues and plant peptide signals for enhanced herbivore resistance in tomato (InteCue)

Plants are often under threat of pests. How do they defend themselves? It is known that plants can perceive volatile cues to fend off pests. Plants can also produce small peptide signals to fight against pests. It is still unknown if plants can integrate volatile cues and peptide signals for enhanced pest resistance. The aim of "InteCue" is to investigate the capacity and mechanism of tomato plants to integrate volatile cues and peptide signals for stronger defense against pests. Upon success, this research will help to lay the foundation of breeding new pest resistant crops and developing efficient pest control strategies.

Dr. Agne Frismantiene

Institute of Cell Biology, University of Bern

Supervisor: Prof. Dr. Olivier Pertz

Project title: Deciphering oncogenic signalling patterns to break cancer drug resistance (NOSCAR)

Breast cancer is the leading cancer in women by incidence and the second cause of cancer-related death in the female population. To cure the more advanced and aggressive cases of breast cancer, modern, targeted chemotherapies have been proposed. However, cancer drug resistance limits the promise of targeted therapy. "NOSCAR" aims to better understand how cancer develops resistance to targeted therapies. To this end the project aims to study cell communication dynamics in breast cancer organoids at the single cell level in thousands of cells and over extended periods of time. This will allow to identify molecular vulnerabilities in cancer cell communication that might be targeted to break cancer resistance.

Dr. Hugo Guillen Ramirez

Department for BioMedical Research (DBMR), University of Bern

Supervisor: Prof. Dr. Rory Baldwin Johnson

Project title: Computational genomics of long noncoding RNA domains across metazoans (RNADOMAIN)

Previously disregarded as junk DNA, the so-called "dark matter of the genome" encompass RNA molecules that do not encode for proteins. In particular, long noncoding RNAs (lncRNAs) have been linked to pathophysiological processes. However, a full understanding of lncRNAs' roles in disease requires us to solve the outstanding mystery of how the lncRNA sequences encode their functions. Aided by artificial intelligence algorithms, "RNADOMAIN" aims to shed light on this "sequence-function code" of lncRNAs as a means for targeting them in disease.

Dr. Tina Uroda

Department for BioMedical Research (DBMR), University of Bern

Supervisor: Prof. Dr. Rory Baldwin Johnson

Project title: Linking sequence to function of long noncoding RNAs with CRISPR-Cas9 (CRISPR-Locate)

A great surprise in the wake of the Human Genome Project has been the discovery of vast numbers of RNAs that do not encode proteins. However less than 1% of these "long noncoding RNAs" (lncRNAs) have been experimentally characterised. To understand lncRNAs' biological significance, we must solve the pressing question of how lncRNAs' functions are encoded in their primary sequence. To answer that question the project aims to identify lncRNA domains and their function in a natural biological context via development of high-throughput techniques. Resulting maps of functional lncRNA domains will contribute to unlock the potential of 10^4 novel genes in medicine and biology.

Dr. Andrew Ronald Friedman

Institute of Geography, Oeschger Centre for Climate Change Research (OCCR), University of Bern

Supervisor: Prof. Dr. Stefan Bronnimann

Project title: Assessing and QUantifying the ATlantic Instrumental hydroClimate (AQUATIC)

Global warming is projected to have pronounced impacts on the hydroclimate -- including rainfall and river flow -- in the tropical Atlantic basin, which contains the world's largest river systems and rainforests, and growing populations. "AQUATIC" will compile recently-recovered measurements of precipitation, river discharge, and surface salinity from different archival sources to develop an integrated record of tropical Atlantic regional hydroclimate back to the late 19th century. The historical data will contribute to an understanding of the mechanisms of hydroclimate variability and constrain future climate projections.

Dr. Juliane Kammer

Emergency Departement, Inselspital Bern, University of Bern

Supervisor: Prof. Dr. Wolf Hautz

Project title: TeamUp: Understanding and improving team decision making in uncertain environments

(Better) Teamwork is supposed to be a key element in reducing the unacceptably high incidence of diagnostic error worldwide. The goal of the project "TeamUp" is to advance the understanding of decision processes in teams in uncertain, error prone environments such as the emergency room, and ultimately, to inform theory-based interventions to achieve diagnostic excellence. The project will thus contribute to a reduction of diagnostic errors, avoid unnecessary treatments, save healthcare costs, and ultimately enhance patient safety.

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We are committed to protecting the health and safety of Canadians, visitors and employees. Social and physical distancing restrictions will remain in place until further notice from local and regional health authorities.

Last Mountain Lake National Wildlife Area is open to the public for day-use only. While most trails are open, some trails and visitor facilities may remain closed until such time that they can be safely re-opened.

For more than a century, Last Mountain Lake National Wildlife Area (NWA) has been officially recognized as a special place for wildlife.

The NWA was first protected in 1887, when 1,025 hectares (ha) of land at the north end of Last Mountain Lake were set aside as breeding grounds for wild fowl, becoming the first federal bird sanctuary in North America. Two main factors contribute to attracting such a wealth of birdlife to the area: its good habitats, as one of the most productive lakes in southern Saskatchewan; and its strategic location in the heart of the central flyway of North America. Spectacular populations of ducks, geese, sandhill cranes and other migrating birds use the region as they cross the Great Plains between their breeding grounds in the north and their wintering grounds in the south.

More than 300 species of birds have been recorded at Last Mountain Lake NWA during migration. Up to 50,000 cranes, 450,000 geese and several hundred thousand ducks can be observed during peak migration. Although less visible, many songbirds, shorebirds and birds of prey spend from a few days to several weeks each year in the area. Birds travelling through at least 25 different countries, from arctic Canada to Argentina, use the rich habitat of Last Mountain Lake. The NWA is also an important breeding ground for at least 100 species of birds, many of which are unique to the prairie region. Moreover, 9 species of shorebirds, 43 species of songbirds and 13 species of ducks nest within the NWA. Some of the most spectacular breeders include:

In addition to its values as a staging and a breeding area, the Last Mountain Lake NWA provides suitable habitat for 9 of Canada's 36 classified species by the Committee on the Status of Endangered Wildlife in Canada (COSEWIC) in 1993. These species were evaluated as vulnerable, threatened and endangered bird species at the time:

peregrine falcon

piping plover

whooping crane

Spragues pipit

ferruginous hawk

loggerhead shrike

Baird's sparrow

Caspian tern

Cooper's hawk

Colonial nesters such as pelicans, cormorants, gulls, terns and grebes are particularly dependent upon the legal protection offered by the NWA. These birds nest in mixed colonies on several islands on the lake or on floating platforms in the marsh and are very sensitive to disturbance during the breeding season.

Find more information on Last Mountain Lake NWA in the summary table below.

Management

Under the Canada Wildlife Act , NWAs are protected and managed in accordance with the Wildlife Area Regulations . The primary purpose of NWAs is to protect and conserve wildlife and their habitat. For this purpose and according to the legislation, all activities in a NWA that could interfere with the conservation of wildlife can be prohibited. Consequently, most NWAs are not accessible to the public and all activities are prohibited. However, some activities may be authorized through Schedule I.1 of the Wildlife Area Regulations or the issuance of permits as long as they are consistent with the management plan goals for the NWA. For more information, consult the NWA Management and Activities section.

Any authorized activities at Last Mountain Lake NWA are listed in Schedule I.1 of the Wildlife Area Regulations and signage is posted at access points. These authorized activities include:

Wildlife viewing Hiking Operating a vehicle, other than a snowmobile or an all-terrain vehicle, on designated roads and trails and in designated parking areas Swimming Non-commercial berry picking Non-motorized boat launching and boat landing Non-motorized boating Cross-country skiing, snowshoeing and skating Sport hunting  including with dogs off-leash when hunting waterfowl  without a commercial guide, from half an hour before sunrise to half an hour after sunset, if the hunting is carried out in accordance with any applicable federal permit and any authorization required by the laws of Saskatchewan for sport hunting in that province; and without the use of toxic shot Non-commercial sport fishing in designated areas in accordance with any applicable federal permit and any authorization required by the laws of Saskatchewan for sport fishing in that province, during the period beginning on May 15 in one year and ending on March 30 in the following year Activities referred to in items 1 to 8 and 10 during the hour before sunrise and the hour after sunset, in addition to during the period referred to in subsection 3.1(3)

Planning your visit

Last Mountain Lake is one of the sites selected as part of the Connecting Canadians to Nature program and is an ideal place for any nature-lover to visit. Whether you're interested in hiking, wildlife observation, photography or one of the various interactive programs that are offered seasonally, you are sure to find something for every member of the family. The recommended length of a visit is 2 to 4 hours, but there are also options for longer or shorter visits. The Last Mountain Lake NWA is open from dawn to dusk, during daylight hours only.

Activities

Last Mountain Lake NWA is completing the new Interpretive Pavilion, which will be open to the public during visiting hours from May to September. It has been filled with temporary exhibits, many of which are on loan from local museums and parks. From the pavilion, the public can obtain information on the various activities taking place throughout the NWA. These include:

Geocaching

Bird Migration Board Game

Big Birds Activity

Driving Tour

Hunting and Angling

Trails

Last Mountain Lake NWA currently has three main hiking trails for visitors, all of different lengths and ecology. A trail guide with numbered stops accompanies each visitors to learn more about the unique nature of each trail. All trails are mowed pathways, and although not completely flat, they are relatively even surfaces on which to walk. They include:

Shore-to-Sky trail: Located next to the Interpretive Pavilion, this trail offers a 30 minute hike along the shoreline (15 minutes if walking at a brisk pace), and ends at the new observation tower.

Grasslands trail: Drive into the Migratory Bird Sanctuary to complete the hour long walk through the beautiful prairie grasslands overlooking the lake. Washrooms are available at the trailhead.

Wetland Trail: Drive to the confluence of Lanigan and Saline Creeks and hike to explore the wetlands and waterways of this area. Washrooms are available at the trailhead. Please note that the boardwalk is closed as it is being relocated, but we must wait for the pond to dry before completing the process.

Public facilities

Interpretive Pavilion

Washrooms

Picnic and Day-Use Area

Parking

Booking events

At Last Mountain Lake National Wildlife Area, staff availability for guided activities and tours is limited. If you would like to book an activity, please contact us in advance to explore the options available. Some of these options include:

Guided Hikes and Birdwatching

Pond Dipping

Owl Pellet Dissection

Wide-area Games

It is understood that Last Mountain Lake NWA is a fair distance from any major urban centers, which is why we offer a variety of travelling activities, including our Mobile Museum. This is a 14-foot trailer containing several exhibits showcasing the work we do at the NWA and the wildlife that resides there.

To engage the public, Last Mountain Lake NWA holds several events throughout the year. Some of these include:

Annual Open House (June)

Annual Mentored Waterfowl Hunt (September)

Dark-Sky Events

Special location notes

There may be biting insects during the summer season. This includes ticks and mosquitos, so make sure to wear full-length pants and shoes, and bring insect-repellent.

Weather in the summer can be extremely hot, and there are limited places with shade. Please make sure to bring sunscreen and plenty of water.

Camping is prohibited at all times.

Certain parts of the NWA are used for hunting in the fall, please check with the office.

No food service is available on site.

Please remain on the trails. Not only will this reduce the chance of contact with ticks, it protects wildlife from being disturbed.

Please do not damage, destroy, or remove plants.

Due to the remote nature of our location, gas stations are limited in the area, fill your tank before you come.

All roads leading into the NWA are gravel.

Dogs are allowed, but it is mandatory that they be kept on a leash.

Trails are inhabited by gophers and the occasional badger. Please be wary of holes along the trails.

Coyotes reside here, so exercise caution in the area.

Directions

The Administration Building and Interpretive Pavilion are both located at the main access point south of Highway 15.

From Regina and Saskatoon

Take Highway 2 to Highway 15. Go east on Highway 15 for 14.4 kilometers where you will see a sign for Wildlife Road. Turn south (right) and travel 9.6 km to the headquarters office.

GPS: 51.416929, -105.239036.

More information on access and permitting for Last Mountain Lake NWA can be obtained by contacting the Environment and Climate Change Canada office at LML NWA.

Map of the area
An Australian fashion label has relaunched its most popular two-piece which has been sold out for weeks after hundreds of women bought it to wear while working from home during coronavirus isolation.

Maurie and Eve brought back its 'Nomade' set, a polyester outfit which features a $99 white knitted long-sleeved top and matching $99 flared trousers, on Monday due to customer demand.

But proving its universal appeal, the top has already sold out again just 24 hours after relaunching, with sizes six to 14 now available for pre-order on the sustainable Sydney brand's official website.

The matching pants are still available in size 12, but all other sizes must be pre-ordered with shipping starting from late June - so patience is a virtue you'll certainly need if you want to get your hands on the bohemian-inspired ensemble.

Sustainable Sydney label Maurie and Eve relaunched its 'Nomade' white knitted twin set (pictured) on Monday, but the top has already sold out again in just 24 hours

The 'Nomade' pants are still available in size 12, but all other sizes must be pre-ordered with shipping starting from late June - so patience is a virtue you'll certainly need if you want to get your hands on the bohemian-inspired ensemble

Maurie and Eve is not the only Australian brand racing to keep pace with increasing demand for stylish athleisure and loungewear.

Petal and Pup restocked its signature 'Rockford' trousers last week at the request of shoppers keen to relax in the soft beige pants during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Available in sizes extra small to extra large, the $89 Rockford pants have an elasticated waist and wide-legged flare, making them a fashion-forward yet comfortable choice for days spent at home.

The style sold out in weeks when they were first posted on the website, so the restock will come as welcome relief to customers who were eagerly waiting.

Petal and Pup restocked its signature 'Rockford' trousers (pictured) last week at the request of shoppers keen to relax in the $89 soft beige pants during the COVID-19 pandemic

Comfort became king almost overnight for millions of Australians working from home under strict social distancing laws, with stilettos swapped for slippers and trouser suits traded for cosy lounge sets.

And while some are investing in luxurious clothing from the likes of Maurie and Eve and Petal and Pup, most are turning to fast fashion from retailers like Kmart which is currently selling a $30 set that's stylish and affordable in equal measure.

Available in sizes six to 24, the cotton and polyester set features a loose fitting long-sleeved top and comfortable pants with an elasticated waist, perfect for lounging around the house, doing chores or chasing after kids.

Available in sizes six to 24, this cotton and polyester set from Kmart features a loose fitting long-sleeved top and comfortable pants with an elasticated waist, perfect for lounging around the house, doing chores or chasing after kids

Kmart shoppers are calling the ensemble their 'lockdown uniform'.

'In a world currently full of uncertainty, take a moment to breathe. Or if you are like me appreciate the goodness [Kmart Australia] has to offer, like this sleep set that clearly won't be worn for sleep!' one woman wrote on Facebook.

Tracksuits, elasticated pants and loose-fitting jumpers dominated clothing sales in March, with the 'loungewear' category seeing a 120 percent increase in demand year on year according to new data from online retailer The Iconic.
[April 15, 2020] Costa Rica's Fonatel project making continues to make progress

Sydney, April 15, 2020 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Just released, this edition of Paul Budde Communications focus report on Costa Rica outlines the major developments and key aspects in the telecoms markets.

Read the full report: https://www.budde.com.au/Research/Costa-Rica-Telecoms-Mobile-and-Broadband-Statistics-and-Analyses Costa Ricas liberalised telecom sector saw substantial growth for a number of years, though the level of growth has fallen sharply since 2016, and fell to only 0.3% in 2018, year-on-year. Although the state-owned operator ICE remains the dominant provider of fixed-line services, the regional operators Claro and Movistar are significant players in the important mobile services market. Considerable change to the market emerged from the 2019 sale of Movistar to Millicom International, trading as Tigo. The deal, still to be finalised, was part of a wider plan which also saw Tigo acquire Movistars business units in Panama and Nicaragua. The number of fixed-lines fell for a number of years though more recently the decline has been offset by growing consumer use of VoIP services. This was stimulated by the 2014 hike in tariffs for fixed-line calls. Costa Ricas broadband market is the most developed in Central America, with the highest broadband penetration for this sub-region. Geographical distribution however is unequal, with a much higher digital gap than in the case of telephone services. Compared with the whole of Latin America, Costa Ricas broadband penetration lags behind Chile, Argentina, Uruguay, and some Caribbean islands. The Costa Rican telecom sector has showed greater resilience than most others in the region, and with the implementation of number portability there is greater scope for increased competition in coming years. This has been reflected in the sharp decline in the cost of broadband data in recent years. BuddeComm notes that the outbreak of the Coronavirus in 2020 is having a significant impact on production and supply chains all around the world. During this time, the telecoms sector to various degrees is likely to experience a downturn in mobile device and ICT equipment production, while it may also be difficult for network operators to source necessary equipment or manage workflows when maintaining and upgrading existing infrastructure. Overall progress towards 5G may also be postponed or slowed down in some countries. On the consumer side, spending on telecoms services and devices is likely to be impacted by large-scale job losses and the consequent restriction on disposable incomes. It is largely unknown what the long-term impacts will be as the crisis develops. However, though challenging to predict and interpret, these have been acknowledged in the industry forecasts contained in this report. In addition, the report covers the responses of the telecom operators as well as government agencies and regulators as they react to the crisis to ensure that citizens can continue to make optimum use of telecom services. This can be reflected in subsidy schemes and the promotion of tele-health and tele-education, among other solutions. Key developments Government, telecom regulator and telcos agree on strategy to address COVID-19 crisis;

Regulator prepares for 700MHz auction;

Telefonica Costa Rica sold to Millicom International;

ICE secures access to Telia Carrier's Central America backbone network;

Movistar and Claro secure licenses at auction;

ICE investing more in multi-technology NGN project;

Report includes the regulator's market data reports for 2018; telcos' financial and operating data updates, Telecom Maturity Index charts and analyses, recent market developments. Companies mentioned in this report Instituto Costarricense de Electricidad (ICE), RASCA, Tigo, Cabletica, Claro, Movistar Key Statistics

Regional Market Comparison Telecom Maturity Index by tier Market Leaders Market Challengers Market Emergents South America Telecom Maturity Index Central America Telecom Maturity Index TMI versus GDP Mobile and mobile broadband penetration

Country overview

Telecommunications market Market analysis

Regulatory environment Historical overview Regulatory authority Sutel Fixed-line developments General Telecommunications Law Sector liberalisation Universalisation Fund (Fonatel) Interconnect Access Number Portability (NP) Tariffs DR-CAFTA Mobile network developments Spectrum auctions Mobile Number Portability (MNP) Roaming

Mobile market Mobile statistics Mobile data SMS/MMS Mobile broadband Mobile infrastructure Overview Digital networks Major mobile operators ICE (Kolbi, ICE Cellular) Claro (America Movil) Movitar (Telefonica Costa Rica) Mobile Virtual Network Operators (MVNOs)

Fixed-line broadband market Introduction and statistical overview Market analysis Broadband statistics Hybrid Fibre Coax (HFC) networks RACSA Digital Subscriber Line (DSL) networks Fibre-to-the-Premises (FttP) and Fibre-To-The-Home (FttH) Other fixed-line broadband services Fixed wireless (WiMAX, WiBro, Wi-Fi) Internet via satellite

Fixed network operators ICE Claro

Telecommunications infrastructure National telecom network Internet Exchange Points (IXPs) International infrastructure Terrestrial networks Submarine cable networks Satellite networks Smart infrastructure Wholesale

Appendix  Historic data

Related reports



Table 1  Top Level Country Statistics and Telco Authorities  Costa Rica  2020 (e)

Table 2  Evolution of GDP in Costa Rica  2010  2020

Table 3  Number of authorised telecom service operators  2011  2018

Table 4  Growth in telecom sector revenue and annual change 2011  2018

Table 5  Change in telecom revenue by sector  2014  2018

Table 6  Change in revenue market share by sector  2014  2018

Table 7  Fonatel investment in telecoms  2012  2018

Table 8  Fonatel covered premises, people  2015  2018

Table 9  Mobile, broadband subscriptions enabled via Fonatel  2014  2018

Table 10  Growth in the number of mobile number portings - 2013  2018

Table 11  Development of roaming revenue (SMS/MMS and voice) - 2013  2018

Table 12  Average traffic per mobile subscriber - 2012  2018

Table 13  Change in the number of mobile subscribers by main operator - 2012  2018

Table 14  Change in the mobile market share by operator - 2011  2018

Table 15  Mobile market traffic - 2011  2018

Table 16  Development of mobile revenue by service - 2014 - 2018

Table 17  Development of mobile revenue by service - 2014 - 2018

Table 18 Proportion of mobile telephony service revenue by type - 2011  2018

Table 19  Growth in the number of mobile subscribers and penetration - 2010  2025

Table 20  Change in the number of prepaid and contract subscribers - 2010  2018

Table 21  Change in the proportion of prepaid and postpaid subscribers - 2010  2018

Table 22  Change in the proportion of prepaid and postpaid subscribers - 2010  2018

Table 23  Development of prepaid and contract mobile ARPU - 2014  2018

Table 24  Development of prepaid and contract mobile ARPU - 2014  2018

Table 25  SMS and MMS traffic - 2011  2018

Table 26  Average SMS traffic sent per user per month - 2014  2018

Table 27  Decline in SMS/MMS revenue - 2011 - 2018

Table 28  Growth in the number of mobile internet subscribers and penetration - 2010  2025

Table 29  Growth in the number of mobile internet subscribers and penetration - 2010  2025

Table 30  Growth in mobile internet revenue - 2013  2018

Table 31  Growth in mobile internet traffic - 2013  2018

Table 32  ICE mobile subscribers - 2012  2018

Table 33  Claro mobile subscribers - 2012  2018

Table 34  Movistar mobile subscribers - 2012  2018

Table 35  Change in the number of MVNO mobile subscribers by provider - 2011  2018

Table 36  Change in the number of MVNO mobile subscribers by provider - 2011  2018

Table 37  Fixed-line broadband revenue and ARPU  2011  2018

Table 38  Change in the proportion of fixed internet connections by data rate - 2015  2018

Table 39  Change in the proportion of fixed internet connections by data rate - 2015  2018

Table 40  Growth in the number of fixed broadband subscribers and penetration  2010  2025

Table 41  Change in the proportion of fixed broadband subscribers by technology  2015  2018

Table 42  Fixed-line internet traffic and annual change 2013  2018

Table 43  Growth in the number of cable modem subscribers and penetration  2010  2018

Table 44  DSL subscribers and household penetration  2010  2018

Table 45  Fibre broadband subscribers  2010  2018

Table 46  WiMAX subscribers  2009  2018

Table 47  Development of ICEs financial data  2010  2018

Table 48  Decline in the number of fixed lines in service and teledensity  2010  2025

Table 49  Decline in the number of ICEs PSTN lines and penetration  2010  2018

Table 50  Growth in the number of VoIP connections and penetration  2010  2018

Table 51  Change in VoIP market share of subscribers by operator  2013  2018

Table 52  Change in the proportion of traditional fixed and VoIP lines  2012  2018

Table 53  Change in PSTN and VoIP revenue  2012  2018

Table 54  Development of PSTN telephony and VoIP ARPU  2012  2018

Table 55  Average PSTN telephony and VoIP revenue per minute  2014  2018

Table 56  Change in fixed-line telephony and VoIP traffic  2010  2018

Table 57  Change in the average telephony traffic per subscriber (fixed-line and VoIP)  2010  2018

Table 58  Growth in international internet bandwidth  2007  2018

Table 59  Wholesale fixed-line broadband lines and revenue  2015  2018

Table 60  Historic - Evolution of GDP in Costa Rica  2000  2009

Table 61  Historic - Mobile subscribers and penetration - 1998  2009

Table 62  Historic - Internet users and user penetration  1997  2015

Table 63  Historic - Fixed broadband subscribers and penetration  2000  2009

Table 64  Historic - Broadband market share by technology  2000  2008

Table 65  Historic - Fixed lines in service and teledensity  1997  2009

Table 66  Historic - Cable modem subscribers and household penetration  2000  2009

Table 67  Historic - DSL subscribers and household penetration  2002  2009 List of Charts

Chart 1  Latin America Overall Telecoms Maturity Index

Chart 2  Latin America Telecoms Maturity Index  Market Leaders

Chart 3  Latin America Telecoms Maturity Index  Market Challengers

Chart 4  Latin America Telecoms Maturity Index  Market Emergents

Chart 5  South America Telecoms Maturity Index by country

Chart 6  Central America Telecoms Maturity Index by country

Chart 7  Latin America Telecoms Maturity Index vs GDP per Capita

Chart 8  South America mobile subscriber penetration versus mobile broadband penetration

Chart 9  Latin America fixed broadband penetration versus mobile broadband penetration

Chart 10  Growth in telecom sector revenue and annual change 2011  2018

Chart 11  Change in telecom revenue by sector  2014  2018

Chart 12  Change in revenue market share by sector  2014  2018

Chart 13  Fonatel covered premises, people  2015  2018

Chart 14  Mobile, broadband subscriptions enabled via Fonatel  2014  2018

Chart 15  Growth in the number of mobile number portings - 2013  2018

Chart 16  Development of roaming revenue (SMS/MMS and voice) - 2013  2018

Chart 17  Average traffic per mobile subscriber - 2012  2018

Chart 18  Change in the number of mobile subscribers by main operator - 2012  2018

Chart 19  Change in the mobile market share by operator - 2011  2018

Chart 20  Growth in the number of mobile subscribers and penetration - 2010  2025

Chart 21  Change in the number of prepaid and contract subscribers - 2010  2018

Chart 22  Growth in the number of fixed broadband subscribers and penetration  2010  2025

Chart 23  Change in the proportion of fixed broadband subscribers by technology  2015  2018

Chart 24  Growth in the number of cable modem subscribers and penetration  2010  2018

Chart 25  DSL subscribers and household penetration  2010  2018

Chart 26  Development of ICEs financial data  2010  2018

Chart 27  Decline in the number of fixed lines in service and teledensity  2010  2025

Chart 28  Decline in the number of ICEs PSTN lines and penetration  2010  2018

Chart 29  Change in the proportion of traditional fixed and VoIP lines  2012  2018

Chart 30  Change in PSTN and VoIP revenue  2012  2018

Chart 31  Development of PSTN telephony and VoIP ARPU  2012  2018

Chart 32  Change in fixed-line telephony and VoIP traffic  2010  2018

Chart 33  Change in the average telephony traffic per subscriber (fixed-line and VoIP)  2010  2018

Chart 34  Growth in international internet bandwidth  2007  2018 List of Exhibits Exhibit 1  Generalised Market Characteristics by Market Segment

Exhibit 2  South America - Key Characteristics of Telecoms Markets by Country

Exhibit 3  Central America - Key Characteristics of Telecoms Markets by Country

Exhibit 4  Major submarine cable networks connecting Costa Rica Read the full report: https://www.budde.com.au/Research/Costa-Rica-Telecoms-Mobile-and-Broadband-Statistics-and-Analyses Nicolas Bombourg [email protected] Within Australia (02) 8076 7665 Outside Australia +44 207 097 1241

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Figueroa Street in South Los Angeles, an area where the highest number of prostitution-related arrests in the city are made. (Luis Sinco / Los Angeles Times)

Armed with condoms and disposable thermometers, the outreach workers ventured out to streets in South Los Angeles notorious for sex trade activity.

They expected that some women would still be working on this chilly Friday night in early April. But what they saw caught them off guard.

Two weeks into the mandated stay-at-home orders designed to curb the coronavirus pandemic, not only were sex workers out in pre-quarantine numbers  the johns were, too.

"It was business as usual," said Stephany Powell, executive director of Journey Out, an L.A.-based nonprofit that helps victims of sex trafficking.

The pandemic is devastating the global economy, and it has not spared sex workers. Strippers, escorts and porn performers are experiencing financial hardships, and many have turned to webcam sites or relief funds to scrape by.

Stephany Powell is the executive director of Journey Out, a local organization that helps victims of sex trafficking. (Luis Sinco/Los Angeles Times)

But for those selling sex on the streets, by far the most vulnerable population in the industry, there are fewer options. Many have to work to survive during the pandemic, and they are finding that some customers are still seeking them out, apparently willing to share the risk.

Many of those selling sex on the streets tell advocates they have little to no choice but to continue doing high-risk work that has only become more fraught during this health crisis.

"When you talk to them about the coronavirus, theyre aware of it, and theyre afraid of it like everybody else," Powell said of the workers. "If youre out there right now, youre really being pushed to be out there, whether that push factor is poverty or somebody making you."

On any given prostitution stroll, there's a mix of those who have been coerced by sex traffickers and those who are in the life by choice. But even in those cases, many are held captive by forces including discrimination, abject poverty and the need to provide for their families.

Many street sex workers lack high school diplomas, are undocumented, have extensive criminal records and are victims of abuse, according to advocates. It's difficult for them to find work in the best of times, and they aren't privy to the social safety nets available to most others during an economic recession.

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Housing vouchers, food stamps, Medicaid, or other forms of welfare are also hard to come by for anyone earning income from sex work. And they are often ostracized by or isolated from resources like family, church and other community organizations.

With almost nowhere to turn, they face grim options: Work the streets or starve. Work the streets or face the wrath of pimps or traffickers.

"Struggle is what we do. Danger is what we face," said Stephanie Grant, a survivor of sex trafficking and crisis counselor at Journey Out. "Our circumstances are regularly very dire, and every day we face life-and-death decisions. The [coronavirus] is just another danger added to the pot."

Some of the johns who continue to solicit services amid the pandemic have taken advantage of the situation, demanding that they pay less money and seeking riskier services, according to advocates.

One young woman got into a car with a man wearing a mask and gloves. He insisted she sanitize her hands before touching him, said Grant.

"Clients are demonstrating that they believe their lives are more valuable than those of the woman they engage with," she said.

Grant holds daily Zoom meetings with about a dozen women who work on the streets. "About half are still out there, doing what they need to do," she said.

In L.A., the pressure to be on the streets is compounded by increased demand for full-service sex work. Advocates aren't certain what's driving the increase but say it could be due to a combination of boredom and anxiety.

"Even if some clients are moving to remote sex work, the overall effect of everyone being stuck at home and stressed out has been to increase demand, and all of the commercial establishments that people could visit for erotic titillation or satisfaction are closed," said Ashley Madness, political action director for the Sex Workers Outreach Project's L.A. chapter.

Although demand for street prostitution may eventually decrease as more people experience job losses and reduced wages, pimps may cut prices to stimulate demand, just like an airline or restaurant might, said Siddharth Kara, an expert on human trafficking and a visiting scientist at the Harvard School of Public Health.

Sex workers say they were already facing more dangerous conditions after laws were passed in 2018 that made it illegal to advertise sex work online, according to advocates. Before, sex workers say, they could screen potential clients on sites like Backpage, which was shut down after being linked to the sex trafficking of underage girls.

Though the Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act and Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act were billed as a way to protect sex workers, the new restrictions have effectively pushed more of them onto the streets, according to some advocates.

Another concerning pattern also emerged: More workers returned to abusive or exploitative managers to survive.

Advocates say that pandemic-related job losses also are driving former sex workers back to the streets.

Harmony Grillo, the executive director of Treasures, an outreach and support organization for those in the sex industry, noted that some of the women she worked with had done just that as the income they made through the gig economy and service jobs evaporated.

"If were in fear, if our financial future is uncertain, we want to go back to whats familiar," Grillo said. "Its heartbreaking to watch people whove fought so hard to leave be sucked back in by this."

Advocates worry that, as economic conditions worsen, traffickers will force their victims to work more hours and cajole them into riskier behavior.

"Traffickers and pimps will use whatever vulnerabilities they can," Kara said, "to exert, coerce and extend the exploitation of women and girls."

With the help of Treasures, women who feel particularly susceptible to the pull of sex work have created their own online accountability group, checking in on a daily basis to encourage one another to stay strong in the face of mounting uncertainty.

"Many of the women developed post-traumatic stress disorder while in the life," Grillo said. And being confined and isolated in their homes has revived memories of the conditions they experienced while under the control of pimps. The flashbacks have prompted nightmares and panic attacks.

The Los Angeles Police Department confirms that the sex work on L.A.'s streets continues unabated. The department does not have specific plans to address the issue, according to Capt. Gisselle Espinoza, though officers have worked with advocacy groups like Journey Out to "increase awareness of good sanitation habits."

"We are doing our regular traffic enforcement in areas that warrant it," Espinoza said. "Enforcement remains status quo."

Elsewhere in California, some commercial sex corridors are dark.

Johns in San Francisco have mostly stayed away from the strolls in the Mission District and the Tenderloin, said Celestina Pearl, outreach manager at St. James Infirmary, which provides clinical and social services to sex workers in the Bay Area.

"Casual johns might go out to the strolls once in a while," Pearl said. "Right now they're like, 'I'm just definitely not going to.'"

St. James Infirmary surveys street workers to gauge their needs at any given time. Before the pandemic, many asked for pepper spray, Pearl said. But now they just need cash and supplies, like hygiene products and condoms.

In Los Angeles, many need housing. Jazzmun Crayton, senior manager of strategic partnerships with the Asian Pacific AIDS Intervention Team, has spent the past few weeks finding beds for unhoused sex workers. She's been able to get six women into shelters.

One woman visited Crayton recently to say she hadn't been working the streets and was taking social distancing measures seriously.

Crayton beamed. She knew it was a big deal.

Against all odds, the woman was protecting herself.
Nigeria: 4 killed at pastors home in jihadist attack

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The pastor of an evangelical church in north-central Nigeria and three members of his congregation, including a 10-year-old boy, were shot dead by radical Fulani herdsmen, according to a Christian persecution watchdog.

The attack took place at the house of Pastor Matthew Tagwai of Evangelical Church Winning All in the village of Ngbra Zongo near the Miango area in Plateau States Bassa County on the night of April 7, according to Morning Star News.

The attack was carried out by armed herdsmen against the community, an area resident, identified as Patience Moses, was quoted as saying. Two other Christians  were also injured during the attack by the herdsmen, and they are currently being treated at a hospital at Dantako village.

The deceased pastor was 34.

This new attack, like the ones before it, is condemnable, said the Rev. Yunusa Nmadu, Jr., ECWA general secretary, about the killing of Christians in Plateau state and northern Nigeria. The continuing attacks on harmless and unsuspecting Christian communities without a concrete, strategic response from our duty-bearers to protect our people leaves much to be desired.

Let the authorities know that people do not run forever. There comes a time when they are pressed to the wall, and in such times reactions and counter-reactions will inevitably occur.

Since the start of 2020, estimates suggest that over 400 Christians were killed in the West African country.

In all, not less than 410 Christian lives have been lost in Nigeria to Jihadist Fulani terrorists in the past 93 days of 2020, the Anambra-based International Society for Civil Liberties and Rule of Law (Intersociety) said in a statement.

At least 50 Christians were killed in March and 10 in the first two days of April by Fulani herdsmen.

This is on daily average of about five Christian deaths. On average, the Jihadist Fulani militants killed 125 Christians in January and February, respectively, and 50 in March, Intersociety reported.

The killings are largely a result of increased terrorist attacks from Boko Haram splinter groups and overnight attacks carried out by Fulani herders against predominantly Christian farming communities in Nigerias Middle Belt.

Since 2015, about 11,500 Christians have been killed in Nigeria, according to Intersocietys estimates. In 2019, between 1,000 to 1,200 Christians were killed by Fulani attackers.

Nigeria ranks as the 12th worst country in the world for Christian persecution on Open Doors USAs 2020 World Watch List. It is one of the most deadly countries in the world for Christians.

Because of the Nigerian governments inability to halt societal and extremist violence and hold those accountable responsible, Nigeria was added to the U.S. State Departments special watch list of countries that engage in or tolerate severe violations for religious freedom in December.
Cross-border freight volumes across Mexico are suffering due to a significant drop in demand, according to transportation officials.

The decline is linked to the closure of truck-making and auto parts plants across Mexico to contain the coronavirus, as well as the March 30 executive order by Mexican President Manuel Obrador to close all nonessential businesses.

"The flow is slow, due to the unemployment of the automakers; cargo has dropped 20%," said Armando Martinez, president of the Tampico chapter of the National Chamber of Cargo Transportation (CANACAR).

According to the Mexican Association of the Automotive Industry (AMIA), 80% of the cars manufactured in Mexico are shipped to the United States.

The coronavirus pandemic has begun to spread across Mexico rapidly in the past two weeks. As of Monday, Mexico had 4,661 confirmed cases and 296 deaths. Since March 31, the number of coronavirus cases has skyrocketed by 326%.

Obrador declared the coronavirus a national health emergency on March 27. The executive order by Obrador suspends all nonessential activity in Mexico until at least April 30.

As in the U.S., Martinez said, most freight moving across Mexico currently consists of consumer staples such as food, toilet paper and medicine.

Martinez serves as the CANACAR representative for the Mexican state of Tamaulipas, which includes the land port cities of Nuevo Laredo and Reynosa, as well as the seaport at Altamira.

"The supply chain cannot be stopped; we as a motor transport sector are an ally to face crisis situations, since we guarantee the supply of food and medicine," Martinez said in an interview with news outlet El Norte.

Mexican trade groups in the transportation and automotive sector have asked Obrador to reclassify auto factory workers as "essential."

"We refer to the public statements made on April 8 by President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, where he expressed his agreement for the automotive industry to restart operations in a globally coordinated manner [with its business partners]," stated a document signed by four trade associations representing Mexican vehicle manufacturers, auto parts and distributors.

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Miguel Elizalde, president of Mexico's National Association of Producers of Buses, Trucks and Tractor-trucks (ANPACT) said some U.S. manufacturers have indicated that they could reopen by next Monday.

Elizalde and other Mexican automotive officials want to resume operations at the same time U.S. plants reopen.

Mercedes-Benz has said it plans to resume production at its plant in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, on Monday, as does Japanese automaker Subaru at its U.S. in Lafayette, Indiana.

Automakers Ford, Toyota, Mazda and General Motors have targeted early May for possibly resuming production at their North American factories.

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Region, already hit hard by coronavirus lockdowns and drop in oil prices, braces for a health crisis with few resources.

Sub-Saharan Africa is facing an unprecedented health crisis from the coronavirus pandemic and a severe economic downturn that could drag on economies for years to come, the International Monetary Fund said on Wednesday, warning: No country will be spared.

It really is as bad of an economic hit as the region has seen in decades, Abebe Aemro Selassie, director of the IMFs African Department, said during a teleconference on Wednesday.

In its latest Regional Economic Outlook: Sub-Saharan Africa report, the IMF said that the regions gross domestic product is expected to contract by 1.6 percent in 2020, a downward revision of 5.2 percentage points from predictions made six months ago.

Countries have been shut off capital markets  this crisis is unprecedented and calls for bold and decisive action, Selassie stressed.

Immediate priority should focus on boosting health spending regardless of debt levels, providing targeted cash transfers for the most vulnerable communities, and hard-hit small- and medium-sized businesses.

Oil exporting countries  like the continents top producer Nigeria  are facing one of the sharpest declines in oil prices seen in many decades. This is particularly worrying during a public health emergency when resources are essential to keeping people alive and societies functioning.

Overwhelming weak healthcare systems

As of April 13, over 7,800 cases of COVID-19 have been confirmed across 43 countries in the region, with South Africa, Cameroon, and Burkina Faso most affected, according to the IMF.

The rapid spread of the virus, if left unchecked, threatens to overwhelm already weak healthcare systems.

There are so many unknowns for Africa like how COVID-19 will interact with our young population, our hot weather. The governments are trying their best, but they have structural realities that make their response very difficult, Mohammed Yahya, United Nations Development Programme representative to Nigeria, told Al Jazeera.

It does not help that the price of oil has recently plummeted leaving many commodity exporters with severe holes in their state budgets. Compounding the challenges, Official Development Assistance (ODA) from wealthy countries is down while debt burden skyrockets.

It is more structural defaults that COVID-19 has exposed, such as overreliance on commodities, huge informal sectors, low tax base, and poor healthcare infrastructure, Yahya added.

Theres no curve to flatten when theres no healthcare.

Staying at home is a guarantee for hunger

And lockdowns and quarantines, while seemingly an effective tactic implemented by developed economies to halt the spread of coronavirus, is simply not an option for the people who live hand-to-mouth and have limited access to social safety nets.

I can afford to go to the supermarket and fill my fridge. But the average person doesnt even have enough money for their next meal, UNDPs Yahya told Al Jazeera.

Quarantine and travel restriction measures have been implemented in 44 and 43 countries on the continent, respectively.

According to the IMF, these strict measures have imperilled livelihoods throughout the continent. There has already been social unrest in Nigeria and South Africa.

Staying at home is a guarantee for hunger, said Yahya.
A weatherman sent viewers into a frenzy when he gave an impromptu performance on the drums to the signature BBC News theme tune.

BBC North West presenter Owain Wyn Evans shared footage of himself dashing to his drum kit after finishing his forecast so he could play along to the closing music.

The weatherman, who describes himself as "unapologetically flamboyant", has been forecasting from his Manchester home amid the coronavirus lockdown.

Posting the video on Twitter, he wrote: When they said try working from home I didnt realise theyd expect me to do the music too.

In the clip, he tells viewers: Thats the forecast, stay safe and Ill see you soon.

In the next shot he is then playing vigorously along to the famous theme while wearing his usual dapper three-piece suit.

After the video was widely shared, Mr Wyn Evans said: We are all trying to find ways of keeping our spirits up during this difficult time of lockdown, and it is great that this has proved such a hit.

It started out as a fun idea and has really caught on.

The tune itself is obviously a bit of a banger anyway, and I knew it would sound brilliant on the drums.

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

Mr Wyn Evans started learning the instrument when he was eight and was a semi-professional drummer before he decided to go into weather presenting.

His drumming was met with amusement and praise by viewers and fellow presenters.

Channel 4 weather host Liam Dutton responded: This is ace!

And one social media user commented: They need to replace the usual music with your performance permanently. That was fantastic!

The clip has more than one million views on Twitter, with celebrities Gary Lineker and Carol Vorderman praising his efforts.

Poem 'You Clap For Me Now' aims to show power of immigration on coronavirus frontline

Among the thousands of responses from viewers were fellow BBC colleagues.

Look North cameraman Malik Walton wrote: "Simply the best thing I've seen this week, last week and next week."

BBC journalist Alasdair Gill tweeted: "Magnificent work."
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The COVID-19 pandemic has exposed many vulnerabilities in the U.S. health care system. While shortages of safety equipment and ventilators have been widely reported, the shortage of physicians and staff to manage patients in respiratory failure is also a major concern. Given the reported conditions throughout northern Italy with hospitals operating over capacity and exhausted medical personnel, the same concern arises in the United States. While some may be quick to write off the coronavirus health care crisis in Italy as unsurprising given the smaller size of Italy versus the U.S., a countrys capacity to respond to a pandemic is not so simple. Although there are more doctors in the U.S. than Italy, their ability to work is geographically restricted, making the redeployment of doctors to needed areas a complicated affair.

The United States does not have a single nationwide medical license allowing physicians to practice medicine across all 50 states. American doctors are only permitted to practice in states where they have been granted a medical license. The medical license application process in a new state is often costly and time-consuming. During an event such as the COVID pandemic, the problematic nature of our licensing system may be exposed as physicians from around the United States willing to help during a crisis may not be able.

Currently, many states are waving requirements for medical professionals to obtain licensure in their state as long as they hold a valid license in another U.S. state, a response to personnel shortages from the COVID-19 crisis. The goal is to provide the hardest-hit areas with as much medical manpower as possible to manage the expected influx of critically ill patients. However, not all states are waving requirements. States such as Arkansas, Missouri, Nebraska, Virginia, Illinois, and Kansas (among other states) have chosen to keep their current licensure requirements in place, possibly leaving themselves at risk for physician shortages should the COVID-19 situation worsen.

Although this emergency waiver of state medical license in states that have chosen to do so is likely temporary, it raises the question of why the United States maintains a system in which doctors must get separate state licenses. All state medical licenses require medical students to take and pass the same grueling medical licensing exams called the USMLE (or COMLEX for Osteopathic medical students). US-trained or foreign graduates, must take and pass all four test series in order to practice medicine in the United States, regardless of location. The scores are transmitted to the Federation of State Medical Boards (FSMB,) which transmits this information to individual states licensing boards.

As both the president of a medical education company and also an emergency teleradiologist, I am no stranger to the frustrating world of United States medical licenses. Regularly, I spend half my time working with medical students to prepare them for board licensing exams and advise them on how to navigate residency. For the past decade, I have been lecturing and tutoring across the U.S. and abroad to improve student preparedness for the USMLE and COMLEX. I also spend time explaining how a students USMLE or COMLEX scores and possible failures can affect their chances of obtaining a medical license, showing them how these exams fit into the broader, complex system of medical licensure.

As a radiologist, I work with a company providing remote overnight and weekend radiology coverage for more than 150 hospitals across more than 16 states and the District of Columbia. In order to do radiology work, I hold 16 different medical licences. For every hospital in every state in which we provide coverage, all of the radiologists must have a medical license in that state, in addition to a license from the state where they reside. Each of these states has its own unique license application paperwork and fees, which largely ask for the same information and rely on the exact same test scores.

The cost of each application is not just fees, which typically runs in the hundreds of dollars per application with renewal every 2-3 years. The far bigger costs are the enormous volume of paperwork required and the extreme time delay  up to 6-9 months in some states  for an already licensed physician to obtain an additional state license. Our radiology group has a full-time team of staff devoted solely to applying and renewing licenses for our doctors. Counting application fees, the cost of acquiring each license easily reaches several thousand dollars.

Licensure in a state-by-state fashion should not be required to practice teleradiology or telemedicine. Just like during the COVID-19 epidemic. If doctors have to wait for states to waive licensure requirements to treat patients, it may cause delays in care costing lives. It would be fair to expect that once a doctor has a license in one state, it is straightforward to obtain a license in another state. For example, I had to wait nine months to obtain a license in Texas despite already holding ten other state licenses at the time. This kind of delay affected every doctor in my group and prevented us from providing much-needed coverage to hospitals in that state.

With the medical care costs continuing to rise, streamlining the licensure process would make it easier for our nations physicians to better respond to the medical needs across the country  especially during nationwide medical crises. The increasing use of telemedicine beyond the radiology, into specialties such as internal medicine, neurology, psychiatry, and even ICU care, will require more physicians to apply for and hold multiple state licenses. Because all physicians already take the same exams and use the same national processing center, it seems logical we should adopt a single national license. Such a licensure system would not only be more cost-effective, but also greatly help the United States ability to respond to large scale medical events in the future.

Marcel Brus-Ramer is founder and president, Elite Medical Prep.

Image credit: Shutterstock.com
New Delhi: Actress Shriya Saran, currently in Barcelona (Spain), revealed that her husband Andrei Koscheev had developed coronavirus while they were in Barcelona. However, the doctors told informed the couple that Andrei is fine, but if they stay there, he will get infected and hence, they decided to go home and self-isolate themselves.

In an interview to The The Times Of India, Shriya said that she and Andrei have been in lockdown in Barcelona for nearly a month now. Spain is one of the worst-hit countries and the situation has turned their lives upside down. She went on to explain how they were hit when Andrei kind of developed the symptoms and how they started taking precautions in time.

To make matters worse, Andrei began to develop a dry cough and fever. We rushed to a hospital but the doctors were overwhelmed and urged us to leave. Chances are that even if he doesnt have COVID-19, he will get it if he stays here, the doctors told us. So we decided to go home and self-isolate ourselves and get treatment at home, Shriya said.

They slept in different rooms, maintained a distance from each other.

Thankfully, hes feeling better now, so I hope the worst is behind us, the actress added.

Shriya further added that she misses her home in India and her parents. They stay in Mumbai and she constantly keeps calling them. Her mother also shared some recipes with her.

Shriya married Andrei in Udaipur in March 2018. They have been married for two years now.

On the work front, Shriyas last film was 2018s Phamous. She made a cameo appearance in 2019s NTR: Kathanayakudu.
The government is set to hold a meeting with chief executives of public sector banks and other lending institutions on Thursday to draw an action plan to offer financial support to economic activities that will restart on April 20.

The action plan will have two phases: one for the lockdown period when the economy activities resume, from April 20 to May 3, and the second after the lockdown period is over.

The meeting, which will be chaired by financial services secretary Debashish Panda over video conference, will be attended by the chief executives of all PSBs along with the management of National Bank for Agriculture and Rural Development, National Housing Bank and Small Industries Development Bank of India.





ALSO READ: Lockdown guidelines: IT-ITeS allowed to resume work; Nasscom hails move

The government is set to discuss "timely origination, sanction and disbursement of fund-based and non-fund based credit, clearing of payments and supply of cash for activities allowed to to operate from April 20.

The government on Wednesday allowed resumption of certain economic activities in areas where there are no Covid-19 cases. These activities will include agriculture and horticulture, construction, industrial establishments, fisheries, plantation, MGNREGA works, among others.

The government will ask banks to ensure adequate stock of cash in ATMs across the country and sufficient supply of cash to business correspondents.

ALSO READ: E-commerce firms seek clarity on non-essentials; gear up for MHA guidelines

Another action plan will be drawn through which the government will discuss cash transfers under Pradhan Mantri Garib Kalyan Yojana, monthly wages and credit growth after May 3.

This is the second such meeting being held by the finance ministry with bank executives. In a meeting with PSB chiefs on Monday, the finance ministry had asked them to extend all possible help to all sectors of the economy, according to the Press Trust of India.
From: David Rubin - Author of 'Trump and the Jews' N/A , None Wednesday, April 15, 2020



What Was Chinas Role in COVID-19 and Possible Biological Warfare? Intro: What is China's involvement in COVID-19, its origin and its bioweapons research? Was this novel coronavirus just a result of a poorly supervised wet market? Or was it a lab experiment gone bad or even outright biological warfare? If so, was its escape accidental or intentional, perhaps to test its ability to spread for a future release of an even more serious pathogen? Joining us to discussion this topic is David Rubin, former mayor in Israel who is familiar with the psychology of biological warfare and weapons of mass destruction. Q&A: In Israel, you are no stranger to rocket attacks, shooting attacks, or other dangers. You yourself were shot my terrorists in an attack that left your then 3-year-old son in critical condition. How do citizens of Israel get used to that sort of stress? Answer: Like it or not, it's a central part of our lives. Thank God, we survived, and life must go on. Use of the phrase 'weapons of mass destruction' has often been ridiculed, while anyone who dares to warn about them is branded a conspiracy nut, but as one who is well aware of the Iranian nuclear threat to Israel, are they mistaken? Answer: Absolutely, the threat is very real, and the Chinese Coronavirus Crisis may be a case in point. Are you saying that Covid-19, which we know originated in China, falls into the category of "weapons of mass destruction"? Answer: There is a very convincing documentary made by Epoch Times that raises very serious questions about the Chinese Communist Party's possible involvement with biological weapons. It's not a stretch to say that the CCP, which clearly seeks covert world domination, may have concocted Covid-19 with not so altruistic goals. Wait a second, are you saying that it may have been intentionally produced to be used as a biological assault weapon against the free world? Answer: What I am saying is that the virus may not be just an accidental infection originating in the Wuhan wet market. Rather, it may have been a lab experiment gone bad or even outright biological warfare. Knowing the Communist Chinese government, do you think they would ever intentionally risk releasing a bioweapon? And if so, didn't it backfire on them, infecting their own people? Answer: It did, but they somehow seemed very prepared to immediately lock down Wuhan, and now the United States and other Western countries, including Israel, where I live, are suffering far worse, while the CCP is trying to exploit that suffering to benefit themselves, both economically and politically. What I am saying is that it seems very suspicious and the mainstream media should be asking these questions and investigating further. You wrote a book on President Trump and his leadership style and resolve. Tell us about your book, Trump and the Jews, and why you believe that President Trump will be able to guide us through this crisis. Answer: President Trump, ever the CEO, has been providing a steady hand, admittedly in his own somewhat out-of-the-box way, but that's what's needed in this volatile situation. Reference video on the origin of the Wuhan COVID-19 virus: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gdd7dtDaYmM Bio: David Rubin, former Mayor of Shiloh Israel, is the author of the book, "Trump and the Jews" and five other books. Rubin is the founder and president of Shiloh Israel Children's Fund, established after he and his then three-year-old son were wounded in a terror attack. He can be found at www.DavidRubinIsrael.com or at http://www.ShilohIsraelChildren.org


He also promised that a Labor Governments would provide free teacher training for prospective teachers in both Government and non-Government schools.

A pledge to abolish fees at all universities and introduce a system of scholarships based on needs was made in Parliament last night by the Federal Opposition Leader (Mr. Whitlam).

First published in The Age on April 17, 1969

In debate over the Commonwealth Scholarships Bill, he accused the Government of a 20-year failure to take an adequate or appropriate interest in education.

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He claimed Australia lagged badly behind other countries in expenditure on education.

It is remarkable and reprehensible that any Government should direct scarce educational resources into the hands of those who need them least.

A Labor Government would not give scholarships to children whose families are, in any case, able to support them throughout their school careers, while refusing grants to the schools on which underprivileged Australians depend for an equal opportunity in education.
By Akbar Mammadov

Nagorno-Karabakh conflict is outside the scope of the Russian-led Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO) and therefore Kazakhstan will not be involved in military-political participation surrounding this conflict, chief research associate of the Institute for Strategic Studies under the President of Kazakhstan Georgy Dubovtsev, told Armiya.az on April 13.

Commenting on Kazakhstan's support for Azerbaijan's territorial integrity, the military expert noted that Kazakhstan constantly supported Azerbaijan in the issue of restoring its territorial integrity.

"At the same time, our country constantly made it clear that it did not intend to take military-political participation in resolving the Karabakh conflict. This position has always been highly appreciated by the conflicting parties", he added.

The Kazakh expert also stated that Kazakhstans position is that in the event of aggravation of the situation in the Nagorno-Karabakh zone, Azerbaijan, with which our country has close political and economic ties, not to mention the common Turkic roots of our peoples, may suffer one way or another, and Armenia, which is our partner according to the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO) and the Eurasian Economics Union (EAEU), may also suffer.

"I believe that in the future Kazakh leadership will maintain a neutral position, not allowing steps that could be regarded as support for one of the parties to the conflict", he said.

According to the Kazakh analyst, in recent years, Kazakhstan has been striving to take the position of an unbiased arbiter and peacemaker.

"Therefore, with any new aggravation of the situation, the leadership of our country will call for a resolution of the conflict by peaceful, political, diplomatic and negotiation means", Dubovtsev added.

Commenting on whether being a member of the CSTO has a pressure on Kazakhstan's foreign policy, Dubovtsev noted that as the organization has no authority in the Karabakh conflict, the country has no intention to take military part to resolve the conflict:

"Our CSTO allies, including Armenia, have always correctly assessed this position and, as far as I know, have never made any attempts to put pressure on our leadership to change Kazakhstans foreign policy".

The Kazakh expert also commented on military, oil and gas or other contracts between Azerbaijan and other members of the CSTO.

"The signing and execution of a number of contracts between the CSTO member countries and Azerbaijan, in particular, on the supply of Russian and Belarusian weapons, as well as the growth of mutual trade and investment, can be cited as an example of our countries' interest in developing relations with the Azerbaijani side".

"As for the response to the unfriendly statements of some politicians, and even more so the unfriendly actions towards Azerbaijan, the Azerbaijani leadership has enough political wisdom to use the entire arsenal of diplomatic means and levers to restore justice", he concluded.

The Collective Security Treaty Organization is an intergovernmental military alliance that was signed in 1992 by six post-Soviet states belonging to the Commonwealth of Independent States - Russia, Armenia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistansigned the Collective Security Treaty.

---

Akbar Mammadov is AzerNews staff journalist, follow him on Twitter: @AkbarMammadov97

Follow us on Twitter @AzerNewsAz
Quad bike tracks in Co Wicklow. Photo: Department of Culture, Heritage & The Gaeltacht

Trail bike tracks on Lugnaquilla, Co Wicklow. Photo: Department of Culture, Heritage & The Gaeltacht

Trail bike tracks and groups of quad bike riders (inset) in the Wicklow Mountains. Photos: Department of Culture, Heritage & The Gaeltacht

"Reckless individuals" on quad and trail bikes are flouting Covid-19 restrictions in the Dublin and Wicklow Mountains, according to the Department of Culture, Heritage and the Gaeltacht.

The bikers, who have travelled distances, are also endangering fragile habitats and risk disturbing livestock and wildlife, the Department said.

The use of quads and trail bikes in Wicklow Mountains National Park and Special Area of Conservation is illegal under the European Communities Birds and Natural Habitats Directive, it pointed out, and "extremely damaging" to fragile landscapes.

Photographs provided to The Irish Independent (above and below) show groups of quad bikers and tracks on Lugnaquilla.

"They are travelling on fragile mountain habits, forest roads/tracks and on the public road," the Department said.

"There is evidence that some have travelled some distance to get there. Many of these vehicles are travelling at speed, causing a safety concern to landowners, other road users and people taking exercise within their 2km radius from home."

Expand Close Quad bikers photographed flaunting Covid-19 restrictions in Co Wicklow. Photo: Department of Culture, Heritage & The Gaeltacht / Facebook

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Whatsapp Quad bikers photographed flaunting Covid-19 restrictions in Co Wicklow. Photo: Department of Culture, Heritage & The Gaeltacht

As well as flaunting social distancing and lockdown restrictions aimed at curbing the spread of Covid-19, unregulated quad usage can disturb livestock and wildlife, and cause vegetation loss and erosion which leads to gullying, scaring of the landscape and eventual landslides, it added.

It asked the public to report illegal activities to the Gardai, or by calling the Duty Ranger of Wicklow Mountains National Park on 087 980 3899.

The Department has kept National Parks and Nature Reserves accessible as "physical and mental health spaces" where local pedestrians can exercise, get some fresh air, experience and connect with nature whilst adhering to physical distancing protocols within 2km of their homes, it said

However, today it also revealed that "a small minority of visitors" to Killarney National Park have not been adhering to Covid-19 guidelines and are continuing to use the lake for recreational purposes.

A number of incidents over the last week saw both An Garda Siochana and National Parks and Wildlife Service staff devoting valuable time and resources to dealing with offenders, it said.

All access to the Lakes of Killarney is now restricted.

Reports of illegal activity in both Wicklow and Killarney will be followed up, and perpetrators will be prosecuted where possible, the Department said.
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In clear defiance of the government directives, hardline clerics in Pakistan on Tuesday announced to resume congregational prayers in mosques, even as the coronavirus cases in the country rose to nearly 6,000.

The government has banned prayer congregations of more than five people as part of its measures to curb the spread of the deadly coronavirus.

Follow latest updates on coronavirus here

Despite the governments pleas to observe social distancing, a group of hardline clerics held a meeting in Karachi to discuss the issue of ban on such prayers and made the announcement before media at the Karachi Press Club.

Mufti Taqi Usmani, a religious scholar and former judge of the Federal Sharia Court, who was part of consultation, said it was decided that five time prayers as well Friday prayer would be held in mosques.

He, however, said that the precautionary measures of the government would be taken to avoid the spread of the coronavirus.

The clerics decision came as the government announced to extend the lockdown for another two weeks until April 30. Those present at a press conference after the meeting included representatives from the Jamiat-e-ulema Islam, Jamiat-e-ulema Pakistan, Jamaat-i-Islami and Tanzeem-e-Islami among other religious parties. The decision came despite announcement by Prime Minister Imran Khan to meet the clerics in order to discuss the issue of gathering in mosques in the holy month of Ramazan which will start from April 25.

On Monday, over 53 senior clerics of Rawalpindi and Islamabad belonging to the Wafaqul Madaris al Arabia held a meeting in Jamia Darul Uloom Zakria here to discuss the ban on prayer congregations, the Dawn News reported.

The Monday meeting -- attended by clerics representing various seminaries, banned groups, proscribed persons and political and non-political parties -- warned the authorities against the ban and said government leaders should abide by religious norms and seek forgiveness.

Click here for complete coronavirus coverage

The warning came before the government could come up with a plan to curb the spread of COVID-19 during the holy month of Ramazan.

Pir Azizur Rehman Hazarvi, president of the Jamia Darul Uloom Zakaria in Islamabad, said, The closure of mosques, shutting down Friday prayers and Taraweeh is unacceptable to the countrymen. Hazarvi, who is also the patron of Jamiat Ulema Islam-Fazl (JUI-F), insisted that in order to get rid of the virus, it was imperative to seek forgiveness from Allah and increase the populace in mosques. A video clip released by the clerics on Tuesday showed leaders of various political and non-political organisations -- including JUI-F, Aalmi Tanzeem Khatam-i-Nabuwat, seminaries such as Taleem ul Quran Raja Bazar and a representative of banned group Ahle Sunnat Wal Jamaat -- sitting in close proximity of each other.

The meeting did not acknowledge the official directives of a maximum of five persons inside mosques for the collective prayers as the clerics said that the testing times demanded more time for prayers and announced that apart from the five times prayers, Friday and Taraweeh congregations will continue.

The clerics, however, agreed to take precautionary measures like use of hand sanitisers, removal of rugs and carpets, washing of floors, cleaning of hands with soaps and social distancing. Hazarvi said, The senior clerics have noted that all efforts will be made to avoid clash and confrontations with the government and the state institutions. Lal Masjids cleric Maulana Abdul Aziz also continued to challenge the authority of Islamabad Capital Territoty (ICT) administration by openly flouting the stipulated precautionary measures, the report said Every week, Aziz releases footages of huge congregations gathered for Friday prayers, denouncing the restrictions imposed by the government. As a result, the number of mosques organising large Friday congregations is increasing in Islamabad.
WASHINGTON, D.C., April 15, 2020--Research released today challenges the notion that teachers might be uniquely equipped to instill positive racial attitudes in children or bring about racial justice, without additional support or training from schools. Instead, the results, published in Educational Researcher (ER), find that "teachers are people too," holding almost as much pro-White racial bias as non-teachers of the same race, level of education, age, gender, and political affiliation. ER is a peer-reviewed journal of the American Educational Research Association.

In their ER article, researchers Jordan Starck (Princeton University), Travis Riddle (Princeton University), Stacey Sinclair (Princeton University), and Natasha Warikoo (Tufts University) analyze data from two studies measuring the explicit and implicit biases of American adults by occupation. The results are the first that the authors are aware of that use national data to compare teachers' and non-teachers' levels of implicit, or unconscious, racial bias.

"Well-intentioned teachers may be subject to biases they are not entirely conscious of, potentially limiting their capacity to facilitate racial equity," said Warikoo, a sociology professor at Tufts University. "If we expect schools to promote racial equity, teachers need support and training to either shift or mitigate the effects of their own racial biases."

The article drew from two complementary national datasets: Project Implicit, which is a large, non-representative sample, and the 2008 wave of the American National Election Studies (ANES), which is a smaller but nationally representative sample. From Project Implicit, the authors used data on 1.6 million respondents, including 68,930 who self-identified as K-12 instructors, from 2006 to 2017. The ANES dataset used by the authors included a total sample 1,984 respondents, including 63 preK-12 teachers.

Examining the first dataset, Warikoo and her coauthors analyzed data from a Black-White Implicit Association Test used to evaluate people's implicit bias. The test measures how quickly and accurately respondents pair White faces with "good" words and Black faces with "bad" words in comparison to the inverse. The test scores reflect respondents' pro-White/anti-Black or Pro-black/anti-White biases. The authors' findings from this dataset indicated that PreK-12 teachers and other adults with similar characteristics both exhibited a significant amount of pro-White/anti-Black implicit bias. Seventy-seven percent of teachers demonstrated implicit bias, compared to 77.1 percent of non-teachers.

To measure explicit bias, the authors subtracted participants' reported warmth towards Black people from their reported warmth toward White people. The results showed that 30.3 percent of the teachers had explicit bias, compared to 30.4 percent of the non-teachers.

To validate the findings from the first study in a nationally representative sample, the authors analyzed a second dataset, from a survey in which adults throughout the U.S., both teachers and non-teachers, were asked to judge Chinese characters as "pleasant" or "unpleasant" after being shown pictures of a Black or White young adult face. As in the first study, authors found no significant association between occupation and level of bias: teachers held the same levels of implicit and explicit bias as non-teachers.

"Overall, our findings suggest that schools are best understood as microcosms of society rather than as antidotes to inequality," said Warikoo. "Teachers are people too. Like all of us, they need support in combating their biases. We shouldn't assume that good intentions and care for all students make a teacher bias free."

The authors noted that various field-based interventions by other scholars suggest that strategies that encourage teachers to pause and reconsider their decisions in critical moments can reduce racial disparities. For example, one intervention that provides a 45-minute training session in a variety of prejudice-reduction techniques, such as imagining stereotype-challenging examples, can reduce implicit bias levels over two months.

"Several of the relatively small interventions that have been conducted have shown promise," said Sinclair, a psychology professor at Princeton University. "It would be helpful to test them at a larger scale, with an eye toward how such strategies work in different situations and with school personnel subject to different types and levels of bias."

###

About AERA

The American Educational Research Association (AERA) is the largest national interdisciplinary research association devoted to the scientific study of education and learning. Founded in 1916, AERA advances knowledge about education, encourages scholarly inquiry related to education, and promotes the use of research to improve education and serve the public good. Find AERA on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.
Monte Davilas children had pictured his funeral as a love fest, with hugs and kisses and a crowd of hundreds on hand to celebrate the life of a colorful Tucson original.

Instead, Davila, the owner of a downtown liquor store across from Tucson police headquarters  a man who once made headlines for tackling an armed robber and holding him down until officers arrived  was eulogized in a near-empty church.

An hour later he was buried with 10 people at his graveside, the maximum allowed in the era of COVID-19.

Social distancing rules have compounded the grief of Tucsonans whose loved ones passed away over the past month or so, whether they died from the virus or other causes.

Funerals are difficult in the best of times. Now, its even worse, said April Seybert, general manager of the citys oldest funeral home, Carillos Tucson Mortuary, 204 S. Stone Ave.

People with large families, especially, face not just the pain of loss but the angst of having to choose which 10 loved ones can attend the funeral in person.

For some families 10 people doesnt even cover the immediate family, said Seybert, who handled the Davila funeral.

Steff Koeneman, spokeswoman for the Catholic Diocese of Tucson, said she sympathizes with affected families, but the diocese must follow protocols to protect public health.

Its a hardship, no doubt about it, Koeneman said. But youve got to keep burying the dead.
After insisting for weeks that the statutory election schedule should be kept, Democratic Gov. Tony Evers tardily awoke to the problem of voting amid social distancing. Four days before the scheduled April 7 vote, he called the legislature into special session to pick a later date. The next day, the Republicans, who control both houses, swiftly adjourned the session, thereby conserving  they are conservatives  the status quo at a slight, they hope, cost in lives. (Voters and polling-place workers are disproportionately elderly.) Wisconsin Republicans, who know their candidates, clearly think they fare better when fewer people vote.
BJP MLA Ashish Shelar on



Wednesday demanded that authorities arrange mobile phone communication between stranded migrant workers in Mumbai and their family members living outside Maharashtra to contain unrest among them.

In his letter to Shiv Sena leader Aaditya Thackeray, who is Guardian Minister for Mumbai suburban district, the Bandra (west) legislator identified lack of communication between the migrant workers and their family members as one of the reasons for growing distress among them.

He said the workers are not able to talk to their family members because they have exhausted pre-paid recharge limits of their mobile phones.

The Bandra West constituency represented by Shelar has a significant concentration of migrant workers from Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Jharkhand and West Bengal.

Thousands of workers gathered near Bandra railway station on Tuesday in defiance of the lockdown norms, apparently due to the rumour about plying of special trains.

"A number of labourers have been unable to speak to or contact their family members due to exhaustion of mobile phone talk-time recharge, as retail shops are closed and many labourers don't have access to online recharge. Arrangement should be made so that they can speak to their family members," Shelar stated.

The former minister said the Tuesday's protest was a serious intelligence failure.

"The labourers were mobilised and organised. The question remains at whose behest?" he asked.

Shelar alleged that the migrant workers have not received any food or rations from the government.

"They also did not receive any aid from the cess collected for labour welfare under the BOWC Cess Actas per the Central government's advisory," he claimed.

Shelar demanded that the entire area in Bandra west be declared as the containment zone till the testings are done and reopened only after the Health department declares it as virus-free.

The former minister also demanded a financial aid for the workers as per the Central advisory.

He also said that the police personnel who handled the Tuesday's protest and local residents be tested for coronavirus infection and the entire area sanitised.

"The migrant workers should be tested and quarantined," he said.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
The number of patients suffering from the deadly novel coronavirus infection crossed 11,000 on April 15, of which 377 patients died and another 1,306 were cured and discharged.

A closer look at the figures reveals that Maharashtra not only accounts for the maximum number of cases reported in the country but also the number of deaths thus far. The state has reported 3,000 COVID-19 cases already, with most of these coming from Mumbai followed by Pune. Delhi, which accounts for the next major chunk, has about half of Maharashtras tally at 1,600 positive cases as of April 15.

For live updates on coronavirus, click here

The Ministry of Health informs that 178 of the 377 deaths that have occurred in the country due to COVID-19 so far, were reported from Maharashtra. Of this, 112 were recorded in Mumbai and 35 in Pune.

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

Though Delhi comes second to Mumbai in COVID-19 case count, Madhya Pradesh has the second-highest number of deaths reported due to the coronavirus disease, at 50 fatalities. The states health department states that Indore accounts for most of these deaths, where 37 patients of novel coronavirus breathed their last.

Coronavirus impact | Lockdown to hit state govt's finances worse than Centre

Delhi has reported 30 COVID-19 deaths so far, making it the fourth most affected city in the nation at present.

Combined, these four cities total 214 fatalities, which constitute 57 percent of the total coronavirus deaths in India.
April 15, 2020

Academic medical center leverages Philips tele-ICU technology to enhance clinician experience and help improve outcomes for ICU patients in Kentucky

Application of virtual monitoring will help aid University of Kentucky (UK) Healthcare's teams in care provision for COVID-19 patients

Amsterdam, the Netherlands and Lexington, KY, U.S. - Royal Philips , today announced a collaboration to create Kentucky's only operating clinical command center for tele-critical care and operational optimization. Leveraging Philips' acute telehealth platform, eCareManager , the academic medical center is implementing a centralized virtual care model to help providers detect risk of patient deterioration so they can intervene earlier and help improve care outcomes for the organization's sickest patients.

Philips' eICU Program is built around eCareManager , which uses advanced analytics and AI to synthesize patient data and deliver actionable insights to support proactive care. Using this comprehensive system, University of Kentucky (UK) HealthCare will provide 24/7 remote monitoring and access to specialists for patients in the neurological, trauma, surgery, post-anesthesia care, medical intensive care, emergency department and cardiovascular patient care venues. The institution also aims to improve bed utilization and patient flow across its 160 ICU beds at two hospitals.

Since COVID-19 is predominantly a respiratory illness, patients with more severe cases may require ICU care. eCareManager acuity based scoring tools monitor a patient's condition to detect subtle deteriorations prior to becoming adverse events. Predictive AI-enabled algorithms such as Sentry Score , designed to focus on a patients cardiovascular and Respiratory systems, provide clinicians in the telehealth center with predictive insights into those patients with the highest probability of requiring an intervention in the next 60 minutes. As bed availability and critical decisions on patient throughput are required, eCareManager integrates as part of its Clinical Performance Applications Suite the Discharge Readiness Score , a predictive algorithm that provides clinicians objective scoring on a patients risk of death or readmission within 48 hours of a planned discharge.

"In these most challenging times, healthcare organizations need digital technology to enhance the patient experience, improve health outcomes, lower the cost of care, and enhance the work-life of care providers now more than ever before," said Roy Jakobs , Chief Business Leader Connected Care, member of the Executive Committee at Royal Philips. "Partnering with UK HealthCare to address these concerns for the sickest patients demonstrates Philips' commitment to deliver unique approaches to help meet the demand of healthcare's greatest challenges."

"This partnership is vital to our foundational vision of high value care. Leveraging technology and highly developed clinical algorithms will aid our progressive high-performance health system," said Dr. Colleen Swartz, Vice President for Hospital Operations at UK HealthCare. "Especially during this time of increased need for very specific isolation and care models in managing COVID-19 patients, the application of virtual monitoring will aid our teams in care provision. Philips is an essential partner in our efforts to progress care across the state."

First of its kind outcomes-based partnership

As the shift to value-based care and reimbursement is increasingly dependent upon measurable outcomes, Philips and UK HealthCare plan to measure Key Performance Indicator metrics and will work together to identify improvement areas and generate mutual value. The partnership between UK HealthCare and Philips is a pioneering model in ICU telehealth, focused on addressing the quadruple aim by measuring outcomes across both clinical and operational value. The Philips eICU Program is uniquely positioned to partner with customers on innovative outcomes-based models in acute care. With the goal of improving patient care, clinical efficiencies, and ICU quality best practices through telehealth, eICU Program outcomes are demonstrated in peer reviewed publications.

As health systems seek to improve health outcomes, eICU programs enable a co-located team of intensivists and critical care nurses to remotely monitor patients in the ICU regardless of patient location, helping to optimize care costs and enhance clinician and patient satisfaction. Intensivists and nurses based in a telehealth eICU hub are supported by high-definition cameras and communications technology, predictive analytics, data visualization and advanced reporting capabilities to support their frontline colleagues.

Dashboards bring together data from the EMR and patient monitors on the ICU floor, where advanced algorithms alert to signs of deterioration helping the care team to proactively intervene at an earlier stage. eICU programs have been the subject of peer-reviewed literature since 2002, with outcomes data presenting clinical benefits in mortality reduction and operational systems benefits through increased throughput of ICU patients by reducing ICU patient length of stay [1].

Philips is the global leader in centralized tele-critical care. More than 20% of US adult ICU beds and 1 in 8 adult ICU patients are monitored by a 24/7 continuous demand model powered by the eICU Program, which combines A/V technology, predictive analytics, data visualization and advanced reporting capabilities [2, 3]. The core of this program is Philips eCareManager software, which delivers need-to-know information to caregivers, empowering them to care for the patients in a more proactive manner.

Philips tele-critical care platforms are available around the globe with clinical informatics applications supporting bedside, unit and virtual care delivery models. For more information on how Philips is addressing the Coronavirus globally, please visit the Philips centralized COVID-19 hub .

[1] Lilly CM, et al. A Multi-Center Study of ICU Telemedicine Reengineering of Adult Critical Care. CHEST. 2014 Mar 1; 145

For further information, please contact:

Kathy O'Reilly

Philips Global Press Office

Tel.: +1 978-221-8919

E-mail: kathy.oreilly@philips.com

Twitter: @kathyoreilly

Silvie Casanova

Philips North America

Tel: +1 978 659 7467

E-mail: Silvie.casanova@philips.com

Kristi Willett

UK HealthCare PR

Tel.: 859-806-0445

Email: kristi.willett@uky.edu

About Royal Philips

Royal Philips .

About UK HealthCare

UK HealthCare is the hospitals and clinics of the University of Kentucky. But it is so much more. It is 9,000 people - physicians, nurses, pharmacists and other healthcare professionals - all dedicated to providing the most advanced, most effective care available, not just in Kentucky but anywhere. UK HealthCare is the power of advanced medicine. https://ukhealthcare.uky.edu/





Attachments
Seemingly overnight, public education in Montgomery County made an abrupt turn as schools closed to stop the spread of COVID-19 and moved to online education.

But just because the teaching is now at home doesnt mean its the same as homeschooling. Many in the homeschooling community argue that a more correct term for what public school parents are going through right now is crisis schooling.

Homeschooling has a curriculum of its own, typically chosen and adjusted to meet the needs of the student, and is just as planned out as public school curriculum. What public schools are trying to do now is take the in-class curriculum they already created and turn it into an online format. No easy thing to do, but not the same as homeschooling.

Tips for teaching

But as public school parents were suddenly faced with the task of trying to help their child get an education from home, many turned to the homeschooling community for resources and advice.

We started getting calls almost immediately from two groups of people; people who were thrust into this situation and they didnt know what to do, they were looking for some kind of direction, said Tim Lambert, president of the Texas Homeschool Coalition. And we were also getting calls from our homeschool veterans wanting to know how can we help these folks.

THS responded by creating two different resources: a Facebook group to offer support, and a website full of educational videos and lesson plans for kindergarten through fifth grade that is free to anyone for the entire month of April.

The organization is currently working on making lesson plans for grades six through 12 available soon. If public schools are closed for longer than currently planned  Gov. Greg Abbott has ordered schools to close through May 3  Lambert said THS is considering keeping the resources available for free for a longer period of time.

This was just an opportunity for us to try and help these families who are in this situation, he said. Lots of the public schools were not prepared for this, perhaps nobody was prepared for this, and online learning from the schools is spotty. So, this is just an attempt on our part to give some resources and direction for people on how to do this at home.

When the Courier asked parents with experience in homeschooling for advice for public school parents, the most common answer was to remember that you cant replicate the in-school experience, so dont try.

Your kids are already going through trauma with having to do school outside of their norm. Please dont add to it by trying to homeschool, said Robin Anderson, who has homeschooled two of her kids for most of their education. Just keep them safe, healthy, and as sane as possible.

Flexibility and communication

Flexibility and communication are key, Anderson said. You may not be able to finish the 10 assignments or tasks you had planned, thats okay. Communicate with your students teacher to make sure they understand your circumstances.

Make (communicating) a priority in your household, but dont forsake their fragile emotional states, Anderson said. Communicating your difficulties with the teachers also allows them to communicate to the administrators who give permissions for extending deadlines and reducing workloads.

Monica Stanley has been homeschooling two of her kids for seven years and before that, she worked as an educator. Her advice to public school parents is to take a breath.

New for everyone

Know that this is new for everyone involved, Stanley said in a comment on Facebook in response to a question posed by the Courier. Your child isnt accustomed to being on a computer or confined to the house 24/7 and neither are you.

Stanley recommends giving your student a lot of downtime for rest and activities like art, music, or a walk in the neighborhood. But dont just focus on your students.

Give yourself grace during this time of uncertainty and transition, she said.

Its a sentiment that Bethany Parrish, Program Director for PACES, a classical school for students who are homeschooled to learn and socialize together while predominantly getting their education at home. But she has seen first-hand how COVID-19 has also changed how homeschooling is being done.

Typically, homeschoolers take advantage of many resources made available by the state, including museums, art galleries, and parks, to experience the curriculum.

That is generally a freedom we are awarded any day of the week, but right now we dont have that at all, Parrish said.

Now, Parrish said she has to try to create structure and freedom for her kids at home, while they are stuck inside to socially isolate. Not being able to leave, she said, was actually more like being in a public school, than being homeschooled. In this time shes practicing the same advice she would give to other parents trying to educate from home, a lot of grace.

Their character and their will and their hearts are not going to be dependent on whether or not the box got checked, she said. Did you talk to them, did you look them in the eye? Thats what they need more than anything.

jamie.swinnerton@chron.com
President Donald Trump on Tuesday pinned the COVID-19 deaths of thousands around the globe on the World Health Organization, which will no longer receive funding from the U.S. as the country conducts a review of WHOs response to the pandemic.

Trump accused the organization, an agency of the United Nations focused on global public health, of mismanaging and covering up the spread of coronavirus. Everybody knows whats going on there."

The U.S. is the WHOs leading sponsor at $400 to $500 million annually, Trump said, which gives the nation a duty to insist on full transparency. China, where the disease originated, only gives WHO about $40 million every year, Trump said.

The hold on funding would last 60 to 90 days during a thorough investigation," Trump said.

This should have been done by previous administrations a long time ago, he said.

Trump blasted the WHOs disastrous opposition to travel restrictions from China, a move he made for the U.S. in January that he has touted as a move that saved untold lives.

Look at the rest of the world, parts of Europe that followed WHO guidelines, Trump said, arguing the organization helped accelerate the pandemic.

Trump added that the WHO took Chinas assurances at face value" and failed to adequately obtain, vet and share information in a timely and transparent fashion. The outbreak could have been contained at its source with very little death and avoided worldwide economic damage. So much death has been caused by their mistakes.

In late January, the president, whos consistently been under fire for his own COVID-19 response, claimed the virus was totally under control in America. Trump also praised China on Jan. 24 for working very hard to contain the virus and for their efforts and transparency. It will all work out well.

China has been working very hard to contain the Coronavirus. 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!  Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 24, 2020

Trump expanded travel restrictions to include Europe in early March, just as Italy was becoming the worlds hotspot.

But domestic social distancing guidelines that urged people to stay home and avoid groups of more than 10 were not recommended by the Trump administration until mid-March, several weeks after health officials pressed leaders for more aggressive action to prevent spreading the virus, The New York Times reported.

As of Tuesday, more Americans have contracted and died form the disease than anywhere in the world; 600,000 have been infected and more than 25,000 have died in the U.S.

Trump on Tuesday pushed for meaningful reforms at WHO, and said the U.S. would redirect aid where its needed after discussions with very powerful, influential groups, medically, politically and every other way, and discussing it with other countries and global health partners.

The WHOs annual budget was about $6 billion for the last two years.

In a news conference in Geneva last week, WHO Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebrevesus defended the organizations effort and urged people not to politicize this virus, CNN reported.

"It exploits the differences you have at the national level. If you want to be exploited and if you want to have many more body bags, then you do it, he said. If you dont want many more body bags, then you refrain from politicizing it. My short message is: Please quarantine politicizing Covid. The unity of your country will be very important to defeat this dangerous virus.

Related Content:
Coronavirus India Lockdown News update: The number of COVID-19 positive cases stands at 11,439 as on date, while 1,306 people have recovered. A total of 377 people in the country have died because of the COVID-2019 infection; In the last 24 hours, 1,076 new cases have been reported. Thus, based on the available data as on date, 11.41% patients have recovered and this figure is on the rise. This was informed by the Joint Secretary, Ministry of Health & Family Welfare, Shri Luv Aggarwal, at the daily media briefing on Wednesday. He also informed that the government has identified 170 districts as hotspots of COVID-19 and 207 districts as non-hotspots while the rest have been categorised as green zones, says health ministry on Wednesday. Addressing his daily presser, Lav Agrawal, Joint Secretary Ministry of Health told media that all districts of the country have been classified into these three categories. Hotspot districts are those where the number of cases is high, while non-hotspots are those region that have reported cases of Covid-19 but the figure is limited. The green zone refers to regions where there are no cases of novel coronavirus. The Joint Secretary informed that besides the hot spots identified by the Centre, states who are fighting the battle at field level may declare additional districts as hot spot districts and take required action accordingly. Maharashtra remains the worst affected state with 2,687 confirmed cases with 178 deaths. Delhi has pipped Tamil Nadu to become second-worst affected state with 1,561 confirmed COVID-19 cases and death toll at 30. Whereas, Tamil Nadu's tally is at 1,204 and death toll at 12, according the Health Ministry.

The Home Ministry in its guidelines issued on Wednesday following the announcement of lockdown 2.0 by PM Modi said that all public services such inter-state, inter-district movement of people, bus, metro services continue to remain barred till May 3. Domestic, international air travel, train services, educational institutions, coaching centres will continue to be shut. The ministry added that public places such as cinema halls, malls, bars, shopping complexes, swimming pools, gyms, sports complexes will also be closed till May 3. All social, religious, sports, political functions, religious places and places of worship will be shut for public till May 3, the ministry said.

Also Read: Coronavirus lockdown 2.0: All agricultural activities to remain fully functional, says govt

Also Read: Coronavirus lockdown: What economic activities will be allowed after April 20?

Also Read: Coronavirus lockdown 2.0 guidelines issued: Check full list of relaxations, restrictions by MHA

Also Read: Coronavirus lockdown 2.0 guidelines issued: Check full list of relaxations, restrictions by MHA

Also Read: Coronavirus in India: State-wise COVID-19 cases, deaths, list of testing facilities

Follow BusinessToday.in for live updates on coronavirus in India and world:

10.57 pm: B Block of Safdarjung Enclave has been notified as a containment zone after four members of a family tested positive for coronavirus.

10.53 pm: Coronavirus updates: 30% police personnel on standby as crime rate goes down in Bengaluru

To ensure that police personnel get sufficient rest, we have kept 30 per cent of our staff on standby as crime rates have gone down in Bengaluru, Karnataka. However, they have not been allowed to go to their native places: Bengaluru Police Commissioner Bhaskar Rao pic.twitter.com/FxzlyyW0Y7 ANI (@ANI) April 15, 2020 10.41 pm: Govt denies allegations of segregation among coronavirus patients PIB Fact Check has refuted claims that patients are being segrgated on basis of religion at Civil Hospital in Ahmedabad, Gujarat. 9.49 pm: 50,000 PPE kits from China land in Guwahati A Blue Dart Air Cargo plane landed in Guwahati with medical supplies, including 50,000 PPEs, from Guangzhou, China. The cargo flight will go to Kolkata now and then to Delhi, Assam Health Department told news agency ANI. 9:40 pm: Rajasthan govt plans to implement modified lockdown from April 21 Ashok Gehlot - led Rajasthan Government has announced that there will be modified lockdown in the state from April 21. As per the government decision, industrial and rural sectors will start operating in the state from April 21. 9:35 pm: Goa's sixth coronavirus patient recovers, says CM Pramod Sawant The sixth COVID-19 patient in Goa has recovered, says CM Pramod Sawant. Only one active case remained in Goa and no new cases reported after April 3, 2020, he added. I am pleased to inform that the sixth corona patient from Goa has recovered. Only one active case remains in Goa and no new cases reported after 3rd April 2020. Dr. Pramod Sawant (@DrPramodPSawant) April 15, 2020 9:30 pm: Coronavirus update: Andhra Pradesh reports 23 new cases, 3 deaths As many as 23 new COVID-19 positive cases (Kurnool 13, Guntur 4, Kadapa 3, Nellore 2, Anantapuram 1) and 3 deaths reported in Andhra Pradesh, since 9AM till 7PM today. Now total number of cases in state increased to 525, while death toll rose to 14. 9:25 pm: India provided 50 lakh tablets of hydroxychloroquine to Mauritius Indian government has provided half a million tablets of hydroxychloroquine to Mauritius on Wednesday, as per their request. Consignment is part of 13 tons of essential lifesaving medicines that have been sent for Mauritius, says High Commission of India in Port Louis. 9:20 pm: 2 new COVID-19 cases reported in Himachal Pradesh Two new positive COVID-19 cases reported in Himachal Pradesh today, taking the total tally to 35, says RD Dhiman, Addition Chief Secretary Health and Family Welfare, Government of Himachal Pradesh. 9:15 pm: WHO lauds PM Modi's 'timely and tough' decision on coronavirus lockdown The World Health Organisation (WHO) on Wednesday hailed the Narendra Modi government's "timely and tough" decision to extend the coronavirus lockdown across India till May 3. 9:10 pm: Ensuring delivery of essentials to help people stay indoors, says Srinagar administration Essentials being made available at home, amid coronavirus lockdown. A fleet of cargo autos is ready to deliver vegetables/essentials across Srinagar. Priority is red zone areas, says Shahid Choudhary, District Magistrate/Development Commissioner, Srinagar, J&K. Essentials being made available at home, amid #CoronavirusLockdown. A fleet of cargo autos is ready to deliver vegetables/essentials across Srinagar. Priority is red zone areas: Shahid Choudhary, District Magistrate/Development Commissioner, Srinagar, J&K pic.twitter.com/HL6pMWlfm9 ANI (@ANI) April 15, 2020 9:00 pm: IMF chief Gita Gopinath calls for measures to support MSMEs, low income households As the coronavirus rampage continues, International Monetary Fund's Chief Economist Gita Gopinath said that MSMEs and low income households must be supported. Talking at India Today E-Conclave Corona Series, Gopinath said the biggest concern is that the impact of coronavirus pandemic could spill into the second hald of 2020. She also said that IMF strongly supports the steps taken by India. 8:50 pm: Indian govt to facilitate return of 180 stranded Pakistanis The Indian government is facilitating the return of 180 Pakistanis stranded in the country because of the coronavirus lockdown, with 41 of them set to return via the Wagah-Attari border crossing on Thursday. 8:40 pm: Delhi govt evacuates migrant workers from Kudesiya Ghat near Kashmere Gate Delhi Dy CM Manish Sisodia on Wednesday said that migrant workers, who have been evacuated from Kudesiya Ghat near Kashmere Gate, were given fruits and shifted to shelter homes set up at government schools in different parts of Delhi amid coronavirus lockdown. "On orders of Delhi CM, all of these workers have been taken to the night shelters set up across Delhi. They'll be kept there now and food will be provided to all of them. If any worker anywhere in Delhi faces any problem, our government will take care of them," said Manish Sisodia. blockquote class="twitter-tweet"> Delhi: Migrant workers evacuated from Kudesiya Ghat near Kashmere Gate, given fruits & shifted to shelter homes set up at govt schools in different parts of Delhi amid #CoronavirusLockdown. pic.twitter.com/SNmasH92ZP ANI (@ANI) ANI (@ANI) April 15, 2020 8:15 pm: Number of COVID-19 cases reach 591 in Indore The total number of COVID-19 cases reach 591 in Indore, Madhya Pradesh, says Indore Chief Medical & Health Officer Dr. Praveen Jadia. 8:05 pm: 49-year-old COVID-19 patient died in Pune A 49 years old COVID-19 male patient has died in Pune. He was suffering from comorbidity and pneumonia. This is fifth death reported in Pune today taking total tally to 43, according to Pune health officials. 8:00 pm: 32 more tests positive for coronavirus in Gurugram district today As many as 32 new COVID-19 cases have been reported in Gurugram district today, says Haryana District Health Department. 7:55 pm: 22 districts of Tamil Nadu identified as hotspots A total of 22 districts of Tamil Nadu have been identified as hotspots. These include, Chennai, Tiruchirappalli, Coimbatore, Tirunelveli, Erode, Vellore, Dindigul, Villupuram, Tiruppur, Theni, Namakkal, Chengalpattu, Madurai, Tuticorin, Karur, Virudhunagar, Kanniyakumari, Cuddalore, Thiruvallur, Thiruvarur, Salem and Nagapattinam. 7:50 pm: Women in Punjab's Hoshiarpur prepare homemade masks for villagers In Gugwaal Haarvillage situated in Hajipur Block of District Hoshiarpur, Punjab, a group of young women, are working tirelessly to safeguard their residents of their village and those in the vicinity, vulnerable migrant workers and ration and food supply distributors from COVID 19 infections by making and distributing face masks free of cost. The group is led by the village Sarpanch Narinder Singh. The initiative started on 6 April 2020 as the women participated stitching and making homemade cloth masks as per the instructions issued in the manual released by the office of Principal Scientific Adviser to the Government of India. PSCST supported this group by providing necessary raw material for this noble initiative.Within ten days, the group of women supplied more than 2000 good quality masks in four villages near GugwaalHaar to migrant labour, villagers, small-time shopkeepers. 7:40 pm: 10 out of 11 Districts of Delhi identified as hotspots A total of10 out of 11 districts of Delhi have been identified as hotspots. These include, These include, South Delhi, South East Delhi, Shahdara, West Delhi, North Delhi, Central Delhi, New Delhi, East Delhi, South West Delhi. 7:35 pm: Coronavirus in Chandigarh: Total number of COVID-19 positive stands at 21 The total number of COVID-19 cases in Chandigarh stands at 21, says Chandigarh Administration. 7:30 pm: Coronavirus: Social distancing necessary until 2022, claims new study According to a new study from Harvard University, prolonged or intermittent social distancing may be necessary until 2022 to contain future COVID-19 seasonal outbreaks. 7:25pm: No new case of COVID-19 reported in Uttarakhand on Wednesday Uttarakhand Health Department on Wednesday said that no new case of coronavirus has been reported today. Total cases in the state stand at 37. 7:20 pm: 38 more test positive for COVID-19 in Tamil Nadu today As many as 38 more people tested positive for COVID-19 in Tamil Nadu on Wednesday, of these 34 are those who attended "single source event in Delhi" and their contacts. Total coronavirus cases in the state now at 1242, including 1113 who attended "single source event in Delhi" and their contacts, says state government. 7:10 pm: Coronavirus effect: India's exports decline 34.6% in March India's merchandise exports fell 34.6% to $21.41 billion in March while imports declined 28.7% due to the ongoing global slowdown in wake of COVID-19 crisis. India's exports dropped by 4.78 per cent to $314.31 billion for 2019-20. Trade deficit narrowed to $9.76 billion in March this year compared to $11 billion in the same month last year. "The decline in exports has been mainly due to the ongoing global slowdown, which got aggravated due to the current Covid-19 crisis. The latter resulted in large scale disruptions in supply chains and demand resulting in cancellation of orders," the commerce ministry said. 7:00 pm: 11,439 active cases in India; 11.41% patients recovered: Health Ministry The number of COVID-19 positive cases stands at 11,439 as on date, while 1,306 people have recovered. A total of 377 people in the country have died because of the COVID-2019 infection; In the last 24 hours, 1,076 new cases have been reported. Thus, based on the available data as on date, 11.41% patients have recovered and this figure is on the rise, says Joint Secretary, Ministry of Health & Family Welfare, Luv Aggarwal, at the daily media briefing on Wednesday. 6:50 pm: Maharashtra, Karnataka in a bit of trouble, says Dr Harsh Vardhan Bihar isn't in so much trouble right now,but definitely,Maharashtra is in a bit of trouble,particularly Mumbai and also Karnataka. But I was happy to see confidence of 3 Secys&more particularly when Maharashtra Secy said with confidence 'we'll take care of it': Health Minister. 6:45 pm: Check BusinessToday.In tracker to check the latest number of state-wise coronavirus cases INDIA CORONAVIRUS TRACKER: BusinessToday.In brings you a daily tracker as coronavirus cases continue to spread. Here is the state-wise data on total cases, fatalities and recoveries in one comprehensive graphic. Click here to Enlarge 6:40 pm: Jammu and Kashmir reports 22 new COVID-19 cases Jammu and Kashmir has reported 22 new cases of COVID-19 on Wednesday, eighteen of them in Kashmir and four in Jammu. The total number of coronavirus patients in the J&K now inches close to 300-mark. 6:35 pm: 2 more tests positive for coronavirus in Punjab today 2 more COVID-19 cases reported in Punjab today, one each from Patiala and Sangrur. Total coronavirus positive cases in the state now at 186, including 146 active cases, 27 cured, and 13 deaths, according to a statement issued by the Punjab Government. 6:30 pm: Kerala reported only 1 new COVID-19 case on Wednesday Kerala Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan on Wednesday said that the state reported only 1 new COVID-19 case today; taking the total number of positive cases in the state to 387, of which 167 are active. 6:25 pm: Delhi to start clinical trial of plasma therapy for COVID-19 treatment Delhi to use plasma technique for treatment on a trial basis to save lives of critical COVID-19 patients, says Lt Governor Anil Baijal. He advised all to strictly adhere to SOPs/guidelines and protocols issued by Union Health Ministry while dealing with COVID-19 patients. 6:20 pm: Govt identifies 170 districts in India as hotspots, 207 as potential hostspots The Union Health Ministry has identified 170 districts as COVID-19 hotspots and 207 districts as potential hotspots, officials said on Wednesday, reiterating that there has been no community transmission of the disease in the country so far. 6.08 pm: Coronavirus updates India: Booze shops to remain closed in Assam Assam government has orderd all IMFL shops, wholesale warehouses, bottling plants, distilleries and breweries in the state to remain closed with immediate effect in view of Consolidated Revised Guidelines and National Directives by Central Government for COVID-19 management. 5.51 pm: Next 2-3 weeks crucial for India: Harsh Vardhan Glad to share that first #COVID19 positive patient of Tripura has been discharged today, as she has recovered & found negative in consecutive tests



She has been sent for quarantine under medical supervision.



I Pray to Mata Tripurasundari so that State turns Corona free soon. pic.twitter.com/xsyQEPEsD7 Biplab Kumar Deb (@BjpBiplab) April 15, 2020

5.46 pm: No coronavirus cases in 400 districts: Union Health Minister

Union Health Minister Harsh Vardhan stated that no cases of coronavirus have been found in around 400 districts of India. We have been able to pinpoint where the virus is, he added.

5.36 pm: Coronavirus in India: Number of cases rise to 11,933; death toll at 392

According to Ministry of Health and Family Welfare, by 5PM on April 15, India's total number of coronavirus positive cases has risen to 11,933. This includes 10,197 active cases, 1,344 patients who have been cured or discharged or migrated, and 392 deaths.

5.26 pm: First coronavirus patient cured in Tripura

First COVID-19 patient of Tripura has been discharged today after she was tested negative in consecutive tests. She has been sent for quarantine under medical supervision, informed Chief Minister Biplab Kumar Deb.

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5.13 pm: India lockdown: Doctor, medical team pelted with stones in UP's Moradabad

Some people pelted stones at a team of doctors, medics and policemen who had gone to pick the family of a novel coronavirus positive patient, who had passed away recently, to take them to a quarantine facility. 3 people were injured in the attack including a doctor and pharmacist.

4.58 pm: Coronavirus cases live: COVID-19 impacted IT services revenues for March quarter negatively

Wipro said on Wednesday that the novel coronavirus has impacted the IT services revenues for March quarter negatively by $14-16 million.

4.48 pm: Lockdown news India: No community transmission in the country so far: Health Ministry

Health Ministry confirmed on Wednesday that there is no community transmission in India so far, however, there have been some local virus outbreaks.

4.35 pm: India lockdown news: 1,076 new novel coronavirus cases in 24 hours

The Health Ministry in its daily press briefing said on Wednesday that India reported 1,076 new COVID-19 cases in past 24 hours. The ministry added that the total number of positive cases in the country stand at 11,439 including 9,756 active cases, 377 deaths, 1,305 cured/discharged and 1 migrated.

4.28 pm: India lockdown: Coronavirus spread due to mutations

Addressing a daily presser on Wednesday, Health Ministry said that novel coronavirus has been spread due to mutations and finally spread to humans. Chinese studies suggest that the virus also spreads through pangolin.

4.23 pm: Coronavirus found in two Indian bat species; not harmful to humans

A study by Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) showed that coronavirus has been discovered in two bat species found in Kerala, Himachal Pradesh, Puducherry and Tamil Nadu. The strain of coronavirus-bat coronavirus or BtCoV is different from the kind found in humans but doesn't cause any harm to humans.

Read more here: Coronavirus found in two Indian bat species; researchers recommend proactive surveillance

4.18 pm: Lockdown live updates: Districts asked to make a crisis plan: Health Ministry

The Health Ministry in its daily briefing on Wednesday said that every district has been asked to make a crisis plan to make sure that the areas which do not have novel coronavirus cases remain corona-free and the one that have the virus don't report any new cases.

4.16 pm: Nationwide lockdown

Will issue guidelines for all permitted movement across India: Health Ministry

4.14 pm: India lockdown news

States have been briefed on containment strategy: Health Ministry

4.11 pm: Coronavirus cases in India

Strict restrictions across India till April 20, curbs to be eased in green zones post the period, says Home Ministry

4.10 pm: Coronavirus cases India

Focus on extensive contact racing of the infected people: Health Ministry

4.09 pm: Coronavirus cases live updates

Door-to-door survey being conductes in hotspots, says Health Ministry

4.07 pm: Coronavirus cases live

New COVID-19 dedicated hospitals will be set up by the government: Health Ministry

4.05 pm: Lockdown news India

Exit and exit strategy are being mapped out, says Health Ministry

4.03 pm India lockdown news: Health Ministry begins daily briefing on COVID-19

Lav Agarwal, Joint Secretary, Health Ministry said on Wednesday that the ministry has identified hotspots and green zones and has issued guidelines for hotbeds across India.

4.00 pm: Coronavirus in India: Vistara announces compulsory leave without pay for senior employees

Vistara chief Leslie Thng announced on Wednesday that the senior employees will be sent on mandatory leave without pay for up to 3 days between April 15 and 30 as a step to conserve the airline's cash flow in the wake of lockdown to fight COVID-19 outbreak.

3.45pm: Coronavirus lockdown India: COVID-19 positive cases past 11,000-mark; Maharashtra, Delhi worst-affected

India's total number of confirmed COVID-19 cases stand at 11,439 as of date, according to Union Ministry of Health and Family Welfare. The confirmed cases comprise 9,756 active cases, 377 deaths, 1,305 cured/discharged and 1 migrated. Meanwhile, Maharashtra remains the worst affected state with 2,687 confirmed cases with 178 deaths. Delhi has pipped Tamil Nadu to become second-worst affected state with 1,561 confirmed COVID-19 cases and death toll at 30. Whereas, Tamil Nadu's tally is at 1,204 and death toll at 12, according the Health Ministry.

3.30: Lockdown in Maharashtra: 117 fresh COVID-19 cases reported

Over 117 fresh novel coronavirus cases have been reported from Maharashtra on Wednesday, taking the total tally in the state to 2,801. Out of these, 66 cases are from Mumbai and 44 from Pune.

3.15 PM: Union Health Minister Harsh Vardhan holds a high-level meeting through video conferencing with the World Health Organisation officials on measures to combat COVID-19.

3.10 PM: While situation remains fluid, we are planning to resume flights in phased manner whenever authorities allow us to do so, says Vistara CEO.

3.05 PM: The Centre asks all deputy secretaries and above level officers to join offices, three weeks after they began working from home due to lockdown imposed to check spread of coronavirus. - PTI

3.00 PM: Recognising the need to conserve financial resources at national level, Chairman & Members of UPSC have decided to voluntarily forego 30 per cent of basic pay received by them from the commission for 1 year, with effect from April 2020. - ANI

2.50 PM: To provide protection to healthcare professionals in the fight against COVID-19, Indian Railways plans to produce over 30,000 coveralls (Personal Protective Equipment) in April 2020. Railways plans to manufacture 1,00,000 of the same in May.

2.45 PM: Delhi High Court has ordered that the functioning of Courts subordinate to Delhi High Court shall continue to remain suspended till 3rd May.

2.35 PM: 117 new cases recorded today in the state, of which 66 are from Mumbai and 44 from Pune. The total number of positive cases in the state stands at 2801 now.

2.28 pm: Coronavirus impact: Share market falls amid negative global cues

BSE Sensex fell 350 points, and Nifty dipped by 37 points erasing their early gains and turning bearish in the afternoon trade session on Wednesday.

Read more here: Share Market LIVE: Sensex falls 350 points, Nifty at 8,800 amid negative global cues

2.23 pm: Maharashtra coronavirus news: Ola partners with BMC to provide essential medical trips

Cab-aggregator Ola has partnered with Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) to provide essential medical trips in Mumbai. BMC has been facilitated dedicated cars for every ward in the city to ferry health workers and paramedical staff across wards and their houses, Ola said in a statement as cited by ANI.

2.14 pm: Lockdown in Madhya Pradesh: Stranded migrant workers to get Rs, 1000: CM Shivraj Singh Chauhan

Madhya Pradesh Shivraj Singh Chouhan said announced on Wednesday that the government has talked to other states to make sure that their migrant labourers get food and shelter. The MP CM also said that the state government will transfer Rs, 1000 in the accounts of such stranded labourers.

Don't worry we'll send you more money if needed. We're standing with you. I request people's representatives to make a list of all such people&send it to Chief Minister's Office or Dist collector's office. We will send money as and when the list is sent to us: MP CM SS Chouhan https://t.co/yVuEJzeM1e - ANI (@ANI) April 15, 2020

2.00 pm: Lockdown guidelines India: Govt bans liquor sale

The Home Ministry in its guidelines for lockdown issued on Wednesday imposed an outright ban on the sale of tobacco, gutka and liquor during the curfew duration. The ministry has also made spitting a punishable offence and has asked the state governments and union territories to strictly follow the guidelines.

1.49 pm: Karnataka coronavirus news

Karnataka recorded 17 new COVID-19 cases on Wednesday, taking the state's tally to 277. Out of these 17 cases, at least 9 are linked to the workers of a pharma company in Mysuru, the state government confirmed.

1.38 pm: Guidelines for lockdown: Home Ministry issues guidelines for containment zones and hotspots

The Home Ministry has announced a set of guidelines to be followed during the lockdown 2.0 for containment zones and hotspots across India. PM Modi in his address to the nation on Wednesday had said that the curbs will be eased for certain areas after April 20. The ministry however, said that there will be no relaxation of any guideline in the containment zones.

Read more here: Coronavirus in India: Home Ministry releases guidelines for containment zones and hotspots

1.26 pm: Gujarat CM corona test: Chief Minister Vijay Rupani goes into self-quarantine

Gujarat Chief Minister Vijay Rupani has gone self-isolation after he underwent testing for COVID-19 on Wednesday. The test results however are normal but CM Rupani has gone into self-quarantine as a precautionary measure. The chief minister underwent the COVID-19 test after he met Congress MLA Imran Khedawala who tested positive for the virus. Khedawala along with other Congress MLAs had gone to meet CM Rupani and other government members to discuss the issue of spike in novel coronavirus cases in certain parts of Ahmedabad.

1.16 pm: Lockdown guidelines: CII on PM Modi's lockdown extension announcement

Welcoming the Prime Minister's announcement of extension of lockdown till 3 May 2020, Mr Chandrajit Banerjee, Director General, CII, said, "The Covid-19 curve trajectory as of now required a fitting containment response and Prime Minister's decision for continuation of the lockdown is necessary to avert a larger humanitarian crisis. His attention to ensuring that harvesting of the rabi crop continues and to taking care of distressed persons is very appropriate." He further added, "Prime Minister has also provided a guidance on exit from the lockdown after 20 April which helps industry plan better. The extension gives the Government adequate preparation time to organise an orderly and safe restart of the economy as and when health conditions permit. Industry too can devise its strategies for commencing operations accordingly during this extension period".

1.06 pm: Bengaluru coronavirus news

A 69-year-old man from Chikkaballapura in Bengaluru died after testing positive for COVID-19 on Wednesday, PTI reported. With this, the total number of coronavirus deaths has risen to 110 in Karnataka.

12.58 pm: Meghalaya coronavirus news

Meghalaya Chief Minister Conrad Sangma said on Wednesday that out of the 68 tests conducted so far, 6 have come out as positive. All those who are tested COVID-19 positive are family members and helpers of the first virus case.

Of the 68 tested so far, 6 have come out positive who are all family members & helpers of the first #COVID19 positive case. 6 other cases are being retested. All the rest of the cases are negative: Meghalaya CM Conrad Sangma pic.twitter.com/Ss1Wro9BFI - ANI (@ANI) April 15, 2020

12.47 pm: Guidelines for lockdown: Commerce ministry issues guidelines for industrial workers

Following the lockdown 2.0 guidelines issued by Home Ministry on Wednesday, the Commerce Ministry issued detailed standard operating procedures (SOP) for industrial workers. The small factories and industrial units under the SOP are allowed to operate in single shifts with single entry point for workers ensuring strict social distancing and avoid crowding. The ministry has also directed the employers to arrange separate stay or transport arrangement for workers while they go back home from the factories.

12.35 pm: Lockdown guidelines

Home Ministry allows industries operating in rural areas to run from April 30 but with strict social distancing rules.

12.25 pm: Lockdown guidelines India: Banks to stay open till direct benefit cash transfers conclude

The Ministry of Home Affairs in its new guidelines for COVID-19 lockdown issued on Wednesday said that bank branches well be permitted to function, as per the normal working hours till the direct benefit cash transfers are complete. The ministry added that banks, ATMs, IT vendors and cash management agencies would be permitted to function according to the list of select allowed activities from April 20. The guideline document further stated that the local administration would provide adequate security at bank branches and banking correspondents (BCs), law and order, maintain social distancing as well staggering of bank customers.

12.12 pm: Lockdown in Delhi: Gautam Gambhir sends 1,000 PPE kits to RML hospital

BJP MP from East Delhi, Gautam Gambhir said on Wednesday that he sent 1,000 PPE kits to RML hospital after hearing about 2 doctors testing positive for novel coronavirus. Taking to Twitter, Kejriwal said, "Heard about 2 doctors testing +ve at RML. I have sent 1000 PPE Kits there today! Delhi Health Min stated 1.40 Lakh kits have been ordered. I request @ArvindKejriwal to expedite their delivery. Our Corona warriors need us! Situation demands being proactive not reactive."

Heard about 2 doctors testing +ve at RML. I have sent 1000 PPE Kits there today! Delhi Health Min stated 1.40 Lakh kits have been ordered. I request @ArvindKejriwal to expedite their delivery. Our Corona warriors need us! Situation demands being proactive not reactive@BJP4Delhi pic.twitter.com/kC9s9r6RU8 - Gautam Gambhir (@GautamGambhir) April 15, 2020

12.02 pm: Lockdown in Delhi: Police books Markaz chief for culpable homicide not amounting to murder

Delhi Police on Wednesday booked Markaz Chief Maulana Saad and 17 others under culpable homicide not amounting to murder. The police has also issued look out circular (LOC) against 1,900 jamaat participants for flouting visa norms. Saad and 17 others have been issued notices to join the police investigation, with 11 of them not coming onboard for being in quarantine.

11.56 am: Lockdown in Maharashtra: Kamal Hassan on Mumbai protests

Actor Kamal Hassan took to Twitter on Wednesday to say that "All the balcony people take a long and hard look at the ground. First it was Delhi, now Mumbai. The migrant crisis is a time bomb that must be defused before it becomes a crisis bigger than Corona. Balcony government must keep their eyes on what's happening on the ground too."

All the balcony people take a long and hard look at the ground. First it was Delhi, now Mumbai. The migrant crisis is a time bomb that must be defused before it becomes a crisis bigger than Corona. Balcony government must keep their eyes on what's happening on the ground too. - Kamal Haasan (@ikamalhaasan) April 14, 2020

11.53 am: India lockdown news: Max Healthcare to check its entire 18000 workforce for COVID-19

Max Healthcare said on Wednesday that it will test its entire workforce of 18,000 people for novel coronavirus infection and admit patients at its facilities. "Max Healthcare intends to proactively test its entire Healthcare workforce of 18000 people and admitted patients at its facilities. In addition, going forward, Max healthcare intends to test all patients at admission itself. This process has now been made possible since relaxation of testing norms by ICMR to cover such individuals," the hospital said in a press release.

11.42 am: Coronavirus live updates: South Korea holds elections amid COVID-19 pandemic

South Korea's parliamentary election began on Friday. Voters wearing masks and gloves came out to vote. Separate polling stations were arranged for coronavirus patients, reports Reuters.

Early voting in South Korea's parliamentary election began on Friday with voters wearing masks and gloves, while separate polling stations were arranged for coronavirus patients https://t.co/CoxhXNi64E pic.twitter.com/y7Mo3oQovV - Reuters (@Reuters) April 10, 2020

11.37 am: Lockdown in Mumbai: Migrant crisis! Bandra police registers 3 FIRs

The first FIR registered by the police is against 800-1000 people who gathered at Bandra. Second FIR was against Vinay Dubey who allegedly incited migrant workers to start walking towards their native places. The third FIR was registered against ABP Mazha Correspondent for running fake news that trains would be up and running. He was arrested from Osmanabad, and is being brought to Mumbai.

11.26 am: Lockdown guidelines India: Govt allows MGNREGA works from April 20

The Home Ministry in its guidelines for lockdown issued on Wednesday said that although MGNREGA works will be permitted from April 20, but only under the condition that there is a strict enforcement of social distancing and people wear face masks.

11.17 am: Home Ministry guidelines: Congress leader Rahul Gandhi asks govt to bring back Indian workers stranded in Middle East

Congress leader Rahul Gandhi asked the government to facilitate flights to bring back Indian workers stranded in the Middle East. Taking to Twitter, Gandhi said, "The Covid19 crisis and shutting of businesses in the Middle East have left thousands of Indian workers in deep distress and desperate to return home."

The #Covid19 crisis & shutting of businesses in the Middle East have left thousands of Indian workers in deep distress & desperate to return home. The Govt must organise flights to bring home our brothers & sisters most in need of assistance, with quarantine plans in place. - Rahul Gandhi (@RahulGandhi) April 15, 2020

11.06 am: MHA guidelines: All public activities prohibited

The Home Ministry in its guidelines issued on Wednesday following the announcement of lockdown 2.0 by PM Modi said that all public services such inter-state, inter-district movement of people, bus, metro services continue to remain barred till May 3. Domestic, international air travel, train services, educational institutions, coaching centres will continue to be shut. The ministry added that public places such as cinema halls, malls, bars, shopping complexes, swimming pools, gyms, sports complexes will also be closed till May 3. All social, religious, sports, political functions, religious places and places of worship will be shut for public till May 3, the ministry said.

10.57 am: Lockdown guidelines: People facing emergency permitted to move: MHA

The Ministry of Home Affairs in its guidelines for lockdown issued on Wednesday said that those facing emergency will be permitted to step out of their homes. The emergency situation can be medical, veterinary care and for buying essential items.

10.49 am: Lockdown guidelines India: What's open

Essential goods supply

courier services

IT and IT-enabled services

Print and electronic media

E-commerce companies

construction activities

Government offices

Hospitals, nursing homes, clinics

Pharmacies, dispenseries, medicine shops

Veterinary hospitals, pathology labs, sale and supply of vaccine, medicine

Manufacturing units of drugs, pharmaceuticals, medical devices, medical oxygen

Agricultural and related activities

Fisheries

plantations

Animal husbandry

financial sector including bank branches and ATMs

Social sector

MNREGA activities

Movement of goods/cargo- inter and intra state

10.35 am: Guidelines for lockdown: What's shut

Agricultural activities Health services Domestic air and rail travel Public transport Metro rail services Taxis and serives of cab agregators Interstate, inter-district travel by individuals Educaitonand training institutes Hospitality services Cinena hall, malls gym nshopping complesex Religious places not more than 20 people allowed for funerals

10.20 am: Lockdown guidelines: Check BusinessToday.In tracker to check the latest number of state-wise coronavirus cases

INDIA CORONAVIRUS TRACKER: BusinessToday.In brings you a daily tracker as coronavirus cases continue to spread. Here is the state-wise data on total cases, fatalities and recoveries in one comprehensive graphic

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10.14 am: Lockdown in Mumbai: 5 fresh coronavirus cases in Dharavi

5 more people tested positive for COVID-19 infection in Dharavi on Wednesday, taking the total number of virus cases in Mumbai's slum to 60. The new cases include 3 males and 2 females all from the Mukund locality of Dharavi. Meanwhile, the contract tracing of high-risk contacts of these news patients is underway, the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation official said.

10.00 am: Rajasthan coronavirus news

Around 29 people tested positive for COVID-19 in Rajasthan on Wednesday including 15 in Jaipur, 7 in Jodhpur and 7 in Kota.

29 #Coronavirus positive cases have been reported in Rajasthan today so far - 15 in Jaipur, 7 in Jodhpur and 7 in Kota. Total number of positive cases in the state now stands at 1034: State Health Department pic.twitter.com/DZq2kkbqIu - ANI (@ANI) April 15, 2020

9.47 am: India lockdown: Home Ministry released guidelines for lockdown 2.0

The Home Ministry on Wednesday issued guidelines for lockdown 2.0 allowing certain sectors to function from April 20 in order to ease public hardship in the wake of COVID-19 outbreak. While, the air, rail and inter-state travel remains suspended, the government has allowed agricultural activties, health services and industries operating in rural area are also permitted. Meanwhile, limited consutrction actigtives are allowed. lomited activites sot be opened from April 20. The ministry added that the states shall not dilute Centre's guidelines.

Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) issues National Directives for #COVID19 management. Wearing of face cover is compulsory in all public places, workplaces. Spitting in public places shall be punishable with fine. pic.twitter.com/14Y7zq9vqp - ANI (@ANI) April 15, 2020

9.39 am: Lockdown 2.0 in Mumbai: Police registers FIR against 1,000 workers for violating lockdown rules

Mumbai Police has registered FIR against around 1,000 migrant labourers who gathered near Bandra railway station on Tuesday defying the coronavirus lockdown rules and causing public health scare.

Read more here: Mumbai migrant crisis: Police register FIR against 1,000 workers over lockdown violation

9.28 am: Coronavirus global news: China reports decline in new confirmed COVID-19 cases

China recorded fewer novel coronavirus cases on Tuesday with 46 fresh COVID-19 positive cases as against 89 a day earlier. Out of these new virus cases, 36 include travellers arriving in China from abroad, as compared to 86 a day earlier. Meanwhile, the 10 remaining new cases are locally contracted infections.

9.15 am: Lockdown 2.0 in Maharashtra: 10 staffers at a Mumbai hospital test COVID-19 positive

10 staffers at a Mumbai hospital tested positive for novel coronavirus on Tuesday and were all quarantined after 3 patients admitted to the hospital were confirmed for the infection. Total 35 staff members of the hospital have tested positive for COVID-19 till now.

9.09 am: Madhya Pradesh coronavirus news

121 fresh COVID-19 cases surfaced in Indore, Madhya Pradesh on Tuesday, taking the total tally in the city to 548.

9.00 am: Coronavirus updates: US reports over 2,000 deaths in 24 hours

The United States reported a record 2,228 deaths on Tuesday, a single-day record, to jump to the total toll of 28,200, according to a Reuters tally. The country also touched a second-milestone on Tuesday with around 6,00,000 reported COVID-19 cases. This is 3 times more than any other nation. The previous single-day record in the US was last set on Friday at 2,069.

8.45 am: Coronavirus cases in India: Confirmed COVID-19 cases past 11,000-mark: Health Ministry

The total number of confirmed coronavirus cases in India stand at 11,439 including active COVID-19 cases at 9,756, and death toll climbing to 377, according to latest data by the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare.

8.30 am: Lockdown in Maharashtra: Migrant-crisis hits India; chaos in Bandra, Surat

Following Prime Minister Narendra Modi's announcement on Tuesday to extend the lockdown by 19 days till May 3, a large number of migrant workers poured out on roads across states hoping to get back home. Thousands of migrant labourers came out in scores to bus stops and train stations wanting to get back to their hometowns and villages. Huge crowds gathered in Mumbai's Bandra, Thane's Mumbra, Hyderabad in Telangana and Gujarat's Surat and Ahmedabad as daily wager tried to leave for their homes. As per the sources, a social media rumour misled the migrant workers in Mumbai that trains were available to cress state borders. Meanwhile, others in Ahmedabad and Hyderabad had poured out, wanting to walk back home even if it meant covering a distance of around 1,500 kilometres on foot.

8.15 am: Coronavirus news: Donald Trump halts WHO funding

US President Donald Trump said on Tuesday night that he is stopping funding of the World Health organisation (WHO) criticising its response to coronavirus pandemic. He said that the organisation failed to do enough to stem the virus from spreading when it first surfaced in China. "With the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic, we have deep concerns whether America's generosity has been put to the best use possible," he said at the briefing adding that the "WHO failed in its basic duty and must be held accountable". He further said that he US would assess the WHO's actions to stop the coronavirus spread before taking any decision on resuming aid to it.

8.00 am: India lockdown: Check BusinessToday.In COVID-19 tracker for state-wise numbers

INDIA CORONAVIRUS TRACKER: BusinessToday.In brings you a daily tracker as coronavirus cases continue to spread. Here is the state-wise data on total cases, fatalities and recoveries in one comprehensive graphic

{mosimage}
CHICAGO/WINNIPEG, Manitoba  At a Wayne Farms chicken processing plant in Alabama, workers recently had to pay the company 10 cents a day to buy masks to protect themselves from the new coronavirus, according to a meat inspector.

In Colorado, nearly a third of the workers at a JBS USA beef plant stayed home amid safety concerns for the last two weeks as a 30-year employee of the facility died following complications from the virus.

And since an Olymel pork plant in Quebec shut on March 29, the number of workers who tested positive for the coronavirus quintupled to more than 50, according to their union. The facility and at least 10 others in North America have temporarily closed or reduced production in about the last two weeks because of the pandemic, disrupting food supply chains that have struggled to keep pace with surging demand at grocery stores.

According to more than a dozen interviews with U.S and Canadian plant workers, union leaders and industry analysts, a lack of protective equipment and the nature of elbow to elbow work required to debone chickens, chop beef and slice hams are highlighting risks for employees and limiting output as some forego the low-paying work. Companies that added protections, such as enhanced cleaning or spacing out workers, say the moves are further slowing meat production.

Meat Supply

Smithfield Foods, the worlds biggest pork processor, on Sunday said it is indefinitely shutting a pork plant that accounts for about 4% to 5% of U.S. production. It warned that plant shutdowns are pushing the United States perilously close to the edge in meat supplies for grocers.

Lockdowns that aim to stop the spread of the coronavirus have prevented farmers across the globe from delivering food products to consumers. Millions of laborers also cannot get to the fields for harvesting and planting, and there are too few truckers to keep goods moving.

The United States and Canada are among the worlds biggest shippers of beef and pork. Food production has continued as governments try to ensure adequate supplies, even as they close broad swathes of the economy.

The closures and increased absenteeism among workers have contributed to drops in the price of livestock, as farmers find fewer places for slaughter. Since March 25, nearby lean hog futures have plunged 35%, and live cattle prices shed 15%, straining the U.S. farm economy.

Meat Demand

North American meat demand has dropped some 30% in the past month as declining sales of restaurant meats like steaks and chicken wings outweighed a spike in retail demand for ground beef, said Christine McCracken, Rabobanks animal protein analyst.

Frozen meats in U.S. cold storage facilities remain plentiful, but supply could be whittled down as exports to protein-hungry China increase after a trade agreement removed obstacles for American meat purchases.

Theres a huge risk of additional plant closures, McCracken said.

The latest came on Monday when JBS said it will shutter its Greeley, Colorado, beef plant, which accounts for about 5% of the countrys production, until April 24.

JBS previously had to reduce production at the facility as about 800 to 1,000 workers a day stayed home since the end of March, said Kim Cordova, president of the local United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) union that represents employees. She added that the union knew of at least 50 cases and two deaths among employees as of Friday.

Plant worker Saul Sanchez, known affectionately as grandpa among some co-workers, tested positive for the virus and died on April 7 at 78 years old, according to his daughter, Beatriz Rangel. She said he only went from home to work before developing symptoms, including a low fever.

Im heartbroken because my dad was so loyal, Rangel said.

Brazilian owned JBS confirmed an employee with three decades of experience died from complications associated with COVID-19, without naming Sanchez. He was never symptomatic while at work and never worked in the facility while sick, according to the company.

JBS said it was working with federal and state governments to obtain tests for all plant employees.

Weld County, where the plant is located, had the fourth highest number of COVID-19 cases of any county in Colorado on Friday, according to the state. Health officials confirmed cases among JBS workers.

JBS said high absenteeism at the plant led the process of cutting carcasses into pieces of beef to fall behind slaughter rates. The company disputed the unions numbers on worker absences but did not provide its own. It took steps including buying masks and putting up plexiglass shields in lunch rooms to protect employees, said Cameron Bruett, spokesman for JBS USA.

Life in Jeopardy

At Wayne Farms chicken plant in Decatur, Alabama, some workers are upset the company recently made employees pay for masks, said Mona Darby, who inspects chicken breasts there and is a local leader of hundreds of poultry workers for the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union.

My life is in jeopardy because were working elbow to elbow, she said.

Wayne Farms, with annual sales exceeding $2 billion, is trying to obtain masks to distribute to employees, though supplies are limited, spokesman Frank Singleton said. He said he did not know of any instances where employees were charged for masks.

Workers at a Tyson Foods Inc. chicken plant in Shelbyville, Tennessee, bought their own masks when the facility ran out, said Kim Hickerson, who loads chicken on trucks there and is a union leader. Some are talking about quitting because they are scared of getting sick, he said.

I just put it in Gods hands, he said.

Tyson, the top U.S. meat producer, is working to find more personal protective equipment for employees, spokesman Worth Sparkman said. The company increased cleaning at facilities and sought to space out employees, which can both slow production, according to a statement.

Workers have lost their trust in Olymel after an outbreak of the coronavirus closed a plant in Yamachiche, Quebec, according to union spokeswoman Anouk Collet. They do not feel that the company took all the measures they could have taken to keep them safe, she said.

Company spokesman Richard Vigneault said the plant will reopen on Tuesday with new measures in place, such as separating panels, masks and visors.

Marc Perrone, international president of the UFCW union, said meat plant workers are increasingly weighing concerns about their own safety and their responsibility to produce food.

If we dont take care of the food supply, the American people are going to panic, he said.

(Reporting by Tom Polansek in Chicago and Rod Nickel in Winnipeg, Manitoba; Editing by Caroline Stauffer and Edward Tobin)

Topics COVID-19 USA Agribusiness Colorado
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Linkedin (Agence France-Presse) Taipei  Wed, April 15, 2020 14:06 636 fc6853813033f564188675f8bd209056 2 Entertainment Doze-Niu,Taiwan,director,sex-assault,#MeToo Free

Prominent Taiwanese director Doze Niu was sentenced to four years in prison on Tuesday for sexually assaulting a female crew member working on a film he was making.

Niu, 53, was convicted of assaulting the woman in November 2018 after guests left a gathering at his home, Taipei's district court said in a statement.

A friend accompanied the woman to hospital after the attack and also to file a police report.

The court said the woman -- identified only as "A" -- had clearly declined Niu's advances.

Niu also "took advantage of his position as a director to speak to the media, to make it look like he and A had feelings for each other", the court found, adding that the defendant had also shown a "lack of remorse".

Niu, known for Taiwanese blockbusters "Monga" and "Love", denied the allegations, claiming that he "made a mistake but didn't commit a crime".

He has yet to comment on the ruling, which he can appeal, and remains free for now.

When the allegations first surfaced Niu told reporters he hoped for a fair hearing but feared public sentiment had made up its mind.

"There is another public trial going on now and I have already been handed a death sentence," he said.

Taiwan has a vibrant film industry and hosts the annual Golden Horse Awards -- dubbed the Chinese-language Oscars.

The #MeToo movement sparked by assault and rape allegations against convicted Hollywood mogul Harvey Weinstein has led to similar abuse being exposed in industries across the world.

But the movement has so far had little impact in Taiwan.
During a 2017 interview with the similarly controversial podcast host Sam Harris, Murray said:

One of the things that struck me most were people who say, You dont understand. We dont particularly like Donald Trump. We are not defending his character, or anything like that. Hes our murder weapon. And I think that is a pretty short and accurate way of saying what function Trump served.

According to Murray, the deplorables comment by Hillary Clinton may have changed the history of the world. That comment,

all by itself, might have swung enough votes. It certainly was emblematic of the disdain with which the new upper class looks at mainstream America, and mainstream America notices this.

Using Murrays portrayal of Belmont, Mass. as the epitome of the liberal elite, and the Fishtown neighborhood of Philadelphia as representative of white working class communities, Niall Ferguson, a professor of history at Harvard, described Murrays assessment of Trump in an article written during the 2016 campaign:

The prevailing mood among Clinton loyalists is one of confidence that they will win. The bookies give her a 68 percent probability of being the next president. The mainstream media are also on board, spewing indignation after Trump called on the Russians to help find Clintons missing emails. And yet. For a year, commentators have made the mistake of thinking that things they find outrageous are also outrageous to a majority of voters. But top journalists live in Belmont. They just dont get what Fishtown folk find outrageous.

Nevertheless, there are some worrisome indicators for Trump.

After an initial rise in his favorability ratings during the last two weeks of March, positive feelings toward Trump have slowly eroded.

Nick Gourevitch, partner and managing director of the Democratic polling firm Global Strategies and a principal in the Democratic polling consortium Navigator Research, has been closely following trends since the coronavirus outbreak began. He emailed the following analysis:

Our first tracker was released March 23rd, which coincided with a period of time after Trump stopped downplaying the virus as much. At that time (March 23rd), we saw his overall approval at minus 2  47 percent approve to 49 percent disapprove  which was unusually high for him. Since then the generic job approval started to slip and is now minus 5.

Beyond the job ratings, Gourevitch continued,

Voters remain incredibly sour on his early response to the outbreak with 62 percent saying he did not take it seriously enough to start and 28 percent saying he got it about right.

In addition, according to Gourevitch,

A majority of voters ascribe negative traits to him as well, including 60 percent who say he is unprepared, 59 percent self-absorbed, and 55 percent chaotic.

One of the crucial questions going into the 2020 election is whether unemployment and widespread financial distress will lift or depress turnout, which groups will cast votes and which will not.

The competition between Republicans and Democrats to place blame on the opposition for the pandemic has already become a central element of the presidential campaign.

The Trump campaign, as Jonathan Swan at Axios writes, has made it clear that it plans to Hit Biden as soft on China. A Trump digital ad released earlier this month claims that Biden stands up for China while China cripples America.
New Delhi: The Noida District Magistrate on Sunday (April 5) directed all schools and colleges in the city to not demand fees from the parents during the lockdown period. A statement released by the DM's Office further added that even if parents fail to submit fees for their wards during the lockdown period, it won't effect student's enrollement in online classes.

The direction from the District Magistrate will bring a relief to thousands of people who are facing a financial crisis brought due to Coronavirus outbreak in the country.

Several people had in recent times taken to social media and had requested the Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister and Noida District Magistrate to exempt parents paying the fees for the first quarters.

Earlier, the Noida DM had asked landlords in the district to not compel tenants for paying their monthly rentals and urged them not to ask them to vacate if they fail to make payment. The DM further ordered landlords to defer rent for a month.

India is under a 21-day lockdown period after PM Modi announced it on March 24 asking people to restrain for going out of their homes and maintain social distancing as it was very important to contain the coronavirus from spreading further.

India currently has over 3374 COVID-19 cases including 77 deaths while 267 patients have recovered.
Source: Xinhua| 2020-04-15 19:19:19|Editor: huaxia

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Pandemic watch: U.S. COVID-19 cases top 600,000, and IMF projects "worst recession" since Great Depression. (Xinhua/Tan Yixiao, Hu Yousong)

"We might well be at a point in time when the number of new cases in the United States will be peaking, and beginning to decline in the country overall."



WASHINGTON, April 15 (Xinhua) -- U.S. COVID-19 cases rose above 600,000 with over 25,000 deaths as of Tuesday as the debate over reopening the economy has heated up.

The country saw 602,989 infections with 25,575 deaths by 6:50 p.m. (2250 GMT), according to the Center for Systems Science and Engineering (CSSE) at Johns Hopkins University.

The hardest-hit state, New York, saw 202,630 infections and a death toll of 10,834, followed by New Jersey with 68,824 infections and 2,805 deaths. Other states with over 20,000 infections include Massachusetts, Michigan, Pennsylvania, California, Illinois and Louisiana.

Worldwide, the virus has infected more than 1.98 million people and killed at least 125,000.

People wearing face masks wait in line to do shopping at a store during the coronavirus pandemic in the Brooklyn borough of New York, the United States, on April 14, 2020. (Photo by Michael Nagle/Xinhua)

PEAK ARRIVING?

"We might well be at a point in time when the number of new cases in the United States will be peaking, and beginning to decline in the country overall," said Robert Schooley, a professor of medicine at the Division of Infectious Diseases and Global Public Health at the University of California, San Diego.

"Having said that, there are still a number of cities and states in which cases are still rising quickly and will likely do so for several more weeks," Schooley told Xinhua. "These include places like Texas, Florida and Georgia whose governors were slow in introducing epidemic control measures."

Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said that there are "indications" that some of the metrics used to gauge the crisis "are starting to level off" in some areas.

According to the COVID-19 model projection done by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington, the nation's deaths per day peaked on April 13 at 2,150, while COVID-19 patients per day peaked on April 10 with 56,831 beds needed on that single day.

"The data shows that the confirmed COVID-19 cases in the country doubled every two to three days in late March. And now the doubling time extended to every 10 days. It reveals that the growth rate started to decline, and the social distancing measures have achieved good results," Zhang Zuofeng, a professor of epidemiology, who is also the associate dean for research at the School of Public Health at the University of California, Los Angeles, told Xinhua.

Considering hospitalization rates, intensive care unit treatment rates and death rates as the "most reliable indicators" in the course of the epidemic in a given location, Schooley said that these numbers seem to be peaking in hot spots like New York, and hopefully they now start dropping rapidly.

President Donald Trump announced in late March that the national social distancing guidelines aimed at slowing the spread of COVID-19 will be extended to April 30, changing his plan to reopen the country by Easter, which fell on April 12.

A woman crosses an empty street in Washington D.C., the United States, April 13, 2020. (Xinhua/Liu Jie)

REOPENING ECONOMY?

However, pressure is mounting for the White House to reopen the U.S. economy as a staggering 16.8 million Americans have filed initial jobless claims in a three-week period ending April 4th.

During Tuesday's briefing on the epidemic in the White House, Trump said that he intended to talk with all 50 governors this week, probably on Thursday, to discuss a national plan for reopening the country.

Trump said that he might try to authorize reopening some states before May 1, within the federally recommended time horizon for social distancing and other mitigation measures.

Groups of big East Coast and West Coast states announced on Monday they would decide by regional consensus about how to approach their strategies for normalcy given how closely they are connected by metropolitan areas, transit and interdependent economies.

Fauci, the country's leading expert on infectious disease, is among the experts who have warned that the United States is not ready to restart its economy.

"We have to have something in place that is efficient and that we can rely on, and we're not there yet," Fauci told the media.

"We will have to continue the distancing policies in places where the epidemic may be peaking as we prepare for new surges in which distancing was late. We are, unfortunately, far from out of danger," Schooley said.

Zhang said that the ideal condition for reopening business in a state is that there are no new confirmed cases for 14 consecutive days. However, no state can meet the criterion by May 1, he added.

It is unlikely to have full reopening of business nationwide by May 1, but it is feasible to first reopen some states which were not heavily hit and some industries such as medical supplies and protective equipment, Zhang said.

A man crosses a road in the rain near the International Monetary Fund (IMF) Headquarters in Washington D.C., the United States, April 13, 2020. (Xinhua/Liu Jie)

WORST RECESSION

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) said on Tuesday the global economy is on track to contract "sharply" by 3 percent in 2020 as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, the "worst recession" since the Great Depression in the 1930s.

"This is a downgrade of 6.3 percentage points from January 2020, a major revision over a very short period," IMF Chief Economist Gita Gopinath said at a virtual press conference on the latest World Economic Outlook report released Tuesday.

The report showed that advanced economies will contract significantly by 6.1 percent in 2020, and emerging markets and developing economies, which typically have growth levels well above advanced economies, will shrink by 1.0 percent.

The U.S. economy is expected to contract by 5.9 percent this year, and the euro area will see a decline of 7.5 percent, said the report. Japan's economic output will shrink by 5.2 percent, and Britain's will fall by 6.5 percent.

"The report emphasizes the unprecedented scale of the crisis," Jeffrey Sachs, a renowned professor of economics at Columbia University and a senior UN advisor, told Xinhua via email.

"The IMF predicts a kind of V-shaped recovery, down sharply in 2020, up not quite so sharply in 2021," Sachs said. "But we might not get such a quick bounce-back because the virus will continue to disrupt public health and therefore the world economy for years to come."

The IMF reiterated that it's actively deploying 1-trillion-U.S.-dollar lending capacity to support vulnerable countries, including through rapid-disbursing emergency financing and debt service relief to the poorest member countries, calling on official bilateral creditors to do the same.

Photo taken on Jan. 30, 2020 shows the headquarters of the World Health Organization (WHO) in Geneva, Switzerland. (Xinhua/Chen Junxia)

HALT FUNDING?

As COVID-19 continues to take a toll globally, the Trump administration is halting the nation's funding to the World Health Organization (WHO), a move experts have warned against.

A review is being conducted to assess the WHO's role in addressing the spread of the coronavirus, Trump said at Tuesday's briefing.

The remarks came as Trump is aggressively defending his own handling of the outbreak in the country after his administration has been scrutinized for downplaying the threat from the coronavirus early on and faulted for delays in testing.

The tone also differed from one of his tweets on Feb. 24, several days before the United States reported its first death from COVID-19.

"The Coronavirus is very much under control in the USA," Trump wrote at that time. "We are in contact with everyone and all relevant countries. CDC & World Health have been working hard and very smart."

Lawrence Gostin, director of the O'Neill Institute for National and Global Health Law at Georgetown University, called cutting funding to the WHO during a global health crisis "disgraceful," warning that it would cause death and even blow back on the United States.

"How shortsighted when global coop needed more now than ever," Gostin said in a series of tweets on Tuesday.

In remarks delivered last week, WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said, "We must quarantine politicizing this virus at national and global levels."

"We have to work together, and we have no time to waste," he stressed.

(Article by Xinhua Reporters Yang Shilong, Sun Ding, Gao Pan, Xiong Maoling, Tan Jingjing, Xu Yuan, Chang Yuan and Liu Pinran) 
Greater availability of African genomic data could lead to medical breakthroughs for the continent's 1.2 billion people.

That's the driving proposition of 54gene  a U.S. and Nigeria-based startup  that collects African genetic code for use in health research and drug development.

The company has closed a $15 million Series A round, in part, to address a deficiency in these processes.

"As of the time we launched, less then 3% of all genome wide association studies globally had been conducted in Africa. There was a lack of data coming from Africans... and the diaspora," 54gene founder and CEO Dr. Abasi Ene-Obong said.

"We are trying to address the gap that currently exists in precision medicine for people of the African continent," he told TechCrunch on a call from Lagos.

New York-based Adjuvant Capital led the round 54gene will now deploy toward that goal. Founded in 2019 by Ene-Obong, the company is headquartered in Washington, DC with a biobank facility in Lagos that holds capacity for 60,000 samples. The startup has an engineering team and a proprietary platform to catalog and analyze the genetic data.

Image Credits: 54gene

54gene also has over 300 researchers, clinicians and geneticists across the continent and a research lab in Nigeria.

With the $15 million  which brings total VC to $19.5 million  the startup will expand its biobank capabilities to 200,000 samples, with a longer term goal to manage up to 500,000. 54gene is also boosting its lab capabilities. "With this funding we are about to expand that lab so we can process actual genetic data for tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of people," said Ene-Obong.

54gene plans to hire across the organization, from seeking a new VP of finance to adding additional scientists.

The company recruits research participants in Africa through studies at venues, such as hospitals, to take genetic samples via swab or blood tests. "Participants have to give us their informed consent before any testing," explained Ene-Obong.

Story continues

Adjuvant Capital Managing Partner Jenny Yip confirmed the VC firm's lead on the $15 million investment. In addition to funds from Adjuvant  which itself is backed by The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and Novartis  54gene is a 2019 Y Combinator alum and received follow on funding from the Silicon Valley accelerator.

The company has a longer time horizon to income, but the primary path to revenues is paid co-development of drugs and medicine working with pharmaceutical companies. "When the drug is in the market...and approved medicine, [54gene] and the pharma company will share revenues," said Ene-Obong.

When it comes to life-saving treatments in Africa, big pharma has faced criticism going back decades. The primary point of friction: the industry's insistence on strict IP enforcement and high-margin prices for HIV/AIDS related treatments on the continent. This has led to legal battles between pharma companies and the government of South Africa over that country allowing production of cheaper generic versions of those drugs.

On the value of Africa's pharmaceutical industry, McKinsey and Company research estimates it at roughly $14 billion, and grossly under its potential  given an addressable market of some percentage of 1.2 billion people for new drugs.

For its part, 54gene's CEO Abasi Ene-Obong is clear the company is a for-profit entity, but aims to balance money-making motives (and those of pharma partners) with advancing health in Africa.

The startup plans to exert leverage over the pricing process through its practice of co-developing drugs.

Dr Abasi Ene Obong, Image Credits: 54gene

"When you are a service provider to big pharma, you can't really make such a request. But when you are a development partner you co-own a significant stake of what's being developed and have more of a say," said Ene-Obong.

The startup is unable to disclose any current big pharma partners or which health issues in Africa it's aiming genetic research toward tackling.

"I can say we will prioritize diseases that affect Africans disproportionately," Ene-Obong said.

One obvious ailment in need of more effective prevention and treatment is malaria  with 92% of the world's 219 million cases occurring in Africa, according to WHO data.

54gene has also turned its capabilities to COVID-19, which has spiked in Africa since mid-March. The company has re-positioned itself to do testing for the virus in Nigeria's public health facilities and plans to offer coronavirus screening in its Lagos lab soon.

"We hope that when given approval, we can do more than 3,000 tests a day," said Ene-Obong
A government watchdog group has alleged airlines that donated to Donald Trumps election were the first in line to receive billions in aid after the president ousted officials tasked with overseeing the congressional relief funds.

Accountable.US, a progressive oversight nonprofit, launched a new website this week outlined where some of the $500bn allocated for distressed big businesses in the $2.2tn Coronavirus Aid, Relief and Economic Security (CARES) Act was being funnelled as the federal government began issuing payments.

The oversight group, which says it is committed to exposing corruption and making sure public officials are advancing policies in the public interest, pointed to companies like American Airlines and Delta  which contributed $264,366 and $195,859 to the presidents campaign, respectively  as having received first dibs on the government bailout money. Its analysis comes just after Mr Trump upended an oversight panel meant to regulate how the historic $2trn legislation was doled out amid the coronavirus pandemic.

American Airlines was set to receive a $5.8bn bailout, while Delta would get $5.4bn in crucial aid, according to the analysis.

While many big businesses typically contribute to leading candidates in state and national elections, the companies receiving initial funds also enjoy strong connections to the Trump administration, the group alleged: Daniel Elwell, who currently serves as a deputy administration for the Federal Aviation Administration, was previously a lobbyist for a firm representing American Airlines, while Steve Dickson, an administrator for the FAA, worked at Delta for 27 years before joining the administration.

Other airlines that donated to the presidents 2016 White House bid enjoyed early access to congressional relief funds, the watchdog group alleged, including Southwest Airlines, which donated over $125,000 to the presidents campaign and received a $3.2bn bailout, as well as JetBlue Airways, which donated $42,085 and received more than $935.8m from the funds.

Democrats have meanwhile condemned the president for rejecting oversight of the congressional relief package and replacing officials leading independent oversight agencies throughout the government, including the recent removal of ex-acting Pentagon watchdog Glenn Fine.

Dwrena Allen, a spokesperson for the Pentagon inspector generals office, confirmed Mr Fine was no longer on the Pandemic Response Accountability Committee in a statement to Politico.

The removal showed Mr Trump was attempting to replace honest and independent public servants because they are willing to speak truth to power and because he is so clearly afraid of strong oversight, said Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi also released a statement saying: The sudden removal and replacement of Acting Inspector General Fine is part of a disturbing pattern of retaliation by the president against independent overseers fulfilling their statutory and patriotic duties to conduct oversight on behalf of the American people.

Even Republican Chuck Grassley issued a tweet calling on the president to view inspector generals as helpers to hold bureaucracy accountable.

Other components of the congressional relief package have stirred controversy in recent days, including a hidden Republican loophole allowing some 43,000 millionaires to enjoy an average windfall of $1.7m each, while the average American only receives $1,200 in stimulus payments.

In a statement to Salon, Kyle Herrig, president of Accountable.US Action, called on the the federal government to be held accountable for how the relief funds are disbursed.

He said: For the millions of Americans facing painful financial choices right now, the very least the Trump administration can do is spend their tax dollars responsibly and effectively.
As the pandemic forces doctors to turn to online solutions, many healthcare providers say they now see their advantages.

When Dr Mythili Krishnamurthy, an obstetrician/gynaecologist in the Indian state of Tamil Nadu, got her patients message on WhatsApp about breast pain and a fever, she was confined to her home, like the rest of India, which had been on lockdown since March 25 due to the coronavirus pandemic. But the lockdown did not stop her from managing the patients care.

Doctors, like Krishnamurthy, are doing house calls again  but now, they are in the form of telemedicine visits. Telemedicine refers to remote care, including real-time video and app-based visits. Because of the public health crisis, a profession wary of accepting telemedicine has turned to it overnight.

Media touts telemedicines value as a way to triage suspected COVID-19 patients, but telemedicine is not just a useful temporary stopgap, healthcare professionals say. It allows doctors to see patients with a range of problems and can improve patient care. Once doctors and patients use it, it is unlikely they will stop.

A doctor speaks with a patient during an online consultation session at a telemedicine centre in Moscow [Alexander Nemenov/AFP]

Poor technological infrastructure and low overall computer literacy in Tiruchirappalli, Dr Krishanmurthys city, made her look for a simple platform to conduct telemedicine. She chose WhatsApp, a mobile app not specifically intended for healthcare.

Our health system is low-resource. Few people have insurance coverage. All payments are out of pocket. I could not pass the cost of an electronic medical record or video conferencing to the patient, she told Al Jazeera. At her hospital, Sri Dhanvanthri Nursing Home, all records are still on paper.

Text communication promoted timely, secure and affordable care.

Initially, calls were infrequent, but now patients almost all have smartphones so they can talk to me and it saves a lot of time and travel. If they travel 60 or 70 kilometres (47-43 miles) in the night to see me, it makes sense.

But she acknowledged using WhatsApp and other technologies do come with disadvantages: Texting requires a basic literacy and doctors and patients can also miss nonverbal cues such as facial or physical expressions when they text.

Using WhatsApp requires an individual rapport between doctor and patient, said Dr Krishnamurthy.

Until recently, official telemedicine guidelines in India were vague. But on the first day of the lockdown on March 25, the Medical Council of India introduced telemedicine practice guidelines, making WhatsApp an approved platform.

New believers

Although telemedicine has been available in many countries for years, with some places even setting up telemedicine centres, it did not have wide acceptance in many places. Many patients, especially in rural areas, were not aware it was an option and many patients, physicians, and healthcare systems resisted accepting it as legitimate patient care.

Barriers to implementing telemedicine have included cost, liability, security, lack of technological infrastructure, and poor computer literacy among patients and doctors.

Despite these barriers, telemedicine has its advantages, experts say, as it increases access to primary and specialist medical care. During the COVID-19 pandemic, access to healthcare has decreased because non-urgent in-person visits are discouraged.

Pakistani doctor Nadia Rasheed discusses telemedicine on skype at an online treatment centre run by the government of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa in the remote Behali area in Mansehra district [File: Aamir Qureshi/AFP]

Aside from improving access and decreasing patients financial and travel burden, telemedicine can also improve care compared with in-person visits.

I hadnt realised how much our exam rooms give us a flat view of our patients. Now its like being surprised by a pop-up book when I turn on the screen, said Dr Su Wang, a medical director at Saint Barnabas Medical Center, in New Jersey.

Dr Wang is a recent convert to telemedicine. Because of the COVID-19 pandemic, her clinic switched to mostly online visits out of necessity. Previously, she assumed telemedicine was subpar care. She scoffed at video physical exams. But after just one week of telemedicine visits, she is a believer. Real-time video visits gave her a more intimate, and ultimately more comprehensive view of her patients, she said.

Its like Im going into their world for the first time. This is what we miss when doctors stopped doing home visits, she told Al Jazeera.

She recalled a man she had treated for years. He had always been quiet and shuffled uncomfortably in her office. His family suspected a movement disorder. But on a video visit, the same patient walked easily to his own kitchen to make tea.

Telemedicine also made medication management easier as Dr Wang could peer directly into his medicine cabinet.

Hes got a pile of meds, and its a little disorganised. And I dont know how he knows which meds hes taking, she said, adding that she thought to herself that she hoped he was not taking the medicine she had discontinued.

Okay this was from two years ago, you must dispose of that, she told him.

A years-long change in two weeks

Even if three in four Americans are ordered to stay home, doing so should not be at the cost of worsening existing health conditions. I dont want to sit on uncontrolled hypertension, Dr Wang said.

Doctors, including her, assumed seniors would not be technologically savvy enough to use telemedicine. This assumption has not held up, she said of her own patients.

We just saw four people over the age of 70. And somehow they figured this out. So we should not assume that seniors dont know how to use their phones.

In the US, among the biggest barriers to implementing telemedicine have been concerns about reimbursement. Only 10 states required equal payment for telemedicine and in-person visits. The technology required training time and could be expensive. More than other countries, legal issues such as privacy, liability, licensing and security have emerged as additional concerns.

University of Miami dermatologist Dr Anne Burdick checks the computer screen in her Miami office, as she discusses telemedicine [File: J Pat Carter/AP Photo]

In March, the USs major governmental healthcare programmes, Medicare and Medicaid, waived many geographical and billing limitations for telemedicine. Private insurers quickly followed.

We had not really pushed it beforehand, because it was just really not on our mind. If it hadnt been for this, there would have been so many approvals required from our institution, Dr Wang said.

The pandemic made a years-long process happen in a few weeks.

We need to decrease foot traffic. We need to protect the patients, and we need to protect our healthcare workers as much as we can, she said. With the implementation of telemedicine, Dr Wangs primary care clinic is humming along  virtually.

She does not see medicine ever going back to where it was before the pandemic.

I think well end up having better care if we have a mix of virtual and in-person visits. Patients still understand the in-person visit is better, but maybe we dont need it every single time.
The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) expects to continue cooperating with the World Health Organization (WHO) to mitigate the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic, despite President Donald Trump's decision to cut off funding for the UN agency, CDC Director Robert Redfield said in an interview on Wednesday

WASHINGTON (UrduPoint News / Sputnik - 15th April, 2020) The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) expects to continue cooperating with the World Health Organization (WHO) to mitigate the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic, despite President Donald Trump's decision to cut off funding for the UN agency, CDC Director Robert Redfield said in an interview on Wednesday.

"WHO has been a long-term and still is a great partner for us," Redfield told CBS. "For me and for CDC and the public health arena, we're continuing to work side by side with WHO to do the best that we can to limit the spread of disease and to protect the American people."

However, Redfield declined to answer a reporter's question on the potential impact of Trump's decision in the middle of a global pandemic, saying: "Those decisions that are going to be made above related to some of the geopolitical issues I have to leave to those that really have that expertise.

"

On Tuesday, Trump ordered the move against the WHO, charging that the UN agency accepted China's claims in January that the virus was not contagious and delayed declaring an emergency until the end of the month.

Critics have charged China with allowing the COVID-19 pandemic to get out of control by hiding the outbreak and under-reporting data on those infected.

Trump announced a suspension period of 60 to 90 days pending completion of an investigation of WHO and Chinese actions during the early days of the pandemic.
[April 15, 2020] Torstar to be exclusive Canadian partner for Madwire, LLC

Sales and marketing software aims to help small- and medium-size businesses TORONTO, April 15, 2020 /CNW/ - Torstar Corporation announced today it has signed an agreement with Madwire, LLC, a Colorado-based software company, to be the exclusive partner in Canada of its innovative sales and marketing software for small- and medium-size businesses. Through its proprietary technology Marketing 360, Madwire helps small and medium business owners to manage and grow their businesses with a suite of powerful and easy-to-use technologies, all in a single platform known as Marketing 360. Torstar plans to offer Madwire's innovative software to its roster of approximately 30,000 small- and medium-sized clients. This agreement is the latest in a growing series of transformation initiatives at Torstar targeted at improving and launching digital products for consumers and clients, supported by investments in new digital platforms, new digital partnerships and first-party data capabilities. "Madwire is a leading technology and marketing services provider for small and medium businesses, providing integrated digital services to thousands of global clients," said Pary Bel, Torstar's Senior Vice President, Commercial Products and Sales Operations.



Madwire, which was founded in 2009, has been recognized seven years in a row as one of the fastest-growing companies in the U.S. by Inc. 500 and been ranked the #1 Best Place to Work by Glassdoor in the U.S. JB Kellogg, Madwire's Co-Founder and Co-CEO, said Madwire is "excited to continue our partnership with Torstar after a successful pilot. Our award-winning software proved to be powerful and drive great results in the Canadian market. This partnership will further enable us to help businesses grow."

Under the agreement, Torstar will have exclusive access to Madwire's proprietary Marketing 360 software and Madwire's marketing capabilities across Canada. The partnership will allow Torstar to expand the suite of products that it offers to small- and medium-size businesses. Functionality ranges from "do-it-yourself" to a fully managed service supported by a team of marketing professionals with deep industry expertise. Madwire's innovative solution includes online payments and invoicing; website development and management; lead collection and email marketing; customer relationship management; reputation management; content marketing and search engine optimization; social media management; and multi-channel advertising. A number of Torstar's clients in the Greater Toronto Area who participated in a recent pilot project offered in collaboration with Madwire experienced strong results, with consumer response metrics up during the test. For more information, visit marketing360.ca. About Torstar Corporation:

Torstar Corporation is a broadly-based media company listed on the Toronto Stock Exchange (TS.B). Its businesses include the Toronto Star, Canada's largest daily newspaper, six regional daily newspapers in Ontario including The Hamilton Spectator, and more than 70 weekly community newspapers in Ontario; flyer distribution services and digital properties including thstar.com (with local editions in Toronto, Vancouver, Calgary, Edmonton, Winnipeg, Ottawa and Halifax), wheels.ca, toronto.com, save.ca, a number of regional online sites and eyeReturn Marketing. It also holds a majority interest in VerticalScope, a North American vertically-focused digital media company. About Madwire, LLC:

Madwire, LLC, is a technology company that provides business management and marketing software and services for SMBs and franchises. Madwire's brands  Marketing 360, Websites 360, SpaceCraft and Top Rated Local  enable SMBs to do everything from building a website to accepting payments, managing leads and customers, appointments, online reviews, social media, business listings, content marketing, multi-channel digital advertising campaigns and more. Madwire was founded in 2009 with the mission of enriching communities by helping small businesses grow. Madwire is headquartered in Fort Collins, Colorado, with an additional office in Austin, Texas. SOURCE Torstar Corporation

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"Gregory was a great and conspicuous lamp, illuminating the church of God."

Basil the Great

Parents today sometimes worry that their children will go off to college and return as converts to some strange, new religion. That's exactly what happened 1,700 years ago to Gregory of Pontus (named Theodore at his birth), only the strange, new religion was Christianity.

Born into an affluent pagan family in Neocaesarea (in modern Turkey), Gregory studied law and the traditional Greek and Roman classics. Then he and his brother were sent for further study to Caesarea in Palestine, where they enrolled in the school of the great Christian thinker Origen. Gregory came to learn pagan philosophy; his teacher converted him (and his brother, Athenodorus) to Christianity.

When Gregory returned home, he found a Christian community of 17 people waiting for him. Soon afterward, Gregory was elected bishop. Although his training was in speculative theology, Gregory's pastoral work was concerned with practical applications of the faith. His skills were such that some of his flock soon attributed miracles to himhence his nickname "The Wonder Worker."

One legend tells how two brothers quarreled over possession of a lake and asked Gregory to arbitrate between them; Gregory is said to have divided the lake into two bodies of water, giving one to each brother. In another legend, he moved an entire mountain.

Timeline 155 Polycarp martyred 172 Montanist movement begins 196 Tertullian begins writing 210 Gregory Thaumaturgus born 260 Gregory Thaumaturgus dies 303 "Great Persecution" begins under Diocletian

"Gregory was a great and conspicuous lamp, illuminating the church of God," wrote Basil. "He possessed, from the co-operation of the Spirit, a formidable power against the demons, that he turned the course of rivers by giving them orders in the name of Christ; and that his predictions of the future made him the equal of other prophets."

By both his friends and his enemies, Basil concludes, Gregory was regarded "as another Moses."

Legends or no, Gregory's leadership must have been great, because during his ministry, most of the city of Pontus converted to Christianity.

The help of Mary

Doctrinal conflicts required him to participate in several church councils that condemned false teaching. Though much more of a practical pastor than a theological writer, Gregory's writings are strong defenses of Trinitarian doctrine. According to Eastern tradition, his principal work, The Exposition of Faith, was given to him in a vision of John the Evangelist with the intercession of the Virgin Marythe first recorded Marian apparition.

But despite his pastoral care of the community, many deserted during the persecution ordered by Emperor Decius in 250. Gregory himself fled into the surrounding mountains with many from his flock. In another of the legends, his enemies pursued Gregory and his deacon to one of their hiding places, but when they arrived, the Christians had been turned into trees.

When the persecution ceased, Gregory returned to Neocaesarea, only to have his flock further decimated by a plague. Then Goths sacked his beloved home city. By his death, his congregation is said to have dwindled down to 17the same number as when he became bishop.
South Koreans who are 19 years of age (legal age for voting) and above are to cast their ballots today, Wednesday, April 14, 2020, starting at 6 am, in the country's parliamentary elections despite the ongoing coronavirus pandemic.

The Korean government decided to temporarily suspend the quarantine rules today in order to permit persons undergoing self-quarantine to also exercise their voting rights. Every single voter wearing mouth-nose covered masks would have their temperatures checked at the entrance of the poll station. Every electorate would also disinfect their hands with sanitizers and put on plastic gloves provided by the government to all electorates before casting ballots. To strictly ensure social distancing rules, voters would to stand at least 1 meter apart from others; such logistics Ghanas Electoral Commission (EC) ought to prepare and make available ahead of the December 7, 2020, general elections in Ghana.

In South Korea voting kicks off at 6 a.m. until 6 p.m. at all 14,330 polling stations across the nation, according to the National Election Commission (NEC) of Korea. The number of eligible voters in South Korea is also around 44 million out of the 51,259,914 million population of the country.

Also, did you know, that, South Korea holds the quadrennial parliamentary elections to fill their 300-seat unicameral National Assembly with 253 directly elected seats and 47 proportional representation slots? Yes, it is!

The country has gone ahead with the elections amid the Coronavirus pandemic because of its proactively-effective mass testing strategy in handling the outbreak since February, 2020, the massive and rapid testing and quarantine efforts glaringly slowed the spread of COVID-19. This has paved way for their citizens to freely exercise their sacred democratic rights even at a time that the rest of the world struggles in lockdown attempt to contain the situation.

It is very evidential, that, Koreans paid the price for it; the pain of discipline in abiding by the initial lockdown directives from the government, thus yielding todays positive outcomes.

It is my fervent hope that my fellow Ghanaian citizens take President Akuffo-Addos COVID-19 directives more seriously by staying home as declared in Ghana, for there will come a time (probably July ending) when the impact would be felt positively or negatively depending on how you the citizens abide by the declaration efforts of our President. Indeed, He is the right President at the right time but, how you adhere to his directives can porously undermine his globally touted leadership credentials in this fight. We ought to be more patriotic by exhibiting matured citizenship today than ever.

From the plethora above, the, December 7, 2020, general elections in Ghana could be held like its happening today in Korea only if we listen and adhere to all the declared measures while making logistical provisions for the citizens at the polls.

I again would appeal to our Ghana President, H.E. Nana Akuffo-Addo, and the government apparatus to get closer to Korea and tap into the reasons for the over 70% recovery cases in the country thus far; worthy of emulation with South Korea continuing to see a low amount of new COVID-19 infections.

South Korea now has a total of 10,564 cases with 7,368 recoveries as I pen down this article, Wednesday, Aril 15, 2020, for my beloved Ghana.

Fellow Ghanaians and friends of Ghana, lets keep social distancing, avoid unnecessary movements, wash hands with soap regularly, stay home, reach out for help through the appropriate designated emergency call lines, support one another and keep praying.

Elephant Regards from the land of the morning calm, South Korea. Yes, Ghana, we can also do it.

signed

Zinleri Richard

(Branch Chairman, NPPSK)

[email protected]

2020.04.15

Cc:

[email protected]

About the author

He is a budding thought advocate, youth leader, political activist, writer, businessman and a former Human Resources Manager from Ghana, with the Local Government Service. Mr. Zinleri, is a native of Boo-Lawra in the upper West region of Ghana, born and raised in Mamprobi-Dansoman, Accra, a proud old vandal, holds a B.A. in Political Science from the University of Ghana, M.A. in International Development Cooperation from the Yeungnam University in Korea and currently a Foreign trade liaison officer with Semyeong Trading Plaza and the NPP Branch Chairman in South Korea
Egypt's Banque Misr is closing its Badrashin branch for one week starting yesterday, Tuesday, till Monday, after four of the branchs employees tested positive for the coronavirus.

In a statement issued on Wednesday, the bank affirmed its keenness to take preventative measures that would maintain the health of the bank's clients and employees.

"The closure of the branch comes within the framework of taking all preventative and precautionary measures that would preserve the health of all parties," the statement said.

During the closure, Banque Misr urged the clients of its Badrashin branch to instead deal with the nearest Manyal Shiha and Um El-Masryeen branches.

Banque Misr has 18,000 employees serving more than 10 million clients in Egypt.

The bank said that all the branchs employees "were notified of the obligation to perform quarantine procedures at home, until the necessary medical examinations are taken to check on their safety and health before allowing them to return to work."

The bank has also contacted the clients who dealt with the infected employees to inform them that they should remain in home isolation for a period of two weeks.

In addition to closing the branch following the detection of the cases, the bank said it is continuously following up on the health conditions of its employees.

"We have also begun the sterilisation and disinfection of the entire branch and its surrounding area," Banque Misr said.

As of early Wednesday, Egypt has registered 2,350 coronavirus cases and 178 deaths.

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Top Ukrainian Security Official Detained For Alleged Collaboration With Russia's FSB

April 14, 2020

The Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) says one of its top officials has been detained on suspicion of collaborating with Russia's Federal Security Service (FSB).

In an April 14 statement, the SBU said General Valeriy Shaytanov is suspected of high treason and terrorism and that it had gathered evidence, including audio and video recordings, to corroborate its case.

According to the SBU, Shaytanov started working for the FSB in 2014 and since had committed several crimes, including allegedly planning to murder Adam Osmayev, the leader of Chechen volunteers who fought on the Ukrainian side against Russia-backed separatists in Ukraine's east.

Ukrainian-Russian relations have been strained since 2014 when Russia seized Ukraine's Crimea region after sending in troops and staging a referendum deemed illegitimate by at least 100 countries.

In April that year, Russia threw its support behind armed separatists in eastern Ukraine, where some 13,200 people have been killed in the ongoing conflict.

Source: https://www.rferl.org/a/top-ukrainian-security- official-detained-for-alleged-collaboration- with-russia-s-fsb/30554391.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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A woman undergoing chemotherapy was sent a van full of crumpets by Warburtons after the company discovered it was one of the only things she could stomach.

The patient, who is self-isolating due to the coronavirus lockdown, told her neighbours that Warburtons' gluten free crumpets and wraps were amongst the few things she was able to eat during treatment.

Neighbours had been adding these items to her shopping deliveries wherever possible, but the products were frequently out of stock.

So one neighbour contacted executive director Ross Warburton on Twitter, and he then made sure to help out.

A Warburton's delivery van / PA

Arrangements were made for a van to be sent from the company's Enfield depot to the woman's home in north London, complete with a crate full of goodies.

Speaking to the Manchester Evening News the firm said: "It's heart-warming to see communities coming together to help each other so it really was the least we could do to make life a little easier for her."

The company was founded by Thomas and Ellen Warburton in Bolton, in 1876, and has since passed down through five generations to become a household name across the UK.

Unsurprisingly, Warburtons was praised for such kindness and generosity.

One person said: "Something in my eye. Ow. Warburtons good on ya xx."

Another added: "Its just so nice to read. Lots of people looking out for one another. Im sure Warburtons were glad to do it.

"Theres so little many of us can do right now when a situation presents itself its great to be able to take it."

Someone else commented: "That's fantastic. Made my day! I'm coeliac, know how important getting gluten-free bread etc is. You're right - online shopping has most gluten-free lines sold out, I'm fine, but it's tough for some. Warburtons definitely are doing the utmost to get their products to shelves."

In a statement on its website, Warburtons said: "Supporting our communities is more important now than perhaps it has ever been.
The British High Commission in Nigeria has made arrangements for charter flights to convey British citizens stranded in the country back home.

PREMIUM TIMES gathered that not less than 4,000 British citizens residing in Nigeria had earlier shown interest in being evacuated to their country.

The high commission, last week, stated that efforts are ongoing to ensure that the Britons are successfully evacuated from Nigeria.

Though Nigeria has a total confirmed coronavirus cases of 373, that of UK has soared to over 98,476, data from worldometer showed.

The British High Commissioner to Nigeria, Catriona Laing, disclosed the evacuation plans in a statement sent to PREMIUM TIMES by the British High Commission in Nigeria.

Im really pleased to tell you that we have now made arrangements with British Airways to run charter flights for us from Nigeria. The first flights will depart this Saturday the 18th of April, and the flight departure times are 15:10 from Lagos and 15:35 from Abuja. Of course the exact times could be subject to change.

Ms Laings statement was contained in a statement sent to PREMIUM TIMES by the high commission.

Ms Laing said the arrangement was made with a company called Central Travel Management who have set up a dedicated webpage for Nigeria and a 24/7 hotline to reserve and pay for tickets.

The link to those webpages are:

Here for Abuja: https://etm.eventsair.com/nigeriafco/fco-abujacharter729/Site/Register

and

Here for Lagos: https://etm.eventsair.com/nigeriafco/fco-lagos718-charter/Site/Register.

According to Ms Laing, the price for these flights will be just under 500.

To be eligible for these flights you need to be a British citizen normally resident in the UK and we will be prioritising vulnerable people. When you book, you will be asked for your passport details and a UK address and we will be doing eligibility checks.

I should also say that making a booking does not automatically guarantee you a seat on the first flight, but if you are eligible you will be transferred to a subsequent flight.

With regards to the questions on getting to the airport, it is very important that you print and take your ticket with you, and if you are stopped at checkpoints, show that to security personnel and make it clear that you are going to the airport to take a repatriation flight to the UK.

Those of you who are successful in making bookings, we will email you with all the details you will need including the time you will need to be at the airport. British travellers should visit Return to the UK page on the FCOs Travel Advice for Nigeria pages for further information, the official said.

The planned evacuation of Britons occurs about a week after the U.S. evacuated about 1,000 Americans from Nigeria.
Panaji, April 15 : 44 US nationals stranded in Goa due to the lockdown were flown back to the US via Mumbai in a relief flight that took off from the state's Dabvolim international airport, here on Wednesday.

According to the Airport Authority of India (Goa) tweet, the 23rd relief flight took off from the Goa airport on Wednesday evening to Mumbai, from where it is scheduled to leave for the US.

"23rd relief flight from Goa airport took off a few moments back carrying 44 passengers to Mumbai for onward journey to the USA," the tweet said.

In all 4,201 adults and 38 infants have been sent to their countries, mostly Russia, the UK, Germany, France and the US, since the lockdown was announced in the country.
Elizabeth Holmes

Jeff Chiu/AP

The federal judge presiding over the criminal trial of Elizabeth Holmes, ex-CEO of Theranos, has ruled that proceedings will be delayed until October.

Due to the coronavirus outbreak, the judge ruled that it was not "realistic" to expect the trial to start as scheduled in July without putting participants in the case at risk of exposure.

Federal prosecutors intend to pursue adding further charges of fraud and conspiracy to commit fraud to Holmes' indictment after some charges were dismissed in February.

Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

The trial for Elizabeth Holmes, the founder of failed blood-testing startup Theranos facing federal fraud charges, has been delayed until October due to the coronavirus outbreak.

The federal judge presiding over the case, Edward Davila, said during a hearing Wednesday that the original trial start date set for July was no longer "realistic." The judge ruled that amid the coronavirus pandemic, it's unclear when large gatherings, such as the Theranos case, would be able to resume by the summer without putting people at risk of spreading or contracting COVID-19, the coronavirus disease.

Ahead of Wednesday's hearing, both defense lawyers and prosecutors had proposed postponing the start date for the trial to avoid health risks associated with a large courtroom gathering of trial participants, grand jury members, as well as the crowds of reporters and onlookers that have gathered for Holmes' previous court appearances.

"We're obviously in uncharted territory here, both in our daily lives and our current occupations," Lance Wade, one of Holmes' defense attorneys, said during the status hearing via telephone. "All future trial participants in this court and other courts are going to have to wrestle with this new post-pandemic world."

Despite the trial being pushed to October, Holmes' defense team has maintained that it should be delayed even further to early 2021. After some of the federal charges against Holmes were thrown out in February, prosecutors said in a recent court filing they intended to pursue further indictments against Holmes on wire fraud and conspiracy to defraud investors. Since the grand jury is not in session due to the pandemic, the court has yet to decide whether these charges can be added to the trial.

Story continues

Considering more than 20 million documents have already been presented in the case, Holmes' defense team argued they needed considerably more time to prepare their case in light of the new allegations.

This is just the latest way the pandemic has affected the proceedings of the criminal case against Holmes, who could face up to 20 years in prison if convicted. Earlier in April, the lawyers defending Holmes asked the case be deemed "essential," which would allow the them to defy multiple lockdown orders to continue to travel, meet face-to-face, and interview witnesses in preparation. However, the judge said he was "taken aback" by the filing, and has yet to grant their request.

Additionally, regular status updates related to the case have had to take place over the telephone, as millions around the world  including California, where the trial is taking place and Holmes lives  comply with shelter-in-place guidelines. The federal court in San Jose, California, where Holmes' trial is supposed to take place, is closed until at least May 1.

Once the CEO of multi-billion dollar blood-testing company Theranos, Holmes now is facing multiple federal charges of fraud stemming from allegations that she schemed to defraud the startup's investors, its doctors, and its patients while knowing that its test results were inaccurate and unreliable. At her peak, Holmes was lauded as "the next Steve Jobs" and was worth $4.5 billion.

The Department of Justice charged Holmes and Sunny Balwani, Theranos' former president, in June 2018, and both have pleaded not guilty. Although the pair  who hid that they were romantically involved for much of the time they headed Theranos  were charged together, the judge in the case ruled in March the two would stand trial separately, with Holmes going first.

The next status hearing is scheduled for July, where the judge will reevaluate based on the status of the coronavirus outbreak.

Read the original article on Business Insider
We feel that institutions must be prepared for scenarios with increased financial pressure on families. This means moving beyond the immediate communication and yield efforts into discussions of sustainable financial aid and pricing strategies that will assist families in the difficult time ahead.

ACT | NRCCUA, an educational data science and research organization, announced today the publication of the Eduventures Report on the Effects of COVID-19 on High School Students & College Choice. College-bound high school seniors across the country are experiencing an unprecedented disruption in their lives. They feel disconnected from friends, family, and educators. Theyve lost the important rituals of senior year. One of these central rites of passage, their choice of and transition to college, has been thrown into turmoil.

This study explores perspectives of high school seniors on how the pandemic will influence college choice and enrollment plans, and how institutions can help them make the best decision in lieu of in-person efforts. The research also reveals that reactions to the COVID-19 pandemic involve a complex interplay of regional infection severity and socio-political affiliations. This report provides both a geographic and demographic mapping of how reactions are shaping college plans across key segments of the U.S. college-bound student population. Some key findings include:



1 in 4 students believe that the pandemic may cause them to change their college choice.

About half of students are worried that the pandemic may delay their enrollment.

About a third of students have already experienced a loss of family income.

Students are three times more concerned about losing out on key high school experiences than they are about having to change college plans.

Student whose enrollment decisions may be most impacted are more likely to be first generation, non-white, and/or reside in a county that leaned democratic in the 2016 presidential election.

The research is based on an Eduventures survey of over 7,100 high school seniors nationally conducted in March and April. It is designed as a complement to the Eduventures Survey of Admitted Students, which examines how students make enrollment decisions and helps institutions improve yield.

The Eduventures research team will offer enrollment teams recommendations on how they can move forward with these findings in a webinar on Wednesday, April 15 at 2pm ET entitled Effects of COVID-19 on High School Students and College Choice. The webinar will explore the following seven data-driven recommendations for institutions:



1. Concern is Evident, Be a Calming Voice for Families. Students are worried, but not necessarily panicking. The communication style that institutions adopt is critical; offer a steady and calming source of support and information for students.

2. Put Students First. Acknowledge the loss that students are feeling, but do so within context. Colleges should make a concerted effort not to place their needs above those of students.

3. Stay the Course on Message. Students worry about paying for college, or delaying enrollment, but changing their choice is not in the cards for many.

4. Be Virtual Far Beyond the Visit. The virtual campus visit is not top-of-mind content for many students. Institutions should prioritize the virtual opportunities students care about most.

5. Strike the Right Tone  Communicate with Your Communities in Appropriate Ways. Communications strategies should consider how the students, families, and communities they serve might be reacting to COVID-19 based on regional infection severity and socio-political affiliations.

6. Supercharge Your Melt Strategies  Students Who Wouldnt Normally Melt Will. The risk of melt is from delayed enrollment more so than currently changing choice; will choice change in the future, though?

7. Develop Financial Aid Strategies for Students who have Experienced Economic Loss. Students who have already experienced job loss have a high expectation of delaying their college enrollment.

According to Kim Reid, Principal Analyst for Eduventures Research and primary author of this study,

The greatest certainty in these uncertain times is that families are experiencing and will continue to experience financial instability. We may see some families rebound from initial losses, but we will see other families endure financial loss as layoffs move deeper into the economy. Reid added, We feel that institutions must be prepared for scenarios with increased financial pressure on families. This means moving beyond the immediate communication and yield efforts into discussions of sustainable financial aid and pricing strategies that will assist families in the difficult time ahead.

Eduventures will next launch its annual Admitted Student Research in June. This research will gather further insight into the impact of COVID-19 on student enrollment decisions. Comparisons to prior year data will reveal changes in student behavior. Additional special topic questions will explore how students have reacted to the pressure on their decision.

The Eduventures Report on the Effects of COVID-19 on High School Students & College Choice will be available for download following the webinar at http://www.encoura.org.

About ACT | NRCCUA

The National Research Center for College and University Admissions (NRCCUA), a wholly owned subsidiary of ACT, is an educational data science and research organization serving over 2,000 member institutions comprised of public and private colleges and universities across the nation. Since 1972, NRCCUA has been a leading provider of data, technology, and programs serving students, high school educators, colleges and universities from its offices in Lees Summit, MO, Boston, MA, New York, NY, and Austin, TX. These solutions represent the link between students making important life decisions and those providing the resources and information they need to succeed in their post-secondary educations and careers. With the launch of Encoura Data Lab, the company now combines data science, advanced analytics, Eduventures research, predictive modeling and omnichannel enrollment services in one platform to enable institutions to make real-time strategic and operational decisions to meet their unique enrollment goals and create the highest probability of student success. For more information, visit https://encoura.org.

Members of the media who would like to speak to the author of this report or obtain a copy of the report can contact Ellen Slaby at eslaby@eduventures.com.
EDWARDSVILLE  From no-visitor policies at hospitals to having many of their own members becoming infected, the COVID-19 pandemic has challenged healthcare professionals across the nation like nothing else.

The pandemic has been bewildering and frightening for the general public as it looks for answers to its questions, and finding the right answers hasnt been easy even for healthcare professionals.

But companies like HSHS Medical Group have been doing their part to flatten the curve of the pandemic while keeping their patients and employees as safe as possible.

This has been flying at us so quickly and everywhere you look on the internet, there is another story about COVID-19, said Dr. Loren Hughes, president of HSHS Medical Group. As a reader, you never know what is real, what is exaggerated, what is fear-mongering, or what is minimizing.

HSHS Medical Group is the physicians division of Hospital Sisters Health System (HSHS) in Illinois. HSHS is comprised of 15 hospitals in Illinois and Wisconsin, including St. Elizabeths Hospital in OFallon and St. Josephs Hospital in Highland, and HSHS Medical Group, an integrated physician network including offices in Troy at 7342 Illinois Route 162 and in Maryville at 2401 S. Center St.

For the most part, HSHS hospitals and HSHS Medical Group have been following the recommendations of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in setting regulations for its hospitals and offices during the pandemic.

We like to have one single source of truth and we use the CDC guidelines because the WHO (World Health Organization) tends to be perceived as a little more political, said Hughes, an Edwardsville resident who formerly had a medical practice in Collinsville.

The IDPH (Illinois Department of Public Health) follows what the CDC recommends and adds a clarification here and there and modifies it based on the needs of the communities they serve. We also work with the county health departments, who have a lot of valuable information for us.

With the state of Illinois under Gov. J.B. Pritzkers stay-at-home executive order, which currently runs through April 30, residents are dealing with social distancing and wearing masks.

Hospitals throughout the state, meanwhile, have instituted a no-visitors policy in an effort to curb the spread of the coronavirus.

We were not limiting things too much when this first started because all of our screening questions were travel-related, asking patients if they had been to China, Iran, Italy or a few other places, Hughes said. Once it started spreading more into the community, thats when it really changed. Thats when restrictions started coming in across the board.

There are a few exceptions to the no-visitors rule, but even those exceptions typically allow only one visitor at a time.

We knew there were those moments in life where you would need someone with the patient, like the birth of a child, Hughes said. We had to at least let one person go in and that needs to be the father, or maybe a mother or a close friend.

If somebody is having a significant surgery, we would allow a visitor to come in. Also, if someone is dying and would be a hospice type of patient, we also make an exception. We havent had much pushback on those restrictions because the community is concerned about keeping themselves and other people safe.

Just like people working from home, video conferences have taken the place of in-person meetings in many businesses. Online technology is also helping hospitals keep patients in touch with their loved ones while the no-visitors rule is in place.

Through FaceTime, Zoom and other applications, hospitals are setting up video connections in the rooms for patients who are cognizant enough to operate them or who can use them with help from a nurse.

Were in the process of setting up iPads and other kinds of video capabilities so family members can sit at home and actually talk to their loved one in the hospital, Hughes said.

For COVID-19 patients who are in danger of dying or who have severe symptoms, it can be especially difficult for family members not to be able to visit their loved ones face-to-face.

Again, though, HSHS Medical Group and other healthcare companies across the nation are using technology to try to make the best of a bad situation.

Thats another instance where video comes in because you can have a nurse hold the iPad and the patient can talk if they are not intubated, and this allows a conversation with others, Hughes said. Caregivers can stand in the doorway or look through the window and can communicate through an iPad held up with the patient. This saves valuable PPE for simple interactions by avoiding a trip into the room.

The patients can also give a doctor an assessment through the iPad about how they are breathing and how they feel.

HSHS Medical Group facilities have been taking similar measures to help reduce the spread of COVID-19.

But the longer the stay-at-home order is extended, the tougher it may be to keep some current restrictions in place.

In the primary care setting, such as our offices, were delaying a lot of the routine things, Hughes said.

Were starting to see things that were not urgent becoming a little more urgent as time goes by. I think were going to see a change in attitude (from patients waiting for a diagnosis) pretty soon.

Keeping its own employees safe has been one of the biggest challenges for HSHS Medical Group and other healthcare companies.

According to recent studies, 20 percent of all affected individuals have been in healthcare, with the added risk of those people infecting their fellow employees and their patients.

There is a funnel leading right to us, Hughes said. We follow all of the CDC guidelines with all of the PPE (personal protective equipment), but those rules changed as (COVID-19) changed from a travel-related problem into a community-based problem.

Now were working with universal masking in all of our offices and if youre involved directly in patient care, you have to wear medical-grade masks. If youre in a non-patient role, behind a desk or somewhere in the back on the phone, you can wear a cloth mask.

To have as many medical professionals on the front line as possible, healthcare companies have had to find a balance between keeping those people working while following strict safety procedures.

It came out at first that you would have a 14-day quarantine if you had exposure to someone who tested positive, but the rules have changed for essential workers, especially essential healthcare workers, Hughes said. Thats a big impact if you have a key person in your office such as a doctor taken out of action for two weeks.

CDC and IDPH have changed the guidelines so now if the exposed critical worker is not symptomatic, they can work with a mask but must actively monitor their temperature twice a day and if it hits 100.0 degrees, that becomes suspicious (for COVID-19) and theyre taken out of the office. If anyone working in an office starts to develop symptoms like cough or sore throat, chills or aches  any of the flu-type symptoms  they are taken out of the office. Our teams have held up very well.

HSHS Medical Group is calling its patients in advance and asking them to come in with a cloth mask. If they dont have a mask, HSHS healthcare professionals will provide one for them.

If the doctors have a patient with respiratory systems, the patient will immediately get a surgical-quality or medical-grade mask and will be referred to one of the HSHS Medical Group respiratory hubs, which includes HSHS Medical Group Family Medicine in Troy (618-343-1722).
The official also explained why a ban on crowds had been introduced.

Ukraine's Deputy Health Minister and Chief Medical Officer Viktor Liashko has said the authorities convinced top clerics it would be advisable to close or restrict parishioners' access to temples to flatten the curve of coronavirus spread.

"And what did this Sunday show us? Most of them listened to this. There were some violations, albeit unsystematic. Only by force is it possible to stop people from gathering outside churches though. Had we applied force, there would've been clashes," Liashko said in an interview with the Novoe Vremya online publication.

Liashko said as the country's chief medical officer, "he banned and closed everything where there is an opportunity for crowds."

Responding to a journalist's remark that, according to the latest opinion polls, many Ukrainians would support him in this decision, Liashko said: "But many would hate even more."

The official also urged Ukrainians to celebrate Easter at home and to refuse trips to relatives.

Read alsoCoronavirus hits headquarters of Russia-backed church in Kyiv  media

"Now the main thing is to isolate yourself. I urge everyone to celebrate Easter at home. Don't go visiting your parents. Even if centuries-old traditions are ruined. At this particular time, you need to do this. (...) There is an opportunity to take out a paska [Easter bread] and the priest will consecrate it outside. The main thing is to approach this issue rationally," Liashko added.

He also explained that the ban on mass gatherings had been introduced because infectious diseases transmitted by airborne droplets are most likely to strike people in crowds.

"Therefore, all of our quarantine measures are aimed at severing this transmission. We have established certain rules for visiting essential facilities: supermarkets and pharmacies. It's a one person per 10 sq. m. rule," Liashko said.
HOUSTON, April 15, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- EOG Resources, Inc. (EOG) today announced that EOG's Board of Directors has changed the company's 2020 annual meeting of stockholders (Annual Meeting) from in-person to virtual-only.

The Annual Meeting will be held on Thursday, April 30, 2020, at 2:00 p.m. Central time (3:00 p.m. Eastern time) via live webcast. Stockholders may access the live webcast of the Annual Meeting at www.virtualshareholdermeeting.com/EOG2020. Stockholders will not be able to attend the Annual Meeting in person.

Stockholders as of the close of business on March 6, 2020, the record date for the Annual Meeting, will be entitled to participate and vote at the Annual Meeting by entering the 16-digit control number found on their proxy card, voting instruction form or notice. Stockholders will also be able to submit questions during the Annual Meeting via the meeting website.

Stockholders are encouraged to vote and submit their proxies in advance of the Annual Meeting by one of the methods described in the proxy materials. If a stockholder has already voted, no additional action is required.

Virtual-Only 2020 Annual Stockholders Meeting

Thursday, April 30, 2020, 2:00 p.m. Central time (3:00 p.m. Eastern time)

The Annual Meeting can be accessed at www.virtualshareholdermeeting.com/EOG2020.

Technical assistance will be available for those attending the meeting.

Proxy Statement and Annual Report

The proxy statement for the Annual Meeting and EOG's 2019 annual report are available at www.proxyvote.com. These materials are also available on EOG's website at http://investors.eogresources.com/Investors. For additional information regarding accessing and participating in the virtual meeting, please refer to EOG's supplemental proxy materials filed with the United States Securities and Exchange Commission on April 15, 2020.

About EOG

EOG Resources, Inc. (NYSE: EOG) is one of the largest crude oil and natural gas exploration and production companies in the United States with proved reserves in the United States, Trinidad, and China. To learn more visit www.eogresources.com.

Investor Contacts

David Streit 713-571-4902

Neel Panchal 713-571-4884

Media and Investor Contact

Kimberly Ehmer 713-571-4676

SOURCE EOG Resources, Inc.

Related Links

http://www.eogresources.com


In this file image, US military police control a cars entering the US - airbase in Ramstein, 05 September 2007, (Torsten Silz/DDP/AFP via Getty Images)

German Police Arrest ISIS Members Planning Attack on US Military Base

Four men suspected of plotting a terrorist attack on U.S. military facilities in Europe have been arrested by German authorities in dawn raids.

A fifth member of the terrorist cell was already in detention.

According to a statement issued by the federal prosecutor, the group had obtained guns and ammunition and had ordered parts for a homemade bomb on the internet.

All five are Tajikistan nationals who had sworn allegiance to ISIS in early 2019, and had high-ranking contacts within the terrorist organization in Syria and Afghanistan who were giving them instructions.

Authorities havent released their full names.

The group initially planned to travel to Tajikistan to join the armed jihad against the government. This plan was abandoned, however, and instead, they turned their attention to U.S. military bases in Germany.

According to the prosecutors, they had already carried out a reconnaissance mission on a U.S. Air Force base. They also had been surveilling a potential murder target, who, from their perspective, had been critical of Islam.

In this file image, Riot police guard the area around the Hotel Bayerischer Hof, the 2020 Munich Security Conference (MSC) on Feb. 14, 2020, in Munich, Germany. (Johannes Simon/Getty Images)

One of the members, named only as Ravsan B. by German authorities, had provided instructions to make improvised explosive devices. The group already had some of the components, which they had ordered online.

Two of the suspects are also accused of traveling to Albania to carry out a $40,000 assassination that fell through.

The four suspected were arrested in the state of North Rhine-Westphalia in the west of the country, where two U.S. Air Force bases are located.

Germany is host to the largest proportion of U.S. troops in Europe, with around 38,000 in total at various bases across the country, according to Deutsche Welt, including around 9,600 members of the Air Force at the two airbases.

In total, the United States has around 74,000 troops in Europe, according to the Congressional Research Service.

After reaching a peak in Europe a few years ago, ISIS attacks have since eased, although they still continue, and plots continue to be uncovered.

In Germany, most recently, police arrested three men in November 2019, accusing them of planning a bomb attack in the name of ISIS.

The worst ISIS attack on German soil took place in December 2016, when a man claiming allegiance to the group drove a truck through a busy Christmas market in Berlin, killing 12 people.

What would have been the first biological weapons attack by the group was foiled by German police in 2018, when a suspected Tunisian ISIS member was arrested in possession of the deadly poison ricin and bomb-making material.

The deadliest attack in Europe claimed by ISIS took place in Paris on Nov. 13, 2015, when coordinated suicide bombs and several mass shootings killed 130 people.
Editor's Note: On October 28, 2020, Miles Taylor, a former official in the Department of Homeland Security, identified himself as the author of an anonymous 2018 New York Times column and subsequent book, A Warning, attacking President Trump as unfit for office. Taylor's claim of authorship was confirmed by the Times and his publisher, Twelve Books. This disclosure conflicts with the reporting presented here and in two related articles on the findings of an internal White House investigation that concluded "Anonymous" was another administration official.

By Paul Sperry, RealClearInvestigations

April 15, 2020

Ever since a senior official in the Trump administration penned an anonymous 2018 New York Times column attacking President Trump as unfit for office, Washington has been engrossed in a high-stakes whodunit. After an exhaustive investigation, the White House believes its cracked the case, identifying Trump's turncoat as his former deputy national security adviser, Victoria Coates, according to people familiar with the internal probe.

The Sept. 5, 2018 op-ed in the New York Times by an unnamed writer now identified by White House sources as Victoria Coates, top photo. Once No. 2 in the National Security Council, the ally of GOP Sen. Ted Cruz has been kept on for political reasons and awaits posting to Saudi Arabia -- far from Trump.

Rather than fire Coates, the White House has quietly transferred her to the Department of Energy, where she awaits special assignment in Saudi Arabia -- far from the president.

Trump effectively demoted Coates just four months after promoting her last fall to the No. 2 spot on his National Security Council. The move was made amid a whisper campaign, started in January, that identified Coates as Anonymous, the person who wrote the Times Op-Ed and a subsequent book, A Warning, claiming to be part of a cabal of fellow Republicans" resisting Trump and his policies from inside the administration.

The Washington press corps has for the most part dismissed the whispers as unsubstantiated rumors circulated on the Internet.

But the sources said the identification of Coates was based on circumstantial evidence generated from a months-long White House investigation led by sleuths within the NSC. Top White House adviser Peter Navarro, who works with the NSC on trade and other issues, also was heavily involved in the probe of Coates.

She declined to discuss the matter on the record with RealClearInvestigations and has retained an attorney, friends say, although several colleagues have rushed to her defense, insisting the White House has the wrong person. But a source involved in the NSC probe who asked not to be identified said there was little doubt. Its her, the source said of Coates. Thats why she was shown the door.

Published last year, "A Warning" dared the president to try to unmask the author. White House sleuths took up the dare, and found the 260-page book offered a wealth of clues.

The multiple sources interviewed by RealClearInvestigations either participated in the investigation of Coates or have direct knowledge of it. They spoke only on condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive matter. They say their evidence exposing Coates includes the following:

Computer textual analyses revealing strikingly similar language, turns of phrase and historical references by both Coates and Anonymous.

Firsthand accounts by Anonymous of events including during the presidential transition  witnessed only by Coates and a small number of others, the latter of whom were ruled out as suspects.

Hawkish foreign policy views held by Anonymous, many of which have been rejected by Trump.

The fact that Coates and Anonymous share a high-profile Washington literary agent with an author roster of disaffected ex-Trump officials.

Coates' long history of writing anonymously, and

Personal details revealed by Anonymous that are consistent with Coates biography.

For political reasons, the White House decided against officially unmasking Coates and firing her, at least not before the Nov. 3 election, the sources said. Publicly outing her would merely create an unwelcome distraction ahead of the election. Coates is a well-connected conservative, who has a staunch ally in Republican Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas. White House political operatives want to avoid the divisions that marked the 2016 race, and are focused on unifying the party ahead of this summer's GOP presidential convention.

Former Deputy National Security Adviser K.T. McFarland: The suggestion that Victoria is Anonymous is preposterous.

Illustrating the sensitivity of the internecine GOP affair is the insistence of some ex-Trump White House officials that Coates is wrongly accused. The suggestion that Victoria is Anonymous is preposterous, said K.T. McFarland, Trumps first deputy national security adviser, who helped recruit Coates to the NSC and then supervised her for much of 2017. She said Coates was a committed member of the Trump team.

McFarland added that Coates denied being the author not only to her, but also to White House security officials, who include FBI agents.

Victoria herself has denied being Anonymous' during her routine security clearance review, she told RCI. Anyone familiar with the security clearance process knows that it would have been a criminal offense, punishable by jail time, for her to lie about this.

Although A Warning opens with a preemptive denial that it discloses any classified information, the Justice Department has been looking into a potential violation of a federal regulation requiring officials with access to classified information to get prior approval before publishing books about their roles in the government. Coates signed a federal non-disclosure agreement, or NDA, when she joined the White House in 2017.

The probe has exposed a less prominent faction secretly undermining Trump inside the White House, sources say: not just Democratic holdovers from the Obama White House, but disloyal Never-Trump Republicans, who, as Anonymous complained in the book, dont believe the president can be trusted to uphold "conservative principles. The author admitted conspiring with several other like-minded officials to obstruct Trump and his policies and directives from the inside.

White House investigators say they are looking into at least four other White House staffers whom they suspect were part of the resistance allegedly with Coates. The behind-the-scenes story of how the White House fixed on Coates as the anti-Trump mole is told here for the first time.

The Hunt for Anonymous

In September 2018, the New York Times agreed to hide the identity of a senior administration official bashing Trump in an opinion piece headlined I Am Part of the Resistance Inside the Trump Administration. The author claimed to be one of several like-minded officials thwarting" the presidents agenda and even plotting to try to remove him from office.

Incensed, Trump declared the screed an act of treason and ordered an investigation to unmask the gutless official. The White House drew up a short list of suspects, but the search soon fizzled out for lack of leads. The mystery went unsolved for more than a year, as the White House continued to spring leaks compromising the president, mostly from within the NSC, including some that led to his impeachment.

White House trade adviser Peter Navarro: Heavily involved in the hunt for "Anonymous."

The major break came in November 2019, when the same anonymous official doubled down on anti-Trump grievances with the release of A Warning. The best-selling expose leaked details of the presidents private conversations and trashed him as "unjust and a "nasty man, as well as a misogynist and "grifter in chief.

He should be fired, wrote the disgruntled insider in the books final chapter. The Trump administration is an unmitigated catastrophe.

The book dared the president to try to unmask the nameless author, boasting the text had been carefully written to prevent any inadvertent disclosure. But to White House sleuths, the 260-page book offered a wealth of clues, and the authors challenge only intensified the desire to track down and unmask the rogue aide.

At first, the 51-year-old Coates was not an obvious suspect because she was not known to clash with the president and seemed to go along with his policies, even though she was a longtime and loyal operative of Cruz, once a leading critic of Trump. Over the course of the months-long investigation, more than 30 other suspects were considered and abandoned before the focus settled on Coates. Unlike other widely rumored suspects who eventually were ruled out -- including former NSC official Fiona Hill and former Pentagon speechwriter Guy Snodgrass -- Coates checked virtually all the boxes.

They were bitter rivals sparring for the Republican nomination in 2016, but Sen. Ted Cruz managed a rapprochement with the President that helped place one of his allies, Victoria Coates, in the White House. For a while anyway.

After a careful deconstruction of details in the book, the White House investigators found that Coatess profile, as well as her persona as a highly opinionated moralist, matched up with that of the clandestine Trump official.

Anonymous is a woman, the investigators deduced, noting the authors disapproving remarks alleging a Trump habit of addressing accomplished female professionals as sweetie and honey. The officials area of responsibility was, like Coates, national security and foreign policy -- with expertise on Syria, Iraq, Iran, Israel and other Mideast hot spots. The books author claims to have been present, as Coates was, at many White House meetings, including with the president. The author shows an insider's understanding of the workings of the NSC and, most telling, started work during Trumps presidential transition, as Coates did.

That gave her away, another source involved in the investigation said. She was in those early meetings and briefings. That put her high on the suspect list.

By January, Coates was the prime suspect.

Authorship Recognition Tools

The sources said that to crack the identity of the rogue Trump official, investigators ran previously published works authored by Coates through forensic author identification programs, and they matched the prose style of Anonymous.

Investigators were able to profile the author of the op-ed and book by sentence structure, grammar, punctuation and syntax. They then compared that writing profile to Coates'. The stylistic traits synced up, sources said.

Linguistic deja vu: Both "Anonymous" and Victoria Coates, in her book above, wrote extensively about the rise and fall of Athens.

Researchers have found that authorship recognition tools can identify an author with a high level of accuracy when there are several thousand words of available content to analyze, as was the case with the sample size the White House analyzed. Coates own body of written work spans two decades and includes several books and dozens of columns, as well as policy papers, speeches and a doctoral thesis.

In short, the authors share the same punchy but at times breezy writing style, with pithy sentences punctuating a fluid narrative.

Whats more, the same manners of expression and phrases, such as like-minded and clear-eyed, kept turning up in the writings of both Coates and the secret Trump betrayer. The two also shared distinct vocabulary -- such as the uncommon sextant -- another linguistic fingerprint that pointed to the same authorship.

Deepening suspicions, both Anonymous and Coates boast of being students of history, and tend to cite the same historical periods. With a Ph.D.in art history, Coates has written extensively about the rise and fall of Athens. She did so in her book Davids Sling: A History of Democracy in Ten Works of Art, and a 2012 column for the conservative blog RedState.com about how the U.S. has claimed classical Athens as an ideological ancestor."

Anonymous spends no fewer than five pages of the book lecturing readers about the fall of Athens, calling it a cautionary tale of how self-government could go wrong and descend into mob rule, even in America. Like Athens, we also have a Cleon in our midst, a foul-mouthed populist politician who uses rhetoric as a loaded gun, the author writes, comparing Trump to the boorish Athenian representative.

Anonymous and Coates are obsessed with the same political figure from ancient Rome: Cicero. They also share an affection for Alexis de Tocqueville. As in Davids Sling, the anonymous author invokes the French historian, writing that Americans have a duty as citizens to get involved to preserve democracy. They can start, Anonymous says, by firing Donald Trump this November.

Other figures whom both write or talk about admiringly: British-Austrian free market economist F.A. Hayek, the late British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, former President Ronald Reagan, and Sen. Mitt Romney of Utah. In 2012, FEC records reveal, Coates personally donated at least $1,500 to Romneys campaign for president. Those who know Mitt believed he would have been a capable leader, Anonymous wrote on page 114.

First Principles

Coates previously wrote speeches for Cruz about the importance of reestablishing the first principles advanced by Americas founders. Anonymous also cares deeply about these first principles. In the Times piece, the author complained, Anyone who works with [Trump] knows he is not moored to any discernible first principles that guide his decision making. Anonymous hits that concept in the book, warning against straying from first principles while citing the Founding Fathers."

In addition, whoever wrote A Warning evidently worked with Trumps son-in-law Jared Kushner in the White House. Kushner is the presidents point man on the Middle East. Coates was promoted in 2017 to work directly with Kushner on Israel and has met with him to help hammer out a Middle East peace plan.

Ideologically, Coates and Anonymous are cut from the same cloth. Both are committed to stopping Iran from developing nuclear weapons in order to protect Israel. Both champion free trade and oppose Trumps America First brand of protectionism and isolationism, as Coates made plain during the Cruz campaign.

Like Coates, Anonymous supported the Iraq War and still defends George W. Bush and his administration for acting on what proved to be flawed intelligence on weapons of mass destruction. The 2003 invasion was justified because, Anonymous writes, it was at least based on real information collected at the time, backed by intelligence community analysts, and accepted by bipartisan majorities in Congress.

Victoria Coates was a protege of former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, above, and worked on a Rumsfeld book project for years with his ex-chief of staff , who would later broker book deals for both her and "Anonymous." AP Photo/Grand Rapids Press, Emily Zoladz

A protege of Bush administration Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Coates embedded with the U.S. military to cover the Iraq War for RedState.com, a blog run by Erick Erickson, an early critic of Trump but who has since modulated his opposition. She filed positive reports from Baghdad, while knocking down criticism that the war was a debacle.

NSC investigators put stock in the fact that Coates has a history of concealing her identity in her writings. For years she blogged anonymously for RedState.com. The site eventually revealed that Coates was the blogger writing under the pseudonym Academic Elephant. In February 2018, several months before the anonymous Times opinion piece appeared, a Reddit user posted an unusual question using the same Academic Elephant pseudonym Coates employed. Could I be sued by the company I work for if I write an anonymous opinion piece for the local newspaper, if everything I say is true? the poster asked, adding that Im reasonably certain that Ill have support from my coworkers." Anonymous expressed a similar concern in the opening pages of A Warning, noting that Trump has a habit of suing critics to intimidate and silence them. Fear of such a lawsuit is one of the reasons offered by the author for choosing to remain anonymous.

Anonymous also used Reddit to promote the book, hosting a Q&A on Nov. 26, 2019.

Further, both share an affinity for Philadelphia. In more than one passage in her book, Anonymous makes a point to remind readers that Philadelphia was the birthplace of American liberty. When shes not in Washington, Coates lives with her family in a renovated Victorian mansion in a tony neighborhood of Philadelphia called Chestnut Hill. In her blog bio, moreover, she proudly described herself as a Philadelphian. Her family has deep roots in the area dating back to 1709. Coates is descended from Andrew Curtin, Pennsylvanias governor during the Civil War.

Theres another Pennsylvania connection: On page 230, Anonymous quotes from a lesser-known Founding Father -- John Dickinson -- to further support her preoccupation with following first principles. Dickinson is well-known within Coates home state as the author of Letters From a Farmer in Pennsylvania, and is cited and quoted by her family-tied Commonwealth Foundation of Pennsylvania, a libertarian think tank recently chaired by her husband and where Coates herself once served as a senior fellow.



Anonymous quotes another figure whos not exactly a household name: American historian Bernard Bailyn. But Coates would know him from her days earning her masters in art history from Williams College  Bailyns alma mater. His writings are required reading there for early American history courses.

Anonymous and Coates also share a passion for Thomas Paine, whose pamphlet Common Sense was required reading at their prep school. Anonymous waxed nostalgically about a war veteran teaching her about Paine. Coates has counted among her mentors a war veteran who taught history at her Pennsylvania boarding school.

Keith Urbahn: The Javelin book agent who helped put together deals for both Coates and "Anonymous." Because Coates was late delivering one manuscript, investigators believe she was tied up writing A Warning.

Another clue, sources said, was the fact that Coates shares with Anonymous the same book agent  the Washington-based Javelin Literary Agency. One of Javelin's founding partners, Keith Urbahn, has been a close friend of hers since 2006, when Rumsfeld asked them to conduct research for his 2011 memoir. Emails previously obtained under the Freedom of Information Act in an unrelated case show Coates and Urbahn worked side-by-side on the book project for several years, reporting to an office on M Street in downtown D.C. that Rumsfeld opened under the name, DHR Holdings LLC.

In 2016, Urbahn helped Coates secure a three-book deal with Encounter Books focusing on political culture. Coates knocked out the first manuscript, Davids Sling, while still working on the Cruz campaign that year. The second book, tentatively titled Seeing the Light: A History of Christianity in Twelve Works of Art, was due for release last year, but was delayed for undisclosed reasons. Industry sources confirmed that Coates is late delivering the manuscript. Investigators believe she was tied up writing A Warning, published in November. Urbahn happened to help broker that book deal, too.

But Javelin denied in a statement that Coates is the author in question, brushing aside the fact it counts Coates as a client as just a bizarre coincidence.

To be very clear, so there is no chance of any misunderstanding: Dr. Coates is not Anonymous, Javelin said. She did not write it, edit it, see it in advance, know anything about it, or as far [as] we know ever read it."

Thats an utterly unambiguous denial. But heres the problem: Thats exactly what Anonymous said would be the response to any such attempt to out her in the book's Introduction: If asked, I will strenuously deny I am the author of this book.

Javelin maintains a full stable of anti-Trump authors, including former National Security Adviser John Bolton and fired FBI Director James Comey. The agency just signed Marie Yovanovitch, the ousted State Department official who testified against Trump during his impeachment. Since landing a $3 million advance for Comey, Javelin has become "a popular destination for Trump administration officials, especially those contemplating an exit, The New York Times recently reported in a lengthy profile of Urbahn and his partner, Matt Latimer, who also worked for Rumsfeld and is chummy with Coates.

Yet other Coates defenders insist that she is a loyal member of Team Trump and that they never heard her say anything disparaging about the president. The rumors are absolutely false and Im ashamed of those pushing this B.S., said Fred Fleitz, who worked closely with Coates while serving as chief of staff to Bolton.

Former NSC spokesman Michael Anton, who worked alongside Coates in the early days of the Trump administration, said he doubts she was involved in any skullduggery. I dont believe it, he said.

Added K.T. McFarland: Anonymous sanctimonious, elitist tone, and [the writers] implication that Trump is an immoral idiot doesnt match up with the Victoria Coates I have known for years.

She went out on a limb to support Trump when few in the Republican foreign policy community did, she added.

Very Anti-Trump in Private

While Coates supporters are adamant that she is not Anonymous, some co-workers said she was careful to hide her opposition to Trump and his agenda during meetings with principals.

She was very anti-Trump in private, said a former NSC official who worked with Coates on the Mideast desk. She even defended Obama holdovers to me. Theyre all fighting Trump."

If Coates supports Trump, she has not been vocal about it. There are no examples of her publicly praising the president, based on a search of the Lexis-Nexis database of her speeches, articles and interviews, though she has expressed support for some of his policies.

A review of Coates Twitter feed going back to the November 2016 election turns up no tweets in which she supports Trump directly, though she remarked in a March 2017 tweet that she was proud" to have joined the NSC team. Coates was restrained even after Trump upset Hillary Clinton, posting no congratulatory tweets.



On the other hand, Coates reportedly was furious that Cruz decided several weeks before the election to throw his support behind Trump, after famously snubbing him at the GOP convention.

She was livid when the Texas Republican endorsed Trump and cited national security as one of his reasons for supporting the Republican nominee, according to a Politico.com article citing people familiar with her alleged meltdown over her boss about-face.

Supporters struggled, moreover, to explain why Coates would accept what effectively was a demotion -- just four months after being promoted to deputy national security -- if she were innocent of the accusations.

Fleitz, who says he has not read "A Warning," speculated that Coates was ready to move on from the NSC after serving three years there, and that her reassignment to the Energy Department had been in the works for a while. But her failure to appear at the Hudson Institute for a recent speech on the White House's plan for peace in the Middle East made it look more like a shake-up.

The events moderator was clearly taken off guard. I feel a little bit like Clint Eastwood talking to the empty chair, the moderator nervously quipped, motioning to a seat the think tank had reserved for Coates on the stage with an unopened bottle of water beside it.

Just two days before Coates was officially reassigned on Feb. 20, Trump told reporters he knew the identity of the anonymous official, but he would not divulge the persons identity.

Cant tell you that, but I know who it is, he said. I know all about Anonymous.
Source: Xinhua| 2020-04-15 12:42:37|Editor: huaxia

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BEIJING, April 15 (Xinhua) -- Chinese universities will admit more doctoral students for 2020 to meet a target of 100,000 set by the Ministry of Education (MOE).

Admissions policies unveiled by some universities showed that they will expand doctoral programs compared with last year.

Shanghai Jiaotong University is expected to enroll around 2,500 doctoral students for 2020, 300 more than that of 2019. Renmin University of China opens around 1,000 slots for 131 doctoral programs this year, compared with 940 slots for 130 doctoral programs last year.

The universities with expanded doctoral programs also include Nankai University, Southeast University, Henan University, Guangzhou University and Airforce Medical University.

In 2018, the MOE proposed a plan to increase the number of China's doctoral students to 100,000 in 2020.

According to guidelines jointly issued by departments including the MOE in March, the country will speed up the training of postgraduates in the field of artificial intelligence, enrolling more doctoral students in particular.
A knife-wielding man has been knocked to the ground by a police car as he threatened officers with the weapon after allegedly trying to rob a pharmacy.

Footage showed the man brandishing the blade while surrounded by officers with guns drawn.

The police were heard shouting 'drop the knife' and 'get down' before an unmarked police vehicle was driven into the alleged offender, knocking him to the road surface.

A 20-year-old was arrested on Wednesday after allegedly attempting to rob a pharmacy in northern Hobart

The 20-year-old man was arrested at 9am on Wednesday after he allegedly attempted to rob a pharmacy in northern Hobart.

In footage of the arrest, an officer warned the man not to get inside a blue Hyundai and shouted at the man to drop his knife.

After the alleged robber was struck from behind by the car, he appeared agitated before stabbing at the window of the unmarked vehicle.

'Put it down now. Listen to me, drop the knife, drop the f***ing knife now,' an officer yelled.

After the man was knocked to the ground by the unmarked car he allegedly picked up the knife before dropping it and surrendering to police.

An marked police car knocked the man over before officers closed in and arrested the allegedly offender

An officer ran over and kicked the knife away from the 20-year-old before another tackled him from behind.

A spokesperson from Tasmania Police told Daily Mail Australia the alleged robber was not injured in the arrest.

'One officer sustained injuries to a hand and another injuries to an ankle during the arrest,' they said.

It is not known how the injuries were obtained.

Armed police mowed down a knife-wielding man in the street after he allegedly tried to rob a pharmacy

The spokesperson said the actions of the officers would be looked into.

'As is normal practice, Professional Standards has been advised and will review the circumstances surrounding the incident,' they said.

The alleged offender was not immediately charged.

Local resident Krystal Brady told Daily Mail Australia she was shocked at the arrest in the usually quiet neighbourhood and was appalled by the behaviour of police.

'I'm all for them taking him down but he is obviously not all there and they get training to deal with mental health - hitting him with the car was also not on,' she said.
According to Mr. Trump, the W.H.O. fought the United States after he ordered limits on flights from China on Jan. 31. He was apparently referring to a decision by W.H.O. officials to issue a statement saying that restricting the movement of people and goods during public health emergencies is ineffective in most situations and may divert resources from other interventions.

The W.H.O. did not criticize the United States, which was not the only country imposing travel restrictions. But it has historically opposed border closings or travel bans during disease outbreaks, on the ground that they never stop transmissible diseases and cause panic and widespread economic damage.

The coronavirus has tested those assumptions in wealthier countries, and many experts agree that a ban on travel to the United States first from China and then from Europe may have bought precious and limited time to prepare. But critics say the White House wasted that time, and Mr. Trump has seized on an opportunity to deflect blame to the W.H.O.

The question of whether the W.H.O. was not aggressive enough in recommending action against the virus has been raised in other countries. Some governments have noted that the organizations leadership did not challenge Chinas assertion in mid-January that there was not human-to-human transmission of the coronavirus.

But the W.H.O. did issue urgent advisories throughout January about the potential dangers from the virus and announced that it constituted a public health emergency of international concern a day before the Trump administration made a similar declaration.

From Jan. 22 on, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the W.H.O. director general, held almost daily news briefings to warn the world that the virus was spreading and that countries should do everything they could to stop it. Every day he repeated a mantra: We have a window of opportunity to stop this virus. But that window is rapidly closing.

Mr. Trumps contention that the W.H.O. was too cozy with China may be the result of the praise it had for the aggressive way that the Chinese sought to contain the virus, using tactics that were sometimes brutal, including people being dragged from their apartments into hospital isolation when they resisted leaving and welding families into their apartments when they broke quarantine rules.
Frontier Communications filed for bankruptcy protection from creditors on Tuesday night as a last-ditch recourse to eliminate debt coming due. This decision came more than five years after it acquired Southern New England Telephone territory in Connecticut  only to take on a crippling amount of debt in a subsequent deal.

Under the plan, control of Norwalk-based Frontier would shift from shareholders to creditors holding unsecured debt, which would be converted into equity shares, according to Frontiers filing in the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Southern District of New York. The court entered the companys petition at 10:30 p.m. Tuesday.

In a subsequent statement, Frontier said it will continue service uninterrupted to its 4.1 million customers. The company is one of the largest telephone, broadband and TV providers in the country with service in 28 states in addition to its home turf covering most of Connecticut.

Goldman Sachs Group has arranged $460 million in debtor-in-possession financing for Frontier to continue operating during the bankruptcy process.

Frontier continues to cut costs and headcount, eliminating 830 jobs in the final three months of 2019 to bring its total job reduction to nearly 2,900 jobs for the year; and to 10,000 for its total separations since April 2016.

In its petition for bankruptcy protection covering more than 100 subsidiaries, Frontier lists total debt of $21.9 billion  categorizing $17.5 billion of that amount as debt for which it is liable  against assets of $17.4 billion. Frontier stated it has agreements in place from three of every four bondholders, which are not listed by name, with other parties allowed to file dissenting motions as the bankruptcy case proceeds.

BlackRock is Frontiers largest existing stockholder with 9 percent of shares that closed Tuesday with a value of 38 cents apiece, followed by Vanguard Group and Charles Schwab, each holding about 6 percent of Frontiers common stock. Shares last peaked at more than $125 five years ago on an adjusted basis, and topped out at $288 in 1993.

Of unsecured creditors identified by Frontier, the human resources software company PeopleScout is owed the single largest amount at $5.7 million, followed by litigants in a class-action wage lawsuit in California to whom Frontier lists debt of $4.7 million as a result of a settlement. Of Connecticut-based companies  excluding any unnamed bondholders  the Southington building heating and air conditioning contractor F.J. Hubeny has the biggest amount outstanding from Frontier at about $540,000.

In its filing, Frontier states those holding general unsecured claims will be paid in full, reinstated, or otherwise unimpaired, with the company reserving 6 percent of its newly recalculated equity shares outstanding for the purpose of post-emergence management incentive plan in its words to compensate executives.

Billions for botched takeovers

AT&T is third on the list of the largest unsecured creditors with a $2.6 million claim, with Frontier having acquired the New Haven-based SNET operations in 2014 from AT&T for $2 billion in a deal hatched by former CEO Maggie Wilderotter. Frontier then spent the following several months attempting to repair strained relations with some Connecticut customers, after bungling elements of the switch-over to its own systems.

Wilderotters subsequent, $10.5 billion deal with Verizon Communications gave Frontier a new patchwork of systems in California, Texas and Florida that included Verizons FiOS fiber optic service to homes. But Frontier was forced to limit its outbound marketing efforts as it again vexed its existing customer base with outages and shoddy call center service.

With Wilderotter taking retirement on the heels of that deal, successor CEO Dan McCarthy was unable to point Frontier revenue onto an upward trajectory, with the company absorbing a $5.9 billion loss in 2019.

In its bankruptcy petition, Frontier blames the emergence of fiber as a superior alternative to historic copper networks, while addressing its failure under McCarthy in extracting profits from the FiOS networks bequeathed it in Wilderotters Verizon deal.

Under McCarthy and before him Wilderotter, Frontier was otherwise late reaching a decision to string fiber directly to customers as it has began doing only recently in Connecticut, New York and several other states with its Vantage fiber offering, with its limited cash forestalling any broader fiber installations.

McCarthy was replaced in December with former Dish Network executive Bernie Han, who intensified negotiations with creditors in January about options that included bankruptcy. For a newly created executive vice president role leading strategic planning, Frontier has retained Carlin Adrianopoli, an FTI Consulting restructuring expert in Chicago who previously shepherded RadioShack through bankruptcy.

Serving the new territories proved more difficult and expensive than the [company] anticipated, and integration issues made it more difficult to retain customers, Adrianopoli stated in a filing accompanying Frontiers bankruptcy petition. Frontier has not been able to fully realize the economies of scale expected from the ... [transactions], as evidenced by a loss of approximately 1.3 million customers.

Updated from an initial version posted on April 14.

Alex.Soule@scni.com; 203-842-2545; @casoulman
(CNN)  Amid rising concerns of the coronavirus being spread in a Florida jail, many inmates were released early, including Joseph Williams.

Now, the 26-year-old is back behind bars for several new charges including second-degree murder with a firearm, according to the Hillsborough County Sheriff's Office.

Williams was originally arrested March 13 for possession of heroin and drug paraphernalia, according to court records. He was one of more than 100 inmates released March 19 to curb the spread of the virus in detention centers and protect inmates and staff.

A day after being released, the sheriff's office says, Williams became the suspect of a murder case.

"There is no question Joseph Williams took advantage of this health emergency to commit crimes while he was out of jail awaiting resolution of a low-level, non-violent offense," Hillsborough County Sheriff Chad Chronister said in a statement.

"Every murder, every violent crime, especially those involving a gun, is a sickening example of the worst in our community, especially at a time when our community is working relentlessly to fight against the spread of this deadly COVID-19."

Court records show Williams is being held in jail without bond. CNN called the public defender's office, which is representing Williams, for comment but has not heard back.

On March 20, police investigating reports of gunshots in a Tampa neighborhood found a man who was pronounced dead at the scene, according to CNN affiliate WFLA.

Williams was arrested Sunday in connection with the case. In addition to second-degree murder, he is facing several new charges including resisting an officer, felon in possession of a firearm, possession of heroin and possession of drug paraphernalia.

"Judges, prosecutors, and Sheriffs around the country are facing difficult decisions during this health crisis with respect to balancing public health and public safety," said Chronister. "Sheriffs in Florida and throughout our country have released non-violent, low-level offenders to protect our deputies and the jail population from an outbreak."

Williams has a lengthy criminal record that shows he has been arrested for 35 charges, according to the sheriff's office.

This story was first published on CNN.com 'Man released from jail amid coronavirus concerns is arrested on a murder charge'
As governors across the country fell into line in recent weeks, South Dakota's top elected leader stood firm: There would be no statewide order to stay home.

Such edicts to combat the spread of the novel coronavirus, Gov. Kristi Noem argued disparagingly, reflected a "herd mentality." It was up to individuals - not government - to decide whether "to exercise their right to work, to worship and to play. Or to even stay at home."

And besides, the first-term Republican told reporters at a briefing this month, "South Dakota is not New York City."

But now South Dakota is home to one of the largest single coronavirus clusters anywhere in the United States, with more than 300 workers at a giant pork-processing plant falling ill. With the case numbers continuing to spike, the company was forced to announce the indefinite closure of the facility Sunday, threatening the U.S. food supply.

Increasingly exasperated local leaders, public health experts and front-line medical workers begged Noem to intervene Monday with a more aggressive state response.

"A shelter-in-place order is needed now. It is needed today," said Sioux Falls Mayor Paul TenHaken, whose city is at the center of South Dakota's outbreak and who has had to improvise with voluntary recommendations in the absence of statewide action.

But the governor continued to resist. Instead, she used a press briefing Monday to announce trials of a drug that President Donald Trump has repeatedly touted as a potential breakthrough in the fight against coronavirus, despite a lack of scientific evidence.

"It's an exciting day," she boasted, repeatedly citing her conversations with presidential son-in-law Jared Kushner.

The piecemeal approach to combating the coronavirus in South Dakota offers a throwback to America's not-so-distant past, the period around a month ago when governors were still leery of using their powers to shut down restaurants and bars or to order people, for the greater good, to stay at home.

It also may offer a glimpse of the country's near-term future, as pressure builds - not least from the president - to reopen after a weeks-long shutdown. Trump has been eager to get the economy on its feet again by the beginning of May after record rises in unemployment claims and dramatic falls in the stock market.

Yet as South Dakota's experience shows, no part of the country is immune to being ravaged by the virus. And rescinding orders that people stay at home - or declining to issue them, as in the case of South Dakota and four other states - offers plenty of peril.

Reopening the county by May is "not even remotely achievable," said TenHaken, who, like Trump and Noem, is a Republican. "We're in the early innings of this thing in Sioux Falls."

Already, the experience has been harrowing: As of early April, the city had relatively few cases. But over the course of last week, the numbers surged as the virus ripped through the city's Smithfield Foods production plant, a colossus that employs 3,700 people - many of them immigrants - and churns out 18 million servings of pork product per day.

On Monday alone, 57 more workers were confirmed to have positive diagnoses, bringing the total well above 300 - and making it one of the country's largest clusters. Other major clusters include Cook County Jail in Chicago and the USS Theodore Roosevelt aircraft carrier.

The Smithfield cases amount to more than a third of the state's overall total, which stood at 868 on Monday, including six deaths, in a state of nearly 900,000 people.

Over the weekend, Smithfield bowed to growing pressure and said it would shutter the facility indefinitely in a bid to contain the spread - though Smithfield leaders cautioned that the action could severely disrupt the nation's food supplies. The factory, like other food production facilities, had earlier been deemed essential by the federal government.

The shutdown of the Sioux Falls plant, coupled with other closures, "is pushing our country perilously close to the edge in terms of our meat supply," Kenneth Sullivan, Smithfield president and chief executive, said in a statement. "It is impossible to keep our grocery stores stocked if our plants are not running."

Before the closure, workers had complained that they were not given sufficient access to protective gear, such as masks. The company said Thursday that it had taken steps to reduce the spread, including "adding extra hand sanitizing stations, boosting personal protective equipment, continuing to stress the importance of personal hygiene." But workers said they were required to work so closely together that it was impossible to stay healthy.

"There is no social distance," said Lily, a 30-year-old Mexican immigrant who had worked at the plant for nearly 13 years but quit because she feared bringing the coronavirus home to her husband and young daughter.

Lily, who spoke on the condition that her last name not be published for fear of retribution, said it is not only at work where she feared the virus. "Many people are sick. Not only in the plant - in the whole city," she said.

Sioux Falls, home to nearly 200,000 people, is the state's largest city. TenHaken, the mayor, said in an interview that he has done everything within his power to enforce social distancing, including using a "no lingering" ordinance to confine restaurants to takeout and delivery service and strongly recommending that all nonessential businesses close.

He has little power of enforcement, however, and no ability to control what happens in nearby jurisdictions. Restaurants within Sioux Falls may have shut down for in-person dining. But the rules don't apply outside city limits.

Without a more assertive response from state government - including stay-at-home orders in at least the surrounding counties and a declaration of a statewide public health emergency - TenHaken said he fears the spread will continue.

"The virus doesn't know boundaries. The virus doesn't know city limits," he said. "We're responding the best we can at the local level but quite honestly with a limited tool set."

TenHaken's plea for state action has also been made by public health professionals.

The South Dakota State Medical Association wrote Noem a letter April 3 warning the governor that the state "may soon face the challenges and hardships currently being seen in New York and other large cities across the country if a shelter in place order is not issued immediately."

Noem is one of five governors representing relatively rural states - North Dakota, Iowa, Nebraska and Arkansas are the others - still resisting such calls. All are Republicans, and all have used similar justifications for going against the national grain.

In Arkansas, Gov. Asa Hutchinson has boasted of his state's "very targeted response" and argued that other states have so many exemptions to their stay-at-home orders that they "override the rule."

Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds has said that keeping people at home takes a toll on their mental health and that "suicides and domestic abuse" would rise.

Noem has perhaps gone even further than others, however, citing the principle of individual liberty and the limitations of government to dictate people's behavior - even when public health may depend on it.

Special Investigation 147 NY dams are 'unsound,' potentially dangerous Thousands of dams have not been inspected in over 20 years.

Citing scientific modeling, the governor acknowledged this month that up to 70% of residents in her state may ultimately fall ill to coronavirus. But, she suggested, it wasn't up to government to tell them how to behave.

"The people themselves are primarily responsible for their safety," she said. "They are the ones that are entrusted with expansive freedoms."

Noem on Monday continued to defend her approach, saying the state had high levels of voluntary participation in social distancing strategies - "much greater than some of those states that issued shelter-in-place orders."

She also said that spikes in case numbers, such as the one at Smithfield, had been "expected" and that the state's numbers overall were trending in the right direction.

Noem, who said she was closely coordinating with the White House, focused her remarks on a trial of hydroxychloroquine, the anti-malarial drug that Trump has frequently touted as a possible remedy for the coronavirus, though its effectiveness has not been proved. Scientists in Brazil stopped a study of the drug in coronavirus patients after some developed irregular heart rates.

She batted away questions about a statewide stay-at-home order - or even countywide ones. But public health experts say such an order is what's needed, even in a rural state such as South Dakota.

"In rural areas, there's less access to health care," said DenYelle Kenyon, director of the public health program at the University of South Dakota. "And all it takes is one case to spread to a small community."

Front-line medical workers, too, have been outspoken in calling for the state to step up.

Amy Taylor, a Sioux Falls-based nurse who is married to a nurse practitioner, sat down one evening and spent 10 minutes tapping out a petition on change.org demanding that Noem order people to stay home.

"I thought some friends might sign it," Taylor said. "But it just kind of took off."

The petition was closing in on 30,000 signatures as of Monday night. Many of the signers identify themselves as health-care workers.

"I just don't understand why we aren't doing everything we can to save people's lives," Taylor said.

More than 160 county and city leaders in South Dakota have also petitioned Noem, urging her to declare a statewide public health emergency.

Rapid City Mayor Steve Allender was among those who signed. As leader of the state's second-largest city, he has instituted aggressive measures to keep people apart. But as is true in Sioux Falls, citywide efforts can only do so much when the state's response is such a patchwork.

Now, economic pain from the shutdown is growing - and so is frustration that the city's businesses have been closed while others nearby remain open. Without the state backing him up, Allender said, it will be tough to hold the line.

"There's no political winners in this pandemic," said Allender, a Republican whose city has seen relatively few cases. "You have to decide on which side of the argument you're going to lose - the one that was too cautious or the one that was too reckless."
Information Minister Kojo Oppong Nkrumah has downplayed claims by Zanetor Rawlings that there are partisan considerations in the government food aid in the lockdown areas.



The Klottey Korley MP has accused NADMO officials of demanding party association from vulnerable people before dishing out food to them.



This must end now and immediately because coronavirus does not know NPP and NDC. Neither does it know CPP, PNC, PPP or APC etc. This is a humanitarian crisis, women and children are hungry. They are locked down because its not their fault the virus is in Ghana."



People are literally being asked to show evidence of their party membership before being given food. This is not acceptable [and] this is very sad [because] the virus does not show whether you are NDC or NPP before it infects you, she lamented in an interview while she distributed aids to her constituents.



However, the Information Minister told Morning Starr that the claims cannot be validated.



Validation is very important here. This is hearsay. We will have to independently verify these claims, he said.



Also challenging the claim is Accra Metropolitan Assembly (AMA) Chief Executive Mohammed Adjei.



its unfortunate that at a time like this, such a statement would be made by an Honorable Member of Parliament who has been missing all this while [and] resurfaced out of the blue for attention.



Even though the government has welcomed efforts by all to support the effort to lessen the effects of the lockdown on the vulnerable, misinformation and attempts to politicize such efforts should not be countenanced, he said in a statement.













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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Michael Yao, the World Health Organisations (WHO) Africa programme manager for emergency response, has warned of a rapid increase in coronavirus cases on the continent. Noting that, During the last four days, we can see that the numbers have already doubled, he added, If the trend continues, and also learning from what happened in China and in Europe, some countries may face a huge peak very soon.

Far more so than in Europe and China, Africas health systems are woefully underfunded, understaffed and under-resourced. There is a vital need for a vaccine, but chances of obtaining one in less than 18 months are slim to nil. Under these conditions, Ugandas government has taken a leaf from US President Donald Trumps playbook in touting untested remedies, chiefly the anti-malarial drugs chloroquine (CQ) and hydroxychloroquine (HCQ), as a potential lifesaver.

According to PML Daily, Director of Health Services, Ministry of Health, Henry Mwebesa has revealed that [three recently discharged patients] who had tested positive [for the] Coronavirus were treated using the controversial hydroxychloroquine drug, that was used in the 90s and early 2000s to treat malaria.

Plaquenil is one of many brand names for the drug Hydroxychloroquine. (Photo credit: Twitter/Manon01901750)

Mwebesa tweeted, The patients we are discharging today were on hydroxychloroquine and erythromycin actually. He made his remarks in response to one of his followers, Brandon Ndoni, who asked the Ugandan government to clarify the controversy over the use of CQ and HCQ in light of the fact that the WHO, Europe (bar France) are yet to authorize use of Antimalarials Hydroxychloroquine, Chloroquine in treating Covid-19 pneumonia.

Health Minister Dr Jane Ruth Aceng sought to justify this, telling a press conference in Kampala that, although HCQ is still undergoing testing, it can stop the spread of the disease by stabilizing red blood cells and promoting the uptake of oxygen.

The governments endorsing of HCQ and CQ has helped promote panic buying and stockpiling of the drugs.

In February, Janet Diaz, head of clinical care for the WHO Emergencies Program, answered a reporters question about CQ at a press conference, saying that there was no proof yet that it was an effective treatment.

Just last week, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention updated their therapeutic options guidance, removing any reference to HCQ and stating explicitly, There are no drugs or other therapeutics approved by the US Food and Drug Administration to prevent or treat COVID-19.

Having spent decades slashing health care systems and starving them of resources, African governments are attempting to promote HCQ and CQ as quick-fix cures to conceal the impact of privatisation and budget cuts carried out at the behest of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank as the condition for loans.

While the WHO reiterates that mass testing, contact tracing, isolation and treatment are the most effective ways to fight the virus, African governmentslike their counterparts in the advanced industrial countries refuse to mobilize the necessary resources to fight the virus.

President Yoweri Museveni, in power since 1986, has spent his years in office giving away Ugandas assets to international financial interests and carrying out a punishing series of privatisations. This wholesale robbery and looting of resources on behalf of international capital and its local agents has had a catastrophic effect on the working class and poor farmers.

In 2017, the country ranked 162 out of 189 on the UNs Human Development Index. Three-quarters of the population lives on less than $3.10 per day. Life expectancy is just 62 years, only two years more than war-torn Democratic Republic of Congo; 51 percent of Ugandans lack access to safe water; 82 percent do not have access to improved sanitation facilities; and acute malnutrition (wasting) among children between six months of age and five years old is four percent, but 10 percent in the West Nile sub-region of Uganda.

In a bid to stop the virus spreading, the government ordered a lockdown at the beginning of April. But with 71 percent of people who live in the capital, Kampala, sharing a one-roomed home with several others, this is a terrible ordeal.

There is a ban on all transport and a night-time curfew, now extended beyond the initial two weeks for a further three weeks, amid a national power outage. Security forces have fired on people violating the curfew. The ban on all private and public transport extends even to medical emergencies, and at least seven pregnant women have died as a result of the lockdown.

Scovia Nakawooyas unborn child died inside her as she struggled to reach a hospital on foot. Her husband Francis Kibenge begged drivers to take her to a hospital a mile and a half away. Grace Nagawa, the couples 19-year-old daughter, wept as she explained, Sometimes she would stop, bend and put her hand on her thigh to support her body, just to rest a bit. Nakawooya died at the medical centre the next morning.

The situation facing the country, which hosts Africas largest refugee population1.4 million from neighbouring DRC and South Sudanis dire. Julius Kasozi, a public health officer with the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) in Uganda, said, I fear a high death toll if the virus reaches the settlements.

As well as all the other restrictions, the lockdown bans the movement of refugees outside these settlements, preventing them from getting food rations and other essentials. The UNs World Food Programme has announced a 30 percent reduction in the rations it distributes to refugees due to a loss of 67 percent of its funding for East and Central Africa.

A second locust swarm that is sweeping East Africa and the Horn is devouring newly planted crops and livelihoods in its path. It is expected that poor farmers and semi-nomadic herders in the east and the semi-arid northeast Karamoja region will be the hardest hit, even as the coronavirus sweeps the country. The flight and travel bans imposed to stop the spread of the virus mean that much needed pesticides and international personnel to fight the locusts are not available.

While the government has urged farmers to start planting to ensure food security, Loupa Pius, project officer at Dynamic Agropastoralist Development Organisation in Karamoja, told Al Jazeera, People should be advised to halt planting of crops to observe the direction and the stage of desert locust outbreak.

Otherwise, if this is not taken into action, the usual food insecurity will override the region, including capable people who can usually easily find their own food without aid. This time round, they are likely to ask for it because the situation has been hit by COVID-19.

The United Nations is already warning that the locust swarm could increase 500-fold by June.




SOUTH Africa-based funeral parlours are engaging authorities to ensure that there is a smooth process to repatriate bodies through Beitbridge Border Post for burial in Zimbabwe.





The parlours are concerned with the manner in which the process is being handled with ever-changing rules and regulations on both sides of the border.





Under normal circumstances at least 60 bodies are brought into the country through Beitbridge Border Post weekly for burial.





As a result of the state of affairs, six bodies were returned to Johannesburg on Wednesday last week after the parlours reportedly failed to meet some regulations which are being rolled out under the lockdown guidelines in both Zimbabwe and South Africa.





Chronicle understands that initially one relative and the hearse drivers were allowed passage into the country, but now that has been changed.





Under the new changes, only the South African parlours driver is expected to leave the human remains with Zimbabwean parlours at Beitbridge Border Post for onward transportation.





However, this has been met with logistical challenges with parlours from the two countries yet to agree on sharing transportation fees. On average it costs R15 000 to repatriate the remains of a Zimbabwean from South Africa.





The chairman of the Inner-City Funeral Directors Association-South Africa (IFDA-SA), Mr Nkosi Kwanike Nare said yesterday that the state of affairs has resulted in bodies piling up in Johannesburg mortuaries.





He said one of their members was recently fined R18 000 for overloading their morgue with three bodies.





As an association, we support all attempts by Sadc governments to curb the spread of Covid-19 in South Africa, Zimbabwe and in the region, he said.





We comprehend the necessity of implementation of lockdown and all set out statutory instruments as provided by the respective authorities.





Additionally, we understand that there has been so much panic from every one of us resulting in these spontaneous measures being put in place, in an attempt to harness and arrest the spread of Covid-19.





As dedicated stakeholders, we have adopted the worst case scenario stance, whereby all-natural deaths cases are treated as Covid-19 cases. This is done to enhance precautionary measures to ensure that our staff and clients are all safe.





Mr Nare said they had since tabled a number of proposed safe repatriation measures to Zimbabwean and South African authorities for consideration.





These, he said include the sharing of drivers by its members, especially those who have a sound geographic knowledge of Zimbabwe and were also prepared to repatriate human remains without any family member on board.





The official said they were also proposing that their funeral assistants/drivers meet at the nearest agreed point with the bereaved family in Zimbabwe.





As a safety precaution, our drivers will be accompanied by a fully completed RG1 Form for port health human remains declaration to facilitate information accuracy, said Mr Nare.





The drivers also have a full set of Person Protective Equipment (PPE) and they will return at the drop-off and shall not be part of the funeral proceedings thereby minimising the risk of cross-contamination.





In addition, we will attempt to have Covid-19 rapid test kits in place so that the funeral assistant/driver may be tested on both trips.





As IFDA-SA, we commit to policing our members in adhering our set regulations and all enacted by the government.




The coronavirus (COVID-19) lockdown may be forcing you to stay holed up at home. But, this could also be the best opportunity to invest any idle time in pursuing those oft-planned courses. Here's a list of free online courses to make the most of the lockdown. (Image: Reuters)

Harvard University is offering 67 courses online for free. The duration ranges from one week to 12 weeks depending on the subject. Students can avail programmes across domains like business, computer science, art, design and humanities. Details are available online at learning.harvard.edu (Image: harvard.edu)

NASSCOM, in partnership with MEITY, has launched on-demand courseware on Artificial Intelligence (AI). Under their NASSCOM FutureSkills initiative, the foundational Artificial Intelligence course from SkillUp Online is aligned to the industry-recommended curriculum. Otherwise priced at Rs 6,800, this course is free for all until May 15, 2020. Details are available on fslearning.nasscom.in (Image: Pixabay)

Oxford University Press has launched an initiative to provide students and teachers free access to its learning resources, both for schools and higher education streams. OUP will also provide teachers with free access to its Online Teacher Training modules and webinars. Details are available on originindia.oup.com/campaign/schoolteachers. (Image: global.oup.com)

Japanese multinational firm Nikon is offering free photography courses all through the month of April. You can enrol on the website and take courses on a range of topics like how to get started with the DSLR, making music videos to photographing children and pets. Details are available on nikonevents.com/us/live/nikon-school-online/ (Image: Nikon)

Madras Dyslexia Association and National Programme on Technology Enhanced Learning (NPTEL)-IIT Madras are offering free online teaching courses providing remedial support to children with Specific Learning Difficulties. The courses are targeted towards primary school teachers (Classes I-V), and professionals such as occupational therapists, counsellors, and speech pathologist. It contains simple methods of identifying and remediating young children with dyslexia. Details are available on swayam.gov.in/NPTEL (Image: IIT Madras)

Online tutoring platform Vedantu is providing free access to its complete learning platform. Students will get free access to Vedantus live classes, tests, doubt solving, study material, notes and class recordings. This will cater to Grades 1 to 12 covering subjects like Maths, Science, Social Studies, Physics, Chemistry among others. Courses for JEE & NEET are also available. Details are available on vedantu.com (Image: vedantu.com)

Multinational footwear and fitness accessories firm Nike is offering NTC Premium free of charge. This is a subscription-based service that includes studio-style streaming workouts, progressive training programmes and expert tips from trainers. This service has a library of more than 185 workouts ranging from 15 to 60 minutes. These span bodyweight-only sessions, yoga classes, targeted training programmes and full-equipment workouts for all fitness levels. The application can be downloaded to get access to the content. (Image: Nike)

TCS iON, a strategic unit of Tata Consultancy Services, is offering a 15-day self-paced digital certification programme called Career Edge, specially designed for college students/working professionals to enhance their career skills by helping them effectively utilise the time at hand during this period of lockdown. The programme, offered on the TCS iON Digital Learning Hub platform, is followed by an online digital assessment and certification. (Image: TCS iON)

Global e-learning marketplace Udemy has released the Udemy Free Resource Center. This is a curated collection of more than 150 free Udemy courses to help students learn new skills during the lockdown. The courses range from programming a complete game, HTML5 fundamentals to time management. Details are available on udemy.com/courses/free/ (Image: Udemy)

Yale University is offering one of its most popular courses called 'The Science of Well Being' for free on Coursera. Here, Professor Laurie Santos reveals misconceptions about happiness, annoying features of the mind that lead one to think the way they do, and the research that can help us change. Details are available on coursera.org/learn/the-science-of-well-being (Image: Yale University)
China's viticulture in transition

Peter Kupfer of Mainz University published a history of the Chinese wine culture / 9,000-year-old discoveries from central China are the world's earliest traces of winemaking

The oldest archaeological evidence of the use of wild grapes to make a fermented ritual drink comes from China and dates back some 9,000 years. This "Neolithic cocktail" is currently thought to be the world's oldest alcoholic drink. Viticulture itself began only a little later, about 8,000 years ago in Georgia. "Alcohol and, in particular, wine made using grapes has been a fundamentally important part of cultural life in Eurasia for thousands of years. And China has played a key role in its history," said sinologist Professor Peter Kupfer of Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (JGU). Kupfer has been studying China for four decades and has investigated all aspects of the alcohol culture of the Middle Kingdom, which has shaped the lives of its peoples for thousands of years. In Kupfer's view, the emergence of China as one of the world's leading wine-producing and wine-consuming countries is best seen against this background.

Human evolution has always been linked with winemaking

Recent research suggests that alcohol has played a central role in human evolution and the history of civilization. Wine is humanity's oldest and most widespread cultural and ritual drink, older even than beer. "Without exception, the rise of all advanced Eurasian civilizations was intimately linked to the development of a wine and alcohol culture that was initially linked to magic and later played a role in social and religious rituals," explained Kupfer, describing the key influence alcoholic drinks have had on human history. Wine and, later, beer consumption in the Eurasian continent is as old as the ties and cultural exchange between its peoples. The peoples of Eurasia have been in contact and exchanged ideas and goods over vast geographical distances since prehistoric times, long before the heyday of the Silk Road two thousand years ago. "Barley was exported from Mesopotamia to China, where it was used exclusively for beer brewing," Kupfer cited one example.

Although still unproven, Kupfer believes that there were probably links between the most ancient winemaking sites - between Georgia 8,000 years ago and Jiahu in central China some 9,000 years ago. China's natural history has also been pivotal to its viticulture: For millions of years, the country has been home to the world's richest and most diverse range of species of the Vitis genus. During glacial periods, vines found a refuge in southern China, which is now home to over 40 Vitis species, 30 of which are indigenous.

With very few exceptions, alcohol has never been prohibited in China. Quite the reverse: The Chinese rule "No celebration without alcohol" has been followed throughout all epochs. "The way the Chinese toast each other has remained unchanged for 3,000 years, as evidenced by ancient written precepts on the subject of hospitality," added Peter Kupfer. Given the preeminence accorded to French wines, it is natural to assume that winemaking must have originated in ancient Greece or Rome. In fact, it has developed since the Neolithic Age over thousands of years in the context of continuous exchange between Eurasian regions, with Persia and India playing a particularly important role very early on.

New wines from the Middle Kingdom

Only in the late 19th century Chinese viticulture started to realign itself with its Western counterpart - at approximately the same time as European wine culture was establishing itself in numerous overseas regions, including North and South America, South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, and Japan. Chinese companies imported vines and technologies from Europe, cooperated with European vintners and oenologists, and increasingly adopted French techniques of winemaking, including aging in oak barrels. These techniques remain the basis of Chinese winemaking today. "But since the 1990s, wine production in China has begun to become increasingly self-sufficient. Ever more land is being cultivated for winemaking and the area is now as extensive as that in Germany, while imports and consumption of wine are also rising. In particular young people, naturally receptive to new experiences, are learning to appreciate wine." Kupfer also emphasizes that there are already outstanding wines to be discovered on the Chinese market, in particular red wines, and that Chinese terroir and climate represent an excellent basis for future growth. "In my opinion we will witness the emergence of a very distinct wine culture in China in a few years. Chinese geography - varied and on a scale of thousands of kilometers - offers ideal perspectives for such growth," Kupfer suggested.

Amber Shine and Black Dragon Pearls: The History of Chinese Wine Culture

In 1998 Peter Kupfer was appointed Professor of Chinese Language and Culture at the Faculty of Translation Studies, Linguistics, and Cultural Studies of Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz. Since 2008 he has undertaken several research trips along the Central Asian, Chinese, and Iranian sections of the Silk Road and has made a special study of Chinese wine culture. His book Bernsteinglanz und Perlen des Schwarzen Drachen: Die Geschichte der chinesischen Weinkultur [Amber Shine and Black Dragon Pearls: The History of Chinese Wine Culture] provides a comprehensive interdisciplinary analysis of the role played by wine and alcohol in Chinese culture. It takes into account all the various related aspects - the archaeological, anthropological, historical, ethnographic, sociological, literary, artistic, linguistic, and culinary factors. The book illuminates the history of wine and alcoholic drinks in China through the various epochs down to the present day. Its publication was supported by funding provided by the German Research Foundation (DFG).

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This story has been published on: 2020-04-15. To contact the author, please use the contact details within the article.
In a letter to five Democratic senators, Alphabet's Verily explained how it would protect data collected by its coronavirus screening website and defended its decision to require users sign in with a Google account to gain full access.

The Baseline Covid-19 website made a big splash in mid-March when President Donald Trump announced project at a press briefing that reportedly caught the Google sibling company off-guard. The idea for the site was to screen people for symptoms of the virus and direct them to nearby testing locations if they appeared to be a candidate. So far, the site has rolled out at a smaller scale initially than Trump originally suggested, having launched only in California. Verily is Alphabet's life sciences company, which is run separately from Google.

The project drew swift criticism and concern after its announcement, especially over the site's requirement that users have a Google account to access the full suite of tools. In late March, Sens. Bob Menendez, D-N.J., Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio, Cory Booker, D-N.J., Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn. and Kamala Harris, D-Calif., asked Verily CEO Andrew Conrad to answer questions on its commitments to user privacy. The same group of senators earlier questioned both Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai and Vice President Mike Pence about whether they'd considered the implications of such a project, and asked about Google's other work in the healthcare space.

Responding to senators in an April 10 letter, Conrad said the company would not use data collected through the Baseline Covid-19 website for commercial purposes or any uses not described in the project. He also said the company would not sell any data collected through the site to third parties and that the project would adhere to the standards of the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) in other states that don't have "comparable" frameworks. The letter was made public Tuesday night.

But Conrad defended Verily's decision to make visitors to the site sign in through a Google account, saying the accounts are used to authenticate users. He wrote that coming up with an alternative method would have risked compromising users' security.

The company gave no indication it would expand authorization options later on, saying it "does not currently intend to provide a different mechanism for authentication" on the site. Verily said it recently created a screening tool that does not require authentication and is based on guidelines from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). That version of the tool, however, does not give users access to a secure test results portal or updates on changing testing criteria.

Verily said it has no way to determine whether visitors to the site did not proceed with the screening because they didn't have a Google account.

Menendez said in a statement he was pleased to get a "firm commitment" from the company on its data protection standards but said he was still "concerned" Verily would not quantify how many people could not participate in the screening because they did not have a Google account.

"If Verily is seriously considering expanding these sites to other states  or nationally  my hope is that they address this question and provide an alternate authentication method to ensure that anyone interested in accessing a testing site can use the program," Menendez said.

Conrad would not provide a timeline to senators for the broader roll-out of the project, which has so far only launched in parts of California. As of the morning of April 9, Verily said, nearly 15,000 of the 68,000 people who completed the screening were eligible to be tested. More than 7,300 of those people were tested for the virus, according to Verily.

Conrad wrote that Verily was "in final discussions with entities that will operate in other states."

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Jesus said to him, Away from me, Satan! For it is written: Worship the Lord your God and serve him only (Matthew 4:10). This was Christs response to Satan after his third temptation in the wilderness.

Satan must have known Christ would not sin, and yet he tried to tempt Him anyway. Why bother? And why is this episode included in the New Testament since Satans attempts were useless?

The Three Temptations

Christ had not eaten for 40 days and nights. He had retreated to the wilderness to be with the Father and to pray after his cousin, John, baptized Him. At His weakest point, Satan tried to break the Savior. He urged Jesus to do three things:

1. Turn stones into bread (Matthew 4:3)

2. Jump from the pinnacle of the temple so the angels could save Him (Matthew 4:6)

3. Bow down and worship the devil in exchange for power (Matthew 4:8-9)

Satan kept upping the ante, as though he believed Jesus was only waiting for the right temptation; the best offer. Christ resisted all of these temptations because it was impossible for Jesus to sin. The Son was wholly obedient to the Father. Jesus used the Word of God against Satan to clarify that God alone is God.

Satans Purpose

One writer says that, as Satan tried to lure Christ away from Gods side, he believes he will prevail. His goal is to somehow kill Jesus and thereby enjoy victory over God, vengeance perhaps for being thrown into the fiery pit of Hell with his fellow conspirators following their rebellion. Since Jesus was fully God and fully man, able to sympathize with the reality of temptation to men, Satan must have believed He would succumb to the desires of the flesh.

Romans 8 says that those who live according to the flesh have their minds set on what the flesh desires; but those who live in accordance with the Spirit have their minds set on what the Spirit desires. Immanuel was sent in the likeness of sinful flesh but did not set His mind on earthly desires.

At Jesus baptism, the heavens were opened to him and he saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove and coming to rest on him (Matthew 3:16). Christ lived by the Spirit, so Satan could not tempt His flesh.

Gods Purpose

What is the reader meant to do with Satans futility? And how can one live up to the sinlessness of Christ when we know that if we were put under this much pressure, we would probably yield to it? The purpose is not to make us feel small, but to empower and educate the reader as to how he or she can resist temptation.

James 4:7 says that the power to resist the Devil is ours if we do what Christ did: submit to the Lord. Christ is our model: turn the Word against the evil one and worship God. Every word of the Bible is God-breathed and useful for teaching (2 Timothy 3:16).

This episode took place because God allowed it and we can use it to learn how to stand firm against the Devil, just as God permitted Satan to tempt Job and Job worshiped the Lord. Satan tempted Job by taking everything from Him, but Christs temptations were the opposite. The Devil tempted Gods Son to be obedient elsewhere; to derive power from and forego the coming trials at Satans side.

The Almighty wanted to demonstrate how far Satan would go and what is at stake for us as believers because Satan targets the same areas in the lives of Christians today. Believers are more likely to sin when faced with hunger or fatigue.

Christians still wrestle with doubt (will God really save me?) and pride (the desire for power). As Jesus waits for God to minister to His body, He trusts the Fathers plan for eternity and submits to the Lord. As heirs of Christ, we can do it too. The serpent fails.

Straight Path in the Wilderness

Matthew 4:1-11 reminds Christians to expect and endure evil without giving in; but also shows us how to resist by using the very words of God. Even Christ quoted Scripture as His defense, rather than coming up with some new wisdom. In his farewell to the Ephesian elders, Paul said I commit you to God and to the word of his grace, which can build you up and give you an inheritance among all those who are sanctified (Acts 20:32).

Christ is the Word by which believers receive the inheritance of God; the grace which is our salvation and our stronghold. John 1:1 says, In the beginning was the word, and the word was with God, and the word was God. In this encounter with Satan, Christ essentially protects Himself with  Himself; the truth of who He is: the unchangeable I AM.

Twisted Truth

Christ responded to Satan with the truth and was the first to quote scripture in His encounter with Satan, always beginning It is written. Today, Satan twists Scripture to confuse and fool us which is why we must know the Bible.

We utilize the Word of God, sharper than any double-edged sword (Hebrews 4:12), and thereby invoke the power of Christ for our defense. Satan takes his cue from our Lords words. Once he understands Jesus defense, He seeks to twist our Lords trust in the Father. Satan tries some subtle twisting of Gods word, and perhaps the adversary felt certain he could overthrow our Lord even on biblical grounds!

Of course, Christ has the advantage. He knows the Word; He is the Word, but memorizing the Bible is not enough: we must come to grips with what God means to say and who He is. Not only the word but the speaker matters. Even non-Christians use Bible verses out of context, adopting them as devices to mold truth to their purposes and desires.

The Son hangs on every word of God. [...] Every word. Not a few words. Not the words particularly easy to accept. What a shallow and short-lived victory that would have been: to be manipulated by Satan into taking Scripture out of context. Those who are hostile to God do not submit to Gods law (Romans 8:7).

Jesus did not turn the stone into bread because God had said: man does not live on bread alone but on every word that comes from the mouth of the Lord (Deuteronomy 8:3). He did not jump from the top of the temple because Gods people do not put the Lord [their] God to the test. (Deuteronomy 6:16).

Christ did not bow down to Satan in exchange for power because Satan had no power to bestow: Fear the LORD your God, serve him only (Deuteronomy 6:13). Jesus did not need new words; the Father had spoken sufficiently in the law He gave to Israel when they were in the wilderness. Deuteronomy literally means Words in Hebrew.

Self-Defense Classes

Out of context, the Lords words seem lifeless, powerless. But Christ always knew what the Father meant by what He said. He did not read the Word to get something out of it for Himself. Jesus read the word in order to trust God, not test God. Give careful attention to proper interpretation and hide Gods word in your heart so you can live by it.

This is our shield and our sword. Christ has shown us by way of His own experience with Satans temptations, at a time when He was weakened by hunger and thirst and isolation, how to defend ourselves when we are weak.

iStock/Getty Images Plus/rudall30

Candice Lucey is a freelance writer from British Columbia, Canada, where she lives with her family. Find out more about her here.
The "Europe Immunochemistry Market to 2027 Regional Analysis and Forecasts by Application; Product; End User, and Country" report has been added to ResearchAndMarkets.com's offering.

The Europe immunochemistry market is expected to reach US $775.97 Mn in 2027 from US $430.82 Mn in 2018. The market is estimated to grow with a CAGR of 6.9% from 2019-2027.

The growth of the immunochemistry market is primarily attributed to the significantly increasing prevalence of cardiovascular diseases and rising incidence of diabetes in the region. However, shortage of skilled professionals is likely to have a negative impact on market growth. On the other hand, rising healthcare expenditure in Europe is likely to have a positive impact on the growth of the Europe immunochemistry market in the coming years.

The growth of the immunochemistry market is primarily attributed to the significantly increased prevalence of cardiovascular diseases and the rising incidence of diabetes in the region. However, a shortage of skilled professionals is likely to have a negative impact on market growth. On the other hand, rising healthcare expenditure in Europe is expected to have a positive impact on the growth of the European immunochemistry market in the coming years.

As per the data estimated by the European Cardiovascular Disease Statistics 2017, cardiovascular disease (CVD) causes 3.9 million deaths and more than 1.8 million deaths in Europe every year. The CVD accounts for 45.0% of all deaths in Europe and 37.0% of all deaths in the EU. CVD is the primary reason for the death of men and women in all countries. Furthermore, as per the American Heart Association (AHA) 2019 statistics, 121.5 million adults in the U.S. which are around half of the US adult population, suffer from cardiovascular disease.

Reasons to Buy

Save and reduce time carrying out entry-level research by identifying the growth, size, leading players and segments in the Europe immunochemistry market.

Highlights key business priorities in order to assist companies to realign their business strategies.

The key findings and recommendations highlight crucial progressive industry trends in the Europe immunochemistry market, thereby allowing players across the value chain to develop effective long-term strategies.

Develop/modify business expansion plans by using substantial growth offering developed and emerging markets.

Scrutinize in-depth regional market trends and outlook coupled with the factors driving the market, as well as those hindering it.

Enhance the decision-making process by understanding the strategies that underpin security interest with respect to client products, segmentation, pricing and distribution.



Key Topics Covered:

1. Introduction

2. Europe Immunochemistry Market- Key Takeaways

3. Research Methodology

4. Europe Immunochemistry Market Market Landscape

4.1 Overview

4.2 Market Segmentation

4.2.1 Europe Immunochemistry Market By Product

4.2.2 Europe Immunochemistry Market By Application

4.2.3 Europe Immunochemistry Market By End User

4.2.4 Europe Immunochemistry Market By Country

4.3 PEST Analysis

5. Europe Immunochemistry Market Key Market Dynamics

5.1 Key Market Drivers

5.1.1 Significantly Increasing Prevalence of Cardiovascular Diseases

5.1.2 Rising Incidence of Diabetes

5.2 Key Market Restraints

5.2.1 Shortage of Skilled Professionals

5.3 Key Market Opportunities

5.3.1 Rising Healthcare Expenditure in Europe

5.4 Future Trends

5.4.1 Rising Future Conferences and Workshops

5.5 Impact Analysis

6. Immunochemistry Market Europe Analysis

6.1 Europe Immunochemistry Market Revenue Forecasts And Analysis

6.2 Performance of Key Players

7. Europe Immunochemistry Market Analysis By Application

7.1 Overview

7.2 Europe Immunochemistry Market, By Application, 2018 2027 (%)

7.3 Europe Immunohistochemistry Market Revenue And Forecasts to 2027, By Application (US$ Mn)

7.4 Diagnostics

7.5 Drug Testing

8. Europe Immunochemistry Market Analysis By Product

8.1 Overview

8.2 Europe Immunochemistry Market, By Product, 2018 2027 (%)

8.3 Europe Immunohistochemistry Market Revenue And Forecasts to 2027, By Product (US$ Mn)

8.4 Antibodies Market

8.5 Equipment

8.6 Reagents

8.7 Kits

9. Europe Immunochemistry Market Analysis By End User

9.1 Overview

9.2 Europe Immunochemistry Market, By End User, 2018 2027 (%)

9.3 Europe Immunohistochemistry Market Revenue And Forecasts to 2027, By End User (US$ Mn)

9.4 Hospital Diagnostic Laboratories

9.5 Research Institutes

9.6 Others End Users

10. Europe Immunochemistry Market Revenue and Forecasts To 2027

11. Immunochemistry Market Industry Landscape

11.1 Overview

11.2 Growth Strategies done by the companies in the Market, 2018 (%)

11.3 Organic Developments

11.3.1 Overview

11.4 Inorganic developments

11.4.1 Overview

12. Immunohistochemistry Market-Key Company Profiles

12.1 Bio SB

12.1.1 Key Facts

12.1.2 Business Description

12.1.3 Financial Overview

12.1.4 Product portfolio

12.1.5 SWOT Analysis

12.1.6 Key Developments

12.2 Cell Signaling Technology, Inc.

12.3 F. Hoffmann-La Roche Ltd.

12.4 Merck KGaA

12.5 PerkinElmer, Inc.

12.6 Thermo Fisher Scientific, Inc.

12.7 Abcam Plc.

12.8 Agilent Technologies, Inc.

12.9 Bio-Rad Laboratories, Inc.

12.10 Danaher

13. Appendix

13.1 About the Publisher

13.2 Glossary Of Terms

For more information about this report visit https://www.researchandmarkets.com/r/sca8xj

Research and Markets also offers Custom Research services providing focused, comprehensive and tailored research.

View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20200414006103/en/

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15.04.2020 LISTEN

Some residents sharing a wall with the hotel where the eight ladies who tested positive for the Coronavirus are being quarantined in Tamale have called for their evacuation from the area.

The residents want them to be sent to an infectious disease treatment centre established at the Tamale Teaching Hospital (TTH).

According to the residents, it has been three weeks since the eight Guinean ladies were quarantined in the hotel, situated in the residential area, thereby putting the lives of those living close to the hotel at risk.

They added that the Guinean ladies have exceeded the 14 days mandatory quarantine after testing positive for the COVID-19, but they are still being kept in the hotel.

They also complained of being stigmatised as a result of their proximity to the hotel hosting them.

Appeal

Hajia Fati Alhassan, who said she share a wall with the hotel where the Guinean COVID-19 patients are being quarantined claimed they cannot moved freely in the area and their other relatives and friends have stopped visiting them.

"I am leaving here with my grandchildren and these children cannot go out in the compound to play because of the presence of these COVID-19 patients in the hotel I share a wall with," she stated

Hajia Fati stated further that nobody, including the COVID-19 regional team, was telling them anything in relation to the status of the Guinean ladies who are in quarantine in the hotel.

"We are also being stigmatised by other residents and recently one of my grandchildren who went to buy porridge was asked by the porridge seller not to come closer to her because his house was nearer to where the COVID-19 Guinean patients are being quarantined and therefore might infect her with virus," she said.

Awudu Nashirudeen, who also share a wall with the hotel also expressed concerns about the continued presence of the Guineans in the hotel since they have been kept there for about three weeks now.

"Nobody is telling us anything and those of us who lived closer to the hotel are scared and cannot move freely," he said.

"Our appeal to the authorities including the Northern Regional Minister and the Tamale Metropolitan Chief Executive is to evacuate them from the hotel as they have exceeded the 14 days mandatory quarantine to the treatment centre at the TTH," he stated .

"Since the lady escaped from quarantine they have brought soldiers and policemen to my compound to guard the area," he said, adding "The current situation is scary and we do not know what to do as we also have children living with us hear."

Another resident, Hajia Isha Frimpong, said other residents have informed their friends that they were staying with the Guinean COVID-19 patients and therefore those who knew them have started shunning their company and also pointing fingers at them.

"I am therefore adding my voice to the appeal for the Guinean COVID-19 patients to be evacuated from the hotel where they are being quarantined to the treatment centre to put residents who live close by the hotel at ease as we live in fear now of being infected and stigmatised," she stated.

Background

Eight Guineans and two Burkinabes who arrived in Tamale on March 24,2020 tested positive for the COVID-19 and are being quarantined in a hotel in Tamale. However one of them escaped from the hotel but was later arrested in Accra.

Authorities

Efforts by this reporter to reach the Northern Regional Minister, Mr Salifu Saeed and the Mayor of Tamale with the concerns raised by the residents proved futile.

---graphic.com.gh
It has emerged that the two Nigeriens who tested positive and refused to undergo care at the Ga East Municipal Hospital on Monday, attempted to leave the facility without authorization.

The two also threatened staff with a sharp object, stressing that they will not stay at the facility.

According to the medical superintendent of the hospital, Dr. Ebenezer Oduro Mensah, it took security personnel about three hours to subdue the two persons and have them returned to police custody where they were brought from.

Narrating the development on Eyewitness News, Dr. Oduro Mensah said the hospital, which is the national treatment centre for COVID-19 received the two Nigeriens on Monday morning and gave them a place to stay but later in the day, they managed to leave their holding area to the car park on the compound in an attempt to leave the facility.

We received them as we receive all other clients and gave them a bed to make them comfortable where they were[But] somewhere around 3 pm, I was informed by my staff that they had picked up their luggage and were attempting to leave, he said.

Eventually, they left the holding area and moved to the staff car park threatening to leave [the hospital] We called on the onsite police officers to intervene but hey indicated that we had to call for further help It took about 3 hours or more for them to be subdued and sent to police custody, he added.

Dr. Oduro Mensah said the behaviour of the two Nigeriens show that they will be a threat to other patients and medical facility if kept there hence the decision to have them kept in police custody.

We realized by the nature of their behaviour that they were going to pose a threat to both patients and staff on duty One of them kept insisting that he wanted to leave and that he wasnt prepared to stay there. He kept saying he was well and he didnt think he is sick and so doesnt see why he should stay there, he noted.

The two Nigeriens who are asymptomatic and were only to be observed for a period at the hospital are now in the custody of the Accra Regional Police.

Meanwhile, the Regional Director of Police Operations, ACP Kwesi Ofori says the Police Hospital is working with the Ministry of Health to take full responsibility of the two persons.

Arrest of Nigeriens

The two Nigeriens were arrested on April 5, 2020 when a taxi they were in was stopped by police enforcing the lockdown directive.

The two could not give tangible reasons for their movement, sparking suspicion hence their arrest.

Further investigations by police triggered a medical test on them at the Ridge Hospital whose result came back on April 13, 2020.

Citi News' Umaru Sanda Amadu reported that, On April 5, they [Police] found them moving with a taxi driver. The police noticed that there were inconsistencies in their answers. When asked where they were coming from, they said they came from Niger and had their luggage on them. The police took them into custody and then to the Police hospital and eventually to the Ridge Hospital where they had their samples taken.

--citinewsroom
A team of retirees that scours the remote ravines and windswept plains of the Pacific Northwest for long-forgotten pioneer orchards has rediscovered 10 apple varieties that were believed to be extinct, but they may not be able to sell them on due to the coronavirus pandemic.

EJ Brandt and David Benscoter, the Vietnam veteran and former FBI agent who make up the nonprofit Lost Apple Project, recently learned they'd unearthed their largest number ever in a single season after they sent their finds to Temperate Orchard Conservancy in Oregon, where all the apples are sent for study and identification.

The apples positively identified as previously 'lost' were among hundreds of fruits collected in October and November from 140-year-old orchards tucked into small canyons or hidden in forests that have since grown up around them in rural Idaho and Washington state.

However their nonprofit took a major hit when they had to cancel both an annual fair where they sell newly grafted 'lost' apple trees and a class on how to graft wood to grow a new apple tree because of the coronavirus outbreak.

The two events fund much of their $10,000 annual budget that goes toward travel costs, apple shipping and apple identification.

In this October 28, 2019, photo, amateur botanist David Benscoter, of the Lost Apple Project, sits near an apple picking pole as he studies his notes while collecting apples in an orchard at a remote homestead near Pullman, Washington. Benscoter and fellow amateur botanist EJ Brandt recently learned that their work in the fall of 2019 has led to the rediscovery of 10 apple varieties in the Pacific Northwest that were planted by long-ago pioneers and had been thought extinct

Milalfyi (left) was found in Pullman, Washington. Gold Ridge (right) was found in Pomeroy, Washington

10 NEW LOST APPLE PROJECT DISCOVERIES Streaked Pippin Found: Waitsburg, Washington Gold Ridge Found: Pomeroy, Washington Sary Sinap (ancient apple from Turkey) Found: Latah County, Idaho Butter Sweet (of Pennsylvania) Found: Latah County, Idaho Colman Found: Latah County, Idaho Claribel Found: Latah County, Idaho Milalfyi Found: Pullman, Washington Nelson Sweet Found: Seattle, Washington Fink Found: Boise, Idaho Advertisement

'Two months ago, I was thinking: "This is going to be great. We've got 10 varieties that have been rediscovered," but .... right now, we couldn't pay our bills,' Benscoter said.

Still, the self-described apple detectives take comfort in their work as they navigate todays unprecedented times and find inspiration in imagining the lives of the pioneers who planted these trees. About 25% of homesteads didn't make it, Brandt said, and many settlers died or simply walked away to avoid starvation.

'It was a hard life. I cant even imagine what they went through, but they survived and they went on with their lives,' he said. 'It's hard now, too, but it's going to be OK. It's all a part of life.'

Each fall, Brandt and Benscoter spend countless hours and log hundreds of miles searching for ancient - and often dying - apple trees across the Pacific Northwest by truck, all-terrain vehicle and on foot. They collect hundreds of apples from long-abandoned orchards that they find using old maps, county fair records, newspaper clippings and nursery sales ledgers that can tell them which homesteader bought what apple tree and when the purchase happened.

By matching names from those records with property maps, they can pinpoint where an orchard might have been - and they often find a few specimens still growing there. The pair carefully note the location of each tree using GPS and tag the tree with a plastic band before bagging the apples in zip-close bags and shipping them to the Oregon experts for identification.

'When I find an apple thats lost, I want to know who homesteaded it, when they were there, who their children were, when they took their last drink of water,' Brandt said. 'We cannot afford to lose the name of even one of these landowners.'

In this October 28, 2019, photo, apples collected by amateur botanist David Benscoter, of the Lost Apple Project, rest next to his field notes and an apple picking pole in an orchard at a remote homestead near Pullman, Washington

In this October 29, 2019 photo, amateur botanist EJ Brandt of the Lost Apple Project examines apples he picked from a tree in an orchard near Troy, Idaho

In the winter, they return to the trees - often on foot or on snowshoes in freezing temperatures and blinding snow - to take wood cuttings that can be grafted onto root stock to propagate new trees of the varieties that come back as 'lost' specimens.

The task is huge. North America once had 17,000 named varieties of domesticated apples, but only about 4,500 are known to exist today. The Lost Apple Project believes settlers planted a few hundred varieties in their corner of the Pacific Northwest alone as they moved across the U. S. West to try their hands at the pioneer life.

These newcomers planted orchards with enough variety to get them through the long winter, with apples that ripened from early spring until the first frosts. Many were brought with the settlers in buckets from their homes on the East Coast and in the Midwest. Then, as now, trees planted for eating apples were not raised from seeds; cuttings taken from existing trees were grafted onto a generic root stock and raised to maturity. These cloned trees remove the genetic variation that often makes 'wild' apples inedible.

With the 10 latest varieties identified, Brandt and Benscoter have rediscovered a total of 23 varieties.

The latest finds include the Sary Sinap, an ancient apple from Turkey; the Streaked Pippin, which may have originated as early as 1744 in New York; and the Butter Sweet of Pennsylvania, a variety that was first noted in a trial orchard in Illinois in 1901.

In this October 23, 2019, photo, apples collected by amateur botanists David Benscoter and EJ Brandt of the Lost Apple Project, rest on the ground in an orchard at an abandoned homestead near Genesee, Idaho

In this October 23, 2019, photo, amateur botanist David Benscoter, of the Lost Apple Project, works in an orchard at an abandoned homestead near Genesee, Idaho

Botanists from the Temperate Orchard Society identified them by comparing the collected apples to watercolor illustrations created by the U.S. Department of Agriculture in the 1800s and early 1900s and by poring over written descriptions in old botany textbooks and reference guides, some of them more than 150 years old.

One apple, the Gold Ridge, was particularly hard to identify because the experts couldn't find any illustrations or descriptions of it anywhere. Finally, botanist Joanie Cooper went page by page through a reference book written by a botanist who died in 1912 until she found it.

'It's the luck of the draw,' said Shaun Shepherd, another Temperate Orchard Conservancy botanist. 'And we learn more as we go along.'

With spring underway, the Lost Apple Project will soon enter its busy season as apple trees everywhere blossom and prepare to fruit. As they wait, Brandt and Benscoter are busy grafting wood cuttings from the newly discovered 'lost' apple trees onto root stocks and updating their records from the last season.

'It was just one heck of a season. It was almost unbelievable. If we had found one apple or two apples a year in the past, we thought were were doing good. But we were getting one after another after another,' said EJ Brandt. 'I dont know how we're going to keep up with that.'

Pictured is a third of the baby trees EJ Brandt and David Benscoter have been grafting. The county fair that could have helped them raised $10,000 has been canceled due to the COVID-19 pandemic
Republicans in the Senate said the bill would align Pennsylvania's standards with other states while requiring companies to provide proper safety measures. 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  Gov. Tom Wolf will veto a bill that would have allowed a significant number of businesses across the state to reopen, which Republicans passed despite the states top health official warning the move would put more lives at risk.

GOP lawmakers do not have enough votes to override his veto.

As the administration has stated many times, irresponsibly going against the direction of the secretary of health and reopening businesses too early will only extend the length of the economic hardships created by the pandemic, Wolf spokesperson Lyndsay Kensinger said in an email.

The legislation, which garnered final approval from the Senate along party lines, would have redefined essential businesses and provided a road map for employers to reopen as long as they took certain safety precautions as defined by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Those changes would allow most construction projects to proceed, and companies that did not receive a waiver but fall under federal Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency guidelines, to reopen.

Democrats decried the legislation as premature and unsafe, since the state lacks adequate testing and personal protective equipment for front-line workers. The bill also runs counter to state and federal health experts who say a number of safety measures  including greatly increased testing and contact tracing  must be in place before a reopening.

There is not a robust system for either of those things in Pennsylvania.

In March, Wolf closed all but life-sustaining businesses as the coronavirus spread across the state, shutting down a large swath of the economy. In response to initial criticism, the administration opened a waiver process for businesses not considered essential. Those decisions, however, were made in secret and have been criticized as inconsistent and unfair.

The Republican majority as well as some Democrats have grown frustrated with that waiver process, in part because of claims that it has allowed big-box stores to remain open while forcing small businesses with to shutter.

Senate Majority Leader Jake Corman (R., Centre) cited the waiver process and the administrations refusal to release information about how those waivers were granted or denied, and who received them, as motivation for passing the measure.

This process has failed, Corman said. It has not been transparent or consistent. What were trying to accomplish is to set a standard, a nationally recognized health standard, about what can be open and what cannot be open.

In a letter to the legislature sent last week, Secretary of Health Rachel Levine advised lawmakers against broadening guidelines for what constitutes an essential business, and said it would have a devastating impact on public health in the state.

Encouraging increased social movement of Pennsylvanians at this time by reopening a significant amount of businesses would be reckless and irresponsible, Levine said in the letter. The decision to shutter non-life sustaining businesses that support families across this commonwealth was a painful one, but before we can save livelihoods we must save lives.

The House passed the bill Tuesday mostly along party lines, with Democratic members attempting to add personal protective equipment, hazard pay, and workers compensation amendments, which a Republican leader said would be taken up in subsequent bills.

The Senate on Wednesday also passed a bill that would create a cost and recovery task force made up of members from each branch of government. Republican lawmakers amended the legislation to allow each county to create its own plan to reopen local economies, meaning the bill needs to return to the House. Democrats opposed the plan.

Senate Minority Leader Jay Costa (D., Allegheny) said the state is not yet prepared to handle the surge of COVID-19 cases that could arrive if businesses begin to open.

These decisions should be made by health professionals, not by county executives, he said. It is not safe to reopen businesses when we do not have widespread testing" or personal protective equipment.

The passage of the legislation illustrates a growing divide on how the state should respond to the coronavirus pandemic.

Republicans say they are attempting to clean up what they see as a flawed waiver process while protecting public health and the economy at the same time. Democrats see these efforts to reopen businesses  against Levine and other health experts advice  as premature and fear they will end up endangering workers who will be forced to go back to work.

Wolf this week joined a coalition of East Coast governors in forming a pact to determine how to safely reopen the states economies. On Wednesday, he defended his decision-making on closures and the waiver process.

Unlike other states in the nation, were not just handing out a list and saying, this is the way it is, he said during a daily briefing. Were trying to do everything we can to make sure that we are keeping Pennsylvanians safe. Were doing that by staying home and making sure the businesses that remain open are absolutely essential.

100% ESSENTIAL: Spotlight PA provides its journalism at no cost to newsrooms across the state as a public good to keep our communities informed and thriving. If you value this service, please give a gift today at spotlightpa.org/donate.
[April 15, 2020] BlackRock Raises US$5.1 Billion for Global Energy & Power Infrastructure Fund III, Third Global Energy & Power Infrastructure Fund

BlackRock's Global Energy & Power Infrastructure Fund ('GEPIF') has achieved a US$5.1 billion final close of Global Energy & Power Infrastructure Fund III ('GEPIF III' or 'the Fund'), making it the largest alternative investment fundraise in BlackRock history. The final close value also exceeded both the original Fund target of US$3.5 billion and the original hard cap of US$4.5 billion. "This milestone is a testament to BlackRock's focus on helping clients achieve better investment outcomes," said Edwin Conway, Global Head of BlackRock Alternative Investors. "Investors are looking to build resilience into their portfolios and ballast against equity market shocks by increasing their allocations to less correlated exposures in private markets. The current market volatility has underscored the value of our commitment to delivering solutions that can help our clients match their long-term liabilities and support their beneficiaries. Investor demand for this fundraise reinforces our belief that infrastructure will play an increasingly important role in portfolio construction moving forward." The Fund's commitments include investment mandates from over 50 institutional investors, including public and private pension funds, sovereign wealth funds, foundations, insurance companies and non-profit organizations across the U.S., Europe, Asia and the Middle East. Over 70% of the commitments are from investors in the prior fund, which reflects investors' high-level of confidence and trust in the GEPIF team and its expertise in the space. Building on the investment strategy of its predecessor funds, GEPIF III aims to generate strong uncorrelated returns from investments in high-quality and essential energy infrastructure businesses and assets. These companies will generally have long-term contracts and visible revenue streams from strong counterparties and seek to provide robust dividend yields to investors. The investments are diversified geographically and by energy sub-sectors, which primarily consist of: 1) the power sector, including electric power generated from renewable sources (solar, wind, hydro and waste-to-energy) and from natural gas, while excluding coal-generated power, 2) the midstream sector, including energy transportation and storage, and 3) the utility sector. Mark Florian, Head of the Global Energy & Power Infrastructure team within BlackRock Real Assets, said: "The success of the fundraise reflects the search for diversified returns in a yield-starved environment, which continues to be front of mind for investors. Our strong off-market sourcing capabilities are differentiated by a disciplined investment approach focused on creating an optimized risk-adjusted return for our investors and a tailored solution for our partners and their customers. This philosophy has led to strong investment deployment and origination that includes multiple repeat partnerships with great companies, and we believe this strategy will continue to create many investment opportunities for our Funds." BlackRock Alternative Investors is designed to serve investors today and tomorrow as they seek outperformance in real estate, infrastructure, private equity, credit, hedge funds and alternative solutions. We strive to bring our investors the highest quality investments by drawing upon our global footprint, superior execution capabilities and position as a preferred partner. About BlackRock BlackRock's purpose is to help more and more people experience financial well-being. As a fiduciary to investors and a leading provider of financial technology, our clients turn to us for the solutions they need when planning for their most important goals. As of December 31, 2019, the firm managed approximately US$7.43 trillion in assets on behalf of investors worldwide. For additional information on BlackRock, please visit www.blackrock.com/corporate. About BlackRock Real Assets In today's dynamic and complex global investing market, we seek to help our clients' access real assets that could help meet their investment goals by providing a distinct range of well defined, utcome orientated strategies, along the investment risk - return spectrum.



Our dedicated teams of industry and sector specialists deliver global reach, with deep local expertise. They have decades of relevant experience, are deeply embedded in their operating industries by sector and geography and have developed strong partnership networks over time. BlackRock's culture of risk management, knowledge sharing, and investment discipline sets us apart and underpins all that we do. With over 400 professionals in 27 offices managing over US$50 billion in client commitments as of December 31, 2019, BlackRock Real Assets partners with clients to provide solutions tailored to individual portfolio needs such as income, growth, liquid or balanced real assets outcomes. Important Information

This communication is for journalists. It is not for publication. It has been provided for information purposes only and does not constitute a financial promotion, marketing communication or an offer or invitation to anyone to invest in any BlackRock funds and has not been prepared in connection with any such offer. Accordingly, this material does not constitute an offer or solicitation by anyone in any jurisdiction in which such offer or solicitation is not lawful or in which the person making such offer or solicitation is not qualified to do so or to anyone to whom it is unlawful to make such offer or solicitation. It is your responsibility to be aware of the applicable laws and regulations of your country of residence. This information is confidential and was prepared solely for the named recipient. It may not be used or published without the prior consent of BlackRock. Valuation risk

The Fund will be exposed to securities and other assets that will not have readily assessable market values. The valuation of such securities and other assets is inherently subjective and subject to increased risk that the information utilised to value such assets or to create the price models may be inaccurate or subject to other error. Due to a wide variety of market factors and the nature of the securities and assets to which the Fund will be exposed, there is no guarantee that any value determined will represent the value that will be realised on the eventual disposition of the Fund's investments or that would, in fact, be realised upon an immediate disposition of such investment. Concentration Risk

Investment risk is concentrated in specific sectors, countries, currencies or companies or because the Fund has only a small number of investments. This means the Fund is more sensitive to any localised economic, market, political or regulatory events. Concentrated investment exposure by the Fund could magnify the other risks to which the Fund is exposed. Redemption risk

The Fund's investments are generally illiquid and therefore an investment in the Fund is intended for long-term investors able to accept the risks associated with an illiquid investment and who are able to commit their funds for the duration of the Fund Redemptions, to the extent they are permitted, may be limited, postponed or altogether suspended in certain circumstances. Lack of available investments

The Fund will be competing for exposure to investments in a highly competitive market, against other funds, as well as individuals, financial institutions, strategic players and other investors, some of which may have greater resources than the Investment Manager. There can be no assurance that the Fund will be able to locate, attain and exit investments that satisfy its investment objectives, or that the Fund will be able to fully invest its committed capital. Restriction on Withdrawal

The Fund is not intended to be a short-term investment and has no certainty of returns. Commitments to the Fund are generally not transferable or redeemable and Investors will be committed to the Fund for its duration and may not be able to withdraw from their participation prior to the expiry of the Fund. Risks associated with ownership and operation of real estate assets

The Fund may be exposed to risk of loss arising from, or relating, to the ownership, operation or management of any real estate in which it has an interest. Although the Fund seeks to mitigate these risks through the diligence process and otherwise, there can be no assurance that it will be able to avoid or effectively mitigate any such risks, which could have a material adverse effect on the Fund's returns. Issued by BlackRock Investment Management (UK) Limited, authorised and regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority. Registered office: 12 Throgmorton Avenue, London, EC2N 2DL. Tel: 020 7743 3000. Registered in England No. 2020394. For your protection telephone calls are usually recorded. BlackRock is a trading name of BlackRock Investment Management (UK) Limited. Issued in the EEA by BlackRock (Netherlands) BV: Amstelplein 1, 1096 HA, Amsterdam, Tel: 020 - 549 5200, Trade Register No. 17068311. For more information, please see the website: www.blackrock.nl. For your protection telephone calls are usually recorded. BlackRock is a trading name of BlackRock (Netherlands) BV. In Canada, for Permitted Clients only.  2020 BlackRock, Inc. All Rights reserved. BLACKROCK, BLACKROCK SOLUTIONS, iSHARES, BUILD ON (News - Alert) BLACKROCK, SO WHAT DO I DO WITH MY MONEY are registered and unregistered trademarks of BlackRock, Inc. or its subsidiaries in the United States and elsewhere. All other trademarks are those of their respective owners. For distribution in the European Economic Area (EEA) This material has been created for use by prospective Professional Investors in the Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, Malta, Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Spain, Sweden. As at the date of this document, the Fund has been notified, registered or approved (as the case may be and howsoever described) in accordance with the local law/regulations implementing the AIFMD for marketing to professional investors into the above-mentioned member state(s) of the EEA (each a "Member State"). For Investors in the UK: In the UK this document is directed only at persons who are professional clients or eligible counterparties for the purposes of the Financial Conduct Authority's Conduct of Business Sourcebook. The opportunity to invest in the Fund is only available to such persons in the UK and this document must not be relied or acted upon by any other persons in the UK. For Investors in Switzerland: For Qualified Investors only. This document is marketing material. This document shall be exclusively made available to, and directed at, qualified investors as defined in the Swiss Collective Investment Schemes Act of 23 June 2006, as amended ("CISA"). The Global Energy & Power Infrastructure Fund III is domiciled in United States, Cayman Islands, and Luxembourg. The Fund has not been registered with the Swiss Financial Market Supervisory Authority (FINMA). Representative in Switzerland is BlackRock Asset Management Switzerland Limited, Bahnhofstrasse 39, CH-8001 Zurich and the Paying Agent in Switzerland is State Street Bank International GmbH, Munchen, Zweigniederlassung Zurich, Beethovenstrasse 19, CH -8002 Zurich. The Fund's confidential Private Placement Memorandum and/or any other offering materials and the annual and semi-annual reports, if applicable, of the Fund/s are available free of charge from the representative in Switzerland. Investors should read the fund specific risks in the Prospectus and any other offering material. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20200415005112/en/

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Source: Xinhua| 2020-04-15 16:45:25|Editor: xuxin

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BERLIN, April 15 (Xinhua) -- German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas on Wednesday criticized U.S. President Donald Trump's decision to halt funding to the World Health Organization (WHO).

"Blaming does not help. The virus knows no borders. We must cooperate closely against COVID-19," said Maas on his Twitter account. "One of the best investments is that the United Nations, especially the underfunded WHO, to strengthen, for example in the development and distribution of tests and vaccines."

Trump announced late Tuesday that he had instructed his administration to suspend funding for the WHO, which he accused of "severely mismanaging and covering up the spread of the coronavirus."
Syracuse, N.Y.  While Syracuses hospitals suffer historic financial losses, theyve seen a heartening bump in donations from the community, aimed at helping staff and patients.

The three major hospitals have raised nearly $200,000 to be used for things like child care for employees and virtual visitation for isolated patients.

The community support comes amid a financial crisis for local hospitals, which are suffering multi-million dollar losses. The donations are a drop in the bucket compared to the lost revenue, but have provided small relief to the front-line workers who need it most.

The Crouse Hospital Foundation has raised nearly $80,000 since mid-March for its COVID-19 Emergency Response Fund. That fund is being used to connect new parents to their babies in the neonatal intensive care unit, among other things.

The Upstate Foundation, the fund-raising arm for Upstate University Hospital, has raised more than $50,000 for a series of programs. That money will go to medical students facing new economic hardships, families of employees in need of services like day care, and virtual visitation  providing devices that let patients keep in touch with the world while visitors are barred from the hospital.

St. Josephs Health raised $50,000 just last week for a pair of new funds: the COVID-19 Medical Response Fund and COVID-19 Community Support Fund. The hospital is also raising money to support staff who are dealing with financial hardships.

On behalf of St. Josephs Health, we are so grateful for the outpouring support of our generous donors, said Vincent Kuss, vice president of development for St. Josephs. Our patients and colleagues are very fortunate to have such a generous donor base during this time of need.

Hospitals have seen other big displays of support in recent weeks.

A group of Chinese-Americans used overseas connections to collect and donate masks and other personal protective equipment to St. Josephs.

At Upstate, dozens of first responders turned out on several occasions to send off 44 nurses who volunteered to go to Long Island to work at a makeshift COVID-19 hospital. Police gave them an escort out of town.

Experts have said hospitals will likely need some type of stimulus money to avoid bankruptcy or closure as a result of the coronavirus pandemic. Thats especially true for smaller hospitals in more rural parts of the area.

In order to slow the spread of the coronavirus, hospitals have had to cancel all elective surgeries. Those procedures are where hospitals make money. Now, hospitals are dealing with far more empty beds than usual as they await a potential surge in COVID-19 cases, which officials hope to avoid.

As of Tuesday, there were 49 Onondaga County residents hospitalized with COVID-19. That number has been relatively flat since last week.

To cope with the losses, hospitals are making cuts. St. Josephs furloughed 500 employees last week. Thats more than 10% of the hospitals workforce. Crouse Hospital is losing around $300,000 a day and has sent home 154 workers without pay.

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The Soviet model of development had many drawbacks and ultimately proved unable to compete with the free economies of the West. However, even though the USSR allowed no free enterprise, free speech or a multi-party system, it still had some important advantages. In its foreign policy, Soviet Russia was guided by the principles of internationalism and equality of all races and nationalities. From its very outset, the Soviet Union actively supported anti-colonial movements, upholding the right of nations to self-determination, the development of their native languages and their cultural advancement. Even the principle of territorial autonomy that existed in the Soviet Union implied the right of each nation to preserve its own customs, language and cultural traditions.

It so happened that all of the USSRs friends and foes during the Second World War were colonial powers. The latter were the Axis countries: Italy, which had invaded Ethiopia, the last independent country in Africa; Japan, with its ruthless policy of robbery and violence in China and Korea, and Germany, hell-bent on getting back its colonies in Africa.

The former included England and France, the two largest colonial powers, which controlled almost all of the African continent and, along with the Soviet Union, fought the Nazis. However, the "Great European Powers" hard-won victory did eventually force them to reconsider their colonial policy. By the mid-1960s, Europeans, including those under the influence of the Soviet Union, had been forced to leave Africa and grant independence to their former colonies, many of which were getting assistance from the Soviet Union, often on an absolutely free-of-charge basis. The USSR had now its own zones of influence in Europe, where it established socialist regimes.

However, no country in the Soviet bloc had its national identity infringed upon, and its native language banned. They were all heavily subsidized by the Soviet Union and still, not one Soviet leader ever made any insulting statements about any nation. Unlike even Mahatma Gandhi, the liberator of India and a fighter against colonialism, who sometimes put his fellow Indians above the Africans.

After the Soviet breakup and Russias weakening however, neocolonialism reared its head. The concept of a new colonial policy pursued by a number of countries is more than just about economically strangling the Third World states; it also implies an ideological struggle. Since the start of this century, the blame for the outbreak of WWII has increasingly been put on the Soviet Union, and many freedom fighters in Africa are now declared "agents of the Comintern."

Moreover, having destroyed monuments to ideologues of socialism and state leaders, Europe got down to the business of finishing off the Soviet legacy, tearing down memorials to Soviet soldiers, its onetime saviors. On April 3, without notifying the country's leadership, Ondrej Kolar, the mayor of one of the municipality districts in the Czech capital Prague, ordered the removal of the monument to Soviet Marshal Ivan Konev, who liberated Czechoslovakia from Nazi occupation in 1945, and prevented the destruction of its capital.

The statue had no face mask, jeered the Czech official, who had studied in the United States, adding that this was a violation of the quarantine. A few days later, a monument to Russian soldiers, who fought during the Second World War in Bulgaria, was vandalized. Naturally enough, all this caused an angry reaction by Moscow.

Russias defense minister Sergei Shoigu asked the Czech authorities to hand over the monument to Russia, only to be told that even though the country's leadership condemned the local officials initiative, it would still not be able to return the monument since it did not actually own it. Even though Czech politicians have not always been that scrupulous, just as it was with the theft of humanitarian aid sent to Italy, and their refusal to cooperate with other countries affected by the coronavirus outbreak. And still, the neocolonialists have achieved their goal, and another page of history has been rewritten.

There is one thing we should all bear in mind, however. Even though the Soviet assistance to most African countries was not necessarily critical, the loans made available by Moscow were provided on more favorable terms compared to those offered by the West. Moreover, the specialists and educational programs, which the USSR shared with the African countries, helped them avoid a new colonial dependence on Western corporations. In this day and age, it is hard to imagine the demolition of the monument to the Africans, who fought in the First World War in France, and the destruction of the graves of colonial troops in Europe. Hard, but still possible, because neocolonialism has no principles, since all it wants is profit. This is why there is little, if any, US and Western European assistance to the African countries amid the current pandemic. After all, the only aid they can count on will most likely come from Russia and China, not from the EU and America

By Theodor Zima, international journalist
Pakistan's coronavirus cases rose to more than 6,200 on Wednesday, as a top minister said it is a "difficult situation" for the government which is fighting war at different fronts including COVID-19, poverty, hunger and weak economy.

"This is a difficult situation," Planning Minister Asad Umar said while addressing a conference along with PM's aide on health Dr Zafar Mirza and adviser on national security Moeed Yusuf following a meeting of National Command and Operation Centre (NCOC) here.

He said besides coronavirus, the government is fighting war at different fronts including poverty, hunger and weak economy.

"It is important to find a balance between slowing the spread of the virus and ensuring lower-income people don't have to go hungry," he said, adding that the country was "passing through a difficult situation."



Prime Minister Imran Khan on Tuesday extended the lockdown till April 30, but allowed several industries to open up.

His Advisor on Health Dr Zafar Mirza said that a lower number of deaths, in comparison with the rest of the world, didn't mean the people should stop taking precautionary measures.

Yusuf said all Pakistanis currently in India will be brought back to the country through Wagah border on Thursday.

All Pakistanis who are arriving from other countries will be quarantined. Those wishing to stay in hotels will have to bear their own expenses, he added.

Yusuf said that due to limited testing kits, the country's ability to test local residents will be restricted if all Pakistanis arriving from other countries are tested. This is one constraint the government is facing in bringing back people from abroad, he said.

Meanwhile, the number of coronavirus patients in the country rose to 6,250, with 534 new confirmed cases and 11 deaths during the last 24 hours.

According to reports, worst-hit Punjab province reported 3,016 cases, Sindh 1,668, Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa 865, Balochistan 281, Gilgit-Baltistan 234, Islamabad 140 and Pakistan-occupied Kashmir 46.

So far, 1,446 people have recovered from the disease and 107 deaths have been reported in the country.

The authorities has so far conducted 73,439 tests, including 3,380 in the last 24 hours.

Punjab Chief Minister Usman Buzdar tweeted that the death toll in the province has now reached 28 and 43,565 coronavirus tests have been conducted so far.

Minister of Industries Hammad Azhar has said several sectors and industries including construction, agriculture, chemical manufacturing, e-commerce, software, paper and paper packaging, fertilisers, mines, glass industry and plant nurseries were being allowed to open.

He said exporters can also become operational.

Khan, while allowing relaxation in the lockdown to allow these industries to work, warned of action if set procedures were flouted.

He also announced to bring ordinance to curb smuggling and hoarding ive strict punishment to culprits.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
- Azziad found out a lot of guys on the internet accused her of turning down a job at Diamond Platnumz's TV station because of his loose morals

- She termed the allegations as fake and promised to take legal action against the perpetrators

- The dancer kept repeating that she did not refer to the father of four as an immoral woman eater

Queen of Tik Tok and Kenyas new favourite dancer Azziad Nasenya has hit out at haters trying to taint her name and good image.

The young university student said she was appalled to learn a few guys accused her of referring to international baby daddy Diamond Platnumz as a woman eater.

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She termed the reports as false and maintained she did not turn down a job with the Bongo Stars media house Wasafi TV.

Azziad said she was going to involve her lawyers in going after netizens who have been spewing the rumours.

READ ALSO: Beautiful Saumu Mbuvi emerges in lover's company month after delivering 2nd child

The flat-tummied dancer termed the sentiments as fake news and assured her fans she was not the type to go around saying such things.

This is fake news, I have engaged my advocate on the matter, the beauty said.

Her followers told her to take a chill pill and avoid commenting on issues that do not concern her lest she end up being irrelevant.

Rumour had it the young Utawezana challenge winner turned down a chance to work for Wasafi TV thanks to Diamonds reputation and love for women.

Guys claimed Azziad was not ready to work for a brand run by someone who lacked morals.

Vocal radio presenter and corporate MC Jalango even commented on the issue and asked the girl to wake up and smell the coffee.

In an Instagram message dedicated to the young celebrity, the former comedian and actor said Diamond and his brand are two different entities.

To him, the Tanzanian heartthrobs behaviour does not affect how his company is run and he urged Kenyas favourite dancer to take the job and stop complaining.

Azziad made it to stardom after a Tik Tok video of her dancing to Mejjas song Utawezana caught the eyes, hearts and wallets of many.

She instantly gained thousands of followers and became a household name thanks to her fire waist.

Even Zari Hassans brother could not help but thirst over her smile and dance moves.

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.

Azziad Nasenya : I received over 17,000 messages after doing the Utawezana challenge | Tuko TV

Source: TUKO.co.ke
Why have Mr. Trump and others criticized it?

The president has accused the W.H.O. of responding too slowly to the threat of the virus and not being critical enough of China. (The same accusations have been leveled at Mr. Trump, who was warned in January about a possible pandemic and who repeatedly praised the Chinese government for its handling of the virus.)

The W.H.O. has consistently advised against travel restrictions, arguing that they are ineffective, can block needed resources and are likely to cause economic harm. But Mr. Trump has frequently pointed to his decision to limit travel from China in late January as evidence he took the threat seriously.

But Mr. Trump is not alone in his criticism. Some experts have said the W.H.O. was slow to declare a public health emergency and was too trusting of the Chinese government, which initially tried to conceal the extent of the outbreak, as the country has gained influence in the organization.

Mr. Trumps decision to halt funding appears to be the first such formal announcement of its kind by an American president, experts said, though the United States has had a sometimes contentious history with the W.H.O. on issues like breastfeeding and tobacco.

Dr. Amesh Adalja, a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, said there were legitimate concerns about the need for reforms at the W.H.O. Some member states have undue influence over the organizations messaging, and after the Ebola outbreak that began in 2013, regional offices were seen as having inadequate autonomy to respond to the emergency, he said.

There is room to criticize here, he said. But I dont think, in the middle of a pandemic, making a political statement is the best way to address the shortcomings.

Mr. Gostin said that the organization has been hobbled for structural and political reasons, and become timid as a result.
The Jawaharlal Nehru University Students Union (JNUSU) on Wednesday urged the administration to launch a mental health helpline to counsel students stressed about curtailed academics due to ongoing lockdown.

In a statement, the varsity said it has launched a COVID-19 portal to provide verified information on coronavirus, steps taken by JNU and public institutions as well as research related information.

The students' union appeal to the varsity comes in the backdrop of a University Grants Commission directive asking all universities and colleges to set up mental health helplines to address students' concerns during the health crisis.

"These are certainly difficult times, and as we know a lot of students are battling with issues of mental health.

The fear of academic losses, questions regarding the future, caring responsibilities, issues coming on the back of the extended period of stay at home among other myriad issues have made many students feel even more vulnerable," the students' union said in a letter to Vice Chancellor M Jagadesh Kumar.

Stressing that it is important to extend support in every way possible way to all students, the union asked him to start an initiative to "offer psychological support and counselling to the students of JNU, to help cope with the COVID-19 pandemic that is one of the most tumultuous moments in our recent past".

Other central varsities like Delhi University and Jamia Millia Islamia had started counseling students much before the UGC directive.

The JNU's COVID-19 portal will collect select information from public domain, official circulars, guidelines, research milestones, challenges and opportunities for the university's students, faculty, staff and the community at large, it said.

Feedback or suggestions about the website -- http://jnu.ac.in/covid 19 can be sent to covid19@jnu.ac.in, it added.

"COVID-19 pandemic is a matter of great concern for all of us. As part of our commitment to the JNU community and to the nation at large, we recognise our role in unitedly fighting this pandemic and providing academic leadership towards this objective," Kumar said.

JNU has a large number of faculty members who are involved in information dissemination, data mining, vaccine and diagnosis research that have direct or indirect implications for effectively dealing with the disease and secondary issues arising from it, he said.

The varsity has also formed a COVID-19 task force, led by Professor Pawan Dhar, which is looking into the possible ways of working with national agencies to enable the best use of JNU resources for public welfare, the varsity said.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Boris Johnsons most senior aide is facing fresh allegations he flouted lockdown rules by taking a sightseeing trip on Easter Sunday.

The prime minister is facing mounting calls to sack Dominic Cummings amid claims he made several trips to see his family in County Durham, while the country was being told to stay at home.

Ministers vociferously defended Mr Cummings after it emerged he had made the 260-mile journey, insisting he had obeyed the rules by staying in one place while there.

However, an eyewitness told The Observer and the Sunday Mirror he had seen Mr Cummings on 12 April, 30 miles from Durham in Barnard Castle.

Another eyewitness said they saw the prime ministers most trusted aide in Durham on 19 April, days after he had been photographed returning to Downing Street.

UK news in pictures Show all 50 1 /50 UK news in pictures UK news in pictures 30 December 2021 Sunrise at Bamburgh Castle in Northumberland PA UK news in pictures 29 December 2021 The Very Revd Dr Robert Willis, Dean of Canterbury Cathedral, looks at Becket, a six month old red-billed chough as he visits Wildwood Wildlife Park in Kent on the anniversary of the murder of Thomas Becket PA UK news in pictures 28 December 2021 Troops of the Household Cavalry are seen reflected in a puddle during the changing of the Queens Life Guard, on Horse Guards Parade, in central London PA UK news in pictures 27 December 2021 A pedestrian walks past a winter sale sign outside a John Lewis store on Oxford street in London Getty UK news in pictures 26 December 2021 Riders take their bikes through the snow near Castleside, County Durham PA UK news in pictures 25 December 2021 Patrick Corkery wears a santa hat and beard as waves crash over him at Forty Foot near Dublin during a Christmas Day dip PA UK news in pictures 24 December 2021 People stand inside Kings Cross Station on Christmas Eve in London Reuters UK news in pictures 23 December 2021 Christmas shoppers fill the car park at Fosse Shopping Park in Leicester PA UK news in pictures 22 December 2021 The sun rises behind the stones as people gather for the winter solstice at Stonehenge. Getty UK news in pictures 21 December 2021 People take part in a winter solstice swim at Portobello Beach in Edinburgh to mark the solstice and to witness the dawn after the longest night of the year PA UK news in pictures 20 December 2021 An auction employee displays poultry to buyers and sellers attending the Christmas Poultry Sale at York Auction Centre in Murton PA UK news in pictures 19 December 2021 Joao Moutinho of Wolverhampton Wanderers looks on during the Premier League match between Wolverhampton Wanderers and Chelsea at Molineux Getty Images UK news in pictures 18 December 2021 Freight lorries queuing at the port of Dover in Kent PA UK news in pictures 17 December 2021 Newly elected Liberal Democrat MP Helen Morgan, bursts 'Boris' bubble' held by colleague Tim Farron, as she celebrates following her victory in the North Shropshire by-election PA UK news in pictures 16 December 2021 Brussels sprouts are harvested by workers as they prepare for the busy Christmas period near Boston in Lincolnshire PA UK news in pictures 15 December 2021 Lewis Hamilton is made a Knight Bachelor by the Prince of Wales at Windsor Castle PA UK news in pictures 14 December 2021 The Royal Liver Buildings surrounded by early morning fog in Liverpool PA UK news in pictures 13 December 2021 People queue outside a walk-in Covid-19 vaccination centre at St Thomas's Hospital in Westminster Getty Images UK news in pictures 12 December 2021 People take part in the Big Leeds Santa Dash in Roundhay Park, Leeds PA UK news in pictures 11 December 2021 People arrive at a Covid-19 vaccination centre at Elland Road in Leeds, PA UK news in pictures 10 December 2021 Stella Moris speaks to the media after the US Government won its High Court bid to overturn a judges decision not to extradite WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange PA UK news in pictures 9 December 2021 Camels are lead around Salisbury Cathedral during a rehearsal for the Christmas Eve Service PA UK news in pictures 8 December 2021 Margaret Keenan and Nurse May Parsons, a year after Margaret was the first person in the UK to receive the Pfizer vaccine PA UK news in pictures 7 December 2021 Snowfall in Leadhills, South Lanarkshire as Storm Barra hits the UK with disruptive winds, heavy rain and snow PA UK news in pictures 6 December 2021 A person tries to avoid sea spray on New Brighton promenade in Wallasey as the UK readies for the arrival of Storm Barra Getty UK news in pictures 5 December 2021 People release balloons during a tribute to six-year-old Arthur Labinjo-Hughes outside Emma Tustin's former address in Solihull, West Midlands, where he was murdered by his stepmother PA UK news in pictures 4 December 2021 People walk through a Christmas market in Trafalgar Square Reuters UK news in pictures 3 December 2021 A pedestrian carries a dog as they dodge shoppers on Oxford Street in central London AFP/Getty UK news in pictures 2 December 2021 Duchess of Cambridge inspects a Faberge egg at the Victoria and Albert Museum Getty UK news in pictures 1 December 2021 Meerkats at London Zoo with an advent calendar PA UK news in pictures 30 November 2021 Workers put the finishing touches to the Trafalgar Square Christmas Tree ahead of the lighting ceremony later in the week PA UK news in pictures 29 November 2021 Home Secretary Priti Patel is greeted by a police dog at a special memorial service for Met Police Sergeant Matiu Ratana Getty UK news in pictures 28 November 2021 Riyad Mahrez of Manchester City battles for possession with Aaron Cresswell of West Ham United during a match at the Etihad during snow Manchester City/Getty UK news in pictures 27 November 2021 Residents clear branches from a fallen tree in Birkenhead, north west England as Storm Arwen triggered a rare red weather warning AFP via Getty Images UK news in pictures 3 December 2021 An aerial picture shows a worker using a quad bike and trailer to transport freshly harvested trees at Pimms Christmas Tree farm in Matfield, southeast England AFP via Getty UK news in pictures 26 November 2021 A shopper browses Christmas trees for sale at Pines and Needles in Dulwich, London Reuters UK news in pictures 25 November 2021 A murmuration of hundreds of thousands of starlings fly over a field at dusk in Cumbria, close to the Scottish border PA UK news in pictures 3 December 2021 A pedestrian carries a dog as they dodge shoppers on Oxford Street in central London AFP/Getty UK news in pictures 24 November 2021 Migrants are helped ashore from a RNLI (Royal National Lifeboat Institution) lifeboat at a beach in Dungeness, on the south-east coast of England, on November 24, 2021, after being rescued while crossing the English Channel. AFP via Getty Images UK news in pictures 23 November 2021 The coffin of Sir David Amess is carried past politicians, including former Prime Ministers Sir John Major, David Cameron and Theresa May, Speaker of the House of Commons Sir Lindsay Hoyle, Home Secretary Priti Patel and Prime Minister Boris Johnson during the requiem mass for the MP at Westminster Cathedral, central London PA UK news in pictures 22 November 2021 The scene in Dragon Rise, Norton Fitzwarren, Somerset where police have launched a murder probe after two people were found dead Tom Wren/SWNS UK news in pictures 21 November 2021 London-based midwife Sarah Muggleton, 27, takes part in a 'March with Midwives' in central London to highlight the crisis in maternity services PA UK news in pictures 20 November 2021 Police officers monitor as climate change activists sit down and block traffic during a protest action in solidarity with activists from the Insulate Britain group who received prison terms for blocking roads, on Lambeth Bridge in central London AFP via Getty Images UK news in pictures 19 November 2021 A giant installation of Prime Minister Boris Johnson made from recycled clothing goes on display at Manchester Central, as part of Manchester Art Fair, in a 'wake-up call for the Prime Minister to tackle textile waste' PA UK news in pictures 18 November 2021 The scene at a recycling centre in Stert, near Devizes in Wiltshire after a large blaze was brought under control. The fire broke out on Wednesday night the fire service has said and local residents were advised to keep windows and doors shut due to large amounts of smoke PA UK news in pictures 17 November 2021 The sun rises over South Shields Lighthouse, on the North East coast of England PA UK news in pictures 16 November 2021 ancer Maithili Vijayakumar at the launch of 2021 Diwali celebrations at St Andrew Square in Edinburgh PA UK news in pictures 15 November 2021 Forensic officers work outside Liverpool Women's Hospital, following a car blast, in Liverpool Reuters UK news in pictures 14 November 2021 Wreaths by the Cenotaph after the Remembrance Sunday service in Whitehall, London PA UK news in pictures 13 November 2021 Richard Ratcliffe, the husband of detainee Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, is ending his hunger strike in central London after almost three weeks. Ratcliffe has spent 21 days camped outside the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office in London without food. He began his demonstration on 24 October after his wife lost her latest appeal in Iran, saying his family was caught in a dispute between two states PA

Earlier, Downing Street had described the first trip as essential, saying Mr Cummings needed his familys help to care for his young son because his wife was sick with coronavirus and he feared he was next.

Cabinet ministers lined up to defend Mr Cummings, saying he had put his family first and accused critics of trying to politicise the issue.

Grant Shapps, the transport secretary, used the daily Downing Street press conference to suggest that Mr Cummings had not broken lockdown rules because he had stayed put upon arrival in Durham.

But Robin Lees, 70, a retired chemistry teacher, told the papers he had seen Mr Cummings in Barnard Castle on Easter Sunday.

Mr Lees compared him to Catherine Calderwood, Scotlands former chief medical officer, who stood down after visiting her second home twice during lockdown.

Labour, the Liberal Democrats and the SNP have written to Sir Mark Sedwill, the cabinet secretary, calling for an inquiry into Mr Cummingss decision to travel from London to Durham.

They want the probe to include when the prime minister was made aware Mr Cummings had left the capital.

Senior Tories also expressed concern that Mr Cummings's behaviour could encourage others to flout the rules, jeopardising the governments plans to gradually lift the lockdown.

The Independent can reveal that senior MPs are set to question Mr Johnson over Mr Cummings later this week, as pressure grows on the prime minister to explain what he knew about the trip under lockdown.

Parliament is in recess until June, meaning Mr Johnson will not have to face MPs at Prime Ministers Questions.

But members of the Commons Liaison Committee, which is made up of the chairs of other select committees, said they expected Mr Johnson to be questioned about Mr Cummings when he makes his first appearance before them later this week.

Pete Wishart, an SNP MP who sits on the committee and is a member of the "quad" which organises its business, said: If nothing has changed and Dominic Cummings is still in post by Wednesday, it would be very surprising if this was an issue that was not raised.

Another member of the committee said: Im sure one of my colleagues will crowbar the Cummings question in.

In a statement defending Mr Cummings, Downing Street said his trip had been essential to ensure his young son was properly cared for. After an offer of help from his sister and nieces, he travelled to a house near to but separate from his extended family.

A spokesperson for No 10, said: "Yesterday [Friday] the Mirror and Guardian wrote inaccurate stories about Mr Cummings. Today [Saturday] they are writing more inaccurate stories including claims that Mr Cummings returned to Durham after returning to work in Downing Street on 14 April. We will not waste our time answering a stream of false allegations about Mr Cummings from campaigning newspapers."

There was confusion about the involvement of police, however. No 10 also said that at no stage was Mr Cummings or his family spoken to by the police.

On Saturday night Durham Police took the unusual step of confirming they had spoken to Mr Cummingss father.

Steve White, the police and crime commissioner for Durham Police, a former head of the Police Federation in England and Wales, said it was "most unwise" for Mr Cummings to have travelled when "known to be infected".

The SNP accused No 10 of a "cover up" after reports some in Downing Street knew Mr Cummings had made the 260-mile journey during lockdown.

Former Tory cabinet minister David Lidington, Theresa Mays de facto deputy prime minister, told Newsnight: "There's clearly serious questions that No 10 are going to have to address, not least because the readiness of members of the public to follow government guidance more generally is going to be affected by this sort of story."

Professor Neil Ferguson, the epidemiologist whose modelling prompted the lockdown, quit as a government adviser for flouting the rules when he was visited at this home by his lover.

At the time Mr Hancock, the health secretary, said he was "speechless" and that he backed any police action against Mr Ferguson.

Sir Ed Davey, acting leader of the Liberal Democrats, called for Mr Cummings to quit over the allegations, while a spokesperson for Labour said: "The British people do not expect there to be one rule for them and another rule for Dominic Cummings."

Asked by reporters on Saturday if he had considered his position, Mr Cummings said "obviously not".
A man charged with aiding and abetting the alleged removal of a woman's labia minora at a Central Coast tattoo parlour will argue that he had nothing to do with the procedure, which police allege was female genital mutilation.

Police in 2018 charged American national Howard Rollins with aiding and abetting female genital mutilation - a charge that carried a maximum of 21 years imprisonment - in relation to what is alleged to be a botched procedure done by a body modifier and friend of Mr Rollins, Brendan Russell, in 2016.

Howard Rollins outside Gosford District Court in 2019. Credit:AAP

Mr Rollins is not alleged to have touched the woman, who cannot be named for legal reasons, and told her she "didn't have to go through with it if she didn't want to" before the procedure, the District Court heard on Wednesday.

The woman did go ahead with the procedure although Mr Rollins "left [the tattoo parlour] before the end of the procedure", Judge Robert Sutherland, SC, said on Wednesday.
ODSC East 2020 has now become the ODSC East 2020 Virtual Conference, a completely-virtual event taking place on April 14-17. This event is expected to bring in more than 8,000 data scientists and attendees and will feature over 260 virtual sessions such as half-day training sessions, talks, workshops, keynote talks. It will also feature a track with over a dozen talks detailing how data scientists are helping combat the coronavirus pandemic.

By using the ODSC Virtual Conference platform, all attendees will be able to log in from their preferred location and watch the sessions in real-time. The ODSC East 2020 Virtual Conference will run multiple tracks related to specific focus areas, such as ones for machine learning, deep learning, NLP, and more.

Keynotes include:

John Montgomery, Microsoft

Margaret Mitchell, PhD, Google Research and Machine Intelligence Group

Michael Kearns, PhD, Warren Center for Network and Data Sciences, UPenn

Mike Stonebraker, PhD, MIT CSAIL, TAMR

Thomas Wolf, PhD, Hugging Face

Matei Zaharia, PhD, Stanford, Databricks

The ODSC East 2020 Virtual Conference will also feature a track dedicated to the COVID-19 pandemic. Some talks scheduled to occur are:

CEDAR: Information Technology to Enhance Open Science in the Fight Against COVID-19, Mark Musen, PhD, Stanford University

Coronavirus After the Curve, Roger W. Thomas, Oracle

COVID-19: Unprecedented Challenges and Opportunities for Data Science (and Scientists)  Voices, Visions, and Ventures form Harvard Data Science Review, Xiao-Li Meng, PhD, Harvard Data Science Review

Plus, additional talks from Johannes Eichstaedt, PhD of Stanford, Jason Wang, PhD of Stanford, Fawad Butt of United Healthcare & Optum, and more.

For those interested in finding AI solutions for their business, the Virtual AI Expo will feature demo talks and networking sessions to help managers find the ideal solution for their business. Partners include Microsoft, DataRobot, Dotscience, Red Hat, SAS, Looker, Appen, HPCC Systems, S&P Global, MIT and more.

Open Data Science Conference (ODSC) is the leader of applied data science conferences. Our conferences bring industry leaders, key executives, start-up companies, engineers, and investors on the threshold of innovation together. We delve into topics like artificial intelligence, machine learning, deep learning, predictive analytics, natural language processing, data visualization, and research. We do this to make sure the future of technology, industry, academia, and the military are at the forefront of emerging technology and advancement into tomorrows future today.
Police have seized 2million of cocaine and 300,000 in cash after a major drugs probe in Kent.

The National Crime Agency and MET Police arrested five people across Kent following an investigation into drugs and money laundering.

The Organised Crime Partnership, a joint team of NCA and MET personnel, launched raids on properties in Gravesend.

The OCP seized 44lbs of cocaine from a van on Gatwick Road, Gravesend, and arrested two men aged 32 and 29.

A combined National Crime Agency and MET Police taskforce seized more than 200million of cocaine and 300,000 in cash during three raids in Kent

Police saw a third man escape from the area and he is now wanted in connection with the investigation.

NCA head of specialist operations John Coles said: 'Taking this amount of class A drugs off the streets is a significant result for the OCP as we know cocaine fuels gang violence and exploitation.

'Seizing drugs and cash has a major impact on the wider organised crime groups that are involved in drug distribution, and prevents them from investing profits in further offending.

'Our investigation into these seizures continue, and we are still seeking one man in connection with them.

Two of the raids took place on Gatwick Road in Gravesend, Kent, where two men aged 32 and 29 and a 32-year-old woman were arrested

'I'd urge him to come forward to us, or for anyone with information about their whereabouts to get in touch via Crimestoppers.'

A second raid on the same road resulted in a 32-year-old woman being arrested on suspicion of supplying class A drugs and a further nine pounds of cocaine being seized.

A 51-year-old man and a 50-year-old woman were arrested by police on suspicion of money laundering in another raid on the nearby Rochester Road.

300,000 in cash was also grabbed by police at the property.

The five people arrested are now being questioned by NCA officers.

The raids come after police continue to try and reduce the drug flow across county lines.

In October 2019 Kent Police arrested 118 people for drug related crimes as well as knife crime and exploitation of vulnerable people.

Superintendent Mick Gardner of the Kent and Essex Serious Crime Directorate said: 'This enforcement activity is in addition to our determined and sustained focus around identifying and tackling individuals associated with gangs and county lines.

'Throughout the county both uniformed and plain clothes officers are working relentlessly to remove drugs from our local communities.'
Egyptian authorities said all congregational religious activities, including communal prayers in mosques, will continue to be suspended during Ramadan

Egypt's mosques will remain closed until no new coronavirus cases are detected, a statement by the religious endowments ministry read.

The ministry said on Wednesday it told its workers to maintain the closure of mosques to protect the public from the threat of the coronavirus.

The closure of mosques and suspension of congregation prayers continues to be applied until the reason for the closure no longer exists and no new cases are reported, it said.

It added that holding Friday congregations despite the closure is "wrong, a sin," and an encroachment on religion and the state.

Egypt ordered the closure of mosques and churches on 21 March for two weeks in a move aimed at curbing the spread of the novel coronavirus.

The closure was extended indefinitely at the end of March over the spread of the pandemic amid concerns that the virus would affect the people during the Islamic fasting month of Ramadan, which begins on 24 April.

The Egyptian authorities said all congregational religious activities, including communal prayers in mosques, will continue to be suspended during Ramadan.

Other public activities planned for Ramadan, such as charity banquets for the poor to break their fast, have also been suspended.

The precautionary measure was preceded by the suspension of schools, universities and air traffic.

A two-week night curfew which first began on 25 March was extended until 23 April.

Egypt on Tuesday reported its highest daily increase in coronavirus cases with 160 new infections, bringing the total number of confirmed cases to 2,350.

The death toll now stands at 178, including 14 fatalities reported on Tuesday.

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American actor Joaquin Phoenix called for New York to release some prison inmates, in light of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The 45-year-old on Tuesday (local time) shared his thoughts in a tweet released by the Release Aging People in Prison Campaign. Phoenix called on Gov. Andrew Cuomo, a Democrat, to take action immediately.

The tweet began, "A message from Oscar award-winning actor Joaquin Phoenix : I'm calling on @NYGovCuomo to take action in New York by granting clemency to New Yorkers in prison. The lives of so many people depend on his action. No one deserves to die in prison from COVID-19."

Earlier in the video, he said, "The spread of coronavirus in prisons threatens the health and safety of all of us."

"When you're incarcerated there's no such thing as social distancing and ensuring good hygiene is not an option. Leaders must do everything possible to prevent incarcerated people and those who work in prisons from becoming ill and spreading the virus," the actor added.

According to Fox News, as of Tuesday, there have been nearly 600,000 cases of the coronavirus in the United States and just over 25,000 deaths.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
According to OSCE Special Representative, all details of the exchange have already been approved

The date of the next exchange of prisoners between Ukraine, Russia and Donbas militants, which is expected to take place before Orthodox Easter, is constantly being specified. This is stated in the message of the President's Office on Telegram.

It confirmed that the next stage of the prisoner exchange is being prepared.

"The latest approvals of the list and the logistics are ongoing. The release will take place in the near future. The date is constantly being updated," the message reads.

The Office also noted that the information that prisoners were being exchanged then was not true.

"Unfortunately, mutual release is complex and requires additional approval. In addition, this process is complicated by the fact that the release takes place amidst the quarantine and therefore requires mandatory pre-organization of the observation for our citizens whom we are taking back home," the President's Office added.

It was stated by OSCE Special Representative Heidi Grau that all details of the future exchange of prisoners had already been agreed upon.

As we reported earlier, the so-called Donetsk Peoples Republic (DNR) suggested holding an exchange of prisoners with Ukraine via "10 for 8" formula.

"The Donetsk Peoples Republic insists on the swiftest exchange due to the complicated epidemiological situation in the world. For this reason, on March 26, during the meeting of Tripartite Contact Group, we put forward a proposal to exchange according to the 10 for 8 formula. The Ukrainian side flatly rejected our offer," DNR's Ombudsman Darina Morozova said.




President Moon Jae-in participates in a video conference with the leaders of China, Japan and ASESN member countries from Cheong Wa Dae, Tuesday. Public support for the ruling Democratic Party of Korea in Wednesday's general election is forecast to allow him to push ahead with key policies during the remainder of his term that ends in May 2022. Courtesy of Cheong Wa Dae



By Yi Whan-woo



Optimism is rising that President Moon Jae-in will be able to run state affairs steadily for the remainder of his term with the ruling Democratic Party of Korea (DPK) expected to win big in Wednesday's general election.



If the ruling party and the liberal bloc take the majority of the 300-seat National Assembly, his policies are expected to more easily get parliamentary endorsement.



Such a result has come after public approval for the President and the ruling party bounced back from the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic when criticism mounted over the government's poor response to the outbreak.



The high approval rates in recent surveys indicate the public has given high marks for the Moon administration's capability in handling the crisis, which is now becoming a worldwide exemplar.






15th April 2020

Runtime 17:13





The AIM-listed infrastructure group InfraStrata (AIM:INFA) have just done an exclusive interview with London South East. This coincides with an RNS release announcing that the company have received the long-promised, 1.13M grant money from the EUs Innovation and Networks Agency.

Joining us online, CEO John Wood gave London South East an in-depth operational update, emphasising the synergies between the Belfast shipyard Harland & Wolff and the County Antrim-based gas storage project. John Wood said that when Islandmagee gets the go-ahead he expects to commission and construct 45M worth of large modules at the yard each year for two years, and have them moved by sea to the Islandmagee gas storage site.

Going forwards, said Wood, the Harland & Wolff facility with two large dry docks gives us the capability to work across six different markets. We hope to be running at 80% capacity generating turnover of 400M revenues. Defence offers us an ideal opportunity as there are two large defence programmes in the UK, a third one on the way, and the two existing providers dont have enough capacity, so theres an ideal opportunity there to get involved he said. Across the cruise sector there are numerous vessels now looking for dockings, the yard has 16 tenders out at the moment, and believe they will win business. Although nothing is signed as yet, we remain hopeful of cruise line business.

Our projection for the yard was always break even by the end of this year, and thats still where we want to be he added. The uplift we expect at the end of the year will more than compensate for the delays which we have had due to Covid. Our unweighted pipeline is about 1.8 billion at the moment, our weighted one is at 821M over the next five years. The job now is to turn that into firm orders and contracts.

Over that time frame InfraStrata hope to contribute 1500 jobs to the Northern Irish economy. Turning to Islandmagee and gas storage, this has been discussed at No 10 by John and his team, and he believes that they have now future proofed the environmental impact of the project by introducing real time off-shore monitoring into the process. Wood explained he looked at the Marine Licence work which had been done previously, and more or less started again.

He is hoping a decision on the Marine Licence will be made by DEARA and signed off by the Agriculture, Environment and Rural Affairs Minister Edwin Poots within a month or six weeks. Covid taking priority obviously, we are still hopeful of that decision.
The doctor has been treated and is stable.

Hyderabad: A post-graduate doctor was slapped on the ear by the son of a suspected Covid-19 patient, who was not willing to stay in Osmania General Hospital and insisted on being discharged.

Junior doctor Nikhil, who was attending on the suspected patient in an isolation ward, had said that it was not possible to discharge the patient and asked the son not to raise a hue and cry.

The first test of the patient was positive and the hospital authorities were waiting for the second test for confirmation, the junior doctor had informed the father.

Furious, the attendant slapped the doctor, who began bleeding from the ear. The doctor has been given treatment and is now stable.

Telangana Junior Doctors Association (T-JUDA) have demanded that special police protection be provided to doctors during the Covid-19 crisis. Doctors are upset as this is the second attack on them, after the first at Gandhi Hospital some days ago.

The Afzalgunj police later booked a case against the attacker. Afzalgunj inspector P. Gyanender Reddy said Dr Nikhil had lodged a complaint against the man for misbehaving with him.
The Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) is facilitating the return of foreigners including Pakistani nationals, who are stranded in India due to coronavirus COVID-19 lockdown, back to their countries, government sources told on Wednesday.

"The MEA is facilitating the return of foreign nationals presently in India to their countries. These include nationals of Pakistan. We understand from the High Commission of Pakistan that 180 of their nationals presently in India want to go back. We are coordinating with concerned authorities to facilitate their departure," said the sources.

Countries like Russia, Japan, Germany and Ukraine have been carrying out special operations to evacuate their citizens stranded in India following the announcement of nationwide lockdown to contain the spread of coronavirus. India has so far reported 11,933 cases of coronavirus, according to the Union Ministry of Health and Family Welfare.
Paul Abberley has been the CEO of Charles Stanley Group PLC (LON:CAY) since 2014. This report will, first, examine the CEO compensation levels in comparison to CEO compensation at companies of similar size. After that, we will consider the growth in the business. And finally we will reflect on how common stockholders have fared in the last few years, as a secondary measure of performance. This method should give us information to assess how appropriately the company pays the CEO.

See our latest analysis for Charles Stanley Group

How Does Paul Abberley's Compensation Compare With Similar Sized Companies?

According to our data, Charles Stanley Group PLC has a market capitalization of UK141m, and paid its CEO total annual compensation worth UK749k over the year to March 2019. We think total compensation is more important but we note that the CEO salary is lower, at UK362k. As part of our analysis we looked at companies in the same jurisdiction, with market capitalizations of UK79m to UK318m. The median total CEO compensation was UK575k.

Pay mix tells us a lot about how a company functions versus the wider industry, and it's no different in the case of Charles Stanley Group. On a sector level, around 67% of total compensation represents salary and 33% is other remuneration. Our data reveals that Charles Stanley Group allocates salary in line with the wider market.

Thus we can conclude that Paul Abberley receives more in total compensation than the median of a group of companies in the same market, and of similar size to Charles Stanley Group PLC. However, this doesn't necessarily mean the pay is too high. A closer look at the performance of the underlying business will give us a better idea about whether the pay is particularly generous. You can see, below, how CEO compensation at Charles Stanley Group has changed over time.

LSE:CAY CEO Compensation April 15th 2020

Is Charles Stanley Group PLC Growing?

On average over the last three years, Charles Stanley Group PLC has seen earnings per share (EPS) move in a favourable direction by 30% each year (using a line of best fit). Its revenue is up 5.7% over last year.

Story continues

Overall this is a positive result for shareholders, showing that the company has improved in recent years. It's nice to see a little revenue growth, as this is consistent with healthy business conditions. It could be important to check this free visual depiction of what analysts expect for the future.

Has Charles Stanley Group PLC Been A Good Investment?

Given the total loss of 4.5% over three years, many shareholders in Charles Stanley Group PLC are probably rather dissatisfied, to say the least. So shareholders would probably think the company shouldn't be too generous with CEO compensation.

In Summary...

We compared total CEO remuneration at Charles Stanley Group PLC with the amount paid at companies with a similar market capitalization. As discussed above, we discovered that the company pays more than the median of that group.

Importantly, though, the company has impressed with its earnings per share growth, over three years. However, the returns to investors are far less impressive, over the same period. While EPS is moving in the right direction, we'd say shareholders would want better returns before the CEO is paid much more. On another note, we've spotted 2 warning signs for Charles Stanley Group that investors should look into moving forward.

Arguably, business quality is much more important than CEO compensation levels. So check out this free list of interesting companies, that have HIGH return on equity 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.
As a Trader Joe's cashier who is deaf, it can be difficult for Matthew Simmons to communicate with customers even in normal times. But the last few weeks have been nearly impossible thanks to COVID-19.

"I rely heavily on using my lip-reading skills so customers wearing facial coverings is a problem for me," Simmons said.

Masked grocery store shoppers unaware Simmons is deaf would ask questions and try to strike up a conversation with him at the cash register -- making for some unintended customer service issues.

"People thought I was ignoring them or being rude but I simply didnt know they were speaking to me because I cant see their mouth," Simmons explained. "It made me upset because I couldnt help it and left me feeling defeated."

PHOTO: Matthew Simmons co-worker made a shirt identifying him as hearing impaired after Simmons revealed he was struggling to communicate with customers at work. (Courtesy Matthew Simmons)

MORE: 'Thanks for everything you do': Amid coronavirus, good news is happening

Simmons began brainstorming ways he could solve the problem with his coworkers at the Vancouver, Washington, store. The team decided it would be best to have a crew member work alongside him for the time being so there wasnt a breakdown in communication with customers hustling to get supplies. That is until Simmons came across the perfect shirt online.

"It read I'm Deaf on the front and 'tap on the shoulder' on the back which is exactly what I needed people to know from a distance so I can do my job," Simmons said.

He went to his boss Ali Baker about the shirt and she loved the idea. They got some paint, an iconic Trader Joes T-shirt, and began designing the shirt together -- making sure the lettering was clear and visible from afar. Baker also bought three small white boards and dry erase markers for Simmons to walk around with so shoppers could ask him questions while covered up.

PHOTO: Matthew Simmons co-worker made a shirt identifying him as hearing impaired after Simmons revealed he was struggling to communicate with customers at work. (Courtesy Matthew Simmons)

PHOTO: Matthew Simmons co-worker made a shirt identifying him as hearing impaired after Simmons revealed he was struggling to communicate with customers at work. (Courtesy Matthew Simmons)

"People will normally stand at his cashier no matter how long the line is because they adore him so much," Baker said. "Were one big family here and he usually does the most communicating out of everyone on our team so we had to make a change."

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And the change that came was instantaneous.

"The first customer at my register read it and wrote down on the small white board 'It must be hard with everyone wearing masks! Thank you for your help,'" Simmons said. "People finally understood it was such a relief."

PHOTO: Matthew Simmons co-worker made a shirt identifying him as hearing impaired after Simmons revealed he was struggling to communicate with customers at work. (Courtesy Matthew Simmons)

Simmons shared his experience in a Facebook post Sunday that has since received thousands of likes and comments, all cheering him on.

"Thank you for all that you do," one user commented.

"Totally respect how hard you work and how patient you are," another chimed in.

MORE: Parents decorate doors for high school seniors missing graduation amid pandemic

But what may have been the highlight of Simmons new look was the support he received from his peers.

"To see the lengths that my fellow teammates went to so that I would feel supported and no different than any other employee really shows the human kindness we have for one another," Simmons said. "Working together towards a common goal, breaking down barriers, showing compassion to one another instead of prejudices. Thats the best part."

Simmons added he plans to wear his new shirt for the foreseeable future.

Trader Joe's assistant manager helps deaf cashier amid coronavirus originally appeared on goodmorningamerica.com
South Africas COVID-19 coronavirus epidemic does not follow the same trajectory as any other country in the world. This is according to Salim Abdool Karim, who chairs the Minister of Healths COVID-19 advisory committee.

In nearly every country where the virus has broken out, there was an initial surge in infections. This is generally followed by a series of extreme interventions from the government, resulting in the flattening of the curve.

However, the coronavirus epidemic curve in South Africa made a sharp knuckle on 27 March 2020 and plateaued.

To illustrate how South Africas curve deviates from the rest of the world, Karim showed graphs comparing it to countries like the United States, Spain, Italy, China, and the United Kingdom.

He also showed how South Africas curve differs from countries who responded more effectively to the virus, such as South Korea, Japan, and Singapore.

Expected vs actual trajectory

Based on other countries experiences with the coronavirus, it was expected that the number of cases in South Africa would be much higher by now.

The Minister of Health for South Africa, Zweli Mkhize, told journalists at the start of April that they expected the total number of confirmed cases to have reached between 4,000 and 5,000 by around 2 April.

Karim has given further context for the Ministers statement, explaining that South Africas epidemic trajectory closely followed that of the United Kingdom.

The chart below compares the epidemic trajectories of South Africa with the United Kingdom from the day each country reported its 100th case of the coronavirus.

Why is South Africa different?

Karim said that there are three possible reasons the epidemic trajectory in South Africa is different:

We are testing less, or just not testing enough. We are testing enough, but not in the right places. If tests are mainly being done in the private sector, we may not be getting a sense of what the epidemic is doing in poorer communities that dont have medical aid. The reduction in the rate the epidemic is growing in South Africa is genuine due to the interventions that were implemented.

According to Karim, the first two explanations are the least likely.

Coronavirus testing in South Africa has remained fairly constant since 23 March, yet the number of people testing positive every day still took a sharp turn.

Karim added that on the day that South Africas epidemic plateaued, coronavirus testing by the National Health Laboratory Service increased sharply. This means that public sector testing has increased and we have a reasonable view of what is happening with the epidemic in poorer communities.

This leaves only the third option  something has caused the rate of new infections in South Africa to reduce significantly.

You have to think back two weeks at a time

Karim explained that to understand the coronavirus case numbers you are seeing today, you have to look back at what was happening in South Africa two weeks ago. This is because when someone tests positive for the coronavirus, it reflects an infection from two weeks ago.

From the time you get infected, you have a period in which you are in incubation that takes about 7 to 10 days, said Karim.

Patients only start experiencing symptoms after the incubation period, at which point they go to a doctor, clinic, or hospital.

From there the patient needs to receive a laboratory test, and only if the results come back positive is the patient considered an active coronavirus case.

State of disaster interventions worked  Karim

This means that the reduction in the rate of new cases we have been seeing in South Africa these past two weeks may very well be explained by the urgent and drastic interventions implemented as part of the national state of disaster, Karim stated.

Among the restrictions imposed when the national state of disaster was declared on 15 March were:

International travel bans from high-risk countries including Italy, Iran, South Korea, China, Spain, Germany, the UK, and the US.

Screening and request for self-isolation of South Africans returning home from high-risk countries.

Ban on large gatherings, including government events.

Schools closed from 18 March.

The closure of 35 land ports.

Because of the two-week average incubation period of the coronavirus, the new cases reported in this week will be the first indication of the impact of the lockdown.

Active screening for coronavirus in vulnerable communities

Karim explained that in addition to the regular testing for the coronavirus when patients start feeling sick and go to their doctor, clinic, or hospital, South Africa is also actively screening for the virus among those who are most vulnerable.

There are currently over 28,000 workers actively screening whether people are possibly infected.

Where the screening procedure finds that someone potentially has the coronavirus, they are referred to a lab or clinic for a full test.

As a result of the active screening and the timing of lab results, we should expect large daily variations in the number of new coronavirus cases in South Africa, Karim stated.

You will see some large numbers and some small numbers dont let that bother you, he said.

Karim said that to decide whether the lockdown must be extended they will be looking at whole weeks worth of data at a time.

We compare weeks with weeks, so that were comparing apples with apples.

Now read: What needs to happen before the coronavirus lockdown is relaxed in South Africa
Ravi, the man who irons clothes in our street, makes an SOS call from his village on the outskirts of Chennai, 12 days into the lockdown. He is penniless and has been buying essentials on credit. Now the grocer says enough is enough. We transfer a small amount to the grocers bank account and provide him temporary relief. But not everyone is as lucky as Ravi. People who were eking out a decent living as daily wage earners are suddenly in penury with no work, no income and no one to turn to for a loan or a meal.

The plight of homeless and mentally challenged people who live on the street is worse. Accompanying a group of social workers going in search of such people on the highways to offer them free lunch packets, for a story of course, was more of an eyeopener, personally. It seemed that those cooped up in shelter homes run by the authorities were a luckier lot as they at least get three meals a day, unlike the silent sufferers going without food and totally dependent on the large-hearted individuals, groups and organisations who reached out to them with a meal packet or some pack of essential commodities.

Now its this sort of charity that the Tamil Nadu government wants to banish. Individuals or groups cannot help another individual or a group going without food. Every bit of charity has to flow through the government machinery. Of course, the government has been doing its bit ever since the lockdown began -- providing shelter to stranded migrant workers, feeding the poor and providing relief to ration card holders.

But there are others who fall outside the purview of government agencies. There also people who have no ration card, no home and not in the governments reckoning at all. Those are the people only NGOs and small-time social activists could identify and reach out to. That is why there can be no justification in criminalising the large-hearted people who try to provide succor to their suffering fellow citizens.

The reason offered by the government for not allowing such charity is that in such social work social distancing is given a go by. Of course, in these days of the coronavirus spread, no one can be allowed to violate social distancing norms. Even the use of masks, gloves and other protective gear should be made mandatory. But does the government feel that social workers and activists are incapable of following social distancing norms and only those engaged by official agencies can do it?

In fact, Tamil Nadu has a rich tradition of social work, with many individuals and non-governmental organisations doing yeomen service in the fields of education, health, poverty eradication, social justice, human rights and so on, complementing the good work of successive governments. To give a specific example, Tamil Nadu could succeed in its battle against the spread of HIV only with the help of NGOs.

Also, ordinary peoples inherent kind-heartedness and their eagerness to help fellow human beings were on display during the 2015 Chennai floods. It was the common man who rose to the occasion, saving many individuals from drowning and helping the affected people. It was not the government that came to the peoples aid then.

When the reality is such, why has the present government suddenly undermined the work of private individuals and insisting on their working only through the government agencies? Knowing the inalienable red tape and lethargy associated with the functioning of government agencies, not many small NGOs, targeting say providing lunch to 200 people, can wait for clearances from the authorities.

Unlike national-level cash-rich organisations, with whom the Tamil Nadu government has now associated itself in providing succor to those affected by the lockdown, homespun groups of social activists will not be encouraged by the authorities to reach their teeny-weeny bits of relief material to those desperately needing help.

So there can be nothing wrong -- as long as social distancing is adhered to -- for small groups of do-gooders to search and find their targeted beneficiaries for providing relief even as the gargantuan organisations can function efficiently in league with the government agencies to reach out to much larger numbers of people.

Also, the government can rest assured that the work of small groups, who would like to see for themselves the results of their charity by reaching out to the needy personally, would not prevent individuals and organisations reposing faith in the government and contributing to the chief ministers relief fund.

Cracking the whip on anyone violating social distancing norms is one thing and a sweeping ban on private charity is another thing. Only a despotic government can tell its people not to help someone in need, for such a move goes against the grain of democracy and even basic humanity.
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She had confidence in this hospital, and she knew without a doubt I would be treated by a dedicated staff that would be in one accord, determined to treat with the best care, and thats what I got here.

The Ealeys thanked Dr. Walter Doty and the nurses for their dedicated care, treatment and endless words of encouragement he received during his hospitalization.

He kept telling me not to give up, and, Doctor Doty, I did not give up, Ealey said.

Temonica said being away from her husband was tough, but knowing he was being well taken care of made the situation a little easier.

After I came in contact with the virus, I was tested and tested negative, she said.

However, out of extra precaution and for the safety of our children, I went into quarantine and our children just came home yesterday. So, without my husband and without my children at home, this has been extremely hard.

But Doctor Doty kept in contact with me on a daily basis. I just cant thank him and his nurses enough for what they did for my family.
[April 15, 2020] KBR Lands Seat on $6.4B Air Force Contract for Global Contingency and Humanitarian Support

HOUSTON, April 15, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- KBR (NYSE: KBR) announced today it has been awarded an indefinite-delivery, indefinite-quantity (IDIQ) contract by the U.S. Air Force for worldwide contingency and humanitarian support. This Air Force Contract Augmentation Program V (AFCAP V) contract has a maximum ceiling of $6.4 billion. Under this multiple-award contract, KBR will have the opportunity to compete on task orders to provide a full range of support for the U.S. government. These services could include assisting with contingency planning, deploying, training and equipping of U.S. military forces; emergency and contingency construction; and logistics and commodities. KBR may perform these tasks in locations around the world. The contract's period of performance is eight years. KBR has held a seat on predecessor contracts, AFCAP III and IV, since 2005. "When the U.S. government faces unexpected circumstances, KBR has the ability to quickly and adeptly meet challenges head-on anywhere in the world," said Byron Bright, KBR President, Government Solutions U.S. "We are honored to serve the Air Force through this contract  no matter how demanding the environment might be." KBR has provided critical services under previous AFCAP contracts. This includes recovery efforts at Tyndall Air Force Base after Hurricane Michael devastated it in 2018. KBR's international footprint, robust supply chain and military readiness expertise enables the company to rapidly mobilize and respond to customers' urgent needs. Known for excelling in complex and extreme environments, KBR is trusted to overcome the nation's most pressing challenges. KBR is engineering solutions for the needs of today and tomorrow, safely and efficiently. About KBR, Inc. KBR is a global provider of differentiated pofessional services and technologies across the asset and program lifecycle within the Government Solutions and Energy sectors. KBR employs approximately 38,000 people worldwide (including our joint ventures), with customers in more than 80 countries, and operations in 40 countries, across three synergistic global businesses:



Government Solutions, serving government customers globally, including capabilities that cover the full lifecycle of defense, space, aviation and other government programs and missions from research and development, through systems engineering, test and evaluation, program management, to operations, maintenance, and field logistics

Technology Solutions, featuring proprietary technology, equipment, catalysts, digital solutions and related technical services for the monetization of hydrocarbons, including refining, petrochemicals, ammonia and specialty chemicals, as well as inorganics

Energy Solutions, including onshore oil and gas; LNG (liquefaction and regasification)/GTL; oil refining; petrochemicals; chemicals; fertilizers; differentiated EPC; maintenance services (Brown & Root Industrial Services); offshore oil and gas (shallow-water, deep-water, subsea); floating solutions (FPU, FPSO, FLNG & FSRU); program management and consulting services KBR is proud to work with its customers across the globe to provide technology, value-added services, integrated EPC delivery and long term operations and maintenance services to ensure consistent delivery with predictable results. At KBR, We Deliver. Visit www.kbr.com

Forward Looking Statement The statements in this press release that are not historical statements, including statements regarding future financial performance, are forward-looking statements within the meaning of the federal securities laws. These statements are subject to numerous risks and uncertainties, many of which are beyond the company's control that could cause actual results to differ materially from the results expressed or implied by the statements. These risks and uncertainties include, but are not limited to: the outcome of and the publicity surrounding audits and investigations by domestic and foreign government agencies and legislative bodies; potential adverse proceedings by such agencies and potential adverse results and consequences from such proceedings; the scope and enforceability of the company's indemnities from its former parent; changes in capital spending by the company's customers; the company's ability to obtain contracts from existing and new customers and perform under those contracts; structural changes in the industries in which the company operates; escalating costs associated with and the performance of fixed-fee projects and the company's ability to control its cost under its contracts; claims negotiations and contract disputes with the company's customers; changes in the demand for or price of oil and/or natural gas; protection of intellectual property rights; compliance with environmental laws; changes in government regulations and regulatory requirements; compliance with laws related to income taxes; unsettled political conditions, war and the effects of terrorism; foreign operations and foreign exchange rates and controls; the development and installation of financial systems; increased competition for employees; the ability to successfully complete and integrate acquisitions; and operations of joint ventures, including joint ventures that are not controlled by the company. KBR's most recently filed Annual Report on Form 10-K, any subsequent Form 10-Qs and 8-Ks, and other U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission filings discuss some of the important risk factors that KBR has identified that may affect the business, results of operations and financial condition. Except as required by law, KBR undertakes no obligation to revise or update publicly any forward-looking statements for any reason. View original content to download multimedia:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/kbr-lands-seat-on-6-4b-air-force-contract-for-global-contingency-and-humanitarian-support-301041371.html SOURCE KBR, Inc.

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Sentral Senayan II, location of MHI's newest subsidiary, PT Mitsubishi Heavy Industries Indonesia

TOKYO, Apr 15, 2020 - (JCN Newswire) - Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, Ltd. (MHI) has launched full-scale operations at a newly established subsidiary in Jakarta, Indonesia. Named "PT. MITSUBISHI HEAVY INDUSTRIES INDONESIA", the new entity takes over the role of MHI's Jakarta Liaison Office as the representative of MHI Group in the country, with functions now enhanced significantly. The establishment of the subsidiary was undertaken to boost MHI's participation in social infrastructure projects in Indonesia and strengthen sales and service operations for MHI Group products and technologies.The new subsidiary is capitalized at 5 billion rupiah (approx. 40 million yen), with backing from MHI and Mitsubishi Heavy Industries Asia Pacific Pte. Ltd. (MHI-AP), its subsidiary headquartered in Singapore. Until now, the Jakarta Liaison Office, established in 1984, has promoted sales of MHI Group products and provided operational support. In addition, MHI-AP in recent years has proposed and marketed solutions encompassing MHI Group's diverse portfolio of products, technologies and services across the Asia-Pacific region including Indonesia. These initiatives will be ramped up through PT. MITSUBISHI HEAVY INDUSTRIES INDONESIA, which has integrated functions including marketing of social infrastructure projects and provision and promotion of more locally based after-sales services.Operations at the new subsidiary got underway this month, with Shinji Kobayashi serving as President Director.MHI-AP's Managing Director Yoshiyuki Hanasawa, who serves as MHI Group's Executive Vice President and Chief Regional Officer for both the Asia-Pacific and India regions, expressed: "The establishment of PT. MITSUBISHI HEAVY INDUSTRIES INDONESIA enables MHI Group to be closer to our customers and the market in Indonesia. It will allow us to better understand their requirements and to respond to them more swiftly with customized solutions and after-sales services. We hope to broaden the network built by our Jakarta Liaison Office and look forward to strengthening our relationships with our stakeholders in Indonesia through more projects in the country as we grow and develop together."MHI will work closely with MHI-AP and offer its full support to the new subsidiary's activities.About Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, Ltd.Mitsubishi Heavy Industries (MHI) Group is one of the world's leading industrial firms. For more than 130 years, we have channeled big thinking into solutions that move the world forward - advancing the lives of everyone who shares our planet. We deliver innovative and integrated solutions across a wide range of industries, covering land, sea, sky and even space. MHI Group employs 80,000 people across 400 locations, operating in three business domains: "Power Systems," "Industry & Infrastructure," "Aircraft, Defense & Space." We have a consolidated revenue of around 40 billion U.S. Dollars. We aim to contribute to environmental sustainability while achieving global growth, using our leading-edge technologies. By bringing people and ideas together as one, we continue to pave the way to a future of shared success.For more information, please visit MHI's website: https://www.mhi.comFor Technology, Trends and Tangents, visit MHI's new online media SPECTRA: https://spectra.mhi.comSource: Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, Ltd.Copyright 2020 JCN Newswire . All rights reserved.
Source: Xinhua| 2020-04-15 22:59:30|Editor: huaxia

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BAGHDAD, April 15 (Xinhua) -- A Turkish drone bombed on Wednesday a refugee camp for Turkish Kurds in northern Iraq and killed two women, the Iraqi military said.

The Iraqi air defense forces monitored a Turkish unmanned plane, flying with an altitude of 6 km and a speed of 200 km per hour, breached the Iraqi airspace and fired a rocket on a refugee camp for Turkish Kurds near the town of Makhmour, some 100 km southeast of the northern city of Mosul, the media office of the Joint Operations Command said in a statement.

The bombardment resulted in the killing of two women among the refugees, the statement said.

The Iraqi forces rushed to the scene, and more information will be released later, the statement added.

Makhmour area is mainly populated by Arabs and Kurds and has been captured by Iraqi army from the Kurdish Peshmerga forces since October 2017.

Turkish forces frequently carry out ground operations, airstrikes and artillery bombardments against the positions of the outlawed Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) militants in northern Iraq, especially the Qandil Mountains, main base of the PKK.

The PKK is listed as a terrorist organization by Turkey, the United States and the European Union.
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Bravos Married To Medicine has been a hit with viewers for the past seven seasons for its fresh take on reality television. The series follows medical professionals and wives of doctors in Atlanta and has been praised for showing the spectrum of women outside of whom they are married to. Viewers loved the show so much that an LA spinoff was greenlit.

(L to R) Mariah Huq, Dr. Simone Whitmore, Toya Bush-Harris | Heidi Gutman/Bravo/NBCU Photo Bank via Getty Images

Mariah Huq works both behind the scenes and on-camera as a full-time cast member, but after her recent Instagram post, fans are questioning if Huq is returning for another season.

Mariah Huq on Married To Medicine

Huq was part of the show from the beginning, serving as both an executive producer and a cast member. As a wife of a prominent Atlanta doctor, she was very involved in the charitable world of Atlanta and considered herself to be a socialite. Huqs personality was a standout from the beginning but as the show progressed, her relationships with the other women were tested.

Source: YouTube

Much of Huqs storyline has centered around the demise of her friendship with her former BFF, Quad Webb. The two were close before the show began airing, with Huq even being a member of Webbs bridal party. Webb dated one of Mariahs cousins in the past, which is how they allegedly met.

The details of why they stopped being friends arent clear, except both women alleging that the other spread lies and damaging information about the other. Huq accused Webb of propositioning her married brother-in-law and Webb accused Huq of using drugs in the past. Theyve tried to reconcile on the show but have never been able to move past their issues.

Source: YouTube

Huq has also made an effort to showcase blended families and an interracial and interfaith marriage. Shes African American and her husband was born in Bangladesh. Huq was raised as a Christian while her husband was raised as a Muslim and they celebrate both faiths.

Mariah Huq reveals she has yet to receive her contract for the upcoming season of Married To Medicine

Huq left the series after two seasons but remained on the show as an executive producer. She returned in season 4, much to some of her co-stars dismay. In an interview with Bravos Daily Dish, Huq explained why she opted to return to the show,

It was time to start new and fresh. had been sick and suffered a miscarriage, I lost my father, I had been through so many things that are just so much heavier and have so much depth that I just felt like were all friends and were all grown women, so we should be able to, not necessarily forget about the past, but move on from it.

Source: YouTube

The last few seasons have been hard on Huq with her ongoing arguments with Webb, her relationships with other co-stars have been a rollercoaster, and shes fought hard against the drug abuse claims. Still, Huq is looking to return to the show as a full-time cast member.

She took to Instagram to announce to fans that she has yet to receive her contract in a short video.

Morting-ting-ting Where is my contract? Huq wrote in her caption. Last time I checked I was #MarriedToMed Now I have to worry about Covid & Contracts.

Mariah Huqs Married To Medicine co-stars speak on whether or not shes returning to the show

Huqs co-stars, Dr. Heavenly Kimes and Dr. Contessa Metcalfe, chatted about Huqs post during a live Q&A on Dr. Heavenlys YouTube channel.

The messy thing is who told her they got theirs and she didnt get hers? Thats messy right? Metcalfe asked. According to Dr. Heavenly, their co-star Latoya Bush-Harris spilled the beans. Bush-Harris is Huqs close friend. Dr. Heavenly revealed that she was instructed by the network to not talk to other co-stars about contract renewals when she received hers.

Whether Huq will be on season 8 of Married To Medicine has yet to be confirmed but Huq is open with her fans and will be sure to update them.
A 48-year-old man quizzed by fraud squad detectives as part of a probe into a sophisticated international 15m Covid-19 scam has been described as a "wheeler dealer" businessman who is "down on his luck".

The man, who is originally from Co Clare but is now living in Co Roscommon, was questioned by specialist officers for number of hours on Friday.

He is understood to be co-operating with the garda probe and he was not arrested as part of the massive international investigation into a huge face-mask swindle.

Gardai said that documents and electronic devices were obtained and are currently being forensically examined, but this process may take a number of months to complete.

"This individual was not previously known to gardai for involvement in crime and he certainly does not fit the profile of someone involved in organised crime at this level," a source told the Herald last night.

"It would be fair to say that he is a failed businessman who is down on his luck.

He has been involved in many enterprises over the years, including senior roles in the retail and hospitality sectors as well as a number of other enterprises.

Scheme

"This individual was not arrested last week but it is very likely that he will be in the coming weeks as 1.5m has been found in his bank account. This cash has been frozen.

"The big question now is to establish how this individual got involved in such a massive fraud scheme. It is also fair to say that he is an eccentric type of person," the source explained.

The investigation was launched when German health authorities made an upfront payment online of 1.5m for face masks, only to discover the website advertising the personal protective equipment (PPE) was being operated by scammers.

The German state of Nord Rhein Westphalia, worst affected for coronavirus cases in that country, contracted a company based between Zurich and Hamburg for 10 million face masks at a cost of 14.7m.

They then went to a trusted supplier in Spain but the scammers had set up a cloned website for this company who claimed they could not fulfil the order due to high demand of PPE needed because of the global coronavirus pandemic.

They were then directed to an Irish middleman who put them in touch with a Dutch company and distributor, whose website and details have been cloned by scammers.

A deal was made and 1.5m was paid up front to an Irish company based in Roscommon, and 880,000 is forward to the account of a Dutch company, with the rest of the money to follow.

On 27 March Irish and German stakeholders made the trip to Amsterdam to oversee the handover.

52 vehicles had been sent from Germany to collect the masks and were due to receive a police escort at the border, but the shipment never arrived.

The transactions were made by the German companies' managing director while in home quarantine in Bavaria at the end of March after a holiday in Austria and a complaint was made to police in the Traunstein Region on March 30.

Recovered

A total of 12.3m was returned from the company to the German state and the 1.5m was traced to a bank account in Roscommon and frozen.

Of the 880,000 sent to the Dutch account, 490,000 was traced to a Nigerian bank account which was deposited from a UK account.

That money was recovered. A further 125,000 was transferred to another Dutch bank account.

Two men appeared in a Dutch court on April 9 in relation to alleged fraud, falsification and money laundering in connection with above 880,000 proceeds of crime.

Yesterday gardai announced details of the investigation which is being led in this State by the Garda National Economic Crime Bureau (GNECB) which is working with Irish, German and Dutch Financial Intelligence Units (FIUs) and supported by international police agencies.

Gardai revealed that the suspect questioned last Friday under "section 7 of the Criminal Justice (Money Laundering and Terrorist Financing) Acts 2010 to 2018".

"This is a serious offence carrying a maximum term of imprisonment of 14 years after conviction on indictment," a spokesman said.

"Enquires under covered that fraudsters had captured the address of a real existing Dutch Company whom operate in this business and opened a bank account at the same Dutch bank as the real company in a compromised similar name," the garda spokesman said.

Crime

"This case initially came to the attention of the financial sector which alerted the authorities in each jurisdiction including Interpol and Europol.

"Interpol is now coordinating the case, which allows for a cohesive investigative approach.

The investigation is ongoing and Interpol continues to support its member countries in their common goal to combat Covid-19 related financial crime," he added.
By Lisa Rapaport (Reuters) - Contact tracing has been used for decades to control the spread of infectious diseases. The basic idea is simple: track down infected people, then find everyone who has been near them and encourage those people to stay home until it is clear they are not sick. Right now, stay-at-home orders are being used worldwide to minimize the potential for people infected with the novel coronavirus to spread it.

By Lisa Rapaport

(Reuters) - Contact tracing has been used for decades to control the spread of infectious diseases. The basic idea is simple: track down infected people, then find everyone who has been near them and encourage those people to stay home until it is clear they are not sick.

Right now, stay-at-home orders are being used worldwide to minimize the potential for people infected with the novel coronavirus to spread it. When restrictions are lifted and normal activities resume, extensive contact tracing will be needed to prevent new outbreaks.

Here's what you need to know about contact tracing:

HOW DOES CONTACT TRACING WORK?

First, public health investigators find out everyone an infected person has seen, and everywhere that person has gone over the previous several days.

"Almost every infection has a period of time during which a person with the infection is considered contagious," said Dr. Prathit Kulkarni, from Baylor College of Medicine in Houston. "Contact tracing is the process of figuring out who was in enough contact with the person during the time they were infectious that they may have been exposed."

If investigators find people with symptoms, they may ask them to self-quarantine for two weeks and provide a rundown of contacts. People without symptoms may also be asked to self-quarantine and may be monitored to see if they remain symptom-free.

WHY IS CONTACT TRACING NEEDED ONCE STAY-AT-HOME ORDERS END?

While stay-at-home orders are in place, infected people do not come in contact with many others. In San Francisco, for example, each new case only has about five contacts who need tracing, said Dr. George Rutherford from the University of California San Francisco, who is working with the city to track people with new coronavirus infections.

But once people return to school and work, each infected person could easily come in contact with 1,000 others, he said.

"This is the first line of defense against coronavirus once things open up again," Rutherford said.

WHAT IS NEEDED FOR CONTACT TRACING TO WORK?

Hundreds of thousands of investigators will be needed to do contact tracing in the United States once stay-at-home orders lift, Rutherford said.

Some disease investigators are already on the job at the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and state and local health departments, but they only make up about one-tenth of what is needed. The rest of the investigators might be some combination of recent graduates from public health programs, volunteers, and librarians or other government workers who have been furloughed.

Extensive testing will also be needed to identify infected people, says Dr. Ranu Dhillon of Brigham and Women's Hospital and Harvard Medical School in Boston.

"Robust testing and contact tracing ... will be essential for keeping COVID-19 transmission contained and from again spiraling out of control," Dhillon said. COVID-19 is the respiratory disease caused by the coronavirus.

(Reporting by Lisa Rapaport; editing by Nancy Lapid and Grant McCool)

This story has not been edited by Firstpost staff and is generated by auto-feed.
President Donald Trump arriving to speak about the coronavirus in the Rose Garden of the White House on Tuesday. Read more

GENEVA  Nations and health experts worldwide reacted with alarm Wednesday after President Donald Trump announced a halt to the sizable funding the United States sends to the World Health Organization. They warned that the move could jeopardize global efforts to stop the coronavirus pandemic.

At a briefing in Washington, Trump said he was instructing his administration to halt funding for the WHO pending a review of its role in severely mismanaging and covering up the spread of the coronavirus. The United States is WHOs largest single donor, contributing between $400 million and $500 million annually to the Geneva-based agency in recent years.

I will always put the well-being of America first, Trump said in a statement on Wednesday.

Trump has repeatedly labelled COVID-19 the Chinese virus and criticized the U.N. health agency for being too lenient on China, where the novel virus first emerged late last year.

Outside experts have questioned China's reported infections and deaths from the virus, calling them way too low and unreliable. And an investigation by The Associated Press has found that s ix days of delays between when Chinese officials k new about the virus and when they warned the public allowed the pandemic to bloom into an enormous public health disaster.

The WHO has been particularly effusive in its praise for China, calling on other countries to emulate their approach and repeatedly praising their transparency.

But China only agreed to a proposed WHO-led mission to investigate the coronavirus after WHOs chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus personally paid a visit to Chinese President Xi Jinping, a highly unusual move to secure a country visit during an outbreak.

The European Union on Wednesday said Trump has no reason to freeze WHO funding at this critical stage and called for measures to promote unity instead of division.

Trudie Lang, a professor of global health research at Oxford University said attempts to hinder WHO's work could have significant consequences for the pandemic response.

The reason we're making such fast progress on diagnostics, vaccines and drugs is because of WHO's role as a neutral broker, she said. It's their role to bring together the best science.

On Twitter, Bill Gates  whose foundation was the second-largest donor to the WHO for its latest two-year budget, contributing over $530 million in 2018 and 2019  wrote that stopping funding for WHO during a world health crisis is as dangerous as it sounds.

Their work is slowing the spread of COVID-19 and if that work is stopped no other organization can replace them. The world needs WHO now more than ever, Gates wrote.

Worldwide, the pandemic has infected over 2 million people and killed over 128,000, according to a tally by Johns Hopkins University.

Germanys foreign minister, Heiko Maas, pushed back at Trumps announcement.

Placing blame doesnt help, he wrote on Twitter. The virus knows no borders. We must work closely against COVID-19.

The Netherlands also threw its support behind the WHO. Now is not the time to hold back funding. Once the pandemic is under control, lessons can be learned. For now, focus on overcoming this crisis, Sigrid Kaag, minister for foreign trade and development cooperation, said on Twitter.

Devi Sridhar, chair of global public health at the University of Edinburgh, called Trump's decision extremely problematic, noting that WHO is leading efforts to help developing countries fight the spread of COVID-19.

This is the agency that's looking out for other countries and leading efforts to stop the pandemic, Sridhar said. This is exactly the time when they need more funding, not less.

Sridhar said Trump's move was a short-sighted political decision that would likely have lasting consequences.

Trump is angry, but his anger is being directed in a way that is going to ultimately hurt U.S. interests, she said.

Sridhar and others said it was still unclear what the precise impact of Trump's funding cuts might be, but that other health priorities funded by the U.S., like polio eradication, malaria and HIV, were likely to suffer.

Aid workers in developing countries worried they might be hardest hit by Trump's decision.

Trumps decision to withhold support from the WHO is pulling the rug out from under our feet at a pivotal moment. It will impact the humanitarian community as a whole, said Tom Peyre-Costa, regional media adviser for Central and West Africa for the Norwegian Refugee Council. It defies logic at the height of a global pandemic and will lead to many more deaths.

In Beijing, Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian says the country is "seriously concerned about the U.S. governments decision to suspend funding.

Russia's foreign minister Sergey Lavrov warned against politicizing and said he believed WHO had acted effectively in its handling of the pandemic.

The WHO did not respond to repeated requests from The Associated Press for comment.

Some experts say WHO dallied in declaring a pandemic; it did so only on March 11, long after the surging outbreaks on multiple continents met the agency's own definition for a global crisis.

They were really behind the curve, said Mark Woolhouse, professor of infectious disease epidemiology at the University of Edinburgh.

The U.N. health agency also insisted for months that the virus could be contained and was not as infectious as influenza. But many outbreak experts, including at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, say COVID-19 is spreading many times faster than flu and that its rate of spread was apparent in January.

Still, some global health academics said Trump's attacks on WHO might actually strengthen the agency's credibility.

If Trump was making a great success of the pandemic response in the U.S., if there were minimal cases and deaths there, that might be different, said Sophie Harman, a professor of international politics at Queen Mary University of London. But things are getting worse and that reinforces the need for WHO.

___

Cheng reported from London. Associated Press writers Mike Corder in The Hague, Frank Jordans in Berlin, Daria Litvinova in Moscow, Darlene Superville in Washington, Andrew Meldrum in Johannesburg and Sam Mednick in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso, contributed to this report.
AXIS Capital Holdings Limited has announced $1 million in targeted donations to support COVID-19 relief efforts. AXIS will partner with non-profits providing pandemic relief globally, as well as in the communities in which AXIS operates.

COVID-19 is an unprecedented challenge that is impacting millions of lives, said Albert Benchimol, president and CEO of AXIS. As a purpose-driven organization, we feel a deep commitment to do our part to give back and help support the relief efforts that are underway globally, as well as in our local communities. Nearly every one of us has been touched in some way by COVID-19. This is a time that we must come together as an industry, as companies, and as individuals to support the relief and recovery efforts and help create a sustainable future.
Italy has seen an estimated 60% decline in crop yields since the disease was discovered in the country in 2013. (Getty)

A deadly disease affecting olive trees in Europe could cost economies over 20bn (17bn, $22bn), according to new research.

The Xylella fastidiosa pathogen, spread by insects, has destroyed large areas of trees in Italy and could vastly increase the costs of olive oil for consumers.

Italy has seen an estimated 60% decline in crop yields since the disease was discovered in the country in 2013.

The Xylella bacterium has now been found in Spain, France and Portugal and plantations in Greece also now face a potential threat from the disease.

A new study has estimated that the disease could cost the Spanish economy alone 17bn over the next 50 years if the infection expands and the majority of trees are affected and die.

READ MORE: UK economy could shrink by quarter if lockdown persists

The researchers modelled different scenarios including tree death leading to end of all growing. They compared this worst case with a scenario where replanting with resistant varieties occurred.

Projections have been made for Italy, Spain, and Greece, which between them account for 95% of European olive oil production.

Italy could lose over 5bn, while Greece could see a decline of just under 2bn.

Dr Maria Saponari, from the CNR Institute for Sustainable Plant Protection in Italy said: The damage to the olives also causes a depreciation of the value of the land, and to the touristic attractiveness of this region.

It's had a severe impact on the local economy and jobs connected with agriculture.

Researchers warned the disease is likely to leave consumers worse off.

The expected effect could be that there would be a shortage of supply, lead author Kevin Schneider from Wageningen University in the Netherlands told the BBC.

And I would expect that if prices go up, consumers will be worse off.

READ MORE: EUs chief scientist quits over European coronavirus response

If the infection is slowed down, or resistant varieties are planted instead, costs to consumers and local economies would be significantly less.

Story continues

The industry is currently fighting the disease by removing infected trees and trying to clamp down on the movement of plant material and the sap-sucking insects, such as spittlebugs, that spread the pathogen.

Several scientific initiatives are attempting to tackle the spread of the bacterium by using insect repelling clays, vegetative barriers and genetic analysis to determine why some plants are more susceptible to the infection than others.

The researchers believe that the only way to completely wipe out the disease is finding trees that are resistant to the pathogen.

While two varieties of olive tree have been found to have some resistance, the researchers are calling for much more research in this area in order to save the European olive oil industry.
Mumbai, April 15 : Actress Payal Ghosh claims she is financially broke and is missing work during the ongoing lockdown.

The actress took to Instagram to declare her situation, adding that she is "living a life never imagined".

"Missing work, life, traveling, financially broken, living a life never imagined... none of our lives are bed of roses right now.. but we have to compromise things as the situation demands.. we have to follow the lockdown rules to keep us safe and keep others safe," wrote Payal.

The actress also reminded everyone not to step out of their homes amid the COVID 19 pandemic.

"We can't let the virus spread.. then we will see mortality in crores.. please be responsible, please stay wherever you are.. let's fight it together.. and we have to ... please take care #stayhome #stayhomesavelives," she wrote.

Payal Ghosh made her screen debut in the 2008 English film "Sharpe's Peril" and has appeared in Tamil, Telugu and Kannada films, besdies the 2017 Bollywood release, "Patel Ki Punjabi Shaadi" that starred Rishi Kapoor and Paresh Rawal.
April 15 : Bade Acche Lagte Hai famed actress Chahat Khanna gets candid about her family, kids, and current lockdown during her recent media interaction.

Making headlines with her stunning and viral song, Bade Acche Lagte Hai with Mika Singh, actress Chahat Khanna says that her daughters are keeping her super busy during this lockdown.

When asked about spending time creatively during lockdown, Chahat said, I am a mother looking after her kids. So spending time creatively is difficult. Had I been alone I might have time to read, paint, write or exercise, but with me its other way round. I dont get a single second to spare on creativity, as my kid doesnt leave my back not even for five minutes. So its becoming next to impossible for me to indulge myself into creativity so its kind of mad house right now for me

Chahat Khanna is a working mother, who probably doesnt have time to binge watch, but we asked her about secret binge list and she said, I am watching Dynasty. I am also watching light hearted films which are about hope, love and rom-com which can lighten the mood. I need them! There is a very beautiful film called The Holiday on Netflix. I have watched Maska recently, which is very soulful, light-hearted and is pleasure to watch

With lockdown all productions and projects are delayed or shutdown. We asked Chahat if any of her shoot got affected because of lockdown.

She said, I wont say shoot, but my projects got delayed. By June, I was about to come up with new project but now it will take almost August or September. So my projects got delayed not the shoot.

Chahat Khanna also urged all her fans to take lockdown seriously, despite the discomfort.

She said, I really want to say, lockdown is crucial, if we take it seriously then we might actually be free after that. If not, this will keep on extending. So we have to help ourselves, we have to stay indoors if we want this lockdown to get resolved soonest

Chahat Khanna was last seen in Prassthanam, also starring Sanjay Dutt, Jackie Shroff, Manisha Koirala, Chunky Pandey, Ali Fazal, Satyajeet Dubey, and Amyra Dastur.
New Delhi: The US technology giant Apple launched an affordable second-generation iPhone SE with a 4.7-inch Retina HD display, paired with Touch ID for industry-leading security in Cupertino on Wednesday (April 15).

In the US, iPhone SE is available to pre-order on apple.com and the Apple Store app beginning April 17 and will arrive at Apple, Apple Authorized Resellers and select carriers on April 24 in the United States and over 40 other countries and regions, said the company.

The iPhone SE will be available in 64GB, 128GB and 256GB models in black, white and (PRODUCT)RED through Apple Authorised Resellers and select carriers. The new iPhone SE is stated to be powered by the Apple-designed A13 Bionic, the fastest chip in a smartphone and features the best single-camera system ever in an iPhone.

The availability of the new iPhone in India will be announced at a later date. The first iPhone SE was a hit with many customers especially in India who loved its unique combination of small size, high-end performance, and affordable price.

The updated iPhone SE will start at $399 or less than half the price of its leading flagship devices and be available as of Friday.

"The first iPhone SE was a hit with many customers who loved its unique combination of small size, high-end performance, and affordable price; the new second-generation iPhone SE builds on that great idea and improves on it in every way," Phil Schiller, Apple's senior vice president of worldwide marketing, is quoted as saying.

iPhone SE features

The new iPhone device features an aerospace-grade aluminum and durable glass design with an all-black front. It also features the familiar Home button designed with sapphire crystal to be durable and to protect the sensor, and a steel ring to detect a user`s fingerprint for Touch ID.

iPhone SE comes with wireless-charging capability with Qi-certified chargers and also supports fast-charging, giving customers up to 50 per cent charge in just 30 minutes.

It also flaunts Dual SIM with eSIM that provides flexibility for users to have two separate phone numbers on a single device while traveling abroad or for use as a business line.

iPhone SE also boasts of the best single-camera system ever in an iPhone with a 12MP f/1.8 aperture Wide camera and uses the image signal processor and Neural Engine of A13 Bionic to unlock computational photography, including Portrait Mode, all six Portrait Lighting effects and Depth Control.

The company stated, "The rear camera supports high-quality video capture at 4K up to 60fps, and extended dynamic range comes to iPhone SE for more highlight details up to 30fps."

Notably, Apple Inc today released the smaller iPhone with reduced rates to broaden its appeal to budget-conscious customers as the coronavirus hobbles the global economy. The lower-cost model could attract more consumers to Apple services, a growing driver of revenue.
WASHINGTON - The struggle to reopen Congress is more complex than just monitoring how far the coronavirus curve has been bent toward containment, then recalling more than 500 lawmakers to the Capitol.

This isn't at all like reopening a corporate headquarters in a city center or a regional plant in a suburban office park, where employees are traveling a relatively short distance to their workplace.

Instead, Congress functions much more like a large college campus. More than 10,000 employees, on a normal day, are spread across the Capitol, seven office buildings for lawmakers and committees, the Capitol Police headquarters, the Library of Congress and a dormitory for Senate pages.

Then there are the more than 15,000 tourists a day who would visit the complex during the peak springtime season. That practice has been prohibited since March 13, and few leaders are even contemplating when the general public would be allowed to return.

The most basic duties - 100 senators showing up for a roll call, or up to 435 members of the House voting - are inherent violations of federal health guidelines that say groups should be limited to no more than 10 people.

And then there are the dozens of members of the House who, rather than rent or own a private apartment, live in their offices. Each morning these lawmakers use showers in the House gym to get ready for that day's work representing their constituents.

Without access to the House gym, these lawmakers have nowhere to shower each morning, and all gyms in Washington have been ordered closed through District of Columbia Mayor Muriel Bowser's emergency orders shuttering all nonessential businesses.

On Wednesday, Bowser extended that order until at least May 15, which is almost two weeks beyond what congressional leaders have set as their aspirational return to the Capitol.

Those leaders are now recognizing just how daunting the task is to try to get Congress back to any semblance of normalcy.

"People think we can do Congress by Zoom. Zoom is a Chinese entity that we've been told not to even trust the security of. So there are challenges, it's not as easy as you would think," House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., said Tuesday night on MSNBC's "All In With Chris Hayes."

The Silicon Valley company, founded by a Chinese entrepreneur, has come under scrutiny for its security measures. Pelosi said a more detailed technology report would be delivered during a House Democratic caucus call Thursday.

House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, D-Md., who is in charge of the chamber's scheduling, acknowledged Wednesday that some things would have to change to make up for the lost time while Congress is shut down. He said lawmakers will go beyond the typical workweek of starting Monday evening and finishing Thursday afternoon.

"Once we're back, the schedule will likely change to accommodate the work we have to get done," Hoyer told reporters during a conference call, predicting some recess weeks for lawmakers to work in their districts would be canceled. "They'll have less time at home, less time with their constituents, but more time acting on behalf of their constituents on work that we need to do."

To be sure, many members of Congress say they are working harder than ever before, just doing so from their homes trying to help the myriad local hospitals dealing with the deadly coronavirus and small businesses struggling through the economic crisis.

These constituent services have consumed their daily lives, but there remains the need to continue to work on legislation, both bills related to the coronavirus and others dealing with normal business like funding the federal government.

Committee chairmen have been holding teleconference meetings with rank-and-file lawmakers, but long-standing rules forbid actually holding formal hearings and votes on legislation from remote distances.

To change those rules, the full House and Senate would have to return to the Capitol, hold a debate and then vote on such changes. Hoyer said Wednesday that no such full return can happen until the "advice of the health-care community" is that doing so is safe.

Whenever that time comes, Hoyer's planned five-day workweek in Washington requires lawmakers to travel from near and far, most on planes and trains, to get to the Capitol.

Any return to normalcy would then involve several hundred lawmakers trekking back home after five days in Washington, then repeating that exercise after a weekend at home.

That would place hundreds of lawmakers on two flights a week, the type of regular travel that many are reluctant to even think about now because of the constant exposure that would entail.

"I'm actually more concerned about members of Congress spreading this back in their district," Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart, R-Fla., said in a recent interview.

Diaz-Balart, who contracted covid-19 in mid-March, spent three weeks quarantining himself in his Capitol Hill apartment before he returned to Florida. With constant travel to and from Washington, even seemingly healthy lawmakers could be asymptomatic vectors of the virus.

"That's the last thing you want," Diaz-Balart said.

Some lawmakers live in group houses, which puts them in close quarters just like college students. House Minority Whip Steve Scalise, R-La., has lived almost a decade in a townhouse with three other lawmakers.

Sen. Christopher Coons, D-Del., has an even trickier routine. Every day he usually takes Amtrak from Wilmington, North Carolina, to Washington, then back at night - the type of travel on public transit that seems more dangerous than ever. On some occasions, when he has to stay overnight, Coons will bunk up with a fellow senator who has an extra room in their home near the Capitol.

Beyond the lawmakers are the more than 13,000 aides who work for them, some of whom are back home in their states. Since Congress finished a $2 trillion rescue package in late March, almost every staffer has been working from home, leaving the Capitol complex a bit of a ghost town.

Many office doors have signs telling cleaning crews not to enter, because no one is working there.

Of the Senate's dozen cafeterias and coffee shops, just one carryout remains open, mostly serving the police who still guard the buildings. In a cramped basement room, just four customers are allowed in at a time.

Any return to normalcy, just bringing back the lawmakers and a few staff each to the Capitol, would be an exponential growth from the current occupancy and likely require even more support staff to help operate dining areas and cleaning.

Leaders, for now, have few answers, other than hoping medical research can come up with a solution sometime soon.

"We need to get the work of the American people done," Hoyer said.
An anti-terrorism court in Pakistan has adjourned for an indefinite period the hearing against Mumbai terror attack mastermind and Jamat-ud-Dawah chief Hafiz Saeed in four terror financing cases in the wake of the coronavirus outbreak in the country.

Saeed, a UN designated terrorist whom the US has placed a USD 10 million bounty on, was sentenced to 11 years in jail in two terror financing cases in February. The 70-year-old fiery cleric was arrested on July 17 and is lodged at the high-security Kot Lakhpat jail here.

"Lahore's anti-terrorism court has not been holding hearing in four terror financing cases against Hafiz Saeed and other JuD leaders for the last one month or so because of COVID-19," a court official told PTI on Wednesday.

He said the court had adjourned the hearing for an indefinite period.

'It is likely that the proceedings in these cases may resume once the issue of coronavirus is settled, he said, referring to the COVID-19 pandemic that has killed 113 people and infected more than 6,200 others in the country.

The Pakistan government on Tuesday extended the ongoing lockdown due to the virus outbreak until the end of this month.

Saeed underwent angioplasty at a hospital here last month after he complained of chest pain



The Counter Terrorism Department (CTD) of Punjab police had registered 23 FIRs against Saeed and his accomplices on the charges of terror financing in different cities of the province.

Saeed-led JuD is the front organisation for the LeT which is responsible for carrying out the 2008 Mumbai attack that killed 166 people, including six Americans.

The US named Saeed as a Specially Designated Global Terrorist, and the US, since 2012, has offered a USD 10 million reward for information that brings Saeed to justice. He was listed as a terrorist under the UN Security Council Resolution 1267 in December 2008.

In February, Lahore's anti-terrorism court sentenced Saeed and his close aide Zafar Iqbal to five and a half years each and imposed a fine of Rs 15,000 in each case. A total of 11 years sentence will run concurrently.

The US welcomed the conviction of Saeed and described it as an "important step forward" for Pakistan in meeting its international commitments to combat terror financing and not to allow non-state actors to operate from its soil.

The crackdown on Saeed's outfit last year followed a warning by the international terror financing watchdog to Pakistan to deliver on its commitments to curb terror financing and money laundering.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
The Company's NAV decreased by 17.5% during the month of March (in GBP terms).



Global equity markets continued to fall during the month, as a number of countries entered lockdown, in an effort to contain the spread of the coronavirus. For reference, the MSCI World Index fell by 13.2%. The shutdowns associated with the coronavirus will have a material negative impact on demand and supply of mined commodities. However, mining companies are benefitting from currency moves and the fall in oil prices, which has been beneficial for cost savings. In addition, going into this crisis, the mining sector was one of the least levered sectors, therefore the outlook for dividends relative to other sectors remains relatively bright.



Mined commodity prices continued to come under pressure, with zinc, aluminium and copper returning -5.7%, -11.0% and -12.1% respectively. Iron ore posted moderate negative returns, with its price falling by 0.6% in March. Elsewhere, the gold price was up by 1.6% on the month, reaffirming its safe haven status in times of market volatility. Similar to last month, gold equities lagged the gold price; it seems that gold equities have been sold as investors seek to lock in the strong gains seen over 2019 to cover losses elsewhere. However, whilst liquidity and other factors are impacting markets in unusual ways, gold companies are well placed to weather this period and are making strong profits at current gold prices. Therefore, we see this dislocation between the gold equities and the gold price as temporary and not related to fundamentals.



Within the energy sector, in addition to the reduction in oil demand, OPEC and Russia failed to agree to production cuts. The prospect of excess oil supply caused spot oil prices to fall by over 60% over the month and caused energy equities to also fall. Oil prices decreased, with Brent and WTI (West Texas Intermediate) returning -62.6% and -56.5%, to end the period at prices of $19/bbl and $20/bbl respectively. The implications for global oil markets, where transportation accounts for more than half of annual demand, are that consumption levels look set to contract notably during the second quarter such that annual average demand could contract by up to 5% for 2020 (estimate), a much greater decline than in the Global Financial Crisis in 2008.



All data points in US Dollar terms unless otherwise specified. Commodity price moves sourced from Thomson Reuters Datastream.



15 April 2020
TORONTO, April 15, 2020 /PRNewswire/ - Franco-Nevada Corporation notes that the location of its upcoming annual meeting of shareholders (the "Meeting") has been changed to its corporate head office at 199 Bay Street, Suite 2000, Commerce Court West, Toronto, Ontario as the original meeting venue, the TMX Broadcast Centre, is no longer available due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The Meeting will be available through a live webcast and teleconference. Franco-Nevada is strongly encouraging registered and beneficial shareholders to vote in advance using their proxy or voting instruction form, as applicable, and to participate in the Meeting through the webcast or teleconference. Shareholders will be able to submit questions during the Meeting through the webcast or teleconference or may submit questions in advance of the Meeting to [email protected].

Details on how to access the live webcast and teleconference are listed below:

Conference Call and Webcast: May 6th at 4:00 pm ET



Dialin Numbers: North American Toll Free: 18883900546

Local and International: 4167648688

Conference ID: 06822739



Webcast: www.franconevada.com

The Company will continue to monitor the situation and will post any changes or updates in respect of the Meeting to the Company's website and by press release. We encourage shareholders to regularly check the website for updates.

Details for Upcoming Release of Q1/2020 Results

Franco-Nevada will release its Q1/2020 results on May 6, 2020 and management will host a conference call the following day, May 7, 2020 at 10:00 a.m. ET to review the results. Interested investors are invited to participate as follows:

Q1/2020 Results Release: May 6th after market close



Conference Call and Webcast: May 7th 10:00 am ET



Dialin Numbers: North American Toll Free: 18883900546

Local and International: 4167648688



Webcast: www.franconevada.com



Replay (available until May 14th): North American Toll Free: 18883900541

Local and International: 4167648677

Pass code: 621893 #





Corporate Summary

Franco-Nevada Corporation is the leading gold-focused royalty and streaming company with the largest and most diversified portfolio of cash-flow producing assets. Its business model provides investors with gold price and exploration optionality while limiting exposure to many of the risks of operating companies. Franco-Nevada is debt free and uses its free cash flow to expand its portfolio and pay dividends. It trades under the symbol FNV on both the Toronto and New York stock exchanges. Franco-Nevada is the gold investment that works.

SOURCE Franco-Nevada Corporation

Related Links

www.franco-nevada.com


By Dave Graham

MEXICO CITY (Reuters) - Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador on Tuesday proposed bringing forward a referendum on his presidency to June 2021 from 2022, challenging his opponents to accept the offer and vote him out of office.

Critics of the leftist president's management of the economy, his security record and handling of the coronavirus pandemic have increasingly urged voters to use the self-imposed "recall vote" on his performance to get rid of him.

Lopez Obrador, who won election by a landslide in 2018, proposed the early vote on his six-year term, and initially wanted to hold it on the same day as mid-term legislative elections in June 2021.

Fearing he would use the vote to put himself at the center of the 2021 elections, the opposition balked at the idea and forced him to move it into the spring of 2022.

Now that Lopez Obrador's popularity has fallen sharply, opponents have seized on the referendum as an opportunity.

Never shy of scrapping with critics, Lopez Obrador challenged them to put their grievances to the public by moving the vote to when he first proposed it.

"I'm offering them to bring forward the date. That we don't wait until 2022 for the recall vote, that we take advantage of the (mid-term) elections by holding it the same day," he said at a regular government news conference.

Lopez Obrador, 66, took office 16 months ago and his approval ratings were initially around 80% in some polls. But his popularity has tumbled, and a daily survey by pollster Consulta Mitofsky now puts his approval score at 46.5%.

A separate poll for newspaper El Financiero showed voter support for the president's National Regeneration Movement party, never as popular as Lopez Obrador himself, had slipped to 18% in March from 33% in January.

That equalled combined backing for the two main opposition groups and former rulers, the centrist Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) and center-right National Action Party (PAN), which had 8% and 10% respectively.

Story continues

Three out of five voters showed no preference for any party.

Mexico slipped into a mild recession last year, hit by a slump in investment precipitated in particular by concerns about Lopez Obrador's readiness to allow business contracts signed under the previous government to be called into question or cancelled.

Despite his pledge to reduce record levels of drug cartel-fueled violence plaguing the country, homicides crept up to new highs under Lopez Obrador in 2019.

(Reporting by Dave Graham; Editing by Frank Jack Daniel, Sandra Maler and Tom Brown)
Source: Xinhua| 2020-04-15 16:03:47|Editor: huaxia

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BEIJING, April 15 (Xinhua) -- Senior legislators of the National People's Congress (NPC) on Wednesday attended a voluntary tree-planting activity in Beijing, as part of the country's continuous efforts to improve its ecology and the environment.

Vice chairpersons of the Standing Committee of the NPC, or China's top legislature, Zhang Chunxian, Shen Yueyue, Ji Bingxuan, Eligen Imibakhi, Chen Zhu, Wang Dongming, Padma Choling, Cai Dafeng and Wu Weihua attended the event held at a tree-planting area in Fengtai District.

They were joined by a group of legislators from the NPC Standing Committee, the NPC's special committees and working committees.

The NPC Standing Committee has consistently organized voluntary tree-planting activities in spring for years.
Copyright  2020 Albuquerque Journal

SANTA FE  The state Supreme Court  in an unprecedented hearing by video link  rejected an emergency petition Tuesday that would have shifted New Mexicos June 2 primary to an election by mail.

The decision came after more than two dozen of New Mexicos top election officials  citing danger to public health  pleaded for court permission to close polling sites and conduct the primary election largely through mail-in ballots.

In a 2-hour hearing, the justices wrestled with their authority to step in.

They pointedly asked whether granting the petition would usurp the Legislatures authority to craft election laws. But they also asked whether election officials would have the proper protective equipment to conduct an in-person election safely.

In the end, they ruled unanimously that state law prohibits them from ordering a mail-in election.

Instead, the court directed county clerks throughout the state to mail absentee-ballot applications to voters to encourage people to vote absentee, rather than in person, a step the court said is permitted by law.

Obviously, this is a very difficult case, which is evidenced by the other branches having chosen not to act, Chief Justice Judith Nakamura said Tuesday as she announced the decision.

The public health emergency is obvious, she said, but state law prohibits mailing ballots to voters unless theyve first filled out an application. Consequently, the justices ordered county clerks and Secretary of State Maggie Toulouse Oliver to mail absentee applications  but not the ballots themselves  to voters.

It is indisputable that in-person voting poses a substantial health risk to the state of New Mexico, Nakamura said.

The chief justice delivered the ruling to a nearly empty courtroom in Santa Fe.

It was the Supreme Courts first hearing conducted through videoconferencing. Four justices sat in the courtroom, and another participated by video.

Attorneys addressed the court through a video link.

Tuesdays ruling doesnt necessarily preclude New Mexico from moving to a mail-in system for the June 2 primary. But it would take emergency legislative action  in a special session  to change election rules.

Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham and her attorneys said an immediate special session is unlikely because of the public health risk of a crowded Capitol.

Voting is scheduled to start in three weeks. Absentee ballots can be mailed out starting May 5, and a limited number of sites for in-person early voting open that day.

Broader early voting locations open May 16.

Republicans, Democrats and Libertarians will be picking their nominees for the U.S. Senate and House, legislative seats and many local races.

The general election is Nov. 3.

During Tuesdays hearing, Justice Edward Chavez, who is retired but heard the case because two justices recused themselves, skeptically questioned attorneys pushing to shift the election largely to mail-in ballots. He noted that the Legislature had required absentee voters to first submit an application before getting a ballot  a potential sign, he said, that lawmakers wanted extra safeguards in place for voting by mail.

Im not sure the court can overlook those safeguards, Chavez said during the hearing.

Justice Michael Vigil, in turn, said it was clear the Legislature permitted mail-in voting in some circumstances, such as in special elections or after an absentee application.

He asked whether it would amount to a suicide pact to move forward with an in-person election.

Carter Harrison, an attorney for the Republican Party of New Mexico, which opposed the emergency petition, told the Supreme Court that there were other options.

County clerks, he said, could seek court approval to dramatically reduce in-person polling locations while launching an information campaign to encourage absentee voting. The application process required for absentee voting ensures the ballots get to the right addresses, he said.

This decision by the Court ensures that the health and safety of every voter and worker is protected, while making sure that our election will not be susceptible to fraud, Republican Party Chairman Steve Pearce said in a written statement after the hearing. We are pleased that the Justices recognized this and that we can proceed with a fair and free election in a safe environment.

State Democratic Party Chairwoman Marg Elliston said the emergency petition for mail-in ballots was the best option for protecting both public health and the peoples right to vote.

The Democratic Party of New Mexico remains concerned about how in-person voting could threaten the health and safety of many New Mexicans, she said in a written statement. We will continue to do everything possible to help our fellow New Mexicans make their voices heard, including encouraging voters to fill out their absentee ballot applications.

The 27 county clerks and Toulouse Oliver had told the court that under their plan, they would still offer a limited number of sites where New Mexicans could drop off ballots or vote if absolutely necessary. But they said poll workers are scared to staff their normal precincts and that traditional voting sites, such as schools, are closed anyway  critical barriers to carrying out a tradition election.

The clerks are not asking this court to legislate, said Daniel Ivey-Soto, a state senator and attorney who represented the 27 clerks. Instead, were asking this court to respond to a public health emergency.

The Republican Party and other opponents, meanwhile, slammed the petition as an illegal attempt to bypass the Legislature.

Its been unclear whether the Legislature is unable to meet or just unwilling to meet, Harrison told the court.

Courtroom seating for Tuesdays hearing was arranged to meet social distancing standards, and video of the hearing was streamed online.

Two retired justices  Chavez and Richard Bosson  participated in place of two current members of the court who recused themselves. Justices Shannon Bacon and David Thomson are on the ballot this year and didnt participate in Tuesdays hearing.

Toulouse Oliver immediately encouraged voters Tuesday to update their voter registration to ensure the state has the correct address and to look for an absentee application in the mail. She said her office would comply with the court order and do everything it can to ensure voters can make their voices heard.

My office will be working with all county clerks to ensure that all of the polling places we are required by law to staff and equip have the personal protection equipment needed to make in-person voting as safe as possible for all New Mexicans who choose to utilize it, Toulouse Oliver said.
People wear their face masks waiting in line for an emergency food distribution at the 88th Street Temple Church of God in Christ on April 14, 2020 in Los Angeles, California, during the coronavirus pandemic.

California Gov. Gavin Newsom announced additional unemployment benefits for the state on Wednesday as well as new measures to handle a record volume of unemployment inquiries.

"People are not where they were just a few weeks ago," Newsom said at a press briefing Wednesday. "Just in the last four weeks, 2.7 million Californians have formally filed for unemployment insurance."

Newsom said California is now setting up the federal government's Pandemic Unemployment Assistance program, which will provide benefits for certain unemployed individuals, including those who are self-employed, gig workers and independent contractors. There are 1.5 million self-employed California residents "also deserving of direct assistance," according to Newsom.

The state's Employment Development Department will serve as a one-stop shop for both unemployment insurance and PUA benefits starting April 28. Newsom said the plan is to issue PUA benefits within 24 hours to 48 hours, rather than 21 days as is the case for unemployment insurance claims.

California is processing one million unemployment payments each week, according to Newsom.

"We are in the process now of dealing with an unprecedented number of people making phone calls into our EDD," he said.

Newsom signed an executive order Wednesday extending the hours of unemployment call centers, which will now be open 8:00 a.m. to 8:00 p.m. seven days a week. The state has also redirected 1,340 state employees to help handle the increase in call inquiries.

California is also setting aside aid to help undocumented immigrants who are ineligible for unemployment insurance and disaster relief from the CARES Act, according to Newsom. The state's $75 million Disaster Relief Fund will provide one-time cash benefits to undocumented immigrants, and Newsom said California is raising an additional $50 million through a public-private partnership.
NATO defence ministers took stock Wednesday of the economic damage raining down on allied countries because of the pandemic crisis  and considered the disease's ability to blow vast holes in national defence budgets.

The military alliance's secretary general, Jens Stoltenberg, acknowledged the obvious in a teleconference with journalists following a virtual meeting of defence ministers from 30 member nations.

"Of course there will be economic consequences of the COVID-19 crisis," he said.

"We've seen a significant reduction in GDP. We have seen forecasts about further reductions and, of course, there will be budget consequences."

Stoltenberg was quick to add that he thinks "it's a bit too early to say how big those consequences will be because ... it will depend upon how long the crisis will last."

A defence analyst said the NATO chief was giving himself room to manoeuvre  partly in reponse to the tempestuous relationship U.S. President Donald Trump has with allies he has badgered into spending more on defence.

"He's trying to be as a cagey as he can," said Robert Baines, president and chief executive officer of the NATO Association of Canada, an independent, non-profit organization that provides analysis on the alliance and global security.

"I find it interesting the language has shifted in that direction."

Prior to a meeting of NATO foreign ministers last month, Stoltenberg suggested the pandemic crisis shouldn't affect the ability of nations to meet their defence spending targets.

In Canada, the parliamentary budget officer is forecasting a deficit of $112.7 billion in the current fiscal year  the result of unprecedented economic stimulus and relief programs and plummeting tax revenue.

Canada has some military expenses coming up

The bills for many of the big-ticket spending promises in the Liberal government's defence policy  new fighter jets and naval frigates  will come due within five years.

Story continues

Baines said that major defence equipment spending will be a tough sell with politicians and voters if Canada is still dealing with the pandemic's economic aftermath.

"The abiitty to justify especially the large procurement projects  that's going to become harder and harder if we get hit with anything less than a V recession, as far as the economy going down and right back up," he said.

"If that doesn't happen, it will be a very hard sell for the larger procurement programs that have just been put off and put off for so long."

Defence Minister Harjit Sajjan was not immediately available for comment.

But a senior defence official, speaking on background today, said there has been no indication of any change to the department's spending plans and the Liberal government remains committed to delivering what was promised in the 2017 defence policy.

Canada's federal balance sheet is not bleak as those of some other allies  including the United States, where Congress recently approved a $2 trillion economic lifeline package.

Even before the COVID-19 crisis, some budget-challenged southern European countries had sold port facilities to the Chinese state-controlled firms.

Through its so-called Belt and Road initiative, Beijing has provided trillions of dollars in loans and other assistance to countries around the world. By early last year, about one-tenth of Europe's port capacity had been sold off by cash-starved governments in Spain, Italy and Greece.

Cash-strapped nations selling infrastructure

The possibility that trend could accelerate due to the economic fallout of the pandemic was a topic of discussion among the NATO defence ministers on Wednesday.

"The fact we will most likely have an economic downturn may make some allies more vulnerable for situations where critical infrastructure can be sold out," Stoltenberg said.

He reminded the ministers that having a stable transportation system is key to their collective defence and said the sale of national assets could undermine the resilience of the alliance as a whole.

"I conveyed that message but also many allies conveyed that message during the meeting," the secretary general said.

Going into the meeting, Stoltenberg said that NATO is placing more emphasis on the resilience of member nations in light of the pandemic.

His attention was focused on the stranglehold China maintains over the production of vital medical equipment and protective gear.

He announced Wednesday that NATO defence ministers will conduct a sweeping review of the baselines the alliance uses to assess whether countries are resilient enough to withstand shocks, and whether they have the capacity to maintain reliable infrastructure and telecommunications in an emergency, among other things.

"Many allies highlighted the importance of critical industries, infrastructure, as part of our resilience," Stoltenberg said. "We're seeing this as a NATO responsibility."
Wind Creek Bethlehem paid the city of Bethlehem its $2.5 million host fee payment as scheduled Wednesday, passing on a state offer for casinos to defer their first quarter payments.

Wind Creek voluntarily closed on March 15 and then the Pennsylvania Gaming Control Board indefinitely shut down the states 12 casinos two days later. Casinos remain closed under Gov. Tom Wolfs stay-at-home order.

Wednesdays payment is the first installment of the $10 million host fee the Southside casino pays annually regardless of its revenue. Unless state lawmakers take action or more deferrals are allowed, the casino must make that payment even if it is closed for months at a time.

We understand that the community need is as great as ever, and we wanted to ensure the funds were delivered as planned, said Kathy McCracken, general manager of Wind Creek Bethlehem.

The state Department of Revenue gave casinos an option to defer their first quarter host fee payments, but Wind Creek did not take the option, according to a joint news release from the city and gaming operator. A department spokesperson could not immediately provide details on the deferrals when reached after business hours Wednesday.

Earlier this month, Bethlehem Mayor Bob Donchez said every month the casino is closed the city loses about $800,000, but that is a worst-case scenario where Wind Creek makes none of its obligated payments.

Under state law, Bethlehem receives 80% of the $10 million host fee and then a share of the casinos slots and table games revenue -- 2 percent of each -- which typically amounts to $1.8 million annually. Allentown gets the other 20% of the host fee. Lehigh and Northampton counties split the slots money 40/60 and Northampton doles out Bethlehems share.

The payment was a welcome surprise for Bethlehem city officials who had been bracing themselves for a missed payment.

When Wind Creeks leadership team arrived last spring, they pledged a commitment to our community," Donchez said. "This crisis has given them an early opportunity to fulfill that pledge. And for that, we are very thankful.

Last week, Donchez estimated the city was facing a $5 million to $7 million deficit in its $80 million 2020 budget if the casino payments did not come in. This projection assumed a $2 million shortfall if the casino remained closed into June.

City Business Manager Eric Evans said some state officials had indicated casino host fee payments might be prorated given the unprecedented shutdown. So, the city drafted conservative budget projections where the majority of those payments did not come in.

The city is still expecting a 2020 budget shortfall, which will be determined by the length of the coronavirus crisis and the health of the local economy, but it will be significantly lower, Evans said.

The citys implemented a hiring freeze and is looking at every aspect of municipal spending, like project deferrals and spending freezes. The mayor has said he would only consider furloughs or layoffs as the last option.

The casino has also committed to pay its employees with benefits through May 31.

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.

Sara K. Satullo may be reached at ssatullo@lehighvalleylive.com. If theres anything about this story that needs attention, please email her. Follow her on Twitter @sarasatullo and Facebook. Find lehighvalleylive.com on Facebook.
Most people pay little or no attention to the social contract that underpins their relationship with the State.

Yet, the social contract is very important as it sets out the often unwritten agreement whereby the citizen contributes to the common good economically, socially and culturally on the assumption the State will ensure a minimum standard of living, essential social services and infrastructure and the protection of basic rights.

Moments of great upheaval often see people raising major questions concerning what was simply taken as "given" previously. The Covid-19 pandemic is such a moment.

The general response to these new challenges has shown a solidarity that is not always obvious in the usual day-to-day experience of most people. But it also shows up the inequalities on which our society is built.

The economic lockdown is imposing the greatest cost on those already worst off. Thousands of jobs have been lost in hospitality, leisure and related sectors which for the most part are low paid.

Many of those who are still working and risking their lives, such as carers and healthcare support workers as well as shelf-stackers and cleaners, are also among the low paid in our society.

Government now clearly acknowledges that the basic welfare payment of 203 is too low as it decided its Pandemic Unemployment Payment will be 350 a week. If it is too low for those becoming unemployed, then it is too low for those already unemployed.

It is beyond time that every person in Ireland was guaranteed an income which provided a minimally essential standard of living as set out by the Vincentian Partnership for Social Justice.

Once Covid-19 has been defeated, all countries will face a major challenge: to decide if the experience of recent months and our response to it should shape the future of our society? Will we decide to learn from this experience and tackle the inequality and exclusion we've failed to address heretofore.

What we see clearly now is the healthcare services that were struggling to survive are now being provided with major additional resources that, we were told, couldn't be even considered just a few months ago. What was claimed to be impossible then is taken to be the sensible thing to do today.

All of this suggests there is something profoundly amiss with our social contract. Once Covid-19 has been addressed successfully it is crucial that we face up to the radical reforms that are required if we are to reverse the prevailing thrust of policy- making over the past four decades which has failed to eliminate the inequality and exclusion that blights our society.

We need a social contract that is underpinned by a commitment that government will work at all times to produce five key outcomes simultaneously: 1) a vibrant economy; 2) decent services and infrastructure; 3) just taxation; 4) good governance; and 5) sustainability.

Working to achieve one or two of these and not all five simultaneously simply leads to further inequality and exclusion.

We need the investment in infrastructure and services to develop a thriving economy. We need just taxation to pay the costs. We need good governance to ensure people have a say in shaping the decisions that affect them. We also need to ensure everything that is done is sustainable environmentally, economically and socially.

This will require new approaches to the world of work and a recognition that much of the work done in society is unpaid but not really recognised or valued, eg work in the community, in the home, in personal development etc.

It will also require us to recognise our tax and welfare systems are not fit for purpose in the 21st century. The social welfare and income tax credits systems should be replaced by a Universal Basic Income.

A new social contract will also require us to give the priority to climate change that it urgently needs. The response to Covid-19 shows society can be mobilised quickly and effectively to address a real and present danger. Climate presents such a danger, but the policy response so far has been wholly inadequate.

We now know we can respond quickly and effectively to major threats. This pandemic illustrates the critical value of having an effective public sector. The focus of recent decades on constantly reducing its role is now seen as wrong.

Countries with a functioning public sector that caters for essential health services for all are seen to be better equipped to deal with the pandemic than others, such as Ireland, who have two-tier health care. Why should we go back to a two-tier healthcare system when this is over?

Some might think this is not the time to focus on issues such as the future of the social contract. History says otherwise.

During World War II some major future changes were developed. In 1941, President Roosevelt and Prime Minister Churchill issued the Atlantic Charter, which led to the establishment of the United Nations.

In 1942, the UK published the Beveridge Report with its commitment to a universal welfare state. In 1944, the Bretton Woods conference put together the post-war financial architecture.

Now is the time to think through what we want when Covid-19 is over. Business as usual is not acceptable. We need a new social contract.
Billionaire philanthropist Bill Gates is defending the World Health Organization, blasting President Donald Trump's decision to halt funding for the U.N. agency in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic.

Microsoft co-founder and his wife, Melinda, voiced support for the WHO in separate Twitter posts early Wednesday, a day after Trump announced that he is halting U.S. funding while the administration reviews the agency's response to the Covid-19 outbreak.

"Halting funding for the World Health Organization during a world health crisis is as dangerous as it sounds. Their work is slowing the spread of COVID-19 and if that work is stopped no other organization can replace them. The world needs @WHO now more than ever," Gates tweeted.

Tweet

The White House defended Trump's announcement.

"Any suggestion that the President is putting the health and safety of the American people or global health aid in jeopardy is false," deputy press secretary Judd Deere said in a statement. "The WHO's response to COVID has been filled with one misstep after another, and President Trump is standing up for the American taxpayer to ensure we hold WHO accountable for their flawed actions."

Gates has long focused on the health field within his work at the nonprofit Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, though he often avoids diving into political issues. However, he has been speaking out on the coronavirus pandemic. In late March he said the United States missed its chance to avoid mandated shutdowns because it didn't act fast enough on the pandemic.

Trump said Tuesday that his administration is suspending funding from the WHO as it investigates how the agency reacted to the coronavirus outbreak. Trump said the international health agency made mistakes that "caused so much death," as the virus continues to spread.

Since it emerged more than three months ago in Wuhan, China, the coronavirus has infected more than 1.9 million people worldwide and killed at least 125,678, according to data compiled by Johns Hopkins University. The WHO designated the virus as a global health emergency on Jan. 30, when there were fewer than 10,000 confirmed cases across the globe.

It's unclear exactly what mechanism Trump intends to use to withhold WHO funding, much of which is appropriated by Congress. The president typically does not have the authority to unilaterally redirect congressional funding.
TORONTO, April 15, 2020 /PRNewswire/ - (PBT.U: CSE, PTGEF: OTC Markets) - Portage Biotech Inc. ("Portage" or the "Company") wishes to provide an update on a portfolio company, Intensity Therapeutics, Inc. ("Intensity"). Portage Biotech Inc. holds an 9.7% equity interest in Intensity.

Intensity signs clinical trial collaboration with Bristol Myers Squibb

Intensity's collaboration with Merck reports favorable safety of INT230-6 in combination with pembrolizumab

The company is launching seven phase 2 combination cohorts in solid tumors

Intensity Therapeutics announced yesterday it has entered into a clinical trial collaboration agreement with Bristol Myers Squibb Company (NYSE: BMY). The program will evaluate the safety and efficacy of Intensity's lead product INT230-6, an investigational, novel and potent anti-cancer drug designed to directly kill cancer cells through intratumoral injection and improve immune cell recognition of cancer, when dosed in combination with Bristol Myers Squibb's Cytotoxic T Lymphocyte-Associated Antigen 4 (CTLA-4) immune checkpoint inhibitor Yervoy (ipilimumab). The combination will be evaluated in patients with breast cancer, liver cancer and advanced sarcoma in a series of new cohorts within IT-01, Intensity's ongoing Phase 1/2 clinical trial. Intensity will sponsor and conduct the clinical trial and Bristol Myers Squibb will supply Yervoy for use in the study.

"We are pleased to share that Intensity has now partnered with Merck (previously announced on June 25th 2019) and BMS, the two leaders in the cancer immunotherapy space" said Ian B. Walters, MD, CEO of Portage and Chief Medical Officer of Intensity. Recently (March 14, 2020) Intensity also announced favorable safety from the first cohort of the Keynote A10 study (pembrolizumab/anti-PD1 plus Intensity's INT230-6). Intensity is launching into seven phase 2 programs evaluating high unmet medical need tumors types such as colorectal, pancreatic, squamous cell, bile duct, sarcoma, liver and breast cancers.

The full release can be found at: https://intensitytherapeutics.com/media/#media-group-press-releases

About INT230-6

INT230-6, Intensity's lead proprietary product candidate, is designed for direct intratumoral injection. INT230-6 was discovered using Intensity's proprietary DfuseRxSM technology platform. The drug is comprised of two proven, potent anti-cancer agents, cisplatin and vinblastine, and a penetration enhancer molecule that helps disperse the drugs throughout tumors for diffusion into cancer cells. In preclinical studies, INT230-6 eradicated tumors by a combination of direct tumor killing, releasing tumor antigens and recruitment of immune cells to the tumor. Results generated by the National Cancer Institute (NCI) showed treatment with INT230-6 in in vivo models of severe cancer resulted in substantial improvement in overall survival compared to standard therapies. Further, INT230-6 provided complete responses in animals with long-term, protection from multiple re-challenges of the initial cancer and resistance to other cancers. The NCI and Intensity's collaborative research, published in July 2019 in the Journal OncoImmunogy, showed strong synergy when INT230-6 was combined with anti-PD-1 and anti-CTLA-4 antibodies. INT230-6 is being evaluated in a Phase 1/2 clinical study (NCT03058289) in patients with various advanced solid tumors. There have been no dose limiting adverse events observed in patients to date, even when dosing into deep tumors in the lung and liver. Several patients demonstrated tumor shrinkage, symptomatic improvement, and evidence of cancer cell death and immune cell activation on tumor biopsy.

About Portage Biotech Inc.

Portage is a unique entity in the world of biotechnology, enabling research and development to produce more clinical programs and maximize potential returns by eliminating typical overhead costs associated with many biotechnology companies. We nurture the creation of early- to mid-stage, first- and best-in-class therapies for a variety of cancers, by providing funding, strategic business and clinical counsel, and shared services, to enable efficient, turnkey execution of commercially-informed development plans. Our portfolio encompasses nine portfolio companies whose products or technologies have established scientific rationales, including intratumorals, nanoparticles, liposomes, aptamers, cell penetrating peptides, and virus-like particles. In collaboration with our subsidiaries, we create viable product development strategies, to cost-effectively deliver best-in-class R&D, clinical trial design, and financial and project management, to ultimately build value and support commercial potential.

Forward-Looking Statements

This news release contains statements about the Company's information that are forward-looking in nature and, as a result, are subject to certain risks and uncertainties. Although the Company believes that the expectations reflected in these forward-looking statements are reasonable, undue reliance should not be placed on them as actual results may differ materially from the forward-looking statements. The forward-looking statements contained in this news release are made as of the date hereof, and the Company undertakes no obligation to update publicly or revise any forward-looking statements or information, except as required by law.

Neither the Canadian Securities Exchange nor its Market Regulator (as that term is defined in the policies of the Canadian Securities Exchange) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release. We seek Safe Harbor.

SOURCE Portage Biotech Inc.

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www.portagebiotech.com


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Large crowds of people descended on a popular New York City greenmarket and appeared to ignore social distancing orders on the same day that Gov. Andrew Cuomo told all New Yorkers that they must wear faces masks in public.

New Yorkers were seen enjoying a sunny Wednesday while buying produce from the Union Square Greenmarket, which is open on Mondays, Wednesdays, Fridays and Saturdays between 8am-4pm.

Though there were signs near the entrance that encouraged social distancing, photos showed some people getting a little too close to each other.

And while most shoppers were wearing masks, there were others who weren't despite Cuomo announcing a directive that anyone going out in public must wear a face covering.

Scroll down for video

Large crowds of people descended on a popular New York City greenmarket and appeared to ignore social distancing orders on the same day that Gov Andrew Cuomo told all New Yorkers that they must wear faces masks in public

New Yorkers were seen enjoying a sunny Wednesday while buying produce from the Union Square Greenmarket, which is open on Mondays, Wednesdays, Fridays and Saturdays between 8am-4pm

Though there were signs (pictured) near the entrance that encouraged social distancing, photos showed some people getting a little too close

And while most shoppers were wearing masks, there were others who weren't despite Cuomo announcing a directive that anyone going out in public must wear a face covering

A woman is seen holding a plant that she purchased from the greenmarket in Union Square on Wednesday

At a nearby Trader Joe's, people were seen standing in line outside the grocery store without protective wear.

Earlier on Wednesday, Cuomo said residents will be required to wear face coverings when they are out in public and where they risk coming into close contact with other people.

The new outbreak-fighting mandate will require a mask or face covering on busy streets, subways, buses or any situation where people cannot maintain six feet of social distancing.

The promised executive order from Cuomo echoes recommendations from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention(CDC) as a way to limit the spread of the coronavirus.

The order takes effect Friday, the governor said, and either a mask or a cloth covering such as a bandanna will work.

'Stopping the spread is everything. How can you not wear a mask when you're going to come close to a person?' Cuomo said at his daily briefing. 'On what theory would you not do that?'

The governor said there will initially be no civil penalties for noncompliance, but he's urging merchants to enforce it among customers.

Earlier on Wednesday, Cuomo said residents will be required to wear face coverings when they are out in public and coming in close contact with other people

One woman is seen on her phone while holding her dog during a visit to the Union Square Greenmarket

Dozens of New Yorkers were seen purchasing items from the Union Square Greenmarket in Manhattan on Wednesday

Earlier on Wednesday, Cuomo said residents will be required to wear face coverings when they are out in public and coming in close contact with other people

The new outbreak-fighting mandate will require a mask or face covering on busy streets, subways, buses or any situation where people cannot maintain six feet of social distancing

Though hospitalizations from the outbreak are leveling off, New York officials are trying to dramatically reduce transmission rates as the death toll rises. New York recorded 752 deaths Tuesday, for a total of more than 11,000 in just over a month.

Those figures don't include roughly 4,000 other deaths in New York City during the outbreak that city officials say were probably caused by the virus, but haven't been confirmed by a lab test.

Cuomo's announcement came hours after New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio called for stores to make customers wear face coverings in order to protect store workers against exposure. De Blasio had previously recommended face coverings in public in the city.

The governor also disclosed an outline of his plan to reopen New York's shuttered economy, starting with the most essential businesses, and said he would order people to wear masks in public when a safe distance from others could not be maintained.

Cuomo, New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy and Connecticut Governor Ned Lamont talked about achieving a new normal as opposed to returning to life as it was before the coronavirus outbreak. Cuomo stressed that the crisis would not be over until a vaccine was developed some 12 to 18 months from now.

Neighboring New York and New Jersey account for more than half of the 30,000-plus deaths across the US from COVID-19. Connecticut, east of New York, saw deaths tick up by 197 in the state's largest one-day gain on Wednesday.

The promised executive order from Cuomo (pictured) echoes recommendations from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention(CDC) as a way to limit the spread of the coronavirus

Cuomo, who on Monday declared that New York had passed the worst stage of the pandemic, said he would look to open up first those businesses that were most essential and where spread of the virus could be minimized.

Both Cuomo and Murphy said rapid, mass-scale testing was critical to getting people back to work.

'We need to build a bridge toward a reopening of the economy,' Cuomo said. 'We are going to a different place - a new normal.'

Cuomo said that a total of 18,335 people were hospitalized across New York because of COVID-19, the respiratory illness caused by the coronavirus, down from 18,697 a day earlier, which had marked the first decline since the crisis began.

However, patients newly admitted to the hospital for COVID-19 came to 2,253 on Tuesday, up from 1,649 a day earlier, while 752 deaths were recorded, hovering around the same high level they have been at for the past week.

He said New York, which in recent weeks has been pleading for hospital ventilators, is now planning to send 100 ventilators to Michigan and 50 to Maryland.

In New York state, there are more than 213,000 confirmed cases and this graphic shows how the cases have fluctuated since March 16 through April 14

There are more than 645,000 confirmed coronavirus cases in the US with more than 28,000 deaths

Contrary to the trend in New York, hospitalizations in New Jersey rose slightly to 8,270, with an additional 2,625 coronavirus cases recorded on Wednesday for a total of 71,030. The number of people who died rose by 351 to 3,156.

'Sometimes we think we've rounded the bend in a permanent way, but it's uneven,' Lamont said.

Cuomo repeated a call for the federal government to help roll out rapid testing on a mass scale.

'We cannot do the testing and tracing without federal assistance,' Cuomo said.

Murphy said a 'robust' contact tracing program and widely-used testing gauges that give quick results, such as the saliva-based test developed at Rutgers University in his state, were pre-conditions to restarting the economy. The test was approved by the US Food and Drug Administration regulator.

'You've got to have both of those elements in place, or I dont think you can reopen.'

On Monday, New York, Connecticut, Delaware, Massachusetts, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Rhode Island agreed to work together to devise strategies for easing stay-at-home orders and getting people back to work.
Kelly, 28, (pictured) has been single for three months and has no children

Kelly, 28

Dating past?

My last relationship lasted for three and a half years. I wanted to settle down, while he wasnt sure, so eventually we separated.

Pre-date nerves?

Yes. Its weird going on a date with your mum in the house. Were isolating together. She was more excited about my virtual date than I was.

First impressions?

I set the table with a candle and a bottle of wine, with the laptop across from me, and I wore my black jumpsuit, as if it was a real date.

When Daniel came on the screen, he was sitting on the floor. I was initially bemused until he explained he had laid out everything on a picnic blanket. I thought it was lovely. He had on a nice shirt and jeans.

Vital statistics Single for three months, no children. Current role Training facilitator for the Government. Would like to meet An intelligent and mature man who can take care of himself, and knows what he wants. I love board games and learning new skills, so I'd like to meet someone curious. Advertisement

Easy to talk to?

We ended up doing more talking than eating! We discovered we are both hipsters who love jazz clubs, musicals and poetry slams.

We also both have side projects. I host board game meetings and review digital games. I was fascinated to hear about his voluntary projects and his plans to travel to Russia.

Embarrassing moments?

Just one connection break early on, but after that all went well.

Did sparks fly?

I definitely felt there was a little bit of flirting going on. We spoke for more than three hours. Neither of us ate much, preferring the chat and the wine.

It did get serious when we talked about coronavirus  he told me he didnt do any non-essential things. I said: Id better go then. He laughed and told me to stay.

Kelly's verdict: 8/10 Liked? How easy the conversation felt. Regrets? Drinking a whole bottle of wine on a first date. See him again? Yes. Advertisement

Would you like to meet him in person?

Weve said wed definitely like to meet face-to-face. He lives just two minutes from my favourite place in London, Spitalfields Market.

Daniel said hed love to come to see me in Jersey because he likes sailing and fishing.

What do you think he thought of you?

I think he thought I was easy to chat to, and we had a connection.

Would you like to take him home to your family?

Mum was upstairs, but thankfully she didnt come down. Hed get on with my friends and family.

Daniel, 32, (pictured) is long-term single and has no children

Daniel, 32

Dating past?

Ive had a couple of serious relationships, but Ive been single for a long time. I think Ive been too busy with my career, but Im also not a great fan of endless messaging, which seems to be what a lot of dating apps require.

Pre-date nerves?

This is my first virtual date, but I wasnt nervous. Im used to talking to new people.

First impressions?

Kelly is attractive and has a great personality, but its harder to get a sense of how you feel online  I think body language and physical proximity tell you a lot.

Easy to talk to?

Were both straight-talkers, so we got on well. Its funny that she is so nerdy about board games. I used to play them, too, when I had more time.

Vital statistics Single long-term, no children. Current Role Freelance Project Manager and Bartender. Would like to meet Someone smart and well-travelled, who enjoys fitness and being outdoors. I don't like people who take pictures of everything rather than enjoying the moment. Advertisement

We also chatted about coronavirus and how it is affecting our lives. I am originally from Slovakia and thankfully my family is safe at the moment.

We were laughing a lot, though. She has a good sense of humour.

Embarrassing moments?

Just one break in connection. But I definitely prefer meeting in person as Im not normally chatty online. Im having to learn to talk via the internet a lot more, but I dont really like it.

Did sparks fly?

Its hard to tell if we were flirting, because you cant sense the chemistry involved. But I enjoyed her company and our chat.

Would you like to meet her in person?

I would like to meet her in person to see if the pheromones are there. I do have a slight concern about the distance between us  Im based in London while Kelly is in Jersey  as I dont often have spare time to travel, but well see.

Daniel's verdict: 7/10 Liked? She is funny, straightforward, and a good listener. Regrets? None. See her again? Yes. Advertisement

What do you think she thought of you?

I believe she liked me as we chatted for so long, and got on so well. It was funny to hear her mum upstairs clapping and cheering for the NHS  not something that usually happens on a date.

Would you like to take her home to your family?

I think so  she is so chatty and friendly.

Fancy a date with an eligible single like you? Or would you like to play cupid for someone else? Email your  or their  details and a photo to blinddate@dailymail.co.uk
The total number of COVID-19 cases in India has risen to 11,439 with 1,076 fresh cases reported in the last 24 hours

NDMC firefighters spray disinfectants on a street at Mandir Marg during a nationwide lockdown in the wake of coronavirus pandemic, in New Delhi. PTI photo

New Delhi: The Union Health Ministry has identified 170 districts as COVID-19 hotspots and 207 districts as potential hotspots, officials said on Wednesday, reiterating that there has been no community transmission of the disease in the country so far.

Addressing the daily briefing to provide updates on coronavirus situation in the country, Joint Secretary in the Ministry of Health Lav Agarwal said that states have been asked to classify districts which have reported a higher number of cases as hotspots, the districts where cases have been reported as non-hotspots, and green zones where no cases have been reported.

"Hotspots are those districts which are reporting more number of cases or where the rate of growth of COVID-19 cases is high," Agarwal said, adding a detailed direction has been issued to states stating consolidated efforts are required to utilise this period of lockdown to curb the spread of the virus.

"Cabinet secretary held a video conference today with all chief secretaries, DGPs, health secretaries, collectors, SPs, municipal commissioners and CMOs where hotspots were discussed and orientation on field level implementation of containment strategy was given.

"They were told about large outbreak containment strategies, cluster containment strategies. Delineation of buffer and containment zone, parameter mapping, defining of entry and exit points were also discussed in detail," he said.

The joint secretary said movement of people will not be allowed in containment zones except for those related with essential services and special teams will search for new cases and samples will be collected and tested as per sampling criteria.

The officials said that health facilities in buffer zone outside the containment zone will be oriented and people facing SARI and influenza-like symptoms will be tested there.

"Special teams have been formed which will work in containment zone and do contact tracing and house-to-house surveys. Cases of fever, cough and breathlessness will be identified in the survey and requisite action will be taken as per protocol," Agarwal said, adding that there has been no community transmissions so far but some local outbreaks.

The total number of COVID-19 cases in India has risen to 11,439 with 1,076 fresh cases reported in the last 24 hours while the death toll stands at 377, the ministry official said.
People gather at the entrance for the New York State Department of Labor offices, which closed to the public due to the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) outbreak in the Brooklyn borough of New York City.

Reuters

Nearly three-quarters of Americans are feeling the pinch financially amid the coronavirus pandemic, according to a new Insider poll.

Various stay-at-home orders, travel restrictions, and COVID-19 outbreaks in the workplace have stalled the US economy. Nearly 17 million people have filed for unemployment in the last three weeks.

Only 25% of poll respondents say they have experienced no financial hardship and have been fairly unaffected by the coronavirus.

Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

The novel coronavirus has swept across the US and flattened millions of American jobs in its wake.

Various stay-at-home orders, closures, travel restrictions, and COVID-19 outbreaks in the workplace have effectively stalled the US economy. Many businesses have closed their doors, with state-mandated lockdowns only allowing "essential" businesses to continue operating unless working from home is possible.

With US companies  from small businesses to major corporations  straining under various lockdown measures, millions of American workers have experienced pay cuts, furloughs, and layoffs.

In the last three weeks alone, nearly 17 million people filed for unemployment in the US.

And according to a new Insider poll, 72% of Americans are feeling some pinch financially due to the pandemic.

On April 10 and 11, we asked 1,017 US adults: "Are you experiencing financial hardship because of the coronavirus?"

11% reported "Serious financial hardship, I'm unsure if I can meet my basic needs this month"

20% reported "Some financial hardship, it's going to be very tight in the immediate future"

21% reported "Slight financial hardship, I'm cutting back on some expenses"

20% reported "Little financial hardship, there's some problems but nothing too out of the ordinary"

25% reported "No financial hardship, I'm so far fairly unaffected by the coronavirus"

Story continues

The severity of the respondent's financial burden likely is dependent on a myriad of factors, namely the respondent's job, socioeconomic status, and location.

Some people are forced to continue working and risk exposing themselves to infection, because they hold jobs considered part of the critical infrastructure  like grocery clerks, healthcare workers, and delivery drivers. Meanwhile, others are being laid off or furloughed altogether when "nonessential" businesses  like hair salons and restaurants  were forced to close due to lockdown orders.

On the other hand, many white-collar workers have simply been able to move from their corporate offices to their homes, continuing operations remotely.

The unemployment filing in just 3 weeks outpaced the worst month of the Great Recession. In Florida, hundreds of residents were forced to break social distancing measures just to file for unemployment after a website crashed due to the overwhelming volume of online applications.

With so many Americans feeling the financial toll, the federal government approved stimulus checks as part of the $2 trillion stimulus package to hold struggling workers over until the US labor market recovers from the toll of the pandemic.

Despite the US governments' attempts to help struggling Americans make ends meet, many citizens reported that a $1,200 check is simply not enough.

SurveyMonkey Audience polls from a national sample balanced by census data of age and gender. Respondents are incentivized to complete surveys through charitable contributions. Generally speaking, digital polling tends to skew toward people with access to the internet. SurveyMonkey Audience doesn't try to weigh its sample based on race or income. A total of 1,107 respondents were collected April 10-11, 2020, a margin of error plus or minus 3 percentage points with a 95% confidence level.

Read the original article on Business Insider
For corn and soybean farmers in Illinois and Iowa, the coronavirus has put new pressures on an agricultural community that has already been fighting an uphill battle for years. Weather conditions and international trade issues, in particular, have pulled on the farming economy even as the rest of the country recovered from the 2008 Great Recession. So while farming has not been as hard hit by coronavirus as other parts of the economy, it has had less room to fall, economists said.
Severe weather and tornadoes rampaged through six Southern states on Sunday and Monday, leaving massive damages in its wake.

Southern state residents were enjoying a leisurely Easter Sunday listening to an audio feed of their church service when as many as 60 tornadoes roared over Mississippi, Texas, and Louisiana. At the same time, storms hit Alabama, Georgia, and the Carolinas.

The two-day destruction lefts hundreds of thousands of homes and businesses without power amid the public health crisis COVID-19. Authorities reported at least 34 people dead and thousands of residents displaced.

It was one of the most significant natural disasters since a 2014 tornado killed 35 people in the central and southern parts of the United States.

Seeking Shelter

Thousands of residents flocked to the local community shelters wearing face masks following coronavirus guidelines.

State officials and emergency agencies are grappling with improvising and creating sustainable temporary shelters and necessities for the tornado and storm victims. They are working out plans to prevent housing a large number of evacuees in a single shelter to minimize risks of spreading the COVID-19 pandemic through the community.

Experts said the natural disaster has led to different strategies on how to deal with the outcome while minding the pandemic simultaneously.

In The Eye of the Storm

According to meteorologist Katie Martin, the eye of the storm system brought heavy rain, twisters, and high winds to parts of six states. These include southern Kentucky, eastern Georgia, Florida, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Arkansas.

Most victims, they said, died under trees fallen by the storm, or collapsed infrastructures.

The storm also triggered massive flooding and mudslides in mountainous areas, cutting off the power supply for 1.3 million residents.

Mississippi Governor Tate Reeves said the storms were the worst they've had in over a decade. Alabama Governor Kay Ivey decided to suspend shelter-in-place and social distancing orders should it stop residents from receiving the necessary support and response they need.

The American Red Cross initially opened multiple sites in Mississipi as temporary shelters. The evacuees were eventually moved into hotel rooms before Monday morning in compliance with the recommended social distancing measures.

Experts, however, say sustaining social distancing policies will not be possible should a disaster in the scale of Hurricane Katrina occur. They said authorities would be forced to house people together in shelter environments.

The weather forecast showed a calmer Wednesday across much of the United States---with a minimal chance of severe storms in areas in the South.

The Storm Prediction Center said a few strong thunderstorms could appear over southeast Georgia and Florida on Wednesday.

Richard Chapman, a resident of Pickens County, South Carolina, said his time in the military could not compare to the destruction the tornado and storms brought. "It was almost like a bomb hit," he said. "It was ungodly."

At the height of the storm, 50,000 residents in Connecticut and Massachusetts experienced massive power outages. More than 200,000 people were still without power on Tuesday afternoon.
Kanye West plans to exercise his right to vote in the upcoming presidential election.

In a new interview for the May cover of GQ, the Jesus Is King rapper  who previously admitted that he was not registered to vote  opened up about his plans for the 2020 presidential election between presumptive Democratic candidate Joe Biden and President Donald Trump.

I will not be told who Im gonna vote on because of my color, West told the magazine, explaining that he would not be swayed to cast his ballot a certain way because of his race and social status. Im definitely voting this time. And we know who Im voting on.

Both my parents were freedom fighters, and they used to drink from fountains they were told they couldnt drink from, and they used to sit in restaurants where they were told they couldnt eat from, he added. They didnt fight for me to be told by white people which white person I can vote on.

Tyler Mitchell Kanye West

West, who previously experienced backlash for supporting Trump throughout the 2016 election and during his presidency, said he wont let fear or criticism get in the way of his voting rights.

RELATED: Kanye West Opens Up About Publicly Supporting Trump: Im a Black Guy with a Red [MAGA] Hat

Oliver Contreras - Pool/Getty Kanye West and President Donald Trump

Im not going to be told by the people around me and the people that have their agenda that my career is going to be over. Because guess what: Im still here! Jesus Is King was No. 1! he said.

I was told my career would end if I wasnt with [Hillary Clinton]. What kind of campaign is that, anyway? West added to GQ. Thats like if Obamas campaign was Im with black. Whats the point of being a celebrity if you cant have an opinion? Everybody make their own opinion! You know?

Just last month, the Stronger rapper spoke about his support for Trump in the cover interview for WSJ. Magazines April issue, further explaining his resentment over the assumptions fans make about him because of his race, profession and education.

Story continues

Im a black guy with a red [MAGA] hat, can you imagine? West said. 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.

Shutterstock; SAUL LOEB/AFP/Getty

Prior to his interview with the magazine, West still rarely shied away from his love for Trump, often tweeting about his support for the controversial president over the years.

In a series of tweets in April 2018, West called the former Celebrity Apprentice host my brother, writing, 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.

You don't have to agree with trump but the mob can't make me not love him. We are both dragon energy. He is my brother. I love everyone. I don't agree with everything anyone does. That's what makes us individuals. And we have the right to independent thought.  ye (@kanyewest) April 25, 2018

Later that year, the two famously got together at the White House in October to talk tax cuts, prison reform, mental health and racism.

West reiterated his loyalty in another tweetstorm last January, writing, Trump all day. Just so in 2019 you know where I stand. They will not program me. Blacks are 90 percent Democrats. That sounds like control to me.

Trump all day  ye (@kanyewest) January 1, 2019

One of my favorite of many things about what the Trump hat represents to me is that people cant tell me what to do because Im black, West added. We will change the world. God is on my side. I am a Christian. I am a taxpayer. I am myself. God is with us.

WSJ. Magazine speculated in their piece that Wests love for Trump may be founded on his belief that with Trump in power he will find support in the government, with the outlet citing his unusual access to the Trump administration.

One example of this was when West called Trump to help free fellow rapper A$AP Rocky back in July 2019 after he was taken into custody in Stockholm, Sweden, following a street altercation involving a 19-year-old male.

Tyler Mitchell Kanye West

As the magazine lays out, West called Jared Kushner at the White House from his swimming pool in Calabasas. Less than an hour later, while West was out of the pool and eating breakfast, he received a call back from the president who agreed to help Rocky, ne Rakim Mayers.

The young rapper was charged with assault, to which he pleaded not guilty. He was released from detention on Aug. 2 before being convicted by the Stockholm District Court on Aug. 14.
Source: Xinhua| 2020-04-15 21:25:46|Editor: huaxia

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ADEN, Yemen, April 15 (Xinhua) -- Yemen's government forces on Wednesday declared recapturing an army base from the Houthi rebel group in the country's northeastern province of al-Jawf following armed confrontations.

"The government forces managed to regain control over the Khanjar army base that's located in a deserted area in the northeastern part of al-Jawf," according to the state-run Saba News Agency.

The base located in Khabb district of al-Jawf used to be a center for supervising and securing the supply lines of government forces linking the oil-rich province of Marib with the key areas near the Saudi border.

Meanwhile, the Houthis-affiliated Masirah television network accused the Saudi Arabia-led coalition of launching airstrikes against the district of Khabb in al-Jawf and others locations in neighboring province of Marib.

Masirah reported that warplanes of Saudi-led Arab coalition launched more than 24 raids, including 18 raids on key locations in Marib and six others on the district of Khabb in al-Jawf.

Last week, the Saudi-led coalition announced a comprehensive cease-fire in Yemen for two weeks in response to an international call for a global cease-fire to counter the outbreak of the novel coronavirus.

However, the coalition and the Houthis later exchanged accusations of violating the cease-fire in several Yemeni provinces, while military confrontations between government forces and the Houthis are still taking place in many areas of the war-torn Arab country.

Yemen has been locked in a civil war since late 2014 when the Houthis seized control of much of the country's north and forced the Saudi-backed government of Yemeni President Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi out of the capital Sanaa.
Zoom will let its paid users decide where their data is going after its latest privacy scandal.

The changes come after criticism over the fact that users' data was being sent through servers in Chinese data centres, potentially allowing conversations and video chats to be intercepted by the Chinese government as they were sent.

Zoom said its centres in the country have "always been" geofenced, meaning that data generated outside of China would not move through the country. But chief executive Eric Yuan admitted that in the rush to meet demand during the coronavirus lockdown some best practices were not implemented and some meeting data may have been routed through China.

Mr Yuan said this issue had since been corrected.

Now, the company has said it will allow its paying subscribers to directly choose which data centre regions are happy for their meeting data to transit through.

Recommended 5 best Zoom alternatives

The firm currently has eight data centre regions: the United States, Canada, Europe, India, Australia, China, Latin America, and Japan/Hong Kong.

From April 18, every paying Zoom user will be able to opt-in and out of each specific region, the company confirmed.

However, users will not be able to opt-out of their default region, where their account is provisioned, Zoom said, adding that for the majority of customers, this was the United States.

The company also said that free users will be locked to data centres within their default region and will not be able to opt-in or out of others, but that "data of free users outside of China will never be routed through China".

Gadget and tech news: In pictures Show all 25 1 /25 Gadget and tech news: In pictures Gadget and tech news: In pictures Gun-toting humanoid robot sent into space Russia has launched a humanoid robot into space on a rocket bound for the International Space Station (ISS). The robot Fedor will spend 10 days aboard the ISS practising skills such as using tools to fix issues onboard. Russia's deputy prime minister Dmitry Rogozin has previously shared videos of Fedor handling and shooting guns at a firing range with deadly accuracy. Dmitry Rogozin/Twitter Gadget and tech news: In pictures Google turns 21 Google celebrates its 21st birthday on September 27. The The search engine was founded in September 1998 by two PhD students, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, in their dormitories at Californias Stanford University. Page and Brin chose the name google as it recalled the mathematic term 'googol', meaning 10 raised to the power of 100 Google Gadget and tech news: In pictures Hexa drone lifts off Chief engineer of LIFT aircraft Balazs Kerulo demonstrates the company's "Hexa" personal drone craft in Lago Vista, Texas on June 3 2019 Reuters Gadget and tech news: In pictures Project Scarlett to succeed Xbox One Microsoft announced Project Scarlett, the successor to the Xbox One, at E3 2019. The company said that the new console will be 4 times as powerful as the Xbox One and is slated for a release date of Christmas 2020 Getty Gadget and tech news: In pictures First new iPod in four years Apple has announced the new iPod Touch, the first new iPod in four years. The device will have the option of adding more storage, up to 256GB Apple Gadget and tech news: In pictures Folding phone may flop Samsung will cancel orders of its Galaxy Fold phone at the end of May if the phone is not then ready for sale. The $2000 folding phone has been found to break easily with review copies being recalled after backlash PA Gadget and tech news: In pictures Charging mat non-starter Apple has cancelled its AirPower wireless charging mat, which was slated as a way to charge numerous apple products at once AFP/Getty Gadget and tech news: In pictures "Super league" India shoots down satellite India has claimed status as part of a "super league" of nations after shooting down a live satellite in a test of new missile technology EPA Gadget and tech news: In pictures 5G incoming 5G wireless internet is expected to launch in 2019, with the potential to reach speeds of 50mb/s Getty Gadget and tech news: In pictures Uber halts driverless testing after death Uber has halted testing of driverless vehicles after a woman was killed by one of their cars in Tempe, Arizona. March 19 2018 Getty Gadget and tech news: In pictures A humanoid robot gestures during a demo at a stall in the Indian Machine Tools Expo, IMTEX/Tooltech 2017 held in Bangalore Getty Gadget and tech news: In pictures A humanoid robot gestures during a demo at a stall in the Indian Machine Tools Expo, IMTEX/Tooltech 2017 held in Bangalore Getty Gadget and tech news: In pictures Engineers test a four-metre-tall humanoid manned robot dubbed Method-2 in a lab of the Hankook Mirae Technology in Gunpo, south of Seoul, South Korea Jung Yeon-Je/AFP/Getty Gadget and tech news: In pictures Engineers test a four-metre-tall humanoid manned robot dubbed Method-2 in a lab of the Hankook Mirae Technology in Gunpo, south of Seoul, South Korea Jung Yeon-Je/AFP/Getty Gadget and tech news: In pictures The giant human-like robot bears a striking resemblance to the military robots starring in the movie 'Avatar' and is claimed as a world first by its creators from a South Korean robotic company Jung Yeon-Je/AFP/Getty Gadget and tech news: In pictures Engineers test a four-metre-tall humanoid manned robot dubbed Method-2 in a lab of the Hankook Mirae Technology in Gunpo, south of Seoul, South Korea Jung Yeon-Je/AFP/Getty Gadget and tech news: In pictures Waseda University's saxophonist robot WAS-5, developed by professor Atsuo Takanishi Rex Gadget and tech news: In pictures Waseda University's saxophonist robot WAS-5, developed by professor Atsuo Takanishi and Kaptain Rock playing one string light saber guitar perform jam session Rex Gadget and tech news: In pictures A test line of a new energy suspension railway resembling the giant panda is seen in Chengdu, Sichuan Province, China Reuters Gadget and tech news: In pictures A test line of a new energy suspension railway, resembling a giant panda, is seen in Chengdu, Sichuan Province, China Reuters Gadget and tech news: In pictures A concept car by Trumpchi from GAC Group is shown at the International Automobile Exhibition in Guangzhou, China Rex Gadget and tech news: In pictures A Mirai fuel cell vehicle by Toyota is displayed at the International Automobile Exhibition in Guangzhou, China Reuters Gadget and tech news: In pictures A visitor tries a Nissan VR experience at the International Automobile Exhibition in Guangzhou, China Reuters Gadget and tech news: In pictures A man looks at an exhibit entitled 'Mimus' a giant industrial robot which has been reprogrammed to interact with humans during a photocall at the new Design Museum in South Kensington, London Getty Gadget and tech news: In pictures A new Israeli Da-Vinci unmanned aerial vehicle manufactured by Elbit Systems is displayed during the 4th International conference on Home Land Security and Cyber in the Israeli coastal city of Tel Aviv Getty

The video conferencing app has grown exponentially during the Covid-19 lockdown as millions of workers and students attempt to stay connected for jobs and study, while family and friends have turned to Zoom and similar apps as a means of staying in touch.

Zoom has admitted struggling to handle waves of new users on the service and has now postponed all new product development in order to focus on correcting security issues discovered on the platform, some of which have come to light thanks to the new, wider use of the service.

Additional reporting by Press Association
There are an expected 80 million Americans who will receive their payouts, most of whom will receive $1,200, by Wednesday via direct deposit. For those not among those millions, the IRS launched a tracking tool Wednesday known as "Get My Payment."
Twitter cannot stop praising an 8-year-old boy hailing from Nowpora in Jammu and Kashmir and for all the right reasons. Its the generous act of the young one, named Malik Ubeed, amid the ongoing coronavirus crisis which has now won people over. Turns out, the little one visited the district commissioners office in Bandipora with a very special intention. He donated all his piggy bank savings to help those affected by the nationwide lockdown.

Official Twitter handle of Department of Information and Public Relations, government of Jammu and Kashmir shared this inspirational and heartwarming tale along with an image of Ubeed.

This 8-year-old old kid, Malik Ubeed from Nowpora, a student of class 4th, dropped in at DC Bandipora office today along with his Piggy Bank. He walked in and handed over his piggy bank saving to the DC & wanted the money to be spent in the fight against #COVID19. They tweeted.

#Beautiful_Surprise

This 8 yrs old kid, Malik Ubeed frm Nowpora, a student of class 4th, dropped in at DC Bandipora office today along with his Piggy Bank. He walked in & handed over his piggy bank saving to the DC & wanted the money to be spend in the fight against #COVID19. pic.twitter.com/xrPbTzi18f  DIPR-J&K (@diprjk) April 13, 2020

Since being shared two days ago, the post sparked varied reactions among people. Tweeple couldnt stop appreciating Ubeeds gesture. Some even pointed that he is someone from whom everybody should learn the meaning of true kindness.

Fight is Big ....Everyone need to Contribute....God bless this Child..., wrote a Twitter user. Respect, tweeted another. Lovely gesture, expressed a third. Others should learn from this child, wrote a fourth.

In this time of crisis, stories of several corona heroes doing their bit to fight against coronavirus are going viral. One such person is this doctor from Bhopal who lives in car to keep his family safe.

Also Read | PM Modi tweets about #CoronaHeroes offering others help, praises their effort
Stacey Abrams, the former Democratic gubernatorial candidate for Georgia who made headlines for calling out alleged voter suppression during her election, is offering to run alongside Joe Biden on the Democratic presidential ticket this year.

Yes. I would be honored, Abrams told Elle when asked whether she would accept an offer from the former vice president to serve as his running mate. I would be an excellent running mate.

I have the capacity to attract voters by motivating typically ignored communities. I have a strong history of executive and management experience in the private, public, and nonprofit sectors. Ive spent 25 years in independent study of foreign policy. I am ready to help advance an agenda of restoring Americas place in the world. If I am selected, I am prepared and excited to serve, she continued.

Abrams shot to notoriety in 2018 when she ran in Georgia to become the countrys first black female governor. She lost the election by 1.4 percentage points to her Republican opponent, Georgias secretary of state at the time, Brian Kemp, who enforced one of the strictest voter ID laws in the country while he was running against Abrams. Abrams has refused to concede the election ever since, alleging that Kemp engaged in voter suppression.

She originally signaled her willingness to run alongside Biden in February, saying she would be doing a disservice to every woman of color, every woman of ambition, every child who wants to think beyond their known space if she refused such an offer.

Rumors swirled earlier this year that Abrams is one of the top contenders to be tapped as Bidens running mate. Biden is now the presumptive Democratic nominee to take on President Trump in November after Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders dropped out of the race last week.

Weeks earlier, Abrams said she intends to be elected president someday, saying thats my plan, and that she believes the country will elect her to the top executive office over the next two decades.

Story continues

Her openness to joining the Democratic ticket as vice presidential nominee comes after she signaled last year she would only run as a presidential candidate.

You dont run for second place, she remarked during an appearance on ABCs The View in March of 2019.

The VPs job is to be chief lieutenant and partner by taking on the roles and responsibilities assigned to you by the president, Abrams said in her interview with Elle. I am very self-aware, and I know that my resume  is usually reduced to She didnt become the governor of Georgia. But it is important to understand all the things I did to prepare for that contest.  I am able to stand effectively as a partner, to execute a vision, and to serve the vision of the president.

More from National Review
The new FX miniseries Mrs. America, officially out today, will tell the story of the battle for the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA)  bringing to light one fight for gender equality that has gone on for nearly 100 years. The nine-part series follows some of the biggest feminist activists of the 1970s  including Gloria Steinem, Shirley Chisholm, and Flo Kennedy  in their fight for womens rights, and the right-wing efforts to stop them.

Mrs. America sheds a light on the culture wars of the 70s, which have in many ways shaped the world we still live in now. The ERA, which demanded individuals not be subjected to discrimination based on their gender, played a large role in the fight for equality in the U.S. While the amendment sought to equalize rights for all genders, opposition to it from conservative parties were strong. This included anti-feminist activist Phyllis Schlafly, who at the time claimed the womens rights movement posed a threat to traditional family values.

So, what exactly is the ERA? The Equal Rights Amendment was a proposition that was actually introduced to Congress in the 1920s that would guarantee equal rights for all U.S. citizens regardless of sex. Although middle class women were largely supportive of the ERA in its early adaptation, it wasnt until the womens movement in the 60s that the amendment garnered real support. After being reintroduced to the House of Representatives in 1971, the ERA went on to pass through the House and move to the Senate for ratification. This is where the timeline of events around the constitutional amendment and the movements overall value became of greater prevalence in American history.

While the movement for gender equality has changed and grown over the years, the conservative movement at the time also helped to create the Republican Party as we know it today. The fight around the ERA is an important one in understanding todays climate around gender justice, reproductive freedom, and the modern right wing. Ahead, weve detailed a complete timeline of events  from the ERAs first trip to the Senate to where we stand today.

Story continues

1923: The Equal Rights Amendment is introduced

In 1923, just three years after women won the right to vote, the Equal Rights Amendment was written by members of the National Womens Party, which first formed in 1916. The document was written by Alice Paul, who founded the party, and was introduced at the 75th anniversary of the 1848 Womens Rights Convention. That same year, the ERA was first introduced in Congress.

Mid-1920s: The ERA fails to gain broad support

Even though the ERA was introduced to guarantee equal legal rights for all people  regardless of their gender  support for the document within the womens movement itself was divided along class lines. Working class women were still fighting for labor protections and were concerned the ERA would threaten laws that made working conditions in factories safer.

1943: Alice Paul rewrites the ERA

Twenty years after she first introduced the document, Paul rewrote the ERA in 1943 to better reflect the language in the 15th and 19th Amendments, which granted the right to vote to Black men and women The new version, then called the Alice Paul Amendment, stated: Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of sex. But the labor movement would still not join the fight.

1950: The ERA is introduced in every Congressional session, but only gets passed once.

For the next 47 years  from 1923 to 1970  the ERA was introduced into every session of Congress, but awaited a hearing on the floor, until 1946. However, the amendment was blocked in the Senate. Four years later in 1950, the Senate passed the ERA, but with language that would essentially nullify any meaningful impact.

1954-1964: The ERA gets an ally in the House

By 1954, when she was elected to the House, Michigan Congresswoman Martha Griffiths had joined the fight to pass the ERA, and worked to have it added to Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. The Civil Rights Movement at the time helped to kickstart a new wave of activism around womens rights, and at this point, the labor movement had finally joined in on the demands to ratify the amendment.

1970: The National Organization for Women joins the fight

The National Organization for Women (NOW), which was founded in 1966, vowed to take on the fight to ratify the ERA. In February of 1970, twenty leaders of the feminist group disrupted hearings of the U.S. Senate Subcommittee on Constitutional Amendments and demanded the ERA be brought before all of Congress. Rep. Griffiths was instrumental in this effort, and filed a discharge petition to force the ERA to be heard by the full House. Her petition was successful and the ERA passed in the House, but was later killed in the Senate.

1972: The ERA passes, but the movement gains a new enemy

On March 22, 1972, the ERA passed in Congress and was then sent to the states for ratification. However, Congress also placed an arbitrary seven-year ratification deadline on the amendment. Because the ERA entered a new phase at this time, a religious right-wing movement in opposition to the amendment also started to gain steam, with conservative activist Phyllis Schafly launching the National Committee to Stop ERA. Within the first year, the ERA received support in 22 states, but that progress slowed due to right-wing campaigns.

1974-1977: States fail to approve the ERA despite the approaching deadline

Although 22 legislatures ratified the amendment in 1972  with eight more joining the following year  only five more states approved the ERA over the course of three years, which advocates grew weary of as it approached the deadline. Following this, from the mid- to late-70s right-wing, anti-ERA groups had launched a full on assault on the Equal Rights Amendment in states across the country, as ERA advocates had a deadline to meet.

1978: Right-wing groups take the fight against ERA ratification nationwide

By 1978, ERA advocates became more militant in their demands for an extension of the ERA deadline, organizing pickets, civil disobedience, hunger strikes, and a march of 100,000-plus supporters in Washington, D.C. in July of that year. As the deadline approached, New York Rep. Elizabeth Holtzman moved to extend the ratification deadline to June 30, 1928, but Congress remained divided on whether or not to allow this resolution to pass.

1980: Ronald Reagan is elected and theres a massive push for conservatism in the U.S.

Ronald Reagans election win in 1980 solidified the countrys move to the conservative right, along with a push for traditional family values. After Illinois contested the ERA ratification extension, court battles continued, while the American people endured a paradigm shift under a new president.

1982: The ERA falls short, despite major protests

After receiving an extension for ratification, ERA supporters still missed the June 30, 1982 deadline, and was just three states shy of securing the necessary 38 states for full ratification. The House failed to pass on a vote of 278-147, the minority being against the ERA but still within the 2/3 limitation. But the struggle continued, as the amendment was reintroduced in Congress just two weeks later on July 14. During this time, a group of seven ERA supporters went on a fast and seventeen others chained themselves to the doors of Illinois Senate chambers in protest.

1985-1992: The fight for the ERA trudges on

For seven years, and even since, the Equal Rights Amendment has been introduced before every Congressional session and held in Committee. NOWs vow to continue fighting for the movement has never wavered.

1995-1996: An ERA Strategy Summit creates new resolutions

According to NOW, the annual ERA Summit began in an effort to continue conversations around equality. The group convened to call for a new ERA, with new language that included concepts around reproductive rights, abortion, and non-discrimination on the basis of sexuality.

2017-Present: The ERA movement is once again revived

In the early 2000s, movement to ratify remained at an impasse, though the fight for ratification continues in 2020. In the last few years, the ERA has finally been ratified in 38 states, though the deadline has now expired. Nevada ratified the amendment in 2017, becoming the first state to ratify after the deadline passed followed by Illinois in 2018, and Virginia in January 2020. Virginias passing of the ERA made major headlines with final tallied vote of 27-12 in the Senate and 58-40 in the House, making them the 38th state to pass the amendment.

Now that this requirement has been met, the ERA will likely continue its long fight ahead, but supporters will not be backing down anytime soon. As depicted in the FX series Mrs. America, the ERAs fight is far from over, and a new generation of equal rights supports continue to stress the imperativeness of ratifying it as soon as possible.

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Linkedin Julia Suryakusuma (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Wed, April 15, 2020 11:26 636 fc6853813033f564188675f8bd20008a 3 Opinion COVID-19,climate-change,sustainable-development,crisis,economic-inequality Free

Have you ever driven whilst drowsy? Several years ago, I could not shake off my drowsiness and fell asleep at the steering wheel  yes, in a speeding car! I hit a road separator and almost toppled the car over. I woke up faster than if I had suddenly had ice-cold water doused on me! All drowsiness vanished without a trace! With heart pounding and eyes wide open, I made it home safely. Phew, close call!



Is the COVID-19 crisis going to wake us up, or are we going to remain drowsy, crash headlong into a disaster and possibly die a painful death?



Theres a quote about crises. When written in Chinese, the word crisis is composed of two characters  one represents danger, and the other represents opportunity.



Yes, the coronavirus is dangerous, but it does offer opportunities to reflect and change our ways.



The pandemic has brought out the best in people around the globe. Communities all around the world are displaying extraordinary levels of comradery to help each other through the COVID-19 pandemic, observed Michael Broom of the World Economic Forum.



A poem, called When religion lost God by someone posing as respected Islamic leader Mustofa Bisri aka Gus Mus, about the frailty of rituals when places of worship close, went viral recently. When the coronavirus came, youre forced to look for God in your isolation, as God cannot be found in crowds or in sharia. Yes, yes, yes!



The other silver lining of the worldwide lockdown has been the drastic decline in pollution and traffic. Imagine, blue skies over Jakarta and many other cities around the world! A rare sight indeed!



Charles Eisenstein, author and gift economy advocate, wrote a beautiful reflective essay called Coronation. COVID-19 is showing us that when humanity is united in common cause, phenomenally rapid change is possible.



So, does this mean were embarking on an Age of Aquarius, where theres a shift away from duality and self-centered thinking towards a more humanitarian perspective that considers the oneness of all beings?



Dream on.



With regards to the reduced pollution, according to Li Shuo, senior climate and energy policy officer at Greenpeace in Beijing, Its hardly a sustainable way to reduce emissions, he said.



When the pandemic passes, companies and industries will scramble to make up for lost production time. As Li Shuo said, hes worried that efforts to reignite Chinas economy might end up making the coronavirus epidemic a step backward for climate efforts. This will also be true of other countries.



Have you heard of disaster capitalism? Its defined as the practice [by a government, regime, etc] of taking advantage of a major disaster to adopt liberal economic policies that the population would be less likely to accept under normal circumstances.



Naomi Klein discusses this in her 2007 book The Shock Doctrine: the political strategy of using large-scale crises to push through policies that systematically deepen inequality, enrich elites, and undercut everyone else.



Klein points out that the coronavirus is the perfect disaster for disaster capitalism and how market capitalism provides solutions to crises that exploit and exacerbate existing inequalities  of class, race and gender.



Its not clear yet how the shock doctrine will play out in Indonesia because these are early days, but time will tell.



Some observers have pointed out how COVID-19 has been used for political purposes. Regional heads such as Jakarta Governor Anies Baswedan and West Java Governor Ridwan Kamil, who may have presidential ambitions in 2024, seem to be subtly attempting to undermine President Joko Jokowi Widodos efforts in dealing with the pandemic. For example, on the fourth day of the large-scale social restrictions (PSBB), there were still throngs of people in commuter line stations in Jakarta, Depok, Bekasi and Tangerang. The central government is spending billions of rupiah to help the regions, but if the regions cant contain their residents, this will cause the virus to spread quickly. This is only political speculation, but it would hardly be the first time there has been a lack of coordination between the central government and the regions.



In Hungary, Prime Minister Viktor Orban, a populist leader, has used the crisis to seize more power, to rule by decree, to crush minorities and curb immigration. According to Imre Szijarto and Rosa Swartzburgh in an article for the Jacobin online magazine published on April 8, Orbans administration has done all this in the name of the response to coronavirus  exploiting its emergency powers to silence dissent and demonize minorities.



During the 2014 and 2019 presidential campaigns, both candidates, Prabowo Subianto and Jokowi, employed populism to try and win the election. In his second term (2019 to 2024), with an unexpected looming crisis, it is not unlikely that Jokowi will also resort to more controlling measures, which will benefit the ruling elite at the expense of the poor. Indonesia has already been under oligarchic rule anyway  the gap between rich and poor will continue to widen as it has over the decades.



The coronavirus is a turning point in history. While we cant control our leaders, let alone national and international politics, we can certainly make this a turning point in our personal lives. After being touched by the virus, at least metaphorically, and facing the possibility of death, would you try to redeem your past mistakes, or just carry on till your mistakes catch up with you?

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not reflect the official stance of The Jakarta Post.
An Australian couple decided there was no better place to ride out the coronavirus pandemic than in a luxury beachfront villa in Bali.

Daniel Wilkins and his wife and daughter have been staying in Cemagi Beach, spending their days lounging by the pool while the rest of world is forced to stay inside amid lockdown measures.

Despite businesses across the Indonesian island shutting down, Mr Daniels said some were still able to deliver food and alcohol to their secluded villa which costs just $900 a month.

Their lavish lifestyle sparked jealousy on Facebook with many admitting they wished they had thought of the idea.

Daniel Wilkins and his wife and daughter have been staying in Cemagi Beach, (pictured) spending their days lounging by the pool while the rest of world is forced to stay inside amid lockdown measures

'My wife and I made the decision a few weeks back to ride out the covid19 problem in Bali rather than come home,' Mr Wilkins said.

'There are few people around and we have an entire beachfront villa estate to ourselves (no one else here) for $900 Aussie per month.

'Gojek are still operating and delivering babi guling (spit roasted pork and rice) for $2.50. Wow Booze started delivering $10 bottles of wine which is keeping me going as well.'

Mr Wilkins said they hoped their stay would help the Balinese economy which has plummeted dramatically due to the lack of tourists.

'They are advising everyone here to stay inside unless buying food, working etc,' he said.

'Before we went into isolation all the supermarkets were full of everything you need and now there are hotel and restaurant suppliers doing deliveries to home (even cheaper than the supermarket). 

'Hope everyone back home is well and can't wait till you are all back here soon to give the Balinese tourist economy the help it needs.'

Daniel Wilkins (pictured with wife) has been staying in Bali with his family, paying just $900 a month to stay in a beach front villa which they have 'all to themselves'

The family have been holidaying at the Natha beachfront at Cemagi while Australians back home have been forced to stay indoors

Mr Wilkins also said he had bought travel insurance for his family and visas were now unlimited until after the pandemic.

The post was flooded with Australians congratulating the family on the bright idea.

'So bloody jealous. Living the dream. Better to be isolating there then here in Australia,' someone commented.

'Why didn't we think of this?' another said.

'Living the dream guys ... well played,' one person said.

But some said the risk of getting sick and stranded overseas was enough to turn them off.

The family said despite many businesses forced to shut down during the pandemic, some restaurants and hotels were able to deliver food and alcohol to them during their stay

'Nope! Couldn't pay me enough to do this. Who knows when or if we'll ever be able to fly again,' one commented.

'Until you catch something and then can't go to a hospital because they are packed. Seems like a plan,' another said.

'Maybe you could have just kept those happy feelings to yourselves as a lot of people are doing it tough losing jobs - money on holidays already booked and forced to take holidays from work that they had planned to travel with but still have to use and have to instead stay in doors,' someone wrote.

In the wake of the virus Bali has banned all foreign visitors from entering, meaning thousands of workers have lost their jobs working in hotels, restaurants and clubs.

Indonesia has had 4,839 cases of COVID-19 and 459 deaths.
NEW YORK, April 14, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- Cannabinoid Hemp Oil Market Research Report by Form (Concentrated Oil, Cream, Food Additive, Inhaled Liquids, and Supplement Capsule), by Source (Inorganic and Organic), by Distribution Mode, by Application - Global Forecast to 2025 (Cumulative Impact of COVID-19)







Read the full report: https://www.reportlinker.com/p05881711/?utm_source=PRN







The Global Cannabinoid Hemp Oil Market is expected to grow from USD 547.58 Million in 2019 to USD 3,081.56 Million by the end of 2025 at a Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 33.36%.



Market Segmentation & Coverage:

This research report categorizes the Cannabinoid Hemp Oil to forecast the revenues and analyze the trends in each of the following sub-markets:



"The Inhaled Liquids is projected to witness the highest growth during the forecast period"



On the basis of Form, the Cannabinoid Hemp Oil Market is studied across Concentrated Oil, Cream, Food Additive, Inhaled Liquids, Supplement Capsule, and Tincture Spray. The Concentrated Oil commanded the largest size in the Cannabinoid Hemp Oil Market in 2019. On the other hand, the Inhaled Liquids is expected to grow at the fastest CAGR during the forecast period.



"The Inorganic is projected to witness the highest growth during the forecast period"



On the basis of Source, the Cannabinoid Hemp Oil Market is studied across Inorganic and Organic. The Organic commanded the largest size in the Cannabinoid Hemp Oil Market in 2019. On the other hand, the Inorganic is expected to grow at the fastest CAGR during the forecast period.



"The Online Mode is projected to witness the highest growth during the forecast period"



On the basis of Distribution Mode, the Cannabinoid Hemp Oil Market is studied across Offline Mode and Online Mode. The Online Mode commanded the largest size in the Cannabinoid Hemp Oil Market in 2019, and it is expected to grow at the fastest CAGR during the forecast period.



"The Cosmetics & Personal Care is projected to witness the highest growth during the forecast period"



On the basis of Application, the Cannabinoid Hemp Oil Market is studied across Cosmetics & Personal Care, Food & Beverage, Medical & Pharmaceuticals, and Pet Care. The Medical & Pharmaceuticals commanded the largest size in the Cannabinoid Hemp Oil Market in 2019. On the other hand, the Cosmetics & Personal Care is expected to grow at the fastest CAGR during the forecast period.



"The Asia-Pacific is projected to witness the highest growth during the forecast period"



On the basis of Geography, the Cannabinoid Hemp Oil Market is studied across Americas, Asia-Pacific, and Europe, Middle East & Africa. The Americas region is studied across Argentina, Brazil, Canada, Mexico, and United States. The Asia-Pacific region is studied across Australia, China, India, Indonesia, Japan, Malaysia, Philippines, South Korea, and Thailand. The Europe, Middle East & Africa region is studied across France, Germany, Italy, Netherlands, Qatar, Russia, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, Spain, United Arab Emirates, and United Kingdom. The Americas commanded the largest size in the Cannabinoid Hemp Oil Market in 2019. On the other hand, the Asia-Pacific is expected to grow at the fastest CAGR during the forecast period.



Company Usability Profiles:

The report deeply explores the recent significant developments by the leading vendors and innovation profiles in the Global Cannabinoid Hemp Oil Market including Aphria, Inc., Canopy Growth Corporation, CBD Health Solutions, LLC., CV Sciences, Inc., CW Hemp, Elixinol LLC, Endoca, Folium Biosciences, Freedom Leaf Inc., Green Roads of Florida, LLC, Isodiol International, Inc., Kazmira LLC, Medical Marijuana, Inc., NuLeaf Naturals LLC, and Pharmahemp.



FPNV Positioning Matrix:

The FPNV Positioning Matrix evaluates and categorizes the vendors in the Cannabinoid Hemp Oil Market on the basis of Business Strategy (Business Growth, Industry Coverage, Financial Viability, and Channel Support) and Product Satisfaction (Value for Money, Ease of Use, Product Features, and Customer Support) that aids businesses in better decision making and understanding the competitive landscape.



Competitive Strategic Window:

The Competitive Strategic Window analyses the competitive landscape in terms of markets, applications, and geographies. The Competitive Strategic Window helps the vendor define an alignment or fit between their capabilities and opportunities for future growth prospects. During a forecast period, it defines the optimal or favorable fit for the vendors to adopt successive merger and acquisition strategies, geography expansion, research & development, and new product introduction strategies to execute further business expansion and growth.



The report provides insights on the following pointers:

1. Market Penetration: Provides comprehensive information on sulfuric acid offered by the key players

2. Market Development: Provides in-depth information about lucrative emerging markets and analyzes the markets

3. Market Diversification: Provides detailed information about new product launches, untapped geographies, recent developments, and investments

4. Competitive Assessment & Intelligence: Provides an exhaustive assessment of market shares, strategies, products, and manufacturing capabilities of the leading players

5. Product Development & Innovation: Provides intelligent insights on future technologies, R&D activities, and new product developments



The report answers questions such as:

1. What is the market size and forecast of the Global Cannabinoid Hemp Oil Market?

2. What are the inhibiting factors and their impact analysis shaping the Global Cannabinoid Hemp Oil Market during the forecast period?

3. What is the competitive position if vendors in the Global Cannabinoid Hemp Oil Market?

4. How Porters Five Forces define the Global Cannabinoid Hemp Oil Market landscape?

5. What are the technology trends and regulatory frameworks in the Global Cannabinoid Hemp Oil Market?

6. Which are the products/segments/applications/areas to invest in over the forecast period in the Global Cannabinoid Hemp Oil Market?

7. What is the competitive strategic window for opportunities in the Global Cannabinoid Hemp Oil Market?

8. What are the modes and strategic moves considered suitable for entering the Global Cannabinoid Hemp Oil Market?



Read the full report: https://www.reportlinker.com/p05881711/?utm_source=PRN



About Reportlinker

ReportLinker is an award-winning market research solution. Reportlinker finds and organizes the latest industry data so you get all the market research you need - instantly, in one place.



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PHILIPSBURG:--- Prime Minister Silveria Jacobs announced on Tuesday evening that some banks on St. Maarten have agreed to open their doors on Tuesday to allow persons with checks to change those checks.

Those banks that will open are Windwards Island Bank (9 am to 3:30 pm) ORCO Bank, Republic Bank and BCEM (8:30 to 12 noon) and FCIB Bank (8:30 to 1 pm).

Chinese Supermarkets that opened in the various districts that opened their shops on Tuesday were helpful to the community who managed to purchase much-needed items.

The Department of Social Services was able to deliver the 1,500 boxes to the needy, deliveries of the other boxes that were requested will resume at a later date.

While the EOC has submitted a proposal to allow Supermarkets and Banks and gas stations to reopen so that persons in the community could conduct essential business. Based on the proposal movement for essential services will be allowed for 3 days per week as the shutdown continues. The movement will be done in two zones from East to West while Cole Bay will be the checkpoint for those persons wishing to go over the hill to Philipsburg.

The reopening of all supermarkets will go into effect as of Thursday, April 16th. Jacobs urged residents to only venture out for essential services. She said that it is important for people to remain at home in order for St. Maarten to flatten the curve on the spread of the coronavirus. The Prime Minister said the national decree will be adjusted to allow the opening of essential businesses and the movement of people.

CPS will also continue its community outreach program by testing persons in hotspots. Jacobs said on Tuesday CPS team spoke to 85 persons some of whom were tested, especially those with symptoms thus increasing the number of persons tested. She said there are still more test kits available on the island while the order was placed for more kits.

Persons that have to move around for medical appointments will be allowed to do so without a waiver but the persons must be able to show proof of their appointment. The use of the waivers will also be minimized as there are still some hiccups with the use of the waivers.

Currently, there are 53 persons that were tested positive for the COVID-19, 90 persons in self-quarantine. 161 in self-isolation, a total of 161 tests were conducted, 15 pending, 9 deceased while 5 persons have recovered, four persons are still hospitalized, 3 in stable conditions while one is critical and on ventillator.
A girl wears a face mask as she play on a swing near the Yingwuzhou Yangtze River Bridge in Wuhan in central China's Hubei Province, Wednesday, Jan. 29, 2020. Countries began evacuating their citizens Wednesday from the Chinese city hardest-hit by a new virus that has now infected more people in China than were sickened in the country by SARS.

Arek Rataj/AP

An author in Wuhan, China  where the first coronavirus cases were detected  kept an online diary describing life in lockdown in the city.

Going by her pen name, Fang Fang, instead of her real name Wang Fang, she chronicled various days during the 76-day lockdown.

The New York Times translated excerpts of Wang's accounts, from the first few days of the entire city going under quarantine to the day the lockdown was lifted.

"If authors have any responsibilities in the face of disaster, the greatest of them is to bear witness," she said in an interview with The Times. "I've always cared about how the weak survive great upheavals. The individuals who are left out  they've always been my chief concern."

Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

An author in Wuhan, China  where the first coronavirus cases were detected  kept an online diary describing life in lockdown in the city.

Her controversial diary was widely relied upon by tens of millions of Chinese readers looking for in-person updates as the coronavirus first began to unfold in the country, The New York Times reported.

Going by her pen name, Fang Fang, instead of her real name Wang Fang, she chronicled various days during the 76-day lockdown. The Times translated excerpts of Wang's accounts, from the first few days of the entire city going under quarantine to the day the lockdown was lifted.

"If authors have any responsibilities in the face of disaster, the greatest of them is to bear witness," she said in an interview with The Times. "I've always cared about how the weak survive great upheavals. The individuals who are left out  they've always been my chief concern."

Staff members move barriers in front of a railway station of Wuhan on the first day inbound train services resumed, March 28, 2020.

Aly Song/Reuters

On January 26, Wang began her 'diary of a closed city.'

"The people of Wuhan are still at a critical time," she wrote, according to The Times' translation. "They have moved past their initial terror, helplessness, anxiety and stress, and are much calmer and steadier. But still they need to be comforted and cheered on by everyone."

Story continues

Wang then relayed a story she heard from her daughter about her friend's father, who had liver cancer and died from a "suspected case of infection." After he was hospitalized, there was no available medical staff to treat him and he died in three hours, Wang wrote.

She described the quiet atmosphere in the city as people remained indoors to contain the spread of the then mysterious virus. At the end of January, she described how hard it was to find staple groceries like eggs when she went on an errand run.

Wang commended the employees in supermarkets and street cleaners who were still diligently working amid the outbreak, adding they gave her a sense of calm by carrying on with their lives.

"True, they have to go on living and so do we, that's the way it is," she wrote. "I often admire these working people. Sometimes a brief chat with them leaves me feeling mysteriously calmed."

A photo of Li Wenliang is seen with flower bouquets at the Houhu Branch of Wuhan Central Hospital, where he worked, on February 7, 2020.

STR/AFP via Getty Images

On February 7, Wang wrote she was 'distraught' to find out whistleblower doctor Li Wenliang had died from the coronavirus.

Li Wenliang was labeled a martyr after the doctor, who was silenced by Chinese officials when he initially sounded the alarm on the coronavirus late last year, died from the coronavirus. People in China were up at arms following Li's death, with posts continually flooding the internet despite Chinese censors. People also took the streets in an uproar.

"The flood of tears became a mighty wave on the internet!" Wang wrote. "That night, Li Wenliang was ferried into another world on all the tears shed for him."

"At midday shouts went out in Wuhan: We'll be the ones to care for Li Wenliang's family and children."

People arrive at Hankou Railway Station in Wuhan to take one of the first trains leaving the city in China's central Hubei province early on April 8, 2020.

Noel Celis/AFP via Getty Image

Following Chinese officials' announcement that they would soon lift the lockdown, Wang also concluded her diary on March 24.

The unprecedented lockdown on Wuhan's nearly 11 million residents was lifted on April 7  76 days after it was initially put into place.

"Many people have left messages saying that no officials will be held accountable, that there's no hope in sight for that," she wrote in her final entry. "As for whether they will ultimately be held responsible, I don't know."

She wrote that the people of Wuhan, as "witnesses to the tragic times of this city," have a "responsibility and duty to seek justice for those who died wrongfully." Wang wrote she will do her part by continuing to chronicle this historic time during a pandemic.

"If anyone imagines that I'll lightly set aside my pen, that will never happen," she wrote. "One word after another, I will inscribe them onto history's pillar of infamy."

Read the original article on Business Insider
Fort Bend County has made it easier to track positive coronavirus cases in the community with a new website launched yesterday.

The interactive site, updated at 8:30 a.m. daily, allows you to see more specific location data on coronavirus cases in the county, including zip code, precinct and jurisdiction.
The Delaware Rivers comeback from its polluted state decades ago has established it as a model for other river restoration efforts across the county and made it an environmental advocacy groups 2020 River of the Year.

The distinction from American Rivers comes in the organizations annual Most Endangered Rivers report, which identifies 10 waterways across the U.S. in need of help.

(Read the full report here)

The Delaware, which flows between Pennsylvania and New Jersey on its 400-mile route from New Yorks Catskills to the Delaware Bay, can be a map for others, the report says.

The Delaware River is a national success story, Bob Irvin, president and CEO of American Rivers, said in a news release. The Delaware shows how a healthy river can be an engine for thriving communities and strong local economies.

A 2013 re-enactment of George Washington's daring crossing of the Delaware River.Alex Remnick | NJ Advance Media for NJ.com

The rivers 13,600-square-mile watershed supplies drinking water to millions of people, including the Easton area, New York City and Philadelphia, and contributes $22.5 billion a year to local economies via outdoor activities, American Rivers says.

The Washington, D.C.-based nonprofits report says that 75 years ago industrial pollution left parts of the Delaware uninhabitable for aquatic life. It credits clean-water safeguards and community stewardship with the rivers restoration, evidenced by the return of fish species like Atlantic sturgeon and American shad to its tributaries via dam removals.

Interstate 80 and the Delaware River run through the Delaware Water Gap, separating New Jersey and Pennsylvania.Steve Novak | For lehighvalleylive.com | LightHawk

American Rivers was among the organizations that opposed the infamous Tocks Island Dam project in the 1970s, which would have flooded out the Delaware Water Gap and created a 37-mile lake.

Groups that have invested in the health of the Delaware River and its watershed, from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to local breweries, gathered in Allentown over two days last October to discuss the biggest threats facing the river, including pollution, development and climate change.

The American Rivers report says that kind of coordination, along with support from elected officials on federal, state and local levels, is necessary to continue the rivers rejuvenation.

A view of Phillipsburg to the east from above the Route 22 toll bridge over the Delaware River.Saed Hindash | For lehighvalleylive.com

For the reports 10 most endangered rivers in 2020, it named: the Upper Mississippi; the Lower Missouri; Big Sunflower River in Missouri; Puyallup River in Washington; South Fork Salmon River in Idaho; Menominee River in Michigan and Wisconsin; Rapid Creek in South Dakota; Okefenokee Swamp and St. Marys River in Florida and Georgia; Ocklawaha River in Florida; and the Lower Youghiogheny River in western Pennsylvania.

Steve Novak may be reached at snovak@lehighvalleylive.com. If theres anything about this story that needs attention, please email him. Follow him on Twitter @SteveNovakLVL and Facebook. Find lehighvalleylive.com on Facebook.
STATEN ISLAND, N.Y.  The get-rich-quick scheme of two ex-convicts, one of whom was convicted of manslaughter in Brooklyn decades ago, was foiled early Friday morning after they were caught stealing an ATM in Stapleton, said authorities.

Almando Pumarejo, 58, and Frank Perez, 57, broke the lock on a grocery store at 226 Van Duzer St. at about 2:30 a.m., a criminal complaint said.

The defendants, who live nearby in the same building on the 400 block of Van Duzer, left and returned about a half-hour later, said the complaint.

They entered and removed an ATM, the complaint said.

The duo was nabbed shortly thereafter.

The heist was the second in six months which Perez pulled, allege prosecutors.

On Oct. 19, he burglarized Clean Rite laundromat at 1106 Bay St. in Rosebank and also stole an ATM, the complaint said.

Yeah, thats me, Perez replied when cops quizzed him about the break-in, said the complaint.

The defendants were each charged with felony counts of third-degree burglary and third-degree grand larceny.

They are also accused of misdemeanor counts of criminal mischief, stolen-property possession, criminal trespass and petit larceny.

The pair was arraigned remotely over the weekend in Criminal Court and released on their own recognizance.

Perez must return to court on July 21.

His lawyer did not immediately respond to an email seeking comment.

Pumarejos next court date is July 10. Biju Koshy, his lawyer, declined comment on the case.

Both defendants have served prison stints.

In 1989, Pumarejo was convicted in Brooklyn of first-degree manslaughter and criminal weapon possession, show online records of the state Department of Corrections and Community Supervision.

He was sentenced to 10 to 30 years behind bars and paroled in September 2001, those records said.

Subsequently, in 2005, Pumarejo was convicted in Brooklyn of felony drug possession and sentenced to up to 18 months in prison.

Perezs criminal history likewise dates back three decades in Brooklyn.

In 1989, he was convicted of stolen-property possession and unauthorized motor vehicle use and sentenced to 18 months to three years, said Corrections records.

More recently, in 2011, he was convicted of felony drug possession and sentenced to 30 months behind bars.
Google contract workers say the company this week cracked down on their access to skills learning tools, causing consternation among workers who previously received free courses.

Several workers said they were told over the last week that their access to learning resources through LinkedIn Learning were no longer valid, as it is reserved for full-time employees and interns, according to materials viewed by CNBC.

The crackdown comes as the company faces pressure from contract employees who have petitioned for better treatment amid the COVID-19 pandemic. Commonly referred to as TVCs (temporary, vendors and contractors), these workers make up at least half of the company's 300,000-person workforce, but are often excluded from company-wide events and offerings.

Multiple TVCs said that management has sent emails encouraging workers to take advantage of learning tools since the company ordered all employees to work from home in mid-March. Many TVCs had freely accessed the training tools since at least 2016 without any pushback, according to workers and documents. That includes Google contract employee Bruce Bookman, who spoke to CNBC after writing a blog post Tuesday criticizing the change.

But this week, Google cracked down on access, according to documents viewed by CNBC.

"We noticed that you have a LinkedIn Learning account using your Google credentials," read an email from Kris Mortimer, a program manager for Google's vendor operations who notified TVCs of the change on Wednesday. "Because this resource isn't needed to do your job and is considered a softskill/professional development training, it's only available to full-time employees and interns," she said. "We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause."

"Despite all we do for the company for less pay than full-time employees, we see management rejiggering what contractors can access," Bookman told CNBC in an interview. "It's heartless to do this during a global pandemic."

Mortimer's note goes on to say that if workers need the learning tools to complete their job, they have to submit a formal request or purchase a consumer license themselves.

"It places a high burden on managers and TVCs because what was once open must now be repeatedly requested by every individual," Bookman wrote. "This creates a bottleneck nightmare. Requests can get buried and end up at the bottom of a manager's pile very easily."

Some workers expressed dismay at the crackdown. "This is easily one of the benefits I'd like most," one worker said on an email thread. "RIP," wrote another in a separate thread.

"It's interesting they are actively going through the accounts," another wrote.

Google didn't respond to requests for comment on the changes.
Paradise Vice Mayor Michael Zuccolillo sent sexually explicit text messages and photos to a person he believed was a 16-year-old girl but was in fact a sheriffs deputy investigating him, officials said Tuesday after charging him with several crimes.

Zuccolillo, 41, surrendered at the Butte County Jail on Tuesday after a months-long investigation that included a person who launched a self-initiated to catch a predator effort against the vice mayor, and a sheriffs deputy masquerading as a teenage girl.

The vice mayor is charged with arranging a meeting with a minor for the purpose of engaging in lewd or lascivious behavior, sending harmful material to a minor, and communicating with a minor for the purpose of engaging in sexual conduct. He posted $135,000 bail.

Reached by phone Tuesday night, Zuccolillo said he has no comment at this time.

Sheriffs officials said the investigation began Feb. 24, when a tipster, whose identity was not released, told the Sheriffs Office that he had evidence to prove that Zuccolillo had been sending sexually explicit text messages and photos of his genitals to a person he believed to be a 16-year-old girl visiting the Sacramento area from China.

The tipster told officials the messages were sent as part of an ongoing conversation that included a discussion of Zuccolillo traveling to Sacramento to have sex with a person he believed was a 16-year-old girl and her adult sister, according to the Sheriffs Office.

Sheriffs officials said the tipster obtained evidence by targeting Zuccolillo in what is best described as a self-initiated to catch a predator style operation and that he targeted the vice mayor because of animosity he had for Zuccolillo resulting from a bad business deal.

Detectives told the tipster to stop communicating with Zuccolillo. After consulting the district attorneys office and the FBI, investigators acquired cell phone records for Zuccolillo and the tipster through search warrants.

At some point during the investigation, an undercover sheriffs deputy took over the persona of the fake 16-year-old girl and exchanged text messages with Zuccolillo. He sent photos of his genitals to the undercover deputy, sheriffs officials said.

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.

Investigators searched his home, vehicles and electronic devices, and submitted the case to the district attorneys office for review.

Zuccolillo was elected to serve as vice mayor for a one-year term that ends Dec. 8, according to Paradises Town Council web page. Previously, he served on the Paradise Town Council and served on the Planning Commission. He is a real estate broker and operates his business out of Paradise, according to his Town Council biography.

He is scheduled to be arraigned July 10 in Butte County Superior Court.

Anyone with information about this case should contact Sgt. Pat McNelis or Detective Jason Miller at 530-538-7671.

Lauren Hernandez is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: lauren.hernandez@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @ByLHernandez
A tradesman has recalled how he hurled himself into the tray of his ute and was taken on a high-speed joyride in a bid to stop alleged thieves trying steal it.

Greg Hamill was asleep at his home in Kanimbla, Cairns, when he heard the garage open around 2.30 Monday morning.

'I was in bed and heard the roller door lifting up, unfortunately for them, it is really loud, it's a bit old, so I jumped straight out of bed, sprinted down the hallway and onto the ute,' told Sunrise.

'I was thinking "Im going to get you, youre not going to take my ute!'

Mr Hamil said he hung on for 20 minutes, kicking into the car's back window as the alleged assailants swayed the car across the road, reaching speeds up to 200kmph as they tried to throw him off.

Greg Hamill (pictured) was taken on a high-speed joy ride in the early hours of Monday morning after diving into his ute's tray as it was allegedly taken by theives

'As soon as they started speeding really quickly and trying to throw me out of the car I started getting scared. I had to lay down at one point as the ute was going so fast,' he said.

Mr Hamill said the men grew tired of him kicking and screaming and eventually bailed from the vehicle and ran.

Police have charged a 20-year-old North Queensland man while the other man is still on the run.

Dramatic CCTV footage of the brazen theft Mr Hamill posted on Facebook has gone viral, racking up more than 249,000 views and almost 6000 comments.

It shows the two alleged theives entering Mr Hamill's home at 2.21am through his front door before his keys were stolen.

Mr Hamill then leaps on to the back of his white ute as it begins to speed out of his driveway and starts bashing into the window from the tray.

'So my house was broken into last night, while I was asleep... again,' his post reads.

Greg Hamill posted CCTV footage of two alleged burglars attempting to steal his car from his home in Kanimbla in Cairns on Monday morning on his Facebook page

'They tried to steal my car, so I went for a ride.'

'Joy ride lasted about 20 minutes and they probably hit 200km/hr with me in the back,' his post continues.

'It was a pretty heated discussion while they drove crazily around the suburbs,' he posted. 'They kept telling me to jump and I kept trying to break the window.

'They pulled over a couple of times where one tried to stab me and I had to kick him away. Then they'd take off again swerving and trying to throw me.'

After the terrifying journey, Mr Hamill said he was able to convince the men to leave his car.

'Between yelling at them, kneeing and punching the drivers side passenger window, dodging them trying to stab me and throwing stuff, we came to an agreement where they'd ditch the car and bolt and none of us would get hurt,' he wrote.

A Queensland Police spokesman previously told Daily Mail Australia Mr Hamill's car was found abandoned nearby in Manoora.
Opposition: People gathered to protest against plans to further restrict abortion laws in Warsaw, Poland, back in January. Photo: Kacper Pempel/ Reuters

Human Rights Watch, one of the world's largest human rights groupings, yesterday accused the Polish government of taking advantage of the coronavirus lockdown to debate new limits on abortion and sexual education.

The ruling conservative Law and Justice (PiS) party had abandoned its previous attempts to tighten abortion rules following massive public protests. Now, a number of citizens' initiatives are set for a first reading on parliament's agenda for today and tomorrow, including one that could criminalise sexual education activities and another on new rules on abortion.

"The chaos and anxiety surrounding Covid-19 shouldn't be used as a distraction from harmful attempts to push through dangerous legislation," Hillary Margolis, senior women's rights researcher at Human Rights Watch, said.

"The Polish government's focus during the pandemic should be to protect people's health and rights, not diminish them."

Staunchly Catholic Poland has some of the toughest abortion rules in Europe, with the procedure allowed only in the case of some foetal abnormalities, rape, incest or a threat to the mother's health.

The PiS has also spoken out against sexual education, arguing attempts to teach young people about sexual orientation and gay rights could threaten Polish culture and should be blocked wherever possible.

The "Stop Abortion" project, which proposes banning abortion when prenatal tests show serious, irreversible damage to the foetus, was first submitted to parliament in 2018.

"I believe that killing disabled children is simply murder. If legislation on this will cross my desk, I will certainly sign it into law," Poland's President Andrzej Duda, a PiS ally, told Polish Catholic news outlet 'Niedziela' earlier this month when asked about the abortion restrictions project.

PiS did not respond to Reuters' requests for comment.

Poland's constitution allows citizens to submit legislative proposals if they can gather 100,000 signatures.

The proposals were submitted to the parliament during the last term and must be discussed by May, according to parliamentary rules.
Vietnam has taken correct and timely action on the East Sea issue by sending a diplomatic note to the UN Secretary General to oppose China's claim over the East Sea and assert Vietnams sovereignty

over the Hoang Sa (Paracel) and Truong Sa (Spratly) archipelagos, according to Russian international law researchers and experts.

Russian international security expert Grigory Trofimchuk

Professor Vladimir Kolotov from Saint Petersburg University stressed that Vietnams act proves it is a responsible member of the international community and that the country is protecting its national interests in line with the UN Charter and the norms of international law.

The Russian expert reiterated that when elected to the position of a non-permanent member of the UN Security Council, Vietnam received a record number of supporting votes.

This shows Vietnam's increasing international reputation, he said, adding that 2020 offers a series of opportunities for Vietnam to deploy effective diplomatic activities within the UN and ASEAN, contributing to making the world a safer and fairer place.

Sharing Kolotovs opinion, Grigory Trofimchuk, an international security expert, said the East Sea is not only an issue for Vietnam-China relations or Southeast Asia, it is also an important issue for the UN.

He said in the coming time, after the COVID-19 pandemic is controlled, a large international conference on the East Sea issue should be organised.

Without any mechanism to prevent a global conflict originating in the region, the international community should find a solution to the issue, he noted.

The Russian experts highly appreciated Vietnam's role in strengthening intra-bloc solidarity in ASEAN as well as in consolidating the blocs position.

Kolotov said as the Chair of ASEAN 2020, Vietnam can enhance its role by promoting solidarity in the region.

For his part, Trofimchuk said ASEAN is not only an economic organisation, but also a political organisation and has an overwhelming advantage over many other organisations operating in the region.

The East Sea issue is in the area of direct responsibility of ASEAN, so this organisation should be at the forefront of implementing its efforts to stabilise the situation.

As the host country for the ASEAN Summit 2020, and a directly relevant party of the East Sea issue, Vietnam is expected to make specific proposals to resolve this issue, he said.

Vietnam's stance is extremely important, he stressed, confirming that the basis for resolving East Sea-related issues is peace and through political and diplomatic negotiations.

While answering international reporters queries about the issue on April 9, spokeswoman of the Vietnamese Ministry of Foreign Affairs Le Thi Thu Hang emphasised that Vietnam's consistent stance is resolving disputes in the East Sea through peaceful means on the basis of international law as defined in the 1982 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS 1982).

The viewpoint was clearly and fully expressed in a diplomatic note recently sent by the Vietnam Permanent Mission to the UN, Hang said, adding that circulating such a note at the UN is a normal procedure./.VNA

US senators express concern over East Sea situation US Senator Jim Risch, Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, along with three others on April 11 criticised the Chinese Coast Guards recent sinking of a Vietnamese fishing boat in Vietnams Hoang Sa archipelago waters.
PARK RIDGE, Ill., April 15, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- (AANA) -- As the COVID-19 pandemic continues to strain not just the physical and emotional well-being of front-line healthcare workers, many are also facing a financial burden and strain on their personal lives. The American Association of Nurse Anesthetists (AANA) urged Congress to compensate frontline healthcare workers in a manner that reflects the serious harm they are experiencing.

In an April 14 letter to the U.S. House of Representatives and the Senate, AANA President Kate Jansky, MHS, CRNA, APRN, USA LTC (ret), and AANA CEO Randall D. Moore, DNP, CRNA, MBA, stated that during the pandemic healthcare workers, including Certified Registered Nurse Anesthetists (CRNA), continue to do one thing that is not unprecedentedrun toward danger to take care of patients.

As advanced practice nurses, CRNAs have vast experience in critical care settings and advanced education and training in anesthesiology. CRNAs provide care across all settings and in all patient populations and are the primary providers of anesthesia care in rural and underserved areas and on the battlefield in forward surgical teams.

"CRNAs and other front-line healthcare workers are putting their own  and often their families'  health and safety in jeopardy," stated Jansky and Moore. "Though they did not sign up for these conditions, they are not deterred. And for that, they deserve to be compensated in a manner that reflects the serious risk and strain they are under. The AANA strongly supports fair and equitable hazard pay that is available to all healthcare providers retroactive to the beginning of the crisis."

Since the outbreak of COVID-19, CRNAs have continued to provide top-of-the-line anesthesia care, but they have also seen their roles change drastically. CRNA expertise in airway management, hemodynamic monitoring, management of patients on ventilators, placement of invasive lines, and overall management of critically ill patients uniquely positions them to provide life-saving care to those suffering from the novel coronavirus. In fact, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) recently recognized the valuable role CRNAs are playing in the treatment of COVID-19 by granting long-overdue full practice authority during this pandemic.

In many cases, CRNAs are doing work without appropriate Personal Protective Equipment (PPE), meaning that CRNAs and other healthcare workers are forced to reuse masks, or even devise their own PPE in hopes of protecting themselves and others.

"In many cases, front-line providers are also facing financial burden and strain on their personal lives, opting to stay in hotels to avoid exposing their families  and even going weeks or months without seeing their loved ones," stated Jansky and Moore. "While the CARES Act, signed into law last month, provided valuable support to small businesses and providers during the crisis, CRNAs now call on Congress to go further by incentivizing and properly compensating the front-line healthcare workers who continue to put their lives on the line."

The treatment of COVID-19 relies on the entirety of the healthcare workforce: from those providing cleaning services, to those providing care inside and outside of ICUs, to those intubating patients, and to those comforting patients as they take their dying breath. Unfortunately, this also means healthcare workers are particularly susceptible to COVID-19. As more and more providers become ill and are unable to work, Congress must ensure providers are incentivized to remain on the front lines or volunteer to step up to the plate by granting equitable incentive and retention payments to front-line providers.

SOURCE American Association of Nurse Anesthetists

Related Links

http://www.aana.com


Dr. Sonia Macieiewski (R) and Dr. Nita Patel, Director of Antibody discovery and Vaccine development, look at a sample of a respiratory virus at Novavax labs in Rockville, Maryland on March 20, 2020, one of the labs developing a vaccine for the coronavirus, COVID-19.

As the coronavirus continues to spread around the world, teams of experts are scrambling to develop a vaccine to protect millions of people from infection.

Finding a vaccine is a collaborative effort, experts say, and is expected to take around 12-18 months. The WHO said at the weekend that there are currently 70 vaccine candidates in development.

But who, or which country, gets priority when a vaccine is finally found is yet to be seen and could prove controversial.

The president of Germany's Federal Institute of Vaccines and Biomedicines, an agency of the German Ministry of Health, told CNBC that the race to develop a vaccine is a collaborative and cooperative effort.

"Everybody has been working on a vaccine for everybody," Professor Klaus Cichutek, president of the Paul-Ehrlich-Institut told CNBC Tuesday. "That's a global thing we have to do and there's nothing like 'only a vaccine for the U.S'., or Germany, or whatever."

Vaccine development is a labor-intensive endeavor; it's costly and it takes time, often several years of research and development and clinical trials. Time is of the essence when it comes to the coronavirus, however, with almost 2 million confirmed infections of Covid-19 so far worldwide, and over 126,000 deaths, according to data collated by Johns Hopkins University (JHU).

The future distribution of a vaccine could depend on the characteristics of the product, how many vaccine doses can be produced, and in what amount of time, Cichutek said.

"I cannot say exactly how this (distribution) will work but I'm sure everyone is dedicated to the world and not only to their nations or key regions. This is a global effort where the world and humankind needs a good vaccine and we need more than one."
All-In on Renewables

A Power Puzzle

Nearly 75 percent of the electricity generated at the Intermountain Power Project in Utah is sent to the California cities of Los Angeles, Riverside, Pasadena, Burbank, Glendale and Anaheim. Almost half of this goes to LADWP customers.

Escaping from Coal

Its All About the Battery

The renewed Intermountain Power Plant in Utah will draw on a supply of hydrogen created from renewable sources to generate electricity. Infographic courtesy of MHPS and Magnum Development.

Unique Geology

Setting the Pace for Future Efforts

The Los Angeles Department of Water and Power (LADWP), the largest municipal utility in the nation, is leading a $1.9 billion effort to develop the worlds first utility-scale hydrogen power plant. The city is one of more than 150 across the country that have committed to 100 percent renewable power by 2050.LADWP will oversee the transformation of a coal-fired power plant to one that will run on green hydrogen  hydrogen produced using renewable energy. The project achieved a major milestone recently with the announcement that Mitsubishi Hitachi Power Systems (MHPS), had been awarded the contract to manufacture and service the turbines for the updated plant.The turbines are the most important ingredient in the projects success. When they are put into operation in 2025, they will generate electricity using a mix of 30 percent hydrogen and 70 percent natural gas. By 2045, when all necessary plant retrofits are completed, MHPS will be able to upgrade them so they can be powered entirely by hydrogen.As the first project of its size, it is an important milestone to establish the feasibility of hydrogen production at this scale, said Thomas Koch Blank, a senior principal for industry and heavy transport at the Rocky Mountain Institute. It will provide proof of concept of a type of hybrid plant  gas/hydrogen  that might play an important role for the power grid.LADWP provides electricity to an estimated 1.5 million customers in Los Angeles, and another 5,000 in the Owens Valley. Its customer base is only slightly smaller than that of the Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority and about 30 percent bigger than that of the Long Island Power Authority. While L.A.s population has been growing at slower rate in recent years, the city is expected to have about 3.5 million more residents by 2050.In April of 2019, Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti announced a sustainable city plan that included a commitment to 100 percent renewable power by 2045. This would put the city on target for the statewide goal mandated by SB 100 , signed by then-Gov. Jerry Brown in 2018.The state law requires that 100 percent of retail sales of electricity to California end-use customers and 100 percent of electricity procured to serve all state agencies be zero-carbon by the end of 2045. (Nuclear power is included in this mix; while zero-carbon, its generally not considered renewable because there is a finite supply of uranium.)LADWPs project is a significant step toward this goal and would help ensure that one in 10 Californians have reliable renewable power. It also offers a case study in how a local government can utilize and reimagine existing resources to make the most of them.Since 1978, LADWP has used electricity generated at a coal-fired power plant in Utah, which exists within a somewhat complicated ecosystem. The plant is known as the Intermountain Power Project (IPP), which is owned by the Intermountain Power Agency (IPA), a political subdivision of the Utah state government created under its interlocal cooperation act and owned by 23 Utah municipalities.IPP is operated by these municipalities in partnership with other participants , including LADWP, the California cities of Glendale, Burbank, Pasadena, Riverside and Anaheim and several Utah rural cooperatives.The way it worked out in the end is that the costs of the project are born by whoever is using the power, said IPA spokesman John Ward. Over the history of the project, greater than 98 percent of the total power billings have been paid by California municipalities.LADWP is the biggest customer, currently using almost half of the power produced at IPP. Reflecting this, LADWP directs the Intermountain Power Service Corp. (IPSC), which contracted with IPA to hire and manage the workers who operate and maintain IPP. Because of the way these relationships evolved, LADWP had an outsized ability to reimagine how IPP could fit in its plans for the future. According to Ward, it spent eight years doing just that.LADWP gets 18 percent of its power from coal, significantly higher than the 3.3 percent in Californias statewide energy mix . In a state aiming for a carbon free economy, a coal-fired power plant is high on the not to do list.Not only is coal a primary source of CO2 emissions, it also no longer makes economic sense as a power source. Estimates show that as soon as 2030 it will be cheaper to build renewable power sources than to run coal plants.IPA knew that the customers for those coal units were going to go away in 2025, said Ward.The plan that came into focus for renewing IPP had the potential to do two things. In the short run, the plant could be weaned entirely off coal and run on a mix of hydrogen and natural gas.By 2045, it could not only be entirely powered by hydrogen but could also address the biggest challenge of renewable power generation: maintaining a steady balance between energy production and energy demand.In California, generating renewable energy is not a stumbling block. We're actually over-producing renewables so much that we have to shut down carbon-free renewable energy because the grid just can't handle it, said Mike Ducker, vice president, ofRenewable Fuels and Western Region for MHPS. The demand is not a match with when the supply is available.We have days where we're able to use 85 percent renewables, but we also have peak summer days where we're at 15 percent, said Reiko Kerr, senior assistant general manager of Power System Engineering, Planning and Technical Services for LADWP.How do you scale up that 15 percent to 100 percent without having this massive amount of over-generation built? she said. You don't need that during your spring and fall time, but you need it during the summer peak season.Its long been known that the way to solve this problem is to store sun and wind power when its abundant and tap it when its not. Right now, it's four-hour storage, said Kerr of current battery capabilities. If you double your storage footprint you get eight hours, but the density of that and the amount you would require would be massive. You could probably get through a day, but you need something that provides resiliency for long-term outages.While batteries are expected to eventually be able to store enough electricity to ensure that renewable power is always on, LADWP is plotting a course that does not depend on advancements in battery technology. Hydrogen can both power the generation of electricity and be stored in large quantities for long periods, and be used as needed.IPP happens to be situated in a place uniquely suited to hydrogen storage. It sits on top of a salt dome roughly three miles wide and one mile deep, with space for 100 enormous caverns in which hydrogen can be stored.This form of storage is well established. For roughly 40 years, we've been storing hydrogen in salt caverns in the Gulf Coast to support the petrochemical industry, said Ducker.Solar and sun power production that would otherwise be shut down will be used to power electrolysis, a process that breaks water into hydrogen and oxygen. The hydrogen will be stored in a cavern and be available to power IPPs new turbines.Depending on the size of the plant and how big we make the caverns, it can be anywhere from a week to several weeks worth of storage, said Ducker.Though the LADWP project is the first of its kind, the innovation driving it is not new technology but a combination of existing methods on an unprecedented scale. It will provide certainty that when the power available from other renewable sources cannot meet demand, stored hydrogen can fuel enough generation to meet customers needs.This is not a science fair experiment -- all of the elements of this project are mature technologies and are known technologies, said IPAs Ward. We're just integrating and scaling them up.RMIs Koch believes the project can be a catalyst for other green hydrogen efforts in the region. The updated IPP plant will provide hydrogen power at scale which can kick-start the local hydrogen market, he said, setting the pace for the development of hydrogen energy resources for other sectors, such as transportation.If there's an opportunity and probability of converting a gas plant into a hydrogen plant where you have greenhouse gas-free energy and it helps keep our grid reliable as we integrate large-volume intermittent renewable resources, said Kerr of LADWP, I don't see what the downside is.
Pork and Beef Producers Ask USDA to Buy Meat, Speed up Stimulus Money

With meat-processing plants across the country shuttering due to the CCP virus pandemic, pork producers are asking the Trump administration to consider buying large quantities of meat, and other livestock farmers are seeking answers about the kind of support they can expect to receive from the latest stimulus bill.

The closure of several major facilitiesincluding one of the largest pork-processing facilities in the United States and a major beef plant in Coloradohas put pressure both on the supply of popular proteins for sale across the country and on the farmers who raise livestock for slaughter.

Meat-processing plant closures are threatening more than just the supply of meat on the market; experts say they are also threatening the farmers who could soon have more cows, pigs, or other animals on their hands than they can afford to feed or house.

You see pig values plummet significantly, so for many of our farmers, right now it costs more to care for the animal than the value of the hog, said Jim Monroe, a spokesperson for the National Pork Producers Council. So our farmers are in a dire situation.

Corinne Henslee and her sister Ellen prepare orders at Front 9 Farm where they have started offering weekly deliveries of vegetables, meats, cheeses and other fresh items following the CCP virus outbreak, in Ohio, U.S., on April 4, 2020. (Dane Rhys/Reuters)

What the Agriculture Department (USDA) will do with the $9.5 billion for agriculture producers that Congress included in the stimulus bill passed late last month is an open question.

Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue said last week that his agency is using all financial resources we have been given to develop a program that will include direct payments to farmers & ranchers hurt by COVID-19 & other procurement methods to help solidify the supply chain from producers to consumers.

The program, however, has not yet been finalized. Details on the program will be forthcoming shortly, a USDA spokesperson said Tuesday.

Some industry insiders have warned of a potential meat shortage on the horizon, while others have said the United States is far from running out of protein while highlighting other consequences of plant closures.

In both commercial and public storage, the United States has stockpiled 925 million pounds of frozen chicken, 491 million pounds of frozen beef, and nearly 662 million pounds of frozen pork, according to the USDA.

Monroe said because pork producers operate under a just-in-time production system, when one group of pigs is ready to be harvested, another is right behind it. When meat plants close, the live animals can pile up.

We are calling for massive USDA pork purchases as one solution to this, Monroe said. If the USDA came in and purchased, you know, a large amount of pork, that would go a long way towards relieving this capacity issue.

A truck arrives at Smithfield Foods pork plant in Smithfield, Virginia, on Oct. 17, 2019. (Tom Polansek/Reuters)

The closure of Smithfield Foods pork-processing facility in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, on Sunday touched off a new wave of fears about the food supply given the increasing numbers of sick or absent workers across industry plants, even those that for now remain operational.

Kenneth Sullivan, CEO of Smithfield, said in a statement that the shutdown of meat-processing plants is pushing our country perilously close to the edge in terms of our meat supply.

It is impossible to keep our grocery stores stocked if our plants are not running, Sullivan said. These facility closures will also have severe, perhaps disastrous, repercussions for many in the supply chain, first and foremost our nations livestock farmers. These farmers have nowhere to send their animals.

In addition to the Smithfield plant, several other facilities have recently closed their doors. JBS USA, a massive beef and pork producer, has shuttered two of its plantsincluding a major beef facility in Greeley, Colorado, that the company announced on Monday it was temporarily taking offline after two employees died of COVID-19 and dozens more tested positive. Tyson Foods, another top meat producer, also recently closed a pork plant in Iowa.

Larger Animals, But Not Empty Shelves

Don Close, an industry expert at RaboResearch Food & Agribusiness, said consumers arent likely to see meat shortages in the short term as long as the majority of processing plants remain operational, even if they have to scale down production.

The big fear factor I have today is if we get into a scenario where we outright close a bunch of these processors all at the same time, it really gets scary really fast, Close said. If we were to have one or two more of the really big beef plants closed, that would cause big grief.

Close noted that another problem with plant closures, beyond the rising numbers of animals left on farms, is that animals who arent harvested will continue to get biggerand putting that additional meat on the market will drive prices down.

When we are behind in slaughter those animals continue to gain weight, so we are including both numbers of head and tonnage of product on the market, he said. It puts tremendous pressure on farmers.

Not every sector of protein production is calling for USDA purchases or warning of empty grocery store shelves, however.

Colin Woodall, CEO of the National Cattlemens Beef Association, stressed that the country is not facing a beef shortage due to COVID-19, the disease the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus causes. But he said the loss of processing facilities can force ranchers to pay to feed and care for cows that pile up in their pastures.

Whenever you have a packing plant shut down, it means that you basically stop the flow of cattle and you start backing up the flow of cattle, Woodall said. There is a cost associated with that.

It is a significant economic impact to the cattle producers, Woodall added.

Lawmakers in some agriculture-heavy states pressed Perdue earlier this month to use some of the stimulus money for targeted, temporary, equitable relief to cattle producers.

While we do not know what the full market impact will be for the various commodities produced in our states, we recognize there is an immediate need for assistance for our cattle producers, wrote the bipartisan group of 145 lawmakers.

Woodall said the administrations efforts to address problems caused by the closure of processing facilities should include helping shuttered plants with access to virus tests, masks, and other personal protective equipment for workers hoping to return to the job.

For us its just continuing to have the government across the boardnot just USDA, but all the way to the White Househave support for these packing plants.

A USDA spokesperson said the department is focused on helping to maintain the food supply chain as facilities struggle with worker absences and closures.

USDA recognizes and supports the efforts of private industry and companies to maintain operational status of their facilities while also maintaining the safety and health of their work force. USDA will continue to support a locallyexecuted, statemanaged, federally-supported emergency response system, the spokesperson said.

The CNN Wire and Epoch Times staff contributed to this report
The T2K Collaboration has published new results showing the strongest constraint yet on the parameter that governs the breaking of the symmetry between matter and antimatter in neutrino oscillations. Using beams of muon neutrinos and muon antineutrinos, T2K has studied how these particles and antiparticles transition into electron neutrinos and electron antineutrinos, respectively. The parameter governing the matter/antimatter symmetry breaking in neutrino oscillation, called cp phase, can take a value from -180 to 180. For the first time, T2K has disfavored almost half of the possible values at the 99.7% (3) confidence level, and is starting to reveal a basic property of neutrinos that has not been measured until now. This is an important step on the way to knowing whether or not neutrinos and antineutrinos behave differently. These results, using data collected through 2018, have been published in the multidisciplinary scientific journal, Nature on April 16.

For most phenomena, the laws of physics provide a symmetric description of the behavior of matter and antimatter. However, this symmetry does not hold universally. The effect of the asymmetry between matter and antimatter is most apparent in the observation of the universe, which is composed of matter with little antimatter. It is considered that equal amounts of matter and antimatter were created at the beginning of the universe. Then, for the universe to evolve to a state where matter dominates over antimatter, a necessary condition is the violation of the so-called Charge-Parity (CP) symmetry. Until now, CP symmetry violation has only been observed in the physics of subatomic particles called quarks, but the magnitude of the CP symmetry violation is not large enough to explain the observed dominance of matter over antimatter in the universe. T2K is now searching for a new source of CP symmetry violation in neutrino oscillations that would manifest as a difference in the measured oscillation probability for neutrinos and antineutrinos.

The T2K experiment uses a beam consisting primarily of muon neutrinos or muon antineutrinos created using the proton beam from the Japan Proton Accelerator Research Complex (J-PARC) located in Tokai village on the east coast of Japan. A small fraction of the neutrinos (or antineutrinos) are detected 295 km away at the Super-Kamiokande detector, located under a mountain in Kamioka, near the west coast of Japan. As the muon neutrinos and muon antineutrinos traverse the distance from Tokai to Kamioka (hence the name T2K), a fraction will oscillate or change flavor into electron neutrinos or electron antineutrinos respectively. The electron neutrinos and electron antineutrinos are identified in the Super-Kamiokande detector by the rings of Cherenkov light that they produce (shown below). While Super-Kamiokande cannot identify each event as a neutrino or antineutrino interaction, T2K is able to study the neutrino and antineutrino oscillations separately by operating the beam in neutrino mode or antineutrino mode.

T2K released a result analysing data with 1.49x1021 and 1.64x1021 protons from the accelerator for neutrino beam mode and antineutrino beam mode respectively. If the parameter cp equals 0 or 180, the neutrinos and antineutrinos will change their types (from muon to electron) in the same way during oscillation. The cp parameter may have a value that enhances the oscillations of neutrinos or antineutrinos, breaking CP symmetry. However, the observation of neutrinos is already enhanced in the T2K experiment by the fact that the detectors and beam line components are made out of matter and not antimatter. To separate the effect of cp from known beam line and interaction effects, the T2K analysis includes corrections based on data from magnetized near detectors (ND280) placed 280m from the target. T2K observed 90 electron neutrino candidates and 15 electron antineutrino candidates. T2K expects to observe 82 electron neutrino events compared to 17 electron antineutrino events for maximal neutrino enhancement (cp =?90) and 56 electron neutrino events compared to 22 electron antineutrino events for maximal antineutrino enhancement (cp=+90). The observed number of events as a function of the reconstructed neutrino energy is shown below. The T2K data is most compatible with a value close to cp=?90 that significantly enhances the oscillation probability of neutrinos in the T2K experiment. Using this data, T2K evaluates confidence intervals for the parameter cp. The disfavored region at the 3 (99.7%) confidence level is ?2 to 165. This result represents the strongest constraint on cp to date. The values of 0 and 180 are disfavored at 95% confidence level , which was the case in T2K's previous release in 2017, indicating that CP symmetry may be violated in neutrino oscillations.

While this result shows a strong preference for enhancement of the neutrino rate in T2K, it is not yet clear if CP symmetry is violated or not. To further improve the experimental sensitivity to a potential CP symmetry violating effect, the T2K Collaboration will upgrade the near detector suite to reduce systematic uncertainties and accumulate more data, and J-PARC will increase the beam intensity by upgrading the accelerator and beamline.

###

The T2K experiment is supported by the Japanese Ministry for Culture, Sports, Science, and Technology (MEXT), and is jointly hosted by the High Energy Accelerator Research Organization (KEK) and the University of Tokyo's Institute for Cosmic Ray Research (ICRR). The T2K experiment was constructed and is operated by an international collaboration, which currently consists of nearly 500 scientists from 68 institutions in 12 countries [Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Poland, Russia, Spain, Switzerland, UK, USA and Vietnam]. This result is made possible by the efforts of J-PARC to deliver high-quality beam to T2K.

The US T2K collaborating team is composed of 13 institutions [Boston University, University California, Irvine, University of Colorado, Colorado State University, Duke University, University of Houston, Louisiana State University, Michigan State University, University of Pennsylvania, University of Pittsburgh, University of Rochester, Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, and Stony Brook University] is funded by the US Department of Energy, Office of Science. The US groups have built super-conducting corrector magnets, proton beam monitor electronics, the second neutrino horn and a GPS time synchronization system for the T2K neutrino beamline; and a pi-zero detector and a side muon range detector (partial detector) in the T2K near detector complex. They are currently participating in an upgrade of the T2K near detector, SuperFGD. They are also part of the team that built, upgraded and operates the Super-Kamiokande detector.

More information about the T2K experiment can be found on the T2K public website (http://t2k-experiment.org).

Media Contacts for Further Inquiries:

(For contacts in Japan and elsewhere in the world, see international media contact information on next page.)

Prof. Chang Kee Jung, US Representative, Stony Brook University (Stony Brook, NY), chang.jung@stonybrook.edu,

Phone: +1 631-707-2018 (c), +1 631-474-4563 (h).

Prof. Daniel Cherdack, University of Houston (Houston, TX), ddcherdack@uh.edu,

Phone: 201-693-6117.

Prof. Edward Kearns, Boston University (Boston, MA), kearns@bu.edu,

Phone: 617-353-3425.

Prof. Thomas Kutter, Louisiana State University (Baton Rouge, LA), kutter@phys.lsu.edu, Phone: 225-578-8310.

Prof. Kendall Mahn, Michigan State University (East Lansing, MI), mahn@pa.msu.edu,

Phone: xxx-xxx-xxxx.

Prof. Christopher Mauger, University of Pennsylvania (Philadelphia, PA), cmauger@sas.upenn.edu

Phone: xxx-xxx-xxxx.

Prof. Kevin McFarland, University of Rochester (Rochester, NY), kevin@rochester.edu,

Phone: 775-538-4668, 585-275-7076.

Prof. Vittorio Paolone, University of Pittsburgh (Pittsburgh, PA), paolonepitt@gmail.com,

Phone: 412-877-4079.

Prof. Kate Scholberg, Duke University (Durham, NC), schol@phy.duke.edu,

Phone: 919-660-2962.

Prof. Hank Sobel, University of California, Irvine (Irvine, CA), hsobel@uci.edu,

Phone: 949- 824-6431.

Prof. Hiro Tanaka, Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, Stanford University (Menlo Park, CA), tanaka@slac.stanford.edu,

Phone: 650-885-1565

Prof. Walter Toki, Colorado State University (Fort Collin, CO), toki@lamar.colostate.edu,

Phone: 970-491-1548.

Prof. Eric Zimmerman, University of Colorado (Boulder, CO), edz@Colorado.EDU,

Phone: 303-735-5338.

Media Contacts for Further Inquiries (International):

Globally and in Japan:

Dr Atsuko Ichikawa, Spokesperson, T2K Collaboration, Kyoto University (Kyoto, Japan), ichikawa.atsuko.6e@kyoto-u.ac.jp

Phone: +81-75-753-3859

Globally and In Switzerland:

Prof Federico Sanchez, International Co-Spokesperson, T2K Collaboration, Universite de Geneve, federico.sancheznieto@unige.ch

Phone: +41 22 379 6227

In Canada:

Dr Akira Konaka, TRIUMF (Vancouver, Canada), konaka@triumf.ca

Phone: +1 604 222 1047

In CERN:

Prof Albert De Roeck, CERN, (Geneva, Switzerland) deroeck@mail.cern.ch

Phone : +41 798881352

In France:

Dr Sara Bolognesi, CEA/IRFU (Saclay, France), sara.bolognesi@cea.fr

Phone: +33 1 69 08 14 61

Prof Michel Gonin, IN2P3/Ecole Polytechnique (Palaiseau, France), michel.gonin@polytechnique.edu

Phone : +33 1 69 33 32 20

In Germany:

Dr Stefan Roth, RWTH Aachen University (Aachen, Germany), roth@physik.rwth-aachen.de

Phone: +49 241 80 27296

In Italy:

Dr Maria Gabriella Catanesi, INFN Sezione di Bari (Bari, Italy), gabriella.catanesi@cern.ch

Phone: +41 75 411 1532

Antonella Varaschin: Ufficio per la Comunicazione INFN, antonella.varaschin@presid.infn.it

Phone +39 3495384481

In Poland:

Prof Ewa Rondio, NCBJ, Warsaw (Warsaw, Poland), Ewa.Rondio@ncbj.gov.pl

Phone: +48 501 235 875

In Russia:

Prof Yuri Kudenko, INR (Moscow, Russia), kudenko@inr.ru

Phone: +7-903-6159125 (c), +7-495-8504248 (o)

In Spain:

Dr Thorsten Lux, IFAE, Barcelona (Barcelona, Spain), tlux@ifae.es

Phone: +34 93 170 2702

Prof Anselmo Cervera, IFIC, Valencia (Valencia, Spain), anselmo.cervera@cern.ch

In U.K.:

Prof Dave Wark, STFC/RAL/Daresbury Laboratory/Oxford University (Oxford, U.K.), david.wark@stfc.ac.uk

Phone: +44 7788186085

Prof Morgan Wascko, Imperial College London, m.wascko@imperial.ac.uk

Phone: +44-207-594-3465, +44-7939-592-708

In U.S.A.:

Prof Chang Kee Jung, State University of New York at Stony Brook (Stony Brook, NY, USA), chang.jung@stonybrook.edu

Phone: +1 631-707-2018

About KEK:

Hajime Hikino, PR office, High Energy Accelerator Research Organization (KEK, Japan)

press@kek.jp

Phone: +81-29-879-6047

Hiroko Tada, PR office, Institute of Particle and Nuclear Studies, High Energy Accelerator Research Organization (KEK, Japan),

htada@post.kek.jp

Phone: +81-29-864-5638

About ICRR:

Makio Nakamura, PR Office, Institute for Cosmic Ray Research, The University of Tokyo (ICRR, Japan)

icrr-pr@icrr.u-tokyo.ac.jp

Phone: +81-4-7136-5148

About J-PARC:

Minako Abe, PR section, J-PARC

pr-section@j-parc.jp

Phone: +81-29-284-4578
A charter plane of about 180 Romanian fruit pickers is due to land at Stansted tomorrow to fill labour vacancies to keep up with demand amid the coronavirus crisis.

The plane coming from Bucharest to London tomorrow is the first of up to six which will arrive in the coming months so that UK farms stay staffed with labourers.

Country Land & Business Association has warned that current travel restrictions could have a massive impact on farming and leave agricultural companies short-staffed.

A charter plane of about 180 Romanian fruit pickers is due to land at Stansted tomorrow to fill labour vacancies to keep up with demand amid the coronavirus crisis. Stock picture

The plane coming from Bucharest to London tomorrow is the first of up to six which will arrive in the coming months so that UK farms stay staffed with labourers. Stock picture

It is believed that not enough British workers have applied for farming jobs since becoming unemployed during lockdown.

A plummeting demand in flights have seen many airlines, including EasyJet, Ryanair and Wizz, suspend flights between the UK and eastern European countries.

Air Charter Service has confirmed that it has booked the first service to carry easter European workers to the UK, according to The Times.

The workers on the Boeing 737 will be taken by bus to farms across the southeast of the UK and Lincolnshire.

Passengers on board the aircraft will be required to maintain social distancing guidelines and will not be allowed to leave Romania if they display any symptoms of Covid-19.

It comes as the Government's watchdog, the Office for Budget Responsibility, today warned the economy could shrink by more than a third this quarter alone with two million people made jobless if the lockdown continues for two more months.

Shocking analysis from the OBR underlines the trade-offs being made to combat the deadly disease by putting the country into lockdown.

It is believed that not enough British workers have applied for farming jobs since becoming unemployed during lockdown

It warns curbs staying in place for three months will slash GDP by 35 per cent, with unemployment soaring to 10 per cent and the government's deficit hitting 273billion - the highest level since the Second World War.

The watchdog ominously said it was assumed 'for now' there will not be any permanent economic damage, and much of the crash will be unwound as pent-up demand is unleashed when the lockdown finally ends. However, the resulting 13 per cent year-on-year drop will still be worse than anything in the last century.

Responding to the chilling scenario - which emerged as the International Monetary Fund (IMF) predicted the worst global downturn since the Great Depression in 1929 - Chancellor Rishi Sunak said: 'People should know there is hardship ahead.'

A plummeting demand in flights have seen many airlines, including EasyJet, Ryanair and Wizz, suspend flights between the UK and eastern European countries

The apocalyptic figures emerged after Dominic Raab moved to quash the idea of an imminent loosening, with the UK now facing restrictions until at least May 7.

But there is growing alarm about the potential death toll from economic misery, with life expectancy set to take a major hit. Doctors have also warned that suspending all non-urgent NHS operations to focus on coronavirus cases means more cancer and heart disease patients will die.

The Cabinet is divided over whether to push to ease the lockdown soon, with some saying the public is obeying social distancing too well and that people must be urged to keep working where possible.

But concerns have been raised that it is impossible to lift the curbs at the moment anyway because the public is so strongly in favour of them staying in place, and would simply refuse to go back to normal.
EAST CHINA SEA (April 9, 2020) An MH-60 Sea Hawk helicopter, assigned to the "Warlords" of Helicopter Maritime Strike Squadron (HSM) 51 flies alongside two AH-64 Apache helicopters, attached to the "Grim Reapers" of U.S. Army 2nd Infantry Division, 2nd Combat Aviation Brigade, 4-2 Attack Reconnaissance Battalion, Bravo Company, as part of Cooperative Deployment (CODEP). (U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 2nd Class Markus Castaneda)

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Couriers delivering online orders of household essentials have become a lifeline for Houstonians hunkering down at home to slow the spread of the novel coronavirus.

But a growing number of workers responsible for getting packages to consumers are falling sick, leaving those remaining on the job worried for their lives.

When Im walking into work, its nerve-wracking, said a truck driver for FedEx Freight in Cypress who wished to remain anonymous because the worker feared retaliation from the company. I dont want to miss work because Im a single parent, but Im afraid Im gonna catch something.

Package delivery workers have been thrust into the front lines of the global fight against the coronavirus as millions of Americans under stay-at-home orders turn to online shopping to get canned goods, medicine and household supplies. Workers who fulfill these online orders and deliver them say they are risking their lives to ensure consumers home shelves are well-stocked.

REFINERY CASES: Reports: Two workers test positive for coronavirus at Valeros Port Arthur Refinery

At least 24 package workers in the Houston area  including 19 Amazon, three UPS and two FedEx workers  have been diagnosed with COVID-19, according to internal company communication obtained by the Chronicle, interviews with employees and media reports. COVID-19 is the respiratory illness caused by the new strain of coronavirus.

Representatives of Amazon, FedEx and UPS declined to disclose the number of employee cases, citing company policies and employee privacy concerns. Each of the companies insisted they are taking steps to protect workers.

Public health preparation

Public health officials say social distancing, frequent hand-washing and wearing personal protective equipment such as face masks and gloves can help slow the spread of the coronavirus. But these health and safety measures can be difficult to maintain at massive warehouses where hundreds of workers transport, sort, load and deliver millions of packages daily.

Call this a public gathering of sorts, said Dr. Ed Septimus, a professor of internal medicine at Texas A&M University. Where there are more people in a confined space, the greater the opportunity someone has COVID-19, or any communicable disease.

Virus particles can live on cardboard for up to 24 hours and up to three days on plastic, according to a study by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. But the risk of catching the virus is greater from an infected person than contaminated surfaces, Septimus said.

RETAIL-TO-GO: What 'retail to-go' means for customers, businesses and employees

Four workers at local Amazon, FedEx and UPS facilities and one employee at FedExs Memphis air freight hub  who were granted anonymity because they feared reprisal from their employers  said they are increasingly concerned for their health and safety as their colleagues have fallen ill.

FedEx

The FedEx Freight driver, who has been working for the company for more than a decade, said the company disclosed in a late March meeting with some workers that an employee at its Cypress facility tested positive for COVID-19. The local Fox affiliate reported March 20 that FedEx confirmed an employee at the companys Southwest Houston FedEx Shipping Center off Beltway 8 near Gessner also tested positive for COVID-19.

However, the FedEx driver said the company has not been forthcoming with information about cases and did not immediately provide face masks, gloves and disinfectant wipes to clean forklifts and semi-trailer trucks that are shared among workers. After the Chronicle reached out to FedEx, the driver said, the company last week began issuing masks, gloves and disinfectant wipes.

Were panicking, the driver said. Were worried about catching it from one another.

A second FedEx worker who loads and unloads freight airplanes at the companys Memphis hub echoed similar concerns. The employee said the company has not issued notices to employees about COVID-19 cases, and that masks were only recently distributed to employees.

Im scared when I go into work, the Memphis worker said. It makes me feel like Im less than a human being, that were expendable and that our lives dont matter.

CORONAVIRUS CHRONICLE: Subscribe to our new daily podcast for pandemic insights through a Houston lens

FedEx said in a written statement that it is investigating employees concerns, but it said the company has ordered millions of additional face masks for employees. The company also said it was working to provide hand soap, disinfecting wipes and hand sanitizer to employees.

If an employee tests positive for COVID-19, FedEx said it promptly notifies all workers at that facility and others known to have been in close contact with the individual. Furthermore, FedEx said it is cleaning and disinfecting its facilities.

The safety and well-being of our team members and customers is our top priority, FedEx spokeswoman Heather Wilson said in an email.

Amazon

The Chronicle obtained eight emails from Amazon to employees sent between March 26 and April 11, notifying them of 19 confirmed cases of COVID-19 at an Amazon fulfillment center in north Houston.

At least one other case has been reported at an Amazon facility in Katy, according to a Facebook post from Waller County Judge Trey Duhon.

We understand that you may be nervous about coming to work, an Amazon email dated April 4 stated. Individuals will not be penalized for any absences. And if you feel sick, please STAY home. Thank you for everything youre doing for the community during this unprecedented time.

An hourly Amazon employee at the north Houston fulfillment center said about a third of his coworkers on his shift have stopped showing up to work out of fear of catching the virus. However, most warehouse employees are still working because they have no other choice to pay the bills, the warehouse worker said.

CORONAVIRUS UPDATES: Stay informed with accurate reporting you can trust

Now Playing: 'COVID-19 in 60': Houston coronavirus news in a minute Video: Houston Chronicle

Im worried about bringing it to my boyfriend, the Amazon worker said. Ive told my boyfriend if it gets really bad, Im telling him to move back and live with his mom.

Although Amazon notifies employees of new coronavirus cases at each facility and when the sick workers last clocked in, it doesnt specify the workers shift or department.

How am I supposed to know who is sick and where to avoid? the Amazon worker said. Im just assuming everywhere is not safe.

A second warehouse worker at the Amazon facility, called HOU2, confirmed the account.

Amazon said it has increased the frequency and intensity of cleaning at all of its warehouse facilities, and has eliminated stand-up meetings and staggered staffing at work stations to promote social distancing. The company is also checking employee temperatures daily and is providing hand sanitizer and disinfectant wipes to employees.

We are taking proactive measures to protect employees and associates who have been in contact with anyone who has been diagnosed or becomes ill, Amazon spokeswoman Alyssa Bronikowski said in an email.

UPS

A low-level manager at a UPS facility in North Houston said the company emailed local management teams informing them of positive COVID-19 cases at three local distribution centers: Sweetwater Lane in North Houston, Willowbrook in Northwest Houston and in Stafford, southwest of Houston. The Chronicle obtained a copy of the management email and notice sent to UPS employees.

UPS told employees to maintain the recommended six feet of separation between coworkers and allowed the optional use of personal protective equipment, such as face masks. However, the manager said UPS hasnt issued face masks to most employees and is not enforcing masks rules or social distancing measures.

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Warehouse workers maintaining six feet of distance, would be very difficult for that to happen with people working in tight quarters, the manager said. I work with 300 people, and maybe a dozen people are wearing masks. There doesnt seem to be any sense of urgency.

UPS said in a statement it had modified its operating procedures to maintain social distancing, including adding space between work stations inside its facilities and suspending requirements that customers sign for packages. The company said it is providing all of its Texas employees face masks and instructions on how to properly wear them, and requiring workers to wear UPS-provided masks or their own masks. The company also is supplying antibacterial soap, hand sanitizer and wipes, and distributing an additional 250,000 individual bottles of hand sanitizer.

In addition, UPS said it had increased cleaning at its 2,200 facilities nationally, including disinfecting vehicles and equipment daily.

The safety and health of our employees is extremely important as we care about each other, our families and the communities where we live and work, UPS spokesman Matthew OConnor said.

paul.takahashi@chron.com

gwendolyn.wu@chron.com
Ever since the country was placed in a state of lockdown with only essential services running, many people reportedly started buying illegal alcohol to satisfy cravings.

According to Reuters, police officials have witnessed an increases in seizures of hooch (homemade liquor) which has also claimed lives of poor people in the past who couldn't afford branded liquor.

Indiatimes spoke to Jeet, a consumer who has paid obscene amounts of money to buy booze in Pune, Maharashta. Wishing to only give out his first name, he told us, "I bought Blender's Pride for Rs 700 for a quarter and bought 6 quarters for Rs 4200 plus 300 delivery charge."

Jeet

"I bought a crate of Budweiser beer for Rs 4,800 but there was no delivery charge because the delivery guy wanted some beers for personal use. For a bottle of Old Monk, I paid Rs 2,000," he added.

In Pune, the price of a Blender's Pride quarter is around Rs 250, a Budweiser beer crate for Rs 3,400 - Rs 3,600 and Old Monk for Rs 600-700.



AFP (IMAGE FOR REPRESENTATIONAL PURPOSES ONLY)

Another consumer named Manish told Reuters, Many are willing to pay even higher prices for liquor, but cant get any. I was lucky as I at least got some."



According to Google Trends, there has been a rise in online searches for How to make alcohol at home during the week of March 22-28 in India. Incidentally, this was the same week when Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced the nationwide lockdown.



AFP (IMAGE FOR REPRESENTATIONAL PURPOSES ONLY)

Since the lockdown has been extended, police officials are expecting a rise in the liquor prices more than what they already are. Since all alcohol shops are sealed except in a few states, people are not minding getting involved with the grey-market sellers.

An excise official from Maharashtra told Reuters, Even habitual drinkers hold limited stocks which must have been exhausted by now. In coming weeks, more and more consumers will try to buy from the grey market."

However, not everyone can afford to pay these exorbitant prices and have resorted to drinking homemade liquor which is also known as 'country liquor' or desi daaru.

A man named Naresh from Indore also told Reuters, Even hooch is so expensive. In normal circumstances I could have bought branded liquor at this price."

The report adds that a 180 ml hooch bottle which is normally sold for Rs 60 is now being sold at over Rs 250. It mentioned how two men lost their lives in Uttar Pradesh last week after consuming homemade liquor while five others had to be admitted to the hospital.

AFP (Indian police gather around containers of bootleg alcohol recovered in a raid) IMAGE FOR REPRESENTATIONAL PURPOSES ONLY

There have also been cases of people committing suicide due to the unavailability of liquor.
Police officers have wrongly fined children for breaching the UKs coronavirus lockdown, even though only adults can be punished under new laws.

Senior officers revealed that 39 fines had been handed to under-18s since the Health Protection Regulations came into force three weeks ago.

The national lead for out of court disposals, Deputy Chief Constable Sara Glen, said the notices will be rescinded because the legislation doesnt allow it.

The admission came after two police forces wrongly charged people under the separate Coronavirus Act 2020, and several prosecution reviews are underway.

Parliaments human rights committee warned that police may be punishing people without any legal basis amid confusion over the difference between the law and stricter government guidance.

More than 3,200 fines have been issued across England under new coronavirus laws in total, with the vast majority being handed to men under the age of 35.

Ms Glen said the current figures showed no disproportionality in respect of ethnicity.

Violations of the coronavirus lockdown appear to have spiked on the warmest days seen in a heatwave over Easter.

On Good Friday and Saturday - when temperatures rose above 20C for much of the UK - around 400 fines were given out each day. The figure dropped to 177 on Monday, when the temperature fell.

Ms Glen said the statistics said the figures suggested a correlation to weather, and that fines had been handed out at mass barbecues, on beaches and at beauty spots.

 Some police may have gone too far in enforcing lockdown, senior Tory admits

The younger profile are going to stretch this boundary and good weather is driving people outside, she added.

A total of 83 cases have reached court, where two miscarriages of justice have so far been admitted by police forces that wrongly applied the new Coronavirus Act.

In the very small number of cases where police have got it wrong, we have put our hands up and corrected that, she added.

We will continue to abide by the principles of fairness, proportionality and common sense.

Martin Hewitt, chair of the National Police Chiefs Council (NPCC), said the use of fines and arrests remained a last resort for officers.

This is very new legislation that was rushed through because we are in a crisis, he added.

All legislation has issues when its first enacted. We need to carry on doing what were doing, and make sure the checks and balances in the system identify when issues do emerge.

Mr Hewitt admitted that there had been mistakes but said police officers were trying to do their best in very difficult and unusual circumstances.

Following criticism of some police incidents and tactics, including the use of drones to film walkers and roadblocks, the senior officer said he was determined that we do not impact on the relationship between the police.

Several forces have had to retract public statements or social media posts by officers, including suggestions that people could be reprimanded for buying non-essential items in supermarkets.

Where there have been examples where weve seen officers going a bit too far to get the message across, we have been public about the fact that was not what we wanted, Mr Hewitt said.

Police have received more than 112,000 reports of coronavirus-related incidents and 178,000 of anti-social behaviour in recent weeks.

A police officer wears a protective face mask in Westminster (Reuters)

While calls to to 999 and 101 are down, the number of online reports has rocketed by almost two thirds, after many forces set up dedicated forms for alleged coronavirus lockdown violations.

I think its perfectly legitimate if people are seeing people not abiding by rules for people to tell the police, Mr Hewitt said.

We will risk assess and triage any report we receive, to take whatever is the appropriate action.

Overall crime recorded by police across England and Wales dropped by 28 per cent in the four weeks to Monday, compared to the same period in 2019.

Provisional data shows a 37 fall in reported rape, 27 per cent drop in serious assaults and personal robbery, residential burglary down 37 per cent and shoplifting halved.

A small number of crime types, including domestic abuse and online child sex offending, are expected to increase during the lockdown and police are encouraging people to continue reporting incidents.

Across the UK, 10 per cent of police officers and staff are currently absent through sickness, self-isolation or caring responsibilities.

But Mr Hewitt said policing remained in a strong position because of the drop in normal demand, and ranks being bolstered by voluntary special constables and retired officers returning to duty.

Our message to the public is keep reporting crime to us  we are still here for you and our teams are working round clock to keep you safe, he added.

To those in danger or at risk, my message is we will come when you call for help.
Nations around the world reacted with alarm Wednesday after President Donald Trump announced a halt to the sizable funding the United States sends to the World Health Organization. Health experts warned the move could jeopardize global efforts to stop the coronavirus pandemic.

At a briefing in Washington, Trump said he was instructing his administration to halt funding for the WHO pending a review of its role ``in severely mismanaging and covering up the spread of the coronavirus.'' The United States is WHO's largest single donor, contributing between $400 million and $500 million annually to the Geneva-based agency in recent years.

Trump has repeatedly labelled COVID-19 the ``Chinese virus'' and criticized the UN health agency for being too lenient on China, where the novel virus first emerged late last year.

Outside experts have questioned China's reported infections and deaths from the virus, calling them way too low and unreliable. And an investigation by The Associated Press has found that s ix days of delays between when Chinese officials k new about the virus and when they warned the public allowed the pandemic to bloom into an enormous public health disaster.

The WHO has been particularly effusive in its praise for China, calling on other countries to emulate their approach and repeatedly praising their transparency.

But China only agreed to a proposed WHO-led mission to investigate the coronavirus after WHO's chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus personally paid a visit to Chinese President Xi Jinping, a highly unusual move to secure a country visit during an outbreak.

The European Union on Wednesday said Trump has ``no reason'' to freeze WHO funding at this critical stage and called for measures to promote unity instead of division.

Trudie Lang, a professor of global health research at Oxford University said attempts to hinder WHO's work could have significant consequences for the pandemic response.

``The reason we're making such fast progress on diagnostics, vaccines and drugs is because of WHO's role as a neutral broker,'' she said. ``It's their role to bring together the best science.''

On Twitter, Bill Gates _ whose foundation was the second-largest donor to the WHO for its latest two-year budget, contributing over $530 million in 2018 and 2019 _ wrote that stopping funding for WHO during a world health crisis ``is as dangerous as it sounds.''

``Their work is slowing the spread of COVID-19 and if that work is stopped no other organization can replace them. The world needs WHO now more than ever,'' Gates wrote.

Worldwide, the pandemic has infected nearly 2 million people and killed over 127,000, according to a tally by Johns Hopkins University.

Germany's foreign minister, Heiko Maas, pushed back at Trump's announcement.

``Placing blame doesn't help,'' he wrote on Twitter. ``The virus knows no borders. We must work closely against COVID-19.''

The Netherlands has also thrown its support behind the WHO. ``Now is not the time to hold back funding. Once the pandemic is under control, lessons can be learned. For now, focus on overcoming this crisis,'' Sigrid Kaag, minister for foreign trade and development cooperation, said on Twitter.

Devi Sridhar, chair of global public health at the University of Edinburgh, called Trump's decision ``extremely problematic,'' noting that WHO is leading efforts to help developing countries fight the spread of COVID-19.

``This is the agency that's looking out for other countries and leading efforts to stop the pandemic,'' Sridhar said. ``This is exactly the time when they need more funding, not less.''

Sridhar said Trump's move was a short-sighted political decision that would likely have lasting consequences.

``Trump is angry, but his anger is being directed in a way that is going to ultimately hurt US interests,'' she said.

Sridhar and others said it was still unclear what the precise impact of Trump's funding cuts might be, but that other health priorities funded by the US, like polio eradication, malaria and HIV, were likely to suffer.

Aid workers in developing countries worried they might be hardest hit by Trump's decision.

``President Trump's decision to cut US funding of WHO, while allegedly only temporarily, will have significant and far-reaching impacts that won't be felt by Americans or Europeans, but instead by the world's most vulnerable populations,'' said Donald Brooks in Burkina Faso, chief executive officer for Initiative: Eau, an American aid group focused on increasing drinking water safety and quality in developing areas and conflict zones.

In Beijing, Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian says the country is ``seriously concerned'' about the US government's decision to suspend funding.

The WHO did not respond to repeated requests from The Associated Press for comment.

Some experts say WHO dallied in declaring a pandemic; it did so only on March 11, long after the surging outbreaks on multiple continents met the agency's own definition for a global crisis.

``They were really behind the curve,'' said Mark Woolhouse, professor of infectious disease epidemiology at the University of Edinburgh.

The UN health agency also insisted for months that the virus could be contained and was not as infectious as influenza. But many outbreak experts, including at the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, say COVID-19 is spreading many times faster than flu and that its rate of spread was apparent in January.

Still, some global health academics said Trump's attacks on WHO might actually strengthen the agency's credibility.

``If Trump was making a great success of the pandemic response in the US, if there were minimal cases and deaths there, that might be different,'' said Sophie Harman, a professor of international politics at Queen Mary University of London. ``But things are getting worse and that reinforces the need for WHO.'

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WOODLAWN PARK, N.J.  Their love story is the stuff of movies. Alfredo Pabatao was the son of a successful clothing retailer, Susana Galapate the daughter of a stableman who tended horses.

Both grew up in the same neighborhood in the Philippines. She lived in a modest, middle-class home, he in an ornate house that stood out with its marble accents.

They fell in love, against his parent's wishes, married in 1976 and later became the parents of five children.

The couple and their three youngest emigrated to the United States in 2001, eventually settling in Palisades Park. But their oldest children stayed behind  they'd become adults during the 14-year application process and no longer qualified to come with their parents. The parents vowed that when they were able, they would begin the work of bringing their two other children to America.

Susana, 68, and Alfredo Pabatao,64, of Palisades Park, are among those in New Jersey who contracted coronavirus and later died. The couple died four days apart.

They would not realize that dream, though. Susana and Alfredo Pabatao died late last month after a one-week battle with the coronavirus. The couple, both health care workers, died four days apart at the same hospital, Hackensack Meridian's Palisades Medical Center in North Bergen.

"My mom and dad are inseparable and where my dad goes my mom goes, and where my mom goes my dad goes,'' their youngest daughter, Sheryl Pabatao, said in an interview this week. "That was their fate, to go together."

Susana Galapate Pabatao was a nurses assistant at Bergen New Bridge Medical Center, a long-term care hospital in Paramus, sometimes working 12-hour shifts, according to her daughter. Her husband worked as an orderly at Hackensack Meridian. Alfredo Pabatao, 68, could have retired a few years ago, his daughter said, but he was waiting until his wife turned 65 later this year so they could do so together.

The couple, who became U.S. citizens more than a decade ago, were patiently working to secure legal residency for their two oldest children, Stephen and Ann Michelle, who remain in the Philippines. Sheryl Pabatao said she and her sister Angela and her brother, Sybil, of Palisades Park, will continue the process so her parents' dream of having their children together in one country can be fulfilled.

Story continues

The couple were "those type of people who are both nurturing and have that love for their family, said Sheryl Pabatao, who also lives in Palisades Park. Local pharmacists who treated her mom and dad remembered them as the kindest people that they ever met and they said that we werent the only ones mourning. They were loved by everyone.

Started with a sneeze

Alfredo Pabatao was the first to feel under the weather. He started to sneeze last month and then developed a cough on St. Patrick's Day. He blamed it on allergies, but the next day had a fever, as did Sheryl.

The next day, a doctor advised Pabatao to go to Hackensack Meridian, where he was admitted hours later. That same day, Sheryl Pabatao went to nearby urgent care center and got a prescription to be tested for the coronavirus.

When she returned to her parents home, she found her mother with a 102-degree fever. Susana resisted going to the hospital, but for the next several days, the fever would not subside, her daughter recalled.

Sheryl Pabatao said she and her mother tried for four days to get tested at the then recently opened drive-thru screening site at Bergen Community College in Paramus.

The site was plagued with long lines. Mother and daughter rose before sunrise to go to the center but could never get in. Every day her mom seemed weaker, Sheryl Pabatao said.

Alfredo, 68, and Susana Pabatao,64, of Palisades Park, are among those in New Jersey who contracted coronavirus and later died.

On March 23, four days after being admitted to the hospital, Alfredo Pabatao went into cardiac arrest and was moved to the intensive care unit. Hours later, at around 5:30 a.m March 24. his wife was admitted to the same hospital. Susana was in a fifth-floor room, while her husband lay in the third floor ICU.

Alfredo Pabatao would never speak to his wife or the rest of the family again. He died on March 26.

'Daddy passed away'

It was hard for us to accept at that moment what had happened and then I had to tell my mom, Sheryl Pabatao recalled as she wept.

Sheryl Pabatao worried about telling her mother, but word of her fathers death had reached extended family members. She feared someone would inadvertently tell her.

I told her Daddy passed away, Sheryl recalled. She stayed quiet on the line." Over the phone, she could hear the medical equipment in her mother's room "going crazy.

And then Susana Galapate Pabatao hung up.

More than 20 minutes later, on another call, her mother said she was not going to last much longer.

She said I cant do this anymore. My lungs hurt and I cant breathe right now, Sheryl Pabatao said.

A few hours later, her mother collapsed in her hospital room. Doctors intubated her and transferred her to intensive care. Susana Galapate Pabatao died on March 30. More than two weeks later, their daughter is still trying to process the sudden deaths and life without her parents.

"They went from zero to 100,'' she said. "They went from being OK to not being OK."

The children plan to have a memorial service, once social distancing restrictions are lifted, and have started a Go Fund Me page to help with funeral expenses. They plan to bury their parent's ashes in the Philippines.

Follow Monsy Alvarado: @monsyalvarado

This article originally appeared on NorthJersey.com: Coronavirus: New Jersey couple, married 44 years, die days apart
At least 25 people were confirmed killed and several others wounded following a communal clash in Nigeria's northeastern state of Taraba, said local police on Tuesday, Trend reports citing Xinhua.

About 100 houses were destroyed as the fracas resumed between the local Shomo and Jole ethnic groups in Lau local government area of the state on Monday, the police said.

The ethnic groups dominate two neighboring fishing communities in the area.

Taraba police spokesman David Misal said an investigation has been launched into the clash, as the cause of the conflict was not officially known.

However, local sources said a long-time ownership tussle over some ancestral fish ponds between the two ethnic groups was the cause of the latest disagreement.

For decades, these two communities had been disagreeing over the fish ponds, causing the loss of many lives.

In the early 90s, the state government had banned fishing activities in the disputed fish ponds. The ban was lifted in 1999 and more hostilities resumed in the area between the locals.

Taraba police chief Ahmed Azare said he has redeployed a team of riot police to quell the fresh violence.
Fishing communities the world over affected by coronavirus, both economically and socially: researchers

April 15,2020 | Source: Mirage News

The coronavirus pandemic could have a huge impact on fisheries, predicts an international panel of researchers. Although it varies a lot between countries, depending on their fisheries culture, says Marloes Kraan, an anthropologist at Wageningen Marine Research and co-chair of the panel.



Twenty five researchers from 12 different countries met last week to discuss the social impact of the coronavirus pandemic on the fisheries sector. They are members of the social working group at ICES (International Council for the Exploration of the Sea), an international network for marine scientists.



Two main problems have arisen for the sector due to the coronavirus crisis. Firstly, fisheries are heavily dependent on international trade, says Kraan. That is now severely hampered by measures such as closed borders and fewer flights. The Netherlands, for example, exports about 80 per cent of its fish, mainly to France, Spain and Italy. So if those markets get smaller, it has an effect on the Netherlands. The closed borders cause other problems. For example, the shrimps caught by Dutch fishers in the North Sea are usually peeled in Morocco, but that country is in lockdown.



A second problem is that a lot of the trade is in fresh fish and shellfish destined for restaurants, hotels and cafeteria  a branch that is now closed nearly everywhere. It is precisely the small-scale fisheries that seem to be affected by that in the first instance, says Kraan. Large shipping companies often have the facilities to freeze their catch.



On the other hand, in some countries such as Germany, more tinned fish is being sold, as people have started hoarding it. And some Dutch fisheries are dealing with the loss of the restaurant trade by switching to different fish  fishing for plaice instead of sole, which is mainly sold to restaurants.



The kinds of problems that arise also depend a lot on the fisheries culture, says Kraan. In certain regions of Spain, for example, the fishing fleet is owned by the fishers, whereas once a state of emergency was declared, all power went to the federal government. Initially, this caused some confusion as to who made decisions. Entirely different problems were in play in remote areas such as Alaska and the north of Norway, where strict travel bans were in place due to the limited capacity of hospitals. This makes it difficult to hire fishers from elsewhere, which is what usually happens. An exception at the moment is Sweden, a country where the fisheries have not yet encountered many problems, says Kraan. Firstly because Sweden doesnt have a complete lockdown, and secondly because the fisheries there are geared to catching fish for the fishmeal industry, for feeding farmed fish.



The researchers will continue to follow developments. Kraan: It is going extremely fast and changing from day to day. We know, for instance, that the Dutch shrimp fishing boats are already putting to sea again, so solutions are being found quickly. She will soon conduct a survey among fishers to see how they are doing. Its not just about the economic impact, says Kraan. For many fishers, fishing is a way of life that has gone on for generations. If your business goes bust, it is not easy for you to do anything else. It would mean losing a big part of your identity. Kraan particularly hopes that science can learn from this situation. We are looking at which measures different countries are taking and what works, so we can advise governments better on how they can help fisheries get through this crisis.

Theme(s): Communities and Organisations.
A man was fined by police after he allegedly gave them the middle finger as they drove past before calling them a 'rude name' when they stopped to talk to him.

Police allege the Queensland man, from Mt Isa, was walking along Camooweal Street on Monday afternoon when he gave passing officers the finger.

Seeing the gesture officers pulled up to talk to the man.

A 34-year-old Mt Isa man was fined by Queensland Police after he allegedly gave two officers the middle finger before calling them a 'rude name' when they stopped to talk to him (two Queensland Police officers pictured on duty)

'The man then called the police a rude name and when police have pulled up to talk to him, he continued swearing,' police said.

A Queensland Police spokeswoman told Daily Mail Australia the man was issued the infringement notice for 'public nuisance'.

The man called the officer a 'c**t'. It is illegal to swear in public in Queensland.

In the most extreme cases a guilty verdict for offensive language can still result in up to six months imprisonment.

Daily Mail Australia has contacted Queensland Police for comment.
Fan favourite Derek Lau turned down producers when they offered him a spot on MasterChef: Back To Win.

The 27-year-old financial analyst now regrets his choice, as the opportunities he chose to pursue have since fallen through due to the coronavirus pandemic.

'I was approached to do it, and unfortunately felt it wasn't the right time for me to get back on the show,' Derek told HuffPost Australia on Wednesday.

Mistakes: On Wednesday, MasterChef fan favourite Derek Lau (pictured) revealed why he regrets turning down a spot on the new Back To Win season

Derek had been hoping to open a restaurant in Melbourne or a Balinese eatery this year, but was forced to 'pull the pin' when coronavirus hit Australian shores.

'[We] were close to signing some further agreements when COVID-19 hit. So unfortunately that too is off the table,' Derek revealed.

He added: 'In hindsight, a lot of those opportunities have unfortunately dried up as a result of COVID-19 so it might have been a good time to go back on the show.'

Derek is still watching the 2020 season, however, and it turns out he's rooting for 'big sis' Poh Ling Yeow to win, having had the opportunity to cook with her after competing on the show last year.

Hindsight: The financial analyst now regrets his choice. The opportunities he chose to pursue have since fallen through due to the coronavirus pandemic

In an interview with The Project on Monday, Poh revealed she forgot how horrible MasterChef was.

'It definitely was not like riding a bike. That first episode... we walk in and are just rudely greeted by Gordon [Ramsay]!' the 47-year-old said of her return.

'I forgot how horrible it was to run around and get your equipment. That's the thing - it's so stressful.'

Personal favourite: Derek is still watching the 2020 season, rooting for 'big sis' Poh Ling Yeow (right) to win. He had the opportunity to cook with her after competing on the show last year

But Poh admitted it wasn't all bad, and said she wanted to return because of 'that feeling'.

After being told she was the early favourite to win this year's season by an impressed Gordon, 53, Poh said it was 'really flattering' but also 'very embarrassing'.

MasterChef: Back To Win continues Wednesday at 7.30pm on Channel 10
Cambodia is not the only country to declare a state of emergency in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, but the legislation passed last week by Hun Sen's government  like that in Orban's Hungary  should be ringing alarm bells for anyone anywhere concerned with the erosion of human rights and democracy.

With Australians and many other international observers leaving Cambodia, there is a danger that what is now happening inside the country will never be reported. Credit:iStock

Passed by a parliament from which opposition members have been excluded, and open-ended in duration with no sunset clause, the new law suppresses freedom of speech and assembly, allows control of technology by any means necessary and imposes draconian penalties, including long jail terms and property confiscation.

Ostensibly designed to save the community from the ravages of the coronavirus, there is already evidence that the new wide-ranging powers of surveillance, media and information suppression, and response to "obstruction", are being used to crack down on those who dare to question the government's authority, with arrests, increased surveillance and public attacks on human rights activists.

Repression of human rights in Cambodia is not new and in many ways the new law simply formally enshrines existing practice. Prime Minister Hun Sen, who has retained authoritarian power for 35 years, has systematically suppressed any movement towards a mature democracy. For those of us who worked so hard to bring to forge the Paris Peace Accords in 1991, bringing to an end Cambodia's catastrophic years of genocidal violence and civil war, the human rights and democracy record ever since has been a profound and ugly disappointment.
You wouldnt know it, but the school holidays are over, and today students start back at college and primary schools.

In notices that have gone out to parents, many local Primary schools are noting that this term is like no other in the history of NZ education.

The process is new to everyone, and the schools are putting a lot of effort into making it work as best they can.

Flexibility has been key, as schools are well aware that parents are uncertain about their input into the process, as well as having other demands on their time during lockdown.

Silverdale School principal Cameron Lockie says Silverdales distance learning programme is a mix of online and offline learning.

In a notice to parents and caregivers, he says the school has developed a website that is available to everyone. Teachers are available to reply to emails Monday to Friday, 9am-1pm.

We dont expect you to become the teacher  more of a support person for your child's learning, he says. We have provided your child with enough independent work for them to do alongside you. We appreciate you too will likely be working from home, so the suggested timetables and activities are optional. Feel free to make the timetable work for you and your family or run with your own ideas.

Orewa North Primary principal Katherine Pascoe says the school has rolled out an online programme with a flexible curriculum.

Our staff have been meeting on online platforms during the holidays and are enthusiastic and committed to making this work as best they can for our students and their families, she says.

The home learning provided for students of Orewa Primary is described as offering a variety of learning experiences in the hope of motivating childrens curiosity, creativity and love of learning. A suggested timetable, with teacher support, has been provided but families are reminded to make the best decisions that work for them.

Principal Diane Lambert says the school would like this to be an easy and enjoyable time for families, working around other commitments.

Links to Red Beach Schools online programme have been provided to families with the added instruction from Principal Julie Hepburn to do what works best for your bubble.

For students of Whangaparaoa College, the big difference is that work is being done at home without face-to-face connection with teachers.

Deputy Principal in charge of curriculum, Dawn Sullivan, says because the college is a Bring Your Own Device school, online learning is a part of students normal way of doing things.

She says for in-home learning, some changes have been made to programmes and teachers have been asked to connect with students through video conferencing or email as well as being available to answer questions and give advice. The school day is a little shorter  from 11am-2pm

We are very fortunate that only a very small number of our learners do not have access to a device or to the internet and we are working with the Ministry of Education to get these learners online and with a device as soon as we can, Dawn says.

And what of the post-lockdown future? Red Beach Schools Julie Hepburn says we are constantly being reminded that everything is going to be quite different as we move forward beyond the lockdown. What this means for Red Beach School we have yet to be told. Much is being written about how this could look but the reality is  nobody knows!
Ayushmann Khurrana is currently homebound owing to the nationwide lockdown because of COVID-19 pandemic. In a recent interview with noted journalist, Rajeev Masand, the actor spoke about how he is spending his quarantine period and the effects of lockdown on the film industry.

Talking about his kids amid the lockdown period, Ayushmann said that he had been tutoring them and that the experience was "pretty different, but now we have got used to it. There are online classes happening, which is unique for us."

He mentioned that studies are not like state boards of ICSE and told Rajeev Masand, "We don't know anything about it. We are trying to learn new things. I had run away to escape this and now I am doing just that. What is the point?"

On becoming a tutor to kids, the actor said that he was a "bad teacher". However, he added that he had been teaching Hindi to his kids but 'IB Hindi is different'.

Ayushmann also said that he believes the lockdown should continue till "we are free of this virus." Speaking about the effects of lockdown on the film industry, the Dream Girl actor said, "Our industry will take a hit for sure. People will think twice before going to theatres or to any public event."

Recently, the actor dedicated a poem to the frontline warriors who are working round the clock amid the Novel Coronavirus pandemic. Speaking about it, he said that it came 'straight from the heart'. He revealed how he would watch them from his balcony; how he believed that they are not lesser mortals than us and that one should thank them.

The actor said that he was glad that his poem had resonated with many people and some of them even wrote back to him, including producer-director Aditya Chopra who penned a poem for him.

Ayushmann further elaborated on how he is coping with this lockdown and said that he believes there is no way of approaching this issue because nobody knows how to deal with it and how one feels. He said that the only way to deal with this is to look forward with positivity, be happy and to have a good life's savings.

The actor said that this experience has made him realise that 'zindagi ki zarooraten bahot kam hoti hain (Life's needs are very basic). One should live as minimal a life as possible. He joked that he has been living from one night suit to another.

Talking about how his kids have been reacting to the lockdown, Ayushmann said he felt children were resilient and easily adapt to situations.

The actor said, "Yes, it is true that they want to go out and play but one has too keep them distracted," further adding that he has a guitar at home and uses online chess games to keep the kids busy. Ayushmann further said that he believes in being honest with them and telling them that they too know nothing when it comes to this pandemic.

When asked if he feels there would be a change in the kind of films he would want to do, Ayushmann said, "I am sure the kind of films we will make will be different from the kind of films we have seen earlier." He said, "How to make it topical is the real challenge. I want to go back to sets, have some reading sessions, jam with directors, go out on locations, I am missing that madness."

The actor revealed that he was quite sure that the lockdown would be extended and that it was difficult to keep up with sanity. He further said that his family is into chanting and it's spirituality which has kept them going.

When asked what he is binge-watching during this break, Ayushmann said that he finished watching The Morning Show and Bombshell and is currently hooked to Money Heist.

Ayushmann Khurrana Condemns Heinous Attacks On Cops Amid Coronavirus Lockdown

Rajkumar Hirani, Ayushmann Khurrana Support Daily Wage Workers Amidst Coronavirus Crisis
(CNN)  Wildfires near the Chernobyl power plant are now under control, Ukrainian authorities said Tuesday.

There is no more "open fire" but some grass and brush is still smoldering, said the State Emergency Service of Ukraine.

Three aircraft, three helicopters and more than 400 firefighters were used to control the blaze, which raged for several days.

Forest fires are not uncommon in the deserted 1,000-square-mile exclusion zone, which was evacuated following the devastating 1986 blast at the nuclear power plant that sent radioactive fallout billowing across Europe, exposing millions to dangerous levels of radiation.

Fears had been raised that the fires could overrun the nuclear power plant and a radioactive waste storage facility.

Emergency services said Tuesday radiation levels in Kiev and the surrounding region are "within normal limits."

On Monday Chernobyl tour operator Yaroslav Yemelianenko reported fires were burning within two kilometers (1.2 miles) of the nuclear reactors and the storage facility in a video posted on Facebook.

"The situation is critical. The exclusion zone is blazing. Local authorities report that everything is under control, but in fact, fire is rapidly spreading to new territories," he wrote in the post.

Any smoldering in the exclusion zone that remains will be extinguished in "a few more days" according to a statement from the office of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.

The explosion at Chernobyl killed 31 people and millions more were exposed to dangerous radiation levels.

The final death toll as a result of long-term radiation exposure is much disputed. Although the UN predicted up to 9,000 related cancer deaths in 2005, Greenpeace later estimated up to 200,000 fatalities, taking further health problems connected to the disaster into account.

For more than two decades, authorities maintained the exclusion zone around the reactor, including the city of Pripyat, once home to 50,000 people.

However in recent years Chernobyl has become a popular site for tourists, despite its tragic history.

Visitor numbers saw a sharp rise following an HBO mini-series about the tragedy which aired in 2019, and the Ukrainian government decided to designate it an official tourist attraction in July.
"Soviet Space Graphics: Cosmic Visions from the USSR," (Phaidon, 2020), released April 1, is an incredible collection of images from the USSR.

One new book transports readers back to the early days of Soviet spaceflight with an unbelievable collection of stunning, colorful and nostalgic images.

" Soviet Space Graphics: Cosmic Visions from the USSR ," (Phaidon, 2020), released April 1, is a masterful compendium of images showcasing space design ideas from the then Soviet Union from the 1920s through the 1980s. It highlights the beauty of early space design in imaginative, colorful artworks.

This book is a collaboration between the Moscow Design Museum and author Alexandra Sankova, who is both a graphic designer and a founder of the museum. " I grew up in the Soviet Union and dreamed of becoming cosmonauts as many boys and girls did," Sankova told Space.com in an email, adding that, during this time period in the Soviet Union the cosmonauts, and even the first dogs to fly to space, were some of the most adored and revered figures.

Related: The 10 Greatest Soviet and Russian Space Missions

" Soviet Space Graphics: Cosmic Visions from the USSR "Soviet Space Graphics: Cosmic Visions from the USSR," (Phaidon, 2020) showcases a number of incredible images from the Soviet side of the space race.

"The theme of space penetrated into every apartment, and I don't mean only magazine covers. Belka and Strelka  who were the first animals to successfully complete an orbital flight and return to the Earth alive  obtained status of the Soviet Union's most famous dogs," Sankova said.

Image 1 of 31 The cover of "Soviet Space Graphics: Cosmic Visions from the USSR." (Image credit: Phaidon) The cover of "Soviet Space Graphics: Cosmic Visions from the USSR." Image 2 of 31 Technology for the Youth, issue 11, 1958, illustration by G. Pokrovsky for the article Lunar Landing, depicting a spaceship taking off from the surface of the Moon, leaving behind a trail of incandescent gases and fire-red dust. (pages 26-27) (Image credit: Phaidon) Technology for the Youth, issue 11, 1958, illustration by G. Pokrovsky for the article Lunar Landing, depicting a spaceship taking off from the surface of the Moon, leaving behind a trail of incandescent gases and fire-red dust. (pages 26-27) Image 3 of 31 Youth, issue 4, 1976, illustration by V. Kotlyar. (page 65) (Image credit: Phaidon) Youth, issue 4, 1976, illustration by V. Kotlyar. (page 65) Image 4 of 31 Knowledge is Power, issue 10, 1960, illustration by V. Viktorov depicting space dogs Belka and Strelka. (page 30) (Image credit: Phaidon) Knowledge is Power, issue 10, 1960, illustration by V. Viktorov depicting space dogs Belka and Strelka. (page 30) Image 5 of 31 Radio, issue 6, 1956, illustration by N. Grishin, for the article Television of the Future, which discusses the potential for communications satellites to transform television. (page 23) (Image credit: Phaidon) Radio, issue 6, 1956, illustration by N. Grishin, for the article Television of the Future, which discusses the potential for communications satellites to transform television. (page 23) Image 6 of 31 Technology for the Youth, issue 4, 1961, illustration by G. Pokrovsky for the article Steps to the Stars, depicting a spacecraft passing over Mars. A system of intricate inflatable structures is attached to the tail of the craft, comprising a mirror for photography, a telescope, a radio relay antenna and a solar power plant. (page 54) (Image credit: Phaidon) Technology for the Youth, issue 4, 1961, illustration by G. Pokrovsky for the article Steps to the Stars, depicting a spacecraft passing over Mars. A system of intricate inflatable structures is attached to the tail of the craft, comprising a mirror for photography, a telescope, a radio relay antenna and a solar power plant. (page 54) Image 7 of 31 Technology for the Youth, issue 8, 1958, Machines  Astronauts, illustration by N. Kolchitsky showing the individual components of Sputnik 3 as different characters. (page 34-35) (Image credit: Phaidon) Technology for the Youth, issue 8, 1958, Machines  Astronauts, illustration by N. Kolchitsky showing the individual components of Sputnik 3 as different characters. (page 34-35) Image 8 of 31 Knowledge is Power, issue 2, 1954, illustration by K. Artseulov for the article Five Days in a Hot Air Balloon, which explores the possibilities of long-distance flights using hot-air balloons. (page 92) (Image credit: Phaidon) Knowledge is Power, issue 2, 1954, illustration by K. Artseulov for the article Five Days in a Hot Air Balloon, which explores the possibilities of long-distance flights using hot-air balloons. (page 92) Image 9 of 31 Outlook, issue 4, 1976, Yuri Gagarin: Lets Go!, illustration by S. Alimov. The first track on the magazines accompanying flexi-disc record was a recording by Gagarin titled Planet Earth is Beautiful. (page 129) (Image credit: Phaidon) Outlook, issue 4, 1976, Yuri Gagarin: Lets Go!, illustration by S. Alimov. The first track on the magazines accompanying flexi-disc record was a recording by Gagarin titled Planet Earth is Beautiful. (page 129) Image 10 of 31 Knowledge is Power, issue 2, 1949, illustration by K. Artseulov for an interview with Vasily Romanyuk, the first person to complete a parachute jump from the Earths stratosphere, at a height of 13,000 metres (42,650 feet). (page 91) (Image credit: Phaidon) Knowledge is Power, issue 2, 1949, illustration by K. Artseulov for an interview with Vasily Romanyuk, the first person to complete a parachute jump from the Earths stratosphere, at a height of 13,000 metres (42,650 feet). (page 91) Image 11 of 31 Young Technician, issue 7, 1968, illustration by R. Avotin. (page 105) (Image credit: Phaidon) Young Technician, issue 7, 1968, illustration by R. Avotin. (page 105) Image 12 of 31 Technology for the Youth, issue 10, 1965, illustration by Alexei Leonov for the article The First Space Dawn Artist Provides Us With His Drawings, depicting the Sun rising over Earth. Leonov was the first human to walk in space during the 1965 Voskhod 2 mission. (page 68-69) (Image credit: Phaidon) Technology for the Youth, issue 10, 1965, illustration by Alexei Leonov for the article The First Space Dawn Artist Provides Us With His Drawings, depicting the Sun rising over Earth. Leonov was the first human to walk in space during the 1965 Voskhod 2 mission. (page 68-69) Image 13 of 31 Technology for the Youth, issue 12, 1955, illustrator unknown. (page 103) (Image credit: Phaidon) Technology for the Youth, issue 12, 1955, illustrator unknown. (page 103) Image 14 of 31 Technology for the Youth, issue 1, 1964, illustration by S. Lefterev for the article Morning in the Astrocity, depicting a futuristic scenario of space transportation within a cosmodrome. (page 158-159) (Image credit: Phaidon) Technology for the Youth, issue 1, 1964, illustration by S. Lefterev for the article Morning in the Astrocity, depicting a futuristic scenario of space transportation within a cosmodrome. (page 158-159) Image 15 of 31 Technology for the Youth, issue 2, 1959, illustration by B. Dashkov for the article What Would a Space Station on the Moon Look Like? (page 173) (Image credit: Phaidon) Technology for the Youth, issue 2, 1959, illustration by B. Dashkov for the article What Would a Space Station on the Moon Look Like? (page 173) Image 16 of 31 Technology for the Youth, issue 11, 1965, Satellite for Everyone, illustration by O. Yakovlev. (page 186) (Image credit: Phaidon) Technology for the Youth, issue 11, 1965, Satellite for Everyone, illustration by O. Yakovlev. (page 186) Image 17 of 31 Outlook, issue 2, 1973, In the World of Professions: Machine Builders, illustration by N. Koshkin. (page 176) (Image credit: Phaidon) Outlook, issue 2, 1973, In the World of Professions: Machine Builders, illustration by N. Koshkin. (page 176) Image 18 of 31 Technology for the Youth, issue 4, 1956, illustration by A. Pobedinsky for the article Brain Emits Stars on the Oscilloscope Screen, which speculates on the existence of telepathy, and whether the human brain emits elecromagnetic waves and signals. (page 151) (Image credit: Phaidon) Technology for the Youth, issue 4, 1956, illustration by A. Pobedinsky for the article Brain Emits Stars on the Oscilloscope Screen, which speculates on the existence of telepathy, and whether the human brain emits elecromagnetic waves and signals. (page 151) Image 19 of 31 Young Technician, issue 10, 1964, illustration by R. Avotin for the article Space Greenhouse, which hypothesizes on the creation of an environment suitable for growing plants in space. (page 226) (Image credit: Phaidon) Young Technician, issue 10, 1964, illustration by R. Avotin for the article Space Greenhouse, which hypothesizes on the creation of an environment suitable for growing plants in space. (page 226) Image 20 of 31 Young Technician, issue 8, 1979, illustration by R. Avotin in celebration of the graduating class from a young bionics enthusiasts club. The cover line reads: Nature gave wings not only to birds. May bug, dragonfly, butterfly  how do they fly? Maybe by unravelling this mystery, designers will be able to create the perfect aircraft. (page 201) (Image credit: Phaidon) Young Technician, issue 8, 1979, illustration by R. Avotin in celebration of the graduating class from a young bionics enthusiasts club. The cover line reads: Nature gave wings not only to birds. May bug, dragonfly, butterfly  how do they fly? Maybe by unravelling this mystery, designers will be able to create the perfect aircraft. (page 201) Image 21 of 31 Technology for the Youth, issue 8, 1976, Echo of the Future, illustrations by E. Bukreev depicting futuristic scenarios in Siberia. The artworks were submitted for the drawing competition Siberia Tomorrow. (page 190-191) (Image credit: Phaidon) Technology for the Youth, issue 8, 1976, Echo of the Future, illustrations by E. Bukreev depicting futuristic scenarios in Siberia. The artworks were submitted for the drawing competition Siberia Tomorrow. (page 190-191) Image 22 of 31 Knowledge is Power, issue 5, 1940, illustration by L. Epple for Boris Anibels science-fiction novel Sailors of the Universe, about a mission to Mars. (page 196) (Image credit: Phaidon) Knowledge is Power, issue 5, 1940, illustration by L. Epple for Boris Anibels science-fiction novel Sailors of the Universe, about a mission to Mars. (page 196) Image 23 of 31 Technology for the Youth, issue 5, 1969, Oh, that Mysterious Moon!, illustration by R. Avotin for an article that presents photographs from the Luna 9 unmanned space mission. (page 209) (Image credit: Phaidon) Technology for the Youth, issue 5, 1969, Oh, that Mysterious Moon!, illustration by R. Avotin for an article that presents photographs from the Luna 9 unmanned space mission. (page 209) Image 24 of 31 Technology for the Youth, issue 3, 1955, illustration by N. Kolchitsky. (page 204) (Image credit: Phaidon) Technology for the Youth, issue 3, 1955, illustration by N. Kolchitsky. (page 204) Image 25 of 31 (Image credit: Phaidon) Image 26 of 31 (Image credit: Phaidon) Image 27 of 31 (Image credit: Phaidon) Image 28 of 31 (Image credit: Phaidon) Image 29 of 31 (Image credit: Phaidon) Image 30 of 31 (Image credit: Phaidon) Image 31 of 31 (Image credit: Phaidon)

Now, given the large span of time that this collection draws from, the team had to be very selective with the images they chose to include. "The selection of visual material took quite a lot of time," Sankova said. They chose from a massive variety of materials including posters, postcards, magazines and books from those decades.

She noted that images from magazines have long been overlooked by art historians because they printed and distributed the magazines to all Soviet citizens and the images were therefore very common. However, "many of these works are masterpieces of graphic design."

But the pieces they ended up choosing are incredible not just for their visual beauty but the design and inspiration behind them as well as many of the artists who contributed to the magazines they drew from were also experts in technology and science fields. "For example, the author of the "Technology for the Youth" cover (page 153) Vladimir Aryamov was the chief designer of the All-Union Scientific Research Automotive Institute, the author of numerous concept cars that were much ahead of their time. Later he worked at the All-Union Scientific Research Institute of Technical Aesthetics  the leading organization for industrial design in the USSR," Sankova said.

Some of Sankova's favorite images included in the book are by both cosmonaut Alexei Leonov , the world's first spacewalker and a science-fiction artist. In addition to being a groundbreaking cosmonaut as the first person to ever conduct a spacewalk, Leonov was also a talented painter. "The vivid, spectacular and authentic works created "first hand" painted an image of the cosmos as a romantic, friendly space in the minds of many Soviet citizens," Sankova said.

The space race

While these images are stunning and diving into the history of Soviet spaceflight is very interesting on its own, Sankova points out that "it is fascinating to compare American and Soviet graphics, as space programs were carried out simultaneously."

"The space race influenced everything  from innovations to design of newspapers, magazines, and posters in both countries. NASA imagery is awesome and impressive! I dream of creating an exhibition where the works of Soviet illustrators and designers will be displayed alongside with the works of their American colleagues," Sankova said.

If you are familiar with art and pieces of pop culture from the U.S. during the space race you might see familiar styles or imagery. From fantastical, imaginative technology ideas to glamorized visions of space tourism and exploration, it is interesting to see the similarities and also the differences between art from different parts of the world during the space race.

Follow Chelsea Gohd on Twitter @chelsea_gohd . Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom and on Facebook .
More than 17 million Americans have filed for unemployment over the past three weeks due to economic disruption from the coronavirus pandemic. As a result, many are eagerly awaiting their stimulus checks from a $2.2 trillion federal relief bill  and now may need to wait longer.

The Washington Post reports many checks worth $1,200 may be delayed because President Donald Trumps name has been added to the mailed payments. Bloomberg confirmed Monday that the U.S. Treasury Department has instructed the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) to print Trumps signature in the memo line of the checks being sent out in the coming weeks.

Chad Hooper, national president of the IRSs Professional Managers Association, told the Post that any last minute request like this will create a downstream snarl that will result in a delay.

According to Forbes, the IRS information technology team will have to make a programming change before the checks are passed to the Bureau of Fiscal Service for printing and issuing.

Its unclear how much of a delay the change could cause. A Treasury spokeswoman told Bloomberg that the addition of Trumps name wont delay the checks, despite other officials saying differently.

Bloomberg reports the IRS can send about 5 million paper checks a week. The IRS said its sending about 80 million payments via direct deposit this week, without Trumps name, but another 70 million to 90 million paper checks bearing his name will go out starting next week. As a result, the entire process could take months to complete.

The New York Times reports the change comes after Trump suggested it to Steven Mnuchin, the Treasury secretary. The president is not legally authorized to sign the checks, which is why his name will appear in the memo field.

According to Bloomberg, a civil servants signature  the disbursing officer for the payment center  typically appears on benefit checks or one-time economic stimulus payments.

Trump previously claimed that he didnt want to have his name on the stimulus checks, which will send more than $292 million in direct economic relief.

Do I want to sign them? No, he said at an April 3 press briefing.

The stimulus checks, officially referred to as economic impact payments, are part of the $2.2 trillion Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act approved by Congress. Most U.S. adults will get $1,200 each and $500 per eligible child.

MORE ON CORONAVIRUS

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Man waiting for stimulus deposit says he accidentally got $8 million in bank account

Stimulus checks: Heres when federal payments should hit bank accounts
PUNE, India, April 15, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- The global water and wastewater treatment market size is projected to reach USD 456.68 billion by 2026. The increasing demand for water treatment facilities across the world will have a positive impact on the growth of the market in the coming years. According to a report published by Fortune Business Insights, titled "Water and Wastewater Treatment Market Size, Share & Industry Analysis, By Segment (Chemicals {pH Conditioners, Coagulants & Flocculants, Disinfectants & Biocidal Products, Scale & Corrosion Inhibitors, Antifoam Chemicals, Other Chemicals}, Equipment {Biological, Filtration, Sludge Treatment, Disinfection, and Other Equipment}, Services), By Application, and Regional Forecast, 2019-2026," the market was worth USD 265.30 billion in 2018 and will exhibit a CAGR of 7.1% during the forecast period, 2019-2026.

Water and wastewater treatment is carried out before being used for commercial and domestic purposes. The growing demand for freshwater, coupled with the low availability of naturally available drinking water has created a subsequent demand fort this process. The increasing investment in the R&D of this process will bode well for the market in the coming years. The constantly increasing global population has created a subsequent demand for water and wastewater treatment across the world. The increasing water shortages have contributed to the growing demand for wastewater treatment. Recent technological advancements will open up a huge potential for the companies operating in the water and wastewater treatment industry in the forthcoming years.

Request For COVID-19 Impact Analysis Report: https://www.fortunebusinessinsights.com/enquiry/covid19-impact/water-and-wastewater-treatment-market-102632

An Overview of the Impact of COVID-19 on this Market:

The emergence of COVID-19 has brought the world to a standstill. We understand that this health crisis has brought an unprecedented impact on businesses across industries. However, this too shall pass. Rising support from governments and several companies can help in the fight against this highly contagious disease. Some industries are struggling and some are thriving. Overall, almost every sector is anticipated to be impacted by the pandemic.

We are making continuous efforts to help your business sustain and grow during COVID-19 pandemics. Based on our experience and expertise, we will offer you an impact analysis of coronavirus outbreak across industries to help you prepare for the future.

Click here to get the short-term and long-term impact of COVID-19 on water and wastewater treatment market: https://www.fortunebusinessinsights.com/water-and-wastewater-treatment-market-102632

List of leading companies that are currently operating in the water & wastewater treatment market include;

Acciona

Pt. Amrita Enviro Energi

Hydro International

Orenco Systems

ASIO, spol. s r.o.

Aquatech International LLC

Trojan Technologies

BioMicrobics Inc.

Kurita Water Industries Ltd.

Calgon Carbon Corporation

Kemira

SUEZ worldwide

Xylem

DuPont

Evoqua Water Technologies LLC

3M

Pentair plc.

Ecolab

United Utilities Group PLC

American Water

Other Key Players

Growing Wastewater Treatment Plants Across the World Will Aid Market Growth

The report encompasses several factors that have contributed to the growth of the market in recent years. The increasing number of water and wastewater treatment plants has made a huge impact on the growth of the market in recent years. In January 2020, Kurita Water Industries announced the launch of a new wastewater R&D facility.

The company unveiled the new R&D base in Japan and claims that it will be completing the construction of the plant by 2022. This R&D base will not just help the company grow, but will have a huge impact on the growth of the market in the coming years. A few other factors have influenced the growth of the market and the same have been discussed in detail, in the report.

Speak to Analyst: https://www.fortunebusinessinsights.com/enquiry/speak-to-analyst/water-and-wastewater-treatment-market-102632

North America Dominates the Global Market Driven by Increasing Water Treatment R&D Facilities

The report analyses the ongoing water and wastewater treatment market trends across North America, Latin America, Asia Pacific, and the Middle East and Africa. Among these regions, the market in North America currently dominates the global market owing to the presence of several water and wastewater R&D facilities across this region.

As of 2018, the water & wastewater treatment market in North America was worth USD 104.53 billion and this value is projected to increase further in the coming years. Besides North America, the market Asia Pacific will witness considerable growth in the coming years driven by massive investments by countries such as China, India, and Japan.

Quick Buy - Water And Wastewater Treatment Market Research Report: https://www.fortunebusinessinsights.com/checkout-page/102632

Detailed Table of Content:

Introduction

Research Scope



Market Segmentation



Research Methodology



Definitions and Assumptions

Executive Summary

Market Dynamics

Market Drivers



Market Restraints



Market Opportunities

Key Insights

Key Emerging Trends - For Major Countries



Key Developments: Mergers, Acquisition, Partnership, etc.



Latest Technological Advancement



Insights on Regulatory Scenario



Porters Five Forces Analysis

Global Water and Wastewater Treatment Market Analysis, Insights and Forecast, 2015-2026

Key Findings / Summary



Market Analysis, Insights and Forecast - By Segment



Chemicals





pH Conditioners







Coagulants & Flocculants







Disinfectants & Biocidal Products







Scale & Corrosion Inhibitors







Antifoam Chemicals







Others





Equipment





Biological







Filtration







Sludge Treatment







Disinfection







Demineralization







Others





Services



Market Analysis, Insights and Forecast - By Application



Municipal





Industrial



Market Analysis, Insights and Forecast - By Region



North America





Europe





Asia pacific

pacific



South America





Middle East & Africa

TOC Continued!!!

Get your Customized Research Report: https://www.fortunebusinessinsights.com/enquiry/customization/water-and-wastewater-treatment-market-102632

Key Industry Development:

January 2020: Xylem announced the launch of a new multi-dimensional center for water, wastewater and energy technologies. This centre will be based at their regional headquarters based in Singapore.

Have a Look at Related Research Insights:

Water Treatment Chemicals Market Size, Share & Industry Analysis, By Type (Coagulants & Flocculants, Corrosion & Scale Inhibitors, pH Adjusters & Stabilizers, Anti-foaming Agents, Biocides & Disinfectants, Others), By End-Use Industry (Municipal, Oil & gas, Mining, Power, Paper & Pulp, Food & Beverage, Others) and Regional Forecast, 2019-2026

Water Clarifiers Market Size, Share, and Industry Analysis, By Type (Flocculants, Organic Coagulants, Inorganic Coagulants, Ph Stabilizers), By Application (Municipal, Pulp & Paper, Textiles, Petrochemicals, Metals & Mining, Others), and Regional Forecast, 2019-2026.

About Us:

Fortune Business Insights offers expert corporate analysis and accurate data, helping organizations of all sizes make timely decisions. We tailor innovative solutions for our clients, assisting them address challenges distinct to their businesses. Our goal is to empower our clients with holistic market intelligence, giving a granular overview of the market they are operating in.

Our reports contain a unique mix of tangible insights and qualitative analysis to help companies achieve sustainable growth. Our team of experienced analysts and consultants use industry-leading research tools and techniques to compile comprehensive market studies, interspersed with relevant data.

At Fortune Business Insights, we aim at highlighting the most lucrative growth opportunities for our clients. We therefore offer recommendations, making it easier for them to navigate through technological and market-related changes. Our consulting services are designed to help organizations identify hidden opportunities and understand prevailing competitive challenges.

Contact Us:

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Read Press Release: https://www.fortunebusinessinsights.com/press-release/water-and-wastewater-treatment-market-9766

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[April 15, 2020] Orion Energy Partners Announces Continued Growth of the Senior Advisory Board

Orion Energy Partners, L.P. ("Orion Energy"), a private capital partner to lower/middle market energy infrastructure and related businesses, is pleased to announce the addition of Jay Bernstein and Steve Newby to its Senior Advisory Board. "As we navigate through unprecedented times, we are pleased that Orion Energy has been able to work very effectively focusing on the well-being of our team, the core strengths of our diverse investment partnerships and the support of our limited partners. We are deeply appreciative of the involvement of our Senior Advisory Board in these priorities," said Rob Rusk, Co-Founder and Partner who oversees Orion Energy's relationship with the Senior Advisory Board. "Our new members, Jay Bernstein and Steve Newby, both have extraordinary records as energy industry CEOs and principal investors and will help us advance our Firm's initiatives. Jay and his family's company exemplify the owner/operator structure that is a hallmark of Orion Energy's investment partnerships. Steve's insights as a CEO and principal investor both in conventional and alternative energy reflect the evolution of our strategy, which focuses on more environmentally innovative sectors. Jay and Steve also complement the operating and leadership experience of the other four members of our Senior Advisory Board." Jay Bernstein is the Chairman and CEO of NIC (News - Alert) Holding Corp. NIC Holdings owns Northville Industries, the largest gasoline and diesel storage and distribution business on Long Island and also traes oil, light products and futures in the Atlantic Basin. Jay is a member of several industry, policy and philanthropic boards.



Steve Newby is the Chairman and Owner of Sunshine Solar, one of the largest commercial solar installers in the Southeast. Previously Steve was the Founder, President and CEO of Summit Midstream, managed a proprietary energy infrastructure investment fund for ING, and was Managing Director and Head of Project Finance for SunTrust Bank. He is an Adjunct Professor at the Kenan Flagler Business School at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Orion Energy is also pleased to continue its close relationship with Jean Wilson as she steps down from the Senior Advisory Board to focus full time on her operating role at Pattern Energy. "We would like to thank Jean for her service on the Senior Advisory Board and her contribution to promote innovative thinking at Orion Energy," commented Gerrit Nicholas, Co-Founder, Managing Partner and chair of Orion Energy's ESG Committee. "Through our work with Jean and other industry leaders, we have strengthened our focus on capital partnerships which support a transition to sustainable, environmentally innovative energy businesses and practices."

About Orion Energy Partners Orion Energy Partners is a private capital partner to lower/middle market energy infrastructure and related companies, primarily in North America, managing approximately $1.8 billion of investable capital. We provide non-control and non-dilutive capital in flexible, senior secured loan structures as an alternative to equity investment and traditional loans. Our target investment sectors include downstream, renewable and alternative energy, power generation, midstream, asset-heavy services and other industrial energy opportunities. Orion Energy manages long-term, committed capital across multiple investment funds, allowing us to forge transformational relationships across a diverse group of companies and to be patient and supportive as these organizations execute on their business plans. We aim to have more than 50% of our capital partnerships support a transition to sustainable, environmentally innovative energy businesses and practices. Please visit www.OrionEnergyPartners.com to learn more about our capital partnerships. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20200415005384/en/

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Linkedin Luc Olinga (Agence France-Presse) Washington, United States  Wed, April 15, 2020 10:19 636 fc6853813033f564188675f8bd1f62a2 2 Business united-states,Airlines,aviation,financial-aid,COVID-19,American-Airlines,United-Airlines,Southwest-Airlines,coronavirus,delta-airlines Free

United States Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and major US airlines on Tuesday reached an agreement on financial assistance amid the coronavirus pandemic, aiming to keep paying workers and avoid bankruptcies in an industry that employs 750,000 people.

The Treasury came to terms with 10 airlines, including the four largest  Delta Air Lines, Americans Airlines, United Airlines and Southwest Airlines.

Some were initially hesitant to accept the money for fear of nationalization despite the damage done by the pandemic, which has brought air travel to a standstill.

Read also: Airports reduce hours, close terminals following sharp decline in flight traffic

US President Donald Trump said the deal means "our airlines are now in good shape, and they will get over a very tough period of time that was not caused by them."

Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin meanwhile said he was "working with the airlines to finalize the necessary agreements and disburse funds as quickly as possible."

Congress last month approved a US$2.2 trillion stimulus plan to rescue the world's largest economy, which includes $25 billion for airlines to continue paying employees' salaries and benefits until September 30.

While details of the agreement were not disclosed, a source close to the negotiations said the US government would become a minority shareholder in the airlines.

In his statement, Mnuchin said the deal "will support American workers and help preserve the strategic importance of the airline industry while allowing for appropriate compensation to the taxpayers."

He added that the Treasury is evaluating applications from smaller passenger carriers and also "will provide further guidance" to cargo airlines and their contractors.

Happy airlines

US airlines hailed the agreement, with Southwest congratulating the Treasury on its move "to infuse liquidity into the economy and try to keep businesses open and people on the job  and that certainly includes the airlines and our employees."

A passengers waits for a Delta Airlines flight in Terminal 5 at Los Angeles International Airport, May 4, 2017 in Los Angeles, California. (AFP/Robyn Beck)

Southwest expects to receive $3.2 billion under the program, $2.3 billion of which will go towards payroll for its 60,000 employees with the balance taking the form of a low-interest loan to be repaid over 10 years.

In exchange, Southwest will give the government about 2.6 million warrants  financial instruments that can be turned into stock shares and whose price was not specified but is usually fixed in advance.

That is in line with a demand the Treasury made in talks on Friday for warrants to compose 10 percent of the aid each company receives, the source said, while informing airlines that they'd have to pay back 30 percent of the money they received.

Airlines are also eligible for another $25 billion in loans to help them resume operations after the pandemic caused air traffic to plunge, leading carriers to suspend routes, cut back on orders and cancel hundreds of flights.

American Airlines said it would apply for $4.75 billion in those loans this week, in addition to $5.8 billion received under Tuesday's agreement with the Treasury.

"The support our government has entrusted to us carries immense responsibility and an obligation that American Airlines is privileged to undertake," the carrier's CEO Doug Parker said in a statement.

Read also: Transportation industry seeks 'rescue package' to weather COVID-19 impacts

"It is our privilege to continue flying through the downturn and to be in a ready position as our country and the world return to the skies."

Travel hit hard

American and Southwest have also promised not to lay off or cut pay for their employees until the end of September  when the Treasury program finishes.

In addition, the carriers said they had agreed to limits on executive compensation, share buybacks and dividend payments.

The pandemic has caused the cancellation of about 80 percent of US carriers' flights including many transatlantic routes.

The International Air Transport Association said on Tuesday that passenger revenues would plunge 55 percent, or $314 billion, in 2020 due to the pandemic.
Although showing no symptoms and being cautious, Keith Whiteing has the back of his nasal passage swabbed while being tested for the novel coronavirus at the Velocity Urgent Care April 15, 2020 in Woodbridge, Virginia.

A group of business executives warned President Donald Trump on Wednesday that the federal government "needed to dramatically increase" the availability of coronavirus testing before Americans would feel comfortable returning to their normal lives, according to a new report.

The Wall Street Journal, citing people familiar with the situation, said Trump held a conference call with about three dozen financial, food and beverage, hospitality and retail industry executives who are part of a new task force that will advise him on reopening the country.

It was the first of four planned calls involving task force members.

"The people involved in the first call ... described current testing levels in the U.S. as inadequate to effectively reopen the economy," the Journal reported.

The participants reportedly told the president that Americans needed to see much more testing for Covid-19 before they "would be confident enough to return to work, eat at restaurants or shop in retail establishments."

A number of the executives on the hourlong call indicated that are trying to obtain tests for their own companies so that their workers and customers can be screened for the virus, according to the Journal.

The number of Americans tested daily for the coronavirus has been between 120,000 and 140,000 in recent weeks, according to a Washington Post report that noted that rate still leaves the U.S. behind South Korea, Germany, Canada and Italy on testing per capita.

Paul Romer, a New York University economics professor and Nobel laureate, has said that more than 20 million Americans should be tested each day.

The Journal, in its report, said that during the call Trump called "on participants who largely praised the president and his administration."

The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment from CNBC.

Tweet

He expressed confidence that the U.S. economy would eventually recover. But he added, "It may not be in June or July. It may be in August."

New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, echoing advice from many health experts, said Wednesday that there needs to be widespread testing for the coronavirus, coupled with the tracing of people who have been in contact with infected people, before life could return to close to normal in the absence of a vaccine for the virus.

Cuomo called on the federal government to play a lead role in expanding testing.
PARIS  Amazon said Wednesday that it would temporarily halt its operations in France after a court ruled the company had failed to adequately protect warehouse workers against the threat of the coronavirus and that it must restrict deliveries to only food, hygiene and medical products until it addressed the issue.

Amazon contested the findings of the ruling, handed down Tuesday by a civil court outside Paris, and said it would appeal. The court had given the company a deadline of Wednesday evening to carry out the order or face a fine of 1 million euros (nearly $1.1 million) per day.

We have suspended activities in our distribution centers in France, despite the huge investment we have made to ensure and strengthen safety measures for our employees, Amazon said in a statement, adding that it was perplexed by the courts decision. The threatened fine was too steep to risk not complying, Amazon added.

The company lashed out at unions that had brought the court case despite what it said was concrete evidence that it had worked to strengthen safety measures at its six mammoth warehouses around France. The ruling is likely to have consequences for many people in our country, including thousands of employees, Amazon customers and French businesses that make sales on Amazons platform, it added.
Cumberland County corrections officials said 92 prisoners have been released during the coronavirus outbreak, with roughly half occurring because of the viruss spread.

According to Warden Travis Shenk, 45 inmates have been released since March 18 in connection to the pandemic. The other 47 people were already scheduled for release.

Cumberland County announced several safety precautions at the prison in recent weeks as cases in central Pennsylvania grew, including suspending visitations and performing screenings on everyone coming and going from the facility.

Temporary releases have happened in Dauphin and York counties, too, as officials fear the prisons close quarters could cause the virus to spread quickly if its brought inside.

Hundreds of inmates from prisons in counties such as Lancaster, Allegheny, Northumberland, Montour have also been released in recent weeks.

READ MORE:

Coronavirus testing site to open in York County

US retail sales plunge an unprecedented 8.7% in March

Apple announces new iPhone SE for $399, part of proceeds will benefit COVID-19 and HIV/AIDS response
One of President Muhammadu Buharis media aides, Tolu Ogunlesi, has said that the 50million grant from the European Union (EU), will go to the United Nations Basket Fund recently launched in Abuja.

The EU on Tuesday gave the Nigerian government the money to help in the fight against the spread of COVID-19.

A total of 373 cases have been confirmed so far in the country.

In reaction to the news, Ogunlesi tweeted: The 50m EU Funding just announced today (at a meeting with PMB) is going into the UN Basket Fund launched recently in Abuja, and which is managed by the UN system in Nigeria.

According to the EUs Ambassador, Ketil Karlsen, this is its largest single contribution to the response in Nigeria and the largest support that the EU is providing anywhere outside Europe.

We heard your call for assistance and the EU has reacted swiftly as a demonstration of our true partnership, Karlsen said.
Australia's bosses will be unlikely to hire new staff even after the coronavirus lockdowns end, a leading business survey showed.

The National Australia Bank's barometer for March showed business confidence had plunged to a record low as non-essential enterprises were forced to shut three weeks ago.

Employers were twice as anxious about COVID-19 compared with the Global Financial Crisis of 2008 and the most recent recession in 1991, giving the economy a dismal score of minus 66 on the NAB index.

NAB chief economist Alan Oster said a prolonged weakness in business confidence would likely deter bosses from hiring new staff, with the effect deepening the longer the coronavirus restrictions continued.

The National Australia Bank's barometer for March showed business confidence plunging to a record. Employers were twice as anxious about COVID-19 compared with the GFC and the last recession in 1991, giving the economy a dismal score of minus 66. Pictured is Sydney cafe owner Marc Zheng

'There is significant risk that a blow to confidence of this magnitude for an extended period could lead to ongoing fallout in terms of employment growth and capital expenditure by business,' he said.

Business anxiety levels throughout the ages March 2020: minus 66 points as coronavirus forced the shutdown of pubs, clubs, dine-in restaurants and cinemas November 2008: minus 30.3 during the global financial crisis as Democrat Barack Obama won the US presidential election against Republican John McCain December 1990: minus 23.7 after then Labor treasurer Paul Keating declared: 'This is the recession that Australia had to have' September 2001: minus 14.9 as planes crashed into New York's World Trade Centre and Australian airline Ansett was placed into administration Source: NAB monthly business surveys Advertisement

'While industries like recreational and personal services will be most significantly impacted, it is likely that every corner of the economy will feel an impact.'

Westpac senior economist Andrew Hanlan said business confidence was being eroded by the lack of any indication on when restrictions would end.

'The key uncertainty is the future path of the virus and when restrictions can be eased so that businesses can reopen,' he said.

The International Monetary Fund forecast that the impact of the lockdown would cause the worst contraction in the Australian economy since the 1930s Great Depression.

The IMF predicted a 6.7 per cent plunge in Australia's gross domestic product for 2020 - dwarfing the deep downturns suffered during the early 1980s and early 1990s recessions.

Australia was also expected to be among the world's worst affected economies, with the forecast contraction this year more than double the three per cent decline predicted for the global economy.

The International Monetary Fund predicted a 6.7 per cent plunge in Australia's gross domestic product for 2020 - dwarfing the deep downturns suffered during the early 1980s and early 1990s. Treasury is also forecasting unemployment doubling to 10 per cent. Pictured are women queuing up outside a Centrelink office at Marrickville in Sydney's inner west

In 2009, the world economy shrunk by 0.1 per cent, as the GFC reached a climax.

Australia's Treasury had forecast the unemployment rate would double from 5.1 per cent in February to 10 per cent by the end of June.

They had forecast the jobless rate rising to 15 per cent, the highest since the Great Depression, without the $130billion JobKeeper package, which is giving $1,500 a fortnight wage subsidies to six million Australian workers.

In March, NAB's business confidence reading plunged by an unprecedented 64 points to minus 66.

During the GFC in November 2008, Australian businesses had a confidence reading of minus 30.3 while the measure plunged to minus 23.7 in December 1990.

The federal government had committed over $300 billion in stimulus to alleviate the coronavirus crash, significantly increasing public sector debt.

However Treasurer Josh Frydenberg said Australia's debt to GDP ratio was about a quarter of the US or or United Kingdom, and about one seventh that of Japan.

In March, NAB's business confidence reading plunged by an unprecedented 64 points to minus 66. During the GFC in November 2008, Australian businesses had confidence reading of minus 30.3 while the measure plunged to minus 23.7 in December 1990

'Our measures are temporary, targeted and proportionate to the challenge we face and will ensure Australia bounces back stronger on the other side, without undermining the structural integrity of the budget whilst maintaining our commitment to medium term fiscal sustainability,' he said.

The federal government has pumped $214billion into the economy with three stimulus packages.

The COVID-19 response also includes $105billion worth of action from the Reserve Bank of Australia and the Australian Office of Financial Management.

The $320billion in government spending makes up 16.4 per cent of GDP.

The IMF forecast Australia's economy rebounding by 6.1 per cent in 2021.
TULLAMORE-based home brewer Brendan Sewell says a German-style craft beer from White Gypsy Brewery in Templemore, Co Tipperary will suit just fine for people in self-isolation.

TULLAMORE-based home brewer Brendan Sewell has identified the ideal beer for people in self isolation.

Sewell, who writes a weekly craft beer review for the Tullamore and Midland Tribune, recommends a German-style creation from White Gypsy Brewery in Templemore, Co Tipperary.

Writes Sewell: White Gypsy Brewery is one of the few remaining micro-breweries in Ireland that hasn't succumbed to canning their beers as yet and I'm glad as there's something about the classic design of the long-neck bottle that I find very traditional, especially so in Ireland.

The ethos behind White Gypsy's brewing is similar too, in that the styles they tend to brew are usually very classical with minor modern adjustments.

This beer for review contains some interesting, unique and yet traditional ingredients. In particular German malt and yeast. Weyermann branded dark wheat malt is rarely seen in Irish beers but across Europe it is used in versions of Dunkleweizen, Weizenbock, Kolsch and Altbiers. All these beers are very traditional in Germany so White Gypsy have kept their tradition in brewing, and I repeat myself - traditional.

Along with this malt is the classic pale Pilsner malt, also German, and this malt in particular is important as it should allow the dark wheat to shine. Weihenstephan yeast from the Weihenstephaner brewery in Bavaria completes this German classic and it's hard to get any more traditional yeast than one from a brewery founded in 1040!

I'm dying to try this Irish version and I've the correct style of tall glass to fill with the pillowy foam head that I expect to get from a wheat beer.

From the pour, the aroma is unmistakably smoked malt. The bottle states that this is Bamberg style smoked wheat that has been dried out over beechwood logs to impart the unique smoky quality.

Smoked bacon rashers would be a good example of the aroma profile of this beer along with mild clove, banana and bubblegum! The two-inch thick characteristic head of foam and ample carbonation help to waft the aroma around and the first sip only adds to this unique palette of flavours with the sweet bready maltiness of the wheat malt simmering away under the smoked beech.

This is a beer to savour on a cold rainy night by a log fire or when self-isolating! Incredible German-style modern version of a traditional classic.

Craft beer reviewer Brendan Sewell is a Tullamore-based chef, award winning brewer and founder member of the Midlands Beer Club.
Potential coronavirus patients are continuing to be refused testing despite following the government's advice that anyone with mild symptoms should present to clinics.

A rise in community transmissions has led medical experts to urge anyone in certain 'hotspots' across Australia with cold symptoms to attend a COVID-19 clinic.

NSW Health this week singled out ten danger zones across the state, where there is concern over the number of community transmissions.

Liverpool, Blacktown, Cumberland, Westmead and Penrith have all been earmarked as potential hubs in Sydney's west, while Waverley, Woollahra and Randwick, in the city's east, and Ryde in the city's north-west, are also areas of concern.

'In those areas, we have identified cases of COVID-19 where there aren't clear links to clusters,' NSW Chief Health Officer Dr Kerry Chant said.

'We want to assure ourselves that there is not broader community transmission occurring in those areas.'

But a number of people who attended clinics in these areas on Wednesday were told they were not unwell enough to be tested - leaving clinics quiet and nurses standing idle.

Potential coronavirus patients are continuing to be refused testing despite following the government's advice that anyone with mild symptoms should present to clinics

A number of people who attended clinics in this area on Wednesday were turned away and told they were not sick enough - leaving the clinics empty and nurses and doctors standing idle

One man from Woollahra said she felt compelled to get tested after listening to the advice of NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian.

But despite thinking the process would have been streamlined, he soon gave up on the idea after being given the runaround by her doctor and then the testing clinic.

'I said to my fiancee I should get a test as I have mild sore throat and am a bit wheezy on the chest,' he said.

'I drove to the pop up testing area next to Double Bay Doctors but I was turned away as it is appointment only, but they looked very quiet and no cars were queuing.'

He was given a phone number to call so her symptoms could be assessed before an appointment could be booked.

But when he called the hotline she was told her to go to her GP instead.

When he then called her GP, they told her they could not fit her in until Thursday.

In the end he gave up on trying to get a test and chose to self-isolate for a few days instead.

'I have very, very mild symptoms, and I only felt I should get the test as the premier instructed us to do it,' she said.

'It's very frustrating, people won't jump through hoops like this just to get a test.'

NSW has had more than 2,800 confirmed coronavirus cases so far - the most of any state in Australia and more than double Victoria, which has 1,299 sufferers.

These are the suburbs in Sydney that have been identified as possible hotspots by NSW Health, because locals have tested positive to disease without any obvious links to clusters

'Danger zones' across Australia have been identified in areas where there have been a high number of community contractions that doctors cannot trace. Despite residents in these areas being urged to get testing for mild symptoms, some claim they are still being turned away for not being sick enough

It was a similar story for another local who was turned away from a drive-thru testing centre at Bondi Beach, despite believing he met the new criteria to be swab tested.

The man had been experiencing a runny nose and mild sore throat for a few days but only considered getting tested after the government announced testing criteria had been expanded.

During the early stages of the COVID-19 outbreak in Australia, only those with severe symptoms such as shortness of breath or a high fever, or those who had returned to Australia from overseas within recent days, could be tested.

'My housemate lost their sense of smell and went to get tested, so I thought I should do the right thing too  but when I got there they turned me away,' the Coogee local said.

'The nurse told me that only those with fevers or shortness of breath could be tested.

'I pointed out that seemed to be at odds with what the government is now saying, so she said I could get the test - but there was no point putting myself through it when the result would almost certainly come back negative.'

The 'danger zones' flagged by health officials are areas where doctors are at a loss to trace the source where an individual contracted the virus.

There have been more than 6,400 confirmed coronavirus cases across Australia, with 63 deaths linked to the virus

NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian has urged more people to get tested for coronavirus in a bid to stop anyone spreading coronavirus without realising

People were given hand sanitiser and had their temperatures checked before entering Sydney Fish Market on Friday, April 10

With all recently returned travellers having been successfully forced into quarantine and only released after a negative test, there has naturally been a significant drop in the number of cases that can be linked to overseas travellers.

As a direct result of this there has been a spike in the number of community spread cases.

Other states such as Victoria and South Australia have also recently relaxed testing protocols to allow anyone with a fever or breathing difficulties to get checked.

There are currently more than 1,200 known cases of coronavirus in Victoria, with 88 of those in the affluent Stonnington Council area alone.

Essential workers are also able to be checked more easily.

Federal Health Minister Greg Hunt said the biggest concern now is that undiagnosed cases in the community are spreading the virus without knowing.

Daily Mail Australia has contacted NSW Health for further comment.
Apple has just unveiled the new iPhone SE, sticking with the rumored date, even if there was no flashy event - just a press release.

Despite what its name might have you believe, the new iPhone SE is more of a refresh of the iPhone 8 than of the original SE. You can think of it as an iPhone 8 with the latest chipset and a better camera. Oh, there are new colors too, but that's about it.

The new iPhone SE has the iPhone 8's 4.7-inch "Retina HD" screen with True Tone and support for Dolby Vision and HDR10 playback. This is surrounded by large bezels, and below there's a sapphire crystal covered capacitive Touch ID fingerprint sensor like in the iPhone 8. It's powered by the A13 SoC, just like the iPhone 11, 11 Pro, and 11 Pro Max.

Its camera has benefited from the new chipset too. The single 12 MP f/1.8 shooter on the back, features improved Smart HDR photography thanks to the raw power inside that chip. For portrait shots, in lieu of a secondary camera, Apple has gone with something called "monocular depth sensing", which uses machine learning to detect depth and faces. We'll have to see how this compares to the first three Google Pixel generations, in terms of quality of portrait mode shots from one lens.

The camera has "cinematic" video stabilization - and you can record up to 4K at 60fps, with stereo audio. The front-facing selfie cam is still a 7 MP unit, and this has some portrait mode effects too.

Otherwise, this is an iPhone 8, it even ships with the same measly 5W charger in the box. However, the new iPhone SE does support 18W charging, you just need to buy another adapter (or use a beefier one you may have around the house). If you have such an 18W adapter, expect the battery to charge from 0 to 50% in about 30 minutes.

The iPhone SE (2020) - which is what we're calling it for sanity's sake - also supports fast wireless charging, Wi-Fi 6, LTE-A, and dual SIMs, although the second one is eSIM.

Gone is the 3D Touch tech, now replaced with Haptic Touch. It has an IP67 water and dust resistance rating, meaning it can be submerged in up to 1m of water for up to 30 minutes.

The new iPhone SE has grown a lot in size compared to the original SE model, but then again phones have been doing that left and right for the past few years. So it may just qualify as a 'compact' device in this day and age, depending on what your exact definition of that may be.

The 2020 iPhone SE in black, white, and red goes on pre-order this Friday, on April 17, and will start shipping on April 24. In the US, you can get one for $399 with 64GB of storage. So, price-wise at least, it does fit its chosen name. If you need 128GB, you'll have to pay $449, while the 256GB model is $549.

With a qualifying trade-in you can pay just $229 for a brand-new iPhone SE (2020), and Apple offers installments too, starting at $9.54 per month.

Across the pond, the iPhone SE starts at 479 and 419, respectively.
Because the orders always change, amiright?

Theres a bucket-list vacation you and your spouse want to take. Youve been squirreling away money. Youve got an Amah-zing Vacation board on Pinterest. Youve been Googling, and planning and dreaming. Lots and lots of dreaming. Dreaming about that vacation is whats getting you through allergy season and the end of the school year right now.

Or maybe thats just me.

But youre afraid to start buying plane tickets and booking hotels because you dont want to lose your deposits, or worse  the full payments  if and when your spouses orders change and leave gets revoked. And if you dont purchase soon, that incredible fare or deal you found will be as gone as that pint of Ben & Jerrys you thought youd carefully hidden in the back of the freezer.

Or maybe thats just me.

Good news, fearful travelers! There are two ways to book that dream trip and still be protected, and one of them is probably not what you think.

First things first, the obvious one: Buy travel insurance.

But theres a catch. Buying travel insurance is great advice  for civilian families. Travel insurance policies cover most of the things that could happen  to civilians  that would prevent them from being able to take dream trips.

With my military family clients, I make it a point to reiterate that they make sure to read the fine print very carefully. Many travel insurance policies only allow military to cancel their trips if called to duty for a natural disaster, not a combat zone deployment or simple TDY or leave revocation, Casey Cote told me. Shes a military spouse herself and a travel agent, so she knows exactly where were coming from with these fears.

I called a certain travel insurance company to ask about that leave-gets-revoked scenario. (Im not going to name-check that company here because it turns out their policy is pretty standard and other companies impose the same limitations):

Me: Your policy says it covers military who have to cancel because they are called to war. How do you define war?

Representative: We cover it if they have to go to war or if they are called up to respond to a national disaster.

Me: Yes, but how do you define war?

Representative: What do you mean? We define it as war."

Me: But what if my husband got sent to a place that isnt officially a war zone." Like, what if he got sent to Syria? Were not technically at war there. Would that be covered? Or what about a humanitarian mission?

Representative: I have no idea. We would have to review that on a case-by-case basis after it happened.

Me: You mean after weve purchased this expensive trip and this expensive travel insurance policy, you would decide later if the insurance policy would actually cover us? That doesnt really sound like insurance to me.

Representative: Im sorry, Maam. I wish I had a better answer for you. We do cover illness and death in the family.

Me: Okay, so what about non-war orders? What if my husband doesnt get sent anywhere to fight but something comes up and his orders are changed? Would that be covered?

Representative: Again, I really dont know. Wed have to have a letter from the commander explaining the situation and then wed consider it on a case-by-case basis.

Me: Again, that doesnt really sound like insurance.

Cote says this case-by-case basis thing is really common with travel insurance companies.

When you start peeling away the layers of jargon on these policies and ask in-depth questions, agents freeze up and have no clue what to tell you, she said.

Cote also said that many travel insurance policies have a "cancel for work reasons" clause that should cover military duty  emphasis on the should  but sometimes doesnt.

I've run into some travel insurance companies who give me the runaround when I mention that scenario, because the word military seems to change everything, Cote said.

TravelGuard is the travel insurance company Cote said she most often recommends to both military and non-military clients. She said TravelGuard's cancel for any reason clause seems more cut and dry than most, the coverage limitations are clearly defined and the staff in the call center are typically able to answer coverage questions.

Section 2 of TravelGuards Gold Plan benefits explanation states that TravelGuard will reimburse the full cost of the trip if, among other things, the Insured or Traveling Companion is called to active military service or military leave is revoked or reassigned.

But even with that clearly spelled out, you can never be too careful, Cote said.

As I recommend to all my clients, if you are unsure of any part of the policy or do not fully understand any of the certificate jargon, call the insurance company before purchasing your policy and sort those questions out, and be as specific as possible when describing your travel and military needs. Only they can shed light on specific terms as they relate to your travel needs. If you need to buy a more comprehensive plan to cover your needs, then do so. It may come at a higher cost, but that cost will likely outweigh the risk of traveling without having all possible travel snafus covered, she said.

Theres one other option for travel coverage that you may not have thought of: Your credit card.

Useful for more than just running up debt and jimmying the lock when your toddler locks himself in his bedroom, your credit card might  emphasis on the might  offer you some travel protection.

I stumbled across this tidbit of information when planning a trip recently and called my credit card company to ask. No dice. Mine offered some travel protection, but not the kind that would cover our military concerns.

So I started digging and discovered Chases Sapphire card was mentioned on several travel websites as the best card to have when traveling, for a number of reasons.

There may be other cards that offer the same, similar or even better travel benefits, Im certainly not saying Chase is the only one. Also, its worth noting that Im specifically talking about the Chase Sapphire card. Other Chase cards do not feature the same travel protection.

Heres why I like the Chase Sapphire card: The insurance on the Chase Sapphire card specifically covers any change in military orders. And they cover it for both the card holder and a traveling companion, not just an immediate family member. The Chase Sapphire card also covers multiple people in a family  so if the service member has to cancel, the entire family can recoup the costs. It covers cancellations and interruptions for other reasons, too. And, yes, I called Chase, spoke to several representatives, and confirmed all of this, right before I applied for the card.

The representatives did tell me that the amounts can change from cardholder to cardholder and that theres a cap on the amount it will cover. For the card I got, that cap is $10,000 per person with a maximum of $20,000 for a family  which is more than enough to cover any trips we plan on taking.

In any case, before you buy travel insurance or make any big purchases on a credit card that offers travel protection, take 15 minutes to call to talk to the representatives, and then get them to email you the information they report so that youll have it in writing. Hopefully youll never need it, but youll sure be glad to have it if you do.

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Pro-lifers can pray outside abortion clinics in Mich. during coronavirus shutdown, court rules

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Pro-life activists can pray outside abortion clinics in Michigan even as the state has shut down most activities to curb the spread of COVID-19, a court ruled Tuesday.

Earlier this month, Andrew Belanger of the group ONElife for Life filed a lawsuit against the city of Detroit and Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer over being ticketed for demonstrating outside an abortion clinic.

The suit also named Justin Phillips and Cal Zastrow as plaintiffs and said the state was using its stay-at-home executive order to wrongfully target pro-life demonstrations.

U.S. District Court Judge Janet Neff issued an order noting that both parties had reached an agreement that allows for pro-life demonstrations during the lockdown period.

Defendants agree that Executive Order 2020-21 does not prohibit the conduct of Plaintiffs that is alleged in the Complaint, noted the order filed Tuesday.

The City of Detroit shall dismiss the criminal citation issued to Plaintiff Andrew Belanger and any related criminal charges or proceedings that might arise from this citation and the incident related to it.

In return, explained the order, the pro-life activists will release the City of Detroit and each of its employees, agents, departments, officers and representatives from any and all liabilities, damages, or claims, arising out of the incident underlying Plaintiffs complaint.

The parties agree that the above-captioned lawsuit shall be dismissed with prejudice as the provisions of this stipulation resolve Plaintiffs claims, and each party shall be responsible for his or her own costs and attorneys fees, it continued.

The pro-life activists were represented by the American Freedom Law Center, a conservative legal group based in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

AFLC co-founder Robert Muise said in a statement released Tuesday that the order was a clear victory for our clients rights to freedom of speech and free exercise of religion guaranteed by the First Amendment.

It has been said that all tyranny needs to gain a foothold is for people of good conscience to remain silent. During this current pandemic, we will not remain silent; we will remain vigilant, Muise said.

Last month, Whitmer issued an executive order aimed at curbing the spread of the coronavirus, which resulted in the shutting down of many businesses and social gatherings.

On Mar. 31, Belanger and a small group of pro-life activists were demonstrating outside the Scotsdale Womens Center in Detroit, according to the AFLC.

Although the demonstrators were practicing social distancing, police arrived and Belanger was issued a State of Michigan Uniform Law Citation for allegedly violating the executive order.

In addition to the legal decision released on Tuesday, the state government also posted a clarification online stating that the executive order does not prohibit persons from engaging in outdoor activities that are protected by the First Amendment.

Persons may engage in expressive activities protected by the First Amendment within the State of Michigan, but must adhere to social distancing measures recommended by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, including remaining at least six feet from people from outside the persons household, it explained.
Everfresh Natural Foods has expanded its portfolio with a range of sprouted grain loaves and cakes after taking delivery of new equipment from supplier Holmach.

The new products include a banana & walnut cake, a date & orange cake and vegan chocolate cake, as well as wheat-free loaves, all of which are free from dairy, sugar and preservatives, said Gloucestershire-based Everfresh.

With the support of sponsorship from Innovate, Holmach was tasked with improving the food safety and quality of the sprouted grain products, using more efficient processes.

Holmach believed the latest steam/air technology from Lagarde Autoclaves would fit the bill, resulting in a safe, ambient product that offered an extended shelf-life while retaining flavour and moisture, without spoilage. Following a successful trial at Lagardes head office in Montelimar, France, Everfresh purchased a four-basket, 1,400m static retort to integrate within their production line.

The companies also explored new ways of packaging the baked goods to further reduce the processing time, while not detracting from the products appearance and ease of distribution.

Tom Russell, managing director of Everfresh Natural Foods, said he was thrilled with the Lagarde retort, describing it as the Rolls Royce of autoclaves.

The process has been greatly simplified thanks to the Samantha PC-controlled Recipe Management System. Holmach provided training and support and continues to provide thermal processing expertise, he added.

The temperature probes mean we are able to significantly refine the process, further improving quality, as well as saving energy, time and production costs.
MANZINI  The business community anticipates losing over E10 billion in revenue due to the coronavirus.

This was an estimate figure disclosed by Business Eswatini Chief Executive Officer (CEO) Nathi Dlamini.



Dlamini said the revaluing of prospective losses was an exercise that was still underway, as the situation kept evolving. However, Dlamini said based on revised forecasts of the gross domestic product (GDP) growth rates, it was anticipated that the private sector would lose over E10 billion. Dlamini said this loss would be in the short term.



This amount, which is envisaged to be lost by the private sector, amounts to 41.5 per cent of the countrys National Budget, which when announced by the Minister of Finance, Neal Rijkenberg, stood at E24.1 billion.

I would not be as pessimistic as to say there are industries that will not rise again, but I would certainly expect their recovery period to be much longer, he said.



This was after this publication had sought him to assist with an estimate of how much could be lost by Business Eswatini members due to the pandemic.

Furthermore, Dlamini was sought to highlight the industries which were expected to fall through due to the impact of the coronavirus. To this, he could not state for sure which industries were suspected to suffer the most.



However, he said: For example, based on the SARS outbreak around 2002, industries such as travel and tourism took around 18 to 24 months to recover, and we would expect similar timelines, based on how soon the pandemic is contained.



AU relief



The deficit anticipated by the private sector could partially be supported if the country positions itself in order to benefit from the Special Envoys of the African Union (AU).

The special envoys team was set up by the Chairman of the AU, South African President Cyril Ramaphosa, on Saturday. He appointed Dr Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, Dr Donald Kaberuka, Tidjane Thiam and Trevor Manuel as Special Envoys of the AU to mobilise international support for Africas efforts to address the economic challenges African countries will face as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic.



The special envoys will be tasked with soliciting rapid and concrete support as pledged by the G20, the European Union (EU) and other international financial institutions.

President Ramaphosa said: In light of the devastating socio-economic and political impact of the pandemic on African countries, these institutions need to support African economies that are facing serious economic challenges with a comprehensive stimulus package for Africa, including deferred debt and interest payments.



The impact of the coronavirus pandemic has been global in both scale and reach, and this necessitates coordinated international action to capacitate all countries to respond effectively, but most particularly developing countries that continue to shoulder a historical burden of poverty, inequality and underdevelopment, President Ramaphosa said.



A press statement by the AU further quoted President Ramaphosa as having said the sentiment expressed in two recent letters written to the G20 by a group of world leaders and a team of esteemed economists underscored the importance of bolstering health systems in poorer countries. He said this could only be done with the support of the international community.
WASHINGTON  President Trump insists that choosing when to reopen the economy is the biggest decision Ive ever had to make, and, in the short term, he is undoubtedly right. It is a perilous balance of public safety versus economic revival that would test any president, even one not consumed by a looming election.

But behind it is an even broader challenge: Whether an avowedly America First president who has always measured national strength by the size of the Pentagon budget, the number of ships in the Navy and improving the nuclear arsenal has now seen a peril that would lead him to drastically shift how he thinks about the nations security.

Another president might see this as the moment to gather nations together in a collective fight against a virus that leaps borders at astounding speed.

But, so far, Mr. Trump has shown little interest in collective action, apart from episodic telephone calls with allies. His announcement on Tuesday that he would withhold American funding from the World Health Organization  for making the same mistakes he did, underreacting to the coronavirus outbreak and praising Chinese transparency  suggests that, if anything, he is again determined to go it alone.
Coronavirus kept millions of churches from gathering for first time in 2,000 years, Rick Warren says

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While some churches defied government orders to gather for Easter on Sunday, Rick Warren, founding pastor of Saddleback Church in Lake Forest, California, says the coronavirus pandemic prevented millions of churches around the world from physically gathering for Easter Sunday for the first time in 2,000 years.

Because of the worldwide COVID-19 virus pandemic, millions of local churches are going to be unable to meet together this Easter. Now this has never happened in 2000 years, Warren said in a recorded message that was shared with followers of his megachurch online on Sunday ahead of his Easter sermon.

Warren told the Orange County Register that he had planned a sermon for Easter Sunday called Time to Dream, in celebration of the first 40 years of his church as well as its future but had to go produce a different message for his congregants after the pandemic began to unfold. The new message was called Expecting a Resurrection When Life Falls Apart.

Ive never seen anything like this, Warren told the OC Register on Good Friday about the virus. 9/11, Katrina, things come and go. This is different.

Warren explained that along with the rest of the world, many people of faith were having their lives disrupted by the impact of the coronavirus and they are anxious too.

The past weeks Ive received literally thousands of emails, texts, and calls from people distressed by the way this world has been turned upside down, he said before reading a letter from a woman describing her struggles.

Using the story of Christs resurrection, however, Warren made the case that living a life of faith through Christ can help people get through the pandemic.

Jesus resurrection proved that He really was who He claimed to be, it validated His identity. A lot of people in history have claimed to be God. Lots of people have claimed to be God but only one proved it by bringing Himself back to life  its why 2.3 billion Christians are celebrating Easter this week, he said.

The resurrection story, he said, is Jesus model for what people should do when life falls apart. He explained that it is natural to experience anxiety or despondency when going through a crisis, but taking advantage of the power of God that comes through Christ gives people the ability to overcome challenges.

The people whose lives had fallen apart when Christ was crucified and then when they saw Him being raised from the dead, they went from being cowardly to being courageous. They went from being fearful to fearless. They went from being gloomy to being glad, from being hopeless to being hopeful and happy. They went from being powerless to being powerful, from being upset to being unstoppable and Christianity spread through the whole world, he said.

It was seeing the risen Jesus Christ come back from the dead, he said, that caused the transformation.

That quickly changed their lives, then millions of lives and then billions of lives.

The California pastor noted that people will repeatedly go through periods of fear and pain, confusion and grief, and freedom and joy just as Jesus' disciples did between the crucifixion and resurrection of Christ.

Many people are afraid because of this COVID-19 virus and many are in pain because of this COVID-19 virus. When you are in the day of fear and pain, you need to do two things. You do the two things that Jesus did, he said.

He then noted how Jesus reached out to friends ahead of His crucifixion and He also prayed.

Draw close to friends. Before Jesus was betrayed, arrested and tortured, the very last thing He did was spend some time intimately with His friends, Warren said.

The pastor encouraged people to reach out to God in prayer.

He also urged, "Rely on the power of Jesus."

"You can't do this on your own power. ... Willpower is not enough," he stressed. "It takes more than self help,  than positive thinking. Im in favor of positive thinking; its better than negative thinking but it only works on stuff you can control. What about the stuff you cant control? You cant resurrect yourself. You need a savior. God has to do it for you. And thats called salvation."
Jindal Steel and Power Ltd (JSPL) said on Wednesday it has bagged a contract to supply 12,000 tonnes of special grade rail blooms to France Rail Hayange.

Britain and France have also evinced interest in JSPL's products and they are expected to place orders soon, it said in a statement.

JSPL, the only private-sector company to manufacture head-hardened rails, recently bagged a 2,308 tonne supply order from Rail Vikas Nigam Ltd (RVNL) for development of Kolkata Metro Corporation.

Head-hardened rails are typically used in metro rail projects and high-speed freight corridors, which require maximum durability against wear and material fatigue caused by escalating train frequencies, high acceleration and deceleration, abrupt braking and higher axle loads.

Head-hardening technology entails a special heat treatment process that requires precise temperature control to achieve nearly 50 per cent higher hardness as compared to a normal rail.

"JSPL believes in innovation and is undertaking multiple experiments successfully in the rail sector," said Managing Director V R Sharma.

After the rail freight corridor and increasing demands for metro rails, JSPL has got a certification from the Research Designs and Standards Organisation.

The company has also started the production of 1,080 head-hardened heat-treated grade rails, said Sharma.

A part of the 22 billion dollar O P Jindal Group, JSPL is an industrial powerhouse with an active presence in steel, power, mining and infrastructure sectors.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Amid tragedy, we can see a cleaner future. But will we keep sleepwalking towards a climate catastrophe?

I had a text from my brother a week or two ago telling me to go outside and look up. And there in the night sky was a stunning pairing of the crescent moon and Venus, that brightest of planets, blazing 25 million miles (more than 40 million kilometres) away.

Even from a city drowned in street lights, it was a spectacular sight, a quiet moment of wonder in these unsettling times.

I thought of that quote from the famous late American astronomer Carl Sagan. He was writing about a photograph taken by Voyager 1 in 1990 as it headed for the outer fringes of the solar system. There, barely discernible in the vast reaches of space, was a pale blue dot, a lonely speck. It was Planet Earth.

Look again at that dot. Thats here. Thats home. Thats us, Sagan wrote. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives.

Sagans words are a short and powerful treatise on our one chance on this one planet. With the dead from COVID-19 being buried in their thousands, it is no time to lecture on how we should live. But there will be an opportunity soon enough to act on the lessons learned from this crisis.

The Earth is the only world known so far to harbour life, Sagan wrote. There is nowhere else  to which our species could migrate  like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.

And right now, that stand is against a virus of our own making, a crisis that has all but stopped the human world turning on its axis. It is a frightening and scarcely credible time in which to be living.

It is thought that COVID-19 originated in a live animal market in China. Such establishments are a fetid mixing bowl for disease, supplied as they are by the illegal wildlife trade. In an interview with the Guardian, the United Nations environment chief Inger Andersen said: Never before have so many opportunities existed for pathogens to pass from wild and domestic animals to people.

China has now banned live animal markets. But it is critical that the ban is maintained and also extended across the world.

Opportunities from tragedy

This could be a turning point on many levels.

Right now, an unintentional but illuminating, large-scale experiment is under way on global emissions. The pandemic has shut down industrial activity and airline flights, minimised car exhaust fumes and slashed air pollution in our cities. It is this pollution which has created a scourge of respiratory illnesses over time and which has now made millions more susceptible to the worst effects of the coronavirus.



Stanford University research But suddenly the air we breathe is cleaner than it has been in decades. In China, the drop in airborne pollutants over two months is estimated to have saved the lives of 4,000 children below five and 73,000 adults above 70, according to

CO2 emissions have plunged  Chinas industrial output alone dropped by 13.5 percent in January-February from the same period a year earlier. That is the weakest reading since January 1990, when Reuters news agency records started.

But as soon as the pandemic is over, economies will need to rebuild. Typically, after a downturn, like the financial crash of 2008, there is a surge in emissions as nations crank up their economies. This will almost certainly happen this time, too.

But the outbreak has shown that governments can take radical and urgent action to tackle a clear and present danger. The problem is, the dangers presented by the climate crisis seem too distant to matter to most, especially politicians. But if we think COVID-19 is bad, we aint seen nothing yet: the effects of the climate emergency will be far worse down the line.

Amid tragedy, we have had a sniff of a cleaner, safer future. Once this pandemic is over, never will there be a better moment to put our shoulder to the renewable energy wheel and take on the technological challenge of big-scale energy storage for when the wind doesnt blow and the sun doesnt shine. Or we will sleepwalk into another global crisis more malevolent by far than the coronavirus.



Your environment round-up

1. The biggest conference in 10 years on biodiversity may have been postponed because of COVID-19. But that has not stopped the UN biodiversity chief calling for a ban on wildlife markets.

2. Earth online. Young people are now mobilising online under the hashtags #ClimateStrikeOnline and #DigitalStrike, posting pictures of their climate strikes while on lockdown. Fridays for Future have also launched Talks For Future, weekly webinars with scientists, journalists and activists.

3. A story from the archives  one of the most spectacular locations  the remote Lofoten Islands in Norway and the annual cod migration threatened by a changing climate.

4. And a jolly tale of taming the robin.

The final word
A couple who drove hundreds of kilometres from Victoria to New South Wales claimed they made the trip to recycle cans.

Police did not believe they had a valid reason to drive so far and gave them a $1,000 fine for breaking coronavirus restrictions.

NSW Police Commissioner Mick Fuller revealed the absurd excuse in a press conference this morning.

A couple who drove hundreds of kilometres from Victoria to New South Wales claimed they were going to recycle cans.

He said: 'Overnight, there were around 15 additional tickets written for non-isolation.

'Most were individuals again who had multiple warnings, one was a couple that had driven hundreds and hundreds of kilometres from Victoria into New South Wales to allegedly recycle cans.'

New South Wales has a 'return and earn' scheme where people can receive 10c for depositing cans and bottles at recycling centres. Victoria has no such scheme so some people cross the border to make money.

Five more residents at Newmarch House care home in western Sydney have been diagnosed with the virus after a nurse worked for six days with the disease.

Working with a 'scratchy throat', she unwittingly passed the disease to nine residents and five colleagues and is 'mortified'.

New South Wales recorded 11 new cases of coronavirus on Wednesday and no new deaths.

The National Cabinet will meet today to discuss how to lift restrictions, including getting schools back up and running.

Scott Morrison will lead the meeting with state and territory leaders, some of whom are maintaining strict advice about keeping children at home during the coronavirus pandemic.

Mr Morrison is worried about too many students being forced into distance learning

Mr Morrison is worried about too many students being forced into distance learning.

'I'm very concerned about the quality of education that's going to be delivered to our kids this year,' he told 6PR radio.

Deputy chief medical officer Nick Coatsworth says the leaders will look at how to make schools safe, but added that won't include teachers being made to wear personal protective equipment such as face masks.

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 said there were 136 coronavirus cases, or about two per cent of all cases, in Australians aged between five and 18-years-old.

'It quite clearly affects a lower proportion of children,' he told reporters in Canberra.

The federal government is also working on an app to track people's movements that could quickly help trace contacts of those newly diagnosed with the virus.

Singapore, where about 20 per cent of people have signed up to the app, has provided coding information to Australia for development.

Treasurer Josh Frydenberg discussed the state of the global economy again with his G20 colleagues overnight.

Mr Frydenberg stressed the need for government to coordinate economic policies, and for central banks to synchronise their actions on monetary policies.

He also reiterated calls for borders to remain open to allow the free flow of urgent medical supplies and equipment needed to fight the pandemic.

The International Monetary Fund expects the Australian economy to shrink by 6.7 per cent this year, more than double the global rate, amid the coronavirus crisis.

Unemployment is tipped to rise to an average of 7.6 per cent in 2020 and 8.9 per cent in 2021.
State lawmakers gave Gov. Tom Wolf a choice: allow more businesses in Pennsylvania to open or stay the course with his COVID-19 mitigation efforts that he said follows the advice of health experts.

The state Senate on Wednesday voted to send to the governor a bill that would require him to develop a plan adhering to federal guidelines. It would allow certain employers to reopen their businesses and get workers back to work within the next three weeks. The Senate voted 29-21, with all Republicans and independent Sen. John Yudichak of Luzerne County supporting the bill.

Late Wednesday, Wolf indicated he would veto the bill. Earlier Wednesday before making his intentions clear, Wolf said the course were on right now is the least bad choice we have to make and with all the painful decisions that go with it. Its the right course.

Wolf has remained firm about his need for Pennsylvanians to remain home to limit the spread of the coronavirus. The state remains under a stay-at-home order until April 30.

Late Wednesday afternoon, Lt. Gov. Fetterman sent a message on Tweeter that suggests Wolf is likely to reject it. In citing the Senate vote, Fetterman wrote rhymes with veto.

Fetterman wrote that everyone wants the state to reopen but added, One side wants science and experts to lead that discussion on the when.

Based on the Houses 107-95 vote to pass this measure on Tuesday and the vote in the Senate, neither chamber appears to have the two-thirds votes needed to override a veto if that is the path Wolf chooses.

Senate Bill 613, as amended by and passed in the House on Tuesday, would require the governors plan to use Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and federal Homeland Securitys Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency guidelines in determining which businesses can be open during the coronavirus emergency disaster.

Some 45 states have used the CDC and this federal guidance to determine which businesses can operate during this coronavirus crisis. Meanwhile, health experts, including the states Health Secretary Dr. Rachel Levine, have cautioned against reopening the economy to the extent this bill could do.

Levine said it was premature and could lead to a tsunami of cases" that could overwhelm the states health care system. She called Senate Bill 613 reckless and irresponsible.

As of midnight Tuesday, 26,490 people in Pennsylvania have been infected and 647 have died, according to the state Department of Health. Wolf and Levine have said the curve is flattening but also said social distancing measures are necessary to continue the states progress and save lives.

Senate Republicans argued that the the list of life-sustaining businesses that the Wolf Administration developed and the accompanying waiver process created inconsistencies and confusion and shows favoritism. Following federal guidelines for businesses that choose to reopen to follow would address that inequity, they said.

Senate Majority Leader Jake Corman, R-Centre County, said this bill wouldnt lead to a massive reopening of businesses, just those that can meet the federal guidelines laid out by the CDC and U.S. Department of Homeland Security.

"We need a path forward that continues to protect the lives of vulnerable Pennsylvanians without sacrificing the livelihoods of more than a million workers, Corman said. We need to create a process that is fair and transparent, that truly protects the health of state residents and mitigates the spread of this virus.

Sen. John DiSanto, R-Dauphin County, said the governors extreme approach has forced more than 1.3 million Pennsylvanians out of work so far, put businesses at risk of permanent closure, and imperiled the long-term health of Pennsylvania residents and our economy.

He said this bill will put the state on equal footing with other states and countries that have been able to maintain more business activities and employment during the pandemic.

Pennsylvanians must be afforded the same freedom to take appropriate precautions about their lives and livelihoods, DiSanto said.

This legislation is not a setback to the health first approach we have in place, said Sen. Lisa Baker, R-Luzerne County, who was among the many senators who participated in the Senate session remotely. It is a hard realization that things have gone too far.

But Democrats stood with health experts who urged a more measured approach to reopening the economy when the virus has slowed and the health care system has the capacity to help prevent the virus from killing people.

This is not the time to jeopardize the public health and safety, said Sen. Steve Santarsiero, D-Bucks County. There is a better way to go about what were trying to do here and this is not it.

Sen. Judy Schwank, D-Berks County, agreed that the timing of the bill is wrong. Testing for the virus and antibodies are not readily available and health care workers dont have the equipment they need to do their job.

If they dont have enough equipment, how can we possibly redirect more to other businesses. I just dont think we are prepared to take this step, she said.

Senate Democratic Leader Jay Costa of Allegheny County added, this fight has come with sacrifices. I know that our business community is feeling them deeply but the most important thing at this point in time is our health.

Workers will undoubtedly get sick," he said. "Customers will get sick and the virus will spread to their families and we will lose progress, all of the progress that we have made over the past four-and-a-half or five weeks.

Costa said the legislation would take authority away from the governor.

The Senate also amended a House-passed bill (Senate Bill 327) to insert a provision giving county commissioners and county executives the authority to decide when businesses inside their jurisdiction should open. The Senate passed that bill by a 29-21 vote, with all Democratic senators opposing it. That bill now returns to the House for its concurrence on that change.

Senate Republicans said the governors one-size-fits-all approach to keeping businesses closed is inappropriate, particularly in areas where cases of the virus are minimal. Democrats said the virus doesnt respect county lines and political boundaries. Leaving it up to individual counties to decide whether business should be open is a bad move, Democratic lawmakers said.

So does Wolf.

He said he wouldnt support the bill if it reaches his desk. He said those who authored and support the bill want to move on to the next phase of recovering from the economic devastation this virus was caused.

But this is something we all need to do as a commonwealth, the governor said. So I have concerns about handing over the responsibility for opening up, especially in places where we might not be perfectly ready.

Note: This story has been updated to reflect the fact that Gov. Tom Wolf plans to veto the bill.

Jan Murphy may be reached at jmurphy@pennlive.com. Follow her on Twitter at @JanMurphy.

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Filmmaker Joel Coen's upcoming take on William Shakespeare's classic "Macbeth" is titled "The Tragedy of Macbeth".

The director, who has made some of the most critically-acclaimed films such as "Fargo", "The Big Lebowski" and "No Country For Old Men" with his brother Ethan Coen, is going solo for the new project.

The film will feature his wife, actor Frances McDormand and Denzel Washington in the lead.

Talking to Film Stage along with Joel, McDormand said the new adaptation will be different from the previous iterations of the famous play.

"I think a very important thing about Joel's adaptation is that we are not calling it 'Macbeth'. We're calling it 'The Tragedy of Macbeth', which I think is an important distinction. In Joel's adaptation, we are exploring the age of the characters and our adaptation the Macbeths are older.

"Both Denzel and I are older than what is often cast as the Macbeths. We're postmenopausal, we're past childbearing age. So that puts a pressure on their ambition to have the crown. I think the most important distinction is that it is their last chance for glory," the Oscar-winning actor said.

Joel described the new take as a thriller.

"I think that is something that I've always sort of felt when watching the play and also something that became more clear and more interesting to me as I was getting into it and doing the adaptation.

"It's interesting how Shakespeare sort of pre-figured certain tropes in American thriller and crime literature that were common in the early part of the 20th century," he said.

Joel said the echoes of the Shakespearean story, which follows an ambitious Scottish general and his scheming wife, has often been felt in American crime fiction.

"That kind of fiction I used to read as a kid. I thought it would be interesting to bring certain aspects of that to the production of the movie," he added.

Produced by A24 and Scott Rudin, "The Tragedy of Macbeth" will also feature Brendan Gleeson and Corey Hawkins.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
- Leads Recent Financings of PIC Therapeutics and Amphista Therapeutics

- Portfolio Company Arrakis Therapeutics Partners with Roche

LONDON, April 15, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- Advent Life Sciences ('Advent') announces the launch of two exciting new cancer companies, PIC Therapeutics Inc ("PIC") and Amphista Therapeutics Ltd ("Amphista"), and a major partnership between portfolio company Arrakis Therapeutics Inc ("Arrakis") and Roche. This continues Advent's long-running investment and support of early-stage innovative biotechnology companies with a paradigm-shifting approach to the discovery of new medicines. Since 2006, Advent-backed companies have obtained regulatory approvals for 14 innovative medicines and medical products, reflecting the calibre and commitment of the founding scientists, clinicians and entrepreneurs that Advent has supported. In that time, the Advent portfolio has achieved over 20 exits.

Today it was announced that Advent led the close of a $5M Seed investment round in its portfolio company, Boston-based PIC, which focuses on transforming the treatment of cancer though the selective modulation of oncogene translation. PIC was co-founded by Professor Gerhard Wagner of Harvard University and Dr Richard Peters. The company is led by CEO Sun Altbach and Alan Walts, Executive Chairman and Venture Partner at Advent. Belinda Termeer, PIC Board member, also participated in the financing.

Recently two other companies co-founded by Advent, announced success stories; Massachusetts-based Arrakis, pioneering the discovery of a new class of small molecule medicines that directly target RNA, and Glasgow-based Amphista, creating first-in-class cancer therapeutics that harness the body's natural processes to degrade and selectively remove disease-causing proteins.

Amphista, which Advent spun out of the lab of Alessio Ciulli at the University of Dundee, closed a $7.5 million Series A round. Amphista discovers and designs small molecules that act in a different way from conventional PROTACs and the company's initial focus is to apply its insights to the design of anti-cancer agents.

Arrakis announced a strategic collaboration and license agreement with Roche in which Arrakis received a $190 million upfront cash payment, with the potential to achieve payments totalling up to multiple billions of dollars, for the discovery of RNA-targeted small molecule drugs against a broad set of targets. Advent founded Arrakis in October 2015 with Jennifer Petter, Advent Venture Partner Alan Walts, and the late Henri Termeer.

"Advent has a deep and enduring commitment to founding companies with paradigm-changing approaches. It is a privilege to support the scientists, clinicians and entrepreneurs in our companies as they realise important medical breakthroughs. We look forward to similar success at Amphista, Arrakis and PIC," said Raj Parekh, General Partner at Advent Life Sciences.

Advent Life Sciences Venture Partner, Arrakis co-founder, and PIC Executive Chairman Alan Walts, commented, "Since its founding in 2015, Arrakis has established a leadership position in the field of small molecule RNA modulation. We are thrilled to see the recently announced partnership with Roche, which will support Arrakis' mission of transforming drug discovery. PIC Therapeutics is poised to transform the treatment of cancer and we are excited to partner with the PIC team as a lead investor."

Advent's highly experienced and diverse team of 16 investment professionals, all of whom are scientifically or clinically qualified, comprises serial entrepreneurs who have founded numerous companies that have discovered important new medicines for a range of unmet needs. The team takes an active role in both founding and supporting its portfolio companies.

About Advent Life Sciences

Advent Life Sciences founds and invests in early- and mid-stage life sciences companies that have a first- or best-in-class approach to unmet medical needs. The investing team consists of experienced professionals, each with extensive scientific, medical and operational experience, a long-standing record of entrepreneurial and investment success in the US and Europe and is particularly focused on supporting entrepreneurs and founders to take innovative new medical entities from concept to approval. The firm invests in a range of sectors within life sciences, principally drug discovery, enabling technologies and med tech, always with an emphasis on innovative, paradigm-changing approaches. Advent Life Sciences has a presence in the UK, US and France. For more information, please visit www.AdventLS.com

About Arrakis Therapeutics

Arrakis Therapeutics is a biopharmaceutical company pioneering the discovery of a new class of medicines that directly target RNA. Arrakis is building a proprietary pipeline of RNA-targeted small molecule (rSM) medicines focused on cancer and genetically validated targets in other disease areas. The company brings together scientific leaders in RNA structure, chemistry and biology, along with a highly experienced management team and the backing of leading life sciences investors. The company is located in Waltham, Massachusetts. For more information, please visit www.arrakistx.com or engage with them on Twitter @ArrakisTx or on LinkedIn.

About Amphista Therapeutics

Amphista Therapeutics is a biopharmaceutical company creating first-in-class therapeutics that help harness the body's naturalprocesses to selectively and efficiently degrade and remove disease causing proteins. The company's pipeline of novel small molecules that cause targeted protein degradation (TPD) is focused on challenging diseases including cancer. Amphista is a spin-out of renowned TPD expert Professor Alessio Ciulli's labs at the University of Dundee, and is based in BioCity Glasgow, Scotland. The company is funded by leading life science investors including Advent Life Sciences, the European Investment Fund, the Scottish Investment Bank, and BioMotiv. For more information please visit www.amphista.com

About PIC Therapeutics

PIC Therapeutics is a Boston, MA-based biotechnology company focused on fundamentally changing how we treat cancer by developing a new generation of therapeutics based on the modulation of RNA translation. PIC's therapeutics target the "master switch" of cancer signaling pathways, selectively blocking oncogene protein production by modulating the Pre-Initiation Complex (PIC) that drives their mRNA translation. PIC Therapeutics' selective approach has the potential to simultaneously modulate multiple oncogenic drivers leading to a powerful new generation of cancer-treating therapeutics. PIC is guided by a dedication to improving cancer patient outcomes and to realizing the potential of our technology to their benefit. For more information please visit www.pictherapeutics.com

Media contacts:

Advent Life Sciences

Laura Lane

pr@adventls.com

Scius Communications

Katja Stout

katja@sciuscommunications.com
Leading health experts denounced President Donald Trumps decision to halt U.S. funding for the World Health Organization amid the coronavirus pandemic.

Trump announced the move on Tuesday, accusing the WHO of failing in its basic duty to initially warn the world of the burgeoning public health crisis that is believed to have originated in China. Trump failed to acknowledge his own refusal to take action on pandemic warnings.

Lawrence Gostin, a global health law expert from Georgetown University, told MSNBCs Ari Melber that therell be many more deaths without a WHO thats empowered.

Check out the segment here:

Gostin also predicted a further loss of U.S. global influence as a consequence of Trumps move:

I predict the world will step into leadership vacuum @POTUS created by cutting @WHO funding. China, Europe etc will increase funding. Only loser is US b/c we will lose all our influence. In global health & amidst a pandemic, America will lose its voicehttps://t.co/ETl1DUexS3  Lawrence Gostin (@LawrenceGostin) April 15, 2020

Richard Horton, the editor-in-chief of the Lancet medical journal, described Trumps decision as a crime against humanity, tweeting every scientist, every health worker, every citizen must resist and rebel against this appalling betrayal of global solidarity.

President Trumps decision to defund WHO is simply thisa crime against humanity. Every scientist, every health worker, every citizen must resist and rebel against this appalling betrayal of global solidarity. https://t.co/7hTwUZ4lJV  richard horton (@richardhorton1) April 14, 2020

The presidents decision makes Americans less safe, lets be clear about that, Thomas Bollyky, the director of the Global Health Program at the Council on Foreign Relations, explained to CNNs Don Lemon:

Continue reading on HuffPost
Social distancing measures need to be lifted in a gradual and prudent manner that suits each localitys situation so as to achieve the dual target of effectively controlling the COVID-19 pandemic and ensuring socio-economic development.

Prime Minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc (centre) chairs the meeting on April 15

Prime Minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc made the remark at a meeting on April 15 among the Governments permanent members, the national steering committee on COVID-19 prevention and control, ministries, sectors and localities. This event reviewed the implementation of the PMs Directive 16 on urgent measures against the disease and discussed the next steps.

Addressing the session, PM Phuc thanked the whole people for supporting the Party and States policies on the COVID-19 combat, saying that generally, the entire society has complied with Directive 16 well with good outcomes obtained.

He called on people to continue supporting the Government and adhering to disease prevention and control measures.

Although Vietnam has secured certain achievements in the work, there remain latent risks of community transmission which could turn small hotspots into large outbreaks, he noted, requesting all to stay vigilant, keep in mind that fighting the pandemic is like fighting an enemy, and continue social distancing to protect peoples health and lives.

The Government leader pointed out the necessity to have cautious and appropriate measures to gradually bring back the normal life when the pandemic is pushed back.

He also stressed that an effective fight against COVID-19 must be based on the maintenance of economic activities at certain levels.

At the meeting, PM Phuc agreed with the national steering committee about the classification of localities into three groups  those with high risks, risks and low risks of COVID-19 transmission. The list of localities in three groups can be changed depending on their situations.

Accordingly, the high-risk group gathers 12 localities, namely Hanoi, Ho Chi Minh City, Lao Cai, Quang Ninh, Bac Ninh, Ninh Binh, Da Nang, Quang Nam, Binh Thuan, Khanh Hoa, Tay Ninh and Ha Tinh. They will continue implementing Directive 16, which includes social distancing among measures, until April 22 or April 30, depending on their situation, or even longer if new infections are found.

The group with risks comprises 15 localities: Binh Duong, Thai Nguyen, Can Tho, Nam Dinh, Ha Nam, Nghe An, Hai Phong, Kien Giang, Thai Nguyen, Thua Thien-Hue, Lang Son, An Giang, Binh Phuoc, Dong Thap and Soc Trang. They have to carry out Directives 15 and 16 until April 22. The next steps for them will be decided on April 22 basing on the reality.

Meanwhile, though the 36 remainders have low risks, the possibility of COVID-19 transmission is still very high, so they have to continue complying with Directive 15, according to the PM.

He ordered the chairpersons of provincial-level Peoples Committee to decide social distancing measures to be applied in their localities, asking for those violating regulations on disease prevention and control to be strictly handled.

Besides, the existing policy on exit-entry control needs to be continued until April 30, PM Phuc added./.VNA
THE National Environmental Council is looking forward to form a team of environmental experts who will study the causes of serious damage and ruling waves on the Coastal stretch where two prominent Dar es Salaam hotels are situated.

The team will be given four days for the study and report results to the Vice President Office.

Calling for the expert views on the problem over the weekend, Minister of State in Vice- Presidents Office Mussa Zungu (Union and Environment), said that the VPO was aware of the acrimonious relations between managements of the two hotels as a result of the effects of raging waves, but quipped that only expert views would tell the real causes and suggest solutions.

The minister visited the area following written complaints by some owners of the hotels charging that the protective conservation measures taken by neighbouring hotel complicated the situation and increased gravity of sea devastation in the area.

The minister was sceptical, saying he was not sure if that was the case. I have come here because we are aware of blames and counter-blames on ravages of the sea that are threatening the existence of your valueless buildings and businesses.

The cause of the acrimonious relations might be effects of climate change, not the ones suggested to us. So only expert views will tell the bona fide causes and propose solutions, said the minister.

Mr Zungu said effects of climate change were not always overt, arguing that the best approach to the problem would be expert study by environment experts.

He said he found similar coastal problems in Pemba.

He called for joint efforts between the government, private sectors and environment stakeholders to fight effects of climate change.

The minister said the government wants to investors in all sectors the economy and does not see investors at logger heads.

He called on investors to respect laws, regulations and guidelines on protecting the environment.

NEMC Director General Samuel G wamaka called on investors to employ environment experts who would make environmental audits annually and advise managements on how to handle environment issues before they got off hand.

Tanzania has over 800 kilometres of coastline, stretching from the Kenya border in the north to the Mozambican border in the south.
The Philadelphia skyline seen from Market Street in Upper Darby, where remote governance during the coronavirus pandemic is raising concerns, on April 5, 2020. Read more

While appearing on Good Morning America, White House Coronavirus Task Force adviser Deborah Birx recently said: Were concerned right now about the Philadelphia area. Vice President Mike Pence called Gov. Tom Wolf to say the federal government planned to elevate Pennsylvania to the top of the priority list for some of the scarce supply of personal protective equipment. As the pandemic continues and local governments increasingly serve as the federal systems first line of defense, they need to establish clear priorities in addressing the implications and supporting the diverse needs of our communities in distress.

The pandemic influenced many municipalities to devote time and resources toward stringent public health and safety efforts, suspending projects and personnel considered nonessential. Local government administrators throughout the region are spending every spare moment crunching the numbers to understand and plan for the forthcoming economic devastation.

Indeed, Philadelphia Mayor Jim Kenney already announced plans to present a new budget to City Council on May 1, anticipating catastrophic services cuts the likes of which have never been needed. This week, the Pennsylvania legislature convened an emergency session to provide an immediate cash infusion to state agencies struggling to keep pace with the demand for medical and financial support services.

Yet, the recently elected leadership of Upper Darby Township Council appears undeterred by the pandemics fiscal devastation and continues to plod along with business as usual. The newly installed legislature of Pennsylvanias sixth-largest municipality, led by Council President Laura Wentz, recently expended precious taxpayer resources to litigate the most mundane, nonurgent matters, such as updated fee schedules for code enforcement for hours on end online, in lieu of the standard public hearings at the municipal building. Wentz initiated a virtual Council meeting on April 1 at 7 p.m. Unbelievably, it droned on until shortly after 1:30 a.m.

Prior to the ban on gatherings during the pandemic, in an unorthodox resolution, Upper Darby Council tightened up restrictions on the public for questioning or debating with members of Council during public meetings. This resolutions dubious relationship with the First Amendment notwithstanding, the subsequent shift to a virtual governance model managed to further exacerbate the trampling of citizens rights to participatory democracy by relegating public comment to a selective reading of prescreened emails. Fighting a virulent pathogen has changed the world, but when did it turn democratically elected councilmembers into arbiters of free speech?

 READ MORE: Government transparency is also falling victim to the coronavirus pandemic

According to local economist Joel Naroff, the eventual unemployment rate could exceed 20%. He cited the University of Michigans Current Conditions Index finding that we must prepare for a longer and deeper recession.

Instead of buckling down, last week, the Upper Darby Township Council approved a controversial school district land development plan in a meeting conducted exclusively online. The school districts massive and expensive capital improvement plans had been largely panned by already overburdened taxpayers prior to the pandemic-induced recession. Yet, an affirmative vote to proceed with the districts most recent proposal was pushed through via Facebook Live shortly after 1 a.m. Even those who managed to stay awake until the bitter end of Wentzs online gabfest could not voice their concerns due to the muzzle on challenging councilmembers, a ban on raising concerns deemed redundant, or a simple lack of functional alternatives given the technological limitations.

When our recently robust economy descends into the fiscal abyss, citizens rightly demand that local government clarify its focus. Taxpayers should not add to their current worries that local legislators will utilize subterfuge to fast-track nonurgent policy matters.

 READ MORE: Times of extraordinary government power require more transparency, not less | Opinion

We know that COVID-19 presents a clear threat to our physical well-being. We must not allow it to also compromise our civic well-being.

Residents affected by the school district plans range from seniors living on fixed incomes who cannot afford the projected property tax increases, to families with small children whose educations are at stake, and neighbors whose lives will be upended by the construction. Upper Darbys Council president should have arranged an extension with the school district on the land development vote until after this public health crisis ends. Irrespective of ideological disposition, there should be broad consensus that any vote of local consequence that occurs after 1 a.m. via technology that limits public participation fails to meet the most basic standards of transparency and due process. Their outcomes should be afforded legitimacy accordingly.

In a democracy, process matters. While far from exclusive to Upper Darby Township Council, these experiments in virtual governance demonstrate that video chats may be the perfect anecdote for alleviating the personal pain of social distancing, but fall painfully short of ensuring the health of our democracy.

Terry Tracy is the co-founder and CEO of Broad + Liberty Inc. ttracy@broadandliberty.com
Iran said Wednesday the world is learning that the United States "kills people", after President Donald Trump suspended US funding for the World Health Organization amid the coronavirus pandemic.

Trump has accused the UN body of covering up the seriousness of the COVID-19 outbreak in China before it spread around the world.

The US president on Tuesday ordered that payments amounting to $400 million be halted pending a review of the WHO's role in allegedly "severely mismanaging and covering up the spread of the coronavirus".

The death toll from the COVID-19 pandemic has topped 125,000 around the world, with more than two million people infected by the disease since December.

Iran's Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif likened the funding freeze to Washington's "maximum pressure" campaign against his country.

The United States launched a campaign of crippling sanctions against Iran in 2018 after Trump unilaterally withdrew from a nuclear deal.

"The shameful defunding of WHO amid a pandemic will live in infamy," Zarif wrote on Twitter.

"The world is learning what Iran has known & experienced all along," he said.

"US regime's bullying, threatening & vainglorious blathering isn't just an addiction: it kills people." Iran itself is battling the Middle East's most deadly outbreak which has left over 4,700 dead and more than 76,300 infected.

It has repeatedly called on the Trump administration to reverse its sanctions policy, which has been opposed even by some US allies, particularly since the pandemic hit. Medicines and medical equipment are technically exempt from the US sanctions but purchases are frequently blocked by the unwillingness of banks to process purchases for fear of incurring heavy US penalties.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
While Massachusetts is expanding coronavirus testing across nursing homes and other long-term care facilities, some operators and health care advocates say persistent gaps could lead to more cases and deaths among some of the states most vulnerable residents.

The numbers are sobering. Over 11% of the known COVID-19 cases at long-term care facilities have ended in death, compared to a statewide rate of just over 3%, according to an analysis of data released Tuesday by the Department of Public Health. Nearly half the states 957 reported deaths were at long-term care facilities, and the 3,907 cases reported among residents and employees represents 14% of the state total.

The majority of long-term care facilities in Massachusetts have not detected a case of the coronavirus  but health care workers and executives from several operators say testing remains limited a month into the state of emergency.

If we are trying to prevent an outbreak, why wait until we have an outbreak to go and test? said Anne Thomas, president and CEO of the Glenmeadow Retirement Community in Longmeadow. The facility has had one resident test positive for COVID-19, but the majority are independent living residents who do not qualify for testing under the states mobile testing program.

If we are really going to crack this thing, we are going to need to be a lot more proactive, Thomas said.

JGS Lifecare, which operates the Leavitt Family Jewish Home and the Sosin Center for Rehabilitation (JNH) in Longmeadow, sent a letter to families last week saying 21 residents who contracted COVID-19 have died. The company cited limited access to testing and the narrow criteria as barriers to preventing the spread of the virus.

Instead of waiting for testing to become available through channels ordinarily available to nursing facility providers, we proactively contracted with a private lab to begin the process of wide-scale testing of our residents at JNH, the letter reads.

Over half the facilitys 180 residents  and over half its 84 employees  tested positive, JGS Lifecare said.

Efforts to expand testing at long-term care facilities began March 31, when the Department of Public Health launched a mobile testing program.

The testing was initially approved for nursing homes, but the program expanded to include assisted living facilities and certain group homes. Now those facilities with trained clinical staff can order tests to administer or get the National Guard to test people, as they did at the Holyoke Soldiers Home, if at least one resident has symptoms.

Health and Human Services Secretary Marylou Sudders, director of the states COVID-19 Command Center, said last week that samples collected by the mobile teams would be prioritized for testing by the Broad Institute, with results returned within 48 hours.

In its first week, the National Guard was deployed to 80 nursing homes and rest homes across the state, conducting more than 1,300 tests. On April 6, DPH started letting the facilities with trained clinical staff to order test kits and conduct the tests internally, sending samples to the state lab for testing.

As of Monday, the state has conducted more than 3,700 on-site tests at more than 220 facilities. At least 35 facilities ordered test kits to collect samples on their own, Gov. Charlie Baker said Monday. The state sent out almost 4,500 tests.

Baker said the rollout of the mobile testing program and the quick implementation of no-visitation policies in facilities across the state helped keep the rate of infection relatively low among long-term care facilities that house older residents.

Gov. Charlie Baker speaks during a media availability at the State House to discuss updates relating to COVID-19 on April 13, 2020 in Boston.Staff Photo By Nancy Lane/MediaNews Group/Boston Herald

Speaking from the Massachusetts State House Monday afternoon, Baker touted those two actions as the reason a fraction of the states roughly 1,000 facilities had at least one confirmed COVID-19 case.

The large percentage of facilities without cases is quite a tribute, I think, to a lot of the folks who work in many of those institutions, and we shouldnt forget that, he said.

The states latest figures show 214 long-term care facilities with confirmed cases.

But health care operators argue the number of outbreaks and the severity of COVID-19s impact will only worsen if testing is not more widely available.

Tara M. Gregorio, president of the Massachusetts Senior Care Association, wrote in a letter to Baker and legislative leaders that one model projects thousands of infections and deaths among nursing home residents if there are more delays in widespread, comprehensive testing and access to protective gear.

In the worst case scenario, Gregorio projects up to 19,000 nursing home residents, or half of the resident population, and one-fifth of employees could become infected. Gregorio said the model suggests a death rate of up to 10% of residents.

The most likely scenario, she added, predicts more than one-third of the nursing facility population contracting the virus, killing 3% of residents.

In the letter, Gregorio said the states mobile testing program is well-intentioned but not enough to meet the needs of facilities across the state.

While we appreciate the Command Centers recent and ongoing expansion of mobile testing, the reality is that facilities are still facing significant barriers, including extended wait times for the testing, delayed testing results, as well as inconsistent testing guidance, the letter states.

Gregorio said wider surveillance testing has to happen now to avoid a much larger crisis.

While Massachusetts is among the top states in the U.S. for testing per capita, Baker agreed more needs to be done.

If you were to say to any of us here, are we doing enough testing? We would say no, he said, and if you talk to most other states, they would say the same thing.

Baker said the bulk of his call Monday with Vice President Mike Pence and other governors focused on testing capacity, but it is unclear whether what that means as far as testing among residents in long-term care facilities and the staff.

The Loomis Lakeside at Reeds Landing in Springfield, a 500-resident senior living facility, has had four residents test positive for the coronavirus. All four lived within the facilitys 42-bed skilled nursing unit, said Margaret Mantoni, CEO of Loomis Communities.

"The testing has been extremely limited," she said. "Knowledge is power."

The Loomis properties include the senior communities Applewood in Amherst and Loomis Village in South Hadley. Applewoods independent living community would not qualify for the mobile testing program. Some of the residents and staff at Loomis Village, which has both independent and assisted living, could qualify.

Lori Mayer, a spokeswoman for Genesis Health Care, which owns Heritage Hall in Agawam, said access to testing at the nursing homes is improving since the mobile testing program launched.

So far at Heritage Hall West, 57 residents and 12 staff have tested positive. There have been four deaths, she said. The disease has not been found in the other Agawam Heritage Hall facilities.

We are now able to get results within 24 hours and can test entire buildings if needed, Mayer wrote. "At the end of the day, we cant fight what we cant see. Thats why testing is so critical for nursing home patients, residents and those caring for them. "

Lisa Gaudet, vice president of communications for Berkshire Healthcare, said dealing with a set of state responses that change every day is part of the challenge. Berkshire Healthcare has 15 skilled nursing facilities and three senior housing communities. Its operations include the newly opened East Longmeadow Skilled Nursing Facility, Day Brook Village in Holyoke and Linda Manor in Northampton.

Berkshire Healthcare is testing residents when, under DPH guidelines, there is a resident with symptoms, Gaudet said.

I hope we are keeping up with it, she said. We are all learning, and we are learning every day.

Gov. Charlie Baker listens as Health and Human Services Secretary Marylou Sudders speaks during a media availability at the State House to discuss updates relating to COVID-19 on April 13, 2020 in Boston.Staff Photo By Nancy Lane/MediaNews Group/Boston Herald

Identifying clusters

AdviniaCare, a residential care facility in Wilmington, was designated to become a treatment facility for only COVID-19 patients until social workers and other officials convinced the state to test the residents and staff.

Fifty-one of the 98 residents who were set to be moved tested positive for the virus, prompting the state to halt its plans, WBUR reported last week.

In doing that testing, more than half of individuals who were asymptomatic tested positive, Sudders told reporters Monday.

The state changed course and selected multiple decommissioned or otherwise empty nursing homes to be converted into COVID-19 treatment facilities, adding 986 beds for COVID-19 patients.

The testing at AdviniaCare may serve as a lesson for why testing asymptomatic residents is crucial to preventing the spread of the coronavirus  but most long-term care facilities across Massachusetts do not have that option.

It would be wonderful to have the ability for the city to be able to test congregate populations like those individuals who are living in shelters so we can rule out COVID-19 or rule in COVID-19 and monitor those individuals in shelter facilities, as well as long-term care and nursing facilities, said Helen R. Caulton-Harris, Springfields health commissioner.

Caulton-Harris is tracking multiple clusters of cases at nursing homes and long-term care facilities, Including the outbreak at Chapin Center that has infected at least 43 people and killed one resident.

When multiple cases are identified, local health officials follow up with those who tested positive to check if they have good personal hygiene habits and find out who they might have exposed. Health officials then have to track down the exposed individuals, warning them to self-quarantine, as part of a process called contact tracing.

The Chapin Center in Springfield.

If a facility sees a rise in cases, the state sends an epidemiologist to make sure the facilitys staff and residents are practicing social distancing and washing their hands regularly, Caulton-Harris said.

The role of local public health is then to follow up with that facility and to make sure that they are doing everything they can to keep the residents safe by social distancing and just monitoring the symptoms of the residents there, Caulton-Harris said.

In some cases, the state could order increased testing and order all residents to be tested, but the state is in charge of providing those test kits, she said.

The kits are not widely available to test people in congregate settings, including nursing homes where there may be asymptomatic residents and employees. Springfield has been asking for test kits, but has not received them, Caulton-Harris said.

Sudders said the state is taking steps to test more asymptomatic people. She said the Executive Office of Health and Human Services reviewed the needs of various nursing homes over the weekend, including staffing, protective equipment supplies and infection control.

Sudders also said she hopes the creation of COVID-19 wings and non-COVID-19 areas within long-term care facilities could help reduce the spread, in addition to additional testing in these locations. Her comments come a week after the state announced $30 million in funding for COVID-19 treatment within nursing homes, and another $50 million in funding for all nursing homes across the state.

Its another thing to check temperature, but people may be asymptomatic, Sudders said.

We continue to try to respond," she added. We understand that individuals who are the most vulnerable are people who are in those 24/7 congregate care facilities.

Independent living centers left out

Some health care operators say the parameters for mobile testing are too stringent. Independent living communities, which house people in their 50s or 60s or older, are not eligible for tests under the program, according to the states overview.

Thomas, the Glenmeadow executive, said proactive testing means being able to check every resident and employee, including employees who recently switched from a facility that had an outbreak and residents in independent living centers.

The Longmeadow community has 250 employees and 160 residents, including 33 residents in assisted living.

The state added assisted living centers to the list of those eligible for the mobile testing program. But Thomas said she worries about the rest of the Glenmeadow residents, who may be presumed healthier than their counterparts in higher levels of care. Given what state officials have said about transmission among people with no symptoms, Thomas said waiting for symptoms in an assisted living or independent living facility is like sitting on a powder keg with a lit fuse.

What I need is enough tests to test all the staff and all the residents here, Thomas said. We cant test if there are no symptoms.

The facilitys one case, a 97-year-old resident who tested positive after experiencing symptoms, was able to get a test after it was ordered by a physician, Thomas said. That resident is being treated outside of Glenmeadow and is stable.

Our average age is 88. They have all the same frailties as residents of nursing homes, Thomas said. We absolutely want to keep people out of Baystate Medical Center.

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Police said one of the victims outside the bodega had just come from a vigil for a friend who had been killed in November 2019 in a hail of 49 bullets, allegedly by members of Young World. Police also said bullet casings from one of the guns used in the bodega incident has been linked to another fatal shooting in January.
The supreme head of the Armenian Apostolic Church, Catholicos Garegin II, has been criticized by Armenias political leadership after calling for former President Robert Kocharians release from prison.

In written comments to News.am publicized late on Tuesday, Garegin said that relevant authorities should free Kocharian in order to avoid further complications of his health condition during the coronavirus pandemic. He cited doctors professional opinions regarding the presidents health.

Garegin also argued that countries around the world are releasing criminal suspects and convicts not posing a threat to the society these days to prevent them from being infected with coronavirus.

Kocharian, who is standing trial on corruption and coup charges strongly denied by him, was taken back to a prison in central Yerevan on April 3 after spending more than three weeks in hospital. His lawyers claimed that he will risk contracting the virus if not set free.

The Armenian government has no comment on His Holinesss wishes and hopes, Prime Minister Nikol Pashinians spokeswoman, Mane Gevorgian, told RFE/RLs Armenian service.

Gevorgian noted in that context the fact that Garegins spokesman, Rev. Vahram Melikian, had formally vouched for Samvel Mayraperian, a businessman indicted as part of the corruption case against Kocharian.

Law-enforcement authorities allowed Mayrapetian in January 2019 undergo treatment in Germany for a life-threatening form of pancreatitis. Melikian and a prominent Armenian academic guaranteed in writing that he will return to Armenia once his treatment in a German clinic is complete. Investigators said in early March that the tycoon is now refusing to present himself before them on unsubstantiated grounds.

Gevorgian said that the government expects the Echmiadzin-based Mother See of the Armenian Apostolic Church to reassess the guarantee signed by Garegins spokesman.

A close associate of Pashinian, deputy parliament speaker Alen Simonian, went farther on Wednesday, accusing the Catholicos of trying to exert pressure on Armenian courts. For decades he did not intervene in the imprisonment of various people, Simonian said, referring to political opponents of Armenias former governments.

Other government loyalists took to social media to condemn Garegin in even stronger terms. Gevorg Gorgisian, a senior lawmaker from the opposition Bright Armenia Party, denounced the verbal attacks.

The Catholicos can make any statement on any believer, Gorgisian told RFE/RLs Armenian service. Why has he not made [such statements] in the past and why is he making them now? These are legitimate questions that can be put to the Catholicos. But that must be done with utmost respect.

The Mother See defended Garegins stance, saying that it is in tune with the churchs humanist mission and values. Therefore, it is not appropriate to politicize the position of His Holiness and engage in fruitless debates, it said in a statement issued later on Wednesday.

Kocharian, 65, as well as his former chief of staff and two retired army generals went on trial last year on charges mostly stemming from the 2008 post-election unrest in Yerevan. The ex-president, who ruled Armenia from 1998-2008, rejects the accusations as politically motivated.

The judge presiding over the high-profile trial, Anna Danibekian, has repeatedly refused to free Kocharian pending a verdict in the case. Prosecutors have also opposed his release.

Danibekian was due to consider a written appeal for Kocharian release, signed by three former Armenian prime ministers, during a court hearing scheduled for March 17. The hearing was postponed, ostensibly because of her illness, leading defense lawyers to accuse the authorities of foul play. The trial is due to resume later this month.
The materials should prove that Zoltan Andrusko bought SIM cards and mobile phones used by Miroslav Marcek and Tomas Szabo when conducting the murder.

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The trial in the Jan Kuciak and Martina Kusnirova murder case continued after more than two months on April 15, under strict hygienic measures due to the coronavirus pandemic.

The number of people and journalists allowed in the courtroom is limited. However, the court has enabled a voice recording to be made by media present.

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Of the four people originally charged with the murders, only three are still being tried in this proceeding. Miroslav Marcek, who pleaded guilt and admitted he was a hitman, has been sentenced to 23 years in prison.

The verdict is not final as the prosecutor has appealed it.

Bias objected

The only person present on April 15 was Marian Kocner, while Tomas Szabo and Alena Zsuzsova asked for the proceeding to be held in their absence.

Kocners attorney Marek Para objected to the bias of the court senate at the very beginning. As he explained, the same senate sentenced Marcek, and the verdict suggested that the murder was carried out upon the order from Kocner, although his name was concealed.

"The court stated my client was guilty in advance," Para said, as quoted by the Sme daily.
Nathan Brown, of Nathan and Jennifer Brown Farms, in Hillsboro, Ohio, knows that it is a stressful time not only for him, but for other farmers, right now.

For him, depression has been something that has been hard to shake over the last month.

Ohio State Extension educators say farmers in their areas are facing challenges with markets, stress over being essential workers amid the global COVID-19 pandemic and concerns about the weather following a disastrous 2019 planting season.

All that worry  not only about individual farms, but about the country as a whole  adds up.

Its a stressful time for everybody right now, Brown said. We gotta realize that were all in this together and nobody is singled out.

Crisis concern hotline: Call 1-800-447-1985. Crisis Text Line: Text 4hope to 741 741 to be connected to a trained crisis counselor. National Suicide Prevention Hotline: Call 800-273-8255 for support for yourself or for loved ones. Ohio State resources: u.osu.edu/2019farmassistance. #gotyourback campaign: gotyourbackohio.org.

Markets

According to Purdue Universitys agricultural economy barometer results from March, farmer sentiment on current and future conditions saw the largest one-month drop since Purdue started collecting this data in 2015. The COVID-19 pandemic played a part, with 74% of farmers saying they were concerned about how the virus would affect their farm.

Weve been in a steady decline in prices since 2012  that part, I think guys were adjusting to, but now you throw in this virus that nobody knows what the outcome of the thing is going to be, said Brown, who grows corn, soybeans and wheat, and has a cow-and-calf operation. The coronavirus has really upset the cart.

Chris Zoller, an extension educator in Tuscarawas County, said beef and dairy farmers are struggling with markets in his area. Sam Custer, of Darke County extension, said some dairy farmers are still unsure if or how they will be paid for the milk they had to dump recently.

Custer noted that while federal legislation has been enacted to support farmers, there are still many unknowns about how the aid will work.

Weather

The weather is another unknown. Brown said while farmers are hoping not to face the same challenges that plagued 2019, they are already seeing a similar weather pattern to what they saw in spring 2019.

Its definitely a worry in the back of everyones mind, he said.

Risk

While some people are now working from home or off work due to the pandemic, farmers have the opposite issue. They still have crops to get in the ground, equipment to prepare, livestock to feed and care for, as essential workers.

Brown said this could put farmers at risk for the virus. He encouraged fellow farmers to create a plan for their spring crop planting.

That way, if the community gets together to get crops planted if someone gets sick, we have access and know what to do, he said.

Social

Economics and weather arent the only things weighing on some farmers minds.

I think there is some anxiousness about being asked to stay at home, Custer said. Thats not the normal operating procedure.

Many farmers spend long hours working alone, and enjoy going into town to talk to retailers or get coffee.

Socially, it is an issue, Custer said. For some, especially those that are a little more extroverted, I think this is a very difficult time.

Outreach

Extension offices are closed physically, so extension educators have had to adjust their outreach. Custer has been holding virtual coffee hours for farmers in his county on Tuesdays and Thursdays. He has had as many as 20 people join the virtual coffee hours, and has had farmers request to keep doing them.

Zoller has been holding virtual office hours, where farmers can call him or contact him over Zoom if they have questions or something that they want to talk about. He said some extension educators are also calling farmers that they work with and know well to check in on them.

Were trying to keep that going as best as we can, he said.

Got your back

The Ohio Department of Agriculture, with Ohio State Extension and other agricultural and mental health groups, launched the #gotyourback campaign in 2019, in response to the challenges that farmers were facing.

Theres a big stigma around mental health, Brown said. We dont want to admit that we are struggling, but right now, were all struggling.

The website launched with the campaign, www.gotyourbackohio.org, is still live and includes resources for farmers and families that are struggling.

OSU Extension also has resources for facing agricultural challenges, including mental health challenges, at www.u.osu.edu/2019farmassistance. The group has added a page to the website with COVID-19-related resources.

Support

Brown said that sometimes, stepping back from work, even during the planting season, can help with stress.

Its okay to take a few hours to get yourself back right again, he said. The work will still be there.

He said considering positive things has been helpful for him. His children are out of school right now, and while their education is important, they are enjoying the spring calving season.

My oldest boy got to help me tag a calf the other day, Brown said. He was so excited about it. We gotta sit back and realize all the blessings that we have.

Brown also encouraged farmers to check on their neighbors.

Its okay to ask people if theyre okay, he said. And I want guys to know that if its more than what you can handle right now, its okay to reach out for professional help.

Some mental health professionals are continuing to see patients through telehealth appointments. The Ohio Department of Mental Health and Addiction Services has a list of mental health providers on its website, www.mha.ohio.gov.
Source: Xinhua| 2020-04-15 17:45:48|Editor: huaxia

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HONG KONG, April 15 (Xinhua) -- Officials on Wednesday stressed the significance of enhancing the national security education in China's Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (HKSAR) with more measures on the horizon to raise people's awareness on the occasion of the fifth National Security Education Day.

Rather than something far away from daily life, national security actually concerns everyone and covers a wide range of areas from economy to culture and cyberspace, Director of the Liaison Office of the Central People's Government in HKSAR Luo Huining said.

For instance, the ongoing battle against the COVID-19 outbreak is significant to national security and related to every family in Hong Kong, Luo said in a video speech published on a new website designed to promote the national security education.

Put online on Wednesday morning, the website, nsedhk.com, vividly tells the significance of national security with text introduction, online galleries, video speeches and a Q&A game. An essay competition also started on the website, in which contestants write about their understanding of national security and peace in Hong Kong amid the pandemic.

The website, officially named National Security Education Day 2020, was launched by the Hong Kong Policy Research Institute, with the HKSAR government and the liaison office as support organizers.

The launch of the website is the latest move of the HKSAR government to bolster the national security education, nearly 23 years after Hong Kong's return to the motherland, as appeals have been on the rise for more efforts to accomplish the necessary and urgent task.

Hong Kong residents' consciousness of the state is still inadequate and the HKSAR, as an open, free and internationalized place with a high degree of autonomy, is the country's weak point in national security, Leung Chun-ying, vice chairman of the National Committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC) , said.

The weakness became noticeable during the months-long social unrest since mid-2019.

During the dark time generally spanning from last June to the beginning of this year, protests triggered by political disputes repeatedly turned into shocking street violence from vandalism to arson and even murder in Hong Kong where blatant lawbreaking activities were common.

Hong Kong, one of the safest places in the world with a crime rate falling 12 years in a row since 2007, was plunged into an abyss of chaos.

Violent crimes seriously challenged the rule of law and damaged the personal safety of residents, including "near-terrorism" acts from making bombs to assaulting police officers, which, if not effectively contained, will likely pose a threat to national security, HKSAR Chief Executive Carrie Lam said.

The conspiracy between external forces and local politicians was found behind the unrest, posing an even greater threat to the "one country, two systems" principle and national security. Hong Kong's opposition figures have become a pawn used by some Western countries in their rivalries with China, Leung said explicitly.

Tung Chee-hwa, also vice chairman of the CPPCC National Committee, said the unrest since last year and the COVID-19 outbreak underline the significance and urgency of carrying out national security education in Hong Kong.

Officials have pointed out that safeguarding national security is not only the constitutional responsibility of Hong Kong, an inseparable part of China, but in line with the interests of Hong Kong residents.

The motherland is the biggest source of strength for Hong Kong to resist storms and overcome challenges, and to safeguard national security is to protect Hong Kong's fundamental interests, Luo said.

Riding on the steady development of the mainland, Hong Kong has developed into a global financial, transportation and commercial hub over the past decades, attracting numerous foreign businesses and investors. In particular, Hong Kong has taken shape as the largest offshore business center for the Chinese currency renminbi and as a world-class fundraising market for global companies.

Efforts should be made to establish and improve legal systems and enforcement mechanisms in safeguarding national security in Hong Kong, Luo said, stressing zero tolerance of any acts that threaten the rule of law, the cornerstone of Hong Kong's prosperity.

Noting the significance of education in promoting public awareness of national security, Lam called for joint efforts by the HKSAR government, schools and various organizations to encourage Hong Kong residents to better understand the importance of national security.

Lam also mentioned national security in public health and finance. "In the face of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, the HKSAR government will not slacken its effort and will continue to work together with the public to fight the outbreak."

April 15 is designated as the day for raising awareness of national security among the public after the Standing Committee of the National People's Congress passed the National Security Law in 2015.
The Nigeria police, Ebonyi state command has arraigned the Publicity secretary of All Progressive Congress, Ebonyi state, Mr Chika Nwoba before a magistrate court sitting in Abakaliki.

Chika Nwoba was accused of publishing statements on Facebook against some members of the party including Member representing Ikwo/Ezza south Federal constituency in the Federal House of representative, Hon. Chinedu Ogah.

The charge sheet reads thus, "That you Chika Nwoba 'm' on the 6th of December 2019 and 29th day of March, 2020 in Abakaliki in the jurisdiction of this honourable court did publish on Facebook statements against Hon. Comrade Chinedu Ogah which are likely to cause fear and alarm to the public or to disturb the public peace knowing or hearing reasons to believe that such statements are false and thereby committed an offence punishable under section 59 (1) of the criminal code Cap 33 vol.1 laws of Ebonyi state of Nigeria 2009.

When the matter was called up, counsel to the defendant, J.N Nweke appealed to the Court to grant the accused bail on self recognition as the offence committed was bailable.

In his submission, the Police Prosecutor, O/c legal, Ebonyi State Police Command, SP Ayeni opposed the appeal for bail for the defendant arguing that the life and safety of the accused can no longer be guaranteed, considering the nature of the crime he committed.

In her judgement, Magistrate Nnenna Onuoha granted the APC Chieftain bail of N100,000, and one surety in like sum; a letter of introduction from a traditional ruler stating that the accused is of good character and an evidence of current tax clearance.

The case was adjourned to 25th May, 2020 fo further hearing. Ends
Close friends: Joe Biden and Barack Obama walk past each other at the White House in January 2017 during Mr Obamas time in office

Former US president Barack Obama endorsed Joe Biden in a video yesterday, giving the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee a boost from the party's biggest fundraiser and one of its most popular figures.

"I believe Joe has all the qualities we need in a president right now," Mr Obama said in a nearly 12-minute video, touting him as a "close friend" and lauding him for his perseverance and compassion.

Mr Obama and Mr Biden are close friends from their two terms in the White House, when Mr Biden served as vice president. Mr Biden leaned heavily on his affiliation with the former president throughout the Democratic primary, framing his pitch as an extension of Mr Obama's presidency. In recent weeks, he has told donors he has been in touch with Mr Obama about his vice-presidential pick.

The endorsement marks Mr Obama's return to presidential politics more than three years after leaving the White House. He rarely talks directly about his successor, Donald Trump, and avoided intervening in the Democratic primary.

But Mr Obama has been following the Democratic race closely from the sidelines and is eager to take a more active public role in the campaign. He is expected to headline fundraisers for Mr Biden and public events in key swing states, if those events can still be held given social-distancing guidelines.

The endorsement comes a day after Bernie Sanders also backed Mr Biden. The former vice president now has the support of all of his former Democratic primary rivals except for Elizabeth Warren. The Massachusetts senator is expected to formally throw her support behind Mr Biden soon, according to a person familiar with her plans.

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Two other prominent Democrats who have yet to formally endorse Mr Biden are former president Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton, the party's 2016 nominee. Hillary Clinton has been in regular touch with Mr Biden, including several times since Mr Sanders dropped out of the race, according to an aide.

Mr Obama has been an obvious shadow throughout the 2020 Democratic primary. Mr Biden coined the "Obama-Biden administration" moniker when he talked about various accomplishments.

But he also tried to insist he was running as his own man, telling anyone who asked that he urged Mr Obama not to endorse him out of the gate or even in the thick of the primary.

Mr Obama's tenure became a sort of punchbag for some hopefuls in a primary fight that early on was defined by a debate over the need for generational and systemic change versus a return to normalcy after the Trump era.

By the time voting began, Pete Buttigieg was almost explicitly comparing his youthful bid to Mr Obama's 2008 campaign and the progressives were framing their healthcare proposals as a way to build on Mr Obama's legacy. Mike Bloomberg, meanwhile, featured Mr Obama in his ubiquitous advertising effort, much to Mr Biden's chagrin. "You'd think Mike was Barack's vice president," Mr Biden once quipped to donors.

For his part, Mr Biden leaned even more heavily into Mr Obama as primary voting began. Aiming at Mr Sanders, the self-described "democratic socialist", and billionaire Mr Bloomberg, who had been elected New York City mayor as a Republican, Mr Biden said in an interview on February 21 that "they're not bad folks - they're just not Democrats".

Campaigning before increasingly diverse audiences in Nevada and South Carolina, Mr Biden ramped up his recollections of when Mr Obama tapped him for the ticket in 2008. He recalled Inauguration Day, 2009, waiting for the train in his hometown of Wilmington, Delaware, "for a black man to pick me up for the two of us to be sworn in as president and vice president of the United States".

Mr Biden said he had thought of that day as a national victory over institutional racism. Now, in the Trump era, he calls that conclusion a mistake. "I thought we could defeat hate", he said, but, "it never goes away".

On February 29, Mr Biden took the stage in South Carolina to celebrate a near 30-point victory that would propel him past Mr Sanders and everyone. He dusted off a line he had used many times before: "I'm a proud Obama- Biden Democrat."

Mr Obama was watching. His sideline approach nearing its end, he called his former vice president that night to congratulate him on his victory.
BAKU, Azerbaijan, Apr. 15

By Rufiz Hafizoglu - Trend:

Trade turnover between Turkey and Syria amounted to $93.2 million in February 2020, showing a decrease of $7 million compared to the same month of 2019, Trend reports referring to Turkeys Ministry of Trade on April 15.

"In February 2020, Turkey's export to Syria amounted to $76.6 million, and import from Syria made up $16.5 million," the ministry said.

According to the ministry, from January through February 2020, trade turnover between Turkey and Syria made up over $172.7 million, which is $33.8 million less compared to the same period of 2019.

"From January through February 2020, Turkey's export to Syria amounted to $144.8 million, and import from Syria made up $27.9 million," the ministry said.

Turkeys foreign trade turnover in February 2020 exceeded $32.2 billion.

In February 2020, export from Turkey increased by 2.3 percent compared to February 2019, exceeding $14.6 billion.

Turkey's import increased by 9.8 percent in February 2020 compared to the same month of 2019 and exceeded $17.6 billion.

From January through February 2020, export of Turkey increased by 4.1 percent compared to the same period of 2019, reaching $29.3 billion. Meanwhile, Turkeys import increased by 14.3 percent compared to the same period of 2019, exceeding $36.8 billion.

Turkeys foreign trade turnover in 2019 made up $374.2 billion.

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A Miami police sergeant handcuffed Dr. Armen Henderson outside his home while loading supplies to care for the homeless.

Screenshot/SkyNews

Miami police are investigating an incident between an African American doctor and a police officer who confronted the man while he was loading supplies to distribute to the homeless in downtown Miami.

While Dr. Armen Henderson was loading a white cargo van outside his home, he was confronted by an officer who handcuffed him before Henderson's wife confirmed his identity and the officer left.

Miami Police Chief Jorge Colina announced one day after the incident that the department was investigating the incident, which Henderson alleged was a case of racial profiling.

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The Miami Police Department is launching an investigation after an African American doctor on the frontlines of battling the coronavirus was handcuffed outside his home.

Dr. Armen Henderson, a black physician at the University of Miami Health System on the frontlines of battling the coronavirus, has been helping test Miami's vulnerable homeless population, the Miami Herald reported.

"We've been out there once or twice a week for the last four weeks, handing out tents, toiletries, masks, socks," Henderson told ABC News. "We've been testing individuals for COVID-19 because it's the most vulnerable population. If you want to control the spread you have to go right to the source and take care of these individuals first."

And on April 10, Henderson was loading up bags of supplies in a white cargo van outside his home to distribute to the homeless in downtown Miami with a local outreach group he works with.

But before the 34-year-old could deliver the critical supplies, he was handcuffed by a law enforcement officer outside his home.

Soundless security footage from Henderson's home shared with ABC News showed the internal medicine physician donning a face mask and moving bulky trash bags on the sidewalk when a Miami police officer approached him and appeared to begin questioning the doctor.

Story continues

"He just said, 'Are you littering over here?' Do you live here? Do you work here?' And I was like, 'Yes, I live here. This is where we put our bulky trash and the city comes to pick it up every week at this same place,'" Henderson told ABC News.

Henderson said he turned around to finish loading the car since he was due to meet the homeless outreach group in half an hour. However, Henderson claimed the officer took offense to his walking away.

"I guess he must have thought that I had disrespected him or something like that," Henderson told the outlet. "He jumped out of the car and started yelling, 'You call me sergeant when I'm talking to you, and blah, blah, blah. And, you know what, give me your ID.'''

According to Henderson, when he told the sergeant that he didn't have any identification on him, the law enforcement officer immediately handcuffed him and walked Henderson towards the front of his patrol car. The security footage appeared to show the sergeant yelling closely in Henderson's face.

"He put me at risk," Henderson said. "Now I feel like I should get tested, honestly. Most likely I will because he definitely was spitting in my face. I could feel it while he was yelling at me."

Henderson said he called out to his wife, who was inside his home with his two children, to bring out his ID. After Henderson's wife confirmed her husband's identity, the sergeant released him.

"He didn't apologize. He just got in his car and drove away," Henderson said.

Miami Police Chief Jorge Colina announced on April 11, one day after the encounter, that the department would be investigating the incident after it drew swift public outcry for Henderson who has been working to treat one of Miami's most vulnerable populations for COVID-19.

"The City of Miami Police Department does not condone or accept profiling of any kind," Colina said in a video. "I'm making that statement because I've been made aware of a video that has been circulating of an encounter that occurred on Friday, April 10, in the Flagami neighborhood."

Colina claimed that the sergeant in question stopped the doctor due to a "litany of complaints pertaining to illegal dumping." However, Henderson was taking out trash outside his own residence.

The Miami Police Department confirmed to Insider that the officer under investigation is Sgt. M. Menegazzo. Although Sgt. Menegazzo is currently being investigated by internal affairs, an officer told Insider that Menegazzo has not been suspended and may still be out in the field.

Read the original article on Insider
Fitch affirms 'BB' ratings on EVN, EVNNPT, PVN; revises outlooks to stable

Fitch Ratings has revised the Vietnam Oil and Gas Group's outlook to stable from positive. Photo PVN

Fitch Ratings has affirmed issuer default ratings and senior unsecured ratings of Vietnam Electricity (EVN), National Power Transmission Corporation (EVNNPT) and Vietnam Oil and Gas Group (PVN) at 'BB'.

However, the rating agency has revised the three companies' outlooks to stable from positive.

According to Fitch, EVN's ratings reflect its standalone credit profile (SCP), which is at the same level as the Viet Nam sovereign rating. Under Fitch's Government-related entities rating criteria (GERC), EVN's ratings will be equalised to that of the sovereign in case of any weakening in its SCP given the company's strong linkages with the state.

PVN's ratings are capped by those of the sovereign under Fitch's GERC given the company's strong linkages with the State. PVN's SCP is assessed at 'bb+'.

A factor that could, individually or collectively, lead to the upgrade of EVN and PVN is positive rating action on the sovereign, provided the likelihood of State support does not deteriorate significantly, Fitch said.

EVNNPT's ratings are based on the consolidated profile of EVN, which owns 100 per cent of EVNNPT, in line with Fitch's parent and subsidiary rating linkage criteria. The consolidated rating approach is driven by strong linkages between EVNNPT and its parent. EVNNPT's SCP is assessed at 'bb+'.

MoIT requests Hai Phong to create favourable conditions to transport goods

The Ministry of Industry and Trade (MoIT) on Monday requested Hai Phong City People's Committee to ensure smooth goods transport of trading enterprises and logistics services coming to and from the city while implementing the COVID-19 pandemic prevention activities.

The ministry said during the Prime Minister's Directive 16/CT-TTg on preventing and controlling the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic, Hai Phong City has been given urgent tasks, especially strengthening control of drivers of trucks coming to and from Hai Phong City.

However, the measures have caused difficulties for manufacturing, import-export and logistics enterprises in transporting goods to and from the Hai Phong Port, the largest port in the North of Viet Nam.

According to the Ministry of Industry and Trade, Hai Phong is a centrally-run city in a strategic location of the Northern key economic region, converging favourable factors for industrial production, trading and logistics.

The ministry has requested Hai Phong authority to create good conditions for transport goods as well as goods for production during the pandemic, aiming to boost exports and hit economic growth targets.

The ministry has also asked Hai Phong to review taxes and fees as well as reducing transport costs, including toll, parking fees and infrastructure fees. That is considered as an efficient support for the enterprises during the pandemic period.

The ministry has proposed Hai Phong raises any problems they face in implementing disease prevention that have affected trade.

At present, the ministry and other ministries and sectors have carried out measures to ease problems. This would help enterprises maintain their production and prepare all resource for resuming production growth after the pandemic.

At the same time, the ministry has been managing import and export activities in combination with the domestic market to ensure a stable supply for exports and domestic goods consumption. 

EVN power supply rises in first quarter

Electricity of Viet Nams production and import of power increased by 6.3 per cent year-on-year in the first quarter, ensuring safe and uninterrupted supply is available amid the COVID-19 pandemic.

A report by the State power distribution company showed that total power output was 57.29 billion kWh.

Domestic production was 49.28 billion kWh, a 6.47 per cent increase.

Renewable energy accounted for 2.76 billion kWh, including 2.31 billion kWh from solar energy, 28 times up from the same period of last year.

Ninety large-scale solar energy projects with the capacity of 4.500 MW were operated commercially last year.

Coal-fired thermal power accounted for 33.91 billion kWh, an increase of 21.3 per cent, and hydroelectricity for 8.93 billion kWh, a 30.4 per cent decrease.

The water flow to hydropower reservoirs across the country was low.

Large hydroelectric plants such as Hoa Binh, Ialy and Tri An are expected to be expanded in this year.

EVN is building 18 grids after completing 22 others in the first quarter with a capacity of 110-500kV. But the work faces difficulties due to several reasons including the COVID-19 pandemic.

EVN has asked customers to use online services when they want to register for electricity connections or make changes to prevent the spread of disease.

In March nearly 745,000 people used them.

EVN has urged the Ministry of Industry and Trade to subsidise power for all users by 10 per cent for the next three months.

The ministry has agreed and will soon announce whether the reduction will apply for April-June or May-July.

Vinachem asks to apply 0% tax rate to fertiliser products

The Viet Nam National Chemical Group (Vinachem) has sent a document to Viet Nam Fertiliser Association, asking the National Assembly to add fertiliser to the list of products subjected to value added tax (VAT).

The group suggested to impose a VAT rate of between 0 and 5 per cent.

Vinachem proposed to amend Law No. 71/2014 /QH13 on some articles of tax, which took effect on January 1, 2015.

That the law clarified fertiliser products are free from VAT, which also means that fertiliser firms can no longer deduct the VAT they paid for inputs.

Consequently, domestic fertiliser production costs increased. Therefore, businesses must increase the price of fertiliser, meaning the price cannot be reduced for farmers.

Increasing domestic fertiliser production costs is detrimental in terms of market competition with imported fertilisers, especially those imported from China, according to experts.

Vinachem said that subjecting fertiliser products to VAT is in compliance with current laws and international commitments on trade protection, ensuring a healthy and equal competitive environment and the interests of businesses and farmers and the country.

If fertiliser products are subjected to 0 per cent VAT, the products will be sold at a pre-tax price plus zero VAT, which means output VAT submitted to the State is zero.

Enterprises still received a VAT refund for inputs, which will reduce fertiliser production costs and allow the opportunity to reduce prices in the market.

If fertiliser is subjected to 5 per cent VAT, which is also output VAT paid by enterprises to the State, their input VAT will still be refunded.

"In both cases above, both domestically produced fertilisers and imported fertilisers are subject to the same VAT rate, creating an equality between domestic and imported ones," Vinachem said.

In its dispatch to the Viet Nam Fertiliser Association on the issue, Vinachem also emphasised that, in both cases above, the State did not have to spend money to support businesses during the Covid-19 pandemic, but only adjust policies so that the production and business activities of domestic fertiliser producers are equal to foreign ones.

HCM Citys tax revenues fall well short of target

Ho Chi Minh Citys daily tax revenues have fallen by 31 percent in the first quarter of this year because of the COVID-19 pandemic, Chairman of the municipal Peoples Committee Nguyen Thanh Phong has said.

Phong told an online meeting last week that the revenues had fallen to 947 billion VND (40 million USD) against a target of 1.64 trillion VND (69.4 million USD).

The outbreak greatly affected the countrys socio-economy, especially the citys and its services and industrial sectors, he said

Its economy grew by just 0.42 percent in the period, down from around 7 percent a year ago.

The worst affected of the citys sectors are services and tourism. The number of foreign visitors fell by 42.2 percent year-on-year.

The number of new enterprises decreased by 15.7 percent. The flow of foreign direct investment (FDI) was down a third to 1.05 billion USD.

But Phong promised that after the pandemic subsides, there would be no outbreaks or community spread and the city would come up with solutions to foster priority sectors including tourism and services to ensure growth resumes.

It would also promote the use of information technology, reform the administration, stimulate tourism demand, control the consumer market and ensure peoples essential needs are met, help businesses access support packages, and accelerate the rate of public investment, he added.

VinFast secures exemption from import tax on parts for exported cars

VinFast, Vietnams first electric car manufacturer, has been approved for exemption from import tax on parts to manufacture and assemble automobiles to export for testing, following a the proposal of the Ministry of Finance.

VinFast will be one of the special cases under the Law on Export and Import Tax and Decree No.134/2016/ND-CP on guidelines for the law on export and import duties.

As of now, VinFast imports parts and components to assemble finished cars and then export them overseas for testing. This move is to facilitate its long-term plan to export luxury cars.

In December 2019, international media reported that billionaire Pham Nhat Vuong had plans to export electric cars to the US in 2021 and that he would spend $2 billion of his own fortune to realise this plan. This cost makes up half of the total capital in VinFast.

In late March 2020, VinFast submitted its financial statement to the Hanoi Stock Exchange, which reported a loss of VND5.7 trillion ($247.83 million) last year. Besides, the company has an equity capital of VND19.45 trillion ($845.65 million).

VinFast established a technical arm in Melbourne in preparation for dipping a toe in the Australian market. The company, in addition to having an eye on Holden, the legendary car brand that is about to close down in Australia, also expressed interest in acquiring the design and engineering facilities of General Motors (GM) Australia, including the Lang Lang testing system which is in the same situation as Holden.

In addition, the company is in the process of completing necessary procedures to start selling cars in Russia. The source did not reveal a timeframe for when this would happen.

In order to draw attention in the international market, VinFast launched two car models at the Paris Motor Show 2018 just a year after the companys incorporation. These two car models were both based on BMW design and powertrain. Both are powered by a 2.0-litre turbocharged engine and an 8-speed automatic transmission. Currently, both two models have been launched to the market.

FPT lowers sales plan due to COVID-19 despite surging revenue

At its recent annual general shareholders' meeting, the FPT Board of Managers announced that the technology giant is mulling over dropping this years sales plan by 15 per cent to better align with the economic fallout though it finished the first three months with rather upbeat performance.

FPT recorded net revenue rising by 16 per cent on-year to VND6.57 trillion ($285.65 million), while its net profit surged by 19 per cent on-year to VND945 billion ($41.1 million) at the end of 2020s first quarter.

The technology giant also targets a 17.1 per cent rise in net revenue to reach VND32.45 trillion ($1.41 billion) and pre-tax profit increasing 18.1 per cent on-year to VND5.51 trillion ($239.57 million) at the end of 2020, according to VNDIRECT. However, its online advertising arm has been particularly vulnerable to the pandemic, since it has been hit hard due to shrinking demand for advertisements.

Specifically, some of FPTs most important export markets such as Japan and the US have also been hit hard by the pandemic. Thus, weak growth might well persist in the forthcoming time.

Experts also raised concerns over potential risks to FPT, including intensified competition in the telecommunications segment. Accordingly, FPT could lose market share to Viettel and VNPT in fixed broadband, in addition to the firms software revenue (mostly from foreign markets) being exposed to foreign exchange challenges.

On the bright side, the firms strategy for the next five years, which revolves around digital transformation, is slated to boost its profit margins. For example, FPT invested in upgrading the optical infrastructure in the remaining areas and expanding its coverage to gain new subscribers (although average revenue per user, or ARPU, my decline), according to Yuanta Securities. The substantial demand for software solutions from enterprises across the globe is also a silver lining in the global recession.

The Board of Directors also approved the 2019 cash dividend payment of 20 per cent, which is VND2,000 per share (8.7 US cents). What is more, 10 per cent cash dividend was already paid last year, and the remainder will be paid in the second quarter of 2020.

On the other hand, the payment of 2019 dividend by shares (15 per cent of 678.3 million outstanding common stock) is also expected in the coming time.

This year, FPT will also maintain its dividend policy of 20 per cent cash dividend.

Thailand's banks get approval to expand operation in Myanmar

Thailands two major commercial banks - Kasikornbank and Siam Commercial Bank (SCB) - have received permission to expand operation in Myanmar.

Kasikornbank said on April 11 that it plans to invest up to 40 million USD in a 35 percent stake in Myanmars Ayeyarwaddy Farmers Development Bank after receiving approval from Myanmars central bank.

The investment will be done through its unit Kasikorn Vision, which has a budget of 14 billion baht (428 million USD) for overseas business opportunities.

Meanwhile, SCB, the country's fourth-largest lender by assets, has won preliminary approval for a subsidiary business licence in Myanmar, targeting 7 billion baht in loans in the first five years of operation.

The bank expects to set up the subsidiary and begin operations by the end of 2020, said Chairman and Chief Executive Arthid Nanthawithaya.

The licence enables the bank to open a subsidiary bank 100-percent-owned by SCB and provide the same comprehensive commercial banking services as branches in Thailand. A subsidiary licence allows branches in 10 major business areas.

SCB has had a representative office in Myanmar since 2012.

The bank is ready to provide total financial solutions to corporate, small-business, and retail clients in the neighbouring country and to use Myanmar as a strategic country for expanding the international business network, Arthid said.

In the initial phase, SCB will focus on catering to Thai corporate clients with existing investments in Myanmar and others who want to explore trade and investment there.

More than 100 Thai business operators are investing in Myanmar with SCB support. The bank's clients operate in a broad range of sectors, including consumer products, energy, industrial estates, manufacturing and agro-industry.

Arthid said SCB stands ready to bridge trade and investment between Thailand and Myanmar, as well as regional trade within the CLMV 2 countries (Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar, Vietnam, China and Singapore).

Foreign banks are allowed three licence types in Myanmar: establishment of a commercial bank as a subsidiary, foreign bank branch and equity participation with a local bank.

Thailand has cumulative permitted investment in Myanmar of about 11 billion USD and is the third-largest investor after Singapore and China.

Thailand is also Myanmar's second-biggest trade partner after China, with trade value of 7.6 billion USD in 2019./.

Conference discusses incentives for solar power growth in Vietnam

The Green Innovation and Development Centre (GreenID) hosted an online conference in Hanoi on April 11 on the second phase of the feed-in-tariff (FIT 2) and policies for the development of solar power in Vietnam after 2020.

The event aimed to discuss the significance of designated incentives for the growth of solar power in Vietnam from the perspective of stakeholders and chalk out the pros and cons of the Prime Ministers Decision No.13/2020/QD-TTg on the mechanism for encouragement of the industry in the country, according to GreenID Director Nguy Thi Khanh.

Decision No.13/2020/QD-TTg was issued last week to replace the Decision No. 11/2017/QD-TTg dated 11 April 2017 which expired on June 30 last year. The new decision will be effective from May 22 this year and only valid for six months.

Hereby, recommendations would be made for the growth of the solar power industry to match its potential and values it can contribute to the society after 2020, she added.

Over the last two years since Decision 11/2017/QD-TTg was launched, Vietnam has been seeing a boom in solar power, making it a leader in Southeast Asias solar photovoltaic (PV) market. Data shows that as of the end of last June, the countrys cumulative solar PV installation reached nearly 4.464 MW.

According to the Electricity of Vietnam (EVN), rooftop solar PV projects in the country have generated a total of 25.459 MW by the end of February 2020.

Participants voiced concerns over Decision No.13/2020/QD-TTgs period of validity which might not be enough to make changes and support the development of the domestic solar power sector, particularly against the backdrop of the COVID-19 pandemic which is ravaging globally and taking heavy toll on most of enterprises and workers.

Some proposed ways to extend the decisions validity of support policies for rooftop solar PV projects and its effective should be further discussed for the recommendations to be sent to relevant authorities as soon as possible./.

Regulation on coordination in settling intl investment disputes issued

Prime Minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc has signed Decision No. 14/2020/QD-TTg promulgating the Regulation on coordination in the resolution of international investment disputes.

The Regulation prescribes the principles, tasks, power and process of coordination among state agencies, organisations and individuals concerned in settling international investment disputes through international arbitration or at other tribunals outside Vietnam.

It does not apply to the settlement of investment complaints at arbitration centres, courts, agencies and organisations of Vietnam according to Vietnams law.

Regarding the principles of coordination, the leadership agency, the legal representative agency of the Government, and relevant agencies, organisations and individuals are responsible for promoting full, effective and timely coordination in handling international investment disputes pursuant to the provisions of the Regulation and the Vietnamese law to optimally protect the lawful rights and interests of the Government and state agencies of Vietnam.

The leadership agency, the legal representative agency of the Government, and relevant agencies, organisations and individuals are also obliged to keep State secrets and conceal the information and documents obtained during the process of dispute settlement, in accordance with the provisions in international arbitral proceedings and the provisions of Vietnams law.

The leadership agency, the legal representative of the Government, and relevant agencies, organisations and individuals must take responsibility before the law for the consequences incurred by their failure to coordinate in line with the aforementioned principles.

The Regulation specifies the contents of coordination, including the exchange of information and documents among relevant agencies in the process of settling foreign investors complaints, denunciations and problems in order to prevent international investment disputes.

In addition, the agencies concerned coordinate in the resolution of international investment disputes through appointing their competent persons to join the intersectoral working group on dispute settlement at the request of the leadership agency, as well as to participate in negotiating and mediating international investment disputes, designing and implementing the strategy and roadmap for dispute handling, and collecting and providing information, records, evidences and documents serving the settlement of international investment disputes.

These authorised individuals are also in charge of dealing with contents related to judgments and decisions by international arbitrators, and performing other affairs in the resolution of international investment disputes./.

Thailand plans new borrowing worth 30.6 billion USD

Thailands Finance Ministry said it will explore domestic and foreign funding options for planned borrowing of 1 trillion baht (30.6 million USD) to finance a major economic stimulus programme.

The debt is a key element of a 1.9-trillion-baht package to help low-income households, farmers and companies reeling from the impact of the COVID-19. According to the Bank of Thailand, Southeast Asias second-largest economy may contract 5.3 percent this year.

Patricia Mongkhonvanit, Director-General of the ministrys Public Debt Management Office, said the country is exploring all possibilities. The sum wont be borrowed all at once, but proceeded gradually, as the funding need arises, she added.

Patricia said the Finance Ministry is looking at a mix of instruments, including government bonds, treasury bills, promissory notes, term loans and savings bonds. Tapping international organisations like the Asian Development Bank and foreign debt markets are also options, she noted.

The objective is mainly to tap the local market first, she said, adding that there is ample domestic liquidity and demand for Thai products.

A pending executive decree will permit the fund-raising efforts to run through September 2021, a time-frame designed to give Thai officials flexibility since the duration of the outbreak is uncertain./.

Dong Nai province strives to help firms join support industry chain

Domestic firms in the southern province of Dong Nai are finding it hard to join the supply chain providing products to the support industry, according to the local Peoples Committee.

There is still an absence of connectivity between foreign direct investment (FDI) firms and domestic support industry ones, the office said, adding most of the FDI firms in the support industry rely on the components or accessories they produce by themselves or imports.

In order to develop the support industry, Dong Nai authorities will, from now to 2025, focus on helping firms broaden their markets, match supply with demand, connect them to support firms, and train their personnel to meet the requirements by support industry firms.

Special help will come in the form of support in terms of infrastructure use fee at industrial zones and complexes for small- and medium-sized enterprises, it said.

Besides Ho Chi Minh City, Dong Nai province is another sizable economic hub in the south of Vietnam./.

Vietnam's cement market continues with slow growth amid COVID-19 pandemic

The outbreak of COVID-19 in the world and Vietnam hit the cement industry in the first half of 2020. The country's cement demand is expected to be slow as countries implement various levels of isolation and quarantines, leading to reduced residential demand for buildings and keeping workers home.

According to FiinResearchs Vietnam Cement Market Report 2020, after reaching the record growth of 16.4 per cent in 2018, clinker and cement on-year sales growth shrank to only 3.2 per cent in 2019 due to the slowdown in both domestic and export markets.

Particularly, Vietnam began a 14-day nationwide social distancing from 1 April, resulting in the suspension of the construction of residential, commercial, and hospitality projects in big cities. In fact, domestic sales of cement recorded an on-year decline by 5 per cent while the total clinker and cement export volume reached 6.6 million tonnes for the first three months of 2020, posting a sharp decrease by 17 per cent compared to the same period last year.

As a response to the negative impact of COVID-19, the government will provide the credit stimulus package of VND250 trillion ($10.87 billion) and fiscal stimulus package of VND30 trillion ($1.3 billion) to reduce to the negative impact of COVID-19 on the economy and support economic recovery after the disease outbreak. In addition, the government has committed to boosting public investment disbursement in 2020. On March 12, the government agreed, in principle, to convert three North-South Expressway projects which were initially planned to be executed under the public-private partnership (PPP) model into public investment projects to accelerate public fund disbursement and support economic growth.

FiinResearch assesses a moderate outlook for the domestic cement market thanks to the government's commitment to boost public investment packages in 2020 to reduce the COVID 19 impacts on the economy, as well as expected improvements in residential real estate with launches in the second half of the year thanks to the support from the local authorities to accelerate the licensing process as well as to solve other legal difficulties faced by property developers.

Meanwhile, cement export markets have a negative outlook due to limited demand from key export markets, especially China, Bangladesh, and the Philippines.

The report also pointed out that the designed capacity of the Vietnamese cement industry is expected to surge in the next four years thanks to the aggressive expansion by local private players including Tan Thang, Thanh Thang, Long Thanh, and Vissai. Especially, the year 2021 is expected to witness a significant increase in cement supply thanks to the completion of five large projects.

FiinResearch forecasts domestic cement sales volume to increase by 1 per cent in 2020 and follow 4 per cent CAGR in 2021-2030 thanks to the recovery of infrastructure development, as well as the residential, commercial, and industrial real estate segments in Vietnam.

Vietnam promotes medical supply exports to support international fight against COVID-19

Prime Minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc urged the Ministry of Industry and Trade to increase support and push up the export of several medical supplies, including antibacterial and anti-drop face masks, to countries in need, particularly those in Europe and the United States.

This is part of the prime ministers conclusion speech at a recent government meeting reviewing measures in combating COVID-19.

On recent days, customers from different markets such as the US, EU, Spain, and most recenty Russia and Canada have voiced the rising demand to import medical supplies, such as protective gear, gloves, and face masks to serve the fight against the COVID-19 pandemic.

Nguyen Thi Thu Thuy, deputy director of the Vietnam Trade Promotion Agency under the Ministry of Industry and Trade, has told the media that customers from different markets have continuously asked about the capacity for medical supplies provision from Vietnamese companies.

For instance, the Russian market would need one million sets of single-use protective gear, more than five million medical face masks, one million anti-bacterial masks, two million fabric-made masks, 100,000 protective glasses, one million medical blouses, and more for shipping to Saint-Petersburg.

"Vietnamese businesses need to pay due regard to preparing legitimate papers showing the products are eligible for exportation from Vietnam, plus other necessary documents when anchoring at Saint-Peterburg port," Thuy noted.

Facilitating the export of fabric masks and other measures aims to support local businesses that are short of export orders as many of them were delayed or cancelled due to the pandemic.

In addition, the Canadian market is showing demand for millions of medical supplies, such as single-use N95 face masks, single-use surgical masks, nitrile gloves, vinyl gloves, medical blouses, and protective medical gear, hand sanitiser, and protective eyewear, among others.

Functional Canadian bodies will take the initiative in selecting the export firms and soon contact businesses meeting their demands.

Earlier, the government enacted Resolution No.20/NQ-CP dated February 28, 2020 on licensing the export of medical masks during the COVID-19 epidemic.

Accordingly, the Ministry of Health shall provide licences allowing the export of medical face masks while the country is combating COVID-19 with the purpose of providing aid and international support on behalf of the Vietnamese government.

This policy does not apply to the export business of export-processing enterprises having acquired investment certificates and those engaged in processing medical masks for foreign clients on contracts signed before March 1, 2020.

Right after the enactment of the resolution, the Vietnam Textile and Apparel Association (Vitas) has reported rising orders for fabric-made face masks.

The General Department of Customs has also improved processes in checking the export of fabric-made face masks to facilitate business activities during the COVID-19 outbreak.

Facilitating the export of fabric masks and other measures aims to support local businesses that are short of export orders as many of them were delayed or cancelled due to the pandemic.

Of the proposed measures to help textile and garment makers weather difficulties in the current context, The Vitas has sought the government's permission to allow those in the sector to engage in production and export of items serving the fight against COVID-19 to partly cover expenses in these difficult circumstances.

Vietjet's POWER PASS accounts launched with free air tickets available

Low-cost carrier Vietjet has launched its POWER PASS accounts that will allow passengers to fly on unlimited routes with Vietjet on 45 routes covering Vietnam.

Two types of POWER PASS accounts are available for passengers to purchase at http://powerpass.vietjetair.com or www.vietjetair.com. POWER PASS Sky6 is priced at 8.99 million VND (386 USD) for passengers for domestic flights until the end of September 30,2020, while POWER PASS Sky12 card is priced at 16.99 million VND (730 USD) for passengers to book domestic flights until the end of March 31, 2021 (except for Lunar New Year).

POWER PASS offers free tickets (excluding taxes, fees and additional add-on services), 15kg of checked baggage and 7kg of hand luggage. There is no limit to the number of domestic flights passengers can take during the validity of their passes, it said.

The airline is giving away 200 POWER PASS accounts with discounts of up to 50 per cent for lucky passengers. Gifts worth 299,000 VND each will be also given to all passengers paying via HDBank's new credit and international payment cards. Passengers can also buy POWER PASS at the bank's 285 branches and transaction offices nationwide.

Vietjet is the first airline in Vietnam to operate as a new-age airline offering flexible, cost-saving ticket fares and diversified services to meet customers demands. It is a fully-fledged member of the International Air Transport Association (IATA) with the IATA Operational Safety Audit (IOSA) certificate.

Vietjet was named Best Ultra Low-Cost Airline 2018 - 2019 and awarded the highest ranking for safety with 7 stars in 2018 by the worlds only safety and product rating website AirlineRatings.com. The airline has also been listed as one of the world's 50 best airlines for healthy financing and operations by Airfinance Journal in 2018.

The airline has also been named as Best Low-Cost Carrier by renowned organisations such as Skytrax, CAPA, Airline Ratings, and many others.

South Korea, Viet Nam eye closer co-operation in supply chain



South Korea and Viet Nam could enhance their co-operation to help Viet Nam become the main link in the supply chains of South Korean businesses, especially in the automobile, electronics and garment and textile sectors.

Insiders made the statement at a video conference on Monday to share ideas on ways to expand economic ties despite the strain caused by the COVID-19 pandemic on global business activities.

South Korean Minister of Trade, Industry and Energy Sung Yun-mo and his Vietnamese counterpart Tran Tuan Anh discussed ways to expand bilateral ties amid the growing economic fallout from the pandemic.

The two sides plan to use regulations to allow businesses to immediately exploit the combined origin of textile materials under the EVFTA, to take advantage of high quality textile and apparel materials from South Korea, serving production and export of Vietnamese textile products to Europe.

In addition, Viet Nam and South Korea will also discuss food security, rice supply, fruit, vegetables and seafood trade amid the COVID-19 pandemic.

Anh asked South Korea to accelerate assessments for risk import licensing for Vietnamese red dragon fruits and grapefruit and support activities that distribute Vietnamese goods major South Korean firms like Lotte Mart, E-Mart, Home Plus and CJ Home Shoping.

During the meeting, the South Korean side thanked Viet Nam for enabling some of its residents to enter the country for major business activities amid the pandemic, emphasising that travel by business officials is crucial to maintain the global supply chain.

The two countries also agreed to push for a system which would allow them to process certificates of origin through electronic platforms.

The measure is expected to speed up customs procedures for exporters and prevent forgery of documents, according to the South Korean Ministry of Trade, Industry and Energy.

Viet Nam is the third-largest export destination for South Korea, whose outbound shipments to the Southeast Asian country hit US$48.1 billion in 2019, down 0.9 per cent from a year earlier.

In 2019, South Koreas overall exports sank more than 10 per cent.

The countrys outbound shipments edged down 0.2 per cent year-on-year last month and plunged up to 18.6 per cent annually to $12.2 billion in the April 1-10 period, according to the data from the Korea Customs Service.

The figure is expected to continue dropping due to the pandemic, said experts.

Investment in HCM City export processing, industrial zones up 86%



Export processing and industrial zones in HCM City saw US$117 million of investment poured into the zones in the first quarter, a 86 per cent increase compared to the same period last year, according to the HCM City Export Processing and Industrial Zones Authority.

FDI in the zones was nearly $66 million, a 2.58 per cent increase year-on-year.

Eleven FDI projects registered more capital of over $60 million. There were six new projects with total capital of $5.48 million, a 74 per cent decrease from last year.

The zones received VND1.1 trillion ($47 million) worth of domestic investment, up by 37 per cent year-on-year. There were 13 new projects, while 12 projects increased their capital.

The increase in investment in the zones was mainly from domestic sources and foreign projects that already had plans to register more capital, according to the authority, which said that investment attraction in the second quarter may face challenges due to the COVID-19 pandemic

HCM CITY, as of March 20, had attracted over US$1 billion worth of FDI, a 33 per cent drop year-on-year, according to the HCM City Statistics Office.

Paper, packaging firms hit by COVID-19 fallout



Domestic paper and packaging firms face a shortage of raw materials and a slump in both domestic and export demand.

Many packaging manufacturers said orders have fallen by 30-50 per cent year-on-year since the start of February.

They mainly supply firms in sectors like garment and textile, footwear and others to package for export, and demand has fallen since the latters exports have, they said.

Nguyen Van Thanh, director of Phu Nguyen Thinh Phat Packaging Production, Trading and Services Co., Ltd, told Sai Gon Giai Phong (Saigon Liberated) newspaper: Orders decreased by about 30 per cent. The reason is that the company mainly supplies packaging to export enterprises. Recently, their exports have run into difficulties due to the pandemic.

Many garment enterprises have cancelled their long-term contracts [with us], and signed seasonal contracts instead for tens of thousands of packaging boxes each. A number of others stopped order because they have no new export orders.

Investment in the pulp industry remains modest, causing heavy reliance on imports.

But the COVID-19s spread to many countries and territories has made it hard to import pulp, according to the Viet Nam Pulp and Paper Association (VPPA).

The association said many scrap paper suppliers abroad have cancelled their orders.

Dang Van Son, the VPPAs deputy chairman and general secretary, said: According to our assessment, large manufacturers have very small stocks of raw materials, enough only for one to two months. Many small and medium-sized enterprises have run out of inventory.

If the situation prolongs, many firms have to close down, he said.

Also according to the VPPA, the prices of raw materials have increased by VND200,000-300,000 per tonne, sending manufacturing costs surging.

Many Vietnamese paper producers are small, mostly with a capacity of less than 30,000 tonnes per year, and use old equipment, and so they are not very competitive, it said.

Most local firms focus on normal packaging paper and export it, and the country has to import over a million tonnes of high-class coated packaging paper, high-class copy paper, coated printing paper, and other special kinds of paper every year, the business group said.

Firms therefore need to adjust their product structure, it said.

It is currently trying to help businesses find raw materials and funding to help them maintain production.

It has also petitioned relevant ministries to streamline import procedures and speed up customs clearance to help businesses quickly source raw materials.

It has also urged the Ministry of Transport to help reduce logistics costs for paper companies.

Mitsubishi Motors allowed to produce eco-friendly cars in Thailand

Mitsubishi Motors Corp. has been given the green light from Thailand for its electric and hybrid vehicle production plan as the Southeast Asian country struggles to minimise the impact of COVID-19 on its economy.

Accordingly, the Board of Investment of Thailand said on April 13 that it approved Mitsubishi's 5.48 billion baht (167 million USD) project to renovate existing production lines at a plant in Laem Chabang Industrial Estate, southeast of Bangkok.

As planned, Mitsubishi will manufacture 39,000 units annually to sell in Thailand and neighboring Southeast Asian countries. Its subsidiary in Thailand will make 9,500 electric vehicles and 29,500 hybrid cars per year.

The board said Mitsubishi's eco-car production is scheduled to start in 2023./.

HCM City shut downs factories, businesses at a high risk of spreading COVID-19



The People's Committees of all 24 districts in HCM City were expected to submit a report on the assessment of COVID-19 infection risks at businesses and factories to the citys Standing Committee office this afternoon.

Businesses that do not meet the requirements of epidemic prevention will be required to shut down immediately.

On April 11, the HCM Citys Standing Committee directed districts people committees to strengthen the assessment of virus infection risks at businesses and enterprises in the city.

Since then, the district authorities and related units have quickly and strictly assessed all businesses.

During the assessment process, the citys People Committee decided to temporarily shut down operation of the PouYuen Viet Nam company in Binh Tan District for two days from April 14 to 15.

The company's risk of COVID-19 infection had reached 91 per cent after the city authority completed the assessment.

PouYuen Viet Nam has more than 60,000 workers, and has three working shifts.

According to the city People's Committee, if COVID-19 infections occur at the factory, the consequences will be very serious.

On April 6, the citys Standing Committee issued a set of indicators to assess the risk of virus infections at businesses and enterprises.

The indicators are based on 10 factors: the number of workers, the density of workers in the factory, workers who wash hands before entering and leaving the factory, percentage of workers wearing masks, number of workers whose temperature is checked, number of workers using public transport or company pick-up vehicles to workplace, number of pick-up points on the route to the factory, the distance between workers at the cafeteria, night shifts, and enough masks for workers.

According to the set of indicators, enterprises will be graded on a maximum scale of 10 points for each component.

The businesses will be asked to shut down immediately if they score more than 80 points. Businesses scoring from 50 to 80 points will be also asked to shut down unless they come up with solutions to mitigate the risks.

Other businesses will be allowed to operate normally but will be supervised constantly by authorities.

According to the citys Department of Labour, Invalids and Social Affairs, the city has about 3.2 million factory workers at 415 enterprises.
When a homeless shelter in northern Kentucky closed because it could not safely house people under social distancing guidelines, local officials arranged for residents to sleep at a convention center. But it soon became clear that the coronavirus could still spread in such an environment, so shelter director Kim Webb - like her counterparts in dozens of cities nationwide - looked to book hotel rooms for those needing a temporary home.

Webb, the executive director of Emergency Shelter of Northern Kentucky, and other advocates arranged to pay a Springhill Suites hotel in Florence to house 40 people for the April - only to have the mayor object.

"In the middle of a pandemic - as we're trying to drop 50 or 60 or 70 thousand dollars to put Kentucky residents in hotels - we get the door slammed and told, 'There's zoning issues or there'll be code issues,' " Webb said. "If we can't rally around people in a pandemic, my concern is: Are we prepared for what's coming?"

Homeless shelters are at greater risk of outbreaks because of dangerous overcrowding, advocates say, with people in many cases sleeping on cots or in bunk beds spaced less than two feet apart. But local officials and residents in several communities from New England to California have resisted using vacant hotels to house them.

In San Francisco, where Mayor London Breed initially pushed back against the idea of moving homeless people into hotels and instead proposed housing them in the massive Moscone Center, at least 70 people in the city's largest shelter have tested positive for covid-19, the disease the novel coronavirus causes.

Outbreaks among the homeless population are also occurring in New York, which was slow to move people into hotels, said Diane Yentel, president and chief executive of the National Low Income Housing Coalition. She fears that smaller communities that have resisted using hotels to ease crowding at homeless shelters will also experience a similar rapid spread of the highly contagious respiratory disease among their most vulnerable populations.

Homeless Americans are considered particularly vulnerable to the coronavirus because they typically have underlying health conditions and lack access to medical care.

A recent study estimated that the pandemic would probably result in more than 21,000 hospitalizations and 3,400 deaths among the country's homeless population.

Advocates say the use of hotels to reduce crowding could save lives - not only of those who are homeless but in the rest of the community.

"I would hope most communities would see this kind of arrangement as something they could do to help deal with a very serious problem," said Steve Berg, vice president of programs and policy at the National Alliance to End Homelessness.

To cushion the financial burden, the $2 trillion coronavirus relief package includes $4 billion in emergency services grants to house homeless people temporarily in vacant hotels and motels. Some states, including California and Connecticut, can use disaster assistance money from the Federal Emergency Management Agency to pay hotel costs.

In Florence, Kentucky, which is south of Cincinnati and home to a number of hotels that have been largely vacant for weeks, Webb had sought to use private donations to house homeless people in a hotel.

But Florence Mayor Diane Whalen said the plan to move homeless people across county lines was formed without notifying the city. So was a previous move of about 100 people, including Ohio residents, into a Microtel in Florence, she said.

"There was no conversation at all," said Whalen, who notified hotel owners that they could be violating zoning ordinances. "You can't make decisions that directly impact my community without including us on the front end."

Whalen noted that Kentucky's Democratic Gov. Andy Beshear's executive order limiting interstate travel and her concern that moving people into Florence would increase the chances of spreading the coronavirus within her community. "Who would be ensuring that they are self-quarantining and sheltering at home?" she said.

Whalen said she would consider temporarily adjusting the zoning code to accommodate homeless people in hotels, but the Springhill Suites canceled the contract and Webb found another location.

Housing advocates in Connecticut trying to move 1,100 people from 60 homeless shelters - about half their population - into 800 to 900 hotel rooms also encountered resistance from West Haven Mayor Nancy Rossi, a Democrat.

"Every other mayor understood what we're trying to do, but she didn't want New Haven to dump its homeless population into West Haven," said Richard Cho, chief executive of Connecticut Coalition to End Homelessness, who is overseeing the state's efforts to relieve crowding in its homeless shelters. "Some suburbs want to believe that homelessness is a city problem and don't want to take responsibility."

Rossi said the city was "blindsided" by state plans. She said city officials learned of the plan only when they tried to secure a couple of floors at the same Best Western to house paramedics in case they were exposed to the coronavirus and were told by the state that the hotel was to be used to house homeless people instead.

"Under the governor's executive orders, towns don't really have any authority to reject this," Cho said. "We're racing to get ahead of an outbreak. Homeless shelters could become a tinderbox in terms of rapid spread of the outbreaks."

Cho said Rossi is cooperating after pressure from state and local officials. But the town is taking in far fewer people from New Haven shelters - 56 instead of 96.

The remaining rooms will be reserved for the local West Haven homeless population of about 40, which Rossi said she is trying to relocate from city streets.

Cho said some hotel owners have also been hesitant to house homeless people because they are concerned about damage and the possibility of turning hotels into hospitals.

Pushback against housing homeless people in hotels also occurred in Plymouth, Massachusetts, where a hotel owner and town officials opposed plans to quarantine homeless people who fell ill with the coronavirus in a Best Western.

In California, Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom's statewide initiative to secure 15,000 hotel rooms to house homeless people also ran into local resistance.

Residents of a gated retirement community in Orange County's Laguna Woods protested plans to temporarily house homeless people at the nearby Ayres Hotel, prompting the boutique hotel to cancel the lease with the Board of Supervisors.

In San Francisco, after Mayor Breed resisted calls to relocate the city's large homeless population into vacant hotel rooms, the city's Board of Supervisors announced emergency legislation last week to procure more than 8,000 hotel rooms by April 26.

"My greatest fear is that the city cannot move quickly enough to get people off the street to stave off widespread infection and widespread death in this population," said Kyriell Noon, chief impact officer at the Glide Foundation, a charity helping San Francisco's homeless. "It wouldn't take much to tip the whole community over. The sooner we can get folks off the streets and into hotels, the better I think it's all going to end."

Andy Lynch, a spokesman for Breed, said the mayor has expressed concern for the city's homeless residents since the pandemic began.

As of Monday, he said, more than 750 people from San Francisco's vulnerable populations, including 447 from its homeless shelter system, are being quarantined in hotel rooms.

- - -

The Washington Post's Jonathan Baran contributed to this report.
A McDonalds restaurant in Guangzhou, China, has been closed by the chain after it posted a sign on its door prohibiting black customers from entering.

According to USA Today, the sign went viral on social and prompted McDonalds to close the restaurant and provide training for the staff.

The sign said, Weve been informed that from now on black people are not allowed to enter the restaurant. For the sake of your health consciously notify the local police for medical isolation. Please understand the inconvenience caused.

Again, for those who still doubt that Black people and particularly #AfricansinChina are being targeted we feel it is our duty to share this. A sign at a @McDonalds restaurant seems to make this perfectly clear pic.twitter.com/FaveKrdQHi  Black Livity China (@BlackLivityCN) April 11, 2020

In a statement to USA Today, McDonalds said the sign is not representative of our inclusive values. McDonalds also said the branchs employees and managers will undergo values training.

According to CNN, racial tension is high in the city. Recent warnings from Chinese officials about the rising number of imported coronavirus cases have stoked anti-foreigner sentiment. Africans in the southern Chinese city have been evicted from their homes by landlords and turned away from hotels, despite many claiming to have no recent travel history or known contact with Covid-19 patients.

The U.S. Consulate General has advised African-Americans to avoid the city.

The U.S. embassy has issued an alert amidst reports that Black Americans are being affected by anti-African racism in Guangzhou pic.twitter.com/JNk68IGkiY  Black Livity China (@BlackLivityCN) April 12, 2020

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VANCOUVERAs the world gasps at U.S. President Donald Trumps decision to temporarily pull funding from the World Health Organization, public policy experts say Ottawa should support a review of the organizations handling of the coronavirus pandemic and its relations with Beijing.

But such a review should not include following suit with the U.S. to pull resources, analysts warn.

On Tuesday, Trump announced the U.S. is temporarily halting funding to the WHO pending a review of its role in severely mismanaging and covering up the spread of the coronavirus. He said the WHO accepted mainland Chinas initial claims about the virus at face value and didnt share all it knew about the pandemic.

The WHO failed in its basic duty and must be held accountable, Trump said at a White House news conference.

Last week, Trump accused the organization of being very China centric and said it seems to err always on the side of China.

Beijing reacted to the news with a promise to fund the WHO and said the U.S. decision will weaken international co-operation.

Publicly available data shows the U.S. had its compulsory membership fees in the WHO at about $58 million for 2020. Countries can also make voluntary contributions and the WHO says they amount to 75 per cent of its funding. The U.S. put in $281 million in 2018, which is the last year available.

Chinas membership fees for this year are nearly $29 million, according to the WHOs figures, while in 2018 its voluntary contribution was about $6 million.

Canadas 2020 membership fees are $17.5 million, according to Global Affairs Canada, with $29 million in voluntary contributions in 2018, according to WHOs figures.

Global Affairs Canada said it has contributed a further $16.5 million to WHO since Feb. 11.

Trump is not the sole critic of the WHOs relationship with Beijing. But some observers say Chinas relationship with the WHO isnt the only problematic one and that more international bodies are experiencing interference by Beijing, raising calls for a rethink of Chinas involvement in them.

On Tuesday, a group of more than 100 China scholars and politicians released a statement criticizing the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) response to the crisis and accusing it of a coverup to hide the outbreak in its early stages rather than deal with it.

It calls the pandemic Chinas Chernobyl moment, referring to the nuclear power plant meltdown and subsequent coverup in Ukraine that helped destroy the credibility of the Soviet Union in 1986.

The statement also lays blame at the feet of the WHO for refusing to allow Taiwan, which it insists is a province of China and not its own country, to participate in the organization at Beijings request. Taiwan has its own government and maintains it is a sovereign nation.

Under the influence of the CCP, the World Health Organisation first downplayed the pandemic, it reads. Taiwanese health officials also allege that they ignored their alerts of human-to-human transmission in late December.

ICAO and the WHO are bound by a UN General Assembly resolution recognizing the Peoples Republic of China based in Beijing as the lawful government of China, but Taiwan under the name Chinese Taipei has been an invited guest to an ICAO Assembly in 2013 following approval from Beijing.

Earlier this month, federal Health Minister Patty Hajdu was hit with a litany of criticism after she suggested a reporter in Ottawa was feeding into conspiracy theories on the internet for questioning her on the WHOs COVID-19 infection numbers from China.

But nearly three weeks ago in an official statement, Chinas own premier had warned officials not to cover up their COVID-19 figures.

U.S. intelligence officials have also warned the veracity of Chinas figures cannot be trusted.

The CCP also suffered criticism both at home and abroad for the detention of a group of doctors who initially raised the alarm about the virus. Dr. Li Wenliang, seen as the doctor who first raised the issue of coronavirus, died after contracting COVID-19, enraging the Chinese public.

Canadas Minister of International Development Karina Gould said the U.S. makes its own decisions and there will be questions about the handling of the pandemic. But, Gould said, now is not the time to ask them.

After every emergency and after every crisis there should be a deep (examination) of the response and the lessons learned, she said. But right now we need to be focused on working together, putting our differences aside, and addressing what is the urgent and existing crisis that we have in global health right now.

Meanwhile, an MP on the Canada-China Parliamentary Committee meant to examine Canadas relationship with China said Ottawa needs to take a look at the WHOs relationship with Beijing.

Conservative Garnett Genuis told the Star that dealing with the pandemic is the main concern, but in the long run an examination of the WHOs response to it should be undertaken.

He said some of the political and structural incentives which led the leadership of the WHO to be too obsequious to the Chinese leadership, are of concern.

Clearly, they were wrong to praise the Chinese governments response and they still havent really owned up to that error.

He said the exclusion of Taiwan is a particularly important issue, given the countrys success in responding to the outbreak.

Despite the controversy over the WHOs relationship with Beijing and how it factored in the handling of the pandemic, most experts interviewed by the Star agreed the U.S. decision to pull funding from the WHO is not a good idea.

They said Canada should not follow suit.

The defunding of the WHO will disproportionately affect developing regions, particularly in Africa, where there is a dearth of access to fresh drinking water, says Dexter Voisin, dean of Factor-Inwentash Faculty of Social Work at the University of Toronto.

Its not just access to clean drinking water, Voison said. The WHO also provides access to health care, medication and testing. When you look at rates of global COVID rates reported in Bangladesh and India and Africa, the rates are small, not because the impact has been smaller, just because they havent had the ability to ramp up testing so the numbers are under-reported.

Abandoning such countries in a time of need will impact the whole world, he said.

Jessica Drun, a Washington, D.C.-based expert at the Asia Pacific security and policy-focused Project2049 think tank, said removing the funding will leave a funding and leadership gap that China will try to fill.

Were already seeing this happen with Chinas outsized influence in UN peacekeeping operations and the appointment of a Chinese representative to the UN human rights council, Drun said.

Instead, Washington should work with like-minded countries like Canada to emphasize the continued importance of a rules-based international order.

Worries about Beijings influence over international bodies is not limited to the WHO. Experts are calling for a multilateral review to investigate Chinas influence in the United Nations as a whole, since the problems likely extend beyond the WHO.

The U.S. had withdrawn from the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) and United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) in October 2017 and June 2018, respectively.

Sophie Richardson, China director at Human Rights Watch, said such moves create a power vacuum.

I dont think the answer is to gut or weaken an international institution, Richardson said. Its to make it function the way its supposed to function.

Richardsons watchdog group and other advocacy organizations had protested the appointment of a Chinese representative earlier this month to the influential United Nations Human Rights Council, given Beijings record on human rights issues.

In a comprehensive report in 2017, Human Rights Watch found that China has worked consistently and often aggressively to silence criticism of its human rights record before UN bodies and has tried to weaken central mechanisms to advance rights.

In a high-profile case in 2013, Chinese police detained activist Cao Shunli after she tried to travel to Geneva to participate in training on the Human Rights Council. After Cao became ill in detention and died, the Chinese delegation in Geneva blocked a moment of silence for her at the Council in March 2014.

There hasnt been evidence of financial coercion or bribery, she said, but it seems more that UN officials and members have repeatedly shied away from having a diplomatic fight with China.

It can be easy for people in stable countries to underappreciate the role of the United Nations, but in places where the state perpetrates human rights abuses, or where public health infrastructure is lacking, Richardson argued people dont have that luxury.

If like-minded governments that care about these institutions dont come together soon to develop a plan to push back against the Chinese government agenda, I think well have a very different and weaker set of institutions in the not too distant future, Richardson said.

The debates about the WHOs actions in relation to China during the COVID-19 pandemic follow a recent controversy involving another UN agency.

In January, the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO), which is based in Montreal, blocked numerous critics on Twitter who were voicing calls for Taiwan and Taiwanese experts to be included in discussions around the outbreak of the new coronavirus.

In one case, a consultant was surprised to find he was blocked after only retweeting another users post calling for Taiwans participation.

Neither the ICAO nor the World Health Organization recognizes Taiwans sovereignty and will only work directly with Beijing.

Most criticisms had centred around whether it makes sense for Taiwan  as a major air-travel hub in Asia  not to have direct access to the agency to contribute to the fight against the coronavirus.

But there is concern about the will to conduct such reviews into Chinas growing influence over international bodies, especially as the world braces for the economic fallout of COVID-19.

Public health as well as human rights are at stake, so this should be priority, and realistically, countries will have to figure out how to work with the U.S. as a central player in the process, said Taipei-based researcher J. Michael Cole, a senior fellow with the Macdonald-Laurier Institute in Ottawa.

Much of the world is in a bit of a slump at the moment and may feel powerless. Well need enlightened leadership and sufficient momentum through democracies working in concert. Given the stakes, I think its absolutely essential that something like this happens.

President Trumps attitude toward allies, unfortunately, has gotten in the way of the alliance-formation that will be needed to deal with the challenge. Trump is partly to blame for this; allies also are responsible: they have let their resentment for Mr. Trump get in the way of collaboration with the rest of the U.S. system and society.

Richardson said, Every week that goes by, when there isnt that pushback just makes it that much easier for Beijing to advance its agenda.

With files from The Associated Press and Bloomberg

Joanna Chiu is a Vancouver-based reporter covering both Canada-China relations and current affairs on the West Coast for the Star. Follow her on Twitter: @joannachiu

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The British government has hailed India-UK trade ties as the first consignment of 2,800,000 packets of paracetamol from India is set to be distributed across the country's supermarkets and retailers to stem the spread of the coronavirus pandemic.

The shipment followed India's decision to lift export restrictions on essential drugs, but further discussions were required for the UK's urgent need for paracetamol.

"This will mean nearly 3 million more packets of paracetamol on British supermarket shelves," UK International Trade Secretary Liz Truss said in a statement on Tuesday.

"Coronavirus is the largest threat we have all faced in decades, so it's imperative that we work together to continue global trade and keep supply chains open. I'd like to extend a big thank you to officials both in the UK and India who worked hard on this agreement and I look forward to working with India and other countries soon to ensure we beat COVID-19," she said.

Last week, Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) minister, Lord Tariq Ahmad, had also highlighted the export consignment of paracetamol as a sign of the close cooperation between India and the UK.

"The UK and India continue to work in close partnership to respond to the COVID-19 threat. My sincere thanks on behalf of the UK government to India for approving this important shipment," said Ahmad.

The shipment arrived as a series of charter flights laid on by the UK government to ferry thousands of British residents stranded in India's coronavirus lockdown began landing in the UK since earlier this month.

The FCO says that the flight will make "serious inroads" into repatriating the estimated 21,000 Britons in India, with an end of April target set for getting the majority who wish to return to their homes in the UK.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Not for distribution, directly or indirectly, in the United States of America, Canada, Australia or Japan



This announcement is for information purposes only and does not constitute an offer to sell or issue or the solicitation of an offer to buy, subscribe for or otherwise acquire any new ordinary shares of Mainstay Medical International plc in any jurisdiction

Regulatory News:

On 7 April 2020, Mainstay Medical International plc (the "Company" or "Mainstay") (Bourse: MSTY) announced that it intended to establish a new Irish holding company for the Mainstay group (the "Mainstay Group"), Mainstay Medical Holdings plc ("Mainstay Holdings") and to delist Mainstay's ordinary shares from Euronext Paris and the Euronext Growth market operated by Euronext Dublin (the "Delisting"). It is intended that this new corporate structure will be a corporate reorganization implemented by means of a scheme of arrangement under Chapter 1 of Part 9 of the Companies Act 2014 (the "Scheme", and, together with the Delisting, the "Reorganization

Mainstay announces that it yesterday published a circular relating to the Reorganization (the "Circular") which is being posted to shareholders of Mainstay ("Shareholders"), together with the associated forms of proxy (the "Forms of Proxy

The Reorganization requires approval by Shareholders at a scheme meeting (the "Scheme Meeting") to be held at the office of McCann FitzGerald, Riverside One, Sir John Rogerson's Quay, Dublin 2, D02 X576, Ireland on 8 May 2020, commencing at 10.00 am (Irish time). In addition to approval at the Scheme Meeting, implementation of the Reorganization requires approval by Shareholders at an extraordinary general meeting of Mainstay (the "EGM" and together with the Scheme Meeting, the "Meetings") to be held at the same location commencing at 10.15 am (Irish time) on 8 May 2020 or, if later, immediately after the conclusion or adjournment of the Scheme Meeting. If the relevant approvals are obtained at the Meetings, the Scheme will require sanction by the Irish High Court.

Arrangements regarding the Meetings having regard to Coronavirus (COVID-19)

The health and safety of our shareholders, employees and other attendees is a top priority for Mainstay. We are also obliged to comply with the emergency measures introduced by the Irish Government on 27 March 2020, which require people to stay at home and restrict public gatherings. To the extent those (or similar measures) remain in place on the date of the Meetings, we ask Shareholders to refrain from physically attending at the venue for the Meetings. In fact, such measures may prohibit Shareholders from physically attending at the venue for the Meetings. Instead, we strongly encourage Shareholders to submit completed Forms of Proxy for the Meetings in the manner, and by the latest times, specified in the Circular and also to join the proceedings over a conference call facility detailed below.

Conference Call

You will be able to access the call using the numbers below:

Ireland: +353 14311252

France: +33 170750711

United States: +1 6319131422

PIN: 21544633#

Please dial in 5 10 minutes prior to the start time using the phone number and conference code above.

Shareholders should be aware that attendance on the conference call will not constitute attendance at the meeting (and it will not be possible to vote electronically in real time at the Meetings). Accordingly, Shareholders who attend the call and who wish to vote must still submit their Forms of Proxy no later than 48 hours before the relevant Meeting.

Questions

While Mainstay will have the facility to take some live questions on the day of the Meetings, we encourage Shareholders to submit, in advance, any questions they would like to have asked at the Meetings by email to matt.onaitis@mainstay-medical.com. All questions received will be collated, read into the meeting record, answered at the meeting and thereafter directly to the Shareholders.

Mainstay will continue to monitor the impact of the COVID-19 and any relevant updates (including any updates regarding any adjournment, change in venue or otherwise) regarding the Meetings will be announced by regulatory information service and made available on the Company's website, www.mainstay-medical.com

Enquiries

If you have any questions about the Circular, the Meetings or how to complete the Forms of Proxy or to submit your proxies electronically, please call the Company's Registrar, Computershare Investor Services (Ireland) Limited, on (01) 4475566 or (if calling from outside Ireland) +353 1 4475566.

About Mainstay

Mainstay is a medical device company focused on commercializing an innovative implantable restorative neurostimulation system, ReActiv8, for people with disabling Chronic Low Back Pain (CLBP). The Company is headquartered in Dublin, Ireland. It has subsidiaries operating in Ireland, the United States, Australia, Germany and the Netherlands, and is listed on the regulated market of Euronext Paris (MSTY.PA) and Euronext Growth operated by Euronext Dublin (MSTY.IE).

About Chronic Low Back Pain

One of the root causes of CLBP is impaired control by the nervous system of the muscles that dynamically stabilize the spine. ReActiv8 is designed to electrically stimulate the nerves responsible for contracting these muscles to improve dynamic spine stability, allowing the body to recover from CLBP.

People with CLBP usually have a greatly reduced quality of life and score significantly higher on scales for pain, disability, depression, anxiety and sleep disorders. Their pain and disability can persist despite the best available medical treatments, and only a small percentage of cases result from an identified pathological condition or anatomical defect that may be correctable with spine surgery. Their ability to work or be productive is seriously affected by the condition and the resulting days lost from work, disability benefits and health resource utilization put a significant burden on individuals, families, communities, industry and governments.

Further information can be found at www.mainstay-medical.com

CAUTION in the United States, ReActiv8 is limited by federal law to investigational use only.

Forward looking statements

This announcement includes statements that are, or may be deemed to be, forward looking statements. These forward looking statements can be identified by the use of forward looking terminology, including the terms "anticipates", "believes", "estimates", "expects", "intends", "may", "plans", "projects", "should", "will", or "explore" or, in each case, their negative or other variations or comparable terminology, or by discussions of strategy, plans, objectives, goals, future events or intentions. These forward looking statements include all matters that are not historical facts. They appear throughout this announcement and include, but are not limited to, statements regarding the Company's intentions, beliefs or current expectations concerning, among other things, the establishment of a new holding company of the Mainstay Group and the delisting of the Company's ordinary shares from Euronext Paris and the Euronext Growth market of Euronext Dublin.

By their nature, forward looking statements involve risk and uncertainty because they relate to future events and circumstances. Forward looking statements are not guarantees of future performance, and the actual results of the Company's operations, the development of its main product, and the markets and the industry in which the Company operates may differ materially from those described in, or suggested by, the forward looking statements contained in this announcement. In addition, even if the Company's results of operations, financial position and growth, and the development of its main product and the markets and the industry in which the Company operates are consistent with the forward looking statements contained in this announcement, those results or developments may not be indicative of results or developments in subsequent periods. A number of factors could cause results and developments of the Company to differ materially from those expressed or implied by the forward looking statements, including, without limitation, shareholder approval of the scheme of arrangement, the outcome of the Company's interactions with the FDA on a PMA application for ReActiv8 and the successful launch and commercialization of ReActiv8. As a result, investors should not rely on such forward-looking statements in making their investment decisions. No representation or warranty is made as to the achievement or reasonableness of, and no reliance should be placed on, such forward-looking statements. The forward-looking statements herein speak only at the date of this announcement. None of Mainstay, the Mainstay Board, Mainstay Holdings or the Mainstay Holdings Board assume any obligation to update or correct the information contained in this announcement, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise, except to the extent legally required. Nothing contained in this announcement shall be deemed to be a forecast, projection or estimate of the future financial performance of the Mainstay Group except where expressly stated.

Important Notices

The information contained in this announcement is for background purposes only and does not purport to be full or complete. No reliance may be placed for any purpose on the information contained in this announcement or its accuracy, fairness or completeness.

The contents of this announcement are not to be construed as legal, financial or tax advice. Each prospective investor should consult his own legal adviser, financial adviser or tax adviser for legal, financial or tax advice, respectively.

Disclaimers

This announcement and the information it contains does not constitute and shall not be considered as constituting a public offer, an offer to subscribe or an intention to solicit the interest of the public for a public offering of Mainstay's securities in Ireland, France, the United Kingdom, the United States or any other jurisdiction. This announcement does not comprise a prospectus or a prospectus equivalent document.

With respect to Member States of the European Economic Area, no action has been taken or will be taken to permit a public offering of the securities referred to in this announcement which would require the publication of a prospectus in any Member State. There will be no offer to the public of Mainstay Holdings Shares in any Member State of the European Economic Area and no prospectus or other offering document has been or will be prepared in connection with the issue of Mainstay Holdings Shares.

J&E Davy, trading as Davy, which is authorised and regulated in Ireland by the Central Bank of Ireland, is acting exclusively for the Company and Mainstay Holdings and no one else in connection with the Reorganization and will not be responsible to anyone other than the Company and Mainstay Holdings for providing the protections afforded to its clients or for providing any advice in relation to the Reorganization or any matter referred to herein.

The release, publication or distribution of this announcement and the documents referred to herein in jurisdictions other than Ireland, France and the United Kingdom may be restricted by law and therefore persons into whose possession any of this announcement and the documents referred to herein come should inform themselves about, and observe, any applicable restrictions or requirements. Any failure to comply with such restrictions may constitute a violation of the securities laws of any such jurisdiction. To the fullest extent permitted by applicable law, Mainstay and Mainstay Holdings disclaim any responsibility or liability for the violation of such requirements by any person.

Notice to investors in the United States

The Reorganization relates to the shares of an Irish company (a "foreign private issuer" as defined under Rule 3b-4 under the U.S. Securities Exchange Act of 1934 (the "Exchange Act")) and is proposed to be made by means of a scheme of arrangement provided for under, and governed by, Irish law (the "Scheme"). Neither the proxy solicitation rules nor the tender offer rules under the Exchange Act will apply to the Scheme. Accordingly, the Mainstay Holdings Shares to be issued pursuant to the Scheme have not been and will not be registered under the U.S. Securities Act of 1933 (the "Securities Act") or under the relevant securities laws of any State or territory or other jurisdiction of the United States, and are expected to be offered in the United States in reliance upon the exemption from the registration requirements of the Securities Act provided by section 3(a)(10) thereof and exemptions provided under the laws of the States of the United States in which eligible Scheme Shareholders may reside.

For the purpose of qualifying for the exemption from the registration requirements of the Securities Act provided by section 3(a)(10) thereof with respect to the Mainstay Holdings Shares issued pursuant to the Scheme, Mainstay will advise the Court that its sanctioning of the Scheme will be relied upon by Mainstay Holdings as an approval of the Scheme, following a hearing on its fairness to Scheme Shareholders at which hearing all Scheme Shareholders are entitled to attend in person or through counsel to support or oppose the sanctioning of the Scheme and with respect to which notification has been given to all such Scheme Shareholders.

The Mainstay Holdings Shares to be issued under or in connection with the Scheme to a Scheme Shareholder who is neither an affiliate, for the purpose of the Securities Act, of Mainstay or Mainstay Holdings on or prior to the time the Scheme becomes effective nor an affiliate of Mainstay Holdings at the time the Scheme becomes effective (the "Scheme Effective Time") would not be "restricted securities" under the Securities Act. Scheme Shareholders who are affiliates of Mainstay or Mainstay Holdings on or prior to the Scheme Effective Time or affiliates of Mainstay Holdings after the Scheme Effective Time may, under Rule 145(d) under the Securities Act, be subject to timing, manner of sale and volume restrictions on the sale of Mainstay Holdings Shares received in connection with the Scheme. For the purpose of the Securities Act, an affiliate of either Mainstay or Mainstay Holdings is any person who directly or indirectly through one or more intermediaries controls, or is controlled by, or is under common control with Mainstay or Mainstay Holdings respectively. Whether a person is an affiliate of either Mainstay or Mainstay Holdings for the purpose of the Securities Act depends on the circumstances. Persons who believe that they may be affiliates of either Mainstay or, after the Scheme Effective Time, Mainstay Holdings should consult their own legal advisers prior to any sale of the Mainstay Holdings Shares received upon the implementation of the Scheme.

The Scheme is subject to the disclosure requirements and practices applicable in Ireland to schemes of arrangement, which differ from the disclosure and other requirements of U.S. securities laws.

Mainstay and Mainstay Holdings are both incorporated under the laws of Ireland. Some or all of the officers and directors of Mainstay and Mainstay Holdings may be residents of countries other than the United States. It may not be possible to sue Mainstay and Mainstay Holdings in a non-U.S. court for violations of U.S. securities laws. It may be difficult to compel Mainstay, Mainstay Holdings and their respective affiliates to subject themselves to the jurisdiction and judgment of a U.S. court. It may not be possible to enforce in Ireland a judgment of a U.S. court in respect of violations of U.S. securities law.

None of the securities referred to in this announcement have been approved or disapproved by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, any state securities commission in the United States or any other U.S. regulatory authority, nor have such authorities passed upon or determined the adequacy or accuracy of the information contained in this announcement. Any representation to the contrary is a criminal offence in the United States.

There will be no public offer of securities in the United States.

View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20200415005561/en/

Contacts:

PR and IR Enquiries:

LifeSci Advisors, LLC

Brian Ritchie

Tel: 1 (212) 915-2578

Email: britchie@lifesciadvisors.com



FTI Consulting (for Ireland)

Jonathan Neilan or Patrick Berkery

Tel.: +353 1 765 0886

Email: mainstay@fticonsulting.com



Euronext Advisers:

Davy

Fergal Meegan or Barry Murphy

Tel: +353 1 679 6363

Email: fergal.meegan@davy.ie or barry.murphy2@davy.ie
With 181 more persons testing



positive for coronavirus in Madhya Pradesh, their tally climbed to 938 on Wednesday, health officials said.

However, no fresh death was reported in the past 24 hours in the state, where the fatality count stood at 53, they said.

The viral disease expanded its footprint to two new districts, taking their number to 26 out of the total 52 districts in the state.

COVID-19 patients were detected for the first time in Agar Malwa and Alirajpur districts on Wednesday, they said.

Worst-hit Indore's tally rose to 544 cases with the addition of 117 new cases in the last 24 hours, the officials said.

"A report from a Delhi-based laboratory has found 117 more people of Indore infected with the coronavirus. Now, the number of COVID-19 cases in the city has gone up to 544. Of these, 37 patients have so far died during treatment," Chief Medical and Health Officer (CMHO) Praveen Jadia said.

"Most of the new patients from Indore are either relatives or close acquaintances of people who earlier tested positive for coronavirus. All those who came in contact with these patients have already been isolated as a precaution," Jadia said.

Nine more cases were reported in Bhopal, which took the tally of COVID-19 patients in the state capital to 167, the officials said.

With 22 more persons testing positive for COVID-19, the number of such cases in Khargone has gone up to 39, the third highest in the state after Indore and Bhopal, said the health officials.

Of the 53 deaths recorded so far, Indore alone accounts for 37. So far, five persons have died in Bhopal, six in Ujjain, three in Khargone and one each in Chhindwara and Dewas.

Apart from Indore and Bhopal, Morena district has recorded 14 cases, Jabalpur 12, Ujjain 30 (4 new), Hoshangabad 16 (one new), Khargone 39 (22 new), Barwani 22 (5 new), Raisen 04, Gwalior six, Khandwa 16 (one new), Dewas 15 (8 new), Sheopur 03, Vidisha 13, Chhindwara 04, Satna two, Dhar 3, Shivpuri two, Ratlam 12 (10 new), Shajapur 4, Mandsaur two and Betul, Tikamgarh and Sagar one each.

On Wednesday, first COVID-19 positive cases were found in Agar Malwa (3) and Alirajpur (1), the officials said.

One COVID-19 patient hails from another state.

So far, 64 coronavirus patients have recovered and returned home, the officials said.

As many as 290 containment areas have been established across cities in the state to stem the spread of the deadly virus, they said.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Washington: The coronavirus death toll in the United States crossed 25,000 on Tuesday with the country witnessing the highest single-day tally of 2,129.

As of Tuesday, more than 6,05,000 Americans had tested positive for the novel coronavirus -- more than the other top three countries taken together -- according to Johns Hopkins University.

A record number of 2,129 of Americans died in one single day, the previous highest being 2,074 on April 10. New York has become the epicentre of the country's outbreak with 2,03,020 confirmed cases and 10,842 deaths so far.

In total, 25,981 Americans have died due to the deadly virus, Johns Hopkins University said.

"The United States is continuing to make substantial progress in our war against the virus. We grieve at every precious life that has been lost to the invisible enemy, but through the darkness, we can see the rays of light, US President Donald Trump told reporters during his daily White House news conference on the pandemic.

"We see that tunnel, and at the end of that tunnel, we see light. We are starting to see it more than ever before. We have held our numbers, everything we have done we have been very, very strong on it and very powerful on it, he said.

Trump said the United States has far more ICU beds per capita than any other nation. We have 34.7 ICU beds per 100,000 people, which is the best there is compared with roughly 12.5 beds per 100,000 in Italy, 11.6 beds in France, 9.7 beds in Spain, he said.

There are more than 16,000 ventilators at hospitals and other healthcare facilities that are not in use at this moment, he said referring to the steps he has taken to fight coronavirus in the country.

The US Food and Drug Administration, he said, has now authorized the first test developed by researchers from Rutgers University that can use saliva from patients.

It is the first one. These test can be self-administered by patients in healthcare settings, which will reduce exposure for medical workers and save personal protective equipment. Rutgers will begin processing 10,000 test daily, he added.
In this Wednesday, April 15, 2020, photo, a woman wearing a mask against the coronavirus looks at a globe showing China, in Wuhan in central China's Hubei province. AP




KEELE, England, April 15, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- Biocomposites, an international medical device company that engineers, manufactures and markets world leading products for use in infection management in bone and soft tissue, today announces the appointment of Will Connelly as President, Biocomposites Inc., covering the Americas - effective 20 April 2020. His role will focus on growing Biocomposites Inc. throughout the Americas in reconstruction, spine, trauma and foot and ankle.

Michael Harris, Chief Executive Officer of Biocomposites, said: "I am delighted to welcome Will to the team. His track record of success in orthopaedics, trauma and spine will serve us well as we continue to focus on growing our business to meet the needs of surgeons managing infection in bone and soft tissue. The recent launch of a STIMULAN 3cc pack size in the U.S. and securing a new contract with HealthTrust covering 25% of our target market, gives us a strong foundation to exploit opportunities as the market returns."

Will Connelly, commented: "I am extremely pleased to be joining the team at Biocomposites to build on its success in the U.S., Canada, Mexico and South America. Over the years I've seen first-hand the value surgeons place on the STIMULAN platform, and with approvals to mix it with antibiotics in Canada and Mexico, I'm excited to get started."

Will brings demonstrated analytical, strategic and business development capabilities with highly relevant experience. He joins Biocomposites from Aesculap Implant Systems where he was Executive Team Member and Vice President, Sales, Orthopaedics and Spine. Prior to Aesculap, he held the positions of Regional Vice President for reconstruction and trauma with Smith and Nephew and Director of US Sales with Orthofix.

About Biocomposites

Biocomposites is an international medical device company that engineers, manufactures and markets world leading products for use in infection management in bone and soft tissue. Based in Keele, UK, it has global operations across Europe, USA, Canada, China and India. Biocomposites is a world leader in the development of innovative calcium compounds for surgical use. Its products target a broad spectrum of infection risks across a variety of specialities, including musculoskeletal infection, orthopaedics, trauma, spine, foot and ankle and podiatry. Biocomposites products are now used in over 100,000 procedures per annum and sold in more than 40 countries around the world. Please visit biocomposites.com to learn more.
Furious Republican activist Candace Owens has said that coronavirus measures are 'spiralling into tyranny' after she was stopped by police in Whole Foods for not wearing a mask.

Owens took to Twitter on Tuesday to recount how she had been out shopping with her husband unaware of Mayor Muriel Bowser's April 8 mandate requiring customers to 'wear a mask or mouth covering.'

The 30-year-old, who made a point of declaring her backing for the police, said she could tell that the officer 'disagreed with (the policy) personally' because of how frustrated she was becoming with customers complaining about shopping carts and surfaces not being wiped down.

But despite this, the officer told Owens and her British husband George Farmer, 'You guys have to wear your masks.'

Owens took to Twitter on Tuesday to recount how she had been out shopping with her husband unaware of Mayor Muriel Bowser's April 8 mandate requiring customers to 'wear a mask or mouth covering.'

Owens recounted: 'I said "I don't have a mask. I haven't bought one.'" I didn't race to buy toilet paper, I'm not a part of the corona crazies. I'm not a part of the tin foil hat, bunkering in my basement. I'm just living my life.'

The conservative activist claims she and her husband then had to partake in an absurd charade of holding their clothing up to their faces while having to pick up items in the store.

Owens added: 'We must've been in the store for like, four minutes picking some stuff, and the police officer chases me down and she says that she's getting complaints that I don't have a mask on.'

Following this anecdote, Owens forges on with her diatribe against the draconian coronavirus measures imposed in Washington DC and elsewhere, claiming at one point there is 'no empirical evidence to support the wearing of masks.'

In addition to 68 deaths, the nation's capital has more than 2,000 cases of coronavirus.

President Donald Trump sparked a furious backlash from Democrats yesterday when he dared to suggest he had the authority to decide when states would re-open for business, not governors.

He has reluctantly sided with health experts who say that the lockdown measures - which have been replicated throughout the world - are the only way to prevent a catastrophe.

Candance Owens married Brit George Farmer, the son of a baron, over Labor Day weekend, pictured. The happy couple were engaged over a FaceTime call after two and a half weeks of dating after meeting in December 2018

Guests at the Owens-Farmer wedding included Brexit Party leader Nigel Farage, pictured right, and Charlie Kirk, who founded right-wing Turning Point USA

But Trump has also said that states in the Midwest, or those which are not badly hit, which could include DC as Owens described it, should not be bound to lockdown measures which are suited to densely populated cities like New York and Los Angeles.

Owens, formerly the communications director for Turning Points USA, a conservative youth organization, married Farmer at a Trump Winery in Virginia in August, eight months after they met.

Farmer, the son of a Tory peer, met Owens at the launch of a right-wing student group in the UK and got engaged over a FaceTime call after just two-and-a-half weeks of dating.

They tied the knot at the end of August, over Labor Day weekend, at Trump Winery, near Charlottesville, in front of a host of equally conservative guests, including actor Jon Voight, radio host Larry Elder, Brexit Party leader Nigel Farage and Charlie Kirk, who founded right-wing Turning Point USA.

They tied the knot at the end of August over Labor Day weekend at the winery owned by the first family near Charlottesville

Pictures from their wedding on August 31 show Owens in a traditional lace, floor length white gown with sleeves, right. Her hair was tied back in a loose half up, half down style she wore a long veil. She posted images of her three dresses, writing: 'To the ladies asking I wore @moniquelhuillierbride for all three of my dresses'

The happy couple, who rent an apartment in Mount Vernon, Washington, shared the images from their special day on social media

In some images from their wedding day posted to social media, the couple - who live in a rented apartment in Mount Vernon, Washington - thanked Eric Trump for the 'incredible venue and sunset in the captions, and revealed their simple white wedding cake was topped with a red Make Weddings Great Again' hat, which guests also wore later in the evening.

Eric Trump is the president of the winery, and oversees the company's winemaking, marketing and global distribution, according to the Trump Winery website.

Pictures from their wedding show Owens in a traditional lace, floor length white gown with sleeves. Her hair was tied back in a loose half up, half down style she wore a long veil.

After the ceremony she donned a red 'MAGA' hat and her new husband wore a light blue Brexit Party cap and smoked a huge cigar.
[April 15, 2020] Coretelligent Included in Boston Business Journal's 2020 Fast 50 List for the Fifth Consecutive Year

The Boston Business Journal has named Coretelligent, a leading provider of comprehensive managed IT and private cloud services, to its exclusive 2020 Fast 50 list, which represents the 50 fastest-growing private companies in Massachusetts. The Fast 50 companies are selected and ranked based on a formula that counts revenue growth from 2016 to 2019, making these companies a key component of the region's continued economic growth. "At a time when the world is coping with the challenges of the COVID-19 crisis, I am extremely proud of our team for continuing to serve our customers with excellence," notes Kevin J. Routhier, Founder, and CEO of Coretelligent. "Receiving this prestigious award from the Boston Business Journal for the fifth consecutive year helps us remember that the individuals behind the Coretelligent brand are making a difference in the lives of our clients every day. The inclusion in this year's list is more meaningful than ever, as it demonstrates Coretelligent's ability to consistently deliver exceptional service while achieving exceptional growth." Coretelligent's continued success is the result of an unwavering focus on security and process, which helps provide clients with the assurance that they are fully compliant with government regulations and protected from cyber threats at all times. Their experience in complex businesses such as financial services, life sciences, technology, legal and manufacturing assures that each new client will have access to the background and knowledge required to quickly scale and implement solutions. "At a time when positive busines news is hard to come by, the privately held companies included among this year's Fast 50 have something to celebrate indeed," Carolyn M. Jones, market president and publisher of the Boston Business Journal, said. "The COVID-19 crisis has changed the way we work and live; and like many others, we have reimagined our event and content to ensure the health and safety of all. Our celebration, originally scheduled to be held on May 20, is now expected to be held in November."



A Fast 50 special publication is scheduled to run in the May 22 weekly edition of the Business Journal. A second publication, complete with rankings by revenue, will be published in conjunction with the Fast 50 event at the Aloft Hotel Seaport in South Boston, where we will announce the actual rankings. Companies on the Fast 50 must have their headquarters in Massachusetts and must have reported revenue of at least $500,000 in 2016 and $1 million in 2019 were considered. The numbers were crunched and analyzed by the Business Journal's research department and by the media company's Fast 50 partner, Withum. To be included, companies must maintain growth from 2018 to 2019 and record minimum sales of $1 million for 2019.

For the complete list of 2020 Fast 50 companies, visit the BBJ's website here. About Coretelligent Coretelligent is a leading provider of comprehensive managed IT, Security, and cloud services, enabling organizations to seamlessly power and successfully grow their businesses. Founded in 2006 and led by world-class experts, Coretelligent's key White Glove services - Managed IT, Security and Compliance, Cloud Management and Backup and Disaster Recovery - are relied on by top-tier organizations in the financial services, life sciences, legal, and technology industries among others. The organization is recognized as leaders by the Boston Business Journal, CRN, Inc., MSPmentor, and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. Coretelligent's headquarters are located in Westwood, Mass., with strategic offices located nationally in New York City, Philadelphia, Atlanta and the San Francisco Bay area. For more information, please visit www.coretelligent.com or follow us on Twitter, Facebook & LinkedIn. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20200415005466/en/

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She can get into the skin of character - whether its the doting mother from Taare Zameen Par, the sizzling sassy businesswoman in Dil Toh Bacha Hai Ji or the hilarious doctor in Good Newzz, Tisca Chopra has always taken up unconventional roles from the very start and done pure justice to them.

Twitter

In all these years, the actress continues to be relevant. At a time and age, where everything is stalled due to Coronavirus, Tisca is all set to return to television with one of our favourite show, Hostages,





The show which was on Hotstar is coming back. We got in touch with the stunning actor who spoke to us during the lockdown days and she's so positive, it's inspiring.

Twitter

Taking a direction course is helping me beat quarantine

Tisca has been up and about despite the lockdown. She has staying in way before the actual lockdown began. "I have started lockdown diaries on Instagram that's keeping me motivated and I'm hoping others are getting motivated too. We were staying in a couple of days before the lockdown only. I was barely stepping out. It's crucial. My husband and I predicted Coronavirus is going to be pretty bad and here it is. Lockdown diaries helps me focus on keeping my day on track warna poora din aap night suit me bhaithe rehte ho."





Tisca gave us an insight on what she's upto. She has been taking an online direction class. Talking about her long time passion, Tisa says, "I have been wanting to get into direction and I don't like to do things half hardheartedly. I have been taking the master class of Martin Scorsese and then watching movies of the same director. I am quite happy the way this has turned out for me. I have discipline and a routine.





Not just that, Tisca is multi-tasking. "I'm watching a lot of content, catching up with friends, spending time with my daughter, we play board games, we have been having a decent time although my heart goes out to those who are out there, esp migrant workers, doctors and health care staff."







Celebs are on Instagram because they are bored too not because they want to be seen

Instagram/Tisca Chopra

Farah Khan has been slamming celebs who are flaunting their life in times of quarantine, however, Tisa feels they are not showing off. "Celebs are not doing it to be seen. They are on Instagram so much because they have the time to do all these things, otherwise they are shooting, listening to narration. Now they have 18-20 hours. This is also the time to hold hands and not be negative, Coronavirus has taught us that you could be a celebrity, housewife, a person in a small town in India, everyone is equally threatened by the illness. People are connecting on a human level, its just a way to reach out. I may not be able to perform or act but interacting with fans helps me to get out there a little bit."







Tisca feels blessed to be relevant

Instagram/Tisca Chopra

"My journey has been fun and I am thankful for it There are many actors from the 90s who haven't continued working but I have and I am thankful for it. Getting such wonderful films and directors, it's just amazing. There are a bunch of interesting roles coming my way after this situation gets over."







Medium or platform doesn't matter, Today is the time to do good stories





Whether its web, television or cinema, Tisca feels content is the king. "People are holding onto stories rather than medium. I love both films and web. television not so much but Hostages is coming back so its great. The show was loved online so I hope people will enjoy as it has a certain quality of virality to it."











More than screen time, story matters to Tisca Chopra



"If the story is something you want to listen to and you love the people you are making it with then screen time is not important. If you are doing a feature film which takes about 4-6 months, then it's important to work with people with similar preferences."







The best way to get motivated is to check your weight everyday



Instagram/Tisca Chopra

Before wrapping up, she has an advice for people who are binge eating and binge watching. "It's important to keep a certain routine and schedule. Have a plan, it's only 2 weeks. You can get a lot done. the important thing is - it will pass. These are crucial days of your life, yeh bhi aap ki zindagi se ek ek din kam ho raha hai, so if you can understand that then you must enjoy. It's your house with your loved ones. Chat, eat, cook, clean , read. You have limited time on earth, so why give even one day to sadness.







Well, point taken, Tisca.
BRUSSELS  President Emmanuel Macron, never very popular, has touched his highest approval ratings in France since the onset of the coronavirus. As Italy has been devastated, Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte has hit a remarkable 71 percent, up 27 points. Even in Britain, where Prime Minister Boris Johnson waffled over a strong response, then became seriously ill himself, the government is the most popular in decades.

There is nothing like a good crisis to get diverse populations to rally around their leaders. When people are confused and afraid, they tend to trust their governments, because to think that the authorities are themselves confused and afraid, let alone incompetent, is too much to bear.

The question is whether that will last once the crisis eases, criticism mounts and normal politics resumes. Usually, it does not last long. Formal inquiries into the inevitable errors and mistakes soon follow, and voters, if allowed, often take their revenge, even on the most effective leaders.

And it is safe to say that many of those getting a boost for the moment have been less than effective, judging by the crushing toll of a virus impervious to partisan bluster and unforgiving of mistakes.
A murder suspect, Abegunde Olaniyi, has recounted how he killed a Christ Apostolic Church, Oke Imole evangelist, Mrs Grace Ajibola in Ibadan, Oyo state.

The suspect said to be an errand boy to the evangelist, said he first hit her with a wooden object and then strangulated her, and thereafter carted away her Tecno mobile phone and three Automated Teller Machine (ATM) cards.

Read Also: Man Murders His Wife For getting Pregnant Again

Olaniyi revealed also that he had discovered Mrs Ajibola had a sum of about N2 million in her bank account after she sent him to withdraw money for her via the ATM at a new generation bank at Apata, Ibadan.

I decided to murder her and take possession of the money, Olaniyi said.

According to him, he had already made a withdrawal of N120,000 from the victims bank account when he was arrested.

Speaking to journalists on Tuesday, the Oyo State Commissioner of Police, Sina Olukolu, said Olaniyi killed Mrs Ajibola on March 17, 2020 at about 11am at her residence at the Oluyole area of Ibadan. He said the police recovered one Tecno mobile phone and two ATM cards belonging to Mrs Ajibola and the wooden object that the suspect used in hitting her.

Olukolu said also that Olaniyi was arrested in his hideout in Akure, Ondo State. Olaniyi told journalists he didnt know what came over him on that fateful day that made him kill the evangelist.
PR-Inside.com: 2020-04-15 18:51:04

Calgary, Alberta, April 15, 2020 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- NOVA Chemicals Corporation, 1000 Seventh Avenue S.W., Calgary, Alberta, Canada T2P 5L5

www.novachemicals.com | 403.750.3600 tel | 403.269.7410 fax

Calgary, Alberta (April 15, 2020) - NOVA Chemicals Corporation (NOVA Chemicals) today announced that it has completed the previously announced sale of its 50% ownership interest in Novealis Holdings LLC (Novealis) to Borealis AG (Borealis).

Formed in 2018, Novealis is the joint venture between affiliates of Borealis and NOVA Chemicals, which subsequently formed a 50/50 joint venture with an affiliate of Total S.A. to launch Bayport Polymers LLC in Houston, Texas.

##

About NOVA Chemicals

NOVA Chemicals develops and manufactures chemicals and plastic resins that make everyday life safer, healthier and easier. Our employees work to ensure health, safety, security and environmental stewardship through our commitment to sustainability and Responsible Care NOVA Chemicals, headquartered in Calgary, Alberta, Canada, is wholly-owned ultimately by Mubadala Investment Company of the Emirate of Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates.

www.novachem.com

For further information please contact:





Jennifer NanzDirector, Corporate Communicationse-mail: jennifer.nanz@novachem.com

Investor Inquiries

Patty Masry

Leader, Financial Reporting and Investor Relations

e-mail: patty.masry@novachem.com

The NOVA Chemicals logo is a registered trademark of NOVA Brands Ltd.; authorized use.

Responsible Care is a registered trademark of the Chemistry Industry Association of Canada
The Russian Federation continues to massively deprive Ukrainian citizens in the annexed Crimea of their property rights in violation of international law.

The Prosecutor's Office of the Autonomous Republic of Crimea conducts procedural management of the proceedings over the appropriation of state and private property by the occupying power in Crimea, the Representative Office of the President of Ukraine in the Autonomous Republic of Crimea posted on Facebook.

"The next step of the occupiers is the illegal inclusion of more than 11,500 land plots in the temporarily occupied territory of the Autonomous Republic of Crimea and the city of Sevastopol in the list of territories where the land plots cannot be owned by foreigners and foreign legal entities under the private property right. Furthermore, the occupying power illegitimately defines the citizens of Ukraine, who live or own property in Crimea but have not received an illegal passport of the Russian Federation, as foreigners," the statement reads.

It is noted that such actions of the occupying power entail serious violations of international humanitarian law and human rights, in particular the provisions of Article 1 of Protocol 1 of the ECHR on the right to peaceful enjoyment of possessions of every natural or legal person.

"Currently, the Prosecutor's Office of the Autonomous Republic of Crimea conducts procedural management of the criminal proceedings over the massive appropriation of state and private property by the occupying power on the Crimean peninsula," the Representative Office added.

It is emphasized that the information about the systematic commission of such a war crime by the officials of the occupying power and Russian authorities was sent by the Prosecutor's Office of the Autonomous Republic of Crimea jointly with the Regional Center for Human Rights to the Office of the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court and reflected in the reports of the Office of the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court on the preliminary examination of the situation in Crimea for 2017-2019. The violation of property rights is also mentioned in the interstate lawsuit of Ukraine against the Russian Federation filed at the ECHR.

As reported, Russian President Vladimir Putin signed a decree to include 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 list covers the land plots in Bakhchisaray, Dzhankoy, Kirovske, Krasnoperekopsk, Leninske, Nyzhniohirsk, Rozdolne, Saky, Simferopol, Sovietske, Chornomorske districts and the adjacent land plots of urban districts of Alushta, Armiansk, Yevpatoria, Kerch, Saky, Sudak, Feodosiya and Yalta.

The EU extended sanctions against individuals and organizations involved in the annexation of Crimea until September 15, 2020.

ol
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TORONTO, ON / ACCESSWIRE / April 14, 2020 / MinKap Resources Inc. (TSXV:KAP) ("MinKap" or the "Company") announces that, further to its press release of February 18, 2020, the non-binding letter of intent (the "LOI") dated February 3, 2020, between the Company and DG Resource Management Ltd. ("DG") has been terminated by the Company in accordance with the provisions of the LOI. The Company remains open to further negotiation of revised terms with DG in respect of the Breccia Gold Property in response to current market conditions.The Company also announces that further to its press release of March 5, 2020, the non-brokered private placement of up to 10,000,000 units (each, a "Unit") of the Company at a price of $0.075 per Unit for aggregate gross proceeds of up to $750,000 (the "Offering") has been terminated and will not proceed as proposed.The Company continues to evaluate and review other gold and base metal opportunity for potential acquisition.On behalf of the Board of DirectorsMinKap Resources Inc.Jonathan ArmesPresident & CEOPhone 1 (416) 708-0243Neither 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.This press release contains forward-looking statements within the meaning of applicable Canadian and U.S. securities laws and regulations, including statements regarding the future activities of the Company. Forward looking statements reflect the current beliefs and expectations of management and are identified by the use of words including "will", "anticipates", "expected to", "plans", "planned" and other similar words. Actual results may differ significantly. The achievement of the results expressed in forward-looking statements is subject to a number of risks, including those described in the Company's management discussion and analysis as filed with the Canadian securities regulatory authorities which are available at www.sedar.com . Investors are cautioned not to place undue reliance upon forward-looking statements.SOURCE: MinKap Resources Inc.
Music executive, Ubi Franklins South African babymama, Nicola Siyo, called him out on social media after he reposted a video of their son, Shiloh.

The South-African beauty accused the music executive of neglecting their child and pretending to be a dotting dad to deceive people.

In her words;

Instagram daddy of the decade ubifranklintriplemg tell me, have you ever met this Shiloh you are busy posting? Do you know he is turning one? Public image does not raise children.

Read Also: Brymo Tells Adekunle Gold His Secret To Making Good Music

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The "jackass, loser, fat-tire biker" that CNN's Chris Cuomo berated on radio has filed a formal police complaint against the Prime Time anchor.

The 65-year-old Long Island man, David Whelan, was the subject of a Cuomo tirade during a broadcast of "Let's Get After It with Chris Cuomo" over an alleged verbal confrontation between the two on Easter Sunday.

According to the East Hampton police complaint, obtained by The Independent, Cuomo allegedly threatened Mr Whelan, saying he hadn't "seen the last of him" and that "he would beat the crap out" of him.

"At this time D. Whelan does not wish to pursue charges but does want the situation documented as he is worried about C. Cuomo retaliating against him," the report said.

In an interview with The New York Post, Mr Whelan said he approached Cuomo and asked why he wasn't social distancing.

"I said to him, 'Your brother is the coronavirus czar, and you're not even following his rules  unnecessary travel'," he said.

Cuomo has been in quarantine and broadcasting from his Southampton home since announcing on 31 March that he had tested positive for coronavirus.

According to Mr Whelan, Cuomo responded: "'Who the hell are you?! I can do what I want!' He just ranted, screaming, 'I'll find out who you are!'"

"He said, 'This is not the end of this. You'll deal with this later. We will meet again.' If that's not a threat, I don't know what is," Mr Whelan said.

Cuomo vented about the incident during his SiriusXM radio show on Monday, explaining that his public profile prevented him from firing back at people talking "bullshit".

"I want to be able to tell you to go to hell, to shut your mouth," Cuomo said. "I don't get that doing what I do for a living, me being able to tell you to shut your mouth or I will do you the way you guys do each other."

"I don't want some jackass, loser, fat-tire biker being able to pull over and get in my space and talk bullshit to me, I don't want to hear it."

It is the second major controversy to come out of Monday's show, during which Cuomo seemingly had an existential crisis and said he didn't want to work at CNN because he didn't value indulging irrationality and hyperpartisanship.

"I don't like what I do professionally. I don't think it's worth my time," he said.

"I don't think it's worth it to me because I don't think I mean enough, I don't think I matter enough, I don't think I can really change anything, so then what am I really doing?"

Cuomo walked back the comments during his SiriusXM show on Tuesday, saying he was taken out of context.

"I was talking about having legitimate questions, which I've had all along this administration. Let alone, with a fever with Covid for two weeks and being pissed off about being sick and rethinking a lot of things on an existential basis all the time," he said.

CNN did not immediately respond to a request for comment. CNN has previously defended their star broadcaster after video showed him threatening to throw a man down a set of stairs.

The video, shared widely across YouTube and Twitter, showed Cuomo repeatedly cursing and threatening a man in New York in August last year.

"Punk ass bitches from the right call me Fredo," Cuomo says to a man standing beside him. "My name is Chris Cuomo. I'm an anchor on CNN. Fredo is from 'The Godfather.' He was a weak brother and they use it as an Italian aspersion."

After the man says he thought Cuomo's name was Fredo, the cable TV host became agitated, saying: "You're going to have a big fucking problem. I'll fucking ruin your shirt. I'll fucking throw you down these stairs."
Coronavirus swabs from patients are kept in a plastic sealed tub (PA)

Two healthcare workers at a hospital in Kilkenny have died after contracting coronavirus.

The staff members worked at St Lukes General Hospital in Kilkenny city.

Their deaths were confirmed as Irelands death total rose to 444 on Wednesday.

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There have been 12,547 confirmed case of the virus in the country since the outbreak began.

Of those who have tested positive, around one in four is a healthcare worker.

A spokeswoman for Ireland East Hospital Group expressed sympathies for the two staff members.

I can sadly confirm that two healthcare workers from St Lukes General hospital Carlow/Kilkenny have passed away having tested positive for Covid 19, she said.

We would like to give our sincere condolences to their families, friends and colleagues.
ATLANTA, April 15, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- Jackson Healthcare today announced it has responded to the State of Georgia's emergency call to bring hundreds of additional critical care doctors and nurses to Georgia to meet the anticipated shortage of healthcare workers as the State prepares to reach peak hospital capacity in the coming weeks due to COVID-19.

Governor Brian Kemp announced earlier this week that the State contracted with Alpharetta-based Jackson Healthcare to undertake the critical mission of filling the staffing needs of healthcare providers that are battling the spread of COVID-19.

"Jackson Healthcare is working all across the country to place doctors, nurses and other healthcare workers on the front lines of battling COVID-19," said Shane Jackson, president of Jackson Healthcare. "But Georgia is our home, and when the State asked us to help supply healthcare providers in Georgia with the personnel they would need to treat these patients, we immediately made it a top priority."

"Our team has been working around the clock for the past several weeks doing everything we can to help our fellow Georgians," Jackson added. "We are honored to work with the incredible professionals at the Georgia Department of Community Health, our many healthcare staffing partners who are a critical part of this effort, the tremendous team at Phoebe Putney Memorial Hospital, and the healthcare community across Georgia, which is on the front lines of this crisis."

Governor Kemp announced Tuesday that Jackson Healthcare is deploying roughly 570 healthcare professionals across Georgia. These healthcare professionals are providing support at Albany's Phoebe Putney Memorial Hospital, as well as other healthcare facilities across the State.

Working with Jackson Healthcare and leveraging the COVID-19 Surge Staffing Program from its subsidiary company, Healthcare Workforce Logistics, enables the State to quickly anticipate and meet various urgent staffing needs driven by increased demand for healthcare workerssuch as physician, nursing and allied health professionalsand shortages of core staff due to the spread of COVID-19.

Healthcare workers seeking to help at healthcare facilities treating COVID-19 patients can register on its website at www.jacksonhealthcare.com/GAresponse.

About the COVID-19 Surge Staffing Program

The Surge Staffing Program from Jackson Healthcare and Healthcare Workforce Logistics was designed specifically for the fight against COVID-19. Through Healthcare Workforce Logistics' vendor neutral model, healthcare delivery organizations can easily access locum tenens, nursing and allied health professionals, allowing them to rapidly address the shortage of healthcare staff and meet rising demands for professionals in the field due to the coronavirus outbreak.

The COVID-19 Surge Staffing Program is a free service to healthcare delivery organizations and is available nationwide. Just as the State of Georgia has put it into action, states across the country can benefit from the ability to staff their facilities with healthcare professionals in and around their areas. Learn more by clicking here.

About Healthcare Workforce Logistics

Healthcare Workforce Logistics is the leader and innovator in vendor neutral healthcare workforce solutions to healthcare employers across the nation. With deep expertise and experience, HWL helps healthcare employers optimize their workforces to increase efficiency, improve patient outcomes and reduce costs. HWL delivers managed services programs, vendor management systems, candidate sourcing tools, consulting and other services. Clients include acute-care hospitals, community health centers and clinics, physician practice groups, retail and urgent care centers, home health providers and healthcare employers in many other settings. Healthcare Workforce Logistics is part of the Jackson Healthcare family of companies. For more information, visit www.hwlmsp.com.

About Jackson Healthcare

Jackson Healthcare is a family of highly specialized healthcare staffing, search and technology companies. With a mission to improve the delivery of patient care and the lives of everyone it touches, it helps healthcare facilities across the country serve more than 10 million patients each year. Backed by more than 1,500 associates and with over $1 billion in annual revenue, Jackson Healthcare is a top three U.S. healthcare staffing firm. In addition to being Great Place to Work certified, it is consistently recognized as an employer of choice, having appeared in consecutive years on Fortune's Best Workplaces in Health Care and Biopharma, in 2019 on the Best Workplaces for Women and in 2018 on the Best Workplaces for Millennials lists, as well as being named a best place to work by the Atlanta Business Chronicle. Learn more at www.jacksonhealthcare.com.

SOURCE Jackson Healthcare

Related Links

http://www.jacksonhealthcare.com


Gary Allibon (pictured), 59, was driving a cash transit van at 6am on June 7, 2010, on Sussex St, in Sydney's CBD, when he was gunned down during brazen robbery

Almost a decade after Gary Allibon was 'executed in cold blood' during a robbery in Sydney's CBD, police say they're close to tracking down his killers and are offering $1 million reward for information about the murder.

In June 2010 Mr Allibon, 59, was working as a security guard when he was shot in the back during the robbery of a cash-transit van on Sussex Street in Sydney.

Three men stole cash and Mr Allibon's work-issued firearm before fleeing in an Audi S8 driven by a fourth man, NSW Police said in a statement on Wednesday.

The Audi was seen two days later exiting the M5 at Henry Lawson Drive in convoy with a Mercedes C63 before it was destroyed by fire in a car park at Milperra in western Sydney.

No one has yet been charged over Mr Allibon's murder, but police say they are close to solving the crime.

Police investigating the shooting have linked four cars to the crime and found two of them

'We believe we have a clear picture of the events of the day, and a fair idea of the identities under the balaclavas, but we need the community's help to bring our case beyond reasonable doubt,' Detective Acting Superintendent Grant Taylor said in a statement.

'Make no mistake, this wasn't a robbery gone wrong. Gary Allibon had complied with their demands and was executed in cold blood.'

Police on Wednesday announced the reward for information about the murder had increased ten-fold to $1 million.

'The time for any - or all - of these people to come forward is now. Strikeforce Lorimer will get the pieces of information they need, so either way, you'll be seeing us soon,' Det Acting Supt Taylor said.

Mr Allibon's widow Monica joined police in calling for community help, saying she won't be able to move past her grief until she finds out what happened to her husband.

'We had the simple dream of growing old together; that was ripped from us with a single bullet fired in greed,' Ms Allibon said in a statement.

No one has ever been charged in Mr Allibon's murder - however his widow, Monica, hopes the reward will bring her husband justice

'Those men robbed the van and took my husband's life, and the people who know them and what they did are robbing me of answers and justice for Gary.'

The gun used in Mr Allibon's shooting has been linked to a 2007 Vaucluse shooting and a 2010 shooting in Merrylands.

Bullet casings found in the Audi get-away car are linked to a shooting in Wentworthville in 2010, police said.

The Audi and the Mercedes have also been linked to two other cars - a white BMW X6 4WD and a 2004 BMW 5-Series sedan.

Police are urging anyone with information to contact CrimeStoppers.
The European Union (EU) has urged countries to adopt a gradual and targeted approach to lifting lockdown measures, with new cases across the continent finally slowing.

In guidance published Wednesday, the EU's executive arm, the European Commission, instructed countries to take gradual actions, relaxing restrictions in stages and allowing time between each action to measure the impact. The advice echoes that released on Tuesday by the World Health Organization (WHO).

Widespread lockdown measures have been implemented across much of the EU in an effort to combat the spread of the coronavirus, including the closure of non-essential businesses, schools and borders.

As of Wednesday afternoon, almost 2 million cases of the virus have been confirmed worldwide, resulting in more than 128,000 deaths, according to data compiled by Johns Hopkins University. Some EU countries have been hit particularly hard: namely, Italy and Spain which have reported over 21,000 and 18,500 deaths respectively.

The Commission's roadmap said decisions to lift lockdowns should arise out of epidemiological proof of a sustained slowdown of the virus, sufficient health system and monitoring capacity.
Sydney, April 16, 2020 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Just released, this edition of Paul Budde Communications focus report on Saudi Arabia outlines the major developments and key aspects in the telecoms markets.

Read the full report: https://www.budde.com.au/Research/Saudi-Arabia-Telecoms-Mobile-and-Broadband-Statistics-and-Analyses





Saudi Arabia tenders out two new MVNO licenses in 2020

Saudi Arabia offers one of the most progressive telecoms markets in the Middle East and is well positioned to capitalise on the potential opportunities offered by 5G. Mobile penetration is considered high in and the market is heavily saturated, with a large number of mobile broadband users.

The mobile operators are very competitive and comprise of Saudi Telecom Company (STC), Mobily and Zain KSA - as well as MVNOs. Competition will increase further with two new MVNO licenses offered for tender by the Regulator in 2020.

Recently the operators have been exploring ways to monetise the thousands of mobile towers spread throughout Saudi Arabia. In 2019 STC established a subsidiary to manage its tower infrastructure, called TAWAL.

5G is firmly on the agenda for Saudi Arabia with the regulator awarding new spectrum for 4G/5G use in early 2019. STC, Zain KSA and Mobily have all developed various 5G partnerships with solution providers like Huawei, Nokia, Cisco and Ericsson and the three operators have launched preliminary services.

While Saudi Arabias fixed broadband penetration is considered low on a global scale; there has been significant work towards developing fibre-based networks instead of DSL, which still comprise the largest market share.

BuddeComm notes that the outbreak of the Coronavirus in 2020 is having a significant impact on production and supply chains all around the world. During this time, the telecoms sector to various degrees is likely to experience a downturn in mobile device and ICT equipment production, while it may also be difficult for network operators to source necessary equipment or manage workflows when maintaining and upgrading existing infrastructure. Overall progress towards 5G may also be postponed or slowed down in some countries. On the consumer side, spending on telecoms services is likely to be impacted by large-scale job losses and the consequent restriction on disposable incomes. In contrast, the demand for mobile and broadband services is expected to rise, as more citizens will require online services for work, entertainment, education, tele-health and social purposes.

This valuable BuddeComm report provides analyses, information, industry statistics and insights into in Saudi Arabias progressive telecoms sector.

Kylie Wansink, BuddeComm, 2020.

Recent developments:

In mid-2019 both STC and Zain KSA launched their first 5G networks.

Zain KSA announced in late 2019 that it was going to offer commercial 5G network roaming services between Saudi Arabia and Kuwait.

Universal Services Licenses have been awarded in Saudi Arabia.

An infrastructure sharing agreement was established in 2019; allowing Zain KSA to utilise the fibre-based infrastructure of Saudi Telecom Company (STC).

Saudi Arabia is implementing strategies as part of its the Vision 2030 program.

Companies mentioned in this report include:

Saudi Telecom Company (STC), Integrated Telecom Company (ITC), GO Telecom/Etihad Atheeb, Mobily/Ettihad Etisalat/Bayanat Al-Oula, Zain KSA, Virgin Mobile Saudi Arabia, Arabsat.

Key statistics Country overview Impact of Coronavirus (Covid-19)

Regional Middle East Market Comparison Introduction Mobile and mobile broadband penetration Fixed and mobile broadband penetration

Telecommunications market Market overview Market analysis Universal Licenses Saudi Arabias Vision 2030

Regulatory environment Historic overview Regulatory authority Telecom sector liberalisation Fixed-line developments Licenses Interconnect and access Number Portability (NP) Universal service Mobile network developments Licenses Roaming MTRs Fingerprinting law Spectrum

Mobile communications Market overview Historical overview Market analysis Mobile statistics General statistics Mobile voice Mobile data Mobile broadband statistics Mobile infrastructure Tower sharing 5G 4G (LTE, LTE-A) 3G Satellite mobile Major mobile operators Saudi Telecom Company (STC) Mobily (Etihad Etisalat) Zain KSA Mobile content and applications M-banking and m-payments

Fixed-line broadband market Market overview Historical overview Market analysis Fixed broadband statistics Fixed-line broadband technologies Integrated Telecom Company (ITC)

Fixed network operators Saudi Telecom Company (STC)

Telecommunications infrastructure Overview of the national telecom network International infrastructure (satellite, submarine) Terrestrial cable networks Submarine cable networks Satellite networks Smart infrastructure Data centres, cloud computing Blockchain Artificial Intelligence Smart grids Smart cities

Appendix  Historic data

Related Reports

List of Tables

Table 1  Top-level country statistics and regulatory authorities  Saudi Arabia  2020

Table 2  Saudi Arabia  GDP and inflation  2014  2019

Table 3  Saudi Arabia  mobile, fixed-line and total telecoms revenue of service providers  2010  2016

Table 4  Saudi Arabia - mobile subscribers and penetration  2009  2024

Table 5  Saudi Arabia - major mobile operators market share  2005  2018

Table 6  Saudi Arabia  prepaid subscribers  2002  Q3 2018

Table 7  Saudi Arabia  active mobile broadband subscriptions and penetration  2010  2024

Table 8  Mobily revenue and mobile subscribers  2006  1H 2019

Table 9  Zain KSA customers, revenue, EBITDA  2016  2018

Table 10  Saudi Arabia - fixed broadband subscribers  2009 - 2024

Table 11  Saudi Arabia - fixed broadband subscriptions  technologies and penetration  2010  Q3 2018

Table 12  STC Group revenue and profit  2005  2018

Table 13  Saudi Arabia  fixed-lines in service and teledensity  2010  2020

Table 14  Saudi Arabia  International Internet bandwidth  2010  2018

Table 15  Historic - Saudi Arabia - fixed lines in service - 1995  2009

Table 16  Historic - Saudi Arabia  mobile, fixed-line and total telecoms revenue of service providers  2001  2009

Table 17 Historic - mobile subscribers and penetration rate - 1995  2008

List of Charts

Chart 1  Middle East  mobile subscriber and mobile broadband penetration

Chart 2  Middle East  fixed and mobile broadband subscriber penetration

Chart 3  Saudi Arabia  mobile subscriptions and penetration  2009  2024

Chart 4  Saudi Arabia  major mobile operators market share - 2018

Chart 5  Saudi Arabia  mobile subscribers and penetration  2009  2024

List of Exhibits

Exhibit 1  Historical  Bravo acquisition

Exhibit 2  Submarine cables in-service in Saudi Arabia





Read the full report: https://www.budde.com.au/Research/Saudi-Arabia-Telecoms-Mobile-and-Broadband-Statistics-and-Analyses
Dublin, April 15, 2020 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- The "Diagnostic Imaging Market - Growth, Trends, and Forecast (2020 - 2025)" report has been added to ResearchAndMarkets.com's offering.





The major factors augmenting the growth of the diagnostic imaging market include the rise in the prevalence of chronic diseases, increased adoption of advanced technologies in medical imaging, and rise in the geriatric population.



The burden of chronic diseases is on the rise globally, and medical imaging procedures play a crucial role in the accurate diagnosis of chronic diseases. The increase in the aging population and changes in societal behavior are contributing to a steady increase in these common and costly long-term health problems. Most of the deaths by chronic diseases are attributable to cardiovascular diseases, obesity, and diabetes. According to WHO, the global burden of chronic diseases is expected to reach 57% by 2020. The most affected would be the emerging markets, as the population growth is anticipated to be most significant in developing areas.



New models for therapy and diagnoses are being developed, which provide precise results, help in early detection of diseases, and help minimize the cost of treating these diseases. With the increasing disposable income, people are becoming capable enough to have access to imaging procedures for early detection of diseases.



Furthermore, the medical imaging field has advanced at a great pace, stimulated by advances in digital and communication technologies. New imaging techniques that reveal greater anatomical details are available in most of the diagnostic labs and hospitals. The aim is to improve access and precision, decrease cost, and make the impact of radiation less harmful. The trend is shifting from fixed to portable equipment. For example, until recently, size and electricity requirement have hindered the proper use of ultrasound. Today, smaller ultrasound equipment can provide color-flow Doppler imaging, relying on battery power solely.



Oncology Segment under Application is expected to Account for Largest Market Share during the Forecast Period



Oncology deals with diagnosis and treatment of tumors and cancers, which is one the leading causes of morbidity and mortality. Among both sexes, lung, breast, and colorectal cancers are among the most common cancers in the world with lung cancer alone contributing to more than 13% of the total cases diagnosed, as stated by the Globcan.



According to National Cancer Institute report 2019, it was estimated that around 606,880 people will die in 2019 in United States only. In addition, one-third of deaths are due to high body mass index, low fruit and vegetable intake, lack of physical activity, tobacco use (includes approximately 22% of cancer deaths), and alcohol use. Additionally, there are several minor side effects, such as nausea, headaches, dry mouth, diarrhea, allergic reaction, and others, as well as some major side effects, such as kidney disease, dementia, and others associated with its use, which can affect the adoption rate, and hence can be a restraining factor in the market.



Diagnostic imaging plays a vital role in interventional oncology (with rising opportunities to diagnose and treat in a targeted and minimally or non-invasive manner) as well as in chemo and radiation therapy. Tools, such as CT, are the highly beneficial and preferred method of imaging for many conditions, including trauma patients. Comparatively, PET is mostly preferred as compared to SPECT, and there are hybrid medical devices also available such as PET/CT or PET/MRI.



North America accounted for the Largest Share in the Global Market



North America is found to hold a major share of the diagnostic imaging market, and is expected to show a similar trend over the forecast period, without significant fluctuations. The United States contributes to the major share in the diagnostic imaging market, which can be attributed to the increasing technological advances, higher affordability rates from the population, and the number of diagnostic procedures increasing on a yearly basis. MRI diagnostic is a growing field, both in terms of the number of the installed scanner and in the number of scans being performed. Based on the data by OECD, the United States is one of the leaders, second only to Japan, both in terms of availability and utilization.



Hence, with the presence of well-established healthcare facilities, an increasing demand for advanced healthcare systems among the aging population, and increasing prevalence of chronic diseases, the market is expected to grow in the forecast period.



Competitive Landscape



The market studied is consolidated owing to the presence of a few major players in the market. The market players are focusing on R&D to develop the technologically advanced products in order to reduce the cost and side effects associated with the products. The barriers for the new entrants are high in this industry, and hence few major market players hold the maximum market share.



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 Market Drivers

4.2.1 Rise in the Prevalence of Chronic Diseases

4.2.2 Increased Adoption of Advanced Technologies in Medical Imaging

4.2.3 Increase in the Geriatric Population

4.3 Market Restraints

4.3.1 Expensive Procedures and Equipment

4.3.2 Side Effects of Diagnostic Imaging

4.4 Porter's Five Forces Analysis

4.4.1 Threat of New Entrants

4.4.2 Bargaining Power of Buyers/Consumers

4.4.3 Bargaining Power of Suppliers

4.4.4 Threat of Substitute Products

4.4.5 Intensity of Competitive Rivalry



5 MARKET SEGMENTATION

5.1 By Modality

5.1.1 MRI

5.1.1.1 Low and mid field MRI systems (less than 1.5 T)

5.1.1.2 High field MRI systems (1.5-3 T)

5.1.1.3 Very High, and Ultra High Field MRI Systems (3T and more)

5.1.2 Computed Tomography

5.1.2.1 Low End Scanners (~16-Slice)

5.1.2.2 Mid Range Scanners (~64-Slice)

5.1.2.3 High End Scanners (128-Slice and More)

5.1.3 Ultrasound

5.1.3.1 2D Ultrasound

5.1.3.2 3D Ultrasound

5.1.3.3 Others

5.1.4 X-Ray

5.1.4.1 Analog Systems

5.1.4.2 Digital Systems

5.1.5 Nuclear Imaging

5.1.5.1 Positron Emission Tomography (PET)

5.1.5.2 Single Photon Emission Computed Tomography (SPECT)

5.1.6 Fluoroscopy

5.1.7 Mamography

5.2 By Application

5.2.1 Cardiology

5.2.2 Oncology

5.2.3 Neurology

5.2.4 Orthopedics

5.2.5 Gastroenterology

5.2.6 Gynecology

5.2.7 Other Applications

5.3 By End-User

5.3.1 Hospital

5.3.2 Diagnostic Centers

5.3.3 Others

5.4 Geography

5.4.1 North America

5.4.1.1 United States

5.4.1.2 Canada

5.4.1.3 Mexico

5.4.2 Europe

5.4.2.1 Germany

5.4.2.2 United Kingdom

5.4.2.3 France

5.4.2.4 Italy

5.4.2.5 Spain

5.4.2.6 Rest of Europe

5.4.3 Asia-Pacific

5.4.3.1 China

5.4.3.2 Japan

5.4.3.3 India

5.4.3.4 Australia

5.4.3.5 South Korea

5.4.3.6 Rest of Asia-Pacific

5.4.4 Middle East & Africa

5.4.4.1 GCC

5.4.4.2 South Africa

5.4.4.3 Rest of Middle East & Africa

5.4.5 South America

5.4.5.1 Brazil

5.4.5.2 Argentina

5.4.5.3 Rest of South America



6 COMPETITIVE LANDSCAPE

6.1 Company Profiles

6.1.1 Canon Medical Systems Corporation

6.1.2 Carestream Health Inc.

6.1.3 Esaote SpA

6.1.4 FUJIFILM Holdings Corporation

6.1.5 GE Healthcare

6.1.6 Hitachi Medical Systems

6.1.7 Hologic Corporation

6.1.8 Koninklijke Philips N.V.,

6.1.9 Shimadzu Medical

6.1.10 Siemens Healthineers



7 MARKET OPPORTUNITIES AND FUTURE TRENDS



For more information about this report visit https://www.researchandmarkets.com/r/39pf3e

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Chief Minister of Telangana K Chandrashekhar Rao has declared that the government is ready to conduct tests on any number of people and offer treatment to people who are suffering from the Corona Virus. He denied allegations of a shortage of n 95 masks and PPE Kits. he said all these are rumours. The CM made it clear that as per the guidelines given by the Centre, lockdown in the State would continue till April 20 as it is. He desired that the initiative shown by the peoples representatives, cooperation extended by people for the implementation of lockdown and assistance to the poor should continue.

The CM held a high-level review meeting on the measures taken to contain the Coronavirus spread, implementation of the lockdown, assistance given to the poor, procurement of the agriculture produce, Central government guidelines and other issues at Pragathi Bhavan. Medical and Health Minister Sri Etela Rajender, Chief Secretary Sri Somesh Kumar, DGP Sri Mahender Reddy, Principal Secretary (Finance) Sri Ramakrishna Rao and others attended.

CM KCR said that to contain the spread of Coronavirus, lockdown in the state had been implemented well. People have extended their excellent cooperation. People should continue their support in the days to come. As per the guidelines given by the Centre, lockdown in the State would continue till April 20, as it is. Later, based on the circumstances prevailing then, changes would be done. People should support the lockdown as they are doing now, the CM said.

Based on those who are suffering from Corona, 259 Containment Centre is opened in the State and they are managed effectively. Stringent measures are taken so that the virus does not spread. We have adequate test kits to conduct tests on any number of people in the State. There is no scarcity of the PPE Kits in the State. We have so far 2.25 Lakh PPE kits. The number will increase to 5 Lakh shortly. We have placed orders for another 5 Lakh kits. In all, the state will have 10 Lakh PPE Kits. As on date in the State, we have 3.25 Lakh N95 Masks. The number will increase to 5 Lakh very soon. We have placed orders for another 5 Lakh N95 Masks. With this, our state will have 10 Lakh N95 Masks. Besides this, Ventilators, other medical equipment, number of doctors, other medical staff, hospitals, beds and all are ready. So far 20,000 beds are already. Even if the patients increase to one lakh, the government made all arrangements for their treatment. The Telangana government is ready to wage a battle against the Coronavirus, the CM declared.

The Public representatives have taken a lot of initiative in monitoring the assistance given to the poor, procurement of the agriculture produce. Sarpanches, municipal Chairpersons, Mayors, Counsellors, Corporators, MLAs, Ministers are working with commitment. This work should go on. Educate the people. Ensure that the government policies and programs are reaching the people. Except for Medical and Health and Municipal administration Ministers, the rest of ministers, MLAs should remain in their districts, constituencies and monitor the situation, the CM urged.

The government has taken several measures so that no one in the state should suffer from hunger or starvation. The government announced cash prizes for those who are working very hard. These are all received by the beneficiaries. For every poor family, we have deposited Rs 1500 cash in the banks in their accounts. The programme to distribute 12 Kg of rice has almost completed. The cash incentives announced by the government for the sanitary workers, municipal, gram Panchayat staff and 10 per cent additional pay to the medical staff have reached them. Since sanitation works should continue in the villages and urban areas without any break, for all the gram panchayats in the State for April month Rs 308 Crore, for all municipal corporations, municipalities Rs 148 crore is released, the CM announced.

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Queen of England gives first-ever Easter speech: Take heart in hope of risen Christ

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Queen Elizabeth II spoke of the hope of Christ in a first-ever Easter address amid unusual circumstances for many Christians in that many were unable to attend church due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

"As darkness falls on the Saturday before Easter Day, many Christians would normally light candles together. In church, one light would pass to another, spreading slowly and then more rapidly as more candles are lit. It's a way of showing how the good news of Christ's resurrection has been passed on from the first Easter by every generation until now," she said.

"This year, Easter will be different for many of us, but by keeping apart we keep others safe."

Yet Easter is not canceled, she added, it is needed as much as ever.

"The discovery of the risen Christ on the first Easter Day gave his followers new hope and fresh purpose, and we can all take heart from this. We know that coronavirus will not overcome us," she said.

"As dark as death can be  particularly for those suffering with grief  light and life are greater. May the living flame of the Easter hope be a steady guide as we face the future."

Last Sunday, in another rare address, the queen spoke specifically about the COVID-19 pandemic that has besieged the world, killing over 116,000 people so far and infecting over 1.8 million around the world, particularly in Europe, and the ongoing response to the disease outbreak.

"Together we are tackling this disease, and I want to reassure you that if we remain united and resolute, then we will overcome it. I hope in the years to come everyone will be able to take pride in how they responded to this challenge, and those who come after us will say the Britons of this generation were as strong as any, that the attributes of self-discipline, of quiet, good-humored resolve, and of fellow feeling still characterize this country. The pride in who we are is not a part of our past, it defines our present and our future," the queen said.

"Across the Commonwealth and around the world, we have seen heartwarming stories of people coming together to help others, be it through delivering food parcels and medicines, checking on neighbors, or converting businesses to help the relief effort. And though self-isolating may at times be hard, many people of all faiths and of none are discovering that it presents an opportunity to slow down, pause and reflect in prayer or meditation."

Queen Elizabeth first ascended to the throne in 1952. She is England's longest-serving monarch since Queen Victoria, her great-great-grandmother. She is the longest-serving female head of state in world history, surpassing Queen Victoria's reign on Sept. 9, 2015.

The queen will turn 94 next week.
Paramedics and EMTs prepare to transport a gravely ill 92-year-old man with CCP virus symptoms from his home in Yonkers, New York, on April 6, 2020. (John Moore/Getty Images)

HHS Says Elderly and Disabled Pandemic Patients Have Equal Rights

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) has been reminding health care providers that they are legally forbidden from discriminating against elderly or disabled patients when treating those with the CCP virus.

While reports of anyone afflicted with the CCP virus, often known as the novel coronavirus, being denied care for any reason are rare in the United States, there have been news reports about patients in countries with overtaxed health care systems such as those in Italy and Spain being denied treatment during the pandemic because they were older.

Newspapers stateside such as The Arizona Republic have been publishing articles in recent days about disabled patients in this country expressing fear that during the medical triage process they will lose out if they have to compete for scarce resources with other more fully-abled patients.

Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand of New York, and seven fellow Democratic senators including Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and Tim Kaine of Virginia, urged the Trump administration in a letter April 10 to protect patients.

As our health care system struggles with the surge of COVID-19 patients, its crucial that the administration provide clear guidelines for equitable care for all Americans, the letter reads.

The Trump administration did move forward on the issue last month, as the senators acknowledged in their letter.

After reminding the reader that the office enforces laws that prohibit discrimination on the basis of disability in HHS-funded health programs or activities, a little noticed bulletin issued March 28 by the HHS Office of Civil Rights (OCR), stated that persons with disabilities should not be denied medical care on the basis of stereotypes, assessments of quality of life, or judgments about a persons relative worth based on the presence or absence of disabilities or age.

California issued a similar bulletin two days later, reminding health care providers and payers that rationing care based on a persons disability status is impermissible and unlawful under both federal and state law.

HHS advised health care providers that they must keep in mind their obligations not to discriminate against elderly and disabled patients when prioritizing COVID-19 treatment.

Persons with disabilities, with limited English skills, or needing religious accommodations, should not be put at the end of the line for health services during emergencies, OCR Director Roger Severino said in the bulletin.

Our civil rights laws protect the equal dignity of every human life from ruthless utilitarianism.

Decisions by providers concerning whether an individual is a candidate for treatment should be based on an individualized assessment of the patient and his or her circumstances, based on the best available objective medical evidence.

HHS acted after the Chicago-based Thomas More Society, a public-interest law firm specializing in religious freedom issues, and the Freedom of Conscience Defense Fund, a Rancho Santa Fe, California-based civil rights organization, authored briefs for submission to OCR.

Commissioned by Fordham University bioethicist Charles Camosy, Princeton Universitys Robert George, and Harvard University sociologist Jacqueline Rivers, the briefs confirm that rationing scarce medical supplies, such as ventilators, to exclude the elderly and the disabled, violates various federal civil rights statutes.

The initial memo was dated March 23 and was followed up with another memo on April 3.

Charles LiMandri, special counsel to the Thomas More Society and the Freedom of Conscience Defense Fund. (Courtesy Charles LiMandri)

Attorney Charles LiMandri, special counsel to both the Thomas More Society and the Freedom of Conscience Defense Fund, headed the team that wrote the memos.

We recognize that doctors must use triage to prioritize treatment and that means having to make difficult choices, LiMandri said in a statement.

But rationing health care based on a persons age or disability is not only unlawful, it is inhumane. We are pleased the Trump administration shares that belief, and we expect the bulletin to reassure doctors fighting at the frontlines of this pandemic.

Separately, in an interview with The Epoch Times, LiMandri said, If any hospitals are getting federal funding, and I understand they pretty well all are, they could lose that funding, at the very least, if theyre found in violation of federal law.

While age is not irrelevant in triaging, it is important to make clear that you just cant have a numerical age cutoff, he said.

But since the predictions of mass death have fallen short, making life-and-death decisions based on scarce resources has not become much of an issue during the pandemic in the United States.

Now, fortunately, the way its turned out, the coronavirus is not having the bad impact that we thought it might in terms of rationing  so were hoping that these issues addressed in these memos at this point are going to be more theoretical than real, at least in the current crisis.

Nonetheless, you dont want someone being disqualified simply because they might be 65 if theyre otherwise in good health, and that wouldnt be good medical judgment anyhow, nor would you want someone being disqualified because they have Down syndrome.

Weve got to be really careful about drawing lines [regarding] whose lives are worth saving and whose arent worth saving, LiMandri said.
[April 15, 2020] PayScale Donates Vital Compensation Data, Empowering Employers to Make Critical Pay Decisions During Current Economic Crisis

SEATTLE, April 15, 2020 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- PayScale, Inc ., the leader in on-demand cloud compensation data and software, today announced the company will provide a free one-year subscription for its Crowdsourced and Company Sourced compensation datasets to PayScale MarketPay customers.

The announcement comes at a time when most businesses are experiencing unstable economic conditions with government-mandated closures, employees exiting the workforce and significantly reduced revenues due to the Coronavirus pandemic. As businesses navigate the economic volatility caused by the COVID-19 crisis, they need the most current and accurate compensation insights to make more informed decisions about pay across their workforce, said PayScale CEO Scott Torrey. We recognized that we could alleviate some of the financial stress and time required to address workforce compensation issues by donating two rich datasets when our clients need it most. PayScales Crowdsourced Data provides businesses with the ability to keep a pulse on the ongoing changes in our shifting talent market. More specifically, this dataset offers customers: The freshest compensation insights available with data updated weekly

Data insights from the worlds largest compensation database containing 65 million salary profiles collected from employees across the U.S. and Canada

Data collected from payscale.com which attracts 10 million visitors and adds 300,000 new profiles each month to ensure businesses have the most timely, accurate and comprehensive data on the talent market

Compensation insights beyond just title to include a wide array of compensable factors such as specific skills, certifications, geographic location, educationand industry

A data set built on more than 15 years of expert analysis and curation to ensure accurate compensation insights



www.payscale.com .



PayScale is also donating its Company Sourced Data, offering companies one of the most up-to-date employer-sourced datasets available. This dataset includes:

Data from 1,900 participating companies including Fortune 1000 companies and medium-sized organizations, across a broad range of metro regions and industries in the U.S.

Aggregate compensation information reflecting pay from 2.5 million employees and 5,500 jobs; data is anonymized and updated quarterly

The combination of artificial intelligence and machine learning to save compensation professionals time by automatically matching jobs with the appropriate paya painstaking and time-consuming task today

Exceptionally strong data in the healthcare, manufacturing, finance, insurance, education, technology and energy industries sectors currently on the front lines of the COVID crisis Torrey concluded, During these times of uncertainty, its more important than ever?to have the most current compensation data to?inform strategic decision making which is why we are providing these critical insights to our customers at no cost right now. PayScale provides an agnostic compensation platform designed to give businesses the flexibility to utilize external compensation data sources to fit the specific needs of their company. Companies using MarketPay can leverage Crowdsourced Data, Company Sourced Data and third-party survey data, all in a frictionless way. For more information about PayScales compensation data available at no cost to MarketPay customers, please visit: https://discover.payscale.com/free-data/ About PayScale:

PayScale offers modern compensation software and the most precise, real-time, data-driven insights for employees and employers alike. More than 8,000 clients, from small businesses to Fortune 500 companies, use PayScale to power pay decisions for more than 23 million employees. These companies include Encana, The New York Times, Sunsweet, T-Mobile, United Health Group, Wendy's and Perry Ellis. For more information, please visit: https://www.payscale.com/ or follow PayScale on Twitter: https://twitter.com/payscale and #getpayright.

Press Contact:

Phyllis McNeice

Email: [email protected]

Tel: 206.954.1481

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AAI-GVK group-run Mumbai airport on Wednesday said it has helped transport more than 3,700 foreign nationals back to their respective countries, who were stranded due to the suspension of all commercial air passenger services amid the lockdown, with 20 repatriation flights in the last three weeks.

Besides, during the same time the airport has also maintained seamless cargo operations and conducted close to 240 cargo services as well, Mumbai International Airport Ltd (MIAL) said in a statement.

Working in tandem with the stakeholders in the aviation industry and the respective embassies, Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj International Airport (CSMIA) has facilitated the operation of flights carrying the stranded passengers from Mumbai to London, Atlanta, Frankfurt, Singapore, Paris and Tokyo among others, it said.

Following the directive issued by the Central Government to combat the coronavirus outbreak, all commercial passenger flights suspended in a bid to stop the spread of the global pandemic, the private airport operator said.

Furthermore, the Mumbai airport has recorded the highest number of exports and import delivery of cargo in a single day in India, MIAL said without sharing any specific numbers.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
You should feel zero guilt about asking for a full refund from a large airline, cruise line or hotel chain. Those companies will almost certainly survive the coronavirus crisis, and theyre keeping your money because they think they can. But in dealings with smaller companies, you may want to think twice before demanding all your money back. They need cash to survive.
Though the number of coronavirus infections in Egypt increased this week, officials believe they are close to flattening the curve

According to figures released by the Ministry of Health, the number of coronavirus cases in Egypt increased by 1120 in eight days to reach 2,190 by 13 April. Government officials nonetheless continued to issue reassuring statements.

Mohamed Al-Amari, chairman of parliaments Health Committee, told Al-Ahram Weekly that while it took 51 days to report more than 1,000 coronavirus it took only eight days to reach more than 2,000 cases.

This means the virus is spreading faster, with reported cases in the eighth week ranging between 100 and 120 a day, said Al-Amari.

This increase was expected. The World Health Organisation [WHO] and Ministry of Health officials long anticipated that the seventh and eighth weeks would see the highest number of infections.

The Ministry of Health and the government now need to keep the numbers steady and push the curve of the infection down, said Al-Amari.

In a public statement on 11 April, Minister of Health Hala Zayed said 88 per cent of coronavirus patients in Egypt present simple symptoms.

We also have 10 per cent with moderate to advanced symptoms. Only two per cent can be described as severe cases, said Zayed. Worldwide, Egypt remains in the low rates of infection category.

Zayed said the number of doctors infected with coronavirus in Egypt is also low compared to many other countries.

In some countries infection among doctors stands as high as 25 per cent, said Zayed.

Zayed revealed a committee was formed on 11 April, charged with stemming coronavirus infections among medical staff in public and private hospitals.

It will make sure strict anti-infection measures are in force, that medications are available, and that there will not be any infiltration of the virus into hospitals, said Zayed.

Ministry of Health Spokesperson Khaled Megahed said in a TV interview on 11 April that the course of coronavirus infections in Egypt looks similar to Japan.

There is the China scenario and the Japan scenario, and so far we seem closer to the Japan scenario, said Megahed.

Indeed, compared to Japan, we have fewer infections. Japan had reported more than 7,000 coronavirus cases by 11 April (with infections ranging between 400 and 500 per day), and a death toll of just five.

I hope that the number of coronavirus cases will slow by May or June, and the curve of infections will go down and then disappear, said Megahed.

Al-Amari noted that while the number of infections increased slightly in the eighth week, the death toll rose from 78 by 5 April to 159 by 12 April.

It took almost two months to report 85 deaths and just one week to report 81 more, said Al-Amari. This may have been expected, though it could suggest more stringent measures should be taken to contain the tide.

Megahed stressed that most, if not all, of the patients who have died had underlying health conditions.

Coronavirus is most serious for those with chronic conditions, particularly high blood pressure, diabetes and heart and kidney failure.

What is most significant about the eighth week, argued Megahed, is the number of patients, 488, who fully recovered and were released from hospital.

This is a very positive development. While the number of reported coronavirus cases increased in the eighth week, the number of patients recovering is also rapidly increasing.

John Jabbour, WHO representative in Egypt, also said on Monday that all the patients who died from coronavirus in Egypt had underlying health problems and some died before they reached hospital.

According to Jabbour, WHO is looking into the reasons behind the high rate of deaths in Egypt, which stands at 7.6 per cent. Around 30 per cent of Covid 19 patients died before being sent to quarantine hospitals or receiving medical treatment.

About 85 per cent of the patients have recovered without receiving medical treatment as they had very mild symptoms.

Egypt took very serious anti-coronavirus measures, using rapid response teams and effective surveillance systems to track infections and isolating citizens from other countries, said Jabbour.

While coronavirus infections differ from one country to another, the basic rule is that the virus mainly targets people, particularly older people, suffering from chronic illnesses, said Jabbour.

Jabbour said he could not give a date for when the virus will disappear in Egypt.

All we can say is that the country should continue implementing stringent measures to contain the virus, said Jabbour. And we are closely coordinating with the government to review measures taken to stem the rate of deaths.

Minister of Information Osama Heikal said in a TV interview on 12 April that the coronavirus in Egypt could subside in June if Egyptians complied with precautionary measures, especially during the holy month of Ramadan.

Ramadan, which is often marked by family gatherings, is expected to start on 23 April. Egypt will also celebrate the Sham Al-Nessim holiday and orthodox Easter on Sunday and Monday.

The unfolding of the crisis during Ramadan is worrying, but if citizens show commitment, coronavirus in Egypt will subside in June, Heikal said.

Heikal insisted Egypts healthcare system is capable of containing a gradual rise in cases. What would be problematic, he said, is a sudden spike in the number of cases.

A government emergency committee is closely monitoring the situation and citizens behaviour during the crisis, he added.

On 13 April Egypt ranked 53 among 215 countries with the pandemic. Egypt ranked fifth among 22 Arab countries in terms of infections, trailing Saudi Arabia (4,934), the United Arab Emirates (4,521), Qatar (3,231) and Algeria (1,983).

Egypt, however, is second only to Algeria in terms of the number of fatalities. Algeria has recorded 313 deaths and Egypt 146. The death toll in Saudi Arabia is now increasing by around five each day. Morocco is facing a surge in infections for the second week, and has recorded 1,763 cases and 126 deaths. Iraq also continues to see a spike. The number of infections increased from 1,000 on 5 April to 1,378 and 78 deaths on 13 April.

In comparison with Iran, Turkey and Israel, Egypt is also faring well. Turkey has recorded 61,049 cases and 1,296 deaths. Iran has recorded 73,303 cases and 4,585 deaths, while recorded cases in Israel reached 11,586 and 116 deaths.

According to the World Bank, economic growth is expected to slow down to 3.7 per cent from the expected 6 per cent before the pandemic, while Fitch forecasted it will slow down to 4.1 per cent. Both however agreed however that Egypts figures fare best compared to other Arab countries.

*A version of this article appears in print in the 16 April, 2020 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly

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UC Irvine Medical Center healthcare workers bang on windows in a return of gratitude as they watch first responders in a drive-by parade recognizing their efforts amid the COVID-19 crisis. (Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times)

Healthcare workers from Glendale to Mission Viejo were honored Tuesday by first responders who drove firetrucks, highway patrol cars and police vehicles in processions of tribute for their efforts amid the COVID-19 pandemic. At UC Irvine Medical Center in Orange, healthcare workers gathered outside to acknowledge a parade of about 25 emergency vehicles honoring them with sirens and flashing lights. The procession paused outside the windows of an emergency room, where workers inside banged on the windows in a show of mutual appreciation. At Mission Hospital in Mission Viejo, Orange County sheriff's deputies honored nurses from the cardiac rehab unit. And a group of Glendale police officers and firefighters gathered to honor the workers at Adventist Health Glendale.





UC Irvine Medical Center

UC Irvine Medical Center workers acknowledge police officers parading in their honor. (Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times)

UC Irvine Medical Center workers wave to firefighters. (Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times)

An Anaheim firefighter in the procession at UC Irvine Medical Center. (Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times)

St. Jude Medical Center

Medical personnel from St. Jude Medical Center stand clustered on the sidewalk as Fullerton and Brea Firefighters, EMS and Police join together in a show of support for healthcare workers outside of the hospital in Fullerton. (Kent Nishimura/Los Angeles Times)

Medical personnel pose for pictures with Fullerton firefighters in a show of support for healthcare workers outside of the St. Jude Medical Center in Fullerton. (Kent Nishimura/Los Angeles Times)

Firefighters stand atop a Fullerton Fire Department Engine in a show of support for healthcare workers outside of the St. Jude Medical Center in Fullerton. (Kent Nishimura/Los Angeles Times)

Adventist Health Glendale

Adventist Health Glendale workers take a break to acknowledge the tribute in their honor. (Luis Sinco / Los Angeles Times)

Healthcare workers, police officers and firefighters gather outside the Glendale hospital. (Luis Sinco / Los Angeles Times)

(Luis Sinco / Los Angeles Times )

Healthcare workers in Glendale. (Luis Sinco /Los Angeles Times)

Police officers applaud at the Glendale hospital. (Luis Sinco / Los Angeles Times)

Providence St. Joseph Medical Center

A vintage Burbank police car leads a procession to honor healthcare workers at Providence St. Joseph Medical Center in Burbank. (Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times)

Healthcare workers wave to friends before the start of a procession to honor nurses during a noon celebration in front of Providence St. Joseph Medical Center in Burbank. (Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times)

First responders proceed with lights and sirens on Alameda Avenue to honor healthcare workers at Providence St. Joseph Medical Center in Burbank. (Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times)

Mission Hospital

A worker from Mission Hospital in Mission Viejo acknowledges the tribute. (Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times)

Nurses from the Mission Hospital cardiac rehab unit are honored. (Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times)

The scene at the hospital in Mission Viejo. (Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times)
Michigan U.S. Sens. Debbie Stabenow and Gary Peters endorsed presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden in a joint statement, saying the former vice president played a key role in the states economic recovery.

Stabenow, D-Lansing, and Peters, D-Bloomfield Township, added their names to a large list of Michigan Democrats who put their support behind Biden, including Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, after declining to weigh in during Michigans March 10 primary. Their announcement also came on the heels of endorsements from former President Barack Obama and Bidens primary rival U.S. Sens. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt.

Michigans Democratic senators cited Bidens support of the 2009 auto bailout and called the former vice president a champion for Michigans middle-class families and workers. Stabenow and Peters said Biden is the best choice for residents who want to see cheaper prescription drugs, more environmental protections for the Great Lakes and better access to skilled job training.

Now more than ever we need a steady leader that can bring our country together to find common ground and solve the tough challenges ahead of us, Peters said in a release.

Stabenow said she counts Biden among her friends in Washington, highlighting their relationship as colleagues in the U.S. Senate and allies when Biden served in the White House.

Joe Biden has always had our backs in Michigan, Stabenow said in a release. Time after time, he has been there for us when it really counted.

Biden handily won Michigans Democratic primary, benefitting from the support of African American voters in Detroit, suburban communities in Southeast Michigan and rural areas Sanders had claimed in the 2016 Democratic primary. Biden won by 261,684 votes, beating Sanders by 17 percentage points.

Michigan voted for the Obama-Biden ticket twice, but Democrats lost control of the state in 2016. President Donald Trump carried Michigan by 10,700 votes, becoming the first Republican to win the state in nearly three decades.

Republicans are focusing attacks on Biden and Peters, who is among a handful of Democratic senators running for re-election this year in states Trump won. Trump Victory, a joint fundraising committee for Donald J. Trump for President the Republican National Committee, quickly released a statement criticizing the two Democrats for being soft on China.

Peters sent a separate message asking supporters to donate to his reelection campaign and Bidens campaign Wednesday morning. The email stated Republicans are assembling a massive GOP war chest to unseat Peters, who has been out-fundraised by Republican challenger John James for three consecutive quarters.

James, a U.S. Army veteran and businessman from Farmington Hills, raked in $4.8 million for the three-month period ending March 31, according to his campaign. Peters posted the best fundraising quarter of his career, his campaign said, but fell $800,000 short of James total.

Peters maintains a slight edge over James. The first-term senator raised $13.4 million since the beginning of 2019, while James campaign said it raised nearly $13 million.

Stabenow is not up for re-election this year. She fended off James in 2018, beating him by 6.5 percentage points.

Read more on MLive:

Joe Biden comes to Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmers defense after Trump slams states coronavirus response

How Bernie Sanders lost Michigan to Joe Biden

Democrats have spoken. Joe Bidens Michigan win shows signs of strong coalition for general election
U.S. Customs and Border Protection officers in Arizona discovered two migrants hidden in the trunk of a car after they had unlawfully crossed the Mexico-United States border on Sunday.

CBP said in a statement released Tuesday that agents assigned to an immigration checkpoint on state Route 85 near Gila Bend conducted the search of a Buick sedan with a sniffer dog.

During the investigation, the Border Patrol officers found that a 39-year-old woman from Phoenix was smuggling the two undocumented individuals.

The Honduran migrants were immediately processed and deported to Mexico.

CBP said the driver of the vehicle was arrested and could be charged with human trafficking.

CBP found two Honduran migrants hidden inside a Nissan sedan during an immigration checkpoint stop in Gila Bend, Arizona. The individuals were processed and immediately deported to Mexico. The vehicle''s driver, a 39-year-old United States citizen and resident from Phoenix, was arrested and could face human trafficking charges

The federal law enforcement agency said it has expedited the deportation of individuals who are caught entering the United States without legal documentation after the government set up several command stations near the American side of the Mexico-U.S. border.

The so-called 'one-stop' centers have been operating since dating back to March 14.

Under Title 42, CBP is allowed to expel some immigrants through ports of entry instead of transporting them to Border Patrol stations.

The decision, the agency said, eliminates the risk of detained undocumented immigrants contracting COVID-19.

'Despite traditional risks of human beings being stuffed into a trunk, there's now increased risk due to exposure to coronavirus,' said Tucson Sector Border Patrol Assistant Chief Patrol Agent Michele Morales.

'These human smuggling tactics increase exposure risks for our agents, those they smuggle, and endanger the safety of the American people.'
President Donald Trump speaks with Satya Nadella, Chief Executive Officer of Microsoft, and Jeff Bezos, Chief Executive Officer of Amazon during an American Technology Council roundtable in the State Dinning Room at the White House in Washington, DC on Monday, June 19, 2017.

The Defense Department's inspector general found the $10 billion JEDI cloud contract, which was awarded to Microsoft, doesn't appear to have been influenced by the White House, according to a new report issued Wednesday.

However, the inspector general noted in the report that it had limited cooperation from White House officials throughout its review and, as a result, it could not complete its assessment of allegations of ethical misconduct.

Microsoft was awarded the contract on Oct. 25. In November, Amazon Web Services, Amazon's cloud computing unit, filed a lawsuit in the U.S. Court of Federal Claims protesting the JEDI decision. The company argues that President Donald Trump's bias against Amazon and its CEO Jeff Bezos influenced the Pentagon to give the contract to Microsoft.

The JEDI deal drew immediate scrutiny because Trump became involved and he often criticizes Amazon and Bezos. Trump's influence over the deal came into focus when a book charting then-Defense Secretary James Mattis' tenure at the White House claimed the president told Mattis to "screw Amazon" out of the contract.

The new 313-page report summarizes findings from a review of the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure, or JEDI, cloud computing contract, conducted by the Defense Department's Office of the Inspector General. The JEDI contract is intended to modernize the Pentagon's IT operations and could be worth up to $10 billion for services rendered over as many as 10 years.

The inspector general said it did not find evidence that the Defense Department's JEDI contract evaluation and award process was pressured by "any DoD leaders more senior to them, who may have communicated with the White House."

Department of Defense spokesperson Lt. Col. Robert Carver told CNBC in a statement that the inspector general's report confirms the Pentagon's JEDI cloud procurement process was conducted "fairly and in accordance with the law."

"This report should finally close the door on the media and corporate-driven attacks on the career procurement officials who have been working tirelessly to get the much needed JEDI cloud computing environment into the hands of our frontline warfighters while continuing to protect American taxpayers," Carver said.

Frank Shaw, Microsoft's corporate vice president of communications, told CNBC in a statement: "The Inspector General's report makes clear the DoD established a proper procurement process. It's now apparent that Amazon bid too high a price and is seeking a do-over so it can bid again. As the IG's report indicates, Amazon has proprietary information about Microsoft's bid that it should never have had. At this stage, Amazon is both delaying critical work for the nation's military and trying to undo the mistake it made when it bid too high a price."

Last June, the Pentagon inspector general began an evaluation of the Defense Department's handling of the JEDI contract. As part of its review, the inspector general's office interviewed a number of personnel involved in the evaluation who communicated with the White House. The inspector general said none of those officials reported feeling "any outside influence or pressure for or against a particular competitor" as they made their award decision.

But the inspector general warned that the review was not definitive.

"We could not review this matter fully because of the assertion of a 'presidential communications privilege,' which resulted in several DoD witnesses being instructed by the DoD Office of General Counsel not to answer our questions about potential communications between White House and DoD officials about JEDI," the report states. "Therefore, we could not definitively determine the full extent or nature of interactions that administration officials had, or may have had, with senior DoD officials regarding the JEDI Cloud procurement."

An AWS spokesperson suggested the report doesn't reveal all that much.

"It's clear that this report couldn't assess political interference because several DoD witnesses were instructed by the White House not to answer the IG's questions about communications between the White House and DoD officials," the spokesperson wrote in an emailed statement to CNBC. "The White House's refusal to cooperate with the IG's investigation is yet another blatant attempt to avoid a meaningful and transparent review of the JEDI contract award."

The inspector general's office reviewed the Pentagon's decision to award the contract to a single company and found that it was reasonable.
The total number of coronavirus cases in Gujarat rose to 695 as 56 more people were found infected with the disease on Wednesday, the health department said.

Of the new cases, 42 were reported from Ahmedabad, six from Surat, three each from Vadodara and Panchmahal, and each from Botad and Kheda, it said.

With this, the total number of coronavirus cases in Ahmedabad has gone up to 404, followed by Vadodara-116, the health department said.

Botad and Kheda districts reported first coronavirus cases on Wednesday.
Iranian gallery launches online art exhibition in age of social distancing

03/29/20

Source: Tehran Times

TEHRAN - Iranshahr Gallery in Tehran and the Surface Art and Design Project have recently launched an online gallery titled "Atelier 99" to escape from a slump in art sales that started in the light of the COVID-19 pandemic. The gallery intends to support visual artists in the difficult days of the pandemic, Iranshahr has announced on its website. It also provides an opportunity for art aficionados to visit exhibitions and purchase the artworks they like.

In addition, the works are offered at reasonable prices in which the shares of the galleries are omitted, encouraging private collectors and art aficionados to purchase a greater number of artworks.



View "Atelier 99" artworks

Atelier 99 is currently playing host to an exhibition displaying works by Mostafa Chubtarash, Nilufar Kasbi, Narenj Kazemi, Leili Rashidi, Behruz Majidi, Mojgan Mollahosseini, Maryam Tabatabai, Zeinab Movahhed and several other artists.


Source: Xinhua| 2020-04-15 21:27:50|Editor: huaxia

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- Wuhan Leishenshan (Thunder God Mountain) Hospital ceased operation in Wuhan on Wednesday, a landmark development in the city's months-long battle with the epidemic;

- Medics recall life-and-death moments at the hospital;

- Constructors say building the hospital was the most urgent task ever undertaken.

by Xinhua writers Yao Yuan, Zhong Qun and Wang Zuokui



WUHAN, April 15 (Xinhua) -- A makeshift hospital ceased operation in Wuhan, capital of central China's Hubei Province, on Wednesday as the coronavirus epidemic wanes.

Wuhan Leishenshan (Thunder God Mountain) Hospital was built in 10 days to treat COVID-19 patients. Construction began in late January. Its last batch of patients was transferred to normal hospitals on Tuesday.

At the closing ceremony, doctors and nurses waved flags and wrote their names on the clothes of their colleagues for memory.

"We hope that the hospital will never restart operations," a local district official told an applauding crowd.

After the closing ceremony, medical workers were seen disinfecting and sealing the remaining wards.

Ambulances, transferring the last batch of COVID-19 patients to other hospitals, leave Leishenshan (Thunder God Mountain) Hospital in Wuhan, central China's Hubei Province, April 14, 2020. (Xinhua/Cheng Min)

Wang Xinghuan, head of the hospital, said they worked hard to achieve a low mortality rate of 2.3 percent among its patients, 45 percent of whom were in severe or critical conditions.

The 1,600-bed hospital is managed by the Wuhan-based Zhongnan Hospital of Wuhan University with over 3,000 medics from nine provincial regions in China. A total of 2,011 patients have been treated there.

"After Leishenshan was built, I can see the efforts to increase beds and the support coming from across the nation," said Fang Yanhong, a nurse with the Zhongnan Hospital, adding that the completion of Leishenshan has shored up confidence of local medics in winning the battle.

Photo taken with a mobile phone shows cured patients waving goodbye to medical workers before leaving the Leishenshan hospital in Wuhan, central China's Hubei Province, April 4, 2020. (Photo by Gao Xiang/Xinhua)

The retirement of the hospital is a landmark development in Wuhan's months-long battle with the epidemic, indicating the city's COVID-19 treatment and medical operations are "back on the normal track," Jiao Yahui, an official with the National Health Commission, told Xinhua.

Jiao said the medical facility was built at a time when "medical resources were in the shortest supply."

It has played a crucial role, enabling the city to admit more patients in a short period of time, thus helping contain the source of infection, she said.

The official said there is no timetable for dismantling the Leishenshan Hospital, noting it could be reactivated at any time if needed.

Photo taken on Feb. 8, 2020 shows the interior view of Leishenshan (Thunder God Mountain) Hospital in Jiangxia District of Wuhan, central China's Hubei Province. (Xinhua/Xiao Yijiu)

Jiao also highlighted the importance of transferring patients from the two makeshift hospitals - Huoshenshan and Leishenshan - to four large hospitals in Wuhan.

"We hope to secure the patients the most effective treatment by placing them at the four hospitals with high-quality medical resources in the city," Jiao said, adding that the treatment of the severe and critical cases remained difficult.

HECTIC WORK, LIFE-AND-DEATH MOMENTS

Yang Xiao, an ICU doctor in Leishenshan Hospital, said the hospital is well equipped with intensive care facilities.

"The ICU wards here are well equipped with ventilators, monitors and hemodialysis devices. CT and chest radiography were also introduced into the hospital upon its establishment," said the 31-year-old doctor. "The hospital is particularly good at hemodialysis, which is managed by a team of non-local medics who came to support Wuhan."

However, Yang said, "as a temporary hospital, Leishenshan could not compete with large comprehensive hospitals in terms of testing capacity and medicine inventory. So transferring the patients (to large hospitals) will benefit their treatment."

Having worked in Leishenshan for over 20 days, the young doctor said the work there has been hectic and full of life-and-death moments.

People work at the construction site of Leishenshan Hospital in Wuhan, central China's Hubei Province, Feb. 4, 2020. (Xinhua/Xiao Yijiu)

Yang recalled her most impressive patient as an 85-year-old man, who was discharged from Leishenshan a few days ago.

"The retired doctor volunteered to return to his community clinic at the peak of the epidemic and got infected there," she said. "When arriving here, he was very calm. He told me he was already 85 and 'if my time had come, then be it; if I was to live on, then live it to the fullest.'"

Yang was glad she could finally take a rest. "Many local doctors were already stretched to our breaking point ... What I wish to do most (after leaving Leishenshan) is have a good sleep."

MOST URGENT TASK

With a construction area of 8 hectares, the Leishenshan Hospital has full 5G coverage and can conduct remote consultations like other large Chinese hospitals, said Wang Liang, deputy chief engineer of China Construction Third Bureau First Engineering Co., Ltd., the hospital's constructor.





People from China Construction Third Engineering Bureau Co., Ltd. work at the construction site of Leishenshan (Thunder God Mountain) Hospital in Wuhan, central China's Hubei Province, Jan. 30, 2020. (Xinhua/Xiao Yijiu)

Wang said building Leishenshan within 10 days is the most urgent task the company has ever undertaken despite its rich experience in building hospitals. The company received the design at the last minute, and the MEP (mechanical, electrical and plumbing) workload of such an improvised epidemic hospital is three to four times that of a comprehensive hospital.

"The construction involved more than 1.5 million meters of wires, 150,000 meters of cables and 800 units of ventilation equipment. At the peak of the construction, 22,000 people worked at the same time at the construction site," he said, noting that this was completed in a locked-down city during the Spring Festival, a time when most factories cease operation and workers return to their hometowns for a family reunion.

"We mobilized all the company's buyers to hunt for materials across China, and we summoned workers from across Hubei Province and other parts of China," Wang said.

"Many came here not for money, but more out of passion -- they wanted to fight together with Wuhan."

(Video reporters: Yu Guoqing, Rao Rao, Xiao Yijiu and Wang Siban; video editor: Chen Sihong)
Kolkata, April 15 : If you told Saurav Ghosal he would be spending his entire mornings on the lawn at his home here doing physical exercises and engaging in a certified course on nutrition in the evening -- in between grabbing a siesta after lunch -- he would most certainly scoff at you under normal circumstances.

Ghosal, India's top male squash player, had his plate full with an eye on making it to the PSA World Tour Finals in Cairo, Egypt in the third week of June when he returned to the city from London last month. Ghosal was taking part in the Canary Wharf Classic where he lost in the quarterfinals to eventual champion Mohamed El Shorbagy.

It was business as usual in London but the panic button had already been pressed in India. Since then, COVID-19 reared its ugly head and brought the world to a standstill.

"In the beginning it was a bit of a shock. I don't know the last time when I did not play squash for a month unless like when I am really injured," Ghosal told IANS in an interview.

"And when you are injured, you do know when you can get back. Right now we don't even know that. So initially it was a shock to the system. But one of the reasons why we are top athletes is because we are mentally strong," said the 33-year old.

"That kind facet in your personality needs to come to the fore. To recognise the situation and find perspective which gives you a positive outlook of it and see what best you can make out of it," Ghosal opined.

In his final few sessions of a certified online nutrition course, Ghosal said although he is nowhere close to being a professional in this field, it has helped him gain more knowledge on what to eat.

"I do one physical session on the lawn in my building. That takes me upto lunch. Then I eat lunch, sleep and then I wake up and do the nutrition course which takes me an hour and 15 a day. So it's basically divided into 11 lectures, I have done eight lectures till now. I have three more lectures to get the certificate that comes out of it," he explained.

"I am not doing that to become a nutritionist but for my personal knowledge and how it can help me. If I can add anything to what I do as an athlete. Other than that I watch a few squash matches, Netflix, Hotstar and the usual stuff.

"I am not going to be a certified nutritionist but it's like part of a credit of the entire course. If I end up doing a nutrition course, which I doubt I will, then this certificate basically goes towards credit for that course," he added.

Ghosal would have been in Egypt now taking part in the El Gouna International Squash Open. It was followed by Manchester Open, British Open and Mauritius Open for the Indian ace.

"Depending on how I did in these events, I was 9-10 in World Series finals rankings...so if I could make it to the top eight I would have played the World Series finals in the third week of June. Now all gone out of the window," Ghosal said.

The reigning PSA World Champions and all Platinum event winners automatically qualify for the PSA World Tour Finals, which features a men's and women's event, both containing eight-player draws. Ghosal is currently ranked 13th.

Ghosal, though, is not bogged down and is hopeful he will come out of this isolation period a better human being.

"The positive out of it (lockdown) is it gives you time to stop, pause and think.

"We had not had time to ourselves for the last 15-20 years of my life. We keep complaining a lot of the times that we are living out of a suitcase. Now we are living out of our wardrobe.

"I don't remember the last time when I was in Kolkata for one month at a stretch since I was in school, or any city for that matter.

"You can get better as a human being and that helps in your sport. This situation is in no one's control.

"I don't know how anyone is going to be come out of this. Match sharpness will be an issue. Physical fitness won't be an issue as we are all working on it right now. I have to prepare the best way I can and hope for the best."
Erik Trautmann / Hearst Connecticut Media

MassMutual announced up to $25,000 in free life insurance at no cost to hospital workers, those in urgent-care clinics and paramedics who are at risk of exposure to coronavirus infection.

The Massachusetts-based carrier is committing $3 billion to the new HealthBridge program, which will offer term policies covering a three-year span for covered health workers who die as a result of complications from the novel coronavirus COVID-19.
A mobile phone displays an internet meme of a growing online movement called "Milk Tea Alliance" to show solidarity between Thailand, Taiwan and Hong Kong, in this illustration taken on April 15, 2020. (Patpicha Tanakasempipat/Illustration/Reuters)

Young Thais Join Milk Tea Alliance in Online Backlash That Angers Beijing

BANGKOKYoung Thais have banded together to pillory the Chinese embassy in Bangkok over a feud with Thai celebrities, part of a growing online movement to show solidarity with Taiwan and Hong Kong that has annoyed Beijing.

The movement, which calls itself the Milk Tea Alliance after a shared passion for sweet tea drinks, has triggered a wave of online criticism of China at a time when Beijing is trying to improve its image hurt by the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus crisis.

The movement burst into the public eye in Thailand in recent days, after Chinese internet users launched a campaign against a young Thai actor whose TV drama has been popular in China, and his Thai model girlfriend. The two were both accused of having expressed support for Hong Kong and Taiwanese independence by sharing comments online.

Hong Kong pro-democracy protesters attend a rally in support of Taiwan President Tsai Ing-wen outside the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) headquarters in Taipei, Taiwan, on Jan. 11, 2020. (Tyrone Siu/Reuters)

In Thailand, support for Taiwan and Hong Kong have become rallying cries for Thais who consider their own government too authoritarian and too close to Beijing.

The hashtag #MilkTeaAlliance was among the top trending on Twitter in Thailand on April 15 along with one in Thai that translates as #MilkTeaIsThickerThanBloodwhich had nearly one million tweets.

The Chinese embassy waded into the affair late on Tuesday with a Facebook post criticizing those who attacked China. Beijings One China principle towards Hong Kong and Taiwan was irrefutable and the recent online noises only reflect bias and ignorance, the embassy wrote.

That triggered 17,000 replies, mostly from angry Thais.

Protesters at a rally in Taipei in support of a protest against the proposed extradition bill in Hong Kong, China, on June 16, 2019. (Wu Min-zhou/The Epoch Times)

Dont Force It

One China Principle is only Chinas. Dont force it on others, commented Facebook user Duangporn Sangchan.

The embassy did not respond immediately to a request for comment on the response.

The backlash shows that the official narrative repeated among governments, armies and elites isnt widely accepted in Thai society, said Wasana Wongsurawat, an expert on China at Bangkoks Chulalongkorn University.

Anti-Beijing sentiment has become a part of Thais fight against authoritarianism, she told Reuters.

A pro-democracy activist (C) from HK Alliance holds a placard of missing citizen journalist Fang Bin, as she protests outside the Chinese liaison office in Hong Kong, China, on Feb. 19, 2020. (Isaac Lawrence/AFP via Getty Images)

A Thai government spokeswoman told Reuters the government respected Thais freedom of expression and the issue did nothing to affect the nations ties with China.

Taiwans government and Hong Kongs pro-democracy protesters appear glad to have found new allies in Thailand. Without referring directly to the row, Taiwans President Tsai Ing-wen late on Tuesday tweeted best wishes in Thai for the local new year, which began on Monday.

Hong Kong pro-democracy activist Joshua Wong posted a meme of three figures clinking glasses of milk tea and called for pan-Asian solidarity to fend off all forms of authoritarianism from China.

Wasana said Thailands younger generation were less likely than their parents to accept the arguments of authority.

They are rather convinced by milk tea, which is their lifestyle, she said.

By Patpicha Tanakasempipat. Epoch Times staff contributed to this report.
Westbrook, Maine, April 15, 2020 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Infinity Federal Credit Union (FCU) is no stranger to working with the Small Business Administration (SBA). The credit union was recognized as Maines Leading SBA Credit Union Lender in 2018 and 2019.

Infinity FCU has gathered resources about the Paycheck Protection Program and created an information hub on its website. The hub includes the program application, frequently asked questions for borrowers, loan calculators, as well as a comprehensive checklist outlining all the documents needed to move forward with applications.

Business owners can download the relevant documents and submit them for processing via the secure portal on Infinity FCUs website. The Small Business Team is working diligently with the SBA to keep applications moving through the pipeline. Infinity FCU is prepared to process applications from business with an existing banking relationship and potential borrowers who dont have an established relationship with the credit union.

Infinity FCU is an experienced SBA lender and the CARES Act provided an opportunity for us to jump out front and help our community like never before, says Infinity FCU President/CEO Elizabeth Hayes. We value small businesses as an economic driver for Maine and we are excited to participate in keeping Maine small businesses and communities strong.

As a local non-profit, COVID-19 brought on many challenges, among them was paying our employees during these uncertain economic times. The new CARES Act offered relief by allowing us to apply for a loan to cover payroll. However, navigating the application process was difficult with so little guidance, says Claude Rwaganje, Executive Director, ProsperityME. Last week, we reached out to Infinity FCU for help. They walked us through the process and within 2 days of submitting our application, we were approved. I am so grateful to their Small Business Team for helping us so quickly. We couldn't have done it without their help. Now, we can focus on the important work of helping our immigrant community navigate these turbulent economic times instead of worrying about how to pay our employees.

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Infinity Federal Credit Union has been an excellent partner for our small business when we were most in need, says Hester W. Mishkin, Co-Owner, Centerpoint Martial Arts. Working closely as a team, theyve been extremely prompt, communicative, and detail-oriented to maximize our success. They were fast and thorough right from the start. Their team offered expert insights into business lending details that we would have otherwise missed making a significant impact. Weve felt truly supported and appreciated as a local family business and were most grateful for their strong work ethic and commitment.

# # #

About Infinity Federal Credit Union

As Maines first credit union, Infinity Federal Credit Union has been serving its members since 1921, initially as the Telephone Workers Credit Union of Maine, then as Telco of New England FCU. Infinity FCU is now community-based, available to anyone who lives, works, worships or attends school in Cumberland and York counties and the city of Bangor, Maine. Infinity FCU is a not-for-profit cooperative organization owned by its members and guided by the vision: We do banking differently to keep you a step ahead in life. For more information about Infinity FCU, please visit www.infinityfcu.com.

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Kathy Guillory

Infinity Federal Credit Union

(207) 854-6000

kguillory@infinityfcu.com


You are more likely to die from Covid-19 if you live in a county in the United States with higher levels of long-term air pollution, according to new research released Tuesday by Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.

"We found that an increase of only 1 gram per cubic meter in fine particulate matter in the air was associated with a 15% increase in the Covid-19 death rate," said lead author Francesca Dominici, co-director of the Harvard Data Science Initiative.

The study defined high pollution levels as fine particulate matter (PM 2.5) levels above 13 micrograms per cubic meter of air, much higher than the US mean of 8.4.

"The results suggest that long-term exposure to air pollution increases vulnerability to experiencing the most severe Covid-19 outcomes," Dominici said.

The new information should be used by federal, state and local officials to make informed decisions about enforcing social distancing and preparing hospitals and local health care systems for a potential influx of more severe cases that will need extreme measures such as ventilators, Dominici said.

"We know the counties that have higher pollution levels historically," she said. "We know that even if they [the counties] haven't experienced high number of deaths yet, that would be one of their higher risks."

As for areas not currently seeing high mortality rates that should prepare, "Atlanta stands out as one of the clearest examples," said co-author Xiao Wu, a Ph.D. student in the department of biostatistics at Harvard University.

"DeKalb and Gwinnett counties all have PM 2.5 levels greater than 13 micrograms per cubic meter of air across our study period, and still have a relatively low number of confirmed cases and deaths," Wu said. "Baltimore as well stands out as a place with high PM exposure, but a low number of deaths for now."

Wu said other counties with high pollution levels with current death rates from Covid-19 lower than the average across the US include:

Fresno, Kings, Los Angeles, Orange and Tulare counties in California

Vanderburgh county in Indiana

Butler, Hamilton and Montgomery counties in Ohio

Allegheny and Westmoreland counties in Pennsylvania

"That means that in these counties, we need to keep an even closer look to the social distancing measures, and we need to make sure that they are equipped to respond to those hospitalized with Covid-19," Dominici said. "This is really, to me, utterly common sense."

See related: CNN's live tracker of Covid-19 cases across the US

The study is a "pre-print," which means it has not undergone peer review and been accepted by a journal for publication. Pre-prints are becoming more and more common during the pandemic as researchers scramble to provide study results that might hold clues to fighting the virus.

The results provide "stark new information about the deadly toll of particle pollution," said American Lung Association president and CEO Harold Wimmer, who was not involved with the study.

"The nation has known for some time that long-term exposure to particle pollution can worsen symptoms of lung disease, increase susceptibility to lung infection, trigger heart attack and stroke, and can even cause lung cancer and premature death," Wimmer said in a statement.

"This new research from Harvard now links particle pollution exposure to a dramatically higher death rate from Covid-19."

Fine particulate matter

The study analyzed the levels of fine particulate matter in each county in the US between 2000 and 2016.

Particulate matter is a mixture of solid and liquid matter found in the air. Dust, dirt and smoke particles are larger but there are also extremely small, inhalable particulates that can't be seen with the naked eye. Those are called PM 2.5 because their size is generally 2.5 micrometers or less.

That's really tiny -- for comparison, an average human hair is 30 times larger than a PM 2.5 particle. Because they are so small, these particulates can get deep into the lungs and wreak havoc with our lungs and bodily functions.

The researchers then compared those county-level maps of air pollution to current numbers of deaths from Covid-19 through April 4, a number tallied by Johns Hopkins University.

There is a large overlap between the underlying conditions that put many Covid-19 patients at risk -- such as lung, kidney and heart conditions -- and diseases made worse by long-term exposure to fine particulate matter.

A prior study of 60 million Americans over age 65 by the same research group found that each 1 gram per cubic meter rise in long-term PM 2.5 exposure was associated with a 0.73% increase in the rate of death from any cause.

Compared to those results, the new study showed the same small increase led to a "Covid-19 death rate of a magnitude that is 20 times the one estimated for all-cause mortality."

The study said those findings held true after a large set of "socioeconomic, demographic, weather, behavioral, and healthcare-related confounders" were taken into account.

The study has some limitations, the authors said, including the fact that the data was averaged at a county levelti.

"If they knew at the individual level the deaths from Covid-19, and knew whether the dead person smoked, had hypertension, had diabetes or any of the other known risk factors, that it would be a stronger analysis," said pulmonologist Dr. John Balmes, a professor of medicine at University of California, San Francisco, who was not involved in the study.

More to be done

The maps also show more danger from the virus in communities of color, said Balmes, who is also a professor of environmental health sciences at UC Berkeley.

"The same counties that have the higher air pollution, they also have more poor people, more poor people of color. And it's probably at the neighborhood level that there's the greatest risk," he said.

"You can use these maps to better target scarce resources, and specifically target resources for the safety net hospitals that these poor people of color usually have to go to," Balmes said.

And there's a global need to analyze the impact of air pollution on risk levels around the world.

"I think overall the general convolutions that long-term exposure to PM 2.5 increases the risk or Covid-19 deaths is probably generalizable to a global scale," said Yifang Zhu, a professor in the department of environmental health and sciences at UCLA, who was not involved in the study.

"So, I think the study gives strong evidence to highlight the importance of further improving our air quality overall," Zhu said.
Source: Xinhua| 2020-04-15 18:04:06|Editor: huaxia

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BEIJING, April 15 (Xinhua) -- As the COVID-19 epidemic has gradually abated in China, schools should stagger reopening alongside proper containment measures put in place, a health official said Wednesday.

Special attention should be paid to guard against risks brought by potential imported infections after the resumption of schools, He Qinghua, an official with the National Health Commission, said at a press conference, urging related localities, authorities, schools and families to fulfill their responsibilities.

A peer-to-peer cooperation mechanism should be established among schools, health and education sectors, medical institutions, as well as disease control departments to ensure that all aspects of the school-based epidemic prevention and control can be fully covered, he said.

The official also called for strengthened sanitation and disinfection at schools, including proper control measures implemented at student canteens.

Health monitoring of returning faculty members and students should be stepped up, He said, adding that it is also necessary to educate them on maintaining good personal hygiene such as washing hands frequently.
A Huntsville man has been arrested in connection with a crash that happened during a police chase and left four people injured.

Hunter Thomas Rollins, 23, is charged with four felony counts of leaving the scene of an accident with injury, two felony counts of attempting to flee and elude law enforcement, and a misdemeanor county of reckless endangerment. He was booked into the Madison County jail with bail set at $31,000.

Hunter Thomas Rollins is shown in a Madison County jail booking photograph.

Rollins was taken into custody late Tuesday, said Alabama state trooper Derek Campbell, a spokesman for the state law enforcement agency.

The arrest stems from a police chase that led to a crash Monday afternoon at Jordan Lane and Holmes Avenue in Huntsville. As troopers were chasing Rollins motorcycle, their patrol vehicle collided with a car at the intersection, Campbell said in an email. Two other vehicles were also hit during the collision, and the patrol vehicle caught fire.

Two troopers, another driver and a passenger were treated for injuries and released from a hospital.

The chase began when troopers tried to pull over the motorcycle on U.S. 72 near Shields Road. Troopers said Rollins, who was operate the motorcycle, refused to stop.

If convicted, Rollins faces up to 10 years in prison for each of the felony charges.
The image at left shows an artist's conception of the central portion of the galaxy that hosts the quasar SDSS J135246.37+423923.5 viewed at optical wavelengths. Thick winds obscure our view, and imprint signatures of the energetic outflow on the SDSS spectrum. The image at right shows the same artist's view at infrared wavelengths, as seen by the Gemini GNIRS detector. The thick outflow is transparent at infrared wavelengths, giving us a clear line of sight to the quasar. The infrared spectrum yields the quasar redshift, and from that reference frame, we measured the record-breaking outflow velocity. CREDIT International Gemini Observatory/NOIRLab/NSF/AURA/P. Marenfeld

Researchers using the Gemini North telescope on Hawai'i's Maunakea have detected the most energetic wind from any quasar ever measured.

This outflow, which is travelling at nearly 13% of the speed of light, carries enough energy to dramatically impact star formation across an entire galaxy. The extragalactic tempest lay hidden in plain sight for 15 years before being unveiled by innovative computer modeling and new data from the international Gemini Observatory.

The most energetic wind from a quasar has been revealed by a team of astronomers using observations from the international Gemini Observatory, a program of NSF's NOIRLab. This powerful outflow is moving into its host galaxy at almost 13% of the speed of light, and stems from a quasar known as SDSS J135246.37+423923.5 which lies roughly 60 billion light-years from Earth.

"While high-velocity winds have previously been observed in quasars, these have been thin and wispy, carrying only a relatively small amount of mass," explains Sarah Gallagher, an astronomer at Western University (Canada) who led the Gemini observations. "The outflow from this quasar, in comparison, sweeps along a tremendous amount of mass at incredible speeds. This wind is crazy powerful, and we don't know how the quasar can launch something so substantial". [1]

As well as measuring the outflow from SDSS J135246.37+423923.5, the team was also able to infer the mass of the supermassive black hole powering the quasar. This monstrous object is 8.6 billion times as massive as the Sun -about 2000 times the mass of the black hole in the center of our Milky Way and 50% more massive than the well-known black hole in the galaxy Messier 87.

This result is published in the Astrophysical Journal and the quasar studied here now holds the record for the most energetic quasar wind measured to date, with a wind more energetic than those recently reported in a study of 13 quasars [2].

Despite its mass and energetic outflow, the discovery of this powerhouse languished in a quasar survey for 15 years before the combination of Gemini data and the team's innovative computer modeling method allowed it to be studied in detail.

"We were shocked - this isn't a new quasar, but no one knew how amazing it was until the team got the Gemini spectra," explains Karen Leighly, an astronomer at the University of Oklahoma who was one of the scientific leads for this research. "These objects were too hard to study before our team developed our methodology and had the data we needed, and now it looks like they might be the most interesting kind of windy quasars to study."

Quasars - also known as quasi-stellar objects - are a type of extraordinarily luminous astrophysical object residing in the centres of massive galaxies [3]. Consisting of a supermassive black hole surrounded by a glowing disk of gas, quasars can outshine all the stars in their host galaxy and can drive winds powerful enough to influence entire galaxies [4].

"Some quasar-driven winds have enough energy to sweep the material from a galaxy that is needed to form stars and thus quench star formation," explains Hyunseop (Joseph) Choi, a graduate student at the University of Oklahoma and the first author of the scientific paper on this discovery. "We studied a particularly windy quasar, SDSS J135246.37+423923.5, whose outflow is so thick that it's difficult to detect the signature of the quasar itself at visible wavelengths."

Despite the obstruction, the team was able to get a clear view of the quasar using the Gemini Near-Infrared Spectrograph (GNIRS) on Gemini North to observe at infrared wavelengths. Using a combination of high-quality spectra from Gemini and a pioneering computer modeling approach, the astronomers uncovered the nature of the outflow from the object -- which proved, remarkably, to be more energetic than any quasar outflow previously measured.

The team's discovery raises important questions, and also suggests there could be more of these quasars waiting to be found.

We don't know how many more of these extraordinary objects are in our quasar catalogs that we just don't know about yet," concludes Choi "Since automated software generally identifies quasars by strong emission lines or blue color -- two properties our object lacks -- there could be more of these quasars with tremendously powerful outflows hidden away in our surveys."

"This extraordinary discovery was made possible with the resources provided by the international Gemini Observatory; the discovery opens new windows and opportunities to explore the Universe further in the years to come," said Martin Still, an astronomy program director at the National Science Foundation, which funds Gemini Observatory from the U.S. as part of an international collaboration. "The Gemini Observatory continues to advance our knowledge of the Universe by providing the international science community with forefront access to telescope instrumentation and facilities."

Notes

[1] The colossal energy carried by the quasar outflow is a product of both the speed of the wind and the amount of mass it carries. An intuitive way to understand this is to compare a freight train and a champion sprinter -- while both travel at roughly the same speed, the more massive freight train has far more momentum and energy.

[2] This result is independent of the recent NASA/STScI press release on quasar winds which focused on strong winds in 13 other quasars.

[3] Quasars take their name from their first identification in the 1950's at radio wavelengths. Quasar is a contraction of quasi-stellar radio source, a name chosen to reflect the starlike appearance of these radio sources when viewed at visible wavelengths.

[4] The gas feeding a quasar surrenders energy in the form of light as it falls into the central black hole. This emitted light is both the origin of a quasar's luminosity and the source of the energy that drives outflows.

More information

This research was presented in the paper Discovery of a Remarkably Powerful Broad Absorption Line Quasar Outflow in SDSS J135246.37+423923.5 in the Astrophysical Journal.

The team was composed of Hyunseop Choi (The University of Oklahoma, USA) Karen M. Leighly (The University of Oklahoma, USA), Donald M. Terndrup (The University of Oklahoma, USA and The Ohio State University, USA), Sarah C. Gallagher (Western University, Canada, and the Canadian Space Agency), and Gordon T. Richards (Drexel University, USA).

NSF's National Optical-Infrared Astronomy Research Laboratory (NOIRLab), the US center for ground-based optical-infrared astronomy, operates the international Gemini Observatory (a facility of NSF, NRC-Canada, ANID-Chile, MCTIC-Brazil, MINCyT-Argentina, and KASI-Republic of Korea), Kitt Peak National Observatory (KPNO), Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory (CTIO), the Community Science and Data Center (CSDC), and the Vera C. Rubin Observatory. It is managed by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy (AURA) under a cooperative agreement with NSF and is headquartered in Tucson, Arizona. The astronomical community is honored to have the opportunity to conduct astronomical research on Iolkam Du'ag (Kitt Peak) in Arizona, on Maunakea in Hawai?i, and on Cerro Tololo and Cerro Pachon in Chile. We recognize and acknowledge the very significant cultural role and reverence that these sites have to the Tohono O'odham Nation, to the Native Hawaiian community, and to the local communities in Chile, respectively.

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Church St., 500 block, 9 p.m. April 1. A male at a residence struck a man on the head with an unknown object and took cash from his pockets. The attacker threatened the injured man with a gun and demanded he withdraw additional cash from an ATM. The attacker and two accomplices accompanied the man to a convenience store where he withdrew money from an ATM. One of the attackers struck the man in the head, causing him to lose consciousness.
T he crisis over shortages of vital protective clothing for doctors and nurses was laid bare today with the leak of plans to start re-using disposable equipment.

Gowns and masks that are designed to be thrown away would be cleaned and reissued under last resort plans being drawn up by Public Health England.

Some hospitals have already begun laundering single-use gowns to preserve their dwindling stocks, reported the BBC which obtained the leaked document.

Others are reportedly asking staff to make do with DIY equipment including swimming goggles. Among the plans set out in the leaked document were the cleaning of used face masks using disinfection or sterilisation methods, including steam and ultra-violet light treatment.

Coronavirus infecting a cell - In pictures 1 /9 Coronavirus infecting a cell - In pictures Coronavirus infecting a cell EPA An image captured and color-enhanced at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) Integrated Research Facility (IRF) in Fort Detrick, Maryland, USA and made available by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) shows a colorized scanning electron micrograph of an apoptotic cell (red) heavily infected with SARS-COV-2 virus particles (yellow) EPA The SARS-COV-2 virus begin the infection process of cytoplasm of the cell, inside which is the nucleus, responsible for storing the genetic material of the cell EPA Tthe SARS-COV-2 virus particles after infection and viral replication inside the cell (white circle in the left corner) EPA A series of dark spots, which are viral particles of the SARS-COV-2 virus, trying to infect the cytoplasm of the cell, inside which is the nucleus, responsible for storing the genetic material of the cell EPA An arrow pointing to a novel coronavirus particle attached to cell membranes, displaying its typical glycoprotein spike 'corona' on the viral surface (issued 02 April 2020), seen in an electron microscope image, the first black and white portrait of the SARS-CoV2 virus, which causes the COVID-19 disease EPA An image captured and color-enhanced at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) Integrated Research Facility (IRF) in Fort Detrick, Maryland, USA and made available by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) shows a colorized scanning electron micrograph of an apoptotic cell (purple) heavily infected with SARS-COV-2 virus particles (yellow) EPA

The document also suggested buying stocks of building or sportswear eye protection fitted with extensions to cover the side of the eyes as substitutes if proper medical goggles or face shields ran out. Another plan was using washable laboratory coats and patients gowns where there were no disposable gowns or coveralls available.

At the same time, the British Medical Association has gathered shocking examples of doctors having to wash and re-use personal protective equipment (PPE) and even dip their hands in a bucket of steriliser because hand gel had run out.

It said some doctors have been told by their NHS trusts to re-use gowns and some have donated some of their PPE to nurses and healthcare assistants who faced even worse shortages.

An obstetrics and gynaecology trainee in the South-East said there had been no eye protection for three weeks and there were no facilities to clean footwear. Surgical masks are not fluid resistant. There are no reinforced gowns for high volume procedures (eg C-section).

PPE equipment is in short supply  and often locked away. We have bought more than 4,000 worth of PPE over the last four weeks as a group of trainees.

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An anaesthetics trainee in Scotland said: Were having to wash our visors in disinfectant because we dont have enough.

We also ran out of hand gel briefly and were provided with a bucket of steriliser to dip our hands in.

A core medicine trainee in the East of England said: Trust is now asking us to reuse single-use gowns not only between patients but also when we leave and return from breaks.

A foundation year doctor on a Covid-19 ward for the elderly in the North-West said: After the death of two of our nursing colleagues... we decided to let our nurses and healthcare assistants have priority with the gowns.

Coronavirus - In pictures 1 /106 Coronavirus - In pictures A sign advertising a book titled "How Will We Survive On Earth?" is seen on an underground station platform Getty Images Customers wearing face masks shop at the pork counter of a supermarket following the outbreak of the novel coronavirus in Wuhan, Hubei province Reuters Westminster Bridge is deserted in London the day after Prime Minister Boris Johnson put the UK in lockdown PA Canadian passengers Chris & Anna Joiner ask for help onboard the MS Zaandam, Holland America Line cruise ship, during the coronavirus outbreak, off the shores of Panama City via Reuters A man crosses a nearly empty 5th Avenue in midtown Manhattan during the outbreak of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) in New York City Reuters The London Eye is pictured lit blue in support of the NHS, as the spread of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) continues Reuters Boris Johnson addresses the nation on the Coronavirus lockdown Andrew Parsons Commuters cope with Coronavirus Jeremy Selwyn Milan's Piazza del Duomo empty AFP via Getty Images People in protective clothing walk past rows of beds at a temporary 2,000-bed hospital for COVID-19 coronavirus patients set up by the Iranian army at the international exhibition center in northern Tehran, Iran AP Martina Papponetti, 25, an ICU nurse at the Humanitas Gavazzeni Hospital in Bergamo, Italy poses for a portrait at the end of her shift AP Pope Francis celebrating a daily mass alone in the Santa Marta chapel at the Vatican, as part of precautionary measures against the spread of the new coronavirus COVID-19 AFP via Getty Imag Vysheyshaya Liga - FC Torpedo-BelAZ Zhodino v FC Belshina Bobruisk - Torpedo Stadium, Zhodino, Belarus, March 27, 2020 Players in action during the match despite most sport being cancelled around the world as the spread of coronavirus disease (COVID-19) continues Reuters Hanks and Wilson both have coronavirus Tom Hanks General view of an emergency makeshift field hospital as it is set up at Pacaembu Stadium for coronavirus (COVID-19) patients with a capacity of 200 beds in Sao Paulo, Brazil Getty Images People on a busy tube train in London at rush hour despite Prime Minister Boris Johnson calling on people to stay away from pubs, clubs and theatres, work from home if possible and avoid all non-essential contacts and travel in order to reduce the impact of the coronavirus pandemic PA Naomi Campbell catches a flight in a hazmat suit with goggles, a surgical mask and rubber gloves @naomi Sophie and Emily Ward pose for a photograph with their hand-drawn picture of rainbows and a message on their window in St Helens, as the spread of coronavirus disease (COVID-19) continues 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 Corona virus outbreak. PA Shoppers queue outside a branch of Costco, in Croydon, south London, on the weekend after Prime Minister Boris Johnson ordered pubs and restaurants across the country to close PA Charing Cross Tube Bakerloo Line very quiet at 8.15am Jeremy Selwyn A woman with a plastic box over her head on the London Underground. PA A Racegoer attend Cheltenham Festival on Ladies Day wearing a fashionable face mask SplashNews.com Prime Minister Boris Johnson visits a laboratory at the Public Health England National Infection Service in Colindale PA A man who appears to be homeless sleeping wearing a mask today in Victoria Jeremy Selwyn A couple kiss in Milano Centrale railway station in Milan on March 8, 2020 AFP via Getty Images A combination picture shows visitors wearing protective face masks following an outbreak of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) looking at blooming cherry blossom nd a pigeon walking at an closed cherry blossom viewing spot during the first weekend after Tokyo Governor Yuriko Koike (not pictured) urged Tokyo residents to stay indoors, in a bid to keep the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) from spreading Reuters This combination photo created on March 5, 2020 shows tourists visiting Angkor Wat temple in Siem Reap province on March 16, 2019 (top) and on March 5, 2020 AFP via Getty Images Traders work on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange Getty Images U.S. President Donald Trump looks at the $2.2 trillion coronavirus aid package bill as Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY), House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) and Vice President Mike Pence stand by during a signing ceremony in the Oval Office of the White House Reuters A satellite image shows an empty South Beach during the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) outbreak in Miami, via Reuters General view inside the empty stadium as the two teams line up prior to the UEFA Champions League round of 16 second leg match between Paris Saint-Germain and Borussia Dortmund at Parc des Princes UEFA via Getty Images A Sainsbury's supermarket in Cambridge is among those to sell out of antibacterial hand sanitizer PA Tents and ambulances are set up next to the Princess Cruises Grand Princess cruise as it sits docked in the Port of Oakland on March 09, 2020 in Oakland, California. The Princess Cruises Grand Princess has been held from docking until today as at least 21 people on board have tested positive for COVID-19 also known as the Coronavirus Getty Images Medical staff produce traditional Chinese medicine to treat patients infected by the COVID-19 coronavirus at a hospital in Wuhan AFP via Getty Images Army soldiers wearing protective suits spray disinfectant as a precaution against the new coronavirus at a shopping street in Seoul, South Korea AP Russian President Vladimir Putin wearing protective gear walks at a hospital for patients infected with coronavirus disease (COVID-19) on the outskirts of Moscow via Reuters A woman who has recovered from the COVID-19 is disinfected by volunteers as she arrives at a hotel for a 14-day quarantine AFP via Getty Images Passengers on board the Diamond Princess cruise ship are seen as the ship arrives at Daikoku Pier where it is being resupplied and newly diagnosed coronavirus cases taken for treatment as it remains in quarantine after a number of the 3,700 people on board were diagnosed with coronavirus Getty Images Dave Abel pictured in hospital in Japan Manchester United fans in the stands during the Premier League match at Old Trafford PA Police officers wearing masks stand in front of the H10 Costa Adeje Palace hotel in La Caleta, in the Canary Island of Tenerife AP Carnival revellers wear protective face masks at Venice Carnival Reuters A general view is pictured of Burbage Primary School in Buxton, Derbyshire after the closure of the school as a pupil's parent has tested positive for the novel coronavirus COVID-19 AFP via Getty Images People wearing face masks walk past the Olympic rings in front of the new National Stadium, the main stadium for the upcoming Tokyo 2020 Olympic and Paralympic Game Getty Images People leave Kents Hill Park Training and Conference Centre in Milton Keynes where Coronavirus evacuees are due to be released from quarantine today and allowed to go home PA 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 A woman wears a mask while crossing London Bridg Getty Images A general view of Worthing Hospital in West Sussex PA Passengers relax on board the Holland America-operated Westerdam cruise ship, which has been denied permission to dock in Thailand over coronavirus fears via Reuters A child waves as she sits in a vehicle carrying residents evacuated from a public housing building, following the outbreak of the novel coronavirus, outside Hong Mei House, at Cheung Hong Estate in Hong Kong Reuters A woman wearing a Minnie Mouse face mask looks at her mobile phone in Beijing on February 11, 2020 AFP via Getty Images The Costa Smeralda cruise ship of Costa Crociere, carrying around 6,000 passengers, is docked at the Italian port of Civitavecchia after a health alert due to a Chinese couple and a possible link to coronavirus on board, in Civitavecchia, Italy Reuters A patient covered with a bed sheet at an exhibition centre converted into a hospital as it starts to accept patients displaying mild symptoms of the novel coronavirus in Wuhan AFP via Getty Images A medical official takes the body temperature of a man at the departure hall of the airport in Changsha, Hunan Province, as the country is hit by an outbreak of a new coronavirus, China Reuters The view of the Wuhan International Conference and Exhibition Center Getty Images A plane carrying British nationals from the coronavirus-hit city of Wuhan in China, arrives at RAF Brize Norton in Oxfordshire A police vehicle enters the gates of the Royal Air Force station RAF Brize Norton in Carterton AFP via Getty Images Passengers wear face masks as the push their luggage after arriving from a flight at Terminal 5 of London Heathrow Airport AFP via Getty Images French citizens arrive and settle aboard of an evacuation plane with destination southeastern France, before departure from Wuhan Airport (WUH), China AFP via Getty Images Police stand at a checkpoint at the Jiujiang Yangtze River Bridge that crosses from Hubei province in Jiujiang, Jiangxi province, China Reuters A member of staff at Arrowe Park Hospital in Merseyside prepares for a bus carrying British nationals from the coronavirus-hit city of Wuhan in China PA Doctor Paul McKay, who is working on an vaccine for the 2019-nCoV strain of the novel coronavirus, poses for a photograph with bacteria containing fragments of coronavirus DNA, at Imperial College School of Medicine (ICSM) in Londo AFP via Getty Images Workers produce masks at the Thai Hospital Product Company Ltd. factory in Bangkok AFP via Getty Images Passengers wearing face masks are seen on a bus after disembarking from the Costa Smeralda cruise ship, after tests on a woman from Macau with suspected coronavirus came back negative, in Civitavecchia, Italy Reuters People hoard bottles of alcohol after the Philippine government confirmed the first case of the new coronavirus in the country, in Makati City, Metro Manila, Philippines Reuters Taking precautions: with fears growing that the coronavirus will spread from China, a health official checks a womans temperature on the underground in Beijing Getty Images An empty road is seen in Wuhan in China's central Hubei province on January 27, 2020, amid a deadly virus outbreak which began in the city AFP via Getty Images Students wearing masks meditate prior to a lesson at a high school in Phnom Penh, Cambodia AP Medical staff at the Wuhan Red Cross Hospital wear protective clothing to help stop the spread of a deadly virus AFP via Getty Images Staff move bio-waste containers past the entrance of the Wuhan Medical Treatment Center, where some infected with a new virus are being treated, in Wuhan, China AP Workers driving excavators at the construction site of a field hospital In Wuhan, Hubei Province, China. The builders will complete the 1,000-bed hospital by February 3 to cope with the surge of 2019-nCoV patients in the city Getty Images Buddhist monks wear masks as they walk near Royal Palace in Phnom Penh, Cambodi AP A woman and a child wearing protective masks walk toward check-in counters at Daxing international airport in Beijing AFP via Getty Images An employee sprays disinfectant on a train as a precaution against a new coronavirus at Suseo Station in Seoul, South Korea AP A policeman wearing a mask walks past a quarantine notice about the outbreak of coronavirus in Wuhan, China at an arrival hall of Haneda airport in Tokyo, Japan Reuters Paramilitary police wear face masks as they stand guard at Tiananmen Gate adjacent to Tiananmen Square in Beijing AP The resident wear masks to buy vegetables in the market in Wuhan Getty Images Staff sell masks at a Yifeng Pharmacy in Wuhan AP Novel Coronavirus (2019-nCoV AP

An A&E doctor in the East of England said there were no gowns or scrubs on their most recent shift.

A GP from Berkshire said: Unable to get basic PPE apart from aprons and gloves. Some surgical masks, no eye protection. We managed to buy 50 visors before the rush, and had six pairs of safety glasses left from the swine flu epidemic, which the nurses are using as they have closest contact with patients. They wash and re-use these after each session.

In a statement, Dr Susan Hopkins, Covid-19 incident director at PHE, said: PPE is a precious resource and it is crucial that everyone in health and social care has access to the right protective equipment.

All options are being considered to ensure this, including the safe re-use of items, but no decisions have been made.

Care minister Helen Whately blamed a global scramble for PPE this morning for shortages.
(CNN) You're about to hear in the news that stray, feral dogs could be responsible for passing the deadly novel coronavirus to humans.

Don't believe it.

It's a theory, a hypothesis, based on a computer analysis of the genome of various types of coronaviruses -- a theory that has yet to be proven by any established facts.

Some worry that based on this theory, people may fear their pet dogs, or begin to take action against strays. There's no reason to fret about dogs and coronavirus, experts say.

"I do not believe that any dog owners should be concerned as a result of this work," said professor James Wood, head of the department of veterinary medicine at the University of Cambridge in the UK.

"I do not see anything in this paper to support this supposition and am concerned that this paper has been published in this journal," said Wood, who researches infection dynamics and disease control.

"There is far too much inference and far too little direct data," Wood concluded.

"Do we have to worry about getting it from our dogs or do we have to worry about giving it to our dogs?" asked infectious disease expert Dr. William Schaffner, a professor of preventive medicine and infectious disease at Vanderbilt University School of Medicine in Nashville.

"The answer to both of those questions is no."

The search for compatible hosts

Around the world scientists are feverishly burning the midnight oil at their home computers or makeshift labs, looking for the holy grail of virology: the animal responsible for transmitting the novel coronavirus known as Covid-SARS2 to humans.

Most agree bats are the original source -- bats have been the host for several deadly viruses that have jumped to man -- but the transmission wasn't direct. Bats had to have given the virus to another animal, which then gave it to people.

The first suspect was snakes purchased at a Wuhan "wet market," a shopping area where people buy live wild animals to eat. It's thought to be the epicenter of the first case of Covid-19, the disease caused by the virus.

Researchers have since added wild civit cats, domestic cats, ferrets and pangolins (a scaly anteater) to the list of potential suspects, and now -- the intestines of stray dogs.

No one theory has the scientific world convinced, with comments flying back and forth in agreement and disagreement.

Only a computer analysis

The paper, published Tuesday in the journal Molecular Biology and Evolution, focused on a part of the coronavirus genome called CpG, and a protein in animal immune systems, Zap, which helps protect us from viruses.

The study explored the idea that SARS-CoV-2 has evolved to evade the protective human ZAP protein, also known as zinc finger antiviral protein, by reducing genomic CpG. Low levels of CpG would encourage the virus to replicate, the study speculated.

Of the thousands of genomes analyzed, dog intestines were the best host for replication, said study author Xuhua Xia, a biology professor at the University of Ottawa.

"Canis [dog genius] have a tissue that favors the evolution of coronaviruses with a low-CpG genome."

He points out, however, that since not all mammals have been geneotyped and were available for analysis, there could be additional candidates.

"The respiratory tract and the digestive tract -- they share the mouth as the common opening," said Xia, therefore, it makes sense that a respiratory virus could be swallowed and cause digestive symptoms.

In fact, a recent study out of China found one third of the early Wuhan patients with Covid-19 had diarrhea.

However, there is no real world evidence of SARS-CoV2 transmission in dogs. On the contrary, another recent study on real dogs -- not computers -- found the virus replicates very poorly in canines, thus indicating that they are a likely dead end for transmission.

Xia argues that CpG levels in the digestive tract of feral dogs would be a more favorable replication site than the lungs, so therefore the previous study showing dogs were not efficient transmitters via the respiratory tract may not apply.

Critics are skeptical.

"The theory that SARS-CoV2 originated in dogs seems to stem from speculation about CpG and high Zap expression. This is speculative at best and certainly isn't strong evidence for the link," said Mick Watson, personal chair of bioinformatics and computational biology at the Roslin Institute at the University of Edinburgh.

"This study is based on re-analysis of old data without any new data," said Ben Neuman, chair of biological sciences at Texas A&M University-Texarkana, adding that the research has similarities to an earlier paper that incorrectly named snakes as the origin of SARS-CoV-2.

"It is going to take some new data to finally solve the mystery of the origin of SARS-CoV-2," Neuman said. "The conclusion that cats or dogs were involved as an intermediate host for SARS-CoV-2 is highly speculative, and should not be presented as fact."

Animals as food sources

If the hypothesis was true, how would the virus jump from feral dogs to people? Xia suggests it could be transmitted to a person if they touched the dog's feces or was licked or bit by a dog who had recently cleaned its rectal area.

Or perhaps it could occur by selling animals to eat at the "wet market" in Wuhan, as was suggested with the snake hypothesis.

"It has got nothing to do with eating the animal," said Vanderbilt's Schaffner.

"We don't think food is a mode of transmission of this virus," Schaffner said. "There are two ways it can transmit -- the animal is butchered and you create aerosols during the course of butchering and breathe them in.

"Or you can get your hands contaminated and then touch the mucus membranes of your own mouth and nose."

Putting into perspective

To verify his computer hypothesis, Xia would need to find a grant or other resources to test stray dogs in the wild.

"This suggests the importance of monitoring SARS-like coronaviruses in feral dogs in the fight against SARS-CoV-2," Xia said.

While that's a reasonable hypothesis based on the study of viruses, it will take time to do, and the results may or may not support the theory, just as other hypotheses have fallen to the wayside.

"I am confident that answers about the origin of SARS-CoV-2 are still out there, somewhere in the natural world, but we have not found them yet," Neuman said.

To put the study's conclusions into perspective for pet owners worldwide, Schaffner points to what he calls the key line in the paper: "zoonotic transmission must be a very rare event."

"There is near a 100% likelihood that there was just one transmission," Schaffner said. "This is a powerful statement -- one transmission from some animal source to a human that likely occurred in a wet market in China.

"It happened only once, and all the other infections in humans that have occurred have come from that one instance of transmission."

This story was first published on CNN.com, "Stray dogs and coronavirus: Just a hypothetical theory with no proof."
On March 27, during regional COVID-19 stay-at-home orders, the Houston-Galveston Area Councils Transportation Policy Council held its regular meeting by telephone to discuss adjustments to highway project budgets and protocols. This powerful group of elected officials and bureaucrats from eight counties controls billions of taxpayer dollars and how theyre spent on our roads, highways and other infrastructure.

While the Houston-Galveston Area Council (HGAC) eliminated the standard precursor review meeting, removing an opportunity for public discussion, it raced ahead on costly budget decisions without hesitation.

By continuing to hold events like these, government officials appear, at best, to show a lack of awareness of the challenges every person across the country faces and, at worst, to attempt to circumvent public meeting rules to spend taxpayer dollars without required input.

Government spending projects legally require public input. Robust public involvement is essential to carrying out infrastructure projects through a transparent process that is just and produces equitable outcomes for Houstons current and future residents.

Continuing with non-urgent public meetings unnecessarily encourages gatherings and contradicts the Centers for Disease Control and Preventions advice and several counties stay-at-home orders.

Forging ahead with public meetings during the COVID-19 pandemic also runs counter to the purpose and intent of the Texas Open Meetings Act, which exists to ensure that our government remains open, accountable and responsible.

Despite this, Texas Department of Transportation and City of Houston, among other entities, continue to schedule public meetings.

Maintaining a business as usual attitude enforces dangerous new standards for non-priority issues, while ignoring the reality our country is facing: an overburdened health care system, empty grocery stores, students out of school for weeks, surging unemployment and stacks of bills to pay. Residents who rely on word-of-mouth information may never hear of meetings because they are at home rather than their usual gathering spaces.

These are just some of the new challenges to public participation that leaders must consider.

Continuing with public meetings on non-urgent issues sends the wrong message

While recent public meetings have offered alternatives to in-person participation, the options fall short of real civic engagement in a democratic system.

For seniors and low-income residents, online options offer impractical, or impossible, alternatives to participation due to inconsistent or unaffordable internet access. Even households with access to conferencing tools and technology experience their failure under the weight of new demand.

People unable to raise their hand on a video call miss chances to speak; other listeners fail to mute their phones, making the speaker inaudible. Online and call-in options that drop calls or create chaos in speaker protocols, demonstrate the inadequacies of these formats. And many people with disabilities receive no mechanisms to request reasonable accommodations.

Government must rethink public participation

Officials and bureaucrats should launch new major projects only when it makes sense and always in formats consistent with health guidelines. Some decisions require urgency; however, others do not. Some projects require fast timelines; others can simply wait. For those that require public input, we must quickly re-imagine public access and accommodation.

State and local government leaders must postpone public meetings or community gatherings for non-urgent projects. For processes that have specific state or federally defined deadlines, local governments must request  and should be granted  extensions.

Government officials must pause long-term infrastructure project planning and postpone public meetings until access is properly addressed, or in-person participation is again possible. Investments in major infrastructure are a future priority and may invigorate the economy by putting people back to work. To recover and improve quality-of-life in the long-term, Houston will need the right projects, not simply any project.

State and local agencies must abide by the law and conduct urgent meetings with the intention of creating transparency, accountability and conducting business responsibly.

We call on all levels of government to keep a vigilant focus on the true immediate priorities

Our health and safety need action now; meetings on long-term government infrastructure projects can wait while we adjust.

We need officials to set parameters during stay-at-home orders that ensure the systems and structures meant to serve us adapt to our new needs and realities while upholding justice and the rights of the people.

Bureaucrats must recognize the humanity and the human needs of our community; we are all in this crisis together. Kindness may not be a policy mandate, but deliberate consideration of peoples experiences builds trust in the government, and each other, that we all rely on to survive moments like the one we have today.

Timm is a housing and economic development expert. Valdez is the executive director of Houston in Action. Blair serves as the executive director of LINK Houston, a non-profit that advocates for transportation equity.
By Andrew Hay SHIPROCK, N.M. (Reuters) - To the sound of birdsong on rolling grassland, a pickup truck crawls up a dirt track to bring firewood and food to a Navajo family of seven whose father died of the coronavirus hours earlier. Five young relief workers, wearing masks and gloves, unload the provisions at the door for the now quarantined family

By Andrew Hay

SHIPROCK, N.M. (Reuters) - To the sound of birdsong on rolling grassland, a pickup truck crawls up a dirt track to bring firewood and food to a Navajo family of seven whose father died of the coronavirus hours earlier.

Five young relief workers, wearing masks and gloves, unload the provisions at the door for the now quarantined family. It is the first death the mostly female volunteers said they had been called to in this northern area of the nation, the largest Native American reservation in the United States. The family, who live on the plains south of Shiprock, asked that their names and location not be used.

Like African-Americans and Hispanics in the United States, Navajos are suffering a disproportionately high rate of coronavirus fatalities, twice the national per capita rate, according to Navajo Department of Health data.

The tribe, who refer to themselves as the Dine, has high rates of diabetes, heart disease and obesity - underlying conditions that increase risk of severe complications from COVID-19, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control.

Several leaders interviewed by Reuters in the traditionally matriarchal society say they are trying to support a growing number of families quarantined in their homes.

"This is what we're here for, as young people, to be able to sacrifice ourselves, sacrifice our well-being, so that more people don't get sick," said Kim Smith, 36, who drives the group's blue Dodge Ram pickup truck and runs the relief operation from a farm in Hogback, New Mexico.

The pandemic has shown stark inequalities in healthcare, housing and basic services between the Navajo Nation and the states of New Mexico, Utah and Arizona, which it straddles, according to six tribal leaders interviewed by Reuters.

COVID-19 fatalities on the reservation last week overtook those recorded in the entire state of New Mexico, according to health authority figures. As of April 11, there had been 24 deaths on the reservation and 20 in New Mexico, which has more than 10 times the population.

Navajo authorities have set curfews, asked the federal government for field hospitals, and transported COVID-19 patients to neighboring states for critical care, given a lack of ventilators.

"It's just shedding light on the disparities that have already existed and also the lack of federal funding to meet demand for health needs," said Navajo Council Delegate Amber Kanazbah Crotty, as she stayed home and worked her land in the village of Sheep Springs, New Mexico, around 45 miles (72 km) south of Shiprock.

The Bureau of Indian Affairs, the federal government agency which provides basic services to Native Americans, did not respond to repeated requests for comment about the federal response to the coronavirus outbreak in the Navajo Nation.

Navajo Nation President Jonathan Nez, who has criticized the pace and scale of the federal response to the coronavirus, said on Saturday rapid test kits from Abbott Laboratories would soon become available at Indian Health Service (IHS) and tribal clinics.

Dr. Deborah Birx, coronavirus response coordinator for the White House taskforce, told reporters April 2 that IHS clinics would be among the first locations to get the kits as they had some of the least access to testing in the country.

RUNNING OUT OF FOOD

The Navajo Epidemiology Center says the close proximity of families living in homesteads or public housing has driven community spread.

Another factor is travel.

As big as West Virginia, the reservation has only 13 small grocery stores and around 40% unemployment.

That forces residents to drive hundreds of miles to cities such as Farmington, New Mexico or Phoenix, Arizona for supplies and work.

One member's travel can infect an entire family, Navajo leaders warn.

"In a household with multi-generational families, grandmas and grandpas, first it's you and then it's your children and older children, and multiple generations are being hit," Crotty said.

Seeing quarantined families running out of food, former Navajo Nation Attorney General Ethel Branch set up a GoFundMe page. The Navajo & Hopi Families COVID-19 Relief Fund has raised over $600,000 and helped more than 850 families.

The fund reimburses groups like Smith's for supplies they take to families.

Fearing for the lives of elders who carry the Navajo language and traditions, 19-year-old Matthew Duncan put up signs on the highway from Shiprock to Farmington urging Navajos to "KEEP YR Tt'AA' AT HOME." Tt'AA' means "butt" in Navajo.

"Our population of Native Americans is very low, and if this continues, our numbers are going to drop even more," said Duncan, an Arizona State University student, as cars drove by and honked their horns.

Back at the homestead below the Chuska Mountains, the family must sanitize their home, learn how to isolate, and follow Navajo tradition not to speak of the dead father for four days to allow his spirit to pass on uninterrupted. The father, in his forties, died in a Farmington hospital.

Asked if she feared for her own health, Smith said she participated in a ceremony before starting work and believed she was protected by ancestors and holy people.

"Our ancestors sacrificed so much more for us to allow us to continue to be here," she said.

(Reporting by Andrew Hay in Shiprock, New Mexico; Editing by Bill Tarrant and Rosalba O'Brien)

This story has not been edited by Firstpost staff and is generated by auto-feed.
Early this week, around 300 of the countrys dairy farmers received an unwelcome letter from a businessman they have perhaps unfairly nicknamed Fat Bob.

His real name is Balvinder Nijjar, and hes the 49-year-old managing director of a sprawling web of milk companies with headquarters on an industrial estate in Acton, West London.

From here, his brand, Freshways  the largest independent family-run processor in the country  supplies a host of Britains best-known companies, including McDonalds, British Airways, P&O Cruises and Costa Coffee.

In good times, its a lucrative trade, which has made Nijjar rich beyond his wildest dreams.

Balvinder Nijjar, is the 49-year-old managing director of a sprawling web of milk companies with headquarters on an industrial estate in Acton, West London.

In the last year for which records are available (2018), a parent company of Freshways paid out almost 1.4 million in dividends.

Just under half of that went to Balvinder.

The remainder was divided between three of his close relations.

On Instagram, Fat Bob posts pictures of diamond-encrusted Rolex watches, supercars (including a customised gold Mercedes), exotic holidays and images of him posing with handfuls of $500 casino chips.

Unfortunately, things are not so good for the farmers who rise before dawn, seven days a week, to care for the cows whose fresh, creamy milk keeps the wheels of the Nijjar empire turning.

Freshways supplies milk to a host of Britains best-known companies, including McDonalds, British Airways, P&O Cruises and Costa Coffee

Already receiving less for their milk than farmers contracted to almost every other dairy firm in Britain, they are suffering severe cash-flow difficulties because Nijjars company hasnt paid them since February.

Many have been forced to tip milk away, as revealed by the Mail last week, because, thanks to coronavirus, it failed to send trucks to pick up this highly perishable product. That has left many on the verge of bankruptcy, with several already driven out of business.

Now, the farmers pain will get worse.

The letter states that, from now on, Freshways will pay its farmers the contracted rate of 23.4p per litre for 60 per cent of the milk they produce.

For the rest, they should receive the spot rate  what it fetches on the open commodities market.

In recent days, that has ranged from just 5p to 16p a litre. The arrangement will also be backdated a fortnight.

Whats more, Balvinder writes, Freshways will wait until the end of April to pay for half the milk farmers produced in March. The remainder wont reach them till mid-May.

A dairy farmer needs to receive around 26-27p per litre to break even.

Understandably, the letter has thrown suppliers unlucky enough to be contracted to Nijjars firm into crisis.

Its a total nightmare, says Andy Birkle, who has a herd of 270 cows on the family farm where he was born, just outside Loughborough.

My cows still have to be fed and milked every day. We cant cut any costs, we still have wages, electric and feed bills to pay, but our income has been cut off.

On Instagram, Fat Bob posts pictures of supercars (including a customised gold Mercedes), exotic holidays and images of him posing with handfuls of $500 casino chips.

He also posts pictures on Instagram of diamond-encrusted Rolex watches, while dairy farmers say they are struggling to pay their bills

Birkle, 64, says Freshways owes him 160,000 to 170,000: Its a lot of money. The feed supplier rang last night, asking for payment. Ive always paid my bills, and its horrible to be in this situation.

Ive been losing money for the past 12 months. You try to cut costs to keep going, but theres only so much you can do.

Peter Pratt, who has a dairy herd of 260 cows on his farm near Abbots Bromley, Staffs, tells me: If they cut the price and paid us, we could get by. But not like this. I just had to go to my bank and borrow another 100,000 on overdraft, because we have nothing coming in and no guarantees about when it will get better.

When you add up how much Freshways owes farmers, youre looking at 20-25million. Its a huge amount of money.

Nijjars company said no spokesman was available yesterday, and advised us to email any questions to directors Balvinder and his relations Gulbinder and Gurminder Nijjar.

Farmers have tipped away milk because the highly-perishable product has not been picked up. Here farmer Peter Pratt's children empty out some milk

However, they did not respond to my email.

At the root of this crisis are chill winds running through the entire dairy industry due to changes caused by coronavirus.

Before the lockdown, around half of the 40 million litres of milk produced every day were sold in restaurants and coffee shops. The rest was sold in shops.

Current restrictions have roughly halved the amount of milk being sold commercially.

And while we are all drinking a little more at home, the overall market has declined significantly.

That has left millions of litres swilling around the system, unable to find a home, causing prices to plunge. On the open market, its fetching roughly half its pre-crisis sum.

The average coffee we drink at home contains 20-30ml of milk, whereas the average latte sold in a cafe has 120-150ml, explains Gary Mitchell, NFU Scotlands vice president.

Prices have dropped quickly and because profit margins were already incredibly thin, thats causing real pain.

Firms such as Freshways, which supply only the food service sector, have been far harder hit than firms which also cater to retail clients. However, many firms in a similar position are managing to be more generous.

A recent memo by the Royal Association of British Dairy Farmers showed that several comparable companies have cut their prices by 1p per litre. However, none of the 14 named companies is paying less than 24p a litre.

Meanwhile, Muller, which supplies many supermarket chains (where demand has risen substantially), is increasing its rates by a penny, albeit temporarily.

Before the lockdown, around half of the 40 million litres of milk produced every day were sold in restaurants and coffee shops. The rest was sold in shops. Current restrictions have roughly halved the amount of milk being sold commercially. Pictured: Balvinder Nijjar (right) takes a selfie near a helicopter

The current cash crunch comes on top of decades of decline for the dairy industry.

There were nearly 35,000 dairy farmers in Britain in 1996 and 14,500 as recently as 2012. But today the figure is nearer 10,000, thanks in part to consumers growing accustomed to retailers using milk as a loss leader, costing just over 1 for four pints.

In Wales, Abi Reader, who chairs NFU Cymrus dairy board, says two Freshways farmers went out of business last week, even before the latest cuts, which Nijjars letter described as necessary . . . to rebuild the business for the long-term future benefit of all its suppliers and employees.

She expects further cuts to cause more devastation to farming families. The whole dairy sector is in crisis, but for these Freshways farmers in particular its important they get access to government support, she says.

The NFU and the Labour Party have been pressing the Government to come up with help for dairy farmers, but none has yet been forthcoming.

The Secretary of State wants any action to be industry-led, says shadow Defra minister Daniel Zeichner. My view is this crisis shows up some of the long-established problems in the industry.

One such problem involves contracts which prevent Freshways farmers selling milk to suppliers who might pay more.

Freshways are actually paying us 1p, every week, by bank transfer, says Pratt. They say it means they have made a weekly payment, so arent breaking the terms of our contract. If we want to go elsewhere, we have a three-month notice period.

That would take us into July, by which point he and hundreds of other dairy farmers are unlikely to have much of a business left.

Whether Fat Bob, who has made millions from the dairy game, will suffer similar pain remains to be seen.
Actor Sana Saeed, who couldnt attend the last rites of her father as she was stuck in Los Angeles due to coronavirus crisis, has said that she has made peace with the situation rather than fight it. Her father died in India on the day of janta curfew last month.

Sharing that it was extremely hard for her to deal with the news, she told Times of India in an interview, I was already in isolation here and had no one with me. That was tough and unfair.

She added further, I had shut myself from the world for a couple of days and was only taking calls from my family (mother and two sisters). I wanted to be with them and hug them. Every time I felt sad, I prayed. I understood that I had to stop being selfish. I couldnt have expected him to keep living with the kind of pain he was in. I loved my dad so much that I can never get closure, but I have come to terms with the fact that I couldnt be present for his final rites. I have made peace with the situation rather than fight it.

The actor said since her father had returned from the hospital and was stable, she flew to Los Angeles for an event. She now plans to translate his Urdu poetry in different languages to make sure his work reaches out to the people.

Also read: Ramayans Lakshman Sunil Lahri is meme makers new favourite, says Its said you are popular thats why they make these memes

Sana had earlier told Hindustan Times about the sad news. Talking about how the funeral was carried out during janta curfew, she said, My family had decided to do the funeral on the same day and we had only three hours in hand. On their way, they were stopped by the cops to check, but after seeing the death certificate, they allowed them to go. Though I wasnt there physically, my sister kept texting me every time during the ceremony.

Sana is known for playing the role of Shah Rukh Khans daughter Anjali in 1998 film, Kuch Kuch Hota Hai. She was also seen in 2012 film Student Of The Year and has appeared on several reality shows.

Follow @htshowbiz for more
Turkeys stance on its S-400s hasnt changed, even as the United States appeared to dangle support in Syria in exchange for Ankara abandoning the controversial Russian missile defense systems, Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu said Tuesday, Al-Monitor writes in the article Intel: Turkey says S-400 stance unchanged despite US pressure.

It is not appropriate to put preconditions when an ally is in need, an urgent need, like [is] happening in Idlib, said Cavusoglu during a webinar hosted by the Atlantic Council and the Turkish Heritage Organization.

Earlier this month, US ambassador to NATO Kay Bailey Hutchison suggested a package to assist Turkeys military operations in northwest Syria was conditioned on Ankara rejecting the missile defense system, which she said was deterring some of the capabilities that we would be able to give [Turkey] to fight against the Syrian aggression.

Turkeys acquisition of two Russian-supplied surface-to-air missile systems remains a source of friction between the two NATO allies. In early March, US Syria envoy James Jeffrey said that the S-400 issue left US officials split over whether to provide further support to Turkey in rebel-held northwest Syria.

Ankara and Washington have been at odds over the S-400s, which the United States says pose a threat to NATOs air defense capabilities and may compromise the security of its own F-35 stealth fighter jets. The United States threatened sanctions in response and booted Turkey from the joint strike fighter program in July.

Although CAATSA, a sweeping sanctions law passed in 2017, mandates financial penalties for countries doing business with the Russian military, the Trump administration has held off on imposing sanctions for Turkey's S-400 purchase.

Ankara, which supports some of the opposition groups fighting Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, requested in February that the United States deploy Patriot batteries along its southern frontier to defend Turkish troops. Cavusoglu reiterated Tuesday his country is ready to buy them if made a good offer by the United States  a nonstarter for the Pentagon unless Turkey returns its S-400s.

We prefer to purchase from our allies. If not, I have to take alternatives, Cavusoglu said.

The S-400s, the first shipment of which arrived in Turkey in July 2019, have not yet been activated. Cavusoglu didnt say whether the Russian military hardware would be made operational later this month, as expected.

After a summit with his Russian counterpart March 5, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said the plan remains for the S-400s to be fully deployed in April.
An Alabama police detective fatally shot a woman as part of a love triangle dispute with a colleague, authorities said.

Birmingham police Detective Alfreda Fluker, 39, was charged Tuesday with capital murder in the Friday killing of Kanisha Nicole Fuller, news outlets reported. Fluker was also charged with the attempted murder of Detective Mario Theodore White, her coworker on the Birmingham Police Departments Crime Reduction Team.

Officers responding to a reported shooting at a Birmingham park found Fuller, 43, suffering from multiple gunshot wounds. She was hospitalized and later pronounced dead.

Fuller was found inside an unmarked Birmingham police vehicle that was assigned to White, Birmingham Police Chief Patrick Smith said. White was there too, but he wasnt wounded. There is no indication White called 911 following the shooting, authorities said.

Investigators determined Fluker was the shooter and she was arrested Saturday morning. Its unclear whether Fluker had an attorney who could comment on her behalf.

Fluker has been with the department for about 15 years. White is on leave pending the investigation. Additional details regarding the shooting werent immediately released.

Smith said he didnt know the exact relationship between White, Fluker and Fuller but said both women at one point were in a relationship with White.

Its something thats been going on for a little while, he said, but without our knowledge.
In one of Japan's biggest cities, Osaka, people are appealing appealed for donations of raincoats to be used as personal protection gear by hospital workers dealing with the coronavirus outbreak.

Given the shortage of proper protective clothing in Osaka, health workers are being forced to resort to wearing garbage bags over their scrubs.

Reuters

City's Mayor Ichiro Matsui has been pleading people to donate raincoats, "Please send us unused raincoats. Any colour will do," he told reporters on Tuesday.



The region has seen cases mount in recent days, with more than 830 infections recorded, the second-highest in the country after Tokyo's 2,171.

"Some hospital workers are wearing a garbage bag as an alternative to protective gear," Matsui said, adding the makeshift fix raises contamination risks for workers as they removed them over their heads.



"It doesn't matter if you're an Osaka city citizen or not. Please provide us raincoats," the city government website said.

Reuters

The request comes as Japan's two emergency medicine associations issued a joint statement saying they are "already sensing the collapse of the emergency medical system".



"The number of hospitals that can accept patients suffering from a high fever and breathing problems is decreasing," the statement said, warning these patients were instead being sent to emergency clinics which had to turn away patients with other serious medical complaints.

"We fear that patients suffering from heart attacks, strokes, or multiple injuries might lose precious time in being treated," the statement said.

Japan has seen a relatively smaller-scale outbreak than many other countries, with 8,100 infections and 119 deaths since the first case emerged in mid-January.

Reuters

But the government has now declared a state of emergency in seven regions after medical advisors warned the outbreak could grow quickly if people did not stay inside and reduce contact.



According to latest reports, more than two million have been infected with coronavirus worldwide, while 1,26,871 deaths have been recorded.





Europe is the hardest hit continent, with more than a million cases and 85,271 fatalities. The United States, where the virus is spreading most rapidly, registered 6,09,240 cases, and 26,033 deaths.
[April 15, 2020] Molina Healthcare Continues Relief Efforts Nationwide for Its Members, Providers, Employees, and Communities

During this unprecedented time of crisis and uncertainty, Molina Healthcare, Inc. (NYSE: MOH) is promoting several COVID-19 initiatives to support its members, providers, employees, and communities. This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20200415005173/en/ Molina Healthcare employee volunteer delivers personal protective equipment and supplies during ongoing COVID-19 relief efforts. (Photo: Business Wire) "We continue to seek opportunities to ease the burden that this pandemic has placed on all the segments we serve," said Joe Zubretsky, president and CEO of Molina Healthcare. "Now more than ever, as we navigate this challenging time together, improving overall health outcomes is our driving force." Member support: Molina previously announced that it has waived all member COVID-19-related testing and treatment costs. It is providing virtual urgent care services through its partnership with Teladoc and offering free home delivery of prescriptions through any CVS Pharmacy. In addition, the Company is providing telehealth services based on Medicaid Agency updates. Molina also made a Coronavirus Chatbot online tool available to help members identify COVID-19 symptoms and immediately connect with support resources.



Provider support: Molina has accelerated $150 million in payments to providers. Additionally, Molina has extended all previously approved prior authorizations until September 1, 2020. Molina has also enabled providers to be paid the same amount for servicing members via telehealth as they would have for in-person service, and has expedited credentialing to ensure providers are able to see members for any health care reason. In addition, Molina has provided personal protective equipment ("PPE") in many markets and continues efforts to seek and provide PPE where it is most needed.

Employee support: Molina is equally committed to ensuring that its employees stay safe and healthy. In March, Molina transitioned most of its staff to remote status. In addition, to assist employees with their personal expenses related to the crisis, Molina disbursed $500 to each of its eligible 9,000 employees, representing approximately $4.5 million in total disbursements. The Company is also implementing pay enhancements for essential employees. Further, to help address the various challenges that employees may be facing, Molina implemented an additional COVID-19 paid leave policy granting all employees designated time off (80 hours), and is waiving all COVID-19 testing and treatment costs for employees. Community support: Since the national state of emergency was declared due to the pandemic, Molina has committed support and resources to various nonprofits serving those in need across the country, including New York, Washington, New Mexico, Ohio, Michigan, California, Florida, Texas, and other evolving hot-spot states. The support, supplies, and monetary donations have been made to an array of trusted organizations that directly serve vulnerable populations. The spirit of community support is deeply embedded in Molina's culture through its "Helping Hands" program, which has allowed employees to contribute over 180,000 hours of volunteer time since launching in 2013. About Molina Healthcare, Inc. Molina Healthcare, Inc., a FORTUNE 500 company, provides managed health care services under the Medicaid and Medicare programs and through the state insurance marketplaces. Through its locally operated health plans, Molina Healthcare served approximately 3.3 million members as of December 31, 2019. For more information about Molina Healthcare, please visit molinahealthcare.com. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20200415005173/en/

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By Akbar Mammadov

Azerbaijan's First Vice President Mehriban Aliyeva has thanked Turkey for projecting the Azerbaijani flag in capital Ankara as a sign of Turkish-Azerbaijani friendship and solidarity

"I express my deep gratitude to fraternal Turkey! Our countries are always close to each other - both in happy days and tribulations. This is our unity, our strength! I wish our nations good health, peace and prosperity to our countries! May Almighty God protect our world!" Aliyev wrote in her Instagram account on April 15.

Earlier, Turkey displayed the electronic version of the Azerbaijani flag on the iconic Ata Kule tower in the capital Ankara on April 13 to show solidarity with Azerbaijan over the fight against novel coronavirus.

Along with the flag, the words With love to Azerbaijan and One people, two states periodically appeared on the tower.

It should be noted that earlier, Azerbaijan expressed its support for Turkey by flying the electronic version of the Turkish flag on the Heydar Aliyev Center in Baku. Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavu?o?lu praised Azerbaijan's move in his Twitter account, saying "One nation, one heart!".








While working in space, NASA astronaut Jessica Meir took a moment to thank the medical personnel, frontline workers and first responders who have been working to stop the spread of the novel coronavirus here on Earth .

Last week (April 9), astronauts Meir, Andrew Morgan and Chris Cassidy answered media questions from the International Space Station ahead of Meir and Morgan's return to Earth, which is scheduled for Friday (April 17). Before answering questions, Meir addressed the camera to thank people back on Earth.

"We would all like to just give our thanks," Meir said, "to the doctors, the nurses, all the medical personnel, police officers, firefighters  really everybody that is on the front lines down there putting their lives on the line for all of the human race  we give our profound thanks and heartfelt thanks to all of them. Thank you very much, your efforts are appreciated."

In Photos: Expedition 62 to the International Space Station

More: Coronavirus pandemic: Full space industry coverage

Meir, along with Morgan, has been on the space station for the duration of the pandemic. Astronauts on the space station have access to the news and the internet but they haven't been on Earth to experience first-hand just how different things are for so many people around the world as they self-isolate and work to reduce the spread of the illness. In her conversation with the media, Meir said that "it's difficult to believe all the changes that have taken place."

However, while she noted that after seven months in space she is sad that she won't be able to hug her friends and family when she returns home, it will still be wonderful to see them again from a safe distance.

Follow Chelsea Gohd on Twitter @chelsea_gohd . Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom and on Facebook .
MICHIGAN  Anyone experiencing coronavirus-like symptoms can now be tested, according to the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services.

Expanding testing is needed to learn more about how COVID-19 is spreading in our state, said Dr. Joneigh Khaldun, chief medical executive and chief deputy for health. We want to make sure people know that if they have symptoms, they should work with their medical provider to be tested.

Previously, due to limited testing abilities, the state prioritized testing to include only the most likely cases.

The new testing criteria includes individuals with mild symptoms. Other criteria includes:

 Hospitalized patients.

 Symptomatic healthcare workers.

 Patients in congregate facilities with symptoms, including those at:

 Long-term care or elderly living facilities.

 Jails or prisons.

 Homeless shelters.

 Residential foster care facilities.

 Other group living setting.

 Patients age 65 and older with symptoms.

 Patients with underlying conditions with symptoms.

 First responders with symptoms.

The new criteria will only remain open if the testing capacity in the state remains above the testing needs. According to the MDHHS, testing capacity and availability will continue to be monitored, and adjustments may be made as necessary.

Tuscola and Huron County health departments Public Health Officer Ann Hepfer has cautioned residents in the Upper Thumb to not put too much faith in the limited cases being reported because of the previous testing limitations and criteria.

The state has published a list of testing locations, which include Great Lakes Bay Health Center in Bad Axe. The state has also launched an online search portal for people to find the nearest testing location.

There are a total of 13 drive-thru testing locations around the state, which can reportedly test between 100 and 300 patients each per day.

According to GLBH, since opening its drive-thru location at the beginning of the month, it has seen fewer than 10 people per day to come for testing under the previous criteria. The same was said for the companys other location in Bay City, but its Saginaw location was averaging between 20-30 tests per day.

In addition, GLBH received $1.7 million from the federal government through the CARES Act.

Jill Armentrout, the fund development coordinator for Great Lakes Bay Health, said the funding would help the centers keep staff members that are not seeing their regular patients. According to Armentrout, GLBH is operating at 75% capacity and not getting as many reimbursements from insurance companies.

Routine visits are not being done, so were not bringing in doctors for some services, Armentrout said.

The Bad Axe testing site is located at 876 N. Van Dyke Road in the Great Lakes Bay Health Centers parking lot, with orange cones designating where a person is supposed to park.

Testing takes place from 10 a.m. to 12 p.m. on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays.

According to the state guidelines, testing still requires individuals who are experiencing symptoms of COVID-19, such as fever, cough or shortness of breath, to contact their healthcare provider for evaluation before testing. The state recommends calling ahead to the COVID-19 testing site before they go, to learn about what the testing criteria, availability and hours are.

For more information visit michigan.gov/coronavirus.
Source: Xinhua| 2020-04-15 14:48:48|Editor: huaxia

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Citizens bid farewell to medics from the Peking Union Medical College Hospital in Wuhan, capital of central China's Hubei Province, April 15, 2020. The last medical assistance team started leaving Hubei Province Wednesday as the COVID-19 epidemic in the hard-hit province has been subdued. The medical team consisting of over 180 medical workers from the Peking Union Medical College Hospital arrived in the provincial capital of Wuhan on Jan. 26. (Xinhua/Xiong Qi)

WUHAN, April 15 (Xinhua) -- The last medical assistance team started leaving Hubei Province Wednesday as the COVID-19 epidemic in the hard-hit province has been subdued.

The medical team consisting of over 180 medical workers from the Peking Union Medical College Hospital arrived in the provincial capital of Wuhan on Jan. 26.

Among the total, 179 medics left Wuhan Wednesday, and six will continue to stay there to assist local medical personnel in the treatment of patients.

"There are still a small number of patients who have not fully recovered. We hope they can get better as soon as possible," said Guo Fan, a member of the medical team assisting the Tongji Hospital in Wuhan.

The medical team treated 109 critically ill patients admitted to the designated hospital.

"I have left home for over 80 days, I'm looking forward to seeing my family," said Guo.

A farewell ceremony was held in the early morning in Zhonghe International Hotel, where the medical team stayed in Wuhan.

"They worked very hard. I often saw many fall asleep while having breakfast. They deserve our heartfelt gratitude," said Liu Yanxia, a kitchen helper in the hotel, who left her post to see off the medical team.

Liu Chunhong, 56, is a community volunteer in Wuhan. He and another four volunteers drove to the hotel to bid farewell to the medical team.

"The medical personnel have sacrificed a lot for Wuhan. I come here to express my appreciation," said Liu, who put on a volunteer vest with names of the team members signed on it. "I will keep this vest permanently as a souvenir."

After the ceremony, the medical workers headed for Wuhan Tianhe International Airport at around 10:50 a.m., with police motorcycles and cars escorting the buses and local residents lining the streets and waving goodbye to them.

Over 42,000 medical workers from across the country were dispatched to aid Hubei in fighting the epidemic since the virus outbreak. The supporting medics started to withdraw from March 17.
I am facing the reality of having to sleep in my car if I cannot find something, says the description of a campaign by Rashid, a 24-year-old medical student in Chicago who did not want his first name used. Using an alias, he wrote, After talking to people they told me it is not selfish to ask for money from people. So, if you have the means and dont view it as a burden, then please donate.
PUNE The southwest monsoon, critical for Indias economy, will arrive in Pune on June 10, and extend its stay by five days more than earlier forecasts, the Indian Meteorological Department (IMD) said on Wednesday.

Punes new date for the start of the monsoon will be June 10, while it is forecast to exit on October 11, as compared to the earlier forecast of October 6.

These new dates are relevant for many sectors and public services like agriculture, water and power management.

In other parts of Maharashtra, Kolhapur will see the onset of the monsoon on June 9, but a change in the forecasted withdrawal date, from October 1 to October 11.

Satara will see the monsoon on June 10 and its withdrawal on October 9; while Ahmednagar is forecast to see the onset on monsoon on June 12 and withdrawal on October. The monsoon in Nagpur will begin on June 15 and withdraw on October 6.
According to information obtained by RTL, the implementation of the phased exit plan could already be started as early as next week with the re-opening of individual construction sites.

The waiting may soon come to an end: first details of Luxembourg's phased exit plan will be made public on Wednesday, which is when the state council will meet and greenlight the gradual lifting of the current lockdown measures.

The exit plan is hoped to gradually resurrect Luxembourg's economy from its coronavirus-induced slumber. According to information obtained by RTL, construction firms may be among the first to be able to return to business as usual - individual construction sites may reopen as early as next week.

A report conducted by the consulting firm McKinsey will also play a key role in defining the government's next steps.

According to our sources, the coalition government is not reaching an agreement in terms of several specific measures that may or may not be implemented in order to allow the gradual lifting of the current lockdown measures. These points of disagreement for instance include the access to face masks, coronavirus tracing apps, and non-refundable financial state support for companies.

Mandatory face masks?

According to information obtained by RTL, the coalition government is yet to reach an agreement regarding the obtaining, distribution, and financing of face masks. It remains unclear how the masks would be distributed between individual municipalities, schools as well as buses and trains.

No exact date has been given for the lifting of lockdown measures but they are not expected to be lifted until 4 May, which is when schools are also set to reopen. It is possible that this date will be extended by a week based on advice from the Ministry of Health.

The state council meeting will take place at 2.30pm on Wednesday. The press will be informed after the meeting - we will provide updates later this Wednesday.
Company's 28% Sales Growth is Double Industry Average

Company Positioned for Significant Growth in 2020

DENVER, CO / ACCESSWIRE / April 15, 2020 / Leafbuyer Technologies, Inc. ("Leafbuyer" or "the Company") (OTCQB:LBUY), a leading cannabis technology platform, announced today that quarterly cash sales grew 28% year-over-year in the quarter ending March 31, 2020. The increase reflects the cash sales booked in the quarter versus the same quarter last year.

Leafbuyer's 28% year-over-year growth rate is double the industry's projected compound annual growth rate of 14%, according to New Frontier Data. Increased sales of the Company's loyalty, texting, and online ordering solutions account for the continued success.

"Providing our clients with the highest quality marketing technologies is essential to our success," said Kurt Rossner, CEO of Leafbuyer. "Over the past year we have seen the greatest growth in Leafbuyer Loyalty, our industry-leading texting and loyalty platform. We have onboarded hundreds of dispensary clients in new markets like Oklahoma and further solidified our hold on stable markets like Colorado."

Leafbuyer continues to advance its national footprint to include new and established legal cannabis markets. Due to the social distancing requirements of COVID-19, Leafbuyer has experienced increased demand for its order ahead and delivery solutions. Dispensaries, which are considered essential businesses in most states, are pursuing communication and ordering tools to operate successfully in these unstable times.

"In addition to this steady growth, we are extremely excited about our prospects for the coming opportunities in delivery and local pick up. I believe we are positioned to further establish Leafbuyer Technologies as a dominant player in the cannabis industry," continued Rossner.

Leafbuyer realizes revenue from the sales of its sophisticated marketing technology platforms, which drive cannabis consumers to dispensaries and product companies across the country. The solutions include loyalty programs, mobile application-based order ahead, and access to millions of cannabis consumers through the Leafbuyer.com website and its network partners.

About Leafbuyer Technologies, Inc.

Leafbuyer Technologies is one of the most comprehensive technology and communication software providers for the cannabis industry. Leafbuyer.com is an all-inclusive online resource for cannabis deals and information. Leafbuyer works alongside businesses to showcase their unique products and build a network of loyal patrons. Leafbuyer's national network of cannabis deals and information reaches millions of consumers every month. Leafbuyer is the official cannabis deals platform of Dope Media, Sensi Magazine, and Voice Media Group.

Learn more at Leafbuyer.com

Contacts

Leafbuyer Technologies, Inc.

Andre Leonard, +720-432-5593

aleonard@leafbuyer.com

Cautionary Statement Regarding Forward-Looking Information

Safe Harbor Statement

This press release may contain forward-looking statements which are based on current expectations, forecasts, and assumptions that involve risks and uncertainties that could cause actual outcomes and results to differ materially from those anticipated or expected, including statements related to the amount and timing of expected revenues and any payment of dividends on our common and preferred stock, statements related to our financial performance, expected income, distributions, and future growth for upcoming quarterly and annual periods. These risks and uncertainties are further defined in filings and reports by the Company with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). Actual results and the timing of certain events could differ materially from those projected in the forward-looking statements due to several factors detailed from time to time in our filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Reference is hereby made to cautionary statements set forth in the Company's most recent SEC filings.

SOURCE: Leafbuyer Technologies, Inc.

View source version on accesswire.com:https://www.accesswire.com/585180/Leafbuyer-Technologies-Inc-Announces-Another-Record-Quarter
A 29-year-old coronavirus disease (Covid-19) patient, who was undergoing treatment in a city hospital, allegedly killed herself in a bathroom early on Wednesday.

A case of accidental death has been registered at Agripada police station. No suicide note was found from the spot. We suspect the patient was depressed after testing positive. We are investigating the case, said S Agawane, senior police inspector, Agripada station.

A senior doctor of the hospital said, The patient was brought to the hospital on Monday. On Wednesday morning, her body was found in the bathroom. Police officers are investigating the case.

Dr Daksha Shah, deputy director, health department, Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC), said, According to initial information, the woman, a resident of Worli, killed herself. We have informed police.

(With inputs from Shrinivas Deshpande)
A beauty therapist has lifted the lid on Australia's rogue beauticians, revealing many in the industry are operating illegally from home in the midst of the coronavirus lockdown.

The Brisbane-based beautician, who did not wish to be named, said about half the industry is continuing to provide services despite the nationwide ban.

'I think it's very common. I'd say 50 percent of those in the industry are working to some degree,' she told the Courier-Mail.

'I feel like it's stealing from those of us who are doing the right thing.'

A Queensland woman estimates 50 percent of beauticians are continuing to operate during the coronaivirus lockdown. Pictured: Hairdresser Heather (first name only given) colours a customer's hair, for the last time in the foreseeable future due to newly announced time restrictions, in Brisbane on March 25

On March 24, Prime Minister Scott Morrison introduced draconian measures to slow the spread of COVID-19.

This included the immediate closure of many businesses which provide personal services with 'a lot of contact'.

'The following now won't be able to continue: beauty therapy, tanning, waxing, nail salons and tattoo parlours and the same for spa and massage parlours,' Mr Morrison said.

The Brisbane woman said she followed the imposed rules and was forced to close her business, while other operators flourished illegally.

'I've got no savings. No holiday pay. My husband still works but it's not even covering a third of the bills,' she said.

Although the woman said she's tempted to work 'under the table' she feels the health and financial risks are too high.

'Aside from the fact I don't have any money to pay fines, you just don't know who's been in contact with who,' she said.

'It's just not worth the risk. It's infuriating because you think 'oh, I could just have this person in and that might be enough for food this week' but we just don't do it.'

Clients and beauticians are getting around the strict measures by working out of their private residence.

Clients and beauticians have been skirting the strict coronavirus measures by working out of their homes. Pictured: A sign at the entrance of a shopping centre in Toowoomba, Queensland on Wednesday, April 1, 2020, reminding shoppers about social distancing regulations

On March 24, Prime Minister Scott Morrison introduced draconian measures to slow the spread of COVID-19. As a result many business which provide personal services have been forced to shut down. Pictured: A closed sign at a Surfers Paradise business on the Gold Coast, Wednesday, April 8, 2020

'I'm seeing everywhere, technicians and beauty therapists getting countless messages from new clients saying 'do you work from home? I'll just say I'm visiting',' the woman said.

'This isn't about us anymore, this is about the country.'

The main reason she believes beauticians have gone underground is because many desperate clients link their nails and lashes to their self esteem.

'When it comes to nails and lashes, it's more than just a luxury for some women. It's very much self care,' she said.

'It's the one thing they do to keep them pepped up, it's for their self esteem and mental health.

'It's everything for our women having their nails done, and they genuinely freak out if they can't get them done.'

Anyone in breach of Queensland's strict social distancing regulations can face a fine of $1334.50 for individuals and $6,672.50 for corporations.

Queensland have recorded 999 confirmed coronavirus cases to date, including 5 deaths.
PRESS RELEASE  Jim Lovell, who 50 years ago commanded the Apollo 13 mission, often called the space programs most successful failure, will recount that famed mission as the special guest at EAAs annual Wright Brothers Memorial Banquet on Friday, December 11, at the EAA Aviation Museum in Oshkosh. The banquet is held each December at EAA to commemorate the Wright brothers successful flights at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, on December 17, 1903, that began the era of manned flight.

Tickets to go on sale beginning in early fall

Lovell (EAA 320945) commanded the Apollo 13 mission that blasted off from then-Cape Kennedy, Florida, on April 11, 1970. It was destined to be the third manned moon landing mission before an explosion in an oxygen tank early in the flight caused it to be remembered as a pinnacle of ingenuity and imagination.

A half-century after the Apollo 13 mission that kept the world on edge for nearly a week, we are honored to have Jim Lovell join us to recall that mission and the hundreds of thousands of people who made possible Americas successful effort to land men on the moon and return them to Earth safely, said Jack J. Pelton, EAA CEO and Chairman. As a longtime aviator and EAA member, Capt. Lovell shares a passion for flight with his fellow members, which should make for an extraordinary evening as we recall the anniversary of the Wright brothers powered flight.

The thrilling story of Apollo 13 became a hit movie, with Tom Hanks portraying Lovell in the title role. Although Lovell is best remembered as commander of that mission, he was the worlds most experienced astronaut at the time, having flown twice in the Gemini program (Gemini 7 and 12) as well as aboard the famed Apollo 8 flight in December 1968 that was the first manned mission to orbit the moon.

Tickets for the Wright Brothers Memorial Banquet will go on sale in early fall at EAA.org/WrightBrothers. All seats are $60 for EAA members and $80 for nonmembers, and include pre-assigned seating for the dinner. Those purchasing tickets will be asked for their dinner entree preference, with options that include a vegetarian and gluten-free choice.

Doors will open on December 11 at 5 p.m. with a social period, followed by the dinner and presentation at 6:30. As this event is expected to sell out, those interested are urged to obtain their tickets early when they go on sale.
RICHARDSON, Texas, April 15, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- As soon as shelter-in-place orders became eminent across the globe due to COVID-19, Parkinson Voice Project, a nonprofit speech therapy clinic headquartered in Texas, jumped into action to ensure that people with Parkinson's everywhere would not suffer the ravages of speech loss and life-threatening swallowing complications.



"We knew that people with Parkinson's were going to need our help to maintain their speech and swallowing during this crisis," says Samantha Elandary, founder of Parkinson Voice Project.



Elandary, who is also a speech-language pathologist, immediately scheduled Facebook LIVE "SPEAK OUT! Home Practice Sessions" Monday through Friday at 10 a.m. CT and Tuesdays at 6 p.m. CT. Awareness of these online speech exercises is spreading. The practice sessions have more than 1.5K views daily, and numbers are increasing as more people with Parkinson's find out about this unique opportunity. Visit https://www.facebook.com/ParkinsonVoiceProject/ to view the Facebook LIVE "SPEAK OUT! Home Practice Sessions."



90% of individuals with Parkinson's are likely to experience speech difficulty. If left untreated, the speech muscles become weaker, and the disease starts to affect the ability to swallow. These issues can lead to serious, life-threatening complications. Aspiration pneumonia accounts for 70% of the mortality rate in the Parkinson's population.

"We want people with Parkinson's to know that our organization is committed to helping them keep their voices strong during COVID-19," says Elandary.

ABOUT PARKINSON VOICE PROJECT:

Parkinson Voice Project  celebrating its 15th anniversary this year  is the only nonprofit organization in the world solely dedicated to helping individuals with Parkinson's preserve their speech and swallowing. Their effective speech therapy program combines individual speech therapy (SPEAK OUT!) with weekly group speech therapy (The LOUD Crowd). Since 2008, Parkinson Voice Project's clinic in Texas has not billed insurance or charged for its services. Its program is funded through donations and the Pay It Forward concept.

Parkinson Voice Project is successfully replicating its SPEAK OUT! & LOUD Crowd program across the globe to help more people with Parkinson's. They provide online training for speech-language pathologists, and their program materials are available in English, French, German, Hebrew, Italian, Japanese, and Spanish.

SOURCE Parkinson Voice Project
A California man shot and killed his wife and two teenage sons, then took his own life as deputies arrived at his home and ordered him to surrender.

The Riverside County Coroner's Office has identified the suspected gunman in the triple murder-suicide that took place in Menifee on April 6 as Roberto Perez, 39.

According to the Riverside County Sheriff's Office, Perez killed his wife, Yareli Vidal-Venegas, 33, and their sons, David Aguirre, 15, and Ronaldo Vidal, 16.

Authorities in Riverside County, California, say Roberto Perez killed his wife, Yareli Vidal-Venegas, 33 (left), and their two sons, David Aguirre, 15, and Ronaldo Vidal, 16 (right)

Officers were called to the family's home in Menifee, California, on the afternoon of April 6 for a domestic violence report

The couple's daughter, who has not been named, was not harmed. It is unclear whether she was home at the time of the carnage.

Authorities said in a statement that just before 4pm on April 6, deputies responded to the family's home in the 31000 block of Sherman Road in Menifee for a reported domestic violence incident.

Deputies made contact with Perez, who refused to exit the house and told them he had shot his wife and children.

The responding officers negotiated with Perez to surrender, but he refused.

During the standoff, deputies a single gunshot from inside the home. When they entered the residence, they found Perez dead from a self-inflicted gunshot wound.

The man's wife and sons were found mortally wounded. Two of the family members were pronounced dead at the scene, and a third was rushed to a hospital and pronounced dead on arrival.

A loved one has launched a GoFundMe campaign to help the family with the funeral expenses of the deceased mother and sons.

Perez admitted to killing his family, then shot himself dead during a standoff with deputies

'We know they are now in heaven and have or feel no pain, they were selfless people, their laughs were so contagious and they could brightened any room,' wrote Samantha Harding in the description. 'They were all 3 very unique and caring they would be willing to help everyone in need.'

Both Ronaldo, known to is friends as 'Nano,' and his younger brother, David, were students at Paloma Valley High School.

Principal Jennifer Thomasian released a statement on Facebook last week confirming their deaths and mourning their loss.

'It is with an incredibly heavy heart that I share with you the loss of two of our Wildcats,' she wrote. 'Nothing can prepare us for the loss of a friend or loved one, at any age.'
PR-Inside.com: 2020-04-15 13:03:02

Renaud Perrier to Drive Strategic Growth Initiatives in EMEA and APAC for Data Privacy Innovator

WASHINGTON, April 15, 2020 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Virtru , the new standard in data protection, today announced the appointment of Googles former Head of Cloud ISV Partnerships, Renaud Perrier, as Senior Vice President of International Business Development and Operations. Based in Paris, Perrier is charged with directing Virtrus operations, product strategy, and technology partnerships in EMEA and APAC to help the company further expand into key international markets.



A cloud industry veteran, Perrier brings more than 20 years of sales engineering, product management, and partnership development expertise to Virtru. Prior to joining the company, he co-founded We Advocacy, and before that, served as Chief Product Officer at LumApps overseeing the collaborative platform providers product strategy and marketing. In his roles at Google, he developed its global ISV program and helped launch Google Cloud solutions in EMEA. Earlier in his career, Perrier held sales engineering positions at Microsoft.

We are experiencing unprecedented change as a global workforce  already more distributed than ever before  and seeing an accelerated rise in services from telehealth to distance learning, that will likely be the go-forward norm, rather than the exception. G Suite and other cloud solutions have become essential to powering the vital connection and collaboration between individuals and among businesses, said Virtru Co-founder and CEO John Ackerly. Renaud is a tremendous asset and joins us at a time when data has never been more valuable, and privacy has never been more important. We have seen our product usage in EMEA double year-over-year, and Renauds cloud and security expertise will help us further grow internationally, as we continue our mission of unlocking the power of data by creating a world where it is always under your control  everywhere.

Agile, secure collaboration is paramount during this time of uncertainty, especially when extended enterprises are already challenged with navigating a morass of industry regulations  chief among them, GDPR  while seeking to optimize the benefits of multicloud architectures, said Perrier. Virtru enables businesses to enjoy the full power and potential of G Suite and other SaaS applications, like Salesforce, while ensuring the protection of their corporate information and customer data. Im honored to lead Virtrus expansion in EMEA and APAC as we look to provide security at scale to critical markets within those regions.

Virtrus proven architecture and out-of-the-box applications for Gmail and Google Drive prevent unauthorized access to sensitive data to ensure privacy with end-to-end encryption, granular access controls, and customer-hosted keys. Virtru gives organizations the freedom to focus on their mission, innovate, and obtain the peace of mind that comes with the power of privacy. More than 5,000 organizations worldwide across several vertical markets, including education, financial services, government, healthcare, manufacturing, and technology, trust Virtru for data security and privacy protection.

About Virtru

At Virtru, we empower organizations to easily unlock the power of data while maintaining control, everywhere its stored and shared. Creators of TDF (Trusted Data Format), the open industry standard for persistent data protection, Virtru provides flexible, easy to use, and trusted privacy technologies built on its data protection platform that govern access to data throughout its full lifecycle  from creation to transmission, storage, analysis, and sharing. For more information, visit www.virtru.com or follow us on Twitter at @virtruprivacy .

All product and company names herein may be trademarks of their respective owners.

Contact:

Shannon Kelley

CHEN PR for Virtru

skelley@chenpr.com

781.672.3132

A photo accompanying this announcement is available at https://www.globenewswire.com/NewsRoom/AttachmentNg/08ad7b49-7dd0-4e47-8e07-913cccecd553
Nation helping meet global demand for medical supplies

From:ChinaDaily | 2020-04-15 09:46

Domestic companies working round the clock to ensure dispatches are stable

As the COVID-19 pandemic hammers a growing number of countries and the world faces a shortage of medical supplies, Chinese drug and medical equipment manufacturers are working round the clock to produce as many products as possible to ensure a stable global medical supply chain.

When the epidemic broke out in China, many medical supply factories, especially those in the hardest-hit Hubei province, were unable to operate given the lockdown by the government to curb the spread of the contagion. As the outbreak in the country has increasingly come under control, plants have resumed operations and sped up their production of critical medical supplies so that surgical masks, protective gowns, ventilators and test kits can be provided not only for China, but also for the rest of the world.

Vice-Foreign Minister Luo Zhaohui said during a recent news conference that China had already offered emergency assistance to 83 countries and regions and international organizations such as the World Health Organization and the African Union. The assistance included test kits, masks and other medical supplies.

Data from the General Administration of Customs showed that from March 1 to April 4, China had inspected and exported epidemic prevention and control supplies worth 10.2 billion yuan ($1.4 billion), including 3.86 billion masks, 37.52 million protective gowns, 2.41 million infrared thermometers, 16,000 ventilators, 2.84 million test kits and 8.41 million pairs of protective goggles.

In face of the crisis, China is taking advantage of its complete industrial system and maximizing its powerful operational capability, Luo said.

At present, dozens of countries, such as the United Kingdom, Germany, Italy, Thailand, South Korea, Japan and Spain, are boosting their imports of masks, ventilators, protective gowns, disinfection materials, monitors, thermometers and test kits from China, industry experts said.

The importing countries were having difficulties in guaranteeing medical supplies. China, as an integral part of the global medical industrial chain, stepped up, they said.

Although affected by the pandemic during its initial stage, as economic activity steadily resumed, production capacity of Chinese factories gradually caught up.

The Ministry of Industry and Information Technology said that as of March 28, the average work resumption rate of the country's industrial enterprises above a designated size of 20 million yuan in revenue each reached 98.6 percent, and the average employee return rate was 89.9 percent.

Even in Hubei, where the outbreak was once the most severe, more than 95 percent of companies had resumed operations, and around 70 percent of employees were back at work.

Compared to large enterprises, work resumption rates at small and medium-sized enterprises reached 76 percent, said the ministry.

"Manufacturing plants for medical supplies and daily necessities had relatively higher return rates," said Xin Guobin, vice-minister of the ministry.

Li Xingqian, director-general of the Ministry of Commerce's Department of Foreign Trade, said China owns the world's largest, most complete and comprehensive manufacturing system, and the advantages of the system are irreplaceable. China's foreign trade development has sufficient resilience, ample room for development and strong innovation capability.

"This long-term positive trend will not change, neither will China's position in the global industrial chain," Li added.

Ever since the novel coronavirus outbreak, the Chinese government has never levied any restrictions on the export of surgical masks, and producers are expected to carry out their business in a principled way according to market forces.

Despite the ongoing battle with the outbreak in China, the Ministry of Commerce said China has not and never will restrict the export of medical supplies, and it will continue to provide supplies to the best of its ability, to help other nations fight the pandemic.

Cao Xuejun, deputy director-general of the MIIT's Consumer Products Industry Department, said currently, the epidemic situation in China has been steadily improving, and the production capacity of masks, protective gowns and other medical supplies increased rapidly, thus greatly alleviating supply shortages.

"We encourage domestic manufacturing enterprises of medical supplies to actively meet foreign demand, standardize production and export according to corresponding standards in contributing to the global fight against the contagion," Cao said.

Starting from April 1, exporters of medical products, including COVID-19 testing kits, masks and ventilators, need to provide extra documentation when they go through customs clearance, said the commerce ministry.

The Chinese government will ramp up efforts from various departments to accelerate the process of exporting crucial medical supplies to the world while strictly controlling product quality, said Zhang Qi, deputy director-general of the Department of Medical Device Regulation under the National Medical Products Administration.
Some $35 mln of loan provided by World Bank to be sent to combat COVID-19  Health minister

Some $35 million provided by the World Bank will be additional sent to fight the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) by Ukraine, Health Minister Maksym Stepanov said at an online briefing in Kyiv on Wednesday.

"We were able to additionally attract $135 million from the World Bank, of which $35 million will be used to fight against COVID-19. In particular, $20 million will be used to purchase materials and equipment, and $15 million will be used to additionally finance medical facilities to counter COVID-19," the minister said.
World War Two veteran Ermando Piveta, aged 99, became the oldest Brazilian to recover from the deadly coronavirus that has killed more than 100,000 people and sickened 2million across the globe.

Wearing an army cap and saluting from his wheelchair, Piveta left the Armed Forces Hospital in Brasilia to an ovation from medical staff and a soldier's trumpet homage on Tuesday.

'Winning this battle was for me bigger than winning the war,' he said of his fight against an invisible enemy.

'In war you kill or live. Here you have to fight to live,' he added.

World War Two veteran Ermando Piveta is the oldest person in Brazil to overcome the coronavirus. The 99-year-old was released Tuesday from the Armed Forces Hospital in Brasilia

Ermando Piveta is surrounded by physicians outside the Armed Forces Hospital in Brasilia, Brazil, on Tuesday afternoon after he was discharged following a two-week stay after he tested positive for the deadly coronavirus

World War II veteran Ermando Piveta gestures at the Armed Forces Hospital staff in Brasilia, Brazil, after he was cleared to go home after overcoming the coronavirus.

Piveta was a second lieutenant in the Brazilian Army forces during World War Two and served in Africa.

The decorated war veteran's hospital discharge came on the 75th anniversary of Brazilian troops liberating the Italian town of Montese following three days of battle against the Germans.

Piveta tested positive for the coronavirus two weeks ago and spent two days in the hospital's intensive care ward after he developed pneumonia.

The WWII veteran gestures at a bevy of news cameras and bystanders shortly after he was released from a military hospital and became the oldest person in Brazil to outlast the coronavirus. The 99-year-old spent two weeks hospitalized

Ermando Piveta was a second lieutenant in the Brazilian Army forces during World War Two and served in Africa

But he never needed a ventilator and recovered due to his good physical shape derived from life in the military and longevity that runs in his family, the hospital's director said.

Piveta's release from hospital was a bright moment in an otherwise darkening scenario as the epidemic hit Brazil with force this week.

The health ministry reported the coronavirus has infected 28,320 people and killed 1,736 people as of Wednesday. At least 204 deaths were reported in the last 24 hours.

The ravaging virus has left 133,261 people dead and another 2,034,425 sickened in the world.
MADISON, Neb.  One person was killed and four were injured Tuesday in a crash near Madison, Nebraska, the Madison County sheriff reported.

The crash occurred at the intersection of U.S. Highway 81 and Nebraska Highway 32, according to Sheriff Todd Volk.

A northbound Nissan Murano collided with an eastbound Buick Le Sabre.

A passenger in the Buick died. The driver was seriously injured, according to the Sheriff's Office.

Responding to the scene was the Madison County Sheriff's Office, Madison Police Department, Madison Fire and Rescue and Nebraska State Patrol.

The crash remains under investigation.
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$310M in aid for state airports

WASHINGTON, D.C.  U.S. Secretary of Transportation Elaine Chao yesterday announced the Federal Aviation Administration will award $310.3 million in aid to 62 airports in Washington state in response to the COVID-19 outbreak.

This grant funding is part of the newly created Coronavirus Aid, Relief and Economic Security (CARES) Act Airport Grant Program, which has $10 billion in emergency resources for struggling airports nationwide.

The grants will support continuing operations and replace lost revenue resulting from the sharp decline in passenger traffic and other airport business due to COVID-19. Funds can be used for capital expenditures, operating expenses including payroll and utilities, and debt payments.

Some of the airports are: Sea-Tac, Boeing Field, Paine Field, Spokane International, Grant County International and Bellingham International.

The CARES Act also increases the federal share to 100% for funds awarded under the fiscal year 2020 appropriations for Airport Improvement Program and supplemental discretionary grants. Under normal circumstances, AIP grant recipients contribute a matching percentage of the project costs.




The High Court has thrown out the warrant used by the Australian Federal Police officers to search the home of a News Corporation journalist in June last year. The International Federation of Journalists (IFJ) joins its Australian affiliate, the Media, Entertainment and Arts Alliance (MEAA) in welcoming the decision but warning that the powers that enabled the raid remain.

The court found that the warrant used to search the house of Annika Smethurst last year was not correctly issued. The journalists home was raided after the Sunday Telegraph published a story Smethurst wrote on the expanded powers of the Australian Signals Directorate.

That same week there was a raid on the ABC, sparking an outcry about restrictions on press freedom and the publics right to know. In February, 2020, the Federal Court of Australia found the warrants, used by the AFP to raid its office, were valid.

The High Court decision failed to consider whether the raid on Smethursts home had an impact of freedom of information. In the decision handed down today, a majority of High Court justices also dismissed a request that the police hand back the seized material.

MEAA said: "The raid was an attack on the publics right to know what our governments do in our name. The warrant has been quashed on a technicality but the powers that enabled the raid remain. This was based on an assessment by the judges that there was no sufficient right that required protection. Starkly read, this means here is no protection for public-interest journalism in Australia.

The IFJ said: The expanded powers given to the AFP to seize material in the public interest raising significant concerns for journalism. The IFJ calls for greater protections for journalists and for Australian lawmakers to rule out prosecuting journalists for serving public interest journalism.
Global COVID-19 cases near 2mn mark, deaths close to 120K

Iran Press TV

Tuesday, 14 April 2020 9:21 AM

At least 1,920,918 COVID-19 infections have been confirmed worldwide, and 119,686 people have died so far, with the United States leading all nations in both the number of cases and the death toll, followed by major Western European countries.

Latest data collected by the US-based Johns Hopkins University showed that the United States by far leads the 214 countries and territories affected by the viral pandemic, with 582,580 cases as of Monday, followed by Spain, Italy, France, Germany, and Britain in that order.

More than 71,000 new cases of infection with the new coronavirus and 5,319 more deaths from the disease were reported worldwide within the past 24 hours, as many countries discussed plans to loosen lockdown measures despite concerns about the likelihood of fresh outbreaks.

The following are the latest development about the global pandemic in the past day:

France, Britain mark major death toll surge

The French public health authority on Monday reported a new surge of COVID-19 deaths, namely 574 fatalities.

France has now recorded 14,967 deaths, and 136,779 people remain infected in the country.

French President Emmanuel Macron on Monday declared plans to extend a virtual lockdown to curb the outbreak until May 11, insisting that progress had been made in the battle against the highly contagious disease.

The British death toll, meanwhile, surpassed 11,329 on Monday, marking the fifth highest worldwide, and a senior scientific adviser to the UK government warned that the country faces the risk of becoming the worst-hit in all of Europe.

Italy's daily deaths hike, Spain's slows

Coronavirus-linked deaths surged in Italy by 566 on Monday, from 431 a day earlier, though new infections markedly dropped from Sunday's 4,092 to 3,153  the lowest since April 7.

Italy's total death toll since the pandemic surfaced in the country nearly two months ago now stands at 20,465, the second highest in the world after that of the US.

Elsewhere in Europe, Spain's government allowed some businesses to re-open on Monday as the country's death rate from the outbreak slowed.

While some businesses, including construction and manufacturing, were allowed to restart, Spanish Health Minister Salvador Illa said the country otherwise remained in lockdown, with shops, restaurants, and public spaces remaining shut until at least April 26.

Russia may deploy army

Russian President Vladimir Putin announced on Monday that his county might need to deploy military forces to enforce a lockdown, warning that the outbreak was getting worse after the number of confirmed cases surged by a record daily sum.

Putin's remarks came after Russia reported 2,558 new cases on Monday, bringing the overall tally nationwide to 18,328, with 18 infected people dying overnight and pushing the death toll to 148.

The Russian president further criticized what he described as sloppiness in some regions that had allowed local outbreaks to gain a foothold, urging regional leaders to make use of what he said was a three to four-week lag with Moscow, the epicenter of the Russian outbreak.

However, the number of deaths in Russia remains much lower for now compared to most countries in Western Europe and the United States.

Americas

Brazilian officials announced on Monday that the government had banned non-indigenous people from entering tribal lands in an effort to halt the spread of coronavirus in their villages, adding that it would distribute masks, gloves, test kits, and food to their communities.

The outbreak in Latin America's largest and most populous country has raised concerns that Brazil's 850,000 indigenous people are in danger of being decimated by the virus because they have no defense against diseases brought from outside and many live in communal houses where social distancing is not possible.

The country's health authorities have so far reported three deaths among indigenous people, including a 15-year-old youth from the vast reservation where 25,000 Yanomami live on the border with Venezuela.

This is while a new study released in the country on Monday estimates that Brazil likely has 12 times more cases of the new coronavirus than are being officially reported by the government, with too little testing and long waits to confirm the results.

According to official figures, Brazil has a death toll of 1,328, and 23,430 cases as of Monday.

Meanwhile, Mexico's Health Ministry registered 353 new infections on Monday, bringing its total to 5,014 cases and 332 deaths. However, the nation's deputy health minister further cited government statistical models to acknowledge that the Central American country likely had far more people infected with the virus.

Separately, a city government in the central Argentinean province of Cordoba has dug nearly 250 graves, anticipating a death toll surge from the outbreak, even though a nationwide lockdown appears to be flattening the rise in new cases.

Gravediggers at the cemetery in San Vicente on the outskirts of the provincial capital now plan to add a further 250 burial plots in the coming days, said an official of a local union representing the workers that dug the graves.

Argentina moved aggressively to combat the spread of the virus, with a nationwide lockdown in place since mid-March. Its closed borders helped slow growing infections, which now include over 2,200 cases with 95 deaths.

Canada

Canada's Chief Medical Officer Theresa Tam announced on Monday that the country's nursing homes, which have already recorded nearly half of its total coronavirus deaths, will continue to see more fatalities even as the overall number of new cases declines.

The number of people killed by the coronavirus in Canada climbed by nearly nine percent to 734 on Monday compared to a day earlier. That is slower than the 11 percent reported Sunday and the almost 32-percent increase recorded a week earlier.

Deaths in long-term care facilities "will continue to increase even as the epidemic growth rate slows down," Tam emphasized during a daily news conference in Ottawa.

Africa & the Middle East

Nigeria's President Muhammadu Buhari announced on Monday that his government would extend lockdowns in Lagos, Abuja, and Ogun states for an additional 14 days to combat the coronavirus.

Buhari further underlined that it was crucial to extend the lockdown due to an "alarming" increase in positive cases in a number of states. Initial 14-day lockdowns in the three areas began on March 30.

There are currently 323 confirmed cases of the virus in Africa's most populous country of 200 million, nearly three-quarters of them in Lagos and the capital territory of Abuja, and 10 people have so far died from the virus.

Sudan, meanwhile, will impose a lockdown on the capital, Khartoum, for three weeks after 10 more cases were detected on Monday, according to its information minister.

A total of 29 cases have been reported in Sudan, with four deaths.

South Africa's health minister announced on Monday that the country had recorded 99 new coronavirus cases, taking the total in the country to 2,272.

The country also registered a further two deaths from the virus, increasing the death toll to 27, the minister added.

Gaza resumes coronavirus testing amid shortages

Coronavirus testing has resumed in the Israeli-besieged Gaza Strip after the occupying regime allowed five testing kits purchased by the WHO into the Palestinian enclave, a Gaza Health Ministry spokesman said on Monday.

The official, however, underlined that the kits would be of "limited immediate help" because they could be used to test only about 500 people in the densely-populated territory of two million.

On April 8, health officials in Gaza said they had run out of testing kits and voiced concern that a shortage of medical supplies could lead to the rapid spread of infections in the territory.

Gaza has 13 confirmed cases of the new coronavirus, all in quarantine as the Israeli regime continues to maintain its brutal blockade of the impoverished enclave.

Turkey

Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan also announced on Monday that Ankara would impose a new lockdown next weekend as part of measures to halt the spread of COVID-19, having locked down 31 provinces last weekend.

The development came as Turkey's parliament on Tuesday passed a law that would allow the release of tens of thousands of prisoners to ease overcrowding in jails and protects detainees from the coronavirus, but which critics censure for excluding those jailed on "terrorism" allegations.

The law will open the way for the temporary release of around 45,000 prisoners to stem the spread of the coronavirus. Those eligible will be released under judicial control until the end of May and the Justice Ministry will be able to extend the period twice by a maximum of two months each time, according to the law.

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The District Chief Executive (DCE) for Ellembelle, Mr Kwasi Bonzoh has stated that nobody has tested positive of the COVID-19 in the District.



According to him, though the Ghana Health Service (GHS) confirmed that one person tested positive in the Western Region, it was not in the Ellembelle District.



Mr.Bonzoh, who earlier issued a statement on the COVID-19 situation in the District, reiterated the statement when he personally distributed the second batch of Personal Protective Equipment (PPEs) to some communities in the constituency.



The communities are; Azulenloanu, Ambainu, Akasuazo, A.B.Bokazo, Akpandue, Aiyinasi, where the DCE placed the PPEs at vantage points.



The PPEs are Veronica buckets, hand Sanitizers, tissues, liquid soap and table stands among others.

There were rumours that an Italian who entered the District through Cote D'Ivoire to Atuabo by sea tested positive at the Saint Martin's De Porres hospital at Eikwe.



Mr Bonzoh who chairs the Ellembelle District Health Public Committee said the District Health Directorate had not recorded any case of the COVID-19 and asked residents in the area to disregard the rumours and remain calm.



He said the District Health Directorate was making frantic efforts to avoid the spread of the pandemic by ensuring that the precautionary measures were rigidly followed especially social distancing and regular hand washing under running water.



He said the District had given out 350 Veronica buckets, dustbins, washing bowls to various communities, over 5,000 pieces of hand sanitizers, 12 non-contact thermometers, and hand gloves, face masks to the health directorate.



The DCE reiterated the need for the people to observe the safety protocols on the COVID-19 as prescribed by the World Health Organization (WHO) in a bid to contain the spread of the virus.



The DCE said the District Security has partially locked down two markets namely Aiyinasi and Asasetre where the market days are only restricted to food vendors and buyers.



The Assembly has also restricted the carriage of more than one person on motorbikes.



Mr Bonzoh said the District was on high alert and would not make its entry points porous to allow foreigners to invade its territories into the District to spread the pandemic.

Source: GNA









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Featured Video
T he Government is facing pressure to be more transparent about its Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (Sage).

The committee is playing a crucial role in steering the country through the coronavirus crisis.

But with meetings held secretively, very little is known to the public about who sits on it, or what it does.

Here, we assess what we do know about the group.

The Sage group is providing crucial scientific advice to the Government during the pandemic / Getty Images

What role does Sage play?

The group provides scientific and technical advice to support decision makers during emergencies, according to the Government website.

Sage has sprung into action to advise on the UK Governments response to the coronavirus pandemic, and will play a crucial role in the easing and eventual lifting of lockdown rules.

It is responsible for ensuring that timely and coordinated scientific advice is made available to decision makers to support cross-department decisions in Whitehall.

The advice provided by Sage does not represent official Government policy, the Government says, but at least informs it.

Do we know who is in Sage?

The membership of Sage depends on the nature of the emergency but it typically includes leading experts from within Government and leading specialists from the fields of academia and industry.

Sir Patrick Vallance, the Government's chief scientific adviser, sits on Sage / Getty Images

The Government is facing calls to make the full list of members public to allow for scrutiny, following a row over the accuracy of modelling provided by Professor Neil Ferguson, of Imperial College London, to Boris Johnson.

But ministers are reportedly concerned that doing so would be a security risk.

We do know that the group is typically chaired by the Government Chief Scientific Adviser, who at the moment is Sir Patrick Vallance.

Sir Jeremy Farrar, director of the Wellcome Trust who has warned that the UK's death toll could be the highest in Europe, also sits on the committee.

Who is Sir Patrick Vallance?

The public will by now be quite familiar with Sir Patrick due to his frequent appearances at the daily Downing Street press conferences.

Chief Medical Officer Professor Chris Whitty, Chief Scientific Adviser Patrick Vallance and Prime Minister Boris Johnson / REUTERS

Sir Patrick is Government chief scientific adviser and head of the Government Science and Engineering (GSE) profession.

His personal research was in the area of diseases of blood vessels and endothelial biology.

What has Sage been involved with in recent years?

Last August, Sage was activated in response to the potential breach of Toddbrook reservoir in Whaley Bridge.

A Precautionary Sage (known as Pre-Sage) was also activated to advise on the Zika virus outbreak in 2016.

In 2015, Sage was activated to advise on the Nepal earthquake, and in 2014 it was activated in response to the Ebola outbreak in West Africa.
- Changing consumer demand, a disrupted supply chain, and production stoppages are impacting the Automotive industry

- Ride sharing firms have been impacted as Uber, Lyft, and other mobility providers have lost upwards of 60% market value as consumers opt out of the "sharing economy." There will be business model pivots to create alternative revenue streams

- On the other side of recovery, Industry 4.0 and Automation-led initiatives will take center stage as carmakers seek enhanced manufacturing productivity

SANTA CLARA, California, April 15, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- Zinnov, a leading global management and strategy consulting firm, has assessed the shifting gears of the Automotive industry in the shadow of the COVID-19 situation. Zinnov evaluated the impact of COVID-19 on the Global Automotive industry as a whole and on the various players across the automotive value chain including OEMs, Tier-1s, and ride sharing firms. The assessment identified the expected shifts in consumption patterns as well as changing R&D and digital priorities for carmakers on the other side of COVID-19.

The Automotive industry enjoyed an incredible bull run from 2010 to 2018 wherein even developed markets like the US and Europe saw ~5% CAGR growth. This period was defined by technological and consumption pattern disruptions. Carmakers expended budget and effort on large programs focusing on the four key trends that defined this golden age namely Electrification, Autonomous, Connected, and Shared Mobility. The growing market attracted investments even from outside the traditional OEM/Tier-1 supplier community including new-age OEMs (Tesla, Nio, etc.), asset-light companies (Uber, Lyft, etc.), and enterprises from other industry verticals such as Alphabet. However, the Auto industry started witnessing the initial signs of a slowdown in the first quarter of 2019, which has been exacerbated by COVID-19, because of the direct impact on consumer demand.

Taking a data-led approach, Zinnov evaluated multiple factors like shifts in consumer spending as a result of changing risk appetites, supply chain disruptions, industry fiscal health, existing globalization levels of the automotive workforce, and digital readiness, to assess the impact of COVID-19 on the Auto industry. What is irrefutable, is that the ongoing situation has impacted OEMs and Tier-1s alike, who have collectively lost ~20-40% of their market value since the start of the outbreak.

The initial impact of COVID-19 on the automotive supply chain and production was localized to China, up until January 2020. However, with the spread of the virus to Europe in February and the US in March, Zinnov's analysis found that the Automotive industry's key concern shifted from supply chain disruption to demand vaporization.

Zinnov also shared that the sharing/ride-as-a-service economy has been impacted to a greater degree. Uber and Lyft have lost upwards of 60% of their market value/valuations as consumers are increasingly opting out of the sharing economy. The forced lockdowns and social distancing norms have further intensified this problem. All these factors are causing future revenue concerns as well as delay in realization of the already elusive profitability in this space.

The industry is now in the middle of one of its toughest bear phases. Automakers are aggressively leveraging technology, pivoting their business models, and re-engineering their processes and talent to recover from this crisis. There will be an increase in the leverage of online sales channels with carmakers enabling digital showrooms and touchless delivery/shopping through Virtual Reality (VR) solutions. Initial anecdotal evidence points towards an easing of environmental regulations as governments across the globe prioritize spending on economic activity over the environment and EV-related subsidies.

Given the changes across the value chain, automakers will reprioritize their R&D initiatives on the other side of recovery and only two of the four key trends namely Connected and Autonomous are likely to attract a majority of this spend, stated Zinnov. Shared Mobility programs are expected to take a hit given the shift in consumer preference towards "self-owned" cars. However, evidence suggests that "vehicle subscription" will become a trend, with automakers and software companies spending on software to enable such subscription platforms. Auto companies are also most likely to focus on enhancing manufacturing productivity and efficiency by leveraging Plant Automation, Industry 4.0, Cloud-based ERP and PLM systems.

In addition to the measures being taken by the industry and the auto players themselves, governments across the world are also expected to play a crucial role in these extraordinary conditions, stated Zinnov. Auto companies are likely to benefit from their respective governments' expansionary fiscal policies including explicit bail-out packages.

Speaking about the Auto industry, Sidhant Rastogi, Managing Partner, Zinnov, said, "There will be a definitive shift in the way Auto companies will channelize their investments in the aftermath of COVID-19. In the near-term, the relaxation of emission norms, drying up of environment/EV-related subsidies might force certain automakers to put high investment electric powertrain programs on the back burner. In the long term however, there will be renewed focus on making their digital investments count by enabling digital/touchless walkthrough and delivery experiences, bringing in greater efficiencies by leveraging Industry 4.0 and Automation, and innovating on the existing business models to align to the post COVID-19 reality."

"Over the next 18-24 months, we see a paradigm shift happening in the way traditional automakers and the new-age players will operate. Auto players will, in all probability, realign their demand generation initiatives and business models, thereby creating opportunities for strategic partnerships and alliances to sustain in a new reality," he added.

About Zinnov

Founded in 2002, Zinnov is a leading global management and strategy consulting firm, with presence in Santa Clara, Houston, Bangalore, Gurgaon, and Paris. Over the past 18 years, Zinnov has successfully consulted with over 250+ Fortune 500 enterprises and technology companies to develop actionable insights that help them create value - across dimensions of both revenue and optimization. With core expertise in Product Engineering, Digital Transformation, Innovation, and Outsourcing Advisory, Zinnov assists clients by:

Enabling global companies to develop and optimize a global engineering footprint through center setups, and technology and functional accelerators to achieve higher R&D efficiencies, innovation, and productivity;

Advising global PE firms in asset shortlisting and target evaluation, commercial due diligence, and value creation;

Growing revenue for companies' products and services in newer markets through account intelligence, market entry, and market expansion advisory;

Structuring and implementing Digital Transformation levers enabled by technologies like AI/ML, Cloud, IOT, and RPA;

Helping global companies outline and drive their open innovation programs, design and operate accelerator programs, and enable collaboration with start-ups across specific use cases and predefined outcomes.

With their team of experienced consultants, subject matter experts, and research professionals, Zinnov serves clients from across multiple industry verticals including Enterprise Software, BFSI, Healthcare, Automotive, Retail, and Telecom in the US, Europe, Japan, and India.

For more information, visit http://zinnov.com.

Media contact

Nitika Goel

Chief Marketing Officer, Zinnov

media@zinnov.com

+1-408-390-5797

Logo: https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/694742/Zinnov_Logo.jpg








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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.






OVERLAND PARK, Kan. - A teacher with the Shawnee Mission School District is on leave after being charged with a child sex crime. Kim Zier is charged in Johnson County court with one count of aggravated indecent liberties with a child under the age of 14.
COLOMBO, April 14 (Xinhua) -- Global social media giant Twitter on Tuesday apologized to the Chinese Embassy in Sri Lanka for a "systematic mistake" which had led to the suspension of the embassy's official twitter account, and unsuspended it after concerns were raised.

In a statement, the Chinese Embassy in Sri Lanka said that on April 13, Twitter suspended the embassy's official Twitter account in Sri Lanka without informing them of any specific reasons which led to the embassy to request Twitter to clarify and correct their decision.

"The Embassy made solemn representation to Twitter twice, requesting the latter to clarify and correct their decision, to avoid any misunderstanding and random association in the public. In the early morning of April 14, Twitter officially replied to the Embassy for a 'systematic mistake', apologized and unsuspended the Embassy's account," the Chinese Embassy said.

"The Embassy feels regretful to this 'systematic mistake', and would like to reiterate that the 'Freedom of Speech' must be honored, while not be misused to spread groundless, racial or hatred speech, nor be treated with 'Double Standards'," the embassy added.

Luo Chong, a spokesman for the Chinese Embassy in Sri Lanka, said that the embassy had launched its official Twitter account since March this year and had released a total of 481 updates on China and Sri Lanka affairs.

Last week, a local media organization reported three false reports on China's fight against the COVID-19 pandemic and the Chinese Embassy in Sri Lanka had severely condemned it.

The embassy had written an open letter to the Chairman of Wijeya group of newspapers, strongly protesting the "irresponsible" publication of the three articles that completely violated facts and stirred hate speech against China.
Aramco agreed last year to buy the controlling stake in SABIC from the kingdoms wealth fund for $69.1 billion, sealing one of the biggest-ever deals in the global chemical industry.

Dubai/London: Saudi Aramco, the worlds largest oil producer, is in early talks with banks for a loan of about $10 billion to help finance its acquisition of a 70% stake in Saudi Basic Industries Corp (SABIC), according to three banking sources.

Aramco agreed last year to buy the controlling stake in SABIC from the kingdoms wealth fund for $69.1 billion, sealing one of the biggest-ever deals in the global chemical industry.

The financing would be for the SABIC deal, but the borrower is Aramco, said one of the sources, adding that the discussions were at an initial stage, with the company sounding out banks.

Ten billion dollars is where they want to get to, (its) not clear if, in this market, theyll manage to reach that.

A second source said banks involved in the talks included HSBC and JP Morgan as well as lenders in the Gulf.

In response to a Reuters request for comment about whether it was seeking such a loan, Saudi Aramco said: The company continues to review its financial options as part of its normal course of business, while prudently preserving its pristine balance sheet and its resilience.

JPMorgan declined to comment, while HSBC did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

A third banker said Aramco was looking to borrow in U.S. dollars because it was cheaper than in Saudi riyals, in terms of interest, and to avoid pressuring Saudi banks liquidity.

Oil prices crash

The SABIC stake acquisition from Saudi Arabias Public Investment Fund (PIF) will help Aramcos downstream expansion plans. The deal came after months of talks between the company and PIF and was one of the reasons for the delay of Aramcos blockbuster initial public offering late last year.

The loan discussions come at a time when oil-producing nations have been hit by a plunge in demand for crude as a result of the coronavirus outbreak and a slide in oil prices.

OPEC and its allies led by Russia, a group known as OPEC+, have agreed to the largest oil output cut in history that could curb supply by up to 20 percent. But the agreement has done little to boost oil prices as many economies remain under lockdown due to the novel coronavirus pandemic, curbing demand.

Brent crude LCOc1 traded at around $30 on Tuesday, still less than half its close at the end of last year and below the $31.48 price before the output cut deal was reached.

Aramcos shares closed at $31.10 on Tuesday, below the $32 price of its IPO late last year that initially raised $25.6 billion and became the worlds largest.

Saudi Arabia, which owns more than 98% of the oil giant, is likely to sell new international bonds soon, according to sources, as the output cut deal further squeezes revenues hit by the plunge in oil prices.
Vistara CEO Leslie Thng on Wednesday announced that senior employees will be going on compulsory leave without pay for up to three days between April 15 and April 30 as a measure to further conserve the airline's cash flow amid the lockdown to combat the coronavirus threat.

On March 27, the airline had also introduced compulsory leave without pay for up to three days between April 1 and April 14 for the same set of senior employees.

The compulsory no pay leave will affect around 1,200 employees in senior grades.

The remaining 2,800 employees of the airline such as members of cabin crew and ground handling services will be unaffected.

"With the announcement by the government of India on extending the lockdown, we continue to suspend all our domestic and international operations till 3rd May 2020 and this further impacted significantly on our cash flow with no revenue being generated over an extended period of time," Thng said in an email to employees, which has been accessed by PTI.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
I am one of the thousands of farmworkers across the country making sure there is still food to put on your tables. Since I came to New York from Guatemala 11 years ago, I have cleaned cabbage in a packing shed, milked cows on dairy farms, trimmed apple trees in orchards and wrapped and pruned tomatoes in a greenhouse.

If I get sick with Covid-19, Im afraid of what it will mean for my children, my companeros and my community. But unlike many other workers in the United States, my workplace has not shut down. Farmworkers are considered essential, and yet we are left out of government support.

A few weeks ago I started to have a headache and fever. The symptoms got worse, with a sore throat and coughing. I called a health clinic, concerned that I had the coronavirus. The doctor told me that I should stay home for a week, and since there is no cure, there was no reason to come in for a checkup. But I was able to get tested for the virus.

I didnt know what to do. I was so worried: One week at home without a paycheck? I support three daughters in Guatemala and a young son here, and Im on my own. If I told management, what would happen? How would I feed my children or pay my rent?
These aircraft have been crucial for moving medical equipment from China around the globe, the NATO leader said

Open source

Ukraine has been of great assistance to the NATO thanks to its aircraft that perform strategic flights for the Alliance member countries, as the pandemic of Covid-19 coronavirus carries on. Jens Stoltenberg, the Alliance's Secretary General said so during the press conference as quoted by the press centre of Ukraine's Armed Forces HQ.

"Ukrainian planes show how NATO cooperates with its partner country, Ukraine, so as to conduct air transportations for NATO allies. These aircraft have been crucial for a while in terms of shipping medical equipment from China around the world to NATO member countries in Europe", Stoltenberg said, commenting on the involvement of Ukrainian airplanes for flights during the Covid-19 pandemic.

Related: Former NATO Secretary General Javier Solana diagnosed with Covid-19

According to him, NATO welcomes close cooperation with Ukraine and considers opportunities to boost it.

On Wednesday, April 15, Defense Ministers of NATO member countries are supposed to go for a session focusing on the topic of crisis caused by the pandemic of coronavirus.
Hours after accusing Democratic governors of a "mutiny" for signalling they would ignore any presidential order to reopen their states amid the coronavirus outbreak, Donald Trump backed down from the threat after claiming his "authority is total".

This was Mr Trump during a combative Monday evening press conference when speaking about his perceived power to reopen the country with a single declaration: "When somebody is the president of the United States, the authority is total. And that's the way it's got to be. It's total."

About 24 hours later, the president backed down. The reversal came at warp speed  even for Mr Trump, who has whipsawed from one policy stance or legal rationale to another, and sometimes to yet another.

"These will be individual dates," Mr Trump said, threatening to "close them down and start over" if a governor's plan is deemed by federal officials to be ineffective. "I'm not putting any pressure on the governors."

Getting ahead of his own promised announcement on opening the country, the president said "we'll open it in beautiful little pieces".

Instead, he said he intends to allow each state chief executive craft a reopening plan that works for their state, claiming he will use his "total" power to approve those plans.

Legal experts of all political stripes say the lone way Mr Trump likely would win a court battle over the authority would be to claim a national security authority  but that likely would be an easier sell to a court on closing the economy, not reopening it.

When pressed to point to the part of the constitution that would allow him  and only him  to reopen the country, Mr Trump on Monday evening could not. The White House never produced such a legal rationale on Tuesday.

Mr Trump has said he wants some or all of the country "open for business" by May 1.

Saying again he is working on plans to achieve that, he said he is nearing a decision on whether that would be possible, at least for some states or regions.

The president, as he often does, tried to shift blame to governors a night after taking it from them on Monday night, saying "the states have their own testing".
Deputy First Minister Michelle O'Neill during the daily media broadcast in the Long Gallery at Parliament Buildings, Stormont. Credit: Kelvin Boyes / Press Eye

Deputy First Minister Michelle ONeill has said she will not stand in the way of the deployment of the British Army in the fight against coronavirus.





Sinn Feins vice-president was speaking at Wednesday's Covid-19 press conference alongside First Minister Arlene Foster.

Ms ONeill was asked to clarify the remarks she made last week after Health Minister Robin Swann made a formal request to the army for help in distributing lifesaving equipment.

He also requested help from the Ministry of Defence in planning for a Nightingale hospital at the site of the former Maze Prison.

The Deputy First Minister had said the Executive should have been informed of Mr Swanns decision before any request was made.

Speaking on Wednesday, Ms ONeill said she has raised her concerns with the Health Minister around how his request was communicated and the fact there wasn't an Executive discussion.

I have said here on this platform I dont know how many times and Ill say it today, my number one priority is to save lives and whatever is required, including using the British Army, to save lives then I will not stand in the way, she stated.

Thats what Im here to do, I only have one objective.

Meanwhile, DUP leader Ms Foster confirmed that the lockdown regulations will continue for another three weeks.

After that period, the Executive will again review the decision before announcing any further extension or relaxation.

When this all started the process was about containing, delaying and then about mitigation, she said. The next phase of that was recovery.

Were not at that stage yet but what we will be doing in the Executive will be planning for recovery.

Ms ONeill added that she was not in a position to give out exact details of an order for personal protective equipment but did say it was hugely significant.
Parsyl, Inc., the supply chain data platform, today announced ColdCover by Parsyl Insurance, a suite of connected cargo insurance products for perishable goods powered by its IoT data platform. As the only integrated supply chain visibility and cargo insurance solution, Parsyl has created a data-driven insurance offering that is simple, transparent and fast, including the industrys first and only parametric spoilage policy, protecting against losses due to temperature. Parsyls cargo insurance suite gives shippers of perishable goods the coverage, predictability and protection they need for the largest risks to their products.

All ColdCover policies include access to Parsyls detailed quality monitoring and risk management platform, which combines smart sensors and data analytics to automatically generate interactive shipment visualizations, aggregated performance insights and recommendations for avoiding issues with future shipments. These insights help shippers improve supply chain performance, reduce risk and lower insurance costs.

This is an outstanding example of how insurtechs and insurers can partner to bring innovation to the cargo insurance market at a time when supply chain interruptions demand new thinking and new products from Lloyds, said Andrew Brooks, CEO of Ascot Group. The power of Parsyls data is what enables them to respond quickly to customer needs, eliminate or reduce adjustment costs, and drive down expense ratios  something that benefits clients and insurers alike. Were thrilled to be backing this truly unique offering.

Parsyl is able to assess risk and process claims quickly by using its data to understand exactly what happened to goods at any point in the supply chain. The featured product within the suite, ColdCover Parametric, includes customizable quality triggers and payout levels. Parametric coverage is based on product-specific degradation algorithms, which help Parsyl to understand if, when and where products have experienced spoilage during shipment or storage. Parsyl automatically analyzes data and informs customers of temperature breaches. When issues occur, payment is made in 72 hours, giving shippers the cash they need to bounce back from a loss.

Niceland has always prioritized food quality and safety above all else. When businesses like ours lose product due to supply chain issues like temperature fluctuation, we can be left in the dark while claims are investigated. By combining temperature monitoring with cargo insurance Parsyl hits two pain points at once - collecting objective data and using it to hold actors in the supply chain accountable, said Oliver Luckett, Chairman of Niceland Seafood.

The ColdCover cargo insurance suite includes everything needed to insure perishable cargo, such as pharmaceuticals and life science products, seafood, fruits, vegetables and agricultural commodities, and includes a staggered payment option to ease the upfront costs of buying cargo insurance.

The ColdCover product suite includes:

ColdCover Parametric: Single Peril transit cover for spoilage due to temperature

ColdCover Buyback: Deductible Buyback for All Risk transit and STP policies

ColdCover Transit: All Perils cargo policy for theft, loss or damage to products in transit

ColdCover Stock + Transit All Perils cover for theft, loss or damage to products in transit and/or stored in inventory

The way Parsyl is using its data to deliver new products and value for hard to insure perishable risks is exactly the type of innovation the cargo insurance industry needs. We are thrilled to partner with a company so advanced in their thinking and technology, meaning we are now able to deliver unique solutions for both clients and markets, said Gordon Longley, Partner and Head of Marine at McGill and Partners, and partner and trusted advisor to Parsyl.

The company also announced that it has raised $15 million in Series A funding, led by GLP, a major investor in logistics and related technologies, and Ascot Group, a leading commercial insurer and top performing Lloyds syndicate. Parsyl is an approved Lloyds Coverholder and is licensed to offer cargo insurance products in Alaska, California, Colorado, Louisiana, Maine, Massachusetts, Oregon, Texas, Virginia, Washington and the United Kingdom. Parsyl will use the funding to launch its insurance product suite in additional states in the coming months, advance industry specific product degradation algorithms and expand its team.

About Parsyl, Inc.

Parsyl is an IoT supply chain data platform that delivers pioneering cargo insurance solutions for shippers of perishable goods. Parsyls combined hardware and software solution helps shippers understand, mitigate and insure risks to goods as they move through the supply chain, both in transit and storage. Parsyl is an approved Coverholder with Lloyds of London, the premier market for hard to place risk, and its policies are backed by Ascot Group, one of the most respected and innovative A-rated insurers in the world. Parsyl is based in Denver and can be found at parsyl.com or on Twitter @ParsylHQ.

About Ascot Group

Ascot Group is a Bermuda domiciled specialty insurance and reinsurance business founded in 2001 with four operating divisions: Ascot Underwriting, the Managing Agency for Syndicate 1414 at Lloyds; Ascot Bermuda, which writes excess insurance and reinsurance as well as managing the Groups alternative capital vehicles; Ascot U.S., a specialty insurance provider to middle market customers through retail and wholesale brokers in the United States, and; Ethos Specialty, a New York headquartered Managing General Underwriter (MGU) which provides underwriting and insurance services to third parties.

Ascot Group is owned by Canada Pension Plan Investment Board (CPPIB), the largest pension plan in Canada with over C$400 billion in invested assets and representing the retirement contributions of over 20 million Canadians. CPPIB is rated AAA by S&P and Moodys.

About GLP

GLP is a leading global investment manager and business builder in logistics, real estate, infrastructure, finance and related technologies. Our combined investing and operating expertise allows us to create value for our customers and investors. We operate across Brazil, China, Europe, India, Japan and the U.S. and have $89 billion in assets under management in real estate and private equity funds.

About McGill and Partners

McGill and Partners is a new boutique risk solutions business created by highly regarded leaders in the insurance industry. The company was established in March 2019 and obtained the substantial backing of Warburg Pincus, one of the worlds oldest and largest private equity firms, soon after. We have hand-picked market leading talent from the best in our sectors to create a single team with a unique cultural approach. McGill and Partners is headquartered in London with international offices in New York and Miami.
"To support international efforts to disrupt North Korea's illicit activities, the State Department's Rewards for Justice (RFJ) program offers rewards of up to $5 million for information that leads to the disruption of financial mechanisms of persons engaged in certain activities that support North Korea, including money laundering, sanctions evasion, cyber-crime, and WMD proliferation," the Reward for Justice website says.

Cyber activities to steal money from financial institutions and digital currency exchanges,

Using digital means to illegally launder funds through multiple jurisdictions,

Cyber attacks to conduct extortion campaigns against third-country entities,

Using Cryptojacking malware against victims from other countries and abusing their systems to mine digital currencies.

The 2014 Sony Pictures hack,

The $81 million Bangladesh Bank Heist,

The Global 2017 WannaCry ransomware outbreak,

FASTCash: Fraudulent ATM cash withdrawal scheme,

The $250 million theft from cryptocurrency exchanges.

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The United States agencies today released a joint advisory warning the world about the 'significant cyber threat' posed by North Korean state-sponsored hackers to the global banking and financial institutions.Besides a summary of recent cyberattacks attributed to North Korean hackers, the advisoryissued by U.S. Departments of State, the Treasury, and Homeland Security, and the FBIalso contains a comprehensive guide intends to help the international community, industries, and other governments defend against North Korea's illicit activities."In particular, the United States is deeply concerned about North Korea's malicious cyber activities, which the U.S. government refers to as HIDDEN COBRA. The DPRK has the capability to conduct disruptive or destructive cyber activities affecting U.S. critical infrastructure," the advisory says "The DPRK also uses cyber capabilities to steal from financial institutions, and has demonstrated a pattern of disruptive and harmful cyber activity that is wholly inconsistent with the growing international consensus on what constitutes responsible state behavior in cyberspace."Notably, it also mentioned that the U.S. government is now offering a monetary reward of up to $5 million to anyone who can share 'information about illicit North Korea's activities in cyberspace,' including past or ongoing hacking operations.The well-known North Korea hacking group out of all is the, also known asand Guardians of Peace, that has been linked to several high-profile disruptive and espionage-related cyberattacks.The first part of the report lists a broad categorization of cyber activities targeting financial institutions through which North Korea generates revenue while bypassing sanctions imposed by the UN Security Council.This list includes:According to the United States, North Korea has attempted to steal as much as $2 billion through these malicious cyber activities."North Korea targets cyber-enabled infrastructure globally to generate revenue for its regime priorities, including its weapons of mass destruction programs," the U.S. government said."They develop and deploy a wide range of malware tools around the world to enable these activities and have grown increasingly sophisticated."Last year September, the United States Treasury Department also issued sanctions against three North Korean hacking groups for conducting several destructive cyberattacks on the U.S. critical infrastructure.The next part of the latest advisory lists some of the well-known cyberattacks publicly attributed to North Korean nation-state attackers, including:"The DPRK has repeatedly targeted the U.S. and other government and military networks, as well as networks related to private entities and critical infrastructure, to steal data and conduct disruptive and destructive cyber activities," the advisory says.In brief, the United States believes North Korea has developed a robust military-style offensive cyber operation capability that can be used to conduct more disruptive or destructive attacks against its critical infrastructures.
NEW YORK, April 15, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- The College Board today shared how it will make the SAT available in school and out of school as soon as the public health situation allows.

The not-for-profit organization's top priorities are the health and safety of students and educators. Public health officials have made clear it currently is not safe to gather students in one place, and many states have closed school for the rest of the academic year. As such, the College Board will not be able to administer the SAT as planned on June 6, 2020.

The College Board will ensure students have opportunities to take the SAT to make up for the lost administrations this spring, giving them opportunities to show their strengths and continue on the path to college.

"We know students and educators are worried about how the coronavirus may disrupt the college admissions process, and we want to do all we can to help alleviate that anxiety during this very demanding time," said College Board CEO David Coleman. "Our first principle with the SAT and all our work must be to keep families and students safe. The second principle is to make the SAT as widely available as possible for students who wish to test, regardless of the economic or public health circumstances."

Coleman shared three commitments the College Board is making to ensure the SAT is available to all students this fall:

If it's safe from a public health standpoint, there will be weekend SAT administrations every month through the end of the calendar year, beginning in August. This includes a new administration in September and the previously scheduled tests on August 29 , October 3 , November 7 , and December 5 .

This includes a new administration in September and the previously scheduled tests on , , , and . To replace canceled SAT School Day administrations this spring, the College Board will offer the SAT in schools this fall. Almost all of College Board state partners and many of its district partners have expressed interest in providing SAT administrations during the school day later this fall. Some states, like Michigan , have already made announcements regarding fall testing. This is an important opportunity for the many students who take the SAT for free as part of state- and large district-sponsored programs. Specific information about state and district testing will be shared with our partners in the coming weeks so they may create their testing plans for students.

Almost all of College Board state partners and many of its district partners have expressed interest in providing SAT administrations during the school day later this fall. Some states, like , have already made announcements regarding fall testing. This is an important opportunity for the many students who take the SAT for free as part of state- and large district-sponsored programs. Specific information about state and district testing will be shared with our partners in the coming weeks so they may create their testing plans for students. In the unlikely event that schools do not reopen this fall, the College Board will provide a digital SAT for home use, much as the organization is delivering digital exams for three million Advanced Placement (AP) students this spring. As with at-home AP Exams, the College Board would ensure that at-home SAT testing is simple; secure and fair; accessible to all; and valid for use in college admissions. Like the pencil-and-paper test, a digital, remote version of the SAT would measure what students are learning in school and what they need to know to be successful in college. The digital, at-home SAT would build on the organization's experience over the past year of delivering the SAT digitally in schools in several states and districts. While the idea of at-home SAT testing is new, digital delivery of the test is not.

For national administrations, students will be able to register beginning in May. Students who registered for June and those in the high school class of 2021 who do not have SAT scores will have early access to register for the August, September, and October administrations. The College Board will communicate directly with students when the exact date is available. Eligible students will be able to take the test with a fee waiver. For each administration, the organization is preparing to significantly expand its capacity for students to take the SAT as soon as schools reopen. The College Board is calling on member schools and colleges, as well as local communities, to open their doors and provide additional test center capacity so every student who wants to can take the SAT.

To help students keep their college readiness skills sharp when many schools are closed, the College Board and Khan Academy continue to provide free resources online, including full-length practice tests and personalized learning tools at khanacademy.org/sat.

The College Board is working closely with partners in higher education to navigate this evolving situation, and will continue to rely on their expertise to ensure students have what they need as they apply to college during the 20202021 high school year. The organization supports colleges that are rightfully emphasizing flexibility for the admissions process for next year; each institution will decide what flexibility means for them.

Coleman also stressed that it has never been more important than at this unprecedented time to consider the context in which students live and learn. While all students will have the opportunity to take the SAT, the impact of the coronavirus on students varies vastly based on their circumstances. The families hit hardest are most often those with the fewest resources.

The College Board fully supports admissions officers at member colleges who have said the circumstances of the public health crisis will be taken into account when considering test scores, grades, and extracurricular activities in the coming year.

"Our commitment to students is to give them as many opportunities as we can to show their strengths to admissions officers, while relying on the guidance of public health officials," Coleman added. "Throughout, we'll continue to place a special focus on students benefitting from fee waivers and those requiring accommodations."

Over the coming weeks, the College Board will provide students, families, and K12 and higher ed members with new information about testing plans, including via pages.collegeboard.org/sat-covid-19-updates.

About the College Board

The College Board is a mission-driven not-for-profit organization that connects students to college success and opportunity. Founded in 1900, the College Board was created to expand access to higher education. Today, the membership association is made up of over 6,000 of the world's leading educational institutions and is dedicated to promoting excellence and equity in education. Each year, the College Board helps more than seven million students prepare for a successful transition to college through programs and services in college readiness and college successincluding the SAT and the Advanced Placement Program. The organization also serves the education community through research and advocacy on behalf of students, educators, and schools. For further information, visit collegeboard.org .

SOURCE The College Board

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www.collegeboard.org


T he Earl of Wessex has been joined by a string of celebrities to send his 'virtual congratulations' to 8,000 young people who have achieved their Duke of Edinburgh Gold Award.

Prince Edward appears in a video alongside the likes of Larry Lamb, Hugh Bonneville, Chris Tarrant, Marvin& Humes, Katie Thisleton and Gaby Roslin, who would have presented the awards during a ceremony at St Jamess Palace and Buckingham Palace this spring.

The event will be rescheduled due to the coronavirus. 

Edward, said he hoped the video would "boost morale". He also pays tribute to the work of the DofE Gold Award family, particularly those who are volunteering to support the coronavirus effort in their communities.

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 said: "As some of you are aware, we regrettably had to cancel the Gold Award ceremonies at St Jamess Palace in the middle of March, and now weve lost the ones planned for Buckingham Palace in May  for which Im very sorry.

"However, I can assure you we will do everything we can to reschedule as soon as the time is right. In the meantime, I and a few others wanted to congratulate you on achieving your Gold Duke of Edinburghs Award."

He adds: "There were probably times when you were doing it when you were wondering 'why?', and if it was anything like mine, it was probably halfway through the expedition. But now its over, I hope you can savour that sense of satisfaction and looking back, feel that it was not only an enjoyable experience, but also a worthwhile one.

"More importantly, you should feel justifiably proud of what youve achieved.

Moving onto the volunteering effort, he said: "Can I also say that Im really heartened by the fantastic stories Ive been hearing about how the DofE family is actively making a difference under these challenging circumstances.

"And I know that lots of you are out there using your volunteering skills and life experiences to contribute to efforts in your local communities, especially supporting the vulnerable and the isolated. Thank you so much.

"I hope this collection of films will help boost your morale and show you how much people admire your resilience, as well as giving you just a little insight into that band of Gold Award holders that you have just become a part of."

Edward then hands over to the celebrities, who send a string of congratulatory messages.

TV presenter Ranvir Singh said: "I know this isn't quite how you wanted to be rewarded, it was meant to be a big old event." Presenter Alexander Armstrong added: "I'm so sorry we are not celebrating in proper style."

"It's such a shame we have had to reschedule this year, but for obvious reasons we all know why," Martin Kemp said.

British sprinter Iwan Thomas said: "I know how hard you have all worked, the sacrifices you have made."

"Well done to everybody - keep it going," footballer Chris Camara adds.

A number of Gold Award holders also sent congratulatory messages.

"You can be certain you have got the strength and stamina to cope with whatever life throws at you now," John Hudson said.
All Queensland schools should remain closed until the COVID-19 pandemic is no longer a health threat, a newly formed Queensland teachers' resistance group said on Wednesday.

However, any teachers and students returning to Queensland schools in Term 2 must wear face masks, the group said on Wednesday.

The Queensland arm of a federal teachers' group naming itself School Staff Organising Resistance in the Pandemic said it has attracted 100 teachers as members in one day and 1000 members nationally.

A new teacher's lobby group argues schools should remain closed until the pandemic no longer threatens students or teachers. Credit:Fairfax

Spokesman Tim Johnstone, a Queensland high school teacher, said the group believes Queensland schools should stay closed until there were no health threats to teachers or students.
Honor Blackman, who has died aged 94, deserves some mention. She will forever be known for having played a [James] Bond girl, in Goldfinger (1964), but she was never subordinate or vacuous in glamorous roles. In her words, Most of the Bond girls have been bimbos. I have never been a bimbo.

Blackmans feisty independence and intelligence were refreshing and even inspiring, and the product of her upbringing. Born in 1925 in Plaistow, east London, into a lower middle class family, she was often critical of her World War I veteran father Frederick, an ambitious civil service statistician, for driving his four children relentlessly. Later in life, she attempted to see positives in his strictness and hypercritical treatment, asserting her Self-discipline, the ability to work and order my life come from him  Whats done is done and you cant bemoan the past.

Dirk Bogarde and Honor Blackman in Quartet (1948)

Frederick wanted his children to have the opportunities he felt he had not. She was very close to her only brother Ken. When Ken was bullied at school, Frederick taught him how to box, with the result that Honor learned too, picking up a pearler of a right uppercut.

The physical daring was apparent, but so was a determined self-sufficiency. Aged about 10, I knocked out two boys. I just cant bear bullies.

Frederick always felt he was passed over for promotion because of his cockney accent, and for Honors 16th birthday, he offered her the choice between a bicycle and elocution lessons. She later explained, laughing, God help me if Id chosen the bicycle.

The result was an elocution teacher who introduced her to poetry and drama and convinced Frederick that Honor had talent. The family budget stretched to one evening a weeks attendance at Guildhall School of Music and Drama from 1940.

A Night to Remember (1958)

Honor was by now working as a Home Office filing clerk, doubling as a wartime motorcycle dispatch rider. She was nicknamed Top Gear Tessie.

Her first stage work came in 1946, appearing as an understudy in the West End production of Warren Chetham-Strodes The Guinea Pig. She made an uncredited screen debut in Roy Boultings Fame Is the Spur (1947). Rather typically, she was almost trampled by a horse during the shoot, but continued undaunted.

Film company the Rank Organisation took Blackman onto their Company of Youth, to promote young actors. Emphasising her recognition of her own abilities, Blackman was at pains to note that this was not the charm school, where people were picked off the street and hadnt had any training, at ten pounds a week. And I was picked off the West End stage, at a hundred pounds a week.

She made a string of films through the following decade, of which the best-known is probably Roy Ward Bakers film about the Titanic, A Night to Remember (1958).

The Avengers

There were two decent films with Dirk Bogarde, the Alien Corn segment of the W. Somerset Maugham portmanteau Quartet (Harold French, 1948) and Anthony Darnborough and Terence Fishers intriguing So Long at the Fair (1950), also with Jean Simmons. Lance Comforts Daughter of Darkness (1948), with Siobhan McKenna, something of a Gothic oddity, is worth noting too. In Green Grow the Rushes (1951, Derek Twist), Blackman co-starred with an equally youthful Richard Burton, in one of his first featured performances.

With the brisk efficiency of her upbringing, she was not given to public anguish, but it is clear that this was not an easy period. Her first husband forced her to emigrate to Canada and stripped their joint account of her earnings. They divorced in 1956.

Furthermore, Blackman later described herself as unversed in the ways of the world when she began performing, explaining she should have had a different agent: In those days they didnt care about your career, just about earning money.

This, coupled with her husbands plunder, may have driven her to take more television work. It may also have contributed to what she later described as a dip which began as a bout of stage-fright and ended with three weeks hospitalisation.

Honor Blackman in Goldfinger (1964)

She was still turning in some fine performances, such as her wry and poised Hera in Jason and the Argonauts (Don Chaffey, 1963), notable for Ray Harryhausens stop-motion animation. Blackman was still not yet fully recovered in 1962 when she auditioned for The Avengers, although the self-assurance was there for producer Leonard White. He told her she would have to do judo and asked whether she knew anything about it. No, she said, Nothing. Youd have to teach me.

They did, and it was Blackman who encouraged them actually to use it onscreen in her part as anthropologist and martial artist Dr. Cathy Gale. This may have played its part in developing the shows breezy action. One early script mentioned Cathy reaching into her bag for a gun. Blackman later commented, Now every woman knows that if we reach into our handbags for something, 10 minutes later we find it. I would have been dead as a dodo. She suggested judo instead.

The choice was reckless, and she attributed her later scoliosis to doing judo on a concrete studio floor. It sped up the shows action, however, and gave Cathy Gale additional authority.

Blackmans character, who did the lions share of the fighting on the series, was unlike anything seen on British television before. The show was a hit, and Blackman and co-star Patrick Macnee made a forgettable kitsch single, Kinky Boots. She recorded more interesting material off its success, including Men Will Deceive You, a creditable cover of Serge Gainsbourgs La Javanaise. Blackman appeared in 43 episodes of The Avengers from 1962 to 1964.

The television series led Bond producer Albert R. Broccoli to seek her out as Pussy Galore in Goldfinger (Guy Hamilton, 1964) with Sean Connerya film project for which she left The Avengers, to be replaced by Diana Rigg. At 39, five years older than Connery, she became the oldest Bond actress thus far. She was the perfect mix of glamour and cool self-confidence.

Even if the material was slim, it was an engaging performance. Broccolis appraisal was spot on: The Brits would love her because they knew her as Mrs. Gale, the Yanks would like her because she was so good, it was a perfect combination.

The international recognition, however, did not lead to much development of her film career. She continued to give excellent performances in some interesting films, like Peter Collinsons psychological horror Fright (1971), but high-profile star work did not happen.

There were a couple of other films with Connery, including Edward Dmytryks patchy Western Shalako (1968), but at 40 she was already being overlooked in favour of younger stars. She was blunt about it: We have all these older men with their guts hanging out still actingthey can barely put their belts round their stomach so have to belt up round their crotchand they all carry on getting roles and are accepted and praised, whereas older women are given rather boring parts or are cut off at their prime.

But she continued to work. On television she became a reliable turn in sitcoms, and she was noticeably successful in West End runs of Broadway musicals like The Sound of Music (1981). She delighted in the rigours of such performances, playing Mrs. Higgins in My Fair Lady (2006) and the landlady Fraulein Schneider in Cabaret (2007).

She was asked if the latters eight-show-a-week schedule, after only two weeks rehearsal, was not too demanding. The character, said Blackman, is a survivor, and so am I I can do the job. Thats what matters. Im glad people are grown up enough now to acknowledge that youre not necessarily on the rubbish heap if youre a woman over 50.

Film work did come in again, and she continued to give excellent performances in variable pictures. She is excellent in Matthias Hoenes comedy horror Cockneys vs Zombies (2012), a sometimes clumsy if entertaining satire on the gentrification of working class east London.

Politically, she remained a committed Liberal. A supporter of the anti-monarchy campaign group Republic, she turned down a CBE (Commander of the Order of the British Empire), saying since Im a republican I thought it would be somewhat hypocritical.

She compared this unfavourably with Sean Connery, who accepts a knighthood but never comes here, doesnt pay tax here But I dont think he thinks deeply about politics.

The comment about his taxes goes to the core of her liberalism, which demanded a decency it could not deliver politically. In a 2014 Channel 5 report on Growing Old in Britain she advised a group of older women not to become obese because of unnecessary increased demands on taxpayers. That year she campaigned for compensation for those who lost pension funds when insurer Equitable Life collapsed.

That well-intentioned decency, coupled with self-assurance and a refusal to be undermined, also marked out what was appealing in her work.
As movement in Dubai is restricted by the authorities with a strict lockdown in order to flatten the curve of the Covid-19 outbreak, shifting houses has been one of many necessities affected. However, moving companies that were contacted are now doing between 10-20 moves a day, said an expert.



Saqr Ereiqat, a Palestinian-German expat in Dubai described his recent move as being fairly simple. Commenting on Ejari which has been a hurdle for many new tenants, he said: "The Dubai REST application made it a very easy process to complete - I registered my Ejari on the app and immediately got a message from Dewa to set it up a new connection."



"The entire process took less than two hours to complete and to top it all Dewa was offering a 50% discount on set-up fees," stated Ereiqat.



However, he had one bit of advice for current movers - "Do everything in advance to not face any delay".



Richard Waind, the Managing Director for Better Homes, said: "Some people are looking to move either out of necessity, or they see this as an opportunity to get a good deal. This week we had clarification that removal firms are operating and we have linked up with a courier service to allow us to get tenancy contracts signed."



"While face to face viewings are not taking place, prospective tenants who are already familiar with the area and types of properties they are looking for, are open to virtual viewings," he stated.



"The simple process is; you need to obtain a move out permit from your landlord if you live in a community or building and a move in permit from your new residential premises. Once you have procured these, you will need to get in touch with a moving company that is working under the current conditions," he noted.



"The ones that are working can legally obtain all permits needed to carry out the move. With the current conditions in mind serious attention is being paid to employee sanitisation with gloves and masks constantly being worn for the duration of the job," he added.



Lynnette Abad, the director of Research and Data at Property Finder, said: "Life has not stopped, people are moving and properties are still transferring. Last week, we saw 510 sales transactions in Dubai worth Dh1.09 billion. We all need to be agile and innovative during this time."



"In an effort to keep transactions going and agents/buyers/renters interacting during this lockdown, Property Finder has introduced virtual tours which help people view properties with a live 360-walkaround of the property, guided by their agent," explained Abad.



"We have more ground-breaking products coming out weekly which will transform how people conduct real estate in our region," she added.



On the current market conditions, Richard said the "lockdown effect" is also driving enquiries.



"Home is now not only where we live, but where we work and where we teach our kids; and we have seen an increase in tenant enquiries from residents in apartments who are considering a move for more space, and outside space in particular," he pointed out.



"We have closed a number of villa leases from tenants who have taken the opportunity to move now to a property they feel more comfortable spending time at home," he added.-TradeArabia News Service
Ive been a cop for a very, very long time, and ingrained in me is running to our brothers and sisters when theyre in trouble, when officers request help, when they request assistance, anything to come to their aid," Beck said. And I felt that way when I came to Chicago. I saw a good department with a proud tradition with incredibly talented men and women in a time of crisis.
A fundraising committee for President Trump's reelection is using his renewed attacks on the Chinese government's handling of the coronavirus pandemic to mobilize donors, urging supporters in an email Tuesday to "hold China accountable" by contributing to his campaign.

The appeal reflects an increased effort by the Trump campaign and the Republican National Committee to use U.S.-China relations as a campaign issue against presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden.

Trump's intensifying criticism is a shift from his warmer approach following a late March phone call with Chinese President Xi Jinping, during which the two leaders pledged cooperation over the global outbreak. Trump tweeted at the time that he had a "very good conversation" with Xi and that the two countries are "working closely together. Much respect!"

But in recent days, Trump has revived his criticisms of the Chinese government and global health leaders over the coronavirus outbreak, suggesting he would withhold U.S. funding for the World Health Organization, which he said was "very, very China-centric," and re-upping the term "Wuhan virus."

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the World Health Organization and civil rights organizations have discouraged the use of terms tying the novel coronavirus with a geographic location or ethnic group, saying the rhetoric could contribute to the rise in discrimination and violence against Asian Americans.

In a fundraising email Tuesday, the Trump Make America Great Again Committee echoed the president's heightened rhetoric against the Chinese government.

"China has been lying and doing everything they can to cover up the spread of COVID-19 in their country. It's absolutely disgraceful and we can't stand by and do nothing," read the appeal.

"President Trump has always been tough on China, but he can't hold them accountable on his own," it read. "That's why he is calling on YOU to stand with him and hold China accountable for their lies and deceptions during the Coronavirus pandemic."

Tuesday's email appeared to be the first instance of his campaign using an anti-China message to raise money.

Campaign officials said they are drawing attention to the U.S.-China trade relations as an important issue in the general election, and intend to focus their attacks on Biden's response to China over the coronavirus outbreak.

"Joe Biden's coziness with China will be an issue in the campaign," said Tim Murtaugh, spokesman for the Trump campaign. "He has refused to call China an economic threat and said that President Trump's move to restrict travel from China over the coronavirus was xenophobic and reactionary. He also has refused to explain why his son Hunter got an enormous business deal from a Chinese state-owned bank while Biden was vice president. These will all be issues."

Hunter Biden's lawyer has disputed the assertion that the former vice president's son financially benefited from the investment.

The Trump Make America Great Again Committee raises money for the Republican National Committee and the president's re-election campaign, and primarily focuses on raising online low-dollar donations.

RNC spokeswoman Mandi Merritt said Tuesday that the president's actions record on China poses a clear contrast between Trump and Biden to general-election voters.

"President Trump has spent three years standing up to China in ways previous administrations never did, and that includes when Joe Biden was Vice President," Merritt said. "From enacting travel restrictions to highlighting the Chinese government's dishonesty on the origins of coronavirus, voters see President Trump is holding China accountable, and they are responding with their resources and support."

Previously, a Trump campaign email in mid-March criticized Beijing for "pushing online conspiracy theories specifically intended to undermine the fact that the Wuhan coronavirus originated in China," such as alleging that the virus was genetically engineered by U.S. military personnel.

In that March email, which did not ask for donations, the Trump campaign defended the president's use of rhetoric linking the virus to the Chinese government and also attacked Biden for not criticizing China enough.

Trump has raised more money for his reelection than any of his predecessors had at this point in their campaigns.

Trump's campaign, the RNC and their joint fundraising committees have so far raised more than $1 billion, and entered April with more than $240 million in their accounts, officials said.

Trump's fundraising success has benefited from his avid base of online donors, who have consistently driven large sums to his re-election committees in response to email, text and other online appeals.

Trump's reelection committees said they have raised more than $212 million in the first three months of the year, a massive sum that boosts the president's cash lead as Biden begins shifting his focus to the general election. Biden has raised at least $121 million so far.
SEOUL, April 15 (Reuters) - South Korean President Moon Jae-in's ruling party is projected to win a majority in a parliamentary election held on Wednesday, according to exit polls jointly conducted by three major local TV networks.

Moon's progressive camp could secure up to 177 seats in the 300-strong single chamber parliament, while the main conservative party is expected to win as many as 131, the polls showed. (Reporting by Hyonhee Shin; Editing by Alex Richardson)
The US State Department has approved a possible Foreign Military Sale to the Government of Morocco of ten AGM-84L Harpoon Block II Air Launched missiles and related equipment for an estimated cost of $62 million.

The announcement was made by the Defense Security Cooperation Agency, which said it delivered the required certification notifying Congress of this possible sale on Tuesday.

According to the DSCA, the deal also includes containers, spare and repair parts, support and test equipment, publications and technical documentation, personnel training and training equipment, US Government and contractor representatives technical assistance, engineering and logistics support services, and other related elements of logistics support.

The Agency described Morocco as a major force that continues to maintain political stability and economic progress in North Africa, saying this proposed sale will support the foreign policy and national security of the United States by helping to improve the security of a major non-NATO ally that continues to be an important force for political stability and economic progress in North Africa.

The proposed sale of the missiles and support will increase the Moroccan Air Forces maritime partnership potential and align its capabilities with existing regional baselines. Morocco intends to use the missiles on its F-16, multi-role fighter aircraft to enhance its capabilities in effective defense of critical sea-lanes, the agency explained, noting that Morocco will have no difficulty absorbing these missiles into its armed forces.

The prime contractor will be The Boeing Company, St. Louis, Missouri. The purchaser typically requests offsets. Any offset agreement will be defined in negotiations between the purchaser and the contractor(s).

Morocco received 62% of its arms purchases between 2014 and 2018 from the US, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI).

In March, the US State Department approved another request from Morocco to purchase 25 armored vehicles from the DSCA, for $240 million.

The 25 armored vehicles (Hercules M88A2) are recovery units for tanks.
The disruptions to supply chains caused by the new coronavirus have prompted neighbouring Romania to ban cereal exports to non-European Union destinations.

Ukraine, one of world's top grain exporters, is ready to ban wheat exports if sales exceed limits agreed with traders, the deputy economy minister in charge of agriculture told Reuters on Wednesday.

The disruptions to supply chains caused by the new coronavirus have prompted neighbouring Romania to ban cereal exports to non-European Union destinations, as reported by Reuters.

Another neighbour, Russia has also limited grain exports and sold grain from its stockpile to increase supply to its flour millers and bakers.

Read alsoUkraine grain export jumps to record 47 mln tonnes so far 2019/20  media

Ukraine has exported 18 million tonnes of wheat so far in 2019/20, leaving an additional 2 million tonnes available for export over the rest of this season that runs until June 30, in line with a memorandum signed with traders.

"If the pace of exports becomes such that we are exporting 2 million tonnes in April, so, as we agreed (with traders) and warned  we will have to implement the paragraph of the memorandum to stop exports," Taras Vysotskiy told Reuters.

"So far, the pace that we are tracking looks like we are not going to exceed these 2 million tonnes," he said in a video interview.

Ukraine's wheat harvest largely exceeds domestic consumption, but last month Ukrainian bakers and millers asked the government to limit grain exports to maintain bread prices.

The government said it would limit the export of some food products but so far has only halted foreign sales of the popular staple buckwheat. It has also asked parliament to approve lifting import duties on some cereals.

Looking ahead, Vysotskiy said Ukraine's 2020/21 wheat exports could fall sharply to 12-15 million tonnes from around 20 million in 2019/20 following a reduction in the sowing area caused by poor weather.

Read alsoReuters: Ukraine traders agree wheat export curb to protect bread prices

Ukraine has imposed strict lockdown measures to fight the spread of the coronavirus pandemic, but Vysotskiy said the restrictions had not affected the spring sowing, which had taken place at an even faster pace than a year ago.

Ukraine harvested a record 75.1 million tonnes of grain in 2019 and exports could reach all-time high of 52-55 million tonnes in the 2019/20 season which runs from July to June, Vysotskiy said.

However, after a record harvest last year, the minister said a lack of rain during sowing late last year and unfavourable weather conditions this spring would lead to a smaller wheat harvest and lower exports.

"We had three very dry months and high temperatures and frosts. It rained across all Ukraine, which improved the situation a bit, but of course we will not match the record harvest this year," Vysotskiy said.

Ukraine had sowed 2.7 million hectares of spring crops as of April 10, or 18% of the expected sowing area of 15.3 million hectares.

Vysotskiy said the forecast for the grain harvest for 2020 has repeatedly changed depending on the weather. It is now at 65-67 million tonnes but may drop to 60 million if the weather deteriorates.
Two days after allowing sale of liquor, the Assam government on Wednesday withdrew the orders following guidelines issued by the Centre on the extended lockdown due to coronavirus. In neighbouring Meghalaya, wine shops that opened on Monday were ordered to down the shutters in the East Khasi Hills district following imposition of curfew on Tuesday evening due to detection of a COVID-19 confirmed case. Other districts in Meghalaya have also issued similar instructions in view of the extended lockdown everywhere in the country, an Excise department official said. In the consolidated guidelines issued by the Union Ministry of Home Affairs, no relaxation has been given to liquor manufacturing or its retail sales, which was allowed in Assam from Monday by the state Excise Department as also in Meghalaya. A strict ban has been enforced on the sale of liquor, gutka, tobacco etc. under the updated central guidelines that came a day after Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced extension of the nationwide lockdown till May 3 to check the spread of COVID-19 infection.

"States/Union Territory cannot dilute restrictions imposed vide the aforesaid guidelines issued by MHA. States/UTs may, however, impose stricter measures than these guidelines as per requirement of local areas," Union Home Secretary Ajay Bhalla wrote to all chief secretaries during the day.

Deputy commissioners of two districts of Assam told PTI that the Union Cabinet secretary during a video conference this morning specifically instructed all states to shut activities related to production and sale of alcohol.

Following this, the Assam Excise Department issued an order in the evening asking all the deputy commissioners to close liquor shops, wholesale warehouses, bottling plants, distilleries and breweries indefinitely in the state.

The communication issued by Additional Commissioner of Excise S K Medhi stated that the revised order from the state government was issued "in view of the consolidated revised guidelines and national directives issued by the central government for COVID-19 management".

On April 12, Medhi had ordered all liquor shops, wholesale warehouses, bottling plants, distilleries and breweries across Assam to open from the next day for seven hours daily. Opening of the liquor vends in the two northeastern states had drawn a large number of alcohol lovers to the wine shops.

Maintaining social distance, people stood in serpentine queues to have their choice of liquor.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Social distancing in the US may have to last until 2022 to tackle the coronavirus pandemic, a new study by researchers at Harvard has suggested.

Scientists at the Harvard School of Public Health, whose research was published in the journal Science on Tuesday, said that intermittent distancing may be required for the next few years.

The study comes as the US recorded more than 2,200 deaths from the virus on Tuesday, the highest daily number of fatalities in the world. This brought the countrys death toll to 28,300.

In their findings, the Harvard researchers said: Intermittent distancing may be required into 2022 unless critical care capacity is increased substantially or a treatment or vaccine becomes available.

Citing South Korea and Singapore as examples, the study believes distancing measures could ease the burden on health care systems and allow for effective contact tracing and quarantine.

The researchers acknowledged this would have a negative impact on the economic, social and educational wellbeing of the US.

The study added even after its apparent elimination, the virus should be monitored because it could reemerge as late as 2024.

The WHO has said that the number of infections has certainly not yet reached its peak, with 2 million global infections reported so far and more than 124,000 deaths from the virus.

The US has experienced more deaths from coronavirus than any other country.

Additional reporting from Reuters
Accordingly, Super Energy Corporation would pay approximately $73 million to purchase controlling stakes of 70-100 per cent of the four Loc Ninh 1-4 solar plants through a subsidiary in Vietnam.

The total transaction value would be no more than $457 million, cited from its regulatory filing to the Securities and Exchange Commission of Thailand. After the investment in the solar plants, the $384 million is set to be poured into the construction which is already underway and will be finished by the end of this year.

Super Energy Corporation from Thailand is looking to step into the solar energy game in Vietnam

Super Energy calculated that returns on investment from the four solar power projects would be around 17 per cent for each project.

This will enhance the company's strengths and competitiveness in the future and continue to generate revenue for the company. It also expands the company's investment abroad. They will receive investment incentives in renewable energy from the Vietnamese government, such as tax benefits and access to finance, Super Energy said in its statement.

This new investment comes only a month after the Thai firm announced the $51.2 million acquisition of Thinh Long Phu Yen Solar Power. Vietnam is a country with high potential for renewable energy development, especially solar and wind energy, it said. The country is seeing increased interest from overseas investors in the renewable energy sector, according to DealStreetAsia.

VIR also published an in-depth analysis of Decision No.13/2020/QD-TTg  which was issued last week  on encouraging mechanisms for solar power development in Vietnam. The newly-ratified decision sets the deadline of December 31 for solar systems of any scale as commercial operation date and enjoy the feed-in tariff 2 (FiT2) rate, which is considered to be financially attractive.

"Along with the increased FiT for wind and biomass recently announced, Vietnam is undergoing a strong energy transition towards renewable energy following the directives and goals indicated in the Politburos Resolution No.55-NQ/TW on the orientation of the National Energy Development Strategy of Vietnam to 2030, with vision to 2045," rooftop solar expert Mai Van Trung told VIR.

There is also huge potential for international developers and investors to join mergers and acquisitions activities.

Previously, another Thai energy firm Gunkul Engineering Pcl. (Gunkul), through its arm Bright Green Power, expressed interest in investing in solar power plants in Tay Ninh province, Vietnam.

SkyX Solar, a subsidiary of VinaCapital Group, has inked a joint venture agreement with SAIGONTEL to build and operate rooftop solar projects for industrial facilities within the industrial parks affiliated with the latter.

On the flip side, Aboitiz Power Corporation from the Philippines confirmed its decision of terminating its planned acquisition of Vietnams Mekong Wind due to a condition precedent being unmet by the agreed longstop date.
Washington, April 15 : United Nations Secretary General Antonio Guterres on Tuesday said that now was "not the time" to cut off funds to the World Health Organization (WHO) in response to the United States' decision to suspend funding to the agency.

"Once we have finally turned the page on this epidemic, there must be a time to look back fully to understand how such a disease emerged and spread its devastation so quickly across the globe, and how all those involved reacted to the crisis," Guterres said in a statement.

"But now is not that time," he added. "It also not the time to reduce the resources for the operations of the World Health Organization or any other humanitarian organization in the fight against the virus." "It is my belief that the World Health Organization must be supported, as it is absolutely critical to the world's efforts to win the war against COVID-19," the UN chief said.

Guterres' remarks came after US President Donald Trump decided earlier in the day to suspend his government's funding to the WHO. The US, until now, had been the biggest donor to the agency, Efe news reported.

"Today I'm instructing my administration to halt funding of the World Health Organization while a review is conducted to assess the World Health Organization's role in severely mismanaging and covering up the spread of the coronavirus," Trump announced during a press conference at the White House.

Trump justified his decision by using the WHO's opposition to the closure of borders to combat the spread of the virus. He also blamed the organization for not having acted sooner and for having not only trusted, but also having "praised" the Chinese government.

"As the organization's leading sponsor, the United States has a duty to insist on full accountability," Trump said, adding that Washington contributes $400-500 million annually, while China contributes about $40 million.

On April 8, Trump threatened to suspend US funding to the WHO, accusing it of having a "bias" toward China and of being "wrong" about COVID-19, although he acknowledged that doing so in the midst of a pandemic was perhaps not the most appropriate thing.

His decision to carry out his threat just a week later is reminiscent of his withdrawal from UNESCO, the United Nations Human Rights Council, the Paris Agreement on climate change and the nuclear pact with Iran.

-- The story has been published from a wire feed without any modifications to the text
SPRINGFIELD  A Massachusetts State Police trooper ran into a burning building and helped seven residents, including an elderly woman, escape the home on Saturday night.

Sgt. Liam Jones, who is on special assignment to assist the Springfield Police Department while at least 14 officers are unable to work after being infected with COVID-19, was driving out of the parking lot at the Massachusetts State Police barracks on Liberty Street when he heard the fire call at 20 Parkside St.  an address just 15 seconds away, State Police said.

When Jones arrived at about 11:20 p.m., there was thick, black smoke billowing from the top floor and flames burning through a dormer, police said.

He ran into the two-family home and alerted the elderly woman and two adult men in the first-floor apartment. While they were heading outside, Jones ran up the stairs as several people were running down to escape the fire, police said.

Sgt. Jones then proceeded to the second floor and checked all rooms in the apartment to make sure no one was left on the floor, police said. He attempted to climb to the third-floor attic but turned back because of the thick smoke and fire.

All seven residents escaped but two second-floor residents suffered smoke inhalation and were brought to the hospital for treatment. Two dogs died in the fire, said Fire Capt. Drew Piemonte.

Seconds after the building was evacuated the Springfield Fire Department and Police Department arrived, state police said.

The fire was under control in five to 10 minutes. It was a good stop. They were able to get the lines up there fast, Piemonte said.

The fire caused between $50,000 and $60,000 in damage. The cause of the fire is being investigated by the Fire Departments Arson and Bomb Squad, he said.
Jill Matiskainen hadnt seen her daughter, Nikki, in more than a month. When she finally did, on Monday, April 13, seeing Niiki was, unfortunately, all she could do.

All I wanted to do was run up and hug her, said Jill. The two attendants dropping Nikki off at a nursing and rehabilitation center  dressed in white, full-body coveralls  had to tell her, No.

It was tough to hold back, but there were many reasons to celebrate. Nikki beat COVID-19 despite complications that had Jill contemplating funeral services a few weeks ago.

Two of her doctors told me she was an absolute miracle, Jill said.

Nikki, 42, was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis at 19. Complications from the disease had become harder to manage and she planned to begin living at The Oaks at Sherwood Park, a nursing facility, after returning from a surgery in early March.

The staff here were wonderful and she already knew some of the younger residents. We came in and decorated her room with wolves before she went in for the surgery, Jill said.

Nikki checked in to Silverton Hospital for the surgery in early March and returned to The Oaks without issue. Two days later, she was taken to the emergency room after a fever spiked and her breathing became labored. Forty-eight hours later, Nikki was tested for COVID-19 and the positive results were returned three days after that.

Nikki spent the next 16 days on a ventilator in the intensive care unit at Salem Health.

It got very, very bad, Jill said. She was on dialysis and her liver was failing. We didnt think she would make it.

Nikkis condition continued to deteriorate, but then her body started, unexpectedly, fighting back.

As her condition improved, Nikki was moved to a regular room where she continued to recuperate. She was met by friends and family in The Oaks parking lot when she returned Monday. They held signs and balloons and shouted greetings.

Nikki was still weak, but managed to hold her own in a brief conversation with relatives.

Nikki Matiskainen's greets her as she returns home.The Keizertimes

The Oaks staff are contending with one of Oregons largest outbreaks of COVID-19 in a long-term care facility. The Oregon Department of Human Services revealed April 11 that The Oaks was sixth on the list of nine facilities with five or more confirmed COVID-19 cases. It currently has 14 ongoing cases of the virus, but it is not known if Nikki contracted the virus at The Oaks or sometime during her hospital stay for surgery.

Regardless of where Nikki contracted the illness, Jill was overwhelmed to have reached the opposite shore in a long, emotionally draining journey.

Just being here today, waiting for her to arrive, is such a relief. When she was in the ICU, she was very weak and could barely talk, Jill said. Its been such a rollercoaster of good days and bad days, and Nikki is just the sweetest person in the world. Knowing I will be able to talk to her soon  knowing she is going to make it  is amazing.
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Blank Social Security checks are run through a printer at the U.S. Treasury printing facility in Philadelphia, Pa., on Feb. 11, 2005. (William Thomas Cain/Getty Images)

Proposed Bill Would Give Americans $2,000 per Month Amid Pandemic

Two House Democrats have introduced legislation that will provide some Americans with $2,000 per month during the CCP virus pandemic.

Reps. Tim Ryan (D-Ohio) and Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) introduced the measure on Tuesday, saying that Americans could get the funds until employment returns to pre-pandemic levels.

The Emergency Money for the People Act would include the payments to those over the age of 16 who make less than $130,000 per year, according to a press release.

They noted that the $2.2 trillion CARES Act, passed in Congress last month, is an important first step but it doesnt provide nearly enough support for American families.

Their news release also said: The Emergency Money for the People Act additionally recognizes that not everyone has a bank or a home address to receive a checkso it allows individuals to get this money through direct deposit, check, pre-paid debit card, or mobile money platforms such as Venmo, Zelle, or PayPal.

The bill has 17 other cosponsors, all Democrats, including Rep. Barbara Lee of California, a leading figure on the House Steering and Policy Committee.

A one-time, $1,200 check isnt going to cut it, Khanna said in a live stream. Americans need sustained cash infusions for the duration of this crisis in order to come out on the other side alive, healthy, and ready to get back to work.

According to the news release, married couples who earn less than $260,000 would receive at least $4,000 per month. Qualifying families would get $500 per child, and families will get funds for up to three kids.

Those who were not eligible in 2019 or 2018 but would be eligible in 2020, could submit at least two consecutive months of paychecks to verify income eligibility, the release also said.

The measure would also expand the program to Americans who were ineligible to receive cash under the CARES Act, including college students and adults with disabilities who are still claimed as a dependent on another persons taxes.

It comes as the Treasury Department and Internal Revenue Service (IRS) launched a new Get My Payment website and app to allow Americans to see if their stimulus payments were deposited.

The Get My Payment portal allows people to see when their money will be deposited or when a check will be mailed. The website will also confirm if the IRS will send the money in the mail or via a direct deposit.

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.
Last week, we learned that Apple and Google would be working together on a COVID-19 tracing project, likely a key requirement for the post-lockdown world to come. It was definitely the best news youll ever receive about the creation of a tool that can be used to monitor the personal interactions of billions of individuals.

Yes, mass surveillance is creepy and terrifying when it isnt saving lives. Thats why Im glad that Apple is stepping up and putting its energy into this projectbecause sometimes it feels like Apple is in a unique position to steer our world away from the most negative possible uses of technology and toward a more private and transparent future.

Built with privacy in mind

The new COVID-19 tracking project seems to be rooted in technology that Apple rolled out last year as a part of its revamped Find My technology. It uses cryptography and randomized numbers transmitted by low-energy Bluetooth beacons to create a system where the network of existing Apple devices can be used to find any other Apple device, even if that other device doesnt know where it is and isnt connected to the Internet

Presumably this technology was designed for Apples rumored, but as yet unannounced, tracking-tile accessorybecause such a device would transmit a beacon, but wouldnt have access to GPS coordinates or a network connection. (But its great for lost iPads and MacBooks, too.)

Because Apples brand promise is all about privacy these days, Apple had to engineer the new Find My system so that it didnt inadvertently build a mechanism that could be used to track its users. Because once that kind of data exists, it would be relatively easy for a government entity to produce a legal order demanding that Apple disclose that data.

Apples only recourse against that possibility is to design a system that simply cant be used that waynot even by Apple itself.

Encryption warning signs

The stakes were made clear back in 2016, when the FBI demanded that Apple decrypt an iPhone used by the suspect in a mass shooting. Apple had added encryption and passcode security to the iPhone in an attempt to make it more secure, but the FBI wanted to compel Apple to break into the suspects iPhone and extract data from it.

In the end, Apple was able to provide the FBI with data that passed through Apples servers unencryptediCloud backupsbut other data remained obscure. This was all by design. Apple has built many of its systems to be beyond its own reach, because the moment a secure channel has any insecure portion, its not secure anymore. And government and law-enforcement agencies are happy to go to court to compel even the most well-meaning companies to use that insecure portion to break so-called secure channels wide open.

The beauty about the design of many (but not all) of Apples products is that theyre built on public-key cryptography, meaning that if Apple doesnt hold the keys, it cant decode the messages. Its the mathematics that encryption is based on. Courts can compel companies and humans to do what they want, but mathematics is immune from such cares.

Let Apple light the way

In this moment, when the interests of public health require that we build tools that track our movements and associations in order to quickly squash potential outbreaks of COVID-19, its vital that the tools that get built cant be easily perverted for other uses. Anyone who lived through the aftermath of 9/11 can remember that many decisions made rapidly in the aftermath of the initial attacks ended up being anything but temporary. Governments and law enforcement agencies are always reluctant to give up any power theyre given.

Thats why I want Apple involved in building these surveillance tools today. Its a company thats committed to safeguarding its users privacy and asking permission before doing anything with user dataand has spent years working on ways to build systems that can provide all the benefits of high-tech tracking tools while keeping the needs of the users in mind.

This is not to say that this new COVID-19 contact tracing technology couldnt be subverted in the future, or that governments who want to exert maximum control over the public couldnt compel everyone to opt in and share their data. Totalitarian regimes are gonna do their thing. But by keeping privacy and transparency in the mix, and building those principles into the machinery itself, Apple can make it less likely that a tool built to re-open society will later be used to strip away our freedom, privacy, and other basic human rights.
A lot of non-Christians pray to the universe; to some kind of energy. They talk about karma, an ancient concept associated with many religions. Christians need to inform themselves about scriptural responses to karma and energy to answer questions or reply to assertions made by unbelievers that this universal energy and God are the same.

Karma: Does it Mean Anything?

Karma is associated with the Hindu and Buddhist idea of reincarnation, although humanists and even some of my so-called Christian friends throw the term around thoughtlessly all the time. Youll recognize karma as a term addressing the cosmic balance between good and bad behaviors.

In terms of karmic economy, acting kindly much of the time puts ones moral balance in the black; too many bad choices lead to a deficit. The karmic sum of your life determines how high or low in society or the food chain you will land in the next life.

Karma is a Sanskrit word for action and refers to cause and effect. Synonyms include fate and destiny. (Ibid.) When someone behaves rudely to customers in the grocery store and then is shamed on social media, thats karma. When the nicest person you know wins the lottery, thats karma. People get what they deserve; whats coming to them.

Karma is associated with behaviors, not with thoughts.

Energy and Chakras

Energy, in physics is the capacity for doing work.

All forms of energy are associated with motion.

While energy can be converted from one form to another, energy cannot be created or destroyed. It is potential, kinetic, mechanical, etc. (Ibid.) Energy is not inherently good or bad. It does not promote kindness or depravity. If there is energy related to karma that connects people its the action of helping.

The Merriam-Webster dictionary online describes a Chakra as any of several points of physical or spiritual energy in the human body according to yoga philosophy. Apparently, there are more than 88,000 points in the human body.

One can supposedly activate these points using crystals such as amethyst, chrysoprase, and rose quartz. These energy centers control love, sensuality, inner growth, prosperity, and more. Skeptics say theres no harm in using the stones. They dont lead to addiction or poison anybody. If someone feels better after laying crystals on special energy points, thats a win.

The implication is that ones moral choices could be affected by energy centers in the body.

According to these occult physiological practices, opening energy points enables good behavior while blockages lead to bad choices. Furthermore, this way of seeing the world implies that the best of ourselves comes from within; we can be good in our own strength by releasing our inner power.

Also implicit is that outward actions are important, but not thoughts.

Its fine to think I really wanted to punch that guy. A like-minded friend says well done for not putting that negative energy out into the world. Self-control and love for neighbors arent necessarily possible among people who ignore the health of their chakras. According to this belief, you have to look inward to be able to look outward.

Photo Credit: Unsplash/Dan Farrell

What Does the Bible Say about Karma?

Do we get what we deserve?

Jesus said, Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do. (Luke 23:34)

Why do you call me good? No one is good except God alone. (Luke 18:19)

We do not get what we deserve. Is it karma when a young mother is diagnosed with cancer, even though she is devoted to her kids and volunteers at a womens shelter? When a corporate executive gives himself a raise, buys a mansion in the Bahamas, and lays off 50 employees...how is he getting what he deserves? If karma makes sense, why did Jesus (of all people) have to die, and in such a way? Even Hindus, Buddhists, and Muslims agree that Jesus was a good man.

No one is righteous (except Christ), but believers are saved from eternal justice; we are covered in the blood of the lamb. We are invited to repent of our sins and receive forgiveness because the only sinless person who did not deserve death took death upon Himself for our sake.

Good Works and Karma

The good person out of the good treasure of his heart produces good, and the evil person out of his evil treasure produces evil, for out of the abundance of the heart his mouth speaks. (Luke 6:45)

What we think is important too. Christians receive the free gift of salvation by grace through Christ, not by doing anything except to believe and repent. After we do this, Christ-emulating thoughts and actions frequently follow. Paul encouraged us in Philippians 4 to meditate on good and worthy things. These thoughts must lead us to Christ because only He is good and worthy.

Yes, love is a verb, but loving action comes out of a place of forgiveness. Actively loving others does not secure forgiveness and a person is not saved by choosing not to act on sinful thoughts. Jesus said anyone who is angry with a brother or sister will be subject to judgment because he has committed murder in his heart. (Matthew 5:22, Matthew 5:28)

For karma to connect people, they have to be freed from the constant need to meet their moral quota. By karmic standards, one can never know when an amount of good is enough. Who is the moral bank manager? Moreover, if the debt seems too heavy to redress with acts of kindness, why not declare total bankruptcy?

What is the point of trying to be good if one sees a huge debt and thinks nothing I do will ever make up for this evil. I might as well be bad?"

Only God's grace is sufficient to cover all sin for all people for all time.

The law of the Spirit of life has set you free in Christ Jesus from the law of sin and death. (Romans 8:2)

Grace touches us personally, but also leads us to relationship and connection. Scripture tells us to work as a body of right-thinking believers. If one member suffers, all suffer together; if one member is honored, all rejoice together. (1 Corinthians 12:26)

Bring the Gospel to the world; increase the Kingdom of God, but not by works or in our own strength. For Christ and in Christ we are willing and able to do good works out of love for Him, confident in the promise that He is sanctifying us and forgives us when we mess up.

There is no ledger. God doesnt keep one and neither should we, for ourselves or others.

Judging others makes us blind, whereas love is illuminating. By judging others we blind ourselves to our own evil and to the grace which others are just as entitled to as we are.

The Bible, Crystals, and Energy

Mark 5:34: Daughter, your faith has made you well; go in peace, and be healed of your disease. Repentance and forgiveness heal our relationship with God, enabling us to engage in community more fully.

Crystals are said to open energy points in the body so that a person can love and can have peace, but the fruit of the Spirit which is in every believer includes peace, patience, gentleness, kindness, love, self-control. They arent a product of our actions, but are in us through Christ by the Spirit. Jesus used physical healing to point to ultimate healing: forgiveness bought on the cross in a single act of love. The relationship between God and His people is restored.

Where is the sentient force behind universal energy, making choices for the good of his or her people and providing direction? Once we start talking about purpose, there has to be a person involved, not merely physics. There is energy all over the place all the time, but it is impersonal and amoral. It doesnt supply direction or comfort or relationship.

Christians are apt to believe in grace, and true believers want to be more like Christ by living out their delight in the Lord, Christians expend a lot of energy being personal emissaries of a living God. Like energy, He is not created or destroyed. But unlike karmic energy, He cares about us personally.

Photo Credit: GettyImages/EzumeImages

Candice Lucey is a freelance writer from British Columbia, Canada, where she lives with her family. Find out more about her here.
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Linkedin Katherine Wei (The Straits Times/Asia News Network) Taipei  Wed, April 15, 2020 21:03 636 fc6853813033f564188675f8bd21fd0a 2 Health Taiwan,Taipei,face-mask,vending-machine,health,coronavirus,COVID-19 Free

It is now supposed to be easier to get hold of a surgical mask with vending machines dispensing them.

"It's so convenient that we have this in public spaces. We won't have to line up at pharmacies any more; when the time comes, we just put our card in (to these machines)," said Ms Cheng, a housewife in her 40s, who was at the Xinyi District Health Center on Monday to collect her fortnightly allotment of masks with her husband.

The vending machines are part of a bid by the authorities in Taiwan to reduce face-to-face contact and make surgical masks more accessible to the public while sticking to the rationing policy on the island.

As of now, each Taiwanese resident with a National Health Insurance card is allowed to buy a set of nine masks every two weeks from pharmacies or through the National Health Insurance app, and the same quota applies to the vending machines.

Unveiled by the Taipei City Government and the Central Epidemic Command Center (CECC) on Saturday for a week-long trial run, the three machines installed near Taipei 101 were modified by manufacturers from those that dispense candy and SIM cards.

Taipei Mayor Ko Wen-je disclosed on Saturday that he had tasked a team of experts to work out a safer and more efficient way for people to obtain masks rather than having long queues at pharmacies.

"We're hoping to remove the risks of human interaction that happens when one buys masks from pharmacies," said Mr Lu Hsin-ke, commissioner of the Taipei City Government's Department of Information Technology, told The Straits Times. Mr Lu's department worked closely with the CECC to make sure that the database of the National Health Insurance system, which tracks each citizen's health records, and mask-buying as well as travel history, will be in the vending machines.

Read also: Vending machines selling face masks appear on Warsaw streets

Just like buying government-issued masks from pharmacies, customers are required to provide their National Health Insurance card, which allows the machine to scan for previous mask purchase records.

Currently, each pharmacy receives a daily quota of 200 sets of masks to sell to the public and every machine has 300 to dispense daily but will be refilled if the stock runs out early.

"The three machines dispensed 700 sets of masks over the first two days," said Mr Lu, who added that they are in operation only when the Xinyi District Health Center was open. Mr Lu's team asked mask buyers to fill out surveys right after using them on Sunday, and some 85 per cent of customers reported that they were "satisfied" or "extremely satisfied" with the experience. Almost all or 90 per cent said they would be using the vending machine again in the future.

The machines do not accept cash; buyers can tag their EasyCard - Taiwan's stored-value card for public transportation and convenience stores - or use credit cards and payment apps.

"Once the week-long trial is over and some technical issues perfected, the city government plans to install mask vending machines in all 12 administrative districts across Taipei," said Mr Lu, who added that the CECC is planning a similar rollout in other cities and counties in Taiwan.

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This article appeared on The Straits Times newspaper website, which is a member of Asia News Network and a media partner of The Jakarta Post
The Punjab government has developed a mobile application with cab aggregator Ola to issue e-passes to over 17 lakh farmers, in a bid to prevent overcrowding at state grain markets during the procurement of wheat.

The procurement of wheat in the state mandis started on Wednesday amid the lockdown imposed to check the coronavirus spread.

According to an official release, the application will help in the online management and regulation of all tractor-trailers and vehicular movement in the mandis.

It removes all unnecessary bias and favouritism, thus bringing transparency to the process, the release said.

Under the initiative, all arhtiyas (commission agents) will be given one pass per wheat trolley, which they will further give to farmers.

Farmers will come to the mandis on a given date at the designated procurement centre.

The app, installed on mobile phones of farmers, will alert them about rush spots' to check overcrowding.

The centralised dashboard of the app, an initiative aligned to the social distancing guidelines of the Union Ministry of Health and Family Welfare, will also give alerts on pass issuance, expiry and validation.

This mobile app has been adopted by the Punjab Mandi Board to launch an e-pass system with the help of the Department of Governance Reforms and Public Grievances in an effort to streamline the procurement operations in the backdrop of the COVID-19 crisis, said the official release.

The software generates the required number of passes automatically based on the past data available with the mandi board. The passes for a particular day are provided three days in advance to arhtiyas to prevent any kind of rush.

The farmer will also receive an SMS with a pass number and a link to download the app.

Vishwajit Khanna, Additional Chief Secretary, Development, said apart from e-passes , an mPass system has also been developed in the ePMB mobile application.

A unicode SMS is sent to every commission agent at the time of pass issuance.

The arhtiya can allocate passes to farmers through the in-built mPass system. The drivers can then download the mPass using the SMS received on his number, and use this at various police nakas for permitted mobility, the release said.

The online vehicular management shall help the board maintain law and order protocols in the mandis, said Khanna.

Ravi Bhagat, Secretary, Punjab Mandi Board, the unique technology solution will help the government manage mandi operations well.

Pranay Jivrajka, co-founder of Ola, in a release said, By helping the government connect with farmers using our technology platform, we are able to put our capabilities to the best use when the nation requires innovation and collaboration to quickly come out of this national crisis.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Australian miner Lynas Corporation has launched a bid for its processing operations in Malaysia to be spared from restrictions aimed at curbing coronavirus, saying the materials it produces are vital to sustaining the country's critical industries including manufacturing ventilators.

Lynas  the top non-Chinese producer of "rare earths" elements that are used in a catalogue of high-tech products ranging from smartphones to military equipment  has been operating its Western Australia mine with a skeleton staff, and suspended production at its processing plant in Malaysia in line with government coronavirus controls.

An employee at work in the Lynas processing plant in Kuantan, Malaysia. Credit:Ian Teh

The company on Wednesday said it had now applied for a "critical industry" exemption after the government extended the restrictions until April 28. Lynas pointed out that its products were essential ingredients in the supply chains of critical industries including the automotive sector, medical devices including ventilators, and oil refining.

In its quarterly report released on Wednesday, Lynas said it had produced 4465 tonnes of rare earths oxides in the three months to March 31, compared with 5444 tonnes over the same period last year.
Thats not what we ended up getting, and I know youre not Indiana, but youre one lot off of Indiana, and Im just wondering if we can get it spruced up a little bit, Conquest said.
The family of a 65-year-old man alleged he died at MY Hospital in Madhya Pradeshs Indore on Tuesday after its staff refused to treat him, prompting the opposition Congress to launch an attack on the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government.

Pandurao, a resident of Kamala Nehru Nagar complained of chest pain on Tuesday. As his family members couldnt get any ambulance they took him to MY Hospital, the teaching hospital of MGM Medical College, on a two-wheeler in the afternoon.

His relative Rahul alleged the staff at the hospital denied treatment to Pandurao and he collapsed after some time on the two-wheeler itself.

Family members said an ambulance service operator had earlier demanded Rs 300 to take the patient to the hospital. They were ready to pay the amount but the ambulance service operator refused, forcing them to take the patient to the hospital on the two-wheeler.

A video of the man lying on the two-wheeler outside MY Hospital and his family alleging denial of treatment by the hospital soon went viral on social media.

State Congress president Kamal Naths media coordinator Narendra Saluja sought to know from chief minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan if this was the state of affairs on health services in Madhya Pradesh and how many people would die like this in the state.

The government should take action against the responsible persons, he demanded.

The man died as he didnt get treatment in the hospital and also he didnt get an ambulance. The kin had to take him to the hospital on a two-wheeler. This didnt happen in any remote part of the state but in Indore known as the commercial capital of Madhya Pradesh, senior Congress leader KK Mishra who belongs to Indore said.

The situation in other parts of the state can easily be gauged but the chief minister is not tired of making lofty claims about the health services, Mishra added.

Public health expert Amulya Nidhi said such a death should be a matter of serious concern for the state government.

It should immediately institute an inquiry to look into the mans demise and his kins allegations. At the same time, the government should have a plan to ensure that amid the Covid-19 situation people with other ailments too get immediate and effective treatment, Nidhi said.

State BJP spokesperson Rajneesh Agrawal said the Congress was being hasty in its statements.

Congress is in habit of jumping the gun before getting details. Any death taking place is unfortunate. The government will certainly look into this, Agrawal said.

Dr Pravin Jadia, Indores chief medical and health officer (CMHO), denied the familys allegations.

The man had gone to the hospital on Monday and later returned home. On Tuesday, he was first taken to a private hospital from where he was referred to MY hospital but when he reached the hospital he was declared brought dead. There was no question of denial of treatment, Jadia said.
Sudan has begun to develop its own ventilators amid the COVID-19 outbreak after some international manufacturers shared their designs online, a defense industry contractor has told Sputnik, adding that it planned to start manufacturing the equipment soon

KHARTOUM (UrduPoint News / Sputnik - 15th April, 2020) Sudan has begun to develop its own ventilators amid the COVID-19 outbreak after some international manufacturers shared their designs online, a defense industry contractor has told Sputnik, adding that it planned to start manufacturing the equipment soon.

"We are trying to develop them, and our team is now working on [this project], after some companies [developing] ventilators have forfeited their rights, and made [ventilator] designs available on the internet," Bashra Fadel Khalil, an inspector general at the National Defense System company, said.

The official said that the initiative was being discussed by the Sudanese health ministry, and after its approval, a manufacturing process would begin.

"After we present our project to the health ministry, and they determine a number [of ventilators], it will definitely be hundreds [of them], we will try to meet Sudan's needs in cooperation with manufacturing companies," Khalil said.

Khalil also noted that Sudan and Russia had large partnership projects, suggesting that the two countries could cooperate in the development of medical equipment in the future.

"There are large cooperation projects between the National Defense System and Russia, as [the latter] is a key partner helping arm the Sudanese army, the air forces in particular. Our relations are strong ... and in this regard, Russians have a strong health system that can be beneficial in the future," the official said.

As of Wednesday, Sudan has confirmed 32 coronavirus cases with five fatalities, according to Johns Hopkins University.
The North Delhi Municipal Corporation (NDMC) has invited applications from qualified and experienced Indian citizens for filling 19 vacancies to the post of Senior Residents in various departments comprising Anesthesia, Medicine, OBG & Gynae, Pediatrics, Radiology, Pathology, Eye and ENT through a 'Walk-in-Interview' process scheduled on April 17, 2020 from 11:00 am onwards at the Auditorium of Kasturba Hospital, 2nd floor, Library Hall, Daryaganj, New Delhi-110002.

CRITERIA DETAILS Name Of The Posts Senior Residents Organisation North Delhi Municipal Corporation (NDMC) Educational Qualification MBBS Degree or Post-Graduation Degree in DNB/PG Diploma Experience Two years in a relevant domain Skills Required Desirable Job Location New Delhi Salary Scale As per the 7th CPC recommendations Industry Civic Body/Health Application Start Date April 17, 2020 Application End Date April 17, 2020

Age Criteria And Fees

Candidates interested in applying for Senior Residents post through NDMC Recruitment 2020 must meet the age criteria as per the NDMC norms, with relaxation (upper age limit) for reserved categories as specified in the notification.

For details regarding fee towards application processing, refer to the official advertisement given at the end of the article.

DDA Recruitment 2020 For 629 Assistants, Officers And Patwaris, Apply Online Before April 30

Educational Criteria And Experience

Desirous candidates applying for Senior Residents post through NDMC Recruitment 2020 must possess an MBBS Degree or Post-Graduation Degree in DNB/PG Diploma from a MCI recognised University/Institute with two years of work experience as detailed in the advertisement.

Selection And Pay Scale

The selection of candidates for Senior Residents post through NDMC Recruitment 2020 will be done based on the candidates' performance in the 'Walk-in-Interview' scheduled on April 17, 2020 from 11:00 am onwards at the Auditorium of Kasturba Hospital in New Delhi.

Candidates selected for Senior Residents post through NDMC Recruitment 2020 will be paid remuneration as per the 7th CPC recommendations.

Capgemini India Goes Ahead With Salary Hike, Allowance For Its Employees Amid COVID-19 Lockdown

How To Apply

Candidates applying for Senior Residents post through NDMC Recruitment 2020 must appear for the 'Walk-in-Interview' along with self-attested copies of relevant supporting documents (originals/copies) at the "Auditorium of Kasturba Hospital, 2nd floor, Library Hall, Daryaganj, New Delhi-110002" on April 17, 2020 from 11:00 am onwards.

Read the detailed notification about NDMC Recruitment 2020 for Senior Residents post here http://mcdonline.gov.in/tri/ndmc_mcdportal/Press/Interview_Schedule.pdf
FDA is concerned about the health of consumers who may self-medicate by taking ivermectin products intended for animals, thinking they can be a substitute for ivermectin intended for humans, the warning states. People should never take animal drugs, as the FDA has only evaluated their safety and effectiveness in the particular animal species for which they are labeled. These animal drugs can cause serious harm in people.
As financial relief arrives in the bank accounts of the thousands of Canadians suddenly left unemployed during the COVID-19 pandemic, many are finding the process puzzling.

If you too are wondering where that money in your account came from, and whether or not youll have to return it, youre not alone.

Many recipients are confused by the difference between Employment Insurance (EI), which a worker typically gets when laid-off, and the new Canada Emergency Response Benefit (CERB), which provides $2,000 per month for four months. The phone lines to Service Canada and the Canada Revenue Agency are busy as thousands of Canadians call for answers everyday.

To help out, the Star is gathering your questions about EI and CERB and attempting to answer your concerns. If you dont see your question below, send it in and well try to get the answer.

If I applied for CERB through the new portal and got it, will I be eligible for EI once the 16 weeks have passed?

A spokesperson for Employment and Social Development Canada said accessing CERB does not have an impact on EI claims, and once a person has received the 16 weeks of CERB, that person may be eligible for EI providing criteria are met.

If my previous income was not from Canada, can I still get CERB?

A person has to reside in Canada to receive CERB, but their applicable income from the previous year can have been earned elsewhere, said a spokesperson for Employment and Social Development Canada.

If I applied for EI but got transferred to CERB, do I still need to do bi-weekly reports through Service Canada?

Yes. According to an emailed statement from ESDC, if you originally applied for EI and were transferred to CERB, you are still required to complete the bi-weekly reports an EI recipient would.

What happens when Ive claimed 16 weeks of CERB? Will I get automatically transferred to EI?

According to an emailed statement from ESDC, anyone who has received 16 weeks of CERB and is still eligible for EI can receive EI. The exact mechanics of the transition have yet to be confirmed.

Is CERB taxable income? What about EI?

CERB is taxable income, which youll have to declare come the 2021 tax season. How much youre taxed will depend on your tax bracket for the year.

EI is also taxable, but its taxed at the source, meaning you wont have to pay any extra taxes on it in 2021. While many Canadians who applied for EI are getting CERB instead, those who applied before March 15 will be receiving EI.

Is it true the CRA is approving everyone for CERB right away, and then asking people to pay it back later if they dont qualify?

CERB is an emergency benefit, meaning its paid out without a full application process  this means people can get their funds within days, instead of waiting out the backlog of EI applications the government had before CERB.

However, this means that if you dont qualify for CERB, you will have to repay what you received at a later date. In an email, a CRA spokesperson compared it to Canadas income-tax season, where your taxes are checked at a later date.

How will I know if I need to repay what Ive received?

There are two reasons you might need to repay CERB money. Some people applied for both EI and CERB, and are receiving double payments. Others applied for one, but dont actually qualify for CERB.

If this is the case, the CRA will let you know, said a spokesperson.

If any payments are found to have been made in error or a taxpayer is deemed ineligible, the taxpayer will be informed and required to repay the amount owing.

How or when do I reapply for the CERB?

According to the CRA, each application for CERB covers a four-week period. After those four weeks, the applicant can reapply, for a maximum of 16 weeks, or four periods. If applying through the CRA, you must make a new application for every period.

The first four-week period runs from March 15 to April 11, and a full list of the periods can be found here.

Will receiving CERB affect my eligibility for EI after the four periods end?

According to the federal government website, receiving CERB will not affect your EI entitlement.

How do I know if the payments Im getting are CERB or EI? What do I do if Im getting both?

If you applied for EI before March 15 and are eligible, you will get EI payments. If you applied for EI or sickness benefits on March 15 or afterward, you will automatically be switched over to CERB.

If you applied for both EI and CERB after March 15, you may get double CERB payments and will have to pay half of it back  the CRA has said it will notify people in this position.

What should I do if my EI application from after March 15 is still processing, and doesnt seem to have been switched to CERB?

According to a CRA spokesperson, your application will still automatically be switched to CERB, and Service Canada is processing these as quickly as possible.

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YEREVAN.  At Wednesdays sitting of the National Assembly, the deputies unanimously passed in the second and final reading the legislative amendments made to the Criminal Procedure Code of Armenia.

However, the deputies did not pass in the second and final reading the bill on making additions to the Criminal Procedure Code, which was tabled by the majority My Step faction, and the bill on making additions to the law on keeping detained and arrested persons, which was tabled by the opposition Bright Armenia faction.
With the nationwide lockdown extended till May 3, domestic airlines have again decided not to refund customers in cash for their cancelled flights and instead have offered them rescheduling of tickets for a later date without any additional fee.

India had imposed a 21-day lockdown from March 25 to curb the spread of the coronavirus pandemic. Consequently, all domestic and international commercial passenger flights were suspended for this time period.

However, most of the airlines had been taking bookings except national carrier Air India for domestic flights for the period beyond April 14.

Aviation consultancy Centre for Asia Pacific Aviation (CAPA) India said the civil aviation ministry should instruct airlines to "halt unfair practice of taking advance bookings until resumption is certain and an interim transition schedule has been established".

After Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced the extension of lockdown till May 3, aviation regulator DGCA issued a circular stating all international as well as domestic flights will remain suspended during the lockdown.

"Following orders from the Ministry of Civil Aviation issued to all airlines, we have extended the suspension of our operations until May 3, 2020.

"We are in the process of cancelling the affected bookings and we will offer customers free of charge rescheduling to another date until December 31, 2020," a Vistara spokesperson said in a statement.

The customer, however, will have to pay the fare difference, if any, at the time of rebooking, the airline said.

A GoAir spokesperson said that it has already "factored in" these type of scenario and that the airline will review its earlier scheme of providing rescheduling free of cost at a later date while protecting their existing bookings for one year.

"In accordance with the Prime Minister's instructions and the DGCA's circular, GoAir has suspended all its flights till May 3," GoAir said in a statement on Tuesday.

The airline also said it is extending its 'Protect Your PNR' scheme till May 3, 2020 wherein customers are eligible to reschedule their flight by May 3, 2021.

The airline had on Monday announced that it was extending the Protect Your PNR scheme till April 30, 2020.

The civil aviation ministry should instruct airlines to "halt unfair practice of taking advance bookings until resumption is certain and an interim transition schedule has been established", the CAPA said in a series of tweets.

With the lockdown extended till May 3, passengers who have purchased tickets for the April 15 to May 3 would "once again only be offered credit for future travel, rather than a refund," it said.

In case of train travel, the railway ministry has said there will be no advance bookings on trains until further notice.

According to the consultancy, this continues to be unfair on consumers who have purchased a service that the airlines cannot deliver, albeit through no fault of their own.

Some passengers may not have a need to travel in future during the validity of the credit and will lose their money, it noted.

"Some carriers have opened full schedule for sale from 04-May. Even if flights resume from that date, which is not certain, it is highly unlikely that full operations will resume from day 1.

"Further flight cancellations almost inevitable, resulting in more pax funds in credit," it said in another tweet said.

It may be mentioned here that the then customers of the erstwhile Kingfisher Airlines and Jet Airways could not recover their money which the two airlines had amassed on account of advance bookings only after their going belly up.

CAPA in its March 18 report had stated that amid COVID-19 and in the absence of government support "several Indian airlines may shut down operations by May or June due to a lack of cash.

Within hours of the government extending lockdown to May 3, budget carrier IndiGo announced resumption of flight services though in a phased manner from May 4.

Announcing that all its flights are cancelled till May 3, IndiGo said, it is in the process of cancelling the reservations."Your ticket amount is protected in the form of credit shell in the PNR, which can be utilised within one year of the issued date."



"In its endeavour to reconnect critical air corridors post the lockdown, IndiGo, India's leading airline, will resume flight operations from May 4, 2020," IndiGo said in the statement.

Gurugram-based spiceJet also said the amount from the cancelled ticket will be maintained in a credit shell.

"We are cancelling the reservation of those who booked tickets for travel till May 3, 2020. Upon cancellation your entire amount will be maintained in credit shell and the same may be used for fresh bookings and travel till February 28, 2021, for the same passenger," it said.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
New Delhi, April 15 : Congress leader Rahul Gandhi has appealed the government to issue emergency ration cards to feed the poor who are suffering from lack of provisions including migrants and poor who are not getting rations through PDS.

Gandhi said that it is "inhuman" that grains are rotting and people remain with empty stomachs.

Gandhi tweeted "We appeal to the government that in this difficult times issue emergency ration cards, this should be for those people who are suffering due to lockdown and don't have food grains ,lakhs of citizens are not able to take ration from PDS ,the foodgrains is rotting in go down and people,are hungry ,inhuman." As per estimates India has more than the one year's reserve of food grains .As per reports the government currently has 58.49 milion metric tones of good grain with rice is about 30.97 and wheat 27.53 million metric ton. The stock is much higher than the required limit as on April 1 said reports.

The Congress has earlier demanded 10 kg ration per person in the family to be provided till September, 2020 for those who are covered in the National Food Security Act and people with or without ration cards.
A second Chinese city has banned its residents from eating dogs and cats with a new law in response to the coronavirus pandemic.

Zhuhai, a city bordering Macau with a population of 1.7 million, issued the order in line with a government's proposal which lists dogs as 'companion animals', an official told state media.

Shenzhen is the first Chinese city to bar pet meat from the dining table. It is situated across the Pearl River estuary from Zhuhai.

The two cities, both in the southern province of Guangdong, will enforce the ban from May 1.

Residents in the Chinese city of Zhuhai will be banned from eating dogs and cats from May 1. In the file photo, dog carcasses are stacked at a dog meat market in Yulin, China, on June 21, 2017

Zhuhai officials announced the decision at a press conference yesterday, reported state-run China News.

Yong Ling, the supervisor of the legal affairs committee of the Standing Committee of People's Congress of Zhuhai Municipality, said lawmakers must adhere to the country's Directory of Genetic Resources of Livestock and Poultry to decide what types of meat is legal to be traded and eaten.

Because dogs and cats were not included a drafted version of the directory, the city decided to forbid the consumption of them, Yong added.

Offenders will face a fine of up to 20 times the value of the meat, according to the law, according to another report from Xinhua.

Because dogs and cats were not included in the government's drafted Directory of Genetic Resources of Livestock and Poultry, people should not consume them, an official said. The file photo shows butchered dogs displayed for sale at a stall in Yulin on June 21, 2018

Both Shenzhen and Zhuhai are situated in Guangdong Province in southern China

The move is part of a wider ban on the trading of wild animals in Zhuhai to ensure food safety in response to the coronavirus crisis.

The city will prohibit all restaurants, hotels and farms from selling exotic meat from May 1.

Scientists believe that the novel coronavirus was passed to humans from wild animals sold as food in a market in Wuhan, a city of 11 million people in central China.

COVID-19, the disease caused by the virus, has killed more than 130,000 people and infected more than two million worldwide since an outbreak emerged in December.

China's last major health crisis, the SARS epidemic in 2002 and 2003, was also linked to the consumption of wild animals.

The SARS virus killed 775 people globally and was later found in civets, a small cat-like mammal, sold in markets in Guangdong.

Scientists believe that the novel coronavirus was passed to humans from wild animals sold as food in a market in Wuhan. The market (pictured), called Huanan, was closed on January 1

Last week, the Chinese Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs excluded dogs from farm animals in a drafted directive.

The authority said it recognises dogs as 'companion animals' and 'not suitable' to be managed as livestock in the document released on April 8.

Only the animals officially listed as livestock or poultry can be bred, raised, traded and transported for commercial purposes in China, according to China's Animal Husbandry Law.

This means the proposal can potentially prevent around 10 million dogs being killed for their meat every year in the country.

The annual Yulin Dog Meat Festival, held every year on the summer solstice, is one of the most controversial food festivals in China.

It sees thousands of dogs cruelly killed, skinned and cooked with blow-torches before being eaten by the locals.

The Chinese Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs excluded dogs from farm animals in a drafted directive, signalling a nationwide ban on dog meat. A woman wearing a face mask is pictured walking her dog, also with a face mask, on a street of Beijing on February 4

The masked palm civet has been linked to the SARS coronavirus outbreak in 2003, which killed 775 people after first emerging in Guangdong, China. The picture above shows the cat-like mammals seized by officials at Xinyuan wildlife market in Guangzhou on January 5, 2004

Animal welfare organisations have expressed their support for the pet meat ban in Zhuhai.

Wendy Higgins, a spokesperson of Humane Society International, called it 'thrilling news for all those in China and around the world who have campaigned for so long to end this brutal trade.'

She told MailOnline: 'Coming so soon after Shenzhen's ban and the government's historic statement classifying dogs as pets, we hope this is the start of a domino effect of progressive legislation across China with other cities following suit.'

She also pointed out that 'most people in China don't eat dogs and cats'.

'So now it would seem that in the absence of a national ban, cities are taking matters into their own hands and reflecting the mood of the people,' she added.

Shenzhen announced it will ban its residents from eating dog and cat meat on April 1 after passing a drafted law the day before. The city has around 13 million residents and borders Hong Kong.
With the Radio Awards 2020 taking place later this week, I interviewed Taryn Westoby, head of Arena Events, who has managed the Awards since their inception in 2010, on the key developments over the years and what she's most looking forward to regarding this year's Awards specifically. But first and perhaps most importantly the state of radio particularly at this time.

Taryn Westoby, head of Arena Events

Comment on the current state of the radio/podcast industry.

Youve managed the Awards since their inception in 2010. What are some of the key developments youve seen over the years?

More specifically, what changes have you made year-on-year to this years Awards?

10 years old!



Have a look at some of the numbers and history behind what has been an amazing journey in the life of The Radio Awards so far. pic.twitter.com/OTAInUjmGw  @SARadioAwards (@SARadioAwards) November 8, 2019

And then in terms of leadership changes, why did you decide to introduce an advisory panel / feel the need to make the Awards more inclusive?

Comment on the first decade of the Radio Awards. Growth, most outstanding achievements in the South African radio industry, highlights, etc.

What do you think has contributed to this years record number of entries and stations?

What are you most looking forward to regarding this years Awards and in 2020 (regarding the industry) in general?

Its a very exciting time. Technology is inviting audiences to enjoy a smorgasbord of audio content on-demand. It means the listener now has more control and choice than ever before, and it creates an opportunity for the everyday person on the street to develop their own platform for sharing content and being heard. Its going to make the radio industry even more competitive and focused on quality programming and production.Particularly at this time of social distancing and isolation as a result of the coronavirus crisis, the radio industry really has a big part to play in keeping people informed but also entertained and uplifted.Well, if theres ever been doubt about the power of radio, the Radio Awards has shown that the medium is more alive than ever, and traditional radio stations are about so much more than what they broadcast on the airwaves.Radio is a platform evolving to stay in tune with digital technology, so now not only can listeners enjoy access to quality content through podcasts, but they can also engage more directly with presenters and their shows via social media.The community outreach initiatives that stations have undertaken to place listeners at the forefront  as they should be  have been impressive in using technology that allows them to become more responsive and accessible to their audiences.Weve made numerous tweaks over the past 10 years to ensure the Radio Awards reflect the dynamic nature of the industry and the appetite of listening audiences.In recent years internet radio has started to take off, and as such its a category that has earned its place at the Awards, although we do believe there is still a way to go.This year we introduced the Station Managers Choice Award which gives station managers the opportunity to shine the light on an employee who does great work behind-the-scenes but is not on-air. Its easy to forget that radio stations depend on a solid team of people  other than presenters and producers  to keep a station alive, profitable and successful.South Africa is a huge melting pot of cultures, languages and ideas, and being able to appreciate and celebrate our diversity is important. Rewarding that diversity requires the efforts of experienced people who can bring a more collaborative approach to decision-making. Having an advisory panel in place has allowed the Radio Awards to make decisions that more closely align with the needs of the radio industry and its diverse audiences.We had a steep learning curve when the Radio Awards were first launched in 2010 as the MTN Radio Awards. Back then we received only 196 entries from 15 radio stations, but we were thrilled. As someone who has walked the path of The Radio Awards since inception, to see them become the number one recognition event for the South African radio industry is hugely rewarding.This year we celebrated a record number of entries (more than 2000) from a record number of radio stations (more than 160)  we really work hard to improve on lessons learned from previous years.Each year we experience fresh highlights in recognising exceptional talent, but last year was especially memorable. At the gala dinner, we hosted two young sisters who were finalists in the Internet Radio category. Their show,on Rx Radio, which broadcasts out of the Red Cross Childrens Hospital in Cape Town, gave everyone the feels, even though they did not win the award. Those children could present a quality show - and use the power of radio for healing - was incredibly inspirational, and shows theres future talent in the industry that needs to be nurtured.Firstly, The Radio Awards are firmly established, undoubtedly upping the prestige of receiving an accolade that carries real weight. Weve also had tremendous support and guidance from members of the NAB (National Association of Broadcasters), based on the feedback theyve received from stations over the past few years.And we also have an experienced project management team, backed by a strong advisory panel that emphasised the importance of transparency and the value of communicating it to the industry.Our communications have been sincere, and weve kept the industry informed of whats happening every step of the way.Having BDO South Africa on board as the new auditors have also upped the credibility of the results.Well, with the recently declared state of disaster around the coronavirus pandemic, and the importance of social distancing, we have  as has everyone else  faced numerous challenges.The Radio Awards gala dinner has developed a reputation as being one of the most exciting and highly anticipated events on the calendar, and unfortunately, the fun and camaraderie that is usually experienced will need to be put on hold until next year. But, with that being said, weve found a new opportunity that involves presenting the Awards through digital announcement and were really excited to see how that is received. After all, necessity is the mother of invention.Wed like to encourage the listeners, and the on-air and behind-the-scenes talent in the radio industry to sign up to watch the online Awards announcement by entering their details on the www.radioawards.co.za website.
FILE PHOTO: Rio de Janeiro's Governor Wilson Witzel is seen after a meeting with Brazil's President Jair Bolsonaro at the Senate President's home in Brasilia

RIO DE JANEIRO (Reuters) - Two Brazilian state governors tested positive for the new coronavirus on Tuesday, in the tourist hotspot of Rio de Janeiro and the Amazon rainforest state of Para, becoming the latest leaders to get the disease as it spreads across the country.

In a video posted on Twitter, Rio Governor Wilson Witzel said that after not feeling well in recent days, with a fever and sore throat, he requested a test and received the positive result on Tuesday.

Witzel visited a hospital later on Tuesday, where he was undergoing tests to see if he needed to be hospitalized, staffers in his office said.

Para Governor Helder Barbalho, in a social media post, said he had also tested positive after members of his staff came down with the virus, although he had no symptoms.

Both governors called for people of their states to obey home shelter guidelines to avoid spreading the virus.

"I ask you once again to stay at home. As everyone can tell, the disease doesn't make exceptions for anyone and the contagion is fast," Witzel said.

Brazil had a record 204 deaths on Tuesday from COVID-19, the severe respiratory disease caused by the new coronavirus, the highest death toll for a single day since the outbreak began. More than 1,500 people have died of COVID-19 in Brazil, with more than 25,000 confirmed cases of the disease.

Governors have played a critical role in curbing the spread of the virus by ordering people to stay inside and most businesses to close.

Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro has criticized lockdowns at the local level, saying the outbreak has been blown out of proportion, even though several of his cabinet ministers and closest aides have been infected.

(Reporting by Rodrigo Viga Gaier and Jake Spring; Additional reporting by Marcelo Rochabrun and Eduardo Simoes; Editing by Sandra Maler and Leslie Adler)
The Andhra Pradesh high court on Wednesday struck down the orders of the YSR Congress party government in the state introducing English medium compulsorily in all the state-run schools.

A public interest litigation was filed by Bharatiya Janata Party leader Sudheesh Rambhotla and advocate Guntupalli Srinivas from Guntur in December challenging the governments order.

The court ruled that the government cannot force the students to study only in a particular medium. The choice of selecting the medium should be left to the students and hence, the existing Telugu medium schools should continue, the court said.

Chief minister YS Jagan Mohan Reddy in November last mooted the proposal to introduce English medium in all the government schools compulsorily from 2020-21 academic year.

Later, the government slightly modified the orders stating that in the first phase, Class 1 to 6 would be converted into English medium and each class would be upgraded to English medium from the subsequent year. By the end of the fourth year, all the classes up to Class 10 would be converted into English medium.

A bill amending AP Education Act, 1982, introducing English medium in the government schools, was first passed by the state assembly during the winter session in December, but it was rejected by the legislative council, where the opposition Telugu Desam Party (TDP) has a majority.

Several members in the legislative council opposed the Bill, suggesting amendments which included making English and Telugu medium available in all government schools, allowing students or parents to choose between the two. However, the bill was introduced in the assembly for a second time again on January 23 and was ratified.

Jagan claimed in the assembly that introducing English medium at the primary level was a revolutionary step in moulding students for the future.

As a father, anyone would prefer to send his children to English-medium schools, and as head of the state I have done the same by introducing the language from classes 1 to 6 starting from the next academic year, he said.

He argued that he was only trying to raise the standards of the aspiring sections of society. He even accused the opponents of English medium of adopting double standards. Which medium of instruction did TDP president N Chandrababu Naidus son study and is his grandson studying? Where are grandchildren of vice-president M Venkaiah Naidu studying? he asked.

The chief minister claimed that many parents associations had welcomed the decision of the government to introduce English medium in the government schools, saying it would do good for their children. They only wanted the government to create sufficient infrastructure to teach the children in English medium.

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In a press release today, Molson Coors Brewing (NYSE:TAP) announced it has completed a deal which will see it launching Truss CBD USA, a joint venture in Colorado making non-alcoholic CBD beverages. Its partner for the planned enterprise is HEXO Corp (NASDAQ:HEXO), a major licensed consumer cannabis producer from Canada which has been in business since 2013.

Truss CBD USA will operate as a largely independent entity, complete with its own executives, board of directors, and marketing department. CBD or cannabidiol, a non-psychoactive extract of hemp, does not contain THC, and is legal in the state of Colorado where Truss CBD USA will be based. CBD is currently a fad item appearing in products from sparkling sodas and lattes to lotions and brownies.

The prospective Colorado CBD drink enterprise is actually the second collaboration between Molson Coors and HEXO. The two companies have already partnered to create Truss Beverages in Canada to manufacture "adult non-alcohol beverage brands." While Truss Beverages isn't yet operational, it's nearing its public launch. Its has products formulated, marketing strategies in motion, and an Ontario production plant under construction.

Truss CBD USA will operate as a stand-alone brand, with Molson Coors owning a majority stake. Its CBD beverages will be produced and sold exclusively inside Colorado's borders to avoid running afoul of CBD's status as a controlled substance elsewhere in the U.S.

Molson Coors will keep itself free of legal entanglements by producing no CBD beverages at any of its own facilities. HEXO CEO Sebastien St-Louis says the new brand features "the leadership of Molson Coors, Powered by HEXO" and that he is thrilled by its potential.
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VANCOUVER, BC / ACCESSWIRE / April 15, 2020 / Universal Copper Ltd. ("Universal Copper" or the "Company") (TSXV:UNV)(Frankfurt:3TA1) is pleased to provide an update for current and prospective Shareholders regarding the Company's 2019 exploration activities and milestones.2019 was a busy and successful year for Universal Copper with exploration efforts focussed on the Houston, B.C. Poplar copper-gold project and through its joint venture partner on the Princeton, B.C. gold project. In addition, the Company's technical team continued to review domestic and international projects with the aim of increasing the Company's copper and gold exposure.Universal also made a significant technical addition with Mr. Wesley Hansen joining the Board of Directors. All Universal employees and contractors are working at home during the current COVID-19 pandemic crisis. The health and safety of our personnel and the wellbeing of the public is always paramount.PoplarThe Company continued to expand the copper deposit footprint with a deep 538 metre drill hole to compliment its 2018 drill program. These holes have confirmed the historic drilling data and expanded the mineralization at depth.19-PC-129 intersected 257.61 metres at 0.488% copper within a 394.82 interval grading 0.413% copper. Complete details of the intersection can be found in the 16-Oct-2019 news release.18-PC-126 intersected 380.97 metres at 0.365% copper, 18-PC-127 intersected 264.86 metres grading 0.421% copper and 18-PC-128 intersected intervals of 151.1 metres at 0.330% copper and 71.0 metres at 0.373% copper. Complete details of the intersection can be found in the 22-Jan-2019 news release.The Company has also completed a Long Wave InfraRed (LWIR) survey over the entire 62,000 hectare claim block and follow up ground surveys on both historic occurrences and newly identified anomalies. Universal's technical team is commencing planning for the 2020 exploration season.PrincetonThrough its joint venture partner Canarc Resources Corp., exploration continued at the Princeton Gold project, where Universal's 2018 exploration returned 219 g/t gold over 0.9 metres and 99.7 g/t gold over 0.9 metres from bedrock trenching of quartz veins. (See UNV 10-Jan-2019 news release).The 2018 property wide airborne geophysical survey identified several linear trends2019 trenching extended the known vein system to 235 metres before the veining trending under thick overburden. Highlights included 44.2 g/t Au over 1.6 metres. The trenching help better define priority targets for drilling.Board of DirectorsMr. Wesley Hanson joined the Board of Directors 01-May-2019. A Professional Geoscientist, Mr. Hanson has over 32 years of domestic and international exploration, mine development and mine operations experience. Highlights include: Director Technical Services for Kinross Gold (2002 to 2006), President and CEO for Noront Resources (2009 to 2012). Mr. Hanson's technical expertise is a key addition to the existing Universal technical team.Clive Massey, Universal Copper's CEO, stated: "As demonstrated, the Company had a very successful 2019 both project wise and corporately. I would like to extend our sincere thanks to our suppliers, contractors, partners and most importantly to our shareholders, for their cooperation and understanding in these unprecedented times. We look forward to getting back in the field and moving the Company forward." The Year in Review:Universal Copper Closes Ft and NFT Private Placements for Proceeds Of $690,325As previously announced in April 15, 2019 news release, the Company closed its private placements of Non Flow Through Units (each "NFT Unit") and Flow Through Units (each a "FT Unit"), receiving subscriptions for aggregate gross proceeds of $690,325.Universal Copper Appoints Wesley Hanson To Its Board of DirectorsThe Company announced on May 1, 2019 news release, the appointment of Wesley Hanson to its Board of Directors. Mr. Hanson has held several senior positions in the mining sector bringing to the Board over 32 years of industry experience in exploration, mine development, mine operations, project evaluation and financing including direct involvement in the engineering, construction and commissioning of numerous mining projects in Canada, the US, Brazil, Chile and Russia. Mr. Hanson is a Professional Geologist and received a Bachelor of Science degree in Geology from Mount Allison University in 1982. The Company intends to further strengthen the Board of Directors, in due course.Universal Commences 2019 Exploration Poplar Copper PropertyThe Company announced on June 11, 2019 news release, the commencement of its 2019 exploration program at its 62,000 hectare Poplar copper property, southwest of Houston, British Columbia. Prior to executing the 2019 drilling program, Universal undertook a ground survey to evaluate several peripheral gold targets identified during historic exploration programs and/or by the 2018 Long Wave InfraRed Survey. The program consisted of prospecting, mapping, soil and rock sampling concentrating in the western portion of the property where last year's forest fire should provide new outcrop exposure in a number of the target areas. The Company developed multiple drill targets as a result of this exploration program.Universal Copper Receives TSX Venture Exchange Approval to Amend Poplar Property AgreementThe Company announced on July 22, 2019 news release, that the Company received TSX Venture Exchange approval to amend the Poplar Property Option to purchase agreement with the Vendor whereby the Company and the Vendor have agreed to extend the time in which the Company has to fulfill its obligations (the "Poplar Agreement"). As a result, the Company has the option to acquire a 100% ownership of 81 mineral titles (the "Poplar Property") from the Vendor whereby Universal Copper can earn a 100% interest, subject to legacy NSR interests ranging from 1% to 2%, in the Poplar Property by completing the share issuances, exploration expenditures and cash payments to the Vendor.Universal Commences 2019 Drilling on Poplar PropertyThe Company announced on August 20, 2019 news release, the commencement of the 2019 drilling campaign at its 62,000 hectare Poplar copper property, southwest of Houston, British Columbia. The purpose of this program will be to expand the known copper de
 But the Prince Prospero was happy and dauntless and sagacious. When his dominions were half depopulated, he summoned to his presence a thousand hale and light-hearted friends from among the knights and dames of his court, and with these retired to the deep seclusion of one of his castellated abbeys  The abbey was amply provisioned. With such precautions the courtiers might bid defiance to contagion. The external world could take care of itself. In the meantime, it was folly to grieve, or to think.

Edgar Allan Poe, The Masque of the Red Death

The devastating impact of the coronavirus pandemic is being felt by billions of people the world over, most acutely in densely populated working class areas and among the poorest layers of society, where social distancing is a physical impossibility and economic desperation makes lack of income life threatening.

For corporations the rising death toll cannot long be allowed to disrupt profits or their usual operations, while parasitic marketeers are increasing their speculative creation of fictitious capital requiring renewed exploitation of the labour power of the working classhowever dangerous the conditions.

Views across the Mediterranean and bay of Cannes from the Alang Alang resort (screenshot from villa-alangalang.com)

Against this polarised world situation, the most grotesque picture emerges whenever an occasional news report shines a light on the behaviour of the super-rich.

Last week, it was reported that French authorities refused to allow ten passengers of a British private jet to disembark at Marseille-Provence airport. The party had planned to travel onwards in three private helicopters to a 50,000-a-night luxury villa in Cannes.

The party comprised three male billionaires in their 40s, three female escorts in their 20s, a secretary, a translator and bodyguards. The trip was organised by a Croatian businessman working in a finance and estate agency in Britain, who reportedly had paid for everything.

Travel into France is still permitted, but the government lockdown includes restrictions on non-essential trips. Travel to a holiday villa for weeks on end is not included.

An aerial view of the Marseille Provence airport in Marseille, southern France. (Boris Horvat, Pool image via AP)

Police turned back the three helicopter pilots, fining them for breach of lockdown regulations. The passengers were not fined because they were not allowed to step onto French soil.

The arrogance and self-entitlement were palpable. The businessman had booked the flight with French authorities in advance, hence the police being in place on their arrival. One of the businessmen told press that they were not holidaymakers but were on their way to complete a deal that would have seen the creation of nearly 1,000 jobs.

The businessman blamed the stupid ignorance in the time of COVID-19. According to one source, the partys leader told police, I have money, lets talk, when they boarded the plane. The party also tried to make use of their connections and made a few phone calls.

Nine of the party returned to Britain. The tenth chartered another plane and flew to Berlin.

The unsuccessful jaunt to the French Riviera points to the phenomenal resources the rich can call upon. A police source told press the businessman was looking forward to the break, intending to lockdown at the villa.

The Alang Alang resort (screenshot from villa-alangalang.com)

Little wonder. The 17,200-square-foot Villa Alang Alang is the most luxurious in the south of France, valued at $70 million and is rented out for 360,000 a month. It has eight bedrooms, a private cinema and nightclub, wine cellar, gym, spa, steam room and indoor pool, an outdoor infinity swimming pool and a jacuzzi. Its multiple terraces overlook the Mediterranean and a private beach. Decorations include a living wall with a tropical water feature and a dinosaur skull overlooking the marbled entrance hall and its three flights of steps.

A dinosaur skull overlooking the marbled entrance hall and its three flights of step (screenshot from villa-alangalang com)

The flight on an Embraer Legacy jet that cost 5,300 an hour and the three helicopters were organised by London-based firm PrivateFly. Such companies internationally are reporting an upsurge in bookings. US-based FlyEliteJets was reporting a nine-fold increase in weekly inquiries by the middle of last month.

Many are chartered to fly the super-rich to private islands, with rent or purchase already a boom industry. Gladden Island, off Belize, for example, is extremely popular because it is totally private and only has one residence. Staff for the property stay on a separate island and must turn on lights remotely to let guests know when they are coming. The island usually costs $2,950 per night for two people, but this is a sellers market.

The wine cellar and cigar room at Alang Alang (screenshot from villa-alangalang com)

The same companyPrivate Islands, Inc.is also handling 700-acre Blue Island in the Bahamas, which has attracted attention because it has a private runway. This has led to an increased interest from those with a private jet and nowhere else to land it. It costs around $70 million to buy.

Private Islands CEO, Chris Krolow, said recently that he had been receiving calls from people on yachts, sailing around islands trying to find a safe place to go and willing to pay a premium.

Private companies hiring luxury yachts are making landing an option for those who can afford it. This is not shipwreck survival stuff. Reporting one seven-week charter by a family, the CEO of Burgess Yachts said the children would be home-schooled aboard and would also receive cooking lessons from the crews chef and be shown the ships engine room. It was unclear who would be doing the home-schooling. British property services companies report an increase in requests for private tutors from parents taking their children out of school, as well as a large demand for places in boarding schools.

Manufacturers of bunkers and bomb shelters in the US are reporting a spike in orders. The Rising S Company has seen a fourfold increase in business on this time last year, with business coming from many countries they had not previously supplied. The average cost of a bunker being considered is $150,000.

Cinema/Games Room at Alang Alang resort (screenshot from villa-alangalang.com)

For the slightly less well-off, who have been unfortunate enough to have contracted COVID-19, the Maldives government has built a coronavirus quarantine resort, including a luxury hotel built in just 10 days on Villingillivaru island, with 30 air-conditioned rooms complete with en-suite medical care.

The rapacious quest for hideouts by the super-rich starkly demonstrates the waste of societal resources under capitalism. London property services company Quintessentially Estates has been inundated with calls from those looking for isolated castles, islands, mansions, yachts and jets. One client was after a new property with a large spa so that his wife would not need to leave the house for her beauty treatments.

A lounge at Alang Alang (screenshot from villa-alangalang com)

Quintessentiallys CEO, Penny Mosgrove, told the Evening Standard that a client with a 35 million mansion in upscale Mayfair was looking for an apartment to rent when he came back to London. He did not want to return to his own mansion in case he infected the premises and was looking at renting a four-bedroom duplex on Grosvenor Square in Mayfair for 18,000 a month.

Despite all this, the elites have continued to socialise within their own circles, at disastrous human cost. Last month, half of Uruguays sudden proliferation of positive cases was traced to a society wedding attended by a fashion designer recently returned from Spain.

In Brazil, the elite Rio de Janeiro Country Club has been heavily hit by the virus. At least 60 of its 850 members tested positive shortly after a dinner given by members of the former royal family. Over half of the guests at the dinner also tested positive. It is difficult not to think of Edgar Allan Poes Masque of the Red Death.

The vast squandering of plundered resources for the benefit of a tiny handful of profiteers stands in stark contrast to what is available to the working class. Public spaces are closed even for essential exercise, workplaces remain open without regard for the welfare or safety of workers, and health care is subordinated to the demands of profit and the market. Every day the pandemic is laying bare the urgent need for a revolutionary overturn to sweep aside this brutal and barbarous system. The vast reserves of wealth must be expropriated by the working class, and a rational and organised deployment of resources put into combating the pandemic and protecting the health and future of the population.
Sir Keir Starmer has called on ministers to publish the UKs exit strategy from the coronavirus lockdown, as he said the severe restrictions have exacerbated existing inequalities across the country.

The Labour leaders intervention comes as the government prepares to sign off an extension to the severe restrictions on British public life at an emergency Cobra committee meeting on Thursday.

It is expected that senior cabinet ministers and officials will be briefed on findings from the governments Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE) into the effectiveness social distancing measures in curbing the spread of covid-19.

In a letter to the foreign secretary Dominic Raab, who is deputising for the Boris Johnson as he recovers from a coronavirus infection at his countryside residence Chequers, Sir Keir says Labour will support the governments extension to the lockdown.

Coronavirus: London on lockdown Show all 29 1 /29 Coronavirus: London on lockdown Coronavirus: London on lockdown A man walks down a deserted Camden High Street Photos Angela Christofilou Coronavirus: London on lockdown Goodge Street Station is one of the many stations closed to help reduce the spread Angela Christofilou Coronavirus: London on lockdown An empty street in the heart of Chinatown Angela Christofilou Coronavirus: London on lockdown People in masks in Chinatown a day after the lockdown Angela Christofilou Coronavirus: London on lockdown A near-empty Piccadilly Circus during the first week of lockdown Angela Christofilou Coronavirus: London on lockdown Sonja, my neighbour, who I photographed while taking a short walk. It was nice to briefly chat even from a distance Angela Christofilou Coronavirus: London on lockdown A couple sit on the empty steps of the statue Eros in Piccadilly Circus Angela Christofilou Coronavirus: London on lockdown Making sure I stay two-meters apart  DArblay Street, Soho Angela Christofilou Coronavirus: London on lockdown A mannequin behind a shop window. UK stores have closed until further notice Angela Christofilou Coronavirus: London on lockdown A notice displayed on a shop window in Camden Angela Christofilou Coronavirus: London on lockdown As part of the lockdown, all non-essential shops have been ordered to close.Image from Camden High Street Angela Christofilou Coronavirus: London on lockdown A skateboarder wearing a mask utilises his exercise allowance in the Camden area Angela Christofilou Coronavirus: London on lockdown Communities have been coming together in a time of need Angela Christofilou Coronavirus: London on lockdown A woman stands alone in a deserted Oxford Street. Up until a few weeks ago, on average, half a million people visited the street per day Angela Christofilou Coronavirus: London on lockdown A couple walk hand in hand down a street in Soho, a day before the stricter lockdown was announced Angela Christofilou Coronavirus: London on lockdown During the first week of March, shoppers focused on stockpiling necessities ahead of a countrywide lockdown Angela Christofilou Coronavirus: London on lockdown Many supermarkers are operating a queuing system to make sure only a limited amount of customers are allowed in at anyone time Angela Christofilou Coronavirus: London on lockdown Stay Safe  Curzon cinemas are temporarily closed under the new measures Angela Christofilou Coronavirus: London on lockdown Pubs, restaurants and bars were ordered to shut as part of the lockdown Angela Christofilou Coronavirus: London on lockdown Camden High Street There are fears that coronavirus could lead to permanent closure of struggling shops Angela Christofilou Coronavirus: London on lockdown Camden Town is eerily silent on a normal working day Angela Christofilou Coronavirus: London on lockdown Shops and supermarkets ran out of hand sanitisers in the first week of the lockdown. As we approach the end of the second week most shops now have started to stock up Angela Christofilou Coronavirus: London on lockdown Empty streets around Soho Angela Christofilou Coronavirus: London on lockdown A noticeboard on Camden High Street urges the public to stay at home Angela Christofilou Coronavirus: London on lockdown Camden High Street, one of Londons busiest tourist streets turns quiet Angela Christofilou Coronavirus: London on lockdown Thriller Live confirmed its West End run ended in the wake of the coronavirus outbreak Angela Christofilou Coronavirus: London on lockdown Empty and eerie Soho streets after stricter rules on social distancing announced Angela Christofilou Coronavirus: London on lockdown A woman pauses for a cigarette on Hanway Street, behind Tottenham Court Road Angela Christofilou Coronavirus: London on lockdown A man steps outside onto Hanway Street, that sits behind what is usually a bustling retail hub Angela Christofilou

But, he added: The question for Thursday therefore is no longer about whether the lockdown should be extended, but about what the governments position is on how and when it can be eased in due course and on what criteria that decision will be taken.

Ministers have argued that now is not the time to talk about this. I profoundly disagree. Overcoming this crisis requires taking the British public with you. Millions of people have played their part and exceeded government assumptions about their willingness to make sacrifices and to stay at home in the national interest.

In return, the government needs to be open and transparent with the public about how it believes the lockdown will ease and eventually end, how this decision will be informed and what measures are being put in place to plan for this eventuality.

Sir Keir also warned the silent pressures on communities across the UK cannot be underestimated, and said to maintain morale and hope the public must be given a sense of what comes next.

Many will be struggling with their mental health as well as other health conditions that may not receive the attention they normally would without the virus, he added. This lockdown is not affecting people equally. In fact, it has exacerbated existing inequalities in our country.

A family living in an overcrowded flat will have particular challenges. And it is hard to imagine the daily horror of someone trapped in a home with his or her abuser. The government has a duty to do what it can to alleviate these pressures on people.

A government source responded: "Our strategy is focused on saving lives. We have been clear that all decisions will be guided by the scientific advice and data. Talk of an exit strategy before we have reached the peak risks confusing the critical message that people need to stay at home in order to protect our NHS and save lives."
Thousands of British children are going hungry because the French firm behind the government's free school meals scheme can't supply enough food vouchers.

Parents have been unable to claim the coupons they need to buy groceries during the coronavirus lockdown because the private company paid to run it couldn't deal with a deluge of inquiries.

Edenred, which made more than 270 million profit last year, has been inundated with calls from schools seeking assistance, with some teachers racking up substantial bills in the process.

Pupils entitled to free school meals, pictured, should receive vouchers worth 15 per week

Now the Government is under pressure to ditch the firm and fund schools directly to use locally approved voucher schemes instead.

Critics claim the politician's 'panicked' U-turn on funding vouchers over Easter is to blame for overloading the national system.

Teachers and parents today slammed the current situation as 'farcical' after being told not to place anymore orders for the coupons until the swamped system can cope.

Around 1.3million children in England are entitled to free school meal supermarket vouchers - equivalent to 15 per child per week - which can be spent at any major supermarket. They should be available until schools reopen.

With children not at school the onus has been put on parents to claim their coupons, but schools have been left trying to help many families facing food shortages.

Reports of delays in the issuing of the vouchers ordered through the scheme have been increasing during the lockdown.

Edenred's website went 'offline' over the Easter weekend so it could be upgraded to meet overwhelming demand as families living in poverty were left high and dry.

Now in an email to schools the firm has now urged those without an 'immediate requirement' to stop visiting the site, and only submit orders four days before they are needed.

Up until recently William Rhodes Primary School in Chesterfield, Derbys, had its own voucher scheme for the more than half of its pupils who are on free school meals.

But they switched to the national scheme as it meant they no longer had to fund the voucher and then claim the money back.

Headteacher Rachel Purvis told Schools Week: 'It's just been a fiasco. I've managed to get one of three batches through since ordering on April 2.'

The school had to help parents set up email addresses, as many didn't have them because of lack of internet access. But she said the delay and problems with orders has been 'farcical'.

'We've just had to keep saying to parents 'They will be coming through at any moment'. You wouldn't believe the time we've spent on this. It's ridiculous,' she said.

Many other school leaders have taken to social media to highlight their frustration at the failing system.

Matter came to a head at the weekend when people visiting the website to check on delayed orders were greeted with a holding page saying it was 'temporarily offline' so the system could be upgraded.

In an email sent to schools the company said 'higher than anticipated' orders placed last week had an 'impact on the performance and experience'.

Edenred said its team had been working 'day and night' through the Easter weekend to process orders and develop system capability.

'If we can balance the load on the system, we can provide a consistent and constant flow of essential support through to families,' the email, sent on behalf of the DfE, read.

But the firm's request for people to stop checking the website and hold off on orders has been met with further outrage.

Julie Mitchell, a school business leader, tweeted: 'I've been thrown out a number of times and have spent the rest of the time waiting for the website to respond. Shocking, shocking service that impacts on some of the most vulnerable families.'

Another headteacher, who asked not to be named, said: 'It might work in Whitehall, but it doesn't work when you get to the check-out at Morrisons.'

One primary school head from Merseyside said: 'Lots of parents are struggling to get a voucher, some might not have a computer or even an email address.

'We are trying to help overcome those obstacles, but we are talking about dozens and dozens of people.

'Then if they do get a code for a voucher they have to print it off before they can take it to the shops. The system just isn't working.'

The DfE has now agreed schools can now place orders for up to four weeks of vouchers at a time, as well as ordering combined vouchers for children in the same household.

Edenred said this will 'reduce the administrative burden on schools and reduce the volume of visitors' meaning a 'significant difference to your experience'.

The Institute of School Business Leadership is lobbying for the Government to reimburse all schools who have instead set up their own schemes.

The Government says it has encouraged schools to work with catering suppliers and see if free meals can be delivered or collected, or if not possible, headteachers can decide what is best for families and can claim reimbursed costs for local voucher schemes.

Despite this, SBL Chair Matthew Clements-Wheeler said it was time for the DfE to 'step up', adding: 'The #FSMvoucherfarce has gone on long enough. Tell schools and trusts you will fund locally arranged schemes.'

Free school meals campaigner Andy Jolley said the 'panicked inclusion' of funding vouchers of the Easter holidays would 'stress any system, never mind a newly developed one'.

'I believe Edenred are doing everything they can in the circumstances, but it's obvious they are struggling under the pressure. DfE need to recognise this and fully support schools who use alternative systems,' he said.

'That means 15 for schools doing their own catering or food parcels and 15 for those using alternative voucher providers.'

The Department for Education previously said staff were working 'tirelessly' with Edenred to resolve outstanding technical problems.

Rachel Purvis said her school had run up a 64 bill, with other schools reporting similar hefty fees.

Asked about Edenred she said: 'I don't know how they got the contract, it seems extraordinary,' she added.

She said that with local services such as foodbanks and church food donations being on hand for families to access, she was 'confident people aren't going without food, but not thanks to Edenred'.

One single mother, with a five-year-old and seven-year-old at home in Devon, said she would normally each receive five free school meals a week at their primary school.

The mother, who does not want to be identified, said she had not received vouchers for this week and last.

The mother, who cannot work through disability, said her children's school provided the vouchers for the first couple of weeks after all pupils in the country were sent home.

She added that she was surprised that the Government took the unusual step of funding the scheme through the two-week holidays.

'I cannot get in touch with Edenred, I have had to go through the school. The school have been very helpful and have said there is a nationwide problem,' she said.

'I am struggling to feed my children. The school my children attend has been amazing, making other provision out of its own pocket to enable the families who are struggling.

'There must be hundreds of other single parents like me across the country struggling.'

The woman said that the cost of providing meals put a big dent in her monthly benefits of 1,200 once expenses such as rent had been paid.

The mother added: 'The school, I cannot fault them, but with the Government's backing, Edenred should be able to cope. They should expect the increase in traffic of people using the scheme.'

Children qualify for the scheme if their parents receive Universal Credit, provided the annual net earned income isn't above 7,400, Income Support, Income based Employment and Support Allowance, Income based Job Seekers Allowance or Child Tax Credit.

A spokesperson for Edenred said: 'In the two weeks since launching the new scheme to deliver food vouchers for the 1.3m children eligible for free school meals on behalf of the Department for Education, thousands of schools have been registered successfully, placing orders to deliver vouchers to the families that need them.

'We have delivered hundreds of thousands of codes those families since April 1.

'We have also made changes to the system which mean that, every day, average waiting times on the site are falling significantly and eVouchers are being fulfilled and delivered within 24 hours.

'We continue to make daily improvements to reduce the impact of surges in demand which may increase these times and we are listening to feedback to improve the process for schools so that families receive their vouchers as quickly as possible.

'We have shared with schools how we are making the ordering process simpler and will continue to do so.

'We would like to thank every parent, family and school for their patience and reassure them that the changes we have made are already making the scheme easier and faster to use.

'Over the past weeks our sole focus has been the success of the scheme, to which we have allocated every necessary resource to ensure every family and carer will receive their eGift cards.'

A Department for Education spokesperson said: 'We know that the free school meal voucher system is delivering for thousands of schools, while many others have successfully put in place their own arrangements.

'We continue to work closely with our supplier to resolve any outstanding technical issues quickly and we thank schools using the system for their patience while it is upgraded to meet increased demand.

'We are providing additional funding to schools, on top of existing budgets, to cover unavoidable costs incurred due to the coronavirus outbreak that cannot be met from their existing resources  including free school meal costs which are not covered by the national voucher system.'
Ankara delays discharge of tens of thousands of soldiers for a month to stave off heavy travelling across country.

Turkey has extended mandatory military service for its male citizens by at least one month, in a move aimed at preventing the further spread of the coronavirus during the discharge period characterised by the mass movement of people.

Following a meeting with military commanders, Defence Minister Hulusi Akar said in a statement late on Tuesday that the years first conscription period, due to take place in April, had also been postponed.

With a few exceptions, all Turkish men have to complete six months of military service after they turn 18. The compulsory time was reduced from 12 months when a new law came into effect in June last year.

The men affected by the ministrys decision had started their duty in November 2019 and were due to be discharged in April.

Despite the measures we have taken, we see that mustering out and conscription [of the military personnel] constitute a risk for our soldiers, society and Turkish Armed Forces, Akar said.

According to the defence ministry, some 55,000 citizens were foreseen to be conscripted in April, while 66,000 others were due to complete their service.

Considering that some relatives and friends would have accompanied both groups of people, as many as 500,000 individuals might have moved between provinces during the process, Akar said in his statement.

As of Wednesday, the number of confirmed coronavirus cases in Turkey was 69,392, including 1,518 deaths. A total of 5,674 people have recovered so far from COVID-19, the highly infectious respiratory disease caused by the new coronavirus.

The spread of the disease has accelerated in recent days, with more than 4,000 new cases and 100 deaths announced daily.

Meanwhile, the Turkish military has reported 223 coronavirus cases and one death to date.

Dr Esin Alavut, a specialist family practitioner based in Mersin, said that any measure that prevents travel and interaction between people is beneficial for the containment of the virus.

It might be very hard to quarantine and monitor that many people at their brigades before their military service ends, she told Al Jazeera.

And self-quarantine might not be possible in many crowded homes they return to, Alavut added.

Social media debate

The defence ministrys announcement sparked debate on social media, with some of those currently serving and their families criticising the move.

The decision will affect the psychology of thousands of soldiers. Ending of services and conscriptions should continue together with 14-day quarantines, regular checks of fever and other measures taken by the government, a Twitter user said.

Others asked the government to use its own means to gradually transport soldiers back to their locales, without the involvement of families in the process.

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Our government is strong enough to deliver our soldiers to their home without the involvement of the families. Send them home. We will not allow them to go outside, said a Twitter user named Sinem Merve Sezdi.

I do not want to believe a state is able to shift its citizens back to their homeland from various parts of the world, but cannot transport 100,000 soldiers for conscription and end of duty, Zafer Tansoy tweeted, referring to the government-facilitated return of Turkish citizens from abroad in the early days of the coronavirus pandemic.

Many others criticised the fact that defence ministrys decision came hours after the government passed a bill to temporarily free some 45,000 inmates as a precaution measure to prevent the spread of the coronavirus in prisons.

The measure was passed on Tuesday by the parliamentary majority enjoyed by the ruling Justice and Development Party.

Turkey has gradually stepped up its measures against the pandemic after reporting its first case in mid-March.

Last week, the interior ministry imposed a two-day curfew in 31 provinces in Turkey, which is scheduled to be imposed again this weekend. The government has also ordered a general lockdown for those aged over 65 and has facilitated the free distribution of face masks.
Ocean Bunkering Services (Pte.) Ltd. is the bunkering arm of Hin Leong Group,. (SOURCE: Hin Leong)

By Alfred Cang, Joyce Koh and Chanyaporn Chanjaroen

(Bloomberg) -- Banks have a combined exposure of at least US$3 billion to Singapores Hin Leong Trading (Pte.) Ltd. and are in talks with the privately-held oil trader over how to shore up its finances amid concerns over its liquidity, according to people with knowledge of the matter.

The group of lenders including HSBC Holdings Plc, DBS Group Holdings Ltd. and Oversea-Chinese Banking Corp., held a virtual meeting with the trader and its advisers on Tuesday, according to the people, who asked not to be identified because theyre not authorised to speak publicly. As many as 10 banks are involved, according to one of the people. HSBC has the biggest exposure at about US$600 million, they said.

Singapores closely-knit oil trading community is gripped by speculation over the predicament of one of its biggest players and the potentially far-reaching impact its difficulties could have on the market and trading partners. Before crudes spectacular crash, it would have been almost unfathomable that a company of Hin Leongs status could be in such a position.

Bloomberg reported last week that some banks wouldnt issue new letters of credit to the trader because of concern over its ability to repay the short-term debt. Nobody responded to calls or emails to the company seeking comment. Spokespeople for HSBC, OCBC and DBS declined to comment.

Founded by legendary self-made Chinese tycoon Lim Oon Kuin, Hin Leong could be the latest casualty of the collapse in oil prices and a heightened caution among lenders to finance commodity trades.

The company was established in 1963 and has grown into one of Asias largest suppliers of ship fuel, or bunkers. OK Lim, as the founder is known, built the company from a one-man-one-truck oil dealer to a regional powerhouse with assets including 130 vessels and businesses across oil trading, terminal and storage, bunker supply and lubricants manufacturing, according to its website.

Story continues

The companys bunkering arm, Ocean Bunkering Services (Pte.) Ltd., was ranked the third-largest shipping fuel supplier in Singapore last year, according to the city-states Maritime and Port Authority. Singapore is the worlds biggest shipping fuel bunkering hub.

Letters of credit are a critical financial lifeline for commodity traders, used as way of financing short-term trade. A bank issues the so-called L/C on behalf of the buyer as a guarantee of payment to the seller. Once the goods have exchanged hands, the buyer repays the lender.

 2020 Bloomberg L.P.
Dear Gov. Gretchen Whitmer,

On behalf of Disability Network of Mid-Michigan, thank you for your leadership and quick action in addressing the needs of Michigan residents in response to the COVID-19 public health crisis. We appreciate the attention that you have given to disability issues up to this point, including providing ASL interpreters for news conferences, reaching out to the public in multiple ways to accommodate as many as possible, and the openness of leadership to respond to questions and concerns.

In the face of a public health crisis, where projections show the need for intensive medical care for individuals made ill by COVID-19 may exceed the resources of the healthcare system, the inclination of providers may be to take "rationing" measures or rather, make decisions about who should or should not receive care. While COVID-19 poses a serious challenge to the capacity and resources of our healthcare system, we at Disability Network of Mid-Michigan believe that longstanding federal and state nondiscrimination laws, such as the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) and Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act, prohibit such rationing measures when they result in the denial of care on the basis of disability. In addition, the federal Office of Civil Rights recently published a bulletin on civil rights laws and HIPAA flexibilities that apply during the COVID-19 emergency.

Due to existing institutional biases, people with disabilities often face challenges connecting to adequate medical care. Now, perhaps more than ever, it is vital that healthcare providers and lawmakers be reminded that people with disabilities have the same right to care and the same right to be free from discrimination as everyone else. DNMM strongly believes the following to be true and universal:

1) Providers cannot deny or limit care to people because of their disability

2) Providers cannot deny or limit care based on the fact that a person may have a lower likelihood of survival or require more intensive care

3) Providers must not rely on quality of life judgments when deciding whether to deny or limit treatment

4) Providers cannot deny or limit treatment to a person with a disability because they may require reasonable accommodations

We absolutely understand this public health crisis has placed considerable strain on our healthcare providers and first responders. We applaud their efforts as they represent the front line of defense against the further spread of the COVID-19 virus. However, when we see leaked memoranda from Henry Ford hospital discussing "care-rationing" and other discriminatory practices, we feel compelled to respond on behalf of the people we serve, their families, and all vulnerable Michigan residents who may be subject to such discrimination.

We thank you and your administration for the many steps you have taken to address this critical issue. All Michigan residents must be able to access healthcare interventions in a timely way. We urge you to issue a directive to all healthcare providers prohibiting discrimination against people with disabilities in offering COVID-19 treatment, so that there is no rationing of care or otherwise treating the lives of people with disabilities, the elderly, and the poor as having lesser value than others, and prohibiting the unnecessary placement of people with disabilities in nursing facilities and other institutions.

We are all in this together. And we all deserve equal access to care should it be needed.

If I can be of assistance with this or any other disability-related matter, please do not hesitate to contact me at 1-800-782-4160. Thank you again for your time and your efforts.

Kelly L. PeLong is the executive director of Disability Network of Mid-Michigan.
PITTSBURGH, Pa., April 14, 2020 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- United States Steel Corporation (NYSE: X) today announced that its Annual Meeting of Stockholders will be held in a virtual meeting webcast format. Due to the public health impact of the coronavirus pandemic (COVID-19) and to protect the well-being of its employees, stockholders and other stakeholders, the location of the annual meeting has been changed to a virtual format only.



As previously announced, the annual meeting will be held on Tuesday, April 28, 2020 at 8:00 a.m., Eastern Time. Online access to the meeting will begin at 7:45 a.m. Eastern Time. Stockholders will not be able to attend the annual meeting in person.

U. S. Steel stockholders, as of the close of business on March 2, 2020 (the record date for the annual meeting), are entitled to join the live virtual meeting. To attend, participate in and/or vote at the virtual Annual Meeting at www.virtualshareholdermeeting.com/X2020 , stockholders must enter the 16-digit control number found on their proxy card or voting instruction form previously distributed.

For additional information regarding how stockholders may attend, participate in and/or vote at the virtual Annual Meeting, please refer to the Companys supplemental proxy materials filed today with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

The proxy card included with the proxy materials previously distributed will not be updated to reflect the change in location and may continue to be used to vote your shares in connection with the annual meeting.

U. S. Steel urges all stockholders to vote and submit their proxy in advance of the meeting by one of the methods described in the proxy materials for the Annual Meeting.

United States Steel Corporation, headquartered in Pittsburgh, Pa., is a leading integrated steel producer and Fortune 250 company with major operations in the United States and Central Europe. For more information about U. S. Steel, please visit www.ussteel.com .
Advertisement

A paradise estate in New Zealand used to shoot Hollywood blockbusters has sold for almost 10 million - with the proviso that the former owners' 14-year-old dog can live out the rest of his days there.

The sprawling 650-acre Arcadia estate on the country's South Island, complete with dazzling blue lakes, lush green pastures and towering mountains, had been in the same family for 80 years.

It was sold on the basis that 14-year-old huntaway Bo, a working breed favoured by high-country farmers, would be allowed to live the rest of his life on the land, The Times said.

Property seller James Veint, 83, is a father of five and decided to put the estate on the market because he felt it would not be fair to give or sell the estate to just one of his children

The new owner, believed to be local, has agreed that Bo (pictured above with seller Jim Veint) will be allowed to continue living on the estate

The estate has been sold to an unnamed local person, with Veint resistant to sell to an international buyer. He said in recent years many local estates had been bought by celebrities or wealthy business owners

The property's real estate listing said it came complete with close to a mile of waterfront and described it as having 'one of the most beautiful farms on earth'

Property seller Jim Veint, 83, said: 'I could never take him away from here now'.

It is no surprise that the estate is a regular first pick as a film location, with an estimated 17 blockbusters having been shot there.

It was first used to shoot the short film J.D. Goes Hunting in 1958 and has become an industry favourite.

The Arcadia estate is a regular first pick for both advert and film locations

The estate was used to represent JRR Tolkien's imagined land of Middle-Earth in Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings trilogy.

Jackson featured the streams flowing through the giant beech trees to show Lothlorien, with the same woodlands later used in Wolverine starring Hugh Jackman, while the wider escape was a backdrop for shooting Narnia.

The estate was used as a backdrop for much of the filming in Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings trilogy. Above, towering mountains in the The Two Towers (2002) stand tall over the cast

Sir Ian McKellen, pictured above as Gandalf in The Fellowship of the Ring (2001) has previously described the Arcadia Estate as his favourite place on earth

It is unclear whether the new owner will still allow directors to shoot on the estate. Above, Hugh Jackman is pictured as Wolverine, just one of many blockbusters to have filmed across its 650 acres

The snow-topped mountains - featured in many a Hollywood blockbuster - can be seen here from as the TSS Earnslaw lship eaves the Queenstown dock

The sprawling estate's high country farm was also used as a perfect backdrop to the mystical fantasy land of Narnia

It was once described by Sir Ian McKellen, who played Gandalf in the Lord of the Rings trilogy, as his favourite place on earth.

And the property has a history as tragically romantic as one of the many films it's featured in.

The estate was named Arcadia - the Greek word for paradise - in the late 19th century by Cambridge graduate and rowing champion Joseph Cyprian Fenn.

Fenn had fled to New Zealand after his fiancee fell in love with his vicar father. Legend has it that he kept the property for 50 years, throwing away any letters, unopened, that arrived from England.

Joseph Fenn, pictured above, named the property Arcadia - the Greek word for Paradise - after fleeing to New Zealand when his fiancee deserted him for his vicar father. Property seller James Veint says he is still in possession of Fenn's rowing medals

The property was later sold to Mr Veint's parents after the Second World War, and he told Television New Zealand that 'I used to think I was the luckiest kid on earth living here and I have been here virtually ever since'.

Mr Veint spent his life raising prize-winning Simmental cattle on the property, turning down a multitude of offers from prospective buyers over the years.

He had never thought of retiring earlier because 'things werent difficult and it was a pleasure to get up in the morning and keep going as long as I could', The Times reported.

As well as being a prime film shooting location, the estate was used as a backdrop to Taylor Swift's music video for her hit song Out of the Woods

Would-be buyers have included the likes of Red Bull owners, actor and model Fabio as well as many film stars over the years but Mr Veint had always resisted selling the property, which is close to Glenorchy and backs on to Mount Aspiring National Park.

The real estate listing said Arcadia Station comes with 'one of the most beautiful farms on earth' as well as nearly a mile of water front.

Mr Veint, a father of five, finally decided to sell up after his partner suffered a stroke last year so that they could relocate closer to medical facilities.

He said: 'I couldnt give it to one child or sell it to one child' and put it on the market in November.

The estate has been owned by James Veint's family for 80 years. Mr Veint has previously said that when growing up 'I used to think I was the luckiest kid on earth living here'

Above, The Lord of The Rings: The Two Towers. Director Peter Jackson used the streams flowing through the giant beech trees to show Lothlorien

Veint did not want to sell to a foreign buyer because he said in recent years many local estates had been bought by celebrities or wealthy business owners.

The new owner, who has not been named, is believed to be local.

In 2017, the Queenstown government - the nearest large town to Arcadia - tightened restrictions on international buyers in a bid to halt soaring property prices.
Key maps and charts explaining how the respiratory virus has spread around the world and how it is being dealt with.

There are now more than two million confirmed cases of coronavirus in 185 countries and at least 130,000 people have died.

The United States has more than three times as many confirmed cases as any other country.

This series of maps and charts tracks the spread of the virus since it emerged in China in December last year.

How many deaths and recoveries have there been?

The virus is spreading rapidly in many countries and the death toll is still climbing - but the majority of people are recovering from the infection.

The US has by far the largest number of cases with some 613,000 confirmed infections, according to figures collated by Johns Hopkins University. This is more than seven times the number reported by China.

The US also has the world's highest death toll with more than 26,000 fatalities including almost 8,000 in New York City alone.

Italy - the worst hit European country - has recorded more than 21,000 deaths while the UK, Spain and France have each suffered more than 10,000.

China's official death toll from the outbreak is just over 3,300 from some 83,000 confirmed cases. Critics of the Chinese government have questioned whether the country's official numbers can be trusted.

Coronavirus global cases, 15 April 2020

This information is regularly updated but may not reflect the latest totals for each country.

Cases Deaths USA 612,014 26,891 Spain 177,633 18,579 Italy 165,155 21,645 Germany 133,154 3,592 France 130,253 15,729 UK 98,476 12,868 China 83,356 3,346 Iran 76,389 4,777 Turkey 69,392 1,518 Belgium 33,573 4,440 Netherlands 28,156 3,134 Canada 27,063 903 Switzerland 26,336 1,226 Brazil 26,113 1,590 Russia 24,490 198 Portugal 18,091 599 Austria 14,325 393 India 12,320 405 Israel 12,200 126 Sweden 11,927 1,203 Ireland 11,479 406 South Korea 10,591 225 Peru 10,303 230 Chile 8,273 94 Japan 8,100 146 Ecuador 7,858 388 Poland 7,582 286 Romania 7,216 362 Norway 6,740 145 Denmark 6,681 309 Australia 6,447 63 Czech Republic 6,216 166 Pakistan 5,988 107 Saudi Arabia 5,862 79 Philippines 5,453 349 Mexico 5,399 406 Indonesia 5,136 469 Malaysia 5,072 83 United Arab Emirates 4,933 28 Serbia 4,873 99 Ukraine 3,764 108 Belarus 3,728 36 Qatar 3,711 7 Singapore 3,699 10 Dominican Republic 3,614 189 Panama 3,574 95 Luxembourg 3,373 69 Finland 3,237 72 Colombia 2,979 127 Thailand 2,643 43 South Africa 2,506 34 Argentina 2,443 109 Egypt 2,350 178 Greece 2,192 102 Algeria 2,160 336 Moldova 2,049 46 Morocco 1,988 127 Croatia 1,741 34 Iceland 1,727 8 Bahrain 1,671 7 Hungary 1,579 134 Iraq 1,415 79 Kuwait 1,405 3 Estonia 1,400 35 New Zealand 1,386 9 Kazakhstan 1,295 16 Uzbekistan 1,275 4 Azerbaijan 1,253 13 Slovenia 1,248 61 Bangladesh 1,231 50 Armenia 1,111 17 Bosnia and Herzegovina 1,110 41 Lithuania 1,091 30 North Macedonia 974 45 Puerto Rico 974 51 Oman 910 4 Slovakia 863 6 Cameroon 848 17 Cuba 814 24 Afghanistan 784 25 Tunisia 747 34 Bulgaria 747 36 Cyprus 715 12 Diamond Princess cruise ship 712 12 Andorra 673 33 Latvia 666 5 Lebanon 658 21 Ivory Coast 638 6 Ghana 636 8 Costa Rica 618 3 Niger 570 14 Burkina Faso 528 30 Albania 494 25 Uruguay 492 8 Kyrgyzstan 449 5 Djibouti 435 2 Honduras 419 31 Guinea 404 1 Malta 399 3 Jordan 397 7 Bolivia 397 28 Taiwan 395 6 Reunion 391 Kosovo 387 8 Nigeria 373 11 San Marino 372 36 Mauritius 324 9 Senegal 314 2 Palestinian Territories 308 2 Georgia 306 3 Montenegro 288 4 Vietnam 267 Isle of Man 256 4 DR Congo 254 21 Sri Lanka 237 7 Guernsey 228 8 Kenya 225 10 Jersey 217 6 Mayotte 217 3 Venezuela 197 9 Faroe Islands 184 Guatemala 180 5 Paraguay 161 8 El Salvador 159 6 Martinique 158 8 Mali 148 13 Guadeloupe 145 8 Brunei 136 1 Guam 135 5 Rwanda 134 Gibraltar 129 Cambodia 122 Congo 117 5 Trinidad and Tobago 114 8 Madagascar 110 Jamaica 105 5 Monaco 93 1 Aruba 92 1 Tanzania 88 4 French Guiana 86 Ethiopia 85 3 Togo 81 3 Gabon 80 1 Liechtenstein 79 1 Myanmar 74 4 Barbados 73 5 Somalia 60 2 Liberia 59 6 Bermuda 57 5 Cape Verde 56 1 Uganda 55 French Polynesia 55 Cayman Islands 54 1 Sint Maarten 52 9 United States Virgin Islands 51 1 Equatorial Guinea 51 Bahamas 49 8 Guyana 48 6 Zambia 48 2 Guinea-Bissau 43 Haiti 40 3 Saint Martin 35 2 Benin 35 1 Libya 35 1 Eritrea 35 Sudan 32 5 Mongolia 30 Mozambique 29 Syria 29 2 Antigua and Barbuda 23 2 Chad 23 Maldives 21 Angola 19 2 Laos 19 Belize 18 2 New Caledonia 18 Zimbabwe 18 3 Namibia 16 Dominica 16 Nepal 16 Fiji 16 Malawi 16 2 Saint Lucia 15 Eswatini 15 Curacao 14 1 Saint Kitts and Nevis 14 Grenada 14 Northern Mariana Islands 13 2 Botswana 13 1 Sierra Leone 13 St Vincent and the Grenadines 12 Seychelles 11 Montserrat 11 Falkland Islands 11 Central African Republic 11 Greenland 11 Suriname 10 1 Turks and Caicos Islands 10 1 Gambia 9 1 Nicaragua 9 1 MS Zaandam cruise ship 9 2 Timor-Leste 8 Vatican 8 Mauritania 7 1 Saint Barthelemy 6 Western Sahara 6 Burundi 5 1 Bhutan 5 Sao Tome and Principe 4 South Sudan 4 British Virgin Islands 3 Anguilla 3 Papua New Guinea 2 Yemen 1 Saint Pierre and Miquelon 1

Source: Johns Hopkins University, national public health agencies. France now includes cases confirmed and suspected in retirement and nursing homes. Last updated on 15 April 2020, 19:00 BST.

The outbreak was declared a global pandemic by the World Health Organization (WHO) on 11 March. This is when an infectious disease is passing easily from person to person in many parts of the world at the same time.

The WHO said it took more than three months to reach the first 100,000 confirmed cases worldwide, but it took less than a week for the number to double from 500,000 to a million. It then took seven days to reach 1.5 million.

The true figure for the number of people with coronavirus is thought to be much higher as many of those with milder symptoms have not been tested and counted.

China has now lifted many of the stringent measures it took to bring the disease under control. Last week, authorities eased travel restrictions in Wuhan, the city where the outbreak began in late 2019.

South Korea where a major outbreak began in February has also seen the number of new cases fall in recent weeks.

Governments across the world have halted flights, locked down towns and cities and urged people to stay at home.

Europe still struggling - but signs of hope?

European countries have seen steep rises in cases and deaths, but slowing infection rates are raising hopes that strict social distancing measures are curbing the spread of the virus.

Italy has the highest toll outside the US, with more than 21,000 deaths so far, but recent data shows the infection rate is slowing.

The country was the first in Europe to record a large number of deaths and has been in lockdown since 9 March, though some quarantine measures are now starting to be relaxed.

Spain - which has more than 18,000 deaths - has also started to ease lockdown measures this week amid signs that the rate of new infections had been falling.

However new cases rose by more than 5,000 on Wednesday - the highest increase in five days - and the EU has warned member states to be cautious when easing restrictions.

In the UK, there have been more than 98,000 confirmed cases and more than 12,000 deaths.

Like Spain, deaths in the UK grew rapidly at first, doubling faster than every two days. That rate of increase has now slowed but the government has not yet indicated that restrictions are about to be lifted.

Germany has said it will start easing its lockdown from 20 April, with smaller shops allowed to re-open and schools to follow gradually from 4 May.

The German government warned on Wednesday that its economy - Europe's largest - could contract by almost 10% as a result of the crisis.

The global economy faces the worst recession since the Great Depression of the 1930s, the International Monetary Fund has said.

New York is epicentre of US outbreak

With more than 600,000 cases, the US has the highest number of confirmed infections in the world. The number of deaths now stands at more than 26,000, and the rate is doubling about every three days at present.

The state of New York has more cases than anywhere else in the world, and there have been almost 8,000 deaths in New York City alone.

Despite these grim statistics, New York State Governor Andrew Cuomo says cases are starting to level off as the effect of social-distancing measures begins to be seen.

Nearly all Americans are now living under some form of lockdown as states increase efforts to curb the outbreak.

Federal coronavirus guidelines, which include social distancing, will be in place across the country until at least 30 April.

The outbreak is having a major economic impact, with figures showing the number of people making a new claim for unemployment benefits surging to a record high of more than 6.6 million in the week ending 4 April. In all, roughly 16 million Americans have lost their jobs since states began to bring in lockdown measures.

Which countries are on lockdown?

The majority of countries in Europe now have strict lockdowns in place, with many only allowing citizens to leave their homes to buy essential items or exercise. In Paris, authorities banned exercise during the day to reduce the number of people out on the streets.

India told the country's 1.3 billion residents to stay at home last month and there are similar restrictions on movement and social contact across the world in countries like Argentina, New Zealand, Saudi Arabia and South Africa.

Data on planned journeys in major cities, from the travel app Citymapper, shows how people in places like London, Madrid, Istanbul and New York are now moving around far less than they were a few weeks ago.

The data shows that while Milan in northern Italy has been locked down for several weeks now, many other cities have been restricting movement for a much shorter period.

While movement is also down in the South Korean capital Seoul, the city hasn't ground to a halt like European capitals despite facing huge numbers of coronavirus cases - a sign of the country's decision to focus on widespread testing and contact tracing rather than imposing a lockdown.

In Russia, the Kremlin had insisted that there was "de facto no epidemic" in the country but President Putin has urged people to stay at home, which explains the significant drop in movement in Moscow. BBC
Bernie Sanders said Tuesday that it would be 'irresponsible' for his loyalists not to support Joe Biden, warning that progressives who 'sit on their hands' in the months ahead would simply enable President Donald Trump's reelection.

And lest there be any question, the 78-year-old Vermont senator confirmed that 'it's probably a very fair assumption' that he would not run for president again. He added, with a laugh: 'One can't predict the future.'

Sanders, who suspended his presidential bid last week, spoke at length about his decision to endorse Biden, his political future and the urgent need to unify the Democratic Party during an interview with The Associated Press.

Endorsement: Bernie Sanders endorsed Joe Biden on Monday saying that he is supporting the Democratic presumptive candidate - and is now calling for his supporters to do the same

He railed against the Republican president but also offered pointed criticism at his own supporters who have so far resisted his vow to do whatever it takes to help Biden win the presidency.

He seemed to distance himself from his campaign's former national press secretary, Briahna Joy Gray, when asked about her recent statement on social media refusing to endorse Biden.

'She is my former press secretary - not on the payroll,' Sanders noted. A spokesman later clarified that all campaign staffers were no longer on the payroll as of Tuesday, though they will get a severance check in May.

Sanders said his supporters have a simple choice now that Biden has emerged as the presumptive nominee: 'Do we be as active as we can in electing Joe Biden and doing everything we can to move Joe and his campaign in a more progressive direction?

'Or do we choose to sit it out and allow the most dangerous president in modern American history to get reelected?'

He continued: 'I believe that it's irresponsible for anybody to say, "Well, I disagree with Joe Biden - I disagree with Joe Biden! - and therefore I'm not going to be involved."'

Sanders said he would not actively campaign or spend money on advertising in the primary contests that are still on the calendar in the coming months.

But he still encouraged Democrats in those states to vote for him, hoping to amass as many delegates as possible for leverage to shape the party platform and the direction of Biden's campaign.

He also vowed to continue fighting for progressive priorities such as his signature 'Medicare for All' as a senator, even though Biden has refused to embrace the government-backed single-payer health care system.

'If people want to vote for me, we'd appreciate it,' Sanders said of the roughly 20 primary contests that remain where his name will appear on the ballot.

He later added, 'I think you're going to see significant movement on the part of the Biden campaign into a more progressive direction on a whole lot of issues.'

Not backing Biden: Briahna Joy-Gray (second from left) was Bernie Sanders campaign press secretary until he withdrew last week. Now she is refusing to endorse Joe Biden

Stuck inside: Sanders did not outline any specific plans to begin helping Biden in earnest and said he said he's essentially 'incarcerated in his home' because of coronavirus social distancing guidelines and did not know when he would return to the campaign trail

Sanders did not outline any specific plans to begin helping Biden in earnest, though he noted that he held dozens of rallies for former Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton four years ago and would be at least as active for Biden.

In the short term, he said he's essentially 'incarcerated in his home' because of coronavirus social distancing guidelines and did not know when he would return to the campaign trail.

Sanders brushed away questions about why he was willing to back Biden so much sooner than he did Clinton, whom he waited until June to endorse.

He said recent conversations with former President Barack Obama did not influence his decision. It came down to simple math, he said.

In 2016, Sanders said he had a mathematical path to the nomination all the way until the California primary, which was held on the last day of voting in June. That simply wasn't the case this year.

'What would be the sense of staying in, of spending a whole lot of money, of attacking the vice president, giving fodder for Trump -- what's the sense of doing that when you cant win?' he asked.

'I will do everything I can to help elect Joe,' Sanders continued. 'We had a contentious campaign.

'We disagree on issues. But my job now is to not only rally my supporters, but to do everything I can to bring the party together to see that (Trump) is not elected president.'
London, April 15, 2020

During this unprecedented time, CNH Industrial N.V. (NYSE: CNHI / MI: CNHI) is continuing to take decisive steps in the fight against COVID-19, focusing on employees' health and the local communities where it does business. To this end, the Company is donating $2 million to the CNH Industrial Foundation and to other charitable projects throughout the world, with a focus on supporting individuals and communities impacted by the virus.

??????This pledge is in addition to the Company's ongoing donations of medical equipment supplies, including ventilators, personal protective equipment, electrical generators and ambulances, to healthcare providers in the regions in which the Company operates.

Furthermore, to demonstrate solidarity with its workforce, the CNH Industrial senior management team has elected to forego temporarily part of its compensation. The Company's Board of Directors have agreed not to take any of their remuneration for the rest of year, the Acting Chief Executive Officer will take a 50% salary reduction for three months, and the Global Executive Committee will take a 20% salary reduction for three months.

Through these initiatives, CNH Industrial reaffirms its longstanding commitment to sustainability and its values. The Company would also like to thank all those who are demonstrating selfless courage in their efforts to help fight this pandemic.

CNH IndustrialN.V.

Contacts:

Corporate Communications

Email: mediarelations@cnhind.com

Investor Relations

Email: investor.relations@cnhind.com

Attachment
A native of Elmhurst, Louthan grew up swimming in the western suburbs and attended college at Illinois Benedictine University in Lisle. With a major in marketing and a minor in French, she considered working at a museum or in international business. But her love of aquatics returned when she was a young mom raising her two sons in Joliet. She held recreational positions in the Joliet area before coming to the Clarendon Hills Park District.
Source: Xinhua| 2020-04-16 05:06:44|Editor: huaxia

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A shop selling children's products reopens in Rome, Italy, April 15, 2020. (Photo by Alberto Lingria/Xinhua)

-- Death toll hits 21,645 in Italy, hospitalized patients drop;

-- France's COVID-19 deaths reach 17,167;

-- Germany extends social distance restrictions to early May;

-- Death toll reaches 12,868 in UK, 98,476 cases confirmed.

BRUSSELS, April 15 (Xinhua) -- The following are the latest developments of the COVID-19 pandemic in European countries.

ROME -- The coronavirus pandemic has claimed 21,645 lives in locked-down Italy, bringing the total number of infections, fatalities and recoveries so far to 165,155, according to the latest data released by the country's Civil Protection Department on Wednesday.



The number of COVID-19 patients hospitalized showed a relevant drop, with 27,643 hospitalized, down by 368 compared with the previous day, including 3,079 in intensive care units, down by 107. Meanwhile, 74,696, or about 71 percent, are isolated at home because they are asymptomatic or with light symptoms, Civil Protection Department Chief Angelo Borrelli told a televised press conference.

There were 578 new fatalities on a daily basis, Borrelli said, adding that active infections rose by 1,127 compared to Tuesday to a total of 105,418.

A woman wearing a mask walks at Montmartre in Paris, France, April 13, 2020. (Photo by Aurelien Morissard/Xinhua)

PARIS -- The deaths caused by the coronavirus surged to 17,167 in France where confirmed cases, number of hospitalized patients and those who need intensive care were decelerating, Health General Director Jerome Salomon said on Wednesday.

Fatalities in hospitals increased to 10,643 while the counting of nursing homes found 6,524 residents died from the respiratory illness since the epidemic outbreak.

Compared to Tuesday's 15,729, the death data jumped sharply but this was linked to a "catching up" in the data feedback, said Salomon.

Photo taken on April 14, 2020 shows a man walking in front of the Houses of Parliament in London, Britain. (Xinhua/Han Yan)

LONDON -- The death toll of those hospitalized in Britain who tested positive for the novel coronavirus hit 12,868 as of Tuesday afternoon, a daily increase of 761, the Department of Health and Social Care said Wednesday.

As of Wednesday morning, the number of confirmed cases of COVID-19 in Britain reached 98,476, said the department.

Meanwhile, the Office for National Statistics (ONS) has suggested the total number of virus-related deaths in Britain is significantly higher than the figures published by the National Health Service (NHS) and the health department, which only count hospital deaths.

Customers queue with distance for purchasing at a supermarket in Berlin, capital of Germany, March 23, 2020. (Photo by Binh Truong/Xinhua)

BERLIN -- German Chancellor Angela Merkel announced on Wednesday generally extending the country's nationwide social distance restrictions which have been in force for weeks, until at least May 3.

This was agreed by German federal and state governments after consultations on Wednesday. The current restriction measures, including a ban on public gatherings of more than two people, a social distance of minimum 1.5 meters and the closure of non-essential businesses, are scheduled to be valid until Sunday.

To support tracking infection contacts, the use of digital "contact tracing" is centrally important, said Merkel. she also suggested wearing non-medical everyday masks where the minimum distance cannot be guaranteed such as on public transport.
Heres what else to know:

Did anyone say when the sheltering orders will end?

No, and officials repeated that the only reason they can even talk about what life might be like after the outbreak is because Californians followed early, urgent directives to stay home and stay away from one another.

Theres no light switch here, Mr. Newsom said. Its more like a dimmer.

That said, officials will be watching closely for the next two weeks, to see whether Covid-19 hospitalizations decline and whether efforts to build a robust enough testing and public health work force have borne fruit to evaluate when it might be OK to dial back some restrictions.

However, Mr. Newsom has said the state is working closely with local officials, so depending on where you live, restrictions could extend beyond state orders.

Officials laid out six things that Mr. Newsom and other public health officials will be watching to help decide when to ease restrictions:

Whether there is sufficient and fast enough testing to monitor any outbreaks, including by tracing, testing and isolating people who have been exposed to the virus.

Whether officials can prevent infections in vulnerable communities, like among older Californians, and those experiencing homelessness.

Whether hospitals are equipped to handle surges of patients, with enough beds, ventilators and protective equipment for workers.

Whether theres progress on developing therapies that could help patients recover more quickly. Mr. Newsom said he was optimistic as the states research institutions and biotech companies focus their efforts.

Whether physical environments have been adapted to the new reality, with plenty of space for people to keep their distance. This will be especially critical for schools and restaurants.

And whether state and county officials can quickly reinstate stay-at-home orders or other measures if necessary.

Didnt the governor announce a partnership with other states?

Yes. On Monday, Mr. Newsom announced a joint effort to figure out a framework for reopening Western states, including California, Oregon and Washington. He said on Tuesday that conversations were ongoing and that other states were expected to join.

[Read more about how governors have been handling the coronavirus crisis.]

Can they be overruled by the president?
Face masks have been used to try to smuggle in 14 kilos of cocaine with an estimated 1 million street value into Britain in a 'despicable' scam during the coronavirus crisis.

Border Force officers uncovered the plot on stopping a Polish-registered van was stopped on the French side of the Channel Tunnel on Tuesday.

Tests of some of the packages came back positive for the drug, which were being concealed within boxes of vital personal protective equipment seized at Coquelles.

'Despicable': Cocaine with an estimated 1 million street value was found hidden within face masks bound for the UK

Stopped: Border Force officers made the discovery and the 34-year-old Polish van driver was arrested

The Class-A drug was found wrapped in 15 different packages and hidden among the face masks inside the vehicle.

It led to the 34-year-old Polish van driver to be arrested and the investigation has been passed onto the National Crime Agency.

He is now being questioned in custody.

Regulators are now examining the masks to see whether or not they are safe to use.

Ian Hanson, Border Force Regional Director for Coquelles, said: 'This seizure shows the lengths drug smugglers will go to.

'It is despicable to think they would try and exploit the current situation in this way to get their dangerous drugs on to the UK's streets.

'It is testament to the expertise of my Border Force officers that this smuggling attempt was prevented and shows we remain active on the frontline in keeping the country safe from illegal drugs and the harm they cause.

'Every year Border Force officers seize Class A drugs worth hundreds of millions of pounds.

'Working with law enforcement colleagues like the National Crime Agency (NCA) we are determined to prevent drug trafficking.'

'Exploiting the situation': The bid to smuggle the drugs comes at a time when health workers are desperate for face masks and other forms of protective equipment against Covid-19

Darren Herbert, NCA Dover branch operations manager, added: 'This seizure is further evidence of the way criminal networks are attempting to exploit the coronavirus outbreak to their own ends, covering this load of drugs with what would seem like vital protective equipment.

'We are now investigating who was behind this attempt, but what is clear is that they have taken a substantial hit.

'At UK street prices this haul might have raised more than 1 million once adulterated and cut down - profit that they have now been denied.'

Cocaine worth more than 2 million was also taken off the streets later that evening in a separate proactive drugs and money laundering operation headed up by the National Crime Agency and Metropolitan Police Service.

Investigators from the Organised Crime Partnership arrested arrest two men aged 32 and 29 on suspicion of class A drug supply offences in Gravesend, Kent, and seizing 20 kilos of cocaine from a van at the scene.

A third man who fled the location is now wanted in connection with the probe.

Officers also discovered a further four kilos of cocaine was found after carrying out a search warrant.

A 32 year-old woman was arrested on suspicion of supplying drugs.

And another search of a second Gravesend property led to approximately 300,000 in cash being recovered.

A 51-year-old man and a woman aged 50 were also arrested on suspicion of money laundering offences.

Seizures: The drugs haul was one in a series stopped from flooding Britain's streets as cars are checked in Coquelles in France

Checks: Border Force bosses have vowed to continue to search vehicles during the Covid-19 crisis

All those arrested are now in custody and are being question by NCA and MPS officers.

NCA head of specialist operations John Coles said: 'Taking this amount of class A drugs off the streets is a significant result for the OCP as we know cocaine fuels gang violence and exploitation.

'Seizing drugs and cash has a major impact on the wider organised crime groups that are involved in drug distribution, and prevents them from investing profits in further offending.

'Our investigation into these seizures continue, and we are still seeking one man in connection with them. I'd urge him to come forward to us, or for anyone with information about their whereabouts to get in touch via Crimestoppers.'
TANZANIA Building Agency (TBA), has announced plans to build additional 150 residential houses for public servants in Dodoma.

This will be part of addressing housing shortage in the new government administrative capital.

TBA Chief Executive Officer (CEO), Daudi Kondoro told 'Daily News' yesterday that 800 houses that the public landlord retained after the dismissal of the capital development authority are not sufficient to accommodate the demand for housing in the city.

We have requested for the budget approval, and luckily the ministrys budget has so far been endorsed by the parliamentary committee and awaits the National Assembly for final decision, he said.

He detailed that the proposed houses will be built at the agencys land at Itega and Nzuguni suburbs in the city.

Our plan is to ensure all civil servants have a place to stay, Arch Kondoro noted. TBA is in charge of managing all public structures, including civil servants housing.

It has recently expanded into construction work of affordable houses that it later sales to civil servants and private individuals," he said.

He reminded tenants however to clear their debts as per initial agreement, especially in buildings that it acquired after the dismissal of CDA by President John Magufuli in May 2017.

Arch Kondoro further said that the agency is completing work on rehabilitating all the structures, including painting them with TBA identity, but was quick to note that the agency expects much of the work to be funded from debt collection.

So far, he said rehabilitation is on-going in Dodoma and Dar es Salaam.

Meanwhile, the TBA boss said the agency is working with a state examiner to establish ownership legality of all public structures across the country.

The goal, according to Mr Kondoro, is to ensure every government house is re-identified, given that some dishonest people had maneuvered their way to obtain false ownership of the state properties.
HNA Group, a former asset acquirer that is trimming its loans under de facto state ward, halted the trading of one of its notes in Shanghai after panicked investors fled, as the economic aftermath of the coronavirus pandemic throws a wrench into one of China's biggest debt workouts.

Trading of HNA's 5.99 per cent 3 billion yuan (US$425 million) note was halted in Shanghai until 2:57pm, after its price plunged by as much as 31 per cent in early transactions, according to a statement to the Shanghai Stock Exchange, where the debt issue is traded.

Investors fled HNA's debt after the aviation conglomerate, based in the Hainan provincial capital of Haikou, hastily called a teleconference overnight with creditors to postpone paying the principal and interest by 12 months on a separate tranche of 7-year bonds worth 1.15 billion yuan due today. The bond had been suspended from trading since April 9.

The meeting was hastily arranged "because the number of investors is relatively large," HNA said in a statement, adding that it "sincerely apologises" for the "lack of preparation." Chinese media said invitations were sent out 30 minutes before the meeting's commencement, and many creditors failed to receive the notice.

SCMP Graphics alt=SCMP Graphics

"Due to the coronavirus pandemic, the Group's core businesses including aviation, tourism, hotel and commercial [operations] are significantly impacted," HNA said. "Although we made various efforts to resume work and production, it is hard for the operations and management to recover in the short term, and the pressure on cash flow is tremendous."

Shares of Hainan Airlines, the HNA Group's flagship and China's fourth-largest carrier, fell by as much as 1.3 per cent in a declining market to 1.55 yuan in Shanghai.

Last week, creditors agreed to postpone exercising 292 million yuan of put options on another HNA Group unit West Air, giving the indebted group much-needed breathing space to work out its debt.

Story continues

The 13-year old low-cost carrier, operating 35 aircraft from its base in Chongqing in central China, eventually paid 235.9 million yuan of bonds on April 7, according to the statement.

The deferment on West Air's put options is a relief for HNA, one of China's biggest global asset acquirers to emerge in the past two decades. China's largest private-sector aviation conglomerate, HNA is under de facto state ward by the local authorities of Hainan province to trim its debt burden, as the government tries to prevent its financial collapse from hurting the broader banking system while the nation's economic growth slows to its slowest pace in four decades.

Sign up now and get a 10% discount (original price US$400) off the China AI Report 2020 by SCMP Research. Learn about the AI ambitions of Alibaba, Baidu & JD.com through our in-depth case studies, and explore new applications of AI across industries. The report also includes exclusive access to webinars to interact with C-level executives from leading China AI companies (via live Q&A sessions). Offer valid until 31 May 2020.

This article originally appeared in the South China Morning Post (SCMP), the most authoritative voice reporting on China and Asia for more than a century. For more SCMP stories, please explore the SCMP app or visit the SCMP's Facebook and Twitter pages. Copyright  2020 South China Morning Post Publishers Ltd. All rights reserved.

Copyright (c) 2020. South China Morning Post Publishers Ltd. All rights reserved.
The same actions committed repeatedly will be punished by $7,200-$15,000 fine

Open source

The Committee on law enforcement activity recommends the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine to enhance the criminal liability for illicit import from Ukraine of goods of anti-epidemic purposes, as the press service of the parliament reported.

The issue is about the bill #3271.

According to the law, exporting medical masks, gowns, and gloves from Ukraine is punishable by a fine in the amount of $4,800 - $7,200 with confiscation of these goods.

The same actions committed repeatedly, or by a prior conspiracy of a group of persons, by a person previously convicted of a crime stipulated by this article, by a public officer using his official position or in a large amount - shall be punishable by a fine in the amount of $7,200 to $15,000 with confiscation of these goods.

The list of the goods of the anti-epidemic purpose, whose export is banned, are determined by the Cabinet of Ministers of Ukraine.

This law shall enter into force on the day following the day of its publication.

As we reported, the production of a drug for the treatment of COVID-19 has officially begun in Ukraine.
London-headquartered Charles Taylor purchased Bowditch Marine Inc. in 2018 and acquired Pilot Marine earlier this year to service the US marine industry.

Charles Taylor Adjusting has been providing full-service adjusting and surveying services in the US, including marine surveying, since 2001.

The group combines decades of marine surveying expertise and will provide marine and cargo surveying and consulting services to assist vessel owners, reinsurance and insurance underwriters, and other maritime interests, the company said in a statement.

The creation of Charles Taylor Marine Technical Services, through bringing together our highly skilled industry professionals, will enable us to centralize technical expertise under one brand, streamline client responsiveness and leverage operational scale, said Christopher Schaffer, head of Charles Taylor Third Party Administration.
Mr Kwadwo Oppong Nkrumah, the Minister of Information, on Tuesday warned persons and institutions engaged in the food relief initiative to strictly adhere to the social distancing guidelines or risk being stopped from undertaking the project.



He said government would not hesitate to stop those persons or institutions purportedly helping the underprivileged with food relief packs during the COVID-19 pandemic if they failed to adhere to the social distancing protocol.



The Minister said though their intentions may be good, the non-adherence to the preventive measures could promote widespread community infections, which was dangerous to the fight against the pandemic.



At a press conference in Accra on the countrys response to the pandemic, Mr Nkrumah said the current situation where large crowds of people were seen scrambling for such relief items was highly unacceptable.



He advised well-meaning persons and institutions to demarcate spaces for beneficiaries to ensure the two-meter distancing to prevent the spread of the infection.



He said the Local Government and Rural Development Ministry, in collaboration with the Ministry of Gender and Social Protection, which were at the forefront of the distribution of food and other relief items to the under-privileged, had earlier issued guidelines on the sharing procedure.



The Minister encouraged the public to strictly comply with all guidelines by the Government and health authorities to help stop further spread of the virus.

Source: GNA









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The NCW has asked Bihar government to ensure that ASHA workers who are on the frontline in the fight against coronavirus are equipped with sanitizers and masks before they set out to work.

This comes after media reports said ASHA workers were forced to screen migrants without masks in Bihar.

The National Commission for Women has written a letter to Bihar Chief Secretary Deepak Kumar in this regard.

"ASHA workers are #CoronaWarriors & the situation around #COVID19 crises demands their health safety while on duty. NCW has written to Bihar Chief Secretary to ensure #Frontline workers are equipped with sanitizers andmask before they set out to work," the NCW said in a tweet.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
It Starts with the Greeks

Pepys, the Great Plague and Some Good Times

Learning from Philadelphias Pandemic

Heres the difference in a nutshell. Until the 20th century, we didnt have a science of epidemiology. Plagues came out of nowhere, devastated populations, and finally magically disappeared, as President Trump predicted for coronavirus before it got out of hand in the United States. Nobody knew what caused epidemics or exactly how they spread. There were no cures and barely any treatments. Although social distancing and quarantines were employed to prevent contagion, the twin tools of hygiene and antisepsis were largely unknown.We are fortunate. We know how pandemics work. We understand how they intersect the biology and chemistry of the human organism. We can identify a virus and explain how it works. We can locate their geographic hot spots and often the region, sometimes even the village, where they originated. We understand how vaccines work in general and we can design vaccines that neutralize specific viruses. We have centers for disease control.It might be instructive to examine three historical plagues to learn what, if anything, they teach us. If nothing else, they should give us assurance and confidence, because it is clear that until very recently, we did not understand them at all.Two of the first plagues recorded in western literature occurred in ancient Greece. In Book One of Homers, a plague decimates the Greek contingent at Troy. This one was sent among the Greek huts on the beach by the god Apollo in anger. The daughter of one of his priests had been taken as a war prize by the Greek military leader Agamemnon. When her father came to the Greek camp to ransom her, not only did Agamemnon refuse to release her, but he publicly dishonored the priest of Apollo. The holy man prayed to Apollo for retribution. Apollo responded by bringing a plague:Eventually another priest explains that the plague will not be lifted until Agamemnon returns the sex slave to her father. He finally does so  reluctantly, petulantly  but rashly decides to take the slave of Achilles, one Briseis, to compensate for his loss and to punish Achilles for calling the public meeting. Proud, heroic Achilles, the greatest of the Greek fighters, withdraws from the war to punish Agamemnon. That set up the plot of the Iliad, the first and greatest epic in literature.What do we learn from this episode? First, Ive read thea couple of dozen times, and taught it in humanities courses, but Ive never really thought about the plague until now. Somehow, out of nowhere, it popped into my head the other day. The coronavirus is like a new vocabulary word. When you look up a word you dont know, suddenly you find it everywhere in the next weeks and months. The virus has caused lists of books about plagues and pandemics to rise to the surface of my consciousness from a lifetime of reading.Second, in the, the plague comes directly from the god Apollo. It is visited upon the Greeks as divine punishment. It is not just a random virus that somehow found its way into the human population. It is a deliberate chastisement  with plagues and other catastrophes are Gods way of punishing human sinfulness  that have had a long, ignominious history. Until very recently, it was common for what Thomas Jefferson called the priestcraft to tell stricken humans they had it coming. That way of thinking has not altogether disappeared. Remember Pat Robertsons claims after 9/11 that the attacks on the Pentagon and World Trade Center were Gods way of expressing his displeasure for homosexuality.Third, from a modern scientific perspective, the plague that visited the Greek army at Troy probably had to do with the crowding of ships and huts in a confined space on the shore of the Aegean Sea. Think of a colossal tailgate party with too few Porta-Potties.Fourth, the plague in thewas overcome not by science or social distancing, but by sacrifice  and some better hygiene. Agamemnon has to give the slave girl back to her father along with a ritual butchering of bulls (a hecatomb) before Apollo will end the plague. We also learn that in the aftermath of the dispute with Achilles, Agamemnon orders the Greek warriors to wash off their defilement. And they washed it away and threw the washings into the salt sea. Not perfect: it would have been smarter to gather the wash rags and bury or burn them, but Agamemnon had the right general idea.Theis fiction (maybe, partly, mostly?) but classical scholars now conclude that it was based on shadowy memory of actual events. While most of the epic is a fictionalized account of a war between East and West at the portal that linked Europe with Asia (Troy at the Hellespont), there appears to have been a cultural memory that a plague occurred that upset the social order of the Greek contingent (but did not affect the Trojans) and nearly caused the Greeks to lose the war. Needless to say, epidemiologists have not been able to identify this plague, but a few have suggested that since Apollo was sometimes known as the mouse god, the mythology may have identified the plague with Apollo because it was transmitted by rodents.The Greek historian Thucydides (c. 460-400 BCE) describes an actual plague in the second book of his monumental (and seminal). In the late fifth century BCE, the city states of Athens and Sparta were locked in a grim and protracted war, eventually won by Sparta with disastrous consequences for Athens, the cultural center of the ancient world.Thucydides approached the plague of 430-427 BCE as he approached everything in life  with admirable objectivity, commitment to truth and detail, a thoroughly secular outlook, and without any desire to moralize the crisis. His account has a really eerie resonance with the first months of the coronavirus pandemic. Things Thucydides reported 2,500 years ago in his lucid Greek seem to characterize the plague we are all facing together. His account is worth reading not just because it is fascinating, but also because he explores the ways in which a protracted epidemic leads to significant social breakdown.He began by writing, So great a plague and mortality of men was never remembered to have happened in any place before. Modern historians estimate that one-third of the population of Athens perished in the plague.Thucydides prefigured modern analysis in ways that remind us how much we owe to the ancient Greeks. He wants to know where the plague began and how it got to Athens. He wants to report and discount rumors about its origins. He declares that he will only report what people can actually rely on as truth and that he knows whereof he speaks, having been both sick of it myself and seen others sick of the same. Thucydides caught the plague and lived to tell about it.He reports that the plague came at a time when the people of Athens were otherwise healthy. Thucydides provides a very detailed account of symptoms: headache, inflammation of the eyes, sore and bloody throats and tongues, labored and fetid breath, hoarseness and sneezing, then a mighty cough settling in the chest, vomiting and with great torment came up [from the stomach] all manner of bilious purgation that physicians ever named. And many that presently upon their recovery were taken with such an oblivion of all things whatsoever, as they neither knew themselves nor their acquaintance. This sounds like Post-Traumatic Stress Syndrome.Think of this masterful account. Remember that it appears in a book-length account of war, not disease.Thucydides writes that physicians were prominent among the victims He reports that birds and other scavenger animals tended to avoid feasting on the corpses. Those that did so died of the infection. The plague had an especially severe effect on dogs because they are familiar with men. Some died because there was no medical help available; others died with all the care and physic that could be used. Medicines that seemed to help some individuals worsened the condition of others. Nor was the disease less pronounced among people who enjoyed great previous health and vitality.Thucydides gave considerable attention to the psychological effects of the plague. The greatest misery of all was the dejection of mind in such as found themselves beginning to be sick, for they grew presently desperate and gave themselves over [i.e., gave up] without making any resistance, as also their dying thus like sheep, infected by mutual visitation, for the greatest mortality proceeded that way [by dense social contact]. Those whom nobody came to help died alone and forlorn; those who were visited and comforted often passed the infection on to their caregivers.Some Athenians ministered onto the sick and dying even though they knew they were putting themselves at risk. For out of shame they would not spare themselves but went in unto their friends, especially after it was come to this pass that even their domestics [i.e., servants], wearied with the lamentations of them that died and overcome with the greatness of the calamity, were no longer moved therewith. In other words, family servants, hardened by the unceasing suffering they witnessed, eventually became indifferent to the plight of their masters. The social structure of Athens was beginning to break down.Thucydides reported that the ubiquity and devastation of the plague  no respecter of persons  led to at least a temporary loss of religious feeling in Athens. People stopped consulting the oracles and praying to the gods because they realized that no remedy could be expected from that quarter.Those who survived the disease were thereafter immune, Thucydides reports. Country people who came to the city for treatment only worsened the problem. Dying men lay tumbling one upon another in the streets, and men half-dead [crowded around] every conduit through desire of water. The temples also where they dwelt in tents were all full of the dead that died within them. For oppressed with the violence of the calamity and not knowing what to do, men grew careless both of holy and profane things alike. The laws which they formerly used touching funerals were all now broken, everyone burying where he could find room, survivors often throwing their dead in other families graves.Eventually, things broke down altogether. Men committed crimes openly rather than by subterfuge and wealthy individuals spent their money recklessly because they reckoned they would be dead long before they ran out of wealth.Values like virtue and honor broke down. Neither the fear of the gods nor laws of men awed any man, not the former [fear of the gods] because they concluded it was alike to worship or not worship from seeing that alike they all perished, nor the latter [obedience to the laws] because no man expected that life would last till he received punishment for his crimes.This remarkable account of the plague of Athens occupies just four pages of a 580-page history of the Peloponnesian War. All the elements of plagues are painstakingly reported: the sudden onslaught; rumors and false reports; conspiracy theories and the blame game; social panic; the inability of health care providers to avoid the disease; the health and undertaking infrastructure overwhelmed until it begins to collapse; the loss of faith; social decay followed by looting, lawlessness and social breakdown, a kind of apocalyptic nihilism: eat, drink, fornicate, blaspheme, for tomorrow you may die.Samuel Pepys (1633-1703) kept the most famous diary in English history. It is a rollicking, fascinating portrait of Britain at the time of the restoration of the monarchy (1660-1670). Aside from being a remarkably intelligent, observant, witty and lusty man, Pepys was fortunate (as a writer) to live through and record two of the great events of the 17th century in England, the Great Plague of 1665 and the Great Fire of 1666.What makes his journal so interesting as a plague document is how cheerful he was in the face of an epidemic that killed off one in seven citizens of London, how little actual inconvenience he suffered and how completely he was able to maintain the basic rhythms of his life. Pepys was an important figure in the civilian administration of the British Navy during the Dutch Wars of the period. He reported that in spite of the plague, everything else hath conspired to my happiness and pleasure, more of these last three months then in all my life before in so little time. Later he wrote, I do end this month with the greatest content, and may say that these last three months, for joy, health, and profit, have been much the greatest that ever I received in all my life.Such diary entries may sound both complacent and inappropriate when we consider that at least 68,596 people died in the plague out of a total London population of 460,000. Bodies were stacked like cordwood in empty lots. The cry of Bring out your dead resounded through London for six months. The death rolls are chilling to read even after three hundred years.Pepys diary also tells us something of great importance about human resilience. Life goes on. The basic rhythms of life are unquenchable. People eat, sleep, fornicate, dance, work, raise children, make music, read books, and find ways to communicate with family and friends. If Pepys can write, I have never lived so merily [sic] (besides that I never got so much [money]), as I have done in plague-time, we pause to realize that even in the first long weeks of the coronavirus pandemic, many Americans have followed the CDC guidelines about hygiene and social distancing, but after the initial panic  not a roll of toilet paper to be had in America or a sack of beans  the great bulk of the people, except in the three or four most virulent hot spots, have accepted social distancing as the new normal.Pepys biographer Claire Tomalin concludes that plague, like other catastrophes, has the effect (on some) of heightening experience, an adrenaline high that gives extra intensity to every experience. She does not fault Pepys. While something like a sixth of the population of London died around him, [Pepys] experienced months of euphoria, reveling in his own success and pleasure, including a fair amount of sex with partners other than his wife Elizabeth.We also learn from Pepys famous diary that rogues and scoundrels exist everywhere and at all times. An aristocratic woman of Pepys acquaintance supplied him with a bottle of plague water, said to be efficacious in warding off the disease. Mountebanks sprang up throughout London to exploit terrified citizens. Pepys chewed tobacco as a prophylactic. He worried that wigmakers might be taking advantage of what to them was a windfall by using the hair of victims in their wigs.The Great Plague led Pepys to write one of the finest entries in his diary, one of the finest passages in the whole of plague literature:How Samuel Pepys was able to maintain his equanimity through all of this is hard to fathom.In the yellow fever epidemic in Philadelphia in 1793, people took muskets into the streets and fired them into the air. Fireworks were set off. Cannons were fired. Partly this was just desperation, but some people thought the miasma could be dispersed by gunfire, some thought that explosions might increase the supply of available oxygen, and some were undoubtedly trying to get Gods attention.Philadelphia had a population at the time of about 50,000. Before the plague dissipated in late November 1793, at least one in 10 Philadelphians had died. Philadelphia was the nations capital at the time. No government figure died, though Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton survived a bout of the fever, and every member of the government eventually fled to healthier climates away from the city.Several lessons can be drawn from the 1793 epidemic. First, all that can be said for the medical treatments is that some people survived in spite of them. Dr. Benjamin Rushs regimen of bleeding and purging cannot have helped anyone. In fact, these treatments had the effect of weakening his patients.Second, in their urgent attempts to understand how the disease came to Philadelphia, how it spread and what factors made it more intense in some neighborhoods than in others, Rush and other doctors and intellectuals approached a scientific understanding of the plague, but never quite connected all the dots. They understood that it probably came from the wharf district, where ships, including ships from Haiti, were docking. They sensed that it had something to do with poor drainage and pools of fetid standing water. Rush even tapped on the door of the truth, that the yellow fever had something to do with mosquitoes, but he did not quite reach that conclusion.We now know that it was the female of the mosquito species Aedes aegypti, found usually in the tropics and sub-tropics. Modern epidemiologists have concluded that the fever came to Philadelphia from the Caribbean, probably with crews carrying refugees from the Haitian Revolution to the eastern seaboard of the United States.Third, the most effective response to the yellow fever outbreak was social distancing and the use of quarantines. So far, in the coronavirus pandemic, the same two responses are most effective, together with vigorous hand washing with disinfectant soap  a procedure entirely unknown and unavailable to the terrified citizens of Philadelphia.Fourth, people intuitively realized that body contact spread the disease. Many surviving documents report that people crossed the street to avoid houses that were known to be infected. People ceased to shake hands until the epidemic was safely passed.Fifth, what Thucydides did in the fifth century BCE  write down every detail he could, even ones that were seemingly irrelevant  continues to be extremely important in combating epidemics. Dr. Rush eventually published a 300-page report of the plague in Philadelphia. Much later, in 1881, a Cuban doctor named Carlos Finlay cracked the case after reading Rushs 1793 report. When he read Dr. Rushs sentence, "Mosquitoes (the usual attendants of a sickly autumn) were uncommonly numerous, Dr. Finlay had his Eureka moment and  for the first time  identified the mosquito as the agent of the disease.We are fortunate to live in the era we do. As long as people accept a few weeks or months of social distancing, we are certain to get through this catastrophe with a comparatively minimal global death toll. No rational person doubts that medical science will produce a vaccine that will, in the next couple of years, transform the coronavirus from a threat to civilization to a serious but handleable global annoyance. Thanks to wide streets, excellent water treatment and sewer systems, a nearly universal understanding of hygiene and antisepsis, and the nearly miraculous capacity of modern science and engineering, a pandemic that might have decimated the planet will now be contained by the ingenuity of modernity.
Rapid Creek has been named as the seventh-most endangered river by American Rivers, a conservation group in Washington, D.C., said as recent mining and exploration increases in the Black Hills.

Other endangered rivers include the Upper Mississippi, Lower Missouri, Big Sunflower, Puyallup, South Fork Salmon and Menominee Rivers, respectively.

Rapid Creek runs 86 miles, winding east into Pactola Reservoir, through Rapid City and joining the Cheyenne River, a tributary of the Missouri River.

The river supplies drinking water for nearly 90,000 people in the Rapid City area, including Ellsworth Air Force Base and Box Elder.

American Rivers cites in its report that mining poses a threat to the clean water, as well as sacred sites. The organization called on the U.S. Forest Service to complete Environmental Impact Statements on proposed mining projects and to consult with 16 tribal nations about the sanctity of the creek.

Mining could devastate Rapid Creeks clean water, fish and wildlife and sacred cultural sites," said Chris Williams, senior vice president for conservation at American Rivers in a release. "The Forest Service must seriously consider these risks and listen to the tribal nations who have cared for the Black Hills since time immemorial.

Four companies are applying to search for gold in the Black Hills, two of which are aiming for the Rapid Creek watershed: Mineral Mountain Resources and F3 Gold.

Large-scale gold mining threatens Oceti Sakowin (Great Sioux Nation) homelands towards the south end of the Rapid Creek watershed. Mining there also threatens treaty territory and present-day reservation lands as well as rural and ranching communities.

Mineral Mountain Resources has mining claims on over 7,500 acres and is drilling on private land near Pe' Sla, a major cultural site of the Lakota people. F3 Gold has 2,485 mining claims and wants to explore above the inlet to Pactola Reservoir and its claims extend into the lake.

American Rivers states that a mining spill, which could include cyanide, arsenic or other heavy metals, could pollute Rapid Creek and its aquifer.

"Water is life. Mining for gold poses a serious threat to our sacred water from Rapid Creek," said A. Gay Kingman, executive director of the Great Plains Tribal Chairmen's Association. "Our drinking water, our environment, our land and the health of hundreds of people are at stake."

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She has been advocating for prisoners including taking trips to meet with Donald Trump as part of her criminal justice reform projects.

And on Tuesday, reality star Kim Kardashian, 39, shared with her social media followers that she has been reading letters from inmates during her coronavirus self-isolation.

She showed off some of the envelopes she's received as well as one handwritten note in a since-deleted nine-second video clip on Instagram story.

Letters from behind bars: Reality star Kim Kardashian showed off mail she has received from prisoners in an Instagram Story clip on Tuesday

Thanked: The 39-year-old is getting the handwritten notes because of her support for criminal sentencing reform

The note from a prisoner let her know they had a release date of May 31, 2024 and they thanked the Keeping Up With The Kardashians castmember, saying: 'You are appreciated.'

Kim has been supporting the First Step Act which seeks to reduce the number of people behind bars through sentencing reform.

Trump signed the bill into law on December 21.

Platform: The Keeping Up With The Kardashians star has been supporting the First Step Act which seeks to reduce the number of people behind bars through sentencing reform

Scent: Also Tuesday, Kim took to Twitter and Instagram to push her latest perfume KKW X KRIS inspired by her 64-year-old momager Kris Jenner that's aimed at the Mother's Day market

Also Tuesday, Kim took to Twitter and Instagram to push her latest perfume KKW X KRIS that's released Wednesday.

She posted a series of images and clips promoting the fragrance inspired by her 64-year-old momager Kris Jenner that's aimed at the Mother's Day market.

Kim has been using her time, too, to plug her SKIMS undergarment line and on Monday shared with her fans that her $68 waist trainer is back in stock.

Posting a clip showing off her cinched waist while dressed in black active wear, the reality star shared that she wears the product around the house or under a baggy hoodie while running errands.

'I don't feel like I'm suffocating, I don't feel like I can't breathe,' she said.

She then pointed her followers to the SKIMS website and emphasizing there is free shipping on purchases totaling $75 or more.

Promotion: Kim has also been using her time to plug her SKIMS undergarment line and on Monday shared with her fans that her $68 waist trainer is back in stock
Velostics Dashboard: tracking and communication across the supply chain Velostics makes it easy to work with suppliers and vendors to eliminate errors and reduce overhead costs. It makes it possible to invoice and get paid faster and to pay our own suppliers faster. -Amit Bhandari, CEO of BioUrja and WestPlains LLC

The supply chain has taken a number of hits in the few weeks since COVID-19 became a concern to the U.S. Grain elevators and ports are operating at reduced schedules. Plants are closing until further notice. Farmers, truck drivers and employees in the industry are worried about how continued operations impact them and their families and are making tough choices about balancing the threat of contagion with the need to put food on the table. With access to infrastructure limited it is important to understand the impact on key nodes in the food production value chain and how to best achieve efficient management of operations and logistics in the current environment.

The epidemic has put a stranglehold on the agricultural supply chain. It has directly impacted traders responsible for trading corn, soybeans, rice and other critical crops and protein, logistics personnel coordinating the movement of product, and back-office administrative personnel entering ticket data and maintaining contracts. The virus has confined them to working remotely, and away from their offices, separated from established work practices and comfort zones and reduced productivity dramatically. To complicate things even more, having to balance work with childcare at home has further impacted their ability to accomplish their work. Economist Nicholas Bloom from Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research (SIEPR) calls it a real productivity disaster for firms that is reducing productivity by over 36% in the short term.

With planting season upon us and harvest not too far away, the busy season for the American countryside is kicking into high gear. This means critical contracts are being filled and goods moved. This is a challenge even in normal times, but it is now even more challenging to stay on top of all the contracts, loads, carriers, drivers, and tickets that already take days to weeks to collect, reconcile, scan and enter into GrainSmart or other systems.

Houston based, Velostics, developed a load scheduling and logistics system that significantly reduces manual work necessary to manage agricultural contracts and loads. Velostics simplifies the coordination of shipments across contracts with tens or hundreds of loads. Ticket data is captured digitally in real-time and is immediately available for contract settlement, invoicing, and payments to suppliers. With the goal of reducing low-value manual overhead to accelerate logistics, Velostics leverages digital automation to minimize time-consuming activities such as scheduling and status check calls, data entry, error checking, and reporting. Traders, logistics, back office data entry, and accounting teams benefit from efficiency. With the easy to deploy platform, shippers and 3PL providers can be up and running in as little as a few minutes.

Velostics makes it easy to work with suppliers and vendors to eliminate errors and reduce overhead costs. It makes it possible to invoice and get paid faster and to pay our own suppliers faster. stated, Amit Bhandari, CEO of BioUrja and WestPlains LLC - a Houston-based global grain and commodity trader, terminal and elevator operator and a Velostics customer.

Logistics for the agri-food industry is amidst mounting strains. It is vital that the quality of raw materials is upheld and that they reach the destination intact. Retailers and manufactures can benefit greatly from the correct logistics technology. End to end process visibility is necessary to ensure the correct product(s) are delivered, in the right condition, to the correct place, in good time in order to maintain cost efficiency for all parties. Implementation of technologies such as Velostics has garnered the early adopters monumental advantages over the competition. Velostics stands ready to support the American agriculture industry in todays challenging environment.

To learn more about Velostics, email info@velostics.com or visit http://www.velostics.com.

About Velostics:

Velostics was created for Logistics Managers looking to improve their cash cycle. Velostics is a SAAS platform that enables collaboration between shippers, customers, brokers, carriers, drivers, and disjointed systems.

Unlike siloed TMS, Dispatch, ELD, and Track&Trace systems, Velostics gets you and your partners up and running in less than a day with:



Cash cycle improvement

Demurrage/detention/dwell time reduction

Error reduction

Admin overhead reduction

Faster shipment processing

Velostics delivers continuous innovation, comprehensive security and access controls, and standards-based integration APIs. Velostics powers the world's leading industrial supply chain and logistics network for error-free transactions and high data fidelity.

Velostics' mission is to eliminate risk in the supply chain, streamline logistics and slash overhead costs in half via logistics automation and collaboration.
Technavio has been monitoring the LNG bunkering market and it is poised to grow by USD 1.61 billion during 2019-2023, progressing at a CAGR of almost 35% 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.

This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20200415005485/en/

Technavio has announced the latest market research report titled Global LNG Bunkering Market 2019-2023 (Graphic: Business Wire)

Technavio suggests three forecast scenarios (optimistic, probable, and pessimistic) considering the impact of COVID-19. Please request latest free sample report on COVID-19 impact

The market is fragmented, and the degree of fragmentation will accelerate during the forecast period. Eagle LNG, Gasum, Royal Dutch Shell, The Linde Group, and Total are some of the major market participants. The expansion of marine logistics market 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.

Expansion of marine logistics market has been instrumental in driving the growth of the market.

LNG Bunkering Market 2019-2023: Segmentation

LNG bunkering market is segmented as below:

End-user Ferry and ro-ro Tanker Container Others

Geographic Landscape The 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=IRTNTR30550

LNG Bunkering 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 LNG bunkering market report covers the following areas:

LNG Bunkering Market Size

LNG Bunkering Market Trends

LNG Bunkering Market Industry Analysis

This study identifies technological advancements in LNG bunkering as one of the prime reasons driving the LNG bunkering market growth during the next few years.

LNG Bunkering Market 2019-2023: Vendor Analysis

We provide a detailed analysis of around 25 vendors operating in the LNG bunkering market, including some of the vendors such as Eagle LNG, Gasum, Royal Dutch Shell, The Linde Group, and Total. Backed with competitive intelligence and benchmarking, our research reports on the LNG bunkering market are designed to provide entry support, customer profile and M&As as well as go-to-market strategy support.

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LNG Bunkering Market 2019-2023: Key Highlights

CAGR of the market during the forecast period 2019-2023

Detailed information on factors that will assist LNG bunkering market growth during the next five years

Estimation of the LNG bunkering market size and its contribution to the parent market

Predictions on upcoming trends and changes in consumer behavior

The growth of the LNG bunkering market

Analysis of the market's competitive landscape and detailed information on vendors

Comprehensive details of factors that will challenge the growth of LNG bunkering market vendors

Table Of Contents:

PART 01: EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

PART 02: SCOPE OF THE REPORT

2.1 Preface

2.2 Preface

2.3 Currency conversion rates for US$

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 END-USER

Market segmentation by end-user

Comparison by end-user

Ferry and ro-ro Market size and forecast 2018-2023

Tanker Market size and forecast 2018-2023

Container Market size and forecast 2018-2023

Others Market size and forecast 2018-2023

Market opportunity by end-user

PART 07: CUSTOMER LANDSCAPE

PART 08: GEOGRAPHIC LANDSCAPE

Geographic segmentation

Geographic comparison

EMEA Market size and forecast 2018-2023

Americas Market size and forecast 2018-2023

APAC Market size and forecast 2018-2023

Key leading countries

Market opportunity

PART 09: DRIVERS AND CHALLENGES

Market drivers

Market challenges

PART 10: MARKET TRENDS

Increase in demand for cleaner fuels

Technological advances in LNG bunkering

Growth in LNG bunkering vessels

PART 11: VENDOR LANDSCAPE

Overview

Landscape disruption

Competitive scenario

PART 12: VENDOR ANALYSIS

Vendors covered

Vendor classification

Market positioning of vendors

Eagle LNG

Gasum

Royal Dutch Shell

The Linde Group

Total

PART 13: APPENDIX

Research methodology

List of abbreviations

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.

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BAKU, Azerbaijan, April 15

By Samir Ali - Trend:

The continued stabilization of the situation testifies to a positive trend in Azerbaijan, Ibrahim Mammadov, spokesman for the Azerbaijani Cabinet of Ministers, said.

Mammadov made the remark in Baku at the press-conference on April 15, Trend reports.

However, the end of the special quarantine regime and the restoration of the educational process are not being discussed in Azerbaijan yet, the spokesman added.

This should not be perceived as a victory over the virus, the spokesman said. The situation in Azerbaijan may improve. But this does not mean that we will return to the previous regime and the lessons are resumed. This is still unknown.

The lessons may be resumed only after the end of the quarantine regime, Mammadov said. The end of the quarantine period and the resumption of the educational process are not the topic of discussion yet. "
Schools should be among the first places to reopen when the government decides to ease the coronavirus lockdown, Sir Keir Starmer has suggested.

The Labour leader also reiterated his call for ministers to publish their exit strategy from the severe social distancing measures, in order to maintain trust and show the public light at the end of the tunnel.

The call comes as the government prepares to announce an extension to the lockdown tomorrow to curb the spread of Covid-19  after both France and the Republic of Ireland confirmed their restrictions would remain in place until the beginning of May at least.

Speaking on the BBC Radio 4s Today programme, Sir Keir said Labour would support an extension to the lockdown and measures necessary to bring down the coronavirus death rate, but demanded an exit strategy detailing how restrictions could be eased.

Coronavirus: London on lockdown Show all 29 1 /29 Coronavirus: London on lockdown Coronavirus: London on lockdown A man walks down a deserted Camden High Street Photos Angela Christofilou Coronavirus: London on lockdown Goodge Street Station is one of the many stations closed to help reduce the spread Angela Christofilou Coronavirus: London on lockdown An empty street in the heart of Chinatown Angela Christofilou Coronavirus: London on lockdown People in masks in Chinatown a day after the lockdown Angela Christofilou Coronavirus: London on lockdown A near-empty Piccadilly Circus during the first week of lockdown Angela Christofilou Coronavirus: London on lockdown Sonja, my neighbour, who I photographed while taking a short walk. It was nice to briefly chat even from a distance Angela Christofilou Coronavirus: London on lockdown A couple sit on the empty steps of the statue Eros in Piccadilly Circus Angela Christofilou Coronavirus: London on lockdown Making sure I stay two-meters apart  DArblay Street, Soho Angela Christofilou Coronavirus: London on lockdown A mannequin behind a shop window. UK stores have closed until further notice Angela Christofilou Coronavirus: London on lockdown A notice displayed on a shop window in Camden Angela Christofilou Coronavirus: London on lockdown As part of the lockdown, all non-essential shops have been ordered to close.Image from Camden High Street Angela Christofilou Coronavirus: London on lockdown A skateboarder wearing a mask utilises his exercise allowance in the Camden area Angela Christofilou Coronavirus: London on lockdown Communities have been coming together in a time of need Angela Christofilou Coronavirus: London on lockdown A woman stands alone in a deserted Oxford Street. Up until a few weeks ago, on average, half a million people visited the street per day Angela Christofilou Coronavirus: London on lockdown A couple walk hand in hand down a street in Soho, a day before the stricter lockdown was announced Angela Christofilou Coronavirus: London on lockdown During the first week of March, shoppers focused on stockpiling necessities ahead of a countrywide lockdown Angela Christofilou Coronavirus: London on lockdown Many supermarkers are operating a queuing system to make sure only a limited amount of customers are allowed in at anyone time Angela Christofilou Coronavirus: London on lockdown Stay Safe  Curzon cinemas are temporarily closed under the new measures Angela Christofilou Coronavirus: London on lockdown Pubs, restaurants and bars were ordered to shut as part of the lockdown Angela Christofilou Coronavirus: London on lockdown Camden High Street There are fears that coronavirus could lead to permanent closure of struggling shops Angela Christofilou Coronavirus: London on lockdown Camden Town is eerily silent on a normal working day Angela Christofilou Coronavirus: London on lockdown Shops and supermarkets ran out of hand sanitisers in the first week of the lockdown. As we approach the end of the second week most shops now have started to stock up Angela Christofilou Coronavirus: London on lockdown Empty streets around Soho Angela Christofilou Coronavirus: London on lockdown A noticeboard on Camden High Street urges the public to stay at home Angela Christofilou Coronavirus: London on lockdown Camden High Street, one of Londons busiest tourist streets turns quiet Angela Christofilou Coronavirus: London on lockdown Thriller Live confirmed its West End run ended in the wake of the coronavirus outbreak Angela Christofilou Coronavirus: London on lockdown Empty and eerie Soho streets after stricter rules on social distancing announced Angela Christofilou Coronavirus: London on lockdown A woman pauses for a cigarette on Hanway Street, behind Tottenham Court Road Angela Christofilou Coronavirus: London on lockdown A man steps outside onto Hanway Street, that sits behind what is usually a bustling retail hub Angela Christofilou

While declining to set out a rival plan, he insisted he had concerns that the closures of schools across the UK were worsening inequalities between children who have resources and those in overcrowded accommodation.

Asked whether the government would have Labours backing to reopen schools, he replied: What Im saying is we need to know what the strategy is, discuss it, challenge it and check that its right. And then I genuinely would hope we could build consensus around it and if we think its the right strategy, the Labour Party would support it.

Pressed again on whether schools should be among the first things to return when restrictions are eased, he told the BBC: In principle, yes.

I also think that mass community testing and tracing is almost certainly going to be part of the answer here. I do think that when it gets to a vaccine weve got to have a national plan to operationalise.

In a letter to Dominic Raab, the foreign secretary who is deputising for Boris Johnson in his absence, Sir Keir said that the lockdown has exacerbated existing inequalities across the country.

Many will be struggling with their mental health as well as other health conditions that may not receive the attention they normally would without the virus. This lockdown is not affecting people equally. In fact, it has exacerbated existing inequalities in our country, he said.

A family living in an overcrowded flat will have particular challenges. And it is hard to imagine the daily horror of someone trapped in a home with his or her abuser. The government has a duty to do what it can to alleviate these pressures on people.

In response to his call for the publication of an exit plan, a government source said: Our strategy is focused on saving lives. We have been clear that all decisions will be guided by the scientific advice and data. Talk of an exit strategy before we have reached the peak risks confusing the critical message that people need to stay at home in order to protect our NHS and save lives.
Photo: Ron Reiring/Flickr

Missed the most recent top news in Sacramento? Read on for everything you need to know.

Sacramento mother suspected of homicide after death of her young son

Police in Sacramento have arrested a woman in connection to the death of her young son.

Read the full story on CBS13 CBS Sacramento.

Video shows hundreds of bystanders watching massive sideshow in Sacramento amid COVID-19 shelter-in-place

The California Highway Patrol says it broke up a massive sideshow on Sunday involving anywhere from 100 to 150 cars in South Sacramento amid the coronavirus shelter-in-place order.

Read the full story on ABC7 News.

77 new coronavirus cases reported in Sacramento County for biggest one-day jump yet

Sacramento County on Tuesday reported its biggest increase in the number of confirmed coronavirus cases in a single day, with 77 new reported infections, as well as one additional death.

Read the full story on The Sacramento Bee.

Sac City Unified school superintendent under fire for pay raise

As Sacramento City Unified rolls out online learning, the school district superintendent is under fire from the Teachers Association.

Read the full story on CBS13 CBS Sacramento.

Summer electric bills may still cost more in Sacramento despite stay-home orders

Sacramento energy users prepare for the summer time-of-day increases, while continuing to stay at home more during the coronavirus pandemic.

Read the full story on ABC10.

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.
A 49-year-old Covid-19 patient, who is in hospital since testing positive on April 1, said he and his nephew never had any symptoms of getting infected by coronavirus.

His elder brother, a 59-year-old who too was tested positive, died in a private hospital on April 5. His 21-year-old nephew was released a couple of days ago.

Sudip Chatterjee, a resident of Sheorafully in Hooghly district, is under treatment at the Infectious Diseases Hospital at Beleghata area in north Kolkata, the states nodal hospital for Covid-19.

My brother had preexisting ailments. He suffered from bronchial problem and hypertension. But I and my nephew never showed any symptom, even though we two tested positive along with my brother, said Chatterjee.

Chatterjee, who is a marketing executive, said he was under nominal medication at the hospital.

I have no symptoms of illness  neither fever nor sneezing and cough. I am on nominal medication. I wonder why my swab samples tested positive yet again, he said.

Overall, 17 people, including the family of their cars driver and domestic help, have been quarantined for coming in contact with Chatterjee, his brother and nephew. According to him, the source of his brothers infection remained untraced.

My brother went to Durgapur in train. He might have contracted it during the train journey, he said.

Chatterjee said that a good number of the patients at the infectious diseases hospital have shown mild symptoms and are at no risk.

Spending time in virtual confinement was the only problem he suffered from. He spent his time using his phone, talking to friends and family members and browsing the internet.

He is also thankful to the doctors and nursing staff who, he said, gave excellent support to sail through the difficult times.

My realisation is that only those with a weak immune system, especially the elderly ones and those with pre-existing diseases, are getting affected by this virus. There is no need to panic but we must maintain social distancing to prevent crowding in the hospitals, Chatterjee said.

Sixteen patients from this hospital have been released so far after testing negative twice.

There are several patients with nominal symptoms but there is no question of taking any case lightly, as their condition may suddenly deteriorate, a senior doctor at the hospital said.

Even on Monday night, one patient died at our hospital after his condition deteriorated. Moreover, anyone testing positive, irrespective of showing symptoms or not, is a carrier, the doctor added.

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Space is mysterious. Weve seen some crazy amazing things in our universe that manage to awe us every time. Whether its the supermoon or the devil eclipse, nature never stops amazing us with its beauty. And now, weve spotted something similarly unusual, similarly breathtaking on Mars.

NASA/Hirise University of Arizona

NASAs Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter released an image of the Martian surface on Saturday that looks a lot like a ginormous dragon. Captured on the University of Arizonas HiRISE camera, the image was spotted in the southwestern Melas Chasma.

The image was first taken on July 4, 2007, from an altitude of 258 km, however, recently, people at the University of Arizona turned the image upside down that made the dragon truly appear.

Twitter

According to a blogpost by the University of Arizona, Along the floor of Melas Chasma is an unusual blocky deposit composed of light-toned blocks in a darker matrix. The high resolution of the HiRISE image reveals layers only a few meters thick in some of the light-toned blocks. The blocks vary in size but most fall between 100 to 500 meters in diameter.

Melas Chasmas is a part of the massive Valles Marineri canyon system located right at Marss equator. According to previous reports by NASA, the presence of Melas Chasmas is evidence for water as well as wind action as modes of formation for several deposits on the interiors.

The researchers also pointed out a set of valleys at the very bottom of the image. Researchers explain that stating, "Several of the light-toned deposits are seen only in the valleys, suggesting they were either deposited or are exposed by erosion.

NASA

Mars has been home to such beautiful formations. NASA has spotted several things such as Pacman, Star Strek Star Fleet Insignia among several other things, but this surely is the coolest.



Does it look like a dragon to you? Tell us in the comments below.




Cheshire Extends Property Tax Deadline

CHESHIRE, Mass.  The Board of Selectmen voted unanimously to extend the deadline for residents to pay their taxes at Tuesday night's virtual meeting.

Like several other municipalities, Cheshire will give its property owners until June 1 to pay real estate and personal property taxes. The board extended the date from May 1 in the wake of the COVID-19 crisis. The June 1 date also applies to the application process for exemptions or abatements.

The town election has also been given a new date in wake of the novel coronavirus pandemic. Town elections will be held June 1 instead of the original date of May 4. The location will still be the Community Center on School Street.

The annual town meeting is still scheduled for June 8 and Town Administrator Edmund St. John IV said the budget process pushes on despite the global shutdown. He is confident the town will be prepared under any circumstances.

"We have the bones of the budget with departmental requests in, but we'll need to solidify that in the coming month. We have to wait and see how revenue projections are coming in. That's the biggest unknown right now. A lot of towns are grappling with this very issue," he told the board. "Fortunately, or whichever way you want to look at it, there are a lot of other communities that are facing large shortfalls ... based on their tourism-based economies. A lot of our tax base is not tourism based so we're kind of avoiding that hit."

"What kind of philosophy will we have moving forward? What kind of revenue will we have moving forward? If board members have any ideas, certainly let me know and we'll try to incorporate what we can into all these budget scenarios."

St. John also gave a general update on the COVID-19 situation.

"We're reaching a peak period, nothing has really affected the town in a sense of changing our operations from what we've been doing. Right now we're just planning on what's next. Trying to do what the board just did tonight in terms of extending the property tax date. The board has already acted on changing the election date. The thing we're keeping an eye on right now is the annual town meeting. We haven't had any plans to move that, however we are keeping a close eye. I think the next few weeks are going to be especially telling."

The board did cover some non-COVID-19 topics Tuesday night.

Highway Superintendent Bob Navin intends to seek bids for mowing the town's fields and grassy areas. He feels his crew's time could be better spent maintaining the town's roads, among other projects, rather than mowing grass. Especially at the old Cheshire School.

"A while back we threw it out there (contracting out the school grounds maintenance), I wasn't sure what the board wanted to do about it. It's about 10-12 man hours a week (mowing at the school). We didn't know if we wanted to continue with [us doing it] or to look into subcontracting that out," he said.

Navin reached out to a couple local contractors to get an idea of what it might cost. He stressed that these were not official bids but ballpark numbers.

"I got some rough ideas. We're looking at a $7,000 to $8,000 yearly contract to take care of the school lawns. I wanted to throw that out there to see how the board wanted to proceed."

Selectman Ron DeAngelis liked the idea and wanted to broaden the scope of the bid should it happen.

"I think we should get a hard number to do all the mowing in town. We wouldn't want to just do part of it. [Right now] we pay for the mower, we pay for the fuel, we pay for all of that so that be [weighed] against what an outside vendor would give us," he said. "The other benefit we need to look at too is keeping the manpower off of the mowing, which to me is a waste of time for the guys at the Highway Department, and putting those hours back into the stuff that doesn't get done every year. That's a huge plus for the town."

St. John said he started going over the numbers with Navin and quickly saw some potential financial savings.

"We factored in the cost of the straight labor rate, benefits tacked on, just to get a full picture of what that would cost. Plus depreciation of the assets that we have. We didn't even get into the cost of gas and oil because by that point we were already over what the quote was for [the school]."

Navin told the board he will put together an in depth look at the proposed bid over the next couple weeks.

"Me and Ed will work on this over the next couple weeks and try to get a more complete analysis. I just wanted to throw it out this week to see where the board was and how much you wanted to pursue this."

Navin did relay a bit of good news to the board in light of the health crisis.

"We will be getting the docks back in the water sometime in the next week, weather permitting. I contacted MASS DCR (Department of Conservation & Recreation) and as of right now there are no restrictions from any of the waterways so we decided to go ahead and try to get the docks in for the kayaks and other stuff on the lake."

At last week's meeting the board acted on awarding two contracts they recently solicited. A $115,000 contract was awarded to LB Corp. of Lee for a total resurfacing of Maple Drive that is scheduled to take place this year. The board also voted to purchase a 2015 John Deere road grader from Five Star Equipment out of Dunmore, Pa., for $173,000. The town voted in 2019 to authorize the board to borrow up to $195,000 to purchase the equipment.

The next Cheshire Selectmen's meeting will be Tuesday, April 21, and will be held virtually. Please refer to the town's website for instructions on how to log in.
Veteran Kannada actress Jayanthi has reportedly been stranded in Hampi in Bellary district, due to the nationwide lockdown to curb the spread of Novel Coronavirus. The 75-year-old actress is stuck in the historical place for weeks now, along with her son Krishna Kumar.

Well, Jayanthi and her son had gone on a trip to Hampi when the lockdown was imposed by the Indian government from March 25. Since then, they have been staying in a hotel. Until April 14, they were hoping to return to Bengaluru after the 21-day lockdown. However, Prime Minister Narendra Modi extended the lockdown till May 3. Hence, with no choice left, they have to stay in the same hotel for a few more weeks.

Due to this, Jayanthi fans have been worrying about her health, but they need not worry about it as she is fine. Her son Krishna Kumar told a leading daily, "We are doing fine. Doctors and officials are in touch with us. The government has the challenge to address public issues, first. We will call for help if there is an emergency."

Jayanthi has worked in over 500 films in her career, not just in Kannada, but also in Tamil, Telugu, Hindi, Malayalam and Marathi films.

Also Read : Shriya Saran On Living In Barcelona Amid Lockdown: My Husband & I Slept In Different Rooms

On a related note, India has reported 11,555 COVID-19 positive cases while 396 deaths so far. Thankfully, 1362 patients recovered from the disease.
The real estate industry on Wednesday said the government's decision to allow construction on those projects where labourers are already available on sites will solve the problem of migrant daily wage workers but said availability of raw materials may be an issue.

NAREDCO President Niranjan Hiranandani said, "The government has issued an order which allows staggered reopening on the stalled construction work to partially resume from 20 April 2020, subject to terms and conditions. The real estate industry acknowledges the positive impact this will have in handling the migrant crisis."



The relaxation has come at the right time as the situation was very grim to keep construction workers at the site afloat, he said.

Credai National Chairman Jaxay Shah said the directives issued by the Ministry of Home affairs will boost the country's economic growth in a slow but steady manner.

"We, however, await the directives by the state government," he said.

The realty sector remains the second largest employer after agriculture and halt in construction activities will have a long-term impact on the realty sector, Shah noted.

"We therefore urge the government to allow construction activity and supply chain in a staggered manner. We are already taking care of the workers and construction can begin amidst the present conditions. We are also ready to start construction at those sites where labourers are already present with subject to the supply chain," Shah said.

Anuj Puri, Chairman - ANAROCK Property Consultants said: "Offering some relief to the construction sector, the government has permitted activity to resume in non-Covid-19 hotspots, provided they follow strict social distancing guidelines. However, the guideline clearly mentions that no construction worker will be brought from outside and only those currently available on the site will be able to resume work."



The move to start at least some of the construction activity on project sites, even with limited workforce, is certainly welcome, Puri said.

"That said, since many migrant workers had left for their villages post lockdown 1.0 announcement, we will have to wait and see how many are actually left back to resume work. Migrant workers comprise at least 80 per cent share of the total 44 million workforce in the construction sector currently," he said.

CREDAI-NCR President Pankaj Bajaj said, "We are awaiting clarity. It seems that Noida construction may be allowed outside the hotspots, But practically it seems impossible. Labour has to stay in-house. Most projects are at the finishing stage. At such stage, labour does not stay in-house."



"The other problem is supply of raw material. Large restrictions are still in force for the production of those goods. Nearly 200 different items go in the construction," Bajaj said.

Supertech Chairman R K Arora spoke about the challenges for starting construction work.

"We require different types of labour in consultation i.e. labour, mason, carpenter, plumbers and bar binders, etc and all are not available at site. Work without construction materials will not be possible since industry related to construction are not allowed till May 3," Arora said.

"By allowing in-situ projects, to commence construction work is a step in the right direction. Upon successful experience, construction activities should be allowed across all projects," said Ashish Bhutani ,MD and CEO Bhutani Infra.

The decision to resume construction activities will help in job creation, said Ankush Kaul, President (Sales & Marketing)- Ambience group said.

Vikas Bhasin, CMD, Saya Homes, said: "Permitting construction activities although with conditions is the right approach and we wholeheartedly welcome it. But the implementation will be subject to guidelines issued by respective states, we will have to wait and watch for clarity to emerge."



Rajat Goel, JMD, MRG World, said, "Allowing in-situ projects, falling within the boundaries of Municipal Corporation to commence construction, while following social distancing norms is a step in the right direction. This will immensely help the daily wage labourers."



Sriram Mahadevan, MD, Joyville Shapoorji Housing, said, We welcome the move by the Government of India towards gradual lifting of the lockdown in a calibrated manner and in turn help resumption of construction activity in non-Covid hotspots with effect from April 20, 2020.

Post a complete shut down, this step would help lift the sentiments of all the labour force who have been staying at their respective sites since the lock down was announced, he added.

In order to ensure lost momentum is regained as soon as possible, inflow of raw materials is also very critical, Mahadevan said.

Shriram Properties CMD M Murali said: "We welcome this move by the government to allow limited construction activities in Rural and Municipal areas. This will help to solve the problems faced by the migrant blue collar workforce to a certain extent. We expect the government to ease the restrictions for Urban areas as well, in the coming days.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Soldiers have been told to ensure their phones have antivirus protection

Existing cyber security policies on usage of mobile phones must be adhered to by army personnel while using the Aarogya Setu app, the soldiers were informed. (Photo | PTI)

New Delhi: The Indian Army has asked its personnel to use the Covid-19 contact-tracing app Aarogya Setu with caution while following all cyber security precautions.

While urging download of the Aarogya Setu app, it advised personnel to avoid it in office premises, operational areas and sensitive locations. Personnel, veterans and families have been asked to cyber security precautions.

Aarogya Setu is a mobile app developed by the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology to help citizens identify their risk of contracting Covid-19.

Existing cyber security policies on usage of mobile phones must be adhered to by army personnel while using the Aarogya Setu app, the soldiers were informed, said sources.

The Indian Army has asked its personnel to only switch on the location services and bluetooth features of the Aarogya Setu app while visiting public places, or when they are engaged in managing isolation centres, while on call for COVID-19 related assistance to civil authorities and while out of cantonments or military stations for essential administrative duties.

They have been told not to disclose their service identity including rank and appointment. The contact list of the user should not contain any reference to rank appointment or service. Army personnel have been advised to keep their mobile operating systems updated and to install antivirus protection on their cell phones.

The Aarogya Setu app has crossed the 5 crore downloads in just the 13 days since it was launched.

The app uses bluetooth, GPS, algorithms and artificial intelligence to notify users of their risk of catching the COVID-19 infection, by tracing the same data from other users of the app.

The app detects other devices with Aarogya Setu installed that come in the proximity of that phone. GPS tracks the location of the user in real time and bluetooth tracks if and when the user comes in close proximity with someone infected by COVID-19.

If a user comes into contact with someone who tested positive for COVID-19, they will be notified about it in a few days. The app has access to the Government of Indias database of known cases.
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Linkedin Anton Vaganov and Tatyana Gomozova (Reuters) St. Petersburg/Moscow  Wed, April 15, 2020 20:08 636 fc6853813033f564188675f8bd21efb9 2 News Russia,Hotel,self-isolation,coronavirus,COVID-19,pandemic Free

When hair stylist Elena returned to Russia from a holiday in Spain with her boyfriend Dmitry, she was reluctant to spend her enforced self-isolation at home with her family.

At the airport in St. Petersburg, she went online to search for places to stay to avoid infecting her relatives with the novel coronavirus. That's when she discovered local hotels were catering to people in her situation.

"We live with our parents at the moment and they are in the risk zone," said the 29-year-old from self-isolation with her boyfriend at Smart Welcome Hotel in St. Petersburg. "We looked up 'self-isolation at St. Petersburg hotels' and we found this one."

Occupancy rates at Russian hotels have fallen sharply as Moscow, St. Petersburg and other regions have declared lockdowns. Russia has so far reported 21,102 cases and 170 coronavirus-related deaths.

Some hotels have begun offering self-isolation services to long-term guests to compensate for lost bookings.

Nadezhda Erekhinskaya, manager at Smart Welcome Hotel, said rebranding as a self-isolation destination had been essential to stay in business.

"In order to stay afloat and not to close completely, we decided to offer our guests these kinds of services," she said. "This is a way for us to at least come out even this month."

Read also: [UPDATED] Hotels, apartments offer sanctuary for self-isolation

Erekhinskaya said the hotel's rates were up to three times lower than normal, despite it having to pay for additional cleaning services and special measures for guests not to come into contact with each other.

The hotel charges 10,900 roubles ($145) for two weeks in a standard two-person room, and 16,990 roubles ($225) for a month.

St. Petersburg resident Lyudmila Voronina took her 70-year-old mother and 12-year-old daughter to self-isolate at the Orekh country club outside the city.

"The air is clean," said Voronina, 41. "I think this is much better than being in an apartment."

Manager Anastasia Ragozina aid that while some guests had cancelled because of the lockdown in St. Petersburg, others wanted to self-isolate in one of the club's cottages.

"There are guests who are apparently fleeing the commotion in the city, the dangers that await them in any elevator, on every button," she said.
 Coronavirus  Forbes 

Irony: Hate Crimes Surge Against Asian Americans While They Are On The Front Lines Fighting COVID-19

There have been a lot of encouraging stories about peoples acts of generosity and kindness during the COVID-19 crisis. Unfortunately, human nature has its bad side too and the crisis has brought out some of our worst qualities including xenophobia, racism and, in some cases, violence.

Hate crimes against Asian Americans and Asian immigrants in the United States have been surging. They have ranged from verbal harassment to denial of services to physical attacks. There is no way to know to what extent President Trumps insistence on calling COVID-19 the China Virus may have motivated these acts, but his statement certainly didnt help prevent them. It is true that the Chinese government acted abysmally, initially denying that the virus could be transmitted person to person. But China is hardly a democracy and the Chinese people were the victims rather than the perpetrators of this cover-up.

In fact, Asian Americans and Asian immigrants to the U.S. deserve our thanks for their role in responding to the COVID-19 crisis. First of all, they are vastly over-represented among the front line medical workers who are treating those who have been infected. Seventeen percent of doctors, 9% of physician assistants and nearly 10% of nurses in the United States are of Asian descent.

Asians and Asian Americans are also at the forefront of Americas efforts to find a vaccine. As of now, one of the most promising efforts has just been reported by the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine. On April 2nd, the University reported:

Scientists today announced a potential vaccine against SARS-CoV-2, the new coronavirus causing the COVID-19 pandemic. When tested in mice, the vaccine, delivered through a fingertip-sized patch, produces antibodies specific to SARS-CoV-2 at quantities thought to be sufficient for neutralizing the virus.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/evangerstmann/2020/04/04/irony-hate-crimes-surge-against-asian-americans-while-they-are-on-the-front-lines-fighting-covid-19/#680636be3b70

  "But China is hardly a democracy and the Chinese people were the victims rather than the perpetrators of this cover-up. "  ChineseChinese 
At a briefing for the press on Monday, President Donald Trump announced that his authority to force states to reopen for business is without limit under Article II of the Constitution. When somebodys the president of the United States, the authority is total, he said. He tweeted in the same vein on Monday that some in the Fake News Media are saying that it is the Governors decision to open up the states, not that of the President of the United States & the Federal Government. Let it be fully understood that this is incorrect. Since then, Amendment X has been trending on Twitter, led by the efforts of strange political bedfellows that sweep in Liz Cheney and Joshua Geltzer.

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Geltzer teaches at Georgetown Law Center, and he served in the Obama administration as senior director for counterterrorism at the National Security Council. Prior to that he served as deputy legal adviser to the NSC and counsel to the assistant attorney general for national security. He has been warning us for a very long time to take quite seriously, and quite literally, the presidents frightening pronouncements on the scope of his constitutional authority. In many ways, what the president is now claimingsome inchoate and free-floating power to seize state authority over stay-at-home and quarantine ordersis just a different version of his long-standing claims about his boundless presidential authority. He has, after all, claimed that he is immune from investigation or prosecution, he has argued that Congress has no authority to constrain his decisions to execute foreigners, and he has asserted that neither Congress nor the courts can tell him how to spend funds appropriated to the military. Yet there is something deeply chilling about the presidents repeated insistence that the 10th Amendment powers reserved to the states are nonexistent. I wanted to clarify with Geltzer what the president appears to be claiming and what the implications might be. Our conversation is lightly edited for clarity.

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Dahlia Lithwick: Sorry to ask this butcan you just do five minutes of Constitutional Law for Dummies: What does the Constitution say about the boundary between state powers and the presidents legal authority?

Joshua Geltzer: Lets start with a slightly broader question: What does the Constitution say about the boundary between state powers and the legal authority of the federal government as a whole, which includes Congress, not just the president? The key notion here is that our federal government has specific powers, whereas states have general powers. This gets called, especially for Congress, the difference between having enumerated powersdescribed, one by one, in Article I of the Constitutionand the states having police powersmeaning the general powers to regulate the lives of those states residents. This distinction was inherent to the text and structure of the original Constitution, and yet still some worried that wasnt enough. So thats why the 10th Amendment was added, making abundantly clear that The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people. Translation: If its not in the Constitution, its a power of the states or of the people, not of the federal government.

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But you asked a narrower question, about the boundary between state powers and the powers of just one part of the federal governmentthe presidency. The powers of the presidency arent generally required to be set out as explicitly as the powers of Congress are. Thats in part because of a textual difference in the Constitution (All legislative Powers herein granted shall be vested in a Congress of the United States versus The executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America). And its in part because of a structural sense that a president must be able to keep the country safe in the face of grave threats and draw on inherent executive authority when needed to do so. But that has notand, I repeat, notgenerally been understood to invade the police powers of the states. Instead, its been interpreted to allow a president to, for example, authorize military action to neutralize an imminent threat to the national security of the country. Thats not displacing state authorityits exercising national authority. Its a key difference.

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And when we are talking about opening states up, whatever that means, that strikes me as classic police powerswhether its opening schools or businesses or easing up on social distancing rules.

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That strikes me that way, too, Dahlia. However authorities are allocated within particular statesand that of course can differ state to statethe basic control over opening or closing schools, or requiring residents to shelter in place apart from essential outings, or imposing social distancing, all seem to fall outside any authorities explicitly granted to the federal government by the Constitution and inside the authorities inherently maintained by the states. So, for President Trump to order states to open up would mean for him to have an authority to override the states own exercise of their authorities to keep their residents safe, especially amid the continuing spread of a lethal virus.

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Is there a tremendous body of doctrine undergirding all this? Do we have precedent for this type of conflict? Does it go back 100 years to the 1918 flu?

"Despite decades and decades of laws getting added to the statute books giving the president more and more explicit authorities, theres still basically nothing to support this assertion of presidential authority."  Joshua Geltzer

The short answer is that President Trumps claim is rather extraordinary when he claims that, When somebody is the president of the United States, the authority is total. I mean, total?? Total despite Congress and the federal courts? Total despite the states and their constitutional reservation of authority in the 10th Amendment? As my friend and mentor Neal Katyal wrote earlier this week, with that language, our commander-in-chief sounded more like the leader of some tinpot dictatorship than of the United States. Neals right.

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But the art of common law is the art of reasoning by analogy. And we do have analogies. We have a famous Supreme Court decision holding that, during the Korean War, the president lacked authority to, in effect, seize control of most of the countrys steel mills in order to support the war effort. And we also have more recent Supreme Court decisions holding that the federal government cant commandeer the states into becoming the enforcers of federal law. But, perhaps most importantly, we have the Constitution itself: a Constitution designed precisely to create a system of checks and balances within the federal government as well as between the federal government and the statesnot a Constitution intended to recreate the very unbounded monarchical authority Americans had just fought a revolution to reject.

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Whats an example of something Trump could legitimately order, related to COVID-19, under his Article II powers? International travel restrictions, presumably? What else?

Its interesting that you raise travel restrictionsbecause thats something President Trump has already done in the face of COVID-19, but not entirely under his Article II powers. Look at his proclamation suspending travel between the United States and China: It cites multiple provisions of federal immigration law, in addition to the general authority vested in me by the Constitution. Its a great illustration of how much power has been explicitly given to the executive branch by Congress itself through statutes passed by Congress and signed by various presidents over the years. That makes it all the more extraordinary for Trump to claim some unidentified source of authority to open up the states: Despite decades and decades of laws getting added to the statute books giving the president more and more explicit authorities, theres still basically nothing to support this assertion of presidential authority.

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But that then takes us right back to your question, Dahlia: What could the president do based on his constitutional authority alone? Theres a decent argument that he could order federal employees back to work, even in states where that would run contrary to governors orders to stay at home. Theres a long line of Supreme Court decisionswritten by the likes of Chief Justice [John] Marshall through Justice [Antonin] Scaliasuggesting a general rule that states cant take steps to, in effect, destroy a valid federal entity or even just directly regulate the federal government against its will. The Justice Department summarized the law in this area in a 1997 opinion that remains on the books and binding on the executive branch. So the president would at least have an argument that he could override state shelter-in-place orders specifically to get federal employees back at workthough the idea of putting only our nations dedicated public servants in harms way strikes me as utterly reprehensible, whatever the law might be.

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Have we any notion where the president is getting his constitutional advice from? What, in other words, is he even formally referencing when he talks about his power over state executives?

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Waitso youre not advising him, Dahlia?? Now Im even more worried.

Honestly, I dont know where Trump gets ideas in his head. But I do worry that he has an all-too-pliant White House counsel and Justice Department to cook up justifications for whatever he does say after he says it. Look at his White House counsels unprecedented assault on impeachment as a process. Look at his attorney generals unrelenting defense of the presidents continued spewing of conspiracy theories regarding law enforcements efforts dating back to 2016. If anyone still thinks President Trump cant find lawyers to write down justifications for his zany notions, that person needs to think again.

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And, to be honest, I worry that many whove rightly rejected President Trumps outrageous assertion of authority havent really grappled with what the legal defenses of that assertion could look like. Im just speculating here, but my hunch is that, if Trump really does go down this unfortunate path, well see his lawyers relying on the Supreme Courts famous decision in the Prize Cases, in which President Lincolns blockage of Southern ports at the outbreak of the Civil War was deemed an acceptable exercise of inherent constitutional authority to maintain the nation itself. Trumps lawyers, I worry, will say that Trump is doing something similar: Hes reinvigorating the American economy before its permanently debilitated and the nations security is forever harmed. That would be the constitutional argument in its most aggressive form. To be clear, I think its utterly unsupported by the facts and projectionsif anything, reopening too much too soon will yield even more thousands of tragic deaths and set back our nations efforts to recover. But I think we need to be prepared for aggressive arguments like that, given what weve seen Trump lawyers argue over the past three years.

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That all being said, President Trump does appear to have walked back his sense of authority in this area, saying more recently that he is ordering governors to craft their own plans for reopening the economy. So maybe someone with some actual sense of the Constitutionand respect for itdid get to Trump and set him straight a bit. Even still, Trump cant seem to let go of the notion that hes the one ordering governors around. And, in this area, its hard to see why he thinks the Constitution authorizes him to do that.

I dont like wasting your brain cells this way, but is it even relevant that a few short weeks ago the same president implied that he had no power over the states and the governors needed to put distancing measures in order?

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Its relevant only insofar as consistency might matter. But consistency simply doesnt matter to President Trumpit just doesnt. In the same breath, hell say that he has complete authority over the nations governors and that the governors have complete responsibility for the obvious failings of the COVID-19 response that are aggravating an unfathomable death toll. Theres no consistency in asserting total power and zero responsibility. But thats Donald Trump.

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The inevitable next question is the grim one: What happens if and when the president orders a state to reopen and a Gavin Newsom or Andrew Cuomo or Mike DeWine says, Yeah, no? Send in the National Guard time? Constitutional crisis time?

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I hope notand Im still willing to believe that our nation can resolve even these escalating, tense fights peacefully. Lets say President Trump issues a proclamation purporting to override a states shelter-in-place or school closure order. The governor of that state should follow in the grand American tradition: He or she should sue. Go to court. Seek an injunction against enforcement of the proclamation on the grounds that its ultra vires, or beyond the presidents powers, and a violation of the 10th Amendment. Let each side make arguments to a federal judge, and let the losing side appeal. But keep us a nation of laws.

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And what happens down the line when Florida or Texas or Louisiana citizens grow sicker, as a result of all this?

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They need to know whom to blame. If a governor wants to get back to normal life before its safe to do so, they should be held accountable. But, in our constitutional system, its their choicenot the presidents. And if the president tries to interfere with that, either in the ways were talking about or even in more subtle ways like attempting to make federal funding contingent on reopening the economy or through the presidencys bully pulpit, then its the president who deserves blame.

What do you say to your conservative friends who are smirking that Democrats sure took to federalism in a hurry this week?

Ill confess: Federalism is a particular relief when national leadership is an absolute disaster, as it is right now. It gives all of us in this country other leaders who can step up to help usas some governors and mayors are doing right now in what Ive called elsewhere homeland security federalism. But, honestly, no serious lawyer or scholar who works on constitutional law has ever denied that federalism is a critical element of Americas constitutional design. Its just a question of what it means when. And, right now, I agree with Liz Cheney: It means that President Trump simply and clearly does not have absolute power.
[April 15, 2020] Earnin Appoints Morgan Sokol as Head of Policy

Earnin, the leader in innovative solutions to some of the world's tougher financial problems, today announced the appointment of Morgan Sokol as VP of Policy. Sokol was formerly an executive at MedMed, where she built and led the Regulatory Affairs team. She has also worked with the Los Angeles Family Housing Corp, Teach For America and received a master's in public policy at UCLA's Luskin School of Public Affairs. In her new role, Sokol will help shape regulatory, policy and community engagement programs for Earnin at the state and national level. Sokol will report into Earnin CEO and Founder Ram Palaniappan. Earnin's Cash Out, HealthAid and Balance Shield comprise one of the industry's first collaboratively-controlled financial platforms, allowing people to access their earned wages before payday, helping reduce approximately $100 million in overdrafts monthly, and helping reduce unpaid medical bills. As one of the largest companies in a relatively new fintech segment, Earnin is working closely with local, state and federal agencies to define best practices for the industry. "Morgan has a rich background in shaping some of the mos important policies in California and nationally around safe and regulated cannabis legalization," said Palaniappan. "We look forward to having her onboard to drive our policy and regulatory efforts as we continue to reshape the financial landscape and build solutions that empower Earnin's growing community to take control of their financial wellness."



In addition to her work at MedMen, LA Family Housing and Teach For America, Sokol has served as a board member of multiple cannabis trade associations, and Culver Palms Meals on Wheels. She also founded UCLA's Luskin Women Leadership Network, the school's first women's public policy networking organization. "I am passionate about working with companies and organizations creating positive systemic change in this country for folks who have been historically marginalized and disenfranchised," said Sokol. "I'm excited to be a part of this movement and look forward to working with the team to help take the Earnin community to the next level."

About Earnin Earnin is a community-supported financial platform with a suite of tools that let people take control of their financial future. Earnin started out by solving one of the greatest - and least discussed - inequities in the American financial system: the practice of employers paying workers bi-weekly. Earnin's core product, Cash Out, allows people to access the pay they've already earned. There are no loans or hidden costs. People tip what they choose. Other products include: Balance Shield, which helps prevent overdrafts, a financial calendar that helps people budget and schedule payments, and Health Aid, a service that tries to negotiate unpaid medical bills without charging mandatory fees. Current funding partners include: Andreessen Horowitz, Matrix Partners, Ribbit (News - Alert) Capital, Felicis Ventures and March Capital. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20200415005559/en/

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By Trend

The continued stabilization of the situation testifies to a positive trend in Azerbaijan, Ibrahim Mammadov, spokesman for the Azerbaijani Cabinet of Ministers, said.

Mammadov made the remark in Baku at the press-conference on April 15, Trend reports.

However, the end of the special quarantine regime and the restoration of the educational process are not being discussed in Azerbaijan yet, the spokesman added.

This should not be perceived as a victory over the virus, the spokesman said. The situation in Azerbaijan may improve. But this does not mean that we will return to the previous regime and the lessons are resumed. This is still unknown.

The lessons may be resumed only after the end of the quarantine regime, Mammadov said. The end of the quarantine period and the resumption of the educational process are not the topic of discussion yet. "

---

Follow us on Twitter @AzerNewsAz
After a woman doctor was allegedly assaulted by patients at Lok Nayak Hospital, Delhi Health Minister Satyender Jain on Wednesday said that the incident is a case of "indecent behaviour" and not "assault".

He assured that the accused will be handed over the police after their completion of the treatment.

"It is not a case of assault, but of indecent behaviour. An FIR is being registered into the matter. After the treatment, the patients will be handed over to the police. We have increased the security inside the hospital," Jain told ANI.

Notably, the hospital has been treating COVID-19 patients.

The incident occurred last evening inside a surgical ward of the hospital. The woman doctor, along with a male doctor who came to rescue her, was allegedly manhandled by the patients.

The doctors had to hide inside the duty room and call the security.

The Resident Doctors Association has demanded action against the floor in-charge and the Chief Medical Officer on duty for allegedly not reaching the ward despite being aware of the situation and ignoring the crisis.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
LA PAZ (UrduPoint News / Sputnik - 15th April, 2020) The Bolivian government may sell the presidential aircraft to finance programs aimed at fighting the coronavirus pandemic, Economy Minister Jose Luis Parada said on Wednesday.

The Dassault Falcon 900EX presidential jet was purchased in 2010 for former President Evo Morales and cost $38.7 million.

"This measure was analyzed, and [Interim] President [Jeanine Anez] made it clear on this issue - if the health system requires it, the plane will be sold," the minister told reporters.

So far, Bolivia has registered 397 cases of the disease on its soil, including 28 fatalities. In a bid to curb the virus, earlier in the day, the authorities extended the country's nationwide COVID-19 lockdown until April 30.
Phuket Governor ordered out

PHUKET: Phuket Governor Phakaphong Tavipatana is to be transferred out of the province by order of the Cabinet at a date yet to be announced.



By The Phuket News

Wednesday 15 April 2020, 06:20PM

Phuket Governor Phakaphong Tavipatana speaks to the press earlier today (Apr 15). Screenshot: Eakkapop Thongtub

The news was confirmed by today (Apr 15) by Trisulee Trisaranakul, Deputy Spokesman of the Prime Ministers Office, who revealed that the Cabinet meeting today resolved to relocate provincial governors in three provinces in accordance with instructions from the Prime Minister.

Ms Trisulee explained that the Cabinet had resolved to transfer Phuket Governor Phakaphong Tavipatana to Petchaburi, where he is to serve as governor.

Petchaburis current governor Kobchai Boonoranais to take up the position of Governor of Chaiyaphum province.

Chaiyaphums current governor, Narong Woonciew, will arrive on the island to replace Governor Phakaphong.

The date that the transfer order will become effective has yet to be announced, but will become public when it the transfers are published in the Royal Gazette, Ms Trisulee said.

Asked about his transfer earlier today, Governor Phakaphong avoided answering the question directly, instead telling reporters, That depends on the Prime Ministers decision. My part is just to do my job the best I can.

Our team is harmonized  [we] dont focus on one person, we work as a team, was all he would say.

Reports online have questioned the measures implemented by Governor Phakaphong to try to prevent the spread of the COVID-19 virus on the island, with some saying he did too little too late, while others reported that the measures he rolled out were too harsh.

Phuket currently has the second-highest reported per capita rate of infection in the country, according to Thai health officials.

Additional reporting by Eakkapop Thongtub
The COVID-19 pandemic has cost New York City between $5 billion and $10 billion so far, Mayor Bill de Blasio said.

New York state is the epicentre of the coronavirus pandemic in the US and has close to 200,000 confirmed cases.

New York City's death toll from COVID-19 surpassed 10,000 after city officials added to the tally more than 3,700 people presumed to have died because of coronavirus but had never tested positive.

de Blasio said Wednesday that the coronavirus outbreak and the resulting shutdown have cost the city between $5 billion and $10 billion.

"We're not going to be able to provide basic services and actually have a normal society if we don't get help from the federal government," de Blasio said on CNN.

"Our revenue is gone, our tax base is gone, our economy is gone," he said. "Five to 10 billion is the amount of money we've lost that we would normally use to be able to support our first responders, our basic services, everything that keeps the biggest city in America going."

Last month, Congress had put together a $2 trillion federal stimulus package and de Blasio had said it was "immoral" that the city would receive only $1 billion in direct aid, despite having a third of the country's virus cases.

"Congress has got to get back and do a stimulus to help cities, help states, helps everyone get back on their feet and actually sustain a normal economy again," he said.

New York City will also spend USD 170 million over the next four months to get food to residents affected by the virus outbreak, de Blasio said.

"I pledge to you, and I'm very confident making this pledge: We will not allow any New Yorker to go hungry," de Blasio said at a news briefing.

New York Governor Andrew Cuomo has joined forces with Governors from New Jersey, Connecticut, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island and Delaware to coordinate a regional plan for restoring the economy ravaged by the COVID-19 pandemic and getting people back to work.

The Governors have announced the creation of a multi-state council that will comprise one health expert, an economic development expert and the respective Chief of Staff from each state and will work together to develop a fully integrated regional framework to gradually lift the states' stay at home orders while minimizing the risk of increased spread of the virus.
Nigerias Information and Culture Minister, Lai Mohammed, has said the government is deploying many strategies to contain fake news among which are campaigns to media houses and cooperation with Facebook and Google.

Mr Mohammed, who was featured on a Nigeria Television Authority programme, Tuesday Live, said the government would not be distracted by fake news in the fight against the COVID-19 pandemic.

On Facebook, for instance, anytime we flag any particular item or story it will be stamped FAKE and be removed from the platform and this has gone a long way in checkmating this pandemic, he said.

We have made reports to various security organisations on this and a lot of things are being down to track them.

However, what is needed is to be educating Nigerians to shun these purveyors and know that there are only two sources for credible information on COVID-19.

It is either from the daily media conference by the task force and the media appearances of members of the task force or the website of National Centre for Disease Control which updates its information on this pandemic every minute, he said.

Mr Mohammed also responded to claims that members of the Presidential Task Force for the Control of Coronavirus are collecting N500,000 daily sitting allowance, noting that the purveyors of such fake news are evil.

The motives behind the upsurge are to distract the government and discredit the main actors so that they can be battling with the fake news instead of COVID-19.

Some of the fake new are totally ridiculous but some are a mixture of fiction and science that make them sometimes believable.

At the end of the day, they are meant to achieve the purposes of distracting government and castigate those who are carrying out the policies and programmes of government by accusing them of corruption

For instance, the allegation that each member of the task force are getting half a million every day as sitting allowance has led to many of us receiving accounts from many people.

Those who believe that if you are getting such huge amount of money daily, you must share it with them, but we will not be distracted, he said.

The Minister of State for Health, Olorunnibe Mamora, who was also a guest on the programme confirmed that he received the United Nations donation to the country on behalf of the government.

He said the first consignments he received in Lagos included 50 ventilators, 3.5 million Personal Protective Equipment comprising of gloves,face masks and allied consumables.

Fiona Braka, the leader of the WHO Immunisation Team in Nigeria, who contributed to the programme via Skype commended the federal government for efforts at combating the COVID-19 pandemic.

READ ALSO:

Ms Braka, a Public Health professional, said WHO is providing guidance and support for COVID-19 fight in the country base on the recommendation of the task force.

We will like to commend the measures the Nigeria authority has put in place starting with identification and recommendation for management when we have the outbreak.

The whole of governments approach is evident in the Presidential Task Force put in place with nine ministers cutting across all sectors, social, economic, humanitarian and other dimensions.

We applaud the setting up of the coordination body, quick recommendation for response starting from detection, testing, efforts put in place for screening at all points of entry.

We commend what Nigeria put in place in all these and the rapid expansion with testing capacity moving from five laboratories to 12 laboratories and the possible expansion, she said.

The WHO representative also commended the efforts of government in training and building the capacity of over 7000 health workers in fighting the epidemic.

(NAN)
And Vista Medical Center East in Waukegan filled all its ICU beds for which it could provide appropriate staffing at one point last week, Norman Stephens, CEO of Vista Health System, told the Tribune. The hospital was able to provide care for all the ICU patients who needed it, but if more ICU patients had showed up that night, they would likely have had to be treated in the emergency department until more ICU beds opened up, he said. The hospital has since gotten more nurses, opened up more ICU beds and discharged many patients.
Even as millions of Canadians look to Ottawa for support through the COVID-19 lockdown, there are growing concerns that chaos in the world's most indebted regions will delay a global economic recovery.

Reports of a breakdown in civil control in places such as Iraq, following the loss of oil revenues, may be an early indicator of wider economic and political fallout.

"Fears are growing that the state will collapse," an Iraqi official told The Economist magazine in a worrying report titled Dark times ahead: The risk that Iraq may fall apart.

Yesterday, the International Monetary Fund released its latest world economic outlook titled The Great Lockdown, in which it forecasts 2020 will see the greatest global economic decline since the Great Depression of the 1930s.

Facing catastrophe

As the IMF warns that absolute global output will shrink by three per cent and that GDP will come in more than five per cent below expected levels, some experts caution that without support from the world's richest economies, some of the world's poorest countries will face catastrophe.

Many economists, including Bessma Momani, a specialist in international financial institutions at Ontario's University of Waterloo, think the IMF outlook simply isn't gloomy enough.

"I think it was actually optimistic. Too optimistic, in my humble opinion, and I can understand why," Momani said.

Fausto Torrealba/Reuters

Momani says the world's poorest people, not just in South Asia, sub-Saharan Africa and South America but in U.S. inner cities, too, will suffer the most, and in ways that could lead to revolts. Places such as Venezuela, already chaotic, may collapse into something worse.

She says the IMF, which is structured to be able to help individual countries when they suffer from unique problems, is not equipped to help everyone at the same time.

It would be like if an insurance company, which is perfectly prepared to help a client in the very unlikely event their house is damaged in a fire, was suddenly overwhelmed by a forest blaze that burned out everyone in the area. In the current crisis, the economy of every country in the world will be affected by the coronavirus and the lockdown to prevent its spread.

Story continues

It may be no surprise that Argentina is on the way to its ninth default on its sovereign debt as it asks the IMF for help. But this time, Argentina will not be alone.

An Italian default?

In Italy, for example, high levels of national debt have been overlooked in the past because of the country's large output of goods and services, Momani says. But now, with a production collapse, Italy is facing a sovereign debt default of its own.

"There's no other solution," says Momani. "It has nothing but, you know, basically asking for an IMF full-on sovereign debt rescue package akin to what we saw with Greece and Argentina."

But, she says, with half of IMF members already putting in requests for money, and fewer alternative sources of cash, there won't be enough to go round.

Manuel Silvestri/Reuters

That's why James Boughton, senior fellow with the Centre for International Governance Innovation, a Waterloo-based think-tank, says wealthy governments must authorize the IMF to extend the use of special drawing rights (SDRs), non-dollar currency units held by the fund.

According to a recent report by Soumaya Keynes, who happens to be a relative of John Maynard Keynes, the economist who helped conceive SDRs, such a plan faces hurdles that could delay it for months.

"Most important," she writes, "America is reluctant to issue any SDRs at all, let alone $4 trillion worth."

Boughton, who has written two histories of the IMF, says there is growing support for an increase in the fund's resources.

"But it's not a slam dunk," he says.

Boughton worries that the world's recent move toward every-country-for-itself thinking could lead to a calamity much worse than the IMF's latest projected $9-trillion loss in global output, which he fears would block an economic recovery in 2021.

And while everyone will suffer, he expects, like Momani, that the poorest people in the poorest countries will bear the brunt of it. Despite the cancellation of some debts by the IMF and the World Bank, more will need to be done by the world's wealthiest countries to prevent a humanitarian catastrophe that we will live to regret, he says.

"The potential for a real disaster here is enormous."

Follow Don on Twitter @don_pittis

More by Don Pittis
Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal on Tuesday joined short video platform Likee to reach out to more people and make them aware about the ongoing coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic.

Kejriwal's first live session on the app, addressing various steps being taken by his government and urging people to adhere stay-at-home guidelines, clocked more than 20 million views within an hour, informed the company.

Kejriwal's profile carries videos of his various press conferences conducted in the wake of the pandemic, and streams government's press releases up to thrice a week.

The profile also includes snippets from his joint press meet with Delhi Lieutenant Governor Anil Baijal, wherein directives concerning the lockdown were first shared with media.

Delhi chief minister has been quite active on various social media platforms such as Facebook, micro-blogging site Twitter and photo-sharing app Instagram.

The Delhi government has formed about 14,000 'coronavirus foot warrior' teams which will go from door-to-door to check for cases and create awareness about the dreaded virus.
Graduate student William Jon Weintraub panicked when he first learned that Rice University would transfer all courses online.

I was like Oh my God. How am I going to do that? he said of the online classes hosted on Zoom. Its hard enough trying to be in a classroom.

Despite not having issues with his in-person classes at Rices Jones Graduate School of Business, Weintraub, who is deaf, said online courses on Zoom were trying.

The first six hours of online coursework were the most brutal, Weintraub said. He sat in front of the screen, disengaged, obtaining little information, and tried to view a class with a fellow classmate before deciding that he had to go to campus, where his professor was filming the class live.

I just wanted to sit in that classroom just to get something out of it and not fail it, said Weintraub, who will graduate with a Master of Business Administration this spring.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, colleges are learning about the extra assistance and needs of disabled communities with online learning. For the deaf and hard of hearing, captioning services and other accommodations are paramount.

A week before city officials announced the stay-home order, Rice officials arranged for Weintraub to sit in the room while the professor filmed more than 20 feet away.

What we quickly realized is part of what enabled him to be successful was being in the room and seeing the professor face to face, said Adam J. Herman, the executive director of the student program office for Rices graduate school of business.

Within a week, Rice hired a closed captioning provider through Capture-It Unlimited Inc., a company that contracts captionists throughout the region, including at about 10 higher education institutions within Harris County and surrounding areas.

Weintraub now works with a captionist who provides real-time transcriptions during his online courses and works with him in breakout sessions on Zoom.

Its almost identical to watching a movie and putting on the subtitles or closed captioning, said Weintraub. He is currently the only student at Rice using the service, Herman said.

NEED HELP?: Houstons COVID-19 resource guide lists services and agencies in the region

Gracie Baltazar, a senior psychology major at the University of Houston, sends recordings of her online classes to a captionist at UH, who transcribes them within a day. The process, she said, has put her at ease during the transition to online classes.

Like Weintraub, Baltazar said she felt immense anxiety when UH announced that it would move courses online. Its a format shes been avoiding.

I thought its just my fear coming true, Baltazar said. Though she got a cochlear implant at age 3, which allows her to pick up certain sounds and pitches, deeper voices can be difficult to decipher.

Suddenly, all the strategies Baltazar had used since middle school to understand the hearing world around her  such as sitting in the front of class, asking professors to face her or working with a captionist in-person during class  would become obsolete over the internet.

But Baltazar said she received immediate support from UHs Center for Students with Disabilities, which contacted her about the changes, listened to her worries and communicated with her professors. She said her professors and classmates have also worked to accommodate her by speaking slowly during class discussions or looking directly into the camera so shes able to read their lips.

Everyone has been patient with me, Baltazar said. Even though I was scared and nervous, everything has worked out.

Cheryl Spadaccia, director of UHs Center for Students with Disabilities, said many students with disabilities have requested new accommodations as courses shifted online.

UH communicated its options and resources for students with disabilities within a week of classes transferring online and was using automated captioning services for its lectures and courses until April 8, when a student requested live interpreters, Spadaccia said.

Before the COVID-19 pandemic, 30 deaf or hard of hearing students at UH were using services to assist them in their in-person classes, said Christie Youngblood, an interpreter at UH.

Three students were using American Sign Language, or ASL, interpreters in class, and 27 were using live captioning. Now that classes have transitioned to remote learning, one student will be using an ASL interpreter, and four are using live captioning in their online classes. The 25 remaining students are using automated captioning services, which can come with their own sets of complications, said Leah M. Halm, vice president and services coordinator of Capture-It Unlimited.

I dont feel the students are getting the quality that they would get having a live person providing real-time captions, Halm said. Like auto-generated captions on YouTube, automated captioning services can lack punctuation or fail to pick up technical terminology, she said.

As most of the companys in-person captioning business has declined, its seen an uptick in its remote services for online classes, she said. .

In addition to automated captioning, UH professors are trying PowerPoints and recording voice-overs for classes, Spadaccia said. And many are attempting to speak slower so words are picked up by captioning software.

Masks and briefings

Having a hearing disability during this pandemic has had its difficulties outside the classroom as well.

Ill be honest, this whole coronavirus thing is such an F you to the (hearing impaired), Weintraub said. Its like taking away their one form of communication, so thats definitely been kind of a struggle for them.

The social distancing and self-isolation protocols can be particularly difficult because they limit human interaction and the ability to see people face to face  major aspects of communication for those with hearing impairments, Weintraub said. Masks make it difficult to read lips or facial expressions.

Facial expressions communicate a whole lot. Its not just the hands and the fingers. Its the face, the hands, the torso, all together, said Heidi Rose, who chairs the communications department at Villanova University and has researched deaf culture and ASL for years.

Access to information and health care can also be an issue, Rose said.

Many news briefings, including the daily COVID-19 news briefings from the White House, do not have an ASL interpreter to sign the information  forcing the deaf or hard of hearing community to rely on closed captions, which are often inaccurate or delayed. In other cases, closed captioning places the impetus on the reader to translate the information from English to ASL  a struggle for those who are fluent in ASL, but not English, said Rose and Baltazar.

And yet another problem: Local televised news briefings with an ASL translator do not guarantee enough screen time to comprehend whats being said. Baltazar said she has watched briefings where broadcasters zoom in on Houston Mayor Sylvester Turners face, cutting off the ASL interpreter from the screen entirely.

This situation has really revealed a glaring omission for the deaf and hard of hearing community, Rose said.

brittany.britto@chron.com

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West Bengals ruling Trinamool Congress (TMC) and governor Jagdeep Dhankhar again got into a war of words on Wednesday after the latter suggested chief minister Mamata Banerjee to consider requisitioning central paramilitary forces to ensure strict implementation of the Covid-19 lockdown in the state.

Lockdown protocol has to be thoroughly implemented to ward off #coronavirus. Police and administration @MamataOfficial failing to effect 100% #SocialDistancing or curbing religious congregations be shown door. Lockdown must succeed-examine central para forces requisitioning! Dhankhar tweeted.

TMC spokesman Snehasish Chakraborty said Dhankhar, who has been at loggerheads with the state government, has no work other than trying and disturbing the state government. The Mamata Banerjee administration is completely preoccupied with responding to the unprecedented situation... and has no time to respond to someone behaving like a Bharatiya Janata Party [BJP] worker, said Chakraborty.

There have been reports of several gatherings, especially around markets, from places like Asansol, Murshidabad, Birbhum and Kolkata. In Murshidabad, hundreds gathered on Wednesday and blocked a road demanding relief material. In North Dinajpur district, dozens took to the streets to protest against the poor quality of food grains given as relief.

The West Bengal police said they were taking additional measures to avoid large gatherings of people moving out of their homes to buy essentials. Drones were being used across the state to identify crowded places and lockdown violators. The police were also using microphones to urge people to stay indoors.

A police officer, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said 1,174 markets have been relocated to spacious areas so that social distancing could be maintained. Areas of 963 markets have been expanded. There still are 256 markets that remain crowded. The administration is looking for suitable alternative places.

Mamata Banerjee has repeatedly said that she wants a strict lockdown with a humane face.

Separately, BJP lawmaker John Barla has written to Union home minister Amit Shah alleging he has been placed under house arrest. I was out to supervise relief work and supply of essentials to the needy but the police seized all items and told me I was supposed to stay home because the lockdown also applied to me, Barla said.
An inmate who was released from prison amid coronavirus contamination fears, has been arrested on a charge of murder.

Joseph Edward Williams was arrested on Monday, in Florida, after being accused of committing second degree murder the day after he was released.

Mr Williams was released, along with over 100 other inmates under Administrative Order 2020-018, that was drafted to protect inmates and staff in prison, during the coronavirus pandemic.

He was initially arrested on 13 March on a charge of heroin possession and the Sheriffs office confirmed that the 26-year-old has now been arrested for 35 charges in total throughout the course of his criminal history.

Hillsborough County Sheriff Chad Chronister said in a press release that Mr Williams took advantage of the coronavirus pandemic.

There is no question Joseph Williams took advantage of this health emergency to commit crimes while he was out of jail awaiting resolution of a low-level, non-violent offence, Mr Chronister said.

As a result, I call on the state attorney to prosecute this defendant to the fullest extent of the law, he added.

Mr Chronister admitted that its difficult to keep both prisoners and the public safe during the pandemic.

Judges, prosecutors, and sheriffs around the country are facing difficult decisions during this health crisis with respect to balancing public health and public safety, he said.

Sheriffs in Florida and throughout our country have released non-violent, low-level offenders to protect our deputies and the jail population from an outbreak. Our commitment as an agency is to keep this community safe and enforce the law.

He added that every murder, every violent crime, especially those involving a gun, is a sickening example of the worst in our community, especially at a time when our community is working relentlessly to fight against the spread of this deadly COVID-19.

Prisons across the country are struggling to keep inmates and prison staff safe during the outbreak and Marylands chief public defender, Paul DeWolfe, is trying to get inmates who are old, high-risk or nearing their release terms released from prison, amid the pandemic.

He told the Independent that the surge is coming. Its just an inevitability, and added our jails and prisons are virtual petri dishes.

According to a tracking project hosted by Johns Hopkins University, Florida has upwards of 21,019 confirmed coronavirus cases and at least 499 deaths.

In the US as a whole, upwards of 594,207 people have tested positive for coronavirus. The death toll has reached at least 25,402.
By Sudhan Thomas

The Jersey City Board of Education has received $3,500 less per student per year below the legally mandated full levels since Christie administration took office in 2009. The JCBOE budget was underfunded by about $25 million from 2009 through 2013; the underfunding dramatically increased to more than $100 million each year from 2013, putting the total underfunding in 10 years in excess of $1 billion.

The School Development Authority (SDA), the state agency tasked with funding capital expenses, including repair, modification and replacement of old buildings, underfunded the BOEs Long Range Facilities Plan (LRFP) in the past 10 years by over $1.1 billion. Between 2013 and 2018, the BOE fund balance went from $75 million in surplus to an operational budget deficit of $100 million.

This $2.1 billion underfunding is a violation of the School Funding Reform Act (SFRA) and runs contrary to New Jerseys constitutional guarantees of thorough and efficient education.

The state was in control of the BOE as a state-administered school district through these years of underfunding. The Christie administrations 2% school tax levy cap limited the BOEs ability to increase the school tax, which accounts for 24% of a homeowners property tax bill.

In 2018, the school tax was $110 million, accounting for 15% of the annual $630 million budget, with the remaining funding came from state and federal sources. The $630 million budget, however, was still $110 million less than the fully funded level established by the SFRA.

In 2018, the state of New Jersey passed S2, which further eliminated $175 million in state adjustment aid from the BOE budget, essentially claiming Jersey City taxpayers had been underfunding their own school budget by $270 million.

The state then proceeded to dump $270 million in the BOES bank cap, allowing the BOE to bypass the existing annual 2% school tax levy cap. The BOE has three years through 2021, per bank cap regulations, to increase the school tax as much as $380 million, which could increase a homeowners property tax by 60%.

A payroll tax projected to collect $80 million annually was hurriedly introduced to pay for this $175 million cut. The payroll tax was supposed to pay each years adjustment aid cut and escrow the remaining collection to pay for the future years adjustment aid cuts, expected to run out in nine years.

Why the BOE chose not to contest the budget cuts totaling over $2.1 billion starting in 2009 is a $2.1 billion mystery! This massive $ 2.1 billion underfunding, $175 million adjustment aid cut is finally now the subject of a comprehensive law suit- constitutional challenge filed by the JCBOE against the State of New Jersey in April, 2019.

The state responded by trying to get a summary judgement dismissal of the BOE lawsuit which Judge Mary Jacobson, Superior Court, Mercer County, denied in January, 2020 thereby allowing the lawsuit to proceed to trial.

The BOE has since pursued an all-encompassing approach in taking lead on the funding challenges and since 2018 has created over $65 million in savings to cut the carry-forward deficit from $100 million to $50 million.

The state, however, has increased the adjustment aid cut to $240 million from the original $175 million dramatically increasing each years state aid cut by an average $ 30 million. This would deplete the payroll tax escrow in four years instead of the projected nine years.

The BOE currently faces a $150 million funding gap. The BOE adopted a fully balanced budget with a $50 million increase in the school tax levy, but the mayors decertification of the $86 million payroll tax commitment -- citing COVID-19 -- creates an existential threat to the BOEs ability to afford thorough and efficient education. The potential of 1,200 layoffs looms ahead, which will eviscerate the school district. A dire situation which needs immediate and urgent redress.

Superintendent Franklin Walker and BOE President Lorenzo Richardson are experienced and capable leaders. The city should come together in this pandemic moment of grief and uncertainty to cure the epidemic of BOE full funding to ensure the 30,000 children of Jersey City have a real shot at the American dream.

Sudhan Thomas is a Community Organizer / Civic Activist  Former President, Jersey City, Board of Education - Former Director , New Jersey School Boards Association

Submit letters to the editor and guest columns at jjletters@jjournal.com
Trot Insider has learned that longtime Ontario horseman James Jim McNeill of Brantford has passed away at the age of 85.

McNeill had been battling Alzheimers for about the last five years. He passed away late at night on Thursday, April 9 in a nursing home in Paris, Ont.

McNeill, who was a first-generation horseman, was involved in the Standardbred industry for most of his life. He made a name for himself in the sulky and on the training side of things starting in the 1960s, and was well known for campaigning Perma Frost and Par Chance, among many others.

McNeill stopped training horses roughly 15 years ago, at which point one of his sons, Rick, took over the training duties on Jims stock. Other notable Standardbreds that Jim co-owned were Zorgwijk Fallon, who he owned along with Rick, and Great As Gretz, who he owned along with one of his two other sons, Les.

Jim is survived by Shirley, his wife of 65 years; sons Dale (Sandra), Les (Patti) and Rick (Susan); eight grandchildren, five great-grandchildren, and his numerous friends in the horse racing community.

McNeills family has informed Trot Insider that cremation has taken place and that a private service will be taking place in the future.

Please join Standardbred Canada in offering condolences to the family and friends of Jim McNeill.
A Northern Ireland care home manager has spoken of his frustration at not being able to book a coronavirus test for his staff after they had to self-isolate due to the pandemic.

The news comes after the government pledged to test all care home residents and staff showing Covid-19 symptoms, following increasing pressure from care home providers, residents' families and politicians.

Health Secretary Matt Hancock said he was "determined" all those who required a test would get one, however it is unclear if the government's pledge will be extended to Northern Ireland.

Tiago, who runs a care home in the South Eastern Health and Social Care Trust area, said two of his staff had to self-isolate last week after members of their families showed symptoms.

Speaking on BBC Radio Ulster's Nolan Show, Tiago said he rang up the NHS helpline in order to try and get the two staff members tested at the SSE arena, however he was unable to get through for three days.

He said having staff off work, when they could be tested and cleared to return, has put a massive strain on the home and other staff.

Staff are also concerned about bringing something into the home, but most of all staff are worried about doing someone else harm and this just increases the stress, which is already high in care homes Tiago, care home manager

"First of all this increases the anxiety on the staff, because they are working under more pressure and worrying 'what if this happens to me, how can I come back?' Because people need to work for their wages," he said.

"Staff are also concerned about bringing something into the home, but most of all staff are worried about doing someone else harm and this just increases the stress, which is already high in care homes.

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"The situation is making more opportunities for errors to take place, which no one wants."

Tiago said by the time he was able to get through to book a test, including the time the staff members had already spent in isolation, it would not have mattered as their isolation period was nearly over.

"There's just so much difficulty getting through on the book line and then people are put on a priority list, so we really have no idea when we're going to be able to get tested," he said.

On Tuesday, it emerged that the number of Covid-19 deaths in care homes across Northern Ireland are to released publicly from Friday.

The Northern Ireland Statistics and Research Agency (NISRA) said it has been working with the Department of Health to provide further information, which will give a more accurate picture of the spread of the virus.

Health Minister Robin Swann on Tuesday revealed 32 care homes in Northern Ireland have been affected by Covid-19, up from 20 the previous week.

The number of those who had been diagnosed or had died following a positive diagnosis has not been revealed, with Northern Ireland's chief medical officer, Dr Michael McBride, stating he did not have such details.
DALLAS, April 15, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- GridLiance, an independent electric transmission utility company, today announced the following key executive promotions to support the company's next stages of growth. Justin M. Campbell has been named executive vice president, chief development officer; Alison Zimlich has been named executive vice president, chief financial officer; Michael Landgraf has been named vice president, corporate development and president, GridLiance West; and, Joe Loner has been named vice president, finance and treasurer.

"This is an exciting time for GridLiance as we continue to expand our footprint and execute our strategic business plan. These well-deserved promotions are a testament to Justin's and Alison's work to support those efforts as members of the executive leadership team. I am also excited to recognize Joe and Michael for their contributions to the company," said Calvin Crowder, president and CEO of GridLiance. "All have made vital contributions to our organization in areas that are critical to our continued growth and success."

Campbell joined the company as president of GridLiance West, the company's subsidiary with assets in the California Independent System Operator region, in May 2017. He assumed the additional role of senior vice president, chief development officer in November 2017. Since that time, he has been instrumental in overseeing the company's growth initiatives, including asset acquisitions, joint development arrangements, and transmission planning.

In his new role, Landgraf succeeds Campbell as president of GridLiance West. Landgraf, who joined GridLiance in 2019 as a director of corporate development, will oversee GridLiance West's operational and financial performance and transmission development. Under Landgraf's leadership, GridLiance will continue to promote common sense transmission infrastructure development necessary for continued renewable energy development in Southern Nevada and required for California to achieve its greenhouse gas reduction targets.

In her expanded role, Zimlich will oversee GridLiance's enterprise risk management and compliance functions and continue to manage the finance, accounting and human resources departments for GridLiance. Zimlich joined GridLiance in November 2017 as senior vice president, chief financial officer and treasurer.

Loner succeeds Zimlich as treasurer of the company. He joined GridLiance as vice president, finance in April 2018. In his expanded role as treasurer, Loner will be responsible for debt financings, tax structuring and compliance and treasury operations.

"Justin has demonstrated strong leadership in helping the company focus on our growth initiatives and leading our transmission planning effort, while Michael's success in business development has prepared him well to execute on our business strategy in the West," Crowder added. "In finance, Alison has been a tremendous asset to the organization, securing investment-grade credit ratings, $250 million in debt financing to fund GridLiance's growth and building out our finance department. Joe has been a strong partner to Alison and has excelled in leading our financial planning and analysis function and played a significant role in executing the company's financings and establishing its investment-grade credit ratings."

About GridLiance

GridLiance is an independent electric transmission utility holding company. GridLiance collaborates with rural electric cooperatives, municipal utilities, joint action agencies and others to plan for the future of the grid, invest in necessary electric infrastructure and implement strategies to improve system reliability and resiliency and reduce overall costs to customers. Based in Dallas, GridLiance operates over 600 miles of transmission lines and related substation facilities in Illinois, Missouri, Nevada and Oklahoma. GridLiance is a portfolio company of Blackstone Energy Partners, an affiliate of Blackstone (NYSE: BX), a leading energy infrastructure investor. For more information about GridLiance, visit gridliance.com.

SOURCE GridLiance

Related Links

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The ways young children play can also raise animals hackles.

According to a study published in Frontiers in Veterinary Science in 2017, children typically start playing with their family dog more creatively between ages 2  and 6, including potentially risky behaviors like pulling objects out of the dogs mouth. Even something as seemingly innocent as making direct eye contact, Dr. Reisner said, can make a dog nervous or provoke it to growl or bite.

Bending over, reaching over, hugging and kissing, patting the head  these are all relatively benign interactions, Dr. Reisner said, but to a dog, being approached by a little person is often absolutely terrifying.

This is also true for cats, who get especially stressed when they feel cornered, said Mikel Delgado, Ph.D., a certified applied animal behaviorist and a postdoctoral researcher at the U.C. Davis School of Veterinary Medicine, who studies cat behavior.

Animals, like people, have individual preferences, which can vary by day. Some dogs might love getting squeezed in a bear hug or massaged by an adoring child. But others might respond snappishly, even if they accepted such interactions previously. A young child may not be able to tell the difference in time. I think the real concern with these interactions is that these are really young children who really dont know what they are doing, said Julie Hecht, a Ph.D. candidate in animal behavior at City University of New York.

How to create a more peaceable kingdom

Rule No. 1 of safe child-pet interactions is supervision. In her work with families, Lanfer teaches parents and caregivers how to read subtle elements of a dogs body language. One of the biggest cues that a dog might be on the verge of biting, she said, is a one- or two-second freeze in motion, in which the dogs spine and muscles go stiff. There are several other signs to watch for too, she said. If your child is clutching your dogs paw so that she can teach him how to write with a marker, for instance, your dog may signal a rising stress level by suddenly closing and tensing its mouth or by staring intently. This might be your sign to intervene.

Similarly, if your cat starts swishing her tail back and forth, flicking her ears or tensing her body, she probably is not happy about the tiara that your child tossed on her head, said Dr. Delgado.

But prevention is even better than intervention. According to Lanfer and Dr. Reisner, the best setup for interspecies harmony is to limit and tightly control the way your child interacts with your pet, and to set strict expectations for what is appropriate as children get older. For babies and toddlers, that means almost no physical interaction. If you are cooking in the kitchen and cant reliably ensure your child isnt toddling over to your dog in the living room, consider physically separating them with a barrier like a baby gate, Lanfer said.
(Bloomberg) --

The lockdown gripping much of the world economy has spurred a real-time stress test of the long-heralded digital future.

Virtual brown bag lunches have replaced office gatherings; schools have rushed out internet-based learning; the International Monetary Fund will this week hold its Spring meetings online; and the U.S. Supreme Court for the first time will hear arguments by telephone and allow live audio broadcasts.

Virus lockdowns have seen millions lose their jobs as waiters, flight attendants, Pilates instructors and other service providers are shuttered. That means sustaining those sectors that can function online has never been more important for a global economy facing one of its darkest periods since the Great Depression.

Guaging the exact size of the digital economy isnt easy: The United Nations Conference on Trade and Development estimates a range of 4.5% to 15.5% of global gross domestic product. While that varies by country, its clear the companies and nations which can migrate the most commerce online will go some way to cushioning the damage.

The futurists are going to have a field day, said Mark Herlach an international lawyer at Eversheds Sutherland LLP in Washington D.C. It will change the way we build our cities, the way we move around in those cities and that in turn changes our energy use. A whole series of knock on effects are coming.

Herlach -- who has had to steer negotiations between clients and government from his home and has used video happy hours and dinner parties to stay in touch with colleagues and friends -- is positive on the experience so far, but worries about a lingering sense of isolation if more opt to work remotely once the lockdowns ease.

Cheaper internet connectivity has enabled explosive growth in online tools, allowing many white collar roles to be done at home and keeping managers and business owners in touch with their staff.

Users of Microsoft Teams soared to a new daily record of 2.7 billion meeting minutes in one day, a 200% increase from 900 million on March 16, the company said on April 9. Even amid security concerns, Zoom has gone from being used by 10 million office workers a day to more than 200 million people.

Story continues

Zooming has become a new verb, said Michael Bowes, a barrister and joint head of Outer Temple Chambers in London. He and his colleagues hold a Virtual Tea Zoom Group at 4pm every Wednesday, where everyone brings their own tea and cake for a general chat about non-work issues.

Already, some companies have an eye on how theyll change operations even when the virus dissipates. Some are looking at cutting expensive travel and real estate budgets in favor of investing in better technology and home office set ups, said Satish Shankar, regional managing partner of Bain & Company Asia-Pacific.

We are poised for a dramatic wanton increase of the digitalization of our economies, he said.

Viewed through metrics such as online government services, fiber internet connection and the share of people who already work from home, Scandinavian nations score highly in terms of online readiness. In tech rich economies such as Japan and South Korea, the sectors most impacted cant readily switch to a remote stance, according to London based HSBC economist James Pomeroy.

Ed Yardeni, who coined the term bond vigilantes in the 1980s, dedicated a recent research note to clients on how he has adjusted to a world of meetings and cocktails over video link during what he calls the great virus crisis, or GVC.

Technology has become a GVC staple, right up there with food and toilet paper, wrote the president and chief investment strategist of Yardeni Research Inc.

Perhaps no sector has been as upended as education, with school closures affecting 90% of the worlds students, or more than 1.5 billion people according to UNESCO. That has forced teachers to scramble online courses with little warning, with knock on consequences for the wider economy as parents are forced to adapt their working schedule around their childrens needs.

Exam timetables have been threatened as authorities grapple with canceling or postponing critical final year exams, or basing grades on past performance.

Wong Mo Yee, a primary school teacher and a member of the Hong Kong Professional Teachers Union executive committee where schools have been shut for months, said the crisis highlighted the need for clear goals about what should be taught at home instead of rigidly sticking with the in-class room curriculum. She also flagged dangers of too much screen time.

Home learning is completely different, the interaction is different, the dynamic in the so-called video classes is also different, Wong said. Its not so easy to engage students in video teaching.

Poorer children have been hardest hit, where families either have to share devices or dont have them at all. Families where parents have to leave home for work and cannot supervise their childs learning have had it tougher still.

The longer children are out of school and not learning, the increased likelihood they will never return to school, said Heather Simpson, chief program officer of Room to Read.

Tech Limits

Manufacturers have also discovered the limitations of tech. One of them is Colin Ng, who is co-founder of Hong Kong-based Lincogn Technology Co. that designs and makes smart home appliances such as facial recognition door locks and mobile phone controlled lights for the Hong Kong, China, U.S. and European markets.

Travel restrictions on the border between Hong Kong and mainland China have disrupted the main artery between Ngs small R&D team in Hong Kong and the companys manufacturing staff in neighboring Guangdong. Thats complicated the process for when a product is meant to move from the R&D laboratory to the factory floor.

Video conferencing the discussion is very difficult, Ng said. It is difficult to explain a lot of the detail through the camera, the conversation becomes very inefficient.

Joerg Wuttke, president of the European Chamber of Commerce in China and a veteran of doing business in the worlds second-biggest economy, said remote working can only do so much for those in due diligence, sales or manufacturing.

Companies are pushing the envelope, Wuttke said. But at the end of the day someone still has to get the coal and oil out of the ground and put solar panels together.

There have been other strains too.

Surging web usage prompted President Donald Trump to hold talks with telecom giants to ensure the networks could cope. In Europe, Amazon.com Inc., Netflix Inc. and YouTube had to reduce the quality of their video streams to ensure networks can handle increased usage.

In China, mobile broadband downloading speed slumped between mid-January and early February before gradually recovering by mid-March, according to network speed testing platform Ookla. Downloading speed in India and Malaysia has started to dip since early March as the pandemic outbreak spread.

The shift online has been a crucial safety net for a collapsing world economy and will change how we study, work and play even when the virus passes, said Chua Hak Bin, senior economist at Maybank Kim Eng Research Pte. in Singapore.

Quarantines and lockdowns for such long periods would have been near impossible to impose and bear without the tech devices available today, he said.

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Spitting in public, which cynics say is almost a national pastime, could now attract punishment ranging from a fine of a few hundred rupees to a charge of attempted murder.

In its revised guidelines for the nationwide lockdown, the Union Ministry says the act, which is second nature to many, will be an offence under the Disaster Management Act.

Spitting and fighting coronavirus don't go well together.

Doctors say droplets expelled into the air through coughing and sneezing transmit the respiratory infection, one reason why people are advised to maintain social distancing.

Spitting could take the tough, little pathogen a longer distance, as when a gutka or pan chewer spews it all out in a stream, aiming at the street corner.

As the coronavirus crisis worsened, Uttar Pradesh home to the Banarasi pan --became one of the earlier states to take note of the threat.

On the day the lockdown against coronavirus kicked in, the Yogi Adityanath government banned pan masala. It also reminded that gutka was banned way back in 2013.

Bihar, Jharkhand, Telangana, Uttarakhand, Maharashtra, Haryana, Nagaland and Assam have also issued orders banning smokeless tobacco products and spitting in public places amid the COVID-19 outbreak.

There is no reason, however, to believe that enthusiastic spitters will mend their ways in post-COVID times.

Spitting in public has been an offence under municipal laws in various cities.

The Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation has imposed a fine of Rs 1,000 if anyone is caught spitting in public. Similar measures are also in place in Delhi. But pan and betel juice stains on walls and office stairwells are proof that nobody cares.

The toughest measure so far has been taken by Himachal Pradesh.

Earlier this month, the state police warned that coronavirus patients who spit at others will be charged with attempt to murder. If the act leads to the victim contracting coronavirus and then succumbing to the disease, expect a murder charge, Director General of Police Sita Ram Mardi made clear.

Mardi was apparently referring to spitting as a deliberate act, meant to cause serious harm.

But the Home Ministry guidelines take even the everyday kind, done in public without any malice, seriously.

The national directive on lockdown conditions issued by the ministry on Wednesday says violaters will be punished.

Spitting in public spaces shall be punishable with a fine. There should be a strict ban on sale of liquor, gutka, tobacco etc, and spitting should be strictly prohibited," it says.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
WATERLOO  Its becoming a pattern at meatpacking plants around Iowa and across the country: Workers, deemed essential to the countrys food supply, continue to provide meat. But working in close quarters, the spread of coronavirus becomes harder to stop.

Meatpacking plants in Iowa, like the Tyson plant in Columbus Junction and a National Beef plant in Tama, have seen outbreaks.

Of 189 coronavirus Iowa cases announced Tuesday, 86 were from the Columbus Junction plant, which closed operations last week. The Iowa Premium plant operated by National Beef in Tama has closed until April 20 after an outbreak there.

One of the largest beef packers in the country, operated by JBS in Greeley, Colorado, is closed until April 24. At least 43 of its 6,000 employees have tested positive for the virus, 14 have been hospitalized and two have died.

Smithfield Foods this week shut down pork production in Sioux Falls, S.D., after more than 100 of its 3,700 workers tested positive for coronavirus.

On Sunday, South Dakotas governor ordered that plant shuttered for two weeks. Smithfield Foods CEO Kenneth Sullivan said that plant supplies 4% to 5% of all pork in the U.S. and that the nations meat supply was perilously close to the edge.

We have continued to run our facilities for one reason: to sustain our nations food supply during this pandemic, Sullivan said in a company release. We believe it is our obligation to help feed the country, now more than ever. We have a stark choice as a nation: We are either going to produce food or not, even in the face of COVID-19.

Tyson Fresh Meats in Waterloo is working hard to avoid an outbreak, company officials and county health officials say.

Protecting our team members is a top priority for us, said Liz Croston, a spokesperson for Tyson. We are continually educating our team members about the importance of social distancing, and weve implemented a variety of measures to protect our team members during this challenging time.

Those measures included deep cleaning and sanitizing facilities, including employee break rooms and locker rooms; checking the temperature of workers before they enter the plant; adding clear plastic shields between work stations and break room tables; and allowing more time between shifts to reduce the number of employees coming into contact with one another.

Two Tyson employees in Waterloo who didnt want to give their names for fear of losing their jobs told The Courier they believe coronavirus has already hit the plant.

The Tyson plant with the outbreak of 80+ people in Iowa is way smaller than the Waterloo plant, said one employee in a message Tuesday. He said he heard there were multiple confirmed cases among workers. If this place doesnt shut down soon, theres nothing there that will effectively slow the spread to point we wont see higher numbers.

Another employee sent a message to The Couriers news tip form online alleging specific employees had tested positive.

Tyson is trying to keep it a secret, the second employee claimed.

In a statement, Croston did not confirm or deny there were infected employees at the Waterloo plant.

She said Tyson was working hard to protect our team members during this ever-changing situation, and the company had relaxed its policy of penalizing workers for absenteeism as well as eliminated the waiting period for short-term disability. Both changes are designed to encourage workers to stay at home if they were sick.

Croston noted the changes have been communicated to our team members in several languages and posted in Tyson facilities.

When we learn an employee has experienced symptoms and tested positive, they remain on sick leave until they are released by health officials to return to work, Croston said. We also affirmatively notify anyone who has been in close contact with the positive team member.

Black Hawk County officials said Monday they are unable to disclose information on outbreaks, saying it is the states prerogative.

But Sheriff Tony Thompson said officials were working closely with Tyson and other businesses on best practices like cleaning, disinfecting and social distancing in their work stations and break rooms.

I think the biggest problem with the meatpacking plants is the nature of the employees they have, Thompson said, adding there are cultural and language barriers to be surmounted in relaying accurate information.

He said the Tyson workforce poses challenges.

When you have cultures that have two or three families living in the same dwelling  up to nine, 16 people living in the same house  its very tough to distinguish that now, you live so close, but when you go to work you have to stay six feet apart from each other, Thompson said. So Tysons would be a good example of a company that were working very closely with, trying to partner with, and making sure that theyre exercising the best practices possible.

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Germany has detained five suspected members of the Islamic State (IS) terrorist group alleged to be planning an attack on U.S. military facilities and an unidentified individual.

Prosecutors said four of the suspects -- all from Tajikistan -- were arrested early on April 15 in the city of Siegen and in the towns of Heinsberg and Werdohl in the western state of North Rhine-Westphalia.

The fifth suspect, also a Tajik national believed to be the leader of the terror cell, was already in custody after being detained in March 2019. The men are all aged between 24 and 32, and came to Germany as refugees.

Federal prosecutors identified the men as Azizjon B., Muhammadali G., Farhodshoh K., Sunatullokh K., and Ravshan B. The suspects' surnames weren't released for privacy reasons.

The men joined IS in January 2019 and were instructed by the terrorist group to form a cell in Germany, prosecutors said.

The suspects reportedly first planned to carry out an attack in their native Tajikistan, but later shifted their target to Germany, including U.S. Air Force bases in the country and a person they deemed critical of Islam.

"Targets for the attacks were supposed to be institutions of U.S. forces in Germany or even individual people," prosecutors said in a statement.

While the attacks were not planned for the immediate future, the group had already acquired firearms and ammunition, as well as secured directions and precursors for making a bomb from the Internet, the statement said.

To help finance the terror plans, prosecutors said the ringleader, Ravshan B., and another suspect traveled to Albania to carry out a $40,000 contract killing, but the operation fell apart and they returned to Germany, the statement added.

The men are alleged to have been in contact with two high-ranking IS figures in Syria and Afghanistan.

Germany's security services estimate there are around 11,000 Islamic radicals in the country, some 680 of whom are deemed particularly dangerous and capable of using violence.

In recent years, Germany has seen several terrorist attacks claimed by IS, including a truck rampage through a Berlin Christmas market in December 2016 that left 12 people dead.

With reporting by AP, Reuters, and dpa
FMCG major ITC expects its new collaborations with unlikely partners, including Domino's, Swiggy and Zomato in the wake of coronavirus pandemic and subsequent lockdown opening new distribution channels, to become mainstream in future, according to a company official.

The Kolkata-based firm had launched multiple initiatives to partake in India's fight against coronavirus infection by tapping a range of distribution channels to ensure that supplies of essential food and hygiene products are delivered at the doorsteps of its consumers during the national lockdown.

It had partnered with food delivery chains such as Domino's, Swiggy and Zomato along with community centric apps such as Apna Complex, My gate, No broker and Azgo which had the readiness to address delivery to housing societies in metros.

The company had also joined hands with logistics player like Dunzo besides opening up directly to the consumers with its portal ITCstore.in with an aim of ensuring uninterrupted supplies of essential items and foods to its consumers.

"The ecosystem of collaborations with emerging distribution channels could become mainstream going forward," an ITC spokesperson said when asked if these partnerships would continue once the health crisis is over.

Through the new distribution channel ITC has been able to deliver its myriad products such as Aashirvaad Atta, Yippee noodles, Sunfeast biscuits, B-Natural juices, Savlon range of soap and hygiene products and floor disinfectant brand Nimyle, which were on high demand during the lockdown.

Commenting on the emerging channels, ITC Ltd Executive Director B Sumant said the coronavirus pandemic has subjected the country and its citizens to an unprecedented situation.

"To provide support to consumers during such trying times, we decided to address the distribution challenge in line with our core principles of innovation, agility and empathy," he added.

The company's "unique partnerships with food delivery chains, consumer food apps, community e-commerce brands, and our own direct to consumer portal have been instrumental in providing timely supply of essentials to consumers during the lockdown and thereby ensuring that people remained confined to their homes, Sumant said.

The partnership with Domino's was one of the first partnerships ITC embarked upon through which the company's food products such as Aashirvaad Atta and Aashirvaad Spices were made available in multiple markets starting from Bengaluru and expanding to other key metros. Depending on effectiveness, the company plans to expand the partnership further in the future.

Through the tie-up with Swiggy and Zomato, ITC ensured home deliveries of its brands like Aashirvaad, Yippee!, Sunfeast, B natural, Savlon, Nimyle and Fiama.

ITC's partnership with Dunzo, an on-demand platform is the latest of its different alliances till date, allowing its essential products are available for consumers in Pune and Bangalore initially.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Laura Tott has tested positive for coronavirus.

The First Dates' waitress - who became a fully registered paramedic in April last year-said she 'kinda knew' she had the respiratory illness, but she was still stunned when the diagnosis was official.

Sharing a selfie on Instagram on Tuesday, Laura wrote: 'Today's been a weird one, kinda knew I had contracted it but actually hearing the word 'positive' threw me a little.

Health: First Dates' waitress Laura Tott has tested positive for coronavirus

'I know I've been quieter on social media recently but I've felt like absolute rubbish. Never had any form of flu before so I'm not handling it well... Never slept so much! (sic)'.

The star added her thanks to everyone staying at home to save lives and protect the NHS, and talked about her early symptoms to 'spread awareness'.

Laura added: 'Never slept so much! Just wanna thank every single person who is staying in their house and doing their bit still, let's all beat this Rona b***h.

Under the weather: The First Dates' waitress said she 'kinda knew' she had the respiratory illness, but she was still stunned when the diagnosis was official

Sharing a selfie on Instagram, Laura wrote: 'Today's been a weird one, kinda knew I had contracted it but actually hearing the word 'positive' threw me a little'

'Just wanna say that I am ok, just feels like a really bad cold, So I'm one of the lucky ones.

'Wanna spread awareness, My first symptoms were complete loss of taste and smell, and then felt like I had sinusitis, I think these symptoms need to be taken way more seriously.

'I had no cough or fever at first, and still have no cough now.

'Stay safe and well everyone! Netflix recommendations welcome, it's gonna be a long week for me (sic)'.

Tear in her eye: The reality star, who works as a paramedic, recently commented on the weekly NHS Thursday applause

The reality star recently commented on the weekly Thursday applause, which sees people stepping outside their home to clap for key workers across the UK.

She wrote: 'That applause last night was unbelievable.

'Something I'll never forget. Even brought a tear to my eye!'
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Linkedin Ghina Ghaliya (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Wed, April 15, 2020 16:53 636 fc6853813033f564188675f8bd21323b 1 National Air-Force,TNI,COVID-19,TNI-AD,coronavirus,TNI-AL,TNI-AU,TNI-Commander,Hadi-Tjahjanto,army,Navy,panglima-TNI,death Free

The Indonesian Military (TNI) has confirmed 55 cases of COVID-19 and 15 deaths among military personnel and their families.

TNI commander Air Chief Marshal Hadi Tjahjanto announced on Wednesday that 190 patients were currently under surveillance (PDP) and 873 people were under monitoring (ODP).

"TNI has conducted rapid testing for active personnel and retired officers. Not all of us have been tested yet," Hadi said on Wednesday in an online hearing with House of Representatives Commission I, which oversees defense.

The Army, Navy and Air Force chiefs of staff also reported at the meeting the number of COVID-19 cases in each force.

Army chief of staff Gen. Andika Perkasa announced 463 cases or suspected cases of COVID-19 among Army personnel, with 285 being active military personnel and 178 civil servants.

Andika did not specify how many of the cases were confirmed cases.

Read also: Galang COVID-19 hospital opens to step up fight against Indonesian epidemic

"There are four deaths, namely one active personnel and three civil servants. Two of the three were medical personnel," Andika said, adding that the last death had happened on Saturday.

Navy chief of staff Adm. Siwi Sukma Adji announced 97 ODP, 32 PDP and 20 positive cases of COVID-19 in his force, among military personnel and their families and civil servants.

"Those who have died were an active Navy doctor, five retired personnel and three of our personnels family members, Siwi said.

Air Force chief of staff Marshal Yuyu Sutisna announced 346 people under monitoring, 23 patients under surveillance and 25 positive cases.

Two people have died, both of them were military personnel. Two people have recovered," Yuyu said.
The president of the Professional Firefighters Association of New Jersey died suddenly at his home Tuesday afternoon, the organization announced.

Dominick Marino, a retired firefighter, was 61 years old.

Details on how he died were not immediately available.

Gov. Phil Murphy said Marino didnt just run into burning buildings, he knocked down walls to protect his fellow firefighters.

Marino was elected president of the Professional Firefighters Association of New Jersey in 2008. The organization represents more than 5,000 active and retired firefighters, EMS and support service members.

Murphy cited Marinos advocacy for a new law in New Jersey providing additional services for first responders, including those who served on September 11, 2001.

He put his heart and soul into everything he did for his members, and in doing so he exemplified everything you ever could want from a leader, Murphy said.

Marino served for more than 25 years as a firefighter in the North Bergen Fire Department and North Hudson Regional Fire Rescue, retiring in 2011.

He is survived by his wife Ellen, three children, and two grandchildren.

Sens. Cory Booker and Bob Menendez released statements mourning the union leaders passing. Booker called him a true leader and champion for New Jersey firefighters, and Menendez said he will always appreciate and miss Dominicks advice and counsel on some of the most pressing issues facing our first responders.

We are shocked and saddened by the sudden passing of @PFANJ_IAFF President Dominick Marino. Don was a true brother in labor, a friendly and familiar face around the state, and a staunch supporter of his membership. We are praying for his family, friends, and colleagues.  pic.twitter.com/Z6t1Cq7Y3t  State Troopers Fraternal Association of NJ (STFA) (@STFA_NJ) April 14, 2020

Rob Jennings may be reached at rjennings@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter@RobJenningsNJ. Find NJ.com on Facebook.
Trump Cuts US Funding to WHO

By Steve Herman April 14, 2020

U.S. funding to the World Health Organization is being halted by President Donald Trump, who blames it for creating "a 20-fold increase" in COVID-19 cases worldwide.

The U.N. health agency, according to Trump, made a "disastrous decision" to oppose his restrictions on travel from China and put "political correctness above life-saving measures."

The action had been expected as Trump repeatedly signaled the move after accusing the WHO of having a bias in favor of China, despite the United States being its largest single funder.

The president said the freeze on funds for the global agency will remain in place "for 60 to 90 days" while a review of its response to the outbreak of the coronavirus is conducted.

Trump contends that the WHO failed in its "basic duty" to investigate early reports out of China about the virus in December of last year.

"Withholding funds for WHO in the midst of the worst pandemic in a century makes as much sense as cutting off ammunition to an ally as the enemy closes in," said Senator Patrick Leahy, the top Democrat on the Appropriations Committee and ranking member of the subcommittee on State Department and foreign operations.

"The White House knows that it grossly mishandled this crisis from the beginning, ignoring multiple warnings and squandering valuable time, dismissing medical science, comparing COVID-19 to the common cold, and saying 'everything will be fine,'" Leahy said.

After a backlash, including from several key senators in his own Republican Party, Trump modified his assertions of the previous day that he would use his "ultimate authority" to soon lift stay-at-home directives and reopen the country's economy.

Reopening individual states

Trump announced he would allow each governor to decide on how and when they would reopen their individual economies.

"We'll open it up in beautiful little pieces," he said, explaining that in his view 20 of the 50 states are "in extremely good shape" and have been spared, until now, the brunt of the coronavirus.

According to the president, some states not hard hit by the virus could reopen before May 1, the day after the social distancing extended guidelines of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are to end.

Trump on Monday said he "calls the shots," in reply to a question from VOA about whether consortiums of states developing their own reopening plans pose a challenge to his authority to declare a national reopening amid the pandemic.

"They can't do anything without the approval of the president of the United States," Trump said.

In response Tuesday, the New York governor, Andrew Cuomo, said Trump was "clearly spoiling for a fight" with state leaders, but "I am not going to fight with him," explaining that the COVID-19 pandemic, which has killed more than 25,000 Americans, is no time for any division between the federal and state governments.

Asked about Cuomo's remark that he was acting more like a king than a president, Trump replied: "I didn't declare myself as king."

Adam White, resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, told VOA, "The president has some rhetorical authority, that's why he's giving all these press conferences and speeches. But day-to-day authority really does reside first and foremost with state and local governments and it always has under our system of government."

COVID-19 testing

Dr. Anthony Fauci, a member of the White House coronavirus task force and the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases since 1984, on Tuesday, told the Associated Press that the United States does not yet have the critical testing and tracing procedures needed to begin reopening the nation's economy.

"We have to have something in place that is efficient and that we can rely on, and we're not there yet," Fauci said.

Governors also said this week they do not have sufficient testing supplies to carry out mass surveillance.

Trump said the federal government is going to insist states test people at their borders for COVID-19.

Cuomo and five other governors of northeastern states began deliberations Tuesday on a regional plan to reopen their economies. The governors of three Western states, California, Oregon and Washington, also announced Monday they are similarly taking a unified approach. The East and West Coast consortiums together represent about 100 million people, nearly a third of the country's population.

Trump also announced on Tuesday the Great American Economic Revival Industry Groups to suggest guidelines on reopening the country. The members will include business and labor union leaders, as well as economists, religious leaders and politicians.

"They already know what I want," the president said. "I don't have to give them instructions. These are very sophisticated people. These are the best people in their fields."

The new grouping is viewed as a potential counterweight to the primary task force focused on public health. Neither Fauci nor another high-profile member of the initial task force, Dr. Deborah Birx, spoke at Tuesday's event.

Airline industry bailout

Trump also announced his administration has reached an agreement in principle with 10 U.S. airlines over the terms of a $25 billion bailout to prop up an industry crippled by the pandemic.

The president of the Association of Flight Attendants union, Sara Nelson, called the payout "an unprecedented accomplishment," but she criticized Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin for delaying the funds and for asking that airlines repay a portion of them.

"We welcome the news that a number of major airlines intend to participate in the Payroll Support Program," Mnuchin said in a statement. "This is an important CARES Act program that will support American workers and help preserve the strategic importance of the airline industry while allowing for appropriate compensation to the taxpayers."

Patsy Widakuswara and Katherine Gypson contributed to this report.

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Union minister Nitin Gadkari on



Wednesday held talks with the representatives of the micro, small and medium enterprises (MSME) industry and assured all possible help from the government to tide over the challenges created by the coronavirus-enforced lockdown.

The MSME Minister held separate meetings via video conferencing with the members of the All India Plastic Manufacturers Association (AIPMA), and the PHD Chamber of Commerce & Industry, from his residence in Nagpur.

During the meeting, the representatives raised some concerns related to the industry and also gave suggestions to the minister.

Some of the issues they pointed out and the suggestions they gave included: waiver of fixed charges on utility (electricity, water) bills, extension of moratorium for certain payments, inclusion of certain goods in the category of essential commodities, payment of salaries to workers during lockdown from their ESI and Provident Fund, addressing liquidity crunch through subsidy, extension in GST payment, relief in transportation for exports of goods.

Gadkari noted down their suggestions and assured them that he would take up the issues with the Union Finance Minister and the Reserve Bank of India (RBI).

"The suggestions related to my department (MSME) will be addressed immediately...We are standing with you. But the industry should also see that other stakeholders like banks, financial institutions and electricity sector are also feeling the heat and need our support," he said.

Gadkari said that the industry should work together and tap the opportunities that will be created when the coronavirus crisis gets over.

He said that several leading countries are planning to move their production units from China, which can be an opportunity for the Indian industry.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
SCARBOROUGH, Maine, April 15, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- According to an analysis by the CBD payment solution Organic Payment Gateways, CBD websites still overwhelmingly choose ".com" for their domains. The preference for ".com" over other choices has seemingly not been impacted by the ever-increasing competition for CBD-related dot-com domains. A top-level domain (sometimes referred to as a TLD), is the right-side portion of an internet address. The most common examples are .com, .net, and .org.

Top-Level Domain Breakdown: Which TLDs are CBD Sites Choosing?

Organic Payment Gateways, a US-based CBD business service provider, looked at over 400 CBD payment gateway inquiries over the past six months and compiled a report that outlined the top-level domain preferences of the businesses that made those inquiries on their site, OrganicPaymentGateways.com. Even in the new and innovative world of CBD e-commerce websites, when business owners carefully balance new products, fast rollouts, and regulatory compliance, dot-com is still the top-level domain choice, and it's not even close.

Roughly 92 percent, or 404 out of 440, CBD e-commerce websites reviewed chose dot-com as their top-level domain. This is significant, as it far exceeds the worldwide percentage of dot-com use, and surprised Organic Payment Gateways as they went through the numbers.

According to Alex Roy of E-commerce 4 LLC, the parent company of Organic Payment Gateways, they knew the dot-com saturation would be high, but not to this extent.

Alex stated, "Worldwide, .com still encompasses nearly 50 percent of all domain registrations as of late last year, according to Statista, a leading source for market-level data. Worldwide data will usually show a lower .com percentage, due to the advent of country code domains like .ca and .uk. But the fact that the CBD sites we looked at were almost twice as likely to go with a .com domain really stood out to us."

"We expected new top-level domains like .biz, .business, .health, and even .buzz and .dog, to take more of a bite out of .com's dominance, in terms of CBD websites. Additionally, it was surprising to see so few .net, .org, and .info domains used by those that inquired with us about payment gateways, considering the huge competition that surrounds short, memorable .com domains," Alex continued.

Here's what Organic Payment Gateways' data shows us about CBD e-commerce and top-level domain choices.

As mentioned, .com was the top-level domain choice for nearly 92 percent of CBD site owners. The second most popular choice was .net, although even in second place, it only accounted for a little over 2 percent of the CBD e-commerce sites reviewed, with just 9 out of 440 choosing .net.

Only four other TLDs, .co, .care, .biz, and .org, had a usage rate that exceeded one-quarter of one percent. Additionally, the following top-level domains had minimal usage: .ca, .io, .me, .tv, .us, .help, .shop, .life, .mobi, .store, .cloud, and .love.

Data for this article was provided by Organic Payment Gateways, a CBD-focused payment gateway provider based in Maine that focuses on placing legal, US-based CBD businesses with easily integrated payment gateways.

According to their site, OrganicPaymentGateways.com, they help websites sell CBD online using the shopping cart and platform they already have in place (regardless of their top-level domain choice).

To learn more about their CBD payment gateway decision tools, visit their site directly at: https://organicpaymentgateways.com/cbd-payment-gateways/

To see more details on Organic Payment Gateways' CBD TLD data, visit: https://organicpaymentgateways.com/online-CBD-TLD-usage

Media Contact:

Alex Roy

800-570-1347

[email protected]

SOURCE Organic Payment Gateways

Related Links

http://www.organicpaymentgateways.com


Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates criticised President Donald Trump's decision to suspend funding to the World Health Organisation as "dangerous," saying the payments should continue particularly during the global coronavirus pandemic.

"Halting funding for the World Health Organisation during a world health crisis is as dangerous as it sounds," Gates tweeted early on Wednesday. "Their work is slowing the spread of COVID-19 and if that work is stopped no other organisation can replace them. The world needs @WHO now more than ever."

The US, the organisation's largest donor, has committed to provide the WHO with $US893 million ($1.4 billion) during its current two-year funding period, a State Department spokesperson said.

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the family's giant philanthropy, is the next biggest donor to WHO after the US, accounting for close to 10 per cent of the United Nations agency's funding.
Shivraj Singh Chouhan said Rs 1,000 will be credited in the accounts of the migrants in other states, amid nationwide enforced to contain COVID-19.

Bhopal: Madhya Pradesh chief minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan on Wednesday announced that Rs 1,000 will be credited in the accounts of the migrant labourers who are stranded in other states, amid the nationwide lockdown enforced to contain the spread of COVID-19.

"Today, we have decided that Rs 1,000 will be deposited in every labourer's account. I appeal to all the migrated labourers that there is no need to worry. In case more money is required, the money shall be credited in the accounts. In the times of trouble, the government stands in solidarity with you all," Chouhan, who took oath as the chief minister on 23 March, told ANI.

Apart from depositing money into the labourers' accounts, Chouhan said that he is in talks with chief ministers of other states to arrange food and water for migrant labourers.

Follow LIVE updates on coronavirus pandemic

"Many workers of Madhya Pradesh are stranded in other states and are unable to return due to the extension of the national lockdown. We have even spoken to other state chief ministers as well for the workers' accommodation and food," he added.

On Tuesday, Prime Minister Narendra Modi, in his address to the nation, announced the extension of the lockdown till 3 May to stop the further spread of COVID-19.

In order to ensure that money is transferred into the accounts, Chouhan requested all MPs and MLAs to maintain a database of all the labourers stranded in other areas so that accounts are created and the money is deposited.

As labourers find it difficult to find work after the harvesting season is over, the chief minister said that in view of the situation, arrangements for their food would be made as well.

"I have instructed all collectors to make arrangements for the labourers. There should not be a shortage of ration for them as well," he stated.

Speaking on labourers not having ration cards, Chouhan said, "We would provide two-month ration free of cost  five kilograms for every person. But if people do not have ration cards, they would also be given ration cards as well."

"We will not let our brothers and sisters go hungry in this time of crisis," he added.

According to the Union Ministry of Health and Family Welfare, 730 positive COVID-19 cases have been reported in the state so far, out of which 51 patients have recovered and 50 have succumbed to the virus.
The annual Thrissur Pooram,



billed as the mother of all temple festivals in Kerala, will not be held this year in the wake of the nationwide lockdown, the Kerala government said on Wednesday.

The iconic festival, known for theparade of richly caparisoned jumbos, performance of traditional music ensembles and a sea of cheering people, was to be held at thesprawling Thekkinkadu Maidan in Thrissur city on May2 this year.

Agriculture Minister and a legislator from the district VS Sunil Kumar told media that the state government and members of the two devaswom boards, which organises the festival, held discussions and consulted with the priests and "unanimously decided" to cancel the Pooram.

"After considering the unusualsituation of pandemic we are facing, the state government and the devaswom Boards have unanimously decided to cancel the famous Thrissur Pooram (festival) and will conduct only the necessary rituals," the minister said.

The rituals will be conducted inside the Vadakkunnathan Lord Shiva temple with the participation of five people and devotees will not be allowed inside the temple.

"All other events related to the Thrissur pooram, including the exhibition, mini-poorams also stands cancelled", he said adding all the religious institutions are supposed to follow the lockdown protocol.

The pooram was earlier cancelled during many instances, including in 1948 when Mahatma Gandhi was assassinated and then during the Chinese war.

"Earlier it was also cancelled or held with minimum rituals when there was a difference of opinion over conducting bursting the fireworks and handling of the usual exhibition," minister said.

This year's festival was scheduled to be held on May 3.

The Pooram exhibition, which usually begins on April 1 and ends in the last week of May, has already been cancelled.

The two-century-old Thrissur Pooram had its origin in 1798, through a royal edict of the then Raja Rama Varma, popularly known as Shakthan Thampuran, a powerful ruler of the erstwhile princely state of Cochin.

The edict entrusted two local temples -- Paramekkavu and Thiruvambady -- as the main sponsors of the festivities to be conducted in a competitive spirit.

Besides the main poorams by the two devaswoms, small poorams from nearby temples also participate in the festivities, which ends with the fireworks display.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
A patient who spent the night in San Francisco General Hospitals psychiatric emergency unit spiked a fever in the morning. Only then did his nurses learn that hed come from one of the citys largest homeless shelters, where dozens of residents tested positive for the coronavirus.

After hospital staff frantically moved the patient to an isolation unit on Saturday, it took 12 hours to confirm he was infected. His nurses learned about the diagnosis from the mans doctors, who called to let them know. And they were scared.

Were talking about everyone being able to have the peace of mind that if theyre not notified, they have not been exposed, said Jennifer Esteen, a registered nurse and organizer with Service Employees International, Local 1021, which represents the nurses at San Francisco General.

As of Tuesday, 2,599 health workers statewide have been infected with the coronavirus on the job and from other sources, the state health department reported. Frontline health workers at Bay Area hospitals want their employers to quickly tell them when they have been exposed to the coronavirus from patients or co-workers. They want to be tested quickly, and have enough protective equipment to stay safe.

But such safety concerns are pit against federal privacy guidelines that hospitals also live by, creating thorny ethical issues.

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Although the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services issued new guidance in February allowing hospitals to share information with public health officials and people at risk of exposure to the coronavirus, hospitals interpret the rules differently.

Esteen said hospital administrators dont always tell employees when they have been exposed to the virus by a colleague.

They (put) the safety of workers on the back burner, she said, adding that what hospitals call privacy is really public health issues at stake here.

San Francisco General Hospital spokesman Brent Andrew said the hospital is investigating the weekend incident in which the patient  who had no symptoms initially  was placed in a room with other patients and given a surgical mask.

Nurse Mary Ann Abille said she took the mans temperature and saw it rising. As she and nurse Katie Enriquez prepared to wheel the patient to the COVID-19 unit, they said the man walked into the hall with no face covering. Enriquez yelled for someone to get him a mask. She got N95 masks for herself and Abille, the high-quality kind kept under lock and key for use with patients suspected of having COVID-19.

Meanwhile, the hospital has taken additional steps to protect staff safety, Andrew said, adding that the citys public health department is contacting two patients who were in touch with the infected person. The hospitals Occupational Health office, which is responsible for employee safety, will do the same with workers who were within 6 feet of those patients for more than 10 minutes, including asking whether employees were wearing appropriate masks and if they carpool with co-workers.

As of Tuesday, however, at least one nurse who was exposed to the patient had not yet been contacted, Andrew said.

Abille and Enriquez, who both contacted Occupational Health Monday, said they were told they were low risk because of their brief exposure wearing masks. They said they were told they wouldnt qualify to get tested unless they presented symptoms.

At Santa Clara Valley Medical Center, where a worker filed a whistle-blower complaint alleging that employees were not adequately informed or protected from co-workers infections, the hospital traces and discloses information about outbreaks, county health department spokeswoman Joy Alexiou said. She said 46 employees, including four on a single floor, tested positive out of about 6,500 working throughout the centers hospitals and clinics. She could not comment on specifics of the workers complaint because of an investigation, but said the floors manager had informed fellow workers of the infection, which is not mandated hospital policy.

Sutter Health informs workers who may have been exposed to a positive patient, but doesnt share identifying information, a spokeswoman said.

Kaiser Permanente Health identifies and notifies every employee exposed at work within a day or two of the test results, but cant share personal information, a spokesman said.

At San Francisco General, where seven employees have tested positive, officials who talk with the people they have interacted with  a process called contact tracing  will disclose the identity of a positive patient, but not a positive employee, Andrew said.

Shamideh Engel, a nurse on the psychiatric unit, doesnt feel safe with that approach.

I would want to know where they were working, which unit, who they were exposed to, Engel said. Theres so much tension and uncertainty.

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.

Jessica Christian / The Chronicle

After this weekends incident, nurse Enriquez, who has asthma and takes care of her baby and mother at home, took matters into her own hands. She c

alled in sick on Sunday and contacted her private doctor, who wrote a note recommending that she isolate for two weeks, but telling her to check with her employer for their isolation guidelines.

Abille, who has been isolating in her bedroom since the weekend and watching her symptoms, also called in sick this week and booked an appointment to get tested Wednesday. They said they were reluctant to go back to work and risk exposure again.

Alice Yee, the supervising nurse at the time, said its difficult to trace exposure in the densely crowded psychiatric unit. Andrew said the hospital recognizes the units challenges and is making changes to protect workers starting Tuesday. They include sending patients from homeless shelters to the emergency department to get tested for COVID-19 first, capping the number of people in the unit, and raising the height of the plexiglass at intake. The unit cant be closed for deep cleaning, but is thoroughly cleaned daily, he added.

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Nancy Gudino, a nurse on the unit when the patients test results were confirmed, said the unit was so busy then that she had time only to wipe down where the patient sat, and to layer up with a lab coat and surgical mask to protect herself.

Recently, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention issued guidelines allowing nurses to wear surgical masks instead of N95s unless theyre interacting with a known or suspected COVID-19 patient. Several Bay Area hospitals said they will follow that policy. Andrew did not say whether San Francisco General is doing so.

Abille said that if she does go back to work this weekend, shell find her own N95 mask to wear just to be sure.

Mallory Moench is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: mallory.moench@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @mallorymoench
A pedestrian walks past the closed Nordstrom Rack in Center City Philadelphia on March 31, 2020. Nonessential retail businesses are closed due to the coronavirus pandemic. Read more

Sweeping efforts to rescue the economy from the crushing effects of the coronavirus pandemic have reached a new phase, as officials say the federal government made direct payments to tens of millions of Americans in recent days.

The direct deposits  $1,200 for adults who make $75,000 or less, with smaller payments for higher earners  were made as part of the $2.2 trillion economic stimulus package passed by Congress and signed by President Donald Trump late last month. Millions more checks are expected to be disbursed in the coming weeks and months. The physical checks will bear Trumps name, as the president looks to take credit for any relief from the unprecedented economic crisis.

The money, which arrived for many people on Wednesday, is sorely needed as government-mandated shutdowns of nonessential businesses, along with orders for the vast majority of the country to stay home, continue to hammer economic output.

Philadelphia-area residents who have received direct deposits in their bank accounts said they were grateful for the cash infusion. But several said the payment should be recurring until the pandemic subsides, especially for the most financially vulnerable.

This can only be the tip of the iceberg for the assistance everyone should be getting in this time, said Kaley Maltz, 25, of Fishtown, who lost her job at a restaurant last month.

In interviews and on social media, people said they would use the money to pay their bills, support local businesses, and donate to those in greater need. Others, uncertain about how long government orders to stay home would remain in place, said they would save the cash.

As of last week, almost 17 million Americans, or 10% of the workforce, had filed jobless claims. As more factories are shuttered, U.S. manufacturing output has shrunk, recording its largest drop since just after World War II. And on Wednesday, the Commerce Department reported that U.S. retail sales plummeted 8.7% in March, shattering the previous record drop in November 2008, during the Great Recession; Aprils numbers, analysts say, are likely to be considerably worse.

 READ MORE: Philly-area workers on losing their jobs in the coronavirus crisis: 'I feel trapped

A whole month without income is kind of frightening, especially with student loans and everything, Maltz said. Luckily Ive been able to forebear them.

She said she applied for unemployment benefits but isnt sure if shes eligible and has yet to hear back. Like in other states, Pennsylvanias unemployment offices have been overwhelmed by the flood of new jobless claims. Maltzs stimulus money arrived Wednesday morning.

I had no idea when it was coming, she said. I checked my bank account ... and just felt super relieved to get it.

She recently moved from South Philadelphia and will use the money to help cover her rent and security deposit.

The relief package gives $1,200 to single adults who make an adjusted gross income of $75,000 or less, based on the 2019 tax return or, absent that, the 2018. Those filing as the head of a household and earning up to $112,500 get $1,200, too. Married couples making up to $150,000 will receive a total of $2,400. Families can also get $500 per child.

For those earning more than those thresholds, the payments decrease by $5 for each $100 that a taxpayers income exceeds the threshold. The payments phase out for individuals making more than $99,000, $146,500 for head-of-household filers, and $198,000 for married couples.

Those with no income, or people who rely on government programs such as Social Security, also qualify.

 READ MORE: What to know about the coronavirus stimulus checks  and how and when you get your money

Elissa Thompson, a mother of two children, ages 2 and 5, said she and her husband, an analyst for Comcast, are saving half of the $3,400 they received and using the rest to pay their bills. Considering it could be 18 months or something, we want to save money just in case they do cut [his] hours, she said.

We dont want to just frivolously spend it, said Thompson, who lives in Northeast Philadelphia. Especially the way the grocery stores are. Were spending three times what we usually do on groceries. Theres no sales. Everythings really expensive.

She added: I dont even want to go out to spend the money.

That approach makes sense, said Diane Lim, senior adviser and outreach director of the Penn Wharton Budget Model. Rather than stimulate consumer spending, this relief package is designed to help people pay bills, buy essential goods, and stay at home during a public health crisis, she said. Large parts of the economy where consumers would normally spend their money are shut down.

We are basically paying people, providing people with cash, in order to make it sustainable that they stay at home and not go to work, she said.

Tracey Costello, 71, of West Philadelphia, said the money would help pay for the more expensive groceries shes been buying lately. She spent $7 on some fancy pasta at Whole Foods on Wednesday because it was all that was left, she said. She paid twice as much for mayonnaise, too.

 ASK US: Do you have a question about the coronavirus and how it affects your health, work and life? Ask our reporters.

Costello also just adopted a cat because of the pandemic, so she expects the check to cover expenses associated with her new feline friend.

So not much left over. None left over, Costello said. But Im happy because I wasnt expecting it and it will make me feel better."

Jim Adair, 31, said he counted himself among the lucky ones: still employed, and mostly unaffected financially. Adair, who works in publishing, said he wants to use the $1,200 to help pay for a move to a new apartment and to help local businesses.

The longer this goes on, I get concerned about them perhaps not being able to reopen, said Adair, of South Philadelphia.

People who felt financially secure enough were considering ways to donate their checks.

I found myself in this position of being very fortunate, said Lillian Dunn, 34, who works for a community arts nonprofit in North Philadelphia. Im working from home. Im not navigating the front-line anxieties and challenges. And I still have my income.

 READ MORE: Stimulus payments are starting to arrive. If you can afford it, heres how to use that money to help Philly.

She said she had become dismayed by Philadelphias criminal justice system  specifically how its cash bail policy can result in jail time for those who cant afford to pay a few hundred dollars. Public health advocates have warned that county jails are breeding grounds for the spread of the virus.

So last week Dunn donated her check to the Philadelphia Community Bail Fund, a group that posts bail for those who cant afford it.

That system is already inhumane," Dunn said, noting that the first Philadelphia jail inmate died from complications of the virus on Tuesday. "And now you have women in that position who are now being exposed.

This article contains information from the Associated Press.
The ongoing coronavirus pandemic had led to a number of fake stories emerging on the internet and print media. Be it finding a cure for the ongoing pandemic or finding the root of it, these fake stories target the ongoing events and spin out narratives which are completely fabricated. One such story has now been brought to light.

Also read: Fact Check: Did Sri Lanka put Kerala CM Pinarayi Vijayan's photo on a stamp?

Claim -

One of the regional print media houses in Gujarat had recently reported that the Army has been deployed in the area in order to maintain lockdown. Various stories were also claiming that the Army personnel which were due for retirement and holidays have been recalled and deployed in Gujarat. Though these reports had no credible sources to back their claim, some questionable media outlets did run stories about the Army in Gujarat.

Also read: Fact Check: Was a funeral home worker accidentally cremated in New York?

Rating - False

As seen earlier on various instances, when regional media outlets run an unverified story, the official bodies have to come forward and weigh in on the matter. This time around, a similar incident took place. The official Twitter account of Additional Directorate General of Public Information announced that the claim of Army deployed in Gujarat is not true in any matter. They also urged media outlets to confirm a story before publication.

Fake & incorrect news found published in print media about Army deployment in Gujarat & instructions given to Army personnel on leave & due for retirement under present circumstances. Media is requested to confirm such inputs from authorised sources only prior to publication. pic.twitter.com/QwbE2Qvmcg  ADG PI - INDIAN ARMY (@adgpi) April 14, 2020

Also read: Fact check: Are Beijing and Shanghai in China not affected by the coronavirus outbreak?

Origin -

As per reports, the story was first run by regional news publication hubs in Gujarat. Stories claimed that the Army has been deployed with expectations of using force against people not following the lockdown. This reportedly brought upon a situation of confusion and fear amongst people.

Also read: Fact Check: Are Himalayas visible from Jalandhar after 30 years?

Google Trends Analytics -

With the ongoing pandemic, a number of fake stories do rounds on social media and other platforms. To verify these fake stories, people use Google as a trustable platform to navigate through fake stories and get the real news. In this scenario too, people took to Google and searched whether the Army is actually deployed in Gujarat.

Also read: Fact check: Is EPFO processing COVID-19 claims on high priority?
PR-Inside.com: 2020-04-15 14:03:04

PEMBROKE, Bermuda, April 15, 2020 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Sompo International Holdings Ltd., a Bermuda-based specialty provider of property and casualty insurance and reinsurance, announced today that as part of the ongoing transformation of Sompo International, the insurer will be consolidating its London presence into one company market platform. This will mean that, from January 2021, it will no longer write business from Endurance at Lloyds (EAL) or Syndicate 5151. All renewals and new business will be written from Endurance Worldwide Insurance Limited.



Mr. John Charman, Executive Chairman of the Board of Directors, Sompo International Holdings Ltd. and CEO Overseas Insurance and Reinsurance Business, Sompo Holdings, Inc. said Our decision to focus our activities in London on a single company platform reflects the unique strength of Sompos global reach, brand, ratings and financial stability. Having one single platform will allow us to continue to profitably grow our business and deliver superior value and solutions to our clients and distribution partners. With Sompo Internationals rating equivalent to Lloyds, we can utilize that rating and our existing operation to be an even more streamlined and efficient provider of risk solutions whilst maintaining a meaningful and diversified trading relationship with Lloyds in the years to come.

Julian James, CEO International Insurance said; Our ambition is to grow our London Market and European business significantly in the near term. Sompo International is now recognized by our brokers and clients as a global leader with significant capability and excellent talent. With one platform, we will be able to provide them with efficient access to the very best products and services, underpinned by highly rated security.

About Sompo International

Sompo International Holdings Ltd. (Sompo International) is a global specialty provider of property and casualty insurance and reinsurance, headquartered in Bermuda. Sompo International companies are wholly owned subsidiaries of Sompo Holdings, Inc., whose core business encompasses one of the largest properties and casualty insurance groups in the Japanese domestic market. We maintain excellent financial strength as evidenced by the ratings of A+ (Superior) from A.M. Best (XV size category) and A+ (Strong) from Standard and Poors on our principal operating subsidiaries. For more information about Sompo International, please visit www.sompo-intl.com.

Contacts

Sompo International

Cara Gallagher

SVP, Marketing  Communications

Phone: + 1 917 421 4973

Email: cagallagher@sompo-intl.com

Luther Pendragon

Caroline Wagstaff

Phone: 0207 618 9158

Email: CarolineWagstaff@luther.co.uk
Here are todays top news, analysis and opinion curated for you. Know all about the latest news and other news updates from Hindustan Times.

170 districts Covid-19 hotspots, another 207 potential hotspots, says Centre

To step up the fight against the Covid-19 pandemic in the country, Indias districts will now be classified into three categorieshotspot districts which report a large number of positive cases, non-hotspot districts which record a few coronavirus cases and green zones which have not reported fresh cases for some time. Read more.

Covid-19: India to facilitate return of 180 stranded Pakistani nationals

The Indian government is facilitating the repatriation of 180 Pakistani citizens stranded in the country because of the Covid-19 lockdown, with 41 of them set to return via the Wagah-Attari border crossing on Thursday. Additional secretary Dammu Ravi issued a letter to authorities in several states on Tuesday to facilitate the return of 41 Pakistani nationals who are currently in different parts of Delhi, Haryana, Punjab and Uttar Pradesh. Read more.

India to send 5 lakh HCQ tablets to Afghanistan from Saarc Covid-19 Fund

India has decided to send 5 lakh tablets of hydroxychloroquine to Afghanistan from the Saarc Covid-19 Emergency Fund set up at Prime Minister Narendra Modis suggestion last month. The fund was created with an initial corpus of $10 million from India; other Saarc members had also pitched in. Read more.

Election on his mind, Donald Trump goes after WHO chief and China

US President Donald Trump has halted funding to the World Health Organisation for its handling of the coronavirus pandemic, a decision attributed to his assessment that the Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus-led global health body had been biased towards China and given the world, and him, what he has described as faulty recommendations. Read more.

CM Adityanath threatens action under NSA after doctors, cops attacked in UP

Three people, including a doctor and a pharmacist, suffered injuries when stones were pelted at the ambulance carrying a team of health workers and police personnel in Uttar Pradeshs Moradabad on Wednesday, Chief Medical Officer (CMO) Dr SP Garg said. Read more.

Even Tulsi has refused visitors to her home: This message from BMC has Smriti Iranis nod

Who can forget the iconic Kyunki Saas Bhi Kabhi Bahu Thi title track. Even the slightest mention of it conjures an instant image in our minds of Tulsi opening the doors to her house and welcoming you in. However, now, that same title track has been used to share an important message and this one is Tulsi approved. Read more.

Youd pay to watch: Michael Holding names 4 best fast bowlers across generations

Former West Indies fast bowler Michael Holding was one of the best fast bowlers in his time. He was a part of the West Indies team that had a fast bowling unit second to none. With Malcolm Marshall, Joel Garner and Andy Roberts by his side, Holding was capable to give sleepless nights to even the best of batters during his playing days. Read more.

The curious case of dreaming in the times of a global pandemic

I saw broken houses and I vividly remember the walls falling down one by one and crumbling into disappearances. I do not know what to figure out from this dream. Is the about the past, the present or the future, I cannot tell but I will keep figuring out, said the 30-year-old writer as she was falling short of words explaining it further. Read more.

Extraction interview: Chris Hemsworth, director Sam Hargrave rave about genuinely great person Randeep Hooda

Neither star Chris Hemsworth nor director Sam Hargrave were too familiar with Indian films and actors before they shot a significant chunk of their upcoming action movie, Extraction, in the subcontinent, but theyve since made amends. Read more.
Bryan Reid is known for building custom log homes on his HGTV reality show Timber Kings, and he's also in the business of pulp  a specialized type of pulp that has become extremely useful over the past few weeks.

Cedar pulp, made by Harmac Pacific in Nanaimo, B.C., is critical for creating medical garments such as gowns and masks used in hospitals all over North America.

"Building log homes  we surely can't help the world in this pandemic," Reid told Daybreak Kamloops host Shelley Joyce.

"By gosh what we're doing with [the pulp]  I think it will go a long ways, not just in Canada but the U.S. too."

Stock Photography

Each year, the company spends about a months worth of production making this special pulp. But this year, the demand for these kinds of items is, of course, high.

"There's quite a call for medical garments for the pandemic," Reid said. "And also I think they need some in reserve. They don't know what the requirements are going to be. So I think it's to be safe rather than sorry."

Reid came into possession of the company in 2008, when the previous owners were facing bankruptcy.

"We didn't really want to go in to the pulp business because as a rule it's a commodity and we're not in the commodity business. We're in the custom home business and we get to control our own destiny," Reid said.

Initially, they wanted to buy the facility so they could have the power plant that was on-site, but the employees talked Reid and his business partners into continuing on as a pulp mill.

Sotheby's Realty

"The employees are the backbone of the operation," he said. "They truly are."

Reid said employees are making pulp 24 hours a day right now, and although they'd probably prefer to be home with their loved ones, they're happy to be at work.

"It's very gratifying," he said.

If you have a COVID-19-related story we should pursue that affects British Columbians, please email us at impact@cbc.ca.
A bottle of Prasco Laboratories Hydroxychloroquine Sulphate is arranged for a photograph in Queens, New York, April 7, 2020. Christopher Occhicone | Bloomberg | Getty Images

Researchers are working as quickly as science will allow to determine whether hydroxychloroquine, a decades-old malaria drug touted by President Donald Trump as a potential "game changer" in curtailing the Covid-19 pandemic, is effective in fighting the coronavirus. Federal health regulators have fast-tracked approvals for coronavirus research, allowing scientists across the nation to skip through months of red tape on potential treatments and vaccines for the deadly virus. On March 24, researchers at NYU Langone launched one of the nation's largest hydroxychloroquine studies and enrolled their first patient 10 days later. It's one of more than a dozen formal studies in the U.S. looking at the treatment for CV-19, according to ClinicalTrials.gov. The drug is proven to work in treating Lupus and rheumatoid arthritis, but not Covid-19. A handful of small studies on its use in coronavirus patients published in France and China has raised hope that the drug might help fight the virus.

New York studies

The study at NYU Langone is one of two being run by New York state. It's a randomized controlled trial designed to determine whether hydroxychloroquine is any better than a placebo in preventing Covid-19. Co-led with the University of Washington, the clinical study aims to test 2,000 adults who have been in close contact with confirmed coronavirus patients, but haven't exhibited any symptoms, to see if the drug can lessen the chances of getting the infection.

EMS workers wheel a patient out of NYU Langone Health hospital during the coronavirus pandemic on April 13, 2020 in New York City. Noam Galai | Getty Images

"We're trying to move at warp speed," Dr. Anna Bershteyn, an assistant professor at NYU Langone and the study's co-principal investigator, said in an interview with CNBC. "The fastest an answer can possibly come we think is in two months." The New York State Department of Health, in partnership with the University of Albany, is conducting a so-called observational study that researchers hope can shed some insight into the drug's potential effectiveness in a matter of weeks, possibly before May. Observational studies aren't considered as conclusive as randomized controlled trials because doctors can prescribe a variety of other drugs to treat an infection. The less formal process, however, can yield faster results and help with the approval process of some treatments.

Albany researchers

New York officials are providing dozens of hospitals across the state with doses of the drug that physicians can use as part of a patient's treatment. In return, the hospitals will provide the medical records to the state, which will then be analyzed by Albany researchers. "The advantage of this study is it has great timeliness," said David Holtgrave, dean at the University of Albany's School of Public Health and a researcher working with the state. He said researchers will be able to track how physicians are prescribing the drug and monitor whether it shortens hospital stays, helps patients avoid intensive care or ventilators and improves fatality rates. Time is of the essence. The virus, which emerged over three months ago in Wuhan, China, has already infected more than 600,000 people in the United States as of Wednesday, overwhelming U.S. hospitals and stretching some past their maximum capacity. In New York, the epicenter of the U.S. outbreak, Gov. Andrew Cuomo announced last week the highest daily death count yet and said life for New Yorkers will never be the same.

Safety testing

Scientists, including the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases director Dr. Anthony Fauci, warn that Americans shouldn't assume hydroxychloroquine is a "knockout" drug just yet. "We still need to do the definitive studies to determine whether any intervention, not just this one, is truly safe and effective," Fauci told Fox News on April 3.

Dr. Anthony Fauci, at a daily briefing at the White House, March 24, 2020. Jonathan Ernst | Reuters

To pass the Food and Drug Administration's muster and win approval for widespread use, the drug will need to undergo rigorous clinical trials with thousands of participants, according to the agency's guidelines. The NYU-UW study will enroll at least 2,000 patients ages 18 to 80, Bershteyn said. Researchers realize that people over 80 are at a high risk of developing severe Covid-19 symptoms and would likely benefit from a potential treatment, she said. "But right now, we have no idea if this drug does anything at all in the context of Covid-19," she said. A study of 150 patients in China released Tuesday showed that the drug didn't appear to help cure the virus. But the research, which has not been peer-reviewed, showed the medication helped alleviate some of the clinical symptoms of the virus.

Side effects

Hydroxychloroquine, which is available as a generic drug and is also produced under the brand name Plaquenil by French drugmaker Sanofi, can have serious side effects, including muscle weakness and heart arrhythmia. A small study in Brazil was halted this month for safety reasons after coronavirus patients taking chloroquine, which hydroxychloroquine is derived from, developed arrhythmia, including some who died. "Because older populations tend to have more heart problems, we don't want to put anyone in harm's way for a drug that might not work," Bershteyn said. "If the drug turns out to have a benefit, then it comes to each patient weighing the risk versus the benefits."

June or July

The NYU-UW Researchers have been moving quickly to finish the study by June or July, Bershteyn said. Writing the procedure, protocols and getting approval from the Institutional Board of Review usually takes months, but they did it in weeks, she said. The study is very "focused," she said, seeking to use the drug for what is called preexposure prophylaxis. "It's not a new idea," she said, adding that anti-viral drugs work quite well in treating HIV, a virus that was once thought of as a death sentence. "If a medical worker gets pricked by a needle from somebody who has HIV, they will be offered anti-HIV drugs and if those drugs are started quite soon after the exposure, often they will prevent the person from becoming infected at all."

Pandemic challenges

Conducting a clinical trial amid this pandemic comes with unique challenges, she said. All interactions between the researchers and patients will be done virtually instead of in person. Patients are also being asked to take nasal swabs and send them to the lab for testing to protect physicians from exposure to the virus. Researchers also want the study to be as standardized as possible. All testing sites are using the same materials and the specimens are going back to the same lab, she said. Whether the drug works or not, the next question will be "what else could work?" she said. "Even if hydroxychloroquine turns out to be effective, you always want to have another tool, especially against a virus because we know they can develop resistance against a drug," she said. "So, even if we're very lucky and hydroxychloroquine works well, we would still need to be testing what the next drug could be for this purpose."

Parallel studies

While NYU and UW conducts the formal clinical study, the University of Albany researchers are conducting a parallel observational study. They are examining the medical records of Covid-19 patients who have been discharged from the hospital or have died to see what was prescribed and what may have been effective. Researchers will be looking for how often the drug was prescribed by physicians and whether it was used in combination with other drugs such as Azithromycin, commonly known as a Z-Pak. They'll also be watching for side effects and whether there's any evidence of positive or negative outcomes, Holtgrave said. "It's going to take a little time to find what the prescribing behavior of the physicians are like," he said. "Do they prescribe more of that or less of that. That may change." Holtgrave ordered his first batch of medical records two weeks ago. Before they arrive, they will need to be sent to an intermediary company, or medical extraction firm, where patients' personal information will be removed, he said. He hopes to have several hundred cases to begin his analysis.

Moving as fast as we can
Wendell Young spent Tuesday morning delivering face shields to workers at a meat processing plant in Montgomery County.

Young, president of the Keystone State of the United Food and Commercial Workers Union Local 1776, had assurances from the company, CTI Foods in King of Prussia, that it had implemented proper protective and safety measures to protect workers from the coronavirus.

With heightened concerns over health and safety at meat processing plants, Young wanted to be certain.

There's nothing like seeing it firsthand, he said. I was very pleased with the precautions taken. My shop steward assured me that its taking place and wasnt just done for the visit.

The plant, which reopened on Tuesday after being shut down three weeks as a result of a coronavirus breakout, is just one of several meat processing plants in Pennsylvania that has been forced to idle production after workers fell ill with COVID-19, the illness caused by the pandemic.

The Pennsylvania Department of Health has confirmed 1,145 new coronavirus cases, raising the statewide total to 26,490.

At least 647 have died, including 63 new fatalities today, according to the health department.

Concerns over the spread of coronavirus across meat and poultry plants has prompted the closure of about a dozen processing plants across the country, including some of the biggest facilities accounting for the food supply to tens of millions of Americans.

Pennsylvania may have a markedly smaller meat processing industry, but the agricultural sector accounts for tens of thousands of jobs and a substantial part of the direct meat supply to dinner tables. As opposed to many of the behemoth meat processing plants across the country, which primarily supply the restaurant and service industry, Pennsylvanias meat processing industry largely supplies its product directly to supermarkets and consumers.

The outbreaks of coronavirus among some plants and subsequent closures have raised a slew of questions regarding the health and safety of workers and consumers, and even potential disruption to food supplies.

Health officials and scientists have affirmed that consumers have little need for concern over the safety of their meat - as far as it relates to the coronavirus.

The greater risk is to be concerned with any type of bacteria that we also cant see from undercooked chicken or undercooked burgers. That's still a higher risk, said Jonathan Campbell, an animal science researcher and meat specialist at Penn State University.

Meat processing plants almost uniformly adhere to Centers for Disease Control guidance on worker hygiene, including the use of face masks, hand washing and sanitation protocol.

The Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture has oversight of cattle and chicken raising, but once the animals arrive at the processing plant, meat processing falls under the jurisdiction and inspection of federal authorities. (Thats why your meat is stamped USDA).

Researchers have found no proof that any enveloped viruses, such as flus or the common cold, which is a coronavirus, transfers to food products.

From a laymans term, part of what protects the virus doesn't allow it to attach to certain surfaces, Campbell said. Its certainly not going to survive the temperatures from cooking. If it was able to transfer to food, and there is no evidence that it can, it would be a product that is raw. Once its cooked, the virus is not going to survive the cooking temperatures in any way, shape or form.

The World Health Organization, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have all affirmed that COVID-19 cannot be spread through food.

That still leaves the matter of worker safety, however.

Young, whose union represents 8,000 food processors in Pennsylvania, may have walked away from the plant tour a little more at ease, but he remains uneasy about workers reporting to work amid the pandemic: As far as Im concerned, the best way for everyone to be safe is to stay home. The reality is that we wont have a vaccination for a year or two, but right now, during this peak, its important to stay home.

The 35,000-strong membership represented by the United Food and Commercial Workers Union, are considered essential workers by state guidelines. In addition to meat processors and candy makers, the union also represents retail clerks and nursing home workers.

While great swaths of the states labor force has been idled since early March, these commercial food workers have been reporting to work. Increasingly, from grocery store clerks to nursing home staff, workers have begun to fall ill from the pandemic.

This week, the meat processing sector came under national scrutiny as meat processing plants, including Smithfield in South Dakota, one of the nations largest food processors, shuttered operations and sent workers home after hundreds of workers fell ill with COVID-19.

In Pennsylvania, about a half dozen plants have issued similar work stoppage orders.

Cargill Meat Solutions, a 900-worker plant in Hazleton shut down temporarily last week after 130 hourly workers tested positive for COVID-19 and a rash of employees called out sick.

The JBS Beef slaughterhouse in Souderton also shut down after one of its shop stewards died of COVID-19. Tyson Foods also halted production to mitigate the spread of coronavirus among its workforce.

In general, the structural design of meat processing poses a challenge to meeting the social distancing guidelines set by health officials. Workers at meat processing plants stand shoulder-to-shoulder to debone and quarter meat, making it virtually impossible to practice social distancing.

Its definitely a challenge, said Campbell. If you think about making a vehicle, theres a ton of automation that goes into manufacturing. Meat processing is not one of those items that is highly automated.

Certainly the meat processing industry has made automated advancement, by and large, though, pivoting to respond to a pandemic typically takes the form of slowing capacity in order to, for instance, address a bottleneck of workers along the production line.

In packaging you have a lot of people around, Campbell said. A plant may slow down production and reconfigure items or use other areas of the building or put people on different shifts. Those are all things that they can do to limit the spread within central operation.

Is Young confident about the safety of workers?

No, he said. Something has to be done. Im very frustrated.

An often cited concern from consumers is the idea that packaging could be contaminated after being handled by a positive carrier.

Campbell adheres to the tried and true adage: Assume the packaging has bacteria on it. Open it carefully, put the meat in the cooking pot or grill, throw away the packaging and wash your hands - correctly.

Use as hot water as you can stand and good soapy water with a lot of soap, he said. It doesnt have to be antibacterial soap. Regular soap will do.

Washing your face afterwards may not be a bad idea, he adds.

Government officials and scientists alike assure that the meat supply chain remains robust.

The empty shelves found in grocery stores at the start of this crisis were the result of a surge in consumer demand and resulting disruptions in the distribution chain, the Pennsylvania Beef Council said in a statement to PennLive. Most retail stores are now well-stocked and positioned to meet consumer demand for beef.

Campbell said that due to the logistics of meat processing and production, consumers would only see a disruption to supplies if, for instance, the pandemic continued to upend the labor and retail market into the fall.

If that happens you absolutely may start seeing issues with transportation, he said.

If anything, at the moment, consumers face a glut in the food supply chain since the demand from sectors such as schools, restaurants and catering has been dramatically reduced.

Also, we can warehouse and freeze meat products to have steady supplies, Campbell said. You just don't see huge fluctuations.

This week, the heads of some of the regions largest grocery stores say their franchises have ample inventory of beef, pork, chicken and more.

At this point, we have not seen any issues with deliveries. All deliveries are coming through as planned. All of our suppliers have told us they have had no issues, Scott Karns, CEO and president of Karns Foods, told PennLive.

Giant and Weis Markets said they were closely monitoring the situation for any disruption in supplies.

Still, at the national level, some suppliers are sounding the alarm that the pandemic could disrupt supplies going forward.

Smithfield Foods CEO Kenneth Sullivan this week warned that the coronavirus pandemic is pushing the nations meat supply perilously close to the edge.

It is impossible to keep our grocery stores stocked if our plants are not running, he said in a statement.

Smithfield, one the countrys largest pork-producing plants, closed its Sioux Falls, South Dakota plant indefinitely after nearly 300 of its employees tested positive for COVID-19.

Pennsylvania Health Secretary Dr. Rachel Levine said Tuesday the curve has been flattened significantly in Pennsylvania. But she also said social distancing measures must continue to reduce the spread of the virus.

With union members back to work at some of the facilities in Pennsylvania, Young remains outraged at the federal governments response to coronavirus.

This time our government leaders ignored the warnings and ignored what their health care professionals were telling them, Young said. Our president failed us. None of us were prepared. Our employers and unions were faced with this at the last minute. We were caught short without equipment, without masks, without proper gear and proper training. That cost peoples lives and its still going to cost peoples lives.

More from PennLive

When can Pa. return to normal? Roadmap emerges, although distance uncertain

Pa. nurses help man say goodbye on FaceTime to grandfather dying of coronavirus: We shed a lot of tears

Stimulus payments: How to track where your money is, how much youre getting from the IRS, and more

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.
Three inmates at the Federal Detention Center in Philadelphia have filed a class-action lawsuit in federal court, seeking release to home confinement of detainees vulnerable to the coronavirus due to preexisting conditions. Read more

Three inmates at the Federal Detention Center in Center City filed a proposed class-action lawsuit Wednesday, saying that confining them there during the coronavirus pandemic violates their constitutional rights.

The three, citing preexisting medical conditions that make them especially susceptible to contracting the virus, are asking a federal judge to order the release of vulnerable persons to home confinement.

They also asked the judge to order the FDC warden to mitigate the serious risk to the remaining inmates and for the appointment of a special master to consider which inmates should be released to home confinement.

Benjamin Geffen, a Public Interest Law Center attorney who helped file the suit, said hundreds of the roughly 1,000 people detained at the FDC likely are eligible for home confinement. He said about 800 inmates are awaiting trial, while the rest have been sentenced or await sentencing.

Geffen said he did not know whether any inmates or staff at the center had tested positive for the virus.

We dont know of anyone who has contracted it yet, he said. We also know the FDC is doing little or no testing there. Youre going to get zero positive results if you do zero tests.

Geffen called the conditions at the facility at Seventh and Arch Streets extremely favorable for the spread of the virus.

The detainees are crowded two per cell, the suit says. Staff members come and go with scant screening for symptoms or personal protective equipment (PPE). Conditions are unsanitary. Detainees have no meaningful ability to take the most fundamental precautions recommended by federal, state, and local officials and public-health experts: social distancing, reducing the number of people with whom one physically interacts, frequent and thorough hand washing, and regular disinfecting of commonly touched surfaces.

The U.S. Department of Justice on Wednesday announced that its inspector general would check to see whether federal prisons are using best practices to prevent the spread of the virus.

A spokesperson for the Federal Bureau of Prisons declined to comment because the matter is in litigation.

The suit, filed by Timothy Brown, Myles Hannigan, and Anthony Hall, also says the conditions present a danger to the surrounding community because the staff comes and goes, potentially spreading the virus in those travels, and a sudden surge of inmates needing hospital care would strain local health-care resources.

The inmates cite outbreaks of the coronavirus at state and federal prisons in Arkansas, New York, Louisiana, Connecticut, North Carolina, and California. In one Arkansas state prison, 43 of 46 inmates in a single housing unit contracted the virus, according to the suit.

The suit also notes that local authorities in some jurisdictions, including Philadelphia, are working to get inmates released to home confinement. And they cite complaints from prison guards, including some in Philadelphia, about conditions while working during the pandemic.

Nationwide, as of Tuesday, 446 federal inmates and 248 staff had tested positive for COVID-19, the Bureau of Prisons said on its website. It listed one case at a residential reentry center on Luzerne Street in North Philadelphia.
Hospital administrators received a letter from the Ministry of Human Resources last week, with an instruction to evacuate 60% of their institutions beds within eight days, according to Nepszava.

In the letter, minister Miklos Kasler instructs all hospitals to make available at least 60% of publicly funded beds by April 15.



The letter also states that patients must be transferred to another institution where the patients condition justifies the need.



The ministry told RTL that mass infection is expected in Hungary, so it is necessary to prepare for the worst-case scenario.



The ministry said co-operation is required from everyone, for example, from families whenever home care can be arranged for the patient.



The head of one institution said the 60% figure equates to 36,000 beds in Hungary.



This does not necessarily mean that all beds would be occupied at the same time, the official said, as patients had been received only in urgent cases since the declaration of the emergency.



Nepszava writes that this evacuation will be problematic for elderly or vulnerable people who cannot be cared for in their homes.



MTI Photo: Gyorgy Varga
[April 14, 2020] Jumei International Holding Limited Announces Completion of Going Private Transaction

BEIJING, April 14, 2020 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Jumei International Holding Limited (NYSE: JMEI) (Jumei or the Company), today announced the completion of its merger (the Merger) with Jumei Investment Holding Limited (Purchaser), a wholly-owned subsidiary of Super ROI Global Holding Limited (Parent), pursuant to the agreement and plan of merger (the Merger Agreement) dated February 25, 2020 by and among Parent, Purchaser and the Company. As a result of the merger, the Company ceased to be a public traded company and became a wholly-owned subsidiary of Parent.

As previously reported, pursuant to the Merger Agreement, Purchaser conducted a tender offer (the Offer) to purchase all outstanding class A ordinary shares, par value $0.00025 each, of the Company (Class A Ordinary Shares) and American depositary shares, each representing ten Class A Ordinary Shares (ADSs), at price of $2.00 in cash per Class A Ordinary Share or $20.00 in cash per ADS, without interest and less $0.05 per ADS cancellation fees and other related fees and withholding taxes, on and subject to the terms and conditions set forth in the Merger Agreement. The Offer and withdrawal rights expired at 12:00 midnight, New York City time, on April 8, 2020, and Purchaser and Parent accepted for payment all Class A Ordinary Shares (including Class A Ordinary Shares represented by ADSs) that were validly tendered and not validly withdrawn prior to the expiration of the Offer. On April 14, 2020 (the Merger Effective Time), following consummation of the Offer, Purchaser merged with and into the Company, and the Company became a wholly owned subsidiary of Parent. The Merger was consummated pursuant to Section 233(7) of the Companies Law Cap. 22 (Law 3 of 1961, as consolidated and revised) of the Cayman Islands, under which no shareholder vote is required to consummate the Merger. At the Merger Effective Time, each Class A Ordinary Share issued and outstanding immediately prior to the Merger Effective Time was cancelled and ceased to exist in exchange for the right to receive $2.00 and each ADS issued and outstanding immediately prior to the Merger effective time was cancelled and ceased to exist in exchange for the right to receive $20.00, in each case, in cash, without interest and net of any applicable withholding taxes (the Per Share Merger Consideration). The ADS holders shall pay any applicable fees, charges and expenses of The Bank of New York Mellon, the ADS depositary (the ADS Depositary) and government charges (including withholding taxes if any) due to or incurred bythe ADS Depositary, in its capacity as the ADS depositary, in connection with the cancellation of the ADSs surrendered and distribution of the merger consideration to holders of ADSs, including applicable ADS cancellation fees of $0.05 per ADS. Notwithstanding the foregoing, 40,344,690 Class A Ordinary Shares and 50,892,198 Class B Ordinary Share owned by Purchaser were canceled in exchange for the shares issued and outstanding immediately after the Merger Effective Time of the surviving company held by Parent.



Pursuant to the Merger Agreement, each vested option to purchase Class A Ordinary Shares (each, a Company Option) outstanding immediately prior to the Merger Effective Time was cancelled in exchange for the right to receive the product of (i) the excess, if any, of the Per Share Merger Consideration over the exercise price per Class A Ordinary Share of such vested Company Option, multiplied by (ii) the total number of Class A Ordinary Shares underlying such vested Company Option. Any then-outstanding vested Company Option that had an exercise price per Class A Ordinary Share equal to or greater than the Per Share Merger Consideration was cancelled at the Merger Effective Time and ceased to exist without receiving any payment for such Company Option. Each restricted share unit of the Company (each a Company RSU) vested and outstanding immediately prior to the Merger Effective Time was cancelled as of the Merger Effective Time and converted into the right to receive in exchange therefor an amount of cash equal to (i) the Per Share Merger Consideration, multiplied by (ii) the number of Class A Ordinary Shares underlying such Company RSU. The Company also announced today that it had requested that trading of its ADSs on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) be suspended, and that NYSE file with the SEC a Form 25 notifying the Securities and Exchange Commission (the SEC) of NYSEs withdrawal of the ADSs from listing on NYSE and intention to withdraw the Class A Ordinary Shares from registration under Section 12(b) of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, as amended. Parent has advised the Company that it intends to cause the Company to file with the SEC, ten days after NYSE files the Form 25, a Form 15 suspending the Companys reporting obligations under the Exchange Act and withdrawing the registration of the Class A Ordinary Shares under the Exchange Act. The Companys obligations to file with or furnish to the SEC certain reports and forms, including Form 20-F and Form 6-K, will be suspended immediately as of the filing date of the Form 15 and will terminate once the deregistration of the Class A Ordinary Shares becomes effective.

In connection with the merger, Houlihan Lokey (China) Limited is serving as financial advisor to the special committee of the board of directors of the Company (the Special Committee); Hogan Lovells is serving as U.S. legal counsel to the Special Committee; certain legal matters of Cayman Islands law with respect to the Merger are advised upon for the Special Committee by Harneys. Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom LLP is serving as U.S. legal counsel to Mr. Leo Ou Chen, Parent and Purchaser (collectively, the Buyer Group); and Conyers Dill & Pearman is serving as Cayman legal counsel to the Buyer Group. About Jumei Jumei (NYSE: JMEI) is a fashion and lifestyle solutions provider with a diversified portfolio of products on offer in China. Jumei sells branded beauty, baby, children and maternity products, light luxury products, as well as health supplements through its e-commerce platform. Jumei has invested in adjacent fashion and lifestyle businesses such as Jiedian, a mobile device power bank operating company, and TV drama series production, to expand its service offerings. These investments will further expand and strengthen Jumeis ecosystem as it seeks to benefit from Chinas transition into the new retail era. Safe Harbor Statement This press release contains forward-looking statements within the meaning of Section 27A of the Securities Act of 1933, as amended, and Section 21E of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, as amended, and as defined in the U.S. Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. These forward-looking statements can be identified by terminology such as if, will, expect, and similar statements. Forward-looking statements involve inherent risks, uncertainties and assumptions. Further information regarding these and other risks is included in the Company's filings with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. These forward-looking statements reflect the Companys expectations as of the date of this press release. You should not rely upon these forward-looking statements as predictions of future events. The Company does not undertake any obligation to update any forward-looking statement, except as required under applicable law. For more information, please contact: Christensen

In China

Mr. Christian Arnell

Phone: +86-10-5900-1548

E-mail: [email protected] In United States

Ms. Linda Bergkamp

Phone: +1-480-614-3004

Email: [email protected]

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Is the rift between Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez getting a little wider?

How else to explain Ocasio-Cortez's sudden concern about Creepy Joe Biden, who has been credibly accused of sexual assault by a young Senate staffer, Tara Reade?

According to The Hill:

Ocasio-Cortez was asked about the allegation against the former vice president during an online forum hosted by The Wing, a womens network and community space, by a questioner who said she was strongly opposed to President Trumps reelection but that she also "really resent[s] the fact that the other choice is someone who has a really long history of being creepy to women," citing the allegation by former staffer Tara Reade. "I think it's legitimate to talk about these things," Ocasio-Cortez responded, according to CBS News. "And if we want, if we again want to have integrity, you can't say, you know  both believe women, support all of this, until it inconveniences you, until it inconveniences us." "I think a lot of us are just in this moment where it's like, how did we get here? You know, it almost felt like we started this cycle where we had kind of moved on from, you know, from all of this. And now it feels like we're kind of back in it," she added. "You know, the most diverse field that we've ever seen  that we're kind of back kind of replaying old movies in a way."

Which probably isn't about Tara Reade, given the Democrats' capacity to ignore uncomfortable topics if the target is a Democrat, as well as their easy way with 'what-about-ism' which in this case would include their narrative that President Trump is the real sex-harasser, not Biden.

Actually, this statement seems to be more about undercutting Bernie Sanders. Just days ago, Ocasio-Cortez's socialist mentor endorsed Biden in the name of party unity, following the heck of a fight he put up to keep Biden from being the nominee. This week he caved in to endorse Biden, which probably meant some kind of deal or payoff from the Democrats, if his past is any indication.

Ocasio-Cortez was not onboard with that one.

Like many Bernie supporters, she was probably pretty displeased at Sanders's pullout from the race just as she was getting her own name out there to the crowd, courtesy of all those Bernie events.

Which the Bernie people noticed she seemed to be using to draw attention to herself rather than Bernie, given that she never mentioned Bernie in her Bernie-rally speeches. This annoyed Camp Bernie mightily.

And yes, there was a rift of sorts even then. And according to a Politico report last March, a whole host of little pinprick things dividing them.

Now she's really undercut Bernie with this embrace of sex-harassment charges against Biden. Because Bernie now looks like a fool to be supporting Biden, as does President Obama, who also (with a smirk) endorsed Biden.

Ocasio-Cortez just pointed out that they endorsed a sex harasser, and an unusually creepy one at that. Coming as it does at a time when Biden is desperately trying to draw the Bernie people into the Democrat tent under his leadership, it's pretty much a call to split and get away from this guy. With Ocasio-Cortez now calling out Biden as a pervert, and 15% of the Bernie-ites already planning to vote for Trump as it is, all it's going to do is justify more Bernie-ites staying home or else casting their votes for a third party if not Trump.

So much for party unity. Will be fun to watch Bernie answer questions about this one. Better still, it will be party-time as we continue to watch Ocasio-Cortez speak out on the election.

Photo illustration by Monica Showalter with use of images by NRKbeta and Phil Roeder, both CC BY-SA 2.0
A summary of the inspections, posted on IDEMs website without notice last month, details how ArcelorMittal and the lab botched the legally required documentation of when and where samples were taken, who handled them and which toxic chemicals were measured, raising more questions about the accuracy of the results.
A top doctor has warned against being complacent during the coronavirus crisis - saying a massive outbreak of the bug in Tasmania could happen anywhere.

Two Tasmanian hospitals - North West Private Hospital and Burnie's North West Regional Hospital - were forced to close after 66 coronavirus cases were recorded, including 45 healthcare workers.

The two hospital closures have forced about 5,000 people into quarantine for two weeks, with 1,200 staff and their families affected. The medical facilities will be given a deep clean with the army and Australian Medical Assistance Teams helping.

Australian Medical Association Tasmanian president John Burgess warned that the outbreak could happen anywhere.

'Healthcare-setting outbreaks have occurred previously and they're something which always have to be guarded against,' he told ABC.

The North West Regional Hospital is seen closed in Burnie, Tasmania, Tuesday, April 14, 2020

Australian Medical Association Tasmanian president John Burgess (right) warned that the outbreak could happen anywhere

'Our role as professionals is to learn from outbreaks when they do occur, and to put the necessary safeguards in place to minimise the likelihood that similar events will occur in the future.

'We have to do it tough now, we have to get behind the effort. It's a total effort for all of the community, not just the north-west.'

Australia's chief medical officer Brendan Murphy backtracked on his sensational claim an illegal dinner party held by hospital staff led to a COVID-19 outbreak in Tasmania.

He was briefing New Zealand politicians via video link on Tuesday when he let the supposed dinner party slip.

'We thought we were doing really well in the last week,' he told the Epidemic Response Committee.

'Then we had a cluster of 49 cases in a hospital in Tasmania just over the weekend, most of them went to an illegal dinner party of medical workers.'

But he issued a clarification after Tasmanian Premier Peter Gutwein said Professor Murphy was 'commenting on a rumour' and tracing had found no evidence of a party.

'I referred to suggestion that a dinner party may have been the source of some of the transmission in the North West Tasmania cluster of cases,' Professor Murphy said in a statement.

'Whilst this possibility had previously been mentioned to me following initial investigations, I am now informed that the contact tracing has not confirmed that such a dinner party occurred.'

Dr Brendan Murphy (pictured on Sunday) was appearing on Tuesday before the Epidemic Response Committee - which has been suspended under New Zealand 's lockdown - when he let the revelation slip

The North West Private Hospital is seen closed in Burnie, Tasmania, Tuesday, April 14, 2020

Testing has been ramped up in the north-west and anyone who suspects themselves of having any symptoms to get tested and to self-isolate.

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 is again a tragic and stark reminder that this virus can be deadly,' Premier Peter Gutwein said.

'Never before has a premier had to ask a community to do this.

'I've got to admit, the responsibility rests heavy on me in having to make these decisions. But I would ask that you work with us.

'This is the best way that we can get on top of this, that we can stop the spread of this insidious disease.

In response to the hospital closures, 23 patients were being transferred to the Mersey Community Hospital at nearby Latrobe.

Eight health care workers, one patient and two close contacts of people who previously tested positive were among the latest northwest confirmed cases on Sunday night.

Tasmanians are urged to continue self-isolating and social distancing when they're out for essential services.

Australia has recorded 6,432 positive cases of coronavirus with 3,603 recoveries. A total of 62 people have died from the deadly disease.
ST. LOUIS, April 15, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- The Sinquefield Center for Research, Inc. announced that its latest cycle of research-related funding to Saint Louis University (SLU), totaling more than $765,000, will support several innovations in COVID-19-related research along with critical, specialized equipment. The donation is part of the Center's 2018 multi-year $50 million gift that established the SLU Research Institute to accelerate the University's rise as a world-class research institution. The funds will be shared across multiple departments, disciplines, investigators and faculty.

Rex and Dr. Jeanne Sinquefield on the campus of St. Louis University.

Dr. Jeanne Sinquefield, who along with her husband Rex, established the Sinquefield Center for Research, described the inspiration and purpose of the donation, "I refer to this as SLU research the Jesuit way. SLU's president Fred Pestello and Ken Olliff, vice president for research, have encouraged the University's researchers and faculty to work together with one shared goal, to conduct and advance cutting-edge research that will best serve the community. The projects we are funding fit perfectly into SLU's historic service-focused mission, challenging and providing opportunities for the university's diverse community of students, faculty and researchers to make the world a better place."

The breakdown of funding includes $300,000 for rapid COVID-19 research, which engages more than 40 members of the faculty across 20 departments, including the SLU Center for Vaccine Development, which houses one of only nine Vaccine Treatment and Evaluation Units leading the effort to find a COVID-19 vaccine; public health research; geospatial research; and emergency preparedness.

An additional $300,000 for the SLU School of Medicine Research Growth Fund, involving multiple Investigators doing innovative research across the School of Medicine. The fund will focus on strategic investments that accelerate research growth in the School of Medicine.



The remainder of the grant cycle funding, just under $200,000, is being used to purchase new Single-Cell RNA Sequencing equipment that will be shared among 10 faculty members across five departments and laser-scanning Confocal Microscopy that will be shared among 13 faculty in three departments for use in addressing infectious diseases and other high-priority research.

The Sinquefields' gift is the second grant related to COVID-19 research made public this week by SLU. On Monday, the university announced that alumnus Stephen C. Peiper, M.D. (Med '77) and Zi-Xuan "Zoe" Wang, Ph.D., his wife, have given $750,000 to SLU to support research aimed at developing new vaccines for COVID-19 and other illnesses.

This funding cycle continues the Sinquefield Center for Research's ongoing support for the SLU Research Institute. The Research Institute leverages the Center's contributions to provide critical support for outstanding researchers, advance the university's research growth ambitions and accelerate SLU's rise as a world-class research institution.



The Sinquefield Center for Research, Inc. is an Educational Institutions and Related Activities non-profit organization that provides assistance in the form of charitable contributions.

For more information about the SLU Research Institute, please visit https://www.slu.edu/research/research-institute/index.php. For more information about Dr. Jeanne and Rex Sinquefield, please visit https://www.sinquefieldcharitablefoundation.com/.

Media Contact:

Laura Slay

[email protected]

314-504-0081

SOURCE Dr. Jeanne and Rex Sinquefield, The Sinquefield Center for Research, Inc.

Related Links

https://www.sinquefieldcharitablefoundation.com/


As the industry looks at suspended shooting schedules on one side, and mega offers from OTT channels on the other, the fate of thousands dependent on theatres for their livelihood hangs in balance.

In the wake of the coronavirus pandemic, single screen theatres are facing the possibility of having to shut down for good, because film production is not happening. Thousands of people stand to lose their jobs.

Telangana and Andhra Pradesh together have nearly 1850 theatres, including multiplexes.

The film industry has so far been inextricably linked with theatres. There is a chain, involving the producer, distributors and exhibitors. In the present lockdown scenario, all theatres have been ordered to close. But the bigger danger is that the closure may be permanent.

Producers are considering releasing their films on the new OTT platforms for ready money, to defray the expenses they have incurred on the movies. This could put the existing system in jeopardy, and lead to considerable unemployment.

Some films are almost ready for release, pending only a few small technical corrections. Producers of these films are getting big offers from OTT channels. Actors and directors are, however, completely opposed to the idea, because they fear their popularity with the public will be lost.

The private channels offers include video interviews from actors to promote the films. But actors are refusing to do these interviews, so the producers are in a dilemma Both sides are discussing the issue, says a producer who did not want to be named.

If the producers sell their films to private channels, there wont be any films to release in theatres. So, what will happen to the theatres?

We have to close the theatres. I dont think there is any chance of opening theatres in the coming months, says Suresh Babu, who owns and leases many theatres in the Telugu states.

He however, feels the situation may change once shooting is allowed to resume. My suggestion is that theatres should open two months after shooting schedules are resumed. Its a very bad situation. So many people will be affected, he laments.

We dont know what will be a good decision. Producers are definitely losing money and we have to support other people too. Its a very difficult situation, says Kona Venkat, one of the producers of Nishabdam, which is among the films that have attracted big offers from private channels for a small screen release.

Overall, India has more than 10,000 theatres which directly and indirectly employ five lakh to six lakh people. You can imagine what the situation will be like for these people in the coming days, says Suresh Babu.

Another producer who did not wish to be identified says, I dont think people will come to theatres until a cure is discovered for COVID-19. I wont be surprised if no film is ready to hit the screens this year.

We have to wait and follow the Governments orders. This situation is totally unexpected, says Sunil Narang, owner of the Asian Multiplex.
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Linkedin Jordan Fabian and Lisa Du (Bloomberg) Washington, United States  Wed, April 15, 2020 14:33 636 fc6853813033f564188675f8bd20adba 2 World WHO,trump,COVID-19,cooperation-termination Free

President Donald Trump said he instructed his administration to temporarily halt funding to the World Health Organization for taking Chinas claims about the coronavirus at face value and failing to share information about the pandemic as it spread.

The WHO failed in its basic duty and must be held accountable, Trump said Tuesday at a White House press conference. The outbreak could have been contained at its source if the organization had correctly responded early on, he added.

Its unclear when any halt in payments would take effect or how much authority Trump has to suspend disbursements, which are authorized by Congress. The US has contributed $893 million to the WHOs operations during its current two-year funding cycle, according to the organization. Administration officials signaled the suspension would be for 60 days.

In a statement Tuesday, UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres said the chance to investigate how the disease spread around the world would come later.

As it is not that time, it also not the time to reduce the resources for the operations of the World Health Organization or any other humanitarian organization in the fight against the virus, he said. As I have said before, now is the time for unity and for the international community to work together in solidarity to stop this virus and its shattering consequences.

The move to limit support to the WHO in the midst of a global pandemic is unprecedented. Yet as domestic criticism of the Trump administrations response has increased and the US became the epicenter of the outbreak, many of the presidents supporters have pointed to the WHO for making early mistakes they say undermined the US and worsened the crisis.

The WHO has been a conduit for tension between the US and China for months, with WHO Secretary-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus being singled out for blame by allies of the president for being too deferential to Beijing. Representatives for the WHO didnt respond to requests for comment.

Billionaire philanthropist Bill Gates, the co-founder of Microsoft Corp., warned in a tweet that cutting off funds for the WHO is as dangerous as it sounds.

Halting funding for the World Health Organization during a world health crisis is as dangerous as it sounds. Their work is slowing the spread of COVID-19 and if that work is stopped no other organization can replace them. The world needs @WHO now more than ever.  Bill Gates (@BillGates) April 15, 2020

The US contributes nearly a quarter of all member state dues for the WHO. That pool of funds  although a small proportion of the overall budget  are used as the organizations operating budget to run daily operations, said Adam Kamradt-Scott, an associate professor of international security at the University of Sydney who has written about the politics of pandemic preparedness. The rest of the funding, called voluntary contributions, come from member states and non-profits and are tailored to specific global health programs.

He warned that Trump could bankrupt the organization if the US pulls both member dues and voluntary contributions, adding that the move would undo decades of working leading the world in fighting diseases. The move could impact global health more broadly beyond the WHO, he added.

We now have a situation in which the US is vacating a leadership role in the middle of the crisis, Kamradt-Scott said. Nature abhors a vacuum. Politics abhors a vacuum even more.
As she ran through the sodden streets of Southampton, Emily Bessant hauled her two-year-old son, Albert, up on her hip and begged her other children  Charles, 15, Gladys, 12, Florence, six, and Leonard, four  to keep up.

The streets were thronged with women, aprons still on, baking left unfinished, children screaming in their wake.

They had only one refrain in their head: 'Let his name be on the survivors' list ... let his name be there.'

Heartbroken: Families were left devastated when the 'unsinkable' Titanic sunk

When Emily reached the White Star Line office at the docks, she could no longer move for people.

There were hundreds waiting, shuffling forward, among them boys carrying placards from the local paper with pictures of the wretched ship involved in the world's greatest sea tragedy.

This was April 1912 and the 'unsinkable' Titanic had sunk days earlier on its maiden journey. Emily's husband, William, a stoker who had kept the ship's boilers burning, had been at sea before on the ship the Oceanic.

He'd come back then. He would come back now, surely. The congregation at the head office began to call out: 'Where's the list? Are there any survivors?'

All Emily could do was wait her turn to reach the front. Emily Bessant, then 38, was my greatgrandmother.

In the grainy black-and-white photographs I've seen of her, she appears stern-faced: a cold, unemotional woman.

I don't know if she wept that day. I'm an eternal optimist and, if that runs in my family, I imagine her more likely hoping against hope that William would, indeed, come home.

Sadly, he never did. Of the estimated 2,224 passengers and crew aboard the Titanic, more than 1,500 died.

The not knowing must have been agonising. And a couple of weeks after the tragedy, Emily received a letter stating that William, 40, had been 'lost at sea'.

The demise of the world's most opulent ship is well known  so, too, are the hubristic claims that it could never sink.

So far, films and books have focused on the people who lost their lives.

From the much-feted aristocrats who gave up their lifeboat places to women and children to those far poorer, for whom there wasn't room anyway.

One of my earliest memories is of my father watching the film A Night To Remember, and saying: 'Your great-grandfather died on that ship.'

As a child, I was haunted by how terrifying it must have been to drown in the dark. It was only when I had children of my own that I realised there was another, as yet untold, story: that of the widows and offspring left behind.

They were the forgotten victims of the Titanic disaster. And their unrecognised bravery is the subject of my new book, The Titanic And The City Of Widows It Left Behind.

At a time when we face our own extraordinary peacetime struggle, there is, perhaps, much to be learned from the quiet, dogged stoicism of women.

The many years between us can make it harder to appreciate that they would have felt grief and distress as keenly as we do today.

Through research and speaking to William's surviving relatives  a cousin and my own sister, along with William's granddaughter, my aunt who's in her 80s  as well as many other Titanic descendants, I became determined to fill in the gaps.

Before the tragedy, Emily and William, who had been married for 20 years, lived with their five children in a two-up, two-down terrace in Henry Road, Freemantle, a suburb of Southampton.

By 1912, William was an old hand on steam ships. Initially, there wasn't room for him aboard Titanic: the ship already had its crew for the boiler rooms, workers from Belfast where the ship had been built.

However, the ship suffered a fire in one of its boiler rooms before she even left Belfast, causing some crew to give up their positions.

Despite this bad omen, William jumped at the chance of a job at the 11th hour.

With a wife and five children to feed, he was under constant pressure to seek work.

Emily's role, meanwhile, was to keep house, look after the children and feed everyone, on a meagre, sometimes non-existent, budget.

Hollywood version: Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet starred in the James Cameron movie Titanic

Families were tightly packed, cheek-by-jowl, in terrace houses.

Laundry hung in the streets, women scrubbed their front doorsteps while their children played outside.

The Titanic, by contrast, was unimaginably opulent with a grand neoclassical staircase hewn from English oak, Turkish baths, a swimming pool, gym and lounge modelled on the Palace of Versailles.

The price of a first-class ticket started at 30, around 2,820 today.

But even a third-class passage cost 7  659 today.

My father, who died in 2005, told me his mother had said Emily and her five children were among a crowd of thousands at Southampton docks to wave Titanic off on her voyage to New York on April 10, 1912.

William would already have been at work, deep in the bowels of the ship, stoking the furnaces to power the mighty vessel as she set sail.

On April 14, as Titanic sailed through the North Atlantic Ocean, seven iceberg warnings were received via wireless from nearby ships.

Titanic was sailing into dangerous waters, but nothing was done to change course.

Devastated: Emily Bessant with three of their children who lost her husband William on the famous ship

That evening, the ship's notables dined on rich food and chatted late into the night.

Perhaps they felt strange vibrations beneath them; they had merely been told that the captain planned to reach New York early to dazzle the world once more.

By 11.40pm, the lookout, Frederick Fleet, was staring out from the crow's nest and into the freezing darkness.

He didn't have a pair of binoculars. But he suddenly saw something terrible. Iceberg. He rang the bell and called the bridge: 'Iceberg! Right ahead!' In Southampton, meanwhile, Emily was getting her five children up for the day.

Her eldest son, Charlie, went off to his job as an errand boy and Emily served up breakfast.

Gladys, Florence and Leonard set off for school, while two-year-old Albert played on the floor.

In our world of instant news, social media and live-streams of worldwide events, it's hard to imagine that, while Titanic languished at the bottom of the North Atlantic, reports of the tragedy were still unconfirmed in Southampton.

Then, on Monday, April 15, people began to talk, to relay confusing messages from house to house and street to street.

The Titanic had hit an iceberg... TheTitanic sank...Everyone aboard saved...Many dead... Emily and the other wives made daily trips to see the lists revealing those who had died and survived.

By April 18, several days after news had reached the city of the disaster, she knew William was missing at sea. Instead of slumping into griefstruck lethargy, she started taking in neighbours' washing to earn money to feed her children.

The Southampton streets seemed to ooze grief and despair, with woeful children  my grandmother, Florence among them  returning from school to their fatherless homes.

A resident recalled: 'A great hush A s she ran through the sodden streets of Southampton, Emily Bessant hauled her two-year-old son, Albert, up on her hip and begged her other children  Charles, 15, Gladys, 12, Florence, six, and Leonard, four  to keep up.

The streets were thronged with women, aprons still on, baking left unfinished, children screaming in their wake. They had only one refrain in their head: 'Let his name be on the survivors' list ... let his name be there.'

Doomed: William Bessant was described as 'lost at sea' in a letter to his loved ones

When Emily reached the White Star Line office at the docks, she could no longer move for people.

There were hundreds waiting, shuffling forward, among them boys carrying placards from the local paper with pictures of the wretched ship involved in the world's greatest sea tragedy.

This was April 1912 and the 'unsinkable' Titanic had sunk days earlier on its maiden journey. Emily's husband, William, a stoker who had kept the ship's boilers burning, had been at sea before on the ship the Oceanic.

He'd come back then. He would come back now, surely.

The congregation at the head office began to call out: 'Where's the list? Are there any survivors?' All Emily could do was wait her turn to reach the front.

Emily Bessant, then 38, was my greatgrandmother. In the grainy black-and-white photographs I've seen of her, she appears stern-faced: a cold, unemotional woman. I don't know if she wept that day.

I'm an eternal optimist and, if that runs in my family, I imagine her more likely hoping against hope that William would, indeed, come home.

Sadly, he never did. Of the estimated 2,224 passengers and crew aboard the Titanic, more than 1,500 died. The not knowing must have been agonising.

And a couple of weeks after the tragedy, Emily received a letter stating that William, 40, had been 'lost at sea'.

The demise of the world's most opulent ship is well known  so, too, are the hubristic claims that it could never sink.

So far, films and books have focused on the people who lost their lives. From the much-feted aristocrats who gave up their lifeboat places to women and children to those far poorer, for whom there wasn't room anyway.

One of my earliest memories is of my father watching the film A Night To Remember, and saying: 'Your great-grandfather died on that ship.' As a child, I was haunted by how terrifying it must have been to drown in the dark.

It was only when I had children of my own that I realised there was another, as yet untold, story: that of the widows and offspring left behind.

They were the forgotten victims of the Titanic disaster.

And their unrecognised bravery is the subject of my new book, The Titanic And The City Of Widows It Left Behind.

At a time when we face our own extraordinary peacetime struggle, there is, perhaps, much to be learned from the quiet, dogged stoicism of women.

The many years between us can make it harder to appreciate that they would have felt grief and distress as keenly as we do today.

Through research and speaking to William's surviving relatives  a cousin and my own sister, along with William's granddaughter, my aunt who's in her 80s  as well as many other Titanic descendants, I became determined to fill in the gaps.

Before the tragedy, Emily and William, who had been married for 20 years, lived with their five children in a two-up, two-down terrace in Henry Road, Freemantle, a suburb of Southampton.

By 1912, William was an old hand on steam ships. Initially, there wasn't room for him aboard Titanic: the ship already had its crew for the boiler rooms, workers from Belfast where the ship had been built.

However, the ship suffered a fire in one of its boiler rooms before she even left Belfast, causing some crew to give up their positions.

Despite this bad omen, William jumped at the chance of a job at the 11th hour. With a wife and five children to feed, he was under constant pressure to seek work.

Emily's role, meanwhile, was to keep house, look after the children and feed everyone, on a meagre, sometimes non-existent, budget.

Families were tightly packed, cheek-by-jowl, in terrace houses. Laundry hung in the streets, women scrubbed their front doorsteps while their children played outside.

The Titanic, by contrast, was unimaginably opulent with a grand neoclassical staircase hewn from English oak, Turkish baths, a swimming pool, gym and lounge modelled on the Palace of Versailles.

The price of a first-class ticket started at 30, around 2,820 today. But even a third-class passage cost 7  659 today. My father, who died in 2005, told me his mother had said Emily and her five children were among a crowd of thousands at Southampton docks to wave Titanic off on her voyage to New York on April 10, 1912.

William would already have been at work, deep in the bowels of the ship, stoking the furnaces to power the mighty vessel as she set sail. On April 14, as Titanic sailed through the North Atlantic Ocean, seven iceberg warnings were received via wireless from nearby ships.

Titanic was sailing into dangerous waters, but nothing was done to change course. That evening, the ship's notables dined on rich food and chatted late into the night.

Perhaps they felt strange vibrations beneath them; they had merely been told that the captain planned to reach New York early to dazzle the world once more.

By 11.40pm, the lookout, Frederick Fleet, was staring out from the crow's nest and into the freezing darkness.

He didn't have a pair of binoculars. But he suddenly saw something terrible. Iceberg.

He rang the bell and called the bridge: 'Iceberg! Right ahead!'

In Southampton, meanwhile, Emily was getting her five children up for the day. Her eldest son, Charlie, went off to his job as an errand boy and Emily served up breakfast. Gladys, Florence and Leonard set off for school, while two-year-old Albert played on the floor.

In our world of instant news, social media and live-streams of worldwide events, it's hard to imagine that, while Titanic languished at the bottom of the North Atlantic, reports of the tragedy were still unconfirmed in Southampton.

Then, on Monday, April 15, people began to talk, to relay confusing messages from house to house and street to street.

The Titanic had hit an iceberg... TheTitanic sank...Everyone aboard saved...Many dead... Emily and the other wives made daily trips to see the lists revealing those who had died and survived.

By April 18, several days after news had reached the city of the disaster, she knew William was missing at sea. Instead of slumping into griefstruck lethargy, she started taking in neighbours' washing to earn money to feed her children.

The Southampton streets seemed to ooze grief and despair, with woeful children  my grandmother, Florence among them returning from school to their fatherless homes.

A resident recalled: 'A great hush descended on the town because I don't think there was a single street in Southampton that hadn't lost someone on that ship.'

An international fundraising operation began. Theatres promised to donate percentages of their takings to the Relief Fund.

Local companies offered to help. Newspapers reported that the Fund must have started to relieve the distress of the bereaved.

But I wonder how true that was. Southampton mayor, Councillor Henry Bowyer, was in talks to set up a relief fund for the 'distressed dependants' of the Titanic crew, but it wasn't achieved overnight.

Meanwhile, on April 29, of the 165 rescued members of the crew, 85 arrived at Southampton railway station.

The local paper reported 'affecting scenes': one unnamed stoker explained how the chief engineer had ordered the stokers to put the fires out on the Titanic,presumably to prevent an explosion, and that the men had continued to do this until 'the water was up to their waists'.

Then their superiors told them to board the lifeboats.

The reason so many stokers had been saved was because only one watch was on duty when Titanic hit the iceberg.

My great-grandfather had been in 'the next watch', preparing to go to work. Emily read every local and national news report about the disaster.

It's hard to imagine how she must have felt reading that interview with William's colleague, a man who did the same exhausting job for the same pay, but had been lucky enough to survive.

Both my father and my aunt told me that weeks after the tragedy, a rich man had knocked on Emily's door, offering to send her eldest daughter, Gladys, to private school in thanks for William helping him survive the tragedy.

Had William died because he had helped another passenger to a lifeboat? Gladys refused the offer.

There is no record of any school fees being paid, or even who the rich gentleman was. But the story was, and still is, a source of family pride.

In newspaper articles from the time, women were often reported saying proudly that her man had 'done his duty' and had died bravely as a hero.

Believing your loved one had not simply died because he was the lowest member of crew and statistically had no chance of making it, but had perished because he had saved others in doing his duty, meant that a feeling of pride could replace grief.

While the news was full of men's heroism, it was largely forgotten that three female crew members also lost their lives. Of 23 female stewardesses, a matron and cashiers, Lucy Violet Snape, Catherine Jane Wallis and Catherine Walsh, didn't make it home.

Were these women, then, heroines, like their male colleagues? Or were they, in fact, victims because women and children should have been rescued first?

Early feminists argued that the loss of the Titanic and men's heroic acts saving the 'weaker sex' set the movement back years.

When the Relief Fund was eventually set up in spring 1913, the bereaved women became Titanic Widows  they had to live up to their mythical status of grieving, pure, God-fearing wives, grateful for the public's sympathy.

A 'lady visitor' was employed to check up on them, to see they weren't wasting money on alcohol or falling into disrepute.

Emily Bessant is mentioned in passing in the Titanic Relief Fund minute books.

She received sixpence a week  about 60 today  for her and her five children.

It was written that her allowance should continue, providing a report on her was 'satisfactory'.

Since she continued to receive her award, her lifestyle seems to have been deemed acceptable.

She never remarried  at which point the allowance would have stopped  nor did she have any other relationship or fall pregnant again.

Emily seems to have quietly, almost invisibly, carried on.

She gradually stopped taking in laundry and went on to run a sweet shop and even purchased a charabanc, which her eldest son, Charles, drove, taking paying customers on outings.

I do wonder whether she ever allowed herself some quiet time at night to reflect on her feelings and how her life had turned out.

As my aunt Doreen told me of Florence's recollections of Emily: 'My mother didn't talk about her crying. She just got on with it  she had to.'

All these years later, I can't help but feel a quiet pride at how my great-grandmother calmly carried on for the sake of her children.

In my view, her bravery  and that of the many other bereaved wives and their offspring  is just as laudable as that of those who went down with the doomed ship.

Adapted from The Titanic And The City Of Widows It Left Behind, by Julie Cook, published by Pen & Sword at 19.99. To order a copy, visit pen-and-sword.co.uk
St. Petersburg court refuses to overturn coronavirus observatory isolation order

 pixabay.com

12:58 15/04/2020

MOSCOW, April 15 (RAPSI) - A court in St. Petersburg on Wednesday refused to overturn an order of Russias consumer rights watchdog Rospotrebnadzor obliging a Russian citizen, who had arrived from abroad, to be isolated for medical observation, the United press service of St. Petersburg courts reports.

A lawsuit was filed by the St. Petersburg resident Georgy Obraztsov. It was the first such claim to the authority, according to a press service official.

The claimant stated that he arrived from Switzerland to Moscow and later travelled to St. Petersburg this March, but underwent no medical examination and was given no recommendation to stay at home. When visiting a governmental office to extend his foreign passport, he was contacted by the police, who then convoyed him to an isolation and observatory medical establishment.

The man argued that he was not duly informed on measures aimed at protection from the spreading of the infection disease he needed to undertake.

He asked for permission to be self-isolated at home as he feels unsafe surrounded by potentially infected persons in the medical establishment.
Amazon will have to limit its deliveries in France to essential goods like food and medical supplies while it carries out a more thorough assessment of the risk of coronavirus contagion at its warehouses, a French court ruled yesterday.

Some worker unions have been calling for the complete closure of Amazon's activities in France, or at the very least a clampdown, after raising concerns over health standards at its shipping sites, arguing they were too crowded.

The US online retailing giant, which has repeatedly said it adheres to health guidelines, said it disagreed with the ruling, adding it was still evaluating the implications for its French logistics centres.

It said it had brought in temperature checks for workers in France like elsewhere, and distributed face masks and sanitiser gel.

The court said Amazon had not always done enough to ensure safety distances were respected, based on checks by labour inspectors at various sites.

In the ruling, seen by Reuters, judges added the company had not thoroughly assessed the contagion risk of employees passing packages to each other.

Amazon will now have to work with employee representatives to carry out such checks and revise its protocols.

In the meantime, it has 24 hours to curtail any shipments passing through its warehouses, limiting them to groceries, hygiene products and medical items - and faces a penalty of 1m per day for a delay in complying.

Reuters
The top of Magik Theatres Facebook page is adorned with a photo of four dragons from the childrens theaters recent staging of Dragons Love Tacos walking single file across Hemisfair beneath a banner reading Magik will see you soon.

Until its possible for the theater to open its doors, which were closed as part of the effort to combat the spread of COVID -19, it has turned the page into a hub for its programming, much of which debuts as livestreams.

Digital storytimes first air at 2 p.m. Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays; Magik MadLibs are live at 3 p.m. Tuesdays and Thursdays; Pirate Pete and Friends, another storytelling series, streams at 10 a.m. Saturdays; and Childrens Yoga is at 10 a.m. Sundays.

The videos remain on the page after their live debut, so families can check in on the series they enjoy whenever they like.

The videos feature actors that Magik regulars will recognize, including John Stillwagon, Josey Porras, Ginger Martel and Rosa Gardner.

Gardner and her 7-year-old daughter, Amelia, have hosted a few rounds of MadLibs, the most interactive offering right now.

For each game, the hosts ask participants for a slew of words  nouns, verbs, location and interjections  which they then slot into a song theyve chosen in advance. During a recent session that Gardner and Amelia hosted, the song was Spoonful of Sugar from Mary Poppins, which, Gardner noted, would be transformed into a spoonful of many other nouns.

The suggestions produced such satisfyingly silly lyrics as A spoonful of restaurant makes the shampoo go down and Just a spoonful of lollipops helps the roller coaster go to the Alamo/ In the most itchy way.

Theres an element of improv, which I already enjoy, said Gardner, who also has recorded some videos for the storytime series.

She also has enjoyed teaming up with her daughter for the videos. Ameilia often comes to Magik with her, Gardner said, but this takes her involvement to a different level.

To have her really be a part of that is super-special for me and her, she said.

The interactive element of the MadLibs series comes a little closer to a live theater experience than some online material, said Anthony Runfola, the companys artistic director.

On ExpressNews.com: SA museums beef up educational content online

You can have that one-way offering, reading a story or reading a play, but the part of theater that I think we all love is the exchange of energy between the audience and the performers, Runfola said. Even though its just MadLibs, I think there is still an exchange that is live, and you can participate. And its been very successful for us.

The companys next big project is going to be finding a way to create some original content that deals with the current situation. Runfola likened it to creating site-specific work. This time around, the site the pieces are being created for happens to be cyberspace.

I have the tools, I dont have a story, Runfola said.  I dont have any words to describe what were going through right now. Im sure Im not the only person feeling that way.

Its a rare thing for adults and young people to be going through something for the first time together. Were in this moment, and we have to find a way to record and capture this moment.

More virtual arts offerings

Villa Finale: The National Trust Historic Site, which was once the home of preservationist and collector Walter Mathis, is giving folks the chance to explore its holdings online. Curators have added information on the pieces. The first objects on display include artwork, including an etching by Mary Bonner depicting a couple heading toward a mission and Julian Onderdonks Pool on the Guadalupe River. There also are a few pieces from Mathis extensive collection of Napoleonic memorabilia, including a bronze copy of the French emperors death mask and a a small carved ivory figure of Napoleon holding a triptych bearing images from his military career. On view at villafinale.org.

On ExpressNews.com: SA performers appear in online cabarets

Esperanza Peace and Justice Center: The Esperanza will be live streaming Azul Barrientos monthly concert, Noche Azul de Esperanza. The virtual concerts are being dubbed the En Casa series. 7 p.m. Saturday, Esperanzas Facebook and Youtube channel and Barrientos Facebook page and Youtube channel.

The Public Theater of San Antonio: The theater has two things in the works this weekend. On Saturday, there will be a reading of Robert Caisleys dark comedy More Better Beautiful, which the theater had planned to stage this summer as part of its new works project Fresh Ink. The production was canceled as part of a slate of scheduling changes due to the COVID-19 shutdown. Caisley will take part in a Q&A after the reading. Then, on Sunday, the virtual Encore Lounge cabaret series continues with At the Movies, starring Lauren Esquivel accompanied by her husband, John Paul, on guitar. Reading: 7:30 p.m. Saturday; $10. Cabaret: 7:30 p.m. Sunday; $5. Registration info for both events can be found on The Publics Facebook page.

Artpace: The downtown space has put the exhibits by its spring residents  Mexico-based Carlos Castro Arias, New York-based Milagros de la Torre and Sandy Oaks, Texas-based Daniel Ramos  up on its website to make sure that the work can be seen. The exhibit was curated by Monica Espinel, a New York-based curator and writer. On view at artpace.org.

Outside S.A.

National Theatre Live: The London company has long offered screenings of its work, filmed live, in movie theaters around the globe. It now has moved those screenings online for free, with a different show offered weekly on Youtube. Playwright Bryony Laverys adapation of Treasure Island will be available Thursday through April 23; next up after that is Shakespeares Twelfth Night, which will be available April 23-30. Information can be found at ntlive.nationaltheatre.org.uk.

Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater: The company, a frequent visitor to San Antonio, is streaming videos of some of its repetoire for free on its website. Upcoming offerings are Rennie Harris Lazarus, available Thursday-Sunday; and Aileys Night Creature, available April 23-26. Info at alvinailey.org.

dlmartin@express-news.net | Twitter: @DeborahMartinEN

Deborah Martin is an arts writer in the San Antonio and Bexar County area. To read more from Deborah, become a subscriber. dlmartin@express-news.net | Twitter: @DeborahMartinEN
MCKEES ROCKS, Pa. (AP)  A driver who crashed his car near a police station in western Pennsylvania had been shot in the chest shortly before the accident occurred, authorities said.

The crash in McKees Rocks occurred around 11:30 p.m. Tuesday.

Officers found the 24-year-old man inside the vehicle, which had struck a utility pole. He was taken to a hospital and was listed in critical condition, but his name and further details on his injuries were not disclosed.

A motive for the shooting remains under investigation.

It wasnt clear if the man was shot while driving or before he entered the vehicle, authorities said. It did not appear that anyone had been in the vehicle with him when the crash occurred.
In the last few weeks, several companies across sectors - hospitality, consumer internet, aviation - have announced that they are laying off staff or putting people on furlough. Unemployment too is at an all time high. According to data from CMIE the rate of unemployment in India is 23.8 per cent by the last week of March, with urban unemployment at a distressing 30.9 per cent.

To dip into this talent pool, firms have come together to form an employer-to-employer partnership called People + Work Connect that is connecting the firms laying off to organisations that are hiring.

The concept was conceptualised by Accenture, Lincoln Financial Group, ServiceNow and Verizon and many firms have joined the initiative since then.

To date, participating companies include Cargill, Frito-Lay, Marriott, Mondelez International, ServiceNow, Walmart, Zenefits, amongst others.

The platform will be free for companies to join and it will soon extend partnership to public sector firms.

Companies that are forced to lay off employees would share the details and expertise of their laid-off or furloughed workforces to connect at no cost with other companies on the platform that are seeking talent. The global platform will be able to deploy people across sectors and industries in areas of opportunity.

ALSO READ: Saving jobs: Allow PF contribution cuts, no wage hikes, ISF urges govt

"By providing real-time visibility into which companies need people and where, People + Work Connect is designed to lessen the economic and societal impacts of the virus and help us work together to make a difference in the lives of hundreds of thousands of people," said Ellyn Shook, Accenture's chief leadership and human resources officer.

"A small group of CHROs came together because we share a passion for making sure that we - and the companies we represent - are remembered for addressing this tough moment with compassion and a sense of responsibility that transcends the business we do every day," said Lisa M Buckingham, executive vice president and chief people, place and brand officer for Lincoln Financial Group during the launch.

Pat Wadors, chief talent officer at ServiceNow, said, "This crisis has created massive job loss and people need help finding work. By connecting companies that are hiring with a talented and available workforce, technology is truly acting in service of people."

"While the current pandemic has been the impetus for People + Work Connect, we expect this type of collaboration to become the norm going forward," said Christy Pambianchi, executive vice president and chief human resources officer, Verizon. "Now is the time to build a more resilient workforce - for today and tomorrow."

ALSO READ: 'Those unwilling may be relieved of duty': Ministry warns absent employees amid coronavirus outbreak
MENDOTA HEIGHTS, Minn., April 15, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- Sieben Edmunds Miller PLLC is pleased to announce the launch of its Peacetime Emergency Free Expungement Program. The firm's attorneys developed this service in response to COVID-19 and its widespread economic impact. This program aids clients who have lost their jobs due to the pandemic in obtaining a criminal expungement free of charge. Expungement of past criminal convictions will help these individuals have greater success in finding new employment or housing.

"As a firm, we strive to give back to our community," Partner Kevin Sieben said. "It's troublesome to see individuals out of work through no fault of their own, and with an old criminal conviction it can be a struggle to find a new job or to move. By offering free expungement services to members of our community, we hope to help alleviate that burden."

Free expungement services will be offered by the firm through the month of April. For those who qualify, a criminal defense attorney will assist clients in filing an expungement petition with the court, obtaining a court date, and presenting their argument before a judge. Interested parties can find more information and determine their eligibility on the firm's website .

"To 'expunge' a criminal offense is to remove it completely from your record," said Partner, Sam Edmunds. "In law, expungement is the process by which a record of criminal charges is sealed. With an expungement, the individual should be treated as though the criminal charge had never occurred, essentially removing it from their record," he concluded.

Sieben Edmunds Miller PLLC is a distinguished criminal defense and personal injury law firm. The firm maintains a reputation for achieving positive results and substantial settlements for its clients throughout Minnesota and Wisconsin. Its office is located in Mendota Heights, Minnesota. Find out more at www.siebenedmunds.com.

Media Contact:

Kevin Sieben, Partner

Sieben Edmunds Miller PLLC

2299 Waters Drive

Mendota Heights, MN 55120

Direct: (651) 994-6744 Web: www.siebenedmunds.com

SOURCE Sieben Edmunds Miller
China on Wednesday expressed "serious concern" over US President Donald Trump's decision to suspend funding for the World Health Organisation and hinted at stepping up its monetary contribution to the UN health agency.

Trump on Tuesday announced halting America's funding of the WHO while a review is being conducted to assess the health agency's in "severely mismanaging and covering up" the spread of the deadly coronavirus.

The Trump administration has accused WHO of taking side with China in the coronavirus outbreak that has brought America's economy to a standstill.

American taxpayers provide between USD 400 million and USD 500 million per year to the WHO, in contrast, China contributes roughly USD 40 million a year and even less, Trump said.

"China expresses serious concern over the US announcement to halt its funding to WHO," Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian said.

Putting up staunch defence of WHO and its Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, Zhao said, "as the most authoritative and professional international organisation in global and public health security, the WHO plays an irreplaceable role in dealing with global public health crisis, especially since the outbreak of the COVID-19".

"Led by Dr. Tedros, WHO is fulfilling its responsivity and playing a central role in coordinating international efforts which is highly recognised by the international community," he said.

With the efforts to contain COVID-19 is at critical situation in the world, this US decision will weaken the WHO capability and undermine international cooperation, he said.

"It will affect all countries including the US, especially those countries with fragile systems and capabilities. We urge the US to earnestly fulfill its obligations and responsibilities to support the WHO in leading the international efforts instead of doing the contrary," Zhao said.

"China will as always support the WHO in playing important role in international public health and global anti-epidemic response," he said.

Asked whether China will step-up funding to WHO to replace US contributions, Zhao said, "China has provided USD 20 million to WHO (to fight COVID-19) and we will study the relevant matter", indicating that Beijing is considering to increase its contribution to the global health body.

Both China and WHO faced serious criticism over lack of transparency specially about the discovery of the coronavirus in December last year and its silent spread in Wuhan until Beijing imposed lockdown in the city on January 23.

By that time over five million people from Wuhan reported to have left for holiday destinations at home and abroad to celebrate the Chinese new year, which many allege resulted in the virus spreading worldwide.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Easyjet founder Sir Stelios Haji-Ioannau has been at loggerheads with the board for weeks

Easyjet's outspoken founder has referred the airline to the City watchdog in the latest escalation in a row over a huge order for planes with Airbus.

Sir Stelios Haji-Ioannou has been at loggerheads with Easyjet's board for weeks over the 4.5billion order for 107 aircraft, which he wants the company to cancel as it battles to stay afloat.

His legal team has now sent a complaint to the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) after Easyjet last week agreed a deal with Airbus to defer the delivery of 24 of the planes.

He wants the FCA to force Easyjet to put the move to a shareholder vote and make the airline release more information about the arrangement.

Easyjet has grounded its 344 planes, furloughed thousands of staff and arranged a 600million loan.

It said: 'The company is well aware of its obligations and constantly reviews its obligations under the Market Abuse Regulation.'
Amidst growing complaints about the low quality Chinese exports of a variety of medical equipment to fight the coronavirus, China on Wednesday asked all the countries to import these items through reputed Chinese firms cleared by the government and vowed to punish those involved in counterfeit behaviour.

As its factories resumed operations after over two-month of grim battle against the coronavirus, China is busy tapping into the vast business opportunities of export of key medical goods, especially ventilators and personal protection equipment (PPE), across the world, including India, where both private and government bodies are placing orders for the import of these products.

Several countries including Italy and Spain have complained about the low quality of medical materials including PPE, testing kits and ventilators, casting a shadow over Chinese exports. The Chinese government has imposed strict restrictions on its firms to ensure quality exports.

Responding to questions about quality concerns raised by several countries related to medical equipment imports from China, Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian told a media briefing here that the Chinese government is facilitating the orderly exports.

"We hope foreign buyers can choose products from companies that have been accredited by Chinese regulators with good production credentials," he said.

Recently many countries have been purchasing medical items in China. While ensuring our domestic needs we support companies with credentials and reputation to export products, he said.

"We facilitate orderly exports and foreign procurement in production, transport and customs clearance. Some countries raised their demand through diplomatic channels. We recommend export firms with qualification to have consultation with foreign buyers," he said.

After this approach, the foreign buyers did not complain about the quality of the materials bought from the recommended channels, he said.

About complaints of poor quality exports by different countries, he said local Chinese embassies verified and responded to such complaints.

I would like to say the quality of medical supplies concerns the life and health of all people. We pay high attention to that. We fight counterfeit behaviour in this process. Once there is a problem with the quality, we will investigate earnestly and punish," said.

Foreign buyers need to verify the usage of the instruction of products whether they meet the criteria of the markets they are exporting to so that they won't make mistakes in a hurry, he said.

Indian Ambassador to Beijing, Vikram Misri said on Tuesday that India has placed orders to procure 15 million personal protection gear from China for medical personnel treating Covid-19 patients besides three million testing kits.

The orders are being placed with bonafide firms with the help of the Chinese government.

"I think facilitation of our needs and our requirements in a timely manner, in a smooth manner, on a predictable timeline at prices that are stable and orderly, would be the best signal possible to send for the India-China relationship," Misri said.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
The United States has offered the Iranian people humanitarian aid during the COVID-19 crisis --an offer that has been rejected by regime leaders. At the same time, those same leaders continue their dangerous and destabilizing policies, with little or no regard for the welfare of their populace. The United States will continue to increase pressure on the Iranian regime to stop their malign activity.

On March 16th, in response to the Iranian governments unacceptable nuclear escalations and refusal to comply with its nuclear safeguard obligations, the U.S. Department of Commerce announced it imposed restrictions on five Iranian nuclear scientists by adding them to the Department of Commerces Entity List.

As Secretary of State Mike Pompeo explained in a news briefing, These five individuals were involved in Irans pre-2004 nuclear weapons program, known as the Amad program, and continue to be employed by the regime to this day:"

After work on the Amad plan was stopped, Iran continued to preserve its Amad-era records and its cadre of nuclear weapons scientists, including these individuals. Many unanswered questions remain about Irans undisclosed past nuclear-related activities. These new listings today by the Department of Commerce reaffirm the importance of demanding a full and honest accountability and accounting from Iran of its past nuclear weapons-related activities.

On March 19, the U.S. Treasury Department took action against five United Arab Emirates-based companies that facilitate the Iranian regimes petroleum and petrochemical sales. The move follows similar designations of key revenue sources that enable Irans malign regional activity. As Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said in a statement, The Iranian regime uses revenues from petroleum and petrochemical sales to fund its terrorist proxies, like the IRGC-QF (Islamic Revolutionary Guard Quds Force), instead of the health and well-being of the Iranian people. The Trump Administration will continue to target and isolate those who support the Iranian regime and remains committed to facilitating humanitarian trade and assistance in support of the Iranian people.

As Secretary of State Pompeo noted, We have an open humanitarian channel to facilitate legitimate transactions even while ensuring our maximum pressure campaign denies terrorists money. . .Were trying to help. We continue to offer assistance to Iran in numerous ways and will continue to do so.
San Francisco, April 15 : Microsoft has patched 113 bugs, including four actively exploited vulnerabilities that allow attackers to remotely execute malicious code on devices that run Windows.

Two of the active zeroday security flaws - tracked as CVE-2020-1020 and CVE-2020-0938 - are hidden in the Adobe Type Manager Library, reports Ars Technica.

On supported operating systems other than Windows 10, attackers who successfully exploit the vulnerabilities can remotely execute code.

On Windows 10, attackers can run code inside an AppContainer sandbox.

A third zero-day exploit is against CVE-2020-0674, a remote code execution vulnerability.

"Microsoft assessed the severity of the vulnerability as critical in all supported versions of Windows except for Windows 10, Windows Server 2019, and Windows Server 2016, where the vulnerability is rated as moderate".

The last zeroday exploit targets CVE-2020-1027, an elevation of privilege flaw in the way that the Windows kernel handles objects in memory.

As part of its monthly Patch Tuesday update, Microsoft released fixes for a whopping 113 vulnerabilities.

Microsoft has seen a 44 per cent jump in the number of Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVEs) fixed between January and April 2020 compared with the same period in 2019, according to Trend Micro's Zero-Day Initiative report.

Of the 113 CVEs patched, 17 are categorised as 'Critical' in severity and 96 are ranked as 'Important'.

"It will be interesting to see if this pace continues, especially considering Microsoft will pause optional Windows 10 updates starting next month," said ZDI's Dustin Childs in a blog post.

Starting in May, the company will pause all optional non-security updates, citing the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on its customers.
Wellington: New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern has announced a 20 per cent pay cut for her cabinet in the next six months to reflect the tough economic conditions during the COVID-19 crisis.

"This is not going to change the government books but for us it's about leadership," she said.

"It's an acknowledgement of the hit many New Zealanders are taking right now."

Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern discusses the government's COVID-19 response. Credit:Getty Images

The pay cut will affect every minister, as well as chief executives within the public service.
The U.S. may face the prospect of having to endure social distancing, which include measures such as school closures and stay-at-home orders, until the year 2022. This is a projection announced by researchers last Tuesday, which they say may be needed if no vaccine will become available soon. (Photo : Pexels)

The U.S. may face the prospect of having to endure social distancing, which include measures such as school closures and stay-at-home orders, until the year 2022. This is a projection announced by researchers last Tuesday, which they say may be needed if no vaccine will become available soon.

According to Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health researchers, intermittent distancing will have be required up to 2022 unless the nation's critical care capability is substantially increased or a vaccine or treatment becomes available. The add that even with apparent elimination of the SARS-CoV-2 virus, surveillance have to be maintained, as there is still the possibility of its resurgence up to 2024.

The research team used the facts currently known about the Covid-19 virus as well as other coronaviruses to simulate possible scenarios from the pandemic. They published their report last Tuesday in the journal Science. Their findings have directly contradicted the research being presented by the President and White House which suggests that the pandemic will be over by summer.

In contrast, the team's projections indicate that the novel coronavirus will come back quickly after the restrictions have been lifted. Harvard School of Public Health professor of epidemiology and study author Dr. Marc Lipsitch has told reporters that if the method of intermittent distancing is the chosen approach to combat the virus, then it may have to be done for many years, which would be very long.

Challenges include finding reliable tests to detect people with antibodies, to establish immunity levels conferred by prior infection; determining how long this immunity lasts; and determining the capability of already-overstretched health care systems to conduct widespread and reliable antibody testing in the general public.

Immunity certificates have also been proposed in the U.K., and controversy ensued regarding the possibility that they may establish a sort of two-tiered society, where people who have the certificates may return to their normal lives, while the rest will remain on lockdown.

The researchers are aware how prolonged, even intermittent, distancing are likely to cause profound negative educational, social, and economic effects. They are hoping that their research will help in identifying likely trajectories that the pandemic may take under various alternative approaches; identifying complementary ways of fighting it; and spurring ideas on new ways control it.

Although cases in the U.S. continue to soar, social distancing seems to have a positive effect. It is currently among our most powerful ammunition against the COVID-19 disease, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention director Robert Redfield. He added that we can limit the effect of the virus by maximizing social distancing.

Many states have already implemented stay-at-home orders and only allowed essential tasks and errands. Violation incurred penalties that vary depending on the state. For instance, Maine imposes a maximum of six months imprisonment and a maximum fine of $1,000. In Florida, an arrest was made for a pastor who continued to conduct large church services; he was charged with unlawful assembly as well as violating public health emergency rules, which are both 2nd degree misdemeanors.

East and West coast states have announced the forming of regional pacts regarding the reopening of economies after the stay-at-home orders have expired. States such as New Jersey, New York, Connecticut, Delaware, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, and Rhode Island are each planning to assign an economic and public health official to a yet-to-be-formed regional working group. The West Coast states of Washington, Oregon, and California have also announced joining forces in bringing an incremental end to the stay-at-home orders.
Actor Ayushmann Khurrana says he is "dying" to play a character like The Professor from "Money Heist" and hopes Bollywood filmmakers are listening.

On the popular Netflix crime-drama, Spanish star Alvaro Morte plays the role of The Professor who brings together a bunch of career criminals who dress up in red jumpsuits and a Salvador Dali mask to rob the Royal Mint of Spain.

Taking to Twitter on Tuesday, the "Andhadhun" star uploaded a video where he's playing "Bella Ciao", the Italian protest folk song which become popular world over after featuring on the show, on a piano.

"I want to be the professor. I want to put this out in the universe. Hello reverent filmmakers! Please! I'm dying to do something like this," he captioned the clip.

In a reference to the lockdown extension amid the coronavirus pandemic in the country, Ayushmann said, he is "itching" to go to work.

"But patience is a virtue they say. Calm down. Till then Bella Ciao #MoneyHeist," he wrote.

Last year, there were reports that Shah Rukh Khan's production house Red Chillies has acquired the rights for the Indian adaptation of the Netflix series. The superstar later denied the rumours.

Since then, many fans have come up with their versions of how a Bollywood remake of the show would look like.

Replying to Ayushmann's video, filmmaker Navjot Gulati said, "Cross your heart and tell me that you won't want to see Shah Rukh as the Professor and Tabu as Lisbon? You can be Rio!"



To which, the actor said, "I'm an SRKian braah."



The fourth season of "Money Heist" is currently streaming on Netflix.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
[April 15, 2020] Bona Law Adds New Antitrust Partner in San Diego with Substantial White-Collar Criminal Defense Experience

Bona Law PC announces that antitrust lawyer Jon Cieslak joined the firm as a partner on March 16, 2019. Formerly at Cooley LLP, Jon brings with him nearly a decade of antitrust litigation and white-collar criminal defense experience that will enhance the firm's full-service antitrust practice. Bona Law is an antitrust boutique firm with offices in San Diego, New York, Minneapolis, and Detroit. Bona Law competes with large international law firms by providing the same level of quality through a team of talented lawyers with big-law credentials: many of them came from big law firms, went to top schools, and clerked for federal judges. The firm provides a wide variety of antitrust solutions for its clients, including by representing plaintiffs and defendants in business-to-business antitrust litigation, defendants in class action and multi-district antitrust litigation, and advising and representing clients in merger clearances, distribution issues, and antitrust compliance. With Jon's arrival, Bona Law is significantly expanding its white-collar criminal-defense expertise. Jon has represented companies and inividuals in investigations and prosecutions by the U.S. DOJ Antitrust Division, including price fixing, bid rigging, and no poaching claims. Notably, he defended the CEO of a large electronics manufacturer against antitrust charges by the Antitrust Division through trial and appeal. Recently, he represented a Fortune 500 company in an Antitrust Division investigation related to no poaching claims, resulting in the closure of the investigation without charges. Jon has also conducted numerous confidential internal investigations for companies related to antitrust, financial reporting, and Foreign Corrupt Practices Act issues.



Jon is also a seasoned civil litigator, having represented clients in a wide variety cases of involving antitrust, unfair competition, Lanham Act, securities, breach of contract, and other claims. He has represented clients large and small in litigation asserting both cartel and monopolization claims in a variety of industries, including electronics, manufacturing, travel, media, and the gig economy. He has defended clients in multidistrict litigation, direct purchaser class actions, indirect purchaser class actions, individual actions, and on appeal. Jon also has extensive experience litigating on behalf of foreign companies in US courts, including disputes involving the Foreign Trade Antitrust Improvements Act (FTAIA). "Jon Cieslak has talent and experience that will reinforce the firm's existing antitrust and competition capabilities," said Jarod Bona, CEO of Bona Law, "but he will also enhance our ability to defend corporate clients and their executives in investigations and actions by the U.S. Department of Justice Antitrust Division and other law enforcement agencies. His addition comes at a time when the government is ramping up antitrust enforcement efforts, which often means parallel criminal and civil proceedings for antitrust defendants."

Jon earned his undergraduate degree from Princeton University and his juris doctor from the University of California - Los Angeles School of Law. After law school, he clerked for U.S. District Judge Jeffrey Miller in the Southern District of California before joining Cooley. Jon's practice at Bona Law will focus on antitrust and other complex litigation and criminal defense across all industries. Jon will also utilize his substantial appellate experience to assist with Bona Law's appellate practice. "I'm ecstatic about joining Bona Law," Jon said. "They are committed to offering clients the best antitrust services in the country by building an outstanding team that focuses on client needs by understanding their business and their true goals with every matter." View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20200415005205/en/

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The latest Beacon Hill bills created in response to the coronavirus pandemic would allow early voting by mail ahead of the state primary and general elections if the state of emergency remains in effect.

Senate Majority Leader Cynthia Creems bill, S.D. 2911, would enable a voter could ask a local election official for a mail-in ballot as an early voter due to COVID-19. Under the bill, all early voting ballots would need to be received by the town clerk before polls close on Election Day.

It is critical that we not make people choose between their health and exercising their right to vote, said Creem, a Newton Democrat.

The bill will likely be referred to the Committee on Election Laws, Creem said.

U.S. Rep. Joseph Kennedy III, who is running to unseat U.S. Sen. Ed Markey, asked the state Legislature to pass a vote-by-mail bill for Election Day.

Sen. Becca Rausch and Rep. Adrian Madaro filed legislation, S.D. 2912, that would send mail-in ballots to voters and personal protective equipment to poll workers if the coronavirus pandemic has not passed. The bill required that a mail-in ballot be postmarked by Election Day and get to a city or town clerk within 5 days of the election.

Democrats in some states, such as Wisconsin, have argued for more voting by mail during the pandemic, but efforts to expand mail-in voting have had mixed results in the courts. Last week, the Supreme Court blocked a federal court order that allowed Wisconsin to continue to process mail-in ballots for up to six days after the states April 7 primary election.

Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers ordered to stop the primary, but the state Supreme Court reversed the order after Republicans challenged him in court.

President Donald Trump weighed in on the vote-by-mail issue last week during his daily press briefing, claiming mail ballots are corrupt.

The fact-checking site at the University of Pennsylvanias Annenberg Public Policy Center, FactCheck.org, states that there is no evidence to back up Trumps blanket claim.

Rausch and Madaros bill would require Secretary of State William Galvins office to send ballots to registered voters at least 18 days before a state election, as well as a secrecy sleeve to cover the results and a postage-paid envelope addressed to the voters municipal clerk.

Each envelope would include an affidavit that a voter must sign and instructions in English, Spanish, Portuguese, Chinese and Haitian.

For state primary elections, unenrolled voters could request a specific partys ballot, according to the bill. The voter would need to make the request at least 35 days ahead of the election.

Cheryl Clyburn Crawford, executive director of MassVOTE, said the SD.2912 does not make voting accessible enough because ballots wouldnt be available in Vietnamese or Khmer. Nor does the bill specify what kind of personal protective equipment poll workers would be entitled to if the state of emergency remains in effect.

Crawford also said the provisions in the bill should be permanent, rather than temporary measures in response to the coronavirus pandemic. Under the bill, these changes would expire Dec. 31.

Instead of merely bridging the gap during this crisis, vote-by-mail should become the new normal in Massachusetts," Crawford wrote in a statement. "The system is thriving in Colorado, Oregon and Washington, and there is no excuse that should prevent Massachusetts from joining the ranks of those states.

Material from the State House News Service was used in this article.

CORRECTION: An earlier version of this story misstated the bill number filed by Sen. Cynthia Creem.

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It is unclear how delays might affect the Purple Lines opening date, because project officials have been able to accelerate some work in the past. The opening of the rail line between Montgomery and Prince Georges counties was initially scheduled for March 2022. The most recent schedule made public has it opening in two phases  in late 2022 between College Park and New Carrollton and by late June 2023 for the rest of the line extending west to Bethesda.
Any of these events could delay a companys rebound when the pandemic wanes, causing irreparable financial harm such as lost revenue, market share and reputational damage, said Kevin Ingram, executive vice president, chief financial officer, FM Global. Countless companies across many industries have paused operations around the world in what has been billed as the biggest factory shutdown since the Second World War, and more closings are expected.

The insurer notes that losses at idle properties could be deemed preventable  as such it is recommending that a host of needs are addressed.

Specifically it suggests that authorities should be contacted to explain that security and maintenance personnel are essential; there should be regular daily round checks inside and outside facilities; fire protection should remain in place with maintenance staff checking that sprinkler valve locks are open; and equipment should be elevated to lower any potential flood damage.

It also suggests that now would be an ideal time to perform overdue maintenance.

Its human nature to focus on the most sensational risk, in this case a terrible one thats commanding attention around the globe, added Ingram. Yet its important to remember that other serious risks havent gone away and continue to affect organisations resilience. Firms that stay vigilant are more likely to be the winners that get back to business at the earliest opportunity.
'We are caught between the devil and the deep blue sea'

IMAGE: Locals look on damaged properties following a ceasefire violation by Pakistani forces in north Kashmir's Kupwara district. Photograph: ANI Photo

With the threat of coronavirus looming large and intense shelling by Pakistan, villagers living along the Line of Control and International Border in Jammu and Kashmir are stuck between the devil and the deep sea.

For the last month, Pakistan has targeted villages and army posts along the LoC and IB in the union territory killing and injuring several people besides damaging more than two dozen houses.

While several attempts were made by infiltrators in the last few days to enter India along the LoC in Kupwara, Poonch and Rajouri districts of Jammu region with Pakistani army providing cover fire to them.

There is heightened fear in the villages under the three districts especially after three civilians were killed last week in Kupwara due to shelling by Pakistan.

"I was seriously injured in the shelling by Pakistan On one side we are fighting to save our families from the threat of coronavirus and on the other they (Pakistan) are targeting us in our houses," Showkat, a resident of village Kasba in Poonch district said.

"We are caught between the devil and the deep blue sea, he added.

Corroborating his views, Balakote resident Mumtaz Bibi said the villagers have urged the administration to build bunkers for them but their plea seems to have fallen on deaf ears.

We had demanded that bunkers be built so that we can save our families from Pakistan shelling. We met district officials but nothing has been done yet. Three shells hit our houses recently and we narrowly escaped," she said.

"We can still save our families from coronavirus by following all guidelines but how do we protect ourselves from mortar shells? asked Mumtaz who said that her home had been totally damaged due to shelling.

However, a district officer said the process of setting up bunkers along the LoC in all the border districts had been initiated sometime back but the due to the coronavirus pandemic, work had to be stopped.

"We will ensure that bunkers are built for people living along the LoC," he said.

Shahzad Malik, a social worker active in the border belt of Rajouri-Poonch said people living along the LoC and IB in Kupwara, Rajouri, Poonch, Samba and Kathua districts are a terrorised lot and in trouble.

"The border situation is very tense and along with people, hundreds of animals have been killed We want the shelling to stop. The coronavirus outbreak has only added to the woes of the people," he said.

Anwar Din of Keran village said: "We want to urge Pakistan and India to stop the shelling. We are fighting the COVID-19 epidemic. Let us allow us to live in peace in this hour of crises."

The army has been educating the border residents about COVID-19 and providing them masks and sanitisers apart from ensuring essential food supplies during the lockdown period.

"Army has come to our rescue with food and other essentials while Pakistan is resorting to shelling and killing people," Sudershan Singh of Laam village, which saw heavy shelling last week, said.

For more than a month now, Pakistan has resorted to shelling along the LoC in Tumina, Panzgam, Chowkibal, Rawathpora among others in Kupwara district, Uri sector in Baramulla district, Krini, Balakote, Mankote, Qasba among others in Poonch district, Laam, Nowshera, Sunderbandi, Manjakote in Rajouri district and Hiranagar, Samba, Ramgarh sectors along the IB in Samba and Kathua districts.

Three civilians including a minor and a woman were killed in the shelling from across the LoC in north Kashmir's Keran on Sunday.

Five army personnel and as many infiltrating terrorists were killed in a fierce gun battle between the forces and a terrorist group that had infiltrated from across the Line of Control in Keran sector of north Kashmir on Saturday.

There were a total of 646 incidents of ceasefire violation along the IB and LoC between January 1 and February 23 this year, Minister of State for Defence Shripad Naik had said in March.

More than 3,200 ceasefire violations by Pakistan troops were recorded in 2019. There is 198 km IB and over 510 km of LoC with Pakistan in Jammu and Kashmir.
Hearing authors read their own work can be as disenchanting as seeing an admired actor out of makeup in the starkness of daylight. When you listen to many writers read their own work, you begin to wonder whether they are at all acquainted with their own words. To be sure, some authors are skilled at both writing and reading aloud, and their works are enhanced by their voices, but many others are best served by handing their books to an experienced voice actor.

A surprising instance of the author making a sad job of reading her own work is Diane Keaton, who stumbles through the narration of her memoir, Brother & Sister (Random House Audio, 4 hours). It hardly seems possible but this veteran actor reads her book as if it's the first time she's clapped eyes on it: emphasis showing up in odd places, enunciation, sloppy and blurred, and sentences unspooling tentatively as though their destination were never quite certain.

Sadly, actor Diane Keaton doesn't impress when it comes to narrating the audiobook of her memoir. Credit:Invision

Ronan Farrow, on the other hand, is, as a narrator, slightly much better - but for one startling weakness. The Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist brings a clear, efficient voice and brisk pacing to most of Catch and Kill: Lies, Spies, and a Conspiracy to Protect Predators (Hachette, 10 hours) his account of exposing the sexual predator, Harvey Weinstein, and the massive intimidation and cover-up that protected him. Farrow's rendition of Weinstein's voice is gratifying: a miserable whine alternating with a browbeating bellow. But when he encounters people from foreign parts, he plunges us deep into Monty Python territory. The intonation of Italian model Ambra Gutierrez seesaws up and down in an absurd, invented accent; British people would seem to be labouring against stiff upper lips; and Farrow's Ukrainian gumshoe sounds as if he might have taken elocution lessons from Boris Badenov.

Trouble of another sort emerges as Anita Anand reads, The Patient Assassin: A True Tale of Massacre, Revenge, and India's Quest for Independence (Simon and Schuster, 10 hours). This tremendous, formidably researched account is set against the final, bitter decades of the British Raj when British troops killed at least 500 unarmed Indians in Amritsar, Punjab, in 1919. Two decades later, a Sikh revolutionary, Udham Singh, assassinated Michael O'Dwyer, the lieutenant governor of the province at the time of the slaughter. But Anand, who has assiduously patched together the man's strange story, is also a radio and television host in Britain. As such, she reads her book with the cadence of a midday newscaster, each sentence bestowed upon us with a flourish of newsiness that gives an air of banality to an account that is anything but.
Deciding to stay in Vietnam amid the epidemic escalation, foreign students studying at universities say they feel secure about their lives and study.

The University of Education, a member school of Thai Nguyen university, has 265 foreign students. Most of them are from Laos, China, Mongolia, Mozambique and Nigeria. Sixty two students now live in the schools dormitory.

About 21,000 foreign students study in Vietnam





The school has released notices in Vietnamese and English to give instructions on how to prevent and combat Covid-19. It has also made hand washing liquid and bought face masks to distribute to students.



The students in dormitory have their body temperature taken every day and they get support buying necessities. In order to satisfy the students demand for online study, the school makes sure that there is high-quality wifi transmission line to rooms and libraries.



From April 1-15, during the social distancing campaign, foreign students are requested to restrict going out and strictly follow regulations on preventing and combating coronavirus. As Laos New Year is coming, the school has launched a competition on writing and making film about the celebrations of New Year in Laos and the world.



The Hanoi University of Education has 200 foreign students from South Korea, China and Laos. Twenty six students stay in dormitory.



The school regularly gives instructions on what students need to do to protect themselves in the epidemic and gives support in their lives. The dormitory management board updates information about the epidemic situation on Facebook fanpages and through all possible channels.

Deciding to stay in Vietnam amid the epidemic escalation, foreign students studying at universities say they feel secure about their lives and study.

While many students decided to return to their home countries, Shiori Kinoshita, a Japanese student at the Hanoi Foreign Trade University, decided to stay in Vietnam.



Here I can feel the warmth and the peace of Vietnam, Shiori said.



Shiori is a student of Kanda University, now studying in Vietnam under a student exchange program between the university and the Hanoi Foreign Trade University.



In a letter expressing her willingness to stay in Vietnam, Shiori wrote she loves Vietnam very much.



She wrote that though the situation is dangerous, she decided to stay in Vietnam because she wants to study Vietnamese at the Hanoi Foreign Trade University.



The student said she has better understood the friendliness of Vietnamese people by studying here. Her letter was written in Vietnamese.



Like other schools, Cuu Long University has had conducted online learning since March 30. Silimoungkhoun Souknilanh, deputy head of the overseas student representative board, affirmed that all foreign students feel secure about their lives and study on the campus of the school.

Le Ha

High school student updates Covid-19 information for ex-pats in Vietnam A Vietnamese high school student has launched a fan page on Facebook to update information about the Covid-19 epidemic in Vietnam for foreigners living in the country.
Tiger King's Joe Exotic surrounded himself with a menagerie of misfits to work at his zoo, finding most of his employees off Craigslist

Tiger King's Joe Exotic surrounded himself with a menagerie of misfits, who were arrested for DUIs, unlawful possessions of weapons, assault and fraud.

Eccentric zoo owner Joe Exotic, who is currently serving 22 years in federal prison for plotting to have his arch nemesis Carole Baskin murdered and killing five tigers, found most of his employees off Craigslist.

He admitted in the hit Netflix docuseries that many were drug addicts, homeless or fresh from jail, as he provided them a small wage and a place to live in exchange for working at the Greater Wynnewood Exotic Animal Park in Oklahoma.

But beyond DUIs and minor infractions with the law, several zoo employees were arrested for assault, unlawful possession of firearms and fraud.

Here, DailyMail.com breaks down the cast members' arrests and charges against them.

John Finlay: Joe Exotic's former husband

Finlay met Joe in 2003 when the then 19-year-old came to work for him at the zoo, with their relationship quickly turning romantic.

The now 35-year-old even had a tattoo just below his belt line that read 'PRIVATELY OWNED BY JOE EXOTIC'. He since has had it covered up.

Joe's former husband John Finlay was arrested in 2014 for domestic assault and battery (pictured) when he reportedly attacked Joe, though he was never charged. Months later in October 2014, Finlay filed a protective order against Joe, but it was dismissed because the court found he failed to meet the burden of proof

Finlay met Joe in 2003 when the then 19-year-old came to work for him at the zoo, with their relationship quickly turning romantic. The now 35-year-old even had a tattoo just below his belt line that read 'PRIVATELY OWNED BY JOE EXOTIC'. He since has had it covered up

The Netflix docuseries shows Finlay, Joe Exotic and Travis Maldonado in a three-way wedding ceremony, but soon after their relationship ended on a bad note.

In 2005 while working at the zoo, Finlay was arrested for leaving a carcass of an animal in an unlawful place.

On August 18, 2014, he was arrested for domestic assault and battery when he reportedly attacked Joe, though he was never charged.

Months later in October 2014, Finlay filed a protective order against Joe, but four days later it was dismissed because the court found he failed to meet the burden of proof.

In September 2018, the mother of this young biological daughter, filed a petition for a protective order against him.

In September 2018, the mother of this young biological daughter, filed a petition for a protective order against him. Pictured: Finlay in a 2013 mugshot for an unspecified warrant

In the petition order she claimed that Finlay told her that 'he would put a bullet in anyone who stood between him and his child.'

She also claimed Finlay 'has told numerous people he wanted to leave state with (their daughter), and he was headed to Florida before he faced prison.'

An emergency order was granted, but weeks later it was dismissed because the police couldn't locate Finlay in order to serve him.

Jeff Lowe: Current owner of Greater Wynnewood Exotic Animal Park

Lowe was arrested and charged in Las Vegas with three counts unlawful possession of wild animals in 2018

Lowe has had his fair share of legal drama, reportedly sued by Prince in 2007 for allegedly selling clothes with his trademarked symbol on them.

In 2008, Lowe pleaded guilty to mail fraud, stemming from a scheme in which he posed as an employee of an abuse organization to obtain more than $1 million worth of goods for a fraction of their value, reported the Beaufort Gazette.

Ten years later, Lowe was arrested and charged in Las Vegas with three counts unlawful possession of wild animals in 2018.

Lowe was running a tiger cub party business in which he allegedly picked up customers in a party bus and drove around the Las Vegas strip while customers played with the cubs.

As part of the plea agreement, Lowe agreed to surrender the animals and pay a $10,000 fine. Lowe never showed up to a later court date for a status check and a bench warrant was issued.

Lowe (pictured with his wife Lauren) told Dailymail.com the warrant for his arrest 'is a paperwork error' and he has a new court date on June 1st where 'he'll take care of it'

The warrant came to light after he became a household name from Netflix's Tiger King.

Lowe told Dailymail.com the warrant for his arrest 'is a paperwork error' and he has a new court date on June 1st where 'he'll take care of it.'

Joshua Dial: Joe Exotic's former campaign manager

Joe Exotic hired Joshua Dial as his campaign manager for his failed bid for president in 2016 and subsequent bid for Oklahoma Governor in 2017.

The 31-year-old has been arrested at least five times.

Joe found Dial working at a local Oklahoma Walmart where he managed the sales of gun and ammo before Joe asked him to help him on his campaign.

Joshua Dial has been arrested at least five times. Pictured: Dial in a 2017 mugshot for assault battery

Joe Exotic hired Joshua Dial as his campaign manager for his failed bid for president in 2016 and subsequent bid for Oklahoma Governor in 2017

Dial was arrested at the tender age of 21 in February 2011, when he was arrested for marijuana and possession of drug paraphernalia. Six months later he was arrested for driving under the influence and drug possession, then again in 2012 for a DUI.

The aspiring politico kept himself out of trouble for a few years until he was arrested in 2017 for felony assault and battery in a probable cause affidavit exclusively obtained by DailyMail.com.

The affidavit states that Dial 'cut/Stabbed/Slashed (victim) with a Japan Ninja Sword called a Katana.

'The victim has a large cut on the left forearm that appeared to be bleeding.

'The laceration was 11 cm x 4cm in size, the victim was sent to St. Anthony's hospital in Oklahoma City via Air Evacuation.'

Dial was arrested at the tender age of 21 in February 2011, when he was arrested for marijuana and possession of drug paraphernalia (pictured). Six months later he was arrested for driving under the influence and drug possession, then again in 2012 for a DUI

He later plead no contest to an amended misdemeanor charge of unlawful carry. He also had to forfeit his sword as a result of the plea agreement.

Dial now attends a university in Oklahoma and a GoFundMe account was opened up to pay for his mental health care after his experiences with Joe Exotic and the zoo.

Part of his trauma stems from witnessing Joe's third husband Travis Maldonado commit suicide which was caught on camera and shown on the Netflix docuseries.

Kelci 'Saff' Saffery: Zoo employee who lost his arm in a 2013 tiger attack

Kelci, who goes by 'Saff' and is a transgender man, has been arrested at least eight times according, to the Garvin County Oklahoma Sheriff's Department.

He's been arrested for a DUI, carrying weapons, obtaining goods by bogus check/false pretense and failure to appear warrants.

In one mugshot, Saff is seen wearing his zoo uniform, complete with his radio.

Kelci, who goes by 'Saff', has been arrested at least eight times according, to the Garvin County Oklahoma Sheriff's Department

He's been arrested for a DUI, carrying weapons, obtaining goods by bogus check/false pretense and failure to appear warrants

Saff lost his arm when a tiger attacked him at the zoo in 2013

James Garretson: FBI informant

Garretson was arrested in Oklahoma on April 12, 2009, for felonious assault by pointing a firearm at his father-in-law during a domestic dispute with his then wife.

According to the police report, Garretson's estranged wife was moving things out of their marital residence and she called her father for his help.

When Garretson arrived back to his house to pick up their two children, he saw his wife's father, grabbed a gun and pointed at him, telling him to get off his property.

James Garretson was arrested in Oklahoma on April 12, 2009, for felonious assault by pointing a firearm at his father-in-law during a domestic dispute with his then wife

Both of his children saw Garretson waving his gun around.

Garretson's wife and father left the residence and called the police. He was later arrest and charged with felonious assault by pointing a firearm.

In June 2010, Garretson pleaded guilty to a single charge of felonious assault by pointing a firearm at an individual. He was given a deferred sentence of four years in prison, 50 hours of community service and a $2,500 fine.

Frank Allen Glover: 'Hitman' Joe Exotic 'hired to kill Carole Baskin'

Frank Allen Glover has a criminal history dating back to the mid 1990s and spread out over four states.

He's been arrested at least 20 times, including for an open container DUI, domestic violence, possession of less than one gram of crack.

Frank Allen Glover has a criminal history dating back to the mid 1990s and spread out over four states. He's been arrested at least 20 times, including for an open container DUI, domestic violence, possession of less than one gram of crack. Pictured: Glover's mugshot in 2018 for an open container DUI

Glover recently admitted to DailyMail.com that he served several years in prison, with court records showing he served almost five years in a Georgia prison for aggravated assault

Glover recently admitted to DailyMail.com that he served several years in prison, with court records showing he served almost five years in a Georgia prison for aggravated assault.

A source said Glover served time for stabbing someone, almost killing them.

While living in Oklahoma. Glover was arrested twice in 2018.

Just weeks later on November 14, 2018, Glover was again arrested for another DUI (pictured). He later pleaded no contest to both charges, was given a one year suspended sentence and paid a fine

The first arrest happened in October when Glover drove his vehicle into another property, got out of his car and started to argue with the owner.

He smelled of alcohol and was stumbling around, according to the police report. He was arrested and charged with a DUI.

Just weeks later on November 14, 2018, Glover was again arrested for another DUI.

He later pleaded no contest to both charges, was given a one year suspended sentence and paid a fine.
Members of Rapid Action Force (RAF) patrol an empty street after India extended a nationwide lockdown to slow the spreading of the CCP virus in Ahmedabad, India on April 14, 2020. (Amit Dave/Reuters)

India Extends Worlds Biggest Lockdown Until May 3

NEW DELHI/MUMBAIIndia on Tuesday extended a lockdown on its 1.3 billion people until at least May 3. Prime Minister Narendra Modi said economic sacrifices were needed to save lives as the number of CCP virus cases exceeded 10,000.

Sharp downward revisions to economic growth forecasts in the wake of the pandemic point towards surging unemployment, but Modi urged Indians to maintain the discipline shown in the first three weeks of the lockdown.

That means until May 3, each and every one of us will have to remain in the lockdown, Modi said on national television.

From an economic only point of view, it undoubtedly looks costly right now, but measured against the lives of Indian citizens; there is no comparison itself.

Later in Mumbai, thousands of jobless migrant workers gathered at a railway station, demanding to be allowed to travel to their homes in the countryside.

Since trains and buses are not operational, they were making noise. To disperse them, police were forced to lathi (baton) charge, said a senior police official.

Hundreds of thousands fled the big cities for their homes in the hinterland when Modi announced the lockdown last month, many walking great distances with their families on empty highways.

Pakistan, with a population of 205 million, also prolonged its lockdown, due to end on Wednesday, by two weeks. Nepal extended a lockdown of its 30 million people until April 27. Nepal has 16 cases of the virus and no deaths but worries about a spillover from India.

Modi announced the extension as the latest government data showed the number of people infected with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) virus, commonly known as novel coronavirus, had reached 10,363, with 339 deaths in India.

Testing

Although the numbers are small compared with some Western nations, health experts fear that is because of Indias low levels of testing and that actual infection levels could be far higher.

Lacking testing kits and protective gear for medical workers, India has only tested 137 per million of its population, compared with 15,935 per million in Italy, and 8,138 in the United States.

Health experts have warned that widespread contagion could be disastrous in a country where millions live in dense slums, and the health care system is overstretched.

According to the government, India has about one doctor per 1,500 citizens. The World Health Organization recommends one doctor per 1,000. In rural areas, where two-thirds of Indians live, the ratio is one doctor to more than 10,000 people.

So far, more than three-quarters of Indias cases are concentrated in about 80 of the countrys more than 700 districts, including New Delhi and Mumbai.

It is my request and prayer to all fellow citizens, that we must not let coronavirus spread to new areas at any cost, Modi said. But the shutdown of the $2.9 trillion economy is exacting a heavy toll.

Since the lockdown began in late March, unemployment has almost doubled to around 14.5 percent, according to the Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy, a Mumbai-based private think-tank.

The shutdown has already sparked an exodus of millions of workers from small industries like textiles and leather, and service industries like retail, tourism, construction and other sectors from cities to the villages.

I am well aware of the problems you have facedsome for food, some for movement from place to place, and others for staying away from homes and families, Modi said.

For them, he offered the hope that restrictions in parts of the country that are not CCP virus hot spots might be slightly eased next week.

Former finance minister P. Chidambaram said that while the country stood behind Modi in fighting the pandemic, he could do more for the poor.

There is money, there is food, but the government will not release either money or food, he said.

Most private economists and the World Bank have revised down Indias growth forecasts for the current year to between 1.5 percent and 2.8 percent because of the pandemic. Barclays Bank on Tuesday forecast zero growth this year.

Official government figures on the spread of the CCP virus in South Asia are as follows:

India has 10,363 confirmed cases, including 339 deaths

Pakistan has 5,374 cases, including 93 deaths

Bangladesh has 803 cases, including 39 deaths

Afghanistan has 714 cases, including 23 deaths

Sri Lanka has 219 cases, including 7 deaths

Maldives has 20 cases and no deaths

Nepal has 16 cases and no deaths

Bhutan has five cases and no deaths

By Sanjeev Miglani and Rupam Jain

Epoch Times staff contributed to this report.
Tanzania's president claimed the coronavirus "cannot sit in the body of Christ." Israel's health minister dismissed a potential curfew by saying that the Messiah will come and save us.

A global Muslim missionary movement held mass gatherings and took blame for spreading the disease.

While most leaders of major religions have supported governments' efforts to fight the pandemic by limiting gatherings, a minority of the faithful in both religious and secular institutions have not.

Some have insisted that in-person worship should continue because of the relief it can provide. Others have suggested that faith is an authority higher than science, and belief can turn back contagion.

The struggle to adapt religious behaviours to a pandemic that doesn't distinguish between denominations or national boundaries was especially urgent in its earliest weeks, before many countries fully locked down. But as more officials trace virus hot spots back to faith gatherings, calls have grown louder for the devout to protect each other's physical well-being first.

"One of the things that most religious faiths stress in the first instance is to care for the most vulnerable in a community, to save others' lives as a primary focus, said L. Gregory Jones, dean of Duke University's divinity school.

But for some people of faith -- particularly those whose churches, synagogues and mosques are important community centers that focus appears to conflict with the very fabric of their lives.

In majority-Christian Tanzania, President John Magufuli told a church congregation last month that he was not afraid of coming here because the virus could be combatted with belief.

Israeli Health Minister Yaakov Litzman had insisted on exempting synagogues and other religious institutions from limits on public gatherings, according to Israeli media reports, only to come down with the virus himself this month -- apparently after failing to heed the social distancing precautions he had publicly preached.

Litzman is now widely seen as a symbol of lax attitudes that led to a disproportionate number of cases in the ultra-Orthodox Jewish community that he belongs to, which makes up just over 10 per cent of the population. Though he dismissed a possible Passover curfew last month, Israel ultimately imposed a national lockdown on the holiday's first night.

In India, the Muslim missionary movement Tablighi Jamaat came under fire with the online circulation of an audio clip said to be of its chief Maulana Saad, urging the faithful to continue to congregate at mosques.

The Pakistani government -- accused of moving too slowly to curb gatherings -- refused to order mosques closed. Instead, it limited congregants to five or less. Still, some hardliners remained defiant despite advice to stay at home from the country's Islamic Ideology Council.

Maulana Abdul Aziz, a cleric at the Red Mosque in Islamabad, urged the faithful to challenge restrictions, arguing it was a sin to keep mosques empty.

In India, authorities said they linked hundreds of infections to Tablighi Jamaat's activities and accused the movement's leadership of negligence.

Most US religious services have paused or shifted online as the federal government discourages group gatherings to help contain the virus. But a few faith leaders and congregants in America, where religious freedom was already a political minefield, have rebelled against those limits and claimed an incursion on their rights.

Others have taken less aggressive steps to assert the power of communal worship, pointing to what they see as the ability of belief to heal the pandemic's spiritual pain.

Retired Catholic moral theologian Janet Smith is among those in her faith urging bishops to support the restoration of the holy sacraments, delivered in person using tactics that wouldn't flout governmental orders.

"We believe that Jesus is really there and is bringing graces in the world that will help stop this coronavirus, said Smith, who recently retired from Sacred Heart Major Seminary in Detroit. She suggested outdoor and drive-up meetings with priests as options for receiving sacraments.

Seeking solace in spirituality or relying on religious rituals for relief and protection, some believers across faiths have continued to shrug off coronavirus risks as they worship.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Casino industry is among many



sectors that have come forward to help the Goa government in tackling the situation arising out of the coronavirus crisis and helping the people stranded in the state due to the national lockdown.

The corporate social responsibility (CSR) divisions of the casino operating companies have contributed in the state government government relief funds and also helping in managing logistics.

The industry players also claimed that they have been helping the government in reaching out to the people stranded in the tourist state due to the lockdown.

"We have supported 25 Georgian nationals by offering them accommodation and food after their Embassy requested for the same. They are safe in our accommodation. We will take care of them till they are in a position to fly back," said Srinivas Nayak, Director, Casino Pride Group which owns two offshore vessels besides some onshore gaming places in the state.

The group donated Rs 51 lakh to the Chief Minister's Relief Fund after the first phase of the national lockdown was announced on March 24.

Nayak said they are also providing regular meals to policemen on duty in North Goa which had reported seven coronavirus positive cases.

"We opened our kitchens for policemen on duty. That was the first thing that was required to do as our police force was on the street enforcing the lockdown," he said.

Similarly, Deltin Group last week contributed Rs 51 lakh towards the CM's relief fund.

"These are challenging times for all, and many people remain vulnerable to the COVID-19. Deltin Group believes in creating awareness amongst general public about the pandemic and providing humanitarian aid to the needy," said Deltin Group chairman Jaydev Mody in a statement.

He stated that the group is also sourcing and procuring essential items like medicines, medical devices, essential food products and other provisions for the people.

Out of the total seven COVID-19 cases detected in Goa earlier--all from North Goa district, five patients recovered from the viral infection while two are undergoing treatment.

No new coronavirus positive case has been reported in Goa since April 4.

Out of the 19 casinos, six are offshore while the rest 13 are onshore entities.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
DOWNERS GROVE, Ill., April 15, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- Quattroflow, part of PSG and Dover (NYSE: DOV), today announced it has extended its line of multiple- and single-use pumps with the introduction of the new Quattroflow QF2500 Quaternary Diaphragm Pump (the "QF2500 pump"). With a maximum flow rate of 2,500 lph (660 gph), the new QF2500 pump is ideally suited to meet the needs within demanding biopharma applications, including chromatography, TFF, virus filtration, sterile filtration and depth filtration.

The QF2500 pump is able to excel in biopharma applications due to numerous design enhancements, such as a new pump chamber that provides excellent drainability to maximize product recovery. The QF2500 pump also features a self-draining design, 125:1 turndown ratio, high flow stability even at low flow rates, linear flow performance and clean-in-place capability. Available accessories include a power box, diaphragm sensor and PID pressure controller.

With the addition of the new QF2500, Quattroflow pumps are now available in eight sizes, covering a flow range from 0.06 to 16,000 lph (0.02 to 4,227 gph). Quattroflow pumps primarily serve biopharma applications that require gentle displacement, reliability, product safety, purity and accuracy. The Quattroflow design does not feature a mechanical shaft seal or wetted rotating parts, ensuring total product containment without abrasion. Additionally, the pumping principle enables risk-free dry running, low pulsation, self-priming and minimal particle generation. With single- and multiple-use models available, Quattroflow has a pump to fit every application need.

For more information on Quattroflow, please go to quattroflow.com. Quattroflow is a product brand within PSG, a Dover company. For more information on PSG, please go to psgdover.com.

About Quattroflow:

Quattroflow is a leading brand of quaternary (four-piston) diaphragm pumps that primarily serve industries such as pharmaceutical and biopharmaceutical that require gentle displacement, reliability, product safety, purity and cleanability. Headquartered in Duisburg, Germany, Quattroflow is part of PSG, a Dover company. For more information on Quattroflow and its complete family of four-piston pumps, please visit quattroflow.com.

About PSG:

PSG is a global pump and dispensing solution expert and leading manufacturer of pumps, systems and related flow-control technology for the safe and efficient transfer of critical and valuable fluids and materials. Headquartered in Oakbrook Terrace, IL, USA, PSG is comprised of several world-class brands, including Abaque, All-Flo, Almatec, Blackmer, Ebsray, EnviroGear, Griswold, Hydro Systems, Mouvex, Neptune, Quattroflow and Wilden. PSG products are manufactured on three continents  North America, Europe and Asia  in state-of-the-art facilities that practice lean manufacturing and are ISO-certified. PSG is part of the Pumps and Process Solutions segment of Dover Corporation. For additional information on PSG, please visit psgdover.com. PSG: Where Innovation Flows.

About Dover:

Dover is a diversified global manufacturer and solutions provider with annual revenue of over $7 billion. We deliver innovative equipment and components, consumable supplies, aftermarket parts, software and digital solutions and support services through five operating segments: Engineered Products, Fueling Solutions, Imaging & Identification, Pumps & Process Solutions, and Refrigeration & Food Equipment. Dover leverages global scale, operational agility, world-class engineering capability and customer intimacy to lead in the markets we serve. Recognized for our entrepreneurial approach for over 60 years, our team of approximately 24,000 employees takes an ownership mindset, collaborating with customers to redefine what's possible. Headquartered in Downers Grove, Illinois, Dover trades on the New York Stock Exchange under "DOV." Additional information is available at dovercorporation.com.

PSG Contact:

Rainer Frericks

+49 2065 89205-0

[email protected]



Dover Media Contact:

Adrian Sakowicz, VP, Communications

(630) 743-5039

[email protected]

Dover Investor Contact:

Andrey Galiuk, VP, Corporate Development and Investor Relations

(630) 743-5131

[email protected]

SOURCE Dover

Related Links

http://www.dovercorporation.com


Ruling Democratic Party of Korea candidate Lee Nak-yon holds up a bouquet of flowers at his election office in Jongno, Wednesday, after his almost certain victory over Hwang Kyo-ahn, chairman of the main opposition United Future Party, for a National Assembly seat representing the central Seoul constituency in the general election Wednesday. / Korea Times photo by Choi Won-suk



By Do Je-hae



The ruling Democratic Party of Korea (DPK) cilnched a landslide victory in Wednesday's general election.



In the election selecting 300 members of the National Assembly, the DPK obtained 163 out of 253 constituencies, according to the National Election Commission (NEC), Thursday. When including proportional representation seats which its satellite party, Civil Together, may win, the ruling bloc is expected to have 180 seats in total. The final result will come out later in the afternoon.



The main opposition United Future Party (UFP) won in 84 constituencies.



A victory in this election is the latest in the DPK's streak of election sweeps since the general election in 2016, the presidential election in 2017 and local elections in 2018.



The election was seen as a crucial midterm test for President Moon Jae-in. The results are expected to boost Moon's confidence to push ahead with core policies in the economy, diplomacy, judicial reform and other areas during the remainder of his term which ends in May 2022.



" Speaking in general terms about the ruling Democratic Party's apparent victory, it appears voters overlooked an economy that was already performing poorly [even before the pandemic], and other controversies, to express their satisfaction with how President Moon Jae-in's handled COVID-19 to date despite some initial misgivings," Sean King, senior vice president at Park Strategies.

"South Korea hasn't done as well as Taiwan has against COVID-19 but has nonetheless done better than most. A rather ineffective conservative opposition, which remains in a state of disjointed disarray ever since former President Park Geun-hye's fall, made things even easier for the incumbents."

The UFP, a merger of conservative parties, is likely to face turmoil as its chairman Hwang Kyo-ahn announced he would resign from his post following his party's defeat in the election.

The ballot counting showed the ruling party leading in some of the other most coveted constituencies as of 11 p.m.

Voters have shown keen attention to the winner of the showdown between the DPK's Lee Nak-yon and Hwang in Seoul's Jongno district, which has produced several former presidents. As of 11 p.m. Lee was ahead of Hwang, 57.4 percent to 40.9 percent.



Among other notable candidates, Ko Min-jung of the DPK was in a neck-and-neck race against former Seoul Mayor Oh Se-hoon of the UFP in the Gwangjin-B District of Seoul. Ko has run a campaign that stressed her close relationship with President Moon as his former spokeswoman.





Highest-ever turnout for early voting boosts overall turnout 18-year-olds hit the polls for first time in Korea Self-isolators vote after regular hours The DPK's Lee Soo-jin, a former judge and political rookie, was ahead of the UFP's Na Kyung-won, a multiple-term lawmaker, in Seoul's Dongjak-B.



The election recorded the highest voter turnout for a general election in 28 years with 66.2 percent of 43.9 million eligible voters having cast ballots at 14,330 polling stations.



"South Korea should be congratulated on a tremendous voter turnout in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic. It's an inspiration to democracies worldwide," King said.



The results for the 47 proportional representation seats are set to be finalized later today. This will take longer than previous elections as the ballot paper was too long for counting machines to be used and so results are being tallied by hand. The paper was too long because 35 parties took part in the proportional representation vote under a new election system designed to give more seats to minor parties.



The high turnout has dispelled concerns before that elections that voters could shun going to the polls due to fears of mass gatherings amid the COVID-19 pandemic. But the number of new infections had dropped considerably ahead of the poll, and despite the social distancing campaign, a record number of people turned up for early voting last week.



The ruling party's performance is seen to reflect the public's level of approval of Moon's leadership in the wake of the pandemic, which has triggered concerns particularly over the economy, in addition to unforeseen social changes such as the opening of online classes for the country's schools.



The DPK rallied voters to put their support behind it and the Moon administration for a more stable management of state affairs to overcome COVID-19.



The main opposition had defined the election as a judgment of the Moon administration, which it says has failed the people on the economy, diplomacy and North Korea, and on responding to the coronavirus pandemic. The UFP blamed the Moon administration for an initial explosive rise in infections here compared to other Asian countries such as Singapore, Hong Kong and Taiwan by refusing to implement a comprehensive ban on travelers from China in the early stages of the pandemic, as advised by the medical community.



Unlike in previous general elections, Wednesday's vote captured keen attention outside the country as the first major nationwide election held after the outbreak of COVID-19.




Ukraine and Turkmenistan have agreed to hold a meeting of foreign ministers and a meeting of the Joint Intergovernmental Commission after the completion of quarantine.

"The parties reached an agreement on holding important bilateral activities, including a meeting of the foreign ministers of the two countries and a regular meeting of the Ukraine-Turkmenistan Joint Intergovernmental Commission on Economic and Cultural-Humanitarian Cooperation after the quarantine," the press service of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Ukraine reports upon the teleconference negotiations between deputy foreign ministers Vasyl Bodnar and Berdyniyaz Miatiyev.

It is noted that the Ukrainian side underscored the importance of combining efforts in present-day conditions to minimize the negative impact of the coronavirus pandemic on the economies of both countries and protect the rights and interests of citizens.

The promising areas of cooperation between the two countries within the framework of international organizations, in particular the UN, were also touched upon.

The parties agreed to intensify the cultural and humanitarian cooperation, to study the possibilities of intensification of educational and scientific and technical cooperation, training of diplomatic staff and conduct of online lectures during the quarantine.

ol
Government on Tuesday announced that it is engaging traditional authorities - Paramount chiefs and Queenmothers to aid community sensitization of their subjects on the COVID-19 and its laid down protocols to fight against its spread.



Mr Kofi Dzamesi, the Minister of Chieftaincy and Religious Affairs, who revealed this said Paramount chiefs were the heads of traditional authority and therefore had wider reach and influence by virtue of respect accorded them by their subjects.



The Minister made this known at a press briefing to provide update on COVID-19 situation in the country in Accra, organized by the Ministry of Information.



He said the threats and prevalence of COVID-19 called for an all-inclusive approach by particularly engaging the people with the language they understand best adding that this is what the Paramount chiefs seek to do in their respective areas.



"The support of traditional rulers therefore is much needed especially at this crucial time as they are accustomed with all segment of the social structure in the various communities across the country," he stated.



Mr Dzamesi said this is important as there were about 369 paramountcies with about 600 traditional councils under them across the 16 regions.



He indicated that some Paramount chiefs added their voices to that of government to emphasize the need for citizens to adhere to the protocols while suspending all traditional practices.



"Queenmothers will be actively involved in ensuring other supports from government. Also information, communication materials on the disease will be designed and shared among the traditional authorities to aid sensitization," it added.



The Minister noted that Paramount chiefs would embark on this with collaboration with municipal and district assemblies and the appropriate structures in their jurisdiction.

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 head of the International Monetary Fund said Wednesday that the lending agency is facing huge demand for support from its members during the global pandemic.

An unprecedented 102 of the IMF's 189 member countries are seeking assistance from the organization, Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva said. The agency is prepared to commit its full $1 trillion in lending capacity to meet the demand, she said.

It is a crisis like no other, Georgieva told reporters, reiterating her agency's assessment that the global economy is in its worst downturn since the Great Depression of the 1930s.

Georgieva spoke at a conference as the Washington-based IMF and its sister lending agency, the World Bank, began its spring meetings, being held remotely this year.

She and World Bank President David Malpass both praised a decision taken Wednesday by the finance ministers and central bank presidents of the Group of 20 major industrial countries to declare a suspension of debt payments for low income countries.

The debt suspension from May 1 through the end of this year is aimed at allowing poor countries to keep an estimated $12 billion that they can use for meeting health care and other needs stemming from the coronavirus.

In a new economic outlook prepared for this week's discussions, the IMF forecast that the global economy will shrink by 3% this year, far greater than the 0.1% dip that occurred in 2009 in the wake of the global financial crisis.

Georgieva said that the IMF has already doubled its emergency assistance programs from $50 billion up to $100 billion. At the same time, the agency is preparing to assist to restart economic growth as countries emerge from the crisis.

We need to think of the challenges we will face on the other side of this crisis, she said, noting the likelihood of elevated levels of debt and rising bankruptcies in many nations.

It is important that the IMF and individual governments put measures in place to deal with those issues, she said. As part of the meetings, the IMF's policy committee will meet Thursday, with the sessions closing on Friday with a conference by Malpass following a meeting of the World Bank's policy panel.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
More than 100 foreign experts who are coming to work at Nghi Son Oil Refinery in Thanh Hoa Province will be quarantined.

Thanh Hoa People's Committee said they were going to receive 105 experts from CR Asia Thailand Company who come to work at Nghi Son Oil Refinery, including two from South Africa, one from New Zealand and the remainder from Thailand.

After landing at Noi Bai Airport in Hanoi, they will be transferred to the quarantine area at Anh Phat 3 Hotel in Nghi Son Economic Zone.

Local authorities must be proactive in carrying out preventive measures, equipment and food to quarantine the experts. They will regularly assess the situation to react to emergencies.



The local authorities will continue to promote and carry out preventive measures to ensure safety for locals and experts alike.

The managers at Nghi Son Economic Zone, the Department of Health, Department of Transport, Department of Finance, the police and military and Thanh Hoa CDC to work closely together on preventive plans. Dtinews

Labour ministry seeks entry for nearly 8,500 foreign experts The Ministry of Labour, Invalids and Social Affairs has proposed the government to lift a ban and allow on a priority basis for 8,459 highly skilled foreign workers to enter Vietnam since it has been difficult to find replacements for them.
Last year was one of the worst years on record for the Greenland ice sheet, which shrunk by hundreds of billions of tons. According to a study published today in The Cryosphere, that mind-boggling ice loss wasn't caused by warm temperatures alone; the new study identifies exceptional atmospheric circulation patterns that contributed in a major way to the ice sheet's rapid loss of mass.

Because climate models that project the future melting of the Greenland ice sheet do not currently account for these atmospheric patterns, they may be underestimating future melting by about half, said lead author Marco Tedesco from Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory.

The study used satellite data, ground measurements, and climate models to analyze changes in the ice sheet during the summer of 2019.

The researchers found that while 2019 saw the second-highest amount of runoff from melting ice (2012 was worse), it brought the biggest drops in surface mass balance since record-keeping began in 1948. Surface mass balance takes into account gains in the ice sheet's mass -- such as through snowfall -- as well as losses from surface meltwater runoff.

"You can see the mass balance in Greenland as your bank account," said Tedesco. "In some periods you spend more, and in some periods you earn more. If you spend too much you go negative. This is what happened to Greenland recently."

Specifically, in 2019, the ice sheet's surface mass balance dropped by about 320 billion tons below the average for 1981-2010 -- the biggest drop since record-keeping began in 1948. Between 1981 and 2010, the surface mass "bank account" gained about 375 billion tons of ice per year, on average. In 2019, that number was closer to 50 billion tons. And while a gain of 50 billion tons may still sound like good news for an ice sheet, Fettweis explained that it is not, because of another factor: the ice sheet is also shedding hundreds of billions of tons as icebergs break off into the ocean. Under stable conditions, the gains in surface mass balance would be high enough to compensate for the ice that's lost when icebergs calve off. Under the current conditions, the calving far outweighs the surface mass balance gains; Overall, the ice sheet lost an estimated 600 billion tons in 2019, representing a sea level rise of about 1.5 millimeters.

Before now, 2012 was Greenland's worst year for surface mass balance, with a loss of 310 billion tons compared to the 1981-2010 baseline. Yet summer temperatures in Greenland were actually higher in 2012 than in 2019 -- so why did the surface lose so much mass last year?

Tedesco and co-author Xavier Fettweis, from the University of Liege, found that the record-setting ice loss was linked to high-pressure conditions (called anticyclonic conditions) that prevailed over Greenland for unusually long periods of time in 2019.

The high pressure conditions inhibited the formation of clouds in the southern portion of Greenland. The resulting clear skies let in more sunlight to melt the surface of the ice sheet. And with fewer clouds, there was about 50 billion fewer tons of snowfall than usual to add to the mass of the ice sheet. The lack of snowfall also left dark, bare ice exposed in some places, and because ice doesn't reflect as much sunlight as fresh snow, it absorbed more heat and exacerbated melting and runoff.

Conditions were different, but no better, in the northern and western parts of Greenland, because as the high pressure system spun clockwise, it pulled up warm, moist air from the lower latitudes and channeled it into Greenland.

"Imagine this vortex rotating in the southern part of Greenland," Tedesco explained, "and that is literally sucking in like a vacuum cleaner the moisture and heat of New York City, for example, and dumping it in the Arctic -- in this case, along the west coast of Greenland. When that happened, because you have more moisture and more energy, it promoted the formation of clouds in the northern part."

But instead of bringing snowfall, these warm and moist clouds trapped the heat that would normally radiate off of the ice, creating a small-scale greenhouse effect. These clouds also emitted their own heat, exacerbating melting.

Through these combined effects, the atmospheric conditions of the summer of 2019 led to the highest annual mass loss from Greenland's surface since record-keeping began.

With the help of an artificial neural network, Tedesco and Fettweis found that 2019's large number of days with these high-pressure atmospheric conditions was unprecedented. The summer of 2012, one of Greenland's worst years, also saw anticyclonic conditions.

"These atmospheric conditions are becoming more and more frequent over the past few decades," said Tedesco. "It is very likely that this is due to the waviness to the jet stream, which we think is related to, among other things, the disappearance of snow cover in Siberia, the disappearance of sea ice, and the difference in the rate at which temperature is increasing in the Arctic versus the mid-latitudes." In other words, climate change may make the destructive high-pressure atmospheric conditions more common over Greenland.

Current global climate models are not able to capture these effects of a wavier jet stream. As a result, "simulations of future impacts are very likely underestimating the mass loss due to climate change," said Tedesco. "It's almost like missing half of the melting."

The Greenland ice sheet contains enough frozen water to raise sea levels by as much as 23 feet. Understanding the impacts of atmospheric circulation changes will be crucial for improving projections for how much of that water will flood the oceans in the future, said Tedesco.

###

Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory is Columbia University's home for Earth science research. Its scientists develop fundamental knowledge about the origin, evolution and future of the natural world, from the planet's deepest interior to the outer reaches of its atmosphere, on every continent and in every ocean, providing a rational basis for the difficult choices facing humanity. http://www.ldeo.columbia.edu | @LamontEarth

The Earth Institute, Columbia University mobilizes the sciences, education and public policy to achieve a sustainable earth. http://www.earth.columbia.edu.
Following the uproar over the unprecedented racist move by Chinese nationals in their motherland to discriminate against Africans, former Cabinet Minister Joe Nyaga has joined Kenyans demanding action.

Read: Kenyans, Africans Facing Open Racism in China Amidst Coronavirus Pandemic

In a statement on Monday, the former adviser to President Uhuru Kenyatta on regional integration, expressed concern over the governments indecisiveness in handling Kenyans being mistreated in China.

According to Nyaga, the delay in taking action is likely to result in frustrated citizens taking revenge against Chinese nationals living in Kenya.

Our government should take a hard position and should not be constrained by the economic relationship it has with China. The danger is that our people could unilaterally take measures that would not be good for Chinese living here.

We saw what black South Africans, in anger, did to the Africans from the rest of Africa, and it was nasty. We must avoid this from happening and hence the need for quick action by China and African governments, Nyaga said.

The former presidential candidate also called on the Chinese government to step in and stop the inhumane actions.

Nyaga said for whatever reason the discrimination may be happening, it is totally unacceptable by any country, especially at a time when the whole world needs cooperation to overcome COVID-19.
Even after New Jerseys coronavirus lockdown rules loosen and businesses begin to reopen, residents should expect some restrictions to remain for a while and not an immediate return to the way life was before, Gov. Phil Murphy said Wednesday.

The notion that were going to go back to some sort of lets just turn the clock back to three months ago, I just dont see it," Murphy said during his daily coronavirus briefing in Trenton. People talk about a new normal, and I think thats a reality.

A normal gathering in the foreseeable future, I just dont see it," he added.

Murphy provided a glimpse Wednesday into what some examples of reopened businesses would look like, including restaurants that could start offering dine-in options again with temperature checks or rapid coronavirus saliva tests at the door.

I could see the restaurant protocol, the governor said, while offering no timeline. You go inside, the servers are masked and gloved. Youre at 50% capacity.

Murphy also said some traditional greetings may be avoided for some time.

I dont know that any time soon were going to go back into the  what I love, by the way  big handshake, kiss on the cheek, hug, high fives, he said.

CORONAVIRUS RESOURCES: Live map tracker | Businesses that are open | Homepage

New Jersey  home to the second-most COVID-19 cases and deaths among U.S. states  has been under near-lockdown since March 21 to help halt the virus spread. Murphy has ordered residents to stay at home, banned social gatherings, closed schools, and mandated that nonessential businesses stay closed until further notice.

Murphy announced Monday that New Jersey is joining six other states  Connecticut, Delaware, Massachusetts, New York, Pennsylvania, and Rhode Island  in developing a regional plan regarding how to scale back restrictions and recharge the economy, though only after the states have pushed past the peak of cases.

Murphy said Tuesday night restrictions may last until June or July.

The governor stressed Wednesday that any rollback would likely be gradual in the absence of a vaccine  which officials say may take more than a year  or widespread mass testing.

The new normal probably wont look like the old normal, at least at first, Murphy said. But we will get through this together, stronger than ever before.

Murphy also said a responsible reopening of the states economy would be dependent upon stronger testing, reducing the virus to a manageable reality," and other factors.

You only get economic recovery on the back of that healthcare recovery, he said.

Murphys comments came a day after President Donald Trump backed down from his stance that he has the ultimate authority to lift COVID-19 restrictions states have put in place. Trump said Tuesday that it will instead be up to each governor individually and that his administration will soon speak all 50 of them in a conference call to discuss plans.

We think that some of the governors will be in really good shape to open up, Trump. Others are going to have to take a longer period of time until theyre in a position to say, Were ready to go.' And thats OK. We understand that. Some of the governors have a very tough situation.

New Jersey, a state of 9 million residents, now has seen at least 71,030 confirmed cases and 3,156 deaths of COVID-19, state officials announced Wednesday. Only New York has more cases and deaths among U.S. states.

Earlier Wednesday, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo made similar comments to Murphy, calling on Empire State residents to expect a new normal when it comes to phased businesses re-openings.

Were going to a different place, Cuomo said.

Murphy has said in recent days there are signs the rate of infection is slowing in New Jersey after weeks of lockdown. Officials have also said the peak of hospitalizations from the virus is now likely to be lower, but later in April.

But Murphy has warned that cases and deaths are continuing to rise, and residents need to keep staying inside and practicing social distancing to avoid erasing any progress.

The governor has also called on the federal government to help provide more medical supplies  including ventilators and testing materials.

NJ Advance Media staff writer Matt Arco contributed to this report.

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Care minister Helen Whately was blasted today for sniggering in a car crash TV interview as it was revealed a 'hidden epidemic' of coronavirus in nursing and old-people's homes may have cost 4,000 lives.

She was taken to task by Piers Morgan on Good Morning Britain as he grilled her over an exclusive report in the Daily Mail that deaths in care facilities are being hugely under-reported because of a lack of testing.

The latest report from the Office for National Statistics says the virus killed 217 care home residents in England and Wales in the two weeks up to April 3.

But industry figures say the true count is much higher  potentially 4,000 since the outbreak started.

GPs are also sometimes reluctant to write Covid-19 on death certificates and figures from care homes are not included in the official daily toll.

Mrs Whately, 43, the MP for Faversham and Mid Kent, was sent out to face the media this morning as anger and questions increased over the vulnerability of care home residents amid a lack of testing and personal protective equipment (PPE) for staff.

She has only been the Social Care Minister since February, when she was appointed in Boris Johnson's Cabinet reshuffle.

Appearing on GMB she insisted that the Government has been working hard to tackle the crisis, but Piers insisted she answer questions about deaths in care homes, telling her he expected her to be working hard.

He asked: 'Is it true that 4,000 people have died in care home? Yes or no?'

The Social Care Minister denied that she had been laughing during the interview on today's Good Morning Britain

She said her laughter was a reaction to him showing her the front page of the newspaper, when she was unable to see him due to not having a screen visible showing the GMB host.

The doctors' daughter who entered politics to improve the NHS In another life Helen Whately could have been on the other side of the coronavirus debate - directly helping patients in hospital. The mother of three, 43, has been the MP for the affluent seat of Faversham and Mid Kent since the 2015 election. But her parents are both doctors and she came close to following in their footsteps. However, in her maiden Commons' speech in 2015 she revealed her upbringing had led her to a different path. 'I come from a family of doctors, and I nearly followed in their footsteps, but time spent in hospitals as a teenagernot because I was ill; I just did lots of work experiencetriggered a different ambition,' she said. 'I wanted to improve the National Health Service itself. After a stint in telecoms, I spent nearly a decade working in healthcare.' Mrs Whately was tipped in 2008 as a rising Tory star by society journal Tatler. After studying Politics, Philosophy and Economics (PPE) at Oxford she worked as a management consultant and an advisor to shadow culture secretary Hugo Swire she contested Kingston and Surbiton in 2010, losing heavily to current Lib Dem acting leader Ed Davey. She was chosen for her Kent seat on an all-female shortlist for 2015 as the incumbent Hugh Robertson stepped down. She was briefly made a deputy chairwoman of the Conservative Party in the dying days of Theresa May's administration last year, before becoming a junior minister at the Department of Digital, Culture, Media and Sport last September. In February this year she was promoted to Social care Minister, as the coronavirus outbreak began to become a global concern. She has been married to Marcus since 2005. Advertisement

The Social Care Minister then thanked him for acknowledging what the government is doing and said the work was 'really important'.

Piers interrupted to say tell her that it was more important that 4,000 people have died, only for the Minister to start laughing. The host said: 'Why are you laughing? What do you find funny about this?'

She said: 'I don't think it's funny in the slightest.'

He responded: 'Well why do you keep laughing then?'

'I'm not laughing at all,' she said.

Piers replied: 'I literally just asked you is it true that 4,000 elderly people have died in hosp and all you can do is laugh what's the matter with you?'

As she continued to insist she wasn't laughing and asked Piers not to suggest she had been, he said: 'We literally just saw you.'

But she said her laughter was a reaction to him showing her the front page of the newspaper, when she was unable to see him due to not having a screen visible showing the GMB host.

The interview sparked a row on social media between those who supported Mr Morgan and those saying he had been unfair.

Mal Smith wrote: 'Care Minister? This gets more Orwellian every day, she's the Minister of Couldn't Care Less.'

And Terence West added: 'Shocking that a government minister laughs and smirks rather than answers important questions, after all you are a public servant being paid for with tax payers money!'

But Diane Key was among those who thought differently, saying: 'Piers went over the top with this interview!'

A spokeswoman for Ofcom said the regulator has received 643 complaints about the interview.

Later Mr Morgan wrote on Twitter: 'Apparently some people found my interview with Care minister @Helen-Whately today 'uncomfortable'.

'For perspective, it probably wasn't quite as 'uncomfortable' as what our under-protected NHS & carer frontline heroes are going through.'

Campaigners and MPs warned yesterday of an 'unfolding horror' that could end up with tens of thousands of forgotten victims.

Ministers face urgent calls to get a grip and get virus tests for all staff and residents with symptoms, more protection gear and a Cabinet minister to deal with the crisis.

Health Secretary Matt Hancock last night pledged action on testing and is also expected to outline a plan to address the crisis in a social care strategy.

All care home residents and staff with symptoms of Covid-19 are to be tested as the Government faces a backlash over its handling of the growing crisis.

In a separate interview Mrs Whately told BBC Breakfast: 'We have been doing everything that we can to protect those really vulnerable people living in care homes or receiving care at home.

Chris Schmid told MailOnline his great aunt Isabel Francis, 94, passed away in Fieldway care home in Mitcham, South London on Friday, April 10. Debbie Cholwill said her mother, who had dementia and was living in a care home, passed away on April 10 after testing positive for coronavirus

George Hillhouse's 74-year-old mother, Helen Smith, died at Almond Court care home in Drumchapel, Glasgow, on Saturday. Mark Gordon fears his mother Susan (above), a 76-year-old terminally-ill cancer patient, is too weak to fight off coronavirus after contracting the infection while at a Tayside care home. He claims staff did not use PPE when dealing with patients

The interview sparked a row on social media between those who supported Mr Morgan and those saying he had been unfair

HIDDEN EPIDEMIC OF CORONAVIRUS IN CARE HOMES MAY HAVE COST 4,000 LIVES, EXPERTS WARN A 'hidden epidemic' of coronavirus in care homes may have cost 4,000 lives, experts warned last night. They believe deaths are being hugely under-reported because of a lack of testing. GPs are also sometimes reluctant to write COVID-19 on death certificates and figures from care homes are not included in the official daily toll. The latest report from the Office for National Statistics says the virus killed 217 care home residents in England and Wales up to April 3. But industry figures say the true count is much higher  potentially 4,000 since the outbreak started. Campaigners and MPs warned yesterday of an 'unfolding horror' that could end up with tens of thousands of forgotten victims. Ministers face urgent calls to get a grip and get virus tests for all staff and residents with symptoms, more protection gear and a Cabinet minister to deal with the crisis. Health Secretary Matt Hancock last night pledged action on testing and is also expected to outline a plan to address the crisis in a social care strategy. Care home operators complain they are being overlooked, with desperate short - ages of testing and staff safety equipment making it extremely hard to stop the disease ravaging their sites. Advertisement

'From the moment it looked like coronavirus was coming our way... we have been working really hard to do whatever we can to protect those receiving care from this truly awful, horrible illness.'

She added it had been 'harder to get heard' on social care issues than for the NHS and said the Government had 'taken huge steps to get PPE out to the care sector'.

Care home operators complain they are being overlooked, with desperate short - ages of testing and staff safety equipment making it extremely hard to stop the dis - ease ravaging their sites.

Jeremy Richardson, chief executive of Four Seasons, which has 191 care homes across the UK, told the Guardian that the official figures 'materially understated' the crisis, adding: 'From colleagues in the sector and in Four Seasons' experience, it is closer to 60 per cent (infection rate).'

It came as one care home lost a fifth of it's residents and the manager says she is fighting a losing battle against the deadly pandemic.

Anita Peet, who is in charge of Wren Hall Nursing Home has criticised health chiefs for their lack of help in fighting the virus.

Ten residents died at the weekend from the virus, and a further 15 are currently in isolation.

She told The Sun: 'We are just having deaths all the time.

'Are people dispensable? It feels as if people are not worth saving. But that is certainly not how we feel.'

'It's getting harder and harder every day. We're fighting a losing battle.

'It is awful that people are not being able to prepare for this, to spend quality time with loved ones. It is making the whole situation more challenging.'

The care home has already paid out 9,000 for protective equipment, and getting a steady supply of PPE equipment was difficult.

She added: ''The first delivery (from the government) was 160 masks. I told them we were using 312 a day. I waited four days and got 400. The supply chain is completely useless.'

Ministers are coming under pressure to include care home deaths in the daily figures.

Mr Sunak and public health officials faced a string of questions over the issue at a press briefing last night.

Organisations including the Alzheimer's Society and Care England, which represents social care organisations, believe the care home death toll is being hugely under-played by a lack of tests.

Why can't patients in care homes go to empty Nightingales? Healthy residents 'are being sacrificed to coronavirus' after government ORDERS homes to take infected patients to free up NHS beds amid claims 4,000 lives have been lost

Furious families have today accused the Government of 'sacrificing' Britain's elderly in the fight against coronavirus by discharging COVID-19 patients into care homes and signing the 'death warrant' of the most vulnerable in society.

NHS hospitals have been ordered to drastically free up beds, meaning thousands of patients have been released, with scores of elderly Britons meeting the criteria sent to care homes dotted across the UK.

In a revolt against the 'dangerous' drive, some care homes have already refused to accept patients over coronavirus fears - not everyone is swabbed for the killer virus before they are discharged from hospital.

But one home in Essex was allegedly forced to accept an elderly COVID-19 patient 'against their wishes' before they were re-admitted to hospital the next day. The daughter of a 96-year-old resident accused Number 10 of 'recklessly exposing' others to the infection.

In Herefordshire, a dementia-stricken 78-year-old was discharged from hospital to a care home, without her family being told. She also had a Do Not Resuscitate (DNR) notice along with the orders not to send back to hospital if she caught coronavirus.

Demanding action from Downing Street, her daughter said: 'My mother has worked all her life and paid into the NHS they do not have the right to sign her death warrant because she's old and has dementia.'

Despite hospitals being told to free up space, it was revealed last night that London's Nightingale Hospital at the ExCel Centre sat almost empty with just 19 coronavirus patients treated over the Easter weekend.

It comes after care industry bosses yesterday suggested that two thirds of all homes across Britain have recorded coronavirus cases. Around 500,000 people are in care homes in the UK.

Grim statistics released yesterday also showed the number of coronavirus deaths in care homes rose ten-fold by the start of April, up from just 20 for the week ending March 27.

But the true scale of the coronavirus catastrophe in Britain's care homes is a mystery because the figures released by the Office for National Statistics are almost two weeks out-of-date.

Number 10 is under mounting pressure to start recording all coronavirus deaths, wherever they happen, amid the accusations the true toll is being swept under the carpet.

The UK's care home regulator, the Care Quality Commission, announced it would step in to collect daily numbers of coronavirus deaths.

Helen Buniak revealed her 96-year-old mother's home was 'ordered' to admit a coronavirus patient from hospital 'against their wishes' on April 8.

She alleged that the Birchwood Residential Care Home, in Ilford, was told it was 'Government policy'.

The discharged patient only stayed in the facility for one day before they were re-admitted to hospital, Ms Buniak claimed.

She told MailOnline: 'How shocking and completely reckless to allow the virus to enter into a care home that was clear of the virus.

'However much the staff did their best to isolate the patient, there is still a serious risk that the virus could spread and cause multiple deaths.'

Ms Buniak said it seemed like the lives of older people in care homes are 'invisible' and argued: 'The Government is willing to sacrifice them.'

'The Government's so called policy to shield those most vulnerable clearly does not apply to the elderly in care homes.'

The Birchwood care home, which looks after around 40 elderly patients, is one of dozens to have limited routine visits from family members.

Another MailOnline reader revealed her elderly dementia-stricken mother was discharged to a care home, without checking with her.

Her mother, of Ross-on-Wye in Herefordshire, was stuck in hospital because health officials had yet to find a care package for her.

She told MailOnline: 'Due to the COVID-19 outbreak most care homes in Hereford with places refused to take her so she was there a while.

'The hospital were getting really annoyed because they wanted her out as soon as possible and the bed freed up.

'On Sunday (April 12) they discharged her to a care home in Worcestershire without consulting me or checking the home could meet her complex needs.'

The woman - who wanted to remain anonymous - added: 'She arrived with a DNR, which said do not transfer back to hospital if she contracts COVID-19.

'My mother has worked all her life and paid into the NHS they do not have the right to sign her death warrant because she's old and has dementia.
A South Korean woman casts her ballot for the parliamentary elections at a polling station in Seoul on April 15, 2020.

As South Korea heads to the polls Wednesday for its legislative elections, the country's president, Moon Jae-in, and his Democratic Party of Korea face a public vote of confidence, according to one expert that spoke to CNBC on Wednesday.

"As the South Korean constitution only permits a single five-year term presidency, the parliamentary elections coming just weeks ahead of president Moon's three-year anniversary will be a kind of referendum of public confidence in his leadership and his progressive party," Soojin Park, public policy fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center, told CNBC's "Street Signs" on Wednesday.

The elections in South Korea come as authorities around the world have scrambled to stem the spread of the coronavirus epidemic. Globally, more than 1.97 million have been infected and at least 125,678 people have died, according to data compiled by John Hopkins University.

South Korea was the first country outside of China to see a major outbreak. But it has since received praise for its efforts to contain the disease, including widespread testing.

That has translated into a surge in Moon's approval rating, a turnaround from previous criticism of his economic policies. That could bode well for him and his party at the polls.

"We're betting on the idea that Moon's rise in popularity recently on the back of the government doing a pretty good job of controlling the coronavirus there will translate into  more support for his party," Scott Seaman, Asia director at Eurasia Group, told CNBC's "Squawk Box" on Wednesday.

Seaman explained the epidemic also gives Moon "more protection" against criticism of his economic agenda.

"A lot more of some of the downside risks and negative news that we see about the economy can be attributed to the coronavirus and not necessarily to the economic policies that (Moon's) put in place," Seaman said.
As the coronavirus continues to spread, some parents find themselves isolated from their partners and children  because theyre essential workers, because they may have been exposed to the virus, or because of a host of unforeseen complications and consequences of a world upended. NYT Parenting readers shared their stories about quarantining while separated.

None of this is easy

My wife catches everything. She has multiple sclerosis, and her medication leaves her susceptible to pretty much every cold that comes through the door. When you have one kid in day care and another in elementary school, the door might as well be a revolving one. As soon as the novel coronavirus reared its terrifying head, we worried shed catch that too. We barely had time to fear the possibility before she began showing symptoms. Her doctor diagnosed her with Covid-19 after a week of fever, shortness of breath, and extreme lethargy. She hasnt been hospitalized, so things could be much worse, but shes spent nearly a month in isolation with symptoms that have stayed consistent and relatively mild, but refuse to disappear. My kids and I have, thus far, been healthy. That said, my new role as the primary parent  really the only parent  does not exactly make for a staycation. The term full plate doesnt do my last three weeks justice. On top of managing my workload while balancing oversight of my fourth graders schoolwork and fielding the demands of a toddler who needs constant attention, theres the emotional load. Ive got to stay sane and put on a brave face for my kids, who know whats going on but desperately want, and arent allowed, to hug their mother. I also have to be there for my wife, whose lingering physical symptoms are nearly matched by the crippling anxiety that grows with each new day that she doesnt feel better. Ive been sleeping on the couch this entire time, unable to offer her much more than a figurative shoulder and frequent runs to the pharmacy for medicine and soup. Did I mention I my full-time day job? Obviously, my wifes health is paramount, and my primary concern is making sure she doesnt get worse. Less urgent is whether my 4-year-old is watching too much Puppy Dog Pals (he is) or if my fourth grader has enough pipe cleaners to finish his science project (he doesnt) or if Im able to survive a single conference call without someone screaming for snacks (I havent). None of this is easy, for any of us, and if the increasingly terrifying news reports are any indication, weve been lucky. Still, every day my wife wakes up hoping to feel better, my kids wake up hoping to be able to snuggle her, and I wake up, on the couch, hoping for all of that, and for my parenting partner to return to the trenches with me.  Mike Julianelle

Daddy, come back

Emily Chou tries to set a daily routine. Her daughters preschool has a virtual class each morning; she does Cosmic Yoga with her 4-year-old and 2-year-old, and scrambles through meals and snacks, taking inventory of their groceries too. At night, they FaceTime her husband, Patrick, who is at his parents house in Montreal, and he does a puppet show with a stuffed animal they left the last time they visited. He left for Canada a month ago to care for his dad, who has leukemia. Now, Emilys not sure when Patrick can come back. She worries about germs spreading on planes, and none of the rental car companies her husband has called in the Montreal area will let him drive back to Massachusetts.

The kids have good days and bad days. The 4-year-old will wake up crying and announce that she needs a hug. She taped photos of Dad on the wall next to her bed; I wish he was real, she said to Emily one night. The 2-year-old has learned to talk more in the weeks since Emilys husband left  she used to say two or three words at a time, and now she says, Daddy, come back.

Emily and her husband arent religious, but their daughter attends a Jewish preschool that now hosts a virtual Shabbat each weekend. The kids huddle around their screens and sing with one another. I never thought in a million years Id be looking forward to a religious event, from a culture I have no connection to, Emily said. Shabbat has become a highlight of each week, though  a chance to come together, she said, a reminder that there is still good.
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Australian taxpayers have donated vastly more money to the World Health Organisation (WHO) than China according to financial documents - even though WHO appears to be in the Communist nation's pocket.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison is under pressure from his own MPs to slash funding to the UN agency after US President Donald Trump announced he would stop funding WHO over its bungled coronavirus response.

Federal Cabinet ministers on Wednesday were shocked that, in a further sign of submission, WHO signed off on China re-opening its 'wet markets' where COVID-19 is believed to have first transmitted from bats to humans.

The size of Australia's voluntary donations to the UN agency, compared with the rest of the world's, are laid bare in WHO financial documents.

Australia's is the eighth biggest donor to the World Health Organisation by voluntary contributions, while China is 21st, 2018 financial figures show. The countries also pay compulsory dues each year. In 2018, China paid $28 million and Australia $9.3million. But China paid more than Australia over a two year period, thanks to hefty fees

US President Donald Trump has slammed the World Health Organisation as too 'China-centric'. Above, WHO Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus (left) and Chinese President Xi Jinping shake hands in Beijing on January 28 ahead of their meeting to discuss how to curb COVID-19

A Chinese wet market in Wuhan, China, has widely been described as the epicentre of the disease. Above, a man buys seafood from a market in Macau in January

The paperwork outlines how each country makes voluntary contributions to the health agency, on top of compulsory fees.

The latest figures show Australia's voluntary contributions to the WHO in 2018 were more than five times the size of China's.

Australia, population nearly 25 million, paid the UN agency AUD$54.5 million in 2018 - the eight biggest voluntary contribution of 71 member countries.

China, the world's most populous country and home to almost 1.4 billion people, paid a pitiful $9.83million in voluntary donations.

Other rich countries such as France, population 66 million, coughed up $14million in donations and Canada, home to 37.5 million people, paid $41.8million, the documents show.

The United States and the United Kingdom chipped in the biggest voluntary donations with the US paying $AUD436.8million and the UK $318.7million.

Countries are also required to pay the WHO compulsory dues each year in order to remain a part of the organisation.

In 2018, China paid $AUD28.4million in dues, while Australia forked out $9.3million. Overall, that means Australia paid the WHO more money in 2018, $63 million in total to $38.2million.

But Government sources pointed out that China paid more money than Australia overall through the two year funding period of 2018 and 2019 ($135 million to $106 million) because of China's compulsory dues.

The financial figures can be revealed as senior Federal Government ministers took aim at the WHO's decision to approve China re-opening its 'wet markets' - where the virus is believed to have started.

Treasurer Josh Frydenberg said: 'It's extraordinary that the World Health Organisation sees it fit for these wet markets to continue in China. They shouldn't.

'They've been the source of outbreaks that have killed people around the world.'

Australia's latest coronavirus figures: 62 people have died and 6,415 have tested positive to the illness as the country 'flattens the curve'

US President Donald Trump has halted funding to the WHO, with Mr Trumpy claiming the organisation had 'severely mismanaged' the coronavirus. Some of Prime Minister Scott Morrison's own MPs have called for reform in the WHO, saying the UN agency should face a 'reckoning'

The Australian approach to coronavirus lockdowns: Police usher a sunbather off a Queensland beach this week

Mr Frydenberg said the WHO played an important role in the Asia-Pacific but 'that doesn't mean that we've agreed with them on everything.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison told Perth radio station 6PR he was 'sympathetic' to Mr Trump's position 'but you don't throw the baby out with the bathwater'.

WHO THE WORLD HEALTH ORGANISATION SAYS ARE ITS BIGGEST VOLUNTARY DONORS Top voluntary contributors United States of America United Nations Republic of Korea Australia Gates Foundation Japan GAVI Alliance National Philanthropic Trust United Kingdom New Zealand Bloomberg European Commission Source: World Health Organisation website Advertisement

Liberal MP David Sharma told Sky News on Wednesday that a 'reckoning' was coming for the WHO and described Australia as a 'significant' donor to the agency.

'I think a lot of countries, Australia included, have been less than impressed with the WHO's performance,' Mr Sharma said.

'I think we should make sure we condition our future funding on necessary reforms,' he said.

'We will need to settle on those reforms with a group of other countries, like-minded countries as well.'

Deputy Labor leader Richard Marles told the same network that Australia shouldn't 'abandon' the WHO.

'We should be raising whatever issues we have from inside the organisation. We should not be abandoning the World Health Organisation.

'With everything that's going on at the moment, the idea that we would be walking away from the globe's multilateral response to health issues, I think makes no sense at all.

'There's a conversation that can be had about how the World Health Organisation can be reformed but at the end of the day, we should not be walking away from it.'

Answers were sought Health Department as to how Australia's voluntary contributions to the health body are used.

Daily Mail Australia has been told many of the government's voluntary donations are targeted to particular programs by the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade.

DFAT and a WHO representative were approached for comment.



How Australia IGNORED the World Health Organisation and stayed one step ahead on COVID-19 - after the WHO argued against closing the border, refused to call the virus a 'pandemic' and heaped praise on China

By Charlie Moore for Daily Mail Australia

Australia appears to be flattening the curve in its battle against COVID-19 since choosing to ignore the WHO and respond to the pandemic its own way.

That's according to government MP Andrew Hastie, who told Daily Mail Australia last week that the WHO had let Australia down by being 'glacially slow' in its response to the coronavirus.

The UN organisation stalled on declaring a pandemic, told countries to keep borders open and heaped praise on China despite the Communist Party's appalling attempt to cover up the outbreak, which erupted in Wuhan in December.

The Australian government has forged its own path toward stopping the virus, managing to already bring down infection rates and slow the spread of the deadly disease, without following advice from the WHO.

A tweet from the WHO on 24 January which shows it repeating Chinese insistence that the virus did not spread between humans

Australia appears to be finally flattening the infection curve in its battle against COVID-19 after the government decisively chose to ignore the World Health Organisation. Above, medical staff hug in Wuhan before leaving Hubei province this month

The Australian government has forged its own path toward stopping the virus, managing to already bring down infection rates and slow the spread of the deadly disease, without following advice from the WHO. Pictured: Nurses at Sydney Airport

Mr Hastie, a former SAS solider who now represents Canning in the federal parliament, slammed the WHO for its indecisiveness

Mr Hastie, a former SAS solider who now represents the Western Australian division of Canning in the federal parliament, slammed the organisation for its indecisiveness.

'The WHO has been glacially slow in its decision-making,' the 37-year-old told Daily Mail Australia.

'When Beijing shut down travel from Hubei to the rest of China on January 23 - but strangely not from Hubei to the rest of the world - why didn't the WHO act decisively then?

'It could've prevented the mass global exportation of COVID-19 then by declaring a pandemic and alerting governments around the world of the danger ahead.

'Closing borders then could've saved lives and a lot of economic hardship.'

Liberal MP David Sharma said it was right for the world to respond to China with 'anger and consternation and demand some sort of transparency and accountability in future.'

He also criticised the WHO for failing to include Taiwan, an island nation claimed by China, which has not been allowed to join the organisation.

Taiwan saw the pandemic coming and implemented strict social distancing and contact tracing measures which have held the virus at bay - but the WHO, pandering to China, kept it cut off from global information networks and refused to learn from Taiwan's success.

Mr Hastie said the WHO's failure to control coronavirus was an example of a global organisation being unable to look out for its member states.

'The reality for Aussies is that only our government will act in our sovereign interest to preserve our prosperity and security,' he said.

People wearing protective clothing and masks arrive at Hankou Railway Station in Wuhan, to board one of the first trains leaving the city in China's central Hubei province early on April 8

Indeed, the Australian government has been one step ahead of the WHO since even before the deadly virus reached Australian shores on 25 January.

That week, while the WHO director-general was busy saying China should be 'congratulated' for protecting 'the people of the world', the Australian government was hatching a national plan to stop the virus.

On February 1, when there were 14,000 recorded cases in the world, Australia banned flights from China.

Two days later, on February 3, the WHO was still telling countries not to initiate travel bans.

Director-General Tedros Adhanom stood up in front of the world's media and said there was no need for measures that 'unnecessarily interfere with international travel and trade'.

In the same press conference he called the spread of the virus 'minimal and slow' and heaped praise on China for locking down Wuhan.

'If it weren't for China, the number of cases outside China would have been very much higher,' he said.

During a WHO meeting that day, China's delegate Li Song said banning Chinese people from travelling was 'seriously against recommendation by the WHO.'

But Scott Morrison took no notice and extended the ban before also blocking flights from Iran, South Korea and Italy, which also suffered outbreaks in February.

In radio interview with Alan Jones on 2GB on February 6, Mr Morrison backed his decision to ignore the WHO.

'We've noted all the things the WHO and others said. But frankly, we're making the calls based on what we think is best for Australia,' he said.

Then, on February 27, Australia became one of the first countries in the world to publicly declare the crisis had 'pandemic potential'.

Mr Morrison told news reporters that afternoon: 'Based on the expert medical advice we have received, there is every indication that the world will soon enter a pandemic phase of the coronavirus.'

Meanwhile, the WHO was still refusing to use the word even as cases around the globe soared to 83,000.

Chinese passengers go through the security and body temperatures check on a first day of ending more than a two-month lockdown in Wuhan earlier this month

'If misused, [the word] can cause unreasonable fear, or unjustified acceptance that the fight is over,' director-general Adhanom said.

Finally, after huge international pressure, the WHO declared a pandemic on 11 March, two weeks after Mr Morrison used the word.

In a press conference on April 2, the Australian Prime Minister emphasised how slow the WHO had been.

'Ten weeks ago, ahead of the rest of the world, Australia listed the coronavirus as a disease with pandemic potential under our Biosecurity Act,' he said.

'Five weeks ago, a fortnight before the World Health Organisation, we called out the coronavirus as a pandemic.'

'We activated the emergency response plan on that basis. Further border closures and measures were announced and implemented,' he said.

The Australian government has also been among the first to criticise China's wet markets where the virus jumped from animals to humans in November.

In another interview on 2GB in early April, Mr Morrison called the markets a 'real problem' and slammed the WHO for inaction.

'This is something the World Health Organisation should do something about. I mean, all this money that comes out of the UN and the World Health organisation.'

Mr Morrison said the WHO should be held to account for the way it uses Australian tax dollars.

'You know, this is why we've got to be quite strident on these things in these forums and make sure that they're dealing with what are quite serious world health risks,' he said.
The private sector in Northern Ireland has suffered its harshest contraction on recent record - sharper than the fall felt during the global recession more than 10 years ago, a business barometer was warned.

Businesses here saw a reduction in sales and output at a rate surpassing the previous record at the height of the global financial crisis in early 2009, according to the latest purchasing managers' index (PMI) with Ulster Bank for March.

It was the harshest fall in around 20 years of the survey.

But the survey took place largely before Prime Minister Boris Johnson announced a full UK-wide lockdown.

And it has been warned that "the pace of contraction will accelerate further to fresh record lows" in April.

According to the latest survey, Northern Ireland has seen the largest retraction in business output across the UK regions.

"All 12 UK regions saw steep contractions in business activity in March. Northern Ireland posted the sharpest fall, just ahead of that seen in Scotland," the survey said.

The services sector, which includes a range of areas including hospitality, saw the worst fall - posting a figure of 23.9, where 50 means no change.

Richard Ramsey, Ulster Bank chief economist, said: "Little did I know back in January, when I was talking about the potential impact of coronavirus on the economy, the extent to which it would come to affect all of our lives.

"At that stage the concern was the indirect impact due to the lockdown in China, given China's key role as a driver of global supply chains and the world economy.

"In a short period of time, though, coronavirus went from an external threat to a very real and present internal one here in Northern Ireland, Ireland, the UK and Europe. Indeed, we are now seeing a true global pandemic and global economic lockdown."

The survey also showed the rate of job cuts was steep and the fastest for almost a decade.

"March saw a broad-based decrease in employment across all UK regions. The declines were led by deep cuts to staff numbers in Scotland, the West Midlands, Northern Ireland and London," the report said.

"At the other end of the scale, the North West, North East and East of England saw relatively moderate job losses."

Northern Ireland companies are the most pessimistic in the UK when it comes to overall business confidence.

And as well as coronavirus, Brexit was seen as a factor set to lead output to decrease over the coming year.

"Sentiment in Northern Ireland was the lowest seen across the UK, with negative predictions registered across each of the four broad sectors," it said.

Mr Ramsey said: "The April survey will be the first full month that the UK, Northern Ireland and Republic of Ireland economies will be under full lockdown conditions.

"Therefore the pace of contraction will accelerate further to fresh record lows. The local economy is enduring its fastest and deepest economic decline in a century. For a recovery to begin, the health emergency must pass."

Mr Ramsey also warned that "only when the lockdowns are lifted will economists be able to gauge the strength and timing of the economic recovery in any meaningful way".

According to the latest PMI, the "global nature of the Covid-19 pandemic meant that new export business fell sharply during March".

New business from outside the UK fell for the 14th month in a row, to its lowest level since December 2008.

Around 54% of those responding to the survey said new export orders declined over the month, with just 10% posting an expansion.

The survey also showed the sectors which have seen the biggest peaks and troughs over the last month since the start of the pandemic. Among manufacturers, food and drink producers saw the largest surge, while those involved in transport equipment saw a sizeable fall.

And among businesses within Northern Ireland's service sector, consumer services, bars, restaurants and hotels saw the largest retraction.
As the coronavirus pandemic sweeps across the world, institutions founded decades ago to organize and manage coherent responses to global crises seem to be flailing on the sidelines.

Individual nations have turned inward, competing for resources and hurling blame at each other for allowing the virus to spread. Some are hoarding vital medical supplies and restricting exports, while others are suffering acute shortages. Countries have set their own guidelines for behavior and determined their own travel restrictions without consulting neighbors or the wider international community.

The World Health Organization, charged with anticipating and alleviating international health insecurity, is accused by the United States and others of making the situation worse. President Donald Trump, who has said the WHO favors China, on Tuesday announced a halt to U.S. funding.

The U.N. Security Council, the world's premier international decision-making forum, has been paralyzed by disputes among its leading members. "A signal of unity and resolve from the council would count for a lot at this anxious time," U.N. Secretary General Antonio Guterres pleaded to little avail last week. "This is the fight of a generation - and a raison d'etre of the United Nations itself."

The question is not only whether the world order has stumbled but what direction it will take when the current crisis is over. Will there be a new appreciation of its importance, and a determination to make it work better? Or will pre-virus trends accelerate toward tighter borders, less cooperation and a tilt toward nationalism?

While no one knows the answer, many believe they know whom to blame for the global failure.

"What we definitely lack most is political leadership," said Catia Batista, a professor of economics at Lisbon's Nova University. "International organizations, even if they have the right objectives, lack the means if they don't have political support."

"With the U.S. not leading internationally, with Europe disappearing into itself and China pursuing its own interests, we really are in trouble," she said.

Institutions such as NATO and the United Nations "over the long term will ossify" without the United States as the leading actor in the world, said Ivo Daalder, president of the Chicago Council on Global Affairs.

Even beyond the question of U.S. leadership, the virus has exposed the incoherence of the sheer number of institutions established over the years to address global crises.

"Every aspect of the international architecture has failed," said Taufiq Rahim, a Dubai-based global health expert with the New America organization. "It starts with the U.N. Security Council, which has shown itself to be not just ineffective but no longer fit for purpose. While the G-7 and G-20 have convened in some form or other, that hasn't led to any direct immediate action."

In the late 1940s, the United States orchestrated the establishment of international structures - many of them under the auspices of the United Nations - that regulate everything from international trade to global health.

Along with international financial institutions such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, they collect and redistribute resources and expertise from the have countries to the have-nots, while attempting to steer developing nations toward political systems most favorable to a free and orderly world.

In their own organizations, such as NATO and the Group of Seven leading economies, the major powers use these structures to smooth economic, political and security relations among themselves and preserve their interests.

Despite this world order's imperfections and glitches, Western leaders, at least, believed its advantages outweighed its disadvantages, and those who disagreed had little power to force change. Yet the political winds and pressures of the 21st century, from human migration and extreme income disparity to protectionism and rising new powers, have weakened its foundations, leaving it ill-equipped to handle the first truly global threat to its very existence.

Just as the United States, as the world's largest economy, received the most credit for enabling the system to work, many now hold it responsible for the downhill slide.

Trump is not the first president to question whether international institutions serve to benefit the United States. Ronald Reagan encouraged congressional efforts to withhold U.N. dues, withdrew the United States from U.N. organizations and cut off contributions to organizations whose policies contradicted conservative dogma.

George W. Bush called on the United Nations to "show some backbone" in confronting Saddam Hussein, and decided to go it alone in invading Iraq when the U.N. Security Council refused to support him.

In their second terms, both Reagan and Bush came to appreciate the benefits of an international system that is based, by design, on American leadership coupled with cooperation. Barack Obama took it a step further, with a recognition of waning U.S. dominance that his domestic political opponents interpreted as capitulation.

"In many ways, Obama's foreign policy was designed . . . to accommodate" the reality of declining American power and influence, and the need "to get people to come along with you to address common problems," said Daalder, who served as Obama's ambassador to NATO.

Trump has abandoned the traditional U.S. role as "leader of the free world" in all but a declarative sense. Showing little interest in persuasion, he tends to couch the U.S. leadership role as "winning" in a zero-sum game.

Rather than using American power to marshal the world response to the pandemic, pushing for global agreement on production targets and distribution requirements, helping to allocate resources, and shepherding a long-term response in therapeutics and vaccines, Trump has prioritized national interests.

He is far from alone in closing borders and banning or restricting the export of key equipment to battle the virus.

Dozens of nations, including the United States, still impose tariffs or non-tariff restrictions on the import of medical equipment, protective gear and even soap, according to the Global Trade Alert project at Switzerland's University of St. Gallen, which describes a "beggar thy neighbor" approach.

Like Reagan, Trump and much of the Republican Party have cited international organizations as the cause of many of the world's woes and not their solution. But like Reagan, some argue, Trump is gradually moving toward appreciation of the world order.

"I see a lot of similarities between Reagan's second term and a Trump second term," said James Carafano, a foreign policy expert at the conservative Heritage Foundation. While Trump has seen international organizations as a "threat to sovereignty," Carafano said, he is becoming "more enamored with the United Nations."

"All the vibes I get out of the U.S. government today are not about disengagement from international organizations, it's about holding them accountable," he said. "Rather than saying international institutions have failed us, the response is 'Dude, we need to pay a lot more attention to these institutions, because they're failing us.' "

If that is the goal, said a senior European official, the United States must become more, rather than less, involved. China, as administration officials frequently point out, now heads four of the 15 U.N. technical organizations, including the International Civil Aviation Organization and the Food and Agriculture Organization, for which the Chinese candidate last year secured a majority of international votes by reported use of economic threats and incentives.

But rather than boycotting agencies and keeping a running tally with China, the European official said, the United States should work to "reclaim and modernize the postwar institutions."

"Some of this requires the Americans to lean in more, and not just criticize what the Chinese do but also reduce the space, and help the rest of us, reduce the space for China to do it," said the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to address international competition.

This official, and the Trump administration, cite the United States' success last month in contesting China's bid to add another U.N. position - director general of the World Intellectual Property Organization - to its roster. The White House and State Department pushed hard to garner votes for the American-backed candidate, Daren Tang of Singapore.

"There are six upcoming elections in international organizations that the United States needs to pay attention to," Carafano said.

Some international actors are optimistic about the future. Even before the pandemic, "people were looking at [international institutions], thinking about how do we modernize them for a world in which there are many more serious economic players as well as great-power rivalry," the European official said. "Previously, there was a tendency to think multilateralism was running out of steam; I think the coronavirus will lead people back into more productive endeavors."

Others see little chance that Trump is serious about turning toward a more traditional exercise of U.S. leadership.

"It's true that both Reagan and Bush were much more internationalist in their second terms," Daalder said. But "the idea that Trump is susceptible to change assumes that new information has any impact in the way he governs."

"He has had a very consistent foreign policy, based on the idea that working with others, particularly through international institutions, is a drain on American resources and that, unless the transaction favors the United States, we're not interested."
Family members of some Goans, who



are stranded on various ships abroad due to the coronavirus lockdown, sat on a hunger strike outside Chief Minister Pramod Sawant's residence here on Wednesday demanding immediate steps by the government to bring them back.

Five of the protesters, all women, were detained, a police official said.

They met Sawant on Wednesday morning, but later refused to withdraw their hunger strike, saying they were not convinced by his assurances.

Gina Pereira, a resident of Varca village in South Goa district, whose husband is working on Royal Caribbean's Symphony ship off the US coast which has reported death of one of its crew member due to COVID-19, was among those taken into custody from outside the chief minister's residence.

Talking to reporters before being detained, Pereira said they staged the protest to draw Prime Minister Narendra Modi's attention over the issue.

Pereira said she met Sawant on Wednesday when she began the hunger strike.

"But I am not happy with the meeting. The chief minister said the issue is with the Centre. If the prime minister will decide on the issue, then we have no option but to sit on hunger strike and draw his attention, she added.

As per government estimate, 7,000 to 10,000 Goans are stranded on various ships abroad.

The All Goa Seafarers Association founder president Dixon Vaz said the family members of Goans who are working on different ships are concerned because of the coronavirus pandemic.

"They were forced to sit on hunger strike as all our efforts to convince the government to act swiftly have failed, he added.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Head of the Bundestag's economy and energy committee Klaus Ernst said the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline is important for Europe, as it will allow more gas to be produced.



"Germany and Europe decide for themselves who to buy gas from, and this does not depend on the coronavirus pandemic crisis," he said.



According to Ernst, the extraterritorial sanctions of the U.S. against companies, including European ones, involved in the construction of the gas pipeline, are unacceptable.

He added that this "requires tough retaliatory measures from Europe." For example, imposing sanctions against U.S. fracking gas, TASS cited him as saying.



The MP also said that the energy partnership is a positive signal for German-Russian relations. "We need to develop these relations in order to smooth out conflicts," Ernst concluded.
New Delhi, April 15 : Union Health Secretary Preeti Sudan on Wednesday wrote to chief secretaries of states and Union terrirtories, asking them to divide their states and UTs into two sections -- hotspot and non-hotspot areas.

"As of now, based on reported cases, the districts can be classified as: Hotspots, Non-Hotspots, districts reporting cases and districts which have not reported positive cases," she wrote.

States also need to identify hotspots based on doubling rate of confirmed cases. The exercise of identification of hotspots, she says, has to be done on a weekly basis, every Monday. She has advised strict containment plans for such clusters.

The Health Secretary has made a strong pitch for ensuring dedicated COVID hospitals in every district, even if the district hasn't seen any positive cases.

Segregating areas into three zones, she said, "Containment operation would be deemed over when there is no case reported in 28 days from an area after the last case tests negative. Hotspots (designated red zones) will be assumed to be undertaking effective containment activities, if no case is reported in the next 14 days (designated orange zones) and will be deemed successful in containment, if no case is repofted for 28 days (designated green zones).

The Centre strongly urged the states and UTs to use this extended lockdown to ensure the Coronavirus doesn't spread any further and is adequately dealt with.

As of Wednesday, India has 10,197 active COVID-19 cases and 392 deaths.
US President Donald Trump on Tuesday (April 14) stopped his country's funding for World Health Organisation (WHO) and said the funding will remain halted till a review is being conducted in the WHO's "role in severely mismanaging and covering up" the spread of coronavirus COVID-19 after it emerged in Chinese city of Wuhan.

"Today I'm instructing my administration to halt funding of the World Health Organization. We will redirect global health and directly work with others. All of the aid that we send will be discussed at very, very powerful letters," Trump said during a press conference.

Notably, President Trump has been openly critical of the WHO, accusing the world health body of not showing urgency to take actions despite being aware of the dangers of the coronavirus.

"The WHO failed in its basic duty and it must be held accountable," added Trump.

"Had the WHO done its job to get medical experts into China to objectively assess the situation on the ground and to call out China's lack of transparency, the outbreak could have been contained at its source with very little death. This would have saved thousands of lives and avoided worldwide economic damage. Instead, the WHO willingly took China's assurances to face value... and defended the actions of the Chinese government," remarked Trump.

The US is the biggest single funder of WHO, providing $400m in 2019 - around 15% of the total budget of the global health body.

"With the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic, we have deep concerns whether America's generosity has been put to the best use possible," President Trump said.

The US is the worst-affected country in the coronavirus COVID-19 pandemic with over 590,000 cases and more than 25,000 deaths.
She has vowed to drop the 13kg she gained while filming Married At First Sight.

And Mishel Karen has stayed true to her word.

The 49-year-old reality star was spotted working out with her daughter Eva in Brisbane on Wednesday.

Working up a sweat! Married At First Sight's Mishel Karen went for a run with her daughter Eva in Brisbane on Wednesday, after declaring she would lose the 13kg she put on while filming the show

The duo were seen going for a run in a local park, before doing squats and stretches on the lawn.

Mother and daughter clearly worked up a sweat, with Mishel at one point collapsing on the ground following the heavy exercise.

During her jog, the teacher turned social media influencer revealed a hint of her midriff in an Adidas tank top knotted at the waist, which she teamed with black leggings.

Mother and daughter time: The duo were seen going for a run in a local park, before doing stretches on the lawn

Puffed: The mother and daughter duo clearly worked up a sweat, with Mishel at one point collapsing on the ground following the heavy exercise

No sweat: During her jog, the teacher turned social media influencer revealed a hint of her midriff in an Adidas tank top knotted at the waist, which she teamed with black leggings

Her daughter Eva wore a similar exercise ensemble.

Mishel spoke candidly about her battle with her weight earlier this week.

She admitted she gained 13kg filming the show between August 2019 and January 2020, and is aiming to lose the extra kilos before her upcoming 50th birthday.

Almost matching: Mishel's daughter Eva wore a similar workout ensemble to her mother

Remember her? Mishel's daughter appeared on the first episodes of MAFS and voiced her disapproval of her mother's TV husband Steve Burley at their wedding

Mishel will celebrate the milestone on December 15, and vows to be fitter than she ever has been before by then, both physically and mentally.

Mishel revealed her weight gain on Tuesday, by posting two comparison photographs, taken at the start and end of production, six months apart.

'I've been a curvy woman, ever since I started trying to have my babies. It was during that time my body started to change to a more voluptuous figure,' she wrote in the caption.

Stretch it out: Mishel and Eva made sure to do some stretching before their run

Squats! The pair were also spotted doing squats on the grass

'It took me some time to get used to my new shape and start to embrace my curves; but I did it with age, confidence and positive affirmations. I am now back to my pregnancy weight just before I gave birth to my beautiful daughter Eva.'

Mishel has two children, daughter Eva, 18, and son Sam, 20.

Mishel continued: 'Not a weight I expected to be after 'getting married' or turning 50! Even though I believe curves are cool, I just don't feel as healthy and fit as I did before I entered the experiment.'

Vow: Mishel will celebrate the milestone on December 15, and vows to be fitter than she ever has been before by then, both physically and mentally

'It is my challenge to fit back into my 'Hen's Night' little black Bec and Bridge dress [at the start of filming]. I hope that you share my journey with me.'

The reality star has also set herself a series of other challenges before her birthday.

Honest: Mishel spoke candidly about her battle with her weight earlier this week. The 49-year-old reality star admitted she gained 13kg filming the show between August 2019 and January 2020, and is aiming to lose the extra kilos before her upcoming 50th birthday

As well as documenting her weight loss on Instagram, she's planning on transforming her skin and hair and changing her eating and exercise habits.

She also plans on managing her personal finances and work-life balance better.

'I hope that you will share and enjoy my journey, and together share stories and support,' she told fans on Tuesday.
Ernest Chemists Limited has presented a cheque of One Hundred Thousand Ghana Cedis (GHS 100,000.00) to the National COVID-19 Trust Fund to help in the fight against the COVID-19 pandemic.



Presenting the cheque on behalf of the company, the Brands Communication Manager, Mrs. Sharon Anim, reiterated the commitment of Ernest Chemists to support the fight and safety of Ghanaians during this period.



Receiving the donation on behalf of the committee, the Chairperson of the COVID-19 Trust Fund, Justice Sophia Akuffo, appreciated the gesture and commended Ernest Chemists Limited for its instrumental role in the health sector and all its contributions to complement the government in the fight against the pandemic.



In addition to the previous donations of medical supplies to the Greater Accra Regional Hospital (Ridge) and the Tema General Hospital, ECL has continued with donations of medical supplies such as disinfectants, sanitizers, pain killers, antihypertensives, examination gloves and hematinics to four more health facilities; Kwahu Atibie Hospital, Tamale Teaching Hospital, Volta Regional Health Directorate and Margaret Marquart Catholic Hospital (Kpando).



These donations altogether form part of the various contributions of the company aimed at promoting the safety of health professionals, who are at the fore front of the fight as well as treatment of infected Coronavirus patients in order to augment governments efforts in the fight against the pandemic. This is also in line with the goal of the company to support to improve healthcare delivery in Ghana.



To ensure that customers receive the needed services during this period, Ernest Chemists Limited has also put in place free delivery services along with free vitamin C for immunity boost in Greater Accra and Kumasi during the current lockdown period. Its Pharmacists are also available via telephone to give health advice and medication counseling to all.



As one of the biggest Pharmaceutical Companies in Ghana, Ernest Chemists Limited also stepped up to the challenge when the government called on Ghanaians to build local capacity to manufacture products to help decelerate the spread of COVID-19.



Currently, the company locally manufactures sanitizers, rubbing alcohol amongst other essential products especially needed during this pandemic. With its wide distribution network, ECL is able to reach and impact the lives of many Ghanaians across the length and breadth of the Country.

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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CLEVELAND, Ohio  The FBI and police are searching for a suspect who robbed a downtown US Bank branch Tuesday morning near Playhouse Square.

According to the FBI, the suspect tried to gain entry into the bank several times before it opened at 10 a.m. Once inside, he tried to use a withdrawal slip to get money but did not have a viable account number. He was told to leave and return with identification.

The suspect then pulled out a note that read: I have a gun and I will shoot you if you press the button. I want 20, 50, 100s," according to the FBI. The man left the bank with an undisclosed amount of cash.

The suspect was about 5-foot-6 to 5-foot-8, 180 pounds, and reportedly had bad body odor, the FBI says.

Tips can be sent to Cleveland police, the FBI, or Crime Stoppers. Reward money is available for information leading to the successful identification and prosecution of the individual responsible. Tips can remain anonymous.

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A Twenty-four-year-old, Abdulai Karim has been jailed six years for escaping from lawful custody and assault on a public officer.

Abdulai Karim also known as JJ was arrested in February 2020 for raping and robbing in Sunyani and its environs.

He was put before the Sunyani Circuit Court B and was in Police Custody helping in the investigation into other crimes he was involved but he escaped from custody and re-arrested in Burkina Faso.

The Bono Regional Police Command, in a bid to recapture the accused, offered a reward of GH5,000.00 for information leading to his re-capture, among other measures.

After escaping from custody, he went to hide in the Upper East Region before sneaking into Burkina Faso.

In a letter from the Bono Regional Police Command and signed by its Public Relation officer Chief Inspector Kingsley Augustine Oppong states, On Tuesday 14th April 2020, the escapee was charged, put before the court, convicted and sentenced to a total of six years imprisonment for the offenses of escape from lawful custody and assault on a public officer 3 years each to run consecutively.

The Bono Regional Police command expressed its profound gratitude to all the personnel and institutions who worked tirelessly and collaborated with Police within the past 14 days to recapture Abdulai Karim.

---First1News.com
[April 15, 2020] Wellfleet and EIS Group Partner on Innovative Insurance Solution

SPRINGFIELD, Mass. and SAN FRANCISCO, April 15, 2020 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Wellfleet, a Berkshire Hathaway insurance company, and industry technology leader EIS Group are building a next-generation insurance administration platform to meet the evolving demands of the employee benefits market.

In the complex voluntary benefits landscape, brokers and their clients commonly work with multiple systems, fighting to integrate with carriers patchworked legacy systems. Whether its product sophistication, internal workflow monitoring, enrollment and third-party integration, or communications across multiple modules, carriers struggle to administer plans in a digitally unified way. Wellfleet Workplace entered the voluntary market last year, on a mission to be the digitally enabled carrier of choice. Partnering with EIS Group helps drive this differentiation by jointly creating an open-architecture and cloud-based software system designed to support the full broker and customer lifecycle. Were building a web-based customer-centric platform with a consistent, multi-channel experience, said James Ocampo, Executive Vice President and head of Wellfleets Workplace division. At Wellfleet, we have no legacy systems: were building our API-driven platform from the ground up, enabling true data integration among apps to power customer-facing processes across multiple channels. Our platform will also improve data agility and operational efficiency, and enhance the overall customer experienceall while enabling the rapid introduction of new products to market, said Ocampo. EIS Groups leadership is excited about the opportunity to build a cutting-edge software system that will satisfy Wellfleet Workplaces customer-centric focus and give users a holistic software solution. The software providers cloud-based platform supports broker and customer lifecycles from rating and quoting, policy issuance and administration, to billing and claims management. Multi-channel touchpoints are easily created and managed through EIS Groups digital experience platform. Wellfleet and EIS Group are making an investment into the future of workplace benefits. If brokers are to keep pace with digital economy demands and engage their clients how they want to be engaged, they need something diffrent, said Tony Grosso, Head of Marketing at EIS Group. A customer-first approach to solution design and an open architecture that easily connects to a rapidly changing ecosystem of products, services, exchanges, and other channels is critical. Our partnership with Wellfleet will push boundaries and raise expectations.



PwC (PricewaterhouseCoopers) assisted Wellfleet in its technology strategy development and is also serving as its primary systems integration partner. With many years experience as a leading student health insurance administrator, Wellfleet leaders understood the importance of creating a system free of the pain points found in limited-function legacy computer systems and challenging tech integrations.

As a Berkshire Hathaway company, Wellfleet takes a long-term view, said Drew DiGiorgio, Wellfleet President & CEO. This investment is part of our strategy to diversify and customize our product offerings, while building a business division led by an experienced team of industry leaders. Were excited to offer the market a customer-centric administration experiencefrom quote to bind to claim. About Wellfleet Wellfleet is a Berkshire Hathaway company focused on delivering customer-centric insurance solutions through flexible product offerings and quality service. With an A++ financial strength rating from A.M. Best, Wellfleets goal is to protect people against risk throughout every stage of life  from grade school to college, the workplace and beyond. The Wellfleet Workplace division delivers high-quality, customizable benefit solutions through a suite of voluntary products. Designed to complement core benefits plans, while providing employees with financial protection from the unexpected, Wellfleet Workplace products include Accident, Critical Illness and Short-Term Disability Income insurance. For more details, visit WellfleetWorkplace.com . Wellfleet is the marketing name used to refer to the insurance and administrative operations of Wellfleet Insurance Company, Wellfleet New York Insurance Company, and Wellfleet Group, LLC. All insurance products are administered or managed by Wellfleet Group, LLC. Product availability is based upon business and/or regulatory approval and may differ among companies. About EIS Group EIS Group is an insurance software company that enables leading insurers to innovate and operate like a tech company: fast, simple, agile. Founded in 2008, EIS Group provides a platform for high-velocity insurance. This open, flexible platform of core and digital solutions liberates insurers to accelerate innovation, launch products faster, deliver new revenue channels, and create insurance experiences the world will love. And with thousands of APIs, the platform gives insurers the freedom to connect to a vast ecosystem of insurtech and emerging technologies. Headquartered in San Francisco, EIS Group powers premium growth for P&C and Life insurance companies worldwide. For more information on how EIS Group helps insurers become unbeatably fast at everything they do, visit EISGroup.com . Contacts: Wellfleet: Jennifer Picard

[email protected]

413-452-5360 EIS Group: Kevin Haydon

[email protected]

845-797-2976

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Around 100 British nationals have flown home from Vietnam and Cambodia onboard a specially arranged flight.

A Vietnam Airlines flight is disinfected after landing at Van Don Airport in Quang Ninh Province from a COVID-19 infected country in late March. VNA/VNS Photo

The Vietnam Airlines plane was laid on by the British Embassy in Vietnam and Vietnamese authorities.

A number of Vietnamese citizens living in the UK came back on the return flight which landed in at Van Don Airport in northern Quang Ninh Province on Wednesday morning. The practice was a joint effort of the Vietnamese representative offices and Vietnamese Embassy in the UK and the Vietnam Airlines.

Passengers returning home included a number of Vietnamese students, children, disadvantaged and elderly people.

The flight was arranged as part of efforts to help foreign diplomatic agencies in Vietnam carry out citizen protection duties.

The passengers who left Vietnam included COVID-19 patients who recovered after treatment.

The flight also transported medical masks as a gift from the Vietnamese Government and people to the UK.

After touching down in Vietnam, all passengers were immediately sent to quarantine.

Following the Governments guidance, representative diplomatic agencies of Vietnam abroad are reviewing and drawing up plans to bring those Vietnamese people abroad with special conditions back home.

Priority will be given to children under 18, the elderly and sick people in line with the countrys quarantine capabilities.  VNS

Vietnamese citizens stranded abroad to be brought home The Prime Minister has asked the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to draw up plans to bring home Vietnamese nationals stranded abroad due to the COVID-19 pandemic, with priority given to the elderly, the sick and people under 18.

Vietnamese stranded abroad assisted to fly home: spokeswoman Vietnamese representative agencies in foreign countries are closely coordinating with international airlines and local authorities to ensure health care as well as essential supplies for Vietnamese stranded at international airports abroad.
Manitoba Justice has proven commendably creative in adapting bail hearings and other routine court proceedings to heed the dictates of social distancing. These innovations bode well for the ongoing problem of offering efficient justice in northern Manitoba.

Hey there, time traveller!

This article was published 14/4/2020 (637 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Manitoba Justice has proven commendably creative in adapting bail hearings and other routine court proceedings to heed the dictates of social distancing. These innovations bode well for the ongoing problem of offering efficient justice in northern Manitoba.

Court dysfunction has existed 'forever' for northern Indigenous people Click to Expand Katie May / Winnipeg Free Press The Thompson provincial building houses the basement court office. Posted: 6:23 PM Nov. 22, 2019 A groundbreaking legal decision bearing his name has earned national attention for exposing "so pervasive, so insidious" problems with bail court in northern Manitoba. But at home in Split Lake, nothing has changed for Dwayne Young. He can't rewind back to a time before his rights were violated. "The time they've taken away from me, I'll never get back. There's nothing they can give me to get that time back," he says. Read Full Story

If necessity is the mother of invention, the current state of emergency has given birth to ingenious ways for Manitobas courts to allow more teleconferencing, video hearings and innovative bail applications.

The legal system is a cornerstone of a civil society and, as an essential service, justice must continue to be done. But, as several weeks of pandemic pressures have proven, that doesnt necessarily mean crowding courtrooms with lawyers, judges, accused people, guards, clerks and spectators.

As Manitoba Court of Appeal Chief Justice Richard Chartier put it, "We are well-aware we have to balance our institutional obligations with the broader public health concerns."

The bail triage process has been changed so housebound lawyers can be emailed case details instead of appearing in court to get this information.

Many links in the chain of justice  including routine remands, bail hearings, guilty pleas and sentencing decisions  are now conducted via video link involving a judge, a prosecutor, a defence lawyer and the accused, who can participate from behind bars. A side benefit is that the accused person doesnt have to be transported between the penal institution and court, a process that can take hours and involve numerous correctional staff, possibly in contravention of social distancing guidelines.

MIKE DEAL / WINNIPEG FREE PRESS Manitoba Court of Appeal Chief Justice Richard Chartier

For security purposes, the teleconferencing employed by Manitoba Justice is password protected. It wouldnt do to use a popular app such as Zoom, which has proven to be easily violated by hackers armed with malicious content.

It was likely challenging for Manitoba Justice administrators to hastily arrange the move to digital on the relatively short notice offered by an approaching pandemic. They deserve credit for their innovation and flexibility, a display of ingenuity that offers hope that this can-do attitude can finally pave the way for overdue changes to the justice system  or, some might say, the injustice system  in northern Manitoba.

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A Free Press series late last year detailed systemic problems with northern courts, including stories of how the charter rights of two northern Manitobans were violated because they spent 51 days and 23 days, respectively, in custody without a bail hearing. Its a long-standing problem that people in remote communities are often denied timely access to legal help and court hearings, and observers have repeatedly recommended the long-overdue expansion of remote internet services that would allow Manitoba Justice to make better use of digital alternatives.

No one is suggesting full-blown trials should be held virtually. Trials can last for several days, which would be a punishing length of time to endure talking heads on a screen, particularly for members of a jury. Also, the nuances of participants in a trial  body language, facial expressions and the dynamics of exchanges  cant yet be fully transmitted by current digital technology to the degree that would ensure a fair trial.

It was likely challenging for Manitoba Justice administrators to hastily arrange the move to digital on the relatively short notice offered by an approaching pandemic. They deserve credit for their innovation and flexibility.

But trials are a relatively small percentage of the items listed on court dockets. Most items are administrative matters as routine as remands, but they can also be as crucial as bail applications.

Under threat of COVID-19, Manitoba Justice has shown many legal matters can be handled without crowding a bunch of people into one room. The next step will be to apply the learned lessons to northern Manitoba.

Its encouraging to think the innovations forced by social distancing might also be used to overcome the challenges of geographical distance.
...We realized there was something we could do to help out members of the medical community, government and other experts on the frontlines fighting the Coronavirus- and thats volunteer our time and band together to do what we do best- develop cutting-edge technology.

Yeti, a design and development agency in San Francisco, has teamed up with several other experts in the medical community and beyond to host a virtual hackathon on April 25th and 26th to help build digital infrastructure for those on the front lines fighting the Coronavirus.

The entirely virtual event will be held over two days via Zoom conferencing. Winning ideas that can realistically be deployed will be paired with sponsors that will be able to help them develop their idea further.

A fellow colleagues and I were talking when we came up with the idea, said Yeti CEO, Tony Scherba. While a lot of us designers and developers are sitting at home and feeling a bit powerless, we realized there was something we could do to help out members of the medical community, government and other experts on the frontlines fighting the Coronavirus -- and thats volunteer our time and band together to do what we do best -- develop cutting-edge technology.

The two day event will be structured as follows:

Saturday

12pm - Kickoff & Team Formation. You can join as a team or individual. If you are an individual who would like to be on a team, we will get you set up with one.

1pm - 3pm - Expert Presentations. We will have a panel of medical professionals and people working in government coordinating this response and other experts talking about the problems they are seeing to help inform the hacks.

3pm - Hackathon Begins - 100% virtual hackathon. We'll have experts available for breakout sessions and questions. Teams will have a way of checking in regularly.

Sunday

12pm - Submissions Due. All participants will remotely submit a quick submission form including screenshots and a description of their work.

12:30pm - Presentations and Demos. Teams will present their work and demo remotely.

Panel members will ask questions and give feedback.

2:30 pm- Winners Announced. Panel will decide on the winners.

To learn more about the event, please visit: https://hackthevirus.splashthat.com/.

Press Contact:

Melissa Leiter

melissa@yeti.co

207-701-1133

About Yeti: Yeti partners with industry-leading companies to research, design and develop innovative digital products. Out of our studio in San Francisco, we guide our clients through the product development process from strategy sessions and prototyping to producing ready-to-release mobile and web applications. We share our expertise in these areas through workshops, classes, and in-person developer training.
I am not God, not even a Nostradamus, but in all things, I try to see tomorrow. Unless the election of a President and MPs is so critical to our existence that we can afford to put the health of the people on hold, it is very possible that at the rate at which Ghana is counting its corona infections, the 2020 elections could be postponed? The possibilities antenna in my head became agitated when, on last Wednesday, the EC announced a suspension of the exercise to compile new voters register until it gets to a time when the Ministry of Health, Ghana Health Service and other experts give it the all-clear.

If the all-clear comes before the end of April, it may be possible to begin and end the electoral process by all the due dates, and conduct actual voting on December 7.

Question is, what if the all-clear comes sometime in May or even later?

By the EC's interim calendar of activities, the compilation of the new register starts from April 18 and ends on May 30. After adjudication on challenges which will end by October 26, the final register will get to all political parties on November 4 and to all constituencies by November 8.

What if something should happen and a new President cannot be sworn in by January 7? Will Ghanaians agree to allow the incumbent President to continue till such time that COVID-19 will cease to be a threat to our existence?

What about all those wannabe MPs from both sides of the divide, especially those in 'World Banks' where primaries have already been held and who knows, by now, that they have two legs in the House come January 2021?

Postponing the election will not be new: the first election in the Fourth Republic was on November 3, 1992. Certainly, on a certificate of urgency, dictated by the will of the people, Election 2020 can be shifted. By its very nature, however, the constitutional process is tortuous and time-consuming.

The EC will have to write to the Attorney-General and Minister of Justice justifying the need to amend Article 112 (4) of the 1992 Constitution to allow for a date change. The resultant bill from the AG's Office will go through the required parliamentary process. I can envisage the walk-outs, the ayes and nays. I can even foresee the NDC mightily advertising the point that the delay has been occasioned by an E.C procurement challenge resulting from its recalcitrance. When quiet is restored, two-thirds of Members of Parliament will have to vote in favour of the amendment.

Only then can EC can go-ahead to begin the processes to change its calendar and programmes to be in tune with the new date.

All of the above process does not foresee Coronavirus still walking the streets of Ghana. Meaning, it is possible that our MPs can cite pandemic reasons for refusing to be called back from a most likely health break.

Fellow Ghanaians, I have a solution. In the event of a delay, I propose that we use the NIA Ghana Card. The NIA is not done registering the entire country, but my experience with the process assures me that all things being equal  corona et al permitting  using the Ghana Card to vote will be the most acceptable option.

Alternatively, how about using the existing register! All we need to do is add names captured in the June 2019 limited registration. This humble suggestion of mine, however, is dead on arrival, having been shot down by Dr. Serebuor Quaicoe, E.C's Director of Electoral Service, who has stated categorically that that will not happen.

To happen or not to happen  unless the EC, and not the whole Ghana, must win by all means  let's learn from some other democracies. In the United States of America, the virus has forced some of the states to postpone their primaries for the election of a Democratic flagbearer. To protect the health and safety of citizens, the Board of Elections has requested that the elections take place primarily by mail ballot.

Meanwhile, in Ghana, as the deadly pathogen walks the streets and strikes in increasing numbers, British Airways has been granted special right to lift British citizens out of Ghana. My information is that the Canadian Embassy staff left a week ago.

Eishh!

Is there going to be a lockdown? What will happen to compatriots in 91% of homes in Accra without toilets and 35.7% nationwide who have to use the public toilets or open defecation? What about the 32%, nationwide, who depend on public taps and the 73.9% in rural areas who have to fetch from wells or natural sources?

And by the way, we may have to wait till pay-day because at this time of the month, people are so broke they can't do the panic buying to stock up.

To do or not to do: that's a question!
A man walks by boarded up bars as the UK continues its lockdown to help curb the spread of the coronavirus, in Glasgow, Scotland, Wednesday April 1, 2020. (Andrew Milligan/PA via AP)

New figures show just over 1bn of promised government support for small businesses has so far reached companies, amid warnings of dire consequences unless banks speed up lending.

Banking industry group UK Finance said on Wednesday that loans worth 1.1bn ($1.3bn) had now been given to small and medium-sized businesses under the coronavirus business interruption loan scheme (CBILS), which was announced last month by chancellor Rishi Sunak.

We expect this figure to continue to grow rapidly as lenders work hard to help get Britain through the current crisis, Stephen Jones, chief executive of UK Finance, said.

Some 700m-worth of loans have been granted in the last week alone and banks have now delivered just over 6,000 CBILs to customers.

Read more: Businesses plead for urgent support as two thirds furlough staff

While the figures show the programme is gathering momentum, business groups said it is still moving too slowly. UK Finance said over 20,000 formal applications are yet to be assessed and tens of thousands more small businesses are trying to lodge formal applications.

Mike Cherry, national chairman of the Federation of Small Businesses (FSB), said the figures were an improvement but there was still a lot of work to do.

Many members tell us its difficult to get to the formal application stage  banks are still slow to respond to CBILS enquiries, Cherry said. Even if you do get your forms through, the process is very demanding for the uninitiated.

UK Finances figures come just hours after the British Chamber of Commerce (BCC) warned its members are facing a potentially devastating cash crunch unless government support reaches them soon.

Businesses were promised 330bn-worth of state-backed loans by the Treasury last month. The money was split between a corporate financing scheme for big businesses run by the Bank of England and the CBIL scheme for small and medium-sized businesses.

High street banks who administer the CBIL scheme have been overwhelmed by demand and are struggling to asses applications fast enough.

Story continues

Read more: UK releases 'unprecedented' financial measures worth 15% of GDP

Frontline staff in local branches and call centres are working incredibly hard to help firms access finance as quickly as possible amid unprecedented demand, Jones said.

Like all businesses they are working at reduced capacity, as many staff are self-isolating or looking after family.

Many businesses will be forced to shut up shop or lay off staff unless government cash can reach them soon, business groups say.

Critics say the CBIL scheme should be extended to include alternative finance providers such as fintechs. Some are also pushing for the UK to overhaul the programme to make closer to Switzerlands scheme, which sees the state guarantees 100% of loans to businesses rather than just 80% as the UK does.

READ MORE: Fintech tells government: 'We can help with coronavirus response'

Is there an argument for looking at something like that? Of course there is, Sunak said at the Downing Street press briefing on Tuesday evening. We continually look at everything other countries are doing.

A 100% guarantee would mean banks are taking no risk and theoretically speed up loan processing by cutting down on checks. However, Sunak said checks on business viability were important to prevent the taxpayer being saddled with higher losses in the future.

The Chancellor defended the scheme as it currently stands, saying there had been enormous improvement and banking staff were working around the clock to get loans approved.

UK Finance said 1,800 loans worth 300m were written over the Easter weekend.

Sunak said in a statement on Wednesday: Getting finance to businesses is a key part of our plan to support jobs and the economy during this crisis - and were working with lenders to ensure support reaches those in need as soon as physically possible.
The United States has announced suspension of funding to the World Health Organization (WHO). This is really unfortunate and would end up weakening the organisation.

It is a widely held impression that WHO should have acted more proactively in disseminating information about the cause and effects of the coronavirus and not merely acted as a mouthpiece of China. Some also believe that Covid-19 should have been declared a pandemic much earlier and WHO should have recommended travel restrictions from and to China quite early. What is needed is a deeper analysis to critically ...
Bettel and Lenert provided an update on Luxembourg's COVID-19 measures following today's government council meeting, and answered questions from journalists. As always, we provided a live video stream and ticker translations.

This followed yesterday's press conference by Minister of Labour Dan Kersch, who explained that the state has unblocked 370 million to cover advances of short-time working schemes for companies. Almost 10,000 companies successfully applied for the financial aid - around 180,000 salaries were paid by the state.

Read our summary of that press conference right here, and follow the latest local and international coronavirus news in our live ticker.
Call to address the plight of migrants

University centres call on the state to address the plight of migrants during the coronavirus crisis

The Centre for Human Rights, University of Pretoria and the Centre for Applied Legal Studies, University of the Witwatersrand, are deeply concerned about the situation of migrants in the territory of South Africa during this COVID-19 crisis.

The above organisations reiterate that the exclusion of any segment of society from access to testing, treatment and other palliative measures put in place to cushion the effects of measures taken to combat the spread of COVID-19 will ultimately undermine national efforts to stem the spread of the virus. According to Frans Viljoen, Director of the Centre for Human Rights: Our overall efforts will fail if we allow prejudice and stigmatisation on the basis of nationality to cause undocumented migrants and other non-nationals to be victimised when they attempt to use these services, or if they are excluded from these services.

Government should be guided by section 27(3) of the South African Constitution, which provides that no one may be refused emergency medical treatment. It is not in the best interest of the country if people from a segment of the society are prosecuted when they present themselves for screening, testing and treatment, or if they are excluded from medical and other essential services. COVID-19 does not discriminate in whom it targets and affects and the mode of transmission and contraction of the virus does not discriminate on the basis of the nationality of the carrier and the infected person. To this end, our efforts to curb the spread of the virus should be non-discriminatory.

The government should make an explicit commitment that no one will, on the basis of their status as a foreign national or undocumented migrant, be excluded from services, or suffer any adverse consequences due to seeking these services. To achieve its objective of curbing the spread of the virus, everyone present in South Africa must be given adequate access to information, medical treatment and other essential services, regardless of nationality or immigration status. Such an inclusive approach is in line with the Regulations issued in terms of the Disaster Management Act, in which the government committed itself, without reference to the issue of nationality, to release resources to ensure the delivery of essential services, to prevent, limit, contain, combat and manage the spread of COVID-19.

While the governments efforts to provide food aid to vulnerable persons is commendable, it appears that applicants for food aid are being asked for their ID number, and that citizens are prioritised in this process. It is our plea that the government should be guided by solidarity  a call that has been echoed by government officials since the beginning of the crisis and national lockdown. We reaffirm that this is not a time to exclude certain populations within society, neither is it a time to reinforce negative attitudes against non-nationals.

The Department of Human Settlements announced that some of the most densely populated informal settlements will be de-congested or de-densified'', so as to reduce the risk of COVID-19 transmission in overcrowded settings where basic sanitation is lacking. Migrant households (documented and undocumented) are more likely to live in urban shacks and informal settlements than non-migrant households. They should however not be disproportionately targeted during resettlement operations. All affected communities should also be consulted before relocation.

The situation of migrant women who may experience gender-based violence in domestic spaces must also be given urgent attention in this period. It is important that all relevant government departments take deliberate steps on this issue even as the government seeks to tackle the spread of the virus. The government must state equivocally and unambiguously that every woman who experiences domestic violence, regardless of nationality and immigration status, is free to call the GBV Command Centre.

Overall, the government must ensure that asylum seekers whose papers were not processed before the lockdown, are not criminalised. According to Tshepo Madlingozi, Director of the Centre for Applied Legal Studies: It is important that the government understands that this is not a time to encourage or perpetuate any form of intolerance. Neither will there ever be a time to do so. As such, the government, through the Department of Home Affairs, should explicitly give directions for the protection of asylum seekers in this period.

We would like to commend the South African government for ensuring that non-national spaza shop owners are not discriminated against. However, it is important that the government strengthens regulations and undertake practical measures to protect these persons in order to ensure that their businesses are not affected by actions that amount to xenophobia, during and after the COVID-19 crisis.

We would like to remind the government about its commitment to non-discrimination in the National Action Plan to Combat Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerances. In this time of COVID-19, it is imperative that the government abides by its commitments towards combating xenophobia and all forms of intolerances.

In view of the above stated, we call on the government of South Africa to:

Emphatically make a commitment that no undocumented migrant will be prosecuted when they present themselves for screening, testing and treatment, or excluded from these services.

Ensure that non-nationals are not discriminated against in the governments provision of food aid and other essential services to those who may be in need.

Ensure that foreign nationals and undocumented migrants are not discriminated against and singled out during the de-densification of informal settlements and other over-crowded areas.

Ensure that migrant women, including girls, who may be trapped at home with abusers are encouraged to call the GBV Command Centre.

Explicitly protect asylum seekers whose papers were not processed before the national lockdown.

Continue to ensure that non-nationals spaza shop owners are not discriminated against during this lockdown period.

For more information, please contact:

Dr Romola Adeola (adeola@up.ac.za)

Migration Rights Clinic Coordinator

Centre for Human Rights

University of Pretoria

Foluso Adegalu (072 898 8307, adegalu@up.ac.za)

Project Officer

Centre for Human Rights

University of Pretoria

Sandile Ndelu (sandile.ndelu2@wits.ac.za)

CALS Advocacy Coordinator

University of the Witwatersrand


With several thousand people



arrested in the city for violation of lockdown imposed to curb the spread of the coronavirus, a pile of such cases would be heard in courts once the situation normalises, lawyers said on Wednesday. The violators, arrested mainly under section 188 of the Indian Penal Code (IPC) for violation of lockdown measures, are generally granted bail from the police station on a personal bond, as it is a bailable section, Radha Kanta Mukherjee, special public prosecutor at the Alipore Court here. According to Kolkata Police sources, till April 14, over 16,000 people have been arrested from different parts of the city for defying the nationwide lockdown which was imposed on March 25.

This is a part of our ongoing measure to ensure that people are not defying the lockdown. Despite our attempts, people have come out of their houses either with invalid or fake documents or without proper reasons," a senior officer of the Kolkata Police said.

We have arrested them under section 188 of the IPC and seized vehicles following necessary legal formalities, the officer said. The process will continue as the Centre has extended the lockdown till May 3, he added.

We have been trying to convince the people through various ways, but it seems that some are not ready to understand the reason behind the lockdown, he added. The violators who were arrested and later enlarged on bail from the police stations would have to appear before the designated courts once the normal judicial function resumes, the special public prosecutor said. According to an order of the Chief Justice of the Calcutta High Court, T B N Radhakrishnan, only extremely urgent matters are being taken up by the courts in West Bengal through video-conferencing only.

"An alleged violator is granted bail on a personal bond if the charges are bailable. The person is given a date, ideally within a maximum period of a month, by the officer- in-charge of the police station concerned to appear before the designated court for further proceedings," Mukherjee said. He said that if the courts do not recommence normal functioning by that time, the alleged violator would have to take another date from the concerned police station, within the jurisdiction of which he or she was arrested. Once the courts reopen, the magistrates would have to deal with thousands of such cases, said Calcutta High Court lawyer Suman Shankar Chatterjee.

If the alleged violator admits guilt, he or she may be punished as per law and the case disposed of, but if the person challenges the charges against him or her, proceedings would have to be drawn against the person before the court gives its verdict, Chatterjee said.

Violation of section 188 (disobeying a public servant's lawful order) attracts jail term of one month or fine up to Rs 200, or both. If such disobedience causes or tends to cause danger to human life, health and safety, the guilty shall be punished with imprisonment for a term up to six months or fine of up to Rs 2,000 or both.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
OXFORD, Mississippi  A Mississippi community used some creativity to celebrate a womans 100th birthday amid the ban on large gatherings during the coronavirus outbreak.

Friends and families of Catherine Alderson were escorted by police cars and fire trucks as they celebrated a century of her life in a car parade Friday, the Oxford Eagle reported. Alderson was able to wave to cars while sitting in her driveway, wrapped in a shawl and surrounded by bubbles and pink balloons.

The idea to bring the celebration to her home came from Alderson's grandchildren, and was made possible by the police and fire departments in Oxford. Long distance family members and Alderson's friends from church also joined the party.

"She didn't know why the Lord had left her here this long," Peggy Leister, Alderson's daughter, said. "I told her maybe it's because she lived for Him and worked hard and tried to do what He asked her to do in the Bible."

Officials in Lafayette County have also been hosting other car parades for children who are missing birthday celebrations due to the outbreak. Deputies said 14 parades with fire trucks and blaring sirens were held in the county since their office announced it will be hosting the drive-by parties last week.
Please dont trust them, judge. Like sugar-coating the coronavirus is creating disaster, sugar-coating our education crisis will also be a disaster. The lights are flashing red, but politicos are rushing full steam ahead on the wrong track.

We cant trust the governor or lawmakers to fix our broken education system. Make them educate all our children as ordered by the Yazzie/Martinez decision.

As one of the organizers of the lawsuit that began 15 years ago, I find politicos, with few exceptions, guilty of nonfeasance. After decades of failing our kids, theyve failed once again but still want the suit dismissed.

Dont be fooled by tossing more money at teacher salaries, reading, math or other soup du jour programs. Yes, they wont hurt, but as they are, its just like adding another taco day for our kids.

Theyve thrown more than another $664 million against a shattered education structure hoping some will stick it back together. Someones pet project was gifted hundreds of millions of dollars for an early childhood trust. We need another huge bureaucracy?

At one time, Republican and Democratic administrations funded education at 55% of state spending. Today, its about 46% and politicos are gleefully chest-bumping for increasing spending about 3% in two years. We need a hell of lot more money, but well-spent money, not the moonshots strategy our governor brags about. Good ideas without a comprehensive plan are irresponsible.

We need a new educational paradigm, a new approach to education, because where were going is nose-diving. Ever wonder why Old Mexico has a higher literacy rate than New Mexico?

But universities, the ones responsible for bringing us into the 21st century, seem oblivious to our new reality. Most students are and will always be culturally distinct. Higher education has yet to produce but a few culturally competent teachers or curriculum. Teacher salary increases without those skills equals a double loss.

The biggest failure centers around Latinos, who outnumber white, Indian, black and Asian students all put together. Schools are failing to graduate half of Latino kids but, amazingly, there is no specific focus on their needs.

Ten years ago, experts sounded an alarm by reporting it would take 100 years to eliminate the achievement gap between Latino and white students given our current course. Community leaders responded by helping to pass the Hispanic Education Act with a mission to eliminate that gap. But in 10 years, zero dollars  zero  have been allocated to this mission that has a measurable goal. Instead, the HEAs been buried in the basement of the Public Education Department.

Why are Latino elected officials MIA in advocating for their community? Black and Indian champions abound, while whites quietly dominate a disproportionate share of resources and jobs. With few exceptions, Latino politicos appear afraid to advocate for parity for our minority majority population.

Gutless politicos dont even utter the word Latino, much less fight for us in the halls of government. Latinos need new, genuine champions who are unashamed to put our children, who make up 63% of all students, at the front of the line for attention, money, jobs, services and programs. We had to turn to the courts when the state ignored our needs. Theyve now added two more years of nonresponsiveness.

Whats the solution? Its hiding in plain sight. Start with a comprehensive plan for a new education paradigm  its already been mostly articulated with all stakeholders input  with clear measurable goals and resources to meet those goals, along with a system that responds in real time to whats working or not working.

The governor and lawmakers have shown their continued failure to follow the courts directives. Only the court holds the power to make them comply with the law.

We should all urge the court not to dismiss this landmark suit that would improve the quality of lives of every New Mexican, but only if done right.

Jose Armas can be reached at armas@swcp.com.
A president who spent precious weeks failing to provide national leadership as coronavirus cases multiplied is now claiming authority he doesnt have. President Donald Trumps unhinged pandemic briefing Monday looked like a parody  peevish, self-centered, dishonest  but it also portends a serious constitutional showdown over how the nation should reopen for business. Trump declared his authority is total on that front, which is plainly false and dangerously dictatorial.

Bluster isnt leadership. Trumps failure to provide the real thing has prompted governors to negotiate among themselves on the pace of their states reopening. At this point, thats the only path.

Trump has lurched from one extreme to another while trying to cope with the challenges of this pandemic. His leadership void has yielded federal confusion and chaos.
In early March, hand sanitizer started flying off the shelves. Then it became nearly impossible to find toilet paper in many stores.

Now, as several of the nation's largest meat processing plants have been forced to temporarily close due to the coronavirus pandemic, meat producers are warning of potential shortages if the crisis continues to disrupt operations for an extended period of time.

On Sunday, Smithfield Farms, one of the nation's largest pork producers, announced it was closing one of its meat processing plants in South Dakota. But it wasn't just any plant. This particular facility in Sioux Falls is responsible for 4-5% of all U.S. pork production (according to figures provided by the company). It will be closed for at least two weeks.

The closure comes after at least 300 of the facility's 3,700 employees tested positive for the novel coronavirus. The Virginia-based company is owned by China's WH Group, which is the world's largest pork producer, supplying meat for brands like Smithfield and Nathan's Famous.

The closure of this facility, combined with a growing list of other protein plants that have shuttered across our industry, is pushing our country perilously close to the edge in terms of our meat supply. It is impossible to keep our grocery stores stocked if our plants are not running," Kenneth M. Sullivan, Smithfield's president and chief executive officer, said in a statement released Sunday. "These facility closures will also have severe, perhaps disastrous, repercussions for many in the supply chain, first and foremost our nations livestock farmers."

Download the TODAY app for the latest coverage on the coronavirus outbreak.

Now, a primary concern for Sullivan and other meat processors is that many American pig farmers have nowhere to send their animals for processing and may face circumstances similar to that of produce farmers who, after seeing demand from shuttered restaurants plummet, are struggling to get their surplus to new markets.

Story continues

So should consumers be worried about an impending shortage of pork and other meats?

Pork Processing At A Smithfield Foods Plant (Bloomberg via Getty Images)

"Prior to March, a large percentage of pork products were produced and sold to restaurants," Julie Niederhoff, associate professor of Supply Chain Management at Syracuse University, told TODAY. "This left a fairly stocked pork supply chain where the the temporary closure of one plant isn't likely to impact consumers nearly as much as it impacts farmers."

Niederhoff is currently predicting a minor short term impact on the price and availability of pork. But that's only if the plant is closed for a few weeks. A longer closure could be detrimental if there's a domino effect throughout the company, she said.

"Nearly 60% of pork is processed in 15 plants all in close geographic proximity to this Smithfield plant," Niederhoff said. If COVID-19 forces more plants in the area to close, "consumers would definitely feel it."

Many farmers and industry workers are already feeling it. According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, meat manufacturing beats out dairy, grains, beverages and produce to account for the largest sector of food and beverage manufacturing in the U.S. The industry is comprised of nearly 500,000 workers.

On Monday JBS USA announced it was closing its Greeley, Colorado, beef plant indefinitely and sending 6,000 employees home to self-quarantine. At least two people who worked at the plant have died from COVID-19 since March and dozens more have tested positive. According to Kerns and Associates, the plant processes about 5% of the total daily beef slaughter in the U.S.

Tyson Foods Inc. and Cargill Inc. have also recently closed plants after workers tested positive for coronavirus. Meanwhile, 50 workers at a Perdue plant walked out on the job after claiming they were exposed to the virus. These events aren't limited to one geographical area, either. Meat processing plant closures are happening in Georgia, Pennsylvania and Iowa, among other states.

According to a report published in March by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, the U.S. isn't the only country potentially facing different types of food shortages. Many countries are dealing with decreasing labor forces and logistics problems in their supply chains. For example in Argentina, road blocks are not only preventing the spread of the virus, they're preventing trucks carrying crops from making deliveries. Other countries like Vietnam and Russia are hoarding crops that would otherwise be exported.

"Countries must find best ways to strike a balance between the need to keep production going and the necessity of protecting the workers," read the report.

Food

So far, the U.S. government's response has not been too alarmist. On Friday, President Donald Trump said in a press briefing he's expecting Secretary of Agriculture Sonny Perdue to "use all of the funds and authorities at his disposal to make sure that our food supply is stable and safe."

Jackie Filson, a spokesperson for Food & Water Watch (a nonprofit that campaigns for corporate transparency), told TODAY that any stimulus money should go directly to farmers and growers, not large companies like Smithfield Foods.

"Companies wouldn't be having to contemplate full-scale plant closures if they had prepared adequately for the possibility of a pandemic and responded appropriately by providing employees with personal protective equipment right away," said Filson. She believes the USDA has been turning a "blind eye" to how food production companies operate today, choosing profits over worker safety.

But Keira Lombardo, executive vice president of corporate affairs and compliance at Smithfield Foods, insisted that the company has been following CDC guidelines, including offering 14-day, COVID-19-related leave with pay. She added that the company has also taken additional steps.

"These (measures) include adding extra hand sanitizing stations, boosting personal protective equipment, continuing to stress the importance of personal hygiene, enhancing cleaning and disinfection, expanding employee health benefits, implementing thermal scanning, increasing social distancing, installing plexiglass and other physical barriers and restricting all nonessential visitors," Lombardo said.

Despite Smithfield's latest efforts, on Monday  the same day the company announced it was donating $30 million worth of meat to food banks  six employees at a plant in Pennsylvania reportedly tested positive for coronavirus, Pittsburgh's KDKA reported.

Some experts say it's likely that more employees who process all types of food, not just meat products, will test positive in the coming weeks.

"This crisis emphasizes the need to modernize our entire agriculture and food system with state-of-the art technologies that decrease reliance on a precarious labor force," said Patrick J. Stover, vice-chancellor and dean of agriculture and life sciences at Texas A&M AgriLife.

Scenes of emptying shelves may worry consumers, but Stover told TODAY there is not a shortage of food itself. Empty shelves seen currently are the result of panic buying and he predicts that will taper off as the crisis abates on some parts of the country.

There is, however, the major problem of how to process and deliver food to consumers when so much of the production system has become centralized. With increasingly larger plants housing a vast number of workers who often do their jobs in close quarters, the likelihood of those workers falling ill within the same timeframe is much greater than if those workers were operating in smaller facilities in more isolated parts of the country.

Food

Still, for now, Stover doesn't think U.S. consumers should be worried.

"The strength of the U.S. food system is its diversity, which supports consumer choice and individual health needs," said Stover. "In countries where the African Swine Fever decimated pork production, poultry and other meat sources filled the gap. Consumers enjoy variety in the food they eat, so longterm changes in meat preferences are unlikely."
A great deal of xenophobia has spread alongside COVID-19, at times inspired by our own public officials. Despite explicit instruction from the World Health Organization to avoid naming infectious diseases after geographic locations, President Donald Trump recently referred to COVID-19 as the Chinese Virus. In Texas, Sen. John Cornyn vehemently attributed the spread of the virus to a culture that eats bats and snakes and dogs.

These remarks are divisive and distract us from more productive ways of protecting global public health amid a rise in urbanization in the developing world.

Research has shown the emergence of infectious diseases is strongly associated with increased human population density, or the number of people per square mile of land area. The worlds urban population has increased almost 30 percentage points since the 1950s. During that time, more than 300 new infectious diseases hvae emerged.

Between 1990 and 2013, Wuhan underwent massive urban sprawl, swelling deep into nearby rural landscapes. The rise of industrial farming eventually pushed small-scale farmers into surrounding forested areas, increasing the risk of animal-to-human transmission. Struggling to compete with an industrialized livestock industry, some farmers turned to alternative forms of production  such as wild species  to earn wages at local wet markets.

Some experts speculate wet markets are responsible for the emergence of COVID-19. The acting head of the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity called for the global prohibition of these markets in an effort to prevent another pandemic.

Wet markets do require more regulation, but there are several potential consequences to eliminating them, including depleted food consumption, an impact on child nutrition and the explosion of black market industries. But it is also important to note that wet markets are not the sole speculative site for disease emergence.

More consequential are slum developments. Approximately 32 percent of the worlds urban population reside in slums, which tend to lack adequate housing, water sources and sanitation facilities. Infectious diseases such as cholera already have been shown to be more widespread in the slums of West Africa. In Brazil, 95 percent of infectious diseases in the countrys third-largest city of Salvador derive from slum communities. Due to rapid urbanization in the developing world, it is estimated that approximately 2 billion of the worlds population will live in slums by 2030.

Global health funding has remained stagnant since 2010, and the current proposed funding for 2021 is the lowest level since 2008. The Trump administration has proposed a 16 percent cut to the the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and a 40 percent cut to U.S. contributions to the World Health Organization. Investing in global health can improve urban health in developing countries by providing funds for infrastructure and sanitation, which are essential to the prevention of disease.

The U.S. must also reinstate the National Security Councils global health security unit, which was disbanded by Trump in 2018. It will be critical in the worldwide fight against emerging diseases. This unit helps in tracking the occurrence of disease and potential bioterrorism that could threaten global health.

Today, more than 4.2 billion people reside in urban settlements compared with 3.4 billion in rural areas. By 2050, that urban population number will reach 6.7 billion, with the majority living in Africa (22 percent) and Asia (52 percent). As cities across the world become more densely populated, we are likely to see an increase in infectious diseases.

The next pandemic is inevitable. Its not a matter of if but where. Calling it the Chinese virus or Wuhan virus distracts us from preparing.

Ricardo Lowe, Jr. is a research associate in the Institute for Urban Policy Research and Analysis at the University of Texas at Austin and a doctoral student in applied demography at the University of Texas at San Antonio. Tracie Lowe is a postdoctoral fellow in the Institute for Urban Policy Research and Analysis at the University of Texas at Austin. She is also a Public Voices fellow of the OpEd Project.
Apple (APPL) and Alphabets Google (GOOG, GOOGL) say privacy and security are top of mind for their collaboration to enable contact tracing apps to function across iOS and Android mobile devices to contain the novel coronavirus. However, telecom and cybersecurity experts say the technology may not fully protect users, raising scenarios that expose the identities of infected individuals.

The planned technology is slated to use low-power Bluetooth functionality standard on iPhone and Android mobile operating systems. The companies propose that as long as a mobile phones Bluetooth remains turned on and enabled, a beacon can exchange information about COVID-positive disease status between phones within 10 to 15 feet of each other.

The privacy questions lie in the difficulty of setting an effective tracking distance, and time frame between when a device detects close proximity with an infected users device, and when the receiving device is notified of the proximity event, according to Ben Levitan, a veteran telecommunications engineer.

The only way to fix this is to come up with a notification area that's fairly large, Levitan said, explaining the so-called fix could render the tracking ineffective. If you give me notifications that someone is within 10 feet, they have The Scarlet Letter. They may have lost their privacy, but it's very valuable to me. Though if you set the parameter to a mile, it's kind of useless to everybody.

Heres how it works

The technology requires two levels of opt-in cooperation: first, from users who voluntarily enter their positive diagnosis into the app and agree to have their status anonymously beaconed by their health authoritys app, and second, from app users who agree to receive notifications if their mobile device comes into close proximity with one containing a positive COVID-19 indication.

NEW YORK NY, - APRIL 12: A woman with groceries looks at her portable telephone while wearing protective gloves and a homemade mask amid the coronavirus pandemic on April 12, 2020 in New York City. COVID-19 has spread to most countries around the world, claiming over 114,000 lives with infections at over 1.8 million people. (Photo by John Lamparski/Getty Images)

An Apple spokesperson explained that mobile devices can watch for these proximity events, then allow apps to notify users whose devices have come into contact with devices indicating users tested positive for COVID-19. Notifications are generated for proximity events that occurred within the past 14 days. While the information doesnt allow users to avoid coming into contact with COVID-positive users, and therefore protect themselves from a high-risk contact, it allows users who find out after the fact to seek appropriate treatment, testing, and personal quarantine if theyve encountered a device whose user indicates a COVID-19 positive status.

During a press call on Monday, Google and Apple representatives said data is stored locally on the users device, requiring no collection or sharing of location or personally identifying information. Beacon information is uploaded to a local server and saved for 14 days, where it can be discovered by devices running a participating app.

Story continues

[See also: How Apple and Google will track the coronavirus from your phone]

Each app user is assigned a unique identifying number known only to their device, according to cybersecurity expert and adjunct industry professor for Information Technology and Management at Illinois Institute of Technology, Louis J. McHugh IV. When the app is activated, the ID number is encrypted using one-way, three-stage encryption.

According to what the framework says, everything is going through a central database of keeping track of all the people we meet, McHugh said.

Countless scenarios where a users identity becomes obvious

While the tech giants say privacy remains top of mind, the app architecture, as described, may not be capable of achieving total anonymity.

As one example, imagine an app user takes a 30-minute walk and sees only one other person. If the user is notified of a proximity event before contacting anyone else, and had not come into Bluetooth range contact with others for the past two weeks, the COVID-19-positive individuals identity may be revealed. The scenario is just one of countless possibilities where a COVID-19 positive users identity could be extrapolated.

Its a very scary idea, McHugh said, explaining that how easy or difficult it becomes to identify a COVID-positive persons identity will boil down to how the application is developed  whether its solely backward looking versus actively monitoring. Once I have that Scarlet Letter, per se, when I'm walking around the park walking my dog, am I notifying everybody when I'm walking?

Neither company addressed how immediately an app user is notified once a proximity event occurs.

Hurdles to make the technology even work

Levitan, who spent 30 years developing worldwide cellphone networks for Yahoo Finances parent company Verizon, Sprint, and others, said the level of cooperation required is unlikely to be achieved. He points out layers of factors working against adoption of the technology.

In addition to the smaller hurdle of keeping Bluetooth constantly activated and mobile phones powered on, there are emotional hurdles, too, he said.

A woman in a surgical mask uses her cellphone after more cases of coronavirus were confirmed in Manhattan, New York City, New York, U.S., March 11, 2020. REUTERS/Andrew Kelly

I think if I had COVID-19 and I wanted to go out, just to go get some groceries  even walking on the beach  all of a sudden people's phones would be blowing up and they'd be running away from me and Im going to be sick of being a pariah and Id turn off my phone, he said.

And unless you make it a crime to turn off your phone, or a crime not to report it, like we do [with] sex offenders  and you are shunned by your neighbors because you're on a database, he said, it may be difficult to get cooperation needed for the new software to aid in reduced transmission.

It is pretty draconian.

At a minimum, for the technology to work, McHugh said it would need to collect information about date and time. Who owns that 14 days of data? he asked.

The fact that the technology is not using location data, McHugh said, is positive. However, he cautioned, Google and Apple have not explained what personal information  like names, addresses, phone numbers  will be collected, and whether the requirements would be set or retained by the developers and agencies that run the apps.

I think the big deal is once we get the app, and once we get our personal information in the app, that's the deal. That's where the shoe meets the road, McHugh said.

Moreover, McHugh said Bluetooth is not the most ideal technology to have constantly activated on a mobile device, which is required to make the tracking software effective.

That's why [Google and Apple] had to bring encryption to the party, McHugh said. If you saw the list of attacks when you're vulnerable to Bluetooth, you would never use it again. There's multitudes of attack factors with a Bluetooth surface because Bluetooth, unfortunately is inherently insecure. A Bluetooth breach can compromise files, photos, call logs, contacts and most data stored on the device, with the exception of encrypted information, he said.

Asked whether data on the systems servers can be breached, Apple and Google acknowledged that attacks can happen despite best efforts. They also emphasized that the decentralized nature of the storage  data stored locally on individual devices and among multiple servers  would discourage bad actors as infiltrating such information would be difficult and expensive.

No precedent in the U.S.

During Phase 1 of the rollout, Apple and Google plan to provide operating system updates on iOS and Android devices that will provide the functionality app developers need to create the apps. Users would need to then initiate a download to use the app offered by their regional health agency.

Under a Phase 2, the companies plan another operating system update that will pre-install a built-in user interface, allowing iPhone and Android device users to get started before theyve installed the app. The rationale for pre-installation, they said, was to reduce barriers in order to get more people to use them. Once developed, the apps will remain under the authority of regional public health agencies.

Government Technology Agency (GovTech) staff demonstrate Singapore's new contact-tracing smarthphone app called TraceTogether, as a preventive measure against the COVID-19 coronavirus in Singapore on March 20, 2020.(Photo by Catherine LAI / AFP) (Photo by CATHERINE LAI/AFP via Getty Images)

Even without formalized criminal or civil penalties, software like this in the U.S. has never been implemented and therefore no precedent exists for how information could be used against its users. Most U.S. states have criminal laws that make intentional or reckless transmission of communicable diseases, such as sexually transmitted diseases, punishable by imprisonment. Federal statutes also provide for imprisonment for violation of quarantine orders.

Embedding the software in mobile device operating systems could be a slippery slope, McHugh said. Are you going to take away my functionality to turn off my Bluetooth, because I know myself when Im not using Bluetooth I turn it off, he said.

McHughs colleague, Illinois Institute of Technology professor Jeremy Hajek, said that because Apple devices represent nearly 20% of worldwide mobile devices and Googles Android devices represent around 80%, the tracking if pre-installed would be ready to go on nearly 100% of the worlds devices.

I think there are people in Apple, Google who really really want to help, and they say, Hey we have this massive amount of power  the CIA couldnt do this, the Army couldn't do this, but we could, Hajek said. Then, he said, the question becomes once a technology like this is implemented, whether it is gradually expanded into other areas.

And you think this system gets shut down the day after COVID-19 is declared done? Levitan asked.

I appreciate the work that two competing companies are doing in trying times for, let's be frank, humanity, McHugh said. Weve just got to be coherent of the privacy and security risks as a whole, and that it not just be a rush to bring this to market.

Alexis Keenan is a reporter for Yahoo Finance and former litigation attorney.

Follow Alexis Keenan on Twitter @alexiskweed.

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By Trend

Former executive director of the Extrabudgetary Pension Fund under the Ministry of Finance Bakhrom Ashrafkhanov was appointed ambassador of Uzbekistan to Azerbaijan, Trend reports with the reference to Uzbek Foreign Ministry.

"On April 14, newly appointed Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary of Uzbekistan to Azerbaijan Bakhrom Ashrafkhanov, who previously worked as Executive Director of the Extrabudgetary Pension Fund, arrived in Baku from Tashkent," the report said.

In September 2019 Ashrafkhanov was appointed executive director of the Extrabudgetary Pension Fund and left this post in March 2020.

From 2002 to 2016 Bakhrom Ashrafkhanov worked in the Ministry of Finance. In particular, he was First Deputy Minister of Finance in 2005-2007 and Head of the Treasury in 2007-2016.

From 2016 to 2018, he was Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary of Uzbekistan to Russia. In September 2018, he was appointed Chairman of the Board of Uzbekneftegaz.

Bakhrom Ashrafkhanov was born in 1969. He is a graduate of the Tashkent State University of Economics, specializing in international monetary and credit relations. From 1993 to 1994, he studied at the University of Kentucky (U.S.), specializing in International Monetary and Credit Relations and Public Finance.

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Follow us on Twitter @AzerNewsAz
The driver killed when his car was struck by a New Jersey Transit train on Tuesday has been identified as a 53-year-old New Milford resident, authorities said

Sheng Chen was pronounced dead after his vehicle was hit by an eastbound Pascack Valley Line train at 4:40 p.m. just east of the New Bridge Landing Station in River Edge, near the boroughs border with Hackensack, NJ Transit said.

Service was suspended for nearly three hours. There were 10 people aboard the train.

Though the incident remains under investigation, safety equipment along the tracks was operating properly, spokeswoman Lisa Torbic said.

Jeff Goldman may be reached at jeff_goldman@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter @JeffSGoldman. Find NJ.com on Facebook.

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KYODO NEWS - Apr 15, 2020 - 09:32 | All, Japan, Coronavirus

Japan is experiencing a shortage of medical thermometers due to the spread of the novel coronavirus, as more businesses require employees to test their temperatures before going to work.

Unlike disposable face masks and disinfectant, the sudden increase in demand for thermometers is expected to settle in time, but some are being sold in online auctions for exorbitant prices.

At Omron Healthcare Co., a unit of leading Japanese electronics company Omron Corp. headquartered in Kyoto, orders for thermometers in March were 2.7 times higher than the same period last year.

"January is usually our peak season, but this year we've had the same volume of orders even heading into spring," said a company spokesperson.

Omron has strengthened its production system by extending working hours and adding weekend shifts, while major medical equipment manufacturer Terumo Corp. is also in the process of increasing production of thermometers.

Several drugstores in Osaka Prefecture have seen sales of thermometers increase ninefold in March compared with the previous year.

"Since a fever of over 37.5 degrees was marked as one of the symptoms (of COVID-19), there has been an increase in stores running out of stock," said an industry source.

On a Yahoo online auction site, thermometers retailing for around 2,000 yen ($19) can be seen listed for around triple the price. Although the government in March banned the reselling of face masks online amid rampant price gouging, thermometers were not included.

"In light of the social climate, we will consider addressing the issue in cooperation with all parties concerned," said a spokesperson for Yahoo Japan Corp., which operates the auction site.

According to Omron, thermometers generally have a life of around five years. Another manufacturer predicts that distribution will return to normal once people in need have been provided with thermometers as they can be used for a long time.

But some local governments are struggling to address the shortage of thermometers in facilities accepting patients with mild cases of the pneumonia-causing virus.

Kanagawa Prefecture, south of Tokyo, has decided to ask for thermometers to be donated.

Related coverage:

Trump orders halt of funding of WHO over its virus response

Osaka asks citizens for raincoats amid shortage of protective gear

G-7 to provide debt relief to poor nations amid virus outbreak
An election authority in protective clothing receives a self-quarantined voter at a polling station in Seoul, Wednesday. Voters ordered to isolate themselves to prevent COVID-19 infections were allowed to vote after regular voting ended at 6 p.m. / Yonhap



By Jun Ji-hye



Eligible voters who have been in self-quarantine to contain the spread of COVID-19 were also allowed to cast ballots for the National Assembly elections, Wednesday, in a decision made by the election watchdog to guarantee their right to vote.



The National Election Commission (NEC) permitted people, who have been ordered to isolate themselves between April 1 and 14 and shown no symptoms of the virus, to vote in the general elections after regular voting ended at 6 p.m.



According to the Ministry of Interior and Safety, 13,642, or 22.8 percent, out of the total of 59,918 eligible voters under self-quarantine have applied to vote in the election.



The self-isolators are people who came into contact with infected patients, and those who returned home from overseas amid the global coronavirus pandemic.



By region, applicants in Seoul accounted for the largest number, with 4,518 self-isolators expressing their intention to vote. In Gyeonggi Province, 4,286 people applied to cast ballots.






A truck driver has been rescued from his cab after it was left dangling 70ft over a river when strong winds forced the vehicle through a bridge barrier.

Ferocious gusts threw Wayne Boone's empty trailer across the I-64 Highrise Bridge over the Elizabeth River in Chesapeake, Virginia, on Monday morning.

Boone faced choppy waters rushing below his windshield as the cab of the jackknifed Freightliner truck swayed over the river in 60 mile per hour winds.

Chesapeake firefighters arrived on the scene and after they had secured the truck with ropes, Justin Beazley rappelled from the bridge to rescue Boone, hauling him up to safety in a harness around an hour and half after the crash.

Strong winds caused the driver, Wayne B. Boone, to lose control on Monday morning on the I-64 Highrise Bridge over the Elizabeth River in Chesapeake

Chesapeake firefighters arrived on the scene and after securing the truck with ropes Justin Beazley rappelled from the bridge to rescue Wayne Boone, hauling him up to safety in a harness around an hour and half after the crash

'It all happened so quick. You train for this, but you just never expect it,' Beazley told WTKR.

'We all signed up for it. Anyone in my position would do the exact same thing. This one call of a lifetime just happened to be me this morning.'

Boone praised Beazley's professionalism during the terrifying minutes, saying: 'He encouraged me to keep fighting you know, 'Come on you can do it.'

'It feels good to know there's still people out there who still care.'

Boone praised Beazley's professionalism during the terrifying minutes, saying: 'He encouraged me to keep fighting you know, 'Come on you can do it.'

Justin Beazley rappelled from the bridge to rescue Boone, hauling him up to safety in a harness around an hour and half after the crash

Chesapeake firefighters at the scene prepare to rescue Boone from his cab - a crane can be seen on the other side helping to secure the precariously hanging truck

Boone was rushed to Sentara Hospital with non life-threatening injuries. His truck was pulled up onto the road by a crane a few hours later.

Chesapeake Fire Capt. Steve Bradley told the Virginia Pilot: 'The tractor-trailer was first stabilized with the assistance of heavy equipment from Hudson's Servicecenter and Fink's Wrecker service to prevent additional movement and then a series of complex and advanced rope maneuvers were used to lower a technician over the bridge, harness the driver, and lift him to a safe position.'

Alcohol was not involved in the crash, Boone had his seatbelt on and is not facing charges.
Man Tracks Down His Late Mothers Car From 1971 and Buys It, Finds Her Sunglasses Inside
Married At First Sight's KC Osborne and Michael Goonan have been spending a lot of time together in Melbourne, where he works.

But on Wednesday, the 29-year-old company director and the 31-year-old dance instructor caught a private jet to Sydney for a business trip.

The couple looked smitten with each other as they shared a few hugs and kisses on the tarmac before boarding the flight.

No COVID-19 downturn here! Married At First Sight couple KC Osborne (left) and Michael Goonan (right) caught a private jet from Melbourne to Sydney for a business trip on Wednesday

The Australian Government currently advises that Australians must avoid non-essential travel within Australia, but individuals can travel between states which have NOT shut their borders if it is essential for work.

On his Instagram page, Michael insisted he was flying to Sydney for business.

In addition to Michael's work, the trip is likely for KC to visit her family, who live near Cronulla Beach in Sydney's Sutherland Shire.

KC and Michael appeared to be well-packed for the trip as they arrived at the airport with three Louis Vuitton bags in tow.

The company director looked smart in a pair of white chinos, black boat shoes and a blue shirt with a flashy gold watch.

Meanwhile, KC was dressed comfortably in a navy blue Camilla and Marc sweat set and white leather sneakers from Saint Laurent.

Flight ready: KC was dressed comfortably in a navy blue Camilla and Marc sweat set and white leather sneakers from Saint Laurent

Cute! The couple looked smitten with each other as they shared a few hugs and kisses with each other on the tarmac before boarding the flight

LV addicts! KC and Michael appeared to be well-packed for the trip as they arrived at the airport with three Louis Vuitton bags in tow

Darling, the private jet's late! The reality couple waited on the tarmac for their plane to arrive

The dance instructor looked very excited to board the private jet, beaming when they walked across the tarmac.

Meanwhile, Michael appeared to be accompanied by a colleague or business associate, who was reading off his phone.

After waiting on tarmac, their private jet shortly arrived and they boarded before departing to Sydney.

Airport energy: The dance instructor looked very excited to board the private jet as she was beaming when they walked across the tarmac

Dapper dude: The company director looked smart in a pair of white chinos, black boat shoes and a blue shirt with a flashy gold watch

On Wednesdays we wear navy! The couple appeared to have coordinated their outfits as they were both wearing navy blue

After MAFS wrapped filming in December, Michael left Adelaide to run the Melbourne branch of his family's commercial ice business.

The company director still has a young son in Adelaide from a previous relationship.

The current work situation: After MAFS wrapped filming in December, Michael left Adelaide to run the Melbourne branch of his family's commercial ice business

Staying together: KC, who moved to Sydney last year after a decade living overseas, is believed to have relocated to Melbourne to live with her boyfriend last month

Two birds with one stone: In addition to Michael's business, the trip will likely be a good opportunity for KC to visit her family, who live near Cronulla Beach in Sydney's Sutherland Shire

Finally! Once MAFS season seven concluded earlier this month, KC was finally able to reveal that she and Michael were in a relationship

KC, who moved to Sydney last year after a decade living overseas, is believed to have relocated to Melbourne to live with her boyfriend, last month.

Once MAFS season seven concluded earlier this month, Michael and KC could finally reveal that they were in a relationship.

They plan to shack up together until the COVID-19 pandemic is over.

Business doesn't stop! Meanwhile, Michael appeared to be accompanied by a colleague or business associate who was reading off his phone

Will you be my quarantine? They plan to shack up together until the COVID-19 pandemic is over

The whole squad is on point: Michael and his crew rocked a number of designer brands

They started dating almost eight weeks ago, after Michael's split from Stacey Hampton, which happened on January 16 in between filming the MAFS reunion dinner party and the finale.

KC amicably split from her ex-'husband', Drew Brauer, shortly after their final vows in December.

Drew, 32, has known about KC and Michael's relationship since March 11 and is supportive. Stacey, on the other hand, is not happy.

Your chariot awaits! KC browsed her phone while Michael looked keen to fly

Gotta jet! The couple boarded the private plane to Sydney from Melbourne
 Flash

UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres on Tuesday launched a campaign to battle COVID-19 related misinformation while the world body began "solidarity flights" in Africa as part of its global effort to fight the pandemic.



The world is facing a dangerous "epidemic of misinformation," Guterres said in a video message. "People are scared. They want to know what to do and where to turn for advice."

He announced the UN Communications Response Initiative to flood the internet with facts and science to counter misinformation.

"The global 'misinfo-demic' is spreading," said the UN chief, adding that harmful health advice and "snake-oil solutions" are proliferating along with falsehoods.

"Hatred is going viral, stigmatizing and vilifying people and groups," Guterres said, referring to discrimination and even attacks against migrants and, especially, Asians.

The first UN "solidarity flight" was scheduled to leave Addis Ababa on Tuesday to boost COVID-19 response on the African continent, said Stephane Dujarric, spokesman for Guterres.

The flight is part of a UN initiative to scale up logistics for the distribution of pandemic response supplies, he said.

Working with the Ethiopian government, the World Food Programme has opened a new hub at Addis Ababa's Bole International Airport. Supplies and humanitarian workers are to be flown across Africa. Medical evacuations will also be facilitated, Dujarric said.

A cargo flight from another humanitarian logistics hub in the United Arab Emirates landed in Addis Ababa on Monday for the program, he said. The plane was loaded with supplies from the World Health Organization (WHO) that were being prepared for distribution to 32 African countries, said the spokesman.

The Addis Ababa-based African Union, through the Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention, is providing technical support and coordination, he told a virtual briefing.

The UN continues to help other countries cope with the pandemic.

The humanitarian coordinator for Syria, Imran Riza, said the UN is supporting laboratory and case investigation across the country.

The WHO already is supporting the rehabilitation of the Central Public Health Lab in Damascus, has trained dozens of laboratory technicians and rapid response team members in testing and sample collection and procured critical diagnosis equipment and multiple shipments of testing kits, he said.

The WHO is also supporting the training of laboratory technicians to staff three new laboratories in Aleppo, Homs and Lattakia governorates.

The UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) is urging greater support for Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iran.

The agency warned that Afghanistan faces the prospect of overwhelmed medical and social services in the face of the coronavirus with a dramatic increase in Afghans returning home, hundreds of thousands of people living in displacement sites and rising poverty levels.

Pakistan and Iran, which host about 90 percent of the world's 2.7 million Afghan refugees, are also experiencing immense strain on their health systems and economies, the UNHCR said.

The appeal of 315 million dollars for the Afghan situation is only 17 percent funded, said Dujarric.

The largest refugee camps in the world in Cox's Bazar, Bangladesh, are facing the threat of the pandemic. The Bangladeshi government and UN partners are working to ensure that there are health systems, services in place for Rohingya refugees from Myanmar and the host community.

The 35 health care facilities in Cox's Bazar that are supported by the International Organization for Migration (IOM) continue to provide essential primary health services, while its partners have trained community health workers and volunteers. More than 110,000 people have received messages on how to prevent the spread of the virus.

In Mexico, the IOM launched a campaign through social networks with the aim of educating citizens about the importance of avoiding xenophobia and hate speech toward migrants during the COVID-19 emergency.

The initiative highlights incidents of misinformation that spread fear. The campaign aims to reach populations in communities where there are migrant shelters, safe houses, or temporary camps for people on the move.

In Chile, the UN team has been working with the government since the beginning of the outbreak on immediate health issues and the socio-economic impacts of the pandemic, said Dujarric.

The UN team plans to redirect 1.5 million dollars to boost social protection and inclusion for the elderly. The UN team is also helping homeless people and people with disabilities.

The UN Children's Fund, the WHO and partners in the Measles & Rubella Initiative have warned that, as COVID-19 continues to spread, more than 117 million children in 37 countries may miss out on the life-saving measles vaccine.

Immunization campaigns in 24 countries have already been delayed, with more to be postponed because of the pandemic.
Other residents of long-term care facilities who died included a man in his 70s in Westmont, a woman in her 80s in Carol Stream, a man in his 90s in Elmhurst, a man in his 70s in Naperville and a woman in her 80s in Lombard. All the victims had other prior medical conditions.
JOHANNESBURG - Nearly 20 European and African leaders have made a joint appeal for a massive international effort to boost Africas coronavirus response, saying that only a global victory that fully includes Africa can bring this pandemic to an end.

The appeal signed by the leaders of France, Ethiopia, Germany, South Africa and other nations, published in the Financial Times, calls for dramatic measures that include an immediate moratorium on all debt payments, public and private, until the pandemic is over. It comes ahead of a meeting Wednesday by finance ministers of the G20 forum on economic co-operation, which includes the U.S., China, India and others.

African officials have joined forces in recent days to appeal for billions of dollars in financial assistance and improve their position in the global competition with richer countries for badly needed medical equipment. The African Union appointed four special envoys to mobilize support and created a platform to help the continents 54 countries bulk-buy medical goods at more accessible prices.

While virus cases among Africas 1.3 billion people total more than 16,000, health experts have said the continent is weeks behind the U.S. and Europe in the pandemic and the rise in cases looks alarmingly similar to Europes.

As the world braces for potential waves of the virus, the joint appeal says no region will be safe if Africa, with largely weak health systems, is left to fend for itself.

An unprecedented effort is required, the appeal says, directly addressing the World Bank and IMF. We must deploy a huge economic stimulus package of at least $100 billion to give Africa the resources it needs to fight the virus.

The IMF on Monday approved $500 million to cancel six months of debt payments for 25 of the worlds most impoverished countries, including 19 African ones, so they can help tackle the pandemic.

On Wednesday, the IMF said sub-Saharan Africa could see minus-1.6% growth this year, the lowest level on record. Recent strides in development could be reversed, it said, and no country will be spared.

Calls for assistance have been growing at the highest levels. In his Easter message, Pope Francis called for debt forgiveness for the worlds poorest countries, saying they are being hardest hit by the pandemic and must not be abandoned.

Africas debt-to-GDP ratio has climbed from 30% in 2012 to 95% today, said French President Emmanuel Macron in an interview posted Wednesday with Radio France Internationale. So we absolutely must help Africa to strengthen its capacities to respond to the health shock, and we must help it to respond economically to this crisis, said Macron.

It is a moral, human duty, Macron added, also calling on China, a major lender to African nations, to help. Macron recently made a similar call at a videoconference for G20 leaders. Hes also pushing for debt rescheduling and, in some cases, debt cancellation.

The U.N. Economic Commission for Africa has said the pandemic could seriously dent already stagnant growth in many countries, with oil-exporting nations like Nigeria and Angola losing up to $65 billion in revenue as prices fall. Livelihoods will be wiped out in a way we have never seen before, Ahunna Eziakonwa, the United Nations Development Program regional director for Africa, has said.

The new appeal, signed by all European leaders of the G20, welcomes a European Union plan for a pledging conference in May.

And as fears grow that resources to tackle other crises on the continent  from hunger to conflict to malaria and HIV  will be drained by the pandemic, the appeal urges humanitarian groups to protect their aid budgets.

Meanwhile, the World Food Program should lead an effort to deliver food and other critical needs to people, including refugees and migrants, in a growing number of African countries under lockdown, the appeal says. Millions of informal workers and others who rely on daily work for their next meals have been affected.

No region can win the battle against COVID-19 alone, the appeal says. If it is not beaten in Africa, it will return to haunt us all.

___

Angela Charlton and Sylvie Corbet in Paris and Nicole Winfield in Rome contributed.
Colorado Politics senior political reporter

Joey Bunch is the senior correspondent and deputy managing editor of Colorado Politics. His 32-year career includes the last 16 in Colorado. He was part of the Denver Post team that won the Pulitzer Prize in 2013 and he is a two-time finalist.
We now have many Montanans wanting to work to support their families but in my opinion are prohibited from doing so by intrusive government regulations. Private homeowners and landlords in Montana that need to have maintenance work done and now qualify for low-interest loans are also hampered by the same laws.

I understand that many professional service providers will not work doing minor maintenance on older homes or mobile homes, even though they can charge many times more than a handyman. If they do concede to work, I believe many do so by the hour, as they more than likely will not bid small jobs.

It is my understanding that the Uninsured Employers Division of the Montana Workers Compensation Division claims anyone injured as a result of contracting without a state license may sue the hiring party. It seems the state claims that no matter if the individual cannot afford the license and insurance and wanted to assume the responsibility, they cannot contract out their services without providing the employer with a permission slip from the government  even if they were hired temporarily and claimed they have other insurance.

To me, this is government overreach at its worst. This should be against the constitutional rights of both the workers wanting to provide for their families and the hiring party wanting to economically maintain their property.

Contracts make individuals accountable to each other for their actions, instead of being accountable to government. Being accountable to government usually equates to a handout rather than a hand up, which means more government control.

Until changes are made, be wary of hiring your friend or neighbor to do any casual work, even with a contract that you believe will protect you against any legal action for an injury.

State Workers Compensation should cut bureaucratic red tape and let our citizens go to work. Please, contact your representatives.

John Rice is a past chair of Montanans for Better Government.

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Haiti - News : Zapping...





The State undertakes to buy 20 million masks locally

The State undertakes to buy from the authorized textile companies, 20 million masks (that is part of their production), for their part these companies will have to supply free of charge to the State, a stock of 1 million masks meeting the standards required by the Ministry of Public Health.



First day of the Tree season

This Wednesday, April 15, is the first day of the Tree Season in Haiti, which season will end on June 30 of this year. To this end, the non-profit association "Promotion for Development" (PROMODEV) encourages each citizen to embark on a vast campaign of sustainable reforestation especially during the period of confinement in the health context with the Covid- 19. "We can plant on the courtyard of the house or in our neighborhood" For this year, PROMODEV adopts the motto "Plante yon fwa pou rekolte tout tan". With that, it is recommended to plant fruit trees and forest trees in order to better contribute to food security and the sustainable reforestation process of Haiti. Particular attention should be paid to Tamarind for this year. "Let's plant and plant again for a green and prosperous Haiti".



Two criminals arrested

Officers from the Central Direction of the Judicial Police (DCPJ) arrested Carl-Henry Beaulieu and Visnor St-Georges over the past weekend. These two men are accused of the disappearance followed by the assassination of their cousin Donald Germeil. One of the assassins, Carl-Henry Beaulieu, who confessed, led the scientific and technical police officers to a site located at the impasse Plato (Tabarre) where they had buried the body of the victim.



Donation of 5 million Gourdes

The National Distributors S.A. (DINASA) and its subsidiary SODIGAZ have donated 5 million Gourdes to the Haitian Foundation for Endemic Diseases on behalf of the Multidisciplinary Commission for the Management of the Pandemic Covid-19.



Food kits in Leogane

This week, 20 districts of the commune of Leogane (Department West) received food kits of joint teams placed under the coordination of the Fund of Economic and Social Assistance (FAES). Distribution operations are carried out door-to-door in order to reach people in difficult circumstances in the current context.



Fire of Milot's Royal Chappelle estimated damage

Following the fire in the night from Sunday to Monday April 13, 2020, a fire in the royal chapel of Milot https://www.haitilibre.com/en/news-30523-haiti-flash-the-royal-chapel-of-milot-world-heritage-destroyed-by-fire.html the members of the Interministerial Management Committee for the Citadelle Historic National Park, Sans-Souci, Ramiers decided in particular to send an emergency mission to assess the damage, preserve what can be preserved and consider short and medium term measures. The authorities promise to do everything so that the Royal Chapel can rise from the ashes. See also https://www.haitilibre.com/en/news-30534-haiti-heritage-fire-of-the-chapel-of-milot-open-letter.html https://www.haitilibre.com/en/news-30523-haiti-flash-the-royal-chapel-of-milot-world-heritage-destroyed-by-fire.html



HL/ HaitiLibre


















The World Health Organisation (WHO) launched an interactive experience on Facebook Messenger on April 14 to help people with accurate and timely information on COVID-19. The UN health agency has already been providing the latest news and information on coronavirus via WhatsApp.

Messenger users will now be able to ask queries and receive quick answers from WHOs Health Alert interactive service. It can be accessed through the WHOs official Facebook page by selecting Send Message or through the dedicated Messenger link.

Stan Chudnovsky, Vice President of Messenger, said that the WHO Health Alert service has already reached more than 12 million people through WhatsApp and now the health agency will be able to expand their reach with important information. This is critical as widespread misinformation can create unnecessary fear and panic in this already trying time, said Chudnovsky in a statement.

Earlier, Messenger had announced a program to partner with developers to provide free services to government health organisations to scale their COVID-19 response. It has partnered with Sprinklr to help with things like automating responses to frequently asked questions to take some burden off the overwhelmed staff.

Read: Modi Govt's Aarogya Setu App For Covid Reaches Key Milestone Faster Than Facebook & Others

Partnered with Sprinklr

Over 20 governments and organizations have launched Messenger experiences including UNICEF, the Government of India, Argentinas Ministry of Health, the Government of France, and Pakistans Ministry of National Health Services. Chudnovsky said that the company is pleased that the WHO has decided to use Messenger, and through their partnership with Sprinklr was able to deploy the experience so quickly.

We will continue to leverage the unique nature and reach of the Messenger platform to help people everywhere connect during this unprecedented moment, said Messenger VP.

Read: Facebook Launches Survey To Help Researchers Better Monitor Spread Of COVID-19

Facebook has also announced new Data for Good tools to support health researchers and nonprofit organisations. It includes three new types of Disease Prevention Maps to help inform disease forecasting efforts and protective measures. It has come up with a prompt on Facebook encouraging people in the US to participate in a voluntary survey from Carnegie Mellon University Delphi Research Center to help identify COVID-19 hotspots.

Read: Facebook Takes Stand Against Brazil President Bolsonaro's Horror Response To Coronavirus

Read: Facebook Pledges $100 Million For News Organisations Amid COVID-19 Crisis
Representative Image (REUTERS/Jayanta Dey)

Inarguably, while many of us are now confronted with an uncertain future, for the millions of Indians engaged in the unorganised sector, the scenario is infinitely grimmer.

As the nationwide lockdown has extended till May 3, it is clear as the scorching summer sky that it is the weak who will bear the biggest burden of the fallouts of COVID-19. Whether it is the daily-wager, small vendor, or the self-employed (skilled or unskilled) worker in the unorganised sector, it is those who have less who will get poorer.

One of the steps that the government has announced is the speedy implementation of a pending national-level exercise to create a database of workers in the unorganised sector. This database is expected to determine the process and extent of the relief that the central government would provide to such workers.

On March 22, when well-heeled Indians stocked up and prepared to work from home, these invisible millions who form the backbone of Indias largely informal economy, packed their meagre rations and began to walk home. Since then without access to work and a daily-wage, they have been forced to dip into the little savings, and food to survive.

It is not clear what will be the course of action after May 3, but even after the lockdown is lifted, a return to normal economic activity may take at the least six months. The limited resumption of work in select sectors is welcome, but this good news has been overshadowed by the proposed ordinance to increase the number of working hours per week without a commensurate increase in the wage.

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 idea is to enable businesses to stand on their own feet, why cant the government step in and support workers by covering the cost of extra wages?

Similarly, while both state and the Centre are taking urgent measures  such as cash transfers to women, releasing food stocks, providing insurance cover to frontline health workers and exemption of bank loans  the unorganised sector worker is yet to receive substantive support from either. In the immediate aftermath of the lockdown it was perhaps necessary to prioritise the elderly, disabled and women; now it is critical that the government focus on the plight of those who have been rendered jobless overnight, and without any hope of getting a job in the foreseeable future.

In the absence of meaningful government support in the form of a basic minimum income such workers will become even more vulnerable than they already are to both economic and social exploitation. Already considered invisible by many in society, they now stare at the virtual evisceration of their basic human rights as well as access to livelihood and employment.

In fact, the evidence on the existential threat faced by nearly 90 percent of our total workforce is already building up. According to the International Labour Organisations (ILOs) latest report, about 400 million workers in the informal economy are at risk of falling deeper into poverty during the crisis. Even if this forecast turns out to be partially true, we are looking at a catastrophic regression in Indias growth story.

Over the last decade, India managed to pull nearly 271 million people out of multi-dimensional poverty, according to the UNDPs 2019 Multidimensional Poverty Index. Our response to COVID-19 and its economic fallout will determine how many fall back into poverty again.

While the shutdown has helped contain the spread of the virus, it has also created a crisis which is likely to be bigger than the pandemic itself. The economy, which was in a slowdown already, has now virtually come to a grinding halt, and global rating agencies have revised Indias growth rate estimates to around 2 percent.

The creation of a database of workers is a step in the right direction, but its implementation bears risks of poor data-collection, and consequently ineffective targeting and distribution of relief.

It has been more than two weeks since India locked down, and its cities emptied out of millions of workers as they rushed back to their villages in sheer desperation. To most the familiar deprivation was better than starving and suffering in Indias metros. Hundreds of thousands more remain in temporary shelters, and many more depend on public kitchens for survival.

Unless, the government takes urgent measures to create a safety net for workers, an economic cushion on the lines of European countries such as Germany, France, Spain or indeed the United Kingdom across the channel, a spectre of mass deprivation and even social unrest hangs over India  one which will not be exorcised by ignoring the toiling masses and serving them platitudes and good intentions alone.
Yesterdays Washington Post carried an attack on South Dakota and its governor, Kristi Noem, under the headline South Dakotas Governor resisted ordering people to stay home. Now it has one of the nations largest coronavirus hot spots. The Posts article is popular on Twitter, as liberal blue checks use it to express their hope that lots of South Dakotans die as punishment for their temerity in electing a Republican governor.

As governors across the country fell into line in recent weeks, South Dakotas top elected leader stood firm: There would be no statewide order to stay home. Such edicts to combat the spread of the novel coronavirus, Gov. Kristi L. Noem said disparagingly, reflected a herd mentality. It was up to individuals  not government  to decide whether to exercise their right to work, to worship and to play. Or to even stay at home. And besides, the first-term Republican told reporters at a briefing this month, South Dakota is not New York City.

I wrote about that press conference here.

But now South Dakota is home to one of the largest single coronavirus clusters anywhere in the United States, with more than 300 workers at a giant pork-processing plant falling ill. With the case numbers continuing to spike, the company was forced to announce the indefinite closure of the facility Sunday, threatening the U.S. food supply.

The entire point of the article is that the Smithfield experience proves Governor Noem was wrong not to order a mass closure of businesses.

But wait! It is obvious even to a casual reader that the Posts attack makes no sense. The article acknowledges that the Smithfield plant had already been deemed essential by the federal government, so no order Noem might have issued would have applied to it in any case. The Smithfield experience had nothing to do with Noems policy.

One is tempted to stop there. The Posts attempted smear obviously missed its mark. But lets continue.

The point of the Post story is to convey the impression that Governor Noems reliance on voluntary measures, education, persuasion, and close cooperation with federal agencies, other governors, and the private sector is a failure. Strikingly absent from the Posts hit job, however, is the bottom line: how many South Dakotans have actually succumbed to COVID-19? The answer: 6, and none have been reported within the last week. South Dakota has one of the best coronavirus records of any state, but the Post didnt tell its readers that. It would have ruined the narrative.

Next: the Smithfield story is actually an interesting one, but the Post tells us essentially nothing about it. First of all, the Sioux Falls facility is massive. It has 3,700 employees, of whom fewer than 10% have tested positive for COVID-19. The Sioux Falls facility is one of the main pork producers in the U.S., turning out around 18 million servings of bacon, pork chops, etc., per day. You may wonder, why were so many diagnostic tests performed on employees at that plant? The answer is that Smithfield implemented an aggressive program, in partnership with two major hospital systems, whereby anyone who entered or left the facility was questioned and had his or her temperature taken. Anyone who reported having a cough, etc., or who showed an elevated temperature was tested for COVID-19.

Moreover, the Post article conveyed the impression that the Smithfield plant might become a ghost facility, closed forever due to South Dakotas failure to elect a Democratic governor. In fact, the plant will reopen in a matter of days. During the brief time it has been closed, Smithfield has been working intensively with the Centers for Disease Control, OSHA, and others, and is implementing measures as described by the company:

Smithfield has instituted a series of stringent and detailed processes and protocols that follow the strict guidance of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to effectively manage COVID-19 cases in its operations. These include mandatory 14-day COVID-19 related quarantines with pay as an uncompromising effort to protect its dedicated employees. The company has also relaxed attendance policies to eliminate any punitive effect for missing work due to COVID-19 diagnosis or quarantine. In addition, Smithfield is taking many measures to minimize its team members risks of contracting COVID-19. These include adding extra hand sanitizing stations, boosting personal protective equipment, continuing to stress the importance of personal hygiene, enhancing cleaning and disinfection, expanding employee health benefits, implementing thermal scanning, increasing social distancing, installing plexiglass and other physical barriers and restricting all nonessential visitors.

None of that made it into the Post story. All of us who like bacon appreciate Smithfields rapid return to production.

Next: the Post probably doesnt care very much about Governor Noem. Its true target, as always, is President Trump:

But the governor continued to resist. Instead, she used a media briefing Monday to announce trials of a drug that President Trump has repeatedly touted as a potential breakthrough in the fight against the coronavirus, despite a lack of scientific evidence.

Where to begin? The Posts ritual assertion that there is a lack of scientific evidence supporting the likely benefits of various forms of chloroquine, together with other medications, is ridiculous. The FDA has approved chloroquine as a COVID-19 treatment. Did it do so despite a lack of scientific evidence? In fact, there is abundant evidence from many international sources supporting the efficacy of chloroquine in various forms and in combination with several other drugs. To take just one example among many, a survey of more than 6,000 international physicians found that Hydroxychloroquine was the treatment deemed effective by the largest number, 37%. So the Lefts oft-repeated without evidence mantra is absurd.

As usual, the Lefts smears are boring, but what is actually happening is interesting. Governor Noem has been working closely with President Trump and Vice President Pence to set up the largest clinical trial of Hydroxychloroquine that, to my knowledge, has so far taken place. South Dakota has secured access to a large number of doses of Hydroxychloroquine from the national stockpile to conduct a series of tests, in conjunction with some of the Midwests major hospital groups.

There will be two tracks: one will test Hydroxychloroquine among those who have tested positive for COVID-19 and have been hospitalized. The second will be prophylactic, testing the drug among high-risk populations that have not been hospitalized, like health care workers. This will be a double-blind study that begins with a clinical trial involving 2,000 patients, but could be expanded to as many as 100,000. This study will tell us more about the effectiveness of Hydroxychloroquine than any other study has done, to my knowledge, to date.

The Washington Post tells us none of this, for obvious reasons. It is called science, and liberals hate it. In my experience, if you start analyzing numbers, if you actually use the scientific method, if you try to figure out what is the best policy rather than what is the Lefts narrative of the moment, you are anathema.

The Washington Post has no interest in science and hardly any interest in public health. Its agenda is obvious to all: elect Joe Biden! How Americas Left came to this sorry state is a topic for another day. For now, lets applaud Governor Kristi Noem and her science-based, and so far overwhelmingly successful, response to the COVID-19 epidemic.

Here is Governor Noem on Fox News, talking about South Dakotas Hydroxychloroquine trial:

And here is Governor Noem, on the Constitution and the proper limits on government power. This, of course, is what the liberals really hate:

Left-wing outlets like the Washington Post have no interest in accuracy, let alone fairness. Today South Dakota is the target, but really, they hate all of us who dont toe the party line.

PAUL ADDS: John has written another superb post. I comment only to call out the Washington Post reporter who produced this ridiculous hit piece. He is Griff Witte.
Highway troopers say a woman is facing charges after a head-on collision in Grand Forks County.

The accident happened one mile north of Manvel along Highway 81 at around 10:55 a.m. on Tuesday, according to North Dakota Highway Patrol.

Troopers said Pamela Reid, 43, of Bathgate was driving a 2007 silver Toyota Corolla on the southbound lane of Hwy 81 to Grand Forks when she slipped off the shoulder and overcorrected, swerving into the northbound lane.

Richard Waterfield, 64, of Stillwater, Minnesota, was driving his 2010 red Toyota Prius. He steered right to avoid Reids corolla, but both cars crashed head-on, according to NDHP.

The corolla came to a rest facing south on the northbound lane, while the prius was pushed into a ditch with standing water.

The roads were covered with snow.

Both suffered non-life threatening injuries and were taken to Altru Hospital in Grand Forks.

North Dakota Highway Patrol is still investigating the crash.
MANILA  Even before the coronavirus arrived in Manila, a saying in the capitals sprawling San Roque slum  no one dies from a fever  crystallized the many threats that its residents faced in their daily lives.

Drug-fueled petty crime. Food shortages. Overcrowding and poor sanitation. Fever, body aches and coughs were commonplace long before the virus came.

President Rodrigo Dutertes lockdown of Luzon, the Philippines largest island and home to Manila, is moving into its second month, plunging San Roques people even deeper into poverty as the virus continues to rage. Yet the restrictions have not stopped runny-nosed children from playing tag in the slums labyrinth of alleyways, as parents shout halfhearted admonitions to stay away from one another.
The 40-year-old man accused of having a pistol and ammunition in a housing estate in Cork city a fortnight ago has been refused bail at the High Court in Dublin.

Jonathan OSullivan of 55 Barretts Buildings, Gurranabraher, Cork, was arrested by Garda Keith Shier and charged with two counts namely having a firearm and having ammunition.

He was refused bail at Cork District Court previously.

Joseph Cuddigan, solicitor, said today that Jonathan OSullivan had also been refused in his application for bail after his appearance at the High Court.

Mr Cuddigan said: It is relatively early days for the case but it is not a case one would expect to be dealt with in the district court.

The solicitor said that on that basis he would anticipate that directions from the DPP would come through reasonably quickly.

Judge Olann Kelleher remanded the accused in custody until April 29 for DPP directions.

The firearm charge states that: On March 23 at Ardcullen, Hollyhill, Cork, in the District Court area of Cork city, he did have in his possession a firearm, to wit, a black. .380 ACP calibre Grand Power model G9A automatic pistol in such circumstances as to give rise to a reasonable inference that he had not got it in your possession for a lawful purpose contrary to the Firearms Act as amended by the Criminal Justice Act.

The wording on the second charge is similar but refers to a single round of ammunition, namely a .380 ACP calibre round, contrary to the same legislation.

During his bail application in the district court, Jonathan OSullivan claimed he was paid to drive a car from A to B and that was it.

He said he did not see the gun or ammunition in the car. He added that he did see the canister of petrol but knew nothing about it.

I presumed that was for spare fuel. I only got the car to pick it up and drop it at a certain location and I done that, OSullivan said.
President Donald Trump warned that he may adjourn both the House of Representatives and the Senate under recess provisions to appoint federal positions while noting that it has never been done before in the history of the United States.

The president, during a Wednesday night briefing, said hes considering exercising his constitutional rights to adjourn both chambers of Congress over held-up nominees, describing the Democratic-led efforts to block his appointments as a scam.

The U.S. Constitutions Article II, Section 3 stipulates that a president may, on extraordinary Occasions, convene both Houses, or either of them He may adjourn them to such time as he shall think proper.

Trump said in his briefing that the Senate should either formally vote on my nominees or it should formally adjourn so that I can make recess appointments. We have a tremendous number of people who have to come into government, and now more so than ever before because of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) virus, a type of novel coronavirus that causes the disease COVID-19.

Article II Section III gives the president the authority to call a special session of Congress. The DOJ apparently affirmed this authority in a 1947 opinion: https://t.co/1DXCGrzyBJ  Amber Athey (@amber_athey) April 15, 2020

If the House will not agree I will exercise my Constitutional authority to adjourn both Chambers of Congress. The current practice of leaving town while conducting phony pro forma sessions is a dereliction of duty the American people cant afford during this crisis, he added. It is a scam what they do.

Trump noted that the move to adjourn both chambers of Congress has perhaps never been done before.

But we need those people here, he said, referring to the held-up appointments in Congress. We need people for this crisis, and we dont want to play any more political games.

Trump noted that data suggested the county had passed the apex on new infections of the CCP virus.

As a result, he will announce new guidelines for reopening the U.S. economy on Thursday. We have passed the peak on new cases, he said. Its very exciting, he said.

Earlier this week, Trump said that he has the power to order governors to reopen their states. On Tuesday, he said he would guide the governors but allow them to decide when to reopen their states.

According to Johns Hopkins University, the United States has more than 630,000 cases of the CCP virus and more than 27,000 deaths as of Wednesday night.

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.

From The Epoch Times
The Fangzheng County Political and Legal Affairs Commission has a trolls meeting in Fangzheng in northeastern Chinas Heilongjiang province, China in 2020. (Provided to The Epoch Times by insider)

Revealing the Operations of Chinas Official Troll Army System

The Chinese regime employs online trolls to push its agenda on the internet. They are commonly referred to as the 50-cent army, so named because they are paid 50 cents for each online post that praises the Communist Partys policies, or insults those who express opinions that stray from the Party line.

They are typically ordinary citizens hired by internet companies or the regimes censorship and propaganda departments.

But in confidential government documents obtained by The Epoch Times, the Partys security apparatus, known as the Political and Legal Affairs Commission (PLAC), is revealed to be a major player as well.

The PLAC is a central government agency that oversees the countrys police, courts, and prisons. It has branches in each province, city, and township.

Screenshot of the leaked document Fangzheng County Trolls Work Summary (Year 2019) in April 2020. (Provided to The Epoch Times by insider)

Trolls Organization

The documents were from the Fangzheng county PLAC, released to different teams of trolls under its supervision. Fangzheng is a county in the city of Harbin, located in northeastern Chinas Heilongjiang province.

The PLAC oversees a professional army, a local army, and internet commentators.

The professional army are those working in government agencies. The local army are government staff in charge of residential areas and villages, as well as those working in state-run companies.The internet commentators are the 50-cent trolls hired from society.

Some trolls recently revealed that they are now typically paid 70 cents ($0.10) per post.

One of the documents explained the different armies objectives, which was to ensure internet speech aligned with the Chinese Communist Party.

[All armies] must make sure to cooperate with each other well have meetings regularly to discuss the hot internet topics and direct public opinion. Each member must have his or her goaland complete their missions.

Another document listed local members of troll armies and their leaders.

For example, the Fangzheng county public security bureau, akin to the police department, has 31 people working in the department in charge of trolls. Sun Naichen, head of the bureaus political division, is the director. Li Xuedong, deputy director of the political division, is the deputy director. Other members are staff at the county public security bureau as well as the smaller police stations within the county.

The local prosecutors office, court, and justice ministry also have their own troll teams, according to the documents. Their teams are relatively small, with four or five members.

Another document listed the trolls in the local army, with 336 individuals names, cell phone numbers, as well as the state-run company or government agency they work for.

The documents did not provide details about the people hired from society. Chinese independent economist and dissident Charles posted on his Twitter on April 5 a copy of an internal document that detailed the latest recruitment plans for the 50-cent army. The Epoch Times could not independently verify the authenticity of the document.

According to the post, the Chinese regimes goal is to hire 4 million trolls from universities and colleges, and another 6.23 million from society at large. There is a quota for each region of the country. For example, Beijing would hire 140,000 trolls from colleges, and 110,000 from society. Shandong province would hire 280,000 students and 500,000 others.

The Fangzheng County Political and Legal Affairs Commission has a trolls training in Fangzheng in northeastern Chinas Heilongjiang province, China in 2020. (Provided to The Epoch Times by insider)

Trolls Operations

Another document summarized how trolls within government agencies should operate.

The trolls receive training and have regular performance evaluations.

The trolls undergo an online training and testing system, each team monitored by a manager.

Every month, the county PLAC asks the managers to award or fine members according to their performances. The incentives include cash rewards and verbal praise.

The document asked all trolls to use typical netizen lingo to express the official Party opinion and guide public opinion on news websites, blogs, BBS [online forums], Weibo, WeChat, and other social media platforms, and so on.

In their posts, trolls should use words that are realistic, easy to accept by people, and fitting to everyday life, the document said.

Because different news topics appear every day, the document said trolls should update their knowledge in a timely manner and lead online discussions with normal netizens.

Screenshot of the leaked document Fangzheng County Trolls Operation Guidelines in April 2020. (Provided to The Epoch Times by insider)

PLAC

As early as 1996, Qiu He, then deputy mayor of Suqian city in eastern Chinas Jiangsu province organized government staff to post propaganda articles online. This was the first time that the Chinese regime tried to sway opinion on the internet.

Qiu was later dismissed from the Party for corruption crimes in 2015 and sentenced to 14 years in prison in December 2016.

Since 2004, more information has been revealed about the Chinese regimes troll operations.

On Dec. 29, 2017, state-run media Xinhua reported that the PLAC-operated news site Zhengyi Net hosted a meeting in Beijing and discussed achievements by trolls in the past nine years.

On May 24, 2018, Chen Yixin, secretary-general of the PLAC, organized a seminar in Beijing, in which he emphasized that trolls must keep the right political direction.

Chinas chief censorship agency, the Cyberspace Administration, also hires trolls to monitor internet posts, delete sensitive information, and post content favorable to the Chinese regime.

Liu, a post deletion officer working for a popular internet platform in China, told online magazine Bitter Winter on April 10 that his job was deleting posts mostly containing remarks criticizing and opposing the government.

At the internet platform, over 200 people were hired to do the same job, Liu said. The platform also hires individuals to delete articles, audio content, and pictures.

With the help of an automated filter, Liu said he can delete about 100,000 posts per day, which is his daily quota.
Unusual times make for unlikely heroes, and the COVID-19 pandemic is no exception.

With the pandemic invading nearly every aspect of our lives, the phrase working on the front lines has taken on a whole new meaning. Standing at a cash register is working on the front lines. So is stocking shelves, pumping gas and serving pharmacy customers.

Much like our emergency rescue workers, these essential employees face danger  in this case an invisible one  every single day. Constantly on the front lines, they show up for work day in and day out  often for extended hours  to make sure we have what we need to carry on some semblance of normalcy in these difficult times.

To be sure, they deserve our thanks and our appreciation. But they deserve more. They deserve protection.

We dont send emergency rescue workers into the fire without protective equipment. Likewise, we must not allow front-line retail workers  cashiers, pharmacy workers, gas station attendants and others who work in essential businesses  to battle this invisible enemy unprotected.

Thats why Im introducing legislation that would ensure these employees have safe working conditions that support them and their families, while also reducing the threat of spreading infectious disease into the community.

The COVID-19 Retail and Grocery Store Worker Safety Act would enact into state law the best practices for doing that. Those practices include social distancing of employees and customers, the use of barriers to decrease contact, store cleaning practices, employee access to hygiene stations and hand sanitizer, paid leave for sick employees and protocols for treating employees who are exposed to COVID-19 within the workplace.

Keeping us connected with essential goods and services is keeping us all alive. And the workers responsible for these essential duties should not be left to fend for themselves.

These heroes deserve no less than their own health and safety.

Patrick J. Harkins is a Democratic member of the Pennsylvania House of Representatives, 1st District.
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San Francisco, 15 April 2020: The Report Internet of Things (IoT) in Healthcare Market Size, Share & Trends Analysis Report By Component (Service, System & Software), By Connectivity Technology (Satellite, Cellular), By End Use (CRO, Hospital & Clinic), By Application, And Segment Forecasts, 2019 - 2025

Internet of Things is a network of interconnected devices. These interlinked devices are embedded with sensors, network connectivity, software, & other electronics that allow them collect & exchange data, making them communicable & responsive. IoT can carry out a lot of duties, in a lot of key industries, from a biochip transponder in a livestock, to a heart monitor implant in a person, or even a built-in sensor in a tire (alerting the driver of tire pressure).

Internet of Things in healthcare profits every stakeholder in the system, i.e., the physicians, the hospital, the health insurance companies, and most importantly, the patients. For physicians, helping in keeping track of the patients health; for hospitals, the real-time tracking of medical equipment and supplies; for insurance companies, the use of data from health monitoring devices regarding underwriting and claims operations, which ensures transparency; and for the patient, personalized attention and constant health tracking.

Access Research Report of Internet of Things in Healthcare Market @ https://www.grandviewresearch.com/industry-analysis/internet-of-things-iot-healthcare-market

Market Outlook

The Internet of Things in healthcare market is expected to be worth USD 534.3 billion by 2025, according to Grand View Research, Inc. North America dominated the market in 2018, with the region largely driven by its technological advancements, medical infrastructure, legislative initiatives and high disposable incomes.

Many organizations are implementing IoT in healthcare in unique ways, such as Nexleaf Analytics, a California based company that offers a ColdTrace system to improve conditions for vaccines and cooking; SystemOne, a barcode and label systems specialist that transmits real time medical diagnostic data to physicians and other healthcare workers; and Aclima, which has teamed up with Google, the Environmental Defense Fund and the University of Texas researchers to deeply understand the air quality patterns in towns and cities across the globe.

Competitive Analysis

Philips, Microsoft, IBM, Cisco, and Cerner are some of the major players in the global Internet of Things in healthcare market. Specialized product developments, research collaborations, and acquisitions are the key strategies adopted by market competitors to gain an edge over others.

Some of the recent developments in the Internet of Things in healthcare market include:

In March 2020, Philips launched the HealthSuite Systemof Engagement , which offers cloud-based managed AI workflow and DICOM interoperability through an integrated and modular set of standards. The system offers IoT, HIPAA-compliant Data Management and Identity and Access Management capabilities.

, which offers cloud-based managed through an integrated and modular set of standards. The system offers IoT, HIPAA-compliant Data Management and Identity and Access Management capabilities. In February 2020, CyberMDX , which provides medical cybersecurity solutions, completed an integration certification for the Microsoft Azure Security Center for IoT , which would integrate detection and visibility capabilities of the former to receive intelligent clinical context security analytics.

, which provides medical cybersecurity solutions, completed an integration certification for the , which would integrate detection and visibility capabilities of the former to receive intelligent clinical context security analytics. In December 2019, Cerner partnered with Medigate, a specialist in medical device security and asset management, to assist the healthcare customers develop a stringent network security and manage security demands on different devices.

Access Press Release of Internet of Things in Healthcare Market @ https://www.grandviewresearch.com/press-release/global-iot-in-healthcare-market
Governor Bill Lee on Wednesday said he was extending school closures through the end of the school year and creating a COVID-19 Child Well-being Task Force.

I appreciate the governors recommendation schools remain closed through the end of the school year to protect the health and safety of all Tennesseans. The coronavirus pandemic is constantly evolving, and we are only starting to see how this pandemic is affecting our children, said Dr. Penny Schwinn, state education commissioner.

Children being out of school for such a long time has significant implications for a childs wellbeing, and this poses a different kind of challenge for all of us, as communities and as a state. There is critical work ahead, and I am honored to convene the COVID-19 Child Wellbeing Task Force in the coming weeks to focus state and local leaders on the well-being of Tennessees children.

Commissioner Schwinn will be convening a COVID-19 Child Well-being Task Force to support local leaders and communities in caring for our students, particularly those who are vulnerable or most at risk. Details about the Task Force will be announced in the coming weeks.

She said the Tennessee Department of Education has developed and designed a number of resources for optional, free use by local districts. This includes school closure toolkits; three times per week superintendent calls; instructional, daily programming on PBS and companion teacher, student and family guides; free access for all families to early childhood platform ReadyRosie; SchoolMea lFinder website for families to locate meal services; a STE(A)M Resource Hub; as well as federal waivers with a focus on nutrition, accountability, and special education.
NEW DELHI: COVID-19 outbreak has made seamless digital communication an important part of our daily life. The Ministry of Electronics & IT is calling 'Teams with experience in software development' to participate in the 'Innovation Challenge for Development of VC Solution'.

With more than half a billion internet subscribers, India is riding high on the digital front. All facets of the economy are leveraging technology for wider reach, convenience and effectiveness. The sudden outbreak of COVID-19 has made digital the most important part of our daily life.

The Centre is taking all necessary steps to ensure that we are prepared well to face the challenge and threat posed by the growing pandemic of coronavirus. The outbreak has led to the unprecedented enforcement of lockdown throughout the country. The concept of Work From Home (WFH), which was till now mostly synonymous with IT industry has become a household term. With Organizations having asked employees to WFH, video conferencing has become an integral part of daily life.

The National Policy on Software Products-2019 has also a vision to drive the rise of India as a Software Product Nation, so as to make India as a global player in development, production and supply of innovative and efficient Software Products, thus facilitating the growth across the entire spectrum of ICT sector. The present proposal would be one of the key product, having a tremendous capability for scalability, market and domestic value addition.

In the light of these developments, the Ministry of Electronics & Information Technology has announced an Innovation Challenge for Development of a Video Conferencing Solution under the Make in India Initiative.

The application must have features but not limited to the few indicated below:

 Should support all video resolutions and audio quality, should work in low and high network scenarios

 Should be low on the usage of power/ processor

 Should not have any external hardware dependency

 Should work on any device

 Should have chat option during the conference, even the multi people conference

 Should have sign-in and non-sign-in options to join a conference

 Can be browser and/or app-based interface

 Should have encrypted network communication

 Should have an audio/video recording feature

 Should have screen/file-sharing capabilities

 Should allow audio to close captioning during the chat (multilingual)

 Should have capabilities to host multiple concurrent conferences having multiple participants in each conference

The Innovation Challenge is open for participation in teams having experts from all domains of a software development life cycle. It would be in three (3) stages: -

a. Ideation (Stage-1): Teams will have to propose their innovative and cutting edge ideas of their solution. Top 10 teams would be selected from this stage. Each team will receive a funding of INR 5 Lakh to build the prototype.

b. Prototype (Stage-2): Build the prototype of the solution. These shortlisted entries from Stage-1 will get a chance to present their prototypes to a distinguished Jury. Top 3 teams will be shortlisted for the Final Stage. Each team will receive a funding of INR 20 Lakh to build the solution.

c. Solution Building (Final Stage): The winner will get a fixed amount of INR 1 Crore along with a certificate from the Honble Minister of Electronics & IT towards deploying the solution for use by Government of India and State Governments for a year and further support @ Rs 10 lakhs per year towards Operations & Maintenance.

Last date for registration: April 30, 2020.
Asia virus latest: Bangkok hospitals protect babies with face shields

THAILAND: Here are the latest developments in Asia related to the novel coronavirus pandemic:

CoronavirusCOVID-19

By AFP

Wednesday 15 April 2020, 10:43AM

There are fears that coronavirus infections in South Asia could skyrocket and overwhelm shaky healthcare systems. Photo: AFP

Bangkok hospitals protect babies with face shields

Fast asleep, swaddled in a towel and snug in a pink beanie, a baby born during a pandemic in a Thai hospital needs one last item to ensure its health - a face shield.

Bangkok hospitals are using them on newborns in their maternity wards to prevent the spread of the coronavirus.

Taiwan reports no new infections

Taiwan reported no new infections, the first time the daily tally has been zero in 36 days.

The island was hit early by the coronavirus but managed to keep initial infections low and stop the disease spreading locally.

Taiwan also suffered a second wave of cases - but the latest figures offer hope that authorities have managed to bring it under control.

Bali surfers in hot water

More than a dozen foreign surfers on the Indonesian holiday island of Bali were given warnings by authorities after breaking virus rules by hitting the waves on closed beaches.

Meanwhile, some other foreigners were pilloried online after photos of a group of them partying on the island went viral on social media.

India nationwide lockdown extended

Indias nationwide lockdown, the biggest imposed in the world over the coronavirus pandemic, will be extended until at least May 3, Prime Minister Narendra Modi said.

The current three-week-old lockdown of the nation of 1.3 billion people had been scheduled to end at midnight yesterday.

From the economic angle, we have paid a big price, Modi said in a nationwide address. But the lives of the people of India are far more valuable.

South Asian nations have so far been relatively unscathed by the epidemic, with around 10,000 cases and 339 deaths in India, according to official figures.

Some experts say India has not conducted enough tests and that the true number of infections is much higher.

And with some of the most crowded cities on the planet, there are fears that numbers could take off and overwhelm the shaky healthcare system.

Asean leaders meet online

Vietnam and Thailand will urge Southeast Asian leaders to set up an emergency fund to tackle the coronavirus at a summit held online, as the pandemic ravages the regions tourism and export-reliant economies.

Hanoi is chairing an Association of Southeast Asian Nations (Asean) meeting on COVID-19, with the country touting its success so far in containing the virus with extensive quarantines and social distancing. (See story here).

Singapore allows teachers to use Zoom again

The city-state is allowing teachers to resume using Zoom, the video-conferencing platform said, following its suspension for online lessons last week after gatecrashers interrupted a class and made lewd comments.

Zoom, which has exploded in popularity but faces growing security concerns, said it had taken steps to address the education ministrys concerns, including giving officials control over teacher accounts.

Singapore meanwhile reported 386 new coronavirus cases, its biggest increase in a single day, as the city-state battles a growing second wave of infections.

Australia, New Zealand flatten virus curve but keep lockdowns intact

Australia and New Zealand brushed aside calls for an easing of tough restrictions on travel and public gatherings despite their success in curbing the spread of COVID-19.

The number of new coronavirus cases in the neighbouring nations has fallen dramatically in the last two weeks, raising hopes that difficult social distancing measures may be relaxed.

Tasmania, meanwhile, ordered an investigation into reports of an illegal dinner party attended by medical workers that caused an outbreak of COVID-19 and forced two hospitals in the Australian island state to close.

Markets rise on China trade data

Asian markets posted gains as better than expected Chinese trade data suggested a rebound from the economic devastation wrought by the coronavirus pandemic.

China reports more imported cases

China reported 89 new coronavirus infections, 86 of which were imported from overseas.

The country where the virus emerged last year has largely brought its domestic outbreak under control, but faces a growing second wave of infections brought in from overseas by returning nationals.

Worlds smallest woman in India stay-at-home virus appeal

The worlds shortest woman took to the streets in central India to call on people to stay at home, after police appealed for help enforcing a coronavirus lockdown.

Jyoti Amge, who is just 62.8 centimetres tall (just over two feet tall), encouraged people to wash their hands and wear a mask and gloves when they leave their homes as she made appearances across Nagpur city, in Maharashtra state.
UPDATE: Fire at empty Jersey Shore home labeled accidental

Jersey Shore firefighters battled a house fire in Stone Harbor this morning.

The blaze, on 118th Street, broke out around 7 a.m. in the 200 block and firefighters remain on the scene at this hour. Officials have not said if anyone was injured.

Companies from neighboring communities have responded to assist, according to witnesses.

Firefighters could be seen on a ladder truck working to attack the smokey blaze on the second floor.

8 Firefighters battle Stone Harbor house fire

While most damage is confined to one house, some damage was reported to a neighboring structure, witnesses said.

The home is a summer residence and was not occupied at the time, according to Stone Harbor resident Ann Delaney, who shared images of the blaze on Twitter. The owners of the home have been notified, she said.

She praised Stone Harbor firefighters for their rapid response and efforts to protect nearby homes from damage.

The fire department does an amazing job, she said.

Matt Gray may be reached at mgray@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter @MattGraySJT. 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.
It is estimated that there are more than 65,000 H-1B visa holders from India in the USA currently. (AFP)

Hyderabad: Thousands of people from Andhra and Telangana holding H-1B visas in the USA are facing massive layoffs in the next few months.

Many companies in the US have started downsizing, amid the economic fallout of the COVID-19 pandemic.

H1-B visa holders, who have been laid off, have 60 days to find a new job. Those who fail to do so are possibly looking at deportation.

Pranitha (name changed), a Hyderabad native and an H-1B Visa holder residing in Mountain View, California, said she had lost her job in a major MNC a week ago.

She said, I got an email telling me the organisation was forced to downsize and they were losing clients. I was let go by the end of that day.

She is currently holed up in her apartment, preparing for interviews.

However, there arent many, given the current situation. I am seriously coming to terms with the fact that I might have to return home in June, she said, adding she personally knew several people who were in a similar situation.

Even if you are fortunate enough to find another job in the next few weeks, it won't be an easy process to ensure your stay in the US. When an H-1B visa holder changes jobs, their new employer has to file a form to update the visa holders employment details with the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS).

Normally, most companies would file a request for expedited processing, which would allow this process to be over within 15 days. However, in view of the ongoing COVID-19 crisis, USCIS had discontinued this service from March 20, until further notice.

The US Department of Homeland Services (DHS), however, announced on Tuesday that it would allow people whose Visas were expiring to apply for extension along with valid reasons.

People with the same employer, whose visas were up for renewal, will be automatically extended by 240 days.

Those without employment would have to apply for a Change of Status (COS) or Extension of Stay (EOS) to continue staying in the US, but on a different visa (eg., H-1B to a visitor visa).

Chinna (name changed), a recently-unemployed H1B visa holder from Hyderabad, living in Minnesota, said, It isnt clear if this extension is a way for us to leave the USA legally (without deportation) or to give us time to look for jobs. I have to speak to my immigration consultancy regarding this. A lot of my friends are confused right now about this development, he said.

Chinna said he wasnt sure if the DHSs announcement has any effect on the 60-day deadline on H-1B visas.

If I get a job at another place, my employer could apply for a change of status, even if it takes a long time. If I dont get a job, I dont know whether I have to get a visitor visa or not so I can leave legally when airports open up or if I can, in fact, stay on and look for another job, he said.

It is estimated that there are more than 65,000 H-1B visa holders from India in the USA currently.

There is currently a petition on the White Houses official website, asking the United States Federal government to increase the 60-day period to 180 days. It went live on March 19.

It has since gotten over 52,000 signatures. However, in order to get an official update on the petition from the White House, it has to get at least 100,000 signatures by April 18.
VANCOUVER, BC / ACCESSWIRE / April 15, 2020 / FinCanna Capital Corp. ("FinCanna") (CSE:CALI)(OTCQB:FNNZF) a royalty company for the U.S. licensed cannabis industry is pleased to announce that its portfolio company, QVI Inc., a cannabis-infused product manufacturer located in Sonoma County, California and doing business as "The Galley", has completed the build out of its co-manufacturing facility and has been issued its California Cannabis Manufacturing License Type N, by the Manufactured Cannabis Safety Branch, CA Department of Public Health. The Type N licenses permits "The Galley" to manufacture, package and label all cannabis infused products.

The Galley is an 8,300 square foot state-of-the-art co-manufacturing facility designed to meet the highest Food and Drug Administration and California Dept. of Public Health standards. The facility is built to FDA and CDPH standards and is focused on high demand areas of production; Edibles, Topicals, Tinctures, Chocolates, Hard Candies, Gummies, Beverages, Vapes, Pre-Rolls and Flower Packaging.

Having received its state manufacturing license, The Galley team expects to be shipping finished products to the market within the next four to six weeks.

Annie Holman, Co-Founder of QVI said, "Receiving our manufacturing license is a major victory for the Galley, and we are excited to now be open for business. We designed and built the Galley to be the premier co-manufacturing facility in California, offering true one-stop shopping for both in and out-of-state brands. Our client list is substantial, and we will be onboarding them as quickly as we can, which positions us for strong growth. In addition, and unlike other sectors of the cannabis market, there is significantly less competition from the "black market' for the edibles that we produce."

"This is a major milestone for the QVI team and for FinCanna shareholders," said Andriyko Herchak, CEO of FinCanna Capital. "QVI is very well positioned to capitalize on a growing market opportunity for high-quality cannabis infused products as evidenced by the strong demand for their services. The Galley delivers exceptional benefits to brands seeking to expand their product offerings and growth prospects across California. We applaud QVI's efforts and look forward to a prosperous future for The Galley as well as a significant source of recurring and increasing royalties for FinCanna."

Under the Royalty Agreement, FinCanna will receive a tiered corporate royalty, adjusted based on revenues, ranging from 15% to 6% of QVI's total revenues, with the top royalty rate of 15% on the first US$20 million of annual sales until cumulative royalties to FinCanna of US$10 million are achieved. In addition, FinCanna is entitled to earn a Supplemental Payment, when coupled with the royalty, will now ensure FinCanna receives a minimum of 35% of the annual after-tax net income from QVI. The supplemental payment will accrue annually and be paid out upon certain triggering events, including a change of control, an initial public offering or certain other specified events of QVI.

About QVI

QVI, which stands for Quality, Value and Integrity, is located in Sonoma County, California. Their purpose-built facility known as The Galley is differentiated from other contract manufactures by its automated capabilities to produce virtually all high-value cannabis products at large volumes under one roof. The facility is built to FDA and CDPH standards and is focused on high demand areas of production; Edibles, Topicals, Tinctures, Chocolates, Hard Candies, Gummies, Beverages, Vapes, Pre-Rolls and Flower Packaging.

QVI's immediate goal is to become the premier contract manufacturer in California, the largest single market in North America and, upon success, to license products nationally and globally.

About FinCanna Capital Corp.

FinCanna is a royalty company that provides growth capital to rapidly emerging private companies operating in the licensed U.S cannabis industry. The company earns its revenue from royalties paid by its investee companies that are calculated based on a percentage their total revenues.

FinCanna's scalable royalty model provides an attractive alternative or complement to debt or equity financing for its investee companies. FinCanna is focused on delivering high-impact returns to its shareholders by way of a strategically diversified investment portfolio.

For additional information visit www.fincannacapital.com and FinCanna's profile at www.sedar.com

FinCanna Capital Corp.

Andriyko Herchak, CEO & Director

Investor Relations:

Arlen Hansen

Kin Communications

1-866-684-6730

CALI@kincommunications.com

Forward-Looking Information

Information set forth in this news release may involve forward-looking statements under applicable securities laws. Forward-looking statements are statements that relate to future, not past, events. In this context, forward-looking statements often address expected future business and financial performance, and often contain words such as "anticipate", "believe", "plan", "estimate", "expect", and "intend", statements that an action or event "may", "might", "could", "should", or "will" be taken or occur, or other similar expressions. All statements, other than statements of historical fact, included herein including, without limitation, statements about the market for, and effectiveness of, QVI products or services, the ability of QVI to commence and expand operations and generate sales, revenues profits and positive cashflows, the results of operations of QVI and the timing thereof, QVI's client lists, FinCanna's ability to fund and source future projects, and FinCanna's ability to earn and realize revenues from its investee companies. By their nature, forward-looking statements involve known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors, which may cause the 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 risks identified in the CSE listing statement available at www.SEDAR.com and other reports and filings with the applicable Canadian securities regulators. Forward-looking statements are made based on management's beliefs, estimates and opinions on the date that statements are made, and the respective companies undertake no obligation to update forward-looking statements if these beliefs, estimates and opinions or other circumstances should change, except as required by applicable securities laws. Investors are cautioned against attributing undue certainty to forward-looking statements.

SOURCE: FinCanna Capital Corp.

View source version on accesswire.com:https://www.accesswire.com/585131/FinCanna-Portfolio-Company-QVI-Inc-Receives-California-Manufacturing-License-for-Production-of-Cannabis-Infused-Products
BERLIN (Reuters) - Germany's government will extend restrictions on movement introduced last month to slow the spread of the coronavirus until at least May 3, Handelsblatt business daily reported on Wednesday, citing the dpa news agency.

Chancellor Angela Merkel is holding a video conference on Wednesday first with cabinet ministers and later with the leaders of Germany's 16 states who will try to agree on whether to ease the measures given some improvement in the situation.

(Writing by Madeline Chambers; Editing by Michelle Martin)
Coronavirus cases in the Veterans Affairs health system may be double the number officially reported at some medical care sites, according to internal hospital memos.

On Tuesday the number of infected veterans treated at VA facilities surged to 4,261 patients across 118 department sites, officials said. It's a major jump from the 30 cases reported just a month ago on March 14.

However, the number of actual infected patients could actually be twice as high, according to documents obtained by the Military Times that reveal inconsistencies in case reporting.

A discrepancy was found at the Louis Stokes Cleveland VA Medical Center in Ohio where the VA reported 37 inpatient and outpatient cases.

However, an internal hospital memo issued on Monday seen by the Times shows 66 already-confirmed cases of the illness among patients.

Coronavirus cases in the Veterans Affairs health system may be double the number officially reported at some medical care sites, according to internal hospital memos. The VA reported 37 inpatient and outpatient virus cases at the Louis Stokes Cleveland VA Medical Center in Ohio. However, an internal hospital memo issued on Monday shows 66 already-confirmed cases of the illness among patients

The hospital has not commented on the gap in reporting. Veterans Affairs is yet to reply to DailyMail.com's request for comment.

That reports comes on the heels of another internal memo that was exposed by the Wall Street Journal last week and revealed major problems in the availability of personal protective equipment at VA sites, despite the organizations insistence that staff supplies were adequate.

As of Tuesday stats, 257 patients and at least nine VA staffers have died from coronavirus-related complications.

Among VA patients, the death rate from COVID-19 is about six percent  well above the rate for the country as a whole.

The latest national data by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention show about a four percent death rate among Americans from the virus.

However, the VA population tested and treated for COVID-19 is much older than the American population as a whole and health experts say that the elderly are more vulnerable to the killer virus.

Testing for COVID-19 for veterans is up outside PFC Floyd K. Lindstrom Department of Veterans Affairs Clinic in Colorado Springs, Colorado on April 2

Air Force veteran Willie Williams, 63, looks to cross the street outside the Soldiers' Home in Chelsea, Massachusetts on April 6

So far only one person in VA care COVID-19 fatality has been under the age of 40. Nearly three-quarters of VA patient deaths from the virus have been 70 or older.

Today the epicenter of the virus is in New York, where the Big Apple boasts about 19 percent of all confirmed virus cases in the country.

On Tuesday the VAs medical center in Brooklyn became the deadliest site within the system with 32 fatalities, surpassing the departments hospital in New Orleans that had reported 31 fatalities.

The VAs center in the Bronx has seen 27 deaths.

The New Orleans site has the most confirmed coronavirus cases in the departments health system reporting 429 cases.

On Tuesday the VAs medical center in Brooklyn became the deadliest site within the system with 32 fatalities, surpassing the departments hospital in New Orleans that had reported 31 fatalities. The Brooklyn VA medical center above

While the VA is scrambling to treat the mounting number of cases, officials have activated a fourth mission to make more than 1,500 beds available for non-veteran patients.

On Tuesday the department reported caring for 80 outside patients in New York, 24 in New Jersey, 27 in Michigan and four in New Mexico.

Five of those patients in New York and one in New Jersey died from the illness.

VA Secretary Robert Wilkie shared a statement saying: 'Helping Veterans is our first mission, but in many locations across the country were helping states and local communities. VA is in this fight not only for the millions of veterans we serve each day; were in the fight for the people of the United States.'

A veterans home in Massachusetts is now under investigation by federal authorities after at least 18 residents died from the virus after it emerged that infected employees were still showing up to work.

Two employees at the Soldiers' Home (pictured) in Massachusetts, where at least 18 residents have died after contracting the coronavirus, are still working out of fear for their job despite testing for positive for the virus

Two other employees, Carmen Rivera and Joe Ramirez, who fell ill with the virus and have been out since last month, said their coworkers are fearful of losing their jobs. The National Guard was sent to the veterans home amid the outbreak

The Department of Justice announced on Friday that it would be investigating the Soldiers' Home in Holyoke to determine if the facility was providing adequate care for its residents amid the coronavirus pandemic.

It comes after two employees who tested positive for coronavirus were still showing up for work out of fear of losing their jobs.

The federal investigation is separate from a state investigation that is currently underway.

Across the nation there are 152 VA Medical Centers and 1,400 community-based outpatient clinics in the US.
Suzanna Fritzberg, former deputy chief of staff and policy director for Pete Buttigieg, the 2020 Democratic president hopeful and former mayor of South Bend, Indiana, has been tapped to lead Birmingham Strong.

A native of Washington, Fritzberg is a Yale and Oxford graduate and holds degrees in policy administration and political theory. She is also a Rhodes Scholar. Fritzberg worked with Buttigieg both during his time as mayor of South Bend and during his presidential campaign, which ended March 1. She served as Buttigiegs policy director and deputy chief of staff from September 2016 to April 2019. She worked as an associate policy director for his political campaign from August 2019 until his campaign ended.

Frtizberg spoke by phone with AL.com Tuesday afternoon from downtown Birmingham. Shes already begun her job as executive director of Birmingham Strong, LLC. Birmingham Strong, LLC, the publicly and privately funded company, is working to help small businesses and workers impacted by the coronavirus pandemic.

Birmingham Strong serves both small businesses and workers impacted by coronavirus. The first round of Birmingham Strong emergency small business loans are being approved now. On Tuesday, Birmingham Strong started accepting applications for the Birmingham Strong Service Corps--a job program that places workers unemployed due to coronavirus in jobs that meet community needs.

Her work with Buttigieg in South Bend focused on issues related to human services and public health. On the campaign, she helped shape policy around antipoverty measures, housing, early childhood education and workforce issues.

I learned an immense amount in that work about the value of partnership and how to tap into a community, Fritzberg said.

Having an orientation on the city government level is pretty valuable in that I have a working understand of how we can leverage some of the federal assets we have with CARES Act, but I also have the muscle memory of building public partnerships.

Fritzberg said she plans to stay in Birmingham while shes working as executive director.

A spokesperson for Birmingham Strong said Fritzbergs salary will be paid by a private investor group. Details about that group and Fritzbergs salary were not provided.
Gandhinagar, April 15 : With at least 65 corona positive cases being reported on a daily basis for the past one week, Gujarat has almost 700 positive cases from 23 of its 33 districts. As the testing intensifies, more and more positive cases are being detected, especially in Ahmedabad, which accounts for more than half the state's total.

During the last week, over 430 positive cases were added in the state --around 250 from Ahmedabad alone in the same period.

State health authorities have found out that of the total positive cases detected, most were from Muslim-dominated areas where the Tablighi Jamaat members had returned from Delhi's Nizamuddin.

The state government then announced 28 hotspots in the state's five major cities where a strict and ruthless lockdown was implemented.

Due to aggressive and intense surveillance and testing in hotspots of five major cities and elsewhere, the number of positive cases, starting from April 7 jumped from a total of 144 to 378 in just 4 days.

Most cases in the spike were reported from Ahmedabad, Vadodara and Bhavnagar. Later, the health authorities felt that the spike in the number of positive cases had reached a peak and no further rise was expected.

"We feel that the number of positive cases in hotspots has reached a saturation point. From tomorrow onwards we will be focusing on other areas of the state, where the virus has not shown its presence," Jayanti Ravi, Gujarat Health Secretary, had said on April 10.

However, the numbers of positive cases spiked since then. From a total of 378 in the state on the April 10, after five days, the count went up touching the 700 mark (695 on Wednesday). Similarly, Ahmedabad saw a climb in positive cases from 197 to 404 on Wednesday.

Not only is the virus rapidly spreading in hotspots, but it is also penetrating into the lesser commutable parts of the state, which had previously escaped from its stranglehold. During the last week, the virus has shown its presence in areas such as Banaskantha, Sabarkantha, Panchmahal, Dahod, Kheda and Botad.

Ahmedabad has the most of positive cases (404), followed by Vadodara (116), Surat (48), Bhavnagar (26), Rajkot (18), Gandhinagar (16), Patan (14), Bharuch (11), Anand (10), Panchmahal and Chotta Udepur with 5 each, Kutch and Mehsana with 4 each, Gir-Somnath, Dahod and Banaskantha two each and Jamnagar, Morbi, Sabarkantha, Botad and Kheda one each.

In the wake of a significant spike in the number of positive cases in hotspots in Ahmedabad, the Gujarat government on Tuesday imposed a week-long curfew in the walled city and in the Danilimda area.
A formula built with mathematical modeling can overcome the problems in traditional approaches, say Oregon and British Columbia researchers

EUGENE, Ore. - April 15, 2020 -- When species under a taxonomic umbrella have faced forks in the road, leading to extinction or adaptation, the path taken has been difficult to follow. In a newly published paper, two scientists argue that long-used approaches for reconstructing these paths are deeply flawed.

While paleontological evidence provides insights on how and why patterns of biodiversity have changed over geological time, fossil finds for many types of organisms are too scant to say anything, said University of Oregon biologist Stilianos Louca, lead author of a paper placed online April 15 ahead of print in the journal Nature.

An alternative approach, he noted, relies on using identifiable changes in an organism's genetic makeup, but the signal in this type of data can be misleading.

"Our finding casts serious doubts over literally thousands of studies that use phylogenetic trees of extant data to reconstruct the diversification history of taxa, especially for those taxa where fossils are rare, or that found correlations between environmental factors such as changing global temperatures and species extinction rates," said Louca, who is a member of the UO's Institute of Ecology and Evolution.

In their paper, Louca and Matthew W. Pennell, an evolutionary biologist at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, also offer a way forward - a mathematical model that introduces alternative variables to characterize long-term evolutionary scenarios that can be accurately identified from phylogenetic data.

"I have been working with these traditional types of models for a decade now," Pennell said. "I am one of the lead developers of a popular software package for estimating diversification rates from phylogenetic trees. And, as such, I thought I had a really good sense of how these models worked. I was wrong."

In their paper, the researchers note that long-used methods extract information about evolution from still-living organisms, using variants of a mathematical birth-death process. These, however, cannot possibly extract information about both speciation and extinction rates, especially for a majority of taxa, such as bacteria, that have left no fossil record.

The paleontological approach estimates the number of species that have appeared and disappeared in various intervals based on discovered fossils and their estimated minimum and maximum ages. In the phylogenetic approach, information is extracted from evolutionary relationships between existing species, using mostly genetic data, and structured in phylogenetic trees known as timetrees.

This is often done by finding a speciation/extinction scenario that would have been the most likely to generate a given phylogenetic tree.

"While an impressive suite of computational methods has been developed over the past decades for extracting whatever information is left, until now we lacked a good understanding of exactly what information is left in these trees, and what information is forever lost," Louca said.

Louca and Pennell's mathematically driven approach clarifies precisely what information can be extracted from extant timetrees under the generalized birth-death model. The researchers introduce new identifiable and easily interpretable variables that contain all available information about past diversification dynamics and how they can be estimated.

"We suggest that measuring and modeling these identifiable variables offers a more robust way to study historical diversification dynamics," they write in the paper. "Our findings also make clear that paleontological data will continue to be crucial for answering some macroevolutionary questions."

"The future depends on synthesizing information from datasets of both molecules and fossils," Pennell said.

The researchers emphasize that their results do not invalidate the theory of evolution itself, they just put constraints on what type of information can possibly be extracted from genetic data to reconstruct evolution's path.

###

The pair's paper will appear in the April 23 print issue of Nature.

Louca, who joined the UO last year after earning his doctorate at the University of British Columbia, was supported by a start-up grant from the UO. Pennell had funding from a discovery grant from Canada's Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council.

Media Contacts: Jim Barlow, director of science and research communications, 541-346-3481, jebarlow@uoregon.edu; Chris Balma, director of communications, science faculty, University of British Columbia, balma@science.ubc.ca

Links:

About Stilianos Louca: https://biology.uoregon.edu/profile/slouca/

Louca Lab: http://www.loucalab.com/

UO Department of Biology: https://biology.uoregon.edu/

UO Institute of Ecology and Evolution: https://ie2.uoregon.edu/

About Matthew Pennell: https://www.zoology.ubc.ca/person/matthew-pennell
An Ongoing Series on Coronavirus

Listen, and understand! That Terminator is out there! It cant be bargained with. It cant be reasoned with. It doesnt feel pity, or remorse, or fear. And it absolutely will not stop  ever, until you are dead. Hell find her! Thats what he does! Thats all he does! You cant stop him! Hell wade through you, reach down her throat and pull her heart out!

 Reese, referring to Arnold Schwarzeneggers character in The Terminator.

That chilling dialogue from 1984s The Terminator still remains part of pop culture lingo. Interestingly, many parallels can be drawn between the Terminators methodologies and a virus: neither feels remorse in whom it targets, neither is easily defeated, and neither will stop pursuing its objective. Fortunately, the COVID-19 coronavirus (C19) is not as interested in ending life as the Terminator was, and for good reason: a virus that kills its host quickly eventually commits suicide by starving itself of more victims. In no way is that minimizing the staggering death toll of C19, as the numbers are overwhelming for a world that hasnt seen this type of global pandemic in 100 years, but it could be far worse.

We will eventually beat coronavirus, likely because of American science. But until then, now is this time to assess what we must do, looking forward, to prepare for a re-emergence of C19 (should it go dormant during the summer), a new strain (should it mutate), or a brand new viral or bacterial threat.

To bolster Americas security, the top priority should be bringing home the big M: manufacturing  in particular, production of medicines and masks  so that America is never again on her knees during a crisis.

*

Medicine Manufactured In China: In the 1970s, this author remembers playing games in the car with his dad for what seemed like an eternity. To that little boy, the barely-moving line of cars was a mile long, as vehicles snaked around fuel pumps, out gas station exits, and down the road for blocks. This disruption of daily life, caused by the Arab nations OPEC oil embargo, resulted in soaring fuel costs, rationed gasoline and exorbitant wait times.

It took several decades, but America finally got it. Realizing the severe cost to its national and economic security  let alone its prestige  the United States decided to stop placing its vital interests in the hands of foreign nations. In doing so, it slowed one of the greatest transfers of wealth in history  petrol dollars from American consumers and corporations to Middle Eastern oil barons. No longer content being bent over the barrel, America strove for energy independence, and, by God, how we succeeded. Harnessing revolutionary new technologies, the U.S. shale (natural gas) and petroleum industries went into overdrive, and, low and behold, the United States is now the worlds leading oil producer (and a net exporter). Most important, it no longer relies on other nations for black gold. Lesson learned.

That same commitment must now be geared toward medicine independence. A staggering percentage of our medications are manufactured elsewhere, with upwards of 80 percent of pharmaceutical ingredients and drugs being produced in China and India. According to the Commerce Department, as reported by Politico, China accounted for 95 percent of U.S. imports of ibuprofen, 91 percent of hydrocortisone, 70 percent of acetaminophen, 40 percent of penicillin and 40 percent of heparin. Thats insane, and tragically ironic, since American companies do the heavy lifting in developing drugs, conducting clinical trials, and implementing safety protocols. Yet after all that, many ingredients and drugs are manufactured in foreign nations. That must end.

At any moment, China could cut off drug shipments to America, effectively weaponizing our life-saving medications. What then? And what if a bio-weapon was unleashed on American military forces or U.S. citizens, but China was the only country that manufactured the antidote drug? We certainly wouldnt outsource the construction of the presidential limousine or a nuclear aircraft carrier to China, so why are we outsourcing our national health to a country that is, at times, an adversary?

This is where partisan politics need to be put aside. Hard as it may be for some to swallow, the leader most capable of achieving medicine independence is President Trump. His take-the-bull-by-the-horns approach, while not ideal for every issue, is exactly whats needed to solve this problem. Put another way, what we dont need are establishment politicians shouting that medical independence must be achieved  but whispering that it can only be done through diplomatic back channels and intricately worded political nuances, so as not to offend China. Sorry, but the time for pussyfooting is done.

Why Mr. Trump? Because he called for more domestic drug production back in September. And his track record in getting similar initiatives accomplished, while others of both political parties had only given lip service, speaks volumes. Consider:

 He made NATO countries pay their previously agreed-upon fair share, when for decades they had not, instead sticking America with the bill.

 He was the first modern president to lower the corporate tax rate, thus reducing the exodus of companies to overseas domains, and paving the way for trillions in repatriated monies to return to American shores.

 He was the first commander-in-chief to rip up one-sided trade deals with China and compel that nation to renegotiate fairer terms.

 Most recently, Mr. Trump threatened retaliation against India if that nation didnt agree to Americas request for the anti-malarial drug hydroxychloroquine, a medicine that may have therapeutic benefits for C19 patients. India had initially banned its export, but, not surprisingly, reversed itself. Now, shipments to America are on the way.

Inarguably, thats exactly the kind of leadership needed when fighting a pandemic.

*

The president needs to use the worlds most powerful bully pulpit to A) inform the nation of our dire medicine predicament (because it is not widely known), B) lay out what he will do (work with Congress to mandate that a percentage of drugs are manufactured in the U.S. by 2021, with a sliding scale to achieve at least 80 percent by 2025), and C) illustrate that this has nothing to do with China, and everything to do with America.

It is imperative not to get caught up in time-killing tangents, such as this being anti-Chinese or racist, or that it gives preferential treatment to pharmaceutical companies. First, its in every countrys self-interest to bring its most valuable assets in-house. Not every nation has that ability, but America does, so we must leverage that good fortune. China does the exact same thing  as it absolutely should  so it isnt racism, but smart nationalism.

Second, given the corporate income tax rate reductions that President Trump and Congress passed in 2017, it is a win-win for pharma companies and the American people. However, our drug manufacturers must be given some protection from frivolous lawsuits and ludicrous jackpot jury awards. Thats not giving them a free pass. Instead, it is serving Americas most vital interest.

Masks and personal protective equipment: The same rationale for bringing drug manufacturing back to America can be applied to medical masks, gloves, eye protection, ventilators, and other critical equipment. That doesnt mean everything must be produced domestically, since diversifying production venues in a global economy is savvy business strategy. But we must have safeguards in place that mandate A) adequate stockpiles are created and remain topped off, and B) we have the capability to immediately ramp up domestic production levels to meet our needs in a crisis.

*

If ever there was a non-partisan issue, this is it, since no rational person can believe that outsourcing production of drugs and medical gear is good for America. One doesnt have to like or support President Trump, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, or House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. But if we are to address this nations Achilles heel, we must get behind all those leaders, and implore them to act immediately.

The health of every citizen, and the future of America, depends on it.

*

Update: In a previous article on COVID-19, this author described the situation at Liberty University, which allowed its students to return from spring break, despite most experts panning the move as dangerous in the wake of the coronavirus epidemic. Liberty University has since stated that no campus residents have tested positive for COVID-19, or required testing because of symptoms.
Shillong, April 15 : A senior doctor in Meghalaya John L. Sailo Ryntathiang, who tested positive for nCoV two days back, on Wednesday succumbed to COVID-19 registering the first coronavirus death in the hill state, officials said.

Confirming the death of the doctor, Meghalaya Chief Minister Conrad K. Sangma said: "I am deeply saddened to inform that the first COVID-19 positive patient in Meghalaya passed away this morning (Wednesday). My heartfelt condolences to his family and loved ones. May his soul rest in peace." Sixty nine-year-old Sailo Ryntathiang, the founder of the private Bethany Hospital, breathed his last in the wee hours on Wednesday. He had tested positive for the coronavirus on Monday evening.

The Chief Minister in a separate tweet said that of the 68 swab samples tested so far, six have come out positive for nCoV and they are all family members and helpers of Sailo Ryntathiang at his private hospital. "Six other cases are being re-tested. We are currently sanitising adjoining areas of the Bethany Hospital, particularly Nongrim Hills, near the hospital in Shillong," the Chief Minister said in another tweet.

Sangma said that a total of 90 samples have been sent for testing after the first COVID-19 positive case in Meghalaya.

The areas around Bethany Hospital in Shillong and Nongpoh have been sealed. Lists of the primary contacts of the doctor and the secondary contacts are being compiled.

The doctor had no travel history except that his son-in-law, who is a pilot, had been to COVID-19 infected countries, and had returned home on March 22. According to health officials in Shillong, the pilot, however, did not show any symptoms of coronavirus and was an asymptomatic case.
Irelands foreign minister has criticised Donald Trump after he said he is freezing US payments to the World Health Organisation pending a review of its warnings about coronavirus and China.

The US president said the Covid-19 outbreak could have been contained at its source with lives spared had the UN health agency done a better job investigating reports coming out of China.

The United States contributed nearly $900 million (823 million euro) to the WHOs budget for 2018-19, according to information on the agencys website.

Simon Coveney, Irelands deputy leader and Foreign Affairs Minister, tweeted that Mr Trump withholding funding was an indefensible decision in the midst of a pandemic.

This is indefensible decision, in midst of global pandemic. So many vulnerable populations rely on @WHO - deliberately undermining funding & trust now is shocking. Now is a time for global leadership & unity to save lives, not division and blame! https://t.co/nOknZnBqDd  Simon Coveney (@simoncoveney) April 15, 2020

He wrote: So many vulnerable populations rely on WHO  deliberately undermining funding and trust now is shocking.

Now is a time for global leadership and unity to save lives, not division and blame.

It comes as Minister for Communication Richard Bruton confirmed that Irelands major telecoms providers have committed to a number of measures to help people stay in touch and work from home during the Covid-19 outbreak.

Providers including BT Ireland, eir, Pure Telecom, Sky Ireland, Tesco Mobile Ireland, Three Ireland, Virgin Media Ireland and Vodafone have signed up.

Now more than ever it is so important to stay in touch at a distance. Telecoms providers including BT Ireland, Eir, Pure Telecoms, Sky Ireland, Tesco Mobile Ireland, Three Ireland, Virgin Media & Vodafone have agreed with my Dept to increase supports to help people stay in touch  Richard Bruton (@RichardbrutonTD) April 15, 2020

Mr Bruton said: Now, more than ever, people are relying on online services to stay in touch with family, friends and work colleagues.

These commitments will make sure that all major providers are responding to this increased reliance, providing extra capacity where needed and ensuring people have the services they need to stay connected.

These are common commitments and some operators may choose to offer extra services to their customers.

The Covid-19 Consumer Commitments are:

 Any fixed broadband customers who do not have unlimited usage already as standard will be given the opportunity, if they require, to upgrade their package (which may be on a temporary basis) with their current service provider;

 Any customer who does not have fixed broadband and who relies solely on mobile access to the internet will have the opportunity to avail of affordable unlimited mobile data access/package from their service provider;

 Fair usage policies will not be automatically applied to unlimited fixed and mobile data packages;

 Service providers may implement appropriate permitted traffic management measures to avoid network congestion;

 Access to healthcare and educational resource websites identified by the Government will be zero-rated for all customers where technically feasible;

 So that customers can remain connected during the crisis, service providers will engage with any customer that contacts them who is in financial difficulty as a result of Covid-19 and has difficulty paying their bills to agree the best way of keeping them connected to voice and data;

 Service providers will work with ComReg in the event of complaints raised to ComReg by consumers, who consider they are not being treated in accordance with these commitments.
A second border force worker at Heathrow has died after contracting coronavirus - as calls grow for more PPE to protect airport staff.

The officer, who has not been named, is reported to have fallen ill while at work and becomes one of the latest victims of the deadly disease which has so far claimed the lives of more than 12,000 Britons.

Union officials are calling for all Border Force staff to be given personal protective equipment as a matter of urgency following news of the tragic death.

The Public and Commercial Services Union (PCS) said two of its members working for the Border Force at Heathrow Airport had now died, adding that safety needed to be improved.

PCS general secretary Mark Serwotka said it was a 'disgrace' that not enough PPE equipment was being provided for staff working at airports.

'The Home Secretary must intervene and ensure our members can go to work fully protected from coronavirus.'

It comes amid concerns over a lack of testing for coronavirus at UK airports.

In early March at the beginning of the crisis passengers arriving from countries hit by the pandemic complained there were no checks on landing back in the country.

Earlier this month planes continued to come in from Covid-19 hotspots, with thousands of passengers streaming through major airports with very little medical screening.

The Public and Commercial Services Union (PCS) said two of its members working for the Border Force at Heathrow Airport had now died, adding that safety needed to be improved (stick image of Border Force patrol at Heathrow Airport last year)

PCS general secretary Mark Serwotka (pictured) said it was a 'disgrace' that not enough PPE equipment was being provided for staff working at airports

Border Force director Nick Jariwalla paid tribute to the recently deceased Border Force officer.

He said: 'Our colleague was a dedicated and professional officer, known for his kindness and generosity. He will be greatly missed by everyone who knew him.

'Our deepest condolences go out to his family and friends at this most difficult time.'

A spokeswoman for the Home Office said it was not necessary for Border Force staff to be wearing PPE all the time. They only need wear it when dealing with someone displaying symptoms of coronavirus.

She said: 'The safety of the public and our staff is of the utmost importance.

'In line with Public Health England guidance, all staff have protective clothing and equipment available, including masks and disposable gloves, for when they are in close contact with anyone displaying symptoms.'

Passengers in face masks walk around a deserted Heathrow Terminal 5 after flights were cancelled

News of the death comes after a Heathrow Immigration officer and his daughter also died from coronavirus last month.

Sudhir Sharma, who worked at Terminal 3, passed away Wednesday, March 25 before pharmacist Pooja suffered the same tragic fate the following day.

The father, 61, from Hounslow in west London, last worked on January 7, therefore officials don't believe he contracted Covid-19 on duty and likely picked it up elsewhere.

He was believed to have had underlying health problems, forcing him to be absent at work, but had recently returned to his job on the frontline.

A source told The Sun: 'It's an absolute tragedy. He was a lovely, lovely man. Every immigration officer is talking about it.

'There are concerns about his widow being unable to attend the funeral because of the isolation issues. It's just so awful.'

His daughter Pooja, 32, worked as a pharmacist in East Sussex at Eastbourne District General Hospital and is thought to have received three days of care and treatment for the virus before her death.

Whether the relatives were in close contact with each other before the tragedies is not clear, but friends and colleagues have since rushed to pay tribute.

Pooja Sharma, pictured left, died of coronavirus just 24 hours after her father Sudhir, pictured right, also lost his life to the disease

Pooja, 32, (pictured) worked as a pharmacist in East Sussex and is thought to have received three days of care and treatment for the virus before her death

Nick Jariwalla, director of Border Force at Heathrow, said: 'Sudhir was a very well-respected, kind and experienced officer. He will be greatly missed by everyone.'

A friend of the daughter posted: 'Really sorry to hear that one of our fellow pharmacists and a friend of mine since university, Pooja, and her father have passed away.

'May their souls rest in peace. Sending my heartiest condolences, prayers and love to their family.'

They added: 'Please, please, please inform family and friends to take this very seriously and to self-isolate, socially distance themselves as much as possible, for their families if not for themselves.'

Heathrow Airport continues to come under fire for a lack of testing.

Some Britons arriving at the airport earlier this month said they were left 'shocked' by the very few health checks being carried out and the lack of medical advice available which left them unsure about whether to go into quarantine.

Despite a surge in the number of coronavirus cases across the country, travellers claimed they were left breezing through security as though it was 'a normal working day'.

One passenger Mete Coban, a 27-year-old charity pioneer and Hackney councillor, who returned to Heathrow Airport from the U.S. on March 16, said: 'Considering just how seriously authorities were treating Covid-19 in the US, I was shocked at just how little the UK authorities seemed to care when arriving at Heathrow.

'I think it's completely irresponsible that we're not at least providing guidance to people about social distancing and giving medical advice.'

Passengers returning to London's Heathrow Airport have taken fire at the lack of testing and medical advice being issued amid the coronavirus outbreak. (Stock image)

One passenger Mete Coban (left), 27, who returned to Heathrow Airport from the U.S. on March 16, said it was 'completely irresponsible that we're not at least providing guidance to people about social distancing'

While Chloe Sloggett, a 24-year-old aesthetics practitioner from north London, who arrived at Heathrow on Saturday with her fiance Toby Hastie, said there were far more medical checks in place in Cambodia and Malaysia than upon her arrival in the UK.

Ms Sloggett, who has been self-isolating since returning home, said: 'As we walked through Heathrow there were posters to explain dos/don'ts and signs to keep two metres' distance, but no-one there was enforcing it.

'We had our temperature checked in Phnom Penh (Cambodia) twice and then again in Kuala Lumpur (Malaysia), but nothing when we landed in the UK.'

Meanwhile Marc Wilson, a 33-year-old postman from Southampton, said he was similarly confused by a lack of advice on what to do upon his arrival from Guatemala via Mexico and the US.

Mr Wilson, who landed at Heathrow on Sunday morning, said: 'In the Americas, I was checked at every land border, every flight, I had doctors asking me questions.

'I landed at Heathrow and there was no advice or anything. I couldn't see any answers online whether I had to go in quarantine or not.'

The Department of Health said the advice for all Britons, whether returning to the UK or not, was the same - to stay at home and only leave if essential.

However, other countries have introduced strict quarantine measures for those entering the country.

This includes in the US and New Zealand, where travellers must isolate themselves for 14 days upon arrival.

Earlier this month leading scientist Neil Ferguson has admitted that airport officials only stopped a third of Britons returning to the UK with coronavirus.

On Andrew Marr, Professor Ferguson said experts believed health officials had only managed to intercept and isolate about one-third of the people who had flown into the UK having become infected with the virus.

He said: 'We seeded infections in different parts of the country and some countries like northern Italy were very unlucky and clearly had community transmission starting very early.

'Here it did start a little bit later.'
There have been four confirmed cases of coronavirus in Midland County during the last five days.

The number of confirmed cases that have completed isolation or have recovered is around 69 percent.

However, Midland Memorial Hospital Chief Medical Officer Dr. Larry Wilson is urging residents of Midland County to continue to take the pandemic seriously.

Wilson said Tuesday that what Midland County residents are going through is a slow burn, compared to the gasoline fire being experienced elsewhere. That includes:

--814 tests and 35 confirmed cases in Midland County;

--631 tests conducted and 46 confirmed cases in Ector County;

--986 tests conducted and 39 confirmed cases in Tom Green County (San Angelo);

--1,028 tests conducted and 68 confirmed cases in Taylor County (Abilene);

--3,376 tests conducted and 317 confirmed cases in Lubbock County.

Theres a lot of activity and talk across the nation -- from the president, governors, our mayor -- about when we can start our economic engines again and when we get businesses moving again, Wilson said. And I want to be a little bit of a baffle to that, if I may, in the context that the reason that were in a position to have these conversations is because of exactly what weve been doing -- the social distancing, the increased hygiene, etc. have made a difference in the way that disease spreads.  But still remember, there are a lot of things that have not changed. Its a very highly transmissible virus. Its got a very high likelihood of spreading from individual to individual when youre in close proximity to one another. It also has a higher lethality than many other viruses that we experience on a seasonal basis, such as the flu. And because of that, we must maintain some level of vigilance and care, no matter how we move forward.

Wilson said Midland is not in the same position as other urban centers across the nation where population densities are greater and the risk of transmission is much higher.

In Harris County (Houston area), there have been 3,747 confirmed cases, according to the Texas Department of State Health Services. The top five counties are Dallas County, with 1,788 cases; Tarrant County (Fort Worth) has 867, Travis County (Austin) has 856 and Bexar County (San Antonio) has 794. Midland County was tied for 45th across Texas on Tuesday.

Other notes from the Tuesday morning meeting of the united command team press conference: When asked about when antibody test will be available in Midland, Wilson said, I wish it were yesterday. It would make a huge difference for us. Im hoping within the month.  It seems like they always get pushed back because theres so much demand. And Midland is not a high demand area, he said.
PR-Inside.com: 2020-04-15 14:00:30

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VANCOUVER, BC / ACCESSWIRE / April 15, 2020 / Black Tusk Resources Inc. ("Black Tusk" or the "Company") (CSE:TUSK)(Frankfurt: 0NB)(OTC PINK:BTKRF) is pleased to announce the acquisition of two Palladium/Platinum Group Element (PGE) properties in Quebec. The properties were acquired directly by the Company through the Quebec staking process. Both properties were staked to cover geological and geophysical features that are interpreted as being conducive to PGE deposition.The first property acquired is The PG Highway Project which is comprised of 11 claims totalling 601.11 hectares. The claims are located along Highway 397, 22 Km north of Val d'Or, Quebec. The PG Highway property adjoins claims that cover the Lynx and La Tour PGE mineral showings. The Lynx showing is located approximately 3.5 Km north of the PG Highway property. At the Lynx, selected samples returned grades up to 1,895 ppb combined platinum (Pt) and palladium (Pd). The two best results returned 1,365 ppb Pd and 530 ppb Pt (sample 828583) and 1050 ppb Pd and 340 ppb Pt (sample 828575) (assessment report GM 61266). The La Tour showing is located 300 metres east of the Lynx. At the La Tour showing, samples returned up to 5,139 ppb Pd and 1589 ppb Pt (GM 60468 and GM 61303). The reader is cautioned that results obtained on adjoining properties are not necessarily indicative of potential for similar results on the Black Tusk - PG Highway claims.The second Black Tusk PGE property acquired is The Lorrain Project, comprising 8 claims totalling 466.67 hectares. This property is located along Highway 391 approximately one kilometre south of Lorrainville, Quebec. The property covers the Guimond-Church deposit. This deposit was found in outcrop and has been intersected by two diamond drill holes. The deposit is categorized as tabular nickel-chromium (Ni-Cr) mineralization hosted in an ultramafic intrusive which generates a strong magnetic anomaly (GM 54730). Two 1954 vintage drill holes intersected serpentinized peridotite injected with quartz veins. Core samples returned 0.48% Cr and 0.27% Ni (best intersections of holes 1 and 2, GM 02994). Sample results also indicate the presence of platinum group elements, including 19 ppb palladium and 59 ppb ruthenium.The Black Tusk-Lorrain property is located within a region endowed with a variety of mineralization styles. Many of these were explored for copper, but have recently been recognized for platinum group elements. This includes the Alotta Project located approximately 10 kilometres north-east of the Black Tusk-Lorrain. At the Alotta, a 2019 drilling program confirmed the continuity of wide zones of nickel-copper-platinum group elements in massive sulphides. The drilling returned a highlight of 22% copper, 34g/t palladium, 3.5g/t platinum, 0.78% nickel, 1.4% zinc and 65 g/t silver over 0.5 metres from Hole ZA-19-05 (Chase Mining Corporation Ltd website December 3, 2019 News Release). The reader is cautioned that results obtained from other properties in the region are not necessarily indicative of potential on the Black Tusk - Lorrain property.Black Tusk continues to show their commitment to exploration in the province of Quebec. The company now owns five mining projects that have potential for gold and/or Palladium/Platinum (PGE) mineralization. "We have acquired these 2 new PGE properties in response to a world shortage as well as recent record-setting prices of Rhodium, Platinum and Palladium. Virtually all electronics, including cell phones and computers, contain PGE in their circuitry as well as all automobile catalytic converters. Black Tusk is excited to start exploring these 2 new projects''. Stated Richard Penn, Black Tusk Resources, CEO.Both of the newly acquired PGE properties of Black Tusk are readily accessible on major highways. The company plans to compile all available information for these two Palladium/Platinum (PGE) projects in order to plan future exploration. Data compilation and GIS plotting is expected to be completed in the following weeks.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) 384-8923Cautionary StatementThis press release contains forward-looking statements based on assumptions as of that date. These statements reflect management's current estimates, beliefs, intentions and expectations; they are not guarantees of future performance. The Company cautions that all forward-looking statements are inherently uncertain and that actual performance may be affected by a number of material factors, many of which are beyond the Company's control. Such factors include, among other things: risks and uncertainties relating to exploration and development; the ability of the Company to obtain additional financing; the Company's limited operating history; the need to comply with environmental and governmental regulations; fluctuations in the prices of commodities; operating hazards and risks; competition and other risks and uncertainties, including those described in the Company's Prospectus dated September 8, 2017 available on www.sedar.com . Accordingly, actual and future events, conditions, and results may differ materially from the estimates, beliefs, intentions, and expectations expressed or implied in the forward-looking information. Except as required under applicable securities legislation, the Company undertakes no obligation to publicly update or revise forward-looking information.The CSE and Information Service Provider have not reviewed and does not accept responsibility for the accuracy or adequacy of this release.Figure 1 - Google Earth image with locations of Black Tusk PGE propertiesSOURCE: Black Tusk Resources Inc.
WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. (WLFI)  Air pollution is dropping dramatically worldwide including right here in Indiana. Jeffrey Dukes, Director of Purdue University's Climate Change Research Center said studies are showing it could be linked to the stay-at-home order.

"We're not solving the problem accidentally as we all stay at home but we are contributing to solving the problem," Dukes.

He's looking at these unprecedented times as an opportunity to learn.

"Maybe after this is all over, we'll realize that we don't all have to be at work all the time, we can be working from home not commuting all the time and saving our time on commuting and saving our energy," Dukes.

He said traffic has reduced by 40% since the stay-at-home order went into effect. Since then, air quality has improved by 38%.

"There are lots of inconveniences and really bad consequences of having to shut down society so let's not kid about that but there are huge air quality improvements in some of the places with the worst air in the world," said Dukes.

In places like India and China, people are seeing climate change improvement with much clearer skies. But people in Indiana may notice these differences in their breathing while outside.

"Although the downside is right now we're getting lots of pollen too so maybe asthma won't be as bad, or the spring won't be quiet as bad from the pollen because we don't have as much of these other pollutants in the air at the same time," Dukes.

This can be particularly helpful for those fighting and recovering from COVID-19.

"The improvements in the air quality that we do have are probably helping those people who need it the most," said Dukes.
Still, Trump drew far more votes in 2016 than Kelly did, and there is little reason, at least as of now, to think that the presidents ability to inspire his core supporters has diminished. Biden still faces the task of reuniting Democrats and rallying Sanders supporters  some of whom backed Trump against Hillary Clinton, the 2016 Democratic nominee  behind him. And Republicans have months to learn lessons from what Democrats did, and they have the money and political expertise to put in place any new tactics or strategies.
A suspected coronavirus patient living in Australia's infection epicentre is accused of ignoring isolation orders and telling police he 'doesn't care' about the disease.

The 52-year-old man from Sydney's eastern suburbs was tested for COVID-19 at Royal Prince Alfred Hospital on Monday and was told he must isolate for 48 hours while awaiting his results.

Sydney's eastern suburbs has the highest concentration of coronavirus cases in New South Wales, which has more cases of the disease than any other state or territory in the country.

Scroll down for video

Medical staff test patients for COVID-19 at the drive through coronavirus testing clinic in Bondi

Police performing a compliance check on Tuesday afternoon allege the man left his home to go shopping and then visit a friend.

The man allegedly told police he didn't care about the deadly bug and could leave his house whenever he pleased.

He was later arrested and charged with failing to comply with a noticed direction at Maroubra Police Station, before being refused bail to appear at Central Local Court on Wednesday.

The man is among a growing list of Australians young and old who are copping $1,000 fines for disobeying coronavirus restrictions.

During the past four weeks alone, the New South Wales Police Force has issued 560 penalty infringement notices for being out of home without a reasonable excuse.

A 26-year-old man from south-west Sydney was busted on Wednesday, with police revealing he had 'told officers he was going to see a friend for relationship advice'.

Police officers patrol Bondi Beach in Sydney to enforce social distancing measures on Sunday

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 Heckenberg man was given a $1,000 fine, ten minutes after he had disobeyed a formal warning from the Liverpool area command to go home.

At the other end of the age spectrum, a 64-year-old man from Woollahra, in Sydney's east, was found almost 300km away at Boomerang Beach near Forster on the state's mid-north coast.

When asked why he was there, he allegedly told police 'he had been on the beach for two hours using his mobile phone'.

Last week, a 41-year-old man from Bathurst in the state's central west was fined $1,000 for taking a morning walk, even though exercise is allowed under tighter COVID-19 public health order restrictions that came into effect on March 31.

Despite that, the police argued 'he gave several different reasons for being out of his home'.

Under stage three restrictions in NSW, gatherings are restricted to no more than two people except for members of someone's immediate household.

Residents are only allowed to leave their homes for essential reasons, including for food, work or education, exercise and medical care or compassionate needs.

Disobeying a COVID-19 rule incurs a $1,000 fine in NSW, Western Australia, South Australia and the Australian Capital Territory.

In Queensland it's $1,334.50, in Victoria it's $1,652 and in the Northern Territory, $1,099.

Police speaking with three beachgoers at a closed Brighton Beach in Melbourne in March

Fines across Australia are a controversial issue, considering people are being penalised even for obeying strict rules to remain 1.5 metres apart in public.

In Victoria, the state's deputy commissioner Shane Patton has promised to review every fine, after police interrupted a funeral despite mourners adhering to the 10-person rule.

'I will review every one of those personally to ensure they have been appropriately issued and that common sense is being applied,' he said on Tuesday.

Victorian police last week dropped a $1,652 fine handed out to 17-year-old learner driver Hunter Reynolds, who was receiving driving lessons from her mother Sharee, about 30km from their Hampton home, in Melbourne's south-east.
Indonesian soldiers stand guard in front of the Bank Mandiri Syahriah where two suspected militants had shot and wounded a police officer in the town of Poso, Central Sulawesi, April 15, 2020.

Police in Indonesias Central Sulawesi province shot and killed two suspected members of a militant group linked to Islamic State (IS) on Wednesday, a spokesman said.

Earlier in the day, the suspected members of the Eastern Indonesia Mujahideen (MIT) had shot and wounded a police officer outside a bank in the town of Poso, provincial police spokesman Didik Supranoto said.

Footage from a surveillance camera seen by BenarNews showed one of the men pointing a gun at the officer as he parked his motorcycle in front of the bank.

The officer put up a fight, but one of the attackers shot him in the chest, while the other tried to seize his weapon.

Police chased the attackers who escaped on a motorbike and killed them in an ensuing gun battle, Didik said.

Our officers were forced to take firm action because they put up a fight, Didik told BenarNews.

Didik said the two men had been on the list of people wanted for involvement with MIT, whose leaders have pledged allegiance to IS.

The spokesman said police found homemade bombs wrapped around the bodies of the two suspects, whom he identified as Ali (alias Darwin Gobel) and Muis Fahron (alias Abdullah), as well as a handgun, a mobile phone and a bullet. He did not elaborate on the bombs.

Didik said the men joined MIT in 2018. Previously, police said that groups membership had been reduced to seven people, but new recruits raised its number to 16, including its leader Ali Karola.

Poso police chief Adjunct Senior Commissioner Darno said officers raided a nearby house believed to be the suspects hideout and found bullets, homemade bombs and a motorbike.

Central Sulawesi police chief Inspector Gen. Syafril Nursal told reporters in Poso that the remains of the suspects would be brought to a police hospital in Palu, the provincial capital, for formal identification.

Didik said the wounded officer was in stable condition.

The director of the Institute for Human Rights Studies and Development in Central Sulawesi, Mohammad Affandi, criticized the police for using lethal force.

The two MIT members should have been captured alive so the motive for the attack and their network could be revealed, Affandi told BenarNews.

The government launched Operation Tinombala, a joint military-police task force, in January 2016 with a mission to capture or kill MIT militants.

Santoso, who led MIT before being killed by security forces in 2016, was the first Indonesian militant to publicly pledge allegiance to IS.

The militant leader had operated out of the mountains in Poso where he conducted para-military training for militants. The training sessions drew recruits from other parts of Indonesia, as well as from abroad, including at least six Uyghurs, Indonesian authorities said.

The worlds largest Muslim-majority country, Indonesia has been hit by a string of terrorist attacks in the past two decades, with more recent strikes being blamed on militants affiliated with IS.




The Lagos State government has discharged 16 Coronavirus (COVID-19) patients,

Naija News reports that the governor of the state, Babajide Sanwo-Olu, announced this in a series of tweets on the micro-blogging site, Twitter on Wednesday evening, April 15.

The Lagos State Governor disclosed that the Coronavirus patients- 14 males and 2 females had a Polish, British and Chinese citizen amongst them.

This online news platform understands that the discharged Coronavirus patients were fully recovered from the COVID-19 and had tested negative

Governor Sanwo-Olu tweeted: Good people of Lagos,

I have more great news from our isolation facilities. 16 persons; 14 males and 2 females including 3 foreigners  1 British, 1 Chinese and 1 Polish citizen have been discharged to join the society.

The patients; 14 from IDH, Yaba and 2 from Onikan Isolation centre have fully recovered and tested negative twice consecutively to #COVID19.

This brings the number of patients successfully managed and discharged from our facilities to 85, the tweet added.

Good people of Lagos, I have more great news from our isolation facilities. 16 persons; 14 males and 2 females including 3 foreigners  1 British, 1 Chinese and 1 Polish citizen have been discharged to join the society.  Babajide Sanwo-Olu (@jidesanwoolu) April 15, 2020

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Los Angeles, April 15 : Actress Soundarya Sharma has approached the Indian embassy and Ministry of External Affairs for assistance, along with more than 400 Indians including students who are stranded in the USA amid a coronavirus pandemic.

"These are challenging times for everyone, but my heart goes to hundreds of students including other fellow Indians who are stuck here, without proper accommodation and resources," Soundarya said.

She added: "I have been writing to the Indian Embassy and the Ministry of External Affairs for evacuation assistance however there has been no positive response nor any assistance to Indians who have been unable to meet their ends here." The actress, who featured in the film "Ranchi Diaries", is hoping to be evacuated back to India.

"I would humbly request the indian embassy and the MEA for a stimulus package for all those students and fellow Indians who are stuck here to help overcome this situation and hopefully arrange an evacuation flight back to India," she said.

Soundarya was in Los Angeles to attend an acting course at the Lee Strasberg Theatre and Film Institute.
WFH for Private offices in Delhi, restaurants & bars to be shut as Omicron-led to sudden rise in Covid cases

Coronavirus outbreak: All five Bhopal gas tragedy victims die of COVID-19

India

oi-Ajay Joseph Raj P

Bhopal, Apr 15: In what comes to a serious turn of events, all the five persons, who recently died due to the novel coronavirus in Bhopal were the victims of the 1984 gas tragedy in the Madhya Pradesh.

According to reports, organisations that are working for the survivors of Bhopal gas tragedy claimed that such people are more vulnerable to the coronavirus infection than normal individuals.

Coronavirus outbreak: Positive cases in Madhya Pradesh's Indore rises to 544

"All the five persons who died after contracting COVID-19 here were victims of the Bhopal gas tragedy," the official said.

Speaking to reporters, an official said that the Bhopal Memorial Hospital and Research Center (BMHRC), a dedicated facility for the treatment of gas mishap survivors, was recently turned into a medical facility for coronavirus patients.

It is allegedly said that the first coronavirus victim from Bhopal, a 55-year- old man, died at the hospital on April 5 due to negligence of authorities.

Also, an 80-year-old gas tragedy victim, who was the former employee of Bharat Heavy Electricals Limited (BHEL), died on April 8. The victim's test results turned out to be positive for coronavirus on April 11.

What does your child think about the coronavirus lockdown: Send us their thoughts

Another a 40-year-old gas tragedy victim, who was also suffering from oral cancer, died on April 12 and his test report later claimed to be positive for coronavirus.

It can be seen that the state government took over BMHRC and turned it into a medical facility for COVID-19 patients instead of paying more attention to the people.
TDT | Manama

Bahrain has so far evacuated over 1,200 citizens from overseas countries following the outbreak of the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic. Foreign Affairs Ministry undersecretary Dr Shaikha Rana bint Isa bin Daij Al Khalifa released last night the updated number of returnees, as she was hosted by the Be Aware programme on Bahrain TV channel.

She commended the strenuous efforts exerted by the National Taskforce for Combating COVID-19, led by His Royal Highness Prince Salman bin Hamad Al Khalifa, Crown Prince, Deputy Supreme Commander and First Deputy Prime Minister.

She said that the Foreign Affairs Ministry exerted all efforts through different directorates, embassies and consulates abroad to survey the number of citizens in overseas countries and plan their evacuation, starting with Bahraini students in China particularly  in addition to Iran, Iraq, Morocco, Jordan, the GCC, and other countries.

Dr Shaikha Rana said that the Foreign Affairs Ministry had also coordinated the evacuation plan with the Ministry of Health and the National Taskforce for Combatting COVID-19.

The government had announced details of the contingency evacuation plan for Bahraini citizens abroad during a meeting which was held with the Council of Representatives last month.

She stressed Bahrains success in managing the crisis competently and taking adequate precautionary measures to fight the pandemic, which earned praise from the World Health Organisation.

She stressed the ministrys coordination with the Jafferi Endowments Directorate to provide new accommodation for 140 Bahrainis who were left stranded after their hotel in Mashhad threw them out.
A Republican congressman from Indiana has told an interviewer that opening up the American economy in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic would be the lesser of two evils.

Trey Hollingsworth, who has represented the states ninth congressional district since 2017, was asked by WIBC radio host Tony Katz whether the federal governments response to the pandemic was the right one  specifically its instruction to Americans that staying at home is necessary to stop the virus in his tracks.

His response was that the governments focus on saving American lives was misguided, given the harm that social distancing measures are doing to the economy.

It is always the American governments position to say, in the choice between the loss of our way of life as Americans and the loss of life, of American lives, we have to always choose the latter. And this is what I push back on, by these people who say science should govern all of this.

Certainly science is telling us where this disease will progress, and how it will progress over time. Certainly the social scientists are telling us about the economic disaster that is occurring, down 20 per cent this quarter alone our GDP is expected to be.

It is policymakers decision to put on our big-boy or big-girl pants and say: this is the lesser of two evils, and it is not zero evil, but it is the lesser of these evils and we intend to move forward in that direction. That is our responsibility, and to abdicate that is to insult the Americans that voted us into office.

Mr Hollingsworth is not alone in arguing that the economy should come first. Texas lieutenant governor Dan Patrick said earlier in the pandemic that American senior citizens should accept the likelihood that some of them would die in order to allow the economy to re-open and preserve the America that all America loves for their children and grandchildren.

The coronavirus pandemic and the drastic measures to halt it have indeed hit the USs economy hard, with unemployment exploding and GDP expected to shrink dramatically in the next quarter. However, many have argued that that number will look far worse than it is in reality thanks to the US governments reporting methods.

Donald Trump has repeatedly said that he intends to lift the shutdown as soon as possible, though his original plan to do so by Easter fell by the wayside after experts warned that doing so could cost tens or hundreds of thousands of lives. He apparently now wants it lifted on 1 May.

Meanwhile, several states  including California and New York  are co-ordinating regional plans to start lifting their own social distancing measures. However, they intend to do so cautiously. While New York governor Andrew Cuomo recently declared that the worst is over if New Yorkers continue to be smart, he also said that you can turn those numbers on two or three days of reckless behaviour.

Elsewhere in his interview, Mr Hollingsworth accused China of hiding the virus to an extent that led to hugely deleterious consequences for Hoosiers here at home  and called for punitive action.

You first figure out how to solve the problem that stands before us  how do we get Americans back to work, how do we get people back engaged in their lives again  and then secondarily you find out whos responsible for that and you go after whos responsible for that.

He did not specify what going after them would entail.
The incident in the Gulf comes amid heighten tensions between the United States and Tehran.

Eleven vessels from Irans Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Navy came close to United States Navy and Coast Guard ships in the Gulf, the US military said on Wednesday, calling the moves dangerous and provocative.

While such interactions had occurred occasionally a few years ago, they had largely stopped in recent months and years, and this incident comes at a time of increased tensions between the two countries.

According to the statement, the Iranian ships approached six US military ships while they were conducting integration operations with Army helicopters in international waters.

At one point, the Iranian vessels came within 10 yards of the US Coast Guard cutter Maui.

The US ships issued several warnings through bridge-to-bridge radio, blasts from the ships horns and long-range acoustic noise maker devices.

The Iranian ships left after about an hour, the statement added.

The semiofficial Fars news agency, believed to be close to the paramilitary Guard, acknowledged the incident in a report that did not include any comment from Iranian officials.

The IRGCNs dangerous and provocative actions increased the risk of miscalculation and collision, [and] were not in accordance with the internationally recognized Convention on the International Regulations for Preventing Collisions at Sea, the US militarys statement said.

On Tuesday, armed men boarded and briefly held the Hong Kong-flagged tanker SC Taipei and its Chinese crew before releasing the vessel.

The US-led International Maritime Security Construct, a group created to deter Iranian attacks in the region, acknowledged the incident in a statement late Wednesday. The group said it assessed no immediate threat to the free flow of shipping in the area.

Tensions between the US and Iran have escalated since President Donald Trump pulled the US out of the landmark Iran nuclear deal in 2018 and re-imposed crippling sanctions.

Earlier this year, the US killed Qassem Soleimani, the head of Irans elite Quds Force, in a drone strike in Iraq.

Iran retaliated on January 8 with a rocket attack on Iraqs Ain al-Assad base where US forces were stationed. No US troops were killed or faced immediate bodily injury, but more than 100 were later diagnosed with traumatic brain injury.
STATEN ISLAND, N.Y. -- The NYPD is asking for the publics help to locate a woman who has gone missing from Port Richmond.

Jasminda Suarez, 37, was last seen leaving her residence on Simonson Place on March 27 at about 9:30 p.m., according to a statement from the NYPDs Deputy Commissioner of Public Information.

Police described Suarez as standing about 53 tall and weighing about 135 pounds, with brown eyes and black hair. She was seen wearing pink leggings, a dark colored T-shirt, a green jacket and black boots.

People with information are encouraged to contact the NYPDs Crime Stoppers Hotline at 1-800-577-8477 (TIPS) or for Spanish, 1-888-577-4782 (PISTA). The public can also submit their tips by logging onto the Crime Stoppers website or by texting their tips to 274637 (CRIMES) then entering TIP577. All calls are strictly confidential.
KENT COUNTY, MI -- The death toll linked to coronavirus COVID-19 cases in Kent County climbed by one to 14 on Tuesday.

The latest numbers show that Kent County has 325 cases of COVID-19, up from 311 a day earlier.

Of the deaths in Kent County, nine were residents at Metron of Cedar Springs nursing home. Administrators at the facility on March 31 revealed that 31 residents and five staff members had tested positive for COVID-19.

Kent County statistics show that 221 of the countys cases are in the urban areas of Grand Rapids, Kentwood, Wyoming, Walker and Grandville. Of those cases, 62 are black residents.

In Michigan and across the country, a major concern is that COVID-19 cases are disproportionately affecting African American residents.

The toll COVID-19 is having on African Americans has garnered state and national attention as similar disparities are repeated elsewhere. Gov. Gretchen Whitmer recently announced the creation of a state task force to examine the reasons for the increased toll of COVID on African Americans and other minorities.

As of April 9, black residents with COVID-19 represented 19 percent of the countys total cases. The rate grew to 21 percent on Tuesday.

Coronavirus deaths surge again during Michigans second-deadliest day

Black residents represent about 10.5 percent of the countys population, according to the latest census data.

Statistics from local hospitals show that, on Tuesday, April 14, 44 people are currently at Spectrum Health facilities with COVID-19 after being admitted through emergency departments, as inpatients or for observation. Spectrum reports that 70 people have been recovered from COVID-19 and been discharged.

At Holland Hospital, there are two people at the hospital with COVID-19.

In Ottawa County, there are 2 deaths and 71 total cases of COVID-19. The total cases increased only slightly from Mondays total of 69.

Among the total cases, 23 percent required hospitalization, data from the Ottawa County Health Department shows.

Of Ottawa Countys cases, 55 percent are female and 45 percent male.

More from MLive

For more statewide data, visit MLives coronavirus data page, here.

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 Michigan coronavirus coverage here

Tuesday, April 14: Latest developments on coronavirus in Michigan

6 reasons Michigan has four times more coronavirus cases than Ohio

Cocktails to go? Bar, restaurant owners push Michigan to allow it during coronavirus

Michigan DNR issues 323 warnings, handful of citations to boaters
It was an utter chaotic scene in Mumbai on Tuesday afternoon after thousands of migrant workers gathered outside the Bandra station demanding that they should be provided travel arrangements to return to their home states.



AFP

This happened just a few hours after Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced that the ongoing nationwide lockdown will continue till May 3.



While it was not a surprise move, it came as a shock to many thousands of migrant workers who are stranded in big cities with no jobs, no income and an uncertain future due to the COVID-19 outbreak. Like the thousands who had gone back last month, they too had tried but the sudden suspension of rail, air and road traffic meant that they were left stranded, desperate and hungry.

BCCL

So, when some rumours started making rounds that there will be special trains from Bandra to take them home, it was only natural for them to rush to the station, only to be told that there is no such thing.



According to reports, the rumours have been making rounds for the past few days, mostly fanned by a self-proclaimed labour leader, whose messages got widespread traction on social media among the migrant workers.

BCCL

The labour leader, identified as Vinay Dubey ran an NGO called Uttar Bhartiya Maha Panchayat and had some influence among the migrant workers.

Over the past few days, he was reportedly running a campaign called "Chalo Ghar Ki Ore (let's go home)" calling on migrant workers to return to their native villages.

In one of the several videos and social media posts that Dubey put out in the past few days, he had appealed to the government to provide special trains to UP, Bihar, Jharkhand, West Bengal and claimed that the migrant workers will die of hunger if they are not allowed to go back home.

Vinay Dubey/ FACEBOOK

He also claimed that he had arranged buses for them to go back, but it was not allowed. He also threatened that if the government does not provide them trains or buses he will lead them on a march on foot, back home.

Dubey has now been arrested for inciting the migrant workers. An FIR for rioting has been filed against nearly 1,000 people in connection with the incident.

BCCL

The protests also took a political turn with the opposition BJP blaming Shiv Sena and Chief Minister Uddav Thakery for the crisis.



This is a serious situation that has occurred and it has happened because migrants are not being provided with proper food and accommodation. We have been repeatedly pointing this out to the state government. The state is trying to escape their responsibility by blaming the Centre, Maharashtra opposition leader Devendra Fadnavis said.

Union Home Minister Amit Shah who spoke to Uddhav Thackeray expressed concern over the gathering and stressed that such events weaken Indias fight against the pandemic and administration needs to stay vigilant to avoid such incidents.

BCCL

Rejecting the allegations again the government, Maharashtra Tourism Minister Aaditya Thackeray blamed the Centre for the protest and sought a roadmap to facilitate the migrant workers' journey back to their native places.

Thackeray said the situation in Bandra or even the rioting in Surat is a result of the central government is unable to take a call on arranging a way back home from the migrant labourers.

"They don't want food or shelter, they want to go back home," he said, adding that a mutual roadmap drawn up with the Union government will help migrant labourers travel from one state to another during the lockdown and reach their homes.

Thackeray said feedback from all migrant labour camps is similar - that they want to go back to their native places. "Many are refusing to eat or stay in these camps," he said.

Maharashtra is not the first state to witness such protests by migrant workers, Kerala, which also has a sizable migrant workers population witnessed similar scenes last month, after an audio clip was widely circulated among them, claiming that special trains have been arranged from them to go back.

But after they assembled and got to know that there was no such arrangement they protested in large numbers on the streets demanding transport facilities to return to their home states.

Kerala Police has arrested several people including a Congress leader who reportedly made the audio clip.
[April 15, 2020] Parrot to manufacture its Short-Range Reconnaissance drone prototypes for the Department of Defense in the United States of America

PARIS, April 15, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- Parrot has passed another milestone in the United States Army's Short-Range Reconnaissance drone program. As the final steps of this selection process, Parrot will participate in an operational assessment to support an Army production award decision. In anticipation of an increased demand signal from the Department of Defense, Parrot will start manufacturing prototypes of its dedicated drone in the United States of America. The mature prototype presented by Parrot, designed with carefully selected components, has now been approved for initial manufacturing. To support Parrot's commitment to U.S. industry capabilities, Parrot is currently finalizing its U.S. production chain with its partner NEOTech to build its final prototype batch for delivery to the U.S. Army and the Defense Innovation Unit in July 2020. The final prototype assembly includes the installation at NEOTech facility of all software developed by Parrot in Paris (France) ensuring high IP protection with no data dissemination. NeoTech and Parrot are also partnering to achieve the highest quality standard in the industry to meet the U.S. Army requirements. With over 40 years of heritage in electronics manufacturing, NEOTech specializes in high-reliability programs primarily in the aerospace and defense industry, medical products, and high-tech industrial markets. NEOTech has a highly talented engineering group and multiple manufacturing locations throughout the U.S. and is well recognized for its excellent customer service and high-level industry specific certifications. This partnership agreement reinforces Parrot's strategy to expand in the U.S. through a dedicated approach of the defense & security markets. "Parrot is honored to work with the DoD on this highly strategic project," said Laurent Rouchon, VP Security & Defense at Parrot. "We have successfully met the high standards set over th last 12 months on the prototype efforts and we look forward to entering this final phase and launching production in the USA."



In April 2019, the U.S. Army and the Defense Innovation Unit selected Parrot and five additional commercial drone manufacturers to develop Short-Range Reconnaissance prototype drones for military use. As a result of the award, Parrot developed a prototype of the drone between May and November of 2019. Parrot focused the company's Paris based research and development efforts toward engineering a drone dedicated to the U.S. Army specifications. A prototype unit was finalized in November 2019, and the initial testing phase continued through January 2020. The initial positive results have encouraged Parrot to begin exploring the industrialization phase in early 2020. About Parrot

Founded in 1994 by Henri Seydoux, Parrot is today the leading European group in the fast-growing industry of drones. Visionary, at the forefront of innovation, Parrot is the only group to be positioned across the entire value chain, from equipment to services and software. Its microdrones, recognized for their performance and robustness, address consumer and professional uses. The Group also has a set of advanced professional solutions (drones, sensors, software) intended for businesses, large corporations and governments. Its expert solutions are focused primarily on three vertical markets: (i) Agriculture, (ii) 3D Mapping, Surveying and Inspection, and (iii) Defense and Security.

The Parrot Group designs and engineers its products in Europe, mainly in France and Switzerland. It currently employs over 500 people worldwide and makes the majority of its sales outside of France. Parrot, headquartered in Paris, has been listed since 2006 on Euronext Paris (FR0004038263 - PARRO). To learn more, visit: www.parrot.com and these subsidiaries www.pix4d.com, www.sensefly.com, www.micasense.com. About NEOTech

NEOTech combines the strengths of three leading contract manufacturers: NATEL, EPIC, and OnCore. With their position and experience as an industry-leader in electronics manufacturing, NEOTech focuses on low-to-medium volume  high-mix designs for high-complexity/high-reliability products primarily in the defense/aerospace, industrial and medical industries.

NEOTech offers a wide array of design and manufacturing services including: full product lifecycle engineering services, manufacturing and testing of microelectronics, cable & harness interconnect products, PCBA, full box build services and aftermarket repair and fulfillment services. NEOTech and its over 3,800 employees are dedicated to solve tough engineering problems, providing customers with high-reliability, high-quality electronic solutions.

Headquartered in Chatsworth, CA, NEOTech has engineering locations and manufacturing locations in California, Colorado, Illinois, Massachusetts, Nevada, Ohio, Mexico, and China. NEOTech holds and maintains industry specific certifications that include ISO9001, AS9100, ISO13485, ISO14001 and MIL-PRF-38534. To learn more, visit www.NEOTech.com. View original content to download multimedia:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/parrot-to-manufacture-its-short-range-reconnaissance-drone-prototypes-for-the-department-of-defense-in-the-united-states-of-america-301041169.html SOURCE Parrot

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It can feel strange, this new world were living in amid the coronavirus pandemic. But just like before, there are moments of joy, inspiring tales of giving back, and struggles as we navigate work, education, parenting and other aspects of life.

Along with the latest news updates and a running list of Chicago-area closings and cancellations, the Tribune is taking a look at how our day-to-day lives are changing.

Here are the latest updates Thursday on how were living in the time of COVID-19:

How we unwind: Backyard birding is having a moment, with homebound Chicagoans spotting everything from great horned owls to fiery cardinals and canary-yellow finches

A gold finch in Mary Kortas' bird feeders in her backyard in Chicago's Norwood Park neighborhood on Thursday, April 16, 2020. (Jose M. Osorio / Chicago Tribune)

Stuck in their homes during the coronavirus epidemic, Chicago area residents are turning to a convenient form of entertainment: backyard bird-watching.

Chicago Audubon Society president Judy Pollock said activity in the societys Facebook group grew 134% in the past month, and there was a 12% increase in members, with 251 people joining.

Our world is obviously turned upside down right now, but (the songbirds) are still migrating, and the finches are still turning bright yellow, like they do in the spring, said Heather Watson, 34, of Paris, Illinois, a physical therapist assistant whose hours have been cut because of the virus.

Its kind of therapeutic to watch them and realize that, you know its crazy, but life goes on.  Nara Schoenberg

How we carry on: Chicago-area mail carriers navigate coronavirus challenges as they face customers eager to chat and Postal Services financial collapse

A United States Postal Service mail carrier, wearing a face cover because of concerns about COVID-19, or coronavirus, works the 1100 block of West Wrightwood Avenue Tuesday, April 14, 2020, in Chicago. (John J. Kim / Chicago Tribune)

Postal carrier Melissa Rakestraw sighs when she sees a postage-due notice on an envelope along her suburban route.

She digs into her purse, pulls out enough money to cover the shortage and delivers the letter. From her perspective, its a small  but necessary  price to pay for her own safety.

I dont want to be counting and handling someone elses money right now, she said. If it comes out of my own pocket, so be it. Im not going to risk my health for a few bucks."

Of course, Rakestraw is risking her health every day as she delivers mail to more than 400 homes in Hoffman Estates. Shes knocking on doors, handling envelopes that customers have sealed with a long lick and working in a postal facility where its nearly impossible to maintain social distancing.

In addition to the day-to-day safety concerns, there are broader financial ones.  Stacy St. Clair

How we get by: Chicago small businesses use federal aid to buy time, but others are left in the lurch as $349 billion fund runs dry

The federal governments $349 billion program to help small businesses stay afloat during the coronavirus pandemic has run dry, leaving thousands of small business owners whose applications are pending to wait on Congress to replenish the funds.

Launched on April 3 as part of the federal coronavirus relief act, the program offers businesses with fewer than 500 employees loans of up to $10 million to cover eight weeks of payroll. In Illinois, 44,453 paycheck loans worth more than $12.5 billion have been approved at an average of $281,196 per business.

Spring Capers may be one of the lucky ones. When the Chicago stylist temporarily closed her three-year-old South Loop hair salon last month amid the coronavirus outbreak, she knew it would hit her seven employees hard. Knowing they could only survive a few weeks without work before the money ran out, Capers encouraged them to seek unemployment benefits.

All that changed Monday, when she was approved for a $62,500 forgivable federal loan from the nascent $349 billion Payroll Protection Program, enabling Capers to keep paying her staff for the next eight weeks, until hopefully, the Spring Place Hair Salon can reopen.

It isnt a lot out of a trillion dollars, but its everything for us, said Capers, 60.  Robert Channick

How we fight: Business owners bleeding money during the coronavirus shutdown gear up for a fight with insurers whove denied their claims

Amy and Erik Baylis fill containers with pasta salad to be added to bags of groceries for employees at Fatpour Tap Works Tuesday, April 14, 2020, in Chicago. (Erin Hooley / Chicago Tribune)

Erik Baylis eight Chicago bars and restaurants have been closed since Illinois barred in-person dining starting on St. Patricks Day.

Baylis, who furloughed his 450-plus employees, assumed an insurance policy would cover some of his losses during the coronavirus shutdown, which is causing him to miss out on $5 million to $6 million in revenue each month.

He was shocked when he received a letter from his insurance company saying it would not.

Reading that was probably my lowest point of this experience, said Baylis, whose Big Onion Hospitality group owns Fatpour Tap Works, Hopsmith Tavern and The Irish Oak, among other establishments.

Thats why you insure, to prepare for the unknown, he said. All of a sudden to be told that theyre not going to pay out is immoral, unethical.

Baylis is among a growing contingent of business owners across the country who are suing insurance companies for denying claims for business interruption insurance as revenues take a nosedive during the COVID-19 pandemic. Without the money, some say they may not be able to reopen or hire back laid-off employees.

How we provide care: How does a school reopen during the coronavirus pandemic? A look at a Chicago Montessori that is back in operation for essential worker child care.

South Loop Montessori School Director Kylee Burke puts a winter hat on a toddler before the child is picked up by her parents Wednesday, April 15, 2020, in Chicago. (John J. Kim / Chicago Tribune)

Mornings at the South Loop Montessori School now begin with thermometers, a change of shoes and diligent hand washing. When staff arrives from their commutes, they are already wearing gloves and masks. Children are escorted, one by one, into the building after getting their temperatures checked at the front gate.

As a newly licensed emergency child care center, the school is allowed to remain open during the stay-at-home order so essential workers  doctors, first responders, critical government employees and grocery store workers  have a place to drop off their kids during the day.

But they are also subject to strict safety protocols. At a time when many businesses and services are shutting down to reduce human contact, the emergency day care centers are taking extensive steps to limit the number of children interacting and follow social distancing guidelines.

Things looks a little bit different than what they are used to, so theres always going to be a time for them to learn new routines, but its been so nice seeing them, said school director Kylee Burke. When I use our observation windows to check in on classrooms, I see lots of smiles. They seem to be happy to be around other children.  Elyssa Cherney

How we prepare: Transforming old Sherman Hospital into COVID-19 overflow facility has been challenging but on schedule, officials say

With more than 180 laborers on the job day and night, work converting Elgins former Sherman Hospital buildings into a COVID-19 overflow patient facility remains on schedule for completion by April 24, officials said.

Id say its 60%, 65% completed, said Tom Nelson, project executive and healthcare director for Turner Construction, the company hired by the the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to rehab the facility.

Much of the space had to be gutted because the three Sherman buildings remaining on the 934 Center St. site were never used as hospital space, according to Turner and Army Corps officials, who provided a tour of the facility Wednesday.

The layout didnt work right for beds, for patients," Nelson said. "It was more exam rooms and medical offices. The decision was to just gut the whole thing and put up partitions in order to make them into usable space for patients.

Read more here.

What you might have missed Wednesday:

What you might have missed Tuesday:
Click here to read the full article.

Heads up Yeezy fans: Kanye West says hed be OK with Nike rereleasing his original Air Yeezy sneakers during his latest interview with GQ.

The Jesus Is King rapper spoke with the magazine about everything from his ranch out in Wyoming including his first-ever Yeezy sneakers with Nike. When asked how he would feel if Nike were to retro, or re-release, his original Air Yeezy 1 and Air Yeezy 2 sneakers, West didnt voice any qualms or hesitations: Man, Im with everything.

More from Footwear News

He then explained further Man, anything that the kids want and the people want. People should be able to have what they want.

Before dropping his first collection with Adidas in 2015, West released Yeezy sneakers through a collaboration with Nike that commenced back in 2007. After two years of designing and testing, the Nike Air Yeezy 1 dropped in three colorways  Blink, Net Tan and Zen Grey  throughout the spring of 2009, with all three selling out almost immediately. The high-top silhouette includes a blend of smooth and perforated leather uppers with suede toe caps and a cross-foot leather strap.

The pairs retailed originally for $250 but resell now for as high as $25,000 on StockX.

Then, in 2012 again after years of production and processing, West and Nike released the Air Yeezy 2. Like its first iteration, the Air Yeezy 2 featured a high top, mixed-material uppers and an adjustable top strap but took it a step further by adding textured spikes across the heel counter for a bold look. The original Pure Platinum and Solar Red colorways released in 2012 with an infamous third Red October version dropping in 2014. While these pairs sold originally for $250, they now resell for upward of $12,500 with the Red October colorway available for as high as $30,000 on StockX.

Story continues

Want more?

The Popular Adidas Yeezy Boost 350 V2 Zebra Is Reportedly Restocking

A Detailed Look at the Upcoming Yeezy Boost 380 Blue Oat

A Sample Version of the Yeezy Boost 700 MNVN Surfaces on Social Media

Best of Footwear News

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Travis Duffy should be spending the day working on the farm he manages, while getting ready for the birth of his son in about five weeks.

Instead, the 39-year-old Canastota man is in Upstate University Hospitals intensive care unit, fighting to stay alive and beat the coronavirus. The virus has a stranglehold on him, and Duffys family and girlfriend say its hour by hour.

Travis, who has had asthma since he was a child but is otherwise healthy, is on a ventilator and has pneumonia, said his sister, Jessica Duffy. He has been flipped on his belly to help him breathe, she said.

They are all praying for his recovery, and hoping he will qualify for experimental plasma therapy as soon as possible.

His girlfriend, Kilee Coye, 25, has tested positive for the virus, and has some symptoms. She is 35 weeks pregnant. While she doesnt have a fever, she has lost her sense of smell and taste, and has a cough, headache and some vomiting.

"This is terrible, and scary,'' Coye said. "I just want to be there with him. Im isolated, and so its very, very hard.

Coye and the Duffy family are relying on their strong bond to get them through this. They have a group chat on their phones, and spend much of the day exchanging information, support and prayers. Travis is one of six siblings, and they all are close, Jessica said.

Its a lot on everyone. Jessica, 42, has been given the healthcare proxy to make decisions on Travis behalf, and she is calling doctors and nurses and advocating for her brother with everything she has. Her parents have tested negative for the virus, but are distraught.

Jessica said she has consented to the convalescent plasma trial for Travis, an investigational therapy that doctors hope will halt the deadly virus. Shes waiting for word on that.

"Ive never begged so much for anything in my life  I want my brother to live,'' she said. Its heartbreaking.

Travis also has an eight-year-old daughter, Aubrey, who misses her dad terribly. She has tested negative for the virus.

When Travis first went to the hospital, he was telling his family how lonely and scared he was.

"It was terrible,'' said his brother, Josh Duffy. We have such an awesome family, and we all wanted to be there for him.

Travis, who is healthy and strong other than having asthma, runs Duffy Farms in Canastota, and raises heifers in Canastota for Curtin Farms. He also grows corn and hay on Duffy Farms.

A Cazenovia High School graduate, he works on the farm with his dad, brother Josh and several other workers.

Two of those workers have tested positive for the virus.

Travis doesnt smoke and wont even consume soda, preferring water instead.

Travis, who also runs a snowmobile team which travels to Canada and other states for competitions, is getting prayers and support from the snowmobiling and farming community, as well as friends and relatives.

People have flooded social media with prayers and support for the family, and one bakery delivered food to the nurses and doctors at Upstate, who the family says have been fantastic.

The ordeal began when Travis felt sinus pressure and stuffiness in early April. His doctor told him he likely had a sinus infection.

The symptoms progressed, and soon he lost his sense of smell, had a terrible headache and a cough. His temperature would fluctuate from below normal to 102, said his girlfriend, Coye, who was with him.

On Tuesday, April 7, he felt so horrible that he went to an urgent care and tested negative for the flu. He was tested for COVID-19 the next day at Oneida Hospital, and found out he was positive on Thursday.

He seemed better at home that day, but his condition worsened that night. Early last Friday morning, he was vomiting, struggling to breathe and had a temperature of 103. Coye called the ambulance, and he was transported to Upstate.

Jessica said he was exhausted at the hospital from trying to breathe. When he tried to talk to her, he sounded like he couldnt catch his breath.

She started texting him: We are all here waiting and thinking of you. Keep fighting. At 7:09 a.m. Friday, she wrote I know you are scared..Its OK. Throughout the day, she texted messages of support as did his family.

Saturday morning Jessica texted him again: "Keep pushing  you will beat this. I know you are scared, but try to rest.

On Easter morning, his girlfriend texted Travis, telling him how much she loved him. He texted back: Love you, she said.

After that, he was sedated and put on a ventilator. The nurses now hold the phone up to his ear so Coye and his family can talk to him.

They hope he can hear them.

The family and Coye have no idea where Travis contracted the virus. He didnt travel and didnt attend any large gatherings. In fact, he rarely left the farm, they said.

Jessica said she believes testing should be earlier and more frequent. People shouldnt have to wait until they have a fever and shortness of breath when they have other symptoms, she said.

In Travis cases, Jessica said she believes days were wasted because he was told he had a sinus infection and tested negative for the flu. If he had been tested sooner, he could have been hospitalized sooner, she said.

One of the farm workers who also tested positive for COVID was initially diagnosed with a sinus infection, and went into a pharmacy to get his medication. If hed been tested when he had symptoms, that wouldnt have happened, she said.

Jessica said part of the reason shes sharing Travis story is to emphasize her belief that people should be tested for the virus when they have initial symptoms, instead of waiting for a fever and shortness of breath.

As family and friends wait for word, Coye is managing her symptoms and putting the finishing touches on the babys nursery. She keeps waiting for word that he has improved.

"This is a living nightmare,'' she said.

Elizabeth Doran covers education, suburban government and development, breaking news and more. Got a tip, comment or story idea? Contact her anytime 315-470-3012 or email edoran@syracuse.com

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With the Covid-19 epidemic showing signs of acceleration, roads leading into infection hot-spots, such as this one at the Banashankari temple, have been sealed off. (DC Photo: Satish B.)

Bengaluru: Karnataka reported its 12th Covid-19 death amid signs that the pandemic is building up a head of steam after seeming to have lain quiet in this southern Indian state for a few weeks.

The death toll now is up to 12, and the evening bulletin issued by the Department of Health and Family Welfare Services showed that 19 new positives were added to the state's case burden, taking the total to 279.

This was the highest addition within a 24-hour period since Karnataka recorded the first coronapositive case on March 9. Karnataka was also the first state in India to record a death due to Covid-19 but since then the anticipated acceleration did not come, giving a ray of hope to the health authorities here.

But the spurt seen in the last 24 hours, the indicates that the epidemic is beginning to build momentum as also seen in similar spurts in the neighbouring states of Telangana and Tamil Nadu.

The two deaths reported today included a 65-year-old male patient from Chikkaballapur, and an 80-year-old woman from Hirebagevadi in Belagavi district. The elderly lady is said to have been infected by contact with a 38-year-old male who himself got infected from a corona positive patient who had a travel history to New Delhi.
Women and children fell to the ground, bloodied and trampled in a desperate surge for food being handed out in a Nairobi slum, as police fired teargas and men with sticks beat the hungry. As African countries grapple with the coronavirus pandemic, observers warn that the traumatic scenes which played out last Friday will not be the last if governments fail to help millions of urban poor who live hand-to-mouth. "I give them (the government) one to two weeks before things get worse. Not in terms of coronavirus, but in terms of hunger," said Kennedy Odede, who runs Shining Hope For Communities (SHOFCO), a grassroots movement which works in the Nairobi slum Kibera and other informal settlements in Kenya. "If it continues like this, we might be playing with fire." Kenya has so far cordoned off the capital and parts of its coastline and imposed a night-time curfew and other social distancing measures. Many these restrictions are having a wrenching impact on the poor, causing many to lose their jobs, said Odede. While President Uhuru Kenyatta has wielded the threat of a full lockdown to get citizens to comply with the rules, officials admit it is an agonising choice, especially as 60 percent of Nairobi's residents live in slums. "Locking up people in the slums will be the last option. A lot needs to be done before that," a high-ranking security official told AFP on condition of anonymity. - 'Unenforceable and unsustainable' - The coronavirus arrived late in Africa, but is slowly taking hold with over 15,000 cases and 800 deaths across the continent. While much of the developed world waited weeks to begin taking action, countries in Africa rapidly shut borders and banned mass gatherings. Mauritius, Rwanda and Tunisia were the first to impose full lockdowns -- with Mauritius going so far as to shut supermarkets and bakeries for 10 days. South Africa is the biggest economy on the continent to completely confine its citizens, while Nigeria imposed lockdowns on Lagos -- the continent's largest city -- and its capital Abuja, which on Monday were extended for another two weeks. Both have millions of people packed tightly in urban slums. "The inevitable reaction has been to follow what the rest of the world is doing," said Jakkie Cilliers at the Pretoria-based Institute for Security Studies (ISS), who has called for Africans to come up with a "unique solution" to stave off the virus. "A lockdown is unenforceable and unsustainable across much of Africa. You are trying to do something that is not possible and you are condemning people to a choice between starving and getting sick. "It's not possible for 10 people living in a tin shack... to not go outside for three weeks." - 'Make ends meet' - In sub-Saharan Africa, Liberia and Zimbabwe have also imposed full lockdowns. However most nations across the continent have stopped short of forcing all of their citizens to stay indoors. Madagascar and Ghana have completely locked down selected regions and towns, while Senegal, Mauritania, Guinea, Mali, Ivory Coast, Burkina Faso and Niger have imposed states of emergency and night-time curfews. Like Kenya, Benin has cordoned off key cities -- preventing movement in and out -- while the capitals of Ivory Coast, Burkina Faso and Niger are also cut off. Ethiopia, with a population of over 100 million, has closed borders and schools and discouraged large gatherings, but has yet to restrict citizens' movement. "We can't impose a lockdown like more developed nations, as there are many citizens who don't have homes," said Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed. "Even those who have homes have to make ends meet daily." On the other end of the spectrum are Burundi and Tanzania, where life largely continues as normal and whose governments have so far downplayed the dangers of the epidemic. "Coronavirus should not be a reason to destroy our economy at all," said Tanzanian President John Magufuli. - 'Ineffective and unproductive' - Experts agree that for the different levels of confinement to work in Africa, significant state support is needed -- a challenge in a continent where many countries are already heavily reliant on donor aid. Kenya has lowered taxes and is delivering free water to slums, Senegal's government is paying electricity bills and Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni has urged landlords to let people live rent-free until the crisis is over. However political commentator Rachel Strohm said such measures mainly benefit people "in the formal sector". In Lagos, Uganda, Rwanda, South Africa and elsewhere, governments are distributing food, however often only to a "fraction of the vulnerable", said Strohm. She argued that many of the measures taken are "ineffective and unproductive" -- curfews on top of transport restrictions create greater crowds as citizens rush to get home in time, and thus enhance the risk of infection. Strohm and Odede back the idea of direct money transfers to citizens -- especially to avoid the inequality and chaos of food distribution. Foreign donors -- battling their own virus-induced economic crises -- will need to step in, they say. Cilliers argued you need to try and "get the maximum economic activity going so people can survive, but try to keep opportunities for infection limited." Another solution to avoid complete lockdowns and economic collapse is mass testing, with South Africa so far the only country seeking this approach. But only around 70,000 tests have been conducted so far, a level that is still "way too low", Health Minister Zweli Mkhize has admitted. The majority of countries are still only able to do limited testing. Meanwhile, ever-stricter measures across the continent have led to a rise in police violence as authorities struggle to get desperate citizens to comply. "I think we will continue to see excesses and relatively substantive brutality," said Cilliers. burs-fb/np/ri
Much-needed small business aid is beginning to trickle out and more is expected in the weeks to come as banks start to disburse the rescue funds to Main Street. But the first-come, first-serve Payroll Protection Program of $349 billion in aid may be nearing a ceiling for loan commitments, with more than 1.3 million loans given approval at a value of more than $296 billion through Wednesday afternoon, according to the Small Business Administration. The program could reach its funding limit by the end of Wendnesday, according to a source familiar with the matter. The SBA and Treasury Department have yet to release any formal statistics on total loan disbursements from banks to small business owners, with one senior administration official telling CNBC the information is not yet available, despite multiple requests. The SBA did release data showing the average loan size is just under $240,000.

Business owners that have received loan approval numbers should start to get funds soon, as Treasury guidance states that "the lender must make the first disbursement of the loan no later than ten calendar days from the date of loan approval." Several big banks reporting earnings this week offered a look into the amount of loans going out the door, with Wells Fargo saying it had received 370,000 indications of interest from customers through April 10. JP Morgan Chase, as of April 14, had 300,000 applications in varying stages for $37 billion in loans, with $9.3 billion already into the hands of small business owners.

Other lifelines for small business

Small businesses like Other Half Brewing, a craft brewery with locations in Brooklyn and Rochester, NY, just had its loan funded by Chase. CFO David Burman said the company had to furlough about a quarter of its staff of under 100 employees, and moved other frontline workers into new positions, whether delivering beer orders or design work. The loan will help to bring workers back so the business will be ready to open its doors again, once it's safe to do so. "It's a tremendous program to keep our business afloat," Burman says. "It's having the assets to hire and keep people on staff, especially as our cash flow has shifted and we are dealing with longer terms with accounts and vendors." Beyond just PPP loans, the CARES Act includes another important provision for small businesses that currently hold non-disaster loans through the SBA: the Small Business Debt Relief Program. This program provides for six months of payment relief on existing 7(a) and 504 loans for approximately 320,000 small businesses. It also includes those business owners who apply for new 504 or 7(a) loans not part of PPP. "These are some of our most vulnerable small businesses. Because you know, if they got an SBA loan, they probably had difficulty getting a traditional bank loan," Sen. Chris Coons (D-DE), a member of the Senate Small Business & Entrepreneurship Committee says. "So these are exactly the companies we want to make sure know that for the next six months, they don't need to do anything."

Sen. Coons said he is working with SBA Administrator Jovita Carranza to make sure these affected small businesses are aware of the loan relief available to them. A senior administration official says outreach to lending partners, stakeholders, borrowers and more is ongoing through e-communications, and that additional guidance is coming later this week. "Given how sharp and steep our economic decline is right now, I really hope that [the SBA] will move as quickly as they possibly can to deliver guidance," Coons says. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin has vowed to replenish the program to the tune of another $250 billion, but Congress has yet to agree to terms on the new funding. Senate Democrats blocked an effort to pass the additional funding last week.

Some funding delays
Ron Adimey hasnt missed a summer in Crystal Beach since 1967.

The Amherst, N.Y., resident is one of about 30,000 Americans whove annually enjoyed the Lake Erie shoreline from Fort Erie to Wainfleet for decades.

But this family tradition in 2020 is in severe jeopardy as border restrictions due to the COVID-19 pandemic have possibly cancelled plans for another summer by the water for seasonal residents.

Adimey is president of the Crystal Beach Hill Association, a private community consisting of 43 units on elevated land that saw its first cottages built in the early 1900s by a religious organization.

The unique cluster of summer residences years later became property of the Crystal Beach Amusement Park until a land exchange that resulted in individuals and families taking over shortly before the park closed in the late 1980s.

The association and its board were founded about 1983, said Adimey.

He agrees with border regulations ordered by the U.S. and Canadian governments and is hopeful the tail-end of the summer might end up being open for travel and outdoor recreational activity.

It just needs to be done. Its sad but its necessary, he said about current rules in place.

If they dont end up lifting the restrictions by the end of July, it will be devastating, he said, adding he usually arrives in Crystal Beach in May and stays until after he celebrates Canadian Thanksgiving with friends on this side of the border.

Adimeys children spent a large part of their childhood in Crystal Beach and his daughter recently bought a cottage in the area. His grandchildren have also spent recent summers there.

Its a huge part of who we are, he said, adding the associations membership is 75 per cent American.

Adimey said vandalism and break-ins have dropped in the past five or six years.

He also pointed out that a hired patrol regularly checks the community to make sure everything is in order, most recently Tuesday morning after high winds and water levels soaked the shoreline Monday afternoon.

It turns out we had no damage this storm, he said.

Fort Erie Mayor Wayne Redekop said there are an estimated 10,000 seasonal residents who become a part of his towns population during the warmer months, most of them U.S. citizens.

He said they are active in the community and have assisted in fundraising for parks and playgrounds as well as the town library.

They spend a lot of money, and not having them around this summer will be another major hit to restaurants and stores already struggling during the pandemic.

Their absence will definitely be felt, said Redekop. It just compounds the negative impact, particularly on the smaller businesses.

Port Colborne Mayor Bill Steele said about 20,000 seasonal residents descend on his city and neighbouring Wainfleet.

Its going to have a huge effect on our economy, said Steele, but aware of the need for border restrictions.

As much as we want to welcome you, we want you to stay home.
the ban on wine shipments from out-of-state licensed wine retailers in your state is unconstitutional and unenforceable

The National Association of Wine Retailers this week delivered individual letters, and a message, to Attorneys General and the chief Alcohol Beverage regulators in 18 states. The letters articulate NAWRs legal position and its advice to NAWR members about the states unconstitutional and unenforceable bans on interstate retailer shipments of wine to consumers in those states. NAWR offers a legislative solution to the 18 states unconstitutional shipping bans and proposes legislative collaboration as a preferable alternative to NAWR members justified defiance of states attempts to enforce protectionist and unconstitutional anti-shipping laws.

_________________________________

Dear Attorney General:

In the interests of transparency and collaboration, Im writing on behalf of the Board of Directors of the National Association of Wine Retailers (NAWR) to inform you of a change in our Associations legal policy and about a new set of recommendations we are giving to our retail members across the United States regarding the direct shipment of wine.

NAWR and its legal advisors have concluded that your states laws and regulations barring shipment of wine from out-of-state licensed retailers are both unconstitutional and unenforceable. This follows from the discriminatory nature of the legal ban on shipments into the state from licensed wine retailers.

Our legal advisors have carefully reviewed the 2019 U.S. Supreme Court opinion in Tennessee Wine v Thomas and the Courts 2005 Granholm v Heald decision. Based on the stark and explicit non-discrimination principles found in these two decisions, the ban on wine shipments from out-of-state licensed wine retailers in your state is unconstitutional and unenforceable.

NAWR informed its member retailers of this analysis. We urged them to respond with equal respect for state laws and their right to operate unencumbered by violations of their constitutional rights. Regardless, it is likely if you attempt enforcement of the unconstitutional wine shipping laws our more assertive members may defy calls to respect your blatantly unconstitutional laws or may seek direct challenges in federal court (which would include recovery of their attorneys fees).

While NAWR has concluded that your ban on wine shipments from out-of-state licensed retailers is unenforceable and unconstitutional, the NAWR board also recognizes the importance and preferability of shipments of wine into your state being accomplished under a recognized and legally adopted regulatory scheme. This benefits NAWR members and state alcohol regulators alike.

Attached is a Model Retailer Direct Shipping Bill for your consideration and analysis. Its details and provisions meet the regulatory and revenue needs of your state, provide for consumers well-regulated access to the wines they have regularly asked our members to ship them, and meets the needs of out-of-state retailers, who prefer to operate under a constitutional regulatory scheme that is neither discriminatory nor protectionist.

A well-regulated system of direct shipment of wine from out-of-state wine retailers contributes to the health and safety of your residents. We look forward to the opportunity to discuss legislation like this Model Bill with you and are at your disposal to answer questions you may have.

Sincerely,

Tom Wark, Executive Director

National Association of Wine Retailers

________________________________

The above letter was sent to Attorneys General and chief alcohol regulators in Arizona, Colorado, Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Maine, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, New Mexico, New York, New Jersey, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Washington.

ABOUT THE NATIONAL ASSOCIATION OF WINE RETAILERS

The NAWR represents independent fine wine retailers located across the United States. NAWR members seek the creation of a fair, level and well-regulated playing field for the sale and delivery of wine and oppose through litigation and legislation discriminatory and protectionist state laws. For more information on NAWR see http://www.nawr.org.
Airline stocks were in focus Wednesday morning on the promise of federal relief to help stem the damage from the coronavirus.

Delta, American Airlines, JetBlue and Southwest were among the companies who said they had reached a deal to secure a slice of the $25 billion package from the Treasury Department.

Bill Baruch, president of Blue Line Capital, said it pays to be picky here.

"Although no one may perform here over the next, say, through this year or at least the next few months -- passenger travel is down here more than 90%, China, which is moving on [from] the virus already, it's not really seeing travel return quite yet -- And ultimately, if you were to try and find a name, I think Southwest would fit the bill for this scenario," Baruch said Tuesday on CNBC's "Trading Nation."

Southwest Airlines is down sharply this year, though not by as much as its peers  the stock has dropped 38% in 2020 compared with a more than 50% decline for the rest of the major U.S. airlines.

Baruch said if Southwest can clear $38, its "path of least resistance in the near term" could be a move up to $44. It last traded at $33.40. A move to $44 implies 32% upside.

Steve Chiavarone, portfolio manager at Federated Hermes, said federal support should give the airlines some cushioning from the worst of the economic fallout.

"The airlines and the broader market in general has really benefited from some of the support from the federal government and central bank. You've taken the worst-case scenario off the market which is mass bankruptcies, financial system collapse and I think that the strong rally that you've seen has reflected that. You've taken the tail-risk off," Chiavarone said during the same segment.

However, he still sees the group as too risky and not as favorable as other corners of the market.

"We think that they're still going to face a kind of sharp decline in demand. We think clients or customers are going to slowly come back, particularly for leisure travel. You do have a lot of people out of work.  While we like cyclicals, maybe we like them in other areas other than the airlines," said Chiavarone.

Disclaimer
At least 32 people associated with Oregon senior care homes have died from the new coronavirus  making up the majority of the states death toll from the disease, according a state list released Tuesday.

The deaths span 13 nursing, assisted living and independent living homes in six counties and include the cluster at the Southeast Portland nursing home Healthcare at Foster Creek.

That home has had nine deaths and 50 coronavirus cases total, according to the new report, the most of any other facility. The state isnt counting the death of a 10th resident at Foster Creek who was identified by employees and the company as a presumed positive case.

The Oregon Health Authority and the Department of Human Services -- the two state agencies responsible for the well-being of Oregons elderly residents -- partnered last week to produce the reports and will release the numbers weekly from now on. The data comes after weeks of requests for the information from The Oregonian/OregonLive.

The agreement, signed one month after Oregons first coronavirus cases in a nursing home, is intended to help the Department of Human Services monitor the facilities it licenses for outbreaks and respond appropriately, according to a copy of the document, obtained through a public records request.

The agency has for weeks declined to provide the newsroom with facility-by-facility case counts, in part because that information came from the places themselves and wasnt validated by public health experts.

The states numbers dont reflect the full caseload across Oregons senior care homes because the Oregon Health Authority hasnt provided details for care homes with fewer than three cases and no deaths.

Tuesdays report also doesnt break down cases and deaths by residents versus employees, though other reports and reporting by the newsroom indicates most of the people who have died are residents.

Besides Foster Creek, three senior communities have had more than one COVID-19 fatality  the Astor House at Springbrook Oaks retirement complex in Newberg, with six deaths; the state veterans nursing home in Lebanon, with four; Laurelhurst Village nursing home in Southeast Portland, also with four.

At least 225 people associated with senior care homes have fallen ill with the coronavirus at 17 facilities with three or more cases or one or more deaths, the state numbers show. The state didnt provide numbers for one of those facilities, an adult foster home.

The state also provided the dates when each community on the list recorded its first confirmed case, revealing a swift spread of the disease.

The nursing home epidemic began March 11, with two confirmed cases at the Edward C. Allworth Veterans Home. The outbreak paused for about a week, with no cases identified in new facilities, until a person associated with a Marion County nursing home was diagnosed March 20.

Over the two weeks that followed, 13 more senior care homes joined the list.

The Lebanon veterans home recorded the first death. One of the first residents at the home to test positive died March 22.

-- Fedor Zarkhin

fzarkhin@oregonian.com

desk: 503-294-7674|cell: 971-373-2905|@fedorzarkhin

Subscribe to Oregonian/OregonLive newsletters and podcasts for the latest news and top stories.
EDMONTONJason Kenney could be emerging as the quick-acting leader Alberta needs in a time of crisis  or, alternatively, as an agent of chaos on the national stage with Canada in the grips of a pandemic.

It depends whom you ask.

This week, the Alberta premier criticized Health Canada and said his province wouldnt wait for the federal government to approve seemingly credible tests, vaccines and medicines.

Kenney told CBCs Vassy Kapelos on Monday he wont wait for Health Canada to play catch-up with other peer jurisdictions, such as the European Union or the United States.

He said the federal health department has been dragging its feet on COVID-19 and that the countrys chief public health officer had previously parroted talking points from the Chinese government.

As a result, Kenney said, hell be circumventing Health Canada to look at unapproved tests, vaccines and medicines that have been approved in other countries.

The premier mentioned hydroxychloroquine, an anti-malarial medication touted by U.S. President Donald Trump despite as yet being unproven against COVID-19, which just began going through clinical trials in Alberta through the University of Calgary, supported by Alberta Health Services and the federal government.

The direction I have given our officials is that if we see a highly credible regulator of medications in a peer jurisdiction like the European Union, Australia or the United States, that has approved a test, or a vaccine, or medication, we should pursue that, Kenney told CBC.

Louis Hugo Francescutti, a public health professor at the University of Alberta, said that Kenneys grievances with federal bureaucracy may have a basis but that now is not the time to bring them up.

Kenney could introduce chaos into the system, should his move pave the way for other jurisdictions in the country to seek their own tests and medicines, Francescutti said.

If 10 premiers and three territorial leaders decide that theyre going to start setting their own standards for tests and vaccines and procedures, within their provinces and territories, then you can see how easily the public is going to get confused.

Canada is also different than the United Kingdom or Australia. Francescutti said the countrys socio-economic, political, fiscal and public health needs are distinct and that decisions during the pandemic should be made through a Canadian lens.

Theres risk involved with bringing unapproved tests or drugs into Canada, he said.

Were in the middle of a crisis, he said. Now is not the best time to try and start introducing new ways to be doing things that could have quite severe consequences if you dont do them properly  whether its a test that gives a false result, whether its a vaccine that has side effects, whether its a treatment that has side effects.

Thats why we have processes at a federal level that vet these.

While Kenney has stressed that Health Canada is still credible, he has called into question some of the decisions it has made to date.

He said that it took too long for this country to shut its borders to international travel and that the chief public health officer Dr. Theresa Tam was giving bad advice at the beginning of the outbreak.

This is the same Dr. Tam who is telling us that we shouldnt close our borders to countries with high levels of infection ... who in January was repeating talking points out of the (Peoples Republic of China) about the no evidence of human-to-human transmission.

Lori Williams, a policy studies professor from Mount Royal University, called the premiers criticisms of Tam inexplicable.

Williams said that, at the time, the worldwide scientific community was still trying to figure out whether human-to-human transmission was happening.

There are a lot of valid criticisms in respect to Chinas transparency and Canadas response to the pandemic, said Williams.

But at this point, the province and the federal government should be working together, she said.

(Canadians) seem very much to like the fact that provinces and the federal government are working together to try to find a solution to something thats pretty frightening for them all.

Kenney could have used his platform to highlight some of the things Alberta has been a leader in, such as contact tracing and securing medical equipment, she said.

In response to questions submitted to the Kenneys office by the Star, spokesperson Christine Myatt said that Alberta will look at approvals in other countries, but that the ultimate decision on whether or not to use will be made by expert health officials  not by politicians.

Myatt said Alberta had bought testing devices from Spartan Bioscience, a technology company in Ontario, before being pleasantly surprised by Health Canadas approval of the testing method Monday.

Billed as a rapid-response testing device for COVID-19, Ontario this week put about one million on order after the handheld device, which analyzes DNA, received approval from the federal government. It helps give test results without having to send them off to sometimes faraway laboratories.

The premier stated very clearly yesterday that he trusts Health Canada and its credibility as an agency in terms of approvals, but should not wait for them to play catchup with credible jurisdictions like the EU and the U.S., Myatt said.

Tam responded to some of Kenneys criticisms, saying the federal government is exploring every single avenue, including tests approved by other countries.

Health Canada does have existing regulations pertaining to urgent public health needs, she said. If certain treatments are approved in the United States or in European countries by their regulators, regulators that we know are of high standard, there are actual mechanisms to bring those solutions in safely.

With files from The Canadian Press.

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Supporting victims of domestic abuse is a priority for the home secretary, and she is fully aware of the distress and anxiety this period may cause to those suffering or at risk of domestic abuse, the Home Office said in a statement. We are working with the police, domestic abuse charities, help lines and front-line workers to support and protect people.
A Portuguese nurse who helped care for Boris Johnson got a bit of a fright when he was urgently called back to work  not realising he had been specially chosen to look after the prime minister.

Luis Pitarma was specially thanked by Mr Johnson after his treatment at St Thomass hospital for the skill and devotion he and his colleague Jenny McGee showed him in intensive care.

But Mr Pitarmas father explained that his sons VIP role came as a surprise, and initially the medic thought hed done something wrong when he was asked to return to the hospital.

Owing to St Thomas's rules, the nurse could not tell his parents hed been taking care of the UK leader until after Mr Johnson had been discharged from ICU and returned to a regular ward.

He said, Mum and dad, youll never guess who Ive been treating  the British Prime Minister! his father, who is also named Luis, explained.

The nurse described Mr Johnson as very approachable.

My son asked the Prime Minister how he should address him. He replied, Call me Boris, thats enough, Mr Pitarma Snr recounted.

He said his son was picked to help care for Mr Johnson partly because of his medical training, which includes expertise in oxygenation  a key element in Covid-19 treatment.

The nurse was involved in the most crucial hours of the Prime Minister's time in hospital, he told his father.

He and Ms McGee stood by Mr Johnson's bedside for 48 hours when "it could have gone either way", the Prime Minister said.

Boris Johnson leaves hospital

Mr Johnson was admitted to St Thomas on April 5 and moved to the ICU the next night. Officials said he received oxygen but was not put on a ventilator.

As well as earning the PMs public praise, Mr Pitarma received a call from Portuguese President Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa thanking him for his role in treating Mr Johnson.

Mr Pitarma Snr, a gas appliance technician in Aveiro, a coastal city in northern Portugal, said he and his wife have since been bombarded with congratulations from family, friends and clients.

Were not used to this kind of thing, he said in a Skype interview from Aveiro.

He said his son has been working in the UK as a nurse for six year, and his parents are happy and proud that his dedication has been recognised.
- Julia, Dani, and Claudia Barretto have given an enormous contribution amid the COVID-19 crisis in the Philippines

- The Barretto siblings launched a fundraiser called #ParaMayBukas to address the issue of overcrowding in hospitals

- They were able to raise over P650,000, which led to the construction of an emergency quarantine facility at Fe Del Mundo Medical Center

- The money they got from the fundraiser will also be used to give free PPEs and meals to frontliners

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Celebrity siblings Julia, Dani, and Claudia Barretto have given an enormous contribution amid the COVID-19 crisis in the Philippines.

KAMI learned that the Barretto siblings launched a fundraiser called #ParaMayBukas to address the issue of overcrowding in hospitals.

The sisters were able to raise over P650,000, which led to the construction of an emergency quarantine facility at Fe Del Mundo Medical Center.

They will also use the money they got from the fundraiser to give free PPEs and meals to frontliners.

In just a week, the fundraiser reached P651,952.22, past its goal of P600,000.

Good news! We stopped the fundraiser already because we reached our goal of P600,000. And because of your support and generosity we ended with more. #ParaMayBukas raised P651,952.22!

P350,000 will go to the building of the Emergency Quarantine Facility, which is currently on going right now. And the P301,952.22 will go to the workforce for their meals and PPEs. From the bottom of our hearts, Thank you so much to everyone who donated! God bless you all, Claudia posted on Instagram.

Swipe to the left to see the photos of the facility:

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KAMI previously reported about Julias interview on Magandang Buhay about her 2019 controversy with Bea Alonzo and Gerald Anderson.

Julia Barretto is an actress who works for the ABS-CBN network. She used to be in a relationship with actor Joshua Garcia and then later got linked to Gerald Anderson. However, Julia and Gerald denied that they got into a relationship with each other.

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!

Maricar Reyes participated in a hilarious edition of our Tricky Questions challenge! Check out all of the exciting videos and celebrity interviews on our KAMI HumanMeter YouTube channel!

Source: KAMI.com.gh
Marysville, CA (95901)

Today

Partly cloudy this evening with more clouds for overnight. Low 39F. Winds light and variable..

Tonight

Partly cloudy this evening with more clouds for overnight. Low 39F. Winds light and variable.
The Governor of Nairobi is sending coronavirus care packages filled with Hennessy cognac to the poor because he claims WHO advice says 'alcohol kills the virus.'

Mike Sonko, wearing an ostentatious visor, said the parcels would contain miniatures of fine brandy at a typically flamboyant news conference from the Kenyan capital on Tuesday.

'We will be giving some small bottles of Hennessy in the food package which we give to our people,' Sonko decreed. 'I think from the research conducted by the World Health Organization and various health organisations it has been revealed that alcohol plays a very major role in killing the coronavirus or any sort of virus.'

Sonko, who has been relieved of his duties pending a 2.7 million corruption trial, has been slammed by medical experts who said drinking alcohol is, in fact, detrimental to the immune system.

Although the WHO do recommend the use of alcohol-based hand rubs to kill viruses, Hennessy - an 80 proof spirit - is not powerful enough to be applied in this way.

The maverick politician, whose self-given name 'Sonko' is slang in Swahili for a rich and flamboyant person, is renowned for his fine jewellery, including brilliant diamond rings and heavy gold chains

The African Medical and Research Foundation (Amref) CEO Githinji Gitahi today rejected Sonko's cognac offering.

He tweeted: 'Please completely ignore clowning of a major global pandemic taking lives and putting extreme pressure on households.

'Dump this the way you would dump your used COVID-19 mask-never to be recovered.'

Gitahi also urged Kenya's Ministry of Health to condemn Sonko's comments in the strongest terms.

In addition to Sonko's prescription of two ounce cognac miniatures worth 4 each, the care packages also include genuine hand sanitizer, maize, nappies, cleaning products and other household basics

Sonko says that his NGO, the Sonko Rescue Team, has years of experience in such work in the community and ought to be allowed to continue.

In addition to Sonko's prescription of two ounce cognac miniatures worth 4 each, the care packages include genuine hand sanitizer, maize, nappies, cleaning products and other household basics.

Although Kenya has only recorded 225 cases of coronavirus, including ten deaths, the disastrous impact it is having on the global markets is battering poorer country's the hardest, leading to hunger and desperation.

On Saturday, the government banned unofficial direct distribution of food donations after a stampede at the Kibra District Office during a handout which left dozens injured the day before.

But Sonko has continued to proudly display his donations on his Twitter feed and has urged the government to overturn their decision.

He says that his NGO, the Sonko Rescue Team, has years of experience in such work in the community and ought to be allowed to continue.

Mike Sonko announced he would be sending out miniatures of the premium brandy at a typically flamboyant news conference on Tuesday during which he donned a protective visor and Kenzo t-shirt

He has garnered a social media following for photos of his trips to the jewellers and throwing a Versace-themed 45th birthday party last month (pictured)

The governor has been barred from office since December as per his bail conditions ahead of his trial for allegedly embezzling 2.7 million (357 million Kenyan Shillings). Sonko denies the charges which he says are politically motivated.

Sonko maintains he is the Governor of Nairobi on his Twitter feed and still appears to be playing an active role during the coronavirus pandemic, despite being forced to give up his powers to the federal government until his trial concludes.

The maverick politician, whose self-given name 'Sonko' is slang in Swahili for a rich and flamboyant person, is renowned for his fine jewellery, including brilliant diamond rings and heavy gold chains.

Governor of Nairobi, Mike Sonko(C), was arrested for alleged financial crimes in December and bailed on condition his office would be barred

Volunteers from Sonko Rescue Team, an NGO privately funded by Nairobi Governor Mike Sonko, fumigate a street to curb the spread of COVID-19 during a joint operation with Nairobi county during curfew at a residential area in Nairobi, Kenya

He has garnered a social media following for photos of his trips to the jewellers and throwing a Versace-themed 45th birthday party last month.

Kenya has for decades battled the scourge of corruption, and President Uhuru Kenyatta - like many presidents before him - has vowed to combat graft.

Dozens of top executives and government officials have been charged since Kenyatta's 2017 re-election, including sitting Finance Minister Henry Rotich who was in July charged over an alleged multi-million dollar corruption scandal.
Bible reading 54 percent higher over Holy week this year: YouVersion

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Although large numbers of churches did not hold in-person services for Holy Week due to coronavirus shutdowns, Bible reading greatly increased compared to last year, according to YouVersion App.

YouVersion reported this week that Bible reading on its app from Palm Sunday to Easter was 54 percent higher than it was for Holy Week of last year.

During Holy Week of last year, YouVersion reported approximately 26.4 million Bible Plan days completed. This year, they reported a 54 percent increase to around 40.6 million Bible Plan days completed.

YouVersion also reported that while last year's Holy Week had 10.8 million verse shares, for this year the total increased by 30 percent to 14.1 million verse shares.

This Easter Sunday was the highest day in YouVersion Bible App history for verses shared and Bible Plan completions, stated Rachel Feuerborn, spokesperson for Life.Church, which launched the app.

Easter looked different this year, but it didnt stop the global church from celebrating Jesus resurrection.

YouVersion also reported that during Holy Week, users of the Bible App for Kids had 5.2 million Bible stories completed, also a record week for that app.

All this on the heels of a record-breaking month, added Feuerborn. March 2020 was the number one month in Bible App history for the number of unique users, app shares, verse shares, Bible searches within the app, audio Bible plays, and video plays.

March was also the number one month for Bible App for Kids installs and Bible App for Kids Bible story completions.

Widely shared verses included Mark 16:6, Dont be alarmed, he said. You are looking for Jesus the Nazarene, who was crucified. He has risen! He is not here. See the place where they laid him, and Psalms 30:5, For his anger lasts only a moment, but his favor lasts a lifetime; weeping may stay for the night, but rejoicing comes in the morning.

The YouVersion report on Bible reading done on its app is not the only indicator of an increased interest in the Bible since the coronavirus was declared a pandemic.

Earlier this month, multiple Bible publishers, among them Tyndale House Publishers of Carol Stream, Illinois, reported an increase in Bible sales compared to the same time last year.

Tyndale reported that their Life Application Study Bible sales went up 44 percent and sales of the Immerse Bible went up 60 percent, compared to March of 2019.

Jim Jewell, an executive at Tyndale, told The Christian Post in an earlier interview that he believes concerns over the pandemic has upended almost everyones lives in some way.

It's not surprising that people turn to the comfort and clarity of the Bible in times of trouble and uncertainty, he said, explaining that social media engagement also grew.

On [our Facebook page for the] New Living Translation, where we post Bible verse memes, engagement was triple what it was last March and up 72% from just last month.
As the United States considers ways to reopen businesses and emerge from the widespread isolation in response to the coronavirus pandemic, there are still unresolved issues being discovered about how the virus is spread.

One of those unresolved issues recently came at Bostons Pine Street Inn, which helps thousands of homeless people every day, including providing hundreds of beds for people to use every night.

The Boston Health Care for the Homeless Program began testing people with symptoms and traced a cluster back to the Pine Street Inn. After securing testing for everyone at the shelter, they discovered 146 of the 397 people tested were positive but asymptomatic, WBUR reported.

So this was stunning to us. We were not expecting that. The shelter was certainly not expecting that," Dr. Jim OConnell, president of Boston Health Care for the Homeless Program, told WBUR. Asymptomatic spread of this virus, while known in the past, has always been thought to be just a small part of it. But it may be that in certain centers like shelters  as it was in the cruise ship, as it might be in prisons ... and nursing homes, for example  it can be a real problem. So were struggling about what the right thing to do is.

The lack of testing, along with the early guidelines of only testing patients with symptoms, appears to have contributed to the spread.

In the interview with WBUR, OConnell said people with symptoms were being isolated, but those without symptoms were able to just do their normal daily activity, including staying overnight in the shelter, walk around town all day."

The kind of testing that revealed such a large asymptomatic cluster in Bostons homeless population hasnt been widespread. In fact, Boston hasnt tested its entire homeless population either, which means there could be asymptomatic people staying in other shelters and unknowingly infecting others.

Officials worry that because the homeless cant self isolate like most people, not understanding the full breadth of the problem could make containing the virus even more difficult.

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Social media and some industry captains are demanding that we spend our hard earned money uplifting the economy

When the coronavirus finally exhausts itself and the danger is over, lets do something good for our country. Lets spend our holidays in India, eat in local restaurants, buy local meats and veggies, buy clothes and shoes from Indian brands and support local businesses.

These businesses are going to find it very difficult to get back on their feet and survive without our help. Theyre suffering badly right now. Lets do our bit in helping each other stand and grow again. God bless India.

This is a Facebook forward that everyone from industrialist Harsh Goenka to students are endorsing. Why uplift the Turkish economy by celebrating our big fat weddings there, when it is pro-Pakistan? Why holiday in the US which is so tough on us in the matter of visas? Why contribute to the economy of the British who looted us or of Europe which has never done anything for us?

Going on holiday now is anyway not an option for the majority of us, who need to get back to work ASAP after the pandemic ends. But the lucky few who can afford a small break would be well advised to think of spending their money exploring the hills and beaches of our own country.

And when it comes to shopping, groceries included, many feel its our moral responsibility to buy Indian brands and commodities. In fact, there are many forwards doing the rounds, urging us to continue buying from the bandi wala, local kirana shop and neighbourhood stationery and fruit shops because they were the ones who ensured that we got our essentials when online giants who we had patronized earlier shut shop.

Currently, this is the sentiment. But will it continue? Will life get back to normal once the lockdown ends?

Its naive to think that the lure of ordering online from e-giants, indulging in retail therapy from the West, or the thrill of travelling the world will end because of the shock we have got.

But we need to think. How much of an extra effort are we willing to make for our economy from now on? Has this lockdown changed us and our priorities in any way?

Nisha Dhawan, Country Director, India, Empower, explains that What the lockdown has enabled is an increase in consciousness about the resilience of the informal sector and, more importantly, how much of a difference it makes to buy from local, small scale vendors. I think it has (already) resulted in a shift of consciousness that we shouldnt always choose the easy (add to cart) option in our day-to-day lives.

The lockdown has forced Divya Jain, Founder, Safeducate, to slow down and take a look at her life, the people around her and what really matters.

There is a new appreciation towards everything that is local and fresh. I definitely want to consume products and brands which I know about, closer to me and mine. Given the economic devastation that I do feel will follow, I see myself buying a lot more for Indian designers versus the West; using my local grocery store as well as deep diving into Indian destinations for our next holiday, says Divya.

Sindhura Indukuri, director The Shri Ram Universal School, wants to promote travel within India. My first international trip was when I was 12 years old. And my son, who is only four, has travelled outside the country more often than within the country. There are so many places within India that my children have never been to, and I would like to take them to these places now, she says. Sindhura is also reviewing her supply chain and giving priority to local sourcing.

There are so many alternatives to my sources outside India, whether it is the toys we buy for our kids, the clothes we wear or the food we eat, she points out.

It may not be possible to completely change our habits post the pandemic, but its great to see how the Spend in India sentiment is being taken seriously.
Doctors, nurses and healthcare workers have become the unwitting heroes of the coronavirus pandemic, winning applause from balconies and streets around the world.

From Yaounde to Rome to New York, the pandemic has infected more than 1.9 million people and claimed 118,000 lives.

Hospital workers are dealing with a huge influx of patients, while also facing a lack of equipment in many cases and the fear of becoming infected themselves. Often, they face heartbreaking decisions while treating their patients.

AFP journalists spoke to healthcare workers around the world to find out what it's really like to be on the frontline in the coronavirus pandemic.

In Italy, one of the worst affected countries, dozens of doctors and nurses have died from COVID-19 and thousands of healthcare workers have become infected.

Silvana de Florio, nursing coordinator in the COVID-19 intensive care unit of the Tor Vergata Hospital in Rome, underlined the importance of being appropriately kitted out with masks, visors, gloves, scrubs and suits to avoid contagion.

"We don't set aside a specific amount of time for it, but we have estimated that for a seven-hour shift, about 40-50 minutes is spent just on getting dressed," she said.

"In terms of hand washing and hand decontamination, we are talking about 60-75 minutes per day," she said after scolding a care worker for not wearing a mask.

"Medical staff can't get sick -- not so much because of their ability to work, but because it would not be fair."



In the Pacific port city of Guayaquil in Ecuador, a sick nurse makes no attempt to hide her anger: 80 of her colleagues have been infected and five have already died.

Ecuador is one of the worst affected countries in South America, with hundreds of dead bodies lying inside homes because the morgues are full.

"We went to war without any weapons," said the 55-year-old nurse, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

"The necessary equipment was not ready when this (the pandemic) was already happening, devastating Europe," said the nurse, who is resting at home as there is no space in the hospitals.

Patients with "severe symptoms" were arriving at her emergency department, "but due to a lack of tests, they were treated as if they had the flu and sent home." "We had no personal protective equipment (PPE) but we could not refuse to treat the patients," she said.

In the United States, Judy Sheridan-Gonzalez, president of the New York State Nurses Association, also complained about the lack of protective gear for medical workers.

"We don't have the arms and the armour to protect ourselves against the enemy," she said at a recent protest outside a hospital.

Benny Mathew, a 43-year-old nurse in New York, said he caught the virus after caring for at least four patients without adequate medical dress.

Not long afterwards, when his fever had subsided, the hospital asked him to come back to work.

"They told me if you don't have fever you can come on work -- that was their only criteria," he said.

"I was told to wear a mask and come to work. We don't have enough staff so I think it was my duty to come back.

"But I was worried that I was going to transmit the disease to my coworkers, to the patients who don't already have it," he added.

With more than 195,000 confirmed cases of COVID-19 and around 10,000 deaths, New York state is the epicentre of the pandemic in the US, the worst affected country so far.

The doctors at Manila's San Lazaro hospital, a specialist centre for infectious diseases, are used to battling humanity's nastiest contagions -- but they've never seen anything like COVID-19.

Suspected coronavirus cases have died at triage, terrified patients grow outraged when they can't get tested immediately and the doctors have to manage the anxiety they could be carriers too.

"It's a living nightmare," said doctor Ferdinand de Guzman, who at 60 years old is himself in a high-risk group.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
LEHI, Utah, April 15, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- Young Living, the global leader in essential oils, is launching an employee-focused initiative to not only hire new workers, but also keep all employees safe, healthy and happy during the global coronavirus crisis.

Young Living is continuing to recruit approximately 250 temporary employees to work at its distribution center as it responds to increased demand. The center is located in Spanish Fork, and role responsibilities include preparing products and fulfilling customer orders for shipment. The temporary work is expected to last two to eight weeks and employees will be paid $12 to $15 per hour, depending on the shift.

In addition to hiring new workers, Young Living is supporting current employees with a multi-pronged approach:

Remote, flexible work

Implemented an emergency leave bank to provide flexible leave to employees impacted by the pandemic



Extended PTO policy to include emergency paid leave



Added new work-from-home and social distancing policies, guidelines and resources



Provided essential equipment, such as 300 laptops and headsets to all Utah -based Member Services call center staff

-based Member Services call center staff

Provided employee training on remote work productivity and wellness as well as manager training for managing a remote workforce

Mental and physical health

Continued regular on-site gym classes by offering them virtually over video conference. Some classes include yoga, weight training, pilates and kids fitness.



Provided online resources with homework help for kids, and enhanced resources for people to have access to therapy and counseling services



Provided American Fork Member Services staff with free lunches for a week



Activated employees across the business to sew thousands of masks for use by workers in the company's Spanish Fork warehouse. To-date, 2,000 fabric masks have been sewn, with additional masks being donated to local community organizations.

warehouse. To-date, 2,000 fabric masks have been sewn, with additional masks being donated to local community organizations. Leading by example

Members and leadership personally donated money to provide lunch for warehouse employees. Donations exceeded the $10,000 goal and the excess was given to those employees to assist with food and childcare.

goal and the excess was given to those employees to assist with food and childcare. Staying connected

Launched the YL Alert app to keep U.S. employees informed in real time about crucial news. Employees are notified immediately as company news is posted. The app also features CDC news, FAQs, emergency contact info and helpful tips.



Creating video content from executives and leaders to update employees on the status of the business and hosting bi-weekly updates



Holding weekly virtual themed "Happy Hour" chats where employees and their families can get involved in activities and contests



Provided a comprehensive employee intranet with daily updates providing resources for employees and their families

"Our employees play a crucial role in our business and the wider community, and keeping them safe and healthy is our top priority," said Jared Turner, president and COO at Young Living. "We are lucky to have such dedicated employees and also to be able to offer additional positions to those in the community who may be out of work during this crisis. We will continue to ensure current and future employees are taken care of as we tackle this crisis together."

To learn more about Young Living's temporary positions, please contact Elwood Staffing at 801-798-0052.

About Young Living Essential Oils

Young Living Essential Oils, LC, based in Lehi, Utah, is the world leader in essential oils, offering the highest-quality oil-infused products available. Young Living takes its industry leadership seriously, setting the standard with its proprietary Seed to Seal quality commitment, which involves three critical pillars: Sourcing, Science, and Standards. These guiding principles help Young Living protect the planet and provide pure, authentic products that its members can feel confident about using and sharing with friends and family. Young Living's productswhich all come from corporate-owned farms, partner farms, and Seed to Seal-certified suppliersnot only support a healthy lifestyle but also provide opportunities for over 6 million global members to find a sense of purpose and whole-life wellness by aligning their work with their values and passions. For more information, visit YoungLiving.com, follow @youngliving on Instagram, or like us on Facebook.

SOURCE Young Living Essential Oils

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In the wake of the current situation, many people around the world are now staying home for the foreseeable future and HTC is putting Viveport Infinity on sale to help ease those newfound feelings of being stuck inside too long.

The company is calling it the Play At Home Sale, and has drastically dropped the monthly price of Viveport Infinity VR service. Which will work perfectly on the Vive Cosmos Elite. Where the service normally costs $8.99 a month, it now costs just $2.25 a month.

Thats an annual savings of nearly $81. The exact cost for a years worth of the service is $27 during this sale. So the exact amount of annual savings is $80.88. HTC isnt keeping this sale up forever though.

Advertisement

The Viveport Infinity Play At Home sale is a limited-time thing

If you dont already have a subscription to Viveport Infinity now is the time to set one up because the sale for it is a limited-time thing.

Itll only be available until April 19 which means you have about five days to snag the deal while its here. If you happen to miss it you will still be able to save some money on the subscription.

HTC says that smaller sales will be offered to consumers if they dont make the initial Play At Home sale. It doesnt mention what those smaller sales are specifically though.

Advertisement

And really, the only key takeaway here should be that the sale will be smaller. So whatever it is, it wont be as good as the sale thats going on right now. Even if you dont use the service right away but youre planning to at some point, youre better off signing up for it before the end date of this promotion.

The sale is available in eleven countries

Wondering just where you can get in on this Viveport Infinity deal? There are eleven countries where the promotion is being offered.

This includes the US, Japan, Canada, the UK, France, Germany, Spain, Australia, Russia, South Korea, and Taiwan. If you dont live in any of those regions, it doesnt mean there isnt a promotion for your country. It just wont be this one in particular.

Advertisement

Viveport is available in over 60 territories though. So if yours is one of them, you should definitely check to see if there are any promotions available specifically for your area. As there may be.

If youre looking for other ways to play games, Sony is offering free titles for its own Play At Home promotion, which includes Journey, and Uncharted: The Nathan Drake Collection for PS4.

That second title in particular is one that was offered for free for PlayStation Plus subscribers earlier this year. The difference here is that Sony isnt requiring users to be subscribers of PlayStation Plus. So if you missed it earlier, now is your chance to pick it up, and you should as it includes three games in one.
You are here: China

Southwest China's Yunnan Province on Tuesday announced it plans to gradually reopen schools from late April in line with their respective conditions.

Middle schools and secondary vocational schools can resume classes from April 20, according to a notice released by the provincial bureau of education.

Grade four to six students in elementary schools will return to school from April 26, with students of lower grades returning from May 6.

The notice said universities and colleges are expected to restart classes for graduating students from May 6, while students of other grades will resume classes from May 11.

Schools that failed to meet the requirements were suspended from reopening and schools across the province should strictly carry out epidemic prevention and control work in campuses, said the bureau.

The school reopening dates for students of kindergartens and special education schools are yet to be decided, it said.
Hyderabad: There was no let-up in the rise in coronavirus infections in Telangana Tuesday, with the state government announcing that the toll due to Covid-19 rose to 18 people in the state, along with 52 news cases in one day, taking the total so far to 644.

As witnessed over the past few days, Hyderabad continued to top the daily rise numbers in the disease, with the health department saying 33 of todays 52 cases came from within the Greater Hyderabad Municipal Corporation (GHMC) limits.

The number of active cases in Telangana state as on Tuesday was 516, while seven more patients who recovered, were discharged, taking the total number of those cured to 110.

Vikarabad district recorded five new cases while Medchal district registered four new cases on Tuesday. Among other districts in Telangana state that saw an uptick in the number of Covid-19 cases were Jogulamba-Gadwal, Suryapet and Nizamabad.

The severe spike in cases within GHMC limits has had officials in a tizzy over the past two days, with 136 containment zones or red zones, being set up within the GHMC area to prevent further spread of the disease.

These zones have been set up based on cases found in a given locality and possibility of it spreading outside the locality. Some of these zones are as small as 250 metres in radius, while others extend to a radius of about half a kilometre.

The government said that no one will be allowed to leave these zones or enter them. People will also not be allowed to leave their homes in these zones.

Following the issue of detailed instructions on management of containment zones, earlier on Tuesday evening, chief secretary Somesh Kumar, principal secretary of MA&UD Arvind Kumar and other officials visited Humayun Nagar to inspect arrangements at a containment zone in the area.

One person who attended the Tablighi Jamaats congregation in Delhi in mid-March, not only tested positive in this particular zone, but his entire family too, the officials said.

Meanwhile, with the extension of lockdown till the end of April in the State, TSRTC announced that it will not be plying bus services anywhere in Telangana till April 30.
Petrol and diesel consumption, which saw its biggest ever decline in the aftermath of a nationwide lockdown, is likely to pick up in the second half of the month as the government has allowed trucks to ply as well as farmers and industries in rural areas to resume operations after April 20.

Petrol and diesel sales had fallen by over 66 per cent and aviation turbine fuel (ATF) consumption collapsed by 90 per cent as the unprecedented nationwide lockdown shut factories, stopped road and rail transportation and suspended flights.

"The government has allowed inter and intra-state movement of goods traffic by road as well as rail. Also, farming operations, as well as industries outside municipal limits, have also been allowed to operate from April 20. All these will involve fuel consumption," a top industry official said.

Trucks are the biggest user of diesel. Diesel is also used as fuel in theharvester and other agri equipment. Some goods train also run on diesel.

All these activities, the official said, will allow diesel demand to pick up in the latter part of the month.

Also, vehicles used by e-commerce operators will be allowed to ply. These vehicles would largely use petrol.

"There isn't much hope for ATF but petrol and diesel demand certainly will look up if all the industries and activities permitted by the government resume operations from April 20," the official said.

The government hasn't yet allowed resumption of domestic and international flights.

Also, road construction and resuming on work on projects in industrial clusters has been allowed, which too would consume fuel, he said.

As part of a plan to exit the world's biggest lockdown and revive stalled economic activity, the government on Wednesday allowed makers of information technology hardware, farmers and industries in rural areas to resume operations after April 20.

This came a day after Prime Minister Narendra Modi extended a nationwide lockdown to May 3 to prevent the spread of coronavirus. The lockdown was first imposed on March 25 for 21 days.

From April 20, the government will lift restrictions on e-commerce companies, goods movement by roads and restart port and air cargo operations.

Factories beyond municipal limits including those in the food processing industry, mining, packaging material, oil and gas exploration and refineries will be allowed to operate. Road construction, irrigation projects, construction work and projects in industrial areas such as SEZ and EoUs will be allowed to operate.

The official said both public and private sector oil refineries had cut down their run-rate following the drop in demand.

Petrochemical plants too had shutdown as products like polymers they produced were not being lifted by user industries such as plastics and packaging unit. Now with packaging industry allowed to operate, some of the products from packed godowns will move, allowing resumption of petrochemical units, he said.

The collapse of demand in the world's third-biggest consuming nation during April came on the back of worst fuel sales in more than a decade recorded in March 2020.

The country's petroleum product consumption fell 17.79 per cent to 16.08 million tonnes in March.

Diesel, the most consumed fuel in the country, saw demand contract by 24.23 per cent to 5.65 million tonnes. This is the biggest fall in diesel consumption the country has recorded as most trucks went off-road and railways stopped plying trains.

Petrol sales dropped 16.37 per cent to 2.15 million tonnes in March as the 21-day nationwide lockdown enforced to prevent the spread of COVID-19 took most cars and two-wheelers off the road.

With flights grounded since mid-March, ATF consumption fell 32.4 per cent to 4,84,000 tonnes.

The only fuel that showed growth was LPG as households rushed to book refills for stocking during the three-week lockdown period. LPG sales rose 1.9 per cent to 2.3 million tonnes in March.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
[April 15, 2020] BIGO Ads partners with Go Mobile and Fistashki to launch its advertising business in Russia

MOSCOW, April 15, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- Mobile marketing platform BIGO Ads announces Go Mobile Inc and Fistashki as the authorized resellers in Russia. BIGO Ads, from BIGO Technology, is an ads platform providing mobile marketing solutions globally. Covering more than 150 countries, BIGO Ads integrates mobile marketing solutions into imo, the video and audio calling app with global monthly active users (MAU) of 210 million, and Likee, the short video creation platform with global MAU of 115 million. With its strong user base and high-quality content, BIGO Ads enriches the user portrait system and provides marketing solutions for advertisers and partners in different scenarios. BIGO Ads utilizes cutting-edge machine learning technology, powerful Artificial Intelligence algorithms, comprehensive big data analysis, and processing capabilities to support branding and performance advertising solutions for advertisers. With various advertisingformats, such as Banner, Native, Video and different cooperation models such as Programmatic buying,



Reserved branding Ads and Auction Bidding Ads, BIGO Ads provides a one-stop integrated marketing solutions for advertisers to reach their targeted audience, increase brand awareness and maximize return of investment (ROI). Go Mobile is a full-cycle digital agency specialized in mobile marketing. The agency provides a wide range of services, including media buying, influencer marketing, special projects, design & video production, ASO, and digital-consulting.

Go Mobile conducted the first Russian Likee challenge, made for Wild Screechers (Rosman). The campaign got 11 million views, 115 thousand UGC, 36% of that was shoot with the use of the product. Fistashki is a full-digital agency for world-largest brands in many industries. The Fistashki team is creative digerati that believes in solutions that use cutting edge digital technologies as the basis for effective advertising communications. Fistashki brings together some of the best digital experts in strategy, media, social media, influence marketing and online reputation management, to support clients in the digital world from strategy and ideas development to final efficiency analytics. BIGO Ads is glad to partner with Go Mobile and Fistashki. With Go Mobile and Fistashki's in-depth understanding of the market and excellent relationship in Russia, as well as the rich and efficient marketing solutions of BIGO Ads, we will provide advertisers with a better service and achieve marketing objectives. Now BIGO Ads is ready in Russia, we are looking forward to new collaboration opportunities with local business. Go BIG with BIGO Ads! SOURCE BIGO Ads

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DUBLIN, April 14, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- The "Solid State Drive Market - Forecasts from 2020 to 2025" report has been added to ResearchAndMarkets.com's offering.

The Global Solid State Drive (SSD) Market is projected to grow at a CAGR of 14.98% over the forecast period to reach US$47.821 billion in 2025 from US$20.701 billion in 2019.



Demand for the SSD market is high by data centers owing to the need for faster, cheaper and denser storage. A solid-state drive is required for various complex operations in data-sensitive industries such as financial services, life sciences, and energy management.



Key factors for the market growth are declining prices, performance improvement due to the formation of NVMe, and surge in cloud customers. Solid State Drives also offer various advantages, such as reduced latency and boot time, less power and space consumption, more resistance to physical shocks among others. Increasing the development of high capacity SSDs is a lucrative growth potential of this market throughout the forecast period.



By Interface Type



The solid state drive (SSD) market is segmented by interface type as SATA, SAS, and fibre channel, and ATA/IDE. SATA interface based solid-state drive offers lower cable size and cost, faster data transfer through higher signaling rates, and more efficient transfer through an I/O queuing protocol. SATA will account for the largest market share of the global SSD market during the forecast period. The old desktop PCs support only the SATA interface for upgrading from HDDs to SSDs, thereby driving the growth of this market segment. Moreover, the lower price of SATA than other interfaces will also bolster the growth of this segment over the forecast period. SAS drives come in a variety of endurance options, depending on the manufacturer, to match a particular workload and write requirements.



By End-User Industry



By end-user industry, the solid state drive (SSD) market is segmented into automotive, aerospace and defense, medical, consumer electronics, and others. Automotive segment holds significant market share on account of growing integration of technologies into vehicles. Consumer electronics also hold significant market share owing to the miniaturization of electronics and electrical parts along with the increasing focus of industry players towards more reliable and efficient data storage solutions.



By Geography



Geographically, the Solid State Drive (SSD) market is classified into North America, South America, Europe, Middle East, and Africa, and the Asia Pacific The report also analyses major countries across these regions with complete analysis and forecast along with prevailing market trends and opportunities which each of these countries present for the manufacturers. North America has a significant amount of market share in of Solid-state drive due to advanced storage solutions and an increase in spending by enterprises on Information Technology infrastructure to gain a competitive edge and increase their business productivity. APAC will witness the fastest regional market growth owing to booming IT infrastructure in emerging economies such as China and India. Growing consumer electronics industry along with the presence of global players such as Toshiba Corporation, Micron Technology, and Samsung Electronics in the region will also contribute to the market growth.



Competitive Insights



Key market players in the solid-state drive market include Intel Corporation, SAMSUNG, Kingston Technology Europe Co LLP, LITE-ON Technology Corporation, and Western Digital Corporation among others. These market players compete on price, innovation, quality, and support services. Major players are engaged in M&A or acquiring smaller regional market players to expand their market footprint. For example, in January 2019, Intel introduced its Optane SSD DC P4801X Series that offers advanced technologies and features, such as enhanced power-loss data protection, high-endurance technology, and end-to-end data protection.



Key Topics Covered



1. Introduction

1.1. Market Definition

1.2. Market Segmentation



2. Research Methodology

2.1. Research Data

2.2. Assumptions



3. Executive Summary

3.1. Research Highlights



4. Market Dynamics

4.1. Market Drivers

4.2. Market Restraints

4.3. Porters Five Forces Analysis

4.4. Industry Value Chain Analysis



5. Solid State Drive Market Analysis, by Interface Type

5.1. Introduction

5.2. SATA

5.3. SAS

5.4. Fibre Channel

5.5. ATA/IDE



6. Solid State Drive Market Analysis, by End-User Industry

6.1. Automotive

6.2. Aerospace and Defense

6.3. Medical

6.4. Consumer Electronics

6.5. Others



7. Solid State Drive Market Analysis, by Geography

7.1. Introduction

7.2. North America

7.3. South America

7.4. Europe

7.5. Middle East & Africa

7.6. Asia-Pacific



8. Competitive Environment and Analysis

8.1. Major Players and Strategy Analysis

8.2. Emerging Players and Market Lucrativeness

8.3. Mergers, Acquisitions, Agreements, and Collaborations

8.4. Vendor Competitiveness Matrix



9. Company Profiles

9.1. Intel Corporation

9.2. SAMSUNG

9.3. Kingston Technology Europe Co LLP

9.4. LITE-ON Technology Corporation

9.5. Western Digital Corporation

9.6. Micron Technology, Inc.

9.7. SK Hynix Inc.

9.8. Microsemi Corporation

9.9. Seagate Technology LLC

9.10. KIOXIA Corporation



For more information about this report visit https://www.researchandmarkets.com/r/g8wh1o

Research and Markets also offers Custom Research services providing focused, comprehensive and tailored research.

Media Contact:

Research and Markets

Laura Wood, Senior Manager

[email protected]



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SOURCE Research and Markets

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Ireland, Europe and the world are living through an unprecedented crisis. We are facing an invisible enemy and a daunting common challenge. If there is one clear lesson from the past weeks, it is that the more closely and effectively we work together in Europe, the quicker we will defeat coronavirus. Joint action saves lives, limits the economic damage and prepares us for as rapid a recovery as possible. The European Commission is pulling out all the stops to achieve this.

While national governments are in the driving seat in taking immediate action within their own countries to address the pandemic, the EU has a big role to play in helping governments to coordinate their policies. For example, when some Member States closed their borders in mid-March in their initial response to the crisis, the European Commission stepped in to establish green lanes to keep goods flowing, supermarket shelves stocked and vital components reaching factories.

The EU has done a lot more to address the wide-ranging challenges posed by COVID-19. Just before Easter, EU finance ministers agreed a 540 billion package to support member states, companies and workers hit by the crisis. The Commission made the state aid rules more flexible than ever before so that businesses big and small can get the support they need. The budgetary rules were relaxed to allow national and EU spending to go quickly to those that need it. This has enabled EU institutions and Member States put up 2.8 trillion to fight the crisis  the strongest response anywhere in the world.

Through an initiative called SURE, the EU is working to ensure that people can keep their jobs and their incomes and businesses stay afloat while we are in lockdown. The scheme will provide 100 billion to help governments make up the difference if a company, especially SMEs, has had to reduce hours for its employees.

Since the early days of the crisis, the Commission is deeply concerned with ensuring food security and an effective food supply chain across the continent. The Commission adopted quick measures in support of the agri-food sector  extending deadlines for CAP applications, increasing admissible support for individual farms and providing new lines for financing of food producing and food processing companies.

Ultimately, the development, production and deployment of a vaccine is vital in the COVID-19 battle. The Commission has therefore reoriented existing research priorities and is making new funding available to this end. It has mobilised 140 million to finance vaccine research, making 80 million available to Cure Vac, a global leader in this field. Seventeen other vaccine-related projects are being supported, including Dublin-based Hibergene Diagnostics.

The Commission prepared a common tender for EU Member States to help secure equipment to protect frontline health care workers and provide their patients with the best possible care under the circumstances. As we all know, frontline workers sacrifice the most in our fight against the coronavirus, including healthcare workers caring for patients, and all workers who contribute to combating the spread of the virus and keeping essential services running. We owe them all our most sincere thanks.
COVID-19 Has Infected More Than 9,000 US Health Care Workers: CDC

More than 9,000 U.S. health care workers have tested positive for the CCP virus in the space of two months, and 27 have died in that time, according to a report released April 14 by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

The federal data is the first of its kind to offer insight into how the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus, commonly known as the novel coronavirus, is affecting health care workers across the United States.

New data show 9,000+ #COVID19 cases in healthcare personnel were identified from 300,000+ cases reported to CDC from Feb 12Apr 9. If you need medical care, call ahead & wear a cloth face covering to protect HCP & other patients. @CDCMMWR https://t.co/oiYeW6zbrp pic.twitter.com/EBFD6ZJye1  CDC (@CDCgov) April 14, 2020

The CDC report found that between Feb. 12 and April 9, at least 9,282 health care workers contracted COVID-19the respiratory disease caused by the CCP virus. Of the 27 deaths, 10 were aged 65 and above.

The figure represents roughly 3 percent of the 315,531 COVID-19 cases reported to the agency in that time. However, it said it is likely an underestimate given data about whether patients were medical workers was available in just 16 percent of the cases. States provide data to the agency on a voluntary basis.

That said, the study still offers important takeaway lessons, said Dr. Robert Glatter, an emergency physician at New York Citys Lenox Hill Hospital.

Data from 12 states that did a better job reporting on whether patients worked in medicine showed that health care workers made up some 11 percent of the total CCP virus cases, the CDC said.

Compared with CCP virus cases nationwide, larger proportions of diagnosed health care workers were women (73 percent of cases), were white, and were young or middle-aged adults. Thats consistent with the demographics of people that work in health care, researchers said.

Of those in the medical field in the United States who contracted the virus, the CDC said more than half likely contracted it via contact a coworker or with an infected patient. Slightly more than half of a group of CCP virus-positive health care workers studied said they were only exposed to the virus in the workplace, but researchers said its hard to know for sure how different people caught the bug.

The total number of COVID-19 cases among [health workers] is expected to rise as more U.S. communities experience widespread transmission, the report warned.

COVID-19 cases in the United States have surpassed 600,000, with at least 26,000 deaths, according to a tracking map by Johns Hopkins University that collates official government data.

Mark D. Neuman, associate professor of anesthesiology and critical care at the University of Pennsylvania, told The Wall Street Journal that the data offers a limited understanding of whether the virus is being transmitted to medical personnel at a higher rate than the rest of the population, given that they may be more likely to get tested for COVID-19.

I havent seen statistics that make me think were having large-scale health care worker infections, Neuman said.

It is critical to make every effort to ensure the health and safety of this essential national workforce of approximately 18 million [health care personnel], both at work and in the community, the report concluded.

Improving surveillance through routine reporting of occupation and industry not only benefits HCP, but all workers during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.
An insurance carrier is not liable for a fatal crash caused by an ambulance that was not listed on its commercial policy, even though the business thought that the vehicle had been added, the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled.

The appellate court affirmed a ruling by the trial court, finding that the terms of United Emergency Medical Services policy required any changes to the vehicles insured to be specifically listed on an endorsement issued by Markel Insurance Co. The court was not persuaded by arguments that United had been lulled into believing only an email was required to amend coverage.

Christopher Sofko was killed on Jan. 2, 2016 when his vehicle collided with a United EMS ambulance driven by Abraham Nadermohammadi on U.S. Highway 30 in Schereville, Indiana. His death sparked a dispute that pitted United and its driver against Markel and its agent, Insurance Service Center. Sofkos guardian, Lilian Rau, also pursued claims against Markel and United.

Along the way, Erie Insurance Co. joined the fray as an intervenor. Sofko was covered under an uninsured motorist policy issued by Erie, so the outcome of the dispute impacted its liability.

United EMSs administrative director, Steven Pavek, testified that he had emailed the Insurance Service Center asking agent Jack Rosen to an ambulance labeled Ford #4497 to be added to the policy and that another vehicle be removed. Pavek never followed up on that request, even though in the past the company had received written endorsements from Markel when changes were made.

United EMS did not realize Ford #4497 was not listed on the policy until after the crash that killed Sofko. Rosen said he never received the email.

The district court found Markel had no duty to defend or indemnify United or Nadermohammadi. It denied cross-motions from Rau and United for summary judgment against Markel.

The 7th Circuit said it does need to know what happened with the email sent by United to decide that Markel is not liable. It is undisputed that neither the Insurance Service Center or the carrier had accepted or responded to United EMSs request to add Ford #4497 to the policy, the court said.

The court also rejected an argument that ambulance companies should be treated in the same way as commercial motor carriers, which regularly take vehicles in and out of service and do not list each vehicle specifically on their insurance policies. The court said under federal law, commercial motor vehicles must weigh more than 10,000 pounds. Ford #4497 weighs less, the court said.

Finally, the court was not persuaded by an argument that United EMS had been lulled into believing that its vehicle was covered because Markel had accommodated all of the companys previous requests for policy changes. Rau argued that equity required coverage because the requested changes did not affect the amount of the premium.

Markels amenability to past changes  did not mean that it was estopped from rejecting amendment requests, the opinion says.
A husband and his wife, both lawyers, were found dead Monday night in their Chicago area home.

Authorities discovered the bodies of Thomas Johnson, 69, and Leslie Jones, 67, at around 7:30 p.m. while conducting a welfare check at their Oak Park home.

Police said that "preliminary information gathered at the scene indicates suspicious circumstances" and it does not appear that the deaths were self-inflicted.

On behalf of the Oak Park Police Department, I want to offer our condolences to the family and friends of Ms. Jones and her husband, Mr. Johnson, both of whom are known in the community and beyond, Police Chief LaDon Reynolds said in a statement.

Image: Authorities say a husband and wife were found dead under

Reynolds said he does not believe there is a threat to the public but out of an abundance of caution patrol cars have increased in the area.

Johnson and Jones were attorneys at the Johnson, Jones, Snelling, Gilbert & Davis law firm in Chicago, about 9 miles outside of Oak Park.

A bio for Jones on the firm's website states that she specialized in federal litigation, real estate and corporate transactions and zoning.

Johnson, who founded the firm, played a crucial role in establishing affordable housing in Chicago and "in securing justice for coal miners, truck drivers and others in the labor movement," his bio reads.

He also helped reform Chicago's voter registration and worked with many officeholders, including former President Barack Obama, according to the law firm.

Phillip Snelling, an attorney who worked with the couple, said the deaths are a tragedy for the firm and the community.

"Tom and Leslie were an extraordinary couple. Not only were they skilled lawyers who both made significant contributions through their legal work but were also generous and compassionate human beings who served the Oak Park and Chicago communities on many organizations and through their works," he said in a statement to NBC News.

"Their loss is shocking and our hearts are broken for their wonderful sons and the many individuals whose lives they touched and made better," Snelling said.

Story continues

In addition, Johnson served as a hearing officer for the Chicago Police Board, an independent civilian body that makes decisions regarding police disciplinary cases.

In a statement on the board's website, President Ghian Foreman said they were saddened to learn of the deaths of Johnson and Jones.

Tom was an outstanding hearing officer and a wonderful man. All of us on the Board admired and respected Toms deep knowledge of the law and commitment to fairness," he said.

Johnson had been a hearing officer since 1991 and presided over more than 350 police disciplinary cases, including the four Chicago officers who were found to have made false or misleading statements about the 2014 killing of Laquan McDonald by another officer.

"His work was of the highest caliber. Most importantly, he was in our eyes and by all accounts a thoughtful, kind, and caring man," Foreman said. "We will miss him greatly, and offer our prayers and condolences to Tom and Leslies sons and family."
President of the National Research Center (NRC) Mohamed Mahmoud Hashem has said that he sees positive indicators for using the Japanese drug Avigan to cure people infected with the novel coronavirus (COVID-19).

In an official statement released on Tuesday, Hashem added that the NRC is working on studying the effectiveness and safety of more than 70 drugs, including Avigan, in the treatment of coronavirus patients.

He went on to say that the NRC administration assigned a number of researchers to develop vaccines or drugs against coronavirus.

Hashem asserted that those researchers are funded by the NRC, denying circulated reports about receiving support or finance from any domestic or international entity.

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The Appointments Committee of Parliament will later today [Wednesday] April 15 vet the Deputy Health Minister-designate, Dr. Bernard Okoe Boye.

The Ledzokuku MP was appointed after the President re-assigned Alexander Abban to the Deputy Minister of Communications portfolio.

Dr. Okoe Boye, who served as the Board Chair of Korle Bu Teaching Hospital, has been one of the figures at the forefront of the governments communication on the novel coronavirus pandemic.

If appointed, he said his focus would be on helping to defeat the coronavirus pandemic.

I pledge to put in all my energy, time and all the things I have learnt on the job to make sure that we win this war. For the war, we are going to win, the only thing we don't know is how long it will take and we all have a role to play in shortening the recovery time, Dr. Okoe Boye assured.

Parliament is currently on suspension and not recess, as was suspected, because of the pandemic.

It had to sit again to receive the Finance Minister who presented a request to utilise the Contingency Fund to contain the pandemics spread.

After the vetting, Members of Parliament is expected to be recalled again possibly on Thursday or Friday to deal with the matter, according to the Majority Leader in Parliament.

Support from constituency

The Ledzokuku Constituency leadership of the New Patriotic Party has come out to refute claims that the appointment of Dr. Okoe Boye is a ploy to favour him in the parties primaries.

There have been some claims in the constituency that his appointment is meant to give him a bigger advantage over opponents and possibly have him contest unopposed.

But speaking to Citi News, the Constituency Secretary, Wisdom Donkor, said claims of a plot were untrue.

They [claim to] have heard that National, Regional [level of the NPP] and even the First Lady and the Chief of Staff are all moving to say Dr. Okoe Boye should go unopposed. They simply just want to tarnish the good image of our hardworking MP so all that they are saying is unfounded, he said.

----citinewsroom
If you want an agreement, and I doubt you do, lets reach one in the clear light of day in Congress. That was the unequivocal response of Popular Party (PP) leader Pablo Casado to Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez during a question and answer session today in Spains lower house of parliament, the Congress of Deputies.

The challenge came after the Socialist Party (PSOE) politician made a heartfelt offer to opposition parties to come together to create a national plan to rebuild the Spanish economy after the damage that has been wrought by the ongoing coronavirus crisis.

Pablo Casado called on Sanchez to be more humble and to wear a black tie as a sign of mourning for the victims of the Covid-19 disease

During the debate in Congress today, Casado offered no clue as to whether he would take part on Thursday in the meeting that the prime minister has organized in a bid to explore the possibility of reaching what has become known as a new Moncloa Pact, in reference to the cross-party agreements of 1977 that produced a national socioeconomic recovery program and shored up Spains transition to democracy after the Franco dictatorship ended.

Casado, who, along with the far-right Vox party, has slammed the governments handling of the coronavirus epidemic in Spain, called on Sanchez to be more humble and to wear a black tie as a sign of mourning for the victims of the Covid-19 disease, and he blamed him for turning Spain into one of the worst countries in the world in terms of its response to the dramatic health crisis.

Both Sanchez and his deputy prime minister, Pablo Iglesias, from the left-wing Unidas Podemos party, tried to avoid being dragged into responding in a similar tone to the harsh questions that were voiced by the PP and Vox.

Sanchez responded to Casados questioning by saying that he was living each one of the coronavirus deaths in Spain as if they were members of his own family, and promised that when the worst of the pandemic is over, the victims and their families would have the tribute that they deserved.

He also rejected the accusation that Spain was responding poorly to the epidemic compared to other countries, pointing to the reduction in the daily infection rate from 35% to the current 3%. He said that this fall was proof that the measures adopted by the Cabinet and the government, such as the strict confinement that has been in place since March 14, were working.

Sanchez called on Casado for another way of doing politics, and the restoration of consensus among Spains political parties

Sanchez repeated that all of the decisions being taken by the government were backed by a committee of experts and scientists, and repeated statements he made during a televised address several days ago calling for political unity.

Sanchez also called on Casado for another way of doing politics, and the restoration of consensus among Spains political parties, insisting on the need for cross-party pacts. We are working for the general interest, not the individual, and I hope that we can reach an agreement that is so necessary.

Later in the session, both the PP and Vox focused their attacks on Deputy Prime Minister Pablo Iglesias, who has become a target of the right-wing parties because they believe that he is imposing radical and populist policies on the government, taking advantage of the coronavirus crisis.

The secretary general of the PP, Teodoro Garcia Egea, sought to blame Iglesias for the high level of deaths per inhabitant that Spain has seen since the outbreak began, an accusation that was levelled by practically all the opposition parties during the debate.

Egea blamed Iglesias for placing ideology above the health of Spaniards, and for spreading propaganda.

The general secretary of Vox, Macarena Olona, claimed during the debate that democracy was being bled dry in Spain, and blamed the communist government of Sanchez and Iglesias for taking advantage of the situation to impose their totalitarian Venezuelan model, as well as the destruction of the nation, going as far to suggest that the government was seeking to outlaw Vox.

Iglesias responded in a measured tone, and once again appealed to the parties to work together with a common denominator: The Constitution and its social-protection mechanisms.

Questions for the health minister

Vox deputy Juan Luis Steegman, who is also a doctor, insisted on questioning the health minister, Salvador Illa, on the official figures offered daily by the government since the coronavirus crisis began. In this mortuary that you have turned Spain into there are thousands of people who have died without the PCR [coronavirus tests], he stated, pointing to Covid-19 cases that had not been properly counted, seniors who had died from the disease in residences without proper diagnosis, and bodies that had not been subject to proper autopsies. He also claimed there were collateral victims who have died due to other causes, simply out of fear of going to hospital.

Illa responded calling for a serious approach and for the opposition not to make use of such worrying statistics, which, he said, were being supplied every day according to the established international criteria.

After 90 minutes, the debate concluded after following a similar pattern, one that saw the opposition aiming to blame the prime minister and Pablo Iglesias for placing Spain in one of the worst situations on a global scale due to their incompetence.

Government spokesperson Maria Jesus Montero echoed the words of other ministers and decried the tone of doom and gloom that Vox and the PP had adopted, at a time when the country was hoping for a different response, one of unity.

English version by Simon Hunter.
The Mayor of Byron Bay has warned up to 75 per cent of workers in the beach town could lose their jobs in the wake of coronavirus.

The popular holiday spot in northern New South Wales has been turned into a 'ghost town' since lockdown measures have taken place, forcing visitors and tourists to stay home.

Mayor Simon Richardson said the global crisis has forced 90 per cent of shops and businesses in the town to close, leaving the town 'devastated'.

'Like most of Australia, there's a lot of us, our estimates were up to 50% to 75% of our workforce are going to be out of work or on severely reduced wages,' Mayor Richardson told ABC News.

The Mayor of Byron Bay has warned up to 75 per cent of the workforce could lose their jobs in the wake of coronavirus (pictured: empty chairs and tables outside a Byron Bay cafe that was forced to close)

The outbreak of the disease has forced up to 90 per cent of businesses to shut up shop (pictured: Bella Rosa Gelato store closed in Byron Bay)

Beaches have also closed in the popular holiday spot in northern New South Wales

The popular Byron Bay souviner shop was one of many retail stores that fell victim to COVID-19

Byron Bay on average has around two million visitors every year but due to borders shutting and people being urged to stay home, the town is now 'scrambling to find any source of revenue'.

Mayor Richardson said accommodation was one of the hardest areas hit and the cancellation of the popular Bluesfest Festival made the situation even worse.

The festival was due to be held over the Easter long weekend and brings around 100,000 people to the beach town every year.

'We've been devastated like any town that relies on visitation and hospitality and the creative industries,' Mayor Richardson said.

'We've been really gutted by an Easter period which has almost rendered our towns ghost towns.'

Byron Bay will continue to suffer with the postponement of Splendour in the Grass which saw more than 42,000 people attend last year's festival.

The event due to be held in July has been pushed back to October after mass gatherings were banned for more than 500 people.

The town is usually full of tourists and visitors over the Easter long weekend but instead the streets were empty and stores closed (pictured: sign on Byron Bay cookie store)

Cotton On, Volcom and Just Jeans are all seen closed in the wake of coronavirus

Byron Bay Mayor Simon Richardson said although the town was financially suffering, they were hopeful it would boom once the pandemic is over

One Byron Bay retail store is seen covered in newspapers after it was forced to shut down

Mayor Richardson said although the town's financial situation was 'dire', they were hopeful it would bounce back after the pandemic.

Photos taken of Byron Bay's busiest street now empty reflect the grim reality locals are facing.

Stores that were once bustling with eager shoppers are now seen covered in newspaper and with their shutters down.

Brands like Cotton On, Volcom and souvenir shops that line the street to the beach shut their doors informing customers they were 'temporarily closed'.

The main street in Byron Bay is seen almost empty as Australians are urged to stay home amid coronavirus

One store is seen offering a closing down sale amid the global crisis

The popular Bella Rosa Gelato store also fell victim to the pandemic and empty chairs and tables sit outside cafes that were also forced to shut down.

But Regional development researcher Professor Andrew Beer from the University of South Australia earlier told Daily Mail Australia the struggle for the beach town will most likely be temporary.

'In the long term, the impact will be negligible. Byron Bay will continue to grow and prosper,' he said.

'Within two months of the ban being lifted, and assuming international travel won't be possible for the remainder of this year, Byron is likely to be booming once again.'

The popular retail store Cotton On Body also shut its doors to the public

Tourism also took a hit with souvenir shops shutting as well as centres offering local experiences for backpackers and tourists
ALBANY  Albany County Executive Dan McCoy announced a large expansion of coronavirus test sites aimed at helping potential victims of the virus in areas where data show residents are more likely to have underlying medical conditions that increase the lethality of the disease.

Working with the Whitney Young Health Center, the county is opening four mobile test sites starting Thursday, McCoy said.

The first location for the mobile testing operation with be at the Capital South Campus Center, 20 Warren St., in the city. McCoy says it should be up and running by noon Thursday. The sites will all be walk-up sites and require appointments. To get an appointment, people should call 518-465-4771.

Were really going to be the first county in the state of New York thats truly going in to areas that need to be tested, that have underlying health issues, McCoy said.

The testing is free  if residents dont have health insurance they will not be charged. Residents with health insurance will have their insurance billed.

The other three sites will open Friday.

One site will run from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. at the Whitney Young Health Center, at 920 Lark Drive. The second will from 9 a.m. to noon at the Bleecker Terrace Apartments on North Manning Boulevard. The third site will run from 1:30 to 4 p.m. at the Watervliet Health Center, at 1804 Second Ave., in Watervliet.

Here is the timeline of Gov. Cuomo's response to COVID-19

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There is no set timeline for how long the test sites will remain there. The county will make decisions on where to move the sites based on testing volume and need. The county will also eventually move some of the mobile sites to the Hilltowns to reach residents there.

On Wednesday, Rensselaer County Executive Steve McLaughlin said he hopes that Whitney Young will bring a test site to Lansingburgh.

The new sites will join a testing operation that opened last week at the University at Albany and staffers from the Whitney Young Health Center will run all four of them. The cost of the test kits and operation to the county were not immediately clear.

Whitney Young CEO David Shippee said their data show the areas where the test sites will be located show greater prevalence for the underlying medical conditions that can compound the health risks of coronavirus and decrease the chance a victim will recover.

We know that  given the huge disparities in the populations we serve and the neighborhoods we hope to take this to over the next couple of weeks that theres a high prevalence of chronic conditions there, he said.

As the virus has spread throughout the country, health officials have discovered that minorities, particularly black people, have suffered higher infection and mortality rates than other groups. In counties outside of New York City, 17 percent of the states COVID-19 deaths were black, even though they make up only 9 percent of the population, according to state Department of Health data. White residents make up 70 percent of the population outside of New York City but only 60 percent of the states deaths from the disease.

Dr. Micheline Ford, a critical care physician at Schenectady Pulmonary & Critical Care Associates, said part of that can be traced back to higher rates of key underlying conditions, such as hypertension, renal disease, obesity and heart disease combined with a general lack of access to health care, health insurance or transportation to get health care.

So, when something like COVID-19 comes along, this population is hit at an extraordinary rate, such that they dont have the ability to actually fight the virus, she said.

County Legislator William Clay, head of the Legislative Black Caucus, said he was sending a letter Wednesday from 14 county legislators and Albany Common Council members to McCoy's office requesting demographic data on how the virus had affected the county to see if there was a disparity among minority populations.

We have no idea how many people of color this has affected, he said.

The county has said that it plans to release demographic data but that it wouldnt show the true spread of the virus in the county because the county had not been able to do widespread community testing for several weeks until the new University at Albany site opened. The lack of available tests forced local hospitals to triage them, reserving them for clearly ill patients as well as health care workers and first responders.

Clay worried that the countys death count was missing people who might have died of the virus in their homes and werent included in the daily tally, which is made of up patients who died in local hospitals.

There is a disparity between what were getting from public sources and what were getting from coroners and undertakers, he said. All were looking for is information so we can keep our constituents informed.

More cases, deaths at Capital Region nursing homes

Special Investigation 147 NY dams are 'unsound,' potentially dangerous Thousands of dams have not been inspected in over 20 years.

Capital Region counties reported six more deaths due to COVID-19 on Wednesday, bringing the regions known death toll from the disease to 63.

Albany County saw four more residents die from the disease, McCoy announced. Three of the victims  which included two men in their 60s, a woman in her 70s and a woman in her 80s  had underlying medical conditions, he said.

The countys death toll from the virus now stands at 20  the highest in the region. It also has the most laboratory-confirmed cases in the region at 515. The only other counties that come close are Schenectady with 249 and Saratoga with 235.

Columbia and Warren counties also reported one new death each on Wednesday.

Warren County declined to release information about the death, other than to say it was a resident from the southern end of the county who had been hospitalized for an extended period of time.

The county is currently battling a large outbreak at The Pines nursing home in Glens Falls, where 33 residents and staff have tested positive to date, according to the Post-Star.

Columbia County Public Health Director Jack Mabb told the Times Union on Wednesday that the countys 10th death was a resident of the Pine Haven Nursing and Rehabilitation Center in Philmont, which is also battling a large outbreak. Twenty-six residents have tested positive for the virus, and seven have now died, he said.

Meanwhile, Rensselaer County officials reported Wednesday that two more residents of the Diamond Hill nursing home in Schaghticoke have tested positive for COVID-19, bringing the home's known infections among residents and staff to nine. Three residents from the home have died as a result of the illness.

Both New York and other states are experiencing a rise in cases and deaths affiliated with nursing homes and other long-term care facilities. In New York, nearly 26 percent of all deaths have been residents of a long-term care facility.

Gov. Andrew Cuomo and state Health Commissioner Howard Zucker have refused so far to release outbreak or fatality data for specific nursing homes, claiming it violates resident privacy. Public health experts have countered that, arguing it serves the publics and familys interest to know where outbreaks are occurring.

The breakdown of known cases, hospitalizations, recoveries and deaths for the 11-county Capital Region are below:

Albany  515 cases, 29 hospitalized, 12 adults in ICU, 216 recovered, 20 deaths

Columbia  100 cases, 6 suspected, 10 hospitalized, 3 in ICU, 42 recovered, 10 deaths

Fulton  24 cases, 2 deaths

Greene  82 cases, 47 active, 36 resolved, 8 hospitalized, 0 deaths

Montgomery  35 cases, 20 recovered, 2 under medical care, 1 death

Rensselaer  146 cases, 58 recovered, 9 hospitalized, 4 in ICU, 6 deaths

Saratoga  235 cases, 14 hospitalized, 122 recoveries, 6 deaths

Schenectady  249 cases, 30* hospitalized, 82 recoveries, 12 deaths

Schoharie  24 cases, 4 hospitalized, 16 recovered, 1 death

Warren  73 cases, 2 hospitalized, 52 recovered, 3 deaths

Washington  40 cases, 21 recovered, 2 deaths

*includes all hospitalizations in county, regardless of patients county of residence

Bethany Bump contributed.
Imagine if Donald Trump had called the Ebola virus, which originated in Africa, The Black Virus.

Or, if in some alternate universe COVID-19 had originated in Israel and the American president started calling it The Jewish virus.

He wouldnt. Because he knows better.

But yet, he got away for days calling COVID-19 The Chinese virus. In fact, he insisted on it, despite widespread condemnation.

It was perhaps too much to expect the bombastic Trump to realize that Chinese isnt a country. Its an ethnicity. And after a few days and a few more hate crimes against Asians, he finally relented.

But why did he get away with this particularly despicable piece of Asian bashing when if he attempted it with other communities he would get pulverized?

I blame my mother. She bought into the whole myth of the model minority. Turn the other cheek, she would say if I told her about any perceived prejudice growing up. Just do your work and show you belong.

And so I did. This was the prevailing wisdom for her generation and the generation before that. I would grow up admiring the Black and Jewish communities and their fight for civil rights. Where were our Black Panthers? Those guys didnt take crap from anybody.

As a result of decades of historical xenophobia, the racist trope that Asians were a Yellow Peril who would spread into communities like a disease, the public is less sensitized to discrimination against Asians. When Saturday Night Live comic Shane Gillis mocked accents and referred to Chinese as f--king ch--ks in a podcast last year it took an agonizing five days for him to get fired. It makes you wonder how fast would he have been fired if he had used the N word? But perhaps what was more disheartening were the number of celebrity defenders who came out to defend his right to free speech.

So generations later, what feels like a punch to the gut is hearing former U.S. Presidential candidate Andrew Yang telling Asian Americans to pitch in and work harder to be more American so they can be accepted.

In an op-ed published in The Washington Post, he said Asian Americans need to step up, help our neighbours, donate gear, vote, wear red white and blue  we should show without a shadow of a doubt that we are Americans who will do our part for our country in this time of need.

Of course everyone should do their part for the country and their community. Thats a given. This week an initiative by the Chinese-Canadian community, in a largely unheralded move under former United Way chair Dr. Joseph Wong, donated 200,000 masks to area hospitals after raising more than $400,000 .

But thats not because anyone wants to curry favour with the Ku Klux Klan. Or in the words of Canadian Simu Liu (Kims Convenience) and soon to be Marvel superhero Shang-Chi in a tweet, Andrew Yang just told us to suck it up, eat a cheeseburger and buy an American flag.

There have been numerous incidents reported of assaults on Asians worldwide, as racists feel empowered by the virus to lash out. Canada has not been immune. An Asian emergency room nurse in Toronto reported that she was hit with an umbrella and spat on by a woman. Actor Russell Yuen (who I shared the briefest of scenes with in a Frankie Drake Mysteries episode) said he had to fend off a verbal attack in North Bay. And reports of being spit on, yelled at and physically attacked have been more common as the pandemic continues to take a toll.

Meanwhile, Yangs op-ed was also a bitter pill for the Japanese-American community, who like Japanese-Canadians, were interned during the Second World War.

Yang used the example of Japanese-Americans enlisting in the military to demonstrate their American-ness during a time of need. He neglected to mention that many of the prisoners were drafted while interned.

It was so typical, know your place and be grateful and well be fine as long as youre dutiful and obedient, says Amy Go, president of the Chinese Canadian Council for Social Justice (CCNSJ). Its basically shut your mouth and let it slide.

Now Yang is a smart guy with some great ideas, including universal basic income that is becoming prophetic in the age of COVID-19. But its sad to see someone this intelligent feel that the best way to counteract racism is to appease the racists.

Yang should have called out the racism for what it is  but instead he chose to promote the myth that Asians are the subservient people of colour  working to uphold a system of institutionalized racism, to show the other coloured people that they can do it too.

To explore the absurdity of the comments, Comedian Jenny Yang (Last Man Standing) took Yangs words to heart by wearing red white and blue, stepping out into the streets and handing out disinfecting wipes, while holding a sign saying Honk If You Wont Hate-Crime Me.

There is hope. Leaders at all levels recognize the impact and have spoken out. But Canadians of all colours need to step up. Gos group is in the process of launching a nationwide anti-racism campaign that she promises will Empower people to call out racism. We need to be more bold.

One issue is that a lot of racism does not fall under the category of physical assault, and its difficult to respond to in the heat of the moment. What happens when someone at the grocery store calls you by a racial slur and tells you to back off?

How do you react? Its really hard and even asking victims to come out is challenging, says Go. But we have to shut this down, to show this is completely unacceptable.

(A first step: The Toronto chapter of the council is gathering data by asking anyone who has been a victim to record their experiences on their website)

Despite his progressive ideas, Yang, not unlike many people of colour suffers from model-minority syndrome. He really, really wants to be liked.

Reasonableness, mind you, isnt a bad thing. Unfortunately, social media rewards the loudest voices. Moderates like Yang who dont play partisan games get drowned out. But there is is no middle road when it comes to race.

Turning the other cheek while trying to say, Were just like you was a strategy that didnt work in the last century. And its not working now.

Racism must be confronted, called out and prosecuted. Or in the words of CCNCSJs Go, Its everyones responsibility to take action as a society. Were all in this together.

Tong Wong is a former Toronto Star reporter and a current freelance contributor.

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New Delhi: Equity benchmark indices on Wednesday (April 15) erased early gains to close lower with the Sensex down 310.21 points or 1.01% at 30379.81, while the broader Nifty closing down 68.55 points or 0.76% at 8925.30. Major gainers on the Nifty were UPL, HUL, Britannia Industries, and HCL Tech, while Kotak Mahindra Bank, Hero MotoCorp, Bajaj Finance, and HDFC Bank were among major losers.

In the afternoon trade, the Sensex was trading 355.60 points down or 1.16% at 30334.42, and the Nifty was also down 84.45 points or 0.94% at 8909.40.

During early hours today, equity benchmark indices moved up following positive cues from global markets. At 10:15 am, the BSE Sensex was up by 758 points or 2.56 per cent at 31,448 while the Nifty 50 edged higher by 222 points at 9,216. All sectoral indices at the National Stock Exchange were in the green with Nifty pharma gaining by 3.76 per cent, FMCG by 2.6 per cent, PSU bank by 2.3 per cent and realty by 1.9 per cent.

Among stocks, chemical major UPL gained by 10 per cent to Rs 357.40 per share. Hindalco was up by 4.8 per cent, Sun Pharma by 4.7 per cent, Axis Bank and IndusInd Bank by 4.7 per cent and 4.2 per cent respectively.The other major gainers were Britannia, Hindustan Lever, Larsen & Toubro and Grasim. However, Kotak Mahindra Bank, Bharti Infratel, Bajaj Finance and Maruti traded with a negative bias.

Meanwhile, Asian equities were lower in morning trade today, bucking an overnight rally on Wall Street prompted by encouraging signs that US coronavirus infection rates were in decline. American officials are beginning to tackle the question of how to safely reopen for business and ease lockdowns that have helped slow the pandemic but battered the economy.

Major indices on Wall Street gained more than two percent overnight on signs that new virus cases had fallen in some of the country's biggest hotspots, including New York. But analysts said it was too soon to herald a broader market turnaround, after the International Monetary Fund forecast a 5.9 percent contraction for the US economy this year and the worst global downturn since the Great Depression of the 1930s.

Shanghai fell 0.3 percent in morning trade and Hong Kong was 0.2 percent lower despite export data on Tuesday showing that Chinese trade volumes had fallen less than feared. Economists polled by AFP have forecast an 8.2 percent first-quarter GDP drop for the world's second-largest economy -- China's first contraction in around 30 years -- ahead of official figures due for release on Friday.

Tokyo slid 0.6 percent after a sharp rise in the last session as a stronger yen weighed on investor sentiment.

Sydney was 0.4 percent lower and Singapore fell 0.1 percent but Seoul was up 1.7 percent as South Korea voted in national parliamentary elections.

Oil futures rose in Asian trade but were still well lower than last week despite the weekend deal by producer nations to cut output by nearly 10 million barrels per day from May. Prices had been battered after the coronavirus outbreak sent demand off a cliff, with a Saudi-Russian price war compounding the crisis.

(With Agency Inputs)
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Quadpack teams up with local charity networks, partners and industry colleagues to manufacture and provide protective equipment and supplies

The beauty packaging industry is coming together to offer aid to international COVID-19 relief efforts through local and national networks. Quadpack is working with its global supply partners and local charities to get protective visors, masks, gloves and hand sanitiser gel to the frontlines in Europe and the US.

The Quadpack Plastics injection-moulding facility in Catalonia, Spain, has adapted a mould to manufacture over 100,000 pieces for face shields. Quadpack took part in a coordinated effort with other companies in the area to produce the various parts of the visors, for easy assembly on-site by users. The first 15,000 visors have already been sent to hospitals, doctors' offices, old people's homes, pharmacies and town halls across Spain.

Similarly, Quadpack's rapid prototyping centre in Leek, UK, is printing face shields and connecting pieces for ventilators using its Stratasys J850 3D printer, in response to an urgent call from North Midlands University Hospital. The team is working closely with OEM partner Stratasys and provider Tri-Tech3D, who is liaising with hospitals around the country to redesign shields and components for their healthcare workers.

Quadpack's offices in China and South Korea are working with Asian partners to donate protective equipment and source hand sanitiser packaging for Europe and the US. Some of the equipment is destined for use by Quadpack's factory and warehouse staff in Germany and the US, with the majority of the material marked for donation to hospitals and care facilities.

Quadpack's aid started with a initial donation of 300 standard face masks used in its wood factory in Spain to the staff at the Vic University Hospital in March. "It was an obvious gesture and it got the ball rolling," said Quadpack CEO Tim Eaves. "We are all in the same situation and of course we will do our part in adapting to meet the current challenges. We welcome the chance to work with industry colleagues and community bodies towards a common goal. As a company, we believe in collaboration as a catalyst for positive change. We never contemplated that our facilities and expertise would be used in this fashion, but are grateful to be in a situation in which we are able to help."

Besides the brave workers on the frontline, Quadpack extends its admiration and gratitude to the businesses, partners, charities and networks involved in coordinating relief efforts and donating time, facilities and material. These entities include, but are not limited to, the following:

In Europe: Tri-Tech 3D, 3dcovid19.tech, AstronSCIENTIFIC SL, Riba Mecanizados Metalicos SA, Cademolt SL, Fotocopias Diagonal Barcelona, Fundacion SEUR, Dentro Spain SL, Dress Code Bcn, Maritim Projects, COMO Mataro, Juan Fornituras Badalona, Ayuntamiento de Gava, Tot Trade Polimers, Biesterfeld Iberica, Omya Polimers, Polimeros Guzman and SET.

In Asia: Allen & Thomas, Apollo, Beauty Star, Bona, Choebe, Dalipack, Kugil Glass, Ninjbo Jieli, PPK, Sam Tai, Sambound, ST Future, Xinyu, Yonwoo, Yuga and Z&Z.

In the US: Stratasys.

-ENDS-

Editors: Check Quadpack's news and operational status relating to the COVID-19 pandemic online at www.quadpack.com/covid-19



About Quadpack

Quadpack is an international manufacturer and provider of enhanced packaging solutions for beauty brand owners and contract fillers. With offices and production facilities in Europe, the US and the Asia Pacific region, and a strategic network of manufacturing partners, Quadpack develops bespoke and customised packs for prestige, masstige and mass market customers. Listed on Euronext Growth in Paris since October 2019, Quadpack relies on a workforce of 600 people to build a more sustainable world. For more information, please visit www.quadpack.com



Contact details

Mariam Khan

Quadpack press office

Summit Media Services

summit_media@compuserve.com

Tel: +34 93 265 4463



Legal notice

This document contains forward-looking statements about Quadpack's business, financial data, and events related to the company's prospects. These forecasts can be identified by the use of words such as "estimated', "plan', "expectation' or words with a similar meaning. Quadpack may also make projections in other reports, presentations and press releases. Furthermore, the company's representatives may occasionally make forward-looking statements. These projections are based on current expectations and on certain hypotheses, many of which are beyond the company's control and subject to a series of risks and uncertainties. In the event that any of these risks or uncertainties should materialise or the underlying expectations are not fulfilled, the results or performance of Quadpack may differ (either positively or negatively) from those explicitly or implicitly forecast. Quadpack assumes no obligation to update or revise any forward-looking statements made previously.

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Ever imagined red wine flowing from the taps of your home? Well, it really happened in Italy's Castelvetro.

As per a report in CNN, the incident took place due to a malfunction in a local winery after some 1000 litres of prepared wine accidentally got leaked into water pipes.

According to the Cantina Settecani winery, the incident occurred cause of a defective valve in the washing circuit within the bottling line. The wine that got leaked is a local speciality called the Lambrusco Grasparossa.

As per Giorgia Mezzacqui, the Deputy Mayor of the town the malfunction lasted for around three hours and affected some 20 homes. Moreover, the local government had clarified that there are no health risks that are going to be involved due to this leakage.

Giorgia told the CNN, At a time where we have very little to smile about, I'm glad we brought some levity to others. Hopefully some day they'll remember us and will want to come visit us.

Fabrizio Amorotti, the commercial manager of the Cantina Settecani winery revealed that some people in the area did call them to inform about the incident and what they were doing about it, while some were happy about it.

The malfunction was appreciated by many. Some clients in the areas called us to warn us about it, and to share they were bottling the wine!, Fabrizio Amorotti told CNN.
U K travel restrictions remain tight due to the Covid-19 lockdown, but not everything has ground to a halt. The City was on Wednesday digesting news that the Government is pressing further ahead with the mega HS2 project, which could provide a well-needed boost to construction businesses.

Europes largest infrastructure scheme recently got the green-light, and the Government today issued a notice to proceed, marking the formal approval for construction to start.

Contractor Costain welcomed the update. The company, led by Alex Vaughan, said a joint venture of which it is part has a 3.3 billion contract on the rail project, which includes creating tunnels in the approach to the London terminus at Euston station.

Given construction start dates are subject to health and safety guidelines on social distancing during the lockdown, Costain doesnt expect the contract to make a significant contribution to its profitability until 2021.

However, Costain also said it has won a 210 million contract by Highways England to upgrade an existing section of the A30 north of Truro, Cornwall.

Shares in Costain leapt 19p, or more than 34%, to 74p.

A joint venture rival of which Balfour Beatty is part will also benefit from the HS2 update. However, unlike Costain, it didnt put a formal statement out on the London Stock Exchange.

Preparatory works Balfour Beatty is working on are due to start imminently, though the main construction wont start until next year. Shares in Balfour Beatty were 14.6p lower at 234.14p.

Today the FTSE 100 was 106.5 points lower at 5684.1, extending losses from Tuesday, while the FTSE 250 was down 582.24 points at 15500,33.

Meanwhile, pay cuts were a common theme today. PPHE Hotel Group outlined a number of ways it plans to reduce costs. That includes chief executive Boris Ivesha taking a temporary 100% salary cut. His basic pay last year was 426,542.

The FTSE 250 company also said total revenue in March reduced by 60.2% .

Shares in PPHE lost 70p to 1170p.

Over on the junior market, OnTheMarket, the online property firm set up by estate agents to challenge Rightmove and Zoopla, said there would be a 20% salary reduction for three months for bosses and most employees who continue to work remotely.

Shares in the AIM-listed company, which also suspended financial guidance for the year to January 2021, dropped 2.4p to 30.1p.

SMALL CAP SPOTLIGHT

Fashion brand Quiz today said it is has reopened its online business, sending the shares up nearly 14%, or 0.76p, to 6.21p.

The AIM-listed retailer temporarily closed stores, concessions and the online arm last month as the coronavirus crisis intensified. It recently warned that March revenues were set to be materially below the boards expectations.

Quiz today said the reopened website will offer standard delivery services only. The distribution centre will operate in strict accordance with all government and health authority guidance.
Civil Society Organisations (CSOs) have called for protection of human rights during the six (6) months State of Public Emergency. The organisations said they note with deep concern, early reports of abuses of power soon after the parliamentary resolution of 9 April 2020 and the alleged violations of human rights. They warned that the State of Emergency should not be used by government to achieve political goals not linked to the COVID-19 pandemic.

The CSOs that raised the concerns are Botswana Centre for Public Integrity (BCPI), Botswana Gender Based Violence Prevention and Support Centre (BGBVC), Botswana Labour Migrants Association (BoLAMA), Botswana Network on Ethics, Law and HIV/AIDs (BONELA), CHILDLINE Botswana, DITSHWANELO  The Botswana Centre for Human Rights, Friends of Diversity, Inclusive Directions Botswana, Lesbians, Gays and Bisexuals of Botswana (LeGaBiBo), Molao Matters, Molayakgosi, Putting Women First Trust, Save Widows and Orphans Botswana, Skillshare International Botswana, Stepping Stones International, Turning Point, WoMen Against Rape (WAR), and Youth Alliance for Leadership and Development in Africa (YALDA - Botswana).

"We were assured by President Masisi on 8 April 2020, that The State of Emergency is intended to deal only with the COVID-19 crisis and will not in any way undermine peoples fundamental rights.

We call upon our political representatives to be fully committed to ensuring the protection of our democratic principles, respect for human rights, non-discrimination, equality and respect for the rule of law, in accordance with Section 18 of the Constitution, which enables an enforcement of protective provisions or fundamental freedoms contained in the Constitution," said the CSOs.

The organisations reminded government that any restrictions to its obligations to protect the human rights of all in public emergencies which threaten the life of the nation, must be proportionate, limited in time, and in no way discriminatory (International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, Article 4, United Nations, 16 December 1966).

"We, however, note with deep concern, early reports of abuses of power soon after the parliamentary resolution of 9 April 2020 and the alleged violations of the human rights of: the spokesperson of the Botswana Patriotic Front, Justice Motlhabane, allegedly assaulted and arbitrarily arrested on 10 April 2020 by the police; Nicholas Kgopotso of the Umbrella for Democratic Change (UDC), who was allegedly harassed by 12 police officers for allegedly causing noise during the current COVID-19 lockdown; two persons (Neo Dikgole and Thuso Sebinyane) who were allegedly assaulted by the police (Office of the President, 11 April 2020); and three suspects arrested for "publishing, through electronic communications, offensive statements against government" (Botswana Police Service, 11 April 2020."

It is not clear in which law the offence of offensive statement against government' is contained, said the CSOs adding that, the right to freedom of expression is protected under section 12(1) of the Constitution. It can only be limited under exceptional circumstances provided by law. They called upon the government to ensure that it does not emulate countries such as China, Brazil, Egypt and Turkey, which all targeted journalists, physicians, health workers and human rights defenders for exposing serious concerns about the coronavirus and concerns for vulnerable communities.

"We therefore urge political leaders to work together, in order to earn the trust of all our people; strongly encourage our government to adhere to the essential principles of public trust, transparency, respect and empathy for the most vulnerable. These are key to us working together as a nation to effectively implement a national strategy to combat COVID-19 and to protect our people; and call upon our government to respect and protect human rights, under all circumstances."
Pernod Ricard Ghana, the leading distributor of premium spirits brands has committed an amount of GHS 193,000 to assist government in the fight against COVID-19 in Ghana.



The company announced the amount is dedicated towards the purchase of 5,000 Personal Protective Equipment (PPEs) masks to frontline hospital personnel of the Greater Accra Regional Hospital, fund 4 Dynamap vital monitor devices to help with treatment, and a donation of GHS 100,000 into the COVID-19 National Trust Fund.



According to the Corporate Relations Manager of Pernod Ricard Ghana, Eunice Osei-Tutu, the Greater Accra Regional Hospital has been designated as a treatment and isolation centre for the COVID-19 disease and the hospital needed every support to curb the disease.



The Greater Accra Regional Hospital has been set aside as a complete, purpose-built unit to hold and quarantine COVID-19 patients. With such a huge task, we at Pernod Ricard Ghana deemed it important to help the hospital with essential items like PPEs to protect our dedicated health personnel risking their lives to care for COVID-19 patients, she said.



Pernod Ricard Ghana will further donate GHS 100,000 to the COVID-19 National Trust Fund, established by the government to support the vulnerable as well as those hard hit by the virus, she added.



Mrs. Osei-Tutu also commended government for its measures to contain the virus. The government is doing an excellent job in managing the Covid-19 crisis and we hope that our contribution will assist further with urgent health care delivery and other government interventions in the aim to curb the spread of the virus.

Pernod Ricard Ghana is the leading distributor of premium spirits brands such as Jameson Irish Whiskey, Chivas Regaland Ballantines Scotch Whiskies, and Martell Cognac. Reaching out to more and more consumers every day, their aim is to bring Good Times from a Good Place so that consumers can responsibly enjoy some of the fastest growing brands in Ghana, during true moments of convivialite.



Pernod Ricard prides itself in fostering the spirit of entrepreneurship amongst its employees, and its unique convivial culture sets it apart from its competitors. By offering employees local opportunities with the prospect of global growth, Pernod Ricard Ghana is recognized as a company that top talent aspire to work for. Pernod Ricard Ghana has achieved Top Employer status for the past two consecutive years, namely 2018 and 2019.

Source: Peacefmonline.com









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By Trend

The Trans Adriatic Pipeline (TAP) consortium has committed 1.5 million euros to support health services in Greece, Albania and Italy, Trend reports citing TAP AG consortium.

At TAP, health and safety come first. It is also our commitment to contribute to improving the livelihoods and quality of life of communities along TAPs route, across our three host countries. To that effect, Trans Adriatic Pipeline AG will provide a total of 1.5 million euros to support the fight of the health services in Greece, Albania and Italy against the COVID-19 pandemic, reads the message.

Luca Schieppati, TAP Managing Director, said that the COVID-19 and its impacts are a challenging reality for all.

We at TAP are closely monitoring developments and doing our part to help prevent the further spread of the virus, by following the latest guidance of public health authorities and implementing a wide range of measures. At the same time, we are also trying to support the needs of our host communities, he noted

Schieppati went on to add that TAP has been working closely with health authorities in all host countries, in order to support relief efforts.

We are humbled to play a small part and assist in the fight against COVID-19, by providing, with the full support of our shareholders, 1.5 million euros; 500,000 euros for each host country. This amount will support the supply of special hospital equipment, personal protective equipment and medicines, according to the needs of health authorities, he said.

TAP project, worth 4.5 billion euros, is one of the priority energy projects for the European Union (EU). The project envisages transportation of gas from Azerbaijan's Shah Deniz Stage 2 to the EU countries.

Connecting with the Trans Anatolian Pipeline (TANAP) at the Greek-Turkish border, TAP will cross Northern Greece, Albania and the Adriatic Sea before coming ashore in Southern Italy to connect to the Italian natural gas network.

The project is currently in its construction phase, which started in 2016.

Once built, TAP will offer a direct and cost-effective transportation route opening up the vital Southern Gas Corridor, a 3,500-kilometer long gas value chain stretching from the Caspian Sea to Europe.

TAP shareholders include BP (20 percent), SOCAR (20 percent), Snam S.p.A. (20 percent), Fluxys (19 percent), Enagas (16 percent) and Axpo (5 percent).

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Voters required to use hand sanitiser and plastic gloves when casting ballots and maintain physical distance.

South Koreans headed to the polls on Wednesday to elect members of parliament under strict safety guidelines in one of the first national elections held amid the coronavirus pandemic.

About 14,000 polling stations were open at 6am (21:00 GMT on Tuesday) around the country after disinfection, and voters were required to wear a mask and have their temperature checked on arrival. Anyone whose temperature was higher than 37.5 Celsius (99.5 Fahrenheit) was led to a special booth.

All voters must use also hand sanitiser and plastic gloves when casting ballots and maintain 1-metre (3.2 feet) distance between each other.

The election is set to decide control of parliament, and shape President Moon Jae-ins ability to push through his agenda in the final two years of his administration, including a minimum wage, policies aimed at creating jobs, and continued re-engagement with North Korea.

According to exit polls jointly conducted by three major local TV networks, Moon Jae-ins ruling party is projected to win a majority.

Moons progressive camp could secure up to 177 seats in the 300-strong single chamber parliament, while the main conservative party is expected to win as many as 131, the polls showed.

South Korea is one of the first countries in the world to hold a national election since the coronavirus epidemic began, with many others postponing votes.





Once grappling with the first large outbreak outside China, South Korea has largely managed to bring its cases under control without large disruptions thanks to a an enormous testing campaign and intensive contact tracing.

The Korea Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported 27 new coronavirus cases on Wednesday, bringing the total infections to 10,591, with 225 deaths. The daily tally has hovered about 30 over the past week, most of them from overseas travellers.

But authorities have warned that infections could resurge at any time, calling for special caution on election day.

Coronavirus patients allowed to vote

As of 9am on Wednesday (00:00 GMT), voter turnout was 8 percent, about 0.9 percentage points higher than in the last parliamentary election in 2016, according to the National Election Commission.

That excludes nearly 27 percent of the 44 million registered voters who took part in early voting last weekend.

Among them were about 2,800 coronavirus patients, for whom the NEC allowed voting by mail and set up special polling stations..

More than 13,000 people in self-quarantine have registered to vote and will be allowed to do so for at least one hour after other voters leave at 6pm (09:00 GMT), according to Al Jazeeras Rob McBride, who is reporting from Seoul.

He also noted that South Korea has never cancelled an election in its history.

A South Korean Confucian scholar wearing a face mask to help protect against the spread of the new coronavirus has his temperature checked on arrival at a polling station [Kang Jong-min/Newsis via AP]

The election campaign has taken on a different look, with candidates wearing masks and bumping fists with supporters instead of shaking hands.

Just three years ago mass protests led to the removal of Moons predecessor, who is now in jail, but the virus has muted public displays of its dynamic democracy.

Things were more heated on the internet, which overflowed with bitter exchanges between supporters of Moon and his conservative opponents, who accuse the government of economic and foreign policy failures and botching the financial response to the epidemic.

Before the virus began absorbing public attention, Moons support was declining amid a sluggish job market, corruption scandals surrounding key political allies and his ambitious but fragile diplomacy with rival North Korea but the response to the outbreak has boosted his approval ratings.

A governing party victory will give Moon new impetus to drive his key domestic and foreign policies, including resuming inter-Korean cooperation and nudging the US and North Korea back to talks, said Duyeon Kim, a senior adviser at the Brussels-based International Crisis Group.

If the opposition wins, Moon will likely become a lame duck, and party politics will quickly pivot to preparing for the 2022 presidential elections, she said.
The real estate industry on Wednesday said the government''s decision to allow construction on those projects where labourers are already available on sites will solve the problem of migrant daily wage workers but said availability of raw materials may be an issue

New Delhi: The real estate industry on Wednesday said the government's decision to allow construction on those projects where labourers are already available on sites will solve the problem of migrant daily wage workers but said availability of raw materials may be an issue.

NAREDCO President Niranjan Hiranandani said, "The government has issued an order which allows staggered reopening on the stalled construction work to partially resume from 20 April 2020, subject to terms and conditions. The real estate industry acknowledges the positive impact this will have in handling the migrant crisis."

The relaxation has come at the right time as the situation was very grim to keep construction workers at the site afloat, he said.

CREDAI National Chairman Jaxay Shah said the directives issued by the Ministry of Home affairs will boost the country's economic growth in a slow but steady manner.

"We, however, await the directives by the state government," he said.

Click here to follow LIVE updates on coronavirus outbreak

The realty sector remains the second-largest employer after agriculture and halt in construction activities will have a long-term impact on the realty sector, Shah noted.

"We therefore urge the government to allow construction activity and supply chain in a staggered manner. We are already taking care of the workers and construction can begin amidst the present conditions. We are also ready to start construction at those sites where labourers are already present with subject to the supply chain," Shah said.

Anuj Puri, Chairman - ANAROCK Property Consultants said: "Offering some relief to the construction sector, the government has permitted activity to resume in non-Covid-19 hotspots, provided they follow strict social distancing guidelines. However, the guideline clearly mentions that no construction worker will be brought from outside and only those currently available on the site will be able to resume work."

The move to start at least some of the construction activity on project sites, even with a limited workforce, is certainly welcome, Puri said.

"That said, since many migrant workers had left for their villages post lockdown 1.0 announcement, we will have to wait and see how many are actually left back to resume work. Migrant workers comprise at least 80 per cent share of the total 44 million workforce in the construction sector currently," he said.

CREDAI-NCR President Pankaj Bajaj said, "We are awaiting clarity. It seems that Noida construction may be allowed outside the hotspots, But practically it seems impossible. Labour has to stay in-house. Most projects are at the finishing stage. At such stage, labour does not stay in-house."

"The other problem is the supply of raw material. Large restrictions are still in force for the production of those goods. Nearly 200 different items go in the construction," Bajaj said.

Supertech Chairman R K Arora spoke about the challenges for starting construction work.

"We require different types of labour in consultation i.e. labour, mason, carpenter, plumbers and bar binders, etc and all are not available at site. Work without construction materials will not be possible since industry related to construction are not allowed till 3 May," Arora said.

"By allowing in-situ projects, to commence construction work is a step in the right direction. Upon successful experience, construction activities should be allowed across all projects," said Ashish Bhutani MD and CEO Bhutani Infra.

The decision to resume construction activities will help in job creation, said Ankush Kaul, President (Sales & Marketing)- Ambience group said.

Vikas Bhasin, CMD, Saya Homes, said: "Permitting construction activities although with conditions is the right approach and we wholeheartedly welcome it. But the implementation will be subject to guidelines issued by respective states, we will have to wait and watch for clarity to emerge."

Rajat Goel, JMD, MRG World, said, "Allowing in-situ projects, falling within the boundaries of Municipal Corporation to commence construction, while following social distancing norms is a step in the right direction. This will immensely help the daily wage labourers."
New Yorks Metropolitan Transit Authority (MTA) has come to an agreement with transit worker unions to grant death benefits to the families of workers that died from coronavirus.

The MTA signed an agreement on Tuesday with the Transport Workers Union Local 100 and the Transport Workers Union of America that pledges $500,000 to the spouse, beneficiary or estate of those lost to Covid-19.

The payment will be made in a lump sum. Workers need to have been in active service on or after 1 February.

Death benefits will also be extended to members of four TWU Locals: Local 100, Local 106, Local 2001 and Local 2055.

We cant bring back our heroic co-workers but we can make sure their families are taken care of, Local 100 President Tony Utano said. We will continue to fight in Albany for additional benefits to help the families left behind and to further honour our lost heroes great sacrifice to this city and state.

New York wouldnt have a fighting chance against this virus if transit workers werent getting the blue collar heroes of this pandemic  nurses, paramedics, food service workers  to the front lines of the battle all across the metropolitan region, TWU International President John Samuelsen added. This Covid-19 death benefit is a recognition of the incredible contributions and sacrifices our workforce has made.

A debate continues to rage as to whether the MTA could have done more to protect workers. Some 2,269 MTA workers have been diagnosed with Covid-19 and 59 have tragically died.

Transit workers are at a particularly high risk of infection as they come into contact with large numbers of people and often have breathing difficulties caused by dust and diesel fumes in subway tunnels or from operating vehicles in heavy traffic.

When the outbreak began the MTA looked to the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) for guidance, which in the early stages of the outbreak did not recommend that healthy people wore face masks.

Since then the CDC guidance has changed and the MTA has distributed 500,000 face masks, including 300,000 N95 masks, asking workers to make them last a week.

The MTA also announced on Tuesday that trains, buses and ferries will give two horn blasts at 3pm on Thursday in honour of transportation workers across the region.
WASHINGTON (AP)  Elizabeth Warren endorsed Joe Biden on Wednesday and became the latest of the former vice president's onetime White House rivals to back him as the Democratic Party moves to project unity against President Donald Trump going into the November election.

The Massachusetts senator rose to brief front-runner status in the Democratic race last fall but suspended her campaign last month after a disappointing "Super Tuesday" that included a third-place finish her home state. Warren left the race without immediately endorsing Biden or her fellow progressive Bernie Sanders, but the dynamics changed substantially in subsequent weeks, with the race on hiatus amid the coronavirus outbreak.

Sanders dropped out last week and endorsed Biden within six days, hoping to persuade his fervent progressive supporters to warm to the more centrist Biden. Former President Barack Obama followed suit on Tuesday, and then Warren, in a move that could fuel speculation that Biden may choose her as a running mate.

Warren made no mention of that possibility in announcing her endorsement, instead saying in a statement that Biden "grew up on the ragged edge of the middle class." That phrase that was a centerpiece of Warren's own campaign and referred to her own upbringing in Oklahoma.
Council workers who are stood down during the coronavirus crises will get over $100 a week more than those on the federal government's JobKeeper payments.

Full time local government workers who are stood down entirely will receive $858.20 a week, while those employees in the private sector on the JobKeeper scheme receive $750.

The deal was worked out between unions and New South Wales councils after the federal government ruled local government workers were not eligible for payments under Scott Morrison's economic stimulus package.

Council workers who are stood down during the coronavirus crises will get over $100 a week more than those on the federal government's JobKeeper payments (pictured: Council workers clean handrails in Melbourne, Friday, March 27, 2020)

Under the pay agreement, which is in effect from this week, councils will firstly attempt to redeploy stood down workers to where they are needed.

If a redeployment cannot be found, employees will be paid up to four weeks 'special leave' and then be entitled to the $858 a week for three months while they are not working.

The payments will be 'pro-rata' depending on normal hours worked and funding is understood to be from council budgets - which means rate payers will foot the bill.

The deal, called the Local Government (COVID-19) Splinter Award, was agreed to by 100 of the 128 NSW councils while the remaining 28 have opted to stay on existing arrangements.

United Services Union General Secretary Graeme Kelly said the agreement was designed to save jobs and provide financial security to local government workers.

'This Splinter Award delivers immediate assistance to our members, particularly those who work in services that have been shut or disrupted by COVID-19 such as libraries and aquatic centres,' Mr Kelly said.

Local councils in other states and territories across Australia are yet to implement an alternative pay agreement despite local government workers being unable to access JobKeeper payments.

Award pay rates are part of state government legislation so the arrangements would have to be agreed upon by unions, councils, and state and territory governments.

Victoria does not have its own industrial relations system so local government workers in the state are dependent on federal government awards which have not been altered.

People stand in a queue outside a Centrelink office in Sydney after the MyGov website crashed, in the wake of New South Wales implementing measures shutting down non-essential businesses on March 28 2020




DENVER  The trial of man accused of killing a Colorado deputy ended in a mistrial partly because of the coronavirus pandemic.

An Adams County District Court judge issued the written mistrial ruling Monday in the case of Dreion Dearing, who was charged with fatally shooting Adams County Sheriffs Heath Gumm during a chase in 2018, The Denver Post reports.

The trial was previously delayed because of safety and fairness concerns surrounding the coronavirus, and District Attorney Dave Young of the 17th Judicial District withdrew the death penalty option in late March.

The pandemic and the removal of the death penalty pushed District Court Judge Mark Warner to order a mistrial.

The current pandemic and the resulting preventative measures impact the publics access to this trial, affect the jury pool and create prejudice and fear in prospective jurors forced to come into the courthouse, Warner wrote.

Some prospective jurors broke down and cried while filling out questionnaires because of fears of COVID-19, and the court did not have a reasonable method to adequately protect jurors in the courthouse, Warner wrote.

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.

Dearings case can be rescheduled for another trial, district attorneys office spokeswoman Sue Lindsay said. A spokeswoman for the Colorado State Public Defenders office, which is representing Dearing, did not immediately return a request for comment Tuesday.
At least 53 universities and colleges have announced that they will drop the ACT and SAT requirement for at least fall 2021 in light of the coronavirus pandemic.

Due to COVID-19 states are on lockdown and students cannot gather for college admission exams that are often critical to get into the top schools in the nation.

ACT Inc. and the College Board, which runs the ACT and SAT exams respectively, cancelled all exams through June, leading universities to bend their entry policies.

Such schools include Boston University, which has adopted test-optional policies for fall 2021 through spring 2022 semesters.

Even the University of California's school system, which released a report in February in favor of mandatory standardized testing, announced on March 31 it will suspend test requirements for its nine schools including UCLA and UC Berkeley for the fall 2021 cycle.

At least 53 universities and colleges have announced that they will drop the ACT and SAT requirement for at least fall 2021 in light of the coronavirus pandemic

The list of growing schools is compiled by the National Center for Fair and Open Testing, a non-profit seeking to end the misuse of standardized testing.

However, Ivy Leagues like Harvard and Yale still require test scores, as does Standford and other competitive West Coast Schools.

Highly selective liberal arts colleges including Williams and Amherst in Massachusetts announced in the spring that tests would be optional for fall 2021 enrollment.

Some schools are are prolonging the exception for even longer. Tufts University announced tests would be optional for a three-year period.

Tulane University, all public Oregon universities, the University of Washington, Scripps College, Northeastern University and Texas Christian University made testing optional for fall 2021 or even longer.

These schools join the over 1,080 schools that already abandoned the test requirement long before the coronavirus emerged.

'The health and safety of students is our first priority and we are collaborating with higher education institutions to provide flexibility to students and to support admissions under these unprecedented circumstances,' College Board spokesman Jerome White said, according to CNN.

Such schools include Boston University, which has adopted test-optional policies for fall 2021 through spring 2022 semesters (above)

Even the University of California's school system, which released a report in February in favor of mandatory standardized testing, announced on March 31 it will suspend test requirements for its nine schools including UCLA (above) and UC Berkeley for the fall 2021 cycle

He said additional SAT dates will be added, 'as soon as the public health situation allows.'

ACT Inc. Spokesman Ed Colby said that its scores will still be referenced in admissions and scholarship decisions, but schools are making 'temporary adjustments to their admission criteria to mitigate COVID-19 impact on applications and enrollment.'

He reiterated that 'ACT remains committed to benefiting' students and schools alike.

Student-run non-profit Student Voice is rallying for all colleges and universities to adopt test-optional policies for fall 2021 with a campaign called #TestOptionalNOW.

'There are many students across the country who no longer have access to test prep... their school's free test date... whose living situation has been changed and no longer have time to study for standardized tests. Those are the students that this test-optional campaign aims to help,' Maodon Tohouri, a junior at Amador Valley High School in California, said in a press conference on Monday.

FairTest hopes that the temporary adjustment could influence the schools to adopt these policies permanently.

'This could well be the tipping point. Removal of the test was already rapidly increasing... From our experience, we've seen that when schools do these pilot programs, they never go back,' Bob Schaeffer, interim executive director of FairTest, said.
People living in Indonesias Kepuh village have recently had some frightening experiences. Mysterious white beings jump out at unsuspecting people on the street. They disappear just as quickly as they appear.

The village on Java island has deployed a group of ghosts to patrol, or walk around, the streets. Village leaders hope the ghosts will frighten people enough to keep them inside their homes and safely away from the new coronavirus.

We wanted to be different and create a deterrent effect, said Anjar Pancaningtyas. He is head of a village youth group that worked with the police on the unusual way of urging social distancing.

Known as pocong, the ghostly beings usually wear white cloth. Their faces are nearly white, except for a dark substance around their eyes. In Indonesian stories, they represent the trapped souls of the dead.

When the ghosts first started appearing this month, they had the opposite effect of what local leaders had hoped for. Instead of keeping people inside, they brought them outside. Locals hoped to see the pocong for themselves.

The organizers have since changed their methods. They have instead launched surprise pocong patrols, with village volunteers playing the part of the ghosts.

President Joko Widodo has resisted declaring a national lockdown to slow the spread of the coronavirus. He has instead urged people to take part in social distancing and to wash their hands and keep clean.

But some communities have decided to take their own measures. They have put restrictions on peoples movements, ordered lockdowns and, in Kepuhs case, used ghosts to frighten people back into their homes.

Residents still lack awareness about how to curb the spread of COVID-19 disease, said Kepuh village head Priyadi. They want to live like normal so it is very difficult for them to follow the instruction to stay at home.

There are now over 4,200 confirmed cases of the coronavirus in Indonesia, and over 370 deaths. Observers fear those numbers will rise sharply.

Researchers at the University of Indonesia estimate there could be 140,000 deaths and 1.5 million cases by May without stronger restrictions on movement.

When Reuters reporters recently visited Kepuh village, the supernatural plan seemed to be working. Villagers would run away in fear when the ghosts appeared in front of them.

Since the pocong appeared, parents and children have not left their homes, said Kepuh local Karno Supadmo. And people will not gather or stay on the streets after evening prayers," he added.

Im Ashley Thompson.

The Reuters news agency reported this story. Ashley Thompson adapted it for VOA Learning English. Bryan Lynn was the editor.

_______________________________________________________________

Words in This Story

ghost - n. the soul of a dead person thought of as living in an unseen world or as appearing to living people

deterrent - n. something that makes someone decide not to do something

soul - n. the spiritual part of a person that is believed to give life to the body and in many religions is believed to live forever

lockdown - n. a state of isolation or restricted movement as a security measure

residents- n. people who live in a particular place

awareness - n. the state of knowing that something exists

supernatural - adj. unable to be explained by science or the laws of nature : of, relating to, or seeming to come from magic, a god, etc.

prayer - n. words spoken to a god or higher being especially in order to give thanks or to ask for something
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The following is a summary of one of many cases across the country compiled in a Hearst Connecticut Media investigation of sexual abuse connected in some way to local affiliates of Boys & Girls Club of America, their staff, volunteers, members and/or attendees. Boys & Girls Club of America said that it does not keep a public list of sexual abuse incidents connected to clubs. If you have a story to share, or have information related to this or other incidents, contact us here.

A former volunteer at the Boys & Girls Club of the San Fernando Valley in Pacoima, California, was sentenced to 14 years in prison for abusing six different boys, court records show.
Saudi Arabia hosted virtual talks between G20 finance ministers and central bankers Wednesday amid warnings of a deep coronavirus-triggered recession and growing calls for debt relief for poor countries including in Africa.

The meeting comes a day after the Group of Seven (G7) nations expressed support for a temporary halt to debt payments from the world's poorest countries to help them weather the pandemic -- if G20 governments agree.

Ministers and bankers from the 20 most advanced economies had pledged in their previous meeting last month to address the debt burden of low-income countries and deliver aid to emerging markets hit hard by the pandemic.

G20 working groups are expected to outline details of the plan in the meeting on Wednesday.

The remotely accessed talks come after the IMF warned on Tuesday that the pandemic is pushing the global economy into its deepest recession in a century, cutting world output by three percent this year, with the potential for an even worse outcome.

The downturn will slash $9 trillion from the world economy, IMF chief economist Gita Gopinath told reporters. As concerns mount for poorer countries without access to capital markets or adequate health facilities, 18 European and African leaders called for debt relief as well as a stimulus package of at least $100 billion for Africa.

"Only a global victory that fully includes Africa can bring this pandemic to an end," the leaders -- from France and Italy to Ethiopia and Kenya -- wrote in a joint letter published in London's Financial Times on Tuesday.

"We must instate an immediate moratorium on all bilateral and multilateral debt payments, both public and private, until the pandemic has passed." Calls for debt forgiveness have been growing, including from Pope Francis and French President Emmanuel Macron, as poor countries need to lift spending on health care to confront the pandemic.

The International Monetary Fund on Monday approved a six month standstill on debt payments from 25 nations, mostly in Africa. French Finance Minister Bruno Le Maire has announced that the G20 nations and the Paris Club of wealthy nation creditors have agreed to a one-year moratorium on debt payments for poor nations.

He said G20 and Paris Club nations, which includes all G7 members, had agreed on the moratorium for 76 nations, including 40 in sub-Saharan Africa.

Le Maire said the agreement so far includes the postponement of $20 billion in payments to bilateral and private creditors.

Another $20 billion in payments to multilateral institutions, mostly to the World Bank, is still awaiting a decision.

Following the G20 talks, G7 nations will hold a teleconference on Thursday chaired by US President Donald Trump.

Britain said it will be represented in those talks by Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab, who will push for coordination on the economic response as well as "G7 action to support vulnerable countries".

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Representative image

Offering some relief to the construction sector, the government on April 15 relaxed guidelines for lockdown 2.0 permitting some construction activity in the non-COVID-19 hotspots starting April 20. However, this is only provided strict social distancing guidelines are followed and construction workers are locally available on the site.

Real estate experts said the resumption of construction activity from April 20 onwards, would send out a positive message to both investors, occupiers and homebuyers. It would ensure healthy cashflows at least for projects that are close to completion and unlock further investment potential.

Also, it is the well-funded projects that are likely to see immediate construction activity after lockdown is lifted. Developers will first look to start with projects that are already nearing completion to generate positive cashflows. Public infrastructure projects are also likely to take off first.

According to KPMG, total construction projects worth more than Rs 59 lakh crore are under development, most of which would have been impacted severely by COVID-19. The Indian construction sector employs over 49 million people, close to 12 percent of the nations working population. Further, it has a multiplier effect on nearly 250 allied industries.

Considering the ongoing scenario, the move to start at least some of the construction activity on project sites, even with a limited workforce, is certainly welcome. That said, since many migrant workers had left for their villages post lockdown 1.0 announcement, we will have to wait and see how many are actually left back to resume work. Migrant workers comprise at least 80 percent share of the total 44 million workforce in the construction sector currently, said Anuj Puri, Chairman  ANAROCK Property Consultants.

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As far as construction activity in non-hotspots is concerned, developers will need to focus on resuming construction on projects that are already nearing completion and have a completion deadline within 2020.

Chairman and MD, Hiranandani Group and National President - NAREDCO said, The real estate industry acknowledges the positive impact this will have in handling the migrant crisis and avoiding an economic crisis. Allowing phase-wise reopening of economic activity with precautions being adhered to is the right step to refuel the economic growth trajectory of the country. With this economic activity will be resumed. Considering the estimated loss of Rs 26,000 crore per day to the Indian economy as a result of the lockdown, this relaxation of lifting the lockdown is a constructive step.

Under the new guidelines, transportation of goods without any distinction of essential or non-essential has also been allowed. This means that developers can procure raw material to restart work.

After the lockdown, there would be immediate traction from existing buyers. "Even a conditional and limited resumption of construction work would provide some reprieve, help eradicate a further six-month delay and ensure that losses are reduced by 30 to 40 percent," said Pankaj Forais, Founder and Managing Director, Liases Foras.

How do you maintain social distancing in the real estate sector?

Under the fresh guidelines, contractors along with developers will need to ensure that social distancing is maintained at the sites and will need to find ways and means of achieving it. For basic hygiene and safety precautions, companies can regularly sanitize sites and provide labourers with masks, soap and sanitizers for washing hands frequently.

This surely will change the rules of the real estate sector. The focus of developments going forward, assuming construction activity will be allowed to resume, would be on three S- screening, sanitation and sanitization of labourers, labour camps and construction sites.

A graded approach is the key to the success of enforcing discipline across construction sites. As the workforce gets ramped up on construction sites the full rigours of screening, infrastructure and protocols will be available to manage the pace of developments, explained Indranil Basu, Director, Project Management, (South India) Colliers International.

The number of labourers that need to be employed at the project site will have to be assessed basis the stage of construction the project is in and the category of the project.

A graded approach is not about starting construction at breakneck speed. Planning will hold the key. Plan your work priorities, enforce proper work environment and infrastructure, screening and sanitation measures, and augment workforce with the focus on critical activities, he said.

Real estate projects would have to be assessed based on the stage of construction that they are currently in, and also on the asset class of the project. The approach for restarting a commercial project would vary from that of a residential or an industrial project. The number of labourers deployed at a residential project site is generally more than the number deployed in an industrial development where the focus is more on mechanization, he said.

Also, if a project is in a structure stage, the number of labourers required at the site would be much more. Therefore, the developer would have to focus more on screening them at regular intervals. However, if the project has moved beyond the structure stage, there is every possibility of less workforce and more skilled labour to be employed.

It should be remembered that the Department of Promotion of Industry and Internal Trade had earlier suggested to the Ministry of Home Affairs in a letter that housing and construction sectors need to be allowed if the labourers stay at the sites with all facilities and safeguards, contractors shall ensure safety sanitation and distancing norms.

It is felt that certain more activities with reasonable safeguards should be allowed once a final decision regarding extension and nature of lockdown is taken by the Central government, it had said.

The Uttar Pradesh government has also decided to resume construction work on government projects from April 15 provided social distancing norms are followed at the sites.

Real estate developers pointed out that some work could actually restart from April 20 keeping social distancing norms in place as most sites do have material that would last about 10 to 15 days.

This may be a good move because the workers that are currently on-site and have not returned to their villages will be occupied, projects that are ready for possession can be handed over and things can move forward. One will have to ensure sanitation and social distancing measures at all times, said Satish Magar, President, CREDAI, National.

Amit Modi, CREDAI, Western UP, president (elect), said that to resume construction work, the entire supply chain needs to be revived. You need all processes and the team comprising workers, engineers, architects in place to restart work. A developer would also have to assess the condition of the material left on site before he decides to resume work.

Credai is planning to come out with a social distancing manual in the next eight to 10 days.

All real estate companies would have to enforce social distancing norms going forward.

Colliers International India is in the process of putting together a white paper on how real estate stakeholders should implement social distancing norms on construction sites.

This will bring about a shift in how we go about doing real estate business in India, said Basu.

Screening would have to be increased on construction sites, in buffer zones, in labour camps and even construction premises. Disinfection would have to be carried out in compliance with WHO guidelines. Labour welfare strategies would hold the key. The need will be to enforce a zero-tolerance policy to implement this. We will advocate the need to deploy safety marshalls to conduct these measures in a disciplined and process-driven manner, he said.

For very large projects, clients will benefit by deputing ambulances on construction sites; there would be regular visits by doctors in labour sites. Being prepared is important and measures as these will ensure that works do not get stopped.

This is important when you are opening up construction sites in a graded manner, he said.

Some consultancy firms have also advocated that developers increase focus on mechanization and rely on pre-engineered products and solutions.

There are two types of projects  government and private where construction activity came to a grinding halt post the lockdown. Most projects  infrastructure or residential  which already has financial closure would see traction first. This is important to boost the confidence of homebuyers and investors.

Projects that were nearing closure will continue. Both infrastructure and industrial projects will move ahead  those fundamentals will not change. This abrupt stop will not alter the dynamics of these projects. Thats what the UP government has done by announcing that construction work on government projects would continue after May 15, said a real estate expert.

Samantak Das, Chief Economist and Head of Research in JLL is of the opinion that de-densification should be the key for all construction sites going forward.

Also, since private investments may take time to resume, the government should focus on spending on infrastructure activity to generate employment and keep the economy afloat.

It should pump in money for public projects such as roads, highways, metro and even affordable housing but implement social distancing norms along the way. That will hold the key, he said.
China concealed coronavirus from the West and is 'evading' blame for the pandemic, a former head of MI6 said today.

Sir John Sawers said Beijing was not honest when the disease first surfaced and faced 'anger' from the international community.

He also insisted the World Health Organisation (WHO) faced 'serious questions' for failing to scrutinise China's activities - although he suggested Donald Trump should direct his fury at the country rather than the UN agency.

The comments came after ex-foreign secretary Lord Hague warned the UK cannot be dependent on the Asian superpower for technology after the crisis demonstrated it does not 'play by our rules'.

The US president launched an extraordinary attack on the 'China-centric' WHO overnight, declaring that he was freezing millions of pounds in funding.

Sir John Sawers (left) said Beijing was not honest when the disease first surfaced and faced 'anger' from the international community. Ex-foreign secretary Lord Hague (right) warned the UK cannot be dependent on the Asian superpower for technology after the crisis demonstrated it does not 'play by our rules'

China 'kept coronavirus secret from public for six day' Chinese leaders did not inform the public that the country was facing a potential pandemic from a new coronavirus for six days at a key point before the outbreak erupted, it has been revealed. In the six days, the city of Wuhan, the former centre of the crisis, hosted a mass banquet for tens of thousands of people. Meanwhile, millions began travelling through the transport hub situated in central China for Lunar New Year celebrations. President Xi Jinping warned the public on the seventh day, January 20. But by then, more than 3,000 people had been infected during almost a week of public silence, according to internal documents obtained by The Associated Press and estimates based on retrospective infection data. The delay from January 14 to January 20 was neither the first mistake made by Chinese officials at all levels in confronting the outbreak, nor the longest lag, as governments around the world have dragged their feet for weeks and even months in addressing the virus. But the delay by the first country to face the new coronavirus came at a critical time - the beginning of the outbreak. China's attempt to walk a line between alerting the public and avoiding panic set the stage for a pandemic that has infected almost two million people and taken more than 126,000 lives. Advertisement

MPs have been demanding a major overhaul of British relations with Beijing, saying its companies should not be allowed to play a part in the new 5G telecoms network.

Speaking on BBC Radio 4's Today programme, Sir John said: 'There is deep anger in America at what they see as having been inflicted on us all by China, and China is evading a good deal of responsibility for the origin of the virus, for failing to deal with it initially.

'At the same time we cannot find a way out of this without working with China... The world will not be the same after the virus as it was before.'

Sir John said 'intelligence is about acquiring information which has been concealed from you by other states and other actors'.

'There was a brief period in December and January when the Chinese were indeed concealing this from the West,' he said.

Sir John said China increasingly appeared 'completely at odds' with the West.

But he said Mr Trump's decision to target the WHO was not the best response.

'It would be better to hold China responsible for those issues than the WHO... heads of UN agencies are wary of offending one of the major powers. But that doesn't excuse the head of the WHO for failing to stand up for the facts, the data, and making the right demands of China,' he said.

'I think the WHO has got serious questions to answer about its performance, but anger should be directed against China rather than the UN agencies.'

In a debate hosted by the Policy Exchange think-tank last night, Lord Hague said the West's policy towards China was 'incoherent and ineffective'.

'This crisis reinforces the case for two major pillars to be established for Western policy towards China,' he said.

The first arises from the fact that China isn't going to play by our rules, and that means that we cannot possibly be strategically dependent on China in many respects, including on technology.

'But the other important pillar arises from the fact that we can't solve global problems without China...

'The Covid-19 crisis is an example of such a dramatic world crisis. So we can't be dependent on China, but we can't be without a framework of cooperation with China.'

He said currently the US was pursuing a policy solely based on 'strategic independence', while many European countries were focusing mainly on engagement.

'We can't have supply chains that are dependent for ever on China, that is exemplified by this current crisis, and we have to have regard to future technology and resources.'

Lord Hague said he saw little prospect of demands for an internation inquiry into coronavirus being heeded.

'Can any of us see China agreeing to and permitting an international investigation into what's happened here? I think that's very unlikely and there have been co-ordinated attempts by China, on social media, to spread ideas that it was somebody else's fault, including the fault of the US.'

Former foreign minister of Australia Alexander Downer agreed that the West's current approach 'lacks leadership, lacks coherence' and called for a 'better, more co-ordinated approach' to managing relations with China.

Workers are disinfected after dealing with travellers arriving in Beijing from Wuhan today

Lieutenant General HR McMaster, former national security adviser to US President Donald Trump, said it is time for the West to 'get some more backbone'.

Lt Gen McMaster said it is 'time for us to end our self-delusion on the Chinese Communist Party' and admit that the West's previous approach to relations with China 'was wrong'.

He said: 'Far from liberalising its form of governance, the Chinese Communist Party is perfecting this Orwellian surveillance police state internally and becoming more and more aggressive externally.

'I think what we have to do is we have to recognise what is driving the party and then not try to continue with this self-delusion that the party is going to somehow liberalise and play by the rules.'

He added: 'I think the way that they mishandled this Covid crisis just highlights for us the nature of the Chinese Communist Party.'

Lt Gen McMaster said: 'I think that for all of us, we just have to recognise that this is going to take tremendous co-operation between us, because I think what we're in now is a decoupling competition.

'I think there is a broad recognition that the Chinese Communist Party is not going to change its behaviour and therefore we have to minimise our exposure, as Lord Hague said, our dependencies.'

He added: 'Unless we get some more backbone ourselves and recognise that we have to compete, and then recognise that this is a competition between free and open societies and a closed authoritarian system imposed on the Chinese people by the Chinese Communist Party, we'll remain at a disadvantage.'

No human-to-human transmission, no travel bans, but plenty of praise for Beijing: How WHO parroted Chinese lies as coronavirus pandemic unfolded

By Chris Pleasance for MailOnline

The World Heath Organisation has found itself with serious questions to answer after President Trump accused the UN agency of 'severely mismanaging' its response to the coronavirus pandemic and withheld $500million in funding.

The WHO has been spearheading global efforts to fight the virus, but has come under attack for playing along with China as the country sought to minimise its initial outbreak and the threat the disease posed.

Critics point to its uncritical parroting of Chinese government data, early claims that the disease was not spreading person-to-person, and praise for the country's leaders as evidence that it was not fulfilling its role.

Trump - who is facing heavy criticism for his own response - has blasted the WHO for advising against travel bans, which he claims 'accelerated the pandemic all around the world', and called for an investigation.

Here, the Mail Online has tracked key WHO statements about coronavirus - from the first cases, through China's outbreak, and beyond - to reveal what the world's largest health body said and when as the disease spread...

Donald Trump gives a briefing at the White House on Tuesday announcing that he will suspend all US funding to the World Health Organisation

December 31  China first reports a cluster of unusual pneumonia cases in Wuhan to the WHO

January 4  WHO tweets about a cluster of pneumonia cases in Wuhan with no deaths, saying investigations into the cause are underway

January 5  The WHO issues its first guidance on pneumonia of unknown cause, saying there are a total of 44 patients and 11 in severe condition. The main symptom is listed as fever, with a few patients having difficulty breathing

The WHO says there is no evidence of human-to-human transmission and that no health care worker infections have been reported

January 7  China says it has identified the cause of the pneumonia as a novel coronavirus, initially named 2019-nCoV by the WHO

China first reported cases of 'pneumonia of unknown cause' to the WHO on December 31, and the agency put out its first tweet on January 4 saying the cause was being investigated

January 9  The WHO praises China for identifying the new virus in a short space of time and repeats its assessment that the virus does not transmit readily between people. It also advises against travel or trade restrictions on China

January 13  The WHO says it is now working with authorities in Thailand after reports of a case there, and may call a meeting of the Emergency Committee

January 14  The WHO tweets saying there is no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission in China, though later clarifies and says there may have been limited transmission via family members

Jan 20-21 - WHO's field team in China conducts a brief field visit to epicentre Wuhan

Jan 21  The first case is confirmed on US soil in Washington, in a person who had travelled from China a week before

Jan 22  A report from the WHO team sent to Wuhan notes human-to-human transmission is taking place, but says more research is needed to assess the full extent. The report notes confirmed infections in 16 medics, a clear sign of transmission from patients

The team recommends avoiding large gatherings, isolating infected people, and a focus on washing hands as the best way to combat the viruss spread

The same day, that WHO Emergency Committee convenes for the first time. Afterwards, Dr Tedros says he has spoken with the Chinese Minister for Health, and praises the government for its invaluable efforts to halt the virus. He calls a second meeting for the following day

Jan 23  With the Emergency Committee split, Dr Tedros says he has decided not to declare the virus a public health emergency of international concern. Referencing the lockdown of Wuhan, which was announced the same day, he says he hopes it will be effective and short in duration. He praises Chinas cooperation and transparency in tackling the virus

Dr Tedros says there is limited evidence of human-to-human transmission, mostly among families or doctors treating the virus. At this point, there are 584 confirmed cases and 17 deaths globally, including in Vietnam, South Korea, Japan, Thailand and the US

On January 14, more than a month after the first infections at this seafood market are thought to have taken place, the WHO tweeted saying China had found no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission

He recommends screening at airports and tells countries to put testing facilities in place, but stops short of recommending a travel ban

Jan 28  Dr Tedros and other senior WHO officials meet Xi Jinping in China, agreeing that a panel of experts should be sent to monitor the outbreak. He praises the seriousness with which China is taking this outbreak, especially the commitment from top leadership and the transparency they have demonstrated

Jan 29  Dr Tedros gives a speech praising Chinas efforts to contain the virus, saying the country deserves our gratitude and respect for locking down swathes of the country to prevent the spread.

He notes a few cases of human-to-human spread outside China, which he says is of grave concern and will be monitored closely

Jan 30  The WHO Emergency Committee reconvenes early and declares a public health emergency of international concern. It comes after confirmed cases of human-to-human transmission in Germany, Japan, Vietnam and the US

Dr Tedros again praises China for setting a new standard for outbreak response with its lockdowns, and says the small number of cases outside the country  98  is thanks to their efforts

Despite noting that a majority of cases outside China have a history of travel to or from Wuhan, he again recommends no measures to curb international travel or trade

Jan 31  Donald Trump announces travel restrictions on people coming from China

Feb 3  Dr Tedros gives a speech to the WHO updating on coronavirus, saying there are 17,238 cases in China and 361 deaths  now thought to be an under-estimate

He praises Xi Jinping for his individual leadership, and insists that cases outside China can be managed if world authorities work together and follow recommendations which include  no ban on travel or trade, supporting countries with weak health systems, investment in vaccines and diagnosis, combating disinformation and urgent reviews of emergency preparedness

Feb 7  Dr Li Wenliang, a doctor who first reported the existence of coronavirus and was initially silenced by China, dies from the virus

Feb 10  The WHOs team of experts arrives in China to assist with the outbreak

Feb 11  The WHO names the disease caused by the virus COVID-19, saying it avoided including a geographical name because it risks stigmatizing people. It says it will not be using the name SARS-CoV-2 because it risks causing unnecessary fear by linking it to the 2003 SARS outbreak

Tedros Ghebreyesus, WHO Secretary-General, pleaded for world leaders to refrain from politicising the virus 'unless you want more body bags'

Feb 12  Dr Tedros says the number of new cases being reported in China has stabilised but adds that it must be interpreted with extreme caution and the outbreak could still go in any direction

Feb 16-24  WHO team of experts convenes in China, visiting affected sites and sharing information on the best ways to tackle the crisis

Feb 17  Dr Tedros begins chairing daily updates on the coronavirus response, with each briefing beginning with an update on the number of infections including from China, which are repeated without caveats

He give an analysis of Chinese data on some 44,000 confirmed cases. He says the data shows that 80 per cent of cases are mild, 14 per cent lead to severe disease, and 2 per cent are fatal. The disease is more severe in older people, with the young largely spared.

He urges world leaders not to squander a window of opportunity to get ahead of the virus and prevent it from spreading

Feb 26  Donald Trump announces a dedicated coronavirus response team, which Mike Pence will lead

Feb 28  The team of WHO experts delivers its first report on the coronavirus. Among its major findings are that the disease likely came from bats, that it is spread through close contact with infected people and not through the air, and that most common symptoms include fever, dry cough and fatigue

The report praises Chinas response as perhaps the most ambitious, agile and aggressive disease containment effort in history saying lockdowns were achieved due to the deep commitment of the Chinese people to collective action and had achieved a rapid decline in cases

Mar 9 - The whole of Italy is placed on lockdown as the virus spreads, the first European nation to enter total lockdown

Mar 11 - The WHO declares coronavirus a pandemic, meaning it is spreading out of control in multiple locations around the world. At this point, cases have been reported in more than 100 countries

Mar 13 - WHO says Europe is now the new epicentre of the virus after cases increase steeply, with Dr Tedros noting more cases are now being reported every day than were reported in China at the height of its epidemic

Mar 19 - China reports no new domestic infections from coronavirus since the pandemic began

The pandemic has now infected some 2million people worldwide, with 128,000 confirmed deaths (pictured, a hospital in Italy)

Mar 20 - Dr Tedros issues a warning that 'young people are not invincible' to the virus after data from outside showed large numbers of people under the age of 50 ending up in intensive care

Mar 25 - As Donald Trump begins touting hydroxychloroquine as a potential coronavirus treatment, WHO warns that no drugs have so far been approved for treating the virus

The same day the organization calls for an extra $2billion in funding to help tackle the virus

Apr 3 - As millions of US citizens sign on for unemployment benefit, Dr Tedros and the IMF call for debt relief and social welfare to help people through the pandemic

Apr 6 - The WHO updates its guidance on masks to say they are effective at stopping spread of the virus, but must be used in conjunction with other methods.

It comes after the CDC updated its guidance to advise people to wear masks in public

Apr 8 - Following Trump's first barrage of criticism for the WHO, Dr Tedros urges world leaders to 'stop politicising the pandemic' unless they want 'more body bags'

Apr 13 - A group of scientists convened by WHO to research a vaccine for coronavirus issue a joint statement urging world leaders to keep listening to the scientific community when responding to the virus
Indian Navy 'Prepared for Immediate Deployment' Amid China's Increased Activities in Region

Sputnik News

12:45 GMT 14.04.2020

New Delhi (Sputnik): In January, Indian Navy Chief Admiral Karambir Singh confirmed the constant presence of seven to eight People's Liberation Army Navy warships in the Indian Ocean Region at any given time. Speaking at the Raisina Dialogue, the admiral warned: "If anyone operates in our region, they have to notify us first".

The Indian Navy on Tuesday asserted its war preparedness while stating that it has continued to maintain its operational vigil in the Indian Ocean Region by carrying out regular maritime surveillance missions by day and night.

The statement comes against the backdrop of movements of a Chinese aircraft carrier and warships through the Miyako Strait as part of a journey to the South China Sea.

"The Dornier squadron of the ENC, INAS 311, operating from the air station, has been undertaking regular maritime surveillance missions. Additionally, all other air assets have been kept mission-ready and prepared for immediate deployment should the need arise", a statement issued by the Indian Navy on Tuesday reads.

The statement also mentioned the preparedness of the navy to support country's civilian authorities to maintain the supply of essential goods during the unprecedented 40-day lockdown in the country.

"The manning of the airfield has been modified to ensure that all requisite safety services and airfield facilities continued to be available", the navy added.

On Tuesday, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced a nationwide lockdown until 3 May to contain the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic.

However, the statement issued by the navy made it clear that it will not lower down its guard to maintain its dominance in the Indian Ocean Region, which has been "threatened" by the Chinese side. Meanwhile, China has claimed that its growing presence in the region is due to patrolling practices.

Last month, the Indian Navy claimed that it had tracked a Chinese vessel near India's strategic Andaman Islands after it passed through the Strait of Malacca. Earlier, Forbes reported that China had deployed at least 12 underwater "Sea Wing" drones  which can play crucial role in submarine warfare  in the Indian Ocean.

A Sputnik

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People in Delhi who were infected with coronavirus (Covid-19) from coming in contact with a positive case was four times higher than those who got it from travelling abroad, as per the data released by Delhi government. So far, only 82 people who travelled internationally have tested positive for Covid-19 in comparison to 327, who got the disease locally.

On Wednesday, Delhi reported 17 new cases of Covid-19, none related to the Markaz. On Tuesday, nine cases had been reported among those who had been evacuated in the special operation, down from 325 the day before.

A total of 2,300 people were taken to hospitals and quarantine centres from Nizamuddin, of which 1,080 people tested positive  putting the positivity rate among them to 46%. As so many people were living in such close proximity, a high number of people were thought to have the infection. This is the reason the government started testing even those without symptoms at the quarantine centres. Now, all the tests have been completed, a senior official from the department of health in Delhi said.

All those who had returned from international travel have completed their mandatory home quarantine, the data shows.

The authorities also reported two Covid-19 deaths in the city on Wednesday  a 43-year-old woman who was admitted to RML Hospital and a 55-year-old woman at the Safdarjung Hospital.

Of the 867 positive cases admitted to hospitals, 29 people are in intensive care, with five on ventilators. Just 323 tests were done on Wednesday, a day after the Delhi government decided to undertake a massive testing drive.

An order has been issued to all registered nursing homes and private hospitals, stating that they shall not refuse treatment to the injured/ serious patients brought to them for any reason.

Containment Zones

On Wednesday, one new containment zone was added in Delhi, taking the total to 56. The zone was identified in North Delhis Model Towns Police Colony. As many as three blocks (G, H and I) were sealed and cordoned off to prevent the spread of Covid.

By late Wednesday evening, a block in South Delhis Safdarjung Enclave was also identified as a potential containment zone. As it was a late development, the neighbourhood is likely to be added in the official list of the government on Thursday as the orders are still being issued, said a senior government official.

We are issuing containment order for B block of Safdarjung Enclave. Four persons of a family tested positive for Covid-19, said BM Mishra, district magistrate of south zone.

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You can leave your umbrella at home for today, but light snowfall is in the forecast for Cambridge starting on Saturday, according to the seven-day forecast from drone-powered weather service Saildrone. The best chance of snow is predicted on Saturday at 60%, with the potential for light snowfall of 0.55 inches.

The immediate forecast also has mild temperatures in store for today. Temperatures will turn cooler on Saturday, getting up to just 42 degrees.

Skies will be cloudy today. Winds are expected to reach a modest high of 18 mph on Friday, with daily top speeds over 10 mph for the rest of the week.

This story was created automatically using Saildrone's local weather forecast data, then reviewed by an editor. We also incorporate historic weather data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). Click here for more about what we're doing. Got thoughts? Go here to share your feedback.
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The entrance to the Cargill Meat Solutions plant in Hazleton, which was temporarily closed last week because of a COVID-19 outbreak among its employees. Read more

The Instagram ad popped up on mobile phones in March  Quarantine in the Poconos.

Another ad asked, Are you looking to escape the epicenter?

With the pandemic spreading quickly, short-term rental firms and property owners on Airbnb marketed the Poconos area as a virus-free zone. But that campaign also helped spread COVID-19 in the Poconos and along the I-80 and I-78 corridors in eastern Pennsylvania, local officials say.

Hazleton Mayor Jeff Cusat said on Tuesday that 3% of the citys population and that of the surrounding towns in Luzerne County have tested positive for the virus.

Cargill Meat Solutions temporarily closed its meatpacking plant last week just outside of Hazleton because the virus had infected nearly 20% of its employees. Workers also tested positive at an Amazon distribution center and a Mission Foods tortilla plant in the Hazleton area, the local Standard-Speaker newspaper has reported.

A lot of people fled the New York area when it broke out for their safety and they brought [COVID-19] here, Cusat said. The numbers are alarming and it did jump up on us quickly.

Monroe County  the Poconos gateway  now records Pennsylvanias highest COVID-19 infection rate, 46.7 cases for every 10,000 residents. Second is Lehigh County with 45.6 cases and, third, Luzerne County, at 44.5, state Health Department data show.

Philadelphia has a substantially lower infection rate of 40.1 cases for every 10,000 residents.

The Poconos regions ties to North Jersey and New York  and thus the flow of commuters, family, and friends between the two areas  are driving the explosion of COVID-19 cases, local officials say.

The area has remade itself over the last two decades into something of a New York bedroom community. Outsiders also own thousands of second or vacation homes, and a tourism industry of time-share units, hotels, and water parks draws half a million visitors to the area on weekends during peak tourism season.

But instead of good times, fear of the virus has driven people to the Poconos area over the last month.

People wanted to get away from New York. If it was you or I, it would be the same thing, said State Sen. Mario Scavello (R., Monroe).

Airbnb, Vrbo, and other firms list 3,000 homes for short-term rentals among Pike, Northampton, Carbon, and Monroe Counties, Scavello noted. At some of these, officials have observed four or five cars parked outside, indicating packed-to-the-walls homes.

Scavello asked state officials to clarify that short-term rentals were not life-sustaining businesses under Gov. Tom Wolfs COVID-19 orders. Dennis M. Davis, the secretary for the Pennsylvania Department of Community and Economic Development, sent Airbnb Inc. a letter asking the company to comply with the shutdown orders on April 7.

DCED spokesperson Casey Smith said Tuesday that Vrbo confirmed receipt of the letter but Airbnb has not.

Were watching them, Scavello said of the short-term rentals. What are you going to do? We would rather them not sign new leases until we get out of this mess.

Meanwhile in Hazleton, Mayor Cusat readily acknowledges the big differences between his city with its Latino population and the Poconos: There are no short-term rentals in Hazleton. Nobody is coming to Hazleton to vacation.

But there are similar dynamics. Many people who live in Hazleton have friends or family in the New York area. Some of them escaped the New York virus epicenter for Hazleton but may have brought the virus with them. And, Hazleton residents still travel back and forth to New York.

Last week, Cargill Meat Solutions shuttered its 900-employee meatpacking plant in Hazleton after scores of employees tested positive for COVID-19. Union officials on Monday put the number of infected workers at 162. Cargill says it will reopen the plant when its safe.

The same union  the United Food and Commercial Workers Local 1776  also represents workers at the Mission Foods tortilla plant, just north of I-80 in Mountain Top. Because of concerns over COVID-19, union officials say, many of the plants hourly employees are calling out sick.

Plant manager Hugo Andrade told the Standard-Speaker last week that 22 of the 510 employees at its plant in Crestwood Industrial Park tested positive for COVID-19. Andrade said that "there is no indication that the employees contracted COVID-19 while present at our facility.

The company could not be reached for comment.

An Amazon distribution warehouse employee has cited about three dozen confirmed cases of COVID-19 at the distribution center in the Humboldt Industrial Park.

Amazon spokesperson Alyssa Bronikowski did not provide the Standard-Speaker with the number of cases, saying, Were continuing to monitor the situation in our facilities and corporate offices, and we are taking proactive measures to protect employees and associates who have been in contact with anyone who has been diagnosed or becomes ill.

 ASK US: Do you have a question about the coronavirus and how it affects your health, work and life? Ask our reporters.

Two elected Hazleton-area officials, in an April 9 letter, called on Gov. Wolf and the state to enforce safe workplace guidelines on big employers to protect employees.

The greater Hazleton area has seen dramatic community spread of the virus, State Rep. Tarah Toohil (R., Luzerne) wrote in the letter. We believe this spread has been caused, in part, by large employers unwilling or unable to adhere to Secretary of Health Dr. Rachel Levines directive."

Its disturbing to see Luzerne County has become a hot spot for the spread of COVID-19, added State Rep. Gerald Mullery (D., Luzerne). I have heard from numerous constituents who are fearful of contracting the virus because their employers are not following the guidelines issued by the state.

The letter did not name the employers.

To control the pandemic spread in Hazleton, Cusat has enacted an 8 p.m.-to-6 a.m. curfew except for those traveling for work. The town also placed restrictions on ride-sharing. Four or more nonfamily members are not allowed to ride in a vehicle or gather in a public area, the order says.

Police are enforcing the curfew, but Mayor Cusat said he did not know how many people may have been cited for violations. If people stick to the CDC guidelines, we will pull out of this OK, Cusat said.

Scavello, the state senator, believes that the regions health data could understate the extent of the pandemic in the area. When people are tested, they are identified by their drivers license or other identification. So if people from New York or New Jersey test positive in the Poconos area, they are not counted as from Pennsylvania, officials said.

Scavello said, I had two people drive up from New York and go right to the hospital because both the husband and wife had [COVID-19].
Security researchers from ESET revealed that the infamous Russian hacker group known as Energetic Bear is behind the hack of two San Francisco International Airport (SFO) websites.

Researchers from ESET believe that the attacks against two San Francisco International Airport (SFO) websites were carried out by the Russian cyber-espionage group known as Energetic Bear (aka DragonFly, Crouching Yeti).

The Energetic Bear APT group has been active since at least 2010 most of the victims of the group are organizations in the energy and industrial sectors.

In March 2018, the Department of Homeland Security and Federal Bureau of Investigation issued a joint technical alert to warn of attacks on US critical infrastructure powered by Russian threat actors. The US-CERT blamed the APT group tracked as Dragonfly, Crouching Yeti, and Energetic Bear.

Now ESET researchers are blaming the Russia-linked APT group for the attacks that took place in March, the hackers also disclosed a data breach.

SFO is a major gateway to Europe and Asia, it serves 45 international carriers. The attackers may have gained access to some users login credentials after deploying malware on both websites.

The attackers inserted malicious computer code on these websites to steal some users login credentials, reads a message posted to both sites by the SFOs Airport Information Technology and Telecommunications (ITT) director. Users possibly impacted by this attack include those accessing these websites from outside the airport network through Internet Explorer on a Windows-based personal device or a device not maintained by SFO.

Hackers may have accessed the impacted users credentials and used them to log on to those personal devices. The SFO ITT urges anyone who even visited either website using the Internet Explorer web browser to change the devices password.

The IT staff at the SFO has already removed the malicious code injected within its websites and took both offline after the attack.

In response to the incident, the SFO Airport reset all email and network passwords.

The malicious code was removed from the affected websites. SFOConnect.com and SFOConstruction.com were taken offline. The airport also forced a reset of all SFO related email and network passwords on Monday, March 23, 2020. continues the data breach notice.

The websites hit by hackers are SFOConnect.com which is used by airport employees, and SFOConstruction.com used by airport construction contractors.

The recently reported breach of #SFO airport websites is in line with the TTPs of an APT group known as Dragonfly/Energetic Bear. The intent was to collect Windows credentials (username/NTLM hash) of visitors by exploiting an SMB feature and the file:// prefix #ESETresearch 1/2 pic.twitter.com/pDZMdb49lb  ESET research (@ESETresearch) April 14, 2020

Contrary to what several people reported, #ESETresearch assesses that this attack has no link with any Magecart credential stealer. The targeted information was NOT the visitor's credentials to the compromised websites, but rather the visitor's own Windows credentials. 2/2  ESET research (@ESETresearch) April 14, 2020

Contrary to what several people reported, #ESETresearch assesses that this attack has no link with any Magecart credential stealer. The targeted information was NOT the visitor's credentials to the compromised websites, but rather the visitor's own Windows credentials. 2/2  ESET research (@ESETresearch) April 14, 2020

According to ESET, hackers were targeting the visitors own Windows credentials, the attackers exploited an SMB feature and the file:// prefix.

The intent was to collect Windows credentials (username/NTLM hash) of visitors by exploiting an SMB feature and the file:// prefix, reads the post published by ESET.

Attackers could have used stolen credentials to attempt lateral movements within the airports internal network to conduct reconnaissance and other malicious activities.

In April 2018, Kaspersky researchers analyzed the serves compromised by the Energetic Bear APT in a series of watering hole attacks.

The state-sponsored hackers used the same file:// prefix trick to gather NTLM hashes from users visiting a compromised website.

At the time it is not clear if the attackers compromised the websites of other airports worldwide.

Pierluigi Paganini

(SecurityAffairs  Energetic Bear, hacking)

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G lossier is launching its first-ever hand cream next week, after two years of development.

The product, which is appropriately named "Hand Cream", will officially launch on April 23, but American health workers have been the first to trial the cream, which is the first of its kind from the purveyors of all things au naturel.

Taking to the company's blog, Glossier's founder and CEO Emily Weiss wrote, Were grateful to other businesses who are retooling their factories to make hand sanitiser (something we cant do, since we dont own our factories.)" Instead, the millennial-favourite has donated the first 10,000 Hand Creams in existence to American nurses and doctors to help exert some damage control on hands ravaged by intensive hand washing.

While the initiative is currently limited to the US, Glossier is hoping to roll out a similar scheme for healthcare workers in the UK soon. Over the past month, the company has been in touch with healthcare professionals and hospital teams and has donated thousands of products to NHS staff.

While not much is known about Hand Cream as of yet, Weiss assured Glossier fans that it's a "BEAUTIFUL formula, delivered in some pretty ingenious packaging."

While since the start of the coronavirus outbreak, the virtues of hand hygiene have been extolled by governments across the world, nurses wash their hands a whopping 55 times a day on average.
(Bloomberg) -- The Defense Departments watchdog found no evidence that the Pentagons controversial decision to award a $10 billion cloud-computing contract to Microsoft Corp. was the result of interference from President Donald Trump, though it said its probe was limited by the White House.

The 317-page report issued Wednesday by the inspector generals office also found that giving the JEDI contract to a single company -- Microsoft -- rather than dividing it among competitors was consistent with applicable acquisition standards.

While the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure project was hotly disputed by rival technology companies from the start, the project gained broader attention when Trump publicly expressed concern about the assumption that the contract would go to Amazon.com Inc.

After Microsoft was given the award instead, Amazon Web Services, Amazons cloud services unit, filed a lawsuit alleging that political interference by Trump cost the company the cloud deal. Amazon said in the suit that the Defense Department failed to fairly judge its bid because Trump viewed Amazon Chief Executive Officer Jeff Bezos as his political enemy.

In its report, the inspector generals office said, We believe the evidence we received showed that the DoD personnel who evaluated the contract proposals and awarded Microsoft the JEDI Cloud contract were not pressured regarding their decision on the award of the contract by any DoD leaders more senior to them, who may have communicated with the White House.

But the report also said the White House limited cooperation with the inquiry. The inspector general said the assertion of a presidential communications privilege resulted in the Defense Department general counsel instructing officials not to answer our questions about potential communications between White House and DoD officials about JEDI.

Claiming Vindication

While Amazons lawsuit is still in the courts, the Defense Department declared vindication from the inspector generals findings.

Story continues

This report should finally close the door on the media and corporate-driven attacks on the career procurement officials who have been working tirelessly to get the much needed JEDI cloud computing environment into the hands of our front-line warfighters while continuing to protect American taxpayers, Lieutenant Colonel Robert Carver, a Pentagon spokesman, said in a statement.

Microsoft spokesman Frank Shaw said in a statement that the report makes clear the DoD established a proper procurement process.

Jon Palmer, deputy general counsel for Redmond, Washington-based Microsoft, said in a blog post that Amazon bid high and lost. Should Amazon be allowed a do-over on JEDI?

Amazon spokesman Drew Herdener said in a statement on Wednesday night that the inspector generals findings say nothing about the merits of the award, which we know are highly questionable.

Amazon has asked the U.S Court of Federal Claims to require that the Pentagon to broaden the scope of a reevaluation that the government requested after a judge said the Defense Department might have misjudged part of Microsofts pricing proposal for the work.

But the Project on Government Oversight, an advocacy group, said the inspector generals findings underscore that the JEDI award was riddled with ethical problems and the appearance of improper influence by Trump.

Add to that the White Houses inappropriate refusal to participate in the inspector generals investigation, and we have a $10 billion mess on our hands, Scott Amey, the groups general counsel, said in a statement.

The Pentagon has said that JEDI, with its acronym inspired by Star Wars, is intended to help bring American military technology into the modern era. The Defense Department is investing in commercial cloud services, which host computing power and storage in remote data centers, to improve data security and speed up real-time sharing of information across the military. The contract is valued at as much as $10 billion.

The inspector general examined dueling allegations of misconduct surrounding complaints that former employees with ties to Amazon may have structured the deal to favor the company, as well as the assertion that Amazon lost out because of Trumps antipathy toward Bezos, who also owns the Washington Post.

Amazons lawsuit cites a book by Guy Snodgrass, a speechwriter to former Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, who alleges that Trump told Mattis in 2018 to screw Amazon and lock it out of the bid. Mattis didnt do what Trump asked, Snodgrass wrote.

The inspector generals office said Mattis couldnt recall whether Trump made that comment, but he said I knew his dissatisfaction with Amazon. I mean I knew that loud and clear. Mattis also told the watchdog that the book by Snodgrass was full of inaccuracies.

Oracles Accusations

The Pentagon inspector generals office also examined allegations, surfaced by Oracle Corp. in a lawsuit challenging the terms of the contract solicitation. Oracle said the bid was tailor-made for Amazon and was fatally tainted by conflicts of interest between the Defense Department and the e-commerce giant.

At least two former Defense Department employees were offered jobs at Amazon while working on the contract, according to the lawsuit. Oracle is appealing a July ruling from the U.S. Court of Federal Claims that dismissed its legal challenge to the cloud contract.

In one case, the inspector general concluded that Deap Ubhi -- a former Amazon employee who soon went back to the company -- violated procurement regulations through his false statements and his failure to disclose his employment negotiations and job acceptance with Amazon.

But the watchdog added that Ubhis minimal and limited contributions were largely discarded and did not affect the conduct or outcome of the JEDI Cloud procurement. Ubhi didnt immediately respond to an emailed request for comment.

The inspector general also concluded that Stacy Cummings, a deputy assistant secretary of defense, violated ethics requirements when she participated in a matter related to the procurement while owning stock in Microsoft valued between $15,001 and $50,000 but that her participation didnt influence the decision. Cummings couldnt immediately be reached for comment.

The Pentagon watchdog cleared two other former Defense Department officials -- Sally Donnelly, a former top aide to Mattis, and Anthony DeMartino, who also worked in the defense secretarys office -- of misconduct. Both had consulted for Amazon before working at the Defense Department.

(Updates with Amazon statement, in 11th paragraph)

For more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.com

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The Narendra Modi government will allow a series of economic activities including food processing industries, construction of roads and industrial projects in rural areas to create job opportunities and give a fresh boost to Indian economy after several industries came to a grinding halt when a federal lockdown was imposed to contain the Covid-19 pandemic.

Even as the country enters into a longer lockdown till May 3, a union home ministry notification on Wednesday underlined opening of industries in rural India after April 20.

To provide an impetus to the rural economy, industries operating in rural areas, including food processing industries; construction of roads, irrigation projects, buildings and industrial projects in rural areas; works under MNREGA, with priority to irrigation and water conservation works; and operation of rural Common Service Centres (CSCs) have all been allowed, said the notification.

These activities will create job opportunities for rural labour, including the migrant labour force. In his speech on April 14, Prime Minister Narendra Modi has expressed concerns about the livelihood of the daily wage earners.

While the government had already exempted agricultural workers from the lockdown apart from those in containment zones, the home ministry notification declared that procurement of agricultural products and agriculture marketing through notified mandis and direct and decentralised marketing will be allowed.

The manufacture, distribution and retail of fertilisers, pesticides and seeds; activities of marine and inland fisheries; animal husbandry activities, including the supply chain of milk, milk products, poultry and livestock farming; and tea, coffee and rubber plantations are allowed to be functional, said the notification.

While the permitted activities from April 20 are aimed to ensure that agricultural and related activities remain fully functional and provide maximum efficiency to the rural economy the government also wants to create employment opportunities, especially for daily wage earners and other members of the labour force.

Transportation of goods is also permitted without any distinction of essential or non-essential goods.

However, no industrial activities will be allowed in areas demarcated as containment zones by local administration as these areas will remain under heavy curbs on movement of people.

The objective of the revised guidelines is to consolidate the gains achieved during the 1st phase of lockdown and further slow down the spread of Covid-19 and at the same time provide relief to farmers and labour and daily wage earners, a press release issued by the information and broadcasting ministry said.

Travel by air, rail and road; operation of educational and training institutions; industrial and commercial activities, hospitality services, all cinema halls, shopping complexes and theatres will remain closed. All social, political and other events, religious places or places of worship for members of public, including religious congregations have been stopped.

The government has also said that some national guidelines, such as mandatory home-made face covers at work places and in public places, strong hygiene and healthcare measures like provision of sanitisers, staggered shifts, access control and thermal screening will remain in place. Fines will have to paid for spitting.

The government has also come with very strong containment measures in the hotspot districts accounting for large number of Covid-19 cases or with fast growth of cases. Only essential services are to be permitted in these zones and strict perimeter control and strict restrictions on movement enforced.
The United States President, Donald Trump, has announced the suspension of funding to the World Health Organisation, claiming the agency had covered up the seriousness of the COVID-19 outbreak in China allowing it to spread around the world.

Mr Trump on Tuesday at a press conference said he has instructed his administration to halt funding while a review is conducted to assess the WHOs role in severely mismanaging and covering up the spread of the coronavirus.

Mr Trump had accused the WHO of wasting tremendous amounts of time in its coronavirus response.

While Mr Trump blamed the international health agency for the pandemic, reports show that he also ignored warnings from his own intelligence agencies of the viruss severity.

The president had six days ago threatened to suspend the U.S. funding for the agency while expressing grievances with its handling of the novel coronavirus.

They missed the call. They could have called it months earlier. They would have known, and they should have known, and they probably did know, he had earlier said.

According to Mr Trump, WHO prevented transparency over the outbreak. The United States is the largest contributor to the UN body  provided $400 million last year  and will now discuss what to do with all that money that goes to the WHO.

With the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, we have deep concerns whether Americas generosity has been put to the best use possible, Mr Trump added.

Rising cases and deaths toll

Meanwhile, the U.S. has now topped the chart of the countries with the highest number of confirmed cases of COVID-19 globally.

As at 23:03 GMT Tuesday, about 2,284 coronavirus-related deaths were reported, according to worldometers.info, bringing U.S. deaths from the outbreak to 25,924.

More than 610,000 cases of COVID-19 have been identified in the U.S., according to worldometers.info.

New York City, which has emerged as the global epicentre for the virus, increased its death toll by an additional 3,700 people who were previously not included in those figures.

The citys new tally has climbed to more than 10,000, edging the U.S. count to 26,000.
M ichael Sheen has criticised ITV for getting his name wrong after a continuity announcer apparently called him by the name of fellow actor Martin Sheen.

The said blunder took place before the second instalment of Quiz was broadcast on Tuesday evening.

The actor, who plays Chris Tarrant in the mini-series, even changed his name to Martin Sheen on Twitter after complaining about the mix up.

He tweeted: "Hey ITV the least you can do is get my name right in your trailers."

Actor Martin Sheen at a climate change rally in Washington earlier this year / Reuters

The apparent mistake prompted amusement among some social media users.

Writer Caitlin Moran tweeted: "ITV announced him as 'Martin Sheen But to be fair, he's such a powerful and elastic actor he could probably do a better Martin Sheen than Martin Sheen."

Another Twitter user said: "Such an acting chameleon. You're confusing everyone, my love."

Another fan wrote: "You're in lockdown for three weeks and everyone forgets you."
Copenhagen: Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen says her government's efforts to fight COVID-19 have been so successful that the country may now be facing a broader rollback of its lockdown than originally planned.

Stengaard School during lockdown in Gladsaxe, Denmark. Credit:AP

On Wednesday, Denmark will release its youngest citizens from a month-long lockdown in a move that has already fuelled considerable controversy.

Babies will return to daycare centres, kindergartens will open their doors, and primary schools will resume in-class lessons for children up to the age of 13.

The government says the move, which follows signs that Denmark's early COVID-19 restrictions paid off, will let parents focus on their jobs and keep the economy going.
LEWISBURG  At least 900 inmates will be transferred from a tornado-damaged prison in South Carolina to the Lewisburg Federal Penitentiary, a union official says.

The medium-security prison in Estill, located almost 100 miles west of Charleston, was damaged Monday morning by a tornado, forcing the federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) to make the move, Andrew Kline, president of Local 148 of the American Federal of Government Employees at Lewisburg, said Tuesday.

He did not know when the transfer would begin but said he anticipates it will be soon. The prisoners will have to be quarantined for 14 days as a precaution against COVID-19, he said.

The quarantine will have to be two to a cell because with the current 179 prisoners, Lewisburg will have approximately 1,100 inmates, Kline said.

Estill is not included in the BOPs daily listing of prisons with staff and/or inmates who have tested positive for the coronavirus. Lewisburg also had not had any inmate or staff member test positive.

Data released Tuesday by the BOP showed 446 inmates and 248 staff had tested positive for COVID-19, and there have been 13 inmate deaths nationwide.

The need to transfer inmates from Estill has caused the BOP to scrap plans to make Lewisburg the holdover quarantine facility for the agencys Northeast Region, Kline said.

Staff at Lewisburg has overcome enormous odds in the past and it is prepared for this, Kline said.

The BOP webpage shows Estill has 965 inmates behind the wall and another 222 in a camp. Lewisburg has 363 in its minimum-security camp.

The tornado hit in what Kline said was the middle of a perfect storm. He was referring to a shortage in staff nationwide plus the pandemic.

As of Monday, 32 staff members from Lewisburg and four from the Allenwood Federal Correctional Complex had been sent voluntarily to other prisons that are experiencing staff shortages.

Attempts were unsuccessful Tuesday night to reach the BOP to learn details of the transfer of Estill inmates and the impact on staffing at Lewisburg.

Thanks for visiting PennLive. Quality local journalism has never been mor important. We need your support. Not a subscriber yet? Please consider supporting our work.
Belgian side Anderlecht resumed training under strict social-distancing guidelines on Wednesday prompting criticism from medical experts.

Despite the Belgian first division being cut short by the coronavirus pandemic the Brussels club elected to go back to work "for those players who want to".

Among those to question Anderlecht's decision was virologist Marc Van Ranst who described it as "legal but a bad signal" during lockdown.

Another doctor wrote to the Brussels mayor telling him: "It's incredible. (It) goes totally against government recommendations and the advice of experts."



Police are carrying out daily checks to ensure the players are respecting the strict health measures put in place to stop the spread of COVID-19 which has claimed 4,400 lives in Belgium.

Anderlecht, placed eighth in the league, say each player is designated a zone on the pitch and his own ball, no passing is permitted.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
This piece was originally published on Just Security, an online forum for analysis of U.S. national security law and policy.

On Tuesday, President Donald Trump announced that he had ordered his administration to halt U.S. funding for the World Health Organization (WHO) pending a review of the organizations actions during the COVID-19 pandemic. The presidents order threatens to damage WHOs ability to contribute to life-saving national and international efforts needed to counter one of the worst pandemics to hit the world in a century. The consequences of this action are so potentially severe that the grounds for taking this path should be proven malfeasance on the part of WHO so egregious that cutting off funds is the only just and effective remedy. The justifications provided by the president come nowhere close to meeting this standard.

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Lets dissect the presidents stated rationales.

The president gave two reasons for ordering a halt to U.S. funding. First, he accused WHO of severely mismanaging and covering up the spread of the coronavirus by taking Chinas assurances at face value and pushing Chinese misinformation about the COVID-19 outbreak in China. The president claimed that these mistakes by WHO have caused so much death. Second, the president argued that WHO fought the United States over travel restrictions that the U.S. government implemented against China because the U.S. measures did not conform with WHOs recommendations.

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The presidents own claims for how he has handled the pandemic and information that we now know the U.S. government gathered about the outbreak undermine the credibility of his accusations that WHO misconduct produced so much death in the United States. The president claims that he effectively protected U.S. citizens from the coronavirus threat by implementing travel restrictions on China against WHOs recommendations. If the president is correct, then Chinese misinformation or WHOs mismanagement of its interactions with China did not mislead the U.S. government. The information that the U.S. intelligence community collected about developments in China in late 2019 and January 2020 and shared across the administration and with members of Congress further underscores that the U.S. government did not depend on, and was not misled by, WHOs interactions with China.

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In light of what we know, the question we should ask is what the United States did for WHO and other countries when the US administration suspected that China was covering up a dangerous outbreak. Given that the U.S. government had information about the outbreak that did not align with what China was claiming and what WHO was providing, what steps did the United States take to bring that information to WHOs attention?

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The United States is a party to the International Health Regulations (IHR), an international agreement that the U.S. government significantly shaped and has strongly supported since its adoption in 2005. The IHR permits WHO to receive and assess information about disease events within countries from sources other than the governments of the affected countries and to seek verification of such information from those governments. The IHR also require states parties to inform WHO of evidence they have about public health risks outside their respective territories that may spread disease internationally through, among other things, human movement.

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Under the IHR, the United States had the opportunity and the obligation to share information with WHO about the disease event that the U.S. government knew was metastasizing in China. Did the Trump administration share information that the U.S. government had about the outbreak in China with WHO? Did it share such information with other countries that faced the same threat as the United States? The president claims that WHO failed the United States and the world by not providing accurate information about the situation in China. But, if the U.S. government did not provide WHO or other governments with information it had about a dangerous disease event in China, then did President Trump also fail to do what he could to protect global health? These questions deserve answers, especially in light of the presidents move to punish WHO for not adequately warning the world before the Wuhan outbreak became a devastating pandemic.

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The presidents second justification for halting funding is that WHO did not agree with the restrictions that the U.S. government implemented on travel from China on February 2. This reason provides no basis for damaging WHO and jeopardizing its ability to help countries combat the COVID-19 pandemic. First, according to the president, the travel restrictions worked, saved lives, and protected the American people. Thus, under this perspective, nothing that WHO said or did concerning the U.S. travel restrictions harmed the health and well-being of Americans. In this context, cutting off funding is a vindictive exercise of presidential authority against WHO actions that had, according to the president, no adverse effect in the United States.

Second, the U.S. government has never required in policy or law that WHO agree with actions that the United States takes in global health. In connection with serious disease events, the U.S.-backed IHR acknowledges that states parties and WHO might differ on how to respond to outbreaks. The regulations require the WHO director-general to issue temporary recommendations, which are not legally binding, to guide WHO member states after the director-general declares a public health emergency of international concern. These temporary recommendations usually include WHOs standard advice that travel and trade restrictions are not effective measures in responding to public health emergencies.

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States parties do not have to follow the temporary recommendations, but the IHR requires state parties to provide WHO with the scientific and public health justifications for trade or travel measures that do not conform with such recommendations. WHO must assess the information provided and may, based on that assessment, ask a state party to reconsider the application of the trade or travel measures. A state party is under no legal obligation to change its approach if the WHO asks it to reconsider its measures.

The temporary recommendations issued on January 30 and updated on February 29 included WHOs advice against the application of travel or trade restrictions to countries experiencing COVID-19 outbreaks. In issuing this advice, WHO was fulfilling its obligations under the IHR, an international agreement that the United States willingly joined and has long supported. Issuing temporary recommendations does not involve picking a fight with the United States or with any of the many other countries that implemented travel restrictions in response to COVID-19. Nor did the president cite any evidence that WHO ever singled out the United States by asking it to reconsider its COVID-19 travel restrictions, as the IHR allows the organization to do. Finally, under the IHR, a state party retains its sovereign prerogative to retain the travel restrictions that it has implemented. In essence, the president is punishing WHO for doing what IHR states parties, including the United States, required the organization to do in a context in which U.S. sovereignty is not diminished and U.S. national interests are not threatened. In this light, cutting off funding for WHO is an abuse of American power.

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This controversy now shifts to the review the president has ordered that will determine whether the United States resumes funding for WHO or moves to reduce or eliminate its support for the organization. Given this administrations unwillingness to admit mistakes, this review is unlikely to conclude that the presidents accusations against WHO were wrong. This probable outcome means that the opportunity and, yes, the need for a comprehensive and transparent review of WHOs interactions with China and the United States during this pandemic will be, without justification, also lost.

More From Just Security:

When International Dysfunctionality Really Matters

Governors and Mayors, Beware: Lawsuits Opposing Coronavirus Mitigation Orders Are a Real Threat

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Georgieva says there is full support to go on the offensive and boost concessional IMF funding for poorer countries.

International Monetary Fund Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva said on Wednesday that the Fund is deploying all of its resources to proactively meet the challenges posed by the coronavirus pandemic and is looking to triple its concessional financing for the worlds poorest countries to over $18bn.

We have full support of the membership to go on the offensive to raise more capacity for concessional funding from the IMF. Our target is to triple what we do for those countries, she told a press briefing held by videoconference.

Earlier, Georgieva issued a statement to a meeting of Group of 20 (G20) finance ministers and central bank governors, saying the Fund was urgently seeking $18bn in new loan resources for the Poverty Reduction and Growth Trust, and will also likely need at least $1.8bn in subsidy resources.

She also told the briefing there is emerging consensus to deploy existing Special Drawing Rights (SDRs) to allow more lending to developing countries.

SDRs are essentially a reserve asset created by the IMF from a basket of currencies including the United States dollar, Japanese yen, Chinese yuan, euro and British pound. Essentially an artificial currency, an SDR allocation is a low-cost way of bolstering IMF member states international reserves during times of extreme stress.

But Georgievas statement that a consensus is building to create new SDRs is at odds with a statement from G20 finance leaders that said the group had reached no consensus over the use of SDRs, either through a new allocation or through lending excess SDRs to poor countries.

A new allocation of SDRs to IMF members could add hundreds of billions of dollars in new liquidity, but the US has opposed the move, in part because it would provide ample resources to countries with no conditions to China and Iran, Reuters News Agency has reported.

The G20 officials did call on the IMF to explore additional tools that could serve its members needs as the crisis evolves, drawing on relevant experiences from previous crises.

The IMF issued $250bn in new SDRs to member countries in 2009, a move that boosted liquidity and market confidence during the depths of the last financial crisis.

Georgieva said she was hopeful that a consensus built around a G20 deal to allow poor countries to suspend payments on official bilateral debt would set the stage for more consensus to expand IMF resources to deal with fallout from the pandemic.
Journalists John Waters and Gemma O'Doherty have launched a High Court action challenging laws brought in by the state arising out of the Covid-19 pandemic.

In judicial review proceedings against the State and the Minister for Health they seek to have various pieces or recently enacted legislation declared null and void by a judge of the High Court.

The legislation challenged includes the 2020 Health Preservation and Protection and Other Emergency Measures in the Public Interest Act, the 2020 Emergency Measures in the Public Interest Act Covid-19 Act, The 1947 Health Act (Affected Areas) Order.

Their proceedings are also aimed at striking down temporary restriction regulations brought due to Covid-19 under the 1947 Health Act.

The legislation relates to various measures introduced to deal with the pandemic.

Representing themselves this afternoon the journalists applied for permission to bring their challenge in an action which is against The Minister for Health, Ireland and the Attorney General.

The matter, which was heard on an ex-parte basis where only one side was present in court, was mentioned before Mr Justice Mark Sanfey.

Mr Waters told the court that the legislation was "unconstitutional", "improperly enacted," and "very flawed".

He said the challenge was brought on grounds including that the laws were brought in by a caretaker Government, by a Dail where the number of TD's present in the chamber when the vote took places was limited.

He said he was further concerned that the legislation was enacted by the outgoing rather than the incoming Senate, which he says it should have been.

File image of Gemma O'Doherty

The two journalists also told the court that they had great concerns about the powers that the new laws gave to the Gardai, and the effect that the laws, the lockdown and travel restrictions are having on the people of Ireland.

Concerns were also raised about the financial steps that have been put in place.

The judge, who said that the court was only concerned about the legality of the legislation challenged and not about any policy taken by government, directed that the journalists' application for permission to bring the challenge be made on notice to the State respondents.

The judge adjourned the matter for a week, when it is to be mentioned before the court.
Gold prices extended gains for the seventh straight day on April 15 to hit a new high of Rs 46,536 per 10 gram in the Mumbai bullion market on rupee depreciation.

The precious metal had hit a seven-and-a-half-year high in the international market on April 14 on fear of recession but pared gains a day later on a stronger dollar.

Major gold-trading centres have remained shut in the country due to the lockdown announced to prevent the spread of coronavirus.

The rate of 10 gram 22-carat gold in Mumbai was Rs 46,536 plus 3 percent GST, while 24-carat 10 gram was Rs 42,627 plus GST. The 18-carat gold was quoting at Rs 34,902 plus GST in the retail market.

Gold prices rose to their highest in more than seven years in the previous session as concerns over global economic growth and a wave of stimulus measures from central banks and governments lifted bullion's appeal," Navneet Damani, Vice President, Motilal Oswal, said.

The retreat from riskier assets followed the IMF prediction that the global economy may shrink by 3 percent in 2020 due to the virus outbreak, the worst downturn since the Great Depression of the 1930s.

SPDR holdings rose 0.8 percent to 1,017.59 tonnes. Apart from ETF flows, continuous gold buying by central banks is also lending support to the prices.

The broader trend on Comex could be $1,695-1,730 and on the domestic front, prices could hover in the Rs 45,800-46,500 range, Damani said.

The gold/silver ratio currently stands at 105.76 to 1, which means the amount of silver required to buy one ounce of gold.

Silver prices gained Rs 1,100 to Rs 44,000 per kg from its closing on April 13.

Also read: Gold prices likely to touch Rs 50,000-55,000 by end of 2020

In the futures market, gold touched an intraday high of Rs 46,785 and an intraday low of Rs 46,060 on MCX. For the June series, the yellow metal touched a low of Rs 36,572 and a high of Rs 46,785.

Gold futures for delivery in June gained Rs 430, or 0.93 percent, on the MCX, closing at Rs 46,716 per 10 gram in a business turnover of 17,427 lots. Gold contracts for August delivery rose Rs 431, or 0.93 percent, at Rs 46,885 per 10 gram in a business turnover of 2,105 lots.

The value of the June contract traded for the day was Rs 3,246.90 crore and August saw the value of Rs 167.66 crore.

Similarly, Gold Mini contract for May jumped Rs 396, or 0.86 percent, to Rs 46,666 in a business turnover of 9,273 lots.

At 1201 pm GMT, spot gold was down by $3.19 at $1,723.28 an ounce in London trading.
Monmouth University is implementing an immediate hiring freeze, suspending capital projects, canceling discretionary spending and slashing the salaries of top-level officials due to the financial impact of the coronavirus pandemic.

Patrick Leahy, the universitys president, announced the measures in a letter to the school community Tuesday.

Leahy said he will take a 25% pay cut while the universitys 18 cabinet members will take a 10% reduction in salary and forgo any salary increases for at least the next six months.

Because Monmouth University is a private institution Leahys annually salary is not publicly available. He earned more than $417,000 in 2016 while serving as the president of Wilkes University in Pennsylvania, according to a report by the The Chronicle of Higher Education. His predecessor earned more than $807,000 according to the same report.

Monmouth has a total enrollment of nearly 6,000 students, with 320 full-time faculty and 375 part-time professors. While its endowment was $100 million as of July 2019, the West Long Branch-based university has a $178.4 million operating budget, according to figures released by the school.

We have no choice but to create room in our operating budget this year both to cover lost revenue and to fund the unforeseen expenses associated with the rapid transition to remote instruction and learning, said Leahy, who was named Monmouth Universitys 10th president in December 2018. Doing all of this will give us a fighting chance to break even in the midst of this crisis.

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Monmouth was one of New Jerseys first universities to cancel classes this spring after a student reported having flu-like symptoms on March 9. Leahy then announced classes would be taught remotely for the remainder of the spring semester and for the summer sessions.

As the coronavirus situation was rapidly unfolding, we took numerous actions to support our university community, Leahy said. For students, we have provided prorated room, meal, and parking refunds; preserved on-campus jobs for the remainder of the semester, even if remote work is unmanageable; and established the Presidents Relief Fund to aid students who are dealing with pandemic-related financial hardship. For faculty and staff members, we have committed to paying full wages and benefits, even when some work is nearly impossible to accomplish in a remote environment.

At the same time, we have absorbed additional costs to adapt teaching and learning to a remote environment, accrued substantial revenue losses from outside event cancellations and reduced bookstore sales, and lost significant philanthropic support as the country has plunged into an economic recession. Taken together, these factors have placed significant pressure on our current operating budget for the fiscal year ending on June 30.

Leahy announced the following measures aimed at mitigating the financial impact and ensuring budgetary discipline for the remainder of the 2019-20 school year:

A hiring freeze on all open and new academic and non-academic positions with the exception of posts that have ongoing searches.

A limit on discretionary spending, with a goal to save $4 million as the school pauses all non-essential operating expenditures.

The suspension of capital projects until further notice, with the exception to work on the simulation lab at the Graduate Center, which is a joint effort between Monmouth Medical Center and the university.

Leahy said he asked his top advisors and the schools union leadership about the possibility of implementing a furlough program, designed to keep employees "as whole as possible while taking leaves of absence from the university during the slow periods of the school year. He pointed to the unemployment benefits under the CARES Act that include an additional $600 weekly payment, helping some employees maintain or even exceed their regularly earned wages while collecting unemployment, and added additional information will be shared following discussions with key stakeholders.

This global pandemic will, no doubt, adversely influence summer and fall enrollments, which will put pressure on next years budget as well, Leahy said. We will spend the next few weeks working through these challenges. This public health crisis  and its associated economic fallout  is unlike anything weve ever seen. Our actions must reflect our new realities.

NJ Advance Media staff writer Adam Clark contributed to this report.

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Source: Xinhua| 2020-04-15 22:18:03|Editor: Xiang Bo

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MADRID, April 15 (Xinhua) -- Spain's former Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy is being investigated for a possible breach of the country's confinement regulations, Interior Minister Fernando Grande-Marlaska confirmed on Wednesday.

A video broadcast on Spanish TV network La Sexta on Tuesday showed Rajoy walking briskly along a street close to his home on the outskirts of Madrid and the network reported it was not the first time the man who led the right wing People's Party (PP) government of Spain between December 2011 and June of 2018 had been seen exercising outdoors.

The video also shows that Rajoy is not carrying any bags, which could have indicated that he had been out to buy food or medicine.

Spaniards have been prohibited from exercising outdoors since the State of Alarm was imposed by current Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez on March 15 in an attempt to halt the spread of the coronavirus.

When asked about Rajoy's apparent breach of the regulation in the weekly 'control session' in the Spanish Parliament, Grande-Marlaska replied that "investigations are being carried out to examine Mr Rajoy's alleged breach of the obligation to stay at home."

"The principal of legality is one of the foundations of a State of Law," said the minister, adding that Rajoy's status as a former prime minister would not help him.

"A person's name does not determine how the law is applied," added Grande-Marlaska.

The Ministry of the Interior confirmed on Wednesday that since the beginning of the State of Alarm, 4,981 people have been arrested for breaking lockdown rules, while 571,807 people are facing fines of between 601 to 30,000 euros (654 to 32,600 U.S. dollars). The possible prison terms for resisting arrest or serious disobedience during the State of Alarm range from three months to a year.
Gov. Gavin Newsom painted an eerie picture of restaurant dining during a news conference on Tuesday, leading chefs and restaurateurs to think more critically about the reopening of the industry while the coronavirus keeps people at home.

You may be having dinner with a waiter wearing gloves, maybe a face mask, dinner where the menu is disposable, where half of the tables in that restaurant no longer appear, where your temperature is checked before you walk into the establishment  these are likely scenarios, Newsom said, giving no timeline as to when restaurants could expect to reopen their dining rooms.

Some in the industry are skeptical about Newsoms vision during the news conference, billed as an unveiling of his road map to recovery following shelter in place, and whether most restaurants could survive it, especially the suggestion that they allow in half as many diners as usual.

Since restaurants are already held together with Scotch tape, I feel like restrictions like that are going to be insurmountable, said Martin Salata, the chef at Oakland restaurant Sister, which is currently closed. If we have to pay full rent at 50% occupancy, its a losing battle. Theres no way.

Liz Hafalia / The Chronicle

David Barzelay, the chef-owner of Michelin-starred San Francisco restaurant Lazy Bear, said a world where a restaurant has to take temperature checks at the door is not a world where Lazy Bear can operate as usual. The restaurant is known for its distinctive, communal style, with strangers seated at the same table and chefs playing dinner party host.

I dont see how anybody wants to go have an experience kind of meal thats marred by those sorts of impersonal aspects. Its the opposite of the kind of hospitality we and Id imagine most fine dining places want to offer, he said.

Shelley Lindgren, owner of the A16 restaurants in San Francisco and Oakland, said that reducing her restaurants capacities could mean shed have to adjust her prices.

One of the ways for us to keep our prices moderate, which has always been a priority, is to seat a lot of people, she said. The fewer people we can seat, the more wed need to charge per person.

John Storey / Special to The Chronicle 2013

Azalina Eusope is excited by the prospect of reopening her Noe Valley Malaysian restaurant, Mahila. Shes confident she could reconfigure the restaurant, and even if she went down from 60 seats to 30 seats, it would be better than her current situation of offering takeout three times a week.

It doesnt cover anything. But 30 people a night? If we can get that, thats better than five people a day for takeout, she said.

Bob Klein, owner of Oaklands stalwart Italian restaurant Oliveto, already tried some of Newsoms proposed measures before the Bay Areas shelter-in-place order went into effect. Namely, he took out tables so they were all 6 feet from one another.

If that becomes the new normal then theyre all easy to accomplish, he said of Newsoms ideas. But the issues are much more complicated than that. Who will be coming in? What do they want? Its a fundamentally different world.

Sarah Rich, co-owner of Michelin-starred Rich Table in San Francisco, agrees that diners wont want what was offered before the coronavirus.

They wont want to stand shoulder to shoulder at the bar  or sit 3 inches from the person next to them. Were going to have to rethink the entire format of the dining experience, she said.

The idea of checking diners temperatures is uncomfortable for some chefs like Eusope.

I'm not a doctor. I dont know how to diagnose someone. That's giving a lot of responsibility for businesses like us to deal with, she said.

Food Guide Top 25 Restaurants Where to eat in the Bay Area. Find spots near you, create a dining wishlist, and more.

Meanwhile, Barzelay and Lindgren both objected to Newsoms suggestion to have servers wear gloves, which they argued was less safe than proper hand washing.

There could be cross-contamination if youre clearing plates at a table, Lindgren said. Plus, could a server open a bottle of wine with gloves?

Gov. Newsom is a restaurant owner, she continued, referring to the group of restaurants and wine shops he owns under the PlumpJack label, currently under a blind trust while he is governor. But it would be really fantastic if there were more individual restaurant owners at the table having these conversations with politicians.

Laura Morton / Special to The Chronicle 2017

While Olivetos formal upstairs restaurant never used to offer takeout and delivery, Klein said it would need to continue to do so even when dining rooms could reopen. Ravi Kapur, chef-owner of perennially crowded San Francisco restaurant Liholiho Yacht Club, said hes not confident reopening, offering takeout for the first time and adding other meal periods like lunch would be financially viable. Similarly, Barzelay said he fears cutting the normal number of diners at Lazy Bear would be worse than just offering takeout, as the restaurant is doing now.

That said, Barzelays team has talked about various scenarios for reopening Lazy Bear, and its possible the restaurant could return with individual tables and a four-course menu instead of the usual 15 to appeal to more price-sensitive diners during a recession. But he wonders, especially if servers are wearing masks and the dining room feels quiet, whether the experience Lazy Bear or any restaurant could offer would be enough to draw diners regularly.

I do think there is a world in which the great places of San Francisco are going to be viable again  maybe not in 2020, Barzelay said. Its just a question of what we have to do to survive between now and then.

Soleil Ho, Kellie Hwang and Esther Mobley contributed to this report.

Janelle Bitker is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: janelle.bitker@sfchronicle.com
The coronavirus COVID-19 outbreak on Wednesday (April 15, 2020) infected over twenty lakh people across the 193 countries and territories.

According to Johns Hopkins University as on Wednesday at 10:45 PM IST, the total number of coronavirus positive cases jumped to 20,16,020. The fatal virus has now taken over 1,30,528 lives since its outbreak in the world.

The United States (US) has been the worst-hit country which has reported over 6,13,187 confirmed cases. Earlier on Wednesday, the US President Donald Trump also instructed his administration to temporarily halt funding to the World Health Organization (WHO) over its handling of the coronavirus disease pandemic. President Trump said the WHO had failed in its basic duty and it must be held accountable. He added it promoted China's disinformation about the coronavirus that was likely to have led to a wider outbreak of disease.

Spain remained on the second spot with around 1,77,633 COVID-19 positive cases.

Italy on the third spot reported over 2,667 new confirmed cases in a day. The total confirmed cases in the country surged to 1,65,155. The number of positive cases was the lowest since March 13 but the daily count of deaths remained high.

Germany with approximately 1,33,154 positive cases is the fourth-worst affected nation in the world. Germany is also thinking to extend its restrictions to May 3 to combat the global pandemic.

France on the fifth spot recorded over 1,31,365 COVID-19 confirmed cases.

The United Kingdom till Wednesday evening witnessed close to 1 lakh confirmed cases. The number of people who came in contact with the coronavirus jumped to 99,455. The UK Health Secretary Matt Hancock said the government will introduce new procedures to limit the risk of the infection and allow people to say goodbye to loved ones wherever possible.

China which is reportedly the country where the deadly virus originated, has recorded over 83,356 COVID-19 cases.

Iran with 76,389 cases, Turkey with 65,111, Belgium having 33,573 infections and Netherlands with 28,314 confirmed cases are the other worst affected countries around the world.

On the list of the places with most deaths due to the coronavirus in the world, the US remained the worst-hit country with over 26,950 people succumbing to the disease.

Deaths from the COVID-19 epidemic in Italy rose by 578 on Wednesday, down from 602 the day before. It has hovered between 525 and 636 for the last 11 days now. The total death toll since the outbreak came to light on February 21 surged to 21,645.

Spain on the third spot recorded over 18,579 deaths in the country. France remained the fourth most affected country where around 15,729 people have died till now due to the virus.

The UK reported close to 13,000 deaths on Wednesday. The death count in the UK rose to 12,868, a daily increase of 761, as the government announced new plans to modify its guidance to allow close relatives to say goodbye to their sick relatives in care homes across the country.

New York City (US) with 7,905 deaths, Iran with 4,777 fatalities, Belgium with 4,440 and Germany with 3,592 are the other worst-hit places across the globe.
T he Treasury Department has ordered for Donald Trump's signature to be printed on checks that will be sent to tens of millions of Americans.

"President Donald J. Trump" will be printed on the left side of $1,200 (963) checks that are scheduled to be sent to 70 million Americans by the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) in the next few days.

Having the President's signature on each stimulus check could slow the delivery of aid that is desperately needed during the coronavirus pandemic by several days, said an official.

This will be the first time a US President's name appears on an IRS disbursement.

President Donald Trump signs the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act in the Oval Office / Bloomberg via Getty Images

According to the Washington Post, Mr Trump asked Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin if he could formally sign the checks, however civil servants are the standard signer for such checks and the President doesn't have the authority to act as a signer for legal disbursements.

The stimulus checks are part of the US Government's economic relief package and they will also bear Mr Trump's name in the memo line below a line that reads "Economic Impact Payment".

Chad Hooper, a quality-control manager who serves as national president of the IRS' Professional Managers Association, told the Washington Post: "Any last minute request like this will create a downstream snarl that will result in a delay."

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However a Treasury Department representative insisted there would be no delays and said the Economic Impact Payment checks are scheduled to go out in time exactly as planned.

In a written statement the representative said: "In fact, we expect the first checks to be in the mail early next week which is well in advance of when the first checks went out in 2008 and well in advance of initial estimates."

Mr Trump signed the 2.2 trillion dollar (1.78 trillion) rescue package for American workers left reeling by the coronavirus pandemic on March 27.

Under the plan, single Americans will receive 1,200 dollars (963), married couples will get 2,400 dollars (1,926) and parents are expected to see 500 dollars (401) for each child.
Newsom Announces Fund to Give Stimulus Checks to Illegal Immigrants in State

California Gov. Gavin Newsom announced on Wednesday a fund to give payments to immigrants who are living in California illegally amid the CCP virus pandemic.

He said that the state will use a mixture of taxpayer dollars and charitable contributions, giving as many as 150,000 adults $500 each, with households being capped at $1,000.

This is a state that steps up to help those in need, regardless of status, Newsom said in a live-streamed announcement on social media, adding that 10 percent of the states workforce is undocumented.

An overrepresentation of that workforce is undocumented in the areas that are so essential to meeting the needs of tens of millions of Californians todayin the health care sector, in the agriculture and food sector, in the manufacturing and logistics sector, and in the construction sector, Newsom added. He said illegal immigrants paid $2.5 billion in state taxes in 2019.

They will be able to apply for the deposits in May.

He noted that a number of such immigrants are not eligible to receive federal stimulus deposits or checks worth up to $1,200 for individuals and $500 for children. Those deposits started going out this week in an attempt to offset some economic losses suffered during the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) virus pandemic.

Paramedics attend to a person with possible symptoms of COVID-19 in Los Angeles, California, on April 12, 2020. (Apu Gomes/AFP/Getty Images)

Many mixed-status families are having trouble taking care of their families, Newsom added. We feel a deep sense of gratitude for people that are in fear of deportation that are still addressing the essential needs of tens of millions of Californians.

According to Newsoms office, the funds will be deployed via a model of regional nonprofits.

About $75 million will come from state taxpayers while charities will raise another $50 million. They include the Emerson Collective, Blue Shield of California Foundation, the California Endowment, the James Irvine Foundation, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, and others, according to Fox News.

The California Immigrant Resilience Fund is a critical investment because so many immigrant families have been left out of other aid packages, yet these residents face consequences to their health and safety that will be compounded across future generations, stated Debbie I. Chang, president of the Blue Shield of California Foundation, according to the Washington Times.

A $2 trillion stimulus package recently passed by Congress, signed into law by President Donald Trump, avails small-business loans and assistance in form of direct payments. The Internal Revenue Services (IRS) Get My Payment was launched Wednesday, allowing people to see when their money will be deposited or when a check will be mailed. The website will also confirm if the IRS will send the money in the mail or via a direct deposit.
Bengaluru, April 15 : The police here have booked five shopkeepers for fleecing customers amid the Covid-19 induced lockdown, and escalated the issue to the Civil Supplies and Weights and Measures departments, an official said on Wednesday.

"We have checked randomly, they (shopkeepers) were charging more than the MRP," Central Crime Branch Deputy Commissioner of Police, Kuldeep Jain, told IANS.

He said the two departments will probe the matter further and take further action.

"We have not yet arrested anyone. This is a non-cognizable offence and we have to take permission from the court. First the respective departments (civil supplies and weights and measures) have to probe the matter," he said.

According to Jain, the two departments will give a proper report on the initial complaint which the police have raised.

He said Kamashipalya and Vijayanagar police stations were among the stations which booked the five shopkeepers, one of whom was also booked under Cigarettes and Other Tobacco Products Act.
Shares in Scandinavian carrier Norwegian plunged as much as 63pc yesterday. Investors scrambled to ditch the stock on the first day of trading after the airline announced a plan last week that would see $4.3bn (3.9bn) of debt converted to equity and obliterate the value of existing shares.

The shares later clawed back some of the steep losses, but were still more than 44pc lower by the time the Oslo stock market closed.

Norwegian - struggling even before the coronavirus outbreak - is planning the debt-to-equity conversion to access crucial funding from the government.

The debt is held by aircraft lessors, bond holders, convertible bond holders, banks and suppliers. As part of the conversion process and accessing government funds, the airline also intends to undertake a subsequent private placement with potential preferential treatment for its current shareholders.

"The proposed measures are necessary in securing the next tranches of the Norwegian government state guarantee program that will release NOK3bn (265m)," Norwegian's CEO Jacob Schram told shareholders last week.

"They are also necessary for the future of the company by strengthening the company's balance sheet," he said.

"We will over the next weeks engage in dialogue with the bond holders, lessors and other creditors, with the intent of converting substantial debt to equity."

Mr Schram insisted the plan "will create a platform which will enable Norwegian to return to the skies as an even better and stronger company".

The airline is holding a meeting with bondholders on April 30 to seek approval of the terms of the debt-to-equity proposal.

"The proposal remains subject to discussions with other stakeholders," said Norwegian in a statement yesterday.
Source: Xinhua| 2020-04-15 11:12:49|Editor: zyl

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WELLINGTON, April 15 (Xinhua) -- New Zealand reported six new confirmed and 14 new probable cases of COVID-19 on Wednesday, bringing the total number of confirmed and probable infections to 1,386 in the country.

There was no new death reported after four new deaths were reported on Tuesday. Nine New Zealanders have now died from COVID-19, most of whom were elderly people.

Director-General of Health Ashley Bloomfield said there were now 16 clusters nationwide, with a new one identified at an Auckland rest home.

Currently, 13 people are in hospital, with three in ICU, including two in a critical condition. A total of 728 people had recovered, Bloomfield said.

He said 115 COVID-19 cases are health care workers, but less than five people have been infected by patients.

With more infected people recovering, there were 649 active cases at present, but it did not mean the control efforts could be relaxed, Bloomfield said.

"We are still not out of the woods," he said.

Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern said at the press conference that government ministers, including herself, would take a 20-percent pay cut for the next six months.

A media rescue package would be considered soon, Ardern said.

All public schools in New Zealand started a new term on Wednesday by connecting teachers via Internet platforms for remote learning.

New Zealand entered a four-week lockdown, or epidemic response Alert Level 4, from midnight March 25.
Amid the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) global pandemic that is infecting millions of people across the globe, hope sparks as the World Health Organization (WHO) reports that seventy vaccination trials for the novel coronavirus are underway, with three already at the human trial stage.

The COVID-19 pandemic has spread to 185 countries and territories, with 1,979,477 infected and 126,539 succumbing to the disease as of 14 April 2020. Scientists and pharmaceutical companies are racing to determine an effective vaccine to protect against the viral infection. While new drugs are being developed, companies are also seeing if older drugs can be repurposed.

The World Health Organization (WHO) released a document containing all potential vaccine candidates that may help protect populations against the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), the virus that causes COVID-19 disease. The virus first emerged in Wuhan City, Hubei Province, in China and has since spread across continents, without an approved treatment or vaccine developed yet.

MERS Virus Particles Colorized scanning electron micrograph of Middle East Respiratory Syndrome virus particles (yellow) attached to the surface of an infected VERO E6 cell (blue). Image captured and color-enhanced at the NIAID Integrated Research Facility in Fort Detrick, Maryland. Credit: NIAID

Three vaccines head the race

The furthest along in the clinical process is an experimental vaccine, which is now in its phase 2 of human trials. Hong-Kong's CanSino Biologics, Inc. and the Beijing Institute of Biotechnology developed the vaccine. Two other vaccines are being tested in humans by U.S. drug makers Inovio Pharmaceuticals, Inc. and Moderna, Inc.

The vaccine developed by CanSino Biologics uses a non-replicating viral vector platform, while it is an adenovirus type 5 vector vaccine. The vaccine developed by Inovio Pharmaceuticals is a DNA-based vaccine, which is a DNA plasmid vaccine Electroporation device, while the one developed by Moderna is an LNPencapsulated mRNA vaccine.

The vaccine candidate built upon the adenovirus-based viral vector vaccine technology platform, which has also been applied to develop an effective vaccine against the Ebola virus infection. In animal studies, the virus has shown promise in inducing a strong immune response.

"Thanks to our collaborators and our diligent team, who worked almost around the clock since late January to develop this vaccine candidate with sound scientific data to support IND filing. Having committed to providing unconditional support to fight against the global epidemic, CanSinoBIO is determined to launch our vaccine product candidate as soon as possible with no compromise on quality and safety," Xuefeng Yu, Chairman, and CEO of CanSinoBIO said.

Meanwhile, Inovio Pharmaceuticals received the green light from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to start its phase 1 clinical testing. The vaccine, called INO-4800, will be used in healthy volunteers to see if it can protect against the coronavirus disease.

"This is a significant step forward in the global fight against COVID-19. Without a new safe and effective vaccine, the COVID-19 pandemic is likely to continue to threaten lives and livelihoods. It also demonstrates the power of our DNA medicines platform to rapidly develop and advance a vaccine for COVID-19 into Phase 1 clinical testing," Dr. J. Joseph Kim, INOVIO's President, and CEO said. "Our dedicated team of staff, partners and funders have been mobilized since the genetic sequence of the virus became available in early January and continues to work around the clock to ensure that we are rapidly advancing INO-4800 through this Phase 1 study towards planned efficacy trials," he added.

Moderna, a Cambridge biotech company, has also received the approval to start testing its coronavirus vaccine in March. The company uses messenger RNA that carries genetic information from DNA to ribosomes to produce proteins. This type of vaccine is new but promising.

"We call mRNA the software of life. You can copy and paste the information into a lot of drugs by using the same technology. That means the way we make mRNA for one vaccine is exactly the same way we make mRNA for another vaccine," he added. It just carries a different genetic sequence depending on the disease," Stephane Bancel, CEO of the company, Moderna, said.

Coronavirus global update

As the world grapple to contain the coronavirus spread, scientists race to develop vaccines and therapies for the viral infection. Though promising, it may take about a year before a vaccine is developed and ready for market. The United States reports the most number of COVID-19 cases, with more than 608,000 people infected, and nearly 26,000 people succumbed to the disease.

Spain and Italy follow with 174,060 and 162,488 people infected, respectively. Other countries with high infection toll include Germany with more than 133,000 infections, France with more than 131,000 confirmed cases, and the United Kingdom with more than 94,000 cases.
Panaji, April 15 : The spouses and families of nearly a dozen seafarers staged a protest outside the Chief Minister's official residence in Panaji, demanding that the state government make urgent efforts to repatriate more than 8,000 Goan sailors, who are currently stranded in different ports-of-call across the world.

The families were subsequently detained by the Panaji Police for violtion of lockdown norms, even as Leader of Oppostion Digambar Kamat called their arrest "unfortunate".

"There are roughly 8,000 seafarers from Goa who are stranded. The number may go up to 10,000. The CM is not giving us any assurance on getting them back," Gina Pereira, a wife of a seafarer told reporters outside the Chief Minister's residence. Pereira said, that her husband is working with Symphony cruises and had been quarantined for more than 18 days already.

Pereira and other families of seafarers were later detained by the police and evicted from outside the Chief Minister's residence and taken to the Panaji police station.

Reacting to their arrest, Leader of Opposition Digambar Kamat said: "It is most unfortunate that the family members of seafarers at the Chief Minister's residence, including women are arrested. They are concerned about their loved ones and it is our duty to give them mental strength and courage during these testing times. Seafarers have contributed to the Economy of Goa," Kamat said.

Speaking to reporters, Goa's Civil Supplies Minister Govind Gaude said that striking outside the Chief Minister's residence during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic was wrong.

"What will you get by going on strike like this. There is a procedure, which has to be followed. They (families of seafarers) are doing the wrong thing," Gaude said.

Chief Minister Pramod Sawant has repeatedly said, that he is in touch with the Prime Minister's Officer over the stranded seafarers issue and that their repatriation would be based on a policy and decisions taken by the Union Ministry of External Affairs.
WHAT ARE WE DOING? We have launched Food For London Now, an appeal to fund the delivery of food to poor, elderly and vulnerable Londoners who are unable to afford food or are confined to home and at high risk of losing their lives from catching the coronavirus. Monies raised go to our appeal partner, The Felix Project, Londons biggest food surplus distributor, which is part of a co-ordinated food distribution effort taking place across London. The appeal is under the auspices of the Evening Standard Dispossessed Fund and run by the London Community Foundation, which manages the Fund.

HOW DOES THE SCHEME WORK? The London Food Alliance has been set up by the Felix Project together with the capitals two other largest food surplus distributors  FareShare and City Harvest  to pick up nutritious surplus food from suppliers and deliver it in bulk to community hubs in each borough.

HOW WILL FOOD GET TO PEOPLE? Each borough will create hubs to receive the surplus food, divide it into food parcels and deliver them to the doorstep of vulnerable Londoners.

WHO WILL GET FOOD? Boroughs are in touch with local charities, foodbanks and community centres as well as the government to ascertain who is most vulnerable and in need.

HOW HAVE THE FOOD REDISTRIBUTORS DIVIDED UP LONDON? Felix is responsible for co-ordinating surplus supply across 14 boroughs, FareShare 12 and City Harvest 7.
Inmates extend their hands at the Modelo prison in Bogota after a riot on March 22 left 23 prisoners dead and 90 wounded (AFP Photo/DANIEL MUNOZ)

Bogota (AFP) - Colombia on Wednesday ordered the temporary release of more than 4,000 prisoners, in an effort to reduce overcrowding and prevent the spread of the coronavirus.

Two prisoners have already died from COVID-19 in the South American country.

The "humanitarian" releases are aimed at ensuring "that the people most vulnerable to the virus can get out of prison confinement and go to house arrest and improve their health protection," President Ivan Duque said on Colombian radio.

Among prisoners to benefit are those aged over 60, those with illness or disabilities, those who have served at least 40 percent of their sentence, breastfeeding mothers and others with children under three years old, said Justice Minister Margarita Cabello.

"This is one of the measures that we are adopting" to deal with the pandemic, Cabello said, adding that the number could increase.

After six months, the prisoners will have to return to prison to serve out their sentences. Breaking the terms of their house arrest would lead to them being re-imprisoned, the minister said.

The government decree does not apply to prisoners belonging to armed groups, or those convicted of drug trafficking, sexual crimes or crimes against humanity.

The move comes three weeks after rioting at a prison in Bogota left 23 dead and 91 wounded.

Colombia has recorded more than 3,000 coronavirus infections, including 127 deaths.
Amazon threatened Wednesday to suspend all activity in France after a French court found it wasn't doing enough to protect its workers.

The online giant also announced plans to appeal Tuesday's emergency ruling, which requires Amazon to stop selling nonessential goods for a month while it works out new worker safety measures.

Sales of food, medicine and hygiene supplies are still allowed under the ruling. However, Amazon France said in a statement Wednesday that the decision is so disruptive that it could prompt the company to suspend all activity at its six French warehouses.

The company stressed the importance of its services to the thousands of French companies that sell on Amazon and millions of people around the country who want to have access to products they need during the crisis. Amazon insisted that it is providing adequate security measures for staff, noting the implementation of temperature checks and mask distribution.

But the court found Amazon didn't do enough to enforce social distancing, to ensure that turnstiles and locker rooms were virus-free, or to increase cleaning of its warehouses. Unions say one worker infected with the virus is in intensive care.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Source: Xinhua| 2020-04-15 22:55:55|Editor: huaxia

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ADDIS ABABA, April 15 (Xinhua) -- The African Union (AU) on Wednesday criticized the decision of the U.S. government to halt funding to the World Health Organization (WHO).

"The U.S. government's decision to suspend funding to WHO is deeply regrettable. Today more than ever the world depends on WHO's leadership to steer the global COVID-19 pandemic response," tweeted AU Commission Chairperson Moussa Faki Mahamat.

"Our collective responsibility to ensure WHO can fully carry out its mandate has never been more urgent," he added.

On Tuesday, U.S. President Donald Trump announced that his administration is halting the nation's funding to the WHO, a move experts have warned against, as COVID-19 continues to take a toll globally.

Speaking to reporters at the White House, Trump also said a review is being conducted to assess the WHO's role in addressing the spread of the novel coronavirus.

The announcement came as Trump is aggressively defending his own handling of the outbreak in the United States after his administration has been blamed for downplaying the COVID-19 threat early on and for delays in testing.
On April 15 last year, a fire destroyed the 800-year-old wooden roof of Notre Dame Cathedral, causing irreparable damage to the inside of the landmark. The fire, which burned for 15 hours, melted 300 tons of lead in the scaffolding above the roof, causing its famous spire to collapse.

On the anniversary of the fire, as France battles the COVID-19 pandemic along with the rest of the world, commemoration plans have been canceled due to the ban on public gatherings. France's lockdown to combat the coronavirus has also forced a full suspension of restorative work at Notre Dame.

MORE: Notre Dame Cathedral holds first mass since devastating fire, with attendees in hardhats

Cleaning and restoration efforts have been at a standstill since March 16

"General Georgelin made the decision to 'put the site to sleep,' in particular, because the current decontamination facilities do not allow implementing, for the benefit of those involved, the rules of security relating to coronavirus," including social distancing, the spokesperson of the public establishment responsible for the conservation and restoration of Notre Dame, Jeremie Patrier-Leitus, told ABC News.

Despite doubts from architects, President Emmanuel Macron has pushed to complete restoration in five years, a goal which General Georgelin has so far defended but is now threatened by measures to stem COVID-19.

Where is the investigation at?

The cause of the fire has been subject to conspiracy theories blaming terrorism, which officials ruled out in an investigation. Others attributed the cause to a malfunctioning electrical system, or a poorly extinguished cigarette. Yet, the precise cause of the fire remains unknown.

"It is an investigation which lasts, which is complex, which is colossal," said Paris prosecutor Remy Heitz on national radio Europe 1.

PHOTO: FILE - In this April 15, 2019, file photo, the Notre Dame Cathedral burns in Paris. The cathedral stands crippled, locked in a dangerous web of twisted metal scaffolding one year after a cataclysmic fire. (Vanessa Pena/AP)

"Today, a year after the fire, we continue to receive donations," according to the director general of the Notre Dame foundation Christophe Rousselot.

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Donations and pledges to restore the cathedral total 902 million -- from individuals contributing a few dollars to huge gifts from patrons including Bernard Arnault, the chairman and CEO of LVMH Moet Hennessy  Louis Vuitton, and billionaire Francois Pinault.

And donations came from all over. North Americans accounted for 1.2 million euros while 48.1 million came from French donors and 2.9 million from the rest of the world.

MORE: Notre Dame proposals envision 'green' roof, glass spire, beam of light

A group of friends from Texas were on a tourist trip to Paris at the time of the fire. "When they came back from their amazement, they spontaneously introduced themselves later in the offices of the Notre Dame Foundation in order to issue a participation check," said Rousselot.

Meanwhile, there's been no decision made on Notre Dame's final design -- with some calling for reconstructing the spire of Viollet-Le-Duc identical to how it was, or designing a "contemporary architectural gesture" as President Macron suggested.

On Wednesday, President Macron released a video on Twitter thanking the firefighters who saved Notre Dame last year and the restoration workers.

Un an apres lincendie de Notre-Dame de Paris, mon message a toutes celles et ceux qui lont sauvee et qui aident a la reconstruire : pic.twitter.com/rdt5ENBK4I  Emmanuel Macron (@EmmanuelMacron) April 15, 2020

"Our days, our thoughts, our lives today are monopolized by the terrible crisis we are going through. However, just one year after the dramatic fire which ravaged part of the Notre Dame de Paris Cathedral, I wanted to thank again all those who saved it yesterday and all those who are rebuilding it today," he said in the video.

"We will rebuild Notre Dame in five years, I promised. We will do everything to meet this deadline. Of course, the work is on hold at the moment due to the health crisis, but it will restart as soon as possible. Notre Dame is a symbol of the resilience of our people, of their ability to overcome hardships and to recover."

The spokesperson of the public establishment responsible for the conservation and restoration of Notre Dame, Jeremie Patrier-Leitus, confirmed that the bell "Emmanuel", built in 1686 and situated at the South Tower of Notre-Dame de Paris, will ring at 8pm local (2pm EST), both to commemorate the fire and to be in unison with the French who applaud their care workers at 8pm everyday. It's the second biggest bell in France after the one in the Sacre-Coeur.

SAVING NOTRE DAME, premiering on April 16 at 7/6c on the National Geographic Channel, recounts the aftermath of the devastating fire and unprecedented one-year rescue mission to prevent the unstable cathedral from collapsing.

Notre Dame marks anniversary of cathedral fire originally appeared on abcnews.go.com
BISMARCK  As a byproduct of "stay at home" orders and other restrictions on movement during the COVID-19 pandemic, most American workers have learned whether their state and federal governments consider them to be "essential."

In the 42 states where residents have been ordered to remain in their homes, workers designated as "essential" are the exceptions to the rule. Which workers make the often long list of exemptions varies by state, but the logic behind the label is the same everywhere: the needs of the public could not be met without these workers.

Included in Democratic Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz's stay at home order was a fairly extensive U.S. Department of Homeland Security list of essential workers, who were exempt from the tight restrictions on movement. After dozens of additions by Minnesota officials, the state's list of exemptions is now 18 pages long and allows employees at medical marijuana dispensaries and motorcycle dealerships to go to work. Minnesotans may also leave their homes to buy food, seek medical services and recreate outdoors, according to Walz's order, which is due to expire May 4.

Meanwhile, the "essential" designation rarely applies to North Dakotans because Gov. Doug Burgum has not ordered residents to stay at home.

Workers named on the Homeland Security list are exempt from two narrowly focused orders made by Burgum and State Health Officer Mylynn Tufte which require that residents self-quarantine if they've traveled out of the state or if a person with whom they live has tested positive for COVID-19.

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Burgum has mandated the closure of movie theaters, gyms, nail salons and barber shops during the outbreak, but no workers have technically been barred from doing their jobs in North Dakota. Restaurants and bars have also been shuttered for in-house service.

The Republican governor has frequently said he would only order more rigid restrictions to keep residents confined to their homes "when and if it makes sense." However, he has said that North Dakota's current restrictions are already as strict as some stay at home orders in other states.

The Homeland Security list of "essential critical infrastructure workers" on which many states have based their own exemptions includes 16 sectors, such as health care, energy, food production and manufacturing. Nurses, doctors and police officers are obvious inclusions for the list, but also named as essential are:

Workers at groceries, pharmacies and retail stores



Farmers, workers at food processing plants and employees at restaurants that offer carryout, drive-thru and delivery services

Workers supporting the energy sector, including oil field workers and coal miners

Truck drivers and mail carriers

Plumbers, electricians, exterminators, construction workers, landscapers and public works employees

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News reporters and editors in print, radio, television and online media

Workers in most manufacturing facilities

Nursing home workers

Many government employees

At the heart of the "essential" designation is the tricky balancing act between ensuring the safety of residents through precautionary measures and maintaining some level of economic activity during the outbreak. Burgum and Walz have stated that their first priority is slowing the rate of infection and making sure hospitals are not overwhelmed by a surge in COVID-19 cases. However, both governors have said they would like to get as many residents back to work as soon as possible.
New Delhi, April 15 : Finance & Corporate Affairs Minister Nirmala Sitharaman participated in the virtual session of the 2nd G20 Finance Ministers and Central Bank Governors (FMCBG) meeting on Wednesday under the Saudi Arabian Presidency, to discuss the global economic outlook amid evolving Covid-19 pandemic crisis.

During the meeting, she appreciated the Saudi Presidency for their tireless efforts in delivering on the outcomes as mandated by the G20 Leaders during the Extraordinary Leaders' Summit, particularly in preparation of G20 Action Plan in Response to Covid-19.

Sitharaman had represented India in the 2nd Extraordinary Virtual G20 FMCBG Meeting held on March 31, wherein she talked about the importance of international cooperation and coordinated actions in ensuring that the financial system continues to support and quickly revive the global economy.

During her intervention, Sitharaman focused upon the role of Finance Ministers and Central Bank Governors in safeguarding the lives and livelihood of people while maintaining macroeconomic stability in a sustainable manner. She also shared with her G20 counterparts the measures taken by the India government to provide the vulnerable sections with swift, timely and targeted assistance.

In this regard, she mentioned that India has disbursed financial assistance amounting to $3.9 billion to more than 320 million people, with a special focus on direct benefit transfer.

The Finance Minister also said that the monetary policy measures undertaken by Government, the Reserve Bank of India and other regulators have helped de-freeze the market and catalyse credit flows. These measures include liquidity support of $50 billion, regulatory and supervisory measures for credit easing, relief on debt servicing through moratoriums on instalments of term-loans, eased working capital financing and deferred interest payments on such financing.

An Action Plan has been prepared by G20 members on the directions of G20 Leaders to protect lives, safeguard people's jobs and incomes, restore confidence, preserve financial stability, revive growth and recover stronger, provide help to countries needing assistance, coordinate on public health and financial measures and minimise disruption to global supply chain.

Sitharaman called it a step in the right direction and said that the document will guide individual and collective actions for the G20 members in responding to Covid-19 pandemic in short and medium term.
Prince William and Kate Middleton's Royal Foundation site has revealed the couple's plan to provide 'practical support' and help frontline workers with 'mental health needs' amid the coronavirus crisis.

A new statement on the Duke, 37, and Duchess of Cambridge's, 38, official website details how their organisation will 'do all it can to support those on the frontline of responding to COVID-19 in the UK.'

The update details the couple's plans to connect their patronages with charities that can offer practical support for frontline responders, and plans to promote and support mental health charities, as well as 'thanking and celebrating those working on the frontline' of the crisis.

It comes after experts revealed how the Duke and Duchess would 'lead' the royal family in their response to the crisis.

Prince William, 37, and Kate Middleton's, 38, official Royal Foundation website has been updated to reflect their changing work amid the coronavirus pandemic

Prince William and Kate are currently seeing out the public health crisis at Anmer Hall in Norfolk with their children.

The statement about their on-going work, which is displayed on the site's homepage, says that in the weeks coming the foundation will be focused on the coronavirus crisis.

It reads: 'The Royal Foundation of The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge will do all it can to support those on the frontline of responding to COVID-19 in the UK.'

'In the weeks ahead The Foundation will be working to connect our partners with those who are able to provide practical support to frontline responders and their families.

A statement on the Royal Foundation website details the couple's plan to help those 'on the frontline' responding to the coronavirus outbreak

It goes on to detail how the couple will also dedicate time to support mental health charities and patronages, continuing: '[The Foundation will be] doing all we can to promote and support the charities that can play a part in helping responders and their families with their mental health needs.

'And playing our part in the national effort to thank and celebrate all those working on the frontline of this crisis.'

It comes days after it was announced that Prince William had become patron of the National Emergencies Trust, which collaborates with charities and other bodies to raise and distribute money, and supports victims at the time of a domestic disaster.

In a short video clip released on Kensington Royal's Instagram account on Sunday, William spoke with two beneficiaries of the Trust  Dal Dy Dir farm, a community farm in Wales, and Moorlands Community Charity, which runs a food bank and meals on wheels, in Yorkshire.

The update comes days after videos were released of Prince William video calling several charities to offer his support

During the video calls, he spoke about how Britain is at its best when faced with a crisis.

It comes weeks after sources told Vanity Fair that the Cambridges wanted to revamp' their work in the face of coronavirus.

Royal expert Katie Nicholl has also revealed how the Duke would be 'stepping up into statesman role' during the crisis.

Prince William was the first member of the royal family to speak to the nation during the crisis in a video, and joined Kate to visit an NHS 111 centre last month.

The Duke and Duchess have revamped their work in the face of the crisis, refocusing their efforts to help support the nation amid the coronavirus pandemic. Earlier this month, they spoke with children and teachers remaining at school in Burnley

Speaking to Australian website 9Honey, Katie Nicholl said the move was 'significant', adding that the Duke and Duchess 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.'

The royal expert explained that left Kate and William 'best placed' to lead the family's efforts and support the nation.

Katie revealed: 'Obviously William and Kate aren't in the vulnerable sector, therefore they are perhaps the best placed or among the best placed of the royal family to be able to help at the moment.'
Dublin, April 15, 2020 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- The "Commercial Aircraft Aftermarket Parts Market - Growth, Trends, and Forecast (2020 - 2025)" report has been added to ResearchAndMarkets.com's offering.





The commercial aircraft aftermarket parts market is anticipated to register a CAGR of over 5% during the forecast period.



The growing commercial aircraft industry, along with the increasing average age of commercial aircraft, is driving the growth of the market.



The need for timely maintenance, repair and overhaul (MRO) services, along with the opening of new MRO facilities around the world, is also propelling the growth of the commercial aircraft aftermarket parts market during the forecast period.



The increase in inventory costs of spare parts for the airlines and MRO service providers is expected to hamper the commercial aircraft aftermarket parts market.



Key Market Trends



The Narrow-body Segment is Expected to Experience the Highest Growth During the Forecast Period



Globally, narrow-body or single aisle aircraft are the most widely used aircraft by airlines. The growth in LCC business model has further fueled the growth of the narrow-body aircraft. As the airlines seek to increase their connectivity and market presence, new routes are being introduced. The increasing landing and takeoffs of narrow-body aircraft are increasing the wear and tear of the aircraft, thereby, increasing the demand for narrow-body aftermarket parts market during the forecast period.



The Asia-Pacific Region is Expected to Experience the Highest Growth During the Forecast Period



The Asia-Pacific region currently has the highest market share and is anticipated to have the highest growth during the forecast period. This is primarily due to increasing air travel in countries, like India, China, Vietnam, Indonesia, Japan, and Taiwan, with approximately 6,600 aircraft in service by the beginning of 2018. The leading MRO service providers, airlines, and governments are collaborating to develop this region as a MRO hub for the aviation industry. For instance, Revima, the French APU and landing gear MRO specialist, has begun the construction of the new landing gear overhaul facility in Chonburi, Thailand for Airbus A320, Boeing 737, and ATR family aircraft. The company has invested about USD 30 million and aims to have the facility fully certified and ready by the first quarter of 2020. Such initiatives by the global players may generate demand for spare parts, thereby, driving the commercial aircraft aftermarket parts market.



Competitive Landscape



The commercial aircraft aftermarket parts market is highly fragmented, due to presence of many players who provide various types of parts and components. Some of the prominent players in the commercial aircraft aftermarket parts market are The Boeing Company, Bombardier Inc., Collins Aerospace (United Technologies Corporation), Honeywell International Inc., and General Electric Company. The consolidation of the market by acquisition of local suppliers and manufacturers of parts and components by the leading OEM suppliers is further increasing the competitive rivalry. Additionally, the focus on the expansion of their businesses by innovative initiatives, increased investments, R&D, and introduction of customized products to cater the growing needs of the customers are expected to help the players to gain a significant share in the market.



Key Topics Covered:



1 INTRODUCTION

1.1 Study Assumptions

1.2 Scope of the Study



2 RESEARCH METHODOLOGY



3 EXECUTIVE SUMMARY



4 MARKET DYNAMICS

4.1 Market Overview

4.2 Market Drivers

4.3 Market Restraints

4.4 Porter's Five Forces Analysis



5 MARKET SEGMENTATION

5.1 Aircraft Type

5.1.1 Narrow-body

5.1.2 Wide-body

5.1.3 Regional Aircraft

5.2 Component Type

5.2.1 Airframe

5.2.2 Engine

5.2.3 Interior

5.2.4 Cockpit Systems

5.2.5 Other Component Types

5.3 Parts

5.3.1 MRO Parts

5.3.2 Rotable Replacement Parts

5.4 Geography

5.4.1 North America

5.4.1.1 United States

5.4.1.2 Canada

5.4.2 Europe

5.4.2.1 United Kingdom

5.4.2.2 France

5.4.2.3 Germany

5.4.2.4 Rest of Europe

5.4.3 Asia-Pacific

5.4.3.1 China

5.4.3.2 India

5.4.3.3 Japan

5.4.3.4 Rest of Asia-Pacific

5.4.4 Latin America

5.4.4.1 Brazil

5.4.4.2 Rest of Latin America

5.4.5 Middle-East and Africa

5.4.5.1 Saudi Arabia

5.4.5.2 United Arab Emirates

5.4.5.3 Nigeria

5.4.5.4 Rest of Middle-East and Africa



6 COMPETITIVE LANDSCAPE

6.1 Vendor Market Share

6.2 Company Profiles

6.2.1 Aventure International Aviation Services

6.2.2 Honeywell International Inc.

6.2.3 Collins Aerospace (United Technologies Corporation)

6.2.4 Meggitt plc

6.2.5 Parker-Hannifin Corp

6.2.6 General Electric Company

6.2.7 Moog Inc.

6.2.8 GKN Aerospace (Melrose Industries)

6.2.9 Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co

6.2.10 Michelin SCA

6.2.11 Bombardier, Inc.

6.2.12 The Boeing Company



7 MARKET OPPORTUNITIES AND FUTURE TRENDS



For more information about this report visit https://www.researchandmarkets.com/r/zf6wc3

Story continues

Research and Markets also offers Custom Research services providing focused, comprehensive and tailored research.



CONTACT: ResearchAndMarkets.com

Laura Wood, Senior Press Manager

press@researchandmarkets.com

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A flamingo from a United Kingdom zoo went on a run this week outside the enclosure.

Officials of the Dudley Zoo and Castle in West Midlands, England, said the flamingos wings are clipped so they cant fly but they can glide  and she glided right out of there.

The zoo has been closed to the public since March 22 because of the coronavirus pandemic.

According to the Express and Star, the flamingo was seen on Tuesday walking down the road outside the zoo. She eventually returned to the zoo herself but not before several folks caught photos of her walking and running around.

A flamingo escape from Dudley zoo yesterday pic.twitter.com/5CWtHadz5Q  David wilkes (@WilkesSouth) April 15, 2020

Zoo officials told the Express and Star that it is likely she caught a gust of wind that helped her glide to freedom.

A spokesman for the zoo told the Express and Star, "During the afternoon of Tuesday 14th April the flamingos were in their outside enclosure when the weather suddenly turned blustery and a gust of wind carried one of the flock out of its enclosure.

"Thanks to a phone call from the public, keepers quickly located the bird and following a quick health check she was returned unharmed to the rest of the flock.

When the flamingo was located she on a grass lawn within the zoo grounds and it was only later that we found out that the flamingo had gone across Castle Hill road before heading home of her own accord.

We are pleased to confirm that the flamingo suffered no ill effects and is happily eating her breakfast this morning.

One of our flamingos didnt stick to the Stay Safe, Stay Home message and decided to take her daily exercise via Castle Hill!

Our keepers were on the scene within minutes and safely returned the flamingo back to their enclosure where she is now once again self-isolating! pic.twitter.com/ZV3vWVqgjQ  Dudley Zoo (@dudleyzoo) April 15, 2020

Perhaps she was just trying to maintain social distancing from the flock.

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A 29-year-old woman is urging all Australians to undergo routine skin checks after a tiny red spot above her eyebrow turned out to be a form of skin cancer.

Marlene Millott, from Melbourne, had noticed a small blemish on her face a few months back, but never thought anything of it.

The young woman, who works at a research centre at Monash University, quickly dismissed the spot as a 'weird pimple' and covered it up with makeup.

'It was just a red spot, I didn't really think anything of it. It had been there for a few months and I was easily able to cover it up,' she told Daily Mail Australia.

Ms Millott would only learn the tiny 'pimple' was actually basal cell carcinoma during a visit to a local clinic, which she saw a recommendation for on Facebook.

Marlene Millott, from Melbourne, was shocked to learn a tiny red spot above her eyebrow was actually cancer

The 29-year-old was diagnosed with basal cell carcinoma, a slow growing, but common form of skin cancer. Pictured left: Ms Millott's red spot which she thought was a pimple. Right: post surgery

With skin cancer running in her family, Ms Millott said she always intended to get checked as a precautionary measure, but had been putting it off for months, and wasn't worried about her 'pimple'.

'You just assume it's something that affects people who are a little bit older,' she said.

'But once I started seeing commentary online, especially one girl who posted about the clinic around the corner from me, it was like a bit of a push.

'I didn't really suspect that I had anything, it was just something I thought I should get into the habit of doing.'

Ms Millott visited Molescreen Skin Cancer Clinic in Camberwell on March 17, and was immediately asked about the tiny spot.

'I walked into the doctor's office and one of the first things she said to me was, "what's the spot above your eyebrow?"

'I'm sure so many people assume moles are the ones you're supposed to be scared of, I just hadn't really thought anything about this little red spot, but she was concerned straightaway.'

Ms Millott was scheduled for a biopsy on March 19 and by March 24, she would receive alarming news she had basal cell carcinoma.

The cancer is the most common form of skin cancer, and unlike melanoma, it grows very slowly.

Ms Millott was told the cancer could have potentially spread to other areas and cause death if gone undetected, however, death from basal cell carcinoma is rare.

'Because I had a family history I always thought it'd happen to me at some point but I just never realised it would be when I was so young,' Ms Millott said.

Ms Millott is now encouraging Australians to learn from her ordeal and to get routine checks even if they do not think they're vulnerable

'I was quite upset and scared by it but I had already prepared myself for it, so it wasn't a huge shock.'

Ms Millott said the bigger shock was the actual removal process, which required doctors to slice off a 9mm by 3mm piece of skin from her face in a procedure for which she was conscious.

The area was then sewn up with seven stitches.

'I was really upset and scared because I thought it was going to be a small thing but it was a bit more dramatic than I expected, that part was quite traumatic,' she said.

'I was so worried that I would end up looking like Scar from the Lion King or something.'

Ms Millott, who has since removed her stitches and has been declared cancer free, said the experience has taught her to be more protective of her skin.

'I've always been quite good trying to look after my skin. I always wear sunscreen when I go to the beach or if I've been out for too long, but obviously I'm not perfect and sometimes forget to reapply.

'I think the position on my face as well, above my eyebrow, you might miss it if you're putting on sunscreen because it's sort of in the hair a little bit.

'The other issue is I would wear makeup most days and that would make me a bit lazy about wearing sunscreen as well.

'But since I've had this happen, I've just been making sure I wear it everyday.'

Ms Millott is now encouraging Australians to learn from her ordeal and to get routine checks even if they do not think they're vulnerable.

'I had booked a random appointment thinking it would be fine, and didn't realise that I would come out with quite a serious result,' she said.

'People should check about clinics in their area, but the one I went to is still open and taking appropriate safety measures for COVID-19.

'So if people are concerned about a spot, they should go get checked now and not wait until things are back to normal.'
Tasmania's Premier Peter Gutwein has lashed keyboard-warrior criticism of health staff in the state's northwest, where a COVID-19 outbreak has shut two hospitals.

Mr Gutwein on Wednesday announced a 'testing blitz' in the region and urged anyone with flu or virus symptoms to contact the public health hotline or a GP.

He also pledged to get to the bottom of the outbreak, which Australia's chief medical officer had previously linked to a dinner party of medical workers.

Tasmanian Premier Peter Gutwein (pictured) said he would 'get to the bottom' of the claims that an 'illegal dinner party' between medical workers sparked a mass COVID-19 outbreak

Professor Brendan Murphy told a New Zealand parliamentary committee nearly 50 staff attended an 'illegal party' at the weekend.

He later walked back his comments after Mr Gutwein said contact tracing had not found evidence of the party.

However, the party claim is being investigated by state police.

Mr Gutwein delivered a blunt message to people criticising hospital staff on Facebook and urged northwest community members to work together.

'Anyone that's thinking about lining up a health care worker, taking a pot shot at them, should just draw breath and accept there is a process underway,' he said on Wednesday.

'We will work through it. We will get to the bottom of it, and then we will explain fully what has happened.'

Of Tasmania's 169 coronavirus cases, more than 80 are linked to the outbreak at the North West Regional Hospital and North West Private Hospital in Burnie.

The dinner party was allegedly attended by 50 guests who were medical staff from two northern Tasmanian hospitals. Pictured: The North West Private Hospital

Mr Gutwein warned keyboard warriors that they should avoid targeting health care workers from the two hospitals. Pictured: The North West Regional Hospital

More than 45 health workers have tested positive to the deadly virus, with a spike in cases over the Easter holidays.

Four new cases were confirmed in Tasmania on Wednesday, all in the northwest.

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 state's sixth death, a 91-year-old woman at the Mersey Community Hospital at Latrobe in the northwest, was linked to the outbreak.

The state government will begin a 'testing blitz' in the region and has brought in additional laboratory technology to boost capacity.

'If you think it's just a sore throat, think about your community,' Health Minister Sarah Courtney said, noting that up to 500 people per day can be tested.

'Make sure if you're experiencing symptoms, call the public health hotline or your GP.'

Testing has been offered to staff of the two hospitals, which are both being deep cleaned by specialist teams.

It is hoped the facilities' emergency department will reopen on Thursday.

Medicos from the Australian Defence Force and Australian Medical Assistance Teams, usually reserved for national disaster relief, will help get services back online.

The hospital closures have forced 1200 staff and their families into quarantine, about 5000 people in total.
For many corn and soybean farmers in the county, its business as usual as they check their seed inventory, hoping for a dry, warm spell so they can till the soil and plant toward the end of April. Meanwhile those who grow vegetables sold to farmers markets, restaurants and schools, are researching new ways to sell their wares and getting an early start on planting.
Automatic Identification & Data Capture Market Research Report by Product (Barcodes, Biometric System, Magnetic Stripe Cards, Optical Character Recognition (OCR) System, and RFID Products), by Offering (Hardware, Services, and Software), by Vertical - Global Forecast to 2025 (Cumulative Impact of COVID-19).

New York, April 14, 2020 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Reportlinker.com announces the release of the report "Automatic Identification & Data Capture Market Research Report by Product , by Offering , by Vertical - Global Forecast to 2025" - https://www.reportlinker.com/p05881701/?utm_source=GNW



The Global Automatic Identification & Data Capture Market is expected to grow from USD 31,364.54 Million in 2019 to USD 62,125.12 Million by the end of 2025 at a Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 12.06%.



Market Segmentation & Coverage:

This research report categorizes the Automatic Identification & Data Capture to forecast the revenues and analyze the trends in each of the following sub-markets:



On the basis of Product, the Automatic Identification & Data Capture Market is studied across Barcodes, Biometric System, Magnetic Stripe Cards, Optical Character Recognition (OCR) System, RFID Products, and Smart Cards. The Barcodes further studied across Barcode Printers and Barcode Scanners. The Biometric System further studied across Face Recognition System, IRIS Recognition System, and Voice Recognition System. The RFID Products further studied across RFID Printers, RFID Scanners, and RFID Tags. The Smart Cards further studied across Contact Smart Cards and Contactless Smart Cards.



On the basis of Offering, the Automatic Identification & Data Capture Market is studied across Hardware, Services, and Software.



On the basis of Vertical, the Automatic Identification & Data Capture Market is studied across Banking & Finance, Government, Healthcare, Manufacturing, Retail, and Transportation & Logistics.



On the basis of Geography, the Automatic Identification & Data Capture Market is studied across Americas, Asia-Pacific, and Europe, Middle East & Africa. The Americas region is studied across Argentina, Brazil, Canada, Mexico, and United States. The Asia-Pacific region is studied across Australia, China, India, Indonesia, Japan, Malaysia, Philippines, South Korea, and Thailand. The Europe, Middle East & Africa region is studied across France, Germany, Italy, Netherlands, Qatar, Russia, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, Spain, United Arab Emirates, and United Kingdom.



Company Usability Profiles:

The report deeply explores the recent significant developments by the leading vendors and innovation profiles in the Global Automatic Identification & Data Capture Market including Avery Dennison Corporation, Cognex Corporation, Datalogic S.p.A., Honeywell International Inc., NCR Corporation, NEC Corporation, NXP Semiconductors N.V., SATO HOLDINGS CORPORATION, Seiko Epson Corporation, Sensors Inc., Sick AG, Synaptics Incorporated, Toshiba, and Zebra Technologies Corporation.



FPNV Positioning Matrix:

The FPNV Positioning Matrix evaluates and categorizes the vendors in the Automatic Identification & Data Capture Market on the basis of Business Strategy (Business Growth, Industry Coverage, Financial Viability, and Channel Support) and Product Satisfaction (Value for Money, Ease of Use, Product Features, and Customer Support) that aids businesses in better decision making and understanding the competitive landscape.



Competitive Strategic Window:

The Competitive Strategic Window analyses the competitive landscape in terms of markets, applications, and geographies. The Competitive Strategic Window helps the vendor define an alignment or fit between their capabilities and opportunities for future growth prospects. During a forecast period, it defines the optimal or favorable fit for the vendors to adopt successive merger and acquisition strategies, geography expansion, research & development, and new product introduction strategies to execute further business expansion and growth.



The report provides insights on the following pointers:

1. Market Penetration: Provides comprehensive information on sulfuric acid offered by the key players

2. Market Development: Provides in-depth information about lucrative emerging markets and analyzes the markets

3. Market Diversification: Provides detailed information about new product launches, untapped geographies, recent developments, and investments

4. Competitive Assessment & Intelligence: Provides an exhaustive assessment of market shares, strategies, products, and manufacturing capabilities of the leading players

5. Product Development & Innovation: Provides intelligent insights on future technologies, R&D activities, and new product developments



The report answers questions such as:

1. What is the market size and forecast of the Global Automatic Identification & Data Capture Market?

2. What are the inhibiting factors and their impact analysis shaping the Global Automatic Identification & Data Capture Market during the forecast period?

3. What is the competitive position if vendors in the Global Automatic Identification & Data Capture Market?

4. How Porters Five Forces define the Global Automatic Identification & Data Capture Market landscape?

5. What are the technology trends and regulatory frameworks in the Global Automatic Identification & Data Capture Market?

6. Which are the products/segments/applications/areas to invest in over the forecast period in the Global Automatic Identification & Data Capture Market?

7. What is the competitive strategic window for opportunities in the Global Automatic Identification & Data Capture Market?

8. What are the modes and strategic moves considered suitable for entering the Global Automatic Identification & Data Capture Market?

Read the full report: https://www.reportlinker.com/p05881701/?utm_source=GNW



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Video has captured the dramatic moment a Maine paper mill was destroyed by a massive explosion.

The blast rocked the Androscoggin Mill in the town of Jay Wednesday afternoon, shaking the ground and causing plumes of black smoke to shoot up into the air.

Video, recorded by a witness from the inside of a truck, shows debris from the explosion making bullet-like noises as it struck other vehicles in the area.

Remarkably, no one was injured in the blast.

Emergency responders rushed to the mill, and the state fire marshal planned an investigation. The cause of the blast is not yet clear.

The mill, which employs about 500 people, is a key piece of rural Maine's economy.

Another onlooker captured the explosion at Androscoggin Mill in the town of Jay on Wednesday. The explosion shook the ground and produced a plume of black smoke that was visible for miles around

Wreckage smolders at the Androscoggin Mill after an explosion at the paper mill, Wednesday, April 15, 2020, in Jay, Maine.

Mill spokesperson Roxie Lassetter said the company was in the preliminary stages of assessing what happened and evaluating the environmental impact.

The explosion released a mixture of wood fiber, water and chemicals, and the company is taking steps to restore order to the mill site, Lassetter said.

Gov. Janet Mills urged residents to stay far from the scene, issuing an emailed statements asking residents to 'join me in praying for the safety and wellbeing of all those in and around the historic mill.'

The mill was built in the mid-1960s in Jay, which today is a community of about 5,000 people.

Maine Senate President Troy Jackson said the state will need to support the community and its workforce in the wake of such a major blow.

'To the 500 mill workers, who showed up to work today expecting it to be an ordinary day, I know that this is devastating and that the next few hours, days and weeks wont be easy,' he said.

An ambulance arrives at the Androscoggin Mill after an explosion at the paper mill. The explosion shook the ground and produced a plume of black smoke that was visible for miles around

The mill had been sold in February by Ohio-based Verso Paper to a specialty paper producer in Pennsylvania.

Pixelle Specialty Solutions, of Spring Grove, Pennsylvania, acquired both the Jay mill and another mill in Wisconsin in a $400 million deal. Pixelle said at the time that the deal would make it the largest specialty paper business in the U.S. in terms of annual production.

'We ask for everyones continued prayers through this and will update information once it is available. We are also asking that you stay away from the area and allow the crews to work,' said Shiloh LaFreniere, spokeswoman for Pixelle.

In this aerial view, bent and charred metal remains after an explosion at the Androscoggin paper mill Wednesday
High-powered women everywhere are showing the world how they can be "Zoom ready" while remaining chic.

US Vogue editor Anna Wintour paired red sweatpants (after saying once she'd never wear them) with a $450 La Ligne knit to announce a virtual event via Instagram, while former foreign minister Julie Bishop switched up her activewear for an evening gown, albeit with trainers, for a video call.

Dr Carolyn Mair, behavioural psychologist and author of The Psychology of Fashion, says that clothing can demarcate between work and non-work time.

"Our clothes should be comfortable and, if we want to maintain some degree of normalcy, they should be the sort of clothes we wore to work when we worked face-to-face."
CAIRO  Most COVID-19 patients experiencing mild to moderate respiratory symptoms recover without the need for any particular treatment, though older people and those with chronic illness are at greater risk. Yet victims of the disease have been stigmatized. Rejection by their communities could hinder the provision of medical care and prevent the disclosure of potential COVID-19 infections, both factors that could increases infection rates.

Sabreen Mohamed, 46, is a nurse who recovered from COVID-19. She told Al-Monitor, People have not been merciful. All of my relatives and acquaintances turned away from me. They look at the coronavirus patient as being the epidemic, though it is not a sin to get sick. My son has even lost friends because of it.

Although I recovered from the virus, people have changed their attitudes toward us, she added.

In an April 13 press conference, World Health Organization representative in Egypt John Jabbour said, Stigma and discrimination against patients and health care workers is a burden on the health care system in addition to the [main] challenges it faces.

The Health Ministry said April 13 that Egypts number of confirmed cases had hit 2,190, including 164 deaths, and that 488 people recovered. The ministry reported April 11 that 30% of the deceased died outside of hospitals, and called on citizens not to delay in reporting COVID-19 infections.

Graduate student Duaa Hosni has experienced coronavirus-like symptoms for 10 days. She told Al-Monitor, I did not go to the hospital for fear of being bullied like one of my acquaintances when diagnosed with the coronavirus. Patients with COVID-19 are being discriminated against as if they have HIV. I've put myself in self-isolation as much as possible, and only had warm drinks and medications to reduce the fever.

Hosni added, The media has only focused on self-isolation and distancing oneself from patients, as if those infected are social outcasts or criminals. It does not stress the importance of personal hygiene or psychological support for patients. Such a reaction is only normal because the illiteracy rate is high here.

Even doctors are suffering from social stigma. Dr. Dina Magdy, whose job involves the triage of suspected coronavirus cases at a hospital specialized in treating patients with fevers in Ismailia governorate, posted a video to Facebook April 6 recounting that some of her neighbors harassed and insulted her, and even demanded that she leave the house because she works in a hospital with isolation units for fear that she will give them the virus.

Speaking to Al-Monitor, Ehab el-Taher, secretary-general of the Egyptian Medical Syndicate, said what Magdy and other doctors have been through is shameful. He said the state has been turning a blind eye to the challenges facing doctors for years. The social stigma associated with the coronavirus patients and doctors treating this illness is due to misinformation that has circulated in the media and a lack of public awareness. The citizens need to realize that the disease is not a disgrace, he added.

Not even the deceased are spared. Burying the victims of the virus has become a very difficult task, though the WHO has explained that dead bodies pose very little risk.

On April 11, villagers in Dakahlia governorate tried to stop the burial of a doctor who died from the virus in his hometown, prompted the security forces to fire tear gas. Prosecutor Hamada al-Sawy ordered the arrest of 23 people who were involved in the brawl.

The same occurred in Beheira governorate on April 7, when the security forces dispersed a crowd of villagers who tried to prevent the burial of another COVID-19 victim.

A video that circulated on social media depicting a pickup truck carrying a victim of the virus raised anger among many citizens in the province of Port Said April 2. An ambulance and funeral homes had refused to transport the body for fear of infection. The Port Said governor dismissed the head of the funeral service association.

In light of these events, Egypts Grand Imam of Al-Azhar Sheikh Ahmed al-Tayeb said in a video posted to Facebook April 12, All acts of bullying and mockery of the victims of the coronavirus are dangerous and totally unacceptable.

Grand Mufti of Egypt Shawki Allam said in an April 11 statement, Refusing to bury the coronavirus victims  has nothing to do with either our religion or ethics and values.

The Health Ministry issued safety procedures in mid-March to deal with deceased persons infected with COVID-19, and recommended that bodies should be covered in a blanket when transported to the hospitals morgue from a trolly that can be disinfected and then wrapped in a fluid-resistant bag. It added that the staff performing the procedures should wear full protective gear.

Meanwhile, the ministry is also providing psychological support for citizens through a hotline and Sawt al-Ummah newspaper is running a campaign against the bullying of COVID-19 patients.
Workers with Lakehouse Restaurant and Catering in Mandeville hand out meals to students Monday, March 30, 2020, at Slidell High School in Slidell. The St. Tammany Parish public school system's Grab & Go drive-through meals resumed service Monday as schools remained closed due to the coronavirus pandemic. The meals are available Monday through Friday from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m., at Slidell High and Covington High. Anyone 18 and under can get a hot lunch and a prepackaged breakfast at no cost. A student ID is not required.
After tracing coronavirus signatures in different species, a new research article published in the journal Molecular Biology and Evolution suggests that stray dogs (more specifically dog intestines) may have acted as the origin of current severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) pandemic.

SARS-CoV-2 has infected two million people to date, resulting in coronavirus disease (COVID-19) accompanied by worrying mortality rates worldwide. Although there is a consensus that the novel coronavirus has crossed over from animals to humans, exact species of origin is still elusive.

Novel Coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 Colorized scanning electron micrograph of an apoptotic cell (green) heavily infected with SARS-COV-2 virus particles (purple), isolated from a patient sample. Image captured and color-enhanced at the NIAID Integrated Research Facility (IRF) in Fort Detrick, Maryland. Credit: NIAID

Accordingly, since the start of this pandemic, scientists have been striving to find an intermediate animal host between bats (which are known coronavirus reservoirs) and the inaugural event of SARS-CoV-2 introduction to humans. Snakes and pangolins were considered as likely intermediates, but the isolated viruses were too divergent from current SARS-CoV-2  suggesting a common ancestor further back in time.

The role of stray dogs

The research article published in Oxford University Press journal Molecular Biology and Evolution delineates a new hypothesis of SARS-CoV-2 source and initial transmission  and implicates stray dogs in this event.

"The ancestor of SARS-CoV-2 and its nearest relative, a bat coronavirus, infected the intestine of canids, most likely resulting in the rapid evolution of the virus in canids and its jump into humans", explains study's corresponding author Dr. Xuhua Xia, a biology professor from the Department of Biology of the University of Ottawa and Ottawa Institute of Systems Biology in Canada. "This suggests the importance of monitoring SARS-like coronaviruses in feral dogs in the fight against SARS-CoV-2", adds Dr. Xia, who is known for studying viral molecular signatures in different hosts for a long time now.

China, Hainan Island, Dadonghai Bay - Chinese vet rescues a stray dog. Image Credit: Evgenii Mitrokhin / Shutterstock

A genomic game of cat and mouse

When a virus invades a host, changes, and adaptations arise in their genomic information, just like a battle scar resulting from a fight with the immune system. All mammals have a crucial antiviral sentinel protein known as ZAP; this protein can prevent viral multiplication, degrade its genome, and stop further progression of the infection.

Within its genome, the virus contains a specific sequence of building blocks known as CpG dinucleotides (a cytosine followed by a guanosine), which basically acts as a noticeboard used by our immune system to seek and destroy the invader. This sequence is recognized by ZAP protein that patrols the lungs after being primed in the bone marrow and lymph nodes.

But viruses can ingeniously hit back. Single-stranded coronaviruses (like SARS-CoV-2) can steer clear of ZAP by reducing the number of their CpG dinucleotides, rendering in turn ZAP powerless. Consequently, this evolutionary trait of CpG loss is a survival response to human antiviral defenses.

"Think of a decreased amount of CpG in a viral pathogen as an increased threat to public health, while an increased amount of CpG decreases the threat of such viral pathogens," explains Dr. Xia. "A virus with an increased amount of CpG would be better targeted by the host immune system, and result in reduced virulence, which would be akin to natural vaccines."

The quest for CpG relatives

After examining a large number of coronavirus genomes, Dr. Xia found that pandemic SARS-CoV-2 and its most closely related bat coronavirus (BatCoV RaTG13) exhibit the lowest quantity of CpG among all close coronavirus relatives.

"This bat CoV genome is the closest phylogenetic relative of SARS-CoV-2, sharing 96% sequence similarity", says Dr. Xia.

When the study authors appraised the data in dogs, they observed that only genomes derived from canine coronaviruses (CcoVs)  which were the cause of a highly contagious intestinal disease in dogs around the world  exhibit CpG values similar to those found in SARS-CoV-2 and BatCoV RaTG13.

Furthermore, coronaviruses that infect the digestive system in dogs also contain lower amounts of CpG than those known to infect their respiratory tract. This points to the fact that SARS-CoV-2 may have stemmed after its ancestor evolved in dog's digestive system  a fact further reinforced by a recent report showing a significant burden of gastrointestinal symptoms in COVID-19 patients.

How the virus ended up in humans?

Canid behavior includes licking anal and genital regions, which is not only found during mating but in other circumstances as well. This may indeed facilitate viral transmission from the gastrointestinal system to the respiratory tract, as well as subsequent switch from gastrointestinal to a respiratory pathogen.

Based on the study results, the authors present a scenario where the coronavirus initially spread from bats to stray dogs consuming bat meat. Afterward, presumed strong selection against CpG in the viral genome while infecting dogs' intestines gave rise to rapid viral evolution towards reduced genomic CpG. Ultimately, such reduced CpG trait allowed the virus to evade human immune response mediated by ZAP and, thus, to become a severe human pathogen that we are faced with today.

"While the specific origins of SARS-CoV-2 are of vital interest in the current world health crisis, this study more broadly suggests that important evidence of viral evolution can be revealed by consideration of the interaction of host defenses with viral genomes, including selective pressure exerted by host tissues on viral genome composition", concludes Dr. Xia.
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(Kitco News) The Royal Canadian Mint has retooled its operations to help fight COVID-19 by making hand sanitizer and plastic face shields with the goal of donating everything to The Ottawa Hospital.

The plan is to donate more than 1,000 liters of hand sanitizer and hundreds of face shields to The Ottawa Hospital throughout April, according to the Royal Canadian Mint.

This is the first time since WWII that the Mint began to make something other than what it specializes in  coins and bullion. During WWII, the Mint contributed to the war effort by making items such as military medals and brackets for gun eyepieces.

Royal Canadian Mint employees have found a creative way to deliver for their community on top of overseeing circulation coin production and distribution, running our refinery, precious metal storage vaults and bullion coin production to keep supporting Canadas essential mining and financial industries, Royal Canadian Mint president and CEO Marie Lemay told Kitco News on Wednesday.

The idea to make hand sanitizer and face shields came from the Mints Research and Development (R&D) group. This retooling was made possible after the temporarily halt to Mints coin production back in March because of the coronavirus. The coin mintage business remains closed until further notice.

To make hand sanitizer, the Mint chose the World Health Organizations (WHO) recipe, which consists of only three ingredients: isopropyl alcohol, hydrogen peroxide and glycerol.

To get the materials for the hand sanitizer five Royal Canadian Mint employees searched Canadas capital for hydrogen peroxide, the National Post reported.

For face shields, the Mint has been using its 3D printers as well as the equipment that is powerful enough to bend metal.

Our employees have no shortage of talent, resourcefulness and ingenuity. Im truly proud of the way they have collaborated to repurpose some of our resources to make a positive difference for our local health care workers, Lemay added.
This week, evangelical leaders from nine major organizations wrote the Trump administration to urge officials to release detained immigrants during the coronavirus pandemic, particularly those who are elderly or at higher risk for contracting COVID-19.

They are calling on the church and community partners to provide any assistance they can including safe accommodations in which to shelter in place for as long as such practices are advised.

Our concern is rooted in our Christian belief that each human life is made in the image of God and thus precious, and, like you, we want to do everything possible to minimize the loss of life as a result of this pandemic, the leaders wrote in a letter sent Monday to Chad Wolf, acting secretary of the Department of Homeland Security.

The letter was signed by Russell Moore, president of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention; Walter Kim, president of the National Association of Evangelicals; and Samuel Rodriguez, president of the National Hispanic Christian Leadership Council, among other members of the Evangelical Immigration Table, a group of Christian leaders who support comprehensive immigration reform.

Detention and camps

The coronavirus pandemic has complicated the already precarious position of those being held in detention by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) while seeking asylum in the US.

Not only do they worry about their health while living in close quarters, they are concerned about what the crisis means for their prospects of a future in the US. With just a year to apply for legal status, the clock could run out while they are waiting for legal clinics to reopen to help them file their paperwork.

The shutdowns, while clearly the right thing to do, will worsen massive immigration court backlogs around the country, said Anna Deal, a consulting attorney for National Justice for Our Neighbors (NJFON), a ministry of the United Methodist Church.

The situation changes daily as courts close and re-open after cleaning with no overarching guidance. Asylum hearings have been pushed back, and some casesmostly of children that had been removed from the court dockets are being re-opened by ICE.

In some cases, ICE has cited coronavirus concerns as cause for transferring detainees to new jurisdictions, away from their current legal counsel, Deal said. If asylum seekers go to court without a lawyer, their chances of winning asylum or relief are greatly reduced.

Asylum seekers are struggling on the other side of the border too, with overcrowding at the tent camps that emerged as a result of President Donald Trumps remain in Mexico program last year.

People at the Brownsville-Matamoros crossing are desperate for basic health and sanitation supplies, according to Rondell Trevino of The Immigration Coalition. The South Texas site has just three hand-washing stations to serve the 2,500 asylum seekers in the camp, including 500600 children.

Within weeks, Trevinos group has raised over $4,000 from a network of churches in Austin and throughout the South to provide more hand-washing stations. So far, they have covered the cost for six $200 stations, their transport, and their maintenance. Our hope is once we get these first ones there, well be able to purchase more, he said, with the goal of providing 1015 stations and covering the ongoing cost for soap, water, and operations.

Immigrant communities and churches

Pastors have also rallied to help refugees and other immigrants in their own congregations. Theyve seen how the destabilization from widespread shutdowns has hit these communities hard.

Immigrants tend fall into the categories most at risk in an outbreak and most affected by a recession. The jobs they lose, the jobs they keep, and the dynamics of their communities make it hard to stay physically, economically, and spiritually well.

Churches are used to providing in-person assistance, helping green card holders with unemployment claims, job searches, aid applications, and monthly bills. But the new normal means everything must be done from afar.

The system has been not easy to navigate from before the crisis, said Durmomo Gary, who works with World Relief in the Chicago suburbs. Now, he said, its further complicated by mass layoffs and the digital divide among some groups of immigrants and refugees. Honestly, I am overwhelmed.

Immigrants who work in factories or service jobs have been likely hit with furloughs and layoffs, said Eric Costanzo, pastor of a large Baptist church in Tulsa, which ministers to hundreds of refugees from around the world.

Those who do still have their jobs are in dangerous situations where, he said, despite employers best efforts, they are still more exposed to the virus than those who can stay home. If they contract the illness, not only is their health in jeopardy, but their economic stability is even more precarious.

The irony of this particular crisis, according to Gary, is that the people who lost their jobs because they cannot work from home via the internet now need to hunt for new jobs online. White and middle-class churches can step in to help immigrant workers access the aid and job search tools they need by serving as an ad-hoc digital help desk. That would be an amazing ministry, Gary said.

Costanzo is also worried that the language barrier makes it more difficult for these workers to understand the severity of the situation, which also makes them less likely to practice social distancing outside of work. From what he can see, he said, they arent regularly monitoring CDC updates, and many report that they are still gathering for various functions.

Ethnic churches are often the primary avenue for immigrants to feel connected to people who understand them. Immigrant ministries in English-speaking churches can help newcomers to engage with the larger community. Virtual connection feels especially inadequate to them. This is mental torture, Gary said.

While the international Sunday school group at Costanzos church is in constant contact over WhatsApp, Costanzo said, most of their ministries to immigrants relied on open doors and face-to-face connection. Refugees would invite their neighbors, ethnic groups would host meals to share their cultures, and the church offered helpful classes that lose some of their appeal online. All the momentum has been put on hold, Costanzo said.

A financial crisis looms for immigrant churches as well, said Matthew Soerens, who serves as the national coordinator for the Evangelical Immigration Table and the national director of church mobilization for World Relief. Without internet access at home, very few congregants tithe or donate online. Paying the bills will be difficult if churches cant pass the plate.

Soerens is asking those who receive stimulus checks but dont necessarily need them to make ends meet to consider donating them to immigrant churches. Costanzo and others are promoting the Share Your Stimulus movement, which encourages recipients who do not need the money to donate it and to share their story online to encourage others to do the same. (Undocumented immigrants, in addition to not being eligible to collect unemployment, will not receive stimulus checks.)

Im aware that were in the middle of a really unprecedented public health crisis, Soerens said. He acknowledged that every community is feeling pressure from multiple angles as schools and businesses remain shuttered. He hopes that in the midst of this, the church will answer the call to serve a group that is always vulnerable, and now faces grim realities that will not end when the height of the pandemic has passed.

With reporting by the Associated Presss Elana Schor.
Incredible high-definition snaps show the International Space Station as a tiny speck as it passes in front of the Sun.

The ISS, which is the largest object ever put into space by humanity at 357 feet long, looks like a fly as it zooms in front of the perfectly round orange star.

The images were captured by Mehmet Ergun, based in Germany, who has a lifelong interest in astrophotography.

Ergun used a powerful telescope attached to a camera to capture 34 individual frames as the orbiting ISS crossed between planet Earth for less than one second.

The images are then collated so the craft can be seen racing from one edge of the Sun to another in a short animation.

The tiny satellite-shaped spacecraft looks like a miniature model as its seen racing from one side of our glowing orange Sun to the other.

Scroll down for video

34 frames of the tiny satellite shaped spacecraft - seen here in white with a larger image of the ISS for comparison - were captured as it's seen racing between the earth and our solar star in less than a second

The Sun moved very quickly because I use a high focal length and small sensor, said Ergun.

Astrophotography is a compelling hobby inspired by all the beautiful objects the universe has to offer.

The passionate space photographer took three weeks to plan the mission and travelled 30 miles from his home in Rheinbollen, Germany, to capture the perfect sighting of the ISS.

Mehmet took three weeks planning the mission and travelled 30 miles from his home in Rheinbollen, Germany, to capture the ISS, using a Rainbow RST-135, among other equipment, which mounts a camera to a telescope

The stargazer, who only bought his first telescope 10 years ago, has also captured detailed images of the Moon, the Milky Way and faraway nebulas.

'Around 2010 I bought my first telescope with which I had my first practical experience in astronomy, Ergun says on his website.

I wanted to share the fascinating sight with my family and friends, which gave me the desire to capture these moments photographically.

The miniature silhouette of the International Space Station can just be made out as it passes between the Sun and planet Earth for less than one second. A filter can be used to isolate the H-alpha emission, removing its colour

So it happened that a short time later I started to study astrophotography more intensively. I discovered how colourful our universe really is.

The images capture the Sun's chromosphere  the second of three layers in the star's atmosphere, literally translating as 'the sphere of colour'.

In the chromosphere, the temperature rises to about 36,000F (20,000C), and at these higher temperatures hydrogen emits light that gives off a reddish colour, known as an H-alpha emission.

When the Sun is viewed through a spectrograph or a filter that isolates the H-alpha emission, new details on its surface can be observed.

The ISS  which is in low earth orbit around 253 miles (408km) from Earth  has been continuously occupied since November 2000.

An international crew of six people live and work while travelling at five miles per second, orbiting Earth about every 90 minutes

NASA says anyone can sometimes see the ISSs distinctive solar panels if they look up at the sky at dawn or dusk, even if they live in a big city.

The space agency has a list of locations online where people can watch the ISS pass overhead.

'It is the third brightest object in the sky and easy to spot if you know when to look up,' NASA says.

'Visible to the naked eye, it looks like a fast-moving plane only much higher and travelling thousands of miles an hour faster.'

The stations orbital path takes it over 90 percent of the Earths population, travelling about 17,000 miles per hour at an equivalent distance to the Moon and back in about a day.
(Adds Bullock detained at Lusaka airport, then released)

LUSAKA, April 15 (Reuters) - Zambia plans to revoke the mining licences of Glencore subsidiary Mopani Copper Mines (MCM) because the company did not give enough notice before suspending its mining operations in the coronavirus crisis and other problems.

In a letter dated April 14 to Mopani's chief executive Nathan Bullock, Mining Licensing Committee secretary Michael Chibonga said Mopani did not give sufficient notice to the government before placing the mines on care and maintenance. Mopani also breached Zambia's labour laws by sending its workers on forced leave and terminating the contracts of mining services and supplies, Chibonga said in the letter seen by Reuters.

"In view of the above, the Mining Licensing Committee intends to revoke the large-scale mining licences," the letter said, referring to Mopani's Nkana and Mufulira mines. Glencore has been given seven days to explain why its licences should not be revoked. A Mopani spokesman told Reuters that Glencore was in discussions with the government.

The miner later said in a statement that Bullock was detained at Lusaka airport in connection with the decision to place its operations on care and maintenance. He was on his way to spend time with his family in Australia and subsequently released, the statement said. Mopani shuttered its mining operations on April 8 but continued to process material it has on site in its smelter and refinery until further notice, the company said in a statement.

The mining company had cited the impacts of a rapid decline in the copper price, critical disruptions to international mobility, transportation and supply chains arising from the coronavirus pandemic. The shutdown is the latest disruption to the global mining sector from the pandemic, which has caused lockdowns and travel restrictions around the world.

(Reporting by Chris Mfula; Editing by Jane Merriman and Grant McCool)
Ways voters can contact you:

Address: 487 Signal Butte Rd, Miles City, MT 59301

Phone number: (406) 234-3562

1. Yes, I would support President Trump's model because it would allow for greater flexibility for the states to implement. Although waivers have been easier to obtain under this administration than under President Obama, Medicaid is still too much a one size fits all model. It is unrealistic to believe that a system that works in Rhode Island would also be ideal for eastern Montana.

2. Montana has a 19th century tax structure in a 21st century economy. In my district, farmers and ranchers struggle with commodity prices at or below breakeven levels, and yet property taxes are due each year. Homeowners, especially those on fixed incomes, struggle with the same problem. We must broaden our tax base to bring property tax relief. Any kind of "new economy" tax should be used to buy down property taxes so the result is revenue neutral.
A political activist from Pakistan occupied Kashmir (PoK) has alleged that Pakistan has been regularly violating ceasefire at the Line of Control these days to infiltrate terrorists into Kashmir valley amid COVID-19 spread.

Amjad Ayub Mirza, a political activist and author based in Glasgow told ANI, "It is Pakistan, which is responsible for ceasefire violation. We, the people of PoK are aware of this fact that always Pakistan initiates a ceasefire violation to which India retaliates."

The activist said that like always, time too, the ceasefire violation was started by Pakistan which created problems for locals, even in the areas of Jammu that do not even come in the jurisdiction of the ceasefire line.

Divulging further on the heinous activities conducted by Pakistan, the activist said, "There can be three reasons for them to do so. Firstly due to the coronavirus outbreak, the establishment has been exposed over the mishandling of the pandemic. The country does not even have proper hospitals, any quarantine systems or ventilators. Amid all that the worst condition is in PoK, where people are not even receiving any relief packages. There are no doctors in hospitals, and even if there are, then they don't have any PPE kits or other equipment. So, Pakistan has initiated a ceasefire violation to divert the minds of the people from the bleak situation."

The second reason is that they want to "infiltrate jihadi terrorists" Mirza stated, adding that the ceasefire violations provide these terrorists cover fire and facilitates infiltration. "And now they (Pakistan) have decided to infiltrate those terrorists who are corona patients so that they can travel Jammu and Kashmir region and spread the virus," he said further.

Citing a third reason, Mirza added that the Pakistan army is planning to have "a massive deployment of its troops" in Gilgit-Baltistan. "There can be another reason for this massive deployment that Pakistan is planning to open a new front on the border of Kargil and Gilgit Baltistan so that Jihadis can be infiltrated from there in future," the activist said.

He told ANI that the Pakistan army should be ashamed of itself that even at this time when the whole is standing united to fight against the deadly contagion, the military establishment continues to commit atrocities.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
CHARLOTTE, N.C., April 15, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- Beginning April 15, the Novant Health Michael Jordan Family Medical Clinic will transition temporarily into a COVID-19 respiratory assessment center and two mobile health units will begin offering COVID-19 screenings in East and West Charlotte. Together, these services will provide COVID-19 education, assessment and testing to Charlotte's most at-risk communities.

"What was true before COVID-19 is true now: we have real health equity gaps in our communities. While Novant Health has long been working to close these gaps, this pandemic is only exacerbating them," said Dr. Jerome Williams, Jr, senior vice president of consumer engagement for Novant Health. "Today, we're transitioning the access points we've brought to our minority communities into COVID-19 screening and testing sites to ensure that anyone who needs care is able to get it. Novant Health is engaged with our community partners and we hear how they're being disproportionately impacted. We're taking action to respond."

The respiratory assessment center at the Novant Health Michael Jordan Family Medical Clinic is designed to test and treat patients who are experiencing moderate to severe respiratory symptoms associated with the coronavirus. This can include shortness of breath, difficulty breathing and chest discomfort. Patients visiting the respiratory assessment center should obtain a referral from a clinician. Individuals without a primary care doctor can call the Novant Health 24/7 coronavirus helpline at 1-877-9NOVANT for information on how to access further evaluation and care.

The mobile screening center units are available to individuals experiencing COVID-19 symptoms. The units will offer education, screening and testing should a provider determine it's necessary. The mobile units are operational Monday-Friday from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. for walk-up and drive-up services at:

2845 Beatties Ford Rd, Charlotte, NC 28216 next to the Mecklenburg County Public Health Office

28216 next to the Mecklenburg County Public Health Office 5501 Executive Center Drive, Charlotte, NC 28212 on the corner of Albemarle Road

Patients in need of routine care  not COVID-19 related - can be seen at the Movement Family Wellness Center powered by Novant Health located at 2225 Freedom Drive.

In addition to these new sites, Novant Health is working with community partners to ensure everyone has information they need to stay safe and healthy, including partnering with two recording artists Doug E. Fresh and Anthony Hamilton to amplify key messages and providing resources to the Hispanic/Latino community, including a Spanish-language helpline and an online coronavirus assessment tool.

Novant Health is also working to ensure its team members, frontline workers and communities have access to vital resources like food, housing and other support  all of which have a direct impact on one's overall health and wellness during this time of uncertainty. Some efforts include:

Contributing an additional $10 million to the Novant Health Disaster Relief Fund to provide financial assistance to team members who need it most during the COVID-19 pandemic

to the Novant Health Disaster Relief Fund to provide financial assistance to team members who need it most during the COVID-19 pandemic Partnering with community organizations to offer free and subsidized alternate child care to team members

Redeploying team members to new roles so they can maintain their current hours

Offering low-interest loans in partnership with M&F Bank to Novant Health-certified and minority-owned suppliers who are facing challenges caused by the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic

Our community health workers program continues to collaborate via phone with a variety of community partners across the system to connect patients to important health and social resources

Novant Health has a MyCommunity tool online (novanthealth.org/mycommunity) to help people search for free or reduced cost services like medical care, food, job training, and more

For more information on COVID-19, please visit NovantHealth.org/coronavirus.

About Novant Health

Novant Health is an integrated network of physician clinics, outpatient facilities and hospitals that delivers a seamless and convenient healthcare experience to communities in Virginia, North and South Carolina, and Georgia. The Novant Health network consists of more than 1,600 physicians and over 29,000 employees that provide care at nearly 700 locations, including 15 hospitals and hundreds of outpatient facilities and physician clinics. In 2020, Novant Health was the only healthcare system in North Carolina to be included on Forbes' Best Employers for Diversity list. Diversity MBA Magazine has also ranked Novant Health third on its 2019 list of "Best Places for Women & Diverse Managers to Work." Novant Health provided more than $993.2 million in community benefit, including financial assistance and services, in 2019.

For more information, please visit our website at NovantHealth.org. You can also follow us on Twitter and Facebook.

SOURCE Novant Health

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Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, April 14)  President Rodrigo Duterte urged the Association of Southeast Asian Nations to "come together and cooperate even more" amid the coronavirus pandemic.

In his speech before ASEAN's online summit on COVID-19 Tuesday, Duterte lobbied for four areas of cooperation as the ten member states and almost all countries in the world battle outbreaks of the viral disease.

"First, our healthcare systems are under increasing stress as the number of infections rise. We face a shortage of vital medicines and medical equipment and supplies," Duterte said.

In the Philippines alone, there are now 4,932 confirmed COVID-19 cases, with 242 recoveries and 315 deaths. Among the fatalities are doctors and healthcare workers, which the Philippine Medical Association has attributed to the shortage of personal protective equipment in hospitals.

"We need to boost production and facilitate intra-ASEAN trade of these life-saving necessities," Duterte said.

He added that ASEAN should take the necessary steps to ensure food security as countries impose lockdowns to contain the spread of COVID-19.

"These immediate responses, while necessary, could drive our societies and the larger international community further apart. And yet, an effective, strategic response requires that we come together and cooperate even more," Duterte said.

"ASEAN must remain open for trade. Crisis or no crisis, as no country can stand alone. Let us, therefore ensure the supply chain connectivity and the smooth flow of goods within our region," he added.

Duterte has placed Luzon, the northern part of the country, under an enhanced community quarantine, restricting people's movement but mandating the free flow of goods. On Monday, Duterte said he will only lift the Luzon-wide quarantine once a cure against the new coronavirus becomes available in the market.

"It is therefore imperative that we support vaccine and research and development initiatives. We should fast-track cooperation with our Dialogue Partners in this area," Duterte told his fellow ASEAN leaders.

He reiterated the Philippines' commitment to cooperate with clinical trials. The country has joined the World Health Organizations solidarity trial, a multi-country clinical study for potential treatments for COVID-19.

Lastly, Duterte urged the ASEAN to "be ready for future outbreaks."

"Specifically, we should establish an early warning system for pandemics in the region," he said.

The coronavirus outbreak began in Wuhan, China in December 2019 and has since infected more than 1.9 million people across the globe. COVID-19 has killed over 119,000 people, according to the Johns Hopkins University's COVID-19 global tracker.
* Stainless steel futures up nearly 2.9% in early trade

* Dalian iron ore extends gains

BEIJING, April 15 (Reuters) - Stainless steel futures in China extended gains into a seventh session on Wednesday, surging almost 2.9% as restocking demand from traders rose, while supply disruptions due to suspension at Philippines' nickel mines also supported prices.

The most-traded June contract on the Shanghai Futures Exchange jumped as much as 2.9% to 13,045 yuan ($1,849.75) per tonne, the highest since Feb. 25. It was up 2.4% to 12,980 yuan a tonne as of 0330 GMT.

"Some steel mills have limited their sales recently to support stainless steel prices which had been running low since the Lunar New Year holiday, stimulating traders' restocking demand," Fu Zhiwen, an analyst with Huatai Futures said, adding that the robust demand may not be sustainable as exports drop because of the coronavirus pandemic.

Fu also said supply disruptions in the Philippines could push prices of nickel ore in the next period.

Top nickel ore producers in the country suspended mining and export operations in a southern province last week to comply with the coronavirus-containment measures.

Nickel futures on the Shanghai exchange surged more than 7% since April 2.

Other steel futures on the Shanghai exchanged edged down, with construction rebar, for October delivery, losing 0.4% to 3,380 yuan per tonne and hot-rolled coil inched down 0.1% to 3,213 yuan per tonne.

FUNDAMENTALS

* Benchmark iron ore futures on the Dalian Commodity Exchange, for September delivery, rose 0.8% to 610 yuan per tonne.

* Spot prices of iron ore with 62% iron content for delivery to China rose to $85.5 a tonne on Tuesday.

* Dalian coking coal rose 0.4% to 1,134 yuan per tonne while Dalian coke fell 0.3% to 1,728 yuan per tonne.

* More than 1.92 million people have been reported to be infected by the novel coronavirus globally and 120,670 have died, according to a Reuters tally.

Story continues

* China has approved early-stage human tests for two experimental vaccines to combat the new coronavirus as it battles to contain imported cases, especially from neighbouring Russia, the new "front line" in the war on COVID-19.

* China's central bank cut the interest rate on its medium-term funding for financial institutions to the lowest on record, as policymakers stepped up their efforts to combat the economic fallout from the coronavirus health crisis.

($1 = 7.0523 Chinese yuan) (Reporting by Min Zhang and Tom Daly; editing by Uttaresh.V)
President Donald Trump listens during a meeting with recovered CCP virus patients in the Cabinet Room at the White House on April 14, 2020. (Doug Mills-Pool/Getty Images)

Lawmakers, Activists Welcome Trumps WHO Funding Cut

President Donald Trumps decision to halt funding to the World Health Organization (WHO) has drawn praise from numerous U.S. lawmakers, as the body comes under increasing scrutiny over its ties to Beijing and its handling of the pandemic.

Trump on April 15 declared funding would be halted for 60 to 90 days pending a review to assess the World Health Organizations role in severely mismanaging and covering up the spread of the coronavirus. The United States is the single largest donor to the WHO, contributing more than $400 million in 2019, according to State Department statistics. That figure is roughly 12 percent of WHOs budget.

While the move prompted criticism from some in the international community, including the United Nations secretary-general and the Chinese foreign ministry, it was welcomed by several Republican lawmakers and rights activists, who slammed the agency for its role in aiding the Chinese regime to downplay the severity of the outbreak during its early stages.

Who knows how much better off the world would be now if China had been honest? Or if the WHO hadnt parroted the regimes lies? Republican members of the House Oversight Committee said in a tweet. The president is right to halt WHO funding until we can get to the bottom of its virus response & relationship with Beijing.

Who knows how much better off the world would be now if China had been honest? Or if the WHO hadnt parroted the regimes lies? The president is right to halt WHO funding until we can get to the bottom of its virus response & relationship with Beijing.pic.twitter.com/3PTr9kYNAj  Oversight Committee Republicans (@GOPoversight) April 14, 2020

American taxpayer dollars shouldnt go to an organization more concerned with appeasing the Chinese Communist Party than protecting global health, Rep. Guy Reschenthaler (R-Pa.) wrote on Twitter.

Thanks to @realDonaldTrump for withholding funds from @WHO.

Last week, I introduced HRes917 w/ 38 colleagues calling for just this. American taxpayer dollars shouldnt go to an organization more concerned with appeasing the Chinese Communist Party than protecting global health. https://t.co/TQQzqXqDH8  Rep. Guy Reschenthaler (@GReschenthaler) April 14, 2020

Other lawmakers including senators Rick Scott (R-Fla.) and Josh Hawley (R-Mo.), and Reps. Jim Banks (R-Ind.), Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), and Greg Steube (R-Fla.) also backed the funding cut. A group of senators recently wrote a letter to the WHO requesting that it release information about its failed and delayed response.

The Senates chief oversight committee also said it would investigate the WHOs pandemic response.

For around three weeks after the WHO was notified of the outbreak on Dec. 31, 2019, the body echoed statements from Chinese officials that there was no evidence or a low risk of the virus being contagious. However, a growing body of evidence shows that the Chinese regime was aware the virus was spreading between humans well before it publicly confirmed human-to-human transmission on Jan. 20.

Recently a WHO official Dr. Maria Van Kerkhov, a specialist on respiratory diseases, said that she suspected there may have been human-to-human transmission right from the start when the organization was first notified.

The organization has also been criticized for its treatment of Taiwan, which it has excluded from membership at the behest of the Chinese regime, which considers the self-ruled island as part of its territory. Taiwan, a self-ruled island with its own democratically elected government, says that as a result, it has been deprived of timely information to fight the virus.

Taiwan officials have also accused the WHO of ignoring its query for information sent on Dec. 31, 2019.

Hong Kong democracy activist Joshua Wong called the WHO an arm of Chinese diplomacy, and rebuked it for sidelining Taiwan.

The WHO is an arm of Chinese diplomacy under the guise of liberal internationalism or global governance. Transnational cooperation is of course crucial to combating pandemics, but the institution in question is the anthesis of it, as the shunning of Taiwan makes painfully clear. https://t.co/00MYt2lBfo  Joshua Wong   (@joshuawongcf) April 14, 2020

Marion Smith, executive director of Washington-based nonprofit Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, said in a statement that the United States should not reinstate funding to the WHO until its director-general Tedros Ghebreyesus is replaced.

China has been misleading the rest of the world about the outbreak that originated in Wuhan and has only been able to get away with it because of the WHOs complicity in covering up the lies, Smith said.
As the coronavirus continues to spread across the state, the needs of New Jersey residents have in turn continued to grow and change.

So, an historic New Jersey ministry decided to change with them.

Star of Hope Ministries, located in Paterson and established in 1913, has shifted its focus from improving the lives of community members through pursuits including church networking and professional development to coordinating food distribution efforts to feed those in need.

Since March 17, the organization has connected with over 70 churches and organizations throughout the state to distribute over 1,000 boxes of perishable and non-perishable foods and over 20,000 meals throughout the greater Paterson area, as well as throughout Newark and South Jersey.

Nonprofit organizations that Star of Hopes Ministries has coordinated with include CUMAC in Paterson, Oasis in Paterson, Boys and Girls Club of Paterson and Passaic, Paterson Habitat for Humanity, and CASA For Children in Passaic County.

Pastor Matt Andersen, executive director of Star of Hope Ministries, said that the restructuring of the mission of organization  made official through a revamping and relaunch of its website  has occurred over the last month in response to the onset of the pandemic.

It came about because our focus has always been responding to the needs of the community, and doing that through the local church partnerships and the organizations that we partner with, Andersen said. So, really when this all started with the COVID-19 epidemic, one of the biggest needs that we were seeing, hearing and anticipating was the food shortages that are happening.

Since March 17, the organization has connected with over 70 churches and organizations throughout the state to distribute over 1,000 boxes of perishable and non-perishable foods and over 20,000 meals throughout the greater Paterson area, as well as Newark and South Jersey.Courtesy - Star of Hope Ministries

Key organizations and groups, including Table to Table for Passaic County, as well as Paterson public schools and various businesses and individuals have consistently supplied Star of Hope Ministries with perishable and non-perishable food items at drop-off locations, including the Hawthorne Gospel, Cornerstone Christian in Wyckoff, Fardale Trinity in Mahwah and the Grace Church in Ridgewood.

The donations are then picked up by the Star of Hope Ministries staff and prepared to be distributed to churches and other nonprofits in the warehouse space at Star of Hope Ministries and at the Grace Redeemer Church in Glen Rock.

Were so encouraged by the many churches and organizations that are serving selflessly during this difficult time. We consider it a privilege to help in any way we can as they help meet the needs of their neighbors," Andersen said. Were following daily sanitary protocols, and our staff that can work remotely is working remotely. And were kind of staggering who works when so we can maintain the social distancing."

Pastor Willie Kirchhofer of Crossroads Cultural Center in Clifton described Star of Hope Ministries as a lifesaver" in helping the center to feed more than 150 families per week in the Clifton area.

The food distribution is a great example of how people and groups partnering together not only meet physical needs, but provides needed hope in this difficult time, Kirchhofer said.

Pastor Charles Salinas of King of Kings Worship Ministry said the Paterson-based church has collaborated with Star of Hope Ministries for roughly six years to help those in need in their community, which currently amounts to approximately 4,000 families.

Through that relationship, when COVID-19 hit, we were able to continue to help people who are in need of food," Salinas said. As they distributed to us, we distributed to the people. And ... we have been able to distribute 8,000 plates of lunches and fresh fruits and vegetables, and also non-perishable foods.

Reflecting upon his desire to help his community throughout the continuing crisis, Salinas said that it is the responsibility of churches like his own to go out and help as much as we can.

Its important because if we are going to say that we are the church, and we are supposed to be the hands and feet of Jesus, then we have to mobilize ourselves and bring the need to the people," Salinas said. And its encouraging for us because many people are so overwhelmed with joy that Jesus is caring for them. Because thats what we tell them. Its not us, its Jesus caring for you.

Since March 17, the organization has connected with over 70 churches and organizations throughout the state to distribute over 1,000 boxes of perishable and non-perishable foods and over 20,000 meals throughout the greater Paterson area, as well as Newark and South Jersey.Courtesy - Star of Hope Ministries

While continuing to welcome monetary donations, Andersen said that Star of Hope Ministries is in particular need of nonperishable food items to donate to community members. Individuals can make donations through trips to the drop-off church locations, or through the organizations online food drive that is active through April 22.

Andersen added that the organization, comprised of 15 active staff members, is currently in the process of establishing ways to recruit new volunteers.

Its been a big challenge because a lot of our churches and volunteers are asking how can they help, and its hard to even facilitate a volunteer session like we used to because of the social distancing and the sanitary requirements and everything," Andersen said.

"So were working on putting together some opportunities for volunteers to be able to help in new and unique ways that are emerging.

Looking forward, Andersen said that he anticipates food distribution to be a long-term need that will continue to pervade the area even as the crisis comes to a close. Nonetheless, it is a need that Star of Hope Ministries is prepared to alleviate as long as we are able, he added.

Really our stance has always been that were going to respond to the needs of the community, Andersen said. So as long as that takes  if this turns into a three- or six-month or even a year-long pivot for us, our part is to be here to serve the most urgent needs of the community. So were going to do whatever we can to do that.

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A Bayonne police officer has taken the lead in raising money for the widow and young children of a New Jersey police officer who died of the coronavirus.

Corrado DeVincenzo set up a GoFundMe.com page for AlTerek Patterson, a Bedminister Township sergeant who died on Easter morning. DeVincenzo noted that Patterson leaves behind a wife, Brandi, and three kids, an 8-year-old and 2-and-a-half-year-old twins.

The page was created in conjunction with PBA Local 366.

Terek was an absolute family man, DeVincenzo said on the GoFundMe page. "He picked up as many extra hours as he could so he could provide for his family and buy his college sweetheart her dream home. He made his dad the best man in his wedding and called his mom every single day.

Thats the type of man he was and some of the reasons why he will be miss by many. Please join us in raising support for his wife and children.

The GoFundMe page has raised more than half of the $50,000 goal in just 24 hours. The page also give people a way to donate directly to Brandi Patterson.

DeVincenzo said he is good friends with Pattersons brother, Michael, who is a state trooper, and he then became friend with AlTerek. Patterson joined the Bedminster Police Department in 2006 and was promoted to sergeant in 2014.
PHILADELPHIA  The last time Alexandra Gunnison saw her father, in early March, the coronavirus was in the early, smoldering stages of its wildfire spread across the country.

Soon afterward, his nursing home in the suburbs of Washington, D.C., was closed to visitors. Not long after that, her father, Dana Gunnison, 75, was confined to his room, along with all other residents.

He sleeps probably 18 hours a day. I call every day when Im able, she said, but he doesnt always pick up. Since he has Parkinsons disease  and now no access to physical or speech therapy  its increasingly difficult to understand him. And Gunnison, of West Philly, worries that ongoing isolation could accelerate his decline.

Shes now one of many who are wondering when, or if, they will see their elderly loved ones again, as recommendations of social distancing and temporary retirement-home visitor bans are stretching into indefinite periods of separation.

A complicating factor is: For the elderly, lengthy periods of isolation to protect them from the virus could be a cure worse than the disease.

The risks of loneliness and isolation are so great that we dont know if were causing a lot of harm by totally socially isolating people, said Carla Perissinotto, a geriatrician and associate professor at University of California-San Francisco School of Medicine, who has studied the health effects of loneliness in older adults, and found links to dementia, loss of mobility, cardiovascular decline, and death.

The hard thing is, we dont have any idea as to when these health risks take effect. Is it after a week? A month? she said. We need to proactively think about how we are supporting people, or were going to see a lot of complications.

Some families are getting creative, driving by parents and grandparents homes with signs, or visiting through windows and screen doors. Nursing homes are, in some cases, leaning on services like FaceTime and Zoom to maintain connections (an unproven intervention, said Perissinotto, but probably better than nothing). And local senior centers are stepping up by conducting frequent phone check-ins, and delivering crossword puzzles along with frozen meals.

But for many, coronavirus precautions have erected a barrier thats starting to take on the look of permanency.

Beth Croker, of Haddon Heights, said her mother Sandra, who is 76 and still recovering from a stroke, has not left her home in three weeks. Theyve fallen into a bleak quarantine routine: Croker drops off groceries, then goes around to the back of the senior housing complex and calls her mother, so she can wave from the window.

Last Saturday, she decided to decorate the parking lot with handmade signs, blast some Bob Seger and act like an idiot  by throwing herself a dance party for her mothers amusement.

I want to make her smile every day, she said, but I dont have much to talk about, because Im just isolating myself, too.

Margate resident Kathy Tabasso and her family have also been hunting for loopholes.

Tabasso, 63, now visits her 88-year-old mother only peering in from the porch for a wave and a quick chat by phone. And last weekend, Tabassos son, a first responder, piled into his car with his wife and their four children for what Tabasso called a love drive-by, holding hand-drawn signs out their car windows, while Tabasso waved from the porch.

I wanted, of course, to go grab them out of the car, she said. It was such a joyous event.

For those who dont have children and grandchildren nearby, local organizations are rushing to fill the gaps. One is KleinLife, which runs four community centers in Philadelphia and Montgomery County that normally serve hundreds of seniors with classes, exercise programs, support groups and lunch service. The centers closed in March, but administrators pivoted quickly to support the seniors in exile.

Theyre delivering a weeks worth of meals every Tuesday, along with booklets of crossword puzzles and, for Passover, hagaddahs. The staff also divided up the list of clients from the last six months, and committed to calling every single one of them two or three times a week.

Still, Sue Aistrop, the organizations vice president for active adult life, said shes deeply concerned about the clients, including Holocaust survivors from Northeast Philadelphias Russian community still recovering from long-ago traumas through programs like art and dance therapy.

More immediately, she said, The Northeast is pretty low income for the seniors, and the congregate meal we were serving was for many their biggest nutritional and caloric meal of the day. So were really worried about their food intake.

Adele Knopman, who stopped counting after she turned 89, said shes grateful those phone calls keep coming, even as her children and grandchildren are social-distancing for her safety.

The isolation wasnt getting to her yet, though. Shes lived through a lot: World War II, Vietnam. Life will continue after this, too  and shes looking forward to it. Im a crazy optimist, she said, her shrug audible by phone. You want me to tell you everything is terrible?

Its the grandchildren who are panicking.

Ryan Hancock of South Philadelphia received news that his 96-year-old grandmother, who raised him in Albany, Georgia, was running a high fever and might not pull through. Given that the town is a coronavirus hot spot, the emergency room was not an option  and neither was visiting for Hancock, who is a cancer survivor.

If she dies or she gets sicker, there is no opportunity for me to get down there, he said.

Matt Roberts, whose parents recently moved from Philadelphia to Florida, checked in helplessly by phone as his father drove himself six hours to a hospital in Jacksonville for emergency surgery on a brain aneurysm. Under other circumstances, he would have been there. Now, he said, Theres this fear of being close to each other to help, and certainly traveling to help introduces this risk that a lot of people are uncomfortable with.

Perissinotto, the geriatrician, confessed that, as she spoke with a reporter, she was on her way to pick up her own 76-year-old mother, to bring her to shelter in place with her family. Given her mothers sturdy health and the recent death of Perissinottos father, they decided that, for them, the safest choice was to be together  with precautions to minimize the risk.

How I phrase this for my own patients is, you have to have these conversations with your family: What are the risks Im willing to have, and how do I balance our wishes with the greater public-health goals? she said. Is there a calculated risk I need to take, in that I will mask and clean my hands, but still have contact, if thats going to be the last time potentially I see someone?

For those who make the opposite decision, its hard not to second-guess.

Anthony Monte Carlo, 20, a Deptford resident and a student at Rutgers-Camden, had planned to visit his 94-year-old great-grandmother in South Carolina in March  but succumbed to his parents pleas that he stay home.

I hope I get to see her again because I dont know when all of this is going to be over, and I dont know how much time I might have left to see her, said Monte Carlo, who feels hes only just begun to realize how much he and his great-grandmother have in common.

Part of me really just wants to go down there, he said. A greater part of me wants to protect her.
Source: Xinhua| 2020-04-16 05:10:37|Editor: Shi Yinglun

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The Minister of Health of Libya's UN-backed government, Ehmid Bin Omar, gives a speech in a press conference in Tripoli, Libya, on April 15, 2020. The UN-backed government of Libya on Wednesday declared a 24-curfew in the country to fight COVID-19 pandemic starting on Friday and lasting for 10 days. (Photo by Hamza Turkia/Xinhua)

TRIPOLI, April 15 (Xinhua) -- The UN-backed government of Libya on Wednesday declared a 24-curfew in the country to fight COVID-19 pandemic.

The UN-backed government said that curfew starts on April 17 and will last for 10 days. Only pedestrians will be allowed from 7 a.m. to 12 p.m. local time (5 a.m. to 10 a.m. GMT), the UN-backed government said.

The UN-backed government also said that small convenient shops, bakeries and shipping vehicles will be allowed to work from 7 a.m. to 12 p.m. local time.

The number of total confirmed COVID-19 cases in Libya so far is 35, including 9 recoveries and one death, according to the National Center for Disease Control.

Libyan authorities have taken a series of measures against the COVID-19, including closing airports, border crossings, mosques and educational institutions, and banning mass gatherings and movements among cities.

Libya announced its first COVID-19 case on March 24. Enditem
WASHINGTON, April 15, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- A group of U.S. mattress manufacturers and unions, which has asked the U.S. government to investigate potential illegal subsidies and dumping of imported mattresses, is responding to false allegations from importing companies. In March, U.S. mattress manufacturers Brooklyn Bedding, Corsicana Mattress Company, Elite Comfort Solutions, FXI, Inc., Kolcraft Enterprises Inc., and Leggett & Platt, Incorporated, as well as the International Brotherhood of Teamsters and the United Steel, Paper and Forestry, Rubber, Manufacturing, Energy, Allied Industrial and Service Workers International Union, AFL-CIO, filed anti-dumping duty petitions against unfairly traded imports of mattresses from Cambodia, Indonesia, Malaysia, Serbia, Thailand, Turkey and Vietnam, and a countervailing duty petition on subsidized mattresses from China. Dumped and subsidized imports from these countries are harming U.S. workers, manufacturers and their suppliers.

A group of companies that imports mattresses from the countries listed above are attacking American mattress manufacturers through a shameless and misleading campaign. Here are the facts:

There is no shortage of mattresses available to the U.S. health care system or other organizations responding to COVID-19. American mattress manufacturers  using American workers  can collectively manufacture and deliver more than 400,000 mattresses a week for emergency use during this crisis.

The filing of this petition does not bar imports  it simply requests the U.S. government use a Congressionally mandated process to independently investigate whether unfair trade exists and is injuring U.S. producers and American workers.

This investigation to determine whether illegal subsidies and dumping of imported mattresses and injury to U.S. industry has occurred will unfold over the course of more than a year, with the U.S. federal government determining whether or when duties should be applied on imports, expected in about six months.

Nothing about this petition has any impact on the availability of mattresses now or in the future; however, if importers rely on dumped or subsidized product, they may have to pay a duty.

Dumped and subsidized imports have surged into the U.S. market in recent years, harming U.S. manufacturing workers.

Since 2017, more than 40 American mattress manufacturers have been forced to close their doors due to these massive increases in the volume of unfairly traded imports  negatively impacting thousands of American workers across the entire country.

Those thousands of American workers were thrown out of work by these unfair trade practices, even before the remaining American mattress producers reported another 1,300 jobs lost due to the huge increases in dumped imports between 2017 and mid-2019.

American producers are fighting to stay in business during one of the most difficult economic challenges our country has ever seen.

In the face of continued huge import surges at dumped or subsidized prices, American manufacturers and unions had no choice but to take action now, under U.S. trade law, to protect workers.

There is absolutely no current policy limitation on the number of mattresses sold in America, whether those mattresses are made by U.S. manufacturers or imported from other countries.

"If illegal dumping and foreign subsidization continue, tens of thousands of American workers will be hurt," said Yohai Baisburd, counsel to the Mattress Petitioners. "This damage will also extend beyond the mattress industry, to American suppliers and producers of textiles, innersprings, foam, clips and machinery. This would also impact warehouse, transportation and retail workers.

"American mattress producers can compete with anyone on a level playing field and based on fair competition," said Baisburd. "If dumped and subsidized imports continue to enter the US, it will only further the great harm being felt by American mattress manufacturers and workers."

SOURCE The Mattress Petitioners
A cacophony of car and truck horns, megaphones and occasional chanting swirled around the Michigan Capitol Wednesday as crowds gathered to protest an order that instructs Michigan residents to stay home to prevent the spread of COVID-19.

Under the current stay-at-home order from Gov. Gretchen Whitmer in effect through April 30, gatherings of any size outside a household are prohibited, as are in-person business and activities deemed non-essential. People are urged to stay six feet apart to stop the spread of the coronavirus, which has infected 27,001 people in Michigan and killed 1,768 dead, 27,001 confirmed COVID-19 cases in Michigan.

But people are still allowed to protest, and thousands took the opportunity to do so in Lansing Wednesday as part of an Operation Gridlock" protest. Organized by the Michigan Conservative Coalition and supported by the Michigan Freedom Fund and other conservative groups, the idea was to create a traffic jam in front of the Michigan Capitol to create gridlock.

This is a statement to show peoples frustration, said Meshawn Maddock, a member of the Michigan Conservative Coalition, ahead of the protest.

People were expected to drive into Lansing from all over the state, she said.

Cars and trucks lined the streets surrounding Michigans Capitol building, displaying flags and painted messages like Stop Oppressive Quarantining: Bring Back Common Sense and Freedom Isnt Negotiable. Some brought their motorboats, which the administration said are not allowed under the stay-at-home order. Others drove business vehicles.

Traffic is backed up well down Michigan Avenue. Lots of honking, some getting out of cars pic.twitter.com/amLMpuYONn  Lauren Gibbons (@LaurenMGibbons) April 15, 2020

Traffic was backed up well down Michigan Avenue and other streets within a few blocks of the Capitol building in downtown Lansing.

Organizers encouraged people to protest from their cars, but a crowd began gathering on the Capitol lawn by 10 a.m. Many were not wearing masks or following social distancing guidelines recommended by the CDC.

Shelly Vanderwerff of Zeeland is currently laid off from her job at a local greenhouse. She is also trained as a pet groomer, and carried a sign on the Capitol lawn asking for the ability to do curbside pet grooming during the stay-at-home order.

She said she felt it was important to show up in person because the governor is taking away jobs, hobbies and other means of activity that could be done safely and help people who are struggling with their mental health.

It seems like shes not listening to petitions and calls and emails, shes not getting how many small businesses that this really is affecting and hurting, she said.

Vanderwerff said shes taking personal precautions to limit the spread of COVID-19, but is concerned that Michigans stay-at-home measures are too extreme.

Police on scene were monitoring the crowd and traffic, but had not interfered with the protest as of 1 p.m. Police estimated between 3,000 and 4,000 people were in downtown Lansing Wednesday.

Asked about the protest during a Monday press conference, Whitmer said people are well within their rights to protest and asked those who plan to protest do so in a manner that keeps themselves and first responders safe.

Its OK to be frustrated, and its OK to be angry, Whitmer said Monday, adding: If it makes you feel better to direct it at me, thats OK, too. Ive got thick skin."

Whitmer also alleged the DeVos family had a hand in the protest, although event organizers and a family spokesperson said neither Betsy DeVos nor any member of the DeVos family had any involvement.

Maddock said any insinuation that the DeVos family was involved in organizing the protest is ridiculous." She hopes Whitmer is hearing the message that people are frustrated with the stay-at-home order loud and clear.

Bureaucrats will never cure a virus, she said.

Read more on MLive:

Wednesday, April 15: Latest developments on coronavirus in Michigan

Coronavirus deaths surge again during Michigans second-deadliest day

Whitmer links Betsy DeVos to upcoming coronavirus stay-at-home order protest; organizers say shes not involved

Gov. Whitmer extends executive orders on hospital capacity, virtual public meetings

Nearly a quarter of Michigan workers have filed for unemployment

Michigans coronavirus survivors describe battles to stay alive

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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Linkedin Riza Roidila Mufti (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Wed, April 15, 2020 08:53 637 fc6853813033f564188675f8bd1ed604 1 Business Airport,operation,COVID-19,coronavirus,PSBB,large-scale-social-restrictions,physical-distancing,Angkasa-Pura-II Free

Airports across Indonesia have reduced their operational hours and services, including by closing terminals, following a drop in flight traffic as a result of government-imposed social restrictions to slow down the spread of COVID-19.

State-owned airport operator PT Angkasa Pura II (AP II), which manages airports in western Indonesia, is applying basic minimum operations at Soekarno-Hatta International Airport in Tangerang, Banten, and Halim Perdanakusuma Airport in East Jakarta. The two airports are the main gates for people in Greater Jakarta to travel by air.

The airport operator is temporarily closing terminals 1B, 1C and 2F at Soekarno-Hatta, while terminals 1A, 2D, 2E and all of Terminal 3 will remain open for 24 hours. At Halim Perdanakusuma, AP II will adjust operation depending on the number of daily flights.

Read also: Transportation industry seeks 'rescue package' to weather COVID-19 impacts

The time slot [for flights] at Soekarno-Hatta and Halim Perdanakusuma has decreased, flight frequency has also decreased following the work-from-home instruction and PSBB [large-scale social restrictions] in Jakarta, AP II president director Muhammad Awaluddin said in a written statement on Monday.

AP II and airlines are also making sure that only half of the seats on every flight is occupied.

According to Transportation Ministerial Regulation No. 18/2020, time slots for aircraft traffic at every airport must be reduced. The regulation also stipulates that each flight must operate at 50 percent of the total capacity to support social distancing.

Awaluddin said Aviation Security would ensure that passengers follow physical distancing rules and wear face masks at the airport.

AP II has reduced the operational hours of 12 other airports.

However, we are always on standby, anytime, if an airplane with technical or operational issues is required to make an emergency landing at our airport. We are also ready to operate for cargo planes transporting medical supplies or other medical needs, Awaluddin said.

Read also: Air passenger traffic falls sharply during stay-at-home period

Radin Inten II Airport in Lampung, for example, is now open from 10 a.m. to 8 p.m. instead of its usual schedule of 6 a.m. to 9 p.m. and Supadio Airport in Pontianak in West Kalimantan from 6 a.m. to 6.30 p.m. instead of 6 a.m. to midnight.

Meanwhile, Sultan Mahmud Badaruddin II International Airport in Palembang, South Sumatra, is open from 6 a.m. to 6 p.m. instead of 5 a.m. to midnight, and Depati Amir Airport in Bangka Belitung Islands from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. instead of 6 a.m. to 9 p.m.
While Mexicos leftist President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador wants to make state oil firm Pemex the pillar of a turnaround in the countrys declining oil production, hundreds of Pemex workers havent been paid for months and havent had health insurance and vacation days covered, Quartz reported on Wednesday, citing former and current employees at the company.

The workers were hired as contractors for Lopez Obradors flagship Pemex revival projectthe construction of an US$8-billion Dos Bocas refinery in his home state of Tabasco. Pemex is the company working on the refinery project, a key campaign pledge of populist leftist President Lopez Obrador who promised to reduce Mexicos reliance on fuel and refined product imports, most of which come from the United States.

Lopez Obradors Mexico First energy policy agenda turned last weeks OPEC+ meeting into a Mexican soap opera after Mexico, part of the non-OPEC producers in the OPEC+ group, disagreed with proposals that it should reduce its production by 400,000 bpd from its October 2018 baseline, offering only a 100,000-bpd cut.

The fact that Mexicos oil hedge protects it from the oil price crash  which hurts other OPEC+ countries much more  was said to be one of the reasons why Mexico dug in its heels and refused to cut its production as much as its OPEC+ partners asked it to.

But while Lopez Obrador touts a win at the OPEC+ negotiations, sources among ex Pemex employees and executives tell Quartzs geopolitics reporter Max de Haldevang that the state oil firm had not paid some of its contract workers since December 2019.

Unfortunately, the current administrations attitude towards workers is not what I would have hoped from a leftist government, a former Pemex board member told Quartz. Other current and former employees say that the firm hasnt taken adequate steps to ensure social distancing and protective gear such as masks and gloves for workers on the sites.

Premium: There Is Still Hope For Oil Prices

In addition, Pemex is months behind in payments to contractor firms, including to those working on the Dos Bocas refinery project, David Enriquez, energy lawyer at law firm Goodrich, Riquelme y Associados told Quartz.

Pemexs financial situation is difficult and is set to become even more difficult with the oil price crash, Fitch Ratings said earlier this month, downgrading the company deeper into junk territory.

The companys stand-alone credit profile is deteriorating because of its limited flexibility to navigate the downturn in the oil and gas industry given its elevated tax burden, high leverage, rising per barrel lifting costs and high investment needs to maintain production and replenish reserves, the rating agency said.

At the current Mexico's crude basket price of below $20/bbl, PEMEX's upstream business does not generate enough cash flow to cover operational and financial costs (half-cycle costs) of more than $25/bbl and the company will need extraordinary government support in the immediate future, Fitch noted.

By Tsvetana Paraskova for Oilprice.com

More Top Reads From Oilprice.com:


Company Update and COVID-19 Response

Perth, April 15, 2020 AEST (ABN Newswire) - Horizon Minerals Limited ( ASX:HRZ ) wishes to advise that due to the impact of COVID-19, the Company has implemented significant controls and requirements to protect the health and safety of its personnel, their families and the communities in which it operates.The Company is also implementing prudent financial measures to maintain its strong current financial position in a time of significant global economic uncertainty.These measures include:- Operational staff and local contractors all residing in Kalgoorlie and observing strict safety and COVID -19 operational guidelines- Head office and administration staff working under flexible working arrangements to minimise face-to-face interaction- A reduction in the number of Board members from four to three with Mr Jeff Williams to step down as a Non-Executive Director- Board and Executive team taking a 25% reduction in salary until further notice- Minimising all expenditure not directed toward bringing the Boorara gold mine into production- Initial RC and diamond drill program completed at the high grade Rose Hill gold project with results expected in the current June Quarter- Drilling programs planned for the second half at Crake, Boorara, Golden Ridge, Balagundi and Rose Hill will commence following positive cash flow generation from Boorara- Mine development work at Boorara remains on track for mine commencement in the June Quarter 2020 and first gold production in the September Quarter 2020- Further updates on the Boorara development and any further responses to the COVID-19 pandemic will be provided in coming weeksCommenting on the Company update, Horizon Managing Director Mr Jon Price said:"Horizon is taking a very conservative and balanced approach to upcoming activities to ensure the health and wellbeing of our staff, contractors and the communities in which we operate. In these uncertain times, cash conservation is also a core focus and we are minimising all expenditure not directed towards bringing Boorara into production in the current June Quarter.""I would also like to take this opportunity to thank Jeff Williams for all his guidance and support since he joined following the merger with Macphersons and wish him all the very best for the future."To view tables and figures, please visit:About Horizon Minerals Limited

Horizon Minerals Limited (ASX:HRZ) is a gold exploration and mining company focussed on the Kalgoorlie and Menzies areas of Western Australia which are host to some of Australia's richest gold deposits. The Company is developing a mining pipeline of projects to generate cash and self-fund aggressive exploration, mine developments and further acquisitions. The Teal gold mine has been recently completed.

Horizon is aiming to significantly grow its JORC-Compliant Mineral Resources, complete definitive feasibility studies on core high grade open cut and underground projects and build a sustainable development pipeline.

Horizon has a number of joint ventures in place across multiple commodities and regions of Australia providing exposure to Vanadium, Copper, PGE's, Gold and Nickel/Cobalt. Our quality joint venture partners are earning in to our project areas by spending over $20 million over 5 years enabling focus on the gold business while maintaining upside leverage.
U.S. Coronavirus Measures Are Justified, UW Economists Find

Aggressive social distancing policies being used to slow the spread of the novel coronavirus COVID-19 are hammering the U.S. economy, but an analysis by University of Wyoming researchers suggests that these measures are economically justified.

The potential benefits of social distancing in saving lives far outweigh the projected damage to the economy, according to the economists from the Department of Economics in the UW College of Business. The teams research, which has received widespread attention in national and international media outlets, will appear in the Journal of Benefit Cost Analysis.

Our benefit-cost analysis shows that the extensive social distancing measures being adopted in the U.S. likely do not constitute an overreaction, says Assistant Professor Linda Thunstrom, lead author of the article. Social distancing saves lives but comes at large costs to society due to reduced economic activity. Still, based on our benchmark assumptions, the economic benefits of lives saved substantially outweigh the value of the projected losses to the U.S. economy.

In fact, assuming that social distancing measures are adopted widely enough to substantially reduce contacts among individuals, the benefits of those policies will outweigh the economic costs by $5.2 trillion, the economists found.

Joining Thunstrom in conducting the analysis were Assistant Professor Stephen Newbold, Professors David Finnoff and Jason Shogren, and graduate student Madison Ashworth, of Star Valley. The team used the most up-to-date information on disease spread and effects on economic activity to conduct the analysis.

It should be possible to conduct a more detailed analysis after more data are available, Newbold says. But a rapid assessment, based on the best currently available information, adds much-needed rigor to the public discussion about the policy response to this outbreak.

Attempts to slow the rate of COVID-19 infections have led many governments around the world to issue unprecedented public policies and guidelines to increase social distance within and across countries. Those measures include closing schools and businesses, imposing broad travel restrictions, and urging citizens to avoid gatherings of 10 or more people.

A recent forecast by Goldman Sachs predicts that these actions will cause the nations gross domestic product to shrink by more than 6 percent this year, even with substantial government stimulus efforts. Already, the country is seeing declines in economic activity and dramatic increases in unemployment, with a particular impact on vulnerable low-income workers.

The UW economists analysis takes into account the potential impact of COVID-19 on the U.S. health care system. Based on previous studies by other researchers, they estimate that the current social distancing measures across the country will reduce the average contact rate among individuals by 38 percent, which reduces the peak of the infection curve by more than half. This would help to avoid overwhelming the health care system and keep the mortality rate lower than the worst-case scenarios.

The economists note that their analysis doesnt examine the impacts of social distancing policies on specific segments of the U.S. population.

It stands to reason that the most vulnerable groups in society will be the hardest hit. For example, the service industry will be disproportionately affected by these policies, which will lead to mass layoffs of low-income workers, the researchers wrote. It also is likely that the most economically disadvantaged groups will suffer the most severe adverse health consequences from COVID-19.

In theory, the disparate impact of the epidemic and social distancing measures could be addressed with appropriate redistributions of resources, they wrote.

The analysis also doesnt consider how the current social distancing measures might affect the probability of a second wave of COVID-19 infections. Instead, we implicitly assume that aggressive social distancing measures buy enough time to develop and distribute cost-effective COVID-19 treatments or vaccines, should a second wave occur, the economists wrote.

In the end, it is in the nations interest to better prepare for outbreaks such as COVID-19, they say.

Our analysis suggests that the aggressive social distancing policies currently promoted in the U.S. probably are justified, given that no good contingency plans were in place for an epidemic of this magnitude, they wrote. But the costs and consequences will be painful. To avoid these in the future, there are likely large social benefits to ensuring that we are better prepared for the next pandemic.
If you are looking for a stock that has a solid history of beating earnings estimates and is in a good position to maintain the trend in its next quarterly report, you should consider Franco-Nevada (FNV). This company, which is in the Zacks Mining - Gold industry, shows potential for another earnings beat.

This precious metals streaming and royalty company has seen a nice streak of beating earnings estimates, especially when looking at the previous two reports. The average surprise for the last two quarters was 20.20%.

For the most recent quarter, Franco-Nevada was expected to post earnings of $0.49 per share, but it reported $0.59 per share instead, representing a surprise of 20.41%. For the previous quarter, the consensus estimate was $0.45 per share, while it actually produced $0.54 per share, a surprise of 20%.

Price and EPS Surprise

Thanks in part to this history, there has been a favorable change in earnings estimates for Franco-Nevada lately. In fact, the Zacks Earnings ESP (Expected Surprise Prediction) for the stock is positive, which is a great indicator of an earnings beat, particularly when combined with its solid Zacks Rank.

Our research shows that stocks with the combination of a positive Earnings ESP and a Zacks Rank #3 (Hold) or better produce a positive surprise nearly 70% of the time. In other words, if you have 10 stocks with this combination, the number of stocks that beat the consensus estimate could be as high as seven.

The Zacks Earnings ESP compares the Most Accurate Estimate to the Zacks Consensus Estimate for the quarter; the Most Accurate Estimate is a version of the Zacks Consensus whose definition is related to change. The idea here is that analysts revising their estimates right before an earnings release have the latest information, which could potentially be more accurate than what they and others contributing to the consensus had predicted earlier.

Franco-Nevada currently has an Earnings ESP of +0.32%, which suggests that analysts have recently become bullish on the company's earnings prospects. This positive Earnings ESP when combined with the stock's Zacks Rank #2 (Buy) indicates that another beat is possibly around the corner.

Story continues

When the Earnings ESP comes up negative, investors should note that this will reduce the predictive power of the metric. But, a negative value is not indicative of a stock's earnings miss.

Many companies end up beating the consensus EPS estimate, but that may not be the sole basis for their stocks moving higher. On the other hand, some stocks may hold their ground even if they end up missing the consensus estimate.

Because of this, it's really important to check a company's Earnings ESP ahead of its quarterly release to increase the odds of success. Make sure to utilize our Earnings ESP Filter to uncover the best stocks to buy or sell before they've reported.



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Spain saw its number of coronavirus cases shoot up by 5,092 today, putting an end to three days of slowing infections.

The 5,092 new cases - up from 3,045 yesterday - mark the largest jump in six days and bring the total from 172,541 to 177,633.

Many countries have seen higher figures at the start of a new week because of delays in counting weekend cases, a problem which may have been exacerbated by the long Easter weekend.

Spain also reported 523 new deaths, down from yesterday's 567, taking the total from 18,056 to 18,579.

The number of new coronavirus cases in Spain was 5,092 today, the highest figure for six days and more than 2,000 larger than yesterday's 3,045

The daily number of deaths was 523 today, slightly down from yesterday's 567 and well down from the peak of 950 deaths recorded on April 2

Of the 5,092 new cases, the Madrid region accounted for 1,478 while Catalonia added another 1,308, according to official figures.

The Spanish government says at least 114 of the new cases were really from the previous day in Andalucia.

The increase of 5,092 brings a halt to a downward trend after jumps of 4,830 on Saturday, 4,167 on Sunday, 3,477 on Monday and 3,045 yesterday.

Still, the average for the last week of 4,420 cases per day is far lower than the average 6,365 of the previous seven days.

Since the beginning of March, Tuesdays and Wednesdays have typically seen an increase in daily infections while Sundays and Mondays have seen a fall. A similar phenomenon has been noted in other countries including Britain.

In Spain, the average Tuesday update has been 914 cases worse than the one on Monday morning when weekend cases are still being counted.

The Madrid region accounts for 6,724 of Spain's 18,579 deaths, while 3,756 people have died in Catalonia.

The flattening curve has prompted the government to begin lifting lockdown restrictions this week, despite concern about a possible new surge in cases.

Construction and manufacturing workers were allowed to resume their jobs on Monday after a two-week 'hibernation' of non-essential economic activity.

Two workers at the Torrero cemetery in Zaragoza wear protective suits as they tape up the coffin of a deceased coronavirus patient in Spain

Marcelo and Juan, two workers at the Huesca funeral home in Zaragoza, move a body from a residence to the mortuary

However, police are still stopping motorists to check the reason for their journey in cities such as Barcelona.

'I still find it quite hasty, this return - I see too many people today,' hospital employee Monica Pinzon said at a Barcelona metro station.

Police and the Red Cross are distributing millions of face masks to people at ticket barriers this week.

For Roberto Aguayo, a 50-year-old Barcelona construction worker travelling on the metro, the restart of his sector came just in time.

'We really needed it. Just when we were going to run out of food, we returned to work,' he said.

However, Catalan leader Quim Torra has described the decision to restart some industrial sectors as irresponsible.

Torra said the lifting of restrictions created an 'enormous' risk of a second wave of coronavirus infections and a second lockdown.

A patient rests in their bed at the temporary hospital for coronavirus patients at Madrid's Ifema conference and exhibition centre

Red Cross volunteers hand out masks to commuters at the Sants metro station in Barcelona yesterday after restrictions were slightly eased

Unlike in other countries such as Britain, Spaniards are not allowed out of their houses for exercise and can only leave for essential activities like buying food.

Shops, bars and public spaces will stay closed until at least April 26 in a lockdown which is feared to have cost at least 900,000 jobs already.

The International Monetary Fund forecasts an eight per cent economic slump this year in Spain, to be followed by a recovery in 2021.

Millions are turning to the government for relief.

On Tuesday, the Spanish government approved a one-month tax moratorium for the self-employed and small companies.

Authorities say the measures will allow those businesses to boost their short-term liquidity by around 3.6billion (3.1billion).

Meanwhile, social security has registered nearly a million requests from self-employed people for pay-outs under the terms of a state relief package announced last month, government spokeswoman Maria Jesus Montero said.
Warning over scammers claiming to sell hand sanitiser

This article is old - Published: Wednesday, Apr 15th, 2020

North Wales Police have issued a warning after reports of scammers claiming to sell hand sanitiser.

It comes after a member of the public received a confirmation email after ordering and paying for the items.

However the delivery never arrived.

It was later found that the company had dissolved earlier this year.

The following advice has been issued on how to remain scam aware during these uncertain times:-

 Be scam aware of people offering or selling:

 Virus testing kits  these are only offered by the NHS

 Vaccines or miracle cures  there is currently no vaccine or cure

 Overpriced or fake goods to protect yourself from Coronavirus such as anti-bacterial products

 Shopping or medication collection services  only use people you trust

 Home cleaning services

Protect yourself and others from scams:-

 Dont be rushed into making a decision, if it sounds too good to be true it probably is

 Only purchase goods from legitimate retailers and take a moment to think before parting with money or personal information

 Dont assume everyone is genuine. Its okay to reject, refuse or ignore any such requests. Only criminals will try to rush or panic you

 If someone claims to represent a charity, ask them for ID. Be suspicious of requests for money up front. If someone attempts to pressurise you into accepting a service theyre unlikely to be genuine. Check with family and friends before accepting offers of help if you are unsure.

For advice on scams call the Citizens Advice Consumer Helpline on: English: 0808 223 1133. Welsh: 0808 223 1144

To report a scam call Action Fraud on 0300 123 2040.

Contact your bank if you think you have been scammed.
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Linkedin Dzulfiqar Fathur Rahman (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Wed, April 15, 2020 17:58 636 fc6853813033f564188675f8bd2198e8 1 Business Indonesia,pre-employment-card,recipients,employees,registration,COVID-19,impact Free

The government has introduced a series of social assistance programs to help people affected by the social restrictions implemented to halt the spread of COVID-19 from affected areas such as Jakarta to other regions of the country.

One of the programs, the preemployment card program, provides access to four months of training for people who have lost their jobs due to COVID-19 outbreak, which has crippled the countrys economy.

To make sure the benefits reach the targeted recipients, the government should inform the public via text message, said researchers.

As of Monday, 2.9 million people had applied via the programs website, prakerja.go.id. The government will disburse the assistance, totaling Rp 3.5 million (US$226.04) in stages, starting with Rp 1 million to take online courses, Rp 2.4 million in post-training benefits and Rp 150,000 as an incentive to take an employment survey.

After increasing the programs budget twofold to Rp 20 trillion, the government plans to cover 5.6 million eligible recipients, with a particular focus on laid-off and furloughed workers, as well as owners of small and medium businesses affected by the outbreak.

With the majority of the promotion and registration for the program taking place online, a large portion of intended recipients may not be able to access the assistance, as only 64 percent of the population has internet access, according to a 2018 study by the Indonesian Internet Providers Association (APJII).

The government, therefore, should partner with cellular service providers to distribute information about the program via text message, said SMERU Research Institute researcher Luhur Bima. Text messages are more likely to reach the public at large, especially people who are potential recipients.

We need to acknowledge there are people with relatively low levels of digital literacy and people who lack access to popular media platforms, including social media, Bima told The Jakarta Post via text message on Monday. The government could also work with community units and neighborhood units to reach people who lack access to modern communication tools.

Informing people via text message was also important at this point because many workers and micro, small and medium enterprise entrepreneurs affected by the outbreak had left the capital for their hometowns, a tradition known as mudik (exodus), said another SMERU Research Institute researcher, Palmira Permata Bachtiar.

Without a good communication strategy, people may be excluded from the preemployment card program, Palmira told the Post via text message Tuesday. Text messages should be used because they are more likely to reach people who live in villages.

Thousands of people left the capital before the government imposed large-scale social restrictions earlier this month to slow the spread of COVID-19. Central Java, for example, recorded 6,724 arrivals in three cities by the end of March.

As of Tuesday, 4,839 people across the country had contracted the fast-spreading COVID-19. Of them, 459 had died of the disease and 426 had recovered.

A number of companies have shut their factories to comply with the government's orders to contain the contagious disease. As a result, nearly 2.7 million people had reported that their jobs had been impacted as of Monday, according to data from the Manpower Ministry and the Workers Social Security Agency (BPJS Ketenagakerjaan), with more than half furloughed or placed on paid or unpaid leave.

The preemployment card program offers access to both online and in-person courses. However, only online courses are available at present, in line with the governments physical distancing orders, according to the programs director of communication, partnerships and ecosystem development, Panji Winanteya Ruky.

The program offers 900 courses, including English for tour guides, accounting, information technology and business management, in partnership with eight companies, including online learning platform Skill Academy and e-commerce companies Tokopedia and Bukalapak.

It is not ideal during this COVID-19 pandemic because many in-person courses cannot be held, Panji told the Post via text message on Tuesday. The Home Ministry has asked regional administrations to provide facilities for people to access online courses, while complying with the COVID-19 safety protocols.

After completing a course, eligible recipients  those aged 18 years or above who are currently not attending university, particularly those who have yet to receive any social assistance  will receive benefits via bank transfers or e-wallet platforms GoPay and LinkAja.
San Francisco, April 15 : As local newsrooms bleed owing to lack of resources and poor ad spend in COVID-19 pandemic, Google on Wednesday announced a Journalism Emergency Relief Fund to deliver urgent aid to thousands of small, medium and local news publishers globally.

The funding is open to news organizations producing original news for local communities during this time of crisis, and will range from the low thousands of dollars for small hyper-local newsrooms to low tens of thousands for larger newsrooms, with variations per region, Richard Gingras, VP, News at Google, said in a statement.

"Local news is a vital resource for keeping people and communities connected in the best of times. But that role is being challenged as the news industry deals with job cuts, furloughs and cutbacks as a result of the economic downturn prompted by COVID-19," Gingras added.

Publishers everywhere can apply for funds via a simple application form.

"We've made this as streamlined as possible to ensure we get help to eligible publishers all over the world. Applications will close on April 29 at 11:59 p.m. Pacific Time. At the end of the process, we'll announce who has received funding and how publishers are spending the money," Google announced.

Additionally, Google.org is giving $1 million collectively to the International Center for Journalists, which plans to provide immediate resources to support reporters globally, and the Columbia Journalism School's Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma which is helping journalists exposed to traumatic events experienced during the crisis.

"We believe it is important to do what we can to alleviate the financial pressures on newsrooms, and will continue to look at other ways to help with more to announce soon," said Google.
Nearly 1000 jobless migrant workers gathered outside a railway station in Mumbais Bandra on Tuesday, hours after Prime Minister extended the lockdown to May 3 to check the spread of the coronavirus infections, demanding for trains to take them home.

Mumbai Police baton-charged the protesting migrant workersmostly from Uttar Pradesh and West Bengalwho assembled near the Bandra railway station around 3pm and dispersed them two hours later.

Bandra Police filed a first information report (FIR) against 700 unidentified persons and the Navi Mumbai Police detained an Airoli resident for allegedly uploading a video on social media which officers said may have helped spread the rumours.

Watch- Mumbai: Wave of migrant workers swamps bus stand after lockdown extension

The man has been handed over to Bandra Police. They will carry out further investigation; we cant reveal anything, said Yogesh Gawde, senior inspector at Rabale police station.

Also read: Social distancing goes for toss in Bandra, homesick migrants protest

Who said what?

Labourers

I am from Malda in West Bengal. We heard the government was running a special train from Mumbai. So we packed our luggage to leave the city as we have lost our jobs, Farooq Shaikh, a daily-wage worker who stays at Behrampada in Bandra (East), said.

We are out of food and now the lockdown has been extended. How will we survive here in Mumbai? We came to know about a special train running for migrants, so we gathered, Zahid Mistri, also from Malda and who lives in Bandra, said.

Also read: What you need to know today

We have spent our savings during the first phase of the lockdown. We have nothing to eat now, we just want to go back at our native place, the government should make arrangements for us, Asadullah Sheikh, who hails from Malda in West Bengal, said.

I am in Mumbai for the last many years but have never seen such a situation. The government should start trains to shift us from here to our native place, Abdul Kayyun, another labourer, said.

Police and railways officials

Vijayalaxmi Hiremath, the senior police inspector at Bandra police station, said they received information about people gathered outside Bandra railway station around 3.30pm. A team of police officers rushed to the spot and found close to a 1000 people there.

Additional reinforcement was called from the reserved police force zonal office and from the neighbouring police stations of Khar and Santacruz.

Also read: Covid-19 cases rising exponentially, its critical to test more: ICMR

We tried to make them understand and asked them to return to their houses, but the crowd was not in a mood to listen, said Hiremath.

The workers were protesting against the extension of the lockdown, saying they do not have access to food and other essentials, a western railway (WR) official, who did not want to be named, said.

Political to and fro

The Bandra incident snowballed into a political blame game between the ruling and opposition parties in Maharashtra as state tourism minister Aaditya Thackeray took a swipe at the central government.

The current situation at Bandra Station, now dispersed or even the rioting in Surat is a result of the Union Government not being able to take a call on arranging a way back home for migrant labour. They dont want food or shelter, they want to go back home. Aaditya Thackeray tweeted.

He also reiterated the state governments demand to operate trains for 24 hours for migrant labourers.

Right from the day the trains have been shut down, the State had requested trains to run for 24 hours more so that migrant labour could go back home. Chief Minister Uddhav Thackeray raised this issue in the PM- CM video conference as well requesting a roadmap for migrant labour to reach home, he said.

After Aaditya Thackerays outburst, the Bharatiya Janata Partys (BJPs) state unit called the incident a failure of the state.

Ex-MP Kirit Somaiya asked the Uddhav Thackeray government to explain how a thousand people gathered at Bandra(West) near the station despite prohibitory orders. Somaiya asked the chief minister to explain what the intelligence agencies were doing and how a large number of people could gather when the police did not allow more than four people in one place.

How and why today? he asked.

Devendra Fadnavis, the former chief minister and leader of Opposition in Maharashtra, said the incident that happened in Bandra was serious and that the state government failed to adequate arrangements for the labourers.

Migrants coming out and demanding food or allowing them to leave for their home state is a failure of the government. It is surprising, that instead of helping the people, ministers are blaming the Central government in an attempt to hide their failure. It is shameful that the government is playing politics at such a time. I urge the state government to hear the people on how they want the ration and food, he said.

Aaditya Thackeray later tweeted saying the Centre and states are facing a Catch-22 situation.

The centre has taken immediate cognizance of the issue and is assisting the State actively. We understand the catch 22 situation centre and states face. Im thankful to PM & HM for understanding the situation, while trying to ensure the safety of home states of migrants, he tweeted.

The migrant labour issue persists everywhere. Even as we house more than 6 lakh migrant labour, with breakfast lunch and dinner, the Union and State Govts are coordinating on further relief for the same. We will continue to ensure the comfort of all migrant labour in our camps, he said in another tweet.

Phone call and Uddhav Thackerays Facebook address

Union home minister Amit Shah spoke to Uddhav Thackeray soon after the incident.

Shah said that events such as the protest weaken Indias fight against coronavirus disease and the administration needs to stay vigilant to avoid such incidents, according to ANI.

He also offered his full support to the Maharashtra government, according to news agency ANI.

In a live webcast later in the night, Uddhav Thackeray assured migrant workers that they were not in a lockup and were safe. They should, therefore, maintain discipline for the next two weeks after which arrangements will be made to have them sent home.

The chief minister said someone must have misled them that trains are starting from today, as a result, they have gathered there.

We have many people who could do this. Do not try to play with their emotions and create a law-and-order situation in the state. I will take strict action against such people. I also ask people not to politicise the issue. This is the time to remain united and fight the pandemic, the chief minister said.

Thackeray also spoke in Hindi during his address.

Why are you worried? You are with us, staying in my state. You will be safe here. There is nothing to worry about. We are not feeling happy to lock you like this. We have to face the challenge unitedly. The day lockdown will be relaxed, you will be allowed to go to your homes. Im in contact with the central government regularly, he said.

He also said that the state has made arrangements of food and stay of around six lakh migrant workers, along with medical facilities. The state also increased the scope of Shiv Bhojan thali, subsidised meal scheme, to 80,000 per day.

What now?

Maharashtras home minister Anil Deshmukh has directed the police to investigate who spread the rumours about the train and take stern action against those found guilty.

Railway authorities also stated that there were rumours on the commencement of train services, however, a notification was issued on the extension of the cancellation of train services.

It is clarified that all passenger train services on Indian Railways, including premium trains, mail/express trains, passenger trains, suburban (local) trains, shall continue to remain cancelled till 12am, May 3, as per guidelines of the Government of India, the Western Railway said in a statement.

(With inputs from agencies)
Christian Bale as Patrick Bateman in American Psycho (Credit: Lionsgate)

Bret Easton Ellis's searing corporate satire American Psycho, penned in 1991, was as controversial, violent, banal, disturbing and (more often than you'd think) amusing a novel as one could imagine. Bringing it to the screen would give any filmmaker with an ounce of sense considerable pause. Many would simply deem it unfilmable. But just a year after the book was published, Edward R. Pressman, veteran producer of celebrated movies like Terrence Malick's directorial debut Badlands, Das Boot and Wall Street, leapt into the breach and optioned it.

Now all he had to do was make it. That part ended up taking a while. With Johnny Depp, Leonardo DiCaprio and Edward Norton at one time set to play the psychotic investment banker Patrick Bateman, and Oliver Stone and David Cronenberg in the frame to direct, it was a bumpy ride to the screen. I Shot Andy Warhol director Mary Harron, who had co-penned the script, eventually beat out higher profile competition to helm it with her first choice Christian Bale as Bateman, gifting the former child star the role that cemented his position as viable leading man in Hollywood.

On the occasion of the movie's 20th anniversary, Yahoo Movies UK spoke to Pressman about how he brought Ellis's horrifying book to the screen, and for god's sake why...

Yahoo Movies UK: When did you first become aware of Elliss novel?

Edward R. Pressman (Credit: Emma McIntyre/Getty Images)

Edward R. Pressman: I remember reading it, and I was in the Hollywood Hills [in 1992], and there were fires in Los Angeles right in front of my eyes. People looting, stealing TV sets. There was race war going on. So when I read the book, I was feeling very impressionable. It caught the moment.

It was given to me by [Re-Animator director] Stuart Gordon. He wanted to make the movie, do it in black and white, and make it ultra-violent. I really thought the only way to take the curse off it, ideally, was to bring in a female director.

Leonardo DiCaprio was set to play Bateman early on, how did he become involved?

Story continues

Christian Bale at pay phone in a scene from the film 'American Psycho', 2000. (Photo by Lion's Gate/Getty Images)

We'd developed the film and brought it to Lionsgate [then Lions Gate], who wanted to make it as a low-budget movie. Then just prior to Cannes in 1997, one of the executives at Lionsgate gave DiCaprio [Harron and Guinevere Turner's] script without talking to us about it. Leo said yes, and gave his blessing for a press release at Cannes. It created a whirlwind. Everyone wanted the film now. It was a magical moment just after Titanic came out.

An Italian distributor flew me from Cannes to his home on the coast of Italy. He had a basement with 15 red Ferraris. He said 'anything you're offered, we will top it'. It sounded like the Russian mob or something. But Mary always stood her ground and said 'it's never gonna happen'. Perhaps it was wishful thinking, but it came true, because after [feminist icon and journalist] Gloria Steinem wrote an article for a major magazine saying that the movie should not be made, that it was misogynistic, Leonardo quit. There was public rancour. A lot of people hated the book. And without seeing the movie, they hated the movie too. [Ironically, Christian Bale's father David ended up marrying Steinem].

Christian Bale in a scene from the film 'American Psycho', 2000. (Photo by Lion's Gate/Getty Images)

A lot of A-list directors wanted to be involved too, right?

When Leonardo announced he wanted to do it, we were approached by Oliver Stone, David Cronenberg, a lot of major filmmakers all of a sudden wanted to do it with Leo. [David] Lynch was one of the first directors I went to as well, and he was interested. Tim Burton came to see me in my hotel room in New York too.

So how did Mary Harron beat out such big names?

She's a very smart gal. And had a real grasp of the movie's irony. The term we always used, Bret and I, was that we always wanted to find a director with a sense of 'cosmic irony'. The epitome of that was, say, Kubrick with A Clockwork Orange. That was the term we used among ourselves in trying to find the right filmmaker. Talking to Mary and seeing her work, and certainly after we saw her script, we thought she'd done a marvellous job. She didn't take the guts from the book. Many would have been turned off by it. It's a very cynical, but also very funny and witty book. Mary captured that, and the ambiguity of it.

Canadian director Mary Harron on the set of her movie American Psycho, based on the novel by Bret Easton Ellis. (Photo by Eric Robert/Sygma/Sygma via Getty Images)

How were the first reactions to the movie?

I remember when the film had its first screening at Sundance. It was super packed. You couldn't get in. It was something people wanted to see by reputation. Fascination even. A lot of people had criticised the book probably more than those who favoured it. We didn't have an established star in the movie, though there was Willem Dafoe, but it was about the younger actors  Reese Witherspoon [and also Jared Leto and Justin Theroux]  who would become famous later.

Why did Mary want Bale in the lead so much?

Mary is an excellent casting talent. She auditioned a lot of people. But she made the decision on Christian, and he really wanted this role. When DiCaprio was going to do the movie, Christian reached out to me to try and save the day. The studio were determined to do it with Leo. But Christian was dead set on the role, and saw what it could be. Mary never stepped away from the project, but the project started to step away from her. But she and Christian always kept the faith. She'd spent a lot of time working on it. But the whole whirlwind with DiCaprio only ended up being about two weeks.

(L-R) Actors Josh Lucas, Christian Bale, Bill Sage, and Justin Theroux on the set of American Psycho, based on the novel by Bret Easton Ellis and directed by Canadian Mary Harron. (Photo by Eric Robert/Sygma/Sygma via Getty Images)

Were you confident that audiences would 'get it'?

I think it was the shock value and the controversial nature that made the film stand out. It's extreme. The ego, the superficiality. I was in New York, and it was playing near where I lived, so on opening night I like to go to the theatres and see reactions. I stopped at 42nd Street at the bottom of Broadway. It was a big theatre, and it was packed. The manager said to me 'Oh, this movie's going to do $15-$20 million this weekend'.

What we found was that the film was doing great in several cities, primarily on the coasts. Some college towns. But business across the country was disappointing. It was maybe more in the consciousness in the cities. It cost $8 million to make, but it was profitable. And continues to be.

Bret Easton Ellis has since said that he perhaps wasn't as pleased with the final movie as he might have been. Do you have any thoughts on that?

Studio portrait of author Bret Easton Ellis. (Photo by Mario Ruiz/The LIFE Images Collection via Getty Images/Getty Images)

We got to be friends. I still see him a couple of times a year. When I've seen him, he's been enthusiastic about the movie. But I've also read him putting it down. But Bret has always been a bit of a rascal.

Most of the time, he's said he's been happy with it, and we've stayed friends. I'd very much like to work with him again.

American Psycho is available to stream on Netflix now.
LANSING, MI  Michigan State Police say officers are using extreme discretion while policing the ongoing gridlock protest in downtown Lansing and around the Michigan Capitol Wednesday. Michigan State Police First Lt. Darren Green, the state security operation commander for the Capitol said there have been no major incidents thus far as anywhere between 3,000 to 4,000 people have gathered on foot and in cars for the protest.

Its been extremely quiet. Weve had officers walking around the Capitol and were monitoring the situation. Everyone thats here has been extremely pleasant and friendly to deal with, Green said.

The protest began Wednesday morning outside the Michigan Capitol in Lansing as thousands of people showed up to protest Gov. Gretchen Whitmers Stay Home, Stay Safe order. Organizers said the goal was to create gridlock in traffic to shut down the city streets in order to demonstrate how upset people are by the order. They also asked those planning to protest to observe social distancing guidelines and to stay in their cars.

Related: Protesters angry with Gov. Whitmers stay-at-home order gridlock Michigan capitol

News reports, photos, videos and social media posts show a scene where several large groups of people are gathered in clear violation of the state stay-at-home order and the social distancing guidelines in that order. Violations of that order are a misdemeanor and can carry fines and possible jail time, Green said.

However, police are not issuing citations for the crowds gathering, even if they are in clear violation of the social distancing guidelines. Instead, officers are reminding people to stay six feet apart and not to encroach on the people near them. Green said the protesters have been receptive to that and are complying with the requests from officers.

The right to free speech is the cornerstone of our democracy and we support peoples right to peacefully protest. What todays protest ultimately demonstrated, though, is a lack of appreciation for the health and safety of others in our state. Each individual who stood at the Capitol today  many in defiance of social distancing  will go home to their families and their communities, putting many others at risk through no fault of their own," said Attorney General Dana Nessel in a statement to MLive. "The definition of a patriot is a person who vigorously supports their country and is prepared to defend it against enemies.

"Demonstrate your patriotism by caring about the well-being of your neighbors. The enemy here is the virus, not each other. The only way we get through this is together; and the sooner we all join together, the sooner this will be over.

Green said the extreme discretion approach is based on a handful of factors. For one, people have the right to gather and protest so trying to stop it could become a legal battle. Secondly, potentially arresting dozens of protestors may create more of a problem for officers trying to maintain a safe environment for everyone around the protests.

Its a delicate balance. People are upset and obviously they are entitled to their opinions on the governors order, Green said. Theres a lot more positive for law enforcement and MSP to exercise discretion.

Green said an exact total wasnt available, but he said somewhere between 3,000 to 4,000 people were involved in the protest. Traffic was backed for miles in all directions leading away from the Capitol, Green said.

If their goal was to create gridlock, they succeeded in that, Green said.

He went on to say that anyone still trying to make their way toward the protest should expect traffic backups well before reaching downtown Lansing exits. He also asked those who may have unintentionally got caught in the gridlock to remain calm and be patient.

Green said police have no plans to change traffic routes or direct traffic to improve the flow as people attempt to leave the city.

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

Complete coverage at mlive.com/coronavirus

Wednesday, April 15: Latest developments on coronavirus in Michigan

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Nearly a quarter of Michigan workers have filed for unemployment

As coronavirus scare relaxes Michigan transparency laws, experts question long-term effects

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The Centre for Socio-Economic Studies (CSS) is warning the government that the current state of the proposed Pre-Tertiary Education Bill will disturb the education system.

The Pre-Tertiary Education Bill, 2019 was laid in Parliament in June last year and seeks to provide for a decentralized pre-tertiary education system and an educational system to produce individuals with the requisite knowledge, skills, and values, to become functional and productive citizens for national development, to establish a Technical and Vocational Education and Training Service, and to provide for related matters.

The Bill has met strong resistance from teacher unions with most of them stressing that the Bill in its current state will pose danger to education management, and also disrupt the synergy between teachers and the Ghana Education Service, which will negatively impact the educational sector.

Adding their voice to the many cries, the Centre for Socio-Economic Studies says, This move by the government, if successful, would place pre-tertiary education in a state of chaos, defeating the intended purpose of Article 25(1) of the Constitution to ensure the right to equal educational opportunities.

"Article 25 (1) of the 1992 Constitution of Ghana in general terms prohibits the discriminatory provision of basic education to the disadvantage of every Ghanaian child in a manner that prevents them from achieving the full realization of their right to education."

CSS is arguing that the Pre-Tertiary Bill in its current state purports to do the exact opposite.

It continued, For instance, under the current arrangement for managing pre-tertiary educational institutions, the Ghana Education Service and its allied institutions have evolved measures, with corresponding efforts to ensure a minimum level of resource distribution and quality assurance for the provision of education resources and achieving productive learning outcomes in accordance with the relevant provisions of the constitution.

Consequently, there is a fair chance, for example, of a child schooling in Adomi in the Asuogyaman District of the Eastern Region being equal in comparison with her counterpart in Kukuom in the Asunafo North District of the Brong Ahafo Region despite the resource mobilisation strengths of the respective districts as the central government acting through the GES is required to ensure equitable distribution of teaching and learning resources. However, under the proposed changes, the ability of each district to mobilise and commit significant allocations to education will define the quality of education each child receives in Ghana and how that child can attain self-actualisation and contribute meaningfully to the socio-economic development of Ghana."

Read full statement below:
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The report Food Extrusion Market by Extruder (Single Screw, Twin Screw, and Contra Twin Screw), Process (Cold and Hot), Food Product (Savory Snacks, Breakfast Cereals, Bread, Flours & Starches, and Textured Protein), and Region  Global Forecast to 2022, The food extrusion market, by food product and equipment, is projected to reach a value of USD 68.38 Billion and USD 7.11 Billion by 2022, at CAGRs of 4.26% and 2.41% from 2017 to 2022, respectively. The market is driven by factors such as the growth of the processed food industry, which in turn drives the extruded products industry. The innovations in the food extrusion industry, for example, by designing extrusion equipment that offers increased productivity and reducing the production cost, also drive the food extrusion market.

On the basis of extruder, the global market was led by twin screw extruder, followed by single screw extruder, in 2016. Ease of functionality, low cost of production, better control of process parameters, high level of process flexibility, and remarkable mixing capability are the key features of twin screw extruders.

Download PDF Brochure: https://www.marketsandmarkets.com/pdfdownloadNew.asp?id=221423108

The food extrusion market, on the basis of process, is segmented into hot and cold extrusion. The hot extrusion segment accounted for a larger market share in 2016. Rapid high energy transfer into the mass with high-temperature short-time advantages is the key factor for the increasing preference for hot extrusion operations.

On the basis of food product, the savory snacks segment accounted for the largest market share in 2016, followed by breakfast cereals. Extrusion technology gave a phenomenal boost to the snack food industry by increasing the possibility of new shapes and sizes and textures using various raw materials.

The European region was the largest market for the food extrusion equipment market in 2016. This can be attributed to the increase in demand for various extruded food products in the European region. The robust growth of the food industry of Europe is supported by the increased demand for ready-to-eat snacks and other extruded food products. Moreover, many key players have their production plants of extrusion machinery established in this region.

Speak to Analyst: https://www.marketsandmarkets.com/speaktoanalystNew.asp?id=221423108

This report includes a study of marketing and development strategies, along with the product portfolios of the leading companies. It includes profiles of leading companies such as Baker Perkins (UK), Coperion (Germany), Buhler (Switzerland), AKRON TOOL & DIE (US), Groupe Legris Industries (Belgium), Pavan SpA (Italy), Flexicon (US), Triott Group (Netherlands), The Bonnot Company (US), and AMERICAN EXTRUSION INTERNATIONAL (US).
LAYING THE GROUNDWORK

INCREASED ACTIVITY

With COVID-19 forcing states to take their workforces remote, chief information security officers (CISOs) are now faced with a unique set of challenges.caught up with several state CISOs to understand how their jobs have changed since the onset of the novel coronavirus pandemic.A number of states were better prepared for the jump to remote work due to pre-existing telework programs. In recent years, both a desire to cut down on carbon emissions and spend public dollars more efficiently has driven state governments to invest in such programs: two examples are Washington state and Utah.Washington state, which was initially hit hard by the COVID-19 outbreak, had identified telework as a means of reducing carbon emissions as early as 2012, after a report from the state's Department of Transportation on commuter reduction said so. In 2014, Gov. Jay Inslee signed an executive order aimed at expanding telework and flexible hours, which laid the foundation for an expansion of a remote workforce."Washington was one of the few states where telework was already highly encouraged. I think that helped us very much in this situation, because many folks, many agencies, were already used to it, Washington CISO Vinod Brahmapuram said.Utah, meanwhile, launched a telework pilot program in 2018, also aimed at reducing daily commutes. The program, which only had 137 participants when it began, eventually grew to a statewide program involving over 2,500 workers. When COVID-19 struck, the government had already been given the opportunity to build out associated infrastructure, said Phil Bates, state CISO with Utah's Department of Technology Services."We had already started doing a number of initiatives associated with remote working," said Bates. Those initiatives included issuing vital items  like laptops and tablets  to workers, growing VPN pools, and educating staff about best practices."That really helped us a lot because we already had a lot of the infrastructure and processes in place... It was just a question of adding a whole lot more people to it," Bates explained.At the same time that CISOs have had to quickly stand up security for large groups of remote workers, they've also faced a surge in the malicious activity that has accompanied the COVID-19 crisis . Experts have warned that increases in social engineering attempts, virus-related lures and ransomware should all be considered possibilities.David Allen, state CISO with the Georgia Technology Authority (GTA), said that his agency has witnessed an undeniable uptick in interest from bad actors.This crisis has presented some challenges across all IT fronts. When your capacity is built around a certain concurrent number on any given day and now 100 percent of your workforce is remote, that puts a certain stress on the technology," he said. "From a security standpoint, in the beginning it was kind of business as usual. But now as we enter the third week or so weve seen a lot of increased activity; weve seen increased phishing campaigns against employees, a lot more scanning activity against networks.Bates has seen similar increases in Utah.We get anywhere from 1 billion to 1.4 billion scan attempts on our network per day. But that's been ramping up since this [COVID-19] has happened over the past couple weeks. I think we hit 2.1 billion last weekend, he said.A threat actor always tries to exploit the weakness in a human or the weakness in a device, Brahmapuram said. Theres a lot about the pandemic that is unknown. That is such a great angle for these hackers to exploit, because they can try to tell people that they have information... Its heart-breaking to me, because... they are being very inhumane in how they exploit this situation.But past mistakes have hopefully helped prepare governments to be extra vigilant. In Georgia, which has seen multiple attacks in the last several years  the city of Atlanta spent $2.6 million to recover from a large ransomware attack in 2018, and a rash of similar malware attacks hit the state's court system last year  Allen said he hopes that previous brushes with ransomware have hopefully made the state workforce wary enough to follow best practices.In reality, we got hit pretty hard with ransomware over the past year and so this has really just reinforced some of those good habits that weve been impressing upon our users over the past 12 months," he said. "Its been an opportunity to reinforce some of those lessons and take some of those skills that they learned on our corporate networks and take them home to their home networks.
The Presidential Task Force (PTF) on COVID-19, has appealed to banks in the country to continue to give skeletal services to Nigerians...





The Presidential Task Force (PTF) on COVID-19, has appealed to banks in the country to continue to give skeletal services to Nigerians.





This comes 24 hours after President Muhammadu Buhari extended the initial two-week lockdown by 14 days.





PTFs National Coordinator, Dr. Sani Aliyu, who made the appeal during the daily media briefing on Tuesday in Abuja, recalled that there was an exemption for banks to provide skeletal services.





When we implemented the cessation of movement policy two weeks ago, we did make an exemption for banks to be allowed to engage in skeletal services and following that, the financial authorities released additional guidelines to the banks.

We are appealing to the banks to continue to provide financial services, especially the availability of cash at the Automated Teller Machine (ATM) and skeletal services within the banking halls.





What is important for us is for banks to comply with our advice in terms of reducing mass gatherings, having hand disinfectants at the entrance point, monitoring of temperature and making sure that they observe the physical distancing measures that we have advised, Aliyu said.




A third of the nearly 2,000 sailors from the Charles de Gaulle and escort vessels are confirmed to have COVID-19.

A third of the nearly 2,000 sailors who were aboard a French aircraft carrier and support craft when a coronavirus outbreak occurred at sea have tested positive.

With two-thirds of test results in, 668 sailors from the Charles de Gaulle and escort vessels in its battle group are confirmed to have COVID-19, Frances defence ministry announced on Wednesday.

Thirty-one were being treated in hospital, and one was in intensive care, a ministry statement said.

Last week, the Charles de Gaulle was brought back 10 days early from a deployment in the Atlantic after some crew members showed coronavirus symptoms.





The carrier, which had helicopters and fighter jets on board, was accompanied by two frigates  one for aerial defence and the other an anti-submarine vessel.

Sailors from the Charles de Gaulle and one of the frigates  and the pilots who returned the aircraft to their respective bases  are all placed in isolation for 14 days, the ministry said.

There had been no virus outbreak on the other frigate.

So far, 1,767 sailors from the battle group have been tested for the virus, the vast majority from the aircraft carrier itself, said the ministry statement.

The Charles de Gaulle, which can transport about 2,000 sailors, had been deployed in the Atlantic as part of a NATO exercise after taking part in Operation Chammal, which seeks to contain the ISIS (ISIL) group in Iraq and Syria.

The vessels in the battle group are being disinfected, the ministry said.
FILE PHOTO: The logo for Occidental Petroleum is displayed on a screen on the floor at the NYSE in New York

By Jennifer Hiller

HOUSTON (Reuters) - Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway Inc <BRKa.N> agreed to take Occidental Petroleum Corp <OXY.N> common shares in lieu of a first-quarter cash dividend, helping relieve the strain on the oil giant's balance sheet.

Berkshire can immediately sell the shares, according to a regulatory filing on Wednesday, but has not indicated its intent. A sale would bring in less than $230 million at Occidental's current price.

The conglomerate last year bought $10 billion worth of Occidental's preferred shares to help finance its $38 billion acquisition of Anadarko Petroleum.

The deal was a bet on rising shale oil prices months ahead of the worst price crash in decades, and saddled Occidental with a huge debt load at a time when there are few buyers for assets to offset the acquisition cost.

Global fuel demand has fallen as much as 30 million barrels per day (bpd), or 30%, this year as efforts to fight the coronavirus pandemic have grounded aircraft, reduced vehicle usage and pushed economies worldwide toward recession.

Representatives for Berkshire and Occidental declined to comment.

"They need to preserve cash in any and all ways possible. It's a dangerous time to be a levered E&P company," said Jennifer Rowland, an industry analyst with Edward Jones.

Last week, Occidental asked the U.S. government to consider providing liquidity to the oil industry.

Occidental shares were off 11% at $13.23 at midday and are down 68% from the start of the year. The company's market value is about $11.7 billion, a fraction of what it paid for Anadarko.

U.S. crude futures fell below $20 per barrel on Wednesday and the global benchmark tumbled nearly 6% to $27.89 per barrel.

The oil price drop and Anadarko acquisition left Occidental with about $40 billion in debt and dwindling means of covering its costs. Last month it slashed its 2020 budget and cut its annual dividend to 44 cents a share from $3.16.

Story continues

Berkshire companies hold around 4.7% of Occidental common shares, according to a Wednesday filing.

Last month, Occidental agreed to take three directors nominated by activist investor Carl Icahn, who had opposed the deal and urged Occidental to sell itself rather than buy Anadarko.

(Reporting by Jennifer Hiller in Houston and Arathy S Nair in Bengaluru; Editing by Shounak Dasgupta, Marguerita Choy and Richard Chang)
Balde struggled to free himself as he was dragged along the platform and into a tunnel, where his head and upper body violently struck a metal partition, according to authorities. Following his arrest last Friday, Munn admitted taking a swing at Balde out of loyalty to his friend, but said he was only trying to push the victim to the ground.
ATHENS, Greece, April 15, 2020 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- TOP Ships Inc. (the Company) (TOPS) announced today that it has entered into a placement agency agreement with Maxim Group LLC relating to the sale of the Companys securities (the Placement Agency Agreement). Pursuant to the Placement Agency Agreement, the Company entered into a securities purchase agreement with certain institutional investors in connection with a registered direct offering of an aggregate of 33,333,333 common shares at a public offering price of $0.18 per share (the Registered Offering). The aggregate gross proceeds of the Registered Offering is $6.0 million. The Registered Offering is expected to close on or about April 17, 2020, subject to the satisfaction of customary closing conditions.



Maxim Group LLC is the sole placement agent in connection with the offering.

The common shares are being offered pursuant to a shelf registration statement on Form F-3 (File No. 333-234281) previously filed and declared effective by the United States Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). A prospectus supplement relating to the offering will be filed by the Company with the SEC. When filed, copies of the prospectus supplement, together with the accompanying base prospectus, can be obtained at the SEC's website at http://www.sec.gov or from the offices of Maxim Group LLC, 405 Lexington Avenue, New York, New York 10174, Attn: Prospectus Department, or by telephone at (212) 895-3745.

This press release shall not constitute an offer to sell or the solicitation of an offer to buy any securities, nor shall there be any sale of these securities in any jurisdiction in which such offer, solicitation or sale would be unlawful prior to the registration or qualification under the securities laws of any such jurisdiction. Any offers of securities will be made only by means of a prospectus supplement and accompanying base prospectus.

About TOP Ships Inc.

TOP Ships Inc. (TOPS) is an international owner and operator of modern, fuel efficient ECO tanker vessels currently focusing on the transportation of crude oil and petroleum products.

Story continues

Cautionary Note Regarding Forward-Looking Statements

Matters discussed in this press release may constitute forward-looking statements within the meaning of the U.S. federal securities laws. 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.

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, our management's examination of historical operating trends, data contained in our records and other data available from third parties. Although we believe that these assumptions were reasonable when made, because these assumptions are inherently subject to significant uncertainties and contingencies which are difficult or impossible to predict and are beyond our control, we cannot assure you that we will achieve or accomplish these expectations, beliefs or projections.

For further information please contact:

Alexandros Tsirikos

Chief Financial Officer

TOP Ships Inc.

Tel: +30 210 812 8107

Email: atsirikos@topships.org
New Delhi, April 15 : The global PC shipments registered 51.6 million units in the first quarter of 2020 -- a steep 12.3 per cent decline from the year-ago quarter - due to coronavirus pandemic which resulted in disruptions at both supply and demand front, a Gartner report said on Wednesday.

After three consecutive quarters of growth, the worldwide PC market experienced its sharpest decline since 2013 due to the COVID-19 pandemic in the January-March quarter, according to preliminary results from Gartner.

Although Lenovo maintained its top position in the worldwide PC market, its shipments declined 3.2 per cent in the first quarter of 2020 and 22.6 per cent (year over year) in Asia Pacific.

HP Inc. had a challenging first quarter, with 12.1 per cent decline in PC shipments after three consecutive quarters of shipment growth.

Dell was the only top vendor that showed shipment growth - rising 2.2 per cent - despite the impact from COVID-19. Dell's shipments grew in all regions in the first quarter of 2020, except in Asia Pacific.

"The single most significant influencing factor for PC shipment decline was the coronavirus outbreak, which resulted in disruptions to both the supply and demand of PCs," said Mikako Kitagawa, research director at Gartner.

Following the first lockdown in China in late January, there was lower PC production volume in February that turned into logistics challenges.

"Once coronavirus-related lockdowns expanded to other regions, there were new, sudden pockets of PC demand for remote workers and online classrooms that PC manufacturers could not keep up with," Kitagawa added.

Despite the impact of COVID-19, the top three vendors' market share remained unchanged from the previous quarter. They accounted for 65.6 per cent of PC shipments in the first quarter of 2020, up from just over 60 per cent in the first quarter of 2019.

Asia Pacific showed the worst decline of 27.1 per cent (year-over-year).

"This quarter's vendor results underscore the growing economic uncertainties that are tightening PC spending, especially among small and midsize businesses," said Kitagawa.

This uncertainty, coupled with the end of the Windows 10 upgrade peak, is causing enterprises to shift their IT budgets away from PCs and toward strategic business continuity planning.

"We will start seeing enterprises and consumers alike extending their PC life cycles on a more permanent basis as they focus on preserving cash," Kitagawa noted.
New Delhi, April 15 : Praveen Togadia, face of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) for decades before being voted out, on Wednesday criticised attacks healthcare professionals and sought the Centre's intervention to check that.

"India Health Line condemns attack on any medical professionals, including doctors, nurses, lab staff, ward staff, as well as the police. We appeal the central and the state governments to take the strictest action against attackers. Save the medical fraternity to save common people," said Togadia.

India Health Line, a socio-medical service platform, was launched in 2014, while Togadia, a cancer surgeon by profession, was with the VHP.

Even on Wednesday, a team of doctors and medical staff was attacked by mob in Moradabad, Uttar Pradesh. They had gone there to take away two Covid-19 suspects.

Earlier in Bengaluru, health workers were attacked while they were conducting door-to-door check for Covid-19 infection.

In Delhi, doctors of the Safdarjung Hospital claimed that they were attacked.

In a viral video from Indore in Madhya Pradesh, a mob could be seen attacking a team of healthcare workers in the first week of April. The team was surveying the area for coronavirus cases.
EUGENE, Ore, -- Thai is a pit bull terrier mix looking for a quiet home and a family that give her the time she needs to adjust and get comfortable in a new environment.

Thai is easily frightened of new things and people, so she will need a safe place to gain the confidence she needs to open up and achieve her full potential.

She is a loyal and loving dog who becomes sweet and silly once she is comfortable in her surroundings. She loves her people and likes to greet her favorite humans with big kisses.

Thai has been getting a lot of training at Greenhill Humane Society and she is ready to learn even more. She should go to an adult-only home and she should be the only pet in the home.

Thai is 1-year-old and weighs about 55 pounds. She came into the shelter as a stray, so her background is not known. Her adoption fee is $175, which helps pay the cost of vaccinations, microchip identification, spaying or neutering, a certificate for a free veterinary exam and more.

Thai was the Pet of the Week on KEZI 9 News. Every Tuesday, KEZI showcases homeless pets on the Midday newscast at 11 a.m. If you are interested in Thai or other animals at Greenhill Humane Society, click here.

Greenhill Humane Society is located at 88530 Green Hill Road and is open daily by appointment only from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Its phone number is 541-689-1503. Adoptions are also currently by appointment only.

To ensure a good match is made, potential adopters must go to the animal shelter in person to meet with the animal and kennel staff. All family members should be present to ensure the animal is compatible with everyone in the household.
Urging all Indians to abide by the extended nationwide lockdown imposed by the central government, actor Ayushmann Khurrana on Wednesday said that only countrymen possess the power to win over COVID-19 and they can do so by staying at home.

The 'Article 15' actor urged people to patiently contribute to the fight against the highly contagious virus by diligently following the extended period of nationwide lockdown.

"We all are at risk due to coronavirus and we have to be patient to beat its spread. Nothing compares to the pain of losing lives and I urge every citizen of the country to stay at home to protect themselves and their loved ones," the 35-year-old actor said.

"Respect the national lockdown till May 3rd and don't flout the rules laid down by the government because the power is with us to save our lives and the lives of many others," he added.

Khurrana has requested each citizen to maintain the same resolve, same dedication during this extended period of lockdown as they have shown during the initial 21-day lockdown.

"Every citizen of India is facing difficulties at various levels, every citizen is anxious but we all have been persistent in trying to keep the virus at check. Only we can help India win over coronavirus and protect the lives of millions of people," said the 'Vicky Donor' actor.

"Let us be compassionate, let our resolve not waver, let our focus to make India win not waver. Each one of us has to maintain strict vigil to control the situation and help India return back to normalcy," he added.

Prime Minister, Narendra Modi on Tuesday had announced the extension of the lockdown as a precautionary measure against coronavirus spread. And the 21-day lockdown which was slated to end yesterday was extended till May 3.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Premier Brian Pallister is telling Manitoba's public service unions that the only way they can avoid layoffs amid the coronavirus pandemic is to accept reduced workweeks for non-essential employees.

Hey there, time traveller!

This article was published 14/4/2020 (637 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Premier Brian Pallister is telling Manitoba's public service unions that the only way they can avoid layoffs amid the coronavirus pandemic is to accept reduced workweeks for non-essential employees.

Pallister raised the issue of a reduced work schedule Tuesday morning when he announced the province will cover the salaries of front-line health-care workers who miss work for 14 days to self-isolate if they have been exposed to COVID-19.

The reduced workweek is an "all hands on deck approach to fighting COVID-19," the premier said at a news conference.

The news was a jolt for unions that have been at loggerheads with the Pallister government for most of the four years its been in power.

MIKAELA MACKENZIE / WINNIPEG FREE PRESS FILES MGEU president Michelle Gawronsky.

"We were told that the only way to avoid significant layoffs would be to voluntarily enter into work-sharing agreements where non-essential staff would have their workweek reduced to as little as two days per week," said Michelle Gawronsky, president of the Manitoba Government and General Employees Union.

Provincial officials were unable to say which public services they consider non-essential, Gawronsky said.

Affected workers would get Employment Insurance for the lost work days, she said. For those who earn less than $54,000 annually, that would mean keeping about 70 per cent of their pay and avoiding a layoff. But it would only be possible if the federal government agreed to make the province eligible for the EI program, she said.

The premier told reporters the plan is required in order to shift resources to where they're needed most right now  the health-care system and fighting COVID-19.

"We were told that the only way to avoid significant layoffs would be to voluntarily enter into work-sharing agreements where non-essential staff would have their workweek reduced to as little as two days per week."  Michelle Gawronsky, president of the Manitoba Government and General Employees Union

Pallister said the work reduction would be a temporary measure to get through an economic crisis brought on by the pandemic that has resulted in shrinking provincial tax revenue, soaring health-care costs and a projected $5-billion provincial deficit this year.

"Its far preferable in our minds to layoffs and a way in which we can help keep people at work part of the time," Pallister said.

The move left unions scrambling for answers to how it will all play out.

RUTH BONNEVILLE / WINNIPEG FREE PRESS FILES Manitoba Federation of Labour president Kevin Rebeck: "Pretty surprised to hear about that today,"

"I was pretty surprised to hear about that today," Manitoba Federation of Labour president Kevin Rebeck said, adding more questions remained after a conference call with the premier.

Pallister has said several times in recent days that private-sector workers have been hit harder by restrictions imposed due to the pandemic, but that doesn't mean slashing the public sector will make things better, Rebeck said. The goal should be to keep people employed as much as possible.

"We're facing an unprecedented health crisis," Rebeck said.

"Right now, more Manitobans than ever are counting on public services to be there. More people are calling on EIA (Employment and Income Assistance), Rent Assist and Child and Family Services than ever before."

"It will take money out of the pockets of families at a time when they need it most and it will put more pressure on an already strained economy."  NDP Leader Wab Kinew

NDP Opposition leader Wab Kinew said Pallister's plan will make things worse for Manitobans who are already struggling to pay their bills.

"It will take money out of the pockets of families at a time when they need it most and it will put more pressure on an already strained economy," Kinew said in an email.

The premier said he's spoken to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland about the EI proposal, adding it wouldn't require a change in federal legislation. It would make use of the employment insurance program that government has paid into the last 10 years, with more than $2 billion in employer and employee contributions, he said.

MIKAELA MACKENZIE / WINNIPEG FREE PRESS Premier Brian Pallister: "All hands on deck approach to fighting COVID-19."

He urged union leaders to join him in lobbying the federal government to allow "this common-sense sharing program" to be used in the public sector, much like it's already in use throughout the private sector. He said a Manitoba government employee getting paid two days a week by the province and three days a week by EI for four months wouldn't be a bad deal for a civil servant "in the middle of a Manitoba summer with their kids at home."

Manitoba a standout on part-time EI OTTAWA  The Pallister government may be the only jurisdiction to consider putting its public servants onto part-time employment insurance. In a Tuesday afternoon survey of the nine other provinces, the governments of Saskatchewan, Alberta, British Columbia, Ontario, Quebec, New Brunswick and Newfoundland and Labrador said they were not exploring such a move. Other provinces did not respond by deadline. Many of the provinces said they were reallocating staff, and some had undergone hiring freezes. click to read more OTTAWA  The Pallister government may be the only jurisdiction to consider putting its public servants onto part-time employment insurance. In a Tuesday afternoon survey of the nine other provinces, the governments of Saskatchewan, Alberta, British Columbia, Ontario, Quebec, New Brunswick and Newfoundland and Labrador said they were not exploring such a move. Other provinces did not respond by deadline. Many of the provinces said they were reallocating staff, and some had undergone hiring freezes. Municipalities across Canada have laid off workers, or kept them as unpaid staff, though it appear no large cities have had their staff undertake part-time EI. Under the federal EI Work Sharing program, employers can implement a voluntary reduction in hours () to retain a full work force on a reduced work week, rather than laying off part of his or her work force, according to a Service Canada website. Its unclear if thats the program Pallister intends to use, and if provincial governments would qualify for it. Dylan Robertson Close

Stay informed The latest updates on the novel coronavirus and COVID-19 delivered to your inbox every weeknight. Sign Up I agree to the Terms and Conditions, Cookie and Privacy Policies, and CASL agreement.

Pallister told reporters the 14-day paid leave will apply to all front-line workers  "people who make the beds and clean the floors and washrooms and do the front-line work of protecting people when theyre in our facilities."

He did not specify if the paid leave includes nursing home and home care workers, said Shannon McAteer, CUPE health care co-ordinator for Manitoba. "We're happy they're implementing this, but what does it mean?"

Meanwhile, social service providers that receive provincial grants are especially nervous right now, said Bob Moroz, president of the Manitoba Association of Health Care Professionals.

The union represents workers at several of them, including the Society for Manitobans with Disabilities, the Rehabilitation Centre for Children and the Aboriginal Health and Wellness Centre.

"A lot of these places are very much on edge," Moroz said. "We need to make sure these services arent on the chopping block."

carol.sanders@freepress.mb.ca
China: Crosses 'higher than the national flag' removed from churches amid COVID-19

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Chinas communist government removed numerous crosses from church rooftops during the country's coronavirus epidemic under the pretext that religious symbolism cannot be higher than the national flag.

Religious Liberty Magazine Bitter Winter reported that in mid-March, crosses were removed from multiple churches in the eastern provinces of Jiangsu and Anhui and in the neighboring Shandong, the prefecture-level city of Linyi.

In February, officials removed a cross from a government-approved Three-Self church in Hexi village. The church was built in 2007 and has complied with state regulations, implementing the four requirements of the governments religion sinicization campaign. Additionally, it had stopped all gatherings during the coronavirus epidemic. Nevertheless, it was not spared in the crackdown.

The government does not provide enough help during the epidemic but instead demolishes crosses, a local believer told Bitter Winter.

Last December, at the height of the coronavirus epidemic, numerous crosses were removed from Three-Self churches in Hegang, a prefecture-level city in the northeastern province of Heilongjiang.

A member of a church in the citys Dongshan district told Bitter Winter that a local official threatened to close down the church if the cross was not removed because it was higher than the national flag.

Crosses of Christ Gospel Church and Luobei Christian Church in Hegangs Luobei county were removed the same month using the same pretext. An employee in the county government explained that the crosses were too eye-catching, and they would attract people into the churches.

In November, government officials ordered the removal of the cross from the Ranfang Church in Gushi county in the central province of Henan, telling believers that its the Communist Party that gives you food and money, not God.

That same month, the cross of the Ranfang Church in Gushi county was taken down.

A congregation member said that ahead of the demolition, the government summoned the church director for ideological work, and officials from neighboring villages were brought in to maintain order.

How can we, common people, withstand these officials in power? the believer asked. We had to restrain our anger and keep silent.



The outbreak of the virus, which began in Wuhan, China, sickened and killed thousands in the country. Previous reports have revealed how the Chinese communist government continued its campaign against Christianity during the coronavirus outbreak.

While most of the churches across the country were ordered to refrain from physically gathering to help slow the spread of the virus, churches both underground and state-approved were permitted to meet online.

However, in Chinas Shandong province, two state-run Christian organizations, the Three-Self Patriotic Movement and China Christian Council released a statement, ordering all online preaching be ceased and churches that gather in secret be rooted out.

Additionally, it ordered officials to guide Christians in other ways, with the caveat of not gathering together!

China is ranked as one of the worst countries in the world when it comes to persecution of Christians on Open Doors USAs World Watch List. The organization notes that all churches are perceived as a threat if they become too large, too political or invite foreign guests.

In the past year, Chinese authorities have shut down a number of well-known churches, including Rongguili Church in Guangzhou, Xunsiding Church in Xiamen, and the 5,000-member Early Rain Covenant Church in Chengdu, China.

A policy of 'sinicizing' the church is becoming increasingly influential because the Communist Party is relying strongly on Chinese cultural identity to stay in power, says Open Doors. The new restrictions on internet, social media and NGOsand the new regulations on religionare all seriously limiting freedom.

China has also been labeled by the U.S. State Department as a country of particular concern for continuing to engage in particularly severe violations of religious freedom.

Pastor Jian Zhu, who was raised in China but now is the director of the China Institute at Lincoln Christian University in Illinois, recently warned that Chinas persecution against house churches is now the worst he has seen since 1979.

The Chinese government now has placed severe restrictions and policies on the house churches, asking neighbors to spy on one another, pressures school teachers and college professors to betray and sign a statement to denounce their faith as well as to do the same to the students, Zhu said.

Now, they are trying to eliminate Christianity from public life, he said. Cameras are all over to watch church and Christians go to Sunday service. Families are threatened to not go to church or they will be punished or their relatives could be in trouble.
NEW DELHI: The Press Information Bureau (PIB) on Wednesday debunked a media report claiming that Prime Minister Narendra Modi did not consult the 21-member scientific taskforce on COVID-19 before extending the lockdown till May 3.

The government agency took to Twitter to reject the media report.

In its tweet, the PIB said, A magazine has claimed that PM Modi did not consult the 21-member scientific #COVID taskforce before extending the lockdown. Reality : All decisions were taken after consulting the taskforce.

The agency also tagged a clarification from ICMR which read There is a media report which makes false claims about the COVID-19 Task Force. The fact is that the task force met 14 times in the last month and all decisions taken involve the members of the task force. Please avoid such conjectures. #COVID2019india #IndiaFightsCorona.

There is a media report which makes false claims about the COVID-19 Task Force. The fact is that the task force met 14 times in the last month and all decisions taken involve the members of the task force. Please avoid such conjectures. #COVID2019india #IndiaFightsCorona  ICMR (@ICMRDELHI) April 15, 2020

The nation-wide lockdown has been extended till May 3 to contain the spread of the pandemic that has killed over 370 people and infected over 11,000 in the country.

The announcement for extending the lockdown was made by Prime Minister Narendra Modi in his address to the nation - the fifth since the COVID-19 crisis began.

In his address, he highlighted the progress India made in checking the spread of the infection and asked the people of the country to follow seven rules in this time of crisis.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi also thanked the nation for its collective fight against coronavirus COVID-19 pandemic and the hardships that the people, especially the migrant workers, faced during this period as he announced his decision to extend the nationwide lockdown till May 3.

''People have gone through several hardships to save India. I know how many difficulties you faced. I respectfully bow to the people of India for their sacrifice,'' PM Narendra Modi said. ''India is fighting coronavirus pandemic due to the unity and penance of the entire country. India has been able to contain coronavirus to a large extent. I thank you all for your patience,'' the PM said adding, ''India will remain in lockdown till May 3.''

The PM said that extending the lockdown is very important to contain the spread of the coronavirus pandemic in the country.

PM Modi stressed that the coronavirus pandemic should be curbed at every level. ''Even if one person dies due to coronavirus, our tension should increase. That is why hotspots must be identified with extended vigilance and harsh steps to be taken to curb the spread of coronavirus. If new hotspots arrive, our efforts will face problems,'' he added.

PM Modi said that till April 20, harsh steps will be taken to curtail the spread of coronavirus in the country. ''Hotspots will be carefully identified.'' He said that rules will be eased for areas where the lockdown is implemented properly and fewer new cases are registered till April 20.
Revised rules for SBI, IDBI Bank, Axis Bank and Syndicate Bank from July 1 2021: Check details here

Bank holiday 2021: Banks to remain shut on these days , know the dates

Bank holidays in August 2021: Banks to remain closed for 15 days in August; Check dates here

Banks need to adopt partnership model; can give great push to economy, says PM Modi

Lockdown guidelines: Banks to remain open

India

oi-Vicky Nanjappa

New Delhi, Apr 15: The Ministry of Home Affairs has issued fresh guidelines on how the lockdown until May 3 should be enforced.

It has listed out several activities that are prohibited. In the case of the financial sector, it has listed out the services that can remain functional.

Lockdown: Full list of activities prohibited until May 3

What remains open in the financial sector:

Reserve Bank of India and RBI regulated financial markets and entities such as NPCI, CCIL, payment system operators and standalone primary dealers.

Bank branches, ATMs, IT vendors for banking operations, banking correspondence, ATM operation and cash management agencies.

Bank branches to be allowed to work as per normal working hours till disbursal of DBT cash transfers is complete.

Local administration to provide adequate security to personnel at bank branches and social distancing should be maintained.

SEBI and capital and debt market services as notified by the SEBI.

IRDAI and Insurance companies.
The escalating coronavirus pandemic has ushered in a new era of stock market volatility, as investors come to terms with consecutive history-making daily swings. But it has also shone a spotlight on a promising investment opportunity  one that's been winning the hearts of millennials.

Sustainable investments  those focused on companies with strong environmental, social and corporate governance (ESG) principles  outperformed their conventional counterparts in the first quarter of 2020, even as the outbreak sent markets crashing.

In the first three months of the year, 70% of sustainable equity funds recorded returns in the top halves of their broad-based peer group, according to investment research firm Morningstar. Of those, 44% scored within the top quartile. When the full extent of the pandemic became clear in early March, ESG-aware companies outperformed other stocks by up to 5.7%, HSBC found.

To be sure, sustainable funds still suffered heavy losses amid last month's downturn. However, the losses were notably lower than that among traditional funds. Morningstar's head of sustainability research, Jon Hale, said that has a lot to do with the underlying principles of ESG-focused companies, which place customers and employees at the fore.

"It's very simple, really  companies truly focused on the well-being of their workers and customers are able to make the right decisions more quickly in a major crisis like this one," Hale told CNBC Make It.
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Leaders of small and mid-sized cities, including in Southern California, say they are being overlooked in federal coronavirus bailouts -- and it's forcing them to consider drastic steps to balance their budgets.

The CARES Act, the $2.3 trillion federal stimulus package passed by Congress last month, includes $150 billion for direct help to state and local municipalities hit hard by the COVID-19 pandemic.

READ: LA Controller Forecasts A $231M Hit To The City's Bottom Line This Fiscal Year

But to apply to the Treasury Department for aid, cities must be one of 36 metros nationwide with populations over 500,000.

Los Angeles fits that bill, but California cities like Bakersfield, Anaheim, Santa Ana and Riverside do not. Their leaders have to appeal to Sacramento for a piece of the state pie.

Officials who are on the ground directing coronavirus response at the city level say that's not good enough.

"As local leaders we are facing an unprecedented crisis with the COVID-19 pandemic," said L.A. City Councilman Joe Buscaino, who is president of the National League of Cities. The organization held a conference call with mayors and members of city councils all over the country asking for the feds to tweak the relief package.

"This is our message: we need direct funding for cities of all sizes."





"It's reprehensible and inexcusable that every other city that's below 500,000 in population [is] currently not given direct funding," Buscaino said.

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Thousands of cities around the country are turning to program cuts, worker furloughs and layoffs to deal with plunging revenue since coronavirus brought local economies to a screeching halt, according to a new survey released by the National League of Cities and personal testimony from mayors on the call.

Many are also dialing back infrastructure projects -- water, sewer and road improvements -- or putting them on hold indefinitely.

Economic activity makes up a large chunk of cities' funding. In L.A.'s case that includes sales taxes, hotel fees, even parking tickets. Stay-at-home orders and social distancing have blasted a hole in those sources of revenue.

So how bad will it be? Los Angeles City Controller Ron Galperin's office said he will release revised revenue estimates this week.

"This pandemic has caused us to have to look every single day at revenues," L.A. Mayor Eric Garcetti said at his Tuesday evening briefing. "There's no question though, that we are going to have cuts."

Last month, San Francisco leaders said that city's shortfall could climb to as high as $1.7 billion.

The fiscal year ends June 30. A new year -- and a new budget -- starts up July 1.

Under the city charter, Monday April 20 is the deadline for Garcetti to submit a proposed 2020-21 budget to the city council. The council must adopt it, or adopt with modifications, by June 1.

During the briefing, Garcetti asked Congress and President Trump to bail out cities in the next round of COVID-19 funds.

"Cities around the country and local governments as well as state governments will go off a fiscal cliff without assistance from Washington," Garcetti said.

11:30 PM -- This story was update with comments from L.A. Mayor Eric Garcetti.

Read the full National League of Cities and U.S. Conference of Mayors Survey:
WASHINGTON - Congressional Democrats alleged Wednesday it would be illegal for President Donald Trump to withhold money from the World Health Organization, igniting a dispute that echoed the impeachment showdown over Trump's delay of security assistance to Ukraine.

"The president's halting of funding to the WHO as it leads the global fight against the coronavirus pandemic is senseless. We can only be successful in defeating this global pandemic through a coordinated international response with respect for science and data," House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., said in a statement.

'"This decision is dangerous, illegal and will be swiftly challenged," Pelosi said.

Pelosi's comments came a day after Trump declared he would be suspending payments to the WHO in response to the United Nations agency's handling of the coronavirus pandemic. Trump criticized the WHO for opposing his decision in January to block and quarantine travelers from China, and also accused the WHO of mismanagement and abetting a Chinese coverup of the early stages of the pandemic.

Trump's announcement set off a torrent of criticism from Democrats and international health experts who accused the president of trying to deflect blame from his own mishandling of the situation, while weakening the principal international organization leading the response to the pandemic. Bill Gates, whose foundation is the second-largest donor to the WHO after the U.S. government, said the decision was "as dangerous as it sounds."

Trump administration officials defended the decision, which also won support from some congressional Republicans.

"Cutting off funding at this time is the right move," said Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C. "This is a critical time for worldwide public health and we cannot afford China apologists running the WHO. I support a suspension of funding by the United States until there is new leadership at the WHO."

The debate on Capitol Hill quickly turned to the president's authority to take the step he had announced, and shades of the impeachment battle immediately emerged. In the impeachment fight, the U.S. Government Accountability Office determined the White House had violated the law by delaying funding for Ukraine that Congress already had approved. Trump was impeached by the House of Representatives over this and other issues in December, and acquitted by the Senate in February.

Sen. Chris Coons, D-Del., a member of the Senate Appropriations Committee, said it was worth pressing for greater transparency, balance and timeliness in the WHO's response - but that the middle of a global pandemic was not the time to do it, especially as the virus threatens less-developed parts of the world.

"This is sort of like shooting at an ambulance because you don't like how quickly they responded to the first call, when you've still got lots of wounded," Coons said.

A senior Democratic aide said in response to the president's move, "We are reviewing all of our options, including asking GAO for an opinion given their opinion that the President's hold on Ukraine funding was illegal." The aide spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations.

U.S. funding for the World Health Organization flows from two pots: Dues that are assessed by the WHO and appropriated annually by Congress; and voluntary contributions made by the United States in response to various health emergencies or needs. For 2020, the assessed contribution is about $120 million, of which the United States already has paid half. Annual voluntary contributions have ranged between $200 million and $300 million.

House Democrats contended Trump does not have the authority to block the remainder of the assessed contribution from being paid out to WHO. "President Trump is violating the same spending laws that brought about his impeachment," said Evan Hollander, spokesman for the House Appropriations Committee.

But senior administration officials, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss the sensitive issue, said the structure of the appropriations law in question allows Trump to spend the remaining $60 million on any international organization, not just the WHO, as long as it is spent by the end of the fiscal year on Sept. 30.

The 60- to 90-day review Trump announced will determine where that money goes, the officials said. They said voluntary contributions to WHO would be stopped entirely and redirected to other international health programs and needs.

With Congress out of session at least through early May, Democrats' options for responding are limited. Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., said in an interview, "It doesn't look like we're coming back into session for a few weeks, but when we do I'm certainly going to pursue language in the next funding bill to restore funding for the World Health Organization."

In a sign of divisions among Democrats as they scramble to respond to Trump's move, however, the administration's legal position was not uniformly disputed by Democrats on Capitol Hill.

One senior Senate Democratic Appropriations aide said the administration's contention that they do not have to spend the assessed funds on WHO specifically is "probably accurate" because of the way the appropriations account the money comes from is structured.

"It may not be a question of whether they have to provide the funds to WHO, but rather what are the consequences of not doing so," the aide said, noting that these consequences could include being in arrears to WHO, undermining WHO's ability to respond to global health threats including covid-19, and weakening U.S. influence in the organization and on global health policy overall.

Democrats and administration officials, along with outside experts, concurred that failing to pay assessed dues to the WHO - in other words, being in arrears - could bring about consequences including the United States losing influence and even voting rights at the World Health Organization.

Whether that would matter to Trump administration officials is less clear.

"We pay into that, and is it so much to ask the minor dividend, the minor return on our investment, would be for the WHO to be honest about the origins of the virus in Wuhan? About the fact that it was human-to-human transmission?," White House counselor Kellyanne Conway said Wednesday on Fox News Channel.

"They lied about that or weren't transparent about that. So, this is about transparency and accountability because we've been so hard hit in this country and we were listening to the health professionals around the world."

- - -

The Washington Post's Anne Gearan contributed to this report.
On March 25, a sanitation worker in Raleigh, North Carolina, named Adrian Grubbs died after contracting COVID-19. Other public-service workers have since reported unsafe working conditions in both Raleigh and Charlotte, the states two largest cities, and have threatened to strike if their demands for safer working conditions and extra hazard pay are not met.

As of Tuesday, the number of confirmed COVID-19 cases in North Carolina was 5,024, with 108 deaths recorded. The counties with the highest number of cases were Mecklenburg (993), where Charlotte, the county seat is located; Wake (501), location of the state capital, Raleigh; and Durham (297), where University of North Carolina (UNC) Chapel Hill is located.

Raleigh sanitation workers reported that on March 17, prior to the death of Grubbs, they had sent a list of demands to the mayor, city manager, and city council that included epidemiology work, testing, reduction in the number of workers in each truck, and additional hazard pay. Despite their city being one of the centers of the virus in the state, they had been weathering unsafe work conditions, such as being forced to jam up to four workers together in the cabs of their trucks.

Last week, public-service workers in Charlotte reported that the city began to cut back on safety measures that were initially taken to keep workers safe. That Monday, the city broke with its rotating schedule designed to minimize social contact and demanded that 200 waste-management workers report to the same building at once, putting them at increased risk of contracting or spreading the coronavirus.

The Charlotte workers also reported that they were not being supplied with needed personal protective equipment (PPE), such as masks and hand sanitizer. One worker related that they are typically given one pair of latex gloves per day and that they are only receiving a measly 3 percent hazard pay. On that Tuesday, April 7, these workers made public demands for adequate PPE, rotating schedules with staggered shift start times, and double-time hazard pay.

Both Raleigh sanitation workers and Charlotte waste-management workers are represented by the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers (UE) Local 150, which has only passed on the demands of workers to their respective city administration. The March 17 demands made by Raleigh workers were accompanied by a threat to strike if they were not met, but even with death of Grubbs on March 25, the UE has not taken action.

The union treated the situation in Charlotte in a similar fashion, circulating a toothless petition to ask for more hazard pay in early April. A UE official declared that the workers cannot strike but the union is still hoping to come to a resolution with the city. Mayor Vi Lyles, according to NBC News affiliate WCNC, declined to take a position on whether essential employees should receive hazard pay during the coronavirus pandemic, but shes open to other proposals.

Both the Facebook page and the web site of UE Local 150 have been notably silent on the situations in Raleigh and Charlotte since its press conference more than a week ago. There is no call on the workers to do anything more than sign petitions and beg local politicians for safe working conditions and adequate pay.

As of Tuesday, there had been 65,039 COVID-19 tests completed in North Carolina, placing it in the bottom tier of states for per capita testing, at just 6,404 tests for every 1 million residents. Testing is still being restricted to individuals in critical condition due to a shortage of supplies.

The states Department of Health and Human Services (NCDHHS) has instructed those who feel that they have the virus, yet are not presenting life threatening symptoms, to stay home and not seek out testing.

The NCDHHS web site reads: For people with mild symptoms who dont need medical care, getting a test will not change what you or your doctor do. Testing is most important for people who are seriously ill, in the hospital, people in high-risk settings like nursing homes or long-term care facilities, and healthcare workers and other first responders who are caring for those with COVID-19.

Drive-through testing is being conducted throughout the state by both public and private organizations, yet the fluctuation of vital supplies has caused some sites to temporarily close. Health officials claim they are actively working to acquire supplies and reopen these sites as well as implement new sites in more-remote areas. The shortage of tests means that it is impossible to accurately assess the real spread of the virus in the state.

On March 30, Democratic Governor Roy Cooper signed an executive order declaring that everyone shelter in place and that only essential services stay in operation. The order limits the size of public gatherings to 10 people and directs all to stay at least six feet apart. On Thursday, April 9, the order was expanded to enforce these regulations within essential businesses, limiting the number of shoppers within stores. On Monday, all stores occupancy was limited to no more than 20 percent of the stores fire capacity.

On March 16, before the stay-at-home order, Governor Cooper ordered the closing of all public K-12 schools, prompting administrators to look for remote methods to continue the learning process. UNC campuses also decided to move remaining spring and summer courses online. College students were notified of this development over spring break, and the majority of residential students have not been permitted to return to on-campus housing.

Following Governor Coopers order on March 30, unemployment has risen drastically, with almost 500,000 claims filed as of last week. According to data from the federal Department of Labor, unemployment has risen by 4,282.7 percent in comparison to last year at this time, with North Carolina being the seventh most affected state in the country. About one in four renters in Mecklenburg County missed paying rent in the first week of April.

In addition to the hundreds of thousands of North Carolina citizens who are losing their sources of income, there are estimated to be 321,000 permanent undocumented immigrants in the state. Every year, thousands of migrant workers travel from Mexico and other parts of Latin America to work in North Carolinas tobacco and sweet potato fields, with the state being the largest producer of these products in the US.

Agricultural workers such as these are expected to share sleeping quarters, kitchens, and bath facilities in barracks and small trailers, with many crammed into single rooms, often with multiple beds within feet of one other. Many of these labor camps do not have hot running water, proper cleaning supplies, or access to the Internet to keep up with the outside world. To reach these seasonal camps, many workers ride on crowded buses across the southern United States from the border. Social distancing and other preventive measures are nearly impossible in such labor camps, putting thousands of workers at risk.

Like most states, North Carolina is also experiencing high rates of infection among its prison population. The Butner Correctional Complex has 60 inmates and 23 staff who have tested positive for COVID-19. One of these inmates, an 81-year-old serving a 99-year sentence, died from the virus on Saturday. The prison contains 914 total inmates, who were only given masks during the last two weeks, after COVID-19 had already broken out within the complex.
Twelve Indian nationals, who participated in the Tabligi Jamaat congregation in Delhi last month, were tested for coronavirus in Nepal on Wednesday after they were found taking shelter in a mosque, according to a media report.

According to the lockdown regulations, all foreign nationals must self-quarantine and not visit public places.

The Indian Muslim men were initially taken in police custody after it was reported that they were taking shelter in a mosque in eastern Nepal's Udayur district.

Swab samples of the men were collected for COVID-19 tests and they have been quarantined, Setopati newsportal quoted Assistant Chief District Administrator of Udaypur Bhimprasad Bhattarai as saying.

The Indian nationals had taken part in the Tabligi Jamaat congregation in Delhi before entering Nepal in March. At least 9,000 people participated in the religious congregation in Nizamuddin last month, which has become the biggest hotspot for the spread of coronavirus in India.

The Nepal Health Ministry said swab tests for coronavirus have been conducted on 6,871 individuals.

In Nepal, 16 people have so far tested positive for coronavirus and one of them has recovered. The remaining 15 are undergoing treatment.

Meanwhile, the police arrested a 21-year-old man from Surkhet district for spreading rumours regarding coronavirus. Prem Bika, a resident of Dailekh district, was arrested for a misleading post on Facebook that a coronavirus case was reported in Surkhet district.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
The Museum of the Southwest has started the Pandemic Documentation Project to collect peoples experiences during this unprecedented time. The idea came about when museum staff were discussing how people would be able to make it through this time without the arts.

Christine Eck, director of community engagement, said people are consuming more art during this time than normal.

People are reading books, people are watching Netflix and people are listening to music and are being inspired to create their own art, she said.

She said this project can be beneficial to help people make sense of what theyre going through.

To document that in an arts-related manner -- its really a primary source document, she said. An essay or photos, drawings, however they express that and its just something the museum can use for the future to have a snapshot of this time.

Eck said the museum shouldnt just be a building with objects. Its a reflection of our community and society. Right now, we feel, is obviously an important moment in history were living in.

Anybody living in West Texas -- from medical workers to grocery store workers to students -- is encouraged to submit, she said. People dont have to be talented in any particular art form; its more about how people want to express themselves.

You are a human being experiencing this moment in history, she said. Arts encompass a lot of things, not what we normally or typically think about an artist Were more interested in what people are experiencing, so that in the future, people look back at this and say, Wow, thats what that was like.

Submissions opened on Friday, and a number were received over the weekend, Eck said.

Want to contribute? Visit https://museumsw.org/pandemic-project-eng/english for submission information. See More Collapse

Instructions for the project -- in English and Spanish  are posted on the museums website. Eck said that when the project ends, the museum will share the submissions, but the format hasnt been decided.

Were going to see how this plays out, she said. Some of the ideas we have are if it will be an exhibition someday -- either formal, or if we will start sharing things in small pieces online; were not entirely sure.

Eck said that during this difficult time this project can provide an outlet and hope.

Its hopefully -- because it expresses that well get through it -- something we can look back on, she said.
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The Indian microfinance industry, a major source of funding for small borrowers, is staring at a major crisis due to the crisis triggered by the coronavirus outbreak.

NBFC-MFIs are in bigger trouble since, under RBI rules, these companies have to give moratorium to borrowers. But, at the same time, NBFCs are not eligible to get moratorium from banks. Thus, it is a double whammy for these firms.

This isn't the first time MFIs are facing a crisis.

In 2010, the Indian microfinance sector had faced a major crisis following a controversial legislation passed by the Andhra Pradesh government. About 35, 000 people lost jobs due to that crisis and significant chunk of money given by banks to MFIs turned bad. The sector never fully recovered from that crisis phase. The RBI had to form a new category of NBFC-MFIs to tighten rules for the sector. If the coronavirus-induced crisis prolongs, these firms may now see a return of the 2010 crisis.

In a note issued on April 15, rating agency Crisil said the extended nationwide lockdown to contain the pandemic has affected the income-generation ability and savings of borrowers of microfinance institutions (MFIs).

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"As for MFIs, normal operations  both loan origination and collections  would remain a challenge since their operations are field-intensive involving high personal touch such as home visits and physical collection of cash, the rater said.

In a separate report, rating agency Icra also cautioned that credit cost of microfinance institutions could at least double from this point that will , in turn, impact their profitability by 3-5 percent in FY21.

The agency has analysed a sample of 29 MFIs, which constitute around 70 percent of the MFI industry on a portfolio basis. On a collective basis, the sample has total repayment obligations and operational expenditure of around Rs 8,000 crore in Q1 FY2021 against which the on-balance sheet liquidity buffer stood at around Rs 5,400 crore, the agency said.

In Charts | Economic impact of lockdown on Centre and states

"In ICRA's opinion, it will take time for MFI collections to get back to normal as the income levels of most borrowers have been affected. Following the resumption of economic activity, borrowers may tend to prioritise cash for their daily needs and savings over repaying MFIs," the agency said.

ICRA expects the credit costs for MFIs to at least double from the present levels of 1-1.5 percent to 2.5-3 percent for most players, which is likely to impact the profitability (RoEs) of the MFIs by 3-5 percent in FY2021.

"The impact on credit costs could be even higher if there is a permanent loss of livelihood/significant decline in income for a proportion of the borrowers, thereby impacting their repayment capacity," the agency said.

On April 14, Prime Minister, Narendra Modi announced that the nationwide lockdown will be in place until May 3. The lockdown, which has already crossed three weeks, has severely affected people in the low-income category in the society - major customers of MFIs.

Banks not immune

Even banks with significant exposure to MFIs are also fearing erosion in asset quality. Early this month, Brokerage house Ambit Capital in its report on April 8 cut the target price of Bandhan Bank sharply to Rs 65 from Rs 395 cautioning that the asset quality will take a significant hit in FY21 on account of likely deterioration in its microfinance portfolio. Bandhan is one of the banks that has major exposure to the sector.

Ambit expects the lockdown to impact the livelihoods of microcredit consumers, mostly daily-wage earners. The problem is likely to get escalated since the collections of dues are entirely in cash, Ambit said. Also, even after the lockdown is over, there is high political risk looming over the sector.

Politicians may ask borrowers not to repay banks, similar to what happened during the Andhra Pradesh microfinance crisis in 2010 and, again, during the demonetisation programme in 2016, the brokerage said.

Bandhan has about 62 percent of its portfolio concentrated in Eastern India and much of its business is in microcredit. In the event of a substantial rise in bad loans from the segment, Bandhan will be forced to slow down its loan growth. This will lead to compression in net interest margins, even leading to losses in the next two financial years, Ambit said in its report.

Total loan book, as at the end of December, stood at Rs 65,456 crore and gross NPAs at about 2 percent of the overall book. Already, there is some evidence of stress in Bandhan's microloan book.

In Q3, Bandhan made an additional provision of Rs 200 crore on standard advances in microfinance portfolio after evaluating risk observed "in certain areas of a northeastern state".

As of end December-end, on a year-on-year basis, Bandhan's microfinance book grew by 33.4 percent. The total microfinance book stood at Rs 40,100 crore.

In the 12 months to December 2019, the total number of active microfinance borrowers of Bandhan grew 21 percent to 10.5 million. A closer look at Bandhans microloan book reveals high concentration in West Bengal, 46 percent of its loan microfinance book. Assam contributes 16 percent.

Besides Bandhan, analysts expect an impact on other banks such as IndusInd Bank with exposure to MFI loans. IndusInd had acquired about Rs 20,000 crore microlending book from Bharat Financial (the earlier SKS Microfinance). The bank has, however, consistently maintained that the portfolio is under control. But not all analysts share this optimism. On April 3, global rating agency Moody's placed IndusInd's domestic and foreign currency issuer ratings of Baa3/P-3 under review for downgrade.

"The review for downgrade of IndusInd's ratings reflects the downside risks to asset quality amid the deteriorating macro environment and financial market volatility. The bank's loan portfolio includes a relatively higher proportion of microfinance and vehicle finance loans than its peers, which are at high risk of being negatively impacted by the economic shock as customers in these segments tend to have limited buffers to withstand economic stress," the agency said.

Facing a difficult scenario, the Microfinance Institutions Network, an industry lobby of MFIs, has written to the government and the RBI seeking assistance in the form of loan moratorium and additional credit facilities. Even though the RBI opened a liquidity channel for banks to lend to companies, only top rated big companies have mainly benefited from this window so far.
Indian students in Israel are practising the good samaritan deed by helping the Israeli authorities to fight against the Novel Coronavirus. The students have volunteered in collecting and testing blood samples in Israel. The Embassy of India in Israel saluted these students and expressed their gratitude for the same.

READ | Bandra incident: Mumbai Police registers FIR against 800-1000 unidentified individuals

We salute our #Indian students in #Israel who are helping Israeli authorities in the #FightAgainstCoronavirus #Covid_19 by volunteering to collect and test blood samples in Israel pic.twitter.com/Hd3AkZRaJr  India in Israel (@indemtel) April 14, 2020

READ | Bandra incident: CM Uddhav reassures migrant workers, warns against exploiting sentiments

Prince Charles praises Sikhs serving in Britain

Just like the Indian students in Israel, the Sikh community in the UK is leaving no stone unturned to battle against the Coronavirus and serving the people with their selfless service. Prince Charles in a video message praised the "selfless service" of the British-Sikh community in the battle against the coronavirus pandemic. The 71-year-old heir to the British throne, who recovered from his COVID-19 diagnosis last month, said he can only imagine the great sadness as the event (Vaisakhi ) cannot be celebrated in the usual way as he lauded the vital role being played by the community on the frontlines of the crisis.

"In these challenging times, the Sikh community is making an extraordinary and invaluable contribution to the life of this country and to so many others, just as it has always done," he said in his message which he opens with "Waheguru Ji Ka Khalsa, Waheguru Ji Ki Fateh".

READ | Dissatisfied with lockdown extension, 'migrant workers' gathered in Bandra: Mumbai Police

In the message issued by his Clarence House office, he notes:

"In the United Kingdom, as elsewhere, Sikhs are playing a vital role on the frontline of this crisis, whether in hospitals or other key roles or through the remarkable work that is being done by gurdwaras to support local communities and the most vulnerable. In all this, it seems to me, Sikhs so marvellously embody the values on which Guru Nanak founded your religion, over five centuries ago: hard work, respect, and selfless service to those less fortunate than yourselves. He said that both he and his wife, Camilla Duchess of Cornwall, are grateful for all the Sikh community's "outstanding efforts".

"At the same time, I know that many of you are suffering personally from the cruel effects of this pernicious virus, or tragically have lost those you love. I can only say that my heart goes out to you under such very difficult circumstances," he said.

READ | Mumbai: Watch shocking drone footage of thousands defying lockdown in Bandra
American Psycho, in which Christian Bale played Patrick Bateman, is marking its 20th anniversary. (Photo: Lionsgate)

Bret Easton Ellis's searing corporate satire American Psycho, penned in 1991, was as controversial, violent, banal, disturbing and (more often than you'd think) amusing a novel as one could imagine. Bringing it to the screen would give any filmmaker with an ounce of sense considerable pause. Many would simply deem it unfilmable. But just a year after the book was published, Edward R. Pressman, veteran producer of celebrated movies like Badlands, Das Boot and Wall Street, leaped into the breach and optioned it.

Now all he had to do was make it. That part ended up taking a while. With Johnny Depp, Leonardo DiCaprio and Edward Norton at one time set to play the psychotic investment banker Patrick Bateman, and Oliver Stone and David Cronenberg in the frame to direct, it was a bumpy ride to the screen. I Shot Andy Warhol director Mary Harron, who had co-written the script, eventually beat out higher profile competition to helm it, with her first choice Christian Bale as Bateman, gifting the former child star the role that cemented his position as a viable leading man in Hollywood.

Related Video: American Psycho Trailer

On the occasion of the movie's 20th anniversary, Yahoo Movies UK. spoke to Pressman about how he brought Ellis's horrifying book to the screen.

Yahoo Movies UK: When did you first become aware of Elliss novel?

Edward R. Pressman optioned American Psycho. (Photo: Emma McIntyre/Getty Images)

Edward R. Pressman: I remember reading it, and I was in the Hollywood Hills [in 1992], and there were fires in Los Angeles right in front of my eyes. People looting, stealing TV sets. There was a race war going on. So when I read the book, I was feeling very impressionable. It caught the moment.

It was given to me by [Re-Animator director] Stuart Gordon. He wanted to make the movie, do it in black and white, and make it ultra-violent. I really thought the only way to take the curse off it, ideally, was to bring in a female director.

Leonardo DiCaprio was set to play Bateman early on. How did he become involved?

Story continues

Bale was cast as Bateman after interest from stars like Leonard DiCaprio. (Photo: Lionsgate/Getty Images)

We'd developed the film and brought it to Lionsgate [then Lions Gate], who wanted to make it as a low-budget movie. Then just prior to Cannes in 1997, one of the executives at Lionsgate gave DiCaprio [Harron and Guinevere Turner's] script without talking to us about it. Leo said yes, and gave his blessing for a press release at Cannes. It created a whirlwind. Everyone wanted the film now. It was a magical moment just after Titanic came out.

An Italian distributor flew me from Cannes to his home on the coast of Italy. He had a basement with 15 red Ferraris. He said, 'Anything you're offered, we will top it.' It sounded like the Russian mob or something. But Mary always stood her ground and said, 'It's never gonna happen.' Perhaps it was wishful thinking, but it came true, because after [feminist icon and journalist] Gloria Steinem wrote an article for a major magazine saying that the movie should not be made, that it was misogynistic, Leonardo quit. There was public rancor. A lot of people hated the book. And without seeing the movie, they hated the movie too. [Ironically, Christian Bale's father David ended up marrying Steinem].

Bale in a scene from the 2000 film. (Photo: Lionsgate/Getty Images)

A lot of A-list directors wanted to be involved too, right?

When Leonardo announced he wanted to do it, we were approached by Oliver Stone, David Cronenberg, a lot of major filmmakers all of a sudden wanted to do it with Leo. [David] Lynch was one of the first directors I went to as well, and he was interested. Tim Burton came to see me in my hotel room in New York too.

So how did Mary Harron beat out such big names?

She's a very smart gal. And had a real grasp of the movie's irony. The term we always used, Bret and I, was that we always wanted to find a director with a sense of 'cosmic irony.' The epitome of that was, say, Kubrick with A Clockwork Orange. That was the term we used among ourselves in trying to find the right filmmaker. Talking to Mary and seeing her work, and certainly after we saw her script, we thought she'd done a marvelous job. She didn't take the guts from the book. Many would have been turned off by it. It's a very cynical, but also very funny and witty, book. Mary captured that, and the ambiguity of it.

Canadian director Mary Harron on the set of American Psycho, based on the novel by Bret Easton Ellis. (Photo: Eric Robert/Sygma/Sygma via Getty Images)

How were the first reactions to the movie?

I remember when the film had its first screening at Sundance. It was super-packed. You couldn't get in. It was something people wanted to see by reputation. Fascination even. A lot of people had criticized the book probably more than those who favored it. We didn't have an established star in the movie, though there was Willem Dafoe, but it was about the younger actors  Reese Witherspoon [and also Jared Leto and Justin Theroux]  who would become famous later.

Why did Mary want Bale in the lead so much?

Mary is an excellent casting talent. She auditioned a lot of people. But she made the decision on Christian, and he really wanted this role. When DiCaprio was going to do the movie, Christian reached out to me to try and save the day. The studio were determined to do it with Leo. But Christian was dead-set on the role, and saw what it could be. Mary never stepped away from the project, but the project started to step away from her. But she and Christian always kept the faith. She'd spent a lot of time working on it. But the whole whirlwind with DiCaprio only ended up being about two weeks.

Actors Josh Lucas, Christian Bale, Bill Sage and Justin Theroux on the set of American Psycho. (Photo: Eric Robert/Sygma/Sygma via Getty Images)

Were you confident that audiences would get it?

I think it was the shock value and the controversial nature that made the film stand out. It's extreme. The ego, the superficiality. I was in New York, and it was playing near where I lived, so on opening night I like to go to the theaters and see reactions. I stopped at 42nd Street at the bottom of Broadway. It was a big theater, and it was packed. The manager said to me 'Oh, this movie's going to do $15-$20 million this weekend.

What we found was that the film was doing great in several cities, primarily on the coasts. Some college towns. But business across the country was disappointing. It was maybe more in the consciousness in the cities. It cost $8 million to make, but it was profitable. And continues to be.

Bret Easton Ellis has since said that he perhaps wasn't as pleased with the final movie as he might have been. Do you have any thoughts on that?

Studio portrait of author Bret Easton Ellis. (Photo: Mario Ruiz/The LIFE Images Collection via Getty Images/Getty Images)

We got to be friends. I still see him a couple of times a year. When I've seen him, he's been enthusiastic about the movie. But I've also read him putting it down. But Bret has always been a bit of a rascal.

Most of the time, he's said he's been happy with it, and we've stayed friends. I'd very much like to work with him again.

Read more from Yahoo Entertainment:
China criticized U.S. President Donald Trumps move to temporarily halt funding to the World Health Organization and pledged to support the global health body.

Trump on Tuesday said he ordered the move against the WHO because it took Chinas claims about the coronavirus at face value and failed to share information about the pandemic as it spread. China has serious concerns about the decision and called on the U.S. to fulfil its responsibilities, foreign ministry spokesperson Zhao Lijian said at a briefing in Beijing on Wednesday.

This U.S. decision will weaken the WHOs capabilities and undermine international co-operation, Zhao said, adding: China will as always support the WHO in playing an important role in international public health and global anti-epidemic response.

The move to limit support to the WHO in the midst of a global pandemic is unprecedented, and attracted criticism from health policy experts as well as billionaire philanthropist Bill Gates. Yet as domestic criticism of the Trump administrations response has increased and the U.S. became the epicentre of the outbreak, many of the presidents supporters have pointed to the WHO for making early mistakes they say worsened the crisis.

The WHO failed in its basic duty and must be held accountable, Trump said at a White House press conference. The outbreak could have been contained at its source if the organization had correctly responded early on, he added.

The Associated Press reported Wednesday that it obtained internal documents showing Chinese officials waited six days in January before President Xi Jinping warned the public of the dangers of the coronavirus outbreak. The delay after China became aware of the dangers of what is now known as COVID-19 allowed millions of people to travel from the epicentre in the city of Wuhan elsewhere in the country and the world, the report said.

While Chinas Zhao said he hadnt seen the report, he added that Beijing updated the WHO in a timely manner and called accusations the government wasnt transparent unfair.

The WHO has been a conduit for tension between the U.S. and China for months, with WHO secretary-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus being singled out for blame by allies of the president for being too deferential to Beijing. Representatives for the WHO didnt respond to requests for comment.

Its unclear when any halt in payments would take effect or how much authority Trump has to suspend disbursements, which are authorized by Congress. The U.S. has contributed $893 million (U.S.) to the WHOs operations during its current two-year funding cycle, according to the organization. Administration officials signalled the suspension would be for 60 days.

Responding to Trumps decision on Tuesday, UN secretary general Antonio Guterres said the chance to investigate how the disease spread around the world would come later.

As it is not that time, it is also not the time to reduce the resources for the operations of the World Health Organization or any other humanitarian organization in the fight against the virus, he said. As I have said before, now is the time for unity and for the international community to work together in solidarity to stop this virus and its shattering consequences.

Billionaire philanthropist Bill Gates, the co-founder of Microsoft Corp., warned in a tweet that cutting off funds for the WHO is as dangerous as it sounds.

The U.S. contributes nearly a quarter of all member state dues for the WHO. That pool of funds  although a small proportion of the overall budget  are used as the organizations operating budget to run daily operations, said Adam Kamradt-Scott, an associate professor of international security at the University of Sydney who has written about the politics of pandemic preparedness. The rest of the funding, called voluntary contributions, come from member states and non-profits and are tailored to specific global health programs.

He warned that Trump could bankrupt the organization if the U.S. pulls both member dues and voluntary contributions, adding that the move would undo decades of work leading the world in fighting diseases. The move could impact global health more broadly beyond the WHO, he added.

We now have a situation in which the U.S. is vacating a leadership role in the middle of the crisis, Kamradt-Scott said. Nature abhors a vacuum. Politics abhors a vacuum even more.

Extraordinarily bad decision

Early on after the news of the virus broke, the U.S. had pushed to have its own experts included in a WHO-led delegation to China. The health group repeatedly praised the Chinese response to the crisis, and later drew questions about whether it acted too slowly in declaring a pandemic.

Trump on Tuesday pointed to a WHO statement in late January opposing travel bans as a response to the coronavirus outbreak. The president instituted travel restrictions on China in late January, later extending it to the European Union and U.K. Around the same time, he also praised Chinas efforts and transparency in a tweet.

One of the most dangerous and costly decisions from the WHO was its disastrous decision to oppose travel restrictions from China and other nations, Trump said on Tuesday. Had other nations likewise suspended travel from China, countless more lives would have been saved.

Ashish Jha, the director of Harvard Universitys Global Health Institute, called Trumps move an extraordinarily bad decision.

One person who reached out to Trump ahead of his announcement was the United Nations secretary-general. Guterres, through the U.S. envoy to the UN, acknowledged WHO missteps in the pandemic, but argued that now is not the time to be pointing fingers.

Some aides to the president have argued that cuts to the WHO now could be counterproductive because it is one of the few agencies with access to some of the worlds most vulnerable populations in Yemen, Libya and Syria, which could all be hit hard by the virus, according to one person.

Budget cuts

The president has sought in the past to cut U.S. contributions to the WHO, even before the virus outbreak. In its proposed 2021 budget, the administration called for reducing voluntary contributions to the WHO by more than half, to about $58 million.

While Trump criticized WHO reliance on Chinese information in the early day of the crisis, he repeatedly praised China and its president, Xi Jinping, for its handling of the coronavirus outbreak in January and February. But he said Friday that the WHO is very, very China-centric. China always seems to get the better of the argument, and I dont like that.

House Democrats denounced Trumps decision to withhold congressionally appropriated funds from the WHO in the middle of a pandemic. They said that he lacks the legal authority to do so and, like his withholding of aid to Ukraine, it would be a violation of the law.

In a desperate attempt to deflect blame, President Trump is threatening to violate the same spending laws that brought about his impeachment, House Appropriations Committee spokesman Evan Hollander said in a statement. The president does not have the unilateral authority to withhold the United States assessed contribution to the World Health Organization.

Democratic Rep. Don Beyer of Virginia called Trumps action so stupid and so dangerous.

The World Health Organization leads and coordinates the fight against pandemics. Its what they do, Beyer wrote on Twitter. You dont stop firefighters from doing their jobs during a five-alarm fire.

Trump is likely to get full support from Republicans in Congress. Several GOP lawmakers, such as Sens. Martha McSally of Arizona and Rick Scott of Florida, have accused WHO of participating in alleged efforts by China to cover up or minimize the extent of the outbreak. Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina pledged to cut funding in the next appropriations bill.

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Official guidance issued for UK prosecutors to ease the burden on the justice system during the coronavirus crisis will see suspects of low-level crimes avoiding criminal charges and lengthy court procedures.

The UK's Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) said its legal teams are being asked to prioritise more serious cases and consider the impact of the pandemic when weighing up whether criminal charges are in the public interest, in order to help the justice system continue effectively in the face of current challenges.

Although lawyers must always assess whether a prosecution is in the public interest, the CPS said the new guidance issued this week asks for extra consideration when deciding the most proportionate response in every case.

Our very function is to prosecute, but we cannot ignore the unprecedented challenge facing the criminal justice system, said Max Hill, the Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP).

We must focus on making sure the most dangerous offenders are dealt with as a priority as we adapt to challenging circumstances. And in less serious cases, it is right that we consider all options available when weighing up the right course of action, he said.

Hill said the approach will only relate to a very small amount of cases and that offences relating to Covid-19 will remain an immediate priority.

Anybody jeopardising the safety of the public will face the full force of the law We know very well the impact crime can have on people's lives, so we want the public to be confident that even in these very difficult circumstances justice will be done, he said.

Under the new guidance, prosecutors will review both new and existing cases on their own merits, and consider every available course of action including community resolution. It could also mean accepting a guilty plea to a different offence if prosecutors are satisfied that a sentence which meets the seriousness of the offending could be passed.

This will not affect the most serious or violent types of crime, the CPS said.

This week's interim Covid-19 related guidance comes after similar directions for police to prioritise cases they are considering for charge, to focus on dealing with the most dangerous offenders. It is designed to prioritise the most serious cases at a time when the courts are not able to operate at normal capacity.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
We can all agree that governments should better prepare for the next pandemic, but we should also expect more from businesses ahead of the next economic crisis.

Consider how quickly our largest and most critical companies began calling for bailouts this year. Executive teams that had padded their bonuses through stock buybacks, financed with high-interest debt, were the first to cry for government handouts.

If we dont impose stricter standards on corporations, the governments current emergency actions will convince executives they need not save for a rainy day. The taxpayer will bail them out every time.

Between President Donald Trump, congressional Democrats and the Federal Reserve, the federal government is pumping $7.6 trillion into the economy through tax breaks, loans, cash payments and credit market easing.

TOMLINSONS TAKE: Rules for restarting the Texas economy once COVID-19 peaks

The federal government will run a $3.8 trillion budget deficit this year, and a $2.1 trillion deficit next year, according to the conservative Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget. Federal debt held by the public will exceed the size of the economy in 2020, and in 2023, debt will break the record set in World War II.

In just a few months, the U.S. is running up a debt proportional to what we spent fighting a four-year world war. Yes, we must deal with the emergency, but we also need to think about the future.

Ideally, deficit-financed measures today would be coupled with reforms to help reduce structural deficits tomorrow, Maya MacGuineas, the committees president, wrote in a letter to Congress.

That should apply to businesses, too.

The airline industry was woefully unprepared, even after the painful lessons of the Sept. 11 terror attacks. Instead of building a strategic reserve, airline executives spent billions buying back shares to run up stock prices. They also merged into a handful of companies that are now too-critical to fail.

Since most of a corporate executives compensation comes in stock, these so-called business leaders were padding their own nests. Now the federal government is offering them $50 billion to help make it through the pandemic if they meet certain conditions.

Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin has proposed that for the first $25 billion, the airlines should pledge shares valued at 10 percent of the loan value and repay 30 percent of the money. But the airlines think the government should just give them $25 billion of taxpayer money.

The oil and gas industry is begging for help after years of financial mismanagement.

After complaining about OPEC fixing oil prices, Trump spent the weekend persuading OPEC and Russia to do precisely that to bail out U.S. oil companies, which cannot compete with cheap OPEC and Russian crude. Americans will pay more at the pump as a result.

U.S. oil companies borrowed billions of dollars over the years and flooded the globe with oil, driving down prices. Smart investors no longer buy oil company bonds, and Wall Street traders have sent oil and gas stocks into the gutter.

To save the industry, Trump reversed his decision to sell off the strategic petroleum reserve and instead wants to spend $3 billion of taxpayer money on American barrels to convince Russia and OPEC to slash their production.

Other examples of business bailouts could fill a book. In a genuinely free market, the government would never intervene. It would let good companies with large cash reserves profit and allow the poorly-managed companies to fail.

An actual free market, though, is a mythical creature. The government must intervene to keep Americans employed and avoid a depression. But when this is over, we should take steps to ensure the government never needs to do these things again.

TOMLINSONS TAKE: Slide in oil prices could signal permanent change to the energy industry

The CARES Act, which provides $2.2 trillion in economic stimulus, forbids companies that take federal loans from buying back stock for one year after the loan is settled. The law also limits executive compensation.

Congress should consider placing permanent limits on stock buybacks. For example, corporations should have strategic reserves sufficient to survive three months of business disruption before buying stock.

Federal law should limit executive compensation to a multiple of the median employees salary. After years of watching executives get massive raises while workers wages stagnate, we need to tie the wealthys prosperity to the average Americans financial well-being.

There are dozens of other rules we could introduce for how the government intervenes during a recession. If companies know they will not get help unless theyve been acting responsibly, they will expect to fail when the bottom drops out.

For now, we must keep businesses afloat until we can get Americans safely back to work. But as soon as we do, we need a roadmap for navigating the next economic crisis. Part of the plan must include demanding more from businesses, so they do not need as much help next time.

Tomlinson writes commentary about business, economics and policy.

twitter.com/cltomlinson

chris.tomlinson@chron.com
Lagos State Ministry of Health announced the death of another patient who died of coronavirus-related complications. The announcement was made today, Wednesday, April 15, 2020.

The patient is noted to have died on Tuesday, April 14, and is the seventh fatality recorded in Nigeria's commercial capital.

The patient was a 63-year-old Nigerian man who had no history of travel or contact with any confirmed case.

Another death , the sixth, had been announced by the state's Commissioner for Health, Akin Abayomi, on Tuesday.

The deceased was a 56-year-old Nigerian who recently returned from the United States.

*One #COVID19 death was recorded. This brings to 7, the number of #COVID19 related deaths in Lagos State.#StayAtHomeStaySafe to break the chain of transmission.



Call 08000CORONA = 08000267662 for care and support on #COVID19 related issues.@NCDCgov@EpidAlert@Mr_JAGss@WHO  LSMOH (@LSMOH) April 15, 2020

Lagos is the epicentre of the coronavirus outbreak in Nigeria, recording a total of 214 cases , 57.4% of the country's total of 373.

25 new cases were recorded in the state on Tuesday, the highest the state has recorded in one day since Nigeria's index case was detected in February.

President Muhammadu Buhari has extended an initial lockdown in Lagos, Ogun, and the Federal Capital Territory (FCT), Abuja by an additional 14 days.

During a national address on Monday, April 13, he expressed concerns that despite the nation's best efforts, coronavirus cases have doubled since the lockdown was initiated especially in both Lagos and the FCT; extending the lockdown till April 27 .

Nigeria has recorded coronavirus cases in 19 states and the FCT.

99 people have been discharged after recovery, 69 of them in Lagos alone.

With the Wednesday's announcement, a total of 12 people have now died in Nigeria from coronavirus-related complications.
Source: Xinhua| 2020-04-15 22:58:08|Editor: huaxia

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ROME, April 15 (Xinhua) -- At least 1.8 million self-employed people in Italy received their first monthly state benefit on Wednesday as part of a larger government package to financially support workers during the coronavirus emergency, the Labor Ministry said.

Each affected person receives a tax-exempt voucher of 600 euros (654 U.S. dollars). The 1.8 million self-employed people represent about 50 percent of all those who have applied and qualified for the benefit.

The other 50 percent will receive the benefit "by the end of this week," Minister of Labor and Social Policies Nunzia Catalfo said in a statement on Tuesday.

Some 22 percent of these first 1.8 million recipients work in the agricultural sector, according to the statement.

The benefit is also planned to be granted for the month of May, and its increase to 800 euros is "plausible," Italian Economy Minister Roberto Gualtieri told local media Tuesday evening.

Also on Wednesday, before the parliamentary finance committee, the Bank of Italy unveiled an official report analysing the economic impact of the coronavirus pandemic and the economy's liquidity needs.

"Based on our assessment, Italy's industrial production would have contracted by around 15 percent in March," the report stated.

The paper said that confidence among firms and purchasing managers "sharply fell in the manufacturing sector, and also dropped to an all-time low in services and construction."

"A similar decline is registered in household confidence indicators, and in particular on personal economic prospects, on the country's economic prospects, and on employment effects (expected)," it specified.

Regarding businesses, the Bank of Italy's report warned the sharp drop in sales due to the nationwide lockdown (in place from March 10 up to May 3 so far) was causing "a fast deterioration in the companies' liquidity conditions."

This problem is partly due also to the "inelasticity of some items of expenditure" in the Italian economy.

"Our estimates show that -- between March and July -- the additional needs for corporate liquidity might reach 50 billion euros," the report said.

These estimates factored in the positive effects of some of the measures contained in the 25-billion-euro "Cure Italy Decree," adopted in mid-March, and assumed the complete use of all new credit lines made available to firms during the coronavirus emergency.

The decree comprises a series of measures, some of which aim to stimulate "a very strong injection of liquidity into the credit system that can mobilize around 340 billion in loans to the real economy," according to Gualtieri.

On April 7, the cabinet adopted a new package to support firms, ensuring further immediate liquidity worth 400 billion euros overall -- some 200 billion euros for the domestic market and another 200 billion euros for the export market. (1 euro = 1.09 U.S. dollars)
"Not only do we need health care workers, but given the legacy systems we should add a page for [COBOL] computer skills, because that's what we're dealing with, New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy said in a news briefing this month. Literally, we have systems that are 40-plus years old."

Old doesn't mean obsolete

But just because the technology is several decades old doesn't necessarily mean it's out of date. Because developers have continuously improved COBOL, many companies and government agencies opt to stick with it rather than switch over to newer options, according to Bill Hinshaw, founder and CEO of Cobol Cowboys, a company that connects experienced COBOL programmers with employers.

"I tell people, it's like if you're riding a bicycle, you hop off of it, and you jump on a Harley Davidson, Hinshaw says. That's the type of change you will see from the COBOL mainframes 60 years ago to what it is today. It's not even comparable.

He says his company has received 350 resumes from experienced COBOL programmers in recent years, as media coverage has started to highlight the need among government agencies.

"Because of the current crisis in New Jersey and other states with unemployment claims, our website has been hit hard with people that know COBOL and want to help, Hinshaw says. People of all ages are coming to us, even. We're getting the younger generations that code and are coming to us to say, We want to learn COBOL. 

Many computer programmers  including COBOL developers  have associate or bachelor's degrees in computer science. It is possible, however, to acquire the necessary skills through online courses or boot camps, some of which are specifically designed to help older adults build new skills or change careers. COBOL mainframe developers make an average of $42 per hour, according to ZipRecruiter.

Connecting programmers to states

To help meet the immediate demand for assistance, IBM has set up a web page to help connect experienced programmers with the state agencies that need them. There are also some states that are in need of additional programming skills to make changes to COBOL  a language that has been widely reported to have an estimated 220 billion lines of code being actively used today, writes Meredith Stowell, an IBM vice president. These changes to the code are required to take into account the new parameters for unemployment payment eligibility, in a very short timeframe."

In many cases, however, much of the mainframe work that involves COBOL programming may need to wait until after the pandemic subsides. For example, the Kansas Department of Labor was working to migrate its technology to newer software but had to postpone that process once the coronavirus emergency developed, according to Gov. Laura Kelly.

Hinshaw expects that many more employers may be looking for COBOL programmers once the coronavirus pandemic subsides to help them transition to newer software.

"You don't do that overnight, he says. You have to build a strategic plan to do that."
Prue Leith won praise from viewers over her honest and heart-wrenching journey to Cambodia in search of her adopted daughter's birth family in a Channel 4 documentary.

Great British Bake Off judge Prue, 80, adopted a 16-month-old Cambodian girl, Li-Da, 45 years ago and gave her a self-described 'very English' upbringing at her Cotswolds home.

But she rarely questioned if she could have helped Li-Da connect more with her Cambodian roots. 'People say adoption is alturistic but for me it was entirely selfish,' she confessed in last night's one-off programme, Prue Leith: Journey With My Daughter. 'I wanted a baby.'

Now social media and DNA testing are allowing thousands of children who, like Li-Da, were evacuated before Pol Pot's genocide to find relatives.

Great British Bake Off judge Prue, 80, adopted a 16-month-old Cambodian girl, Li-Da, 45 years ago and gave her a self-described 'very English' upbringing at her Cotswolds home. In last night's one-off TV special they journeyed to Cambodia to learn more about her past

Viewers were left emotional over the story and praised Prue for supporting her daughter

Li-Da, 46, who has recently adopted her own baby, not only felt a burning desire but also a poignancy as a new mother herself to explore her heritage and help Prue understand why it's important.

Viewers were impressed with Prue's honesty at admitting she had perhaps fallen short in not fostering a connection between Li-Da and her cultural roots, and praised the Great British Bake Off judge for her 'unconditional love'.

One tweeted: 'Thank you @PrueLeith for being frank and honest: the joy of adoptive parenting born of a birth mothers pain acknowledged and honoured. Your and your daughter are brave women #pruesjourney #adoption #motheranddaughter.'

Another added: 'Oh my word - this is something else - so sad Prue has regrets, but they have such a wonderful relationship and how fabulousthey get to do this together #PruesJourney #LiDasJourney.'

Her adoption was organised by the late French humanitarian Yvette Pierpaoli, who got hundreds of orphans and sick babies out before the end of the war. Prue and Li-Da travelled to Yvette's former home, pictured, to see where Li-Da would have lived as a baby

Viewers were impressed with Prue's honesty at admitting she had not given much thought to Li-Da's cultural background, her ties to Cambodia, or the trauma she must have experienced

A third wrote: 'What a heartbreakingly honest journey. Ive loved watching this and hope theres a follow up #PruesJourney.'

In April 1975, the Khmer Rouge, whose Killing Fields took the lives of nearly two million Cambodians, marched on the capital Phnom Penh.

Just three days before the city fell, six-month-old Li-Da was flown out of the country in a bassinet beneath the feet of the pilot of a US helicopter on one of the last flights.

Her adoption was organised by the late French humanitarian Yvette Pierpaoli, who got hundreds of orphans and sick babies out before the end of the war.

After 26 years, Li-Da returned to Cambodia to make her moving 2003 documentary Belonging, to find out the truth about her past.

She discovered a little about her parents, but adopting her son in the UK, who's nearly two and was placed with her and her husband a year ago, was the catalyst for returning.

Research led to a woman whose daughter of the same age was adopted from there and Li-Da took a DNA test to find out if she is her birth mother. Pictured, Li-Da with Prue Leith and the Hong family. It was thought the mother could have been Li-Da's mother

Li-Da left Cambodia with only her birth certificate and an adoption contract saying her family were from Ta Khmau, a suburb ten miles outside the capital.

After 20 years of research, one concrete thing she has learnt is her adoption contract was signed by a nurse from a psychiatric hospital.

'No one really knows what happened to her parents,' said Prue.

'But I was told a tragic story when I adopted her. Her mother was killed in a rocket attack and her father, an injured soldier, carried her until he could walk no further. He had to give her up before the Khmer Rouge came.

'In a sense I suppose I've been safe in the knowledge that all my life Li-Da's mother was already dead, killed by a rocket.

'But one fact we definitely knew was that 20 babies from this hospital were taken away to be adopted by foreigners, and Li-Da was one.'

Prue embraced Li-Da when she was given the disappointing news that a DNA test was not a match

On a previous visit to the hospital Li-Da was told the story of the rocket attack, but wasn't sure it was true. This time they learnt the rocket didn't kill anyone, so her mother could still be alive.

Research led to a woman whose daughter of the same age was adopted from there and Li-Da took a DNA test to find out if she is her birth mother.

However the results were not a match. Prue was on hand to embrace Li-Da and comfort her when she was disappointed.
Source: Xinhua| 2020-04-16 04:07:28|Editor: huaxia

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UNITED NATIONS, April 15 (Xinhua) -- United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres on Wednesday said that debt relief must be an important part of Africa's response to the COVID-19 pandemic, while noting that the African continent could end up suffering the greatest impacts.

"Debt relief must be an important part of the response. The UN will continue to advocate for debt relief for Africa, including non-IDA (International Development Association) countries who cannot service their debt," the UN chief said in a virtual meeting with the African Group, which is one of the five UN regional groups and composed of 54 member states from the African continent.

"Debt relief from non-Paris Club official creditors and London Club commercial creditors should also be part of the consideration," he added.

The Paris Club is a group of officials from major creditor countries whose role is to find coordinated and sustainable solutions to the payment difficulties experienced by debtor countries. The London Club is an informal group of private creditors on the international stage, and is similar to the Paris Club of public lenders.

The secretary-general said that the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa is also working closely with African countries in key areas, from briefing the African Union's Peace and Security Council on the coronavirus' impacts and helping develop food readiness plans, to calling on the international community, together with African finance ministers, for a debt relief package.

"All efforts must be aimed at the common enemy, as we brace for the expected spread of the pandemic in Africa. This is in no way of Africa's making. But as with the climate crisis, the African continent could end up suffering the greatest impacts," said the UN chief.
Two men died of COVID-19 in Tamil



Nadu on Wednesday and 38 more people tested positive, taking the total number of coronavirus cases in the State to 1,242, Health Minister C Vijayabaskar said.

Total number of deaths in the State now stands at 14.

A 47-year-old man with Severe Acute Respiratory Infection, who also tested positive for coronavirus, died at the Government Stanley Medical College Hospital here and a 59-year-old man who was in the intensive care unit of a private hospital alsosuccumbed to the illness caused by the contagion, the Minister told reporters.

Of the fresh 38 positive cases, 34 were infected from the "single source," he said an apparent reference to an event held last month in Delhi.

Three others had a contact history and another was a doctor pursuing postgraduation, he said.

"There is no community spread and this has been ensured as the state has a robust public health system," he added.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Iraqi parties require PM-designate to end US-led military presence: MP

Iran Press TV

Tuesday, 14 April 2020 5:25 PM

An Iraqi parliamentarian says the country's political parties have conditioned approving Prime Minister-designate Mustafa al-Kadhimi's cabinet on his acting on a law approved by the parliament that mandates evacuation of US-led forces.

Sa'ad al-Sa'adi, a senior member of the Fatah (Conquest) parliamentary coalition, made the remarks to the Baghdad Today news website on Tuesday.

The legislature ratified the law in early January, only days after the United States carried out an unauthorized drone attack, assassinating Lieutenant General Qassem Soleimani, the commander of the Quds Force of Iran's Islamic Revolution Guards Corps (IRGC), Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, the second-in-command of the Popular Mobilization Units, or Hashd al-Sha'abi anti-terror force, and a number of others.

The attack came while General Soleimani was on an official trip in the Iraqi capital at Baghdad's request.

The assassinations were followed by thousands-strong funeral processions and protests across both Iran and Iraq in honor of the commanders and condemnation of the US's nearly two decades of deadly interference in the region.

On April 9, Iraqi President Barham Salih tasked Mustafa al-Kadhimi, director of the country's National Intelligence Service, with forming a new government in a month. The presidential ceremony was attended by several high-ranking politicians and public figures, something that was interpreted as Kadhimi's across-the-board popularity with Iraq's political groupings.

He was the third person to be nominated for the office in 10 weeks after his predecessors Adnan al-Zurfi and Mohammed Allawi withdrew their bids failing to secure the legislature's support in their task of forming a government.

Al-Sa'adi said, "Now that Mustafa al-Kadhimi has secured the parliament's vote of confidence [that enabled his nomination as the premier], one of his most important duties is to implement the law ratified by the parliament, based on which all foreign forces should be evacuated from Iraq."

The condition is one of the most important ones that al-Kadhimi has been committed to implement, al-Sa'adi noted, adding "he has consented to [implementing] this condition."

Al-Sa'adi called the result of the parliamentary vote binding, saying it could not be defied by any premier, and has to be put into force, especially in light of the far-and-wide popular support that it has received ever since ratification.

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Amazon has fired two employees who were outspoken critics of its climate policies and who had publicly denounced the conditions at its warehouses as unsafe during the coronavirus pandemic.

The virus has spread widely, infecting workers in at least 74 warehouses and delivery facilities across the country, according to Amazon and media reports. Some warehouse workers have staged small demonstrations in response.

And Amazon acknowledged on Tuesday that a manager in its Hawthorne, California, warehouse died on 31 March, the first reported coronavirus-related death among its workers.

One of the fired workers, Emily Cunningham, a user experience designer who is part of the group Amazon Employees for Climate Justice, had offered on Twitter to match donations up to $500 to Amazon warehouse workers. In that tweet, she wrote that a lack of safe and sanitary working conditions puts them and the public at risk.

Cunningham said late Monday that she was fired on Friday afternoon.

Maren Costa, a principal user experience designer who is also part of the employee climate group, said she also was fired Friday. Costa has retweeted criticism from Cunningham, as well as from groups supporting the activist warehouse workers, about Amazons policies on protecting warehouse staff. Costa, too, offered via Twitter to match donations up to $500 for warehouse workers while they struggle to get consistent, sufficient protections and procedures from our employer.

Separately, Amazon confirmed on Tuesday that it fired a worker at a Minnesota warehouse who had been an activist calling for safer working conditions.

Amazon fired the tech workers for repeatedly violating internal policies, spokesman Drew Herdener said in a statement.

We support every employees right to criticise their employers working conditions, but that does not come with blanket immunity against any and all internal policies, Herdener said.

Amazon employees hold a protest and walkout over conditions at the companys Staten Island distribution facility in March (Getty)

Amazons external communications policy prohibits employees from commenting publicly on its business without corporate justification and approval from executives. Herdener previously said the policy did not allow employees to publicly disparage or misrepresent the company.

Because of how effective weve been in getting Amazon to take leadership in the climate crisis, theyve wanted me gone for a while, Cunningham said.

Costa believes she was fired for her outspokenness as well.

They were targeting the most visible leaders in an attempt to silence everyone, Costa said on Monday night.

Amazon fired Costa in a video call while she worked at home, with her 13-year-old son in the next room. After the call, her son asked if shed been fired for her climate activism, she said. When she told him she was, he asked if she regretted it.

High noon in a coronavirus-stricken world Show all 18 1 /18 High noon in a coronavirus-stricken world High noon in a coronavirus-stricken world Najaf, Iraq A man holds a pocket watch at noon, at an almost empty market near the Imam Ali shrine Reuters High noon in a coronavirus-stricken world Bangkok, Thailand Wat Phra Si Rattana Satsadaram (The Temple of the Emerald Buddha, part of The Grand Palace) Reuters High noon in a coronavirus-stricken world Prague, Czech Republic An empty street leading to the historic Old Town Square Reuters High noon in a coronavirus-stricken world Washington DC, US Lawn stretching towards the Capitol, home of Congress Reuters High noon in a coronavirus-stricken world Jerusalem's Old City A watch showing the time in front of Damascus Gate Reuters High noon in a coronavirus-stricken world London, UK The Houses of Parliament seen from Westminster Bridge Reuters High noon in a coronavirus-stricken world Wuhan, China Empty lanes in the city that saw the first outbreak of disease Reuters High noon in a coronavirus-stricken world Havana, Cuba The Malecon road and esplanade winds along the city's seafront Reuters High noon in a coronavirus-stricken world Cairo, Egypt A little busier than elsewhere: midday traffic in Tahrir Square Reuters High noon in a coronavirus-stricken world Berlin, Germany The Brandenburg Gate, the only surviving city gate in the capital Reuters High noon in a coronavirus-stricken world Caracas, Venezuela Bolivar Avenue, opened in 1949 and the site of many demonstrations and rallies Reuters High noon in a coronavirus-stricken world Moscow, Russia Spasskaya Tower (left) on the eastern wall of the Kremlin, and St Basil's Cathedral Reuters High noon in a coronavirus-stricken world Istanbul,Turkey The harbourside Eminonu district is usually buzzing with activity Reuters High noon in a coronavirus-stricken world New Delhi, India Rajpath, a ceremonial boulevard that runs through the capital Reuters High noon in a coronavirus-stricken world Amman, Jordan The Roman amphitheatre that dates back to the 2nd century AD Reuters High noon in a coronavirus-stricken world New York City, US The main concourse of Grand Central station in Manhattan Reuters High noon in a coronavirus-stricken world Kiev, Ukraine Maidan Nezalezhnosti, the site of many political protests since the end of the Soviet era Reuters High noon in a coronavirus-stricken world Accra, Ghana The odd walker out in the midday sun on Ring Road Central Reuters

I said, No, I dont. Not at all. Im doing this for you,  Costa said.

The 35-year-old California worker who died was an operations manager. Business Insider first reported his death.

The Minnesota warehouse worker fired, Bashir Mohamed, was involved in labour organising and had been advocating for more rigorous measures to protect against the transmission of the coronavirus, according to BuzzFeed, which first reported his firing.

Amazon spokeswoman Kristen Kish said the fired was not retaliatory, but rather the result of progressive disciplinary action for inappropriate language, behaviour, and violating social distancing guidelines.

The online retailer has been closely scrutinised for its handling of the coronavirus outbreak (Getty)

Last month, Amazon fired Chris Smalls, a warehouse worker in Staten Island, after he raised concerns to several media outlets, including The Post, about working conditions. New York Attorney General Letitia James called the firing disgraceful and asked the National Labour Relations Board to investigate the incident, and five U.S. senators, including former Democratic presidential candidates Cory Booker of New Jersey and Kirsten Gillibrand of New York, sent Bezos a letter raising concerns about Smallss firing.

Amazon said the dismissal was related to Smallss ignoring a request from his manager to stay home after contact with a worker who tested positive for the coronavirus.

Cunningham has been a vocal critic of Amazons climate policies, criticising them at the companys shareholder meeting last May. Subsequently, she condemned Amazons work with oil and gas companies on social media and in news reports.

Late last year, Amazon warned Costa, who also denounced the companys climate practices, that she risked being fired for speaking about Amazons business in a public forum.

Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos observes workers in a US warehouse (Amazon, Twitter) ((Amazon, Twitter))

In January, more than 350 employees engaged in a mass defiance of company communications policy to support Costa and others, calling out Amazon for its climate policy, its work with federal agencies and its attempts to stifle dissent in a post on Medium.

Senator Bernie Sanders, an outspoken critic of Amazons use of the federal tax code to generate a net benefit while earning $11bn in 2018, ripped the company and Bezos for leaving its employees to raise funds for colleagues as they work in warehouses.

That is obscene, Sanders said. Maybe  just maybe  the wealthiest man in the world can afford to provide a safe and dignified existence to all of his workers and end Amazons involvement in fossil fuel extraction, instead of just firing employees who are demanding justice and an end to the hypocrisy.

In criticising Amazons warehouse policies, Cunningham and Costa joined a chorus of politicians, unions and others clamouring for Amazon to improve workplace conditions.

For the past month, warehouse employees in Europe and the United States have sounded alarms that the company wasnt taking enough steps to protect them from the virus. Workers complained about policies that push them to meet the per-hour rate at which the company wants orders fulfilled, a practice that they worry discourages safe sanitary practices such as washing hands after a cough or sneeze. Others have complained about stand-up meetings, where workers stand shoulder-to-shoulder at the start of each shift.

Amazon has since taken steps to address those issues, including giving warehouse workers masks and checking the temperatures of employees as they begin shifts, sending workers home for three days if they register 100.4 degrees Fahrenheit or higher, the company said.

Despite losing her job, Cunningham said she has no regrets.

I know Im going to be OK, she said. These times are going to require us to be our bravest, best selves.

The Washington Post
A 22-year-old scrap dealer is in the custody of the police for allegedly spraying some liquid substance into the eyes of a police woman during enforcement of restriction duties at Kaneshie Zongo junction.

The Accra Regional Police public relations officer, DSP Effia Tenge, told DGN Online that Suspect Osman Amadu was part of other occupants of a taxi cap that was prevented by the police from roaming in town as part of the restriction order.

She said around 9am on Friday April 10, 2020, the police woman was on a Covid-19 duty at the Zongo junction ensuring compliance of directives.

DSP Tenge continued that the police woman, name withheld, in the course of discharging her duties , stopped a taxi cabbie with suspect on board.

Suspect was questioned about his movement but instead of answering the questions, he removed the said spray from his pocket and sprayed direct it into the eyes of the police woman.

She said the police woman shouted for help and with the help of other officers who stood nearby, the suspect was arrested and handed over to the Kaneshie police.

The victim was then rushed to the police hospital where she was treated and has currently been discharged.

DSP Tenge said the suspect upon interrogations admitted to the offence and added that he did not know what came over him.

He is being processed for court on the counts of assault on a public officer and violation of the Restriction of Imposition Act, as the substance is being forwarded to the forensic laboratory for examination."

---Daily Guide
Some US$ 85,000 are raised to pay for food parcels. The money was sent to Radio Veritas Asias Mandarin Service for distribution. People "continue to donate, says Fr Leo. So far, the Philippines have reported 5,223 confirmed cases with 335 deaths and 295 recovered.

Manila (AsiaNews/CBCP)  In the middle of the novel coronavirus pandemic, Catholics in China, where the outbreak began, are raising funds to help Filipinos, especially the residents of Manilas poor slums, who are among the most affected and least capable of coping with the lockdown imposed by the authorities to stem the spread of the COVID-19 virus.

So far, 5,223 cases have been reported in the Philippines, with 335 deaths and 295 people recovered.

According to CBCPNews, Chinese Catholics raised ,000 (around 4.3 million pesos) and sent the money to the Mandarin Service of Quezon City-based Radio Veritas Asia (RVA), which handled the money.

Fr Joseph Leo, coordinator of RVAs Mandarin Service, said the funds were used to provide food parcels to residents in poor communities. Some money was given to a number of Catholic charities working among the poor in Metro Manila.

One project run by the Society of St Vincent de Paul helps residents in Payatas, Quezon City, a slum located near a garbage dump where scavenging is the main source of income.

During the current emergency, RVAs pandemic updates have been closely followed amid the governments lockdown, Fr Leo said.

Since we started to report the news of the Manila lockdown, our listeners have been very concerned about the poor people here, he explained.

Every year many Chinese priests and nuns visit the Philippines and learn about the projects promoted by RVA in favour of the poor.

They help them (poor) through us every year. So, when Manila was in a lockdown, they began to donate money to the poor to buy the rice, Fr Leo said. So far, people continue to donate.

The dioceses of Wenzhou, Guangzhou, Tianjin and Fuzhou are at the forefront of the aid project.
Significant health, mental, medication and flight issues likely contributed to a Jan. 22, 2018, plane crash in Bonita Springs that killed Daniel Bernath, 68, a Fort Myers pilot and former Oregonian.

Bernaths plane crashed in a wooded area outside a gated community in southeast Bonita Springs as he flew to Everglades Airport in Everglades City.

The crash analysis in the final report submitted by the National Transportation Safety Board said that Bernath was flying a Vans Aircraft RV-12 within the yellow airspeed caution range and in excess of the crafts maximum structural cruise speed. That aspect was cited as a mitigating factor in the in-flight failure of the crafts left wing shortly before the plane crashed.

An autopsy of Bernath found a cocktail of three potentially impairing psychoactive medications: Citalopram, Mirtazapine and Trazadone, all antidepressants and all carrying warnings that they can impair judgment and motor skills as well as impede the mental or physical abilities required to perform potentially hazardous tasks such as driving or operating heavy equipment.

Bernath had also been released from a months-long stint in a Virginia jail just days before the crash, the report said.

The NTSB analysis cited Bernaths significant coronary artery disease  he had a 50 to 75 percent narrowing of multiple coronary arteries  and said it was possible he could have suffered an acute cardiac event that affected his ability to control the plane.

Overall, the pilots coronary artery and significant psychiatric disease put him at risk for distraction and inattention that could have led to the accident circumstances, the NTSB report said. His unreported psychiatric disease, if not well-controlled, could have led to intentionally unsafe maneuvering.

While the report stopped short of saying the medications led to the crash, the report did say that based on his interactions with the air traffic controllers, Bernath was not performing at a competent level.

Robert Katz, a corporate pilot based in Dallas, said Bernath should not have been flying the plane.

"This pilot was not at all proficient or competent with the skill required to operate this airplane safely," Katz said. "The wild and erratic manipulation of the aircraft's controls tells me this pilot was easily distracted and incapable of multitasking by dividing his attention between looking for other traffic and flying the airplane."

The final report said that while the exact cause of Bernaths behavior could not be pinpointed, the lack of finding any weather issues or mechanical anomalies linked to the crash made it likely that his underlying physiologic or psychiatric disease resulted in his pushing the craft beyond its operating limitations and prompting an inflight failure of the left wing.

Bernath had acted erractically before. In 2010, a federal magistrate in Portland ordered him to undergo anger-management counseling after an altercation with a judge on a downtown Portland elevator. Bernath was found guilty of disorderly conduct for the dust-up with Dan R. Hyatt, a judge in Social Securitys disability hearing office.

In the Florida crash, the NTSB said: According to preliminary air traffic control voice communication and radar data obtained from the Federal Aviation Administration, the flight was en route from (Page Field) to (Everglades Airpark). The pilot was receiving flight following services from air traffic control. While on a southeasterly heading and at 2,500 feet ... the pilot was advised of traffic in his vicinity. The pilot acknowledged, and shortly after this transmission he stated, mayday, mayday. No additional calls were received from the pilot and radar and radio contact were lost.

The report said the plane was built from a kit in 2011 and last inspected in July 2016. A flight plan was not required and had not been filed by Bernath.

Additionally, the report said that Bernath had a sport pilot certificate and, according to the FAA, did not possess an FAA medical certificate, nor was one required to operate as a sport pilot.

However, the NTSB also said that it was Bernaths responsibility to report any medical deficiency that might interfere with the safe performance of sport pilot operations to the Federal Aviation Administration, which the report said he did not do.

"Failure to report any potentially impairing psychoactive medications and any medical deficiency is a willful and direct violation of (FAA regulations)," Katz said, adding, "this man would have never qualified for a medical certificate if required to have one."

The RV-12 is a kit airplane that flying enthusiasts can build themselves. This particular plane was a two-seat all-metal side-by-side craft with a large cabin that seats the occupants ahead of the wing spar  a beam which takes the load along the wing, from wing tip to fuselage.

In a Feb 2018 interview with Bernaths wife, Martha Wong, and daughter, Nicole Bernath, NTSB investigators said she told them the couple moved to Florida from Oregon in 2014 and that Bernath had purchased the plane in Washington State and flew it to Page Field.

Wong told the NTSB she was not in the U.S. at the time of the accident, she was in Bangkok for a reunion.

Bernath was released from jail in Virginia a few days prior to the accident, Wong said. She told the NTSB that Bernath had been in jail for a few months for violating a restraining order that stemmed from a stolen valor claim against him.

Wong said her husband was under medical care at the VA and was under treatment for neuropathy and high blood pressure.

She said Bernath did not have any mental health issues that she was aware of.

Bernaths daughter Nicole said he told her that he flew the airplane on the day before the accident and there were no problems with the airplane and it ran well.

A woman who answered the phone at Bernaths home in the Tanglewood area of Fort Myers declined to positively identify herself and declined to comment.

The 2018 crash was not Bernaths first.

Bernath walked away from a September 2013 plane crash after he said his plane ran out of fuel in the skies above Oregon.

Information from an NTSB report on that crash said the then 63-year-old pilot was unhurt after he was forced to land his airplane near the Sisters Eagle Airport in Sisters Oregon.

He told the NTSB that he ran out of fuel while flying his Flight Design CTSW craft from Coeur d'Alene, Idaho, to Sacramento, California, and crashed in a field about 200 yards southeast of the runway.

A report in the The Oregonian newspaper said Bernath, living in Tigard, Oregon, at the time, was the only person in the plane, which had heavy damage to its nose and undercarriage.

Bernath had been issued his sport pilot license in November 2011 and was rated for single-engine planes only.
SANTA FE  U.S. Sen. Martin Heinrich is throwing his support behind progressive challengers to incumbent New Mexico Senate Democrats in at least two races.

In recent days, Heinrich announced his endorsement of Siah Correa Hemphill of Silver City and Pam Cordova of Rio Communities in fundraising appeals sent out by the two candidates campaigns.

Correa Hemphill is challenging incumbent Sen. Gabriel Ramos in Senate District 28, while Cordova is running against two-term Sen. Clemente Sanchez of Grants in Senate District 30.

Ramos and Sanchez are two of about a half-dozen moderate Senate Democrats who are facing challengers in the June 2 primary election.

Its unusual for U.S. senators to get involved in legislative races, especially when it comes to candidates seeking to oust incumbent members of their own party.

But Heinrich, who won re-election in 2018 to his second term in the U.S. Senate, has displayed a past willingness to get involved in state-level races.

He also endorsed fellow Democrat Garrett VeneKlasen in the 2018 state land commissioner race. VeneKlasen ended up losing a three-way primary to Stephanie Garcia Richard, who went on to win the general election.

Heinrich campaign spokesman Juan Sanchez said the two-term senator has also endorsed other candidates in this years election cycle  including Joe Biden for president and two Grant County Commission candidates.

When it comes to the state Senate races, Heinrich believes Correa Hemphill and Cordova have both the professional and life experiences that best serve their communities as state senators, Sanchez said.

Heinrich also plans to endorse more candidates  in county level to statewide races  in the coming weeks and months, he added.
Bill Gates has condemned Donald Trumps decision to suspend funding for the World Health Organization, saying it is as dangerous as it sounds.

The billionaire Microsoft founder tweeted that the world needs the health body more than ever.

Trumps controversial decision, which he said was made over the WHOs handling of the coronavirus pandemic, has drawn condemnation from infectious diseases experts.

It comes as the global death toll from the virus continues to mount  nearly 2 million people globally have been infected and more than 124,000 have died since it emerged in China late last year, according to a Reuters tally.

Halting funding for the World Health Organization during a world health crisis is as dangerous as it sounds. Their work is slowing the spread of COVID-19 and if that work is stopped no other organization can replace them. The world needs @WHO now more than ever.  Bill Gates (@BillGates) April 15, 2020

Trumps attack

The US president, who has reacted angrily to criticism of his administration's response to the worst epidemic in a century, has become increasingly hostile towards the WHO.

He said the Geneva-based body had promoted Chinese disinformation that led to a wider outbreak than otherwise would have occurred.

Latest coronavirus news, updates and advice

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The WHO failed in this basic duty and must be held accountable, he said on Tuesday.

UN secretary-general Antonio Guterres said it was not the time to reduce resources for the WHO.

Now is the time for unity and for the international community to work together in solidarity to stop this virus and its shattering consequences, he said in a statement.

Story continues

The US is the WHOs biggest overall donor, contributing more than $400 million in 2019, roughly 15% of the organisations budget.

Reaction

China has responded by urging the US to fulfil its obligations to the WHO. Foreign ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian said the pandemic was at a critical stage and that Trumps decision would affect all countries of the world.

Germany described funding of the body as one of the best investments possible. Heiko Mass, the nations foreign minister, said on Wednesday that the virus knows no borders.

Apportioning blame doesn't help. The virus knows no borders, he said on Twitter. We have to work closely together against #COVID19. One of the best investments is to strengthen the @UN, especially the under-funded @WHO, for example for developing and distributing tests and vaccines.

Australian prime minister Scott Morrison said he sympathised with Trumps criticisms of the WHO, especially its unfathomable support of reopening China's wet markets, where freshly slaughtered, and live, animals are sold.

The coronavirus is believed to have emerged from such a market in the city of Wuhan late last year.

But that said, the WHO also as an organisation does a lot of important work including here in our region in the Pacific and we work closely with them, Morrison said.

We are not going to throw the baby out of with the bathwater here, but they are also not immune from criticism.

Gates to fund vaccine research

Bill Gates has been vocal in calling for collaboration to beat the virus. (AP)

Gates has been vocal throughout the pandemic in calling for collaboration to beat the virus.

Earlier this month, he said the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation would fund seven factories to help develop an effective COVID-19 vaccine as quickly as possible.

He said the foundation would help select the most promising seven potential vaccines.

Even though well end up picking at most two of them, were going to fund factories for all seven just so we dont waste time in serially saying ok which vaccine works and then building the factory, Gates told The Daily Show on 3 April.

Itll be a few billion dollars well waste on manufacturing for the constructs that dont get picked because something else is better. But a few billion in this situation were in, where theres trillions of dollars... being lost economically, it is worth it,

Gates and his wife Melinda have already pledged $100 million toward fighting the pandemic.

Coronavirus: what happened today
More than 1,000 Celebrity Cruises employees have joined a class action lawsuit filed Tuesday in Miami, alleging that the company knew how easily the novel coronavirus could spread on ships yet still did not do enough to protect crew members working on board.

In February, the Diamond Princess ship was placed under quarantine in Japan for two weeks, with 712 passengers and crew members testing positive for the COVID-19 coronavirus. The lawsuit states that this was an "early warning of how easily COVID-19 could spread on massive ocean liners," yet Celebrity Cruises still had its crew members eat buffet-style, attend parties, and participate in drills on board despite "having notice that COVID-19 was and/or likely was present aboard the vessels."

Last month, a crew member on the Celebrity Infinity died after displaying coronavirus-like symptoms, and attorney Michael Winkleman told ABC News the cruise line "egregiously failed to take even the most basic steps to protect its crew members from the rampant spread of coronavirus."

The plaintiff representing the class in the suit is Alexandra Nedeltcheva, who worked in the food and beverage department on the Celebrity Apex. She boarded the ship on March 2, and said there were "no masks, no screenings." She tested positive for COVID-19 at the end of March, and said most of her colleagues are sick because "we were the ones in constant contact with all the other people on board." She was able to leave the ship after being in quarantine, and told ABC News, "I pray to God that everybody's safe. The guests are very important, but we're also human at the end of the day."

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports that over the last two months, COVID-19 outbreaks on three cruise ships have resulted in more than 800 confirmed cases in the United States amid passengers and 10 deaths. There are about 18,900 crew members still on board 25 cruise ships that are anchored in U.S. waters, the U.S. Coast Guard told ABC News on Monday, and 20,900 crew members on 26 cruise ships moored in U.S. ports.

More stories from theweek.com

Why can't you go fishing during the pandemic?

China secretly prepared for a pandemic as tens of thousands of people dined together in Wuhan, AP reports

Former UN ambassador claims Trump's WHO funding pullout exceeds Putin's 'wildest dreams'


Australia

April 15, 2020

Byron Kennedy

USA

Asia

Australia

Swinburne University

Melbourne

University of Delaware

USA

Japan

University of Delaware

University of Delaware

Miranda Taylor

Melbourne, Australia

Van Doremalen

DARWIN,/PRNewswire/ -- Australian company SPEE3D has successfully developed and tested a fast and affordable way to 3D print anti-microbial copper onto metal surfaces. Laboratory tests have shown that touch surfaces modified by this process 'contact kills' 96% of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, in just two hours.The process, known as ACTIVAT3D copper, has been developed by modifying SPEE3D's world-leading 3D printing technology, using new algorithms for controlling their metal printers to allow existing metal parts to be coated with copper. Copper parts are difficult to produce using traditional methods and thus 3D printing may be the only tool available to rapidly deploy copper. SPEE3D technology makes it fast and affordable.Australian NATA accredited clinical trial speciality laboratory, 360Biolabs, tested the effect of ACTIVAT3D copper on live SARS-CoV-2 in their Physical Containment 3 (PC3) laboratory. The results showed that 96% of the virus is killed in two hours and 99.2% of the virus killed in 5 hours, while stainless steel showed no reduction in the same time frame. Stainless steel is currently the material typically used in hygiene environments.With laboratory testing complete, it is hoped the Australian-developed breakthrough can be applied to common touch items like door handles, rails and touch plates in hospitals, schools and other public places.SPEE3D CEO,said the company has focused on developing a solution that can be rapidly deployed and is more efficient than printing solid copper parts from scratch. "The lab results show ACTIVAT3D copper surfaces behave much better than traditional stainless, which may offer a promising solution to a global problem. The technology can be used globally addressing local requirements, be they in hospitals, schools, on ships or shopping centres."SPEE3D developed the unique technique to harness copper's proven abilities to eradicate bacteria, yeasts and viruses rapidly on contact by breaking down the cell wall and destroying the genome(1). This is compared to traditional surfaces like stainless steel and plastic, with recent studies showing that SARS-CoV-2 can survive on these materials for up to three days(2).Stainless steel and plastic surfaces can be disinfected, however, the problem with these surfaces is that, even with rigorous protocols, it is impossible to clean them constantly. When surfaces become contaminated between cleans, touching them may contribute to superspreading events. Touching contaminated objects, known as fomite transmission, was suspected during the 2003 SARS-CoV-1 epidemic and analysis of a nosocomial SARS57 CoV-1 superspreading event concluded that touching contaminated objects (fomites) played a significant role(2).To validate its abilities to combat COVID-19, copper samples printed by SPEE3D have been lab tested and shown to kill SARS-CoV-2. The SPEE3D team developed a process to coat a stainless-steel door touch plate and other handles in just 5 minutes. The digital print files were then sent to participating partners around the globe, allowing the simultaneous installation of newly-coated parts in buildings in theand. In a matter of days, copper fixtures were installed in buildings at Charles Darwin University (CDU) in Darwin,in, thein theand inAssistant Director of Digital Design and Additive Manufacturing at the, Larry (LJ) Holmes, said "Scientists and engineers at thewere honoured to be part of this global research collaboration. We recognized the importance of developing simple, yet highly impactful, solutions that have been proven effective on COVID-19. Recognizing supply chain shortfalls over the last couple of months, it was clear to this team that fabrication speed was a priority. Using this technology, we are able to rapidly transition safe options for high-touch surfaces."SPEE3D has worked in close collaboration with the Advanced Manufacturing Alliance (AMA) at CDU. The initial testing of ACTIVAT3D copper and future studies have been funded and supported by the National Energy Resources Australia (NERA). NERA CEOsaid SPEE3D's ability to successfully adapt their technology and pivot their business model demonstrated the resilience of Australian businesses and their potential to help the world combat COVID-19. "NERA has supported SPEE3D to develop market-leading technologies to help our national energy sector, and we're committed to assisting them leverage their skills and expertise into this important new paradigm to help our country and many others curtail the devastating impact of this global pandemic."For more information on ACTIVAT3D copper, visit www.spee3d.com .About SPEE3DSPEE3D, based in Darwin and, is an innovative supplier of metal-based additive manufacturing technology. SPEE3D developed a metal 3D printer able to rapidly manufacture components in a variety of different metals and alloys including copper. SPEE3D printers leverage a process called cold spray, which involves accelerating powder particles within a supersonic air jet. The particles deform and bond onto a surface, building up a coating, and eventually, a 3D object. The company has recently announced government-funded trials with the Royal Australian Navy and Australian Army.Note for Editors:This press release, along with images and videos can be found in the Resources  Press Kit section(https://www.spee3d.com/resources/?resource=press-kit) of the SPEE3D website or dropbox.(https://www.dropbox.com/sh/8qtschhqgo77s1k/AAB0kSauUfVTVTbkBpgf8V6Sa?dl=0)1. Warnes, S.L., Little, Z.R. and Keevil, C.W., 2015. Human coronavirus 229E remains infectious on common touch surface materials. MBio, 6(6), pp.e01697-15.2., N., Bushmaker, T., Morris, D., Holbrook, M., Gamble, A., Williamson, B., Tamin, A., Harcourt, J., Thornburg, N., Gerber, S. and Lloyd-Smith, J., 2020. Aerosol and surface stability of HCoV-19 (SARS-CoV-2) compared to SARS-CoV-1. medRxiv.

View original content:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/3d-printed-activat3d-copper-proven-to-kill-sars-cov-2-virus-on-contact-surfaces-301040163.html



SOURCE SPEE3D




Miss Ghana Foundation, the charity wing of the Miss Ghana pageant has donated some 400 pieces of face masks to health workers at the Ga West Municipal Hospital at Amasaman.



The gesture was part of the foundations widows mite to support frontline workers in the fight against COVID-19 pandemic. Among other items donated were 80 packs of Bel Aqua water and Bel Beverage courtesy Blow Chem. The donation was also made possible by the kind support of Lydia Seyram Alhassan, MP of Ayawaso West Wuogon.



Presenting the items to Diana Ofori Larbi  Head of Nursing and the Medical Superintendent Dr. Eric Sarpong Ntiamoah, reigning Miss Ghana, Rebecca Kwabi and Head of Projects at Miss Ghana Foundation, Isaac K.Y. Quainoo commended the health workers for their efforts so far and promised the foundation is firmly behind them.



Lets all remember to ease the pressure on our frontline workers by religiously practicing the Ghana Health Service (GHS) and other approved precautionary measures. Please stay at home, frequently wash your hands, keep our homes and environment clean and lets all respect social distancing, Miss Ghana 2019 added.



The grand finale of the 2020 edition of Miss Ghana pageant previously scheduled to take place in May 2020 has been postponed until further notice because of the coronavirus pandemic.



Inna Miriam Patty, CEO of Exclusive Event Ghana, organisers of the Miss Ghana pageant indicated earlier that a new date will be communicated depending on how the world fares with the pandemic.



President Akufo-Addo in his sixth address of the nation on the national progress made against the virus on Thursday evening, said although the efforts have been successful, the country was not yet out of the woods.

Source: Daily Guide









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
Nedbank Private Wealth has won multiple awards for its philanthropic advice and has published The Giving Report, a snapshot of giving practices among South Africa's wealthy, since 2010.

Noxolo Hlongwane, Head: Philanthropy Office, Nedbank Private Wealth

Giving to your beneficiary organisations should not stop simply because of a disruption to delivery programmes  in fact, it is more important than ever to support those social impact organisations that are struggling with cash-flow or which lack the resilience to withstand the crisis over time. It is vital that these organisations can continue to pay their fixed costs while in lockdown, so they can continue to operate later. Consider how you can make a more long-term contribution that will lead to lasting social impact, like more sustainable infrastructure.



Consider channelling funding towards immediate relief but within your areas of expertise. Dont move away completely from your focal area  be flexible and think where your support is most urgently needed. For example, at Nedbank Private Wealth, we are redirecting our funding for maths and science into curating content and materials that can be disseminated from online channels. We will resume our support for maths and science but, for now, there is a pressing need for digital material to support learners home study. The National Education Collaboration Trust (NECT) is supporting the Department of Basic Education to make a variety of resources available to learners.



Digital giving is coming to the forefront, and this is shifting our behaviour. Increasingly, we are turning to digital channels when finding, vetting and donating to organisations. While this is easy, convenient, and fully aligned with our objectives as philanthropists, its important to note that one should not abandon due diligence. Make sure youre donating to registered organisations. Criminals take advantage of crises, particularly online, so adhere to the principles of good governance.



Use this time to source and locate organisations within your local community that are most in need of assistance, and which are aligned with your interest  education, support for the homeless, childrens causes or assistance for the elderly. Some communities will be harder hit than others, so consider equitable solutions. Also support frontline organisations like The Red Cross, Gift of the Givers, the Salvation Army, Unicef and so on. As with a war effort, we can repurpose our resources  for example, providing meals for healthcare workers.



When the lockdown is lifted, consider volunteering both time and skills to aid with capacity-building  this will help to strengthen those organisations that lack reserves. We can also better prepare ourselves as donors by building resilience into the funding cycle and also becoming advocates for policy change where appropriate.



Collaboration is everything  work with other funders and see how you can coordinate your efforts for greater social impact.

As people struggle to survive in an extremely challenging economic environment, individual giving will suffer. However, if you can give, it is important to do so. Everyone can be a philanthropist, from donating small amounts of money to registered organisations and the Solidarity Response Fund, which is an independently administered fund. This is a unique opportunity to demonstrate the principles of Ubuntu  realise our interdependence upon one another and pull together to support one another. It will be of particular value as the Covid-19 outbreak will almost certainly lead to further unemployment and poverty.



 realise our interdependence upon one another and pull together to support one another. It will be of particular value as the Covid-19 outbreak will almost certainly lead to further unemployment and poverty. If you live within a small community  like a block of flats or a complex  consider helping the more vulnerable members of the community with shopping for essential items. We can assist at the most basic level, extending kindness to our less well-equipped neighbours.



Be considerate of others. Stay at home and, if you need to go out, limit contact and maintain a safe distance from others. This in itself is Ubuntu in action  and social solidarity is vital at this time.

South Africas affluent families, often vilified on social media for having excessive wealth in a country of great inequality, have been quick to respond to the Covid-19 crisis. On 23 March 2020, the Rupert and Oppenheimer families each donated R1bn to assist small businesses and their employees during this difficult time, and on 28 March the Motsepe family, in partnership with their associated companies (Sanlam, Africa Rainbow Capital, Africa Rainbow Minerals) also pledged R1bn, to help save lives and slow the advancement of SARS-CoV2, the novel coronavirus that has plunged the world into chaos.Our aim is to mitigate the immediate economic impact of this pandemic, by keeping companies in business and protecting jobs. We will do this by funding direct financial assistance to employees who are at risk of losing their jobs or have suffered a loss of income, because of Covid-19, Nicky Oppenheimer explained.It is at times like these that the true value of philanthropy becomes apparent, and we expect to see further pledges in the weeks and perhaps months to come. There is no doubt that short-term relief goes a long way towards undoing some of the immediate damage caused by a disaster of this magnitude. Our government is stretched, given the state of the economy, and philanthropy can bolster the national coffers, helping the most vulnerable to survive.Philanthropy effectively underscores the need for a sustained collective effort to overcome the scourge of the virus. Partnerships play a critical role, and philanthropists can really assist the country by working with the public sector, the private sector, non-profits and affected communities. By leveraging our combined skills and expertise, we can ensure that relief is unlocked in sustainable ways should this crisis continue beyond a few months.Here are a few points to bear in mind if you are considering a philanthropic approach to the crisis.
(Photo : Pixabay) Scientists Obeserve The Most Energetic Quasar: How Will It Affect The Earth?

Scientists have discovered the most active flow of energy from a distant quasar. According to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), the quasar is the brightest object in the universe which is similar to a star that releases powerful radio waves. Quasars can be mostly found far away from the Earth.

According to the Science Daily's report, scientists in the international Gemini Observatory detected a distant quasar known as "SDSS J135246.37+423923." It was revealed to be the most active quasar ever recorded. The team of researchers used the Gemini North Telescope located in Maunakea, Hawaii.

According to the study published by Astrophysical Journal, the outflow of energy created by the distant quasar is at 13% the speed of light and carries large amounts of energy. It can dramatically impact a star formation as it reaches across an entire galaxy. The active quasar can be located 60-billion-light-years away from the Earth.

Scientists observe the most energetic Quasar that releases powerful cosmic winds; How will it affect the Earth?

According to the Science Daily, the study measured the energy outflow created by the said quasar. "While high-velocity winds have previously been observed in quasars, these have been thin and wispy, carrying only a relatively small amount of mass," said Sarah Gallagher, one of the astronomers at Western University in Canada.

The outflow from this quasar in comparison, sweeps along a tremendous amount of mass at incredible speeds. This wind is extremely powerful, and it is still unknown how the quasar can launch something so substantial, Gallagher explained.

Aside from measuring the speed of the outflow from "SDSS J135246.37+423923.5," the team of researchers was also able to observe a supermassive black hole that powers the quasar.

The results of the study showed that the mass of the black hole is 8.6 billion times bigger than the Sun, and is about 2000 times larger than the black hole located in the center of the Milky Way Galaxy. It is also 50% more massive compared to the well-known black hole recorded which is located in the Messier 87 galaxy.

Science Daily explained that quasars, also know as "quasi-stellar objects", are a type of extraordinarily luminous astrophysical space objects that can be found at the centers of enormous galaxies. Quasars can outshine all the stars that can be located in their galaxy because of their supermassive black holes making them the brightest objects in space.

Because of the massive energy the quasars release, powerful cosmic winds are created that can affect the formation of an entire galaxy. Compared to a normal quasar, "SDSS J135246.37+423923.5's" outflow of energy is so powerful and thick that the team of astronomers had difficulties trying to detect the signature of the quasar--although its wavelengths are visible.

Despite the problems the team encountered, they were able to clearly observe the quasar with the help of the Gemini Near-Infrared Spectrograph (GNIRS), capturing a clear view of the quasar's infrared wavelengths. The results of the observation proved that "SDSS J135246.37+423923.5" is the most active one compared to the previously recorded quasars.





 2021 TECHTIMES.com All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission.
Source: Xinhua| 2020-04-16 05:58:33|Editor: huaxia

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Governor of Saudi Arabian Monetary Authority Ahmed al-Kholifey (L) and Saudi Finance Minister Mohammed al-Jadaan (C) attend the G20 finance ministers and central bankers teleconference meeting in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, on April 15, 2020. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank Group on Wednesday welcomed the Group of 20 (G20)'s decision to provide temporary debt relief for the world's poorest countries amid the COVID-19 pandemic. (G20 Saudi Arabia/Handout via Xinhua)

WASHINGTON, April 15 (Xinhua) -- The International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank Group on Wednesday welcomed the Group of 20 (G20)'s decision to provide temporary debt relief for the world's poorest countries amid the COVID-19 pandemic.

"We strongly welcome the decision of the G20 to respond to our call to allow the poorest countries of the world that request forbearance to suspend repayment of official bilateral credit on May 1st," World Bank Group President David Malpass and IMF Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva said in a joint statement.

"This is a powerful, fast-acting initiative that will do much to safeguard the lives and livelihoods of millions of the most vulnerable people," the statement said, adding the World Bank Group and the IMF will move quickly to respond to the G20's request to support this action.

"We championed this debt initiative, and we're committed to taking all possible steps to support the poor," said the heads of the two Washington-based international lenders.

The joint statement came after G20 finance ministers and central bankers on Wednesday agreed to "support a time-bound suspension of debt service payments for the poorest countries that request forbearance" following a teleconference meeting.

Saudi Finance Minister Mohammed al-Jadaan told reporters after the meeting that debt suspension for the poorest countries will be significant and provide around 20 billion dollars in immediate liquidity.

"I'm so glad that during the G20 discussion this morning there was unanimous support for the Fund to do more, especially for those who need us more," Georgieva said Wednesday later at a press conference for the virtual 2020 Spring Meetings.

"Just seeing how the G20 united around debt standstill for the poorest members gives me that confidence that whatever is necessary we will collectively do in the face of this tremendous crisis," she said.

The global economy is on track to contract sharply by 3 percent in 2020 as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, the worst recession since the Great Depression in the 1930s, according to the World Economic Outlook report released Tuesday by the IMF.
HCQ or Hydroxy-Chloroquine is a very important drug these days. Ever since, US President Donald Trump listed it on the top of his shopping lists, every government in the world has turned its attention towards this secret ingredient from India. Countries such as Israel, Brazil, and neighbours such as Nepal and Sri-Lanka have already requested India for essential supplies. Although exports have been restricted, India has had a few exceptions. The action on exports was in order to meet Indias domestic demand from frontline healthcare workers as well as patients suffering from Lupus, Malaria and rheumatoid arthritis.

The interest for HCQ, these days, is also evident from the way it is breaking search records. Keywords such as hydroxychloroquine coronavirus, covid hydroxychloroquine, hydroxychloroquine covid 19, and even azithromycin hydroxychloroquine were break-out terms on Google search between March 8 to March 28th. Strangely, the trends were so irresistible that an Arizona (US) based man and woman consumed Chloroquine Phosphate, a derivative in anti-malarial dosages and fish-tank cleaning compound, to cure themselves of Covid-19. The man could not be resuscitated while the woman is in a critical condition.

So, what makes HCQ such an exciting drug these days? And, most important of all - does India have sufficient capabilities for its domestic use?

HISTORY OF CHLOROQUINE

Surprisingly, the wonder drug is not native to India. Chloroquine, the base ingredient required to synthetically manufacture HCQ was indigenously extracted by South American tribesman from Cinchona plants, some 400 years ago. In India, Cinchona plantations are rare and have been reportedly grown in West Bengal and Assam.

"Acharya Praful Chandra Rai of Bengal Chemicals and Bayer India are credited as facilitators of this drug in India," says Dr RB Smarta, MD of Interlink Consultancy.

Hans Andersag and his co-workers at Bayer helped introduce Chloroquine as early as 1934, but it took several years of research and trials before the drug was approved for prophylactic treatment of malaria in 1947. Bengal Chemicals, India's oldest pharmaceutical PSU - Bengal Chemicals (established in 1901) was the pioneer in manufacturing this drug.

Dr PV Appaji, former CEO at Pharmexcil (Pharmeceutical Export promotion council) and a recognised face in the Indian Pharmaceutical industry says, "Chloroquine was approved for use first time in 1955 only for treatment of arthritis and lupus. The drug is also anti-malarial and is known since 1950s. Hydroxy-Chloroquine was introduced later but the usage is not in big numbers."

Appaji adds that there are several derivatives of Chloroquine although HCQ may not be the first choice of recommendation when it comes to treating malaria. Dr Smarta confirms "Contrary to perception, HCQ is not extensively used in treatment of malaria."

HCQ & TOXICITY

The Indian Council for Medical Research has approved Hydroxy-Chloroquine as an effective drug in combating coronavirus. The recommendation is for prophylaxis (preventive treatment) of asymptomatic healthcare workers and contacts.

ICMR has also specified that intake of HCQ should not instil a sense of "fake security". Currently, the drug is available only on the prescription of a registered medical practitioner. Lav Agarwal, Jt Secretary for Ministry of Health and Welfare clarified on Friday (11th April) that HCQ pills can be consumed only on a prescription.

Sify.com spoke with Dr Bindumati, Sr Consultant for Internal Medicine at Aster CMI Healthcare, a Bengaluru based private hospital running an advisory for patients to resolve common queries. Patients calling at the facility were curious about HCQ. She says "People think HCQ pills can help prevent Covid-19. Some of these pills, especially Chloroquine can be bought without a prescription at a local chemist but usage without a doctor's advice is dangerous."

Dr Bindumati elaborates on the side-effects from HCQ, "Although HCQ is an old drug used majorly for treatment of rheumatoid arthritis, it may have serious side-affects such as Arrhythmia (irregular heart-beat). Patients with rhythm abnormalities, QT prolongation in ECG and on specific drugs or anti-biotics or certain drugs can have Arrhythmia. Other side effects include skin lesions, aggravation of psoriasis and other allergies."

"Also, long term use of Chloroquine can affect vision and result in blindness in serious cases," she adds as a word of caution.

THE RHETORIC OF RETALIATION

HCQ is no longer Indias secret-drug - India met 70% of the world's HCQ needs in 2019. Ever since US President Donald Trump hailed the drug as a game-changer on 19th March, any and every country has requested India for some HCQ. So powerful was President Trump's belief in HCQ that the USFDA on 20th March lifted a 3 year old ban on IPCA Laboratories' US exports. On 26th March, the Indian government banned the export of HCQ. A Directorate General of Foreign Trade notification notification dated April 4 read, "The export of Hydroxychloroquine and formulations made from Hydroxychloroquine under any ITCHS Code... is prohibited with immediate effect."

A March notification had already restricted exports of paracetamol and other nutraceticals. Paracetamol is still restricted for export as on date of the publishing this story. "Hydroxy-chloroquine is found to be effective against coronavirus in laboratory studies and in-vivo studies. Its use in prophylaxis is derived from the available evidence of benefit as treatment and supported by preclinical data," the note added.

The media narrative around the second week of April almost turned India-US relations into a diplomatic nightmare with TV news-channels focusing on the word - "retaliation". During a White House press Briefing session, Trump was reported as having said, "I spoke to him [PM Modi] Sunday morning... I called him... And I said, 'Wed appreciate your allowing our supply to come out...' If he doesnt allow it to come out, that would be okay, but, of course, there may be retaliation... Why wouldnt there be?

In a classic case of framing, the Indian media portrayed the keywords as a threat, failing to even glance over the transcript of conversation at the White House Press briefing.

Did the negative media rhetoric prompt Indian authorities to open-up a special export window? Was there a real diplomatic arm-twist in the conversation Trump was referring to? Or was it a genuine call? There's nothing clear as to what may have clicked for US but India's generosity was appreciated. Trump tweeted:

US President Trump tweeted: "Extraordinary times require even closer cooperation between friends. Thank you India and the Indian people for the decision on HCQ. Will not be forgotten! Thank you Prime Minister @NarendraModi for your strong leadership in helping not just India, but humanity, in this fight!"

US is reported as having stocked 29 million doses with a majority of them coming from India. India has also come to the rescue of Brazil, President Jair Bolsonaro labelling PM Modi as Lord Hanuman lifting a gigantic hill containing the Sanjeevani Booti, and later by Israel's PM. This generosity, however, fans a pressing question - Does India have enough stock for itself?

DESI DRUG FOR DESIS?

The question of HCQ availability for Indians picked steam after initial reports last week that claimed of a drop in stocks. Prominent among them was a HuffingtonPost story that quoted a Chennai based rheumatologist explain prioritizing patients with rheumatoid arthritis because HCQ stocks may be in shortage. An crunch in HCQ supplies was also reported in a story by The Wire.

Numerous unverified tweets were also tracked claiming insufficient HCQ supplies. The Press Information Bureau last week, did a fact-check on a major news-site claiming shortage of HCQ.

So, is India adequately stocked for HCQ?

India's Ministry of Health and Family Welfare has emphasized twice during press-conferences held last week that there was no shortage. News on production statistics quoted by pharmaceutical agencies, associations, and even manufacturers implied there was nothing to fear about HCQ stocks.

Sudarshan Jain, Secretary General for Indian Pharmaceutical Alliance (IPA) has been quoted in several news sites claiming that India consumes 3 million tablets and exports 30 million tablets per annum. Data provided by the Indian Drug Manufacturers association on the demand says, "Last year, 2.4 crore hydroxychloroquine tablets were sold in the domestic market. India has a manufacturing capacity of 10 crore tablets [400 mg HCQ] per month. Hence, there wouldnt be any problem to export the drug to corona-affected countries, including the US. Value-wise, exports of hydroxychloroquine API and formulations were $14.21 million and $37.46 million, respectively, Viranchi Shah, chairman of Gujarat chapter of the association was quoted as saying in a FE news story.

According to statistics in a Tribune story - India has capacity of 20 crore HCQ tablets of 200 mg each month while local consumption stands at 2.40 crores per annum. This was confirmed by Pankaj Patel of Zydus Cadila in an interaction with news-agency ANI.

Patel explained Cadila would produce 30 tonnes of active pharmaceutical ingredient (API) equivalent to 15 crore tablets next month. With crores of tablets being produced, is there any concern?

Identifying HCQ Demand:

An analysis of how many pills India would require immediately can be built based upon calculations of healthcare workers. This analysis is a calculation based on ICMR's recommended dose - 9 tablets for asymptomatic healthcare workers. For asymptomatic household contacts of lab confirmed cases, the total number of tablets would be 5.

 Registered Nurses: 8,79,508(ANM) + 21,17,649(RN & RM) + 56,644 (LHV) as of 2019 = 30,53,801

(Indian Nursing Council Annual Report 2019 for Auxiliary Nurse Midwifery, General Nursing & Midwifery, page no. 50.)

 Asha workers: 10,47,324

(Asha healthcare workers as on Sept19. NHM-MIS report, PIB source)

 Registered Allopathic Doctors: 10,62,398

 Registered AYUSH Doctors: 7,73,668

(Lok Sabha answer: MCI and State MCI registered doctors as on 31st Dec17:)

 State-wise Police Workforce: 17,21,000

(MHA cites PBRD data for 2017)

 Regular non-Covid linked Domestic Consumption = 30 lakh [IPA suggestion] to 2.4 crores per annum [IDMA statistic] [or] 2.5 lakh to 20 lakh tablets per month

An official Rajasthan state government advisory says that Police personnel were eligible for recommended dose of Hydroxychloroquine. Since Health is a state subject, there is a likelihood that respective state governments may seek AYUSH doctors to join in the fight against Coronavirus.

TABLE 1:

Healthcare: Healthcare Workers Tablets Required Nurses: 30,53,801 2,74,84,209 Asha Workers 10,47,324 94,25,916 Allopathic Doctors 10,62,398 95,61,582 Ayush Doctors 7,73,668 69,63,012 Police Force 17,21,000 1,54,89,000 Regular non-Covid cases 20,00,000 Total: 7,09,23,719.00

Table 2: Exports

Countries: Tablets API (mt) US (approved by India) 35,82,000 9 Brazil 50,00,000 0.53 Germany 50,00,000 1.5 Bangladesh 20,00,000 Nepal 10,00,000 Bhutan 2,00,000 Sri-Lanka 10,00,000 Afghanistan 5,00,000 Maldives 2,00,000 Total 1,84,82,000 11.03

The assessment made in the table implies total demand for HCQ at 8.94 crore or nearly 9 crore tablets and over 11 MT of APIs. This number will only increase, considering Health is a State subject and respective state governments may seek higher dosages to cover newer corona-warriors. For instance, Maharashtra which has had the highest number of tests and highest number of positive cases may extend the definition of front-line healthcare workers to accommodate new workforce. It is also reported that Maharashtra government was likely to recommend HCQ tablets to residents of Dharavi in a bid to avert a New-York like break-out. Ditto for the slum areas of Mankhurd-Govandi (also includes Baiganwadi and Lallubhai compound). The population of slum residents is estimated at 20 lakhs, and 5 tablets for asymptomatic contacts may necessitate demand of 1 crore tablets.

If Indias policy-makers were to recommend HCQ tablets to slum dwellers, the demand for HCQ could be multi-fold. According to 2011 Census, the total slum population in India is estimated at 6,54,94,604. 5 tablets for each slum dweller would result in an immediate demand of 32.74 crore tablets. Add this value with the numbers in the table, the grand total demand could be estimated at 41.69 crore tablets.

The MHA and MoHFW have explained that HCQ projections in the country showed a need of 1 crore tablets. The agency also said that stocks in India were estimated at 3.28 crore tablets.

SCALING FROM LAKHS TO CRORES IN LOCKDOWN PART 2?

The Indian pharmaceutical industry has rallied around the cause of HCQ. Companies such as Ipca Laboratories and Zydus Cadila have explained in numerous reports that they were ready to reach capacities in multiples of crores. The other companies that could contribute to the sudden surge in demand includes Bengal Chemicals, Wallace Pharmaceuticals, Intas Pharma, McW Healthcare, Mangalam Drugs, Abbott India, Rusan Pharma, Unichem Laboratories, Laurus Labs and Vijayasri Organics to name a few. PSU Bengal Chemicals's CEO has been quoted as saying that it was ready to manufacture 10-15 lakh tablets every day.

There is no dearth of positive cheer among the industry, but the pressing question is whether processes can be met during a period of lockdown? Some of the processes such as transportation of raw materials, production which may require man-power, fulfilling procurement/QC standards, printing-packaging of tablets, and finally distribution may require hand-holding of several entities that are not certified as essential services provider. Also, newer contract manufacturers joining the corona-war may take time in setting up technology transfers. Another challenge is availability of raw materials. Baring IPCA laboratories which also manufactures the API required for the tablet, other manufacturers may have to depend on imports of APIs from China.

The two industry experts Sify.com spoke to, however believe that the pharmaceutical sector in India is in a position to scale. "We have raw materials and the Indian pharma industry has enough capacity that is yet to be utilized completely. In the interest of the nation, the industry can always ramp up production." says Dr Smarta.

Dr Appaji explaining the ministry's controls on pharma manufacturers, says, "There is a provision for implementing or ensuring availability, monitoring availability, directing manufacturers, asking them to supply to government or govt hospitals and private hospitals. The provisions in the drug control order of 2013 have been empowered to NPPA. The monitoring has begun and exports have been banned. There are weekly reports taken several times from pharma companies."

SOCIAL CHATTER:

The All India Organisation of Chemists and Druggists tweeted a document asking chemists from hoarding HCQ quantities. The agency said, "Sir,AIOCD an Association of 8.50 lac Chemists have directed all the Chemists of Country to not to Hoard Stock of HCQ and Sale the same in Prescription only as per direction of Govt . AIOCD"

Debate: Is HCQ successful?

With Hydroxy-Chloroquine trending in social circles, the science community is split and discussing on success rates in random trials. This discussion about HCQ trial in China says there was "no difference in 28 day coronavirus negative conversion rate for HCQ + SOC vs SOC."

This discussion says that a French analysis found no difference on patients being treated with HCQ. This tweet discusses the chances of HCQ helping in case viruses entered cells and replicated.

DISCLAIMER: Readers are requested to strictly follow ICMR and Health Ministry guidelines. It is advised to consult a Registered Medical Practitioner to resolve queries.

*The story has been updated to remove faulty appearing tweet-embeds.
There are two schools of thought at the moment regarding COVID-19. Majority, says there should be total lockdown and few people believe total lockdown will be dangerous.

Certainly; my stand is that total lockdown will be a perilous journey to be embarked by most African countries. There is without doubt that mostly affected countrys from Europe, North America, and Asia went for the total lockdown. However, Africa cant copy what the west are doing at the moment to address the situation. They have different systems, over the years, they have built or invested heavily in health care, creating jobs in order to reduce the unemployment gap, even those without jobs or are in school are entitled to some allowances for up keeping.

Interestingly, while African governments or leaders are busy with corruptions, neglecting the people who elected them into power, failure to build a robust economy, nepotism and fighting for their own parochial interest, their counterparts (Western leaders) are busy repairing and building the fundamentals. With this, even if there is a total lockdown, the shock will hardly be felt, unlike the Africans.

During the heat of the moment, Canada, the USA, China, Italy, and some other countries have come out with good social interventions to support their people. This does not mean that our leaders in Africa havent done so. I called this intervention from our leaders as driving against the wind which we cannot stand it.

Most economies in Africa will collapse or go into recession if COVID-19 prolongs more than 4 months on the continent and people continue to stay indoors or lockup.

Rather, Africa should find ways to address the challenges. The solution should be centered on Africa and to suit our terrain. We need not copy blindly otherwise, we will jeopardize the economy, creating or causing lots of starvations, increase in social vices and collapsing companies in the process and rendering many already employed- jobless.

THE WAY-FORWARD

The following will help open up the economy and will add up to addressing the challenges related to Africa.

1. Government should cancel the lockdown and introduced restrictions that it is mandatory to wear mask before going out. Any person caught in the public without any mask on should be arrested and arranged before the court of law.

2. Government should channel funds meant for free food, free water, and electricity to invest in the provision of PPEs for health workers and also providing all Ghanaians nose masks at least 10 per person.

3. Government should equip appropriate institutions to carry out mass testing regionally and results should be timely. The citizens should support government set up isolation centers and testing centers in designated areas.

4. Massive education should be carried out on TVs, radios and also community based on COVID 19 and its preventive measures.

5. Schools should resume, but churches should remain closed. Churches should be allowed to deploy other innovative means to reach their congregations with sermons.

6. The borders should remain closed. Inter-regional travels should also remain closed. But partial lockdowns should be lifted and movement within should be allowed but only with the mask on.

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Agribusiness consultant with specialty in Snail Production and Processing || Bee Keeping and Honey Production|| Indigenous Livestock Breeding.

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Facebook Account: Facebook
The police have arrested a total



of 11 persons including a journalist in connnection with the crowd of migrant labourers which gathered in suburban Bandra on Tuesday, officials said.

The police have registered three cases in connection with the incident so far.

In the first case, registered against the mob of around 800 to 1,000 persons for unlawful assembly, rioting, violation of prohibitory orders during the lockdown, nine persons were arrested on Wednesday.

They were allegedly part of the mob.

In a second offence, police arrested Vinay Dubey, a resident of Airoli in neighbouring Navi Mubai for 'promoting disharmony, enmity or feelings of hatred between different groups'.

Dubey had allegedly posted a video on Facebook and comments on other social media sites, seeking train services for taking stranded laboures to their home states.

In a third case, newschannel journalist Rahul Kulkarni was arrested for 'spreading misinformation' over his report that the government was thinking to starting Jan Sadharan train services for migrants, which allegdly led to the crowd gathering in Bandra.

Kulakarni and nine others will be produced before a court on Thursday. Dubey has already been remanded in police custody till Tuesday.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Source: Xinhua| 2020-04-16 05:29:11|Editor: huaxia

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by Xiong Maoling, Gao Pan

WASHINGTON, April 15 (Xinhua) -- When the COVID-19 pandemic abates and the great lockdown ends, a globally coordinated, broad-based fiscal stimulus may become an effective tool to foster the recovery, an International Monetary Fund (IMF) official has said.

"Coordination enhances the effectiveness of fiscal policy actions," Vitor Gaspar, director of the IMF's fiscal affairs department, told Xinhua in a recent written interview, ahead of the IMF and World Bank Spring Meetings.

Meanwhile, he said, it has to respect relevant differences across countries, mainly in their financing capacity.

The IMF official said fiscal policy coordination could also facilitate much needed public investments in green and digital technologies, as well as more spending in people's health and education to attain the UN Sustainable Development Goals.

Noting that the near-term priority is to save lives and livelihoods, Gaspar said this requires accommodating health sector spending needs, safeguarding key public services and social protection, and providing lifelines to support the most affected people and viable firms.

According to the IMF's biannual Fiscal Monitor released Wednesday, countries have taken fiscal actions amounting to about 8 trillion U.S. dollars so far to contain the pandemic and its damage to the economy, with Group of Twenty (G20) countries taking the lead.

Commenting on China's response to the COVID-19 outbreak, the IMF official said the nation's containment efforts have proven to be successful and its policymakers reacted strongly to the pandemic by scaling up health and emergency services.

"They have also provided timely, targeted, and temporary lifelines to protect people and companies," Gaspar said. "This is important because domestic recovery will rest on actions that limit layoffs and bankruptcies of viable businesses, thus reducing the scarring effects of the economic crisis as the lockdown ends," he said.

Gaspar suggested Chinese authorities remain ready to provide additional support if it appears to be needed as the economy returns to normal.

"If more support to growth is needed, it should be on budget and in line with existing efforts to rebalance the economy and foster long-term sustainable growth," he said.

Gaspar put forward specific measures that "will contribute to rebalancing," such as more investment to promote green growth and spending to improve public health system and enhance social safety nets.

Welcoming the Chinese leadership's emphasis on enhancing epidemic prevention and control and on improving national public health emergency management system, the IMF officials said this effort should be "properly budgeted for prompt implementation."

Gaspar noted the Chinese authorities "have already laid the groundwork to ramp up fiscal stimulus if it is needed," highlighting the government's plans to increase issuance of special local and central government bonds to "finance revenue or spending measures to aid the recovery."

When asked whether countries should take fiscal deficits into consideration when rolling out policies to fight the crisis, the IMF official said policymakers should "do whatever it takes but make sure to keep the receipts."

At the world level, governments' global debt is expected to rise by 13 percentage points to reach 96 percent of global gross domestic production (GDP) in 2020, the newly released Fiscal Monitor showed.

"The increase in debt is a necessary consequence of the fiscal actions taken to fight the pandemic," Gaspar told Xinhua. "As the pandemic abates and the economy recovers, hopefully in 2021, public debt ratios should stabilize again, albeit at higher levels."

While governments should provide all the funds needed to support additional health and emergency services, extend emergency lifelines to households and to viable firms, the IMF official said they should also "limit fiscal risks" going forward.

In order to do that, he said, governments should deploy their resources in a temporary and efficient way; embed the fiscal costs in credible medium-term fiscal frameworks; and assess, monitor, and disclose the fiscal risks because not all measures will have an immediate effect on deficits and debts.

In the World Economic Outlook (WEO) report released Tuesday, the IMF projects that global economy is on track to contract sharply by 3 percent in 2020 as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, calling it the "worst recession" since the Great Depression in the 1930s.

Gaspar said emerging markets and developing economies are hit hard by the pandemic, with typically "less room in their budget to respond." He said the IMF is engaging actively with national authorities, in collaboration with other international institutions, to help them address the extraordinary challenges.

Noting that the IMF has 1 trillion dollar lending capacity to help support members, especially developing economies, Gaspar said it is also mobilizing emergency funding to meet the expected demand of about 100 billion dollars.

Moreover, the IMF is working with development partners on increasing the Catastrophe Containment and Relief Trust to 1.4 billion dollars, up from 500 million dollars available, to give debt relief to the poorest member countries.

Aside from financial assistance, the multilateral lender is also ready to offer policy advice and technical assistance, said the IMF official.

"The virus will be not defeated until it is defeated everywhere," Gaspar said. "Global coordination will thus be necessary to support, via grants, concessional loans, and medical aid, those countries with limited health capacity and financing constraints."

"Global cooperation will also be indispensable to develop and distribute universally possible drugs and vaccines," he added.
It is difficult to make a definitive claim about how someone caught the coronavirus.

Crystal Cox/Business Insider

Lawyers say that it will be extremely difficult for customers and employees to hold companies responsible if they catch the coronavirus at grocery stores, restaurants, or other essential businesses.

The coronavirus is relatively easy to catch, can be spread by people without symptoms, and is not immediately symptomatic  making it difficult to make definitive claims on how people contracted COVID-19.

"The biggest hurdle infected employees will face if they seek compensation from an employer will be proving where they contracted the virus," said attorney James Biscone said. "Was it at work? On the way home? On the subway or bus?"

Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

Bill Marler has spent years making companies pay millions of dollars for the illnesses and deaths caused by food poisoning.

Marler made his name tracing food poisoning outbreaks back to chains and suppliers, holding food industry giants responsible for customers' suffering. The attorney, who specializes in foodborne illnesses like E. coli and salmonella, has won more than $600 million for clients, taking on fast-food chains like Jack in the Box and Jimmy John's.

But, Marler says, doing the same in the coronavirus era is a different story.

Hundreds of workers in the food supply chain have been diagnosed with COVID-19, including deaths of employees from slaughterhouses to grocery stores. Some workers claim they have not received sufficient protection on the job, and that their bosses have pushed them to work in dangerous situations.

But, Marler says, the difficulty in tracing exactly how people caught the virus makes it nearly impossible for workers and customers to hold companies responsible.

It takes up to 14 days for COVID-19 to become symptomatic, making it extremely difficult to pinpoint how people catch the coronavirus and assign blame to a specific store, restaurant, or workplace, Marler said. Because the virus is relatively easy to catch and can be spread by people without symptoms, it is almost impossible to make definitive claims about how someone caught the coronavirus.

Story continues

James Biscone, an attorney at Johnson & Biscone, P.A., said that while workers could file for compensation if they prove they caught the virus at work, few will be able to say definitively that they were solely exposed on the job.

"The biggest hurdle infected employees will face if they seek compensation from an employer will be proving where they contracted the virus," Biscone said. "Was it at work? On the way home? On the subway or bus? From a family member or neighbor?"

Companies still need to put in the work to keep employees safe

Essential employees continue to work amid the pandemic.

Crystal Cox/Business Insider

Lawyers say that the cases with the best chances of success are those in which workers can prove that the company was negligent, failing to meet local or federal safety standards.

"Employers who knowingly allow exposed or infected workers to come into work, for example, could create such an increased risk that it overcomes the causation issues plaintiffs would otherwise face," said Aaron Goldstein, a partner at Dorsey & Whitney.

Despite questions around if the cases are successful, lawyers predict a significant uptick in worker health and safety cases in the coming months.

Fast-food workers and grocery store employees have protested their lack of gloves and masks at work, with many employers backtracking on previous policies that prevented workers from wearing personal protective equipment.

Walmart is facing a wrongful death lawsuit from the family of a 51-year-old employee who died of COVID-19, which claims that the company "failed to address and otherwise ignored" employees who said they were experiencing symptoms related to the illness.

With the number of COVID-19 cases rising every day, claims from workers who may have been exposed to the coronavirus on the job will likely end up being hashed out in court.

Goldstein says that companies that employ healthcare workers are likely to be significantly impacted by upcoming cases, especially if they fail to take steps such as providing masks to keep workers safe. Companies that fail to comply with CDC guidelines and stay at home orders are also more likely to be held responsible if workers get sick.

Still, holding companies liable will be an uphill battle for workers and their families.

"Employers and their insurance companies fight injury claims hard, no matter how well the employee performed before their injury," Biscone said.

The fear of the impact of the coronavirus on a business's reputation may ultimately be more powerful than a fear of lawsuits.

"Even if a consumer won't be able to easily make a claim against you, you still don't want to potentially be the source of illnesses for your customers," Marler said. A "restaurant is not going to want to be known as, 'Oh, those guys had 10 COVID [positive] people working there and spewing COVID around."

Read the original article on Business Insider
It sounds too good to be true. A $50 Napa Cabernet, repackaged and sold for $10 a bottle. A $40 Anderson Valley Chardonnay priced starting at $1 a bottle.

How, you might ask? Because its bulk wine.

That Cabernet and Chardonnay are being sold, respectively, by two new brands: De Negoce and Becheur. Both promise a rare sort of bargain thats possible only when the bulk-wine market is as low as it is right now  the result of an oversupply of wine grapes in California.

De Negoce is the work of Cameron Hughes, who revolutionized bulk-wine packaging in the mid-aughts and is now introducing a new model based on wine futures. Becheur, meanwhile, comes from esteemed Napa winemaker Michael Terrien, who is adding another novel element, dynamic pricing, to his sales.

Its easy to see the appeal of their irresistible bottle prices and innovative business practices. But De Negoce and Becheurs ability to offer wine at such low prices is also a harbinger of tough times ahead for the California wine industry, which was already fearing a downturn before COVID-19 brought a host of new financial anxieties.

To move wine through the market right now, its going to take very aggressive pricing, says Hughes.

Bulk wine doesnt sound like a very sexy concept, but it powers much of the global wine industry. Lets say youre an upscale California winery. Every year, you probably end up making some excess wine that you dont want to bottle under your own label. Maybe its not up to your standards, or maybe sales have been stagnating, so you want to get rid of some inventory. You would then sell that excess wine as bulk either directly to another vintner or through a third-party broker. Many large-scale industrial wine brands that youve seen at the supermarket are comprised of cheap bulk wine.

At the end of 2019, the bulk-wine market was at its slowest point in nearly a decade, as wine consumption in the U.S. showed flat growth rates. Since then, demand for bulk wine has picked up a little bit, says Glenn Proctor, partner in the bulk-wine brokerage firm Ciatti. Whereas earlier in the year, Napa Cabernet on the bulk market could be had for $15-$22 per gallon, Proctor says its now selling for $20-$25  still a long ways off from the $36-$50 range of the last few years.

Liz Hafalia / The Chronicle

Which is how a buyer like Cameron Hughes can buy top-tier Napa Cab and sell it to you for $10 or $15 a bottle. I wanted to call this the vulture, says Hughes, laughing, of his new project, but my mom would not let me call it that. He settled on De Negoce, a play on negociant, the French term for a vintner who buys grapes or wine and then bottles it under his own label.

If anyone knows bulk wine, its Hughes. His previous company, Cameron Hughes Wine, is one of the greatest bulk-wine success stories of all time. He launched that brand in 2001, with a Lodi Syrah that he called Lot 1. When that ran out, he moved on to Lot 2, a Dry Creek Zinfandel. The label is now on Lot 704, each bottling unique. The lot scheme worked so well because Hughes wasnt obligated to keep buying any specific type of wine  and also because he had a keen eye for good wines with mass appeal.

More Information How to buy the wines De Negoce: Visit www.denegoce.com to sign up for the email list for Cameron Hughes' wine offerings. The first six wines are all Napa Valley red wines, priced between $10-$15. Twelve-bottle minimum purchase. Flat shipping rate of $29 within continental U.S. Wines will be delivered 4-6 weeks after you order them. Becheur: Visit www.becheur.com to see Michael Terrien's current wine offering. Prices for each new wine begin at $1 and rise as more people buy it (or fall if people aren't buying it). Purchase the wine at its current price, or name a lower price and you'll be notified by email if it drops there. Six-bottle minimum purchase; if you buy 12 bottles, one is free. Shipping is included within continental U.S. See More Collapse

But, according to Hughes, that business grew too quickly. At 100,000 cases, Cameron Hughes Wine was poorly diversified, selling about 95% of its inventory through Costco. A series of low-yielding vintages in 2010 and 2011 meant that the company had to start making some wine itself, which increased overhead costs. By 2012, wed maxed out a $24 million credit line, Hughes says. We lost $60,000 just that year. Eventually the company entered into court-appointed receivership, and in 2017 Vintage Wine Estates purchased Cameron Hughes Wine for $5.5 million.

This time around, Hughes  who is still an employee of the company that bears his name  is doing things differently. Im working super lean, he says. I have no fixed costs. Thats thanks in large part to the futures model: He can sell the wine before he even bottles it.

Heres how it will work. De Negoce will send email offers for one wine at a time, debuting this week with that $10 Napa Cab, with a 12-bottle minimum purchase. Four to six weeks after you place the order, for a flat shipping rate of $29 within the continental U.S., the wine will be delivered to your home.

The prices are so good right now that we can really blow peoples minds, he says. With no middlemen between him and the consumer, he takes a margin of 10-20%.

Becheur, on the other hand, takes a different approach. Terrien, the winemaker for brands including Obsidian Ridge, Terrien and Bluet (a blueberry wine from Maine), says hes in the bulk wine game for sentimental reasons.

This is the third time in my career that Ive been through one of those cyclical oversupply situations, he says. During each previous period of oversupply, hes cringed watching cash-strapped winemaker friends sell off some of their cherished, labored-over wines for pennies.

These wines had been loved and raised for a particular label, says Terrien. Then, due to market conditions beyond the winemakers control, that story was getting lost, blended away, when it should have been preserved.

What if, instead of watching his friends bulk off their cherished wine for industrial-scale supermarket brands, Terrien could be the buyer  and preserve the story?

Food Guide Top 25 Restaurants Where to eat in the Bay Area. Find spots near you, create a dining wishlist, and more.

Esther Mobley / The Chronicle

Becheur, which colloquially means snob, comes across as much more bare-bones than De Negoce. The website looks almost ironically spare, and the wine label itself looks like something youd make on your home printer. The photo next to the current wine offering  for now, like Hughes, Terrien is offering just one at a time  is of a yellow legal pad in which Terrien has calculated the cost of goods.

He posted that photo, he says, because price transparency is crucial here. Youve got to be able to trust that its not going to be a total waste of your money, Terrien says. Then he adds: And if it is a total waste of your money, you still wont have wasted that much money.

In fact, Terrien is guaranteed to lose money on some sales, thanks to his dynamic pricing scheme: Every new wine offer begins at $1 per bottle, and rises in $1 increments as more people buy the wine. If a certain amount of time (at Terriens discretion) passes and the wine doesnt move, hell lower the price. Not unlike with eBay, you can buy the wine at the advertised price, or name a lower price at which youd be willing to buy, and youll get an email notification if it drops to your limit.

What winery made the wine? Youll never know. Bulk-wine contracts prohibit the identification of the original producer or vineyard, but allow the disclosure of the appellation, vintage and grape variety. So all we know is that the inaugural Becheur offer is a 2018 Chardonnay from Anderson Valley in Mendocino County, a wine that its producer sells for around $40. Terrien loves the wine, and so do I: Its bracingly mineral, tasting like lemon curd, almond skin and rising bread dough. By the time I buy it, the bottle price has risen to $14.50  I envy the first buyer, who captured it at $1!  which still strikes me as an exceptional value for such a fine wine.

Im similarly impressed by the De Negoce offerings. One morning in early March, when it was still possible to do so, I sit with Hughes in his NoPa home and taste the first six wines he plans to offer. All are Bordeaux-style blends from Napa Valley. That initial $10 wine  of which he has contracted 6,666 cases  comes from the Oak Knoll AVA. Its ripe and silky, with a distinctive blueberry-cobbler flavor and a formidable structure. The winery that made it sells the same exact wine for $50, Hughes says.

The other five De Negoce wines are admirable, too. Many lean toward the bigger, fruitier end of the stylistic spectrum and are successful in that style. One, from a mountain vineyard, shows the brambly chaparral notes and rustic tannins that I love from Napa hillside wines. Another, from Napas Coombsville AVA, almost recalls Syrah in its melange of iron and rose petals. Hughes plans to price them all between $10 and $15 a bottle.

Theres no question that these wines, from both De Negoce and Becheur, are screaming bargains. What they lack is a great origin story  or at least, they lack the ability to legally share it with you. Even Terrien, who got in this to preserve the story, can share only a bare minimum of information. Who was the winemaker? Whats the story of the vineyard? All of the extraneous-seeming details that ultimately contribute to our pleasure in drinking a wine  and build our sense of its value  are missing. But at $10 a bottle, maybe that doesnt matter.

If the bulk wine market continues to improve and prices rise, both De Negoce and Becheur may be rendered irrelevant quickly. Hughes says hes prepared for that: With almost no overhead, he could stop at any time, avoiding the problems he encountered with his last business venture.

In fact, Hughes believes that the existence of De Negoce is helping the bulk-wine market, and the wine industry surrounding it, get back on course. Were restoring balance, Hughes says. This is one way to keep the ecosystem clean.

Correction: A previous version of this article misstated the status of Cameron Hughes Wine when it was purchased by Vintage Wine Estates. The company was in court-appointed receivership.
The Member of Parliament for Tema West and Deputy Minister of Trade, Carlos Kinsley Ahenkorah, has stated that President Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo has been nicknamed coronavirus hero because of his directives and pro-poor policies meant to fight and prevent the spread of COVID-19.



President Akufo-Addos wartime leadership to conquer coronavirus is what has earned him the nickname coronavirus hero in my constituency, Look at the seriousness with which he met with the leadership of the Ghana medical Association, Likewise the Association of pharmaceutical entities, market women, Labour unions and other frontline health workers.



Look at the lockdown of certain parts of the country, the closure of the borders and the establishment of the COVID-19 Trust fund, the disinfection of markets in the affected areas, free water for three months and free food to the vulnerable in lockdown cities among other things. In fact, The president is a coronavirus hero and that is why he is doing all these wonderful things to fight and prevent the spread of the virus. Mr. Carlos Ahenkorah said in an interview with the Ghana News Agency in Accra.



The president is a coronavirus hero and because of his unique fighting spirit against the virus, I distributed food items in every electoral area of Tema West before coming to the kaizer electoral area, President Akufo-Addo cares about Ghanaians and because of his God-fearing nature, Religious leaders across the country are more comfortable with him.



If you look at our population size and the number of coronavirus cases that we have as compared to the United States, the United Kingdom and other nations that have been affected, you need nobody to tell you that President Akufo-Addo is a coronavirus hero, and even in terms of contact tracing, testing and treatment, Ghana is doing very well.



Ill urge Ghanaians to always pray for the President and the nation. I am happy that my constituents are obeying the Presidents directives on social distancing and hygiene protocols, I have decided to give the people good food from the President because we need good food, bodily exercise and enough rest to fight the virus and stay healthy.Mr. Ahenkorah said.



Mr.Ahenkorah, who was beaming with smile and tipped to win the forthcoming Tema west NPP primary massively because of his high pedigree and good performance as MP said I am in my first term but I have provided many jobs for the youth, invested in peoples education including the provision of dual desks, mathematical sets and books among others, I even donated expensive equipment to some hospitals and was a philanthropist long before I became MP. It was through my instrumentality that Tema West roads were improved, I have helped many people to acquire skills and lectured a lot of people at the regional maritime University.



In fact, I have helped in diverse ways on the quiet. In life, It is natural to have a few detractors who will hide behind politics and use their lying lips to put you in a negative light, It has always been so and that is why scripture testifies eloquently that woe unto you if everyone says you are good. Even Almighty God doesnt enjoy the support of everyone, to the extent that some scientists dont believe in his existence.



I won the primary and was on the NPPs ticket with Nana Addo in 2016 and we won the Tema West elections massively because the battle was the lords, The 2020 battle is still the lords battle and history will repeat itself, Nobody can thwart Gods agenda for my life, Nobody can thwart Gods agenda for President Akufo-Addos life and nobody can thwart Gods agenda for the great NPP.



The constituency chairman, Mr. Dennis Amfo-sefah, alias Nana Boakye, on his part said Many residents who benefited from the free food from our hardworking father-for-all MP have channeled their Thank you messages through me.

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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Chamber cancels July 4 celebration

The Midland Chamber of Commerce announced Tuesday it is canceling the 2020 Star-Spangled Salute because of the current economic climate, as well as the coronavirus social distancing restrictions. All components of the July 4 celebration will be canceled, including the Childrens Parade produced by the Colonel Theunis Dey Chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution, according to a press release.

The business community has always supported the July 4 celebration, and the chamber doesnt want to burden our local businesses with an additional ask on their already strained financial resources, President and CEO Bobby Burns said in a statement. It is far more important that they focus on adapting their business models and taking care of their employees.

MC, UTPB to receive funding

Midland and Odessa institutions of higher education will receive close to $3 million from the CARES Act, according to a press release from U.S. Sen. John Cornyns office.

Midland College is set to receive $1,673,002; Odessa College, $2,118,029; and University of Texas Permian Basin, $1,840,016.

The funds are part of the acts Higher Education Emergency Relief Fund. At least half of each grant must be used to provide students with emergency financial aid to help cover expenses related to the disruption of campus operations because of the coronavirus, according to the release.

Helping Hands receives another matching grant

Helping Hands has received a second $100,000 matching grant, according to Executive Director Mary Hardin.

The nonprofit received the first matching grant offer about three weeks ago, and the goal was met in one week, she said in an email. These funds allowed Helping Hands to offer $145,439 in assistance. Of that, $132,550 covered rent for 116 families who faced layoffs because of the coronavirus or in the oilfield, she said.

Donations can be mailed to: Helping Hands of Midland, 1301 Brinson Lane, Midland, Texas 79703.

KMB urges proper disposal of PPE

Keep Midland Beautiful is urging residents to properly dispose of items such as disposable gloves, sanitizing wipes and masks. These items have been seen in streets and parking lots, according to KMB Executive Director Doreen Womack.

She recommends residents keep a bag inside their vehicles in which personal protective equipment can be placed until the items can be disposed of at home.

Grocery store hours during coronavirus

--Albertsons Market

7 a.m.-9 p.m.

1002 Andrews Highway

For shoppers 60+

7-9 a.m. Monday and Thursday

3317 N. Midland Drive

For shoppers 60+

7-9 a.m. Tuesday and Thursday

--H-E-B

8 a.m.-8 p.m.

Customers 60+

Orders can be called in 9 a.m.-1 p.m. at 833-397-0080. Groceries will be delivered by Favor Delivery.

For more information, go to newsroom.heb.com

--Market Street:

7 a.m.-9 p.m.

For shoppers 60+

7-9 a.m. Monday and Thursday

--Walmart:

7 a.m.-8:30 p.m.
After a year-long investigation by Claudia Joseph, Simon Trump, Ewan Fletcher, Adam Luck, Jason Buckner and Craig Hibbert, the Mail on Sunday named Banksy as Robin Gunningham.

The search began with a photograph taken in Jamaica showing a man in a blue shirt and jeans, with a hint of a smile on his face and a spray can at his feet. Taken in 2004, it was said to show Banksy at work. When the picture was published it appeared to be the first chink in the armour of anonymity with which the artist has shielded himself ever since his work began to attract the attention of the art world.

Armed with this photograph, the team travelled to Bristol, long said to have been Banksy's home city, where they made contact with a man who claimed to have once met the artist in the flesh.

Many people claimed as much, but the moment one started asking for more information, one discovered they actually 'know someone who met Banksy' - and the trail ran cold.

However, this man claimed not only to have met the elusive artist but was able to furnish us with a name - not the usual variations of the name Banks but one all the more intriguing.

The man in the photograph, he insisted, was formerly known as Robin Gunningham - and it didn't require much imagination to work out how such a name could result in the nickname Banksy.

From records available to the public, they were able to glean further information.

Robin's father, Peter Gordon Gunningham was from the Whitehall area of Bristol. His mother, Pamela Ann Dawkin-Jones was a company director's secretary and grew up in the exclusive surroundings of Clifton.

The couple married on April 25, 1970, at Kingswood Wesley Methodist Church. On February 8, 1972, their daughter Sarah was born at Bristol Maternity Hospital, by which time Peter had been promoted to area manager for a hotel company and the couple had bought their first home, a semidetached house in Bristol.

On July 28, 1973, Robin was born in the same hospital. According to neighbours, the boy had early surgery for a cleft palette.

The images provide a behind-the-scenes look at the guerrilla artist creating some of his famous works, captured by his long-time associate - although they do not appear to capture his face

When Robin was nine, the family moved to a larger home in the same street and it is there he spent his formative years and became interested in graffiti.

A neighbour, Anthony Hallett, recalls the couple moving into the street as newlyweds and living there until 1998. They have since separated.

When they showed Mr Hallett the Jamaica photograph, he said the man in it was Robin Gunningham.

In 1984, Robin, then 11, donned a black blazer, grey trousers and striped tie to attend the renowned Bristol Cathedral School, which currently charges fees of 9,240 a year and lists supermodel Sophie Anderton as a former pupil.

It was hard to imagine Banksy, the anti-authoritarian renegade, as a public schoolboy wandering around the 17th Century former monastery, with its upper and lower quadrangles and its prayers in the ancient cathedral.

But they then found a school photograph, taken in 1989, of a bespectacled Robin Gunningham in which he shows a discernible resemblance to the man in the Jamaica photograph.

Pictured is the former family home of Robin Gunningham in Bristol. It's believed Gunningham is Banksy

Indeed, fellow pupils remember Robin, who was in Deans House, as being a particularly gifted artist.

In the rare interviews Banksy has given (always anonymously), the artist has acknowledged that it was while at school that he first became interested in graffiti.

Robin Gunningham left school at 16 after doing GCSEs and began dabbling in street art.

As the investigation continued, their inquiries demonstrated again and again that the details of Robin Gunningham's life story dovetail perfectly with the known facts about Banksy.

By 1998 Robin Gunningham was living in Easton, Bristol, with Luke Egan, who went on to exhibit with Banksy at Santa's Ghetto, an art store which launched at Christmas 2001 in London's West End.

Egan and Gunningham are believed to have left the house when the owner wanted to sell it.

Camilla Stacey, a curator at Bristol's Here Gallery who bought the property in 2000, said that Banksy and Robin Gunningham are one and the same person. She knew the house had been inhabited by Banksy because of the artwork left there - and she used to get post for him in the name of Robin Gunningham.

Once the group were almost certain Banksy was Gunningham - they went searching for him and tried to see if his parents would help.

His mother Pamela lived in a neat modern bungalow in a village outside Bristol. After identifying ourselves, they asked her if she had a son called Robin.

Her reaction was very odd. They showed her the Jamaica photograph and she was visibly startled, but said she didn't recognise the man in the photograph, to whom she bears more than a passing resemblance. They asked if she could put us in touch with him.

'I'm afraid I don't know how to get in contact with him,' she said.

So she did have a son called Robin? 'No, I don't. I don't have a son at all.'

They asked her if she had any other children. 'Yes, a daughter.'

But no son and certainly not a son who went to Bristol Cathedral School?

'No,' she said, and went on to deny she was Pamela Gunningham, insisting that the electoral roll must be incorrect.

Their conversation with Peter Gunningham, who now lived in a gated development in the suburb of Kingsdown, was equally baffling.

Again, they presented the photograph of Banksy/Robin Gunningham. Mr Gunningham said he didn't recognise the person in the picture. They told him that they believed his son to be Banksy. 'No,' he replied. 'I can't help you, really.'

Mr Gunningham politely continued to deny that his son was Banksy but his manner was almost playful. He refused to give them any information about Robin. It was all very strange.

Had the couple never heard of Banksy or Robin Gunningham, one might have expected a reaction of complete bewilderment. This did not seem to be the case.
Sheriffs from four different Northern Michigan counties have publicly voiced concerns regarding Gov. Gretchen Whitmers stay-at-home orders.

In a joint press release issued as thousands of residents protest at the state capital in Lansing, Leelanau County Sheriff Mike Borkovich, Benzie County Sheriff Ted Schendel, Manistee County Sheriff Ken Falk and Mason County Sheriff Kim Cole said they will not strictly enforce Whitmers orders in their counties.

While we understand her desire to protect the public, we question some restrictions that she has imposed as overstepping her executive authority, the sheriffs wrote. She has created a vague framework of emergency laws that only confuse Michigan citizens.

Instead of strict enforcement, the sheriffs say they will deal with every case as an individual situation and apply common sense.

They noted that their focus should be on reopening their counties and getting people back to work, but added that CDC guidelines such as social distancing, washing hands, wearing masks, etcshould be followed.

Each of us took an oath to uphold and defend the Michigan Constitution, as well as the US Constitution, and to ensure that your God given rights are not violated, the sheriffs said. We believe that we are the last line of defense in protecting your civil liberties.

Together, as a community, we will overcome this pandemic, and as Americans, we will persevere and come out stronger than before. As sheriffs of your community we want you to know we have your back and will continue to serve the people who have entrusted us with your protection.

Gov. Whitmers stay-at-home order began on March 24. Initially set to expire on April 13, the order was extended until April 30 as the coronavirus pandemic continues to spread in Michigan.

The order prohibits travel for non-essential workers except for essential duties like grocery shopping and medical visits, as well as some outdoor recreation.

Protests, such as Operation Gridlock ongoing in Lansing, and opposition to the orders have increased in recent days as further restrictions on big box stores and travel between second homes were issued.

There are now 27,001 confirmed COVID-19 cases in Michigan, with 1,768 deaths as of Tuesday, April 14. Another update is expected at 3 p.m. on Wednesday.
[April 15, 2020] New IDC COVID-19 Tech Index Points Towards Declines in IT Spending, But Also Pockets of Opportunity for IT Vendors

A new index of leading indicators for IT spending launched today by International Data Corporation (IDC) supports recent forecasts that point toward declines in overall tech spending in 2020, but also highlights opportunities where businesses may be looking to increase short-term investments as part of their response to the COVID-19 crisis. Enterprise respondents to a global survey identified expected cuts in spending on traditional technologies including PCs, mobile devices, server/storage infrastructure, and IT services, but were more optimistic about their ability to keep funding investments in cloud and new technologies including artificial intelligence (AI) and the Internet of Things (IoT). "There are individual examples of organizations increasing their IT spend on technologies such as laptops in order to support employees working from home, but the overall survey results support our view that total spending on those products will decline as many companies revert to contingency plans and cuts in capital spending," said Stephen Minton, vice president in IDC's (News - Alert) Customer Insights & Analysis group. "Cloud seems to be resilient with some firms continuing to increase their spending even while others focus on ways to cut costs in the short term." The COVID-19 Tech Index uses a scale of 1000 to provide a directional indicator of changes in the outlook for IT spending and will be updated every two weeks. The index is based partly on a global survey of enterprise IT buyers and partly on a composite of market indicators, which will be calibrated over the next few months with country-level inputs relating to the impact of factors including medical infection rates, social isolation, and government stimulus. A score above 1000 indicates that IT spending is expected to increase, while a score below 1000 points towards a likely decline.







COVID-19 Tech Index March April Buyer Intent 1023 1006 Market Indicators 988 969 Total Index 1005 987 Source (News - Alert): IDC COVID-19 Tech Index, April 2020 (Release 1)

Notes: Index score above 1000 indicates expected increase in IT spending for 2020 overall; score below 1000 indicates a projected decline. Buyer intent in the most recent survey, conducted in the last week of March, was broadly flat overall with expected IT spending declines in Europe and Asia/Pacific offset by more bullish expectations amongst US survey respondents. "There is probably some lag in the full impact of COVID-19 becoming apparent to all enterprise IT buyers," said Minton. "Some US firms were still projecting overall budget increases as late as the last week of March, but we think this is more likely to go down than up in the coming weeks. European firms were the most pessimistic in terms of overall IT spending." Market indicators are more negative than buyer intent surveys with economists having significantly lowered their outlook for the rest of 2020 after the release of limited data related to employment and other factors. There is still a huge amount of uncertainty, however, and these indicators may also trend down in the coming weeks. The pace of recovery in the second half of the year remains a major question. The IDC COVID-19 Tech Index is a leading indicator for IT spending, which is designed to provide rapid updates to changes in buyer sentiment and underlying market indicators before these are factored into official market and macroeconomic forecasts. The index is based on a scale whereby a score higher than 1000 indicates growth in IT spending, while a score below 1000 indicates a decline. Complete results from the most recent index as well as additional research related to the pandemic can be found on IDC's COVID-19 microsite at https://www.idc.com/misc/covid19. The index is based on surveys of enterprise IT buyers around the world, who are asked to provide guidance on a variety of factors including general business confidence, overall IT spending plans, and specific changes to budget allocations for individual technologies. Additionally, the index score is weighted with a composite of "market indicators" including macroeconomic forecasts calibrated with inputs relating to medical data, social isolation measures, and the impact of government stimulus plans. IDC will host a special COVID-19 Tech Index webinar on April 21st at 11:00 am U.S. Eastern time. In the presentation, Stephen Minton will discuss how the index works, the most recent index results, and how this aligns with IDC's current forecast for global technology spending. Details and registration for this webinar are available at https://bit.ly/34nlvBy. Learn how IDC can help your organization anticipate and respond to market changes brought on by the coronavirus pandemic. IDC's COVID-19 resource site offers research, market data, webinars, and blog articles that can help decision makers plan their next moves in response to the latest developments. About IDC

International Data Corporation (IDC) is the premier global provider of market intelligence, advisory services, and events for the information technology, telecommunications, and consumer technology markets. With more than 1,100 analysts worldwide, IDC offers global, regional, and local expertise on technology and industry opportunities and trends in over 110 countries. IDC's analysis and insight helps IT professionals, business executives, and the investment community to make fact-based technology decisions and to achieve their key business objectives. Founded in 1964, IDC is a wholly-owned subsidiary of International Data Group (IDG), the world's leading tech media, data and marketing services company. To learn more about IDC, please visit www.idc.com. Follow IDC on Twitter (News - Alert) at @IDC and LinkedIn. Subscribe to the IDC Blog for industry news and insights: http://bit.ly/IDCBlog_Subscribe. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20200415005057/en/

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YEREVAN, APRIL 15, ARMENPRESS. President of Armenia Armen Sarkissian had a phone conversation with Georgian President Salome Zourabichvili on April 15.

The two Presidents talked about the measures against the coronavirus pandemic, the preventive measures and the efforts aimed at overcoming the consequences.

As ARMENPRESS was informed from the press service of the Presidents office, the sides particularly highlighted the close cooperation at all levels between the two neighboring and friendly countries under the current complex situation.

The Armenian and Georgian Presidents expressed confidence that with joint efforts it will be possible to overcome the situation and the consequences resulted by the pandemic and will be able to direct all the potential of partnership to the restoration of economies and welfare of the peoples. President Sarkissian noted that particularly under the current situation food safety remains a priority issue.

Edited and translated by Tigran Sirekanyan
- Vic Sotto used to date other celebrities like Coney Reyes, Angela Luz, Pia Guanio, and Dina Bonnevie before he got married to Pauleen Luna

- Coneys special message to Angela on social media got noticed by netizens

- Her message was posted in the comments section of the Instagram post of Paulina Sotto, Vic Sottos daughter with Angela

- Coney wanted Paulina to extend her birthday greetings to her mom Angela

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Vic Sotto has been married to actress-host Pauleen Luna for four years now but he used to date other celebrities like Coney Reyes, Angela Luz, Pia Guanio, and Dina Bonnevie.

KAMI learned that Coneys special message to Angela on social media went viral.

The message was posted in the comments section of the Instagram post of Paulina Sotto, Vic Sottos daughter with Angela.

Coney wanted Paulina to extend her birthday greetings to her mom Angela. Coney also has a child with Vic Sotto  Pasig City Mayor Vico Sotto.

"Please extend my birthday greetings to your Mom...

"Happy Birthday, Angela!

"God bless you with the desires of your heart, Coney posted.

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KAMI previously reported that Vic and Pauleen continued their Good Friday tradition amid the lockdown.

Vic Sotto is a famous comedian and TV host in the Philippines. He is married to his Eat Bulaga co-host Pauleen Luna. Vic has a daughter named Talitha with his wife Pauleen.

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!

Maricar Reyes participated in a hilarious edition of our Tricky Questions challenge! Check out all of the exciting videos and celebrity interviews on our KAMI HumanMeter YouTube channel!

Source: KAMI.com.gh
A former Vice-President (Africa) of World Bank, Mrs Oby Ezekwesili, has said Nigeria is not indebted to the International Monetary Fund (IMF).

BreakingTimes had reported that the IMF Executive Board recently approved immediate debt relief for twenty-five countries battling with the COVID19 pandemic. Nigeria was however not included in the list.

Ezekwesili, who was a former Minister of Education, stated this in a tweet via her Twitter handle, @obyezeks, on Tuesday.

The Former Education Minister, who noted that the country is not a World Bank or an IMF Low Income Country (LIC), said the recent debt relief announced for LICs has no relevance for Nigeria.

It does for Africa because majority of LICs are in Africa, she added

#BasicFacts 1. Nigeria is not a WorldBank/IMF Low-Income Country LIC. 2. Nigeria is also not indebted to IMF. That recent debt relief announced for LICs has no relevance for Nigeria. It does for Africa because majority of LICs are in Africa.  Oby Ezekwesili (@obyezeks) April 14, 2020
Not just in the fight against COVID-19, but also in politics, economics and society, observes Ajit Balakrishnan.

Words such as 'infection', 'social distance', 'propagation', 'seclusion' and 'transmission' have suddenly become a part of common people's conversation, as well as keywords in speeches by political leaders.

When a COVID-19 infected person is discovered in a community, energetic efforts are launched by citizens and law enforcement authorities to locate the 'super-spreader' and trace, list and test everyone that person has been in touch with.

'Network Science' is suddenly being practised by people as humble as a rickshaw puller to people as lofty as heads of State. It is no longer the domain of just scholars of esoteric sciences.

Talk to anyone who has even a passing acquaintance with Network Science and he will tell you that networks are around all of us.

Some of these are familiar to practically everyone: Telecom networks and computer networks, for example. Telecom networks help us -- users of telephones -- to connect to one another using 'connectors' like telephone exchanges.

Computer networks help us connect by way of our personal computers and smartphones and allow us to send text messages, audio and video clips to other people.

We all know by now that while most of the time, telephone and computer networks do a wonderful job for us, they can occasionally be used by 'baddies' to eavesdrop on conversations, spread annoying commercial messages and even lure us into giving away our bank account numbers and passwords and steal money from us.

Then, there are networks less familiar to the average citizen but studied extensively by scholars, such as biological networks where proteins are seen interacting with each other (';Protein-Protein Networks') or 'DNA-Protein Networks', 'Gene Co-expression Networks', all of which are involved in the birth, growth and health of every form of living body, be it human, animal, bird or insect.

These networks have been the subject of study for decades by government and private sector laboratories.

And, of course, practically everyone nowadays has something to do with social networking sites on the Internet -- Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, to mention a few.

What is astonishing though is the discovery over the last two decades or so that all the above, apparently different networks -- telecom, biological, disease -- can be understood with the help of certain common concepts.

To start with, all networks have 'nodes' and 'edges'.

In the case of COVID-19, the nodes are us human beings, and the edges are what connect the edges together to make up the network.

These edges can be, in the case of landline telephones, actual physical cables; in the case of mobile phones, electronic signal; and in the case of human social networks, a psychological feeling of 'people-like-me'.

Scientists have also formulated other properties of networks: 'Size' (the number of nodes in that network), 'Density' (the number of actual connected nodes to the maximum connections possible), 'Degree' of a node (the number of other nodes connected to it) and 'Degree Centrality' (the extent to which a node acts as a bridge between other nodes).

All this may make you yawn and induce you to murmur, 'Let these scientists have fun with such complicated notions, but why should I bother to understand any of this stuff?'

Well, wait, things can get exciting when you apply it to networks between people.

Let's start with Old Boys Networks, the practice of hiring only those people in your firm who have gone to the same high school as you. This was widely prevalent in the multinational companies in India up to the late 1950s. You had to have gone to Doon School, St Paul's or Lawrence School before you even got a chance for an interview.

Researchers say that most social networks exhibit 'homophily' -- members of a network are prone to maintain relationships with those who are like themselves as measured by social class, race, gender, religion or profession.

Research in the United States says that 60 per cent of first jobs are found through such social networks.

More generally, researchers have found strong evidence of networks in labour markets, particularly in immigrant populations.

Then, of course, there are 'viral videos', videos on the Internet that suddenly catch the fancy of people who then keep forwarding them to friends and acquaintances: Some videos have achieved more than a 100 million views in a few days worldwide purely on the basis of their virality.

The specific processes at work that causes virality of this scale are, as yet, not fully understood though theories abound.

The finance sector has had its share of network catastrophes: 'Financial contagion' is the phrase used to describe this process and can happen at both the international and the domestic level.

The pattern observed so far is that these chain of failures in financial intermediaries are triggered by the failure of a domestic bank or financial intermediary and this failure is transmitted when it defaults on interbank liabilities and/or sells its assets at throwaway prices which brings into question the valuation of assets of similar banks.

And finally, there is this whole body of research which speaks of 'Network Effects' when a network effect is present, the value of a service to a person increases with the number of others using it.

For example, more the number of users using a credit card, more the number of shops who will accept it and hence even more users will use that credit card.

The contemporary venture capital industry is predicated on this faith in Network Effects.

Maybe, it is time for Network Science to be included in school and college syllabuses just as Physics, Chemistry, Botany, Mathematics, etc, and for it to become a required part in the times to come of counting a person as 'educated'.

Ajit Balakrishnan, (ajitb@rediffmail.com), founder and CEO, Rediff.com, is an Internet entrepreneur and chaired a committee set up by the ministry of human resource development on education and entrepreneurship last year to provide inputs for the National Education Policy.
Major international creditors will suspend debt payments this year for the worlds poorest countries, who will be hit hardest by the rapidly spreading coronavirus pandemic that has sparked the steepest downturn in the global economy since the 1930s.

French Finance Minister Bruno Le Maire said 76 countries, including 40 in sub-Saharan Africa, would be eligible to have debt payments worth a combined $20bn suspended by official and private creditors. A remaining $12bn in payments due to multilateral institutions still need to be sorted out.

We have obtained a debt moratorium at the level of bilateral creditors and private creditors for a total of $20bn, Le Maire told journalists.

Group of Seven (G7) finance ministers and central bank governors met by videoconference on Tuesday. They threw their support behind a push to provide temporary debt relief to the poorest countries.

The group is ready to provide a time-bound suspension on debt service payments due on official bilateral claims for all countries eligible for World Bank concessional financing, according to a joint statement. Their offer, however, is contingent on China and other countries in the Group of 20 (G20) major economies joining them, as agreed with the Paris Club group of creditors.

G20 deputies will meet on Tuesday to prepare for a broader meeting of finance ministers and central bank governors on Wednesday. Sources familiar with the process told Reuters they expected the G20 to endorse a suspension of debt payments at least until the end of the year.

World Bank President David Malpass, in a tweet, thanked US Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin for hosting the G7 meeting and backing his joint call with International Monetary Fund Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva for the temporary debt standstill.

The World Bank and the IMF have begun disbursing emergency aid to countries struggling to contain the spread of the novel coronavirus and mitigate its economic impact. They first issued their call for debt relief on March 25, but China  a major creditor  and other G20 nations have not formally endorsed the proposal.

The IMF, in its 2020 World Economic Outlook, said on Tuesday that the global economy is expected to shrink by three percent during 2020 in a stunning coronavirus-driven collapse of activity that will mark the steepest downturn since the Great Depression of the 1930s.

The forecast provided a sombre backdrop to the IMF and World Bank spring meetings, which are being held by videoconference this week because of the pandemic. The meetings, which normally draw 10,000 people to Washington, DC in the United States, have been stripped to the bare minimum, with many interactions among central bankers, finance ministers, and other policymakers not taking place.

Debt cancellation

The pandemic will hit the poorest countries, especially hard since they lack adequate healthcare systems and have already seen massive capital flight out of their economies. Many have also been rocked by plunging commodity prices.

Frances Le Maire said official government creditors, including not only the Paris Club but also China and other members of the G20, were to suspend $12bn under the agreement, which still needs to be finalised on Wednesday.

Separately, a senior German official spoke of a debt moratorium by official creditors worth up to $14bn, a number is previously given by Malpass.

In their statement, G7 officials also called for more contributions to the IMFs facilities that support the poorest countries and said the debt relief effort should include private creditors on a voluntary basis, as well as efforts to enhance debt transparency.

China has become a major creditor to developing countries, especially in Africa, but there is little transparency about how much they owe.

A French finance ministry official said private creditors have agreed on a voluntary basis to roll over or refinance $8bn in debt.

Of the total $32bn due this year, the remaining $12bn is owed by multilateral lenders, mainly the World Bank, Le Maire said, urging such lenders to join the debt relief initiative.

The IMF on Monday announced $215m in initial debt relief grants to 25 countries, drawing on its Catastrophe Containment and Relief Trust. That facility currently has about $500m available, but the IMF is trying to boost it to $1.4bn.

There are growing calls from nonprofit groups, Pope Francis and others to follow up on the temporary suspension of debt payments with a cancellation of debts for the poorest countries.

French President Emmanuel Macron said in a television address to the French nation on Monday that African countries should be helped by massively cancelling their debt, but gave no details.

Le Maire said that at the end of the year, outright debt cancellation should take place on a case-by-case basis and in coordination with multilateral lenders depending on the economic situation of the countries as well as developments in commodity markets and capital flows.
Kristofer Hivju, who played Tormund Giantsbane in HBO's epic fantasy series Game Of Thrones, had self-quarantined with family in Norway following coronavirus diagonsis

Game Of Thrones star Kristofer Hivju and his wife Gry Molvr have recovered from coronavirus.

The Norwegian actor, who played Tormund Giantsbane in HBO's epic fantasy series, took to Instagram on Tuesday to share the health update.

(Click here to follow LIVE updates on coronavirus outbreak)

"Hi! We are fully recovered and in good health after I was infected by the Cororonavirus, and most likely my wife. After several weeks in quarantine and also a couple more indoors after being free of all symptoms, we are finally safe and sound.

We were lucky to only have mild symptoms of the COVID-19. We send our love and thoughts to all of the people where the virus has hit much harder, and to everyone who has lost their loved ones due to the Cornonavirus," Hivju, 41, wrote.

Check out his post here

The actor also thanked his well-wishers for their support and urged people take care of each other as the world fights the pandemic.

Hivju had shared his COVID-19 diagnosis last month.

The actor joins the likes of Idris Elba, Tom Hanks and his wife Rita Wilson, and Sara Bareilles among the other stars who have successfully battled the deadly virus after testing positive.
Source: Xinhua| 2020-04-15 18:46:31|Editor: huaxia

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KUWAIT CITY, April 15 (Xinhua) -- Kuwait on Wednesday reported 50 new cases, bringing the country's total number to 1,405, the health ministry said in a statement.

Among the new cases, 43 have a history of contact with infected patients, the statement said, adding the cause of the infection for the other seven is still under investigation.

So far, 1,196 patients are receiving treatment, including 31 in ICU, according to the statement.

Meanwhile, Kuwaiti Minister of Health Bassel Al-Sabah announced the recovery of 30 patients from the coronavirus, raising the total number of recoveries in the country to 206.

Kuwait on Tuesday reported the third death from COVID-19.

The Kuwaiti government has imposed a nationwide curfew to contain the spread of the coronavirus.

On March 13, Kuwait suspended all commercial flights. The government also closed stores, malls and barbershops.
A new tool designed to monitor the impact of coronavirus on the UK found that population movement dropped by 98 per cent since the start of the lockdown.

Experts in big data and AI from the University of Oxford developed the COVID-19 Impact Monitor and say it already shows 'dramatic changes' in everyday life.

The tool uses aggregated mobile phone location data that has been made anonymous - this is to allow them to track trends in movement.

The team also discovered that 55 per cent of Britons stayed home on Easter Monday and despite a surge in admissions - hospital footfall was down by 80 per cent.

Other revelations from the data include the fact that the best time to visit a supermarket if you want to avoid crowds is 09:00 BST on a Tuesday.

This graphic shows a dramatic drop in movement across the UK since March 1, with the most notable change happening in the past ten days

Researchers say the data collected can't be used to identify an individual but does allow them to understand the impact the virus has on the NHS and community.

Team leader, Dr Adam Saunders said monitoring population movements in response to the pandemic is something being done around the world.

WHAT ARE THE KEY FINDINGS? Population movement has dropped by 99 per cent since the start of March

55 per cent of Britons stayed at home on Easter Monday

Despite a surge in hospital admissions, footfall has fallen by 80 per cent

The quietist time to visit a supermarket is Tuesday at 9 am

19 million Britons are the most at risk of COVID-19 because of age and underlying health conditions

The flow of people between regions in the UK has tumbled by 76 per cent Advertisement

'The team came together to do what we could to help tackle the challenge facing the UK through the use of ethical big data analytics for the public good,' he said.

The team found about 19 million Britons are in an at risk category for COVID-19 due to their age or underlying health conditions - just under a third of the population.

As well as moving about less, the team also discovered that people are travelling around the country less - with movement between regions dropping by 76 per cent.

They've created a digital dashboard to show the data in an easier to understand way - including a breakdown per region.

Dr Matthias Qian, who worked on the development team said getting insights from big data is key to fighting the coronavirus and making social distancing work.

'Fully anonymised and aggregated mobile phone location data provides a responsible approach for revealing important insights for the NHS, the government and the wider public, which can help save lives,' he said.

Data for the app came from a range of services including Cuebiq, CKDelta and Facebook's Data for good programme on population density.

Monitoring tools using location data from mobile phones are already being used to help slow the spread of the virus in other parts of the world.

'The monitoring of population movements in response to the Covid-19 pandemic has received considerable attention following its use in China, South Korea and Singapore, the countries where the virus impacted earliest,' said Saunders.

Privacy experts have expressed concern over the use of location data, with some describing tracking efforts as 'Orwellian'.

While the Oxford tool is designed to provide data on overall trends - rather than specific people - other apps could offer more focused data.

A new NHS phone app has been created that could eventually allow ministers to lift the stringent lock-down that has brought Britain to a halt.

Westminster Bridge is almost empty as a result of orders to stay indoors to slow the spread of COVID-19. Researchers found movement in the UK has dropped by 98 per cent since March 1

Health Secretary Matt Hancock said the 'contract tracing' software would allow people who become unwell to warn those they had been in touch with 'over the past few days' so they can 'act accordingly'.

NHSX, the health service's technological arm, is believed to have been working on software which uses bluetooth technology, alongside Google and Apple, who run the two main smartphone operating systems.

Toni Vitale, head of data protection at JMW Solicitors, said for this sort of technology to work it needs to be installed by at least 60 per cent of the population.

'The question is: if the public accepts this intrusive use of personal data for health reasons in an emergency, would they become desensitised to the UK Government using data for crime prevention, to monitor large crowds at events or even to replace the national census  due in 2021,' said Vitale.

The team behind the Oxford monitoring tool say it is completely anonymous and GDPR compliant. Their goal was to track general movements rather than people.

A number of tech companies are working with governments and researchers to provide information that can help in fighting the virus.

Apple recently announced it would make data generated through its GPS app available to agencies tracking mobility under isolation orders.

Also Google and Apple are working together with governments on using native software to tackle the spread of the virus.
Each day, thousands of Pennsylvanians go to work to ensure that our families have food in their pantries and refrigerators. They jar the apple sauce you give your toddler; they package the beef you prepare for a family dinner; they process the frozen vegetables, and they bag the salty snack you need for a pick-me-up.

Pennsylvania is justifiably proud of its agricultural sector: we grow a lot of food here. But the workers who process and package that food are instrumental in our food supply chain.

Our Local represents 8,000 workers in food processing operations across Pennsylvania who continue to punch the clock in the face of the COVID-19 crisis.

And they are not alone: workers in grocery stores, pharmacies, and in the public sector continue to do their jobs every day. Media reports justifiably highlight the brave healthcare workers in our hospitals and nursing homes. Stories about grocery and pharmacy workers have all Americans concerned for their safety and grateful for their dedication as well.

Food processing workers deserve the same concern, and it is time for Gov. Tom Wolf and our lawmakers to help protect all workers who are without question essential, frontline employees.

Gov. Wolf has taken strong and decisive action throughout this crisis, and he deserves our thanks. Earlier this week, PA Secretary of Health Rachel Levine issued a new order that requires employers to ensure that all facilities have enough security personnel to enforce social distancing of at least six feet and verify that proper cleaning methods are occurring.

This is a critical step that will help stem community spread of COVID-19, especially in food production facilities and in grocery stores. The key, now, is to make sure that this necessary order is enforced. Any employer who fails to meet this mandate should be shut down.

Still, we know that more needs to be done, and I am calling on Governor Wolf to issue an executive order classifying these men and women as essential workers.

This order should mandate enforceable guidelines for social distancing, cleaning and personal hygiene, paid benefits, and attendance policies, as well as specific protocols when an employee is diagnosed with COVID-19. All workers should be provided with the appropriate Personal Protective Equipment (PPE).

Beyond the governors office, the state legislature needs to change state law to protect all workers who are on the front lines of this pandemic.

State law should incorporate these safety provisions and include common-sense paid leave and sick policies that will protect workers and all Pennsylvanians. Every worker should have additional paid sick leave to address the impact of the virus. Even the federal government and the CDC recognize this simple truth. Coming to work sick endangers not just your co-workers, but all their families and essentially all Pennsylvanians.

Its important to have a clear picture of what these workers in the food supply chain are experiencing each day they go to work. They are exposed to hundreds and hundreds of consumers each day. They are working long hours due to increased demand and filling shifts for workers who have tested positive for COVID-19 or have been exposed and are quarantined.

Many employers have worked with our Union to establish appropriate protocols for creating and maintaining a safe work environment and have implemented enhanced sick leave benefits  even employers for whom the federal mandate does not apply.

Unfortunately, some employers have refused to institute many commonsense protocols to keep workers safe. All workers deserve  and all Pennsylvanians will be made safer  if the lifesaving protections and policies that the public health experts are recommending are actually put in place.

We will continue to work with employers to keep workers as safe as possible. We will continue to protect our members rights. All we ask is that Governor Wolf and lawmakers take the necessary action to help workers, their families, and all Pennsylvanians.

Wendell Young IV is President of UFCW Local 1776 Keystone State, which represents 35,000 workers across Pennsylvania and in Ohio, West Virginia, New York, and New Jersey. For more information, please visit www.ufcw1776.org.
The National Bank of Ukraine (NBU) has determined the criteria for writing off the impaired financial assets of banks from reserves for expected losses, which will allow banks to get rid of non-performing loans, the central bank's press service has reported.

"A bank may write off impaired financial assets in the absence of reasonable expectations about their recovery. The write-off occurs if the reserve was formed for such an asset in accordance with IFRS 9 Financial Instruments in the full sum of its gross carrying amount and if one or more of the following criteria apply: overdue repayment of the debt or a part of it exceeds 36 months; the bank did not receive any significant payments in the previous 36 months (more than 10% of the carrying amount of such an asset); the bank did not receive any significant receipts from the sale of the pledge or the enforcement of the security, or the bank did not have access/redemption/recovery of the collateral during the previous 36 months; the bank failed to sell such a financial asset three times in a row; the bank has information that the debt on this asset has been written off by another bank," the report reads.

It notes that the bank has no right to determine more favorable criteria for writing off the impaired assets of debtors related to the bank.

The NBU noted that the write-off is not debt forgiveness. The bank may continue to settle the debt to recover it.

Banks are tasked with analyzing impaired assets for the presence of these criteria and writing them down every year, starting from 2020, until October 1. The relevant information should be provided to the National Bank of Ukraine by November 1 of the current year.

These criteria are defined by NBU Board resolution No. 49 of April 13, 2020 on determining the criteria for the write-off of impaired financial assets of Ukrainian banks at the expense of valuation reserves for expected credit losses. The resolution enters into force on the day following the day of its official publication.

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Credit: CC0 Public Domain

Belgium on Wednesday extended its stay-at-home order to curb the coronavirus until at least May 3 and banned mass gatheringsconcerts, festivals and sporting eventsuntil the end of August.

The lockdown has seen schools, bars and restaurants closed since mid-March, whilte the country's per capita death rate has risen to among the highest in the world.

Announcing the decision, Prime Minister Sophie Wilmes said she would hold new crisis talks next week to discuss a "progressive" loosening of measures from early May.

"It will be an evolving process, based again and always on scientific evidence with a single goal: to slow the spread of the virus," she told the nation at a televised news conference.

By Wednesday, Belgium had recorded 4,440 deaths among a population of 11.4 millionone of the highest rates in the world, although Belgium officials say they have kept closer track of deaths in retirement homes than some countries.

The European Commission, headquartered in Brussels, has been attempting to coordinate the phasing in and phasing out of anti-virus measures across the EU.

But the announcement of a May 3 target date for Belgium came after neighbouring France prolonged its stricter lockdown to May 11, while Germany said it would begin easing some restrictions in the coming weeks.

Belgium's smaller southeastern neighbour Luxembourg was also slightly out of step, ordering its citizens to wear face masks, a measure not taken nationally elsewhere.

The grand duchy's prime minister, Xavier Bettel, said: "Mouth protection will be obligatory, whether it be a scarf, a bandana or a mask." Surgical masks offering a better barrier to airborne virus droplets will be made available over time.

Explore further Follow the latest news on the coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak

 2020 AFP
Around 100 million passenger journeys to, from and within Europe have been lost since 1 March because of the coronavirus pandemic.

The Independent has made the calculation from figures released by Eurocontrol, which coordinates air-traffic control in Europe, together with guidance provided by airlines.

The latest set of statistics reveals the near-total collapse in European air travel because of Covid-19.

As individual countries have imposed no-fly restrictions, and travellers have been locked down by local restrictions, 90 per cent or more of European passenger flights have been grounded.

Some have been replaced by all-cargo flights, with DHL Express becoming the busiest airline in Europe. In the week between 6 and 12 April, it averaged 153 movements per day.

Ryanair is no longer the giant of European passenger aviation. That mantle has passed to the small Norwegian regional carrier, Wideroe, which had 114 flights in the course of a week.

The German national airline, Lufthansa, was in third place with 87, followed by Qatar Airways, which has made a niche business out of repatriation flights. It operated 77 flights between Europe and its hub in Doha.

Turkish Airlines flew 68 operations to take fifth place.

The most stark figure, though, is Eurocontrols calculation of the deficit in flying: 677,959 flights have been cancelled to, from and within Europe since 1 March.

That corresponds to around 80 million passenger journeys that were not made. During the first few weeks of March, when airlines were operating more or less full schedules, there were a vast number of no-shows  which are believed to account for at least 20 million empty seats on planes.

Assuming a conservative typical one-way fare of 50, the loss in revenue from European passenger journeys in the past six weeks is currently 4bn.

That is a small fraction of the 250bn in lost revenue predicted by the International Air Transport Association (IATA) for airlines worldwide in 2020.

Londons dominance as aviation capital of the world has been temporarily suspended. The busiest airport anywhere in Europe was Leipzig in eastern Germany, with 185 movements  ahead of Frankfurt, which had 179.

Oslo was in third place (169).

Heathrow airport has lost 90 per cent of its traffic, while Gatwick airport is operating only one flight in 100 compared with a year ago, when it was the busiest single-runway airport in the world.
By the time he finished, he had become the teacher; me, the student. And he had made the same point that he tries to make during every conversation: At five years shy of 100, he was still able to do things better than some people, say, my age. And in his mind, that included driving.
The Jersey City Council is pressing pause on its expansion of the citys plastic bag ban.

Citing the ongoing coronavirus pandemic, the council has tabled an amended ordinance that would have enhanced the ban on single-use plastic bags and created a more aggressive system for penalizing businesses that break the law.

I think its good legislation, we have to take care of our environment, but it doesnt make sense in the middle of a public health emergency, Ward E Councilman James Solomon said Wednesday.

Under the citys current ban, plastic bags that are at least 2.25 millimeters thick qualify as reusable bags. The ordinance that was originally scheduled for a second reading Wednesday would have banned the thicker plastic bags, as well as reusable bags made of polypropylene.

The amendments also would have required businesses to provide recyclable paper bags to customers for between 10 and 25 cents each.

Municipalities across the state have begun instituting similar bans on single-use plastic bags to reduce pollution and litter, protect marine environments, and slash greenhouse gas emissions.

But the coronavirus has stoked fears of whether reusable bags may be spreading the virus. Some cities have even lifted their bans on plastic bags, including San Francisco and Albuquerque, where shoppers have been barred from using reusable bags.

Tony Radoszewski, president and CEO Plastics Industry Association, even wrote a letter to U.S Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar last month, asking him to speak out against plastic bans and make a public statement on the health and safety benefits seen in single-use plastics.

But a study published in the New England Journal of Medicine determined coronavirus can survive up to 72 hours on plastics and stainless steel.

In Hoboken, which has banned plastic bags and foam containers, Mayor Ravi Bhalla shot down any possibility of the city suspending its ban.

Ive heard from several residents requesting a postponement of our ban on plastic bags, the full ban of which went into effect earlier this year and complied with at virtually all of our businesses, Bhalla said. "Halting the plastic bag ban is not something Im willing to consider at this time, as I dont believe it would yield a benefit to our efforts to combat COVID-19.

In Jersey City, the council tabled the amended ordinance during Mondays caucus and said they would revisit the legislation at the end of the public health crisis. The pandemic has left more than 2,800 residents infected with COVID-19 and resulted in 137 deaths as of Monday.

In addition to the updated rules surrounding plastic and paper bags, the ordinance would have also instituted new fines for establishments that dont adhere to the law. Under the now tabled legislation, businesses would be fined up to $100 for an initial violation, up to $200 for a second offense, and up to $500 for all subsequent violations.

Solomon said during Mondays caucus that he worried about businesses ability to adapt to the updated rules, adding that it will be at least three months before the council returns to the law. When they do, he added, he hopes to include new provisions that will give businesses a grace period to adjust to the expanded ban.

I do think its all sound, but when were in the middle of a pandemic businesses arent going to be able to adapt to it, he said Monday. We can put it on pause until we get out of this.

The New Jersey Sierra Club, an environmental organization, said Jersey City should not delay in expanding its ban, even if the new provisions arent yet enforced.

There are organizations that have always opposed plastic bag bans who are trying to use the coronavirus pandemic to get towns and cities to stop moving forward," said Jeff Tittel, director of the New Jersey Sierra Club. We understand that Jersey City is concerned about public safety, but delaying the ordinance does nothing to advance public health and safety.

Editors note: A previous version of this story should have identified the president and CEO of Plastics Industry Association as Tony Radoszewski.
The Director of the West African Center for Cell Biology of Infectious Pathogens ( WACCBIP ) professor Gordon A. Awandare has appealed to government to direct part of the IMF Covid-19 fund for Ghana into science and medical research.

According to him, it is important the country builds the capacity of science institutions to find local solutions to medical problems.

Speaking to Francis Abban on the Morning Starr Wednesday, the biologist who recently led a project to discover the DNA of the Covid-19, said there will be pandemics in the future the country must prepare for them.

I think it is crucially important how we are responding to the emergencyfor our long term survival, we need to build our own solutions to problems like that so we dont wait for others to do it for us.

I hope that our government will direct the some of the IMF funds to build sustainable capacity so we can deal with matters like this and we can also be ahead of situations like this because we are going to have more, there will be more in the future. We cant wait for the pandemics to hit and then we run into actions, he said.

IMF Support

The Executive Board of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) has approved the disbursement of US$1 billion to be drawn under the Rapid Credit Facility to help Ghanas COVID-19 fight.

According to the IMF, the COVID-19 pandemic is already impacting Ghana severely. Growth is slowing down, financial conditions have tightened, and the exchange rate is under pressure.

A statement by the IMF added that the authorities have timely and proactively responded to contain the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic in Ghana and support affected households and firms.

The Executive Board of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) today approved the disbursement of SDR 738 million (about US$1 billion) to be drawn under the Rapid Credit Facility (RCF). The disbursement will help address the urgent fiscal and balance of payments needs that Ghana is facing, improve confidence, and catalyze support from other development partners.2

The IMF continues to monitor Ghanas situation closely and stands ready to provide policy advice and further support as neededthe uncertain dynamics of the pandemic creates significant risks to the macroeconomic outlook. Ghana continues to be classified at high risk of debt distress. The authorities remain committed to policies consistent with strong growth, rapid poverty reduction, and macroeconomic stability over the medium-term.

Additional support from other development partners will be required and critical to close the remaining external financing gap and ease budget constraints.

---Starrfm.com
Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, April 15)  Cagayan province had no confirmed COVID-19 cases for a week now, the provincial information office confirmed on Wednesday.

The province in the Cagayan Valley Region in northern Luzon had its last confirmed COVID-19 case on April 8. The patient has gotten well and was already discharged from the Cagayan Valley Medical Center.

Another patient suspected of COVID-19 in the province and also confined at the CVMC, tested negative Wednesday afternoon in his second swab test.

CVMC Chief Dr. Glen Matthew Baggao said there were no COVID-19 patients confined at the hospital from April 6 to 14.

All 14 confirmed COVID-19 cases in the province have recovered. A total of 18 suspected patients were previously confined in the hospital, all of whom have been discharged.

Baggao lauded the current health situation in the province, emphasizing they were able to lower the increase in confirmed COVID-19 cases in their area.

Baggao reminded the residents not to be complacent on the situation and to still stay at home to further avert the spread of the virus in Cagayan province.

In the whole Region 2 (Cagayan Valley), there are 27 confirmed COVID-19 cases along with 21 recoveries and one fatality.
This illustration depicts how the Orbital O2 turbine will look when in the water.

Located in waters off the north coast of Scotland, the archipelago of Orkney is known for its natural beauty, varied wildlife and long summer days.

It is also home to the European Marine Energy Centre, or EMEC. Set up in 2003, EMEC acts as a hub where wave and tidal energy developers can test and assess their technologies in the open sea.

If all goes to plan EMEC  which has received funding from a range of institutions, including the Scottish and U.K. governments and European Union  will soon be the site of a significant milestone for one tidal energy company.

At the end of March it was announced that Orbital Marine Power had signed up for a second berth at the center, a development that will enable it to eventually launch a 4 megawatt (MW) floating tidal turbine farm.

The business, which has offices in both Edinburgh and Orkney, is currently developing its O2 tidal turbine.

With a 72 meter long "floating superstructure" that's used to support two 1 MW turbines, the technology will, the company says, be able to generate enough electricity to meet the annual needs of 1,700 U.K. homes.

"Rather than our turbines being fixed to the seabed looking like a wind turbine, they are fixed to a floating platform which we can anchor in really fast flowing tidal streams," Andrew Scott, the CEO of Orbital Marine Power, told CNBC via email.

Orbital's first O2 turbine is due to be connected to the grid at EMEC by the end of this year and fully operational in 2021. It's estimated that the second turbine will be installed in 2022.
Synergy Chelsea Synergy essential workers apartment package, SynergyCares, aims to ensure the care and comfort of our essential workers impacted by the novel coronavirus are given special care and consideration, says U.S. President, Debra Christopher.

Synergy Global Housing (Synergy), a leading global temporary housing and serviced accommodations provider, announced the release of a specialized apartment package and promotional rate designed for the needs of community members (i.e., health care workers, government agencies, and other essential workers) working the front lines of the novel coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 (COVID-19) pandemic.

Synergy essential workers apartment package, SynergyCares, aims to ensure the care and comfort of our essential workers impacted by the novel coronavirus are given special care and consideration, says U.S. President, Debra Christopher. Synergy apartments are located near major city centers, offer 24/7 concierge and emergency services, and come pre-set with an essential workers welcome package. But most importantly, they offer essential workers a sanctuary to rest and recharge their batteries.

SynergyCares is a specialized apartment package and rate bundle tailored to support the needs of essential workers on the front lines of COVID-19 in select U.S. markets.

Each apartment package includes:



Specialized, deep clean prior to move-in

Starter meal and toiletries package

$25 e-gift card to meal delivery services

One Synergy comfort robe

Increased internet bandwidth

SmartTVs w/access to Disney+/Hulu/Netflix/AmazonVideo

Dedicated 24/7 emergency and concierge services

o Exact services vary by each locations shelter in place orders



Flexible reservation policies, (i.e., 24-hours to vacate, 24-hour cancellation policy, etc.)

Be Our Future Guest thank you giftFree two-night/three-day-stay with Synergy

o Offer good for: Seattle, SF Bay Area, Greater LA area, and NYC

*Subject to availability; restrictions apply

If theres one thing our health care workers and government agencies need and deserve, its a good night's rest in a safe, secure, and quiet place, said EVP of Sales & Marketing, Craig Partin. Serviced apartments offer an immediate respite with all the amenities of home for those who need it most.

Corporate apartments, also commonly referred to as serviced apartments or serviced accommodations, are the perfect holistic temporary living alternative to the transient living environment one might find in a hotel.

Serviced accommodations offer a controlled environment, providing front-line, essential workers the safety and security they need to rest easy. Synergy focuses on the hospitality aspect of the business, offering a turn-key furnished housing solution that combines all the standard amenities of home life (i.e., high-speed internet, ample square footage, separate bedroom and workspace with desk, full kitchens with full-sized refrigerators, in-unit laundry, and pet-friendly), with the high-touch service and hospitality of a hotel or resort.

The SynergyCares apartment package is available for all essential workers who need a safe, quiet place to rest. To access the SynergyCares apartment package and promotional rate, guests simply show their work status via a paystub, or hospital or government-issued I.D. and mention SynergyCares when booking a reservation.

For more information, please visit https://www.synergyhousing.com/heretohelp/#/ and fill out the interest form.

About Synergy Global Housing

Synergy Global Housing (Synergy) brings a superior furnished housing experience to the business travel and workforce mobility industry; providing best-in-class serviced accommodations in 85 countries across the globe. Synergy has Global Solutions Centers in Dublin, Ireland; Hyderabad, India; Singapore; Shanghai, China; New York, New York; and San Ramon, San Francisco, Los Angeles, San Diego, and Orange County, California. Through people, passion and innovation, Synergy delivers boutique services, custom-tailored to meet each clients individual needs, on a worldwide platform.

Synergy is a member of The Ascott Limited (Ascott), a Singapore company that has grown to become one of the leading international lodging owner-operators. Spanning more than 170 cities across over 30 countries, Ascotts serviced residence and hotel brands include Ascott, Citadines, Citadines Connect, Somerset, Quest, The Crest Collection, lyf, Preference, Vertu, Harris, Fox, Yello and POP!. Ascott is a wholly owned subsidiary of CapitaLand Limited (CapitaLand), one of Asias largest real estate companies headquartered and listed in Singapore. Ascott boasts over 30 years of industry track record and award-winning brands that enjoy recognition worldwide.
Prince Harry and Meghan Markle have traded the contradictions of royalty for the contradictions of capitalism. Before they couldnt fail  now they can.

Last week, Harry and Meghan renamed their charity, Archewell. It replaces Sussex Royal, the name the couple devised for themselves in January when they announced their intention to leave the royal family, and which the Queen demanded they stop using less than three months later. Indeed, a short history of the Sussexes self-branding reveals much about the contradictions of royal celebrity.

Harry and Meghan announced their departure in January with the launch of a heavily branded website. But the Sussex Royal brand represented an impossible attempt to have both freedom and royal status. The royal brand is enabling (hence Harry and Meghans desire to maintain association with it), while also being disabling (as shown by their need to exit); enabling as it catapulted Meghan to a new level of stardom, disabling as it created a public interest justification for scrutinising her every move, and prevented her from engaging in politics.

There are parallel tensions in royal do-goodery: a huge proportion of royal duties are photo opportunities with charities, when in fact royalty depends upon the maintenance of an unequal status quo. Harry and Meghan will need to make huge sums of money if they are to cover their own security costs. This puts Archewell squarely in the conflicted space of philanthrocapitalism: a means of legitimising social inequality through good works.

Take Travalyst, Harrys eco-tourism venture with Skyscanner, TripAdvisor and Booking.com. Its environmentalist tactics include carbon offsetting, one on which Harry and Meghan have themselves relied in order to justify their use of private jets. Harrys attempt to make air travel guilt-free is at odds with the environmentalist movement they seek to support. But then, calling for the collapse of global air travel would hardly garner the support of the companies with social-responsibility budgets to spend.

In Archewell, Markle will be able to parlay her celebrity status. But at the same time, class politics will proscribe what kinds of work are acceptable for a royal-adjacent celebrity charitable enterprise.

While rags-to-riches stories have always been spun for royal brides, there is a public record of Markles past work, from Deal or No Deal and Suits to her lifestyle blog The Tig. The continued visibility of her historic hustle is anathema to a repressive class system in which those at the top are supposed to pretend it was always thus.

This is why the Sussex Royal brand has been a site of such a power struggle. When the Queen barred Harry and Meghan from using the word royal in their branding after their departure, Meghans American PR team responded by leaking to the Daily Mail that there was nothing legally stopping them from using the name, since Harry and Archie have royal blood and no one can take that away. In this rebrand to Archewell, apparently derived from Greek word for source of action, Harry and Meghan centre their privilege. At the very moment of claiming financial independence, the Sussexes are taking pains to distance themselves from the unroyal grubbiness of having to work for a living.

Hannah Yelin is a senior lecturer in Media and Culture at Oxford Brookes University


By Kim Jae-heun





Binggrae CEO Jeon Chang-won
ALBANY  Scientists at SUNY Polytechnic Institute are working with the state's public health lab and a Connecticut company to develop an advanced COVID-19 test that would check both for the disease and also the body's immune response.

The State University of New York, which oversees the state's public higher education system, is funding the research, which will be done in collaboration with Dr. Klemen Strle, an infectious disease expert at the state's Wadsworth Center, and with Ciencia, a small medical device company outside Hartford, Conn.

The testing technology will be loaded on special chips that will be made in a SUNY Poly cleanroom. Two top research professors at SUNY Poly, Nate Cady and Scott Tenenbaum, are leading the project.

SUNY Poly was awarded $7,500 from SUNY for the project, which is expected to take a year or more to create the final product to be used in hospitals, although the research team is already using patient samples in the lab.

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The disposable chips would be analyzed by a special machine that is also in the development stage, a SUNY Poly spokesman said. The key to the chip would be that it would test for the viral "load" on the body while testing the immune response at the same time. The chip could also potentially be used in clinics for a rapid test of one patient or to measure multiple patient samples all at once.

Cady is a scientific collaborator at Ciencia, according to the company.

I am grateful to our partners (Ciencia) and the Wadsworth Center, along with our research team who, while employing additional precautions and social distancing measures in the labs, continue their work that we hope can help put critical information in the hands of front-line healthcare workers who could then treat patients in ways that could lead to improved outcomes, Cady said in a statement.

Cady and others at SUNY Poly have recently been involved in making face masks for medical staff treating COVID-19 patients at local hospitals in partnership with SUNY New Paltz.

The SUNY Poly research team explained that the new testing chips could provide "faster detection" of COVID-19 and additional data points that would tell doctors whether or not a patient is "clear of the infection" and whether they have developed antibodies that fight the coronavirus, the pathogen that causes COVID-19, a potentially deadly respiratory illness.

This targeted funding is proof that SUNY Polys resources can help address a number of current critical challenges, and we hope it may inspire improved human health outcomes," Tenenbaum said.

SUNY Poly said the tests could also provide an earlier indicator whether or not a patient may need more intense care sooner on in their treatment.

"By measuring the level of antibodies in a patients blood, the same test could provide an estimate of how long it has been since they were infected and what stage of recovery they may be experiencing," the Albany school said in a statement explaining what the test is expected to achieve.
Wuhan: In the six days after top Chinese officials secretly determined they likely were facing a pandemic from a new coronavirus, the city of Wuhan at the epicenter of the disease hosted a mass banquet for tens of thousands of people; millions began traveling through for Lunar New Year celebrations.

President Xi Jinping warned the public on the seventh day, Janaury 20. But by that time, more than 3,000 people had been infected during almost a week of public silence, according to internal documents obtained by The Associated Press and expert estimates based on retrospective infection data.

That delay from Jan 14 to Jan. 20 was neither the first mistake made by Chinese officials at all levels in confronting the outbreak, nor the longest lag, as governments around the world have dragged their feet for weeks and even months in addressing the virus.

But the delay by the first country to face the new coronavirus came at a critical time  the beginning of the outbreak. China's attempt to walk a line between alerting the public and avoiding panic set the stage for a pandemic that has infected almost 2 million people and taken more than 126,000 lives.

This is tremendous, said Zuo-Feng Zhang, an epidemiologist at the University of California, Los Angeles. If they took action six days earlier, there would have been much fewer patients and medical facilities would have been sufficient. We might have avoided the collapse of Wuhan's medical system.

Other experts noted that the Chinese government may have waited on warning the public to stave off hysteria, and that it did act quickly in private during that time.

But the six-day delay by China's leaders in Beijing came on top of almost two weeks during which the national Center for Disease Control did not register any cases from local officials, internal bulletins obtained by the AP confirm. Yet during that time, from Jan 5 to Jan 17, hundreds of patients were appearing in hospitals not just in Wuhan but across the country.

It's uncertain whether it was local officials who failed to report cases or national officials who failed to record them. It's also not clear exactly what officials knew at the time in Wuhan, which only opened back up last week with restrictions after its quarantine.

But what is clear, experts say, is that China's rigid controls on information, bureaucratic hurdles and a reluctance to send bad news up the chain of command muffled early warnings. The punishment of eight doctors for rumor-mongering, broadcast on national television on Jan. 2, sent a chill through the city's hospitals.

Doctors in Wuhan were afraid, said Dali Yang, a professor of Chinese politics at the University of Chicago. It was truly intimidation of an entire profession. Without these internal reports, it took the first case outside China, in Thailand on Jan 13, to galvanize leaders in Beijing into recognising the possible pandemic before them. It was only then that they launched a nationwide plan to find cases  distributing CDC-sanctioned test kits, easing the criteria for confirming cases and ordering health officials to screen patients, all without telling the public.

The Chinese government has repeatedly denied suppressing information in the early days, saying it immediately reported the outbreak to the World Health Organization.

Allegations of a cover-up or lack of transparency in China are groundless, said foreign ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian at a Thursday press conference.

The documents show that the head of China's National Health Commission, Ma Xiaowei, laid out a grim assessment of the situation on Jan. 14 in a confidential teleconference with provincial health officials.

A memo states that the teleconference was held to convey instructions on the coronavirus from President Xi Jinping, Premier Li Keqiang and Vice Premier Sun Chunlan, but does not specify what those instructions were.

The epidemic situation is still severe and complex, the most severe challenge since SARS in 2003, and is likely to develop into a major public health event, the memo cites Ma as saying.

The National Health Commission is the top medical agency in the country. In a faxed statement, the Commission said it had organised the teleconference because of the case reported in Thailand and the possibility of the virus spreading during New Year travel. It added that China had published information on the outbreak in an open, transparent, responsible and timely manner," in accordance with important instructions repeatedly issued by President Xi.

The documents come from an anonymous source in the medical field who did not want to be named for fear of retribution. The AP confirmed the contents with two other sources in public health familiar with the teleconference. Some of the memo's contents also appeared in a public notice about the teleconference, stripped of key details and published in February.

Under a section titled sober understanding of the situation, the memo said that clustered cases suggest that human-to-human transmission is possible. It singled out the case in Thailand, saying that the situation had changed significantly because of the possible spread of the virus abroad.

With the coming of the Spring Festival, many people will be traveling, and the risk of transmission and spread is high, the memo continued.
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"It's hard for anyone to change their usual grocery shopping and food habits in a flash, but COVID-19 is forcing all of us to reconsider how and what we're eating," Harman said. "If you're on a tight budget, buying in bulk so you're taking fewer trips to the grocery store might seem like an impossible or simply unreasonable ask."But, Harman says preparing a shopping list in advance that balances non-perishable (canned or frozen) and perishable food items (dairy products and fresh produce) and aims to repurpose ingredients for multiple meals can help."For example, rather than relying on deli cuts of meat to make sandwiches during the day, consider buying less perishable  and also less expensive  foods like canned white meat chicken to make chicken salad for sandwiches," she said. "Dry chicken salad is the worst, so rather than forgoing mayonnaise to save money, purchase whole milk yogurt instead."Harman says yogurt is versatile, and she recommends serving it for breakfast or a snack."Still in the spirit of less perishable, less expensive items, you can top it with sliced peaches from a can to add a little more flavor and nutrition," Harman said.Harman adds that buying primarily non-perishable food items is an affordable way to build meals for an entire week, especially during this pandemic. But, by adding in some perishable, fresh food items with these shelf-stable staples, you create a healthy balance that satisfies both food cravings and budget concerns.Source: Newswise